Legends 86: Litmus Test

Folklore has had many uses over the centuries. But while some has been used to educate or entertain, one pocket of legends has become a dangerous tool for sorting the good from the bad. Narrated and produced by Aaron Mahnke, with writing by Alex Robinson and research by Jamie Vargas. ————————— BUY EXHUMED TODAY: aaronmahnke.com/exhumed https://www.aaronmahnke.com/exhumed ————————— Lore Resources: Get Ad-Free Lore: lorepodcast.com/support https://www.lorepodcast.com/support Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music https://www.lorepodcast.com/music Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources https://www.lorepodcast.com/sources Official Lore Merchandise: lorepodcast.com/shop https://www.lorepodcast.com/shop ————————— Sponsors: BetterHelp: Lore is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at BetterHelp.com/LORE http://www.betterhelp.com/lore, and get on your way to being your best self. Squarespace: Head to Squarespace.com/lore http://squarespace.com/lore to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using the code LORE. ————————— To report a concern regarding a radio-style, non-Aaron ad in this episode, reach out to ads @ lorepodcast.com with the name of the company or organization so we can look into it. To advertise on this podcast please email: [email protected]. Or go to: https://advertising.libsyn.com/lore ————————— ©2026 Aaron Mahnke. All rights reserved.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Aaron Mahnke?

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• 0:45Aaron Mahnke?

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• 1:05Speaker 01

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• 1:36Aaron Mahnke?

  If you were poor in Victoria-era London, then it was probably your fault. At least, that was the mindset at the time. The government quite literally divided poverty-stricken people into two categories: the deserving poor and the undeserving poor. If you were elderly or disabled, then you fell into the deserving camp. That meant that you deserved to receive government assistance and housing, although it must be said those CB Almshouses weren't an environment that anyone would want to spend much time in.

• 2:19Aaron Mahnke?

  If you were able-bodied, though, then you were one of the undeserving poor. The idea was that if you could work, then you should work, which meant that if you somehow couldn't afford a roof over your head, then you were lazy and hedonistic, and therefore undeserving of charity. When the British government completely overhauled their poverty relief system in 1834, many of the changes were based on their perception that poverty had been earned. Relief would only be given to those who lived and labored in workhouses. Single mothers would receive less money than before, and the government stopped requiring the fathers to pay child support. The goal of all of this, they claimed, was to instill discipline and a positive work ethic in the poor.

• 3:03Aaron Mahnke?

  The way they saw it, if these people just had a bit of self-control, they wouldn't be in such a mess. Looking back, it's easy to see how broken this logic was, and how their priority of pragmatism entirely ignored the social problems that were created by their own system, all in the pursuit of control. Over the centuries, control was perceived as a lot easier when we knew who was good and who was bad. But as one dark corner of history and folklore can teach us, morality tests never work out the way we expect. Instead of solving the problem, they simply create a more horrifying version of it. I'm Aaron Mahnke, and this is Lore Legends.

• 3:48Aaron Mahnke?

  Whenever he met someone, Billy liked to play a game. It was hard not to notice that he had what some people called "mitten hands." His bones looked as though they had melted together until he had no fingers left, just two stubs for thumbs. So, when new acquaintances inevitably asked about it, he'd tell them two stories and ask them to guess which one was true. The first option was that he had served in the Korean War. He and his fellow soldiers had been hiking up a hill when a bomb went off.

• 4:32Aaron Mahnke?

  All of their hands were blown to smithereens, mutilating them so badly that not even surgery could repair the damage. The second option was that he had leprosy. Billy told that story to anyone who would listen for decades. Without fail, everybody always guessed that he was a war veteran, and they were always wrong. Billy had been diagnosed with leprosy back in 1938, when he was just 15 years old. From then on, he spent a significant portion of his adult life at the Carville Leprosarium in Louisiana. But he was such a fun, sweet guy, nobody really believed that he could have had leprosy. Even if he told them the truth, they just laughed, saying it was obviously an old war injury.

• 5:16Aaron Mahnke?

  Of course, Billy's character should have had no bearing on whether or not he was suffering from an illness. But for most people, it did. Because here's the thing: Billy's reality flew in the face of one of humanity's most long-held lies: Bad things only happen to bad people. And since Billy was a good man, there was no way he'd been cursed with one of the worst diseases in human history. Logically, we know that bad things can and frequently do happen to genuinely good people. But it's one thing to say that we know it, and another matter entirely to believe it. You see, as a whole, humanity is a pretty fair-minded group. We demand justice for the innocents and retribution for villains.

