Sin Eater

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What is it about death that wets the appetite? It was the custom amongst the primitive and ancient peoples that sacrifices, even of human beings, were offered upon the grave or on the funeral pyre. Now these days we've mostly traded human sacrifice for the incredible crunchy and cheesy deliciousness of Mormon funeral potatoes or a big old slab of chocolate frosted nut studded Texas funeral cake. Funeral feasts are intimately connected with the sacrifices of the dead in which mourners sealed communion with the spirits of the departed.

A great feast to which kinfolks, friends, and retainers of the honored dead were invited. Originally the feast took place at the grave. Today funeral feasts tend to take place in church halls or restaurants or private homes, not at grave sites or mausoleums, whatever the location. Grieving is hard hungry work and folks who show up for a funeral expect to be fed.

It has been said dispense with the dinner at a country funeral and there will be a small attendance at the funeral. Whether it's a full buffet spread or a bowl full of nuts in the church basement, just be glad that what you're nibbling on is sitting on a plate and not on the chest of corpse. Be glad that it's food in your mouth, real food, and not the accumulated sins of the dearly departed.

Stuff. When it comes to death, human beings get real weird real fast. Of course we do. Death is a bewildering mystery. It seems impossible that a person can be right here in one moment loud and vibrant and overflowing with their stories and then absolutely and utterly gone the next. We've developed all sorts of rituals to cope with death going back tens of thousands of years. The earliest evidence of the burial of human dead dates back a hundred thousand years. A cave in modern-day Israel was found to contain the remains of 15 early homo sapiens. Now it's not the act of burying the dead that's unique to humans. Termites bury their dead too. It's the burying of the dead in specific locations, places marked for this purpose alone. It's the ritual that accompanies the burial that matters, that sets humans apart from the rest of the animal kingdom, or so we like to tell ourselves. Because if we insist that animals are nothing more than eating and reproducing machines with no other lives, no capacity for love or community, then it sure is easier to exploit those animals for our own profit.

But here's the thing. Animals sometimes refuse to comply with our ideas about them. Chimpanzees grieve. A mother chimpanzee will carry the corpse of her dead baby, sometimes for months, tirelessly grooming the body. Elephants grieve. African elephants have been observed covering the of their dead with grasses, leaves, and plants, their own kind of burial. Elephants from that herd or group will then return to those burial sites later, sometimes repeatedly.

Are they remembering their dead and paying their respects? Asian elephants may also bury their dead with a few key differences from African elephants. In India, five dead elephant calves, Asian elephants, were found on their backs in various drainage ditches, bodies partially covered by vegetation. In each of those cases, their surviving herd members avoided the burial sites forever, refusing to return. Rats grieve. Now it's easy to think of rats as nasty creatures who live in the shadows and carry disease, but rats have been seen to bury their dead too.

Crows, so intelligent and social, don't bury their dead, but they do gather around the body of a fallen crow, calling out and crying. We might call that mourning the dead, even though we're not at all sure about what purpose these gatherings really serve. Some scientists think that the crows aren't holding a funeral so much as they are an inquest. They're trying to establish what killed their comrade so they can avoid that fate themselves. I don't know about you, but the thought of a murder of crows trying to establish a cause of death is actually more mind-blowing than a murder of crows sharing a grief ritual. Sometimes you just want to elbow one of these experts and say, do you hear yourself? You're all, crows don't feel sadness.

That's you attributing human emotions to a bird. Those crows are just having a little meeting to figure out why one of them died. That's all. Oh, okay, that's not scary like a flock of birds doing a little criminal investigation. Got it. Now one enormous difference between how animals process that and how people process that comes down to a little three letter word, sin. Something humans can commit an abundance and animals can't commit at all. Or, you know, we believe. How powerful is sin? Sin is so powerful that it doesn't even require action. Thought itself can be a sin. Where does the Bible say that thoughts are free?

The law covers the whole man, body, and soul, not only hands, feet, eyes, and mouth, but also his heart and mind. In Mark 7, 21 through 23, we read out of the heart of men proceed evil thoughts, adultery, fornication, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, and evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within and defile the man. Sin has blasted and ruined the happiness of man, exposed him to the of divine wrath, separated him from God, and made him the enemy of his own soul.

For a person to die under the awful weight of sin, that was bad news for the deceased. The whole eternal lake of fire, demons scampering about with pitchforks, the ceaseless screaming of the damned, etc. What if, what if there was something that could be done to salvage the soul after death? Enter the sin eater. Some say the practice began in medieval times, back when the whole idea of sin really meant something. Oh stop, don't clutch your pearls.

Today, we just pay lip service to the concept of sin, and then we go ahead and give some of the worst sinners imaginable power, position, prestige, and protection. We're just suckers for wealth and charisma. We're seduced by it, in the same way that animals in nature are seduced by garish plumage and loud trumpeting. But in the dark ages, sin was a force to be reckoned with, and the rich wanted a workaround. Money cushioned the discomforts of their mortal lives.

Shouldn't that same money be put to use on behalf of their immortal souls? These were the very people who embraced and benefited from the concept of religious indulgence. Which brings us to the Holy Roman Catholic Church, pretty much the biggest game in town in medieval Europe. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the church stepped into the gap. The people depended on the church for everything, from food and shelter to protection. Their tithes made the church wealthy, and the power held by the Vatican was greater than that of many European monarchies. The church was at the literal center of almost every town, and at the metaphorical center of almost every life. It was the church that held political power, the church that provided education, and even health care. The church created and enforced strict hierarchies of power and influence. There wasn't a single aspect of daily life that the church didn't play a part in, and even the Latin mass, which to us maybe seems like a quaint relic of the past, was also a tool of control. Faith was something that one practiced in a sacred space as a community, under the leadership of a holy expert, the priest.

