Today we delve back into the world of witchcraft to discuss the Witch of Plum Hollow.
But before that, we also talk about when an aspiring mermaid keeps trespassing into your pond, the mushrooms that make you see tiny people, and how birds may actually be government surveillance drones after all.
THE NEWS
TRANSCRIPT:
Chris: Hello, probably cursed listeners. Today’s episode, we delve into the topic of the Witch of Plum Hollow. But before that, we also talk about when an inspiring mermaid keeps trespassing into your pond.
The mushrooms that make you see tiny people, and how birds may actually be government surveillance drones after all. I’m your probably cursed host, Chris. And I’m Sheryl. As we do at the start of every episode, we calibrate our Lord Knarvan Cursometer for the main topic, using articles from recent news. Our Lord Knarvan Cursometer allows us to determine the cursedness of our topics, and all things, it’s got many uses.
Sheryl: I apologize to our listeners for my random things that are smashing around. I am clumsy today.
Chris: I’m going to correct you, that was a poltergeist. Uh-huh, yeah, yeah. If you hear a strange noise, it was a demon or poltergeist. Or the dog. It’s true. If it sounds like a dog growling, it’s probably a demon. Mm-hmm. For the Cursometer, I will enter in the first news story titled, They Saw Them on Their Dishes When Eating, The Mushroom Making People Hallucinate Dozens of Tiny Humans.
This is from January 22nd by Rachel Neuer for the BBC. Every year doctors at a hospital in the Yunnan province of China see an influx of hundreds of people with the same unusual, strikingly odd symptom. Visions of tiny elf-like figures marching under their doors, crawling up walls and clinging to furniture. And all patients share a common culprit.
Sheryl: The elf on the shelf. Sorry.
Chris: Exactly. That elf on the shelf named Lan Moa Asiatica, a type of mushroom and locally popular food known for its savory, umami-packed flavor. Ah, interesting. The problem with the mushroom is if it isn’t fully cooked, hallucinations will occur.
Sheryl: So then maybe cook your mushroom?
Chris: Apparently there is like a limit where it’s like, uh, hallucination? Hallucination? Hallucination? Now it’s cooked. Now you can eat it.
Sheryl: Oh, okay. So you just keep trying until you figure it out whether or not you’re seeing little people? Yep.
Chris: Actually goes into it like how long you gotta wait to cook. Okay, good. Colin Domnauer, a doctoral candidate studying El Asiatica, explains, At a mushroom hot pot restaurant there, the server set a timer for 15 minutes and warned us, do not eat it until the timer goes off or you might see little people. It seems like very common knowledge in the culture there. But outside of Yunnan, the strange mushroom is largely an enigma. There were many accounts about the existence of the psychedelic mushroom and many people who looked for it, but they never found the species, says Juliana Furchi. The mycologist and the founder and executive director of the Fungi Foundation, a non-profit group dedicated to discovering, documenting, and conserving Fungi.
Colin Domnauer first heard of El Asiatica as an undergraduate. Quote, It sounded so bizarre that there could be a mushroom out there causing fairy tale-like visions reporting across cultures in time. I was perplexed and driven by curiosity to find out more.
Academic literature was sparse. In a 1991 paper, two researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences described cases of people in Yunnan province who had eaten a certain mushroom and experienced lilypution hallucinations. The psychiatric term for the perception of tiny human, animal, or fantasy figures.
Sheryl: So it happens enough they’ve got a term for it, it’s fine.
Chris: Yep. See those little lily-putt people? The patients saw these figures moving about everywhere. Usually there were more than 10 tiny beings on the scene. They saw them on their clothes and when they were dressing saw them on their dishes when eating. The researchers added the visions were even more vivid when their eyes were closed. They will not be ignored, the tiny people.
Sheryl: So what you’re saying is it alters your eyeballs? Let’s see, do you even know when your eyes are closed?
Chris: They live in your eyes. It was not until 2015 that researchers finally formally described and named El Asiatica still without much detail about its psychoactive properties.
Sheryl: I mean they just got to take some without cooking it.
Chris: Problem solves. So there’s a reason why this guy Dom Nauer has not taken it. I’ll get into it a little bit here. Dom Nauer’s first goal has been to pin down the species true identity. In 2023 he traveled to Yunnan during the peak summertime mushroom season. In fungi markets he asked sellers which of their mushrooms makes you see little people. He purchased the ones that the giggling vendors pointed to and then brought the specimens back to the laboratory to sequence their genomes.
This confirmed El Asiatica’s identity he says. Chemical extracts from lab specimens produced behavioral changes in mice similar to those reported in human. I don’t know if they saw little people or not. Yeah
Sheryl: I was gonna say how do you test that?
