Speaker 1: Richard Renaissent returned home from a funeral only to find
Speaker 1: no less than eight anxious young couples waiting to see him.
Speaker 1: Many had ventured the short mile over a newly constructed
Speaker 1: toll road between England and Scotland, gunning for the tiny
Speaker 1: town of Gretna Green as their final destination. They had
Speaker 1: all heard about him. In fact, Richard was somewhat famous,
Speaker 1: a gregarious tall tale teller and yarn spinner who had
Speaker 1: been at his post for decades. He moved here to
Speaker 1: do an important job, and a pretty infamous one at that.
Speaker 1: Richard came to Gretna Green, Scotland in nineteen thirty six
Speaker 1: after hearing about a very special job vacancy. A saddler
Speaker 1: by trade, he took up a post as the town's
Speaker 1: residence Annville Priest, a title and distinction entirely specific to
Speaker 1: this small slice of the world. All of these young
Speaker 1: couples were here to get married, and Richard was going
Speaker 1: to be the one to officiate. They had traveled over
Speaker 1: the border to see him, many of them in secrets,
Speaker 1: and many quickly. This was often the nature of his work.
Speaker 1: To many, he was a hero. To others, he and
Speaker 1: those who came before him were a walking, talking loophole
Speaker 1: that defied the sanctity of marriage and was a thorn
Speaker 1: in the Church of England's side. The Marriage Duty Act
Speaker 1: sixteen ninety five put a stop to the marriages of
Speaker 1: small parish churches that were conducted by local clergy without
Speaker 1: the proper marriage licensing. A legal loophole was found, though,
Speaker 1: and the clergy are those who said they were clergy
Speaker 1: realized they couldn't be prosecuted for shotgun weddings should they
Speaker 1: take place on the grounds of Fleet Prison, and over
Speaker 1: the years these amounted to the thousands. A whole cottage
Speaker 1: industry popped up, and the Church became horrified at the
Speaker 1: potential erosion of personal morals and the country's social fabric.
Speaker 1: These marriages often were without licenses or public announcements, performed
Speaker 1: under the radar on the sly and on the Chief.
Speaker 1: So in seventeen fifty three passed a law popularly known
Speaker 1: as Lord Hardwick's Marriage Act, or by its longer legal name,
Speaker 1: an Act for the Better Prevention of clandestine marriages. With
Speaker 1: the Act, Lord Chancellor Hardwick declared that marriages within the
Speaker 1: walls of the Anglican Church would now be marriage's only
Speaker 1: legal form in England and Wales. Essentially, to be legally
Speaker 1: recognized as wed, unless you were Quaker or Jewish, that is,
Speaker 1: a couple had to do so before the eyes of
Speaker 1: an Anglican clergyman. Scotland, though, was not included on this list.
Speaker 1: In fact, for all of England's recent stringency, Scotland had
Speaker 1: very lax laws around these things. Girls had to be
Speaker 1: older than twelve and boys older than fourteen, but no
Speaker 1: parental blessing was necessary. Enter Richard. Because the village blacksmith
Speaker 1: was historically one of the respected trades in the community,
Speaker 1: it made sense that these young couples would seek him
Speaker 1: out as their stand in priest. A tradition was born,
Speaker 1: and he was number four. Richard met with young lovers
Speaker 1: who came by and night to carry out and consummate
Speaker 1: their affairs of the heart. All he needed from them
Speaker 1: was to be of age and have two witnesses to
Speaker 1: their union. His ceremonies were simple, quick, a few words
Speaker 1: exchanged and the bang of a hammer clinging loudly to
Speaker 1: make it all official. He would then pronounce them man
Speaker 1: and wife before sending them on their way. By the
Speaker 1: time the laws changed. In nineteen forty, he had conducted
Speaker 1: over five thousand marriages. That's an average of three hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty seven marriages per year. But as evidenced on
Speaker 1: his arrival home from his friend's funeral that day, some
Speaker 1: seasons were busier than others. All in all, tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of couples have been married here and continue to
Speaker 1: flock to Gretna Green for the same reason. Today. We
Speaker 1: do a lot of things in the name of love.
