MonsterTalk

Blake and Karen welcome Daniel Alan Jones, an investigative reporter, founder of the Texas Cryptozoology Network, and the creator and host of The Vortex, for the first half of a two-part conversation. Blake met Jones at the Gods and Monsters Conference at Texas State in March of 2026, where an after-dinner conversation outside a restaurant, joined partway through by Jeb Card, led to the interview you are about to hear.

Jones is part of the Texas Cryptozoology scene, hanging with (the late) Jim Marrs, Ken Gerhard, Nick Redfern, Craig Woolheater and Lyle Blackburn (among others). He approaches the subject ethnographically: the people who chase monsters interest him as much as the monsters do. This first half of our interview covers the Piney Woods and its tangle of local Bigfoot names, a salamander hunt in the PNW, a failed search for giants in Death Valley, pluys a night camped out in Mothman country. Part two takes up the state of the Cryptozoology today, which will be S05E49 dropping next week.

How Jones defines Cryptozoology and how he got into the topic.
East Texas as Sasquatch country: the Sabine Thing, the Caddo Critter, Holly Him, the Dayton Monkey Man, and the question of whether a dozen regional names mean a dozen phenomena.
Jefferson, Texas, and what it means for a town to declare itself a safe haven for an animal nobody has caught.
Hunting an eight foot salamander. (Eight feet long, not octo-limbed.)
Death Valley, 2019: a search for the skeletal remains of giants, and what the team found.
Big Bird over the Rio Grande Valley – fifty years of reports, ten-foot wingspans, no specimen.
Borrowing Hynek’s close encounter scale from ufology and pointing it at cryptids.
Why the Chupacabra, not Bigfoot, tops the Texas sighting charts, and how a 2004 carcass near San Antonio settled what it actually was.
Mothman before he was a man: the drift from “large bird” to winged humanoid, and the parallel drift from airships to saucers to Tic Tacs.
The one thing Jones has seen for himself…

Exploring Encounters: A Cryptozoology Seminar– Daniel’s free seminar, Saturday, September 26, 2026, 1:00-5:00 PM CT at the Sunrise Cafe in San Juan, Texas. Seating is limited, so register through Eventbrite if you plan to attend in person.
Exploring Encounters livestream– the seminar will also stream live on The Vortex YouTube channel.
The Vortex on YouTube– Daniel’s channel, including long-form conversations with Bob Gimlin, Jeff Meldrum, Ron Morehead, and others.
The Vortex– Daniel’s website and archive.
The Piney Woodsand theSam Houston National Forest– the East Texas forest belt where most of the state’s Bigfoot reports originate.
The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972)and theFouke Monster– the film and the case that built the Southern Sasquatch tradition.
The Patterson-Gimlin film– shot at Bluff Creek, California, in October 1967, and still the most analyzed piece of footage in cryptozoology.
The Trinity Alps– the Northern California range where reports of a giant salamander have circulated since the 1920s. No specimen has ever been produced.
The Chupacabra– the 1995 Puerto Rican original and its very different North American descendant. The 2004 Elmendorf Beast, killed near San Antonio, was identified by DNA analysis as a coyote with mange.
Sarcoptic mange– the skin disease that turns ordinary canids into monsters.
Species (1995)– the film often proposed as the template for the original Chupacabra description.
Thunderbirds– the folkloric backdrop to the South Texas Big Bird reports.
Mothman, theSilver Bridge collapseof December 15, 1967, and the TNT area of Point Pleasant, West Virginia.
J. Allen Hynekand theclose encounter classification system– proposed in 1972 for UFO reports, applied here to cryptid encounters.
Jim Marrs (1943-2017)– the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter, later a conspiracy author, who covered theLake Worth Monsterin July 1969 and the Aurora, Texas spaceman story.
Ken GerhardandNick Redfern– Texas-based authors and Daniel’s longtime colleagues.
The Sierra Sounds– the disputed 1970s recordings produced by Ron Morehead, who joined the Death Valley expedition.
The Marfa lightsand theBig Thicket light on Bragg Road– the two light phenomena Daniel has seen with his own eyes.

Daniel Alan Jones is an investigative reporter and researcher based in South Texas, and the founder of the Texas Cryptozoology Network. He is the creator and host ofThe Vortex, a YouTube channel and website covering cryptids, UFOs, and unexplained phenomena, where he has interviewed figures including Bob Gimlin, Jeff Meldrum, and Ron Morehead. He has been active in the field since 2010, when he began attending meetings of EPIC, the Extraordinary Phenomena Investigations Council, alongside Jim Marrs, Ken Gerhard, Nick Redfern, and Lyle Blackburn. His fieldwork has taken him to the Piney Woods of East Texas, Bluff Creek in Northern California, Death Valley, and Point Pleasant, West Virginia. He takes an ethnographic approach to the subject, treating the community of cryptozoologists as part of what deserves study.

Abominable Science! Origins of the Yeti, Nessie, and Other Famous Cryptids– Daniel Loxton and Donald R. Prothero
Columbia University Press. The standard skeptical treatment of the major cryptids, including a chapter-length analysis of the Patterson-Gimlin film. Start here.

Spooky Archaeology: Myth and the Science of the Past– Jeb Card
University of New Mexico Press. Directly relevant to the Death Valley giants expedition, and to the newspaper hoaxes and suppressed-skeleton stories that keep that narrative alive.

Fantastic Archaeology: The Wild Side of North American Prehistory– Stephen Williams
University of Pennsylvania Press. The older classic on fringe archaeology in America, and still the reference point for how the giants story got built.

The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry– J. Allen Hynek
The 1972 book that introduced the close encounter scale Daniel adapts for cryptid reports. A primary source rather than a skeptical one, and worth reading as such.

Texas Bigfoot: History, Legends, and Modern Encounters in the Lone Star State– Lyle Blackburn
The regional survey Daniel cites in the episode, and the best available catalog of the local names and cases discussed here. Blackburn leaves the conclusions to the reader.

Beyond Words: What Animals Say and What They Mean– Karen Stollznow
Karen’s book on animal communication, out now.

Support MonsterTalk on Patreon– ad-free listening, extended interviews, and the thing that keeps the show running.
In ReSearch Of– Blake and Dr. Jeb Card revisit the Leonard Nimoy series episode by episode.

MonsterTalk theme music by Peach Stealing Monkeys.

This is not a fully accurate transcript, and was machine generated. It’s here for helping search engines find the episode but not intended to be a faithful transcript of the episode. (But it’s not AWFUL.) Some of the material in this transcript only exists in the Patreon/Premium edition of the show and was excised for the commercial version.

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It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature, part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24 mile long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland.
It’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
This week and next, we’ll be hearing from researcher David Allen Jones.
I met him at the Gods and Monsters Conference at Texas State in March of 2026, where he gave a presentation about cryptozoology that included mentions of a lot of well-known names from the field.
On his website and YouTube channel, The Vortex, you can find a lot of long-form discussions with people like Bob Gimlin, Jeff Meldrum, Ron Moorhead, and many other names that’ll be familiar to you cryptid enthusiasts out there.
Daniel’s interested in the same kinds of stuff that keeps Monster Talk listeners thinking, and he’s very engaged with the Texas cryptozoology and UFO scene.
After dinner one night at the conference, I struck up a conversation with him outside the restaurant where we were having a reception.
And the cool evening air was heavy with the delicious scent of mesquite grilling and the chatter of a college’s nightlife getting started.
It was a wide-ranging discussion, and somewhere in there, Jeb Card came out and joined us, and what began as a simple chit-chat turned into a darn interesting discussion.
Well, it’s taken a while to get Daniel on here with us, but we finally got our schedules worked out.
And what we’re going to do is split this into two episodes covering two related topics.
In this first part, we’re gonna talk about how he got involved with cryptozoology and with going deeper than just reading.
And in the second part, we’re gonna talk about the current state of the field as compared to how things were when he first got involved.
Daniel is putting together an event called Exploring Encounters, which will be both in-person and online.
That’s on September 26th, and you can book it at Eventbrite.
I’ll have a link in the show notes
for the streaming option, or if you’re near San Juan, Texas, maybe you can go in person and tell Daniel you’re a Monster Talker.
Again, links in the show notes to that event, as well as to Daniel’s website and YouTube channel.
So, I hope you enjoy listening as Karen and I join Daniel Allen Jones for some Monster Talk.
We should probably have a quick intro of who you are.
I wrote something.
It’s very light.
It’s just that you are an investigative reporter and you’re a researcher and you work with the Vortex and the Texas Cryptozoology Network, which you founded.
and that you like to take an ethnographic approach to cryptozoology and folklore, and that you’ve been doing this for more than a decade.
So you want to add anything to that?
That sounds great, and you’re welcome to kind of dig into any other things that you want to get into or ask questions.
I’m an open book, so that sounds like you hit the highlights, and we can talk about a few other things.
I know you said the big question is the favorite monster, and I already have one that we can get into as well.
so well welcome to the show daniel it’s really great to have you here and you probably get asked this a lot but how do you define cryptozoology we get lots of different answers to that question
Hey, Karen, Blake, great to be able to hear you guys in this way.
I’m glad to be here.
It’s an honor.
And I think that it’s really important to be able to have this kind of discussion about cryptozoology.
In my view, getting involved in a way that was through various people here in my own home state of Texas, I found out, just as you said, there are different interpretive approaches as to what people consider this field to be.
And I would just say overall…
Crypto meaning hidden and zoology pertaining to animals would be dealing with the focus or study or culture of hidden animals, creatures that are not really well known or discussed in various…
cultural settings that are not regarded maybe by science in some way that’s tangible i think that there are a lot of different things that people have described that kind of fit into these categories but overall a field of study and a culture or subculture and i think that that’s something that can be focused on and studied as well as the people the the cultural aspect involved and and the field work is important but i do think that the
The history and the component of how personality kind of relates and media relates to how people learn about the subject is a crucial part about sharing this information as well.
Was there a particular thing that got you involved?
Like what was your gateway into cryptozoology?
Sure.
So I think that I was fortunate to be kind of in the midst of some already prevalent cryptozoologists here in Texas that were really already doing a lot of great work to kind of look into these mysteries of creatures and legends that have been around for a long time.
So in 2010, I…
I was looking into a lot of really interesting subjects.
I think that the overall cadre of unexplained mysteries, UFOs, paranormal experiences, things like that caught my attention.
And because we had many different things happen in the DFW area, which is where I’m from, Dallas, Fort Worth.
And because of some of the things that had made the news and had been around as sort of these local legends that had been floating around in the back of my mind.
And it didn’t really become tangible to me until I found a group that had some speakers that were getting together on monthly meetings.
And the first time I went, it was with someone named Jim Mars.
And Jim, for anyone who doesn’t know, is someone who wrote many books about conspiratorial topics.
But before he was a well-known author on those types of subjects, he was a writer for what would be my local newspaper, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, writing about the Aurora Spaceman in Aurora, Texas, or the Lake Worth Monster here in Fort Worth.
And these were things that became sort of urban legends in a way that they were always talked about.
You heard different things about the Goatman.
growing up or the alien grave.
And so that was something that kind of floated around, but didn’t really become concrete to me until I talked to people who were involved with the actual research and investigations like Jim.
So I got together with this group called EPIC, Extraordinary Phenomena Investigations Council, which Jim was a member along with Ken Gerhard, Nick Redfern.
and Lyle Blackburn, and we had meetings with all of these guys and many others about many topics, but prominently those pertaining to this topic were some of the main figures who I got to become acquainted with, get familiar with their work, and really get a sense of how what they’re doing relates to the overall bigger picture of cryptozoology and how it’s kind of been built off of…
uh people who’ve come long before and i think that’s really a big part about um you know the the gateway between uh what’s being passed down the legacy of this information and i should also give a shout out to my my good friend craig wool heater who has been a big proponent of cryptozoology especially bigfoot um and events and sort of the cultural component as well so that those are some main people who i got to connect with early on from 2010-11
12, 13, and we did some preliminary events with that group.
And from there, it sort of springboarded me into connecting with those guys and sort of the local events taking place, the Texas Bigfoot Conference and some other things, paranormal events, which sometimes include a cryptozoological component or speaker.
And that’s something that I find is really fascinating is there’s a lot of crossover between people interested in the unknown, the unexplained, whether it’s paranormal.
haunted locations, things that seem to have an unusual activity, the UFO realm, that whole arena, and then the area where people are trying to understand these strange creatures.
And there’s a lot of interesting connections or parallels of what’s similar and maybe what isn’t.
But I found just connecting in the research, understanding the subject matter, but also the cultural component has been interesting to see that there are a lot of parallels between these groups as well.
Yeah.
That’s a lot of familiar names.
Yeah.
Yeah, certainly is.
And there is a lot of crossover, a lot of crossover with interest as far as our listeners are concerned too.
And so many different ways that you can do or perform cryptozoology.
And you mentioned field work.
a little while ago.
So in the time that you’ve been interested in this, you haven’t just done the armchair work and armchair research.
So can you tell us a bit about what kinds of creatures you’ve gone out into the field to hunt or look for or do research into?
Sure.
So while many people consider, you know, Bigfoot sort of the prime cryptid, the main figure of cryptozoology, it itself, I think, is going to be able to have its whole own focus with all of this that people know it to be.
A lot of times just relegated up to the Pacific Northwest, or they might know about the Yeti.
across the world.
But I would say that many people are surprised to find out that there are reports of Bigfoot or Bigfoot type creatures, however people describe them, Sasquatch, Wildman, things like that here in Texas, especially the eastern side of the state, which is an enormous forest.
So I’ve been fortunate to go out to the Piney Woods, the Sam Houston National Forest.
And many of these areas that go along the Sabine River and many of these places sort of have these cultural localized names.
The Sabine thing, the Caddo creature or Caddo critter, Holly him, the Dayton monkey man.
And there’s the list goes on.
And my buddy Lyle Blackburn, he put together a great publication called Texas Bigfoot, which.
really chronicles a lot of the different historical instances and these regional names that have been given to what otherwise people just know to be Bigfoot.
Well, I think it’s just amazing to see that wherever, you know, in these places that there have been sightings, a lot of times, and as this great line goes with the legend of Boggy Creek, the 1972 cult classic that I really learned about through Lyle and his…
ability as sort of the biographer of the Boggy Creek Monster, that this isn’t just something that people know to be a phenomenon in Washington and Oregon and Northern California, but all over this area of eastern Texas, southeast Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, there’s a concentration of reports.
Now, what people are actually seeing, that can be questioned and looked into, but there’s no doubt a thorough number of…
people who have described seeing something to the effect of a wild, feral, humanoid person, whether that falls along more of the lines of a large Sasquatch-type creature or more of a feral person or homeless person, maybe that just seems like they’re out in the wild.
Whatever variants you have, colors of hair and all of these things, various groups like the Texas Bigfoot Research Center have tried to make sense of cataloging these and putting them together for archival and research purposes.
And I think that these areas going out in Texas and, of course, Arkansas, MENA, Arkansas, the Ouachita.
Mountains and National Forest is a big hot spot.
People say that there’s still activity out near Falk, Arkansas, where the Legend of Boggy Creek is.
And even in Louisiana, near the Sabine.
river sabine lake all of these different areas the trinity river going through texas these are all amazing places that i would say seem to harbor enough life already so i think that because many of these different places have a very lush environment places that already harbor plenty of wildlife in general it would seem to
uh you know elicit the notion that there perhaps are unknown species whether they are to the effect of bigfoot or something like that that would be amazing and i think that uh one of the cool ideas is that jefferson texas which is part of the piney woods area has been declared officially over the years thanks to craig wool heater
um and his dedication that not only has it been officially recognized as sort of bigfoot weekend in october um it’s become the bigfoot capital of texas but also here a few years ago it was declared a safe haven for bigfoot given that its existence has proven that it would be
able to be a safe haven for their environment through conservancy and i think that’s amazing so those are some places here and of course i’ve traveled out of state as well to the other places i mentioned i’ve gone to northern california in search of the trinity alps giant salamander with my colleagues ken gerhardt
Jason Kantz, Jim Whitehead, and Jamie Wayne, part of the Bluff Creek Project.
And we were right there in the Bluff Creek area where the Patterson-Gimlin film was captured all those years ago.
And although we didn’t see any Bigfoot, people say that because of the surrounding areas that there perhaps could be some activity.
But we were there looking for a giant salamander, which had been purported to exist alongside these.
these creatures for years and had been documented in journals and kind of listed as an anecdote for people who had been going and looking for Bigfoot, calling them things like water dogs and seeing that maybe there were these four to possibly eight foot long salamanders over by Hubbard’s Lake.
and the Trinity Shasta National Forest area.
So we scoured those waters up there in Northern California.
And I think connecting with the places really puts a sense of perspective in mind.
Another fascinating expedition I went on was with some other colleagues, M.K.
Davis, Ron Moorhead, Don Monroe, and the late…
Joe Taylor, who we all went to Death Valley because they had some spots in mind that they wanted to to try to survey and try to see if we could find any indication that there might be the remains of of what they thought to be giants.
And I think that while, you know, this all sounds fantastic and maybe absurd to some people, I think either way, getting out to the field is pure experience and you have firsthand.
uh availability and access to the resources there to know in some way you know what’s possible what had been possible in the past what’s possible now and so uh the death valley expedition we did in 2019 was um really incredible of course we didn’t find any giants but the whole idea was that you know we’re we’re looking in places that are remote that most people don’t go to very often and uh so that’s been another uh amazing one to add to the list and um and i’m here in south texas
where they have the sightings uh for over 50 years now of what they call the big bird and not the sesame street character but more like the thunderbird of native legend where they describe seeing an enormously disproportionately large bird with wingspans of 10 plus feet long
flapping overhead.
And sometimes some of these accounts involve attacks or where people are coming in close encounters, physical proximity.
And in relation to the other subject I mentioned earlier, ufology, UFOs, Dr. J. Allen Hynek came up with an incredible scale to use to describe the close encounters.
of the first kind would just be seeing something.
The second kind would be something that’s in such close physical proximity.
It has an effect upon something or someone.
And so that would be like a close encounter of the second kind where the cryptid in this case, not only was spotted or seen in the air, but actually physically came and approached or even harmed a few people.
And so you have some accounts where this is happening.
uh in cryptozoology and i think that some organizations try to classify like a class a class b type um encounter and i do think it’s important to be able to categorize these in such a way that people can see that it’s not just someone seeing something um you know yards you know several yards feet away and just for a glimpse of
split second and then that’s it.
But they’re actually having physical interactions.
And of course, there are all kinds of interesting and even wild claims of habituation and interaction and other even more lofty ideas that there’s more to the interactions than the physical component.
And I think that that’s important to listen to as well.
And I think there’s many different ways people interpret the cryptozoological phenomenon of encounters, whether it’s with Bigfoot or other cryptids.
But another really fascinating journey I’ll mention is because this is sort of happening simultaneously with us is the Mothman phenomenon back from the 60s.
So I went up to Point Pleasant, West Virginia with Lyle, Ken and Nick Redfern.
And they have a great city dedicated to their legend, despite it being a bit of a tragic situation with the collapse of the Silver Bridge, many people dying.
Some people consider that maybe Mothman was like an omen or harbinger of doom.
But going into those areas, I camped out in the McClintic Wildlife Management Area where it was apparently first seen.
And then I, you know, traveled into the TNT bunkers where there were sightings.
And being there in person, again, is just, I think, a valuable experience overall.
You can’t always expect that you’ll have another encounter or expect to recreate the same situations or conditions.
But I think helping to put things to perspective is a lot more…
um a unique encounter experience than just reading about it online which i think is important too but it just is a way that i can do what i can to encourage the people get out and go explore and just gain an appreciation for nature in general but being in these sites that have historical value um and when the the cities and the places and people around them
do what they can to also commemorate that, I think is an incredible opportunity to share and take part in history.
And that’s been a bit of a contribution, I think, that if I’ve made anything to explore that in a way that is looking into the field research, looking into the subject matter of the cryptids.
And I should say that the interesting thing, and thanks to my colleague, Ken Gerhardt, good friend of mine.
We share a birthday.
Oh, wow.
I think he’s two years older than me, but yeah, October 13th, we both have it.
Very cool.
Well, yeah, he’s done a lot of great work all over the world and has been a big inspiration and role model for me.
And I would highly recommend checking out his latest endeavors on exploring cryptozoology.
But I mentioned him because he wrote a recent book on the essential guide to Mothman.
And I think that just showing that there’s not just the anthropomorphic nature of these cryptids that stands out to a lot of people.
But but that a lot of the ways that they shift or evolve their morphology over the years is an important part to play in how we understand them culturally.
And when it comes to something like Mothman, a lot of people were describing a large bird before there was ever the notion of something humanoid involved.
And I think that that really helps to put things in perspective of how that cultural notion shifts over time and maybe even such in a short amount of time that we forget that, you know, there are other ways that this has been discussed.
And it’s not always been the same thing, just like sort of the
the morphology of UFOs changing from the airships to the flying saucers or Foo Fighters to the Tic Tacs and all of these different things.
Now people say UAP, which can mean anything.
But I think that sometimes you seem to notice these patterns in a way not just that is focusing on what people are actually describing, but just the cultural shift in our perception.
So there’s a big part to play in how the societal outlook works with all of this as well.
For sure.
You know, you laid out a lot of cool information there.
So I know some of what you’re going to be covering today and in our second part is more like a good starting point for this kind of – which is what we asked you on to do.
You’re doing exactly and perfectly what I wanted to talk about.
So this is awesome.
But it’s like it’s a fire hose, man, which is awesome also.
You’ve got a lot of info here.
You –
I had like 50 questions while you were talking.
But I guess one, since we kind of covered a lot of material there, you know, in your region, you’re in Texas, where I think it is de rigueur that if you’re a cryptid zoologist, you have to have a black cowboy hat.
I know that Lyle and Ken do.
Besides that, what are the most popular cryptids that people are seeing in Texas these days?
yeah that’s for sure i think that you know while bigfoot does actually come up on um the charts you know for different things the bigfoot field research organization the other organizations that keep track of this texas does seem to pop up uh maybe not always number one but up there with the higher
rankings but despite that what other uh groups and organizations here texas parks and wildlife they seem to see that bigfoot is up there but not the first it’s usually what people refer to as the chupacabra which really is and this goes with a lot of the different cryptid sightings is probably a situation where you are you’re dealing with misidentification
of known species.
And this is important to keep in mind because, you know, while people do see things, people are also not great witnesses.
Some people are, but it’s not really always easy to tell what exactly you’re looking at, especially if it’s not close up.
But in the early 2000s, specifically 2004 in Elmendorf, Texas, near San Antonio, people were seeing this strange dog-like creature.
And wanting to understand what it was, they made it a new sensation and it got media coverage.
And people essentially figured out that it was a canid or a dog, basically a canine, and with a condition like mange.
And so it’s not necessarily that it was a new species, but because of this, it became a cultural phenomenon that’s different than the original Puerto Rican El Chupacabras, which is more like of a bipedal spined, strange little…
creature that’s been described but that would be probably the the most described cryptid or creature that people see in texas is the chupacabra because it’s a lot easier to see dogs and maybe dogs with conditions than it is bigfoot but i think that that’s going to be up there that’s a really um high one as well
People also, I think, because of just the area, there are a lot of other strange things that people see.
But Dogman is something that’s really been popping up a lot more in the last decade.
Whether people are really seeing Dogman or not, I think just the interesting idea of pop culture blending into people’s perception does play a role.
That may have played a role with the original El Chupacabras in Puerto Rico.
the movie species people consider that might have been the catalyst for that but i would say that other than dog man people do still see that they describe flying or avian cryptids maybe like the big bird still um there are even other accounts like reptilian um
cryptids like the lizard man type situation which of course you know is a really incredible thing to consider but there are other ideas as well not many but there are aquatic cryptids and most of those are going to be disproportionately large known species like large fish large
uh things that are already known but maybe just you know that stand out or what are called out of place animals so i do think that that’s something that people are seeing so you kind of have the whole gamut of of what seemed to be because we don’t definitively or factually know have a base of knowledge for
mammalian cryptids avian and aquatic cryptids and maybe some other things as well but i would say maybe the chupacabra is what’s been relegated probably the the mascot um but i think that there’s just a lot of other interesting one-off uh sightings or encounters that stand out and sort of have a historic you know relevance with all of that as well that’s perfect because we’re going to talk about dogmen in part two so go sorry karen go ahead
Yeah, no worries.
Well, I think we just want to try to fit in one more question to this first part.
And you’ve talked a little bit about not having seen anything with your expedition to Northern California and some of your other research.
But have you ever had a personal sighting?
Well, I always tell people that I approach this subject as someone who’s interested in the research and the field work and exploring the accounts of witnesses because I don’t necessarily have one of my own.
I don’t describe having a cryptid sighting or encounter.
I’m open to that possibility.
I have seen things like the Marfa Lights, which are a light phenomenon, along with what you could call the Saratoga Light or the Ghost Lights of Bragg Road, also here north of Houston, Texas.
But I’ve never seen any…
strange thing like Bigfoot or these other cryptids here.
And I would say that while I’ve been out to the field and been to these locations, a few of them may still have something.
I just wasn’t there whenever they were around.
But, you know, I listen to people’s accounts.
I do think it’s important that despite not having one of my own, that many people do enter this field inadvertently because of something that happened to them.
And I think it’s important that they have an open network that’s safe to them to be able to share without being ridiculed.
So I don’t myself, but I do feel like it’s important to listen to people who do describe witness testimony.
Yeah, we we I mean, we present ourselves as a pro science skeptical show, but we have a huge amount of empathy for people who have these weird experiences.
And we try to come at this with what we call a presumption of sincerity.
If they’re making serious claims, you know, we’re not here to tell them, no, that’s not what happened.
We’re here to understand what happened.
So that wraps up our first half of this interview.
And I thank you so much.
Be sure to check the show notes for links to Daniel’s work.
And if you’re in the Texas area, the details for how to get to his mini conference or to stream into it, that will be in the show notes as well.
That’d be cool.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard part one of our two-part chat with researcher Daniel Allen Jones discussing how he got into cryptozoology.
Come back next week and we’ll be chatting about the state of the field and how stuff’s changed since he got involved.
Monster Talk’s theme music is by Peach Stealing Monkeys.
This has been a Monster House presentation.

The post S05E48 🌀Traditional Cryptozoology with Daniel Alan Jones appeared first on MonsterTalk.

Karen and Matt are back from their trip to the UK and they share stories and photos from their whirlwind visit to a variety of (allegedly) haunted places. Blake makes jokes… and wishes he could go himself.

Trip photos available at our Patreon site.

Why one UFO gets reported in Britain for every ten in the States, and whether alien big cats should count toward the total. Whether English food deserves its reputation, adjudicated by way of Jimmy Carr. The linguistics of “ye” and the lost letter thorn. Livestock as a Dartmoor traffic hazard. And a comparative assessment of Stonehenge against Carhenge in Alliance, Nebraska, which Karen reports is very nearly to scale.

Because images in show notes have proven unreliable, Matt and Karen’s photographs from the trip are posted on our Patreon. They are not paywalled – every tier, including the free one, can see them.

UWE Bristol: new research on the origins of Pluckley’s ghosts
Nature (2024): A Scottish provenance for the Altar Stone of Stonehenge
Mike Dash: The Devil’s Hoofmarks – Source Material on the Great Devon Mystery of 1855
Pitt Rivers Museum: Margaret Murray and the Witch in a Bottle
Treasurer’s House, York – the Roman legion sighting
Erich von Däniken
Borley Rectory
The String of Pearls (1846-47)

Related MonsterTalk episodes:
242 – The Hairy Hands of Devon
S05E33 – The Devil Went Down to Devon
S05E36 – The Chinnery Backseat Ghost
S05E46 – Pluckley (flashback to episode 130, with Hayley Stevens)

Matt Baxter is a paranormal investigator and researcher based in Colorado, and one of MonsterTalk’s most frequent collaborators. He approaches haunted sites the way a good reporter approaches a source – which is to say he goes there, looks at the thing itself, and notices when the plaque is missing.

Beyond Words: How We Learn, Use and Lose Language– Karen Stollznow

Pluckley: The Making and Faking of a Ghost Story– Ed Adams

The World of the Unknown: Ghosts– Christopher Maynard

The Memory Code: The Secrets of Stonehenge, Easter Island and Other Ancient Monuments– Lynne Kelly

The Witch-Cult in Western Europe– Margaret Murray

Devon Ghosts– Theo Brown

Karen’s Beyond Words is out now from Cambridge University Press – the book behind the tour that made this whole itinerary possible.
Beyond Words: How We Learn, Use and Lose Language – Karen Stollznow

If you enjoy this kind of source-checking applied to classic paranormal television, Blake co-hosts In Research Of with Dr Jeb Card, working through the Leonard Nimoy series episode by episode.
In Research Of… on Patreon

Listeners: write in with your own legend-tripping stories and the places you have visited.

Hosts: Blake Smith and Dr Karen Stollznow
Special co-host: Matt Baxter
MonsterTalk theme music by Peach Stealing Monkeys
Some product links may be affiliated with Amazon revenue sharing.

This is not a fully accurate transcript, and was machine generated. It’s here for helping search engines find the episode but not intended to be a faithful transcript of the episode. (But it’s not AWFUL.) Some of the material in this transcript only exists in the Patreon/Premium edition of the show and was excised for the commercial version.

