Behind the Scenes Minis: Villas and Tirades

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V.

00:00:15
Speaker 2: Wilson.

00:00:16
Speaker 1: We talked about Villa's de Vechi week.

00:00:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, two of it.

00:00:24
Speaker 1: There were a couple things that I didn't include. The episode ran a little bit shorter than usual, and I had had these things in and I pulled them out.

00:00:34
Speaker 2: One is a thing that I didn't pull out. It's just a random thing.

00:00:37
Speaker 1: But I just could not substantiate them. And they were odd enough that I would have felt weird even trying to I mean just trying to talk around them. I was like, surely there should be a record of this, Like it just became a weird thing.

00:00:50
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:00:50
Speaker 1: One was that allegedly there was actually a fire there at some point. I don't know if this is true. I never found any news stories about it.

00:01:01
Speaker 2: Nothing.

00:01:02
Speaker 1: And the reason why I was like, I don't know that this is accurate is that when you do look at pictures, I haven't seen anywhere it looks like there's charring or you know, fire damage that you would normally see. It's possible there is, and I just haven't seen pictures but I just do not know. The other was that there was a report that the reason the government finally took some steps to try to close the site with like wire fencing and whatever is that somebody had actually fallen when the upper floor caved in because the upper floor is not there anymore, and that they were injured and that's why. But I also could not find any substantiation of that one, although that would certainly make sense as a catalyst to take steps, but it also could have just been that they got around to it on their list of things to think about. I don't know. Yeah, I understand the it is to want to look at a place that is overgrown and was once beautiful and is now a mess to make up ghost stories about it, Sure I do, But I really think, yeah, these ones are unfounded. Yeah, I'm sorry, most haunted house in Italy. I don't believe you are. When the like the origin story of the ghosts is apparently just not really a thing, that doesn't make it a little weird. Yeah, ironically there is no I found zero mention of the ghost of Sidoli being there, which would have made more sense, sure since he was the architect that was there working. Yeah, I have also had the experience of trying to research something for the show, having like one set of information of what's available in English, and then finding the Wikipedia page for the country where that place is and looking at it out of curiosity and sometimes finding wildly different information and often more just the amount of information is much different, which is not I mean, it's not surprising that a person who was really important to the history of a particular place that is not the United States where we live, and is also not a place that has a lot of cultural and historical ties to the United States. Right, Totally reasonable and normal for there to be way more information about that person in that other place than here.

00:03:51
Speaker 2: Right.

00:03:51
Speaker 1: But occasionally when this happens, I'll like see the Wikipedia page in this other place, and I'll do the same thing. I'll look at it and I will like translated, just to be out of curiout like what does it say? How does it compare? And occasionally go, yeah, this is this is very different, and trying to sort of figure.

00:04:10
Speaker 2: Out where where where the divergence.

00:04:15
Speaker 1: Happened in like the factual yeah, the like where where did that come from? Not so much where did the ghost stories come from? But like where did this completely different story about a murder arise? Right, And this is a case where like there, I feel like places like this have this unique problem in terms of finding the root of that because, especially if they are in a foreign country from where native English speakers live, visitors will go there and locals will tell them stories to goad them on that then get repeated as though they are fact, while those locals are probably snickering at the Dindong tourists who bought everything hook line and sinker, and so it becomes trickier to be like, okay, but then there are also allegedly locals that believe it's haunted, so right, yeah, well, and I mean I've had that experience in the United States.

00:05:16
Speaker 2: We went on a.

00:05:18
Speaker 1: Ghost tour one time in New Orleans that I feel like that ghost tour was a lot grounded in reality most of the time. Yeah, but there were a couple of particular stories that after we returned to our respective homes from our visit to New Orleans, I was like, that would be a great podcast episode, and I went to look it up and I was like, oh no, that story was made up, saying but I can't even find you know, an origin point for something that could have been distorted into that story. Yeah, I also that you said in the episode, like the like Wikipedia articles are not a source that we use for the show. One of the things that I do on Wikipedia sometimes is scroll immediately to the bottom of the article to see.

