MonsterTalk

A skeptical look at one of the most famous ghost photographs ever taken – the 1959 “backseat ghost” snapped by Mrs. Mabel Chinnery in Ipswich, England. This episode is distilled from a recent MonsterTalk Live stream with Blake, Karen Stollznow, and special guest Matt Baxter, who brought fresh research (and one neat new idea) to a very old mystery.

It’s also a companion piece to our Newby Church Ghost coverage and the spirit-photography episode of Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers (1985), which examined the Chinnery photo alongside the Cottingley Fairies and the Newby ghost.

– On March 22, 1959, in Ipswich, Suffolk, England, Mabel Chinnery and her husband Jim visited the grave of her recently deceased mother, Mrs. Ellen Hammell.
– As she returned to the car, Mabel used her last frame to take a candid shot of Jim sitting alone in their Hillman Minx.

– When the film was developed, a figure appeared in the back seat – identified by the family as Mabel’s late mother. Mabel said she saw only Jim and the car through the viewfinder.
– The story first ran in the British Sunday Pictorial (April 19, 1959) and reached US readers via the Sunday supplement Parade (June 28, 1959), which printed the photo next to an earlier image of Mrs. Hammell with the car for comparison.
– The husband’s first name, “Jim,” wasn’t made public until the 1985 World of Strange Powers episode, which featured photo experts Tim Newton and Dr. Steve Gull.

The double-exposure hypothesis. The most common skeptical read is an accidental double exposure: a prior frame of Mrs. Hammell (seated indoors, say) and then a brighter frame of Jim in the car, with the film not advanced between. That would explain both her appearing after death and the famous “collar overlapping the window pillar” detail. The catch: if that’s true, the previous frame on the roll can’t have been a graveside headstone shot – which leads straight into Matt’s research.

Matt’s records check. Matt tracked down an interment list in the Suffolk Chronicle & Mercury confirming the burial (“Hamel, Ellen E, 78 years”) at the old Ipswich Cemetery, plus the plot itself (C1233). So the death, the date, and the cemetery all check out. But the plot had no headstone in 1959 – and still has none today – which complicates the “she was there photographing the gravestone” version of the story.

The location puzzle. In the uncropped frame, the background shows another vehicle, a high wall, and distant buildings that don’t obviously match the cemetery or its approach roads (no parking lot, no rows of trees). If the photo wasn’t shot at the cemetery, the whole “last frame of the roll at the graveside” framing wobbles.

Matt’s new theory. In an emotionally charged week, Mabel may simply have misremembered the order of her frames. The backseat shot could be an older photo of Jim with his mother-in-law (who liked to ride in the back so she could talk to him while he drove) – not a graveside-day double exposure at all. As Matt put it, “it’s a ghost” is a much longer bow to draw.

Why the glasses matter. If this were a genuine apparition, why is the figure wearing glasses that reflect light? Reflections are physics – light bouncing off a physical object that was in front of the lens when the shutter opened. That points to something in-camera, not a psychic “residual self image.”

The film-era window. Accidental double exposures created a unique generation of “mystery” photos in the few decades when roll film was common but cameras still let you forget to advance the frame. Anti-double-exposure improvements weren’t “ghost reduction technology” – they were about not wasting expensive film. The digital era trades those for panorama stretches, orbs, rods, and lens flare.

– The Combermere ghost (1891, Sybell Corbet) – a roughly hour-long exposure during Lord Combermere’s funeral; the leading explanation is a servant briefly sitting in the chair.
– The Wem Town Hall ghost (1995) – the “ghost girl” in the fire, later matched to a child on a 1922 postcard (see flags below).
– The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall – the classic staircase apparition.
– Billy Meier’s “alien women” – his “Asket” and “Nera” photos turned out to be Golddiggers dancers (Michelle DellaFave and Susan Lund) from The Dean Martin Show.
– Rods, orbs, and lens flare – the modern “artifacts you have to learn to recognize” school of mystery photos.

Camera model. In the recording the camera is recalled as the Kodak Brownie (sometimes “Eastman-Kodak Brownie”) – and even that is only “some sources say.” No contemporary source we found pins down the exact model, so treat the camera ID as unconfirmed.

Wem Town Hall photographer. It was Tony O’Rahilly, who photographed the Wem Town Hall fire on November 19, 1995, and maintained the image was real until his death in 2005. In 2010, Shrewsbury reader Brian Lear matched the “ghost girl” to a child in a 1922 Wem postcard reproduced in the Shropshire Star – the now-standard debunking. (A backyard re-shoot is one way such a fake could be staged, but the documented match is to that 1922 postcard image.)

The mother’s name and dates. Rendered variously as Hammell / Hammel / Hamel / Hamill across retellings; Find a Grave lists “Ellen Elizabeth Hammel” (d. March 15, 1959), and the Suffolk interment list reads “Hamel, Ellen E, 78 years.” Parade dates the grave visit to March 22, “a week after her burial,” so “died a week before” tracks to the burial, with death a few days earlier. Spelling and the exact death-vs-burial dates stay a little fuzzy across sources.

– If it’s an accidental double exposure, why does only the collar/window-pillar edge overlap, and why is the composition so well centered? (Raised in the live chat – left open.)
– If the background isn’t the cemetery, where – and when – was the photo actually taken?
– With no headstone in 1959 (or now), what exactly was Mabel photographing at the graveside, if anything?

– The World of the Unknown: Ghosts (Usborne) – the iconic childhood book Karen read from
– Mysteries of the Unknown: Hauntings (Time-Life Books, 1989) – carried the photo

– Deep-dive case write-up (Garth Haslam): Anomalies: Mabel Chinnery’s Strange Photograph
– Spirit photography (Wikipedia)
– Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers (Wikipedia)
– Cottingley Fairies (Wikipedia)
– Wem Town Hall ghost (Skeptical Inquirer)
– Billy Meier (Wikipedia)
– Electronic voice phenomenon (Wikipedia)
– Rupert Sheldrake / morphic resonance (Wikipedia)
– Blake’s old write-up from Internet Archive

Ellen Elizabeth Hammel – 1881 – 1959
Old Ipswich Cemetery
C, 12, 33
You can use a browser and drive around the cemetery area. It does not closely match the background in the uncropped Chinnery photo.

– Uncropped original (Getty): Mabel Chinnery behind the camera
– Full World of Strange Powers episode: YouTube

Hosted by Blake Smith and Karen Stollznow, with special guest Matt Baxter.

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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My wife took the photo at the gravesite, and when we got down to the car, I got in the car, she said, wait a minute, she said, I’ll finish this film off.
And she took my photo, and that was the finish of that.
When I looked through the viewfinder, all I saw was Jimmy in the car and snapped it, and that was that.
Didn’t think no more about it.
But there in the photograph was this unmistakable figure.
Well, I took it and showed it to somebody and they said, it’s your mother in the back.
And I said, don’t be so stupid.
But she was there.
Well, I could see it was my mother, of course.
I could see it was her.
The most extraordinary thing about this is that she always used to sit on that side of the car when she was out with me so that she could talk to me and see me as I was driving.
Jim remembers his mother-in-law’s last words.
She said, Jim, she said, you’ll never come to any harm.
She said, I shall still be with you.
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.
That clip in our intro was from Episode 7 of the 1985 TV series Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers.
We’ve mentioned this episode before because it covers the Cottingley Fairies as well as the Newby Church ghost, and the subject of today’s episode, the backseat ghost photo taken by Mrs. Mabel Chinnery in 1959.
The following discussion…
is a distillation from our recent Monster Talk Live coverage on this topic.
Discussing ghost photos on a podcast has a bit of a visual challenge to it, but if you check the show notes, I’ve included images that were on screen during the YouTube streaming, so that if you’re able to check those out, they may prove illustrative to the content of our discussion.
As normal for a Monster Talk Live, we’re joined by Karen’s husband, Matt Baxter.
And I have to say, Matt brought up a really interesting idea that I hadn’t considered on this case, but it fits so neatly into the mystery surrounding it, I’ll leave it for him to reveal during the conversation.
The full, original conversation will be available on our YouTube channel, but I’ve tightened this up for podcasting.
Monster Talk
But welcome, everybody.
This is Monster Talk Live, and I am Matthew Baxter.
I’m Blake Smith.
I’m Karen Stollznow.
Welcome.
Get yourselves a drink, and let’s get into talking about the Chinnery backseat ghost.
So, Karen, I know you were talking about, you know when you first heard of this.
Yes.
I don’t know about everybody else.
I believe, Matt, you have a photograph.
So we have talked about this book before.
So another used-born, us-born book, I guess, depending on where you come from.
So this is the one that Blake, we discussed this book in an episode many moons ago.
He’s, I think, frantically looking for the picture here.
Frantic.
I’m frantic.
So first off, this is the image.
Yeah, I think this is the bad guy.
To start with this image, because it is so iconic, it is so famous, it’s now known as the Chinnery ghost or the backseat ghost.
But when I first found out about this, and this is probably around maybe 1980, I didn’t think it had a name.
It was just a ghost photograph.
And to me, it looked like a London cab or something.
Yeah, a little bit, yeah.
I know, Blake, you’ve looked into that.
We’ve all looked into this now, and it’s a, what, a Hillman?
Hillman Minx, yeah.
And, yeah, I believe my brother had a Hillman at one point.
So I don’t know, is that a car that you can find in this country, like that brand?
That’s a British import.
You won’t see many of those here in the States.
Beautiful, beautiful old car.
I had a Ferret, but I never had a Minx.
So, yeah, have you got the picture of the book?
There we go.
So the world of the unknown ghost.
So we spoke about this very lovingly a couple of years ago with one of the authors.
And it’s such an iconic book and this is such an iconic photograph and has been touted as one, I guess, the gold standard evidence for ghost photography.
And it is just brilliant.
very well known.
And even if people don’t know the name of it, they still know that picture.
They’ve seen it before.
And again, like part of our series of things that scared the crack out of us as kids.
So here is the image from the book.
And I just wanted to read.
This little story that’s attached.
Because it’s not readable on the screen.
It’s not, no.
So this is my first encounter with this image.
This picture is one of the most puzzling ghost photographs ever taken.
The woman in the back seat was supposed to be in her grave when the photograph was taken.
The driver’s wife took this picture of her husband sitting in the car.
She claims that there was nobody in the car except her husband.
Yet the photograph clearly shows the figure of a woman, her mother, who had died a week before.
Experts say that the film has not been altered in any way.
Yet if you look closely, you’ll see that the corner of her scarf seems to overlap the side pillar of the car.
This would only be possible if her face was placed in the picture after it was taken.
Yet if the experts are correct and the photograph is genuine, there is no explanation.
That’s astonishing that they included that detail back then.
No explanation for how it could have happened.
That is, unless the woman in the back…
was a ghost.
So there we go.
So that’s the first encounter I had with this case, and they did not mention names or places.
So I think what we find online today is typical of urban legend and folklore.
We find the same story again and again, repeated with the same names and dates.
and places, but it’s all very murky, really.
All we have left is this photograph and just the repetition of folklore.
Well, and oftentimes with these stories, as they start to grow, new details will be added to the story that sound like they’ve been there the whole time.
but when you go back and actually look at the previous versions, they’re not there.
So it’s an accretion of information.
But yeah, I do love this story.
And I have to say, it falls into the bucket, the basket of stories where, look, I don’t think this is a ghost, but it’s creepy, but I cannot explain it.
So I’m really relying on the good research of my two friends here.
And Matt has done some really wonderful work
research for this and discovered some things that I never knew.
I’ve done a little bit of digging here and there, but he really has done some great work here.
So I’m excited for him to share the things that he’s found.
Well, I want to start off by saying I cannot remember where I first saw this picture.
My memory is like, oh, it was in one of those time-life books.
Yeah.
But I don’t have any of those anymore, so I would have to rely on you, Blake, because I know you do.
What’s kind of the story here?
How did this happen?
The photo, as it’s usually presented, there’s a few different versions, I should clarify.
But the important thing is that this is Mabel Chinnery’s husband and mother.
Mabel is at the cemetery with her husband to visit the grave of the mother who just died a week ago or so.
This is what drives me crazy.
There’s more than one version of this story.
But the most frequent one is that…
She had one or two more shots on the roll and went ahead and shot a photo of her husband sitting in the car.
And that’s problematic, if true, because of stuff that we shouldn’t spoil right yet.
But that’s the story.
So her mother is definitely dead.
They’re at the cemetery.
And then her mom shows up in the backseat of the car.
That’s the main story.
Well, I think that’s what makes the story so compelling is because of the recent demise of her mother.
And it just seems like it’s a very earnest story.
This looks like an older couple themselves.
Why would this be a hoax?
Why would they make this up?
So, yeah, there’s the picture.
It’s so creepy.
It looks like…
I will admit the first time I saw the picture, I thought it was a fellow in the back seat.
I thought it was a man.
That’s not your mother.
It’s a man, baby.
Now, often this is shown next to an image of Mabel’s mother, which does lead you to, and here we go.
So sometimes she is unnamed, sometimes she’s Mabel’s mother, and sometimes Mrs. Ellen Hamill.
So we have that name to kind of, we had that name to look into.
But, yeah, so if you look at them side by side, I think there’s a little bit of priming there, a little bit of, oh, I can see that face mapping onto that image, the initial image.
But it’s…
It’s a little tricky to really see any kind of detail.
Absolutely.
One of the things is they say that it could be a reflection on the window, but it looks like he’s got his window down.
He does, yeah.
And so I don’t think it’s a reflection.
They often say that, oh, you can see on the left there that the collar is overlapping the edge of the window frame.
I don’t think it is.
It always looks like a cravat to me, that it was a fellow wearing a cravat.
Yeah, yeah.
Again, I don’t know when we want to get into this, but part of this, this was like one of the subject matters of Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers episodes.
And I love that episode because they’re using, I think, a PDP-11 to do digital analysis in 1980.
four something like that uh so it’s it’s some early days for digital analysis but uh um maybe i’ll hold off on what they found but uh shouldn’t we add here that that was the same episode uh that looked at the newbie
church ghost and also the Cottingley fairies.
But we’ve kind of been hitting on a bunch of these ghost photos and this is such a chilling one in some ways.
And the people involved in the photo seem pretty earnest.
Like they don’t seem like…
you know, like glamorous or attention grabbing or anything like that.
So I think they come in all the interviews I’ve seen with them, they’ve come across as like, wow, this crazy thing happened, you know?
So, yeah.
Yeah.
It is, it’s a spooky situation to say the very least, but you know, there are some, there’s a, there’s a lot of unknowns in this whole thing, but there’s a lot of things aren’t,
backed up, you know, immediately, such as, let me see here if I can share this real quick again.
So let’s go back to them.
And we’ve got…
where was the cemetery exactly?
Which cemetery was it?
And all these stories, they don’t specify.
And did Mrs. Hamill actually die the week before?
Is there proof that she died a week before?
And that now they’ve had a funeral and they’re taking pictures.
So I’ve seen a number of articles too where Jim, the husband, had talked about Mrs Chinnery’s mother, his mother-in-law, and how close they had been and said that she had uttered final words to him.
And those final words were, Jim, you’ll never come to any harm.
I shall always be with you.
So I think that that’s the kind of backstory, whether she’d actually said that or words to that effect.
Or not.
That’s the back story to say, well, she was still being chauffeur-driven around like he was Jeeves.
And there she is in the back seat.
And also part of the story is that she liked to sit in the back seat.
She liked to be chauffeur-driven.
So that is where she would sit.
So it’s only logical that her ghost, her spirit would still be in the back seat there.
Makes sense.
It does.
I did some digging around.
and looked far and wide trying to find some of this mystery information.
And I did find this old newspaper, the Suffolk Chronicle in Mercury.
And as you can see, a man was fatally attacked by a prized bull.
Hit in the face by a pellet.
But on this page, you don’t see anything about any death notices or anything like that.
But if you look over on the adjoining page that was not scanned fully, you see that there’s a little bit of a list there.
And when you look at that list, you can find March 18th, Hamel, Ellen, E, 78 years.
That’s internments in Ipswich Cemetery.
So she existed.
So that was accurate.
That was her name.
So we found the cemetery.
We found the fact that she did die when they stated she died.
So all this is true.
So you can read that even better there.
Which, of course, doesn’t prove that that is a photograph of a ghost.
Yes, it does.
But it certainly is interesting to be able to look into this and to see what’s fact, what’s fiction.
But, yeah, so old Ipswich Cemetery, Suffolk, England, and, yeah, to even find her plot.
the exact location and it’s rather sad for me because she’s one year younger than my mother was when she passed last year so
Yeah, this hits me personally.
Hearing this story, I want to believe, and it almost feels like they were looking for some kind of evidence of life after death and some kind of grief hallucination.
Incredibly emotionally charged.
I have a lot of empathy for this couple and for this case and can see why this does appeal to so many people.
So the big story is that she was there taking pictures of the headstone and stuff like that.
Now, when she was there, it would have basically been a week after she died.
And the odds are there wouldn’t have been a headstone.
That’s a good point.
There would have been a burial mound.
And at that time, there were a lot of graves that didn’t ever get headstones.
But you can see right there the plot.
It’s C-12-33.
So if we look, you can see C next to WW2.
And if you zoom in on that, you can see 12 right in the center of the screen.
You zoom in on that a little closer, you can see 33.
There’s no headstone.
Mm-hmm.
Right in the middle there.
Yeah.
So that’s to this day.
So even back then, you know, as you’re saying.
That kind of masonry, they wouldn’t necessarily have that ready at that point.
But here it is today.
They still don’t have a marker, which, you know, is very sad.
But that is an intrinsic part of the story, that she was there to take photographs of the head, the gravestone.
Well, yeah, but so maybe this actually works.
Don’t cuss.
Well, just here’s the thing.
So…
We should go ahead and, I guess, bring it up that one of the most common skeptical analysis is that this is a double exposure that an accidental, if we’re being generous here, an accidental double exposure.
So the way that would work is they would have taken a picture of the mother-in-law sitting in a chair or whatever.
And then they take a second photo.
without advancing the film.
And I know in modern cameras that would never happen, but it was possible to do that here.
Yes.
Okay, so then you get two photos, one of her in the chair and one of those, I guess a much brighter lit photo of her son-in-law sitting in front of the car.
Now…
If that’s true, that accounts for the bleed over on the collar.
And it accounts for her, you know, being in the photo when she’s dead.
Other than her being a ghost.
Right, right, right.
Now, the problem is…
If those things are true, then the previous photo to this one cannot be of headstones in the cemetery.
Yes, exactly.
We have none of those photos.
Right, right.
And as you’ve just demonstrated, there should never be an ability to do those photos, even if they wanted to, because a headstone never materialized.
I don’t mean that metaphysically.
Well, and when you look at find a grave.
Yeah.
There’s no headstone.
There you go.
So that sounds like a feature that was added on later.
Maybe honestly, maybe that’s how they recalled it.
But it’s part of the embellishment.
But in part of the embellishment and the best.
And we’d like to talk about presumption of sincerity with these cases.
The sincere case would be they accidentally do a double exposure.
They take this developed exposure like, holy crap.
And then they start walking the circuit talking about the photo with people.
And as they do that, the story slowly gets embellished with new features.
Maybe.
I think that would be pretty creepy to have a picture of a headstone in the backseat, in the back of the car.
Well, I mean…
That would have been better.
But you’re right.
That would be creepy if that had happened.
But, I mean, I guess there’s no evidence that that whole story of taking photos…
that’s the thing, right?
If, if not that, did they just go to the cemetery?
She looks around and she’s like, well, I’ve got the camera.
There’s no headstone.
I guess I’ll take a picture of my husband, you know?
Right.
Maybe, maybe that happened.
I don’t know.
I mean, well, I think we should go back to whether this was taken at the cemetery at all.
Let’s look in the background because I see another car and a wall.
Exactly.
So when you look at this at first and you look beyond, because we’re so used to looking at the foreground, the front, what’s happening right in front of us and not looking at the back.
And so Matt and I were taking a look at the background and thinking, well, what is that?
It’s a vehicle.
There is some kind of wall.
Is that a building or is it just a wall?
So we don’t have a definitive answer on this, but Matt did look into it a little bit further.
Yeah, let’s try a different share here real quick.
because it does get interesting.
So if I go and I look at this on Apple Maps, you can see the cemetery there, Old Cemetery.
So as I zoom in, it’s funny because where it says Old Cemetery is pretty much exactly where the grave is.
The spot, yeah.
Nice.
So you’ve got…
I don’t know what I mean.
But it makes us want to go there and to take some pictures of the location.
I really want to go there, yeah.
Right.
Like, is there actually a wall around it, right?
So, yeah, what you’re not seeing is a parking lot of any kind.
You know, it could be down here.
barnsby gardens or cemetery road road yes probably but you’re not seeing a bunch of trees you’re seeing maybe one of these houses back there but you see it somewhere where people can park on both sides of the road um to be able to uh i wish i could flip that back and forth quickly um to kind of fit now it is possible that he could have been parked over here and she had to walk
you know, through here to get to the…
But we do have roads in the cemetery too, don’t we?
And I don’t know if those are new or if those…
But there’s no parking places where one car could be on one side and another car could be on the other, like… Like in the photo.
Like in the photo.
So, and that does make it…
difficult yeah so i don’t know it’s i have a theory uh and i think it closely aligns with with yours blake but previous to this i always thought this was a hoax you know it wasn’t until i really started digging into it that i started feeling like this is not a hoax
Absolutely not.
There’s no trickery here because we can look at hoaxes.
We have our version of the brown lady.
That’s actually Karen coming down the stairs there.
But here’s the real brown lady.
And this is a hoax, regardless of what anybody says.
All the conditions that were claimed to have taken place when they took this photo don’t match up with reality.
this is a hoax.
We do have to tackle this in a future episode, too.
We will definitely talk about this in the future.
Now, we have the Lord Cumbermere photo, and this one I don’t believe is a hoax.
It could be, but I think this is…
They put this camera up and left the shutter open for an hour.
They let it expose for an hour.
Hour.
So, over here to the lower left…
Yeah, this is definitely a long exposure.
Someone comes in and sits in this chair and doesn’t realize the photo’s being taken.
Maybe looks at a book for a few minutes or whatever and gets up and walks out.
And this is exactly what you would get.
That’s the kind of photo you would get.
So it’s pretty explainable.
Can I ask for people like myself who don’t really understand double exposures and long exposures, what’s the difference between the two and why is that not at play in the Chinnery photograph?
I’m sorry you didn’t read the rules beforehand, but all questions must be submitted in writing in triplicate three weeks before the show for you to get an answer.
No, this is a situation where if the room was maybe a little dark, you know, you can see they have these big drapes and everything.
It looks like sun is shining in.
Oh, wonderful photograph.
This deserves an episode, too.
But you can see where it’s white, you know, it’s blasted out.
It’s overexposed.
Right, it got overexposed, yep.
So if you put your camera, your smartphone, in night portrait mode, it’s going to basically leave the shutter open longer so more light can get in.
And that means you have to hold very still so you don’t blur.
And this was a situation where it was open for an hour.
A long period of time.
Yeah, came in, sat down, and didn’t know he had his picture taken.
But this is still exactly the kind of place that you would expect to see a ghost.
Exactly.
And the blur fits the description of what they think the blur of Lord Cumbermere would look like.
So now we have this fun one, and I know Blake has done some looking into on this one.
Focus through this one, Blake.
The girl in the fire.
This is the Wim Town Hall photo.
Classic.
This town hall in the city of Wim burned and Tony Arahele, a local photographer, took photos.
And when he produced them, they show up with this face here.
And for a while…
People were concerned, is this pareidolia?
Is this like the end of a log that’s rested on the rail?
You know, what is this?
And for a long time, from the 90s until the, I guess, right around 2010, it was thought maybe it was maybe pareidolia or maybe a ghost.
But, you know, it’s more likely pareidolia.
That was the, again, assuming Mr. Overhealy didn’t fake anything until…
2010, when it turns out that this photograph, this old postcard got reprinted in the local newspaper and the Shropshire Star ran this as like, hey, you know, look at this cool old photo of our local community.
And one of the readers, one of the readers, not listeners, named Brian Lear.
spotted the girl in the bottom left corner.
And it’s like, that girl looks a lot like that ghost in that ghost photo.
Holy crap.
It’s her like it, like it’s a 100%.
It’s not clear here, but it is a 100% match to her.
Yeah, absolutely.
And so over healing, what he did was he had his own photography studio in his backyard.
And he basically took the photo at the fire, a series of photos at the fire.
And then he manually created this photo and reshot it on a new roll so that it appeared in sequence, right?
So he went to a lot of effort to accidentally get a ghost photo.
And I think that’s important because people forget that you don’t need to make a bunch of money on these things if you’re getting one over.
Each person has their own threshold for what they think is worth bothering with.
And Mr. O’Reilly went to a lot of work for this ghost hoax, right?
So was it for the laughs?
Was it because he knew he’d get a few bucks from media?
I don’t know.
In the UK, tabloid media will pay substantially for a good ghost photo.
Oh, yes, they will.
This is not hundreds.
It’s more like low thousands, right?
All right.
Good to know.
It’s good to know, right?
I mean, they’re not joking around if they can get exclusive rights, right?
And all you have to do is kind of have the photo and be willing to say that it was honestly created, right?
So Mr. O’Reilly went to a lot of frigging work to honestly not create this honestly.
So he…
it’s a very dishonest amount of effort to pretend like what i mean what do i know i’m just a photographer well very different to the chinnery ghost then yes yeah right mr chinnery is not a photographer like he’s not a he doesn’t have a lab in his backyard right he’s sitting he’s off to what is it sending it off to the chemist to be developed all right
So, yeah, well, have you ever seen this one?
No, I don’t think I have.
But it does look like, yeah.
Well, this is supposed to be a farm in Scotland where they kept seeing this, the ghost of this child who they believe was from medieval times.
And he would show up and they captured him on photo one time.
And a giant turkey leg and a margarita.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah, Little Surf.
And yeah, I thought the same thing.
I thought this kid looks familiar.
And so did some poking around and I’ll be darned.
Oh, it is.
It literally is Anakin.
Okay.
It literally is.
Cut to the core.
No, I did not know that.
I was just like, it looks like Anakin Skywalker.
Okay.
Well, wow.
Okay.
Yeah.
What about, I don’t think you’ve got an image of this one, but what about the one that you used to talk about in workshops and things like that?
We had an image of these, what, alien women, female aliens.
You had me at alien women.
But who did it turn out to be?
Yeah, I can tell you what it was.
It was Billy Meyer, and these were two plagiarian women, and they were all blurry and everything.
And if you looked at it long enough, you could think that, you know, wow, this could have been taken off an old TV set, you know, a TV picture, you know, because they never come out very good with the moray pattern and everything.
But no, no, Billy wouldn’t do that.
He wouldn’t hoax anything.
But if you happen to have a VHS copy of the Dean Martin Variety Hour, you could actually freeze frame on two of the smiling backup dancers that looked almost identical.
And yeah, so it’s…
You know, when you do these hoaxes, you have to be careful where you pull your material from.
Well, it might take some time, but at some point, someone is going to come across the original image if it’s out there.
But, well, we’re going to look at another picture or… Well, can we hop over to…
There was a photo as a close-up of the Chinry photo that shows the overlap between the collar and the strut in the support around the window.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
People in the chat are asking… Well, they’re making the really good point is if this is an accidental double exposure, it is an astonishingly well-framed one.
Right.
I mean, because everything is centered perfectly.
Right.
So.
Yeah.
So we’re talking about this, this sort of line right here.
Yeah.
I went into our text chat.
I don’t know if you can get that one out easily.
Well, the thing thing is about this is I’m not 100 percent sure about the.
if there was any motion at all with this, how long of an exposure it was.
But I just don’t think that this one tiny little overlap right there, when we’re talking about the degradation of…
you know, reproduction, reproduction, reproduction, if that’s really good evidence of a double exposure.
The reason I’m inclined to believe it is because in that Arthur C. Clarke episode, what they’re doing is they’re taking original photos and scanning them.
It’s really cool because as you may have recalled, I’m a nerd for old tech, right?
Right.
So they’re using a PDP-11 and a drum scanner.
So they had to like wrap…
the image around the cylinder and then rotate it through the scanning apparatus.
And so they’re using technology that they are, would use to like enhance license plates and that sort of thing.
And this is, again, this is like 1984, 1985.
So this stuff is super rudimentary, right?
I mean, you’re looking at 1984 is also the year that Macintosh becomes available.
So most computers are using strictly command line interfaces, you know, not not GUI.
Right.
So these computers were able to do on-screen video analysis, enhancing the crispness, trying to remove the contrast, that sort of thing.
And they were also using the same technology for examining the Cottingley Fairies, looking to see if they could spot any lines or threads holding up the images.
In this home office laboratory is the world’s most advanced equipment for the examination of photographs.
Using a computer, forensic experts help the police to snare criminals by enhancing photographic images to bring out hidden detail.
Today, the computer is focused on the phantoms.
The photographs are optically scanned and fed into the computer for analysis.
Tim Newton and Dr. Steve Gull begin with Gordon Cowell’s photograph.
But what about Mrs. Chinnery’s photograph?
There are some very strange things here.
This scarf definitely does pass this line here.
But further down the picture, the line is definitely in front of her.
There’s also this feature on the other side of the barrier between the two windows.
It does seem to be, as if it might be a shoulder, then that does make her a very wide person.
Perhaps the best explanation is if some mistake has happened here, some very short exposure sometime before has been superimposed upon the picture.
in that analysis, they’re taking the best copy they can get and they see that overlap.
So I think it’s probably really there in the original where that’s happening.
But you’re right.
It’s like, if this is a double exposure, why is the rest of the image not also crossing over, bleeding over?
It’s a really good question.
And for it to be accidental, again, presumption of sincerity, if it’s accidental and nobody’s pulling shenanigans, why is that the only part that overlaps?
It’s a really good question.
Well, what’s your alternative theory, Matt?
I think we can…
spring it on everyone at this point.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, just working on all this, it just kind of occurred to me that you’ve got, well, like Karen was talking earlier about, you know, how your heart goes out to these people.
This was a very emotionally charged time.
She doesn’t notice anything happening until after.
you know, going through the photos and everything else.
So at this point, she doesn’t actually, or potentially, doesn’t actually know what order the photos were in.
She may have thought, I’ve done this when I was a kid and I had a little manual camera, that I would think I took a picture when actually I didn’t.
And so I would, you know, click and then, you know, I’d try to run it forward and everything and then find out that I would have to click it again before I could run it forward or whatever.
But I thought I’d clicked it, but I didn’t click it all the way down, and therefore I didn’t take a picture.
So she could think, hey, I went out and took a picture of my husband when actually she never did.
But she might have took a picture of her husband and her mother somewhere else in that car.
a week before, and she had all the pictures kind of together in a shoebox or whatever, and she’s going through and she’s like, oh, here’s the picture of my husband.
Who’s that in the back seat?
When actually the picture was never actually taken in the order she remembers.
But it’s so emotionally charged, and she suddenly sees this picture with the ones of her taking a picture of the grave mound, or being at the cemetery.
And now she’s got this completely different narrative in her mind.
And I think there’s a couple of different levels that this answers a lot of questions.
It may seem like, wow, you’re really drawing a long bow there, but oh, it’s a ghost.
That’s a longer bow.
Well, I think this episode is out of order in that we’ve got the
newbie ghost uh newbie church ghost episode coming out in which we talk about the importance of also having the images that came before the the one in question and the images that come after uh and so without that information
it’s really difficult to know exactly what was on that film and do what came before, what came after.
And we do go into that in a lot of depth in this next episode.
So, yeah, our episodes are out in that regard.
Well, I just have to say that if this was like I think it might have been…
then if they had an expert analyze the picture and the negative, it’s going to be as authentic as you can get because it is an actual picture.
But this doesn’t look to me like it’s outside that cemetery.
Yeah.
Maybe it is.
Well, it’s interesting, too, because they’re also—
Yet another case of the photo you see is almost always cropped.
Yes.
I looked far and wide for one that wasn’t.
With the little arrow saying, look here, and the priming.
I know what they’re doing.
They’re trying to bring you into the detail where the weirdness is going on.
But in the process of doing so, they strip out the context that would help you figure out what’s actually going on in the original photo.
Right.
So that’s problematic.
It would be really interesting to do some more digging into finding out what is in the background there, because just from a preliminary search, it does not seem like that is at the cemetery.
It’s not in that area where the grave is.
Yeah.
And it could potentially be that old cemetery road or the nearby one where there are houses.
But that looks like some kind of wall.
It doesn’t really look like houses and other vehicles.
But it is really difficult to determine where that is.
It really is.
It doesn’t seem to, on the surface, completely fit in with the story that that is on the cemetery grounds.
That would be so intriguing and interesting if it turned out that it was taken somewhere different and she was alive in the backseat.
That would be really funny.
Yeah.
And that’s just…
It seems like that does answer a lot of questions without making outrageous assumptions.
Yeah.
Now, one of the things, again, sometimes when we talk about ghost photos, I guess there’s sort of an inherent…
which is that the…
photography photography works through chemistry and physics right so light bounces off of a subject matter and then makes it through the lens where back then it’s hitting a piece of film which is covered with chemicals which are photoreactive and then you have to set those into like a fixed state and then develop them and then eventually you get this image which is pretty freaking amazing um
But they’re always sketchy when it comes to saying these are potentially ghosts or the supernatural.
Right.
Because in order for them to be the supernatural, they have to themselves work with the world of physics.
Right.
So I didn’t see the thing, but the camera did.
Right.
So whatever was there, it was not part of the photo I was taking a part of.
But yet it showed up on film.
OK, well, that’s clearly not how physics works.
Right.
It’s a bit like the whole EVP thing where I recorded this room, I didn’t hear anything, but when I played it back, I heard these voices.
The reason I bring it up, because if this photo is legitimately supposed to be a ghost…
The mother-in-law is wearing a pair of glasses which have reflections of light on them, right?
So… That’s always bothered me.
Now, I know, like, people have come up with the… What do they call it?
Where you have, like, a mental concept of who you are.
Residual self-image.
He stole that from The Matrix.
Is it really so hard to believe?
Your clothes are different.
The plugs in your arms and head are gone.
Your hair has changed.
Your appearance now is what we call residual self-image.
That’s another conversation because the Matrix has bled into more paranormal stuff than it has any right to do, right?
So you’re not wrong.
If this were a ghost, why would she be wearing glasses?
Okay, well, it’s part of her…
psychometric, psychoresidual self.
Okay.
But why are they reflecting light?
That makes no sense, right?
So they reflect light because they’re a physical thing.
Whenever that photo is taken, there’s a person with glasses back there that’s reflecting light.
That’s what’s going on.
I don’t think that’s part of that sort of…
psychic resonance or whatever.
I don’t think it is.
I don’t think I’ve always heard that they’re glasses, but I think the standard story I hear is that her eyes are that she’s has demonic eyes or something like that, or, or who, you know, like a lot of the images that you have of these iconic spirit photographs where hollowed out.
So they’re
The ghost doesn’t have eyes anymore.
Like the newbie ghost last week where it’s the, you know, I see a cutout sheet and other people see a haunting skeletal visage.
Suffice to say, this has just always been one of my favorite photographs and really did…
scare the crap out of me as a kid.
And it’s just a very fun image.
I think there’s absolutely a natural explanation behind this.
And perhaps we may not have gotten to the bottom of it, but I think that some of the theories that you guys have come up with are more plausible than this being a ghost.
Unfortunately.
I’m inclined to, again, this sort of the bias of the show, I’m inclined to disbelieve in ghosts.
And if this were supposed to be evidence of such, I would… Not good evidence.
I’d like to know more about what’s up with the glasses and the reflection and all that sort of stuff.
That’s a really good question.
So, yeah.
Well, I still think it’s possible that if it is a previous photograph that’s overlapping or something like that, that it’s not even…
The mother-in-law.
The mother.
It could potentially be someone else.
That could be true, too.
I don’t know.
It’s really interesting, though.
I mean, I guess all those things are technically more plausible in my skeptical world than it’s a ghost, right?
Sure.
But it is interesting.
I want it to be a double exposure.
Like, I want that to be the plausible…
non-exploitative explanation that they just, whoops, got a double exposure.
And then it happened to fit in with this wonderful reassurance that our mother-in-law is still out there watching over us.
That’s lovely.
The backseat of the car.
Right.
Yeah, it’s a sad story.
No matter which way you look at it.
But I think whether it is a double exposure or whether there’s some other natural explanation, I don’t think it’s a hoax.
Yeah, I’d like to continue to believe that because I really, I’d like the idea that they accidentally did this and then it got out of hand.
But it fits with the normal evolution of these stories too, though, you know, where they get out of our control and they become, you know.
Morphic.
Bigger, larger than life.
Yeah.
Do we know, with the newbie church ghost, we talk about the camera and with the Cottingley fairies, we talk about the camera.
Do we have any information on what kind of camera was used?
My understanding is this actually was a Kodak Brownie.
Yeah.
Oh, really?
Cool.
Yeah.
So famous camera.
Yeah, that it is a very famous little camera.
That was what I had read.
That was the Kodak Browning.
And I did some digging in and I found another camera expert talking about.
how it was possible to accidentally get a double exposure.
There’s two, these, these cameras as different models and years came out, they, they remember we’re talking about double exposures as being a whoops, accidentally made a ghost, but what they really are is whoops.
You just ruined your photo.
Right.
So.
for the it’s a very rare circumstance where you ruin your photo and it’s also worth keeping right like so this is the the industry as a whole was trying to push away from circumstances where you could accidentally double expose your film and so these improvements were not ghost reduction technology that was a side effect right they were really about you not wasting your freaking money because it costs you time and effort to make these photos
people didn’t make a hundred photos and then keep the 12 that mattered.
Right.
Like, you know, they had to really put some thought into it because every roll of film costs a bunch of money plus developing it costs money.
Sure.
Well, I have a question just as someone who knows very little about these kinds of things in terms of double exposures, what would be a kind of standard type of double exposure that people would experience?
Yeah.
Usually, some of these older cameras, you would take the photo and your next step is supposed to be advance the film to the next photo, right?
If you forget to do that…
The camera, when it takes that next photo, will be double exposing.
That’s just what happens.
It just re-exposes the film.
Like I had one where I took a close-up of my pet box turtle.
And it was like getting ready to eat something, so it had its mouth open.
And I was just taking pictures of all kinds of little things.
And then I had a picture of a Smurf.
And it looked like this giant monster was eating a Smurf.
And it was very cool, but completely accidental.
And I’ve, I’ve seen a lot of photographs in one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, and I, I tried to take credit for it, but everybody knew that that was an accident, but yeah.
Well, I mean, it was a ghost turtle.
Yeah.
The photographic world has lost this world where accidental double exposures led to these really strange, you know, mystery photos.
The new kinds of things that happen in the digital world, they’re still weird, but they’re not as reliably explainable or as reliably mysterious.
Like, so when you’re doing a…
panorama shot and you get a weird photo of your cat where it’s like the head is here and then it’s got a giant tube body and the tail’s way over here so it looks like your cat’s nine feet long it’s the demon cat whether it’s rods or orbs or double exposure all these different phenomena i’m not finding any of them as compelling as the good old-fashioned double exposure i really i loved them
And I thought they really created a lot of cool mystery photos.
Well, I think it’s a matter, too, of people just not being familiar with that kind of older technology.
And when we talk about chupacabras and just decaying cows and things like that, people by and large aren’t familiar with these processes or old technology.
And so it just seems very magical and mysterious.
True.
It’s true.
Although we’re going to be talking about cattle mutilations real soon.
So I’m excited about that again.
There’s something to look forward to.
There’s lots of things that can cause what would be mysterious to the person not expecting to see these show up on their film or their photos, whatever that, whether it’s digital or film or otherwise, but.
Again, I’m overall skeptical of the idea that film can capture ghosts, especially if you don’t see the ghost.
If you see a ghost and take a photo, that would be the least unexpected thing, right?
Well, I saw it and I took a photo and it showed up.
That’s almost never what happens, though.
It’s the, we didn’t see anything, but when we took the photo and developed it, look what we got.
And that’s a pretty good indicator that what you’re dealing with is something that was in camera, not in real life.
Well, I think even going back to 1959, so right around the time of the newbie church ghost too, and this will all make more sense soon, but I think even going back to that time for people who weren’t really that familiar with technology, the idea that this could capture a ghost I think was more believable.
Yeah.
Not plausible necessarily, but believable.
Yeah, I agree.
I agree.
I, I, I, again, I’ve become super skeptical.
I still love looking at old ghost photos and trying to figure out what’s going on.
So.
Me too.
Love the photograph is just beautiful.
Classic.
Yep.
So thank you so much, everybody.
And thanks to the audience for participating.
That’s a great chat.
Thank you for joining us.
Good to do this.
Got to do more of these.
All right.
We’ll see all of you very soon.
Okay.
Bye.
Bye.
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 of the Mabel Chinnery backseat ghost photo from 1959 with myself, Karen, and with the help of Karen’s partner, Matt Baxter.
I had not seen this uncropped photo that Matt shared during our talk, but his point’s a strong one that the background of the photo, which includes other vehicles, does not resemble the cemetery or surrounding area claimed to be the source of that photo.
In fact, the high wall and distant tall buildings don’t much favor any of the area immediately around the cemetery.
And as Matt also pointed out, it’s unusual for a headstone to be ready promptly unless it was pre-purchased.
And even now, there appears to be no notable headstone.
So the story that the couple was there taking photos at the graveside and finished the roll with a shot of Mr. Chenery might not be quite accurate.
If we take the presumption of sincerity seriously, could the couple have been misremembering the circumstances of the photo?
Was it possible that the previous shot had been of the pre-deceased mother and then, failing to advance the role, Mrs. Chinnery took a shot of her husband sitting in the car and the result was this beautifully centered view of a hybrid of both dead and living, caught by accidents of mechanics and chemistry to resemble a ghost in the backseat?
Is it a hybrid?
If it’s not at the cemetery, could it be an older photo from before she died and through clerical accident it got mixed up with posthumous slides?
We never see any of the other photos in the series.
In fact, that’s a problem with most ghost photos.
The very act of investigation and looking into the context of the whole roll of film is quite unusual.
Of course, that’s only possible on a little window slice of photography.
That period when film had been improved to the point that a strip of film could be tidily put into rolls and taken to the chemist or mailed off to a developer…
And this was just a little slice of time, just a few decades before digital photography would replace much of the process.
And when someone was in the unusual situation of finding that their packet of developed photos held a mysterious artifact suggestive of the supernatural, showing a ghost, an angel, or monsters,
If they took it around to the tabloids, the editors there were not doing investigation.
They didn’t ask to see the envelope and the full reel and the timestamps.
They didn’t look for diary entries or clues whether the story could be verified.
Did they have a good printable photo and did it tell an interesting story?
Yeah?
Yes?
Oh, okay.
Well, let’s publish yet another greatest ghost photo ever taken and get on with the celebrity gossip.
The people who care about whether this stuff is true or not are the very tail end of the food chain.
We are the worms at the bottom of the sea trying to deduce a fully developed sunlit planet of life and beauty from the gray sludge that rains down on the mud in the darkness.
I’m not saying it’s an impossible task.
Every now and then we do get a definitive answer.
But mystery is a little bit like yard plants.
They’ll take hold and grow in the cracks in a barren sidewalk or a driveway or precariously in the side of a water spout.
And so it is with mystery.
A mystery can take root anywhere it can find purchase in the fecund soil of the human mind.
All of us, and probably most of you, are similarly fascinated by such questions and mysteries, but I hope that we’re doing something more than the sort of, that’s cool bro, online ecosystem where this stuff thrives today.
We certainly try.
Monster Talk’s theme music is by Pete Stealing Monkeys.
Remember to insert something upbeat and cheerful here.
This has been a Monster House presentation.
Jim remembers his mother-in-law’s last words.
She said, Jim, you’ll never come to any harm.
She said, I shall still be with you.

The post S05E36 – The Chinnery Backseat Ghost appeared first on MonsterTalk.

Blake, Karen and Matt discover that this famous ghost photo isn’t as old as they expected, and perhaps not as mysterious either. Do we get it right? Do you have a different explanation? Let us know what you think.

The picture was taken by the Reverend Kenneth F. Lord inside the Church of Christ the Consoler, a Victorian Gothic Revival church on the grounds of Newby Hallin North Yorkshire, England. Despite the “medieval monk” legend that grew up around it – complete with claims that the shrouded figure stands some nine feet tall – the church itself was less than a hundred years old when the photo was made. It was built in the 1870s as a memorial to Frederick Vyner, a young heir murdered by Greek bandits, and designed by the architect William Burges.

One of the first things we ran into when researching this case is that nobody agrees on when the picture was made. You will see 1954, 1960, and 1963 all stated as plain fact in different places.

As of this recording,Wikipedia says the image was taken in 1963 and cites a 2012 source – which, as far as we can tell, is just repeating later paranormal-echo-chamber retellings rather than anything from the Lords themselves.

Two dates actually trace back to a primary source:

Around 1960.The earliest publication we have found is the August 13, 1967 article in The Sunday People (“Did the vicar snap a GHOST?” by Patrick Kent), which presents itself as the first publication of the photo. It gives no exact date but states the picture was taken “seven years ago” by Rev. Kenneth Lord – which points to roughly 1960.

1954.The 1954 date that keeps turning up traces to Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers (1984), the companion book to the television series. On pages 122 and 123 the story is retold with details that clearly come from an interview with Rev. Lord and his wife.

So we have two candidate dates – 1954 and around 1960 – both apparently rooted in the family’s own account, plus a more recent 1963 date that does not seem to come from the Lords at all. We can’t say for certain which is correct, but it is worth noting that any date other than those two does not appear to come from the primary witnesses.

The 1967 Sunday People piece is worth reading in full. The paper’s own photographic department took the negative to the film’s manufacturer, who reported no signs of tampering or double exposure in the emulsion. The magazine Amateur Photographer was also consulted, and its expert admitted he was simply puzzled.

But the same experts also explained, on the record, how you could fake a very similar picture. Their do-it-yourself recipe: stop the camera down to a very small aperture, place a cloaked figure in position, expose for a few seconds, cap the lens, remove the figure, then uncap the lens and finish the exposure. The result, they said, should be a convincing “ghost.”

The make and model come from the Clarke book retelling, where Mrs. Lord describes the camera used; notably, the 1967 article also reaches for “a Rolleicord” as its example camera when explaining how the effect could be faked. You can read a detailed enthusiast write-up of the Rolleicord IV here.

One detail jumps out: the Rolleicord IV was one of the few twin-lens reflex cameras that allowed deliberate double exposures– a feature most TLRs of the era specifically prevented. That does not prove anything about this particular photograph, but it is a relevant fact to keep in mind when weighing the skeptical explanations.

Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers[affiliate] by John Fairley and Simon Welfare, with a foreword and epilogue by Arthur C. Clarke (1984). The retelling of the Newby case – and the source of the 1954 date – appears on pages 122 and 123.

