Stuff They Don't Want You To KnowIn an earlier episode, the guys delved into the modern mystery of Genghis Khan's hidden grave, and found he was far from the only famous historical figure lost to secrecy and the inevitable march of time. Travel with the gang as they unravel more stories of humanity's famous lost tombs, hidden corpses and more in the second part of this two-part series.
Conspiracy realist. We are following up in our series on famous lost tombs. This is part two. Check out part one and then help us figure out where Djangis Khan was buried. If you know, just tell us.
Yeah, I hear the X marks the spot or some such nonsense.
Like the river shifted.
Yeah, good to say. Let's go find these tombs, guys. Yeah.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is no.
They call me Ben. We are joined with our returning the fourth member of the fourth member of our podcast Enterprise. Folks. Give a hand for super producer Paul Deckant, who has just come back to Atlanta from some adventures abroad which I don't know how much we want to disclose on air.
Yeah, he's he's saying, stop stop stop talking, okay about that?
Making that sorry across the throat.
Gesture hint taken. Most importantly, you are you. You are here that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. Hold everything, hold the phone, stop the presses, this is a part two episode, which means that if you want to get the whole bang for your creepy buck today, you'll want to listen to Famous Tombs Part one. Then Famous Tombs Part one has some pretty pretty crazy insights. So while you're there, you may also want to listen to our Jengus Khan episode which inspired all of this. I have one quick, Paul, can we get like a breaking news sound cue? Perfect? One quick clarification we want to make when we did our when did our episode on the Ants cult in the Czech Republic, we had some it was called the Curum case. Yes, that's correct, thank you. We had some confusion. We didn't explicitly say it. Both of the boys in that case did in fact survive, and I believe it was me at some point who said I believe one of them died. It's a translation error on my part, So to be clear, there is a little bit of a happy ending for those kids. They did. They did make it this vibe and into adulthood. They've got facebooks, the whole nine.
Yeah, just in case you survived that episode, because it is a it is a gnarly one, but yeah, thank you, Ben. That's important to know.
Oh thanks to everyone on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and so on who wrote to us to ask for clarification or point that out without further ado. Assuming you've heard Famous Tombs Part one, here's where it gets crazy.
We're starting right with getting crazy at the top.
Yeah, well, this was originally supposed to be just one episode.
Now it's true.
Let's break it down. There are a lot of people that died, a lot more people than are currently living, and well, not that have ever lived, because obviously if you died, you lived in spoiler alert.
Everyone who's alive right now gonna die.
Possibly probably, but not definitely.
And also it's hard to bury everybody. Not everybody was buried, so only some of the most important people are gonna have tombs that remain from hundreds of years ago. That's where we find ourselves.
And even those tombs didn't fare as well as their creators had hoped. Right look upon my works, you mighty, and so on. So it's strange. There is one surprise that I found that maybe we can save till the end. But let's let's start with Let's start with lost grave sites. Right was that where that was where we were earlier, right, yeah, I think we had a whole category to start fresh with. So Wolfgang dadais Mozart. You've you've probably heard of it.
Right, Mozart in the Jungle, Mozart in the City.
I was confusing with Beethoven for no good reason.
Beethoven is the one who went death.
That's right.
Yeah.
Mozart was like the magic flute dis auba flute.
He was also he was living a wild rock star life. I didn't know this, but he had tons of mistresses. His wife actually kicked him out of the of the house they shared together, And there was a great comic us on a recent Netflix series who described Mozart's lifestyle and pointed out how difficult it would be in the time of which he lived for your wife to kick you out of that house. Like the bar for behavior given, you know, patriarchal attitudes was so low that you really had to be going ham and bacon.
You know, I have never seen Amedaeis.
It's great. Yeah, yeah, it's a good film.
Cliary that was like his nemesis, right, yeah, Okay, they were beefed up apparently.
Yeah, it's been a while since I saw it, but it's masterful performance. I think, yeah, it's no Police Academy four, but what.
Is exactly you know?
I mean even Police Academy didn't have their stride until well after Police Academy three.
What happened in four? What happened in four?
You have to watch it?
Really?
Yeah, it's just I don't want to cheapen the cinematic experience for you.
They all kind of run together in my mind. I may have only ever seen you. I may have only ever seen Police Academy one. WHOA, Well, I'm sorry, dude, am I fired?
No, we should get together and watch those and then just watch all of them. Then not stop and watch all of the Naked Gun series. There's only two Naked Gun movie.
I'm so sorry. They all kind of blur together in my mind.
Too, and then watch Amadeus, which is the spiritual companion piece to Naked Gun thirty three and a third and Police Academy four.
