[RADIOLAB INTRO]

ROBERT KRULWICH: Should we ...

JAD ABUMRAD: You just wanna launch in?

ROBERT: You go first.

JAD: Oh, all right. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And today on the show ...

ROBERT: Well, this is a whole hour about ghosts. I guess you could call them ghosts, because ...

JAD: I guess it's more of a haunting kind of show.

ROBERT: Yeah. It's a haunting show.

JAD: Because these are stories of possession.

ROBERT: Yes.

JAD: We've got a story of a man whose dreams were possessed by a bogeyman, then ...

ROBERT: A machine that is occupied by a saint.

JAD: And then a dead woman who lives on in a form that many of us have sucked on. Really! I mean, it's actually—not in a sexual way but ...

ROBERT: No, not at all.

JAD: But in a "I wanna save your life" kinda way.

ROBERT: Right.

JAD: And we start with a story that—you know what? I'm just gonna read you something.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: It's from author Mary Roach, and it starts like this, "What happens after you die? I can name you 47 men who've tried to harness the rational horsepower of science to answer this most floaty question. Some were physicians, some physicists, some psychologists. Two were Nobel Prize winners. Of them, only one to date has landed irrefutable proof." Man's name was Thomas Lynn Bradford.

MARY ROACH: Yes [laughs].

JAD: And that is Mary Roach.

MARY ROACH: Hi!

JAD: How are you?

MARY ROACH: I'm fine! How are you, Jad?

JAD: I'm good.

JAD: Mary is the author of several books with wonderfully succinct titles.

MARY ROACH: Spooks. Stiff. Bonk.

JAD: Those are three different books. The one we're talking about today is Spook.

MARY ROACH: The subtitle is Science Tackles the Afterlife.

JAD: Which brings us to Mr. Bradford.

MARY ROACH: Thomas Lynn Bradford was a spiritualist who lived in the early part of the 1900s.

JAD: A spiritualist, is that a ...

MARY ROACH: Spiritualism was very—it was a religion very popular around the turn of the last century that was predicated on this notion that there is no death. That when you die, you just go on to summerland.

JAD: Summerland?

MARY ROACH: A beautiful place beyond.

JAD: The thing is, spiritualists like Thomas Lynn Bradford—actually, especially Thomas Lynn Bradord, they didn't just have faith that summerland was out there after death, they wanted ...

MARY ROACH: Proof! Physical evidence that there is a beyond.

JAD: So here's what happened. One day ...

JAD: When was this, by the way?

MARY ROACH: This was 1921.

JAD: One day in 1921, Thomas Lynn Bradford put out an ad.

MARY ROACH: Yes. He put an ad in a Detroit newspaper.

JAD: Which basically said, "I would like to prove the existence of the afterlife. Anyone out there that can help?"

MARY ROACH: "I'm looking for other like-minded people to think about this." And this one woman contacted him.

JAD: Really?

MARY ROACH: A Ruth Moran.

JAD: Who was apparently a psychic.

MARY ROACH: Then the two of them sat down and they devised what they thought was an iron-clad plan. One person dies, crosses over to the afterlife ...

JAD: And then, from the beyond, that person would yell back.

MARY ROACH: "Hey! It worked, I'm here! There's an afterlife!"

JAD: Meanwhile, the person who didn't die would be sitting in a room somewhere psychically listening to see if they could hear something.

MARY ROACH: Because if they could, then we’zd have our proof.

JAD: Huh.

MARY ROACH: In fact, he—I think it was that evening, Thomas Lynn Bradford, in his rented room, he turned on the gas with the pilot off. And asphyxiated himself. The New York Times reported this whole thing.

[NEWS CLIP: Detroit, February 6. Thomas Lynn Bradford committed suicide last night. His body was found in his room at 2500 Howard Street with the gas turned on.]

MARY ROACH: The landlord in his building found him the next day.

[NEWS CLIP: Nearby were found several typewritten pages on can the dead communicate with the living? Somewhere in Detroit is believed to be a girl who is waiting for him to answer this question.]

JAD: The girl, of course, was Ruth Moran, the psychic. And there she was, across town in her own small apartment with the lights off, as I imagine it, just waiting.

MARY ROACH: Listening. But she didn't hear anything from Thomas Lynn Bradford.

[NEWS CLIP: Detroit, February 7. Though more than 40 hours have elapsed. No message has come back from the spirit world to Mrs. Ruth Moran.]

MARY ROACH: There was a followup story the next day. The headline said, "Dead spiritualist silent."

[NEWS CLIP: Dead spiritualist silent.]

MARY ROACH: It was almost like when somebody is lost at sea. They wait a certain amount of time, and then they finally say, "Okay, we're declaring him dead."

JAD: Yeah. But you know what's weird is, like, this Ruth girl, right? Why wouldn't she just lie and say that she did hear Thomas Lynn Bradford?

MARY ROACH: I know! That's uh ...

JAD: I think it's very—it's very admirable of her to be honest like that.

MARY ROACH: I think that people like Thomas Lynn Bradford and Ruth Moran, they weren't trying to pull a hoax. They weren't charlatans, they really were just seekers. They really just wanted to find proof.

JAD: Huh. But you say—you said in that thing I read, you set him up as being the guy who knows, the guy who found proof. Were you just being colorful when you wrote that?

MARY ROACH: No! I mean the—well, he knows in that he's dead now!

JAD: Oh, I see.

MARY ROACH: Dead people know.

JAD: [laughs] So this isn't really like a knowing problem, it's a journalism problem.

MARY ROACH: It's a reporting problem. Billions of people know, they just can't get the answer back to us.

JAD: Huh. Okay, that brings me to my last question. In your book Spook, in your dedications you say, "To my parents, wherever they are—or aren't." At this point, after writing this book, are you willing to say that they are somewhere or that they aren't?

MARY ROACH: If I had to put my money on it, seriously, if—if a great deal was at stake and I had to decide one way or the other, I would put my money on they aren't anywhere. But that's really depressing and I don't wanna have to put my money on it.

JAD: Yeah.

MARY ROACH: And I don't like to be the sort of person who even says that because, you know, my mother believed. My mother absolutely had faith that when she died, she was going to heaven. And even if she's wrong, she doesn't know she's wrong. So she went through her whole life with a calmness and a peace of mind that I'll never have. The people who believe win. The skeptics lose.

JAD: Thanks to Mary Roach, author of the book Spook, and many others.

ROBERT: Our next story is a little different. Now we've just met a person who couldn't come back. This is a woman who did make it back, make it back from the other side, but in a very strange form.

SEAN COLE: You've probably seen her.

ROBERT: Really?

SEAN: You've seen her face.

ROBERT: Oh.

JAD: Comes from our producer Sean Cole.

SEAN: You may have even ...

JAD: Dated her?

SEAN: Well, put your mouth on her.

JAD: Explain.

SEAN: So you know when you gotta bring somebody back to life?

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Go. one, two ...]

ROBERT: Yeah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... three, four, five ...]

SEAN: They make you take a class.

JAD: Yeah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... six, seven, eight ...]

SEAN: And they make you practice on this dummy?

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... nine, ten ...]

JAD: CPR, yeah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... eleven, twelve, thirteen ...]