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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Here’s a famous example made by a respected solicitor in a church in Arendelle, Sussex in 1940.
It shows a weird luminous figure standing in front of the altar.
And here’s another church ghost made by the Reverend Kenneth Lord in his church in Newby, Yorkshire.
And it shows a hooded figure with a ghastly skull-like face standing beside the altar rail.
Well, do these pictures really prove the existence of ghosts?
Or can it be that even when photographers are honest, cameras can lie?
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.
Well, I can hardly believe it, but we’re finally doing another one of those shows that Karen and I categorize as things that scared the shit out of us when we were kids.
This time is a simple photograph of a church altar in England, only on the right side of the photo there stands a tall, ghostly phantom in the style of a Scooby-Doo cloaked specter.
This translucent figure appears to be wearing a cloth mask with eye holes, and the story behind the photo is as mysterious as the specter it depicts.
This week, we’re covering the newbie church ghosts here on Monster Talk.
Okay, so what are we talking about before we hop in?
What is our topic today?
Okay, so the newbie church specter, newbie, we’re not talking about Roblox or anything like that.
And not nudie, not nudie either.
No, no.
So this is a place in North Yorkshire in England.
Yeah, we’re talking about a very famous photograph that was taken in this church.
Yeah, I’m looking at the Ghost Photographs Caught on Film, which is a book by Dr. Melvin Willen, part of the SPR.
In the book, I’ll just show you this.
For the listeners, I’m holding up a book.
Oh, let’s see.
OK, I see.
Yeah, there you go.
It’s great.
Yeah.
So the it says location Church of Christ the Consoler, Skelton come newbie, Yorkshire, England, Skelton come newbie.
What?
Why is everything named like Lord of the Rings over there?
I swear.
Lord of the Rings is named like everything over there.
Oh, maybe that’s what it is.
Yeah, you’re right.
Maybe that’s what it is.
Yeah, I guess a little Anglo-Saxon naming.
It just, everything sounds so quaint and fun.
And I swear, when I started looking into this stuff, I ran into so many videos of British people doing ghost investigations.
And I, you know…
Unless I win the lottery, that’s not my life.
But man, there’s so many much older places and it seems so much more fun.
You’ll get there.
I’ll get old anyway, right?
When we were there last year, I just didn’t think about this.
particular case because we were in Yorkshire, which is a very large place.
So, yeah, I’m a little disappointed we didn’t manage to get there, but I don’t know.
Next time.
And Blake, I’m sure you’ll get there.
The black monk of Pontefract kind of distracted us a little bit.
Sure, sure.
It’s also in Yorkshire.
So there’s something about Yorkshire and monks.
We used to dream of having a monk.
If you’re interested in ghost photos, which is always ghost photos, great subject matter for podcasts.
But I mean, for real, I know we all three have spent countless hours looking at ghost photos, trying to recreate them and do all sorts of things with them.
This is a classic.
This is one of those scared the crap out of me as a kid.
Yes.
Yep.
One of the famous ones.
And it’s kind of a little newer than I thought it was.
Yes.
Kind of a newbie.
I had no idea it was such a newbie.
Indeed.
Yeah, but we’ll get into all of that because this is, yeah, this is a tough nut to crack, this one.
There’s a lot of, it seems quite simple on the surface.
Yeah.
There’s a lot more behind the scenes.
I would say that I found it interesting that this represents kind of an entire class of specific kind of ghost photo.
There’s a whole lot of photos of church altars with weird…
mysterious figures in them.
I mean, three or four pop right to mind immediately.
And I know there’s got to be more than that.
But people take a lot of photos in churches and sometimes weird things show up.
So yeah, I found that interesting today when I was trying to find more material on this, how many there are like this.
It is like this entire subcategory.
So yeah, we should add too that we have Matt Baxter joining us for this episode too.
Hi, everybody.
Matt did a lot of research into this because, like you said, Blake, this is one of those photographs scared the crap out of me as a kid too, but I don’t think I really thought too much about it.
I just assumed.
It was a hoax, but I didn’t really look into going into this with any great depth.
So Matt has done a lot of work into this, so it’s good to have him join us.
And I think we should talk a little bit about the history of the place too.
So you mentioned, Blake, the Church of Christ the Consoler in North Yorkshire.
Blake said it was the Christ the Counselor, didn’t he?
That too.
But I think what’s interesting about the place is that it’s old, but it’s relatively new in terms of England.
Very.
built between 1871 and 1876, and it was commissioned by someone.
So a lady, Mary Viner, and it was built on the Newby Hall estate.
And so she spent a lot of money.
It was basically money that she had put together as ransom money because her son, 23-year-old Frederick, had been captured by bandits in Greece.
So a very strange story.
And they…
unlived him uh and that didn’t go well unfortunately really really weird story but uh she she took that money and uh she built this church so anglican church what i find is really strange when you look at the photograph to me it looks very orthodox very kind of older catholic it doesn’t look well yeah the whole church is built in a in a neo-gothic style i guess
Yeah, it is.
Victorian Gothic style, but it’s only a couple of hundred years old.
And so when you think of churches and we think about Borley Rectory, the church there, Borley Church, you know, we’re talking 1100.
So old churches seem to range between about 300 to 900 years old and go back to Anglo-Saxon times and medieval Norman times.
So this is considered to be a newer church, but it is very beautiful.
It’s very ornate.
It’s lovely.
It’s lovely.
It’s really lovely.
It is.
I guess it’s the kind of place where you would find a ghost if you were to find a ghost.
Well, one would hope.
I mean, that’s the other thing is…
Those other churches often have their own history.
Some of them predate the schism with England and the Catholic Church.
So ghostly monks and ghostly nuns are de rigueur for that sort of thing.
And a lot of people have sort of applied folklore.
That’s my interpretation, saying that this is a monk or something.
But there’s no deep history for that to come from.
They’re doing a lot of the heavy lifting there with their own interpretations.
Well, yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people think it’s a monk.
And some people say, well, there was a monastery a couple of miles away.
And some people talk about it being an 18th century monk, which wouldn’t have been the case.
So others say, oh, no, correct that.
It’s 16th century.
Other people think it’s a shroud.
So not necessarily robes, vestal robes.
But I guess we’re going to get into that a bit more.
So I would urge readers, readers, readers, listeners, readers and listeners and viewers to go and check out this photograph.
Our hardcore listeners always read the transcripts.
Matt, do you want to give us a little bit of a kind of background on why this photograph was taken?
Do we even know?
Well, and that’s one of the fun parts.
If the standard narrative, if you go on, let’s say YouTube and you look this up, you’ll basically find out that Reverend Kenneth Lord, and how’s that for a great name?
We’re going to be vicar.
He photographs determinism.
Exactly.
Yep.
Yep.
Now.
He’s photographing the interior of the church for several reasons, I guess.
One of those reasons is he was going to make a postcard.
Another one was Christmas cards.
Another one, he wanted to send them to his friends.
So it’s kind of blurry on exactly why he took the photo.
No one was visible in the frame when he took the picture.
And then…
The figure appears only after development.
Spooky.
Now, of course, they immediately send this off to Kodak.
And they examine the photo and they say, you know what?
There’s no double exposure here.
The camera he used was double exposure proof.
It’s impossible for it to be a double exposure.
The image was authenticated right there.
Boom.
And we have instant sort of mythology.
Yeah, this will not be the first time longtime listeners will recognize that the endorsement by Kodak used to be the gold standard for this could not possibly be fake.
Right.
So do we know if it was truly sent to Kodak?
Or not?
Another good question.
Sometimes those stories emerge, you know, years later.
My reading suggests somebody really did do that.
But I guess for me, the question is.
Does it matter?
Because Kodak, basically, their determination would be, does it look like the film was tampered with?
And there’s so many ways to do these kind of photos without tampering with the film.
Yes.
That’s a distinction that I think a lot of people don’t make.
Exactly.
Well, I think we talked about that with the Cottingley Fairies as well.
And the Watertown.
Yeah, yeah.
So, yeah, it is, it’s a recurring, it’s almost, so you know how in folklore they have motifs that are recurring motifs?
This feels like a skeptic motif, like this recurring thing that comes up in skeptical discussions of trying to understand what’s happening in these allegedly paranormal photos.
That’s that that is the Kodak or some photographic agency certified it.
And the other one is private investigator firms were hired to research.
And, you know, that kind of you’re looking for an authority to tell you, look, we can’t say it’s paranormal, but we can 100 percent say that nobody tampered with it.
Right.
So.
Yeah, which is not actually what Kodak is saying, but I think that’s the argument for giving it more endorsement from authority.
Exactly.
Yeah, it is a difficult thing because…
Nobody actually knows.
There’s no documentation that we’ve been able to see.
Nothing’s been sort of presented publicly on exactly what they did, who did it, you know, and there should be documentation and there is none.
So it is hard to say, but they did not say this is a ghost.
That’s the bottom line.
They didn’t say that.
What I think is interesting too, Matt, that you found out with the Cottingley Fairies, we talked about the camera, the model, the make, the history of this, of who owned the camera and what was done with it.
But with you looking into this, it seems like we’re not entirely sure what kind of camera was used and we’re not sure about the skill of the Reverend Lord, whether he was a skilled photographer or whether he was an amateur.
What do we know, if anything?
Go ahead, Blake.
I was going to say, I found a newspaper article where Reverend Lord gives an interview, and it’s the only interview I found with him.
And is this the psychic news retrospective?
It was it was the the Sunday People from August 13th, 1967.
OK. And what I thought there’s a whole but this is the only interview that I found.
And I feel like I should put at least for the patrons, I’m going to put this in the show notes.
But this was from newspapers.com, which we only have a subscription to because of the patrons.
So thank you, patrons.
This article was an interview conducted in 1967.
And it has the photo and I don’t, I have not been able to find a pre 1967 publication of the photo.
So this may be the story that got it out into the wild.
So later.
Okay.
But here’s the really weird part.
Okay.
If you go onto Wikipedia and look up this ghost, which we’ll put a link to in the show notes.
And of course this is subject to change because anyone can edit Wikipedia, but.
Their dates, I believe they gave the 1963 date.
That’s what you hear in terms of the folklore.
That’s whatever it is, it’s 63.
Here’s a little quick insert about the dates.
One of the first things we noticed when we started digging into this case is that there are multiple dates alleged for when this photo was taken.
At the time that I’m recording this, Wikipedia says, This image was taken in 1963 by the Reverend Kenneth F. Lord.
And that date is backed up by a reference to a 2012 source that is from a newspaper.
Now, we can’t know for sure when this photo was taken, but we do have two better references to look at.
First, we have an article in the Sunday People from August 13th, 1967.
This article purports to be the first publication of the newbie photo.
It does not provide a specific date for the photograph being taken, but it does say it was taken seven years ago by the Reverend Kenneth Lord.
which would put the date of the photograph around 1960.
The 1967 article mentions that the newspaper had its own photography department take the negatives to the, quote, makers of the film, quote, who did not see signs of tampering.
Their experts also told the author how to make a convincing photo in the same style by using the long exposure method with a lens cap, which we discuss further on in this episode.
So a 1960 date would be a reasonable candidate.
But when I was doing other research, I kept running into a different date, that being 1954.
Now, where was this number coming from?
I will spare you all the details of the hunt, but it was a very satisfying research project.
And a little bonus delight was that when I ran down the source, which was the 1984 Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers companion volume to the TV series, I already had that book on my bookshelf.
It was very exciting.
So sure enough, on pages 122 and 123 is a retelling of the story of the newbie ghost photo.
And it seems obvious from the text that the book
did some kind of interview or interrogation with the Reverend Kenneth Lord and his wife.
They give details about the make and model of the camera used, and while the 1967 newspaper article said that the experts took the negatives to the makers of the film, in this retelling, Mrs. Lord specifies that Kodak itself examined the film and found no tampering.
and that an independent photographer examined it.
Again, this is completely consistent with her recalling the 1967 investigation by the journalists with The People.
So, 1960 or 1954, what we do know is that the Lords were not going to fall for that old trope about how we know they weren’t lying because their story never changes.
But it would appear any other dates besides 1960 or 1954 are not coming from the primary source of either the Reverend Lord or his wife.
So links to those sources will be in the show notes.
Excluding tampering with the film does not mean that the photo was not able to have been faked.
It just means that whatever was being done may have been done in camera without the need for tampering with the actual film.
But the camera’s type is a RolioCord 4, that’s IV, with a 75 millimeter lens, which has a six by six square aspect ratio negative.
Now, this matters because all the discussions about sending the negatives for study and all this research around it.
you will not find a square aspect ratio copy of this photo.
So much like the Watertown ghost, every photo you see has been cropped.
Why?
I don’t know.
Probably for dramatic focus on the part of the image that’s interesting.
But it does cut down on our capability to do a full analysis of the photo if we never get the full photo.
Just a little complaint there.
Well, and that’s absolutely true.
And, you know, you look at the photos being shown online, and they’re so degraded from, you know, reproduction after reproduction.
And the Rollycord 4 was a decent camera.
It’s a…
You know, you got this waist level viewfinder and it’s 120 roll film.
It’s a fairly serious, you know, camera that you’re using here.
So whoever did take this picture wasn’t a newbie when it came to cameras.
You know, they kind of knew what they were doing enough.
So, and yes, that camera also did make it more difficult to accidentally get a double exposure.
But you could absolutely trick the camera into making a double exposure as well.
So it’s…
You know, that whole thing is absolutely impossible to be a double.
No, it’s not true.
It’s not true at all.
But, yeah, that’s a huge thing.
When a picture is cropped like that and you’ve got the way it’s cropped, you’re showing the ghost to be sort of toward the right of the photo.
what part of the picture was cropped because if the picture that would have been taken directly before that or after that, have the guy in costume ready to jump in, you know, and, and, you know, be ready to, to, to take a, a slow shutter picture.
Um,
We would see that in either the one directly before it or the one directly after that.
You could probably see, and that’s why they cropped it.
Now, this is all just guessing at this point.
It’s not even educated guessing.
It’s just guessing.
But there’s too many holes, and the way this story came out, it was so sort of prepackaged.
You know, it was all ready to be a legend immediately out of the box.
And that’s just strange.
And then now we’re finding out that the date we’re being fed is not even accurate.
Yeah, and I found a – this is an old, old, old, old website from back when the internet was people who knew stuff.
It was on GeoCities originally, but it was – Oh, wow.
Isn’t that Geocities?
That’s funny.
People –
People with expertise used to take the time to build sites to share their knowledge.
And I should put a link to this in the show notes.
Here’s a little excerpt.
It says, The Rolio cords aren’t as luxurious to handle as the T or the more expensive 3.5F models.
The shutter release is primitive.
Slide the little lever under the taking lens over to cock the shutter.
Squeeze it to fire.
A little bonus with the 4 is that you can make double exposures, something that’s not possible with most TLRs.
However, they’re a good beginner’s camera and capable of results to match the T. Hmm.
Selling.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I actually found a website that gives instructions on how to do photos like this with that camera.
Okay.
So it can be done.
But I still have so many questions.
And so we’ve talked a little bit about the photograph and how it could have been cropped.
What about the quality?
So, all right, the original wasn’t tampered with, but what about the version that we see everywhere, splashed on the internet today, on YouTube, in books?
It does seem a little bit different to the original one.
And I’ve only seen…
fleeting glimpses of the original one, and it looked different.
It looked a lot darker.
Matt, can you tell us a bit about this?
Well, actually, I want to note, Blake, you’ve got that book there.
How does the picture look in that book in comparison to what you largely see on the internet?
Faded, not nearly as crisp.
And that’s one of the big things right there.
I think that’s the point.
The contrast, I think, has been cranked up on so many of these to bring out detail that actually was never even there.
So I’m doing a lot of this episode.
I’m nodding vigorously in agreement.
I don’t know if you can get a snapshot or something of the photo, the way it looks in that book for the show notes to do a comparison with what you normally see online.
Yeah, I think that that itself would be very telling for it.
I’ve been really working hard on improving the show notes for the show and putting a lot of extra material in.
And in this one in particular, I found a lot of people who went and tried to do recreations because I guess one of the claims we’re about to get to is how tall is the figure in the photo?
Mm-hmm.
and people doing recreations, that kind of stuff.
You’re going to need to go to the webpage at monstertalk.org and look at the show notes to see these.
But I’ll aggregate a lot of material there for you.
Well, I did just want to hearken back to something that Matt said a little while ago, and that was talking about…
that this is the only shot that we have from that series.
Yes.
And that there’s no before shot and no after shot, which could be telling.
And Matt, I just wanted you to tell your little story again about why that’s important.
My little story.
I was just going to say, because you will not believe how much weight that ghost has lost between the before and after.
It’s amazing.
Taking ghost zimpic.
It was stuffing his stomach in.
Exactly.
I think it was all lighting.
But years and years ago, there was a paranormal group that wanted to do an investigation of a local place called the Brook Forest Inn in Evergreen, Colorado.
And they told them, the Brook Forest Inn told this group that you cannot do that unless you involve Matthew Baxter somehow.
And so what was agreed upon was that I would give them a short course on how to do a more skeptical, more critical thinking style of a paranormal investigation.
And one of those things that I told them to do was don’t run around taking pictures in the dark and don’t think you see something in one picture and throw away all the rest.
So they did exactly that.
They ran around and took pictures in the dark.
And then they sent me one picture is like, what is this?
And it was basically a very, very, very, very dark picture that you could barely see.
So I said, well, where’s the pictures before it and after it?
Oh, we threw all those away because there wasn’t anything in them.
Nothing interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But what those photos would have told me is where they were in the building when that picture was taken.
So what I ended up having to do is lighten it and lighten it and lighten it the best I could.
And it started to look like some sort of beast, you know, a demonic beast, like a possessed dog or something.
And so I’m thinking, what the heck is this?
So I had to actually drive up there, up to Evergreen, and walk around until I saw something that sort of matched what it could be, you know, with pareidolia and everything.
And finally, I did find it.
They took a picture of a picture hanging on the wall of a stone lion statue.
I love that story.
Yeah, you’re enlightened.
Yeah.
But I mean, that’s just one reason why having pictures before and after are important.
Yeah, I agree.
Not even just to tell you where you are, you know, in the course of things, but you don’t know what’s happening with the lighting.
You don’t know what’s happening with, you know, whether or not somebody was walking out of frame or you just don’t know a lot of things that can be answered by having pictures.
Pictures taken before and pictures taken after.
So we’re missing information with this case.
Exactly.
So you have this one picture in isolation and it becomes the entire story.
And that’s a problem.
It is.
This photo now is probably, we don’t know the exact date, but we could say more than 70 years old, right?
And it’s been subjected to all sorts of photographic analysis.
People have gone and tried to do recreations.
But there is a, I don’t know, it’s not in some field of study, but there’s a kind of expertise around photography called, oh, Lord, I’m going to mess this up.
I read it all the time.
It’s one of those words I’ve never said before.
Paradigm.
Yeah.
Once I cross this chasm, we’ll be right to the end.
Photogrammetry?
Photogrammetry?
Photogrammetry.
Photogrammetry.
This is studying photos to determine the internal geometry of the photo using reference points.
Because you’re basically trying to get a 3D understanding of an area by using 2D analysis.
Wow.
Does that stem from medical?
I’ve mostly heard about it from anthropology.
But it’s really geometry and trigonometry at play.
But what you can do, what nobody seems to have bothered to have done, which would be useful…
People have done a lot of recreation photos, but you got to remember that the focal length of the lens can affect how things appear.
So one way to sort of remove that as a factor is to actually go to the site, find the distance between the railing.
and the altar, and then measure those elements so that you can actually sort of have a 3D understanding of what the geometry looks like.
And given that information and the ratio change between the background material and the foreground material, it should be possible to get a really accurate understanding of how tall this figure is.
But since the 1970s…
The general ghost literature calls this a nine foot ghost.
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
Which makes me think about parallels to Bigfoot too.
Oh, he’s eight feet tall.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
He’s Bob Hieronymus tall.
Six foot four.
I’m inclined to think that this ghost is a little more than six feet tall, but that’s exactly how…
I feel like it’s probably possible to determine exactly how tall.
There’s ambiguity around the footing because we can’t quite tell whether the ghost is on the ground or standing on a box because there’s a shadowy robe-like structure…
He’s floating.
…cascading down over the stairs.
But we could get some pretty solid…
I think, well, that’s kind of a funny word, but I think we get some fairly accurate guesses about how tall this figure is.
But I am inclined to think a little over six feet.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I tend to agree.
I know that there have been people there that have kind of tried to recreate it and have shown that, you know, as much shorter people can give that same illusion of being that high.
But then again, we still don’t know, you know, the focal length or anything else.
So it is hard to say.
I absolutely agree with that.
And you have to wonder, did a man measure it or a woman?
Because it would be more accurate if it was a woman.
Or if it was a fisherman that measured it.
We’ve got all these questions.
One got away.
So what I wanted to ask is one of the biggest skeptical theories that I’ve heard about is the vestments theory and using double exposure.
And so the idea is that the image was created using or by draping church robes and vestments over the altar of steps and then combining that with a double exposure.
And apparently there was a common trick in early photography.
So I don’t know if that’s correct or not, but gives that illusion of this hooded, towering, semi-transparent kind of entity.
Do you think that that’s a possibility in terms of explanations for the photograph?
It makes more sense than a ghost.
In a nutshell, yeah.
I mean, if we’re at the point where we want to discuss our hypotheses about what’s really going on here, I, a lot.
of discussion has been about camera artifacts or, you know, accidental things.
I’ll be blunt.
This to me looks entirely like a hoax.
The figure in the photo looks too much like a person wearing a hood and a cowl, uh, cloak kind of combo.
Uh,
And to get around the question of whether it’s a double exposure or not, I don’t even think that’s necessary.
I think a timed exposure.
I agree.
I agree.
What’s the difference then for someone like me?
What’s the difference between timed exposure and double exposure?
If you set a time exposure, it opens the camera to the light for a long period of time, so you get more detail.
But it also means that if something moves through the scene quickly, it pauses and then moves out, it can appear translucent, like it only partially appears on the film.
Or the Cottingley Ferries.
Those were long exposures and timed exposures, I guess you could say.
And the thing with those is that you see the water running in the back is blurred.
Absolutely.
Yep.
And this camera did have a long, it had a very variable exposure setting.
So that is possible with this camera.
I guess the simplest, simplest way to say it is you’re basically taking two pictures on the same piece of film.
over the same, you know, picture area.
So yeah, like you don’t, some of the cameras required you to manually forward to the next frame.
And if you didn’t, you remember that you could take two snaps.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You could take two snapshots on the same area of negative and both would kind of bleed together and make something what most people would call trash.
But every now and then that trash would turn out to be something mysterious.
Yeah.
Yeah.
When I was a kid, I took one accidentally of my box turtle eating the side of our house.
It was a giant turtle.
And that was great.
But yeah, so it’s double exposures are wake perspective.
Yes.
Double exposures are awesome.
But yeah, with the timed exposure, a long exposure.
It is, it’s a lot of times they were done with the lens cap.
So you would take the lens cap off.
I’m clapping in agreement.
Yeah, sorry.
Yeah.
And until, you know, you’ve enough light had got on and you put the lens cap back on.
Well, what they would do if you wanted to do a great timed exposure fraud shot is you would have it all set up with the person there, you know, that you want them to be translucent.
And you take the lens cap off and you get just like a few moments of that.
You put the lens cap back on.
They get out of the shot.
And then you take the lens cap back off and everything else is sharper and brighter.
in the picture except for that anomalous figure.
And the reason you do the lens cap trick is because it keeps you from seeing the sort of motion of them moving through the frame.
One of the other ghost photos they look at is another one in a church.
And in this one, there’s a weird figure.
and there’s an arc of light moving up, and the photo…
It’s an angel.
Well, what happens to the analysis people look at is like, look, you can literally hear them sort of deciphering what’s going on.
The arc of the light, the little arc, is going towards a candle, and they realize what’s happening is a long exposure shot, and someone’s moving through the frame, lighting the candle with tapers.
And so that’s what they’re seeing.
It’s very weird looking until you realize what’s actually going on.
It’s like, oh, of course, right?
It makes perfect sense.
But in this case, by doing a lens cap type thing, you eliminate all that blur.
You just get a nice crisp two shots together.
But what, very importantly, it would pass the Kodak seal of approval.
No sign of a double exposure, right?
It’s like…
In this home office laboratory is the world’s most advanced equipment for the examination of photographs.
Using a computer, forensic experts help the police to snare criminals by enhancing photographic images to bring out hidden detail.
Today, the computer is focused on the phantoms.
The photographs are optically scanned and fed into the computer for analysis.
But what about the sinister figure snapped by the Reverend Kenneth Lord in his church at Newby in Yorkshire?
Even the most rigorous computer analysis cannot provide a simple photographic explanation.
I don’t think at this stage there’s anything unusual about the picture at all.
So I think our conclusions from this is that it’s unlikely to have been built up by a superposition of photographs.
So this could be a candidate for a ghost.
Although a very few photographs are difficult to explain away, not a single one of them offers convincing proof that a ghost has been captured by the camera.
And this, I believe, provides conclusive evidence about the nature of ghosts.
For more than a century, millions of cameras have been clicking all over the world.
By this time, there must be billions of photographs in existence.
If ghosts could be photographed, by now we’d have entire galleries full of portraits.
But we don’t, because these images exist only in the minds of the observers.
I believe that ghosts are at least as real as dreams, and no one has ever photographed a dream.
Yet one day, that might be possible, and then we’d have cameras that could really capture ghosts.
Well, another question.
If we want to give the benefit of the doubt to Lorde, could this be an accident?
In my opinion, no, absolutely not.
This is totally a fraud.
OK, yeah, I said it.
I mean, it’s it’s a guy dressed in a costume with a hood pulled over his eyes, like, you know, with the the eye holes cut out from like a pillowcase or something.
Things happened like whoops.
Well, see, I was I was late to my Klan meeting and ran through the church.
Funny you should say that.
The face does look a little bit like a kind of, you know, sweet ghost boob.
The thing that I’ve noticed nobody has said, they’re saying, oh, it’s a monk.
Oh, you know, but that doesn’t look like a monk’s face.
You know, robes.
And then they say, oh, well, it’s someone that’s got bandages on their face.
Well, it doesn’t look like bandages.
No one has said it looks like death.
It just doesn’t have a sign.
Yeah, it’s just not playing chess or whatever.
Yeah, exactly.
But no, the thing is, hey, scythes don’t matter.
That’s what I’ve heard.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
But nobody says that.
And I find that interesting because that’s the first thing I think of.
But back to the whole thing of could this be an accident?
Let’s just say that I agree with Blake.
But if we were going to say between it being an actual ghost or it being an accident…
there’s far more accident photos than there are ghost photos.
So, again, it’s more likely to be an accident than it is to be a ghost, but it’s more likely to be a hoax than it is to be an accident.
And do you think it could have been…
Here’s another theory I’ve heard.
Someone playing a trick on the reverend.
I mean, it’s got a long exposure setting, but not that long.
Somebody had to be standing by…
in a costume, ready to hop up on the steps.
But he also said he was taking the photos because he wanted to make a series of postcards as a fundraiser.
Ironic, isn’t it?
What about the Christmas card?
I’ve had so many different theories.
Oh, that’s funny.
I guess my question is, if you’re making postcards for the church to raise funds, surely the ghost photo is the one you want to make into a fundraiser.
I mean, that’s awesome.
Yeah.
Well, didn’t he claim too that he didn’t want it to attract more people to the church or ghost hunters or anything like that?
Yeah, he implied very strongly that he was not a publicity seeker.
And again, there was a big gap between the time the photo or some kind of gap between the time the photo was taken.
Reminding me too, just briefly, you mentioned the interview that he did with the media.
Matt, you mentioned some other…
newsletter or newspaper or something.
Were you being facetious or was this another interview?
No, it was, it was, uh, another story.
It was a retrospective and it might’ve referenced that interview, but it was in the, what I said, the psychic times.
No, that’s actually true.
There was, that’s how I found out.
That’s how I found out it was the, the roller cord, uh, for camera.
Um, but so, you know, Blake and I came to the same conclusion off of a different trail, uh, which is pretty cool, I think.
Um, but, uh,
In that particular story, he says that he had just become the vicar, and we really do need to find out if we can see when he became vicar, because that will also help us find out if he’s telling the truth.
Right, if it was 54 or 67.
Right, yeah.
But he had just become vicar, and he wanted to take some pictures of the church, the inside of the church, for his friends, to send to his friends.
That’s what was said in that particular interview.
Yeah, the story changes a little bit, which is in line with— Another hallmark.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
So I was trying to find information about the Reverend Lord, which doesn’t that sound like some kind of special title?
Anyway.
Oh, it sounds like an email from a Nigerian prince or something.
Dear Reverend Lord.
Yeah.
But aside from that article about the original ghost photo, the only other thing I could find was in 1970, there’s a strange article that says, Anne, the girl with two fiancés,
And it’s about this woman named Ann Collins who wants to marry a guy who is in Brazil.
And because of some problems with timing and trips and immigration and rules, they got permission to do a proxy wedding, which I have never heard of before.
I don’t know what exactly.
Basically to have another guy stand in for the groom so they can do the wedding.
Was he dressed like the Grim Reaper when he stood in?
Well, it says they found that Anne would only be able to get a temporary three-month visa unless you were married.
So John’s father, the Reverend Kenneth Lord, Vicar of Skelton, tried to arrange a proxy wedding with Christopher taking John’s place.
They got permission from the Church of England, but the Brazilian authorities would not accept the plans.
They were trying to save a 400-pound airfare to England, but now John will have to make the journey, said Anne.
So this is the Reverend’s son in Brazil trying to get a friend to cover for him for the wedding.
I’ve never heard of anything like that.
And that’s the only other newspaper article I found concerning the vicar.
So the only thing that we’ve heard about him are two different stories that are slightly suspect.
They’re a little sus.
They are a little sus.
Yeah, but yeah, it just does.
Matt and I were discussing this behind the scenes.
Could the reverend be lying?
And it just made us think about the episode that we just recorded about the devil’s footprints and the reverend in that story or thinking about Reverend Foister in the…
It’s all the kangaroos.
Yeah, that there are precedents for reverends lying.
But I just wonder what was his point?
Because if he goes on record and says, look, I’m not wanting to attract attention, what was his motive if this was a hoax?
Yeah.
Sometimes you do things just to see if you can get away with it.
Bit of fun.
Indeed.
I mean, it’s all super sus to me.
But also, I mean, let’s assume because I kind of agree with Matt that it’s probably a long exposure.
So a little bit of work has to go into play here.
Right.
And two people have to be involved to do the little lens cap trick or he’s an elaborate machine maker, you know, like to build a little device.
But I think the most likely scenario is he has an accomplice.
Right.
And he says in that article, again, from the Sunday People in 1967, that he was going to make photographs to do fundraising postcards.
Fundraising, okay.
Where are those fundraising postcards?
Like, I mean, did they come into existence?
I don’t know, right?
Right, yeah, nothing more came of that.
Yeah, that is strange.
Again, if you’re going to make postcards, the one with the ghost is probably going to be the bestseller, right?
But, you know, I don’t know.
So anyway, it’s an interesting article.
It’s certainly an interesting photograph, but the biggest shock for me looking into this was I had no idea.
that this photo was from the sixties or slash fifties, because I assumed this was from the height of spiritualist photographs in the twenties and thirties.
1920s.
That’s what I thought too.
That’s exactly what I thought.
And I did assume that it was a hoax, but I, I couldn’t explain it.
I don’t have the knowledge of photography that Matt has and that you have.
And, but I still just thought, Oh, that’s a hoax of some kind.
Yeah, well, Nigel Bundy, who sent us this, what he sent was actually a really interesting YouTube video, which we’ll also link to.
But he’s always sending me really cool stuff around ghosts.
It’s just…
This is a classic, this one.
It really is.
But the Ghost Club has been around for ages.
And in many ways, it’s sort of the, I guess, the longest lived sort of…
They’re not professional exactly, but longest lived investigative social group for looking into this kind of material.
And what I like about them is that not only did they look at the allegedly real ghost, but they also love a good ghost story.
So, you know, that doesn’t really matter whether or not it’s…
Potentially real or not.
We should probably talk about them too, with all the connections.
Absolutely.
So Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens.
So many, so many.
So I, I, between them and the SPR, you know, a wealth of material that has shown up on the show originates.
So much appreciated.
Yeah.
Well, I think we’ve kind of given away our perspectives.
As to what we think is behind this.
I do want to send over, Blake, a copy of the PDF of the Psychic Times that actually had this article in it.
And what was said in this particular article was…
He took the photos right after he became vicar.
He did it to send to some friends, and a dozen photographs were reportedly taken, and one other person was present.
I bet they were.
Yes, yes.
So very, very interestingly, supposedly it was like an assistant in taking the pictures and everything.
I mean…
As a child, this photo haunted me, right?
Legit haunted me.
Me too.
As an adult who’s… Oh, my God.
I don’t… Karen, and you too, Matt.
I mean, how many hundreds or thousands of ghost photos have we looked at?
It’s a lot, right?
Yeah, like seven or something.
It’s a lot.
It is.
But now going back to this now, it just…
Looks like distinctively phony to me now in a way that it looked distinctively real or plausible.
When you were five.
Yeah.
Well, you remember the whole thing with, was it the Usborne books?
Oh, yeah.
The Walsingham.
Oh, yeah.
The Walsingham ghost.
Yeah.
That scary blue face.
It was just terrifying.
And then we find out it’s Lon Chaney.
Lon Chaney.
Which is pretty scary.
Yeah, so when you’re a kid, the things that scares you makes you laugh when you’re older.
Yeah, a lot of times.
Except the monster under the bed, obviously.
But I still love the photograph.
It just reminds me of my childhood and just makes me think about all the mysteries in the world.
So I still do love it.
It is beloved.
It’s beloved.
Interesting to take a deeper look at it and take some new perspectives and come up with some possible explanations for it.
Makes it less creepy, but still fun.
I’m sort of imagining that the vicar is Simon Pegg and Nick Frost is his assistant.
And they’re doing they’re faking the photo in the church.
And then it’s like, dude, you know, where did you get the the the pillowcase?
He’s like, oh, I borrowed it from my house.
Your mom’s going to kill you.
It’s like you could definitely go south.
All right.
So but it really not leprosy.
No, well, that’s the other thing.
All these little, the folklore around this stuff is always like, it’s a monk and he had leprosy and these are leprosy bandages.
It’s like, why not syphilis?
I mean, come on.
You go straight to leprosy because of the well-known leprosy problem, right?
No, no, syphilis.
Come on, the nose falls right off.
By that time, it would have been syphilis.
But yeah, it’s…
Again, I’m not too sure.
I thought it looked like a skull almost when I was a child.
As a kid, I agree.
It looked like a skull.
As an adult, it looks like a Klansman.
Which is much more scary.
Very frightening.
Well, I feel like we’ve provided ample, plausible explanations for what’s going on.
I don’t think, unfortunately, all the mystery in this one comes down to how it was faked, honestly.
Exactly how did they fake this?
Exactly.
This is not the Patterson-Gimlin film.
This is…
So it is a shockingly, what is it, retro, I guess would be the right word, considering the way it appears and when it popped up and everything.
But I still love it.
I really do.
Let’s think just for a second, though.
So we’re talking about the new perspectives on the Patterson-Gimlin film, and that’s the same era.
So I think it’s likely that more information could come to light.
There had to be someone helping.
I’m shocked there hasn’t been a deathbed confession or something.
Church lady or something.
I’m getting suspicious.
Yeah.
It’s very sus.
Very sus.
Could the assistant be Satan?
Aha.
Well, again, thank you to Nigel Bundy for sending this in and prompting us to talk about something we’ve known about for decades but never bothered to talk about.
Yeah, no, that definitely motivated us to get this one done, finally.
Indeed, indeed.
And thanks for joining us, Matt.
Thanks, Matt.
Love the new recording equipment.
You sound very mature.
Thank you.
Sound.
All right.
Thanks a lot, guys.
And good night.
Okay.
Good night.
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 me, Karen, and guest co-host Matt Baxter discussing the famous ghost photo of a specter in Newby Church.
Check our show notes for links for further reading.
While the producers of Arthur C. Clarke’s show couldn’t definitively prove the photo is fraudulent, we here at Monster Talk are leaning very strongly on its technical and stylistic resemblance to numerous known hoaxes from the history of spirit photography to reach our own skeptical conclusions.
We know how to produce photos like this with the camera used, and such hoaxes look just like this one.
It does remind me a bit of Bob Gimlin allegedly being taken in by Roger Patterson’s Bigfoot setup.
versus being an active participant.
For me, that’s too much of a stretch.
And similarly here, people speculate how the photographer might have been duped by pranksters.
It’s much more parsimonious to conclude that the Reverend Lord was being a bit irreverent when he took this photo with the help of an accomplice.
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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The post S05E35 The Newby Church Specter appeared first on MonsterTalk.

Most Americans meet the Rakshasa in exactly two places: a 1974 episode of a beloved horror TV series and the pages of the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. Both versions give you a debonair, tiger-faced shape-changer with a taste for human flesh – but neither prepares you for how deep, how old, and how genuinely alive these creatures are. To dig us out of that pop-culture foxhole, we sat down with academic researcher Eric Zsebenyi for a tour that runs from the Rig Veda to the Ramayana, into Buddhism, through present-day Sri Lankan politics, and finishes at the tent-shaped tomb of a very naughty Victorian translator.

Eric Zsebenyi holds a master’s degree from Naropa University (2000) and has pursued Buddhist studies as a lifelong avocation alongside a career as a civil servant. His path to the Rakshasas began with a Dharma protector named Vetali in his own meditation practice – which, as you’ll hear, leads straight back to one of India’s stranger monsters. Blake met Eric at the recent Gods & Monsters Conference, where Eric delivered a paper on the Vetala.

You can find Eric’s work here: Eric Zsebenyi on Academia.edu

The audio at the top of the episode comes from Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Season 1, Episode 11, “Horror in the Heights,” which first aired on ABC on December 20, 1974. In it, reporter Carl Kolchak investigates a string of grisly deaths among elderly Jewish residents of a Chicago neighborhood – a story laced with spray-painted swastikas that turns out to be a misdirect. The real culprit is a shape-changing monster that appears to each victim as the person they trust most.

It was the only Kolchak script written by Jimmy Sangster, the prolific Hammer horror veteran. The guest cast is a parade of familiar faces, including Phil Silvers, Herb Vigran, and the always-welcome Murray Matheson as the antiquarian master of exposition. You may also know Matheson as the clown in the classic Twilight Zone episode “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” and from the series Banacek.

The other great American gateway is the first-edition AD&D Monster Manual (1977), where Gary Gygax gave us a tiger-headed, pipe-smoking humanoid in a fur-trimmed silken robe – a flesh-eating illusionist that can only be reliably put down by a crossbow bolt blessed by a cleric. (Where, you might ask, did a crossbow bolt come from? Listen for Eric’s theory.) The Rakshasa’s now-iconic backward-facing hands didn’t arrive until the 1989 Monstrous Compendium, which added a note that their palms seem to commonly curve backward – a detail artists soon turned into a visual “tell” for players.

The Rakshasa goes all the way back to the Rig Veda (composed roughly 1500 BCE), with linguistic cousins in the Avestan language of early Iranian religion. In the earliest layers they’re called rakshas, a word that carries a double sense of “one who guards” and “one who injures” – fitting for entities that sorcerers summon to disrupt the Vedic fire sacrifice. Eric walks us through how the Vedas sit at the foundation of a layered literature (Brahmanas, Upanishads, and onward) in which nothing is ever quite superseded.

The Rakshasas reach their peak as antagonists in the great epics, the Mahabharata and especially the Ramayana. Their king is Ravana – originally named Dashagriva, “the ten-necked one,” and renamed (roughly) “the roarer” after Shiva pinned him under a mountain and set him howling. Granted a boon by Brahma that he could not be slain by gods or demons, Ravana dismissed mere humans as beneath his notice – so Vishnu incarnated as the human prince Rama to undo him. (If “no man can slay him” rings a bell, you’re not alone.)

Because the early Rakshasas attacked the sacrifice, the natural countermeasure was the fire god himself, Agni, who could be invoked to burn them up; Indra and other gods could be called on too. There are protective herbs and amulets, and once the Rakshasas were absorbed into Buddhism, chanting the name of the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara (as in the Lotus Sutra) became a recognized ward.

As for that Kolchak/D&D crossbow bolt, Eric traces it to the Brahmastra – the celestial weapon of Brahma that Rama affixes to his bow to finally kill Ravana. Each great god has such a weapon; the crossbow appears to be a later screenwriter’s flourish on a much older idea.

Rakshasas come in male and female (rakshasi), beautiful and hideous, good and bad – a kind of dark mirror of human society. Some are born to it; others are cursed into the form and stuck that way until the curse is lifted (the Ramayana has some almost comic examples of monsters thanking Rama for hacking their arms off). A few standouts from the episode:

Shurpanakha – Ravana’s sister, whose advances toward Rama end with her nose and ears cut off, setting the epic’s central conflict in motion.

Putana – the rakshasi who tried to murder the infant Krishna with poisoned breast milk, only to be drained dry herself – and who is later resurrected as a devotee and protector of Krishna’s teachings.

For context, the Hindu and Buddhist worlds are crowded with other beings Eric name-checks – pishachas, yakshas, nagas, and the dead who become a preta before (ideally) joining the ancestors. We have promised to slowly snake our way toward a Naga episode in due course.

In the Tantric Buddhist tradition, that fierce Rakshasa energy isn’t only destructive: the wrathful figure Yamantaka, “the ender of death,” has a Rakshasa-headed form, the kind of ferocity said to be necessary to cut through stubborn ego and delusion.

One of the episode’s biggest surprises is how political this monster has become. In Sri Lanka, predominantly Buddhist, Ravana has long been read less as a villain than as a culture hero – the island’s first great king and defender. Since the end of the civil war in 2009, scholars have tracked a surge of Sinhalese-Buddhist interest in him, a phenomenon religious-studies researcher Deborah de Koning has named “Ravanisation”. It has even produced a nationalist organization, the Ravana Balaya.

This dovetails with a strand of ancient-astronaut and lost-civilization speculation – the idea that the epics describe real flying machines (the Pushpaka Vimana, locally “Dandu Monara”) and ancient super-weapons. It’s a full Erich von Däniken move, and we tried to handle it with care: for a great many people, these aren’t dusty myths but a present and lived reality.

The episode closes on a detour into Eric’s favorite monster, the Vetala – the corpse-animating spirit at the heart of the Baital Pachisi, or “Twenty-Five Tales of the Vetala.” In the frame story, a king must repeatedly carry a Vetala-inhabited body to a sorcerer while the creature tells riddling tales and threatens to split the king’s head if he wrongly stays silent. Depending on the era, a Vetala reads like a zombie, a ghoul, or something closer to a djinn.

The “vampire” label comes from Sir Richard Francis Burton, who rendered the collection as Vikram and the Vampire (1870) – a loose translation that has irritated Sanskritists ever since. Burton famously also translated the Arabian Nights, and moved in a circle that included Bram Stoker; whether there’s any direct line from the Vetala to Dracula remains, as Eric puts it, a smoking gun nobody has found yet. (Burton’s full text is free at Project Gutenberg if you’d like to read the tales for yourself.)

And yes, Burton has one of the great tombs – a stone replica of an Arabic traveling tent, in the churchyard of St Mary Magdalen Roman Catholic Church in Mortlake, in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. His wife Isabel famously burned a great deal of his papers after his death. More information and photos here: Mausoleum of Sir Richard and Lady Burton.

Eric first encountered the feminine form, Vetali, through Chögyam Trungpa, the founder of Naropa University, where she appears as a wrathful protector related to Palden Lhamo (Shri Devi).

For Blake’s “how did I not notice this” moment: the Robert Redford golf film The Legend of Bagger Vance is a retelling of the Bhagavad Gita – “Bagger Vance” is Bhagavan (Krishna), and the troubled golfer “R. Junuh” is Arjuna. Western esotericism has been dipping into Indian religion for well over a century, from Theosophy onward.

