A (0:02)

Hi Crime House community, It's Vanessa Richardson. Exciting news. Conspiracy theories, cults and crimes is leveling up starting the week of January 12th. You'll be getting two episodes every week. Wednesdays we unravel the conspiracy or the cult, and on Fridays we look at a corresponding crime. Every week has a theme. Tech, bioterror, power, paranoia, you name it. Follow Conspiracy theories, cults and crimes now on your podcast app because you're about to dive deeper, get weirder and go darker than ever before.

B (0:46)

This is crime house. At the edge of town. A decrepit mansion where a dynasty's darkest secrets are buried in the foundation. A wealthy merchant family in colonial Boston who built their fortune on human suffering and blood money. Their sordid history inspired one of the darkest minds in all of horror, who showed us how dangerous people can be when they fall victim to unchecked greed. Welcome to Twisted Tales, a Crime House original. I'm Heidi Wong. Every week I'll take you deep into the true stories behind horror's biggest legends. From vengeful ghosts to bloody slashers to alien encounters and more, these real life accounts are guaranteed to keep you up at night. But scary stories aren't any fun if you're telling them alone. If you've ever had a haunted moment or twisted tale of your own, I want to hear about it. Drop it in the comments. The creepier the better. Crime House is made possible by you. Follow Twisted Tales and subscribe to Crime House on Apple Podcasts for ad free early access. Today we're diving into the Fall of the House of Usher. Originally a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, Mike Flanagan's 2023 Netflix adaptation turned it into a horror themed takedown of the opioid Cris. But the bones of this story come from Edgar Allan Poe's 1839 masterpiece. A decaying mansion, a family plagued by madness, a sister buried alive, a house that literally collapses under the weight of its own corruption. It's gothic horror at its finest. Atmospheric, psychological and deeply, deeply unsettling. Well, buckle up because the true story behind the House of Usher involves human trafficking, witch trials, bodies discovered in basements, and a generational curse built on the suffering of thousands. And just like in Poe's hail, this house eventually collapsed under the weight of its own sins. But unlike Poe's story, the family behind it got away with everything. Why are more women than ever choosing Natural Cycles? The hormone free, side effect free way to take control of your fertility. Natural Cycles is a birth control app that uses your temperature to find your fertile window. It is more than a basic cycle tracking app. Natural Cycles is the only FDA cleared and CE marked birth control app and has helped millions prevent and plan for pregnancy naturally. Save 15% when you sign up today with code RADIO15. Learn more@naturalcycles.com let's start with the story itself, because if you haven't seen the Mike Flanagan version or Red Poe's original, you need to know what we're dealing with in Flanagan's 2023 Netflix series. Roderick Usher is a pharmaceutical billionaire. He and his twin sister, Madeline built an empire called Fortunato Pharmaceuticals by selling a highly addictive painkiller called Ligadone. They got rich by lying, telling doctors the drug was safe and non addictive, a miracle cure for pain. And when people inevitably got hooked and started dying, they blamed the victims. But in the end, the Ushers themselves pay the ultimate price. The show opens with all six of Roderick's children dead, gone within a single week. Over eight episodes, we learn how each one died gruesome, supernatural deaths that feel like cosmic punishment. Poe's 1839 version hits the same notes just in a different key. An unnamed narrator visits his childhood friend Roderick Usher at the family estate. Roderick and his sister Madeline are both mysteriously sick. And it's not just them. The house itself seems diseased. There's a crack running down the facade. Everything's decaying. The whole place feels wrong. And when Madeline appears to die, she's entombed in the basement. But she's not dead after all. She was buried alive. So she claws her way out and confronts her brother in a final, horrifying scene. Then the entire house collapses into the water that surrounds it, taking the last of the Usher bloodline with it. Both versions are about the same a family consumed by its own corruption, a house that can't stand under the weight of generational sin. But here's what most people don't Edgar Allan Poe didn't invent the Usher family. They really existed. And they were horrible. To understand how Poe knew their story, we need to go back to the beginning. Born In Boston on January 19, 1809, Poe's childhood was marked by tragedy from the start. His father abandoned the family when Edgar was a baby, and his mother, an actress named Eliza Poe, died of tuberculosis when he was only two years old. He was taken in by John and Frances Allen, a wealthy tobacco merchant and his wife, who lived in Richmond, Virginia. They never formally adopted him, but he took their name hence Edgar Allan Poe. The Allans gave him a comfortable life, but it was complicated. John Allan was cold, distant, and never quite accepted Edgar as a true son. There was always that sense of being an outsider, looking in on wealth and respectability. And maybe that's what made Poe so good at seeing through the facade of wealthy families. He knew what it was like to live among them without feeling like he truly belonged. In 1827, Poe moved