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Before we begin, this is a particularly gruesome episode, including descriptions of decapitation and some very, very icky experiments. Listener discretion advised.
William had made more than a few enemies. Having risen through the ranks of the religious clergy, he'd become the ceremonial head of England's Anglican Church. And, well, he wasn't exactly popular. You see, Archbishop William Laud had begun to introduce innovations. Nothing crazy, mind you, just a few changes to increase the splendor of the Anglican services. You know, to jazz things up a bit. But he was not exactly popular.
But to the strict Puritans, this wasn't going to fly. To them, all of the new pomp and circumstance felt a little too Catholic for their taste. And so they charged the Archbishop with high treason and sent him to the Tower of London. On January 10th of 1645, they lopped off William Laud's head.
His body was buried at St. John's College in Oxford. But according to the stories, it's not just his flesh and bones that found their way there. No, allegedly his spirit arrived there too. And that spirit was not exactly in one piece.
At first, witnesses say the ghost looked like any other, a man in old-fashioned clothes, wandering the St. John's library. It's only when he raises his arms that things get, well, terrifying, because that's when the archbishop lifts his head from his shoulders, leans over, and rolls that head toward the living witness like a bowling ball.
Tales of headless ghosts are one of the most common kinds of hauntings we come across, and it makes sense. After all, seeing a figure without an arm or a leg leaves room for interpretation. But without its head, there is no doubt that you're looking at something that is very, very dead. At least, that's how it should be. Unfortunately, though, if history is any indication, that wasn't always the case. I'm Aaron Manke, and this is...
is lore. Indian philosophers called it the Atman, Greeks the Psyche, Romans the Anima. But no matter what word each culture used, they all seemed to agree on one thing: this mysterious entity absolutely existed.
What was it? Well, that would be the human soul. Now, whether you believe in the spiritual, the biological, or some combination of the two, we can all agree that something in us thinks, feels, and drives our actions. It's what makes me, me, and what makes you, you. And just about every community in history has had its own theories about what it is, and what happens to it after we die.
Not only that, but almost every religion has a different idea about when exactly the soul makes its great escape. In fact, very few traditions believe that the soul leaves us right at the moment of death. No, it tends to hang around for a while, like that last lingering party guest who hasn't quite gotten the hint even as all the lights go on and the DJ packs up.
Now, Orthodox Christians believe that the soul ascends to heaven after three days, while in Judaism it takes seven. For Hindus, a ceremony is performed between 10 and 12 days after death, allowing the soul to rise, while Buddhist souls can take anywhere from seven to a whopping 49 days to make an exit.
And in the early 1900s, one scientist considered all of this and had an idea. If the soul had material substance and was located in the body, then theoretically he should be able to weigh a person before and after death, subtract for the difference, and determine the exact weight of a human spirit.
You may have heard the popular idea that the soul weighs 21 grams. Well, this is the study, conducted by Dr. Duncan McDougall and published in 1907, where that idea originated. Basically, the good doctor built a massive scale, big enough to hold a cot with a dying patient on it.
And then he started rounding up people with tuberculosis, six of them to be exact, all on the brink of death. And he chose tuberculosis patients because they laid very still with very little activity. And I'll be honest, while I know that each of these dying folks gave their consent to be part of a madman's science experiment in their final moments, I'm still not fully convinced that it was ethical.
Either way, on April 10th of 1901, the first of McDougall's test subjects passed away. And when they did, their weight immediately dropped three quarters of an ounce, or 21.2 grams. After that, the second patient died losing 14 grams, 15 minutes after they stopped breathing. And the third, 28.3 grams,
And yes, the doctor did account for weight loss due to moisture evaporating, air leaving the lungs, and other dying-related symptoms that might sully the results.
Life after life, soul after soul, McDougall studied his death scales like a modern-day Anubis, and in every single case when the patient died, the number on the scale went down. By the end of his studies, Dr. McDougall had come to a powerful conclusion. Death, he said, produces, and I quote, "...a loss of substance not accounted for by known channels of loss. Is it the soul substance? It would seem to me to be so."
Now, to be fair, even Dr. McDougall himself acknowledged that many more tests would be necessary to be sure that his results meant anything. After all, three of his six tests actually ran into technical issues with the scale, causing him to toss two results out altogether. There simply weren't enough case studies to be sure. And yet, there never would be.
You see, between ethical concerns and the slightly wacky nature of the whole concept, no one ever followed up on McDougal's study. No further tests were ever performed. Like so much about the human spirit, its weight remains a mystery.
