[patriotic music]
- Katharine Wright tells the Wright Brothers,
you guys got to believe in yourselves,
and also let me help you,
because I'm smarter than both of you.
Oh, I just spilled all over the couch and myself.
- Constance Kopp says,
yo, what the [bleep] happened to my buggy?
And that's a fact.
- And the Fox sisters were the first mediums.
I just crossed some sort of drunken threshold.
- You're--you're okay. - [vomiting]
♪ ♪
- Do you have any siblings?
- I have a brother.
- Older or younger? - He's three years older.
- Oh, he's older. - Yeah.
Do you have any siblings?
- One. He's older.
He's a brother, but, like, we hated each other,
and now we're best friends.
- Oh, yeah, we got along
when we were little. - Really?
- Now we [bleep] hate each other.
- Oh, switchies. - [bleep] you.
No, we get along.
- To siblings. - Whoo!
Hey, guys. - Hold up.
Oh, no, you want me to say hello?
- I like "Hey, guys."
It's very podcast-y.
- [laughs] - But maybe say,
"Hello, I'm Lauren Lapkus..." - Hello.
- "And today..." - Okay.
Hello, I'm Lauren Lapkus,
and today we're gonna discuss
the Wright brothers
and the Wright sister.
Am I right?
- [laughing]
- Okay, so everyone's really familiar
with the Wright brothers.
Everyone knows about their planes
and their whole thing, but they didn't know
that there's a younger sister, Katharine.
So basically, our story begins in 1874
in Dayton, Ohio,
and basically she and Orville and Wilbur
were, like best friends, and they'd do, like,
all kinds of old-timey activities
that were fun for people then.
Like, they would collect bones
and sell them to fertilizing plants.
- Classic thing to do.
- You know, classic, like bone collecting.
And they made a pact together
that they were never gonna get married.
Like, the brothers were like, let's not get married.
Why don't we all just, like, be together?
We'll just be, like, a unit. And Katharine's like,
maybe I'll meet someone I actually like.
Like, you guys are my brothers, and I don't really feel
like that about you guys, and I don't think I should
feel like that about you guys. And they're like,
no, no, no, no, no. Let's just stick together
and be, like, a thing.
And she's like, fine, I guess.
[laughs]
And then basically, like, the brothers
started getting really into the idea of manned flight,
and so they're like-- like, I don't care about school.
I want to work on my planes. And he's like,
I want to work on my planes too.
I want to work on planes with you.
I love you. And Katharine was like,
I believe in you.
And they didn't graduate high school.
They were just really focused on the whole plane situation,
so meanwhile, Katharine graduated
from Oberlin College in 1898,
so she was very, like, smart and successful
in her own "Wright."
- Oh, man. - I didn't want to do that,
but I had to. - Okay.
[laughing]
So when she graduates from college,
Orville's like, I have a present for you.
It's a diamond ring.
And she's like, okay.
Are you proposing to me, or what is it?
He's like, no, it's like a brother-sister thing.
Like, it's just, like, a ring. Like, it'll just--
it'll just be like-- it's like our pact.
And she's like, okay, that's kind of weird,
but I guess I'll wear it
until I meet someone.
He's like, no, you'll never meet anyone.
She's like, I might meet someone.
He's like, you won't meet anyone.
Oh, I just spilled all over the couch and myself.
- That's okay. - Okay.
- Moving right along.
So in 1901,
Orville and Wilbur build the Wright glider,
and they go to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina,
and they're like, we're gonna fly the first plane ever.
♪ ♪
But then it goes really horribly.
It, like, falls apart, and it was a complete disaster,
and basically they had a horrible time.
So basically they're just like, forget this.
Like, this is a nightmare.
Like, I'm never gonna be good at this.
Not within a thousand years
will man ever fly a plane.
And Katharine's like, you guys got to believe in yourselves.
No one's ever done this.
Why would you think it would work perfectly
the first time? You have to try again,
and also let me help you,
because I'm smarter than both of you.
And so they got reinvigorated,
and basically they decided
they were gonna fly planes again, because--
- You have to drink every time you say "basically."
New rule.
- Okay.
So their family had, like, a bicycle shop,
and so, like, they were working in this shop,
trying out all these different ways
to make planes.
And Katharine's like, let's look at research
from other people who've done this before.
