Behind the Scenes Minis: Jack and Pearl and Patience

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about jack o' lanterns this week. We did, we did. We didn't say it at the top of the show, but I'm like, I should have said, that's not going to be an exhaustive history of jack lanyards because there are many. I mean, you could do an episode just on like Victorian Halloween decorations that ye depict them in scary and beautiful ways. But I have a list of things that I wanted to mention. Okay, I did not realize until I was an adult, like a grown grown almost. I think it was right before I got married person adult, that a lot of people did not grow up carving pumpkins. And at the time, I thought, like, you have been deprived of your childhood. What has happened? Because there was there was no question. Now, I, upon reflection, don't remember if this was something initiated by my parents or me. But I carved a pumpkin. Yeah, we usually carved a pumpkin. There's only been a couple times that I've carved a pumpkin like as an adult. I did. However, the first Halloween of covid Oh, some friends and I all carved turnips. I am showing Holly a picture of my carved turnip. I actually feel like I took two. I did two of them, but only one of them turned out. I think I only have one picture of one of them saved on my phone. And I carved like it. It's too small to like carve the top out, so I just I carved the bottom out and put it over a little tea light. Yeah, like a little battery of which is really the smart way anyway, because yeah, pulling even with a big pumpkin, pulling open the top and reach your hand in if you have a live candle. Sure, those people today I have noticed suggest carving using a instead of a lid, using a bottom base, cutting the bottom out, and making that though I have very strong feelings and opinions about the proper ways to carve pumpkins, Okay, I am one of those people that does not like to cut all the way through because I feel like if you leave some flesh, you get a lot more options for detailing and shading. And it's to the point where when I see one that's carved all the way through, I'm like, oh, but if you do it that way, do it that way. I'm just I have my own picky business. I did, however, continue to wonder for a while, why didn't everybody grow up in I thought body carved pumpkins? And then while I was researching this episode, I may have accidentally stumbled onto insight. Oh yeah, because I found this is in my least favorite genre of article. But I found a series of presumable intended to be comedic articles about how much dads hated to carve pumpkins and how it was this horrible, messy chore, which it is messy, but you know, it just was one of those things where it was like the same way that people like to complain about their spouses or their kids does not appeal to me. Where it was like, oh, my dumb kids gotta have a pumpkin here I am carving, and I'm like, that is not funny to me. But if there was this culture, this particularly in the late fifties up through the sixties, I kept finding these allegedly funny stories about beleaguered husbands and fathers having to carve pumpkins. I was like, there may have been right about the time our parents were coming of age as adults, where they had been indoctrinated into this idea that pumpkin carving was arduous and unfun, which might be why a lot of our friends didn't do it growing up, but I sure did. I haven't done it as an adult because, uh, you gotta get the pumpkins, yes, and then you gotta then you gotta carve the pumpkin, and then you gotta dispose of the pumpkin. And like we don't currently have a composter or anything. Our city does have a day of like the pickup for compost of pumpkins, because that is a lot of food waste to just like put out. But then also the last several years of my life I have been living in cities, and putting a cut vegetable onto your stoop contributes to the attracting of rodents a lot of the time. So yeah, you weren't gonna like my solve then for throwing away pumpkins, which is to feed it to the rodents, like cut it up and put it out on your deck or your lawn for birds and whatever else to get. Yeah, yeah, I've just I've lived in a couple of neighborhoods that are like really densely populated and have in some cases like struggled with rodent control, and so that makes a little trickier. Yeah, I sure do love pumpkin everything. I'm that person. I am that basic, basic gal who wants pumpkin everything all year round. I know it's not always pumpkin in the pumpkin puree, and sometimes there are other squashes, but I don't care. I will open a can and eat it right out of the can with the spoon. I love that stuff. Nice. Throw like the tiniest scant little scattering of sugar and cinnamon on that, and I'll eat it for days. I'm getting all of my vitamin A in the fall. I love pumpkin flavored everything, fake and otherwise. There was another thing that I discovered while I was doing the research for this that tickled me utterly. Okay, maybe this is something other people have known about and done. I had never seen or heard about it before, and it kind of cracked me up. There seems to have been in the forties and fifties this popular style of party to have called a birthday party. But it was not like Happy Birthday, Tracy, this is your party. It was like a party that was for everyone, and it had twelve tables, each themed to a month of the year. And when you got to the party, you were supposed to sit at the appropriate table, huh, which sounds sort of cute. And then I found this very very funny article in let me make sure I know where this is from the Daily American of Somerset, Pennsylvania. That is a story about something that happened at one of these parties, and it's very charming, and it's under the subheader. Attorney Clarence Shaver sat down at a table laden with pumpkins at the Church of the Brethren birthday dinner last night to observe his October birthday. To his amazement, he found he was in error and that pumpkins can be symbolic of Thanksgiving and harvest when they don't have jack o lantern faces. So he politely excused himself and sought the table bearing the symbols of October. Okay, And that's from a nineteen forty five February paper, which I just thought was hilarious. Like that, it was enough of a startle that. He was like, oh, and then it made the paper