• 6:00Aaron Mahnke?

  So, when it seems like those innocent folks are the ones being punished, we want to know why. For centuries, leprosy, or as it's more commonly known today, Hansen's disease, was considered to be as much a symbol of morality as it was a disease. In a lot of minds, if someone's body had been cursed to quite literally fall apart, then surely they had done something very wrong. For years, scholars believed that leprosy was linked to all manner of sins, from lust to greed. Only the bottom rung of the social ladder would contract the disease. And considering that peasants who lived in squalor were more likely to catch leprosy, it only confirmed their bias.

• 6:41Aaron Mahnke?

  Basically, society as a whole believed that poor people were less moral, and therefore they deserved the bad things that happened to them. In 1321, the Inquisitor of Toulouse even blamed lepers for plotting against the Kingdom of France. He wrote, "These persons, unhealthy in body and insane in mind, had arranged to infect the waters of the rivers and fountains and wells everywhere by placing poison and infected matter in them, and by mixing into the water prepared powders, so that healthy men drinking from them or using the water thus infected would become lepers or die." It was, of course, completely made up, but that didn't stop the French people from hunting

• 7:26Aaron Mahnke?

  down as many lepers as they could to torture them before burning them alive. Even after the plague swept through Europe a few short decades later, the stigma against leprosy remained. Sure, the plague could attack anyone, but leprosy was only for those who were morally lacking in some way. When good people did contract the disease, it would simply be explained away. For example, 19th-century New Brunswick saw their first-ever case of leprosy when a ship of foreigners wrecked offshore. A kind-hearted woman named Ursule Landry offered them shelter for the night. By the time they left, she had leprosy. Not long after, she was dead. At the time, the locals rationalized it by saying the foreigners had taken advantage

• 8:11Aaron Mahnke?

  of her kindness. Her illness and death hadn't been her fault, but that of those evil lepers. For many long centuries, people didn't know what actually caused leprosy. But the truth is, very few people even cared to find out. When the solution was as easy as avoiding sin or what they saw as immoral people, it gave folks a sense of control. And losing control is one of the things that we humans are most afraid of.

• 8:51Aaron Mahnke?

  Heinrich was widely considered to be the greatest man to ever walk the earth. Unfortunately, God seemed to disagree. Anybody on the street would have told you Heinrich was the medieval equivalent of “the man.” He was wealthy, generous, and successful. Oh, and most importantly of all, he was a member of the nobility. For some reason, though, God did not like him, and eventually the Lord Almighty decided to do something about it. He cursed Heinrich with “leprosy.” All of a sudden, none of his winning attributes mattered anymore. In the eyes of all his neighbors, he was a dead man walking, and since that death was contagious, he was shunned from his community.

• 9:34Aaron Mahnke?

  The one thing the illness couldn’t steal from him, though, was his money. So Heinrich funneled his considerable wealth into seeing the best doctors in Europe. Each one told him the exact same thing, too. The only cure was blood from the heart of a virgin. As far as medical prognoses go, that was a pretty bleak one. Heinrich wasn’t about to kill some innocent woman, and he knew he would never find a virgin who was willing to sacrifice her life for his. Accepting his fate, he gave away all his land. His last holding was a modest farm, which he gifted to a peasant farmer who had been struggling to support his wife and children. His only requirement was that the farmer allow him to live on the land with them.

• 10:19Aaron Mahnke?

  Three years passed, and Heinrich slowly deteriorated. Eventually, even death seemed imminent. The farmer asked him, “Was there truly no cure?” With a heavy sigh, Heinrich explained that the only thing that could save him was a sacrificial virgin, and since he doubted anyone would give themselves up for his sake, he was forced to resign himself to a slow and painful death. What the two men didn’t know, however, was that one of the farmer’s daughters had been eavesdropping on their conversation. She and Heinrich had bonded with one another over the years, and his story made her sad. Unwilling to lose her friend, she announced that she would sacrifice her heart for his health.

• 11:02Aaron Mahnke?

  Heinrich escorted the girl to the doctor himself. When they arrived, she was taken into the next room, where she was undressed and bound for the procedure. As she lay ready on the table, the physician sharpened his knife. When Heinrich heard the sound of the blade scraping against the whetstone in the other room, he cracked the door open to peek inside. Now, here’s where the story gets odd, and let’s please remember, I’m just the messenger here, okay? Once Heinrich saw her naked body, he had a revelation. She was so beautiful, and he was about to be the reason that her beauty ceased to exist. So, with a heavy heart, he stopped the doctors from doing the deed, and then returned her home to her parents. From that point on, the story takes on the flavor of a fairy tale.

