Tim Harford
Tim Harford’s long-running column in the Financial Times, “The Undercover Economist,” reveals the economic ideas behind everyday experiences. His first book, The Undercover Economist, was published in 30 languages and sold…
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In 1800s America, something terrifying is feeding on the quiet town of Exeter. As members of George Brown’s family succumb one by one, the town considers drastic measures to protect the living from the dead.
For a list of sources, see the show notes at timharford.com
Cautionary Tales is celebrating Halloween with a full month of paranormal themed episodes. If you have a spooky story or a skeptical question, get in touch at tales@pushkin.fm. If you want access to an extra Halloween episode about the strange world of radio telepathy, alongside plenty of other benefits, check out the Cautionary Club on Patreon.
Pushkin. In the town of Griswold, Connecticut, some children are playing on an old gravel mine. It's spring 1990. Years of excavation have carved this place into a series of steep, grey banks. Abandoned now, it's become the neighbourhood toboggan run. The children scramble up the slopes, boots sliding over loose stones, and then careen toward the quarry floor, shrieking with laughter. Small rocks skitter after them. Then, on one run, the earth gives up something larger than the average pebble, something smooth and brown. It tumbles through the air and rolls to a stop at the bottom. The children form a curious circle around the object. It stares blindly up at them. Two hollow sockets. A sunken nose. A gaping jaw packed tight with dirt. Their laughter fades. This isn't a rock. Soon, yellow crime scene tape cordons off this playground. In the 1980s, a serial killer terrorised Connecticut... murdering at least eight women and girls. The police think that the children might have uncovered another of his victims. It's quickly apparent, however, that this skull is from another century. The state archaeologist, Nick Bellantoni, is called in, and the investigation now shifts from crime scene to historical dig. Bellantoni and his team set to work shaving away the soil, first with flat-edged shovels, Then, with delicate brushes and bamboo picks, coffin after coffin emerges from the hillside. Some of the skeletons inside bear the marks of violent injury. Others still have tufts of hair clinging to their skulls. In one corner, seven much smaller skeletons lie clustered together. Children. This isn't just a gravel pit. It's an unmarked cemetery. One grave stands apart, a stone crypt poking through the mine face. Bellantoni labels it burial plot number four. He begins lifting away the flat, heavy stones that form the crypt roof, then peers into the darkness. Inside is a wooden coffin, painted red. The lid has been smashed inward. revealing two skeletal feet. A man. Alan Toney lifts away another stone... and freezes. Something was done to this body... and it wasn't the work of grave robbers or casual vandals... but someone with eerie patience and a grim, singular purpose... The man's chest cavity was pried open, his skull was severed from his spine, and his thigh bones pulled from their sockets. Both were placed, carefully, deliberately, on top of his ruined ribcage. Staring down into the coffin, Bellantoni realises that he isn't looking at an ordinary burial any more. but a crude skull and crossbones fashioned from human remains. He's never seen anything like it. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. Cautionary Tales 1883, 20 miles from Griswold, another community was facing a mystery of its own. It began with a woman named Mary Eliza Brown. She lived with her husband George and their seven children on the edge of the small farming settlement of Exeter, Rhode Island. The Browns were an industrious family with a small homestead of 30 or 40 acres. Their life followed the seasons, planting in spring, paying in summer, harvest in autumn. In winter, when the ground froze, they hauled timber, fed and watered their animals, and waited for the thaw. The soil in Exeter was thin, the ground stony and stubborn. At the beginning of the century, two and a half thousand people had lived here, but by the time Mary Eliza was raising her family, fewer than a thousand remained. Many had been drawn west by the promise of better land, and now pine and oak crowded their abandoned homesteads, reclaiming what they'd left behind. Those who stayed coaxed cabbage and pumpkin from the soil, and grazed their livestock in rough, stone-walled pastures. Exeter was not an easy place to live, but it was convivial. Neighbours met at the General's store or the tavern, The local paper listed not only marriages and deaths, but ordinary everyday events. Farming accidents, visitors to town, and who was in bed with illness. At the white clapboard church, women organised suppers and charitable gatherings. Everyone knew everyone's business, because everyone's business mattered. And when trouble came to a family, it didn't belong to that family alone. In the early 1880s, Mary Eliza began to change. Ordinary domestic tasks such as washing and cooking left