Now, if you're like me, I'm sure you're left with more than a few questions. And one of those might be, if the soul does in fact have the ability to physically leave the body, then where exactly in the body does it live in the first place? Does it flow through us like blood? Does it reside in a specific organ or a limb?
Well, the answer to that depends on who you ask. The ancient Egyptians believed the soul was composed of nine different entities, the most vital of which being the ab, which, despite how it sounds, was not located in the abs, but in the heart. Hippocrates believed that the soul was tied to our breath, while Plato divided the soul into three faculties: appetite, which was located in the stomach; spirit, which was in the chest; and reason, which was in the brain.
After that, Leonardo da Vinci, everyone's favorite Renaissance inventor, took that brain idea one step further. He claimed that the soul specifically sat above the optic chiasm in the brain, in the region of the anterior inferior third ventricle. Rather specific, I know. Rene Descartes insisted it was in the pineal gland, while the Italian physician Giovanni Maria Lances located the soul even deeper in the brain, within the corpus callosum.
These philosophers lived in a time when science and religion were deeply intertwined, so it makes sense that the spirit and the mind would have been seen as intrinsically linked. As Descartes famously wrote,
I think, therefore I am. And I get it. Our heads, which not only house our thoughts, but allow us to taste and smell and see and hear the world around us, seem like a reasonable top contender for where the soul would sit. But if that's the case, it all leads us to a very chilling question. If the essence of our humanity is tucked deep inside our heads, what happens when that head is chopped off?
The mechanism, he wrote, falls like lightning. The head flies off, the blood spurts, the man no longer exists. These are the words of a Frenchman named Dr. Joseph Ines Guillotine, speaking about the invention that would make his name synonymous with bloodshed and revolution for centuries to come. I'm referring, of course, to the Guillotine.
It was the late 18th century, and the French Revolution was brewing. The revolutionaries dreamt of a more liberated, egalitarian world where all classes and peoples could be treated as equals, not only in their lives, but also in their deaths. In 1789, Dr. Guillotine lobbied the National Assembly to implement an equitable form of capital punishment, in which the rich and the poor would all be treated the same.
Two years later, France implemented his proposal. Under this new law, there would be only one legal way to execute a criminal, regardless of how much they had in the bank. Decapitation.
Enter the guillotine. Not only were laborers and kings alike made equal beneath that falling blade, but it was also intended to be a more humane means of execution than previous methods. In a way, despite its gruesomeness, the guillotine was a physical symbol of the equality the revolutionaries fought for.
But there was a strange side effect to this new invention. For the first time in history, executions could be carried out with a slaughterhouse-like efficiency. During France's "Reign of Terror", which began in June of 1793, heads were rolling at the staggering rate of one decapitation every minute. And even decades later, the guillotine remained in action. Between the years 1825 and 1827 alone, nearly 400 people lost their lives to it.
But with numbers like that, I think you know what comes next. That's right, the stories. Horrifying tales began to circulate among those who had witnessed these beheadings. Tales that suggested the guillotine's victims may not die so quickly after all. In fact, some began to wonder whether the head remained, even if for just a little while, fully alive. It all began with the execution of Charlotte Corday.
Charlotte was 21 years old when the revolution began, and despite coming from a loyalist family, she found herself siding with the revolutionaries. She was inspired by their push for reform and their humanist ideas. But as the fighting escalated and mob violence took hold, she started to find the bloodshed sickening. Soon, the revolution split into two factions, the Girondins, who, like Charlotte, wanted to rein in the mob violence, and the Jacobins, who wanted to amp the violence up even more.
Charlotte watched as her country teetered on the brink of civil war. And let's just say, she wasn't the kind of person to simply stand by and watch. No, instead, she came to a conclusion. The only way to avoid unimaginable civilian deaths would be to get prominent Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat out of the picture. One life in exchange for the lives of thousands. And she was going to be the one to kill him.
Charlotte Corday was only 24 years old when she entered the man's home, a wood-handled kitchen knife hidden under her dress, and murdered Jean-Paul Marat while he took a bath. She was immediately arrested, just as she knew she would be. She made no attempt to escape, only to explain calmly why she had chosen to take Marat's life and sacrifice her own for the sake of her country.
On the evening of July 17th of 1793, ten days before her 25th birthday, Charlotte met the guillotine. In the immediate moment after her head fell, the executioner lifted it in front of the crowd, and then he slapped her across the face. And to the absolute shock of the assembly, Charlotte Corday blushed.
Now, this wasn't a cheek going red from a slap. No, according to witnesses, both of Charlotte's cheeks reddened and her face bore an unmistakable look of fury. And, okay, to be fair, it's a bit scientifically questionable how she could blush without, well, a circulatory system. But the audience saw what they saw, and suddenly a brand new question rocketed through the aghast populace.