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It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature, part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24 mile long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland.
It’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
As promised in our flashback last week, Karen and Matt are here with a recap of their trip to England.
If you live in England, you probably saw them, based on all the stops they made.
So let’s get on to some vicarious village vacationing with the veridical voices of Karen and Matt.
You know, Monster Talk.
welcome back uh you guys uh globetrotters that you are uh i was only i was late to the but there was so much going on here which i don’t want to get into but the uh uh i kind of lost track and then the next thing i knew i saw something
from some skeptic venues saying you guys were giving a talk.
And I think that was how I first became aware you were traveling.
But so what was this just a trip to the UK for promoting the book or was there something else going on or what happened?
Well, this was, I guess, predominantly summer vacation.
somewhere in our part of the world, but also a promotional tour for my new book.
So for Beyond Words, how we learn, use and lose language through Cambridge University Press.
So we had gone to the UK last year.
So we went back and it was a good reminder that everywhere in the UK is haunted.
Yes.
Reputedly has its myths and legends.
And some of them are very, very old.
So that was like the entire country of Savannah, Georgia.
It’s amazing.
And so we have Matt, too.
He’s here to to help go through this kind of summer roundup, I guess we’ll call it a summer summary.
Yeah, yeah, summer is summer.
I like that.
So one of the early things that we did, we went to Cambridge again and I gave a talk at the University Press bookstore and we gave a talk to the Cambridge Skeptics.
We’ll go into that in a minute, but as soon as we hit the ground…
We went to Chiswick House, which is known for the site where the Beatles recorded videos.
So before the days of MTV for the songs Rain and Paperback Writer, that was a kind of bucket list thing that our son wanted to do and for me too.
But then we shot straight over to Kent, which is really, really, really haunted apparently.
And we went to Hever Castle.
So for those who don’t know Piva Castle, it was the childhood home of Anne Boleyn and it’s said that she is still there after all of these centuries.
It is just an absolutely beautiful place.
Matt got some phenomenal photographs of the place and it’s said to be haunted by a number of restless spirits, unnamed, but the most famous person there or ghost there is said to be
that of Anne Boleyn, and people believe that she returns there to happier times of her life, and she crosses this beautiful bridge there across the River Eden.
we can use some photographs to supplement the show.
She was dating Henry VIII, is that right, when he got disillusioned with the church?
Am I remembering that right?
Yeah, I mean, that’s, I think, another show in and of itself.
But yes, I guess they would, you could call it dating, a modern term for the fact that, yeah, they…
There was a power imbalance, but that’s always true when you’re king.
Well, they were having a relationship.
I mean, there’s a lot of backstory.
He’d had a relationship with her sister, was one of his mistresses.
Long, long story, but he was disillusioned with his marriage to Catherine of Aragon because they hadn’t had a…
A living son.
And so he I think he thought that he would have the longed for son within Berlin.
And it’s a really long story that led to the dissolution of the monasteries and the Church of England.
So, yeah, definitely another story.
All the haunted skeletons of abbeys all over the UK or over England.
So, yeah.
Exactly, and we’ll get more into that too.
But certainly this is where he was wooing her, particularly near an old oak tree.
I couldn’t pinpoint the oak tree.
I’m assuming it was still around.
I mean, it’s possible.
Lots of oak trees there anyway.
But that was just really wonderful to get to visit the castle and to see that place.
I’ve wanted to see it for a very long time.
It was…
a couple of hundred years ago, bought up or in the early 20th century was bought up by the American millionaire, William Waldorf Astor.
So he turned into a kind of Tudor-style village of guest cottages.
No, we did not see Anne Boleyn with her head tucked under her arm, which is the kind of canonical ghost.
And there’s no real reason why she would be there anyway because she was executed in London, so not in Kent.
So we spoke about this topic with the Cambridge Skeptics, but she’s exactly the kind of person that we’d expect to haunt Peter Castle or to haunt a castle.
And a castle is exactly the kind of place that you’d expect to be haunted.
So, yeah, history really gives us this setting and folklore just writes the script in this case.
But it was just so beautiful.
And we actually stayed at the castle and had a fantastic breakfast there the next morning too.
So it’s really cool that you can go there and stay at the castle.
Now, one of the interesting things that I saw, to me, there are lots of sort of parallels to Great Britain, our trip to the UK, and the TARDIS.
And Hever Castle, I think, is one of those because Hever Castle does not look very big from the outside.
You see photos of it and it looks just like this amazing castle.
You go there and you’re like, really, that’s it?
It’s like the Alamo.
I was lost in the basement for hours.
There’s no basement at the Alamo.
Yeah, you get inside this castle and it is amazing.
Absolutely.
So, you know, I highly recommend it.
So many nooks and crannies and it goes higher and higher and higher and little hidden rooms.
Yeah, it’s definitely bigger on the inside than it appears to be on the outside.
Nooks and crannies always reminds me of…
What’s the ghost story, Henry James?
Turn of the Screw.
Good Lord, my stupid brain.
When I think about the estate in that story, I always think it has nooks and crannies for crooks and nannies.
Oh, nice.
I like that one.
There’s never going to be a perfect moment for that.
Always an imperfect moment.
What is an excellent use of a spoonerism, that’s for sure.
Very good.
But we want to touch upon quite a few places that we can do deeper dives into, some that we’ve already visited that we want to revisit as well.
So let’s move on to Pluckley Village in Kent.
Years ago we spoke to Hayley Stevens.
That’s right.
Oh, my gosh.
And I do think that we should revisit it at some point too.
Well, you just did.
I mean for AE to do a deeper dive.
Gotcha, gotcha.
We only visited it.
We didn’t revisit it.
That was 2017.
My gosh.
Oh, wow.
It seems like just yesterday.
It does.
Yeah.
That was episode 130.
Yeah.
But this is said to be the most haunted village in the UK and with lots of stiff competition as well.
But it’s ever growing and increasing in its number of ghosts because it used to be that they had 12 ghosts.
So we’ve spoken about the used-born books before, and that’s where I first heard about the story.
And now they say there are about 16 ghosts.
Wow.
So you have to have stiffs to have stiff competition and ghosts.
So there’s probably more dead people.
But I do love this little bit in the used-born book where they talk about –
the scepticism in the community there because they’re sick of people visiting and because of the reputation at the same time, that’s what attracts people there.
But in the book it says, the villagers do not agree as to whether the ghosts exist, but it seems unlikely that the village should get its reputation for no reason at all.
researchers point out that conflicting opinions about ghosts can often be a sign that they really do exist.
So I love that logic there.
That’s fantastic.
And they’ll still take your money, right?
Yeah.
Or take your money, right?
Absolutely.
So I’ll just run through a couple of quick haunted places there, and then Matt might want to comment on our visit there, but they’ve got the Screaming Woods.
So I love the names of these places.
There’s the Devil’s Bush.
There’s Fright’s Corner, a Screaming Man, a White Lady, Red Lady, a Lady of Rose Court, a Watercress Woman, and lots of haunted churches and haunted pubs, haunted by poltergeists and various spirits.
And we got to visit quite a few of these places.
Pluckley’s a little village, smaller than it used to be, but still quite big.
And, yeah, Matt, anything you wanted to say about Pluckley?
It was – I thought it was a lovely little village, really.
But it’s funny because we went to – one of the really haunted places there is a pub called the Black Horse.
And, you know –
They really are leaning into it.
You know, they have this blackboard next to the fireplace that says, come visit us at the Black Horse Pluckley, the most haunted village.
And it’s like, you know, kind of written in chalk.
And then they have like printouts of the history of Pluckley and all the ghost stories and everything.
And then they have another little blackboard in the back
um let me see if i can uh it sounds very katie perilous yes but uh it’s uh the the blackboard in the back is hangs hip and it says ghost corner uh take a seat and feel the chill so you can sit in the ghost corner and see if you can feel anything uh
It’s a very quaint little place.
Really enjoyed it.
Did not feel anything very haunted there, but I did enjoy they had a sign hanging out the front that said, nobody gets out sober.
Which…
Was true in our case.
Well, Blake got it.
This is off topic, but not off topic.
The pub food, like how is the food?
Because I love British pub food, but I don’t get to get it very often.
It is not…
quite what it used to be.
I mean, you’ve got your kind of traditional foods that a lot of pubs have.
Nowadays, there’s more of a kind of focus on, well, we serve Indian food.
Yeah, they have a curry.
Well, I mean, because of the whole British Raj, there’s a long history of the relationship between India and Britain.
Don’t even get me started on the history of chicken tikka masala, which is amazing.
Anyway, but that’s another story.
Probably not a monster talk story.
But it is another story.
Maybe it is, depending on how it affects you.
Yeah.
Yes.
Well said.
The places, the pubs, I mean, have really good food and they really do appeal to vegetarians, vegans, people who are gluten-free, people from all walks of life nowadays.
So it’s very different.
It’s not what it used to be with the kind of meat and three veg, you know, or shepherd’s pie or Yorkshire pudding.
I mean, they still have those kinds of favourites, but nowadays I think different pubs have different focuses.
We went to this pub in Pluckley and we were prepared to have some lunch, but they didn’t have anything that was available.
They only did sandwiches anyway.
So it really depends on the pub where it is.
London’s going to have a bit more of a kind of melting pot.
kind of flair but uh by and large pop food’s really good and i’m going to say this i’m going to say this people say english food is terrible i think american food sports i think english food isn’t that bad because it really it’s a melting pot and it’s supposedly the case here but uh you know often there’s just everything’s burritos and burgers here yeah you’re peter pandering what
Well, you know, British comedian Jimmy Carr was asked, why is British food so crap?
And he’s like, well, he’s like, it really depends on your perspective.
We have Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay, and you have, you know, Ronald McDonald and the Burger King.
So…
You know, really, when you get down to it.
Bye, Fiore.
Yeah.
Where is Flavortown located?
Flavortown is right between Soggyville and Crunchytown.
I do, again, think that we should do individual episodes on these topics, but we’ll have to keep moving along to Cane Rock.
But before we do, I do want to say, St. Nicholas Graveyard, right next to the St. Nicholas Church there.
Don’t tell the kids.
They’ll be so sad.
he’s making a list checking it twice he’s gonna find out who’s naughty and nice
We went into the church.
It was beautiful, beautiful old church.
And like I said, there are locations in the town that are really leaning into this ghost history.
And then you’ve got hanging on the bulletin board right inside the church.
It says, new book from Cantorley Publishing, Pluckley, The Making and Faking of a Ghost Story.
Wow.
In the church, yeah.
In the church.
I just wanted to note that the church is over 900 years old, so it goes right back to William the Conqueror.
It’s been there a minute.
Ten hundreds, yeah, amazing.
But definitely go and visit Pluckley if you can.
It’s just a beautiful little village and it’s just got a lot going for it.
But then we dashed to Cambridge and I gave a talk at the bookstore.
Then we gave a talk to the Cambridge Skeptics, as mentioned.
So we want to give a shout out to the organisers, Chris Gifford and Andrew Dart, and also Dave, who attended our talk.
and came up and talked to us afterwards.
And he has relatives near the whole Chinnery ghost story.
He has relatives near the cemetery.
And so we’re going to stay in contact so that we can revisit that topic too.
He will pay a visit.
He’ll be right there in the back seat if we need him.
Got it.
Exactly.
Backseat driver.
But yeah, it was really cool to meet him.
And he’s going to help us more with that investigation because he’s going to do some on the ground work.
Yeah.
Yeah.
These things never end.
We can keep adding to them.
But we also after my talk at the bookstore, we went to the Eagle Pub, which we mentioned, I think, last year.
But Matt, you want to talk a little bit about that?
Yeah, the Eagle, it’s an interesting place because it’s been on that site there in the middle of Cambridge since 1353.
So it’s been a minute.
That’s almost two o’clock.
Yes, exactly.
And it’s, you know, there were, it really kind of became a World War II Royal Air Force bar, you know, during World War II.
And a lot of the service men were there and they would, they would sign their names into the ceiling with like cigarette lighters and candles.
So you can still see all these kind of burned-in signatures at the top from them.
And it’s got an interesting Cambridge connection.
Watson and Crick announced DNA discovery at the Eagle in 1953.
Oh, yeah, the double helix, yeah.
Yeah, so it’s got those kind of cool things going for it, but the ghost story there is this window that is kept permanently open.
And I have photos that the window is actually open every time we’ve gone there.
And, of course, a great hallmark of whether or not it’s true is the story varies.
But there was a fire upstairs that either a little girl or two boys –
And it’s interesting because in the past, they often always gave more value to boys.
But in this case, two boys equals one girl.
So obviously, the girl has more value.
I bet Rosalind Franklin thinks so.
I think so, too.
DNA burn!
So the thing is, now, because they died in – whoever there died in a fire, this window is now kept open all the time because –
If it’s closed, then the ghosts there feel like they can’t breathe and they start freaking out.
And there have been fires subsequent there whenever the window was closed, supposedly.
So we did see that.
But it’s a good example of a physical feature being part of the legend.
And it’s kind of cool.
Yeah.
And speaking of English food, too, they had proper chips there, as they called them.
So chips.
not being crisps, but hot chips.
So fries, but not French fries, really thick cut steak ones.
Like thick fries, yeah, yeah, cottage fries.
The English contribution to world cuisine, the chip.
Funny that everywhere you had proper this or proper that.
So whether it was proper chips or proper scones or everything done properly, as opposed to what American variant there is, I guess.
Exactly.
Now, I do want to mention something that I found interesting when we were doing our talk with the Cambridge skeptics is often.
We would talk about things in the U.S., and they would know exactly what we were talking about.
But we talked about Hever Castle and Pluckley, and not everybody knew that Pluckley, for example, was the most haunted village in the U.K. That’s true.
We mentioned the hairy hands, and we mentioned the devil’s footprints, and a lot of people were like, what?
What is this?
So it’s like things that were happening right there.
They really didn’t know.
And yet at the same time, I think Great Britain is great for leaning into its sort of historical ghost, you know, lore.
But at the same time, they don’t pay that much attention to it.
There’s so much of it.
And, well, yeah, I do think that there is a kind of numbness to it because it is all around.
And it depends on the books that you’ve read and what stories you’ve grown up with, I think, what you’ve had exposure to.
Well, I think it’s just an accepted thing.
Hauntings are just there.
They’re always there.
And part of the talk was me talking about how compared to the U.S., people in the U.K. will see one UFO to every 10 UFOs seen in the U.S. And I said, unless you count alien big cats, which did not get as big of a laugh as I was hoping for.
That’s so sad.
That’s so sad.
That’s the thing, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
They’ve been on my mind all morning, so yeah.
Oh, yeah, yeah, I bet, I bet.
As you do.
But I said, you know, I said, to be fair, we have Bigfoot.
That’s true.
In response to their alien big cats.
Unfortunately, we need to keep moving along.
I don’t know how we’re going to fit everything in at this rate.
Squish it.
We’ll squish.
Well, so moving on, if we hadn’t had enough of university campuses, then we certainly got our fill when we went to Oxford.
Next.
And I want to give a shout out to our friend Marcus Winderman.
We caught up with him and he and his wife, Olga and daughter, they showed us around and we paid a visit to the King’s Arms pub, which is said to be one of the most haunted locations in Oxford.
And it’s mostly haunted by apparently a pair of unseen academic spirits.
It’s too bizarre.
kind of fighting Oxford dons.
Like their research, there’s frequent sightings.
But people claim that they hear the voices of two older men who are arguing loudly at the bar in fluent ancient Greek.
So a very Oxford thing to do.
And then some of the stories are conflated too.
Other people talk about a ghostly conversation that they overhear where people are bickering over the quality of the pub’s port.
So this is exactly something you would do, Blake, talking about the port, whether it’s good or not.
And then the argument ends with the sound of like a physical blow and then there’s just silence.
So someone dies, obviously, but there’s also a ghostly pianist.
People say that they hear the spirit of a former musician playing the pub’s piano there late at night.
And…
family of ghosts too so i think this is interesting there’s another story and this is something that you we see a lot in the uk these stories on repeat as we’ve talked about before uh so in in this particular pub there was a fire can you believe it supposedly well on the premises and that unfortunately an entire family perished there and that they continue to haunt the premises so
Again, we didn’t experience anything.
I don’t think that necessarily we went there for that experience.
It was more to have a drink.
Sure.
And again, the food was very good and from all over the place.
I mean, we had salads that were really good there.
But yeah, it’s a mixed bag of food across pubs in the UK.
But anything you wanted to add, Matt, about Oxford?
Not in particular.
I did find it to be just a beautiful place.
And the museum that we went to was extraordinary.
And I just, I can’t recommend it enough.
It’s just had a slightly different vibe than Cambridge.
And you have to visit them both to really get what the feel of that is.
Yep.
And that is the Pitt Rivers Museum.
Yes.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
And it’s free, and it is, oh, Blake, you have to go there.
You would absolutely love it.
It’s just, it’s a Victorian museum, and it’s just a cabinet of curiosities.
They’ve got about 500,000 artifacts, so, you know.
I think they have a witch bottle there that’s kind of famous, the silvered witch bottle, if I remember correctly.
Oh, they had early examples of writing and just lots of, you know, paranormal stuff.
But, you know, a lot of thievery, obviously, which…
happened particularly with the germans and the english yeah a lot of things that probably shouldn’t be there um but uh it’s just i mean they have so much stuff it’s a real jumble like oh i remember it was because margaret murray uh who was famous for that book the witch cults uh in western europe she she donated the the witch bottle to the museum that’s why i remember that okay yeah oh yeah but there is a lot of that sort of stuff they’re musical instruments very early
guitars and lutes and ouds and things and weapons.
I’ll put a link if I can find it.
I think there’s actually an online tour where you can actually walk through the whole museum, if I remember correctly.
I think, yeah, there’s videos on YouTube, but definitely go there if you can.
And you need to go there several times to really see everything.
And there are other museums there as well.
It’s just a…
Absolutely fantastic place.
But, yeah, free museum.
It’s really incredible.
And Mark took us there.
We had a great time.
So then we dashed from Oxford to Stonehenge.
So we were really trying to cram everything in.
We saw Stonehenge and the Magna Carta in one day.
Wow.
At the Salisbury Cathedral.
But I think Matt’s going to talk to us a little bit about Stonehenge because, I mean, long history, but it has its reputed ghosts as well.
Yeah, I mean, if you’re a fan of Spinal Tap, you know the history of Stonehenge.
So there’s really no need for me to restate everything.
It’s interesting.
It’s 4,500 years old, but it was built in stages.
So when you look at it 4,500 years ago, it wasn’t all just there.
And the stones come from completely different places in Great Britain.
You know, you’ve got some of them came from southern England, some that came from Wales, some that came from northeast Scotland.
And it’s just and these things are huge.
And we’re talking.
It takes a village.
It takes a village.
It does.
So it’s really interesting.
It’s not just the stone circle.
It’s this huge sort of ceremonial landscape.
I mean, we’re talking this is like a huge field.
And, of course, there are sheep making the most interesting various varied noises that sheep can make.
I want to say about that, that one of the claims, one of the paranormal claims of Stonehenge is that there are unexplained sounds.
And we think they’re pretty well explained by the sheep.
Just the sheep alone.
Yeah.
Didn’t Dickens write about that?
Isn’t that what Bleat House is about?
Bleat House.
Very, very possible.
be surprised by how many sheep are there.
And we got there as early as we could.
And you can actually walk this path from the visitor center to Stonehenge.
And just when you see it, it’s overwhelming.
It’s one of the most overwhelming experiences I’ve ever had to see it.
It’s like a global heritage site, but yet if you watch the news, there’s all these frequent discussions about putting a road through.
Really?
Really?
Well, there are roads all around there.
Again, we turned up really as early as we could, and there are buses around.
There are camper vans.
People…
parked all around the perimeter and I think we got there early enough that we got some good photographs without too many people around but there are always people there and we stayed there for I think an hour hour and a half just walking around Stonehenge and at that point it was absolutely full of tourists a really really jam-packed I mean people from all around the world but just hundreds of people already so
unexplained sounds.
I’m not sure that you ever really get the opportunity to not have people around, but they have shadow figures and floating lights and a lady in white.
If you can believe that, a lady in white.
I mean, that’s never been heard of anywhere before.
Except in the forthcoming stories.
Exactly.
Can you get married there?
I don’t know what they allow.
I know they have like on the solstice.
How much money you got?
Well, I have almost none.
I’m saving up to none.
Well, then you’re not getting married there.
Yeah.
Yeah, you can pay more to get into the kind of inner circle.
You, of course, can’t touch anything, but I’m not sure.
There’s a museum there.
Perhaps you could get married on the premises, but maybe not necessarily in that circle area.
That reminds me of the Empire State Building.
In the Empire State Building, you go to the observation deck, but then there’s an additional up to the dirigible area.
You have to pay to go up a special elevator to get to that part.
It’s for the exclusive inner circle.
I’ve looked it up.
Yes, you can hold a symbolic wedding ceremony or hand fasting at Stonehenge, but it is not legally binding on its own.
Wow.
Okay.
There you go.
You can arrange a private one hour access to the inner circle.
So how private?
No more than about 30 people.
And you can hold a ceremony surrounding the monument as well.
Wow.
But you will be near regular public crowds, but there’s no legal registry there.
So you need to sign paperwork at a courthouse or something.
So yeah, you can, you can hold a ceremony.
So there you go.
For those who would like to hold their nuptials at Stonehenge, you can.
So it is interesting, a lot of the paranormal claims there.
You have a lot of the ones, you know, like I said, the floating lights, the strange sounds, the apparitions, unusual sensations, you know, from energy that’s there apparently.
And, of course, you know, Eric Van Donaghan, who gave us the ancient astronauts –
ideas about how it was built um and then you know you’ve also got the idea that giants built it uh and merlin was involved um the whole thing with the druids doesn’t match up chronologically um
you know, that they’re healing stones and all this kind of stuff.
But the latest one has been shadow people.
And that one is just not an established historical claim, you know, or tradition.
But more lately, people have been seeing shadow people there.
Now, you have to keep in mind that during certain parts of the year and when the sun’s at a certain level, there are real, very dramatic shadows there.
So that’s very different from supernatural shadow people.
Now, one other thing that I want to bring up about it, Stonehenge is interesting because you have Stonehenge in your mind of what this just amazing, impactful location is like.
And you get there and it’s actually a lot smaller than you expect.
And at the same time, it’s much…
Matt’s just not impressed by anything.
Well, wait a minute.
I’m expecting it to be Stonehenge like in Spinal Tap size.
So would I be impressed or not?
Well, it depends.
If you’re talking about the sequel, you won’t be impressed.
If you’re talking about the first one, yes, you’ll be very impressed.
But no, the thing is…
Just being there for a few moments, it seems to almost grow in its significance, you know, just being there in its presence.
So suddenly it becomes a lot less about the actual physical size of it and the impact of it.
So it’s very cool.
Yeah, that same day we paid a visit to Salisbury Cathedral too, which is just phenomenal, and got to see one of the four copies of the Magna Carta that’s there.
So that’s the royal charter signed in 1215.
He’s very important today, I think, still, that states that royal authority is limited by written law.
but it’s just a very important piece even today to just the idea of freedom and protection of the average person.
Yes, but that was another really overwhelming thing to see.
It’s in this tiny little room.
You can’t take photographs and everyone’s in this kind of long line and you only get a couple of seconds to really look at it, but it was just a really beautiful, moving thing to see.
And so after Stonehenge and seeing the Magna Carta, we went to Bath.
So we actually stayed in Bath for a couple of days.
And that is a really beautiful place to visit as well.
What I thought was interesting is that they had, so you had the Roman settlements there.
That’s what it’s mostly known for, the Roman baths.
But one of the most popular stories is that of phantom marching legionnaires of Roman soldiers.
Um, and this is the one where they were like partially below the ground and, and I think it tied into stone tape.
I think so.
That is actually this from York, that particular, but I do think that it traveled to Bath because it’s along the same kind of line.
So I think you just get a running theme of that a lot in the UK where these stories are transported around.
These Romans have lots of times to march from city to city.
Yeah.
Well, they also have a ghostly lady in white there.
So I really do think it’s a matter of those stories being just transported from York to Bath.
They’ve got a grey lady as well.
And stories of phantom carriages too and phantom monks.
So is this sounding familiar at all?
It is.
But have you thought about like we have great ladies, ladies in black, ladies in white.
Is it possible that the afterlife is just not in color?
Is that what’s maybe what’s going on?
Well, there’s ladies in red, there’s ladies in green.
So I think it’s just one lady with a nice wardrobe.
Yeah.
But I mean, part of this was research for another book that I’m working on right now about women and monsters.
So certainly it was really interesting to come across so many ladies in white, but yeah, ladies of all different colors.
But yeah, Bath is just a fascinating place to visit.
Was there anything you wanted to say about Bath?
I need one.
I guess we could move on to Dartmoor.
Yeah, you sent me photos.
That was beautiful.
Yeah, the hairy hands.
I didn’t send you any photos of actual hairy hands.
Well, you don’t see them.
You just feel them.
I don’t know.
That was all very mysterious.
But one of the fun things about it was there weren’t many other people.
Maybe a few more than you might expect, but they were just people driving to and from where they were going and where they were coming from.
And no one was going there to see the hairy hands.
That was just us.
And on a lot of these situations, it was just us going to see these things that we were seeing.
And asking locals about them, yeah.
Right, right.
Now, it’s interesting when you drive here in the States, you’re out on a rural road.
There’s the road and then there’s kind of an embankment down and then there’s usually a barbed wire fence.
And then maybe there’ll be some like livestock or something on the other side of that barbed wire fence.
Not so here.
There is just…
Road and pasture are all kind of the same thing.
And the livestock often like the road better than they do the pasture.
They’re very tame.
And just like Stonehenge, they’re everywhere.
They’re everywhere.
So, yeah, we’re…
There were traffic jams because of livestock.
There’s gorgeous horses.
I’ll have to send you some photos there.
Like it was a mother and a foal just standing in the road.
And I’m like pulling up closer and closer, kind of trying to hopefully make them think, hey, maybe I should move.
Well, after all these circus train wreck photos, it would be great to see some horses that aren’t dead by a train car.
So, yeah, I would welcome them.
Yeah.
I don’t know if they were wild or not.
Yeah, well, that’s the thing is they were in the wild, but they were not afraid of the car at all.
They just looked at us like, yeah, what are you going to do, hit us?
We don’t believe you.
So I actually had to get out of the car and shoo them away.
Yeah.
But they were beautiful, just beautiful animals.
It was like green acres, only it’s like green hectares, I guess, right?
Yes.
Yes, exactly.
It was truly stunning countryside.
But I’ve got a question, Matt.
Yes.
Which is the bridge?
Well, and that’s the fun one.
The locals actually, the locals that know about the legend call this particular bridge the Hairy Hands Bridge, but it is not labeled as such.
There’s another place called Two Bridges that’s very near there that is often mistaken for the Hairy Hands Bridge.
But this one is called Second Bridge, and it goes over Cherry Brook.
And Cherry Brook, actually, there are bridges that go over it.
But this particular one that goes over Cherry Brook is the Harry Hands Bridge.
And I actually, I have some audio here that I can play of me approaching the bridge and what it was like.
So if you don’t mind, I can play that really quickly here.
It’ll just take me a moment to…
To share the audio.
And I want to say, too, that if you blink, you’ll miss it.
That is very true.
That is very true.
It’s weird there’s this discussion about which is the right one, because usually you’ll brook no argument.
Well, of course.
Of course.
So let me know if you can.
So for the listeners, I’m looking at lots of pictures.
Yeah, yeah, and it’s really weird because I don’t know what just happened there.
Oh, we went to the Cancun one.
Isn’t it cool how you can sort them by location?
That’s neat.
I see a white cat.
The white cat of Exeter.
Yeah, where was that?
That was in Dartmoor, yeah.
That was in Dartmoor, yep, yep.
That was a terrifying cat.
So I’m thinking it might have been a ghost.
That’s why it was white.
It was the cat in white.
Oh, yeah.
So this is… We got video here.
This is exciting.
Okay.
So here we are walking to the bridge.
The Harry Hands Bridge is what the…
Okay.
Here comes a car.
We’re going to see if the car makes it.
Um… Yeah.
Okay.
Hmm.
No.
They made it.
Okay.
Well…
All right.
It’s beautiful here, though.
But what you can see with that footage is how under the right or the wrong conditions, that would be very dangerous.
Oh, yeah.
No, these are narrow.
Yeah.
If there’s snow, if there’s ice, if there’s…
fog, that would be really dangerous.
Americans, anything like that hazards to the roads.
Yeah, just some people standing out in the middle of the road with an iPhone videoing them.
But the problem is the roads themselves.
The Romans made very narrow roads and they’re the same roads.
And they’re all haunted.
They’re very…
For many centurions ago.
Yes.
Let’s say they’re hairy.
But so while we were in the area, we also explored a little bit more about the devil’s footprints.
You want to talk about that, Matt?
Yes.
Now, that was a very interesting thing because a recent Monster Talk episode we really went into in depth on the hairy devil’s footprints.
The devil’s footprints when the devil visited Devon and Exeter one night after a snowfall.
So we went around to several of these places, and again, there are no plaques, there’s no, this is the location of, and Great Britain is great about that.
You know, we went by…
all these different markers of places where, you know, Edgar Allan Poe was or whatever.
I mean, they’re all over the place that they let you know what happened here.
But when it comes to this… John Lennon urinated here.
Exactly, exactly.
Ozzy Osbourne bit the head off a bat in another country here.
There’s all kinds of great stuff like that.
But when it comes to a celebrity as big as the devil himself…
they had no markers anywhere about anything.
It was like just melted away with the snow.
If you know, you know.
If you know, you know.
But we did go to several of these places.
We found no lasting evidence that the devil was actually there.
We went to the River X.
We were in Topsham, Exeter.
We went through Exmouth and Dawlish.
I did want to get down to Torquay, which is where Fawlty Towers was set.
We didn’t get to make it this trip, but he went all the way down there.
He went all around.
Yeah.
He’s a traveler.
But like I said, no plaques or markers anywhere saying the devil walked here.
And, you know, it’s just there’s a great contrast because, again, it’s something that the current generation of people living there really know nothing about.
And yet the rest of the world, you know, you go to YouTube and it is just this widely reported thing, both the hairy hands and the devil’s footprints.
Everybody outside of the UK knows about it.
People like us, legend tripping, going to visit these sites and locals just, meh, for the most part.
But we’ve still got two more places we wanted to mention.
One is the Cotswolds.
I’ve always wanted to go there.
It’s a very large area too, so it’s not like it’s one town.
It’s lots of little towns with very cutesy names and lots of ladies in white again.
And there’s a place called Presbury.
And that’s said to be one of the most haunted villages in England.
So it’s something like Pluckley Village that a lot of villagers, they claim to.
But there are lots of pubs that are haunted by poltergeists.
lots of stories of ghostly monks and nuns and spectral stage coaches.
So again, we have that theme running throughout the UK and very reminiscent of Bally Rectory too, but the same kinds of stories.
And again, going back to Henry VIII, I mean, not only Henry VIII and the disillusion of the monasteries, but certainly just a lot of lore, which is just interwoven into these places and the same stories everywhere.
Matt, you want to say anything about the Cotswolds?
Beautiful.
Great for photo ops.
Great for photo ops.
Still lots of very narrow roads.
So after the Cotswolds, we went back to London and we spent a bit of time there.
We still didn’t get to Highgate Cemetery.
I know that that’s high on the bucket list for use.
But, I mean, there’s so many places that we wanted to visit.
One of the places that I wanted to go to is another pub called the Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese.
And you’ve got to be careful because there are two of them.
There’s the Cheshire Cheese, and then there’s the Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese.
So the latter one is a very old place.
It was rebuilt in 1667 following the Great Fire of London.
So it is very old.
But this pub is said to be the haunt of Dr Samuel Johnson, who wrote one of the earliest dictionaries of the English language, and also Charles Dickens.
It’s supposedly the home of
Polly the parrot too, which was a… Norwegian blue, I believe.
But, yeah, the parrot sketch.
Remarkable bird, the Norwegian blue.
Beautiful plumage, isn’t it?
The plumage didn’t enter into it.
It still did.
But Polly was an African grey parrot who lived there for about 40 years and she died in the 1920s.
And so she’s still like a taxidermy piece there, stuffed.
specimen there at the bar.
Now that’s what I call a dead putter.
But apparently she was well known for having a potty mouth.
So she could swear, I think, in multiple languages.
So there are lots of supposed ghosts there, including that of Charles Dickens and Samuel Johnson, it is said.
But, yeah, I’ve got, to me, shocking news anyway, and that is that even though Samuel Johnson, Dr Samuel Johnson, lived just up the street and there’s a museum where he lived, that there’s no actual evidence that he frequented the pub.
Now, we went there and we sat in his seat and there is a large portrait of him hanging above this seat.
And so people are going there to visit this pub because he supposedly went there.
But there’s no evidence that he visited the place because…
Contemporaneously, James Boswell wrote a biography of Dr. Johnson, and he didn’t write about Johnson ever frequenting the place.
Yet there are it’s just commonly accepted that he he went there.
He was a barfly.
Other writers, including Dickens, went there.
So I would I would say it’s still a diction area.
Well, it seems to me like these stories maybe go back to the Victorian era where.
Oh, yeah.
Waiters would kind of point things out and say, oh, look, there are weak stains here on the wallpaper of Charles Dickens or Dr. Johnson, and that they would get tips for pointing these things out.
So it seems like it’s a more recent story.
So I was disappointed because we went there before I knew that there was no evidence of him actually visiting the place.
So they’re just kind of capitalising on the legacy because he did live right nearby.
And there’s even a statue to his cat, Hodge.
I had a cat named Hodge after his Hodge.
So there are lots of statues there of him and lots of evidence that he lived in the area, but no evidence that he actually…
visited the, the year old Cheshire cheese.
And perhaps he did, perhaps he did, but there’s no proof of it anyway.
So I was still in the general area.
Right.
I mean, so, yeah, I mean, yeah, well, we went to his house.
We went, you know, he probably went there.
So yeah, he might’ve gone to his house.
And apparently he does definitely haunt his.
premises, his former premises.
So people hear unexplained footsteps on the upper floors and they experience a kind of intense brooding atmosphere in the room where he compiled his dictionary.
So there’s that.
Very brooding.
So here’s what it looks like.
Nice.
That’s a big old house.
Was it, was, I mean, was that an apartment building or did he own the whole thing?
My gosh.
For listeners, it’s like four stories, I guess.
I mean, it looks like there’s attic space has rooms, too.
Well, I’m not sure.
Let me look it up really quickly.
I mean, it’s a lot of room.
I mean, of course, he probably had to need a lot of room for all the papers with the entries and whatnot.
Cut this out, but yes.
So he rented the entire, it’s a five-story townhouse.
Wow.
So it’s 17 blocks square.
So he didn’t just lease a single room or a flat.
He rented the entire place.
So he moved into the place in 1748 because he needed a massive amount of space to coordinate his dictionary.
It was a very large entry.
Yeah.
But he paid, yeah, apparently 30 pounds per year to lease the whole building.
Wow.
So can you imagine how much that’s worth today?
But it was basically, he turned it into his own publishing workshop.
Yeah, yeah.
It’s quite a story.
Yeah.
There’s Hodge.
Yeah, there’s Hodge.
But yeah, I mean, we’ve just only touched upon a lot of these stories.
And I know, Blake, a lot of these places are on your bucket list too.
Oh, for sure.
I know you’ll get there.
No, exactly.
I don’t know how I’ll get there, but someday.
I really do need a month.
I need at least a month to see all the places I want to see.
Oh, absolutely.
But yeah, we can dive deeper into some of these topics in future and still plenty more to see.
uk is just an amazing place it is for history and folklore and um just
Those who live there are very fortunate, and please, listeners, write in and tell us your stories and places that you visited, and we’ll definitely talk about them again.
Well, thanks for going.
Thanks for bringing these tales back.
There I am.
Oh, that’s nice.
That’s a great photo.
Yeah, but there’s proof.
Samuel Johnson.
Yeah, that’s proof he was there.
Oh, this is the pub, not his house.
Okay, yeah.
No, that’s proof he was there.
His picture’s right there.
Yeah.
His photograph, yeah, that’s a Polaroid.
Yes, that is an actual photo.
That’s really cool.
Well, he’s got dishes on the menu dedicated to him and drinks dedicated to him, the things that he ate and the things that he drank.
So it’s really just to know that those are more recent stories is so funny.
All right.
Well, I hate to cut it short, but I have to fly.
I bid you adieu.
We’ll talk soon.
Sounds good.
Good luck.
See you.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard a recap of Karen and Matt’s recent trip to England, where they managed to squeeze in an amazing itinerary of Monster Talk-friendly activities.
I really hope to get there someday myself.
I had hoped that by this point in my life, a TARDIS would have shown up, but alas, not yet.
Because getting photos to show up in show notes seems to be hit and miss and mostly miss, I’m putting a link to the photos from their trip, but they’ll be posted and hosted at our Patreon site.
These won’t be behind a paywall.
You should be able to see them at any level of support, including our free tier.
And yes, we have a free tier.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of Monster Talk.
Each episode, we strive to bring you the very best in monster-related content with a focus on bringing scientific skepticism into the conversation.
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Hardcore scientific stuff.
Okay, so ghosts.
When a human body dies, which hole does the ghost come out of, north or south?
This has been a Monster House presentation

The post S05E47 MT Legend Tripping: Paranormal England appeared first on MonsterTalk.

Content Warning: This episode contains sustained discussion of animal injury and death, including the killing of working animals, animals shot after escaping, and graphic period newspaper accounts.

Blake and Karen discuss Circus Train Wrecks as an explanation for mysterious “real” animal sightings, as well as a source of folklore monsters of high improbability.

Blake’s working database draws on archival newspaper accounts running from 1877 – the earliest wreck he could document – through the late 1940s. Across the peak decades the rate averages close to two wrecks per year, and the years with none at all are the exception rather than the rule.

Decade-by-decade distribution across 68 catalogued accounts:

1870s – 1
1880s – 17
1890s – 12
1900s – 23
1910s – 7
1920s – 6
1940s – 2

Of those 68 accounts, 55 involved human injuries or fatalities (80.9%), 30 involved animal injuries or fatalities (44.1%), and 21 involved animal escapes (30.9%).

The golden era peaks between 1902 and 1910, with 21 wrecks in nine years. The 1893 Walter L. Main wreck at Tyrone, Pennsylvania is the deadliest of the early period. The 1918 Hagenbeck-Wallace wreck at Hammond, Indiana is the deadliest in the history of American circus railroading. The last recorded wreck in the set is Missoula, Montana, 1949.

A fuller article laying out the sources, the clippings, and the methodology is forthcoming in the UK’s The Skeptic. Blake has said he will share everything he has gathered with anyone who wants to take the research further – particularly the schedule data that would turn his numerator into an actual rate.

1882 – Paint Lick, KY (Sells Bros. Circus)
A large, fierce tiger escaped from its partially crushed cage after a steep-grade brake failure and roamed the Kentucky hills before eventually being recaptured.

1886 – Putnam, CT (Robbins’s Circus)
Several monkeys broke out of their enclosures during the wreck and escaped into the surrounding Connecticut woods.

1887 – St. Louis, MO (John Robinson Circus)
Multiple wild beasts were freed in a derailment. A great commotion ensued, and a leopard bit a showman before it was successfully caught.

1893 – Tyrone, PA (Walter L. Main Circus)
In one of the most famous wrecks in Pennsylvania history, multiple tigers and other exotic animals escaped. While most were rounded up, at least one tiger roamed loose for some time.

1893 – Grass Valley, CA (Sells & Rentfrow)
A cage car containing performing bears was smashed in a collision, freeing the bears into the California woods. They were eventually recaptured.

1895 – Chicago, IL (George W. Hall Circus)
Two massive boa constrictors escaped from their cages during transit. One was caught quickly, while the other was hunted through the city by local police and schoolboys.

1902 – Tifton to Valdosta, GA (W. H. Harris Nickel Plate Circus)
A legendary, tragic escape in which an elephant named Gypsy, badly shaken after a collision with a yard engine, killed her keeper aboard the car, broke loose near Valdosta, terrorized the town, and was eventually hunted down and shot by an armed posse.

1905 – Arkansas City (Unknown Circus)
Following a severe derailment, a wide assortment of menagerie animals broke loose into the surrounding countryside.

1905 – Temple, TX (Campbell Bros. Circus)
Nearly all of the show’s wild animals escaped into the Texas brush, triggering a massive, widespread local panic in the rural districts.

1905 – Brockville, Ontario (Robinson Circus)
A rare non-panic escape in which a massive elephant named Tillie, sensing the impending collision of her train car, physically jumped from the moving car to safety and remained under her trainer’s control.

1906 – Edison, OH (Robinson Show)
Seven elephants were liberated from their derailed cars, ran amuck through the local area, and were eventually rounded up by circus handlers.

1910 – Ebensburg, PA (Frank A. Robbins Circus)
A massive menagerie escape occurred when two lions, an elephant, a leopard, a hyena, a jaguar, and an ibex all escaped into the Pennsylvania mountains, terrorizing local communities.

1921 – Lincoln, NE (Palmer Brothers Circus)
A train washout freed several lions and other wild animals, prompting armed citizen search parties to patrol the area.

1923 – Topeka, KS (Carl Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus)
A Siberian tiger named Lenine broke out of its demolished cage, chased onlookers, and fled half a mile into the countryside before being shot by a posse.

1925 – Norwood, NY (Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey)
A kangaroo and an emu went missing from their transport cars during transit between New York and Montreal.

1927 – Aurora (near Chicago), IL (Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus)
A passenger train slammed into a stalled circus train, killing one elephant. In the chaos, six other elephants stampeded directly through the streets of Aurora before being recaptured.

1945 – Rubiera, Italy (Yatz Circus)
A dramatic wartime collision freed nine lions, fifty monkeys, a hyena, and a boa constrictor. Allied troops in armored cars had to be deployed to assist farmers in hunting down the escaped lions.
Before the Trains – Real Menagerie Escapes

The Exeter Mail Coach Lioness (1816)
On the night of 20 October 1816, a lioness escaped from Ballard’s Menagerie, camped near an inn in Wiltshire. She emerged from the dark and attacked the lead horse of the Exeter mail coach. The guard attempted to shoot her with a blunderbuss; the menagerie owners eventually distracted her with a mastiff, which she killed, and pinned her under a granary. The coach horse was so badly injured it had to be put down.

Wallace the Lion (1830s)
Wallace was a famous attraction touring Britain withWombwell’s Menagerie. He had a history of mauling his keepers, and the situation escalated into tragedy when he escaped his enclosure in Derbyshire and killed a man. Because exotic animals were enormously valuable financial assets, he was captured and returned to the tour rather than being put down.

Christian the Lion (1969)
Not a monster, but a famous real case of exotic animal keeping. John Rendall and Anthony Bourke boughtChristianas a cub from the Pet Kingdom department at Harrods in London, raised him in a London flat, and exercised him in a local churchyard. He was eventually rewilded in Kenya, and the footage of his reunion with Rendall and Bourke remains one of the most-shared animal videos on the internet.

These are the creatures whose origin stories reach for a wreck, a zoo, or a menagerie as their anchor in the plausible:

The Honey Island Swamp Monster– Louisiana
The Pope Lick Monster– Kentucky
The Sidehill Gouger
The Werewolf of Werewolf Springs
The Beast of Neamț– Romania
The Santer– North Carolina
The Tennessee Wildman
The Grunch – covered in our Louisiana lore episode
The Chatawa Monster – Mississippi ape man
The Beaman Monster – Missouri ape man
Phantom kangaroos– numerous, and almost always attributed to a zoo or circus escape

Broadly, they sort into three types: “alien” or out-of-place animals (alien big cats, lions, phantom kangaroos, gorillas), folklore monsters proper, and the plain escaped predator – which is not really monstrous at all unless you happen to be the cow.

Florida’s armadillos.The popular local legend is that the state’s armadillo population came from an overturned circus truck or train wreck near Titusville or Cocoa. Historians and biologists say otherwise: the animals expanded their range naturally from Texas, supplemented by deliberate local releases.

Eastern cougars and black panthers.Loren Coleman documented a farmer’s claim that “a circus train wreck that happened in the 1950s released the panthers,” and an Associated Press report quoting a keeper at Peoria’s Glen Oak Zoo that “the mystery cat was an escaped circus animal.” Coleman found the same explanation deployed in Britain and Australia – and when he checked Australian government records from 1958 to 1974 for the early-1960s wreck that supposedly loosed the cats, he found no documentation of any such accident.

The Florida Skunk Ape.Coleman has been blunt about the claim that “those apes in Florida were the end result of a Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey circus train wreck which loosed apes into the Florida landscape,” filing it alongside other misguided attempts to explain a hairy hominid as a feral pongid.

Coleman on the wreck explanation, 2007–Cryptomundo

The tiger colony of Villa del Carbón.An Associated Press story dated 30 June 1931 out of Pachuca, Mexico reported that a colony of ferocious Bengal tigers in the mountains descended from three animals that escaped an 1913 wreck of the Maravilla Circus train. Blake could find no evidence of a breeding population of Bengal tigers in Mexico, and no evidence the wreck ever happened.

The Rotterdam red panda, 1978.A red panda escaped from Diergaarde Blijdorp and died very near the zoo shortly afterward, its body recovered by staff. The public did not know. Local media kept broadcasting the appeal to watch for it – and more than a hundred people reported sightings of an animal that was already dead, in a country with no other red pandas in it. A useful case for anyone thinking about how expectation manufactures sightings.

Buried in the archives, dated Thursday 19 July 1917 in the Camden, New JerseyCourier-Post, is a jaw-dropping account of a wrecked circus train loosing lions, tigers, elephants, bears, leopards, kangaroos, monkeys, and snakes into a village within half an hour. A woman is pursued through an upper story by a baboon. Three lions enter a butcher shop and devour four steers, sparing only the cashier, who is safe because she is in a cage. Leopards wreck a barber shop. Rattlesnakes clear out a saloon. Bears take the grocery.

Listen to the end of that one. It is worth it.

Wombwell’s Menagerie led, as these things do, somewhere else entirely.The Wombleswere a British children’s television series that first aired in 1973, based on the books by Elizabeth Beresford, and spawned a novelty band whose members dressed as the burrowing, litter-collecting creatures. Underground, overground, wombling free.

The Wombles at the BBC
The Wombles – “Get Wombling!”
The Wombles theme

Thanks toSharon Hill, who took a side quest to help Blake obtain an important research source. That particular case is barely touched here, but it is central to the essay version of this project.

And once again our thoughts turn toJoe Nickell, who would have loved this one. He genuinely liked the circus and sideshow world and interviewed the people who lived in it.

Beyond Words– Karen Stollznow
Secrets of the Sideshows– Joe Nickell
Unscheduled Stop: The Town of Tyrone and the Wreck of the Walter L. Main Circus– Paula Zitzler with Susie O’Brien
Mysterious America– Loren Coleman
Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast– Jay M. Smith

Karen Stollznow’s latest book,Beyond Words, is out now, and she has just returned from touring it in the UK.

Blake’s full write-up of the circus train wreck research is forthcoming inThe Skeptic, with the complete run of newspaper clippings, sources, and references. A link will be shared here when it is published.

If you are a researcher in circus history, folklore, or rail history and want the raw data, Blake has said repeatedly that he will share everything he has. Get in touch.

MonsterTalk is listener supported. You can find all the ways to help at monstertalk.org/support, including ourPatreon, where you can get the commercial-free version of the show with extended coverage.

Please rate and review us wherever you listen, and share the show on your favorite social platforms.

MonsterTalk theme music is by Peach Stealing Monkeys.

This is not a fully accurate transcript, and was machine generated. It’s here for helping search engines find the episode but not intended to be a faithful transcript of the episode. (But it’s not AWFUL.) Some of the material in this transcript only exists in the Patreon/Premium edition of the show and was excised for the commercial version.