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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Oh, Mr. Marriott Lane.
My name is Carl Kolchak.
I’m with the INS.
And you, sir, are the foremost expert on East Indian arts.
And I have a few questions for you.
Now, I’m trying to find out something about a creature named a raca, raca shootsie, raca lanky, raca something.
I didn’t hear it too well.
That’s it.
That’s it.
Good.
Well, that’s all right.
Don’t worry about me.
I don’t have to be back at the office.
Now, go on.
Give me the proof about this Rakshasa.
Well, the Rakshasa is the disciple of Ravana.
Ravana, whose deeds were so horrible, he stopped the sun and the moon in their course.
Do you know I had a date with a girl in colleges like that once?
Mr. Kolchak, a Rakshasa is an evil spirit who can possess a man’s mind and delights in the consumption of human flesh.
Really?
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.
The audio clip at the top of the episode was excerpted from the television show Kolchak the Night Stalker, Season 1, Episode 11, titled Horror in the Heights.
In this episode, our protagonist, the intrepid reporter Carl Kolchak, investigates a string of horrific murders of elderly Jewish community members in a Chicago neighborhood.
The victims, primarily being elderly Jews, is exacerbated by the rampant graffiti of spray painted swastikas around the neighborhood.
But this is not a very special Night Stalker about real monsters of racism and anti-Semitism.
No, screenwriter Jimmy Sangster, famous for his many Hammer horror movies, does a bait and switch on us.
And the person painting the swastikas isn’t a Nazi, but turns out to be a misunderstood immigrant from India who’s trying to protect the community from a very different kind of monster.
One that shape changes into the visage of the person the victim trusts the most.
It’s a great episode with lots of twists, plus a slew of easily recognized character actors like Phil Silvers and Herb Vigran.
And I’m always delighted to see Murray Matheson show up.
Here, he plays an antiquarian master of exposition, but I also love him as the rare book dealer in the TV series Banachek.
You might also recognize him for his role as a clown in the Twilight Zone episode, Five Characters in Search of an Exit.
As we’ll unpack in the interview, the two places most Americans probably learned about Rakshasas are from this episode of the Night Stalker and from the Monster Manual in Dungeons & Dragons.
Way back in the first edition of the Monster Manual, there’s a gorgeous black-and-white illustration of a tiger-headed, pipe-smoking humanoid monster in a fur-trimmed silken robe surrounded by exotic incense and magical accoutrements.
Here’s what the entry says about these potential creature encounters.
Known first in India, these evil spirits encased in flesh are spreading.
They are fond of a diet of human meat and as masters of illusion, they can easily gain this end.
Rakshasas are able to employ ESP and then create the illusion of what those who have encountered them deem friendly.
They can then withhold attack until the prey can be taken off guard.
Although capable of using both magic user spells up to third level and cleric spells first level,
They are not affected by spells under the 8th level.
Rakshasas cannot be harmed by non-magical weapons.
Magical weapons below plus 3 do half damage, but hits by crossbow bolts blessed by a cleric will kill them.
If more than one Rakshasa is in its lair, then the group will be a male and one or more females.
That Night Stalker episode aired in December of 1974, and the first edition of the Monster Manual came out in 1977.
So many details in the Monster Manual entry suggest Gygax is getting his information from that noted monsterologist, Professor Carl Kolchak.
And he could have done worse.
A funny feature of the D&D version of the rickshasa is that in the very first entry, neither the text nor the illustration hint at what would become the distinguishing feature of these feline fraudsters.
In 1989’s Monstrous Compendium, Volume 1, the entry on rickshasa was expanded to include the sentence, Hands whose palms curve backwards, away from the body, seem to be common.
Artists like Jim Holloway started using the visual indicator of the backwards-facing hand as a visual tell, and soon that became a vital clue for players trying to figure out what they were dealing with when a game master wanted to give them hints about any mysterious, powerful, and magical foes not yet revealed in their true form.
The visual language of these mythical shape-changing creatures was being distilled into a specific form, the fancy feline with backwards hands who liked to toy with its food.
So my interest in these creatures has been long gestating, and we’re long past due giving these creatures the Monster Talk introduction.
I met Eric Sabinier at the Gods and Monsters conference a few weeks back and was delighted when he agreed to be our docent through this ancient and mysterious exhibit on Rakshasas.
Eric, I don’t know much about you personally.
Would you like to introduce yourself to the audience?
Just, yeah, briefly, I…
I have a master’s degree from Naropa University that I earned in the year 2000.
And since then, I’ve been working as a civil servant, raising a family, and kind of doing Buddhist studies as a hobby.
And the hobby really kind of ramped up during the COVID time.
I got very interested in a Dharma protector as part of my meditation practice.
started really asking questions about well who who is this person like outside of the lineage that i learned about her and that’s what led me to the monsters because her name is vatali and vatali is the feminine form of vatala which is an indian monster and that got me into the whole you know gods and monsters milus when i saw the advertisement for the conference i thought that’s perfect
I think I told Karen, I know I mentioned to you that I had come across Rakshasa’s primarily first through Kolchak the Night Stalker.
There’s a really great, I think it’s called Horror in the Heights.
I’ll probably put a clip in there for that.
But in that TV show…
it comes across as a very strange, shape-changing monster.
And the way they present it there is it presents itself to you, the victim, as someone you trust the most, and then it eats you, or tears you to shreds.
And then in Dungeons & Dragons, it came up as an occasional higher-level encounter with a magical shape-changer.
So shape-changing’s always in there.
I was unfamiliar with them.
I hadn’t heard of them.
So this is exciting.
New Monster is great.
That’s the funny part, though, Karen, is I thought of it as being an obscure thing.
And then, you know, in the IT world, I work with people from India all the time and happened to mention this.
And as you know, I thought of it as a folkloric kind of thing.
And.
No, no, it’s a very present and real lived experience kind of monster.
And I didn’t know that.
So I was curious about sort of that distinction between the mythic and the perceptually real.
And so I thought, you know, if Eric wants to take a stab at helping us sort of work through these mysteries, I’d really appreciate it.
So, yeah.
Anyway, welcome to Monster Talks, Eric.
Thank you.
Yeah, it’s very, very nice to be here.
Is it Zabinyi?
Yeah, yeah, pretty much.
I mean, there’s a lot of variations when you have all those consonants in there.
So Zabinyi, Zabinyi.
Can you tell us a little bit about these Rakshasas?
And yeah, how do we begin to learn about these creatures?
Well, you know, as Blake said, as Americans, we start off with D&D and Kolchak.
You know, I didn’t I was not familiar with that show, actually, which is really surprising to me, given all the television I watched growing up.
You know, I was born in 1970.
So.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So how I missed Kolchak, I don’t know.
But I did watch that episode several times.
And it’s really interesting how how close it is to the to the lore and yet how different the monster appears because it does.
It looks like a kind of like a Sasquatch type.
type monster, and you don’t find that really in the literature.
I’ll kind of get into how they’re described in the literature in a minute, but as far as D&D, I mean, that’s what we talked about at the conference.
You mentioned the Rakshasas, and I said, well, you shouldn’t get your information about Indian myth from the monster man.
I think I said the fiend folio, but yeah.
I certainly remembered that picture of the tiger headed.
My wife and I were kind of going back and forth.
Was it a tiger headed humanoid or was it just a tiger wearing a smoking jacket?
I think we could probably throw a picture in the show notes.
But yeah, the luxurious garb is definitely a part that’s come up in every exposure I’ve had to it in gaming.
Even though it’s a shape changer and often appears to be something else, eventually it comes down to smoking jackets and fez.
Yeah, I wonder where Gygax got that from.
I don’t know.
It makes me think of some representations of Satan.
you know, sometimes he’s this kind of charismatic character and, you know, like the Rolling Stones version.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I just, I wonder if it’s not, could potentially be influenced by that.
Yeah, it’s very interesting that you mentioned that, Karen, because, you know, there’s some disagreement in the D&D world about whether, you know, does a Rakshasa fit as a demon?
Because the alignment is lawful evil.
And that’s more typically the alignment of devils, not demons.
Okay.
So I think there is maybe some influence of the debonair devil that made it into that.
Smurf Satan.
Right, yes.
And for real, yeah.
I mean, they are, as a gaming encounter, my experiences with them have been, they’re very dangerous.
They’re very tricky.
They sort of fit that trickster role, which actually is something I wanted to talk about a little bit.
like jinn well like well and then of course jinn another great example of a monster or a creature that the western conception is i dream of genie and aladdin but in the islamic world they’re part of the quran they’re you know they’re made from smokeless fire people people widely believe in them you can find youtube videos of people thinking they’ve encountered them
But again, co-workers have talked to me about folklore.
We should actually talk about where they come from textually as well as mythically.
But I would say within present day folklore, there’s these belief…
The way it was described to me was someone who was alive and has too strong of an attachment to other living people.
When they pass, it might cause them to become a Rakshasa, which was not anything I ever saw in…
any of the writing.
So I thought that was an interesting sort of folk belief that you could end up becoming a rikshasa.
But I don’t know if you’ve run into that, but I am interested in, I guess, let me get to a question, which is what are the documents?
What are the written documents that bring us the story of these creatures?
Yeah, so the Rakshasa goes way back in Indian history to the very earliest text, the Rig Veda, which is about 1500 BC.
And it’s cognate with Avestan language.
So there’s some overlap there with the Zoroastrian.
religion but i think the earliest um recorded um you know that you find it in the literature is in the rig veda and they’re almost like spells that are cast or they’re like entities that are summoned by sorcerers to um to harass the vedic practitioners to disrupt the sacrifice
So it seems pretty clear that they are, you know, as the Aryans were migrating south into India and they were encountering the native Dravidians of the tribal folks who weren’t happy with them coming into their territory, these nomads following their flocks and practicing their Vedic sacrifices to their gods.
So they were.
the sorcerers would send rakshasas.
They were actually called rakshas in the earliest literature.
And the word has a dual meaning.
It can mean a guardian or one that causes damage or injures.
So they’re guarding their stuff and they injure those that are impeding or coming into their territory.
Yeah, that makes me think of early demons in Greek mythology.
as well, that they could be this kind of guardian angel character or demons as well, that demons weren’t necessarily evil.
That’s the Western perception that we have today.
We should probably explain what a Veda is as well for listeners.
Well, that’s the collection of texts.
So Vedic is an adjective that refers to the Vedas.
And these are texts, hymns, chants, mantras, not even more poem than narrative story.
And so the earliest Veda, the Rig Veda, as I said, dates back to about 1500.
And then you have additional Vedas that are composed over the course of the next half a century or so.
And then you start getting commentaries on the Vedas.
The Brahmanas are commentaries on the Vedas.
And then Upanishads are commentaries on the Brahmanas.
And the literature builds and builds.
Nothing really gets superseded.
So the Vedas are kind of the foundation.
So where did these sit?
I think, again, unfortunately, I’m limited to sort of my Western upbringing, but thinking about religious texts.
Are these all considered to be sacred?
I know some of them are for moral instruction, but I also know that it’s a little different from, say, Judeo-Christian world because…
Like, growing up in the South in an evangelical community, my parents thought it was really borderline blasphemous to name your kid Jesus, right?
But yet, in Indian culture, you constantly meet people who have been named after a variety of gods and mythic figures.
Interesting.
There’s something different, substantially different about the way that the people of today engage with this material beyond just a matter of moral guidance and faith.
It’s like, again, a very lived experience.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
Well, yeah, there’s fundamental differences between monotheistic and polytheistic cultures.
And you can’t even really say that India is strictly monotheist because they’re kind of like both end rather than either or.
And that’s why they kind of absorb.
They’re very…
amenable to innovation and to new things but it doesn’t mean that the old go goes away you know so the vedas is still the foundation you kind of like you know how the new testament for christians sort of like okay the old testament’s still there but like the new testament is new it’s the it’s the the it kind of supersedes it almost whereas in in in the hindu worldview and there isn’t just one hindu worldview any more than there’s you know anyone
Christian world or that kind of thing.
But there is that kind of overarching sense that Hinduism has room for all the gods.
Like this is our God that we’re worshiping today or our main God or whatever, but that can change in the course of the calendar.
And again, it’s a very pluralistic world view.
And I think if my reading is correct, that even the very concept that Hinduism is one thing is more of a, this is sort of a colonialist interpretation of the local religions.
Like this is all Hinduism, but that’s not actually necessarily how it was at the time.
And I don’t know how that’s evolved since the hated British have been kicked out, you
yeah but that’s that’s kind of how it is with religion in general you know the religion is a construct of the of the academy you know and it’s it’s a it’s a concept that’s very useful in comparing things that are similar but you know the the danger is to um you know neglect the differences in favor of the similarity
So with the Rakshasas, are they found in some of the sects of Hinduism?
I’m thinking like Krishna consciousness.
Well, yeah, so once you get into the period of the epics, so the Mahabharata and the Ramayana were composed in between like the second century BC through the second century CE.
And they’re kind of like the Iliad and the Odyssey.
They’re foundational texts that have these different characters, Rama and Krishna, the gods kind of come down to take part in human affairs.
And the Ramayana is actually full of rakshasas.
So the episode of Kolchak, when he goes to the museum and the museum curator guy is telling him what a rakshasa is, he says, well, he’s a disciple of Ravana.
The Rakshasa is the disciple of Ravana.
Ravana, whose deeds were so horrible, he stopped the sun and the moon in their course.
And that’s actually in this pronunciation.
It’s Ravana.
And so Ravana is like the king of the Rakshasas.
The whole point of the Ramayana is that Vishnu, one of the great Hindu gods, incarnates on earth as Rama so he can kill Ravana.
because Ravana has received a boon from Brahma, who’s this great creator God that kind of gives out boons to demons that impress him.
He causes a lot of trouble that way because he’s very powerful, but he’s kind of portrayed as not the wisest.
So he gave Ravana a boon that he couldn’t be killed by gods or demons or anything.
But Brahma says, but what about humans?
And Ravana says, humans are beneath contempt.
I don’t have to worry about them.
So Vishnu incarnates as Rama, who is a human.
So kind of like the man God, God incarnate.
And so the whole story is about how Rama overcomes Ravana.
And this is the little Lord of the Rings.
No man can slay him.
Exactly.
Very cool.
It is.
And that story is really interesting.
So in that story, Ravana, he’s an antagonist.
I shouldn’t say he’s a villain.
He’s an antagonist.
And there’s some aspects to him that seem a little tragic.
And this kind of comes to, I guess, much like with the djinn, although…
they’re very different entities.
It’s not always easy to pin down whether a Rakshasa is a bad or good, like, I don’t, do they have an inherent morality?
I don’t know.
It’s like, it seems like it depends on the story that they’re being covered.
Well, it is interesting because initially, so kind of the short answer to what is a raksasa is it’s a malevolent, flesh-eating, shape-changing human.
Always a meat eater.
Yeah, yeah.
Good point.
And not just meat.
I mean, I’m a meat eater too, but they eat humans.
That’s their favorite.
That’s their delicacy.
It’s not cannibalism if you’re not one.
Just bad humans or all humans?
Tasty.
Just humans.
That’s right.
Human bean juice.
Initially, they go after the Brahmin priests that are performing the sacrifice.
But then later on, they’re just kind of, I mean, in a way, they’re a personification of the bad things that can happen.
You know, they bring disease.
They, you know, if a woman has a miscarriage, well, that was because of a rakshasa.
And so then there’s ways to protect against them.
But then they kind of, you know, there’s a lot of demons in the Hindu world.
You know, they have pashachas and yakshas and nagas and all kinds of nasty things.
Well, I’m curious about how you can protect yourself.
So with things like amulets or rituals.
Epitropics.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so early on, because the rakshas, as they were called in the earlier texts, they were interfering with the sacrifice, Agni, the god of fire, who the sacrifice is made to, he was one of the most popular ways of, you’d invoke Agni to burn up the rakshasas, and you might invoke Indra or one of the other gods.
There’s also there are amulets.
There’s an herb that I can never remember the name of it.
I kind of think of it as like Ayurvedic king’s foil.
That’s what I was going to say.
It’s good for anything, right?
And so rakshasas were taken over in Buddhism as well.
And one of the ways of warding them off in the Lotus Sutra is to chant the names of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara.
So, you know, mantras can be effective.
Fire can be effective.
The crossbow, we should probably talk about the crossbow, the blessed crossbow bolt.
because that’s well we should because it shows up in in in the cold shack that’s really funny okay a crossbow is the method prescribed in legend by which one may destroy a rakshasa with arrows blessed by the divine brahma himself when the little man was trying to kill a rakshasa or thought he was
Yeah, and I think another little clue as to where he got that is when the museum curator tells him that the crossbow bolt that’s blessed by Brahma himself, there’s a weapon called the Brahmastra, which Rama uses against Ravana to kill him.
And so you have these celestial weapons.
Each of the gods has their own celestial weapon.
Shiva has a trident.
Vishnu has a discus.
Brahma has this thing.
It’s kind of like a fireball in a way.
You can see why Gary Gygax would love this stuff, because it’s got elevated weapons to deal with elevated dangers.
That’s right, that’s right.
So yeah, I mean, the crossbow just seemed like something that got pulled out of thin air, but because Rama uses a bow, and he affixes the brahmastra, the weapon of Brahma to the bow, and he uses that to kill Ravana.
So that would probably be the most effective way of protecting yourself against the Rakshasa, if you have one of those blessed crossbow bolts or Brahma’s weapon.
Neat.
Go ahead, Karen.
Sorry, go ahead.
I was just going to ask us, or…
Rakshasas, are they invariably male or can they be female or are they genderless?
So when we’re introduced to the Rakshasas in the Ramayana,
They are male and female.
And there’s different classes.
There can be good rakshasas and bad rakshasas.
There’s attractive rakshasas and deformed and hideous rakshasas.
So it really kind of mirrors human society in a lot of ways.
And I think that that’s kind of the point.
It’s like the shadow side or the mirror image, the negative image of human society.
And can they shapeshift like demons?
They can.
So there are Rakshasas by birth.
So there’s a kind of complicated genealogy that’s given.
And both the father and the mother’s side tie back to Brahma eventually, which kind of makes sense because he’s the creator, but in different ways.
And so initially the Rakshasas were, they seemed like they were kind of neutral, but then something got out of balance with…
I hate to say it, but it was on the mother’s side.
Something kind of seemed to have gone wrong.
And so this Rakshasa mother gave birth, but then she abandoned her maternal duties because she was drawn by her libidinous side.
So she basically went to have more sex and left the baby in the mountain.
Apparently the father was fine with it too, because he’s never…
He’s like, where’s Junior, you know?
Anyway, so the baby’s left crying in the mountains.
And Shiva and Parvati, so Shiva, one of the great, you know, one of the three great Hindu gods, he comes by with his wife, Parvati, and they see this crying baby.
And out of pity, they make the baby the same age as its mother.
And then Shiva, not content with that, makes him immortal.
and gives him this flying city.
So it’s like all these boons bestowed out of pity on this little Rakshasa baby.
And then Parvati ups the ante and extends this to the whole Rakshasa race.
All Rakshasas will be born the moment they’re conceived and they’ll be the same age as their mother.
So I came across some stuff when I was researching this episode that surprised me.
And I, I don’t know, this seems like a relatively new thing.
So apparently since about 2009, since the Sri Lankan civil war, there has been something called the Ravana movement in Sri Lanka, which, which is sort of inverting the Raksasa into a heroic figure.
And it specifically of interest to me,
not just because we’re covering Marxist, but because it also seems to be tying into that really popular alt-archaeology idea that the Vedas are talking about, an ancient civilization that had flying cities and nuclear bombs and lots of stuff that I think is just mythology, but everybody wants to do their Erich von Daniken number on it.
But it…
In Sri Lanka right now, this is a really important political movement.
I know that’s a little bit outside of what we normally talk about, but this is a direct monster crossover.
Can you help us unpack that?
Or do you know much about that?
Oh, definitely.
Yeah.
So Sri Lanka is a predominantly Buddhist country.
And Buddhism took over a lot of the demons from Hinduism.
So, you know, the gods of Hinduism were opposed to Buddhism.
And so if you think about it sociologically, like the Shaivites and the Vishnuvites were devotees of Shiva and Vishnu.
They were competing for patronage, for royal patronage and for converts.
And so they kind of wrote polemics against each other.
You know, one of Vishnu’s avatars was the Buddha, and he was sent to teach this false doctrine, so kind of vilifying Buddhism.
And then Buddhism wrote their own, some of the early tantras that shows Buddhist deities trampling on the Hindu deities.
So then you have, so if Ravana is an enemy of the Hindus, then maybe he’s our friend.
So they definitely co-op Ravana early on.
The Lankan Vantara Sutra and early Mahayana Sutra features Ravana.
He’s receiving this teaching from the Buddha.
Like I mentioned, the Lotus Sutra, which has Rakshasas that are Rakshasas and Rakshasis.
So that’s the female form.
And they become protectors in Buddhism.
And so, yeah, Ravana is…
Even in southern India.
So in parts of India, Ravana is burned in effigy every year to celebrate the victory of Rama over Ravana.
But as you go further south, Ravana is more of a culture hero.
And especially in Sri Lanka, he’s the first emperor and he defends the island against the invaders.
So yeah, definitely an inversion there.
There’s a number of inversions that go on as these tales evolve.
That is amazing.
Also, and this is a little irreverent, but I can’t help but think about this sounds like they settled some of their scores with rap battles.
It sounds like, you know, if you like that poem, take this, you know, here’s another one.
Here’s an epic poem for you.
So, yeah, that’s kind of neat.
I mean, obviously.
I’m sure these things probably carried a little bloodshed with them, too.
But it is kind of nifty to leave not just bloodshed, but also an epic poem.
Again, this is people’s lived experience.
I always have thought of these as being mythological creatures, and it was really surprising how present and right now a lot of these experiences and stories are.
So I want to be careful to not diminish this in the midst of mythology.
This is things that people deal with right now.
Speaking of which, I mean, obviously, my co-workers’ stories aside, do you know how…
the Rakshasa plays out in present day culture outside of the religious ecosystem?
Are people, do people have Rakshasa stories the same way people have demonic encounter stories, angelic and, uh, djinn type stories?
Have you, have you seen anything like that in your travels?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, um, you know, India is obviously a very religious country.
Um, you know, there’s, there’s a, I think, um,
80 to 80, over 80% are, you know, devout in some form or another, and some 40% believe in demons.
So they have similar experiences.
It’s not quite as high as in America, where it’s like, what, like 60 or 70% believe in the devil, definitely something that you hear stories about.
And sometimes they’re kind of interchangeable sometimes, like Rakshasas, Vaitalas, Yakshas, they sort of blend into each other.
You know, there’s a lot of belief in ghosts.
You know, there’s a big
a big belief in the ancestors so when someone dies they become a preta or a ghost and then if they’re properly taken care of after death if you know the proper ceremonies are performed then the praetor eventually becomes a peter or an ancestor and they go to the land of the ancestors but then you also have the doctrine of karma which you know they don’t see a contradiction there
They kind of make it all work.
And like I said earlier, instead of either or, it’s to sort of end both.
But I wanted to get back to something that Karen said.
I didn’t actually finish answering the question in terms of shape-shifting.
So it seems that the born Rakshasa, along with most gods and demons, has the ability to shape-shift.
one can become a rakshasa through a curse.
And I think you mentioned that towards the beginning of the podcast, Blake, being cursed to be a rakshasa.
And this happens quite a lot.
There’s a couple of almost humorous stories in the Ramayana where Rama comes across, Rama and his brother Lakshma come across this horrible, huge, like one looks like a blemy, like a cyclops blemy with the face and the body.
The face and the torso, yeah, yeah.
That’s right.
That’s right.
And so they have this big battle and then they chop off its arms and then suddenly it says, oh, you must be Rama.
I just remembered, you know, when I was cursed, I was told the curse would be lifted when Rama came by and chopped off my arm.
So thank you.
You’ve lifted the curse.
Those ones are stuck with their form.
They don’t get to shape change.
They’re transformed into horrific, you know, man-eating beasts, and they’re stuck that way until their curse is lifted.
But thankfully, there usually is an end to the curse.
Earlier, you had name-dropped Vitaly, and I am on a bit of a female monster kick at the moment for something I’m working on.
I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about her.
Oh, yeah, I could tell you a lot about Vitality.
I first encountered her through Trungpa Rinpoche, the founder of Naropa University.
um he kind of i feel like he sort of discovered a new form of a tally of a forearmed form um you know in the tradition she is um she appears in tantras when a group of yoginis a group of eight yoginis that go back they appear in the tibetan book of the dead they tally kind of
In the course of the development of the religion, she kind of becomes an independent goddess, and she becomes quite wrathful in the tantric version that is presented by Trungpa Rinpoche.
She rides on a donkey.
She’s related to Sri Devi.
Probably if you’re researching monstrous goddesses, you’ve probably heard of Sri Devi, also known as Paldan Lama in her Tibetan name.
Yeah, I don’t know too much at this point.
But, yeah, this is all interesting.
I mean, there’s just many, many female monsters and they do often just seem to have a different flavour to the male monsters, especially when it comes to demons.
And so, yeah, I was just curious to hear more about her.
And, yeah, I mean, there are a lot of, I think, variations on a theme too across different traditions.
You see the same character but just in a different costume, different name.
Yeah, that’s one of the interesting things about the Tibetan protectors is they originate in India.
And for the most part, I mean, there’s worldly protectors and then there’s the kind of super mundane protectors that are typically, they come out of Indian Tantra.
So, you know, and then they have many manifestations.
And I think that’s one of the most fascinating things is how different can a manifestation be and still be considered to be ultimately Tara or Avalokiteshvara or what have you.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
In preparing the episode, I came across the story of Puttana, who is a rickshasa.
And this is amazing to me.
So she’s going to try to kill Krishna when he’s a baby.
And she offers him poisonous breast milk.
But then Krishna drains her dry and kills her, which is just the most wicked…
Cool.
I mean, look, I, you know, I just, I love a good mythology story, but the, I’m going to kill you with my breast milk and then you get sucked dry like a husk.
That’s just, ah, it’s wicked.
So cool.
One thing I really like about stories like that is that that’s not the end of the story for Putana is because then she is resurrected and she becomes a devotee of Krishna and a protector of his teachings.
Well, she knows he’s a badass.
I mean, when we asked you on, I felt like it’s a big pie to bite into, right?
There’s a lot here.
And I feel like the many gods of Hinduism in the many, many stories, I feel so inadequately informed.
Like, it was only fairly recently I heard that, like, I realized that The Legend of Bagger Vance is a retelling of the Bhagavad Gita.
And it’s like, what?
What, a golf movie?
It’s like there’s so much Hindu culture that I’ve run into but not recognized it for what it was.
You know, it’s just kind of… And then…
There was this period in the 60s and 70s when, well, that’s been actually multiple times, I think, going back to theosophy.
And a lot of Western esotericism sort of dips into Indian religions as well.
And I say India, but that whole region.
Excuse me.
But let’s assume that I think it’s a fair assumption that most of our audience here is not well-versed in this material.
contextually, these creatures, the raksasa, fit into this Hindu culture and this Hindu religion, I guess is what I should say.
I’m just trying to figure out where they fit.
And again, analogy-wise, compared to angels and demons and jinn and some of these other not-quite-gods, definitely not-quite-people, that sort of…
magical role i just i’m trying to place them narratively in the context of this mythology i guess that’s what i’m trying to do what what role do they play within most of these narratives my sense is that the ramayana is kind of like the the peak you know it’s it’s where you have you know rakshasas are the main antagonists whether it’s ravana himself
And that’s Ravana.
Right.
Exactly.
OK, cool.
Yeah.
So you’ve got King Ravana and then you’ve got all these other players that are fascinating.
I mean, so many fascinating incidents.
You have Ravana’s sister who, you know, she kind of kicks things off by she sees Rama and she falls in love with them.
And Rama kind of teases her.
And then because she’s.
She’s out of place in her, you know, a woman shouldn’t be so forward.
They actually cut off her nose and her ears and send her away.
And that was like a standard punishment back in medieval times if a woman committed adultery or attempted to.
And then she tells her brother, hey, you know, guess what happened?
But it’s not Ravana’s desire to defend his sister.
It’s because she describes Rama’s wife Sita as like the most beautiful woman in the world.
And Ravana…
And she knew she would excite Ravana’s lust and he would go after and grab Sita.
So this whole story is how the god came to earth, became a man to defeat this undefeatable Rakshasa.
He’s the king of the Rakshasas.
He can’t be defeated.
I have the sense that after he was defeated, that the Rakshasas kind of, they lost a lot of their clout.
I think you just explained the story better than what I had read.
That’s the key there.
It cannot be defeated by anybody, by a god.
So take the form of a man and then suddenly, you know, that’s, of course, that’s a common motif within mythology or within religions.
The god who takes on human form and then through that gets a transcendent power.
So that’s neat.
That’s really cool.
Wow.
It’s such a complicated story.
And earlier, Eric, you mentioned meditation.
Do these creatures come into meditation in any way, shape or form?
Well, they certainly do when they’re incorporated into the Buddhist tradition.
You know, as I said, the Rakshasas kind of become protectors and protectors are important to help the practitioner to maintain their discipline and
know traditionally they um are invoked to destroy obstacles so um you know it gets into kind of esoteric territory where you know one um you know the one of the um
One of the big tantric figures, Yamantaka, the ender of death, one of his forms is rakshasa-headed.
And something about that wrathfulness is necessary in order to cut through our stubborn delusions and egotism.
Well, I want to say you’ve done a fantastic job of answering pretty much every question I had about Rakshasas and giving us a really great context, including the very important information for how to kill them.
That’s obviously…
Yes, very necessary.
We should have, throughout the entire course of this show, always…
Maybe monsters aren’t real, you know, but just in case, here’s how you kill them.
Pascal’s wager.
That would have been really smart.
In the various depictions of Rick Shasa that are out there, and obviously I’ll put some pictures in the show notes and some links in the show notes.
Is there any that you feel like is your favorite?
Where did you find your go-to Rick Shasa story or image?
Yeah, I think that, so Ravana is a 10-headed, originally his name is Dashagriva, the 10-headed or the 10-necked one.
And he’s named Ravana after he, in his haughtiness, he tries to take on Shiva and Shiva kind of like presses him down with his foot and Dashagriva starts just screaming.
And so he’s like, oh, you scream really nice.
I think I’ll call you Ravana, which means the howler, you know, or the…
The ravening one.
But yeah, I think the image of the 10-headed Ravana, because at one point to get his power, he cuts his heads off one by one and offers them into the fire.
And then when he’s about to cut the last head off, then Brahma comes and he says, wow, that was some amazing austerities there.
I’m going to give you a boon.
And thankfully, one of the boons is I’ll restore your heads.
Nice.
Yeah.
It’s like wishing for more wishes at the last thing, right?
You’ve done a great job, Eric.
Thank you for coming to talk to us about this fascinating creature.
Very fun topic.
And yeah, I mean, so much more to learn too, I think.
Eric, you have listened to the show, so you’re familiar with our signature question, but what’s your favorite monster?
Yeah, so yeah, I’ve definitely got a favorite, and it’s related to Vitaly.
It is the Vatala.
Nice.
There you go.
And I do feel, you know, I wish I could have had, you know, I delivered a paper on Vitaly at the Gods and Monsters Conference.
So I should have been able to answer your question a little bit better, Karen.
And I haven’t, I didn’t prepare a, like the elevator version of who is Vitaly.
So, you know.
No worries.
That was a, yeah, that came out of left field.
Now I was just curious, and I’m going to have to look into the character more myself.
But for audience members who may have missed your talk, what is the Vateli?
So Vateli is the feminine form of Vatela.
And so when I started looking into this, I was like, well, why is she called that?
And so Vatela translates as vampire.
And it’s actually a mistranslation by Sir Richard Francis Burton when he translated a number of texts.
He sure did.
He’s 1001 Ravian Nights, famously.
This is the 25 Tales of the Vatala, and he chose vampire.
and um you know it’s kind of been um kind of stuck in the crawl a lot of sanskritists because it’s it’s not a very good translation it doesn’t really represent what the vetala is or does but it got me really interested in trying to find out
you know more about that what what is a vetella what are the tails um you know what what can they do and and they’re pretty fascinating uh creatures um and just like the rakshasa they’re not you can’t really say it’s any one thing because if you look at one period in the literature it looks like this you know it looks maybe like um you know almost like a zombie which is how some scholars prefer to translate vetella so again another monster
You know, what is a zombie?
It’s something that just kind of does manual labor.
You know, a sorcerer can kind of command it to do this or that.
But later in the literature, Vatelas are almost like djinn.
They’re almost like, you know, there’s the 25 stories of the Vatela where this king has to retrieve this body that’s inhabited by a Vatela.
and bring it to the sorcerer because he’s made a contract.
And every time the king says a word to the Vitella, it goes flying back to the tree off the king’s back, and he has to go back and grab it again.
And so the Vitella tells stories to the king.
to pass the time.
And at the end of it, he tells the king that you have to give a true answer to this question if you know the answer.
If you don’t, your head will split in pieces.
But the king also knows that if he says anything, that the hell is going to go back to the tree.
So he’s kind of in this bind.
So I won’t spoil the end of the story, but it’s more than just a zombie.
It’s a very interesting character.
Like I said, more like a jinn.
Wow.
Yeah, I’m wondering about that translation then.
Is it just this fellow thought it was a cognitive vampire by Tali just because of the sounds in the word?
Yeah, it’s actually…
It’s not exactly known.
So Burton was, he knew Bram Stoker.
It seems like there was some cross-pollination there, but there’s no- Right, some influence, yeah.
Yeah, there’s no smoking gun yet.
People have been looking for it, and that’s one of my projects at this point.
I don’t expect to find it, but I do intend to kind of summarize the scholarship on it and see what it looks like.
And does it make sense to even translate this?
Maybe some things shouldn’t be translated.
Yeah.
That’s what Burton’s wife thought.
He has one of the coolest tombs.
His tomb is crafted after the style of an Arabic traveling tent.
It’s really beautiful.
Wow, where is it?
Sir Richard and Lady Burton are buried in the churchyard of St. Mary Magdalene Roman Catholic Church, Mortlake, in the London borough of Richmond-on-Thames.
I’ll put a link in the show notes to give you more information and to give you photos of that amazing tomb.
But I know that his wife was a little annoyed when Burton got around.
He got around and she burned a lot of his stuff and tried to suppress a lot of his writing stuff because there’s a lot of sexual content to his work.
That was not really a little, little.
inappropriate for the victorian times right but uh people people have been getting up to this sex stuff for nearly a hundred years now and uh so anyway that that’s another story but uh yeah yeah very interesting uh beautiful tomb very interesting character and a great answer thank you so much eric
Yes.
Yeah.
And keep in touch with us about the research you’re doing as well.
Yeah, for sure.
Find out more.
Thank you so much indeed for coming to talk to us because you’ve helped erase a big pile of ignorance.
That is a useful thing to do.
And I appreciate it.
This was a lot of fun.
I really appreciate being on the show.
Thank you.
Have a great night.
Have a good weekend.
Take care.
Good night, guys.
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 academic researcher Eric Sabinier introducing us to the fascinating monsters called Rakshasas.
Check the show notes for lots of additional reading if you want to continue your Rakshasa recon.
Hey, a little bit of bookkeeping.
No pun intended.
Karen’s new book has dropped.
It’s called Beyond Words, How We Learn, Use, and Lose Language.
What is language really?
Where did it come from?
And how did we figure it out?
How do babies go from babbling to speaking full sentences?
Why can some people juggle multiple languages while others wrestle with one?
How does language work?
And what happens when it doesn’t?
With sharp insight and a sense of humor, Stolzno dives into the strange and endlessly fascinating world of language and the mind.
From animal communication to AI, wild children to word slips, and first words to last, this book takes you deep into the science of psycholinguistics where nothing is ever simple and everything speaks volumes.
Packed with pop culture, real-life cases, and eye-opening experiments, Beyond Words reveals how we learn, use, and lose language, and what it all says about being human.
If you’ve ever fumbled for a word or feared forgetting your own name, this thoughtful, surprising book is for you.
Check out the new Monster Talk Live, June 13th at 8 p.m. Eastern.
You go to youtube.com forward slash monster talk and watch me and Karen and Matt Baxter tackle the Chinnery Backseat Ghost, a very famous ghost photograph, which we’re going to dig into.
8 p.m. June 13th, youtube.com forward slash monster talk.
Monster Talk’s theme music is by Pete Stealing Monkeys.
I don’t always get to talk about Kolchak and Dungeons & Dragons on this show, but it always cheers me up when it’s appropriate to do so.
This has been a Monster House presentation.
Decadence, moral decline.
I see, in other words, they might be getting their marching orders right now.

The post S05E34 – Rakshasas appeared first on MonsterTalk.

Hosts: Blake Smith, Karen Stollznow
Special Co-Host: Matt Baxter

On the morning of February 9, 1855, residents across south Devon, England, discovered strange hoof-shaped tracks in the snow. The prints – about 4 inches long, 3 inches wide, and spaced roughly 8 inches apart in single file – appeared to have been left by a biped with a donkey-like hoof. Reports came in from more than 30 locations across the county. Within days, the Illustrated London News published a letter from a correspondent calling himself “South Devon” that would define the legend for generations: a continuous 100-mile trail, identical prints in every parish, passage over rooftops and through haystacks, a crossing of the two-mile-wide River Exe. The Devil, some locals whispered, had walked through Devon.

In this episode, Blake, Karen, and Matt dig into the original sources, trace how the story was embellished over 170 years of retelling, and examine the many theories – from wood mice to Romani conspiracies – that have been offered to explain the Great Devon Mystery.

Blake reads the full text of the “South Devon” letter to the Illustrated London News (February 24, 1855), the single most influential account of the Devil’s Footprints. The correspondent – later identified as William D’Urban, age 19, of Newport House, Countess Wear – claimed Canadian wilderness tracking experience and dismissed all natural explanations.

Key claims from D’Urban’s letter:
– Prints 4″ x 2.75″, spaced 8″ apart in perfect single file
– “Exactly the same size” in every parish
– Trail exceeded 100 miles
– Crossed rooftops, 14-foot walls, and the Exe estuary
– Snow “removed… clear, as if cut with a diamond or branded with a hot iron”

When you go back to the full range of contemporary sources (Feb 13 – Mar 10, 1855), the picture is considerably less dramatic than the legend:

The prints were NOT uniform. Sizes ranged from 1.5″ to 2.75″ wide and 3.5″ to 4″ long. The stride varied from 8 to 16 inches depending on location.

They did NOT all appear in a single night. The prints at Topsham appeared on February 13 – five days after the main event – and headed straight to the local church vestry door, which Theo Brown interpreted as a possible anti-Puseyite prank.

The trail was NOT straight. The Exeter & Plymouth Gazette (Feb 17, 1855) explicitly describes the prints as “alternate like the steps of a man, and would be included between two parallel lines six inches apart.” Tracks in Lympstone meandered through gardens “with inexpressible activity.”

The prints were NOT identical. Contemporary drawings show considerable variation. Some were cloven, some whole. Some showed claw marks, some didn’t. The Reverend Musgrave immediately wrote to correct D’Urban’s oversimplified drawing.

Nobody tracked the prints for 100 miles. The longest verified continuous trail was about 5 miles (Dawlish churchyard to Oaklands). The “100-mile” figure is D’Urban’s estimate based on aggregating reports from different towns.

The river crossing is unsupported. No witness reported following prints to the shore and finding them continuing on the other side. The Exe was frozen that winter – a party was held on the ice – so any animal could have walked across.

The haystack story is second-hand. The single most dramatic anomaly – prints leading to a haystack with an undisturbed surface and resuming on the other side – comes from Musgrave, who heard it from “a scientific acquaintance.”

1855: Original newspaper flap. Local and national press coverage over about four weeks.
1890:Notes & Queries publishes a retrospective 35 years after the event, collecting increasingly folkloric recollections (baying hounds, crutch-stick marks).
1919: Charles Fort includes the case in The Book of the Damned, producing the memorable line: “My own acceptance is that not less than a thousand one-legged kangaroos, each shod with a very small horseshoe, could have marked the snow of Devonshire.”
1929: Rupert T. Gould covers the case in Oddities, going back to primary sources and adding the Kerguelen Island parallel.
1950s: Theo Brown rediscovers the Ellacombe papers at Clyst St George parish church – the only surviving manuscript collection from the original investigation – and publishes findings in the Transactions of the Devonshire Association.
1959: Frank Edwards includes it in Stranger Than Science.
1990s: Mike Dash compiles the definitive source collection; Joe Nickell publishes a skeptical analysis in Skeptical Inquirer.

With each retelling, certain claims hardened into “facts”: the 100-mile continuous trail, the identical prints, the perfectly straight line. The contemporary record tells a more complicated – and more interesting – story.

Strong contenders:
– Wood mice and hopping rodents – Zoologist Alfred Leutscher demonstrated that the wood mouse (Apodemus sylvaticus) leaves V-shaped hopping tracks in snow that closely match the Devon prints in size and spacing. Thomas Fox proposed the rat theory as early as March 1855, with detailed drawings.
– Cats – The only person known to have been outside on the night of Feb 8-9 was a Dawlish farmer, who watched his cat’s prints half-melt in rain and refreeze “into the shape of a small hoof, with still the impression of the cat’s claws enclosed.”
– Donkeys and ponies – Theo Brown noted that donkeys “are the only animals that plant their feet in an almost perfect single line.” Several contemporary sources explicitly compare the prints to a donkey’s shoe.
– Thaw and refreeze distortion – Snow fell around midnight, followed by rain and thaw, then a hard frost at dawn. Anthropologist John Napier’s work on how bear and yak prints become “Yeti tracks” through the same process applies here at smaller scale.
– Hoaxes (specifically anti-Puseyite pranks) – Theo Brown proposed that some tracks, particularly those at Topsham (which appeared 5 days late and targeted a controversial High Church vicar’s vestry door), were deliberate provocations in a Low Church vs. High Church feud then raging in Devon.
– Multiple causes collected into a single story – Joe Nickell’s “contagion” theory: once the first weird tracks were noticed and publicized, everyone went looking in their own gardens and found their own odd prints, which were then folded into the narrative.

Weaker contenders:
– Badger (Richard Owen’s theory, based on a drawing, not fieldwork)
– Birds with iced-up feet
– Otters
– Hares and rabbits
– Escaped kangaroo (Rev. Musgrave admitted he invented this to calm his parishioners)
– An escaped balloon dragging a rope or grapnel
– UFO laser measuring device
– A sea creature that came ashore (Gould’s theory)
– Romani people on elaborate “measure-stilts” (from Manfri Wood’s 1973 autobiography In the Life of a Romany Gypsy)

In March 2009, Jill Wade of Woolsery, North Devon, discovered hoof-like tracks in her snow-covered garden. The prints measured about 5 inches long with a stride of 11-17 inches and ran for 60-70 feet in a single line. Biologist Graham Inglis of the Centre for Fortean Zoology examined them and concluded they were likely made by a rabbit or hare, though he acknowledged they matched historical descriptions of the Devil’s Footprints.

William D’Urban (1832-1928) – “South Devon.” Wrote the most influential letter about the prints at age 19. Later became first curator of the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter. His confident, dogmatic account is the source of nearly every dramatic claim associated with the case.

Rev. G.M. Musgrave – Vicar of Exmouth. The most careful first-hand observer – measured prints with a ruler, recorded precise spacing. Promoted the kangaroo theory from his pulpit while privately admitting he didn’t believe it. Immediately corrected D’Urban’s drawing as inaccurate.

Rev. H.T. Ellacombe (1790-1885) – Vicar of Clyst St George. Compiled the only surviving manuscript collection, including drawings, letters, and even samples of excrement found alongside the tracks (which he sent to Richard Owen and never heard back about).

Richard Owen (1804-1892) – Famous naturalist and founder of the Natural History Museum. Diagnosed the prints as badger tracks based entirely on a drawing sent to him. Never visited Devon.

Charles Fort (1874-1932) – Collector of anomalous phenomena. His Book of the Damned (1919) preserved and popularized the story for modern audiences.

Rupert T. Gould (1890-1948) – Naval officer and investigator of curiosities. His Oddities (1929) provides the best early modern analysis, going back to primary sources.

Theo Brown (1914-1993) – Devon folklorist. Rediscovered the Ellacombe papers, demonstrated that the trail was not continuous, and proposed the donkey and anti-Puseyite hoax theories. Also important in the Hairy Hands of Dartmoor legend.

Mike Dash – Contributing editor to Fortean Times. Compiled the definitive 80-page source collection, The Devil’s Hoofmarks: Source Material on the Great Devon Mystery of 1855, published in Fortean Studies. An extraordinary piece of primary research.

Joe Nickell (1944-2024) – Skeptical investigator. Published “The Devil’s Footprints: Solving a Classic Mystery” in Skeptical Inquirer (Jan/Feb 1996), proposing the “contagion” theory of multiple natural causes collected into a single narrative. Matt’s introduction to the case.

Primary & Historical Sources:
– Devil’s Footprints – Wikipedia
– Charles Fort – Wikipedia
– Richard Owen – Wikipedia
– Rupert T. Gould – Wikipedia
– Kerguelen Islands – Wikipedia (site of 1840 parallel case)

Mentioned in the Episode:
– Can You Draw a Bike From Memory? (Wired) – On the unreliability of drawing from memory
– “Footprints in the Sand” poem – origins (NPR)
– “Monkey Christ” restoration by Cecilia Gimenez – Wikipedia
– Puseyism (Oxford Movement) – Wikipedia
– Never Cry Wolf (1983 film) – Wikipedia

Further Reading:
– John Napier – Wikipedia – His work on thaw distortion of Yeti tracks applies directly to this case
– Hairy Hands of Dartmoor – Wikipedia – Another Devon mystery investigated by Theo Brown

This was a collaborative episode – no single primary investigator, though all three hosts researched independently. Major sources were Mike Dash’s extraordinary compendium The Devil’s Hoofmarks (published in Fortean Studies, Vol. 1) and the late Joe Nickell’s article in Skeptical Inquirer.

Special thanks to Mike Dash for compiling 80 pages of primary source material on what might seem like a minor curiosity – and making it possible for anyone to trace exactly how a puzzling local event became an enduring legend.

If you enjoy the show, please consider supporting us on Patreon. Your support helps keep the lights on and the research flowing. Thank you to all our patrons!

