2024-05-02 01:36:08
<p>It’s a lighthearted nightmare in here, weirdos! Morbid is a true crime, creepy history and all things spooky podcast hosted by an autopsy technician and a hairstylist. Join us for a heavy dose of research with a dash of comedy thrown in for flavor.</p><p><br></p>
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You're listening to a morbid network podcast.
I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at a high school in upstate New York. A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms and spreading fast. What's the answer, and what do you do if they tell you it's all in your head?
Hysterical, a new podcast from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios, binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad-free on Wondery Plus.
Hey weirdos, I'm Alina, I'm Ash, and this is morbid.
No, it's morbid in the morning again, two in a row. Look at us, two in a rizzo.
Waking up early, it's that you might hear a little bit of light rain, which I know some of you actually dig hard.
Prefer even?
You prefer light, maybe a little tippy-tappy.
Yeah, just like a little pitter-patter.
Because it's rainy here and it's windy.
But I woke up and it was so fucking spooky this morning.
It was. It's very spooky today, and it's spooky in the pod lab because we have very light lighting.
And we only have candlelight.
Mm-hmm.
It's feeling right.
Very like low lights.
Yeah.
Yeah, fuck the big light.
Fuck the big light.
Yeah, we need to get some lamps in here.
Yeah.
It'd be gorgeous.
It'd be gorgia.
It'd be gorgina.
It truly would.
Gorginia.
Um, but yeah, I thought I had something else to say, but here I am.
You don't have anything.
No, just that you should buy the Butcher Game, which is coming out September 17th.
And you can get it at theButcherGame.
Com. You can pre-order it right now. It's gonna be awesome.
Psych.
She had something. You get the advanced reader copies today and I get to.. ..
Oh, I'm very excited.
I get to have one and read it on the plane because I haven't read it in totality, if you will.
The path of totality.
I haven't read it in its path of totality. I'm excited.
I'm excited it's gonna be wild.
Curl up on the plane and read your scary-ass book, Hell yeah.
But yeah, pre-order it.
It's awesome and you guys have been great so far pre-ordering and I appreciate you endlessly.
Keep it up.
You are lovely and I see all those really kind things that you're saying.
And it's really nice because they get filtered over to me. I love it and I say, look at that.
I was trying to figure out a way to incorporate, like, keep buying it with, like, keep icing your front bum spelling continues if you do not ice.
Guys, did you ever watch that? This is a fucking left turn?
Such a.
But take it with us. Yeah, that's my brain for you.
Take it with us, because Linz, if Linz is listening, Linz will appreciate that endlessly. Did you guys watch that movie? and if you haven't, go watch it.
It's one of those really nostalgic, great ones.
It's so funny.
Get over it.
It has Ben Foster in it, it has Kirsten Dunst.
It has Shane West in it, it's got...
All the hot people of the time.
All the hot people.
That girl, I can't remember her, the actress's name, but she's in like soul survivors.
Oh, hold on.
I just pulled up the cast list. She's like the hot girl, she's Allison in this, but it's got Martin Short in it.
Fucking Mila kunis is in this?
Mila kunis is in it.
So many people are in it.
Cisco is in it, it's got, yeah, it's just....
It's right.
It's really right, I forgot that. Martin Yeah, that is Martin short. Martin Short is the....
He's the one who says, Keep icing your front bum.
Yeah, swelling continues if you do not ice.
Swelling continues if you do not ice.
Are you thinking, Melissa Sage-Miller? Probably yes. Yeah, she's allison.
Yeah.
So it's a great ridiculous.
Oh, and Colin.
Hanks, Colin Hanks.
And vitamin C?
And vitamin C?
Now I want to watch this, guys, watch it.
Yeah, I don't know what happened. I just started thinking, like, how do I say, like, keep ordering, keep ordering. The butcher game swelling continues if you do not pre-order.
If you don't order the Butcher game.
Honestly, I think that's our marketing tactic here.
Keep pre-ordering The butcher game swelling continues if you do not pre-order.
