Creepy History

Creepy History, story by story.

1. IRome, 891 to 897
   

   Chapter I · Rome, 891 to 897

   The Cadaver Synod

   You play Pope Stephen VI

   Rome, January 897. Pope Formosus has been dead for nine months. His successor still has a few questions for him.

   Your first call · Formosus's acts: still standing, yours too

   Put the corpse on trialAnnul his acts by decree, rebury him

   Sources

   • Wikipedia, 'Cadaver Synod': trial in the Basilica of St John Lateran, January 897; the corpse propped on a throne with a deacon appointed to answer for him; Stephen's question 'When you were bishop of Porto, why did you usurp the universal Roman See in such a spirit of ambition?'; charges of switching sees against canon law, perjury, and serving as bishop while a layman; verdict guilty, acts and ordinations void; three fingers of the right hand cut off, vestments stripped, dressed as a layman, buried in a graveyard for foreigners, then thrown into the Tiber; clergy ordained by Formosus made to submit written renunciations; body recovered and rumours of miracles; Stephen deposed, imprisoned and strangled, July or August 897; Theodore II reburied Formosus in St Peter's; John IX annulled the synod and prohibited trials of the dead (898)
   • Catholic Encyclopedia (1909), 'Pope Formosus': cardinal bishop of Porto 864; condemned and excommunicated under John VIII c. 876 for deserting his diocese and aspiring to higher office; restored 883; elected 891; crowned Lambert co-emperor (892) and Arnulf emperor (896); died 4 April 896; exhumed, dressed in papal vestments and tried by Stephen VI; fingers of the right hand cut off, body cast into the Tiber
   • Wikipedia, 'Pope Formosus': flight from Rome and excommunication under John VIII; restoration 883; election 891 and the canon against translation between sees; crowning of Lambert, then of Arnulf in St Peter's, 22 February 896; death 4 April 896 aged about 80; no later pope has taken the name Formosus
   • Wikipedia, 'Pope Stephen VI': a Roman, elected May 896 with the backing of the Spoleto faction; made bishop of Anagni by Formosus; deposed, imprisoned and strangled in 897
   • Wikipedia, 'Arnulf of Carinthia': crowned emperor by Formosus in February 896, struck by paralysis soon after and returned to Germany
   • JSTOR Daily, 'The Cadaver Synod: Putting a Dead Pope on Trial': the body found in the Tiber, miracle stories, the Roman uprising, Theodore II's reburial of Formosus in St Peter's
   • Catholic Answers, 'The Strange Case of Pope Formosus', citing J. N. D. Kelly, Oxford Dictionary of Popes: Nicaea canon 15 against moving a bishop from one see to another; Boniface VI's reign of about two weeks
   • Liudprand of Cremona, Antapodosis I.30 to 31, trans. P. Squatriti (2007): the dead pope dressed in vestments and questioned in synod; the body thrown into the Tiber and recovered by fishermen. Note for review: Liudprand misdates the trial to Sergius III, and the Catholic Encyclopedia has a monk, not a fisherman, find the body; the story uses the fisherman, keeps the Lateran and January 897, says only that Spoleto's faction backed Stephen, and leaves out the Lateran earthquake and any words of the deacon, all unrecorded or disputed
2. IIWallachia, 1461 to 1462
   

   Chapter II · Wallachia, 1461 to 1462

   The Night Attack

   You play Vlad III Dracula, prince of Wallachia

   Wallachia, between the Danube and the Carpathian mountains, June 1462. Its prince has stopped paying the sultan, and the sultan is coming to collect.

