Behind the Scenes Minis: Criminals and the Maco Light

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Boy.

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Speaker 2: We talked about a murder this week. We sure did with some real sloppy criminals.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, these were.

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Speaker 2: Not uh of all the planning, like the you know, if I'm not saying anyone should plan a murder in fact, please don't, I beg But they did a bad job babying theirtel. I really don't think the other two guys were involved in this planning at all, but like he did not really think anything through. Uh, they all did just absurd things afterward, with the singing and the ordering the pork for dinner and I don't know, just renting a gig from the same person over and over on the course of the weekend and returning it bloody one time.

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Speaker 1: Like yeah, I know.

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Speaker 2: I think maybe all of their time in fight club had knocked their brains about a bit and they were not capable of critical thinking.

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Speaker 1: That's my guy.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, I was away this past week and one of the things that we did one day was we just we're going to have regency stuff on the TV all day one day and we wound up playing through a lot of Bridgerton, which I've watched all of Bridgerton, I have not read the books. I had forgotten about the whole boxing plot line that exists in that show, and I was like, ah, this comes up in that.

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Speaker 1: The thing I'm working on context for this.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I had just sort of forgotten, which is we I mean that boxing comes up in a lot of fiction of the area, even if it's like not the book has nothing to do with that, there will be mentioned of you know, they were trying to get somewhere and the road was just totally glutted with people who were going to the boxing match, like that kind of stuff. How delighted am I always when Hogarth comes up? Yeah, there's been several Hogarth mentions lately. Oh, it makes me want to pull out my Hogarth doc Martins.

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Speaker 1: Yeah.

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Speaker 2: As I was compiling research for this, I went and I just sort of bookmarked a ton of different books from you know, eighteen twenty three, eighteen twenty four, right in the time within you know, a year or two of when all this happened, and it I didn't realize until actually getting into them how many of them were the exact same material, just maybe in a different order. Yeah, Because like a lot of people were like, you know, how I bet I can make a little bit of money is if I compile all of the you know, all of these records and all of these testimonies, I'm just going to put it all into one thing and print it.

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Speaker 1: Maybe I will have.

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Speaker 2: Some paragraphs of original material that are like maybe my own eyewitness account of the hanging or whatever. A lot And then after a while in trying to read just one of them, my brain really just started. I was like, I, yeah, you all don't really have your story straight, and this is all happening in a place called the art of choke. That's the best part, right the Yeah, Yeah, Like you and I don't live in the world where somebody could pull a body from the pond and take it to the nearest inn to have the corridor's inquest right there right at the end.

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Speaker 1: That's just not.

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Speaker 2: I also was thinking about the chain of custody with the murder weapons, because it like really was like these two guys found by the road, they gave it to their boss. I am not sure if their boss then gave it directly to the magistrate, or if that, if they passed through the hands of someone else first, right, which is also you know, not really how ideally it works.

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Speaker 1: No, today, No, there's a lot. There's a lot of Again, I think maybe fight Club made them not able to think things be like, oh, hell, there's this. Everybody knows about this. I didn't even try to conceal the fact that I was doing. I didn't even go to a different town. I just bought that the nearest place to where I was gonna kill the guy.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I just I just went over to the store and bought sack in a rope.

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Speaker 1: You know how you do? Yeah, as you do.

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Speaker 2: I do wish that I was able to I had been able to find more information about William ware or Weir. However it is that people want to say his name because I really found almost nothing, And I'm an a a lot of stuff today, like real brief encyclopedia type articles like describe him as a solicitor, and I have not really been able to figure out like was he actually a solicitor. He lived at lions In, which is a place where a solicitor might live, but lions In had also like declined so much in uh quality, I guess is maybe not the exact best word.

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Speaker 1: But he wasn't necessarily a.

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Speaker 2: Solictorie, right, And when I tried to go back to like news reports and stuff like that from the time, I didn't find anything that described him as a solicitor. But I, like, I also didn't feel like that was enough to conclusively rule that out. I mean, here's the bottom line, right, nothing is enough to conclusively say much of anything about him.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the problem.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know, maybe there are more records somewhere, but I sure did not find them. Oh sorry, William Ware, we don't know a lot about you. So we talked about six ghost stories this week, and I'm just gonna say some of these listener recommendations of these ghost stories were from many, many years ago. I don't know why it took me so long to go, Oh, you know, what would be really fun for October is like six impossible episodes ghost Story Edition. So yeah, if you were one of the folks who suggested one of these things several years ago, sorry it took so long. These were very fun and made me think of other things. Yeah, the story of Resurrection Mary immediately made me think, even though the scenario is not quite the same of The Great Gatsby, Oh yeah, right, sure, since now I'm blanking on the character's name, but Ala Fisher played her in the movie gets hit by the car as everything is reaching its climax, and I was like, I wonder if those informed each other at all?

