Scene is believing. That's what we've always been told anyway. To see something with our own eyes is just the push our minds need to fully believe it's true. And for a very long time, it's worked.

The careers of people like PT Barnum stand as monuments to this sort of notion. Folks saw it in the mummified creature he declared was a real-life mermaid, but was in fact just half a monkey and half a fish, crudely sewn together.

And people saw it when he paraded Joyce Hath around the country, a blind, paralyzed enslaved woman, who he claimed was over 160 years old and a former nurse made to George Washington. It seems that as long as there was some sort of physical proof to set the rise on, there were no limits to the stories people would believe.

And it's a deception that historically has run the spectrum from the innocent to the criminal. After all, snake oil salesmen wouldn't have been as believable without those little glass vials of liquid to accompany their wild fantastical promises, popping the cork and downing the potion added a visceral concrete layer to an otherwise intangible idea.

To some folks, something isn't real until they can set their eyes upon it, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Think about all the big foot or Loch Ness monster stories you've heard. What's at their core? The search for confirmation? Proof that can be touched and seen.

Skepticism can be healthy and should always be part of the scientific process we use to better understand our world. But when it comes to matters of life and death, belief in the invisible might be just as important. In fact, sometimes it's the things you can't see. Better the most dangerous of all.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is lore.

Beautiful lady. That's what they called it. Although in Italian that meant people said Belidana, which admittedly sounds even more romantic. And it certainly is beautiful for a shrub at least, complete with little purple bell shaped flowers and dark glossy berries.

The secret inside that plant is that just about everything, from the leaves and flowers to the berries themselves, contain a number of highly poisonous toxins, which is why it has another more descriptive name, deadly nightshade.

During the Middle Ages, the berries were mashed up and diluted to make a liquid used for all sorts of things. Women rubbed it on their cheeks as a blush, and centuries later it was used by eye doctors to dilate the pupils of their patients during exams.

In fact, the eye drops used today are just synthetic versions of that age old tool, a toxic plant.

Of course, nightshade found other uses throughout history, primarily as a tool of murder. But it wasn't alone. Because for thousands of years, people have used poisons to remove obstacles and create new opportunities by killing those who stood in their way.

The poisoning became such a risk that many rulers throughout history had to rely on people whose main job it was to taste their food and drink to see if it was safe.

And for the discerning poisoner, there were many options out there. There was nightshade, as I mentioned a moment ago, the poison that some historians think was used by the real Macbeth to kill Danish invaders in Scotland a thousand years ago.

The deadly plant is the one most people call hemlock, most famously drank by Socrates as his punishment for the crime of heresy.

Stric 9 is another plant-based poison, which it probably goes without saying was the easiest type of toxin for folks to get their hands on for a very long time.

This poison comes from the plant's seeds and has no known antidote. Although in an ironic twist, the process to make Stric 9 also results in quinine, a substance used to treat malaria, and save lives.

And just about everyone has heard of cyanide. This is the one that we bump into in all those murder mystery shows in films, where the body of a victim has a bluish tint and someone clever notices the smell of almonds.

That blue color is the result of the poison's ability to essentially stop the victim's ability to process oxygen, suffocating them to death.

But those bits of evidence were also the things that eventually made cyanide less popular among poisoners.

Because remember, the point of poison was that it was the invisible killer. In the age before forensic science and chemical analysis, there was really no way of knowing whether poison had been used at all.

Basically, cyanide left too many clues, and so it fell out of style. Although it was supposedly used by the men who killed Rasputin, the Russian monk who advised Zarnickelis II.

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