Adios, Yda!

Hey, true weirdos at the end of this episode, stick around if you want for a little bonus content and conversation. It's not easy to disappear. But it used to be used to be there were no driver's licenses, no credit cards, no internet to digitally track your every move. Even birth certificates weren't a fact of life. There were no social security numbers, no law enforcement databases to store your fingerprints or your DNA. It was just your name and the place you hailed from. This is a story about a woman disappeared. But before she went missing, she went big, really big, big enough to make you wonder, did she vanish on her own? Or did someone else make that decision for her?

And they got a small beam of light. Stuff. Kansas was an estate in 1857 the year she was born. It joined the Union in January 1861, just a few months before the first shot was fired in the American Civil War. Alfred Addis was a Confederate sympathizer, a slave owner, and photographer. He lived with his wife and two children in Leavenworth, Kansas, the very first city to ever be incorporated in the state.

Leavenworth was a place with a split personality. On the one hand, it was where the pro-slavery Law and Order Party was founded. On the other, it lent its name to the Leavenworth Constitution, the most radically abolitionist of all the constitutions proposed in Kansas. And something that isn't so well known, is that Leavenworth had a secret, a network of tunnels and safe houses, stops on the Underground Railroad. You get the feeling that Leavenworth in the 1860s felt a lot like the whole country does today. Deeply divided, seething, the threat of violence hanging hot and heavy over the place like a storm cloud in August. By day, Alfred Addis worked at his photography business, by night he managed a theater. When abolitionists burned that theater to the ground in January 1864, Alfred snatched up his wife and children and his slaves and fled to Chihuahua in northern Mexico. Other Confederate sympathizers had found safe haven there. And it didn't take Alfred long to get back to photography. His pictures of indigenous people and landscapes sold really well to art dealers back in New York. His daughter Yda, eight years old, bright and precocious, was her father's sidekick. He began taking her along on his scouting trips, searching for ever more exotic scenery to photograph. Yda had a gift for language, and she was soon translating Spanish and indigenous languages into English for her father. The family wandered Mexico traveling by mule train, Addis documenting their journey through the country with his camera. They didn't return to the US until the Civil War ended.

And that's when they boarded a ship bound for California. Alfred Addis had heard news of mines threaded with gold and silver. He took off with his camera, taking pictures along the way of Native American tribes in the dusty California countryside that would one day be covered in asphalt and concrete and swarmed with more people than lived in the whole newly United States.

Alfred's life took him next to Tucson where he was appointed United States Territorial Marshal. Now, Alfred didn't live long enough to see Arizona become a state. He was pursuing a man who'd stolen from him, chasing him all the way back to Chihuahua, Mexico. The thief put a bullet into Alfred Addis in 1886, and the photographer died from that gunshot wound. This is where he leaves the story. And his daughter Yda, 29 years old when her father died, 29 and already living an outsized, chaotic, colorful life of her own, a chip straight off the old block. This is where it becomes Yda's story. Yda's childhood spent wandering the Mexican countryside with its own education. And it was a good one. Because when her family landed in Los Angeles when she was 15 years old, school was a piece of cake. Before she'd even finished, she'd founded her own publication, the Los Angeles Independent. Yda graduated first in her class, the very first graduating class ever at Los Angeles High. The Los Angeles Herald published one of her poems that year, The Princess Story, and said that the merits of the composition do not require our compliments. That's how good it was. It was the first of many times her poetry would appear in print. Yda's first job was teaching, one of the few career paths open to a woman of her time. But she was restless. Yda Addis had lived the life of a nomad, a life of freedom and movement. Those years spent crisscrossing Mexico had filled her to the brim. She became a writer. Some of the stories she wrote were the ones that had been shared with her in her childhood by the Mexican people. She put those tales, which had been passed down in the oral tradition into writing. She wrote her own original stories too. Her imagination was huge from love stories to poetry, to tales of ghosts and spirits. She centered women in her fiction, something that wasn't all that common back then. And she didn't wait to be discovered. Yda submitted her work to one of the most distinguished newspapers in California, the Argonaut in San Francisco. And when the paper accepted her stories, her career took off. It wasn't long before readers in Los Angeles, Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia, New York, the whole country were hooked on Yda's writing. Her work was published all over Mexico too. It can be hard for a nomad to settle down in one place. And Yda was a restless soul. The same editors who published her short stories realized that her travels would make great copy too. And they did. Yda's travel writings were vivid and detailed. Readers ate it up.

They lived vicariously through her journeys and they learned about people in places that most would never see for themselves. Yda was so passionate about Mexican culture, even the most ignorant or prejudiced reader couldn't help but have their worlds expanded by her words. She was gifted, and she was fierce, and her work was pretty much renowned. So you might be wondering why you've never heard the name Yda Hillis Addis. It's a wild story. And spoiler alert, it involves a man. Actually, we better make that men.

By 1890, Yda Addis was a literary star, famous in California. The Society Pages reported on her comings and goings and on her wedding. On September 10, 1890, Yda married a prominent Santa Barbara attorney named Charles Storke. He'd served in the Civil War on the Union side, and in the California State Assembly. He was a decade older than Yda, and she was his second wife. Yda was probably glad for a happy distraction, because she'd spent nearly the past year locked in a dispute with the editor of the magazine Harper's Monthly. His name was Charles Dudley Warner. See, there was a group of native peoples in the mountains west of Mexico City, who were known for creating a kind of iridescent pottery that was unique to them.