The church offered sinners the opportunity for redemption via the sacrament of confession and the performance of penance, but it's a little more complicated than it might seem at first glance. Penance isn't a get out of hell free card, because there are two kinds of punishment for sin, especially a mortal sin, which the church defines as a grave and willful rejection, being in communion with God. This is where the eternal punishment of hell comes in. Only a true act of contrition can release the mortal sinner from this eternal punishment, but even the truest act of contrition won't erase the temporal punishment of sin. Temporal as in right here, right now, in this life, and no whining about being punished is permitted either.

The Lord God is doing you a favor, the church teaches, extending you grace. Now atone for your and mercy, or don't, and you can look forward to clocking a fair chunk of eternity in purgatory. And purgatory, particularly in the 11th and 12th centuries, that was a fearsome place that no Christian wanted to visit. A place between heaven and hell where punishment purifies the soul.

You'd think folks would be glad to at least have a fighting chance to dodge hell, but if there's one thing that's true about people, it's this. We always think we're much better than we are. We think heaven's a given for us, if not for our neighbors, who we judge so much more harshly than we ever judge ourselves. We want the fast pass to paradise, not the long and maybe uncomfortable wait in purgatory. Which brings us to the concept of the indulgence. An indulgence wasn't about being absolved of sin, it was about being released from the consequences and penalties of sin. What a human idea. It was all very noble on paper.

A person might make a pilgrimage, for example, to earn an indulgence, or do some charitable works. But as dread of purgatory grew, the idea of the indulgence grew ever more warped. By the 11th century, the holy indulgence had become both a military recruitment tool and a money-making opportunity. Pope Irvine II needed soldiers to fight in the Crusades, so in the year 1095, the pope announced a full indulgence to any man who signed up for the cause.

For those who wanted a break for their sins but had no desire to take up arms, the church evolved a complicated system for calculating how much time in purgatory could be bought away with a cash donation. Obviously, the potential for corruption was vast. Money in exchange for salvation? The wealthy wasted no time donating to the church and collecting their receipts.

Those receipts came in the form of something called a letter of indulgence. The practice grew and grew and morphed, and eventually, it was even possible to purchase indulgences in the name of the already deceased. It was this game of pay-to-play salvation shenanigans that drove the German theologian Martin Luther so crazy that he launched the Protestant Reformation to combat what he saw as the purely corrupt Church of Rome.

You can't buy your sins away, thundered Martin Luther. You can only do that through faith in Jesus. The church, Martin Luther declared, was running a racket. Why does not the pope, whose wealth today is greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus, build the Basilica of St. Peter with his own money rather than with the money of poor believers? Martin Luther shook his Catholic Church and the widely held belief at the time that human beings had any ability at all to influence their own eternal outcome. Salvation, Luther declared, came down to God's grace alone, and God's grace simply wasn't a thing that could be purchased. For in the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith. As it is written, he who through faith is righteous shall live. So if you couldn't buy off your sins or at least reduce the punishment for those sins, then what was left to the man who was simply incapable of living a sinless life? As ever, the rich chafed against anything that cramped their style.

As ever, the rich believed that their wealth made them special, and special people deserve to play by special rules. If they could no longer throw money at their stained souls, then there simply must be another way. Historians think that this is when the practice of sin-eating developed in the British Isles during this medieval period. The ancient chroniclers failed to detect the origin of sin-eating. We owe our best pictures of this weird custom, which has survived from the days when our ancestors were cannibals and did not shrink from the body of a friend or an enemy as a toothsome meal. Oh yikes, funerals were rough enough without having to eat the deceased.

Most of what we know about the practice of sin-eating comes from England and Scotland and Wales. The premise was simple. When a person died, the family would prepare bread. Sometimes the dough would be left to rise on the chest of the corpse. Once it was baked, that bread was believed to contain all of the sins of the dearly departed, symbolically at least. Sometimes an already baked loaf would be placed on the body. A single slice wasn't unheard of in poorer families. To eat the bread was to consume the sins of the dead, purifying their soul and allowing them to bypass purgatory and go straight to paradise. It was a fine workaround, but there's always a catch. The catch being, consuming those sins might have freed the dead from a burden, but the weight of those sins now rested on the soul of the sin-eater, which is why this wasn't a job for just anyone.

A sin-eater was typically a social outcast, a person so desperate for a meal and a few coins that risking damnation was the least of their worries. Not surprisingly though, a sin-eater was also a person considered tainted by the sins they consumed, so much so that he or she would be avoided, shunned even, as someone too dangerous, too soiled to be accepted into polite society, which made for a terrible sort of paradox. The people wanted and needed their sin-eater, yet treated the sin-eater as something revolting and unclean. Pretty much the only time a sin-eater was welcomed into the community was at a funeral. Their presence there was a comfort, because the sin-eater offered the grieving a sliver of hope for the soul of their dead, hope that the church, with its very strict rules and regs regarding the eternal, denied them.

When a person died, a note was sent to the village sin-eater, and it was his job to take unto himself the sins of the deceased. Paid only a trifling sum each load of sins, the man went to the house where the death occurred and sat down on a stool in front of the door. A crust of bread and a bowl of ale were handed to him, and after he finished the meal, he arose and pronounced the ease and rest of the dead person for whom he had pawned his own soul. How could the sin-eater, the lowliest person in the entire community, take in so much sin without losing his or her own soul to eternal damnation? Well, if the idea of one person gobbling down the sins of another is a stretch for you to believe, then this next part will really ask a lot of you. Sin-eaters were thought to have an unlimited number of their own souls to spare. Records show that some sin-eaters gave up their soul as many as 400 times. The ceremony of the sin-eater did vary a little from place to place and even evolved over time. For example, some sin-eaters were not kept at the front door, but were ushered inside to the room where the body lay cleaned and waiting. A piece of bread was placed on the corpse, usually by one of the women relatives. The sin-eater then ate the bread and he was slipped his small fee and hustled out of the house amid a shower of sticks and stones. The sin-eaters, already pariahs, objected to being pelted with sticks and stones on top of every other torment and indignity. Thankfully, this part of the ceremony was soon phased out. It was one thing to shun the village sin-eater, it was another thing to hit him with rocks. Not that you should be impressed by this show of compassion, because the people didn't worry so much about the sin-eater's feelings or about his head being bashed in as they did, but whether or not the sin-eater would show up beside their own dead body when the time came.