somehow, and I'm like, did he tell the paper? Did he? That is quite a my little faux pod have written up in the paper, right, I mean to me, it's hilarious. I get it, but like, what an odd thing to make the paper. I sat at their own table at the birthday party, like should I host a birthday party? And then I'm like, where would I find twelve tables? So maybe maybe in the future, somewhere else that is not my house, because that seems like a lot. It does seem like a lot, unless they're very tiny tables. Like maybe you could do little tiny cocktail tables and do temp ones and see I'm already planning, or maybe in the yard. Oh I love a party anyway. I'm so excited for jacka Lantern season. Do you have feelings about the foam based faux pumpkins and carving them? Do you ever carve those? I've never tried that. Oh. I love it because if you have a really good design, you can keep it and use it over and over and over, which I love. Oh yeah, And I also like those those are great for on the porch because they will not attract rodents, and they're very handy. You should always, of course, not use flame in them, but an artificial candle because you don't want to melt any plastic and stuff. I'm imagining melting burning plastic. That's never a good thing, never a good thing. So we talked about patients Worth and Pearl Curran this week we did. This is when I've been circling for a minute. I mean, it definitely went on my list a year ago. I had heard of them before that, but that was when I was really like, oh, yeah, that's gonna happen. This whole thing is so fascinating to me. Yeah, I don't think I had heard about it at all, but I agree. There are still people, you know, trying to decide what they think was going on with Pearl Curran. We'll never know. I want to mention briefly this thing that utterly fascinated me about her use okay, because you know, her mom clearly had some struggles and when she would go through a rough period, Pearl would get sent to live with another relative for a little while, which you know, is a perfectly valid solution and was very very common then and still goes on a lot now. But what struck me as interesting is that part of what is was and again this is all based on like other people's recollections, so just know that I'm this is all speculative. Right. What was bothering Mary so much about her life and leaving her feelings so nervous all the time was that they were moving around constantly and didn't have consistency, and like money was often a little bit tight. And then I'm like and unfortunately, like this is an example of how like a problem like that will replicate through a family, because the solution was then to move Pearl around constantly and give her very little consistency. And I'm like, yeah, that's a problem with how this works. Yeah, I'm so fascinated by that that, Like I'm always like, did anybody connect those dots that like maybe she had some sort of episode when she was a teenager because she was living essentially the same problems that her mother was experiencing that had triggered her his shoes And I don't know if anybody ever did just a food for thought kind of thing there. Yeah, I'll never ever be able to unravel that particular problem. Yeah, I mean, listen, I have often said, I am as skeptical as they come. I do not believe in ghosts. Yeah, but we talked in the weed Aboard episode about how like it's not. And I never quite got the sense that many people were giving a ton of credit to this possibility in her time, although certainly there have been psychologists since then that have the idea that Pearl may very well have believe like it was not a conscious effort on her part to be manifesting something that wasn't real. She may have truly believed in patience and it was just a part of her brain going no, remember we read that book when we were seventeen, and we'll just put that back in an out into the world in a new way, like we don't, we have no idea. There's a lot of I will say that very few of the psychological analyzes of her seem like they want to vilify her as the lady making something up, but they do often veer off into more like she had serious mental problems, And I'm like, right, she just kind of like a person who had given into the power of suggestion on a level that didn't seem to hinder her day to day life. As pearl current in any way, which makes it a whole other thing to think about. So one of the things that struck me was like the rate at which she was reportedly writing so fast, really fast and really fast if it was coming from being spelled out letter by letter on a wija board. Like I kind of was trying to do mental math of like how fast would that Planchette have to be moving if that was really like how fast she was writing, And then like that led me to mental questions of like, Okay, let's just say hypothetically that what is really going on here is that she's actually pretty good at just like free writing creative work, right, which there are people, yeah, but that can just kind of churn out a free written draft of something. So it's like if even if there's another person sitting with her at at the wigiboard, like, is she really hitting all of these letters or is it more that she's kind of dictating? And like, I don't know, it just seems so fast to me to be me too. Now. I do have friends that are writers that will say like they bang out their first draft in a couple days, and I believe people can do it. But the other thing is that that's usually a draft. Well, I've done National Novel Writing Month multiple times, which is fifty thousand words in a month, and I usually did that with a period of hours per day. But I was also typing. I was typing on a computer, which I do a million times faster than I write with a device. So I'm like, were you're writing out all these with somebody writing out all these words? Were they using shorthand? I just have various questions. I have some answers to you, okay, because I know that they never use shorthand because they were worried about misinterpreting it and not getting Patience's exact odd dialect if they did that. So I know they weren't using shorthand. Like I said, John was doing it. After he died, there wasn't really anybody else that picked it up the way that he had done. So after nineteen twenty two, then it's a little more open to interpretation. I think, like what actually