The World of Lore: Wicked Mortals
Continuing our reading for the spooky season, this week’s book of the week is The World of Lore: Wicked Mortals, by Aaron Mahnke. Since wicked mortals are usually dubbed this due to their actions, this week’s cocktail is called Wicked Behavior, and is 1 ½ oz bourbon, ¾ oz pineapple juice, ¼ oz elderflower liqueur, ¼ oz aperol, ¼ oz lemon juice, ¼ oz honey. And to my absolute shock, I have literally all of this in my cabinet already. So, let’s do this.
Like his other World of Lore books, Mahnke breaks the book down into sections that cover specific categories. So first up is He Walks in Shadows. And he starts with a bang, America’s first notorious serial killer, HH Holmes, who was born Herman Mudgett before growing up to become a con-man and notorious murderer, who haunted the Chicago’s World Fair in 1893…. the same one Little Egypt became famous for, although she was nowhere in this story. So Mudgett, while initially horrified by the medical field, was forced by classmates to touch a human skeleton. This sparked a morbid fascination in Mudgett, who basically jumped into performing surgery on animals—read that as serial killer 101, he began torturing animals. But this is 100 years before the invention of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, so that went uncommented on, and Mudgett grew up to become a serial killer, of such notorious fame he made it to pop-cultural phenomenon Supernatural, as did several other points from this book, incidentally.
What can I say, serial killers make for excellent TV fodder.
Mahnke covers the idea of changelings, which could theoretically have fallen under his book on Monstrous Creatures, except that the true horror of the changeling legend is how people react when confronted with what they believe to be a changeling. So, what is a changeling? Well, if you ever watched or read any of the Outlander series, you know that Claire is often believed to be a changeling, someone who came through the standing stones. Although the folk lore behind changelings is quite widespread. Basically, anyone who suddenly begins acting out of usual, is believed to be a changeling. And humanity in general has a long history of not treating others well, including Mahnke’s own offering of Bridget Cleary, who was dosed in oil and burned alive by her husband, Michael, who believed the fairy had snatched his own bride away.
He tells of tales of ax-murderers, one of whom was relayed on American Horror Story season 3: Coven, he talks about. Body snatchers, not those aliens made famous by Hollywood, but the body snatchers who used to provide medical schools with bodies upon which to practice autopsies. Which was not easy back in the day, as only those who were convicted criminals could legally be used for autopsy. So, the very enterprising William Hare and William Burke started getting ahead of the demand by providing very fresh bodies to the medical school. Very fresh. Ultimately, they killed 17 before being caught in the game. William Hare managed to escape the hangman by turning states evidence, but Burke was executed and was ultimately autopsied by the same medical school to which he had been providing bodies.
He covers women killers in Death Becomes Her, including the infamous Elizabeth Bathory, pronounced Bow-ter-ee, Kate Webster, who would rent out a room and then sell all the furniture in the room before moving on. This culminates in Webster killing one of the landlords and attempting to steal her identity. You would think that would be easier pre-internet, but attempting to do it in a confined neighborhood where everyone knows everyone else proved to be her undoing. Belle Gunness, who was a quite infamous Black Widow killer in the late 19th/early 20th century, and one of the first Angel of Death killers, Nora Kelley, who was renamed Jane during her indentured servitude, and killed quite profligately with morphine before landing in the insane asylum for the rest of her life, where years after she died, “one of the nurses who had cared for her there in Taunton told a story about one experience she’d had. Sometimes, she said, Jane would wave her over to her chair with a twinkle in her eye. And then she would point toward the door. “Get the morphine, dearie, and we’ll go out into the ward.” And then, with a wide grin, she would add, “You and I will have a lot of fun seeing them die.”
As one might expect, the section called Toil and Trouble covered famous, or rather infamous, witches, or, more appropriately, the witch finders, as the poor women burned and hung were rarely…or rather never…actually witches. I do find it appropriate that the witch finders were the wicked mortals in this section, rather than the wicked witches they purported to find and hang.
A Little Peculiar goes into some interesting frauds and cautionary tales, including a very old and familiar tale, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, and the importance of paying your bills on time. Or rather, as Mahnke says, “There are, of course, a number of morals to this story, but one that has stuck with us for centuries remains ever true: never trust a stranger.” But, and this is an interesting addendum to the story of the Pied Piper. It turns out that the problem, historically speaking, may not have been strangers at all. See, in the 13th century, following a battle between Denmark and the Holy Roman Empire, a huge section of what would become Germany opened up for settlement. And so, men called “locators” would go out and try and find people willing to relocate and settle this country, specifically looking for farmers, craftsmen, and soldiers. But people didn’t want to leave the home they knew to fight off the literal wolves in the forest while settling new territories.
The offer to settle the territories came with financial incentives. And so, the people in the existing towns would sell their children to the locators. Got rid of a surplus of population. But to make their remaining children not be freaked out that mommy and daddy just sold their siblings, it became a folk tale about The Pied Piper.
A Little Peculiar goes into the odd tale of the Tofts, specifically Mary Toft, who pretended to give birth to rabbits. Like, A LOT of rabbits. Until ultimately proven a fraud by the physician of King George. Toft was induced to confess to the fraud by prominent London physician Sir Richard Manningham, who advised her that if she didn’t confess, he would “perform very painful operations and experiments on you to discover your secrets.” Following her confession, she was briefly imprisoned before being released because they weren’t sure what to charge her with. She went home, promptly got pregnant…for reals this time…and gave birth to a baby girl.
William Brodie, the real-life inspiration behind Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, had his tale told, along with the early history of spiritualism, including The Fox Sisters and John Murray Spear.
The book rounds out with a bit of a hodge podge called Magic Tricks, which just kind of didn’t fit anywhere else, including spontaneous human combustion, demonic possession, or rather, TALES of demonic possession, as centuries after the fact, fraud was uncovered in that realm as well. The legend of the doppelganger, which is not just a body double or someone who looks an awful lot like you, but literally, a second version of you is seen by others. And if you see your own doppelganger, this is a powerful death omen, which has been seen by most famously, Abraham Lincoln. He covers the hexenmeisters of the Pennsylvania Dutch, which is just a bastardization of the word Deutsch, or German, as the settlers of Pennsylvania were decidedly German, and not Dutch at all. And he covers, in detail, John Dee, magician and most learned man, and most trusted advisor of Queen Elizabeth I, and, incidentally, the inspiration behind the most famous spy of all…. Bond…James Bond.
I had forgotten about John Dee, but I promptly added several biographies on him to my wish list, so I can figure out which one I want to read for next October. Like Mahnke’s other works, this is a fun trip through history and folk tales, well researched and documented, and highly reminiscent of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. I enjoyed all three of his works, including Wicked Mortals, and if you’re looking for some spooky stories going into Halloween, I highly recommend this week’s book.
This book was originally reviewed on YouTube on October 8, 2023, but is now available on Rumble and PodBean.
