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Episode 219: Unanswered

January 16th, 2023

Trigger warnings: Murder, child death, xenophobia.

Disclaimer: This transcript is entirely non-profit and fan-made. All credit for this content goes to Aaron Mahnke, creator of Lore podcast. It is by a fan, for fans, and meant to make the content of the podcast more accessible to all. Also, there may be mistakes, despite rigorous editing on my part. Feel free to point them out, but please be nice!

To step inside them is to enter another world – at least, that was the idea. It’s located underground, beneath a hill in West Wycombe, just outside of London, England, and by it, I mean the caves. You enter them through a rather imposing set of iron gates that are situated beneath the ruins of what looks like an old church. There had always been a natural cave there, but in the 1750s, a local man named Francis paid a bunch of out-of-work farmers to widen and deepen it, using the chalk debris as road material all throughout town. What they created was a system of hand-cut rooms and passageways that looked like something out of a medieval fantasy movie, and each chamber has a name: The Entrance Hall, the Triangle, The Miner’s Cave, the Steward’s Chamber; you get the idea. There’s even one called Franklin’s Cave, but I’ll get to that in a moment. Nearly a quarter of a mile down the path, rumoured to be directly below the church that stands at the top of the hill, is the final destination, a place called the Inner Temple. You can walk right up to that room today, but back in the 1750s, it was actually cut off from the rest of the rooms by an underground river that was named (appropriately, I think) the River Styx. All of this, by the way, was crafted so that Francis had a place to hold meetings of a rather unusual social gathering. His full name was Sir Francis Dashwood, and his social group was known as the “Hellfire Club”, and they gathered for all sorts of rituals and celebrations. Oh, and the Franklin Cave I mentioned a moment ago? It was named after one of the group’s members: Benjamin Franklin. For as long as we’ve had society, there have been groups that seem to exist outside of it. Some have been secret, while others have put themselves on full display, but if the story of one group in particular is true, they should all be treated with caution, because some paths into the occult only lead to destruction.

I’m Aaron Mahnke, and this is Lore.

His arrival in America was really what started it all. Benjamin had been born a little north of Naples, Italy back in 1886 – the year coca cola was invented – but in 1904, he and his brother, Antonio, packed up and moved to the United States, chasing after the promise of a better life. Benjamin and his brother settled in Philadelphia, taking on tough, labour-intensive jobs, but early on, cracks appeared in their relationship. It’s said that his very devout Catholic brother wasn’t too fond of Benjamin’s interest in the occult. Unable to get along, Benjamin left the city to find work elsewhere. And for a while, that was York, Pennsylvania, and I’ve not seen anyone else notice this before, but I find it more than coincidental that an occult-obsessed man would travel to one of the hotbeds of witchcraft in America at the time. Heck, just a few years later, in 1929, the York witch trials would take place, where the occult murder of a local white magic practitioner named Nelson Rehmeyer would be convicted. In York, folks believed in the supernatural.

After that, he married a fellow Italian immigrant named Santina, and the couple began trying to build a typical American life together, but that was a steep hill to climb in that era. You see, the last couple of decades of the 1800s and the first couple of decades of the 1900s were the years when a massive wave of Italian immigrants came to America. I have Italian ancestors through my maternal grandmother’s side of the family, and they arrived inside that window as well. But America didn’t treat them kindly – they were branded with stereotypes and pushed to the fringes of society, setting most of them on path into deep poverty and inequality, and this was what Benjamin and his wife found themselves facing. Of course, he did everything he could to fit in. He went by “Benny” instead, gave his last name an American makeover and worked hard, but it wouldn’t be until they moved to Detroit, Michigan that things started to improve. Yes, their financial situation got better - Benny invested in real estate, transforming himself from tenant to landlord - but the biggest change he experienced was a new focus, a new goal, and it all started with the dreams.

Remember, Benny had always been interested in the occult: it’s what had led to the falling out between him and his brother Antonio; it had been the foundation of close friendships, like a fellow Italian immigrant and railyard worker, Aurelius Angelino, back in Pennsylvania. If he was awake, he was thinking about the world beyond our own and how he could harness it. Even in his dreams, he was obsessing over it. In the dreams, Benny believed that he was receiving visions from God, visions of a mission that he was meant to embark on, and a very specific calling. Benny, it seems, was supposed to become a healer and a prophet, and it was in Detroit that he finally leaned into those dreams and made them a reality. You see, Benny and his wife still lived within a pretty tight-knit Italian community, and as his work as a healer and prophet began to increase, people around him noticed and paid attention. Over time, those ideas that he had about world history became the subject of book that he wrote, called “The Oldest History of the World: Discovered by Occult Science.” But mostly, he was focused on his sermons, gatherings where he would invite others to come and hear his teachings about the true history of the world, and it’s said that he even hand-crafted an intricate model of the universe, what he called the “Great Celestial Planet Exhibition”; it was made of wire and wood and paper and wax, and he placed it right in the middle of his makeshift altar in his basement.

