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Farsight · Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities

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  Speaker 1: Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
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  Speaker 1: is an open book, all of these amazing tales are
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  Speaker 1: right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.
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  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. Goren Crop loved mountains.
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  Speaker 1: Some might say he was even built like one. The
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  Speaker 1: man topped out at six ft three and two forty pounds.
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  Speaker 1: He was born in Sweden in nineteen sixty six and
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  Speaker 1: his father introduced him to climbing at a very young age.
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  Speaker 1: When Goren was six, he and his father climbed the
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  Speaker 1: highest mountain in Norway together, cementing Goren's obsession. Then and there,
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  Speaker 1: mountains change over time, but never go away. They're solid, permanent.
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  Speaker 1: If only Mr and Mrs Crop's marriage had been and
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  Speaker 1: so strong. Several years after Goren's life changing adventure, his
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  Speaker 1: parents divorced. Goren didn't take it well, but after a
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  Speaker 1: few years of endless partying and excessive drinking, he knew
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  Speaker 1: something had to change. He couldn't keep going on this way,
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  Speaker 1: so Goren made a complete one eighty degree turn and
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  Speaker 1: joined the Swedish Paratroopers. It was there he built up
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  Speaker 1: his strength and stamina, marching for miles with one fifty
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  Speaker 1: pounds of gears strapped to his back, and gained the
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  Speaker 1: admiration of his fellow soldiers. But he never forgot his
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  Speaker 1: love of climbing, the feel of rocks under his fingers,
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  Speaker 1: and the thrill of reaching the top of the place
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  Speaker 1: man was not meant to see. Goren lived a simple
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  Speaker 1: life outside of being a paratrooper. He saved his meager
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  Speaker 1: military earnings by living in a tent and climbed mountains
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  Speaker 1: in his free time. By the late nineteen eighties, he'd
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  Speaker 1: climbed five peaks, each of them nearly four miles tall,
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  Speaker 1: and all by himself. After that, it was all about
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  Speaker 1: climbing higher and farther. He was the first Swede to
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  Speaker 1: climb to the top of K two in the Himalayas,
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  Speaker 1: and by the mid nineteen nineties he reached the summit
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  Speaker 1: of five of the fourteen tallest mountains in the world,
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  Speaker 1: most of them by himself. There was a reason he
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  Speaker 1: was known as the crazy Swede. But one peak stood
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  Speaker 1: out above all the rest. Literally, survivors have written books
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  Speaker 1: about it, and countless men and women have died trying
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  Speaker 1: to reach the top. That's right, Mount Everest. He still
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  Speaker 1: had yet to summit the granddaddy of them all. He
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  Speaker 1: was going crop the crazy Swede and climbing to the
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  Speaker 1: top of Mount Everest like everyone else, was out of
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  Speaker 1: the question. He couldn't just fly from his home in
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  Speaker 1: Stockholm all the way to Nepal. No, he wanted to
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  Speaker 1: make an entrance, one that would take him six months
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  Speaker 1: to make. He loaded up a specially designed bicycle with
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  Speaker 1: two fifty pounds of food and gear and left his
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  Speaker 1: home on October sixteenth. He rode six thousand miles on
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  Speaker 1: that bicycle all the way to Mount Everest base camp,
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  Speaker 1: arriving in April of Once there, he convinced the other
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  Speaker 1: ongoing expeditions at the time to let him summit first alone.
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  Speaker 1: No sherpa, no partner, just Goren and his gear. This
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  Speaker 1: was it. Everything he'd been training for. All of those
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  Speaker 1: other mountains he had conquered had been nothing more than appetizers,
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  Speaker 1: and this was the main course. He began his ascent
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  Speaker 1: on May three, trudging all day through snow as deep
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  Speaker 1: as his thighs until he found himself three hundred feet
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  Speaker 1: from the summit. Unfortunately, the day had gotten away from
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  Speaker 1: him and darkness was closing in. Goren wasn't worried about
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  Speaker 1: reaching the top, but of being stranded alone on the
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  Speaker 1: mountain until morning. Up to his waist in snow and ice,
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  Speaker 1: he would surely die of exposure. Instead, he climbed back
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  Speaker 1: down and bided his time in base camp. Then the
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  Speaker 1: unthinkable happened. A blizzard had struck another group of climbers
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  Speaker 1: descending Everest a few days later. They had left too
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  Speaker 1: late in the day and had been caught in the
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  Speaker 1: storm after dark. Goren helped carry medical supplies up the
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  Speaker 1: mountain over the next several weeks. When the weather finally
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  Speaker 1: cleared up three weeks later, he saw his chance. He
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  Speaker 1: was going to try again. On his second attempt, the
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  Speaker 1: crazy Suite did it. He climbed to the top of
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  Speaker 1: Mount Everest all by himself, accomplishing something very few others
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  Speaker 1: had done before him. Then, with nothing left to prove,
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  Speaker 1: Goren descended the mountain. Waiting for him back at base
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  Speaker 1: camp was his only companion, the one who had come
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  Speaker 1: with him all the way from Stockholm, Sweden, his trusty bicycle.
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  Speaker 1: Goren crop packed up his gear, mounted his mighty steed,
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  Speaker 1: and said goodbye to everyone at base camp before beginning
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  Speaker 1: his ride home. It seems that even after climbing the
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  Speaker 1: tall and most dangerous mountain in the world, he just
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  Speaker 1: couldn't help going the extra mile. The mind is a
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  Speaker 1: miraculous thing. This bundle of nerves and gray matter floating
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  Speaker 1: in our heads is constantly coming up with new ideas
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  Speaker 1: and dreams, tiny explosions of creativity every second of every day.
