The Curse 33:54

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In the late summer of 1930, Raffaele Pensardi and his wife, Leonarda Cianciulli, moved with their four young kids to a little town in northern Italy called Correggio.

A terrible earthquake had destroyed the family's previous village and killed nearly all of their neighbors. And so this family was feeling very lucky to be alive, but when they arrived in Correggio, they really had nothing and were hoping that, you know, the people of this town will just be very welcoming and generous and kind of help them get set up again.

And the people of this town did exactly that. Correggio was this beautiful place inside of a fertile valley where people lived in these cottages surrounded by rice fields and mulberry trees. And the people who lived there were very tight-knit and looked after each other and cooked for each other and had parties together. I mean, this was a real community.

And so when Rafael and Leonarda arrived, the townspeople immediately found them this cute little cottage by a stream with a whitewashed front door and a beautiful stone hearth for cooking, and there was an attached storefront on this cottage that they were giving them. And then on top of that, once the family had moved in, the family's new neighbors helped get Rafael a job.

And they also helped Leonarda set up the attached storefront that was part of their cottage so she could sell her homemade soap bars out of the shop. And so very quickly, the family just completely fell in love with Correggio, especially 36-year-old Leonarda.

Losing her home and her previous neighbors in that terrible earthquake had been a tragedy on epic scale, but it was far from the first tragedy that Leonarda had been forced to live through.

Leonardo had been born into poverty. Her mother had actually come from a very wealthy family, but they had cut Leonardo's mom off when she became pregnant with Leonardo. And so when Leonardo's mom gave birth to her, she blamed Leonardo for their poverty and all of their problems and so beat her relentlessly.

And then on top of that, Leonarda's father died when she was very young. And so she was stuck at home being abused constantly by her mother.

When Leonarda was 21, she met Raphael and fell in love with him, and he was a very kind and gentle man. He really made a very strong first impression on anyone who met him. But when Leonarda went to her mother and introduced Raphael to her and said, "I'm gonna marry this man, I love him," her mother flew into a rage and then literally cursed Leonarda. She actually out loud muttered the spell and then told Leonarda that because of the spell,

Leonardo would have evil following her forever. Now, of course, Leonardo was very used to her mother's terrible behavior, and so she did not actually think she was at risk of this curse affecting her life in any way. But not long after actually marrying Raphael, Leonardo began to see evidence that this curse might actually be real.

It started with Leonarda having these sudden fits of seizures for no particular reason. And then, Leonarda, every time she got pregnant, she would miscarry and lose the baby. And so feeling really sad and desperate because all she wanted was a family, Leonarda actually went to a fortune teller in hopes that they would tell her that in the future, her life got better, not worse. Which to Leonarda meant, you know, the curse was not real if my life improves.

But, after this fortune teller took Leonarda's hands and studied her palms, she looked up at Leonarda and gave her grave news. She said, "Leonarda, you're going to have living children, but they're all going to die young. And I see a prison and an insane asylum in your future." This experience totally shocked Leonarda and confirmed for her that her mother's curse must be real.

And sure enough, over the following years, Leonarda and Raphael would go on to have 14 living children and 10 of them would die when they were babies or toddlers. And so by the time Leonarda had arrived in Correggio with her family in 1930, she was absolutely petrified that her last four precious children would die because of this curse. And so in order to keep her kids safe,

She basically never let them out of her sight. And then she also made sure they always adhered to these strange rules and beliefs that Leonarda had come up with about good and evil that were designed to somehow protect the kids from this curse. But the incredible show of generosity and support and kindness that Leonarda and her family had experienced when they arrived in Correggio had really done something to Leonarda. In fact, it really kind of changed the way she viewed the world.

Suddenly, she was less concerned with this curse and how to protect her family from it. And instead, she was just kind of content. She felt safe. She felt happy.