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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From the Western Luminary and Family Newspaper for Devon, Cornwall, Somerset, and Dorset.
13th February, 1855.
Dullish.
Mysterious.
Since the recent snowstorms, some animal has left marks on the snow that have driven a great many inhabitants from their propriety and caused an uproar of commotion among the inhabitants in general.
The markings, to say the least about them, are very singular.
The footprint, if footprint it be, is about three and a half inches long by two and a half inches wide, exactly in shape like a donkey’s hoof.
The length of the stride is about a foot apart, very regular, and is evidently done by some two-footed animal.
What renders the matter more difficult of solution is that gardens with walls 12 feet high have been trodden over without any damage having been done to the shrubs and walks.
The animal must evidently have jumped over the walls.
It has also left marks all over the churchyard and between the graves.
Many parties have traced the print for miles, but as yet without any solution to the mystery.
Several of the very superstitious draw long faces and say it must be the marks of old.
Others conjecture that it must be some monkey which has escaped a traveling menagerie with something on its feet.
But all wish the enigma unraveled.
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.
If you’ll forgive me for paraphrasing the great Fortean researcher Charles Daniels, the devil went down to Devon, or so the stories tell, melting tracks in the snow to infernally show his miles-long walk back to hell.
Yep, we’re talking about the 1855 Devil’s Hoofprints in Devon, today on Monster Talk.
We’re going to talk about, I don’t even know, I want to say it’s the Devil’s Footprints.
I keep wanting to call it The Devil Went Down to Devon.
Maybe that’s what the episode will be called, but…
Like, it wasn’t, honestly, I’ve read about this a zillion times, but I don’t think until preparing for this episode, I really realized how peculiar this story is.
Like, the claims, like, I mean, I know on one sense that what are we talking about?
We’re talking about a set of footprints appearing in the snow in 1855.
that allegedly travel 100 miles, right?
So 100 miles of- Uninterrupted.
Uninterrupted, right, yeah.
So the opposite of Betty and Barney Hill is the uninterrupted journey, right?
But then you’ve got other sources saying that it stretched for about 40 miles.
So you’ve got different theories, different-
beliefs different different stories don’t spoil the end okay okay well yeah it’s not 100 it’s 40 it’s exactly 100 you know that it’s it’s 100 and then it’s like a portal opens 100 miles of footprints portal opens they stop that’s probably what happened probably
It was really hard to not give spoilers straight up.
It really is.
You’re taking a critical approach to these kinds of stories.
Indeed.
I mean, and we are, we’re going to look at the whole thing.
So now I forgot what I was saying, but, but I guess the point is, this is, I don’t know when you guys first heard about this story.
It shows up in so many paranormal and Fortean books.
And we’ll talk about what Fortean means too.
I think I heard about it when it was still the devil’s hoof prints.
So it’s now devil’s footprints.
That’s what you see everywhere.
Yeah.
I guess the earlier version, but yeah, I think I was just a kid and, and heard about them.
I think I dismissed them pretty quickly as, as folklore, but there’s a lot more to the story.
So not only is it a 100 mile, a claim of 100 mile contiguous set of prints.
But the peculiarity is it’s just one hoof.
It’s not alternating footprints.
It’s literally like a hopping hoof, right?
That detail, I think I really didn’t understand until this week when we were doing preparation for this episode.
That’s peculiar.
Charles Fort, who we’ll talk about, makes a very funny joke, which I’ve put in the notes.
Or I think it’s very funny.
I think we’ve talked to – well, I don’t really talk to David Anderson.
We’ve talked with David Anderson before here and there.
We’ve done some crossover stuff with archaeological fantasies.
But he loves Charles Fort and has actually read –
Lowe and the Book of the Damned, these ginormous volumes of Charles Fort books.
And he thinks Fort is being very jokey.
And the few times I’ve attempted to read…
I found it very slow going.
I was not able to get through.
And I.
Like trudging through the snow for a hundred miles.
It’s like, okay.
I’ve read the Lord of the Rings.
All three volumes.
But.
You can’t get through Fort.
I couldn’t get through volume one.
Fellowship of the ring.
I think I stopped.
Before brief.
Eight times.
Well, the village, the village.
Oh, okay.
I never got to the Prancing Pony because I just kept giving up on the damn book.
But when I finally did get past that, that book takes off and it just rocks all the way through the rest of the series.
But getting to Bree was really hard for me.
And so anyway, I feel the same about maybe there’s a point where Fort takes off.
I couldn’t get to it.
So maybe someday.
Yeah.
A lot of older reads are like that.
I came to this from a different angle.
I’d never heard the legend until I read Joe Nichols’ article.
And that was 20 years ago, you know, at least.
Yeah, he wrote it in the 90s, yeah.
Yeah, so that was my first real exposure to it was through Joe Nichols.
So it was already given to me skeptically right off the bat.
It wasn’t sensational at all.
Yeah.
I think we have a very good listenership, okay?
So, I mean, and we steadily have been for a long time hovering, you know, just a little bit shy of 50,000 listeners, right?
I’d love it to be more, but one of the things that I always worry about
is a reason for our lack of, you know, podcast dominance.
Is that we are, you know, fun ruiners.
But I like us to include the legends up front.
You know, I like to talk about the spooky side of it.
Oh, yeah.
Because even if there is a mundane explanation…
These are stories that have endured for centuries or decades, depending on which one we’re covering.
And they do because of their power, their narrative power.
They are weird, mysterious, creepy.
And it doesn’t matter if you’re a skeptic or not.
You can still experience those emotional…
the chill up your spine, the hair raising, you know, I love all that stuff.
And I wouldn’t want to take that away from people.
So I want to make sure that we start out with the creep and then kind of do the reveal.
You know, the Scooby, this is really the Scooby-Doo approach.
You start with the mystery, there’s hijinks and antics, and then we unmask the real estate developer at the end, right?
Yeah, and I think that’s what I tried to do.
They would have got away with it too.
They had it for those pesky kids.
I think we’ve often tried to take that approach.
I tried to with Haunting America to tell the folklore, tell the stories first, and then come in with some potential natural explanations.
Not to say that we’ve necessarily solved it because we can’t go back and replicate it.
Yeah.
We can’t go back and do it again, and we weren’t there at the time.
But, yeah, I think our audience is with us on this one.
They want to hear the story.
Yeah, so I’m actually going to read the original letter that triggered what was a brief but exciting hullabaloo about this Devon footprint thing.
From the Illustrated London News, 24th February, 1855.
Item.
Footmarks on the snow in Devon.
From a correspondent.
As many of your readers have perused, I have no doubt, with much interest, the paragraphs which appeared in several of the papers last week relative to the mysterious footmarks left upon the snow during the night of Thursday the 8th in the parishes of Exmouth,
limston and woodbury as also in dawlish torquay totness and other places on the other side of the estuary of the x in the county of devon extending over a tract of country of thirty or forty miles or probably more
And as the paragraph I allude to does not fully detail the mysterious affair, it may probably be interesting to many to have a more particular account, which I think this unusual occurrence well deserves.
The marks which appeared on the snow, which lay very thinly on the ground at the time, and which were seen on the Friday morning to all appearance, were the perfect impression of a donkey’s hoof, the length four inches by two and three-quarter inches, but instead of progressing as the animal would have, or indeed as any other would have done, feet right and left, it appeared that the foot had followed foot in a single line,
the distance from each tread being eight inches or rather more, the footmarks in every parish being exactly the same size, and the step the same length.
This mysterious visitor generally only passed once down across each garden or courtyard, and did so in nearly all the houses in many parts of the several towns above mentioned, as also in the farms scattered about.
This regular track passing in some instances over the roofs of houses and hayricks and very high walls, one 14 feet, without displacing the snow on either side or altering the distance between the feet, and passing on as if the wall had not been any impediment.
The gardens with high fences and walls and gates locked were equally visited as those unprotected.
Now when we consider the distance that must have gone over to have left these marks, I may say in almost every garden or doorstep,
Through the extensive woods of Luscombe, upon commons and enclosures and farms, the actual progress must have exceeded a hundred miles.
It is very easy for people to laugh at these appearances and account for them in an idle way.
At present, no satisfactory solution has been given.
No known animal could have traversed this extent of country in one night, besides having to cross an estuary of the sea two miles broad.
Neither does any known animal walk in a line of single footsteps, not even man.
Birds could not have left these marks, as no bird’s foot leaves the impression of a hoof.
Or, even were there a bird capable of doing so, could it proceed in the direct manner above stated.
Nor would birds, even if they had donkey’s feet, confine themselves to one direct line, but hop here and there.
But the nature of the mark at once sets aside its being the track of a bird.
The effect of the atmosphere upon these marks is given by many as a solution.
But how could it be possible for the atmosphere to affect one impression and not affect another?
On the morning that the above was observed, the snow bore the fresh marks of cats, dogs, rabbits, birds, and men clearly defined.
Why then should a continuous track far more clearly defined, so clearly even, that the raising in the center of the frog of the foot could be plainly seen?
Why then should this particular mark be the only one which was affected by the atmosphere and all the others left as they were?
Besides…
The most singular circumstance connected with it was that this particular mark removed the snow, wherever it appeared, clear as if cut with a diamond or branded with a hot iron.
Of course, I am not alluding to its appearance after having been trampled on or meddled with by the curious in and about the thoroughfares of the towns.
In one instance, this track entered a covered shed and passed through it out a broken part of the wall on the other end,
where the atmosphere could not affect it.
The writer of the above has passed a five-month winter in the backwoods of Canada and has had much experience in tracking wild animals and birds upon the snow and can safely say he has never seen a more clearly defined track or one that appeared to be less altered by the atmosphere than the one in question.
Marks left upon thin snow especially may after a time blur a little, but never lose their distinctive character, as everyone will know who has been accustomed to follow the track of the American Partridge.
Should you think the above likely to interest your readers or draw from any of them a better solution of this most singular occurrence than has at present been given, perhaps you will allow it a place in your most interesting journal.
I send you a copy of the foot taken from the snow and also a succession of the steps to show you the manner of progressing.
Signed, South Devon
So this letter comes into the Illustrated London News and it lays out the facts.
I’m air quoting that about what was found that morning, that this peculiar 100 mile trackway of single file hopping steps.
I don’t know.
Hopping may be the wrong word.
But it it triggered like this massive response from the public.
Everybody had an opinion on what caused this phenomenon.
And it’s it was tracks in the snow, which is just about as ephemeral as you can get.
Right.
Because you can claim whatever.
But by the time people could come check it out, it’s gone.
Right.
That it just it’s if I said.
Freak weather appearance, too, wasn’t it?
It was unusual.
Yeah, and one of the things that kept coming up in the explanations the public suggested was the idea that this was caused by a partial thawing and then refreezing event, which…
Famously, for cryptozoology enthusiasts, will remind you of the Shipton photos of the Yeti tracks, where maybe it was a mundane animal and the tracks had melted and refrozen, and then they take on very unusual characteristics.
So that is a real…
thing that happens with footprints.
They can get larger, they get smaller, they can change shapes as the weather changes.
So legit.
I remember seeing those Yeti footprints and I was fascinated by them, but at no point was I convinced that a Yeti’s foot looked like that.
So it’s an interesting thing how your mind can really sort of just mold to whatever it is your bias is.
But I have to say that if you look this up on YouTube, The Devil’s Footprints, the story that’s told is told without any references.
It’s just this thing happened and this person said this.
And they have a lot of detail in areas that maybe they shouldn’t.
Like, oh, it was a cold winter evening and these two young girls were looking out the window and they were excited to build a snowman.
And it’s all this stuff like, what?
Where’d that come from?
But there’s no mention of any newspaper reports.
There’s no mention of people’s different things and the dates those came in.
So there’s no fact in any of it other than this thing happened, true story, I was there, is kind of the way they’re told.
And so you have to have skeptical bells ringing throughout watching these videos on YouTube.
And I absolutely recommend if you haven’t, after listening to this show, go watch a few of these videos.
They’re loads of fun.
And it’s a really good exercise in practicing critical thinking just to watch these videos, especially after hearing all the reality.
But I just wanted to put that forward.
Well, I want to add too.
So this is 1855, the 19th century.
We don’t have iPhones.
We don’t have cameras.
So people are basically from memory creating these drawings of what these footprints looked like.
And you have these different renditions of them as well.
And I think we’ll have to put some of the pictures, I think, into the show notes.
Absolutely.
A timeline, the pictures, and then I also like who the key contributors were.
The notes are going to be great on this one.
So go check the show notes for sure.
And we know just how accurate a drawing from memory or a drawing of something is.
And we can refer to the, was it the picture of Christ that was cleaned?
It is literally one of my favorite human accomplishments ever.
I love that so much.
It is awesome.
But that’s an example of just how accurate.
It is to have something sketched by someone who’s not an artist.
It’s fantastic.
Well, I love the, have you ever looked at people, things that we know all about, right?
For example, what does a bicycle look like?
How does it work?
But you ask someone to draw the parts of a bicycle and it is wildly wrong.
Unless you’re literally a bicycle repairman, it is, it is…
Amazing how misunderstood the poor and lowly bicycle is, right?
And similarly, right, we know the problems with memory and all those things.
But yeah, no, well said.
I just wanted to add too.
So Blake, earlier you were talking about the drawing and how it looks like there’s this single file.
that the footsteps are in this single file.
So I immediately thought of that one set of footsteps poem, The Footsteps in the Sand.
Yes.
Oh, I know the one.
Jesus might have been carrying the dove.
Yes.
Yeah, during difficult times, painful times, that someone, Jesus, was carrying them instead.
So I don’t know how old that poem is or how old that saying is.
But it did make me kind of think of that.
since there’s this running theme of these being the footprints of the devil.
I just think that’s interesting, this kind of counterexample of these being devil’s footprints as opposed to the idea of Jesus carrying people during difficult times.
So I don’t know how long that’s been around anyway.
Jesus walks across the beach, but the devil hops on one foot in the snow.
That is his way.
The cool down.
For real.
It makes you wonder as well, what was his motive?
What was he wanting to achieve?
His motive was loco.
Why didn’t he cover them up?
You were talking about covering things up earlier, too.
I wonder why he didn’t cover them up if he was going to harass these.
Well, it’s funny.
I mean, we’re kind of joking about it, but there was like in all the responses to this, some people assumed it was local wildlife.
But there was a legit concern that this was an infernal event, that this was not weather.
This was not nature.
This was something demonic slash supernatural.
But thankfully, we have moved on as a culture and no longer believe that weird stuff is created by Satan.
Just thinking about Lauren Boebert saying that the UAPs are probably demonic.
the more I look into this, the more I see the Old Testament and what was told to us there of fallen angels and Nephilim.
And she’s not alone.
A lot of people think that UAPs slash UFOs are demonic.
Yeah.
I’m sure it’s much easier to believe they’re demonic than to believe it’s their misperception or misunderstandings.
The details are that the footprints were identical.
The devil’s in the details.
Nicely.
That should have been my job.
Okay, that was well done.
You failed us.
So the prints are all four inches long, three inches wide, and about eight inches apart in a single file.
Mm-hmm.
I don’t know why, but this happens with the Jersey Devil, too.
When we get to explanations, one animal in particular keeps coming up, and in both cases, there’s no reason for it.
This will be familiar to you, Karen.
Okay, so…
So the trail did weird and impossible things.
It jumps over 14-foot walls.
It goes through drain pipes.
It goes over haystacks without touching the haystack, crosses rivers, allegedly.
Again, allegedly.
This is the report, right?
I always loved that there was a kid, the idea of it going over rooftops and up walls.
I thought it was so spooky.
Filling in the blank, I swear, when I think about this story, how I first heard about it and thought about it, I basically envisioned something like the Krampus hopping across the Devon, you know.
Bring here Jack is what I would think of it.
I know, I know.
Yeah, exactly, yeah.
Jumping ahead, yeah.
Nicely done again.
God, you’re on fire today.
Some people said the prints were branded as though something hot had been placed there.
There’s a story that a pack of hounds was set out to track it and instead they ran away scared, right?
That’s some good storytelling is what that is, right?
We actually know that the clergy in the area did sermons about the topic because people were actually frightened.
But no one, nobody is reported to have actually cited the creator of these prints.
So whatever they were, they happened outside of eyewitnesses or all the witnesses were murdered slash disappeared.
But there were claims that groups of people had gone out in search of this creature to try and track it down.
There may have been investigations, but everything we have is little letters.
There’s no firsthand report of people who conducted ground search, right?
It’s all these stories about.
Yeah, exactly.
So it’s so funny.
Um, we have to give a little thanks here.
I might as well throw it in here now and I’ll put credits in the show notes.
Um, again, the late Joe nickel, I would have loved to have chatted about this, but, uh, unfortunately he rudely passed away last year without any warning.
So, uh, I liked his take on this and we’ll talk about his conclusions.
Uh, Mike dash friend of the show, uh, uh, who is, uh, such a hero to me about how to do research when he gets on a topic and,
It is going to be thoroughly researched.
It is thorough, yeah.
Holy cow.
So we’re trying to condense what he wrote.
I think what some 80 pages of research.
Yes, exactly.
80 pages of – this is an obscure thing.
He came up with 80 pages of resource material.
Wow.
Thank you, Mike, very much for that work.
He did an amazing job, yeah.
Those are the main two sources that we looked at here.
Obviously, we both have read.
We’ve all read other things.
But if we want to talk briefly about how the story survived, it’s, I mean, as we say, it’s not, there’s nothing important about this story.
It’s just weird.
It’s mysterious.
So the original flap happened.
Sorry, I was just going to say, it’s kind of, I’ve heard about it at times, and then it’s just gone back into obscurity.
Exactly.
come back into the kind of public consciousness again.
And so it’s just one of those perennial favorites, I think.
But it’s for some reason, it just occasionally comes back out and everyone’s talking about it again.
And that’s one of the main reasons I said, hey, let’s talk about this topic.
We haven’t discussed it before.
And suddenly there are a plethora of videos on YouTube about it.
So I’m not sure exactly what has…
reignited interest in the topic.
Charles Fort is probably the most important character in the story as far as keeping the story alive.
Sure.
Now, we’ve talked about Fortiana, Fortians, and Charles Fort briefly in other episodes.
He is…
uh a writer he wants to be a novelist that doesn’t really work out and he’s got an inheritance so he’s got free time on his hands he’s not rich but he’s got enough money to survive and he uses his free time to collect weird stories and he collects them in volumes uh low and the book of the damned are the two that come to mind immediately
And all these stories are all these kind of weird news stories.
Fish falls, weird weather, things seen in the sky, strange animals reported.
It’s the kind of stuff that we sort of thrive on.
We’re very grateful to him.
Yeah, yeah.
But in no way is he skeptical about this stuff.
He just thinks that there’s sort of a secret history.
where maybe science is suppressing, but the newspapers are at least initially reporting often with mockery, these weird events.
And so his books are a treasure trove of strange topics.
for the people who were inclined to look for such things.
They don’t quite get into the mystical, but they definitely cover weird weather, weird creatures, weird phenomena.
And so he writes about this.
He collects the newspaper stories from this original flap back in 1855.
And that gets it back into the modern world.
And then…
we have that sort of first generation of weird shitology, I guess is the right way to say this, where people are collecting these stories into anthology, not anthology, that’s not the right word.
They’re not exactly encyclopedias.
They’re like really collections of weird stuff.
Cataloging.
Yeah, they’re cataloging these stories and giving them maybe a little narrative flair that wasn’t in the original fort retelling.
So they tend to be colorful.
There’s a guy named Rupert T. Gould.
He has a book called Oddities, and that’s one of the places that really took off.
And I have to say, you can see the whole article.
I’ll put links to that in the show notes.
Yeah, Rupert Thomas Gould.
And he did a really good job.
He went back to the primary sources.
He reprinted the illustrations of the prints.
He talked about some of the discussions around…
the hypotheses about what it might have been caused by.
But surprisingly good.
I don’t have a copy of oddities, but I found a website that reprints the entire thing.
It’s really neat.
Now, it is interesting because you do have the story about how all of the tracks were exactly the same.
They were exactly these measurements.
And the stride was exactly eight inches and all this kind of stuff.
But we find out that the prints were not uniform.
The sizes ranged from an inch and a half to two and three quarters inch wide to three and a half inches to four inches long.
The stride was anywhere from eight to 16 inches.
So, yeah, it’s a very interesting start right there.
The prints weren’t uniform, so the first one falls.
They didn’t appear in a single night.
That was the big story.
It happened on this one faithful night from, what was it, the 7th to the 8th?
And it’s not true at all.
The prints appearing in Topsham were on the 13th of February, five days later.
The trail was said to go in a straight line.
No.
It…
wound all over the place.
I mean, there were different reproductions of the map where they all went, and it was all over the place.
They zigzagged across 30-plus locations.
So…
It’s I think that the straight line thing was it conflated the individual prints, you know, one in front of the other, that kind of straight line.
But the entire trail was not a straight line.
But it’s interesting because that is something that is contradicted within the retelling.
They will start off saying straight line and then they’ll say they went to, you know, each door and, you know, zigzag around.
So, well, which is it?
And they were exactly identical in every parish.
And that’s completely contradicted right off the bat, too.
The different drawings showed different prints.
Some were cloven, some not.
Some looked like they had claw marks.
Some didn’t.
Some were devils and some weren’t.
Nobody tracked the prints for 100 miles.
So the longest verified continuous track that was actually verified was about five miles.
So somewhat short of a hundred.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that’s why it makes it a lot easier to think, well, this probably isn’t just one creature.
Because, you know, these pieces of the path were seen in different areas, but it is not continuous.
The river crossing thing, it was supposed to be like, what, a two-mile stretch?
And that’s like Loch Ness.
Karen had pointed that out to me.
Yeah.
So that area.
It is really wide right there, but that’s not supported.
No witnesses, no other witness reports say that I followed these tracks right up to the edge.
And then I, you know, found a place to cross and went over and right on the other side, they continued.
Nobody saw that at any point.
The whole thing about the haystack that he walked straight through the haystack without disturbing it.
I love that.
That’s almost invoking a ghost at this point, something walking through a solid object.
He can leave footprints, but he doesn’t disturb hay.
So I don’t know what that means in terms of like a superpower.
Yeah, well, it kind of excludes the devil, right?
Because, I mean, we know the devil creates crop circles.
So if you can’t mess with hay, it’s probably not the devil, somebody else.
Probably not him, yeah.
That’s a good point.
It’s not a great power, is it really?
No.
It’s more power than I got.
Yeah.
That’s, yeah, yeah.
He was looking for the needle.
Right.
See, he was being very careful going through that haystack because you don’t want to get poked by the needle going through.
That’s a straw man argument, though.
Nice.
Oh, he’s back.
He’s back, ladies and gentlemen.
He’s back.
And some tracks just appeared in the middle of fields and stopped abruptly.
Well, then that’s not continuous, is it?
But I did love that idea, too, along with just walking up walls and over rooftops.
Just the idea of it stopping dead was just very mysterious.
And then starting again somewhere else.
I mean, the fun part about that is if you are thinking about a biped, that’s like, how is that possible?
How is it possible that he went over rooftops and everything?
But as soon as you start bringing in the idea of other animals, like birds, for example, that’s not supernatural at all.
Which brings me, I think it brings us to one of the most frequently used candidates for an explanation.
I’m going to say that a lot of times monkeys from a circus train is a popular idea for monsters.
But number two has to be the kangaroo.
Karen, why is that?
I immediately thought of stories of alien big cats and panthers appearing in places where they shouldn’t be and other creatures because they’ve been brought in by American servicemen or they’ve been brought in by circuses, that kind of thing.
And so, I mean, that doesn’t sound probable, but it is something that’s impossible.
It could be, I’m not saying in this particular case, but certainly in terms of claims, it’s not a supernatural paranormal claim at all.
It’s kind of drawing a long bow.
But that is the kind of claim that we have come across so many times where there’s an animal where it’s somewhere where it shouldn’t be because it’s been introduced somehow.
And so it was a very strange theory.
So that was put forth by the…
priest wasn’t it the reverend musgrave yeah the friar the monk whatever well he was an anglican parish priest he led the church there well it’s funny to me because he later admitted in writing
that he had made up the kangaroo hypothesis because his parishioners all believed that there was something demonic at play.
And you basically were having a local panic about the idea that the devil was visiting Devon at night.
And so, no, no, guys, it’s not the devil.
It’s a kangaroo.
Maybe it was a demonic kangaroo.
I can sleep well knowing that it’s not the devil.
It’s a kangaroo.
You have an ethical issue with it.
I think that was an immoral thing to do.
I’m sure he wanted to relieve them of their fears, but I just don’t think that that was an appropriate thing to lie to them like that.
Well, I think we all know that the greatest trick the devil ever did was convincing people he was a kangaroo.
It was shape-shifting.
So the story starts in 1855.
And then in 1890, they do like 35 years of retrospective.
Let’s go back and talk to the locals about this crazy thing that happened.
And that gets… A long time ago.
Yeah.
35 years ago.
So 1890, that happens.
And then in 1919, Charles Fort writes it up in his Book of the Dam, which has hundreds and hundreds of this kind of story.
But I love his quote.
Because his writing style is a little weird, but he says, My own acceptance is that not less than a thousand one-legged kangaroos, each shod with a very small horseshoe, could have marked the snow of Devonshire.
That is possible.
Anyone who knows anything about kangaroos knows that they breed like crazy, like rabbits.
And frequently hop on one leg.
It is their way.
And are shod as well.
Exactly.
So from Fort’s case, it gets picked up by Rupert T. Gould in oddities.
And then in 1959, it gets Frank Edwards writes about it in his book, Stranger Than Science, which I have a copy of somewhere over here in one of my shelves.
Already over 100 years at this point.
And that’s true.
That’s true.
Story is becoming more and more exaggerated and disfigured.
But the core pieces are becoming, what would you call it, more canonical, where it’s like 100 miles, contiguous, you know, straight lines, single creature, identical prints, you know.
So by the time you get into the 60s, you start to see people trying to fit this into UFO lore, where like maybe a spacecraft passed by, or maybe there was a hippie.
Or a hippie.
But the explanations get a little crazy.
So let’s take a minute and look at the… A little crazy?
They get a little crazy.
Let’s talk about what some of the explanations are out there.
Outside of kangaroos, yeah.
Outside of kangaroos.
Okay, so yeah, we should look at possible explanations.
So this is really, I guess, the meat of the whole case.
And so one of the main explanations that has been posited is that of wood mice and other hopping rodents.
So I, to be honest, hadn’t really heard of hopping rodents.
I don’t know how familiar you guys are with that.
I knew there was a kangaroo mouse, which is very cute.
I mean, really cute.
I just wonder, though, if a creature of that size…
Certainly wouldn’t be able to cover a ground of 100 miles or even 30 miles or even five.
I would debate that as well.
But that’s one of the main ideas of a mouse that holds all four feet together when it leaps.
And that kind of print can look like a kind of cloven print.
Yeah.
That theory was already around actually back in 1855.
So there was, was it Thomas Fox, a brewer from Bellingdon, had sent the island drawings of rodent tracks in different snow depths showing how they could form these hoof-like shapes.
I love that, by the way, the idea that the newspaper reading community sends in letters and drawings.
Different times.
There was a movie called Never Cry Wolf back in, was it the 80s, 1983, I think.
And the interesting thing about this movie is.
There was like this researcher that was kind of out there alone in Alaska, and he’s researching these wolves that are out there.
And how is it are they staying alive?
And comes to realize that the wolves were eating these field mice, but you didn’t see a ton of field mice running around.
So how on earth are they getting enough sustenance?
The bottom line is, if you see one field mouse, you should know there are a lot.
So no, one mouse isn’t going to probably go five miles.
But a good 40 of them, they tend to not just all come flying out at the same time because they have to be very careful.
Or a wolf or something like that, or the devil, will eat them.
Maybe they choreographed.
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, if these mice came from like, you know, Nim, rats of Nim, they were probably pretty smart, knew what they were doing.
I could still apply to kangaroos though, that theory.
With a kangaroo mouse.
Mrs. Frisbee and the kangaroos of them.
That’s the lesser known sequel, right?
Yes, to be written.
Exactly, yeah.
But the thing is, is that I really do think that the wood mice or the hopping rodents is a great contender.
But there are others.
Oh, there are.
But having seen, you know, I grew up in the northern mountains of Colorado and we would have very long winters and have these kind of things.
And you would see footprints that just did not make sense.
And then you would see what made them.
And it’s like, oh, I get it.
But then there were, you know, lots of other animals like cats.
Lucy’s perking up over here.
Oh, and very demonic, or at least familiar.
Well, most, yeah, most cats are very demonic.
And in Dalish, there was a Mr. Wilson.
He reported that the thaw and rain on that night half melted cat tracks and refroze them into the shape of a small hoof.
Now, the thing is, is there would have probably been a ton of them, you know, running around all over the place.
So whether or not that could be donkeys and ponies, ponies, donkeys.
I mean, that’s a big one.
I think that was one of the.
the earliest as well because of just the way that they’re drawn.
But they’re upside down, so it’s bad luck.
And the folklorist Theo Brown.
So I’m going to say Theo Brown.
And then alert listeners may recognize that in my coverage of The Hairy Hands of Devon, she comes up because she’s one of the folklorists who kept that story alive.
So she lived in Devon and did a lot towards –
professionalizing folklore.
And also in this story, she noted that donkeys sometimes place their hind feet in the same line as their forefeet.
So it can look like there’s a bipedal creature when you see their tracks.
So, and that some of the tracks look at least superficially like a hoof, like a donkey hoof print.
So, but we also know that typically
Donkeys don’t hop over giant walls and haystacks and get on your roof, typically.
That we know of.
Right.
But goats do.
Goats do.
Goats will climb anything.
They’re crazy.
So, yeah.
Yeah, you know, another candidate that’s rarely brought up is maybe a talking reindeer that’s eating a devil fruit.
So that’s the Tony Tony Chopper hypothesis.
You heard it here first.
And last.
And that’s the hardest part about an old story like this is to be able to bring in new information.
Exactly.
And I think we are accomplishing that.
We are.
So another theory, and this is one of the main ones, the Thor and refreeze distortion.
So the meteorological background is doing a lot of work in every animal-based explanation.
And an anthropologist by the name of John Napier devoted some serious attention to this in his work on Bigfoot and Yeti prints.
So what, back in the 70s, 1970s?
He’s super important in the history of Bigfoot and in Yeti research.
So it’s all through cryptozoology.
That’s a really important concept.
So yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, so bear and yak tracks, partially melted and refrozen, routinely produce these impossible…
that have been mistaken for hominids.
So you’ve got the same mechanism here with the devil’s footprints, but on a smaller scale.
But this is one of the main things I think when I was a kid and heard about this and just saw the different images and the earliest ones looked better formed and then the older they became, they looked more distorted and reminiscent of that whole thawing, refreezing, just that cycle.
Theo Brown also postulated…
The idea that this might have been hoax work done by, but specifically hoaxes performed by a schism between the low church and high church of England.
Now, I am super unqualified to talk about this, and this is a giant rabbit hole of side information.
But here’s what I would say in summary, that the low church was Protestant evangelical Bible and sermon church.
Very plain services.
not much ritual, and they were very suspicious of what they would call the Papists or the Romans, right?
So the High Church is more focused on the Anglican Church as being a continuation of the Catholic Church.
Right.
And more in line with ancient tradition, more ritual.
And she believed that there really is a lot of schism back then and now between those two approaches to Christianity.
And she thought that maybe that was part of the explanation was that there was prankery afoot.
Which I think is as good of a theory as ever.
And this is only a couple hundred years after the Church of England was set up.
The Catholic Church basically broke down in England.
So I think, you know, it’s an interesting theory and maybe not even necessarily between those who were religious but potentially skeptics, potentially atheists, those who were just wanting to have a bit of fun.
Yeah.
I mean, we know like the crop circles, for example, people will go to elaborate lengths to perform a hoax for real.
Like it’s crazy.
And maintain it for decades.
And to the point that it actually becomes a form of art, in my opinion.
So, yeah.
But let’s I’m going to quickly run through to save us some time.
Some of the less likely contenders for our candidates.
We got badgers, birds with iced up feet.
Otters, hares, and rabbits.
An escaped balloon dragging something along the ground.
The kangaroo, I think, is pretty unlikely.
Okay.
wording here.
I’m going to say it like it was said back then.
We would not normally say this, but gypsies on stilts, okay?
They’re talking about the Romani people, the idea that some weird meteorological or weather event happened, the UFO laser or heat option, and even Gould himself had a theory that maybe it was a sea creature that came ashore.
That makes no sense for Devin, but that was one of the ideas that were out there.
So…
I don’t know if you gave enough attention to the Romany people on stilts.
You just kind of put that in there and move on.
I was going to say that because, I mean, we all know gypsies on stilts, common problem in every community.
A scourge.
If they’re not out there making werewolves, they’re out there hopping around on stilts, hopping over the landscape.
Doing tricks with eggs.
That’s how they do.
Bless their hearts.
All right.
Okay, so we’ve got some kind of weak contenders, long shot, really implausible contenders.
We’ve got stronger ones, wood mice, cats, hoaxes, et cetera.
Strong contenders.
What have we got there?
What’s the…
the most likely theory behind all of this.
Oh, man.
Do we want to say what our favorites are before you, like, spoil things?
Well, yeah, I think we should.
And I’m going to have to say I’m Australian.
I’m going to have to go with the kangaroo theory.
Even though it has been debunked, I have a soft spot for that theory.
Yeah, yeah.
Matt, what do you think?
I think, well, you know, I kind of have a soft spot for kangaroos as well.
But I think it’s kind of a split.
So I could go with the kangaroo mouse, but I think what I’m going to go with is kangaroos on stilts.
What about kangaroos in UFOs?
Well, I was just thinking about the ability of kangaroos being able to jump over these tall walls and get up on roofs and things like that.
I think that that is something that has not been examined closely enough.
And I would love to see a sketch of a kangaroo in an escaped balloon.
Or kangaroos being carried by Jesus.
Although I have to say it’s politically incorrect, but gypsies on stilts is pretty funny.
It is ridiculous, isn’t it?
It really is.
An excerpt from Manfred Frederick Wood in The Life of a Romany Gypsy in 1973.
That night, as everybody in the area found first thing in the morning, the devil walked right across the country of Somerset.
Only it wasn’t the devil at all, but some seven Romani tribes using over 400 set of measure stilts with size 27 boots at their base.
The whole operation took over 18 months to plan out and prepare.
And the reason for it was that on a particular stretch that had always been a Romany drum as far back as anyone could remember, a lot of pikeys had drifted in and caused a lot of trouble for the Romanys.
Now I don’t know exactly how a measure stilt was constructed, but I do know that it consisted of a pair of stepladders that could be lengthened or shortened by means of slides and hinges.
They were joined on top by a wheel.
The bottom of each stepladder stood in the great big boot, and the man operating the stilts stood on one of the ladders and joggled about on it to make as deep a foot impression as possible.
Then he would either swing the second ladder over the top by the wheel, if there was enough headroom, or if there was not enough room, he would raise the ladder by the slide and move it forward by one devil’s stride.
Either way, he got an exact measure of a stride, as the measure stilts were constructed so that they could not over or under stride the three yards it was meant to do.
When the second ladder had been shifted to the front, the stilt treader stepped onto it and shifted the first ladder in front of it again.
And then he joggled about on the second ladder to make a deep impression and stepped forward onto the first ladder again.
And so he went on without ever stepping off the measure stilts for the whole operation.
This was straightforward enough while striding over open country, except that it was done on a dark night and required skillful balancing all the way.
But going over hedges, ditches, and country lanes posed a serious problem, as people might be using the highways and lanes and see a man working the measure stilts.
So, when he worked his way over and along a public right-of-way,
he had to throw a sheet over the whole works so that the devil would be seen walking rather than a man with ladders on boots.
Walking with that cloak over the top, he saw even less of what he was doing than when he walked over the fields.
The Devil was supposed to walk right across Somerset and as straight a line as possible.
He was not supposed to make any detour around houses or churches or barns and so on.
But his footsteps had to go straight up one wall, over the roof, and down the other wall.
The Stilt Treader could not walk up walls.
He had to straighten out his stilts to turn them into a long ladder and then make a muddy line of Devil Strides over a spare set of 27 size boot seal impressions.
Halfway over the top, he had to hoist the ladder up and swing it the right way around without too much noise over to the other side of the building.
This was the snaggiest part of the whole business, as it required exceptional physical strength and poise.
Also, dogs were bound to bark in some of the farm buildings that were being boot marked, and if any of them brought a farmer out of bed, the catch would have been out of the bag.
If any man tried to play this trick on his own, he would do well if he managed to cover two miles in one night.
It would be quite a feat if he managed to cross two cottages or one village church.
But that night, the devil walked the breadth of Somerset, because there were seven Romany tribes in this, and between them they used well over 400 measure stilts.
The root of it was planned very carefully, and every part of it studied over a period of about 18 months.
When the plan was put into operation, it went off without a single hitch.
After the men got back with their measure stilts, a party made their way over to the Devil’s Trail from each of the camping sites and busied themselves with obliterating the tracks made to and from the Devil’s Strides by the stilt treaders.
The next day, the Devil’s footprints could be clearly seen along the whole route.
It put the fear of God into all the locals, but that was not the point of the exercise.
For the next few years, it kept the area free from pikeys and diddikai who swore blind it was a mule load they had crossed, and they were not going to take any chances.
The author of this book, Manfrey Wood, came from the family of the famous Welsh Romany, Abram Wood, a figure so deeply connected with the historical establishment of Romany culture in Wales that to be of the family of Abram Wood became shorthand for being of Romany descent.
In his book, Wood claimed that the footprints were actually a hoax his people pulled off to scare away rivals, using a lot of insider terminology to describe it.
To put it in clearer English, he basically writes in that conclusion, “…for the next few years, the hoax kept the area clear of non-Romani travelers and mixed bloods who were absolutely convinced that a ghost had passed through and they weren’t going to risk an encounter.”
Now, this brief work is an important piece of Welsh Romany folklore, even if it fails to quite convince an informed reader as actual history.
But more than just an unlikely explanation for the footprints, it carries with it hints of a strict internal social structure, one that pits the pure Romany against the mere non-Romany traveler or the mixed blood, implying their gullibility.
It’s a strange brag, but that’s exactly what it is, a brief snapshot of an old Romany elder’s oral tradition capturing not just an unlikely event, but a glimpse of a social strata completely hidden from the rest of the British public.
So in all seriousness, though, I think Joe Nichols take was it was unlikely to be a single contiguous event.
It was more likely that once this weirdness had been noticed, everybody goes to their they hear the story and they go check their farm.
They also see a set of these things.
So maybe a variety of natural creatures making tracks in the snow being collected into a single story by the community.
Yeah.
It’s annoyingly plausible.
Well, I want to add to just the mindset of the people at the time.
Yeah.
So we’re talking about Devon and the surrounds, and the area is just so rich in folklore, as we’ve discussed, stories of the hairy hands and the devil’s footprints, and that’s just kind of scratching the surface.
of the folklore in that area.
So people in that area were very primed and prone to believing in all of these kinds of fantastical things.
I don’t think we’re going to do an episode on it.
But if you want to further reading, were there precursors to this case?
Are there other events like this?
And I went around looking and the one that I found that I thought was the most interesting was in the Kerguelen Islands on the Ross Antarctic shelf.
There was an expedition there in 1840, and they found a really long, single-file, horseshoe-shaped set of prints in the snow.
And it really made no sense to them.
And ultimately, they weren’t able to stick around and investigate or find any local fauna that might have caused it.
And their explanation, they basically just made a note, maybe a pony survived a shipwreck and then…
made a track and then went back to the sea.
I don’t know.
So we don’t know what that was.
It’s very peculiar, but it’s, it’s not, there’s no explanation for it.
There’s nobody knows what caused that.
And there’s no photos because it’s 1840.
So we don’t really know exactly what they saw.
Well, there is interesting that you mentioned that because I didn’t delve into this too much, but there were similar occurrences that took place.
afterwards that are seemingly unrelated that happen in other countries, including an event in Australia.
But there was another event quite recently back in 2009 in North Devon.
There was a similar happening where hoof-like tracks appeared in a garden in an area called Woolsey in North Devon.
I’m going to make a note.
See if we can find photos for show notes.
But in this case, they believed that the hoof-like tracks belonged to a rabbit or a hare.
They were about five inches long, so even bigger than the devil’s footprints.
Yeah.
Well, I will say, like growing up in such a remote area that I did, I would often see those Yeti tracks that I had talked about earlier, but I knew that they were actually created by jackrabbits.
Jackalopes, maybe.
Jackalopes, yes.
Do they have jackrabbits in Colorado?
Oh, yeah.
They’re so peculiar.
They’re much more like a hare than a rabbit.
They were all over the base in San Antonio when I was in the Navy.
And the Navy security training was at Lackland Air Force Base.
And…
They’re huge.
They’re so big.
And they’re not afraid because on base, nobody’s killing them.
And I would go jogging.
I was in such good shape back then.
I used to run like eight miles a day.
A hundred miles, Blake?
No, eight miles.
Eight miles.
But, I mean, I would run half marathons.
In a straight line?
I think we need to take a look at Blake’s footprints.
You can look at my ruined knees is what you can look at.
That’s like maybe behind.
Worn myself out.
But I was so creepy to be running before dawn and then run into just a bunch of these ginormous rabbit shaped.
And they had the weirdest eyes.
They’re so and they’re just not afraid.
Oh, it was eerie.
I saw one decades ago in California.
It was my first encounter with one, and it looked like it was something from another planet.
I’d never seen anything like that.
I wasn’t aware of them.
You know, and you have people joking about tree alligators and all kinds of things.
You have true monsters in this country.
They’re not cute, fuzzy rabbits.
They’re something different.
And when you say people talk about witches being shape changers, they almost always picked cats or hares.
And if you if you could imagine there’s something very eerie about a hare and imagine being a farmer and you go to shoot one and then it doesn’t get killed.
You know, you’re a good shot.
So clearly it’s got to be a witch.
Got to be a witch.
Well, I think that’s about all there is to be said about the devil footprints in Devon.
Do you have any closing thoughts?
Well, I think that this story has been looked at from so many different angles and it’s been debunked.
But I think it’s going to just continue, even though…
I think everyone has their own pet theory on what it is.
So it’s an interesting story in that respect.
But I think it’s just going to continue, even though it’s very likely that we have the answers already.
I doubt the day will come when I’ll hear somebody say, well, they covered that on Monster Talk.
It’s all taken care of.
Yeah, we can shelve that one, guys.
Yeah.
You know, it’s none of these things.
I mean, anytime that you can have a new audience that, that don’t have all the details, you can keep anything going, you know, any, any, you know, urban legend or anything else.
So, and, and the YouTube has created a hunger for this kind of content.
So, yeah, it’ll keep going, and it’s good to be able to be part of the library of reality when it comes to this stuff.
I’m proud of Monster Talk for that, that people can stumble upon Monster Talk and find out so many things that they were misled on.
True enough.
Library of reality.
I like that.
Well, I really appreciate you guys sorting through this ridiculous amount of notes that we’ve got here.
And for Mike Dash and Joe Nickel for trying to run this to like the most plausible explanations.
Good Lord.
One for the team.
Good Lord.
Mr.
Dash, I commend you.
So, all right, guys, we will see you next week with yet another mystery topic.
We will.
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 with special guest Matt Baxter joining us to talk about the Devil’s Hoof Prince in Devon from 1855.
There’s a lot of show notes on this one, so check them out at our Patreon page or at monstertalk.org.
Thanks again to all the researchers out there who’ve done so much work on this case, but especially to the late Joe Nickel and the incredible and relentless work of Mr. Mike Dash.
If you want to support our show but can’t afford yet another subscription, the easiest way is to give us very positive reviews on iTunes or your preferred podcasting platform.
iTunes reviews especially help keep us visible in their listings and suggestions, which help us reach new potential audience members.
Monster Talk’s theme music is by Pete Stealing Monkeys.
I suspect the devil got around 80 miles into his jaunt over Devin when he noticed…
I forgot to put on my Fitbit.
This has been a Monster House presentation

The post S05E33 – The Devil Went Down to Devon appeared first on MonsterTalk.

Guest: Dr. Darren Naish
Hosts: Blake Smith & Dr. Karen Stollznow

Episode Summary

Darren joins Blake and Karen to discuss his new article in Geology Today, which grew out of his work on the Monsters of the Deep museum exhibition. The exhibition originally opened at the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth, Cornwall in 2020, traveled to two additional venues, and most recently ran at the Aberdeen Art Gallery in Scotland. Darren describes how each venue’s unique architecture required a complete redesign of the exhibition, changing both the visual layout and the narrative flow.

The conversation covers the prehistoric survivor paradigm – the idea that fossil animals like plesiosaurs and basilosaurus might have survived into the modern era – and how fossil discoveries influenced what people claimed to see at sea. Darren and Charles Paxton’s statistical analysis of roughly 1,700 sea monster reports found that witnesses didn’t begin describing long-necked creatures until after plesiosaurs became publicly known in the 1820s, consistent with the idea that popular culture shapes sighting reports.

Two famous sea monster cases are examined in detail. The 1893 SS Umfuli sighting, in which Captain Kringle and crew observed something off the Canary Islands, was transformed by an artist’s reconstruction into a plesiosaur-like creature – but the ship’s log actually described what the witnesses thought was a giant eel, with a seven-foot upper jaw fringed with serrated teeth, more consistent with a rorqual whale. The 1915 U-28 sea monster – allegedly a crocodile-shaped creature blasted from the sea when the German U-boat sank the SS Iberian – turns out to have no contemporary support at all. Captain von Forstner’s own 1917 book doesn’t mention it, nor do the many newspaper interviews with the Iberian’s survivors. The story doesn’t appear until 1933, coinciding with both the Loch Ness Monster craze and a nationalist push in German media.

The episode also addresses the coelacanth’s role as cryptozoology’s poster child, and why it’s a poor analogue for the survival of large marine reptiles. The conversation closes with a discussion of how to practice good skepticism – evaluating claims seriously rather than dismissing them reflexively – and Darren’s view that cryptozoology is better understood as parascience than pseudoscience.

About Our Guest

Dr. Darren Naish is a paleozoologist, author, and science communicator based in England. He is the founder of the blog Tetrapod Zoology and the author of numerous books on animals living and extinct, including Hunting Monsters: Cryptozoology and the Reality Behind the Myths (2016). He recently worked with the BBC Natural History Unit on Prehistoric Planet Ice Age for Apple TV. Darren has a longstanding interest in cryptozoology from a scientific and cultural perspective, and has published peer-reviewed work on sea monster sighting reports with statistician Charles Paxton. His article “Monsters of the Deep” in Geology Today is the basis for this episode’s conversation.

Links & References

Darren Naish
Tetrapod Zoology (Tetzoo) – Blog
Hunting Monsters: Cryptozoology and the Reality Behind the Myths (e-book) [affiliate]
Prehistoric Planet Ice Age on Apple TV

Books Mentioned
Bernard Heuvelmans – In the Wake of the Sea Serpents (1968) [affiliate]
Robert France – Disentangled (2019) [affiliate]
Adrian Shine – The Natural History of Sea Serpents (2024) [affiliate]
Rupert Gould – The Loch Ness Monster and Others

Article
Darren Naish – “Monsters of the Deep” in Geology Today (paywalled – contact the author for a copy)

Exhibition

Monsters of the Deep – Originally opened at the National Maritime Museum, Falmouth, Cornwall (2020). Most recently exhibited at Aberdeen Art Gallery, Scotland (closed late 2025). Three distinct versions were created to accommodate different venue architectures. A future venue has been announced but not yet made public.

Key Topics

– The prehistoric survivor paradigm and how fossil discoveries (especially plesiosaurs, first publicly known c. 1824) shaped what people reported seeing at sea
– Statistical evidence that long-necked sea monster reports increase after plesiosaurs enter public awareness (Naish & Paxton)
– The SS Umfuli sighting (1893) – how an artist’s reconstruction turned a reported “giant eel” into a plesiosaur, and how the original description is more consistent with a rorqual whale
– The U-28 sea monster (1915) – a canonical cryptozoological case with no contemporary documentation, first appearing in the 1930s amid Loch Ness mania and German nationalist media
– The coelacanth as “red herring” – why deep-sea fish that don’t breathe air, don’t frequent coastlines, and have unidentifiable bones are poor analogues for surface-dwelling marine reptiles
– Cryptozoology as parascience rather than pseudoscience
– “Automatic skepticism” vs. engaged, evidence-based critique
– Adrian Shine’s concept of “sympathetic skepticism”
– The “scriptids” concept – how fiction and art influence what people report seeing (Blake’s Ouroboric loop of folklore, fiction, and experience)
– Mike Dash’s talk “Our Artist Pictures What the Witness Saw” – on the influence of artistic reconstructions on monster lore
– The growing overlap between cryptozoology studies, paleontology, paleoart, and speculative zoology

People Mentioned
Adrian Shine, – Loch Ness researcher author of The Natural History of Sea Serpents
Bernard Heuvelmans, – Belgian zoologist, coined the term “cryptozoology”
Charles Paxton, – Statistician, co-author of sea monster report analysis with Naish
Chris French, – Psychologist and skeptic
David Attenborough, – BBC broadcaster, turning 100 in May 2026
Loxton & Prothero, – Authors who explored the influence of King Kong on early Nessie sightings
Mike Dash, – Fortean author and historian
Richard Owen – Victorian naturalist
Rupert Gould – Author and investigator of anomalies
Captain Georg-Gunther von Forstner – U-28 commander
Captain Kringle – Commander of the SS Umfuli
Marjorie Courtney-Latimer & J.L.B. Smith – Discoverers and describers of the living coelacanth

 London Fortean Society Event

Darren mentions attending a recent London Fortean Society event. Speakers included Darren Naish, Mark Pilkington, David Clarke, Alice Vernon, and Dominic Chorney.

 Where to Find Darren

Tetzoo.com – Blog, articles, and artwork
Hunting Monsters – Available as an inexpensive e-book
Prehistoric Planet Ice Age – Now streaming on Apple TV
New cryptozoology book in progress – expected 2027 or 2028

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 Here’s a thing I can’t prove, but also feels unassailable.
Sea monsters have been a part of human storytelling for as long as humans have taken to the oceans and crafted their own making.
I mean, monsters come from fear and uncertainty, and three-quarters of our planet is covered in a layer of opacity that begs for exploration, definitely supports hidden life, provides us with food, and often lies between us and vital destinations.
So, of course, we fill those endless waves with monsters.
But which of them are real, and which are better suited to the margins of a medieval illustrated map?
Out of centuries of stories, some have turned out to be based on real animals, but with more recent reports, say from the past 200 years or so, how much of what we think we know about these cases actually holds up when you go back to the original source material?
Probably not as much as you would think.
Today, we’re joined once again by paleozoologist Darren Naish to talk about his new article in Geology Today, Monsters of the Deep, which grew out of his work on a museum exhibition of the same name.
We’ll look at the 1893 sighting of the SS Amfouli, a case where the witnesses described something like a giant eel, but an artist’s reconstruction turned it into a plesiosaur.
And we’ll dig into one of the most famous sea monster encounters of all time, a creature allegedly blasted out of the ocean by a German U-boat during the First World War, a story that somehow nobody mentioned for almost 20 years.
And we’ll also talk about how fossil discoveries shape what people claim to see at sea and whether the coelacanth really deserves its reputation as the poster child for cryptozoology.
I’m Blake Smith.
With me, as always, is Dr. Karen Stolzno.
And this…
is monster talk this is a sad thing but like so many of the people who work in science but touch into cryptozoology are passing away and so it’s like uh finding someone who’s willing to talk about this stuff uh and also maintains academic credibility it seems like a dwindling crowd there’s a lot to say on this
general topic and um i don’t know i kind of feel the opposite to what you just said but oh good maybe i’m wrong maybe i’m wrong let’s see where this goes i think that we are you know you and i have spoken quite a few times before about what you once called post-crypted cryptozoology a quick interruption here while i have said the phrase post-crypted cryptozoology that phrase is actually as far as i know originated by my friend and colleague daniel loxton
I’ll put a link to his work in the show notes.
I think it’s now anyone interested in this is aware of the fact that obviously we’re never going to get away from the fact there’s a lot of people interested in cryptozoology because they are interested in the idea that Bigfoot, Nessie, etc.
are real, right?
That’s always going to be there.
But there’s also an increasing number of people that are fully accepting and embracing of the whole field, the whole idea that…
is not necessarily about what you want to believe.
It’s the, what do other people think?
You know, this is like a broad part of cultural studies.
And I think there’s more people, I think more and more people are prepared to like…
like agree that there’s something to study here that is sociological anthropological cultural and it’s really interesting to you know i find that i’m you know i always have been i always have enjoyed being in the kind of cultural headspace of cryptozoologists and saying well if you believe that’s true then what does that mean you know what does it mean in terms of you know the concept of prehistoric survivors the concept of how many species there are to discover
the concept of what the animal was actually like and how it’s related to other things, etc.
And then kind of like seeing how we can critique that and what we should and shouldn’t critique and which are good arguments and which are bad arguments, no matter who they come from.
Because I think sceptics have often put forward really terrible arguments against cryptids.
I think it’s really, really common today.
And I also think something that just occurred to me at, there was a brilliant event
I’m undergoing a bit of an introspective period on this because Hunting Monsters, my 2016-2017 book that covered various of my thoughts on cryptozoology, that’s 10 years old as of a couple of months ago.
So I’ve been thinking a lot about 10 years of Hunting Monsters.
what would I do in a new edition if I were to be able to do one?
There was an event… And where do you keep all the specimens you’ve collected?
That’s one of the important…
This vast, like, storehouse Tetsu Towers here.
There’s a couple of Bigfoots and Yetis of the many different species.
There was a London Fortean Society event I attended a couple of weekends ago, and it was brilliant.
And like all those events, it was a couple of talks on monsters, a couple of talks on ghost hunting…
some UFO talks, and something that I felt during my talk and I sensed from other people, detected from other people.
And I just the other day listened to an interview from Chris French, and he said the same thing, or something that made me think about the same thing, which is that many of us that are…
widely known as sceptics and are framed as such by our detractors as well as our friends is we kind of actually have a bit of a sort of guilty secret which is I was a believer once I came into this because I was a believer and so when you’re talking about it from a sceptical point of view it’s like I don’t want to say it’s sad but it’s almost like um
So I’m deconstructing this case now.
I don’t think the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot are real zoological entities, but I know that what got me interested in it is the amount of the body of evidence that other people are still accepting as valid.
And I don’t know where I’m going with that, but I think that’s something that is, you know, where you should maybe talk about.
I think a lot of people have already brought attention to this.
But yeah, being a skeptic is not a bad thing.
It’s like coming out of any set of beliefs that generally we don’t think are wise to hold in the modern age.
You said something along the lines of, you know, many an adept critical thinker has sharpened their mind on the whetstone of Bigfoot, right?
So it’s a useful exercise if you’re an honest inquirer, I think.
I would add to this too that if not believers or former believers, certainly people who are aficionados of these kinds of creatures and that we have a love of the folklore and the tales, the stories, the storytelling aspects.
So I think that that brings us together as well.
Let me see.
I guess we should get to the article, right?
Sorry.
Yeah.
So we brought you on the show extensively to talk about your new article.
And so in that article, you walk readers through the Monsters of the Deep exhibition, which apparently ran at the Aberdeen Art Gallery until late last year and had originally opened at the National Maritime Museum in Cornwall.
So back in 2020.
So during COVID.
How did this change or evolve over the course of those five years as it travelled?
Yeah, I mean, let me just say, being invited to be involved in setting up an exhibition like that for someone who’s a, I’m a visually oriented person, I like pictures and models and dioramas and stuff like that, and getting the chance to help put together an exhibition on something you’re really interested in, a dream come true, super happy.
And the National Maritime Museum, it’s a famous British institution, the…
National Maritime Museum is at Greenwich in London so this was in the Falmouth one in Cornwall which is over in the west country and um the fact and it and it yeah there’s a whole story I won’t go into a whole story behind the fact that it opened in Covid because like oh god that was that was not good for us but um
Worst timing ever.
But it then finishing its run there and then deals being made for it to go on exhibit elsewhere.
And it’s been at two other venues since.
Yeah, most recently, as you said, Aberdeen Art Gallery in Scotland, opposite end of the country.
That’s a really fun thing to be involved in because, you know, museums are not like…
prefabricated houses or something.
Every one of them is a strange, very distinctive, weird shape with different sized rooms and even shapes, curved walls and heights of ceilings and all kinds of insane amount of variations.
So you basically have to do a redesign each time, meaning that it’s not the same exhibition each time.
It’s a radically different exhibition.
So there have been three different versions of this.
exhibition and yes i’m super happy with uh all of its visions and where it goes next which i can’t talk about
Does that change narrative flow, or is this just about how it’s presented visually, organizationally?
Yeah, all of that, all of that.
So it was specifically designed for the shape of National Maritime Museum Falmouth, and that was a peculiar shaped building.
Shaped like a Falmouth, actually.
Yeah.
It was a long bottlenecked space.
And we used that bottleneck as like you, several sections of the exhibition, as is reflected in the article.
The idea is you are introduced to what people in medieval Europe thought about the sea.
So that’s a good excuse to have your medieval sea maps like the Carta Marina and so on.
Then you’ve got during the Victorian age, sea monsters are mostly like killed off.
Richard Owen kills the sea monster.
And there isn’t a real reason post the Challenger expedition to think that sea monsters are real.
But then you’ve got this mid 20th century renaissance of cryptozoology.
And we are the sort of people that know about the kind of left-field, weird cryptozoology stuff, but that’s always there, and it does bleed over into pop culture a little bit, but mostly…
It hasn’t.
Mostly popular culture is now sceptical.
Sea monsters aren’t real.
There are new animals found in the seas, but they’re not going to be giant sea serpents and whatnot.
And so the bottleneck gave us an excuse to say that this is a critical point where history could go this way, it could go this way.
Hoovermans and Sanderson and other cryptozoological literalists continued this medieval tradition, and that’s continued all the way to the present.
But otherwise, you’ve got this more scientific…
tech-driven view of life in the oceans so yeah so we exploited the specifics of the building in Falmouth to bring that home but then if you think about other the other museum spaces where things are totally different couldn’t do that had to do something different so yeah you do have to do a redesign
In Aberdeen, which for people who don’t know, that’s really far north in Scotland.
The two biggest cities in Scotland are Edinburgh and Glasgow, which are both roughly at the same latitude.
And they’re still about 100 kilometres away from Aberdeen.
A lot of people in Edinburgh and Glasgow haven’t been to Aberdeen.
I’d never been to Aberdeen.
I’ve been to Loch Ness, which is even further north.
But…
Me too.
Obviously.
Yeah.
Of course.
I should hope so.
Yes.
But yeah, in Aberdeen, it was the space there was like there was an initial room you enter.
So that’s going to have to be our introduction to medieval thoughts.
Then there’s this giant kind of continuously curved space, which we kind of used as an excuse to say, you know, talk about the history of everything all the way up to modern deep sea exploration.
So Blake was wrong.
Let’s make that clear that this is more of a changing of the guards than all people are no longer interested in this kind of thing.
So you’re saying that there’s this ongoing interest in these topics, but it’s just changing with society.
So in the 2020s, then what is keeping this interest alive, these stories alive for people?
I think that these days it seems that the people that are publishing cryptozoological work, and there’s kind of a difference between, you know, like your online enthusiasts, your fans of the field, people in Facebook groups and whatnot, versus people that are actually publishing articles and even books.
And I think that there’s an overlap between people that are interested in cryptozoology academically
and have an overlap with paleontological expertise, because there’s so many alleged connections with fossil animals, evolutionary history, and paleoartistic portrayals of animals, and spec zoo, speculative zoology, the whole field of…
imagining creatures from alternative timelines and imaginary creatures from the future.
I think that all those three fields are quite connected.
And the people that are sometimes publishing on cryptozoology come from that sort of background.
and are doing new critical analyses of how likely is it that megatooth sharks, for example, might have persisted to the present based on what cryptozoologists have said.
That’s something that you have to have…
You have to have paleontological expertise to evaluate that claim.
You have to have paleontological expertise to evaluate various of the claims made about the identity of, you know, Yeti and Bigfoot and so on.
And the major, most influential works in thinking here on sea monsters in particular that have been published most recently, I’m thinking of Robert France’s book of 2019, Disentangled, it’s called.
and Adrian Shine’s 2024 book, The Natural History of Sea Serpents, they pull all those things together but are fundamentally about the human experience in looking at stuff on the sea or in the sea.
Like, in order to evaluate monster reports, you need to know about the history of…
that specific monster and what people claimed about the sighting and how the sighting was interpreted.
But you also need to know about the actual real animals and other objects that occur in that part of the sea.
And you need to have some good background knowledge of how people perform as observers.
what opportunities for observation existed for those people and what the specific conditions were of the time.
Because interestingly, I think those two books in particular have done a good job of showing that the specific sea monster phases of history they were interested in, for France, that’s the late 1810s and 1820s, and for Shine, that’s mostly the late 1800s,
People are using new ships and seeing the effects of new kinds of marine technology, new kinds of fishing technology, new kinds of vessels, new kinds of wakes and waves produced by vessels.
You’ve got to have that in there as well.
And there isn’t, you know, there isn’t like a single simple answer to what sea monsters are.
It’s obviously people seeing a huge number of things.
But yes, you sweep all these things together to try and like, you can explain some specific sightings.
For the listeners, I’m nodding vigorously in agreement.
But so this actually.
Your article and the things you just said fit very tidily into something I’ve been working on.
It started as a joke or some wordplay, this concept of scripteds, the idea that films influence what people see.
But the more I’ve developed that and looked into it, there seems to be this, I call it, Ouroboric loop of…
People’s folklore influencing their experience, people’s fiction that they consume influencing their experience, and people’s experience influencing folklore and fictional representations.
So there’s constant feedback.
And when we talk about sea monsters, you’ve talked about the prehistoric survivor paradigm.
And I was trying to sort of run that same concept back to where it began.
And it seems like, to me, from a fictional perspective, maybe the Lost World and maybe some Jules Verne action there.
But this idea of surviving dinosaurs, in order for that to exist, you also need to have…
A cognizance of extinction, a cognizance of fossils.
So, again, you’ve got real scientific discoveries, scientific discoveries feeding into fiction and then feeding into people’s experience.
And, of course, Locks and Prothero talk about the idea that maybe King Kong influenced early Nessie sightings.
But I’d like to talk a little bit your thoughts on that instead of me saying what I have to think about it.
This idea of the prehistoric survivor paradigm.
Are you finding a similar sort of storyline there or through line for how this is emerged?
I definitely think it’s been important and with respect to sea monsters in particular.
And Charles Paxton and I actually did an analysis of this.
When did we publish that?
I can’t remember the date now.
20, no, I can’t remember.
I’m going to say 2017, something like that.
And we noticed that, and we weren’t the first to notice this, and other people have made this claim before.
Sprugg to Camp was, I think, one of the first people to comment on it.
The fact that the discovery of specific kinds of fossil animals, and most famously, the long-necked plesiosaurs.
That happened in 1824.
It’s the public in parts of the world, and I’m obviously mostly fixated on Western Europe, they were savvy enough and the information was shared well enough in newspapers and popular sources at the time, not just academic journals, that knowledge of those kinds of creatures started to influence the sorts of sea monsters that people reported.
So Charles and I…
Charles has got a database of, there’s about 1,700 sea monster accounts on record and Charles has got like a, you know, giant spreadsheet of most of them.
Wow.
And yeah, at what point in history do people start talking about, you know, saying they see a sea monster with a long neck?
Because as we know, historically, you know, what’s a sea monster?
There’s sea monsters of every conceivable sort of size and shape.
But the commonest form in older literature is a serpent, sea serpent.
But you don’t really get people commenting on a neck until the Daedalus or Daedalus event of 1848, an account that happened off of Namibia, so South Atlantic.
that’s one of the first to actually mention a long neck, even though the creature is actually sort of like a long, like, you know, sort of cylindrical object.
And yeah, there’s statistical support to be found for that contention that people start talking about a neck after plesiosaurs become known, which is consistent with the idea that people are really influenced by popular culture.
So, yes, I definitely do think that, yeah, the discovery of specific fossils, the sharing of it does have a osmotic effect, you know, then goes to the monster sighting.
So that’s, yeah, that’s kind of the background to the prehistoric survivor paradigm.
There’s another thing that always needs to be mentioned, and I find myself mentioning this more and more, and that’s also that the history of cryptozoology and indeed the history of like Fortiana and the paranormal and everything in general is mostly driven by sensationalist popular writing.
So there’s this common idea that, you know…
writer x i’m not going to mention any specific names because it seems mean but this specific writer like oh they they did this big book where they they showed that the evidence for surviving plesiosaurs or whatever is pretty good it’s like well it was a popular book and they were deliberately writing something to appeal you know to a mass audience and they were deliberately uh kind of you know sensationalizing and popularizing it and i i think that that’s partly why some authors
including some that are still quite active today, have really promoted and latched on to the prehistoric survivor paradigm because it’s the funnest and most sensational perspective that you can go on.
What a cool idea.
It’s a fun, speculative idea.
And I’ll say one more thing, which is that…
And the idea that people like writers promoting the prehistoric survival paradigm, the idea that they were thinking that it was a good idea based on various scientific arguments they could make, like, could it be conceivable?
that creature like a plesiosaur could persist for years beyond the end of Cretaceous or a bacillosaur beyond the end of the bacillosaurs or zygodonts, this famous group of long-bodied whales.
Could they have persisted for 36 million years beyond their point in the fossil record?
That’s something that we might say in the modern decades because we’ve now…
you know, decades of recent geological science have helped pin specific ages on the geological strata.
But when these ideas first become popular, late 1800s, they don’t have those exact, like, specific geological, the correct word is evading me right now, but they don’t have the accurate geological ages.
They’ve got this vague view of the age of the Earth and the age of the specific
People have known since the early 1800s that there was an age of reptiles before there was an age of mammals.
But what specific dates can you pin on that?
Well, if you’re a Victorian scientist, you’ll be absolutely fully on board with the fact there is an age of reptiles, but maybe it’s four million years ago.
maybe it’s 10 million years ago, maybe it’s 2 million years ago.
They are not thinking that they are, today, the mesozoic age of reptiles is between something like 252 and 66 million years ago, but they don’t know that.
So they’re thinking that bacillosaurs and plesiosaurs are animals of a few million years ago.
Therefore, the idea that they might have cryptically survived in the modern world is actually not unlikely.
That hasn’t been mentioned enough.
It’s been mentioned a few times in the paleontological literature when paleontologists have commented on things like bacillus or zygodon survival.
But I think it’s one of the things at play here.
Well, the young Earth creationists, if the Earth is only 6,000 years, there’s plenty of time for dinosaurs to still be around.
So there’s some context, right?
I’m going to say, as I always do, dinosaurs are not extinct.
Oh, nitpicking.
I just have to remind people every time.
There’s still so many dinosaur experts, so many paleontologists.
There’s one pooping on my car right now.
Exactly.
We have to train people out of saying that if birds are dinosaurs, and we all agree they are, then you can’t be extinct when you’re still alive.
That’s true.
Can we say Mesozoic marine reptiles are extinct?
Yeah.
Okay, thank you.
We’re back in agreement.
Most people get that granular and just don’t think of it in terms of that.
So in your article, you talk about the U-28 sea monster story and also the SS fully case.
So I’m wondering if you could tell us a bit about those and also that you credit Adrian Shine’s book.
You already mentioned him, A Natural History of Sea Serpents, for that reanalysis.
So if you can tell us about those cases a bit and how important his book is to the field as well.
Yeah, so those are both really good examples of how newsflash is as if you have to go back to the source.
You cannot rely on second, third or fourth hand retellings in popular books.
So this connects to what I just said about the history of sensationalist claims made in books on monsters.
Adrian Shine.
And for those of you who don’t know, most of you will, but he’s the famous Loch Ness guy with the massive beard.
He is the Gandalf of Loch Ness.
That’s true.
Yes, he’s a great guy.
Really, you know, decades of amazing, like, on the ground research.
Or in the water.
Or in the water research.
At Loch Ness and other Scottish lochs.
But yeah, he’s also got this very grounded, serious interest in sea monster research as well.
And he shows in The Natural History of Sea Serpents, which I really liked.
I did a review of it.
at Tetrapodsology.
Yeah, if you go back to the source, the original account is often quite different from the popularised one.
So… And I should also say that a lot of these sea monster reports, they’re so exciting that…
when they’ve been featured in newspapers and popular books, they’ve been accompanied by artistic reconstructions produced by artists, not by the original witnesses.
So you’ll therefore see in a kind of often sort of Chinese whispers or like deliberate embellishment of the original case.
And the Mfuli account is from the vessels called the SS Mfuli.
In 1893, it was off the Canary Islands.
And Captain Kringle, always find that an amusing name, he described their observation, the observation of him and several crew members of like a weird monster of some kind.
And the conventional interpretation of this, which you can see in Hooverman’s book of 1968, In the Wake of the Sea Serpents and Other Sources, is a bulky-bodied, like a lumpy-bodied sea monster with a really long neck projecting way out of the water with a little head.
And it looks exactly like the conventional view of a plesiosaur.
Now, today we know plesiosaurs didn’t look quite like that.
They didn’t look lumpy and bumpy and they couldn’t swim along with the neck way out of the water like that, but whatever.
It looks like a plesiosaur.
So if you’re interpreting this, trying to interpret this based on just that information, it’s like, what could this be?
I can’t explain this away as a wayward sighting of a killer whale or, you know, a bar skin shark or anything.
It’s a giant long-necked monster.
What Shine emphasises, go back to the source, go back to the Umphalys ship’s log, that’s not what was described at all.
The monster that Kringle and others described was thought by them,
to be a giant conger eel they thought they were looking at a giant eel so they were talking about a long and low animal that did not project much above the water surface it certainly didn’t have a long neck and there was no mention of a neck in the in the report in fact and the it was said to have it was only seen fleetingly they got these brief glimpses of it
uh it was said to have an upper jaw seven foot long and the artist that produced the plesiosaur light reconstruction must have like not read this properly or was miscommunicated because it looks like they thought upper jaw um was i don’t know long neck or something i can’t remember how they might have made the mistake
It’s a long jaw, seven foot long, with white gums fringed with serrated teeth.
And as soon as you talk about a really, really long upper jaw fringed with serrated teeth, you should probably be thinking of a baleen whale, like a fin whale or a say whale or something like that.
And…
Now, we know today, if you think of like a blue whale or one of those rorqual whales in your mind, you’re probably thinking of a very, very long, slender animal, looked like a wine glass or something.
We’ve, you know, we’ve seen them on TV and aerial photos.
We haven’t seen them in real life.
But go back to the 1890s, people did not know that rorquals were like that.
They thought they were sort of blubbery, chunky, blocky animals.
So I don’t think they had the information to interpret it as a rort call, but that does seem to be what it is.
So, yeah, that’s a case of having to go back to the source.
What did the witness actually say?
They didn’t say what sensationalist authors have said that they did.
And then picture worth a thousand words.
I mean, look at Mothman.
Frazetta does that cover art for the Mothman prophecies.
It changes the reports.
It changes what people expect.
It matters a lot.
This art stuff matters.
Fortean author and author in general, Mike Dash, gave a really good talk that I went to a few years ago called Are Artists Pictures What the Witness Saw?
And it was all about this.
It was about the fact that
Yeah, as soon as you get an author to make a cool picture for the cover of a book or a magazine, that then becomes the monster.
There were many, many case examples of this.
But yeah, that’s a real important phenomenon.
This affected a whole load of sea monsters and other monsters in general.
And just more briefly, because I spoke for too long there, more briefly, the U-28 encounters, one of the most famous sea monster accounts of all time.
So 1915, First World War.
The German U-boat, U-28, is patrolling off the coast, off the southwest coast of Ireland.
And these vessels, the U-boats, were terrifying.
And I did a bit of research into them, and it’s astonishing how successful they were.
It was ordinary for, in a season, a U-boat to disable or sink between 200 and 300 enemy vessels, which is absolutely unbelievable, their success rate.
So they saw, this is recorded in the, I’ve forgotten the very long German name for war diary, Kreigs something, there’s a German word for it.
A big compound down.
Yes, classic piece of German lingo.
And, yeah, they saw this vessel, the Iberian.
They torpedoed it.
They disabled it.
They took – a small number of men were killed during the attack, like less than five.
About 70 survived and were taken on board.
And the standard procedure was to take survivors on board and drop them off at the nearest friendly port –
and to sink the vessel.
So this is exactly what they did.
They sank the Iberian.
And Captain Von Forstner was the main man.
This story revolves around.
And he’s a very famous U-boat commander.
He wrote a book in, I think, 1917, all about his adventures as a U-boat commander.
And he says that they watched it sink.
um well hold on he says yes there’s two sets of different things but in the 1930s he says that they uh they watch it sink and then they see an explosion and blasted among the skyward among the wreckage is this gigantic like 60 foot long 18 meter long crocodile shaped writhing sort of sea monster and that was written about by hoovermans and other cryptozoologists and that’s a canonical cryptid it’s the marine saurian it’s meant to be like a
surviving mosasaur or other cretaceous marine reptile but there’s no mention at all of this account in von forstner’s book and when the survivors of the attack uh the crew of the iberian were um interviewed by local journalists in ireland there’s many many newspaper reports of what they what they saw and what happened there’s no mention of a sea monster
There’s the story went national across Great Britain and Ireland.
It went international.
It was reported in the US before the US was involved in the First World War.
So they had no reason to be coy or sceptical in their reporting of it.
And there’s no mention of sea monsters at all.
That’s quite a cover up.
Yeah.
It doesn’t become part of the story until 1933, and there’s two things going on in 1933.
In Germany, there’s a little bit of a nationalistic push, and nationalistic right-wing newspapers basically want to celebrate German achievement and excellence.
And, of course, the Loch Ness Monster is a phenomenon in 1933.
So what seems to have happened is that right-leaning…
pro-germany publications wanted a german story coming from a respected german guy like let’s get our own loch ness monster story um and they found that in von forstner and i should also say that von forstner wasn’t like an innocent you know like uh
He participated very much in this because he wrote the forward or the preface, I can’t remember, but he wrote like an introductory set of some text for the German version of the first ever book on the Loch Ness Monster, Rupert Gould’s Loch Ness Monster and Others, which in Germany had a different title.
It’s called like My Adventures with Sea Monsters or something along those lines.
And…
And von Thorsten again mentions there the fact that, oh, I saw a sea monster one time back in the First World War when I was a U-boat commander.
So, yeah.
So we have to conclude from that that sadly the U-28 1915 sea monster account actually didn’t happen.
The Iberian was indeed sunk.
There probably was actually an explosion.
But, yeah, nobody saw or reported or wrote down a sea monster at that time.
Didn’t become part of the literature until the 30s.
Is this article behind a paywall or is it something people can just get to?
It is paywalled, yeah.
But, you know, I hopefully don’t need to say this.
If you ever find an article that you want and it’s paywalled, ask the author, find the author and ask them and they will 99% of the time be more than happy to send you one.
Yeah, on research.net or…
academia.edu or something like that i think it’s just such a well done piece and it’s got great pictures but uh you you get you hit some really great points that i love to see reiterated and one of them is the coelacanth as red herring which is funny in its own right but uh but
Can we talk about that a little bit before we run out of time?
Because it is.
I mean, it is the image of cryptozoology for many people because it’s a real creature.
But I’ve always felt I’ve long felt it doesn’t really qualify.
So, yeah, I like your thoughts.
Yeah, I mean, I’ve been saying for a while that the use of coelacanths as analogues for the prehistoric survivor idea, the fact that, hey, if this lineage of fishes could persist from the Cretaceous to the present day without us realising until 1936, then surely, please yourselves…
And then bacillus and mosasaur and whatever else could survive as well.
Well, no.
No, there’s just a lot of reasons to reject that claim.
Well, reject it as a good argument.
So coelacanths are living coelacanths, which are really quite different from a lot of fossil coelacanths we know of.
But living coelacanths are abyssal deep sea specialists.
They don’t come to the surface.
So far as we know, they don’t come to the surface at all.
They don’t breathe air.
They are off the continental shelf.
They don’t hang around estuaries or coasts.
They have no need to come to the surface.
They have no need to frequent places where people might see them.
And if we imagine that plesiosaurs or bacillosaurs or whatnot survived, all of those animals are, they are, those are all animals that must spend a lot of time at the surface.
They must frequent coastal waters for reasons of like their ecology, you know, where they need to get their food and where they breed and whatnot.
And, of course, the bones, the skeletons of animals like plesiosaurs and whatnot, their bones are big, identifiable.
They roll around for a long time on the seafloor before being broken to bits.
Coelacanth bones, again, those are the modern coelacanths, are really very difficult to identify, very kind of like highly modified, reduced.
Their individual bones are almost impossible to identify.
If you find an individual coelacanth bone, good luck telling us that it’s a coelacanth, whereas you can’t say the same for the groups of fossil whales and reptiles that have been part of the prehistoric survivor paradigm.
So, yeah, I think there’s more to it as well, but the whole argument that coelacanths are good analogues is just not really a good proposal.
They’re not particularly monstrous, which I think there’s something about the original definition of what should be a part of cryptozoology had that sort of…
marquee value.
We’re not looking for a new kind of newt, right?
We’re looking for something a little exceptional, something that would be the subject of folklore.
And there’s not a lot of folklore outside of the Atlanteans.
Now they love their coelacanth stories down there, but you know, up here on the surface where we have to breathe air, there’s not a lot of coelacanth folklore.
And it just doesn’t feel like it’s filling that niche of turning folklore into fact, which seems to be an obsession in the original sort of cryptozoology.
Yeah, when coelacanth became known, thanks to Marjorie Courtney Latimer’s discovery and J.L.B.
Smith writing about it, they did then find other people in East Africa saying, oh yeah, we do know this fish and we do catch it very rarely.
So it might be that local people…
did catch these fishes occasionally but yeah it wasn’t remarkable enough for anyone to really make a big deal out of it and whether that means it’s in the same ballpark as something like a you know 40 foot long marine reptile is again like a thing worth pointing out
Well, unfortunately, we’re going to have to start wrapping things up, but we just have a couple of little questions we want to throw in at the end here.
So you note in your article that cryptozoologists aren’t pseudoscientists and they don’t promote anti-scientific views, but that their work involves a lot of speculation well beyond what the data supports.
And that’s a pretty measured take.
So how do you navigate that line with your work, being sceptical of the claims while also being fair to these people who are making them?
Yes, I think it’s quite important.
You’ll agree with me here that it doesn’t really work when we just…
I’ve been quite frustrated with the history of scepticism that comes from some people, by no means all people that mark themselves as sceptics, in the…
we mustn’t use a kind of knee-jerk, what I’ve called automatic scepticism, just like, oh, that’s such a ridiculous idea, I’m not going to take it seriously.
So, you know, there’s people that have written about Bigfoot and their first argument is, it’s such a stupid idea, it’s not even worth considering.
It’s like, well, I kind of see why you’re saying that, you know, we know why you’re saying that, but it’s not good enough in terms of the quality of evidence that we have.
So I think it’s fairer to people that endorse the existence of given cryptids who in cases do so because they’ve had experiences themselves that they can’t explain.
That’s fair enough.
I think if you put yourself in their position, they are coming up with serious arguments that might support the validity of the thing.
And, yeah, if we then drill down into those, we can show why.
Well, no, if you if you evaluate that scientifically, you know, you should have evidence for this by now.
Does that eyewitness evidence stand up?
What are the prior experiences of that specific witness?
So, yes, I just don’t think it’s.
Yeah, it’s not.
I think it’s easy to reject cryptozoology as pseudoscience.
This has become a bit of a hot topic in recent years due to the behavior of certain editors at Wikipedia.
They’ve just got this blanket dismissal of cryptozoology as pseudoscience.
Whereas a lot of it is not.
It’s like parascience.
It’s something happening in parallel to proper science.
But it’s I still don’t think it’s actually pseudoscience per se.
Yeah, that’s I think our stance as well to address the claims, but not dismiss out of hand.
Yeah, we’ve taken the…
Shine has that phrase he likes to talk about being a sympathetic skeptic.
And I think we’ve done the presumption of sincerity, like the idea that while the claims may be weird or strange or unusual or unlikely, that we’d like to at least start with the assumption that the person making them is not a hoaxer or doing so in bad faith.
I mean…
And I think that’s one of the big take-home things on sea monsters.
Yes, there are these hoaxes in there, like the U-28 encounter, and there’s a few others as well, but mostly it seems to be people misunderstanding what they saw because, and this is Shine’s primary point, that we are not good observers when it comes to weird, big animals seen at sea.
We do not generally have good experience of what we’re looking at.
I think if we wrote a book of monster talk, things we’ve learned, don’t trust your memory and people are not good observers.
And it’s very likely you don’t know enough to make a good judgment.
Like that’s, those are like three really core ideas that, you know, even mundane stuff, like how a taphonomy works with dead animals leading to, you know, mutilation suspicions and conspiracies.
It’s like,
A lot of that, if you just knew more about how animals decay, you would know that this is not that mysterious.
But who has time when there’s a good story to be told?
I don’t know.
Oh, so wrapping up, I wanted to say something like, I really miss you doing your podcast.
But when I went to look and see what you’re up to lately, you’re not lazy.
You’re a busy guy.
So do you want to talk?
I’ve got a big list of things I could list off.
Why don’t you hit the highlights of what you’ve been working on?
Where can people find you today, Darren?
Yeah, the podcast does still exist, but we only get to do it very occasionally.
So I’m most active at tetrapodsologytetzu.com, where I share thoughts, articles and drawings on all the animals that I’m interested in.
I’m generally busy with, I’m doing books all the time.
I’ve got a big book I’m putting together at the moment about cryptozoology, which I definitely want to talk about when it’s out, which will maybe be 2027 or 28.
I’ve just finished a long stint working in TV.
I worked for the BBC Natural History Unit, brilliant job, and helped bring together the Apple TV series Prehistoric Planet Ice Age, which is streaming now on Apple TV.
So do have a look at that if you’re interested in ice age animals.
And Hunting Monsters is still in print, but only as an e-book.
So if you don’t have what I think is quite an interesting, sceptical volume on monsters and cryptozoology, where we’re at as of when I wrote the book, 2016, 2017, then please do get Hunting Monsters.
The e-book is incredibly cheap.
It’s just a few dollars.
Nice.
So I guess that’s it for today.
Although clearly we could just chat a long ass time.
That’s when the new book comes out.
Definitely.
We’ll, we’ll be in touch.
Yeah, please, please do stay in touch.
And I’m, I’m so glad that you’re out there getting some good word out on these, these, these topics besides just, that’s not real.
Shut up about it.
Cause that’s not a really great, that’s not a great talking point.
I, I, you know, monsters are great.
That’s great.
So, yeah, indeed.
So thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us again.
Yeah, thank you.
We know you’re so busy.
Yeah, for real.
Thanks.
And you got to work with Attenborough.
That’s really freaking cool.
I did, yeah.
Me and Dave.
Yeah, it’s his 100th birthday in this month, May 2026.
Amazing.
I’m going to his birthday next week, I think.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, for real.
I mean, obviously, I’m sure this is true of you too, but I’ve been watching him since I was a little child.
Oh, yeah.
Familiar voice.
Oh, my God.
So that’s so great.
Well, say hello for me.
I know he gets to see us too when we watch TV, right?
That’s how that works.
Yeah, he’s always talking about your podcast.
That’s why I always put on pants before I watch his shows.
That’s important.
Yeah.
All right.
Thanks for having me.
It was great talking to you both.
Likewise.
Thank you.
Yeah, have a good weekend.
Take care.
You too.
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 conversation with Darren Nash about sea monsters, source material, and why a story told by witnesses may be completely outperformed by an imaginative illustration.
Darren’s article, Monsters of the Deep, is in Geology Today.
And if it’s behind a pail, I’ll do what Darren suggests and ask him for a copy.
You can find his writing and artwork at Tetrapod Zoology.
That’s tetzoo.com.
And his book, Hunting Monsters, is still available as an e-book.
Check the show notes for links.
He’s also got a new cryptozoology book in the works.
So we’ll definitely be having him back when that’s ready.
And if you haven’t seen Prehistoric Planet Ice Age on Apple TV, which Darren worked on with the BBC Natural History Unit,
It’s definitely worth a look.
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.
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The post S05E32 – Monsters of the Deep with Dr. Darren Naish appeared first on MonsterTalk.