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It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature, part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24 mile long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland.
It’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
This week, we have to talk about the elephant in the room.
And specifically, whether it snuck here on its own, making its way from India through a series of wacky adventures, or whether there’s a more rational explanation that doesn’t involve her donning sunglasses and mocking up a passport for a Mrs. Ellie Funt in order to get past border security and explain why she is here today.
I am speaking, of course, about circus train wrecks.
You know how there’s FAQs, frequently asked questions?
There probably should be FGAs, frequently given answers.
And in the world of mystery beasts and out-of-place animals, at least here in North America, explaining away a mysterious sighting with a wave of the hand and a John Lovett-style circus train wrecks, that’s the ticket, has been a go-to FGA for a long time.
For a few months now, I’ve been saying that I wanted to look into this topic, and this week I took some time and shared some of my findings with Karen.
She had been out of town in the UK promoting her latest book, Beyond Words, so we still needed to catch up, and I want to hear all about the new slew of beloved weird locales that she and Matt managed to visit while they were there.
But that’s not this week.
I’ve been following up on this circus train wreck stuff, and like a phantom elephant’s trunk, there’s a lot to unpackaderm here.
I really, really enjoyed this research, and an article that lays out my findings should serve as a useful guide to anyone looking deeper into the topic.
That’ll be forthcoming.
In the meantime…
I need to thank Sharon Hill, who took a side quest to help me obtain an important research source.
I won’t be talking much about that particular case in this episode, but it’s an important story for the essay version of this effort.
So keep an eye out for that write up and I’ll be sure and share a link here when it’s completed.
Monster Talk.
Yeah, what are we talking about today?
And I think this is a topic that keeps popping up again.
And it’s good to kind of delve into it a bit more.
I don’t remember how many episodes.
I probably could actually look it up now that I’ve started doing transcripts.
But over several episodes, I think it actually started when we were discussing monsters from Louisiana.
I think there was a story in there about the idea that a monster emerged from an escape after a train wreck or a circus train wreck in particular.
And I was like, I know that happens a lot.
But I have never bothered to look into how often did circus train wrecks even happen.
Such a specific thing.
It is.
But I think we have talked about it before, just with regards to alien big cats and just, I guess, flora and fauna that we don’t expect to be in a certain place.
Yeah.
I mean, it doesn’t sound better than a paranormal explanation.
Well, it does.
I think Lauren Coleman kind of it’s funny that I think he and I are both in agreement that it’s not a very good explanation.
But I think Shuker, Carl Shuker.
kind of likes it because it does give you a non supernatural sort of rational explanation for why an unusual animal might be spotted somewhere that it’s not supposed to be.
But how many times can that happen?
That’s seems.
And that’s the question, right?
I, because I don’t know about you, but I just assumed.
And then.
I just assumed this would be a really unusual occurrence.
You wouldn’t think.
Yeah, so I guess, let’s start with the claims.
What are some of the claims?
A quick correction slash insert here.
Despite my having notes in front of me, for some reason my mind went blank, but circus train wrecks have been used as a cryptid and out-of-place animal explanation for a long time.
The Grunch was the monster from our Louisiana lore coverage.
But other folkloric monsters, like the Honey Island Swamp Monster and the Popelik Monster, the Sidehill Galger and the Werewolf of Werewolf Springs, the Beast of Nymphed, maybe it’s D’Ampt, I’m not sure, the Tennessee Wildman, and any number of phantom kangaroos and gorillas and ape man are all tied to circus train wrecks and zoo or menagerie escapes.
I see all of these as being of a family of a kind of rational explanation, even if it’s wrong.
The Popelik monster, which I find that that’s such a strange one because it’s basically a satyr, like it’s a goat man.
But but rather than postulate this escape from a Greek myth, the story is that it was some sort of circus freak show and a train wreck happened.
And that’s why it’s associated with a particular bridge.
Right.
Yeah.
It seems like these claims can be found around the world or at least Anglophone countries.
Yeah.
But but yes.
And they have to be countries where there would be a train.
I mean, so but there is rail in England, but they didn’t have really there’s no history of traveling menageries going by rail like the way like that.
Apparently in the United States, it turns out.
This was actually, there were a lot of train, circus trains.
It was a thing.
And apparently not as safe as I would have suspected it.
Well, you’re making me think of just when my son was a little younger and he liked going to kind of amusement parks and places where they had trains.
And often they would have a circus train.
uh kind of um uh what do you call it like a um compartment train but oh uh like a like a passenger car sort of thing yeah i guess i guess but with bars like bars on it or oh oh for the cage for the for like to show like a cage tiger or whatever yeah or like but
Typically, that’s just one of the kind of cars that have, you know, you’ve got all the different kinds of flat cars and oil tanks and things like that.
And so they usually have a circus one.
So I think that this has been a thing in folklore and reality for quite some time.
Yeah.
So I’ll tell you that what surprised me is.
And not much surprises you.
And I’m very pleasantly surprised.
I mean, let me just, I have to put a whole bunch of caveats here because these are stories about horrible train tragedies and people died.
And the animals died and there was terrible lack of safety and a complete disregard for human life.
And some of these stories ended up with horrible outcomes for the animals in question.
But it was it was not.
A very rare occurrence for circus trains to wreck.
My data showed the first one I was able to find was in 1877.
And they continued with alarming frequency up until right around…
1930 i’m gonna go ahead and spoil something here the the i i first my initial thought was oh i bet that’s when they started implementing like rail safety rules or it’s like no no no that’s not it
No, 1929, the great crash, the economic crash actually caused that precipitous drop in circus train wrecks because a lot of the circuses went out of business and then they consolidated.
And then the newer train, the companies that could actually afford to buy up all these companies and their stock, their rolling stock, were able to start using safer rail cars.
They used to make them out of literally like varnished wood.
Seems a little cheap.
It’s okay.
There is a monster in this story.
The monster is…
the businesses that ran these circuses and their complete disregard for safety.
Oh my gosh.
All right.
So I know your kid loved trains, right?
I love trains.
Not the way my son does, but the, I don’t know.
We had a G scale model rail rate.
Like that’s the big garden size.
Like I had that running around his room.
Oh, you’re kidding me.
Wow.
Oh, it was so cool.
It was so cool.
I still got it, but we took it down.
But on the top, if you look on the cars, on some of them, you’ll see there’s kind of like a wheel on the back that looks like a…
door on a ship where like they would lock the doors, you know, like you rotate to that.
Those were the brakes.
And so before they invented air brakes, the cars themselves would have these brakes.
You have to like go back and rotate the wheel.
So the brakeman would have to be assigned either assigned to a car and like rotate them on command or whatever.
It turns out that when loading the train.
It was really inconvenient to have that big metal wheel sticking up.
So they often just didn’t put it on.
It would take them off and it would make it easier to roll stuff from the back of the train forward, load the train.
And guess what?
That turns out to be horribly unsafe.
I was going to ask you, the natural question is, why were these circus trains so prone to wrecks?
So you’re saying this is the main reason or one of the reasons?
It’s one of the reasons.
I was going to say, they’re also made of wood and varnished wood at that.
And then they were… Oh, man.
Some of these cars…
There’s a story in there about one of these trains where…
at the end after they made all their modifications to load it there were only four sets of brake across the whole train they’re they’re loaded down with heavy circus equipment and humans personnel they had 80 people in a car sleeping in a wooden car that was lit by a lantern so yeah not great to fire hazards and fire hazards safety hazard yeah like this is pre-osha what
so it sounds like some of these wrecks would have involved humans too oh yeah quite a bit a lot of people died um the uh the other thing is it was cheaper to uh move people on these trains if you um
ran them at night off off schedule from the regular train passenger line stuff so and also if you think about it um these trains really wanted to move fast because they wanted to go from one circus town to the next and they had to get there and get unloaded and get ready because the first thing they would do in the new town is have a parade
And the parade was their advertisement for Come See Our Circus.
So they’re like tearing down and hopping on a train, rushing to the next town overnight, unloading the train, building up a circus parade, building the tents.
They’ve got people whose specialty is canvas and poles and all these different things.
So it is a…
I don’t know if that came through, but that was me snapping my fingers to how urgent this business was.
They’re adding dangers.
They’re going nuts.
They’re adding dangers.
They’re moving fast.
They’re removing safety equipment.
And they’re doing a lot of this at a time when they didn’t have electronic messaging and electronic switching.
So there’s people, you know, people, you’re depending on people remembering or being informed all the way across the line that a different train is going to be running, that the siding is going to be filled by a train, or all these different sort of safety factors.
And it just led to so much death and carnage to the point that it’s basically…
I want to say it’s two a year.
It’s actually like 1.8 a year from 1877 to 1929.
So that’s statistically pretty significant, really.
Very significant.
Some years had four, you know, and some years only had one.
And here and there would be like one year, not close to any others, where there would be no train wrecks.
But it was very rare.
Almost every year had multiple.
That’s so wild because I never ever thought that this would have this much frequency and be this horrific.
It sounds like such an anomaly, but it also makes me think about some of the stories that we’ve talked about, like the San Antonio railroad tracks and crashes with trains and buses involving children.
So I think there are some parallels there, too, that these things did happen.
But this is astonishing.
Now, has anyone, you’re delving into this, doing this research, has anyone written about this topic?
Let me just say, OK, I love collaboration and sharing research.
This is such an interesting opportunity.
People have written a lot about circuses.
And in that research material, they have the train schedules for a lot of these big companies.
Right.
Because what I’m looking at is I’m looking for, you know, did a circus train wreck happen?
Did a circus trainer.
So I’m searching for that year by year through the newspaper archives.
All right.
So this is actually, from a statistical perspective, an interesting inversion of the survivorship bias, right?
So there’s a famous math story about trying to get tracks on like where to put armor on airplanes and looking at the data sets for like airplanes of where they were shot when they came back.
And a famous statistician looked at it and said, hey.
We’re only looking at the planes that made it.
We should also be looking to see what happened to the planes that didn’t make it.
That’s actually more important.
Oh, yes.
Like on Facebook, people say, I didn’t wear a seatbelt when I was growing up and I was fine.
And so this is the inverse of that.
So it’s like instead of survivorship, this is the crash.
It’s a bias towards wrecks.
Yeah.
So I don’t have a I’ve got a numerator with no denominators to get real stats here.
But but that data is out there.
So somebody wanted to take the time to do that statistical work.
There’s a really interesting historical thing.
Someone I’m sure.
Yeah.
Well, I’m going to share everything I’ve got with anybody who’s interested.
So when I do my write up, it’ll have it’ll have I’ve got so many newspaper clippings.
I think I have.
Cool.
Yeah.
I mean, I’ve got close to 70 examples and very few of those were overlapping.
So these were covered by the newspapers.
I mean, to me, that would have been of interest.
Absolutely.
Even the smallest collision, if it had a circus in it, was newsworthy, apparently.
For sure.
Yeah.
You read some of those older newspapers and they talk about, oh, Mr. and Mrs. Smith visited town.
Yes, exactly.
Yes, absolutely.
If a circus train crashed, that would absolutely be newsworthy.
Well, so these were a real thing, and that’s fascinating, but how did they become tied to monster lore?
So…
When looking at this case, I was specifically looking at this whole thing about circus train wrecks.
And I want to make sure we do cover that this actually has a precedent that is older than the train wrecks because it ties into zoos and menageries.
But I found several different examples where it was being used as an explanation.
But the irony to me…
is that in almost every case where a monster is alleged to be caused by a circus train wreck escape, Mm-hmm.
There is no corresponding train range from which it could be sourced.
So it’s not what I would have hypothesized was places with known major wrecks would be more likely to spawn phantom lions or phantom apes or that sort of thing.
And that’s not what happened at all.
So they seem to be completely divorced from each other.
It sits there as an explanation, but it has no bearing.
And are we talking about, I mean, obviously monsters, so hybrids and things like that, but also just escaped panthers or leopards, whatever?
One of the early examples was a story out of Mexico that was shared on The Wire and showed up in numerous papers across the U.S. And the story alleged that there was a breeding population of Bengal tigers in Mexico that were sourced to an earlier circus train wreck in which multiple tigers escaped.
But I couldn’t find any evidence that there was a breeding population of Bengal tigers in the wilds of Mexico or that the train wreck alleged to have sourced them or loosed them even took place.
From an AP story,
June 30, 1931 Circus train wreck is blamed for tiger colony.
Pachuca, Mexico A circus train wreck 18 years ago is believed to be responsible for the existence in the mountains near Villa del Carbon of a colony of ferocious Bengal tigers, which sometimes descend to prey upon cattle in the lower lands and are known to have killed several persons.
A tiger and two tigresses escaped when the Maravilla Circus Train was wrecked in 1913 near the villa and they are believed to have been progenitors of the numerous beasts of their kind that now dwell in the mountains.
Bengal tigers do not exist anywhere else in America.
And that many years later as well.
The story hit the wire, as we would say back then.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
And that was one of the earliest ones.
So by the 1920s, I would say this was a pretty common explanation for these erroneous animals.
And I should just because it’s it’ll show up in the article for sure.
One that’s actually been attested to by naturalists, but but incorrectly, is that armadillos in Florida originated in a circus train wreck.
or sometimes in a circus truck wreck.
They actually migrated across from Texas.
There’s actually very clear data on that.
But those stories persisted, especially in the 1940s.
I guess when the population was really blowing up, people wanted to know why it was happening.
And I know that feeling.
Similar climate, too.
Well, and they’ve actually reached Georgia now.
In my lifetime, they were never around.
The possums were your go-to roadkill here.
And in the past 20 years, really since I’ve moved to this house, possums and coyotes have really showed up in force.
So, yeah.
And no circus train wreck.
Well, I wanted to go back to the real wrecks for a minute because a few other questions popped into my mind.
Were these circus animals, were they ever transported differently from livestock or was it the same?
They had special cars.
Yeah, they had, you know, given that they have big cats and predators, they had to be treated differently than just the cattle cars.
But by far…
The most frequently victimized, if that’s the right word, circus animal were the horses.
Horses don’t do well if you break a limb.
And frequently after these…
It can be the end of them.
Yeah.
And so it’s sad.
Horse racing is so cruel.
Yeah, it’s really sad.
If you go look at circus train wrecks, you’ll almost always, it seems like, see a pile of dead horses nearby.
It’s like, you know, that’s just terrible.
If you’ve ever heard a wounded horse scream, it’s not pretty.
Oh, I haven’t.
That’s a horrible thought.
But aside from the animals being injured, I can imagine that if any did escape, that it would have been really chaotic.
Yes.
Bedlam, that’s probably not the right word.
They, a ruckus…
What was the other word?
There’s a whole bunch.
It created a spectacle.
There was a case where elephants got loose in Chicago and were wandering the streets for like four hours.
Oh, wow.
You can imagine sitting in the bar and you look up and you take a sip and you see an elephant walk by and you put it down.
It’s like, never again.
Yeah.
It makes me think even today you do see things on Facebook, on social media, where a bear wanders into a convenience store and just opens up all the chocolate bars.
Or you see a mountain lion get into a shop or something or break into someone’s house.
Eat the cat food and the dog food.
So, yeah, I imagine that the animals that did survive and weren’t injured, it just must have been spooked.
Now, I have to think, you know how…
advertising can be a little misleading uh it’s just a little yeah yeah um occasionally i should i should probably insert the copy here but there when i got to 1914 so at some point i decided uh when i realized 1877 seemed to be the oldest one i just started going year by year through the archives uh with a bunch of different search terms
And when I got to 1914, I saw a jaw-dropping story about animals invading a town.
And it was like, holy cow, how have I never heard of this story before?
This is amazing.
Courier Post, Camden, New Jersey, Thursday, July 19th, 1917.
Animals escape in circus train wreck.
A circus train going about 30 miles an hour was wrecked on the outskirts of a town.
No one was killed, but the cages containing wild animals were smashed and the beasts got loose.
Within a half hour, lions, tigers, elephants, bears, leopards, kangaroos, monkeys, and snakes were overrunning the village.
The people were thrown into a panic and they fled wildly from place to place in their effort to escape the man-eaters.
One woman, pursued by a huge baboon, climbed to the upper story of a house, but the baboon was close on her tail and she leaped out a window.
She landed on a roof, and as she turned to get away from her pursuer, she fell through a skylight.
Two tigers invaded a home where a man and his wife and son were together.
The woman fainted and fell out of a window.
Three lions entered a butcher shop.
Everyone fled but the girl cashier, who was saved because she was in a cage.
The lions devoured about four butchered steers.
A trio of leopards wrecked a barber shop, a flock of rattlesnakes cleared out a saloon, and a company of bears wrecked a grocery store.
Meantime, the people of the place were rushing from place to place seeking safety.
Mothers took their children into storm cellars.
Men ran like mad.
The panic was finally quieted when the keepers from the circus went through the town and rounded up their charges, thus bringing to a climax…
Wild Beasts at Large, the Greater Vitagraph Deluxe Feature, which will be the attraction at the Elm Theater on Saturday, July 21st.
At the matinee, prices will be cut in half for children and there will be a number of other reels.
So that was all just a ruse to lure people in.
It was absolutely just like a normal news story.
Remember a few years ago when the internet wasn’t terrible and they started having these…
There was these fake news stories at the bottom of like CNN.
All the newspaper companies had like ads at the bottom of the page that looked like more news stories, but they were ads.
And I always thought that was really a sign of the demise of integrity on the journalist side.
Yeah.
Or maybe some things have never changed.
Or maybe they’ve never changed at all.
And maybe it’s been like this since 1914.
I was surprised.
Apparently, this would have even been illegal.
I saw that there was actually an act that made it where you were supposed to have your advertisements clearly labeled as such.
Right.
For entertainment purposes only.
That sort of thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And this this copy was clearly not following that protocol.
Yeah, that’s astounding.
And this is just revealing so much.
It’s really surprising.
I thought this would be kind of cut and dried and all this kind of thing didn’t happen or it happened once and then just transported everywhere.
So this is just really illuminating.
Somebody could easily write a book just about circus train escape.
There’s so many interesting stories in here.
Well, do we know anything about the creatures that escaped?
Did they survive?
I mean, you talk about these animals.
Did you say tigers that were…
lions 18 years later that were supposedly in reality are we talking about animals surviving for days or weeks or longer?
Some of them were never recovered I want to say it was New Jersey there were some monkeys that got loose that were never recaptured
Snakes seem to be the ones that really get away.
And that leads to all sorts of discussion where people claim to see them later.
Boa constrictors, that sort of thing.
Now, in reality, these were upper United States.
So those animals would have died from the cold first winter.
Good point.
But yeah, a lot of them got recovered because if you think about it, it’s not like in general animals.
when loosed, immediately revert to their natural state.
These animals have been in captivity for a long time.
It would make them vulnerable.
Right, exactly.
The most heartbreaking, I think, of these stories to me is the 1902 story of Gypsy the Elephant.
The train crash upsets her.
She gets loose.
Her trainer tries to settle her and she smashes him to a pulp.
Okay.
And again, this is 1902.
This is Georgia.
Can you guess what happens next?
From the Chicago Tribune, Monday, November 24th, 1902.
Elephants wild in circus car.
Gypsy kills its keeper in Georgia and is shot after terrorizing people.
Savannah, Georgia, November 23rd, special.
Gypsy, the largest elephant of the W.H.
Harris Circus, became enraged on the train between Tifton and Valdosta, Georgia, killed her keeper, wrecked the inside of the car, and when the train stopped at Valdosta, broke out of the car and terrorized the town and was killed.
The circus train was wrecked by colliding with a yard engine at Tifton Saturday morning.
Several of the animal cars were smashed.
Among the animal cars wrecked was that of Gypsy who was intensely nervous after the accident.
Her keeper, James O’Rourke, tried to quiet her.
The great beast was thoroughly frightened and nervous.
Six miles out from Valdosta, she became so restless and noisy that O’Rourke entered her car for the purpose of attempting to quiet her.
The elephant attacked him and before he could escape,
She had gathered him in her trunk and lashed him against the floor of the car.
The first toss killed the man, but the infuriated beast trampled the body until it was a mass of broken bones and bruised flesh.
O’Rourke had not time to close the door of the car after he entered, and when the train slowed up at a crossing near Valdosta, the way was open for Gypsy to make her way to liberty.
She took advantage of it.
A hasty hunt was organized.
Gypsy had taken to the woods a rogue elephant made desperate by her experience in the Tifton wreck.
The hunt lasted for two hours when the mad elephant was found in a cotton field, tearing up the stalks, tossing them in every direction, and trumpeting as if mad.
It was seen to be useless to recapture the elephant, so large caliber rifles and explosive bullets were brought into requisition.
After a dozen shots, the big brute was mortally wounded, and a final shot in the forehead completed the tragedy.
Yes.
Tragic.
Oh, it really is.
I mean, I… Tragedy upon tragedy.
But it’s the most Georgia story I’ve, I couldn’t imagine it going any other way.
You know, it can happen right now.
That’s the real monster here.
Perhaps, yeah.
You know, we often say that fact is stranger than fiction.
And that seems to be the case here.
Just that these stories are unbelievable.
And, but just, I think as amazing as the claims, the Weider claims.
Yeah.
I mean, it is.
I’ll tell you what I should do.
Now, to be clear, I’m going to be publishing this in the UK’s Skeptic online magazine.
So I’ll share that later.
I was going to ask you about that.
Yeah.
You need a home for this.
But I love show notes.
I’ve been really leaning into the show notes for sharing stuff.
So check the show notes for this one.
And I’ll put in, I think I’ve got something like 17 cases where the animals escaped and what happened.
And they go from 1882 to 1945.
It’s interesting that that kind of straddles the war time.
You were talking about 1914 earlier.
I wonder if during the wars, if there was an increase in interest in circuses because of just, I guess, for social reasons and if this kind of thing was more prone to happening during those years.
Yeah, it’s a good question.
I don’t know that I could track any patterns.
To answer that question, I would need that other data set of what were the actual show schedules like, which exist, but I don’t have it.
So there’s some really good archivist research to be done on that.
So you told me that this train wreck monster story has some historical predecessors.
What are those?
Can you tell us about those?
guess i was curious about the monster side of it but when i got into it i was also wondering
did any escaped you know animals actually cause damage and so yeah the there’s a couple of really historical interesting ones i think and both of them are in the uk where it would not have been on a train but it would have been with a traveling menagerie so i guess they would have been on carts or something i don’t know it would probably been on wagons okay wagon of some kind yeah so uh
There was a, one case is Wallace the Lion, which was in the 1830s.
And so this was apparently a very famous lion that was traveling with something, a company called Womble’s Menagerie.
That sounds familiar.
That’s weird.
Wombles.
It is.
It sounds like something you would catch, you know, if you’ve had some bad pub food.
I’ve got a bad case of venereal disease.
Oh, also true.
Or a kid’s TV show.
It’s the Wombles.
Yeah.
Underground, overground, wumbling free.
The wumbles of Wimbledon, common are we.
Get wumbling!
But he was not a very well-behaved lion.
Oh, Wallace?
Yeah, Wallace said actually… Are they ever well-behaved?
I don’t know.
It’s almost like they don’t want to be in captivity.
Almost, yeah.
But he actually mauled and wounded several keepers.
And then in the 1830s, I don’t know the exact year, but he escaped his enclosure and actually killed someone.
He escaped and killed a guy, but they were able to…
argue that because of how incredibly rare and valuable he was, they returned him to the menagerie and allowed him to continue to be toured, which I just find really surprising.
After he’s had a taste of love.
Yeah.
And then the other one is the Exeter male coach lioness.
And this one in 1860.
We went to Exeter, so.
Oh, it’s probably in the same area.
It probably is.
Devil’s Footprints.
Yeah, yeah.
So I think the inn still exists, although I don’t think it’s an inn anymore.
But it was in October 20th, 1860.
Yeah, probably.
Everything’s a pub.
It is Ballard’s Menagerie.
They had a lion.
The lion escaped.
It came out and in the night found and attacked the lead horse of the Exeter male coach.
And the guard tried to shoot her with a blunderbuss.
But it didn’t work.
The menagerie owners tried to distract her with the dog, and she killed the dog.
And eventually they got her pinned down under a granary.
And I don’t know what happened to her after that, but…
It’s a blunderbuss.
Oh, it looks like in a cartoon, you see a gun with a giant…
The end of it looks like a horn.
Oh, okay.
It spreads out.
It’s like a bazooka or something.
I think…
I think it’s a muzzle-loading scattergun is what I believe it is.
Okay.
Yeah.
Brutal.
Those are really interesting, and it makes me wonder about the turning point where the explanation shifted from escaped from a menagerie to escape from a circus train.
Do we have any data on that?
Again, well, in the UK, it never does change.
Okay.
So here’s…
If you look up alien big cats, ABCs, we’ve talked about these before.
This is the idea that there’s large non-native populations of cats living in the UK.
And of all the cryptids and monsters out there, this is probably the most plausible because there’s so much evidence that they actually exist.
I don’t think it’s likely that they’re really like lions or giant black panthers.
A lot of those are just house cats that are misidentified.
Or as many cases as are reported.
But the story will always be in the 1960s, it was kept in a menagerie, you know, and they passed a law in the 1970s and it made it harder to keep animals like this.
So rather than pay a tax, people just let their animals go, right?
As you would, yeah.
Yeah.
I don’t know if that ever really happened, but there is a very famous case of Christian the Lion.
Now, get this, you could buy just about anything at Harrods.
Went there too.
This couple bought, these couple of guys bought Christian when he was a cub in the Pet Kingdom department of Harrods.
I think that department’s closed now.
Probably so.
But they raised him in a London flat.
And they would take him to a nearby churchyard to let him exercise.
And they kept him until he was quite big.
Eventually, they got him rewilded back to Kenya.
And if you look on the internet, there’ll be famous footage of him being, they come back to visit him as an adult.
They were already adults, but he’s an adult now.
And you wonder, are they about to be eaten?
And instead, he remembers them and licks them.
It’s very heartwarming.
That’s so bizarre.
And London flats are small for the most part.
So I can’t imagine doing that.
It’s unbelievable.
Bizarre.
So I don’t think that explanation of the menagerie escape has ever gone away, nor will it.
But the craziest thing is I would try to, what’s the oldest case where this was being used as the explanation?
And surprisingly, it is the Beasts of Gévaudan.
Your fave.
My favorite.
I love this story.
And as near as I can find, it’s the oldest case where contemporary to the events, one of the explanations is that it’s not a wolf.
It is an escaped animal, either a lion or a hyena that got out of a menagerie.
Now, this led to a really weird observation, which is going to end up being sort of the stinger from my article.
So if you want to wait and read it, you’ll stop listening or skipping it.
But here’s what happened.
So I just finished.
reading brian riegel’s book darwin and the monsters and he lays out the i guess a really nice summary of what i would say is the enlightenment version of monsterology which is that monsters were seen as signs from god
They were wonders and portents, right?
And then they became something that one would keep in a cabinet of curiosity.
And as science developed as a discipline, people started to do, you know, taxonomy and trying to find an understanding of them.
And after Darwin, you start to get this idea that all these animals have lineages and are related to species.
And it becomes a very clearly defined biology that we understand today.
So but prior to that, one would expect, I think, to find that monsters were treated as miracles, wonders or scourges of Satan, all sorts of things.
Right.
And so with Javel Dawn, we’ve got this really interesting case.
It’s happening right in the middle of the Enlightenment.
And we know that some people are saying it is a werewolf and people are saying it’s a magic wolf and people are saying it’s escaped from a menagerie.
They’re looking for rational explanations and magical religious explanations.
But it’s not the first case of wolves.
attacking people in France.
It turns out in Jay Smith’s book, where he talks to the monstrous of the J’ai-Vadon, he talks about previous cases.
And there were every, you know, three or four decades, there would be a spate of wolves killing peasants.
And so I thought to myself, well, this is interesting because here’s a great test case.
I can go back and see what did people say about these monsters?
They’re just wolves, but what did people say about them in those previous cases?
It should be miraculous, right?
It should be that they’re scourges from God if that model’s true.
And instead, what I found is more interesting that it was the church that was proposing these were just wolves.
And it was the populace that believed that they were monsters or something weird or werewolves.
Because so.
It’s not a clear division between science and the supernatural being a paradigm pushed forward by a ruling class.
I don’t know what it is.
It’s messy because the reality is you’ve always got certain people who have…
cultural cachet to say, this is the official story.
And if you want to be respectable, you’d best stick with it, right?
The party line.
The party line.
And the people who control that party line change over time.
And so I think in some sense, science is correct.
I mean, they have a model that’s testable and it holds up very well to testing.
But as far as explanations go, it’s not the accuracy that controls the narrative.
It’s whoever has the printing press.
Yeah.
Yes, the voice.
The voice.
You’re making me think, too, of a recent show talking about the devil’s footprints, to raise it again, and how the local priest…
If it behooves you to do so.
Oh!
That’s a nice one.
But how the local vicar or parish priest was saying, oh, this isn’t the devil.
This isn’t Satan.
This is a kangaroo.
Exactly.
Which is funny, too, because in America, phantom kangaroos almost always get attributed to escapes from zoos or circuses.
Yeah, it’s interesting because you really do have the tropes, don’t you?
Yeah.
They’re lions and tigers and kangaroos and panthers.
And, again, you get similar stories in Australia, but it is interesting the way that they’re retold in different countries in Australia that it’s American soldiers who brought a panther over as a mascot, you know, as opposed to the circus train wrecks, as opposed to the menageries.
It’s a different costume, but the same kind of story.
Yes.
And they also have a there was I found a shipwreck story from Australia as well, explaining another incursion of wild animals from a different place.
That’s interesting.
Is that common to the US and UK as well?
I didn’t see any.
I just saw one from Australia.
So I don’t know.
So that’s where my research ended up.
And I look forward to writing it to something more cohesive.
know yeah yeah i i look forward i think there’s more to come out about this but i guess just in closing what does this all tell us about how people rationalize monsters
Yeah, I don’t know yet.
I haven’t decided.
I can tell you that there seems to be a complete divorce between the data and the explanation.
And that’s that’s interesting in its own right.
In a sense, if you think about it, which is kind of funny in folklore, there’s there’s this idea of these folklore motifs.
And this idea that like recurring these elements would recur in story.
And it’s funny because some of the most folkloric monsters, the ones that are biologically implausible.
seek their anchor in reality in the form of a real kind of event, which apparently has never been the source of any random monsters near as I could tell.
So as plausibility anchoring goes, it’s a very peculiar one because it takes on the mantle of folklore itself.
Oh, gosh, yeah.
It really complicates things, but it’s…
It’s just so interesting.
You’ve done some really great research and thank you for doing that.
And I look forward to what more you dig up and then can put into an article.
This has been such a pleasant distraction during a very challenging time.
So, yeah.
I’m sorry.
Yeah, no, it’s OK.
I’ll just say because I’m because I’m recording it right now.
And this is just from the heart.
I’m almost positive my mother is going to pass either today or tomorrow.
So I’m so sorry.
I empathize, unfortunately.
And she was always she never got around to actually listening to my show.
I don’t think the podcasting was the technology.
But she was so proud.
She was so proud.
I’ll bet.
Yeah.
Thank you for just raising such a wonderful and interesting topic.
And yeah, I look forward to learning more about it.
But this is a really good start.
And certainly, as always, we love to hear from our listeners and see if they’ve got any.
research or any thoughts on the topic?
Absolutely.
I’ll be glad to share all my findings.
Very generous of you.
I hope somebody out there will take this further because I think there’s some really interesting work to be done here.
Yeah, certainly is.
All right.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you, Blake.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard a discussion about my research into circus train wrecks as it relates to monsters and phantom animal sightings.
Stay tuned and the longer write-up should be done in a few weeks.
I’ll mention it and share the link when that’s available.
This topic, or at least this explanation, appears to have been under-documented in monster lore, and I hope some of my findings will be of use to other monster, circus, and folklore researchers.
I’ll be putting links in some of the findings in the show notes, and when the actual article comes out, it will also have links and references as well.
Once again, I found myself reminded of Joe Nichols’ unexpected demise.
He would have friggin’ loved this research.
He really liked circuses and sideshows and wrote a whole book called Secrets of the Sideshows, wherein he talked with important people from that world of touring entertainers.
As I said during my conversation with Karen, when we were recording this episode, my mother’s death was near.
She passed about an hour after we finished recording.
As I’m sure has been clear from various comments across all these episodes, she and I didn’t see eye to eye on what’s really going on in this world.
But she indulged my curiosity about all these weird topics, with the exception of magic and demonology.
She didn’t even allow us to watch obviously fictional shows that had to do with magic.
But somehow…
She still took me to see King Kong in 1976, and she got me that iconic John Berkey lunchbox featuring the movie poster art.
And she took me to Harryhausen movies, which I’m sure must have made her squirm.
Raiders of the Lost Ark was a step too far, and she pulled me somewhat aghast from the film during the early scenes when the federal agents are asking what the Ark was.
In my mom’s head canon, the Ark of the Covenant had been taken up into heaven and implying that it was here on earth was too blasphemous to entertain.
Maybe she thought we were going to go see the 1976 Sun classic, The Search for Noah’s Ark.
Who knows?
It was a strange way to grow up, being instinctively drawn to stories of the supernatural and wanting to know what was real and what was BS, but also being told that anything that countered the narratives of the church and the Bible probably were real, but were demonic.
I remember my parents turning off 2001 A Space Odyssey before the bone even got thrown in the sky, because, as my dad angrily shouted at the television, everybody said this is a good movie, but it’s about evolution.
Yet, they let me watch Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, only joining me for a few minutes during the first episode before deciding it wasn’t to their taste.
Yet, thankfully, they did not forbid me from finishing the series.
Anyway, some parts of who I am are because my parents encouraged me, and some aspects were developed in quiet defiance.
But there would be no Monster Talk without my mother, so I’ll just say thanks one more time.
I’m sure I was an unexpectedly complicated handful and I’m grateful for the effort that she was able to muster.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of Monster Talk.
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Get wombling!
This has been a Monster House presentation.
In the 1830s, I don’t know the exact year, but he escaped his enclosure in Derbyshire and actually killed someone.
Derbyshire, yeah.
Derbyshire.
Derbyshire?
Derbyshire.
Derbyshire.
Anyway.
It was somewhere near the shire.
It was a shire.

The post S05E45 – Circus Train Wrecks 🎪🚂 appeared first on MonsterTalk.

Blake welcomes back Dr. Brian Regal – historian of science, technology, and medicine, and now Professor Emeritus at Kean University – to talk about his final academic book, Darwin and the Monsters: The Long History of Cryptozoology. Regal has been a MonsterTalk guest since the show was still in single digits, and he was the first guest to reach out to the podcast rather than the other way around. He has also been sitting on this particular book for a very long time: he first floated the title on this show back in 2013, and then spent more than a decade writing everything else instead. Karen is away in the UK promoting Beyond Words, so this episode is a two-hander between Blake and an old friend.

The book runs monsters forward from the classical world – Lucretius, Pliny, Aristotle, and a Sumerian hero fighting a monster in the oldest story we have – through the Middle Ages, the age of curiosities, and into the modern hunt for anomalous primates.

Correction noted in the episode: the exchange where Brian first mentioned the Darwin book was MonsterTalk #071 in 2013 – thirteen years ago, not seventeen. The point stands.

Dr. Brian Regal is Professor Emeritus of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at Kean University in Union, New Jersey. He grew up in Newark’s Ironbound neighborhood, served in the armored cavalry, and came to academia without a family map for how any of it worked. His scholarship has consistently pointed at the places where credentialed science and enthusiastic amateurs collide: eugenics and human-origins research, the Jersey Devil, pseudoscience and pseudohistory, alternative theories of who “discovered” America, and the long strange career of monster hunting. He is a Fellow of the Linnean Society and a longtime contributor to the journal Endeavour, and he is one of the most frequent guests in MonsterTalk’s history.

Host and producer: Blake Smith
Co-host: Dr. Karen Stollznow (away this episode)
Guest: Dr. Brian Regal
MonsterTalk theme music: Peach Stealing Monkeys

This is not a fully accurate transcript, and was machine generated. It’s here for helping search engines find the episode but not intended to be a faithful transcript of the episode. (But it’s not AWFUL.) Some of the material in this transcript only exists in the Patreon/Premium edition of the show and was excised for the commercial version.