00:06:06
Speaker 2: If there are books that I am not aware of.

00:06:09
Speaker 1: Because as the quality of search engine results has gotten worse and more driven by ads and whatnot, sometimes I will find a reference to the book in the source list of a Wikipedia article that I might not have found otherwise. Same do it all the time. I am now using a plugin for Chrome that just strips out all of the AI summaries and AD links, which is very helpful, but still, like the results themselves sometimes are less helpful than they used to be. In my personal life, I use Wikipedia for stuff like looking at the list of TV episodes from specific television shows when I'm trying to figure out, like, where did I leave off watching this? My watch history has gotten cleared somehow, that kind of thing, anything that has a fandom association with it. A lot of times the Wikipedia page will be incredibly robust about like that particular entertainment property or whatever. Very helpful anyway. Wikipedia has uses, is what I'm saying. Yeah, even if those uses are not you know, researching episodes of the show.

00:07:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm not anti Wikipedia at all.

00:07:22
Speaker 1: We just always we try to do primary sources as often as possible, right, and then you go to secondaries, etc. And we've always said, like on the Halloween episodes, especially when you're talking about paranormal things or haunting stories, we're not as hardcore about those rules. But this one, even so, I was like, I literally took this from a Wikipedia article and I wanted transparency about it. Yeah. Yeah, for sure, we'll talk about a depressing thing, oh sort of, and then a funny thing, Okay. I have looking at pictures of places that are dilapidated Holmes is very melancholy for me. Yeah, because on the one hand, I'm fascinated and it's like, oh, spookyky, And on the other I'm like, it happens less with smaller or it happens less with big palatial homes like this and more with smaller homes. But I just like, I don't know if it's that I'm too empathetic about the whole thing, and I'm like, this was a place that somebody loved once and they felt like this was their special place and their like, you know, their hopes and dreams were into this space and now it's just junk. And I find that very depressing. Yeah, because I am sentimental about inanimate objects. It happens all the time. Yeah, listen, I'll I see one sad shoe in the road, and I'm sad because like, where is the other shoe? What happened here? That's me. Here's the funny thing. I was looking at pictures from inside Villadeveki in Greece, which again you are allowed to go into and you can buy tickets to go visit, but it also does have a lot of graffiti. But I don't know why. It cracked me up. While I was looking at these pictures, somebody had very very carefully spray painted the URL for their SoundCloud. Oh that's hilarious. And I'm like, on the one hand, I'm like, honey, do you think people are like taking this down or like taking a picture to go visit your SoundCloud because you did a graffiti. But then on the other hand, I'm like, is this very astute because they know this is a place that's photographed a lot Yeah, that presumably those photos are going online and now everyone will know about their SoundCloud.

00:09:51
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:09:52
Speaker 1: I didn't go to their SoundCloud site, but I did think it was funny. I'm waiting for the time there's like a graffiti QR code. I'm sure someone's done it already for the stencil, but it seems like that would be very arduous. You got to get out your cricket and custom cut that biz. But I'm waiting. I'm waiting. The age is coming. Sound cloud graffiti. I don't know why that cracked me up. To very carefully spray paint an entire url is very funny to me. That's just inherently hilarious. That's like the nerdiest graffiti artist of all time. Are you going out tagging? Yeah, let me make sure I spell check it first, Like, yeah, I love everything about it. Listen, we need our giggles where we can get them. We talked about the Hammersmith Ghost murder this week. We did, and I stopped you as we were recording because you were about to be real Ti Rady in a perfectly valid way about the language of the law that allows for the nuance of mistaken understanding.

00:11:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, which I.