• 11:47Aaron Mahnke?

  God sees Heinrich’s selflessness and cures his leprosy. He then regains his position in society and the respect of his neighbors, and then, at the end of the tale, he even marries the farmer’s daughter who had saved his life. He held her heart for the rest of their days—metaphorically, of course. Now, Heinrich’s story dates all the way back to Germany in the 12th century, and its moral lesson seems pretty clear-cut. In an unfair world, bad things happen to good people. But if you continue to do what’s right, then God just might take your suffering away. There’s just one little problem with that surface-level message: Heinrich was never actually a good man.

• 12:29Aaron Mahnke?

  You see, before he became a leper, most of his positive characteristics were connected to his wealth and status, and even though he ultimately caved in, he was perfectly willing to let the sacrificial process begin. In fact, in the original text, the only people who ever protested the daughter’s decision were her parents. Heinrich stayed silent, despite the fact that for three long years, she had been his only friend. Oh, and speaking of the girl, there’s one other thing you should probably know about her. When she met Heinrich, she was just eight years old, making her 11 when she offered to sacrifice herself to save his life—and when he married her.

• 13:09Aaron Mahnke?

  Morality tales and folklore are often thought of as straightforward and simple, when so many of them are actually just terrible efforts at misdirection. Heinrich, it turns out, was a much more terrible person than the story would have us believe.

• 13:38Aaron Mahnke?

  She was rumored to be the most beautiful woman in Indonesia. As the daughter of a Sultan, Ragapadmi would have received a fair amount of marriage proposals regardless. But once word of her legendary beauty spread, the trickle of proposals turned into a deluge. Princes from all over Indonesia traveled to the little island of Madura to ask for her hand. Despite their attempts to woo her, though, Ragapadmi refused each and every one. She was happy living alone in the palace, with only her father and her two beloved dogs for company. She didn’t need anything else. Unfortunately, one of the princess’s rejected suitors was so offended when she sent him away that he resorted to black magic.

• 14:22Aaron Mahnke?

  In retribution, he cursed her with an illness that caused her skin to slowly rot off her bones. Ragapadmi had been struck with leprosy. No matter how many medicine men her father hired, nobody could cure her, and as the months passed by, her skin decayed more and more. Her beauty was soon gone, and, according to some people, her usefulness disappeared with it. Now, her father, the Sultan, had three ministers named Bangsapati, Bangsaseena, and Bangsakara. For simplicity’s sake, though, I’m only going to refer to Bangsakara by name. And that minister, Bangsakara, gets to keep his name because, out of all three ministers, he was the most loyal and kind.

• 15:07Aaron Mahnke?

  By contrast, the other two men were cruel, selfish troublemakers. And soon, their cruelty found a new target in Ragapadmi. The two wicked ministers pushed for the princess to be exiled from the palace. They argued that her rotting flesh made the entire palace stink, and no one wanted to visit or trade with them if they wouldn’t be willing to even step through the door. The Sultan only agreed to their plan when Bangsakara offered to escort her to his home village. Maybe he knew that this particular minister was a trustworthy man, or perhaps he too had secretly grown tired of seeing his daughter’s ruined face. Either way, Ragapadmi and her dogs left with Bangsakara.

• 15:51Aaron Mahnke?

  When they reached the village, Bangsakara’s mother took one look at the princess and immediately knew what to do. She told her son to bring her the leaves of a rare tree called the Galang Sangka. When he returned with them, his mother boiled them into a tea, which she gave to the princess. After the princess drank the tea, the mother led her to a small pond at the edge of the village. Once she bathed herself in its waters, all of her old skin peeled away, revealing new, healthy skin underneath. She had been cured of her leprosy, and she was beautiful once again. Ragapadmi was so grateful to Bangsakara that she decided to marry him. And usually, this is where we would end our story, with a wedding and a happily-ever-after,

• 16:36Aaron Mahnke?

  right? But that isn’t how this one goes, I’m afraid. It seems that the two lovebirds were so distracted by their newfound bliss that they completely forgot to tell the Sultan his daughter had been healed or that they had married one another. So after hearing nothing about her condition for a while, the Sultan sent his two other wicked ministers to check in on the princess. When these men saw that she had been healed, a dark jealousy bloomed in their hearts. As far as they were concerned, Bangsakara didn’t deserve to have such a lovely wife. She should have been theirs. So they invited him to join them on a hunt, and when they were alone, they drew their blades. Oddly enough, though, their knives wouldn’t pierce his skin.