A man like Richard Munslow was the last person anyone would ever expect to become a sin-eater. Munslow was a prosperous farmer, baptized in the Church of England, a married father of seven. Men like Richard Munslow lived solid, respectable lives. Maybe not so memorable, but good and decent lives. Loved and appreciated, admired even, and then forgotten. That would have been Richard Munslow's fate, but fate, that trickster, had other ideas. Tragedy struck the man, a brutal blow, upending Munslow's placid life. Four of his seven children died, an infant gone shortly after birth, and then three more children dead in a single week, all of whooping cough. Grief like that is an earthquake, reshaping the entire world, leaving no landmarks, not even solid ground beneath your feet. The life Richard Munslow once had was over. He was inconsolable. Munslow felt that everything had been taken from him, and now he was a man with nothing, nothing to live for, and also nothing to lose. He made a decision. He would honor the memory of his children, but more importantly, he would redeem their immortal souls. Munslow turned his back on comfort and privilege, and became a man who consumed the sins of others. He traded his ease and risked his own soul in the hopes of granting salvation to another. Richard Munslow became a sin eater, the last of his kind in all of England. By the time the grieving farmer made the decision to pawn his own soul to save the souls of his children and neighbors, the custom of hiring a sin eater was already fading into memory in England and Scotland. In Wales, though, the people were slow to let their sin eater go. Their tradition involved bread and salt and beer placed on the deceased. The sin eater would utter an incantation over the bread, after which he proceeded to eat it, and thereby eating the sins of the dead person. When this was finished, he would receive a fee of sixpence, after which he would leave the place as expeditiously as possible, all the friends and relatives of the departed aiding his exit with bows and sticks.

Listen, if funerals today gave mourners a chance to beat someone with a stick, funeral homes would probably be standing room only. The sin eater bore away all the sins of the deceased and prevented him or her from waking after death. Ah, this was the other service provided by the sin eater, the prevention of ghosts. If the church hated the idea of the biggest outcast in town having the power to redeem the sins of the dead, then you can imagine the church's take on the ye olde village ghostbuster, because as far as the church was concerned, ghosts were impossible. It was pure heresy.

From Ecclesiastes 9, verses 5 through 6, for the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing, and they have no more reward, for the memory of them is forgotten. Their love, their hate, and their envy have already perished, and forever they have no more share in all that is done under the sun. The church ain't afraid of no ghosts, because as far as the church is concerned, there's no such thing. Demons, angels, spirits, yes, but no living man or woman could ever awaken after death to stalk the world in which they'd once lived. Death was final, a one-way trip to either heaven or hell, no exceptions. The Protestant Reformation was also anti-ghost and anti-purgatory, but in denouncing purgatory, Protestant theology basically told the living that their dead loved ones were quite possibly burning in a lake of fire for all eternity, and there wasn't a damn thing to be done about it. For folks who'd long believed that prayer in this realm could help save the souls of those in the next, this was a harsh blow, and even after a century of hard effort to persuade the people to surrender their belief in ghosts, the Church of England hadn't made much progress, because the people, dutiful as they were in attending services and paying their tithes, well, the people quietly but firmly disagreed as to the whole reality of ghosts, and the church leaders saw with dismay that they were not only losing the ghost battle, they were now facing a new and more terrifying enemy, the rise of atheism, which explains the astonishing reversal in Anglican theology. Ghosts, spirits, and phantoms found themselves back in play.

Let the Catholics and the Protestants in continental Europe deny the spirit world all they want. In England, especially in the 19th century, ghosts and ghostly apparitions and spirits of all sorts were all the rage, and in the scattered villages and towns, the sin-eater quietly awaited the next call. It was the custom at funerals to bring poor people to take upon themselves the sins of the people deceased. One of them, a long, lean, ugly, lamentable-looking rascal, took upon him the sins of the defunct and freed him or her from walking this world after death.

So, one reason the practice of sin-eating continued for so long in the British Isles might just come down to a petulant king who had a hard time staying married to just one woman. When King Henry VIII wanted an annulment from his wife, Catherine of Aragon, the Church of Rome was all, lol, no can do, sire. So, Henry split from the Church of Rome and became head of the Church of England in the 16th century. The 17th century brought all sorts of political and religious chaos. The attempt to stomp out all vestiges of Catholicism and Catholic religious practices continued into the 18th and 19th centuries. One of those practices was the administration of last rites and the deathbed confession. Losing the chance to receive absolution from their sins at the time of death left so many of the people feeling desperate and frightened. What punishment awaited them on the other side if they dared meet death stained and filthy with sin? This is the lesson that the powerful never seem to learn. You can step on people and you can oppress the people, but you can never ever truly have full control over the people. When Henry VIII placed himself at the head of the Church of England and banished the Church of Rome, he didn't take into account how much comfort his subjects had derived from their now forbidden rituals. He left his subjects to find their own means of support, their own comfort, and this might just be why the poorest and most desperate suddenly had a new occupation available, the sin eater. And it's all connected to why we follow the weeping and sorrow of a funeral with, if not a feast, then a meal. We no longer think of that bowl of ambrosia salad or that plate of weirdly flavorless cookies as a means of saving the soul of the deceased.

