Mother & Ghost

Hey true weirdos, at the end of this episode stick around if you want for a little bonus content and conversation. Is it the spirit of a person who has died but for whatever reason can or won't leave the physical world behind? Or is it something else, something even harder to imagine, like an entity from another dimension or a parallel universe?

Can ghosts be a kind of energy that lingers in a place where tragedy has occurred? Where there was so much human suffering that it left an invisible, intangible scar? Like maybe big human emotions leave their trace on a place? What is a ghost? True Weird Stuff This is a ghost story and it's true, every word. It all began in a beautiful two-story brick house built atop a hill in Jackson County, Indiana.

The year was 1848 and this house, with its hardwood floors and imported Persian rugs, had one luxury feature that no one living today would consider a big deal. Hanging kerosene lamps. Remember, this was 32 years before Thomas Edison even invented the light bulb, decades before homes were wired for electricity. Those hanging kerosene lamps were a posh convenience.

The kind of amenity you'd expect to find in the homes of the wealthy. This was the home of a prosperous couple. Dr. Creed Wilson, his wife Sophia, and their five-year-old son Aesop. As in, you know, Aesop's fables. Aesop was born in Leesville, Indiana, which, historical fun fact, got its name because the first people to settle there had come mostly from Lee County, Virginia.

With a little sprinkle of North Carolinians thrown in, too. You know, when you think of westward expansion in the U.S., you can't help but think of western-y kinds of things like cowboys and covered wagons. But for settlers on the East Coast looking to stake a homestead claim, the rich farmland of Indiana was plenty far west enough.

And if you need any more proof that what we call the Midwest today was very much the western frontier back then, here you go. In March 1813, Leesville, Indiana, was the site of an absolutely horrific massacre of settlers by members of the Pottawatomie Nation. See, these settlers had, in the name of Manifest Destiny, settled themselves right smack down in the middle of Pottawatomie lands.

And the indigenous population had some feelings about that. Some very hard feelings. Who wouldn't? Don't act like you'd be cool with a wagon train full of strangers setting up permanent camp in your backyard. Even the descendants of the earliest settlers to the region described finding clearings and log cabins waiting for them upon their arrival.

Was this the work of French fur trappers in the late 1700s? Or were these structures built by the native people? This is just one tiny example of how complicated our history really is. The North American wilderness might have been vast and pristine, but it was far, far from uninhabited. Anyway, by 1848, when Aesop and his parents moved into that gorgeous home atop Medora Hill, life in Jackson County had settled into a much more sedate rhythm.

There was a courthouse and a seminary. About 400 people called the county home. The pioneer era was nearly over. The land had been cleared and planted. Rail lines were laid. Canals were dug. Log homes were being replaced by sturdy brick houses. There were stores and commerce. There was government. And the people of Indiana were determined to enjoy Every democratic freedom promised to them in their state constitution.

In just five years, the first public high school in the state would open its doors. New Albany High School. It's still there today, except for a little pause here and there, like the time it served as a hospital for soldiers wounded in the Civil War. Generations of Hoosiers earned their diplomas in those classrooms. And here's another fun fact.

The school once had a faculty member who taught physics and Spanish and even coached the basketball team. You know, the kind of trifecta familiar to every graduate of an American public high school, right? Except this teacher is someone whose name pretty much everyone knows. Edwin Hubble, as in the Hubble Space Telescope.

How cool is that? So Dr. and Mrs. Wilson and their son Esip enjoyed an idyllic life in Jackson County, Indiana. But none of us can live outside of history, no matter how desperately we try. And even in that house on Medora Hill, there was no escaping the reality that war was coming. In 1861, another Indiana Hoosier was in the White House.

President Abraham Lincoln. His family had moved to Indiana from Kentucky in 1816 when the future president was just seven years old. It was the very same year that Indiana became a state. Lincoln remained in Indiana until he was 21 years old. That's about a quarter of his whole life when you think about it. Those were some very formative years, too.

And now that little boy who had lost his mother at age nine, who'd been able to attend school only sporadically, who worked as a ferryman and a farmer and a carpenter and a lawyer, despite having never gone to law school. He found himself the leader of a nation bitterly divided. Lincoln knew that the growing rebellion in the southern states would have to be quelled if the union was to survive intact.