So that's going to be.
Let Zando know that's what we're going with.
Let Zando know that's the direction we are going in. Just, yeah. Swelling will continue if you do not pre-order.
So please do that.
Thank you.
So I know we're a little chaotic, but it's morbid in the morning.
Also, when are we not chaotic? Oh, the way that you just morning showed that I did you did morbid in the morning. And then she reached for her coffee, like, So, wake up, San Francisco.
Wake up weirdos. And she has a ghost mug like ghosts on a mug like actual ghosts, just to clarify.
I would like a ghost mug, though that's one thing of ghosts I do not have.
I'm actually shocked by that, I bet Etsy has ghosts.
You've got a chalice.
I have a chalice, and I have a chalice from actually Caleb got me a chalice and a big old stein.
A tumbler like a stein kind of thing for your ale.
But I need like a coffee mug, and I think Mikey's already looking for one for me because he's a real one right now.
He's the realest.
They just launched loungewear.
I know.
I need sweatpants. I saw that when I thought of you.
I need the sweatpants.
They were cute, they're like Jogger style.
Yeah, I need to get some, I'm going to do that.
This is the most chaotic intro I think we might have ever had.
It really is.
But you know what?
This is a very chaotic case.
So we're ready for the energy.
It's also a Massachusetts case, it's a Boston case, it's got our local hospitals in it. What?
It's got mass general, what?
Oh hey.
It's got all that stuff.
And it's also terrible.
And usually, this person is a daemon, so awesome.
We're going to talk about a jolly Jane Toppin.
Something tells me that she's not so jolly.
No, she's not.
She's not like, she doesn't have, like, a Saint Nick vibe.
Nope.
She definitely doesn't. She is what is commonly referred to as an angel of mercy killer.
I don't think that's the proper name for her.
She's referred to as that a lot.
But that's not even slightly what she did because she was a nurse. So what we're going to be talking about is there's going to be a high count here, as always, with these kind of killers.
She was really fucking brutal.
Like, she didn't do this for mercy killings, she did this because she liked to watch people suffer and die in front of her.
That's horrible.
And she liked having that like power.
That's not why you go into nursing.
Yeah, no. And when you find out like, who she, you know how she grew up and what happened to her very early in her life, you know, she wasn't really going down a great, a great path.
Obviously, you make a choice. Of course, she made the wrong one.
Evidently, she's on morbid.
So, yeah, so you never made a good choice if you're the actual person we're talking about.
So she's actually considered among the first and definitely the most prolific American female serial killers.
Jane Toppin's killing spree went actually unnoticed for more than 15 years.
15.
Because that's the other thing. She was a master manipulator. Wow, she was. She's one of those people that you go. How the fuck did no one realize this?
Like, how was she able to convince people?
I mean, 15 years, that's crazy.
She would transition from one hospital to another, these very highly regarded hospitals, too, like the biggest teaching hospitals in the.
Nation at that point, and still at that point.
And she left an unprecedented trail of carnage in her wake. She was finally arrested in 1901 after killing the entire family of a man who she was hired to provide for.
What, yeah?
And her arrest and her trial were just sensational. Because at that point, especially because this is the early 1900s, murder and cruelty, for cruelty's sake, was not something you associated with women.
No, definitely not.
Now we know better that everybody can be cruel for cruelty's sake.
Now we know better.
But back then, it was like, no way can a woman do that.
But ultimately, Jane Toppin ended up confessing to 31 murders.
Holy.
And that's only what she confessed to. Exactly. We think there's probably many more.
She would, she was reckless.
She would go hard.
So let's go back to the beginning.
Who was Jane Toppin? I don't know.
So Jane Toppin was actually born a Nora Kelly.
Not Jane Toppin.
No relation.
No relation to this one.
She was born in Boston, Massachusetts, March 31st, 1854.
She was the youngest of three children born to Bridget, Finn and Peter Kelly. According to author Harold Schechter, who we will be referencing his work a lot during.
This, and you might recognize that name because in the Ed Gein series, we used his book Deviant for a lot of that. Like, mentioned him a lot during that, too.