Chris: Would the mice see little mice? After being dosed the mice experienced a period of hyperactivity followed by a long stupor. Dom Nauer also visited the Philippines where he had heard rumors of a mushroom causing similar symptoms.
The specimens collected there looked different from the Chinese ones but genetic testing revealed they were indeed the same species. He’s still trying to identify the chemical responsible for the hallucinations but current tests suggest it is not related to known psychedelic compounds. So this is where we get into why he is not taking it. Fair. For one the trips it produces are unusually long lasting one to three days after an onset of 12 to 24 hours.
Sheryl: I mean you just book a week off and don’t do anything.
Chris: Speaking from my own experience when you do like the regular kind of mushrooms when you say you’re gonna do mushrooms the onset is like usually within an hour and you’re fine again after five or six hours. But this is like four days almost of being on mushrooms. You need a break.
You need breaks. That’s fair. Because of the long duration of these trips in the chance of side effects such as delirium and dizziness Dom Nauer has yet to try the raw mushrooms himself. These mega trips might explain why people do not seem to purposefully seek out LA’s Iateka for its psychoactive effects. It was always eaten just for food Dom Nauer says with hallucinations being an unexpected side effect. There’s another curious factor other known psychedelic compounds usually produce trips that vary not only from person to person but also from one experience to the next within the same individual. With LA’s Iateka though the perception of little people is very reliably and repeatedly reported Dom Nauer says. What if the little people are always there but the mushrooms just help you see it?
Sheryl: Yes. Good question.
Chris: The scientific research into this mushroom could end up touching on the biggest questions of consciousness and the relationship between mind and reality. It could also give clues about what causes little-apution hallucinations in people who have not consumed LA’s Iateka.
The condition is rare and as of 2021 only 226 non-mushroom related cases had been reported since they were first described in 1909. Interesting. Yeah. Like I’ve heard of little-apution hallucinations before but typically like it’s also called like Alice in Wonderland syndrome. The little people you see are actually the people around you. You’re just perceiving them as incredibly small. Interesting. And you’re perceiving yourself as big. Apparently the reverse can also happen with the Alice in Wonderland which she also achieved by eating mushrooms. Yeah, for sure did. It’s all coming together. Alice in Wonderland from the Yunnan province in China.
Sheryl: It just needs to lose Carol at some point went to China and had some of those mushrooms.
Chris: It’s true. And it’s like once I can get out of this delirium and stupor I’m going to write a great book about this. That is the first news story input in the cursomometer. Sheryl will input the second news story.
Sheryl: So this article is titled Nude Louisiana Woman Attacked Cop Who Told Her To Leave Private Pond Trying To Be A Mermaid. This is from January 7th by Chris Harris for the US Weekly.
On January 6th police were called to a trespassing complaint in Linville. The caller explained that her neighbor, Erin Elizabeth Sutton, 41, was swimming nude in her pond despite repeated previous requests not to. This time when asked to leave, Erin just started screaming and refused to leave.
Chris: If you can’t go for reason, go for volume. That’s how you win an argument.
Sheryl: That’s what the internet has taught me all caps. When deputies arrived, they tried reasoning with Sutton, who had first refused to get out telling them she was trying to be a mermaid. Stop.
Chris: I’m not going to let my dreams be dreams anymore.
Sheryl: This feels like a Florida woman story.
Chris: Uh-huh. Louisiana woman? Uh-huh.
Sheryl: They eventually coaxed her out of the pond and called EMS to evaluate her. But when they attempted moving her somewhere indoors, she charged one of the deputies. Sutton was tased to zero effect and she continued advancing towards the officer, where she kicked and punched him. She was restrained and taken to the hospital, allegedly threatening to kill the deputies and the paramedics the entire way.
Chris: Have you ever been so mad that you couldn’t be a mermaid? You know. That you overcame a taser and attacked an officer.
Sheryl: I’m going to take a stab in the dark. She’s on some sort of hallucinogenics because I once arrested somebody as a security guard who was convinced that her best friend, Chris Angel, was going to appear and kick all our asses. It did not happen, but I waited. Chris Angel has no idea where I am now.
Chris: It’s true. I bet he appeared like 20 minutes after you had all left. He’s in a karate pose, but no one was around.
Sheryl: So that’s what I think when I read this. That is what that woman is dealing with. Some sort of drug.
Chris: They’re lucky she didn’t have a trident with her.
Sheryl: Yes, no kidding. So she has been charged with three counts of resisting an officer with force or violence, two counts of public intimidation, two counts of battery of a police officer, one count of disturbing the peace slash drunkenness, and one count of criminal trespassing. I’m surprised there’s no substance use one. I guess there’s drunkenness, but that is not being drunk.