The food part of the funeral is now just customary. It's more about hospitality than eternal redemption. Now eating and drinking at a funeral is more a celebration of the life than a payment toward the debt of sin. But there's one last thing, and that's the soul of the sin eater, choked with the transgressions of others, heavy with guilt, stained by so much sin.

Who tended to the souls of the sin eaters? Seemingly no one. I guess the people hoped and wanted to believe that the sin eater would find grace on some other plane because there sure wasn't any on offer here for the poor wretches, including farmer Richard Munslow, the last known sin eater in England. All the man wanted was for the souls of his four dead children to swiftly enter the kingdom of heaven. He traded his wealth, his status, and the easy comforts of his life to make that happen. Munslow humbled himself, became the lowest of the low, a man who feasted on the sins of others at the risk of his own salvation. Richard Munslow died in 1906 and was buried at St. Margaret's Church in the village of Ratlinghope. There he lay under a worn and gravestone, forgotten for more than a hundred years. Until 2010, when the people of Ratlinghope, led by a pastor named Reverend Norman Morris, launched a fundraiser to repair his grave.

Enough time had passed that superstition finally gave way to sentimentality and it was decided that the sin eater was an important part of local and religious history. Now remember though that sin eaters did their work in secrecy and they were scorned, so few records could be found, which made Richard Munslow such an extraordinary figure. With the $1,200 raised in his name, the villagers restored his grave marker and turned it into a memorial for his four dead children as well.

Here lies Richard Munslow and his wife Ann, as well as their four children, George, 11 weeks old, Thomas, three years old, James John, six years old, and one-year-old Elizabeth. It's not often that a man like Munslow, a grieving father who traded his life of privilege for one of the lowliest service, finds himself not just honored but remembered. It's because of who Munslow was in life that he was maybe the only person, the only one, that could help bring the sin eater out of the shadows, who could bring the sin eater redemption, however late or unexpected.

Next time on True Weird Stuff, she was the pride of the whole family, a dazzling beauty adored for her quick wit and kind heart. Hers was a golden life until she disappeared. There were whispers and rumors. It was a heartbreak. It was a breakdown, a scandal, and then a mystery, and then forgotten until police broke down that barricaded third floor door and discovered the daughter who'd been kept prisoner there all along. Our lady of the attic on the next True Weird Stuff.

Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode, Lamar Richardson, Kary "Doc" Bowser, and Don Morgan. I've never heard of sin eating. This is, and I've heard some weird stuff, but I have never heard of this, but I did enjoy talking about the sin levels in the Catholic Church. As a child going to Catholic school, we had to learn all this stuff. We had to learn the cardinal sins, and the mortal sins were like murder, and I think adultery was up there, but as a first grader at Catholic school, I was a little confused by what adultery actually was, but it was interesting to hear talk about purgatory, and so there was heaven, hell, purgatory, and then there was something called limbo. I don't know if you remember that, and limbo was... Unbaptized people, unbaptized babies, yeah. Unbaptized babies who had not gotten the opportunity to start their life and start sending up a storm, so they were just kind of stuck in limbo. So those are the things that I could remember from being in first grade at Catholic school, and so thanks for bringing back the memories. You know what's so wild about the sin eater, so when you think about... God must have the best sense of humor, because what we get up to in God's name is just insane, so you can go all the way back pre-Christian civilizations. You go all the way back to the earliest known evidence of humans living in and you'll find ritualized practices around death and some indication that people, even the earliest humans, understood or believed that there was more to us than just the meat that we're walking around with, right? The whole sin eater thing came about when King Henry VIII abolished penance and death people that had gone for generations believing that you couldn't die with your soul loaded with sin, and so the priest would come and give last rites and you would be genuinely contrite and yeah, you might end up in purgatory for a while, but it's better than hell.

When that went away, it left this enormous empty space in the spiritual lives of the people, and the kind of empty space that left was significant because it's one thing for me to tell you, heads up, Footloose, I don't want you dancing, and it's another thing for me to tell you, yeah, listen, you're just going straight to hell. I mean, what are you going to do?

That's how the people felt, and so you see a practice like the sin eater coming into play because people just are desperate for redemption. This is a totally man-made problem. This is a totally manufactured scenario here, and you can really see the impact. You can really see the incredible tight grip on daily life that the church had for centuries in Europe and the UK, and you can't, I'm so sorry, you can't strip people of the things that make life bearable and expect them to just go, okay, I guess that's the deal now.

So the sin eater was a replacement for deathbed absolution. Right? I mean, think about it, but what's crazy is the way that it was just assumed, and this is a people thing because we're this way today. We've been this way since the beginning. We always look for a scapegoat, somebody who's at the very bottom of the pile that you can just treat like trash, and the sin eaters were, they were absolutely, they were talked about in the most despicable terms, like they were barely human.

They were treated like, not just like animals, but they were treated like foul, unclean animals, and yet it was the sin eater that the grieving called for at the time of death. So I wanted to ask you about this. So you need the sin eater, right? You need them to show up, so I would think you'd be a little bit nicer to them. Okay, give them a little bit of money and do your deal, but why are they throwing sticks and stones at them as they leave?

And beating them. It's like, wow. This was a time of such incredible superstition, too, that they were afraid that this, they knew, the people in these villages, they were small, you know, small clusters of population. The people knew that the sin eater, that their soul was black with sin, that they had been accumulating sin.

And this person, I mean, I think maybe they thought, you know, you would get sin cooties if you got too close. But yeah, the sin eaters were absolutely tormented. And because it was a practice that was not, everyone was doing it, right, in this part of the world, but it was a practice that wasn't sanctioned by the Church of England. And so it lived in the shadows. And there was shame around it. And so it's not really well documented.

The best documented instance of a sin eater happened in a small village in Scotland, where just by random chance, a woman was witnessed calling for the sin eater to come to eat her dead husband's sins. And there was, depending on where you live, Scotland or Wales, there were different kinds of rituals. In Scotland, you would light a fire in the road, and that would signal there had been a death in the house and that the sin eater was needed.

