MonsterTalk

In Part 2 of our chat with folklorist Chris Woodyard we talk about the lore of haunted cemeteries.

Find Chris on BlueSky, FaceBook, and our back catalog!

Chris also partners with Dr. Simon Young on the Boggart & Banshee podcast!

Mentioned in this episode:

Allegedly haunted Woodland Cemetery, Cincinnati OH

Bachelor’s Grove and the famous “Madonna” photo from 1991. (Sad story of legend-tripping vandalism reminds me of Stull, KS. C’mon people – do better!)

The “time machine mausoleum” in England’s Brompton Cemetery

The London-area “Magnificent Seven” cemeteries, so dubbed in 1981

The Highgate Vampire – famous 1970s case (according to folklorist Bill Ellis) influenced Hammer Horror… (but I wonder if the reverse is also true?)

Here’s a little animated clip from Tales from the Crypt (1972).

I didn’t think of this fact when we recorded this two-parter, but when I mentioned that Tales from the Crypt featured imagery shot at Highgate Cemetery in the 1970s, I forgot that the film also featured a ghostly motorcyclist! What a miss on my part.

Grave Wax (Adipocere)

New Orleans cemeteries

We joked about “Uber Ghosts” which led me to this wacky story.

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.
Welcome back to Monster Talk.
Last week, we hit the open road with folklorist Chris Woodyard chasing headless motorcyclists, ghostlights, and the faceless hitchhiker of Dead Man’s Curve.
If you haven’t heard part one, go back and do that first.
We’ll wait.
This week, we’re pulling off the highway and through the gates of something older and quieter.
Though not, as it turns out, all that much more peaceful.
Cemeteries are among the most commonly reported haunted locations in the world, which is interesting when you think about it, because there’s actually a solid theological argument that they shouldn’t be.
Ghosts, the thinking goes, return to where they live, not necessarily where they’re buried.
If the body’s there, sure.
But the soul?
The soul’s supposed to be somewhere else, right?
Yet, here we are.
I guess it depends on what you think a ghost is.
But the history of cemetery haunting is longer and stranger than most people realize.
Long before ghost hunters were pointing electromagnetic field detectors at marble angels, medieval monks were writing down accounts of the restless dead clawing their way out of churchyards to confess unpardoned sins.
Before Victorian garden cemeteries transformed burial grounds into places of pastoral beauty, parks where families could go and picnic among the monuments, urban graveyards in cities like London were genuinely terrifying and horrifying places, bodies stacked six deep, things leaking, and an atmosphere of genuine physical dread that really didn’t need supernatural assistance.
We’ve sanitized death considerably since then.
We’ve pushed it to the edges of town, behind iron fences, and into the care of professional groundskeepers.
And in doing so, we’ve made graveyards strange again.
Strange enough that a Tesla’s auto sensor apparently now picks up ghosts among the headstones.
Strange enough that every cemetery of any decent age seems to accumulate weeping women, bleeding tombstones, and statues that step off their plinths at midnight.
Chris Woodyard has decades of collecting these stories, glowing tombstones of Dayton, the Phantom House at Bachelor’s Grove, the Bronze Lady of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, the spooky shenanigans at Highgate, and the taxi-hailing spirits of New Orleans who just want to get home.
As Chris herself puts it, she’s ambivalent about most haunted cemeteries, but she loves a good story about one, and so do we.
Monster Talk
I’m so glad you’re willing to stick around with us long enough to talk about two topics.
This is so cool.
Oh, sure.
It’s all fun.
We love having you on.
You are a treasure of these things.
Well, I mean, you know, we I think what you have is not just the sort of encyclopedic memory of these topics, but the ability to spin and weave a tail.
And that is a that’s a really good combo.
That’s what I just got a lot of notes.
But yeah, these are topics that our listeners are very interested in.
So today we’re going to talk about haunted cemeteries.
And I don’t even know where to begin.
I just think about haunted cemeteries.
We’ll start with the plot.
you had that up your sleeve i’m not sure i’m afraid not sorry and i think it’s interesting because cemeteries are among the most commonly reported haunted locations and i think some people will say well cemeteries can’t possibly be haunted because the people the bodies might be there but they’re this the soul the spirit is not there right you get the means but where’s the motive right you know
And then other people thinking, oh, well, cemeteries must be haunted because all of these bodies, all of these deceased people.
And then when we think about the history of cemeteries, that they were parks and they were seen as quiet, peaceful places where families would go strolling or have picnics, that kind of thing.
So why is it that nowadays cemeteries attract so many ghost stories, ghost hunters and paranormal claims?
Well, there was a time when cemeteries were a very haunted place, even in the medieval times.
There was one story written by a monk of Byland Abbey.
He wrote about a guy named Robert who haunted the churchyard where he was buried.
And he would keep coming out of the grave and haunting people until two young men got very brave and seized him and kept him until the parish priest arrived and the ghost needed to confess his sins.
He was absolved.
He haunted no more.
And that was a good thing.
And you find a lot of stories even that far back in the 13th and the 12th centuries.
So there were a lot of—a lot of the cemeteries in, for example, the London area were very unsavory places.
They had bodies buried six feet—six deep, and things were leaking out.
It was very unpleasant.
So they were not—
very good places to hang around, and people felt that there was something uncanny about them.
It wasn’t until cemeteries went outside the parishes and into the countryside where garden cemeteries were made, and that’s when they became to be parks and quiet, peaceful places.
But now, most people spend very little time in cemeteries.
So we go to them only for funerals.
We think of them as places of the dead.
And what do the dead do?
They haunt.
So it’s almost inevitable that now we think of them as haunted places.
I personally don’t.
I like cemeteries and I like hanging around them.
Me too.
Yeah.
You’ve got things online like these people with their Teslas and somehow there’s some kind of screening screen.
The sensors.
Yeah.
Sensors.
Yeah.
And they show ghosts in the cemeteries and people are making videos of this stuff.
I don’t know what what’s going on, what the glitch is.
That’s it’s picking up heat from some tombstone and registering as a human.
I don’t know.
I didn’t hear about this.
That’s interesting.
I’m going to have to look into that.
It seems akin to the people using Xbox sensors to spot ghosts where motion and shapes can be used to interpret in the computer.
Let’s just say that I don’t think the software was ever really geared up for spotting ghosts.
So it’s maybe maybe misapplying the technology.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Most of the ghost hunting tools.
But yeah, when I think about cemeteries and just how removed society is and we are from death nowadays and just how euphemized it is, everything surrounding death.
I’m kind of ambivalent about haunted cemeteries because I’ve always said that ghosts go where they live, not necessarily where they’re buried.
Like you said, the soul is gone.
But there’s an awful lot of haunted cemeteries that have stories of real people who are buried there actually haunting them.
You know, Marie Laveau in St. Louis No.
1 Cemetery in New Orleans.
President James Garfield has supposedly been seen at Lakeview Cemetery in Cleveland.
And he can only be appeased with lasagna.
But he hates Monday.
No, that’s a different Garfield.
Sorry.
Different Garfield.
Different Garfield.
And we’ve got a wonderful story here in the Dayton Woodland Cemetery.
There’s a statue of a little boy sleeping with a big dog watching over him.
And the statue is kind of uncanny because the dog’s nostrils are drilled and it seems to breathe when you put your hand under the nose.
Oh, cool.
And the little boy drowned in one of the canals in Dayton in August.
And he was the only son of his parents in Dayton.
supposedly the dog tried to save him and drowned also.
I don’t know that the dog is actually buried there.
I kind of doubt it.
But he’s on the tombstone, and supposedly they come off their pedestal and walk around the cemetery at night.
People have seen them.
So I don’t know.
We have one like that here in Marietta near my house where it’s allegedly if you go there at midnight, you know, one of the statues will a little girl will come and look at you or say something.
And that that does appear to be.
pretty common to nicer cemeteries with cool tombstones.
The way they build them now, they don’t even want to bother having to mow, so they put the tombstones flat and there’s no…
No beauty there.
I don’t know.
No.
I’ve told my family that I will come back and haunt them if they put me in one of those places where the tombstones are laid flat.
Yeah.
That is so lazy.
I hate that.
Well, I’m also thinking about that there was a – I think it was in San Luis Obispo or around that area when I lived in California and there were stories of – so we’re talking about the deceased not necessarily haunting cemeteries but –
people or the living.
And there was a story associated with the cemetery where a woman, and again, like you said, like at midnight, she would turn up and she would go looking for her lost child, baby she’d lost.
And so people would stake out the cemetery at midnight or waiting for her to appear.
And so I think that’s a kind of common story.
Yeah, it is.
You know what ghosts hate?
really hate daylight savings time it messes them up so bad but all these times i i i really do love we don’t really talk about this much on the show and probably should at some point but the time oriented folklore and ghost legends and it’s like what uh
OK, I get it.
But like, how does that work with all the time changes, time zones?
Yeah.
You know, like what?
What is it really midnight?
Exactly.
Exactly.
And it’s like, what?
Like, you know, like daylight, if you said noon is when the sun is right overhead, maybe, you know, but like at night, who even knows?
I don’t I don’t know.
It’s just time has no meaning for the dead.
Exactly.
That’s what I think.
I think people who are fixating on folklore around time are, you know, missing something there.
Like there’s a, there’s a really, that is a human technology that is being superimposed on the supernatural.
So I think, I think what it might be, you know, when you hear about stories of ghosts that are kind of like a videotape repeating itself.
So I think that that’s probably more the idea that’s behind that, that they’re bound to continue this behavior or this habit.
And so it might,
oh, it’s at midnight for us, but it’s just the same time for this ghost.
Yeah.
They’re like, you know, those states that don’t respect it, you know?
So like you came at midnight, but I was out at 11 because I don’t believe in your daylight savings time.
Yeah.
That’s a good excuse for why people miss the ghosts, I guess.
Yeah.
So wrong time.
Well, speaking of the St. Louis Cemetery in New Orleans, they’ve got their own Resurrection Mary type ghost.
Oh, really?
Supposedly, there’s a woman in a white dress who always hails a taxi outside the gates of the cemetery and says, take me to this address.
Trying to get to Cafe du Monde, right?
Yeah, and use some coffee.
That’s right.
She wants to go to this particular dress.
And she says to the driver, go up and ask the man of the house to come out.
And when the man answers the knock, the driver says he’s got a lady.
And the man always sighs in a not again tone.
kind of way and says that’s his wife by the way she died years ago and she was buried in her wedding dress and she tries to get home in a cab ever so often so of course when the driver opens the door the lady in white is nowhere to be found
Now, I have not done any research on this because it just occurred to me.
But I wonder, it may already exist or maybe it will emerge, but I’m wondering if there’s any folklore using these modern ride-sharing apps associated with these ghosts, you know?
Like the Uber ghosts, that sort of thing.
Yeah, I haven’t heard of any yet.
That would be a good topic.
It seems inevitable, doesn’t it?
It does seem inevitable, yes.
I’m thinking about stories of vanishing hitchhikers too, and they might leave behind an item of personal property, a scarf or something like that.
Does she ever leave something blue behind?
No, no, she doesn’t.
But yes, others ones do.
I mean, it’s the usual thing about, you know, you talk to the family, they say, oh, that was our daughter.
She was killed at the…
after the prom and you go to the grave and the jacket that the gallant young man put around her cold shoulders is found hanging on the gravestone.
Yeah.
That’s just a classic story.
Yeah.
I want a beignet so badly right now.
King cake.
You need a king cake.
Those are all right, but man, I really love a beignet.
It is unbelievable.
Too much sugar for me.
Those beautiful cemeteries in New Orleans.
I want to just mention it once again because…
There’s that story that they have above-ground burials because the water tables are so high.
And I did some personal research and found that that was not the real cause.
And I did historical research and discovered that the real origin of that was because when it was under Spanish control, Spanish-style burials were in vogue.
And if you go to Spain, you’re nowhere near the beach, but you’re on a mountaintop and they’re exactly the same kind of burial.
So these are really – yeah, this has nothing to do with the water tables.
And it is such strong folklore that it’s really – I don’t think it’s ever going to go away, that idea of the water tables being the root cause.
But that is not what’s really going on.
People did not like being buried in wet ground because they petrified.
Ooh, cool.
Gross, but cool.
You get the adipocere forming.
Yeah, yeah, the waxy stuff.
Yeah, yeah.
Joe Nickel wrote about that a lot.
Pretty creepy looking.
Oh, it is, yeah.
Yeah, I wonder if we should talk about any other infamous haunted cemeteries.
Now, Blake, one of your favourites is Highgate Cemetery.
Oh, it absolutely is.
And we were talking a little bit, excuse me, about cemeteries in London, and I guess some of those spooky ones might have been, what, burial sites for Black Death and various plagues throughout the centuries?
Well, a lot of those are – you find them in plague pits.
They were – I think they were doing a new excavation for either one of the railways or one of the undergrounds, and they found a couple of plague pits and –
very packed.
Right, multiple bodies.
Those people weren’t usually buried, although there’s more archaeological evidence showing that they were properly buried in coffins and things, not just thrown into pits, but some people were.
So I’m not sure that…
But Highgate, it’s one of the magnificent seven cemeteries which were built around the outside of central London.
They were meant to replace those overflowing London churchyards.
And it was the site of a really infamous flap over a supposed vampire.
This was a vampire, and it’s really not clear what was going on because there was this big quarrel between a man named David Farrant and Bishop Manchester, the old Catholic church.
dueling it out, claiming that this guy did this and this guy did that and there was a dead man and that we staked.
Honestly, I’ve read the books by both of them and I’ve read things in the papers and so much of it just seemed to be fueled by the tabloid press.
But what was really going on, I don’t know.
It’s a very overgrown cemetery.
They’ve done a better job of maintaining it, but it’s very spooky looking.
Yeah.
If you’re a listener and you want to go see what this looks like, go find the amicus film Tales from the Crypt from 1972.
And in that movie, which is…
pretty contemporary to when these alleged vampire incidents happen they film in the cemetery and it is stunning because it’s there’s like the egyptian section yeah it’s very victorian oh oh it’s amazing yeah uh and you can see what it really looked like at the time so
I mean, obviously at some point they switched to a movie set.
So when the people start having supernatural events, that’s just movie stuff.
But the shots of the cemetery are a great little snapshot of the history of that beautiful place.
Yeah, it is a gorgeous place.
I’m wondering if another one of these – sorry, how did you refer to them, the top seven?
What was the term you used?
Oh, the Magnificent Seven.
Oh, yeah.
The Brompton is one of them, and they supposedly have a mausoleum that’s a time machine.
I’ve not been able to figure that one out either.
Again, I think it’s a little bit of tabloid imagination, but who knows?
Cool.
I’m wondering if, is it the Père Lachaise?
Oh, Père Lachaise, yeah.
Yeah, I’d love to go there and see the grave site of Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison.
Yeah, and Jim Morrison supposedly was photographed.
Some fan was there at his grave and had a snapshot taken of himself.
And Jim Morrison is supposedly seen in the back looking kind of fuzzy and white and like a ghost with his arms upraised like he’s on stage performing.
That could have been Will Ferrell.
They look very similar.
But, yeah, they’re very popular sites for fans to visit and leave all kinds of tokens and gifts and things.
They do that at the tomb of Marie Laveau.
Oh, yeah.
Although I’m not sure whether it’s her or her daughter.
That’s a big mystery, too.
But visitors leave offerings.
They ask for favors.
And supposedly she will walk around the cemetery at night.
Another favorite cemetery that’s haunted is Bachelor’s Grove.
It’s got a phantom house.
And I love stories about buildings that disappear.
And there was a famous photograph taken at Bachelor’s Grove showing a woman sitting on a bench, a ghostly woman sitting on a bench.
She looks very, very solid, but nobody was actually there.
Mm-hmm.
All these places I want to visit on my bucket list.
You said bucket, right?
Sorry.
He kicks the bucket list.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, Chris, we spoke a little bit behind the scenes about a topic that really fascinated me.
So I’d love to delve into this a little bit.
So you’ve come across stories of glowing tombstones and statues and graves and tombstones with mysterious pictures that form on them.
So I’d love to hear a bit more about this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, in the same woodland cemetery where there’s the little boy with the dog, there’s a glowing tombstone.
And you can see this from the local university.
Nobody quite knows who is buried there, but it’s haunted by a young woman who sits on the grave and cries.
So various students have gone there and tried to see what was going on.
And a lot of people have supposedly seen the young woman.
Now, I was there doing a TV show and I’d already shot my bit and another friend was doing her bit.
And I’m just kind of wandering around and it’s twilight and I love cemeteries.
And all of a sudden I see this seven foot glowing tombstone.
And it has like a pointed top, very gothic looking.
And it just is luminous, like it’s lit from within.
And I thought, okay, I’ve lost it.
Absolutely lost it.
So I start walking towards it and suddenly it shifts.
It’s actually the lights over in the bar district.
framed by some tree branches.
But it certainly looked like a seven foot lit from within glass tombstone.
It was amazing.
So that was one glowing tombstone, but that’s not the one where the girl actually sits on the grave and cries.
I also like bleeding tombstones.
Who doesn’t?
And it looks like blood had just burst from the stone and smeared as it flowed.
And the story was that when Elizabeth was dying, she called her husband to her bedside and said, I know I’m dying.
I just want one thing.
You take good care of my children.
If you don’t, I hope to God my tombstone will burst and bleed.
Well, he didn’t remarry immediately, but he did remarry.
And the new wife, it was said, began to treat the first wife’s children badly.
And it was then that the tombstone burst in half in a dozen or so places, and it’s got deep red stains all over it.
Wow.
So is that a kind of mold or something?
It’s hard to tell.
Some of the stones have iron in them that tends to rust and looks like it’s bleeding.
But I haven’t analyzed it, so I can’t say.
I haven’t taken a sample.
And when you’re talking about glowing tombstones, too, I was thinking about a silver cliff cemetery here in Colorado.
It’s said to be America’s most haunted cemetery.
It’s little known, but at the same time, a lot of it’s kind of got a there is a group of people who are really into it and have heard about it and camp out at the place.
And so it is quite well known, but also a little known at the same time.
But there were claims that there were lights.
I mean, lots of different stories associated with it.
But one was that maybe there was a wood phosphorescence or bioluminescence or something from the crosses.
I mean, it turned out to be, as you said, in this case, lights from the nearby town and from also headlights from cars.
Well, that’s the thing.
It’s dark and then you’re surrounded by these white marble tombstones.
Yes.
Everyone I’ve investigated has turned out to be either the lights of the people filming or passing reflections on the stones.
And when you’re out in the dark, those white stones will catch any light and show up.
And it’s very, although also note that if it’s the people’s own cameras doing it, they usually don’t notice it until they go back and review the film.
Like, Oh my God, what’s going on?
It’s like, Oh, you poor guys.
I was like, I hate it.
But, but, uh,
But we all want, I mean, even the skeptics would love for there to be continued existence after our death.
It would be so cool, especially if we get to have cool adventures or continue to watch the living or make rocks glow in the dark.
You know, all those important things that we want to do.
There’s a statue called the Bronze Lady in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in New York State.
Oh, wow.
I didn’t know that was a real place.
Yeah.
Oh, it is.
And wrapping us back to the previous episode about headless horsemen.
Anybody foolish enough to insult the statue or slap its face is instantly cursed.
If you sit in the statue’s lap, the statue is said to cry tears of blood.
So that just sounds like a great place to visit.
Yeah, don’t do it, Blake.
He’s got a habit of going to places.
It’s cursed.
I’m cursed enough, I guess, at this point.
I probably should stop.
It’s like one of those witch’s graves.
Every cemetery seems to have a witch’s grave.
And if you disrespect it, there’s a problem.
And I’ve told my family, if they ever bury me, spread the word it’s a witch’s grave and anybody disrespecting it will die horribly within three days.
And I think that will bring a lot of traffic.
Yeah.
Put your URL to your Amazon landing page there for an author.
Yes.
I’ve really enjoyed meeting you through the show and having these conversations.
And I’m curious because the search is ever onward.
Like there’s always more to discover out there.
Are you working on anything interesting right now?
What’s going on in your research?
Well, I’m working on more books about Victorian death because that’s what I do, it seems.
And I’m working on transcribing a whole bunch of 19th century ghost stories.
It’s sort of like we have on Reddit today people telling their own personal experiences.
So I’m always fascinated to hear firsthand what happened to this.
And some of them, of course, are their own versions of the –
vanishing hitchhiker.
But some of them are really unique, and I’m always excited to find new stories.
I mentioned earlier in part one of our discussion that I’m really interested in that intersection between folklore, fiction…
And how they bleed together.
And that people’s real experiences often seem to be reflective of one and end up influencing the other.
And I got it in my head that maybe things like the Enfield Poltergeist case might have been influenced by news stories of some other case.
So I thought, well, how often…
Does the term poltergeist show up in British tabloids or British newspapers?
You know, maybe there was a story, you know, previous to the Enfield case that the kids could have read about or whatever.
And as I started looking, I’m like, oh, my Lord.
Yes.
British newspapers tell poltergeist stories like every couple of years.
I mean, it’s like always something.
Always.
I mean, poltergeists are in the British news all the time and it goes back all the way to the early 1900s.
It may go back before that, but I followed it back to the early 1900s and sort of that spiritualist revival around World War One.
But I mean, it was just continuously poltergeist cases coming up every few years, keeping it fresh all the time.
So that really surprised me.
I want to urge people to follow Chris on Blue Sky.
So, Blake, I know you’re not on social media.
No, but while I was, she was a great person to follow.
She really was.
Oh, yeah, the Victorian history and Victorian morning jewelry.
You post so many interesting bits of information.
Absolutely.
I want everyone to go and follow you there.
Thank you.
Again, I’m not goth.
I mean, I’m goth on the inside and redneck on the out.
But yeah, absolutely.
My daughter says I was goth before goth was cool.
There you go.
Well, yeah, let’s keep in touch.
And I’m sure we’ll have something else to talk about again soon.
All right.
For real.
Thank you so much, Chris.
All right.
Absolutely.
Have a great night.
You too.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
See you, Karen.
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 part two of our conversation with folklorist and author Chris Woodyard.
And if you’ve enjoyed these episodes, I’d strongly encourage you to seek out her books, particularly the Haunted Ohio series, which is about as deep a dive into regional American ghost stories you’re likely to find.
You can also follow her on Blue Sky, where she posts wonderful and eclectic mix of Victorian history, mourning, jewelry, and the kind of macabre ephemera that makes you glad the internet exists.
You can check out our show notes for further reading on the fascinating history of famous and infamous cemeteries.
I do worry that the literal flattening of cemeteries to facilitate easy lawn care will also flatten the narrative landscapes of these once monumental places.
The angst-filled goth teen that I used to be now mourns as much for the homogenization of cemeteries as for the dead therein.
And there’s little I can do but enjoy the places that still remain beautiful and somber and legendary.
Chris mentioned that she’s currently at work transcribing 19th century first-hand ghost accounts.
I guess that’s the Reddit thread of their day, as she would put it.
We look forward to seeing what emerges from that project.
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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Here at Monster Talk, we try to help you stay grounded and we hope you stay above ground.
This has been a Monster House presentation.
What is this place?
This was their burial ground.
Whose burial ground?
Micmac India’s.
I brought you here to bury Ellen’s cat.
Why for God’s sake?
I said why, Judge?
I had my reasons.

The post S05E26 – Haunted Cemeteries with Chris Woodyard appeared first on MonsterTalk.

In part 1 of our chat with folklorist Chris Woodyard, we discuss haunted roads and headless motorcycle ghosts.
Find Chris on BlueSky, FaceBook, and our back catalog!

Chris also partners with Dr. Simon Young on the Boggart & Banshee podcast!

Mentioned in the episode:

Silver Cliff Cemetery in Colorado

Resurrection Mary (Chicago)

Dr. Simon Young’s FAIRY CENSUS (Chris’s podcasting partner)

Third Man Syndrome/Factor

Charles Bonnet Syndrome (visual hallucinations)

Loren Coleman’s late brother Jerry covered Highway Trolls in his book Strange Highways.

Psychomania (1973) British occult motorcycle movie

Song Psychomania by The Damned – was it inspired by the film?

Fiction dealing with the headless motorcyclist trope:

Kolchack: The Night Stalker (S01E15) Chopper

Midsommer Murders – The Dark Rider

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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When police arrived, they agreed the 1956 model BSA motorcycle had been stolen.
Item, the police never did answer how a 20-year-old motorcycle, rusted and long since drained of gas and oil, had roared out into the chill Cicero night.
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 our next two episodes, we’ll be hearing from folklorist Chris Woodyard.
She’s a walking treasure trove of folklore, especially of the spooky flavor that we love here on Monster Talk.
In part one of our chat, we’re looking at the lore of headless motorcycle ghosts.
But before we kickstart that engine, I want to trace the lineage of this particular monster because its roots run deep.
My first exposure to a headless motorcyclist likely came from Kolchak the Night Stalker, specifically the 1975 episode Chopper.
It dealt with the revenge-seeking spirit of a biker whose murder left his head and body in rather different zip code.
It scared me back then, and honestly, the imagery in that episode holds up.
There’s something uniquely visceral about it.
A rider with no face, no eyes, no expression, just the scream of a spectral motor and the scent of moldy biker leather.
Marvel Comics had introduced their own ghostly motorcyclist three years earlier in 1972, Ghost Rider, the flaming, sculled spirit of vengeance.
And while Ghost Rider feels like a purely American invention, all brimstone and chrome and open highway, his conceptual roots reach back further than you might expect.
The character was partly inspired by the 1948 cowboy ballad Ghost Riders in the Sky, an iconic tale of damned souls chasing phantom cattle across stormy skies.
But that song drew on something older still, the Wild Hunt.
This spectral band of supernatural hunters tearing across the night sky is a staple of European folklore.
It’s one of those legends with origins so layered and muddied that we’ll eventually need an entire episode just to untangle it.
When we do get around to covering those ghostly cowboys, you can bet they’ll be heard here.
So Ghost Rider evolved over time.
The original 1970s Johnny Blaze gave way in 1992 to Danny Ketch, a new host to the Spirit of Vengeance who came equipped with a signature weapon, a Hellfire Chain.
Now, when I think about chain-wielding figures from the darker corners of the world of folklore…
There’s really only one contender for the title of most absolutely metal, and that has to be the Dullahan.
This Irish spectral horseman is headless, naturally, and rides a black steed through the countryside on festival nights.
But he doesn’t use a leather whip.
Instead, he carries a whip fashioned from human spine bones, and he uses that to tear out the eyes of anyone unlucky to witness him.
Pretty badass.
Now, was Washington Irving thinking about the Dullahan when he wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in 1820?
Probably not directly, because the earliest major written account of the Dullahan didn’t appear until Thomas Crocker’s work in 1825.
But these characters were traveling around in the same folkloric back roads around the same time.
Now, this image of a headless rider, death personified, carrying its own severed head like macabre luggage, bubbles up out of the human imagination whenever the road gets dark and curves disappear into the gloom.
That archetype has simply migrated from the saddle to the pillion.
For some, a tragic road trip doesn’t end with a crash.
It merely begins.
And Chris Woodyard knows these back roads better than almost anyone.
Hop on.
We’re going to go for a ride.
Monster Talk.
Hey, well, welcome back to the show, Chris Woodyard.
Thank you.
Delighted to be here.
We’re so happy to have you on again.
We have previously talked about omens and women in black and most recently the Wollaton Gnomes.
That was a very popular episode.
That was so fun to talk about.
So we brought you back on today to talk about a number of topics.
So we’re going to actually turn this into two separate episodes, one in which we talk about headless motorcyclists, haunted roads and road ghosts.
And in the second episode, we’re going to treat haunted cemeteries.
Excellent.
Two of my favorite topics.
This will be fun.
There’s so many things to unpack here, but let’s get started with the headless motorcyclist.
And I’m going to…
I have to say I’m a little embarrassed because I’ve heard of vanishing hitchhiker legends, lots of related legends, but never the headless motorcyclist.
And I looked into it and then only to find that there are quite a few stories around the United States and around the world as well.
So could you give us the basic story and then I guess the more specific story that you’re familiar with?
And tell us a bit about why this particular type of rogue ghost has become so popular over the years and the decades.
Right.
I haven’t found a whole lot of them around the world.
I’m almost familiar with the U.S. versions.
And it’s usually a young man riding his motorcycle, usually to see his girlfriend, and maybe he’s about to propose, and there’s an accident.
and his head is cut off, usually runs under a barbed wire fence.
But then his motorcycle is seen driving down the road.
It’s like a ghost light.
You just see the headlight.
And some places you have to do something.
You have to honk your horn three times or blink your light three times, and then the light will be seen coming down the road, and it will vanish, usually in the middle of a bridge.
Yeah, that three times motif just makes me think about legends regarding Marie Laveau and knocking three times.
Oh, yes.
Kind of relationship with the Trinity.
So, yeah, it’s interesting to see that come up here as well.
Right.
And I think the reason, one reason they might be so popular is, you know, the idea, the vision of a headless person driving a motorcycle is quite dramatic.
And then there’s that association of motorcycles with the heroic loner that we like so much in the United States.
And so many of the legends are about a man going to see the girlfriend or the lover and their life is cut short.
So those kind of tragedies make very appealing ghosts.
And Blake, didn’t you find a…
movie about this.
Oh, yeah.
There’s a movie…
There’s an Australian movie called Stone from 1974 that has a motorcycle rider whose head is apparently chopped off by a wire across the road.
Now, I’ve seen lots of movies with wires across the road taking down riders, but not usually decapitating them.
But apparently that was…
It kicked off, I would note that that’s a year before they cover it on Kolchak and do the, which is really my favorite headless motorcycle, the episode Chopper.
I love that one.
Good, good title.
It really is.
It works on two levels, right?
Yes, several levels, yes.
Some of the variations I heard, there was a case in California in Enmore and that had the…
the kind of string across the road story, whereas other ones have the one that you’ve mentioned.
It seems to be the most popular one.
Right, right.
But you have a specific Ohio legend around this?
Yeah, it’s in a place called Elmore.
It’s northern Ohio, northern central Ohio, and it’s just sort of out in the middle of nowhere.
It’s very flat country up there.
And you see the – again, you go and you blink your lights three times and you honk your horn three times.
And the road – you see the spook light coming down the road and it vanishes in the middle of the bridge.
And the story there is that a man came back from the First World War and went to see his girlfriend and found she’d married somebody else.
So he roared off down the road and under a barbed wire fence and cut his head off.
And so now he’s still roaming.
And apparently if you stand in the middle of the bridge, you will get hit.
There was at least one story of somebody who supposedly got thrown into the ditch by this thing.
And lots of people go up and look at it.
One gentleman, I was speaking in the area, and he came up and he says, I went out there.
I was looking for this ghost.
And I honked my horn three times and I blinked my lights three times and I looked in my rearview mirror and what do you think I saw?
And I’m like, he had me going.
I’m like, what?
What did you see?
He says, I saw 30 other cars blinking their lights and honking their horns.
Legend dribbles, huh?
Yeah, legend dribbles.
Big, big place.
But the interesting thing about this is that I’ve got the origin story all wrong.
When we started getting papers digitized, I went and looked to see what I could find about the headless motorcyclist of Elmore.
And the original story was actually a man who was sort of a hermit who lived in a shack in the area, and he hanged himself.
And ever since then, there was a spook light around the area, and young men would go and legend trip and search for it.
And that light would hit people and knock them out.
So that’s the original story, and somehow it morphed into a motorcycle headlight.
A modern-day version, I guess.
I’m always fascinated by the intersection of folklore and media.
So I wonder if the things like that Kolchak episode…
influenced the legend at all.
So I’d be interested in the timing of that.
You know, you are probably right because the first person to tell that story was a local folklorist named Gil.
His last name was Gil.
And he taught school and he would collect stories from the kids in the classes.
And I believe he was the first one to actually tell this as a motorcycle story.
And it was in the 70s, I’m pretty sure.
So it’s very possible he’s gone now, so I can’t ask him.
But I’m just wondering.
That’s a really interesting point.
Yeah, that’s interesting indeed.
Do we think that these stories might be related to tales of headless coachmen and headless horsemen?
Headless horsemen, I think, is a better fit.
The headless coachmen and the headless horses drawing the coach, I don’t connect the two.
They often have a whole coachload of dead people on.
or skeletons or something.
And the motorcyclists are always quite solitary.
So I think a headless horseman is a better fit for that.
And, you know, ghosts seem to be technology adapters.
You know, they’re happy to take whatever they can get.
So perhaps the headless horsemen have gone to motorcycles.
You wouldn’t stick your neck out on that one.
Got it.
Right.
Well,
Yeah.
So now I heard it’s the internet, you know, so, I mean, I don’t know how this works in your local area, but I heard in particular that somehow March 21st is said to be the day.
And so I thought, wow, how timely, you know, we won’t get this episode out in time, but we’re recording just a few days before that, which is really nifty.
That’s true.
I haven’t been up there on that date.
I did go up and you can see the freeway off in the distance and you can see headlights on it, which is one explanation.
People have tried to explain it.
Otherwise, I don’t know.
I didn’t think it was close enough to really look like it was coming down the road.
I wanted to ask as well.
I’ve heard that there is…
some dispute about which bridge this actually occurred on, that there are two or maybe three different bridges and no one quite knows which one it was.
Is that true?
I thought there was just one bridge, but don’t quote me.
I have this in my notes somewhere where I was looking at the story of the hermit in the shack and it was very specific about the location, but I don’t have that at my fingertips and I’m sorry.
No, no, no worries.
Yeah.
But it’s interesting the way these things get put together because what does a bridge have to do with barbed wire?
You know, like that, how does the barbed wire fence associate with a bridge?
But, you know, a landmark, a bridge works metaphorically on many levels.
Oh, yes.
It’s a folklore motif.
Oh, yes.
It’s incredibly popular.
Yes.
So, you know, I’m not going to say liminal.
Ah, see?
You said liminal.
I knew it was going to come up.
But that is, I mean, if you’re driving a motorcycle and do end up going under a piece of wire, there’s…
There’s no defense.
I know, I know, but it’s also true.
But actually, that is interesting, though, because legends that are associated with specific features and specific locations are so interesting because that works in folklore and in…
I don’t know.
It’s funny because I don’t think of haunting lore as necessarily being folklore.
Like sometimes people report cyclical hauntings and sometimes people see like ghost lights don’t necessarily have a date with them all around the world.
Ghost lights are things.
It’s a phenomena you can go see.
Right.
Yeah.
But how do you think place and time intersect so well with these stories?
As someone who’s looked at a lot of these sort of things, why did those two features come up so often, do you think?
Or what do you think the significance is?
I’m not sure.
I mean, I could say it’s liminal, you know, this bridge or that stretch of highway.
And why those?
Yeah.
I mean, locally, we think of every community has like a crybaby bridge or a screaming Mimi bridge, for example.
And this is a place where the teens go to hang out.
They run out of gas on the haunted bridge.
It’s amazing how many dates I’ve run out of gas.
I know.
It’s shocking.
Now, I can give you an example here.
There’s a theory that if you go on a date in a scary place, maybe like on a roller coaster or something or a haunted bridge.
Or Georgia.
What?
Georgia?
That’s where the whole state’s scary.
Oh, okay.
I’m not going there.
See?
It’s that scary.
Anyway, if you go to a scary place, it makes the couple associate that adrenaline rush with each other.
Your heart is pounding.
It must be him or her or love.
And so I think there’s something to be said for these places that are just sort of local scary places.
And who knows how they get started?
We’ve got a crybaby bridge in every county in Ohio practically.
And I’m sure it’s the same in other states.
Why that?
And certainly I’ve read enough horror stories about infants thrown into the river just to get rid of them.
But that’s not usually the story.
The story is usually there’s an accident.
And a carriage or a wagon or a car goes into the water and the bodies are never recovered.
So I don’t know.
It’s one of those social anxieties that bodies are never recovered and you don’t know if someone’s living or dead.
So I think that’s just kind of why the bridges or that sort of thing gets started.
I was thinking it might be also a form of what I call reality anchoring, where it gives you an element that, well, I don’t know if the story’s true, but that’s a real place, right?
In the same way that…
that the friend of a friend, like I heard this from this person.
So it anchors it.
Like, this is not something that I’m just making up.
I, I, I, a person I trust is telling me this story, you know, that it gets, it’s the, it’s kind of, I guess it fits along with the based on a true story concept that like we like, it makes our stories better when we can like literally go there and see it.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
Okay.
Yeah.
That makes a lot of sense.
I don’t know.
No, that makes a lot of sense.
Yeah.
And the more you see this stuff, and of course with the internet and social media, everybody’s got a TikTok or something about their adventures at this site.
And that just inspires more people to go and see if they can experience the same things.
And I think some of them is self-fulfilling prophecy.
Oh, yeah.
It does encourage people to go places.
There’s a place in Ohio used to be called Mud House Mansion.
And the owner actually had it torn down because they had too many people who had seen something on the Internet come and want to break into the place.
Yeah, that could be.
And I’m just thinking about I’ve lived in a number of different places in Australia and here in the United States.
And every place I’ve lived in has had a haunted road.
When I grew up in Sydney on the northern beaches, there was the Wakehurst Parkway.
And even my brother and a friend of his were driving home one night and they saw this glowing blue man who lunged at the car.
And they both died.
swore that they’d seen this of both very skeptical people and so they weren’t quite sure if it was a ghost or what exactly it was but they’d had that experience and
I’d driven along that road many times trying to see this blue man or something else, and then moving here to Colorado, the local road is the Riverdale Road, and there’s a similar kind of story about a haunted car and that occasionally he will just, when you drive past, you’ll see this vehicle just pulled to the side of the road with the headlights on, and then he’ll start racing you and then disappear at some point.
So it’s just really interesting how every place seems to have a story like this.
And I guess I’m wondering, with so many drivers seeing figures and ghosts and things like that in the headlights late at night, from a psychological perspective, what kind of perception errors or environmental conditions might lead people to believe that they’ve seen a ghost on the road or what might they be seeing?
Well, there could be a number of things.
I think about eye conditions.
I think about headlights in your face changing the way your pupils are dilated and seeing things that way.
There’s a very famous story from James Thurber who saw a miniature admiral in full uniform riding a bicycle in front of the car where he was riding.
Now, he had really poor eyesight.
And it sounds like Charles Bonnet syndrome, where folks with macular degeneration start having very realistic hallucinations.
And I know macular degeneration makes driving at night very challenging.
So it’s possible that at least some of those nighttime road sightings come from that.
Right.
Now, I’ve driven thousands of miles around Ohio when I was touring for my books, and much of the time I was driving in the dark.
I never saw anything out of the ordinary.
I never mistook anything I saw for a ghost.
But the strangest thing I ever saw was in broad daylight.
It was on a two-lane road near Indianapolis.
And for some reason, I wasn’t riding my own motorcycle, but I was riding behind my husband.
And we passed a farmhouse, and there was a little girl, maybe six or seven years old, lying in the ditch in front of the house wearing a 1950s-style dress.
And she looked very dead.
So I pounded on his back to try to make him stop, but he couldn’t hear me.
And he pointed to the storm clouds that were on the horizon, and we just went on and went home.
And I looked in the papers to see if there had been an accident, that perhaps the child had been hit by a car and not immediately found by the family.
And I never found anything that would explain what I saw.
So I don’t know if she was a ghost or a real child who had had an accident.
So it was extremely unsettling, but it was in broad daylight.
Now, driving around at night on my Ohio tours, occasionally my late grandfather would pop into the front seat just to say hi, apparently.
And I wonder if there’s a type of third man syndrome, you know, that thing where there’s a presence that shows up during a time of danger or deprivation and they support you, they give you comfort.
But I wasn’t in any peril.
But there he was.
So I wonder if there might be something where people just start hallucinating another presence in the car for no apparent reason.
Right.
Although, you know, for Phantom Hitchhiker stories where one minute you’ve got somebody in the car and the next minute they’re gone, I kind of wonder about carbon monoxide poisoning.
causing hallucinations you get a bad exhaust you get fumes coming into the car so even if you picked up a real person their vanishing might just be a result of the dazed state of the driver so you know theories uh yeah throwing them out there but um honestly if you know some blue man lunging at the car i just wouldn’t know what to make of that well yeah my my brother um is uh myopic so
Now that you mention it, it could be an eye condition, something like that.
But for my friend who was with him to see it too.
Yes, exactly.
I couldn’t, hopefully they weren’t drinking or taking drugs or anything like that that could contribute to it.
But I know certainly I’ve spent a lot of time driving roads in rural parts of Australia and just trees and animals and other things will kind of just jump out at you at night.
And so really, we always looked in.
I’m sorry?
Luminous eyes like a deer or something.
Oh, yeah.
Or something jumping across the freeway or the highway like a deer.
We know from horror films how effective a jump scare can be.
You only have a moment to see whatever’s happening.
You get a first reaction.
And we also know scientifically that what we experience through our senses has to go through the substrate of the mind.
So our eyes…
report stuff to the brain and then the brain interprets it and that’s not always accurate and so many things happen when you’re driving I think for me I’ve had this happen so many times where something’s in the road ahead and I my first thing is I think maybe it’s an animal and I can sort of see it changing shape to be the thing I think you know like and it eventually resolves itself oh that’s just a plastic bag but it went through several other forms before it resolved into a plastic bag now
As a skeptic, I’m thinking that’s my brain trying to resolve what’s really there.
But there are people who would seriously consider that maybe that was something taking shape, like something that was assuming a form to just, you know, get by, which is it.
We have those monstrous plastic bags.
They’re shapeshifters.
Exactly.
Well, you know, I’m so sympathetic.
to people whose epistemologies, you know, go to the supernatural first.
They don’t think about what else might be going on because they lead very interesting lives.
And, you know, and just as valid as ours, I like to try to push towards a concrete materialist reality, but the,
Some very exciting things have happened to me.
And when you’re driving, you don’t get much time to deal with it.
And you spend all these moments later trying to play it back in your head.
What was that?
What just happened to me?
Right.
Here’s something else, though.
There is this sort of highway hypnosis they used to talk about.
I mean, you’re driving along and you’re just kind of on autopilot sometimes.
Yes.
Now, my podcast partner, Dr. Simon Young, has noted in his fairy census how many people think that they see fairies or gnomes while they’re driving.
So there may be just something sort of hypnotic if you’re on a familiar road and you’re just driving along and you’re in sort of an altered state.
Exactly.
And I think add to that weather conditions, maybe if it’s foggy or if it’s raining or if it’s snowing and that can affect perception even more.
And you both talking about garbage bags and things like that remind me a couple of days ago, I just was driving past a tree and it looked like there was a hawk or a crow or something flapping its wings.
And it just turned out to be a garbage bag, but it was great pareidolia.
Yes.
I once I saw this, I don’t know why I’m suddenly sharing stories, but the.
One of the strangest things I’ve seen, I was driving at night.
I used to drive back from college to my home because I didn’t live on campus.
And it was about a 40-minute drive, and it was late at night.
And this night, it was raining.
One of those rainstorms where the rain’s coming down sideways, and people are putting their flashers on, and you’re driving on the interstate, but you’re only going like 35 miles an hour.
And…
I had to cross a lake to get home.
There’s a very long bridge on Interstate 75.
And as I’m driving along, I saw this will be a very strangely detailed thing that I saw.
I saw two people walking hand in hand, wearing yellow raincoats like the like the Gordon Fish guy.
Right.
And they were actually as near as I could tell they were elderly women because they turned and looked at my car and I couldn’t stop.
And then I was stuck in a strange situation.
Now, I’m thinking I would love to render aid to these people because that’s a terrible place to be.
Why are they walking across this huge, long bridge over the lake in this rainstorm?
It’s very dangerous.
But it was one of those things where the next exit where I could possibly turn around was like two miles away.
And then I would have had to have gone.
And I was really thinking it through.
There was really no way.
Yeah, I do anything about it.
It would have been, you know, a 20 minute trip basically to get back to them if they were still there.
But it was so peculiar because I’m like, wait a minute.
Why?
Why were they walking down the road?
I didn’t see any car pulled over to the side of the road.
There’s no exits around there.
It was just so odd and mysterious.
And it was like so easy to start thinking, you know, of a haunting rather than two real elderly people having a terrible night.
Yes.
So I don’t know what happened to them or what was really going on, but I just could not help but think it was easier to come up with a mysterious explanation than to accept that they happened to have this incredibly good rain gear for this incredibly bad situation, right?
Right.
Yeah.
And that’s the kind of thing that leads you to be haunted yourself for the rest of your life.
I’ll never know.
I’ll never know what happened there.
It was just really, but like a snapshot or a jump scare in a movie, it’s there crystal clear in my mind, but never resolvable.
Yes.
Which is kind of fun.
Yeah.
I hope they made it wherever they were going.
If they were indeed people, yeah.
Yeah, absolutely right.
They may have just been garbage bags.
Yes, flapping their wings.
Well, I’ve got one final question before we wrap this part of the show up or this episode up.
So we’ve talked about a number of different –
Road ghosts.
I don’t think, and we’ve mentioned vanishing hitchhikers, so I don’t think we can talk about this topic without mentioning one of the most famous road ghosts in the United States, and I think that would be Resurrection Mary from Chicago.
So she’s the one I always think about.
She supposedly appears near Resurrection Cemetery and asks for, I guess, a ride home and then just…
disappears when the the driver passes the cemetery and uh that if you go there the the gates are i think wrenched open or burnt open or something like that there’s supposed to be burn marks on them where where her hands have touched yes that’s right yeah yeah so um can you tell us a little bit about that that legend how it developed and why it’s one of the most enduring stories in american folklore
I often wonder about Vanishing Hitchhikers.
The whole thing has multiple folklore motifs.
There’s like eight or so variants.
What does that mean?
What are we dealing with?
There’s several theories about who Resurrection Mary actually is.
One was a lady named Mary Bregovi, I believe I’m pronouncing that right, who died in 1934.
She had an accident, an automobile accident.
Others think that she was on her way home from a dance.
Chicago author Ursula Bielski documented a woman named Anna Norcus who died in a 1927 auto accident after a dance.
So that seems almost plausible.
But I look at Resurrection Mary almost as a variant of things like cautionary stories like the Frozen Charlotte Ballad.
We’re talking about somebody who was out going to a ball and they did something their parent didn’t want and they paid the ultimate price and they died.
The story, I think, first appeared in the 1940s.
And I’m looking at it almost as this strain of urban legends that appeared in the 1950s and 60s that reflect anxieties about young women’s behavior.
You know, they’re promiscuous and going to dances everywhere or they’re vain.
And there’s the stories about women poisoned by prom dresses saturated with embalming fluid or the spiders in the hairdo, women in lover’s lanes attacked by hookmen, women hitchhikers.
And it just seems to all go with this anxiety about women being out on their own.
So that’s kind of where I see it coming from.
Perhaps there really was a woman.
There’s an awful lot of people who have reported this.
And as I say, when you’ve got folklore motifs like this, they’re always asking, a lot of them are asking for a lift home.
She gives the address and you go there and, oh, it’s the cemetery and, boof, she’s gone.
So what does that mean?
You know, there’s just too many people who have seen this.
But at the same time, it’s just got this undertone of we want our women to stay home and not be out hitchhiking at night.
Right.
Yeah, I could definitely see that.
And I also want to point our listeners to a previous episode.
Blake, you’ll remember this one, the Telly Savalas story.
I do.
Because when I think of prototypical stories like this, it’s the vanishing hitchhiker, so the person who’s getting the lift, who’s getting the ride.
But in the Telly Svala story, he talks about the vanishing driver, how someone gives him a ride.
So I’m not sure if you’re familiar with this tale.
No, no, I don’t know that one.
I’ll have to put a clip of Matt doing the voice because it’s really funny.
I hear a voice.
Very spooky, yeah.
So the guy has a high-pitched voice.
And it’s said that he’d taken his own life and he’d shot himself in the voice box in the larynx, and that’s why his voice was so high.
But, yeah, it’s very spooky.
And to hear, you know, Kojak telling the story, it’s a really interesting one.
And, you know, we unpack that in that episode.
But it’s just interesting.
It’s the complete opposite.
It’s an inversion.
But I’ll say that also is you bring a hitchhiker and I’ll bring a ghost.
That’s the Chicago way, to paraphrase.
I want to get Capone.
I don’t know how to get him.
You want to get Capone?
Here’s how you get him.
He pulls a knife.
You pull a gun.
He sends one of yours to the hospital.
You send one of his to the morgue.
That’s the Chicago way.
Yeah, that’s the Chicago way.
Well, can I tell one more story about a hitchhiker?
Absolutely.
This is, again, a very local story.
There’s a place in Claremont County known as Dead Man’s Curve.
And it was a very dangerous two-lane road, narrow, lots and lots of fatal accidents.
The authorities decided to widen and straighten it, make it nice.
And a month later, five people died in a car crash there.
And one of my friends was the only survivor.
Oh, wow.
And he lived with that till he died.
He never, never got over it.
A little survivor guilt kind of thing.
Not to diminish it.
That’s horrifying.
He was a teenager and just he never got over it.
But ever since then, the creature that they called the faceless hitchhiker has haunted that dead man’s curve.
And it’s a dead black figure of a man.
It’s sort of a three-dimensional silhouette, as he described it.
And he and his friends saw it at least six times over the course of maybe 25 years.
Wow.
Like a shadow person.
Yeah, it was like a shadow person.
Yeah, yeah.
This friend of his who was a nurse, she was out driving her mother’s station wagon along the road early one morning.
And the thing ran out of the woods, threw itself in front of her car trying to block it.
And she hit it, felt both sets of wheels running over.
And she said, my God, I’m a nurse.
I could have killed somebody.
So she stopped and she started backing up.
And as she looked in her mirror, she saw the thing putting a foot on the trunk and grabbing the luggage rack.
to climb up on the top of the car.
Oh, my gosh.
So she floored it, and it fell off, and even now she gets the shakes when she talks about it.
Oh, it’s intense.
I’ve never heard anything like that.
So that’s the faceless hitchhiker of Dead Man’s Curve.
Wow.
That’s a bit more aggressive than I would care to deal with.
Yeah.
Legend tripping that one.
I think given that we talked about Resurrection Mary, that’s a really wonderful transition to what we’ll be talking about in our part two of our interview with Chris Woodyard.
So tune in next week to hear about Haunted Cemeteries.
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 the first part of our interview with folklorist and author Chris Woodyard.
She’ll be back next week to continue our conversation as we branch off the highway and into haunted cemeteries.
I know a single episode can’t plot every road spook or haint onto a single map, but I wanted to mention a couple more rest stops if you’d like to explore this topic on your own.
First, and I can’t say it’s to everyone’s taste, but I’m incredibly fond of the 1973 supernatural motorcycle film Psychomania, also known as The Death Wheelers.
It’s an absolutely bonkers film that combines British horror’s fascination with pagan revival and satanic tropes with the scary teens on motorbikes energy of that era.
It’s wrapped in the kind of post-mod fashion sensibilities that you might expect from an amicus or hammer production.
And while I’ve never seen a direct confession that the film inspired the goth legends The Damned, they do have a track titled Psychomania on their album Anything,
with lyrics that suspiciously evoke that same blend of the supernatural and the motorcyclic.
So check it out if you’ve got a taste for pre-Satanic Panic era occult cinema.
The other item for your consideration was brought to my attention by the late Jerry Coleman, brother of cryptozoologist Loren Coleman.
Jerry wrote two books around the title Strange Highways that collect roadside paranormal accounts.
In the first volume, he discusses the Highway Troll, an entity that feels like it stepped right out of a Twilight Zone episode.
I’ll put links to those in the show notes.
Now come back next week for more with Chris Woodyard.
And in the meantime, be sure to wear your seatbelts and your safety helmets.
We much prefer your being in our audience than being the subject of our research.
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 S05E25 – Headless Motorcyclist Ghosts appeared first on MonsterTalk.

We talk with Karen’s friend, author and Ex-Mormon Steve Cuno about paranormal ideas in the Mormon religion. 

Steve Cuno: 

Behind the Mormon Curtain: Selling Sex in America’s Holy City

“It’s Not About the Sex” My Ass: Confessions of an Ex-Mormon, Ex-Polygamist, Ex-Wife 

David W. Patten and Mormon Bigfoot:

Reddit Thread

Between Pulpit and Pew: The Supernatural World in Mormon History and Folklore

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.
Sometimes things work out in unexpected ways.
The story behind this episode is that Karen wanted to interview her good friend Steve Kuno on the topic of Mormonism, but I’m always reluctant to do episodes that potentially sound like we’re hammering on religious belief.
While I’m not a believer in the supernatural, I don’t find much value in the religion is pure poison narrative.
To me, religion is a complex human phenomena.
It has cultural and personal value, even if I don’t subscribe to the mythos.
That binary approach just doesn’t work for me.
So I’m not going to be doing an episode where we would just be bashing religions wholesale, even if I don’t believe in them.
But at the same time, acknowledging that they have cultural and personal value to people doesn’t mean they should be beyond critique.
Every religion I’ve ever looked at has aspects that are troubling to me.
I tend to view religions through a historical lens, as human institutions.
And like any human institution, they’re as prone to brilliance and beauty as they are to deep flaws and contradictions.
Anyway, I could yak a long time about that, but the bottom line is that Karen convinced me to do this episode by framing it as a way to look at how Mormons deal with paranormal claims like exorcism and miracles.
And of course, we will talk about the interesting role of Bigfoot in some Mormon theology.
But as it happens, I just got back from Texas State University’s Monster Conference, Gods and Monsters 2026, which was organized by my friends and Monster Talk alums, Natasha Michaels and Joe Laycock.
One of the talks that I attended was Monstrous Religions in 19th Century U.S.
Political Cartoons by historian Josh Patterson, who’s an associate professor at TSU.
He showed and discussed about a dozen examples, but of course there’s hundreds, of 19th century political cartoons that literally monsterized religions to make their points.
Mormon examples abounded as did Catholic.
It highlights the historical tension where freedom of religion often felt like code for Protestantism is our state religion.
Looking at that history of monsterization was a reminder of how easily we turned the other into something scary.
It made me realize that avoiding the topic of religion out of a desire not to offend might actually be missing a chance to understand that process and explore the nuance at play.
So I’m really glad that Karen pushed for this because our guest, Steve Kuno, provides such a fascinating human perspective on the subject.
We’ll be discussing several books during the talk, and I’ll have links to those ready in the show notes.
Monster Talk
Well, our guest tonight, Steve Kuno, is a Portland-based author, columnist, and the award-winning mind behind books like Behind the Mormon Curtain, Selling Sex in America’s Holy City.
And I think this is one of the best book titles ever.
It’s not about the sex, my ass.
Confessions of an Ex-Mormon, Ex-Polygamist, Ex-Wife, a memoir which was as told to Steve.
And Steve holds a degree in journalism and mass communication from the University of Utah.
He’s a former Salt Lake City marketing executive and also a former member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is why we’ve brought him on to Monster Talk today to talk about the paranormal side of Mormon beliefs.
So welcome to the show, Steve.
Thank you.
That was a delightful and thorough introduction.
Well, I’m glad that it was all accurate then.
Yeah, I didn’t know I had a stalker.
This is very nice.
Thank you.
AI has come so far.
Well, Steve is a man of many talents.
And in talking about Mormons, I don’t even know where to begin.
Now, Steve, you provided us with a long list of possible.
topics.
And I think we should just kind of dive into some of these and get you to chit chat a bit about the stranger side of the LDS.
And yeah, I think I’d like to begin with something that you told me about years ago when we first met.
And that was your brief stint as a faith healer of sorts.
Do you want to tell us a little bit about that?
Sure.
I’d probably be overstating to claim to have been a faith healer, but I did participate in a faith healing.
And so I can tell you about that.
So, yes, I was a missionary for the Mormons.
The Mormons send young men out on two year missions.
It’s unpaid service.
In fact, you shell out your own money to pay your way there.
And so I was sent to the province of Quebec.
And the church put me through a two-year course to learn to speak French so that I could tell French Canadians in French that they darn well ought to be Mormons.
And so there I was.
Mormons believe that the men should be ordained to the priesthood.
At age 12, you get ordained to the priesthood, but you don’t get to do very much.
But by the time you’re 18, they ordain you to the higher priesthood, and you get to go around doing blessings and that sort of thing.
So there we are.
We’re Mormon missionaries.
We’re pounding on doors.
And we were working with a family where the mom told us that she had a tumor in her neck and that she could only move her head so far to one side before the excruciating pain stopped her from further movement.
And she explained that she had a tumor and that the doctor wanted to do surgery, but she’d said, no, I’m going to have the missionaries give me a blessing.
Oh, boy.
It’s kind of every missionary’s worst nightmare to be stuck in that situation because I think deep down inside you don’t think it’s going to work.
You don’t admit that, but you’ve got all kinds of outs when you’re a religious person of this sort.
Like, well, someone didn’t have enough faith or wasn’t in accordance with the will of the Lord.
So you’ve got all these excuses.
But we went through the ritual.
Mormons, before they give a blessing for the sick, they’ll pull out a little bottle of olive oil.
They’ll remove the cap and, through prayer, consecrate the oil for the blessing of the sick.
And you have to remove the cap.
That’s very important.
Otherwise, you’re blessing the bottle, not the oil.
And that’s not going to do anybody any good.
I never thought about that.
That’s funny.
How many times, Blake, have you forgotten to take off the lid?
Never, but I’ve, in the evangelical community, they do a similar kind of, well, I say similar, I haven’t heard the whole ceremony, but oil and laying on the hands for healing and blessing.
Yeah, so yeah.
Olive oil too?
Olive oil as well?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah.
I guess you could just olive oil.
Yep.
And the motor oil just doesn’t go over.
It doesn’t.
Right.
Yeah.
So I just think if you left the lid on, think how many people needlessly died because someone left the lid on.
It’s very sad.
Inexcusable.
So anyhow, the Mormons do the laying on of hands thing to the first person.
There are two of you.
So the first will anoint.
That is put a drop of oil on the crown of the head of your subject.
Essentially, you lay your hands on this person and say, I anoint you with this oil in the name of Jesus.
And then you both put your hands on the person’s head and the other one pronounces a blessing.
And so we always ask the person, who would you like to do what?
And for some reason, the woman asked my companion to do the anointing and asked me to pronounce the blessing.
I’d been a missionary for about six months at this point, and I did not want to do this blessing, but I’d been asked.
Now, I do have to tell you, I did believe.
I was a Mormon missionary because I believed the whole thing about Klein and Sinker.
I was a convert.
I wasn’t there under family pressure.
I was there because I was motivated and thought I was bringing the truth to these poor French Catholics.
So I did believe and I did have faith, but I knew I wasn’t a healer.
So anyhow…
My hands are on her head and all of a sudden I overhear myself telling her that she’s going to be well.
I mean, not just going to be well, commanding her to be well.
And we removed our heads, our hands from her head.
And she looked this way and that way and twisted her head right and left and all motion had returned to her neck.
And we were blown away.
And I remember, you know, as we were leaving thinking, I.
believe, but I don’t have the faith to heal.
She obviously had the faith to be healed.
And then years later, when I decided that the Mormon church was hooey, I had to deal with this.
And I know there’s such a thing as spontaneous healing, but that would be one dilly of a coincidence if it happened in that moment.
And I do not believe that positive thinking accounts for it.
But then I got to thinking and realized, oh, and I will tell you that the next time we saw her, she said her doctor was absolutely amazed because the tumor was gone.
But then I began to think back and realize, you know, there was never mention of x-rays.
It could well be that she had simply decided she had a tumor.
Much like we see, speaking of Australia, when we see Richard Saunders doing his thing with that little…
plastic ring people wear around their wrists and suddenly they think they’re stronger because they put it on.
Like a live strong type thing.
Applied kinesiology.
Yeah.
And I’m thinking, okay, maybe she woke up with a stiff neck and it had been stiff for a few weeks and maybe with the blessing it was, what was it called, Karen?
Applied what?
Apply kinesiology.
They’ve got lots of little tests where they do arm movements and after you say whether you prefer the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or something like that, then your arm can move more freely.
Lots of very spurious stuff.
Is there any chance that the joint needed lubrication and the olive oil did the trick?
Maybe it seeped down.
That test you just cited, though, is obviously silly because anybody knows it’s the Beatles.
Agreed.
Agreed.
I know Karen’s very serious about that answer.
From the heart, yeah.
Well, that’s why we’re still friends.
So I figure that’s probably, I don’t know what happened, but my best guess is that there probably was no tumor, just a stiff back, and she tried to move her head a little harder after the blessing.
And so you met her twice, and there were no further meetings after that?
Oh, no, we met them lots and lots and lots of times.
And they actually joined the church.
And it was very quite a trial for them because this was pre 1978.
And her husband was black.
She was white, French, Canadian.
And so unusual that they were a couple at the time.
In fact, when they bought their house, the neighbors took up a collection to buy it from them and get them to move because they didn’t want a mixed couple on their street.
Horrible.
Yeah, that’s.
So I don’t think there’s a lot of not a wide public understanding of that sort of baked in racism that sort of inherent in the idea.
And I don’t know if this I my understanding is this has changed in the formal guidance from the church.
But wasn’t there a time when.
people who weren’t white were considered to be subject to the Mark of Cain or something like that?
Oh, yes, yeah.
Pretty close, and I’m glad you brought that up because to follow up on my earlier observation, this was pre-1978.
Pre-1978, Black men in the Mormon church were not allowed to hold the priesthood.
That meant a couple of things.
They could not marry in the temple, and all good Mormons are under obligation to get married in a Mormon temple.
but black people weren’t even allowed in because they couldn’t hold priesthood.
And that also meant that the Mormon church has several divisions in heaven.
It also meant black people couldn’t get to the highest degree of heaven.
Now, when the church had been, until 1978, black people couldn’t hold the priesthood.
Maoris could, Native Americans could, but people of black African descent, even who dropped the drop of blood down there.
could not hold priesthood.
That changed in 1978 when the then president of the Mormon Church, President and Prophet Spencer W. Kimball, suddenly announced to the world that, okay, the time has finally come when everybody, all worthy men, that is, tough luck, Karen, all worthy men can hold the priesthood.
Yeah, yeah.
And what is the priesthood exactly?
Can you refresh?
It is the authority to act in the name of God.
So you can do baptisms and ordinances, blessing the water and the bread, which Mormons use water instead of wine, and giving blessings like my missionary companion and I did.
So we had dropped an article.
We had not addressed this issue with this particular couple when we were teaching them.
And they had five daughters, by the way.
And so none of the daughters could go to the temple either.
They couldn’t hold fish in any way because they exercised the poor planning and judgment to be female instead of male.
But also, if they had married a white guy, they still couldn’t have married him in the temple because they had black in their heritage.
So anyhow, we had dropped off an article at their house.
We hadn’t addressed the topic with them yet.
The article was on how Mormons are so darn healthy because they don’t smoke and drink.
We had failed to notice a little paragraph at the end of the article that alluded to the priesthood ban.
So next time we showed up at their house, here was this furious gentleman.
What do you mean I can’t have priesthood?
And somehow, somehow we got him to.
He was a meek, humble man.
He accepted it and joined the church anyway.
And I look back on it.
Actually, it’s beyond me that any person of color would be a Christian at all, but especially a Mormon.
And so blood of Cain thing, the church, at first when it was banning black people from the priesthood, we’re talking mid-19th century, nobody cared.
But in the 1950s and 60s, when we started having this thing called the civil rights movement in this country, people started caring very much about that.
And so suddenly the church apologetics were getting really kind of strange.
And suddenly it wasn’t a doctrine, it was a policy.
And they danced around it.
But I think the real catalyst, as I look at the history for the change, there was immense pressure on the church to change the policy.
But of course,
you know, God’s in charge and he has to tell the prophet to change it.
People don’t put pressure on prophets.
But I think sports did.
BYU had a football team and suddenly you had colleges around the country refusing to play them because of the priesthood ban.
And I think that tied in mightily with the change because not only was it horrible PR for the church, it also meant a revenue stream was cut off.
priorities yeah exactly well i mean so i i’m i first of all uh do not profess to be a historian nor an expert on mormon history but i seem to recall something about utah’s statehood
requiring the rescinding of polygamy.
And, and then like when they wanted to become a state, suddenly they got a message from God saying, yeah, yeah, yeah.
That was, uh, we’re good with that.
We’re good.
Yeah.
Is that, did you, is that something you’re familiar with enough to talk about?
Oh yeah.
It, uh, it was worse than that.
So, all right.
So you’ve got, we probably, I know this will be weird, but we probably should explain what polygamy is.
Okay, well, polygamy means multiple spouses.
If we really want to get pedantic, the Mormons were practicing polygamy, which is multiple wives.
But we’ll just use the catch-all phrase polygamy.
And so… What would multiple husbands be?
Well, polyandry.
Oh, polyandry.
Okay, gotcha, gotcha.
Yeah.
Sorry, I just, I went blank for a moment, other than thinking, really complicated.
I mean, it’s all complicated.
I mean, anytime you have more than two people in a relationship, it’s complicated.
But yeah, yeah.
So what we have is, you have Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, who was a prophet.
and uh so you know you kind of expect a prophet to be like to behave himself and maybe keep various commandments and so one day he was found in in flagrante delecto with his wife’s 14 year old housekeeper and this was very very early in his prophethood years like within the first couple of years
And he did not confess to adultery.
Instead, he said, well, gee, you know, Moses had lots of wives.
Abraham had lots of wives.
And God is restoring the true church through me.
And so part of the restoration of all things must include prophets having multiple wives.
Well, this was news to the members of his new flock, and it was especially news to his lawful wife, Emma.
who never liked polygamy and, in fact, denied that it happened.
And a lot of his peers in his Quorum of the Twelve Apostles were too.
too fond of this either, until he mentioned to them that God said they had to take multiple wives too, and that went a long way toward mitigating their attitude.
But they practiced it in secret, oddly enough.
They even kept it secret from the members of the church.
And from their wives.
Yes.
And incidentally, he married, quote-unquote,
minor children.
He also married married women.
And what he’d do is send the husbands away on a church mission and then hustle the wives while the husbands were away.
It’s a naughty business trip.
Oh, my gosh.
So he was tarred and feathered for hitting on somebody’s little sister.
And eventually his philandering or his polygamy, whatever you want to call it, is what got him killed because he hit on the wrong fellow’s wife.
That fellow published a tell-all newspaper.
He ordered the destruction of the newspaper because he happened to be mayor of the all-Mormon town, Nauvoo, Illinois.
So he was arrested for destroying the newspaper, and then while he was in jail, a mob stormed the place and shot him.
Interestingly enough, he had a gun on him.
It wasn’t the most secure jail in the world, and he got off three shots at the crowd before they finished him off.
So then the Mormons were in Illinois at this time.
They were under immense pressure to leave.
So Brigham Young led them to Mexico, a territory under the control of Mexico that we now call Utah.
So there were the saints in Mexico.
So Brigham Young could finally bring polygamy out into the open.
Now, the U.S. had no law against polygamy.
It hadn’t needed one.
But it wasn’t terribly popular.
But now that they were in Mexico, no problem, until I think it was seven months later when the United States and Mexico executed the Treaty of Hidalgo.
And lo and behold, the Mormons were back in the United States territory of Utah.
They hadn’t moved the territory.
It had become U.S. soil again.
And now there are shenanigans.
They brought polygamy out into the open.
So there was immense pressure in the United States Congress to outlaw it.
So they did.
And of course, the Mormons said, phooey, we take orders from God, not from you.
And the government started seizing church property, jailing church leaders.
And finally, in 1890, Brigham Young’s successor introduced a statement saying, OK, we’re done with polygamy.
And it was an outright lie.
They just practiced it in secret, but not very well.
And to this day.
Sort of, yeah.
Fundamentalist groups, yeah.
Absolutely.
Like Warren Jeffs and his crowd.
Yes.
So finally, the church did, probably by about 1930, they were officially through with what they called plural marriage.
But yes, Karen, a bunch of little splinter groups decided, well, this means we have a fallen prophet, and we have to return to the original ways.
So they split off and started their own little fundamentalist Mormon churches, and those exist all over.
the country now and in parts of Canada and Mexico.
If I might plug a book called God Bless America by one Karen Stolzno.
Chapter one is all about Mormon polygamy.
And I have to compliment you.
You got your history and doctrine spot on.
It’s an excellent read.
So many people who write about Mormons get the details wrong.
You got them right.
And I don’t know how you did that.
Oh, I really appreciate that.
It was just so interesting and it’s hard to remember everything because the book’s about 10 years old now.
I’ll have to go and revisit it.
Almost Marian age, yeah.
14.
Yeah, honestly.
But, yeah, I really hope our listeners go out and get a copy of It’s Not About the Sex.
That’s a great book.
And you really just talk about the hypocrisy behind this and just the reality behind polygamy and what it’s really like, especially connected to the church and the more fundamentalist groups.
We’ve certainly got a couple of communities out here still in rural parts of Colorado.
And yeah, they’re still around.
And yeah, I don’t know what’s happened to Warren Jeffs.
I guess he’s still in jail.
I think so.
where he belongs.
Exactly.
I’m always hesitant for us to cover religion because there’s so many different religious beliefs and some people hold them very sacred.
But the paranormal side, I think, is fair game.
And I’m also very interested in…
How you can have a mainstream religion and then there’ll be always, always some version of it will split off and become mysticism.
There’ll be some version of the religion that gets involved in esoteric ideas and like, you know, sanctioned magic and that sort of thing.
I noticed that in the list of topics you were willing to talk about, you included exorcism, and that falls right into our purview.
It does, right up our alley.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a Mormon exorcism, although it doesn’t surprise me that such things exist.
Can you talk a little bit about how the church handles such things?
Sure.
So, Satan is very real to Mormons.
There was a war in heaven before the world was made where God was…
presenting his plan that he was going to send everybody to earth and we were going to sin and Jesus would save us.
And Satan stood up and said, hey, wait a minute.
You know, some people won’t make it if we do it your way.
How about I go down and force everybody to be good?
And there was a war and Satan lost and was cast out.
Two thirds of the spirits in heaven followed him.
And so their job is to come to earth and try to get us all to be naughty so we won’t be saved.
So very real to Mormons.
And possession is real to them.
They believe the possession stories in the New Testament, for instance.
So I had an experience with an exorcism, sort of.
Oh, my gosh.
This was about a year later.
I was still a Mormon missionary.
And I was in an area in the northern part of the province of Quebec, called Lac-Saint-Jean.
And a fellow called us in because his friend was possessed by a spirit.
And so we walk in and here’s this guy.
And anytime we tried to talk about something sacred, he would burst out laughing.
And at some point or another, he said, my spirit keeps whispering things in my ear.
I’m sorry, I keep laughing.
But he keeps whispering to me and he kept laughing and laughing.
Our mutual acquaintance said, well, you know, we have the priesthood cast out the devil.
And once again, guess who ended up being the spokesman.
So we laid our hands on his head and I told the devil to be gone.
We lifted our hands and the guy looked up very sober faced and said, oh, I felt him exit through my nose and he ran away.
And.
I remember walking out thinking, holy crap, this stuff works.
You thought it was a demon, but it’s not.
Oh, where were you when we needed you?
Anyhow, I look back now, and then it was years later when I worked in mental health circles for a while and learned about schizophrenia.
And the guy sure fit the description.
And I also know that when somebody afflicted with schizophrenia is hearing voices, sometimes putting earplugs in helps, it mitigates.
And I thought, you know, again, this could be another thing where it’s psychosomatic.
We put our hands on our head and he’s temporarily better because I do know that he went back to being quite troubled the very next day.
Of course, in our mind, he went out and got himself repossessed.
And years ago, when I was still an active Mormon, I don’t know if we’re
I’ve been out for, how old am I now?
I’ve been out for a good 30 years, but we had someone in our neighborhood when I was married and had kids who wanted her house cleansed of spirits.
So my friend and I went over and did a little prayer and she wanted us to do every room in the house.
And I said, no, we’ll just do it all from the living room.
But what’s funny is at that point, I did not at all suspect there was a demon in our house.
I just knew that she was a little off kilter.
Yeah, then you’re right.
These things only really help temporarily and they go back exactly the way they were.
Yep, exactly.
Well, we’ve got so many items of interest on this list still, but I don’t think that we can talk about the Mormons without talking about underwear.
Oh, so you’re saying you’re 30, some 30 years out of the church, but you still wear the underwear, right?
Oh, no, I’m 30 years out of the underwear.
I remember I’ve been through Utah a couple of times and you see these Mormon underwear stores and it’s just such a confronting thing to see if you don’t live in the area.
So if you could tell us a little bit about the magic underwear, I think probably a lot of our listeners would be familiar with the concept anyway.
It’s funny because that was something in the early days, the church.
In the early days that I was looking into and eventually joining the church, they did not like to talk about that.
But now we have this thing called the internet and they can’t hide from it.
So they’re trying to turn around and proudly own it.
So I assume we’re talking about Under Armour, is it?
Yes.
So when the Mormons came up with their temple ritual, which is largely ripped off from Masonic rituals,
Part of it was they would put the sacred underwear on you.
Now, in those days, we’re talking back again in the 1840s, 1850s.
Before lycra or spandex.
These are primitive times.
Long before.
And undies in those days were long-sleeved and long-legged and had collars.
And then the Mormons would take marks and sew them into it.
So there’d be…
a mark over each breast and a mark over the navel and a mark over the right knee.
And these related to promises you made in the temple.
In fact, when you go through the temple ceremony, there’s a big, huge veil hanging in front of you that has those very marks in it, large.
And so that’s put on you and you’re supposed to wear that the rest of your life.
Now, as fashions came along, nobody cared that underwear was long, say in 1840.
But eventually hemlines crept up and suddenly we had this thing called short sleeves.
And so they shortened the leg and put these shorter sleeves on the underwear, but it was still one piece.
When I joined the church in 1973, they call them garments, by the way.
When I joined in 1973, the garments were knee length and they had a little cap sleeve and a scoop neck, but they were one piece.
The men’s had a… Onesies.
Onesies, yeah.
The men’s had a little trapdoor in the back and a slit in the front, and the women’s had a slit all the way around.
And you’re supposed to wear these all the time, which… And in a high-demand religion, like Mormonism, people love their rules.
The more they get into it, the more they love their rules.
And so they started multiplying.
Lots of rules.
The thing was, you wear them day and night.
That was the instruction.
You were allowed to remove them to bathe or to have sex.
But a lot of Mormons were just thrilled with the concept of always keeping them on.
You could go to open mic day at church and somebody would stand up and…
and brag about how I always keep at least one arm through my garments when I’m showering.
And this is where I will try to get some sympathy because I am long-legged and my height is in my legs, not so much in my torso.
So when I got my first set of garments that I wore for a few years, they looked at my T-shirt size, which meant I had the cleanest rear end of all the missionaries because the things were just too darn small for me.
Anyhow, I remember when I joined the church, a friend of mine talking about how part of the purpose of these things is to keep you from illicit sex because, you know, they’re kind of inconvenient.
And if you’re with a non-Mormon woman, you sure as heck don’t want her to see these things.
And they’ll never, ever come out with two-piece because that would just be too easy to remove.
A few years later, they came out with two-piece.
And I suspect it’s because the octogenarian prophet was having trouble getting in and out of his garments by that time.
But there are all kinds of stories.
When you receive the garment, it’s officially placed on you when you’re in a temple ceremony.
And you’re told it will be a shield and a protection unto you.
They don’t elucidate.
And that leaves room for lots and lots of stories and rumors.
You know, stories about people who…
Yeah, whose garments protected them.
Somebody stabbed him with a knife and it bent when it hit the garment.
But you get all these faith-promoting rumors.
So I had assumed it was explicitly a spiritual defense, but you’re saying that no, no, no.
There’s or at least there’s some sort of metatextual like it.
There’s at least folklore that it gives you much more than merely spiritual defense.
Yeah, that’s a fair summary.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Metaphorically.
And so, yeah, you’ve got you’ve got the faith promoting rumors that it’s a physical protection, but really it’s supposed to be a spiritual one.
And the church tries to emphasize that.
You know, don’t go standing in front of a bullet.
Right, right, right, right.
I mean, Mitt Romney, I mean, I guess if he’s following the rules.
So if you’re following the rules, everybody’s supposed to wear this if they’re Mormon, right?
Mitt Romney wears them.
Yeah, okay.
And so did, oh, what was his name?
Harry Reid.
Oh, really?
I didn’t know that.
Okay.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
So I joined the church when I lived in Reno, Nevada, and I was 19.
At the time, Harry Reid was lieutenant governor, and he was running for either, I can’t remember if it was Congress or Senate or what, but part of his campaign was to go visit every Sunday school session in Mormondom throughout Nevada and get somebody to introduce him.
He was clearly trying to carry the Mormon vote by just showing up.
And in those days, you know, the Mormons were fewer in number and was, ooh, one of ours is running, we’ll vote for him.
He very much used that.
Well, I feel dumb for not knowing this because Harry Reid was very much tied into Robert Bigelow and the UAP, Art Bell.
sort of ufo culture and the skinwalker ranch uh yeah so yeah i’m not saying that bigelow owned reed but bigelow heavily donated to reed and all that relationship helped mainstream a lot of ufo culture stuff
Oh, I wasn’t aware of that.
Oh, yeah.
No, it’s really interesting how that sort of cash slash Nevada slash now I know Mormon.
I really I’m surprised I didn’t know that.
Yeah.
Are you implying a relationship between politics and cash?
Yeah, a bit, a bit.
Well, I’m since we’re talking famous Mormons, I’m wondering about the Osmonds.
Oh, yeah, they were.
They were.
I think that stretches my knowledge of famous Mormon people.
Well, I mean, they’re a little bit country, but they’re also a little bit rock and roll.
So there was a development in Mormon underwear in the last year.
Like literally in the past year?
Yes.
This is exciting.
Breaking news, folks.
Stand by.
What’s the news?
What’s the news?
Now you can get them sleeveless if you happen to be female.
It’s hot in here.
This was on the heels of lots of research where they were finding a lot of Mormon women were finding excuses not to wear their garments because they’re hot and they’re uncomfortable.
And they like to go sleeveless.
And so they had more and more women saying, well, I’m dressing to go to the gym all day.
Yeah.
I think the church found out they had to compromise.
And so they introduced…
Last year, a sleeveless garment in Africa and other warm climes.
And that was the rationale was it’s just too hot for the cap sleeves.
And what it did was it spawned a bootlegging enterprise over here.
We had people stateside buying the garments overseas, marking them up and selling them here to Mormon women who wanted to go sleeveless.
Wow.
Now they’re available stateside.
And you also have a number of women who are furious because when they wanted to wear tank tops, they were called whores.
They were told they were showing their porn shoulders, and now it’s okay.
Oh, boy.
Yeah, well, I’m going to direct listeners to check out your book, Behind the Mormon Curtain, again, Selling Sex in America’s Holy City.
Oh, thank you.
And just think of the hypocrisy that you uncovered with this book.
I mean, it’s subject for another interview.
But yeah, it’s a fantastic book, Blake.
You’ll have to check it out too.
Steve goes undercover and really exposes so much that’s going on behind the scenes.
It sounds like a lot of stuff’s going on under the covers.
Must you say undercover?
Yeah.
Well, Steve, I don’t know how much you know about this, but I’ve done a lot of reading around this strange, and I don’t think this is a mainstream idea from what I understand, but Mormon…
what would you call it?
I’m not really sure what the right word is.
Extended Mormon lore.
I don’t know.
It’s not from the mainstream stuff.
I don’t know if it’s what you, I don’t really know what the right term is here.
I don’t think it’s exactly folklore, but whatever you would call it when a religion has adjacent material that’s not canonical, but is widely known.
Yeah, it’s fringy.
I guess, let me, Steve, what do you know about Bigfoot in the Mormon religion?
Because there’s some things going on.
Oh, this is wonderful.
Especially now that I live in Oregon.
Bigfoot country.
Yeah, Bigfoot’s my neighbor.
Or at least so I’m told.
We have a Bigfoot museum an hour’s drive from my house.
Well, I mean, don’t we all?
Everybody on this call does.
That’s right.
So there was an early Mormon apostle named, I think,
Patton.
I can’t remember his first name.
David Patton.
David W. Patton.
And he told a story that somebody wrote down in a journal somewhere about how he was riding someplace in his mule.
We’re talking mid 19th century.
He’s running somewhere on his mule.
And suddenly this large hairy man appears next to him so tall that he’s walking alongside Patton on his mule and their heads are at the same height.
And the guy wasn’t wearing any clothes, but he was completely covered in fur.
And he said he had been cursed to wander the earth.
And his job was to try and lead souls to hell.
That was the story as reported.
Okay, now we back up, and again, black people couldn’t hold priesthood, and when the church was casting about for reasons to explain it, they said, oh, well, black people are descended from Cain, because in the Bible, Cain gets a mark placed upon him for killing his brother, and Brigham Young said the mark was the broad nose and the dark skin.
It’s about as cruel as you can get, and so…
People started putting two and two together and decided that that hairy guy, oh, and Cain was cursed to wander the earth.
You may remember the mark was put on him lest anyone who encountered him kill him.
So the idea is that maybe Cain never died.
Ergo, that big hairy guy walking next to David Patton must have been Cain.
And he was also Bigfoot.
So there you have a Mormon…
I don’t know too many Mormons who believe that, but it has been a popular Mormon folklore tale that Cain became Bigfoot.
Yeah, that’s…
There are…
I believe it’s in religious studies.
There’s some journal articles I can link to.
I’ve been curious about this for a while.
I think one of our listeners and a colleague and a friend, Justin Mullis, sent me some links that I can put into the show notes for that.
But yeah, it’s something that’s intrigued me for a long time because one of…
The most prominent, I’m not going to air quote it, but scientist who is interested in Bigfoot and is a proponent of Bigfoot and recently passed away was Jeff Meldrum.
And he was a Mormon.
And I think I’ve always.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
And I was very curious to what extent his fascination with Bigfoot might have come from this sort of Bigfoot slash Mormon perspective.
folklore that was like kind of bopping around in the in the air but yeah yeah and i’m not saying in any way that jeff promoted this idea at all i think he was aware of it though and so i i it’s it’s definitely something i’ve been interested in would like to know more about and there is again i’ll put some links in the show notes about that
We should start to wrap things up pretty soon, I think, unfortunately, even though we could just talk for hours about all these interesting topics.
But I’d like to finish with one more that I’d like to ask you about.
We hear, I guess, those of us who are non-Mormons, we hear about things like if you’re a…
If you become a Mormon, you will, or men in particular, will own their own planet.
I’ve heard that.
A fundamentalist belief.
But one of the topics that you raised was that we can become gods.
So can you tell us, Steve, a bit about how we can all, is this just for white men or is this for all Mormons?
Now it’s all Mormons.
Well, asterisk, there’s a footnote and restrictions apply.
So it is a Mormon doctrine that you can become gods, that we are children of God and we’re here to learn and grow.
And in the hereafter, eventually we become gods ourselves and we populate our own planets and become gods under those people.
That is a Mormon doctrine.
The church is doing its best to distance itself from that, which I’m finding very curious because, yes, it’s quite scriptural.
Read the Doctrine and Covenants, which is a book of Mormon scripture besides the Book of Mormon, and it’s pretty clear.
So, but it sounds so ridiculous when you say we’re going to get our own planet.
So the church, you know, church members are now saying, well, we don’t believe we’re going to get our own planet.
It is a doctrine.
And that’s the best I can give you.
They’re weaseling.
They’re trying not to emphasize that, but it is very much a doctrine.
Joseph Smith himself in what was called the King Follett discourse said something like, if you could see God as he is, you would see a man sitting on his throne.
And we have got to learn to become gods ourselves because that’s our destiny.
Children of God grow up to be God.
I can remember a talk by one of the Mormon apostles, Boyd K. Packer, where he said, you know, kittens grow up to be cats, puppies grow up to be dogs, humans grow up to be gods.
Now, the caveat to that is only the most righteous and valiant people, meaning Mormons, of course,
We’ll get that privilege.
There are several degrees in heaven, and only those who attain the top degree will attain unto godhood.
And the men will be gods, and the women will be goddesses and priestesses to their husbands.
It’s the husbands who are the gods.
The women may be godlike, but they’re kind of like, you know, assistant gods in a way.
And this brings us around to polygamy again.
If you’re a Mormon woman and you’re valiant and your husband is not in the hereafter, you’ll be reassigned as a plural wife to somebody who was valiant up there in the hereafter.
Ah, phew.
Well, these planets don’t claim themselves.
Exactly.
Yeah, gosh, it sounds a lot like Scientology, too.
It appeals to the egotistical and the narcissist.
Oh, yeah.
And that hit home for me in particular because I’m a widower, and I had decided the church was baloney while my wife was still alive.
She declined very quickly in her health.
She knew I no longer believed in the church.
She still had faith.
And somewhere in the back of her mind, I’m sure she was thinking, in the hereafter, I’m going to be a plural wife to somebody else because my husband doesn’t believe anymore.
It was a pretty cruel doctrine.
Yeah.
It’s real-world effects of these kinds of things.
Oh, yeah.
Lots of opportunity for judgmentalism.
Indeed.
Wow.
Well, are you seeing we should go ahead and wind up, Karen?
Yeah, still so many good topics.
I don’t know if you want to…
Bryce, anything else?
Oh, I have so many questions.
I mean, we typically steer away from religion, again, because, I mean, first of all, so many people… All of this is paranormal.
Yeah, but it is quite, quite.
And it’s interesting.
I mean, I don’t think we’re singling out the Mormons because every religion has peculiar ideas.
I mean, that’s…
They just do.
They just do, right?
One of my books looks at the Mormon church’s 13 articles of faith, and one of the things I write in the wrap-up is, look, no matter what church you’re in, if you dig deep enough, you’re going to find stuff that’s weird.
True enough.
True enough.
Can I return to polygamy again real quickly?
Well, I mean, we certainly want to.
Yeah.
You very kindly plugged my book about prostitution in Utah, and I’m grateful because I’m proud of that one.
But the one I wrote before that.
Such a good book.
Thank you.
Well, and you helped with that.
I run my books past Karen before I publish them, and you gave me good feedback.
You called me on being a typical male in a couple of instances when I was writing that thing, and I appreciate that.
Oh, well, it was such an honor, though.
Just a different perspective is what I offered.
And I mentioned earlier, Blake, it was polygamy that brought Karen and me together because I had dated a former polygamist wife.
After my wife died, I met a woman who had been in a polygamist cult for seven years.
Joanna, right?
Joanna, yes.
But by the time Joanna and I met, the murders were pretty well done.
And so we came up with this book, her memoir, and we realized nobody else had done a funny polygamy memoir, so we wrote It’s Not About the Sex of My Ass.
And, you know, I was going to make a point with this besides just plugging the book, but I forgot what it is.
But it’s a good book, and everybody should read it.
And so this is how Karen and I met.
So I read God Bless America, and her first chapter was on…
Mormon polygamy and as I said earlier it was absolutely spot on so I wrote Karen and said hey would you like to read my book and thus we became friends oh yeah and it was I mean it just I did research it was just from a kind of I guess from the outside looking in viewpoint and so to read a story about someone who was actually within the system and to meet Steve and all of his experiences someone who’s
had that lived experience and then come out of the church was just really such a different perspective for me.
But yeah, just Steve has been a good friend all of these years.
And yeah, we’ve got an interesting connection.
Well, Steve, if you’ve checked out a few episodes of Monster Talk, you have to know what the next question is going to be.
My favorite monster.
Yeah, exactly.
Steve Kuno.
Kuno, I say.
Well done.
What is your favorite monster?
I would have to say my favorite monster is that thing that was under my bed when I was like three or four.
And it came out and made faces at me every time the lights went out.
Classic.
You know, it often brings up, this is a monster I believe has been with us for a long time, but where did it live before we invented beds?
That’s what has been haunting me.
In cupboards and yeah.
Yeah.
It lived in caves.
Yeah, I agree.
I really do think it was like the monster that’s always just in the shadow, just outside.
But see, when I was that age, we lived in upstate New York.
And I think it’s still, I don’t know if the bed is still there, but the monster is still there.
Almost certainly.
After he moved west, he didn’t bother me.
I love that answer, though.
I mean, we often talk about…
Yeah.
About the monster under the bed and just shining the light on that, that monster.
And so, yeah, that’s, and we’ve never had that answer before.
I don’t think so.
And it is, it is the most primal.
It’s the, it is the, it’s the one I don’t, I’ve never met anyone who didn’t think that when they were a child, there was a monster either under the bed or in their closet.
Well, Steve, it was really nice to meet you.
Thank you so much for taking time to talk with us tonight.
The pleasure has been mine.
Thank you both so much.
Well, yeah, really good to hear your voice and I’m still hoping that we can do lunch someday.
We’ll see what happens.
My travel is kind of limited, but Portland is here and please come.
Yeah, we will see.
Of course, we’ll keep in touch.
Very good.
And I hope I haven’t lost you too many listeners today.
Yeah.
No, I’m sure you gained readers.
Exactly.
All right.
But when’s this coming out then?
Like about, is this going to be next week or two weeks?
No, no, no, no.
It’ll probably be like four weeks.
We’re ahead of the game here.
So yeah, I’ll send you an email, but probably about four weeks.
So early April.
Okay.
I will look for it and then I will go hide in shame.
It was really nice to meet you, Steve.
Thanks so much.
Thank you both.
All right.
Good night, everybody.
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 an interview with our guest author Steve Kuno about paranormal beliefs and practices in the Mormon religion.
Check out the show notes that link to Steve’s books and to some of the ideas that we talked about, including the Mormon conception of Bigfoot.
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 S05E24 – ParaMormonal Activity with Steve Cuno appeared first on MonsterTalk.

Part two of our discussion of the interesting made-for-TV film The Stately Ghosts of England(1965). Blake and Karen are joined by Matt Baxter and this is a continuation of part 1. The film stars Margaret Rutherford, her husband Stringer Davis, and celebrity clairvoyant Tom Corbett.

Blake noticed early use on screen of ghost hunting equipment like time-lapse cameras.

Blake suspects this was not so much “night vision” as just a red filter.

And parabolic microphones!

The electrical technician who monitored “the haunted corridor” is interviewed.

Finally, Blake loved the use of fonts and artistic transitions and how simple and elegant the closing credits were.