You guys aren't--you're just making it up at this point.
And so she's, like, translating from German
and all these languages, and she's like,
this says you need to fly like this.
You have to go and make the wings, like, bigger.
Make the wings, like, taller, and--
and go and believe in it more and all this stuff.
And they created a whole new plane together.
And so basically--
- Uh, you got to drink.
Basically. - Oh, shit.
Okay, so December 17, 1903,
they try it again at Kitty Hawk,
and Orville Wright fow-- fowered--
[laughing] Powered the first flight.
20 feet above the ground,
and it's epic,
and I don't like the word "epic,"
but I have said it here because it's accurate.
It's a really big deal,
and they have, like, 700 successful flights.
They're up, and the they're down.
They're all over the place.
[clears throat]
So, like, Katharine flies in the plane
for the first time ever,
and she was like,
I feel like a bird,
and birds are so happy,
and birds sing because they're happy.
So Wilbur's like, we couldn't have done it without you.
I love you.
So then, years later,
Katharine is like, all right, [bleep] this.
I'm getting married. I'm 52.
I might as well get married at this point.
I feel like the pact is over.
Meanwhile, Orville's like,
no, the pact's not done. I hate you.
I'm not gonna speak to you ever again,
and she's like, whatever. I have this dude now,
and I don't really care if you don't talk to me anymore.
And they, like, make out in front of Orville.
It's really rude.
[both laughing]
It's so dumb.
- It's really rude. - It's so rude.
Orville's like, damn, this blows.
We all have known about Orville and Wilbur
for as long as we all have lived,
but if they didn't have Katharine,
they wouldn't have had the belief in themselves.
They wouldn't have confidence, and they wouldn't have had
the ability to translate things to know what--
how things really work.
There's always someone else behind the scenes
who's helping people.
No, I bet that's not true. I take it back.
But sometimes there is.
- You got that right.
- You got the right one, baby, uh-huh.
- Uh-huh.
[both laughing]
[intense music]
- Whenever you're ready, buddy.
- Hello, I'm Mike Still,
and today we're gonna talk about the Kopp sisters:
the original lady badasses.
- Cheers. - Cheers.
[exclaims]
[giggles]
So our story starts in 1914 in Paterson, New Jersey,
and Constance Kopp and her sisters Norma and Fleurette
go out to lunch.
They're eating sandwiches and 1914 drinks,
and all of of a sudden, they hear this loud noise.
Beep, beep! [mimics explosion]
[mimics tires screeching]
[mimics horse whinnying]
[spitting]
[exclaiming]
[groans]
[mimics horn honking]
[both laugh]
[snorts]
So their horse-and-carriage cart was smashed
by an automobile.
Who was driving this automobile?
It was Henry Kaufman.
He was a mean little guy
who owned the Paterson silk-dyeing corporation.
Constance comes out and she's like, yo!
What the [bleep] happened to my buggy?
Ah, I don't know.
Who cares?
You're a woman.
I'm Henry Kaufman. I'm the king of silk.
I'm not gonna worry about some horse and buggy bullshit.
[bleep] you.
[laughs]
So he drives off in his car,
but Constance was just like, no.
We're not gonna let this guy walk over us.
We're going to e-mail--
[laughing]
We're gonna write him a letter and say, "Give me 50 bucks.
Give us 50 bucks," so they go home to their farm
and she sends a letter to Henry Kaufman.
Doesn't hear a response.
So a few weeks go by, and a brick goes through
their farmhouse window.
Oh, my God. What's that?
I don't know, a brick.
Who would do it? I don't know.
A week later, Norma went out to the outhouse
behind the farmhouse
and boom! Boom!
She was getting shot at!
She runs back inside.
Guys!
I was trying to take a dump
and I was getting shot at!
So the Kopp sisters are starting to get so pissed off
about this, so they go to the county prosecutor,
and they say, "Look, we're getting harassed,
"we're getting threatened.
"You need to help us out here.
You need to send some people over to our farm."
And he's like, I don't know.
I don't believe you.
There's no proof. There's no proof.
But the sheriff of Bergen County, Robert Heath,
overheard what they were talking about,
and Sheriff Heath was like, I'll help you, little ladies.
I'll teach you how to help yourself.