Yda had spent time with the potters and learned their methods and wrote about it in a piece she submitted to Harper's Monthly. Charles Dudley Warner was like, oh, there's no way those Mexicans are capable of making this pottery. Nice. Has there been even one minute in human history without arrogance and racism? The answer to that is nope. Warner also gave Yda's writing a side eye. And she was like, you cannot be serious.

Because Yda was not one to shy away from a fight. She pushed back hard, defending the makers of the pottery and her own work. Warner was so convinced of his rightness, that he sent a man named WC Prime to Mexico to investigate. And Prime returned with the news that every word Yda had written was true, and that the magazine should publish her article immediately, which it did with a catch. When the article appeared, it was under the byline WC Prime. Yda did get a little mention.

Miss Yda Addis, the discoverer of the place of manufacture of the iridescent Mexican pottery, and of the process by which it is made, is a well known newspaper writer on the Pacific Coast, is a good Spanish scholar, and has spent several years in Mexico. Charles Dudley Warner do what? First insult the subject of her work, and then steal the work itself? No, you didn't. The Los Caldes jumped to her defense.

She alone and entirely at her own expense undertook the journey into the almost inaccessible region where this pottery is done. And there beguiled the shy natives of their wonderful secret, which as she supposes may have been brought to them from Europe many years before by some artist sold priest, and which through them had been preserved, though lost to the civilized world. Miss Addis pluckily stands up for her and she does it in an admirable spirit and in a most thorough manner. Lots to unpack there, not the least of which is the assumption that a long ago European must surely have taught the people this technique because God forbid the white man doesn't vacuum up the credit for every single achievement in the world. That said, the paper did have Yda's back. Just three weeks later, they published this. Miss Yda Addis, the lady whose graceful and versatile pen has enriched our magazines and newspapers with elegant and instructive literature on a wide range of topics, recently contributed to Harper's a paper upon iridescent pottery, the value of which was so great to art that Charles Dudley Warner tried to take to himself credit for its discovery, which he was in no wise entitled to do. Miss Addis spent nearly a whole year tracing to an isolated portion of Mexico. The place where this art, supposed to be lost, has been preserved in great perfection. Mr. Warner has done great damage to his fame by his indefensible attempt to rob Miss Addis of her right of discovery. The lady will hereafter make Los Angeles her home. The way those old time journalists love to run on sentence, you'd think punctuation hadn't been invented yet, but there you have it. Yda Addis would not be cowed. What do they expect from a woman who spent her childhood trekking through Mexico as her father's translator? She was brave and bold and outspoken, and society has a way of dealing with women like that. Women who dare to challenge the status quo. Yda may have thought she was done fighting after this victory. She had no idea that she was just getting started. The marriage to Charles Storke. Was it love? Or was it, as the gossips whispered, a move on Yda's part to grab some financial security for herself? Whatever motivated the marriage, it wasn't enough to keep them together. Their first year seemed, you know, peaceful enough. Yda had a story called A Woman's Wild, published in the Argonaut. Her name was all over the press and including the classifieds. Wanted. Skins of fox, wildcat, bear, or California boon. Suddenly, out of nowhere, Yda filed for divorce from Charles Storke on the grounds of cruelty. She fled their Santa Barbara home for a friend's place in Los Angeles, and this private matter was about to become a public scandal. Charles Storke fired off letters to the local papers. He claimed that Yda was leaning toward insanity. He said she loathed Tom, his 14-year-old son from his first marriage, and declared that unless Charles kicked the boy out, she would not return to their marital home. Charles said she was an unsafe woman, and had tried several times to take her own life. Yda's response was that Charles was a big petulant baby who treated her shamefully. She said he'd refused to give her any money during their 9-month marriage, but he had taken $300 of her money, and that'd be like taking more than $10,000 today.

Charles responded by playing the crazy lady card. He petitioned the court to appoint a guardian to look after this mad woman. The reason no one even blinked at this was because it was shockingly common in the late 1800s for men to pack their wives off to insane asylums for the crime of trying to assert themselves in their marriages. All a husband needed was a eccentricity. A husband got to be the judge of what constituted erratic or eccentric behavior. It was as simple as a husband requesting his wife be committed. We know now that many of the women committed to asylums during that time were far from insane. Depressed, maybe. Stressed out. Anxious.

Frustrated by their near-complete powerlessness. Bet you didn't know that female independence was viewed as a form of insanity back then. It was considered unnatural, some sort of disease of the mind. And here's a fun fact. Just having your period could get you committed. They called it uterine derangement. It was a diagnosis so common that doctors encouraged mothers to deny their daughters meat, hot showers, and access to fiction in the hopes of delaying the onset of this dreadful derangement for as long as possible. The asylum was a safe place to park a woman suspected of inappropriate or scandalous behavior. Well, not safe for her necessarily, but safe for the family's reputation. Goodness gracious, who could ever judge a man for having a sick wife? Poor thing.

For the wife, the asylum was terrifying. Resist at all and you could find yourself in a straitjacket. Loud or boisterous patients were managed with chloroform. The really tough cases could end up in surgery. Doctors back then declared that cutting off a woman's clitoris had a 70% success rate in curing madness. Funny how easily they can find it when they've got a scalpel in one hand. Oh no, was that out loud?

