Waking Up

Published Oct 6, 2022, 9:00 AM

The lives we live can often leave a mark on the world. Sometimes that's due to our accomplishments, and sometimes it's all about what we've forgotten.

Welcomed. Aaron Manky's Cabinet of Curiosity is a production of iHeart 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. The games we enjoy today have evolved over time. Baseball in basketball, for example, look a lot different today than they did fifty years ago, and soccer or football for listeners outside of the United States, might have undergone the most change. It used to be a lot closer to rugby. But one man sought to change all of that when he wasn't walking along the bottom of the New York Bay. His name was Arthur Pember. Born in Brixton, England, in eighteen thirty five, Pember came from a wealthy family, his father a successful stockbroker. He was homeschooled and didn't go to college, choosing instead to work alongside his father in London as a stockbroker as well. Pember eventually married Elizabeth Houghton in eighteen sixty, but after she died from complications arising from a miscarriage. He remarried in eighteen sixty two to Alice Mary Grieve, but eighteen sixty two also marked the start of a blooming passion for Pember the No Names or n N football club. He could often be found clad in a knitted jersey and cap, scrambling across a field in northwest London as he tried to put a ball between a pair of goal posts stuck in the dirt. He became team captain the following year and represented the club at a meeting of all the other clubs in the area in October of eighteen sixty three. Football was something of a wild West back then, before things were standardized and coded. Every club town seemed to have its own set of rules. For example, Cambridge University used only their feet, but players at the Rugby Public School use their hands to carry the ball. Rugby Public School also happened to be where the sport of rugby originated. With everyone else playing by different rules and regulations, figuring out who scored and who won became something of a headache. Pember chaired the first football club meeting and explained to the group how the sport they loved needed a universal rule book. Not only would it make it easier for everyone to play, but it would also expand its appeal outside of their organization. They all agreed, and by the end of the meeting two decisions had been made. First, the captains of eleven clubs came together to form an official governing body known as the Football Association, and secondly, they elected Arthur Pember as its president. But not everyone was in agreement. England's public schools already played by their own rules and had no interest in joining the Association unless they had a prominent role in either creating the new guidelines or running them entirely. Public schools in the UK weren't like the public schools in America. They were institutions meant for the elites of high society. Pember had never attended a public school, and he had no interest in letting them steamroll his efforts of football standardization. He got to work laying down the law. Players could no longer run while holding the ball, nor could they kick or trip someone below the knee, otherwise known as hacking. It took five meetings and a lot of heartache, but in the end Pember got his rule book. The laws of the game were sold for a shilling apiece published as an easy to carry booklets. The association kicked off part in the pun the adoption of its new rules on January ninth of eighteen sixty four with a game between two teams, one captain by Pember himself. The president side one two to zero, kicking off Pember's multi year tenure as a prominent football player and high ranking member of these asociation. Roughly four years later, Pember and his family moved across the Pond to America, settling in New York City on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Aside from football, there was another activity he loved, mountaineering. Back in eighteen sixty three, Pember had actually summitted Mount Blanc in the Alps and now lectured in New York. On his climbing experiences, he was almost never satisfied and sought new ways to push himself. But more importantly, Pember seemed to have a problem with bullies, as he had handled back home by refusing to let one football club kick opposing players during games, as I said, a practice known as hacking. His stance caused that club to leave the association entirely. He took a job for the New York Tribune, investigating corruption among the police departments in prisons. He also reported for The New York Times on how the poor lived by disguising himself as a beggar and embedding himself among them. But one story still nagged at him. It had captivated him soon after his arrival in New York when he learned about the existence of the Fiji Mermaid, an exhibit that had been part of P. T. Barnum's American Museum. The mermaid was a three ft long sea creature that had been allegedly purchased from Japanese sailors in eighteen twenty two. It had a fish like tail, a shriveled body, and a mouth full of teeth. It had been a hoax, obviously most likely made of paper mache, but Pember didn't care. Even though he knew better. He believed traveling to the bottom of New York Bay made for a must read story. Papers were already reporting on the potential mermaid sighting by a mother who had allegedly witnessed one off the coast of Cape Cod in eighteen seventy two. Pember donned a diving suit and stepped off a boat into the murky depths of New York Bay. His boots weighed sixteen pounds and carried him to the bottom, helped by a hundred pound weight that had been fastened to his chest. He certainly got an Eiffel of absolutely nothing. The bay was too polluted to see anything at all. He wrote his story saying, I can vouch for the fact that there are no mermaids in New York Bay, at least not in that part of which I explored. Pember, after suffering the losses of several of his children and his wife Alice, eventually left New York for North Dakota, where he wrote a book about his time as a journalist back east. Unfortunately, he never finished it. He died at the age of fifty eight. Though his life