The Devil Made Me Do It

Published Jun 10, 2021, 9:00 AM

Obscure orders of clandestine people are always a bit curious. And so are these two stories about people that fit that description.

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Welcome to Aaron Benky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. London is one of the world's great banking cities. There's no question there, and like so many parts of London's history, we can trace London's banking roots back to the Middle Ages five to be exact. But the city's first bank wasn't so much founded as it was consecrated. You see. That's when a church in London was made. The home of monks who were already controlling the wealth of monarchs and landowners us Europe, chartered by the Pope in eleven nineteen. It took the order only a few years before King Alfonso the First of Aragon had given them a castle in his will. Maybe he liked that each monk had to take a vow of poverty and chastity before they joined the Order. Maybe he just wanted to get a little credit with Heaven. When he set out towards his final destination. But he wasn't the only one. Within a few years, the monks were managing a massive fortune around Spain, something like a third of the kingdom. As representatives of the Church, the monks were the ones to benefit. It didn't take long before the brotherhood owned everything, from castles and mills to all the wool and wine their lands produced. Even if the monks themselves were poor, the order got rich, not least because any man who joined and took the same vow of poverty had to hand over his own belongings, and in those days there were plenty of rich and powerful men taking the vows. After all, this was the era of Crusades, and when French and Italian armies invaded Jerusalem in ten it also came the era of pilgrimage. By the time the monks opened their chapel in London almost a hundred years later, it was simply a new way station on a well worn road for travelers from every corner of Europe on their way to the city of Jerusalem. And that's where the banking comes in, because one of the things that hasn't changed about traveling a long distances that it's expensive, but in those days, pain for a lot of things meant carrying a lot of money. But if you've heard the story of robin Hood you might see why rich travelers didn't think lugging sacks of gold on the road was a good idea. So they came up with a better solution. Someone at the beginning of their journey, say in London, could go to the chapel with their wealth and leave it in the hands of the monks. In return, the chapel would give the traveler a note of the amount. We don't know today exactly what that kind of document looked like, but there's no doubt it was less conspicuous than stacks of clanking coins, and the next time the traveler checked in with the monks, they could make a withdrawal. Today we might take it for granted that banks worked this way, and our international credit cards are a common everyday item, but in the Middle Ages this was a revelation. Once they started to become well known as bankers, though, things started to get even more complicated. They were taking deposits from merchants, yes, but even the rulers of France decided that they should deposit all the royal wealth. With the Order, it essentially made these monks the crown treasurers. At one point the British royals followed suit, but it was the Crown Jewels of England they deposited in the chapel for safekeeping, and kingdoms all across Europe. The monks became the financial middlemen between the people and the Crown, even collecting taxes sometimes. Soon enough, these monks, sworn to poverty, were the most sophisticated accountants around. They even got called into audit the complex financial arrangements for other merchants and wealthy nobles. If their chapel in London had become England's first bank, the rest of their operation grew into Europe's first financial services company. Here's the thing, though, The Order was founded as the Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon at Jerusalem. That was their official name. But the richer they grew, the harder it was to call them poor, and that might be what started their bad reputation, especially when it comes to murky and powerful international networks. So their name the Poor Knights of the Temple came to be defined as suspicious dealings, hoarded treasure, and vast conspiracies as the years passed, and eventually those medieval pioneers of international banking simply became known as the Knights Templar. Those who look back on the good old days in America often think of a time when kids could freely walk the streets without care. Front doors were left unlocked at night, there wasn't the threat of danger around every corner. In reality, times were still problem att Nearly every decade of the last century has seen war. During the nineteen fifties, Edgains brutal crimes scandalized his quiet Wisconsin town. He went on to inspire such fictional serial killers as leather Face and Norman Bates. From the Great Depression to Vietnam, there wasn't an era in history without its problems, and as the years advanced, so did change, often at an alarming rate. By the late nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties, the world looked much different than it had even ten years earlier, and parents were worried. Crime was on the rise. In suburban Moms and dads were scared for their children. Many of their fears were laid out in a nineteen eighty book called Michelle Remembers a memoir of sorts by a woman named Michelle Smith and her psychiatrist, Lawrence Pastor. In the book, Smith claimed to have suffered through something called satanic ritual abuse when she was five years old. The book was eventually discredited, but not before it did some serious damage to the national psyche. It kicked off an era in American history and as the Satanic Panic, a time when the media, law enforcement, and mental health industry all started warning people about satanic cults that plagued their small towns, and children were especially in danger. One of the biggest stories of the day had to do with a college student named James Dallas Egbert. James had grown up in a suburb of Dayton, Ohio, and from a young age it was clear that he was a little bit different. For one, he was a genius, having graduated high school at the age of sixteen. In nineteen seventy nine, he was enrolled at Michigan State University as a computer science major. Being young and on his own in such a new place had taken a toll on him. The experience sent him into a spiral of depression and drug use, and he'd fallen in with a group of other students who had gotten him into a strange new form of occultism. They would sit around a table each night reciting incantations summoning demons and other hellish creatures from their dorm rooms. Egbert's parents worried about him, but it all came to a head on the day that James disappeared. No but he knew where he had gone, so the police were called in and his parents hired a private investigator named William Dear. The investigator noticed a clue in the boy's dorm room wall. He followed his hunch down to the steam tunnels beneath the university, where it was clear that James had been, and in the process his investigation unearthed a lot about the troubled students. His trip to the steam tunnels had most likely been part of the ritual the students were performing related to their evening summoning sessions back in the dorms, and it was this story that the papers and news programs reported on could a satanic cult be living on Michigan State's campus. Not long after he went missing, James eventually called William Dear and told him where he was. He had traveled from Michigan to New Orleans, where he planned on taking his own life. The investigator came down immediately to collect James and return him to his family. The truth was that James had faced severe depression and anxiety over a number of issues in his life, but he begged dear not to tell anyone without a valid explanation for his disappearance. Though the press only had one thing to hold onto James's nightly rituals with his friends. The only problem was that he actually hadn't joined a satanic cult. He had been casting spells and slaying creatures in a fairly new tabletop game known as Dungeons and Dragons. And because the media couldn't report on the truth about James, the theories and fears about Dungeons and Dragons spread among concerned parents everywhere. Nowadays, the game is played every day by kids, teens, and even Hollywood celebrities. It's become a part of everyday culture. But back then, Dungeons and Dragons was seen as a menace and a gateway to the dark side. More than just a game, it was viewed by many as a roll of the dice for America's soul. Little did they know it would be a critical hit

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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