0:00 [SPEAKER_00]: Hammond, Indiana, is known for a number of things, like being the home of the former NFL team, the Hammond Pros, who were led by the first black coach in NFL history, the legendary, Fritz Pollard, in 1925. 0:14 [SPEAKER_00]: It would be another 60 years before there was a second black NFL coach when the Oakland Raiders hired art shell in 1989, so Fritz was living well ahead of his time. 0:25 [SPEAKER_00]: While Pollard is an icon, and I hope to tell his story one day, 0:34 [SPEAKER_00]: The day I'd like to talk about the time, 500 local himidians gathered together, one seasonably hot summer afternoon, wearing their Sunday best to watch an innocent man get buried alive. 0:46 [SPEAKER_00]: But before I get too far into this, you need a little more context. 0:50 [SPEAKER_00]: The early 20th century was an era of astonishing medical discovery, professional science was a relatively new idea, even the word scientist had only been coined 0:59 [SPEAKER_00]: in 1833, but by 1904, rapid advances in medical fields were taking place again, aspirin, x-rays, and the EKG all burst onto the scenes in the decade prior, and the lines between magic and science were blurred anything seemed possible and in the same month that the American surgeon Dr. William Keene presented his research on open-heart passage to the Philadelphia County 1:25 [SPEAKER_00]: July of 1904, a self-proclaimed clairvoyant, named Harry Moreta, exported this fascination with new science, and convinced Harry Zirkel, a local army veteran, to be hypnotized, in the large open space of Wolflake Park. 1:41 [SPEAKER_00]: It may be hard for us to appreciate the popular appetite for side shows like these, but imagine a time, an even radio broadcasting, was non-existent. 1:50 [SPEAKER_00]: Try to picture your local park, streaming a full season of Game of Thrones, for a one-time showing, and you'll have some sense of the energy and waffle like that day. 2:01 [SPEAKER_00]: And so it was, on the afternoon of July 17th, that before he crowd, a 500-learing buzzing town folk, Maretta and Zorkel took the stage. 2:11 [SPEAKER_00]: Maretta was a known performer in a master's showman, but many locals refused to accept his claims of clairvoyance. 2:18 [SPEAKER_00]: Zorkel, being first among them. 2:20 [SPEAKER_00]: Maretta claimed he could hypnotize anyone, Zorkel had said, okay hypnotize me, and it was on, to raise the stakes. 2:29 [SPEAKER_00]: Maretta had also said that when once he had succeeded, he would bury his naissayer, six feet deep, and leave him there for three days. 2:37 [SPEAKER_00]: Zorkel responded with the equivalent. 2:40 [SPEAKER_00]: of a fake yarn, and when the two finally faced off in Wolf Park, the event had the energy of a heavyweight fight, and similar to a pre-fight weigh-in, the two men stood toe to toe at the center of a wooden stage, while Zorkl played to the audience, and taunted his opponent. 2:58 [SPEAKER_00]: The crowd clapped and cheered, then quieted, as Merrata commenced the ritual of hypnosis. 3:04 [SPEAKER_00]: With drawing his gold pocket watch from his cloak pocket, he suspended it in Zorko's face, the watch swung back and forth, in the expert hand of the hypnotist, while the audience held its breath, and nothing. 3:18 [SPEAKER_00]: The first attempt to hypnotize Zorko failed, a small wave of laughter 3:28 [SPEAKER_00]: On the second attempt, the crowd gasped as Zerkle fell lifeless on the stage before being caught and lowered to the ground by the closest man. 3:38 [SPEAKER_00]: This mob of 500, a few minutes earlier, still murmuring with the absurdity of the spectacrol, was itself gripped in a kind of hypnotic stillness with his antagonist on the ground in front of him. 3:50 [SPEAKER_00]: Maretta held up his hand like he preached in his temple and proclaimed loudly. 3:54 [SPEAKER_00]: Harry's circle, I command you to remain beneath the earth until Tuesday night, between the hours of 9 and 11, only then will you have the power to release yourself from me. 4:04 [SPEAKER_00]: To emphasize the depth of his terrible powers, Maretta pulled a pistol from his cloak and fired it near the head of the hypnotized man. 4:13 [SPEAKER_00]: Still motionless, he placed pepper under circles nose and nothing. 