Category: History Blog

Almost every culture on the planet has some form of “monster” in their belief systems. Sometimes these “monsters” are based on actual events that have, over the generations, morphed into something far more spectacular than what actually happened. Sometimes, as in the case of “sea serpents”, they’re based genuine animals that were hitherto unknown to the people who created the stories. Yet other times the “monsters” are purely creatures of fiction, invented as entertainment to pass a long winter’s night, to keep an invading army away, or as morality tales for children.

What most of these “monsters” have in common is that they don’t exist. But in the late 1800s, there was a monster that was very real. And not only is the the story about the monster itself interesting, so too is the tale of how and why it came into existence.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to The Red Ghost.

As you probably know, the United States and Mexico fought a war between 1846 to 1848. As a result of America’s victory, the US was given undisputed control of Texas, as well as the entire states of California, Nevada and Utah, in addition to most of Arizona and parts of Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico. Although American settlers quickly rushed to certain parts of these new lands, much of the land would remain sparsely populated – except by Native Americans – for almost 30 years.

By the 1880s, though, much of what would one day become Arizona had been converted into ranches or farmland. That didn’t mean that everything was peaceful, however. The iconic Apache warlord Geronimo still terrorized the area, and it wasn’t uncommon for a rancher to wake up and find his livestock stolen, his fences destroyed or his neighbors killed or maimed by Geronimo and his men.

It was because of the threat of Geronimo that two women were left alone in their house on Eagle Creek in southwest Arizona one morning in 1883. Geronimo had been active in the area the past few nights, so the men of the family left early that morning to check on their sheep.

Continue reading “The Legend of Fantasia Colorado”

When the Roman Empire collapsed in AD 476, Europe was shattered into thousands of tiny kingdoms. Over time, these tiny kingdoms grew, either by merging through marriage or by conquest. And thus, by the 10th century, the feudal system was in place all over the continent.

Under this system, a lord (or king) had absolute control over a span of territory that ranged in size from a few square miles to several hundred square miles. Underneath the lord were the clergy and knights, who protected the lord both spiritually and physically. Underneath them came the merchants. Underneath the merchants were skilled laborers, like blacksmiths and coopers. And underneath the skilled laborers were the unskilled laborers, or serfs, who farmed the lord’s land.

It might initially seem that the feudal system was a one-way hierarchy. After all, the serfs could not move (or even travel, in most cases) without their lord’s permission. They grew crops on the lord’s land, and were required to give him a large portion of their harvest to pay rent. But the feudal system had a paternal side, too. The lord was expected to treat the serfs fairly, and to use his knights to protect them from invading armies or bandits.

In time, these small societies grew in size, as one small kingdom was conquered and absorbed into another, or as marriage created associations between such kingdoms. Eventually, these small kingdoms would grow into the modern countries of England and France (and eventually Germany and Italy, although those two countries wouldn’t be fully formed until the 19th century).

Here’s the interesting thing, though: from around AD 900 until the American Civil War, most armies were based on that feudal system. Instead of a “national army” made up of “English” soldiers, most armies were made up of thousands of individual regiments formed by dukes, earls, and other forms of nobility. As soon as a king knew that an invasion was coming, he’d put out a call to his aristocracy, who would organize their own knights and take them wherever the king wanted them. Although the soldiers were certainly loyal to their king, they generally only took orders from their local lord.

Although this system would break down over time (especially by the time of Napoleon, the founder of the first “modern army”), traces of it nevertheless persisted until the US Civil War, when Irish immigrants were allowed to create their own regiments for the Union army. So instead of “Lord Fluffernutter’s Essex Cavalry” you had “O’Connor’s 96th Irish Infantry”. So… slightly different, yet the same.

Here’s what’s really interesting, though. There is still one such “feudal army” in Europe: the Atholl Highlanders.