Or doctors might yank out her ovaries or administer an ice water douche or go truly medieval and attach a handful of leeches to her labia. All this and just the threat of all this was sometimes enough to frighten a patient into submission to make her get her unruly personality under control, to swallow and hide her every emotion. This was the fate. Charles Storke was teeing up for his estranged wife, Yda. So my husband has a knack for denouncing everyone with whom he has trouble as a lunatic. Dare those who regard Storke himself as insane. For instance, Senator E. H. Hickock, Mr. W. A. Stafford of Montecito, as well as a number of physicians. Her husband, Charles Storke, was talking to the press too. He had proof of her insanity, he said. And get this, it involved a public execution, a hanging. The first time I noticed any evidence of insanity was the night when a train was going down to Ventura, taking the committee who were going to hang Mr. Lopez. Mrs. Storke began to insist that I get up and escort her to Ventura to see the hanging. I said no. I did not think it was any place for a woman. She kept arguing with me to go and I kept declining, fully an hour.

Finally, she said, if you'll not go with me, I'm going alone. I told her if she went at all, she'd have to go alone. So far, not so crazy. I mean, sure, yeah, wanting to go watch a man be hanged sounds kind of sketchy. But remember, this was during a time when public executions drew whole families who brought the kids and packed a picnic. Let's see what else Storke's got. She returned and said the train wasn't going. She sat in a chair and refused to go to bed until after 3 o'clock in the morning. The next morning, she said she'd regretted what she had done the previous night and threatened to take poison on account of it. I finally persuaded her to abandon the idea. Okay, the poison threat was a bit dramatic, but insane.

Come on. No, listen, said Storke. Listen, there's more. Storke claimed that Eda took a lethal dose of morphine and locked herself in a closet all that night. She was a wild lunatic. Storke then described an incident where a colleague of his called him an assistant, not an associate. According to him, this sent Eda right off the deep end. I saw her in the adjoining room trying to set fire to her dress with a match.

I put out the fire and made her go to bed. Eda had a response ready. She said that on the last day she spoke to her husband, the conversation was very calm and abruptly he began shouting at her. He said, why you're not insane. You're only devilish. He said that he only put up with me because he thought I was insane, but that he was at last convinced that I was not. He told me that if I remained in Santa Barbara one more day, he would have me arrested and locked up as he me a very dangerous woman to be at large. Eda also testified that Storke was a filthy man. No, literally filthy as in not bathing for weeks at a time. Once he did not change his underclothing for three weeks. Eww. And then Eda insinuated that her medication had been spiked with morphine by whom she couldn't say Storke and you thought breakup posts on Facebook were messy. The stakes are sky high though. Charles Storke really could call the police and have her commit it and that's why she packed up and took off for Los Angeles. As one reporter put it shortly after she married that man Storke, it seems your real trouble in life began. It had and it was about to get worse. The judge in the divorce case ruled against her that there had been no cruelty on the part of Charles Storke, but judge also found in her favor that she was not insane before during or after the marriage, which was a sore disappointment for Charles, who very much looked forward to packing her off to the nearest asylum. Instead, he was ordered to pay alimony, a court decree Charles Storke opted to just ignore for the next five years. By the time the court got around to dealing with Storke over that matter, Eda had gotten herself into the craziest, most serious kind of legal trouble. First, she was accused of sending anonymous poison pen letters. Then she was accused of murder. It's a tale that began with the discovery of a dead body in a barley field in Montecito. Eighteen-year-old Ethel Richardson had been battered, her throat cut. A trail of blood led back to the home of her mother, Mary Richardson.

Mary had also been beaten and shot in the head and was miraculously still alive, though not for long. The press carefully noted that no outrage had been committed upon either woman, which was their polite way of saying that neither woman had been raped. A bloody ironwood walking stick was found at the scene, a stick known to belong to a man named Cyrus Barnard, who'd worked as a gardener at the Richardson home. When police knocked on Barnard's door to question him about the crime, things quickly turned violent and Barnard was killed by a deputy sheriff. This would have ended all speculation about Ethel's murder, but for Ada, she believed that there was far more to the story and that the real perpetrator was being protected by powerful men in the Santa Barbara community. A blizzard of anonymous letters began showing up in mailboxes, letters that said that Mary and her daughter were attacked by the business agent of Mary's dead husband, who apparently owed the late Mr. Richardson money and was ready to commit murder rather than pay his debts. In February 1899, Ada was arrested and charged with writing those hundreds of anonymous letters. Why was she the suspect? Because the murder was all she could talk about.

People in Santa Barbara complained that she was ruining their peace with her endless demands that the real killer be brought to justice and then plot twist. She herself was accused of the crime from the San Francisco Examiner. She has developed her character in such a way that the great body of the townspeople believe her capable of the crime and the evidence seems to point more clearly to Ada Addis than any other person. This is a fun spot to jump in and mention that Ada's ex-husband, Charles Storke, was now the district attorney for Santa Barbara. Terrible, terrible luck for Ada and a sweet opportunity for revenge for the still fuming Charles. Her conduct toward the murder case has been the same as her conduct toward the letter case. She was first person to denounce the anonymous libels. Her mouth was the first to tell about the town that the letters were being circulated. She followed the case and kept it alive until at last she was convicted of it. Hello, by this logic, Nancy Grace would have been convicted of murdering Lacey Peterson and her unborn son, Connor. The tracks are a strong evidence against her.