Chris: She’s an all natural mermaid. No substances improving her ability to perform as a mermaid.
Sheryl: But then why did she say she was trying to be a mermaid if she was clearly a mermaid?
Chris: She was just waiting for the skin between her legs to stitch together and her feet to turn to flippers. This is how I assume mermaids are born. That’s right. Great. Sheryl has input the second story. I will input the third and last story titled Russian startup hacks pigeon brains turns them into living drones. This is from February 10th by Gayun Lee for Gizmodo. Sheryl found this new story and I think it was fantastic. Birds aren’t real. Birds aren’t real. We should do an episode of Birds Aren’t Real.
Sheryl: I really want to, but it doesn’t help that we have birds upstairs. So nobody’s going to believe us. They may take offense.
Chris: Russian startup Neary has announced the completion of test flights of pigeons fitted with neural implants. The company says pigeons may outperform mechanical drones in navigating complex terrains, accessing small spaces, and withstanding harsh weather.
And they can fly up to 300 miles a day without needing the change batteries. But they need to eat. Yeah, they might get sidetracked by French fry lying in the middle of a parking lot.
Sheryl: Not if they’re being controlled with their brain.
Chris: I guess so. They just keep getting zapped, but they’re also fighting to get to the French fry.
Sheryl: The French fry. Poor pigeons.
Chris: To turn the pigeons into living drones, they inserted tiny electrodes into the birds’ skulls, and then connected the electrodes to a stimulator mounted on the pigeons’ heads. The neural implants delivered, quote, quote, mild stimulation to the pigeons’ brain, prompting it to prefer certain flight paths while the bird otherwise behaves naturally. So it sounds like they’re just shocking it until the bird does what they want. Yeah, that is correct. The pigeons can be deployed almost immediately after surgery, which the company claims poses a low risk to the bird’s survivability.
Sheryl: I don’t say anything about its ability to find mates or… Yep. Just saying.
Chris: During test flights, the pigeons carried a small controller, solar panels, and a camera for users, which allowed the company to assess the effectiveness in collecting data.
Sheryl: How do those pigeons fly? That is a lot of equipment for a pigeon to hold.
Chris: Yeah. Maybe the solar panel is like… Remember on our old calculators, that little panel on there that makes the numbers light up? Maybe it was one of those. I hope so. Neary states that when not engaged in test flights, the birds continued their normal routines and received care from company operators. The company also claims to consult in-house bioethicists for their experiments.
Sheryl: Paid Russian bioethicists?
Chris: Listen, I paid you to tell me that everything I’m doing is okay. I didn’t tell you. I’m not paying you to tell me to stop with this mad science. That’s correct. However, Neary has yet to provide independent reviews from third-party sources, leading to some experts to question the ethical implications of the technology. Neary has also firmly insisted that PJN-1 pigeon… Uh-huh, nice. …is strictly restricted to civilian use, saying it makes every effort to ensure our biodrones are used exclusively for civilian purposes, with no concealed or secondary use.
Sheryl: Yeah, yeah, because we believe what the Russian government says.
Chris: I’m just imagining that the toy commercials for a pigeon with electrodes on its head get it for your child this Christmas. As for the involvement of Russian government-related investors, Neary states that government support is a common and widely accepted worldwide practice. In all major countries, breakthrough technologies are supported by the state.
Sheryl: Yeah, especially in countries with Putin in charge.
Chris: The company states the technology is ready for practical use… Practical use?
Sheryl: Yeah, what practical use?
Chris: …in utilities, logistics, agriculture, and emergency response. Sure. Oh, good, a pigeon has showed up. Uh-huh. During this emergency.
Sheryl: Oh, man, Russia is a wild place.
Chris: It’s true. They want to clone mammoths and turn pigeons into drones.
Sheryl: They keep raccoons as pets? I don’t know.
Chris: All right, that is three stories in the cursometer here. We’ll get it to spit out the results to tell us how cursed each story is. Please stand by.
Speaker 3: And the results for the first news story about the tiny people that appear when you eat mushrooms. The cursometer says probably benign.
Sheryl: Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with it. Just make sure to cook your food before you eat it. Problem solved.
Chris: Yeah, cancel all your plans for four days if things don’t go to plan.
Sheryl: I mean, that seems like a legit reason to call in sick to work. I’m hallucinating little people. It is not safe for me to drive my car.
Chris: It’s true. I undercooked my food and I’m going to take a long weekend. Uh-huh. The cursometer results for the second news story about the rampaging mermaid woman of Louisiana. Cursometer says the curse is people.
Sheryl: Yeah, I don’t know what’s wrong with her, but she is definitely dealing with something.
Chris: Being a mermaid is not going to solve your problems. Not even that, but like, why would you use a fountain?