ended abruptly, he left behind a sizeable legacy, and not just as a journalist. One week before he died, Pember read in The Times that local football clubs were playing the game according to the rules laid down by the Football Association in England. His rules. He might not have found mermaids in New York Bay, but Arthur Pember had changed the face of one of the world's most popular sports during his short time on this earth. New Jersey is known for a lot of weird things. Heck, there's even a whole magazine devoted to it, from haunted roads, to abandoned mental facilities to strange creatures lurking within its woods. New Jersey isn't just about boardwalk pizza and turnpike exits, but one weird story that doesn't often get told revolves around a man named Charles Bruin. Bruin was a Civil War veteran who had moved to Burlington, New Jersey after the war to become a tailor. He led a quiet life, getting along with his neighbors and attending church every Sunday. However, on November nine of nineteen o three, the unexplainable happened. Charles Bruin disappeared. No one knew what had happened to him. His neighbors hadn't seen him. The police and friends searched high and low, even across state lines, for the valued member of their community, to no avail. All that remained was a man's hat with a piece of paper bearing his name. The items that have been found on a ferry, the crew of which hadn't remembered seeing him either. Four years went by. A man by the name of Alfred Woolman had moved from Burlington, New Jersey, to Plainfield, Vermont, and taken a job as a trolley conductor. He was watching his passengers boarding the trolley when a man stepped on for a ride. Woolman recognized him immediately. After all, he had been a mainstay of Burlington for so long and had been missing for the past four years. It was Charles Bruin. His friends and neighbors were surely going to be thrilled that he was still alive. Woolman walked over and greeted the man, asking him what had happened, why he had left. The passenger looked up as though Woolman was a stranger. He told him he must have the wrong person. He said his name was Frank Johnson from New York and he didn't know this Bruin the conductor was talking about. Johnson exited the trolley soon after leaving. Woolman stupefied, but the conductor refused to let it go. He started asking around town if anyone knew this man, Frank Johnson. As it's turned out they did. Johnson had arrived in Vermont three years prior, and just like Bruin, he kept mostly to himself. He was simply a god fearing man who attended church on Sundays. But that wasn't enough for Woolman. He had to know for sure. He was like a dog with a bone, and he knew he needed help to bring closure to the case. He reached out to Bruin's brother, who came to Burlington and greeted the man who looked exactly like his sibling. Johnson, however, was upset. He had already told Woolman that he was not Charles Bruin. He had no idea who these people were, including the man claiming to be his brother, So Johnson explained to them the details of his old life in New York. He had had a daughter who still lived there. Her name was Anne, and he had recently purchased a life insurance policy for her. Frank Johnson's back story was full of little details, and for a moment it sounded like Woolman and the brother had gotten mixed up in the bizarre case of mistaken identity. They all eventually departed and the story wound up in a local newspaper. Maybe it was a slow news day, A friend of Johnson's name, Dr Buchanan read the story about Woolman, the brother and Charles Bruin from Burlington, New Jersey. As it so happened, Buchanan's father had been a chaplain back in Burlington's and asked him if he had ever known Charles Bruin. Then, around June thirty, Buchanan was awoken in the middle of the night by a phone call. It was Johnson's landlady. Her tenant had apparently woken up without any knowledge of where he was or how he had gotten there, and Johnson told her that his name was Charles Bruin. Buchanan and his father hurried to the home where Johnson knee Bruin was staying and found him pale faced and in a daze. He said he was Charles Bruin from Burlington, New Jersey. He recognized Dr Buchanan's father, but the last four years were a blank. He didn't remember Anne or New York or any of what he had told Woolman and his brother a short time earlier. He did, however, remember everything that had happened before he became Frank Johnson, such as his life in New Jersey and his time in the Civil War, but something else had cropped up doing Bruin's life as Frank Johnson his prophetic dreams. One dream had involved a fire in a shop in which a woman named Miss Brown would have died, but Johnson had been there to save her. The following day, fire broke out at the same establishment, just as he predicted, and he stepped in to save Miss Brown's life for real. Another dream occurred after an incident in which he had repaired a fur coat and then sent it back to its owner. The owner returned it, saying that the lining was shredded by the time it had reached him. That night, Johnson dreamt that he had taken the coat back to New York, where he met a small man who told him the skins that he had used for the lining were the wrong type. The next day, Johnson packed up the coats, took it to New York, and met the man that he had seen in his dream. The rest of the events transpired exactly as he predicted. No one knew exactly what had caused Charles Bruin to abandon his old life and start a new one as Frank Johnson, nor could they explain in his ability to predict the future through his dreams, although his story was reported on in several newspapers and the Journal of American Society for Psychical Research. As for Bruin, he went back to New Jersey where he was reunited with his family. One week later, however, he moved back to Vermont where he got his old job back, the one that he had when he was Frank Johnson. Because apparently, some habits, even the ones we don't remember, and definitely be hard to break. 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.

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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