Speaker 1: Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
Speaker 1: is an open book, all of these amazing tales are
Speaker 1: right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. The Greek playwright Aristophanes
Speaker 1: had been drinking with philosopher Plato at a banquet when
Speaker 1: he delivered a speech originally meant to be a kind
Speaker 1: of satire on the creation myths of the time. Aristophanes
Speaker 1: proposed that there was a reason for love's existence in
Speaker 1: the world. He told Plato and the gathering crowd that
Speaker 1: men and women had originally started out as one being,
Speaker 1: two heads, four arms, and four legs, performing cart wheels
Speaker 1: to get from place to place. And these beings were
Speaker 1: fast and strong, too strong for the gods, in fact,
Speaker 1: who didn't want to be. Usurped as the most powerful
Speaker 1: entities in the universe. To remind them of their place,
Speaker 1: Zeus cleaved each pair in half. Since then, humans have
Speaker 1: walked this earth longing for their missing halves, and are
Speaker 1: drawn together by love. While he may have meant the
Speaker 1: story to be an absurd, comedic exercise, there's something beautiful
Speaker 1: about the sentiment two people searching their whole lives for
Speaker 1: that perfect soul mate to make them whole again. Perhaps
Speaker 1: Martin van Buren Bates and his wife Anna haning Swan
Speaker 1: were two halves of a whole. Born in Nova Scotia
Speaker 1: in eighteen forty six, Anna grew up among eleven other
Speaker 1: brothers and sisters, while Martin was raised down in Kentucky.
Speaker 1: He worked as a school teacher before the Civil War began.
Speaker 1: When it did, he signed up to fight in eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty one, joining the fifth Kentucky Infantry as a private
Speaker 1: in the Confederate Army. Martin turned out to be a
Speaker 1: fierce fighter, and he often intimidated the Union soldiers on
Speaker 1: the other side. It didn't take long for him to
Speaker 1: rise up through the ranks to become captain. After the war,
Speaker 1: Martin found himself a few job prospects back home, but
Speaker 1: traveling circus offered him the chance to earn a living
Speaker 1: and see more of what North America had to offer.
Speaker 1: The tour took him all over, including across the border
Speaker 1: into Canada. It was at a stop in Halifax where
Speaker 1: he met Anna, who was immediately taken with Martin. She
Speaker 1: was brilliant, a prodigy piano player, as well as a
Speaker 1: talented singer and actor who had once portrayed Lady Macbeth.
Speaker 1: She too joined the circus and struck up a relationship
Speaker 1: with Martin. Shortly after that, they were married. Despite their
Speaker 1: nomadic lifestyle, Anna and Martin wanted a place for themselves
Speaker 1: to settle down, a home to go to when they
Speaker 1: weren't on tour or when they needed arrest. The newly
Speaker 1: Woods had a house built on one thirty acres of
Speaker 1: farmland in Ohio that they purchased with their circus earnings.
Speaker 1: Its ceilings were fourteen feet high, the doors were built
Speaker 1: to be eight feet tall and wider than usual, and
Speaker 1: they had all their furniture custom made too, because it
Speaker 1: had to be in order to accommodate their imposing frames.
Speaker 1: Martin Bates, you see, was seven and a half feet tall,
Speaker 1: while his wife Anna stood an impressive seven feet eleven inches.
Speaker 1: Martin had grown quite tall when he was six years old.
Speaker 1: By the time he was twelve, he was over six
Speaker 1: feet and weighed more than two hundred pounds. Anna had
Speaker 1: begun growing very early on in her life as well.
Speaker 1: At four years old, she was already over four ft tall.
Speaker 1: Two years later, she'd grown another foot and a half,
Speaker 1: and they'd both been hired by the circus as an attraction,
Speaker 1: and they were successful, too, drawing enormous crowds to gawk
Speaker 1: at their severe statures. She and Martin had two children together.
Speaker 1: The first, a girl, born in May of eighteen seventy two,
Speaker 1: died during birth. That baby had weighed over eighteen pounds.
Speaker 1: The second child, a boy this time, was born seven
Speaker 1: years later. He measured almost thirty inches long and weighed
Speaker 1: in at twenty three pounds nine ounces. Sadly, he lived
Speaker 1: only eleven hours before passing away, but in his short life,
Speaker 1: the child had earned the Guinness World Record for largest
Speaker 1: newborn in history. Anna toured with the circus for a
Speaker 1: few more years alongside her husband before settling down on
Speaker 1: the farm. It's not clear if Anna had some kind
Speaker 1: of underlying condition, or if perhaps the loss of children
Speaker 1: had done untold damage to her heart, but she died
Speaker 1: in her sleep in the summer of eighteen eight one
Speaker 1: day before her forty second birthday. Her husband had a
Speaker 1: statue of her installed at her grave site before selling
Speaker 1: their house and moving into town. He wouldn't find love
Speaker 1: again for another ten years, when he would remarry this
Speaker 1: time to an average sized woman. Martin died in nineteen
Speaker 1: nineteen at the age of eighty one. He never had
Speaker 1: any children, but he'd lived a long, fulfilling life, much
Speaker 1: of it spent with his perfect mate Anna. When they
Speaker 1: were together, they were two halves reunited to become whole,
Speaker 1: showing the world that love truly does come in all
Speaker 1: shapes and sizes. People can be pretty skeptical when it
Speaker 1: comes to tales of the supernatural. Our first inclination is disbelief,
Speaker 1: to chalk up the stories to wild imagination or a
Speaker 1: cry for attention. Ghosts aren't real. We say that clunking
Speaker 1: sound in the middle of the night, it's just the
Speaker 1: pipes or the creaking floor, or maybe the house is
Speaker 1: just settling. But what happens when a ghost story is
Speaker 1: more than just a story. What happens when the police
Speaker 1: and the media both believe that what is terrorizing one
Speaker 1: family is more than just a frightening tail because they've
Speaker 1: seen or at least heard it for themselves. The Palathon
Speaker 1: family lived on the second floor of an apartment in Spain.