   Your first call · The sultan's army: several times yours

   Meet them in open battleBurn the land and fall back

   Sources

   • Wikipedia, 'The Night Attack': the Ottoman army over the Danube on 4 June 1462, Radu commanding 4,000 horsemen; Vlad's scorched-earth retreat, burning crops and villages, poisoning wells, moving people and herds; the camp south of Târgoviște; the attack from three hours after sunset until four in the morning, with torches and bugles; aiming for the sultan, Vlad's men hit the tents of the viziers Mahmud Pasha and Ishak Pasha; Mehmed had forbidden his soldiers to leave their tents at night to prevent panic; Mehmed's march on an empty Târgoviște and the impaled outside it (Chalkokondyles 9.104: about 20,000 men, women and children, Hamza on the highest stake); Mehmed: 'a man who had done such things was worth much'; withdrawal, Radu left with Ottoman troops
   • Wikipedia, 'Vlad the Impaler': son of Vlad II Dracul ('Dracula', son of the Dragon); Vlad and Radu as hostages at the Ottoman court; ruler of Wallachia from 1456 as an Ottoman tributary; stopped paying tribute in 1461 while Mehmed was at Trebizond and turned to Matthias Corvinus; the trap set by Katabolinos and Hamza, both captured and impaled; the winter campaign across the frozen Danube and his letter to Matthias of 11 February 1462 counting 23,884 Turks and Bulgarians killed; the boyars' desertion to Radu; arrest by Matthias in November 1462 on forged letters and about twelve years' captivity
   • Medievalists.net, 'The Impalings of Vlad the Impaler', quoting Laonikos Chalkokondyles, The Histories, book 9, trans. A. Kaldellis (Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, 2014): Katabolinos and Hamza sent to seize Vlad, both captured and impaled, Hamza on a higher stake; the field of the impaled outside the capital, men, women and children; Mehmed's verdict on Vlad
   • Mental Floss, 'When Vlad the Impaler Repelled an Invasion with a Forest of Corpses': the scorched-earth retreat, poisoned wells and thirst of the Ottoman army in summer heat
   • R. Florescu and R. McNally, Dracula, Prince of Many Faces (1989): the hostage years, the 1462 campaign, the arrest by Matthias and the forged letters
   • F. Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time (1978): the Wallachian campaign of 1462. Note for review: army sizes (Ottomans 90,000 to 300,000 in old sources, 34,000 to 39,000 modern; Vlad 7,000 to 24,000) are given only as 'several times over'; raid casualties, Vlad's disguise in the camp, the boyar Galeș, whether Mehmed entrenched after the raid, the fleet's landing and crossing place (Brăila in some accounts, Vidin and Turnu Severin in others) and Radu as half-brother are disputed and left out; 'about twenty thousand' follows Chalkokondyles
3. IIIEast Anglia, 1645 to 1646
   

   Chapter III · East Anglia, 1645 to 1646

   The Witchfinder General

   You play John Gaule, vicar of Great Staughton

   Manningtree, Essex, March 1645. England is at war with itself, and a young man here says he has heard witches meeting near his house.

   Your first call · The Witchfinder: invited to your parish

   Preach against him from your pulpitRally the county's ministers to preach too

   Sources

   • Matthew Hopkins, The Discovery of Witches (1647), Queries 1, 4, 10 and 13: Query 1 'That he must needs be the greatest Witch ... himselfe', answered 'If Satan's kingdome be divided against it selfe, how shall it stand?'; in March 1644 (old style) at Manningtree he heard a woman speaking to her imps; the accused woman kept from sleep two or three nights, on the fourth calling her imps with ten in the room: Holt like a white kitling, Jarmara a fat spaniel without legs, Vinegar Tom a long-legged greyhound with a head like an ox, Sack and Sugar like a black rabbit, Newes like a polecat; swimming 'of late hath, and for ever shall be left'; he demands 'but 20.s. a town' to 'maintaine his Companie with 3. horses'
   • W. Notestein, A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 (1911), ch. 8: Elizabeth Clarke and the Manningtree beginning; Gaule's description of watching (stool, cross-legged, no meat or sleep, hole in the door for the imp, flies and spiders killed); John Lowes, eighty, pastor of Brandeston fifty years, litigious, his parishioners glad to get him hanged, run backwards and forwards for days and nights, confessed to sinking an Ipswich vessel 'making fourteen widows'; report to Parliament of torture, special commission at Bury with Serjeant Godbolt, swimming stopped, eighteen condemned including two men, the barn and the psalm, about 120 more in gaol; Huntingdonshire justices eager, several executed; Hopkins's full letter to one of Gaule's parishioners ('the sooner to heare his singular Judgment', the Suffolk minister 'forc'd to recant', Kimbolton, 'good welcome ... else I shall wave your Shire'), read as bluster; Gaule's reply dedicated to Colonel Walton; Norfolk queries via the assize judges; 'twenty shillings a town' against twenty-three pounds and expenses at Stowmarket, when a day's work brought sixpence; Stearne: Hopkins died 'peaceably, after a long sicknesse of a Consumption'; their record surpassed the combined records of all other English witch-hunters
   • John Gaule, Select Cases of Conscience touching Witches and Witchcrafts (London, 1646): accepts that witches exist; the tests of watching, walking and swimming as 'ignorance, humor, superstition'; distrust of forced confessions; dedicated to Valentine Walton
   • Wikipedia, 'Matthew Hopkins': born c. 1620, son of a Puritan minister, no older than 28 at death; of Manningtree, Essex; active during the English Civil War; claimed the title Witchfinder General, never bestowed by Parliament; Chelmsford trial 1645; questioned by Norfolk assize justices; died at Manningtree 12 August 1647, of tuberculosis
   • Wikipedia, 'John Gaule': vicar of Great Staughton, Huntingdonshire; preached against Hopkins around 1646; Select Cases of Conscience (1646) dedicated to the county MP Valentine Walton; believed witchcraft existed but objected to the swimming test; died 1687; his works consulted at the time of the Salem witch trials
   • Wikipedia, 'Bury St Edmunds witch trials': the 1645 special court of oyer and terminer after reports of torture; 18 hanged on 27 August 1645, 16 of them women, John Lowes, vicar of Brandeston, among them
   • Wikipedia, 'Valentine Walton': MP for Huntingdonshire, Parliamentarian colonel, brother-in-law of Oliver Cromwell
4. IVGodalming and London, autumn 1726
   