So Sheriff Heath gives all three of the Kopp sisters
a gun.
So he taught them how to use the guns.
Aim up.
Aim at your target.
[imitating gunfire]
He let them hold the guns
and kiss guns.
Whatever you do to guns.
[both chuckle]
And that's a fact.
[both laugh]
So the media heard about the Kopp sisters,
and they became a sensation.
So you'd think that these people would give up.
Like, these ladies are armed.
They're dangerous. No.
The Kopp sisters got an extortion letter,
and it said, "Bring $1,000
"to the corner of Broadway and Carol and meet a man in black.
"We know where you live.
"We're gonna kill your farm
"and kill the cows
"and kill you.
We're gonna murder you."
[chuckles]
"We're gonna smash you up.
Signed, H.K. and company."
Which that--I mean, that's Henry Kaufman.
That's his initials.
Like, it's clearly Mr. Silk himself.
So Constance wasn't gonna have this.
She's like, I'm taking this into my own hands.
So she goes to the corner of Broadway and Carol
and a man in black shows up, but she's not alone.
She has backup from Sheriff Heath,
and he's like...
[stammering]
And then he realizes the jig is up
and he runs!
And Sheriff Heath's like, go!
Go! Go!
[dramatic music]
And they capture him, and they're like,
well, how do we prove it was Henry Kaufman?
New science:
handwriting analysis.
They hired William J. Kingsley to examine the handwriting,
and William J. Kingsley said, "Oh, my God.
This is the same as Henry Kaufman."
♪ ♪
"We know that he is the criminal
that went after the Kopp sisters."
And because it was his handwriting
and he used the Post Office, it became a federal crime,
and we went to jail for abusing the mail.
So Constance Kopp brought down this kingpin
everyone was scared of in New Jersey.
And Sheriff Heath was so impressed, he said,
"Well, Henry Kaufman's under arrest.
And I want you to be under sheriff of Bergen County."
She became American's first female sheriff.
[triumphant music]
And then the Kopp sisters
started their own detective agency,
and they solved cases and they found out--
there were crimes and everything.
So Constance's achievements--
wait.
[speaking indistinctly]
[laughs]
Sorry.
[laughs]
So Constance's achievements became world-renowned,
so when Constance passed away, everyone was very sad.
- The others, did they continue as detectives?
- They didn't continue as detectives.
Fleurette was really into, like, fashion and music
and singing and stuff,
and you know her as Madonna.
No, that's not true.
[laughs]
That's not true.
- Have you ever seen a ghost?
- Of course not.
- Why you say, "Of course not"?
- I enjoy hearing ghost stories--
- You do like ghost stories. - Yeah, and I enjoy hearing
other people's accounts, but that's all garbage.
- Okay.
- How's it going? I'm Hollywood's JD Ryznar,
and today we're gonna talk about the Fox sisters
and all the ghosts they talked to.
- I'm gonna prove you wrong tonight.
- So...
our story begins in the 1840s in a small farmhouse
of the Fox family.
And it's a spooky house.
They hear sounds at night: knocks on the door,
phantom steps on the stairs.
[knocking]
And young Maggie and Katie Fox run into their parents' room
and say, "Mom, Dad, there's a fricking ghost in our room.
You got to come check it out."
And the mom runs into the room,
and the girls are like, ghost, are you there?
Tap, rap, ghost. Are you there?
Rap two times for yes, three times for no.
And the ghost goes... [taps twice]
And the mom's like, oh my-- holy smokes!
It's a ghost in our house!
What they learned from the rapper once they--
once they figured out a special code
was that this ghost was a peddler who was murdered
and buried in their cellar.
And the mom, she starts bringing neighbors over,
and everybody was like, oh my--these girls can talk
to ghosts, to the spirits of the dead.
This is the real deal.
So fearing for their daughters' souls,
Ma and Pop Fox sent Maggie and Katie off to live
with their sister Leah in Rochester, New York,
and when Leah saw their skills with communicating to ghosts,
she was like, I want-- I want to be your manager,
and we're gonna make a lot of money.
So she invites the press, and the press comes,
and they are-- they're skeptical.
They're like, these ghost girls can't talk to ghosts.
This is garbage, but Maggie and Katie are so good,
they convince the press, like... [taps twice]
Your sister has three dead babies.