00:11:09
Speaker 1: Completely agree with, although I feel like in Great Britain it may work differently than it does here. Right, So we live in the United States. I don't know why the word United States didn't want to just come out of my mouth just then, but we live in the United States, so we like that's the context we're operating out of. But when I was reading that whole, all the legal language, it made me super angry because the basic idea of what that boiled down to is that if a person believes that someone else is a threat, even if that is an unreasonable belief, if they were genuinely laboring under that unreasonable belief, can use it as a defense. So if you think wildly with no basis that someone is a threat to you, and you shoot and kill them, you can still use that thinking they were a threat as a defense even though it was unreasonable. And we have similar laws in parts of the United States. And when the United States, we are also living in a society that for centuries spread racist misinformation about really anyone who was not white, but especially about black people, and very especially about black men, presenting black men as uniquely dangerous to everyone else, and that has been used as a defense so often in people murdering unarmed black people in particular, also unarmed people of other races, saying well, I thought that this person was dangerous, right, and I don't think that is a good defense. I do think that it is incumbent on all of us not to kill one another. And so having to read this language that was like, oh, yeah, this is actually fine, if not fine, but like this is appropriate to use as a defense, I was like, no, I think if you are under the absolute unfounded misapprehension that someone is threatening you and you kill them because you're scared, that's not a good defense. I think I agree with you one hundred percent. I think, and I could be wrong. So any of our listeners from Britain who want to set the record straight, the way that it is handled in courts there is different than here insofar as there has to be enough evidence that it would be reasonable for them to have come to that conclusion, you know what I mean. They can't just say this person looked scary and they happened to be in my yard, so I got scared and shot them. There has to be and he did this and this and this, and there has to be evidence behind it. Yeah, you know, in that case, that nineteen eighty three case, there's all the stuff about like that guy told me he was a police officer, but then he couldn't produce any credentials that proved that, right, and he you know, he obviously was lying to some degree, which kind of fed the problem that he was just that he was in fact doing what you're talking about, going after a young black kid, that he was doing that kind of profiling wrong thing.

00:14:39
Speaker 2: So it's I.

00:14:40
Speaker 1: Think there is more room for that kind of discussion and nuance in courts in Britain to establish a reasonable like that, yes, a reasonable person might think this was the situation versus the way it is often handled here, where you just have to say they were on my property and I was scared.

00:15:00
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:15:00
Speaker 1: Well, And part of my frustration here is that, like, because of the centuries of propaganda that has been steeped throughout society in the United States, it's possible to build an incredibly racist argument that someone was reasonable in feeling that they were threatened, right, which is like just a whole other.

00:15:23
Speaker 2: Layer of it.

00:15:24
Speaker 1: The definition is really like how you perceive reasonability, I think at that point, Yeah, not to make light of it. But I really do think, like what is considered reasonable to some people, it's not reasonable to us writers, and I think some municipalities are a little more stringent in their assessment of that.

00:15:45
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:15:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, anyway, that was my my tirade, I guess. Yeah, it is wild to me in this that. I mean, it kind of speaks in this story to how well liked Francis Smith was then even the victim of his accidental shootings, family members were like, no, yeah, uh, he really was purposely taking this dumb risk. Yeah, which is interesting. That kind of feeds into some like similar similar things that continue to happen today that it's like taking us, you know, an unwise risk is not grounds for being summarily executed in the street.

00:16:32
Speaker 2: No, not at all, not at all, not at all.

00:16:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is like a point that was made in the trial was that like even if he had been on purpose pretending to be a ghost.

00:16:42
Speaker 2: That's not something you kill somebody over. Yeah.

00:16:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's a very interesting case. I'm so fascinated by scenarios as evidenced this year maybe of like mass hysteria and like group fear, that this one was very interesting to me, Like where an entire community can get so heightened where but what's really fun. Fun is not the right word because it does involve a murder. But what's really really interesting is how Hammersmith had enough people that were really amped up over this that they were sending you know, people were going out and hunting patrols are happening, and at the same time, like London was like, oh Hammersmith, I mean, those dang dongs think they're ghostly. It's an interesting thing in like cultural pockets within larger metro municipalities that just have their own beliefs or you know, they get caught up in the thing.

00:17:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, now we have that, but.