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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come from the bottom part of this lane here, oddly enough, where we are now, and as if it was coming from the abbey there.
Oh, yes.
It was a wonderful feeling of peace.
It seemed to take away all my tiredness after a long day.
How I wish I could hear it.
I wonder if I should have the ears to hear.
You may, you may not.
Maybe tonight.
You’ll have to wait till around midnight.
Never mind.
We will keep tryst.
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.
Welcome to part two of our two-part coverage of 1965’s The Stately Ghosts of England.
An NBC made-for-TV movie about haunted estates in England, with an interesting cast featuring the husband-and-wife team of actress Margaret Rutherford and her husband Stringer Davis, along with celebrity clairvoyant Tom Corbett, tour a trio of homes to find evidence of the paranormal.
If this isn’t the first such television show, it’s certainly pioneering in the field and includes some use of early ghost gear to try and capture something unusual, including time-lapse photography and parabolic microphones.
Check out the show notes for links to the full movie and the book upon which it was based.
Now, let’s continue part two, our stately Ghosts of England coverage.
Monster Talk
Let’s go from there to our Salisbury Steakhouse.
Salisbury Hall.
So Hertfordshire, East England.
And I’m saying Hertfordshire because Blake screws it up.
Hey, now.
Salisbury Hall, this is a tough one to initiate.
Close to St Albans.
So Matt and Blade and I, we went there last year.
It is a fantastic town of old Roman settlements, a bustling modern city today.
But Salisbury Hall is, well, they described as being a small…
premises but I think it’s still very beautiful currently owned by a Mr and Mrs Goldsmith well I think I think they’re still the owners but this was reputed to be the home of Nell Gwynn so I’m sure lots of our listeners will have heard of her so she was a
an actress in the 17th century, but probably more well-known to us today as a mistress of King Charles II.
And I did laugh when Margaret Rutherford said, the king’s mistresses were notorious and legion.
The king’s mistresses were notorious and legion.
Very appropriate for St Albans.
Yeah.
So the claims are that visitors and researchers have reported…
general hauntings, cold spots, eerie atmosphere and the ghost of Nell Gwynn as well.
And what I thought was amusing was when they started speaking about, or the owner said that he’d never seen her.
And then he said, well, actually, Nell Gwynn’s ghost was seen by Sir Winston Churchill’s stepfather.
So you think they’re going to say by Sir Winston Churchill, but no, it’s his stepfather.
No less a person than Sir Winston Churchill’s stepfather.
But then it’s said that Sir Winston Churchill had seen the ghost of…
Abraham Lincoln when he stayed at the White House.
So maybe he was sensitive to this kind of thing.
Imagine Abraham Lincoln appearing and saying, put out that cigar, please.
I will let Matt talk a little bit about Tom’s findings here.
Oh, Tom’s findings here.
Tom is our psychical clairvoyant, or excuse me, celebrity clairvoyant.
Celebrity clairvoyant.
Society clairvoyant.
Society clairvoyant, yeah.
Society celebrity clairvoyant, not a medium.
No, no, he was…
He’s a large.
Extra large.
So, yeah, this one was interesting.
I mean…
What I remember them hearing were footsteps.
That there was, you know, someone as a…
I think the lady at the house when she was a little girl growing up.
And that was a sister, wasn’t it?
Or was it a wife?
I don’t think we ever found out.
I believe that was his wife, Mrs. Goldsmith, is how they referred to her.
And she talked about how when she was a little girl, she was sick.
She had a horrible cold.
And she heard these footsteps coming down the hall.
She thought that someone was coming to check on her.
And yet the footsteps went one way and never came back.
And she found a letter, I believe, of someone who had lived there before that had also stated the same things, that these footsteps could be heard.
And it’s just kind of interesting because I believe that Tom had found out that, oh, you know, was there something behind this wall?
Was there a fire or something?
So there was nothing there now, but it used to be.
the hallway would continue down.
Right, the fire burned down that whole wing of the house.
Yeah, that was another wing of the house that had burned down.
I believe 1813, I think, is when that had burned down.
So the ghost…
walks down the hall and through the wall, and they only hear the footsteps going one way.
So that was an interesting thing.
But it seemed like there was another ghost.
Oh, that was the extra ghost.
That was a ghost on top of Nell Gwynn.
Yeah, because Nell Gwynn was the…
the impish gutter snipe, I believe she was referred to.
And when you have Margaret Rutherford calling you an impish gutter snipe, she made it sound like a good thing.
And I was amazed just what an accent can do.
She was 18, a redheaded, impish, witty, loyal gutter snipe who had made her way up from the streets to be an orange seller, to be eventually the best loved actress and comedian of her day.
Well, Nellie came from the poorest streets of London, where life was lived to its fullest, and pleasure taken when and where one might.
But then as soon as Tom tells you about this second ghost… Did it feel like there was things?
She worked her way up from being an impoverished imp to being the king’s whore.
Right.
Exactly.
Okay.
But I do want to add, too, that Mrs. Goldsmith, I thought it was just…
suspect that she had been drugged up when she had this experience.
Yeah, because she had such a bad cold.
Had a few hot toddies.
Probably.
Those are medicinal.
I didn’t get the feel.
You guys may have felt differently.
The vibe I got from this is this is posh celebrity ghosts
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
This is not proof of life after death.
This is proof that…
ghosts also have class, like they have a class structure, right?
But it really didn’t feel like I was supposed to initially believe.
I was just supposed to believe that if you have a fancy house in England, it’s probably haunted.
That was the thing I was supposed to believe.
I don’t know.
Yeah, yeah.
And it was well done because I think that message really came across.
And one of the interesting things that I didn’t see…
And the credits that you do see in the credits of most ghost hunting shows these days is for entertainment purposes only.
Oh, yeah.
Because that should have been there.
Oh, true believers.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
But as soon as Tom talks about the second ghost, he says that, oh, you’re wrong.
There is more than two.
There’s a third one that I met on the bridge.
And then they didn’t say anything else.
Yeah, well, she gets just, again, I think Margaret Rutherford at this point ends up in the…
the the hangar and finds the the airplane wasn’t that cool and surprising with the mosquito fighter yeah yeah uh and it’s uh so and she’s like oh another ghost um the prototype of the gallant little mosquito fighter bomber um you won’t find that in council housing right that’s interesting
In the infield house, yeah.
That’s right.
Exactly, exactly.
But while she’s walking back, you overhear Tom on the bridge talking about the third ghost.
So we don’t get to hear much about it other than she’s really nice.
Yeah, she was a woman.
But what does he then say about Nell Gwynn?
So we basically have Margaret Rutherford asking Tom, can you feel her presence?
Is she here with us?
What does he say?
Yes, yes.
You do it so well.
It’s basically, yes, she’s here, but she’s fading.
I don’t believe she’ll be coming here for very much longer.
Fading, she is.
Yeah.
She’s reaching her state of rest.
She’s very definitely here.
Is she here?
I mean, is she in our midst?
Oh, yes, without a doubt.
but she’s fading.
I don’t think she’ll come to this house much longer because she appears to me as though she’s finally reaching her state of rest.
So there you go.
I want to kind of like tie this bit up with a bow before we go on to Bowley, Bewley.
But I looked into this because I just, I wondered if Nell Gwynn had actually ever lived there.
And so it’s a little bit more complicated.
That’s bold.
She lived here.
She gave birth to their first son upstairs.
This was such a romance.
And she says, this, this is Nellie’s house where she loved and laughed and to which she now returns.
And she didn’t.
actually live there.
What?
She didn’t live there.
She spent some time at a cottage on the grounds, but she actually lived in London, in Palmore.
So she didn’t live there.
I don’t know if she gave birth there.
There might be some documentation on that, but her spirit apparently doesn’t linger there because she used to visit…
Charles, when he was going there to attend to business matters.
And that was the cottage that she stayed in.
And presumably he stayed with her there.
So she didn’t live in the house.
So how could she possibly be haunting the place?
Wow.
There you go.
She’s faded.
Well, that’s a bummer.
I feel like the rug’s been pulled out from under me and now I’m questioning everything.
Anyway, I guess we should move on to the third and final property.
So we have Beaulieu, and that’s in Hampshire.
So it’s Beaulieu, the palace house.
Which I would have totally thought was Beaulieu.
Beaulieu or Beaulieu.
And I’ve actually heard different pronunciations, but Beaulieu is the most common pronunciation and the one that they use in Stately Ghosts.
So let’s go with that.
And this is owned by the Montague family, but they will – Still owned by them.
They’ll capulet it out to renters.
So next door you have the crumbling abbey ruins dating back to 1204.
So going back to the time of King John, who’s of Magna Carta fame, was forced to sign the Magna Carta.
But it was run by the Cistercian monks.
I love that word.
Cistercian.
It just sounds so cool.
It sounds cool.
I don’t know what it means, but it sounds cool.
It means a German shepherd.
Oh, that’s Alsatian.
Sorry.
Cistercian is a flower.
It does sound like Cistercian.
We used to have those growing in our backyard in Sydney.
But anyway, we’re digressing a lot tonight.
So Beaulieu is haunted or said to be haunted by a grey lady and a blue lady.
So, again, we go back to the idea that ghosts, you know, aren’t seen in colour because of the ectoplasm, but they talk about a grey lady and a blue lady and they talk about specifically phantom monks, as they say, chanting.
And the sounds of bells as well.
So there is a church nearby.
It’s the Beaulieu Abbey Church or Church of the Blessed Virgin and Holy Child.
So it’s Anglican.
That sounds a bit Catholic to me.
It does.
But it’s not because this place was wound up into the whole disillusion of the monasteries.
Henry VIII basically…
seizing the wealth of all of these uh these churches and right which i thought was it that the little side quest thing was the cistercians were a subset of the benedictines and they were saying how that they had originally had a poverty vow but then by the time henry the eighth uh does his whole i get to divorce and i also get to keep all the catholic wealth thing uh they had already sort of gotten corrupted from the original values and had wealth apparently so
Yeah, yeah.
So apparently they had been, I think, pretty legit at one point and then were viewed to be, I think, heavy drinkers and stashing wealth and all kinds of corruption was going on.
But, yeah, certainly earlier on they were very well known for their commemoration of the dead.
And so at Bewley, there are lots of claims of people chanting at 2 a.m. in the smell of incense and people seeing monks, in particular a monk in a brown habit on the ground.
If somebody woke me up at 2 a.m. chanting, I would be incensed.
That’s a fact.
This was all really an enigma.
Yep.
The Lord said, I was in the water.
For everyone who remembers our 1990s electronica chanting phase.
That was a big thing.
No, no, I didn’t know about that.
Oh, yeah, that was a big thing, yeah.
It was the hotness.
I was going to talk about Tarboli Rectory and the reclaims of the sound of chanting.
But I did some digging into those claims.
Some of the claims at Beaulieu are that people can smell incense.
And that makes me think of some research that I did into Borley Rectory, where some of the residents, especially the foisters, would talk about the smell of incense or the smell of perfume or…
bacon even wafting through the premises at night and in doing a little bit of research into that it seems that there was a company that wasn’t too far away maybe a kilometer away or which is a little under a mile away called Bush Boken Allen and my father used to talk about them so it was a company that made perfumes and they made syrups too so like brown sugar syrups and honey syrups and
various syrups for foods.
And so I think that that was accounting for those strange smells that they were getting.
And there might be something like that taking place at Beaulieu if we think in terms of natural explanations over paranormal ones.
But, yeah, that’s one of the claims.
But the sister, the sister who was saying that.
Margaret Thatcher.
Yeah.
I saw Ms. Slocum from Are You Being Served?
Stunning hair.
Stunning, stunning hair.
She was talking about that incense while standing next to a bunch of flowers.
And I’m sure that there have always been flowers in the house.
That’s a good point.
Beautiful gardens, yeah.
Oh, totally.
You can see Stringer Davis, like, knocking her away.
No, you fool.
You’re doing this terribly.
I did think that was a fun story, though.
It was.
She’d heard the chanting and then she spoke with, I think it was a friend of hers, and she just started mindlessly playing a tune of the chanting that she’d heard.
And this friend then said, oh, so you heard it too.
I thought that was creepy.
Yeah.
They were very loud last night.
But what I want to draw your attention to, Blake, I don’t know if you picked up on this, but there was an interview with a guy, they referred to him as Michael Sedgwick, and I think he referred to himself as an author.
Here’s a little informational insert on Mr. Sedgwick.
Michael C. Sedgwick, 1926 to 1983, was a British motoring historian, author, and curator who served as a preeminent authority on automotive history.
Educated at Winchester and Corpus Christi, Oxford, Sedgwick began his career in publishing in 1948 before becoming the curator of the Montague Motor Museum, now the National Motor Museum, at Buley in 1958.
During his eight-year tenure, he established the museum’s library master index and conducted extensive research for several major works by Lord Montague.
Although he resigned his curatorship in 1966 to pursue freelance research and writing, he remained an integral figure at Bewley as director of research and a member of its advisory council until his death.
In 1984, the Michael Sedgwick Memorial Trust was established in his honor to support scholarly research and publication within the field of motoring history.
Sedgwick’s association with the 1965 television documentary The Stately Ghosts of England arose from his first-hand experiences while residing on the Beaulieu estate.
In the film,
He provided a measured account of an unexplained event from December of 1959 in which he observed quite definitely chanting, drifting in uneven waves from a hill opposite his residence late at night.
Sedgwick noted that he had unsuccessfully checked his radio for a Latin service at the time, only later discovering a potential correlation with a local villager’s death.
Rather than definitively attributing the sound to the abbey ruins or identifying it specifically as Gregorian chant, Sedgwick’s testimony offered a historical and personal narrative of auditory phenomenon linked to the estate’s monastic past, contributing to the broader folklore of the site.
But when he spoke about the experience that he’d had, that I think he was sitting there, he was in a cottage on the premises.
and maybe Nell Gwynne lived there as well, but he spoke about how he’d heard the heavy and painful sounds of men carrying a burden down the garden.
So a burden, they’re referring to a coffin.
And that made me think of the Lord Dufferin.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
I thought, oh, my God, that’s some kind of omen that a death in the village had occurred that day.
And he referred to that, too, and said that.
It did in every way sound like they were hiding a body.
It really did.
It really did.
So I thought, oh, Lord Dufferin.
And again, it’s just these stories coming out in.
You know, the same stories, you know, ghosts, ghostly monks and ghostly nuns and ghostly coffins, but just different premises, but same stories.
The chanting was an interesting addition to this one, though.
The monks.
Well, yes.
And I, yeah, when we were watching that, Matt, it just made me think about…
some of the investigations that you’ve done and one in particular you’d spoken about, I think it was in Colorado Springs.
Do you want to tell us a bit about that?
Something that could possibly account for the apparent sounds of chanting?
Well, they were referring to this chanting as kind of fading in and out, like it was on a bad radio station or something, a distant radio station.
So, yeah, when you brought that up, yes, exact same thing happened in this place that I was investigating in Colorado Springs, which was an old church that had been converted into a newspaper office.
It was the Colorado Springs Independent.
and uh spending the night in there now these these you could hear the sounds of a choir singing uh in the middle of the night in there and it only happened at night yeah um and it was probably i was just part way through the night i realized what it was that was making the noise that was making this this choir sing and that was uh snow tires
driving down I-25 in Colorado Springs, not too far from the church.
And snow tires have those nice little studs in the metal studs.
And when there’s no snow on the road, they sing.
The tires will just sing on the road.
And of course you get a Doppler effect where as they’re coming near you, the sound goes up in pitch.
And when it goes away from you, it goes down in pitch.
So you’ve got multiple different pitches going and they almost get to this point of harmonizing with each other.
And you get into a place that has a lot of interesting acoustics, like a church.
And you have a choir singing for you.
Now, with all the noise and everything else that goes on during the day that we don’t really pay attention to, you don’t notice any of it in the daytime.
But at nighttime, when everything is calm, you start noticing this.
So I thought, I wonder if something like that could be happening.
And there, absolutely, because tires during that time were called a bias ply tires.
And the rubber was harder.
The spacing of the tread blocks, it was more uniform.
They were evenly spaced.
They weren’t very acoustically engineered at all.
They were ribbed in like a zigzag sort of pattern on the treads.
For her pleasure.
Exactly.
And a lot of the roads during like the 1950s, when they were hearing this so much, were a grooved concrete.
And they were like large slabs with expansion joints and everything.
You do that on like I-10 if you’re going through Louisiana.
Yeah, exactly.
oh life could be a dream if i could take you up in paradise up above if you would tell me i’m the only one that you love life could be a dream sweetheart hello hello again um yeah that’s that’s how that song was uh written um but uh the thing the thing is is is
People have referred to those as singing tires, or they would hear the highway hum or the concrete choir.
These were normal for people to refer to these kind of sounds this way.
And it would, at night, there would be probably less traffic than there would be during the day.
So it would fade in and out.
And the sounds would rise and fall.
And there were plenty of roads around there that could have generated these sounds.
But at night, when you’re creeped out just slightly, your mind does the rest.
Your mind just takes over it.
We like to interpret patterns and everything else.
That’s what we do.
But it does.
It sounds like multiple voices.
And it just…
You know, if your windows are slightly open, like with the author there, he opened up the windows because he was letting all the smoke out from him smoking.
So he let all the smoke out opening the window and that’s when he heard it.
And, you know, so if like you’re fatigued and it’s nighttime and the landscape is kind of empty.
Your brain really loves to anthropomorphize.
That’s right.
They had that member of staff who they interviewed as well, and she spoke about hearing the sounds at midnight, so not 2 a.m., but she spoke about having a long day and hearing the sounds lifted her, picked up her spirits, and made her feel less tired, even though it was midnight.
Yeah, I think that’s rather telling.
But I also looked into wildlife in the area just to see if the sounds of animals could account for the sounds because we’re going to talk about this end bit in a second where we hear, I guess, toads and frogs and things like that.
But the area is part of…
the New Forest National Park.
Which we’ve talked about the New Forest before because that ties in with the birth of Wicca.
And Gerald Gardner claimed that his original magical learnings came from an old witch from the New Forest.
Well, yeah, a magical place that has…
I thought this was really interesting.
It’s home to free-roaming ponies and donkeys and deer.
So you’ve got all kinds of…
creatures there that could be making sounds as well that could be misconstrued.
But the show actually wraps up at this point because they go outside the walls of the Abbey and they do a stakeout.
They do, with sound equipment.
So it looks real modern, very modern.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, it’s like a modern stakeout.
Let me throw in here to say, if you want to watch this video, there’s a one…
one video version that cuts off.
It starts early without the beginning and it cuts off without the ending.
But there’s a two-parter that has all the information.
So I’m going to link to the two-parter in the show notes.
So if you want to see the whole thing, that’s the way to do it.
Well, yeah, it’s 50 minutes long, but I think there’s a little bit more that we want to discuss at the end here.
But when they listen and then you hear the bells from the local church, so they don’t hear the chanting, they’re disappointed, but she sums up the program and she sums up her personal feelings when she says, let those deny who will.
I, for one, will choose to believe in them.
So that’s how they…
Finish the show.
As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.
Yeah, it sounds very biblical.
It sounds a little biblical.
It certainly does.
But I thought what was interesting is a kind of, I guess, a postscript to all of this, and that is that Bewley was investigated in quotey fingers by Most Haunted, one of their live episodes back in 2003 with Derek.
We’ve mentioned him a couple of times, Derek Okora.
I don’t know where to begin with that episode.
We should almost cover that, I think, for a separate episode of Monster Talk to talk about their findings and just they have a sceptic on the show and they have a historian who’s absolutely not a sceptic and they talk about the monks and they said Derek kept referring to these monks.
as having been there in the 1700s, the 18th century.
But the monks would have been gone by the mid-16th century.
Yeah.
With Henry VIII getting rid of them, it would have been, I think, by the 1530s or 1540s.
By that time, I think they would have all been gone.
So he was just making stuff up.
And what did you make of that?
We suffered the entire episode.
Well, it was a live episode, so they had huge audiences sitting out there on folding chairs.
And it was ice cold.
It was so cold out there.
And it was like…
You know, there used to be a TV network or channel called Spike TV.
Do you remember that, Blake?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, they did the Bigfoot challenge.
They did, yes.
Yes, but they had so many shows.
They literally geared their show to be like, this is a man program for man-type men.
But the thing is, they had a lot of, like, spring break-type shows that were live.
And everybody that they would go, oh, yeah, I’m having fun here.
Woo!
You know, it was the same, and that’s how the crowd was.
Yes, and that’s what this show was, this live Most Haunted.
One skeptic in the audience, and she was shamed, and one skeptic who ended up bringing down Derek a couple of years later, and then that must have been very satisfying for him because all of these, throughout these years, the producer of it…
fielding that annoying host said there’s no acting on this program none whatsoever everything you see and hear is real so that’s a quote so she said that and then a couple of years later she’s saying well we tell people that everything is real but then it turns out that he’s a fake so he had to go but then they replaced him with someone else but I think that that’s deserving of a separate episode because of everything that goes on
It was an amazing episode, and yeah, we probably should talk about it.
I did want to talk about the end of the stately ghosts of London, though, or of England, because it –
At the very end, what I did is I turned on the captions on the YouTube thing so I could, you know, see what was being said.
I understand the British accent.
Yes, because I just couldn’t keep up.
Well, you know, sometimes they would talk over each other or whatever.
And there was like one line where.
Was it Lord Montague that said, come and eat my sister?
No, I want you to come and eat my sister.
Yes.
That’s what it sounded like.
Blake, did you hear that?
I didn’t notice that, no.
Yeah, he said, come and eat my sister.
But both Karen and I looked at each other because we swore.
He said, come along now and eat my sister.
No, I want you to come and eat my sister.
And it was like, what?
What?
and uh so i had the captions on and then i did a transcript from those captions and
it does say eat my sister in the caption.
Just so you know, just so you know.
So there’s some cannibalism going on there as well.
But the thing is, or other things, the thing is, is at the end when they are sitting there and you just hear the frogs croaking really loud for the choir.
This is, this is what’s interesting about voice to text.
The captions thought that the frogs said, foreign, so you.
So the frogs knew that I was not from there.
Wow.
Wow, I think that’s the most paranormal aspect of this.
It is, it is.
It is really, it is very cool in the end.
They’re basically sitting there in the ruins of the abbey.
The camera’s pulling out.
They’ve got all this fancy sound equipment, like they’ve got like a…
uh what parabolic mics they don’t really comment on it but you can see if you know what it is that’s what it is yeah it’s it’s well it’s something kind of beautiful about it and and sad too because i mean she’s up in years and she has her biggest successes in the next couple of years because she receives her her uh oscar and then she received becomes a dame and then a couple of years later she’s gone so this is something kind of poignant about
That scene, I think.
Yeah, yeah, quite.
So, yeah.
But anyway, so in conclusion, I want to say, first of all, thanks for bringing this up because I had not seen this before.
I didn’t realize the significance.
It was extraordinarily entertaining and wholesome.
And while I may not agree with the conclusions that they drew, it’s really neat to see this sort of prototypical example of what would become paranormal media.
We did see a ghost in it, though.
We did see a ghost.
Oh, oh.
Yeah, Karen, what they drove up in.
Oh, that.
That’s right.
Yeah, the Rolls Royce Silver Ghost.
Yeah.
Gorgeous car.
Gorgeous car.
Yeah, still on display at Buley.
Oh, nice.
Well, they had the fabulous Lord Montague drive up in that, in the episode of Most Haunted, didn’t he?
He’s like, oh my God, that’s the Silver Ghost.
It’s the same one.
Wow.
Comes with the estate.
Okay, good to know.
What a bargain.
It is really, it’s fun to watch.
Yeah, as you say, it’s wholesome.
I guess it’s still in the Hayes era, isn’t it?
1960s.
But it does seem to really predate ghost hunting, ghost hunting culture, haunted houses, and also just the fact that they talk about this being bad for business in those days.
Now it’s the source of business today.
Yeah, exactly.
What an inversion.
Well worth watching, and I think our listeners are going to enjoy watching it.
It is quite literally a gorgeous bit of film.
I mean, the colors are really rich.
They don’t make them like this anymore.
That’s a fact.
So maybe for our benefit, but still.
Well, I’m enjoying all of these archives, and so I think we’ll continue to do these shows.
So we’ve had a lot of good response to these.
Good deal.
All right.
Well, thanks so much for bringing it to my attention and to the listeners’ attention.
And thanks for joining us once again for an in-depth discussion of media that probably doesn’t get this much attention normally.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, there isn’t enough.
There’s really nothing out there on this.
We’re the only ones right now.
All right.
You guys have a great night.
I really enjoyed chatting with you about this.
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 two of our two-part look at the 1965 television special, The Stately Ghosts of England.
While we didn’t find it to contain a smoking gun proof of the paranormal or psychical, it does seem to serve as a template of sorts for what eventually becomes ghost hunting television in the 21st century.
Shows like Most Haunted certainly owe something of their format to this special.
Interestingly, self-proclaimed clairvoyant Tom Corbett also went on to consult on the Richard Matheson horror movie The Legend of Hell House.
So even though I didn’t recall him when I saw him on this movie, I had seen his influence before.
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 S05E23 – The Stately Ghosts of England (pt2) appeared first on MonsterTalk.

Blake and Karen are joined by Matt Baxter to discuss the 1965 made-for-TV film The Stately Ghosts of England. The film stars Margaret Rutherford, her husband Stringer Davis, and celebrity clairvoyant Tom Corbett.

The film was directed by Frank De Felita who previously cam up in our  DEBASED ON A TRUE STORY about The Entity, which he also wrote.

The movie was based on the book by Diana Normond which you can read on The Internet Archive.

You can watch the entire film on The Internet Archive as well.

The “on screen” interstitials and notices were something to behold.