SEAN: And the dummy has this face?

JAD: That you suck on.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... fourteen, fifteen, sixteen ...]

SEAN: Well you don't suck on it, you blow into it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... seventeen, eighteen, nineteen ...]

JAD: That's what I meant.

SEAN: You don't know a lot about CPR.

JAD: Ah, right. Well, what's the story with the dummy?

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five ...]

SEAN: Well, so that lady ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty ...]

SEAN: ... before she was a dummy, that face belonged to an actual woman's face.

JAD: The CPR dummy's face is an actual lady?

SEAN: An actual lady that was transfixing and inspiring to millions of people, and used to basically hang out with Napoleon and Mozart.

JAD: What?

ROBERT: Come on!

SEAN: True.

JEREMY GRANGE: Yes.

SEAN: I first heard this story from this guy Jeremy Grange.

JEREMY GRANGE: I'm a producer with BBC Radio in the UK.

SEAN: He made a documentary about all of this a while back. But basically ...

JEREMY GRANGE: We ...

SEAN: ... story starts, our story starts in Norway in the early 1950s. There was this toymaker named Asmund Laerdal.

JEREMY GRANGE: And Asmund Laerdal was making plastic toys, brightly colored toys.

SEAN: And this story also involves ...

JEREMY GRANGE: His two year old son, Tore.

TORE LAERDAL: I'm Tore Laerdal.

SEAN: He's all grown up now.

TORE LAERDAL: Well, obviously, I don't recall the details myself, but it's been told to me that ...

SEAN: One day, he and his father Asmund are at their summer home, which is on the ocean. And somehow, Tore toddles his way out of sight and the next thing anyone knows ...

TORE LAERDAL: I was found floating face down in the sea. And I was just kept floating by some air trapped in a raincoat.

JAD: He's on top of a raincoat on the water, or ...?

SEAN: I think the raincoat is on top of him, but basically it's keeping him aloft.

JAD: So there's a bubble of air underneath.

SEAN: Yeah. And then Asmund, his dad, sees him.

TORE LAERDAL: I don't know how long I have been in the water, but when I was pulled up by my father, I was lifeless.

SEAN: And not only does Asmund not know mouth-to-mouth resuscitation ...

TORE LAERDAL: This was in 1954.

SEAN: ... there is no mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

ROBERT: You mean, people didn't know about it.

SEAN: It hadn't really been developed yet. And so his dad ...

TORE LAERDAL: He was shaking me.

SEAN: Doing whatever he could.

TORE LAERDAL: Gradually, I responded.

SEAN: And as fate would have it, not long after that, Asmund, having freshly saved his son from drowning, is contacted by the man who is developing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

JEREMY GRANGE: An Austrian doctor called Peter Safar.

SEAN: He had worked out all the basics of CPR with the mouth to mouth and the compressing the chest and everything like that. But ...

JEREMY GRANGE: He realized he needed a way for people to practice this. And ...

TORE LAERDAL: My father was asked whether he possibly could help making some kind of training device.

SEAN: And pretty quickly, Asmund thought, "Well, we need a dummy."

JEREMY GRANGE: And Asmund had to decide what the face of this dummy was gonna look like.

SEAN: Should it be a woman, should it be a man?

JEREMY GRANGE: I think he felt that people would be more intimidated or shyer if it was a man's face, so he decided to go with a woman's face.

SEAN: An attractive woman's face.

TORE LAERDAL: Because at that time you were asking laypeople to blow into a quote- unquote "dead person."

SEAN: You know, you don't want to blow into somebody who's gaping with a horror face.

JAD: [laughs]

SEAN: She should look comfortably dead.

TORE LAERDAL: And then he came across this girl in my grandparents' home.

SEAN: Asmund is there in the house and he looks up at the wall and sees this face of a woman. It's a mask.

TORE LAERDAL: And my father was taken back by the beauty of this face.

SEAN: And he says, "That's the face I'll use."

JAD: This is a mask? What kind of mask was this?

SEAN: It was a death mask.

JAD: What's a death mask?

SEAN: All right, I'm gonna get—I'm gonna go back even further here, so stay with me for a minute.

JAD: Okay.

SEAN: Back in the 19th century, commonly, people, after they were dead, they'd have masks made of their faces because you want to preserve their countenance. So right after the person dies, pretty much, you take a bunch of clay and you stick it on their face and you make a mold, fill the mold with plaster, and then you've got a plaster mask, and you can reproduce it, and reproduce it. It was especially common in Paris.

KRISTEN CLARK: Hey, Radiolab! It is a sunny, cold Paris October morning. And ...

JEREMY GRANGE: Of all these mask-makers workshops that existed around Paris 120 years ago, there's only one left.

KRISTEN CLARK: And we're about to visit Lorenzi's

JEREMY GRANGE: Called Lorenzi's.

KRISTEN CLARK: Which is a—which is like a mask-making shop. So I'm gonna—we're coming up to the gate.

SEAN: We asked our friends Kristin Clark and Tamar Tsardoyavitch to drop by there for us.

JEREMY GRANGE: They've still got this incredible workshop, And you go up some rickety, narrow, wood stairs, and you get to the top and there's just banks of faces.

KRISTEN CLARK: Rows and rows of people that look like they're sleeping.

JEREMY GRANGE: Death masks of ...

KRISTEN CLARK: Who is the one at the top there?

JEREMY GRANGE: ... everybody. You know, Napoleon!

CLERK: Napoleon, yeah.

KRISTEN CLARK: Where is ...

JEREMY GRANGE: And Robespierre.

CLERK: Robespierre.

KRISTEN CLARK: Robespierre.

CLERK: Robespierre. He was in the French Revolution.

CLERK: Revolution.

JEREMY GRANGE: Mozart, Beethoven.

CLERK: That's the mask of Chopin, the composer.

JEREMY GRANGE: Looking at you from the wall and from the ceiling.

KRISTEN CLARK: All of their eyes are closed.

JEREMY GRANGE: Face after face after face.

SEAN: And they're all famous.

JEREMY GRANGE: Historical figures. But also among them is ...

SEAN: This girl. She's not a poet, she's not a conqueror, she's not anybody.

JAD: Well she's gotta be somebody, I mean, who is she?

SEAN: Well the story that emerged after she died, and this is maybe fact, but the sources are lost to us, so we're not sure exactly what happened. But she was young.

JEREMY GRANGE: You know, in her early to mid 20s. Came from the countryside.

SEAN: Not from Paris.

JEREMY GRANGE: You know, she was a sort of poor, uneducated woman, but she came to Paris.

SEAN: Meets a man.

JEREMY GRANGE: And there was a love affair.

SEAN: Which then turns sour.

JEREMY GRANGE: The story is that maybe she was pregnant and abandoned, or ...

JAD: Oh ...

JEREMY GRANGE: Or maybe she was just abandoned.

SEAN: She goes to a bridge that's stretching across the Seine, might be the one by the Louvre. Steps to the edge ...

JEREMY GRANGE: And she threw herself into the river and she drowned. And then the body was recovered.

SEAN: She was taken to the morgue, which wasn't that far away. And in those days ...