00:17:56
Speaker 1: It's all segregated down into communities online, Right's right? Yeah to me? If you are in this community that has been gripped by the possibility that there is a ghost, and it seems likely that, if not a ghost, there is at least someone all in white who has been scaring people on purpose, and the way such things are handled is often with community patrols. It's reasonable to me for the community patrol to question that person. Ye, well, yeah, I question the guy that happens to be out at night in all in all white clothes, the fact that it jumped immediately to shooting him. I'm like, I don't fully follow Well, he.

00:18:44
Speaker 2: Called out for him twice and he didn't answer.

00:18:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, and to me, that's still not a reason to shoot.

00:18:49
Speaker 2: Well. No, but like, I mean, I think in that moment of fear.

00:18:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, again, keeping in mind that this was two hundred years ago, when our understanding of the world was a bit different. Yeah, I can see we're in that moment of fear. Somebody might do that. I'm not happy about it. I don't want that to happen. But I also am kind of one of those people that's like, you know what, this man had the pants scared off of him, and he reacted in a way that was not great but is understandable, particularly because he did say like, hey, who are you and Thomas didn't want to reply, and the fact we kind of glossed through it. But that in that testimony that his mother in law gave about his previous altercation with someone thinking he was a ghost, his response was not oh, no, I'm so sorry. It didn't even occur to me that I would look like a ghost.

00:19:45
Speaker 2: It was I'm gonna punch you in the head. Like, clearly.

00:19:51
Speaker 1: He was not participating in trying to ease anybody's minds about the situation. He sure sure, Like that is a man that seems all ready for five Like, oh my gosh, I thought you were a ghost. Really, I will punch you, Like what is the that's not a logical reaction either, rights, it's a lot of problems. Yeah, yeah, don't punch people. Don't shoot people, is the moral of the story. Yeah, don't do it. At least don't punch people for wearing white work clothes at night. Well, he was going to punch the guy for thinking he was, you know, a ghost, even though he yeah, yeah, so you don't everybody be cool? Which is the problem is that we don't. We live in a world where everybody can't be cool and there's guns cool, just mind your mind your business. We could all just be hanging out having snacks, trick or treating.

00:20:49
Speaker 2: I don't know.

00:20:50
Speaker 1: The other thing that I think is germane here is that Graham the shoemaker came forward. Nobody believed him because they didn't want to. There may have been a perception that he because he did it the day after the sentencing, that he was trying to help mitigate the final outcome for Francis Smith, but also because people didn't want to. But what's interesting is that he faced no repercussions whatsoever, even though I mean it sounds like, according to a lot of accounts, he was out there not just scaring people but touching them in ways that might be considered assaultive.

00:21:34
Speaker 2: Oh you know what I mean, Like, yeah, he's.

00:21:36
Speaker 1: Putting his hands around somebody. If he's putting his arms around someone, if he's putting his hands on someone's throat, that would be considered assault in my book. Oh sure, he didn't seem to face any repercussions for any of that. So the whole thing has problems. That's annoying. There's layers of things. Everybody be cool. So this Halloween, I hope that you have a wonderful celebration, however you celebrate it. If you do, I hope that you have so much fun that involves no violence whatsoever, that no one assaults you in any kind of way. With the one very niche exception of if you pay to go into some sort of haunted attraction where you know that you are likely to be in some way assaulted by someone in the spirit of fun that you have consented to. That's my one, very niche exception. I hope that you have a wonderful time and that you celebrate with delicious things, maybe a yummy candy corn flavored cocktail. I'm working on one right now I'm very excited about. And that as you go into this weekend, you have some relaxation time. Maybe you're going to recover from your Halloween revelry. If you don't have time off, maybe you have to clean up the yard after your Halloween decorations, or just be like me, leave that stuff up your around.

00:22:53
Speaker 2: It's great.

00:22:54
Speaker 1: I hope everybody is kind to one another and that we all take care of each other rather than an is, rather than immediately jumping to violent reactions. We all need each other to be cool. We will be right back here tomorrow in a classic episode, and then on Monday we will have something brand new. 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.