The Bone Collector

Published Aug 20, 2024, 9:00 AM

Some curious stories are built by the living, and some are made possible by the dead.

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Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. It was a cold winter night in nineteen forty two, and quiet blanketed the Eastern Front as thick as fresh fallen snow. A dozen Nazi soldiers were huddled in their tents, shivering against the bitter Russian cold. The steady rhythmic beeps of the lufoffas officer's radar screen signaled clear skies, and only static filled the airways. It had been a night. With any luck, it would stay that way. The officer sat up as a faint sound came to him over the mechanical worrying of his instruments. Somewhere far above, he could hear a noise like a soft wind, whooshing through the willow branches. His face fell. They were here. Even as he yelled to raise the alarm, he could see it was too late. The first bomb was already exploding. Against the command center, painting the night sky red with fire. The night Witches had struck again. In the final years of World War Two, one of the most feared ally air squadrons of the Eastern Front was the Soviet five hundred and eighty eighth Night Bomber Regiment. The five hundred and eighty eighth was nicknamed the Knackhexen or the night Witches by the Germans, not just because their planes made a sound like a sweeping room, but because every member of the five eighty eighth, from mechanics to pilots, were women. The Soviet Union hadn't intended to have women on the front line at all. When Hitler invaded Russia in the summer of nineteen forty one, Joseph Stalin believed his Red Army would easily defeat the Nazis. By the fall, his outlook was less rosy. The Nazis had proven stubborn and Leningrad was under siege. Thousands of young men had been captured or killed. So when female flying ace Marina Raskova approached him with a plan for an all female regiment, Stalin gave her the go ahead. Despite his approval, Marina's regiment did not have an easy time of it. Her recruits had just months to master skills that airman learned for years. Every woman had to be pilots, navigator, maintenance and ground crew, and of course the male soldiers didn't take kindly to what they called the little girls serving on the front line. As a result, Marina's flyers got the absolute worst equipment. The five eighty eighth were given Polykarpov P two biplanes. These little wooden two seater boxes were used as crop dusters and never meant to fly in combat. They had virtually no protection from the freezing Soviet winter, they moved incredibly slow, making them an easy target for anti aircraft guns, and on top of all of that, they could barely carry any weight. Marina's pilots flew without radios, guns, radar. Even parachutes were too heavy for the planes to carry, and for the same reason, the planes could only transfer two bombs at a time, meaning in every raid the pilots would have to fly back and forth dozens of times between their base and the target. Each attack, pilots and navigators would be in the air for upwards of ten hours. Any one of these issues might have made their goal, which was to bomb Nazi camps and supply lines on the Eastern Front, seem impossible, but Marina's Night Witches turned their issues into advantages. The night Witches only ran missions under cover of darkness. Their tiny planes were too small to get picked up by radar. Since they had no radios, they couldn't be spotted by someone listening to the airwaves. Only that, but their fastest speed was slower than the stall speed of Nazi planes, meaning that they could outmaneuver German pilots easily. The only sign the night Witches were there was the telltale woosh of their wooden planes. From nineteen forty one to nineteen forty five, members of the five eighty eighth flew more than twenty four thousand combat missions, dropping three thousand tons of bombs on the Germans. They were the most highly decorated unit of the Soviet Air Force during the war, and so feared by the Nazis that any German who downed a night Witch was awarded the Iron Cross, and when their leader, Marina Raskova's plane was shot down, she was given the very first state funeral of World War II and had her ashes buried in the Kremlin, The Night Witches opened the door for women to serve in combat in the Soviet Union. Marina eventually staffed three all female bombing regiments, with the Night Witches being the most famous of these. Still, even after all of their accomplishments, they faced discrimination on the home front. Despite their impeccable record, they weren't allowed to fly their planes in Moscow's end of war victory parade. It wasn't them, the organizers claimed, it was their equipment, the planes that took them back and forth across the Eastern Front, that carried three thousand tons of bombs and scared the wits out of the Nazis. Those planes, they said, were just too slow. There is a moment in a lot of horror movies that's critical to the film success. It's usually right after the protagonist's first real ghost sighting, when the poltergeist activity or demonic possession spikes and we finally know what we're dealing with. It's that moment when many audience members lose their suspension of disbelief, because when the character knows the ghosts surreal, you expect them to run and not look back. Any behavior that doesn't involve removing themselves from the situation as soon as possible just seems implausible. After all, if you've ever seen empirical evidence that your house is haunted, wouldn't you move as well? That's exactly what six year old Jiang Bowl wanted to know after his first ghost encounter. The Taiwanese boy was climbing around his family's attic one day when he saw something that made his blood run cold, a horrific spectral figure with no eyes, no nose, and no mouth. Jiang wasted no time in getting out of there. He fled the attic and didn't stop running until he found his dad, But when he told him what happened, he was stunned by the response he got. His dad already knew about the ghost, but had given up about doing anything about it. He wanted to move, but they couldn't afford to live anywhere else at the moment. They were, as Jiang put it later, poorer than the ghosts. That experience affected Jiang deeply, and he made sure that he didn't find himself in that position ever again. First by dragging himself out of poverty. He grew up and built a successful business as a fung shwe consultant, now for the uninitiated. Fung shwe is the ancient Chinese art of arranging physical items in an environment for maximum harmony. It's rooted in Taoism, but it's popular all over the world. Today in the West, we almost exclusively associated with interior design. Someone might tell you that your living room is bad fung shui if the furniture is laid out poorly, But it has applications outside the home as well, from gardening to architectural design. In fact, some of the earliest uses were in ancient Chinese graveyards. It was thought that the proper flow of energy was critical for the spirits of the dead to rest peacefully. That history may be what inspired Jiang to look beyond the home of some of his trickster clients. Through the course of his work as a consultant, he occasionally encountered people who seemed to practice perfect fung shwe, but who were never the less plagued by illness or bad luck. Rather than giving up, he set out to inspect the graveyards of their recently deceased relatives. In many cases, he found that the graves had been damaged, allowing moisture or other problems to affect the human remains. Jiang theorized that the ghosts were uncomfortable as a result, and had decided to curse their descendants with bad luck until someone fixed the problem. So he did just that. In addition to his Functue consulting work, he began offering his services as a bone collector. He would dig up the graves of his client's ancestors, painstakingly clean and dry the remains, and then place the bones inside a large urn. Jiang believed that the remains had to be arranged for maximum comfort and harmony, which usually involved placing them in a sitting position. A lump of charcoal was added to the urn to make sure they stayed dry. Then the whole thing was reburied in the original grave, and according to Jiang, the practice had incredible results, instantly curing everything from headaches to mania in his clients and their family members. And perhaps that claim stretches your suspension of disbelief, but Jiang's success as a bone collector speaks for itself. He has many satisfied customers. So if you feel some disharmony in your life, maybe Functionue can help. But before you go rearranging your living room for the one hundredth time, reconsider whether the problem might be less with your furniture and more with your ancestors. If so, it's probably the sort of thing you should take care of sooner rather than later, because there's nothing worse than a ghost with a bone to pick. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another a war winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at Theworldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.

Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities

From the creator of the hit podcast Lore comes a new, bite-sized storytelling experience. Each twice 
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