Speaker 1: We put ourselves out there. We take chances and were
Speaker 1: asked to endure great tests of faith and courage, and
Speaker 1: hopefully it's worth it. What's also true, though, is that
Speaker 1: love has a dark side, because where there's light, there's
Speaker 1: always shadow. Across the ages or as long as we've
Speaker 1: loved and lost, we've had to sit with the darkness
Speaker 1: that love can bring. And for as long as we
Speaker 1: have been trying to figure out how to cure what
Speaker 1: ails us and cure what's within us, we have been
Speaker 1: trying to understand what love does not just do for us,
Speaker 1: but to us. Yes, love can heal, but it can
Speaker 1: also be deadly. I'm Aaron Manky, and welcome to bedside Manners.
Speaker 1: Every species has the biological imperative to procreate. Humans have
Speaker 1: been working on that project for a very long time,
Speaker 1: but we don't necessarily have a sound biological reason for
Speaker 1: why we fall in love. Now, some researchers believe that
Speaker 1: it's just a trick of our nervous system. The flooding
Speaker 1: of our brains with feel good chemicals might indeed urge
Speaker 1: us toward mixing up our genetic material with someoneman creating
Speaker 1: an offspring. But the flip side of this assumption is
Speaker 1: that we also know that not every pairing that ex
Speaker 1: experiences love has the ability to create new life. So
Speaker 1: if it's not something distinctly biological, what is love and
Speaker 1: where does it come from? Great minds across the ages
Speaker 1: have been asking this very question. We find authors pining
Speaker 1: after love in ancient Sumerian proverbs and the pain of
Speaker 1: love mentioned in the Bible. Sappho, the famous mysterious poet
Speaker 1: from the seventh century, left remnants of some of the
Speaker 1: earliest musings on heartache. It seems that we have always
Speaker 1: loved what we couldn't have for one reason or another.
Speaker 1: These writings speak of pain that is talked about in emotional, physical,
Speaker 1: and spiritual ways all along the way. Over the course
Speaker 1: of this cultural evolution of thousands of years, one thing
Speaker 1: hasn't changed, the idea that love and love sickness are afflictions.
Speaker 1: The direct correlation between passionate love and deep personal disturbance
Speaker 1: has been noted for thousands of years. Our friend Galen
Speaker 1: left behind the story of a woman who was tossing
Speaker 1: and turning and losing sleep with each passing night. When
Speaker 1: Galen visited her, she was reticent. She told him that
Speaker 1: she was ill, but was reluctant to go into many details.
Speaker 1: After spending some time with her, he decided that she
Speaker 1: was suffering from a standard class of melancholy. When a
Speaker 1: friend came to visit and mentioned that they had just
Speaker 1: seen a performance by a particular dancer, the woman came alive.
Speaker 1: At this point, Galen took her wrist between his fingers
Speaker 1: to feel her pulse. It had become irregular and she
Speaker 1: had become flushed. But though these are very physical symptoms,
Speaker 1: he was led to believe that the root of her
Speaker 1: issues weren't just physical, but emotional. Her mind was disturbed.
Speaker 1: Galen concluded that this woman was melancholic, not just because
Speaker 1: her humors were out of balance, but due to the
Speaker 1: affliction of affection. The real origin of her illness, he believed,
Speaker 1: was an offset of melancholy, called specifically love melancholy. Melancholia
Speaker 1: and love sickness both originated from excessive black bile, Galen believed,
Speaker 1: but love sickness was its own kind of psychological disturbance,
Speaker 1: then already required the correct treatment protocol. Others saw it
Speaker 1: as its own illness. The various texts on the subject
Speaker 1: describe an array of symptoms sadness, insomnia, hollow eyes, disturbances
Speaker 1: in the pulse, mental anxiety, dejection, despondency, and physical debility.
Speaker 1: But they all wonder how does one treat a love
Speaker 1: sick patient. Over the years, physicians would go on to
Speaker 1: prescribe everything from blood letting, foreskin clamping, burning a woman's
Speaker 1: thighs with acid inhaling the burned feces of a beloved,
Speaker 1: and therapeutic intercourse. Of course, the terminology and treatments for
Speaker 1: love sickness have evolved across time and place. Today, the
Speaker 1: contemporary field of psychopathology, the study of abnormal cognition, behavior
Speaker 1: and experiences, has broken apart the symptoms of ancients and
Speaker 1: focused on behavior combinations particular to someone in the throes
Speaker 1: of what we might call love sickness, obsession, infatuation, emotional instability,
Speaker 1: and emotional dependency. The idea that love is madness with
Speaker 1: big air quotes there has never been shaken from our
Speaker 1: collective consciousness. In fact, love sickness was a valid diagnosis
Speaker 1: by medical practitioners for almost two thousand years. In recent times,
Speaker 1: as the field of psychiatry has gained momentum, researchers have
Speaker 1: been trying to parse apart where love ends and madness begins.