her exhausted. Soon her clothes hung loose about her frame, and in the afternoons she grew feverish. The Browns did what families do when someone sickens. They watched, nursed, waited. Eldest daughter Olive, a dressmaker, cared for her mother devotedly. The doctors who served Exeter had seen illness like this before. A common response was to try to strengthen the body with nourishing food, cod liver oil, fresh air and rest. Others put their faith in patent medicines such as soothing syrups and herbal extracts. We don't know exactly what the Browns tried, but it didn't stop Mary Eliza wasting away. Then Olive began to flag. That can't have been surprising at first. She had her dressmaking work, domestic duties, and she was nursing her mother. But soon the family noticed other changes. She was gaunt and pale. Her eyes appeared sunken. At night she complained of a strange sensation, a heavy suffocating pressure on her chest. And through it all, Mary Eliza was fading. Just before Christmas 1883, she passed away, and her family buried her in the graveyard next to the white clapboard church. But whatever had drained Mary Eliza did not leave with her. Olive developed a cough, a dry, persistent racking at first, but soon her handkerchiefs came away spotted with blood, flecks of scarlet, then teaspoons. There was a name for this kind of wasting illness, because it seemed to consume the sufferer. It was called consumption. Consumption was familiar in Exeter. People knew it could pass through families, but its causes were less certain. Some said it was hereditary. Others blamed bad air. Others still reached for older, stranger notions. Perhaps something invisible was feeding on the family, moving from victim to victim. George Brown held no truck with such beliefs. But that didn't make what was happening to his daughter any less frightening. Six months after her mother's death, Olive was aware that her body was failing her. In agony and struggling to breathe, she chose a hymn for her funeral. When Olive died in June 1884, aged 20, the whole town gathered at the church. Together they stood to sing one sweetly solemn thought. For the next few years, the Brown family clung to familiar routines. The seasons turned as they always had, harvest in autumn, planting in spring. George Brown traded in cattle, and the farm grew. Daughter Mercy Lena, known as Lena, learnt the work of the household, sewing, mending and making do. She also sang at the local Sunday school, along with her younger sisters, Hattie and Jenny. Son, Eddie Brown, grew into a tall, strong young man. He joined the local band, whose marches and polkas were the soundtrack of social life in Exeter, a favourite at fairs and lawn parties. He helped his father in the fields, found work as a clerk at the general store, and was well-liked in the community. When Eddie was around 21... He got married at the local church and moved with his bride Hortense to a new house on the outskirts of town. Shortly after the wedding, his band came to visit, filling their home with music. Then the music faded. Eddie Brown grew tired. Soon he began to cough. Cautionary Tales will return. In 19th century New England, consumption was the leading cause of death, claiming one in four lives. To the people of Exeter, it was terrifying and enigmatic. Yet while they debated bad air versus bad bloodlines, science was closing in on the true culprit. In the 1860s, French doctor Jean-Antoine Villemin proved that pulmonary tuberculosis, also known as consumption, was an infectious disease, the work of an invading pathogen. Then in 1882, the year before Mary Eliza died, a German doctor called Robert Koch peered through his microscope and saw slender rods stained blue against the glass coverslip. This was the tubercle bacillus. the organism behind the disease. A monster had been feeding on the brown family. It wasn't invisible, but it was very, very small, and now it could be studied. Koch's discovery was a major victory for germ theory, but his findings were still new, and while they'd made their way to New England, they hadn't yet filtered through every town, let alone every farmhouse. Still, By the time Eddie Brown fell sick, doctors had a better idea of what they were dealing with. Open windows, rest and a warm climate had long been prescribed for consumption. Now these remedies carried a new scientific logic. If something infectious was passing between people, fresh, moving air might help keep it at bay. Doctors advised their patients to go to the mountains, where the air was clean and the climate sunny and dry. Brochures invited the sick to the land of new lungs, imploring them to come west and live. In California and Colorado, cities filled with so-called lungers. In the Adirondacks and other mountain resorts, specialised sanatoria were opened. Here, patients spent as much time as possible outside, resting in the open air. A number of them reported that their symptoms eased. They seemed to get better. George Brown had faced consumption twice before. First in his wife, then in his eldest daughter. He'd buried them both. And now his son was sick. Eddie was 22, married, and making his own way