The Spice of Life

We really don't give a lot of thought to the spice rack in our house.  For most of us, it's just a thing that's there, mostly ignored unless we need to pizazz up a soup or something.  It’s nothing but a collection of powders of various colors with strange smells.  Cinnamon, nutmeg, coriander, and so many more.  Magical names that we only know because recipe books demand dashes of this and that, forcing us to run out to the grocery store to spend ten dollars on a bottle containing only a few ounces.  However, you’re really not giving these spices for their full due.  After all, the contents of all those little jars literally and completely altered the course of world history.

For most of European history, the predominant spice widely available to the people of that continent was salt.  Now this might not sound too bad to your "I only eat steak and potatoes" uncle, but for the rest of European society it kind of sucked.  They didn't even have pepper.  That's right, fucking pepper, salt’s number one chum today on everybody’s tables.  Now this wasn't the case for many other places in the world, most notably India and Southeast Asia.  In these far off places, people enjoyed a myriad of different spices, creating a multitude of flavor combinations which enticed the tongue and enraptured the mind.  They also covered up the taste of rotting meat, which is kind of important when you live in the tropics, but we don't need to go into that right now.  Anyways, as early as Roman times, the people of Europe began to realize that their food could be more delicious, and thus was born the lucrative spice trade.

Now getting spices from India and Southeast Asia to far off Europe was no easy feat.  There were two major routes by which spices traveled.  The first was by sea across the Indian Ocean to Egypt and then on into Europe, and the second was by land across the Silk Road from China to the Roman city of Constantinople.  Now as you can imagine, this being in the time when sailing ships and horses were the best ways to get around, this took a lot of time and effort, so of course it cost a butt load of money.  Only the wealthiest of Europeans could afford the deliciousness of spices.  However, the added flavors were so much better than what was locally available that plenty of people thought it more than worth it to pay more than the spice’s weight in gold to get some.   After all, gold was shiny, but it doesn't really make your chicken dish pop.

Now this spice trade continued for hundreds of years, and the money in it was so good that the fall and rise of empires didn't really seem to affect it.  There were fortunes to be made, and nothing really gets people to forget about religious and political differences quite like a giant pile of cash.  However, this all changed in the fifteenth century when the Ottomans came on the scene (the Turks, not the couch).  Throughout the first half of the century the Ottomans conquered the Middle East and Egypt, before turning their attention to the Balkans and what remained of the old Roman Empire.  In 1453, they conquered Constantinople, allowing them to rename it Istanbul and effectively giving them complete control over all the spice routes between Europe and the Far East.  Now the Ottomans were a little more fanatical at the time about the whole religion thing, especially when it came to hating the Christians in Europe, which is fair because many of the Christians at the time hated them just as much.  However, the Ottomans were so fanatical that they decided to be huge dicks by putting massive taxes on any spices exported to Europe, effectively cutting off the flow of deliciousness.  This didn’t really sit well with the European ruling elite, who were less than happy with suddenly being forced to eat bland food.   

Not being the type to just take things sitting down, the European elite instead went with the idea of finding a creative solution by financing expeditions to search for alternative trade routes.  Eventually this led to the Portuguese discovering that Africa had a bottom in 1488.  Prior to this, pretty much every cartographer in the world, with the likely exception of those living in southern Africa, just kind of thought the continent went on forever.  Thanks to this little discovery, the Portuguese established a new trade route to India, thus ensuring they would be rich as hell.  Not wishing to be outdone, the Spanish threw a bunch of money in the lap of some dude named Christopher Columbus, you’ve probably heard of him, who was convinced you could get to the Far East just by sailing west.  This didn’t quite work out since America was kind of in the way, but it did create an opportunity for Europeans to exploit the New World for glory and profit.  This in turn led to the ascension of Europe and western culture to its current dominance today.  All because some rich guys wanted to eat tastier foods and the Ottomans being huge dicks.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spices,_Panaji_(6684415299).jpg

