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Lore

Lore 266: What's in the Box

Duration
36m
Broadcast on
03 Nov 2024
Audio Format
other

The end of the world has always been a big fear. And fear, as we all know, is a powerful fuel for driving folklore into the future. Let's meet one individual who did just that, while also leaving us with a fascinating mystery to unravel.

Narrated and produced by Aaron Mahnke, with writing by GennaRose Nethercott, research by Sam Alberty, and music by Chad Lawson.

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©2024 Aaron Mahnke. All rights reserved.

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The date was December 21st of 1954, and like any day in history, there was plenty going on. Jane Fonda turned 17. The song "Home for the Holidays" was number one in the U.S. charts. The very first Godzilla movie was crashing its way through Japanese cinemas, but if there's one thing that absolutely did not occur on this particular Tuesday, it was the apocalypse. Which, to one group of midwesterners, was a huge bummer. They were called the seekers, and they were a doomsday cult. Led by a Chicago woman named Dorothy Martin, the group believed that on December 21st of 1954, global catastrophe would arrive in the form of a massive earthquake and a tidal wave. But not to worry, Martin had a backup plan. Aliens were going to swoop down, gather the seekers up in their flying saucers, and carry them off to a planet called Clarion. Sounds legit, right? However, little did the seekers know there was an imposter in their midst. And no, I don't mean Dorothy Martin. It was a social psychologist named Leon Festinger, who had infiltrated the group to study what would happen to them, mentally speaking, when their beliefs did not come to pass. Which, of course, they didn't. December 21st came and went, and Festinger watched the seekers struggle to make sense of it all. He saw the group do wild mental gymnastics to keep justifying their faith against all evidence. And it led Festinger to develop a new psychology theory about what happens when our beliefs conflict with reality. And you may have heard of it before. He called this phenomenon cognitive dissonance. It just goes to show, at the end of the day, or should I say, at the end of the world, there's nothing we can cling to more tightly than stories. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is lore. When we think of doomsday prophets, we probably imagine cyanide cults, billboards warning that the end is nigh, men shouting from street corners and carrying signs quoting the Book of Revelation. You know, apocalypse stuff. What probably doesn't spring to mind is an 18th century peasant girl. But settle in, because that's about to change. Joanna was born in April of 1750, and her first few years were honestly pretty typical for the time. She was one of six children raised on a humble farm in

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