So he knows a lot about old timey serial killers. We love an author. According to Schechter, Kelly, the father, was a chronic drunk, prone to violent outbursts, and so wildly eccentric that his neighborhood nickname was Kelly the Crack, as in Crackpot.
It's a little iconic, but it's pretty horrible that he was a father.
He's also really fucking terrible.
Okay, it's not iconic at all.
He's terrible. In fact, in the years after Jane's arrest, strange and outrageous rumors actually began circulating about her father's bizarre behavior. Including one where people said that while working at a tailor shop, he sewed his own eyelids shut.
What, yeah?
Nobody knows if that was true or not.
It was just a rumor, but it was like people believed it because of who he was.
Right?
So you know what kind of person he is? If people are like, maybe, he did like, perhaps.
Wow.
Now, on September 25th, 1859, Bridget, the mother, died from tuberculosis, leaving the children in the sole care of Peter.
Of Kelly the Crackpot.
Kelly, the crackpot, who was very unequipped to be a single parent to three small children, very unequipped to be any parent to three small children. He very much struggled to provide for his three daughters for three years, until he gave up. Finally, he just was like, You know what?
No, I can't do it, I think so.
And he brought eight-year-old Delilah and six-year-old Anora to the Boston Female Asylum.
In February of 1863 and just begged them to take the children.
Oh my god.
This place was one of the very few aid societies in Boston. at the time. It was called the Boston Female Asylum, but it was later renamed the Boston Society for.
The Care of Girls It was a public charity that raised funds and provided support for female orphans in the city.
Was it horrible, though?
From what I don't know a lot about this place. I didn't look too hard into, like, what was? Because honestly, this was awful anyways? And I was like, going into, like, looking into this place might send me over the edge at.
This point.
Whenever you look into an orphanage, it really brings you to like the depths of the human behavior.
I have a lot of trouble looking into those kinds of places. I can't handle reading about those children being orphaned, children being treated. It's like, I can't, I can't, it's another level.
But from the moment, one thing I will say about them is, you know, it did turn into.
A facility that people respected.
So from the moment they looked at Peter Kelly, the managers of the female asylum could tell.
That he was in absolutely no position to take care of these children.
They're like, hand him on over, we got this.
In their initial description, Kelly was described as a man quote whose habits evidently rendered him an unfit protector for his little girls. And noted that the appearance of both girls quote indicated that they had been rescued from a very miserable home.
Oh, no.
Uh, the surviving documentation of the female asylum doesn't really provide a lot of details about their life before being surrendered to the asylum.
It doesn't. It also really doesn't provide any insight into how they formed these opinions.
That they first formed upon seeing them.
Yeah.
But, Schechter points out quote Modern research has conclusively shown that brutalization.
Is always a factor in the development of adult psycho psychopathy. Yeah, um, very evident in Jane Toppen, yeah.
Um, so. Schechter suggests that both girls probably certainly suffered from significant.
Abuse at the hands of their father. And it was bad enough that it was easily identifiable by strangers upon first seeing them as coming from a miserable home.
That's really, really, really sad.
So, in fact, based on that initial assessment, the board voted unanimously to admit the girls.
That day, wow, that same day, like, right away, yeah.
That tells you everything you need to know.
All of them across the board were like, bring them in.
And Peter signed the papers, surrendered his children and never saw them again.
Never spoke to them, never saw them again. Bye.
Which, obviously, like, was most likely a good thing. The fact that, like, the abuse, at least at his hand, stopped there. But then you think about the trauma that that creates. Like, you just you have your dad for six to eight years of your life, and then you literally never see the fucker again. Like that's-.
As horrible as he was, it's like, that's all, you know, yeah.
That's that's a whole different kind of it, that's like impounded, impacted drama.
And it's like, when that's all you know, that's all you-.
That's your dad.
That's also all you expect-.
Right out of life, yes.
Is when you for six years or eight years have been treated like that and then given up.
You just think that's what life is.
