Route 1 Unknown

Beneath a clothing store in SoHo, under a glass panel in the floor, there is a stone well. In January of 1800, the body of a twenty-two-year-old woman named Elma Sands was pulled out of it. Her neck had been broken before she went into the water.

The man accused of killing her was defended by Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, two bitter rivals sitting at the same table for the last time. The trial ran through the night. The jury deliberated for five minutes. And when the verdict was read, Elma's cousin Catherine Ring stood up, pointed at Hamilton, and cursed them all.

Within four years, Hamilton was dead, shot by Burr at Weehawken. Within thirty, the judge who presided over the trial walked out of a hotel on Broadway one December evening and was never seen again.

No one was ever convicted. The well is still there.

Part one of a Manhattan pair. Next: the disappearance of Judge John Lansing.

Chapters
00:00 The Well
04:00 Greenwich Street
08:51 The Search
11:33 The Spectacle
14:51 Prosecution and Defense
19:17 The Curse
21:01 The Fates
26:21 The Judge in the Dark
29:11 The Well Rediscovered
32:02 Unanswered Questions
34:54 The Road Remembers

Sources and further reading
William Coleman, Report of the Trial of Levi Weeks (1800)
Paul Collins, Duel with the Devil (2013)
New-York Historical Society and Library of Congress archives

Route 1 Unknown is a Pause and Play Media production. Drive carefully. Route 1 is longer than you think.

A motorist on a fog-lined road in Mathews County, Virginia, stopped for an armored figure in his headlights. The figure asked for directions. "Is this the King's highway? I've lost my ship."Fifty acres of pine forest on the Chesapeake Bay. Three hundred years of witnesses. A phantom ship sailing above the trees. Skeleton soldiers carrying lanterns. A woman in white who screams before the storm. Three competing legends. None can be verified. None will go away.Episode 2 of our Halloween pair. Episode 1, The Last Vampire of New England, is out now.Chapters0:00 The Question on the Road4:07 Three Legends10:24 The Phantom Ship15:41 The Soldiers20:57 The Voices of Mathews County27:26 What the Explanations Explain31:06 What the Explanations Miss34:49 The Storm Woman38:45 The Drive Home42:08 Outro

In 1892, the same decade as the first automobile, the people of Exeter, Rhode Island exhumed the body of a nineteen-year-old girl. Her name was Mercy Lena Brown. They cut out her heart, burned it on a rock, and fed the ashes to her dying brother. Five years later, Bram Stoker published Dracula.This is the story of the last documented American vampire exhumation, and the family it destroyed. A community dying of tuberculosis. A doctor who said the ritual was nonsense, and was overruled. And a clipping about Mercy Brown that turned up among Stoker's research papers.Chapters00:00 Cold Open03:39 The Terror of Consumption09:12 George Brown's Losses13:01 The Community's Demand17:19 March 17, 189220:21 The Newspaper Storm24:26 The Long Shadow27:30 The Dracula Thread30:52 Unanswered Questions33:12 Closing MeditationRoute 1 Unknown investigates the stories that live along America's oldest highway. Drive carefully. Route 1 is longer than you think.