But at the core of so many cults is a business model, and for Benny, that was healing. There were hexes and packets of mixed-up herbs that people could buy from him, all promising to aid in the healing of various illnesses. He even offered animal sacrifices for a fee, for those customers who needed something more than a potion, I guess. But healing of this sort was a gamble. Some people purchased his services and found what they were looking for, but many did not, and as the years went on, that sort of business model has a way of creating something new: disgruntled customers. All of it was bound to catch up with Benny; at least, that was the assumption most people would make. The trouble is, Benny wasn’t alone; in fact, American culture at the time was a hotbed of groups just like his, and there’s a lot we can learn from a brief study of a few. Although, truth be told, none of it bodes well for Benny.

***

The world that Benny Evangelist lived in was filled with others just like him. Actually, they ran the spectrum, from brushing right up against the edge of normal, accepted religion, to far out on the fringes of what was even considered normal. There were people like Billy Sunday, a former professional baseball player, who traded in one touring life for another, travelling the country as a fire-and-brimstone preacher, whose message of temperance is thought to have helped spark prohibition. Or how about the House of David, a commune that was founded in Michigan in 1903. The folks who started it, a couple named Benjamin and Mary Purnell, proved that Benny wasn’t even the only cult leader by that name in Michigan. Their group, though, followed the teachings of a different prophet, Joanna Southcott, although she received her information the same way Benny did: through visions. Then there was Margaret Matilda Wright Brown*, who started having visions of her own in 1916 that focused on a lot of Doomsday stuff. Her teachings quickly grew her community to over a thousand followers but fizzled out years later with flavours of elaborate fraud and attempted murder. Out in Kansas City, there was the Adam God cult, started by James Sharp in 1903, after he witnessed a meteor crash and believed it was the Holy Spirit giving him a mission to preach a special message, which, if you’re paying attention, probably feels a bit familiar, doesn’t it? The Adam God cult drew a ton of followers, and they settled on a farm that was gifted to them by a wealthy member. By 1906, they were carrying guns and starting trouble, and two years later it all ended in a violent shoot-out that took five lives. Founder James Sharp and his wife, of course, survived. And these is just a small sampling of the seemingly countless groups like Benny’s that were out the in the early parts of the twentieth century. Maybe it was the growing class divisions that made it possible, perhaps it was the Great Depression; my guess is that it was a combination of a lot of those things and more. One European newspaper reporter asked the rhetorical question in an article in 1927: “How do Americans and English residents of the Riviera amuse themselves? They join cults.” And, honestly, if you read enough of them, it really does start to feel like it was becoming America’s pastime, which leads us back to Benny Evangelist. He might not have been the only prophet out there in the market, not even the only one in Michigan, for that matter, but he was having success.

But like I said before, not every customer was walking away happy. Yes, some were, and those people stuck around, even more convinced than ever that Benny’s healing powers had really chased away their medical problems, but there were just as many who felt that he had failed them. It’s easy to feel their frustration – Benny was apparently charging $10 a session, and while that’s probably what a lot of people today spend on coffee and a bagel each morning, it was roughly two day’s pay back then, the equivalent of about $300 now. It was a big sacrifice, and so when it didn’t pay off, people got upset. Making that an even more bitter pill to swallow was Benny’s new big house. He’d come a long way since his arrival in America a few years before, and some of that had to do with his real estate ventures, but what most people saw was a guy who was making a fat profit off of their suffering. 3587 St. Aubin Street was the address. Benny lived there with Santina and their four children, ranging from eighteen months to eight years old. It was a busy house, where family life was mixed with work, in the normal stuff and the occult. Everyone knew where Benny the healer lived, which is why, on the morning of July 3rd of 1829, a man named Vincent Elias showed up and knocked on their door, and what happened as a result would shake the community to its core.