What if the guillotine wasn't as humane as they had been led to believe? What if, for just a few moments after beheading, the victim remained brutally and repulsively aware?
Now, Charlotte's head may have been the first to show signs of lingering life, but it wouldn't be the last. Famed executioner Charles-Henri Sasson insisted that once the severed heads of two rival members of the National Assembly were placed together in a bag, and one bit the other so hard, it was impossible to separate them.
Doctor and philosopher Melchior A. Weikart claimed to have seen one head's lips move, while a mid-20th century chaplain named Father Deveyaud reported that he could, and I quote, see the condemned man's eyes fix on me with a look of supplication, as if asking forgiveness. Instinctively, we made the sign of the cross to bless the head, and then the lids blinked.
In 1836, infamous murderer Pierre-Francois Lassonnier agreed to help prove once and for all that human consciousness did in fact continue after decapitation. He was to be executed by guillotine on the morning of January 9th, and in cahoots with a physician named Dr. Leleu, had schemed a plan. What was the plan, exactly? Well, he was going to wink.
That's right, Lassignere had promised Dr. Leleu that as soon as the blade fell, he would close his left eye and leave his right eye open. Now, before you add the image of a winking severed head to your arsenal of nightmares, don't get too excited. It didn't work. Dr. Leleu observed the murderer's head for quite some time after the execution, but that gruesome wink never occurred.
Oh, and by the way, while Pierre-Francois Lasseniere may not have shown signs of life after his beheading, he did achieve a different kind of life after death. He became the inspiration for the main character in none other than Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment.
Dr. Leleu's experiment may have failed, but scientists remain enthralled by the idea that maybe, just maybe, the line between life and death could be hazier than we thought. Enthralled enough, in fact, that a few scientists even took that question a step further. What if, they wondered, the head could survive more than a few moments? What if, with proper assistance, science could allow a head to keep on living without its body indefinitely?
It looked like something right out of a horror movie. The makeshift laboratory scattered with drills and scalpels. The bloody floor. The animals rattling in filthy cages. The frenzied doctor inserting needle after needle into his precious, terrible experiment. And then, the centerpiece of it all, balanced carefully on a low pedestal. A lone human head.
It's a scene that makes me really wish that it was nothing more than a movie, but unfortunately, I'm describing the very real experiments of Dr. Jean-Baptiste Vincent Laborde. Call him a mad scientist. Call him a real-life Dr. Frankenstein. Call him whatever you want. Just don't call him an amateur. Dr. Laborde was serious about his attempts to resurrect severed human heads. Serious enough that he attempted it again and again and again.
By the late 1880s, when Dr. Laborde first began his research, numerous other scientists in the field of reanimation had already made major headway. No pun intended, I swear. Take, for example, the work of Dr. Jean-Césaire Legelois, who attempted to revive headless torsos, and French physician Brown-Sacar, who conducted research that, well, let's just say would not be viewed favorably on didthedogdie.com.
Research that actually had successful results when it came to reanimating facial muscles. But the thing is, no one had ever attempted to reanimate a human head. No, for that, Laborde was eager to be the first. And hey, everyone needs a hobby, right?
Of course, in order to do his work, Laborde would have to acquire a reliable supply of good ol' human heads. Which you would think would be easier said than done. At least, you would hope so. But apparently the French authorities were all just as stoked as Laborde was to see the abomination that would be a living severed head. And so they happily agreed to supply the doctor with a steady flow of prisoners' guillotined remains.
The first head Dr. Laborde attempted to reanimate belonged to a convicted murderer named Kempe. However, due to some bureaucratic red tape, it ended up taking an hour and 20 minutes for the remains to be delivered to the laboratory, by which point the brain had been dead far too long to be of any use.
At any rate, Dr. Laborde came up with a plan. He and his lab assistants outfitted a horse-drawn van into a makeshift traveling laboratory, equipped with an exam table, five stools, candles for lighting, and all the equipment needed to, well, resurrect a human head. Then he planned to station himself right outside the cemetery gates, ready to greet the next head as soon as it fell, and conduct his experiments right there in the street.
And so, on the day a prisoner named Gamut was to be executed, Laborde saddled up the horses, leapt into his necromancy mobile, and received his test subject without delay. Within minutes, Laborde's team was hard at work. And this is how it went. First,
holes were drilled into the dead man's skull. Then the scientists inserted electrified needles through those holes and into the brain, essentially trying to trigger the nervous system into a physical response. And amazingly, it worked with the lips and jaw twitching.
