Amy Bruni’s Cuisine to Kill For

**Scott Philbrook** (0:02)
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**Amy Bruni** (0:05)
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**Forrest Burgess** (0:10)
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In Portsmouth, Rhode Island, in the winter of 1673, a boy was sent to bring his grandmother into supper and found her near the hearth on the floor of her room. Her name was Rebecca Cornell. She was 73 She had crossed the Atlantic from England in her late thirties, raised her children on two continents, and in her last years she lived in a cold back room of a house that had once been her own, put there by the sun she had handed it to, doing the work of a woman half her age. The fire had burned low. When they found her, the coroner looked at the burns and at the ash from her clay pipe, and he wrote down the simplest answer he had. An accident, that would have been the end of it. Rebecca would have been buried and the record would have called it a misfortune. But a few nights later, Rebecca's brother, John Briggs, woke in the dark and said that she'd come to him, not in memory, but in the room. He said something pulled at the bedclothes, and when he sat up, she stood at the foot of his bed, and she spoke to him to say, See how I was burned with fire.
He proceeded to tell the authorities about this strange experience, and in the Rhode Island of 1673, they took this sort of thing a little more seriously than folks probably would today.
So they exhumed her, and sure enough, beneath the burns they found a wound that a fire would not have made. And on the strength of what sounded like a dream, they tried Rebecca's son, Thomas, for her murder, and they hanged him. As far as anyone has found, it's the only time in American law that a ghost's account was entered into the record, and the accused went to the gallows for it. 350 years later, people still sit down to dinner in the building on that ground, and some of them, including tonight's guest, say maybe Rebecca and her son Thomas never left. You can read Rebecca Cornell's story in a book that came out just this summer, printed just a few pages from a recipe for Penny Olavatka that is now served at Rebecca's former home, because this book is actually a cookbook, written by renowned paranormal investigator Amy Bruni. It's called Cuisine to Kill For, Recipes and True Crime Stories from the World's Most Haunted Places. She's eaten in that restaurant. In fact, it's not too far from the place she now calls home.
There are close to 60 locations like Rebecca Cornell's old home and Amy Bruni's new book. Each one, a real death and a real meal set side by side. Tonight, Amy joins us to talk about how you build a book like that, and why death and drinks, dinners and desserts, turned out to belong together more than even she expected.

**Scott Philbrook** (3:30)
Welcome back to Astonishing Legends. I'm Scott Philbrook, and this is Forrest Burgess.

**Forrest Burgess** (3:34)
Who doesn't want to dig into a helping of meat stew with polenta and egg from Bran Castle while discussing Vlad the Impaler in his penchant for, well, impaling? Amy Bruni, from the introduction of Cuisine to Kill For.

**Scott Philbrook** (3:47)
Join us tonight as we sit down with paranormal investigator, author, executive producer, and television creator, Amy Bruni, to talk about her hundreds of investigations and her newest book.

**Forrest Burgess** (4:02)
And we're back.

**Scott Philbrook** (4:03)
That we are, folks, and it's good to be back. As you probably noticed, we've been on a bit of a lighter schedule for the summer with the main show, but tonight's episode is the last one like that before we return to our regular heavier schedule.

**Forrest Burgess** (4:14)
Yeah, the Dead Letter Office has been and will remain weekly until we come back with two new main shows for September after we get back from the wet, hot, bad magic summer camp with Dan and Lindsay Cummins and the Time Suck and Scared to Death crew.

**Scott Philbrook** (4:29)
Yes, that is going to be a blast. Listen out for a promo tonight explaining how you can get tickets if you haven't already.

**Forrest Burgess** (4:34)
Well, I'm very excited to introduce our next guest and one I've been waiting for since we started the show because it's somebody I've heard, everyone's heard about her if you're interested at all in paranormal investigations and those really fun paranormal shows. But I didn't know much about her and really didn't start thinking heavily about it until we did the Velisca series. Also, this is a great idea, the concept of what she's going to talk about tonight and we're really proud to present with her. As you may know, when you hear about somebody who's about to be executed, they give them a last meal.