Murdering Your Way to Better Health

The turn of the 19th century wasn't such a bad time to live, at least compared to all the time before it.  People were progressively living longer lives thanks to major advancements in medical science, which was mostly thanks to a boom in the number of medical colleges; though it probably also didn’t hurt that these hallowed halls of learning had started teaching how the human body actually worked instead of just making up things about the four humors and other such nonsense.  Medical students of the era were some of the first to be taught via the use of dissected cadavers, the practice having only become widely acceptable a few decades earlier.  For some reason, people have always been a little weird when it comes to dead bodies.  However, it wasn’t just the medical students having all the fun, it was also the general public.  Many people of the era attended events called dissection theaters, where a trained physician would show anyone with the balls to look all the different parts of the body.  One must remember that people didn’t have TV’s back then.  However, there was just one little problem.  All of this educating and dissecting required a lot of dead bodies, which was a bit of an issue given that most people were rather less than willing to have the bodies of their loved ones cut up.  It didn’t help that many churches claimed the practice was against the teachings of the bible, which if you were pretty literal in your belief of resurrection kind of made sense, sort of.   

Anyways, by 1820 the city of Edinburgh, Scotland was the center of anatomical study in the world, which I’m sure is a little fun fact that the local tourist bureau surely hyped the shit out of.  This of course led to a huge local demand for dead bodies which couldn't really be met by the available supply.  According to the laws of the time, the only cadavers that could be used for medical research were those of dead prisoners (either by execution or natural causes), people who committed suicide (since they were going to hell anyways), and orphans (because apparently fuck orphans).  What this basically meant was that you had representatives from medical schools going around to prisons and orphanages on a daily basis, asking with barely concealed hope whether or not anybody had died.  As with any situation where supply didn't meet demand, and customers were willing to pay out the nose to get what they wanted, people got creative.  Okay, maybe not creative, but they did start grave robbing in order to obtain fresh corpses to sell to the medical schools.  These purveyors of the dead, called resurrectionists, mostly targeted the poor, since the poor were too broke to do much about it, except for the occasional riot through town.  However, even with this ill-gotten supply, there still just weren’t enough cadavers to go around.

It was during this strange point in history that an Edinburgh lodging house owner named William Hare found that one of his lodgers had died without paying his bill.  Not being the brightest of fellas, he went to his friend William Burke to ask for advice, who being a man without morals, suggested selling the body to a medical school.  The pair did just that, pocketing what amounted to around $1,000 in today's money for their trouble.  A few months later, another one of Hare's lodgers grew ill, sparking ideas of a further payout for Burke and Hare.  However, not being the most patient of men, the duo instead just straight up murdered the sick lodger and sold his body.  Things just kind of got out of hand from there.  Due to a lack of sick lodgers, Burke and Hare switched things up a bit by murdering local prostitutes and vagabonds, an estimated 16 to 30 people over the course of a year.  However, when concocting this new strategy, the duo failed to realize that medical students loved sleeping with hookers just as much as everybody else.  Many of the students began to recognize the faces and bodies that were turning up on their dissection tables.  Questions began to be asked, and eventually everything fell apart.  As a result, Hare was imprisoned and Burke was hanged.  His body was of course given to the medical school to dissect.   

The Burke and Hare murders, followed by a couple of copycat killings, convinced the British government that something had to be done to improve the supply of dead bodies.  After all, the advancement of medical science depended on it.  In 1832, a new law was passed giving medical colleges access to unclaimed corpses, the bodies of those who died in workhouses, and the cadavers of people donated by their loved ones in return for the college paying funeral expenses.  So yes, basically the law just gave doctors better access to dead poor people, which remain the main source for medical cadavers to this day.  On the plus side, this pretty much completely solved the corpse shortage problem, and put an end to the illegal body trade.  It also led to huge leaps forward in medical science as researchers began to more fully understand how the human body worked, resulting in the modern medical care we all now enjoy today.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Burke_Murdering_Margery_Campbell.jpg