———————
Monster House presents…
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We’re dependent upon the revenue from these ads and from the support of our patrons at patreon.com forward slash monster talk to continue making this show.
As a disclaimer, your hosts are unable to control what ads you will hear, and while we have done what we can to avoid ads that are divisive, the system that injects them sometimes ignores our preferences and always seems to ignore our efforts to not interrupt the conversational flow.
While we understand this can be disruptive, we’re trying our best.
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It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant, hairy creature.
Part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24 mile long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland.
It’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
Brian Riegel returns again to talk about science and monsters.
He’s now retired from teaching and he’s joining us to talk about his final academic book, Darwin and the Monsters.
It’s a somewhat bittersweet discussion for reasons that will be clear in the interview, but I enjoyed reading his book.
The volume is from an academic publisher, and it reminds me a bit of ye olde blockbuster video days, when some monsters were priced for home purchase, and others were mysteriously priced to rent, with a sticker putting it out of range for most people.
That said, I enjoyed reading it, especially across the first few chapters.
Those describe how monsters were viewed in the ancient world and walked the reader through the centuries to bring them from myth to curiosities to controversy to cryptozoology.
I’ll put a link in the show notes if you want to snag a copy, but as I said, you might want to check the library instead of the bookstore on this one.
But this episode is not a book review, it’s a chat with an old friend.
And I don’t know what Brian will do next, but I’ve enjoyed talking to him across the entire history of the show, and this is no exception.
Despite being retired now, somewhere in there he’s still just a kid from New Jersey who loved monsters.
Despite a career that spans Cold War military deployment and academic achievements, he never lost that sense of wonder and excitement.
If you enjoy our Monster Talks, you’d probably enjoy hearing from his autobiography, which I’ll also link to in the show notes.
It’s called The Monster from New York.
Karen was not available to be here this week as she’s in the UK promoting her new book, Beyond Words, How We Learn, Use, and Lose Language.
She’ll be back very soon for more Monster Talks.
Welcoming back Brian Riegel to Monster Talk.
My God, Brian, you’ve been with us as a repeat guest since we were in the single digits.
In fact, I’m almost positive you were the first guest who reached out to us to make an introduction.
And you saw somehow presciently that your work would overlap with our mission.
And that has continued to be true for all this time.
That’s amazing.
So I really appreciate that.
Oh, so you’re Brian Riegel, and you are now an emeritus professor of history from Keene.
Emeritus, historian emeritus of the history of science, technology, and medicine.
All right.
Do you ever really stop being a historian?
Don’t you always have to be?
No, no.
So we’re here today to talk about your new book.
So I’m holding up your book for listeners who are not on YouTube.
This is Darwin and the Monsters, The Long History of Cryptozoology by Brian Riegel.
Now, I got questions, Brian.
First of all…
Based on the pricing, is this meant to be a textbook?
I mean, it’s a little pricey for my poor, poor, poor pocket.
So can you talk about that?
How did this book come to be?
Who’s the target audience?
Because I love the content, and I know our readers, sorry, our listeners would love the content, but I don’t know how this, I’d like to hear how this book came to be and who you had in mind when you wrote it.
Well, if you remember…
Way back in the Stone Age, the first time I appeared, you were good enough to have me on the show.
The last thing you always ask is, do you have anything new going on?
Yeah.
And I said, yeah, I’ve got this idea for a book called Darwin and the Monsters.
Holy cow.
Wow.
I do not remember.
That is amazing.
A quick correction.
This exchange was actually in episode 71 back in 2013.
So that was 13 years ago instead of 17.
But the point stands.
Brian’s been planning this book a long time.
Don’t I know that feeling?
I never got around to doing it.
It was supposed to be loosely my doctoral dissertation.
but I didn’t think the school would let me do a doctoral dissertation on monsters.
So I said, well, I’ll put it away.
I did the next best thing.
I did the life of Henry Fairfield Osborne, who was the president of the American Museum of Natural History forever.
literally died in his office.
He’s the guy who named Tyrannosaur.
He named Velociraptor.
He sent Roy Chapman Andrews, the guy that Steven Spielberg based Indiana Jones on.
He sent Andrews off to Outer Mongolia.
And so that was deemed acceptable.
And so I said, well, I’ll get to this Darwin thing when…
I’m finished with my doctoral dissertation.
I finished a doctoral dissertation.
And for those in the audience who are working on a doctorate or thinking about working on a doctorate, I had a publisher for that Osborne book before I was done writing it.
In fact, I only had three chapters.
I had no idea how books were written or published.
The neighborhood I grew up in, in Newark, I didn’t know anyone
who knew anyone, who knew anyone, who knew anyone who had ever published a book.
You know, so I was, I had no one to, there were my professors, they had all published a lot of stuff, but no one had published anything recently.
And so I came along and I contacted Ashgate and I, because they had put a little tiny ad on,
in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
And it said, oh, do you have an idea for a history of science book?
Let us know.
So again, being as naive as I was at the time, I just sent them like a one-page outline.
I said, oh, here’s an idea I have.
And they said, oh, we like this.
Can you send us a little more fleshed out version?
And so I did that and they liked that.
And then they said, can you send us a more detailed multi-page explanation of what you’re doing?
And I did that.
And the next thing I knew, they sent me a contract.
Wow.
But I only had three chapters done.
And I was like, I can’t tell them I only have three chapters.
They’ll take the contract back.
Excuse me.
And I was living in Providence at the time.
And my late wife, Lisa, was living with me there.
And I said to her, what do I do?
She had never published anything yet either.
And we were like two innocent babes wandering through the woods trying to figure out what to do.
And so I figured, well, let me just be honest.
And I said, look, I only have three chapters.
And they said, we don’t care.
We want you to do it anyway.
Take 18 months to finish it.
And so that became the book on Henry Fairfield Osborne.
Just as I was finishing that, I got contacted by ABC Clio.
They wanted a book on evolution controversies.
So that’s when I did the human evolution controversies.
And I don’t even remember what my own book was titled.
And so I said, okay, well, I’ll do that.
And then I’ll do the Darwin book.
And just as I was finishing the human evolution controversies, I got offered another chance to do another book.
And at the time…
which is what got me kind of in trouble with this new thing.
All my professors and everybody in academia who pays attention to doing doctoral dissertations, they tell you, you have to get published.
You have to get published.
The only way you’re going to get a job is to be published.
The only way you’re going to get tenure is if you get published.
The only way you’re going to get promoted is if you get published.
I had this kind of schizophrenic need.
Anybody who would let me write something, I’d write.
Articles, books, and the stuff just kept piling up.
And every time I got something to do, I’d say, I’ll do this, and then I’ll come back to Darwin.
And then something else would come along.
And I felt I couldn’t not, if someone was offering me a contract to write something, I felt I couldn’t say no because I need published work to get a job, to get promoted, you know, all that stuff, get tenure.
And so it took forever.
And finally, I decided to get around to it.
And the problem was,
Routledge, I contacted a couple of places.
Routledge said they liked the Darwin and the Monsters concept.
But then Lisa came down with cancer and I couldn’t work on it as much.
And then she passed away.
And when that happened, all the excitement I’d always felt for the last 40 years about writing and publishing and talking about, it just disappeared.
know it was just gone and so i tried desperately to tell routledge could you cancel this contract because i really don’t want to do it you know yeah and they said no no we love it we love it and so i asked a few times and they just kept saying no we want you to do it so i did it i did it but my heart really wasn’t in it so it didn’t come out as well as i had hoped
That’s why it’s really thin.
I never write huge, thick tomes anyway.
Because I figure, once I said what I wanted to say, I’m not very good at padding out things.
Some people are, but I’m not.
And so, you know.
But I think there are good parts to it.
I like the sea monster part.
I thought that came out well.
Well, if you don’t mind me throwing in a comment, I especially enjoy… Monster Talk listeners, they’re going to know.
People get fascinated with a kind of monster or a certain part of the story and they get really into that.
And I think it’s really hard to write for an audience who’s a cryptozoology enthusiast because it’s kind of like Godzilla.
I like Godzilla, but I’ve met real fans.
I am not worthy to talk to them.
like you know what i mean so like there are people who will be so absurdly into cryptozoology that i can’t keep up with the level of factual minutiae but you do a great job of introducing that road of how did we go from just pure folklore
to a taxonomy and having a concept of some of these monsters might be real and some of these monsters are relegated to folklore.
And how does that influence that journey from a non-scientific world to a scientific world?
I think you did well.
Thank you.
Well, that’s what the book is really all about.
Yeah.
It’s not about Bigfoot.
I’ve had some critiques already.
You didn’t talk enough about Bigfoot.
Shut up.
What I wanted to do is tell the story of how cryptozoology, even though the word is fairly new, the idea goes all the way back to the classical world.
Lucretius and Pliny and Aristotle, all those people were talking about monsters.
You know, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest known piece of literature, is a monster story written in ancient Sumerian.
And so that’s what I wanted to try to track, that progression from the ancient world, because there were people…
in ancient Greece.
And everything we know about monsters initially comes from India.
So Alexander the Great invades India.
And that’s what kind of opens up India to the West.
And they immediately start encountering in India all these stories about monsters.
A lot of the most popular monsters of the European Middle Ages start off as Indian monsters, and they just give them sort of westernized names.
And so I wanted to tell the story of how does that go?
How do we go from Lucretius saying, there are so many stupid people out there, they’ll believe in anything, to…
modern cryptozoology.
And so that, I’m not sure if I managed to pull it off, but that’s what my attempt was.
Yeah, I mean, I think that comes across.
And I think if someone’s coming to the book and they’re looking for a thorough history of cryptozoology, that’s not what it is.
But you lay out your case pretty clearly that you’re trying to talk about that journey.
So I think if you know what the book is and you put it right there in the signpost, what the book’s about, I think they should be satisfied.
I think so.
But maybe since this was actually on your mind way back when we first talked, it was your original premise was Darwin and the werewolves and how that Darwin killed the werewolves.
Right.
Right.
Well, I did that as a joke.
Yeah.
But it’s.
but is it a joke?
It’s like scripted.
I did scripted as a joke, but is it a joke?
You know, not really, you know, but that interplay between movies and monsters and fiction and reality, like it turns out to be way more real than just the wordplay.
Right.
And I think the same thing is true with Darwin, but let’s talk about it because what you are discussing.
And there’s kind of a filter at play because when people are starting to classify these monsters, and there is, even way back then, this sort of, I’m going to say, euhemerist need to try to find the fact behind the legend.
And sometimes people look at the legend and they go, okay, well, that’s just not so, right?
But yet people are still looking for Cynoscephalic Saints, and they’re looking for headless monsters with the face on the chest, right?
Right.
That journey from deciding these are not possible because we now know enough about our model of the universe to realize these have to be filtered out.
So that’s an interesting journey.
And you talk about it.
Do you want to kind of lay out some of that?
When does that distinction start to emerge in a sort of formal way?
And I guess we have to acknowledge that it never really does because people are all…
Always really to discard everything we’ve learned and say, no, no, no, magic’s real.
This is all real.
Right.
Well, it’s sort of a long journey.
And like you said, it never really goes away.
The fact of modern cryptozoology being done in the way it’s done shows that people are still as gullible today as in Lucretius’ day.
He would not be surprised by any of this.
And so you find it comes sort of in stages.
One of the…
One person wrote to me and critiqued it, said, you spend too much time on werewolves.
Wait, can you ever spend too much time on werewolves?
Exactly.
What are you talking about?
You can’t talk enough about werewolves.
For a lot of reasons, not just because they’re cool.
Right.
I wanted to say, actually, I had this pulled up.
In your acknowledgments, you mentioned Martin Grabe of the Sabine Baring Gould Appreciation Society.
Right.
Okay.
So I bring this up because I don’t know how they got my name, but out of the blue…
Simon and Schuster reached out to me to ask if I wanted to have a review copy of their new edition of Sabine Baring Gould’s Werewolf book.
It’s coming out in September.
It is so beautiful.
I mean, I already have, obviously, a copy.
Sure.
It’s just a gorgeous little book.
It’s so well done.
I am delighted that these classics are still being printed.
I thought that was really funny because I had pulled this up because they wanted me to mention it.
Ta-da!
I don’t even have to make up a connection.
It’s literally right there.
I don’t know if you have a copy of this.
I’ve got an older copy.
You can never have too many werewolves.
You cannot.
Right.
So, yeah.
So, werewolves.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to get off track, but werewolves sometimes get me off track.
Too many werewolves, the cryptozoologist said.
Yeah.
How can they say that, though?
What is the dog man, if not some kind of werewolf?
I put it to you.
Starts off as a cynocephaly, the dog-headed man back in the Middle Ages, you know.
That’s part of my underlying argument, is that cryptozoology is not something new.
It’s been around literally…
literally as long as humans have been writing things down, they wrote about monsters.
And werewolves have been around
You mentioned that thing I did on Darwin, which a paper I actually gave before the British Society for the History of Science.
And, you know, so I’m up in front of like 300 of the world’s, you know, leading Darwin scholars because it was for the Darwin of Palooza, the 2009.
anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species.
So you’ve got this idiot from New Jersey
standing amongst all these world-renowned scholars.
And I’m talking about how Darwin helped get rid of werewolves because, you know, the whole idea of evolution is things change slowly from one to another.
And that even though humans and werewolves and canines are ultimately linked evolutionarily because all things are linked evolutionarily.
But they’re really not that close on the evolutionary scale.
And sort of tongue-in-cheek, I said, you start to see, after Darwin, you start to see this fall off in belief in werewolves.
But, I said, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
Because once werewolves start sort of dying off, as it were,
who takes their place, but anomalous primates, Yeti, Bigfoot, those sorts of creatures, they start coming to the fore.
So there’s this constant sort of replacement going on.
Survival of the fittest.
I mean, for real.
I think these ideas exist.
I’ve started to argue that there’s sort of a narrative Darwinism going on where we can’t predict what’s going to survive, what’s not.
But these ecosystems change.
You can sort of see a Darwinian model of monsters as narrative versus living creatures.
And I sort of see that the magic seems to be coming back strongly.
Not that it was ever gone, but I mean, this whole thing with the Dogman in particular is frustrating because for people who take cryptozoology, they want it to be a real science.
But then when they look around at the ecosystem of monsters with which they have to work, those monsters…
less and less comport with a biologically reasonable model, right?
Right.
Well, that’s the big problem.
The whole concept of these creatures runs into Darwin and stops dead in its tracks because you don’t see any evolution of, you know,
The Thunderbird or, you know, the Mothman.
You see that with other animals.
You see even extinct animals.
I mean, we can trace the lineage of dinosaurs, for example, back quite a ways.
And there’s fossils and there’s, you know, that support it.
But, you know, with the exception of Gigantopithecus, there’s no fossil material around anomalous primates.
And, you know, I know that I’ve gotten caught up in these kind of discussions before about the whole, well, the reason you don’t find Bigfoot bones in the woods is because you don’t find bear bones in the woods either.
I said, yeah, but we know what bears are.
Yeah.
Also, just pet peeve, we do find bear bones in the woods.
I know, I’m just mentioning this, you know it, but I did research and the state of Pennsylvania keeps records of their bear kills and included in there every year is statistics for bears that weren’t hunted.
They were just found dead naturally.
What Grover Krantz said didn’t exist, but yeah, they do.
It’s just nice to see it on paper.
Right, right.
Yeah, and, you know, I caught a lot of flack a few years back.
when i blasphemed and said the coelacanth is not a good model for cryptozoology yeah cryptozoology by by definition of cryptozoologists is the study of unknown animals that have a mythological background that people were talking about like bigfoot has a mythological background
The coelacanth didn’t have a mythological background.
They just started pulling them up, you know, alive out of the ocean in East Africa.
So I don’t think that is really a good model to use.
No, I agree 100%.
I do think…
Maybe if they had like a no copy with a British Black Panther on the back.
No, people would say you’re just being a no copy cat.
Bada bing.
Okay.
But seriously, there’s no folklore around coelacanths.
It’s just, it’s a weird fish that came up and it is not.
I love the idea that it’s a living fossil.
Although as a pro science person, I have to remind people, this will sound super nerdy.
But just because it has a strongly conserved phenotype doesn’t mean that it’s literally a living fossil.
The underlying molecular coelacanth is definitely different than its ancient ancestor.
Like evolution still happens.
Like every now and then you find these creatures that for whatever reason, they don’t seem to change much on the outside.
But on the inside, they do change.
That’s just what happens.
It’s like people who say humans have stopped evolving because of whatever.
No, no, we haven’t.
It’s just really slow.
Sorry.
And no one was looking for the coelacanth.
No.
It was just found.
There was one day.
Thank you for putting it with my silly rant.
Sorry.
I just that stuff.
This is a very nerdy field.
And so it gets a lot of really it’s like you want to be broadly informative.
And I think your book is.
But you can’t.
you can’t gloss some of this stuff without triggering the pedants, you know?
Right, right.
So that’s a challenge.
But I think you make a good case in here.
And I think it’s one that’s important.
It’s one of those things where I think when you read it, we’re like, well, of course.
You know, of course, but you wrote it down and nobody else has, right?
You know what I mean?
So, I mean, I think true ideas sometimes seem really obvious, but somebody needs to make the argument.
But I don’t think it’s obvious.
I don’t mean to dismiss it.
On the contrary, I think this is an important insight that this change, and I guess we’re seeing the fallout from it again as people are having to like…
filter their monsters through the the brutal sieve of science and what comes out the other end is either nothing or creatures that have to be magical and that that’s uh right it is it it’s it’s quite a filter and i i think it’s it’s inadvertently pushing us further and further into a world where if we want to have monsters we have to we have to
you know, we have to believe in magic where I don’t know how else to put it.
Like they’re, they’re just, there aren’t a lot of monsters that can survive that filtering, you know, it’s brutal.
I still like monsters.
I still like them too.
I think that’s the other thing is I, it’s obvious from reading it, you love this stuff, which is, that’s really good.
And I, I am so sorry about the circumstances like this, just that’s, it’s so hard, but I, man, I appreciate you getting it done anyway.
That’s really good.
Yeah.
which brings us back to the price.
It’s kind of pricey, but I’m going to put a link to the book in the show notes.
So are people going to be using this, do you think in a textbook environment or is this primarily?
I have no idea.
The only audience I’ve ever written for is me.
I’ve never thought I’m going to write this book in this way because this audience is going to like it.
I’m very good at not paying attention to criticism.
even when it’s good criticism.
Yeah.
I wrote this for me, the person I envisioned reading all of my work from, from my doctoral dissertation on up to this, I wrote for an audience of one and that’s me.
And if other people like it, that’s fantastic.
If not.
Well, if our listeners take the time to read it, they’re going to learn some stuff.
I’m confident of that.
Well, I hope so.
And I think they’ll have fun along the way.
I’ll tell you something my wife said to me, which I was kind of, she says a lot of things, but this one was actually shocking to me.
Like she said, I’m working on a book on technology and innovation.
And it’s a lot of things, but I was talking to her about, you know, who the target audience is and this sort of thing.
And she said,
Don’t write the book that you think people want.
Write the book that you know people need.
I was like, damn, girl, you should be writing on me.
I hope I could do that someday.
We’ll see.
If I get it done, I’ll send you a copy for sure.
Great.
I’d love to see it.
Well, is there anything that you’re working on now that you’re retired?
What’s next for Brian Riegel?
I think this is going to be my last academic book.
Okay.
I had an idea for a novel that went all the way back to before I even went to college about a historian of science who…
gets involved in a lot of wacky stuff.
And I wanted to cram every bit of wackiness into it.
And I’d worked on it a little bit on and off over the years.
And the main character is a woman.
Originally, I based it on Ann Wilson of Heart.
Oh, wow.
You know, at least visually.
Yeah.
And then I switched over to Counselor Troy from Star Trek.
And then, of course, it just, you know, I’m lying in bed with this character.
And so it became Lisa.
I had students last year, my last semester, because Lisa had adjuncted at Kane a couple of times.
So a couple of students said, well, what was she like?
Because she had passed away by then.
And I said, she was a combination of Dr. Mrs.
Girlfriend.
from the Venture Brothers and Franny Fisher, the Australian female private eye.
And so I said, if you want to know what she was like, that’s it right there.
I was fortunate enough to meet her once, as you’ll recall.
And I thought she was a delight.
And for a thousand reasons, it broke my heart to hear of her passing.
But I really did want her to read my book.
I really did.
So she’s in my mind a lot.
She really is.
Right.
Well, I had somebody write to me just recently who found the podcast we did about them.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
And immediately became a huge fan of yours.
Oh, that’s nice.
And, you know, and Monster Talk.
And so, you know, it’s…
People enjoy this stuff.
Yeah.
And I like that this show is kind of timeless, too.
You don’t need to be listening episode to episode.
You can hop in anywhere, which is good.
All right.
Well, Brian, thank you so much for coming back to talk with us here again.
It’s been a long-ass journey.
I really appreciate you letting us be a part of it.
I had no idea what I was doing.
when I started off on this.
Yeah.
You know, I was, as I laid out in my recently published autobiography, The Monster of Newark, all I knew was I wanted to do something like this.
Yeah.
I had no idea how to go about doing it.
You know, I never knew anybody who’d gone to college, certainly not the graduate school.
And I just sort of played it by ear.
I did stuff that I was I was very lucky that I didn’t go to some big world conquering university.
because it would have been fun to go to Princeton or Oxford or Cambridge or whatever.
But I have a feeling that no one there would have supported me in the work I did on monster history.
Luckily, I went to a slightly smaller school where I found, even amongst the administration, I found a lot of support for doing this.
And I think that was in part because I wasn’t searching for monsters.
I’ve never searched for a monster.
I always looked at the history of other people who were searching for monsters and tell the history of it.
And so I, you know, I’ve basically been my whole career sort of stumbling around in the dark, trying to sort of move forward.
All I ever really focused on was moving forward and doing something that I enjoyed, doing something that was fun.
If it wasn’t fun, I didn’t want to do it.
That’s a good way to live, I think.
Yeah, I am technically a historian of science.
In this book, I talk a little bit about Darwin.
But I never did sort of mainstream science history.
First off, because there were already a huge number of people already working on it who had much greater resources than I did.
And secondly, this is something I found extremely interesting.
I found it a lot of fun.
I didn’t want to do, you know…
there have been so many books published on Ben Franklin.
You know, I’m not going to be able to add anything to that body of knowledge.
Even with Darwin, there’s, you know, there’s hundreds and hundreds of books on Darwin.
And there are scholars around the world who have done these amazing works.
And I said, I can’t keep up with that.
You know, I,
There’s nothing I can add to the story of Darwin or Madame Curie or, you know, any of that.
Or Henry Ford.
I didn’t want to work on Henry Ford because, first off, other people were doing it.
And secondly, Henry Ford was a real douchebag.
He really was.
Why do I want to spend several years researching this guy’s life?
He’s kind of the Elon Musk of his day.
Yeah, yeah.
And so I’ve been extremely lucky.
And for most of that journey, I had this great partner who understood and supported what I was doing.
And, you know, that’s I can’t ask for better.
I got to do this fun stuff with this fun person and meeting guys like you and others.
So I can’t really I can’t really complain.
Well, I want to tell you, you did a great job with the title, The Monster of Newark, for your autobiography.
If people want to find out why it’s called that, you can buy the book.
It’s in the show notes, the link.
I was going to suggest you call it Tanks for the Memory.
But, you know, you went your own way.
Fine.
Well, there is a chapter about my military service with the armored cavalry.
But as I told you once, I didn’t start off to write an autobiography.
I was making notes because I was trying to figure out, you know, Aristotle says the unexamined life is not worth living.
And I started thinking about what I was doing.
How did I get to be this person that does the history of monsters?
And I started making notes and thinking about it and writing a little bit more.
And the next thing I know, bada-boom, bada-bing, bada-bam, I’ve got a whole book.
And fortunately, Jonathan Downs and the Fortean Press…
wanted to publish it and so you know there we are the strangest autobiography there is
Brian, I wish you well with the book.
And again, as always, thank you for taking the time to talk to the Monster Talk audience.
It’s always a pleasure.
I’ve never regretted coming on your show.
Well, I appreciate that so much.
And you knew at this point the puns were there.
So, you know, you came anyway, and I appreciate it.
Oh, I should have said, Karen wanted to be here, but she is away in the UK, probably hunting ghosts and monsters on her own.
Well, be sure to tell her I said hi.
I will do so.
And she regretted not being here.
It was a pleasure being here.
All right.
Have a good night, Brian.
You too.
Thanks a lot.
All right.
See ya.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard an interview with Brian Regal about his latest book, Darwin and the Monsters.
Links to Brian’s books are in the show notes.
Karen is in England promoting her book, Beyond Words, but we’ll be back soon.
You know, Karen lost her mom about a year ago, and my own mother’s probably going to be gone in the next few days.
And talking with Brian reminded me of meeting his partner Lisa back in 2014, when she had been so vibrant.
And it’s really hard for me to see so many reminders of death and mortality, but at least metaphorically, the burdens we face as living would crush us if we had to face them alone.
And when we share our pain with our friends, it spreads the load a little bit.
And I know it helps take a little bit of the pain away, but it also binds us together.
So thank you for supporting our show.
Thank you for listening.
Thank you for being part of the Monster Talk family.
And if you’ve got someone in your life that you love and care about, take a minute and tell them.
Monster Talk’s theme music is by Peach Stealing Monkeys.
If you finish, say, over and out.
But she knows I’m through talking.
I know she does, Doctor.
It’s a rule, though.
You gotta say it.
Isn’t that right, General?
Right, sir.
This is ridiculous.
A lot of good your rules are gonna do us if we don’t locate them.
Over and out.
Oh, now you’re happy.
This has been a Monster House presentation

The post 🐺 S05E44 – Darwin and the Monsters (with Dr. Brian Regal) appeared first on MonsterTalk.

This episode includes an extended discussion of a televised paranormal investigation in which a crew treated an alleged spirit-box recording about a sexual assault as cause for celebration. The hosts address the claim and the ethics of its presentation directly. Please consider another episode if this topic would be traumatic for you.

Blake and Karen are joined by paranormal investigator Matt Baxter for a live MonsterTalk recording about Denver’s Peabody-Whitehead Mansion – the red sandstone pile on Capitol Hill’s old Millionaire Row that ghost tour operators like to call the most haunted building in Colorado, if not the country. The three of them had walked the place the night before at the invitation of author and paranormal researcher Richard Estep, who is writing a book about the mansion and wanted skeptical voices in it alongside the believer accounts he had already collected.

What they found was a genuinely beautiful 1889 Frank Edbrooke house with a well-documented history – a Crimean War surgeon, a strikebreaking governor, a second life as restaurants, nightclubs, and recently as apartments. But what does it mean if the haunting reputation does not show up anywhere in the record until the restaurant era of the 1950s? From there the episode turns to the 2012 Ghost Adventures visit, the spirit box sessions it produced, and the moment that earns this episode a content warning.

The real history of 1128 Grant Street – built in 1889 for Dr. William Riddick Whitehead, a surgeon who served in both the Crimean War and the American Civil War, and later home to Colorado Governor James Hamilton Peabody
Architect Frank E. Edbrooke (Wikipedia), who also gave Denver The Brown Palace Hotel (Wikipedia), the Oxford Hotel and the state capitol
 Governor James Hamilton Peabody (Wikipedia), The Colorado Labor Wars and the Cripple Creek strike (Wikipedia), and how a genuinely brutal labor record gets recycled as a ghost motif
Why the ghost stories start in the 1950s – when the house became a restaurant and bar – and not during the sixty years people actually lived in it
The “Peabody Dozen”: soldier spirits, a young woman on the second floor, a phantom chandelier, a Lady in Black, a crotchety old man, crying babies, and the usual poltergeist furniture
What the current residents report experiencing: nothing
The 2005 Peter Boyles Halloween radio broadcast from the mansion, and Matt’s front-row seat to a spirit box being sold as “Thomas Edison’s Telephone to the Dead”
Ghost hunters teaching paying customers how to cup their hands near a camera flash to manufacture orb photographs
A brand new ghost story introduced in 2005 that simply failed to take hold – folklore caught in the act of being made
A close reading of the 2012 Ghost Adventures episode: the spirit box sessions, the “unsuspecting workers” experiment, the ball of light, the prop skull, and the on-screen claim that police opened an investigation
Auditory pareidolia, apophenia, priming, and why the on-screen subtitle is doing most of the work
Whether odd rooms, steep staircases, infrasound and EMF actually contribute to unease – or whether the stories we are told beforehand are doing the real work

Peabody-Whitehead Mansion (Wikipedia)
The Peabody Mansion – official site
Westword: “Haunted” Denver Mansion Turned Into Luxury Apartments (2026)
Alan Berg (Wikipedia)
Ghost Adventures (Wikipedia)
Electronic voice phenomenon (Wikipedia)
Pareidolia (Wikipedia)
Apophenia (Wikipedia)
Infrasound (Wikipedia)
Prof. Chris French, anomalistic psychology (Wikipedia)
Denver Public Library, Western History Collection
Colorado State Archives

Matt Baxter is a paranormal investigator and a longtime friend of the show. He was present at the mansion during the 2005 Halloween radio broadcast and returned with Blake and Karen for this visit.

Thanked but not appearing – Richard Estep, who arranged the visit, is a paramedic and paranormal investigator who has written more than thirty books and appeared on Haunted Hospitals, Paranormal 911 and Haunted Case Files. His book on the mansion is in progress, and he has an open invitation to come on the show when it is finished.

Denver history and Capitol Hill
Denver Landmarks & Historic Districts by Tom Noel and Wellington Webb
Colorado’s War on Militant Unionism: James H. Peabody and the Western Federation of Miners – George G. Suggs Jr.
Ghosts of Denver’s Capitol Hill – Phil Goodstein (out of print – look for Library copy)
Talked to Death: The Life and Murder of Alan Berg – Stephen Singular

Hauntings, folklore and belief
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark – Carl Sagan
Paranormal America – Christopher Bader, F. Carson Mencken and Joseph Baker

Beyond Words by Karen Stollznow  is out now

Richard Estep’s book on the Peabody-Whitehead Mansion is forthcoming. We will link it here when it is out.

MonsterTalk theme music is by Peach Stealing Monkeys.
MonsterTalk is produced by Blake Smith and co-hosted by Karen Stollznow. If you enjoy the show, you can support it directly at patreon.com/monstertalk. Thank you – sincerely – to everyone who does.

This is not a fully accurate transcript, and was machine generated. It’s here for helping search engines find the episode but not intended to be a faithful transcript of the episode. (But it’s not AWFUL.) Some of the material in this transcript only exists in the Patreon/Premium edition of the show and was excised for the commercial version.

———————

The post 🏚️ S05E43 – The Peabody-Whitehead Mansion appeared first on MonsterTalk.

Blake and Karen are joined by Dr. Ben Dodds, author of Myths and Memories of the Black Death to discover more about a disease which forever changed world history when it swept across Europe in the 1300s.

The conversation runs from the mechanics of the disease – what a bubo actually is, what finally kills you, and why the textbook rats-and-fleas model spreads far too slowly to explain what medieval eyewitnesses described – to the harder question of how anyone in 2026 knows any of it. Along the way: the marmot hypothesis, the medieval physicians who were certain they had it figured out, the appalling 1348 pogroms whose victims were dug out of the ground in a Catalan town a short drive from where Dodds was sitting, why Monty Python understood the Middle Ages better than most historical novelists, and a closing answer about the aftermath that most listeners will not see coming. Blake’s cold open, meanwhile, sets out to explain why we call it the Black Death at all – and reels in an unexpected monster.

Myths and Memories of the Black Deathby Ben Dodds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
Publisher’s page at SpringerLink– includes chapter previews
Dr. Ben Dodds at Florida State University– his faculty page, including his ongoing work on Spanish bandit stories

The Black Death– the 1346-1353 outbreak specifically, as distinct from every later plague wave
Yersinia pestis– the bacterium, not a virus, which turns out to matter a great deal
Bubonic plagueand thebuboesit is named for
Septicemic plagueandpneumonic plague– the faster and the more transmissible forms
Disseminated intravascular coagulation– one of the mechanisms behind the darkened skin, and a good illustration of how thoroughly this disease overwhelms the body’s own defenses
The Oriental rat flea– the classic vector, and the reason the classic model spreads too slowly
Marmots– not Marmite, not Vegemite. Long-standing plague reservoirs across Central Asia
CDC: Plagueand theWHO plague fact sheet– the disease is treatable with antibiotics and still very much with us
National Museum of Australia: Bubonic plague– background on the Australian outbreaks and the North Head Quarantine Station Karen visited

The ancient DNA work that finally confirmedY. pestisas the culprit also opened a new argument about whether the Black Death left a mark on the human immune system. It is a live dispute, and a good example of exactly the point Blake raises in the episode about provisional truths.

Klunk et al., “Evolution of immune genes is associated with the Black Death”(Nature, 2022) – the East Smithfield plague-pit study identifyingERAP2as a candidate for selection
Barton et al., “Insufficient evidence for natural selection associated with the Black Death”– the rebuttal, arguing the statistical signal does not hold up
John Hawks: Another look at selection and the Black Death– a readable walk through both sides of the argument

Dr. Alex Brown, Durham University– principal investigator on the Leverhulme-funded project “Modelling the Black Death and Social Connectivity in Medieval England”
What a list of Black Death survivors reveals about how people recovered– Brown and Grace Owen on a scrap of parchment tucked into a Ramsey Abbey manor account, naming 22 tenants who took to their sickbeds and got back up again
Medieval peasants and their surprisingly generous sick leave– the Black Death as a sickness event and not only a mortality event
The Great Famine of 1315-1317– the childhood deprivation that may have made a generation of adults more vulnerable thirty years later
The Little Ice Age– climate shift, animal behavior, and new contact between species
The Statute of Labourers (1351)– what it looks like when the landowning classes are extremely annoyed that wages have gone up

Humorism– the framework inside which the whole medieval debate took place, and the reason “complexion” meant something quite different then
Miasma theory– bad air rising from the earth, one of the competing explanations
Medical astrology– planetary conjunctions as a cause of humoral imbalance, and a serious subject of university debate
The flagellants– extreme public penance, which looks like panic from here and looked like a reasonable intervention from there
The Plague of Justinian(6th century) and theThird Plague Pandemic(late 19th century onward) – the other two documented global plague pandemics

Persecution of Jews during the Black Death– the pogroms of 1348-1351 across Europe
The well-poisoning accusation– a conspiracy theory that medieval observers could see was contradicted by the evidence in front of them
The blood libel– first recorded in the 1140s and still circulating today
“The Black Death and its Consequences for the Jewish Community in Tàrrega”– Colet, Muntané, Ruiz, Saula and Subirà inThe Medieval Globe, on the 2007 excavation of six mass graves at the Roquetes necropolis and how the bones line up with the documents
“Uncovering a Medieval Pogrom: Genetic History of a Jewish Community in Catalonia”(Genes, 2026) – brand new genome-wide analysis of sixteen individuals from those graves, the first such data from a medieval Iberian Jewish community

Doomsday Bookby Connie Willis (1992) – the Oxford time-travel novel Dodds recommends, and rates highly for the accuracy and the emotional weight of its 1348 sections
Monty Python and the Holy Grail(1975) – the “bring out your dead” sketch, which Dodds argues is not mocking medieval people but mocking our condescension toward them
World Without Endby Ken Follett – discussed in the episode as the guest’s single least favorite depiction of the Black Death, so consider yourself warned rather than recommended
The Pillars of the Earth– the earlier Follett novel it follows [AFFILIATE LINK NEEDED IF WANTED]

The Green Children of Woolpit– Dr. Dodds’ favorite monster. Two children with green-tinged skin appear in a Suffolk village, recorded by two chroniclers well after the fact
William of NewburghandRalph of Coggeshall– the two sources for the story
Every prosaic explanation offered is plausible and none of them are well grounded in the evidence, which is exactly why the story has legs. By the early modern period people were already suggesting the children had fallen from the moon.

Oxford English Dictionary: “Black Death”– where the earliest English attestation lives, and where the argument starts. Nobody who lived through the pandemic called it that.

Karen’s bookBeyond Words: What Animals Say and How We Understand Them

MonsterTalk theme music by Peach Stealing Monkeys.

