The Mysterious Moving Coffins of Barbados

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If you are feeling suicidal, thinking about hurting yourself, or a concern that someone you know may be in danger of hurting himself or herself, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK. 1-800-273-8255. It is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and is staffed by certified crisis response professionals. Thanks to our sponsors and Patreon supporters, Astonishing Legends is free to listen to. We appreciate your support of them, and us. In the island nation of Barbados, tucked away in the Cemetery of Christ Church Parish Church, stands a sealed stone chamber half above and half below ground, simply known as the Chase Vault. This crypt holds a dark and bizarre reputation dating back to the early 19th century. The legend centers on a small collection of coffins, all but one of them heavy, lead-lined caskets that belonged to the Chase family and others, interred inside the vault from around 1807 to 1812. The entrance was secured by a massive stone slab, a door so heavy it reputedly required six or seven men to move. Furthermore, this massive stone was typically cemented shut by masons. Yet, starting in 1812, every time the vault was reopened for a new burial, those who peered inside were met with chaos. The heavy lead coffins were found violently disturbed, scattered, sometimes tossed against the walls, or even upside down in a wild disarray, their contents spilling out onto the floor. But for all of these reported disturbances, the stone entrance remained sealed, with no sign of physical entry or vandalism. The phenomenon attracted so much local and international attention that the governor of Barbados, Lord Combamere, decided to investigate it himself. Around 1819 and 1820, detailed steps were taken to rule out human interference. Governor Combamere had sand spread across the floor and pressed his own official seal into the cement when it was closed. When the vault was next opened, the seals were found undisturbed, and no footprints marred the surface of the sand. But inside, again, the heavy coffins, including one so large it usually required six or seven men to move, were found violently moved yet again. Unable to account for the disturbances, the bodies were eventually removed from the Chase Vault and buried separately, leaving the stone vault permanently empty to this day. What could possibly be responsible for these disturbances? Welcome back to Astonishing Legends. I'm Scott Philbrook, and this is Forrest Burgess. It is not generally known that in Barbados there is a mysterious vault in which no one after death can rest in peace. Captain J. E. Alexander, 1833 edition of The Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction. Volume 22, page 51. Join us tonight as we wander into the Chase family vault of Barbados. And we're back. That we are, folks. And if you can't tell, which you might not have noticed yet, I have a cold. So, you know, if I sound weird. Hmm. You know, some would say that you always sound a little weird. That's just naturally you. Well, thank you for that, I guess. This week I've gone from what one listener several years ago called a thin-voiced control freak to a nasally thin-voiced control freak. Ah, you've added some zhuzh, as they say. Yeah. A little spice on that. Well, I feel like our listeners have really gotten to know us, don't you? Oh, yeah. That guy nailed it way back. No secrets here anymore. But cold or not, the show must go on. Indeed, friend. That is so true. Well, we've just had our 11th anniversary, if you can believe that. And I can't, frankly. But it's true. Our first show was early October of 2014. And the world was a very different place back then, sort of, I guess. But we're still here. Yes. We're still human. And we're still digging. And by that, do we mean we're not AI? We're not AI. Oh, I see. Yes. We're not AI yet. How would you know? I don't know. I don't think it's gotten good enough to be as stupid as we can be on a microphone. That's exactly what I was going to say. You can't be this stumbling off the cuff. Or maybe you could program that. But just not there yet. Not yet. Anyway, speaking of October, it's the spooky season. And that means a couple of things around here. First of all, Tess is doing blog-stonishing again at astonishinglegends.com, which is a new blog entry for every single day of the month. Yes. Still in awe of that. Just unbelievable how she can generate that much content. And that in itself, friends, is an astonishing legend. And at this point, her blogs are the search engine for all things unusual, at least stuff that we've covered or have not yet covered. Well, we're getting to the point, yeah, where any time we need to look for something new, all we got to do is scroll through her stuff. That's right. It's like that plus our storied story folder, which, yes, we do still have. Oh, yeah. But AI, eat your heart out. But also, folks, the Astonishing Legends Network is humming along like crazy right now, with Richard Haddam putting out a new episode of Richard Haddam's Paranormal Bookshelf every Friday of October. So look for that. And the Midnight Library is rocking and rolling as well, with episodes like Sweet Teeth, with everything you need to know about teeth of all kinds being involved in strange practices and rituals. Yeah. She's got another one on palmistry that just came out, which I'm personally glad didn't involve Miranda using an actual severed hand to explain. Oh, well, don't count that out yet. Yeah. But, you know, she's got another one around the corner about high strangeness at Highgate Cemetery. Oh, that's great stuff. We also expect to catch up with Ed and Chris from Scared All the Time next week for an update on their spooky season. So be sure and find, subscribe, and leave reviews for the Midnight Library, Richard Haddam's Paranormal Bookshelf, and Scared All the Time. Oh, and also, tell all your friends. Oh, yes. And hey, one last thing. Don't forget Astonishing Legends, please. Oh, yes. Yeah. Right. Yeah, sometimes we, yeah, we're always looking for new listeners, folks. We believe there are a lot of people out there who think they wouldn't like a show on the paranormal, but they would love Astonishing Legends if they just gave it a shot. Yes. We're not just an acquired taste, although we're an acquired taste. But, you know, in other quick news, the Halloween merch is here right now in our store. And everyone who just skipped this housekeeping segment has no idea, most likely. You know, we've got some very special limited edition glow-in-the-dark hoodies, everyone's favorites, and long-sleeved t-shirts up in the store right now. That's right, folks. And in prior years, we've been able to print to order. So we just had to essentially pre-order stuff, and then we printed it, which has upsides and downsides. The upside is we get exactly what we need in terms of inventory and print it and ship it out. But the downside was it's real difficult to get them to everyone by Halloween if they order later in the month. Oh, that is so true. You know, but this year, we've already printed them, and we have a very finite amount available to us, which means when we say supplies are limited, they really are. Which means if you're listening, and you can do it, and you want to get one of the 2025 limited edition shirts, then go as soon as possible to astonishinglegends.com slash store, and click on apparel and gear, and you'll see what we have available there. Yep, I already got mine, but then again, the owner is an old friend. Oh, so you and Astonishing Al are on speaking terms again, is what you're saying. Kind of. He doesn't take my calls. We just DM the blue sky. I wouldn't even do that. You know, all right, folks. Well, we've got a great show for you tonight, so let's dive into it. Well, this is a good one, man. You've been wanting to do this for a while, if memory serves. For some reason, it's like vaguely familiar to me already. I mean, you've heard of it. It's kind of one of those time-life things. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've heard it over the years, moves, moving coffins. But, you know, part of it, too, is probably mixed up with that idea of coffins like floating around in New Orleans when it floods and things like that. So, you know. And then I'm probably getting it cross-mixed up with the rocks that sail across the sand in Death Valley. So who knows? I don't even know what I'm talking about anymore. But we should do the sailing stones. The sailing stones, yeah. And maybe this is tied to that phenomenon in some strange way. I don't think so. No. But it's interesting that you mentioned two things. First of all here, time-life books and also New Orleans. You know, people ask us all the time, you know, what were the scariest stories you could remember as kids? Yeah. And I've been meaning to actually text you that because as we're coming up with Halloween spooky season themes and ideas. This one is one that I distinctly remember because the first time I came across the idea was from that series of time-life books. Yeah. And a lot of people were buying these popular series. Remember the Old West? We talk about the time-life series in the Old West. I think one was ghosts, and that's where I read the story, and it creeped me out. And the reason why is because as a small child, I started imagining and picturing myself being sealed inside the vault, or at least just, you know, spending the night there. This was before people did ghost hunts and challenges. Why not? In the dark. You know, and of course, with a lot of kids, some of your fears are abandonment. That was a recurring dream I had that my parents just, like, left me somewhere, and I couldn't get back, and I had to figure it out. But this fear was being in pitch black. Like I said, a lot of fears for me is not knowing what's coming. And so when people talk about, well, I hide under the covers, or I hid under the bed, or I go in the closet where it's completely pitch black, like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, not me. I want to see what's coming. You're Corey Feldman. You're going to get all your crap together and be ready. That's exactly right. I don't, I cannot be in the dark. And so imagine as a kid, I just started, you know, your imagination runs wild. And it's like, oh, I'm just picturing suddenly you're in the dank smell, the moist earth, and the dankness, and a faint whiff of decaying corpses. And suddenly you hear like a, and something's moving in there where it shouldn't be. And just, just me picturing, you know, what's inside the coffin decaying or just desiccated, just the, yeah, that creeped me out. Those kinds of, just one picturing, yeah, just corpses inside these heavy coffins. And then suddenly starting to move about, and then you hear the creak of the door open on the coffin. And also that is, I'm not going to look it up even, but there is a difference between a coffin and a casket. You know, I just learned this a few months ago, but I'm not sure I can remember now. One, I think, is generally a rectangular shape. The other one has the typical shape. The other one has a hinged door. That's one differentiation between the two, I believe. The other one has an easy open lid and a fresh ceiling, you know, Tupperware kind of closure. I'm kidding about that. But the idea, though, that something's moving around in the dark and by unnatural forces and you're trapped in there, yeah, that freaked me out. So that was one of the early stories as a kid that just, it is, it just creeped me out. And, you know, there's something about, again, the place setting and, you know, how you and I look at these kinds of childhood fears. And I guess it's an adult thing is to overcome that fear as you examine it. And you take away the mystery and the unknown, and it's still creepy. It can be. But you look at it analytically, I guess. And, you know, I love legends and how do they form. And I think this is a good case here. It's like, how did this start? What are the real bones of the story? And what can be traced back? And that's how we approach stories now. And I would say, like, a lot of things that we cover is that you can do that and you understand it. And it's, you know, what you don't understand is what you fear. But there's still a creep factor here. Yeah. Whatever's buried should not come up out of the ground. Right. Whatever's in the vault should not be moving around. Now you've gone too far. Yes. Anyway, that's how we got to the mysterious moving coffins of Barbados. And we're certainly not the first ones to use that label. But it works. So here we are. But the Chase family vault where this took place is an empty burial vault now. All the stuff is gone. When this all supposedly took place, the vault was sealed up tight with a huge stone door. And yet, over a span of about 11 years, roughly 1808 to 1819, according