happened. He may have just been extraordinarily good at it, But yeah, twenty five hundred words to thirty five hundred words in ninety minutes to two hours is a lot that's hand cramped. Territory for sure. So yeah, I don't don't know, and he wrote down everything that happened in addition to that, since she would also be like, I would like to comment on the weather or that person over there that's here visiting, because she would Apparently I didn't hear a lot. I didn't find a lot of instances or evidence of it, but she was said to be insightful. One of the things that made people believe patients was real was that she would times say things that indicated she knew personal details about people in the room that Pearl could not have known. Whether that's true or not, I don't know, but yes, And so John is madly writing all of this out, well at all plays out. Here's the thing. I think Rosa Alvaro was a confession. Yeah, but I mean it does seem real easy to interpret it that way. Yeah, And that was so that came out in nineteen nineteen, so it was six years after all of this started. And that seems like about I don't know if the right amount of time is the right phrasing, but I could see that as being a length of time where she was reaching the point of like, I don't know if I can keep this going she did after that, but that's probably also in formed by financial need, whereas at that point she may have just wanted to be Like she was said to have been very excited when it got sold for a movie option, and I think she made like fifteen hundred dollars off of it, but she didn't. It didn't She wasn't able to parlay that into an ongoing Pearl current writing career because nobody seemed very interested in more of her work. They wanted more Patience Patience. Patience is Victorian novel. It's very funny to me. I hope that doesn't sound disrespectful, but I think it's hilarious. It's like, oh, you might have misplayed your hand here. Here's the other thing that people have often mentioned in the discussion of it. We didn't really dig into all of the debates over her work that were going on, but one of the things that people who believed the whole thing was real would often say, like, there is literally no way that Pearl Curran could be preparing to do this, Like even if she was like studying up in the day before people came over, there's no way somebody could pull this off. But like we know that there are people who have, you know, essentially photographic recall of certain specific things, like it's entirely possible that somebody could do it. And I feel like part of why I really dislike most of the cases that are made suggesting it is real. We touched on in the show are that they are all very dismissive of Pearl Curran and kind of talk about her as though she's some sort of simpleton that could never pull this off. She could not have written these words. Well, she did, so shush yeah. Well, and especially because she did also write a short story on her own, like she obviously could write a short story that was good enough that people wanted to adapt it into film. But again, that one thing seems to like kind of vanish in the mist. I think it didn't work into anybody's story of what they thought was going on, so everybody kind of disregarded it. They're like, ah, too confusing, because if it did, even for the people that it would have proven. I think so many people were invested in the idea that it was a mental illness of some kind manifesting that they didn't want They at that point did not want to be like, oh, she was just a very very clever woman who managed to keep this thing going for a shocking amount of time. I mean, by the time she died, she was still channeling patients and it was twenty four years into their relationship together. For lack of a better phrase, just fascinating. Fascinating anyway, Pearl current. The other thing that I think is proof positive that the patient's worths could not have been real. She was a chatty Chatterson, and if she really was a spirit that could channel to people, she would have showed up again in the last hundred years to have something else to say. There's no way she could have kept it shut for one hundred years. There's just I don't know how much more specific detail we know about her, like purported biography, beyond what we said in the little, very little, but it like it. It has some tropes, oh very much so like very much so like is when I read just like the first paragraph of the outline, I was like, this reads like a made up, fanciful story by a white person. One hundred percent. Yeah. I mean she they had asked her some other questions Emily and Pearl when she had first appeared, and it was like, where are you from and they were very cagey answers, like far away across the sea. And eventually they got some additional info and Casper Yost, because he really was trying to track it down, identified the town he thought made the most sense, and like we mentioned briefly in the show, he went to England and tried to like find her in place and time and couldn't find anything. Really, So, yeah, that's a made up entity that doesn't conveniently didn't have any family to connect her to, conveniently died at the hands of indigenous people and was not given any kind of proper burial. It sounds like conveniently, it's all very convenient. Yeah, And as you said, Tropius, heck yeah, obviously they're really were colonists. Obviously there really were people who were killed in various conflicts. But like it just it fits so many hallmarks of what a person might make up as their purported spiritual guide. Yeah, oh yeah, Like it went through the checklist like of difficult to trace, stays just nebulous enough, gives the details that people would be like I've heard of that happening before. Then, I hope none of you are haunted by ghosts. Or spirits this weekend or ever unless you want to be I mean, I always say don't believe in ghosts, but if one showed up, I'd be into it. So Baba Duke, come to my house. We hope that if you have some downtime this weekend, that you get to use it doing whatever makes you happiest. And if you don't have downtime, I still hope you sneak some happiness in there. We will be right back here tomorrow with a classic Episoddin then on Monday with something brand new for the Halloween season. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.