back to Boston. When he sat down to write the Fall of the House of Usher twelve years later, Poe used a name that was already synonymous with New England opulence. The Usher family were successful merchants, respected, connected, and profitable. Their mansion on Boston's Tremont street had a notorious reputation throughout New England. Their house was old and crumbling. It's the type of house that kids dare each other to run past, the building that makes people cross the street rather than walk in front of it. Dark stone windows that seem to watch you as you pass. And when the Usher mansion was finally demolished in 1830, people realized it contained something more horrible than they'd ever imagined. As workers cleared the basement, they supposedly made a grisly Two bodies locked in a sickening embrace. Skeletal remains intertwined, as if they died holding each other or fighting each other. Now, whether this actually happened or was just another urban legend, that's debatable. But it's not hard to imagine these stories circulating and becoming a part of the dark mythology surrounding the Usher name. Because the real horror of the Usher House didn't start in 1830. It started over 150 years earlier, in 1679, with a desperate merchant named John Usher and a decision that would damn his family forever. John's father, Hezekiah Usher, ran one of Boston's most important bookshops in the late 1600s. And this wasn't just any bookshop. It was the bookshop, the place where Boston's elite came to get the latest imports from London. Religious texts, scientific treatises, the kind of books that marked you as educated and cultured. Hezekiah understood something crucial about the colonial world. Knowledge was power and controlling who had access to that knowledge, even better. But Hezekiah's son, John, well, he had a different philosophy. John didn't think knowledge was power. He thought money was power. He didn't want to be just comfortable and well off. He wanted to have the kind of wealth where your name carried weight, where doors opened before you even had to knock. So John got into shipping and. And for a while, business was good. He was trading tobacco, corn, timber, rum, all the staples of colonial commerce. He built a reputation as a sharp businessman. He also married well to the daughter of John Safin, another successful merchant. Between the two families, they controlled a significant portion of Boston's maritime trade. Everything was going according to plan. But in 1679, it all went wrong. One of John Ussher's ships set sail for Spain, loaded with cargo. It was supposed to be a profitable voyage to sell the American goods in Spanish ports, then buy European products to bring back, making money on both ends of the journey. But the voyage was cursed from the start. During the journey, the ship was damaged in a storm. Not enough to sink, but water got into the cargo hold and the goods started to spoil. Then when the ship finally limped into port in Spain, the merchants discovered there wasn't actually a market for their products. Nobody wanted American tobacco. They had too much already. The corn rotting and worthless. The timber couldn't give it away. John Usher was staring down financial ruin. He'd borrowed money to finance the voyage, and he had debts to pay. Other merchants were circling, ready to snatch up his remaining ships and assets if he showed any weakness. Now, most people in the situation would cut their losses, maybe downsize a bit, sell off a ship or two, rebuild slowly and carefully. But John Usher wasn't most people. He saw a different path forward, a darker path. He was going to recoup his losses by trafficking in human beings. In the 1670s and 80s, human trafficking was massive, massively profitable. And it was technically illegal for independent merchants like John Ussher to participate in it. The British Crown had granted a monopoly to the Royal African Company. Only they could legally transport enslaved people from Africa to the Americas, which meant the Crown made sure they were the only ones benefiting from it. And the Royal African Company was making money hand over fist. John Ussher and his father in law looked at this monopoly and thought, why should they get all the profits? So they hatched a plan. They hired a ship called the Elizabeth. They didn't own it. That would have left too much of a paper trail. They just quietly hired it for an apparent trading voyage. The captain and crew were carefully selected men who didn't ask too many questions. Men who understood that discretion was more valuable than morality. And in 1679, the Elizabeths set sail for Africa. The mission was simple and horrifying. Sail to the West African coast, kidnap or purchase enslaved people and smuggle them back to the colonies for sale. They'd bypass the Royal African Company entirely and keep all of the profits. Pretty straightforward and evil, right? But here's where things get complicated. Because somebody talked. Maybe a crew member got drunk and bragged in a Tavern. Maybe a business rival pieced together what was happening and told the authorities. Maybe the Royal African Company had spies watching for someone to try something like this. However it happened, John Usher learned after the Elizabeth was already heading back to the colonies that his smuggling operation had been discovered. This is when panic should have set in. The criminal would try to call off the voyage, destroy the evidence, maybe flee to another colony and start over. But not John Usher. He quietly dispatched a second ship, one that wasn't registered