Two sets of tracks followed by Ethel Richardson to her death. The small tracks correspond exactly to the dimensions of Ada Addis's foot. She is a small woman and her foot is very small. Then, and this is quite the wild stretch, it was suggested that since Ada was exactly the same height as the dead gardener, Cyrus Barnard, she had dressed up in his clothing to commit the crime. She made it her brag many times that it was her custom to go about the city at night in various disguises dressed as a boy or as a Chinese. The woman was among the first in town who knew of the murder. Peter Stern, a local policeman, says he'd always suspected the former Mrs. Storke of the murder. The jury trial lasted three weeks. Ada's defense tried hard to make the case that her ex-husband, Charles Storke, was part of a larger conspiracy to drive Ada out of Santa Barbara and that maybe he was involved in writing the anonymous letters. The jury didn't buy it. Ada was found guilty. Sentencing was scheduled to take place the following month. Ada disputed the verdict, of course, and declared that she was now to be addressed as Ada Addis Storke Jackson. The Jackson came from what she called a contract marriage to her former divorce attorney, Grant Jackson. For his part, Grant Jackson denied that any such thing was true and that he was angry that she dared take his name. Well, that wasn't all he was ticked off about. He was also pretty worked up over the fact that Ada tried to kill him. Grant Jackson claimed that he was awakened from a deep sleep on July 8th, 1899 by a tickling sensation on his nose. He woke to find a figure standing over him. It's me, Grant. Have you got a gun? He said he did. Haha said Ada as she whipped a revolver from the pocket of her dress. Haha. I've got the drop on you. Grant demanded to know what in the world she was doing in his bedroom. That's my business. Keep your voice down. I'm here to kill you and then commit suicide. So don't be in a rush. We both got to go. Grant said that Ada dropped her handkerchief and when she bent down, he pounced. It took 10 minutes of wrestling before Grant was able to overpower her. He tied her hands behind her back and shouted for help. A neighbor heard and called police. Grant said that as they waited for the police, Ada begged him to let her go and even offered him money to forget the whole thing.

Grant did not forget the whole thing. Ada was arrested and charged with attempted murder. At the time of her arrest, she was carrying a satchel packed with two bottles of chloroform, prussic acid and cyanide. When reporters showed up at her jail cell, she didn't deny cutting the window screen and climbing into Grant's bedroom. I really went to Jackson's room because I knew I would find him in a better mood and then could talk to him undisturbed. I mean, I guess she had taken the bottle of chloroform out and it appeared that a chloroform cloth was the source of that tickling sensation on Grant's nose and then there was the whole concealed revolver in her pocket thing, but yeah. Okay. Sure. Yeah. She's just there to chat, but if that's the case, why not just go in through the front door? I've been accustomed to enter that way as I have been in the house a number of times and at all hours of the I carry chloroform at all times on account of heart trouble and the prussic acid and the cyanide. Why I carry those articles is nobody's business. Now, Grant Jackson did agree that Eda did prowl around his house very often, but had never seemed desperate or dangerous in any way, but now between the libel conviction and this assault on her former attorney and maybe current husband, it only amped up paranoia in Santa Barbara that Eda was in fact very dangerous and ought to be sent to San Quentin for a good long time. As Eda sat in her cell, she was cast as the boogeyman of Santa Barbara, a liar, a cheat, and clearly capable of violence. Bail was said at $5000, but Eda had no money and couldn't pay it.

Worse, the press was now reporting that the attack on Grant Jackson was clear evidence that Eda had very likely murdered Mary and Ethel Richardson with the gardener Cyrus Barnard serving as her accomplice. Eda was, they said, a woman in the grip of a murderous mania. A man named Frank Gutierrez, who Eda had accused of writing the anonymous poison pen letters, went and demanded police protection. Eda was behind bars, but Gutierrez insisted that she had powerful friends who were out for revenge against any and all who've been connected to her case in any way. It was said that, get this, Eda had acquired influence over certain Italians who would happily do her bidding. Hey, there's an early taste of the discrimination awaiting generations of Italian Americans, all of whom were assumed to be tied into the mafia one way or another.

Opinion as to the woman's sanity is divided. Many shake their heads and declare that they always predicted that unless she was sent to jail or an asylum, she would close her career with a tragedy. I only went to Grant to force him to certain information that he has that would clear me of the libel charge. He knows who wrote those letters. I wanted to make him get me a new trial. I was armed. I always go armed, except when I'm in jail. The people of Santa Barbara, yeah, they said Eda was in the grip of a murderous mania, but the town itself appeared to be in the grip of paranoid hysteria. One local paper was openly exasperated at what felt like the West Coast version of the Salem witch trials, this time with only one witch under scrutiny. Now, since Eda Addis is held in confinement, our citizens might live in safety day and night because barring Eda Addis, everybody in this community is strictly honest and law-abiding, thus society being purged. Why sound the alarm and make us believe that Eda is harmless in person, she still has an influence of evil with her emissaries. We are making a mountain out of a mole hill. All the time when Eda was free to roam about day and night, absolutely no one was killed. In the midst of all the hysteria, they alone had the guts to say out loud what Eda's real crime was. She refused to conform. She knew the rules that applied to women of her day, and she broke them. The very gift that had taken Eda so far, her talent as a writer, that was her real sin. Her main trait of individuality consists of a desire for distinction, and not having succeeded to be celebrated, she has at least succeeded in becoming notorious.

Where now is the friend of Eda Addis? She has drifted from bad to worse, and as a finale, has tried to kill her husband, Grant Jackson. Now the San Francisco papers have it that she killed the Richardson ladies. She will be accused of many more crimes before imaginative reporters get through with her. The machinery of the law in Santa Barbara will be kept operative indefinitely in dealing with her defects. The ordeal was taking a toll on Eda. She's haggard, pale, seemingly struggling with pain.