And Abraham Lincoln saw no room for compromise on the matter of slavery. As far back as 1828, when the future president was just 19, he traveled with a friend named Alan Gentry to New Orleans. The pair made the journey along the Mississippi River and happened to come upon a slave auction. Lincoln was sickened and appalled by what he witnessed, telling Gentry, If I ever get a chance to hit that thing, I will hit it hard.

That thing for Lincoln was slavery. And now in April 1861, Lincoln got that chance. He put out a call for volunteers, 75,000 volunteers, to join the union cause in suppressing the Southern Rebellion. In Jackson County, Indiana, many rallied to that call. Hoosiers began organizing and Aesop Wilson, now 17, wanted to serve.

His mother, Sophia, was frantic to stop him. She pleaded with him to stay by her side. His father's health was failing and she could not possibly care for him on her own. But war, with all its promise of valor and glory, has called to young men since the beginning of human history. And Aesop could not bear to sit on the sidelines, watching his father wither and his mother grieve, while all around him others were heeding the call to defend their country against his mother's wishes and without her knowledge.

Aesop Wilson enlisted. Late on the night of July 11, 1862, Aesop quietly slipped out of the house on Medora Hill. He signed on as a drummer boy for Indiana's 22nd Regiment Company B under the command of one Captain Tanner. The beloved only son of Dr. Creed and Mrs. Sophia Wilson headed off to war. We need to talk about what it meant to be a drummer boy in the American Civil War.

They were the youngest soldiers. A handful were under the age of 10. Can you imagine sending your 10-year-old off to war? How about your 10-year-old self? Thanks to the careful work of historians, we know that most of the drummer boys were age 15 or younger. At 17, Aesop was older than most, and the job of drummer boy was no lark.

They weren't there to provide the troops with entertainment. The drums were a kind of battlefield communication system. Think about how chaotic and noisy those Civil War era battles were. In all the confusion of rifle and musket and cannon fire, how in the world could soldiers possibly hear the shout at commands coming from their officers?

That's where the drums came in. The drummer boys memorized patterns, specific drum rolls that meant attack or retreat or fall back to an agreed-upon position. In the frenzy of battle, one drummer boy would get the signal from command and begin beating out the roll. Others would hear and join in, and soon the battlefield would echo with the thunder of their drumming.

Honestly, just imagining this makes me feel panicky. The terror and adrenaline in those boys and all the soldiers on both sides must surely have experienced even as they marched straight toward their own likely deaths. Puts our comfortable soft lives into grim perspective, doesn't it? This was Aesop Wilson's new life.

He'd run away to war and was having the grandest adventure. Tanner's company first set up camp in Jefferson City, Missouri, and while Aesop might have broken his mother's heart by enlisting, he tried hard to make up for it by writing letters home. He wrote about army life and his duties and all the ways that military life in Missouri differed from his life back home in Indiana.

For starters, Missouri was a border state between the North and the South with a foot in both worlds. In 1860, there were more than 114,000 enslaved people in the state. Yet at the same time, a third of the population in Missouri at that time had come from the northeastern United States as well as from countries like Germany and Ireland.

And unlike South Carolina, which cooled its jets for less than two months after Lincoln was elected to the presidency before exiting the Union, soon joined by Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, the Missouri State Convention voted 98-1 against secession in March 1861. Thanks to its 800-plus miles of railroad lines and the industrial hub that St. Louis was rapidly becoming, Missouri was hugely strategically important to both sides, and Missouri sent many of its sons into battle on both sides.

Well over 100,000 fought for the Union. 40,000 fought for the Confederacy. Like the nation itself, it was a state divided. And like our modern political leadership, which often seems completely detached from the will of the people it allegedly represents and serves, Missouri had a governor with ideas in direct opposition to the will of the state convention.

Governor Claiborne Fox Jackson was firmly and fully Team Confederacy. That's why on November 28, 1861, Governor Fox, with the help of some pro-secession members of the Missouri General Assembly, passed an ordinance that turned Missouri into the 12th state of the Confederacy. Okay then, sir. Okay. Call it whatever you want.