And then get back to Lost Tumes Part two.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart remains one of the most influential classical composers of all time. That's not hyperbole. The guy was just that good. He died on December fifth and seventeen ninety one, and maybe this is unfamiliar to a lot of people, but the circumstances of his death remain murky today, and there are over one hundred theories about what happened.
Whoa especially for someone that you know, I'm seventeen ninety one is a long time ago, but it's not that long ago. It's not as though there wasn't somebody looking at his body after his death and going that's probably this. But again, when you're dealing with something about poison or something that kills you internally, and seventeen ninety one, then it's probably a lot more difficult.
Sure, Yeah, a ton of people thought he had been poisoned because again and he was living wild.
He probably had a lot of perhaps spurned lovers. But it may have sought revenge.
Maybe he contracted something from his wild lifestyle.
Oh that's possible, quite possible. Yeah, maybe he just had you know, at this time in human history, it's disturbingly easy for what we would consider a common everyday infection to grow unchecked and kill you, you know, like an infectious disease like rheumatic fever, so on. So Mozart died, and that is where our story about Mozart begins off to a great note. The record seemed to indicate that he was sealed in a wooden coffin and buried in a plot along with four to five other people, and that there was a wooden marker used to identify this technically speaking mass grave.
That is so strange to me that he didn't wasn't in like a place that was venerated a little bit more hm, very strange. But anyway, this idea that he was, you know, perhaps buried with several other people gave rise to the commonly accepted myth that he was buried in a pauper's grave what was known as a popper's grave at the time, a less wealthy person's grave, specifically because of the debts that he'd accrued over the course of his pretty crazy life that we talked about.
Probably was it like party debts, Yeah, yeah.
I mean those royalties never got to come in for Mozart, really.
That's true. And didn't he largely exist on kind of a like a patronage kind of model when he was alive?
Yeah, I believe so, ye artists model, So he is he's buried not the best financial situation, and this idea, this idea of in turin our loved ones with four to five other people might today be something that we associate with poverty or with crime, you know what I mean. That's how merciless government or a drug cartel, if those things are still different today, that's how they would bury people. That's now decent folks bury people, right, But this was the standard practice for middle income families at the time. His death is murky and unexplained, but his burial was surprisingly normal, right.
So the burial of groups of people in one grave was organized and dignified, and it differed significantly from the images of large open pits now that you think of when the term mass grave gets thrown around. Mozart may not have died rich, but he was admired. He had friends, and they came to his widow's aid. They helped her pay his debts and his funeral costs. There was many large grave side gatherings, and grand funeral were not really a thing to do in Vienna during this period, so Mozart's burial was likely very simple, but a church service was certainly held in his honor, and he was buried as a man of his social standing would have been at the time. At this point, Mozart had a grave. However, at some stage during the next five to fifteen years, his plot was dug up to make room for more burials.
Wow. Yeah, this is a practice they picked up combating epidemics and plagues, and conventionally we have to make more room for the dead so that the living can live. The bones were reinterred, they may have been crushed to reduce their size, and as a consequence of this, the position of Mozart's grave was lost. Again. This we're paying more attention to this because it was Mozart, this amazing composer. This was also fairly common practice for someone living in Vienna at the time, and some historians have suggested that maybe there's a little bit of a pr spin here, a bit of post mortem propaganda.
And I had never heard this at all before.
Really, yeah, this was new to me as well. The idea is that Mozart's widow, Constance may have encouraged the pauper's burial story, or even started it, to make the public more interested in her husband's work and then to come see her perform Mozart's pieces compositions.
It sounds like something that you might hear about in the social media age, where you know, you start a video or something about, oh my gosh, my loved one died and they were just put here and these are the terrible circumstances that were going through. But check this out while I sing this song that my loved one that just died wrote that you can find on iTunes right now.
Yeah. Yeah, And we know, okay, we know that's quite possible depending on what your uh, your base level estimation of human ethics might be, you know, and there are a lot of there are a lot of circumstances that have probably lost to history. We do know that grave space was at a premium back then. It's still a problem that local municipal organizations in the area have to worry about. Frankly, and people were given one grave for a few years, then moved to an all purpose smaller area. But here's here's one strange thing. We may have lost Mozart's grave, but someone may have his skull.
Is it Nicholas Cage.
Yeah, he has it in his pyramid right next to t Rex skull. No, it's a okay, let's let's get to the real thing.
Here.
It's called the Salzburg Mozartium. That's kind of cool. Mozartium.
Yeah, Mozart Strasa right in Salzburg.