It was September 1899 when she finally appeared in court to be of attempted murder. She was accompanied by her lawyer, who happened to be the very first woman ever admitted to the California bar, and only the third woman admitted to the bar in the whole United States, Clara Shortridge Fultz. Delay after delay, technicality after technicality, the weeks dragged on, turning into months. By the time Eda appeared before the Fultz was long gone, and Eda was representing herself. Lawyers do like to get paid, and Eda had refused to pay hers, so she arrived in court clutching a large black handbag and dressed as the San Francisco examiner put it, an odd attire consisting of a loose-fitting bathrobe made apparently of a gray blanket.

The woman has clothing, but it is her habit in the jail to eat, drink, and sleep in this gown. Eda held up the black bag and told the judge, this contains evidence which will, when the time comes, unearth a terrible conspiracy now going on in Santa Barbara, and which will unravel the mystery of the Richardson murder case, which led to my libel conviction. Then she flat refused to enter a plea on the grounds that she had no counsel to advise her, so back to jail she went. In December, a grand jury failed to indict her on the charges and recommended that the whole case be dismissed, which the district attorney did to the outrage of all those in Santa Barbara who were convinced of her guilt. They didn't release her from jail though. She was serving time for the libel case, and since any story about her sold newspapers, the San Francisco Examiner took another shot at keeping her in the headlines.

Her mischief-making still goes on. For the past three or four weeks, letters have been going out about this city which resemble in character the well-known anonymous letters alleged to have been written by Eda Addis. They are not as filthy as those letters, but have many points of similarities. It is thought that the letters must have been sent out of the jail through her numerous visitors or through hobos to whom the letters might have been thrown through a jail window. Ah yes, the old prison hobo mail delivery system, of course. By December 22nd, it was announced that these obscene letters had been directly traced to Eda. Whether or not that was the truth hardly mattered. Eda's appeals to overturn the libel conviction were denied. She'd be staying in jail no matter what, and then out of nowhere, the California State Supreme Court announced that Eda Addis would be getting a brand new trial. She won that case. The state Supreme Court ruled that the original jury should have been shown handwriting samples and that the defense should have been allowed to put a handwriting expert on the stand because all of those letters, they were not in Eda's handwriting at all. They were in a man whose name you've already heard. Frank Gutierrez, you know, the dude who claimed that Eda knew some Italians who happily murder him as a favor to her. Eda walked out of jail in early May 1900. Two months shaved off her sentence for good behavior. She looked healthy again and strong. She told the press that while she hoped for a new trial to clear her good name, she intended to leave Santa Barbara for good.

To go, she said, to a town where she wouldn't be persecuted. That town sure wasn't San Francisco because when she arrived there in September 1901, the headlines screamed, Santa Barbara anarchist here. When Frank Gutierrez went missing in April of that year, it was hinted that perhaps foul play was involved and naturally it was insinuated that Eda was involved somehow. It was like she was hiding under every bed, lurking in every dark shadow, five feet tall, 90 pounds of pure evil, just waiting for a chance to attack. Santa Barbara held its breath and waited for her next dastardly deed and waited and waited and waited and for all we know, Santa Barbara is still waiting because Eda Addis up and disappeared. Gossip said that her ex, Charles Storke, had finally succeeded in having Eda committed to an asylum. She died there. Some said, no, no, no, no, no, she escaped. But neither story was true. The woman they called Eda Addis did vanish into a new identity, Adelaida Hillis Jackson of San Antonio, Texas. Those were the days, right? When you could just, you know, move, change your name and start over fresh. Eda, now Adelaida, took a secretarial job with the Laredo, Texas Board of Trade. That only lasted about six months. Her elderly mother and aunt were with her in San Eda cared for the two older women until their deaths in 1913. She drifted after that job to job. Her last known gig was working as a maid. If she was still writing, no one knew. No one in Texas had any idea that Adelaida Hillis Jackson was actually the celebrated writer and notorious poison pen Eda Addis. She was no longer the young wild beauty whose talent and bold charm captivated California. Now, she was just another tired looking older woman bent over her menial tasks as invisible then as she would be now. We love the idea of destiny when destiny delivers us to a dreamy destination. Funny how we're not such fans of destiny when the story ends badly. For Eda Addis, it looked like her destiny was fame and fortune as a writer. Every bit of her life pointed that way. It was mythic, childhood explorer, brilliant student, published and successful before she was even 21 years old. She clearly had the seed of greatness inside her. But was there another darker seed too? Was that the seed of madness? Where Charles Storke and Grant Jackson had so dramatically and publicly failed to lock her up in an asylum, the state of Texas succeeded. She was committed to San Antonio State Hospital with a diagnosis of paranoia. Was this her true destiny all along? No matter how she fought, was it always meant to end with her powerless and locked away?

If Eda continued writing after her disappearance from Santa Barbara, that work has never been found. Had she lost the heart for it? Was she trying to distance herself from the exhausting scandals in Santa Barbara and feared that her writing would only call attention to her and her new life? It was 1902 when she disappeared and 1912 when she reappeared in San Antonio. Where was she for those 10 years?