4:17 [SPEAKER_00]: At this point, what the audience is seeing doesn't look like hypnosis. 4:21 [SPEAKER_00]: It looks like death. 4:23 [SPEAKER_00]: And maybe this is why they watched passively while a traveling con man buried their neighbor alive. 4:30 [SPEAKER_00]: Four men joined Maretta on stage to wrap Zorko's body, which had become unexpectedly rigid in a white shroud. 4:38 [SPEAKER_00]: They placed the body in a coffin with a breathing tube and covered it in black cloth. 4:42 [SPEAKER_00]: Before these men, with great ceremony, lowered it into the ground. 4:46 [SPEAKER_00]: For the coffin was covered with dirt, about half of the crowd filed by, to peer down the air passage, to confirm that this burial was no hoax. 4:54 [SPEAKER_00]: By the time it was over, the end of the event was a bit anticlimatic. 4:59 [SPEAKER_00]: Eventually, the last people filed away, and small clusters of speculation and gossip, and soon, or rather himself, was gone. 5:07 [SPEAKER_00]: It was easy to speculate as to what happened here. 5:09 [SPEAKER_00]: But difficult to do so with any degree of confidence. 5:12 [SPEAKER_00]: The range of possibilities was too vast. 5:15 [SPEAKER_00]: Had the crowd been somehow fooled into thinking Zorkel was down there at all? 5:19 [SPEAKER_00]: Or would they hear his sudden screams? 5:21 [SPEAKER_00]: Clawing up, the breathing tube. 5:23 [SPEAKER_00]: Was Maretta planning to skip town with pocketfalls of money, leaving them to dig up a dead body three days later? 5:29 [SPEAKER_00]: And so on. 5:30 [SPEAKER_00]: On the morning of July 20th, the crowd was so feverish with excitement that multiple women were injured and the crushed toward the coffin as it was raised and carried to a platform surrounded by raised wooden stands. 5:43 [SPEAKER_00]: These stands were so full of energy and onlookers that one of them clapsed injuring a few more spectators to show continued. 5:51 [SPEAKER_00]: Merrata raised his hand as before, but with the opposite incantation, and as the coffin near the surface, he began to shriek and rail, as if to hold the spell with the volume of his voice. 6:05 [SPEAKER_00]: Slowly, and dramatically as possible, the coffin was opened to reveal the body of Zorkel inside. 6:12 [SPEAKER_00]: Meretic continued this borderline manic behavior, hands outstretched, and the body in the coffin moved. 6:19 [SPEAKER_00]: The legs stretched, then the arms. 6:21 [SPEAKER_00]: The lips were swollen. 6:22 [SPEAKER_00]: The eyes opened glazed, and when he looked around, he did not appear to recognize his own relatives of the graveside. 6:30 [SPEAKER_00]: Finally, 6:35 [SPEAKER_00]: next, he asked if the girl was okay, and the questions soon murmured throughout the crowd. 6:41 [SPEAKER_00]: A young girl in the audience had fallen during the hypnosis, mere seconds before he had. 6:47 [SPEAKER_00]: Doctors examined Zorko had to tow, and when they brought him to his feet, the crowd erupted, despite three days without food or water, and limited air he was able to walk himself home. 6:58 [SPEAKER_00]: so what happened? 7:00 [SPEAKER_00]: How did circle survive those three days so calmly while buried several feet underground or was he really hypnotized or was it all asking him? 7:08 [SPEAKER_00]: Where's circle in Marrada co-conspirators? 7:11 [SPEAKER_00]: Also, where did he go to the bathroom? 7:13 [SPEAKER_00]: Now, before I tell you, I want you to brace yourself after thinking through the various possibilities about how I myself would have handled a similar situation. 7:23 [SPEAKER_00]: I have arrived at a single answer which addresses all of the questions at once. 7:28 [SPEAKER_00]: In the answer is this, I have absolutely no idea and nor does it appears anyone else. 7:39 [SPEAKER_00]: What we are left in the case of the live burial of Wolf Lake is something other than a tidy history and more of an intact, vod-ville act where the mystery died with the performers. 