Speaker 1: Researchers want to know what is normal and abnormal in love,
Speaker 1: if love chemically makes our brain do abnormal things, and
Speaker 1: how do we know when the scales have tipped too far.
Speaker 1: The story we have for you today will leave you
Speaker 1: thinking about all of these things. It's a story that's
Speaker 1: been told for almost a century as a love story,
Speaker 1: but as you'll see, it's something much deeper, much darker,
Speaker 1: and much more sinister. Yes, it's true that perhaps love
Speaker 1: did live here within this narrative frame, but so too
Speaker 1: did obsession, destruction, and death. First of all, I want
Speaker 1: you to remember Elena Miagre Dahias for who she was
Speaker 1: in life. She was a vibrant young woman who was
Speaker 1: part of a tight knit Cuban American clan, with her parents, sisters, aunties,
Speaker 1: all living in Key West, Florida. It was said that
Speaker 1: Elena had a lovely singing voice, enjoyed dancing with her girlfriends,
Speaker 1: going to school, praying at church, keeping a diary, and
Speaker 1: occupying herself with the concerns of the average teenage girl.
Speaker 1: When she and her friends began courting, it was only
Speaker 1: fitting that she dreamt of finding a lasting love, and
Speaker 1: at sixteen, she thought she found one in the person
Speaker 1: who would become her husband, a local boy named Louise.
Speaker 1: They got married and moved in with his family, but
Speaker 1: she was love sick. She became pregnant and then she
Speaker 1: began to cough. She wished for someone to care for her,
Speaker 1: but Louise wasn't up to the task. When she lost
Speaker 1: the baby, he left her. Elena was always described as
Speaker 1: exceptionally beautiful, all raven hair and dark eyes, but there
Speaker 1: was nothing about her life that ever made her feel
Speaker 1: that she was exceptional or destined for fame, and indeed,
Speaker 1: the stories we tell about Elena most often start not
Speaker 1: with the contours of her life but with her corpse.
Speaker 1: And it's here that I implore you not to remember
Speaker 1: her as a specter, or as storytellers would later call her,
Speaker 1: an it, but as a very real, very animated woman
Speaker 1: whose body and story have been taken from her in death.
Speaker 1: Our story today opens in a hospital with Elena very
Speaker 1: much alive. In April of nineteen thirty, twenty one year
Speaker 1: old Elena went to the local marine hospital for X
Speaker 1: rays and blood samples. Her cough had only been worsening
Speaker 1: in recent days, and it was time that she was
Speaker 1: seen by a specialist. Many of us don't recognize important
Speaker 1: life moments for what they are. Elena was no different.
Speaker 1: But the man on the other side of the X
Speaker 1: ray machine knew that upon seeing Elena, his prayers had
Speaker 1: come to pass and his life would never be the same.
Speaker 1: Count Karl von Kosel, the assumed name of Karl Tansler,
Speaker 1: had been chasing his visions for almost five decades. As
Speaker 1: a teenager, he claimed to have been visited by his
Speaker 1: dead aunt, who revealed to him the face of his
Speaker 1: future wife. This charted a course that would take him
Speaker 1: across countries and continents, acquiring fake medical degrees and licenses,
Speaker 1: and growing delusions. As he sought the fulfillment of this
Speaker 1: ghostly promise, he looked for her everywhere. Carl claimed to
Speaker 1: have seen a vision of his future wife for a
Speaker 1: second time at a graveyard in Spain. The third time
Speaker 1: he saw the face of this woman, he later said,
Speaker 1: was when Elena walked into his exam room. Their worlds
Speaker 1: had collided, Elena and Carl's, and there was no turning back.