Who was she? And what about the diagnosis of paranoid insanity that led the state of Texas to commit her? What was that? Did her life with all those relentless accusations and harassment finally catch up to her? Or was she sick all along? Her belief that a powerful group of men in Santa Barbara had targeted her, framed her for all those nasty letters? That does sound paranoid. Did Grant Jackson really betray her to her ex-husband Charles Storke? Or was he blameless and she fixated on him to the point of delusion? Whatever else you might say about Eda, men were definitely a weakness. From an early romance with the very married former governor of California, John Downey, 30 years her senior, to that deranged night in Grant Jackson's bedroom, Eda and men made for a bad combination. As a writer, she may have been a keenly perceptive observer, but when it came to her personal life, she was as messy as any of us. Eda tangled with the kind of men who had the power, resources, and connections to make her life difficult. But she taught them a lesson too. A wild Mexican landscape in her childhood. Be very careful when you dismiss what seems smaller and more helpless than you.

It's the smallest creatures that can be the most dangerous threat of all. Eda spent the last decade of her life in that Texas asylum. She died in 1941 from uterine cancer. Her body was unceremoniously buried on the hospital grounds beneath an unmarked stone slab. Worse than being forgotten, Eda was erased. That's changing now. After more than 100 years of silence, her work is finally being rediscovered. In her day, Eda was mocked for being a fighter. They jeered and said she was pitting her small woman's hand against the whole world. They scolded her for refusing to sit quietly to take her punishment like a lady. They said, it's unbecoming to be so vindictive, Eda. Vindictive. If I could eliminate every other characteristic of my nature and cultivate but that one, I would gladly do it. Yes, ma'am. Or as Max might say, I'm not crazy.

You made me crazy. Next time on True Weird Stuff, it is so easy to dismiss people's sightings of cryptids, you know, whether it's Mothman or Bigfoot. It's so easy to dismiss them as a say the people were drunk or crazy or seeking attention. But on the next True Weird Stuff, we're gonna take you to a little town in Illinois and we're gonna let the police tell you the story of what happened in the summer of 1973. That's on the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode, Sam Moore making his first appearance, Don Morgan, Ashley Palmer Fischer, and Doc Kary Bowser. Thank you for letting me have the last line of the episode, Sherry.

That's one of my favorite things that you've ever said. So I was like, oh, I'm gonna put that on. This really did happen with someone who I was with. She was acting irrationally. I guess that would be the best way to say that, wouldn't it, Sherry? Irrationally is a generous and fair and very, generous description. And I said to her, I said, this is just plain crazy. I said, you're crazy. And she said, I'm not crazy. You made me crazy. So that really was said to me.

That really was said to me. It's one of my favorites. So, you know, let me just say up front that I had just tested positive for COVID when I was working on this episode. So I visited my mom who lives out west. And my mom had been sick for weeks. She had had eye surgery and she couldn't leave the house. So the first Sunday that she was allowed to drive, my mom decided to go to church. Let me get a drink. And she runs into one of her neighbors right before the services begin and the neighbor is visibly sick. And my mom said, oh my goodness, what is wrong? And the neighbor said, oh, Frannie, I have the COVID. But I just knew coming to church would make me feel better. So my mom got COVID. And then I flew out to visit my mom and I got COVID. And I was in bed for five days when I was supposed to be on, we don't even like to use the V word, do we Max, on vacation. Because we never get a, I can't I know, but it's fun work. Well, it is but you know, sometimes you need a break from it. Yeah. So I spent my the bulk of my vacation sick in bed with COVID and working on this episode. So like, I don't even know if it if it makes sense. But I came across, I came across Yda Addis's story a while back and, and I just was like, so ticked off in every direction. Because from the very beginning, first of all, we have to stop and talk about what an extraordinary intellect this woman had. She didn't get any formal schooling till age 15. And she had such a natural talent for languages that here she is riding around with her dad in the Mexican desert. And she's picking up indigenous dialects. She taught herself Spanish and then was able to translate all of these different dialects and languages back for her father, an incredible writer. There are so many like people are doing doctoral dissertations on Yda Addis, because she is the reason that some of these ancient folk tales from Mexico made it into the wider world. She carried these stories back. And she didn't she never pretended they were her stories. If you follow right, she, she took, she had such love and reverence for the people of Mexico, such love and reverence for the culture, that it was like her honor to bring their stories to the world. So she's just really remarkable.

But she was also headstrong and beautiful and badass at a time when those behaviors were not common in women. So she was captivating. To quote the producers of Dateline, she lit up a room when she walked into it. She men found her irresistible and she found their attention irresistible. She had the scandalous affair. I mean, she was like maybe 18 years old when she had this scandalous affair with the former governor of California, who was married at the time. And then of course, Charles Storke, this prominent attorney in Santa Barbara, was older and more worldly and more experienced and more connected and all the ends you can add on. And so what could have been this brilliant career as a writer was very much derailed by a sloppy hot mess of a personal life, which can I get an amen? Like can't relate to that. But I also couldn't help but wonder, when you look at her whole story, Max, when you zoom out, I feel like you can see that things began taking a turn for her in another way where her mental health is concerned. You can begin seeing the early signs of that around the Charles Storke marriage. Because I mean, there wasn't, I took it, I put it in and then I took it out of the episode, some of the drama with her and his son from the first marriage. I mean, right from the jump, things were not good. And there did feel like a persecution complex in some ways. Like Eda very much felt attacked by this new world that she had found herself in when she married Charles Storke. And you could say, yeah, that's clearly, you know, we're seeing the very early signs of some difficulty, some emotional dysregulation ahead. But couldn't you also say, she's really young, and she spent most of her life in the wilderness. And this society that she's found herself in and married into is alien and unfamiliar.