7:50 [SPEAKER_00]: The simplest explanation that a co-conspirator willingly lay down under six feet of dirt and managed to do so without having a raving panic attack is that once the easiest and most difficult to believe. 8:04 [SPEAKER_00]: Is it possible that the two men were in Kahuts and pulled one over on the earnest citizens of Hammond? 8:10 [SPEAKER_00]: Of course, even likely, but never proven, even with a talent full of people looking to prove it. 8:17 [SPEAKER_00]: We do know from other sources that Professor Harry Marrata was widely advertised as the quote, only original Hindu clairvoyant, palmist and medium in America. 8:28 [SPEAKER_00]: He also offered a reward of $500. 8:31 [SPEAKER_00]: For any person to whom he could not teach the art of hypnosis. 8:35 [SPEAKER_00]: We also know that he was arrested on federal charges for defrauding an anxious wife from Milwaukee. 8:41 [SPEAKER_00]: When he failed to use his hypnotic power to return her missing husband, the woman named Miss Lincoln had sent $25 along with a lock of her hair to Maretta and when her husband did not return as promised, reported the clairvoyant to the police. 8:55 [SPEAKER_00]: The party ended from Arrata when he claimed to know the secrets of Alchemy, and to know how to turn ordinary objects into gold. 9:03 [SPEAKER_00]: He stole $2,000 from one man in the scheme, and when the police caught up to him, they sent him to Bridewell House of Corrections in Chicago. 9:11 [SPEAKER_00]: But, Zirkel, on the other hand, appears to have been a straight shooter. 9:14 [SPEAKER_00]: He was something of a part-time party magician. 9:17 [SPEAKER_00]: You know the type, Ribbons, Rings, Cartrix for Children? 9:20 [SPEAKER_00]: This was actually part of the reason he confronted Arrata in the first place. 9:24 [SPEAKER_00]: He thought men like this were giving, quote, magicians, like him, a bad name. 9:31 [SPEAKER_00]: According to his obituary, he firmly believed that the cleaner a show, the more worthwhile it was, and that making life more wholesome, more productive, more beautiful, is the most that any man can do. 9:43 [SPEAKER_00]: This obituary contrasted Zorkerl's magic, with that of people like Marretta, those who would quote, 9:54 [SPEAKER_00]: The reference to Earth in particular, which he had been buried in, suggests a lingering embarrassment and resentment over the scene at Wolf Park. 10:03 [SPEAKER_00]: While Marrada was a fraud in many ways, it seems his gift of hypnotism was real, and that Zurkl paid the price, both in humiliation and what sounds like a truly terrifying experience. 10:13 [SPEAKER_00]: The early 1900s was the perfect time for con artists, and self-proclaimed clairvoyance thrived. 10:19 [SPEAKER_00]: This word clairvoyant appeared in American newspapers, more than a quarter of a million times, before 1900 and 1910 alone. 10:27 [SPEAKER_00]: It makes me wonder who the clairvoyants of our own age could be. 10:31 [SPEAKER_00]: Are they the social media influencers who exploit a growing self-image crisis among young people? 10:36 [SPEAKER_00]: Do you sell us products we don't need? 10:38 [SPEAKER_00]: Or are they politicians who convince us that their parties and policies will solve everything? 10:43 [SPEAKER_00]: They might also be the financial gurus who offer quote 10:49 [SPEAKER_00]: or the health gurus, with equally simplistic promises about getting the body of your dreams. 10:54 [SPEAKER_00]: Personally, I believe it's all of them, but as you look to call these people out, be careful not to get zorkled, so to speak. 11:02 [SPEAKER_00]: Just because these people aren't who they claim to be and can't do everything they claim to do, doesn't mean they don't have the power to embarrass you. 11:09 [SPEAKER_00]: Being right is one thing. 11:11 [SPEAKER_00]: Being wise is another. 11:13 [SPEAKER_00]: In his attempt to expose Marotta, poor circle, played right into his hands. 11:18 [SPEAKER_00]: He empowered a con man, providing him some of the best press he would ever get, which he undoubtedly used to exploit more victims.
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