Continue reading “The Last Personal Army”

Most Americans are familiar with the story of the “Pied Piper of Hamelin”, a fairy tale included in thousands of children’s storybooks. For those of you that have never heard the tale, or, if you’re a bit rusty on the details, the story goes like this:

In 1284, the town of Hamelin, Germany had a massive rat infestation. A stranger appeared in town, offering to get rid of the rats for a fee. The townsfolk agreed, and the man whipped out a pipe (the musical kind) and started playing a tune. The rats all heard the music and started following the piper, who then walked into the Weser River, causing all the rats to drown. For some reason, the townspeople then refused to “pay the piper” as it were, and the man vowed to get his revenge on the people of Hamelin. He came back a few weeks later and, when all the townsfolk were in church, the man piped a tune and lured 130 of the town’s children to a nearby cave, where they were never heard from again.

Like any folktale, there are several versions of the story. In many versions, only two of the town’s children survive – a crippled boy who couldn’t keep up with the others, and a deaf child who never heard the piper’s tune. In other versions of the story, the children are led to the Weser and drowned just like the rats. In still other versions, the piper takes the children to a cave and holds them hostage until the town either a) pays him the fee he was promised; or b) gives him a huge amount of gold as ransom.

But what you probably don’t know about the Pied Piper story is that most historians believe that it’s based on actual events!

Around the year 1300, the citizens of Hamelin installed a stained glass window in their local church depicting a piper leading the town’s children away (the “rat infestation” wasn’t added to the story until the 1560s). At the time, stained glass windows in churches were often dedicated to local tragedies; more “whimsical” use of stained glass (such as in the Shakespeare Memorial in London’s Southwark Cathedral) would come much later. Sadly, although there are several contemporary written accounts of the window, we don’t know what it actually looked like, as it was destroyed in 1660. Additionally, surviving town records indicate that there was, in fact, some such “tragedy” in the town in June of 1284.

Continue reading “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”

The court of Queen Elizabeth I was a dour place, filled with sycophants decked out in the drab black cloaks fashionable at the time. But then Walter Raleigh showed up, dressed like a peacock in garish colors in a dizzying array of expensive fabrics like silks and damasks. Raleigh certainly dressed to impress – in 1584, he reported the theft of three clothing items worth almost £115 – which was more than enough money to run an entire household (including servants) for an entire year!

But Raleigh came to court with more than just nice clothes. He was intelligent, witty, and just plain charming. It was Walter Raleigh, for example, who allegedly laid one of his expensive cloaks over a mud puddle so that Elizabeth wouldn’t dirty her royal feet. He could play music, write poetry, flirt and talk about almost any issue in his West Country accent, which Elizabeth found perfectly adorable.

She quickly began lavishing gifts on Raleigh, from titles and royal appointments to estates and monopolies. It was the monopolies on wine licenses (granted by Elizabeth in 1583) and the export of wool (1585) that gave Raleigh immense wealth that he used to buy more of his beloved expensive clothes, to spare no expense in redecorating and refurbishing the estates that Elizabeth had given him, and to fund an entourage of 30 servants (each of whom needed their own set of fancy clothes, too!). Raleigh quickly rose from a virtual nobody to become one of the richest men in England, and he used his wealth in ways and quantities that shocked and staggered his contemporaries. Raleigh, indeed, threw money around in ways that would make even the gaudiest hip-hop mogul of today hang his head in disgust.

But Raleigh was more than just flash. He had a dream… a dream of an English colony in the wilderness of America. In 1584, Raleigh sent his first colony to Virginia (which then comprised a section of what would later become North Carolina). The colonists landed at Roanoke Island in present-day Dare County, North Carolina. The colonists would suffer greatly due to lack of food (mainly caused by poor selection of colonists) and troubled relations with local Indian tribes. The expedition ended in failure in 1586.

Raleigh found himself unable to fund a second trip on his own, so a joint-stock company was created. When enough investors had been lined up, Raleigh launched a second expedition in 1587. This group of colonists were supposed to stop by Roanoke Island and pick up a few soldiers left to guard the settlement after the first expedition left. They were then to settle somewhere north on Chesapeake Bay. However, Simon Fernandez, the captain of the colony’s main ship, the Susan Constant, unceremoniously dumped the colonists on Roanoke Island on July 22, 1587, as he wanted to get to the Caribbean as quickly as possible to loot Spanish treasure ships.