The women in the town loved Leonarda and always came by the house to say hi to her and eat some of the amazing tea cakes that she would make. And also, Leonarda had become best friends with this woman named Virginia, who was a former opera singer from Milan who was very elegant and beautiful. And every time she went to a dinner party, she would invite Leonarda. And also, Leonarda and her family were becoming financially stable really for the first time ever.

Leonardo's soap shop that she ran out of their cottage was really successful. People came from all around to buy her soaps because nobody could make them like she could. And Raphael's job as a clerk was very steady, and he too was becoming well-respected in town.

And so because of how well this transition to Correggio had been, at some point, Leonarda made a promise both to herself and to the universe that instead of focusing all of her time and energy on this curse which had plagued her her whole life, instead she was going to focus on helping the people of Correggio any way she could because they had done so much for her. And that is exactly what Leonarda did, but in a kind of ironic way.

Because of the fear Leonarda had for her mother's curse, she had gone to that fortune teller many years ago. And even though the news she got when she saw the fortune teller was horrible, Leonarda had left that experience kind of fascinated with the art of fortune telling and magic and sorcery. It just really appealed to her.

And so now that Leonardo was running this very successful soap shop out of her house, there were all these people coming from far and wide that would ask to barter for her soaps. Bartering is like trading one item for another item versus paying for something outright with money.

And so, Leonarda began bartering with these travelers whenever they had books about fortune telling, about magic, about sorcery, about how to make potions, about the occult. And after reading through all of these books and learning as much as she could, Leonarda, in addition to selling her soaps, began offering fortune telling services to the people of Correggio.

And it would turn out she was really good at predicting the future. To the point where people in town basically began going to her for all kinds of advice. She helped women find love. She told farmers what crops to plant. She created these charm bags for people and told them they would protect them. She also began creating these herb potions for people when they got sick. It actually got to the point where people trusted her so much that when they got sick, they didn't even go to the doctor. They just went to her.

And so very quickly, Leonarda felt very proud of the fact that she had lived up to the promise she had made both to herself and to the universe to always help the people of Correggio at every turn. But more than that, Leonarda was starting to think that this newfound sense of purpose and happiness she was getting in helping the people of Correggio through her various services had finally broken her mother's curse.

By 1939, Leonarda and her family had been living in Correggio very happily for almost 10 years. And at the time, Leonarda's oldest son, Giuseppe, was 17 years old. Giuseppe was tall, he was handsome, he had dark hair, he had dark eyes, and all the girls loved him.

And Giuseppe and Leonarda had always had a very close relationship. Every day Giuseppe would come home and he and his mom would sit in the kitchen and they would chat for a while and eat some of her tea cakes. But now, in 1939, when Giuseppe was 17, he started to act a little bit different. He would come home and instead of going into the kitchen to sit with Leonarda, he would just go straight to his room and shut the door.

And when Leonarda or Raphael would ask him, you know, "Hey, is everything okay?" Giuseppe would get very defensive and say he was fine and to please just leave me alone. But to Leonarda, it seemed really obvious that her son was not fine and she thought, you know, maybe he has some sort of secret he's keeping and that's what's making him act this way. He's hurting on the inside but he can't share it with the world. But Leonarda had no idea what this secret might be.

And then one day, late that same year, Leonarda was walking through town when one of her neighbors came up to her and said, "Hey, are you aware that your son Giuseppe has signed up for the military and he's leaving for training in just a few months?" Leonarda had not heard about this. People were talking a lot about World War II, which had just started around this time, but Leonarda had never considered that her precious son would go off to fight in that war.

But now, Leonarda realized that Giuseppe's recent strange behavior suddenly made sense. This was the secret he was keeping. He had joined the military and he hadn't told his family. Leonarda turned around and went straight home. She went right into her bedroom, shut the door, and she just sobbed. To her, it felt like her mother's curse was back. And now her precious son was going to go off into the war and he was going to die.

unless she found a way to combat this evil that was now following her again. So for the next several days, Leonarda did not open up her soap shop, she didn't come downstairs, she just stayed locked in her bedroom and read through all of her books about magic and sorcery and the occult, looking for some sort of solution for how to fight this curse. And finally, she figured out what she had to do.