And then you're like, Well, that's how I should be treated, right? Like, that's just what you come to expect. Which is what forms these horrific things in adulthood. Sometimes because you are just going being like, what, like, the world sucks.
Everybody's horrible, everything's cruel.
Why would I expect, or why would I be anything different? Like, that's just putting that in that kid, it's true.
It's like, when you're in a horrible relationship as an adult and you just come to expect, that's.
What I should expect from a relationship? So you end up going into these cycles of being with these horrible people who treat you like shit because you're like, Well, that's what a relationship is. What else could it be?
The expectation becomes like, what you accept?
Yeah.
So nothing is known that, and this is where this is probably a good thing at this point.
Because I was like, I don't want to know a whole lot of details about what happened there. Really. Nothing is known of Delilah and Anora's time at the asylum. Like there isn't, like a lot of records that say like, this is what happened during that time.
That's probably good.
But for Anora, that time was pretty brief.
And from the looks of it, it wasn't super eventful. It's not like, you know, we have a lot of medical records happening or anything like that. It was just, you know, uh? In November 1863, that's when a woman named Anne Toppin of Lowell.
Massachusetts appeared before the Asylums Board and expressed a desire to adopt Anora.
Just Anora, just Anora.
Yes.
Now, after filling out all the paperwork she needed to, the request was approved and custody.
Of Anora was transferred to Anne Toppin, she immediately renamed the girl Jane and added the surname Toppin, so she went from Anora Kelly to Jane Toppin.
And she's like, at least 10 at this point, probably.
She's definitely at least like eight, I would say, or like, nine, you know, like she's, or maybe you're right, like, maybe it's somewhere around the 10s. She's a young girl.
To be dealing with that.
Renamed.
After all, she's been through, I think.
Um, and regarding the transfer of custody, it's important to note here that although.
Anne Toppin had expressed interest in adopting Jane because we're going to refer to her as Jane now, because she did go through her adult life as Jane.
She, like, accepted that name.
There's no documentation showing a formal adoption ever occurred.
Like, there's no documented adoption here, like she adopted her, but not formally.
That's interesting. Did the process change? Maybe, like throughout the years, or no.
No, she should, there should have been adoption documentation, she just formally she just like got custody of the girl.
It's essentially weird.
Um, and later, this was brought up in Jane's trial, way later in her life, by one of the psychiatrists who evaluated her. Um, who thought it was pretty significant that Jane was adopted, uh, was was adopted quote unquote, but was actually apprenticed to Mrs Toppin on indenture papers.
So she worked for her is what we're really saying.
And they got that from the Lowell Historical Society. It's in basically, in the simplest terms, Anne Toppin didn't go to the female asylum looking.
For a daughter, that day, she went looking for a servant. yeah, a child servant.
So she was essentially like, sold to this woman.
Essentially.
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I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at the high school in Leroy, New York.
I was like, at my locker and she came up to me and she was like, stuttering, super bad. I'm like, stop f***ing around.
She's like, I can't.
A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms and spreading fast, like doubling and tripling. And it's all these girls with a diagnosis. The state tried to keep on the down low.
Everybody thought I was holding something back. Well, you were holding something back intentionally. Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, no, it's hysteria.
It's all in your head, it's not physical. Oh my gosh, you're exaggerating. Is this the largest mass hysteria since the Witches of Salem, or is it something else entirely?
Something's wrong here, something's not right. Leroy was the new dateline, and everyone was trying to solve the murder. A new limited series from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios. Hysterical?
Follow Hysterical on the Wondery app, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus.
Now, according to Harold Schechter, there's little documentation of what became of Delilah, her sister after Jane left with the Toppins, right right. But he said, as an adult, she it was not a good life for her.
Delilah Delilah did not have a good life afterwards, like they were obviously severely affected by what happened to them in childhood.
Oh God, this is so sad all around.
She ended up like living on the fringes of society, she fell into, like turning to alcoholism and other substances. She became a sex worker out of desperation only, and died in squalid circumstances.