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  Speaker 1: Feed it and watch it grow. Push it just a
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  Speaker 1: little bit and you'll be amazed at when it's capable of.
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  Speaker 1: Helene Smith had opened her mind while growing up in
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  Speaker 1: Hungary in the late eight hundreds. From a very young age,
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  Speaker 1: she treated her brain like a sponge, absorbing as much
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  Speaker 1: as possible from books, teachers, and her surrounding environment. She
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  Speaker 1: was fluent in five languages and had passable skills in
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  Speaker 1: three others, England, Latin, and Greek. She was also a
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  Speaker 1: spiritual person. Literally the whole family was. Helene's mother and
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  Speaker 1: brother were known to experience visions of the future, communicate
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  Speaker 1: with the dead, and even see into other worlds. Their
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  Speaker 1: talents hadn't skipped Helene, who started attending and hosting seances
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  Speaker 1: in her thirties. Her performances were what we've come to
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  Speaker 1: expect from mediums today. She had knowledge of events she
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  Speaker 1: shouldn't have known about, and could relay messages from dead
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  Speaker 1: relatives to their living ones via her voice or through
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  Speaker 1: taps on a table. Nowadays we greet these techniques with
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  Speaker 1: healthy skepticism and even have clear explanations for many of them,
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  Speaker 1: but back then it was a different story. Take cold reading,
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  Speaker 1: for example, a common observational method used by mediums to
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  Speaker 1: do people into revealing more about themselves than they realize.
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  Speaker 1: A medium can use that information, be it verbal or
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  Speaker 1: through body language, to pretend to know something about a
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  Speaker 1: person without explicitly being told. We're wise to it today.
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  Speaker 1: But back in, Helene's intuition was a revelation. She was
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  Speaker 1: the star attraction at parties where her abilities were tested
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  Speaker 1: by new and increasingly doubtful audiences. Then one night, a
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  Speaker 1: new skill manifested automatism. Helene found the spirits would speak
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  Speaker 1: through her, sometimes literally, but often using her hands as
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  Speaker 1: their own. She could write in the persona of the
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  Speaker 1: spirit she had conjured without conscious thought. As far as
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  Speaker 1: she knew, time had passed and something had been transcribed,
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  Speaker 1: but she hadn't written a word of it herself. But
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  Speaker 1: automatism turned out to be a talent that would take
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  Speaker 1: her far, some might say too far. During one particular
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  Speaker 1: seance at the home of a psychology professor named Theodore Floorny,
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  Speaker 1: Helene began to communicate with the other world, not the
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  Speaker 1: world of the dead, as she had done many times before.
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  Speaker 1: This was a much different world, an outer world otherwise
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  Speaker 1: unreachable by man. Helene entered a trance, a kind of
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  Speaker 1: deep sleep, where she sighed and swayed in her chair
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  Speaker 1: to music that only she heard until the music suddenly stopped.
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  Speaker 1: Then Helene softly recited the words coming to her from
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  Speaker 1: this distant land translated into English. The spirit said, this
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  Speaker 1: is the house of the Great Man, as Stain whom
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  Speaker 1: thou hast seen a stain you see lived on Mars,
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  Speaker 1: and Helene Smith of Earth heavy incredible ability to go
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  Speaker 1: there in her mind at least and bring back the
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  Speaker 1: message to us. Floornie wasn't so sure. After multiple sessions
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  Speaker 1: with her and a copious amount of research, he concluded
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  Speaker 1: the similarities of the supposed Martian language to Helene's native
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  Speaker 1: French meant she hadn't really accessed the far reaches of
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  Speaker 1: outer Base using her mind. Her deep trances and automatism. However,
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  Speaker 1: those were not so easily explained. Hearing this today, you
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  Speaker 1: two might assume Helene was probably conning them all, that
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  Speaker 1: she knew exactly what she was doing and was very
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  Speaker 1: good at it. You might be right too, But Helene
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  Speaker 1: did one more thing that leaves even the most skeptical
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  Speaker 1: of skeptics scratching their heads. She described the floorny her
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  Speaker 1: journeys to the planet Mars, which Flournie recorded in his notes.
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  Speaker 1: During one session, she told him in the Martian language
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  Speaker 1: that she saw carriages gliding by with no horses or wheels,
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  Speaker 1: but emitting sparks. While gas powered automobiles first appeared in
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  Speaker 1: the late eighteen hundreds, they would not be mass produced
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  Speaker 1: until well after the turn of the century. Perhaps Helene's
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  Speaker 1: vision of vehicles on Mars was a lucky guess, meant
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  Speaker 1: to wow unsuspecting crowds, or maybe not. With robots traversing
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  Speaker 1: the surface of the red planet. Today, it's tempting to
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  Speaker 1: believe the impossible that she really could see the future.
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  Speaker 1: I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
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  Speaker 1: of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn
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  Speaker 1: more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.
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  Speaker 1: The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership
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  Speaker 1: with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show
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  Speaker 1: called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television
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  Speaker 1: show and you can learn all about it over at
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  Speaker 1: the World of Lore dot com. And until next time,
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  Speaker 1: stay curious.