to the story, every single time it was open for a new burial, the lead coffins inside had been tossed about, completely changing position. Now, just a quick word about that just occurred to me here. The heavy stone door or immovable entrance to the tomb is also kind of an ancient idea. Because, I mean, one, it's practical. You don't want animals getting in there. You don't want people grave robbing. That's as old as time. It's also the idea of permanence. And again, I think about the burial of Jesus and his body. That the large stone, I think, slab or circle was moved in front of the entrance. And it would take several people to move it. Yet, when they came back after the third day, he had ascended. Or it was gone. Everyone would see that. And so that should not have happened. So when something like that does happen, there's a disturbance, it gets your attention. And what I'm talking about, the chase fault, is that these are also the elements of legend and myth. And the story's as old as time here. And that, you know, everybody dies. You have some sort of permanence, but also remembrance. And when that's gone topsy-turvy, it's disturbing. Okay, so having said that, I think the next thing we should do is tell the story in greater detail. And I think, Scott, you should take the honors and tell the story. This is the story of the Chase Vault. The vault itself is located in the cemetery of the Christ Church Parish Church in the town of Oyston's Barbados, a fishing village world-famous for its fish fry. But that fame is adjacent to the infamy of the burial vault at the heart of tonight's legend. Today, if you visit the site, the marble entrance slab is still there. But the vault remains empty for reasons you'll soon understand. According to journalist Stephanie Huber of Key Carib Magazine, which we found online, the vault was first purchased in 1724 by the patriarch of the Elliott family, James Elliott. His wife, Elizabeth, was buried there 68 years later in 1792. But 15 years after that, ownership of the vault changed when it was sold to the Walron family, a surname dating all the way back to the Dark Ages. The Walrons had agreed to allow Elizabeth Elliott's coffin to stay in the vault, but planned to place Thomasina Goddard's coffin in there in late July of 1807. But when the vault was opened for Goddard, Elizabeth Elliott's coffin had vanished without a trace. Six months later, in February of 1808, Colonel Thomas Chase's two-year-old daughter tragically died, and he theoretically purchased the vault from the Walrons at that time to place Marianne Chase's remains within it, in a small, lead-lined coffin. Unfortunately, just four years later, in July of 1812, Marianne's older sister, Dorcas Chase, was buried at the young age of 17, also in a lead-lined coffin. According to some accounts, she had taken her own life by starving herself, out of despair of living with her ruthless father, Colonel Thomas Chase. Up until now, with the exception of Elizabeth Elliott's coffin going missing, the initial burials of the Chase girls were reportedly undisturbed. But that period of tranquility was brief. In James Edward Alexander's 1833 work, Transatlantic Sketches, he highlights the critical turning point to a month after Dorcas Chase's death, when her father, Colonel Thomas Chase, a wealthy landowner in Barbados, and the owner of the vault, took his own life. The vault was opened again for Colonel Chase on August 9, 1812. His lead coffin was described as massive, reportedly requiring six or seven men just to get it to the vault. Yet, when the heavy marble ceiling slab on the vault was removed, the three coffins already inside, including the two lead-lined coffins of his daughters, who preceded him in death, were found in a shocking state of confusion, having been, quote, tossed from their places. The coffin of the infant, Marianne, was said to have been thrown from its corner to the opposite angle of the room. The events established a disturbing pattern. The coffins were carefully placed back in order by Masons, and the vault was sealed securely after each interment. For some skeptics, the involvement of the Freemasons is enough to doubt the story in its entirety, but things are never that simple. Subsequent openings revealed renewed chaos. Alexander's account records similar disturbances when the vault was reopened for burials in 1816 and 1819. In the September 1816 opening to enter another infant named Charles Brewster Ames, the coffins were again found in great disorder, with Thomas Chase's enormous lead-lined coffin having been pushed over, quote, as easy as if it had been an empty box. An adult named Samuel Brewster was placed in the vault in November of that same year. The mystery escalated, attracting attention in Victorian society, when in 1819, the vault was opened again for the burial of Thomason Clark. There is confusion on the gender of this person, as it may have been Thomason or Thomassina. The funeral was delayed by several hours just to open the vault. The mortar was removed quickly, but the stone door seal took some time to lift out of the way. And once it was opened, chaos presented itself again. According to researcher Veronica of Nightbringer.se, Colonel Thomas Chase's coffin was moved and leaning against the wall in this instance, and the other coffins were, quote, scattered about as domino bricks. The only coffin undisturbed was a wooden coffin in the vault, that of Thomason Goddard, which had been there a dozen years at this point. The situation now demanded official intervention, and the governor of Barbados at the time, Lord Combermere, decided to oversee the final, definitive investigation. He ordered a series of rigorous security measures. The walls were sealed, and he pressed his own seal into the outside edge of the wall to ensure no human entry could occur without detection. Most critically, fine sand was sprinkled across the vault floor to register any footprints. A year later, on April 18th, 1820, Lord Combermere and other persons of high respectability returned to open the vault. What they found remains the core enigma of the legend. The walls and the governor's seal were undisturbed. The sand spread across the floor was pristine, showing absolutely no evidence of human or physical intrusion. Yet inside, the heavy coffins were once more found in disarray. One version of the report, attributed to Nathan Lucas, who claimed to be present, stated that the confusion was wild, and that a cedar wooden coffin, that of either Thomasina or Thomas and Clark, was the only one that was not disturbed. Although another account states Colonel Chase's heavy lead coffin was on top of that one. This final recurrence, which defied explanation by any obvious physical means, resulted in the bodies being removed. The governor ordered them to be reinterred separately in earthen plots. The chase vault itself was sealed for good and has remained empty ever since. Astonishing Legends is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things that people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home, and more. Plus, you can count on their great customer service to help you when you need it, so your dollar goes a long way. Visit Progressive.com to see if you could save on car insurance. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. Alright, quick quiz for the hiring managers out there. What's worse, being understaffed or being poorly staffed? Well, that's a trick question, because both are recipes for chaos. Either way, just say to yourself, this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. You'll get matched with candidates that meet the skills, certifications, and everything else you're looking for. 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Which was cute, until they unfriended you and took it with them. Which was not so cute. Anyway, now you're on eBay. And there it is. Same tee from the same tour. Still living in your memory, rent-free, forever. See? The things you love have a way of finding their way back to you. But eBay isn't just for getting whatever your ex-BFF stole back. It's also for that rare championship foul ball you caught, then heroically gave to the kid next to you. And where else are you going to find your first car? The one you wish you never sold, but now, you finally get the chance to take back home. For good this time. Shop eBay for millions of finds, each with a story. eBay. Things people love. I'm Brittany Williams, and you're listening to Astonishing Legends with Scott Philbrook and Forrest Burgess. Now, back to the show. It really is a wild story with a lot of amazing details, but I guess the question is, how much of it can we show really happen? That's right, and there's a lot of debate over the timeline of when the stuff supposedly happened, and we'll get into what the skeptics say and all that, and did it happen at all, or is it just a story and common ground with another story, which I don't even know if you've heard about. Folklorist Andrew Lang, from the same time period, investigated the striking Barbados case for another really cool old publication, the Folklore Journal in 1907. Now, this was way after the fact, but it's still early 1900s. And he compared it to a wild story from 1840, decades after the Barbados story, on an island in the Baltic now known as Saarema, but at that time known as Osel, O-S-E-L, or Osel. The village that it took place in at that time was called Ahrensberg, and Lang, who we will talk more about along with this parallel case, termed his finding an instance of story by location, B-I hyphen location, by location, which is something we've talked about on the show before, titling his dedicated article, Death's Deeds, A Bilocated Story, which we'll read excerpts from here in a bit. So that's one of the several legends concerning ambulatory coffins, or simply a moving coffin legend. There's more than one. There's more than one. Yeah, no, that's when we were doing the research on this, that's what you're reminded of, and you may not know this before, but like, it is a little like the screaming skulls, or the mysterious moving skulls, and that it's a common, I guess at the time, and again, it's historically and culturally a bit of a meme for the time period, but it's a common, I don't know, trope. There's something about it though, about, yeah, moving coffins, screaming skulls, these kinds of things that lend themselves to evolve into legends. Yes. And so when you think of the moving coffins of Barbados, it's like, that's not it. There are other legends of moving coffins. There's more than just this one, exactly. Yeah, and because these are, we're talking about very fundamental elements to life and death, in this case, death, and what do you put people in? Well, you can just bury them in the cold, cold ground, or you put them in a box of some kind. Yeah. Or you, well, back in the Gobekli Tepe days, you left people out in the field, and the vultures picked all the flesh off and you went back for the bones later. Yeah. And so there are different ways, again, all throughout history of how that was handled, but it comes for everyone. So it's a very universal theme about things that are dead and gone and should stay there, not move around. You know what's funny, or maybe not funny, is that now if you wanted to go and do that thing with the vultures, if you can find some society that's like, okay, we'll let you do this. Right. These days, they would probably be like, no, it's going to hurt the vultures. You've got too many preservatives and drugs in your system. Right. This is going to be bad for them. We did an impact study, and it's going to kill the bird. Yeah, or at least intoxicate them to a level that can be deadly. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. No, you know what? On the flip side of that, my friend, because this is a topic for other reasons we've, you know, certainly I've been looking up, is that now there will be some other new age hipster companies that is like, yeah, yeah, we feature vulture deaths. Yeah. I got to say, I'm not against it. I'm not against it. No, I know. I might prefer it to being in a box in the ground. I don't know. No, we've talked about aquamation. Yeah, yeah. Instead of fire, we have water now, or basically they put you in a big vat with alkali. I like the thing where they make you into coral and drop you in the ocean. They could do that. They could turn your remains into stones now. You could put on the mantle. Oh, yeah. There's just, it's just, yeah, it's just fascinating. But they're all building upon these themes of remains remaining. You know what I'm saying? Like there's something, there's something there that is. That should be the title of your memoir. Remains remaining. Remains remaining. Yeah. Okay, well, this story has gone by a lot of names over the years. The most straightforward name is simply the Chase Vault, like you just said, which leaves you wondering if we're talking about a bank heist. No, it's not a bank heist, but it's also widely identified, this story, as the urban legend of the mysterious moving coffins. That's how I knew it. Well, when this story first appeared in print, it was 1833, and in the publication called The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. I just love those old titles. They can't just have a one-word thing. They got to have like a subtitle next to it to stretch it out. Well, it was presented in this publication in a section called The Anecdote Gallery, sometimes referred to under the broader heading, Tales of the Tomb. Oh, yes, yeah. Yeah, The Crypt Keeper. Well, again, we're going back to The Crypt Keeper, and something decayed and cackling and laughing at you and telling it, you know, Tales from the Crypt. Come on. That's right. The Mirror was actually one of our favorite research finds on this one. It's a free PDF on Google Books. We'll have a link, but there's a lot of fascinating stuff in there. The full title of it, I've got the title page here in our outline. I'm just going to read everything it says on the cover. The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, containing original essays, historical narratives, biographical memoirs, sketches of society, topographical descriptions, novels and tales, anecdotes, select extracts from new and expensive work, poetry, original and selected, the spirit of the public journals, discoveries in the arts and sciences, useful domestic hints, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I had to look up the et cetera, it's because it's actually an ampersand. Yes, right. And then the letter C in a period. And I was like, that's got to be et cetera. But I had to look it up. That's how they used to write it. It would be an ampersand, a C in a period, which I thought is pretty cool. Wow. And then it's volume 22, you know, printed and published in 1833. Yeah, really going for that search engine optimization there. Yeah, exactly. I'll just put everything in the title. Yeah. Before that'll happen. But, well, that name is almost a perfect encapsulation of the Victorian mind, isn't it? It suggests a grand, almost a philosophical effort to merge the high-minded pursuit of knowledge with a simple digestible entertainment, which was Reader's Digest or the Time Life books. That's what I'm talking about. Like, I don't need to, just give me the creepy stuff. Yeah, exactly. And put it in what they still say today about our show being too long. It's like, just get to the chase. Yeah. No, that's the idea is that, okay, that's kind of what it's about. Now let's get into the where's and the why's and the six questions. Yeah. So anyway, getting back to this thing, it wasn't just a journal or just some grocery store checkout fluff, which I love those little booklets too, by the way. Yeah, yes. This was a weekly miscellany aiming to be like a veritable storehouse of facts and searches after profitable knowledge, quote unquote. That's certainly not my words there. Storehouse of facts and searches after profitable knowledge all presented in a quote, again, entertaining and attractive form. Right. So like you said, SEO, it's Google. This is an early version of Google. Exactly. Well, looking at volume 22 alone, which was published in London in 1833 by Jay Limberd, the contents list ranges across almost every subject imaginable. All right. Now we should point out for historical precision that John Timms was the editor of the Mirror at this time. And he was a force in British journalism and letters during the 19th century. And he was an English author, editor, and antiquary. And the sheer volume of his work is staggering. I mean, he published works reportedly amounted to more than, get this, 150 volumes. Yeah. That kind of output places him more as a curator of popular knowledge than a single author, really. And being an antiquary, by the way, there's a society of antiquarians still exists to this day, 3,000 members or something in London. That's, just look it up. We'll have it in the show notes if you want to read about what they did and what they talked about. But, you know, antiquities and historical sites and this sort of thing. That's what they would suggest, sure. Yeah. But it's fitting, though, that he wasn't always just John Timms. He also used the pseudonym Horace Welby for some of his writing. And he played a key role in keeping historical and anecdotal material circulating, providing a preface for the Chandos Library reprint of the Percy Anecdotes, which I had never heard of until we were researching this story. But these were basically the earliest version of Cliff's Notes. Yeah. And of course, now a lot of kids are not even going to know what those are. So basically, it's like a cheat sheet or a summation of like the Odyssey or whatever. So you could maybe fake your way through a test in college. That was what Cliff's Notes were. But in this case, the Percy Anecdotes for us, this is fascinating to me. These were, if you would read these, you could appear well read when you were having to make small talk in high society. Yes. So it's like a shortcut. That's right. It's the early version of having the phone like cupped into your hand with AI running. Yeah, exactly. It's like, oh, what was it? Well, you do. Well, actually, you know, the Cliff's Notes were supposed to be a study aid. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah. They knew what you were doing. I know. They knew you were cheating. Well, that's why people bought them. But actually, though, it's like a print early version of AI and chat webnots because you could just like, okay, summarize this. Give me the points. And here's the difference, I'll say, is that you could trust the Cliff's Notes. That's right. That's right. It wasn't hallucinating. Yeah, it wasn't making crap up. And also it was a Cliff's apostrophe S Notes. It was Cliff's Notes. Anyway. Who was Cliff anyway? We'll do a future episode of him. He's worthy of mention. Yeah, he's an honorable mention here. But it's starting to sound a little bit like, this might be a weak connection, but Fort, kind of a Fortian, a collector of stories in a way. Right. It's the anecdotes. Yeah, exactly. That's what's interesting about it. Well, that's the thing. Okay. So nowadays, though, anecdotal stories, you know, they're treated as somewhat without value. You could say that's just, okay, I thought of our friend Jerry, when you make a counterpoint to something political. He's like, well, that's anecdotal. Jerry and I are often, and folks who have been listening to the show a long time, he's a very old friend of ours. He was in the episode, What's Gotten Into You, which that's a fun one. If you have ever wondered what it's like when a bug invades one of your orifices, but Jerry used to be a lawyer. And so we used to talk, we chat pretty much on the regular. And whenever we're chatting online or whatever, usually debating some political thing or some legal thing. Sure, sure. And I'll make my case for something. And he'll be like, that's anecdotal. Like, it doesn't count. That's anecdotal. And that's my impression of him, which is not how he actually sounds. No, but if you know him, that's exactly what you picture in your head. What Percy's anecdotes shows or Cliff's notes or whatever, like, is that there is value in that information and sharing it in a certain way, even if you don't have a factual backing on it. This is the point about an anecdote and what Jerry was saying. It's like, well, okay, so you don't have a chart. It's not pulled from a poll or fact. It's not a factoid, really. It's an experience and it's a retelling of a tale and some details might be wrong, but listen, if it's an anecdote. Or involved. Exactly. And so it's the telephone game. But if it's a friend of ours and they're telling the anecdote and it's anecdotal, quote unquote, it's like, I'm going to tend to believe that the bones, there's some truth in there. Something weird did happen. Now, you may have the colors wrong, the times, the distances. Or it might not even be, like in this case, the thing might not be this specific thing, but at some point, something inspired this story. That's what I'm saying. Something weird did happen. And it's, okay, think about, you mentioned this earlier about the Pied Piper and being there. The idea is that, no, something really weird and disturbing and tragic happened. It wasn't just a fairy tale. And that's what we're talking about, myths and legends here and the birthing of them. Something strange is the foundation of this. And think about this, though. Okay, so nowadays, yeah. So anecdotes are treated without value. You know, this is like, okay, that's your little story here and that's nice, but we're not seeing it in any print or we're not seeing it anywhere. There's no documentation for it. I don't see any photos. And that's the other thing. Back then, it's like, well, if you print it, it must be true. You know, it's like, oh, we've put it down. It's in black and white. It's all, you know, we've got to believe it. You can't have it both ways. It can't be a Joseph Mulhatton story talking about the Kincaid's Cave and the Grand Canyon. Yeah, that's another role that started as the legends. Yeah, tabloid stuff and it's in print, but like he made it up. Or does it just ring true? Okay, so again, today, not as much value. But back then, you got to realize that, you know, access to knowledge of any kind was harder to come by. Okay, and we're talking about political stuff. You know, when my dad's the boomer era here is like, yeah, you learn stuff in school, but you didn't have, you know, when he was really lucky, you didn't have TV news. You had print. That's right. But a lot of people got their news from newsreels at the movie theater. When you went to see your double feature there of your Westerns, you got a newsreel and that's how people learn a lot about the world. Exactly, it's a march of time, right? Okay, so, and again, if you're uneducated or all you do is go to the movies and watch Buck Rogers or whatever, and that's how you're getting your, yeah, it's kind of one-sided and it's been filtered down, but it's a method of dissemination of information, okay? And Lord Byron, I was interesting that you made a bullet point about talking about Lord Byron here. Yes. He called the Percy anecdotes indispensable. There you go. Indispensable. I don't know how he, is that how he sounded? No, but it was, he had a, he had a curled lip. I think he had a, he had a bit of a speech thing going on. But I was about to, no, the weird connection is that this is also to me and my estimation, a magical time of strangeness because around the turn of the, the 17th into the 18th century, this is the age of Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, husband of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, you know, they were young bucks back then. You're talking about in their twenties, but like 1812, that's when they were at their height and a lot of dark, romantic, gothic material is being created by some of the best writers in the world. So it's the age of, of great anecdote and experience and that kind of romantic feel. So anyway, that's my little comment here on this timeframe of this kind of story and why it might perpetuate and be wildly popular just as an anecdote in the day. So let's come back to the Christ Church Parish Church. The one that we're talking about here is actually the fifth structure on that site. The original parish church was built around 1629 near Dover Beach. Beach is an important word here. It was wiped out by a flood in 1669, 40 years later, which apparently scattered coffins and bones all over the beach. A nice start for this particular church. Now the bad luck did not stop there. They relocated the second church to the present site, pretty high up on a hill to avoid flooding again, which makes sense, but also trying to find a secure spot overlooking the village of Oystens. Again, world famous for its fish fries. There's so many YouTube videos about people going there to have the fish fry. I'm like, I was super into this. Yeah, no, I was, uh, if you see the, uh, video of it, they get really hungry. I, I, I think I actually happened to catch a segment on first look. It's the show that comes on after Saturday Night Live and they, they go to around these fabulous locations and eat food and drink. Yeah. They were talking about the Barbados fish fry and how it's world renowned. There you go. There, it looks like a lot of fun too. But, uh, so anyway, the church, the first church that was built up there on the higher ground was completely destroyed by the hurricane of 1780. That's back before the storm. Then a third church was built after 1786 or so, only to be destroyed again by the devastating hurricane of 1831. Right. Now that church would be the one that our story takes place in. Right. Okay. So the fourth church was consecrated in 