But that was unique to like that one space. Because again, no mass media, no social media, no sin eaters.com for all of your city needs. Shipping is free, right? There's none of that. So the practice kind of changed and morphed depending on where you went. And in some places, it was bread. In some places, it was bread, salt and beer. Some places, you had to bake the bread on the corpse. Other places, you just had to sip the food on the corpse. Well, no, you didn't bake it. I'm sorry. You let it rise. Let it rise. Even when you said it, I was like, I don't do that.

You let it. The dough, the bread has to soak up the sin. Oh, I see. By putting the food on the dead body, the sin would travel into the bread or the salt or the sometimes cheese. But that was rich people. I know it doesn't make any sense when you step back from what you're going now, who would think that that was real? Who would buy that? Who would believe that?

But you have to remember, this is the dark ages. Remember where you were. The general population wasn't educated. They weren't literate. And everything in their life was dictated and controlled by the church. Everything. They lived and died by the word of the law and the word of the church. So, yeah, I mean, sure, put the bread on the body and here comes the sin.

So this practice was in play in the 16, 17 and 1800s and kind of died out. It goes even further back. There are instances of it that they've seen in like the 10th and 11th centuries all the way through. It was gone everywhere except for England, Scotland and Wales by the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. And Richard Munslow was an outlier because he was still sin eating into the 19th and 20th. He died in 1906. Yeah. So that was the next question I was going to ask. Yeah. Was he kind of the last of that? He he was the last. Well, he was the last known senator. And the reason that he was known at all is because how prominent he was before he lost his children. So it would be like if you think about the sin eaters of the past had been like the village outcast, you know, the poorest person in all the land. Now, suddenly you have this man who who's a land owner, who employs people. He's well known and regarded and respected. And he gives up everything to do the lowest job there is because he was desperate for his children to get into heaven. And I just want to point out the infant mortality rate at that time was very, very high. It wasn't unusual to lose an infant 11 days after birth. Right. But if you weren't paying close attention, he lost three children in a week to whooping cough.

Let me shout out the state of Florida for just yanking vaccine mandates in schools. And if you're an anti-vaxxer, what are you doing here? Please don't. Why are you listening to this show? We are not your people. But when when we turn our backs on science in favor of whatever the hell it is, we're embracing this man lost three children in a week to whooping cough. You think that can't but it can. Oh, yeah. All around the world. So, you know, think about that the next time you're celebrating how no children in Florida have a vaccine mandate going into school.

And it's not just the unvaccinated who suffer the entire community because of something called herd immunity. And I probably should stop talking now or the white van is going to pull up outside and take me away. I just can't believe how stupid we are in this unique moment in 2025. So one of the things that I noticed, the newspaper reports that we do, one of the things that I get to see that listeners don't is I get to see your script. And so what you do with each article, you put what year they came out. Some of that stuff was in 1950. So were they doing like a historical piece? I'm wondering in the paper about it. I was waiting for you to ask that because I did not put this in the episode. Many, many, many, many boatloads full of people emigrating to the new world came from those villages in the British Isles. And those people, the descendants of families who use Sin Eaters came to the United States and the practice picked up here. But it was very isolated and very scattered. There was a woman, the news story in the 1950s, people were talking about it because a woman had died in Kentucky and her obituary mentioned a Sin Eater. And people were like, what the hell is a Sin Eater? I mean, think about 1950 America, right? Post-World War II, white picket fences, happy days. The heck's a Sin Eater?

So there were isolated pockets in like Kentucky and West Virginia, Ohio, the Ohio Valley, where people from that part of the world had settled after emigrating. And, you know, you bring your practices from home. We see that that's why we call or we used to call America the melting pot, because people brought these traditions and cultural practices from all over the world. And when they got here, they, they evolved again, to fit this culture in this landscape. But Sin Eating as a practice, that was kind of the end of it. You didn't see it may still be out there. There may be someone listening right now who's like, holy, I thought that was just my mamaw's church. It may exist somewhere, you know, in some, in some way. But that's why it made the American News in the 50s. Because it was this relic from another time.

So this was primarily something that people with the Church of England practiced? Yeah. Yeah. Even though like you can, in the beginning of the episode, when you hear about, you know, how we used to eat the dead, right, to honor them, we would take some of their essence into us. We don't do that anymore. That seems rough.

Now we now we take their ashes and snort them. So there's, there's always been a connection between where human beings are concerned between death and ritualized eating or drinking the ritualized consumption of food. One of the first ways that the tradition of the Sin Eater kind of showed up in England, after the death of Richard Munslow, became it was the custom of funeral cookies, funeral wafers. So picture of a small sort of laborless and kind of a hard biscuit type thing. Yeah, those would be baked and distributed to mourners at funerals. And nobody really knew where that came from. But what you were doing is you were symbolically consuming the sins and transgressions of the departed. You the cookie just had to have been the wafer just hadn't been, you know, placed on the body. And you weren't beaten with a stick afterward. But you can see how that kind of that practice sort of evolved.