   Chapter IV · Godalming and London, autumn 1726

   Mary Toft's Rabbits

   You play Nathaniel St André, Anatomist to the King

   Godalming, Surrey, autumn 1726. In a poor cottage, a young woman is giving birth, again and again, to rabbits.

   Your first call · The King: waiting for your report

   Declare it genuineCut open its gut first

   Sources

   • Wikipedia, 'Mary Toft': baptised Mary Denyer 21 February 1703; married Joshua Toft, a journeyman clothier, three children; pregnant and working in the fields in 1726; Mist's Weekly Journal, 19 November 1726: working in a field with other women 'they put up a Rabbit' and pursued it, and since then 'she hath not been able to avoid thinking of Rabbits'; early August egested pieces of flesh; labour 27 September, animal parts; Ann Toft sent them to John Howard, a Guildford man-midwife of thirty years' experience; Howard dismissed it, then came; three legs of a tabby cat, a rabbit's leg, pieces of an eel's backbone, the cat 'she was fond of that slept on the bed at night'; Howard moved her to Guildford and offered to deliver rabbits before any doubter; the royal family sent St André and Molyneux, arriving 15 November, lung placed in water floated, concluded the rabbits bred in her fallopian tubes; Ahlers 20 to 21 November, straw and grain in the droppings, cuts by a man-made instrument, reported to the King; St André's demonstration before the King 26 November; Lacy's Bagnio, Manningham; pamphlet 3 December; porter's confession implicating Margaret Toft; confession 7 December before Manningham and Douglas after threat of an operation; Tothill Fields Bridewell as a 'vile cheat and impostor', discharged 8 April 1727; St André refused audience; died 1763 in Godalming
   • Wikipedia, 'Nathaniel St André': Swiss; taught French, German, dancing and fencing in London, his fencing poor, wounded by a pupil, impressed by the surgeon's wealth and took up medicine; surgeon and anatomist to the royal household from 1723, his fluent German favoured by courtiers who had not learnt English; treated the King in 1726 and was given the King's own sword; helped deliver a fifteenth rabbit after fourteen; A Short Narrative of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbets; judged duped; refused audience with the King, royal duties and salary removed, kept the title of court anatomist
   • Public Domain Review, 'Mary Toft and Her Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbits': St André, Swiss surgeon-anatomist to the King, and Samuel Molyneux, secretary to the Prince of Wales; arrived at Guildford 15 November to news Mary was in labour with her fifteenth rabbit; Ahlers found corn, hay and straw in the dung pellets, reported to the King 21 November; Manningham saw what he believed was a hog's bladder and was persuaded to keep his doubts quiet; porter at Lacy's bagnio confessed Margaret Toft asked him for the smallest rabbit he could find; forty-page Short Narrative published 3 December, four days before the confession; maternal impression
   • Godalming Museum, 'Mary Tofts (1703-1763)': Godalming background, the fields, the rabbit, the fifteenth rabbit, imprisonment and release, return to Godalming and burial there in 1763
5. VEdinburgh, November 1827
   

   Chapter V · Edinburgh, November 1827

   Burke and Hare

   You play Dr Robert Knox

   Edinburgh, November 1827. The city is one of Europe's great schools of anatomy, and anatomy runs on dead bodies.