to him or to Safin. The ownership was buried under layers of legal maneuvering that would take investigators months to untangle. The second ship had one intercept, the Elizabeth at sea before it reached its destination. Under the COVID of darkness, in some unnamed cove along the Atlantic coast, the two ships met and transferred their human cargo from one vessel to another. The Elizabeth returned to port empty and clean, looking like just another merchant ship returning from an unsuccessful trading voyage. Meanwhile, the second ship made port somewhere else, probably one of the smaller colonial harbors where officials were easier to bribe or simply didn't ask questions. The enslaved people were unloaded, sold at auction, and John Usher recouped his losses from the Spanish voyage. And just like that, John Ussher and John Safin had established themselves as smugglers. Because this wasn't a one time thing, this was the beginning of a systematic operation. They found a way to circumvent the Royal African Company's monopoly. They discovered that with the right amount of planning, they could make enough enormous profits from human suffering. Historians aren't sure exactly how many voyages they financed or how many people they trafficked. The whole point was to avoid leaving records, after all. But we know it was enough to transform the Usher family fortune. Within a decade, they'd obtained the kind of wealth John had dreamed of. They'd bought more property, married into more powerful families, and they built that notorious mansion on Tremont Street. The foundation of the House of Usher was literally built on stolen lives, on the bodies of people who died in cargo holds during the middle Passage, on the suffering of families torn apart and sold into bondage, on blood and chains and screams of terror. And this was just the beginning of the Usher family's twisted legacy, because just a few Years later, in 1692, the family would find themselves at the center of another dark chapter in American the Salem witch trials. If John Usher was the family's golden child, his brother, Hezekiah Jr. Was the Black sheep. He wasn't ambitious like John was or intellectual like their father. But in 1692, Hezekiah Jr. Was in the spotlight when a young woman named Susanna Sheldon accused him of witchcraft. Now, if you know anything about the Salem witch trials, you know they were absolute madness. Mass hysteria given legal legitimacy, a moral panic that consumed entire communities. It started small, with a few girls in Salem Village claiming they'd been bewitched when asked to name names. It was the usual suspects at first. Social outsiders, poor women, people who didn't quite fit in with Puritan society. Like Sarah Good, who was a homeless beggar. And Sarah Osborne, who scandalized the community by living with a man before marriage. Or Tituba, an enslaved woman from the Caribbean. Easy targets. People without power or protection. But then the accusations started spreading. As the trials continued through 1692, something remarkable happened. The girls started accusing wealthy people, powerful people, people who never thought they'd become targets, including Hezekiah Usher Jr. Some historians think that this shift towards accusing the wealthy wasn't random. Point a finger, cry witch, and watch your business or political rival get dragged away in chains. When Susannah Sheldon accused Hezekiah, she was making a very bold move. This wasn't some poor widow she could easily destroy. This was a man with connections and money, a man with the ability to fight back. But it worked. Hezekiah was arrested and charged with witchcraft. The evidence against him was typical for these trials, which is to say, completely insane. People claim they'd seen a spectral form tormenting the afflicted girls. They said that his spirit had appeared to them in dreams through threatening them if they didn't sign the devil's book. You know, the usual supernatural evidence that would get laughed out of any normal courtroom. But In Salem in 1692, it was enough to put you on trial for your Life. Hezekiah Usher Jr. Was placed under house arrest while awaiting his formal hearing. He was confined to his home with guards posted to make sure he didn't flee. And here's where things get suspicious, because Hezekiah escaped. And it wasn't some elaborate plan. He just walked out. One day, the guards came to check on him, and he was gone. Fled in the night. With help from family members or paid accomplices, he made it to Rhode island, which was just outside the jurisdiction of Massachusetts, and waited for the hysteria to blow over. And the wild part? It actually worked. The charges against him were eventually dropped. Maybe it was because by late 1692, people were starting to wake up to how ridiculous the witch trials were. Or maybe it was because the Ushers were rich and powerful enough to make the problem disappear. They could hire lawyers, bribe guards, apply pressure through Their business connections, they could afford. Afford justice in a way that Sarah Good and Tituba and other victims never could. And even though Hezekiah Usher Jr. Escaped the noose, the accusations stuck to the family name like a stain. First, they were smugglers, traffickers in human misery. Then they were accused of being witches. The Usher family accumulated sins like other families accumulated wealth. And whispers followed them wherever they went. Was that just the wind on the street or screaming from inside the house's walls? The echoes of all those peoples who died in ship holds to make the Ushers