in the world. A journey to the mountains would mean leaving his loved ones, his work, and the family farm. But in the end, the Browns decided it was worth it. In the autumn of 1890, he set out for Colorado Springs. Eddie probably travelled by train, watching the green hills of New England give way to vast, flat prairies. until the Rocky Mountains rose on the horizon. When he arrived, it wasn't into untouched wilderness, but a young city, crawling with people who were all there for the same reason, to get well. Many of them stayed in boarding houses with special porches for consumptives to sleep in. Others stayed outside in canvas tents. Eddie settled among them. A few months later, his wife Hortense followed him, chaperoned by his trusty former employer. Together, Hortense's care and the Colorado climate seemed to work their magic. The color returned to Eddie's cheeks, and his frail frame gradually filled out again. His cough persisted, but he was well enough to take up work as a conductor on the city's streetcars. News of Eddie's happy improvement reached Exeter. For the Browns and their friends, it was something to celebrate. But their joy was tempered. Eddie's sister, Lena, was fading fast. Lena's health troubles had started in the summer of 1890, just before Eddie left home. It's unclear why she didn't go with her brother to Colorado. There may only have been enough money for one of the Browns to make the long journey, or she may have been deemed too weak to travel. In any case, Lena stayed in Exeter, and by November 1891, the local illness log described her condition as very critical. George Brown called in a local physician, Dr Harold Metcalf, widely regarded as one of the best doctors in the area. He'd worked for some years at New York City's Bellevue Hospital, attending patients on the horse-drawn aid wagons that raced through the streets each day. He was experienced and pragmatic, but the doctor examined Lena and told her father George that there was nothing he could do to save her. He could make her comfortable. Doctors used morphine and opium to quiet coughing and soothe pain. But by this stage, Lena's lungs were badly damaged. She was 19 years old. On a bitter midwinter day, George Brown laid a second daughter to rest beside his wife. The ground outside was frozen hard. Lena was placed in a crypt in the churchyard, where she would remain until the spring thaw. A month after Lena was buried, Eddie and Hortense returned to Exeter, not because Eddie had been restored to full health, but because he'd taken a turn for the worse. The Colorado climate no longer seemed able to help him. He managed the long journey, but arrived in Rhode Island exhausted. Eddie was genuinely beloved in his hometown, and the local paper reflected that affection. If the good wishes and prayers of his many friends could be realised, friend Eddie would be speedily restored to perfect health. Some of Eddie's neighbours thought they knew how to make those prayers come true. There was an old supernatural remedy, something George Brown hadn't tried yet, and they believed it might save his son. Local law held that when consumption swept through a family, it wasn't just an illness, it was the dead reaching back from beyond the grave to drain the living. If this was what was happening to Eddie, then there was only one way to stop the feeding. Go to the churchyard, open the graves of Mary Eliza, Olive and Lena, and destroy the source. The neighbours approached George and asked for permission to take the necessary steps. He must have understood their desperation. but he could not grant their terrible request. Griswold, Connecticut, 1991. After a year of excavation, Nick Bellantoni and his team had found the remains of 29 people. The burial ground had been a small farm cemetery where generations of families had been laid to rest side by side The skeleton from the crypt the one that had been carefully arranged into a skull and crossbones came to be known as JB because JB55 had been spelled out in brass tacks on his coffin lid Bellantoni sent JB to the National Museum of Health and Medicine, Washington DC, where investigations revealed that he'd died in the early 19th century, aged around 55. He'd suffered from arthritis and something else too. All over his ribs were pale, pitted lesions, evidence of a chronic pulmonary infection that likely caused chest pain and coughing. JB had almost certainly died of tuberculosis. What's more, forensic examination showed that when JB was rearranged, there'd been no flesh left on his bones. His body was already fully decomposed. Whatever the skull and crossbones ritual was, it hadn't taken place around the time of his death. Instead, it had been performed at least five years later. Bellantoni knew that he was looking at some kind of ritual and to help him decipher what it meant, he reached out to folklorist Michael Bell. Bell had spent years researching strange disturbances to burial grounds all over New England in the 18th and 19th centuries and he told Bellantoni that he'd observed a distinct pattern. When consumption decimated a family, people sometimes returned to the dead and opened their