JEREMY GRANGE: Bodies would be displayed behind glass, and hopefully their relatives, or their friends, would come along and say, "Yes, that's my father, or my sister, or my daughter." And she was this particularly beautiful corpse. And everybody rushed down to see her. And eventually yeah, the guy who ran the morgue took a plaster cast of her face because she was so beautiful.

SEAN: He was just struck by her, just like Laerdal, just like everybody.

JAD: What'd she look like?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JEREMY GRANGE: I wouldn't say a sort of plump face, but a rounded face.

SEAN: She's lovely, but not in a come hither way. She's more like sort of weirdly saintly looking?

JAD: Like she's serene?

ROBERT: Innocent, maybe?

SEAN: Serene, innocent, but also sort of knowing. And she has ...

JEREMY GRANGE: A little smile. If you look at the mask, there's just this little smile playing on the lips. And it's—it's just enough to—to kind make you think, "Well, why's she smiling?" And who is she?

SEAN: And who is she? And the problem was ...

JEREMY GRANGE: She wasn't identified.

JAD: Oh, so they didn't know.

SEAN: No. And so, ultimately, people started calling her by this name.

JEREMY GRANGE: The inconnue.

JAD: Inconnue.

ROBERT: Inconnue, inconnue.

JAD: What does that mean?

ROBERT: The un—

SEAN: Well, so you know the word "ingénue," which means "innocent lady," like the character, the ingénue in the movies?

JAD: Uh-huh.

SEAN: This is l'inconnue, which means, "unknown woman."

JEREMY GRANGE: The inconnue de la Seine. The unknown woman of the Seine. And then gradually, the plaster cast worked its way into the mask-makers workshops and out onto the streets of Paris.

SEAN: And it wasn't long before this woman became a sensation, and everyone started writing about her.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The face of the young, drowned woman ...]

JEREMY GRANGE: Rilke.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... was beautiful because it smiled. Smiled so deceptively, as though it knew.]

SEAN: Anias Nin.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The woman who had drowned herself here years ago, and who was so beautiful that ...]

JEREMY GRANGE: And Nabokov.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Touchingly frail, young shoulders.]

SEAN: Who wrote this entire poem sort of demanding, you know, "Well, who made you jump?"

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Who was he?]

SEAN: Why? You know, who was the guy?

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I beseech you, tell me your mysterious seducer. Was he some neighbor's curly-locked nephew of the loud tie and gold-capped tooth?]

SEAN: In any case, this mask is a huge deal. In all, thousands, countless people have it hanging on their wall, the same way you would hang Napoleon on your wall, because he's Napoleon.

ROBERT: Yeah.

SEAN: But they don't know who she is. And that's sort of the point. Like who is she? And everybody's captivated, including our toymaker. Asmund Laerdal.

JEREMY GRANGE: He felt that the inconnue ...

TORE LAERDAL: The attractiveness and the story ...

JEREMY GRANGE: ... would be the right model to use.

SEAN: For the first CPR mannequin in history, who has a name!

JEREMY GRANGE: Resusci Anne.

SEAN: Resusci Anne.

JEREMY GRANGE: Could you describe what we have in front of us here?

TORE LAERDAL: Well, what we see is the very first production model of Resusci Anne from 1960.

JEREMY GRANGE: She's had to—the face is changed slightly, because if you want to do CPR, you have to have an open mouth. So regrettably, the ...

SEAN: The slight smile is now parted.

JAD: Yes.

JEREMY GRANGE: But you've still got the high forehead and the closed eyes.

JAD: Wow.

TORE LAERDAL: And ...

JEREMY GRANGE: Every Resusci Anne CPR mannequin that's produced ...

SEAN: 300 million people have been trained on this thing since it was first introduced in 1960.

JEREMY GRANGE: ... has the face of the inconnue.

SEAN: Still.

JEREMY GRANGE: Still.

TORE LAERDAL: And hopefully she's looking quite attractive.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen ...]

SEAN: The craziest part about it is that ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two ...]

SEAN:  ... this face ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven ...]

SEAN:  ... of this drowned woman ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty.]

SEAN: ... becomes the face that people blow into to learn how to save drowned people.

JAD: [laughs]

SEAN: So it's like ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... one, two, three, four ...]

SEAN: It's like over ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... four, five, six, seven, eight ...]

SEAN: ... and over and over again ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... one, two, three, four ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen ...]

SEAN: ... thousands and thousands of people ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... one, two, three, four ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two ...]

SEAN: ... are trying to bring this woman back to life.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: … twenty-three, twenty-four twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty.]

ROBERT: That's kind of beautiful, actually.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... four, five, six, seven, eight ...]

JAD: That's kinda nice.

ROBERT: Yeah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty.]

ROBERT: The only issue maybe is like, every fact you've just given her isn't really given about her. It isn't really a fact.

JAD: Yeah, what do we actually know about this woman?

SEAN: Well, so Jeremy went into his research sort of asking the same question, well what do we ...

ROBERT: Really know?

SEAN: What do we really know that's true?

JEREMY GRANGE: I—I have a horrible suspicion the truth, you know, is that she didn't die.

JAD: What?

JEREMY GRANGE: Yeah. I mean—having shown the mask to Pascal Jacquin, who's a member of the Brigade Fluvial ...

SEAN: This is the river police, whose job it is to pull dead bodies out of the Seine and rescue people from the Seine. And Pascal is in charge, so ...

JEREMY GRANGE: He's seen, you know, hundreds of drowned bodies. He can look at a face and he can know whether that's somebody who's drowned.

SEAN: And he said ...

PASCAL JACQUIN: It's surprising when I saw the picture to see that so peaceful face, just because everyone we've found in the water is never so peaceful.

JEREMY GRANGE: Not to put too fine a point on it, but when somebody's drowned, they start decomposing quite quickly.

PASCAL JACQUIN: They are swollen most of the time. So ...

JEREMY GRANGE: The features that you would have seen in life don't really last very long ...

PASCAL JACQUIN: It's not so nice looking.

JEREMY GRANGE: ... once somebody's been in the water.

JEREMY GRANGE: Do you think she's attractive?

PASCAL JACQUIN: Yes, of course. Yeah, yeah. Just she looks really graceful.

JAD: So if she didn't die, then ...

ROBERT: Who was she then?

SEAN: She may have been a model who somebody thought was pretty and wanted to take a plaster cast of her face, I mean, at that point, it's anybody's guess.

ROBERT: We don't know this?

SEAN: This is our end of knowing.

JAD: It's our end of knowing.

ROBERT: What?

JAD: Well, it's frustrating.

SEAN: But maybe it's better that way. I mean, if you don't—like, the reason why she was so captivating is because people don't know and they can just fill this gap with their own stories. They can just sort of sit there and muse about her. In fact ...

JEREMY GRANGE: Uh ...

SEAN: ... Jeremy told me this story about this museum that he went to in Liverpool. It was at the historic house of a photographer there. And ...

JEREMY GRANGE: And in the kind of waiting room, there was the mask of the inconnue, actually, on the wall there. So, you know, slightly disingenuously, I ask the guide, "Oh, what's that?"

SEAN: Very disingenuously [laughs]

JEREMY GRANGE: [laughs] Well ...