She read that if she gave something beautiful to the universe, the universe would reward her. And in Leonardo's mind, that reward would be sparing her son.

And so Leonarda decided that the most beautiful thing she could offer the universe would be to help the people of Correggio, which she was already doing. But in her mind, she thought she could really ramp up her efforts and really try to change people's lives. And she thought if she could do that, the universe was sure to notice and it would save her son's life. Mr. Ballin Collection is sponsored by BetterHelp.

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Leonardo decided that the first person she would really go above and beyond to help inside of Correggio was a woman named Faustina. Faustina, who was in her 70s, was desperate to get married, but to many people in town, including Leonardo, she seemed kind of beyond help. She was totally antisocial, she was awkward, and just kind of given her age, it seemed like marriage was just not in the cards for her.

But this is where Leonarda thought she could step in and change everything for Faustina. She would find her a husband.

So, Leonarda reached out to Faustina and told her about a friend of hers, a man, who lived in a city to the north, who was also alone in his old age and who was likely looking for marriage, and she could set them up if Faustina was interested. And so Faustina was immediately interested and wanted to meet this guy, but Leonarda did tell her that, you know, this guy, the reason he's not married is he's kind of difficult to be around, he's kind of a jerk, but he's got a wonderful heart, he means well, I think he'd be a great fit for you.

And so again, Faustina's like, great, I want to meet him. I want to marry him. I'm ready. And then finally, the day came when Faustina actually went to this other town and met this guy in person and they fell in love. And Faustina just moved right in with him. And before long, she was sending happy postcards back to Correggio, telling everyone about how happy she was and how thankful she was for Leonardo's help in setting them up.

And so Leonardo was obviously thrilled, not only for her friend's happiness, but also it really felt like she had checked the box in terms of really going above and beyond to help someone in Correggio in an effort to get the universe to spare her son.

But her son was still a couple months away from leaving for training, and Leonardo, she's very superstitious, and she's thinking, okay, I don't know if that was enough to get the universe to save my son. And so I need to find somebody else I can help. So in September of 1940, Leonardo began her next good deed project with another woman in town.

She was a widow in her 50s named Francesca. She had worked as a teacher, but when her husband got sick, she quit her job, and then when her husband ultimately died, she was left with nothing.

So, Leonarda reached out to Francesca and told her that she, Leonarda, would be willing to reach out to her own mother's rich family to see if maybe they had a job they could finesse for Francesca. Now, of course, Leonarda was not excited about talking to her mother's family,

who had disowned her mother and had shown no interest in Leonardo. But Leonardo wanted to do this for Francesca and for the sake of her son and getting the universe to notice what she was doing. And so sure enough, Leonardo would reach out to her mother's family and they were remarkably open to the idea and they got a job for Francesca in Switzerland.

And so eventually, Francesca jetted off to Switzerland, and then a couple of days later, she was sending postcards back to Correggio saying how happy she was and how thankful she was for Leonardo's help. And so again, Leonardo was so happy about this outcome, both because she cared about Francesca, and also because this was yet another kind of check in the box of her good deeds that the universe was going to notice that in turn would save her son.

But again, after Francesca didn't need any more help, Leonarda found herself looking at her son who was getting closer and closer to leaving for training, and she would think to herself, "Have I done enough to protect him? Have I really stopped this curse from killing him after he leaves?" And Leonarda eventually decided that no, she had not done enough. She needed to do at least one more really big good deed for someone in this town.

And who better to help than her best friend Virginia, the former opera singer? Leonardo knew from all her talks with Virginia that Virginia really missed living in the big city and going to the opera house. And so Leonardo reached out to Virginia and said, "You know what? I can reach out to my mother's rich family and maybe they can find a job for you in a big city if you're interested." And so Virginia was like, "Wow, yes, I would love that. That's an amazing opportunity."