S05E31 – From Loup Garou to Rougarou with Louisiana Dread’s Kyle Crosby (Part 2 of 2)

Episode Summary

This is part two of our conversation with Kyle Crosby, creator and host of Louisiana Dread. In Part 1, we covered the history of the Acadians and how they carried the loup-garou legend from France to the bayous of Louisiana. Now, in Part 2, Kyle walks us through the transformation of the loup-garou into the Rougarou – from strict werewolf to all-purpose shapeshifting boogeyman – and takes us on a tour of Louisiana’s other legendary creatures, from the Axeman of New Orleans to the feu follet to the Grunch.

The Rougarou – Curse, Boogeyman, or Both?

Kyle describes growing up terrified of the Rougarou in Lafourche Parish – it kept him indoors after dark and faithful to his Lenten penance, because breaking that penance seven years in a row meant you’d turn into one. The Rougarou’s lore varies by region, but some common threads emerge: if bitten or scratched, you can’t tell anyone for a year and a day or you’ll become one yourself. You’re a Rougarou for 101 days, and once the curse lifts, you can never speak of it. A voodoo priestess, a traiteur, or a witch can inflict or relieve the curse. During the day, the cursed person is weak and feeble; at night, they become a shapeshifting beast. Unlike the French loup-garou – always a wolf – the Louisiana Rougarou can take nearly any form, giving the swamp at night an uncanny quality where any sound or shadow might be something else entirely.

Kyle notes the Rougarou is less malevolent in some tellings than its French ancestor – the cursed person’s main goal is to transfer the curse by biting or scratching someone else. But in his family’s version, courtesy of a horror-movie-loving grandmother, the Rougarou was going to rip you to shreds.

Can’t Count Past 12

Blake brings up a classic piece of Rougarou defense: leaving 13 objects by your door. The Rougarou can only count to 12, so it sits there counting and recounting until sunrise forces it back into human form. Kyle confirms this was traditionally done with chicken bones – because the Cajuns spreading these tales orally were poor – while wealthier folks used coins. (Kyle suspects those coins may have attracted a different kind of visitor.) Blake connects this to the broader folklore motif of supernatural creatures with compulsive counting behavior – vampires who must stop to count scattered rice or salt – a kind of folkloric OCD.

A Cautionary Tale – and a Way to Cope

The conversation turns to the Rougarou’s deeper cultural function. Kyle explains that the legend served dual purposes: as a cautionary tale to enforce obedience (especially in children), but also as a coping mechanism for loss. Missing children were sometimes attributed to the Rougarou because the alternative – that a human neighbor could commit such an act – was too horrifying to accept. Within a deeply Catholic community, the idea that a human would risk eternal damnation by kidnapping a child seemed impossible; a mythological beast was a more bearable explanation.

Rougarou Fest

Kyle and Blake discuss the annual Rougarou Fest in Houma, Louisiana – a free, family-friendly festival every October featuring a parade, live music, amazing food, and a big Rougarou appearance. All proceeds benefit the South Louisiana Wetlands Discovery Center. The 2026 festival is scheduled for October 23-25.

Why the Rougarou Persists

Karen asks why the Rougarou endures as a cultural force, and Kyle connects it to the persistence of Catholicism and the Cajun community’s fierce attachment to their heritage. He notes that the 1921 Louisiana Constitution effectively banned French from public schools – at a time when 85% of the state spoke French. Today, fewer than 4% do, but there’s a growing movement to preserve the language and the folklore that comes with it.

The Axeman of New Orleans

Kyle tells the story of the Axeman of New Orleans, an unsolved serial killer case from 1918-1919 that straddles true crime and the supernatural. The victims were primarily Italian grocers on the West Bank – part of a large Sicilian immigrant community that Kyle notes arrived in Louisiana in greater numbers than even New York or New Jersey, with three boats per month from Palermo. He traces the community’s history to the Sicilian “lemon wars” and the early formation of La Cosa Nostra, which he says had roots in New Orleans before spreading to New York, New Jersey, and Chicago.

The Axeman always used the victim’s own axe – common household tools kept for chopping firewood and, critically, for breaking through the roof during hurricane flooding. Kyle recounts the story of the Cortimiglia case, where a political figure named Louis Marrero – described by Kyle as virulently anti-Italian – blackmailed a surviving victim into falsely accusing two Italian men with alleged Mafia ties. When her husband woke from his coma and contradicted her testimony, she eventually recanted, and Marrero’s political career was destroyed. (The town of Marrero in Jefferson Parish still bears his name.)

The story takes a supernatural turn when a letter arrived at the Times-Picayune from someone claiming to be a spirit from Tartarus, promising a “Passover” – but sparing anyone playing jazz. That night, every jazz band in the city was booked, the wealthy hired them for private parties, and the poor packed the dance halls. No one died. The Axeman was never caught.

Correction: In the interview, Kyle places the Axeman’s jazz letter in October 1919. The letter was actually published on March 13, 1919, with the threatened “Passover” night falling on March 19, 1919.

The Feu Follet (Cajun Will-o’-the-Wisp)

Karen asks about the will-o’-the-wisp, and Kyle introduces the Louisiana version: the feu follet (or fouffoyer, as he pronounces it). He tells the Cajun origin story of a wicked blacksmith named Will Smith (no relation) from Acadiana who dies, gets a second chance from St. Peter, lives even more wickedly, and is then rejected by both heaven and hell. The devil condemns him to walk the earth with only a burning coal to light his way – and that coal is the mysterious bioluminescent light seen glowing over the swamps at night, luring the unwary to their deaths. Blake shares his own childhood memories of wanting desperately to see a will-o’-the-wisp on his grandfather’s swampland, and never quite managing it.

Louisiana’s Monster Menagerie

Kyle rattles off a few more creatures from Louisiana’s deep bench of folklore: La Tataille (or Le Bêtail) – a beast of the swamp around Lafayette and the Atchafalaya; Madame Grand Doigt (Madam Longfingers); and Le Litiche – a half-alligator, half-human creature. Kyle notes that different regions have their own dominant monsters, with the Rougarou and feu follet claiming his home turf.

The Grunch

Kyle saves his personal favorite Louisiana monster for last. The Grunch originates from a story about traveling circus sideshow performers in the 1920s who were ostracized and abused by the public and retreated from New Orleans to a road in New Orleans East (or, in some versions, west along the Mississippi to Muntz). After being continually harassed – even by kids throwing rocks – they stopped praying to God and started praying to the devil, who gave them a creature to defend them as long as they lived. The Grunch is described as half man, half goat, half reptilian – a math problem Blake is quick to flag – that drains blood like a chupacabra but also eats people. A photo allegedly taken in New Orleans East after Hurricane Katrina is sometimes claimed to show the creature. An alternate origin story drops the deal with the devil and goes with generations of inbreeding among the isolated performers producing the monster – a pattern Blake notes shows up in dozens of cryptid origin stories involving wrecked carnival trains.

Find Kyle

Louisiana Dread
Website: louisianadread.com
YouTube: @LouisianaDread

Check out Kyle’s gumbo reviews on YouTube – if you can’t make it to Louisiana, at least you can live vicariously.

Further Reading & References

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.
And this is part two of our conversation with Kyle Crosby of Louisiana Dread.
In part one, we dug into the history, the Acadian expulsion, the layers of trauma and culture that built Cajun and Creole Louisiana, and the old world roots of the Lugaroo.
If you haven’t listened to that yet, I’d recommend going back.
It sets the stage for everything we’re about to talk about.
What you need to remember, though, is that the Lougarou that came over from France was a werewolf.
Wolf is right there in the name.
Loup means wolf.
But Louisiana doesn’t have wolves.
What it does have is swamps and darkness and owls and mangy dogs and alligators and about a thousand sounds at night that you can’t quite identify.
And somewhere along the way, the Lugaroos stopped being a wolf and started being, well, anything.
It’s a shapeshifter, a curse you carry for 101 days, a creature that pulls your toes if you leave your feet out from under the covers at night, which honestly, y’all should know better than to do that, right?
Today, Kyle’s going to walk us through the Rougarou as he grew up with it, a creature that scared him into keeping his Lenten penance and staying indoors after dark.
And we’ll talk about why it persists, what it meant to communities dealing with real-world horrors, and how it sits alongside the whole ecosystem of Louisiana monsters, including one born from a traveling circus and the devil himself.
It’s time for Kyle to hit us with some mysteries, murders, the mafia, music, and, of course, Monster Talk.
Okay.
And we’re back.
All right.
So first of all, thank you again, Kyle, for spending so much time with us.
This is such a beautiful part of the world.
Such a beautiful part of this country.
Oh my God.
The food is so good.
I can’t think about Louisiana without thinking about it as haunted because much like Savannah, you know, the most haunted city in America, New Orleans is also the most haunted city in America.
So.
They look a lot alike, too.
They do.
I went to, you know, at Gods and Monsters, I think I actually took the time to point this out, that we didn’t have Spanish moss there in Texas, but they did have, what was it called?
Ball moss or something.
I looked it up, but yeah, that was really interesting.
I once heard that Savannah was described as New Orleans with a penicillin shot.
that’s pretty funny i mean it’s one of the few places in georgia where you can walk on the street with a drink without getting in trouble so yeah maybe amen amen place to go so i guess we should i again i don’t want you to be constrained to the rougarou because there’s more than there’s probably more than a dozen scary stories coming out of louisiana and yeah
But we are fascinated by the Rougarou.
And as you already mentioned in part one, it turned from being strictly a werewolf into something more of a boogeyman.
Can you talk a little bit about how you first heard about it?
Or what do you hear in Rougarou stories contemporary?
What is a Rougarou?
Yeah, definitely.
And first, I am so grateful to be on this show because, again, you and I, we hit it off immediately whenever we started talking and you brought up, you know, how much you’ve been to Louisiana and you liked it at the conference.
I had a great time.
So I really appreciate y’all having me on.
So when it comes to the Rougarou and my upbringing, it was always, always used to strike fear in me.
And it freaking worked.
Um, I did not go outside after the lights went on, uh, on the street lights came on and the sun went down.
The Rougarou was going to eat me.
If you, um, you give up something for everybody who’s not Catholic, you know, Lent, you do that every year, you give up something.
Um, if you break that penance seven years in a row, you turn into a Rougarou.
So I was not breaking my penance.
You know, I was not doing anything because one year it’s like, well, I did have a, I gave up macaroni and cheese, but I had one noodle with cheese.
I don’t know if that counts towards the Rougarou thing, you know, so you never could be too sure.
It was always in the back of our heads too, as we grew up and we started to realize, you know,
Maybe we outgrew the Rougarou coming after me.
But at night, if you’re in the swamp or you’re in the marsh and it’s dark, you can’t really see much.
You hear the noise of the swamp.
You can never really be too sure that you are alone.
And nine out of 10 times, you’re not alone.
Whether that be a raccoon, an alligator, whatever.
Best case scenario, right?
It’s eerie.
And it’s not just the Rougarou that can strike fear.
Because we have over 15 different cryptids that are in Louisiana alone.
And doing the research and getting to learn all this stuff is absolutely phenomenal.
Best perk of the job.
And they all derive from different areas.
Do you have one in particular that you’d like to hear about first?
Well, so are you thinking like Honey Island or what are you thinking?
Honey Island is one of them.
Yeah.
Honey Island Swamp Monster is really good.
But again, the Rugaru is king.
It’s always going to be the best one.
That’s what people paid for.
They’re here for the Rugaru.
So we should probably cover that one first.
Yeah, definitely.
So, I mean, the Rugaru.
it’s all religious, right?
It’s 101 days.
If you are bitten or scratched by a rougarou, and it’s difficult to really talk about in a generalized sense because there’s so many different tweaks here and there in different regions.
For instance, like if you are bitten or scratched by a rougarou, you can’t tell anyone for a year and a day or else you’ll turn into one.
There’s another piece of the lore from where I’m from that I was always taught that you are a Rugaru for 101 days.
And after that, you can’t tell anyone you were ever a Rugaru or you will turn into one.
Also, if you see a Rugaru and you find out someone is a Rugaru, you can’t tell anyone or you’ll turn into one.
A voodoo priestess or a traitor or a witch can turn you into one.
They can also relieve you of the curse because at the end of the day, it is a curse.
It’s not, you know, this romantic thing.
You are very feeble, weak, your most vulnerable self during the day.
because at night you turn into this shape-shifting beast.
Now, for the most part in literature, you’re going to find a way scarier lycanthrope, werewolf-like creature in France, as opposed to what we have down here, which is more, it’s less malevolent.
It’s a curse and they’re just trying to rid themselves.
Their main goal is to get rid of the curse and the way you can do that is to bite or scratch someone and the curse transfers to the other.
Ah, yeah.
So when and why does the Rougarou shift from a curse that you earn to a boogeyman that comes for you?
It was always a boogeyman to me.
I learned recently that in some areas of Louisiana, it wasn’t a malevolent creature.
I was always told, maybe because my grandma was a freak that loved horror movies, that it was going to literally rip me to shreds.
So it was always a violent, evil, scary creature to me.
But in literature, because I guess it’s mostly an attempt to get to children,
And they’re all written by adults.
There’s never a child that writes about a Rougarou.
So it’s always, you know, oh, you better do this or the Rougarou is going to get you.
Not, hey, the Rougarou can get you at any time.
Some instances, there’s the Rougarou can pull your toes at night if you sleep with your feet out, you know, that kind of stuff.
That’s just good sense.
I mean, even a skeptic knows you got to keep your feet covered.
Right.
That could be anything to get you.
That’s science is what that is.
That’s science.
Right.
And so, I mean, I feel like it’s always been a…
a curse and it’s always been a boogeyman like creature because they’re not mutually exclusive you can some things can be true but shapeshifters are such an interesting concept anyway like you say the the lugeroo is a wolf it’s always a wolf but the rugeroo could be just about anything which means you know when you’re walking out at night and you hear you know an owl is it an owl maybe it’s not an owl maybe something else you know so
Or you run into a friend and they’re acting a little weird.
Is it your friend?
Or is it something else?
It has… Uncanny valley.
Yeah, there you go.
This uncanny quality.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So one of the things I read about was the idea that if you leave 13 objects by the door, that a Rougarou can’t count past 12.
Have you heard that before?
Oh, yeah.
Can’t count past.
That’s how you defend yourself against one.
If you hear that owl outside, you put 13 something.
Usually it was chicken bones because the people spreading the tales orally were very poor.
So it would just be chicken bones, but you could mostly, the wealthy would put coins, 13 coins, and they would wake up the next morning, come out, and then the 13 coins would be gone or 12 coins would be gone.
I think somebody robbed them, but it was more chicken bones for the Cajuns because, again, they didn’t have much.
Yeah, that’s fascinated me for a long time.
I think when you get past just watching monster movies and you start reading the literature and reading the old stories that are rarely put on film, this idea about the undead, and specifically vampires usually, having this almost what sounds like OCD.
You could throw rice, you could throw salt, and they have to stop and count every bit of it.
I’ve always found that fascinating.
fascinating like and that that is um he just he’ll keep counting because he’s frustrated because he doesn’t know what the next number is so he’ll keep counting to 12 until the sun comes up and then he gotta he gotta run back because he’s turning back to human you you mentioned hearing about the rougarou uh and being warned against it so it does have that um i don’t know
I don’t know what the exact word is that.
A cautionary tale.
A cautionary tale, yeah.
I think there’s a lot of stories about water monsters that are sort of similar, where clearly there’s an element of keep the kids away from the water so they don’t drown, right?
But did you hear any specific Rougarou stories where it was like, this didn’t happen to me with my cousin Jimmy.
This absolutely happened to him.
You know, that kind of thing.
Oh, yeah, my physics teacher in high school.
Whoa.
Okay.
They were playing golf in the back by a golf club in the back by the marsh and by the levee and all.
And…
He hit the ball a bit too far towards the woods and it was getting dark.
The sun was about to go down.
And by the time he went to get the ball, the sun was down and it was very, very dark in the woods.
And he saw two red eyes glaring at him and kind of it seeped back into the woods itself.
So you couldn’t see him anymore.
And he said, that’s when I saw the Rougarou.
Wow.
Oh, yeah.
Two red eyes.
I’d never heard him or anything.
But he said him and his friends hauled ass after that.
So would you say that today there’s still people who.
believe in the Rookaroo or is it more one of those things like in Australia where people go there and they talk about, but where the drop bears or here in the US talking about tree alligators, is there a section of society that still think that there is something or might be something?
100%.
There are many people in Louisiana that have reached out to me, much less that I haven’t even talked to yet, that believe that they have seen one, that believe that it is real.
that it lives amongst us.
But also, you know, and not to get very sad, but the Rougarou in itself is a story for obedience, right?
It’s a story, a cautionary tale to warn people.
But it also was a way to cope with loss.
as opposed to like missing children.
The Rougarou was blamed a lot for children who just went missing because why did my child get taken from me?
There’s no way a human could do something so heinous as stealing my daughter from me at such a young age.
It had to be this mythological creature that has taken my daughter from me.
Because again-
No human would do that knowing the consequences when they die, that they will go to hell.
But as we know today, humans are very capable of doing much worse.
So it’s not, it was more of a coping mechanism as well as a level of obedience.
Right, yeah, a way to explain the world.
Yeah, because you don’t want to admit that, yeah, my neighbor kidnapped these kids and all that kind of stuff.
There’s no way.
So it had to be this beast.
Karen’s a linguist, so we…
And I just am just a word nerd.
I don’t think I have any speciality except for puns.
But I’ve heard that the roo-ga-rooing has become a verb.
Have you heard that in the wild?
Oh, God, no, I have not.
Wild, that’s interesting.
I heard it.
I saw it on some webpages as, you know, something like make it a ruckus or, you know, getting up to no good.
But so if it’s not widely known, I guess it is now.
That’s interesting.
I’ve never heard of Rugaruin.
Rugaruin.
I don’t want to waste a question.
So how about this?
Are you familiar with Rugaru Fest?
Because we’ve been really covering a lot of monster festivals, and apparently there is a Rugaru Fest in October.
Oh, yeah.
It’s one of the most fun festivals I’ve ever been to.
Oh, really?
Oh, yeah.
It’s awesome.
There’s a parade.
Then there’s a big Rougarou that comes out.
There’s lots of vendors, amazing music, amazing food, awesome drinks.
The community shows up.
And, you know, the people of Louisiana are very special.
We love to show our hospitality.
We love to talk to people.
We love to have a good time.
Is that Huma or Houma, Louisiana?
Houma.
I would have got there eventually.
There’s only so many ways you could pronounce it.
I’ll put a link to that in the show notes.
That’s in October.
Oh, it starts on my wife’s birthday, October 23rd.
Nice.
All right.
Oh, I have to add that to our bucket lists.
Yeah, that would be cool.
A birthday present.
Yeah.
So you got it.
So, Kyle, why does the Rougarou persist as this cultural force today, do you think?
I think because religion, the Catholic faith has persisted so much.
I think it has a lot to do with Catholicism and the belief and holding on to what we hold dear.
There’s a reason why it’s over 100 years removed from our…
language being removed, but yet lots of us still hold on to the last vestiges of it.
85% of the state spoke French in 1921.
Today, less than 4% of people speak it, but now there’s more of a surge of preservation than there has ever been.
And I think that that comes with folklore too.
Our folklore has been passed down for several generations.
And that story has been kept alive.
It’s just such a beautiful place and a beautiful culture and beautiful people.
So unique.
It is.
And I don’t know what I would do if…
I mean, I realize obviously I’m just some guy up in Georgia, but, you know, I use a lot of blackened seasoning.
I wouldn’t see that gone.
But, you know, when I think about monsters of that area, and you’ll recall I asked you about this at the Texas conference, but besides the Rougarou, I know there’s a few other monsters people probably want to hear about.
But this one’s a weird one because it straddles that world of true crime and the supernatural.
Can you tell our listeners a little bit about the Axeman?
Oh, I knew that was coming.
Absolutely.
I love the Axeman.
Because the Axeman, that also kind of transcends time.
Not as popular as the Rougarou, and it’s younger than the Rougarou.
Because this happened in 1919.
1918, 1919, a slew of axe murders started happening on the West Bank.
Now, to preface this, in the late 1800s, we had more Sicilians and Italians come through Louisiana than New York and New Jersey.
Wow.
So you have a large influx of Italians here.
And they faced racism and prejudice.
And they moved to the West Bank of New Orleans, which is today Jefferson Parish.
And they would be grocers.
They would do that kind of stuff, right?
But you’d have three boats per month from Palermo, Sicily to New Orleans.
So you had so many people coming through.
And a lot of people escaping this…
lemon craze that was going on in Sicily at the time, enough that, you know, people would hire armed associates to protect their lemon interests.
And it was called La Costa Nostra.
Well, where do you think those people came?
To Louisiana, to the West Bank.
They would go and escape that, but they also started their own.
They would also start their own businesses and they would form with the early formings of the mafia.
I just kind of quickly insert here that I never expected the mafia to be turned into a liminal experience.
Absolutely, my friend.
It came before the organized crime in New York and New Jersey and Chicago.
It started in New Orleans.
Wow.
So you have these Italians, these Italian grocers showing up dead in their house and they’re all killed with an axe.
And one common misconception is that the Axeman killed a lot of people.
I think he only killed about six total, 12 victims.
They didn’t have that many deaths.
Lots of them survived the attack.
But it also faced political pushback from a guy named Louis Marrero.
who the town of Marrero in the West Bank is named after today.
But he was very anti-Italian, and he put the blame on these Italian deaths on the mafia.
So one night, this couple was attacked and they survived, and they said it was a tall man dressed in all black with a top hat, and he had an axe.
Also of note, it was always the people’s axe that got attacked.
He never had his own axe.
He killed you with your own axe.
Because the majority of homes back then had an axe in the backyard to cut firewood, but also for storms.
If a hurricane came, you kept your axe with you in the attic.
And you would stay in the attic as the water rises.
You have that axe to break a hole in your roof.
So everybody would have an axe.
Now, it took one family to get assaulted, and both the man and woman went into a coma at Charity Hospital, and the woman came out of her coma first.
And Louie Marrero and his goons went into the hospital, and…
blackmailed her, threatened her to say that it was these two Italian men that had old mafia ties that assaulted her.
And she said, okay, I’ll do it.
So in court, she testified and she blamed those two that were sentenced to death.
The husband wakes up from a coma.
He’s like, no, this ain’t true.
This was not these guys.
He divorces his wife after she doubles down on, he goes, I don’t, this is terrible.
I don’t, I don’t condone this at all.
They divorce.
Then the wife comes clean saying, no, Louie Marrero blackmailed me and blackballed me essentially.
And the two men was set free.
Louie Marrero’s political career tanked because everybody saw how corrupt he was.
And now a letter arrives at the desk.
of the newspaper, the Times-Picayune, claiming to be this phantom, this mystical creature from, quote, Tartarus, that was sent and is making a Passover tonight in October of 1919, and everybody who’s playing jazz will be spared of my Passover.
Wow.
So that night…
All the jazz bands were bought up by the wealthy and they would go to the wealthy people’s houses and play.
So the poor people would clamor into dance halls and listen and dance to jazz.
And no one died that night.
Right.
It’s pretty nuts.
Yeah.
And super creepy.
I don’t know why.
I mean, he’s got to be quite old now, but he still kind of scares me.
Never been caught.
Never been caught.
According to the note, he’s very nuts.
According to the movie, he was very old.
I wanted to ask about another monster.
So the Will-o’-the-Wisp.
So these are found around the world, one of these universal claims about flickering lights that are seen at night over graveyards and bogs and swamps.
So I guess it makes sense that you would find these in Louisiana.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So we call it the Fufoyer.
The Foufouillet and the story goes is that there was a blacksmith in Acadiana south of Lafayette near New Iberia and his name was Will Smith.
No relation.
No relation.
We’re going to need to get some genealogists on that.
So Will Smith was a wicked man.
And so wicked is that he dies and he goes to the pearly gates in St. Peter’s like, look, you were bad, but we’re going to give you another chance.
You have another chance at life.
Go live it morally.
So he comes back to earth and he lives it even more wicked than the last time.
So then he bypasses the pearly gates and he goes straight to hell.
And the devil says, I don’t even want you, man.
But you’re going to be damned to walk the earth.
And you’ll only have this burning coal to light the way.
So this light, this bioluminescence that we see in the swamp is the fufuye.
luring you to your death.
Wow.
That’s a cool story.
You know, my family, my grandfather had a…
Probably, it was only maybe…
I’m guessing 20 acres of swampland.
But I used to love to go out there at nighttime.
And, you know, we didn’t have alligators, but we had snapping turtles and catfish and all the other things a good swamp should have.
But I wanted to see a Will of the Wisps so bad.
And I never saw anything like it.
I still have it.
But, man, I would love to.
I’d love to.
That’s one of my favorites.
It’s beautiful.
I’ve seen one.
Yeah.
I’ve seen it.
It’s also with lightning bugs.
It just looks surreal.
It’s beautiful.
Very beautiful.
There’s, like, you know, lightning bugs, bioluminescence, starlight.
There’s so many different explanations.
And I imagine, kind of like with Bigfoot, people are seeing a lot of different things, and you’ve got to follow this.
But still, when you’re out there…
There’s something really special about that marshland, swampland.
It’s so magical.
Yeah, very, very.
And it made me a little bit of fear, a little bit of beauty.
Yeah, it’s quite a mix.
It’s his own kind of gumbo, right?
Visual gumbo.
Do you know, and I’m probably going to butcher this, La Tatia?
La Tatia?
La Tatai.
So the Tatai is…
It’s kind of like a paramount fae, like a father figure, but it’s a beast.
Another folklore beast.
There’s another one called Madame Grontoit.
That’s Madame Longfingers.
So the tatai is a beast.
It’s a creature in the swamp that’ll eat you.
The same thing with the litesh.
Litesh is also a beast that’s half alligator, half human.
I never heard much of the Tatai.
I heard of a Betai, where I was from, which is like a beast.
The Tatai is, that’s like Lafayette, north of Lafayette, and then Jafalaya, around Opelousas and stuff, too.
We had the Rougarou down, and we had the Foufouillet down where I’m from, Rougarou.
We had the Betai, Madame Grontoit,
But again, y’all, there’s so many different creatures, as y’all can see.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, again, I kind of joked about it earlier, but I mean, it’s just such a rich ecosystem of monsters and ghosts.
We didn’t even really touch on ghosts at all.
I feel like we ought to bring you back at some point.
So I hope you’d be welcome to that at some point.
Absolutely.
That sounds wonderful.
Kyle, I think we could just keep talking for hours about these monsters.
They’re so interesting.
And with so many unique monsters at your disposal, this is going to be a difficult question.
What’s your favorite monster?
Oh, that is – it’s tough because I grew up with the Rugaru.
I identify as a Rugaru.
Okay.
My obsession with monsters, I will say, started with Godzilla, King of the Monsters.
Addicted to monsters after that.
I wanted to be Godzilla.
In terms of…
Louisiana Monsters.
The Grunch kind of has a soft place in my heart just because of the lore behind it.
Would you mind if I tell you real quick?
No, tell us about The Grunch.
So The Grunch, back in the early 1900s,
the 1920s-ish.
I feel like I’ve been talking about the 1919, 1920s a lot on this podcast.
But during the Great Depression, traveling circus…
took a nosedive.
People used to love the traveling circus before the Great Depression, but it ruined these traveling circus.
But the, like the, what do you call them?
The matador, not the matador, the guy in charge, the master of ceremony, whatever.
The master ceremony.
Ringleader, yes.
So like the ringleader, the trapeze artist, those people can get jobs at bars and restaurants in the city of New Orleans.
But the sideshow performance…
were people with abnormalities, deformities, conjoined twins, the bearded woman, the strong man or the dog-faced man, you know, things like that.
They were ostracized and they were very much so abused by the public.
And they said, hey, we don’t want to live in the city anymore because we keep getting abused.
So they moved outside the city to New Orleans East back when it was just all swamp and woods on a road called the Grunch Road.
Now, there’s another part of the lore that says that they, instead of going east, they went west along the Mississippi River to a town called Muntz.
But regardless, the story remains the same, that they set up a tent.
or a camp, and people would go out of their way to harass these people, leave the city.
Kids would go ride their bikes and throw rocks at them and stuff.
So they started praying to the devil to help them.
They stopped praying to God because God wasn’t answering their prayers.
So they prayed to the devil.
And the devil, in exchange for their souls, obviously, that’s always the deal, right?
He gave them a creature.
that won’t prey on them, but will defend them as long as they live.
And these people live very long lives.
They eventually died of natural causes, but this grunge creature is still around and it’s half man, half goat, half reptilian looking creature.
Half-failed math student.
I don’t know how many halves you can have, right?
Like a man-bear pig, right?
Right, right.
But it’s man, goat, reptile, and it…
It’s like a chupacabra.
It’ll drain blood, but it also eats people.
And there was a photo taken right after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans East, Little Woods area that claims to be the grunch in itself.
But there’s another story that they never made a deal with the devil, that they just intermarried.
and had um they were all inbred after you know a generation or so and then a generation of inbred sideshow performers created this monster kind of like uh the jersey devil how the woman gives birth to the 13th child and it’s the devil oh yeah i told my wife and my cousin this story and she loved it yeah
So that would probably be, I just love the lore of being, you know, this sideshow performer circus type of thing.
Wow.
Well, Kyle, oh my gosh.
Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us and our listeners.
Oh, my pleasure.
This was so fun.
So much.
Go ahead, Karen.
Sorry.
I was just going to say, and we’ll have to keep in touch and bring you back to talk about ghosts.
Oh, I’d love that.
I have so many ghosts.
I’m looking at six ghost books in front of me right now that I got to do some research for some more stories coming up.
Well, it’s easy to find Kyle.
But in case you’re having trouble, there’s links in the show notes for both these episodes.
Check him out.
Louisiana Dread.
Check out his gumbo reviews.
We can’t all go have gumbo, but we could at least live vicariously through YouTube.
So, yeah.
And if ever you come to Louisiana.
Louisiana, you know where to get the best gumbo if you watch.
Exactly.
You’re on.
Fantastic.
And good luck with your work on selling the series.
It sounds amazing.
Yeah, yes.
Thank you so much.
I just, I really appreciate it.
You’re just a treat to talk to you.
I appreciate it so much.
Oh man, that means a lot.
I appreciate that.
I’ll come on the show whenever y’all need.
I love talking about this stuff.
I love talking about Louisiana and promoting our culture and sharing our culture with anyone who appreciates it.
You have a good night, Kyle.
Thanks a lot.
All right, my friends.
Good night.
Bye-bye.
Talk 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 Kyle Crosby of Louisiana Dread wrapping up our two-part dive into the Rougarou and the rich haunted folklore of South Louisiana.
Kyle is a filmmaker, historian, and cultural advocate, and he’s currently working on adapting Louisiana’s dark history into a scripted horror anthology series, which I can’t wait to see.
Links to all of Kyle’s projects are in our show notes, his YouTube channel, his social media, all of it.
Just go out there and check them out.
And Kyle, if you’re listening, thank you so much.
This was a real treat, and we minute it about having you back to talk ghosts if you can make time for us.
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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Positive reviews help keep us visible in iTunes, which is a great way to help us find new listeners.
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And to our patrons and supporters, we thank you.
You make this show possible, and Karen and I don’t take that for granted.
Monster Talk theme music is by Pete Stealing Monkeys.
We’ll see you next time.
This has been a Monster House presentation.
We’ll see you next time.
I mean, technically we won’t see you, but we’ll be talking at you.
Honestly, idioms rarely hold up to scrutiny.

The post S05E31 – From Loup Garou to Rougarou (pt 2) with Louisiana Dread’s Kyle Crosby appeared first on MonsterTalk.

Episode Introduction

This is part one of a two-part conversation. Blake and Karen are joined by Kyle Crosby, filmmaker, historian, and founder of Louisiana Dread, a multimedia project dedicated to documenting the dark history, folklore, and culture of the Pelican State. Kyle is a native of Larose, Louisiana, who grew up in Lafourche Parish and on Grand Isle. He spent years working in the film industry before returning home to preserve the stories he felt were being lost to time. Through his popular YouTube channel and social media platforms, he bridges the gap between scholarly history and regional folklore – covering everything from the legend of the Rougarou and the Honey Island Swamp Monster to the real-life mysteries of the Cajun Coast. Kyle is currently adapting his historical deep dives into a scripted horror anthology series, with one episode in the festival circuit and a second in pre-production.

Blake met Kyle at the second Gods and Monsters conference at Texas State University, where Kyle’s presentation on Louisiana’s history and folklore inspired Blake and Karen to finally tackle the Rougarou as a proper episode.

In this first part, the conversation digs into the history of the Acadian expulsion, the cultural forces that produced Cajun and Creole Louisiana, and the Old World roots of the Rougarou legend. In part two, they’ll get into what the Rougarou actually became – a shape-shifting boogeyman with regional variants, plus feux follets, and a monster that might have been born from a traveling circus.

Kyle Crosby / Louisiana Dread

YouTube – Louisiana Dread
TikTok – @louisianadread
Instagram – @louisiana.dread
Facebook – Louisiana Dread
Website – louisianadread.com
Kyle’s Gumbo Reviews

Topics and References

The Acadian Expulsion (Le Grand Derangement)

In 1755, the British Crown forcibly expelled French-speaking colonists from Acadia (present-day Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island). The Acadians were a community of French colonists who had intermarried and intermingled with the Mi’kmaq First Nation over generations. The British separated families – men shipped in one direction, women and children in another – in what has been called the first documented ethnic cleansing in North America, a distinction that says more about whose suffering was recorded than who suffered first. By the Treaty of Paris (1763), over 11,500 of the roughly 14,100 Acadians in the region had been deported.

Some displaced Acadians eventually made their way to Spanish-controlled Louisiana. In 1785, King Carlos III of Spain funded seven ships to transport approximately 1,600 Acadians from France to Louisiana, in what has been described as one of the largest single migrations of Europeans into the Mississippi Valley. Some Acadians went to France first before eventually reaching Louisiana; others arrived in staggered waves over several decades.

The word “Cajun” itself derives from “Acadien” (the French term for the Acadian people), anglicized over time as English speakers dropped and shifted syllables.

Ancient Louisiana

Kyle notes that Louisiana’s human history stretches back thousands of years before European colonization. Among the ancient cultures discussed are Poverty Point, Marksville, and Coles Creek. The nearby Watson Brake site in northeastern Louisiana dates to approximately 3500 BCE – predating the Great Pyramids of Giza – and is considered the oldest known earthwork mound complex in North America. Poverty Point itself is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Above-Ground Burial – Spanish Influence, Not Floating Coffins

The episode tackles a popular myth: that New Orleans buries its dead above ground because coffins float up from the water table. Kyle and Blake discuss how this practice is actually rooted in Spanish colonial influence – the same above-ground burial traditions seen in Madrid and Barcelona. While early settlers who buried the dead on levees did occasionally see coffins displaced by flooding (and Hurricane Katrina produced dramatic examples), the architectural tradition itself reflects Catholic Spanish culture transplanted during Spain’s control of Louisiana, not a practical response to groundwater. Kyle notes that every tour guide in New Orleans repeats the floating coffin story because it gets the oohs and ahhs, but the truth is more interesting.

The Suppression of French in Louisiana

In 1921, the Louisiana state constitution established English as the official language and effectively banned French as a language of instruction in public schools. This happened at a time when an estimated 85% of the state’s population spoke French as their first language. Kyle describes the punishment children faced for speaking French at school – hit on the fingertips with rulers, forced to kneel on dried rice, made to write “I will not speak French” on the chalkboard. Karen draws parallels to the suppression of Welsh in British schools and the treatment of Indigenous languages in North American residential schools. The ban was not officially lifted until the Louisiana constitution of 1974.

Cajun, Creole, and Cultural Identity

Kyle discusses how after 300 years of French, Spanish, Native American, West African, and Caribbean communities living together in Louisiana, the distinctions between “Cajun” and “Creole” are more complex than most people realize. He defines a Louisiana Creole as someone born in Louisiana, French-speaking, of Catholic faith, with ancestry from West Africa, Western Europe, and/or Native America. He argues that after three centuries of intermixing, most people in South Louisiana share this heritage – but that racial divisions were deliberately reinforced during segregation and forced cultural assimilation in the 20th century, creating artificial separations that persist to this day.

Coastal Land Loss

Kyle emphasizes that Louisiana’s culture is inextricable from its land – and that land is disappearing. He states that Louisiana loses a football field of land approximately every 100 minutes, and that since 1930, the state has lost an area roughly the size of Delaware. His guiding principle: “You lose your language, you lose your land, you lose your culture.”

Visit NASA link for much more info on loss of coast-land.

From Loup-Garou to Rougarou

The French loup-garou was a werewolf – a proper lycanthrope. Belief in such creatures was not an ancient relic; the Beast of Gevaudan terrorized the French countryside between 1764 and 1767, barely a decade after the Acadian expulsion. French colonists carried the loup-garou legend wherever they sailed – including to Grosse Pointe, Michigan, where a werewolf legend dates to the French colonial period.

But when the loup-garou was transplanted to Louisiana – a landscape with no wolves – it changed. Kyle explains that the word “loup” means wolf and “garou” means shapeshifter. As Cajun French evolved in isolation, the L and R sounds in “loup-garou” swapped through a process called metathesis – the same linguistic shift that turned “plarine” into “praline.” The loup-garou became the rougarou.

Crucially, the Rougarou is not a lycanthrope. It’s a shapeshifter – half-human, half-anything. In Louisiana literature and oral tradition, the Rougarou appears as an owl, a bird, a mangy dog, or a wolf depending on the region. It is also more closely tied to Catholic religious belief than to European werewolf mythology. Native American folklore of the region also contributed to the evolution of the legend, creating a uniquely Louisiana creature that blends French, Indigenous, African diaspora, Spanish colonial, and Caribbean spiritual traditions.

Kyle also notes that Louisiana Cajun French preserves an older form of French than what is spoken in modern Paris – the language did not evolve in the same way because it was isolated from metropolitan French linguistic change.

Credits

Monster Talk theme music by Peach Stealing Monkeys.

Support MonsterTalk

Visit monstertalk.org/support for links to our Patreon, donation options, and our Amazon wishlist. Used books and Kindle editions are always welcome! You can also support us by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen, and sharing us on social media.

Come back for Part 2, where we’ll get into the Rougarou itself – how it became a shape-shifting swamp creature that can’t count past 12, why breaking your Lenten penance might be more dangerous than you think, and some other Louisiana monsters that deserve their time in the spotlight.