rich? Whether any of this was true depends on what you choose to believe. But in the eyes of their neighbors, the House of Usher was rotting from the inside out. And over a century later, when Edgar Allan Poe sat down to write his masterpiece, he created a fictional family that perfectly captured this real horror. And he added one more element to the story, something that would make his tale even the specter of opium. Let's dig deeper into what makes Edgar Allan Poe's the Fall of the House of Ushers so disturbing. The narrator arrives at the estate to find his childhood friend in terrible condition. Roderick Usher is ghostly pale, his skin almost translucent. His eyes are too large, too bright. He can barely tolerate light or sound. And his skin is so sensitive, even soft fabrics cause him agony. His twin sister, Madeline, is even worse. She's wasting away, sleepwalking through the mansion's corridors like she's already half dead. The house mirrors their deterioration. The giant crack splits the structure from roofline to foundation. Fungus creeps across the stones. The rooms are suffocating, airless, as if the building itself is holding its breath. Then Madeline succumbs to her illness. Or at least that's what Roderick thinks. Panicked and desperate, he seals her body in the family vault beneath the estate. But days later, during a violent storm, terrible sounds echo up from below, scratching at stone, the scrape of fingernails on metal. Madeline wasn't actually dead. Roderick had buried his sister alive. She emerges from the crypt, blood covering her white gown, and falls upon her brother. The scene from Fall of the House of Usher where she does that is so scary. And also, like, kind of weirdly beautiful. In case you guys didn't know, I am also Mike Flanagan's literal biggest fan. So, like, it's crazy. They die together. As the crack finally splits the mansion in two and the entire structure sinks into the black water below. And Poe gives us a clue about what's poisoning this opium. When the narrator first sees the House of Usher, Poe describes his reaction like. I looked upon the scene before me upon the mere house and the simple landscape features of the domain, upon the bleak walls, upon the vacant eye like windows upon a few rank sedges and upon a few white trunks of decaying trees, with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after dream of the reveler upon opium. Basically, he's saying it's like the moment when the drug wears off and the euphoria crashes into reality, when everything that seemed beautiful and transcendent before suddenly seems hollow and suffocating. Because that's what opium does. It gives you a warm floating sensation where nothing hurts and everything feels possible. But when it wears off, the crash is brutaldepression, anxiety, physical pain that feels worse than before you took the drug. And if you keep using it, your body becomes addicted. You need more and more just to feel normal. Without it, you get violently sick, sweating, shaking, vomiting, muscle pain. It's a trap that's nearly impossible to escape. Opium kills, sometimes quickly from overdose, sometimes slowly, as addiction destroys the body over years. And that's what happened to the Ushers. Later in the story, Poe describes Roderick's strange way of speaking, that manic energy that cycles between intense excitement and complete collapse. He compares it to the irreclaimable eater of opium during the periods of his most intense excitement. Now, on the surface, these might seem like just atmospheric details. Poe loved mood setting, carefully chosen words that made you feel the creeping dread of his stories. But here's the thing about opium in the 19th century. It wasn't just some exotic drug that Poe was using for gothic violence flavor. Opium was everywhere. In Poe's time, you could buy opium at any pharmacy. It was prescribed for everything from headaches to anxiety to menstrual cramps to women troubles, which was basically code for anything doctors didn't understand about women's bodies. It was in cough syrup, it was in teething medication for babies. People simply didn't think of it as a dangerous drug. They thought of it as medicine. And of course, people got addicted. Horribly, devastatingly addicted. But addiction wasn't understood the way we understand it now. If somebody couldn't stop taking their medicine, well, that was just a moral failing, a weakness of character. The idea that the medicine itself might be the problem, that was rarely considered. And the companies that manufacture these opium laced medications made fortunes. They marketed them as miracle cures. They put them in pretty bottles with reassuring labels. They convinced an entire society that opium was safe, beneficial, and even necessary for good health. Sound familiar? Because this is the exact playbook that would be used 150 years later by Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family with OxyContin. Fast forward to 2023. Let's get back to Mike Flanagan's version of the story for a minute. Making the Ushers big pharma execs wasn't just about updating the setting. It was about drawing a direct parallel. Poe understood how families built fortunes on human suffering in the 1800s. Flanagan wanted to show that we're still doing it today. In the latest chapter in that story, the Opioid Crisis. See, the Sackler family built their fortune on OxyContin, which is a drug that essentially synthetically recreates the effects of opium. The Sacklers owned Purdue Pharma, which manufactured and aggressively marketed this safe, non addictive painkiller