Speaker 1: Though he was a Charlatan and a confabulist, he was
Speaker 1: undeniably brilliant. Carl was something of a mad scientist, harboring
Speaker 1: a long obsession with matters of electricity, radio waves, and
Speaker 1: other feats of engineering, including the repair of a wingless
Speaker 1: airplane that he kept on the hospital grounds. He was
Speaker 1: as dapper as he was eccentric, a true Key West
Speaker 1: character that had become known on the island for his
Speaker 1: strange ways, and he seemed harmless enough ignosed to Lena
Speaker 1: with a case of tuberculosis, a sickness that had wiped
Speaker 1: out a quarter of Europe's population in the prior century.
Speaker 1: It's one of the world's oldest known illnesses and continued
Speaker 1: to kill more people than any other disease in industrialized
Speaker 1: countries through the early twentieth century, it remained extremely fatal,
Speaker 1: something that Elena, her family, and Carl were well aware of.
Speaker 1: He committed himself then and there to saving this young woman.
Speaker 1: But beyond this being an act of benevolence or dutiful
Speaker 1: adherence to a hippocratic oath that he had never taken,
Speaker 1: because remember, he was no real doctor, this commitment was
Speaker 1: the first moment in an instant in long lasting obsession. Elena,
Speaker 1: for her part, naturally wanted to live. Medicine is supposed
Speaker 1: to help us stave off death, and if she had
Speaker 1: to hang around a strange, bespeckled man three decades her
Speaker 1: senior to have a good shot at it, she was
Speaker 1: going to do it. He seemed grandfatherly to her, a
Speaker 1: concerned scholar, even if he did give her the creeps.
Speaker 1: So he tried everything electricity cures and gold cures, tonics
Speaker 1: and radiation. He saw her at the hospital, but he
Speaker 1: also started to visit her at her family's home. Desperate
Speaker 1: for answers, they let this man come knocking at all hours.
Speaker 1: That is, of course, until he crossed the line. He
Speaker 1: began proposing marriage to Elena, who initially laughed it off,
Speaker 1: but he kept trying, and her admonishments became stronger. But
Speaker 1: he wouldn't take no for an answer. He begged, he pleaded,
Speaker 1: and Elena still refused. Although her husband had long run off,
Speaker 1: there was no way that she could marry this man,
Speaker 1: and as the records show, Carl was still married too,
Speaker 1: but he had no scruples where matters of the heart
Speaker 1: were concerned. Carl's behavior earned him the ire of the family,
Speaker 1: but they were torn for they, or at least some
Speaker 1: of them, believed that with his undivided attention, he could
Speaker 1: save their beloved Elena. His diaries, which he later published,
Speaker 1: paint the portrait of a man obsessed with possession. He
Speaker 1: lived in a strange alternate reality, entirely of his own
Speaker 1: design and imitation version of the real world, where lines
Speaker 1: of fact and fiction are blurred. It's hard to know
Speaker 1: what he believed to be true and what he wished
Speaker 1: to be true. Elena became sicker and sicker, though her
Speaker 1: family became angry with and scared of, Carl, eventually moving
Speaker 1: houses and not leaving a note for him, But he
Speaker 1: still managed to find them through a loose lip neighbor
Speaker 1: and Sensing that the family was emotionally and spiritually exhausted,
Speaker 1: he made his move. He installed himself at Elena's bedside,
Speaker 1: just like a leech that promised to cure but instead
Speaker 1: bled its host to death. The disease finally took Elena
Speaker 1: in October of nineteen thirty one. It said that she
Speaker 1: died tired and angry, refusing to let her family call
Speaker 1: for their doctor. She had had enough of him and
Speaker 1: his lecherous advances. If death is an end, our story
Speaker 1: would stop there. But Elena's demise was just the beginning
Speaker 1: of a much longer, far stranger, and more twisted chapter
Speaker 1: than she had ever experienced in life. Elena's death couldn't
Speaker 1: dissuade Carl van Kozel. In fact, it only encouraged him.
Speaker 1: When word arrived at his lab via her brother in law,
Speaker 1: Carl sprang to action. When he finally made it to
Speaker 1: her family's home, he immediately tried to electrocute her back
Speaker 1: to life. He wrote in his memoir that this was
Speaker 1: what many, perhaps most people, would call the end, but
Speaker 1: a strange kind of new life now began for me.
