Hey folks, Aaron here. As you've no doubt heard on this show over the past few months, I have a new book coming out.

And at the risk of repeating myself, let me give you a brief recap on the subject matter before giving you a free gift right here in this bonus episode.

I launched lore in March of 2015, over 11 years ago, which is pretty crazy to think about.

And the very first episode was about one of my all-time favorite real-world events.

It involved a very frightened farm town in Rhode Island and the death of a young woman in 1892 named Mercy Brown.

And Mercy is still famous today for what those townsfolk did to her body.

You see, in an effort to stop an epidemic,

they exhumed her corpse looking for signs that she was some sort of undead creature

that fed on the living.

They then cut out her hearts and liver and burn them to ash,

all to stop a monster from killing

anyone else.

It's wild, right?

These were real people who did an actual documented thing that most people today would have

a difficult time believing, and yet it really happened.

And ever since I published that episode, I've been wrestling with a nagging

question. Why? Why did those villagers do that very specific thing, like some sort of

traditional ritual? Why did they think that it would work? And why did they believe it so

deeply that they were willing to ignore their common sense and the evidence right

before their eyes. That's what my new book is all about. Exhumed is an exploration of that

big, complicated question. It explores the things that motivated those villagers and the beliefs

that had drifted through their culture for so long, they had become common sense,

...