And so, Leonarda again would contact her mother's rich family and again they came through, finding this job as a social planner for this very rich guy in Florence, Italy who often funded plays and operas. And so this job was perfect for Virginia. When Leonarda told Virginia about this opportunity, Virginia cried tears of joy.

After packing up all of her things, Virginia made a stop at Leonardo's house to say goodbye and thank you. And the two women would hug and laugh and cry. They would drink wine together. And then finally, when it was time for Virginia to go, even though Leonardo was very sad, she was also quite happy because finally she felt like this good deed was enough to get the universe to spare her son.

However, Leonarda, being a very superstitious person, did have one more little thing she wanted to do with Giuseppe before he left for the military. And this little thing was her, Leonarda, bathing her son, her 18-year-old son, with a particular bar of soap, and then she also wanted to feed him a special kind of tea cake that she was going to make.

The soap and the tea cake had these special herbs and ingredients and different things she had pulled from her books of magic and the occult, and they would kind of form like a protective barrier both outside and inside of Giuseppe.

So, on the same night that Virginia headed off to Florence, when Giuseppe came home, Leonardo approached him and said, "I want to give you this bath and I want to feed you these tea cakes." And Giuseppe was not remotely enthused at the idea of having his mom bathe him. He's 18. But he knew she was highly superstitious. She seemed pretty emotional about this. And it just seemed like it was extremely important to her. And so he said, "Okay."

And so Leonardo washed her son with this special kind of magic soap, and then she also gave him the tea cakes. And then afterward, even though Giuseppe was really annoyed by what he had just been asked to do, Leonardo was so happy she was practically floating. She felt like she had done everything she could possibly do, and now she could just relax because her son was safe. But soon, Leonardo would learn that that was not actually true.

A few days after giving her son the magical last bath and magical tea cakes, the police showed up at the front door of Leonarda's house. And when she opened the door and saw the police, she asked what was going on. And the police would say to her, hey, the three women that you supposedly helped that left town recently, they've all been reported missing by their families. They don't know where they are.

And so Leonarda, she was totally shocked by this. And she said, no, that's not possible. I write to them all the time. I get postcards that come in very regularly from all of them. And then Leonarda went and got the postcards and showed the police like, look, I'm talking to them. How could they possibly be missing?

And so the police, they would look at these letters and they would agree with Leonarda that it is pretty strange that she'd be getting these very authentic seeming letters from these women if these women were also missing.

And so eventually the police would leave and they would tell Leonardo that they would be in touch if they needed anything. And then over the next couple of days, Leonardo was very concerned about these three women, but she received numerous postcards from these women over those several days. And all of these postcards were totally normal seeming. And so Leonardo was fairly confident that whatever was going on with the police had to have been a mix up and she wouldn't be hearing from them again.

But a couple of weeks later, the police did come back to Leonardo's house, except this time they didn't knock, they just barged right in.

After the police had spoken with Leonarda that first time, they did some digging on these letters that she was receiving and they managed to trace them all back to their start point. And it turned out all of these letters from all three of these women were originating from one place. It was this little town to the north of Correggio. And when police went to this little town, they discovered that these letters that were starting in this little town were all being mailed by the same person.

And they got a physical description of this person who apparently was pretending to be these three women. And the description was of a tall, handsome young man with dark hair and dark eyes. It was Giuseppe. After the police barged into Leonarda's house, they went straight to Giuseppe's room where they accused him of murdering those three women. And then they hauled him out of the house and brought him to the station to question him about where he dumped the bodies.

When the last police officer left Leonarda's house, Leonarda walked outside and just stood there wondering what she was going to do. It was like she had done everything in her power to protect her son from this curse, but somehow this curse she knew had done this to her son. And so now she knew there was only one thing she could do. Without saying anything to her husband, she went inside, she got her things, and she began making her way to the police station.