***

Vincent didn’t kill Benny. I know that’s what you were expecting to hear, so I thought I would get that right out of the way. No, Vincent had paid them a visit because he and Benny were about to wrap up some real estate business; they knew each other well, and were colleagues and friends. What he found when he knocked on the door and let himself in was a scene of absolute horror. No children came running to greet him, so he turned to Benny’s first-floor office and stepped inside. Benny was there, seated at his desk, but he was slumped over in a pool of blood. Oh, and his head? It was on a chair, beside him. Vincent immediately called for the police. It’s said that nearly the entire homicide squad from Detroit rushed to the scene, and when they arrived, they started investigating the rest of the house. Upstairs, the bodies of all four children, as well as Santina, were found brutally murdered. Benny might have been the only one who had been decapitated, but that doesn’t mean the others didn’t die brutal deaths. I’ll just leave it at that. The killer, however, hadn’t been neat and clean. There was no attempt to conceal their movement through the house, with bloody shoeprints marking each of their steps throughout. The police even found a bloody fingerprint. You don’t need to watch a lot of murder mystery shows to know how sloppy that was. Of course, the first assumption was that some disgruntled member of Benny’s cult had shown up in anger and killed the entire family. As we’ve already learned, he was getting rich off of other people’s misfortunes, and that sure doesn’t sound like the sort of life that leads to a happy ending. It didn’t help that there were a lot of occult objects found inside the house, painting a vivid picture for the police about who Benny really was, so it was a safe assumption. But even though they asked the entire neighbourhood and offered a big, $1000 reward, no one had anything useful to offer them.

They did also toy briefly with another theory, though. A note was found in the house that basically said, “This is your last chance.” Some people felt that it had the trappings of extortion, a common element found in a criminal organisation known as the “Black Hand”, and yes, they had spent years preying upon well-off Italian immigrants, but by 1929, they had faded away thanks to the growth of a new group – the Mafia. To the police, the letter felt like an amateur’s attempt to frighten Benny to hand over money – not the type of person who would kill a family of six in cold blood. The final theory was about a mysterious “demolition crew”, that Benny was buying some reclaimed lumber from. In fact, just the night before, he had called a watchman at a house the demolition crew was taking apart, so he could set up a time the next morning for them to deliver the wood to his house and receive payment. Maybe they showed up the morning of July 3rdand just decided it would be easier to kill everyone and take the cash. I don’t know, that seems weak to me, they were probably much more likely to just haggle the price higher. They had a business to run, after all, and if they killed all of their customers, that business would fall apart.

And that was the result of their investigation – three separate theories, no arrests, and no answer to the question of who truly killed the Evangelist family. The only witness that ever turned up was the family dog, who was found on a porch of a neighbour a few months later. The poor pup’s reputation proceeded it, too, and the woman refused to take it in and adopt it, and obviously the police weren’t able to get any useful information out of it, either. The family’s funeral service was held three days after their bodies were discovered, on July 6th. Over three thousand people attended, although I have to wonder how many people were their because they loved and respected them, and how many showed up to watch their anger and frustration be buried six feet below the grass of the cemetery. And as far as we know, their killer was never brought to justice.

***

Humans have always been drawn to those who offer answers. Exactly how that desire has played out over the centuries is a varied and flavourful collection of groups that have left their mark on history. From the Hellfire Club’s debaucherous gatherings of society’s elite, to those struggling to make the most of their lives, cults have always been a vendor designed to provide what people are looking for. Most of them, though, leave those questions unanswered, and in the case of Benny Evangelist and his faithful followers, where the goal was physical healing, it ended in something worse: blood. Now, I could tell you that their house on St. Aubin Street was eventually torn down, but you probably know better than to assume that means the story has faded away. Events like that have a way of living on, even when all the people involved no longer are. Legends, whispers, rumours, all of it keeps them alive. But for Benny Evangelist, there’s one more enticing detail that’s kept people coming back, time and time again, to study the mystery. A little while ago, I mentioned that Benny had a friend back in York, Pennsylvania, who worked with him at the railyard there. His name, as I said, was Aurelius Angelino, and not only was he a fellow Italian immigrant, but he actually came from the same hometown back near Naples, and both men were obsessed with the occult. But here’s the thing I didn’t tell you: ten years before the brutal murder of Benny and his entire family, Aurelius Angelino gathered up his twin four-year-old boys and killed them while his wife was making dinner. Similar to Benny’s killer, Angelino used an axe, and similar to Benny’s crime scene, the police found a single bloody fingerprint. Now, Angelino was caught red-handed in the truest sense of the word, and because his behaviour wasn’t viewed as “sane”, he was sent to a psychiatric institution for the criminally insane. And then, four years later, he escaped. And I know what you’re thinking – what if Angelino was angry that Benny left town and made a better life for himself. Perhaps he followed him to Michigan and found his old friend at the centre of an occult gathering, wielding the power of a true prophet, and maybe he was overcome with jealousy, leading him to kill Benny’s entire family, and that could be it. But there’s one detail that’s left investigators and researchers confounded and stumped for decades, because it points to a timeline and chain of events that no one is prepared to unpack, that somehow, and in some way, Angelino didn’t kill his own kids back in 1919, and that Benny’s 1929 murder was an act of revenge and not jealousy. And that detail? The bloody fingerprint found in Angelino’s house back in 1919 was an exact match to someone he knew very well. It was the fingerprint of Benny Evangelist.