Although Raleigh and company promised the colonists a steady stream of supply ships, it wasn’t to be. By the time John White (a friend of Raleigh’s and overall commander of the expedition) arrived back in England from Roanoke, it was too late in the year to return to Virginia. Then the Spanish Armada sailed towards England, and every ocean-worthy ship was commandeered for the defense of the realm. White managed to get a special dispensation from the Queen to allow two small ships to sail to Roanoke in 1588, but the captains of these ships were greedy and tried to capture Spanish ships while in transit; instead, they were captured and the venture was a total loss.

Continue reading “The Lost Tribe”

Laughter is the best medicine, or so the old saying goes. But what if laughter wasn’t the best medicine? What if laughter was the disease?

It all started in a boarding school in Tanganyika in January of 1962. These were heady times for the nation on Africa’s east coast: the country had only received its independence from Britain a few weeks previously, and it had yet to merge with Zanzibar to form the modern nation of Tanzania. Perhaps the joy of independence or the stress of what the future might hold was just too much. No one, it seems, will ever know for sure what the root cause of the epidemic was. All that’s known for sure is that someone told someone else a joke at an all-girls boarding school at Kashasha village on the morning of January 30, 1962. The three students involved in the joke became subject to uncontrollable fits of laughter, sometimes lasting only a few minutes, other times lasting as long as 16 hours. Since laughter is, in some sense, contagious, the laughter fits quickly spread to 95 of the school’s 159 students. The attacks left no permanent injuries, but the laughter fits did mean that few students could learn anything, so the school was shut down on March 18th.

You’ve probably seen a movie or TV show about communicable diseases where the doctors plot the spread of the disease. There will usually be at least one scene in the show or movie where the doctors urge a public official to act on the matter. As part of their plea, they’ll almost always have a fancy computer graphic of the disease spreading across the nation. Like the tentacles of an evil octopus, the graphic shows the disease spreading out from “ground zero” to invade the rest of the country.

As soon as the Kashasha school closed, all of the students went home… and the laughter epidemic spread across the region, almost exactly as it would in one of those maps in a Hollywood movie. Within 10 days of the school’s closure, 217 of the 10,000 people in the village of Nshamba, home to several of the boarding school girls, came down with the “laughing disease”. Several girls that attended a school in Ramashenye but lived near some of the girls from Kashasha infected their own school; within a couple of weeks, 48 of the 154 students there became “infected” and the school was shut down in mid-June. One of the girls that attended the Ramashenye school went back to her home in Kanyangereka when the school closed and promptly “infected” several members of her own family, who in turn “infected” other villagers, who in turn “infected” people from other villages, causing two more schools to close. The “infection” would prove to be tough to eradicate at Kashasha school: after re-opening on May 21st, 57 additional students rapidly became “infected” and the school was shut down again in June.

By the time the “disease” finally ran its course in June 1964, the laughter epidemic had “infected” around 1,000 people and caused the closure of 14 schools in the area. Just like a “real” epidemic, the only effective preventative measure seemed to be quarantining villages yet to be touched by the disease.

Scientists, both then and now, have been able to conclusively rule out any biological or environmental cause of the “disease”. Whatever it was, the epidemic was not caused by a virus or bacteria, or some chemical in the food supply or environment. There is no historical mention of a similar disease in the area, nor is there any word for it in any of the indigenous languages. In fact, scientists were completely puzzled by the initial spread of the “disease” at the Kashasha school. The girls lived in a dormitory-style arrangement there, yet the “disease” didn’t seem to follow any of the known rules of modern pathology. Girls that shared rooms with “infected” students didn’t necessarily become infected themselves. The disease didn’t follow any known pattern of friendship or location.