Speaker 1: Even though she was gone and her family was deep
Speaker 1: in mourning, Carl conned his way into their home. He
Speaker 1: offered to pay rent. They relented, so he moved into
Speaker 1: Elena's room and into her now cold bed. Our phony
Speaker 1: Counts also talked her family into allowing him to construct
Speaker 1: a beautiful stone moss soleum for their daughter, something much
Speaker 1: grander than they could ever have afforded themselves. They agreed,
Speaker 1: and were justly horrified when it was revealed that he
Speaker 1: had engraved both her name and his name on it.
Speaker 1: He visited her every night at sunset, a long and
Speaker 1: limber shadow, skulking through the graveyard. He would unlock the
Speaker 1: three locks he had installed on the door, go inside,
Speaker 1: and sit with her. He spoke of undoing the locks
Speaker 1: of the heavy casket and listening to Elena speak with
Speaker 1: him from her inner coffin. He wrote of hearing Elena
Speaker 1: singing for him, and one night she finally asked him
Speaker 1: to take her home. Carl, who once claimed to have
Speaker 1: died and come back himself, believed death was truly only
Speaker 1: a state of suspended animation. So it's here that we
Speaker 1: now find him, supposedly under the direction of Elena, carting
Speaker 1: her body out of the graveyard in a child's wagon.
Speaker 1: He later claimed that this moment was nothing short of
Speaker 1: their great divine wedding March. That night, he brought Elena's
Speaker 1: corpse to his cottage and began to work on engineering
Speaker 1: her resurrection. Over time, he tried all different things. He
Speaker 1: soaked her body in tubs of chemicals, hoping her cells
Speaker 1: would saturate and she would waken. He waited her, apped her,
Speaker 1: He injected her with vitamins, and he took cultures from
Speaker 1: her body for his microscope. And when her skin began
Speaker 1: to fall off, he replaced it with silk. When her
Speaker 1: eyes putrified, he replaced those two. He sealed her leaking
Speaker 1: orifices with wax. He excavated larva and sprayed her with perfume.
Speaker 1: He dressed her in a wedding gown and brought her
Speaker 1: to bed. Karl thought that he was working in secrets,
Speaker 1: but rumors spread. People saw him frequently hauling chemical solvents, deodorizers,
Speaker 1: reams of silk, and gauze to his home. He was
Speaker 1: a scientist and inventored, though, so who could say what
Speaker 1: he was up to. It was later rumored that late
Speaker 1: at night, neighbors would hear organ music wafting from the
Speaker 1: windows with two bodies seeing joined in dance, and this
Speaker 1: went on for seven long years. One of Elena's sisters, Nana,
Speaker 1: had heard the rumors. She didn't want them to be true,
Speaker 1: but after a rash of break ins at the graveyard,
Speaker 1: she insisted that Karl opened a Lena's coffin and show
Speaker 1: her that her sister was all right. Carl refused, but
Speaker 1: he did offer her something else. Carl brought Nana back
Speaker 1: to his cottage. He opened the door and led her inside.
Speaker 1: He had dressed Elena and Jules and brought Nana over
Speaker 1: to see her. According to his later writings, he was
Speaker 1: proud to show how well he had taken care of
Speaker 1: his beloved. Nana, though was horrified. She couldn't believe her eyes.
Speaker 1: She thought that this had to be a doll. It
Speaker 1: couldn't be true. Carl's account of what transpired in their
Speaker 1: bedside conversation is inconceivable at best. Nana, he claims, just
Speaker 1: walked out and told him to put Elena back where
Speaker 1: he found her. She has been under my care all
Speaker 1: of these years, he said, to have shot back, I
Speaker 1: have paid all of her expenses. You forgot that I
Speaker 1: own the tomb and everything inside. He was subsequently arrested
Speaker 1: on the charge of desecrating a grave and spent a
Speaker 1: night in jail. But since the statute of limitations had expired,
Speaker 1: it had now been years since he had kidnapped Elena's body,
Speaker 1: and because the court determined that he was saying and
Speaker 1: mentally competent, he was free to go. As for Elena's corpse,
Speaker 1: she was taken from the cottage. She was given a
Speaker 1: second funeral, which amounted to an entirely different kind of spectacle.