Manics and Haunted Houses

They called it the Gilded Age.  The late nineteenth century was a very prosperous time for the United States.  Immense tracts of western land were being developed, providing huge amounts of natural resources (farming, mining, and logging) that were shipped back to the major eastern population centers via newly built railroads.  These natural resources fed a rapid period of industrialization across the eastern U.S., noted for its significant increases in wages, standards of living, and technological innovation.  The massive growth was fed by billions of dollars of capital from European investors, who were desperate to find new growing markets.  The United States was basically the China of today.  Also from Europe came millions of impoverished immigrants, frantic to get a piece of the American dream.  Many Americans, both locals and immigrants, never escaped poverty, instead ending up ground up in the gears of the great American machine.  Others were luckier.  Lifted by the rising tide of prosperity, they were propelled into the growing American middle and upper classes.  High above it all sat the billionaires.  Barons of industry who ruled over all as gilded gods, shining far above the growing smog in the golden sunlight.  It was the best of times, and it was the worst of times, depending upon who you were.

Perhaps nothing speaks more to the fancy predilections of the era quite as much as the idea of the Victorian mansion.  The Victorian mansion was the McMansion of its day, by which I mean it was an overpriced monstrosity paid for by people who believed that the good times would never come to an end.  Newly built streetcar lines in most cities caused rapid urban expansion, as people with the means to do so rushed to get out of the smoggy industrial cores.  Away from the city centers, a person could more easily buy larger tracts of land for less money.  It was the start of suburbia.  The Victorian mansions tended to be gaudy, huge, and ridiculous.  They tended to have vast rooms with high ceilings, large stairways that served no purpose other than to lord the wealth of the household over any visitors, and all of the newest innovations; such as electricity and telephones.  Though they had numerous fireplaces, they were all just decorative, with the primary source of heat coming from coal fired furnaces, fueled by cheap mass produced coal.  However, though meant to look to be the height of luxury, they were actually big wooden piles of shit.  New building techniques, the most important being materials standardization, allowed the giant houses to be thrown up quickly and on the cheap.  With few to any building codes, crooked construction crews cut every corner they could in order to reap a higher profit.        

Unfortunately, the good times never last forever.  The rapid economic growth led to thousands of businesses borrowing ridiculous sums of money in order to keep up with the expansion.  The trouble started when commodity prices collapsed in 1890.  This slowed demand for the construction of new railroads, one of the major drivers of the U.S. economy at the time.  As a result, by 1893 several railroad companies went bankrupt.  European investors, freaking right the fuck out, responded by pulling their money out of the U.S., collapsing the stock market.  This further spooked investors, causing stock market collapses around the world, which drove the global economy into a major slump today known as the Panic of 1893, because the name Fucking Freakout of 1893 was a little too on the nose.  Across the United States, overextended businesses failed by the thousands, throwing a shit ton of people out of work, 20 percent of the U.S. workforce to be exact.  Numerous banks failed, which caused panicked people to rush to get their money out of the banks, which caused more banks to fail.  Many in the growing middle class suddenly found themselves thrown back into poverty.  People did any work they could to avoid starvation.  Many women turned to prostitution just to feed their children, which probably pissed off the existing prostitutes since it undoubtedly lowered the price for a poke.  The Panic of 1893 lasted until 1897.  During the worst of it, the billionaires, who were busily consolidating businesses into massive trusts, had to bail out cities, states, and even the federal government.         

So, what does all of this have to do with haunted houses?  Well, similar to our most recent recession, the collapse of the U.S. economy left many Americans unable to pay their mortgages.  Thousands of Victorian mansions, financially underwater and costing a ghastly amount to upkeep, were abandoned across the country and left to rot.  Many of these homes, some not even fully completed, were never inhabited again.  They slowly fell apart on overgrown lots, becoming gloomy hulks that children dared each other to enter, memories of a bygone era filled with dust and cobwebs.  The prevalence of these abandoned houses was so great that by the 1920's they had become the archetype for the stereotypical haunted house, an image that still exists to this day.  The Addams Family, Scooby Doo, and countless Halloween specials, all contain what has become an icon in America’s collective imagination. 

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Old_Hall,_Fairies_by_Moonlight.jpg