Sheryl: Why not, I don’t know, go to the ocean or something else?
Chris: It wasn’t a fountain. It was somebody’s pond in their yard.
Sheryl: Oh, right, pond in the front yard.
Chris: Maybe they’re trying to be, what are they called, selkies? They’re like swamp? Swamp? Swamp roommates?
Sheryl: Yeah. We’ll have to try that this summer when our neighbors put out that gaudy fountain again, see if we can try some around in their naked, clean worm mermaid.
Chris: King Triton says this is my land now. And the cursometer results for the third news story about the pigeons, the biodrown pigeons. Cursometer says the curse is people. And probably also definitely cursed. Why would you do this to pigeons?
Sheryl: You know, I wanted to say the curse is Putin, but I can’t guarantee he’s involved in this in any way she performed. So, because it’s not all people, it just sounds like the crazy people in Russia who decided making a drone of a pigeon is a good idea.
Chris: Now you’ve worked in labs. I know you can like order laboratory animals. Are there laboratory pigeons? Yeah. Do you think they have lab pigeons or do you think they just went to a public place and lured them in with breadcrumbs? These are just street pigeons they experimented on.
Sheryl: I mean, I would guess that they’re probably lab pigeons, but that’s just a guess. I don’t know enough about Russia to know. Yeah, what’s going on? But if you’re trying to run an experiment, you want all variables controlled. So they try to make the animal that you’re getting to be as similar to the other animal as possible. Okay. So that’s why you would get lab animals instead of random street pigeon. Because random street pigeon, you can’t control what diseases it’s got or what parasites it has or everything is kind of controlled in lab pigeon.
Chris: As close as to a clone as you could probably achieve. All right. Well, that concludes the calibration phase of our episode. Before we get to Sheryl’s main topic, we are going to make a quick pit stop at the Probably Cursed Museum and Gift Shop for today’s artifact. The artifact I want to talk about today is the Aztec Jaguar Warrior Statue, artifact number 33 in the Probably Cursed Museum and Gift Shop. The figure itself is about three and a half inches tall and the base material appears to be made of stone, possibly onyx. It is a little weighty and is also adorned with other stones and clay sculpturing.
The sculpture itself depicts a human figure sitting cross-legged holding a bowl on one leg and holding a blue stone in the other hand. He’s wearing a headdress styled after a jaguar with a halo of green feathers around it. Jaguar warriors were members of Aztec society’s warrior elite.
They were often employed at the battlefronts in war and used to capture prisoners for sacrifice to Aztec gods. We found it a little while ago in one of our local Goodwill Thrift Shops here in Edmonton, quite a long way from this figurine’s original home. Our recent vacation in Mexico City reminded me that this was in our collection, which is why I bring it out today. If you would like this Aztec warrior figurine in your home, you can get it from probablycursed.etc .com. We can’t promise they will bring you anyone to sacrifice to strange ancient gods, but he will look good on your shelf, whatever he chooses to do. Also be sure to check out our other artifacts as well as our upcycle art. Sheryl has been uploading some tarot spreads. I think they should be up there by now. And mystery boxes. We have a lot of goodies for you at probablycursed.etc .com.
Sheryl: Should we put the haunted house update in here?
Chris: Do you have one? For this episode too? A kind of.
Sheryl: So this haunted house update is a bit more of a spooky pet update? I’m not sure. Today while I was pulling cards for the tarot spreads that are on our Etsy shop, I’m sitting in the bird room and our new bird havoc came down to try help me with the tarot cards. She grabbed the hanged man card and then tried to run away with it. So I grabbed her from her and went back to sorting. And hex our oldest bird was like super scared.
Every time she saw the cards, she would freak out and fly away even though like I wasn’t even chuffling the cards or she just saw them immediately was gone. Yep.
Chris: Those things are cursed. Yeah. She’s singing in bird language.
Sheryl: Probably. Oh, so but havoc was like super, super interested in the cards like she just kept coming back to try to chew on them or grab them or play with them. So I decided to see what would happen if she picked some cards to put into the tarot envelopes and keep in mind I’d shuffled the deck several times at this point. So her her card that she had originally picked is someplace else than it was before. And so I fanned out the cards in my hand and I went okay havoc pick one. And the first card she picked again was the hanged man. So if you buy one of our tarot spreads, and you happen to get a spread with holographic holographic cards and the hanged man in there. Havoc pulled those cards for you. You have had your fortune read by a cockatiel. How many people can say that? I you know what if this summer if the dog is outside we can have havoc pick some cards for somebody else she can start doing tarot readings on our social media.
Chris: Yep. Set her up on the coffee table. Get her own deck. Straight around.