Wow, that's really fucking awful. So that's really all that's known, and it's just really sad. And it kind of shows you, like, what happened really affected them both in different ways.
And it makes you wonder, like, first of all, obviously what? They we know what they went through in the beginning of their life with their dad being abusive, like we can only imagine. But then you wonder, what? Yeah, like the orphanage doesn't sound like it was the best.
No, which usually they weren't, no.
So now, once settled in with the widow and Toppin and her young daughter Elizabeth, Jane began attending public school. And there she was identified very quickly as very intelligent and very quick to pick up on new skills and new ideas.
She was very smart.
At home, she appeared to get on pretty well with Elizabeth, her like quote unquote new sister.
But there was definitely a difference in how they were treated by Anne. Elizabeth was allowed to go out, play with her friends, do the normal things.
Jane had to stay in the home and she had to just help with the housework.
Cinderella.
She was a servant. Yeah, literally.
Also, Anne often went out of her way to remind Jane of her heritage a lot.
Which like? And she would remind her of it, like, as a way of kind of being like, this is your station in life. Because you're Irish. Oh so, and she would say to her, like, and she was, this is a quote, you can't help being Irish. But that doesn't mean you have to act like a patty.
Oh bitch, yeah, it's on square up.
So she exactly.
Square the fuck up bitch.
I was like, Let's go, Anne, we are Irish, okay?
Right in the chin.
Yeah, exactly right in the chin.
But and to tell a child this right, like to make her think that somehow she, you aren't treated like my real daughter, because I, you're basically my servant.
Even though I sought you out, like, what?
So, in response to the poor treatment she received from Anne, who Jane honestly didn't even call mother, didn't call Anne, she called her auntie.
Oh, wow.
Jane developed, strangely, a very cheery and gregarious personality.
And actually, like, ended up like going the opposite way for a little while.
And she also became what everybody thought of as a very clever, very fascinating storyteller.
It really is interesting how how different households affect kids, yeah, and like, kids respond to trauma in so many different ways. Yeah, like, there are kids that, like, really go through like dark, dark depression and really retreat into themselves.
And then there's kids that, when they're not at home, just like, really flourish.
Yeah, that's the thing.
Even though they've gone through very similar treatments.
Kids are so fucking resilient.
Yeah, they are, they absolutely are.
That's why when you see a child that has been broken, you have to know that. That is very difficult to do. In the grand scheme of things, that takes a lot of shit on that kid for them to be broken.
Yeah, like that.
So like, whenever you see that, it's not like, Oh, they're just dealing with some stuff.
It's like, No, that kid's been through shit we can't even imagine.
Because for them to actually break, it takes a lot. That's really heartbreaking. Kids are very resilient.
Yeah.
And it shows right here that she was just she was broken.
But man, she became a very monstrous human being, a very brutal, monstrous adult.
And actually, like a lot of her childhood acquaintances would say, if Jane Toppin were there, it wasn't necessary to provide any other entertainment.
Wow.
She was a good time, gal.
And in hindsight, it's pretty clear that her very outgoing personality was definitely partially a way for her to kind of, like, compensate for feeling so inferior. In her own home. She felt like she had to overdo it.
Yeah, she got some kind of, like, validation.
And this worked for her for a little while, but eventually it actually led to the other way. It pushed her into the other side. Because it led to this very much a complex of self-hatred and intolerance. Because then she was fighting these ideas that her heritage made her less than, and that she was treated less than all the time at home. So it's like, but you're being kind of, like, thought of.
As this gregarious, really entertaining person outside.
So I think those two things fighting just led to her.
Not understanding who she actually was. And then there was this complex that was fighting against each other.
And she just went again. It's like two paths diverge in a wood.
And you choose the wrong one.
And as she grew older, Jane and the Toppins would go out of their way to hide, ignore, or even downplay the fact that she was Irish at all.
Around other people, like, it was a total source of shame.
It's crazy how they lived in Boston.
That I were hiding the fact that they're Irish, I'm like Jeez, and actually, they relied upon a story that they would say.