***

Do an internet search for terms like “cult” and “secret society”, and you’re bound to find a whole slew of books and websites that talk about them. One reason is because they have always been popular to discuss, but another would be because they are real things that have historically made a lot of people nervous. To that end, I’ve got one more unrelated tale of unusual groups to share with you, and all you need to do to hear about it is stick around through this brief sponsor break.

[Sponsor Break]

William Morgan was trying to get ahead in life. Born in 1774 in Virginia, he worked as a bricklayer and a stonemason, work that eventually pulled him north to New York. He seemed like the kind of guy who might settle down, he had a wife and two kids, after all, but the only reputation he really had was that of a drunken drifter. He would pursue one business venture, only to fail, pack up his household, and move on to the next, rinse and repeat, and that was his life for a long time. Honestly, reading about his early life makes me feel like one of the very few respectable qualities this man possessed was his determination and confidence. William was sure he could find a way to put himself on the map, to make something of himself, and in a way, he eventually did, just not the way he intended. It happened when William was chatting with a friend of his named David Miller, who ran a struggling newspaper. Now, the two men had a lot in common. Both of them were horrible at running a business, both firmly believed that they were destined for greatness, and both had very few rules about how they were going to achieve it, which, I’m sure you’d agree, is not a healthy combination. William had an idea, though. All around him, he kept hearing about a secret society that seemingly controlled his entire world, they were embedded deep within the government of the newly born United States of America, and they used that power to become the wealthiest folks around. Who was this group? The Freemasons.

Now, I highly doubt there’s anyone out there who hasn’t at least heard of the Freemasons. A full third of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were members of the Freemasons; so were other significant Americans, both then and now. George Washington, Paul Revere, Mark Twain, and, uh… Shaquille O’Neal. Anyway, William’s new business idea was really simple – he was going to infiltrate the ranks of the Freemasons, learn all of their incriminating secrets, and then write it up as a book, which David Miller would print and sell. It smelled like easy money to these men, so they got right to work. William did indeed sneak in, pretend to be a member and gain access to all sorts of juicy secrets, and he did in fact write it all up for publication. But he and David were so proud of the progress they were making that they bragged about it all over town, and soon enough, the Freemasons found out about it and set out to stop them. At first, it was just harassment from the masons in their community, angry words, threats of violence, that sort of thing. It was posturing, nothing more, except that posturing escalated quickly. On September 8th of 1826, a group of masons tried to destroy David’s print shop. Two days later, the masons set fire to the homes of both men, and then the following day, William Morgan was arrested on false charges. Basically, a local tavern owner, possibly a mason himself, claimed that William had borrowed a shirt and never brought it back. Once that charge was dropped, William was arrested again, this time for failing to pay a tab in the same tavern. The tab, by the way, was just $2. Yeah, the masons were angry, and they were pulling all the strings they could to unravel William and David’s business plan.

On the night of September 12th, a huge crowd of masons showed up at the jail where William was being kept and demanded to pay his bail and take him into their own custody. The jailor’s wife was on duty at the time, and she really did try to brush them away, but things got pretty heated and she gave in to save her own skin, and honestly I don’t blame her one bit. Those masons dragged William out into the night while another group visited his wife. They told her that they would let her see her husband, but only if she handed over the unpublished manuscript. Afraid for his life and her own, she did what they asked, and then they took it and sent her away. Her husband William was never seen again. That same night, another group of about fifty masons kidnapped David Miller and locked him up in an undisclosed location. Even still, a bunch of his friends managed to track him down and break him out, and with that, a very wild night came to an end. Now, from one point of view, the masons got what they wanted – they put an end to a critic who had threatened to expose their secrets. In fact, they made him disappear completely, but from another perspective, they really made a mess of things. Why? Because a secret society doing criminal stuff to stay secret didn’t exactly endear itself to the general public. Soon enough, news spread, and as a result, an anti-mason movement sprung up. Not locally, either – nationally. How massive was this movement? Well, a new, short-lived political party popped up, called the “Anti-Masonic Party”. Sitting president, John Quincy Adams, even felt that it was necessary to announce that he had never been, nor ever would be, a mason. Their recruitment numbers dwindled, and within a few years, the organisation was reduced to a shadow of its former self, and in the middle of that storm of bad PR, David Miller saw his next best opportunity. He rewrote the book from notes and memory and published it anyway, which, considering the harassment he had already suffered, was pretty brave of him. And the response from the masons? Not a single thing. David Miller’s tell-all exposé went completely unanswered.

[Outro]

*The correct name seems to be Margaret Matilda (Wright) Rowen.

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