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

———————
Monster House Presents
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Now, I’ve never actually myself seen or heard the supernatural, but I can remember in my lifetime servants walking all miles around the passages rather than to go down that corridor at night.
And in any case, I can promise Mr. Corbett sufficient work for any medium here at Longleat tonight.
Well, Mr. Corbett isn’t a medium.
He’s a clairvoyant.
Mediums claim to be in touch with the spirit world through a guide, a long-dead man or woman whose job it is to bridge the gulf between the living and the dead.
But clairvoyants make no such claim.
I just happen to be born with a gift.
I can see ghosts.
I can’t exercise nor tell them to go away, but when they’re around, I can see them.
Well, if that’s the case, we might as well get on with the job.
It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature, part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24 mile long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland, it’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
This week and next week, we’re taking a look at a made-for-TV special produced by NBC in 1965.
Karen and Matt watched it on YouTube and brought it up as a show topic, and I was surprised at how enjoyable I found it.
When we got together to talk about the film, we ended up chatting for more than an hour, so I split this into two parts.
This film is directed by Frank DiFalita, who was a novelist, director, screenwriter, and enthusiastic researcher of the paranormal.
His novel, Audrey Rose, was adapted into a supernatural horror film, as was his, based on a true story novel and screenplay, The Entity, which explores the claims of Doris Bither and the paranormal researchers who studied her case.
We discussed that film in our series, Based on a True Story, and I’ll put a link to that in the show notes.
But The Stately Ghosts of England is not a particularly controversial or sensational film.
It’s more of a cozy exploration of venerable British homes and the well-to-do occupants who claim to share their residence with ghosts of previous tenants.
So here’s the thing.
When we started researching to put these episodes together, I realized that from a high level, the movie has all the elements of what would later become reality TV ghost hunting shows.
Now, in one sense, this movie is sort of recapitulating the kinds of investigations that the Society for Psychical Research conducted for decades.
And that influenced things like Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, which itself quite openly used SPR archives for inspiration.
The movie version of that novel, The Haunting, came out in 1963, just two years before this film.
And while the homes selected were inspired by the eponymous book by Diana Norman, which itself came into being in 1963, the structure and atmosphere feel indebted to Jackson’s novel.
Diana Norman was invited to work with self-described clairvoyant Tom Corbett, and the book she wrote describes visits to well-known English homes like Longleat, Woburn Abbey, Little Coat, Burford Priory, and others.
As Norman describes Corbett walking through these homes sensing spirits, it will be a familiar experience to anyone who’s watched reality TV shows with alleged psychic clairvoyance mediums.
The TV movie only deals with three of these homes, and in part one, we’ll get as far as Longleat.
Part two will take us to Salisbury Hall in Bewley.
If you want to see the film, there is a complete version on the Internet Archive, and I’ve linked to that in the show notes.
Monster Talk.
The whole gang’s back together.
It’s good stuff.
Back together, and here to talk about yet another one of those…
BBC archival videos that YouTube keeps suggesting, recommending to Matt and I.
And this one is the stately ghosts of England.
I keep going to say stately homes or houses of England, but I guess that is the impression that they’re trying to give with this.
So it was actually an NBC News production and a 50-minute special that aired back in 1965.
And so The Stately Ghost of England was inspired by a book of the same name written by Diana Norman back in 63, so a couple of years before this aired.
The Norman Conquest, got it.
I’ve seen her name, yes, spelt in different names, but we’ll go with that anyway.
But her book details visits to 11 English country houses.
So she looks at other locations too, Woburn Abbey, Camfield Place, and Little Coat.
So some of our listeners might be familiar with some of those places, but certainly the three that we’re going to be talking
talking about tonight.
And Blake, I know that you’re particularly interested in this aspect of the show and of the book too, that it seems to predate the big boom in haunted houses, even though these stories go way back, but certainly the ghost hunting culture aspect.
And it seems to really show ghost hunting techniques of the past and was certainly ahead of its time.
Well, you may recall this.
Well, this came out about, what, two years after the movie The Haunting, based on Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.
Oh, yes.
Indeed.
I didn’t even connect that.
And in a lot of ways.
That sort of set a prototype template for a ghost investigation.
But Shirley Jackson was copying spiritualist investigations as documented in the SPR’s archives, the Society for Psychical Research.
So I felt like what we were seeing here was, while not entirely natural, like it was very much…
What would be the word recapitulating the behaviors of SPR type investigations?
I think obviously different format in a dramatic presentation.
Right.
So but but yeah, I mean, I feel like.
It feels, honestly, although it feels very staged, and I guess we’ll get into all that, it feels very staged and constructed, but it also felt a little elevated compared to how the modern amateur ghost hunter YouTube sort of culture is.
At least in terms of accents.
And settings.
There’s a built-in class structure.
by deriving it from the superset of stately homes, and then you just get the haunted ones, and then you just get the ones that are in that book, and then you just get the ones that are included in this video.
So, yeah, it’s really…
I think we should start by talking about the cast a little bit.
Sure.
So we introduced the cast, and they’re described as experts, and I thought it was interesting that in the same breath they’re then introduced as true believers.
But we have…
as the star, the host, the wonderful Dame Margaret Rutherford.
So she wasn’t actually a dame then.
She was a dame in 1967.
And around that time, she won an Academy Award.
And I think at the time, she was the oldest Academy Award winner for Best Supporting Actress.
And also, I think the last person to win an Academy Award who had been born in the 19th century.
So I thought that was interesting.
Oh, well, we should specify what a dame is, because a lot of people in America might think it’s like toots, the mall on the arm of the gangster, you know, so.
Yeah, well, I’m not sure, but I think it’s like a British order.
So it’s kind of akin to a knighthood.
Is it a female knighthood?
A kind of knighthood, akin to a lord, I believe.
But I don’t know, and we’re going to talk about her husband in a minute, if he was actually, if he receives a title too.
The thing is like Dame Judi Dench.
Yeah.
In certain orders of chivalry, a lady, a dame is considered higher honor than a lady.
So now I know everything.
And that could be because the recipient’s a woman.
But yeah, certainly the term has pejorated in the United States where it can be a kind of dismissive term for a woman.
When I hear the term, unless it’s within the context of Elizabeth Taylor, I do think of it being an insult.
But Margaret Rutherford, she was amazing, an actress of stage, movies, television.
When I think of her, I think of her as Agatha Christie’s character, Miss Marple, and she’s unforgettable in that role and really brought some comedy to the role too.
So you would think she’s a very unlikely host for this show at first, but apparently she was a buff, this is a quote, a buff of all things paranormal.
So she lends that air to the show and also her collection of capes and silk hats.
Yeah, you’d think that’s probably her own clothing.
I don’t think there was a big budget.
But yeah, she’s interesting.
She’s captivating.
I mean, I don’t know that I would go to her for expertise, but boy, howdy, can she command a room.
She can, and her background is very interesting, too.
She really had quite a tragic upbringing.
I don’t know how much we want to get into this, but both of her parents took their own lives.
At the same time?
No, they were both in and out of mental health institutions at the time.
And her mother was pregnant at the time and her father kept going back into hospital.
And she didn’t know that he was still alive at one point.
She was told that he’d passed and yet he was still alive for about another 10 years in a hospital.
Oh, yikes.
But she, I think, as a result of that, suffered childhood trauma and went through depression and anxiety her whole life and had electroshock therapy.
Oh, wow.
But was greatly supported by another cast member by the name of Stringer Davis, and that was her husband.
And he’s an interesting character.
He has a quiet presence, I think.
in the show.
I didn’t know who he was at first.
I thought, who is this guy?
He doesn’t really say anything.
But apparently she would put, so he’d appeared in about 20 films with her and in later years she’d made it a condition of any contract that she had for movies and television that he would always play a part in anything that she appeared in.
Charles Bronson had the same deal with his wife.
So after they got married, a bunch of movies they do together.
So, yeah.
Oh, interesting.
It’s nice, but it keeps you from being separated.
It makes good sense from a relationship perspective.
Oh, yeah.
I drag Matt into things.
Look at where we are.
In fact, this is a drag show.
A lot of people don’t know that.
Well.
Much like Springer Davis was, I think, very comfortable being known as Margaret Rutherford’s husband, I’m very comfortable being known as Dr. Karen Stollznow’s husband.
Mr. Kathleen Smith here.
But they had an interesting relationship.
I think he came from stock and wealth, and his mother did not want them to get married, so they were together for about 15 years during their courtship and didn’t marry until his mother passed.
And I think that she referred to Margaret Rutherford as that older actress lady, and he didn’t particularly like her.
But it just seems like they had…
I don’t know, a relationship of convenience
like you read up on that a little bit yeah it sounded like for the time a lot of people gossiped that this might have been what they call a lavender marriage which is to say that Stringer might have been homosexual this was a time when it was on the cusp of that becoming legal but it was a very it wasn’t decriminalized until yeah I’m not sure what year
late i think mid to late 60s is my recollection but uh but before that you could be imprisoned uh if you were openly gay oscar wilde yeah yeah it not not pleasant yeah rough times 67 yeah there you go so it was partially decriminalized in england and wales via the sexual offenses act in 1967 so yeah speaking of oscar wilde uh margaret rutherford appeared in in some of his plays
I think the importance of being earnest and, I mean, just so many very well-known movies and plays.
But yeah, they had a very interesting relationship.
I read a lot to a lot of people say, oh, their relationship was never consummated.
And it’s like, I don’t know how anyone could possibly know that.
Well, the video.
Or the lack of video.
But yeah, they were together for their entire lives and died within a year of each other.
Which is very romantic and very, very common with people who’ve been married a long time.
I, my, it, their relationship set off my gaydar sense.
That’s the only reason I even looked it up.
I didn’t read anything about it until I actively went to look for it because something about their chemistry just seemed like that, that, that relationship, like that vibe.
So I don’t know.
It’s called acting.
Acting.
But it was so common in the cinema of the time or in the, in that, that world, the acting world at the time, you know,
Yeah, well, Rudolph Valentino, I think there were claims about him and Errol Flynn.
Errol Flynn, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But there was some nasty business.
I mean, we’re getting off.
Oh, way off topic.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But there was some nasty business when they were at the end of their lives and Margaret Rutherford had Alzheimer’s.
Oh, no.
And they brought in someone to care for them, a nurse, and I think she kind of –
tried to cozy up to Stringer and I think had aspirations to marry him.
And then when he died, she forged a will and said that he’d left her everything and stole some of their possessions and sold them off and I think is still at large.
Wow.
Yeah, she… A lot of drama.
Was a warrant out for her arrest.
Well, I mean, they’re actors, but a lot of extra drama.
Yeah, yeah.
But there is a third cast member…
and an additional person that we’ll talk about too.
But the third cast member is Tom Corbett.
And in some references to the Stately Ghosts of England, the book, it seems like he was a co-author, but he actually travelled with Diana to these 11 places, visited them.
So I think that’s why he’s woven into this TV show.
But he’s described, so he’s the psychic, and he’s described as a society clairvoyant.
Hmm.
So, interesting.
And he has that vibe.
Doesn’t he feel like the sort of the chip coffee character?
Like, he really does to me.
A bit.
Yeah.
Derek Okora?
Or Derek Okora?
Yeah, I mean, yeah.
It’s just like, again…
This is I think this is maybe a very important little film because of how it prototypes everything.
Like it really does set a template for what one of these investigation shows should look like.
And I. Yeah.
Ground.
There’s features here that will not appear in future stuff, which I loved, which we’ll get to.
But it really does feel like you could make a new version of this with different cast members and it would be super obvious what everybody’s doing, what their roles are.
It’s very, very much familiar territory now, but probably quite novel at the time.
Yep, yep.
And I’m surprised that they didn’t do a sequel because there were so many other houses and mansions in the book.
But there is one additional key player in this show.
Do you want to talk about the producer, Matt?
The producer, he’s an interesting chap.
What was his last name?
It’s Frank.
Yeah.
And he wrote The Entity.
Oh, really?
Audrey Rose.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Wow.
And I mean, he was a producer and director and did many things in that area.
But he wrote quite a few things.
And among them, you mean the screenplay, right?
Because I think that was the book was written by parapsychologists, right?
But so you wrote the screenplay?
Yes.
OK. Well, I just saw when you look up the entity, when you look up his name, it says IMDB as well says he’s the author of the entity.
But I think you might be right that that’s the screenplay.
Although Jay Anson was the author of Amityville, and he wasn’t there at the time.
Well, let’s get into, I guess, the meat of the show.
I want to add, too, that at the start of the show, that they say that they talk about these ghost stories and how they, quote, might be bad for business.
And I thought, wow, the reverse is.
Yeah, no kidding.
It is the business.
But I think it’s fun when you see them traveling in a it’s a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost.
It’s a beautiful vehicle that they’re driving in and so scenic.
They go past Stonehenge.
So there’s so much atmosphere to all of this.
But the first place that they go to, which is kind of near Stonehenge, it’s in Wiltshire, which is in southwest England.
It’s a place called Longleat House.
And, yeah, I thought let’s go through this in the order in which we saw this in the show.
Sure.
But it is a beautiful house, and I believe it’s now owned by a Lord Henry Thine, I think is how you pronounce his name.
But the place is known for allegedly having a resident ghost, so the ghost of –
I said his wife in my notes, but no, obviously this is the wife of the Viscount at the time, Viscount Weymouth.
So this is in the 18th century when they owned the place.
That’s the 1700s.
1700s.
That’s right.
So this ghost, Lady Louisa, known as the Green Lady as well.
So she’s believed to wander the corridors near the library searching for her lover.
So she was married.
But she took a lover.
What did they say in the show?
It was like he wasn’t much of a chap.
And society was absolutely thunderstruck when she married my ancestor, who, I have to admit, wasn’t much of a chap.
He wasn’t much of a chap, yes.
So, yeah, I don’t know if that was a reference to his sexuality or his appearance.
I think it was his appearance because they really focused on that portrait of him where he had that kind of Ichabod crane, long nose and no chin kind of thing.
So, yeah, he didn’t come off as a type of guy that was going to, you know, round himself up a fetching woman.
Or enter into a duel.
Or into a duel, exactly.
It sounds like it may have been that he just pulled a sword on a guy, that it wasn’t necessarily a fair duel.
Well, I wonder if it even took place because there’s no…
no name of a lover.
So they even say that, that he has no name.
It doesn’t seem like there are any records.
And if we’re talking about the 1700s, as Blake pointed out, that they would have had records of these kinds of things and duels were the way that business was handled and they were legal, but there would have been records of someone having died on the premises and it would have appeared in…
in the local newspapers.
So we’d have records.
And it is sad that they had to resort to dueling, but rap battles had not been invented yet.
So this is what they had to do.
So got to do what you can.
That’s right.
It just tracks.
We’re not around.
So she allegedly still haunts the premises and you can still hear the sound of her, her weeping.
and I thought it was interesting too where they spoke with the lord of the manor and asked him, have you ever actually seen this ghost?
And he said, no, I’ve never seen the ghost myself.
I’ve never, I think he said, actually seen or heard the supernatural, but he refers to their, I believe, the librarian.
and that she’s had some kind of encounter and they go and speak with her.
And she says, well, I didn’t actually quite see the ghost myself.
It was more of a sinister presence that I felt.
And then they invite her to visit the corridor and she’s like, oh, no thanks.
So she doesn’t want to go along.
So throughout this production, they have these interstitial images that they use.
And this is so funny because they’re going to be filming in a corridor up at the top, I guess, which I imagine would have been Servant’s area back in ye olde days.
It’s not that old, but…
That long hallway that they’re going to shoot down.
And they, they throw up a card on the screen and it’s, it’s all like in like a italic font.
It’s very elegant.
And it says the haunted corridor filmed by hidden camera.
And Matt, I, you know, I know you’ve looked into this sort of thing.
Like I have a lot.
Was it in any way, did that look like it was hidden camera footage?
It did not.
The only thing that made it seem like maybe it was hidden was that neither of them acknowledged the camera.
Right.
They did a great job.
But at some point, one of the characters is wearing glasses and you can see the studio lighting like when they turn.
It’s like, OK, that’s not a hidden camera if you’ve got to rig lighting for the scene.
Well, and it moved.
The camera was moving.
Yeah.
So, and it was in the middle of the hallway, which is a great place to hide something.
Yeah.
And they later show the hallway from the other perspective and there’s nowhere to hide it.
Right.
Yeah, that was hysterical to me watching that.
But before, when he was talking, who was it?
The Lord.
The Lord was talking about how he hadn’t seen anything or heard the supernatural.
But then he references Mr. Corbett and says that it will be sufficient work for any medium here at Longley tonight.
And Margaret Rutherford just spoke right up.
Mediums claim to be in touch with the spirit world through a guide, a long-dead man or woman whose job it is to bridge the gulf between the living and the dead.
But clairvoyants make no such claim.
Clairvoyants make no such claim.
It was just funny how she schooled him there in this knowledge everyone should have about mediums and clairvoyants.
I really enjoyed that a lot.
That’s why she’s the host.
And it was great because they were sitting at this big long table with this ridiculously huge chandelier centerpiece in the middle of it.
And you suddenly see Tom Corbett’s head pop around because he’s sitting on the other end of the table.
pop around and, you know, he’s basically, I just happened to be born with a gift and I can see ghosts.
And it’s just funny the way his head pops around that big, huge centerpiece.
And it seems like it was done for comic effect, but, you know, nobody laughed but me.
Oh, no, it was funny.
And just see the opulence of the house and the table.
But, yeah, well, they caught some evidence, though, didn’t they?
Yeah.
Do you have any evidence, I think, in the entire show?
Yeah, I mean, they’ve got…
I’m not sure what kind of camera that was supposed to be.
Was it night vision?
It didn’t look like night vision.
I mean, that would be too early for him.
I don’t know.
It had like a red filter on it.
I don’t really know what it was.
Okay, but here’s the thing about that.
I have read that supposedly…
They were having trouble filming there because the ghosts were causing, you know, the film to come out either reddish or orangish or cameras were falling and things were happening.
So until the director, Frank, decided to say ghosts can do.
Do we have your permission to film here?
And then everything stopped and behaved the way it should.
So and that was actually publicized.
all the problems, supernatural problems they were having.
So I am assuming that that footage is part of that mistake.
Well, it’s not the beginning of a manifestation as they refer to it.
Well, but that’s the thing is we don’t know if it was time lapse.
We don’t know if it was slowed down.
I would say they do show the little, there’s a little clock in the bottom left-hand side and it does move.
So I’m assuming it’s time lapse, but I don’t know what kind of filter that is.
That’s crazy.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
But yeah, and it’s just one of those things, you know, coming from a critical thinking perspective.
It’s difficult because we have no information.
They’re on the top floor, there would be windows, but the cameraman who they interviewed says they were all blacked out.
And yet you can still see a clear sort of triangle of light coming from an upper window that is stationary throughout.
So they didn’t black out that window.
And if they didn’t black out that window, what other window did they not black out?
And if that was time lapse, could that have been the moon?
It depends on how much time it took.
But it was clearly a shaft of light.
They even called it a shaft of light, which is great.
But I’ve never heard of a ghost being referred to as a shaft of light before.
A little orb, I’ve heard that, but that came many years later.
Well, you start to call it that, and you say, don’t say that, because that shaft.
Right, exactly.
I’m just talking about shaft.
So it was, you know, when it would move, it clearly conformed to the shape of the wall and the corners and everything.
So, you know, it was light and the clear.
It had borders like it was coming through a window.
Yeah, it in every way looks on.
Except we’re remarking on it, but yeah.
Right, right, right.
You put a red filter on it.
Right.
Yeah, we ruin everything.
You put a red filter on it, and then you have a guy in horn-rimmed glasses with interesting eyebrows say, I didn’t do anything.
I was just sitting here.
And I can’t explain it.
Well, then it’s a ghost.
That’s right.
Well, and that was that.
I think we’ve still got two more places to visit, so we should move on.
We end that segment where they do these cool interstitials.
I’ll put these in the show notes.
Is it Longleat or Longleat?
I think it’s Longleat.
Longleat.
Longleat.
And they’ve got, like, it’s an illuminated manuscript.
And what they’ve done is they’ve made a cutout to do, like, an insert over the video.
They totally copied the Princess Bride.
They really ripped off the Princess Bride in 1963.
They totally did.
And it says a very haunted house.
This…
is delightful i it is so pleasant and innocent like i it just is so much it’s coming to us with a cleaner uh like a cleaner um i don’t know what you would call it uh karmic load than most of the modern stuff
I had a little bit of a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang kind of feel.
Yeah, it feels like a Disney Sunday night special.
The colors are very rich.
I don’t know.
It’s a bit Pride and Prejudice.
I bet.
Anyway.
Before we get to the next house, though.
You mean the Salisbury Steakout?
Yes.
Okay, sorry.
That was good.
I could smell that one coming.
Now, the…
The one before that, I have to comment on Rutherford’s wonderful little scamp-like behavior of sneaking away and finding hidden passages.
Yes!
Or do they find her?
And she does it twice in the thing where she just kind of wanders off.
And I love it.
I love it so much because she seems so mischievous doing that.
She stole that from Home Alone.
It reminds me of the Ghost Story for Christmas where you’ve got a character who’s looking in a library.
Everyone else has left and then mysterious things happen.
But they shoot from behind the books.
Like you’re getting the ghost perspective on her.
Are we really supposed to…
It reminds me of in Ghostwatch, there’s a moment where it’s supposed to be like a staged camera where the kids can’t see it.
When I say staged, it’s supposed to be fixed on a tripod.
And the shot changes, even though it’s supposed to be completely automated.
So it kind of breaks the…
If you know anything about filmmaking, you don’t normally have the ability to shoot from behind the books out at the people looking at the books.
That’s just impossible.
So…
Yeah, anyway, it sort of broke it for me, but it didn’t make me not love it.
I loved it.
Yeah.
They stole that from Interstellar.
Damn!
You ain’t wrong.
You ain’t wrong!
Well, I think we should move on to the next problem.
Yeah, yeah.
And so that’s Salisbury Hall, and this is in Hertfordshire in East England.
And so it’s pretty close to St. Albans, which is the Roman settlement.
Erin, can I stop you?
We forgot something else.
What?
A long late.
Why ghosts rarely appear in color.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, well, yeah, I guess we need that information to talk about.
Anything else?
Yeah, certainly the third place.
Ms. Rutherford is a paranormal expert.
She is, and she was so great.
Because I didn’t know this.
I didn’t know this myself.
She said that ghosts rarely manifest in color.
It’s normally in black and white because of all the ectoplasm.
The people who’ve seen the ghost testify to it being greyish in colour.
Well, ghosts rarely manifest themselves in colour, Lord Barth.
They’re usually described as grey or whitish grey because that’s the general colour of the ectoplasm which surrounds psychic manifestation.
And yet we’re talking about a green lady and later on we talk about a grey lady and a blue lady.
The monks in brown.
The monks in brown.
So, yeah, that logic is quickly forgotten.
But it was cool that they got to throw in a little insert with lots of old ghost photos, which I know we all love.
Yes, those were beautiful.
That’s right.
Yes.
Yeah, there was a silver bell, the manifestation and the ghost of random hole.
Yes.
Yeah.
Classic.
Classic.
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 Matt Baxter, Karen Stolzno, and me discussing the 1965 NBC television movie, The Stately Ghosts of England.
This was part one of a two-part coverage, which will conclude next week.
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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Stay tuned for part two next week.
This has been a Monster House presentation.

The post S05E22 – The Stately Ghosts of England (pt1) appeared first on MonsterTalk.

I’m excited to be posting this BONUS content – an interview with film historian Gary D. Rhodes. Gary is joining me to talk about his newest book Weirdumentary: Ancient Aliens, Fallacious Prophecies, and Mysterious Monsters from 1970s Documentaries. I can’t overstate how enjoyable this book was and how likely listeners to MonsterTalk and In ReSearch Of… are to be equally thrilled with it.

Weirdumentary has a forward by Stephen Bissette who wrote a book also likely to be of interest to listeners: Cryptid Cinema(affiliate link)
(A follow-up to that book is under construction and will include research by your’s truly about the “4-walling” tour of the PGF.)

I linked to Feral House’s page for Weirdumentary above at the request of Gary. If you’re curious about their catalog, we talked with their owner recently about monstrous food and they also produced Al Ridenour’s new book about Carnival.

This is not a complete list of the films in the book – and it also covers a few TV series including In Search Of… and Arthur C. Clarke’s _____ (he had three ITV series covering topics similar to ISO with each season getting a slightly different name).

1970: Chariots of the Gods, The Unexplained

1971: The Hellstrom Chronicles, The Man Who Saw Tomorrow

1972: Bigfoot Man or Beast, Monsters! Mysteries or Myths?, The Devil’s Triangle, The Legend of Boggy Creek

1973: In Search of Ancient Astronauts

1974: Deadly Fathoms, In Search of Ancient Mysteries, In Search of Dracula, UFOs: Past, Present and Future

1975: Mysteries from Beyond Earth, The Force Beyond, The Legendary Curse of the Hope Diamond, The Man of Miracles, The Outer Space Connection

1976: Beyond Belief, In Search of Noah’s Ark, Mysteries of the Gods, The Amazing World of Psychic Phenomena, The Legend of Bigfoot, The Legend of Loch Ness, The Miracle Healers, The Mysterious Monsters, World Beyond Death

1977: Aliens from Spaceship Earth, Journey into the Beyond, Mysteries of the Great Pyramid, The Lincoln Conspiracy, The Underground Doctors, The Unknown Force

1978: Are We Alone in the Universe?, Beyond and Back, Curse of the Mayan Temple, Manbeast! Myth or Monster?, Mysteries from Beyond the Triangle, Mysteries of the Mind, Mystery of the Sacred Shroud, Secret of the Bermuda Triangle, The Amazing World of Ghosts, The Late Great Planet Earth, The Lost City of Atlantis, The UFO Journals, UFO – Exclusive! , UFO: Top Secret, Unknown Powers, World of the Unknown

1979: Attack from Outer Space, Charles Berlitz’s The Bermuda Triangle, Death: The Ultimate Mystery, Encounter with Disaster, Hypnosis and Beyond, In Search of the Historic Jesus, The Doomsday Chronicles, The Prophecies of Nostradamus, UFOs Are Real, World of Mystery

