The
fault in humanity
‘The
World of Lore: Dreadful Places’ shows true horror is created
through our own actions
By
MacKenzie Chase
Sarah
Winchester was running away from evil. Following advice from a medium
after her husband and child’s death, she packed up her life and
traveled west until she felt safe from the spirits she thought were
haunting her. She ended up in California’s Bay Area, purchased an
eight-room farmhouse in 1886 and began renovations many have
speculated were meant to confuse the spirits; construction continued
until her death 36 years later.
With
staircases that lead to dead ends, miniature doors that open into
normal-sized rooms and vice versa, and an estimated 148 to 161 rooms
total, the mansion was dubbed the Winchester Mystery House and opened
to the public in 1923. The allure of the unknown has drawn visitors
ever since and there have been numerous reports of floating lights,
doors that shut on their own and cold spots along with the
overwhelming sensation of being watched.
The
World of Lore: Dreadful Places explores locations that echo with
the trauma of some of history’s darkest moments and is the third
book adapted from author Aaron Mahnke’s podcast, Lore. For
regular listeners of the podcast, it’s difficult not to read the
stories in Mahnke’s trademark narrative style, both matter-of-fact
and familiar in his monotone voice, as he delves into popular
folklore stories like that of the Winchester Mystery House and the
Stanley Hotel—the inspiration behind Stephen King’s Overlook
Hotel in The Shining. Lesser-known stories that may have been
lost to time are uncovered as well through extensive research, with
details pulled from dusty newspaper archives and ancient personal
accounts. A bibliography is included at the back for those who would
like to do their own digging.
In
the same way some people consider King’s Pet Sematary to be
his most terrifying novel, the most chill-inducing stories in
Dreadful Places are those that aren’t about ghostly
apparitions as much as they are tied to concrete truths, revealing
the human desire to find meaning or patterns in tragedy. Readers can
imagine themselves making the same mistakes of giving in to desire
and searching for things that should have remained buried,
consequences be damned.
Some
stories also demonstrate how the tragedies used as inspiration for
legends can be more brutal than any folktale could ever dream up. The
legend of the Richmond Vampire was born when a creature was seen
emerging from a collapsed train tunnel. Its skin peeled away from its
body and its bloody mouth was full of sharp teeth. After it seemed to
disappear into the tomb of a nearby cemetery, people told tales of
the vampire and waited fruitlessly for its return.
The
truth was discovered years later through hospital records that showed
a man named Benjamin Mosby had arrived after the collapse with burns
from a burst boiler causing his skin to peel and broken teeth falling
from his mouth.
Dreadful
Places is separated into five main sections: Cities of Shadow,
Inside These Walls, Distant Shores, Deep and Dark, and Off the Beaten
Path. As one might expect, many of the supposedly haunted locations
are places where large amounts of human tragedy has occurred with
insane asylums, prisons, castles, New Orleans and other cities with
long pasts taking center stage and unsettled spirits playing the
leads.
Mental
health reform was a difficult struggle in the 1800s. Most people were
placed in asylums unwillingly and treated more like prisoners than
patients. Dorothea Dix called for the creation of humane facilities
for patients through the 1840s and fought for a “modern, conscious
approach to caring for the mentally ill,” which included better
facilities with windows and courtyards. With that in mind, Dr. Thomas
Kirkbride designed the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane, which
was “built on a foundation of naiveté and hope.”
The
facility was meant to house 250 people when it opened in 1864 but the
rooms soon overflowed with over 700 patients hoping for treatment
just 16 years after opening. It was eventually renamed the Westin
State Hospital and more rooms were built in an attempt to hold the
2,600 patients who had been committed by the early 1950s. Without
enough consistent staff members, treatment quality fell, and the
hospital gained a reputation for poor living conditions and inhumane
treatment. In one case, two patients in an overcrowded room became
fed up with their other roommate’s snoring and decided to end it
permanently with help from the leg of a heavy bed frame, claiming
ghosts did it when staff found the body.
Years
after the hospital was finally shut down in 1994, some portions were
opened to the public for historical tours and guides have reported
wet footprints appearing in hallways on humid days with no owner to
be seen. One historian claims a door which was always left unlocked
was impassable one day. A violent shaking from the other side halted
further attempts to enter.
It’s
easy to imagine what sort of legends exist in a country with a deep
history of slavery, deadly epidemics and genocide, and many of the
stories Mahnke describes in Dreadful Places uncover shameful
actions from the torture of slaves to forced removal of native tribes
from their territory—but not before cursing the land being stolen
from them.
Each
story is told with careful consideration of the truth versus
embellishments, and Mahnke notes when he is unsure of the origins or
reliability of specific events while black-and-grey illustrations by
M.S. Corley contribute to any visions conjured by the mind while
reading.
The
conversational tone used in the Lore podcast carries over to
the book and, while it feels more fitting in the audio version, that
tone still acts to relieve readers of chilling accounts like a
friendly hand to encourage you through a particularly frightening
section of a haunted house. When recounting a supposed Bigfoot
sighting in 1978 within the Bridgewater Triangle, a portion of land
in Massachusetts known for unexplainable phenomena, local man Joe
DeAndrade says he saw a hairy, “apish man-thing.” Mahnke then
adds, “Oddly enough, I went to high school with a guy who fits that
description.”
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