English 箭头
Podcast Cover

[The Soapmaker of Correggio: A Mother's Deadly Superstition]-[The Curse]

MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories · B2 · 2024-02-22

True crime
Or study on the web version

📋 Summary

The Tragic and Macabre Tale of Leonarda Cianciulli

In the late summer of 1930, Leonarda Cianciulli and her family arrived in the small Italian town of Correggio, seeking a fresh start after a devastating earthquake. While the townspeople were remarkably welcoming, providing the family with a cottage and helping them establish a soap shop, Leonarda’s life was deeply shadowed by a history of trauma and superstition.

The Weight of a Mother’s Curse

Leonarda’s life was defined by the belief that she was cursed. Born to a mother who blamed her for their poverty and subjected her to relentless abuse, Leonarda grew up fearing the "evil following her forever." This fear was compounded by a fortune teller’s grim prophecy: "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."

When ten of her fourteen children died in infancy, her terror for the safety of her remaining four children intensified. She became obsessed with protective rituals, developing a set of "strange rules and beliefs" to ward off the curse.

The Turning Point: World War II

By 1939, Leonarda had found a sense of purpose and stability in Correggio. She was a successful soap maker and a pillar of the community, offering fortune-telling and herbal remedies to her neighbors. However, the onset of World War II triggered her deepest fears when she discovered her beloved son, Giuseppe, had enlisted in the military.

Convinced that her son was doomed to die in the war, Leonarda spiraled back into her superstitious dread. She believed she needed to offer something "beautiful to the universe" to secure her son’s survival. This desperate need for protection led her to reinterpret her helpful community role into a horrific sequence of ritualistic murders.

The Atrocities of the Soapmaker

Leonarda’s plan was as calculated as it was gruesome. She targeted three women—Faustina, Francesca, and her best friend, Virginia—under the guise of helping them find new lives or jobs.

  1. Faustina and Francesca: After poisoning them with wine and killing them with an axe, Leonarda attempted to dissolve their remains in "caustic soda" to create soap. When the bodies failed to emulsify properly, she dumped the remains in a septic tank and ground their blood into flour to bake "tea cakes." She fed these to her friends and, most chillingly, to her own son, Giuseppe.
  2. The Final Sacrifice: Virginia’s body was the only one that mixed "beautifully" with the caustic soda. After adding perfumes, Leonarda created a "beautiful, rich, creamy bar of soap." She used this soap to bathe her son and fed him more of the blood-infused tea cakes, believing she had finally created a "protective barrier" for him.

The Aftermath and Prophecy Fulfilled

When the police traced letters sent by Leonarda (pretending to be the missing women) back to Giuseppe, the truth was uncovered. Despite her claim that "my son Giuseppe is innocent," the investigation revealed the full extent of her depravity.

Leonarda’s fate matched the fortune teller’s prediction exactly: she was sentenced to 30 years in prison and three years in an insane asylum. She died in 1970 at the age of 76. Her son, whom she had murdered to protect, faced his own uncertain destiny, either lost to the war or vanished into anonymity. Leonarda’s story remains a haunting example of how extreme superstition and maternal obsession can descend into absolute horror.

🎯Key Sentences

1
today's story is no different.
2
it really will keep you guessing until the very end.
3
the people of this town did exactly that.
4
she basically never let them out of her sight.
5
nobody could make them like she could.
Expand All

📝Key Phrases

1
keep you guessing
2
ripped straight from the headlines
3
get set up
4
tight-knit
5
cut someone off
Expand All

📖 Transcript

Hey Prime members, you can binge eight new episodes of the Mr. Ballin podcast one month early and all episodes ad-free on Amazon Music.
Download the Amazon Music app today. Our stories typically have really big plot twists at the end and today's story is no different.
However, the plot twist today is so unexpected, so abrupt, so horrifying that it really will keep you guessing until the very end.
But before we get into today's story, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday.
So if that's of interest to you, please change the fourth song on the Amazon Music Follow Button Sleep playlist to the loudest heavy metal death music you can find.
Okay, let's get into today's story. If you're anything like me, you love a good story that has twists and turns and moments that make you stop and think, like, how is the story even real?

ListenLeap Brings You Into Real Context Learning

🎨 Interesting Content
🌍 Real Materials
📱 Listen Anytime
Or study on the web version