Speaker 1: Almost seven thousand people lined up to take a look
Speaker 1: at what was left of her. Then her body was
Speaker 1: taken to a secret location and reburied, And for those
Speaker 1: of you who are wondering, even to this day, that
Speaker 1: location is still a mystery. But the Count refused to
Speaker 1: go quietly. If he was going to get charged with
Speaker 1: desecrating a grave, he might as well do it. The
Speaker 1: night he left town, Elena's mausoleum was blown up with
Speaker 1: a time bomb. Today, the cracked edifice can still be
Speaker 1: seen in Key West. Although she and the Count are
Speaker 1: both long gone, whispers of his love and her loathing
Speaker 1: are all that remain. The story of Elena and Count
Speaker 1: van Kozol has gone down over the years framed as
Speaker 1: a macab love story, when in fact it is nothing
Speaker 1: more than a nightmare. Elena was vehemently opposed to Van
Speaker 1: Kozel's advances, and he took her silence by means of
Speaker 1: her death as consent, and recently it's possible that an
Speaker 1: even more sinister epilogue has been uncovered. The folks in
Speaker 1: Key West claimed to have made a discovery in an
Speaker 1: old pulp detective magazine in which a journalist was able
Speaker 1: to recover police records from the case. It was claimed
Speaker 1: that during renovations of von Kozel's home, bottles of potions
Speaker 1: and a confession note were uncovered, and in that note,
Speaker 1: the writer appears to be confessing to murder. Putting two
Speaker 1: and two together, one is left to wonder if the
Speaker 1: count realized that if he couldn't cure and possess her
Speaker 1: in life, a fatal poisoning would help him secure her
Speaker 1: in death. Of course, one should be skeptical of these
Speaker 1: kinds of magazines. They look and tend to read like
Speaker 1: a tabloid, and those police records that could have corroborated
Speaker 1: any of these claims, it seems, have since been destroyed.
Speaker 1: Historians believe the missing records might be due to the
Speaker 1: lack of predigital age storage space. If a case was
Speaker 1: considered closed, well, no sense in keeping it around, right,
Speaker 1: and the article it's been reported otherwise got all of
Speaker 1: the facts right. The journalist who wrote it is long dead,
Speaker 1: so there hasn't been a way forward to report on
Speaker 1: the reporting. Regardless, the story continues to fascinate us. It
Speaker 1: is a very extreme example of what could be understood
Speaker 1: as a deadly love sickness, love that has turned into
Speaker 1: something far darker. The media talks about crimes of passion
Speaker 1: and the lengths that people will go to in the
Speaker 1: name of love, and now scientists have been able to
Speaker 1: identify some really interesting and also alarming things that folks
Speaker 1: have been alluding to for thousands of years. It seems
Speaker 1: that love takes a very physical toll on our bodies.
Speaker 1: The shorthand term for aid to Katsubo cardiomyopathy is broken
Speaker 1: heart syndrome. It presents similar to a heart attack, though
Speaker 1: those who suffer from it tend to make complete and
Speaker 1: full recoveries, and we're also able to see the effects
Speaker 1: of love on neuroimaging of our brains. Scans light up
Speaker 1: much differently when looking at all the different kinds of love,
Speaker 1: romantic love lighting up in the region that suggests personal
Speaker 1: apprehension and social judgment might also be compromised. Scientists have
Speaker 1: also suggested that they may have found an overlap between
Speaker 1: obsessive compulsive disorder and romantic attraction. The term limerins was
Speaker 1: coined to describe a set of all consuming psychological symptoms
Speaker 1: characterized by obsessive, intrusive thoughts about an object of affection.
Speaker 1: We now know that this state isn't just psychologically based,
Speaker 1: but neurologically as well, and it leaves us to wonder
Speaker 1: if this is what we call love, Is it all
Speaker 1: simply another affliction to be treated? How do we tease
Speaker 1: apart what is harmful and keep the stuff that benefits us?
Speaker 1: And even more challenging than all of that, when those
Speaker 1: things live together in the same cognitive stew how do
Speaker 1: we tell them apart when we're deep in it? And
Speaker 1: how can we save our solves? Love, of course, isn't
Speaker 1: just something that happens to us. It's something that we
Speaker 1: as humans do, and love doesn't have to be in
Speaker 1: grand gestures, As count Van Kozo believed, love comes in
Speaker 1: small moments every day. If you stick around through this
Speaker 1: brief sponsor break, my teammates Robin Miniter will tell you
Speaker 1: a story about a love that was lost and then
Speaker 1: found once more. The woman in the window was a
Speaker 1: mystery to so many. She largely kept to herself, a
Speaker 1: specter and white, illuminated by the oil lamp's warm halo.