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Speaker 1: Yeah?

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Speaker 2: Yeah, there are also a lot of other ghosts stories, Like we mentioned the vanishing hitchhiker or urban legend, but there are a lot of other named ghosts that are you know, the ghost of someone who was killed in a car crash or something similar who tries to hitch a ride with somebody and disappears at one of several places, the place that they died, the place they were buried, their.

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Speaker 1: Home, any of those.

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Speaker 2: The reason I wound up putting make a Light on here was initially just like that was a story I heard a lot when I was a kid. And one of the reasons that I heard it a lot was I had this drama teacher who was the drama teacher at my high school and also the director for the summer theater program that I did, and with our summer productions, there would usually be a day at the very very end of the program where like, uh, this was part of like a summer enrichment program that the school system did, and so there would be a day toward the end where uh, like we were already doing our performances, so we weren't really doing rehearsals anymore. Right, we had rehearsed, you know, we were going to have a show that evening. We're not going to have a rehearsal, but we were because this was a you know, a school the school system enrichment program, like we were still expected to be there during the day, and so we would just have this day that we sort of took care of chores around the theater and hung out, and uh, the teacher, whose name was Maggie Griffin, would tell us her story is about the Maco Light.

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Speaker 1: Oh I remember. I remember no details of the Mago Lights story.

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Speaker 2: All I remember is like how excited we would be about when it was time to hear about the Maco Light. And it was like, uh, you know, we were all very excited about being in the play. We were all theater kids, like that's we were very into the performance part of it. But like also a bonus side effect of like these last days of our summer theater program was like getting to hear the Maco Light story, which I'm still like, yeah, I don't remember. I remember zero.

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Speaker 1: Details about that. I believe firmly that Disney imagineers were very familiar with both the Rotherwood story and the Larnux story. Oh yeah, when they wrote the story. Sorry for the Disneyland Paris version of Haunted Mansion. Okay, First of all, the family name associated with it is not Rotherwood but Ravenswood, Okay, and it features a daughter who has people suitors who mysteriously die the story there in the I really really love the way Disneyland Paris marries the story of the Haunted Mansion with the story of their Big Thunder Mountain, which is that the man who struck it rich with Big Thunder Mountain in a gold strike then built the mansion and he has since died and it's his ghost theoretically killing all of these suitors or husbands, and she walks around in her wedding dress looking for her lost groom. And so I was like, oh, this is a lot of overlap with these specific stories. Yeah, I do not mind the factual discrepancies between the you know the ghost story, uh and like when there is you know, actual fact that it was based on, Like I don't, I don't mind those factual discrepancies. I did not know the part about the MAGO, like the real the real accident that has so many things in common with the MAGO like ghost story, And I'm just assuming that like that real accident sort of informed that ghost story and like got sort of people messed up details along the way, and like the messed up detail version got off, but like I did not. Yeah, I was not aware when I.

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Speaker 2: Sort of put this on the list due to my own nostalgia that I was going to wind up reading about an actual like there really was an actual train accent accident that had some similarities with it. You mentioned that if you were spending your first night in a purportedly very haunted mansion, you would do things differently.

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Speaker 1: What would you do? Hey, y'all, let's be friends. You don't have to leave me alone week and hang show me cool stuff in the house. That'd be great. I just you know, they'll be like raccoons, but ghosts. It'll be the same way. Okay, that works out. Help me get dressed. It'll be fun. We'll be we'll be buddies.

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Speaker 2: So yeah, I enjoyed working on these ghost stories. I'm glad that we also have ideas for potential future installments on haunted hotels and then maybe also ghost towns. I didn't look enough into the ghost towns to see how many of the ghost towns have ghost stories right attached to them. I just put them all on a list that that says ghost town. So maybe we'll see at some point in the future. So I hope everybody has had a good Friday, and I hope whatever's coming up for your weekend is great. We will be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow. We will have brand new episodes next week. 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.