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…
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.
In 1755, the British crown decided it had had enough.
French-speaking colonists in what is now Nova Scotia, people who had built lives, families, and a whole culture blending European and Mi’kmaq traditions, had been a thorn in the empire’s side for decades.
So the Brits did what empires do.
They tore families apart, they loaded men onto ships headed one direction, and women and children onto ships headed another, and they scattered this community across the Atlantic.
It has been called the first documented ethnic cleansing in North America.
which is not to say it was literally the first.
The genocide of indigenous peoples across this continent was massive and ongoing, but the Acadian expulsion was deliberately planned, ordered, and recorded by the British crown, a paper trail of cruelty, which is the distinction that says more about who the imperial powers kept records of than who suffered.
Eventually, some of those displaced Acadians found their way to the swamps and bayous of Spanish-controlled Louisiana, where they started over.
They brought their Catholic faith, their French language, their recipes, and of course, their monsters.
You see, back in France, the loup-garou was a werewolf, a proper lycanthrope.
And belief in such creatures wasn’t some quaint relic of the Middle Ages.
The Beast of Gévaudan was terrorizing the French countryside barely a decade after the Acadian expulsion.
Werewolves were not just a continental concern.
French colonists carried the Lugaroo with them wherever they sailed.
For instance, there’s a werewolf legend in Grosse Pointe, Michigan that dates to the French colonial period long before it was even a state.
These weren’t dusty old stories to be discarded on the way to the New World.
These were important dangers of an ongoing and monstrous concern.
But when you transplant a monster across an ocean into a landscape with no wolves, where it mingles with native traditions and African diaspora folklore and Spanish colonial culture and Caribbean spiritual practices, well, that monster is going to change.
And that’s exactly what happened to the Lugaroo on its way to becoming the Rugaroo.
Today on Monster Talk, Karen and I are joined by Kyle Crosby, filmmaker, historian, and founder of Louisiana Dread, a multimedia project dedicated to documenting the dark corners of the Pelican State.
Kyle is a native of South Louisiana, descended from the very communities we’re going to be talking about.
And he gave us a fantastic presentation at the Gods and Monsters Conference at Texas State University.
that made us say, okay, we finally need to do that proper Rougarou episode we’ve been wanting to.
So this one’s a two-parter.
Today, we’re going to dig into the history, the Acadian expulsion, the incredible cultural gumbo, and I do mean gumbo, that produced Cajun and Creole Louisiana, and the old world roots of the Rougarou legend.
In part two, we’ll get into what the Rougarou actually became, a shape-shifting boogeyman with his own rules and his own regional variants.
Plus,
Ex-murderers, Will of the Wisps, and a monster that might have been born from a traveling circus.
You don’t want to miss this.
Kyle Crosby is a filmmaker, historian, and the visionary founder of Louisiana Dread, a multimedia project dedicated to documenting the dark corners of the Pelican State.
A native of La Rose, Louisiana, Kyle spent years in the film industry before returning home to preserve the stories he felt were being lost to time.
Through his popular YouTube channel and social media platforms, he bridges the gap between scholarly history and eerie folklore.
covering everything from the legend of the Rougarou and the Honey Island Swamp Monster to the real-life mysteries of the Cajun Coast.
He’s currently working to adapt these historical deep dives into a scripted horror anthology series, ensuring that Louisiana’s unique cultural heritage remains as haunting and vibrant as ever.
And I hope that’s true, because you talked about that, and I put it in here, and then I thought I probably should check and make sure Kyle is actually still in the process of adapting these stories.
Absolutely, I am.
Yes, I got one in the festival circuit right now and in pre-production for a second episode this summer.
Fantastic.
I met Kyle at the second Gods and Monsters conference, which I am now calling Gods and Monsters 2 Eclectic Rougarou because I can, because I can, because nobody can stop me.
So I met Kyle at Gods and Monsters where he gave this wonderful presentation talking about a broad overview of what he is doing with his media and outreach.
And part of that, just a little smidge of it, touched on one of my favorite, and Karen’s too, I believe, that we talk about a lot, the Rougarou.
We talk about it a lot, but we have never dug in to the Rougarou.
We haven’t.
Very remiss.
I well, and partly because I didn’t feel like we had anybody with whom to speak cogently.
Yeah.
So welcome to Monster Talk, Kyle.
Oh, there you go.
Oh, it’s a pleasure.
I love being on here.
This is great.
Thank you so much for having me.
And yeah, if there’s one thing I could talk about all day, it’s Louisiana.
And with that is the Rougarou for sure.
And don’t, don’t let me forget.
You also do something with food and besides eating it.
So we don’t want to miss that.
So we’ll put links to all Kyle stuff in the show notes.
This is going to be a two-parter.
So we’ll put those links in both parts.
Well, Karen, you want to kick us off?
Yeah, I just want to start.
I love Louisiana.
I’ve been there quite a few times and all around, but I never knew it was the Pelican State.
I guess I never saw that on the license plates.
Am I wrong?
Did I misremember?
No, it’s 100% the Pelican State, the Bayou State.
Best state in the Union, in my opinion.
It is the gumbo, the gumbo state.
Gumbo capital of the world, baby.
Yeah.
Well, let’s start with a little bit of history.
So, Carl, can you tell us, who were the Acadians?
Yeah.
So, just a brief, a little bit further.
So, we’re going to go to 1755, and even a little bit further back than that, because you have…
um louisiana under french control uh obviously after thousands of years of native american settlements you have uh cultures like the um culture the marksville culture coles creek culture poverty point cultures these are civilizations thousands and thousands of years old that still have
huge mounds, burial mounds, ceremonial mounds dotted all over the state of Louisiana that you could kind of see today.
And I’m talking like those predate the pyramids in Giza.
So they are ancient, right?
So when you have colonization kind of occur with the French first, we became Spanish for about 40 years or so.
During Spanish occupation is when you have the Seven Years’ War.
To most Americans, it’s known as the French and Indian War.
And with that, France loses.
And as a result, France will give Louisiana to Spain as sort of like a concession for the participation in the war, despite Spain actually losing as well.
So France gives Louisiana to Spain.
Then you have France losing possessions in Canada, primarily in New Brunswick, Cape Breton, Grand Pre, all that.
So that area was populated by French colonists that kind of intermarried and intermingled with the Mi’kmaq First Nation tribe.
And then, you know, a while later, you have a completely different generation of mixed European Native American people known as the Acadien.
The Acadien.
You can look at it as the Acadians.
That is the more anglified version of it.
We call them Acadien.
So when the British took control of that area, their main goal was to get French completely out the area.
So.
What they did was a genocide, as the British do sometimes, as you’ve seen throughout history.
It was a mass starvation, mass killing.
These people were forcibly removed from their homes, mass deportations.
They would take women and children and lock them in churches.
And they would take the men, some of the elderly, and they would ship them around the world.
And they would take the women and children out of the churches and ship them in the opposite end.
So they would never see each other, very much so displaced.
But King Carlos in Spain, King Carlos III would send…
famously send seven ships to collect a bunch of these Akajan people, and they would end up in Louisiana.
Now, those people, they’re called Akajan, but then English people can’t really say that, especially Americans.
They couldn’t be able to say Akajan.
So it would be Akajan, Akajan, Akajan, Akajan, and it would be the A would separate from that word.
So that’s where you get the name from.
Nice.
Well, I mean, not nice.
It’s actually terribly brutal, but still.
That’s why I’m here, man.
You know, it does suck.
But if it didn’t happen, I wouldn’t be here.
You know, so I’m grateful, you know, that that.
that I’m able to be here and to tell people more about the atrocity that occurred, but then also to let people know, hey, we are something to celebrate.
We’re not victims.
We’re not perpetual victims of this genocide.
The first recorded ethnic cleansing in North America, now I say recorded and I stress recorded because it’s not, it never accounted for the natives, the Native Americans that were here before, but it is a documented ethnic cleansing of people in North America.
that, you know, for the majority of my life, it was kind of glossed over a little bit.
And that is perpetuated by the American school system to not let us really know about where we came before.
We’re all American.
Yeah.
I was just going to say that with so much tragedy and displacement, these atrocities that you’re talking about, no wonder the area is so rich in folklore and myth and legend.
Oh, absolutely.
Because that comes with all other ethnic groups here, too.
We are.
There’s one thing that we have abundance of, and that is trauma, collective trauma.
Even when you talk about Creole, Creole has West African, you know, in that ancestry.
So there were free people of color.
Yeah, there were free blacks here.
You don’t see that anywhere else in the United States.
But the vast majority were enslaved Africans.
that were forcibly removed from their homes and brought here to do manual labor.
And it was the transatlantic slave trade was the darkest mark on the American history and culture.
And that comes from immense trauma.
You have what happened to the natives and you have what happened to the Cajuns.
You have all this stuff, all trauma.
And it just kind of builds what we have today, essentially.
I mean, I don’t know if there’s any way to talk about the mixture of cultures without relating it to gumbo, but.
Everything comes back to gumbo, all roads lead to gumbo.
But I mean, you know, they talk about the melting pot and all these things.
It’s like, but my God.
Louisiana is such a melting pot.
One of the things that struck me when you were talking at Gods and Monsters, two, eclectic Rougarou, one more time there for the not paying attention people, but the…
You mentioned the influence of Spanish style burial on the above ground tombs.
And I was so glad to hear that because it’s been sort of like a little pet peeve of mine.
Like when I realized that I, what actually I think may have triggered it was I was stationed in Spain and up on a big hill, a beautiful cemetery.
I love going to cemeteries.
And I noticed, my God, these cemeteries look like the ones in New Orleans.
But we’re nowhere near the water, you know?
So why?
So that’s what got me curious about it.
And then at some point, I think it was when that show Mythbusters was on.
I started doing these experiments to see, you know, because obviously I can’t go bury a coffin myself, but I got the hypothesis.
I’m lazy.
It’s not like there’s no law against it.
I’m just very lazy.
I did a scaled down version and I like with just what would have been the equivalent of like two foot of soil.
And I did real sandy soil.
you know, I couldn’t get anything to pop up.
I even like a water bottle, which is all filled with air wouldn’t pop up out of there.
And I thought, this is, this is not right.
And then I dug and dug and finally found some of just a few places on the internet where they say, yeah, it was the Spanish influence that caused that cultural shift towards that kind of burial.
But I, I, it is so pervasive, that myth that, that if you bury somebody in the ground, they’re just going to pop right up.
Well, it started that way, right?
Like it did.
That was the catalyst, was the first settlers here would do that.
They would bury their dead on the levee and the river.
Not a great place.
No, not a great place.
That could happen anywhere.
It could happen anywhere.
Not necessarily here.
Yeah, we are below sea level.
You go to where I’m from on Grand Isle, you pass by places like Leeville, South Lafourche area, and you are looking at…
water level that’s higher than the land it’s pretty crazy to see but when the river would flood one or two seasons that’s all it would take for human beings naturally to be like oh wait what the hell’s going on here we got to kind of fix this right and yeah like you put you put concrete on top of anybody they ain’t moving bro you know so you you you bury them
But also it was during Spanish times that the city was growing rapidly.
And like every large city, you are, you know, competing for space.
And there’s no more room for this, no more room for that.
And the cemetery is very confined.
And it only makes sense to build up, especially if you see the same things in Madrid, Barcelona, the same types.
It’s just our culture that does that.
Down to Bahia, you know,
There’s a big concrete slab with a few bodies under that.
And during Katrina is when there was an undertow and it swept some of them out from underneath that concrete slab.
And that’s when you do see coffins floating up.
It’s not impossible, but it’s just because the reason that we bury above ground isn’t because of the ground level water.
You know, it’s just truly because our culture.
If you get a hurricane tidal surge, it doesn’t matter where you’re buried.
That can wipe up.
It can move things.
It’s incredible.
People lose track of that stuff.
Absolutely.
Every tour guide you’re going to go to in New Orleans is going to say that because it does the oohs and the ahhs.
The tour guides, God bless them.
Do what you got to do.
You know what I mean?
I do.
Let them do what they got to do.
There’s a video on the Louisiana Dredge channel that you can watch that explains it very well.
And you don’t have to lie and make up all kinds of stuff.
It’s, you know, it’s the truth to me is so much more interesting than something that’s made up.
But I’m always under, I always say, never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
To give our listeners some context here, I was just thinking this expulsion of the Acadians, that was like 1755, I think.
And to give some context here, one of my favorite werewolf-related stories, it’s not really a werewolf story, but it’s this French story, The Beast of Gévaudan.
So that was like a huge story in France between 1764 and 1767.
So, you know, this idea that that maybe werewolves like ancient folklore.
No, no.
Like this was like werewolves in French culture in particular was.
a legitimate belief like it was really firmly believed and I think that I’m not sure how that translated overseas so I know in France they were like newspapers but I don’t know how people necessarily kept up with what was going on I don’t know if people were shipping newspapers back and forth or how that worked exactly but also keep in mind that the natives in the area had folklore of their own that
kind of amalgamized between French and native.
Because the Rougarou in itself isn’t a lycanthrope at all.
Even though the original word says is loup, it’s not a werewolf.
It is a shapeshifter.
That’s Garou.
Garou is a shapeshifter.
And in fact, I don’t know how long you’ve been in Louisiana, bro, but we ain’t got no wolves.
So the legend predates that.
Now, it’s more religious-based than it is lycanthrope, if anything, because you can be a wolf.
It’s half human, half anything.
So mostly in literature, you’ll see it as like an owl or bird or a dog, especially like a mangy dog.
That’s where kind of the Louisiana part kind of sifts in.
But still, you have different regional stories in Louisiana that will say.
That it is different things.
It is a wolf.
It is a half-man, half-wolf.
It is a full-blown wolf.
You know, you have different stories depending on the region of the state.
Cutting to the core of this, what did the Lugaru mean to the Acadians before they left France?
So it is, again, based on lycanthropy.
And you probably heard this term Lugaru, L-O-U-P.
and Rugaru, they are synonymous.
They are the same.
But because of the R, the L and the R, we’ll go to Lu.
So Lu, L-O-U-P, is wolf, and Garu is shapeshifter.
But when the Acadians came to Louisiana, and as time started going on, phonetically, an L and an R will change, will swap.
It’s the same, have you heard of the tasty treat of pralines?
Mm-hmm.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
That’s pecans with sugar, right?
Yeah, exactly.
So the original is plarin, P-L-A-R-I-N-E, plarin, but then the L and the R switch, pralin, and the same thing with lugaru.
As we became more, it’s more of an anglicized…
Most Americans or anglophones can’t really, they can’t do that.
Because that is an L sound.
It’s over time.
It’ll change.
I just want to say that that happens a lot in English too.
And over time we’ve had that, that transposing of sounds with words like bird used to be bread and horse used to be cross.
So yeah.
People say ask.
People used to, when I was, like, the switch from ask to axe was actually, it switched the other way first.
It was originally axe and became ask and then became axe again.
It’s like, so.
Yeah, they existed at the same time, both of them.
And axe was actually the more posh term.
Yeah.
Language of us.
That’s what people say in our, because, like, we, most people from Georgia.
sound more like British English than American vernacular because of the lack of evolution in that southern dialect.
And it’s the same with our French here in South Louisiana.
We speak an older French than what you would see or hear today in Paris because their language evolves.
You know, like the new kids go, oh, yeah, it’s lit.
Yeah.
All this kind of stuff.
They don’t have these, you know, words.
That happens in France.
That happens in Paris.
And that is the main location of the French language is the headquarters.
But for us, it doesn’t evolve.
It stayed the same.
The same words that I say in French today, my great-great-grandfather was saying those words too.
That’s preserved.
Very interesting.
Very much so because of the lack of evolution in the language itself.
The Acadians who came down, about how many people are we talking here?
Like, I mean, how big of a population is this?
It was a few thousand that came down.
I forget the exact numbers off the top of my head.
But not like…
I think it would be 1,200.
You said they fit on like seven ships, right?
So I guess it couldn’t be… Oh, yeah.
It would stagger.
It staggered.
And in some cases, they would go to France first.
Oh, get out.
Really?
Wow.
Okay.
That’s a hell of a…
So they would go back to France first.
Well, because they were displaced, right?
Yeah.
So your wife and kids are now in Haiti.
And you are now in France and you don’t know where they’re at.
But you do hear of this new world.
You couldn’t find them anywhere around Paris.
But you hear of this, you know, place in the new world called La Louisiane.
Or Louisiana at the time because it was Spanish.
And you need to go find your kids, find your wife.
Give it a try.
You know, you have nothing.
You have no home.
You have nothing.
So why not?
Hell, let’s go give it a try in the new world.
Some would find each other again, very few.
But others just came and started a completely new life.
Like the last name Cherami, that’s my mom’s last name.
They went to France first.
They aren’t considered the original crop of Acadians.
There’s about, I want to say, 30-something families that are considered the first Acadians to come here on those ships.
So, yeah, it would be staggered.
You said you lose your land, you lose your life.
So what’s happening to Cajun communities right now?
The exact quote that I always tell people is you lose your land, you lose your language, you lose your culture.
It comes in that order.
It comes language first, then your land, then your culture.
And that’s what’s happening to us at the moment.
When we lost our language was 1921.
The state of Louisiana made it illegal to speak French across the state in government buildings, public services, public schools, places like that.
And this is also happening when 85% of Louisiana is speaking French as their first language.
English maybe as their second or third language of the French or Spanish, right?
So how is…
an increasingly American state and elected officials going to combat this because they don’t like anything different than them, especially then because Quebec was trying to get to be their own country at that time.
Who in the U.S. would do that?
And it would be us for sure.
We’ve always been different.
than the rest of the united states um it’s hard to put us in a category because we don’t fit into any um you have um a and this is also during segregation so you have a minority anglo-american minority
in a predominantly Anglo-American school and you have minority Afro-Creoles in a minority African-American, sorry, majority African-American school.
And they’re both shoved down the rhetoric that, let’s be honest, still exists today in the U.S. as you’re not American unless you speak in English.
And that shoved down the neck of these kids.
My grandfather told me that he couldn’t speak French in school or else the nuns would hit his fingertips with rulers.
Make him kneel and dry rice until he spoke English right on the board a hundred times.
I will not speak French.
I will speak English a hundred times on the chalkboard before you can go home.
For the listeners, I think we should, because you did such a beautiful job and I’m really messing you up right now.
I apologize, but you did such a good job explaining your own position in this cultural heritage.
So you’re not speaking as an outsider who’s studying the Cajun culture, you Creole Cajun.
this is your community.
Could you give a little, like talk about how you fit into that?
Yeah.
And today, honestly.
In my opinion, we are all Creole, all of us here in South Louisiana that have these things in common.
There’s a big divide amongst people, and that division still exists, and that was purposeful.
As time goes on, in 1963, the schools are desegregated.
So now, all these kids are together, and they were both told, y’all are different, y’all aren’t the same, when in reality, we’re all related.
After 300 years, that’s Creole.
Born in Louisiana, French-speaking, Catholic faith.
That is a Louisiana Creole.
But you have to have ancestry from West Africa, West Europe, Native American.
Well, after 300 years, these French and Native American heritage Cajuns come here and they intermingle with free black people, enslaved black people.
You have that African diaspora now.
So 300 years later, we all Creole.
But it was meant to divide based on race in the 60s because it was forced…
cultural assimilation afterwards.
You want everyone to be the same, everybody to speak the same language in America.
You want everybody to, you know, be one thing and not have any multiculturalism.
And that was directly counteracted to what we were.
And you can easily divide a population.
I think it was Lyndon B. Johnson.
I quoted this at my speech that said, if you can convince the poorest white man that the wealthiest black man is lesser than you, that poor white man will give you all their money.
And it’s true because you instill that over a hundred year period.
You have people who are confused about their ancestry, who they are.
We don’t really fit into America, you know, and we never have.
And we were never meant to.
So that’s where I am in my community.
I consider myself an advocate for cultural unity amongst people of Louisiana and for the preservation of our history, culture, folklore, as well as our land that is eroding by the minute.
we are losing a football field of land every 100 minutes in this state of Louisiana.
That is not an exaggeration.
Since the year 1930, we have lost an area the size of Delaware in terms of land.
Now, it’s a long coastline, so it takes a while, but you look at the satellite images from when we landed on the moon in 1969 compared to now, it is breathtaking how much we’ve lost.
And what people don’t realize is that the more land we lose, the less protection we have against these hurricanes and these mega storms that are going to keep hitting major cities, but you need land to weaken them.
And if you don’t have land, you don’t have that weakness in these hurricanes.
So that’s how you lose your language, your land, and you will eventually lose your culture.
You will be removed from the land.
Yeah, there’s just so many issues all coinciding here.
And what you’re saying about this is a kind of linguistic genocide and that does unfortunately happen around the world.
I mean, in Wales, a similar thing was going on with kids learning or speaking Welsh in schools and being punished for it and being subjected to all kinds of cruelty.
And then, of course, across the United States too with residential.
schools and the way that Indigenous people have been treated.
So, yeah, it’s a very wide-ranging problem.
But could you tell us, Kyle, where you’re from and a little bit about your community’s history?
Yeah, I’m from a place called, so we have parishes instead of counties here in Louisiana.
And it’s all based off Catholicism.
How close was the church that you got to go to, essentially?
Not necessarily geographically significant place, right?
But…
I live in a place called Lafourche Parish.
It is about two hours south of New Orleans.
I live in the southern part of the, well, from the southern part of the parish called South Lafourche, an island off the coast called Grand Isle.
And that’s where I grew up between those two places.
And the history of that community is vast.
You have people from all walks of life coming down there.
You have Cajuns.
You have free Africans.
You have enslaved Africans, plantation life.
You have Creoles, all different types.
But also because it is an island, you have a lot of pirates, people descended from pirates, myself included.
Lots of pirates, stories and stuff like that.
um but also that gets romanticized too it’s all through like hollywood it’s not you know the swashbuckling type of stuff it’s you know it’s it was real real um cutthroat things going on but
If you look up any page of Louisiana history, they have from A to B what went on, and it happened in every place in South Louisiana, from plantation life to resort life.
you know, a lot of Cajun culture down where I’m from.
But the really thing that separates us from the rest of the state is the pirates.
There’s this beautiful mixture.
I say beautiful.
I mean, obviously it’s, as you said, it’s, it’s, it’s everything seasoned with trauma, big old.
Yeah.
But you can still love and appreciate it.
Yeah.
But I think, you know, I think as most of our listeners will be aware, the real measure of cultural migration and mixture is always measured in monsters.
But we’re about to end this segment and go to part two.
But I just want to say when we come back, we’re going to be talking about.
Louisiana monsters, specifically the Rougarou, but I know we’re going to talk about some other stuff, too.
But I want to remind people that Kyle doesn’t just talk about history and cool, spooky stuff.
He also talks about food, which many of us have to have to survive.
Yeah.
So be sure and check the show notes for links to all of his material because we’ll have it all there right there for you.
No, I don’t think we’ll have any recipes, but there’ll be lots of stuff to look at.
So we’ll be back.
You can ask for a recipe and I can get it for you.
There you go.
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 conversation with Kyle Crosby of Louisiana Dread.
If you’re not already following Kyle’s work, check the show notes.
We’ve got links to his YouTube channel and social media and yes, his food content because he reviews gumbo and I have to respect that.
In part two, we’re going to get into the Rougarou itself.
How it went from a French werewolf to a shape-shifting swamp creature that can’t count past 12.
Why breaking your Linton Penance might be more dangerous than you think.
And some other Louisiana monsters that deserve a little time in the Monster Talk Spotlight.
So come back for that.
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The post S05E30 – From Loup Garou to Rougarou (pt 1) with Louisiana Dread’s Kyle Crosby appeared first on MonsterTalk.

Episode Summary

Neuroscientist Dr. Melissa Maffeo joins Blake and Karen to discuss her new book Science of the Supernatural: Critical Thinking for the Mind and Brain (Cambridge University Press, 2026). Melissa is an associate teaching professor of psychology at Wake Forest University, where she also serves as Associate Director of the Neuroscience Program.

In this episode, Melissa talks about using paranormal topics as an accessible entry point for teaching psychology and neuroscience, and shares her view that most supernatural experiences can likely be explained by what’s happening in our brains – even if we don’t yet have all the answers. The conversation covers a wide range of topics from the book, including the God Helmet experiments, the neuroscience of out-of-body experiences, how parasites can hijack behavior, and whether prior belief shapes what we experience.

Topics Discussed

Anomalistic Psychology vs. Parapsychology – Melissa explains the key difference: parapsychology begins with the assumption that supernatural phenomena exist and seeks to study them, while anomalistic psychology follows the scientific method and looks for what might poke holes in the hypothesis.

The God Helmet – The conversation digs into Michael Persinger‘s God Helmet experiments, which used magnetic stimulation of the temporal lobes to try to induce mystical experiences. Melissa discusses the temporal parietal junction (TPJ) and its likely role in our sense of self and embodiment – and what happens when something goes wrong there, including a fascinating case study of a patient who experienced an increasingly menacing shadow figure as stimulation increased.

Chris French’s Haunted Room – Melissa discusses former MonsterTalk guest Chris French‘s experiment in which he built a “haunted room” at his university lab, varying electromagnetic frequencies and infrasound. The result? The biggest predictor of supernatural experiences wasn’t EMF or infrasound – it was prior belief in the paranormal. (Hear our earlier conversation with Prof. French: “The Science of Weird Shit”)

The Australian Sheep-Goat Scale – The “Australian Sheep-Goat Scale” sounds like agricultural trivia, but it is actually a cornerstone of parapsychological research. Developed by Michael Thalbourne, the name borrows a biblical metaphor from Matthew 25:32, which describes a shepherd separating the “sheep from the goats” at the Last Judgment. In research terms, “Sheep” are those who believe in the possibility of paranormal phenomena, while “Goats” are the skeptics who reject them. This distinction was popularized by psychologist Gertrude Schmeidler in the 1940s to study the “Sheep-Goat Effect” – the observation that a person’s pre-existing belief or disbelief in the supernatural can actually influence their performance in experimental tests of those very phenomena. Melissa discusses how scores on this 18-item scale strongly correlate with Persinger’s temporal lobe sensitivity scale – a finding she’s replicated with her own students.

The “Haunted” Theater Experiment – Melissa describes a 1997 experiment by James Houran and Rense Lange, titled “Context-induced paranormal experiences.” By taking two groups through the same dilapidated theater but only telling one group it was “haunted,” researchers demonstrated that our brains are incredibly efficient at “filling in the blanks.” The group primed for ghosts reported significantly more chills, drafts, and “sensed presences” than the control group. This highlights a psychological phenomenon known as demand characteristics: when people are put in a specific context (like a “haunted” building or a religious trial), they subconsciously look for – and often find – the sensations that match the expectations of that environment.

Zombies, Parasites, and Behavior – The chapter on zombies (subtitled “Rabie, Baby” – named by Melissa’s daughter) explores how rabies, cordyceps fungus, and parasites can hijack host behavior. Melissa highlights the emerald cockroach wasp, which performs a kind of brain surgery on cockroaches to enslave them. The discussion also touches on toxoplasmosis and the growing research on the gut-brain connection. Melissa also recommends the book This Is Your Brain on Parasites by Kathleen McAuliffe.

Perception, Reality, and The Dress – The conversation touches on optical illusions and the blue/gold dress viral phenomenon as demonstrations that our perception is constructed by our brains – and that “just because you believe something doesn’t make it true.”

Favorite Monster – Melissa’s pick: extraterrestrials who abduct humans as part of a massive government cover-up. She’s fascinated by the cognitive processes behind abduction experiences – the confabulation, the consistency of the narratives across cultures – even though she doesn’t believe aliens are actually snatching people from their bedrooms.

Books Mentioned

– Science of the Supernatural: Critical Thinking for the Mind and Brain by Melissa Maffeo (Cambridge University Press, 2026)

– This Is Your Brain on Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society by Kathleen McAuliffe

Related MonsterTalk Episodes

– The Science of Weird Shit – with Prof. Chris French

– Paranormality, Psychic Dogs, Ghosts and Silly Voices – an Interview with Richard Wiseman

About Our Guest

Dr. Melissa Maffeo is a neuroscientist and associate teaching professor of psychology at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she also serves as Associate Director of the Neuroscience Program. She earned her PhD in neuroscience from Florida State University, is known for innovative teaching methods, and co-founded a neuroscience teaching conference. Science of the Supernatural is her first book.

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.
For most people, it’s easier to believe that there’s an intangible magical thing called a soul bopping around inside our bodies than to believe that the complex and amazing experiences of being human are all created in the lump of mushy organs we collectively refer to as the brain.
The concept of the soul as some kind of explanation for human experience is so widespread that not believing in it makes you a weirdo at best and a dangerous blasphemer at worst.
Melissa Maffeo’s new book, The Science of the Supernatural, does a fine job of introducing how the brain can generate many of the peculiar phenomena that we call supernatural.
I’m not trying to spoil the book.
Far from it.
I read a lot of books about brains, psychology, psychiatry, neurology, entirely because I want to better understand my own experiences in a scientific framework.
I can definitely enjoy a garden without having to populate its bottom with fairies.
And it’s been my experience that knowing a peculiar occurrence was generated by a brain is no more disappointing than discovering mundane but exalted experiences are as well.
The opposite, actually.
I get to intellectually savor experiences like love and hunger and satiation without diminishing their visceral significance, while at the same time being able to contextualize things like deja vu and synchronicity and, you know, nocturnal visits of shadow people, which can help those odd but natural moments feel a little less frightening, dangerous, or mystically significant.
but that’s just me and that’s how I like to live.
I can’t say that if you read Melissa’s book, it will turn you into a materialist, but I can say that if you’ve got an exalted opinion of the specialness of paranormal experiences as lying outside the walls of scientific explanation,
that her book, Science of the Supernatural, should help you at least entertain the notion that maybe a lot of what we think of as impossible supernatural experience isn’t a hoax or a miracle, but is derived from the complex interaction of that aforementioned brain, combined with our insatiable need to create stories about what it’s told us.
The philosopher Emo Phillips once said something back in 1987 that seems apt here.
He said, I used to think that the human brain was the most fascinating part of the body, but then I realized what was telling me that.
You can find links to Melissa’s book, Science of the Supernatural, Critical Thinking for the Mind and Brain, in our show notes.
But right now, let’s get to some Monster Talk.
So Dr. Melissa Maffeo is a neuroscientist and associate teaching professor of psychology at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she also serves as associate director of the neuroscience program.
She is known for innovative teaching methods and co-founded a neuroscience teaching conference.
Her new book, Science of the Supernatural, Critical Thinking for the Mind and Brain, was published by Cambridge University Press in March 2026.
In it, she uses topics like ghosts, zombies, and extraterrestrials as a lens for exploring how the brain distinguishes facts from fantasy, blending pop culture with cutting-edge research to examine paranormal and extraordinary claims through a scientific lens.
Welcome to Monster Talk.
Thank you, Blake.
That was a really nice introduction.
This is a fantastic book, and I think it’s a book that really needed to be written.
And I think a lot of people have been kind of talking about this topic and these issues, but I’m really glad to see that someone’s put this together.
And it looks like a lot of research, a lot of hard work.
Thank you for saying that.
You know, I piggybacked off of a lot of there’s a handful of UK researchers that have done some of this.
But I think what I really tried to bring in was the neuroscience angle, because I think that there is neuroscience work out there.
But I tried to really synthesize all of it so that we can examine supernatural experiences through the lens of psychology and neuroscience.
But I also really wanted to use it as a teaching tool for my students because I teach psychology and neuroscience classes.
And I just think it’s a really fun, creative, accessible way to get students interested in the course content.
Clever to go the textbook route.
It’s written in a style that I think will be very accessible, but it also goes deeper than a pop science book.
So I appreciate that very much.
It’s not a long book, but it covers a lot of really cool material.
And I think, first of all, I’m very interested in the human mind and how it works.
I think listeners will know I have a lot of obsessions, but one of them is this whole, how do you approach…
the human experience, because if you just say psychology, you’re missing the chemical side, psychiatry, you’re missing the, you know, neurological structures of the brain.
There’s so much, there’s a, it’s one of those elephants.
It may take more than 10 blind men to really understand, I guess.
But I think.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like maybe the subtext of your book is that you’re supporting the concept of a purely materialistic interpretation of anomalous phenomena, that everything that we experience could be explained by psychology or neuroscience.
I think so.
I am reluctant to make that claim completely because I don’t have the evidence to back it up.
But that is my personal belief.
It’s a strong hunch for me, too.
Yeah.
And so that’s I mean, that was kind of one of the goals of the book.
One of the goals of the book was not to debunk any kind of paranormal or supernatural belief, but rather to offer alternative explanations that people that have not had a neuroscience or psychology class might not know about.
So I do personally think that most of the things that we experience can be explained by science, even if we don’t at the moment have that explanation.
Do you think that being a materialist necessarily closes the door on other explanations?
I think that’s something we’re often accused of as skeptics is being close-minded because you already have a hunch that it’s happening in the brain.
Are you still open to other explanations?
You know, that is such a good question.
And I truly, I want to say yes.
I very badly want to say yes.
And what I kind of joke around when I tell people is I want to have an experience that I can’t explain.
And I have been in situations where I’ve been around people while they are having experiences that they interpret as supernatural, but I interpret them as a coincidence.
And I use it as a teaching moment, you know, but my students are always like, but Dr. Maffeo, you’re just as biased as the other side is.
And I’m like, yeah, I mean, I kind of am.
What would it take for me to really start believing in something?
I really don’t know.
I was down in Tampa, Florida a couple of years ago with my sister and her husband, and we were going to go kayaking.
And we were in this really backwards like sandwich shop.
And I saw some guys there and they had these really excellent tattoos and some of them were of Harry Potter.
So I had to go compliment the Harry Potter tattoos and sort of chit chatting with the guys.
And it turned out they were paranormal investigators.
Oh, wow.
We have to sit down and have our sandwiches together.
And so I told them, you know, and I was still working, was working on this book, you know, so I’m really trying to do a lot of research and talk to as many people as I can.
Um,
And he was like, yeah, I used to be a skeptic too and I didn’t believe anything, but then I had an experience that I couldn’t explain.
And I said, well, what was your experience?
And he told me that he was at a haunted location and he was sitting at a table with his friend and they had their cell phones out on the table.
And then just all of a sudden from nowhere, the cell phones just flew across the room.
And he couldn’t explain it, except that, you know, a ghost had picked it up and thrown it.
I wasn’t there.
I have no idea what that looked like.
So I can’t say anything about it.
But I would love to experience something like that.
And if I did experience something like that, I don’t know if I would search for some kind of natural explanation.
Like maybe there was some really crazy, weird magnetic flux in the earth underneath me.
I don’t know.
I don’t know what it would take to make me believe.
Yeah, it is very difficult when someone’s had a personal experience and you can’t replicate that to be able to.
And certainly if they really buy into the idea that it is paranormal, it’s very hard to falsify.
But we have talked a lot over the years, Blake, haven’t we, about skeptics who’ve had paranormal-like experiences.
Sure.
But we’ve found that a lot of sceptics have had these experiences and we just attribute a natural explanation to them rather than a paranormal or supernatural explanation.
But, yeah, I’m curious about your students.
Are they predominantly sceptics or are they…
I believe, is there a mix?
They’re a mix.
They’re definitely a mix.
The classes I teach, it probably depends on the classes.
Right now, I’m teaching introductory psychology.
And I would say that the students are flat in the middle of everything.
Some of them are complete skeptics.
Some of them are very extreme believers.
Most of them are in the I’m not going to shut it out, but I don’t necessarily believe it kind of camp.
I’m actually I’m really trying to collect some empirical data on them this semester because, like I said, I am interested on this.
And for pedagogical reasons, I want to know if.
teaching psychology through this lens really does enhance any kind of motivation to learn psychology or critical thinking.
So I’m really, really curious to see the data when it comes back at the end of the semester.
So I’ll have to let you know when I have that out.
Yeah, keep us posted.
Definitely.
We’re way off script here, but you make me wonder, when you consider the history of psychology itself,
and the role of people like James, and then the rise of parapsychology, it used to be that it feels like that the world of psychology was much more open to these things.
And I guess I am actually leading into a question I did have prepared, which is the difference between anomalistic psychology and parapsychology.
But I’m also curious about, has the field of psychology itself changed
divorce itself from these questions because of respectability or because they feel like they’ve adequately solved the mysteries and therefore don’t need to dwell upon them anymore?
Because I’m really not sure what the drive is.
This is all assuming that I’m correct, that there has been that divorce away from covering of this kind of material.
What is that?
That is a really complex question.
So I’ll start with the easy part, the difference between anomalistic and parapsychology.
And I think that that’ll lead into a bigger answer.
So parapsychology operates under the assumption that supernatural things exist and they want to study that.
It’s like starting an experiment and saying, I know that my hypothesis is right, but that’s not what the scientific method teaches us to do.
And anomalistic psychologists more try to follow the scientific method.
So what we want to do is set up the experiment that will not support our hypothesis, actually, what’s going to poke holes in our theory.
So I think in the field of psychology,
Anomalistic psychology really isn’t so divorced from the field.
I think that anomalistic psychologists very much fall in line with, you know, historical psychology.
I think that as our understanding of
really complex things, like the concept of the self, like the concept of consciousness, those are not inherently supernatural.
But I think, you know, 100 years ago, 200 years ago, we had more supernatural or religious explanations for those types of things.
But a lot of these questions…
Do ghosts exist?
Are there extraterrestrials that come to Earth and pick up humans?
Those aren’t falsifiable.
We can’t measure them with the tools that we have today.
Some of the anomalistic psychologists do their best to measure them.
One of the really famous studies that was done by Chris French in London set up what he called a haunted room in his own laboratory at the university where he had participants come in and he varied electromagnetic frequencies and he varied infrasound.
And he had the participants kind of walk around this like kind of small room and just note whether or not they had noticed anything weird or anomalous.
And what they ended up finding was that there was no relationship to whether
The EMF or the infrasounds was related to any kind of supernatural experience, but what was related to supernatural experience was a prior belief in the paranormal.
So I think it’s hard to do experiments like that because we can’t possibly do a ghost condition and a no ghost condition, right?
And people like Chris French have done the best that they can to replicate that or to have that.
I think that psychologists would study this, were we able to.
But I think that we can’t design the experiments that would really answer the deep questions that we have.
Well, it’s the filter problem, replicability of the phenomenon itself, not just the results of the test.
I mean, we usually talk about science replication issues.
We’re talking about being able to reproduce a result.
But here, the phenomenon itself is resistant to replicability, which is a little tricky to study.
It is tricky to study.
And there are lots and lots of parapsychologists in the world that have documented experiences, right?
Like I have files on my computer that were given to me by paranormal investigators that have sound and lights and things like that, that are absolutely anomalous.
But the problem is, like you said, we can’t replicate that experience and we can’t
do the types of tests that we need to do and i do believe um you know people who are experts in i don’t know video editing and things like that have looked at some of these videos and said they haven’t been tampered with
I personally don’t know enough about videography to know what sorts of things will cause reflections of the lights to look anomalous.
The parapsychologists claim that they haven’t been altered in any way, and I believe that, but I also don’t necessarily believe that it was a ghost that was caught on camera.
Well, I wanted to dig into the book a little bit, and you delve into so many interesting studies and topics.
One of them that I…
know a little bit about, but I’ve always wondered about, I’m really, really interested in your opinion about the pursing is God helmet.
And I know some sceptics who think it’s silly, it’s ridiculous.
And then some people who think it’s the common ground for sceptics and believers, this is scientific.
So I’m wondering if you can tell us a little bit about this, the experiments and what your findings are.
I love this topic.
And he’s got some, you know, YouTube videos that I always show my students.
And we always talk about, would you put the helmet on?
You know, what would you experience?
So this God helmet is a sports helmet that’s been fit with electrodes that are going to deliver stimulation to the temporal lobe of the brain.
So the temporal lobe is kind of like right behind where the ear is.
And the idea, Persinger’s original research…
was that if you deliver this stimulation at the right level, it will induce a mystical experience.
And he’s got published accounts of people that he’s brought into his lab that put on the helmet that have these really anomalous, intense experiences of…
having other figures in there talking to him when no one else in the room can see any of these figures.
So Persinger’s idea was this area of our temporal lobe, which is the junction between the temporal lobe and the parietal lobe.
So we call it the temporal parietal junction or the TPJ.
His idea was that that’s kind of where our neural basis of God lives in our brain.
Some people have tried to replicate his findings and have been unable to.
So that’s something I’ve never personally tried to replicate it.
However, and I cited these studies in the book, there are a number of different case studies where patients have been evaluated for temporal lobe epilepsy.
And one of the treatments for epilepsy is to go into the brain and remove those epileptic areas, those pathological areas that are just hyperactive if that patient’s not responding to more traditional medications.
Okay.
So as they’re going in and doing these evaluations, sometimes that involves applying a little bit of current to different parts of the cerebral cortex, the outermost part of the brain.
And there are several case studies that suggest that…
current applied to the temporal parietal junction will induce an experience.
And sometimes people experience that as an out-of-body experience.
Sometimes people experience that as having another figure with you.
The first case study that…
came across was evaluating a 22 year old woman for this surgery and when they applied stimulation she had this experience of this illusory shadow figure and at low at low voltages this shadow figure was just kind of following her and mimicking her movements but then as the current got turned up
She had the experience that this shadow figure was now a male and was wrapping his arms around her in a really uncomfortable, unpleasant way for her.
And then even trying to interfere with some of the tasks that she was trying to do.
So what does that mean?
I don’t know.
And I am really interested in this.
We believe that the temporal parietal junction is probably part of the neural basis of our sense of self and sense of embodiment.
I have this sense of myself living inside my own body, but that’s generated by my brain, probably with my TPJ in conversations with other parts of my brain, like my hippocampus.
But if something is going awry there,
it’s possible that I could experience myself outside of my own body.
And indeed, people do.
Out-of-body experiences are not uncommon.
Sometimes they’re a result of sleep paralysis.
They might be a result of maybe a temporal lobe seizure.
It also can be a result of lack of oxygen to the brain.
In fighter pilots that go through extreme G-force, they sometimes have this syndrome that can manifest as out-of-body experiences.
So you’ve talked about the TPJ and the hippocampus.
What is your position on paranormal centers of the brain?
Is there anything like that for…
in terms of experience and belief?
To answer your question, I don’t know.
I think the answers to all of the questions are, I don’t know.
Sure, that’s the safe position.
So one of the things I’m really interested in learning more about is this temporal lobe.
We know that people who have temporal lobe epilepsy can sometimes have supernatural experiences.
Like, for example, people, scholars now believe that Joan of Arc might have had epilepsy and many of her visions were a result of a seizure.
And there’s been lots of cases like that.
There is a scale that Persinger uses in his research called the temporal lobe sign scale.
It’s part of a larger scale that actually does measure behavioral and subjective signs of temporal lobe epilepsy.
But there’s a subsection of that scale that supposedly measures the, quote, lability of your temporal lobe.
And it has questions like, I can’t remember all of them, like sometimes I smell smells that don’t really exist in the world right now.
They don’t have a source.
Sometimes when I’m driving over a bumpy road, I lose track of where I’m going, like questions like that.
And what that supposedly relates to is temporal lobe lability.
I haven’t seen anything that really shows its validity for that.
So I would love to see that if it exists.
I’m not aware of it.
But one of the things that does exist is a very strong correlation between temporal lobe lability as predicted by that scale and belief in the paranormal.
That’s been shown many times in research.
I’ve shown that with my own students many times when I survey them.
So it’s a really interesting correlation.
And, you know, we say in psychology, correlation does not equal causation.
This doesn’t mean anything, but it makes me raise an eyebrow.
And I think one of the questions is maybe there are some people that are a little bit more sensitive to natural things that go on in the earth.
Maybe some people do have more magnetic receptors in the brain than others.
And to be honest, we’ve never found a magnetic receptor in the brain in any animal, I believe.
So we certainly don’t know if they’re there in humans, but we do know that some animals can absolutely detect the magnetic pulls of the earth and they use them for migration.
But we don’t have a mechanism for that.
So I’m sure that there’s something in our brain that we have yet to understand that
that might make a human more susceptible to maybe a magnetic force.
And with the lack of any scientific knowledge of knowing what kind of magnetic force is out there that you’re experiencing, kind of the next logical step is say, oh, I just experienced something paranormal.
Chris French’s research in the haunted room does kind of negate that a little bit.
So I would love to see more people replicate that.
And also I would love to see a wider variety of EMF and infrared sounds that he used.
Maybe it’s something that’s outside of the stimulus range that he used that people are sensitive to.
And I don’t know that answer.
It’s fascinating.
It is.
I think, I guess one of the challenges is that,
To some extent, we know that people are susceptible to contagion of ideas and especially in groups.
And, you know, that’s been studied in psychology through priming.
And I don’t know if there’s an entire field about expectation psychology, but it certainly seems to be really relevant to this kind of work.
My background is actually more in the humanities.
I was an English major.
And I’ve come to believe that because we use language to share ideas and stories, that the narrative component to this stuff is also super important.
And I started talking about this idea of a culturally available template for explaining phenomena that you don’t understand.
But I’m really interested in…
this idea of contagion and how ideas are transmitted and how that is actually relevant to perception and the shared experiences.
And I know it’s got to be really tough to make experiments around that because the very thing you’re wanting to study is also going to be contaminated as people talk about their experiences.
So I know there’s a big blob of concepts, but would you like to talk about how you approach that aspect of this phenomena?
And that’s one of the big takeaways that I really want my students to get out of this class is do we experience the world simply as a result of our own experiences, right?
Are we creating our own cage, our own limits of our life?
And, I mean, I think the answer to that is largely yes.
I do think that.
There was a study that was done, I think, in the late 90s.
And what the researchers did was they took participants to an old movie theater that was in disrepair and it was no longer being used.
And some of the participants, they said, okay, we’re going to walk through this theater, but there are some reports of it being haunted, but don’t worry, it’s probably fine.
And then the other group…
They were just told, it’s just this old rundown theater that we’re not using anymore.
We just want you to walk through and just notice stuff.
And then the results are exactly what you would expect them to be.
The people that were told to expect something supernatural had more supernatural experiences and reported more weird things.
This haunted theater experiment study was a 1997 experiment by James Hurin and Rince Lang titled Context-Induced Paranormal Experiences.
By taking two groups through the same dilapidated theater but only telling one group it was haunted, researchers demonstrated that our brains are incredibly efficient at filling in the blanks.
The group primed for ghosts reported significantly more chills, draft, and sensed presences than the control group.
This highlights a psychological phenomenon known as demand characteristics.
When people are put in a specific context, like a haunted building or religious trial, they subconsciously look for and often find the sensations that match the expectations of that environment.
So I love showing that.
That’s actually, in my intro psych class, that’s the very first empirical research article we read over the course of the semester because we’re talking about research methods and, you know, how to form a hypothesis and how to test a hypothesis.
But I think that that priming, that suggestibility and that expectation plays a huge, huge role in what we’re able to experience.
You know, I was raised.
um, in a, we, we didn’t really talk about supernatural stuff.
We, we loved it.
You know, uh, my parents love reading Stephen King and I was raised on Stephen King and the X-Files and I love that stuff, but like very rarely in my life will I have an experience that I’m like, oh, that was definitely something supernatural.
And part of it is just our own ability to perceive.
You know, we have our primary five senses, but we have a whole lot of other senses that don’t fall within that five that no one really ever talks about.
So sometimes you can detect something that you don’t really know that you’re detecting.
And because you don’t know what it is, we’re going to try to find an explanation that suits you.
And that explanation for some people is going to be a paranormal explanation.
Right.
Well, there are so many other things that we could talk about.
And we’ll have to bring you on, I think, at a later stage so we can talk about more of these really interesting topics.
But I think I’m going to be the one lumbered.
If you can’t tell already, I’m Australian by birth.
So I’m going to be the one who’s lumbered to ask you about the Australian sheep goat scale.
And I didn’t know anything about this.
So can you tell us a bit about this?
Yeah, that is the scale that measures paranormal belief.
That is a widely used, highly reliable, valid scale.
I forget how many items are on it.
Not very many.
18.
I was going to say 15 or 16.
According to my research.
It’s very important.
Yeah, and you know what?
I actually…
don’t know where that name came from.
It is a very funny name for a scale and when you read it so many times and you abbreviate it so many times it kind of just like floods right past you and you don’t even notice it anymore.
Quick insert on the sheep-goat scale.
The Australian sheep-goat scale sounds like agricultural trivia, but it’s actually a cornerstone of parapsychological research.
Developed by Michael Falborn, the name borrows a biblical metaphor from Matthew 25-32, which describes a shepherd separating the sheep from the goats at the Last Judgment.
In research terms, sheep are those who believe in the possibility of paranormal phenomena, while goats are the skeptics who reject them.
This distinction was popularized by psychologist Gertrude Schmeidler in the 1940s to study the sheep-goat effect, the observation that a person’s pre-existing belief or disbelief in the supernatural can actually influence their performance in experimental tests of those very phenomena.
I do remember first reading about it, God, years ago, I think in some of Chris French’s work, probably, and being like, what?
But I don’t know where the namesake came from.
Yeah, that’s an interesting one.
All right.
It is, but so it’s sheep are believers and goats are disbelievers.
Is that right?
Yeah.
I have my notes.
I can’t find them on the page.
I found them.
Okay.
Yeah.
So that’s so strange.
I mean, I mean, it’s just random.
I mean, I don’t, I, I, I’ve been around goats and sheep and I can’t really tell who is actually the more gullible or susceptible to these ideas.
Yeah.
Yes, so it is an 18-item scale that is designed to measure people’s belief in the paranormal.
So they tried to get at all different levels of it because paranormal, supernatural can be a whole lot of different things depending on what you believe are.
So it doesn’t necessarily…
require that you have seen a ghost in real life to score high on this.
It’s even a little bit of a belief that some people can experience some precognition, maybe know something before you technically should have known it, or maybe had a dream that might slightly foretell the future, things like that.
That’s the scale that is highly correlated with the temporal lobe lability scale.
And that’s the scale that I use in my classroom.
Yeah, the students are always like, what are you giving us?
And I’m like, it’s science.
Don’t worry.
Trust me.
Well, one of the chapters you covered zombies.
And I want to just be clear, we’re zipping through these things.
I believe I told Karen before we did this, I believe any chapter in here would make a whole episode easily because there’s so much to talk about and unpack.
So and I think, you know, listeners or many of our listeners are also readers.
I think they’re going to dig this.
But you talked a little bit about rabies and zombies.
And obviously one of the big takeaways is don’t get rabies.
And you talked about fungus, the cordyceps fungus.
Everybody knows from The Last of Us.
So what do you think the lesson is when it comes to how these external factors can modify our behavior and perception?
Are our minds more powerful than our brains or are our brains more powerful than our minds?
If I can make that distinction.
That’s a very compelling question.
I love this stuff.
I did not want to stop writing this chapter.
I was geeking out doing this research.
And my daughter, I have to give her a shout out.
She was the one that named the subtitle Raby Baby.
And it was after a ghost story that she made up.
So I love it.
Yes, she’s very on point.
She was probably about seven or eight when she named that.
So she’s pretty good.
My kids hear a lot about rabies in my house.
But with all of these viruses, bacteria, parasites, fungi, there are so many examples of them that take over the behavior of the host.
Um, there’s a book, I can’t remember the name of the author.
It’s called, um, your brain on parasites.
And it is such a good book.
So I definitely recommend it.
Um, yeah, it’s, it’s really, really good.
And it’s kind of crazy to think about how easy it is for a, you know, a parasite to take over your behavior and your cognition.
But that’s what we see.
And to be fair, we don’t see it quite so much in humans, but maybe we do when we don’t know it.
One of my favorite parasites that I didn’t talk about in this book is the emerald cockroach wasp that basically does brain surgery on a cockroach.
And keeps the cockroach alive, but then enslaves the cockroach to bend to the will of the wasp.
Well, I think that these are really, really interesting questions in animal behavior.
And just the mere fact that the wasp can do this based on just touch alone, it can just feel around inside the ganglia in the nervous system of the cockroach and just…
feel when it’s in the right brain area.
And it just zaps its venom into the motivation brain area of the cockroach, which is just fascinating to me on so many levels.
But then when we bring it back to humans, there is some evidence that things like toxoplasmosis might impact our opinions of cats and things like that, or the scent of cat urine.
Why is it that we don’t see this as much in humans?
I suspect it’s because our brains are much more complex.
I suspect that we have more networks that are involved in complex behaviors that we do, but also maybe we do see it in humans and we just don’t know it because we don’t know how to ask for it.
There is a growing huge field in psychology and neuroscience about the mind-gut connection.
We know that the majority of the serotonin that is produced in our body is produced in our gut.
We know that we need to keep the bacteria in our gut very happy.
And if they’re not, we are not going to feel well.
More and more, that’s getting linked to behavior and mental health.
We don’t know how, we don’t know a mechanism here, but it’s kind of the same idea.
We have these little teeny tiny microscopic animals that are taking over our brain and behavior.
Well, it’s tricky, too, because with animal models, you can look at neurochemical information.
But with people, we wrap everything in narratives.
And the narratives that we tell don’t necessarily have any relationship to what’s actually going on.
The more I deal with people with mental illness, which sadly is not a small amount lately, the amount of things that you can see as a, let’s say, not mentally ill person, whatever that means.
Is that anyone?
The amount of things that like I have someone in my family who has a mental illness that anyone who visits them knows they have really quickly.
And it is impossible to demonstrate that to them.
Like they’re literally blind to the problem.
And it’s just very frustrating because they cannot see it, which in our world of investigating the paranormal, there’s so many things that I’m not seeing people who see these things are crazy at all or mad or even mentally ill.
But it tells you something about the scope of how much we have to.
consider that everything we experience is filtered through our brains as a processor.
And it’s just, it’s not as reliable as we want to believe.
We’ll tell ourselves it is, but getting that outside perspective or trying to find hard evidence kind of undermines the concrete belief that a lot of people have in these things, I think.
So, yeah.
That’s another takeaway that I want my students to get just because you believe something doesn’t make it true.
We do demos all the time to show them that sort of thing.
There’s the easy demos like optical illusions and that blue and gold dress that went viral.
My students and I talk about the neuroscience behind color perception, but then also color expectancy.
Some of us expect to see different colors and then we do see different colors.
So it really is like, again, like what we were talking about before, our reality is just shaped by our beliefs and our experiences.
That doesn’t make it any less real.
You know, just if someone has a paranormal experience and they label it as paranormal, that was their experience.
So I don’t want to take that away from anybody.
But also my brain is not wired to experience anything like that.
Mm hmm.
That’s a possibility.
As someone who’s been on both sides of that, you know, now… And I’ve actually had people in the comments on our show complain that I’m closed-minded because I’ve admitted that if something really profoundly supernatural happened to me, I would still be disinclined to believe it as the immediate response.
Yeah.
I’m much more open now to saying I don’t know.
Like, I’m much more comfortable with that in a way that maybe I wouldn’t have been before we started doing this show.
Well, that’s what a good academic does.
That’s…
Being honest that maybe you can’t know.
Not even that I don’t know, but I can’t know.
It’s not unknowable.
Yeah, yeah.
Things that happened in the past, particularly, how do you, you know, we’re not there anymore.
That moment’s gone.
I can’t explain it.
But still, I just have to live with it.
And other people, when I tell them such stories, clearly that’s supernatural.
But is it?
I don’t know.
Maybe there’s something else going on.
I think we need to wrap things up, unfortunately, even though there’s so much more that we could talk about.
So, again, we’ll have to bring you back on the show at some point when you’re ready.
But we have a final question, a signature question that we like to ask all of our guests.
And it’s a tough one, isn’t it?
It’s a tricky one.
Often.
For monster lovers.
So, Melissa, what is your favourite monster?
That is such a good question.
And I would have to say that my favorite monster are extraterrestrials that come to Earth and abduct humans.
And obviously the government knows about them and we do experiments about them.
Everyone knows it’s a giant cover-up.
I think that those are my favorite monster.
For, oh, God, so many reasons.
And maybe it’s because I am really interested in what actually is beyond our solar system and what possibilities are outside of our solar system.
And I think that there is some compelling evidence to suggest that there is life beyond our solar system.
I think that there probably is life beyond our solar system.
I don’t necessarily believe that it has truly come to Earth and hoodwinked a whole globe of people to abduct a couple of people from their bedrooms.
I don’t necessarily believe that piece of it.
But I think it’s really interesting, and I think it’s really interesting how so many people
have had an experience that they interpret as an abduction of that quality.
And I’m just so profoundly interested in, in the cognition that’s behind that and the confabulation that’s behind that.
And I just can’t imagine what that would feel like.
No, I’m sensing your next book.
Well, Melissa, thank you so much for writing this book and for taking the time to talk with us and our audience about it today.
Thank you so much for having me on.
I really appreciate it.
I believe our audience is the right audience for this.
So I think they’re going to have a good time with this.
So for sure.
Is there anywhere in particular you want them to go to look for the book?
Well, it is on Amazon, but probably buying it from the publisher.
So Cambridge University Press.
But it should be available online wherever books are sold.
Well, thanks so much.
Have a great night.
Yeah.
Thank you, Melissa.
Thank you so much.
You just heard an interview with Melissa Maffeo about her new book, Science of the Supernatural.
If you’re a longtime fan of Monster Talk, I think this one’s going to really be a favorite.
It hits on so many topics that we’ve covered on the show and apply scientific theory and academic rigor to them without dismissing them or their importance.
Grab a copy using the affiliate link in our show notes or demand it at your local book purveyor of choice.
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.
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The post S05E29 – Science of the Supernatural with Melissa MaffeoS05E29 appeared first on MonsterTalk.

Hosts: Karen Stollznow, Blake Smith
Guest: Matt Baxter

In this episode, the MonsterTalk crew tackles one of the most famous photographic hoaxes in history – the Cottingley Fairies. In 1917, two young cousins in West Yorkshire produced five photographs that appeared to show real fairies dancing in the garden behind their home. What began as a bit of childhood mischief spiraled into a worldwide sensation when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Theosophical Society championed the images as proof of the supernatural. The team explores how layers of credibility – authentic negatives, expert validation, retouched reproductions, and celebrity endorsement – created a blueprint for how misinformation gains legitimacy. More than a debunking, this is a story about two girls swept up in forces far beyond their control, and the adults who used them.