1837 and that managed to survive until 1935 when it was finally destroyed by fire. Okay. Now the hurricanes in Barbados are not all that unusual, of course. Exactly. Speaking as someone near the Southeast coast of North Carolina, hurricanes are going to hurricane and Barbados is directly situated in what they call the hurricane belt. Storms form in the East Atlantic and make their way West over to the Americas, usually on a beeline for Barbados and thousands of islands between the Atlantic ocean and the Caribbean Gulf of Mexico and South and North America. But still, this is a near constant cycle of destruction. And the Barbados doesn't always get hit, but it's in a high risk area. But with the church here, we've got flood, hurricane, fire, just for this one particular church. But on the other hand, this is an island kind of in harm's way when it comes to the Earth's climate systems. But for people wondering, when hurricanes are destroying churches at this new location up on the hill, it's from wind and rain and not storm surge or inundation, because this location is 87 feet above sea level. And no hurricane storm surge has ever gotten that high. Although in 1899, a 44-foot surge was reported during Cyclone Mahina in Australia, in Bathurst Bay, I think. And most experts think that height was exaggerated by the shape of the terrain when it came in. Yeah, it's like it washed up the... Yeah, exactly. So there's some hydrodynamics, I guess you'd call, happening there. But yeah, typically no, not that... If you look at famous storms, like Katrina's surge in New Orleans was 28 feet. Yeah. We point this out for folks who might think a storm surge flood could have entered the Chase Vault and floated the coffins around like it did at the first Christ Church Parish Church. But that church, as I said earlier, was down on the beach. That's just not going to happen on top of an almost 100-foot-tall hill. But here's the other thing, and this is significant. There are no major documented hurricanes during the years this story or legend took place. There was one around 30 years before the first burial, and then another major hit was over 100 years later. Right. But wind and rain, more of an issue, and of course, a fire can strike anywhere, right? Okay. But still, those don't move lead-lined coffins around inside a vault that is half below ground. Yeah, that's right. And for me, Forrest, I got to say, the first thing that I thought was flooding was probably what happened here. I thought they probably floated around. Even though they're heavy coffins, I know enough about physics to know that pretty much anything can float if it's watertight, and there's math to do there, and I'm not going to try to get into it because I'm too stupid to explain it. But I do know that big, heavy things can float. And I was like, well, that must be what happened. Water got in there and floated this stuff around. And we're going to talk about why that seems unlikely here moving forward. But that is kind of the elephant in the room. So what we wanted to do was take it off the table here pretty much right away. Yeah, I got you. Well, no, there's a name. He made a concrete boat, right? So to go battleships. It's displacement. I mean, that's, but there's a term for that. But basically, you're displacing enough water that heavy objects can float. So lead-lined coffins, sure. Buoyancy. You're talking about buoyancy. Yeah, but it depends on the shape and other factors, okay? Now, here's the thing, though. The true paradox lies in the heavy security measures taken to prevent any mundane explanation. Now, think about this, okay? The door itself was a massive stone slab requiring a half dozen men to move it. And after each closure, it was cemented by masons. So doing a good job of sealing it up with cement. And the most critical detail, though, is, as you mentioned in the story, the investigation overseen by the governor of Barbados, Lord Combermere, who served in office from 1817 to 1820. Yeah, that was the definitive test, the attempt to definitively rule out human intervention. Lord Combermere was present for the opening, or he ordered the final opening in April of 1820. He had his own seal affixed to the concrete that closed the entrance prior to that. And when they went back in 1820, the seal was found undisturbed, meaning it was clear that no one was getting in and out of the vault. Right. And when I was a kid and reading that story in the Time Life book, that's what sealed it for me, I guess. Yeah. That part of the story, seriously, was like, oh, so they did go back and try to make sure that no one had gotten in there, that it was not tampered with. And that was a common thing with your signet ring, you know, just. Yeah. That occurs, again, that's another trope. I'm sealing this. Yeah, that's, I know, there's a lot of elements in this, if you want to call it myth or legend, that, yeah, checks the boxes, as they say. It's like you have some kind of seal to prevent any kind of tampering. And then anybody who would, like, well, they broke in through that and they got in there. It's like, that's a lot of work for a big prank. Like, that's going to pay off decades later, you know, so. Yeah. That's true. And again, there wasn't, you know, that many valuables, I would think, in there. There's easier ways to go grave digging, I would think. So, but here's the thing. You know, for me, it wasn't just Lord Combermere's seal, okay? Other prominent members of the island had left marks on the outside of the vault, too, which tells you how invested these people were in figuring out what the hell was going on. And to a point, if that actually happened, the point here that we're making is that that's a lot of work to investigate this and find out, to rule out chicanery, trickery, pranking. And that must have meant to me that something really disturbing happened, to take that much effort. This was an official, methodical investigation. The governor ordered or oversaw meticulous preparations. So that's meant to guarantee that the entrance had not been breached by unseen human intruders. Which is the next thought you have after, oh, it flooded and they floated. And it's like, oh, it didn't? That can't be the thing? Oh, people are sneaking in. They're sneaking in and they're doing this. Maybe even the masons are sneaking in and doing it. And it's like, still, it's concrete, six or seven guys. No one's going to notice them out there working. It's like, there's a lot of things. That's my point is that, okay, so you're trying to make an allegorical point, maybe, if you're Masonic, that we're going to talk about a little bit about that. Because they're often looked to as a possible motive here. Or for, what, a lesson that's going to, again, pay off the next time somebody dies decades later? Like, I'm not sure if that makes any sense to me. But here's a very simple and direct thing to consider here. We must stress the physical impossibility of this movement. And what I'm talking about is that then you're, what we're talking about is getting six or seven people in on the gag. And in a small area where everybody knows each other or was chattering and they kept that secret. But the deal is that sources consistently highlight the massive weight of these lead coffins. So think about that. Yet, these lead-lined coffins were just somehow thrown around in at least one case, quote, as easy as if it had been an empty box, end quote. One coffin was even found leaning directly against the heavy entrance block. So think about that, okay? That means something propped up against the back of the door and then you'd have to leave. It couldn't leave. Yeah, then you had to leave through other means, which is not possible, okay? So, meaning that logically, if a physical being had been in there doing that, theoretically, it would have blocked your way out. Exactly. So that's the background on what physically happened, according to the lore. But the real mystery is when we pull back and look at the actual documentation. This isn't ancient history. This all happened in the early 1800s. But tracking down verifiable proof of the events was actually kind of difficult. Okay, well, as you said earlier, the earliest known printed record of the Chase Vault Saga dates to 1833, appearing in transatlantic sketches by General Sir James Edward Alexander. And Alexander, he was a Scottish traveler, writer, and soldier, recounts the full sequence of the burials and disturbances, including the opening where Lord Combamere was present. And as I pointed out earlier, Alexander's account was reprinted as an extract that same year, 1833, in the Anecdote Gallery section of the Mirror of Literature of Music. It's anecdotal. Instruction. This is the other point I forgot to make earlier. It's not an anecdote if it happens to you. And if Jerry's listening, no, in your front. No, he's not. He hasn't listened to me. Well, I don't want to mention the other person, but I thought this was pretty humorous. I wasn't there. I did teleport in for a Zoom blackjack game. Oh, yes. Our friend Jerry is a great blackjack deal. Yeah. No, it's a ton of fun. But there was some talk about all the layoffs that were happening a couple years ago now. And it's like, well, that's anecdotal. It's like, yeah, unless you're the one who got laid off. Right. Then it's a fact. By the way, everything I was saying in that debate, that argument where he was saying that, has all come to pass. There you go. So the proof is in the pudding. But no, as far as a pudding proof, proof pudding, is that if you're the one who opens that vault and things are askew, it's like, okay, I'm officially freaked out. Right. Something happened here. Because there's no sign of any forced entry. Then your thoughts go to the supernatural. Astonishing Legends is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible. Financial geniuses. Monetary magicians. These are things that people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home, and more. 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The problem is, Ordersen himself gave conflicting accounts of the tale, resulting in multiple variations circulating almost immediately. It's a classic case of an internally inconsistent narrative being repeated over and over until it gained factual weight. Like you said earlier, you know, it's a game of telephone. It's just human nature. It's never going to go away, I believe. And now we have computers and robots doing it. Just making stuff up. But again, I think about the wizard clip and the one Reverend telling the story. So now you have two official accounts, sort of. Or just two accounts that people go off. And then that forks the story or the legend into two different areas with different accounts. And yes, there's some allegorical things being inserted, I believe, to make a point. But is that what's happening here? Okay. But talking about the inconsistencies here in the narratives, this is what precisely what drew the attention of Andrew Lang, who we mentioned earlier. Okay. You can't discuss the analysis of this mystery without bringing up Lang. He was a Scottish polymath. Scott, what is that? This is a person that can do a bunch of things. Yeah, do lots of things. Yeah, Candace Saint-Germain. I just wanted to see – no, that's the one thing I did know. Yes, of course, I remember, yes. Okay. Yes, yes. Sorry. I certainly can't trip you up. Anyway, but no, he was a polymath like Saint-Germain. He was a renowned poet, a novelist, literary critic, and an anthropologist just because he didn't have enough stuff on his resume yet. Yeah. But crucially, okay, for our purposes here, he was deeply involved in the nascent fields of folklore studies, mythology, and psychical research. Ding, ding. Lang was the president of the SPR, or Society for Psychical Research, in 1911. It's still around. We've talked about it 100 times on the show. It's 143 years old now. But he specialized in this area of folkloric study, which is a thing now. You can get degrees in it. We hear from listeners all the time who study this, and we've even had college professors who teach it contact us to ask if they can use some of our old episodes in their classes, which is incredibly flattering. If I could do anything and go back to school, this would be what I would want to study. But he was one of the pioneers in this. He researched mythology and psychical research, and Lang pointed out that good stories never truly die. They are simply bilocated or renovated, attaching themselves to new contemporary dates and locations, which is a fascinating concept. That is a very fascinating concept to me, anyway. Okay, so – and the Chase Vault story here is a textbook example of bilocation. It's almost too perfect. Get this, because, you know, Lang explicitly paired the Barbados events spanning 1812 to 1820 with a nearly identical narrative that occurred overseas in 1844. That's right. We alluded to this earlier. That parallel