At this point in her life, Leonarda looked much older than her actual age of 46. She had very gray hair, her face was very wrinkled and she was stooped over, and she was always carrying these charm bags and magical potions and little stick figures that she claimed protected her family. And so her overall appearance when she wandered into the police station was that of a very frail old woman who was also very strange.

And so, Leonarda hobbled her way up to the front desk and in a trembling voice, she asked the attendant if she could speak to the detective who was working on her son's case. And then a moment later, she was led into an interview room where she was told to wait. And then a little while later, the lead detective walked into the room, he sat down across the table from Leonarda, and he said, "What can I do for you?" And immediately, Leonarda said, "My son Giuseppe is innocent."

And the detective, when he heard this, he was not remotely surprised. In fact, this is fully what he expected this conversation was going to be. He knew Leonardo loved her son very much, and of course she was going to say he was innocent. This is what parents typically did in cases like this. But the detective decided he wouldn't try to stop her. He would just let this very distraught mother kind of talk for a bit. He would tell her that he would follow up on whatever she was saying, and then he would drive her back home.

But this detective was not expecting the things that would come out of Leonarda's mouth over the next couple of hours. In fact, her story about why Giuseppe was innocent was so shocking and so bizarre that the detective outright said, "I don't believe you. I don't believe this. This can't be true." And then other officers were called in to listen to her story to see if they believed it. And they too said, "This doesn't seem real."

But the police would follow up on the details she gave, and it all checked out.

It would turn out back in late 1939 on the day that Faustina, the first woman that Leonardo pledged to help in order to get the universe to save her son, when Faustina was set to go north and meet her future husband, Faustina stopped by Leonardo's house to say bye. And when she was in Leonardo's house, something very unexpected happened.

When Faustina walked into Leonarda's kitchen where Leonarda was, Faustina was so excited about meeting her potential future husband that her hands were shaking and she was smiling ear to ear. And so Leonarda said to Faustina, hey, you need to calm down. And so she handed Faustina a glass of wine. And so Faustina took the wine and she had a couple of sips of wine.

And right away Faustina started feeling dizzy and before long she was grabbing the table just to keep from falling over. It would turn out the wine was poisoned by Leonarda. And so Faustina, she's kind of looking up at Leonarda and Leonarda is looking down at her and she's got an axe in one of her hands. And she says to Faustina, "I'm so sorry." And then she winds up and she strikes Faustina in the chest with the axe and lodges it in her chest.

And so she lets go of it, expecting Faustina to die. She doesn't. Faustina is just standing there with an axe in her chest. And so Leonardo grabbed the handle of the axe. She pulled it out of her chest and then began wailing on her head over and over and over again until Faustina did fall to the ground dead.

Then, Leonarda lit a fire under her big metal pot on the stove, and then she cut Faustina's body into nine pieces. She drained the blood out of the body into a bucket, and then she chucked those nine pieces into the pot on the stove and began to mix them with caustic soda, which is a powerful dissolving agent that's used to make soap. And then she boiled the ingredients, her body parts and this caustic soda, for hours.

Faustina's body slowly turned into this horrible black mush inside of this pot, and Leonardo was watching this the whole time, and she just had a look of total disappointment as this was happening. And then at some point, she just took the pot off the stove and dumped the ingredients, Faustina's body, down the septic tank. And then Leonardo waited for Faustina's blood that she had dumped out to coagulate, which means it became semi-solid.

And then she heated it up in the oven and then ground it into flour. And she would use that flour to make tea cakes, which she fed to her friends the next day, as well as her son, Giuseppe.

Leonardo also asked her son to mail some letters for her from the little town to the north where Faustina had supposedly gone. These letters, of course, were written by Leonardo pretending to be Faustina to give the impression that she was still alive and well. And Giuseppe, when he was told to go mail these letters, didn't think anything of it. He was used to doing errands for his mom.