And then, in the words of Mary Roach, author of Stiff, The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, the prisoner slowly opened one eye as if, with great and understandable trepidation, he sought to figure out where he was and what sort of strange locality hell had turned out to be. Yeah, I hate it too.
By the time the third head rolled around, so to speak, Laborde was an old pro. This time he was determined to receive the remains even faster, and so naturally he bribed the authorities. This third subject, by the way, came from a prisoner named Ganyi, and only seven minutes passed between the moment when the guillotine dropped and Laborde began his experiment. And this time Laborde was trying something new. The head would be fed a steady flow of blood.
On one side, he injected the arteries with oxygenated cow's blood, and on the other, he connected those arteries to a tube that was attached to a living animal, specifically a dog, which basically served as a live blood donor. And then, Dr. Laborde and his team watched as the executed man's head began to show terrible signs of life.
His muscles contracted, his eyelids and forehead moved. At one point, his jaw loudly snapped shut and the tongue, in Laborde's words, seemed to boil. Laborde had proven something impossible. Human heads could, indeed, be reanimated.
And yet, the biggest mystery still remained. Sure, the dead man's head might be able to move, but could it think? Could it feel? In other words, was Laborde seeing mere reflexes or an ungodly form of consciousness?
In the end, Dr. Laborde himself may not have made a conclusive call on this matter, but a contemporary of his did, a man named Dr. D'Assy de Lanier. He too hooked a head up to a living dog, and as he watched as the color returned to the executed man's face, Dr. Lanier recoiled. He later would go on to describe how, and I quote, the whole face wakened into an expression of shocked amazement. I affirm that during two seconds, the brain thought,
And that was that. The public had their answer. If only for a moment, the human brain, and perhaps the soul with it, could continue to live even without the body. And as for that humane, elegant means of execution, the guillotine? Well, I'll let Dr. Lanier say the final words on that.
There is no worse torture, he wrote, than decapitation with the machine invented by that sensitive deputy, Dr. Guillotine. When the knife has done its work, has fallen with that sinister noise which you know, when the head has rolled into the sawdust, this head, separated from its body, hears the voices of the crowd. The decapitated victim feels himself dying in the basket. He sees the Guillotine in the light of the day.
Since the date of its inception, in 1792, the guillotine had sparked a heated debate: Was the device a painless and immediate way to meet death? Or was it just the opposite? Despite the gruesome research conducted by physicians over the years, doctors remained split on that most essential question of whether or not a head remained conscious after removal.
In the end, though, science didn't matter. Public opinion did. You see, the tales of moving heads were enough to thoroughly freak everyone out and convince the public that if a head could move, it could probably think and feel as well. The situation came to a head, so to speak, during the execution of murderer Eugène Weidemann of Versailles at what would be France's final public execution by guillotine.
And amazingly, we have a first-hand account from a 17-year-old eyewitness describing what happened. "The noise of trams and cars stopped," the boy reported, "and every other sort of noise began. A great wave of howling and screams engulfed the square. They rushed Vitamint to that extraordinary structure so that his bound feet came off the ground."
His hands were tied behind him, and his head was held back. They set him down by the plank and punched him in the stomach so that he fell forwards onto it. A strap went over his back, the plank tilted forward, and the man they called the photographer adjusted his head. In that instant, the knife fell, and I thought I would die myself.
What followed was nothing short of pandemonium. Some spectators even rushed the scaffold to dip their handkerchiefs in the slain man's blood. And finally, the authorities realized the mistake they had made. Public beheadings did not deter disorder. It encouraged it. Enough was enough. The French president himself announced that from then on, public executions would be officially banned.
Oh, and by the way, this didn't take place in the wake of the Revolution. No, France's final public execution was actually held on June 17th of 1939. And that eyewitness? Well, he would grow up to become an actor who got his start in the genre of horror. Although most people today know him better for his work in The Lord of the Rings. That man? Saruman himself, Sir Christopher Lee.
Unless you're a clam or a jellyfish, it's safe to assume that you probably have a head. After all, as much as we differ from cats, parrots, giraffes, and more, when it comes down to it, most animals have one thing in common. That is, a place to put a hat. If the legends are true, though, there may have once been a group of people who had no heads at all. But don't worry, we're done with the gross stuff. Consider this last story a palate cleanser. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.
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It is the largest medieval map in existence. At over a meter and a half long and nearly as wide, the Mappa Mundi features over 500 ink drawings on a single calfskin. It depicts the known world in intricate detail: castles and cities, oceans and exotic animals on distant shores. And then there are the headless men with faces in the middle of their chests.