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It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature, part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24 mile long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland.
It’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
Hey, we’re calling this episode The Black Death.
But before we dive in, I want to give you something to chat about at your cocktail party.
I mean, your next cocktail party.
Because that’s what this show is really about, right?
To give you weird stuff to say at fancy cocktail parties?
Wink emoji.
Right.
So, no one who lived through the Black Death called it that.
In the 1300s, it would have been called the Pestilence, the Great Mortality, or perhaps the Great Death.
As we will learn in the following interview, this is not a disease lost to history.
It’s alive and well, unlike the people who are unfortunate enough to catch it.
Now, don’t be too afraid.
Modern mortality rates are far lower for a variety of reasons, but it’s still a very serious illness.
Black Death first shows up in print 200 years after that first big outbreak.
It’s Svartadoden in Swedish chronicles in the 1500s, and in Danish it appears as Densortadoth around 1600.
But why was it called the Black Death?
This is the little mystery I got hooked on when writing this intro, and I’m so glad I checked because I found a really cool monster hiding in the etymology.
All right.
Historians of the plague lean towards this being a kind of translation error.
The Latin atra mors uses atra, which means both black and dreadful or terrible.
And the idea here is that the metaphorical terrible death got flattened into its quite literal colorful meaning.
Meanwhile…
controversy looms for the etymology crowd, because if you check the Oxford English Dictionary, as one does, you’ll find the OED asserts the terminology comes from the victim’s skin turning black.
Modern medicine tells us that the dark coloring of the skin can be caused either by necrotic flesh or from what is called disseminated intravascular coagulation.
Check the show notes if you want to learn more about how this disease absolutely overwhelms a human’s defenses.
Now, I’m slowly working my way through an online course on the colorful life of words.
And dictionaries may seem like cozy repositories for interesting snapshots of a word’s meaning.
But let me tell you, folks, dictionaries are battlegrounds.
Don’t let the pince-nez glasses and the tweed blazers fool you.
Anyway, I’m inclined to believe the translation hypothesis, the one that vectors from Latin metaphorically to English literally.
But while researching this introduction, this is where I got a really cool surprise.
Now, the earliest use of the English phrase black death that the OED can find anywhere is from 1755.
It sits on page 24 of an English translation by a man named Berthelsen.
He was translating a Danish bishop’s book, rendering the Danish phrase Sortaduth into Black Death for what is currently the oldest such usage in print.
The bishop who wrote this book is named Erik Pontapaden.
The book is The Natural History of Norway.
You have heard from this book before, even if you don’t remember it.
Trust me on this, because The Natural History of Norway turns out to be one of the founding documents of modern kraken lore.
In the book, Pontapadan argues for the sea serpent, the mermaid, and an octopus of monstrous size with a reputation for pulling ships under.
A century later, Herman Melville wrote a pretty famous book about a whaling crew whose captain gets somewhat obsessed with finding a very particular whale.
In fact, a whale who might be characterized as the White Death.
In chapter 59 of Moby Dick, the Pequod finds what Melville describes as
A vast pulpy mass furlongs in length and breadth of a glancing cream-collar lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its center and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas.
After it sinks back into the sea, our narrator Ishmael comments, There seems to be some ground to imagine that the great kraken of Bishop Pontapadan may ultimately resolve itself into squid.
So how about that?
The term that modern English speakers use to describe the Great Plague, the Black Death, and the first print assertion associating the legendary Kraken with a real but mysterious enormous cephalopod species come from the same book.
Now, to be pedantic, it’s Pontapadan’s text as translated to English by Berthelsen.
I don’t want to leave that out or someone might, well, actually, use so hard that at your cocktail party you have to go hide behind the charcuterie board in embarrassment.
And I don’t have to tell you how these fancy cocktail parties can go, right?
Also, Herman Melville was writing from his personal experience on a whaling ship.
And at almost the exact same time, Iapetus Stamestrup was writing up the Kraken in scientific papers and would later name these tentacular giants Architeuthis, just six years later.
All right, you go on, mingle, have some hors d’oeuvres.
I’ve got to go join Karen and our guest, Dr. Benjamin Dodds, for some Monster Talk.
We’re bringing on Dr. Benjamin Dodds, Ben, to talk about the Black Death.
And it’s one of those topics that I’ve been interested in for a very long time, since my university days.
And it just feels like everybody knows the stories, but then the more you dig into it, the more complicated and surprising it all becomes too.
And I think it’s fascinating that we’re still learning new things about the pandemic and how people experienced it and drawing parallels to COVID and things that happened to us today.
So I thought that Ben would be…
the ideal guest to come on and help us unpack the history and also some of the myths.
Yeah, there might be some misconceptions out there.
Yeah, just a few.
So welcome to the show, Ben.
Indeed.
So I understand that your work is on cultural memory and you research the Black Death and Spanish history too and interweaving with cultural memory, how we remember and how we misremember in popular culture.
So this is right up our alley and that of our listeners.
Could you tell us just a little bit about your work and what you do?
Yeah, I really first started working on the Black Death when I was working on peasant agriculture and peasant economy in England.
So it was using medieval sources rather than modern sources and memory.
And I was looking at the way in which peasant societies managed to turn themselves around and come back from the impact of the Black Death, from the very high mortality and, you know, what effect it had on their economic life.
And then later on, I became interested in the cultural memory aspects.
That was largely because I was very fortunate to teach classes on the Black Death for many years and work with lots of students on this.
And the students were often interested in, you know, the movies and the novels and so on that emerged from the or that represented the Black Death.
So I tried to, you know, try to have a little think about that and look at the Black Death from that different modern perspective.
So you’re using the past to learn about the peasant tents.
That’s right.
Yeah, I’ve never thought of it like that, but that is true.
I always make the assumption that people do know about the Black Death.
I mean, it’s such a… What is the word?
Synecdoche.
Like, it really sort of wraps up a whole lot in a tiny set of words.
But what is the Black Death?
How long of a period are we talking about?
You know, how long did it take to sweep Europe and…
You know, basically, what are the basics?
And from there, we’ll dive in a little deeper.
I mean, the Black Death is a major pandemic that arrives in Europe in 1347, spreads across Europe into the early 1350s, also affected parts of Africa and affected very large parts of Asia, probably going back significantly earlier, perhaps even into the 13th century, some scholars have thought recently.
That’s the sort of Asian part of the pandemic that it moves gradually westwards into Western Europe.
So it lasted a few months in each individual place that it went to visiting this sort of awful mortality on pretty much every community that we know about.
Our evidence is mostly from Europe, although people are working much more on evidence from Asia nowadays.
So that’s an exciting aspect of the work that’s being done.
And it’s an outbreak of bubonic plague, which is caused by a bacteria called Yersinia pestis.
And the Black Death is often used as a sort of coverall term to describe all plague outbreaks in the past.
But strictly speaking, the Black Death is the one in the 1340s, which are very important because the Black Death comes to Europe in the 1340s after being absent for several centuries and then keeps coming back again repeatedly every few years.
That is to say, outbreaks of high mortality plague.
based mortality right through into the 17th and 18th centuries in European countries at least.
So it’s the beginning of this long phase of high disease related mortality.
You’ve reminded me that years ago I grew up in Australia and I went to a place in the northern beaches.
It’s called the quarantine station.
So it was a place where they would people who would come in on boats would have to stay there for a period of 40 days if they had scarlet fever or some kind of interest, some kind of.
infection or disease just to kind of contain it, not bring it into the general population.
And they had these kind of log books there showing the people who’d come through and what kinds of illnesses they had.
And I was astonished to see cases of the Black Death then.
And so that was back in the 1800s in Australia.
And I’ve heard that there are still some cases around today.
Is that true?
Yeah, you get it’s usually framed in terms of three major global pandemics that we know about in documented history.
So one in the sixth century that’s sometimes called Justinian’s Plague.
Then the 14th century one, which is obviously the Black Death that, you know, continued renewed outbreaks after that.
And then there’s a third pandemic as well that emerges in the Far East in the late 19th century.
And then.
That’s the one that has a really devastating outbreak, especially in the Indian subcontinent, with millions of people dying then into the early years of the 20th century.
But as you as you say, Karen, I know absolutely that you get isolated cases of bubonic plague today when people have been in contact with infected animals in the southern and western United States, for example, in the mountains and, you know, in other parts of the world to Central Asia and so on.
Very shocking.
And I’d like to ask about how many people it actually affected too, because when I was at university, we learnt that it could have been anything from maybe a third to a half of the population of Europe that died from the bubonic plague.
And now I’m hearing that the statistic is more maybe around 60%.
Can you clarify?
what the accepted figure is today?
Yeah, I think that’s right.
Something like, if we take their sort of population of Europe as a whole, something like 50%, maybe even higher.
It’s difficult to get precise data on the mortality because we do know about some individual communities, monasteries, for example, or groups of, there’s groups of notaries in one city that we know about, but they tend to be adult males.
And some people have suggested that children and elderly folk might have been even more vulnerable than they are.
So, you know, sort of push up the figures that we’ve got from the known communities a little bit more.
But something around 50 percent in total, although there’s a lot of evidence of how much the.
the impact varied from one community to the next.
So there’s a really fantastic study of North East England and lots of small isolated villages which were quite close to each other.
Some of those villages experienced the death of 80% of their tenants, some 20% of their tenants, even if they’re just a few miles apart.
So a lot of local variation.
But yeah, really, really high overall mortality.
That’s pretty difficult to imagine, you know, given what we went through with the sort of fear and awfulness of COVID and the mortality rate there was much, much lower, obviously.
So it’s difficult to really, I don’t know, compute that kind of death on that sort of scale.
I think the only comparable and possibly even worse case of disease-related mortality was in…
indigenous communities in the Americas, and some of them, at least after their first contact with Europeans, where people’s immune systems weren’t used to the diseases that the Europeans were bringing with them.
So we see sort of awful 90% mortality of, you know, people there, and huge overall mortality over
in the Americas as a result of that contact with the Europeans.
So, you know, I think those are two comparable events within recorded history.
I think in prehistory there may well have been ones too that archaeologists are sort of turning up with this devastating high mortality.
Yeah.
People know this as words, but…
There’s a very visceral side to this besides stacks of corpses.
There’s the whole symptoms of the disease itself.
And I remember even from high school, you know, and, you know, in American high school, this is a very small segment of a history class.
Right.
But.
The descriptions of what happens to you if you get this are pretty astonishing.
And the buboes, you know, I guess I suppose that means your body is dealing with so much infection.
It just blows out your armpits and swells.
But lymph glands are just like you’re just overwhelmed with infection.
But what is it?
that kills people?
Do we know?
I mean, like the disease sticks around for a long time.
And I know we get some level of immunity in the surviving generations, but this disease is astonishingly brutal during these high mortality times.
Can you talk, I’d like to two things.
What are the symptoms?
I guess really three things.
What kills you?
And then I’m really curious as to how do we know?
Like, what are the historical vectors and archaeological vectors?
Like, how do we know what happened?
These are really hard questions, these, and really difficult to get at.
But in terms of symptoms, I think that’s right, that the body is overwhelmed by bacterial infection, hence the buboes in some cases.
You get blackening of the skin too, sort of blotches appearing on people’s skin.
Often this culminates in a sort of really severe chest infection, so people are coughing up blood and so on.
You run an extremely high fever.
You die very quickly, often within two or three days, in some cases within weeks.
24 hours if the um if the the bacteria enter the bloodstream very quickly then you know septicemic version of a plague you can die you know die even more quickly than that so people are dying um you know very rapidly in a very visible horrible way that involves a lot of a lot of pain and suffering um i think that the question of immunity is a really intriguing one because
normally people don’t really have immunity to bacterial infections.
You might have a portion of the population that’s immune to particular viruses, but Black Death is bacteria.
Good point.
And yet it does seem that when we get detailed evidence on particular populations, it does seem to suggest that those who survived the Black Death were more likely to survive subsequent outbreaks of plague in the 1360s and 1370s and so on.
And so you get this odd skewing of the population pyramid by the late 14th century because
And generations of children are taken out, well, not entirely taken out, but severely sort of depleted by these repeated outbreaks of plague that affects them more than the adults, because they were the ones who hadn’t survived a previous outbreak.
So you get a sort of ageing population pyramid.
in the places that we know a lot about.
So it’s a kind of curious situation, something we don’t fully understand.
We know about the nature of the infection, but only because of recent work.
There was a really long standing debate on whether the Black Death was caused by
plague at all whether it was caused by Yersinia pestis at all and whether it could have been something different which has been in large part resolved just in recent years because scientists have been able to do much more with ancient DNA found in the burials of plague victims and they’ve been able to identify the DNA of the bacteria that were in their bloodstreams demonstrating that you know that was pretty much likely to have been the cause of the bubonic plague so it’s a major sort of advance and discovery.
um but then that throws up another problem which is when you have modern bubonic plague outbreaks they spread slowly and they’re quite difficult to catch because it’s a it’s a rat-based disease that needs to be transmitted from the rats to the humans by rat fleas so all the rats die because they’re suffering from the disease the fleas have nothing to feed from so they’re then forced to feed from humans therefore passing the disease to the humans quite a slow sort of process
Whereas medieval people are very clear that whatever the Black Death was or the form of plague or whatever can be passed from person to person in a really sort of rapid way, you know, much in the same way as, you know, we know that COVID could be passed from person to person.
So we’re not quite clear on what the mechanism for that was.
Droplet infection, possibly, but…
I mean, obviously, I’m not a doctor, but apparently the bacteria are quite large, so it’s difficult to catch plague from droplet infection.
It’s not sort of aerosolized in the same way as COVID is, for instance.
Some people think it could have been human body lice, which obviously people carry much more in the Middle Ages, and they carry disease like typhus and so on.
So maybe they were involved in plague infections.
Other mammals, besides rats as well, possibly, so the other carriers.
So there’s a lot of interesting scientific work on this and, you know, unresolved mysteries about…
quite why the Black Death is so devastating and spread so quickly.
Yes, speaking of culprits, I’ve heard that some people have been pointing the finger at marmots.
Is that true?
Yeah, you can get some quite plausible sort of scenarios where you have the early 14th century’s period of very rapid changing climate, where there’s cooling of the climate in the 14th century, which obviously affects the behaviour of animals and insects associated with those animals, because they sort of move if you’ve got changes in temperature, precipitation and so on.
So you could have a scenario where animals that aren’t coming into contact with humans very much,
start to come into contact with humans much more, transmitting diseases to humans.
But it’s one of those things that it’s easy to come up with sort of hypotheses about what might have happened, but really difficult to actually prove because we really need to know the history of marmots and rats and so on.
And it’s very difficult to unpick from the archaeological record because they’re very small bones and the people don’t necessarily look for them.
Obviously, documentary records are kind of problematic because it depends what people are noticing and what they choose to write down.
So, yeah, there are all sorts of really interesting cases or possible scenarios for the transmission of that disease from animals to humans in the first place.
And as a clarification point, this is marmites, not marmite and not Vegemite, right?
Absolutely.
They’re to blame for other things.
But I mean, to me, it’s fascinating that.
these questions are still there.
And of course they’re still with us now because.
even though the disease theory of medicine, I believe, is pretty widely accepted, there’s still people who resist it.
And that is present back then and has debate at an academic level.
And then now it has debate as sort of an epistemological level, which is very different.
But that resistance to the idea that…
disease comes from bacteria or virus is still out there.
And I just, I worry sometimes because I’m fascinated by these debates and these efforts to try to, you know, narrow down what is the actual cause.
But at the same time, the uncertainty inherent in science, where we’re always looking at provisional truths, is seen as a weakness by people who don’t want science at all and want to reject it.
I want these discussions.
I want these debates.
But at the same time, I am always afraid that having them is just fuel for the people who want to reject the entire system.
I agree.
And I think the Black Death is a really good case in point.
And, you know, I guess we might come to this in terms of sort of myths and memories and so on.
But the Black Death is the ultimate sort of medieval thing, isn’t it?
That this demonstrates how horrible the Middle Ages were, how dirty they were, how supposedly ignorant people were and so on.
And, you know, like the Monty Python, bring out your dead sketch and so on.
This representation of people in the past as hopelessly superstitious and helpless in the face of things like this.
And I think that…
That sort of image of people in the Middle Ages is really undermined by what you’re saying, Blake, because as you point out, we don’t really fully understand what was going on now from our perspective with all our supposed additional knowledge and so on.
And that raises the other question of the extent to which we would be able to cope with something like this now, because you can treat bubonic plague with strong antibiotics.
But if you had so many people becoming infected so quickly.
You know, it would be a whole big deal trying to get enough of those antibiotics produced and supplied to people.
You know, we know already from the vaccine situation during COVID-19 how difficult this sort of stuff is when you have something on a very large scale.
So I think that we’re probably not quite as safe from something like the Black Death as we might be inclined to think that we are.
But we have an understanding.
The Black Death has the advantage that if it takes a while to produce the medicine, the number of people who need it is drastically reduced very quickly.
And the same applies to people getting that medicine, right?
If you’re dying so quickly, it’s too late, right?
Isn’t it?
Before anything happens.
It is.
That’s very dark humor, but true.
Malthusian reckoning.
So Ben, how much do we know, actually know about how ordinary people experienced the plague?
And what are some of the biggest misconceptions that were around at that time?
I mean, I think we know quite a lot about how people experience the play because we’ve got a lot of written records from, you know, from Europe and other places, too.
So we’ve got eyewitness accounts.
We’ve got lots of, you know, really gruesome descriptions.
How far that translates to what ordinary people experience, though, is much more problematic because obviously most people can’t read and write in the Middle Ages and they’re not leaving firsthand accounts of what they experienced.
um that said we can get at their experience often from administrative records and that kind of thing which record um you know what happens in agricultural communities there’s some really interesting work being done by a historian called alex brown has a team of researchers at durham university at the moment where they uncovered
in records of payments to workers, people at the time of the Black Death who weren’t able to work as sort of medieval sick leave, which sort of reveals the Black Death not just as a mortality event, but also as a sickness event that people are just unwell and sort of taken out of action for a while.
So we can get this sort of roundabout picture from those records that they’re not very appealing on the surface, right?
Because they’re,
sort of administrative and it’s all about money and payments and this, that and the other.
But historians have been able to use those to give clues about ordinary people’s experience.
I think in terms of misconceptions, I think one of the main ones is that medieval people were so helpless in the face of the Black Death that they sort of panicked and behaved in irrational ways, threw up their arms and just sort of went crazy, basically, which I think is…
Really a long way from the truth, because I think people in the Middle Ages, first of all, thought that they understood what was going on, that there was a, you know, Blake, you were talking about this.
There was medical science in the Middle Ages and it wasn’t medical science as we think of it.
But they scientists thought that they were able to explain the Black Death and they debated it and had different possible explanations for it.
But they thought that they had the tools to understand what was happening.
Then obviously a lot of people saw the Black Death in terms of a kind of biblical punishment, you know, which made a lot of sense if you’d heard a lot of Bible stories and so on.
This was the sort of thing that God might do to punish sinful humans.
And so they’re able to make sense of the experience, possibly in a way that we wouldn’t really be able to today, that most people wouldn’t.
see frame things in those terms but to them this was entirely logical this is the sort of thing that god had to do in order to warn human beings to behave themselves better um so we see stuff like this extreme penitence you know that people whipping themselves and so on which looks to us like people going crazy in the face of the black death but is actually quite a rational response in terms of their understanding of what was going on to try and allay the you know the suffering that they were experiencing
So I think it obviously varies from person to person, group to group.
But a lot of medieval people responded in a pretty rational and sensible way to the awful situation they were facing.
They’re also pragmatic, too.
You know, the economy didn’t collapse.
People went out and sowed the fields and harvested the grain and so on because they had no choice.
If they didn’t do that, they were going to die of something else.
Right.
If the Black Death didn’t get them.
So you get this kind of continuity in the face of a disaster that’s pretty unimaginable to us.
If you’re into statistics, this seems like an incredible opportunity to hypothesize many, many effects and let them play out.
I mean, I’m thinking here, like, for example, just you’ve got fewer people able to go out and sow the fields.
But also, you’ve got fewer people who will need to eat in the autumn, right?
So it is fascinating if you could detach yourself from the horrible humanity of the thing, like all the death and the pain and the suffering.
But just from a how do these things play out in economic models, in population models?
Wow, what a rich ecosystem for testing ideas.
But you mentioned that it’s a bacteria, not a virus, which means, I think, as you were saying or alluding to, someone could get this again and again.
The immunity might be, I guess if there’s a genetic level, it would be people who might have a better immune system for recovering.
Maybe that’s the vector.
Who knows?
Or the angle, the advantage.
But golly, you could get this every season if it comes back.
No, thanks.
Yeah.
I think that’s right.
There’s some really good evidence for that from cemeteries, too, when people have looked at the bones of people who died in the Black Death because there was a huge famine in the 1310s.
And one of the arguments is that the impact of that famine on children was so severe that it permanently weakened them.
for the rest of their life so you know folk who are adults at the time of the Black Death had gone through this sort of traumatic deprivation of you know dietary deficiencies and so on in their childhood years and that made them much more vulnerable to the Black Death when it came along so without that it’s not that there wouldn’t have been a Black Death but that the effects of it were exacerbated by those long-standing deficiencies which I think that archaeologists can tell when they look at people’s
look at the evidence of bones because bone structure is changed by those kinds of deficiencies.
But then, as you say, you get the opposite scenario, right?
Because after the Black Death, there’s suddenly an abundance of land and far fewer people who are using that land to survive.
So you get this sort of ironic situation where people have gone through what must have been truly traumatic and yet find themselves in a much better position afterwards where they’re able to acquire land cheaply.
They’re able to work for people for much higher wages than they have been before.
And it’s almost overnight.
There’s a sudden improvement in the aftermath of the Black Death that must have been really noticeable.
I mean, all our source material comes from elites and they don’t like this, right?
Because they don’t want to have to pay workers more money.
They don’t think the poor should be going around behaving like the rich.
So they talk about…
You know, poor folk going around wearing coats that are lined with fur and drinking from, you know, nice sort of cups and going to the pub instead of working in the fields because wages were high.
So they had to work less and so on.
So that’s the elites getting cross about something which must have been great for most people.
The plague dividend, right?
Absolutely.
So, Ben, you mentioned the explanations and that some people viewed this as a punishment from God.
And even though there wasn’t medical science as we understand it today, what were some of the explanations that people came up with that medical people of the time thought might be underpinning this disease?
Well, they have no understanding in the Middle Ages, obviously, of microscopic pathogens in the human body that are causing disease.
And they frame disease instead in terms of the balance of humours in our body.
So each person’s body is made up of this set of humours.
And when you are ill, that’s because those different components, black bile, yellow bile and so on, are out of sync.
um so when medieval people talked about someone’s complexion that meant their overall balance of humors that defined their personality so you might be phlegmatic or choleric or sanguine which is defined by your natural balance of humors but then when someone’s someone gets some kind of disease that balance is thrown out
And that’s what causes the disease.
So there is no doubt that the Black Death is caused by some kind of humoral imbalance like every other disease.
But the debate between scientists is what causes the humoral imbalance.
And one of the you know, one of the main explanations is astrology.
So people are thinking about the movements of the planets across the backdrop of the stars in the sky and.
One of the things that determines people’s humours is the way in the arrangement of the planets as they sort of cross each other’s paths and so on, you know, within the signs of the zodiac and all the stuff that we think about in connection with astrology today.
So this is at the heart of medieval science, very much the sort of thing that university professors and so on would be debating.
And they decide that there were these astrological events which probably caused various things to happen to people’s humours.
And they grapple with all the same sort of stuff we would do, right?
If this is to do with the stars, then why do some people get sick and other people don’t get sick?
Why are some communities affected worse than other communities and so on?
So there’s this whole kind of scientific debate.
Other people say, oh, it’s not to do with that.
It’s to do with some kind of…
The emergence of gases from the centre of the earth, which creates this sort of miasma and that sort of wafts across and people are breathing it in and that causes humoral imbalance and so on.
So there are all these competing explanations, very much like there is when we get a modern, you know, modern disease.
When Covid came along, there were all these different explanations, weren’t there?
Was this something that was transmitted to humans in a…
you know, a fish market in China somewhere?
Was this something that escaped from a laboratory?
Whatever it might be.
The same kind of process of scientific debate amongst medieval scientists.
That, I think, raises the question of blame.
We always like to blame things on groups or peoples or others.
So who…
Who did they blame the plague on?
Was it like, was it your enemy neighbors?
Was it a religious group?
Outsiders.
Outsiders.
Was it foreigners?
Yeah.
Well, the most shocking and appalling, or one of the most shocking and appalling things at the time of the Black Death is the targeted violence towards Jewish people, because some people in the Middle Ages, especially prior to the arrival of the Black Death, think that this disease that they’re hearing about is caused by…
Jewish people and that causation can take different forms.
So some of it is a kind of conspiracy theory, this idea that Jewish people are deliberately poisoning wells, that Christians are then drinking from those wells and getting sick.
And there’s another sort of broad framework that people have where.
They’re living in communities with Christians and Jews together.
And people argue that that makes God angry because Christians weren’t meant to live with Jews.
And therefore, you know, that anger is expressed through plague and therefore the Jews need to be targeted and murdered.
I mean, the whole thing is really horrible and really appalling and also very problematic.
in terms of medieval explanations, because medieval people can see that Jewish people in their communities are dying of the Black Death as well as Christians.
So it’s obviously the conspiracy theory doesn’t really stand up very well.
But the evidence is really heartbreaking.
There’s a very famous case in a town, it’s not far from here, in Spain, in Catalonia, called Targa.
and we know from documentary evidence that there was an awful series of attacks and murders of jewish people in targa in 1348 associated with the black death and then in you know those documents obviously go back to the time period itself but then just a few years ago some jewish cemeteries were excavated in targa and they found the actual bones of those people who were murdered in those attacks
And the archaeological evidence was almost even more shocking than the documentary evidence, because you could tell that some of those victims were elderly folk who were obviously not able to escape from the pursuers and were murdered in the most brutal fashion.
So, you know, I talked before about how medieval people didn’t panic and so on at the time of the Black Death, but some of them certainly saw fit to perpetrate these awful acts of violence.
in a very illogical fashion that was obvious obvious to medieval people that you know that jews were vulnerable to although i guess before the arrival of the black death that might not have been so clear to them so they were taking they thought they were taking um preventative action but yeah it’s it’s a really really awful episode men women and children burned alive and all this sort of stuff that is unfortunate i mean it always is and i i i
It does seem like conspiracies that blame the Jews is like it’s the go to for Europe and America, apparently.
So, well, we have a lot of Europeans who migrated here.
I think we brought those terrible ideas with us.
But I just it’s kind of heartbreaking.
But I found it surprising that.
And correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t see a similar sort of scapegoating being applied to Islam or to Muslims.
So, but yet, you know, different…
They were newer, well, relatively newer.
Yeah, but I mean, they controlled…
Spain from, what, the 700s to the 14th?
It was a long period and certainly were well known.
And I know that there were also, but am I missing the boat there?
Were Islamic people, were Muslims, I should say Muslims, were Muslims being blamed at all or was it pretty much just Jewish people?
I mean, it’s targeted mostly at the Jews and it’s partly because there are more Christian communities throughout the rest of Europe where there are larger Jewish populations than there were Muslim populations.
Outside of the Iberian Peninsula, clearly, you know, Muslims were travelling into Northern Europe and so on, but there weren’t large communities of Muslims in
most European towns, whereas I don’t know about most, but many European towns had Jewish Jewish communities there.
There’s a whole sort of like theological aspect to this, too, because obviously Christians were blaming Jews for the murder of Christ.
And that gives a special sort of religious take there.
hatred of Jewish people in the Middle Ages was seemingly different from what happened in Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
It very much racialized, right?
The representation of the Jews as racially different and racially inferior led the Nazis to target them with that kind of pseudoscience.
Whereas in the Middle Ages, it wasn’t really a racial objection to the Jews so much as an objection to their religion, their religiosity, and the fact that it was intolerable
for Jews, for some medieval Christians, for Jews to exist in their communities because of that, you know, history of sort of killing Christ and not accepting Christ and so on.
And the blood libel was from the 1100s.
And so, I mean, the myth of the blood libel lasted for…
I mean, a long time from the 1100s to now.
And it all gets wrapped up into this sort of racialized stuff in the modern period.
But as you say, from the time of the Crusades and so on, you’re getting all these sort of myths and so on about the way that the Jews are behaving.
And it’s another conspiracy theory, isn’t it?
This idea that these people are powerful, they’re different from us, they’re doing nasty things, they want to target us, they want to get us and so on.
And I think that, you know, this is a…
a sad sort of take isn’t it on human nature but this is what human beings do in times of in times of crisis is try and find somebody to blame and then take out that frustration well we’re a very pro-science show here no matter what uh our current uh head of uh medical here in the united states says you would be surprised by just how wildly wrong he can be when he is spouting alarming official sounding statistics
We are 4.2% of the world’s population.
We buy 70% of the pharmaceutical drugs on Earth.
15% of American youth are now on Adderall or some other ADHD medication.
When I was a kid, I always say this.
A typical pediatrician would see one case of diabetes in his lifetime.
Today, it’s one out of every three kids who walks through his office door.
20 years ago, there was no diabetes in China.
Today, 50% of the population is diabetic.
So here’s the thing.
All the numbers you just heard him say are bullshit.
Americans don’t buy 70% of the drugs on Earth.
We buy around 6%.
15% of American youth aren’t on ADHD meds.
Estimates put it closer to 5%.
One in three kids don’t have diabetes.
It’s actually 0.35%, or one in 285 kids.
And the rate of diabetes in China is roughly 12%, not, as I think you already know, 50%.
Half of all the people in China do not have diabetes.
I think that this sad period could come back at any moment, unfortunately.
But I guess it has.
It’s like I just it breaks my heart that it’s again, I keep coming back lately to the epistemological problem that people who don’t use.
science, evidence, logic, reason as their methodology for making their decisions are never going to agree with you when you have good evidence because that’s not how they’re making their decisions in the first place.
And it’s really problematic when you’re trying to actually get people to change their position.
So, yeah.
Ryan, your podcast is about monsters, isn’t it?
And this is the way in which people create monsters.
They monsterize.
Because they need them, don’t they?
They need the monsters in order to be able to explain the horrors that they’re enduring.
Well, and we’d love to say, well, you know, witches aren’t real, but aren’t they fun at Halloween?
Except witches…
may never have been real, but they’re always still a real threat to be accused of witchcraft.
You can still be murdered for being a witch.
You can still be in terrible jeopardy.
That’s the real fear.
Right.
It’s not about the cool, spooky story.
It’s about the horror of being accused.
We found a witch!
We found a witch!
We found a witch!
We have found a witch!
May we burn her?
Burn her!
that is very difficult to defend yourself against accusations that are based on magical thinking.
It’s just really, really hard.
So, yeah, we talk about this too.
We love monsters in the spooky sense, but the horrors are real right now and have always been.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
Well, Ben, earlier you were talking about your students and their exposure to pop culture about the Black Death.
Could you talk a little bit about how it’s been portrayed in books and movies and documentaries and even video games?
And is there any kind of depiction out there that you think gets it right or any that really gets it wrong?
Yeah, I mean, there’s so much, isn’t there?
And there’s so much really sort of good stuff.
It’s central to popular culture and the way that we think about, you know, what the Middle Ages were, the way that we distance ourselves from the Middle Ages, that we want to feel that we are modern and that we are protected against all this sort of stuff.
And they were medieval and so on.
And so it makes for a really good kind of story.
And the, you know, the most famous one, the Monty Python one with the bring out your dead sketches all over YouTube and so on.
Here’s one.
Ninepence.
I’m not dead.
What?
Nothing.
Here’s your ninepence.
I’m not dead.
Here.
He says he’s not dead.
Yes, he is.
I’m not.
He isn’t.
Well, he will be soon.
He’s very ill.
I’m getting better.
No, you’re not.
You’ll be stone dead in a moment.
We’re a long way from Monty Python, right, in chronology now, but, you know, folk love Monty Python and, you know, young people too are sort of enjoying it for the first time.
And I think it’s a particularly clever sketch, right, because it’s making fun of exactly this kind of misconception.
It’s making fun of the way that we represent medieval people as, you know, eating mud, hopelessly filthy, chucking people in plague carts before they’re even dead and so on.
And it’s actually a mockery of these assumptions that we make.
It’s, you know, a very smart piece of comedy on the part of Monty Python.
They were educated, yeah.
I think they were historians, yeah.
I think Michael Palin and Terry Jones were both historians.
Yeah, absolutely.
And they really knew what they were talking about when they were depicting that.
There are some great ones, though.
There’s a really good science fiction book by Connie Willis called Doomsday Book, which is part of a series that she wrote about.
A team of scholars at Oxford University devise a method of time travel and they send historians back to the past.
And they…
accidentally send some people back to the past in the time of the black death which you know some way sound doesn’t sound the most promising of sort of framing for a narrative but it’s the depiction of what it’s like at the time of the black death that i think is really good in that novel she really researched it and it brings home the awful personal tragedy of
the just being there in the mid 14th century at that time you know children wandering about the place because they’ve lost both their parents and all other family members and they just don’t know what to do it’s a desperate awful tragic situation um so you know within the framework of science fiction with very much sort of popular you know popular literature and so on there’s a really sort of engaging and detailed and historical representation of the black death
My own personal bugbear on this one, the one that really gets my goat, there’s a book by Ken Follett that’s the sequel.
He wrote Pillars of the Earth, which is a famous one about the construction of a cathedral.
And there’s a book, the big book that he wrote is a sequel called The World Without End, which should probably be called The Book Without End because it’s extremely long.
And there’s a very annoying representation of the Black Death there.
It goes through all of the sort of horrors of it and so on, which is sort of fine.
And some of it’s kind of documented.
But then he has this community where somebody comes in with these almost modern ideas that, like a modern person, they’ve looked around them and observed what’s happening.
So they encourage everybody to wear these face masks and
you know really reduces the mortality because they’re stopping the infection but then all the medieval people come along and say that’s got nothing to do with the transmission of disease and so on this is silly stop people wearing those face masks and it’s this sort of patronizing notion that if only medieval people behaved a bit more like us then they would have been just fine they just needed to be a little bit more modern um and they would have been okay look how superstitious and ignorant they were and they can’t really sort of cope with that
And I think that it’s really the opposite of getting to grips with the Middle Ages, that stuff, isn’t it?
That sort of very condescending attitude of we are superior, we are modern, they were stupid.
I mean, the book’s awful in lots of other ways, too.
It’s misogynistic and unpleasant representation of female characters and so on.
But the representation of the Black Death in that is the one that I dislike most.
Wow.
I’ll issue you that one.
Thank you so much for talking with us tonight.
Now, your book is called Myths and Memories of the Black Death, and I’ll put a link to that in the show notes.
Thank you.
And this is so fascinating.
We could talk on and on about this.
I know you don’t have to come back.
There’s some areas that intersect with what we talk about.
But I want if you could leave our listeners with one surprising fact, it doesn’t have to be uplifting.
It’s up to you.
But just one surprising fact about the black that they they might not know because of all these misrepresentations.
What would that be?
I would go for what we were talking about earlier, about things getting so much better for so many people pretty quickly after the Black Death, because we think that it’s the ultimate doom and gloom, that it’s the end of everything, that it undermines society and so on.
And it obviously was in some ways, it’s horrible, but it didn’t undermine society.
And some people found themselves with lives that were rapidly much better in the aftermath.
Well, I say some people, a lot of people, right?
We’re talking about ordinary folk, peasants, you know, the less wealthy social groups.
Especially inheritance lawyers.
That is really interesting.
I think I heard that from…
James Burke, either in his Connection series or maybe in The Day the Universe Changed, he talked a little bit about that.
And the peasants?
Well, thanks to that loom way back and the fact that flax is cheap to grow, linen was their thing.
Well, it was everybody’s thing, really, in hats and shirts and bed sheets.
And especially if you take an indiscreet look up the nearest girl’s skirt.
underwear and just this once that’s the great historical trigger of change what you’re looking at now yes frilly knickers fascinating uh to see i again it’s hard to find an upside when there’s piles of corpses on the street but yeah there was some upside so yeah life keeps going on so
Yeah, Ben, to echo what Blake said, it’s just been great to talk with you, and I’m so fascinated by this topic.
So we’ve been around since 2009, and I’m astonished we haven’t talked about this before.
We’ve touched upon it, but it’s just been great to chat with you.
We’ve got one final question, though, that we ask all of our first-time guests.
It’s our signature question, and that is, what’s your favourite monster?
I was thinking about this one.
This is a great question to think about.
And I think mine is very definitely the Green Children of Woolpit.
You know the story from these.
Late 12th and 13th century, two chroniclers describe something happening in the mid 12th century where these two children with green tinned skin mysteriously appear in a village.
I won’t go on about it because I’m sure you know about this.
It’s a famous… We do, but our listeners may not.
Yeah, yeah.
if you want to summarize, that’s fine.
We’ve never done a whole episode about it, but it is one.
I love this story.
So yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I, I no doubt there’s kind of prosaic explanation for this, but it really isn’t clear to me what that is, right.
That there’s been all these suggestions and they’re, you know, kind of plausible, but it’s really hard to ground them in the evidence.
And.
I don’t know, who knows what’s going on and what was going on.
And it’s really fun to speculate about what the possibilities are for where those children might have come from.
And interesting the way that this idea takes off so quickly as well.
Even in the early modern period, they’re already saying that these children fell from the moon or whatever it might be.
So it’s kind of connected to early science fiction too, that really fascinating story.
Indeed.
We’ll put some links in the show notes for that as well.
Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us and for working in education.
The world needs this.
Yeah, for sure.
It’s been really great.
Well, thank you so much to you both.
It’s been a real pleasure talking to you.
Thank you for staying up for us.
I appreciate it.
Yeah, it was quite late.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard an interview with Dr. Benjamin Dodds telling us about the Black Death, a disease which killed millions in Europe in the 1300s and which is still a pestilence humans deal with to this very day.
His book is Myths and Memories of the Black Death, and a link to it is in the show notes.
There are still fascinating mysteries being debated and studied about both the historical impact and mechanisms of this disease, as well as how human resistance and immune responses have changed over the centuries.
This is not a story merely of history, but one actively affecting people today.
And if you’re interested, perhaps your own research could one day help answer some of these questions.
As always, I hope that this discussion has inspired you to go learn more.
Check the show notes for some links to help your quest.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of Monster Talk.
Each episode, we strive to bring you the very best in monster-related content with a focus on bringing scientific skepticism into the conversation.
If you enjoy Monster Talk, we now have a variety of ways to support the show, all with convenient links at monstertalk.org forward slash support.
That’s monstertalk.org forward slash support.
We have links there to our Patreon page as well as a donation button.
Another great way to support the show is to buy books from our Amazon Monster Talk wishlist, which directly helps us with our research.
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Monster Talk’s theme music is by Pete Stealing Monkeys.
On second thoughts, let’s not go to Camelot.
It is a silly place.
This has been a Monster House presentation.

The post ☠️S05E42 – THE BLACK DEATH🐀 appeared first on MonsterTalk.

Content Warning: This episode contains frank discussion of animal death, carcass predation, and graphic descriptions of animal mutilation. Listener discretion is advised.

Blake and Karen continue their conversation with religious studies scholar Lee Weiss on the cattle mutilation mystery. If you missed part one, wind your podcast player back an episode – this one picks up right where the panic peaked. At the center of part two is Emmy Award-winning reporter Linda Moulton Howe, whose 1980 documentary A Strange Harvest wrapped a decade of dead cows, black helicopters, and hypnotic regressions into a single package and delivered it to America.

Lee walks through what happened next: the government’s Rommel Report and its verdict of “Mother Nature,” the tragic Bennewitz affair, cow parts arriving by mail in Alberta, a declassified CIA remote-viewing file, and how the whole phenomenon finally hardened into alien orthodoxy. It all ends with the big question – what’s actually killing these animals?

A Strange Harvest (1980)– watch a pristine copy of Linda Moulton Howe’s documentary on Archive.org, along with its 1993 sequel Strange Harvests
Linda Moulton Howe– the Emmy Award-winning Denver reporter who became “the dead cow lady”
Cattle Mutilation– Wikipedia’s overview, including details of the Rommel Report (Operation Animal Mutilation, 1980)
The FBI’s Animal Mutilation Files– the declassified records that first drew Lee into this topic
Paul Bennewitz– the businessman at the center of a genuine government disinformation campaign (a future MonsterTalk episode, Blake promises)
The Gold Key comics version of the ‘Snippy’ storyvia Archive.org
Dulce Base– the legendary underground alien base of northern New Mexico
Senator Harrison Schmitt– the astronaut-senator who convened the 1979 Albuquerque conference on the mutilations
Ed Sanders– the beat writer and Manson family chronicler who penned one of the first major mutilation articles
R. Leo Sprinkle– the University of Wyoming psychologist whose hypnotic regression appears in A Strange Harvest (papers held at UW’s American Heritage Center)
Bill Cooper– the Pale Horse conspiracist Howe crossed paths with
Art Bell– whose Bigelow-sponsored Area 2000 featured Howe’s segments before Coast to Coast AM
Robert BigelowandNIDS– whose 1990s investigations included the prion disease conspiracy theory
The Stargate Project– the CIA remote-viewing program whose Sunstreak files contained Lee’s strangest find
Endangered Species (1982)– the mainstream movie cash-in that nobody on the panel recommends
Procedures for Evaluating Predation on Livestock and Wildlife– the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension manual Lee recommends to anyone serious about the topic

Quantifying the gross in Linda Moulton Howe’s A Strange Harvest (1980) · a MonsterTalk investigation · hover over any bar for details

Method: full transcript (7,285 words, ~57 min) parsed by caption; exact word and phrase matching per category. The “body part removed / missing” concept counts “removed,” “missing,” “gone,” or “taken” only when a body part appears in the same caption, to exclude phrases like “mutilations had gone away.” Compiled for MonsterTalk S05E39-40, “Strange Harvest: The Cattle Mutilation Mystery.”

Lee is looking for leads on Project Sunstreak – the CIA remote-viewing subproject whose declassified files inexplicably involve images of mutilated cattle – along with any other cattle mutilation ephemera, and an introduction to Linda Moulton Howe if you can manage one. Reach him here: ([email protected]).

Lee Weiss is a religious studies scholar researching mass paranormal and psychogenic events, including the cattle mutilation phenomenon and its religious dimensions.

Lee Weiss on Academia.edu
Of Gods and Monsters Conference (2019)– where Blake and Lee first met
Gods and Monsters 2 (2026)– where they renewed the acquaintance
Religion, Culture, and the Monstrous– the academic volume featuring contributions from both Blake and Lee

Check out Lee’s writing at his Substack

Check out Karen’s bookBeyond Words.

This is not a fully accurate transcript, and was machine generated. It’s here for helping search engines find the episode but not intended to be a faithful transcript of the episode. (But it’s not AWFUL.) Some of the material in this transcript only exists in the Patreon/Premium edition of the show and was excised for the commercial version.