1. Frances and the Dancing Fairies (July 1917) – The iconic first image. Frances gazes past four dancing fairies, one playing a pipe.

2. Elsie and the Gnome (September 1917) – Elsie reaches toward a gnome who looks suspiciously like Rowan Atkinson.

3. Frances and the Leaping Fairy (August 1920) – Taken with the new Cameo cameras and marked plates provided by Gardner.

4. A Fairy Offering a Posy of Harebells to Elsie (August 1920) – Featuring a fairy with a very fashionable 1920s bob haircut.

5. Fairies and Their Sun Bath (August 1920) – The most blurred and “ethereal” looking image. Frances maintained to her death that this one was genuine. Matt suspects the camera simply wasn’t stable.

Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers included this visual that showed how the photos were enhanced before distribution

In the summer of 1917, cousins Elsie Wright (15, turning 16) and Frances Griffiths (9) were living together at 31 Main Street, Cottingley, West Yorkshire. Frances and her mother had returned to the UK from South Africa because Frances’s father, Arthur Griffiths, had gone to serve on the Western Front. The girls played constantly at the beck (stream) behind the house, and when scolded for getting wet, claimed they went there to see fairies.

To prove it, they borrowed Elsie’s father Arthur Wright’s Midg quarter-plate camera – a glass-plate camera from around 1912 – and returned within the hour with one of the most iconic images in paranormal history: Frances gazing past a group of four dancing fairies, one playing a pipe. A second photograph followed – Elsie with a gnome (who, Karen notes, bears a striking resemblance to Rowan Atkinson).

Elsie’s father Arthur, a keen amateur photographer with his own darkroom, immediately suspected a prank. But Elsie’s mother Polly believed the photographs were genuine. In 1919, Polly attended a lecture on “Fairy Life” at the Bradford Theosophical Society and shared the images. That brought them to the attention of Edward Gardner, president of the London lodge of the Theosophical Society, and eventually Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was already writing an article on fairies for The Strand Magazine.

Gardner had the negatives examined by photographic expert Harold Snelling, who declared them “genuine” with “no trace of studio work” – technically true, since the trick was all done in-camera with cardboard cutouts and hatpins, not in a studio. Snelling then produced enhanced copies from the original negatives for publication – transforming evidence into what Matt calls “presentation artifacts,” though they continued to trade on that original credibility claim.

In 1920, Gardner returned to Cottingley with two Cameo cameras and secretly marked photographic plates. The girls produced three more photographs: Frances and the Leaping Fairy, A Fairy Offering a Posy of Harebells to Elsie (featuring a conspicuously fashionable 1920s-bobbed fairy), and Fairies and Their Sun Bath. These were again sent to Snelling for enhancement before publication.

Both Kodak and Ilford examined the photographs. Kodak found no proof of fakery but refused to certify them as genuine, noting that fairies aren’t real. Ilford said they were fake. Believers interpreted the ambiguity as validation.

Doyle published his article in the Christmas 1920 Strand, and followed it with The Coming of the Fairies in 1922. The reaction was brutal – the creator of Sherlock Holmes was widely mocked. Gardner sold prints at lectures, and the rights became tied to the Theosophical movement. The girls and their families received little or no money.

In 1921, Gardner returned to Cottingley with more cameras and an occultist named Geoffrey Hodson. The girls were no longer present – both had moved overseas and married. No new photographs were produced, but Hodson claimed to see fairies everywhere.

The case languished for decades until 1978, when it was attacked from multiple angles at once. Fred Gettings – a prolific British author of some 59 books on art, occultism, astrology, tarot, and esoteric symbolism – was researching early illustration for his book Ghosts in Photographs: The Extraordinary Story of Spirit Photography (Harmony Books, 1978) when he stumbled across fairy drawings in Princess Mary’s Gift Book (1915, illustrating a poem by Alfred Noyes called “A Spell for a Fairy”) and recognized the unmistakable similarity to the Cottingley fairies. James Randi noted in Flim-Flam!, is that Gettings was himself an avowed believer in spiritualism and spirit photography – Gettings wasn’t looking to debunk anything. He was simply honest enough to publish what he found. The single most damning piece of evidence against the Cottingley photos came not from a skeptic but from a believer.

That same year, Randi enlisted Robert Sheaffer – a skeptic experienced in investigating UFO claims – and William Spaulding of Ground Saucer Watch in Phoenix, Arizona, to perform computer-enhanced image analysis on the photographs. Spaulding’s scanning technology, originally developed for analyzing satellite and UFO photographs, confirmed the fairy figures were flat (exactly what you’d expect of paper cutouts) and turned up what appeared to be a thread support in photo number four. Randi initially reported these findings and promoted the “string” theory of how the fairies were supported. According to at least two independent sources, Elsie Wright – by then in her late seventies and still not confessing – responded via New Scientist, sarcastically asking what part of the sky the strings were supposed to be attached to. By the time Randi wrote up the case in chapter 2 of Flim-Flam! (1980), titled “Fairies at the Foot of the Garden,” he had reconsidered: he captioned the computer enhancement image as “doubtful evidence” and wrote that no support was even necessary for the figures. Randi included Gettings’s Princess Mary’s Gift Book discovery in the chapter but disappointingly did not provide a proper citation for Ghosts in Photographs.

The hoax remained officially unresolved until the early 1980s, when pressure mounted from two directions simultaneously. Journalist Joe Cooper, who had been working directly with both women for years, secured Elsie’s first public confession for The Unexplained magazine in 1982. Concurrently, Geoffrey Crawley, editor of the British Journal of Photography, was publishing a thorough ten-part forensic investigation titled “That Astonishing Affair of the Cottingley Fairies” (1982-1983). Crawley’s work prompted Elsie to write him a detailed confession letter dated 17 February 1983, now held at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford. The combined weight of Cooper’s journalism and Crawley’s photographic analysis finally brought the truth out after more than sixty years: the fairies were cardboard cutouts drawn by Elsie, copied from illustrations by Claude Shepperson in Princess Mary’s Gift Book (1914), with wings added by the girls. They were held upright in the grass with hatpins – the very mechanism that Randi’s string theory had tried and failed to identify. Frances maintained to her death that the fifth photograph – Fairies and Their Sun Bath – was genuine.

Matt emphasizes that this is not simply a debunking story – it’s a story about two children who got swept up in adults’ belief systems to the point that they couldn’t back out. He draws a parallel to his own childhood experience of pranking his mother on April Fool’s Day and being punished for it, noting the Edwardian-era pressure on children who humiliated adults. He also shares his own experience with Fact or Faked producers who asked him to create increasingly “real” paranormal evidence for television – a modern echo of what happened to the girls.

On the photography itself, Matt notes that the strongest evidence against the photographs’ authenticity isn’t strings or wires – it’s the fact that the fairies, supposedly dancing and fluttering, are perfectly sharp in images where the background is blurred. With the slow exposure times required by the Midg camera, anything truly moving would have been a blur. The sharp-edged fairies are clearly two-dimensional objects holding still.

Matt frames the case as a “blueprint for how misinformation gains legitimacy” through layered credibility: authentic negatives (true but misleading), expert validation (technically correct but contextually wrong), enhanced reproduction (quietly altered perception), and authority endorsement (emotionally amplifying everything).

Blake tracked down a first edition of Princess Mary’s Gift Book (1914), the source of the fairy illustrations that Elsie copied. He discovered two things: first, the original illustrations by Claude Shepperson don’t have wings – the girls added those. Second, and deliciously ironic, Arthur Conan Doyle himself has a story published in the very same book. Blake eventually gifted his copy to Ken Feder, archaeologist, friend of the show, and Sherlock Holmes enthusiast. [See Ken’s new Holme’s Mystery! (2026)]

This story has a confusing abundance of Arthurs. Both girls’ fathers were named Arthur (Arthur Wright and Arthur Griffiths). The author who championed the photographs was Arthur Conan Doyle. And the television host who later covered the debunking was Arthur C. Clarke. Keep your Arthurs straight!

Karen highlights that Frances originally described seeing not fairies but tiny troops marching in the brook – imagining what her father might be seeing on the Western Front. The fairy photographs emerged as a coping mechanism during wartime. Doyle’s involvement is often attributed to the death of his son Kingsley in 1918, though his engagement with spiritualism actually predates his son’s death by over thirty years – he attended his first seance in 1881 and declared himself a spiritualist in 1887. What the war did was turn him from a private believer into a public evangelist. Karen also draws parallels to the Fox Sisters, the Enfield Poltergeist, and the Guyra Ghost – all cases involving children whose pranks were amplified by adult belief systems.

Primary Sources:

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Coming of the Fairies (1922) – Full text at Project Gutenberg

Cottingley Fairies – Wikipedia

Geoffrey Crawley – Wikipedia (details on his ten-part debunking in the British Journal of Photography)

Rose Fyleman – Wikipedia (author of “There Are Fairies at the Bottom of Our Garden,” 1917)

Rose Fyleman, “Fairies” (1917) – Full poem at All Poetry

The Fairy Census – Dr. Simon Young’s survey of modern fairy experiences

Museum Collection:

The Cottingley Fairies – National Science and Media Museum, Bradford (home of the original photographs, cameras, and Elsie’s confession letter)

The Midg Camera used for the first two fairy photographs – Science Museum Group Collection

Video – Archival and Documentary:

BBC Nationwide (1976): “Cottingley Fairies: Fact or Fantasy?” – BBC Archive on YouTube – The BBC interview with Elsie Wright, still maintaining her story nearly 60 years later.

Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers, Ep. 7: “Fairies, Phantoms and Fantastic Photographs” (1985) – Full episode on YouTube – The episode Blake remembers, featuring the debunking of the Cottingley photographs.

Antiques Roadshow – Cottingley Fairies segment (BBC One, January 2009) – Frances’s daughter Christine Lynch appears with the original photographs and one of the cameras given to the girls by Doyle. Items appraised at £25,000-£30,000.

“The Cottingley Fairies: A Study in Deception” – Dr. Merrick Burrow, Leeds University Library (2021) – The excellent lecture Karen and Blake recommend, covering the deception with fairness to all involved.

“How the Cottingley Fairies Photographs Were Made” – National Science and Media Museum (2020)

Podcasts:

Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford: “Photographing Fairies” – Explores how the girls wanted to come clean but kept delaying out of consideration for the feelings of the adults they’d fooled.

Further Reading:

Princess Mary’s Gift Book (1914) – Wikipedia – The source of the fairy illustrations, featuring artwork by Claude Shepperson – and, ironically, a story by Arthur Conan Doyle.

Princess Mary’s Gift Book – Full text at Project Gutenberg – Read the original book online, including the fairy illustrations by Claude Shepperson.

The Cottingley Fairies – Historic UK

Geoffrey Hodson – Wikipedia (the clairvoyant who saw fairies everywhere at Cottingley in 1921 – while the girls saw nothing)

Edward Gardner – Wikipedia (the Theosophist who drove the investigation on the ground)

Joe Cooper, The Case of the Cottingley Fairies (1990) – Amazon – The definitive account by the journalist who worked with both women for six years and secured Elsie’s first public confession in 1982.

Fred Gettings, Ghosts in Photographs: The Extraordinary Story of Spirit Photography (1978) – Amazon – The book in which a believer in spirit photography inadvertently discovered the Princess Mary’s Gift Book source of the Cottingley fairy cutouts.

James Randi, Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns and Other Delusions (1980) – Amazon – Chapter 2, “Fairies at the Foot of the Garden,” covers the Cottingley case in detail, including the computer enhancement analysis and Gettings’s discovery.

“Two village girls and a brilliant man like Conan Doyle – well, we could only keep quiet.” – Elsie Wright

“I never even thought of it as being a fraud. It was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun, and I can’t understand to this day why they were taken in. They wanted to be taken in.” – Frances Griffiths

“This case isn’t just about fake photos. It’s about layers of credibility… It’s a blueprint for how misinformation gains legitimacy.” – Matt Baxter

“Are you saying that there’s a Gardner at the bottom of the fairies?” – Blake Smith

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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Fairies by Rose Fyleman There are fairies at the bottom of our garden.
It’s not so very, very far away.
You pass the gardener’s shed and you just keep straight ahead.
I do so hope they’ve really come to stay.
There’s a little wood with moss in it and beetles and a little stream that quietly runs through.
You wouldn’t think they’d dare to come merrymaking there.
Well, they do.
There are fairies at the bottom of our garden.
They often have a dance on summer nights.
The butterflies and breeze make a lovely little breeze and the rabbits stand about and hold the lights.
Did you know that they could sit upon the moonbeams and pick a little star to make a fan and dance away up there in the middle of the air?
Well, they can.
There are fairies at the bottom of our garden.
You cannot think how beautiful they are.
They all stand up and sing when the fairy queen and king come gently floating down upon their car.
The king is very proud and very handsome.
The queen, now you can guess who that could be.
She’s a little girl all day, but at night she steals away?
Well, it’s me.
MUSIC PLAYS
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.
That lovely intro was the poem Fairies by Rose Fyleman.
The reading was by Rachel Lackey, who is the co-host of Rachel Watches Star Trek and is a frequent reader on another show I love, Strange Studies of Strange Stories.
Links to those shows will be in the show notes.
And thank you so much to Rachel and her husband, Chris Lackey, for helping with this episode.
It’s almost inevitable that when you hear the story of the Cottingley Fairies, this particular poem’s line about fairies at the bottom of the garden comes up.
Fyleman’s poem was published in Punch magazine in May of 1917.
The first Cottingley photo was taken in July of 1917.
There’s no evidence of any direct connection between the two, no evidence the girls had read the poem, no evidence Fyleman had heard about the girls.
They’re independent events that happened to occur weeks apart in the same country during the same cultural moment.
But the coincidence is almost supernaturally perfect.
Fahlman’s poem describes fairies at the bottom of a garden, near a little stream that quietly runs through, which is an eerily precise description of the Cottingley Beck at the bottom of the Wright family garden.
The poem was a massive hit, reprinted over 20 times in the next 10 years.
And by the time Arthur Conan Doyle published the fairy photographs in The Strand in December of 1920, the phrase, there are fairies at the bottom of our garden, was a well-known one in British culture.
It gave the Cottingley story a ready-made tagline.
And there’s another connection which will be revealed at the end of this episode, one whose linguistic aptness was so stunning that I couldn’t believe no one had made the connection before, but as near as I can tell, you’ll hear it here first.
A lot of coincidences swirled around our coverage of this episode, and it led me to making a lot of inserts into the show, which I hope will make what can be a somewhat convoluted story much clearer.
At a minimum, if you’ve only had a tenuous exposure to the tale of the Cottingley Fairies, you should be well informed by the end of this episode.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, everyone.
We have Matt joining us again.
Oh, boy, Matt.
Sorry, I stepped on you already.
That didn’t take long.
But we’re going to talk about a topic that I think is very near and dear to our hearts, the three of us, and yet it’s a topic that we should have spoken about before and have touched upon many times but haven’t dedicated…
a full episode too.
And that’s the Cottingley Fairies, very famous story.
And Matt and I were watching an old BBC video dating back to 1976 on YouTube, and it was about the Cottingley Fairies.
So at that point, a lot of people still believed in the stories behind the hoax.
And I guess to this day, people still do, even though it has been debunked multiple times.
But we thought,
it’s more than time that we should delve into this topic a bit more on monster talk.
So that’s why we’re here today.
Yeah.
I’m excited about this.
I don’t, you don’t recall when I first came across these, it was probably in a book, not a TV show, but the first TV show I remember seeing about it was Arthur C. Clark’s.
He did a show.
He did multiple series.
So every time he did a different season, they would like rename the show.
So I think it was the world of strange world, strange powers.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And they actually had on important people from this story to reveal the shocking truth.
I mean, shocking.
uh if you’re from the past i think by the time it came on television in the 80s it wasn’t that shocking except more like how long could you keep a hoax to yourself without revealing it especially the circumstances around this one so spoiler uh this
There probably were not really fairies at the bottom of the garden.
Well, I think it’s interesting that the first time that you found out about the story, that it was when it was debunked.
Because I can’t remember what age I was.
think it would have been six or seven around that age but people still for the most part believed in the story it hadn’t been debunked and uh i think i just saw it in numerous books on the paranormal and i thought oh well um at that point maybe there’s something to it uh i i think i had a bit of natural skepticism uh even at that age but uh yeah this goes back to
the early 20th century.
So we’re talking 1917.
And I think that’s when the first photograph came out.
And I think it’s really interesting that it coincides with a poem called Fairies from 1917 by Rose Fileman.
And that very famous line, there are fairies at the bottom of our garden.
That’s the way that it starts.
And I think it’s just interesting.
It must be synchronicity that that poem came out.
That’s the only explanation, right?
Only explanation.
We recently, in fact, as we’re recording this, it’ll be coming out this week and next week, we had talked to Chris Woodyard, a folklorist and author.
Now, she does a podcast and her partner is a fairy researcher named Simon Young.
It’s a great job title.
It really is.
One of the things he’s done is a sort of a survey or a census, a fairy census.
There’s still extraordinarily widespread belief in fairies.
And maybe we should talk about that just briefly, because I think historically before, let’s say before Shakespeare, because I kind of tried to run this down and I don’t think there’s a hard answer to this, but I wanted to kind of know when did fairies transition from being a widely held.
explanatory belief system for why mysterious things happen around your house and on the farm.
Versus becoming a sort of Disney-fied, cute little winged things that you don’t really need to worry about.
They’re just adorable for folklore and fairy tales, right?
And it is a long transition.
And it seems like maybe that actually even started with Shakespeare because he included fairies in some of his plays in a way that probably would have been seen as…
I don’t want to say blasphemy, that’s not quite the right word, but risky considering a lot of people still thought fairies could f*** you up.
Yeah, they were bad fairies like sprites and elves and
pixies and that kind of thing right what are the many things that could make your milk come out bad or your butter not come out at all or you know ill fortune blame something right if it’s not a witch why not the fairy right right the good folk you know so
So anyway, over the years, especially during the Victorian period, which is shocking, the Victorians were responsible for yet another problem.
They really sort of changed them to be these delightful little fun creatures versus the serious.
Maybe it’s not just the Victorians.
Maybe it has something to do with the rise of industrialization, the Enlightenment.
There’s lots of other things that may have been applied.
spiritualism.
Well, spiritualism still endorsed the fairies though, right?
I mean, they still, I mean, that’s kind of part of the problem here, which we’ll get into, but I guess we’re talking about a time when people were seriously questioning if fairies were real.
When along come these girls with this interesting story, but maybe we should set that up, uh, in context and talk about what, whose photos are we talking about?
What did they photograph and why?
Yeah, well, so this dates back to 1917.
And we’ve got a story of two young girls.
They were cousins.
Elsie Wright, who was, you’ve got 16 here, but I think I heard she was 15, 16.
As regards her age, there’s a bit of blurriness in her picture of Elsie.
The published accounts of Doyle and Gardner, and then later retellings inspired by those accounts, and by Elsie herself, all describe her as being 16 years old when the photo was first taken.
That first fairy photo was traditionally described as being taken on a Saturday afternoon in July of 1917.
The Saturdays in that month were the 7th, the 14th, the 21st, and the 28th.
On the 7th or 14th, Elsie was still 15 years old by days or weeks.
On the 21st or 28th, she’d have just turned 16.
Elsie is usually portrayed as an innocent young girl, unlikely to participate in a hoax.
But Elsie was already a college student and had a job.
That job?
In a photography studio where her art skills were focused on photographic touch-up.
That arguably significant fact is rarely mentioned.
In addition to the discrepancy about Elsie’s age, Doyle also describes Frances as being 10, but she was 9 when these things started.
I bet Karen’s about to point that out.
And her cousin, Frances Griffiths, who was nine when things started.
And yeah, so they were cousins.
And Frances and her mother had returned to the UK.
So this all happened in West Yorkshire.
So Cottingley, a little town, little hamlet in West Yorkshire.
And so they returned to the UK from South Africa.
They’d been living there.
So I
So this was in 1917.
So we’re talking World War I still.
And the reason that they came back was that they were going to stay with the relatives because the father was going away to war at the Western Front.
So I think, yeah, he had friends.
I’m not exactly sure.
I don’t even know what his name was.
His name was Arthur Griffiths, Sergeant or perhaps Sergeant Major, sources differ, of the Royal Garrison Artillery.
So they all moved in together and they’re living in this house at 31 Main Street in Cottingley.
And I saw the house actually went up for sale a couple of years ago too.
It went for about £250,000.
That’s very expensive.
It is.
So they were all huddled together in this house and also Elsie’s mother, Polly, and father, Arthur, all living together.
And the girls really developed an affinity.
And I think that Elsie really took Frances under her wing and took good care of her, felt sorry for her.
She, you know, is this little girl who’s…
grown up in South Africa and didn’t have any friends there.
So she really kind of took care of her.
They do come across in the reading as more like sisters than cousins when they’re young, to me.
And it’s interesting because that is quite a gap in age.
I know that my brother and I have that.
age gap between us and I think it really was almost like a separate generation.
It was quite a gulf between us in age.
But they really got along very well and they like to play out in the beck, which is an older term for a stream or a brook that’s at the bottom of the garden, which is still there.
So you get a lot of legend trippers, people going there to check out this beck, which is the scene of the crime.
And so they would always play down there and get their beautiful dresses and shoes drenched from this stream.
And they’d continue to get into trouble for this.
And so the princess’s mother said, well, why are you doing this?
Why are you playing in the stream in the back?
And she said, well, we go there to see the fairies.
So the parents all laughed at this and mocked the kids and thought that it was quite ridiculous.
And so I think Frances got it in her head that she would prove to the parents that she was actually seeing fairies.
And Elsie kind of came to her rescue and wanted to support her endeavor.
And so they basically concocted this idea to create these fairies.
So it’s really hard to tell this story without just busting and debunking the story right at the start.
So, Matt, do you want to talk a little bit about the camera, what was used and how this next part occurred?
Well, sure.
I do want to say that I don’t think that this is a story about, you know, this hoax being debunked.
I think it’s a story of how two girls were being kids and they got swept up in other people’s belief systems to the point that they couldn’t back out.
And so it’s more of how they were kind of taken advantage of.
And so we know going in, this is a hoax.
This is them having fun.
But it’s what happened afterwards that really seems to make the big difference in all of it.
So they borrowed their father’s camera.
And it was a Midge camera.
And…
This one, you know, around 1912 is when it was made.
Now it is a quarter plate image camera.
It uses actual glass plates.
So it’s a very typical, you know, camera of the day, very standard.
Is it a handheld camera or one that you have to put on a tripod?
Well, it is much better on a tripod.
And the reason for that is because of the fact that light has to come in
and hit this glass plate.
And so you need enough, you know, basically photons to be coming in.
So that means that the aperture has to stay open until that happens.
And what I’m basically trying to say is if there’s movement during this time, things blur.
And so they had to hold very still to get good pictures.
And that was that was fairly well known.
But so, yeah, these these first pictures were taken with this camera.
And that was kind of it.
It didn’t.
Nothing really happened right away.
They took these pictures.
And then it was actually a while after that.
I think, Karen, you were saying that didn’t the mother attend a talk?
Well, let’s describe the first photograph.
So we have a picture that the most influential one, the first image is of Frances, so the younger girl and the dancing fairy.
Frances and the fairies, yeah.
And that’s just that splendid picture, that really iconic one.
She’s such a beautiful girl and the dress she’s wearing and her hair and these four fairies that are just frolicking about in front of her.
And one of them has a…
a pipe pan pipe or i don’t know some kind of oboe i’m not sure exactly what instrument it is but the other fairies are dancing and there are i guess the the idea when we think of fairies nowadays when we even the disney fairies this is the prototypical fairy the the kind that we imagine but it is a beautiful shot you can see the water in the background and just the the beck it’s a really lovely photograph
And so the girls took that picture.
I don’t know.
Are they processed immediately?
Is it like a Polaroid or do they have to go and develop it?
Yeah, it has to be developed.
Yeah, it has to be developed.
But their father was an amateur photographer and they had a dark room there at the home.
Yeah, so that’s Elsie’s father, Arthur.
Yeah, so he’s the photographer.
I just this reminds me so much of we were just talking recently about the Patterson Gimlin film and the fact that Roger Patterson takes a camera, borrows it or rinse it in this case, goes out to shoot a Bigfoot and then gets the Bigfoot shot on the first try.
These girls take their camera out to go get a photo of a fairy and get the shot on the first try.
It’s amazing.
What luck.
I was thinking of those parallels, too.
And I think as we go on, there are some parallels to the shades of the Enfield poltergeist and the gyro ghost as well, with the girls trying to prove that they their stories.
Not only that, but also I should say that when we talk about spiritualism and theosophy, spiritualism in particular starts with the Fox sisters who begin most likely by pranking their parents.
And then they get the whole community like leans into it.
Like it’s the most amazing thing ever.
And what kind of pressure does that put on a kid to sustain that story?
I mean, and in this case for the rest of their frigging lives, it’s so anyway, we’ll get there.
They’re really overshadowed their lives, but as Matt’s.
hinted at that the mother got involved.
So it was Elsie’s mother, Polly, she believed that they were authentic.
But Arthur, he immediately thought that this was some kind of prank.
He said, nothing but a prank.
That’s the quote.
And he thought that they were using cardboard cutouts.
So in some ways, the whole thing was kind of blown up right at the start.
But I think it was sometime later that the mother went along to a theosophical society in
a town called Bradford that was nearby, near Cottingley.
And I think it was entitled Fairy Life.
This looks like a good place for a quick primer on the cast of characters and concepts in this tale.
Theosophy is the esoteric religious movement founded by Helena Blavatsky in 1875.
Blavatsky’s system blended a form of Eastern mysticism seen through the lens of Victorian Europe, Western occultism descended from Hermeticism and alchemy, and a layered cosmology of invisible planes of existence, astral, etheric, and so on, populated by various non-physical beings.
After Blavatsky’s death in 1891, leadership of the Theosophical Society eventually passed to Annie Besant and Charles Webster Ledbetter, who we’ve talked about before on the show.
Besant and Ledbetter expanded the system considerably, and critically for this story, they claim direct, clairvoyant perception of these invisible planes.
Ledbetter published detailed descriptions of nature spirits, elementals, and thought forms, beings he said he could personally observe on the etheric and astral planes.
Besant and Ledbetter revealed these worlds in their 1901 book, Thought Forms, which Ledbetter expanded on in his 1913 book, The Hidden Side of Things.
So, by 1917, there was a body of theosophical literature treating fairies not as folklore, but as documented etheric fauna, real entities with real functions in nature, just invisible to ordinary perception.
Edward Gardner, the main Cottingley investigator on the ground, was a committed theosophist.
Gardner was president of the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society.
For Gardner, fairy photographs were not charming curiosities.
If you could capture etheric beings on a photographic plate, you had empirical evidence for the planes of existence described by Blavatsky, Besant, and Ledbetter.
That’s why he carefully and secretly marked photographic plates and had prints examined by outside experts.
Gardner wanted to believe, but he also thought he was doing scientific investigation.
Arthur Conan Doyle is a separate case.
He was not a theosophist.
He was a spiritualist, and this distinction matters.
Doyle’s core commitment was to survival after death and communication with the departed through seances and mediums.
Doyle acknowledged that theosophy had a more coherent philosophical framework than the broader spiritualism movement.
Doyle wrote that he was deeply interested in and attracted for a year or two by theosophy.
particularly reincarnation and karma.
But Doyle explicitly broke with Blavatsky over her characterization of spirits of the dead as mere astral shells, contradicting the core spiritualist concept of meaningful contact with the deceased.
By 1927, Doyle publicly stated that Theosophy’s anti-spiritualism kept the two great bodies of psychic thought apart.
Doyle’s support for the Cottingley photos wasn’t to prop up theosophy.
Doyle saw fairy evidence, like other wonders such as mummy’s curses, as evidence of a reality beyond the material, a gateway drug for accepting the existence of spirits beyond death.
Doyle’s closing line in the Strand article, make the strategy explicit.
If you could get the public to accept fairies, they’d be more open to that spiritual messages were supported by physical facts.
Fairies were the thin edge of a rhetorical wedge.
For Gardner, the theosophist, the fairy photos validated the etheric plane.
For Doyle, the spiritualist, the photos softened up materialist resistance to the supernatural in general.
Gardner’s Theosophical Network brought the photos to initial public attention when Pauli Wright mentioned them at a Theosophical Society meeting in Bradford.
Once Doyle knew of them, his celebrity put them in front of the public via the Strand.
This, in turn, brought clairvoyant Jeffrey Hodson to Cottingley in 1921.
Hodson claimed to see fairies everywhere, while the girls, notably, saw nothing.
Hodson published his book, Fairies at Work and Play, in 1925.
Hodson’s book reads like a naturalist’s field guide to etheric fauna.
The whole affair was self-reinforcing.
The theosophical literature said these beings existed, the Cottingley photos appeared to confirm it, and then the clairvoyants showed up to provide additional field observations.
Meanwhile, the actual evidence was two little girls with cardboard cutouts and hat pins.
The story has elements that make it tricky to keep track of who is who.
When Doyle wrote his book, he gave both girls aliases, doubling the ways you’ll see this story discussed.
Nominally, there’s an even weirder coincidence.
Both girls’ fathers and the author Conan Doyle all share the same Christian name.
But of them, I would say that the author Arthur was an otter auteur.
And then there’s author Arthur C. Clarke, yet another one to keep track of.
And so they started talking about these photographs and got the interest of a number of members of that society, in particular, a fellow named Edward Gardner.
And so that’s really where things start taking off from that point.
Edward Gardner, he sent the photographs and the negatives to an expert named Harold Snelling.
And looking at those original negatives, he said that they are genuine and there is no trace of studio work.
Now, this becomes the core credibility claim throughout the rest of this story, is this initial looking at the original negatives, that there’s no trace of studio work.
Well, of course there wasn’t, because this was all in-camera stuff.
But anyway, moving forward.
Well, yeah, I think there’s a, yeah, I don’t know at what point we want to talk about things because there’s so much to this story.
But really I think it becomes this, it’s a snowball that just kind of turns into an avalanche when it’s originally contained with this family and then this Theosophical Society gets involved, Edward Gardner gets involved, Harold Snelling gets involved, and then they end up bringing in Arthur Conan Doyle.
And that’s where things really take off.
And he’s, I think, writing an article for a magazine at that time, coincidentally about fairies as well, for The Strand magazine.
So he was, wasn’t he publishing Sherlock Holmes stories in the same magazine?
In the strand, yes.
So, yeah, this was, I think, 1920.
And as we know, he’s a really passionate supporter of spiritualism.
And so he wants to use these images.
So I think it’s at this point that the girls really kind of lose control over these images.
And…
So at this point I think they’ve got, is it three pictures or two pictures?
Two pictures at this point.
It’s the Francis and the Dancing Fairies and Elsie and the Gnome.
Those are the two main pictures.
Now I do want to say just really quickly in here before we continue with that line of discussion.
Three years have passed in this time.
Now, for a kid, that’s a long time.
Elsie’s now like 19 and, you know, Francis is 12.
I mean, they have grown quite a bit.
Elsie’s about to get married.
They’re moving on with their lives at this point.
Right, right.
Now, the thing is, is I had an experience when I was about 10 or 11.
When on April Fool’s Day, I had made these kind of little wristbands that I would pretend they were power bands, mega power bands, that I’d be a superhero when I wore them and everything.
But they were actually made out of a kind of a metal.
and I decided I was going to fool my mom, and I put ketchup all over my wrist and said, Mom, I accidentally cut my wrist with these, and she panicked and freaked out and everything.
Now, when you’re a kid, you’re always told, tell the truth.
So I told the truth, and she was so furious with me for fooling her that I got hit and grounded.
And this especially was the time of big punishment if you humiliated an adult.
So telling the truth was not a good idea.
Good point.
So if you get pulled into something and now suddenly this famous, well-respected author is now getting pulled into it on something you did three years ago and you’ve had to retell the story many times in that amount of time, I’m sure you can start to build a pretty good memory of falsehoods, you know, of what happened in your head.
So I’m really feeling bad for the girls at this point.
It’s kind of terrifying.
I think, yeah, that’s a really good point.
We’re talking about the Edwardian era.
So just after the Victorian era, and I can only imagine what punishments would have been like.
I wanted to say too, that we didn’t really describe the second picture.
So we’ve got the first picture with Francis and the dancing fairies, the really iconic one, but there is a secondary one, which is very well known too.
And that’s Elsie with the gnome.
But I think the gnome looks like Rowan Atkinson.
It does a bit.
That’s funny.
Yeah.
Well, no, the thing about that has, have you ever seen Rowan Atkinson and that gnome in the same room at the same time?
No.
Excellent.
Just, just putting it out there.
I don’t think it’s farfetched.
Yeah.
So, yeah, we’re now at 19.20.
And so we have Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has become involved and he’s writing this article for The Strand magazine.
about fairies, coincidentally, and he wants to use these pictures.
So as I stated earlier, I really think it’s at this point that these girls kind of just lose their control over the situation, give over the images.
Now, I believe too that Arthur was offered money to publish these pictures and that he refused.
He just thought it was the right thing to do to share these pictures with the world so that people could…
learn about these apparent fairies.
And so I really think at this point, they’re just kind of sticking to their stories and they lose control over the narrative.
But something huge happens with this as well.
Because Harold Snelling gets pulled back into it.
And he is asked to improve the pictures for this publication.
Yeah.
So he makes.
Got to make them cleaner.
Got to make.
Yeah.
Just clarifying here.
Just using a little.
Touch up, right?
Yeah, so he makes prints from the original negatives, and then he creates copy negatives from those prints, and then he retouches and intensifies these copies.
So these are no longer evidence.
These are now presentation artifacts.
But the thing is, is none of this is presented this way.
These are still based on that first credibility claim of genuine and no trace of studio work.
So this is where things get really blurred, much like the blurring we’re going to talk about shortly.
Well, and I think that this is interesting too because to this day, this is exactly what still goes on.
If people have recordings of electronic voice phenomena, if people have photographs, they’re touched up.
Yeah, let me just run that through some filters here and we’ll clean that audio up so it sounds like a voice.
Matt, do you want to just – I guess we don’t want to go into it too much, but if you want to touch upon your experience with those TV producers and that TV show.
It’s relevant.
It is.
It is because this is what happened to the girls.
Now, I was working on a ghost hunting reality show called Colorado X Case Files of the Paranormal, and we had made a –
video of a Ouija board kind of going crazy.
And, you know, and we put it out there as a bit of like, you know, hoping it would go viral and stuff.
And it kind of did.
But of course we said nothing.
It was just a promotion for the show is all it was.
And a factor faked.
producers got ahold of me and said, wow, this is crazy.
Did this really happen?
And I said, well, there’s a video of it.
Of course it happened.
You know, I didn’t say how it happened or that it was faked or anything else.
And they’re like, do you think you could make a video, another video of this and, and make it even more pronounced and more crazy.
And it’s kind of like, so you’re asking me to fake.
Now you’re not asking me of what I originally did as fake.
You’re now asking me to fake.
Mm-hmm.
And that’s the bottom line.
So I did.
I didn’t say I was going to fake anything.
I’m like, well, I’ll see what happens.
And made another video and sent it to them.
See if the spirits comply.
Right, right.
And they were like, wow, this is great.
Do you think you can make it?
And we’ll offer this much money for you to do this.
And it was just like, all right, no, this is…
this is really going too far you know you’re you’re asking me to pose um you know on a a very big tv show fact or faked you’re asking me to pose this as real evidence you know at this point you’re asking and you’re offering to pay me to do it
So I’m not interested in positioning it that way.
I will position it with a lot of ambiguity, but I’m not just going to out and out say, yes, this is real.
It’s not going to happen.
And to be clear, I believe that Gardner actually provided the cameras.
These were called cameo cameras, and the plates were marked and everything.
for the girls to take more photos, and they did.
They took three more photos.
They had Francis and the Leaping Fairy, Fairy offering a posy to Elsie, and Fairies and their sunbath.
Now, this is all cool, but again, we’ve got to remember, this is three years later.
The girls are now older, so the pictures aren’t going to look the same no matter what.
And again, these were sent to Snelling to be enhanced for reproduction.
I’ve got to put that Blade Runner sound effect.
Enhance.
Zoom in.
Enhance.
Exactly.
I want to add, too, that with the fairy offering posy of hair bells to Elsie, that the fairy’s very on trend because she looks like a flapper with that hairstyle and that dress.
So every contemporary fairy.
Yeah.
Well, Bob’s in the land of the Fae is just a hot style at the time, you know.
Fairies are not immune to this kind of, you know, peer pressure and wanting to look good and fashionable.
So they have to deal with that as well.
But, yeah, yeah.
Also at this time, they were examined by independent analysis, basically, is what we’re talking about, both Kodak and Ilford.
Now, Kodak found no proof of fakery, but they weren’t convinced.
And Ilford said there’s fakery here.
This is fake.
Kodak went with the, look, we don’t see any obvious signs of trickery, but fairies aren’t real.
So therefore, these aren’t real.
That really did not sit well with Doyle, right?
No, no.
But because they both didn’t come out and say absolutely fake, it was a little ambiguous.
So believers interpreted that as validation because that’s how believers do.
It’s, you know, bias.
So yeah, things got real commercial after that.
Mm-hmm.
So Gardner started selling prints at lectures.
Doyle publishes The Coming of the Fairies in 1922.
And the rights were effectively tied to the theosophical movement circulation.
So the girls, they received little or no money for this.
And of course, we know the father refused payments being ethical.
So, yeah.
Yeah, Doyle’s book, he really laid it on the line.
You can actually get the entire text.
I’ll put links in the show notes if you want to go read it.
But his Becoming of the Fairies is…
I don’t want to say it’s shallow sophistry.
That’s not very nice.
But he basically makes some very not convincing arguments that…
The preponderance of the evidence is that the fairies are real and should be considered thus.
Look at these photos.
These girls couldn’t possibly have faked these.
Turns out maybe one of them actually is working in the photography industry and her job is literally touching up photos.
So yeah, maybe they underplayed that.
But I just want to say the reaction to his book…
was brutal, absolutely brutal.
The guy who had created Sherlock Holmes is being mocked as a doddering old fool, basically.
It’s time for some good old-fashioned myth-busting.
There is a very common idea, one that we may have even perpetuated ourselves because it’s so embedded in modern stories about Arthur Conan Doyle.
But attend, if you will, the facts surrounding the notion that Doyle got involved with spiritualism because of the death of his son Kingsley following the Great War.
Kingsley Doyle died on the 28th of October 1918 from pneumonia during convalescence after being wounded in France.
But Doyle’s spiritualist involvement goes back over three decades before that.
In 1880, while still a medical student at Edinburgh, he attended a lecture called Does Death End All?
and wrote to his mother about it.
Interesting, but not convincing to me, he said.
In 1881, he attended his first séance.
From 1886 to 1887, he participated in table-turning sessions at the home of his patient, General Dresen, in South Sea.
And then, in 1887, the same year A Study in Scarlet was published, he wrote to Light magazine, explicitly declaring himself a spiritualist.
Therein, he described a specific experience that had given him his definite demonstration.
In 1893, he joined the Society for Psychical Research.
In 1894, he investigated a possible poltergeist case in Devon with Frank Podmore.
Then there’s a long quiet period, roughly from 1887 to 1916, where he was involved but not publicly crusading.
The Doyle’s family estate’s website is explicit about the misconception, noting that his interest took root some 30 years earlier, well before his son’s birth.
What the war did do was catalyze his shift from private investigator to public evangelist.
In 1916, before Kingsley’s death, he was apparently impressed by what he took to be the psychic abilities of his children’s nanny, Lily Loader Simons.
That, combined with the mass bereavement of the war, convinced him that spiritualism was a new revelation sent by God to comfort the bereaved, and he began lecturing publicly.
His first public spiritualism lecture was in October of 1917.
The new revelation was published in 1918.
So the more accurate version is, Doyle was a committed spiritualist for 30 years before the war, but the war turned him from quiet believer into missionary.
Kingsley’s death may have intensified an already white-hot commitment, but it did not create it.
The popular narrative gets that causation exactly backwards.
It’s a tidy story that just happens to be wrong, which is fitting for our discussion of the Cottingley Fairies.
Moreover, to the consternation of friends and admirers who desperately wanted Doyle, the writer, to be as analytical as his detective creation, he was a surprisingly gullible man who fell for many hoaxes and tricks throughout his life.
The Cottingley fairies were far from an isolated lapse in judgment.
In 1921, the magician William Marriott, stage name Dr. Wilmar, took photographs of Doyle under close observation by three witnesses, then revealed that he had used sleight of hand to add a translucent figure and dancing fairies to the images.
Doyle publicly admitted Marriott had proved a conjurer could fake a spirit photograph.
and then went right on believing in spirit photography anyway.
When spirit photographer William Hope was exposed as a fraud in 1922 by Harry Price and others using X-ray-marked plates, Doyle defended Hope and called the investigation a conspiracy.
That same year, he told newspapers that Lord Carnarvon had died not from blood poisoning, but from spirit warriors guarding Tutankhamen’s tomb.
And in a seance conducted by his wife Jean for his friend Harry Houdini, a message supposedly from Houdini’s recently deceased mother came through in English, although Houdini’s mother spoke Hungarian and German,
and was signed with a Christian cross, and she had been Jewish, on her birthday with no mention of the occasion.
Doyle believed it was genuine, while Houdini was quietly devastated, and the friendship never recovered.
Even Harry Price, who made his career exposing fraudulent mediums, said of Doyle, his extreme credulity was the despair of his colleagues, all of whom held him in the highest respect for his complete honesty.
Poor, dear, lovable, credulous Doyle.
He was a giant in stature with the heart of a child.
I think that also with this whole thing, I think fairies are basically a footnote in a sense, because he was kind of doing that, you know, six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon in a sense, where…
If you believe in these fairies, which are absolutely real as you can see, then that means that everything else from ghosts to aliens to everything to psychic abilities, all this has to be real because the fairies are real.
So it was kind of his linchpin in a sense that, you know, if you’re going to see that these fairies are real, then you have to believe in all these other things that I’m promoting, right?
Linchpin or hairpin?
Yeah, hairpin, yeah.
Absolutely, good point.
This is a little convoluted, but one of my favorite little bits of trivia, right?
So the illustrations famously, now famously, were copied out of a book called The Princess Mary Gift Book.
And I was always fascinated by this as an adult.
Once I learned about the fairies, I wanted to see this book.
And so I tracked down a first edition copy for a very reasonable price.
Wow.
It goes back to 1914.
It is.
It’s quite old.
And it was so cool because not only did I get this first edition, but it had a…
a, what do you call it?
A dedication in the front from someone who’d given it to someone else as a gift.
And I was able to find them too.
They had gone off to the great war and you know, I could, I, so I mean, why I couldn’t say, you know, the ultimate, you know, how it ended up in my hands.
I could say that it was absolutely authentic first edition and had been given at one point to a child from a soldier, which is really cool.
But, but
What shocked me, because now that I had the book in my hands and was looking at it, is not only is it the source of these illustrations, and they are quite lovely, but they don’t have wings.
They don’t have wings, yeah.
The kids added the wings in.
But if Doyle had paid attention, he actually has a story in the Princess Mary gift book.
I didn’t know that.
Exactly.
I didn’t either.
Oh, how ironic.
Well, when I got that and I saw that connection, I honestly didn’t feel like my bookshelves were the correct place for this to reside.
So our frequent guest and friend of the show, Ken Fader, is a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes and Doyle and of this story.
Well, I want to add, too, these illustrations were done by Claude Shefferson.
This was Frances’s book.
She’d brought it to the UK from South Africa.
And so, yeah, that’s dated 1914 and 1917 when they had these experiences.
Now, I want to add as well that when the girls originally thought they were seeing something, sadly, it was Frances who thought she was seeing these tiny troops.
So in the brook that she was seeing these tiny little, instead of fairies, she was seeing troops, and she imagined that that’s possibly what her father was seeing in the Great War.
And so I think that’s kind of where this started.
So rather than being fairies, they were originally soldiers who were walking around this brook and, I guess, marching around.
And so that’s how she was coping with her father being away.
So I think that that’s part of this story too.
This was a mechanism, a coping mechanism for the girls to deal with the war, which again, spiritualism, a coping mechanism for people to deal with death and the war and for Doyle as well, dealing with the fact that he’d lost his son.
So a lot of…
people who were very affected by the war and by death.
So a lot of emotion that’s invested in this story.
Well, maybe it was less a Beck and more of a Donnybrook.
Sorry.
Now I don’t know how to get back into the story.
drawn these pictures and then they’d cut them out and they positioned them around the grass using hat pins.
So later on, when we have a debunking of everything that was going on, this was in 1978.
James O’Reilly had concluded that the photographs were fake and he said that he could see strings were supporting the fairies.
So to me, I thought, I don’t know how you could really use strings.
They wouldn’t be kind of stiff enough.
You would think, well, what did people have at that time?
that you could use instead.
And I think you could kind of naturally think that they might have used something like hat pins.
But that was, I mean, certainly closer to the reality.
And the girls came out and said that they used hat pins when this was debunked in the 80s.
But yeah, that was James Randi.
I don’t know who…
James Randi’s investigation of the Cottingley photographs came together in 1978, drawing on several lines of attack.
Robert Schaefer, a skeptic experienced in investigating UFO claims, had the idea to apply computer enhancement to the fairy photos.
He enlisted William Spalding of Ground Saucer Watch in Phoenix, Arizona, who ran the images through scanning technology originally developed for analyzing photos of the moon, taken by satellite, but which the GSW used to analyze UFO photos.
Spalding’s computer confirmed the ferry figures were flat, exactly what you would expect of paper cutouts, and also turned up a thread in photo number four when it was prompted to look for such things.
Randy reported these findings and initially promoted what I like to call the fairy string theory.
But there’s a detail I haven’t been able to fully nail down yet.
According to at least two independent sources, Elsie Wright, by then in her late 70s and still not confessing, fired back with a letter in New Scientist sarcastically asking what part of the sky the strings were supposed to be attached to and how paper figures could possibly remain motionless if suspended by thread.
It was a brilliant bit of misdirection.
She was mocking the proposed mechanism without admitting to the hoax.
I searched for these letters in my local library system and online, but couldn’t locate the specific new scientist issues in time for this episode.
So if any of our listeners out there have access to late 1978 and early 1979 issues of New Scientist and want to hunt for this exchange, we would love to hear from you.
I’ve also ordered Joe Cooper’s book, The Case of the Cottingley Fairies, which likely documents this exchange with proper citations, but it won’t arrive for a couple of weeks.
What we can confirm from our pages of Flim Flam itself is that by 1980, Randy had moved on from the fairy strength theory.
He captured the computer enhancement image as doubtful evidence and wrote that no support was even necessary for the figures.
Meanwhile, the real breakthrough had come from an unlikely source.
Fred Gettings, a British author of dozens of books on occultism and esoteric art…
And as Randy notes in Flim Flam, an avowed believer in spiritualism and spirit photography, had stumbled across the fairy illustrations in Princess Mary’s gift book while researching his own book on spirit photography.
Gettings recognized the unmistakable similarity to the Cottingley fairies and published his findings.
Randy included this discovery in Flim Flam, but disappointingly didn’t provide a proper citation to Gettings’ book, Ghosts and Photographs, published in 1978 by Harmony Books.
So by the time Flim Flam went to press, Randy had the right picture.
The fairies were flat paper cutouts copied from a children’s book.
What he didn’t have yet was the confession or the hat pins.
Those came a few years later when the combined pressure of Joe Cooper’s interviews and Jeffrey Crawley’s meticulous photographic investigation finally prompted Elsie to come clean.
I’m going to take a step back for a second.
Now, Gardner did try another attempt to validate things in 1921.
And he returned there with more cameras and an occultist by the name of Jeffrey Hodson.
And so they were there to get more pictures.
Now, I have no idea if the girls were even involved in this particular photo shoot because no new photos came out of it.
They were, I think, overseas at this point.
They’d both moved overseas and gotten married.
Right, right.
So Hodson, the occultist, claims to see fairies everywhere during this little excursion.
So I find that really interesting.
Highest reward, I guess.
Yeah.
So without the girls there to produce fairies, they got no fairies.
But, you know, an occultist still saw fairies everywhere.
So that was kind of interesting.
Now, it was, what, in 1966 when Elsie suggested that the images may be thought forms.
That was going to happen at some point.
Somebody was going to say thought forms.
Well, she did claim to, at the end of her life, they did reveal that it was a hoax.
We have something akin to the Fox sisters where they admit that it was a hoax and then they kind of go back and they go back and forth for a while.
But she had said that the fifth image was real.
She maintains that, yes, we did hoax these other images, but the fifth one, so fairies in their sun bath, which does look a little different to the other pictures.
I think that they’re…
A bit more blurry, a bit more kind of ethereal looking.
A little more double exposure-y rather than just cardboard cutouts, maybe.
Yeah, what’s going on there with that one, Matt?
Because I don’t think the camera was stable.
OK, is is just kind of my my first thought on that, that it was just there was just enough of a movement that it kind of, you know, it was more messy and a little more blurred and probably one that in everyday photography you would have tossed.
You would have tossed that aside.
No good.
But I want to throw out just to the James Randi thing.
You asked who he’d worked with.
You know who he worked with?
Bob Schaefer.
They used they called in some friends in the UFO flying saucer world and got early computer enhancement of the photo.
That’s where they.
I think they saw a wire or a string.
Anyway, I just thought that was really funny because we know Bob.
Yeah, yeah.
It was probably more, you know, just photographic artifacts.
But the interesting thing is that I saw a video of James Randi, probably 80s or 90s, talking about this.
And what he points to…
is what i think most photography people would point to and that is the fact that you know this is the type of camera that needs a certain amount of light exposure so you look and you see the back is blurry the back right but the girls and the fairies that are dancing at the time are sharp
So that means that they are holding still.
And, you know, that I think is a stronger piece of evidence against the reality of these than, oh, maybe I see some string.
I think that it’s, you know, seeing the really sharp edges of something that is supposedly dancing and fluttering and everything to be perfectly still.
It is suspect.
It makes you think, okay, this is a two-dimensional drawing that they stuck there.
Well, it goes back to the same thing with the Patterson Gimlin film.
It’s all about what, you know, what was the focal length, what lens they used, what was the shutter speed, all that kind of stuff.
Exactly.
Or it’s a guy in a suit.
I don’t, you know.
So we’ll see how that turns out soon.
Yeah, exactly.
We should go back then to when the girls revealed that it was a hoax.
Yes.
Blake, you’ve talked about the Arthur C. Clarke’s Wall of Strange Powers.
And so it’s really interesting because there’s a video, the BBC video that Matt and I watched.
The women were interviewed and they were very steadfast that these images were not fake.
They were real.
And how could we possibly have faked this?
So there is that difference between, I guess, you know,
Matt can probably explain this better, but the fact that a photograph has been tampered with or as opposed to actually faking something that’s within the picture.
So those pictures were real pictures, not a hoax.
that hadn’t been tampered with in those early days and later were.
But I think it’s kind of a matter of semantics, really, as to whether they were hoaxed or the pictures were fake.
And they really, I think, clung onto that idea that, no, these pictures were not fake.
Well, the pictures were real, yes.
They were not tampered with.
They were not, you know, all that was absolutely true.
But I think Elsie and Frances had a real…
I guess there were two eras.
There was the era of sunk cost where they had to stick to their story, and then they had the era of the jig is up.
Yeah, yeah.
And so, excuse me, this is the time that we’re talking about where they’re being interviewed for TV.
So we’ve got these early days where they’re still continuing to say that this happened, and then they come out and they admit that this was a hoax and that they were too embarrassed to admit the truth after they’d fooled Doyle.
And so we’ve got some quotes here.
Two village girls and a brilliant man like Conan Doyle.
Well, we could only keep quiet.
And in that same interview, Frances said, I never even thought of it as being a fraud.
It was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun.
And I can’t understand to this day why they were taken in.
They wanted to be taken in.
There’s a podcast called…
It’s called Cautionary Tales, and they did an episode on this and talked a lot about how the girls wanted to come clean, but then they felt bad for Doyle, so they wanted to wait until he passed.
And then they felt bad about Gardner, and it’s like these people kept not dying for a long time.
And then, you know, and then, as you say, sunk costs like it’s going to be very embarrassing.
At what point do you finally just give up?
And I don’t know.
It seems like it was the publication of Jeffrey Crawley’s Tim Part story about sort of exploding all this.
That really I mean, it was as you say, the jig is up.
It’s like it’s over.
We’re going to you might as well come clean because clearly this guy has our number.
Right.
So.
Yeah, and you mentioned – sorry, I’m just scrolling through all of our notes here.
I’m getting a bit croaky too.
Edward Gardner, I’ve read quite a few pieces where the girls spoke about him, and it seems like they didn’t really like him, and they thought he was a fraud.
They thought he was a hoaxer, and so they –
didn’t really enjoy working with him.
And so I think that he really encouraged them to maintain the story for that period of time.
Yeah, I think this is just such a sad story because these girls were just followed, followed by these fairies, followed by these stories for their entire lives.
And they were older ladies when they finally admitted that it was a hoax and they’d just been pressured into this by these older men.
and he’d really used them and made money from this.
It’s not like the Patterson-Gimlin film where we have these main characters who are making a lot of money and still want to cling on to that.
These girls made nothing.
It was really just their honour that was at stake.
So it’s a very complicated, messy story.
And I really feel like they were dragged along and it was just an innocent prank to begin with.
And the two girls bonding and wanting to kind of stick together in the face of the parents and have a little autonomy and having some fun.
And it just blew up into something years later.
And they had to really hold on to this for their entire lives.
And so we spoke earlier about parallels with other stories, but I think there’s certainly,
some parallels with the Enfield poltergeist with these older men getting involved in the story and really taking it to the media, taking it to the world, and also the Guyra ghost and just the pious fraud and perpetuating some of the phenomena to try and prove to other people that, yes, this did exist.
And I guess to this day we’ll never really know how the girls felt about that final photograph because they really did –
stick to their story that that one that one was real and it does look different to the others but uh in fact it looks a little bit more fake i guess to me because of the blurriness
I think for such a small piece of history, there’s an astonishingly large amount of documentation around this and things you can read.
So if you are interested in this topic, please check the show notes because there is plenty to look at.
Well, yeah, in particular, I think, Blake, the video on YouTube that you came across from Dr. Merrick Burrow, who’s the curator at the Leeds University Library.
The talk that he did, The Cottingley Ferry is a Study in Deception.
It’s audio only, but- It’s got little, he has- Slides.
Slides, slides, yeah.
Yeah, some of the images.
But that is excellent.
I think that he really does a fantastic job of debunking the story, but also being very fair to those people who are involved.
But I think just in closing, can we talk a little bit about what happened to the photographs?
What happened to the negatives?
Because I’m still a bit confused.
Well, they did sort of get dispersed in a sense.
And I think Blake had found that some of them were being auctioned and antique roadshow kind of thing.
One of them had turned up.
But they’re dispersed, not all in one place.
So they’re rarely what are actually getting examined today.
You know, the things that are getting examined today are the copies.
It’s like there’s fourth generation copies of these things that are being put forth as the originals.
Interesting story.
And it certainly just takes me back to my my childhood, a time where people still believed in the story.
But I think even after all that’s been revealed, there are still people who are out there and believe in the Cottingley fairies and do cite them as evidence of the existence of fairies.
Yeah, you know, it’s an interesting thing, you know, when you just look at the big picture of this, no pun intended with that, but this case isn’t just about fake photos.
You know, it’s about kind of layers of credibility.
You know, you had this first layer of authentic negatives, which was true, but misleading.
And then you had the expert validation, which was technically correct, but contextually wrong.
And then you had enhanced reproduction, which was quietly altered perception.
And then you had this authority endorsement with Doyle.
And that just emotionally amplified everything.
And it’s just really, this is like a blueprint for how misinformation gains legitimacy.
And it’s not about fake photos.
It’s about the machine of misinformation gaining legitimacy.
And all the vectors of psychology.
There’s so many interesting things there.
Be a good slide there for all the different motivations.
Yeah, indeed.
Oh, yeah.
The story’s over, but it’s still being told.
And I think there’s a lot more to probably come out.
Yeah, and when someone new sees one of those photos, all of the debunking, all of the credibility that was laid on top of it, all of it goes away because you’ve got a new person looking at it with new eyes and seeing that this is a picture of a real fairy.
So the story starts over, you know.
Well, I think too that the girls are, the way that they’re dressed, the way that they look…
that’s kind of our prototypical idea of what ghosts look like.
And so I think that all feeds into it as well, just because it’s old.
These are old pictures and they’re historical.
And so I think people look at these and they go, these must be true.
These are old.
They couldn’t do those things back then.
Right.
Absolutely.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stolzno.
Today you heard Karen Stolzno, Matt Baxter, and me discussing the case of the Cottingley Fairies.
The story is often told as that of two clever girls getting one over on gullible adults, but I hope we’ve made it clear that something far more complicated was going on.
The adults in the story were deeply invested in the existence of fairies, but not in the way the average person then or now would think of them.
Far from the dainty winged creatures literally depicted in the photographs, these adults were looking to support a complicated religious belief in ethereal entities with concrete scientific evidence in the form of photographs.
In the end, the concrete turned out to be as flimsy as the paper and hat pins used in the hoax.
But it isn’t Elsie or Francis who turned a childhood prank into a global sensation.
Furthermore, I think a good case can be made that the culprit isn’t Arthur Conan Doyle.
If blame must be placed, I’d put the lion’s share of it on Edward Gardner.
Gardner was a fervent member of the Theosophical Society, and he usually plays second fiddle to Doyle in retellings because Doyle’s so much more famous.
But look at what Gardner actually did.
He’s the one who got the original negatives from the family and took them to Harold Snelling, who was supposed to vouch for the photo’s authenticity, but who then retouched them and produced new prints.
Gardner used those prints in his lecture tours around Britain, and he was selling copies at those lectures, all before Doyle was even involved.
He’s the one who actually went to Cottingley and met the Wright family.
Doyle never went himself.
It was Gardner who vouched for the family’s character and their transparent honesty, and that assessment became a cornerstone of Doyle’s published arguments.
Gardner is the one who provided the girls with a new cameo camera and secretly marked photographic plates for the second series of photos.
Gardner accompanied occultist Jeffrey Hodson on the final 1921 visit, where Hodson claimed to see fairies everywhere, while the girls saw nothing and privately considered Hodson a fraud.
And Gardner co-authored much of the material that ended up in Doyle’s book, The Coming of the Fairies.
Without Gardner, the story probably dies at a Theosophical Society meeting in Bradford.
Doyle supplied the fame, but Gardner supplied the machinery.
He surfaced the photos, authenticated them, retouched them, distributed them, vetted the family, equipped the girls for round two, and profited from the whole affair.
And as Karen and Matt and I were recording this episode, and I was laying all that out, it suddenly hit me.
In the end, it turns out there was a gardener at the bottom of the fairies.
Monster Talk’s theme music is by Pete Stealing Monkeys.
Thank you so much for letting us be a part of your listening life.
This has been a Monster House presentation.
Wait, are you saying that there’s a gardener at the bottom of the fairies?
That’s a really good one.
That one was, yes.
That one is on point.