And maybe you've seen them: medieval illustrations of naked, headless humanoids with faces not above their necks but on their torsos. And as it turns out, there are versions of this creature found in folklore from all over the world. The Indian Ramayana describes a headless demon with an eye in its stomach. The Japanese yokai called the Danotsura literally translates to "torso face." But while these versions are supernatural beings, the headless men depicted on the map of Mundi are just that:
Men. That is, for centuries Europeans believed them to be a real race of humans.
The first documentation of headless men that we know of came from the Greek historian Herodotus, who a whopping 2,500 years ago described, and I quote, "...headless creatures with eyes in their chests, inhabiting what is now Libya." Later, a first-century Greek geographer wrote of a Nubian tribe called the Blemmyes, who had, you guessed it, no heads and faces on their torsos. Even Pliny the Elder backed up this claim.
Now, here's the thing. The Blemys were a real African tribe. A nomadic kingdom, they lived between 600 BC and 300 AD, and despite having significant cultural and military power, they were mostly known for the rumors that they were indeed headless. And some people believe that this was a natural trait.
In the words of Isidore of Seville, people believe that, in Libya, "Blamaya are born as trunks without heads and have their mouth and eyes on their chest; others, born without necks, have their eyes on their shoulders." In more upsetting theories, though, the body was thought to be deliberately augmented. By which I mean that their heads were removed at birth and their facial features grafted onto their chests.
And look, folks didn't have a great understanding of how biology worked back then. But science aside, the mysterious, evocative concept of the Blameys remained in the cultural imagination for centuries, long after the actual Blamey kingdom fell.
By the time of the Middle Ages, they'd become a full-blown legend. In some descriptions, they weren't just headless, but giants as well, reaching up to 12 feet tall and 7 feet wide. Others insisted that they were covered in, and I quote, "'coarse hair like wild animals.'"
Centuries passed by. European explorers pushed farther and farther across the globe. And as they did, rumors of these smiling torsos popped up in more and more locations. Maps and reports from the late medieval period show Blameys living on an Asian island in India
off the coast of Brazil, and many, many more. In 1596, famous Elizabethan explorer Sir Walter Riley placed them in South America. It seemed everywhere on the map, another headless man appeared. Except for one tiny caveat. None of these writers had ever seen such a thing. Herodotus Pliny Raleigh
They had all just heard about it through the grapevine. According to Raleigh, he fully believed that the stories were true because all children local to the region spoke about the beans. And as we know, children never believe folktales in urban legends, right? Which makes it totally legit.
Today, it's pretty well accepted that no such thing as a headless race of people ever existed. Yet, I'll be honest, to this day we aren't sure exactly where the idea came from. But there are, of course, some theories. Perhaps, as Raleigh's contemporary Johannes De Lett believed, along with a number of modern theorists, the description was merely an exaggeration of the local people's very short necks and low-set heads, a common genetic trait for certain regions.
Another possibility is that blamey soldiers carried shields with faces painted on them. Or perhaps a particular style of headgear made the people look like they had no heads at all. Perhaps it was actually crouching apes the explorers had seen. After all, bonobos often sit with their shoulders above their heads. Heck, maybe it was just aliens.
What we do know for sure is that Blameys continue to impact art and culture to this very day. Take for example the work of one English writer who I will call Charles.
Not only was he famously a fan of Sir Walter Riley, but as a child he spent many an hour at his father's place of work, Ripon Church, where descriptions of Blameys ornamented the walls. And while we can't be certain, it's possible that these influences moved Charles' pen as he reimagined a classic English nursery rhyme in one of his books for children. This rhyme was originally about a cannon that fell off a tall wall, but Charles had a different idea.
He soon found himself instead describing an egg-shaped being with no head and a face right in the middle of its body. Charles, by the way, was Charles Dodgson, but you probably know him better by his pen name, Lewis Carroll. And that blamy-like egg that appeared in his book, Through the Looking Glass, well, that, of course, is none other than Humpty Dumpty.
This episode of Lore was produced by me, Aaron Manke, with writing by Jenna Rose Nethercott, research by Jamie Vargas, and music by Chad Lawson. Don't like the ads? I've got a solution for you. There is a paid version of Lore on Apple Podcasts and Patreon that is 100% ad-free. Plus, subscribers get weekly mini-episodes called Lore Bites. It's a bargain for all of that ad-free storytelling and a great way to support this show and the team behind it.
Lore is much more than just a podcast, though. There's the book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime. Information about all of that and more is available over at lorepodcast.com. You can also follow this show on YouTube threads, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. And when you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.
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