was the notorious Ahrensberg incident. And I say notorious not because it's not infamous. Most people haven't heard of this, honestly. Yeah, right. But this is something that happened in a Lutheran cemetery on the Isle of Oesel, O-E-S-E-L, in the Baltic. There, the Bux-Hodin family chapel became noisy in June 1844. And when opened in July, the coffins were found displaced and lying in a, quote, confused pile, end quote. Aha! And it gets eerier than just floating coffins. After the Ahrensberg coffins were replaced and the chapel was sealed, an official committee of the Consistory investigated. Like Lord Colbomere's team in Barbados using sand, the Ahrensberg investigators strewed wood ashes everywhere inside the vault specifically, quote, to detect footsteps, end quote. Yeah, there you go. I love this idea. You know, when my grandmother, a little aside here, what you would do when you packed up, you know, your summer cabin for the winter season, she would dump a bag, make it look like a bag of flour had spilled over from the shelf behind the cabin door. Then she could tell if anyone had broken into the cabin over the winter. Forrest Burgess' grandma is James Bond. That's pretty cool. Grandma Welchel. Yeah. No, there's a, hey, it's, it's, it's a knowledge of the pioneers and they have these little tips and tricks. The other one is a, yeah, you probably know, you nail, you get a board and they pound a bunch of nails in there and put it near the front door so bears don't try to. Oh yeah. That's how they, that's how they injured that poor Bigfoot in Alaska that time. Oh. They kept attacking the hunting cabin that you could only get to by airplane, by seaplane. Yeah. Don't you remember that? Now, what if you open your cabin door and it swept over to the sugar or the flour is displayed? That's a giant footprint. Yeah, just a giant footprint. Well. I might enter cautiously. In the case of Ahrensburg and the ashes, the result was exactly the same. The seals were undisturbed, the ashes untrodden, but the heavy coffins were found violently displaced, quote, standing on their heads in Ahrensburg. Now, in both locations, after repeated violent, inexplicable movements inside sealed tombs without external trace, the final resolution was to remove the bodies and bury them in the earth. Well, there you go, properly interred. And when you just think about it, it's like now if the coffins pop out of the ground, now that's even more terrifying. Yeah. As they push up or come up from your swimming pool, as in that they didn't poltergeist. Indeed. Yeah, no, they're supposed to stay there. That was my earlier point in the beginning here, is that now you're kind of sealing earth around them, six feet of dirt above them. Right, right. And that should literally seal the deal here. But get this, getting back to the bilocation of the story, it's the shared crucial detail of the supposed cause that seals the bilocation theory in this case. Now, Lange noted that the Olsen and the Barbados tales were, quote, precisely similar in every respect, including the supposed cause of trouble, the presence of the corpse of a suicide, end quote. Now, in Ehrensberg, the initial troubles were attributed to a suicide. In Barbados, the local belief, as recorded by Reese in 1864, was that the chaos was caused by the suicide of Dorcas Chase, who had, quote, starved herself to death owing to her father's cruelty, end quote. And the other corpses wished to expel her. The connection is chilling. The movement of massive lead coffins, the use of fine powder to detect entry, the sealing by high authorities, and the final attribution to spiritual energy from a suicide. This strongly suggests that either the Barbados incident inspired the 1844 Baltic story, or that both locales appropriated an older circulating legend, which Lange called a bilocated story. But he's not ready to give up on the Chase vault. Andrew Lange was rigorous. He set out to anchor the Chase story in verifiable history, a man after our own hearts, noting that the differing versions could all be traced back to the aforementioned 1800 Rector Ordersen's accounts. But when he tried to verify the core events, the recurrent chaos inside a sealed vault witnessed by many officials, he hit a major wall. He, quote, could find nothing to substantiate them. He searched the burial register of Christchurch and contemporary Barbados newspapers, finding a complete absence of documentation regarding these dramatic disturbances. Yeah, and when it comes to doing research, this is an excellent approach, and it's a gift to us and you as listeners to have the results of a much more contemporaneous investigation. And just as a little side note, it reminds me of a simultaneous invention theory where two stories pop up, which is maybe a form of bilocation. Anyway, getting back to this, you know, this is the kind of thing that stands out to us, this kind of interesting bilocation of, in this case, myth or story or anecdote or news reporting. Now, how could this not have been written about at all when this was occurring? You would think, as we were saying, it's such a monumental and weird and creepy, scary kind of thing. Somebody must have mentioned it. Yeah, I mean, the absence of documentation is absolutely damning for the legend itself. But if the governor, Lord Combermere, had sealed a heavily guarded vault only to open it and find massive lead coffins thrown confusedly about, in quotes, that would be front page news across the entire island. The fact that contemporary local sources don't mention the incident raises some super viable questions for the skeptics of this legend. But Lang's persistent eventually led to a critical, albeit complex, piece of apparent testimony. Initially, he had noticed only a dubious, quote, unpublished firsthand account, end quote, allegedly by a man named Nathan Lucas, who we have mentioned earlier. He claimed to be present at the last opening in April of 1820 with Lord Combermere. Right, right. Skeptical modern investigators point out that reliance on an account attributed to an eyewitness by an unidentified source doesn't constitute true direct testimony, but listen to these details. That's right. I think that's a fair point. But, you know, the story doesn't end there, though, for Andrew Lang. Now, he later received a document, what he describes as a, quote, complete autograph record, end quote, by that same Nathan Lucas, who was a member of the island's parliament, and it was countersigned by the Reverend Dr. Ordersen. This record gave credence to the internal chaos, okay? Lucas confirmed the, quote, wild confusion, end quote, among the heavy lead coffins upon opening the vault. But he also noted the wooden coffin, that of Thomasine Clark's, was undisturbed. Now, crucially here, Lucas specifically denied finding any trays of water and dismissed the idea of recurrent, localized earthquakes as the cause of the movement. Yes, that's yet another theory. It was just, oh, it's a bunch of earthquakes. Yeah. So, even the skeptical inquiry by a meticulous folklorist like Lang, who found the external evidence weak, was later countered by this internal manuscript verification. And when he says a complete autograph record, this is like an early version of an affidavit, basically. Yeah, exactly. This is a signed witness testimony with two witnesses on it. Hats off to Lang for sharing that, because not every skeptical investigator would do it. And you know who you are. Just kidding. Skepticism is welcome here. I used to be skeptical, too. Oh, but then you got haunted, right? Yeah. Okay. Well, all right. Well, this leaves us in a paradoxical state. We have an official level report from an island politician seemingly confirming the impossible events. Once again, heavy-lead coffins in wild disarray, but simultaneously contradicting the mundane theories like water damage, while the public record remains silent. Now, it is this persistent historical ambiguity that keeps the theory of supernatural movement, okay, or all right, perhaps a Masonic allegory, as some skeptics suggest, alive even today. So, what we're saying here is that now the things are being whittled down. Yeah. The possibilities, right? Yeah, and so this is a classic scenario that we faced before. Confirmed burials and testimony claiming impossibility set against no record in the newspapers. It's precisely the kind of historical ambiguity that turns a tragic event into a persistent piece of folklore. Oh, always happening. And also, people will note, too, the time lapsed between event and reportage. Same thing with the bell witch, right? Ingram and his account, and it's happening a lot later, and in between the time, you have a lot of people retelling and telling the story. All right, now, though, before we accept the supernatural explanation, we have to, as we always do, look at the mundane. That is just responsible investigation, in my opinion, even though most of our listeners would disagree about anything responsible about this genre. But, okay, so anyway, let's take a look at the most common natural explanation, and that being flooding, which to an extent we had examined earlier. Okay, now, we ruled out Storm Surge, but our friend, and we've never met him, but we would be friends. I just know it. Yes. Brian Dunning. So, anyway, what Mr. Dunning had done, he made the very valid point on his Skeptoid podcast, episode 399 from January 2014, that Barbados gets a lot of rainfall. And in theory, the coffins could float. So, Scott, you should read this excerpt from Dunning's show. This is on his blog, which I'm pretty sure are transcripts of the audio. We can estimate the buoyancy of the lead-lined coffins. They would have floated only if their weight was less than the equivalent volume of water. We don't have the dimensions of any of the coffins, but we can guess. A coffin is a six-sided affair, like the kind Dracula would sit up from, as opposed to a casket, which is a rectangular box. See, we talked about that earlier. Okay, six-sided. That's the point that I was forgetting earlier. Yes, exactly. I looked up the dimensions. This is Dunning speaking again. I looked up the dimensions of all kinds of coffins. There is clearly no such thing as a standard size. And the volumes I calculated ranged from 400 to 900 liters in volume. That means they would displace 400 to 900 kilograms of water. For folks who would prefer the imperial version of that, that's around 110 to 240 gallons of water. Dunning continues. Some of today's mortuary guidelines suggest that the average casket weighs about 150 kilograms, about 25 kilograms for each of six pallbearers. Thomas' coffin is said to have required eight men to move. And if we assume that they were straining twice as hard as the average pallbearer, they were lifting only 400 kilograms. So, although these numbers are all best-guessed estimates, and hats off to him for pointing that out, Thomas' coffin was at least neutrally buoyant and more than likely floated like a court. Now, this is where, when he makes statements like that, I'm like, ah, that's a little over the top. But okay. Okay. Floated like a court. But the Chase Vault is located at an elevation of about 33 meters, as we had said in feet, roughly, on Pleistocene coral reef limestone, which is highly porous and has a fast percolation rate. This means that if the vault were to become inundated with water somehow, it would easily drain out through the ground. Right. Even Sir Schaumburg, a surveyor and geographer by trade, noted this characteristic in his 1848 book. Barbados gets a lot of rain. It rains half the days of the year and averages around 100 millimeters per month. I did not find any studies looking into the question of whether the Chase Vault happens to collect much rainwater, but in my view, this is very much a possibility. More than enough water is there, more than enough drainage capacity exists in the vault, and more than enough buoyancy was in those coffins. I'll give them that. It's pretty convincing for the mundane angle. You know, again, if you'd only looked at that, it's like, all right, that's enough. I'm fairly satisfied. But the report here also says that water would drain quickly if collected at all. Okay. Which I still agree with you would seem unlikely at that high elevation. So, you have to consider other factors that may not be being considered in this equation. And on the other hand, the elevation of the island does go up from there. So, this vault is downhill from there. Okay. So, there's a lot of land there. And even if it's too high for a storm surge, okay, maybe there's a lot of runoff. All right. Coming down towards the vault. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, this is my thing. And for folks who have ever been homeowners, and if you haven't, then you don't have to worry about this. But my crawl space has been flooding. And I was trying to figure out why it's flooding. And the guys are down there, and a big downpour came. And in North Carolina, especially lately, we've been getting these really intense downpours. They're down under there. Like, it's pouring through the wall because the foundation of my house is brick. And it has what are called weep holes, which are gaps in the mortar between every couple of, a few bricks here and there, which is really to prevent, I'm becoming an expert on this after paying people to tell me what the problem is. Oh, dear. Which is to prevent water from collecting inside the bricks in your foundation. But what I found was that people had been, landscapers had been putting so much mulch outside my house that they piled it up to where it was right up to where these weep holes were that were originally very high up. And the rain would make a little swimming pool and then pour through the weep holes into the crawl space. All I had to do was shovel out the mulch and dig it down basically the height of one brick and the problem went away. But one thing I will say is that with these downpours and this being right near the roof, the speed with which this little pool area would fill up was staggering. So I'm just saying I can see a lot of rain pouring into this thing. You see the pictures of the vault if you go to our website and you look at the pictures for this episode. But again, if the ground is super permeable, basically coral, it's hard to imagine the water collecting in there to the point where it would float things. But this is my other big counterpoint to this statement, to Dunning's assessment here, is the wooden coffin was not moved, which you would think would be the first thing to float. So it's like if all the floating is happening and then the lightest coffin that was more likely to float and have much higher buoyancy isn't going anywhere. Why is that? And the other thing you might say is, well, it never happened anyway. And it's like, well, if it didn't, why are we even talking about buoyancy? Like why are we even having this conversation? That's right. Exactly. And I don't know how one coffin, it would work for one coffin to be placed on top of another if they're all floating maybe. Again, weird things happen. I'll grant you that. Well, supposedly the children's coffins in some drawings I saw, but who knows how accurate they are. But there were some historical sketches that implied that the children's coffins, which were some of the earliest ones that went in there, were eventually stacked on top of the adults that joined later. Which makes sense because the adults are the bigger ones. You're building like a pyramid of coffins. Because you're not going to put a giant lead-lined coffin on top of a child's lead-lined coffin. And it's lead-lined. It's not totally lead. I think it's wood on the outside, lead on the inside. It's not entirely clear to me, the construction. But yeah, it still doesn't make sense. And it doesn't make sense that this wooden one was in there, at least by one account, for a dozen years undisturbed. And then the lead ones are tossed all over the place with the canoe theory or whatever you want to call it. None of it makes sense to me. But here's the other thing. There is a lot of speculation going on here in Dunning's assessment. Not to say that our whole show isn't based on speculation. But it's always interesting to me when the skeptical explanations are speculating on the science as much as paranormal researchers like us are speculating on the paranormal aspects. To me, it's the same thing. It's a tug of war. Yeah, it's that old chestnut. Look, it's like in the movies. I said in cinema theory or just in cinema criticism, it's called suspension of disbelief. Right. Like, okay, that didn't make sense, but we're entertaining this and, you know, we're being entertained and we're just going to let that slide. Right, right. And so, yeah, when you have – and maybe it's a psychological thing when you're on the side of reason and logic that it's more accepting to go with it and say phrases like more than likely. Yeah. More than enough water was there. But in my view, this is very much a possibility. Okay, that's your view. I like how that's worded. So I give them a lot of credit, again, because it's important how you phrase these things because you're shaping thought and opinion. Right. And people will either continue on with their wonder and research or just thinking about it, or you are done with it. It's like, that's enough. I've heard enough. That's good. Yeah. I'm satisfied with this explanation. So that's a personal view. But I think when you're on that side of it, the argument, then you maybe get more leeway is all I'm going to say with leaving those things kind of dangling. And again, the one that it's not just him, but many others have pointed to, like the Betts sphere, for example. And it's like, okay, here's how we make, you know, we pound that square peg into the round hole of logic. Like that artists, you know, he claimed that he had a collection of metal spheres that he got, you know, they're ball valves, giant ones. They're very similar to ones they actually make and manufacture. And he had a bunch of those rolling around the top of his VW van. One fell off at a turn. That rolled miles inland over very rough terrain just by wind. A perfectly round spherical thing got pushed by wind miles inland into very bumpy and dense foliage. It's like, okay, that's, you've gone too far. So I always say the rational explanation becomes more irrational than the irrational explanation. Yeah, than the little green man thing. But that's what I'm saying. Yeah, it's just like, okay, so we'll give you these outs because it has to be rational. It has to be logical. Well, anyway, the vault was about 12 feet deep, 3.7 meters, I guess they say, placing it just below ground level. And Barbados does receive significant rainfall, sometimes half the days of the year. But as Dunning said, in theory, saturated conditions could cause it to fill the crypt, allowing the coffins to float. But if lead coffins can float, then a flood could toss them around and even cause the observed damage like broken corners, in theory. Okay, but that water theory falls apart a little bit on the security measures taken by Governor Kommermere during the final investigation in 1820, as we said. So they opened the vault and found the six coffins in, quote, wild disarray. But the fine sand they had, meticulously sprinkled across the floor, was undisturbed, showing no footprints, if you believe this account at all. That's right. And if floodwaters had risen and subsided, they would have washed that sand all around. You would have been able to tell. There would have been unmistakable traces of its action. Right. Furthermore, Nathan Lucas, the member of parliament, whose autograph record Lang eventually acquired, explicitly confirmed the confusion, as they say, for how they were laid out, of the lead coffins. But specifically, quote, denied that there was any trace of the presence of water, end quote. Right. So scratch inundation. Yes. Let's look about, okay, what about terrestrial violence? Because some initial published versions, like Alexander, questioned if the cause was indeed something like an earthquake, which occasioned it, as he said. Yeah. Well, researchers quickly dismissed this. Earthquakes were rare in Barbados, and historical searches have failed to find any significant seismic event between 1812 and 1820 that could account for shaking up the coffins. And as Lang pointed out, an earthquake strong enough to violently toss massive lead coffins five times over an eight-year period, yet so confined that it disturbed nothing else on the island, is simply not credible. Okay. All right, then. Now that, all right. I know, look, weird things happen. You and I have lived for decades in earthquake country. Yes. And we have a lot of stories. There's one after the bad quake in, not Silomar. Where did that start, Scott? Oh, Northridge? That's right, the Northridge quake. Yes, the Northridge. I remember some people we knew who this happened to at college, they were saying, like, when it stopped, my bed was on the opposite side of the room, and my roommates was on the other side. Oh, yeah. The beds had shaken that much that they ended up on opposite sides. Yeah. I think so. Or they were both together. Somehow, one bed went all the way across the room during an earthquake. But you know what, that's outlay. Come on, that's earthquake country. We're not talking about that here. So, yeah, to me, much less likely. Yeah, yeah. Now, the final common natural theory revolves around gases of corruption. Yes. And this idea is that pressure built up inside the lead coffins and caused them to move like, quote, rockets, which is equally as terrifying to me. Yeah. Yeah, what's going on there? The thing that also, the thing that creeped me out as a kid, and in this moment, is I'm very sensitive to smells. Yeah. Not that they bother me, but I have a very acute sense of smell, and just, I can picture this. Yeah. So, when you say sealed, like Tupperware, gases, okay, I'll leave it there. Yeah, well, here's the good news for you, I guess, or your peace of mind. This, too, fails the physical test. So, Lange, in his rigorous analysis, flatly rejected the gas explosion theory. He stated that if gas pressure built up violently enough to move a coffin, especially one requiring a half dozen men just to lift, it would not just move it. It would explode it. Exactly. Citing the case of Henry VIII's coffin. I was going to mention that, but I was going to spare you. Did his coffin explode? I don't think I knew that. But Lucas's account explicitly mentioned that he said nothing of any injury to the coffin, only, again, wild confusion, which is the name of my high school band. Yeah. I like it. Yeah, thanks. Very nice. But the story you're talking about is that there was some king's body on display lying in state that did, apparently did pop. Ugh, I don't think I knew that. Yeah, thank you, Mr. Lyon. Moving on. All right. Well, hey, it is Halloween. Come on. It's a spooky gross season. Yeah, that's right. Popping bodies. This is the time for this kind of thing. Right. We'll just look it up, folks. Yeah. That makes for nobody came to the wake afterwards for the snacks. Yeah. Let's put it that way. I hope he ate before that. Okay. Now, perhaps more important from a philosophical standpoint here, why should only the Chase coffins or the Walron family coffin, if we count Mrs. Goddard, be afflicted by this violently gaseous internal pressure? But none of the other seal-led coffins in neighboring vaults across the cemetery. So why isn't this happening everywhere? If this happens in one place, why not? At this point, we've laid out the horrifying physical descriptions of the vault, the heavy lead coffins tossed around like kindling, the undisturbed sand, the intact seals. But for me, Forrest, I think one of the most compelling arguments comes from the sociological angle. The idea that this entire thing could be some kind of Masonic fabrication or at least a story that got way out of hand. The skeptical investigator, Joe Nickel, who recently passed and we will always have tremendous respect for, called the Chase vault stories historically dubious, suggesting that the whole setup might be a Masonic allegory. Okay. So I'm not, when I was looking over those notes and the Masonic angle here, which I mentioned earlier, perhaps you could explain this to me. It's just that you're thinking now that because the Masons may be to be blamed for this because it's some kind of allegorical display in that they acted this out. And that I read one line, it's like, oh, okay, so there's a lot of Masonic stuff in here. And we know those Masons are always making stuff up and doing pranks in their aprons. Yeah. I mean, what Joe was saying here was like, oh, well, it's about a secret vault that's a very Masonic idea and it symbolizes death where divine truth is ultimately revealed. And he also said that some of the men, I think two of the men named in the story were Masons and that the narrative itself is riddled with symbols and phrases that they would instantly recognize. Now, I couldn't track this down. I really wanted to find this. It's in a particular issue of Fate Magazine that we could get, but I couldn't get in time for the show. I did look for it. Right, right, right. Stacks and stacks of Fate Magazine, but I didn't have this one. So I'm curious how specific he got about the symbols and phrases that are embedded in the story itself. I do think that's an interesting idea, and I think there's probably no doubt that stories are handed down by the Masons and other organizations, you know, like religion, that are supposed to have messages in them to carry forward to future generations. And if you're in a secret society, maybe this is the perfect kind of story for that. But on the other hand, when you say, oh, well, two of these guys that were