• 17:18Aaron Mahnke?

  No matter how many times they slashed at his throat, it never left a mark. So in one final desperate attempt, the ministers lied, telling Bangsakara that they were only trying to follow the Sultan’s orders. Bangsakara, it turns out, was a loyal servant. If his master wished him to die, then he would make it happen. So he offered his own dagger to the ministers, and that finally is what killed him. When Ragapadmi learned of her husband’s death, she ran to his body and threw herself upon him. In the process, she nicked her finger on the same blade that had killed him. Something about this blade must have been magical, because that single scratch killed her instantly.

• 18:00Aaron Mahnke?

  When her dogs saw that their beloved owner had died, they threw themselves into a nearby lake. In a matter of minutes, the entire family was gone. There was no grand funeral for Madura’s princess. Instead, a peasant buried her alongside her husband and her dogs—quietly, and with no ceremony at all.

• 18:36Aaron Mahnke?

  It is an ancient fear. In fact, records of leprosy date back over 4,000 years. And as each new culture has tried to find a new and unique way to manage that fear, they've left a lasting record of our flawed humanity. As we discussed earlier, most Western societies used leprosy as a kind of moral litmus test. Indonesians, though, treated it for what it really was: a deadly disease. Remember, in the legend, Ragapadmi did not contract the disease because she was a bad person. It was a curse, one that no amount of good deeds could have prevented. And she didn't cure it by becoming a better person. She just isolated herself, drank some tea, and took a bath.

• 19:19Aaron Mahnke?

  Basically, she turned to self-care. Maybe that's because her story isn't one of the really old ones. You see, despite the fact that leprosy has been around since antiquity, it didn't actually make its way to Indonesia until the late 17th century. Once there, though, it exploded, moving like a wildfire through the country's poor agricultural workers. The Dutch East India Company, and later the Dutch colonists themselves, didn't do much to fight its spread, aside from building a few leprosariums. In reality, they cared less about stemming the tide and more about preventing it from spreading from the Indonesian peoples to the colonizers. Along the way, the Dutch told the Indonesians that they were a dirty people and that's

• 20:04Aaron Mahnke?

  why they were all catching the disease. But the truth of what the Indonesians believed is right there, tucked away inside their folklore. Ragapadmi's folk tale is hyper-local to the island of Madura, where her story was passed down orally for centuries. And because it's been told by so many voices over the years, there are countless variations of it. The version I shared today is simply one of many. But it isn't just a folk tale. According to local tradition, Ragapadmi and Bang Sakara were real people. Not only that, but their remains have actually been located. Each of the three graves was marked with a stone, one for the princess, one for her husband, and one for her dogs.

• 20:48Aaron Mahnke?

  All of whom were buried just five miles off the coast of Madura, in a place with a reputation as an island of lepers.

• 21:11Aaron Mahnke?

  I hope our journey today through the dangers of morality assumptions and purity tests gave you something new to ponder. Thankfully, today, leprosy is completely curable. But back in the day, it was a death sentence. And once people started to moralize it, the disease became the judge, jury, and executioner, all rolled into one. But most folklore about leprosy didn't reflect the reality of how permanent the illness was. People needed to pretend, at least for a while, that they could avoid their fate. But some things in life truly are permanent, and the idea that they could control that was the stuff of fairy tales. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.

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• 23:35Aaron Mahnke?

  Once upon a time, the king of Colchester decided it was time to look for a second wife. His first wife had died, leaving him to raise their 15-year-old daughter alone. The princess was beautiful and kind-hearted, and she seemed happy enough. But there were no other young women her age in the castle to keep her company, and the king worried that she might secretly be lonely. So when he met a rich woman who also had a teenage daughter, he figured he could kill two birds with one stone. He could gain access to her wealth, and the princess would gain a new companion. There was just one catch: the old woman he had chosen was hideous, and unfortunately, her daughter was much the same.

• 24:19Aaron Mahnke?