1980: Land of Celtic Ghosts, Mysteries of the Mind, UFO Syndrome

1981: Search for the Titanic

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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Dr. Gary D. Rhodes is a filmmaker and professor of media production at Oklahoma Baptist University.
A renowned film historian, he’s arguably the world’s leading expert on Bela Lugosi and early horror cinema.
And his extensive body of work includes, I’m going to say over 20, but well over 20 books, including such titles as Birth of the American Horror Film and documentaries like Lugosi…
Hollywood’s Dracula.
He specializes in American film exhibition and the intersection of documentary and fiction.
And today, or tonight, we’re going to be talking about his new book, Weirdumentary.
Welcome to, well, I’m going to say welcome to the shows because I booked you initially to talk on my show In Research Of.
which is a show where I and Dr. Jeb Card watch old episodes of In Search Of.
And then, as we like to say, add in the information the producer chose not to include.
Absolutely.
It’s been a ride.
I just noticed this morning, I guess we started like in February of 2020, so like a month before the pandemic.
And we’re into season five now in recording.
So, yeah.
It’s a long show and it has a lot of good information and it’s very interesting.
And it has a prominent place in your book, which is why I was targeting that.
But my other show is called Monster Talk.
That’s the one that’s been going on since 2009.
And I realized there’s a whole lot of overlap there too.
So I thought rather than just target this at either audience, I would make this a universal Monster House Productions podcast that will go into both feeds.
Well, I can’t thank you enough for having me.
I apologize.
We had a couple of moments, a couple of times that I had to cancel, but I’ve long been a fan of Monster Talk, and I’m so grateful to be with you today.
Well, it’s really exciting.
Now, it’ll probably surprise people that I’m having you on to talk about where your mentor is when you’ve done so much work in horror.
But can you talk a little bit about your other interests before we get into the weirdumentaries?
You’ve done a lot of work on Bela Lugosi and early horror cinema.
I feel silly asking the question because I think most of our audience are probably monster people and horror people.
But how did you get into that?
Were you one of the monster kids, picked up the distribution stuff from TV, like horror hosts?
Or how did you fall into this?
That’s a wonderful question.
Thank you.
You know, for me, I guess if I am a monster kid, I’m 53, I’d be about the youngest of that monster kid generation, meaning…
I think we got cable in my home at about the age of 10.
And by the age of 12, we had a VHS player.
I mention that because until the age of 10, we had three networks and PBS.
And so me and the other kids at school, you know, if they were showing an old black and white movie.
you know, we watched it.
And so I grew up watching the films we didn’t.
There had been, I was from Oklahoma, there were various Oklahoma horror hosts, but that had kind of died out by the late 70s when I was young.
but they would play them sometimes on Sunday afternoon.
And I have such fond memories of watching them, not only around the Halloween season, but at other times of the year.
My mother was actually, though, my mother was an original shock theater fan back in like 58, 59, 60.
So I guess it comes from that and my mother’s fascination with these films.
And I suppose…
Many of us as little kids love ghost stories, campfires, tales, all of that.
It never left me or I never left it one way or the other.
Yeah, I think I first got into – well, no, I shouldn’t even say that.
I was starting to say something about the –
is it David Scull?
Uh, yeah, I knew David well from about 1991.
Yes.
I think, I think maybe he had the first sort of academic book that I read on this.
And then I realized, well, no, what am I talking about?
Because I grew up reading, uh, you know, Fangoria, famous monsters, all the books in the school, you know, library about monster movies.
Oh yes.
I mean, I think maybe his was the first grownup academic book on that.
And I, that sadly he left us fairly recently.
Um,
But yeah, so in your work, though, your professional work, some of what you’ve written talks about, I think I might be.
oversynthesizing this, but the way that audiences are effectively trained, nobody goes to movie training, how to watch a movie, but you end up being trained.
And I think that has an impact on how you categorize what’s a weirdumentary, because there’s this concept of having an expert on screen and how important that is.
And that is somewhat subverted in the films you’ve selected for this book.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, this goes back to me.
And, you know, at times I’m doing very egghead academic peer reviewed stuff that probably only a small number of scholars read.
And then sometimes I’m writing for, you know, well, I’ve done things for USA Today and Washington Post and stuff.
So different audiences.
But for me, the reason I say that would be the prologue to saying I think we’re trained as audience members without knowing it in a lot of ways.
I mean, we all, even if we can’t articulate it verbally, we all kind of know that a fade to black means the end, whether it’s the end of a film or the end of a part of a TV show, and then there’s a commercial, or maybe sometimes it’s in the middle of a film and it’s the end of somebody’s life or consciousness, you know, like the POV of their eyes going dark.
So I think we’re trained in a lot of ways by movies and growing up with them.
And at this point, of course,
There’s no one alive who didn’t grow up with them.
I mean, somebody may have avoided them if they were in some community or family that disdained film or wouldn’t allow them to be watched, but obviously film dates to the 1890s, so we’re all part of this knowledge base.
And to move along really quickly, I’d say that newsreels come in around 1912, and they’re silent for a while, but they still have a kind of expert narrator, not with voice, but with on-screen text, intertitles, you know, the old silent film way.
And then they’re so popular, of course, they move into the sound era and are popular into the early 60s when, of course, television news takes that place.
And television news, we all grow up with and we see experts.
We hear the so-called in documentaries and news, the so-called voice of God, you know, the disembodied narrator.
Sometimes it’s a famous person.
Sometimes it’s not.
But, you know, maybe they have allegedly an authoritative sounding voice.
They sound famous.
like they know what they’re saying, even if they are not that well-versed in what they’re saying or if they’re just a paid actor.
Even TV commercials, I think, do this for us, you know, try bare aspirin over some other brand, what have you.
So I think there is this veneer of an expert voice, an expert narrator.
as well as, I mean, we would see it even as you and I were talking, if we put on the news about world events of today, of recent times, let’s bring on an expert about this country, this war, whatever else.
So yes, I think we’re very much trained in a lot of ways about film, including what’s supposed to be real, what’s supposed to be nonfiction, what’s supposed to be trustworthy.
Yeah, I think Jeb Card and I have talked a lot about the path to the show in search of because originally that would have been Rod Serling.
And, you know, he’s got that voice you’re talking about, the gravitas, and he’s a great presenter and writer.
But when they brought in Leonard Nimoy after Serling died, it changes it because you get this sort of, I think, I would argue that it’s a credibility propped up by his fictional role as Mr. Spock on TV.
Like, he’s so associated with being the science officer of the Enterprise that it’s like if he’s going to tell you something, he’s got a little more credibility than, say, a Shatner, although Shatner appears in your book, too.
I love that they had sort of competing nonsense documentaries.
It’s great.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and it’s fascinating because, you know, the Shatner, the first Shatner one that he narrated and appeared on camera was called Mysteries of the Gods.
Hello, I’m William Shatner.
As Captain Kirk and with the rest of the crew of the USS Enterprise, we made many wondrous voyages into the future, into the vastness of space.
But that was fiction.
I’d like to take you along on another kind of voyage, but this is based on reality.
The real world we live in.
It was 1976, and of course this is, I guess, his 50th anniversary for Weirdumentary, because he still has on, this year, a show of this type, some of your listeners may know, called The Unexplained.
So, Shatner now has 50 years of these kinds of, of narrating these kinds of films and TV shows.
It’s amazing to me, not only his literal longevity, but his professional longevity.
And he still seems sharp as a tack, which is great.
I’m proud of him.
Wonderful.
No, it’s inspiring in a lot of ways.
I mean, I even heard him speak about a year, a year and a half ago live and with the questions and everything, talk about sharp as a tack.
He’s quite something.
He really is.
I think, you know, he I as a Star Trek fan, I mean, you know, all the the back story drama stuff is like you can live to a point where all that stuff just falls away and you’re just a legend.
And I think he’s reached that point.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, it reminds me of that wonderful line of dialogue in Chinatown.
Oh, yes.
You know, John Houston says, what what is it?
Politicians, whores and ugly buildings all get respectable if they last long enough.
I say it all the time.
It’s so brilliant.
It really is.
But we’re here today to talk about weirdumentaries.
And I have to say this book is gorgeous.
I happen to own a substantial chunk of these hard to find movies, many of which I’ve scraped from the furthest corners of the Internet.
Yeah, yeah.
But some of them are lost, and all we have is marketing material.
But what makes a weird geometry?
What are people going to get when they get into this book?
Well, yeah, thank you.
You know, there have been these kind of films investigating, inquiring after everything from, say, the afterlife, spiritualism.
You know, there have been films, kind of pseudoscience documentaries, at least as early as 1923, when there was a film called Is Conan Doyle Right?
And it was asking about his belief in spiritualism.
So, you know, these kinds of topics kicked around a lot.
But when it comes to what I’m calling the weirdumentary, a particular formula really coalesced by 1972.
They really seemed to come on around 1970.
By 1972, there’s a really ironclad formula.
There’s even one company that largely specializes in them that we can talk about if you want.
And a lot of these were getting theatrical releases.
So they had that imprimatur as well as the would-be experts and on-screen co-hosts and so forth.
And then this kind of comes to an end in my mind, particularly in terms of these slightly larger budgets, slightly more distributed, certainly sometimes theatrical.
What I’m talking about kind of comes to an end in 1981, 82 with…
The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, which was Orson Welles’ hosted documentary about Nostradamus.
So it’s this particular period of time.
And they share some particular traits, which I can talk about if you’d like.
Sure.
Yeah.
I was going to say this period, I believe you were alluding to Schicksal and Classics.
Oh, yes.
Yes, absolutely.
We do need to talk about that because I did some work for Steve Bissett.
It was independent research I was doing, and he’s going to include it in his next scripted cinema book.
Another great book.
I am looking forward.
Absolutely.
He’s a great writer and he’s so great.
But he had he was very clear to me that he says, you’ve got to be really careful about.
signed because a lot of people think wrong ideas about what they were involved in, what they weren’t involved in, what they distributed, what they didn’t.
So yeah, I do want to talk about that.
But yeah, if you want to, I don’t want to lose track of the original question, you offered to extrapolate a little bit.
So please do.
I think that, you know, in the book I look at, and I think it was something special about that period to begin with.
Just a quick thought would be Eric Von Daniken’s book, Chariots of the Gods, was released in 1968.
First released.
And it spoke about how aliens from the distant past, from other planets and so forth, visited Earth to help early man.
you know, whatever it would be, build up pyramids or so forth.
That same year, Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001, A Space Odyssey is released.
And I suppose the two men behind those two projects might not have, they couldn’t have been more different in most respects.
And 2001 was a stated fictional film where Von Daniken posed his as nonfiction.
Although Kubrick’s 2001 certainly feels at times like a documentary, what am I getting at?
They both came at the end of kind of the 60s, after the Summer of Love and so much else, so much interest in everything from holistic medicine to New Age to different philosophies to inquiring into the unknown.
Kubrick’s 2001 actually offered the same explanation that von Daniken did in terms of the monoliths planted on Earth as well as on the moon that helped from the earlier australopithecines through the star baby at the end of the film.
Yeah, and that ties in Arthur C. Clarke, too, who is also in your book with his TV series.
Wow, this stuff is all connected in so many ways.
It is quite connected.
And, you know, and that wasn’t just, you know, people of the youth culture and so forth, obviously investigating some of these topics.
I mean, at this point, as we speak in 2026, and I’m not a university professor of science, but I would strongly believe that most universities.
Thinking about some of these issues, investigating them into the paranormal and so forth, would often be met with disdain, laughed at, beneath contempt.
But in the 1970s, a lot of university professors, various researchers, various enterprises from SETI to particular scholars, including Clark, Arthur C. Clark, were taking these things seriously.
Not even if they didn’t actually believe in them, but they were interested in pursuing…
the unknown.
And that included not just what we’ve been talking about, but also, well, you mentioned cryptids and Steve Bissett.
I mean, here we’re talking everything from Bigfoot to Loch Ness Monster.
We’re talking about all the different things the human mind might be able to do.
You know, Uri Geller bending spoons, maybe foretelling the future like Nostradamus.
Also, rethinking and challenging history, speculative history.
Is what we’ve heard about, say, Abraham Lincoln’s assassination really true?
Is there more to the story?
So there’s even some conspiracy elements there.
Well, this is kind of the era.
and the topic, and it appeals even now to people.
Of course, there’s still these kinds of shows, but I think it had a far greater grip on society in the 70s, and including the fact a lot of these films were released theatrically.
So on the one hand, you have topics that we’ve just been talking about.
That’s part of what I’m calling the weirdumentary.
But there’s a couple of three other things that become part of the brew, the key ingredients.
One of them does become a notable narrator.
So we’ve already kind of covered that.
So Rod Serling, Burgess Meredith, John Carradine, Shatner, Nimoy, Orson Welles on more than one occasion, various others.
And sometimes if the budget was lower, it was somebody who seemed quite authoritative like Brad Crandall.
but maybe not quite as well known as the others.
So you had these topics.
You had the stately, would-be, believable narrator, usually of some note, often positioned in some office with books on the wall behind them to make them seem even more academic-y or academic-y, I guess, or whatever.
But so you had those two things.
And then there’s this wonderful film of 1972.
We all probably remember Charlie Pierce’s Legend of Boggy Creek, which had very documentary aesthetics in the recreations of the folk monster, a kind of cryptid type character in Arkansas.
And using things like handheld camera, which became such an aesthetic sign of the real, like we were talking about earlier.
If the camera shook a bit, that was what people saw on TV about footage from Vietnam or riots or so forth.
A lot of documentary, the documentary film movements of the 1960s, the D.A.
Pennebakers and the Maisels Brothers, Les Blank, too.
You know, there were certain aesthetics that went with documentary at the time and news gathering.
So Legend of Boggy Creek kind of helped introduce, let’s do recreations and recreations that bear some aesthetic sensibilities.
Of what people consciously or not think is true footage like well, like famously the Patterson Gimlin footage, but also just again, the very footage we might still see this aesthetic.
You know, if you turn on the news and somebody’s filming in a war zone, obviously they don’t have time to put up a tripod.
Maybe the boom pole comes into the shot or something like that.
It’s natural lighting.
All of that, of course, is not only tied with arguably what is supposed to be real, and I think more people would have believed that in the 1970s, but it was also cheap to achieve.
Yeah.
Because you could shoot quickly.
You didn’t have to, you know, natural lighting.
You didn’t have to have a lot of lights in a lot of cases.
So low-speed recreations, a particular type of host, and this particular group of weird topics…
That, to me, is the weirdumentary.
So that’s beautifully done.
The Mysterious Monsters hits all those notes, I think.
Oh, yes.
We’ve covered that in a special bonus episode for the In Research Of show.
And I grew up in the evangelical community, so we had Hal Lindsey with the Christian stuff like The Late Great Planet Earth.
Right, which of course became the film narrated, I would say weird documentary narrated by Orson Welles, too.
There you go.
And so this stuff, it was pervasive in the 1970s.
It really was.
And for a lot of us, I think, you know, if we were kids then, these things really did kind of have that gut punch.
They really did.
I mean, everybody was asking, not everybody, but a lot of people were asking at various levels of culture in America.
What if?
What if this exists?
Does it exist?
Let’s look into it.
Well, if you’re a little kid and if you’re already drawn to things like horror and science fiction, if you’re a little kid, you know, stuff like, you know, Ivan Marx’s film Legend of Bigfoot, you know, it seemed like, oh, gosh.
He must just be out there just around the corner.
If they just look three or four trees further.
I mean, doesn’t that feel.
I’m talking about me at the age of five.
But yeah, yeah.
But I mean, it feels like a Disney documentary in a lot of ways.
But it’s Ivan Marks and, you know, he’s no Disney.
But I mean, it really has that low cost nature film vibe.
You know, only as an adult that I realized what a.
amusing grifter i’ve remarked right right right well that’s that’s kind of how i you know this book is not one that i i definitely wrote with tongue in cheek uh trying to have fun trying to have fun with the films because i really do love a lot of them now some of them are very difficult slogs you know yeah yeah
But the best of them, a lot of these, whether it’s Ivan Marks or the Mysterious Monsters, some of the ones we’re talking about, a handful of others we might mention, you know, some of them are still a lot of fun, even though, yeah, of course, we view them quite differently now.
Maybe a bit more of what would you say, kind of in a campy light?
Yes, I think very much so.
And I think I’m sort of an, I don’t know, this sounds weird to say, but I think I’m like a…
somewhat notable online skeptic like absolutely but but i’m also uh very very in love with these things like i mean i like i the question of whether they’re real or not i think that’s an important one i like to answer it but i never stopped loving this and the biggest sin of some of these movies is not that they were giving out misinformation but they were doing it in a boring way i
Yeah, no, some of them were dreadfully boring because they were trying to cash in, obviously, you know, on the success of the others.
And the misinformation thing becomes a curious thing because certainly that’s what it was in large measure.
But, you know, the filmmakers, certainly the ones that were a little bit more savvy in some of the companies.
So carefully would they put, sometimes buried at the end of the credits, well, you know, these are merely opinions, one of many that we’re presenting, you know, and there are other views.
And, you know, they’d almost get in that kind of little disclaimer thing in a moment of the film.
in a place of the film, like buried in the credits that, you know, well, certainly as a kid, I didn’t even notice, you know, but it was a way of saying like, uh, if not actually winking at the audience, it was a way of, of among other things, maybe of avoiding, uh, you know, lawsuits or whatever.
I mean, in search of, you know, with Nimoy does that too, doesn’t it?
That, you know, that these are in the credits.
Sometimes it will say one possible explanation.
Exactly.
They’ve got a disclaimer right there.
Yeah.
You know, I think the only time that that really was flagged like in a big way,
Orson Welles in the Nostradamus Man Who Saw Tomorrow does have a brief moment.
I think it’s the most fascinating in the film now where he actually says, you know, some people, including me, disagree with these opinions.
I’m paraphrasing, you know.
No, no, I know.
I’m not trying to cite the dialogue exactly.
And it’s very brief.
But it’s basically, you know, him saying, look, I’m doing this, but I’m still distancing myself, you know, from it.
Wells comes up on our show a lot because Jeb is very fond of that famous frozen peas commercial where he was recording and getting angrier and drunker.
We know a remote farm in Lincolnshire where Mrs. Buckley lives.
Every July, peas grow there.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
No, I know that one.
Well, he and I would have a lot to talk about, I’m sure, because Wells, you know, from start to finish captivates, you know, so many of us from from from the great payday to to some of the more.
Yeah.
More more stranger moments.
Yeah.
No, he’s he’s.
Yeah.
A larger-than-life character, to be sure.
Yeah, absolutely.
So we should talk about the legacy of these kinds of movies.
The weirdumentary era, I think it could be argued, ended in the early 1980s.
That certainly consists of what you include here in your definition.
Yeah, yeah.
And this – I assume it’s not because audiences stopped being interested.
It’s because of the rise of cable television and that sort of thing.
Absolutely.
Yeah, cable became and still is streaming, you know, the home –
for these programs.
It seems lately that I’m seeing, even now, ever the more, you know, of them, not just Shatner’s The Unexplained, but it seems so many people from, what, Ving Rhames to Lawrence Fishburne to… To Danny Trejo, of all people.
Danny Trejo, yes, absolutely.
And Trejo’s new one has an interesting disclaimer at the beginning.
You know, there’s two disclaimers.
One is viewer discretion advised, some of this disaster footage, whatever might be disturbing.
The second disclaimer footage I find even more fascinating, much more, because it says some of the recreations in this program might be created by AI.
Wow.
Yeah, so from Ivan Marks with one 16 mil and a shaky camera.
And his wife wearing a Bigfoot outfit.
And his wife wearing a Bigfoot outfit to AI creating.
Well, we started, I did, started talking about HAL 9000, 2001, in other words, and we’re back to that.
But anyway, yeah, so this keeps going.
But yeah, I would agree completely.
You know, it becomes the place for cable.
It’s still huge.
I would argue it’s not as huge, if only because we’re beset by so much content.
Everything from the video store populating every town by the mid-’80s, and you could start watching what you wanted when, to the sheer number of channels, and so somebody could click on MTV all night rather than just the three networks or PBS.
I think these things are still huge.
I think cable did become the next home.
But for me, things did did change and including the fact that that some of these I actually saw theatrically, you know, and that that’s another element of it for me, as well as what some classic did, you know.
Yeah, I wish, the only one that even comes close, and I don’t believe this is in your book because it’s not technically a weirdumentary, but it uses every single trope, which would be Sasquatch, The Legend of Bigfoot, which was a Sun Classic distribution, I believe.
But they included the Patterson-Gillen film, and they do recreations of famous Bigfoot stories, all wrapped up in a sort of travelogue of…
them pursuing uh the the goal of trying to catch a bigfoot uh right right you if a savvy person in the audience would notice that well this isn’t really a documentary because someone’s filming this and they’re changing their shots and you know absolutely like it gives itself away like the horror mockumentary or found yeah
Yeah, Blair Witch type thing.
For me, I did stick mitigated by by Legend of Boggy Creek, which I think did play a role in getting these others that came after to to do the recreation footage, which was one of some classic specialties, you know, is in their films were doing recreations.
On very low budgets, of course.
But in general, the films I include did pawn themselves off as nonfiction.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
Where there were so many others.
I mean, we were talking about gut punches as kids.
I mean, I remember Sun’s wonderful film, Hanger 18.
Oh, yeah, we’ve covered that one.
Wonderful.
And it’s like, I love it.
But some of those kinds of things, yeah, they didn’t fit because they were much more…
And ostensibly, you know, this is a what a docudrama, a fictionalized version of, you know, of the of the entire subject rather than I’m a documentary, even if I have to say somewhere quietly.
Yeah, there’s so many variants on that sort of rapper inspired by real events, you know, like that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We actually, for Monster Talk, we’ve done a YouTube series that I still, I’m overly, what is the word?
I think maybe it’s a bit precious to me, but debased on a true story where we sort of look at these based on a true story things and sort of deconstruct.
No, not really.
I love it because how loose that language is.
And you were kind enough to mention my book, The Birth of the American Horror Film, which covers the genre to 1915.
And it was around, gosh, 1908 or so.
I’ll have to send you the thing.
There was one ghost movie and it was a very short film, Nickelodeon era.
It doesn’t exist, sadly, but the marketing materials do.
And it said based on a true story.
Oh, nice.
So this thing that you’re talking about, which I find so fascinating, too.
It goes back, yeah, that far into early cinema.
So it’s, you know, because as a kid, sometimes I would be seeing it more.
Well, even on posters for films I couldn’t yet see, like, you know, Texas Chainsaw Massacre or, you know, you know what?
Yes.
Yeah.
Right.
Like with John Lear.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, John Larroquette telling us how real it was.
And of course, by the time I saw it, I had already met Robert Block and realized that to the extent it was based on truth, it was the same single real-life person as he had based Norman Bates upon.
Yeah.
We based, you know, very, very loosely, but it’s loose.
What’s a looser word than loose in the thesaurus maybe is what, what I need right now.
The, the, that’s so funny.
They had, you remind me, I was listening to an interview and I can’t remember who it was with.
It was Joe Bob Briggs talking about how people would tell him that they need, he would meet people who said, well, I have a friend who’s, you know, lost someone in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Like it was a real event.
Oh, goodness, goodness gracious, yeah.
You just kind of, what do you do with that?
Well, exactly, because as I’m sure you know, and it’s so much fun, obviously we know everything about it, meaning that it’s fake, but I actually took, she was then my girlfriend, now wife, to the actual home.
The setting of the home.
Is that the one they get turned into a barbecue place?
Well, yeah.
Well, I think they turned maybe the gas station into a barbecue place.
That’s it.
It’s a restaurant, too.
Yeah.
They had several cuts of meat, and I shouldn’t even admit this, but of course I, and I do love my steaks rare, but I ordered it.
At the house of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, you know, everybody getting their pictures taken in front of it.
And, yeah, you know, Briggs meets somebody who says it was a real thing, you know.
So, yeah, they’re talking about a disconnect, you know.
I mean, at least it was a friend told them, not a, you know, that at least gives you a little bit of distance so you don’t have to, you know, worry that you’re with someone who might be dangerous.
Right, right, right.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
But you’ve got so many wonderful movies and specials in here.
But you did put in a very prominent role In Search Of, which I’m glad you included it.
It certainly seems like it almost has to be.
But how did you feel about, because you did something interesting by spreading it out amongst the different chapters.
Right, because I break the book into various sections because to me all of this does kind of – well, you were saying about things – you didn’t use the word synergies, but like connections, networks, things that – to me, all of these topics I cover are kind of connected, but they’re still singular in a way.
In other words, there’s a section in the book on ancient aliens.
There’s a section on the paranormal.
There’s a section on prophecies.
or speculative history.
So I did try to break them into, well, I guess we might say if we wanted to be boring sub-genres or something, you know, like I’ve just defined.
So that’s where In Search Of, as well as Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World, not only show up, but they show up in so many of the different sections because, well, I think they figured out long ago, and as people like Alan Landsberg, long ago, what I did when I was…
thinking about this book initially, that they realized, yes, we can have everything from the death of Marilyn Monroe or what happened to Amelia Earhart, along with exorcisms, voodoo episodes, the real life Dracula, you know, all that made up, in other words, those seasons of In Search Of.
As I think about it now, and I really hadn’t so much, but yeah, I think somebody like Landsberg with that series knew well what…
I’m calling it weird, but he knew well what that was, meaning that these strange subjects of inquiry could fit within the umbrella of, in his case, one TV series, as well as some of the others he made, too.
Yeah, yeah.
We just, in season, was it season five?
Death, Daredevil Death Wish.
Yeah, yeah.
That’s early season five, where they use some, not the same footage, but some of the same people from a special they had done on That’s Incredible, his other show, which, you know, there was a, I guess it seems like from our research, there was a lot of…
public outrage for like some of the stunts being quite violent on that show.
Right, right, right.
Well, that’s one of the things I remember as a kid.
And even through the years, I think with my sisters or friends from that period, we’ll jokingly say to one another, you know, don’t try this at home kids or whatever kind of disclaimer they had to give.
Right.
Yeah.
On, on that’s incredible.
So.
I think there’s a podcast I like to listen to with some game designers, and they have a trope that they say, you know, if you look out the window and you see Zeppelins everywhere, you know you’re in an alternate timeline.
And this is not really usable for many circumstances, but if you look out and you see someone wearing a bee beard, you know you’re in the 1970s.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Well, and that’s true of a lot of obviously the recreations in these films from, you know, the the clothing styles to, you know, the cars and everything.
It really does wonderfully evoke the period on the one hand in a kind of a truly nonfiction way, while at the same time being, you know, bogus dramatizations, you know, of the paranormal content or whatever else, you know.
And some of those haunt me.
I mean, the legend of Boggy Creek and the mysterious monsters just have – there’s moments where you get Bigfoot invasively sticking his arm through a window or coming through a door.
Right, right.
It’s like, you know, when I’m out in the woods as a kid, I’m thinking, it’s Bigfoot out here.
But that was all about, hey –
is it dark outside?
Cause he could be right there, right?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
He’s right there, uh, peering in when, when, when he’s, if he’s illuminated, it’ll be by the UFO landing, you know, nearby.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, but, but, but, and, and these things did like, like we were saying, you know, they did seem so, Oh, fascinating and possibly real.
The possibility was there was more, it was, it was very much there.
And the fire of that, particularly in the imagination of, uh,
of a young kid.
For me, one of the ones that also, I bet some people will remember it.
It was always one of my favorites was, and this was Sun Classic as well.
Charles Berlitz’s Bermuda Triangle.
I got to watch that while in the Bermuda Triangle last summer.
That was so neat.
Oh, gosh.
I wish I’d have been there.
It was amazing.
I wish I’d have been there.
I wish I’d have been there because I still love going to some of those locations.
Actually, during our honeymoon, my wife and I went to several places, among them Point Pleasant.
Oh, neat.
For Mothman, for fun.
But anyway, I…
Yeah, Charles Berlitz’s Bermuda Triangle, if you saw it as a kid, and I think that’s something, you know, that if you tell something, and I teach film students, you know, if you tell somebody that’s 18 or 20, 22 now, and you say, well, gosh, Tron, or whatever it was in the past, Star Wars, the effects, or whatever you’re talking about, you had to be there to really understand that this was so new, and they can understandably not…
do that because they can’t go back in time.
For me, that would be, I feel similar if I was to try and say how I feel about Charles Berlitz’s Bermuda Triangle because at the time, it seemed deeply compelling, deeply believable when I saw it at the age of seven.
Brad Crandall seems such a, again, authoritative host.
His office that he’s in has all kinds of little boat models he picks up as if…
Those are evidence of something.
I don’t know.
Yeah, he’s one of those people.
I didn’t know who he was, but he has so much screen presence.
Oh, the voice.
I think a lot of people would recognize his voice even now, though they wouldn’t his name.
And yeah, I saw that in a theater.
When I go back to it now, of course, it’s, you know, the special effects and dramatizations are rather…
You know, poor and and parts of the film are very boring.
But as a seven year old, somehow it had me enraptured, you know, entranced at the front row of my local movie theater, you know?
Yeah.
Did you when you were pursuing these?
I know part of this is academic.
And I bet this is the question you probably get asked all the time.
How many of these did you watch?
Well, I’ve watched every one in the book that survives.
Wow.
Some of the really early ones, like, you know, they don’t survive, unfortunately.
There was only one, though, of the big period under review.
To go back again to basically, I’m talking 69, 70, Patterson Gimlin, the original Chariots of the Gods documentary through, which a lot of people I’m sure would be shocked to find now was nominated for a Best Documentary Award.
Yeah, we talked about that.
Yeah.
And that’s the English cut, not the German.
Is that right?
Yeah, I think it would have been the English language cut, which, you know, I didn’t even realize as a kid, you know, what that would have meant or that Harold Reinald was a German filmmaker and so forth.
But you watch it now, if one does, and you can see at certain moments, like when they open up an ornate Bible.
on screen it’s german script rather than english so there’s a couple of little kind of giveaways yeah they replaced you know the um the uh um uh what what am i trying to say the uh the the narration you know uh right for german yeah yeah
I wish, this is so frustrating.
These movies, as precious as they are to me in a nostalgia way, very few of them are really great quality.
Nobody’s going to go back and remaster these, right?
And I don’t even know how they would for something like Chariots because it’s comprised of so many pieces of footage from different places.
You can tell from shot to shot, there’s all kinds of different…
film style.
I don’t know how to put that.
I’m assuming that I don’t know if the filmmaker made all these himself or what, but like the quality is wildly all over the place throughout the movie.
Well, yeah, and then, you know, the duping of some of these films and when it finally got theatrically released in America and so forth.
You know, there actually is a company that’s put out a small number of these and really treated them very well in terms of trying to, if not restore them in…
you know, in, in expensive, huge terms, but to try and clean them up a bit, uh, VCI, um, has a few of these out, but I think you’re right about most of them for me.
You know, you can find a lot of these on the internet and I’m pleased that, uh, you know, if somebody gets the book and they, they see some of these, you can find a lot of them on YouTube.
Yeah.
Uh, but there were a handful that I, I had to search for a long time for the VHS, uh, which was the only way some of them were ever, uh,
distributed outside of maybe a theater, and even then, you know, maybe not so much.
But of the 70s and early 80s ones, I saw all of them but one.
And there was one, and Steve Bissett and I have talked about this.
In fact, he mentions it in his foreword to my book.
He wants to watch this one film like I do, not because it’s probably any good, but it’s the only one that I couldn’t find.
Yeah.
From the period.
It’s called Mysteries from Beyond the Triangle, 1978.
And the little bit online about it…
Today, people give different wrong dates, everything about it.
I went back through all the movie trades, all the newspapers.
I found stuff from the period.
That was the only one of the core era we’re talking about that I couldn’t see, didn’t see because I couldn’t.
I hope a copy’s out there somewhere.
And you try.
Sometimes for me, it’s even thinking, okay, I know the director was so-and-so.
Let me try to reach out to maybe his heirs or so-and-so who has a copy.
And that’s the only one.
It was one of the many.
I mean, we’re talking about the Sun classic, Charles Berlitz’s Bermuda Triangle, but there were several, including one narrated by Vincent Price, The Devil’s Triangle.
In that period, obviously, that was maybe the peak moment for popularity of the Bermuda Triangle, but that one
So if anybody out there listening has a copy, I would pay a premium price to watch it.
You know, just to be complete.
Exactly.
I mean, it is that kind of obsessive desire to hunt down something that I think makes for a good academic.
Well, thanks.
It was a lot of fun though, because I loved these growing up and some of them did have a real impact on me, but I probably only saw 25% of the ones that I…
came to write about for the book.
I saw the main ones, the ones people like you and me, we probably do remember, obviously, Chariots of the Gods or Man Who Saw Tomorrow.
The Mysterious Monsters, I think a lot of people do remember fondly, perhaps less fondly if they go back and watch it now.
But some of them were quite obscure.
So I probably only saw about 25% of them at the time.
as a kid.
And yeah, so, but it was fun finding the others.
That’s so neat.
Well, if anybody finds it, obviously, I think word will get back to you.
These, you know, we’ve got good listeners and, you know, you’ve probably already done the work, but sometimes these things do turn up.
I remember when I was growing up, I would see stills
from Edison’s Frankenstein movie.
Oh, me too, me too.
Listed as a lost film.
I’m like, this looks crazy.
And now you can see a high-diff restoration on YouTube.
Yeah, it’s amazing.
I remember that feeling too.
I believe you were talking about those horror film kind of school books.
Yeah.
And like the school libraries would have elementary libraries, like by Ian Thorne.
You know, and the Frankenstein one, as I recall, I hope I’m recalling correctly.
It may have been a famous monsters that I saw, but I saw that still image of myself too.
And it just burned itself into my brain.
If I can have 10, 15 seconds, I’ll tell my favorite story like that, which is very quick.
Sure, go ahead.
We probably, those of us who were reading the stuff back then, whether it was, you know, the earlier books on horror by people like…
Calvin T. Beck or Carlos Clarence, William K. Everson, so forth.
You know, they would always talk about how the first horror film was probably one called The Devil’s Castle from 1897 or so, and made by Georges Méliès, the famously made Trip to the Moon in 1902.
Another great one to watch restored.
Yeah, it’s amazing.
The restoration of that is breathtaking.
Yeah.
And many more people, of course, know about him now, thanks to Scorsese and the film Hugo, where Ben Kingsley plays him as a character.
Well, anyway, from the age of 8 or 10, just reading about The Devil’s Castle, oh my goodness.
And then somewhere around 2002, a copy turned up.
It’s a French film.
It was very popular when released in America, shown in America by exhibitors.
And a copy around 2002 showed up.
in New Zealand of all places.
Wow.
And it too can be watched on YouTube.
So, you know, we, we sometimes, especially in the pre home video age, you know, we, we were just dying to see some of these things.
And then now I feel kind of the reverse where I’m just overwhelmed by, by possibilities of what I can watch.
You know, there’s too much.
Well, there is too much.
And I think there’s a peril in that this ability to watch things streaming has created the false impression that, therefore, everything’s available all the time.
And that’s so far from true.
Dramatically untrue.
And even what is on a streaming channel, we also know, well, we’ll see the leaving soon.
Yes.
Tag.
And so there’s this constant, it feels to me constant at least, coming and going, as well as the stuff that’s never there, occasionally stuff that’s on YouTube but then gets pulled for whatever reason.
I have to say, maybe it was because one of the happiest eras of my life was the beginning of the home movie, the movie, home VHS movie rental places, you know, the VHS rental places.
So exciting.
And so to this day, I’m still a physical media diehard, you know.
And I am…
A huge proponent.
I think my hoarding has made me switch to digital.
I know what you mean, because at a given point, well, you know, we mentioned famous monsters.
And about the age of 12 or 13, I met Forrest Ackerman, and we became close friends until the time of his death.
And I knew his wife well, and he even, as part of a larger dedication, dedicated one of his books to me.
But
But Forry, I remember saying that his wife really had had it with his collection when she opened up the refrigerator and he had poked stuff even to the fridge just to find a place for some films.
And so, yeah, it can become overwhelming.
Seriously, thank you so much for giving me so generously of your time.
I really appreciate it.
I can’t imagine a book better suited for our audience than this book, especially in research of audience.
It is so on point for everything we talk about.
and for that time period and it’s beautifully laid out i know people say sometimes they’ll call something a coffee table book but i don’t really keep a coffee table i do drink a lot of coffee but exactly but but this is a book i would love to have out for guests if we actually had guests but since we’re anti-social we don’t uh i’ll do this instead and say if you’re thinking of having me over have this on your coffee table i’d love to pick it up and it’s just it’s great
Well, and if I can make the plug, I’ve got to say, you know, the publisher, Ferrell House, it has long been a source of incredibly fascinating books.
In fact, when I was 13, the very first book I worked on, and I wasn’t the author, I was a research assistant, was Nightmare of Ecstasy, the Ed Wood biography.
Oh, wow.
Which Ferrell House published.
And I say that only because, you know, my first experience working on a book was
was Farrell House.
And then all these decades later, you know, it’s one of my own books that they published.
And I think Farrell House, they do such amazing books on all kinds of curious, strange topics, wonderful topics.
They did go, and this is nothing to do with me, but I’m praising them.
They went way above.
what most any publisher would do on Weirdumentary by, yes, the great graphic design, the sheer number of color images.
So I hope if anybody is interested, they can buy it from Ferrell House directly or an independent bookstore.
So we support those or as need be.
And I do understand Amazon or wherever else.
Yep.
I will put links to all those things in the show notes, along with, if I can find them, I will take some time and try to put some of the YouTube links.
Sometimes we’ve had the weird experience and sad experience of when we link to in search of episodes that are on YouTube, they quickly disappear.
And so we worry sometimes that by putting a link, it causes that content to evaporate.
But still, I think listing some of these and letting people have a link straight to them would be a useful bonus and maybe a reason to bother going to the show notes.
Absolutely, because even though a lot of them are boring, there are still a small number, like Chariots of the Gods, that are really fun, engaging.
Some of them have great soundtracks.
So some of them really are a lot of fun to watch, even for a skeptic like me or you.
Yeah, I think so.
I think so for real.
Gary, thank you so much.
I know we had to do a lot of work to get this to come together, but it was totally worth it.
And I hope this will not be the last time we speak.
I hope we will do it again.
And I’m grateful for you and your listeners.
And I’m certainly grateful for your patience with me.
Not a problem.
Letting this happen.
Thank you so much.
Have a great evening.
You too.
Wonderful.
See ya.
Bye-bye.

The post BONUS: Weirdumentary with Gary Rhodes appeared first on MonsterTalk.

We are delighted to talk with Dr. Christopher Beatty about his research into Dragonflies. From ancient times these insects have been the subject of wonder, fear and misinformation. Let’s keep the wonder but get rid of some of the other stuff as we dive in on a creature whose lifecycle, morphology, and effectiveness as a hunter elevate its place in the lore of humanity.

Why this title for the episode? Tune in and find out.

Petroglyphs of Dragonflies 1000y/o (Atlas Obscura)

Dragonflies in Japan – Akitsu Shima

Dragonfly Helmet (Japanese)

Those are from a class of helmets called Kiwari Kabuto – amazing variety

Some cool electronica I used to listen to back in “the day” from an album named after dragonflies:  Odonata by Amethystium
Good lord – has it been 25 years?? Tempus fugit.

Additional note from Dr. Beatty:
“I’m the past-president of the Dragonfly Society of the Americas, a group that promotes public awareness, as well as research and conservation of dragonflies.  We are open to anyone with interest in odonates, and membership is quite inexpensive ($15/year).

We have an annual meeting, which for 2026 will be taking place in Hot Springs, North Carolina, in the last week of June.  Info on the meeting can be found here:https://www.dragonflysocietyamericas.org/hotsprings2026.”

As mentioned in the interview, mating damsel flies form heart-shaped bindings.

Dragonfly Nymph Hunting

They’re really something to watch… in slow motion, of course.

And spoilers… as regards “Favorite Monsters,” but if you haven’t seen it ya gotta SEE it:

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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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 I’m excited to do one of my favorite kinds of Monster Talk episodes, the kind where we look at real creatures that have become enshrined in myth and legend, only to discover that the reality of their capabilities may be even more wondrous than our collected imaginations even hinted at.
Dragonflies are known by many names around the world and are seen as monsters in some cultures and noble spirits in others.
In English, we’ve been calling them dragonflies for a few hundred years, combining the fantastical dragon with the common fly.
In Sweden, they’re known as Trollslanda, combining that fairytale monster, the troll, with slanda, a word which comes from a term for a spindle such as you’d wind thread around.
Which is interesting because Dragonfly lore also frequently brings in sewing metaphors for other reasons.
Perhaps because of their needle-shaped body, or perhaps because some of their actual biological processes look suspiciously like the motions of pushing thread through cloth.
These creatures are beautiful and deadly.
And I think they’re fascinating.
And in this episode, we’re talking with Dr. Christopher Beatty.
And I think it’s safe to say that Karen and I both learned a lot.
And we’re delighted to share this conversation with you.
Monster Talk.
Well, thank you for joining us.
So can you tell the listeners who you are?
Sure.
My name is Chris Beatty.
I’m an evolutionary ecologist.
I’m currently a visiting scholar at Stanford University, and I also am a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
I work on aquatic insects and most specifically on dragonflies and damselflies.
I’ve done some work on their behavior, looking at things like evolution of territoriality and color evolution and signaling.
More recent years, I’ve been working on their…
of biogeography, sort of how the species got to where they are.
And a lot of that has moved into doing more genetics and genomics.
So I do spend a lot of time working with DNA and genomes these days.
That’s so cool.
I’m so interested in so many things about these creatures.
I’m assuming the listeners know what a dragonfly is, but we should probably talk about that.
And you said dragonflies and damselflies.
And I only know damselflies as something that fly fishermen use to
fish, and I don’t really know anything else about them.
Are they closely related?
Is there a difference?
What is that?
They are.
So they’re part, and that’s probably me just being a completist saying it that way.
They’re all part of the insect order Odonata.
And so dragonflies, it’s a little confusing because the common name for the order is dragonflies.
But then there are three sub-orders within that order.
There’s the dragonflies, Anasozagoptera.
And then there’s the damselflies, Zygoptera.
And then there’s another very small group with only about three species in it called Anisozygoptera because they kind of share traits of the two.
The differences, they do look a lot alike.
The differences you would see looking at them, dragonflies, when they land, their wings are out like an airplane wing.
So they land with the wings lateral.
Damselflies land with the wings folded over their bodies.
Oh, I’m looking at them now.
That’s okay.
I’ve seen these and didn’t even know there was…
But as soon as you say that, I see the difference.
Yeah, yeah.
Right.
They have a lot of similarities.
I say they’re part of the same order.
It’s two groups that separated, oh, I want to say 180, 190 million years ago, maybe a little further back, basing on estimates.
Yeah, yeah.
So they have similar ecologies.
Their dragonflies are predators both in their juvenile stage in the water as a nymph and they’re predators as adults.
But yeah, that would be the difference.
There’s about 6,400 species.
species of Odonates currently described.
And that’s roughly divided.
There’s about a little over 3000 dragonflies and a little over 3000 damselflies.
And yeah, there are some other, uh, a lot of dragonflies, the eyes, uh,
The eyes, the compound eyes, take up the whole head.
So it’s just sort of two eyes that meet right in the middle.
Damselflies tend to have the eyes more out, sort of separated kind of on a wide head, almost like a hammerhead shark, kind of on a wide, on stalks, would be another way that you’d tell them apart.
I tend to think about, in mammals, widespread eyes being something that prey would have to be more alert.
Oh, yeah.
But in insects, not so much.
These things, apparently, if my reading is correct, have 360 degrees field of vision.
That’s a lot of vision.
And they’re brutal hunters, which I know we will talk about.
Right.
So is that trait…
That associating predatory with, you know, I guess it’s stereo vision, but eyes evolved separately.
I’m answering my own question here.
Eyes evolved separately in insects.
So is there any relationship between predator and prey and eye configuration in insects?
I would certainly say four.
I’ll just call them dragonflies if that’s okay.
And we’ll know I’m referring to the whole order.
But vision is super important in them finding their prey, in finding mates, in navigation.
We have examples of…
several dragonfly species that are migratory.
And so obviously their visual system is very different from ours, but with the compound eyes, they do have a huge number of facets that wrap around.
There are those that literally have facets basically facing backwards so they can look all around them.
They can see above quite well and below.
A lot of people I work with have occasion to need to catch dragonflies, which can be a trick.
one strategy that people will use is if you can kind of get underneath them if you have one that’s maybe flying back and forth along a stream and you want to catch it you maybe can see a little bit less well directly below and then you sort of swing up but that’s that’s one technique but yeah the um vision is certainly very uh very important to them
I just love dragonflies.
I love their colours.
I’ve always been fascinated with them, but I haven’t really known too much about them.
So we’re really excited to do this show with you.
And you’ve touched upon biology already, but I’m wondering if you could address some more questions about where we might find them and things like how long do they live, what do they eat, and what causes their beautiful colours?
Something many people may not be aware of is that the dragonfly spends a majority of its life underwater.
It’s an aquatic nymph in freshwater habitats.
You can find them in a variety, be it ponds or sometimes larger lakes, streams and rivers.
Oftentimes, that habitat is fairly species-specific.
There are those that are adapted to live in fast-moving current and those that much prefer kind of a quiet pond.
They, on average, if I can generalize across the whole order…
It’s probably safe to say that most species, individuals take about a year to go through their life cycle.
That can be different in high elevation places where it takes a little longer, for example, or higher latitude.
It might be a little shorter than that in places like the tropics where you might get multiple generations over a long, warm, wet period.
But they lay their eggs in water.
A lot of species, the egg hatches fairly soon after it’s laid.
And they’ll spend time as a nymph, usually eight to 10 months.
And then they emerge.
Dragonflies are different.
They’re what we call hemimetabolous insects.
So incomplete metamorphosis.
There are the…
The mayflies and the grasshoppers are a couple of other examples of insect groups that do this.
So they don’t have a pupa stage.
They don’t, you know, like butterflies and beetles.
They don’t have this resting stage where they go from being sort of a grub-like larvae to this very different adult.
The dragonfly nymph has…
You know, it doesn’t look like an adult, but it has some of the traits.
It already has large eyes.
And if you’re watching one develop, you can actually see that it has wing pads on its back.
The wings are inside the pads.
It’s a little like an undeployed parachute.
And they’re slowly growing in there.
And so it will feed and get larger.
and it will molt the old exoskeleton and grow a new one.
And when it’s ready, it’ll crawl up on some sort of a stick or a stone, some sort of material sticking out of the water, and then it will emerge.
The exoskeleton splits right at the thorax.
Maybe I should…
Quickly point out, you have three body parts in all insects.
You’ve got the head, the thorax, where the wings and the legs are attached, and then the abdomen.
That’s all I remember from biology.
That’s all I remember.
Hey, that’s great.
No, that’s, you know, a fundamental thing about, you know, the vast majority of life on the planet.
That’s good.
So it splits along the top of the thorax.
And so they sort of pull their thorax and head out first.
And that allows that exoskeleton to harden a little.
And then they’ll use the legs.
When the legs are strong enough, they’ll grab onto the structure that they’ve climbed out onto and then pull out the abdomen.
And then that’s when they pump lymph into the wings and the abdomen to expand.
So that’s when those wings expand out to their full size.
And then once they harden, they can fly.
And adults…
On average, probably that part of the lifespan is six to ten weeks, depending on how lucky they are or, you know, if they get hit by a truck or…
But that, yeah, probably ten weeks.
I’ve seen individuals at places I’ve worked where, especially the males, as you get towards the end of the summer and the flying season, if you catch one, the back edge of the wings are pretty shredded and battered.
They’ve…
been out and about and busy.
So yeah, that’s the average lifespan.
I work on a particular group that’s kind of a violation of that rule.
And they spend actually multiple years as a nymph.
But that’s their life cycle.
One of the interesting things about their mating, of course…
Once they come out, it’s go time.
Flying, they feed as adults.
They’ll eat on average.
This usually gets people to like dragonflies even more if they don’t already.
They’re voracious eaters of other insects, especially mosquitoes.
They’ll eat about 30 to 100 mosquitoes a day on average from what we know.
And so life once you’re an adult is all about flying around and finding mates.
It’s eating and mating.
It’s just like you’re 20.
I often tell people, you know, for dragonflies, they’ve been around 325 million years.
They eat whatever the heck they want and they have sex in midair.
So, you know, it’s pretty good life.
Life peaked early for Earth.
You mentioned their abdomens, and I can’t help but notice that their abdomens are very long and slender compared to a lot of insects.
Obviously, there’s others, but is there a relationship?
This is a weird, specific question, but is there like a common average ratio to the head and the thorax compared to the abdomen across species, or does that vary wildly?
But is that mathematically significant?
It is, and I have colleagues who are engineers who spend a lot of time looking at this.
This is not my field, but it does, some of it has to do with the dynamics of flight.
You have sort of long distance flyers versus short maneuverability, and the length of the abdomen can influence that.
There are also some constraints.
For example, there are some damselflies in South America that lay their eggs in tree stumps.
So you get these epiphytes and tree stumps that are full of water and they put their eggs in there.
And quite often, they have very long abdomens.
And very likely, the constraint of that is just to be able to maneuver themselves in to get the eggs down into the water.
The length of the abdomen can also be important when they mate.
If you’ve ever seen a pair of dragonflies flying together…
You’ll either see them sort of head to tail.
The male is always in front and has claspers at the end of his abdomen to attach to the female.
That’s another dragonfly and damselfly difference.
For dragonflies, there’s a structure on the top of the female’s head to attach to.
For the damselflies, there’s a structure on the thorax.
And so when they first sort of work out that they’re interested in mating, they’ll attach like that.
That’s referred to as tandem.
And the sperm production structures, the organs for that in the male, are in the very end of the abdomen, just like the ovaries and then the oviduct are in the end of the female’s abdomen.
But if the male is attached to the female…
with that part of his body, then it sort of makes it a problem.
Like, well, how do you deal with the sperm and get it where it needs to go?
And it turns out dragonfly males have a second set of naughty bits.
They’ve got what are called accessory genitalia.
It’s a structure on the second and third section of the abdomen, kind of up close to the thorax on the bottom.
And if you watch, sometimes you’ll see males flying around and you’ll actually see them curling their abdomen and that’s them transferring sperm in there.
And so the female, if she’s receptive, will then roll her abdomen around and they’ll make what’s called the mating wheel or the copulation wheel.
For damselflies particularly, it’s been suggested if you see them, actually it makes kind of a heart shape.
Aww.
So, yeah, so that’s sort of the damselfly.
I have colleagues that will send out, you know, holiday cards or certainly Valentine’s Day cards and put a damselfly mating pair there.
Hey, happy Valentine’s Day.
Here’s some insect porn.
That’s right, exactly.
I wouldn’t suggest the dragonflies are particularly, you know, gentle or romantic, but, you know, it gets the job done.
right did you want to go back to that yeah okay i’m just thinking about all the vivid beautiful blues and greens and and why they’re all different and uh yeah i’m just wondering what you can tell us about that yeah and are they actually different colors or is it one of those things like birds where it’s like the
No, scales.
It’s like the scales reflect certain colors.
Yeah.
Right.
So there are actually a couple of different mechanisms, and it depends a little on what color you’re seeing.
There are pigments that, especially if you see things like some of the blues that you might see, like spots of blue or bands of blue on the, well, really on any part of the body, but on the…
thorax and the abdomen.
Those often are caused by structures that have pigments inside them, and those are under the exoskeleton.
In some cases, that area of the exoskeleton is thinner and a little more clear, so that color can come through.
There are some interesting patterns that we’ll see.
Some of those pigments end up being temperature dependent.
And so if the individual cools off, those colors appear to go away.
And if they’re still alive, if they warm up, they’ll come back again.
But there’s some blues and yellows that work that way.
And then for the dragonflies that you see that have like a metallic coloration, that is a structure that’s on the surface of the exoskeleton.
And that’s actually a scattering.
There’s Tyndall scattering and Raleigh scattering are sort of two of the mechanisms that I know of.
But that’s a little bit more…
similar to how the scales on a butterfly will they also there’s a lot of superstructure involved there and so it differentially reflects different wavelengths back and so you get that as a color and then the sort of the third major way that you’ll see colors are on a structure
that’s again on top of the exoskeleton, but it’s called prunosity.
And it’s a waxy structure that is basically sort of exuded onto the body.
And those often are like a bright blue or a white.
There are some dragonflies you’ll see that have a really white abdomen or white patterns on the wing.
And that’s more of that waxy structure.
It looks very white to us.
In many cases, it also has an ultraviolet reflectivity as well, which we don’t see, but which dragonflies and other things do.
Wow, amazing.
The function, it can function in mating.
The best understood ways that it functions in mating are usually in damselflies with color on the wings.
And that, especially if it’s a very dark sort of color,
That’s often driven by melanin that has been sequestered into the wing, that’s been put into the wing.
And melanin is part of the… Well, it’s true for…
many insects, but it’s part of the dragonfly immune system.
If they have different things that might be like infections, parasites that can get in, the melanin will sort of glob around it and sort of protect the insect from them.
And the idea is that if you’re a really robust male…
that you can put a lot of melanin into this flashy wing and sort of signal, well, I’ve got melanin to spare.
Look at me, I’m just pouring penicillin in my coffee and throwing it over my shoulders.
Exactly.
So, you know, it’s excessive consumption.
Yeah, yeah.
That’s funny.
A very complex answer.
That’s really interesting.
Well, it strikes me as being particularly interesting because in many species, coloration is related to, if not sexual selection, to how you present to predators.
And these creatures have been around for so long that their predators have evolved.
Like some of them didn’t even exist before.
So what do we know about these ancient dragonflies compared to now?
I’m always fascinated by what can be directly inferred from, you know, the fossil record, amber, wherever.
But I’m really curious about, you know, what do we know about what eats them back then?
What eats them now?
Right.
Well, I think color, it does sort of beg the question, how can they get away being so brightly colored when obviously there are things that are going to want to eat them?
To their benefit, it’s probably the case that they’re pretty fast and can get away, though they still get eaten.
But we have some records, there are
fossil examples, wings tend to fossilize pretty well.
And so that’s oftentimes when we get representation of extinct species or other lines of dragonflies that aren’t around today, that aren’t part of the dragonfly or damselfly group.
We do tend to get wings and we do have examples going quite a ways back showing…
wing coloration, where you can see some banding and color in the wings.
Coloration, one other thing I should mention, thermoregulation can be really important too.
It’s thought that the colors, the different colors may reflect or absorb thermal temperature or thermal radiation and help them to adjust their temperatures.
So that’s beyond sort of mate recognition.
That’s another potentially really important one.
But yeah, I’m happy to talk about the fossil dragonflies.
On my wall in the living room, I have a life-size drawing of Meganeuropsis permiana, which is the largest known wingspan.
I’m just confirming here, wingspan was up to about 75 centimeters or 28 to 30 inches.
We have those from the Carboniferous era.
So the idea, there’s some debate about it, but the idea was that we saw potentially larger amounts of…
oxygen in the atmosphere back then.
We had larger trees, larger plant structures growing.
They were dying and falling, but the fungus and other things that break down cellulose hadn’t really evolved to catch up yet.
So we had periods potentially with oxygen levels, I think up to about 30, maybe slightly higher than 30%.
We’re at about 21% these days.
And the idea basically being that, you know, if you have a higher concentration of oxygen outside, potentially it can work in its…
dragonflies, like other insects, have trachea that open onto structures called spiracles that are basically just openings on the side of the body.
And so the air basically just works its way in.
It’s not carried by blood the way ours is.
And it has to eventually get into very small capillaries that can get all the way down and into the tissues and cells.
So if you have higher pressure oxygen, potentially it can get in deeper.
And so those organisms can grow to be larger.
And so that’s how we ended up with that group.
That particular group is called griffin flies.
So they’re not the ancestors of our modern dragonflies.
They’re, you know, another extinct lineage.
There are a number of other lines.
The gigantopithecus of dragonflies, right?
Yeah, yeah, right.
Well, Chris, a little while ago, I thought I heard you mention engineers studying dragonflies.
And I wonder if you can talk a bit more about that.
I was wondering if there are any applications for areas of engineering or other areas of science regarding the way that dragonflies move and fly.
Is there?
Is that a thing?
It is, yeah.
There are a few different groups that I know of, a couple here in the US and some in Great Britain that come to mind.
And we are very interested.
Dragonflies have a lot of flight ability that we still cannot replicate.
They can hover really well.
They can fly backwards.
Not many insects can do that.
The ability to develop drones, other aircraft that could use those same approaches to flight, potentially there are a lot of ways we could use that.
And one of the challenges is there’s sort of mimicking how the muscles move in moving the wings.
But if you’ve looked at a dragonfly wing, you can probably see it has a pretty standard shape.
The front wing, well, actually that’s another difference between dragonflies and damselflies that I forgot to mention.
And that’s actually the origin of the suborder names.
If you look at a dragonfly, the front wings and hind wings have different shape.
In the dragonfly, the hind wings are wider, close up to the body.
In damselflies, they tend to have narrow stalks.
So the fore and hind wings are kind of similar in shape.
The dragonfly wing is a kind of a complex structure.
The patterning and density of the wing veins can cause some parts of the wing to be a little more stiff and other parts to be a little more flexible.
Most dragonflies also have a structure.
If you look at them, there’s a little rectangle or a little dot on the leading edge of the wing towards the outside, right before the wing curves back.
That’s called a terastigma, and that is basically just a thicker layer of the exoskeleton.
that’s there, and that brings some rigidity to the end of that wing.
And so sort of the size and shape of that is an important component of, along with the size and shape of the wing that allows flight.
But as they’re flying, it might be better to think of them as swimming, as doing like a butterfly stroke in the air, because as they move those wings…
different parts of them will sort of bend and flex.
And that’s a big component of how they are able to do all the things in flight that they do.
And the material design of mimicking that is a real challenge.
And so that’s part of the sort of the challenge in figuring out how to get flight like a dragonfly can fly.
All right.
Very cool.
We know they will eventually succeed, though, because I’ve seen Dune, and that’s set in the future.
Oh, yeah.
The ornithopters.
Right.
I don’t know why they call it an ornithopter.
You know, it’s got too many wings.
It does.
It looks just like a dragonfly to me, you know.
Or maybe it’s a damselfly.
I didn’t look to see how they put their wings away when they’re not flying.
It could be pointed out, not necessarily in the dragonfly line, but there are, you know, foremost insects, it’s come down to two pairs of wings.
Things like the flies, the hind end has adapted into these structures for sort of orientation.
So they’re not…
which is why the order is called Diptera, two wings.
So there’s only two functioning wings.
And then for the beetles, the four wings have become the sort of hardened elytra that cover them up.
So they fly more with the back wings.
But there are some examples from the fossil record of some insects that appear to have wings on that, appear to have six wings, appear to have something of a pair of wings on the front wing.
thoracic segment on that first segment.
The modern dragonfly, modern insects, have the wings on the second and third of the thoracic segment.
I’m always interested in what got thrown away by evolution.
You see some weird, yeah, the fossil record’s great.
You come up with, yeah, just about anything has been tried in the past.
If you look back long enough, we sort of circled around the aquatic form of them.
But can we talk a little bit more about that?
Because when I told my kids we were doing this, one of them got very excited and began just spouting off things that they knew about baby dragonflies and talking about how they’re similar to xenomorphs.
And that’s the example I use.
Yeah.
Jet propulsion.
And I don’t want to spoil it.
No, no, absolutely.
No, the dragonfly nymph is a pretty wild and crazy organism.
So your comparison to the xenomorph is an interesting one.
They have this prehensile mouth part.
It’s only in the nymphs.
The adults don’t have it.
Adults have pretty standard sort of chewing jaws.
And although the nymphs have chewing jaws too, but it’s covered up by this thing.
I like to suggest, imagine if you had a third arm and the shoulder was attached to your chin.
Because the structure folds, it has sort of a two-part structure that can fold up under the body, much like your two sections of your arm.
And then it has a mask which has prehensile hooks and spines and all sorts of things associated with it, depending on the species.
And that folds up and covers the face, covers the mouth parts.
During COVID, a good friend of mine made up masks that looked like a spiked-tailed nymph mouth part.
It was great.
Just this gnarly-looking thing.
It actually looked a little bit like the mouth parts on the Predator, if we can bring Predator into the conversation, as well as the Xenomorph.
But you probably do remember that the xenomorph has those sort of internal jaws that jump out.
And the mechanism, you have to look at it on slow motion photography to see it.
But this arm can just basically reach out super fast and use those hooks to grab prey.
And that’s how they capture their prey.
And then they bring it in and sort of manipulate it with that and then chew it up and eat it with the mouth parts.
It’s a wild mechanism.
And in fact, that’s why the order is called Odonata.
Most all of the other insect orders have terra, P-T-E-R-A, in their name.
Hemiptera, coleoptera, diptera.
And that’s because they were described and sort of separated out from one another through their wing structure.
That was the system Linnaeus used.
Fabricius, another early person who worked on taxonomy, when he broke up the insects, broke them up by mouthparts.
And, you know, basically that was the one name that was left over because that mouth part is just so weird.
It’s like, well, we have to still name the order after that.
It’s crazy.
So the O-D-O-N, the Don in that, or Odon, I think it’s Odois is the…
is the, is it a Greek, I think a Greek root.
And that basically like an orthodonture.
Yeah.
It’s tooth.
Right.
And so Odonata is the toothed ones.
And yeah, so that mouth part is wild and the jet propulsion too.
So the only dragonflies can do this.
When you look at dragonfly nymphs.
The damselfly nymphs have what look like three tails.
There’s three structures at the end of the abdomen.
And they do actually use them for kind of long and slender, and they can use them for swimming.
But predominantly, they’re gills.
And the technical term is caudal lamellae.
And it’s just sort of a large surface area that they can use to exchange gases.
And then that’s connected to the trachea.
But the dragonfly nymphs breathe through their butt.
They have an internal gill in a rectal chamber, and they will sort of expand and contract their abdomen a little like a bellows and draw the water in and out.
And not all of the dragonflies are some of the primitive…
species that are primitive groups that can’t do it you say primitive but they’re really old already so you mean that they have you know they’ve maintained their old phenotype from long ago is that what you mean right boy that’s a you’re you’re calling me out a little because primitive is a dangerous word to use yeah yeah just well i live in the deep south and man anything i could do to help remind people that evolution is real i like to i like to do that so so yeah so the um so
The major families, a lot of the major families of the dragonflies, some of them go back.
There’s this group I work on that’s about 160 million years old.
That’s when it appears to have separated from the other main families in the dragonflies.
But there are a lot of them that they’ve diversified in the last 25 to 30 million years.
And the old, the petal tails, the group I work on is one that their gill structure and abdomen structure, they really can’t do that jet propulsion thing.
Where they live, it wouldn’t work very well anyway.
They live in sort of bog habitats and there isn’t a whole lot of water to move around in.
But the…
But yeah, some of them will fill up with water and then just blast it out and go shooting away.
And it’s definitely something they’ll use as predator avoidance if they can.
Butt jets.
Yeah.
That’s where it’s at, man.
It looks like fun.
While we’re still talking about biology, I wanted to quickly, I read, and that doesn’t make it true, that adult dragonflies have a success rate when they hunt higher than 90%.
Is that true?
There are a couple, actually a recent paper from a group out of UC Davis or some recent work on that.
And there’s a paper from 2013 that I was just looking back to remind myself where they did high-speed video photography.
When you look at how dragonflies hunt…
There’s sort of two groups.
There’s what we call perchers and flyers.
The flyers are more active.
They’re like, well, we call it hawking because it’s more like a hawk.
They spend time on the wing flying around looking for things to eat.
But the perchers, which tend to be some of the more mid-sized dragonflies, they will find sort of a vantage point and they will sit there and they will watch for things to fly by and then go after them.
And what they were able to figure out was basically that the dragonflies can do trigonometry.
They’re like, if you’re a submarine trying to sink a destroyer, you don’t aim for where the boat is.
You try to figure out where it’s going and its speed, and you try to send the torpedo to where it’s going to be.
And that’s generally what they do.
They take off and fly, and they can sort of match speed.
But yeah, they are…
The species that were studied showed like 95…
if you look at the percentage of times that they went after a prey and succeeded in capturing it, yeah, it was like 95 to 97% of the time.
We think about lethality in animals, like, you know, a pack of lions is probably running in the thirties, right?
Yeah.
I think it’s 25.
I actually looked this up.
It’s 20, 25%.
And I think great white sharks are 50, 50.
There you go.
Obviously, insects don’t have a lot of cognitive power to imagine how much peril they’re in.
But if a dragonfly gets after you, you’re probably dead already.
You just don’t know it yet.
We should be much as I would love to live in a world where we had…
giant dragonflies, life would be a lot more of a challenge for us, potentially.
I don’t know if they would see us as prey, but if they did, it would make the morning commute a tough thing.
I saw a documentary, it’s called Heavy Metal, and you get to ride them.
It’s really cool.
Oh, yes, yeah.
Well, Chris, we’ve looked at a lot of the amazing science behind these creatures, and I wonder if we can shift gears a bit and just take a different angle.
When I think about dragonflies, I think about how popular they are in literature and art, jewellery, things like Art Deco.
I have a couple of lamps that are ripoffs of the Tiffany-style lamps that have dragonflies.
Do I?
So, I’m wondering, this is probably not your purview, but are there any myths or legends that you could think about regarding dragonflies and why are they so popular in art and literature?
Actually, there are a lot of examples and I am not a specialist on this, but I am very interested in it from, you know, being sort of the…
being someone who works with these things.
And it depends on the part of the world, but there are a lot of examples.
You say they appear in art, you know, the Tiffany lamps, you’ll see them in sort of, you know, Art Deco and sort of Beaux Arts design.
But there’s another, I’ve actually gotten to visit the site about 10 years ago.
Yeah, I think it’s a Mogollon culture, and that’s southwestern U.S. and into Mexico.
There’s a place in the Gila National Forest that I’ve visited that’s, I think it’s just called the Dragonfly Trail, but it’s artwork that’s about, it’s petroglyphs.
They’re, I believe, right about 1,000 years old, and it’s representation of dragonflies.
And in that particular area, you can find the…
the dragonfly petroglyphs quite regularly uh and so yeah another another example where they’ve been represented the culture probably that has to my knowledge that has um embraced
dragonflies the most would be in Japan.
In fact, Akitsushima is a name which basically means the island of dragonflies.
And that’s sort of the Japan sort of appearing in mythic stories.
And there we see the dragonfly tends to be something that represents
uh sort of good luck and good fortune they’re seen as as a very fortuitous thing and they’re also seen as a very sort of brave and bold organism there’s some great examples of um samurai battle helmets that i’ve seen if you get a chance you should look them up there’s one i think the minneapolis institute of art has one and um and the met in new york they’re 16th or 17th century but there’s these helmets
And the dragonfly, because it sort of boldly launches forward and goes after its prey, it’s seen as sort of this sigil of a bold soldier.
And so they have these helmets that are really quite wild in the way that they’ve built sort of…
dragonfly iconography on top of them, which is really cool.
I saw it described as because they don’t have to turn around to flee.
They can back up.
So they always face their enemy.
It’s very brave.
Kawari Kabuto is, I believe, the Japanese name for the particular style of helmet.
But just about anywhere you go, you will find there are
it’s interesting because in sort of Northern European stories, you will get dragonflies being potentially a little more malevolent or a little more of a trickster.
The snake doctor, is that a familiar term to you, Blake?
Like earlier today, I was reading about that.
Yeah.
I didn’t know if they called them that in Georgia.
That’s in, I grew up in Southern Illinois and that was a name that I did hear.
Some people call it, uh, Appalachians and the Appalachians.
Yeah.
So I’m in the South end of the Appalachians and there’s a lot of snake folklore, um, about things, uh, joint snakes.
This reminded me of the joint snake, the idea, because the idea behind the joint snake is it’s a snake that can break apart and then go back together.
Um, I,
I think the most uh you humoristic version would be that that’s probably a glass lizard that people saw right you know which really does break apart but does not go back together but the idea that dragonflies would be sewing them back to together again as like helping them like it was that is the idea yeah that that they’re they’re there to stitch them or if they get injured to heal them and you you will find
Europe and in several places in Africa and around, you’ll find the sort of association with dragonflies and snakes.
That’s possibly because in some of these areas, you tend to find them in the same place.
Especially if you’re in a more arid region, you probably will find them more along rivers or in places that are a little more wet.
But even the origin…
If we go back to the name, Dragonfly is not a super old name.
I think it goes, I think the first time it’s seen in print is in like the 16th century.
Oh, wow.
That’s really new.
But it refers to sort of the, it goes back to the older concept of, you know, dragon as giant serpent.
Yeah.
And so it’s, yeah, they’re sort of seen as, you know, if you look at them, they’ll sort of long abdomen and, you know, they can be, they can sort of flex as they fly.
And so that’s kind of what you go back to.
And there’s also some of the earlier names.
that you find for them.
Adderbolt.
Really?
Yeah.
So an early…
So actually some of the names… Like a flying snake?
Like an adder?
Yeah.
So Bolt may have a…
You know, I think of bolts as associated with like, you know, arrows and, or, you know.
Yeah, crossbows.
Crossbows, things like that.
That’s the sound they make, by the way.
A lot of people don’t know that.
It’s strange because it’s also the sound that phasers make.
Yeah, yeah, pew, pew.
It’s wild.
That’s where the terms like a whinge and whine come from.
as well, from Scottish.
You say whinge, we say whinge.
Oh, sure.
Yeah, the sound of an arrow going past, zooming past.
Oh, right.
I saw multiple folklores involving dragonflies sewing things.
Why?
I don’t know.
Does it look like a needle?
I don’t know.
Well, that actually, so some of the older names, we’ve already talked about Snake Doctor.
Adderbolt was an older one.
Horse Stinger or Horse Killer.
They don’t sting.
That’s one thing I want to make very clear is dragons, sometimes people are afraid of them because that long abdomen looks like they might injure you.
They don’t have a stinger.
But Devil’s Darning Needle is another common name.
And, you know, like a darning needle like you’d use to darn a sock.
Yeah.
In some places, Cabellitos del Diablo, the Little Horses of the Devil in Spain and in some places in South America.
But the, yeah, the…
I’m not, well, it’s interesting.
I’m not quite sure.
I mean, it does look a little like the darning needle, but this is kind of my guess.
But if you watch a lot of dragonfly species, when they go to lay eggs, sometimes the male will stay with the female and mate guard.
But in many species, once they’ve made it, the male will leave and the female will go and oviposit eggs.
And many of them will just sort of fly kind of straight up and down and dip their abdomen in the water.
I have seen that at the swamp.
Okay, yeah.
And it’s almost, if you watch them, it almost looks like a mechanical sort of as they go up and down.
And in fact, there’s, well, there’s a few names, but the one I can think of right away in Brazil, one of the common names is Lava Bunda.
And I believe the interpretation is basically a butt washer.
So it looks like it’s washing its backside.
That’s great.
Fascinating.
Yeah.
And I love those sorts of names because it’s an observation about what they’re doing.
It’s like a behavior, life history sort of inference.
But I have wondered if that almost doesn’t look like sewing.
in that when you watch a female putting eggs in the water, that up and down over and over again, you know, it greatly predates things like a sewing machine, which, you know, I can think of, you know, watching my mom running the sewing machine and, you know, the needle going up and down.
But yeah, so I think that’s the, the darning needle is, it’s a name I’ve heard in several places.
But yeah, they’re, so in some places they’re seen as, and you may have heard some of the stories too, that if you go to sleep by the creek, they’ll sew your mouth shut or sew your eyes shut.
Yes.
Super creepy.
Yeah.
um but uh but in a lot of places they’re seen as sort of a good especially coming out of water because you know rainy seasons are often the sign of a new growing season and dragonflies often sort of presage you’ll you know you’ll see as it gets rainy and the water comes out there you know they’ll sort of show up and uh so that’s a lot of you know in um
places in South America, certainly a number of places in Africa where they’re seen as this sort of harbinger of good things, of good fortune and bounty.
Well, speaking of darning, I have to say, darn it, we’re running out of time.
Oh, sure.
So I have to wind up here, and I believe we could easily talk for another hour or two about these things.
Yeah, we’ll have to have a sequel, I think.
Anytime we get to talk about it, I know some people wonder, why do we do episodes about pure biology?
It’s like so many monsters and folklore originate with the natural world.
And we can both dispel common myths and also just…
be reminded about…
There’s remarkable facts and figures.
Exactly.
Evolution is astonishing.
Anyway, I’ll never get tired of it.
And I really appreciate the work you’re doing in this field and taking the time to talk to us as well.
Well, thanks.
It’s been a blast.
As I say, I’ve been a fan of the show for a long time, so I’m excited to get to come on and share.
I will point out that if you’re a mosquito, if you want to talk about the most monstrous thing in the world, it’s definitely a dragonfly.
You turned him, you turned him pure hero because I don’t, we’ve done, we’ve done an episode about mosquitoes, but it is the most lethal to humans.
Right.
Yeah.
They are used actually in places.
There’s a variety of different, uh, approaches, uh,
But there’s been work taking, like say going into a community in an area that has malaria.
And in a lot of cases, people are collecting water for use.
They’ll have rain barrels.
And of course, those can get filled with mosquitoes, but they will go in and put dragonfly nymphs in those containers.
And they’ve been able to show in some cases that it doesn’t…
you know, get rid of mosquitoes across the area, but it can bring the numbers of them down around the communities where people live.
And so it can actually be a way to sort of help combat the malarial mosquitoes is just have the dragonfly nymphs just eat them up.
It’s certainly the prettiest.
Well, you know what’s coming next, given that we’re out of time.
I do.
You’re all prepared.
Christopher Beatty, what is your favorite monster?
It would be really tempting to talk about Meganaropsis permiana, but I got to go with the home team.
I am from Alton, Illinois, and I’m not the first person to bring this monster up.
Joe Laycock, I believe, he said something about having family in the area.
But back in Alton, we have an animal, a cryptid, called the Piusaw bird.
which has kind of a long history in its folklore.
There was artwork that was painted on the bluffs along the Mississippi above Alton that was first recorded by Père Marquette when he was exploring the region in the 1670s.
And the modern story, which is…
probably more of a 19th century artifact than any story that came from the actual native people of the region.
But it’s this great chimeric monster.
It has antlers and a face like a man with a beard, but it’s got a giant body covered in scales with wings and this long tail that can wrap around its body with a fish tail at the end.
And it’s got four legs.
So it has kind of a dragon-ish kind of look to it.
Yeah.
And the story was that after, I think, a battle in the area, it started feeding on the corpses left in the battle and got a taste for human flesh.
And so it was attacking local villages.
And there was a village leader, Chief Otoga, as the story goes.
He, in a dream, got the inspiration to take a number of…
men of his community and go and hide out near the Pius Hubbard’s cave.
And he sort of offered himself up his bait and they shot it with poisoned arrows, I believe is how the story goes.
And it expired.
But of course, every so often, somebody out fishing on the Mississippi.
Late at night, thinks they, you know, hear the whoosh of the wings of the Piusaw bird flying over them.
So, yeah, that’s the cryptid I grew up with.
That’s our hometown monster.
So, yeah, I wanted to call out the Piusaw bird.
Yeah, fantastic.
Thanks so much for talking with us today.
We’re going to put a lot of, I’m going to put a bunch of pictures in the show notes because we talked about a lot of cool stuff and some of it.
You did a great job of moving your hands around, but the listeners can’t see that.
I’m sorry, I realized I was gesticulating as I was describing.
I know, I know.
I was like, I want to say, for the listeners, he’s moving his hands towards his head.
But no, this is great.
This is great.
Thank you, Chris.
Thank you so much.
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 Dr. Christopher Beatty going deep into the fascinating world of dragonflies.
Check out the show notes for links and pictures of these amazing and beautiful creatures.
I’m tempted to call them flying death machines, but as Dr. Beatty says, they’re also flying love machines.
So go have a look and check out some links for further reading.
Monster Talk’s theme music is by Pete Stealing Monkeys.
And once again, the real monsters turned out to be the fiends we met along the way.
This has been a Monster House presentation
Here is your sacrifice.
Full attack.
Now, give me your power.
Throw her in.

The post S05E21 – Dragons & Trolls of the Marsh appeared first on MonsterTalk.

We’re joined by Christina Ward of Feral House publishing to talk about the intersection of food, culture, belief, control, and the weird as she tells us about two of her recent projects:
American Advertising Cookbooks and Holy Food.

