Today's tour through the Cabinet of Curiosities is a little hot, a little cold, and a whole lot of mysterious.
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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. Don worked as a meter reader for the gas company in a small Pennsylvania town in the mid nineteen sixties. It was one of those idyllic jobs you imagine seeing in old black and white television shows like Leave It to Beaver. He would show up each morning, bright and early in his smart, tidy uniform and begin walking through town and knocking on doors. Of course, it was December when this story took place, so I imagine it was slightly less idyllic with all the snow and ice around. But still Don got to spend time outside in the unshine and fresh air. Well most of the time, he still had to step inside the homes to read the meters. On September five, his first stop was at the home of a retired doctor named John Bentley. Dr John was two years old, so Don made it a point to check on the man each month and see how he was doing. But when he knocked on the door on December five, no one answered it was, however, unlocked, which was very unusual. Don stepped in out of the cold and called out for Dr John, but no one answered. Assuming the older man was out for the morning, Don descended the stairs to the basement and headed towards the gas meter. On his way across the basement floor, though he encountered something odd. It was a pile of ash. Don later described it as a circle of dark powder about a foot in diameter, standing maybe five inches high. He gently kicked the toe of his shoe into the ash, which scattered a bit, but then moved on to the meter. When he had recorded the number on his pad of paper, he headed back upstairs, and that's when he noticed the smoke. It wasn't thick, but the sunlight coming in one of the living room windows highlighted a few wisps of smoke that still hung in the air. More concerned now, Don began to shout for doctor John and walk across the house, checking all of the rooms for signs of a fire. That search eventually led him to the downstairs bathroom and a bizarre, unsettling scene. It was a human leg laying beside a large charred hole in the bathroom floor. Dr John's old metal walker had partially fallen in the hole and was leaning against the bathtub where a tattered robe had been thrown. Stepping in and peering down the hole, Don was surprised to see the pile of ash on the basement floor, his toe marks still visible in the gray surface. The coroner would later try to put the pieces together. No pun intended, of course, because there was only one leg. They searched the house for signs of foul play, but found nothing out of the ordinary. They tossed around theories about Dr John lighting his pipe and catching himself on fire, but there were no signs of burns anywhere in the house except for the bathroom floor where his walker had been found. And that was the oddest thing about it. All the plastic parts on Dr John's walkers were still intact, as if the fire had somehow limited itself to a very small space. So small the coroner suggested that when the victim's leg fell out of the blaze, it failed to burn up. There was even a shiny black loafer still fitted to the foot, untouched by fire. When it was all said and done, the authorities simply had no way of explaining what had happened to poor old doctor John Bentley without clear evidence to point out. His cause of death was officially listed as as fixiation and burning, which honestly sounds more like a description of the results rather than an explanation for the cause. Some, however, think that Dr John's death is a rare example of something almost supernatural, spontaneous human combustion. Was his death really the result of some unnatural internal fire or was he simply the victim of an accident to that left no evidence for people to find that? Of course, is the burning question, isn't it. Francis had found himself in possession of an abundance of free time. It's a long story that I honestly don't want to get into here, but let's just say that he had been worked king in one field for most of his life, but a mistake at the age of sixty five earned him some prison time, a hefty fine, and permanent expulsion from the industry he loved. So there he was in March of six with not much else to occupy his time. As the story goes, he was writing in his carriage through the snow covered streets of the village of Highgates, now a suburb located to the north of London when he called for his driver to stop near Pond Square, and idea had fallen out of the air and struck him metaphorically. Of course, he had been watching other carriages passed by and noticed how their wheels pulled up the snow to reveal the grass beneath. What struck him as odd thought was that the grass was always perfectly green, rather than dead and yellow, and it occurred to him that maybe the snow had something to do with that. Francis climbed out of the carriage into the damp, cold air and looked around. Calling his driver over, he instructed the man to go to a nearby farm and purchase a chicken. When the coachman returned, he was told to kill the bird, pluck it clean, and clean out its insides as if he were preparing it for a meal. When the pale, white remnant of the chicken was ready, Francis took it and laid it in the snow alongside the park. There, a crowd began to gather as this strange man started doing even stranger things. First, he scooped up handful after handful of snow and packed it into the chickens abdomen. Then, after retrieving a sackcloth from the carriage, he put the chicken inside and packed it with even more snow. Not remember this was sixteen twenty six, so even though the sight of a frozen chicken at the grocery store might strike us as normal, there were no freezers back then. What Francis was testing was a theory that we all knew would pay off. Snow, because of it's cold temperature, could preserve raw meat for later. It was genius. Sadly, Francis wouldn't live to see if his hypothesis worked. That hour out in the wet and cold must have weakened his body, and by that evening he was in bed with pneumonia. A few days later he was dead. The frozen chicken, as far as I can tell, disappeared after that. There are stories, of course, there always are in situations like this. Many people over the years of claim to see the pale shape of a naked chicken running around the area of Pond Square. The most common version of these sightings is that the bird appears from nowhere, runs in a circle two or three times, and then vanishes. While the tales of the ghostly chicken might fall within the realm of fantasy. Francis is embedded firmly in the pages of history. He's been referred to as the father of empiricism, who used inductive reasoning to build scientific knowledge, much as he did that cold day in Pond Square with his frozen chicken, but he did much more. He served Queen Elizabeth as her legal advisor and was knighted by King James the first. You and I might know him as that crazy old guy with a bag full of snow and a dead chicken, but thankfully history will remember him with a bit more respect. Our Francis, you see, was none other than the Lord High Chancellor of England, Sir Francis Bacon. 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 Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com and Until next time, stay curious, h