Even though Leonarda basically got away with killing Faustina, her plan for Faustina had not really gone the way Leonarda had hoped. When she boiled Faustina's chopped up body parts and this caustic soda, they didn't really mix the way she wanted them to. Leonarda was convinced that the reason for this is because Faustina was too skinny, and so there wasn't enough fat on her body for the mix to be perfect.

So, Leonarda had come up with another elaborate story, this time for another woman, Francesca, about that job in Switzerland she got through her mother's rich family. Of course, none of that was true, and when Francesca came by Leonarda's house to say goodbye to her, she was offered a glass of poisoned wine, and after she sipped from it she became dizzy, and then Leonarda showed up with an axe and hacked Francesca to death.

But again, when the body parts and the caustic soda were in the pot on the stove boiling together, they were still not coming together the way Leonardo wanted.

And so again, Leonardo, with a look of disgust, just dumped the pot down the septic tank and wound up making tea cakes from Francesca's blood. Then the next day, she fed those tea cakes to her friends, as well as Giuseppe, and she also asked Giuseppe to send a few more letters from up north. These letters were, of course, from Francesca.

Still feeling totally unsatisfied with how the last two killings had gone, Leonarda moved on to her third target, her best friend, Virginia. And this time, when Virginia came by Leonarda's house to say goodbye, everything went to plan. Leonarda was able to poison Virginia, she killed her with the axe, she chopped her up, she put her in the pot, and this time, the nine chunks of her body mixed beautifully with the caustic soda.

And so after adding a few fine perfumes into the pot, Leonardo was finally able to create the thing that she had not been able to create with the other two women's bodies. And that was a beautiful, rich, creamy bar of soap. She also, again, made tea cakes from Virginia's blood.

That night, when Giuseppe came home, Leonarda demanded that she be allowed to bathe him with her magic soap, i.e. the soap made from Virginia's body. And so she did that. She scrubbed him with Virginia's body soap. And then while she was doing that, she fed him the tea cakes that were made from Virginia's blood.

It would turn out, Leonarda did in fact believe that in order to save her son from this curse, she would need to give something beautiful to the universe. And at first, she really had believed that the way to do that was by helping the people of Correggio above and beyond anything she had ever done before. But at some point during her interactions with Faustina, the first woman...

Leonardo had decided that, you know what, that wasn't enough. She really needed to make sure that her son was going to be safe. And so the only way really that Leonardo could guarantee her son would be safe would be if she actually took a life and gave that back to the universe. That would save her son.

The reason Leonardo wound up taking three lives and not just one life is because she also decided that as an extra protective measure, she wanted to make sure that she actually bathed her son, literally, in the body parts and kind of essence of the life she had taken. And so that's where the idea of the soap came in.

However, the first two women, their body parts didn't mix right, and so she couldn't turn them into soap. But then Virginia came along and her body did mix with the caustic soda. And so Leonardo was able to make her soap. She was able to bathe her son with Virginia's body and feed him Virginia's blood. And so in Leonardo's mind, she had done everything she could to protect her son at that point.

Leonardo would ultimately be sentenced to 30 years in prison as well as three years in an insane asylum, just as the fortune teller had predicted. Leonardo died in 1970 when she was 76 years old.

As for her family, they fled Correggio and three of her children changed their names and vanished. And her prized son, Giuseppe, who she had killed to protect, had gone on to join the military and he would go to war and he either was killed in combat or simply changed his name and vanished as well.

Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin Podcast. If you enjoyed today's story and you're looking for more strange, dark, and mysterious content, be sure to check out all of the Ballin Studios podcasts. We have this one, The Main Show, and we also have Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries, we have Bedtime Stories, and we have Run Full. You can find all of these podcasts simply by searching for Ballin Studios wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Also, there are hundreds more stories like the one you heard today that are in video format on our YouTube channel. And that channel is just called Mr. Ballin. So that's going to do it. I really appreciate your support. Until next time. See ya.

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. It's 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.

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