Sheryl: Pick cards. It’s a good time.
Chris: We’ll make sure that she is in a good mood so you don’t get a terrible prediction. Uh-huh. Thank you very much for that update, Sheryl. And we’ll head over to your main topic for today’s episode.
Sheryl: In Sheldon Cemetery, just slightly northwest of Sheldon Corners, Ontario, is an unmarked and hidden grave for a remarkable woman named Elizabeth Barnes. Mother Barnes, or known to some as the Witch of Plum Hollow. Elizabeth Barnes was born in Cork, Ireland between 1794 and 1800 under the name Jane Elizabeth Martin.
Chris: Well, she really changed her name. Yeah. She just dropped the Jane entirely.
Sheryl: Yes. I’ve actually been noticing a bunch of that with my family history where they just randomly decide they’re not going to be called by their first name anymore. Yeah.
Chris: Maybe that’s what the second name’s for. Back in the day, it was like, listen, we’re going to give them the name that we’ll like, but we’ll give them the backup name in case they hate the first one. That’s right.
Sheryl: Elizabeth liked to embellish and exaggerate her personal story. And she often told people she was the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter.
Chris: A little bit like John Blymyer in our Hex Hollow Murder episode. That’s correct. He was a seventh son. No, wait, his grandfather was a seventh son of a seventh son.
Sheryl: So unfortunately, in the case of Elizabeth, her family has since noted that this is likely untrue. From what they can tell doing genealogy studies, she was an only child. Oh.
Yeah. I also found an article that noted she claimed to be of Spanish origin. And another article stating she had been born in Spain to a British father and a Spanish mother.
Chris: I’m just imagining a hard Irish accent and like a big cloud of red hairs like, hey, I was born in Spain.
Sheryl: There’s even a third article stating that she had been or there’s even a third article that I found that said she was born to an Irish landowner and that her mother was a Spanish Gypsy. Okay.
Chris: Yeah. So that’s when people are like, you look Irish. I’m just like, well, technically.
Sheryl: It’s funny because I had to look it up because there were so many mentions of Spain. And apparently at the time, Spain was seen as a place of superstition where magic and sorcery were common. And it was even thought that Spain had an underground school of sorcery. So I suspect the mention of Spain was to try lend credibility to her.
Chris: Oh, it was just like a little sprinkle of extra magic.
Sheryl: Mm-hmm. Because I’ve seen very weird to just be like, why Spain? Well, why, of all places, what is this desire to be like, oh yeah, I’m associated with Spain? Yeah. That kind of makes sense.
Chris: I wonder if that’s the origin of, there’s a stereotype of Latino people that they are superstitious. I wonder if it springs from that. Definitely possible.
Sheryl: Yeah, I have no way of knowing, but it would be interesting if I can find more about this underground school because that could be kind of a fun episode of our podcast. Yeah. Yeah. El Hogwarts. Uh-huh.
Chris: Esquela del Hogwarts.
Sheryl: It turns out Elizabeth even lied on her census record, changing her religious affiliation in country of origin several times.
Chris: Well, as you’ve seen from doing my family’s ancestry, that seemed to be going on in my family too.
Sheryl: Yeah, maybe it’s just an Irish thing. Based on what her descendants have found and with the assistance of the genealogist, she was born in Ireland. There’s no Spanish that they can find.
Chris: I like how she was like, I’m the seventh daughter. I’m the seventh daughter. And they’re like, she’s an only child. Yeah. Like maybe if you had five other siblings, you could get away with it. And they’re like, oh, maybe I just haven’t met the other two.
Sheryl: Yeah. Or maybe two of them died in childbirth. Like we don’t know. But yeah, to be an only child, that’s quite the number two exaggerate. So when Elizabeth was around 20 years old, her father had planned to have her married off in an arranged marriage to one of his army buddies.
Chris: That seems like an odd agreement to make in war.
Sheryl: And no surprise, Elizabeth was in love with another man and did not want to marry her dad’s friend. So on the eve before the marriage was supposed to take place, she ran off and secretly married a man named Robert Joseph Harrison. And Bobby Harrison. Yeah. And they boarded a ship and left to America immediately after the wedding. So she’s just up and left.
Chris: You know, I would, too. Yeah. I wouldn’t want to get married to like one of my mom’s war buddies. She’d ever gone to war and made friends.
Sheryl: That’s right. We don’t know how long after their arrival in America, Robert died. But we do know that Elizabeth became a widow at a very young age. Poor Lizzie. Yeah. The article I found said when she was 27, she was widowed, leaving her to raise a young son on her own, which 27. Yeah, that’s pretty young. Yeah. A few years later, she married again. And this time to a shoemaker named David Barnes, and they had nine more children. Nine. Nine.