That she lost both her parents in an accident at sea while they were traveling to the United States from Italy.
Oh, okay.
So they would use that as the thing.
They're like, No, she's Italian.
And this also is what we're going to find out is. Jane is a liar in her entire life, She becomes a chronic, pathological any kind of liar you can think of. She lies, lies, lies. She lies right out of her face. She lies like a liar.
All the live long day for her whole life.
And it's like, because she was taught to lie, she was taught that in order for you to be respected as a human being.
And to be treated as a human being.
And for us, even to deal with you as a human being, lie about who you are to your very core as a child. So it's like, she was just taught this shit.
Yeah.
And then it turned her like she became a monster.
Yeah, because of it.
And while a lot of people around Jane when she was younger, remember her as very pleasant, you know?
Pretty easygoing, like nothing crazy.
But even at a young age, there were signs that beneath her cheery exterior, there was definitely a significant like uptick.
In her being more selfish.
It seemed like there was signs of her being a deceitful person as well, and as she got older, those came out more and more. Yeah, she was lying.
It was like she was pushing that down, but she just couldn't.
According to Schechter, some of her schoolmates described her as an incorrigible liar, prone to wild fabrications that she doggedly stuck to.
Even when they were proven to be frequently false.
That's the scariest kind of person when you can look like, when they're lying to you and you're like, No, I literally have this proof right here.
And they're like, No, you don't, the scariest type of person.
You can't argue with somebody like that.
No, you can't, because then they turn it around and make you feel crazy. It's like, that's the scariest thing.
It's when you start questioning your own integrity. Am I wrong?
Am I crazy? Am I? I'm holding a movie ticket here and you're telling me that it was printed wrong? Yeah, but maybe it is.
Maybe.
But Jane regularly claimed, among other things, that her father was a world-renowned sailor who lived in China. Her brother had fought against the Confederates at Gettysburg and was awarded a medal by President Lincoln.
Damn.
And that her sister's unrivaled beauty had won the heart of an English Lord.
Aw, which sounds....
All those things.
SAD.
Don't like, offend me, they make me think that she has a fantasy life.
That she wished she lived, yeah, and probably....
And she lived in this miserable life.
And she just wanted to escape it.
And probably went to that fantasy land in her mind growing up.
Which would be all right.
If she was just telling.
If it stopped there, ....fantastical tales about her family. Who gives a fuck?
And about herself?
Who gives a fuck? Let people live in their own fucking fantasy world, as long as it's not fucking with you.
Let people live in their de lulu.
But she takes it to a dark place.
Yeah, don't let them live in the dark place.
Yeah.
Now these lies, like we said, pretty trivial. They did serve several purposes for Jane, not only were they further attempts to cover her Irish heritage.
Which she was being told was something to be shamed of.
But they were also an attempt to compensate for her crippling feelings of inadequacy and to prove also her superiority.
Over the less glamorous and more mundane around her.
As she grew older, the lies became less like a fantasy kind of thing.
Like, that is like.
My sister is so gorgeous that an English lord fell in love with her. Like that kind of silly stuff, less trivial and much more pointed and much more cruel. Okay, they became....
They took a very sharp turn. In her teen years, Jane became known as a vicious gossip at school.
Oh, no.
Spreading the nastiest rumors about the other girls. I mean, she turned hard as a teen.
Like I said, it was like it went from that trivial little girl fantasy world.
Where you're, like, whatever man like, live there until, like, you've had a tough life.
Mean girl.
Then it just turned into like, Well, I want to hurt people.
And she would like, and then she would report like this fake bad behavior to teachers about people that didn't happen.
Trying to get them in trouble.
And when she herself was caught?
Or doing or saying something bad.
She would invariably blame it on someone else.
And make herself out to be a victim.
So she very much took on the victim role later in life, and she used that as a crutch to do despicable things.
Makes sense?
That's good now. While most of her peers and teachers eventually kind of grew tired of calling out her lies and bad behavior.
They were just like.
You're kind of annoying, Ann Toppin.