involved in it were known Masons on the island, I'm just like, well, this is Barbados. This is a small island. Yeah, yeah. During a time of slavery, is it fair to say there's probably a lot of Masons on the island, I would say. I'm sure. Yeah. So it's like, I don't know if that's all that weird back then. And, you know, as much respect as I have for Joe, and that is a lot, this seems like a little bit of a stretch for me. But he did say, and I'm quoting from Wikipedia here, that in a similar tale of Restless Coffins was told, circulated in 1943, that specifically included a party of Freemasons and a vault containing the founder of Freemasonry in Barbados. But my thing is, like, why is a story over 100 years later proof that the one before it was allegorical? I don't get that. Like, to me, that's a leap, too. And that's a little bit kind of the thing I thought about when Lang was talking about, well, we have this other story with the Arnberg vault and the coffins getting crazy. And it's like, well, that was 30 or 40 years later or whatever it was. That's all later. So, like, I get the bilocation idea and I get the Masonic idea and all these implications. But nobody is definitively pointing to the story that predates the Barbados one. No one is doing that yet that I have found in our research. Hmm. Well, I mean, I guess it's your view on, look, we, you know, I have family members, grandparents, great uncles, you know, they're Masonic members. Sure, yeah. Some in high standing. I know lots of Masons, yeah, sure. Yeah, it's just like, I think the thing of like, oh, well, they would make up and further this story because it suits their purporting of their narrative. They're pushing here. Right. And their belief system. It's like, yeah, but I think if you were a Mason, if you were involved in that, that's not really their bag. You know what I'm saying? Like, that's not really, no, no shade against any other fraternal organization that they go around, you know, doing goofy things here over the discounted and subsidized beer and other alcohols at the bar there. But just saying that that's not really their thing in my view. And I think if you talk to them, that would not be. Now, they do. Here's the thing is that they will act out during their ceremonies allegorical, like, mini plays. Sure. Let me skits to emphasize to their own members the importance of these stories. But this, to the public, doesn't really track, as they say, for me, anyway. Astonishing Legends is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible. Financial geniuses. Monetary magicians. These are things that people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home, and more. Plus, you can count on their great customer service to help you when you need it. So your dollar goes a long way. Visit Progressive.com to see if you could save on car insurance. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Yes, potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. All right, quick quiz for the hiring managers out there. What's worse, being understaffed or being poorly staffed? Well, that's a trick question, because both are recipes for chaos. 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Not just a tee. The band tee. From the last show your favorite band ever played. You wore it everywhere. Then, your BFF started glaring in. Which was cute until they unfriended you and took it with them. Which was not so cute. Anyway, now you're on eBay. And there it is. Same tee from the same tour. Still living in your memory, rent-free, forever. See? The things you love have a way of finding their way back to you. But eBay isn't just for getting whatever your ex-BFF stole back. It's also for that rare championship foul ball you caught. Then, heroically, gave to the kid next to you. And where else are you going to find your first car? The one you wish you never sold. But now, you finally get the chance to take back home. For good this time. Shop eBay for millions of finds. Each with a story. eBay. Things people love. Hello, everyone. I'm Sheila from Ashland, Kentucky. And this is Astonishing Legends. Let's get back to the show. All right. So, we have to mention one other skeptic. Benjamin Radford. He is a modern investigator and a writer known for his skeptical analysis of the Chase Vault phenomenon. His work, particularly his article called Reopening the Chase Vault Mystery, was published in Skeptical Inquirer in 2020. Oh, really recently. And we subscribe to that online. Yeah. But that places the entire story within a larger context of global legends. Indeed, it does. You know, Radford's analysis shifts the focus away from what's called terrestrial mechanics and towards maybe what we're more aligned with, the evolution of folklore here. Right. Treating the Chase Vault not as a unique anomaly, let's say, but as, quote, one version of a broader moving coughing legend. That has more appeal to me than earth mechanics, okay? So, what he's doing, he's proposing that the narrative wasn't necessarily created as an intentional hoax, but that it gained its specific and strange details as people retold it. And then emphasizing and adding elements over time, you know, according to their own established beliefs or agendas. And this may include, perhaps, the Freemason allegory Joe Nickel had noted. Right. So, that point of view provides a tidy explanation for the persistent nature of the tale, suggesting it's a self-correcting piece of folklore rather than a verifiable event. We know that Radford is not just writing about it. He's also active in the podcast space, having co-hosted an episode dedicated to the subject, The Dancing Coffins of Chase Vault, on the excellent podcast, Squaring the Strange. So, look for that if you haven't read it. Ah, very cool. Yeah. Now, Radford argues that people just retold a great story, adding elements like the Masonic overlay to suit their own agendas or beliefs. He even went inside the vault recently in 2019 and found that the bricks inside were intact, showing no damage, which should have been inevitable if massive lead coffins were repeatedly crashing into them. Well, one would think, logically, of course. But with all due respect, Radford, and I'm going to strike that, I'm not sure how I feel about it, with all due respect. Respect is due, but that just phrase is tired. Yeah, yes, yes. No, seriously, with respect, with great respect to Radford, that's one of those things that we get hung up on, I have to say. And it goes back to when we talk about the skeptical viewpoint saying, you know, that haunting can't be real because the ghost you saw actually lived two miles down the road. Remember, we always say, like, logically, that doesn't make sense. I don't believe in ghosts, but if I did, that wouldn't make sense. This one wouldn't be here unless it could have ridden a bus or a bicycle. But here, what we're talking about is, you know, presupposes a lot of things about how the paranormal works, okay? In spite of all the tellings of the Chase Vault coffins being violently tossed about, they weren't violently tossed about at all. Right. That's not the description. Yeah. They were just in new positions that made it appear they had been violently tossed about. Exactly. So the skeptical viewpoint that Radford is taking about a lack of damage to the walls inside the vault is constrained by the idea that whatever happened, it must have been violent and obeying the laws of physics. It should have left damage. But we're talking about something that no human saw happen. Who's to say they didn't float in the air like the Ghost Lady in Ghostbusters or Siegfried and Roy in Vegas? Wait, I did not expect you to pull out Sieg and Roy. I was thinking about the Ghost Lady in Ghostbusters, or just basically just floating through the air, but wow. With fishing strength. No, you know what we're going towards here? The first thought, when this concept was put forth of like, okay, so then we're going to apply some logic to how this may have happened. Right. As we're talking about the laws of the paranormal and what can and cannot happen, it's like, oh, well then this must be some kind of a portation perhaps that they just, maybe they did float through the air. Maybe they just suddenly in one instance were there. Yes. From one place to another. Right. You know, maybe this wasn't a very slow process, like your racing stones, the racetrack at the Mojave there. Right. It's just over time and it appears that way over decades or years, we couldn't see in there. Okay. So that's the fact. Maybe the space-time continuum hiccuped and then the movement happened like it did with the, you know, as we said, sailing rocks or some other, I'm trying to think of the, there's another natural phenomenon that happens. It occurs so slowly, you don't notice it. Right. Right. And it's invisible to the human eye. It's a sleight of hand. It's an illusion. Yeah. So over a long time, like a year, maybe this could happen or, okay, maybe if they did float on water, maybe they wouldn't really hurt the stone. You know what I'm saying? There's a lot of things then you're, then you really have to do a bunch of mental gymnastics to kind of make one thing work. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes me a little crazy, honestly, deconstructing the myth. It's like making blind assumptions about the nature of the journey that led to the end result. It's unknowable without eyewitnesses or cameras or something to record. Record it happening. But, you know, now we're getting into Brandolini's Law, some people will say. Oh. And I get that. Wait, what is it? Is that a new series? It's relatively new. I think 2000, early 2000s, maybe. Oh, I thought it was a TV show. No. Yeah. It's not a new law procedural, Brandolini's Law? No. What is it then? It says, the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it. Did you just make that up? No, it's real. That does not sound like a thing. Look it up. Oh, I'm going to trust you on that. But seriously, no one, not us, not Joe Nickel, if he was still with us, not Benjamin Radford, can definitively say how any of the coffins, if you believe any of this at all, were actually transported from point A to point B. No one saw that. It just looked like a violent thing happened. But we don't know that. Nobody knows that. Yeah, exactly. It's like if you had placed the, oh, we've heard about this all the time with strange aportation tales. Well, getting back to poltergeist, the stacking of the kitchen table chairs. Yeah. We've actually heard stories where people being serious, like something like that happened. Yeah. Or what's the latest thing with the poltergeist where the clothes were stuffed and arranged like mannequins in the Stratford poltergeist story boggles the mind. But then you think, okay, maybe it didn't happen. Anyway, moving on. We know Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur, the famous creator of Sherlock Holmes weighed in on this subject, suggesting that animal magnetism might have been the source of the movement. And you know, Doyle wasn't alone in looking towards the fringe at that point. He also suggested that the spirits of the suicides, Dorcas Chase and her father, Thomas, were the ones wreaking havoc in the tomb. And we know that he had a mind and an eye towards the supernatural possibilities. Yes, he did. You know, but we also know, again, yeah, he, you know, take it in by, there's a lot of debate and some testy exchanges back in the day about that kind of stuff. But, you know, a lot of people are giving him shade here for falling for the hoax fairy pictures back in the day. And then, you know, being a huge fan of spiritualism, you know, you could say, okay, well, that said, you know, fake fairy pictures don't mean fairies ain't real. But I would say this, here's the other thing, which I love throws into the works. And it is so much about human nature. Yeah. So later on, after I think the, it was found out or they confessed the girl, the woman who took the photographs. The fake fairy photographs. The fake fairy photos said, yeah, some of them are fake. Right. Not all of them. And it's like, okay, come on now. Are you just, are you still, you know, yanking the chain here? What are you doing? Just, if you're going to admit to some of them. We have seen that. I mean, we have seen, it's something that I think we first noticed when we covered the Delphus ring. Right. And it was the first time that I sociologically and psychologically thought about these people that had experiences and then they weren't being believed or they did get sort of caught up in the attention they were getting. And it seemed a lot like over the years, the, you know, the 11 years now that we've been doing this, sometimes you do think the first event seems real and then subsequent and ensuing events feel a little bit made up, even by the same person. And I find that that aligns with human nature. And this idea, it's like, oh, this