Chris: That is too many.
Sheryl: Six boys and three girls. Although two of her children died as infants.
Chris: So six boys and two girls and three girls.
Chris: So one of those boys is the seventh son of the witch. And if he had seven boys, then he could have a seven son or a seven son. That’s correct. Sorry, I’m getting caught off track.
Sheryl: It’s perfectly fine. In 1843, Elizabeth and her new family moved to Ontario. Shortly after moving to the Plum Hollow area, David left his wife and moved to Smith Falls. David.
Chris: Uh huh. He left her with his nine children. Yep. Good Lord.
Sheryl: This meant that Elizabeth Barnes was now a single mother again. But this time she was left to raise eight children instead of just the one.
Chris: If I was her, I would leave two. Uh huh.
Sheryl: And unfortunately, with it being the 1800s, work prospects for women were a bit limited. Yeah. This is when Elizabeth decided she was going to start a career as a fortune teller. She set up a room in her attic for fortune telling and started to read tea leaves. And as luck would have it, Elizabeth was a great fortune teller. It didn’t take long for her to become famous.
Chris: I think she would have been all over Etsy if she was born today.
Sheryl: Yeah, 100%. Although I think it’s hard to get famous on Etsy. We’re trying and it’s not working. Yeah, it’s true. Yeah. People traveled from all across Canada and the United States to visit the Wichita Plum Hollow. And she charged 25 cents per reading, which is close to about $8 in today’s money. Wow.
Chris: Yeah. You know, that’s reasonable. Yeah.
Sheryl: So I looked it up because I was curious. So just for an example of what the average salary was like for a blacksmith in New York at the time. Yeah. They made about $1.25 per day for a 60 hour work week. 60 hours. Elizabeth could make $1.25 with only five fortune telling sessions. Wow. Yeah. She was doing quite well for herself, which is good because she had eight children to feed.
Chris: Yeah. That’s a great operation she’s got going on there. She must have had a flair for it for her to be so successful with it.
Sheryl: Those who visited Mother Barnes said she had an oval face with kind features, but that her brown eyes had the ability to stare into a person’s soul.
Chris: Oh, like John DeRoyder of the Staring Cult.
Sheryl: One rumor, which I cannot confirm, and that the Wichita Plum Hollow herself refuses to discuss. Is that a young lawyer from Kingston, Ontario made a trip to see her and ask about his future. Mother Barnes declared that the man would become a leader of a new country and that its capital would be called Bytown. Well, that young man was John A. MacDonald. For our non Canadian listeners, he was Canada’s first Prime Minister. And the town formerly known as Bytown is now Ottawa. Crazy. Yep. Again, she won’t confirm that this ever actually happened, but people people like gave a wink.
Chris: I’m not allowed to talk about that.
Sheryl: Yeah, she just kind of kept it to herself. This isn’t the only account of her clairvoyant abilities. One day, two young couples drove up to her cabin in the hopes of learning about their futures. One of the young women had traveled into town to visit potential suitor. And when the woman asked Mother Barnes if she would marry the man that she had come out there to visit, the witch told her she would in fact marry the man who had driven her to town.
Yeah. And when that man who had driven her entered the room shortly thereafter, Mother Barnes also told the man, the girl who just left the room will be your wife. Oh, she’s playing matchmaker. And the two were married within two years.
Chris: I just want to call back to the John A. McDonald story. Not the last time a Prime Minister of Canada consults with psychics. If you listen to our first episode, Mackenzie King also.
Sheryl: Also, it seems like Ontario is a very happening place for psychics back then. It’s a little weird.
Chris: I bet there’s lay lines. There’s always lay lines where psychics are involved.
Sheryl: On another occasion, Mother Barnes welcomed a group of young people to her house. After reading the fortunes of all the people in the group, an 18 year old girl was the last party member to sit down. Witnesses claim that Elizabeth looked visibly distressed. And after a few moments of awkward silence, she returned the girl’s quarter, got up from the table and said, I can see no future. And then she walked out the door with the 18 year old girl, escorting her back to the horse drawn buggy that had brought her and the group to the house. And the witch then watched the people leave her property. Mother Barnes then walked back into the cabin and sent away the rest of her visitors, once again saying, I can see no future.
About an hour later, word was sent back to the cabin. The horses that had been pulling the buggy were spooked by a train. And in the commotion, the 18 year old girl had been thrown from the buggy and died. Crazy. She was the only person in the party to have been injured in the incident.
Chris: So extrapolating from this, I assume that she believed her powers of seeing into the future? The future is fixed. She can’t change what’s going to happen.
Sheryl: Maybe, I guess so.
Chris: Because I feel like she would have tried.