Yes, they represented with this pretty morbid gift at one point, and it's supposedly Mozart's skull.
Interesting but surely unconfirmed.
Unconfirmed but looking good. Yeah, who uh the the skull belonged to someone who died in a way that's consistent with Mozart symptoms before death.
What were those buttons we talked about in the last episode, Thomas pain, Thomas pain buttons. Yeah, it's kind of like a thing where you could probably confirm roughly the age of the skull and how this person met their end, but don't We also not really know how Mozart died. There was no trauma to the skull or anything.
It was Yeah, he had symptoms that were he had symptoms upon which we could build a couple of theories for death. Poison doesn't really check out in this scenario. But here's how the story goes, and this is already sort of a legend. Allegedly, a grave digger during the reorganization of Mozart's original grave was struck by a pang of conscience and said, I, you know, I can't let Mozart's skull go gently into that good night, rage, rage, et cetera. And he took the skull, he stole it. Essentially, scientific testing so far has not been able to confirm or deny that the skull belonged to Mozart. But and this goes back to what you were asking, there's evidence on the skull to determine that whomever originally was the I guess possessor of this skull, whosever's skull it was, they died due to something called chronic heematoma, which would be consistent with some of Mozart's symptoms before death. He had a lot of swelling, He had things that looked like maybe not an infection in the kidneys, but his kidneys were We're not working correctly now. Even now, they're several medical theories about the exact cause of his death, But people who are using the skull as a basis for those theories have to admit no one, no one is one sure it's Mozart's skull yet.
Yeah, because you'd have to have another part of the body right to test that you could confirm was Mozart to get some DNA from.
That or maybe a descendant. Would you do that?
Otherwise you're using genetic genealogy trying to maybe fit him within a family tree somewhere.
Hmm, interesting, I wonder are there any descendants of Mozart alive and kicking?
Are you a descendant of Mozart? Let us know? Not the end of the show.
It was a fake out, but there might be a lot more children of Mozart than they're aware, just because of those wild times he was having.
M It looks like Mozart's two surviving sons died without descendant that we know of, and this is the end of Mozart's story, but not our show. Stay tuned, will take a brief break for a word from our sponsors. We're back. Okay, So Mozart has a lot of legends surrounding his death, but as we saw when you scrutinize this, a lot of it's normal, other than the fact that someone apparently stole a skull and they've been passing around for for years. This next tale concerned someone who is purposely buried in secret and hopes that their body would never be found. And it's a guy named Attila the hun But who is that? Who is that?
You know, well, you've definitely heard the name before, but you may only know the broad outlines of Oh it's a Tilla Hunt. That sounds familiar. It's kind of like that Genghis guy, right, not that Jingus dude, but it sounds like the Genghis guy for sure. But even the most prominent scholars in the field, people would actually be studying someone like until the Hunt. Consider this person until an international man of mystery of sorts, not necessarily in Austin powers, but you know, get in that same ballpark.
Yeah, This guy, who appears to have come just out of the blue or at least his origins or somewhat murky, became an incredibly terrifying and dangerous conqueror in the early fifth century. He led a group of a group of communities that were allied together that were collectively known as the Hunnik Empire, and they terrorized the Eastern and Western Roman empires.
I hope the ideas of communities terrorizing an empire like that.
Like some would be considered clans, some would be tribes, some would be bands, exactly, would be conscripted exactly.
It's just a really interesting way to frame it, because ultimately, that's what those groups are. It's a community of people working together for a goals. It just happens to be to terrorize It.
Not quite as vicious as your local HOA from what I understand, right, but at least the HOA stays in one place.
I think that George Lucas was inspired by Attil the Hunt when he named Jabba the Hut.
Hmmm, I think it's quite possible. Yeah, I think it's quite possible.
I should ask him.
Yeah, he's kind of hard to get to. He lives in a compound. He doesn't really go outside very much.
Okay, job of the Hut.
People are still mad about those prequels.
I read it very this this has not too much to do with today's episode, but just a side note because I don't think we can make a full episode about this. There's a fantastic fan theory slash conspiracy theory regarding jar Jar Binks and the prequels. Yes, the argument being that jar Jar Binks, when Lucas like control of the franchise, was originally intended to be revealed as a Sith lord. You heard that man familiar with that one.
And he was literally the key to everything in that first movie and what eventually he was going to be the key to everything in the whole series.
Man George really liked that character, didn't he. Oh yeah, he.
Doubled down, you know what I mean. There's to each their own, but he doubled down. You can see some videos arguing this theory, and I gotta admit I'm not one hundred percent persuaded, but it made you think.
It really did. He certainly ended up being a sith lord in our minds.