Once the disease left the school, however, a pattern became clear: adolescent females at mission-run schools were first to be infected. They would then take the disease home to infect their mothers and other female relatives. Young boys appeared to be somewhat susceptible to the disease, however adult men appeared to be completely immune to the epidemic. There is also not a single instance of a “person of stature” in the community – policemen, doctors or schoolteachers, either male or female – becoming infected. Europeans and other Westerners seemed to have immunity, too. In fact, the disease seemed to follow a strict path along tribal and familial lines. If a female relative, a male relative, and a complete stranger of either gender were locked in a room with an “infected” person, the disease would probably infect the female relative, possibly infect the male, and would almost never infect the stranger.

The “Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic”, as the disease is called, has remained a curiosity in medical textbooks for 40 years now. Although many in the medical community are interested in the epidemic, the fact that the disease only caused laughter, sore muscles and extreme irritability in its subjects means that there’s little priority in researching the matter further. “Mass hysteria” seems to be modern medicine’s conclusion about the incident, although that in itself it pretty interesting, as certifiable cases of mass hysteria are vanishingly rare in human history, especially in the modern era. Cases of mass hysteria in Germany and Italy in the wake of the Black Death are well-known (and I’ll write something about that in the next few days), but examples in the modern era are limited to lynchings and a few other incidents. Cases such as the Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic are amazingly rare.

So enjoy your day… but you might want to think twice about telling that joke at the water cooler!

Read more about the epidemic here.

Mention “disasters at sea” and most Americans will think of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. A history buff might think of the sinking of the R.M.S. Lusitania, a British passenger ship sunk by a German torpedo three years later. Some might even think of the Andrea Doria, an Italian ship that struck the MS Stockholm in the north Atlantic in 1956.

But the fact is, all of these disasters pale compared to the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff in World War II. 1,520 people lost their lives in the Titanic disaster. Lusitania’s sinking lost 1,198 souls. Almost everyone survived the sinking of the Andrea Doria, except for 46 people who were killed on impact with the other ship. At least twice as many people died in the Wilhelm Gustloff disaster compared to Titanic, Lusitania and the Andrea Doria combined. At a minimum, 5,348 people were lost from the Wilhelm Gustloff, although many speculate that the actual numbers of the dead could be twice that number. And sadly, almost no one knows anything about the tragedy.

The Wilhelm Gustloff was the first German cruise ship built under the Nazi’s Kraft durch Freude (“Strength Through Joy”) program. Named after the assassinated leader of the Swiss Nazi Party, the ship was built by the Blohm and Voss shipyards and launched on May 5, 1937. For the first two years of her existence, the Wilhelm Gustloff served her intended purpose of providing leisure activities for Nazi party members. Concerts, dinner cruises and even full-blown vacations aboard the Gustloff were offered as enticements to German citizens for meeting certain goals, or as recognition for a job well done.

Of course, World War II changed all that and the Gustloff was pressed into wartime service. From September 1939 to November 1940, the Gustloff served as a hospital ship; later on in the war she was used as a barracks for U-boat trainees. In this capacity, she was docked at Gotenhafen, in East Prussia (which is now called Gdynia, and is part of Poland).

By January 1945, the Soviet Army was rapidly closing in on East Prussia. In fact, by January 23, 1945 East Prussia was effectively surrounded and cut off from the rest of the German-speaking world. Many Germans had firsthand knowledge of the many atrocities committed by the Wehrmacht during their invasion of the Soviet Union, and reports began to trickle in of Soviet “revenge atrocities”. In many villages, the Soviet soldiers raped every single German-speaking woman they could find. Many German women and children were lined up and shot without mercy. As you might guess, the Germans trapped in East Prussia were terrified of what might happen to them when the Soviet Army came. German admiral Karl Dönitz knew that the war was lost, and on that same date (January 23, 1945) he radioed naval command in Gotenhafen and ordered them to begin “Operation Hannibal”: the evacuation of as many people as possible.

Continue reading “The Tragedy of the Wilhelm Gustloff”