Did you have you never wondered maybe you've never been to a big ethnic funeral, or wake, which is just as much about eating and drinking as it is about grieving and Yeah, I mean, there was there were some funerals that I went to. One I'm thinking in particular, that would have been like a second cousin, they lived in Delaware. And I can remember there was a lot of food that was kind of a there was the funeral, one of the children died. The children was it was a very tragic accident that happened. And but but we, but you know, he we, we had this great big feast. After the funeral, where that struck you as strange, didn't it? It did, because I suppose that it was a bit of a, it felt like it should be more of a somber occasion. And the occasion took on almost a party atmosphere, which I suppose on the one hand, you can you can make a case for that. But as a child, it seemed a little strange to me. I had the same reaction the first time I was old enough to comprehend that. It seemed to me that people like how could you have an appetite? And if you've ever, um, so like, when my when my stepdad died, when my when my grandma black hair died, there were these big feasts like, okay, so when my stepdad died, he was LDS. And there was a meal served in the ward hall after his service. And the food was the food looked amazing. But who had an appetite? Right? Yeah, all these ladies in the in the their local ward. And my mom has done this for years. She for years, my mom was the go to lady to help put a funeral meal together as a volunteer. The food was amazing. Those those Mormon funeral potatoes, if you've never had them, you need to get you to a funeral. But but you're so sick with grief and loss that it's hard to watch other people on hinging their jaw and shoveling it in. And I asked my grandma long before when I was younger, long before she died. Why do we do this? This seems terrible to me.

And my grandmother said, people eat after a funeral to remind themselves that they're still alive, that there's something about death that makes a person crave life. So it's not just food, it's sex and laughter and all of those things. So and it's a it's almost like a primitive and superstitious way of pushing the grim reaper back and closing the door. Like, yeah, you got close but look at me just eating and loving and singing and all of the things that are strictly a part of life that you can't take away yet. So I thought that was an interesting way of thinking about it. But we do, you know, food in in our culture, because it's very culturally specific, right? Like we the color black is what we wear from morning, but in other cultures that white. So in our culture, food and death are really, really linked. And I have been to funerals where I heard people bitching that the food wasn't very good. Like, like, sir, you are not at the Golden Corral. You're at a funeral. What are we doing here? I think that, you know, it would bring to you that life is short, please don't complain. You know, I had to, I'm going to reread something that was from one of these newspaper reports that I think is hysterically funny. It is the custom of funerals to bring poor people to take upon themselves the sins of the people deceased.

One of them, a long, lean, ugly, lamentable looking rascal, took upon him the sins of the defunct and freed him or her from walking after death. So not only was this person poor, they were also long, lean, ugly, and lamentable. Lamentable looking. Yeah. And this person just did you a favor. They just ate your dead loved one's sins so they could go to heaven. And you and you're still being an asshole, right? Yeah, the poor sin eaters, they were not as valuable as they were.

They were not treated sort of surprised by that. I really am. For me, there were so many. You know, God is one thing. Faith is one thing. Organized religion, that's another story. Because organized religion, that's a man made, that's a human made thing. And when you really dig into some of these like, proclamations and rules, you go, this is why I say God must have the best sense of humor. You go, what? What are we doing here? Why are you, these people, their lives were so short, and so hard. There's no antibiotics. They were, you know, they were hungry and cold. And, you know, if they got sick, they died. Like it was a terribly, people lived into their 30s. And I was like, it was such a brutal, hard time.

And you took from people this one comfort that that they desperately wanted, and needed this, this opportunity to be absolved. You took that from them. So of course, they were going to fight back. And the other thing that you took from people, you told them that once you took purgatory away, and then it was heaven or hell. And with no absolution of sin, where do people think they were going, Max? They didn't even have the chance to work it out in purgatory. They were just going straight to hell. So you've lived a short, hard, bitterly difficult life. And now you're going to hell. For what? What was your sin? What was so grievous that you should burn for all eternity?

These people were, and it's so easy when you're fat and sassy and chewing on a drumstick and preparing to have your next ex-wife beheaded. It's so easy to be clueless about the suffering of people on the ground. That's a dynamic we still see today. If you've never been hungry, then it's very easy for you to talk about how other people can tighten their belts.

If you've never been cold, then it's easy for you to talk about how people should put on an extra sweater. So nothing has changed. People in power and people with wealth have not changed their song at all throughout all this time. They just have new ways of acting out that oppressive wealth and power. And so you saw this happen to these people who went to the village sin eater.

And they're the ones who get made fun of. Oh, they're so superstitious. Oh, who would think that you could put bread on a dead body and eat their sins? I don't judge those people. Those people were desperate and terrified, and they came up with something as best they could. Plus, they'd been told by both the Catholic Church and the Protestant Reformation that ain't no such thing as a ghost. Well, the people did not believe that because they had their own lived experience.

They'd been, since time began, human beings have been reporting hauntings and apparitions and paranormal stuff, right? And also, again, if a loved one could come back and walk this world, then death wasn't forever. And it gave people hope in a weird way. Does that make sense? Gave them hope. And now you're taking hope and absolution. What's left? Let's pick fleas off each other, Vincent, until we die of the plague. This is the life that these people were working with. And I thought it was very interesting, and this brings us right back around to how religions are man-made. When the Anglican Church realized that the harshness and the strictness of the dogma about life and death was driving people into atheism, they went, oh, wait now. Beep, beep, beep. Looks like ghosts are real after all.

Because we've done previous episodes on how crazy people were for spirit photography and seances and mediums and all of that in the 19th century. Oh, yeah. The Anglican Church had no choice but to kind of reverse that position because they were losing people who insisted that yes, there absolutely is such a thing as a ghost. And so you see the way that things get kind of like people go too far, and then they back it up a little bit, and they evolve it to fit the beliefs of the time. Because what's the point of having a religion if no one shows up and pays their tithes and beliefs? What are we doing with an empty building?

They had to find a way to offer comfort to the faithful. And so that little evolution happened in the 19th century. It was just kind of delicious to see that come back in. So yeah, this really just comes down to, this is just a story of people doing the best they can with what little they had, and trying desperately to atone for whatever sins they committed or thought they committed, so that they could have a fighting chance of a paradise after death.

Well, Sherry, it does break your heart. I had never heard of sin eating. I'm very familiar with emotional eating, which in and of itself seems to be perhaps sinful. Well, that description of the sin eater that you like so much, the lean, ragged, lamentable-looking rascal? Not a lot of calories in sin, apparently. No, apparently not.