Call it Wonka Land if you like. Because despite all this political maneuvering, Missouri did remain in the Union. As you can see, in joining Captain Tanner's company, young Asap Wilson found himself not in a far-flung sleepy backwater, but in a critical conflict spot in the war. In a letter home dated September 21, 1861, he wrote, Mother, I write you a few short lines to let you know that I am well, fat, ragged, and sassy.

We are now on the War Eagle, one of Uncle Sam's boats, on our way from Boonville to Jefferson City. We left Jeff City Wednesday night and ran up to Glasgow, about 100 miles from Jeff City, where we were landing and sent out some troops to attack a secession battery under the command of Major Tanner, who was just starting out when he was seriously wounded, probably fatal.

We are now guarding him down to Jeff City. The regiment is now encamped at Boonville. This will probably be the last time I will write to you, for the mail does not come up so far to our camp. We've been having a hell of a time lately. Fifteen minutes notice is all we get of marching orders. I've traveled nearly 800 miles now, and I have the first success to see yet.

This old boat's running over logs, stumps, and everything else, so we'll have to close now. Signed, Uncle Sam's Asa. It was the last letter Dr. and Mrs. Wilson ever received from their son. When you think of dying in war, you probably think of bullets, bombs, bayonets. You think of combat. But for soldiers fighting in the American Civil War, there was another enemy, an invisible foe.

Disease dogged both sides, measles, malaria, and most devastating, typhoid fever. The technical name for that is Salmonella typhi, and it manifests as one wicked, severe intestinal infection. It spreads easily, and the particular conditions in Civil War encampments were just about the perfect incubator for it. By necessity, the troops would set up camp by water, streams, rivers.

Latrines would be dug too close to that water, and it took very little time for entire streams and rivers to become fouled with human waste. One newspaper report described the smell of the Tennessee River as so offensive that the men had to hold their noses while drinking it. A cavalry soldier in South Carolina lamented that there were so many dead bodies on the ground that even the water smelled and tasted of them.

Gruesome details all by themselves now add in routinely and unavoidably poor hygiene and rampant ignorance about bacteria and germ theory. Plus, in a cruel twist, some people infected with typhoid can be asymptomatic. It's incredibly dangerous for a disease that can be transmitted by air, by food, and by water. People at that time just didn't understand or know any of this.

Even doctors were uncertain about what exactly caused what they called camp fever, and there was no standard treatment for it. The Union Army kept track of cases of typhoid fever in the ranks, which is how we know that over 75,000 Union soldiers were sickened and over 27,000 died. It's theorized that the numbers had to be pretty similar on the Confederate side.

Typhoid fever isn't anything to take lightly. The symptoms can be nightmarish, high fever, red lesions on the skin, severe pain, vomiting, and paralysis of the bowels, which, if untreated, can lead to a miserable death. A death made even more miserable in a crowded army camp where a bedroll on the ground and a metal cup of contaminated water might be the only treatment available.

Now grim as that sounds, you might have chosen it over one of the remedies Civil War-era physicians had to offer. How does drinking turpentine sound? No? How about ammonia? Maybe you'd rather have a fistful of leeches applied to your flesh? Lucky patients got a slug of whiskey or laudanum. Not one of these options was effective against typhoid, and the doctors knew that.

They felt as helpless as the men laid low by the disease. Union Army surgeon Dr. Daniel Holt wrote in his private journal, Very little can be done for a man while he lies upon the ground with typhoid fever. When I order one to the hospital, it seems almost equivalent to ordering his grave dug. Between 1861 and 1863, typhoid fever was busy spreading from camp to camp, and neither side was prepared or equipped to deal with the level of illness and death the fever brought.

And drummer boy Aesop Wilson, so young and healthy, Aesop came down with typhoid fever in October 1861, only three months into his military career. He died in camp in Boonville, Missouri. By December, having heard nothing from their son in months, the Wilsons were becoming frantic with worry and fear. In desperation, on the 1st of January 1862, Dr. Wilson wrote a letter to a man in Cooper County, Missouri.