The post S05E28 The Cottingley Fairies appeared first on MonsterTalk.

Blake and Karen welcome back author and paranormal investigator Richard Estep to discuss his new book from Visible Ink Press, Monsters: Myths, Legends, and Real Encounters. Richard is a paramedic, clinical educator, and the author of more than 30 books on the paranormal, true crime, and history. Karen wrote the foreword for this one – and donated her fee to Doctors Without Borders.

The book covers a grab bag of monsters – from the classics like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster to lesser-known creatures like the Fresno Nightcrawlers. Richard describes his approach as mixing the tried-and-true big names with some weirder, more obscure entries – and giving each one a critical appraisal.

Karen discusses several Australian cryptids featured in the book, including the Yowie and the Bunyip. She was surprised to find a creature she hadn’t heard of – the Moolyewonk (also known as the Hawkesbury River Monster). Karen has crossed the Hawkesbury River many times and never heard of it.

The river is home to real creatures including bull sharks (which can swim in brackish and freshwater), large eels, dolphins, and even platypuses. Karen suspects eels – which can grow up to 8 feet – are likely candidates for sightings. The creature has sometimes been lazily compared to Australia’s Loch Ness Monster, but as Richard notes, unlike Loch Ness, the Hawkesbury River is connected to the ocean – making a very different kind of cryptid claim.

Richard draws parallels between the Moolyewonk and Morgawr, the Cornish sea/river monster spotted in Falmouth Bay, England – two nations on opposite sides of the world with remarkably similar water monster traditions.

Many Hawkesbury River Monster sightings cluster around the 1930s – coinciding with the global explosion of Loch Ness Monster interest, which historians have linked to the cultural impact of the 1933 film King Kong. The famous Surgeon’s Photograph of Nessie – long one of the most iconic images in cryptozoology – was eventually debunked as a toy submarine with a sculpted head and neck.

Richard describes going “squatching” near Bailey, Colorado, visiting the Sasquatch Outpost – a combination store and museum. He went out into the woods with local filmmakers, tried tree-knocking, and even brought some of his ghost-hunting equipment along. Nothing definitive turned up, but he’s intrigued enough to be working on a full In Search of Bigfoot book.

Karen has also visited the Sasquatch Outpost and recalls their token system – visitors place a token in either an “I believe” or “I don’t believe” jar after seeing the exhibits. The “I believe” jar was significantly fuller. Karen’s token went in the skeptic jar.

Richard mentions Belle Grove Plantation in Virginia – birthplace of President James Madison – which reportedly has the trifecta: UFO/UAP reports, Bigfoot sightings (including soldiers on exercises at nearby Fort Barfoot being stalked), and ghost encounters.

Blake mentions Joshua Cutchin, who has appeared on MonsterTalk and coined the term “weird washing” – the idea that a lot of high-strangeness Bigfoot encounters get filtered out of the literature because researchers want Bigfoot to be just an animal. Richard calls Cutchin a contemporary John Keel.

The gang also touches on the Ohio Bigfoot flap in the news, the Georgetown, Colorado train sighting (which turned out to involve a ghillie suit), and the infamous 2008 Bigfoot-in-a-freezer hoax from Georgia.

Blake reminds listeners that if Bigfoot turned out to be a real animal, it wouldn’t just be fun – it would be genuinely important for science, giving us another primate to study. But in an age of AI-generated imagery, even photos and videos are becoming harder to trust. As Richard puts it: “It’s either too good to be true or not good enough to be true.”

Karen brings up a favorite case of the show – the Serbian vampire Arnold Paole (circa 1725-1726). Paole was a hajduk (irregular soldier) who claimed he’d been plagued by a vampire while serving in Turkish-controlled territory. He reportedly protected himself by smearing the vampire’s blood on himself and eating soil from its grave. After breaking his neck in a fall, Paole died – and was later blamed for an outbreak of vampirism in his village.

The case is notable because it was documented by a regimental surgeon and investigated by a royal commission – giving it an air of official credibility. But as Blake notes, the physical characteristics described in the exhumation reports – blood-stained lips, blood gushing when staked, apparent hair and nail growth – are entirely consistent with normal taphonomic processes (what really happens to bodies after death). Karen notes that conflicting details about whether Paole served in Greece vs. Turkey are a hallmark of urban legend.

Richard also discusses the disturbing detail that among the “vampires” destroyed in Paole’s case was an 8-day-old infant.

Richard draws a connection to the Mercy Brown case (Exeter, Rhode Island, 1892). Mercy’s family was devastated by tuberculosis (then called “consumption”), and when her body was exhumed six weeks after burial in January, villagers were alarmed to find it hadn’t decomposed. Of course, as Richard points out – she’d been put in the ground in the dead of a New England winter. Essentially a natural refrigerator.

This leads to a broader discussion about how ignorance of posthumous processes fuels supernatural belief – from vampire panics to cattle mutilation claims (ranchers apparently good at keeping cattle alive, less clear on what happens after death) to the chupacabra, which is most often explained as mangy dogs or coyotes.

Richard makes the sharp observation that tuberculosis was actually fairly well understood by the time of the New England vampire panic – yet rural communities still defaulted to supernatural explanations. Sound familiar?

Blake’s favorite monsters! Richard’s chapter on werewolves covers clinical lycanthropy (a real psychiatric condition), old superstitions (born on Christmas Day, eyebrows that meet in the middle), and even studies showing that emergency departments are not actually busier during full moons – despite what medical professionals believe.

The standout case is Bill Ramsey, dubbed the “Southend Werewolf.” As a boy in 1952, Ramsey claimed a cold gust of wind possessed him with a wolf spirit. He allegedly ripped a fence post from the ground and gnawed on it. Years later, in the 1980s, he attacked people in a police station and had to be restrained by multiple officers.

Ed and Lorraine Warren got involved, diagnosing demonic possession (shocking no one). They arranged for Ramsey to fly to the US for an exorcism in 1989 – with the plane ticket paid for by a British tabloid in exchange for story rights. Lorraine Warren claimed to have witnessed Ramsey’s face “transfigure” – though no such transformation appears in any video footage. A book deal followed, along with talk show appearances including Sally Jessy Raphael.

Richard, who declares himself “no fan” of the Warrens, sees this as a likely case of someone cashing in on mental health issues and erratic behavior – with the Warrens acting as opportunists. Karen wonders why this case never became a Conjuring movie, speculating it may have been too unbelievable even by those standards. Karen also draws a possible connection to a 1970s Barney Miller episode featuring a man who believed he was a werewolf – which predates Ramsey’s public claims.

Richard co-wrote a book on Mothman with Tobias Wayland and visited Point Pleasant, West Virginia for research. He has an 8-foot-tall cardboard Mothman staring out of his guest bedroom window. He also traveled to Cornwall, England to research Morgawr.

Richard is currently working on:
– In Search of Bigfoot – includes a planned trip to Bradshaw Ranch in Arizona (a reported hotspot for paranormal activity)
– A book on spies and espionage for Visible Ink Press
– A trip to New Orleans to explore vampire culture and subcultures (Blake recommends Cafe Du Monde beignets and taking a guided tour of St. Louis Cemetery No. 1)
– His autobiography is set for release at the beginning of June

When asked which cryptid he’d want to be real, Richard picks Krampus – with the modification that the naughty list should extend to adults, not just children.

Richard Estep, Monsters: Myths, Legends, and Real Encounters (Visible Ink Press)
Richard Estep and Tobias Wayland, Mothman: Sightings and Investigations of the Iconic Flying Cryptid
Ed Warren, Lorraine Warren, Robert David Chase, and William Ramsey, Werewolf: A True Story of Demonic Possession (1991)
Horrified board game by Ravensburger (designed by Prospero Hall)

Arnold Paole – Wikipedia
Mercy Brown Vampire Incident – Wikipedia
New England Vampire Panic – Wikipedia
Clinical Lycanthropy – Wikipedia
Ed and Lorraine Warren – Wikipedia
Surgeon’s Photograph (Loch Ness) – Wikipedia
Hawkesbury River – Wikipedia
Morgawr – Wikipedia
Mothman – Wikipedia
Taphonomy – Wikipedia
Krampus – Wikipedia
Patterson-Gimlin Film – Wikipedia

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’re welcoming back author, paramedic, and paranormal investigator Richard Estep for what I believe is his fourth visit to the show.
At this point, he should have his own parking spot.
Richard has written more than 30 books, and if you’ve heard our previous conversations, you know he’s a guy who takes the stories seriously without necessarily buying what they’re selling, which is a sensibility we very much appreciate around here.
His latest from Visible Inc. Press is Monsters, Myths, Legends, and Real Encounters, and it’s a departure from his usual ghostly fare.
This one’s all creatures.
Bigfoot, Nessie, vampires, werewolves, chupacabras, and some genuinely obscure ones that I hadn’t encountered before.
And Karen wrote the foreword to this one, which then she donated the fee to Doctors Without Borders because she is a better person than me.
I would have spent that money on perfectly good coffee.
What I appreciate about this book and this conversation is Richard manages to do the thing that’s actually really hard to do.
He tells you the stories, gives you the weird and wonderful details, but then he also tells you why they probably aren’t what believers think they are without making you feel stupid for having enjoyed the ride.
We get into Australian river monsters, Serbian vampires, the Warrens doing their Warren things with a werewolf case, and Richard’s own adventures going squatching in the Colorado woods.
Did he find Bigfoot?
No, but he got his steps in.
Monster Talk.
Yeah, congratulations on the new book.
It is a beauty.
Yeah, now this one is, this was less ghosty.
This one’s more critters, critters oriented.
Yes, zero ghosty, right?
Yeah.
So, I mean, there’s a little bit of demon.
That’s like the pepper and salt for your paranormal book.
You have to have a little, just a little… Garnish.
A little garnish of… Lots of crossover.
A little hint of demon.
That’s a good way to start.
So Richard, after writing about ghosts for so long and poltergeists and demons and even serial killers, and you’ve written history books and a recent memoir as well, and now you’ve turned your attention to monsters and cryptids.
So what inspired you to write this new book?
Well, it was their turn.
But honestly, I’m that kid that grew up with universal monster movies and in the UK hammer horror movies, you know, which just means you have an entirely different looking Dracula who became Saruman a bit further down the line.
So, you know, just the joy I still get from playing those games, running around, destroying Dracula’s coffins, you know, trying to keep Frankenstein’s monster and his bride apart.
As well.
As you do.
Yeah.
And, you know, we all love our monsters, right?
I mean, right now, isn’t there a new, there’s a new Frankenstein’s monster movie out called The Bride.
That’s right.
Not to be confused with the one with Sting, but yeah.
No, no.
This one directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal.
That’s right.
I haven’t seen it, but I hear phenomenal things about it.
Yeah, it looks very Art Deco, which is kind of cool.
Yeah.
Very 1930s.
I love that.
Bonnie and Clyde.
Yeah.
And so I think I’m surprised it took me this long to get around to monsters.
I’ve always been like cryptid adjacent.
I like to tell people that when we talk about high strangeness, when I was growing up and investigating cases in the 90s in the UK, you had your ghost people, as we were called, your UFO people and your monster people, and never the twain shall meet.
And then we started comparing notes right around the time the X-Files came out, and the X-Files started covering all three of those things.
And we realized we had a whole lot more in common than we did separating us.
And we stopped siloing so much.
So I just, someday I always wanted to get around to writing about monsters.
You know, and I’ve been on Monster Talk, of course, which was always fun to do.
And I’ve always been fascinated.
So finally, Visible Inc. said, it’s time you did a monster book.
Fair enough.
Logical next step.
Yeah, we’ve had on Joshua Cutchin.
Love Josh.
And he calls Bigfoot a forest poltergeist, which I think is rock solid, you know.
He’s on my interview list for my next book, actually, which is about Bigfoot.
But his works on the Bigfoot phenomenon, he definitely takes an esoteric, high strangeness view of it.
It’s quite a potpourri of monsters you have here.
So with so many monsters to choose from, how did you whittle down the list for what was going to be in this book?
I’m like the proverbial deranged child in a candy store with a monster book in that I just went on a grab bag of things that fascinated me.
So when I wrote my first book on serial killers, you know, the expectation was you talked about some names that everybody knew.
John Wayne Gacy, you know, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, people like that.
And then I wanted to add in some that were lesser known.
Your indies versus your top 40.
Exactly.
And so I kind of tried to do the same thing with monsters.
Like it’s kind of expected that you’ll talk about, if it’s your first book on monsters, Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster, you know, those kinds of things, Chupacabra.
But then I wanted to do a few weirder ones like the Fresno Nightcrawlers, which very few people seem to have heard of.
and things like that.
And then all the many things from Karen’s homeland that have fangs and seem to want to kill you, you know.
So I just kind of went off on some weird tangents, and it was just a delight to mix the tried and trusty.
And I wanted to also do a critical appraisal.
Like, for example, Loch Ness Monster.
I grew up as a child of the 70s, watching countless BBC documentaries, seeing all the books, the book by Nicholas Wichel, the surgeon’s photograph.
You know, I can see that in my mind’s eye, the head.
And that’s my imitation of the surgeon’s photograph.
Well done.
Well done.
That’s convincing.
But it was so iconic.
Like almost anybody would know what that photograph was.
And it’s only relatively recently, you know, that we’ve known it was debunked.
And it was, in fact, you know, a toy submarine, I believe, with a sculpted head and neck on it.
I wanted to kind of go back and do a retrospective on stuff like that and look at where those classic cases kind of, do they hold any water?
No pun intended.
Well, if you don’t attend to my will, that’s fair.
Yeah, that’s truth.
So you’ve mentioned Australian cryptids, and I think that’s a good lead-in for me.
So you write about some very famous cases like the yaoi and the bunyip, but then you treat another creature that I haven’t actually heard of before.
And so I guess you’d pronounce it the molywonk, molywonk?
The Muliwonk.
Yeah, probably sounds better if you say it, Karen.
But I had never heard of this creature, even though I know its supposed homeland, which is the Hawkesbury River.
Yeah.
So it’s also known as the Hawkesbury River Monster, and there are a number of other Indigenous names for the creature as well.
So I’ve crossed the Hawkesbury River many times, and I’ve never heard about this creature.
I know that the river has got some really interesting…
real creatures like sharks and dolphins and even platypus.
Wait, wait, wait.
Sharks in a river?
Yes.
Yeah.
It’s probably a bull shark.
It’s needed to be more terrifying.
Bull sharks, yeah.
Yeah, bull sharks can play around in brackish waters.
Yeah, or go up a river.
Apparently they go way up the Mississippi.
So, yeah, yeah.
They also have lots of eels, so I suspect that that’s what people might be seeing.
Some of them grow very large, up to about eight feet, and other kinds of fish as well.
I didn’t think eels had feet.
It started.
But yeah, that was really cool.
Could you tell us about this creature?
Yeah, initially I thought this, because it’s been kind of lazily described as Australia’s Loch Ness Monster, but as you guys are well aware, kind of the Loch Ness Monster story is so problematic in so many ways.
Not least the whole thing about Loch Ness not being connected to the ocean, whereas the Hawkesbury River, you know, is obviously is.
So the fact that there have been sightings of this, you can’t quite call it a river monster or a sea monster because it’s been spotted in both locations fascinated me.
are we talking about a freshwater or a saltwater or some kind of combination creature?
And then looking at the Aboriginal lore and the fact that these sightings go all the way back, I think Karen hits the nail on the head, you know, this was probably a way for Indigenous peoples to describe large, you know, eels or other entirely normal, entirely natural creatures of the river.
But I just kind of loved the idea that that story had…
had survived down through the generations.
And when I was in Cornwall, England, I loved the parallels between the Moo-Yoo-Wonk and Moga, the Cornish river slash sea monster that is seen in Falmouth Bay, which is oceanic, but then also has been seen swimming up river as well.
So I kind of loved the fact that you have these two nations on opposite sides of the world that had very similar stories.
And I wanted to talk about more things that swam than just the Loch Ness Monster.
Yeah, and I’ll add too that it seems like a lot of the sightings are around the 1930s, so really coinciding with stories of the Loch Ness Monster, and I guess it was global at that point, global interest.
Mainly because of cinema, right?
Because… King Kong and…
Yes.
Historians have pointed out, smarter people than me have pointed out that the explosion of Loch Ness Monster stories really does tie in with King Kong hitting movie theatres.
Yeah.
But I want to say too, sorry.
Go ahead.
There are similarities between the Hawkesbury River and Loch Ness.
They both have these internal waves and just, it can be very dangerous.
How big of a river is this?
Like how wide or like if you’ve been there?
just don’t know i mean it’s extremely wide it’s not as deep or as dark or as cold as uh loch ness it really snakes around uh and it covers a large surface area but it’s not as big as loch ness
Well, I was just going to say, you crossed a bridge.
Is that how you’ve encountered it?
Or, like, have you canoed on it?
Oh, no, nothing like that.
But people do.
But, yeah, certainly just going over freeways when you’re going north up to Queensland.
Yeah.
I mean, it’s just north of Sydney.
But it does really snake around.
So it covers a lot of ground.
And not that far from major population centres, if I’m not mistaken.
Right, Karen?
Oh yeah.
Very, very close to, I mean, uh, New South Wales has last time I looked about 8 million people.
Uh, and most of them are in Sydney, maybe about 4 million in Sydney, but certainly millions of people around.
So.
Which kind of always begs the question, no matter which monster you’re talking about, you know, unless you’re looking at something way out in the woods, um,
where is all the good video footage?
You know, where are all the contemporary sightings?
Good question.
Yeah.
So I love the fact that the publisher’s title was Myths, Legends, and Real Encounters.
And a lot of this stuff falls under the auspices of myths and legends.
And, of course, I think, you know, you already have given us a great explanation for Mu Yu Wong sightings.
Well, yeah.
I mean, sightings and real encounters, not necessarily saying it’s true, but certainly it’s sightings.
It’s a real encounter with something, yeah.
Yeah.
Chris, most of us just watch them on video, which is a different kind of reel, R-E-E-L, right?
Oh.
So you actually got to go squatching?
So that’s a little different from a ghost stakeout.
What was your experience like?
Yeah.
So Bailey, Colorado is…
It’s up in Adams County, and it’s pretty rural, but it’s also fairly close to Denver.
It’s close enough you could drive it pretty comfortably in like 30 minutes.
And they have the Sasquatch Outposts out there, which is a combination like store and museum.
And I’d wanted to visit anyway because, you know, it’s one of those things where I’m kind of ashamed it’s been on my doorstep for a quarter century.
And I’ve never been to that part of the country before, really.
And so I went up there and I talked to some local filmmakers and I said, could we go squatching?
You guys do this quite frequently.
And they took me out into the woods.
And it was an experience for sure.
It really was.
So I spent a day at the Sasquatch outpost and then out in the woods looking for and failing to find Sasquatch or Bigfoot.
Did you hear anything unusual?
I mean, the key thing is it’s the woods, right?
It is.
And so you run into this all the time.
I tried the classic, you know, knocking on trees and things of that nature.
Did have some weird things happen with some of the, I took some equipment I used for haunted locations to see if we would get anything with that.
Did have some odd behavior with some of that, but nothing definitive.
It certainly has intrigued me enough, though, that I’m working on a Bigfoot Sasquatch project now and going out to Bailey quite often.
Again, have yet to find anything, but if nothing else, I get my steps in out in the woods.
It is a very wholesome.
Sorry, go ahead, Karen.
Sorry.
I was going to say I’ve been to that museum just a couple of years ago, and it is good fun.
And I think I kind of remember that we talked about this maybe last year, but how they give you a token when you enter.
And then by the time you go and see all of the exhibits, when you’re leaving, they ask you, do you believe in Bigfoot or not?
And you can decide where to put your token.
But there were certainly more tokens in the, I believe.
jar than they were in the i don’t believe and yours went where karen oh you know i don’t believe yeah you’re definitely not a token believer on the show um i thought i’d get that one in before you did blake i look at the uh you’d imagine a room full of skeptics going to see peter pan and you know if you believe wherever you are clap your hands and she’ll hear you clap clap
we don’t believe in the play-ins tragically.
But I do love that they don’t tell you what to believe.
Like they, they, um, they use a lot of, uh, which I’ve made a career out of doing.
I try not to tell people what to believe either.
I’ll tell them what I believe, but I love that they give you the choice.
They’re like, here’s what we’ve got.
Here are some pictures.
Here’s some, you know, what we consider to be evidence.
You decide, which I think is great.
And you can see what everyone else has decided as well.
Um,
So that was a fun adventure and it continues to be interesting.
You know, you mentioned Josh Cutchin, who is on my interview list as I look at the more kind of, um,
an esoteric side of the bigfoot phenomenon and i think it’s fascinating to me how many claims there are of bigfoot encounters in relation to ufo uap activity and haunted locations too i was at bell grove in virginia last year which is the plantation that president james madison was born at
So it’s a historic site, and they have the trifecta.
They have UFO UAP reports there.
They are right on the Rappahannock River, like they’re back onto the river.
They have numerous Bigfoot sightings there.
And what kind of fascinated me was that literally five miles up the road is a massive army base, a training center, Fort Hood.
And there are accounts of soldiers on exercise being stalked by Bigfoot.
But yeah, so that kind of fascinates me too.
And the idea that, you know, these realms might intersect a little bit.
There might be some overlap has fascinated me.
So, Chuck, is he the one who drew parallels between Bigfoot and Christmas trees?
I don’t think so.
He created weird washing.
So the idea that there’s a lot more unusual, ultra-terrestrial type stuff going on with Bigfoot that just doesn’t make it into the literature because when people are compiling the stories, they just want it.
Bigfoot’s an animal.
It’s an animal, which is increasingly becoming a challenge because I think not only…
do you have the question of where’s the body, but also more and more people are seeing pair, you know, portal Bigfoot and that sort of thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You got to account for the dimensional Bigfoot.
Exactly.
Kind of like a John Keel.
I think it was kind of a contemporary John Keel.
Yeah.
So whether I agree with him or not, I think he’s got, he’s on rock solid ground as far as categorization.
Yeah.
Yes.
And certainly has bring some interesting perspective to the man.
And the man can eat some pancakes.
That’s all I’m just saying.
Oh, I believe it.
But here’s the question back at you.
Australia again, Karen, right?
You know, talking about the Yowie, Australia is one of those few places on earth where you have still all of this untouched, unspoiled wilderness.
Do you think the potential, if the Bigfoot claims hold any water, do you think that is the kind of location where it’s more likely to be genuine?
You know, because vast tracts of Australia are still untouched by humanity, right?
Well, I think a lot of areas have been crossed and traversed by Indigenous people and then in the past couple of hundred years, explorers.
So I think it’s comparable in many ways to California.
And I’ve been out to Willow Creek, California, many years ago now, the Bigfoot capital of the world, and went to the basic area where the Patterson-Gimlin footage was shot.
But I think that terrain is kind of similar in many ways.
And so I think certainly a lot of it can be remote.
But if we’re talking about really remote areas, we’re talking about more desert, so not Bigfoot.
or county country.
But certainly the areas where people claim that they’ve seen the Yowie, it’s going to be areas like maybe the Blue Mountains.
My grandmother used to live there and there is a lot of lore surrounding the Yowie there and a lot of well-known people who, there’s a guy called Tim the Yowie Man.
I don’t know if you encountered him at all.
No, but the clue to his job is very much evident in his name.
Yeah, yeah.
Says it all.
What do you do, Tim?
Well.
I’m the owie man.
So I just don’t know how much people believe, though.
I think it’s like, you know, we talk about a lot of different monsters and that people in Australia drop bears or here in the US tree alligators.
People don’t really believe in those things, but…
It does attract tourists and it’s just something that people like to joke about.
So the yaoi, I just…
For the same reasons that we don’t have good evidence for Bigfoot.
We don’t have good evidence for the Abominable Snowman.
We don’t have good evidence for the Yowie Sasquatch.
But there are parallels, certainly, to the American versions.
It does appear to be a universal myth.
It does.
But wouldn’t it be cool, though…
If if there was like more physical evidence and and it was it was a marsupial Bigfoot, that would be the best.
Like so it’s not literally a Bigfoot, but it’s, you know, convergent evolution.
Right.
That would be neat.
You know, the platypus, that’s a pretty strange creature.
It is a very strange creature indeed.
So, yeah.
I do feel a lot like I really empathize with the platypus.
Whichever way I turn, there’s an enormous bill in front of me as well.
Oh, yeah.
You must have been listening to our conversation pre-show.
Oh.
Are you guys following?
And I’m sorry, I know it’s your show, but it might be bad form for me to ask you questions.
But are you following the Bigfoot news out of Ohio right now, the equivalent of a flap that’s going on?
As per usual, my neighbor texted me immediately.
He’s like, have you seen this?
Yeah.
So I watched the footage.
Explain this.
Yeah, pretty much.
Yeah.
So I remember.
He also sent me footage when they had the 2008 Bigfoot in a freezer fiasco here in Georgia.
And he was like, you got to turn on CNN.
They’re saying they found Bigfoot.
And I’m like, wait a minute.
Are they saying they found Bigfoot?
Or are they saying someone said they found Bigfoot?
And he was like, hold on a second.
And he came back.
He’s like, oh, well, they’re saying somebody found Bigfoot.
It’s not the same.
It’s not the same.
You may remember there were multiple reports of Bigfoot sightings here in Ohio last week, but what you might not know is that the Buckeye State ranks fourth nationwide for sightings.
I saw a still on Fox News, so I haven’t seen the full footage or whatever, so I don’t even know if it moves, but it looked very much like a…
a Bigfoot shaped silhouette, you know?
So, yeah.
Great.
I mean, we had an incident here in Colorado.
I don’t know if you recall this one, Karen, but it was taken by some tourists on a train.
Oh, maybe it was Georgetown.
I think it was a Georgetown.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That’s right.
I think Matt and Blake, they did a video on that through our YouTube channel.
But, yeah, it was another guy, and it was a, what do you call those, ghillie suit?
A ghillie suit.
Yeah.
And some cool signs.
We kind of want to believe, and that’s the thing.
Sure, yeah.
I mean, it would be fantastic.
But at the end of the day, yeah, you know, once you get into the realm of looking for physical evidence, there just isn’t a bunch there, unfortunately.
Sadly.
Yeah.
I mean, I always want to remind people that it would be really helpful scientifically if it turned out Bigfoot was a real animal.
That’d be really neat.
I mean, not just fun, but like having yet another primate to examine, to understand.
That would be really important for science.
I have to reconcile my- Oh yeah, so when it goes to the idea of that, yeah, just- Yeah, no, not at all.
It’s the evidence.
Yeah, exactly.
Which, but it would be really, it would be not just cool, it would be useful.
So yeah, and we would certainly celebrate it, but until we can get something more tangible than a video.
And of course, in these days-
even videos and photographs are becoming increasingly hard to trust.
So that’s unfortunate.
That’s a whole other issue, isn’t it?
I mean, the fact that, you know, it’s either too good to be true or not good enough to be true.
I mean, if I, with a simple prompt, I can get some amazing Bigfoot footage, you know, and have him talk to me.
So it’s really, you know, what, um, did you, um,
Do any other on-site investigations for this book that you want to talk about?
I mean, I’ve done a section on Mothman, so I did get out to Point Pleasant.
I’d written an entire book about that, co-written with Tobias Weyland.
And so that was a delight to go do.
Mothman remains a perennial fascination for me.
There’s an eight-foot-tall cardboard Mothman.
I was going to say life-size, but…
There’s some problems with that description, right?
There’s an eight foot tall Mothman peering out of the windows of my guest bedroom upstairs, which the delivery folks had not commented upon, strangely.
So Mothman for sure, getting out to Point Pleasant.
And then, yeah, I got to Cornwall in England for Morgar.
The Cornish legends of Morgar just fascinate me as everything about that part of the British Isles does, you know.
But so much of the stuff you’re dealing with anecdotal stories that took place 50 years ago.
So there’s really only so much you can do.
I am excited to be getting to New Orleans next month for the first time ever.
Oh, cool.
I have a hankering to look into vampire culture.
Get to Café du Monde and have some beignets.
You’re like the ninth person to tell me that.
And it probably, yeah, it sounds like very sound advice.
No, no, for really, for real.
You got it.
You got it.
It’s really good.
Seriously, you are.
Talk about diabetes.
Diabetes and coffee.
Their coffee’s rock solid.
They got that community coffee with chicory in it.
It’s good.
It’s good.
I like that stuff.
Yeah.
Me too.
Me too.
Yeah.
I know years ago, Blake, do you remember we went to a conference there and Joe Nickel managed to wrangle his way into the LaLaurie house.
It’s like, how did you do that?
But I think that must have been pre the current owners.
Yeah, probably.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean.
I think that I’m just going to New Orleans mainly to experience it.
I have a hankering to write a book.
I’m doing In Search of Bigfoot right now.
As you guys know, I did In Search of Demons.
I’ve made a career out of searching for things I don’t find and writing about them.
And so I really would like, after I wrote a chapter on vampires in this book, to write a full In Search of Vampires where I get to delve into the myths and various subcultures and things like that.
Yeah, that’s the Anne Rice.
I don’t know how it’s going these days, but I remember going in the 90s and it being a big deal, like so many goths, so many goths when she was still alive.
Do you…
honey island the honey island monster the the swamp tours are really fun uh they will uh disavow the existence of the swamp monster but you know it’s still a fun ride i love a good monster story as obviously you do and your listeners so you know sometimes the joy is just in the story itself yeah no you’re always full of stories uh marie laveau and uh what is it um
St. Louis, uh, cemetery number one.
Yeah.
Ride or what do you go take the tour with a tour guide?
Like they’re not joking about how dangerous it is.
Uh, there’s a lot of muggings that go on if you just take a walk.
So yeah.
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
Lots of good things to see and do there.
Um, but I jump around topics a little bit.
So, uh,
mentioning vampires.
So you’ve got a chapter on vampires, Richard, and you reference an early legend of the Serbian vampire, Arnold Paoli, we’ve heard different pronunciations, and that’s a favourite tale of ours on this show.
Could you tell us a little bit about this case?
Yeah, and I was surprised to hear it was one of your favorites.
I just didn’t know you had a favorite vampire case, which I thought was kind of cool.
But he’s essentially this Serbian soldier that, while serving in Greece, has an encounter with a vampire.
Then…
gets concerned about it, so tracks it to its grave and covers himself in its blood, because apparently that protects you from vampirism, goes back home, and then ultimately has an accident, breaks his neck, and rises from the grave and becomes a vampire.
preying on his neighbors, or so the story goes, and is blamed for outbreaks of vampirism.
And what I found fascinating about this story was it comes to us from, I want to say it’s 1725 or then about, and is brought to us by a regimental surgeon.
So a military man who should have some credibility as an eyewitness.
But then you start kind of delving into some of the accounts of vampirism and they get to be quite questionable.
What did you guys conclude about this case?
Well, I think what’s interesting is that you said that he’d spent time in Greece.
And from some of the sources I’ve read, they say Turkey, not Greece.
So I think that’s a hallmark of an urban legend where you’re hearing, oh, he’s from Austria or he’s from… Yeah, you make a great point, Karen.
That’s the kiss of death, right?
It is said.
The minute you have those three words, you’re on colourful but challenging ground.
Well, yeah, and I don’t think I’ve delved into the historical records that much, but it’s a possibility that he did exist.
And all the other vampires pale by comparison.
Yeah.
Oh, I see what you did there.
They don’t belong in the daylight.
So the primary source is this regimental surgeon, which is why it’s kind of interesting, and there was a royal commission to investigate it.
And, you know, so they start exhuming bodies, as of course happened in so many of these cases, and staking them and setting fire to them, and Arnold Piaoli, let’s call him.
So, you know, they make much of the fact that he had red-stained lips, and when they put a stake in his heart, blood gushed from his mouth, you know, go figure.
Oh, and his hair was still growing in his nails.
It’s classic.
If you want to make…
I love this word, euhemerist explanation.
His…
The characteristics they describe are consistent with a sort of posthumous taphonomy.
Like, they…
correlate very closely to what really happens with bodies after death so it’s really cool just to take a quick sidestep you know the mercy brown case from the u.s um which you know we’re looking at about almost not quite but almost two centuries later um and they were surprised that this poor girl who was put in the ground in january in new england you know six weeks later had not decomposed yeah it’s crazy putting someone in the fridge
you know, but, but, you know, one of the things that I found very disturbing about the power lead case in the records, you know, they’re talking about vampirism and destroying these bodies.
One of them was an eight day old child.
I’m trying to picture an eight day vampire.
And how does it ambulate?
I mean, just as a thought exercise, how does it ambulate?
How does it locomote, you know, let alone bite you.
Does it gum you to death?
I mean, how does that work?
Yeah, good point.
Very sad.
So on the one hand, you have a regimental surgeon who should really know what he’s talking about.
And then on the other, you have claims that even for the vampire realm are a little bit outlandish.
So it’s tough to square that circle.
But, you know, it’s the…
Ignorance about death.
It reminds me, weirdly, of all the cattle mutilation stories.
You would think people who run ranches would know what happens posthumously with cattle, and clearly they don’t.
Like, clearly they’re good at keeping cattle alive, but what happens to them posthumously, not well understood.
So not everybody’s trained in this is what happens to a dead cow, right?
And so… A chupacabra is an angel.
Yeah, very much…
Yeah, very much so.
Very much so.
And it’s like, well, oh, no blood.
I’m like, yeah, because it turned into a big pile of goo because that’s what happens when an animal dies, you know.
So it’s like, I cut it and it didn’t bleed.
Yeah, because blood does not stay liquid.
Yeah, yeah.
Anyway.
Specialized knowledge.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, not everybody has the same base understanding, and that’s fine.
And then you inject some superstition, or you inject that desire to believe.
What fascinated me about the Mercy Brown case is that tuberculosis was pretty well understood.
Yeah.
And yet, you know, rather than go for this, you’re looking at kind of fairly rural New England, but even so, you know, there should have been a medical provider that knew what these signs and symptoms portended.
And yet vampire frenzy, you know, and we think we’re so much better than that.
And then I promise not to soapbox, but we look at some of the medical denial that’s happening today.
Yeah, absolutely.
We really have learned nothing as a society.
I mean, the germ theory of medicine.
People think that’s well understood, but then again, people, oh, it’s cold.
You have a cold, right?
That’s what happened.
You get, no, it’s like, no, it’s like there’s bacteria or viruses cause these things.
And it’s like, yet that you cannot get rid of the idea that temperature or all these other folk remedies or folk explanations are at the root cause.
The flu shot gave me the flu.
I mean, yes.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
So my battles, let’s just say, well, okay.
So listeners will know that my favorite monster tends to be, although it changes sometimes, but tends to be werewolves.
And so when I get a new book about monsters, I always go to the werewolf chapter first.
And I destroyed your fun somewhat in this one.
It was a good chapter.
I really enjoyed it.
Although I was really surprised to see the Warrens show up.
So you want to tell us a little bit about the case of Bill Ramsey, the werewolf.
This was really, I really enjoyed this chapter.
So.
So I got to, in my defense, so when I write these kind of books, hopefully this will be your view, but let me know.
I try and provide some equal ground to both sides, no matter how credible I find them to be.
So I talked a lot about the scientific basis for clinical lycanthropy.
I talked about some of the old superstitions about it.
If you’re born on Christmas day, eyebrows that meet in the middle, that kind of thing, you know.
Which I have to shave regularly.
I’m not saying anything.
I’m just, I have to shave regularly.
and others statistically.
And I also even pulled the data from emergency departments.
Studies have been done that prove that as superstitious as people like myself and my fellow medical professionals are when it comes to the full moon, we are not, in fact, any busier in emergency departments and 911 systems during a full moon.
The only people who are are cops because a full moon is a burglar’s moon, you know?
So I kind of had wanted to get that out there and give a scientific basis for it.
But I also want to show both sides of the coin, not least because otherwise the publisher would have to call this no monsters.
So what I found interesting about the Warrens case, number one, I have to declare a bias.
And my bias is that I am no fans of Ed and Lorraine Warren.
No fan of Ed and Lorraine Warren.
That is my personal bias from perspective.
I have strong feelings on that and their work.
What I found interesting was this was just contemporary enough that a lot of the primary sources were still extant.
You know, so you could see some of the video interviews, some of the material, newspaper, archival stuff.
And of course, the human werewolf himself, alleged werewolf, co-wrote a book about it.
And I’ve long believed that when there is money to be made, we should be skeptical of any kind of story like this, you know?
So this is a guy that claims that as a boy, and most of this was written down in the late 80s, but as a boy, a cold gust of wind went through him and suddenly he was possessed by what he would later be told was a demonic wolf spirit, you know?
Shocking that the Warrens would find a demonic spirit of some kind, but there we go.
And so after this, he begins acting like a wolf.
He chases his poor, terrified dog around the house, which makes me dislike him already.
If you’re frightening a dog, you are not my people.
And, you know, acting with increased aggression and then makes newspaper headlines when he goes into a British police station accompanied by a sex worker for reasons I could not quite ascertain.
So it takes this lady of negotiable affection to a police station and proceeds to attack the entire police station and has to be supposedly restrained by like multiple officers, like six or seven police officers at the same time.
So it’s a fascinating case, right?
I think that…
As a clinical professional, when I review it, it makes absolute sense in the context of someone that is suffering a behavioral emergency or delusional behavior.
And then we introduce money to the mix because the Warrens arranged for this guy to be flown to the United States around about 1989 for an exorcism.
right that’s how you do it well and when you follow the money it turns out that who paid for the ticket was one of the big british tabloid newspapers in exchange for the story rights um you have you have lorraine warren on on record on video interview saying that she watched him uh transfigured that she saw his face right not transformed transfigured exactly yeah yeah yeah
So, you know, you look at any of the video clips that are out there of this of this exorcism and there’s no evidence of pointy ears or any kind of change like that, you know.
But, hey, he transfigured into a wolf.
OK, fine.
So I honestly thought the whole thing.
Oh, and then, of course, there was a book deal.
And, of course, obviously never trust someone that is making money writing books about monsters.
But by the same token, I feel like there was so much financial gain from this case.
They did the lecture circuit in the U.S.
They did – I don’t know if you’re old enough, Blake.
I don’t think you’re in the country, Karen, but Sally Jessie Raphael, the talk show.
Oh, I remember.
I remember that show.
Oh, you do?
Okay.
So it goes on talk shows like that to tell his story.
He’s on the circuit.
And so I just find the whole thing extremely questionable.
But it made international headlines.
You know, Wolfman attacks police station.
Pandemonium ensues.
I just want to comment on this.
I don’t know.
Blake, you’re probably familiar with it, Richard.
I’m not sure.
But the Barney Miller.
show the the police sitcom from the 1970s um and there was an episode i was discussing this with matt and he showed me this episode where there was a character who thought he was a werewolf do you remember that like i don’t i wasn’t allowed to watch the show but i was familiar with it yeah
This guy was locked up and suddenly he claims that he’s itching and scratching and there’s a cop there who says, oh, yeah, that’s just how it is around here.
We always feel itchy and makes a joke about it.
But then he just starts to kind of tear his clothes off and howl until the main character comes in and then they end up bringing in some doctors to take him to a mental institution.
It’s a police station, not a horror movie.
Take a good look.
Hair is growing out of his face.
It’s called a beard.
Haven’t you ever seen one before?
He dates all of this.
So this goes back to the 70s.
And now I know that with this, that the Bill Ramsey case, he says that he has that first experience when he’s nine.
but I don’t know if there’s any evidence to support that.
It just seems like he’s using that as a kind of origin story that he comes out in the 80s and is talking about this.
But, oh, yes, this goes back to when I was nine and I had this experience with my parents.
what he was, uh, he bit into the fence and, uh, or tore it out of the ground.
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
He beat down the policeman with a fence post.
That was, uh, very epic, very epic.
So, but, uh, yeah, it just, I wonder if he wasn’t in some way influenced.
by the Barney Miller show.
I don’t know, Stranger Things.
You know, I’d love to, I should look and see, or one of us should look to see if that aired like on the BBC or something in the UK.
That would be a fascinating.
It did air in Australia, so back in the 70s and the 80s.
So it’s very likely that it did.
Why couldn’t this have been the last Conjuring movie?
And that’s exactly what I was thinking.
I was wondering, so he has this book deal.
How come this didn’t turn into a movie?
Why was this one kind of tossed out and all the other ones that would turn into movies?
I’m wondering if this was just too unbelievable.
You know, so again, I don’t ever want to mock the afflicted, so clinical lycanthropy is a condition.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, I think that even in there, the devil made me do it case, not that I want to go down a Warren’s rabbit hole.
Alcohol and mental illness are really as far as you need to go to explain that particular case away.
But of course, the Warrens injected exorcism and demons, because why not?
And so I feel I’m kind of glad this one is a little bit more obscure that they got a book out of it.
The book is still out there, I guess, but it’s not really considered required reading by most people, even in the cryptozoology field.
I truly think this is a case of somebody that cashed in, probably cashed in on the beliefs that they had and some erratic behavior that resulted.
And the Warrens, I…
Personally, just my opinion, I saw as opportunists that saw something like this and saw that there was money to be made.
I want to say that you squeezing in Warren rabbit hole is worth the price of admission.
Good.
Well done.
So, yeah, no, but I agree.
I mean, the money you cannot when money comes into play, even the mentally ill sometimes realize that maybe there’s something there.
Right.
I mean, you know, everybody’s got bills.
Right.
Yeah.
Especially those dog bill platypuses.
That’s right.
They do.
You’ve spurred me on.
It’s a time to start winding up.
Richard, you’re working on so many things concurrently.
What’s next for you?
As you were nice enough to mention, my autobiography is out at the beginning of June, but that is done and dusted.
I’m just right now looking forward to this coming weekend, spending an evening in a supposedly haunted but definitely historic mansion in Denver.
Nice.
Can you say where?
I can tell you once we go off air.
Okay.
Fair enough.
Yeah.
And so let’s see.
So there’s that.
In terms of book projects, I’m currently working on a book for Visible Inc. about spies and espionage.
Is it regular espionage or ESP-anage?
You know, there is a full book.
I know, for real, for real.
Yeah, absolutely.
No, it’s just regular espionage and spy stories.
I could tell you more, but I’d have to kill you.
That’s how that works.
Please do.
I refuse to read a spy book just because I don’t want to know.
That’s fair.
And then In Search of Bigfoot I’m working on.
So I’m heading out to, are you guys familiar with Bradshaw Ranch?
No.
Oh, that’s one you should definitely look up for a future show.
Bradshaw Ranch, that’s on my very near calendar as well.
Is that in Colorado or somewhere else?
It is not.
It is in Arizona.
Oh, okay.
Gotcha.
That’s a rabbit hole that I apologize in advance for sending you both down, but you should definitely review that.
I’m always interested in hotspots, whatever they are.
That’s always interesting to me.
Check out Bradshaw ranch for some more information.
Cool.
Okay.
Well, okay.
So we’ve, we’ve had you on several times and we appreciate it.
All the visits.
And I, I really, I love your work and I love the fact that you do.
I think you do very well.
The balancing act of, uh,
Embracing the possibility of the weird and the unusual, but also acknowledging that sometimes there’s not enough there to accept it as actual literal fact.
So that we know very well what a tight wear that is.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
It’s a challenge, right?
It is because at the end of the day, you do want people to read your books, to see your work.
But by the same token, there’s that moral obligation to say, you know, I don’t think there is anything necessarily to this.
But hopefully we can have a fun journey along the way.
Absolutely.
I mean, searching for monsters and…
exploring the concept of monster is, is such a human thing.
Every culture has monsters and, and, and you know, yeah, we’re skeptical about their literal existence, but we will not deny their importance culturally, you know, at all, at all, ever.
And we, we, we, we love monsters, right?
But so our question for you this week is if.
you had to pick a crypto that you could make real, like, or that would turn out to be real.
What would you want to be?
Not what do you think is real?
What would you want to be real?
Which I think, by the way, no one’s ever asked me that.
And I think it’s a better question.
So I appreciate that, Karen.
This is an easy one for me, actually.
I did in my capacity as a clinical educator, I did a medical lecture last Christmas and it was holiday monster themed medical scenarios, you know.
So, for example, I did Ebenezer Scrooge and the ghost that he saw were a function of carbon monoxide poisoning.
You know, things of that nature.
So I took a Dickensian twist to it, added some Dickensian stories to my medical classes.
And then, of course, the one that I gave my students to begin with was a child that was snatched from its bedroom window on the evening of December the 5th and turned up the following day beaten.
Oh, I see where you’re going with this.
Yeah, I know.
Krampus.
Krampus.
It’s a terrifying story.
But what I would like to see is a slight change to the rules.
So Krampus, of course, is the dark side of St. Nick.
The naughty kids get Krampus.
The good kids get Father Christmas.
I would like to see Krampus and his naughty list extend to adults as well as children.
Nice.
Very cool.
Blake will be whisked away.
Oh, no.
I like that you said whisks.
Yeah, you’re on that list.
You and I both probably.
We’ll meet up in Krampus’ lair.
I’ve been beaten with sticks plenty of times growing up in the South.
Don’t you worry.
Don’t you worry.
But this one will be free, so there’s that.
I just haven’t been drug around in a sack over the shoulder of a monster.
Well, do you know, the way this year’s going, blink and it’ll be December.
It will.
It will.
Well, Richard, we can highly recommend your book.
I’m looking forward to this book, too, by the way.
What’s that?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
You can read the foreword, too.
That’s by a very notable celebrity.
No, I was very, very honoured to be asked to write the foreword for the book, and it was cool to get a sneak peek.
Karen insisted on donating her fee for the foreword to Doctors Without Borders.
Oh, that’s nice.
Yeah, which I thought was immensely classy and a great call.
Oh, thank you so much.
Thank you for offering that.
And yeah, they’re working very hard to deliver vaccinations, which are incredibly important to people who can’t access them around the world.
And yeah, so that was my… Like people in America, right?
Make America healthy again.
Thank you.
This is a lovely book.
I love the illustrations, love the layout, love the content.
Well done.
Well done, Richard.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Thank you very much.
Thank you for coming on the show again.
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 conversation with author Richard Estep about his new book, Monsters, Myths, Legends, and Real Encounters from Visible Inc. Press.
Links to the book and a whole pile of Wikipedia rabbit holes are in the show notes.
I particularly recommend the Arnold Pales story if you want to ruin your evening with vampires.
I mean, I love vampires.
My wife’s the one who hates vampires.
Yes, because she’s vampire racist.
I think we’ve established that.
Richard’s currently working on an In Search of Bigfoot book, a book on spies and espionage, and he’s also heading to New Orleans to explore vampire culture.
So if you’re in New Orleans and see a British paramedic eating beignets at Cafe Du Monde and scribbling notes about the undead, that’s just Richard.
Leave him alone.
He’s working over there.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of Monster Talk.
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The post S05E27 – Monsters: Myths, Legends, and Real Encounters with Richard Estep appeared first on MonsterTalk.