SEAN: You knew everything about it at that point.

JEREMY GRANGE: I thought—I thought I'd see. And it was amazing. She told me this story about twins. Two—two girls from Liverpool. And this is—you know—the important bit, from where we were. From the city where we were.

JAD: Not from anywhere near France.

JEREMY GRANGE: Not from anywhere—exactly! And ...

SEAN: The story was almost exactly the same, except this time, one of the twin girls left Liverpool in her late teens or early 20s, made her way to Paris, fell in love, got knocked up, the guy left, she despaired, and then ...

JEREMY GRANGE: Threw herself off the bridge and drowned. And the mask of this beautiful corpse was taken.

SEAN: But this version keeps going after that. Fifty years later, the surviving twin, who never knew what happened to her sister, takes a trip to Paris.

JEREMY GRANGE: Is walking through the streets of Paris and sees this face on the wall and, you know, this time, instead of it being her own face, it's the face of her twin sister ...

SEAN: Twin sister.

JEREMY GRANGE:  ...who's there. And so her twin who died long before her is kind of kept forever young while she has had to age. And so she's from Liverpool now, as far as ...

SEAN: As far as the Liverpudlians are concerned.

JEREMY GRANGE: Yeah.

SEAN: And I wonder if she's also from Cornwall, as far as the Cornwallians are concerned. And, like ...

ROBERT: Maybe she's like a Muscovite, as far as the people in Moscow are concerned?

SEAN: She's Sicilian, as far as the Sicilians are concerned.

JAD: Maybe she's a Laotian, as far as the Laotians are concerned.

ROBERT: And a Buenos Arian ...

SEAN: Maybe Australian.

JAD: How about Calcuttan, as far as the Calcuttans are concerned.

SEAN: Beirutian, as far as the Beirutians are concerned.

JAD: Let's get "D" one. Let's get a "D" in here.

ROBERT: Denverite, as far as the Denver people are concerned.

JAD: Denverites. Yep.

ROBERT: Dalatian, as far as people in Dallas ...

JAD: Producer Sean Cole. And before we go, thank you to Jeremy Grange and to our readers, Pike Malonovsky, Marine Boudeau and Jeff Spurgeon.

ROBERT: And special thanks to Lisa Morehouse and Michelle Kanu. We'll be right back.

[JEREMY GRANGE: This is Jeremy Grange.]

[MARY ROACH: Hi, this is Mary Roach.]

[JEREMY GRANGE: And here are the credits.]

[MARY ROACH: Here I go. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation.

JEREMY GRANGE: And the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.]

[MARY ROACH: More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

[JEREMY GRANGE: Radiolab is produced by WNYC.]

[MARY ROACH: And distributed by NPR.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And today ...

ROBERT: Well, it's about being haunted. Ghost stories.

JAD: Yeah and next we have a story that's—it's not so much a ghost story, it's more of a facing—how would you put it? Facing ...

ROBERT: Your bogeyman, I'd say.

JAD: Yeah. [laughs]

ROBERT: But in this case, like, literally.

JAD: Meh, not so ...

ROBERT: Almost.

JAD: Almost. And it comes to us from—Matt, you ready?

MATT KIELTY: Yeah.

JAD: From reporter Matthew Kielty.

MATT: Steve.

STEVE VOLK: Yes.

JAD: And another guy.

MATT: How you doing?

STEVE VOLK: I've never been better.

MATT: [laughs]

JAD: So Matt, I don't know exactly how we're gonna start this story.

MATT: Sure.

JAD: But maybe just introduce us to this guy.

MATT: So, this guy is Steve Volk. He's a reporter.

STEVE VOLK: A city reporter here in Philadelphia. I write about courts, crime, politics.

MATT: But the thing that I read was a personal story of Steve's. Story starts with Steve in his early 20s. And one night, he goes to sleep.

STEVE VOLK: Right. So I have this dream where I wake up in my apartment. There's nobody there but me, and I'm just sort of pacing around the room. And I feel that sort of—that kind of tremor or buzz, almost, that something bad's about to happen.

MATT: That—that feeling when, like, the wall's kinda close in on you a little bit.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

STEVE VOLK: I could just feel that something's about to happen. And I look over at the window, and there's this face.

MATT: Outside his window.

STEVE VOLK: This man.

MATT: Just hovering there.

STEVE VOLK: And then he sort of recedes back into the dark and  comes back again. And so it sort of bobbed up to where I could see it and then recede back into the distance. And it was very, very threatening.

JAD: Yeah.

STEVE VOLK: I don't know what's happening. I just think that this—this person's trying to scare me, intimidate me

MATT: So he waits there for a minute. And a moment later, Steve hears this knock.

JAD: Uh oh.

MATT: At his front door. He knows immediately it's this guy.

STEVE VOLK: And so I start hollering using every expletive I know. You know, "You're gonna—you're gonna scare me?" I start daring him to come in so I can kill him. And I have this rage that, you know, I don't—I don't know that I've ever really felt in real life. So much rage that it made me feel sick.

MATT: He's just screaming at the door, over and over.

STEVE VOLK: "Come in here so I can kill you." I was really violent.

MATT: And then all of a sudden, this guy just kicks open the door.

STEVE VOLK: And we fly at each other. We're both swinging and grabbing each other.

MATT: And then ...

STEVE VOLK: I wake up. Literally with my fist, you know, my hand balled up into a fist, and I've just thrown a punch at the air.

MATT: And he's—and he's in just an absolute panic.

STEVE VOLK: Very, very profoundly disturbing dream.

JAD: But it's just a dream.

MATT: Yep. But the thing about this dream is that it wouldn't go away.

JAD: Meaning?

MATT: Like any time there was any sort of anxiety that flared up in his life: work deadline, relationship, family troubles.

STEVE VOLK: Back again!

MATT: And every time, the same thing.

STEVE VOLK: This face that comes up out of the dark

MATT: The face, the window, the door, the fight.

STEVE VOLK: You know, I wanted it to go away.

MATT: And so this is something—this persisted for how long?

STEVE VOLK: I would say I had this dream at least six times a year for about 20 years.

JAD: 20 years?

MATT: 20 years.

JAD: So he must have had it, like ...

MATT: Hundreds of times.

STEVE VOLK: So yeah, I—it was a dream that I wanted to be done with. And I wasn't sure how to be done with it. But ...

MATT: A couple years ago, Steve starts working on this book basically looking at things that are kind of out there on the edge of science. But he's looking at them in this objective, investigative way. And one of the things that he ends up bumping into is ...

STEVE VOLK: Lucid dreaming.

MATT: ... lucid dreaming.

JAD: Lucid dreaming. So this is where you, like, wake up inside your dream. Like, you're awake.

MATT: You're—yeah, you're awake, you're present, you're aware, you can control what's happening in your dream.

JAD: Let me just ask you, really? I mean, I've seen Inception. I've heard people say that they have lucid dreams, but I just always assumed those people just don't know what they're talking about. They—they're actually referring to something else.

MATT: Yeah, it seems crazy. And for a long time ...

STEVE VOLK: Western science denied lucid dreaming happened.

JAD: Yeah.

STEVE VOLK: It didn't exist.