throughout the 1990s and 2000s. They paid doctors to prescribe it and lied about its addictive potential. They created a marketing campaign that convinced an entire medical system that undertreating pain was the real crisis and that opioids were the solution. People inevitably got addicted. Oxycontin is basically heroin in a pill. And Purdue Pharma's response? Blame the patients. They were drug seekers, addicts, people with character flaws who abused their medications. This lie killed hundreds of thousands of people. The opioid crisis has claimed more American lives than the Vietnam War, more than car accidents, more than gun violence. And the Sacklers made billions of dollars from it. To Mike Flanagan, it was the ultimate modern parallel to the Usher family. And he didn't shy away from his intentions. The show opens with all six of Roderick Usher's children already dead. And here's where Flanagan gets really clever. Each episode is named after a different Poe work, and each death is in style inspired by that story, the Mask of the Red Death. The young son Prospero throws a decadent party that ends in horrific carnage. Prospero is an Easter egg for the Edgar Allan Poe nerds listening. Are you an Edgar Allan Poe nerd? What's your favorite story? Let me know in the comments. And then there's the murders in Rue Morgue. One child meets a brutal end involving a chimpanzee who was all drugged with Ligon because they were testing them on chimps. The Black Cat. Another is driven to madness by a mysterious feline. The Telltale Heart. The Pit and the Pendulum. The Gold Bug. Each episode weaves a different Poe tale into the Usher family's downfall. It's gruesome, gothic, and absolutely a commentary on generational wealth built on human suffering. Because while Roderick's children party in their penthouses and vacation homes, hundreds of thousands of Americans are dying from opioid addiction. The show doesn't let you forget that for one second. And just like that, Poe's 170-year-old Gothic ghost story becomes a searing indictment of modern American capitalism. In Flanagan's adaptation, the Usher family faces supernatural retribution for their sins. It's cathartic, satisfying, and even feels like justice. But it's also a fantasy, because in real life, the Sacklers are still rich. Extremely rich. Purdue Pharma made over $35 billion from OxyContin. The Sackler family personally pocketed $10 billion of that. Purdue Pharma did eventually plead guilty to federal criminal charges for misleading doctors and patients about OxyContin's risks. But the only thing the company and the Sacklers lost was money. About 7.5 of the 35 billion dol they made. That's about 21 cents for every dollar. And the Sackler family's current net worth still estimated at nearly $11 billion as of 2024, they gave up ownership of Purdue Pharma. They can't sell opiates in the United States anymore, but they're still billionaires. Most of them will never see the inside of a courtroom, let alone a jail cell. Many feel that in the end, they got away with it. Edgar Allan Poe understood something that we're still grappling with today. That some patterns never change, that the same cycles of greed and suffering repeat themselves generation after generation, just wearing different masks. Poe spent his whole life trying to expose these patterns. And in the end, some think that he paid the ultimate price for it. On October 7, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe was found delirious on the streets of Baltimore, Maryland, under mysterious circumstances that have never been fully explained. He was taken to a hospital, where he drifted in and out of consciousness for four days until ultimately dying. He was only 40 years old. Some people think he was drunk. Poe had struggled with alcohol throughout his life. Others think he was the victim of a coping scheme. This was a type of electoral fraud where gangs would kidnap people, drugged them, disguised them, and forced them to vote multiple times at different polling places. Still others suspect foul play of a different sort. A beating, poisoning, murder disguised as a drunken accident. We'll probably never know the truth of his death, but here's the truth I do know about his life. Edgar Allan Poe grew up blocks away from the House of Usher. He heard the whispers about human trafficking in witch trials. He saw how families built their fortunes on suffering, then pretended they were still respectable, and he wrote it all down. The fall of the House of Usher isn't just a ghost story. It's a warning. And we keep telling this story, Poe's version, Flanagan's version, all the versions in between, because we need to believe that justice is possible. We need to believe that some houses are so corrupt by evil that they have to fall. But the real horror is this. The House of Usher keeps getting rebuilt. It falls, yes, but there's always another wealthy family ready to lay a new foundation on someone else's suffering. Poe understood this in 1839. Mike Flanagan understood it in 2023. And we still haven't learned the less. Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of Twisted, a Crime House original. I'd love to hear from you. What did you think about today's stories? Anything you're dying for me to COVID Leave a comment or review wherever you're tuning in. And be sure to follow Twisted Tales so we can keep building this community together. I'll be back next week with another unbelievable true story. Until then, stay curious and remember, there's no reason to fear the dark unless you try to hide from it. Foreign.