Your emotional eating is another problem. It's low carb. So this is one of those stories that at first you go, oh, look at those. This is crazy superstition. But then you peel a layer back, and then a layer back, and you end up going, well, damn. Let the people have their sin eaters. God, did you need to take everything from them?

You had their labor. You had their youth. You had their vitality. You had everything that they worked to grow and create was yours. You couldn't give them a little bit of hope that when they died, there might be something better. I mean, think about that. And we touched on the indulgences. That was corrupt as hell. That started off okay, but that quickly became pay for play.

And to this day, there's a lot of anti-Catholic sentiment in the world, a lot of it. And it's not a long ago thing. It's a right now thing. Because Max can tell you how many times in your life has someone said to you, oh, but don't you pray to statues? Oh, my. Don't you give the church money so that you cannot have sins? Don't you do that? Part of the reason that people say that stuff is because some religion, somebody from some other religion in order for self-justification concocts these things to make themselves look like, but we're right and they're wrong.

And so that's where that information comes from. I mean, that information comes from a pulpit somewhere. And a lot of it is like woefully incorrect, like historically forever incorrect. Catholics do not pray to statues. Catholics do not place the Virgin Mary above Jesus or God. I mean, none of these things are true, right? Catholics cannot write a check to be absolved of sin. Yes, Catholics have the sacrament of confession. Yes, Catholics have penance.

But that's not at all the same thing as, oh, hey, I'm going to Venmo you a few bucks. I accidentally killed my neighbor. I mean, it doesn't work that way. At one time it did, but not anymore. No, and I don't have enough money for all the sins to give to the church, but I did. My mother, anytime anything happened, any discomfort that I had in my life as a child, my mother would go, offer it up for the poor souls in purgatory. I'm not even sure she was a hundred percent sure if that was doing anything. It was just something to say to a kid that was complaining. Before we wrap up, let's chat about purgatory for a second. You were raised in the Catholic Church and I was raised in the Catholic Church. Purgatory was like a thing. I've never understood why. I mean, Martin Luther hated it. Purgatory had to go. There's going to be no purgatory. There's also not going to be any works. You're going to have faith and faith alone will get you into heaven. We won't even get into predestination where you could be born condemned to burn and there's no damn thing you could do about it. Purgatory struck me as a kid like summer school. Yeah, I kind of failed this. I didn't do well during the school year, so I've and we learned it very simplistically, but didn't it strike you as a kid like, that's a pretty good deal. Yeah, I got to go do some purgatory time, but that's better than being jabbed.

I'm having some fun along. I'm having a little fun along the way. I'm just doing venial things. It's no big deal. You're in purgatory. Yeah, you're cleaning the bathroom or what have you, but you're not in hell. Can I just say that they used to call what they called last rites is now the anointing of the sick in the Catholic Church. It's a sacrament, but when I was a kid, they called it extreme munction. So, you better get the priest there to get to the hospital to make sure you give them extreme munction, which is, you know, you anoint with oil and everything else. That way they'll go to heaven. I'm going, suppose the priest got stuck in traffic. Well, you're screwed. Even as a kid, there was a little part of me that said, that seems kind of unfair. Enter the sin eater. Now imagine instead of the priest being stuck in traffic, you're not allowed to have this at all anymore, but you're still terrified, right?

Where's your extreme unction? Where's your absolution? That's your mother or father or child or husband or whatever dying in front of you. And they're just going to die with all that sin blackening their soul. Can you see how the sin eater came to be? And for people of faith, like, I don't know what your, Max's parents were devout. They were such devout Catholic.

I have it sitting right over here. They have an official commendation from the Pope in Rome. For all the work they did through the years for the church. When your dad was in the hospital at the end, did he not have the priest come? Did you not have the priest come to his room? Yes. To administer that? Yes. Because that was something that was really important to my grandma. She wanted to see her priest.

Let people have their comfort. Let them have it. And the great delicious irony here is when the church yanked away absolution at death because of superstition, they opened the door for an even more wild, wacky, superstitious practice in the form of the sin eater. Sometimes, church, you dance with the devil, you know, because you have no idea what's going to come through that door after you slam it shut. I think that it really comes down to this. I think that faith for people is a mystery, but it's also a source of comfort. And I don't think any man-made institution should take that from people in the name of God. You just don't think they should.

And yet, that's what happened here. And you could say, well, those people were ignorant and illiterate, and they should have known that that wasn't real, blah, blah, blah. You could say all of that. But you're saying that from 2025. You have no idea what it was like to be so scared for your eternal soul and to feel like maybe your worst sin, maybe your worst sin was what? What could it be? I'm talking regular people, not awful people that commit murder. What was your worst sin? Did you lie to the village seamstress and tell her you liked her dress? What was your worst? Think about when you first started going to confession as a kid, when you were digging deep for a sin. I gave my brother a dirty look. You're going to hell for that?

Sherry, when we were kids, and I don't know why they did this, but we had our parish church. But then there's a church that we went to on Saturday mornings for mass. Parents love to go to mass on Saturday morning. And then, of course, we go to church on Sunday morning as well. They would go to confession at the church that wasn't at our parish. Now, I don't know why. I don't know if decided, well, we don't want the priest that's there to know the sins that we have. And so we went to a priest at a different parish. That's exactly why they did it. My parents were not committing any heinous sins, I can assure you. They were not. Here's a sin for Max's mom. I raised my voice again. What sin was that woman guilty of? What sin was your father? Neither of them. I knew people as a kid who wouldn't go to confession at their parish church. But remember when face-to-face confession came out? Boy, the place emptied out with that. If you thought the priest recognized your voice, what were you going to do when the priest looked at your face? I'd rather do that because I think people misunderstand the reason for doing that. To sit with somebody and tell somebody your sins is a humbling proposition. And it's good to be humble.