graves. They weren't looking for loot. They were looking for something else. In Exeter, 1892, Eddie Brown grew ever weaker. He and his family knew the disease was doing its final work. In the morning, he woke drenched from night sweats. Every cough tore at his chest and as his lungs filled with blood and pus, even the simple act of drawing breath was a struggle. The people of Exeter came to George again and repeated their request. This time George spoke with his son Eddie. Then he went back to his neighbours and gave his consent. A group of men gathered at the graves of Mary Eliza, Olive and Lena, shovels in hand. Cautionary Tales will be back shortly. In March 1892... Dr Harold Metcalf opened his door to an agitated young man. Eddie Brown was in a dying condition, he said, and a number of Exeter townsmen had exhumed the body of Mary Eliza Brown in order to save him. He wanted Metcalf to come and examine her remains. Then he muttered something else, something about blood and dead family members returning to feed on the living. Absurd, said the doctor. He was a man of science, and though he hadn't treated Eddie Brown, he knew that Eddie's sister Lena had died of pulmonary tuberculosis. There was no mystery to be found in any of the Brown graves. He turned the messenger away. Before long, the young man was back, and this time he carried word from George Brown. The farmer was clear that he didn't believe in any superstition himself, but he wanted Metcalfe to dissect the bodies of his dead wife and daughters all the same. Metcalfe was baffled, but he agreed. He gathered his instruments and set out. At the churchyard, a group of men were waiting beside an open grave. Metcalfe saw that Mary Eliza had already been dug up. Her remains were withered and shrunken by years underground. George and Eddie were nowhere to be seen. But among the men present was a journalist from the Providence Journal. Later, he described Mary Eliza's body as mummified. Then men had summoned Metcalfe to look for liquid blood, the supposed link between the dead and the living. He watched as they set their shovels to a second grave, olive brown. But when the coffin lid was pried open, there was nothing left to examine, only dry bones and a lingering shock of hair. That left Lina. Unlike her mother and sister, Lina had not been interred in the ground. Instead, she'd been placed in a cold stone crypt to wait out the winter. The men now opened it and were astonished by what they saw. Two months after her death, Lina had changed remarkably little. Her skin and flesh were still intact. Metcalfe followed his instructions. He stepped forward with his scalpel, made a careful incision into Lina's torso and removed her heart. He laid the organ out, and sliced into the muscle. And then they saw it. A chilling streak of red. Liquid blood. Metcalfe knew that there was nothing supernatural about this, and he tried to explain that the lack of decomposition to Lena's body was normal. She'd only been dead for two months, and she'd been kept in the cold. He also pointed to her lungs, which were riddled with scar tissue. But the townsmen had found what they were looking for, blood in the heart of a woman who died of consumption. To them, this was evidence that some part of Lena Brown was undead and leeching life from her brother. There was an obvious problem with this story. Mary, Eliza and Olive had died long before Lena had even fallen ill. She couldn't have been feeding on them. But perhaps that mattered less than the fact that Eddie was still alive and wasting away, and now there was something they could do about it. The old belief held that as long as blood remained in the heart of the dead person, their family members would continue to die. And so... There in the churchyard, the men kindled a fire, cast Lena's heart into the flames and watched it burn to ash. According to the ritual, Eddie Brown was supposed to drink those ashes mixed into a tonic. We don't know if he ever did. In 2019... Nearly 30 years after Nick Bellantoni unearthed JB, researchers were finally able to narrow down who he might have been. Using DNA profiling and genealogical records, they concluded that he'd probably been a farmer named John Barber, who'd lived in the area in the 1800s. Close to JB, the team had found another, smaller coffin marked NB13. almost certainly Barber's son, Nathan, who had died as a young teenager. Ballantoni theorised that the skull and crossbones ritual was an apotropaic remedy, that is, a kind of magic intended to ward off evil. Similar practices have been observed in Europe. Across the Atlantic, corpses were sometimes found bloated, with their hair and fingernails apparently still growing, and blood in the heart and chest cavity. All these things had natural explanations, but to people who didn't understand the processes of decomposition, they could look like signs that the dead were not quite finished with the living. By the time someone came for John Barber, there was no heart left to examine. His soft tissue had disappeared. And so whoever returned to his grave chose another old practice intended to stop the dead returning. They separated his skull