thing happened to me and all these people are paying, but now either the, no one believes me. Right. So I'm going to say that it happened a bunch more times because I want them to believe this first one that I know was real or, oh, this, look at this. People are paying attention to me. I'm going to say it happened again or whatever. And what happens then is other folks come along and they say, oh, this third event, no way. I was there. It didn't happen. And then they throw the baby out with the bathwater and say that nothing ever happened. And unfortunately, I think the experiencers are doing themselves a disservice, but it's hard psychologically when you're in that position of being an experiencer, of not trying to keep it going until you can figure it out or until people believe you. And that's why you always hear them, Pascagoula, all these folks are just like, I wish I had never said anything because they don't get any kind of closure. All they get is called crazy. And so they can either say, well, it kept happening. I saw that thing again. I saw that monster again in the woods. I saw whatever. And that does seem like a thing that happens. So with the girl, and we've never covered those fairy photos. If we had, I would know a lot more about her. Yeah, yeah. But maybe she took a picture and there was a fairy. And then she went crazy and started faking. Of course, that took a high level of skill because those pictures are good. But still. Yeah, for the time, not bad. Yeah. It's also like the photos of the floating heads off the ship. We were going to talk about that. Oh, the SS Watertown. That's right. Yes. And one of Scott's original ideas for the podcast, the Dead Water Theory. Yes. Or Phenomena. Yeah. Which is fascinating. But no, I was going to say just quickly before you move on here, before you move on, is that I think, you know, the opposite could happen. And I call it the, there's two variations of it. One is the boy who cried wolf in that you put out some fake stories about something spectacular happening. And then those are found out to be false. And then something real, really spectacular and impossible happens. And then nobody believes you. Or it's the Jose Chung scenario where you're doing something else to fake something. And then something else on top of that extraordinary happens. My favorite X-Files episode ever. Yeah. Because again, logically, that's a possibility. If you believe that something extraordinary can happen. All of this brings us back to what Andrew Lang observed during his research into this story's origins. Which incidentally, he could not substantiate in contemporary documents like the burial register or local newspapers. The economy of Barbados at this time was supported entirely by slavery. The majority of the slaves there were from Ghana. And Andrew Lang noted a very specific local theory attributed to the Ghanians on the island. They believed that the disturbances were caused by the corpse of Dorcas Chase, again, who had died by suicide. And the other dead bodies were trying to expel her from the vault, which is something we just talked about. The idea of expulsion by a corpse, whether Dorcas or Colonel Chase, who had also reportedly died by his own hand, is what truly ties the Barbados case to the other moving coffin legends, like the one in Arnsberg, where the presence of a death by suicide corpse was also given as the supposed cause. Right. Okay. So on one side, we have the materialists and skeptics suggesting a literary fabrication or a Masonic morality play, which is, again, odd. But, okay, I'll accept that, put that on the table. And this is backed by modern inspections of intact bricks. But countering that is a powerful and persistent narrative structure, regardless of your belief system, in that there's some kind of concept of psychic energy, some kind of power, or something like animal magnetism, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle suggested, is disturbing the dead folks. And then underpinning all of it is that this ancient fear that a death violating the natural order, specifically taking one's own life, creates a spiritual contagion that the peaceful dead reject. So there's something that, again, that's very biblical, you could say. It goes against a lot of religions, that it's still a big no-no, and then you end up in some kind of purgatory or limbo. Right. Where you're just kind of, you're bouncing around. And so whether the coffins truly moved or not, the belief systems in these theories here behind this legend reveal kind of a tension between the scientific and the supernatural mind, depending on your viewpoint, and what you think really happened. Yeah, which brings us back to the enduring nature of the mystery. Whether you lean towards Joe Nichols' theory of a story fabricated as a Masonic allegory, laden with symbols Freemasons would recognize, or Benjamin Radford's analysis that it's simply a powerful oral tradition, a moving coffin legend embellished over time. The fact remains that from earthquakes and inundation to gas explosions and animal magnetism, all have failed to explain what happened, if it did happen anyway. In thinking about the types of forces that can happen here. Then we're talking about aportation perhaps, as we just discussed in Skulls. Yeah. You have an unwanted, almost like a cursed kind of thing with remains, human remains. And that's something, if you're talking about the taking of your own life theory and that's disrupted the supernatural order or the rules of the underworld, and it's a big faux pas, no-no, then there is rebellion against that, rejection and some kind of, actually what we're talking about here is a lot of psychic force, if you're going to go that route, to move these heavy, heavy objects. So it's a lot of energy, it's a lot of power, and does that fit within the usual things that are by human spirits or not? And then you can really parse that out if you're way into the woo. So we're talking about forces here, or force of sociology, story, myth, and making this enduring tale perhaps, a legend, because we're still talking about it and people are still looking into it. People are still looking into it, and including us, because it has all the makings of an astonishing legend. One of the great upsides of a tale like this is that it's drawn the attention of great investigators throughout history, so we have the benefit of all their work and perspectives. Skeptics have offered their respectable theories, but the core of this tale remains stubbornly unexplained. Consider this. On five separate occasions, spanning nearly eight years from 1812 to 1820, the lead-lined coffins within the Chase Vault were allegedly disturbed in ways that defy rational explanation. The final incident was even corroborated by a double-signed eyewitness statement. To this day, no one can definitively explain what went on each time that vault was sealed shut with concrete and stone. It could be that we're not meant to know. That's going to wrap up episode 318 of Astonishing Legends. Stay tuned after the credits to hear some local folklore from Barbados that fours scraped together. It's really cool stuff, and it's going to be after the closing credits. Links to all our research are in our show notes. This was the first of three spooky main shows in a row for October, so we'll be back next week. As always, look for new episodes of the Dead Letter Office weekly on Tuesdays, and keep an eye on our Patreon for more bonus content. Don't forget the 2025 limited edition Halloween merch is in the store right now, and this year in particular, supplies are limited. So visit AstonishingLegends.com and click on Store and AL Apparel and Gear to get those. Astonishing Legends is edited by Sarah Voorhees-Wendel at VW Sound. Our co-producer is Tess Feifel, who also leads our research efforts and manages our social media. And we're grateful for the hard work of our technical producer, Ed Vakola, behind the scenes. Special thanks to our announcer, John Bolin, for lending his voice to our shows. Hi, I'm Brittany Williams. Hiya, this is Sandra. Hi, I'm Sheila Mead. I don't know if you need it, but in case you do, here's a noise sample. 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You can also visit us at Patreon.com slash AstonishingLegends, where patrons have access to commercial-free versions of both the main show and the Dead Letter office, as well as additional bonus content, including the Patreon-exclusive show, The Astonishing Junk Drawer. No part of this show may be reproduced anywhere without permission. Copyright Astonishing Legends Productions. Good night. We cherish local legends and how local viewpoints paint these pictures because, hey, in many ways these stories are flavored by the culture that they exist in. Again, every place has them, but specific to Barbados, tying into the roots of Africa and belief and their legends and spirituality here, you get the legend of the Duppies. First of all, I love the name because it sounds like puppies or guppies, but these are malevolent spirits coming from Bajan folklore, the locals, the natives, and it originates out of Africa. As we've heard so many times before, with every culture, these things are bad and they bring misfortune and woe and misery and they haunt people at night. There are several types of them. There is a hag, an old hag type of spirit. During the day, she looks like an old woman, like the old hag thing, but at night, she doffs her skin. Her skin comes off. She transforms then into a ball of fire and sucks the blood of infants. There is something called a rolling calf, and this is some type of creature that has chains around its body that may be connected to the old hag in some way. Again, that's like a Jacob Marley thing, speaking of sunny Caribbean climes. These duppies, they're a spirit that are causing mischief, disruption, is perhaps the moving coffins, the work of duppies. We may not know. A couple of other things here. So the Hartman legend, it's a cautionary tale. So again, if we're talking about made up tales that get transformed over many decades to instruct and inform or inspire, you know, allegorical, this is one of, you know, that's told to keep children in line. So it's a little like Krampus or Llorona, you know, you better behave or the Hartman comes to get you and he, he preys on bad children and how he does it is that he tempts them with candy and as they get closer, he then carves out their hearts and he feeds them to the devil. Get that? He's described as some kind of skeleton figure and has cow legs and he drives around in a black hearse. So what I like is that you have elements that are modern because kids will tie in with that. And, uh, you know, sometimes you see a black hearse, like you better watch out, you better not be a spoiled brat or the Hartman is going to get you. That one is just a kind of a creepy kid story, especially the evil cardiology element here. And then there's a, uh, of course there's a great haunted house called Fisher Pond. And, uh, this house is, it's a plantation house and it's 350 years old at least. And it's one of their most famous haunted locations there in Barbados. And, uh, you know, the other resident ghost name, uh, her name's Violet. And she is thought to have drowned in a nearby pond and she haunts the mansion here, the plantation house. So, but people visit that and they get spooked and they get haunted. And, uh, you and I one day, Scott should visit the chase vault and go have a fish fry afterwards. I'm super in. Let's do it. Let's do it. We just have to avoid this last thing I'm going to mention called the steel donkey. Oh, this story is a legend of a man who, uh, he creates some kind of large steel donkey statue and it's going to be placed on his property grounds. Somehow though, he, he angers this thing or he disrespects it because he did not finish it or left it in disarray. And so a curse is born and then the statue comes to life. It attacks its owner and escapes and it has glowing red eyes and it haunts the roads at night and it terrorizes people who are traveling alone on dark roads. And it sounds a lot like Blucifer. It really does. It's like a dead match for Blucifer. Wild. Who harmed its creator. Yeah. Killed him. But totally unrelated. So again, is this a bi-location story of some kind of mythical elements of, of the creator making a monster that turns on him. Right. And kills the owner and then terrorizes everyone else. So thank you, mad scientist doctor for making this thing or sculptor and turning this loose upon people in the, uh, walking home alone at night or flying out of Denver. Those are fascinating stories. That's, that's really interesting stuff. I love it. The most, uh, attracting element though, of course, for us again, is the fish fry. So man, let's just go. Let's, we did a vacation. I see. Let's get down there. Check this thing out. 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