MATT: But the more Steve looked into it, he realized that, like, the science behind this is real.

JAD: It is?

MATT: Yeah. So ...

JAD: Sell me.

MATT: ... we're gonna start with this guy, Steven Laberge.

JAD: Steven Laberge.

MATT: So,in the late '70s, Laberge goes to Stanford. He wants to study consciousness. The reason he does is because he's actually—he's grown up his entire life claiming to have lucid dreams.

JAD: He claims he's been controlling his dreams all his life.

MATT: Yeah.

JAD: Yeah.

MATT: But at the same time, he's also a scientist.

STEVE VOLK: So he had to find a way to show people objectively that lucid dreaming exists.

JAD: Wait, hold up. How would you even go about doing that? Because if—because if the dream, it's only in your head, so how can you prove something that's only in your head?

MATT: So that—that actually takes us back to Laberge's advisor.

STEVE VOLK: A guy named William Dement.

MATT: William C. Dement.

STEVE VOLK: Dement has ...

MATT: He's conducting all of these sleep studies at the Stanford Sleep Science Center, and one of the things he notices is when people go into this dream state, their eyes behind their eyelids, they begin to just ...

STEVE VOLK: Dart around like crazy. They go diagonally, sideways.

MATT: Basically, what we know as REM. Or ...

STEVE VOLK: Rapid eye movement.

JAD: Right.

MATT: But one day, Dement has this subject, and as he's watching this guy. And this guy's eyes, when he goes into REM, out of nowhere, his eyes go from craziness to this, like, really slow, controlled pattern: left to right, left to right, left to right. And Dement ...

STEVE VOLK:  Was so intrigued that he immediately went and woke them up and said, "Do you remember what you were dreaming?" And they said, "Yeah, I was watching a ping pong match."

MATT: [laughs]

STEVE VOLK: Ba dum bump! Right? I mean, it sounds like a joke. But ...

MATT: But for Laberge, this is like a total revelation. I mean, think about it. If you are in a dream and you, like, wave your hands around, or you shout, you're not moving or anything—on the—in the real world. But if you move your eyes in a dream, someone sitting out there in the real world will actually see your eyes move. They'll see that. It's like this little hidden line that you can use to call out from the dream world to the awake world.

STEVE VOLK: And so Steven Laberge figures, "Okay, what I'm gonna do then is have somebody monitor me while I sleep, and once I'm dreaming and become aware that I'm dreaming, I will issue two smooth, controlled eye movements.

MATT: In other words, "I'm gonna go to sleep, and when I become lucid in my dream, I'm gonna move my eyes left, right, left, right. And then you, out here in the real world, you'll see my eyes actually move left, right, left, right. And that way you'll know that I am lucid in my dream."

JAD: Huh.

MATT: Controlling what's going on.

JAD: That's pretty cool.

MATT: So Laberge gets all hooked up to the machines and his assistant sits there, watching his eyes go all crazy. And then ...

STEVE VOLK: Suddenly, instead of herky jerky movement ...

MATT:  ... His assistant sees ...

STEVE VOLK:  ...Smooth, controlled movements.

MATT: Left, right, left, right, left, right.

JAD: The same pattern they had agreed on.

MATT: The exact same pattern.

JAD: And they were sure that Laberge was deep asleep during this pattern making?

MATT: Yeah, yeah, they were watching—they were watching on the EEG machines that he was in a deep sleep when he made that pattern signal.

JAD: So he was conscious while he was unconscious, is what you're saying?

MATT: Correct. He was lucid.

JAD: Okay. And he was able to repeat this?

MATT: Yeah, he went on and ended up replicating this with a lot of other people.

JAD: He published it?

MATT: Yeah, he published it.

JAD: Like, in a journal, not like just on the web.

MATT: Yeah.

JAD: Wow.

STEVE VOLK: And you won't find, at this stage, you won't really find credible dream researchers denying the reality of lucid dreaming.

MATT: So ...

STEVE VOLK: You will find them ignoring it routinely.

MATT: ... Steve gets in touch with Laberge, who, it turns out, is doing these workshops now teaching people how to have lucid dreams.

JAD: How to have lucid dreams?

MATT: On command.

JAD: This is something you can learn?

MATT: You can learn how to do this, yeah.

STEVE VOLK: Laberge has discovered a lot of different techniques for this.

MATT: He's got techniques.

JAD: What are the techniques?

MATT: So first of all, to become lucid in a dream, you have to realize in the dream that you're dreaming.

JAD: Yes.

MATT: Which is kind of, like how do you ...

JAD: How do you do that in a dream?

MATT: Well you actually—what you do is, you practice in the waking world. You become, like, hyper-aware of certain things that work differently in the dream world than they do in the waking world.

JAD: Like what?

STEVE VOLK: One of the most easy for people to follow is print.

MATT: Like text. When you're awake, text is text. But text in a dream ...

STEVE VOLK: Changes really dramatically.

MATT: From moment to moment.

STEVE VOLK: Right now, there's a Viewsonic monitor across from me, and when I look away from it and look back, it still says Viewsonic. However, in a dream, when you look away from it, because it has no external reality, when you look back, it could be anything. It could be nuclear launch codes. It could be poetry.

MATT: The point of all this is to zero in on things that make you question.

STEVE VOLK: Am I awake, or am I dreaming?

MATT: It's called a state test.

STEVE VOLK: And what ends up happening, if you start doing this in real life, is you end up being in a dream, and because you've asked yourself this question a dozen times that day, "Am I awake, or am I dreaming?" That thought will occur to you in the dream.

JAD: And if it does?

MATT: That might—that might open the door to actually becoming aware.

JAD: Huh.

MATT: And taking control.

STEVE VOLK: Then you are more than halfway there at that point.

MATT: So Steve, he started trying all this out, doing all these state tests. But it wasn't really working, so he ended up calling Laberge's assistant.

STEVE VOLK: And I called her and we talked through different techniques in the book. And then we talked about this nightmare.

MATT: And when she heard about his nightmare, she actually suggested a different technique.

STEVE VOLK: In waking life, imagine the dream as it happened, and then find the point at which you would like to gain lucidity. Something happens, something shifts, and this is the point where you'd like to become lucid.

MATT: And he decided when the face first appears in the window ...

STEVE VOLK: That's the moment.

MATT: ... that very specific moment ...

STEVE VOLK: ... when I want to gain awareness. And so I would imagine myself doing this over and over.

MATT: Face, awareness. Face, awareness. And then one night he goes to sleep.

STEVE VOLK: I'm walking through my apartment. Nobody there but me. And I feel that sort of familiar buzz of anticipation.

MATT: Something bad's about to happen.

STEVE VOLK: And I look into the window, and there's the guy.

MATT: Just like usual. But this time, he says ...

STEVE VOLK: I was there.

MATT: You're there, and then suddenly you're there?

STEVE VOLK: Yeah. It's like my perspective shifts and I am in this body in this place, not observing something, but in it. So I could feel, you know, my fingers tickling my palms. I could feel my feet on the floor. I locked into these feelings, because they make the dream more stable. And I wanted this dream to be stable, because this face has been showing up in this window for 20 years. And it—it does its thing. It recedes, it comes back. And I go to the door, and I reach for the door, and the handle, there's a door handle, it feels that real. And I turn it and I open it. A moment or two later, the guy appears in the doorway. And there's this moment where we look at each other face to face. And he's this total nondescript guy.