And she was not able to fit herself into the tiny slot that was available to a woman of her status and station at that time, right? Tell me what you think. Well, and I think sometimes you find that there are people who are incredibly accomplished in other ways, but they struggle with the personal life, you know, and so you're right, it was a small slot she was going to fit into. I think it was interesting that you said, the marriage to Charles Storke, was it love? Or was it as the gossip whispered, a move on Eda's part to grab some financial security for herself? I think that that's I don't think that's fair to her. And the reason I don't is it's possible she was attracted to Charles Storke, not because she thought it's a meal ticket, but she was attracted to the fact that he was accomplished. A lot of women find that sort of attractive, not necessarily that they're gold digging for money.

Do you know what I mean? I agree with you. But that gossip, like you can tell a lot about a culture by the gossip and the tabloid and all of that, that like that seamy underbelly of it, because it kind of gives you there's what we say we are and who we say we are and what actually are and how we behave. I think at the time, society had no way to comprehend a woman like Eda Addis. Because this was not I'm with you. This was not a materialistic person. I mean, this was someone that grew up sleeping on the ground, you know, surrounded by mules. This is not some princessy person.

And there was nothing in her life before or after Charles Storke, where money and material comfort even showed up on the radar. So I thank you for catching that because I agree with you on that. The other thing that was interesting to me. So the second husband, his last name was Jackson. Yeah, don't you think that when she decided that she wanted to assume a new identity, that she still used the last name Jackson? And I wonder, wonder why that was.

That the whole Grant Jackson thing is so intriguing, because there's not like in the public records, which I must tell you are spotty and unreliable. In a lot of cases, there's no public record record of a marriage to Grant Jackson. But at that time, common law marriages were pretty common. And we're sort of like when they said when they called it a contract marriage, that's what they were talking about. Like, hey, want to be married now? Okay, shake on it. Yeah, it wasn't a romantic marriage.

But if you notice that the new identity she took, her initials were still AJ. And my guess is she had a lot of towels and handkerchiefs monogrammed already. And so she could still use them. And it was easier that way. The thing about so if you read between the lines, with Grant and Yda, Grant had not a problem. He admitted, oh, she comes and goes and prowls around the house all the time. That sounds to me like the 19th century version of a booty call. Does it not? Yeah, it does. He was, he was absolutely fine with Yda coming and going. Now, in his defense, he did wake up to find her trying to chloroform him. And she did claim that chloroform was a medication she used for heart trouble. So make of that what you will. And she would she didn't think it was any of your business why she was walking around.

It's because she didn't have a good excuse for those things. You are using I'm using it for this. What about that other stuff? You know what, that's none of your damn business. I love her. I love that. Tell me, tell me that. I mean, she's a wild, exhausting wildcard. And I know back in the day, like, you know, you might have, you might have found Yda extremely appealing. Because she is. Yeah, right? Yes. Yeah. I mean, I, I've got to say that I, I had a type at one time. And also a type was attracted to me as well. So when I look at Yda, I go, yeah, I get this. Yeah, I sort of understand this. Yeah, I, I just loved her. And I loved she was so incredibly talented as a writer. And she would not. She would not be disrespected. Taking on the the editor, the publisher of Harper's Weekly magazine, back then as a writer, and as a woman was the craziest thing you could imagine doing. Everything, everything about the culture and the establishment was bigger and stronger and arrayed against her and she won. She won. And it was a really shitty thing that that the Harper's did when they argued they disputed her work sent a dude in to investigate who came back and said, Yeah, everything she says true, you should publish it. And then they published them under his name. That was a shitty thing, Max. It was Yeah, there's no question about it. That is a classic example of to quote you.

I'm not crazy. You made me crazy. So she's trying to put him out with chloroform. It's me, Grant. Have you got a gun? Oh, very dramatic. Very dramatic. And you'll notice and this is this is true. If you go dig through like all the transcripts and everything, you'll notice that that was almost flirtation for Grant Jackson, wasn't it? Yeah. Which tells you right between the lines that the two of them had something hot and fierce and it was not uncommon for her to for him to wake up in the middle of the night and there she was.

Whatever else that was. So then we fast forward and she literally fell off the face of the earth. The entire city of Santa Barbara was convinced that at any moment the terrifying Yda Addis would spring up from behind the couch and attack that she was every kind of criminal that you could possibly be. She was the boogeyman. She was the scary story. They told their And then she just disappeared and the saddest part of all of this is it's like when she decided that she could no longer be Yda Addis. She decided she could no longer do what Yda had done and she stopped as far as can be known.

She stopped writing and it was really a loss. Like we lost something when she disappeared for that decade before she turned back up in Texas. So let's talk for a minute about packing your wife off to an insane asylum. I don't think people understand how common that was and how many women found themselves institutionalized for the crime of reading or being boisterous or talking back to a husband.

Many, many, many, many, many husbands were married to bold, creative, independent women and loved it or at least lived with it. But there were others who were like, yeah, no, that's not going to be happening under my roof. And when they had had enough and were tired of it, or maybe someone else had come into the picture and the wife was an inconvenience, they would have them commit it where the most unspeakable, unimaginable cruelties were perpetrated under the guise of medicine. And you may not have known a lot of Americans don't. When we hear the phrase genetic or genital mutilation, we think of something that's happening in the developing world, among people that don't know better. But the reality was, is doctors at that time were extremely pleased to note that if they removed the clitoris, the insanity was cured. I have to just say, what the hell? Did that not shock you? That was shocking. I had never heard that before. You and I had talked before about the idea that you could just have your wife put We talked about that before. I was unaware that that had happened. It's just, it's not something we studied in school.