He begged the man, whose name was George Gray, to please help him find his son. On January 26, 1862, George Gray sat down to write a letter back, the kind of letter that no parent should ever have to open. Dear Sir, Your letter of the 1st came to hand this morning, which is the first that I have learned of the death of your son.

I immediately called on Captain Kaiser for information, but got none. This morning I had the first chance to visit the graveyard. I found your son's grave. It is marked on the footboard with lead pencil, but I can direct you so that you can find it at any time. In the Methodist Cemetery, east of Jerome Babbitt's headstone, with the footstone of Babbitt at the head of Aesop's grave, there is no doubt that you can find the grave at any time you come to get the body of your son.

If there is any more I can do for you, write and I will assist you in any way that I can. As I am not very well, I will not write any more. Yours respectfully, John Gray. Aesop's mother Sophia could neither accept her son's death, nor accept any comfort in her grief. She could not and would not rest until her child was returned to her.

So, in April 1862, Dr. Wilson commissioned a sturdy metal casket and had it shipped by rail to Boonville. Aesop was removed from his grave to the metal casket and returned to his home in Indiana. Still, Sophia would not believe that the coffin held the body of her only son. She demanded it be opened so that she might see his face to be certain.

She gazed at her boy and, it's probably for the best that we don't speculate as to what she saw. Death by typhoid fever is a terrible way to go and mortuary practices and military camp in 1861 were all but non-existent. Yet, to Sophia, this was Aesop. This was her boy, her son. Finally, come home to her. An undertaker was summoned.

Sophia Wilson instructed the man to pack Aesop's body in charcoal and seal the casket closed. Then, she had the casket delivered to the brick house on Medora Hill, carried up the staircase, and placed in the upstairs hall in front of the window. And there, the body of Aesop Wilson remained for the next twelve years. In the afternoons, Sophia would bring her sewing and sit by the metal casket.

She had a small wicker chair placed there just for this purpose. She'd speak to Aesop, telling him all the humble details of her day. She'd talk of his father's health, which was worsening. She described the weather, how the garden was coming along. Her life, already narrowed by grief, became even smaller. Her days were shaped entirely by her need and desire to sit vigil by the metal casket in the upstairs hall.

And Dr. Wilson? His grief was no less sharp, no less painful. But he believed that Aesop should be laid to rest. He pleaded with his wife to bury their son, but she wouldn't hear it. He became more and more desperate to reach her, to reason with her. Yet the days passed. Then the weeks. Then whole seasons. Sitting in his study, he could hear the soft murmur of his wife's voice as she chatted away to their dead boy.

Her eyes seldom met his, and when they did, Dr. Wilson saw with a sinking heart that she was living now in another place. A twilight space between this world and whatever it is that awaits us after we die. Spring. Windows thrown open to the fresh, green, earthy smell of the rich Indiana soil waking up from the cold. Summer with its stifling heat, the hum of insects, the air in the upstairs hall heavy and humid.

Autumn, those burnished golden afternoons, and a chill in the air like the blade of a knife, the woolen shawl draped over Sophia's shoulders as she sat in her little wicker chair. Winter. Gray leaden skies, snow blanketing the ground, an endless white suffocating silence that made Dr. Wilson think of the grave. Did the man feel buried alive in that once grand brick house?

A house that was now more a mausoleum than a home. And then, in 1873, the doctor made a plan. Spiritualism in 19th century America was more than a religious movement. It was this enormous social phenomenon that held millions of people in its sway. The belief that the living could somehow communicate with the dead, well, that really spoke to a nation at war, a nation grieving so much death.

The stern puritanical Christianity that shaped early life in America offered little comfort to the grieving, especially those grieving the loss of a child. Remember, it wasn't that long ago that a person who claimed to communicate with the spirit world would have risked being executed for the crime of witchcraft. But so much death and destruction, so many young men lying lifeless on the battlefield, it changed the American psyche.