JAD: Really?

STEVE VOLK: Like any old beer-drinking dude. So he looks at me, and he's clearly perplexed because we're not going through our usual dance. You know, I kind of backed up to give him room.

MATT: Guy walks in.

STEVE VOLK: And we're standing there looking at each other. And the—I hadn't thought about what I would actually say. I just—I just thought I'd let him in.

JAD: What does the guy do?

STEVE VOLK: Well, he pulls out a gun. At this point, when he pulls this gun out, the whole dream in this moment now becomes for me this kind of battle between what I know to be true, which is that this is a dream and it has no external reality, and the natural feelings of fear that crop up when somebody who's already been terrorizing you for 20 years has now pulled out a gun. And he is really carefully looking at me, like, waiting for me to go back to my normal reaction.

STEVE VOLK: So he pulls the gun up now and points it at me, looking at me like, "Okay, now are you gonna do what you usually do? Now are you afraid?" And in my head, I'm just like, "It's a dream, it's a dream, it's a dream, it's a dream." And so I just stand there. And he starts firing.

[gunshot]

STEVE VOLK: My first reaction is to look down at myself, right? To look down at my chest and my stomach. And I can see that my shirt ...

[gunshot]

STEVE VOLK:  ...Is just sort of billowing with each impact.

[gunshot]

STEVE VOLK: With each bullet.

[gunshot]

STEVE VOLK: But there's—there's no blood, there's no nothing. I'm not—I'm not hurting. I am taking this and it's—and it's nothing. I really feel, and I had this thought at the time, "I'm real."

[gunshot]

STEVE VOLK: I am Superman! This guy is firing bullets at me.

[gunshot]

STEVE VOLK: And nothing. I look up at him and he sort of looks at me, and then he smiles and drops the gun by his side. And the sensation I had was like that message was like, "See? You got it! You got it! I'm nothing to be afraid of at all." And I woke up still feeling like—you know, still feeling like Superman. And I have never had that dream. It's never happened again.

MATT: It's gone.

STEVE VOLK: It's gone. The dream is gone.

[gunshot]

[gunshot]

JAD: Wow. Thank you, Matt.

MATT: Hey, sure.

JAD: And thanks also to Steve Volk, his book, which goes into much more detail on lucid dreaming and many other things, is called Fringe-ology.

ROBERT: This puts me in mind of a solution to a problem I've had now for several years, you know?

JAD: Like it may be eating up on you in your dreams?

ROBERT: I should have just waited it out, really. I should have just said, "Yeah, go ahead, stab me!"

JAD: See, now I'll never hurt you again!

ROBERT: I mean, this is something that everybody can take home and use tonight.

JAD: All right. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: We'll be right back.

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Shalin Olaria, and I'm calling from Piscataway, New Jersey. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Thanks!]

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Today on Radiolab.

ROBERT: It's ghost stories.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: And this one, well, this one is going to take us into a machine.

LATIF NASSER: All right, my name is Latif Nasser.

JAD: He's not a machine. He's a grad student.

LATIF: In the history of science department at Harvard.

JAD: But he did get us thinking about really old robots. One in particular that was ...

ROBERT: Actually was kind of haunting.

LATIF: So the year is 1562. This is 450 years ago.

JAD: Not so long after Columbus.

ROBERT: Yeah. Ferdinand and Isabella are dead, and there's a new king of Spain.

JAD: Phillip.

ROBERT: Phillip, yeah. And he has a son.

LATIF: the 17 year old crown prince, his name's Don Carlos.

JAD: And one day ...

LATIF: He's in the royal lodgings, he's walking down a flight of stairs, he trips, he falls, he bashes his head against a door near the bottom of the stairs.

ROBERT: Mmm.

JAD: This is the crown prince, you say?

LATIF: The crown prince of Spain.

JAD: So this is a national calamity.

LATIF: It is a national calamity because he's the heir apparent, right?

JAD: Hmm.

LATIF: So—so, well, at first it doesn't look like it's such a bad injury. He's still conscious, but then his head starts to swell to this kind of crazy size. He becomes delirious and feverish. He's struck blind.

JAD: Ooh!

LATIF: And so at this point, the king comes, right? This is King Phillip II. So he is, at this time, he is the most powerful man in the world, right? So he basically controls the—all of the Americas, he controls much of Europe, the Philippines is named after him.

JAD: He was tight with the Pope.

LATIF: At this time, the Pope and the king were like, you know, BFFs.

JAD: Yeah.

LATIF: So the whole Spanish court is going nuts. Across the country, people are seeing this, reading this, as a kind of sign that God's very angry, right?

JAD: Yeah.

LATIF: And so they're fasting, they're doing these kinds of prayer processions, things like this.

JAD: And according to Latif, the king calls all the best doctors in Europe to come to Spain to help his son. And these doctors are trying everything.

LATIF: They are drilling a hole in his skull.

JAD: To relieve the pressure?

LATIF: To relieve the pressure. They are bleeding him, and blistering him, and they are purging him to the extent that he has, like, 20 bowel movements within just, like, a certain few hours.

JAD: [laughs]

LATIF: They're, like, smearing all over the wound, they're smearing like turpentine and honey.

JAD: Wow. Poor Don Carlos!

LATIF: Even after all of this, they sort of look at each other, they look at him, and it's kind of like, this is—he's gonna die. It's ...

JAD: So he's dying.

LATIF: Yeah. He's basically on his deathbed.

JAD: So at this point, according to Latif, the king goes to his son.

LATIF: Legend goes that he kneels beside his son at his son's deathbed, and he makes a pact with God. The pact is, "If you help me, if you heal me son, if you do this miracle for me, I'll do a miracle for you."

JAD: Wow, that's quite hubristic of a human being to say to God.

LATIF: Well, let's also remember that's he's—he's the most powerful man in the world at this point.

JAD: He's a god among men, really.

LATIF: Hubristic or not, this is—this is what he says.

JAD: Yeah, okay.

LATIF: All of a sudden, his son just gets better.

JAD: Really?

LATIF: Within a week he can see again. Within a month he—it's as if he didn't fall at all.

JAD: He just pops right back up.

LATIF: Yeah.

ROBERT: And King Phillip must have thought, "Oh my god. This is amazing"

JAD: Exactly! My God! That's probably exactly what he thought!

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: And when his son can finally speak he says to him, "Dad, you know, the weirdest thing happened when I was out. I had this dream."

ELIZABETH KING: Oh, that's a great story.

JAD: This is Elizabeth King.

ELIZABETH KING: I'm an artist and a professor in the sculpture department at Virginia Commonwealth University.

JAD: And she's actually the one who hooked Latif on the story.

LATIF: Yep.

JAD: In any case, the dream.

ELIZABETH KING: There are documents of Don Carlo next morning, saying that he had had a dream.

LATIF: This vision.

ELIZABETH KING: That a figure ...

LATIF: In a Franciscan habit.

ELIZABETH KING: Shaved head.

