Sometime in the late 1800s, a whole bunch of people decided it would be cool to contact the dead on a semi-regular basis. This wasn’t just a fringe phenomenon. Folks like Marie Curie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were all about it. But no one was as all about it as Ben and Sue Allen.
Twice or thrice a week, they’d host a séance in their Nashville, Tennessee home, inviting their circle of well-to-do friends to bear witness to Sue’s uncanny ability to contact the spirit world. These evenings included everything from sassy remarks from the dearly departed to haunting visions of one member’s future self to The Thing: a creature that people described as a cat or a handless arm that manifested beneath the dining room table.
It spent the séances unbuttoning shoes, lifting the table, and generally creating wild (if invisible) havoc. People who didn’t believe in The Thing would sometimes run out of the séance in a terror, only for The Thing to follow them home. In this episode, we dive into this weird moment in humanity’s view of the supernatural and speculate on what exactly The Thing could be.
But first, Zoey is here with her Something Southern: payback against Robin’s laziness, Mad Libs Vacation edition.
Sources:
“A Forgotten Haunting” by Betsy Phillips, Nashville Scene, Oct. 27, 2011.
Hidden History of Nashville: The Best Stories From The Tennessean’s Weekly Column “Learn Nashville.” by George R. Zepp, published by The History Press (2013).
“The End of The Thing?” by Margaret Lindsley Warden, The Tennessean, Jan. 14, 1951, pages 58–60.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/152718082/susan-dorothy-allen
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/42957032/benjamin-bentley-allen
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Freemasonry
“Why Did So Many Victorians Try to Speak with the Dead?” by Casey Cep, The New Yorker, May 24, 2021.
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