———————
Monster House presents…
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We’re dependent upon the revenue from these ads and from the support of our patrons at patreon.com forward slash monster talk to continue making this show.
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It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant, hairy creature.
Part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24 mile long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland.
It’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
This is part two of our look at cattle mutilations with religious studies scholar Lee Weiss.
I would recommend checking out part one if you missed it, since we’re continuing a conversation and you’ll be joining in medias res.
Pretty much just like the Odyssey in that respect.
I mean, the poem, not the movie.
Well, I mean, I say not the movie.
I haven’t seen the movie.
But look, can we just get on with this intro?
I didn’t want to sidetrack our discussion, but we briefly talk about UFO comics in this episode, and two of my most vivid 1970s weird shit moments are watching Jack Webb’s produced TV show Project UFO and buying one of these gold key UFO comics off the black metal spinning comic book rack at the drugstore next to my pediatrician’s office.
When I recently discovered that these Gold Key comics are available on the Internet Archive, I had to go look that issue up and was delighted to see that my recollections about the content match the actual book.
We do talk a lot about how fallible human memory is, but sometimes it can be rewardingly accurate.
And the older I get, the more pleased I am when any of the dusty garbage in my head turns out to be based on a true story.
The point is that you’ll find a link to those comics in the show notes along with links to Emmy award-winning Linda Moulton Howell’s documentary Strange Harvest.
I know skeptics and believers won’t always agree on what’s behind these stories, but at least we’re able to go review the same source material for how these ideas propagated out into the wider world back in ye olde groovy disco days.
And this series sure would be improved by a follow-up deep dive into taphonomy, wouldn’t it?
Because skeptics will tell you that every one of these dead animals had its own cause, it’s better if we do take a little trip down to Funimilane soon and learn how various factors change the forms of animals when they die.
Whether it’s predators or humans or disease or accidents, what happens next is fascinating and follows some predictable patterns.
This has led to insights useful in forensics, and some of these patterns are so predictable that they become evidence suitable for helping determine guilt or innocence in court cases.
It’s nasty and disgusting and also fascinating, which sounds a bit like how my wife describes me, but that’s a different story.
Besides, as useful a tool as it is for helping skeptics win arguments, these wounds were not caused by Occam’s razor.
Monster Talk.
We’re joined again by Lee Weiss this week, and we’re discussing animal mutilations.
If you haven’t heard part one, you need to get back into your podcast and wind back to last week and get part one.
But one person hits the scene, and I think she manages to take one hour of television and stick all of this candy into one beautiful big wrapper, which I admit I knew about for decades, but only watched…
uh last night in preparation for this show i finally sat down and watched the whole thing uh for listeners there’ll be a link in the show notes there is a beautiful pristine copy of this film on archive.org you can download and watch or just watch streaming um i’m not gonna say it is the height of journalism but um after this film she does become not linda moulton howe but emmy award-winning linda moulton howe linda moulton how emmy award-winning uh
Well, reporter, I guess.
Linda, how should I introduce you?
I always lose track.
Emmy-winning, I know you’ve done documentaries, right?
Or maybe an Emmy award-winning TV producer and author.
But all of that’s so hard to say.
So all of that, Linda Howe.
Of course, Emmy award-winning Linda Howe coming up here in just a few moments.
Usual Linda Moulton Howe, investigator, Emmy award-winning documentary producer.
and general scientific reporter for this program.
Linda Moulton Howe, Emmy Award-winning documentary producer, investigator of crop circles and animal mutilation.
The documentary Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist looking into crop circles, animal mutilations, and stuff going on in Puerto Rico.
Linda Howe, who is…
an investigative journalist actually emmy award-winning producer linda howe is an emmy award-winning television producer writer and researcher of earth mysteries linked to non-human intelligences we’re talking about strange harvest can you can you tell us a little bit about this film i it’s
Yes.
I rewatched it recently, too, and it holds up.
I know you’re familiar with In Search Of.
Did someone say In Search Of?
If you loved In Search Of, you should check out another fine Monster House production, In Research Of, with myself, Blake Smith, and Dr. Jeb Card.
In Research Of, we’ll talk and have some fun.
We share ideas, but not the only ones.
We’ll share the facts that we show sometimes last.
I.R.O.
In each episode, we take a 22-minute episode of In Search Of and add information that the producers didn’t or couldn’t include.
Check TV listings in your podcast market.
It’s got these beautiful 70s.
I mean, it’s 1980, but it’s still got these beautiful 70s vibes.
And it’s kind of where what becomes now, I think, effectively the orthodox explanation for the cattle mutilation phenomena becomes crystallized.
Now, really, before this, it had all, I mean, again, we talked about this since Snippy, it had been associated with aliens.
And by 76, the Snippy story is popularly associated with UFOs in…
comic books for children.
The illustrations are great.
Some of the images in this comic book are just, I mean, they’re astonishing.
And they do cover all of these true UFO stories from the golden age of UFOs with these just beautiful, like, Silver Age comic illustrations.
And you get to see the horse get zapped just in eight different issues.
But while it had always been this kind of, one of the theories, there’s still this skepticism, like,
The early investigators are still trying, the 70s investigators are still promoting a vision of, well, it could be a government conspiracy.
It could be something else.
It could be the satanic cults.
The satanic cult theory goes throughout the 70s.
And there’s a lot of tangentially, there are better…
you know, agent to mutilate cattle ostensibly than UFOs on first glance, when you have like the Night Stalker going around, when you have the, one of the first great like articles on the cattle mutilation phenomena is by Ed Sanders, who was this beat writer who also wrote the first book on the Manson family.
And according to him, he got involved with this after writing his Manson family book and getting a tongue, a cow tongue mailed to him in the mail.
There’s a very strange account out of Canada in 1992.
This is just a side note, I’m sorry.
I’m just wondering if they lick the stamp themselves or use the cow tongue.
Sounds like voodoo to me.
A little bit, it’s odd.
But in 1992 in Edmonton, a number of residents of this town called Legal
received a series of cow parts in the mail over the course of a number of days so they just open up their mailboxes there’d be parts of cows in there cow tongues cow eyes something that came up but to circle back around to kind of what her documentary really does
These strands of both conspiratorial thinking and UFO thinking, that the cause of this is either space aliens or some kind of conspiracy, they’d been in the community a long time, but there was still this attempt through the 70s, most of the investigators are trying to at least…
They all have their pet theories, and I think secretly most of them at the time really believed it was aliens from the beginning.
Gabe Valdez, I don’t think, did.
I think some of them really thought it was this…
Some military conspiracy or another.
Emmy award-winning TV producer and author.
Linda Moulton Howe, in her documentary… Emmy award-winning Linda Moulton Howe.
Emmy award-winning.
Emmy award-winning.
Who won’t return my emails.
Oh, no.
I’ll send her another one.
In this… She basically… And this goes out of…
It goes…
It is a like cult classic on cable television.
It gets like, I don’t know if it’s syndicated with documentaries, but it’s circulated quite regularly to the point that she updates it in the early 90s.
But it fuses these dimensions of there’s a government conspiracy and then also there’s this alien conspiracy.
She becomes quite fixated on this later on.
And I don’t know if we want to get into the Benowitz stuff or just kind of like simmer with the birth of the alien conspiracy.
The senator has this conference to kind of bring attention to this and invites both federal law enforcement people and also the nascent cattle mutilation investigation community.
And this is ostensibly where Benowitz gets brought into this scheme.
In our first episode, Lee, you were talking about copycat cases of this.
And I’m wondering when Strange Harvest came out, what effect this had on the spread of not only the belief in this, but also the phenomenon taking place.
So did this increase the amount of cases that were seen?
It’s an odd thing.
You would expect it to, but it doesn’t.
After, so her report comes out at the same time that this thing called her report, her documentary, comes out at the same time that the Ronald report comes out.
So this FBI agent, or at this point he was retired from the FBI, but he’s appointed to head this federal investigation into this.
Now, by this point, the FBI hadn’t been investigating this since 1976.
Not very extensively going by their records, which is how I initially got involved with this.
And all of the FBI’s records on cattle mutilation are readily available also on archives.org.
The Rommel Report interviews all these people and effectively concludes, no, it’s all natural causes.
It does weirdly highlight a number of cases that it says, well, this is anomalous, we can’t explain this, but then it doesn’t expand on that.
even though the cases don’t seem, it’s odd.
The whole thing is very odd.
And one does get the impression the federal government really is just trying to sweep it under the rug, which makes sense given the background and that it just is kind of annoying, like you can’t explain it.
But after 1980, the cases do drop off.
Now, there are still isolated accounts.
And these periodic breakouts.
And weirdly enough, right now, there’s a huge outbreak that’s been going on for years in Texas.
There’s, I think, another in New Mexico.
So they still reoccur post-1980.
But after the 70s, and particularly 75 and 76, it’s like, I mean, it gets so bad that they’re shooting at helicopters.
And like the…
like people are forming posses.
Wow.
It doesn’t ever get back to that point.
After 1980, the phenomena kind of… And what happens, I think… Emmy award-winning TV producer and author.
Linda Moulton Howe has some…
I love that.
I just say her whole name every time I reference her.
Yeah, one of those names.
For some reason, it is.
For real, yeah.
Well, I mean, she always, you know, on the Art Bell shows.
By the way, Art Bell before, if you go back to our archives, you can find after he passed, I did a tribute episode.
But before he did Coast to Coast, he did a show called Area 2000, which was entirely sponsored by Robert Bigelow.
And that show…
Emmy award winning TV producer and author.
Linda Moulton Howell already doing regular segments, very reminiscent of what became her Earth Files.
So that whole formula was there as a way.
And I didn’t really understand exactly what she was doing in the sense that she was a local reporter.
She did.
She got an Emmy for doing this coverage of this story.
And then that became her life.
Like her life became reporting on these strange things.
Like she didn’t go on to cover traffic reports or local political corruption.
Right.
No, it’s like she became the dead cow lady.
Right.
So.
she gets sucked straight into it um and again i think it’s something that hap similar would happen to benowitz it’s the same guy that they’re interacting with and i mean she was also interacting with i’m not gonna get in i’m not a my background is not in ufos but um like she was interacting with uh bill cooper before his death um so she i think she they get to her i think
The dead horse meets the pale horse.
I got it.
It’s quite an apropos.
She seems a lot less anti-Semitic than he was.
Thankfully, yeah.
Yeah, in her favor.
So I think one thing that happens with this documentary, and because at this point the cases are receding, people are reporting on them less.
And it really fully shifts just completely into the ETH, the alien hypothesis, and specifically the alien conspiracy sort of branch.
You don’t really, with one odd exception that I’ll talk about more a little bit later, Bigelow’s NIDS, they…
Because they also do a lot of cattle investigations in the 90s.
One of their teams really, really took seriously the medical conspiracy, like governments, like FDA, military, covering up a prion disease outbreak theory.
They had maps and graphs, and they have this whole claim that Alzheimer’s rates are being misreported.
but which is true.
And that what this is covering up is a wide scale outbreak of prion disease in the beef supply.
It’s a great conspiracy, right?
I mean, but it’s a really good one.
Yeah.
And in the UK, they were terrified of it and we didn’t want it to happen here.
So everybody, it just like, okay.
Oh no.
Another outbreak of Ebola has happened in Africa.
We’re like, oh, that’s terrible.
Is it coming here?
Because we matter, right?
Like that’s, it always comes back to, is it about us?
Is it about us?
Is it about us?
Fear.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So when I watched Strange Harvest last night, I was surprised.
I’m a little curious.
I was talking to Karen before the show.
It’s 57 minutes long.
And I didn’t know if it was originally a 90-minute documentary or if it was an hour, but they’ve extended it just a little bit to make it into a VHS or something.
So I wasn’t quite clear on that.
It was made for TV, and then she extends it with more footage later.
Okay, that fits.
I think in 88, the longer version, and then 93 is the sequel, which is Strange Harvests, which I still haven’t watched yet, but I just found out about it a few minutes ago.
Since our recording, I found a little more about the history of the documentaries we’re discussing.
It’s because there’s more than one Strange Harvest out there, and it gets confusing fast.
The original is A Strange Harvest, singular.
It aired May 25, 1980 as a 90-minute evening special on KMGH-TV, Channel 7, Denver.
It pulled the largest audience in that station’s history for a locally produced documentary, and it won Linda Moulton Howe a regional Emmy the following year in 1981.
Now, the version most people watch today, including the copy up on the Internet Archive, is not that original broadcast.
It’s a shorter reissue, running about 57 minutes, with new Howe narration bolted onto the front that references cattle mutilations as late as 1982.
It circulated on home video as you’ll see it dated to 1988 in some catalog listings.
And then, 13 years after the original, there’s a sequel, Strange Harvests, plural, with that S on the end.
That one came out in 1993.
It’s about an hour long and it revisits the same territory, animals still dying, light still in the sky.
It’s a separate film and it’s the one that trails off into the full alien conclusion.
So,
A Strange Harvest 1980 Emmy Award winner.
It’s recut home edition.
And then Strange Harvest, 1993, the follow-up.
Same story, three different packages.
And then to make it even more confusing, in 2024, a new film called Strange Harvest hit the indie film circuit.
You’ll see that one referred to as a mockumentary, but to be clear, it’s a horror film, not a comedy, so maybe pseudo-documentary is a less ambiguous label.
Anyway, it has nothing to do with animal mutilations.
It’s about a serial killer called Mr.
Shiny, and most importantly for our purposes,
is not related to the topic we’re discussing but in the end of that episode i was shocked to see leo sprinkle show up doing a hypnosis and a hypnotic regression now leo sprinkle if ufo people will know him as being a hypnotic regression uh ufo investigator from way back uh also from the colorado area karen and he was also involved sorry yeah he was also involved with stan roman x early from here yeah
So but they’re doing this again, just like on in search of they’re doing like it’s a dark room with brown walnut paneling.
And they’re asking this woman to recall these memories.
They’re quite traumatic.
I mean, it is it.
You know, it.
an early Cronenberg movie.
It looks like The Brood or Shivers.
In more ways than one.
There’s a guy in Scanners who looks a lot like Leo Sprinkle, but…
the the what surprised me was it starts out as a pretty straight documentary and then by the end of the thing it’s well this is either a government conspiracy or it’s aliens those are really the only two explanations that make any sense both yeah or both right or the governments are colluding with the aliens you know so right so
For her to have kept this same story going and the story itself to have evolved so little is surprising.
It’s almost like it rolled into its canonical version and just stuck, right?
So in a sense, I’m wondering if Strange Harvest sort of forms part of the canonical literature of the field.
I think so.
I think, and I think that’s the transition from, in the 70s, you really get some out there theories about what’s going on.
I mean, you get like new agers writing into Stigmata and proposing, well,
One really good one is that this is a mass, what’s the topa or a thought form that’s being manifested by the collective anxiety of the human race.
And what’s specifically…
the collective anxiety of America vis-a-vis the Soviet Union and the war.
And that it’s first preying on the cattle and that next it’s going to trigger some mass psychic event that will kill all of humanity.
It gets related to also like Soviet psychological operations.
I do have an odd digression
if any of your listeners want to help me with this.
Oh, crowdsourcing.
We love crowdsourcing.
While I was looking into the FBI files on this, I thought I would look into the declassified CIA files.
Do you know what Project Sunstreak is?
I do not.
Project Stargate?
I do know Project Stargate.
So it’s a subsidiary of that and had to deal with remote viewing.
Okay.
So it’s…
a little redacted.
It’s like one of their usual remote viewing reports.
The odd thing is that it seems to involve using images of mutilated cattle as an attempt to interfere with or block the remote viewer’s capabilities.
And it seems to imply that this could be used as defense against potential Soviet psychic spies that, well, perhaps we could use the American, like they would just, and it’s very, I don’t, again, it’s quite redacted.
Wait, like pictures of dead cows would block Soviet psychic spies?
That’s utter nonsense.
Oh, that’s a good one.
fitting that’s three now and what’s even stranger is for some reason they include in the declassified document this clipping about cattle mutilation reporting oh wow which and i and i’ve no there’s no reference in the it’s a very brief document none of the other ones
In case any of your listeners are believers in the government conspiracy, just to give them some more fuel.
What would they, what are you looking for?
And where would you like them to send information if they have the information to provide?
Up to that.
Oh, yeah.
I’ll put it at the end of the show.
I’ll put it in the show notes.
And if you have anything to contribute here or leads or just, you know.
Or any cattle mutilation.
Blassy pictures of dead cows, whatever.
If you can get me in touch with Linda, anything.
yeah that sounds good yeah we have one more pop culture thing i guess we should at least mention so we don’t get angry letters uh there was a mainstream movie about uh ostensibly ostensibly about cattle mutilations uh which is endangered species in 1982 if they aren’t stopped now there may be no hope for the future
Endangered species.
It’s not science fiction anymore.
I didn’t care for it.
It’s a dreadful movie.
Not even so bad as good.
It was just really not great.
Not really, no.
Definitely not.
It’s really, it’s also a strange mishmash.
It’s clearly like an odd cash-in, kind of late, like a late cash-in.
I think it’s more inspired by just like the sci-fi trend in late 70s, early 80s, like cinema.
And then there’s this like…
spoiler alert if anyone is planning on watching the movie.
Don’t.
Don’t.
I won’t.
The ending is that the government is conducting, I mean, it’s effectively the Valdez hypothesis, but the government is conducting secret tests and then they’re utilizing cattle in these tests.
Which is interesting.
So you see that even like up until like the 80s, the full like panoply of theories are still out there.
And some of them are still out there, like the satanic abuse theories and the ritual violence theories and the cult theories.
Those are still out there.
And ultimately those have the most quote unquote weight in terms of evidence.
people investigating it, I guess.
But the government theory outside of, you know, the alien, either that they’re at war with the aliens in an underground base, if you follow with like the…
Dolce.
Do you have more to say about Dolce?
I’m not the person to talk to about it.
But, I mean, it’s interesting that this phenomenon seems to touch, like, every inch of the American, like, paranormal landscape.
It touches almost every major, like, that’s why the Kennedy assassination.
It touches all of these major alien conspiracies, abduction conspiracies.
It’s basically barbecuing on.
well unfortunately we’ll need to start to wrap things up but uh i think we need to ask the big question what’s going on here what what is really behind all of this which we’ve touched upon
What’s actually happening?
Again, there are some strange outlier cases.
What’s actually happening to the cows, I think, is just a series of mostly natural events.
And I think anyone who is very serious about cattle mutilation, the two things they need to look at are…
There’s a great book that AgriLife Extension put out, Procedures for Evaluating Predation on Livestock and Wildlife.
That’s handy.
That’s a great title.
Yeah, it’s very easy to remember.
But it’s this manual for ranchers that just shows here are the usual signs of predation.
Now, I think what’s happening in the cases that get people really freaked out initially that start the outbreaks, people are stumbling upon animals that…
have a series of a series of different natural wounds that have for whatever reason either dried unusually there’s weather perhaps there’s predation after an initial predation so
coyotes get to something then cows cows then crows get to something so you could stumble across an animal that has its genitals ripped open but then also a single eye plucked out and you would think well coyotes don’t pluck out a single eye you could also stumble upon this animal three days later after ants had eaten it and after there had been some certain weather phenomena and then not only does it have these initial two unusual wounds but then it’s also got
strange sort of drawings of these patterns of predation that you have.
So you stack all this together.
Then when you combine that with…
any social or cultural phenomena that are occurring, or the fact that everyone, well, everyone, people really don’t seem to talk about counting anymore, but people in the know might mention it to you.
And then suddenly this story begins to exist.
I had a conception of what this looked like, but these stories wrecked them.
I think that’s the best one yet.
Let’s hope it’s a laugh.
Oh, we’re definitely going to have to wrap things up.
All right.
Well, okay.
So Lee, you’re our first time guest here.
So when people come on for the first time, besides harassing them with puns, we always like to ask this signature closing question, which is what is your favorite monster?
I spent the most time with the Yeti.
So not him.
Mothman is too simple.
Where me go one, me go all, right?
Oh, it’s trailing off now.
There are some really surreal monsters you find in early Chinese and Tibetan medical documents.
So you get stuff that’s just like a caterpillar with eight human legs and ears but no eyes or something that’s just like a ball covered in mouths.
I think those, at this point in my life, those are my favorites.
I realize those are not Japanese, but so many anime monsters seem to be akin to that.
I think there’s a through line of inspiration of these surreal, much more interesting than just big, hairy monsters.
Indeed.
If I did meet a Yeti, I would at least be able to ask them why they’re…
what they have to do with these UFOs and why they’re eating all of our cows’ rectums.
A fair question.
Please do.
Well, Lee, I can’t believe we’ve been doing the show this long and never really tackled this topic.
Oh, yeah, I know.
I appreciate you.
We asked you to really try to eat a giant dead elephant, and I think we’ve taken some really solid bites here.
So what are you going to do with your research?
You still thinking about what to do with it?
I am.
So initially it began as a broader topic looking at how paranormal phenomenon, particularly mass paranormal psychogenic events like these, induce religious experiences and spiritual experiences.
Initially, I was thinking about doing an academic paper, but I’ve kind of sworn off of those.
I’m done with them.
I’m not totally sure what is going to become of this.
I have a couple of little just short summaries of the more interesting cases I found.
Ones that focus on, again, like the weird monsters, the ones that focus on comparisons to horse ripping, similar phenomena in Europe and internationally.
But yeah, again, and if anyone is interested in a…
bunch of odd stories about dead animals, they can feel free to let me know.
I think this would make a great book.
I do too.
I really do.
But I would never, struggling through my own and watching Kieran go through hers, I wouldn’t wish that on anybody, but I think it can be good.
Well, I hope you do something with it because it seems like you’ve done a lot of work and I’m really pleased about that.
I love it when anybody goes to the trouble of just pulling together all this work.
You get your Mike Dash’s, your Robert Bartholomew type people doing this kind of stuff.
So that’s really great.
I think you’re a good company.
Fantastic.
Thank you guys so much again for having me.
I really appreciate it.
Really interesting stuff.
I have to keep in touch and bring you back on again.
Indeed.
Thank you so much.
Have a good night.
Thank you, Lee.
Hey, you too, guys.
Thanks again.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
Well, that was part two of our look at the phenomena of animal mutilations with religious studies scholar Lee Weiss.
Check out the show notes for links to Lee’s work as well as his contact information if you want to help him with his search for more information about animal mutilations or with contacting Linda, I mean, MA award-winning television producer Linda Moulton Howe.
Oh, and check out the show notes for one more thing.
I asked Lee for an example of the kinds of monster he was talking about when he did his favorite monster pic.
He sent me a link to the Hun Dun, a strange creature from China with six legs, no head or face, and four wings.
And I didn’t remember ever seeing such a thing before, but I have.
There’s a delightful animated one in the Marvel movie Shang-Chi that’s hanging out with Ben Kingsley’s Trevor Slattery character.
What is that?
Oh, who?
You can see Morris.
Morris?
Oh, Morris.
They can see you.
You’re real.
All this time I thought I was hallucinating him.
Where’s his face?
He’s a bit sensitive about that.
And I enjoyed the heck out of that film, but it was so full of amazing imagery that poor Morris the Hundun has fallen out of my recollections.
It reminds me a bit of the old story about the city fella who found himself driving a country road out in the sticks when he was passed by a four-legged chicken.
When he saw the chicken run into a farm, he pulled in after it and asked the farmer what’s going on.
The farmer told him it was an experimental chicken with four legs they were trying out to see if they could get more legs per bird.
Oh, how do they taste, said the city fella.
We don’t know, said the farmer.
We’ve never caught one.
Monster Talk theme music is by Pete Stealing Monkeys.
I wonder if amateur researchers waiting around to see what comes to eat dead cattle count as some kind of a stakeout.
This has been a Monster House presentation.

The post 🐂S05E40 – Cattle Mutilations: Part 2🛸 appeared first on MonsterTalk.

Content Warning: This episode contains detailed discussion of animal injuries and death. Both parts carry an explicit tag.

Blake and Karen welcome Lee Weiss, a religious studies scholar whose deep dive into the FBI’s declassified cattle mutilation files grew into a sweeping study of one of America’s strangest panics. Blake first met Lee at the Of Gods and Monsters conference in 2019, and the two reconnected at its 2026 sequel – both contributed to the academic volume Religion, Culture, and the Monstrous. (affiliate link)

In part one of this two-part investigation, Lee lays out the anatomy of the “classic mute” – the missing eyes, ears, and soft tissue, the reportedly bloodless wounds, the absent tracks – and traces the phenomenon back to its 1967 case zero: Snippy the horse, found dead in Colorado’s San Luis Valley. From Victorian sheep panics and escaped menagerie cats to the economic collapse of the 1970s American rancher, the picture that emerges is far stranger than dead livestock. And that’s before the unmarked helicopters show up.

Part two lands next week.

Cattle Mutilation– Wikipedia’s overview of the phenomenon, its history, and investigations
The Mutilation of “Snippy” the Horse– the 1967 Alamosa, Colorado case that started it all (the horse was actually named Lady – Snippy was her sire)
The Condon Committee– whose investigation of the Snippy case found no evidence of abnormal causes
Gabe Valdez– the New Mexico State Police officer who became the state’s best-known mutilation investigator
British Big Cats– the “alien big cat” phenomenon Blake compares to earlier livestock panics
Dr. Darren Naish– previous MonsterTalk guest referenced in the alien big cat discussion
Project Plowshare– the government program detonating nuclear devices for civilian purposes near several mutilation hotspots
The Mi-Go– the Lovecraftian fungi from Yuggoth – and also a complex term from Tibet, a subject our guest has studied deeply

Lee Weiss is a religious studies scholar researching mass paranormal and psychogenic events, including the cattle mutilation phenomenon and its religious dimensions.

Lee Weiss on Academia.edu
Of Gods and Monsters Conference (2019) – where Blake and Lee first met
Gods and Monsters 2 (2026) – where they renewed the acquaintance
Religion, Culture, and the Monstrous – the academic volume featuring contributions from both Blake and Lee

Check out Karen’s bookBeyond Words.

MonsterTalk is hosted by Blake Smith and Dr. Karen Stollznow.

This is not a fully accurate transcript, and was machine generated. It’s here for helping search engines find the episode but not intended to be a faithful transcript of the episode. (But it’s not AWFUL.) Some of the material in this transcript only exists in the Patreon/Premium edition of the show and was excised for the commercial version.

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In September 1967, on the King Ranch in the San Luis Valley of Colorado, an Appaloosa mare called Snippy was found dead and stripped of flesh from the neck up.
Some said this was the work of flying saucers.
Who or whatever did it, no one knows.
Since that time, and perhaps even earlier in this century, thousands of cattle, horses, and other animals have been cut up in strange ways throughout the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, Panama, the Canary Islands, and possibly other South American and European countries.
Parts missing are usually an ear, an eye, the tongue, the lower jaw is stripped of all flesh, the sexual organs are cut out, the rectum is cored out, and in some cases, the blood is gone.
Adding to the mystery is lack of tracks or other evidence.
Mutilated cattle have been found on wet sand or rain-soaked ground with no tracks around them, not even their own.
Some people call it cattle mutilation.
Whatever it’s called, it’s a strange harvest.
It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature, part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24-mile-long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland, it’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
So this week we’re kicking off a two-part look at the very mysterious and icky world of animal mutilations.
That horrific and disturbing introductory clip was from a documentary hosted and put together by Emmy Award winning journalist Linda Moulton Howe.
We’ll hear much more about that film and its various versions next week in part two.
But the clip does a couple of things.
Firstly, it quickly and tidily summarizes what sorts of oddities people refer to when they talk about the weird shitology category animal mutilations.
second it justifies the warning up at the top and the explicit tag that we’re slapping on both parts because some people will find the talk of the damage done to these animals disturbing also since I’ve already put in the explicit warning I get to say weird shitology without beeping it out that saves time
Skeptical investigators will tell you what’s really going on in most of these cases is natural post-mortem taphonomic processes performed by predators, carrion feeders, insects, and other biologically mundane factors.
But while that may be statistically true, the really weird part, the part that gets the weird shitology seal of approval, is all the adjacent circumstances surrounding these cases.
It’s animals found in oddly inaccessible places, a lack of tracks, the appearance of strange lights, mysterious unmarked vehicles, or a reported lack of blood.
And we will discuss a lot of that stuff over the next two episodes.
But in the end…
All we can honestly say is that animal mutilations of the type we’re discussing have so many unusual features that we couldn’t cover it all in a single episode.
Or in a two-parter.
Honestly, even an encyclopedic book would be challenged to contain the amount of oddness, and a scholar trying to tackle such a thing would likely feel utterly lost.
But my friend and fellow researcher Lee Weiss is collecting and compiling.
He has been for a while, and even though he’s still in the data gathering phase of his research, I suspected he would do a great job of introducing this topic to you fellow monster talkers.
So that’s what we’re going to do for these next two episodes.
One more thing.
This is a disturbing topic, but I’ve had a few decades to get over it.
If by some chance this is your first experience with such mutilations, I think you’re in good hands with Lee.
But you might find some of my comments sound flippant.
I hope a little levity is appropriate to lighten what would otherwise be a rather dark and disturbing walk through history.
Not just the animal deaths, but the economic and political story around them.
It can be a lot to take in.
I come from a family of farmers and ranchers and blue-collar people who know the toughness of trying to make it as an independent business person in these risky but vital professions.
So I’m not making fun of them and I’m not making fun of the pain and suffering of the animals.
But take, just for example, the case of cattle mutilation in the extreme elevations of the Rocky Mountains around Colorado.
I could speak of those cases with empathy and compassion.
but I cannot walk away from all that wordplay, people.
The stakes are just too high.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to the show, Lee Weiss.
I met Lee for the first time at Gods and Monsters 1, although we recently met up again at Gods and Monsters 2, Eclectic Rougarou.
Rougarou.
Rougarou.
Rougarou.
But Lee was giving a talk about the me go or the me go, which I thought our Lovecraft fans out there will mean they know that you’re a fun guy.
So that’s my that’s my Call of Cthulhu joke.
All right.
So, yeah.
So we have to ask the question.
This is a big topic.
And as I told Lee last night, it’s like we have to ask the question, how do we eat?
An enormous dead elephant with its genitals and eyeballs already gone being harassed by unmarked helicopters all the while.
So, again, I think the answer is still one bite at a time.
But before we get out our forks and napkins, welcome, Lee.
Is there anything else you want to add about yourself?
Or did I nail most of it?
I think you got it.
I think the elephant comment particularly encapsulates what I’m about.
Excellent.
Oh, it’s a scary stop.
This is such a huge topic.
I guess not exactly monstrous, but definitely monster adjacent, which is territory that we’ve very happily embraced to keep the show going.
But I mean, this is a mystery that’s been with us effectively our whole lives.
And I guess what we should probably start with is figuring out what we’re talking about.
What are animal mutilations or cattle mutilations or livestock mutilations?
Because if you listen to the people reporting them, they’re not just dead animals.
There’s something going on.
What are we talking about today?
So I think the best way to start talking about it is to look at what is called in the community the classical mutilation.
And that has, depending on who you talk to, a variety of different signs.
Generally, and the most generally, but we’ll see, there’s an acceptance of pretty much every rule, like that this…
phenomena presents.
You’ll be missing genitals.
There will be missing eyes, particularly left eyes.
Ears will be gone.
Sometimes tails will be gone.
There will be either very clean cuts like wounds to the animal or odd jagged edges.
All of these things, and then you get even more novel phenomena, like people will claim that there’s no blood anywhere, whereas they would usually see blood with these, that the wounds don’t bleed, which ultimately is a fairly normal thing in a dead animal, but that there is a conspicuous lack of blood.
This accelerates the point of animals drained of blood, animals completely bloodless, or even the blood being dried off, like it’s present, but it’s almost like sand.
A really common claim later on becomes that these wounds are sealed with lasers, that they’re cauterized.
Then you get these kinds of…
dealing with the locale and the ways that they’re found, that there are no tracks around anywhere.
So not only that dogs and coyotes will seem to avoid them, or birds, but that the animal itself, generally a cow or a bull, sometimes a horse, rarely a lamb, very rarely a pig or something else, but there will be no tracks of that leading to the site where it was killed, which all of the authorities find very unusual.
So those are the normal traits of the individual act of the animal mutilation.
The larger and more interesting component of it is that once one person finds a dead mutilated animal,
many other people in the community will begin to.
And there are a number of, I think, very well-recorded cases where this happened almost simultaneously, where the two people did not communicate with each other or read any third party or talk to a police officer.
They both simply found these dead cows and…
both had an extreme reaction to it.
Now, in general, this occurs within a social context where people already knew about this more broadly, but it’s still unusual that they would both have this experience.
There’s also these concomitant phenomena of unusual aerial sightings.
It’s deeply tied in with UFOs, as we’ll talk extensively about.
But then you mentioned monsters.
It’s also tied in very closely with monster sightings.
Sheriff Valdez, Gabe Valdez, who’s one of the major figures in this, and Wolverton.
Also, I think Sheriff Wolverton or Captain Wolverton.
both of them in their books on this subject and they’re these major figures and these major like first-hand investigators these 70s incidences all of them devote a lot of time and attention to monster sightings that occur concomitantly within i don’t know to borrow like ufology terminology flaps of cattle mutilations or these these localized events these mass events
And yeah, people will start seeing UFOs and they’ll start seeing monsters.
And just like with the cattle mutilations, there’s one really odd case where two separate young girls in this, I believe it was Colwell, it’ll come up later.
Both of them see like dog men stalking through the night on the same night, but they didn’t like, I mean, it was a small town.
I’m sure they were, but they didn’t know each other.
So I’d say those are kind of the,
the features of what we’re talking about.
As we’ll talk about later, there’s a lot of different global phenomena of people finding dead animals and the community becoming almost irrationally afraid and then having…
psychogenic, religious, spiritual, whatever you…
These paranormal events surrounding it.
The cattle mutilation phenomenon in America, in North America, I think is unique in that it has this kind of…
It imagines that it has this very rigorous structure.
Well, these are the classic cattle mutilations, but… Well, I’d like to…
pop in and ask a couple of questions you’ve covered a lot of ground already uh but i’m just wondering uh why cattle i mean you’ve talked about other animals to pigs and horses uh but it seems to be
seems like the canonical thing is that the cattle mutilations and also where this is occurring.
So you’re saying this is worldwide.
I’m here, I’m in Colorado at the moment and I hear of a lot of cases here, but I don’t think I ever heard of any in Australia where I grew up, but presumably a lot of farming there, agriculture.
I suspect that there are probably some cases there too.
But yeah, if you could tell us a little bit about why cattle and where these are occurring mostly.
I’m so glad that you brought up Australia already because that is a really interesting side point of the whole phenomena.
But to get to the question, I’m not entirely sure.
I do have my suspicions.
I think it has to do with the way that cattle are raised, are ranched.
They’re…
unless they’re on a feed line, they’re often outside, particularly in the 60s through 70s and 80s in North America.
And also in Australia in the 30s and 40s, I’m not sure about now.
It is a lack of knowledge of mine.
these animals are outside all the time and sometimes the ranchers won’t see them for days on end and that will be normal.
So when the rancher discovers the cattle, it’s, you know, in an advanced state of mutilation if it’s died perhaps two days ago and has been preyed upon.
I suspect that’s the real reason.
Like if we were just, you know, a scientific explanation, I would say that’s what’s happening.
And vis-a-vis Australia, there’s this…
During the late 70s, early 80s, when there is this huge panic in North America.
one of the major international sources of confirmation that this is happening everywhere is Australia.
And there’s a lot of weird urban legends that come out of these zines and these cult publications surrounding it, by guys like Tom Adams, who we’ll talk about later.
There’s actually a fake movie, a fake silent movie.
find the name when we get into Australia later on but that I’ve seen in like lists of lost films but it’s I mean it’s not a real movie it’s allegedly about flying saucers abducting cattle in Australia and it’s linked to this like silent film director in Australia but it’s not real but there are a number of cattle mutilation
paddocks in Australia, but that seemed to be tied to ranching and cattle rustling and economic concerns as opposed to anything UFO related or government related.
Well, I don’t know where to begin because there’s so many elements to this, but I’m just wondering, where did this link to UFOs and to the government?
How did these connections?
begin to be these associations how were they made to to animals just dying and decomposing well please i was gonna say should we start with at some point like okay listeners will know i had sort of a pet peeve or
a bugbear or something around the idea that when a monster flap happens, somebody comes along and extends the history and anchors it in the past for sort of a credibility anchor.
So let’s just start with when the pop culture conception of this phenomenon happened.
Like, can we, can we talk about like what, I guess there is sort of a case zero, even though if, if the skeptics are right about what’s really going on, there’s no case zero because this has always been happening, but.
But what’s case zero for animal mutilations?
And let’s bring it from there, if that’s cool.
If that works for you, Karen.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
So 100%, it’s snippy.
Or I believe her real name was Lady.
Yeah, why the pseudonym?
Was she a dancer or something?
It’s a great question.
I thought you said Skippy.
We’re talking about Australia too, so.
It’s interesting that Snippy is the archetypal case because Snippy has almost nothing in common with the later cases.
Now, Snippy is the first kind of time…
It’s the first time where one of these events was viewed through a, let’s say, paranormal lens.
Because I found a number of much earlier accounts of like what I would still call like mass panics.
dealing with like um even in like in america and in france that goes back a long ways this one was quite early on tied in with ufo activity but even before then the family didn’t have any idea it was happening um snippy’s weird for a lot of reasons now so my understanding is snippy was her father the horse’s father and and again this is coming from it’s these accounts are so inaccurate
And a lot of them then are filtered through like UFO comic books, but this is for sure the first real like, it cements it in the cultural imagination.
But yeah, so Snippy is this horse, I believe her name was Lady, her father’s name was Snippy.
And the family finds her and it’s quite, it is quite striking and grotesque.
And it’s one of the ones that I’ve looked at where I actually have no idea what caused the injuries.
Like a lot of them, I’m very confident.
Like most of them, I’d say, you can explain this.
I mean, it’s weird.
And a lot of them, they’re very strange.
And I can see why people are freaked out by them.
But you can explain them.
This one is a little inexplicable.
The sheriff says she got hit by a bolt of lightning.
Karen, have you seen the snippy picture?
Yes, I have.
Okay, good.
So we’re all on the same page.
It is quite a striking image.
And I think that… A lightning striking image.
Oh, yeah.
Sorry, I love current events.
If we’re calling snippy case zero, and I agree with you, because after snippy, we start to see, and I’m sure we’ll get into the 1970s, what happens there.
But I’m wondering, before snippy…
This reminds me a little bit of some, they’re not moral panics, but they’re kind of a panic that happens sometimes where people decide that there’s a big cat out there.
There’s something, there’s some kind of predator out there and we’re going to have to hunt it, especially in the UK, where they’re going to hire…
trackers to track down because some sheep have died and there’s got to be an explanation and it’s got to be you know something unusual and do those cases kind of fit into this or have you looked at that or do or am i on it i’m on a side rail somewhere i think they’re very closely connected okay um and again so that’s i think when people post snippy and like post like the
All of the books that have like their introductions always will pre-snippy what was before the trying to, like you said, sort of create some broader history to it.
Historical anchoring, I think is how I call it.
And they always go to these…
Yeah, this Victorian, and there’s earlier accounts they find.
There’s one, I think, that in King James Demonology, he writes, this is like 1606.
Yeah, he goes back a piece, right?
He writes about sheep being massacred, but it’s so vague, you can’t really.
The ones that are the most similar to what…
We’re talking, and what we see even in the 30s and 40s are, and I think these people are finding it in, it’s in, I think, low or strange talents.
I’ll pick it up in a second.
The whole idea is you have these Victorian communities in England and France that are being terrified by, yeah, like these wolves, these weird beasts.
The weird thing about those is some of them later on get explained.
And I’m skeptical of even these explanations.
They get explained by like local noblemen who own these private zoos.
They were just these Victorian private zoos, and they would, like, lose ocelots.
It’s the wealthy menagerie.
Today we’re dealing with a classic menage.
Menage?
A menagerie.
Oh, it’s basically just a big-ass alien zoo full of aliens run by another alien.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Yes.
That comes up in the alien big cat community a lot.
And yeah, because there’s a number of cases where that’s, like, you have…
this strange creature stalking around in the woods and all of these sheep are mutilated in the communities and an uproar and then like you don’t hear about them two weeks later they like shoot a strange like some ant like animal from some guys but again i i don’t know i don’t know how how closely like how true that actually i mean the menagerie element is true and i’m sure that a bunch of animals escape from these menageries but
The connection does seem a little convenient to me.
Darren Nash has been on a few times.
We’ve discussed alien big cats, and it’s like there’s a plausible possibility that some surviving bodies of non-local large cats could exist in the UK.
It’s biologically plausible, and there seems to be some evidence for it.
But I think it’s probably overstated.
I would say…
In my estimation, the wealthy menagerie is kind of comparable to what in America we would call the derailed circus train.
Well, it’s a weird animal.
That’s not unusual, but it’s unusual that it would be here.
So therefore…
We have to have an explanation, and therefore the plausible explanation is a train derailed and let loose a collection of animals.
I cannot let this go.
I’m going to track down every record I can find of American circus train wrecks, because I just suspect there’s not very many, but it comes up as an explanation a lot.
Well, then we have the version in Australia of American soldiers bringing over these creatures.
indigenous also plausible that that really seems to have happened some but then to what extent do they survive and breed over a panther as a mascot or something like that yeah anyway
All right.
So I want to go to the 1970s where everything happens.
I was just a little guy in the 1970s.
I wasn’t old enough to to watch R-rated movies or read this sort of literature.
But meanwhile.
Across America, ranchers were getting quite upset because of what was going on with these animal mutilations and the government’s response.
So I guess we need to talk about that a little bit.
I don’t know how much we want to cover the economic, sociopolitical components of this.
Because you can get really into it.
And I don’t particularly want to.
It’s really…
quite tedious.
30 minutes later.
And if you look at this graph, you can see…
When it comes to choosing accounting software, there’s no accounting for taste.
That is effectively the situation.
But it is fascinating, and it really plays a major role in this.
Could we say that the American rancher was undergoing an extensive period of economic difficulty?
It was an extensive period of economic difficulty, absolutely.
But in addition to that, there’s also…
There’s this wheat deal that we make with the USSR, which is an attempt to kind of thaw relations.
It results in this halting of, as I understand it, the raising of the price.
Ultimately, this makes it incredibly difficult to raise cattle, particularly for small independent ranches, which were precipitously declining from the 50s to the 80s.
So there is this real economic
struggle that’s occurring um i think one thing that i’ve actually never seen it mentioned in any cattle mutilation literature i might be wrong about that but i’m pretty sure i’m right
In the same time, I believe it’s 73 or 74, there’s a mass protest of ranchers about the specific ramifications of this law because they can’t afford to feed their cattle.
So their cattle are too expensive effectively to sell.
So they bring out all of their cattle to this field, these hundreds of ranchers, and just kind of kill, like murder their cattle as an act of protest.
I don’t know if it’s murder, if it’s an animal.
It depends what you’re…
You’re a vegetarian or not.
Well, the Smiths say meat is murder, right?
Be loath to disagree with Morrissey.
So this was some sort of stakeout.
Oh, dear.
Linda McCartney said that first, but anyway.
Red Bull gives you wings.
Oh, she did?
Oh, I thought she was talking about stakeouts.
Okay, okay.
Sorry.
But so this is occurring at the same time that these cattle mutilation kind of outbreaks are happening and this social panic is happening.
There’s also a great deal of correlation between the kind of move that the Midwestern rancher makes away from kind of the mainstream politics of the 50s and 60s into a more libertarian skepticism of the federal government.
Again, largely because of Nixon’s economic policies.
This, I think, has a lot to do with the conspiratorial overtones and even the UFO overtones that the whole phenomena ultimately adopts.
So I think that’s an important kind of component.
I think we won’t get into…
the economic parameters of the wreck and the dual economic, but all of these things undergird what becomes this, I mean, it staged the scene for this kind of collective social pattern.
Yeah.
And so to sort of navigate this, you’ve got a culture and an important…
economic component of at least the united states because these ranchers are they’re big business right but they’re struggling and to some extent they’re blaming the government for their economic problems but now this mutilation flap happens so
How does it go?
Maybe you can give me this roadmap.
How does it go from angry ranchers in small communities to having like a big government response with hearings and papers being delivered?
How do we bridge that piece of the timeline?
How do we get to the government actually saying something’s going on, but it’s natural?
How does that happen?
Slowly at first, but then incredibly quickly.
So the real…
I think the beginning of the crisis…
you get local sheriffs and local authorities involved and they can’t explain what’s happening either.
Because, I mean, the ranchers are obviously more knowledgeable than they are about what they’re seeing in the cattle because they don’t spend all day dealing with cattle.
And these ranchers have seen hundreds of dead cattle, which is ultimately what gives their testimony so much credibility.
I mean, they do know more about dead cows than any of us do.
But so the ranchers agree with them.
And the sheriffs agree with the ranchers and they bring that back up.
Then this spreads and sometimes local media will pick it up.
And these are generally small towns.
This is all occurring within this kind of culture of fear and skepticism.
There’s also the Vietnam War.
Yeah, the 70s were a big…
divisive time a lot of american myths are collapsing right so one of the early theories that shows up quite like in in the in the like in stigmata which is the major uh mute zine of the time and like really the the early receptacle for it and it shows up over and over and over again the theory is that well this must be
traumatized veterans coming back from vietnam and this theory continues to show up we’ll i’ll talk more like it is a military psyop is this this replication of actual things that american psychological operations forces did to villages and i don’t want to criticize their newsletter but they missed a great opportunity to call it steak mata i’m just saying that
But we’re going to have to break this episode into two parts.
And I want to make sure that people who listen to this first part tune in for part two, because as this community is coming up and saying, look, we’re suffering economic.
difficulty because of these mutilations it’s more than that like they’re not just saying these cattle are dying they’re saying some very weird stuff is going on there’s a stack of of mysterious unusual quasi-paranormal phenomena going on
And I think it would not be wrong to say government conspiracy, animal testing, satanic cults comes up a lot, a shocking amount of alien conspiracy.
And then, of course, some people just saying, no, no, these are natural deaths, which is not nearly as popular an answer.
So.
Can you set us up for part two?
If we’re going to wind down part one here, tell us about the conspiracy theories that start to stack up.
So that’s the thing.
And part of what drove me to this topic initially was it, as with a lot of these mass paranormal experiences, there’s this very religious component to it.
There’s this very intense, like…
these experiences seem to presage further strange experiences and i think that’s part of what like what propels the the panic in the beginning like at all what makes it so viable that these ranchers who see these dead animals all the time suddenly begin to think oh well maybe it’s the government maybe it’s a cult maybe it’s aliens because people begin to have incredibly strange experiences and continue to have strange experiences
specifically surrounding this ostensibly conventional phenomena.
So some of the theories that, I mean, these people really want to build up theories.
And while now I think the alien abduction theory is probably the most popular, up until the 90s, government involvement or a conspiracy involving…
the meat industry, the idea that there is some occult infection of mad cow disease in the meat supply that the government is surreptitiously testing to avoid a mass panic.
Valdez’s theory, Sheriff Valdez and then his son, who has taken up his legacy investigating these things, believe that these were tied to government investigations into
exposure of radiation.
So at the same time and location that these mutilations are happening, the United States government is engaged in something called Operation Plowshare, where they’re detonating atomic nuclear weapons for civilian purposes, mining and effectively oil fracking.
Now, a lot of these mutilations occur incredibly close to Operation Plowshare sites, and there’s only like four of them.
to perform a multitude of peaceful tasks for the betterment of mankind.
Man is exploring a source of enormous, potentially useful energy, the nuclear explosion.
He sees the potentials and he sees the problems.
To investigate both and to develop the technology that will turn potentials into realities, the United States is conducting, for the benefit of all nations, a program it calls Plowshare.
It’s also in a giant expanse of the country, which is perfect for ranching.
Then you get, particularly we’ll talk about Linda Bolton Howe soon, I’m sure, you start to get the alien explanation, which again has been tied into it since Snippy.
And…
That then gets tied back.
It always gets tied back to this government conspiracy.
There’s a skepticism that the federal government is withholding information, which is why they get involved and get involved so quickly.
I think it starts initially slowly, then it just spirals out of control.
And that’s a good breaking point, I think.
Sorry, I think because what was going to happen is I think.
In 1980, Linda Moulton Howell’s movie, Strange Harvest, is going to take every one of these theories and wrap it up in a beautiful package that she delivers to America, sort of.
We’ll talk about the spread of it.
But I think we need to break here and then come back next week in part two to explain how this stuff explodes nationally and where we end up today.
Thank you so much for joining us, Lee.
We’ll see you next week.
Thank you very much, guys.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard part one of our look into cattle mutilations with independent researcher Lee Weiss.
Be sure to check out the show notes for more info on the topics discussed and for links to books and videos that we brought up.
And you got to come back for part two and the show notes for part two because we will get into way more of Emmy Award winning Linda Moulton Howell’s documentary Strange Harvest.
I think you’ll enjoy my data visualizations about that in the show notes next week.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of Monster Talk.
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The United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, Panama, the Canary Islands, and possibly other South American and European countries have been cut up in strange ways.
Some said this was the work of flying saucers.
This has been a Monster House presentation.