ROBERT: Sharp nose.

ELIZABETH KING: This marvelous monk.

JAD: Entered his room.

LATIF: And approached his deathbed, holding a cross, and basically told him, "You're gonna be fine."

ELIZABETH KING: And that's quite well-documented.

ROBERT: Apparently, there was a witness in the room.

ELIZABETH KING: In the sick room with him that night.

ROBERT: Who overheard the prince talking to a ghost, sort of mumbling things in his delirium.

JAD: So Don Carlos has this dream. Suddenly he's fine. And the natural question that people are asking is, "Who is this monk?"

LATIF: Yeah.

ELIZABETH KING: Yeah.

ROBERT: I mean, is it just a generic monk, or is it somebody specific? Some messenger from God?

JAD: And from his description ...

LATIF: Physical description and ...

JAD: The shaved head, the ...

ROBERT: The pointy nose, monk's habit.

JAD: Piercing eyes. Even the kind of cross he was using, everybody in town, the king, everyone was like, "Oh yeah."

LATIF: Like, "We know exactly who this guy is."

JAD: "Can only really be one guy."

LATIF: A kind of local friar, who died a hundred years before, named Diego de Alcala.

JAD: Diego de Alcala.

JAD: Who is he?

ELIZABETH KING: He is a local holy figure whose corpse was associated with a number of documented miracles.

JAD: In fact, this guy was so holy in this town ...

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Actually not just in the town, you wanna know something?

ROBERT: What?

JAD: Here's a bit of trivia. Ever heard of San Diego?

ROBERT: California, you mean?

JAD: Yeah, as in the Padres?

ROBERT: What does have to—is this the same guy?

JAD: Same guy!

ROBERT: The same guy? This Saint Diego?

JAD: This is the patron saint of the people who founded San Diego!

ROBERT: Oh my! He is holy! All right. So there you go.

JAD: There you go. So he was so holy in this town that people believed his corpse, his 100-year dead corpse, had healing powers.

LATIF: And some people, there are different stories, but some people say that even—they—these ...

JAD: That unbeknownst, Don Carlos, that night that he had the dream ...

ELIZABETH KING: The priesthood and the king himself, according to some stories, went and they got this corpse out of the church, out of the crypt, they carried it through the streets, they brought it to the bedroom, they ...

LATIF: Literally put it—they sort of snuck it in bed with Don Carlos, and that's how he healed.

JAD: Eww!

ROBERT: They didn't stick him in bed with his bones, right?

JAD: Did they, did they?

ROBERT: They just—they kind of brought him into the room.

ELIZABETH KING: There's different reports.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: Oh!

ELIZABETH KING: There's a picture of it in this engraving.

JAD: Oh!

ELIZABETH KING: And if you can—you probably can't see it ...

JAD: Wait.

ELIZABETH KING:  ... but look at this picture right here.

ROBERT: She had a copy of a 16th—roughly a 16th-century woodcut showing you this scene.

JAD: Where you could kind of see.

JAD: Oh wait! So there!

ROBERT: There he is! They're taking him over the bed!

JAD: He's in bed!

JAD: The two men in bed together—or about to be.

ELIZABETH KING: Well they could be—you know, they could be just laying him down.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: Caught in the middle.

ELIZABETH KING: We're seeing it ...

JAD: Meanwhile, back to our story. You've got Phillip II who has asked God for a miracle, God came through, through this monk, and now Phillip II is like, "Uh oh."

LATIF: "I've gotta deliver." King Phillip II owes God a miracle.

JAD: Yes, he does.

LATIF: And he is acutely aware of this. So basically what he does is he enlists this really renowned clockmaker.

JAD: A clockmaker?

LATIF: Yeah, named Juanelo Turriano

JAD: Juanelo Turriano.

LATIF: Yeah.

ELIZABETH KING: A huge man, a big ox of a man. Described as always being filthy and blustery, and not a lot of fun to be around. But a great, great clockmaker.

JAD: Certainly among the best.

ELIZABETH KING: In Spain.

ROBERT: Maybe the entire Holy Roman Empire.

LATIF: So the king goes to this guy, and he says, "Look, I want you to make a mechanical version of Diego de Alcala."

ROBERT: What?

JAD: A mechanical version of this 100-year dead holy priest?

LATIF: Yes. Like a mechanical monk.

ROBERT: A robotic padre.

LATIF: Yeah.

JAD: Which—and this I did not expect—still exists!

LATIF: Now the monk-bot is in the Smithsonian. Perfect working order.

JAD: No way!

LATIF: I swear! I swear that it's since 1977.

JAD: No!

LATIF: Yeah!

CARLENE STEPHENS: The first time I saw this figure, I was drawn to it and then repelled.

JAD: That's Carlene Stephens, she is a curator at the Smithsonian in DC. About a week after Latif and I spoke, we ended up in DC meeting with her and she showed us ...

LATIF: Oh wow!

JAD: The monk! Who lives in a little glass case.

CARLENE STEPHENS: What we have here is an automaton, over 400 years old.

JAD: Is this the first robot that we know of?

CARLENE STEPHENS: No.

JAD: Wow.

LATIF: No.

JAD: No idea.

CARLENE STEPHENS: No. The ancient Greeks had things that could be considered robots.

JAD: Okay, back to our story. 450-some odd years ago, our clockmaker, what's his name?

ROBERT: Turriano.

JAD: Turriano.

ROBERT: He goes into his shop and does whatever he does.

JAD: Connects one gear to another, to another.

ROBERT: For hours.

JAD: Weeks, months.

LATIF: No idea how long it takes, and I don't think anybody does.

JAD: But he emerges one day into the bright sunshine with, what did you call it?

ROBERT: A robotic padre.

JAD: Yeah.

LATIF: It's a 15-inch high ...

CARLENE STEPHENS: Figure.

LATIF: Made of wood and iron, has the sort of habit, has the sandals, has the rosary, has the cross.

JAD: And poking out of the top of the habit, is a little ...

CARLENE STEPHENS: Bald, hairless head.

JAD: With that sharp nose, like a—like a razor.

CARLENE STEPHENS: And the rather ferocious eyes.

ROBERT: Like intense? Or like doing business for ...

JAD: More like, "I'm focused."

ROBERT: I'm focused.

JAD: Like, "Maybe I'm only 15 inches tall, but I am focused on something much bigger than you, you human!"

ROBERT: So did you, like, turn it on, or push something?

JAD: Yeah! Well why would I go on a train and go for three hours just to look at it?

ROBERT: [laughs] All right, obvious question.

CARLENE STEPHENS: Okay, do you wanna wind it?

LATIF: Sure!

JAD: Yeah.

CARLENE STEPHENS: Okay.

LATIF: Okay.

JAD: Do it.

JAD: So Carlene takes us out into the hall, and we sit down on the floor. She gives Latif a little brass key, he sticks it into the secret slot in the monk's side.

CARLENE STEPHENS: And I think it goes counter clockwise.

LATIF: Okay.

CARLENE STEPHENS: You would tend to want to do it this way.

JAD: And Latif winds up the monk.

LATIF: And I'm turning it counter clockwise, and it's surprisingly sort of taut. How much should I turn it?