Yes, yes, the sith lord in our minds, in our hearts, in our hearts. Yeah. So jar Jar, like Attila, the hunt may well have played a mysterious role in history. We know, we know a pretty good bit about the movements of Attila and co movements of and we know about their military campaigns, but most of the information about Attila himself comes from his enemies at the time, which we run into a lot. You know, people who hunt witches are writing about witches. They're not going to say the nicest thing about witches, right, And most of Hunnik literature compounds the problem because it was passed down orally, so people were just telling stories to each other playing telephone again, and bit by bit that stuff disappeared or got absorbed into other empires. People still don't agree on exactly where Attila the Hun was from, and they also don't really know what he looked like except for one description, like one paragraph from one guy who went to the court, and people have made entire academic careers off that paragraph. But fast forward, here's a conqueror, not quite as successful, probably as Alexander the Great, but a huge threat to the Roman empires at the time.
And then he died, and then he died.
And that's where our story begins. Yes, exactly again, ah man. He died sometime in March of four fifty three at a feast celebrating his latest marriage, and people are still arguing about exactly how he died surprise surprise, to this day. And there are four prevailing theories about this. Theory. Number one is that in the midst of this soiree, this revelry, and of course some heavy drinking that accompanied it, he suffered a severe nosebleed and choked to death in a drunken, bloody.
Stupor gross Do you want to hear theory number two?
You remember the Children of the Corn Too movie.
Oh, I could not tell you anything about that.
Well, I just remember there's one part where they have like a voodoo doll of this woman and they stick a knife in her nose and she gets like a she bleeds to death from a nose bleed. That's kind of how I picture this going down.
Oh okay, here's theory number two. Possibly Again we're talking about heavy drinking at the party and something there was a complication because of this, But in this case it's internal bleeding, something called esophageal verses, where these dilated veins in the lower part of the esophagus in your neck there, but lower a little bit, they rupture, leading to death by bleeding out hemorrhage essentially. Ah okay, So like he either bled out in the nasal area or in the throat area. That's what we've got so far.
Coffee up lit. Yeah, so either way, this was super messy.
Yeah, it's choking essentially, you can't breathe.
Yeah.
There's this other theory that was recorded about eighty years after his death by a Roman chronicler named Marcellinius, and in their report he says Attila, king of the huns and Ravager of the Provinces of Europe, was pierced by the hand and blade of his wife. So he said, yeah, it's straight his wife killed him. He had just picked up he was celebrating this his latest marriage. I think we had said earlier he married pretty frequently. These were political alliances at times, and I'm sure in at least a few cases these were not consensual marriages.
Yeah, Marsilian, Marsillian, Marsillians, Marsillinius. Yeah, Marcellinius did not mention which wife, that's true.
I think we assumed it was his latest wife, for his most recent Uh. And then that last theory is that he was assassinated by Roman officials, which is just a natural thing you would assume, because he was a terrorist in their eyes, you know what I mean, who couldn't quite be caught.
So yeah, and what were Roman officials good for if not plotting assassinations. I was kind of there.
And it is a big party where there's a lot of heavy drinking. Again, a little bit of that poison if you looked like he was choking.
Yeah, and so they say he's dead. He explode, blood exploded out of his face. Somehow we don't have no further questions. It's time to bury him. So they get a triple I guess a triple leveled or triple shelled coffin. First, it's encased in gold, and that's to show everybody that he was a baller, no, literally, that he was wealthy and glorious.
Wait, the is that at the core? So between him, there's nothing between him and the gold essentially.
Right, okay, right? And then over the gold silver to show that he's down with the moon and the river. Oh, that's good that he shares kinship with him. Right, and then finally iron to show that he was most importantly, most outwardly a tough, tough dude. Nice, so they put some thought into it, but with a heart of gold, but with a heart of gold quite so, just so, And this this is strange because here's where the story takes a turn. Myth and fact get very difficult to differentiate from this point on.
Yeah, it's true. Hun engineers they have those at the time are said to have diverted the Tisa River long enough to dry up the main river bed where Attila was entombed in this magnificent sarcophagus. So then the waters were released and they flooded back over the grave site and this is this is the thing we've heard about. Actually, I think this was the case with the burial of Jengis Khan as well. The folks that bore his casket of sarcophagus to that site were then murdered unequivocally. And it's possible they may have even known that that was going to hapen and then they were like down with that just for the absolute privilege and honor of being able to carry their glorious leader to his final resting place.
At least their immediate family might know maybe or it's probably secret.