Let me share just one example of how entire communities were devastated. 135 of the 139 students enrolled at Ole Miss, you know, the University of Mississippi, enlisted in Company A of the 11th Mississippi Infantry Regiment. They were nicknamed the University Greys. Every single one of those students turned soldier was slaughtered on July 3rd, 1863 in the battle known as Pickett's Charge.

That's a casualty rate of 100%. Every single one of those very young men dead. These were sons and brothers and sweethearts, their lives snatched away before they'd even begun. The nation's grief was bottomless, hopeless, unfathomable. In those terrible times, the living craved more than scripture, needed more than faith to drag themselves through the endless impossible days.

Do you see how the unbearable trauma the Civil War inflicted on this nation was mirrored by the explosive rise of psychic mediumship, of seances, of hands clasped in darkness, begging the dead to speak, begging the dead to bring comfort to the living. Dr. Wilson learned of a married couple in Kentucky, a Mr. and Mrs. Kegwin.

The Kegwins were both spiritualists, both gifted mediums. For the sum of $50, the pair would travel to the Wilsons' home and conduct a seance in hopes of reaching the spirit of Esau so that his mother might be persuaded to let the boy go. The Kegwins arrived at Medora Hill on a gloomy afternoon, the sky as sullen and dark as a bruise.

As they waited for sunset to begin the ceremony, the heavens unleashed a downpour. Rain pounded the roof, sluiced off the windows, and the neighbors and friends of Dr. and Mrs. Wilson who'd gathered for the occasion were all soaked from their bonnets to their boots. They assembled in the upstairs hallway, encircling the metal casket that held the remains of Aesop Wilson.

One of the families present for the seance brought with them their young daughter. The child, just five years old, later described being held on her father's lap, clinging in fear to the lapels of his wet woolen coat. Decades later, that child grown and a married woman recounted the events of that evening. In the darkness of that upstairs hall, the Kegwins called for the spirit of Aesop Wilson.

The group waited in the dim silence, hearing only the sounds of their own breathing and the storm outside still lashing the house. And then it happened. A voice, faint and muffled. They say the sounds seemed to hover over the bent form of Sophia Wilson. Trembling, the grieving mother called out, Who is this? Who is this talking?

This is Esau, mother. With tears streaming down her cheeks, Sophia Wilson looked wildly about, her voice cracking. We can barely hear you. Why can't you talk louder? Esau! It's damp and rainy and I can't get in here. Now, one can't be faulted for thinking that earthly weather ought not be an issue for the departed. But then again, what do we know about the rules that govern such things?

What inconceivable distances the soul must travel to revisit the living? What kind of energies must be conjured to give that soul a human voice once more? And those present that strange evening in 1873 were convinced that mother and son had somehow been reunited. For her part, Sophia Wilson was satisfied that this was truly Esau.

Come back at long last to ease her grieving and troubled heart. Sophia brought herself to ask the one question that Dr. Wilson had prayed so fervently to hear. Son, would you like to have your remains buried? Yes, mother. Sophia Wilson steadied herself. Taking a deep, trembling breath before asking, Where? In the cedars, just north of the house.

The very next day, the metal casket containing the body of Aesop Wilson was finally laid to rest under the fragrant shade of those very cedar trees. It was a funeral a long time in coming, more than 12 years after the drummer boy had succumbed to typhoid fever. The war that claimed his life was long over. The Civil War had ended eight years earlier on April 9th, 1865, when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia.

Dr. Wilson died just two years later in December 1875 and was buried at a cemetery in Leesville, not with his son under the cedars. Mrs. Wilson lived on as a widow, alone in the house with only her memories until she too passed in January 1891. After her death, the house remained empty. No one in the family showed any desire to live in the home or save any of its contents or even the house itself.

Over time, it fell into disrepair and was frequently targeted by vandals. It soon grew a reputation for being haunted, perched there on Medora Hill, slowly crumbling, its empty windows gazing blankly at the landscape below. Eventually, the house was torn down, though the story of Jackson County, Indiana's very own haunted house, lives on to this very day.

I said at the beginning that this was a ghost story, a true ghost story. So now I'll ask the question again. What is a ghost? Did the spirit of Aesop Wilson, his young life cut tragically short, haunt the house on Medora Hill until the day his remains were finally laid to rest? Or was Sophia Wilson the real ghost in this tale?