and his legs from his body. Years later, in 1896, 1892, Lena Brown became the focus of the same desperate hope. The story was eerily captivating, so much so that it even crossed the Atlantic. In 1912, a newspaper clipping detailing Lena's exhumation was found tucked away among the posthumous personal papers of the author of Dracula, one Bram Stoker. The Providence Journal covered the exhumation ritual with a sneer, sensationalising it as a lurid vampire panic. It's not clear that anyone in Exeter actually used the word vampire or believed that this is what they were dealing with. All the same, the newspaper used gothic tropes to mock the townsfolk as ignorant bumpkins who preferred superstition to science. I think the picture is far messier and far more human. True, the people who opened Lena's grave didn't understand tuberculosis as their doctors did. True, their explanation was magical. But that doesn't mean their decision was a simple contest between science and superstition. Koch had found the bacillus, that was one thing. But learning how to diagnose tuberculosis, prevent its spread, treat it, and eventually cure it, would take decades, and far more than scientific discovery. It demanded public health systems, better housing, sanitation, new nursing practices, education and millions of tiny changes in everyday behaviour. The Brown family lived in the long gap between science understanding what was killing people and science knowing how to stop it. On paper, George Brown's decision to allow the exhumation to go ahead looks like a contradiction. He was a pragmatic farmer who sought out modern doctors, sent his son west, and insisted that he had no faith in the old folk beliefs. Yet, he gave his consent anyway. Exeter was a small, tightly connected place, and that probably played a role in his decisions. Neighbours read about the bed bound in the local paper and watched over the sick. They helped with farm work, celebrated marriages, and gathered for funerals. George might have found some of their beliefs strange, but these were people he knew, people he relied on, and people he would have to live alongside after Eddie was gone, if Eddie was gone. but I wonder if something else was at work here too. Medical sociologists sometimes talk about a form of action bias called the treatment imperative. This is the pressure to keep treating a patient who's dying, even when the intervention carries a high burden of distress, and even when the chance of success is vanishingly small. Doctors can feel it, patients can feel it, and families can feel it too, The very existence of an intervention can create the powerful sense that it ought to be tried. This idea is usually associated with modern medicine and its technological advances. George Brown didn't have an intensive care unit full of machines or an arsenal of drugs. All the same, I think the treatment imperative can help illuminate the dilemma he faced. To George, doing nothing may have felt less like the simple absence of action and more like a deliberate choice to let his son die. The ritual offered him what medicine could not, something he could do. Perhaps the question was no longer, do I believe this will work? And instead became, can I live with myself if I don't try? In May 1892, two months after the exhumation, George Brown buried his son. Eddie was 24 years old. His obituary described him as a young man of sterling integrity and someone that any community could ill afford to lose, with a white clapboard church filled for his funeral. A local weaving shop sent cushions bearing the words... husband and shopmate. The casket was covered in flowers, including a wreath from his old employer with the inscription, Loved Ones Parted, and a choir sang the hymn, Some Sweet Day. George Brown had lost his wife and three children. He would go on to bury three more daughters, Annie, Jenny and Myra, Only Hattie survived him. He lived in Exeter for another 30 years, side by side with the same neighbours who'd opened the graves of his wife and daughters to try and save his son. In that time, the world transformed. The X-ray opened a window into the human body and scientists developed the first tuberculosis vaccine. But in May 1892... None of that existed yet. At Eddie's funeral, the choir sang of a different kind of hope. By and by, some sweet day, we shall meet our loved ones gone. Some sweet day, by and by. For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at timharford.com. Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fiennes and Ryan Dilley. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Ben-Nadav Hafri edited the scripts. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohen, Corinne Gileard-Fisher, Eric Sandler, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review. It really does make a difference to us. And if you want to hear it ad-free and receive a bonus audio episode, video episode and members-only newsletter every month, why not join the Cautionary Club? To sign up, head to patreon.com slash cautionaryclub. That's patreon, p-a-t-r-e-o-n dot com slash cautionaryclub. Thank you.
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