Right, Yeah, maybe they weren't told. Wow, but they had to know something was up right. The sarcophagus stood out. And I appreciate you pointing out the similarities with Djengis Khan because there's also that river legend about the Khan, right, so maybe these stories got combined over time.
Yeah, but that is I mean, I love that idea that somewhere at the bottom of a river that's where Attilabehun rests.
It also points to a possible cultural or ancestral commonality between the Hun community and the Mongol community. Some sort you know, at least in this funereal practice. So yeah, as you say said, no details ever emerged. Where exactly is he buried, We don't know. We've heard that he's at the bottom of this river, right, sleeping with the fishes, sleeping under the fishes technically, yeah, because the heavy coffin would have sank, and quite possibly with untold treasures.
Yeah, it does make you want to somehow find a way to travel a river and just like with a metal detector or something.
Heck, yeah, I love uncharted man untold treasures.
But let's speculate. You think there was some like nice neck pieces in there, some chains.
Weapons like is lucky not lucky, but you know, whatever's prized, sword or spear or something. Yeah, probably varied in full armor, jewels, quite possibly. Yeah, encrusted. I love it when things are encrusted. Maybe maybe worked, bone carved, boney stones, things like that. Yeah, maybe a bit. And beyond card, no, not good enough.
Can you imagine how much money until the hun or Jakis Kahn or somebody would have on a bed bath and beyond card.
I don't think they paid for things, Yeah, that's true. I think they would just ride the horse in and go reeving. You know, wow, But who knows. Maybe if they had a coupon that would change it. Maybe if they said, well, twenty percent off, it's virtually free.
Anyway, That's how we fix the world and stop everybody from hurting each other and being so mad. Coupons build bad, bath and beyond and just give everybody gift cards.
Oh man, I don't you know. I think I knock that mail or that they send out just because it is so ubiquitous, Like do you get them at your houses?
Oh?
Yeah, of course, yeah, yeah, I am a human being.
You have a bed, bath, and beyond.
I've always wondered what the beyond. I guess beyond is just all the non bed and bath related idea kitchen.
Yeah, well, it really depends on the intonation you use when you hit the odd.
I think I've mentioned this before, but this is particularly appropriate for this episode. In my hometown, there's a store called Caskets and More.
Whoa, I remember that?
Yeah, okay, see, and it again.
It's the intonation.
Yeah, but I think with.
Caskets and More it's it's a little more sinister. I love it though, And the fact that Attila the Hunt's grave site is lost to history until somebody diverts a river just to see what veracity there may be to this story. Uh, that still hasn't stopped cities, villages, and towns in the area from advertising themselves as the genuine location of the grave of Attila the Hunt. So if you'd like to suspend your disbelief just a bit, feel free to travel to Hungary and then snap a selfie in front of any variety of here lies Untila the Hunt signs. You know what I mean, I'm there, Yeah, just point you know what they I just pointed a river.
Ah.
It's so it's so morbid. But if you think about it, someone has died in every river on this planet. I hope I didn't just ruin rivers for everyone.
Yeah.
Maybe not every creek.
Yeah, but every river. The water keeps flowing, So here we go. That one doesn't bother me as much. Lakes still, though.
Lakes did You should ask Scott Benjamin about this before we go to break. We did an episode years and years back about how many cars have been found in lakes when they dry up just even fifteen feet twenty feet from the shoreline. It's disturbing. It's way more than you think, and just in the US, far far more.
All right, Well, let's go to the lake everybody. No, you know, I don't want to go on a tangi, but Lake Land ear up near where I grew up. There's some there's some creek sepiness to that lake because it's a man made it's all. You know, it was flooded and everything.
There are no natural lakes in Georgia.
Yeah, and everyone talks about how there's supposedly a church down there and everything, and there are all these legends about what's at the bottom of this really murky, gross looking lake. That is wonderful and I love Lake Laniar and go visit if you get a chance. But it just has this creepy quality to it.
But I believe there's some sand to that matt because there were structures there that were flooded. That's a true story.
Yeah, yeah, but some of it is a little far fetched in my eyes. Even if you look back at the historical record, some of the things that come out are pure legend. But they're fun.
I don't know, you know what. Let's have a creepy conversation about this off air while we're playing a word from our sponsor. Okay, fine, No, that's fine. Yeah, yeah, just agree to disagree.
I'm okay with that, all right.
No, I think you're both wrong.
Oh sorry, you had to see that. We have to remember that we're friends. We can't let these off air conversations tear our friendship apart.
You're right, Let me apply a little bit more of this here.
We go ahead, and we met some mats on death's door right now, and he's still here for you. Well, by you, I mean you the listeners.