It's good to be able to face that stuff. And you say, well, God can do it. Yes, you can. Yeah, God can. But there is something about the process of, I can tell you from having done it. There's something about the process of sitting there and telling somebody that does help. It kind of helps cleanse you. It unburdens you of the weight of that. I think there's a therapeutic component to it, don't you? Yeah. I mean, I've done face-to-face. It's been a, bless me, Father. I haven't been to confession since the Triassic period. But I can remember face-to-face confession as a teenager in Catholic school, where you would just kind of talk it out.

But we were lucky. We had some youthful priests that were very much embracing these new ways. When some of these changes happen, of course, not everybody embraces them. That's awkward, too. My grandparents never went to face-to-face confession. That wasn't the world they were brought up in. Sherry, it was tough being a 14-year-old boy and going to confession. I'm just going to tell you it was. Because I can remember when we went to that church, there was a priest by the name of Father Ernst. Father Ernst spoke like this. I can remember I went into the confession, here I am 14 years old, and I am going to bear the worst things that I have done. As a 14-year-old, there are so many, so many worse things that you can do. I'll never forget him.

Through the little shade, he went, How many times? I'm like, I kind of lost count. I don't know. Take a moment, shall we? Let's have a moment of empathy for the priests that had to listen to teenage boys confessing jerking off over and over and over to the point where the priest must have been like, All right, seven Hail Marys, and please wash your hands before you eat dinner.

How many times? Oh, my God. That had to be so, and you're so bashful and improper. That must have killed you. I was like, I think this is one we're not going to tell. We're not going to tell this one. God sees all. At that time, when you're that age, you just don't have great understanding about a lot of things. There was a priest that I had who was a friend, and I lost touch with him. I looked him up recently, and he died a few years ago, but he really had a sensible attitude about all of this stuff and about what's important. What you can say is a sin and what you can classify as sin is really just selfish behavior most of the time. To be able to look at it as that and lose selfishness and to try to become a selfless person. There's another checkmark on the list about what the sin is. I can tell that you went to seminary school, though, because what you're talking about is several levels deeper into theology than what the surface level stuff gets thrown at you when you're 12 and 13 years old, don't you think? Yeah. I think you're right.

You had the benefit of getting to really wrestle with the meaning of these sacraments and rituals and what you were trying to do, that you were trying to bring peace to your own conscience and learn how to be of service to your fellow human. If you don't have the benefit of that, here's what you're told. You need to make some stuff up and get in there and tell the priest something. It's your turn. You've got to do it. You would go, all right, I did this many times. I screwed up something in school. My mother would go, you better be telling the priest in confession.

If she knew what the sins were, she was berating to me to make sure that I did it. I could have said, Mom, look, there's no problem at all. I'm going to find a sin eater at the end. No problem. My first few rounds of confession after receiving the sacrament. You get the sacrament of holy confession in middle school. You can imagine. That's a challenging time.

You started that in first grade for us. I didn't make my first holy confession. Here's why you needed the confession, because you weren't allowed to have the communion if you were going to the confession, unless you went to confession. Because at six, I was burdened with a lot of sins. There was adultery. Well, at this point, at six years old, you're confessing original sin, because you've got nothing else. But then they told us, well, there's a little act of contrition you can say during the mass if you're going to go to communion. That'll hold you over until you get to confession, which I always thought was kind of interesting. At age six, I was under the impression that if I accidentally chewed the communion wafer, I was biting Jesus.

You know me, and you know my imagination. My paralyzing fear of biting the Savior at six years old was unbelievable. I would have rather honestly choked to death on the communion wafer than risk taking a bite. But when you're a little kid and there's something in your mouth, sometimes you don't think and you bite down. In your imagination, you hear the screams of Jesus as you bite him. What a way to grow up. Is it any wonder we're like this?

The nuns gave us strategies for what to do with the communion wafer, too. Does anybody care about what we're talking about? I wonder. But they would give us strategies. If the communion wafer got stuck to the roof of your mouth, you had to gently rub it with your tongue. And then a minute later, you could receive communion in your filthy little hands.

Like what? Because you were also never supposed to touch it, remember? Right, yeah. And then they changed that. Anyhow. For me, it just comes down to, if you have faith and it brings you comfort and meaning to your life, yay, I am so glad. That's none of my business. Absolutely. There's a lot of people that get great comfort from all of that stuff. None of my business. Just like it's none of your business what we believe or how we choose to practice that. And the minute that you inhale those filthy grubby things, touch the mysteries of faith, you see all sorts of wacky distortions like the story of the sin eater. When it really all came down to this, these people believed in God with their whole hearts. They believed in the promise of heaven and the threat of hell. That was it. That was the whole story. And anything that people in power did to make their suffering worse by letting them think that after a life of struggle and hardship that they were going to spend the rest of eternity on fire, that was the sin. That was the real transgression.

So yeah, the next time you're at a funeral and you go to that little lunch afterward and you catch yourself thinking, well now whose idea of potato salad is that? Be an emotional eater, not a sin eater. Yeah. Take a minute and remember that once upon a time, people would have been happy to see even crappy potato salad if it meant they didn't have to eat the sins of the dead. Now, next week on True Wisdom Stuff, oh this is a story. Oh my God, this is such an unbelievable and shocking true story. Some parents just do not know how to let go and let their kids grow up. They want to control every aspect of their child's life and sometimes if you come from a family with a really prominent name and wealth and an image to uphold, that can be a thousand times worse. Just be glad that you, like the start of next week's True Weird Stuff, didn't find yourself locked up in your family's attic for decades to punish you for being a disappointment. That's on the next True Weird Stuff. We'll see you then. And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, 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 trueweirdstuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content. Everything true weird is waiting for you at trueweirdstuff.com. And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram. 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 Axland. True weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright 2025 Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.