This is the memory palace. I'm Nate Demet.

The guards rolled their eyes as they let the strange woman through the gate so it'll be prison.

Elizabeth Vanley was used to that sort of thing.

Since she was a girl growing up in Richmond, Virginia,

long before it became the capital of the Confederacy in 1861,

people called her an adduc. She was so headstrong and opinionated for a girl.

And when she was marrying age, even though she was the daughter of a wealthy business owner,

set to inherit a mansion in the center of town and a farm just outside.

She had very few gentlemen callers. It seems her reputation kept them away.

And when she was 25 and her father died, this odd, willful woman

did something that confirmed to all of Richmond's society.

But indeed, she was a little nuts. She freed her slaves.

And for the next 18 years, while the country went down the road towards Civil War,

Elizabeth Vanley was the neighbor the people of Richmond would cross that road to avoid.

She was the strange spencer who lived in the crumbling mansion.

Alone, except for the black servants whom she paid.

The first Union POW started showing up at Libby Prison in late spring of 1861,

right after the start of the war.

And Elizabeth Vanley did too. She arrived with cakes and bread and meat wrapped in cloth and

books and bibles for the prisoners. The guards decided to let her in. She was harmless.

She was that woman they'd grown up calling crazy bad.

Lately, she was the woman who didn't march in the torchlight parade to support the troops.

...