He reminds me in many ways of Sir Francis Drake.
Oh me too, I remind myself, I hope not.
Okay, Well, who's other than reminding everyone vaguely of our pal Matt Frederick. Who is Sir Francis Drake.
Well, he was this fifty six year old guy that apparently unfortunately died. He was born in fifteen forty. He lived until January twenty eighth, fifteen ninety six, and he was an English explorer who was involved in things such as you might know of piracy, elicit slave trading. He also became the second person ever to circumnavigate the globe. But his name when you hear sir Francis Drake. You a lot of times, if you're not a big history buff, you just imagine in my head this explorer. This I'm speaking personally here because his name has been mentioned in so many video games and all these things. But a lot of times you don't get the context, the full context at least of what somebody like this their life and what they did.
Yeah, he did quite a bit. He sailed around the globe when that was a big deal. Still is, yeah, right, it still is. He was acquainted with the halls of power. Is definitely not a not a great person, So don't fall for a lot of the romanticization you may read about Drake. His circumnavigation was also a pirate mission technically.
Yeah, well in a way it almost kind of had to be, in this weird and messed up way. But I give that's the idea of I need to get supplies. However I can get supplies.
Oh and this is good foreshadowing of what happens to him because his expedition was officially a journey for knowledge, a voyage of discovery, but he also had a secret agreement with Queen Elizabeth that along the way on this quote unquote Voyage of Discovery. He would attack and assault and terrorized the Spanish any way that he could, particularly if it meant disrupting their shipping routes. So as soon as they got into this Pacific, he almost made it more of a priority to plunder Spanish ships and rob ports than he did to actually go all the way around the world, and he stole a lot of stuff. He eventually returned home from that trip as the world's most wealthy pirate.
He got night did too for his efforts, right by the queen. Mm hmm.
He got knighted as well, and the Spanish king put a massive price on his head from because from fifteen seventy until the end of his life, this guy's out to get the Spanish, and King Philip the Second offered a bounty of twenty thousand ducats for his head that was the equivalent of millions of dollars today. When he came back from his worldwide piracy escapades, you're right, Matt, he was knighted, and then in fifteen eighty eight he participated the English defeat of the Spanish Armada, and he went on to become a tremendously influential figure in his even in his own day. And then he died, and that is where our story begins in fifteen ninety six. At least with this one, we do know how he died. He died of dysentery. So no one's like secretly poisoned. No one's like, uh, exploding blood face.
He went out Oregon trail style.
He went out Oregon trail style. He did, he really did. And he never got to Oregon, No, not without trying, though, So what did they do? Because the Spanish were on their backs. They hated this guy so much and for very good reason that they were actively searching for his corpse.
Because they wanted to like do stuff to it.
Yeah, and then get the bounty from King Philips. Bring him, like bring him the head, but let's do some stuff to it first.
Sure, so Drake had a burial at sea, as was custom for a sailor type such as himself. He was buried in a lead lined coffin near the Bay of a Portobello, a few miles off the coastline. It is supposed that his final resting place is near the wrecks of two British ships, the Elizabeth and the Delight, which scuttled in Portobello Bank.
Yeah. Yeah, he was planning on this in advance. He said, if I die, when I die, sink the ships sink me too. Bury me in a coffin in the dark depths of the ocean, because I do not want those Spaniards to get their hands on me. He was also buried in full armor for his request, because he really did like His plan was that if these ships were purposely scuttled, if he were buried at sea in a leadline coffin to keep his remains from somehow rising right as they decay and separate, that he would be able to prevent the Spanish from finding and desecrating his remains. And that was his genuine fear. Like have you ever anyone listening, have you ever been at a point in your life where you think there are people who are interested enough in your death that they would desecrate your body.
I don't know.
That seems strange.
Yah, yeah, that's that's out there. But in his case, yeah, people would definitely want to desegrate his body.
Like those people are living very high stakes lives.
Yeah, definitely. But yeah, I guess the whole point. I mean, I didn't even realize that you could seal. I guess yeah, it's obvious you could seal a coffin at that point in time in history, a leadlined coffin actually get that much of a seal where water isn't going to seep in, where the weight is going to keep him at the bottom. That's intense. Francis Drake, eancuse me, sir.
