Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

For the past two years, on the second Wednesday of every month, a plate of fifteen to twenty half peeled bananas has appeared on the corner of Abbey Road and Wendsor Avenue in Beeston, a small town in the Midlands of England.

Residents have been baffled as to the reason they keep appearing, and to many the mystery is less important than the mess the bananas leave in the street.

One such resident, clear Short, decided to try to reason with the mysterious gifter in a note left in the banana's usual location, reading please respectfully, no more bananas.

The notes had no effect.

The next month, the bananas were there again, and it brings to mind another such mystery concerning the final resting place of one of America's most beloved authors.

On October third of eighteen forty nine, A man in crisis appeared outside of Gunner's Hall, a busy tavern in Baltimore, Maryland.

It was a dreary day and the place was packed to the gills.

At first glance, the patrons took the man as another drunkard due to his rumpled appearance and his day's demeanor.

He was clearly unwell and was brought to the hospital, where he died four days later.

He was buried in an unmarked grave at Westminster Presbyterian Church.

After a modest funeral.

In eighteen seventy five, his grave was moved and the citizens of Baltimore gathered funds for a headstone.

After all, he was one of Baltimore's favorite sons, One Edgar Allen Poe.

One hundred years later, in nineteen forty nine, a shadowy figure was noticed entering the graveyard.

He was dressed in black with a white scarf, his visage hidden by a wide brimmed black hat.

It was late on the nineteenth of January, which happened to be Poe's birthday.

The figure was seen to kneel and place three roses on the grave, after which he poured himself a glass of cognac to toast the dead author.

Once he had drained it, he left the open bottle beside the flowers and disappeared into the night.

When a balto Our Sun reporter came inquiring, the Reverend, Bruce McDonald suggested that the visits had been occurring for years.

The reporter noted, the anonymous citizen who creeps in annually to place an empty bottle of excellent label against the tomb of Poe on the anniversary of his death is a jokester, mister McDonald figures, and so the Poe toaster made his way into the public consciousness.

He returned each year, and each year performed the same ritual, three roses the grave, a kgnak toast the remainder of the bottle left for Poe.

As the tradition continued, small crowds began to gather to catch sight of the mysterious toaster.

The man never gave up his identity, and though there has been much speculation, there has never been an explanation for the yearly pilgrimage.

But he remained faithful to Edgar for decades, and then in nineteen ninety three he left a note, perhaps as much for onlookers as for the author.

It read, the torch will be passed.

A few short years later, in nineteen ninety nine, another note was left to confirm this.

The original toaster had died the previous year, but his successor continued the tradition for many years in his stead, with modest crowds standing by to bear witness, and then as inexplicably as it began, it ended Onlookers in twenty ten found themselves quite disappointed when, for the first time in over sixty years, the mysterious man failed to appear.

When he didn't show up the following year, it became clear that the toaster would visit the grave side nevermore.

Although there has been a lot of speculation around the identity of the original toaster, it remains uncertain to this day who really was visiting Poe's grave, and while there were other visitors who left tokens on the grave as well, these were not seen as serious successors.

In twenty fifteen, the Maryland Historical Society declared that it was searching for a new toaster.

The following January, a large crowd once again gathered outside the Westminster Graveyard for a ceremony with food insider provided the audience was treated to a reading of pose the cask of Amontiado.

And then, for the first time in half a decade, it happened Poe's toaster entered the burial ground.

He placed the three roses on the grave and poured himself a glass of cognac.

And when he'd finished the tipple, he placed the bottle beside the flowers, and then, to the delight of everyone there, pulled out a violin and played Camille Sainssan's dance macab And then he took his leave, identity still a secret, and thus the tradition continues onward, bolstered by the passion of its fans, who are bound together by the shared love of a good old fashioned mystery.

The abbey was a peaceful place, nestled in the remote French countryside, many miles from the east of Paris.

There was a small village nearby, but the monks largely kept to themselves.

But on this day they had a visitor.

He was one of the most famous philosophers of the Enlightenment, come to stay in their village.

He was eager to peruse the extensive library kept within their walls.

The priest came out to greet him and welcome him.

The visitor's name was Voltaire, but this story isn't about him.

It's about the priest who welcomed him to Sunna be in seventeen fifty four.

His name was dom Augustine Calmet, and for someone who lived a life as a monk, he left an indelible mark on history.

He was born in sixteen seventy two, the son of a blacksmith.

Without much in the way of prospects for life, he began studying to become a Benedictine monk at the age of fifteen.

A student of rhetoric, philosophy, and theology, he was an intelligent and capable learner.

Even as a priest, he was frequently engaged in scholarly work.

Dom Calmet's first published work was printed in seventeen oh seven, and it was called a Literal Commentary on All the Books of the Old and New Testaments.

An extremely popular work among Catholic thinkers, it would be printed and reprinted several times over the following decades, during which Calmet also worked on several other works of Christian and popular histories.

He wrote one called a Dissertation on the Highways of Lorraine, and another called History of the Famous Men of Lorraine, as well as a Tome of Universal History published beginning in seventeen thirty five.

As varied and specific as these topics are, they would not be the topic that would make him famous.

That would be a little niche topic that he turned his attention to.

In the seventeen thirties, Europe, you see, was in the middle of a strange period.

An epidemic of weird, superstitious stories had started popping up throughout the countryside.

They were mostly focused on Eastern Europe, but some occurred in various other countries as well as far south as the coast of Italy.

And the stories were about vampires.

No two vampire stories were identical, but all included elements of resurrection after death.

And we know that these were caused by a collision between the folk beliefs of the people and Christianity as a religion.

Peasants who were used to burning their dead had to adopt a religion that said that the body was necessary for resurrection during the end times.

It's a paradox that helped create a monster.

Meanwhile, dom Calmet knew none of this.

What he knew was that the people across Europe claimed to have encountered men who came back from the dead, a belief that was as heretical as it was impossible.

With the eye of both a historian and a Christian theologian, he set out to write a study of these various accounts and see what he could find.

The majority of vampire accounts at the time were written by Hungarian army doctors sent to study the vampire panics by Empress Maria Theresa.

Calmet's Studies of Vampires gathered these altogether, as well as several other stories from across the continent, to create a study of what he saw as a modern phenomenon.

His resulting study was published in seventeen forty six as Dissertations on the Apparitions of Angels, Demons and Spirits and on the Revenants and Vampires of Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia and Cilicia.

And I'm sure that you won't be surprised to hear that it was a best seller.

It seems that everyone had an opinion on the monk who wrote about the occult, but much of the popular opinion was not a positive one.

Calmet's peers thought that he had succumbed to superstition writing about the ravings of peasants far Afield.

Even Voltaire, who had greatly admired Calmet's theological writings, publicly decried this work.

But of course the book was also not without its many admirers, and the subsequent attention was enough for Calmet to expand it in seventeen forty eight, and the result of his genuine curiosity was a much stronger foundation for what this creature would become.

Before his writing, vampire stories vary greatly from region to region, but Calmet's efforts ensured that the monster would become a specific thing in the minds of the public.

It's a curious story the few people today remember.

While bram Stoker gets all the credit for the modern vampire, none of what he did would have been possible at all without the efforts of a Benedictine monk who lived a century earlier.

Augustine Calmets would never know it, but through his religious writings he left a faint fingerprint on an entire genre of popular which in a way has helped him live on long after his death.

I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.

This show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works.

I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the Worldoflore dot com.

And until next time, stay curious.