The post 🐂S05E39 – Cattle Mutilations: Part 1🛸 appeared first on MonsterTalk.

Blake and Karen welcome back historian Dr. Joseph Gagné, a specialist in New France and the French colonial period of North America, to talk about Champ – the famous monster of Lake Champlain. Most of the lake sits between New York and Vermont, but about 7% of it lies in Quebec, and Joseph’s upcoming paper in the ethnology journal Rabaska asks a question almost nobody else has: how does the French-speaking side of the border see this most American of lake monsters?

The answer involves a fabricated Samuel de Champlain quote, a five-foot fish that really was a monster in its own way, nearly 300 years of digitized Quebec newspapers, and a curious case of cross-border monster pride – because why borrow Champ when you already have Ponik and Memphré? Plus hoax serpents, colonial werewolf panics, and how Nessie taught every lake monster what a lake monster is supposed to look like.

Champ – the alleged monster of Lake Champlain, which borders New York, Vermont, and Quebec
Samuel de Champlain – the French explorer who named the lake in 1609 and described a fish now generally identified as a longnose gar – though his Indigenous allies described far bigger specimens, more in line with the alligator gar
The famous 1977 Champ photograph was taken by Sandra Mansi
Mary Anning‘s discovery of the plesiosaur helped transform sea dragons into prehistoric survivors – a template later locked in by the Loch Ness Monster
Quebec’s own lake monsters: Ponik of Lake Pohénégamook and Memphré of Lake Memphremagog – plus British Columbia’s tourist-magnet Ogopogo
The Beast of Gévaudan – and its Quebec contemporary, a werewolf reported prowling between Quebec City and Kamouraska in the same era
Monster tourism along the lake: Port Henry, New York and its Champ festival, and the annual Sasquatch Calling Festival in Whitehall, New York
Joseph’s next project: Le Griffon – the first ship to sail west of Niagara Falls, and the first to sink on its maiden voyage in the Great Lakes

Joseph’s paper on Champ will be published in issue 24 of Rabaska: revue d’ethnologie de l’Amérique française. You can order a copy from the Société québécoise d’ethnologie, and issues are eventually posted for free on Érudit.

Want to do your own research? Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec’s digital collections hold over 950 digitized periodicals spanning from 1764 to today – many in English!

Follow Joseph’s shenanigans at his site, Curieuse Nouvelle France.

The Legend of La Corriveau (episode 181)

The Ghost of Ticonderoga (S04E17)

The Untold Story of Champ: A Social History of America’s Loch Ness Monster [Affiliate Link]

Lake Monster Mysteries: Investigating the World’s Most Elusive Creatures [Affiliate Link]

Champ: Beyond the Legend [Affiliate Link]

Lake Monster Traditions: A Cross-Cultural Analysis [Out of Print – Price WAY TOO high] – But you’re in luck! The Internet Archive has it! and please support them – they’re doing important things for researchers around the world.

Joseph’s second book, Voix de guerre: Le renseignement au sein de l’armée française lors de la guerre de Sept Ans en Amérique du Nord, is coming this fall from Presses de l’Université Laval – with a co-edition in France!
Its final chapter covers rumors and superstition during the French and Indian War – very on brand for this show.

Karen’s book Beyond Words is available now. (affiliate link)

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Support the show at monstertalk.org/support – Patreon supporters get extended, commercial-free episodes (including the extended version of this very interview).

This is not a fully accurate transcript, and was machine generated. It’s here for helping search engines find the episode but not intended to be a faithful transcript of the episode. (But it’s not AWFUL.) Some of the material in this transcript only exists in the Patreon/Premium edition of the show and was excised for the commercial version.

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It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature, part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24-mile-long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland, it’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
When we first started Monster Talk, I was hoping to speak to fact-based academics and use monsters as a framework to talk about stuff like biology and physics.
And what about psychology?
Sure, witnesses are people, and surely that has a bearing on what and how they see things, right?
And
We ended up bringing religious studies folk in because what people believe and how they engage with belief through ritual and dogma and faith and pragmatism, that seemed relevant.
And, of course, archaeology.
And we’ve always had monsters for as long as we’ve had language and minds compelled to classify our experiences across a spectrum of normal to highly unusual.
And we enshrine our monsters as embodiments of our fierceness and as…
apotropaics against other monsters.
That’ll be written in stone.
So folklorists helped us understand the transmissibility and mutability of stories.
And we even started bringing in literature and art experts to speak on how we use fiction and creativity to model and to inspire.
These fields of study all hinted different perspectives and different approaches.
And every discipline and academic expertise has brought us a little bit closer to understanding what a monster is.
Historians bring a critical lens to the historiography of monsters, analyzing how primary sources and media and print culture construct, perpetuate, and transform these narratives over time.
Where other disciplines hunt for physical proof, historians investigate why these stories persisted and what they reveal about the specific societal and cultural anxieties of the people who recorded them.
A funny thing I noticed when thinking about this intro, though, the historians we’ve had on sure seem to like werewolves.
I guess our first was Brian Riegel, who argued that it wasn’t silver bullets that took out the werewolf, but rather Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
And historian Jay Smith taught us about the role of tabloid journalism on the metaphysical power to turn mundane but awful packs of wolves into the magical beasts of Gévaudan.
And today’s guest, Dr. Joseph Gagne, also loves werewolves, which is why we’ve brought him on again to talk about lake monsters.
Well, you may think I’m just subverting expectations, but in fact, there is some actual truth there because while not every monster is a werewolf, I am becoming more and more convinced that every monster is a shape changer.
As we transmit stories, both the sender and the receiver change the information and shape it within their own imagination.
And this is true for werewolves and Sasquatch and Thunderbirds and the actual subject of today’s discussion, lake monsters.
In a lake that lies nestled between Vermont, New York, and Quebec, it is said that there is a monster.
If you go look in monster books, you’ll read about French explorer Samuel de Champlain reporting seeing a 20-foot serpent thick as a barrel with a head like a horse.
Of course, that quote doesn’t come from 1609.
It comes from 1970.
It was in the summer 1970 issue of Vermont Life magazine and an article by Marjorie Porter titled The Champlain Monster.
In 1977, lake visitor Sandra Mancy would log her sighting with a famous monster photo.
Champ is many things.
The monster was like a serpent.
It was like a plesiosaur.
It had many humps.
It had one hump.
It was just a head.
It was just awake moving through the water.
You can check our show notes on this episode and learn more about the different ways this monster has been reported and depicted.
But our guest…
Dr. Gagné has an upcoming paper that’s looking back at the original report by Champlain and also examining a really interesting question.
Most of the sightings happen on the parts of the lake that are in the United States.
But how is Champ viewed on the other side of that border in the land of poutine, maple syrup, and Mounties?
Let’s find out.
Monster Talk
Welcome back to the show.
And correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this now Dr. Joseph Gagne?
Yes, it is.
Awesome.
Yes, it is.
Congratulations.
I’m still proud of that.
Thank you.
That’s so cool.
You should be proud.
And it also is, once again, something that overlaps with audience interest, I think.
Absolutely.
You’re talking about CHAMP.
And you’re bringing an interesting perspective here because usually we hear about CHAMP from the American side of the lakes.
And I think that’s actually an interesting part of the research you’ve done here.
So I don’t.
want to spoil it, but what we’re going to try to do is guide you through the sort of Reader’s Digest version of your essay.
And then for listeners, they can go to a URL that we’ll put in into the show notes and find the essay this fall.
So what are we talking about with Champ?
I guess we should just pretend that someone has never listened to this show and they’ve never heard of Champ.
What is Champ?
Where is Champ?
Why is Champ?
Champ is the name of the mysterious denizen of the underwater world of Lake Champlain, which happens to be, yes, mostly in the U.S., right between the borders of New York and Vermont.
But a 7% portion of it is in the French-speaking province of Quebec.
If you don’t get it from the Champlain region, then it’s merely sparkling lake water.
I was going to say sparkling lake monster.
That’s a good one.
That’s a good one.
And that’s what got me interested was the fact, well, I am a New France specialist.
And so this is the French colonial period of most of North America.
And Lake Champlain bears the name of the explorer, Samuel de Champlain.
I kept reading about this story that Champlain was the first to see Champ, the lake monster of Lake Champlain.
So the question is, is this true?
Yeah.
Now, I’m not the first to have thought, well, you just got to read the original document to find out.
And so many people have done so, namely Robert Bartholomew.
You have Joe Nickel and Ben Radford.
Also, Michel Meuget also read the original document.
How do you say that?
Because I always say Meuget or Meuget.
That’s what I thought.
And then I asked someone who was Belgian, and he’s like, oh, I don’t know.
I would have said Mergie.
I was like, oh, okay.
Well, I can put it like that.
I just presumed you have to pronounce it.
Yeah, yeah.
Because I didn’t know if I had to pronounce it the French way or like a German way, so I wasn’t sure.
No, no, that’s good.
That’s good to know.
So one more time.
Mergie.
Mergie.
Neat.
Yeah, Mergie.
Yeah.
Mergie.
And don’t knock the Belgians because, sure, they’re terrible colonialists, but they also gave us palm frits.
And for that, we’re thankful.
Also, if there are Belgians that want to correct me, please do so.
Sure.
Yeah.
Different across regions.
Then came the question, well, who is writing about Champ?
And when you look through the historiography, that is like the history of the history, basically they’re all American authors.
And so you always get an American view of the legend.
But my question was…
Or also the fact that, like, more than 90% of the lake is on your side.
Sure, whatever.
We’re number one is all I’m saying.
Yeah.
But, see, that’s why I kept wondering, though.
I thought, well, I mean, there is a tiny portion of the lake that’s on our side of the border, so surely we must talk about it.
Yeah.
Which is really, I joke a lot, but that’s a really solid insight, right?
So, yeah.
It is.
It certainly is.
And what I thought was curious was every time you hear about sightings, it’s always Americans.
And I started wondering, well, are there any sightings on the Quebec side?
And so…
When you do research, you want to find proper sources.
And in Quebec, we are very lucky because the National Archives of Quebec, and my bosses will insist that I do mention Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales du Québec.
On our website, we have digitized over 950 Quebec periodicals.
And if anyone is interested, not all in French, we do have a handful of titles that are in English as well.
And so I was able to keyword search through nearly 300 years worth of newspapers on our side of the border for Sea Serpent, Lake Champlain Monster, Champlain Dragon, or whatever I thought might have been used.
And I ended up with about 50 mentions of the monster throughout the years.
And…
My grand conclusion, funnily enough, is that clearly Quebec is paying attention to the monster.
But strangely, it’s always reporting what Americans say they saw.
Are we Quebec’s Florida man?
Is that what we are?
I think what’s interesting is that in the early 1980s, I believe he was an archaeologist, Joseph Zarzynski compiled a list of about 224 counts of sightings between…
1609 which is the day that champlain probably saw the monster if he did see it because that was the year he named the the lake after first exploring it uh and sightings all the way to 1984.
But what’s interesting is that he only had a single eyewitness from the Quebec side.
And he had literally written to French newspapers on the Canadian side asking, has anyone seen the Lake Champlain monster?
Because he realized that the weird thing, there is no French Canadian eyewitnesses to the monster.
And Robert Bartholomew…
barely found more.
He found about three people.
And so you see there’s really this disconnect between Americans seeing the monster and French Canadians seeing the monster.
Now, geographically, once again, it does make sense when you realize that most of Lake Champlain is on the American side.
Also, the cooler, deep waters are on the American side.
So, you know, it just kind of fits with the whole Loch Ness vibe with the mountains and so on.
Meanwhile, the average depth of the water on the Canadian side is about 14 feet.
So not quite impressive.
And so, oh, look, there’s a monster.
Oh, never mind, it’s a seaweed.
I can clearly see it within 14 feet of water.
But what I think happens is that there’s a kind of national pride going on because a theme that seems to be brought up every once in a while by journalists is this weird scoffing of…
We have our own critters like that.
And sure enough, Quebec does have many lake monsters.
The two most famous being Poinic, the lake monster from Lake Poinigamook.
And you also have Memphrey from the Lake Memphremangog.
And what’s interesting is that the…
When you read the papers, people seem really proud of these monsters going, these are ours and only ours.
And so there’s this weird national pride, even though part of Lake Champlain is on the Canadian side.
Apparently, Quebecers just decided, yep, nope, we’re better than that.
We have our own lake monsters.
What’s also very interesting, Ben and Joe, in their book on Lake Monsters, had described these two monsters basically as Champ Light.
Oh, you’re talking about Lake Monster Mysteries?
Yes.
They had basically said that they’re a diet version of Champ, and so there’s many parallels.
And sure enough, you see, just like…
you have a lot of tourism based around, uh, uh, champ on, on the, uh, especially on the New York side with, uh, Port Henry and crown point and so on, but also on the Vermont side, uh, these monsters on the Canadian side also have, uh, have a lot to do with, with tourism.
And in fact, I thought I found this really damning, uh, editorial from 1957, uh, with, uh, this was, uh,
with memfray where someone literally wrote hey you know it’s kind of cool how tourists like flock to see ogopogo in bc we should have our own monster wink wink and see what happens well i want to step in at this point and and ask you why this is the case i mean you’re addressing it
in in some ways but why did champ become popular in the united states but never really catch on in in quebec or in canada in general so i hear you’re talking about is it panic and uh memphrey uh but but why why didn’t champ really catch on there
I think it’s because there is a first claim.
Early on, you start having these festivals in Port Henry, for example, and they’re very lucrative.
And so what happens is if you’re thinking economically, and this is, of course, just a working hypothesis, but if you’re thinking economically, we don’t really want to compete.
so you want to have your own thing and maybe have a monster tourism.
So maybe someone after seeing that festival will say, uh, might not want to go to another champ theme festival, but might say, Oh, well let’s go check out this other monster.
That’s different.
Uh, so that could be an idea, but all in all, I think it’s, it’s also the fact that, uh,
In general, Champ seems to be a lot more present in the American media.
And so in Canada, it’s more like a secondary story where they’re always just reporting, oh, by the way, Americans are talking about this monster.
And so it’s not organically within the culture and it’s more in the print culture whenever they’re trying to fill blanks by inspiring themselves with American print.
I see.
Which is really something we’ve been honing back in on again and again around here.
And you’ve brought it up.
I really need to read Michel Merget.
I need to read his book because multiple people have talked to me about how important the concepts are there.
But one of the ideas he talks about is this idea that lake monsters are sort of paper tigers.
But he doesn’t mean it in the sort of…
way that that’s sort of colloquially used.
He’s talking about the role of media in growing and perpetuating monster concepts.
And I think I first hit on this with the Beast of Gévaudan, where… Jay Smith’s book.
Jay Smith came on and was talking about how that the broadsheet newspapers were really looking for content and they would publish any kind of crazy story if it perpetuated the idea there’s a monster ravaging…
The landscape.
Do you want an anecdote in parentheses here?
Sure, hop in.
Quebec does the same thing.
Well, that’s exactly what I was wondering.
Exactly the same period as the Beast of Gévaudan.
Oh, it’s the same time period, okay.
It’s the same time period, and literally they’re saying, hey, careful, there’s a werewolf that’s traveling between Quebec and Kamouraska further downriver.
And they say it’s just as dangerous as the one in Givaudan.
Wow.
And this is exactly the same period as there are no ships coming in or out because winter’s coming up and so on.
And so it’s a low point for news.
And so clearly that’s what’s going on.
Wow.
That is interesting.
I mean, obviously, in my heart, I feel like maybe the role of the media is underplayed because it is the mechanism by which we hear monster stories more often than not.
Very few, I mean, maybe this is more common back in the past to be sitting around at a party and someone tells you, here, what happened to so-and-so.
I mean, obviously, urban legends are called that for a reason.
But the media is definitely…
I don’t necessarily blame the one who used the word complicit, but I mean, it’s more than that because don’t forget today, you know, when you want to read your news or what, what do you do?
First thing is you go on the internet and sadly, social media is now becoming the number one source of news.
But back in the day, they were.
It was directly through newspapers.
It’s in the name, newspapers.
And so you could literally have manufacturing areas where you would literally have someone hired just to read the newspaper to the workers as they’re working.
So everyone is getting exactly the same news.
Yeah, interesting.
And so this is why newspapers are so central for spreading these rumors, these stories, and so on.
Yeah, I think of them as sort of nodes or like within a network.
You know, they’re a special kind of node because they’ll spread it to anyone who’ll read it or listen to it.
But yeah, so there’s an editorial component where whoever is putting out what deciding what’s in the paper.
And maybe that doesn’t exist as much or now it’s an algorithm instead.
But but the parallels are strong that that what makes the story I’m going to air quote go viral because I don’t really like.
the idea of virality but i don’t really have a better mech you know analog but it people refer to it yeah it is and uh thanks richard dawkins but anyway the the media has a huge role here i mean they’re they’re an important part uh maybe the only parallel i could think of is the person
who collects monster stories and puts them into books because those people also become nodes.
And I think maybe Jeb Card came up with this idea, but the idea that maybe a window area, maybe it was him, but a window area is not where monsters happen.
It’s where a person who cares enough to share the stories happens and they make a window area by collecting stories.
I kind of think of those as like the Wi-Fi amplifiers.
It’s just as the signal’s getting weaker and people are about to forget about a monster, someone comes along, creates a compendium of monster tales, and then throws it back into the wild.
Well, what about tourism then?
So we’re talking about social media.
What role does tourism play in keeping…
these lake monster legends alive today oh a lot uh case in point uh port uh port henry and you’ll have to forgive me i’m forgetting the the dates but i i do know they had i believe it was a smelting he who melts it smelts it that’s what they say
And so they were steel manufacturers.
And at some point, the industry died down locally.
And so they were a little desperate to boost up the local economy.
And they came up with the idea for this festival.
And at some point, when you read the 1980s newspapers, they’re complaining that they’re…
The festival is working so well, they don’t know where to put the people coming into town.
So you can see that it is a boon, a seasonal boon to help boost up the area.
And you see that all along the Lake Champlain corridor.
Oh, what’s that little town?
There’s a little town.
And it’s funny because…
I think this started just before the pandemic, and just as I was like, oh, I’ve got to do this, they have a Bigfoot calling contest every September.
Oh, you know what?
I think I’ve heard people hollering for Bigfoot.
Whitehall, but something like that.
I have a vague recollection of watching a video of people stepping up to a microphone and making their best Bigfoot call.
Whitehall is an epicenter of Bigfoot sightings.
in the Northeast.
We’re here for the calling contest and it should be a lot of fun.
you see that it is becoming something.
And in fact, on the Quebec side, like I said, I, I’m hypothesizing that they don’t want to compete with another monster.
They’d rather just create their own.
And in the case of, even I have a hard time pronouncing this, like the city chose the monster as their logo.
And it kind of looks like a literal water dragon.
It really has like a dragon head.
Yeah.
And so they encourage people.
And it’s really funny because their promotional material, when you look for ads for their town, the vibe is basically come for the monster, but stay for the summer sports and the food and the so on.
That is so interesting.
A couple of times you’ve mentioned sightings as dragons instead of necessarily like monsters.
Yeah, in colonial days, yes.
Yeah, so is there a kind of difference?
Do you get those dragon sightings today, or is that colonial only?
That is very colonial talk.
In fact, it’s funny, when you’re researching these topics, you see the evolution of terms.
For example…
I’ve never really seen dragon for champ, but the term sea serpent or just serpent tended to disappear after the 19th century, replaced by monster.
Interesting.
And during colonial times, what’s interesting is, again, the power of media.
Because, as I explain in the paper, to try to explain, well, is it plausible that Champlain thinks he saw a lake monster?
Does his French colonial culture allow for the existence of sea monsters?
And it’s yes and no, where cartography, even by 1609,
european cartography is starting to get rid of monsters on the on the maps we all know the here here be monsters trope uh yeah yeah yeah because cartographers want to be as accurate as possible and they’re now willing to just say you know what we have no idea what’s over here and they will literally spell it out no idea what’s here yeah
But even though the educated portion of society is now backing away from monsters, that doesn’t mean that the average person stopped believing in these.
And so every once in a while, you do have these glimpses of tales of sea monsters.
But again, the fact that they are rare in the written record…
is more indicative of fewer people knowing how to write in French colonial society than people not believing in them.
Because we do have indications.
Every once in a while, it’s like looking for, it’s like a whack-a-mole.
Every once in a while, you know that belief is there and it pops up once in a while.
But again, I got to remind the listeners that contrary to New England and all the other British colonies, New France was nowhere near as literate.
We’re talking about 10% of people in the countryside knowing how to at least sign their name and about 40% in the city.
And not only that, but when they did, it was in French.
And who understands that?
No idea what you’re talking about.
So the naming is kind of in line with people’s beliefs at the time, what’s plausible, whether it’s a dragon or a serpent or an undiscovered creature.
Is that what you want to say?
It’s relevant because what I wanted to say was we see…
dragons continuing to appear in American newspapers all through the last half of the 19th century.
It becomes like a big thing.
We talked about the tombstone episode where the tombstone epitaph flying lizard, but what happened in the early part of the 1800s that transformed sea monsters.
Mary Anning discovers the plesiosaur.
And suddenly the idea of sea dragons is not as interesting or popular as the idea of plesiosaurs and the idea that maybe these prehistoric, mesozoic marine reptiles, right?
I think this matters like a lot.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And in fact, you’re seeing that also with sea serpents, just the term serpent.
What really caught me off guard was I was trying to illustrate at some point also, well, you know, do hoaxes exist?
They obviously do.
Do we have examples of hoaxes throughout Quebec’s history?
And there are plenty.
And one of my favorite ones was in the 1800s, there were four young gentlemen who claimed to have found a sea serpent.
And while all this speculation is going on in the newspaper, is it real?
Is it not?
I was surprised when one newspaper went as far as saying, oh, this serpent might actually be of a plesiosaur kind.
Nice.
I was really surprised.
I was like, whoa, this is way before Nessie.
Because…
Champ, as Robert Bartholomew had really masterfully demonstrated, Champ is like this amorphous creature where at some point it looks like a giant slug, at some point it’s an alligator, at some point it just keeps changing until…
there’s this comparison with Nessie and then it just kind of solidifies and stays in the shape of a plesiosaur.
And so it’s interesting seeing how Nessie really…
influenced all lake monsters, because all of a sudden, there’s this kind of consensus, okay, this is what a lake monster is supposed to look like.
But until then, I mean, people are constantly…
They’re constantly…
changing what the monster looks like according to the eyewitness, which also brings up the question, well, what did Champlain actually see?
Did he see something?
It does.
As we like to say in question number seven, what did he actually see?
What did he write?
What did he write?
Well, this is the fascinating part.
So just to, the story is kind of funny to begin with, because when he arrives in Quebec, he befriends passing Indigenous people, namely the Wendats that are traditionally lived in…
rather than Ontario, but they did regularly travel through the St. Lawrence.
And he also befriended the local Algonquins, including the Innu.
And…
as he was having arrangements with them going like, well, can I set up a little fur trading post in what is now Quebec City?
They said, oh, absolutely.
And in exchange, well, do you want to help us if ever we’re at war with an enemy?
And Sean Plain’s like, sure, hoping that will never happen.
Not realizing, no, no, they’re currently at war.
with the five Iroquois nations.
It’s not as hypothetical as he thought.
It’s not as hypothetical.
So you can imagine Sean playing a year later when his indigenous friends are like, hey, about that promise, you want to come with?
And he’s like, wait a minute.
And what’s hilarious is that he initially had a…
a lot of men that were supposed to follow him and they all chickened out except for two so you got three three Frenchmen along with about 60 indigenous people also on their side the only ones who didn’t chicken out going to Lake Champlain to confront a war party of Iroquois and Champlain was hoping that
his firearm would suffice to terrorize the enemy, which it did.
This is right before the Iroquois start trading with the…
Were we talking, like, rifles?
Or, like, he had a small cannon?
Because, I mean, that makes…
It’s crazy how much… How do you translate an arquebuse?
How do you pronounce that?
It’s a wheel lock.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, wheel lock.
There we go.
Yeah, so all the old school…
In high school, I was fascinated with all kinds of early guns and weapon books all the time.
Like I was a nerd.
It was so embarrassing.
That’s reassuring.
But that’s the thing, right?
Champlain was lucky because unlike you, the Iroquois did not know much about firearms yet.
Right, right.
Although this is just before the…
It’s like the one guy showing up with a laser pistol, right?
It matters.
It’s a big deal.
Exactly.
Right, yeah.
So years later, the Dutch will supply them with weapons.
For a fee.
But as Champlain is traveling, what’s fascinating when you read him, he is really interested in everything.
So he’s literally writing as he’s in enemy territory, he’s looking like, oh, look at the mountains.
These are the most beautiful trees I’ve ever seen.
And he starts talking about fish and so on.
And at some point, he talks about this creature that he sees.
Now, ever since the 1970s,
Most works on Champ will say, oh, he saw basically a plesiosaur, this horse-like head just craning over the water and then diving again.
But in reality…
What he actually described is a fish about five feet long, which when you look at his sketch and the way he described it is clearly a long-nosed gar.
Now, I’m not innovating by describing the fish.
Many people have already said it was a long-nosed gar.
What’s interesting, however, is that even ichthyologists…
that red Champlain were very dubious about Champlain’s indigenous allies telling him, oh yeah, we’ve seen some that were like 12 feet long.
Because they’re clearly talking about something way bigger than a long-nosed gar.
And since the only gar that gets that size is the alligator gar, which does not go further up north than, I think, the Illinois River.
well people just dismissed it as oh they don’t know what they’re talking about but as a french colonial historian i got to remind i got to remind people indigenous people as well as fur traders traveled really really far and so champlain’s indigenous allies are either talking about what they’ve heard from other
allies further out west or they themselves have traveled far enough and they probably did into the interior of the continent that they’ve seen them and so they might be conflagrating both species but to them they clearly recognize there’s bigger fish out there and so in a certain way uh even a five foot gar is a five foot long nose gar is still pretty impressive
I like to say, well, he did, in a way, see a monster.
I mean, I love fishing, and I would love catching one of those.
But, I mean, alligator gar, even today, I think alligator gar and catfish are both nodes for folklore.
I mean, like, I grew up in a small southern town, and we had legendary alligator gar in lakes and rivers that I don’t even think were there.
But there’s such a monstrous fish.
And they’re plausible because they’re real animals.
They still today, people like a giant catfish, a giant alligator gar, even now are in.
Let me also add that I maybe this is groundbreaking revelation, but fish people sometimes lie.
You know, one of my favorite, favorite fishing jokes is, yeah, my uncle used to brag about his six inch fishes.
And then the friend goes, six inches, that’s not big.
Oh, I forgot to mention, he measures between the eyes.
Nice.
That’s the kind of same phenomenon you see in the media, because what’s interesting is that around in the 1920s is the first time someone mentions a link between Champlain and the Lake Champlain monster.
Now, Robert Bartholomew had really identified the first store on the American side as being from the 1970s with, what was it, Vermont Life, I think.
And I forget the name of the author who had described basically Champlain seeing a plesiosaur type creature.
But in the 1920s, French Canadian newspapers were already talking about, oh, is the Lake Champlain monster a big fish?
And so the first…
mentions of the story are fairly accurate.
You know, they’re more paraphrasing what, what Champlain said, but every retelling, the fish gets bigger and scarier and with more teeth.
And so you see the mutation into a monster fish until finally it’s just a monster.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And I think that’s, I mean, in the things that you shared with us and what we’ve seen of the pre-publication, it’s very compelling.
It’s not shocking, and it still happens today.
The human need to turn mundane, natural things.
They’re not mundane.
They’re interesting and outstanding, but they’re natural.
Into something more than that is very understandable.
It happens all the time right now, but you’ve done a great job of bringing that fact with the historicity of the materials that you’ve pulled together.
I know there’s a barrier here around the language, but I really would encourage people to…
when this is published to look it up and read it.
And we will certainly share that with our listeners when that goes live.
Yeah.
I think that there’s so much that has been written from the U.S. angle that it’s really important to have this Quebec perspective.
So I think it’s wonderful work that you’ve done.
And fun.
It’s cool.
I don’t know.
But I’m curious now, Joseph, what are you working on now?
Right now, I have two projects right now because I have my second book coming out also this fall.
And I’m super excited to say that not only will it be published in North America, I just found out it’s going to be a co-edition with France.
So I’m actually surprised, like, my God, I’m going to be published in France.
So again, a French book.
That book is on military intelligence during the French and Indian War on the French side.
There’s actually a whole chapter.
My last chapter is all about rumors and superstition where people are like, oh, we’ve seen the Virgin Mary in the sky.
Clearly we’ve won.
And so opposition between like what French officers believe and what indigenous people believe and then the clash of beliefs and so on.
So it’s very apropos with what we’re talking about today with like…
beliefs and and and media and so on uh and my second project is the same one as the last time i was on the show uh uh i’m i’m trying to finally finish uh a paper slash possibly short book on the search for the giddy phone or the griffin the first ship to sail uh west of
niagara falls and also the first ship to sink during its maiden voyage in the great lakes wow that’s and it’s such an interesting idea uh in in under reported so that’ll be really cool
It sounds like a future Monster Talk episode.
It does.
Yeah, especially this one is fascinating because…
Does it become a ghost ship?
It does become a ghost ship.
Oh, like the Mary Celeste.
There you go.
It does become a ghost ship.
I actually do discuss the folklore of it very shortly.
But what’s fascinating is you have over 20 shipwrecks that were told, aha, this is the Griffin, even though there’s never any proof.
So the paper slash possibly book is in two halves.
The first half is what do we really know?
I’m really trying to go through all the primary sources.
And then the second part is, well, here’s basically the history of the three most famous cases, including one I will not name for now, but I know people will be very, very disappointed on the Canadian side when I poke holes in their theory that their shipwreck is the Griffin
When it is clearly not in a weird feedback loop.
I have to thank you guys because I’ve also added a reference from your show on the episode on Griffins.
Oh, nice.
Oh, good stuff.
I added that book.
I forgot the name of the author, but I added, I added the author’s book in the list when discussing what is a Griffin?
Exactly.
Exactly.
So fascinating.
Well, as always, every time we talk, I think we can just keep talking.
But obviously, we can’t really just keep talking because you have to come back for another episode.
You can always come back.
That’s exactly right.
So just this is really cool.
And thank you for giving us a sneak peek at what’s coming up.
And we will definitely share this.
We can go in and put a link out to the magazine or the journal.
And when it goes live, we’ll share that with the listeners and remind them.
Be sure to remind us, but we’ll be keeping an eye out for it.
We will.
Sounds good.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Anything else, Karen?
No, I think that’s it.
Joseph, thank you so much.
Have a great night.
Please keep up the good work.
I know it’s hard, but you’re doing good stuff, man.
Oh, you are.
Yeah, so nice to chat.
Have a good night.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard an interview with Joseph Gagné discussing his upcoming article on the Lake Champlain Monster, which will be published soon in Rabosca, a journal of French-American ethnology.
Links to that magazine, Joseph’s new book, and all sorts of research goodies, especially for the French speakers and readers out there, are in the show notes.
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How do skeptics stay hydrated in droughts?
They have their own well, actually.
This has been a Monster House presentation.

The post 🦕 S05E38 – Champ Across the Border appeared first on MonsterTalk.

Note: This episode deals with murder and goes into some detail, so we’re putting the “explicit tag” for the mature content, perhaps not suitable for all audiences.

MonsterTalk steps outside its usual territory for a true-crime case with a paranormal afterlife. Blake and Karen welcome Hallie, host of The Morbid Curiosity Podcast, to revisit one of the most notorious unsolved crimes in American history: the August 1892 axe murders of Andrew and Abby Borden in Fall River, Massachusetts, and the trial that acquitted Andrew’s daughter Lizzie while leaving much of the public convinced she did it.

Drawing on Hallie’s background in anthropology and skeletal analysis, the conversation lays out the timeline, the forensic evidence, and the tangle of rumor and theory that has kept the case alive for more than a century – before turning to the crime scene itself, now run as “America’s most haunted” bed-and-breakfast, and asking what, if anything, still lingers there.

Hallie walks the timeline: Abby killed first (roughly 9:30 to 10:30 am), Andrew shortly before his body was found around 11:15. The famous “forty whacks” is folklore – Abby suffered about 18 hatchet wounds and Andrew 10 to 11, with one of Andrew’s eyes cut clean in two. Not forty, but gruesome overkill all the same.

Crime-scene photography was brand new in 1892. Right around this moment, French researcher Alphonse Bertillon was standardizing forensic photography – the dual-pose mugshot, the top-down crime-scene shot with a measurement grid in frame. The Borden bodies were photographed where they fell and the images were used at the 1893 trial, and a sensation-hungry press turned them into grisly woodcut illustrations for readers across the country.

Karen raises the wardrobe puzzle: the dress Lizzie wore that morning had no blood on it, a second dress she said was paint-stained got burned, and a blood-spotted bucket she attributed to menstruation. Hallie, who knows her historic clothing, explains why a quick change would have been tough – layers, corsets, buttons, ribbons – and why the “she did it naked and changed after” theory runs into the problem that two murders meant two changes. (Also home to the finest accidental pun of the episode, courtesy of Karen: “clothing of the period.”)

The detail that pushes Blake off the fence: the day before the murders, Lizzie reportedly tried to buy prussic acid – cyanide – at a local pharmacy, claiming she needed it to clean a sealskin cape. The druggist refused, and that testimony was ultimately kept from the jury as too far removed from the crime. Blake notes a competing moth-fumigation version, Hallie flags that both Abby and Lizzie had voiced fears of being poisoned days earlier, and Karen adds that Lizzie was medicated on morphine during the inquest – which may help explain her famously muddled testimony.

Part of the “how did she walk?” answer is her defense – a former governor of Massachusetts with a silver tongue and a gift for getting damaging evidence (like the cyanide trip) excluded. Blake and Karen connect it to money and the courts, with a nod to the JonBenet Ramsey case. Public opinion swung too: sympathetic during the trial, then sharply against Lizzie afterward as she moved to a Hill mansion, dropped her charities, befriended actresses, and became permanently estranged from her sister Emma, who left and never returned.

On the paranormal side, the house now runs as a bed-and-breakfast under paranormal-tourism company US Ghost Adventures, with ghost tours and overnight hunts. The crew stays skeptical: the original Sci-Fi Channel Ghost Hunters came away empty in 2006, the official ghost tours only began in 2004, and – as Joe Nickell has argued – the “haunting” is largely people primed by a spooky setting and a true story imagining what happened there. Blake ties it to work by Chris French and Richard Wiseman on the real drivers of ghost experiences, and his own rule of thumb: a true-crime site literally owned by a company called US Ghost Adventures is naturally selecting for a good ghost story.

For our signature closing question, Hallie picks the Leshen – the antlered, deer-skulled forest guardian from The Witcher 3, a darker spin on the gentler tree-spirit of Slavic folklore. It launches Blake into one of his favorite themes: how games, art, and online image-making quietly rewrite what a monster “is” – the same drift that gave the Wendigo its now-ubiquitous antlered look and changed what people report when they say they’ve seen one.

Karen’s latest: Beyond Words by Karen Stollznow – a deep dive into the science of psycholinguistics, from animal communication to AI, wild children to word slips, and first words to last. (Blake is reliably informed it counts as a grown-up book that he is still allowed to enjoy.)

From our guest, Hallie: catch her show, the Morbid Curiosity podcast, including her two-part Lizzie Borden coverage – Morbid Curiosity – Lizzie Borden (remastered).

MonsterTalk theme music is by Peach Stealing Monkeys.

Got a theory about who really did it? Bring it to our Facebook group or our Patreon – and, as always, keep it polite, wontcha?

This is not a fully accurate transcript, and was machine generated. It’s here for helping search engines find the episode but not intended to be a faithful transcript of the episode. (But it’s not AWFUL.) Some of the material in this transcript only exists in the Patreon/Premium edition of the show and was excised for the commercial version.