Sheryl: Yeah, if she thought she could.
Chris: Yeah, like just hang here for another hour before you head back and then you’ll miss the train. Yeah.
Sheryl: My guess is also if she was seeing the future, if she’s trying to look into the person’s future and then there’s nothing, it’s just blank. She’s not seeing that the person’s going to die. She just sees that there’s nothing for her to see anymore. And she’s like, I don’t know what to tell you. I can’t see anything. Maybe she thought her ability had worn off for the day or something.
Chris: Oh, her psychic battery went kaput.
Sheryl: Mother Barnes became so popular that the local police apparently consulted with her to help solve crimes.
Chris: It seems like a good cheat code if you actually have an actual psychic. Like, we could collect evidence all afternoon or we can just go ask who did it.
Sheryl: Her biggest claim to fame was the murder of Morgan Doxtator. Doxtator? Yeah, D-O-X-T-A-T-E-R.
Chris: Okay, the Taterman.
Sheryl: The Taterman. So Morgan was a 17-year-old boy who went missing on June 20th, 1860. Morgan’s cousin, Edgar Harter, claimed that the 17-year-old boy had actually drowned in Charleston Lake, which is along the Ontario-New York border. A search began for the body of the young man and many people were not convinced that Edgar’s cousin was actually telling the truth about Morgan’s death.
But there was no evidence and eventually the investigation stalled. A group of young police officers, or men depending on what article you read, decided to make the trip to Mother Barnes. When they arrived, even before the men had spoken a word to her, Mother Barnes informed them she knew the reason for their visit. She told them that the ghost of Morgan had visited her and told her where his body could be found. He indicated that his body had been hidden to help cover up his murder. And Mother Barnes directed the searchers to a location of the body, saying that they would find it under a fallen tree, partly submerged in the water, and she was even able to provide information about Edgar Harter’s part in the crime, which led to his trial conviction and murder slash subsequent… Oh, let me redo that. Which led to his trial conviction for the murder and the subsequent hanging.
Chris: I wonder if she could see no future for him too.
Sheryl: I mean, I feel like if you’ve helped sentence someone to death, you may as well do a fortune telling reading to see if there’s any future. It’s true, just to see. So Morgan Doxeter’s grave is in the old Evan Mills Cemetery in New York State, and the inscription on his grave actually says, Morgan Doxeter, age 17 years old, who was murdered by his cousin Edgar Harter on June 20th, 1860 at Charleston Lake, Ontario. Another grim story I found in a local paper from the time is when a farmer went to Mother Barnes because he had lost two calves and he couldn’t find the animals anywhere. The witch informed him that the cows were dead and that their bodies were buried somewhere along the edge of his pasture. She also informed him that the calves had been skinned, that their skins were drying in Mr… All the articles said Mr. Blank, but it’s not Mr. Blank. They redacted his name so they didn’t put his actual name. But basically the skins were found drying in Mr. Named or Dacteds barn. John A. McDonald. Yeah, hanging from the beam in the rafters.
Chris: He let all that feel go to waste. I guess so. He’s like, I just want a cool jacket.
Sheryl: On a lighter note though.
Chris: I think that’s another example too of, you know, the farmers like, you know what, I could look around or I could just cheat and go see the witch of Plum Hollow.
Sheryl: That’s right. On a lighter note, Mother Barnes was also consulted on the case involving some missing cheese from the Plum Hollow Cheese Factory, which the cheese factory is also a local celebrity to some. It’s still standing the building and… The restaurant here? No, this is in Plum Hollow.
Chris: Okay, then the actual cheese factory.
Sheryl: The actual cheese factory. When asked about the mystery, Mother Barnes told her clients to watch for the cheese thief on a particular night. Following her instructions, her clients were on watch at the factory that night and caught a local hired man. He was stealing cheese, which later admitted he was taking to sell at the nearby community of Smith Falls.
Chris: Black Market cheese. Or no wait, that’s bootleg cheese. Okay. What do they call it when it’s like you’re selling pirated material?
Sheryl: I think that’s bootleg. It’s bootleg. Bootlegging. Leg cheese. Yeah, best kind of cheese. So Elizabeth died on February 10th, 1891, leaving behind seven children, 47 grandchildren, and 14 great grandchildren.
Chris: I think there is a seventh son of a seventh son on that. Yep. In that group.
Sheryl: The location of her grave was kept a secret, and cement was poured over top of it just to be sure it wouldn’t be a target for vandals. A grave margar was eventually erected in her honor, but it does not pinpoint the location of her grave. It’s just in the cemetery, so people know that she’s buried in there somewhere.
Chris: Oh, okay. Yeah. Interesting. Maybe that cheese guy had connections who would desecrate that grave.