And he's like, my sister has three dead babies!
I believe you.
And all of a sudden, everybody believes it.
And the Fox sisters were the first people
ever to be called mediums.
And so this new thing thing called spiritualism
lights a blaze across the United States of America.
But wait! Stop the reenactment
because guess what.
There was-- - Mm-hmm.
- It's all bullshit.
[exclaiming]
You ever see "Wayne's World"? [exclaiming]
- Of course I've seen "Wayne's World."
- That's what they do when they do a flashback.
We're gonna do one now.
This is gonna be good. - [laughs]
- Make the picture look wavy.
[both exclaiming]
So here's what really happened:
Maggie and Katie are pulling pranks on their parents
on April Fool's Eve.
The girls are tying apples to strings and making sounds
up the stairs.
Woop, boop, boop, boop, boop.
Katie says to Maggie,
You know how you can snap your toes
like you snap your fingers?
You should do that,
and they'll think it's the ghost
because they're dumb.
So they were cracking their toe knuckles,
and snapping their toes like this,
and that was the raps that the ghosts made.
These little kids were [bleep] with their mom.
Next they knew, they were making money.
But Maggie says to Katie, like,
hey, this is not quite a good idea,
'cause we're kind of fooling people into this.
And Katie's like, we should keep doing this,
'cause this is fun.
We're making people believe anything they want.
We're making people feel good.
[blows raspberry]
Pause. The next thing is
when you go to commercial break.
- Okay.
You want to do a commercial for--
- Commercial.
Comedy Central will go to commercial.
All right, anyway.
Okay. Here we go.
Um...
Okay.
♪ ♪
- Okay, so where were we?
It's 1888.
Once the girls got super rich
ripping people off with their fancy ghost stories,
they're just drinking booze and talking to each other.
Going like, I feel so shitty
that we're ripping people off,
making 'em feel good about talking to dead people.
And so Maggie sells tickets
to a show at a theater
where she's gonna expose spiritualism as a fraud.
People file in. They're like,
let's hear what's happened.
So Maggie takes the stage at this theater
and is like, here's how we do it.
And she takes off her stocking,
and she's like, I click my toes
like this.
[snapping fingers] Blap, blap, blap.
I can't do it.
If I could do it, I'd be making a thousand dollars a week
as a stupid medium, making people think
they're talking to their dead babies.
Boop, boop, boop.
Give me a thousand dollars.
Boop, boop, boop.
Give me another thousand dollars.
Boop, boop. I'm rich.
Maggie gives this big presentation.
She gives away all her secrets.
At the end of her speech, she says,
spiritualism is the greatest curse
mankind has ever known.
And the audience is like,
[bleep] her.
We like talking to ghosts.
Spiritualism has taken off at that point,
and so basically what Maggie Fox has done
is made her and her sisters irrelevant.
So after Maggie realizes that her life is nothing
when she's not a medium,
she just drank a bunch of booze till she died.
[slurping]
[exhales]
Decades later, after the girls were dead,
after it was all over sometime in the 1900s--
the early 1900s,
some fan of theirs
was snooping around the foundation
of their old farmhouse,
and they found some bones.
The bones of the ghost they were initially talking to?
- Oh, shit.
- A lot of people said it was chicken bones
and other bones,
so it was not really--
you can't really take a lot out of it,
but maybe it's the bones of people.
I don't know. I don't know.
It's maybe real. It might be fake.
I don't know.
I just crossed some sort of drunken threshold.
- Hey, JD? - Mm.
- Let's talk ghosts.
All right, so this meter
detects hot or cold.
So when it feels cold,
it goes blue.
A true spirit really only
energizes through blue.
I'm gonna have a couple of names
that I'm gonna bring up here.
John Van Pelt.
You created this house.
Your wife--you remember his wife's name?
- [mumbling] Myra Marsh.
- Very good.
Myra Marsh Van Pelt
lived here.
Are you still here?
If so, let us know.
- [vomiting]
[spitting]
[slurring] Ghost stories--puking history.
[retching]
- Look at that. You got to see this.
The color is changing.
- [coughing, retching]
♪ ♪
- We're the Kopp sisters.
I'm Hard Spoken.
I'm Strong.
I'm a singer.
And we will kick the criminals' asses.
[playful piano music]