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Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her mother 40 whacks.
When she realized what she’d done, she gave her father 41 whacks.
It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature.
Part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24 mile long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland.
It’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
We generally eschew true crime here at Monster Talk due to a variety of reasons, not the least of which is my apparent abiding need to avoid financial success.
I’m joking, but true crime continues to be a financial juggernaut fueled by what many would characterize as morbid curiosity.
So, it does feel a bit apropos that our Virgil for this trek outside of our normal domain is the host of a podcast literally called Morbid Curiosity.
Her name is Hallie, and our topic is the sensational 19th century crime often referred to as the Lizzie Borden murders.
But our journey is not so far outside the monster adjacent as to keep us from discussing the paranormal aspects of the aftermath to this famous crime.
I can see why this story fascinated people at the time and why it still does.
The crime was violent and shocked the community and the nation.
but I will hold any further ruminations back until after the interview.
So let’s now join Hallie from the Morbid Curiosity podcast as we travel back to New England in 1892.
Monster Talk
Welcome to the show, Hallie.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Yeah.
I have a background in anthropology and archaeology.
I did an undergraduate in those.
And then I did a postgrad in human skeletal analysis.
So my main work has been with skeletons.
I previously worked in museums and libraries, mostly in the archives.
where research was the main goal of the job.
And I really loved it.
I loved hanging out in rooms full of old books.
And while I was doing that work, I would always be listening to podcasts.
So I’ve loved podcasts for a long time.
I’ve been listening to Monster Talk since 2015 or so.
Oh, wow.
So it’s really awesome to be on the show.
Oh, it’s good to have you here.
As I said, a lot of mutual interests, I think.
Yeah, definitely.
Well, that’s definitely how I found you guys.
Well, thanks for joining us.
I think Karen did a pretty good job of setting up how we picked this topic out of all the topics that your show covers.
But I’ll be honest, I went through a phase where I was really into true crime, but I’ve sort of burned out on it.
And so we don’t cover it very often, even though I’m still interested and very familiar with a lot of these stories.
um in fact especially the paranormal angles for sure but there’s like right now there’s a big serial killer exhibition in atlanta and my wife and i went because kathleen loves this stuff um and uh well like a lot of people i mean in fact i mean if you think about podcasting podcasting was just chugging along just fine until the first super hit came along with serial
True Crime is absolutely what really catapulted podcasting out of the, what do you want to call it?
The slums?
I don’t know.
Into the solid suburbs.
The nerdy niches of all the corners of the internet.
There’s a lot of people who love True Crime.
I guess my point is I’ve read a lot about various horrific murders, but we haven’t covered a lot of them here.
And I’m making assumptions that everybody knows who Lizzie Borden is, but maybe not.
So let’s assume that some of our audience doesn’t know anything about this crime and the many hypotheses about it.
And maybe you can give us a 101 on who’s Lizzie Borden, who got murdered, what she got to do with it.
Where are the bodies?
What’s the evidence?
You know, the basics.
Definitely.
Well, Lizzie Borden is an alleged axe murderer who allegedly killed her father and stepmother in 1892, allegedly.
We’re saying because we don’t want to get sued, right?
No, it’s all, everybody thinks she did it, basically, but she was acquitted of this murder.
A lot of people at the time still believed she was the one who killed them.
And it’s still an unsolved murder and a pretty gruesome one at that.
And people are very fascinated by it, including me, which is why she’s famous.
Why wasn’t she convicted?
Because everyone in the jury was a quitter.
All right.
Sorry.
So she was acquitted, but she’s still famous.
Yeah.
The reason that the trial got so much attention was because it was a very, very violent crime.
Basically, there wasn’t a lot of evidence to prove that anyone did it.
Like it was there was blood everywhere, but they couldn’t find the killer.
Who died?
I guess we should.
Her father and her stepmother.
Her evil stepmother?
Possibly.
We don’t know.
Gotcha.
I just always have to assume that, right?
Yeah, always.
We know that she and her sister didn’t like her stepmother very much.
And we know that there was some pretty intense tension in the house between Lizzie and her older sister, Emma.
And their stepmother, whose name is Abby, Abby Borden.
And their father, Andrew Borden, was kind of a character in that he was quite a rich guy.
He had a lot of money.
He ran several textile mills and owned a lot of real estate.
But he didn’t like to spend any money.
So there was some resentment that had been noted by other friends and family that Lizzie and Emma thought perhaps he could shell out a little bit more.
Like they lived in the industrial part of town next to his textile mills instead of in the more affluent area of town called The Hill.
So…
They never really had people over.
They didn’t do any entertaining because they were embarrassed of their living situation.
They lived at 92 2nd Street is the address of the house where the murders took place.
And it was a duplex that had been pretty roughly converted into a single family home.
which is important later.
I was just going to ask you just regarding the relationship between Lizzie and her father, that it was further strained because he’d actually given some money to Abby’s family or purchased a house for them and yet wouldn’t purchase mod cons for them or buy a house for them.
So is there truth to that, that he was giving money to…
To her and her family, but not to his girls?
Well, sort of.
So Abby had, I think it was her sister, was living in a house with her mother and her mother wanted to leave her share of the house.
And…
I believe Abby asked Andrew to buy that share so that her sister could keep living there without paying any rent.
And when he did this, he agreed.
When he agreed…
Lizzie and Emma both got quite offended and said, well, anything she gets, we should also have.
He tried to sort of mullify the situation by buying them each a piece of property.
He bought one house for them both to have in their names.
Okay.
He was trying to fix the situation by giving them property.
And it kind of worked, but after this incident…
they would no longer eat breakfast with either of their parents.
Like, it caused a great offense.
And I’m not quite sure why.
Like, I don’t really understand what the offense was, but they also all got the same allowance.
Like, each of them received a certain amount of money every week, and it was the same.
Whereas Emma and Lizzie’s, they could use for whatever they wanted, and Abby had to use hers for the house.
So it was kind of, it was really like…
the girls sort of ran things.
You know what I mean?
Like he, he was very, while he was quite strict, I think, especially with money, he definitely had a soft spot for his girls more than his wife.
It seems.
Okay.
That’s interesting.
I’ve heard so many different versions of these stories and stories that maybe he had molested the girls, his daughters at some point.
And,
stories that he didn’t ever give them any money and that, again, this is probably going off the rails, but it just seems like different sources would tell you different things, that Lizzie was a kleptomaniac, that Lizzie was a lesbian.
So it’s really hard to find out what’s true and what’s not because there are so many different stories and claims out there.
Yeah, when you have a mystery like this, people tend to wonder about it and then theorize about it and then publish books about it.
So we’ve got lots of different theories.
And having immersed myself in this pretty often, because I find it so interesting, you can see where they’re coming from for each theory.
It’s hard to write…
a lot of them off just because we don’t have a killer we don’t know how it happened and it’s it’s a complete mystery like either um either lizzie was a criminal genius and planned the murder so well that she got away with it or someone else was a criminal mastermind and got away with it and um
Yeah, everybody loves a murder mystery.
So lots of theories are out there.
I guess we should back up just a little bit and talk about the actual murders.
What happened?
So what was the circumstance of the murders?
Not to initially get to who was home, who wasn’t, but what do we know about the timing?
And I guess…
famously the method of killing yeah what we know for certain we do know the timeline and we know the most likely murder weapon and we know and we know how complicated it would have been to pull it off and not be caught um so the timeline abby the stepmother was killed at some time
Abby was killed sometime between 9.30 and 10.30 a.m. on August 4th.
And Andrew was killed the same day, sometime shortly after 11.30, is what they think.
And there’d been, like, Lizzie’s uncle, John, had been in the house previously.
It was the first time he’d stayed over in a long time.
So, like, he’s also suspect.
I can give you I mean, we all know the rhyme, right?
Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother 40 whacks.
And when she saw what she had done, she gave her father 41.
She didn’t actually give them that many whacks if she did it.
Abby Borden had 18 sharp force trauma injuries to her head and neck, mainly the back of her head and neck.
And Andrew Borden had 10 to 11 similar injuries, mostly to his face.
And everyone always remarks on the detail that one of his eyes was cut completely in two.
So that means it was definitely a very sharp instrument that was used.
And the amount of violence was what shocked everyone.
It was complete overkill in the truest sense of the word.
And this is one of those crimes where there are horrific crime scene photos.
Indeed.
I think crime scene photography was pretty new at the time.
And they were able to get photos of both Andrew and Abby.
Hallie is right.
It was brand new.
In fact, right around the time of the murders in 1892, a French police researcher named Alphonse Bertillon was completely revolutionizing forensics.
Before Bertillon,
Crime scene photos were just random chaotic snapshots.
He introduced a rigorous scientific system of biometrics, standardizing everything from the dual pose mugshot to top-down crime scene photography taken from heavy tripods with metric measurement grids placed right in the frame.
For the first time, photography wasn’t just a visual aid, it was a measurable objective scientific record.
The Borden investigation caught the very early crest of this forensic wave.
Investigators extensively photographed the bodies of Andrew and Abby exactly where they fell, and the prosecution actually used these graphic images during the 1893 trial to map out the tight physical constraints of the house for the jury.
But these photos didn’t just stay in the courtroom.
The 1890s marked the birth of sensational yellow journalism, and while the technology didn’t yet allow newspapers to print high-resolution photos directly on the front page, the press eagerly transformed the police photographs into detailed, grisly woodcut illustrations and sketches.
The public didn’t just read about the brutal scene at Fall River.
Thanks to this new era of forensic photography, they could see it.
One of my lovely listeners sent me a great postcard with the one of Andrew on it not that long ago.
Yeah, they’re very haunting images and pretty graphic too.
But at the same time, a little tricky to see some aspects of them.
But you were…
Talking about a little earlier you mentioned the blood situation and from what I’ve read, part of Lizzie’s belief that she was innocent was that the dress that she was wearing that morning didn’t have any blood on it.
And yet apparently there was a second dress that she claimed had paint on it and that she had burnt it for that reason and that that possibly could have been the smoking gun, might have had blood on it.
And I’d also heard that there was a bucket that had some blood in it and Lizzie claimed she was menstruating at the time.
So what do we know about that particular aspect?
I believe there’s a particularly scandalous claim, too, that she was naked when she performed these murders and then had gotten changed afterwards.
And I think about the clothing of the period, too, and just how long it would take a woman to… Ooh, clothing of the period.
LAUGHTER
We picked up on that one.
I didn’t intend that one.
But well done.
But the clothing of the era, let’s put it that way, that, you know, corsets and multiple layers and just how long it would take to disrobe or to get changed.
So, yeah, in all of your research, what have you uncovered that might point to her?
having been involved as regards the blood and clothing and things like that.
Well, with the, as you said about the clothing, knowing a little bit about historic clothing, there were, yeah, there was a lot of layers, but if she needed to quick change, she could have just taken the outer layer off unless the blood spatter penetrated beneath it.
Cause usually like listening to the types of fabrics that these dresses were made of, it’s like corduroy and calico.
These are all, I mean, corduroy especially is not particularly,
absorbent to my knowledge calico would be so you might have problems with blood seeping beneath the top layer unless you changed very quickly but again it would have taken time because like there’s lots of buttons there’s lots of ribbons there’s things to tie up there’s collars like corsets under corsets there’s lots of things that you’d have to put on and off so i’m not sure if she
If she killed Andrew Borden, because she was seen between the murders as well, so there would have had to be two changes of clothes.
So it doesn’t seem probable to me personally, but unless, you know, maybe he skipped some of the undergarments that day, I’m not sure.
Yeah.
Well, there’s another point, too.
How accurate do you think they were with the timing?
Because it seems like quite a big chunk of time in between the two murders.
Do you think that they were correct or do you think in those days they didn’t really ascertain that accurately?
Yeah, the accuracy is also suspect because.
They know that Abby was killed first because her blood was coagulated and her body was cold when they went up and found her.
She was actually discovered after Andrew.
And he was still bleeding freely when they found him, which means Lizzie would have had to change very quickly.
And it was Lizzie who screamed for the maid, Bridget, to come down.
like just screaming bloody murder, basically.
So they know Abby was killed first and then Andrew, but the timing in between, it’s hard to say.
There was something in the court documents that I was reading.
No, it wasn’t the court documents.
It’s this awesome book by Kara Roberts called The Trial of Lizzie Borden, where she made a comment that the police officers…
didn’t quite understand how Lizzie and many of the other witnesses couldn’t have been paying attention to the time.
Like they just, because, you know, police officers have regimented schedules.
They’re constantly checking the clock to make sure they’re on time for whatever they’re doing, or they know that you need to be paying attention to the time.
Whereas a lady of leisure, which is…
Lizzie was at the time.
She wasn’t married.
She didn’t work.
She lived at home.
She didn’t pay attention to the clock.
So a lot of the statements from the inquest, which was the first thing that was performed before the trial, they did an inquest, was the officer who was interrogating her just getting frustrated that she didn’t pay attention to the time.
And so there’s definitely some
some room there for doubt as to what happened and when.
So it sounds like that the police pretty quickly pinned their suspicions on Lizzie.
Is that just because they knew she was at home?
Was she at home at the time of the murders?
Did they confirm that?
Why was she always the primary suspect?
Yeah, so it was just her and the maid, Bridget, who were at home.
So they assume Abby was killed sometime between 9.30 and 10.30.
During that time…
In the morning?
In the morning, yep.
A brunch murder.
Brunch murder, definitely.
Let’s all do brunch murder.
Have a Bloody Mary and then… Bloody Lizzie.
A Bloody Lizzie.
I like that better, yeah.
Just have a little, a little ax.
An umbrella.
Yeah, that’s good.
Tasteful.
Yeah.
On the day, everyone had been sick the night before.
So a lot of people had been in and out of the house vomiting.
Then Andrew left at like nine o’clock to go see about his businesses.
The uncle who’d stayed the night, he also left.
So it was just Abby, Lizzie and Bridget.
Abby sent Bridget outside to clean the house windows.
And then she went to go change the sheets in the guest bedroom.
So then it’s just Lizzie.
And Lizzie gave several accounts of where she was and what she was doing during the inquest.
And a lot of it didn’t add up.
But again, she wasn’t really paying attention to the time.
So she may have done all of these things that she said in that time, but she couldn’t give a very good account of the order in which she did things.
Andrew came home about, I think, just a little before 11.
And Bridget had to come back inside to do the windows on the inside.
And the front door was locked, so she had to let Andrew in.
And during her testimony, she said when she let Andrew in, she heard Lizzie laugh from upstairs, which is where Abby’s body was found in the guest bedroom.
creepy but it is and the lizzie said that she was i think ironing in the kitchen or something or she said she was ironing she said she um she was in the barn later um
Well, she said she was in the barn during the time that her father was killed.
I don’t actually remember what she said she was doing when her mother, her stepmother.
Sorry, Lizzie would be very angry if I said her mother.
She was constantly correcting people to say, no, that’s my stepmother, which is when suspicion actually fell on her.
Because the police were like, you should be crying and upset and you are so calm and you are correcting me that this is your stepmother.
not answering our questions at the scene of the crime.
So she had suspicion on her quite early just for because of her behavior.
But so her mom was killed sometime pretty soon after Andrew Borden left is the assumption.
Um, so Bridget is outside.
Bridget comes back in.
Bridget hears Lizzie laugh from upstairs and then come down and speak to her father.
So between murders, she did come downstairs and talk to her father and no one noticed anything amiss about her clothes or how she was acting.
Her dad comes home.
She tells him, Lizzie tells Andrew that Abby received a note from a friend and went out to go visit her friend.
And then Andrew goes to take a nap on the couch.
Bridget, who’s still not feeling very well, goes up to her room, which is in the attic, to have a nap.
And Lizzie is the only one awake in the house at this point.
She told the police she went out into the barn to look for some fishing sinkers.
She said she’s looking for irons to put on her fishing rod because she was going for a fishing trip in a few days, I think.
And then I think that was just 11-ish.
And then at about 11, sometime between 11 and 11.15, she starts screaming, calling for Bridget to come downstairs and telling her someone’s killed father.
And the doors had all been locked.
There’s there wasn’t really any way that someone could have come and gone without running into either of the ladies, really, which is why everything sort of came down quickly to Lizzie.
Right.
Yeah.
It’s just such a complicated case.
And it seems like there are so many loose ends and it’s missing information.
And you mentioned, Hallie, earlier that the family were feeling sick.
So I don’t know if Lizzie was sick as well, but that the stepmother and the father were sick.
And so was Bridget.
And wasn’t…
Didn’t it come to light that Lizzie had gone to a local pharmacist, chemist, and tried to purchase prussic acid?
I don’t know exactly what that is, so perhaps you can tell us about that.
But that she tried to get some kind of poison.
What do we know about that?
Was that true?
It is true that she went into a chemist.
The day before the murder, she went to the chemist and asked to buy prussic acid, which is cyanide.
And she told the pharmacist on duty that it was to clean her seal skin cape, which was a very expensive gift that her father had given her, possibly to mullify other tense feelings that were happening in the house, because it seems like it was wave after wave of tension in this house.
When he testified at the trial, that testimony was thrown out.
So it didn’t actually, it wasn’t presented to the jury because they thought it was too far away from the incident or didn’t have anything to do with the incident.
Was that traditionally used for cleaning, the cyanide used for cleaning clothing?
That sounds odd.
It is odd.
It’s not what it was used for.
And I don’t think anybody used it for that.
Yeah, the chemist wouldn’t sell it to her because he said, that’s poison.
I’m not giving you that.
And she left.
And that was his testimony.
She said she was never there.
Strange.
Yeah, it’s it’s everything is very confusing, like reading through Lizzie’s inquest testimony, which is the only time she ever spoke on record.
Just reading it is very confusing because she seemed in general.
confused by everything that she was asked and she wouldn’t directly answer any questions and um the go ahead sorry to interrupt i’d heard that she’d uh she’d been medicated so i was yes she was put on something uh morphine yeah yeah yeah that’s yeah that’s what i was gonna just about to say yeah she was medicated beforehand
And I wouldn’t be surprised if she was very confused.
I have no claims to deep knowledge on this case, but I did read that the prussic acid was allegedly being used to fumigate to stop moths.
Uh, so that was, that was at least one version of this I heard.
So not as a cleaning agent, but as a, uh, anti moth agent, maybe I don’t, but again, uh, it’s sketchy.
It’s sketchy stuff.
Yeah.
It’s, and it, and her saying she wasn’t there and he said she was, it was a controlled substance, the kind of the same way you can’t buy certain cough medicine now because it’s got other uses everybody knows about and they don’t want it.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And like I think a week before, Abby Borden had gone to her doctor and said she thought she was being poisoned.
Yikes.
And then again, the day before the murders, Lizzie thought she was being poisoned or she told a friend that she thought she was going to be poisoned.
Boy, that sounds such, doesn’t it?
Like maybe poison yourself just a little bit.
So everybody gets poisoned, but you don’t die.
That kind of thing.
Exactly.
That was my thought.
Maybe it’s too slow.
So maybe she came up with a better method.
That’s one of the theories.
Yeah.
She just went, okay, well, this isn’t working.
Yeah.
Time for plan B. I’ve read that they’d gotten sick on bad mutton.
So it was they used to the father wouldn’t shell out for good quality food and they used to eat mutton all the time and it was rotting or something.
And that’s what made them sick.
But yeah.
Again, so many versions, it’s really hard to piece together the truth.
Yeah, it’s not surprising it stayed a mystery because of all the contradicting statements that were made, both during the trial and the inquest.
It’s very confusing.
I get the impression that if this crime happened now…
it would be solved really fast because of DNA and other stuff.
Like it wouldn’t be that big of a mystery, but maybe I’m wrong on that.
So I don’t know.
Sorry to interrupt.
I was thinking about that and I was reading Blake, you sent Joe Nichols article on this.
Oh yeah, that’s right.
Skeptical inquirer.
And he spoke about how all nowadays for all of these reasons, we.
DNA evidence, we would find the answers.
And then I just thought about the JonBenet Ramsey case here in Boulder, Colorado.
Oh, yeah.
And just how the cops kind of stuffed that one up.
And so I thought, well, I could see today, you know, things going awry and not being able to get to the bottom of something just with…
things not being contained properly.
So, I mean, the kind of thing still happens today.
Well, it does.
And I think one of the biggest challenges is that if the victims of the crime, or if the participants in the sort of crime ecosystem, I’m not sure what you call that whole thing there with all the potential suspects and the victims.
If there’s money, lots and lots of money,
it turns out that complicates things in the courts quite a bit.
In the JonBenet Ramsey case, it’s like the evidence…
It was like the whole thing was complicated by how much money was at play, it seems like to me.
And it seems like maybe this too, that wealthy people or people who potentially might inherit a big pile of money suddenly have legal means available that aren’t there for…
Poor schlubs like me who just can’t get away with murder.
No matter how hard I try.
You’re definitely right there.
She had an amazing lawyer.
Like she, her lawyer was like an ex governor of Massachusetts who had a silver tongue and he was able to make any witness that came up on the stand feel very comfortable before tearing them apart.
Like he was good.
And she, like, with the inquest that was held for her, she was interviewed, but she wasn’t allowed to have her attorney present.
And so they had to throw that out.
So they couldn’t use her only statements in court.
This big shot lawyer that she had was really good at getting certain evidence excluded, like the prussic acid incident.
Well, I’m curious about something else.
It seems like during the trial that Lizzie had the public on her side, that they were very sympathetic to her losses and what had happened to her, and they thought she was this kind of socialite and this religious…
character went to church every week and it was just well known in the community she couldn’t have possibly done it and then afterwards it seems like the the public and the community really turned against her uh do we we know why do you think it’s just she was stigmatized afterwards or uh do you think that the community might have known more than we know today
Well, her behavior changed after she was acquitted.
Her behavior changed dramatically.
Beforehand, she went to church a lot.
She supported lots of charities.
She taught Sunday school.
She lived quite an ascetic lifestyle, I think mostly because her father had his hand on the purse strings, you know, so she couldn’t spend.
And afterwards,
She and her sister moved into a mansion in the biggest, like the biggest mansion in the affluent area of town.
She stopped supporting her charities.
She started throwing parties.
She made friends with actresses, which like at the time was like a scandal.
And she just started behaving very differently.
And she wouldn’t speak about the trial.
And…
It’s not…
I think what happened was the people doing the newspaper reporting who were in the courtroom were very supportive of her.
And they couldn’t believe that a well-bred Christian woman like Lizzie could have killed her father and stepmother.
Because they were all kind of from that upper echelon.
But the regular folks…
were like, if that was me and I was on trial, I would have been, you know, condemned.
So there was a lot of like a class division between who supported her and who thought she did it.
And the newspapers were just spitting out story after story, like trying to both support and tear her down.
There was, I think, one
newspaper story that was a complete hoax that was talking about how Lizzie was pregnant and her father and mother were threatening to turn her out of the house if she didn’t reveal the man who got her in trouble and then she killed them to get the money and then there was another one that was like talking about how her uncle and her planned together to get rid of them and
It was just story after story, just really smearing her character.
And then afterwards, with the change of behavior, all of her friends and her sister, in fact, just left.
She’d moved into that big house with her sister.
And then eventually her sister completely abandoned her and they never saw each other again.
Was that because they got an inheritance and she was of independent means?
I’m not sure what… Well, they got the inheritance because…
They actually got an extensive inheritance because when… Because of the order of the murders, Abby was killed first and she left everything to Andrew.
Then Andrew was killed.
So everything went to Emma and Lizzie.
So both of their, I mean, I’m not sure that Abby had much, but everything went to Lizzie and Emma.
And nothing went to Abby’s family, though Lizzie and Emma did pay them something, like, eventually.
But they got a lot of money.
They moved to this big house.
And then…
Suddenly they fell out and Emma just left.
And they never spoke about why, neither of them.
And it was like this big public secret.
Wow.
Yeah, again, it just really seems like there’s so much that we don’t know.
Lots of missing information, but certainly ample motivation for Lizzie to have committed these crimes.
But at the same time, I think that the idea of the uncle being a suspect is interesting because he hadn’t been on the scene for a long time and suddenly…
Out of the blue, he comes back into their lives.
And I’d heard claims of an illegitimate son as well.
So I just don’t know.
Lizzie missed out because she could have written a book called If I Did It, and that would have really cleaned up.
That would have been smart.
I wish she had because that would answer so many questions.
I just wonder if we can turn to the paranormal side of this just for, I guess, in closing because –
I mean, this is certainly one of those true crime stories, cold case that a lot of people have discussed, you know, ad nauseum before us.
And so being monster talk, I think it’d be fun to just kind of delve or interesting to delve into just some of the paranormal claims because I believe nowadays the house has been turned into a B&B and that they have ghost tours.
Yeah, D&B is the dead and breakfast, so.
Yeah.
Pretty gruesome, but, yeah, what do you know about the claims that people make about paranormal sightings and things that take place in the house today, supposedly?
Well, it is a dead-end breakfast, and they do have tours.
They have…
murder history dinners now uh i think the house was bought recently by a ghost hunting company i think um i’ve heard that yeah
The Borden house has worn a lot of hats since 1892. After Lizzie and Emma sold it in 1918, it passed through a string of owners and spent decades as a working business address – from 1948 to 1995 it was home to Smart Advertising, a local printing company. When the family behind that company died in 1996, the property was inherited by granddaughter Martha McGinn and a longtime employee, Ron Evans, and that same year they opened it to the public for the first time as a bed-and-breakfast and museum. For a long stretch Fall River regarded the Borden legacy with a kind of quiet civic embarrassment, but the house leaned into it, and tourism gradually turned the murder site into one of the city’s signature draws.
Then in May of 2021, the place entered its current era when it sold for two million dollars to Lance Zaal, founder of the nationwide paranormal-tourism company US Ghost Adventures. Under that ownership the house has gone all-in on the paranormal marketplace – overnight stays, historical tours, nightly ghost tours, murder-history dinners, and overnight ghost hunts – and yes, you can book the very guest room where Abby was killed.
That corporate approach has also rubbed up against the neighbors. When a coffee shop called Miss Lizzie’s Coffee opened next door in 2023, US Ghost Adventures sued over its name and bloody-hatchet logo and asked a federal court to make them stop. On that question, the courts sided with the coffee shop – twice. A judge declined to block the shop in 2023, finding little real risk that anyone would confuse a coffee counter with an overnight ghost tour, and pointing out that nobody gets to own the historical Lizzie Borden story itself. A federal appeals court upheld that in November of 2024. So the company couldn’t force a name change.
Where it went sideways for the cafe was everything that came after. The owner parted ways with his lawyers, started representing himself, missed a pile of court deadlines, and by early 2026 had been found in default – which now has US Ghost Adventures asking a judge for something like a quarter of a million dollars. And then, in a twist that has nothing to do with the ghost company at all, the cafe’s own landlord moved to evict it. So the shop has announced it’s leaving Second Street – relocating, fittingly, to a former church where Lizzie Borden herself once taught Sunday school. The turf war is ending, just not for the reason you’d expect.
Like it’s still operating as a bed and breakfast, which is sounds like a lot.
That’s a lot going on in the house.
And I have this thing about people ghost hunting in hotels is you’re never going to catch anything because there’s always so many other people around.
Any evidence that you collect is going to be suspect because someone else could have moved something or coughed or pushed something or turned on water that made plumbing Creek.
Like there’s no way to properly like scientific method ghost hunt in any type of hotel.
And this is a small house with, I think they’ve added two rooms in the basement and three rooms in the attic.
And it’s,
you’re not getting a suite either.
There’s like shared bathrooms, which is great, I guess.
It seems a bit crowded to me.
Was that a Jack and Jill type thing, right?
I think that’s what they call it in America when you have two bedrooms that are joined together with a bathroom in the middle.
Yeah.
Sorry, that was something I learned recently while watching a movie with my wife.
That’s interesting.
That’s cool, yeah.
That’s what that was called.
That’s neat.
But the website for the Lizzie Borden house says it’s America’s most haunted house located in Fall River, Massachusetts.
That’s very specific.
I don’t know many other houses in Fall River that would be haunted.
So I don’t know.
Yeah, I mean, that makes me wonder if the house that Lizzie purchased afterwards, if there aren’t claims associated with that, too.
Yeah, I haven’t heard anything about – I think it’s called Maplecroft is the house that they bought up on the hill.
And I haven’t been to either.
Have either of you been?
No.
I haven’t.
You know, I’ve had a lot of people ask me over the years, why haven’t you investigated this house?
And I think because I just didn’t view it as being a very kind of, I guess, salient –
paranormal claim um yeah that certainly people say uh oh there there are ghosts in in the place and i haven’t been there myself but yeah it’s just not kind of canonical paranormal for me
Yeah, I haven’t been either.
And I actually haven’t heard like any similar to the actual case.
I haven’t heard any consistent claims of specific ghost activity either.
I know the ghost hunters, the original sci-fi channel ghost hunters, Jason and Grant, went there in like 2006 and they didn’t catch anything.
They didn’t see anything.
They said it’s not haunted.
And I think a lot of people assume that the house was haunted because of the horrible things that happened there.
And I feel like… Like Amityville?
Yeah, like the incident ends up haunting the place and the ghost stories come after that.
I feel.
Yeah.
Then the, the tour, the ghost tours, like official ghost tours weren’t actually offered until 2004.
The ghost hunters visit in 2006.
And I think.
I think I read Joe Nichols’ article as well, and he said that the ghostly presence is mostly due to personal feelings of people who visit and learn about it and then are actually in the space and can better imagine what happened, and so people get haunted by the incident.
I think that’s what he said.
I think…
There’s been, we’ve talked about this a lot recently because we’ve been kind of revisiting some ghost cases.
And we have psychologists like Chris French and Richard Wiseman looking into the root causes.
Like, is it the environment?
Is it infrasound?
Is it electromagnetic waves?
Like all these different things.
And it…
at the end of the day, if you have an inclination to the paranormal and someone primes you with a setting that is spooky, creepy, based on a true story, those things, I think that has more to do than anything else than any external, you know,
The kind of place that would be haunted if places would be haunted.
I agree.
And it’s like, I just, that’s such a more powerful impactor on this stuff, I think.
And so if you go to a place that is a true crime place, literally owned by a company called U.S. Ghost Adventures.
Yeah.
It seems like that you’re naturally selecting for a higher propensity of incident or story.
Definitely.
But I am a stinking dirty skeptical person and a known fun ruiner.
But don’t you want to believe I would love to see a ghost?
I just haven’t.
I’ve tried and I haven’t.
Yes, absolutely.
We’ve tried.
Yeah.
When I thought I was being haunted in those times, except for in the immediate terrifying phase, it was fascinating.
If you’re not literally scared out of your mind, it’s really cool to contemplate and try to figure out how to get to the bottom of it.
So, yeah, absolutely.
We’ve just always found natural explanations for these claims and phenomena.
Yeah.
So, yeah, nothing yet.
We’re keeping open minds, aren’t we?
Absolutely.
And, of course, you can’t exclude maybe it’s not a ghost, maybe it’s a demon, you know.
Exactly.
Poltergeist.
Yeah, definitely a poltergeist.
But but this is a leprechaun.
Well, this is this reminds me this time of like photography is coming into play.
And the media is really big into this.
This is not too long after the the the Whitechapel murders with Jack the Ripper.
Yeah, they actually did think Jack the Ripper had come to America was one of the headlines, I think, that I read.
Oh, that’s interesting.
Yeah, I just I feel like.
And even this goes back to the Beast of Chez Vidal, and we talked about that, the rise of tabloid newspapers, broadsheets.
When there’s media to carry the story, then there’s an ecosystem there that will feed back on itself.
So I think…
it was almost destined to become a big news story for a lot of, I mean, this would play big now.
I mean, it’s, it’s not, I mean, it’s got affluent, you know, upper middle-class people with crimes and suspicions and rumors.
It’s got everything we need, you know?
That’s basically why it’s just such a popular case.
Yeah.
That it’s just got everything.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, just so long afterwards, it’s still, but people are just fascinated with this case.
Yeah, it’s got scandal.
It’s super violent.
It’s unsolved.
And everything was very public.
So like, what more do you need to create lasting public interest?
Yeah.
Do we know which PR firm came up with the rhyme about Lizzie Borden took an ax?
Because that was brilliant, right?
Kids started singing it as like a jump roping rhyme.
Oh, golly.
Yeah.
And then the papers printed it and it went like national.
I mean, I would say that like the Freddy Krueger rhyme is clearly homage to this rhyme, you know?
For sure.
Well, we didn’t grow up with it in Australia.
I don’t remember hearing it until I came here.
To the US.
Okay.
But it might have migrated to Australia.
But did you jump rope, Karen?
Did you jump rope?
Not very much, I’ll be honest.
I’m not a rope jumper.
But, yeah, well, gee, do you have any other questions, Blake, before we wrap up?
No, I mean, this was a really nice introduction to a really nasty story.
So we appreciate you coming on the show, Hallie, and talking with us about it.
Yeah, it is.
It’s such an interesting case, but we do want to be sensitive to this kind of story.
We don’t really tend to talk about true crime because we tend to…
to have our sensitivity with the victims uh and we do and and and you know it’s like a lot of these cases it’s the murderer or the suspect that gets all the fame and then who remembers andrew and abby you know that’s um but uh that that’s i i at least their names are preserved and you know that it’s just it’s um
They may not have been terribly nice people.
Maybe.
Yeah, I don’t know.
All right.
Well, Hallie, you said you’ve listened to the show before, so you should know what’s coming next.
As a first-time guest, we’d like to finish up with our signature question, which is, and this is how you define it, but what is your favorite monster?
I had to think pretty hard because I love folklore.
It’s one of my favorite things to read about.
And I decided to go with the Leshen.
Go on.
The Witcher version of the Leshen.
It’s a big, hulking forest spirit with a deer’s skull for a face.
And it guards the forest.
It controls plants.
It can call on wolves.
And if you’ve played The Witcher, it’s quite a formidable enemy in The Witcher 3, the game.
And it combines two of my favorite things, which are skeletons and plants.
Where is it found?
I’m not, I think the original…
folklore is um well the author’s polish yeah i think it’s kind of in that area the polish uh german uh sort of uh eastern european type folklore and i know the the regular non-witcher version of the lesson it’s just kind of a little tree spirit that plants trees and
looks out for the forest.
It’s not this big, hulking, spooky creature.
But I like the big, hulking, spooky creature.
I was going to say, the Witcher series…
We’ve discussed on the show before, Perlmutter, David Perlmutter talked about it.
It was one of his favorites.
And I’ve actually read the first couple of books and really liked the way he does twists on the folklore.
Yeah, I love the books.
But the games are their own thing.
I mean, like the games are extraordinarily popular and they really do play a lot in this folklore space.
And that is a very creepy looking monster.
Well, I’m wondering, is it male, female, both, neither, genderless?
I’m not sure.
I’ll put a link in the show notes.
You can check that out for an image, Karen.
Well, a funny thing.
The the Wendigo is also sometimes depicted in a similar way to the election.
Yeah, that’s a new thing.
But yeah, you’re right.
I don’t know where that comes from, because the Wendigo is like kind of a cannibal zombie type.
It is.
There is an entire I don’t know what you would call it exactly, but it’s a.
I’m really I ought to have a good term for this, but there’s an ecosystem that happens online and social media, specifically in art spaces where people are redefining what monsters are by their representation of these monsters in art.
And it’s it’s having such a big impact, which, again, that’s one of my go to themes is how.
pop culture and fiction and movies change the way people experience monsters in real life.
Yeah, the exorcist effect type thing.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
And the way these monsters are being redefined changes what people actually experience when they encounter them.
So now people who report a Mothman sighting are not reporting an armless, you know, owl, bird-looking thing.
They’re seeing a humanoid with arms and legs, you know,
And that probably has more to do with the artwork on the original book and in the statue that’s in Point Pleasant now.
So I think this is another one of those cases where you have the folklore of the Wendigo, which is a spirit of a cannibal.
It’s a possession story about how doing a taboo action can lead you to a really bad place and losing your humanity.
But now it’s also a sort of boneheaded antlered humanoid monster in, you know, in art spaces online.
It’s like I we you can’t control.
the evolution you can’t right exactly you can’t you can’t all you can do is observe it right i mean you could try to have an impact but you can’t you can’t know what’s going to take off and what’s not and and that whole image of the wendigo has become a huge pop culture uh it’s changed the iconography of the monster for sure yeah yeah it’s it’s fascinating to watch how these things change
Yeah, I think, whoops, you pressed one of my buttons.
I was like, rant unleashed, rant unleashed.
Sorry, but I do think about this all the time.
So, yeah.
He’s strange like that.
But this is a very cool monster.
Thank you, Hallie, for joining us.
And we have so much in common, so we’re going to have to keep in contact and bring you back on the show to talk about something else.
Yes, please.
Well, Hallie, thanks so much.
Thank you for having me.
This has been awesome.
Very, very cool.
Well, it’s been really fun.
Yeah, thank you so much.
Yeah, you take care.
We’ll chat soon.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard an interview with Hallie, the host of the Morbid Curiosity podcast, discussing with us the sensational 1892 Borden murders.
I hope you’ll forgive me, but when I was putting the show together, I started to get frustrated.
This is one of the rare cases where I have a really strong feeling that despite the uncertainty often expressed by the true crime community, I personally could not stop feeling that Lizzie Borden was guilty.
In particular, it was her extremely suspicious attempt to buy cyanide that knocked me off the fence.
This was the stuff they kept locked up, and it certainly was not a common household item for taking care of moths.
It was so dangerous that the druggist balked at the very idea of selling it to her because it would have been easy for her to accidentally cause her own and others’ demise.
But her lawyer managed to get the whole incident removed from consideration so the jury did not have that critical evidence to weigh when they made their decision.
Combined with the clear motive and the means, it’s just too much for me.
But I’m not here to say everyone should agree with me.
It’s just my take on a mystery that lots of people have very strong opinions about.
And mulling this stuff over is one of the reasons true crime is such a popular genre.
I told Karen about this that I felt compelled to comment and asked her if she wanted to add her own thoughts.
And she replied with the following and said that I should read it verbatim.
She did not give me permission to read her words in my barely adequate Steve Irwin impression.
But if it amuses you to do so, please feel free to hear it that way in your head.
My position is that I’m not entirely convinced Lizzie was the perpetrator, at least not beyond reasonable doubt.
The circumstantial case against her is certainly compelling, but I think there are still enough unanswered questions that I’m hesitant to treat it as settled.
If she was involved, I’ve sometimes wondered whether she may have had help from an accomplice, perhaps her sister Emma, the maid Bridget Sullivan, or even her uncle John Morris.
Morris especially has always struck me as an interesting figure given the timing of his visit.
his somewhat loose alibi, and the family financial tensions.
And he was, by trade, a butcher.
That said, none of the alternative theories is particularly conclusive either.
Ultimately, I think it’s one of those cases where we’ll probably never know for certain.
Lizzie remains the most likely suspect in many people’s eyes, but I’m not convinced the evidence completely excludes other possibilities.
And I think Hallie made her own thoughts about this uncertainty quite clear.
Plus, she has her own well-produced show, and I will put a link to that remastered episode of Morbid Curiosity in the show notes.
Have a listen.
You probably have your own opinions, so please feel free to discuss your theories at our Facebook group or over at our Patreon site.
We’d love to see and participate in such discussions.
Just, as always, try to keep those conversations polite.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of Monster Talk.
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Monster Talk theme music is by Peach Stealing Monkeys.
I forgot to ask Hallie if it was possible that maybe Bigfoot was behind these murders.
Sure, it may sound a little bit silly, but the big guy really does not have a good alibi.
So that is something to think about.
As you said, something silly to think about.
This has been a Monster House presentation.

The post 🪓 S05E37 – The Lizzie Borden Murders appeared first on MonsterTalk.