Never tired of punishing Jane?
Whatever Jane did, anything, she did wrong or didn't complete her chores.
To Ann's standards.
Because, remember, she's just her servant.
At this point.
Jane would be beaten with a switch.
And, like, very brutally berated.
So, not surprisingly, this abuse hardened Jane, and it honestly made her fucking hate Ann.
Yeah, I would think.
And she would carry that.
For the rest of her life.
That hate stuck around.
You're not going to let go of something like that.
But while Jane definitely had no love for her foster mother.
Quote unquote.
She saved the darkest feelings.
Of hatred and resentment.
To her foster sister.
I was wondering if it was going to get there.
In Jane's mind, Elizabeth was the embodiment of everything.
That Jane would never have and could never be.
She was beautiful, she was popular with her peers.
And it all seemed to come so effortlessly for Elizabeth.
But what Elizabeth represented most of all was Jane's failed or unrealized romantic desires.
As well.
When she reached her late teens, Elizabeth began.
You know?
She began dating.
A young deacon named Oramel Brigham.
And their enduring relationship would stand as a constant.
Reminder to Jane of her inferiority.
As a narcissistic psychopath, Jane was caught.
In an endless, and she ended up being diagnosed.
Yeah, Jane was caught.
In an endless.
And endlessly frustrating cycle of desire for the adoration and validation that comes with love. But would always kind of be thwarted by her truly profound egotism and her inability.
To form any kind of bonds with people around her that were meaningful in any way.
She just couldn't get there.
It just wasn't, you know?
She, she is found to be like, she has a lot.
Going on.
She's diagnosed with a lot.
And it's like, So these kind of things were really stopping her from ever forming.
A meaningful bond.
Which is a sad thing.
To look at, Yeah, just.
When you look at.
Just that.
You know, like, when you look at everything else, you're like, Oh, fuck.
But that like knowing that people.
Have to live with that is tough. Definitely that like something is just innately.
Stopping you from being able to form those kind of bonds. But basically, she desperately.
Longed for?
The physical and romantic affection that she was reading about in books, yeah, but she was completely incapable of actually feeling.
Those things for anyone else which made her.
Inherently.
Undesirable to everybody else. Because she just wasn't showing it to anybody, so it wasn't coming off as she wanted it, right, you know?
This is such a.
Such a tragic tale it is, it's sad. And as she grew older and her romantic desires took on.
You know?
The natural flow of becoming, you know, more adult in nature. She stifled those feelings, and she kind of like those romantic failures and her.
Inability to find that like a real.
The reality of that?
Instead of just in a book or something she heard about or seeing her sister.
Have that? It warped, and it ended up twisting those desires and causing themselves to like.
Kind of manifest in fucked up ways, like it was.
Like these desires, she was having to feel.
This thing and to have this thing.
She couldn't have it, it wasn't happening.
She saw it wasn't happening.
She saw other people.
Having it couldn't get it.
So she took that desire and she just twisted it.
Into like.
Maybe I want to see people.
Suffer, Maybe that's what I want.
Because no one's giving me.
What I actually?
Want and maybe I can take.
That from them.
Maybe I can take the most.
Important thing from them, which is.
Their lives. So when Jane turned 18 years old, she received a $50 stipend.
From Ann Toppin.
Per her.
Indenture contract.
O.OF.
And as a legal adult now, she was free to leave the Toppin house, but with.
Nowhere else.
To go, and very few skills beyond that.
Of a domestic worker at the time, she chose.
To stay.
At the Toppin House for nearly a decade more.
Wow, when Ann.
Died a few years later. Bye.
And ownership of the house transferred to Elizabeth and her new husband.
Or Mel Brigham?
The Deacon, Jane stayed on acting as a domestic.
Worker, just as she always had.
So now she's living in the same house she grew.
Up in and worked.
As a domestic.
Worker and now?
She's working for the lady of the house.
Which is Elizabeth?
And her husband, who Jane is very jealous of.
This relationship, so this is just.
Bad, this is a recipe for fucking disaster.
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