After all, that was her figure glimpsed passing by the upstairs window. She who made the wicker chair creak as she settled into her daily vigil at Aesop's casket. That was her voice floating down the stairs. Her voice in those snatches of whispered conversation that were carried on the breeze. Crushed by loss, nearly destroyed by grief, Sophia could neither follow her son into death, nor fully exist in the world of the living without him.

Instead, she drifted in a land of shadows, of memory, afoot in each world, but no peace, no home in either. The Wilson house was haunted, as so many places are, just not by the dead, but by the living. Next time on True Weird Stuff, She was a sweet lady, just a little sweet grandma. That's what they called her. They called her Grandma.

And she was really good at being a healer. And she could heal all kinds of problems. It's just sometimes the problems she healed didn't live to tell about it. On the next True Weird Stuff. So Sherry, I'll ask you the question that I always ask when I hear one of these stories. How did you come upon this story? Well, you know, it's really, like there are a lot of ghost stories out there and a lot of haunted houses.

But what really jumped out about this one for me is that it was just such a terrible loss for Sophia Wilson as a mother and as a parent. You know, like I feel that in my soul. And a lot of, you know, America, we've talked about this before, Max. America is a really young country. Any American story, you bump into all the other American stories, right?

Think how many times we've brushed up against spiritualism and the Civil War just in True Weird Stuff, right? Because we've only been around a couple hundred years. And so everything is, everything happening everywhere like the movie All at Once. So I had read about the Tanner's Regiment and the typhoid in the course of working on something else.

And I came upon Aesop's story and I set it aside because I wanted to learn more as a mom. And then the more I learned about it, I thought, you know, this is a haunted house. That was a house haunted by loss and grief and by Sophia's inability to move forward. And also, I think we can all agree that packing Aesop's remains in charcoal and parking them upstairs for over a decade definitely qualifies as weird.

Abso-freaking-lutely weird. Absolutely off the chain. Not the sort of thing I think you'd get away with today. I suspect we have laws. But that was a haunted house. The problem was we, the ghost wasn't the boy. I think the ghost was his mom. How about you? Yeah, that's what I think as well. And I think it was a way of, it was either the mom or, is it possible that, the other thought that I had was the father lost two people in his life.

He lost his wife and he lost his son. And I'm just wondering if he was thinking, if it was somehow cooked up by him to say, because he was still alive at that time, right? Yeah. If he somehow cooked that up to be able to have it so that he could, she could move on and he could have his wife back too. I don't think that he did it for a selfish reason.

I think he did it because he was tired of seeing her in such pain, someone who he loved that he saw in such pain. I think you make such a good point. And Dr. Wilson, he's kind of lost in this story and not just our telling of it. He's just kind of lost in this little slice of American history because the story really became about the haunted house of Jackson County, Indiana, and the macabre aspect of having the casket upstairs.

But he was in poor health when Aesop ran away to join the war. And, you know, I was amazed he hung on as long as he did. And I think, to your point, I think he could not let go and die with his wife and the body of his son upstairs. And I do think that he cooked this up. And I can't, I tried to find like the Keg Wins of Kentucky.

I tried to find something that would be like, oh, they're charlatans or, oh, you know, they were legit or they were proven to be fake or whatever. And they are such random like whack-a-mole heads. They pop into this story and then they disappear. I think that he hired them, explained the situation to them, and I think it was really clear what the goal was.

Right. Do you know what I thought about this? This is like a metaphor for our own lives and what we do emotionally. Do we all have an Aesop in our lives? In other words, not a person, but something that's happened. And we continue, rather than burying it and moving on, we continue to keep that casket in the house. So we keep on reliving it over and over.

You know, because that's what, you know, when you have a resentment in life, that is a re-feeling of something. You have the emotional component of whatever's happened in your life, but then you reach a point where you choose to keep something like that alive. I think that's really true. And it's a metaphorical metal casket in the upstairs hall for a lot of us.