You know, it's a shameful chapter. And what do we do with our shameful chapters? We kick them under the bed, right? Where nobody can find them. And the tragedy of it was, is Yda went buck wild rebellious when Charles Storke began moving to have her institutionalized. Because every woman back then knew what that meant. Even if every woman today doesn't. And so she really became frantic at that point. And if you look at her story through that lens, you see someone who feels the entire system mobilizing against her and knows already that her chance of beating that system is really small. Could that be to send you into the most dramatic, outrageous behaviors to try to protect yourself from that? You've got to figure it out. Absolutely. I mean, these were powerful men. I mean, Charles Storke certainly was a powerful man. I mean, you're trying to divorce the DA of Santa Barbara County in Santa Barbara. Good luck. And the fact that I mean, back then, hey, you think the US Supreme Court is sketchy now? Whoa, buddy. At least, you know, we pretend that there are some ethics and some rules involved. Back then, nobody said to Charles Storke, hey, my dude, it doesn't look good. You probably shouldn't be involved in these legalities. It was just a different world.

The sad part for me is that not only was this incredible voice, this talent silenced, but she ended up in the place she'd been trying to escape. Anyway, she ended up in an asylum. And Max, and this comes up a lot on True Weird Stuff, another unmarked grave. It does come up a lot on here, doesn't it? Which makes you say, okay, how many other women's bodies were buried without ceremony or grave markers on the grounds of that hospital in San Antonio? Remember the episode, The Baby Broker? Right. How they turned the Tennessee State Hospital into a pregnancy baby mill by having guards and townsmen and various people systematically raping the inmates and then taking the babies and selling them? Right. How many bodies are in that soil? No ceremony, no acknowledgement, no grave marker. I would say the number is probably staggering.

Staggering, like appalling and horrible. And if you're wondering, yeah, but wouldn't we have dug some of those up? Well, not necessarily. Not all of those buildings. I mean, we don't have asylums, you know, air quotes like that anymore. But some of those buildings have been repurposed and are in use for other things. Some of them were just empty and abandoned and the land still belongs to the state. But the idea that you're just going to, you know, stumble across a ton of unmarked graves, that requires some things like ground penetrating radar, and the impetus to even begin looking. And if you don't know that these things happened, what would compel you to start looking?

So here's something to think about, you know, as we wrap up Yda Addis's story, and because she is being rediscovered. Don't be surprised if you don't stumble across her name somewhere in, you know, your newsfeed, because they're beginning to really bring her back to life. But here's something to think about. When we tell stories like this, we realize that there just is no such thing as the good old days.

Like there's no corner of the past that you can travel to where people don't act like people. It's a fairy tale, it's a bedtime story we tell ourselves. We say, you know, back in the day, and you can pick whichever version of back in the day you want, the 1950s, the 1850s, the 1650s, whatever. Back in the day, people worked hard and they were honest and they looked after their neighbors and they took care of their families and they obeyed the law and they had respect for institutions. Well, no, they didn't. No, they didn't.

There is not a single place in the past that you can visit where people act anything different than like people. It's part of human nature. You know, we have the capacity to choose. We have the capacity to be so good and so decent and honest and kind. We also have the capacity to be selfish and amoral and terrible. And every waking moment, we get to choose between those things. Every day, every transaction is a choice.

Am I going to do the good thing, the kind thing, or am I going to be kind of a selfish dick, right? That has been true for since people were invented. There is no such thing as the good old days. You don't have to go back very far before you're digging up a bunch of unmarked graves of children. And by that, I mean the 1980s in Florida at the Florida Reform School for Boys, right? You don't have to go back very far before you're finding children being stolen from their families and sold to people in adoption for pay schemes. You don't have to go back very far at all to discover that people have always been people. But maybe now another thing you'll discover is Yda Addis because she's being reclaimed and her work is being rediscovered. And it wouldn't shock me if she popped up into your newsfeed at some point as an American writer who did incredible work and then vanished off the face of the earth, vanished off the face of the earth to be buried under an unmarked concrete slab on the grounds of an insane asylum in Texas. Ain't no such thing as the good old days. So next week on True Weird Stuff, I do love a cryptid. Oh my god, do I love a But even more than a cryptid, I love a cryptid that somehow people have forgotten about or maybe they didn't know about in the days before there was the internet. So there's this little town in Illinois and it's famous for being the place where the most destructive tornado in American history ever landed. So its first claim to fame was this terrible tornado, like an F5 tornado, even though this was before they were ranking them that way. And so the town rebuilt, got hit by a tornado and rebuilt again. Things were pretty cool and pretty quiet for a long time until the summer of 1973 when a pair of people kind of getting it on, making out down by the river had an experience. And we're going to let the police department tell you this story because so often when it comes to anything you can't explain, whether it's Bigfoot or Mothman or UFO or the Jersey Devil or blah, blah, blah. People don't want to believe the people who experienced it. They say they're hoaxers or they're drunk or they're crazy or they're just attention seekers trying to get famous, even though you would not pass a 10 question quiz where you had to name 10 people who tried to get famous this way. Right? Even though, okay. I mean, once you get past Travis Walton and Betty and Barney Hill, I need to hear what else you have because you don't have much. So this is a thing that happened in this town. And it started in 1973. And it ended in the summer of 1976, the bicentennial year. And we're going to let the police tell you that story. Because maybe if you hear it from them, you'll be a little more open to the possibility that not one of these people were lying. And not one of them was trying to pull off a hoax. That is on the next True Weird Stuff. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next time.

True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr.

Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright 2024 Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.