   Your first call · Your students: always short of bodies

   Pay, and tell them to come againPost a standing price for fresh ones

   Sources

   • Wikipedia, 'Burke and Hare murders': Edinburgh one of the leading European centres of anatomical study; Scottish law allowed dissection of those who died in prison, suicides, foundlings and orphans, and the legal supply failed to keep pace; resurrection men, grave guards, watchtowers and mortsafes; Burke and McDougal lodge with Hare in Tanner's Close, West Port, November 1827; Donald, owing £4 rent, dies; coffin filled with tanner's bark; body taken to the university and on to Knox, who set the price at £7 10s; an assistant glad to see them again; killings by smothering; Mary Paterson (April 1828) still warm, stored in whisky three months; James Wilson ('Daft Jamie'), 18, recognised by students, Knox denied it and dissected him ahead of the others; Margaret Docherty (31 October), the Grays refuse McDougal's £10 a week; Hare's immunity and confession to sixteen killings; Burke hanged 28 January 1829 before about 25,000, publicly dissected, skeleton in the Anatomical Museum; effigy of Knox burned February 1829; committee found no evidence Knox knew of murder; Anatomy Act 1832
   • Wikipedia, 'Robert Knox (surgeon)': born Edinburgh 1791; smallpox cost him his left eye; army surgeon after Waterloo; private anatomy school at Surgeons' Square, 504 students by 1831; assistants including William Fergusson; never prosecuted; left Edinburgh, died in Hackney, London, 1862
   • Wikipedia, 'Sir William Fergusson, 1st Baronet': Knox's demonstrator, later Serjeant-Surgeon to Queen Victoria and a baronet
   • University of Edinburgh Anatomical Museum, 'William Hare': the lodging house in Tanner's Close; both men Irish labourers; the first body, Donald, November 1827; Burke's skeleton in the museum
   • burkeandhare.com, the victims: sixteen killings in Hare's confession, the poor, old and sick of West Port
   • Crime+Investigation, 'Burke and Hare': James Wilson, a well-known West Port figure; recognised on the table; dissected first when reported missing
   • Witchery Tours, 'This day, 12 February 1829: Knox, Knox, who's there?': the crowd burns Knox's effigy outside his Newington house
   • National Library of Scotland broadside, the committee's report on Dr Knox (1829): no evidence he or his assistants knew of murder; his manner of receiving bodies faulted
6. VIExeter, Rhode Island, 1883 to 1892
   

   Chapter VI · Exeter, Rhode Island, 1883 to 1892

   The Last Vampire Panic

   You play George Brown

   Exeter, Rhode Island, early 1892. A farmer named George Brown has buried his wife and two daughters, all taken by the same slow disease.

   Your first call · Your son Edwin: getting weaker

   Let them digRefuse, and nurse Edwin yourself

   Sources

   • Wikipedia, 'Mercy Brown vampire incident': George Thomas Brown (1842 to 1922); Mary Eliza Brown died 8 December 1883 of consumption; Mary Olive died 6 June 1884 aged 20; Edwin and Mercy Lena fell ill; George persuaded to permit the exhumations; villagers, Dr Harold Metcalf and a reporter exhumed the bodies on 17 March 1892; Mercy's body at a normal level of decomposition; heart and liver burned and the ashes mixed with water as a tonic for Edwin, who died two months later; George never caught tuberculosis; the last New England vampire exhumation; Lovecraft's 'The Shunned House'
   • Wikipedia, 'New England vampire panic': consumption (tuberculosis) blamed on a dead family member draining the living; the sign a body too fresh with liquid blood in the heart; remedy of burning the heart or organs and giving the ashes or smoke to the sick; cases from the late 18th century to 1892
   • Rhode Island Historical Society, 'Have Mercy': Mercy died in January 1892; frozen ground, her body held in the receiving tomb at Chestnut Hill; the neighbours' request and George's reluctant consent; the heart and liver burned on a rock and the ashes given to Edwin; Providence Journal of 19 March 1892; Edwin's death 2 May 1892; George's death 1922
   • Christopher Klein, 'The Last American Vampire', History.com: Edwin's stay of about 18 months in Colorado Springs for the dry air, returning no better; Metcalf the medical examiner at the exhumation; Edwin died 2 May 1892
   • Small State Big History, 'Mercy Brown': Mercy Lena, called Lena; George consented but did not attend; Chestnut Hill Cemetery behind the Baptist church; Dr Harold Metcalf of Wickford, the district medical examiner, said the condition of the body was normal for one dead two months in winter; clotted blood in heart and liver; the ashes fed to Edwin; the Providence Journal's sceptical report
   • Contingent Magazine, 'Against the Grave' (2026): Mercy Lena Brown born 1872; George Stetson's 1896 verdict of rural 'depression of brains'; George Brown's later life
   • Cemetery Travel, Mercy Brown: the receiving tomb at Chestnut Hill; heart burned and the ashes given to Edwin
   • Find a Grave, Edwin Atwood Brown (died 2 May 1892, aged 24); later embellishments of the story
   • Michael E. Bell, Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England's Vampires (2001): the belief, the remedy and the Brown case