I mean, well, we've known people that couldn't get past the end of a relationship. Right. And who could not, they could not let it heal. They kept the wound open and festering for, well, you know, in some cases for decades. And it can be, it's unthinkably painful for me to imagine the loss of a child. I have nothing but compassion for Sophia, even as I cannot wrap my head around the sheer madness of that level of grief.

Because that is a kind of madness. And grief will make you insane. That's why they say, like, if you've lost someone, no decisions for a year. Because you're not in your right mind. Right. And Sophia was not in her right mind. And I soft-pedaled some of the worst aspects of this story. But I need you to imagine, Asap died of typhoid on the ground.

He was not, like, there was no funeral director, okay, boys and girls. I'm not sure what kind of a cheap pine box he was in when George Gray found his grave. And the cemetery, I don't know if you gathered from George's letter, but, you know, the bodies were buried, like, one right on top of the other. That's how thick and fast the casualties were coming during the Civil War.

Right. And especially during this typhoid outbreak. So we exhumed that body and shipped it home to Indiana. If Sophia was not out of her mind before they unsealed the casket so she could look at Asap, I feel like she had to be afterward. Thoughts? Yeah, I'm sure that that had a lasting effect with all of this. How could it not?

As a mother looking at your son, It was not good. It's too horrific to even imagine. I know sometimes in a true weird story, we just go all in and give people all the details and sound. I think this was something we did. It was a sound effect of something in flesh. And they went, oh, wow, that was really wet. Oh, yeah.

I'm not sure I can hang. This was this was one where we just kind of held that back. And I went into some detail on the typhoid because people have this really simplistic and glamorous idea about war. You know, we have a lot of people in this country that are itching for another civil war. And boy, are we ever spoiled and comfortable.

For some reason, as humans, we have a short memory on just how horrific these are. I've done a lot of reading and a lot of stuff about the Civil War. I was obsessed with serial killers and mass murderers when I was a kid, but I also was with the Civil War. And so I'm fully aware of just how awful the conditions were. And you talked about it.

You touched on it some in this story, talking about the sheer number of people who died from other than war injuries just because of the deplorable hygiene conditions. And it wasn't because they were dirty or careless. We don't realize how new so much of our knowledge is, like germ theory, DNA. There's a lot of stuff that's just a regular, everyday part of our world that's pretty new.

And sometimes I get the woo-woos because I think to myself, wow, humanity existed for millennia, scratching out pretty simple lives, including and up to through the American Civil War. And then the rate of technology and our grasp of science and our understanding of the natural world, everything from bacteria to volcanoes, it's pretty recent.

It happened real fast. Right. And a lot of the medical knowledge they had, they amputated a lot because they didn't know what else to do. And Ken Burns did the Civil War. If you ever have a chance to see the PBS Ken Burns Civil War, I just rewatched it not long ago. It's fascinating. One of the things that lets you know that this wasn't that long ago, on the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, some of the soldiers from both sides of the war came together and you could see they were, obviously they were amputees.

There were so many of them who they showed who now were old men who were amputees and whatnot because of them not knowing what all that they could do as far as being able to just save a life, because of the way medical things were. And as you talked about in there, the things they went to and the kinds of treatments that they have were just awful.

Well, in a lot of cases, you know, like a soldier would be injured in battle. And by today's medical standards, we didn't need to take your leg, son. But if you had severe blood loss, if you had bone just shattered and pulverized, we had to take your leg. I mean, we're out in the middle of a field in Virginia. There's just not a lot we're going to be able to do here.

No. And I shared the story of the university graze, which I want you to think about that. 135 members of the entire student body of 139 were killed in Pickett's Charge. The entire student body of Ole Miss wiped out at Pickett's Charge. Did you know that? Have you ever heard that little story? I did know that story, yes.

And I believe that that is in the Ken Burns documentary as well. It is. Yeah. And, you know, whole families, there were families that lost grandfather, father, uncle, son, brother, whole families that were decimated on both sides. And the scars that the American Civil War has left on this nation's psyche, the unfinished business that we have been, you know, playing kick the can with now for over 100 years.