That's right. That man sailed around the world robbing people blind. Can't forget about that. Fast forward to twenty eleven. There's a guy who owns sports teams. He's also a pirate enthusiast. He reads a book about Francis Drake and he says, you know what, I'm going to find this fleet and this guy's body. This pirate enthusiast and sports team owners named Pat Crochet like Jim Crochey, and he claimed that he and a team of his treasure hunters had discovered two ships off the coast of Panama, and the ships that they found they believed to be the Elizabeth and the Delight, which mentioned earlier in nol Elizabeth being one hundred and ninety five ton ship and Delight being a fifty ton ship. And as you know, most speculation places Drake's body in Coffin somewhere in that area, and they focused on Portobello Bay after they hired a guy named Trevor mcgenry to pinpoint areas where the ships might have gone down. But very quickly they ran into a gray area when it comes to the protection of British shipwrecks, when it comes to anything from the Age of Empire.
That's right. Under the Protection of Military Remains Act of nineteen eighty six, British naval vessels anywhere in the world are protected from exploitation. However, there's one little caveat here. The Act only covers certain ships which sunk since nineteen fourteen, and only British citizens can be prosecuted under it, which is a bit of a problem. Not right there. So there's a lot of history and ships that sailed before nineteen fourteen, and if it's only British citizens, anybody else who's outside coming in doesn't have to even worry about this.
Yeah, So this is where they get to an interesting thing. There's an organization called the Joint Nautical Archaeology Policy Committee sexy name right is still my Heart, and they have been pressing the United Kingdom's government for years to ratify some international agreements on the protection of what they would call underwater cultural heritage, you know what I mean. So the guy in charge of the Joint Nautical Archaeology Policy Committee is a guy named Robert Yorke. I don't know if he's a relation to Tom but he told the BBC if these are Drake's ships, they are presumably sovereign and immune. So why isn't the British government telling these people to go away? If we ratify the convention, we can make sure they were properly conserved and looked after. But Panama did ratify the convention, so its government might act to protect the wrecks of the ship. And what they mean when they say protect the wrect is not to allow someone to attempt an excavation or to attempt an analysis of this site just because they want to. You know, you have to have government approval, which can be really, really difficult. As we saw in our previous episode exploring the lives and burials of Neffertidy and Leopatra. People in the modern day can at a very very difficult time trying to get government approval for any ancient site. And it makes sense you don't want everybody to be able to just go somewhere and start digging, right. And as of this recording, it's weird because this was reported in twenty eleven and we tried, but we couldn't find much new information. So as of this recording, it appears Drake's body has yet to surface and his secrets, whatever they may be, remain safe in his watery grave.
Just need somebody to go rogue and just go down there and find it, against all the government's wishes. Just go and do it.
Nicholas Cage, Yes, we're.
Invoking you and or who else is famous for playing like frogmen and the Navy seals and stuff. Oh, we need the body, Ventura, that's who we need. See. Yeah, we need Jesse to go down there.
And maybe Jason Statham can come the rock. We should just assemble a crack team of action stars.
Just the expendables. Go find Sir Francis Drake. Please.
I would watch it. It'd be a different direction from them. I would definitely watch it. And that's that's where the story of Drake's body ends for now. But so far we have just been looking at the graves of famous dudes. There is another mysterious lost grave here in the United States. In New England.
Yeah, here's here's here's the broad Strokes. Mary Dyer I was born Mary Barrett in sixteen eleven. She was an English teacher and a Colonial American Puritan who became a Quaker and who was hanged in the Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony for repeatedly defying a Puritan law that banned Quakers from the colony. She is one of the four executed Quakers known as the Boston and Martyrs.
It's a true story. It might not be familiar to a lot of people because she may not be famous in the current celebrity sense. You know, she's not an Instagram right, But Mary Dyer was a tremendously important person in the world of religious freedom during her lifetime. Her sin was converting from Puritanism to Quakerism, primarily because of these doctrinal differences. Quakers believe that people could interface directly with God or hear directly from God without needing a middle layer, an intermediary like a clergyman or something.
It's funny, in twenty nineteen, that doesn't seem like that big of a deal or that big of a difference. But my goodness, that is an entire paradigm shift for the power structure. Yeah oo right, dangerous for dangerous for her mm hmmm.
And this, yeah, this was a huge idea. It threatened the authority of the church leaders, and they they were so threatened to this that they had already banned Quakers from living in Massachusetts. Dyer went into exile and Rhode Island, but then she returned to Boston to support two friends who were imprisoned for their beliefs. All three were sentenced to death, but then at the last moment they said, no, you're just banished, get out of town, don't return, like the beginning of the Witch, except Mary Dyer came back again speaking out for religious freedom. So she eventually was put to death. She was hanged. She was buried in an unmarked plot in sixteen sixty and today we still don't know where the grave is. Was she buried, as some had said in Boston commons. Was her body stolen and in turned on a family farm. Was it put to the wind?
Nobody knows.