LATIF: And so if you sort of wind up this sort of secret spring ...

CARLENE STEPHENS: I think there's a stop and then it'll ...

LATIF: Okay, all right, I'm going. I'm going.

LATIF: Put it on the ground.

CARLENE STEPHENS: Well just ...

LATIF: All right.

CARLENE STEPHENS: Let him go.

LATIF: Yeah.

CARLENE STEPHENS: Give him a push.

LATIF: Okay.

LATIF: It'll walk very slowly.

CARLENE STEPHENS: One foot after the other coming out from under the cassock. In fact, there's actually little wheels under there. And yet you see the feet coming out. The head is turning from right to left. The eyes are rolling in the head, the mouth is opening, closing.

LATIF: As if it's sort of muttering like a prayer.

CARLENE STEPHENS: The arms are in motion. One arm is raising and lowering a cross. The other arm is beating the chest.

JAD: Wow!

CARLENE STEPHENS: A symbolic gesture to a Catholic that is called the mea culpa. After three or four steps, the arm holding the cross does something new. It moves two different, new directions to bring the cross to the mouth. And the figure kisses the cross.

LATIF: Whoa.

JAD: It's oddly, like, mesmerizing

CARLENE STEPHENS: Yes.

LATIF: Yeah.

CARLENE STEPHENS: The next thing it's doing is that it's turning and moving in a different direction, and then walking its paces and kissing the cross.

JAD: As we watched it, it turned once, then twice, then three times, four times, then it got back to where it started.

CARLENE STEPHENS: So if you imagine a table with a number of people sitting around it, probably it's gonna sort of, at one point or another, head for you, and then turn away and head for someone else, and then turn away.

JAD: Wow.

ROBERT: Why would the king of Spain, who could have, you know, I don't know, built a church, or taken a crusade to Jerusalem, or done something, you know, he could have done anything. Why did he decide to commemorate his son's revival by making a little automatic doll? Like what was that for?

JAD: Yeah, Latif, what was he thinking?

LATIF: Yeah, it's a good ...

ELIZABETH KING: That's the $64,000 question

LATIF: It's a great question.

CARLENE STEPHENS: It's a really good question.

JAD: The truth is, there's really no way to know for sure.

CARLENE STEPHENS: As a historian, I gotta—I gotta rely on the documentation.

JAD: And there's not a whole lot of that in this case. But one interpretation certainly could be that, you know, the king had this sort of amazing, miraculous thing happen to his son. And now he had a way of sharing that with his subjects. Because he's got this device, it's an illusion, the machinery of it is completely hidden.

LATIF: There's no visible—yeah, that's one of the craziest parts. That it's all sort of hidden underneath the robe.

JAD: So when he put it down on a table, or in a courtyard, people would have seen it move on its own, they would have been amazed—as we were—and he could have said, "Look! Here is the miracle! Look what God did for our country!"

ROBERT: God likes Spaniards!

JAD: Yeah, look at what God did for Spain!

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: Which would have been a useful thing for a king to be able to say, right?

ROBERT: Yep.

JAD: So that's one, that's one possibility. The other is just on a more utilitarian level, this was a machine that was built to pray.

ELIZABETH KING: And this was a period when you could buy prayer repetitions.

JAD: So if you had the money ...

ELIZABETH KING: You could get someone to pray for you while you do something else.

JAD: Oh, that's so cool!

ROBERT: So you're—so you're covered.

ELIZABETH KING: You're covered.

JAD: And if you think of it from Phillip's perspective, he needed to say thank you to God, and here he had this thing that if he wound up, was an automated thank you machine.

ROBERT: Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

JAD: Yeah, thank you, thank you, thank you.

ROBERT: Or could be ...

JAD: I love you, I love you, I love you.

LATIF: It could also be, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: [laughs]

ELIZABETH KING: Or it could also be, please, please, please, please, please.

JAD: Whatever you need. But if you think of it more expansively, says Latif, like what did it mean at that time to be a Catholic? Like, what did it really mean? Well then, this robot was maybe the best Catholic you could ever hope to be.

LATIF: What counted as prayer was quite specific in the sense that if you say the right things and do the right actions, in the right order, in the right time, and in the right place—sort of, that's prayer. That's when God notices.

JAD: So it's about method.

LATIF: It's about method, it's about ...

JAD: And maybe this monk, he says, was like method embodied.

CARLENE STEPHENS: That's a good one. I mean, why not? It is, in fact, perfect. It repeats itself over, and over, and over. And it replicates the ideal.

LATIF: So it's basically, what it is, is ...

ELIZABETH KING: A little teaching object.

LATIF: Like this is what you're aiming for.

ELIZABETH KING: Here's how you do it.

LATIF: This is it, this is the perfect prayer.

JAD: The perfect prayer.

LATIF: This is doing it the perfect way every time. And I—because I'm just this, you know, this lowly, imperfect human, I'm not. I can only aspire to this perfect piety.

JAD: Are you making this up, or do you think that this might—the monk might have actually been seen this way?

LATIF: It could be true! I don't think it's so crazy!

JAD: Especially if you think about what was happening at that moment. This is counter-Reformation Spain, right?

LATIF: Not so long after Luther, you know, is nailing his theses on the wall ...

JAD: And there's this big debate raging about how actually do you get closer to God?

LATIF: You have the kind of protesters with Luther, who are saying, "It's not about, you know, works, it's not about saying something this many times, it's about whether you feel it." And then you have the kind of Catholic argument, which is to say, "You do these rituals, because these are the rituals and these are the way you get—this is the way you get close to God. This is the way you pray."

JAD: You pray like this thing.

ROBERT: Just like this thing. And if you're a Catholic king, and if God's a catholic—and you better hope he is ...

JAD: And if you're Phillip II, you look at this guy, and you say, "God, you and me are square."

ROBERT: Special thanks to Latif Nasser and to Sarah Abdul Rahman ...

JAD: Sarah!

ROBERT: ... for production help on this story.

JAD: Thanks also to the amazing Elizabeth King, Carlene Stephens at the Smithsonian, and to David Todd. He constructed a replica of the monk which is actually what we heard moving around.

ROBERT: Oh.

JAD: Because the monk itself is very old and you don't want to be winding that thing.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: But big thanks to David Todd, we couldn't have done this piece without him. And actually, he and Elizabeth King will be publishing a book soon, which is called ...

ROBERT: A Machine, a Ghost, and a Prayer.

JAD: The story of a 16th century mechanical monk. And thanks lastly to Steven Vitiello, who recorded clock sounds in David Todd's workshop, which we used in the piece. I'm exhausted from those thank yous. So much gratitude.

ROBERT: And of course, thank you for listening.

JAD: Yes. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Bye.

[LATIF: Hello, hello. I'm Latif Nasser. Calling in for the credits. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Our staff includes Ellen Horne, Soren Wheeler, Pat Walters, Tim Howard, Brenna Farrell, Melissa—Melissa—Melissa—Malissa O'Donnell, Dylan Keefe, Lynn Levy, and Sean Cole. With help from Daisy Rosario and, is it Nas? Nasha? Nadia Wilson. Thanks guys. All right, thanks very, very much, you guys.]

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