A lot of that stuff, you know, we're still seeing the echoes of that because history is nothing if not a giant echo chamber. And what you do not resolve today, you will clean up tomorrow. And we're still living that. The Civil War was the unresolved issues in our founding as a nation. Then we had the Civil War, and we still are cleaning up the unfinished business from the Civil War itself.

This has been the problem. This is a problem we've had since the founding of our country. We are. It's like as a nation, we are walking around with this festering, painful splinter. And we're we keep pressing down on it and going, it's weird. It hurts. But but you know how it is when you've got a really bad infected splinter.

The thought of deal of what it's going to take to get it out. You go, all right, tomorrow. And you just keep pressing down where it hurts. And we're never really going to be OK. We're never really going to resolve until we deal with it. And no, I have no idea what that might look like. The state of Missouri now is a fascinating thing to think about.

When you look at the American Civil War, Missouri, where he ran off to to be a drummer boy, because Missouri was Missouri claimed union. But of course, the governor, Claiborne Fox, if that's not a wild say, I say, I'm going to make one kind of name. He was like, nah, we're going to be in the Confederacy. And the people in Missouri and the state convention were like, what?

No, that's not what we voted. Ninety eight to one against. And he's like, I say, I say, I say, son, we are going to be in the Confederacy. All sorts of crazy stuff in the history of the state of Missouri where the Civil War is concerned. You know, they tried floating this thing called the Missouri Compromise, where, you know, the first the first floating of the Missouri Compromise was OK.

All right. OK, we're not going to outlaw slavery, but you can't bring new slaves into the state. And also, if if you're the child of a slave, you get to be free when you're 25. Well, that did not make it through Congress and the Senate. To no one's surprise. Then the next thing that came around was with Henry Clay, who was a congressman from Kentucky and the speaker of the House at the time.

And he he created and helped push through didn't create, but he helped get the legislation through where at certain latitude, longitude lines, you know, slavery, you could have it. Then here you couldn't have it. Totally a state divided, a nation divided, families, people divided. And and at the end of it, what do we have to show for it?

But so much death. And without the American Civil War, I'm not sure that we would have advertisements on the radio today for California psychics because the the spiritualism movement that exploded in this country during those years never really left us. It just migrated into kind of quirky corners and carnival arcades.

And, you know, California psychics, fortune tellers and roadside tarot card readers. But where the heck did you think all that came from? Once upon a time, this entire nation was like Sophia Wilson. This entire nation was perched next to a coffin whispering to their dead loved one and praying for any any kind of response.

And that's where all of that came from, which is why I'm very I don't like people judging people who believe in that because who are we to who are we to decide where you get your comfort? You know, I agree with you totally on that. I don't know if I don't know that anybody has the answer on that. And when you think about this story.

So Dr. Wilson brings the spiritualist in from Kentucky. They perform the seance. We know what we know about it because that little five year old girl grew up to tell the story to the press. That's how we even know, OK, what happened that night in that house. We have firsthand account. And I know you're going, well, she was only five at the time.

OK, yeah, fair enough. But, you know, we we have her story. So he gets the psychics and Sophia hears her son's voice. And the next day they they bury him. And she is then able to begin the process of. She healing that wound as much as you ever can. His dad lived for two more years. She lived for a long time after that.

So that seance might have been complete BS. It might have been just a smoke show and not the kind, you know, because you're hot. It might have just been like a total magic trick. But I say this to you, that magic trick, that that carnival of crazy. It put that boy's body in the ground and it allowed his parents to go on.

So. Thanks for checking out this episode of True Word Stuff. I want to thank my bonus son, Zane, for playing the part of Aesop Wilson. And ladies and gentlemen, that was my husband making his audio performer debut as George Gray. Oh, and special thanks to my friend Becky Story, who played the part of Sophia Wilson. Thank you, Becky.

Y'all take care. We'll see you on the next episode of True Word Stuff. And if you listen to us on Apple podcast, hit the plus button in the top right corner. And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it. If you subscribe, rate and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website, True Weird Stuff dot com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content.

Everything true weird is waiting for you at True Weird Stuff dot com. And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram and Twitter. 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 Sutton. 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 Axland. True Weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright 2023 Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.