Speaker 1: For years, Emily was her only company in her bedroom
Speaker 1: on Main Street and Amherst, Massachusetts. Sequestered above and away
Speaker 1: from the outside, she created rich landscapes of her own
Speaker 1: inner world, and with ink she'd penned these internal geographies.
Speaker 1: She was a prolific writer, authoring hundreds of letters and
Speaker 1: poems on bits and shreads and pieces of paper. Emily
Speaker 1: was a dreamer, and she was a lover her word,
Speaker 1: so accurately conveying what her heart was saying, but who
Speaker 1: her heart and she, in turn was saying These things too,
Speaker 1: has long been a source of controversy. Emily Dickinson only
Speaker 1: published ten poems in her lifetime, and when she died
Speaker 1: in eighteen eighty six, she left behind a massive body
Speaker 1: of deeply personal work, almost eighteen hundred poems and hundreds
Speaker 1: of letters to be come through by her family, and
Speaker 1: what they found was astounding for the sheer volume of
Speaker 1: words left behind, but also for the contents of the pages.
Speaker 1: It's believed that whoever took it upon themselves to handle
Speaker 1: her work didn't want the world to see what she
Speaker 1: had written, or at least some of its key parts,
Speaker 1: so began the crossing out of names and the extraction
Speaker 1: of entire lines with a sharp blade. Whoever did this
Speaker 1: thought it would make her work more palatable and more
Speaker 1: saleable to the general public. After all, it would be
Speaker 1: scandalous should the world know that Emily had carried on
Speaker 1: a lifelong relationship with another woman, a woman who was
Speaker 1: not just her neighbor but her brother's wife. Some historians
Speaker 1: believe that Emily's love was unjustly censored and sanitized in
Speaker 1: the wake of her death, But in recent years, with
Speaker 1: some good old fashioned detective work in the benefit of
Speaker 1: modern technology, historians have been working to restore the larger
Speaker 1: story of Emily and Susan's love and cement their story
Speaker 1: in the larger cultural mythos around Emily Dickinson. In the
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties, scholar Martha Nell Smith got to work combing
Speaker 1: over Emily's original work. She carefully studied the impressions on
Speaker 1: the backs of the delicate aging pieces of paper, and
Speaker 1: for the harder cases, she employed infrared technology to detect
Speaker 1: any alterations made to the documents. Using computer, textures and
Speaker 1: tones could be manipulated pixel by pixel restoring attempts at obliteration.
Speaker 1: Think of these tech detectives as restoration specialists, working painstakingly
Speaker 1: to uncover what others have long thought to be lost
Speaker 1: to our eyes. And it's in these letters that we
Speaker 1: find Emily's love and longing for Susan written over the
Speaker 1: arc of four decades. They lived somewhat parallel lives, side
Speaker 1: by side in two separate, stately homes. Their relationships stretched
Speaker 1: back into their early twenties, and whether the intervening years
Speaker 1: and everything they brought it since speculated that Emily had
Speaker 1: other entanglements, but the affection shared between these two women
Speaker 1: burned bright and lifelong. The exact shape of Emily and
Speaker 1: Susan's love may never be known to the world, but
Speaker 1: today we have a best guess at what it meant
Speaker 1: to them. In a world where they could never be
Speaker 1: married nor recognize as domestic partners, they found a way,
Speaker 1: Albeit it secretly to love and to be loved at
Speaker 1: a time when marriage was less about affection and more
Speaker 1: about social strategizing. For all of the heartache and the
Speaker 1: obstacles that the years presented, Emily and Susan continued to
Speaker 1: find their way back to each other, separated only by society,
Speaker 1: scripts and a stone's throw. Grim and Mild Presents Bedside
Speaker 1: Manners was executive produced by Aaron Manky and narrated by
Speaker 1: Aaron Mankie and Robin Miniter. Writing for this season was
Speaker 1: provided by Robin Miniter, with research by Sam Alberty, Taylor
Speaker 1: Haggerdorn and Robin Miniter. Production an assistance was provided by
Speaker 1: Josh Thine, Jesse Funk, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. You
Speaker 1: can learn more about this show, the Grim and Mild team,
Speaker 1: and all the other podcasts that we make over at
Speaker 1: Grimm Mild dot com and, as always, thanks for listening.