Nobody knows. And then we have just one last thing. This is the thing that I don't know about you guys, It surprised me when I learned about it. Steve Jobs is buried in an unmarked grave his family, and he specifically requested it.
Now we can't.
Worship him, No, you still can't.
Oh look at my thing.
Just yeah, just we all worship him. We worship him constantly, and we look at our phones all day long, and these are these laptops in front of us or our watches.
Well, it's the worry was that people would go to his grave and either maybe desecrate it or just try to leave their own intrusive tributes. The thing is, this isn't this is in Silicon Valley, So it's many people feel that they have discovered the exact location, and they will swear it's confirmed it's a cemetery.
Do you think if they did give him a grave it would have been made entirely of glass?
I don't know, like like the Apple store.
It would have looked like an Apple store.
Oh maybe in a way. That's that's on brand. I guess all right.
Steve Jobs and that guy certainly was an innovator. But if you have you read any of some of his.
Quotes, terrible person seemed like a real, real terrible person. Really real meani uh falsely used handicap license that like car tags too, so he could park in handicap spaces.
I'm trying to provide a counterpoint somewhere in here.
Kids, he doesn't acknowledge.
Steven kick puppies experience, right, was Wosniak Okay? Was he the nicer?
Yeah? Everybody's weird in their own way.
I guess we'll do a show on Apple in the future. Tell us yours Steve Jobs secrets, you know what else?
Any what else? Everyone is in their own way? Matt Special, that's right, Special.
I was going to bring up some mister Rogers.
Yeah, now that's a serious rip Steve Jobs. I mean, I like my iPhone, but I could take him or leave the mister Rogers. That guy was a national treasure.
Unfortunately, Fortunately we know mister Rogers the location of his resting place for the rest of these and again, we've just scratched the surface here. The question remains, will we ever find any of these graves?
You know?
In some cases yeah, in other cases absolutely not, because the people have been scattered into the wind, their remains have been made into buttons, their remains have been stolen by secret societies. That is true again check out episode one. But we have to end on some questions. You know, we asked these earlier. What benefits do these searches have for modern human civilization? Is this a waste of money? Should we focus on feeding the people who are starving to death?
Now?
Those are loaded questions, I know, I know, or because we can spend it the other way? Or are we investing in the future by learning more about the past. Those are very I think they're both very strong arguments.
Sure, I asked this question. We did the gengis Con episode. It feels to me very much like a waste of time, like who cares? But then you pointed out very correctly, Ben, that it does. There are artifacts that could teach us things about the past that are there to be discovered potentially. I was more hung up on the idea of having to know, having to have the answers and understand, you know, be in control in some way.
But I see both sides. I think you guys are forgetting about all the gold. There's a lot of gold, ducats, silver buried under these rivers and next to the ships. We got to find that gold. Maybe the heart of the ocean is down there.
Maybe maybe Orde la maire, Well don't. I don't lose hope, though, because as for the odds of findings long forgotten resting places and these corpses that have disappeared, we can end on a somewhat less bleak note. We do find these things. I can't believe I've forgot to mention this last episode. We recently discovered another famous royal body, King Richard II himself the Hunchback of Shakespearean fame. His body was lost to antiquity until twenty twelve when somebody found it underneath a parking lot.
It's that's not a joke, that's not kidding. Yeah, that's real.
That's real. He also didn't really have a hunchback.
Yeah, this kind of thing has occurred a couple of times, not necessarily with a king over someone of this statue, but an interesting unmarked grave that was found underneath a building somewhere where there's just been a building for a couple of decades and it just happened to get cemented over, you know whatever case bricked over or wooded over.
Wood it over, paved over, bricked over whatever it is built a top. Yeah, and this is in a way an inspiring and optimistic thing. We want to hear your stories and we want to hear what your take is. Is this worthwhile? Is this waste of time? There is clearly more out there. What are some of the mysteries maybe in your neck of the global woods? Or if you were a treasure hunter, an adventurer and archaeologist, what would be your number one quest? What would be your Oak Island money pit for instance? And why? You can let us know on Facebook at our community page. Here's where it gets crazy when you where you can talk to the best part of this show, your fellow listeners. You can also follow us on Instagram. You can follow me personally on Instagram at ben Bowl or you.
Can follow me at Embryonic Insider. I think Matt chooses to stay off the personal gram that's correct, and our show Instagram is at Conspiracy Stuff Show.
And that's the end of this classic episode. If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode, you can get into contact with us in a number of different ways. One of the best is to give us a call. Our number is one eight three three STDWYTK. If you don't want to do that, you can send us a good old fashioned email.
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