Sheryl: I mean, I know that sometimes if somebody is believed to have supernatural powers or whatever, people will try to chip off pieces of their grave in the hopes of
Chris: taking that little bit of magic out.
Sheryl: Yeah, and I think that her family was just like, let’s just not bother with that.
Chris: Yeah, that’s fair.
Sheryl: Shortly after her death, on March 16th, 1891, an interview with the witch was released by the Ottawa Free Press. In the interview, Elizabeth told reporters, I’m a bit of a fraud. She confided that most of her visitors were boys and girls seeking advice on who they would marry. We would have a friendly cup of tea together, and they would tell me about their hopes and dreams. Often, I would help them make up their minds to do whatever they had intended to do in the first place.
Chris: She’s almost like a guidance counselor. Mm-hmm.
Sheryl: She also noted that sometimes, just out of nowhere, I find myself speaking words of advice that seem to be the solution to the person’s problems, which invites you to make up your own mind about her abilities if she’s getting random messages that are helping to solve crimes.
Chris: Oh yeah. She’s just speaking about it and it seems to help. Yep. That does sound like being psychic. I don’t know. I don’t know either. I’ve never been psychic, but I assume that’s what it’s like.
Sheryl: If you happen to be in Sheldon’s Corner, Ontario, you can still find Mother Barnes’ cabin along the aptly named Mother Barnes Road, just west of County Road 29. The cabin is on private property, so I would not suggest approaching the cabin without an invite. Yeah. But you can park along the road and gaze upon the witches’ cabin.
Chris: You know, we had gone on a trip to Ottawa a few years ago, and during that trip we went to Kingston and just googling it on Google Maps. We must have driven her by that area, the Plum Hollow, because it’s right in between the two places.
Sheryl: It is. I’m going to end the story by quoting an article from the Ottawa Journal on November 5, 1963. It reads, Ah, that was very cool.
Chris: I like that story. We don’t have that many good witch stories. No, and in general.
Sheryl: And I feel like her story is one that’s very much of the times. It talks a lot about what it was like for women back then, between the arranged marriage and then being widowed and then all of a sudden her husband leaving her and now she can’t find a job. It’s a very much interesting and empowering story.
Yeah, I agree. And her family still lives in the area, so they actually own the land that the cabin is on. So it’s still being kept in the family, even though, you know, she died over 100 years ago at this point.
Chris: I wonder if they have ever thought about turning that into a tourist attraction.
Sheryl: They have, and there is actually a museum in the cabin.
Chris: Oh, we could have totally seen it. Yeah, we could totally see it. It might not actually be in the cabin. Actually, let me correct that. It might just be in a building close to the cabin, but there is a museum dedicated to her out in Plum Hollow. I mean, she was there in 1845.
Sheryl: Yeah, so she died in 1891.
Chris: Yeah, that’d be like a 120 year old cabin if it’s still standing in a field somewhere.
Sheryl: So I’m pretty sure that they’ve taken someplace else and turned it into the museum, but there is a woman that actually she is a reenactor, so she dresses up like the witch and she will read your tea leaves if you want. Cool. Yeah, so it’s, and that’s how a lot of this information came to be was that the family has done all this research on her.
Chris: So I wonder if she’s helping the local teens get partners.
Sheryl: Yeah, fine. Find love. That’d be interesting.
Chris: We will get the cursometer to tell us the cursiveness of the witch of Plum Hollow. Please stand by.
Sheryl: And the cursometer says probably blessed.
Chris: I agree. This is a good witch. Yeah. This is way better than John Blymeyer and him trying to solve that hex if you listen to our previous episodes.
Sheryl: Yeah, like she never did anything that wasn’t good to other people. It sounds like a lot of people did crappy stuff to her, but she’s still, yeah, she was still nice and good.
Chris: She wasn’t casting evil spells. She was fighting crime. Yep. She’s a vigilante.
Sheryl: Finding lost cheese and.
Chris: And lost calves, RIP baby calves. Yeah. Thank you very much for the topic Sheryl. Yeah, you’re welcome. Thank you very much for listening. You can keep track of all of our goings on on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, all of our, all the socials.
Sheryl: If you go to our website, our social media is also linked on there, probablycursed.net.
Chris: And if you have money burning a hole in your pocket, be sure to check our probablycursed.etsy .com shop for our cursed artifacts and upcycled artwork. Tarot spreads that Sheryl’s working on. We’re putting all sorts of stuff up there that we’ve, I think you might like it. You should go check it out.
Sheryl: Yep. You can also send us episode ideas. If there is an episode you would like us to cover, send us an email at probablycursedpodcast.gmail .com.
Chris: And as always, stay spooky.
Speaker 3: Stay spooky everyone.
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