  Now, I wish that I could tell you that they had beautiful hearts underneath their crusty exteriors, but this is a fairy tale and they don't usually work that way. Both the mother and daughter were foul and selfish, their nasty faces reflecting their evil nature perfectly. Naturally, when they saw how stunningly beautiful the princess was, they were filled with a bitter envy. So the new queen set to work poisoning the king's mind against his own daughter. With each false rumor that the queen spread about the princess, the king showed less and less affection toward her. Broken-hearted, the princess begged to leave so she could seek out her place in the world. And the king agreed, and sent her on her way with just a loaf of bread, a wedge of cheese,

• 25:03Aaron Mahnke?

  and a bottle of beer. The princess traveled through forests and valleys, until one day she came across an old man sitting outside a cave. He greeted her with a smile, and, starved for kindness, the girl smiled back. Then she offered to share her meager rations with the man. He accepted, and the two enjoyed a companionable meal together. After the old man finished eating, he told her that since she had been so good to him, he would return the favor. The old man directed her to a hedge, which magically opened to reveal a pathway. On the other side, there was a garden with a well. And when the princess sat at the edge of the well, a golden head floated to the top

• 25:47Aaron Mahnke?

  of the water, singing, "Wash me and comb me, and lay me down softly, and lay me on the bank to dry, that I may look pretty when somebody passes by." Although the princess had never met a disembodied golden head before, she figured that there was no harm in doing what it asked. She removed it from the water, combed its hair, and then laid it out to dry. After that, two more heads rose from the water inside the well, each one asking for the very same thing. And the princess helped each of them in turn, until all three of them were laid out on the grass, drying their hair in the sun. It was then that the heads decided to reward her for her efforts. The first one told her that she would charm the most powerful ruler in the land, the

• 26:32Aaron Mahnke?

  second gifted her with the sweetest voice on earth, and the third prophesied that she would soon become a queen. After lowering them back down into the well, the princess continued on her way. Eventually, she came across a king hunting in the forest. As soon as he heard her beautiful voice, he fell in love. Within a matter of minutes, he had asked her to become his bride. The two were wed almost immediately. And then, upon learning that his new queen was actually the daughter of the king of Colchester, her husband insisted that he be allowed to pay respects to his new father-in-law. When the princess returned home in a bejeweled chariot, her father was overjoyed to see that she had done so well for herself.

• 27:15Aaron Mahnke?

  All of his wife's twisted lies fell away, and he saw his daughter clearly once again. But the princess's evil stepmother and stepsister refused to be happy for her. Instead, they seethed with jealousy. And once they heard how the princess had achieved such good fortune, they got to work. The ugly stepsister went off on her own journey. Unlike her fair sister, though, she brought a fine chariot and enough food to feed a whole army. Then, when she came across the old man by the cave, she refused to share her meal with him. And finally, when she somehow found the hedge, she didn't wait for it to open, and instead violently hacked her way through.

• 27:56Aaron Mahnke?

  Finally, she reached the well, and the three floating heads were already waiting for her. And just like they had with the princess, they asked the stepsister to wash and comb their hair, but in response, she beat them with a wine bottle. This was obviously not the best way to win them over. And so furious, the heads cursed her with leprosy. And funnily enough, this turned out to be the best thing that could have ever happened to her. When she stumbled into the next village, putrid and rotting, everyone fled, everyone that is, except for a poor country cobbler. The cobbler took pity on this stepsister, brought her to his home, and applied remedies to her skin until the leprosy was healed.

• 28:38Aaron Mahnke?

  And through this process, her transformation wasn't just physical, it was spiritual as well. During her weeks with the cobbler, the stepsister's heart softened. By the time her disease was gone, so was her sour disposition. As the story goes, the stepsister eventually married that cobbler, and together, the couple moved out to a remote part of the kingdom, where they lived happily ever after.

• 29:16Aaron Mahnke?

  This episode of Lore Legends was produced by me, Aaron Mahnke, with writing by Alex Robinson and research by Jamie Vargas. Just a reminder, I have a brand-new weird history book that's coming out on August 4th. It's called Exhumed, and it explores the roots of the New England vampire panic through the lens of centuries of wild and bizarre folklore. Head over to aaronmahnke.com/exhumed to lock in your copy today. Don't like hearing ads on this show? Well, there is a paid version that is ad-free, available on Apple Podcasts and Patreon. Subscribers there also get weekly mini-bonus episodes called Lore Bites, and Patreon members specifically get discounts on lore merch and access to my inbox. Learn more over at lorepodcast.com/support.

• 30:01Aaron Mahnke?

  Follow the show on YouTube Threads, Blue Sky, and Instagram. Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. And when you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.