Speaker 1: On September ninety four, they began hearing bizarre sounds coming
Speaker 1: from their kitchen actually, let me clarify that from within
Speaker 1: the stove in their kitchen, a voice spoke from within it,
Speaker 1: and there was laughter too, and sometimes screaming coming from
Speaker 1: everywhere and nowhere at once. At first, it was believed
Speaker 1: by both the family and the neighbors that the voice
Speaker 1: was coming from someone else on the block. The chimney
Speaker 1: where the stove smoke was let out connected to other homes.
Speaker 1: It was entirely possible that a man's voice was carrying
Speaker 1: from another unit through the pipes and into the stove
Speaker 1: in the Palothon family. But if that were true, then
Speaker 1: the neighbors would also have been experiencing the same thing,
Speaker 1: and yet only they had a voice coming out of
Speaker 1: their stove. Those who stopped by to listen verified their claims.
Speaker 1: They too heard someone talking or laughing or yelling from
Speaker 1: inside the stove. And that's when the rumors started to spread.
Speaker 1: The Palothons were haunted. The rumors quickly turned into belief
Speaker 1: in a terrifying supernatural entity known as a duende. Duende
Speaker 1: is a Spanish term for a possessor of a house.
Speaker 1: In eighteenth century paintings, the creature is depicted as a
Speaker 1: goblin or imp with sharp teeth and long, claw like fingers.
Speaker 1: As the story spread, crowds from within the town and
Speaker 1: beyond gathered outside to listen in and try to hear
Speaker 1: the Duende speaking. All the while, the Palathon family did
Speaker 1: their best to carry on with normal life, while the
Speaker 1: creature made sure that could never happen. It would ask
Speaker 1: questions and even answered them. When asked, it would call
Speaker 1: out the name of the Palathons made and then cackle
Speaker 1: it's howling laughter ringing out from deep within the stove. Eventually,
Speaker 1: the disruptions became too great, and the family reached out
Speaker 1: to the authorities for help and flowing out the mischievous
Speaker 1: little demon. The police chief himself attended to the matter,
Speaker 1: arriving at their doorstep in mid November of ninety four.
Speaker 1: Upon entering the home, he immediately started questioning the voice.
Speaker 1: Where are you? He asked, why are you doing this?
Speaker 1: The Duende answered no. The chief asked more questions, wondering
Speaker 1: if the person on the other end needed a job
Speaker 1: or money. Again, it's simply replied no. Then he asked
Speaker 1: one final question, then, who are you? What is it
Speaker 1: that you want? The voice responded from the stove, saying nothing.
Speaker 1: I am not a man. The local police helped the
Speaker 1: family find other living arrangements while they investigated the cause
Speaker 1: of the disturbance, but tales of a demonic voice forcing
Speaker 1: a family out of their home had rattled the community.
Speaker 1: A panic spread throughout the town, and the story eventually
Speaker 1: wound its way to the United Kingdom, where the London
Speaker 1: Times started reporting on it. A Spanish radio station even
Speaker 1: asked to interview the voice for one of its talk shows.
Speaker 1: The investigation carried on for weeks, with the police at
Speaker 1: a loss as to the reason for the voices persistence.
Speaker 1: Architects and contractors were asked to inspect a home but
Speaker 1: found nothing. The police, fed up with getting nowhere in
Speaker 1: their hunt, brought in every organization in person they could
Speaker 1: think of. They asked the army to cut off the
Speaker 1: Holmes access to electricity and phones. Officers guarded all entrances
Speaker 1: around the clock. Priests spiritually sanitized the apartment with holy
Speaker 1: water and prayers, and it seemed that the duende, or
Speaker 1: the person behind it, had finally been forced out. The
Speaker 1: voice had gun silence. The Palathons soon moved back in
Speaker 1: and during their first night there nothing happened. They all
Speaker 1: had a RESTful night's sleep, something they hadn't experienced in
Speaker 1: almost two months. The following more earning, though, a voice
Speaker 1: bellowed from the chimney cowards. It called them cowards. Here
Speaker 1: I am for the Palaton family. That was the last straw.
Speaker 1: They packed up and left their apartment forever. That day,
Speaker 1: the police chief, under orders from the governor, brought the
Speaker 1: family in for questioning. He even had them speak with
Speaker 1: a psychiatrist to see if perhaps the situation had all
Speaker 1: just been in their heads. It hadn't, but it also
Speaker 1: hadn't been a real duende. The voice, as declared by
Speaker 1: the governor later, had been the work of their maid.
Speaker 1: She hadn't done it to deceive them or to run
Speaker 1: them out of their home, though it seems that she
Speaker 1: suffered from something called unconscious ventriloquism. She'd been able to
Speaker 1: throw her voice and didn't even know it. The voice
Speaker 1: was never heard from again after the governor's announcement. Forty
Speaker 1: years later, the block was demolished and a new structure
Speaker 1: was built in its place, and this new building's name
Speaker 1: at the Fouende the Goblin Building. I hope you've enjoyed
Speaker 1: today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for
Speaker 1: free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show
Speaker 1: by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created
Speaker 1: by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works.
Speaker 1: I make another award winning show called Lore, which is
Speaker 1: a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can
Speaker 1: learn all about it over at the World of Lore
Speaker 1: dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Ye