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.
I dreamt it was 1975 and I was…
wandering through a suburban house where a celebration was being assembled with the collective energy of ritual.
The carpet had fresh vacuum lines.
A few brave scented candles were trying to exercise the pervasive ghosts of cigarettes.
Somewhere, a TV murmured low and constant, canned laughter and tinny music.
A hymnal to American entertainment.
On the dining table, a spread meant to say welcome.
Meats and crackers, dips and vegetables.
A bubbling fizzy punch that promised sweetness and afterburn.
Comfort food.
Food as hospitality, as performance, as right.
And then, something quivered at the far end of the table.
In dreams, you don’t always get to look away.
The scene unfolds at the mercy of a hidden director.
I wanted to return to the familiar geometry of cubes of cheese and rounds of meat, but the thing at the end of the table seemed to glow with an unnatural light of greens and yellows, a fluorescent sheen that belonged more to a lab than a living room.
It was a gelatinous presence.
At first it seemed to look back at me, a mass of floating eyeballs and entrails.
No, not eyes and not organs either.
Olives.
The red pupils merely pimentos.
And then a second awareness arrived, a revelation worse than the first.
Was that meat suspended in there too?
And marshmallows?
And savory vegetables commingled with sweet fruits?
No.
These ingredients were unhinged, flavors and textures never meant to mingle, now hung in a translucent, quivering suspension, waiting to go wriggling down the mouths of dear friends.
And that’s where our episode begins.
Not with a monster exactly, but with a familiar Monster Talk question.
Why does something common become uncanny?
Tonight, we’re talking with food historian and publisher Christina Ward about mid-century American food culture, the corporate and religious forces that shaped it, and the way that meals become more than nourishment.
She’s brought two books with her to help us think about what we eat and how it’s shaped by collective trends, economic efforts, marketing, belief.
These books are American Advertising Cookbooks and Holy Food.
And along the way, we’ll brush up against some of the strange borderlands where cuisine becomes symbolism, symbolism becomes obligation, and the dinner table starts to look, just for a moment, like some kind of altar.
Monster Talk
So who are you, Christina?
Who am I?
My name is Christina Ward.
I am a proud Wisconsinite.
I come from the land of the frozen tundra and cannibal sandwiches, i.e.
raw beef and onion sandwiches.
fish fries, and cheese curds.
But aside from that, I’m a food historian, as well as a writer and a master food preserver.
So I make lots of jams and jellies and pickles.
And I run a small independent publishing company that’s been around for a long time.
And it’s called Ferrell House.
And so we publish books that are nonfiction, that are investigative.
weird, fun, counterculture, some older pop culture, some memoirs, some biography and music books.
So that’s our channel.
That’s what we do.
And I just keep the little circus going.
A friend of mine described it as the entire Muppet show with just one puppeteer.
I’m Statler and Waldorf.
Well, Christina, we brought you on the show because I was looking for someone who could talk to us about monstrous foods.
So I think we often see a lot of those memes getting around on social media about different kinds of…
various meats in aspic and gelatin and jello and things like that.
And we’re all horrified and disgusted by them.
But it appears that these were quite fashionable and popular in the Western world during the 60s and 70s.
But it’s such an interesting topic.
And I think there’s a lot of overlap with the things that we like to talk about.
And then we met you and we came across two of your books.
So Holy Food and American Advertising Cookbooks.
And both of them, I think, really epitomize what we were wanting to discuss on the show.
So we’re really excited to be able to chat with you today.
Well, thank you.
So your two books explore very different forces that shape American food culture.
So religion and corporations, but maybe they are more similar than different in many ways too.
But what first drew you to investigate food through these particular lenses?
I have a joint love of this trifecta of weirdness, American history, and food.
And so I love it when I can bring it all together.
And so I look at things and historical things and…
In the sense of like what a micro history, because I think that you can tell a big story by focusing on the small parts of it.
And that’s where that to me became really interesting of always, you know, wanting to know facts and wanting to know stuff.
And growing up as a hungry kid, I’m a working class kid and wondering why were we eating boxed macaroni and cheese?
But if I went to the friend’s house, you know, they actually had pot roast.
What’s the difference?
How does this all happen?
And from even from childhood on, so that lifelong fascination of why.
Why is the thing the way it is?
Has really led me down to some really interesting pathways of my own research and work.
And the book you mentioned earlier, American Advertising Cookbooks, came out in 2019.
And that was, again, at a time that you mentioned, Karen, people were kind of rediscovering and seeing on the Internet the pictures of…
like green jello with like carrots and tuna fish in it and going, eww, because they didn’t know the history.
And everybody makes a fundamental error of looking at that green jello with vegetables or meat in it and thinking it’s lime.
It’s not though.
It’s celery flavored Jell-O.
And so now it gets, it kind of recasts of like, oh, wait a second.
The thing isn’t what I thought it was.
It’s something different.
And I think, and that’s where the great stories are.
I grew up with a great aunt who made a green Jell-O.
I never really cared for it, but it was a family.
Well, I don’t know if it was a family classic.
She always made it, you know, but it had I remember it had pecans and some other things in it.
It was a very crunchy.
It was a savory jello.
I think maybe that’s why it disappointed me.
It looked like it was going to be sweet and it was not.
By the way, these books are full of fascinating facts and history.
And photographs.
And photographs and some recipes.
But you cover this material very respectfully.
So while it’s not exactly a cookbook, it’s not really a kook book either.
So I thought that was well done.
In Holy Food, you uncover how spiritual beliefs and movements influence what people eat, which I think, if you look at at least the Abrahamic religions, is an old thing.
But it affects cults and new religious movements and other things.
Can you talk about some of the examples of…
food traditions from various religions that people will find when they get your book?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mentioned one already.
Coming from the Great Lakes region is fish fries.
Fish fries were born out of, one, the Great Lakes, and two, the Catholic prohibition on…
eating meat on Fridays during, especially during Lent.
And so traditionally that’s where a lot of churches as fundraisers would have like fish fries in their basement to help, you know, raise money and feed the congregation.
And if you’re in the Midwest, then all the bars started doing it.
But the real revolution was in Buffalo, New York, when…
McDonald’s franchisee noticed all his burger sales were falling off in a very Catholic Buffalo.
And he introduced what was to become the Filet-O-Fish sandwich.
McDonald’s corporate was against it, but he went forward and he proved that this was a very successful thing.
Again, is still permanently on the menu.
So that’s just like one small example of, so this, you know,
Early 1900s Catholic tradition and belief of not eating meat leads you to the Filet-O-Fish.
Now, Holy Food really talks about some of the more newer modern religious movements.
And I mean that is it’s only in America, kids, you know, where we don’t have state religions.
We’ve got sort of the First Amendment.
And so people started taking ideas, what they thought about their gods.
and inventing new ones or changing what the religious practices were.
And in that soup is a thousand other new religious movements.
And some of them we don’t even really know too much about today because they only lasted maybe a few years.
But the ones that lasted for a few generations really did influence the American food systems.
Well, I’d like to just get some clarification on fish fries, if you don’t mind.
I grew up in Australia.
And so when you say fish fries, I think of two things.
I think of fish fingers that you might call fish sticks here.
And I also think of the fries where you go to some countries like…
maybe in Barbados and or even in, I think, Florida, where you can fish or buy fish and then take it to a place and they fry it up for you.
So I’m assuming you’re talking about something more along the lines of fish sticks.
I’m talking more along the lines that I guess the most.
analogous food would be like a British-style fish and chips.
So it’s a battered, deep-fried, a lot of times it’s cod, and it’s served with potato pancake, applesauce, coleslaw, rye bread, and butter.
That is the tradition.
But in the Great Lakes, we had an abundance of fish.
So a lot of times you saw bluegill, walleye.
Perch was really popular in the Great Lakes before it really fished out.
You’re seeing it come back a bit.
But that is where that tradition.
So bringing the Catholic prohibition on meat and then knowing what we know about, you know, English fish and chips.
It comes to the United States, gets twisted around and becomes a staple.
I’d like to add, too, that growing up in Australia, we had lots of fish and chips, so just like the English.
And often we’d get a particular kind of fish called flake and only come to find out years later that it’s shark.
So I don’t know if they still sell that.
I think they call it lemon fish in New Zealand.
But, yeah, it’s interesting, just the variations on a theme, I guess.
And that, I think, to me is always so fascinating, whether you’re talking about religiously inspired food or even the corporate inspired stuff of like, what sticks?
How does it spread?
Because if something tastes good, everybody is willing to try it.
And so many of those, the ideas that then get married to what the food and what we’re eating and the culture that comes around it.
Thinking back, we just talk about like kind of fish and chips, as you’re saying, it morphs in different regions, what kind of fish is being used.
But also what’s similar is that idea of communal eating together.
So, yes, restaurants, but it started in, you know.
pubs and then church basements and then bars.
And so, again, these ideas of sharing food together also has a really interesting place in how we decide what we’re going to eat and what we believe.
Your advertising, American Advertising Cookbook, I’m holding this up.
It reminds me so much.
I had a dear friend named Leo Linkort who used to blog.
these strange 1970s cookbook.
I am so sad that he’s dead all the time, but especially I think he would have absolutely have loved this book.
It’s full of just heartbreakingly gut-wrenching photos.
Well, I think what’s really interesting, too, is it seems like everything old is new again.
You’ve got this whole section on avocados and avocado ice cream, and that’s…
kind of popular again nowadays, especially with Asian communities.
Our entire kitchen was done in avocado.
Nice and 70s.
Really was.
I was going to ask, though, how did marketing strategies change what might have been like a novelty, like a jello or a spam into like a staple of American dining for a while?
And really, it’s the story of the innovation of technologies in the 1900s.
Paper is cheap to produce.
It’s cheaper.
Printing presses are becoming are automated.
You can print things for so much cheaper.
So by the time you get to like the 1910s, 1920s, businesses that are, you know, in the food business are able to advertise differently.
There’s more magazines.
So there’s a need for writing about food for ads.
You need to have like Susie Homemaker, right?
recommending recipes.
So this whole ecosystem starts developing around automation, technology, and cheap paper.
And one of the first ones, the Hellman’s company was one of the first to kind of come up with this idea of a recipe booklet.
And it’s such an easy, brilliant idea of this booklet of if you’re going to sell a product to someone, teach them how to use it.
And in the early 1900s, you’re getting you mentioned avocados and your bananas.
And a lot of these foods were exotic.
And so we needed to be taught to eat them.
And one of my favorite illustrations in the world is from a very early United Fruit bananas cookbook where there’s a great little cartoon showing somebody trying to eat a banana with the skin on it because you didn’t know that you were supposed to peel it unless someone tells you.
Right.
If you think about it.
I had the same problem.
Yeah.
So it’s like you have to approach it with the child mind and then you go.
And so these cookbooks were very much instructional.
And this notion, again, of anybody who likes cookbooks, if you see these recipes presented, you’re like, well, I have to cook every day.
for, you know, my family.
It’s getting boring.
That looks interesting.
I’m going to try the infamous ham and bananas with hollandaise sauce.
And, you know, that’s like one of the more popular internet ones that people go like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Who could eat that?
But what’s really fascinating is that particular dish has roots in traditional Caribbean cuisine, because if you think about roasted pork and plantains, right, a little different.
And then it comes to the United States to the marketers and the marketers like, well, we’re not selling plantains, we’re selling bananas, you know.
People aren’t going to roast a whole pork, but they’ll eat ham.
And so you see there’s a whole cadre of people doing recipe development, figuring out specifically how to use these ingredients so they can sell more stuff.
You remind me, my husband and I were at Target yesterday and we were buying a plantain.
They couldn’t find the code for it.
So they just, the person thought it was a banana and just put it through as a banana.
Very unripe.
If anybody’s ever eaten a plantain thinking it was a banana, they’re in for a bit of a surprise.
Absolutely.
Both books involve a fair amount of historical research.
So you’ve done a marvellous job with these books.
And how did you go about finding and interpreting these old recipes and obscure food histories?
And did you come across any unexpected discoveries?
Lots, lots of great unexpected discoveries throughout researching through both books.
And part of that is I’ve always been interested in food and working in food.
And anybody who’s spent time in kitchens, whether it’s your home kitchen or even commercial kitchens, is you start to understand the chemistry and the science of cooking of flavor profiles and things go together.
Once you have a working understanding of that, in addition to like knowing how to research things and historians.
it starts making sense about the origin of recipes and where they come from and then which direction they can go.
So in doing that, if you can look at, like I gave the example of the bananas hollandaise, is you can, if you know the history and how the components, you can trace it back to where its source was.
So reversing that, one of my favorite discoveries that I didn’t know, and this is a childhood hated thing.
is our neighbors always would make for after-school snack, invite all the kids over, and the mom always made peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches.
I don’t know if anybody’s been subjected to that.
It’s disgusting.
It’s horrible.
I’m nodding in agreement.
And it was like, who thought of that?
Who thought of that?
And of course, I find out in this course of like doing the research and looking at all these old cookbooks.
And there it is.
The first time I see the recipe, the suggestion for peanut butter and mayonnaise.
And it was Jif.
Jif did it.
Wow.
Those jerks.
Goodness gracious.
Yeah.
And so that was, to me, a big discovery in that idea of like, wow, OK, how much autonomy and choices do we really have?
How much are we really choosing what we eat or how much of it is really chosen for us?
That is a beautiful segue into my next question, which is.
I think religions famously tend to restrict people’s behaviors.
And I think something that critics would say maybe is a bug, but some people might see it as a feature.
I don’t know.
But they give you strictures against dancing and music and some ideas against sex, how you do it, all these sort of things.
But there’s food laws.
There’s food laws.
You’ve got kosher, halal, vegetarianism.
Can you talk about how…
These prescriptive morality rules affect food around.
Well, I guess we’re mostly focusing on America, but just how religions and religious practices control what we eat.
Yeah.
You know, it’s interesting if you go back to when you mentioned the Abrahamic religions, which are kind of, you know, share the the Judea.
Judaic kind of origin story and share like the kosher and halal are very close in those food rules.
And if you follow the kashrut, the kosher rules, you would be very safe.
You would not be likely to get foodborne illnesses.
And so if you go back that way and think about what’s going to keep your community safe,
Some of those rules would definitely keep you safe.
And people always say like, well, don’t eat pork.
It’s filthy.
And we have to think about it differently.
It’s not filthy because they like mud.
They are very prone to pathogens that kind of coexist in a pig’s ecosystem with very little detriment to the pig.
But if someone else is going to eat that pig, you are going to get very sick.
So people before germ theory, well, just don’t eat that.
And so as these rules get codified into a culture, into a community, and then into a religious practice, they’re usually, and again, those form ones are there to keep your community safe as well as cohesive.
How do you tell another member of the tribe?
Well…
You’re not eating bacon.
You’re not.
And so some of those shared cultural experiences help form that community, that shared practice.
Now, you extrapolate that out and it comes back to we’re talking about like Buddhism and the variety.
I’ll call I’ll say Hinduism as the shorthand, knowing that it is a beautiful thousands of different beliefs that kind of the British called Hinduism.
But there are some core beliefs there of like the ahisma that do no harm.
A lot of in the Indian subcontinent, a lot of just their existence and religious practices are about doing no harm.
And that goes apply to animals.
And if you’re a Jain, a Jain monk applies to plants, plants.
You can only eat foods that are essentially not going to harm a plant.
So you can’t eat a carrot because it would kill the carrot.
You can eat an apple because the tree is giving it to you.
It won’t harm the tree.
So some of these rules come about because of belief.
And then other ones, the food itself shapes the belief.
So now, so we come to that big picture of that.
And you bring it back to the States now.
And food then becomes a really great way to build your followers, right?
And to share that belief.
The SDA, the Seventh Day Adventists, some of the healthiest people on the planet.
When they do like the blue zone studies about who’s the healthiest, it’s always Seventh-day Adventists.
Why?
Because they’re vegetarians and have been forever and most often vegan.
And they also published many, many cookbooks for twofold reasons.
And this comes to like in the United States and the cookbook convergence is.
It’s a recruiting tool for people to join your belief, and it’s also a way to help new believers adopt the practices.
And so this all converges together when it comes to the United States.
But you start off saying, what do those food rules do?
It keeps people safe in many instances.
It builds community, and it oftentimes builds control.
And I believe I found a kindred spirit in you.
You’re vegetarian?
I am.
Yeah, wonderful.
So I grew up vegetarian.
My mum just came home one day when I was about eight and said, I’m not cooking meat anymore.
And she was trying to fix a thyroid condition that she had at the time.
So we all went vegetarian.
And so at the moment, I am…
vegan and gluten-free, have to be gluten-free.
And you mentioned Jainism too.
I was on a flight once too.
It’s really hard to find something that, to find airplane food that is vegan and gluten-free.
And so I thought I’ll try.
a Jane meal on a flight to Australia with Air Canada.
And we had so much confusion when a flight attendant brought over my food and I said, oh, I’m Jane.
And she said, no, this is for Karen.
But yeah, it’s really difficult to find a combination of both of those.
But getting back to food as a tool of identity and belonging in your research into religious food ways and corporate.
cookbooks.
What patterns did you see in how food builds and can also manipulate community?
A lot of the times it can build community because of the shared preparation practice as well.
I’m thinking as soon when you were asking that, Karen, I was thinking about two different groups, is if you look at the Church of the Latter-day Saints, Mormons,
is they have a very robust community built around shared foods, storing food for disaster.
They’re very big on the prepper community and always have been since the 1800s.
You’ll have to have a year’s worth of food.
If your family is somehow incapacitated in some way, your neighbors are all going to help you to make sure that you have your food and you’re prepared.
um there’s a tradition of like community canning where people are the communities in the latter-day saint communities are always working together to build their food supply so again that’s the community building now conversely as a form of control
You see a lot of that with more of the modern American, what we would definitely term as a cult.
And I’m going to be very careful and say cult is a group that is definitely following like Hassan’s like bite model, that they’re controlling what you think.
They’re controlling your emotions.
They’re controlling your physical, like where you can go, what you can dress like some, and they’re controlling what you think.
Wait a minute.
My wife has put me in a cult.
I just realized it.
Some cults are happy cults.
It’s just me and her.
Well, maybe if she starts cooking and inviting people over, she might be expanding the cult.
When she cooks, there is definitely some behavior control going on there because I will do a lot.
Lucky she doesn’t listen to the show.
You have a podcast?
That’s my wife, right?
Yeah.
And so, and this was where it becomes monstrous, especially of withholding food.
That is a very popular thing.
And also hierarchies of food in high control cultish groups is the, you’ll see, I can tell you, I spoke and interviewed probably, you know, people who survived Jonestown, as well as a few people.
I talked to the son of Jim Jones Cook,
And she died with his sisters at Guyana at Jonestown.
And then I also talked to Jones’s former son-in-law.
And what to me was so interesting about that conversation, because they talked about food in two entirely different ways.
um because as his former son-in-law before they were exiled they were part of their elite the top they ate fantastic and they didn’t eat the same food that jones prohibited for the followers they ate whatever he wanted
Whereas the followers for sometimes he tried to take everybody vegetarian for a while.
It didn’t quite work out for a while.
He was on a liver kick that somehow liver was going to help you in some sort of healing properties.
And he was making people eat liver a couple of times a week.
And so that becomes then more the coercive control.
And then, of course, withholding food if people were behaving in the way that the leadership wanted is there definitely we hear this a lot.
I know you’re not supposed to say the word, but this in Scientology is if you’re not just your garden variety believer, but if you’re in that organization where you’re.
considered part of the kind of priesthood, so to speak, and working and living on the campuses is that there’s a lot of control through food.
You know, sometimes we get very concerned as sort of skeptical people about how people are being manipulated.
But there is…
There’s something powerful about sacrifice and about membership and identity.
And when you’re participating at the level of literally watching everything you eat, not from a health perspective, but from a behavior perspective, it gives you that sense of community.
And even as I grew up in an evangelical community, so when we had a get together, there was always food and it was always amazing.
And maybe that’s been one of the hardest things to give up from leaving the church has been that communal dining experience.
It’s just it’s really it’s quite a loss.
But I think that one of the universals is like Karen asked earlier about discoveries.
So most, and again, you can’t make too many generalities, but I can generalize about this, is most religious traditions, newer ones and older ones, have this idea of communal meals and about sharing.
And so if you go to a Sikh temple, there’s langar, you can go.
If you go to the Hare Krishna temple still, there’s always free lunch.
And well, they might charge a dollar now.
Good to hear.
And it’s good, too.
That’s my little asterisk to come back to the Hare Krishnas.
But also the church basement spaghetti dinners at the Catholic schools to, again, just as you’re talking about in evangelical communities of just the after church, after service, you know, potlucks.
Every community, every religious community has that idea.
And I think that that is more about being human.
um because there’s an act of trust if you think about just that idea of eating together um if i give you a cookie and you eat it that’s an act of trust because you don’t know if i gave you a poison cookie or not um and so in that act of trust is how we build communities seems like maybe that’s something that’s being lost in the internet world you you you get uber eats but you don’t get uber greets right
Right, right.
And I’ll go back to my Haris for a second.
I don’t know if anybody is a music fan or like punk rock.
One of my favorite like kind of little tidbits is in the New York City hardcore scene.
So we’re talking early 80s, the most like aggro hardcore punk rock.
All these guys, and it’s mostly guys, are dirt poor, living in squats.
And where they are is around the corner from the Hare Krishna temple.
So all these guys go and, you know, they get the free meals at the Hare Krishna’s.
Do they officially convert?
One does.
But many of the guys, if you talk to them today, and these are men now in their late 50s, early 60s, many of them are still vegetarians to this day.
And they also will use some of the Hare talk, not even consciously, but it’s just some of the phraseology is there.
And I think that’s fascinating.
And that to me is that larger influence.
Who would have thunk that, you know, the Hare Krishna temple down the Lower East Side would have that influence throughout hardcore punk rock music and starting in New York City and kind of spreading out to where, you know, you can make these through lines, this idea of like straight edge of veganism and stuff in punk rock.
kind of is rooted in the Hare Krishnas.
Not completely Hare Krishnas, just a lentil bit.
I love lentils.
We’ve got a local ashram and we go occasionally.
I went years ago for a book I was researching, God Bless America.
And yeah, we occasionally go back because…
of our diets.
And you do see a lot of people in low, lower socioeconomic groups.
So you’ve got to sit through a sermon, but there’s fantastic music as well.
And you just get people, it’s a real melting pot of people, not just Hare Krishnas.
And I’m a big fan of George Harrison too, but the food is fantastic.
Definitely recommend it to anyone.
And just to
have a different experience and go see a different culture and different religion and absorb it.
And absorb it because I think what most people, if you walk away with, again, the majority of these new religious movements, unless it’s a cult, is that it’s community.
People are building community and they’re building community.
And the best one of the better ways to do that is around food.
This American Advertising Cookbook, and you sort of talked about this with Jell-O and with how corporations have given people guidelines or basically an
Well, an entree into how to use their products.
I’m thinking here.
Books and cookbooks.
In fact, my wife and among her many cookbooks, she her family was from the Rochester area and the Rochester Electrical Company had a the electric company had a cookbook.
And I suspect it was like built by employees.
But it became like some of those recipes became staples.
And I see on eBay people trying to buy the cookbook so they can recreate those recipes.
And in your holy food.
book, you’ve actually included some updated recipes from these religious groups.
Can you talk a little bit about what did you have to do to make those accessible to the modern reader?
So we wanted to test them.
And luckily, the pandemic happened.
I try to look for that.
Something we hear all the time.
Recipe testing can be a bear.
And so all of a sudden, everybody’s at home.
And of course, I know a lot of people, both really good home cooks and professional chefs as well.
And everybody’s stuck at home.
And so it was great.
So we worked, friends worked together, testing everything out and finding out where the fail points were.
If you’re looking at a recipe from the 1800s, obviously, we’re not cooking on wood stoves anymore.
So you need to adjust things.
And so we were able to through testing to update them for modern cooks.
And that was really the only modernization.
So I didn’t change any flavor profiles or anything like that.
We just made it a little easier to for a modern cook and recognizing what some of the available ingredients are today versus what it would have been, you know, in the 1800s.
But, and I purposely to I’m going to say this is in our testing, we only, you know, everybody weighed in there were a couple terrible recipes like they look good on paper but when we made them they were, they were awful.
And so I only included the recipes that actually would taste good.
Because I think that came out of my experience from working with American advertising cookbooks, which is where the food is monstrous and disgusting looking.
And that would be easy to make fun of because you’re talking about religion, too.
People will often mock religion.
So I didn’t want to set the food up to fail.
You know what I mean?
So to have things to say, OK, here’s a horrible group, but that dish is delicious.
I think I.
First of all, I know you come from the zine scene to some extent.
A little bit, yeah.
And then we talked about magazines as well, like professional magazines and books.
And I think we’ve already talked about we’re book lovers here.
But it seems like…
YouTube and the Internet, especially YouTube, is really sucking all the air out of that kind of that ecosystem.
And I think my wife, first of all, I think it’s hard to get a recipe from a video.
I hate that.
And.
I guess the upside is you can go to the comments and see, are people actually trying the recipe?
Do they like it?
Are you doing anything internet-wise to give people that connection to the book when it’s a food-related book where people are going to try things out and give feedback on it?
No.
I am a book person.
Me too.
I will defend material culture.
YouTube videos can be helpful if you’re reviewing and you’re not sure on a step or something.
But I do think that there’s a value in a cookbook and actually have it printed and having it in front of you and being able to reference it, being able to write in the book and make your own notes and how you do it.
Did your own adjustments.
It’s a living document.
It’s a living document.
Some of the best recipes I picked up for a holy food and picking up some of these like cult cookbooks.
Some of my favorites were the ones that had notes in them, you know, and one I found from the Yogi Bajon group, the three HO they had, it was a great old book.
Their old golden temple cookbook actually had a pressed marijuana leaf between the pages and,
Wow.
How appropriate, right?
A real buddy.
You’re not going to see that on YouTube.
You’re not going to, you know, you’re not going to get that kind of the extra that the, we talked about, you were talking about passing on recipes too, is, you know, now it’s a living document.
It’s a thing.
It gets passed along and, you know, you can change it.
And a YouTube video doesn’t do that same thing.
You’re reminding me about going to my grandmother’s house as a kid and having to copy out recipes for things like cauliflower or gratin from the Common Sense Cookbook.
That was a popular one.
Cauliflower cheese is still a good, good dish.
Anything with cheese.
Yeah.
But I think that’s the thing that’s passed down.
And one of my fun facts about American advertising cookbooks is we’re so far away from when it began that…
My grandmother was born, my paternal grandmother was born in 1911.
And I can go back and I remember my great grandfather who was actually served in the end of the Civil War.
So that’s a different lifespan than if you think about today, we don’t often have touch with people who actually cooked from scratch or had food.
like just an isolated ethnic recipe experience because we’re such a global diversified community.
So that being said, when you look at these old cookbooks, people are starting to realize that grandma’s favorite salad or the thing that Auntie Fanny made all the time wasn’t really her invention.
What it was was something that was picked up in one of these very popular…
corporate cookbooks and then kind of just became a favorite and passed along so that that’s the big rude awakening for people if they start really looking at their favorite family recipes they should track it back because that may not be an original family recipe but it might be from campbell’s wow
I want to say thank you for putting an index in the book.
Also, because when I got the holy food, the first thing I wanted to find out was, did you cover sin eaters?
I just just as you know, it’s monster talk.
And that that fits right into that sort of folk horror.
It’s I mean, it’s a serious religious practice.
But also, I was wondering, did you talk about it?
So thank you for including that.
It’s not a big part of the book.
But did you want to mention that?
Or do you want to talk about that at all?
Oh, I’m happy to talk about it.
I think, you know, and that was the biggest challenge for me with the working on the Holy Food book is I was like, and then another thing and another thing.
And so it was a real exercise in scope and keeping the scope.
And so a lot of the early practices I kind of just glossed on a little bit because we’re going to focus on what was happening in modernity in the United States.
So that being said, sin eaters, I love it.
It was such a great, weird practice in earlier days of Christianity when the notion of transference of sins.
So, you know, you even hear some of that phraseology today, the sins of the father passed on, which is kind of a ridiculous notion.
But so the converse of that is coming out of it’s coming out of a Protestant tradition, but with its origination in Catholicism, where this notion you could be forgiven.
for your sins.
And again, then earlier in the Jewish tradition of atonement.
And so Catholics took it as this idea of like a confession.
You can be confessed to your sins and be absolved.
The Protestant break.
they didn’t take that so much with them.
And so there was a necessary way, how are we going to essentially absolve someone from their sins so they can get to heaven?
And so in Wales, and especially in the West of England is where this really kind of started-ish, and then it spreads to in Germany and in Holland, you’ll see that there are small variations, but similar notion behind it of…
If we can, like a transubstantiation, if God can enter the host and become the living bread and the bread and the wine and the blood and body of Christ, cannot the reverse happen?
And that’s the idea of the sin eating.
So can we take a physical thing and transfer someone’s sins to the thing and then have them ceremonially consumed in a way that absolves the sinner?
And that’s essentially the death cake.
The death cake, the honey cake, the sin eater, the sin cake.
And the sin eater specifically in, again, Western England and Wales was a designated mourner, essentially.
And every culture has a form of someone like this in the small community.
Someone who is essentially like the village scapegoat.
And the sin eater would be the one person in charge.
And they were…
usually, again, lived near the cemeteries, lived on kind of a little bit of an outsider on the outskirts of the community, but was definitely a part of the community and was called in at times to, you know, essentially perform this ritual act of eating the sins of the someone who died.
Were they stigmatized or did people think, oh, they’re going to hell for this or no judgments?
No, no.
And it was but it was always a bit of an outsider of the community.
So I wouldn’t say that I’m struggling a little bit because I’m trying to find the right analogy to say that someone who’s like the necessary, a garbage man, if you will, someone in the community needed.
It was very much a functioning part of the community, but was a little bit like looked down upon because they were doing the filthy job, if that makes sense.
So not completely ostracized, but not essentially at the upper echelons of society.
That is fascinating.
It shows up in so many horror stories and that concept because it’s kind of it’s Christian, but fringe folky, kind of like it feels like it’s not like it’s not part of like most mainstream versions of Christianity.
But but yet it’s well known and has persisted.
So and it has to do with food.
So I felt like I had to ask.
So, yeah.
And again, I love how this gets diffused.
So I give you, there’s the dark origin.
But in Bavaria, they celebrate, they make death cakes.
And it’s like a really lovely chocolate cake.
And so oftentimes it was placed on the corpse’s chest before pre-funeral homes, when if you died, you were laid out at home.
Not to be confused with a few more potatoes, which is very different.
Very different.
Death by chocolate.
Yeah.
And so, you know, they have this cake.
And then people would, again, it’s very much about ritual and ceremony.
Because then we get to touch on cannibalism a little bit too, right?
Because if you look at many early cultures looked at the consuming human flesh, the flesh of the enemy or an elder.
is you either you’re consuming that power that person had, you’re consuming the wisdom that person had.
And so that, again, influences that notion of what does death actually mean?
What are we putting in our bodies actually and then symbolically?
And so in old New York culture, that idea of the death cake was a death cook and it was a cookie.
And it became a commemorative thing.
And so when you, people in like the old duchies in New York, the cookie was very elaborate of very kind of a shortbread hard cookie.
And it was stamped with like the name of the person who died and their death date.
And it was this commemorative thing.
And again, people would save them, but the intention was it was eaten in memory.
It’s a, it’s so, so we get all these different variations on how we associate different,
Mostly sweets with someone dying and again sin eaters to death cakes to death cookies.
There’s a lot of variations but they all come down to this cannibalistic notion of by eating a portion of the person that we can either remember or absolve ourselves and absolve them.
Christina, you were talking about just having a wealth of information and having to decide what to include and what to discard.
And that leads me to ask, you’re always working on something cool.
What are you working on right now?
What I’ve been doing now is, again, putting the publisher hat back on and just really busy and working with writers and editing a lot of books.
But for myself, again, as a cookbook collector, there is always great information within those cookbooks.
So I have two different lines of where I’ve been going and following, and I’m not sure which one’s going to take more precedence.
It always depends where the research leads.
So that being said, and Blake, you mentioned about the church cookbooks, right?
Alongside advertising cookbooks, it was the idea of the community cookbook.
What is the community?
And there’s some funky communities that put some cookbooks out there.
So I’ve been collecting and researching there.
So there might be something along the lines of the church community cookbooks.
And the other fascination, and I have a large collection of them, is the notion of the celebrity cookbook.
And so, you know, there’s something going to be in that direction of the notion of what is the celebrity cookbook?
What makes that different?
What makes people want to care what Vincent Price was cooking for dinner?
Great example.
Yeah, yeah.
But Vincent and Mary were famous.
They published a number of cookbooks.
They were consummate hosts.
People, you know, getting invited to dinner at Vincent and Mary’s house was something to be coveted.
But why, if we’re not in their official friend circle, why are we interested?
Why?
Do we care what Zazu Pitts made for her candy?
Or Sophia Loren’s tiramisu recipe?
Which, by the way, is really actually a good recipe.
And then where’s that differential between, is it a celebrity who loves food and is actually a really good cook?
Or is it just another vehicle for marketing their image?
And so now you ask the question, Karen, you could see I’m in the midst of all the thinking and the research and kind of doing that.
So I think the celebrities might win out over the churches at this point.
My wife caught me before the interview and insisted that I ask this.
My wife wanted to know if you got stuck with one of the cult or religious groups that is in the book.
Who would you want to dine with?
Who among them has the goods?
I can tell you that the group is kind of faded a bit since the death of Yogi Bhajan.
But the 3HO organization, again, the inventor of kettle potato chips.
Right.
Yeah.
Their, their restaurants, their cookbooks, solid all the way.
If I had to get stuck, I’d want to be stuck with the three HOs because they solid, great, great food, really great, mostly vegetarian.
They had a couple of fishy things, but mostly vegetarian, all really solid.
And as a yoga cult.
It was, you know, fairly benign that way.
I’m not saying they were great people or Yogi Bhajan was a great guy because he wasn’t.
But for your everyday cultist, you know, you were going to eat pretty well and not be too mistreated if you were with the three HOs.
Well, they’re flexible.
That’s pretty flexible.
Baharis would be number two based on food alone.
Wow.
I’m with you there.
Yeah.
Well, now I get to ask our true signature question, and that is, Christina, what’s your favourite monster?
I am a proud Wisconsinite and I love our hoedag so much.
Okay.
Northern Wisconsin’s hoedag.
It’s a weird little creepy monster and, you know, team hoedag.
It’s very regional.
It is.
Yeah.
And I don’t think we’ve had that answer before.
I don’t think we have.
We’ve talked about the hoedag before as a community construct, but…
That was a favorite.
Yeah.
So there you go.
That’s fantastic.
Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us and for these beautiful books.
Thank you.
It’s so much fun.
You can see, I get excited.
I love talking about all this weird food stuff.
Thank you so much for talking.
Yeah.
Thank you.
This was wonderful.
And I think our listeners are really going to love this one.
Have a good night.
Good night.
Good night, Karen.
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 an interview with author and publisher Christina Ward about two of her recent books, American Advertising Cookbooks and Holy Food.
Links to those books and to Ferrell House Publishing’s catalog are in the show notes.
Monster Talks theme music is by Pete Stealing Monkeys.
Hey, we could really use some new reviews at iTunes or wherever you listen to us.
And if you have a moment to give us a five-star rating or write a positive review, it will really help us reach new listeners.
Thank you.
This has been a Monster House presentation.

The post S05E20 – Cults, Corps, and the Culinary with Christina Ward appeared first on MonsterTalk.

Host of Bone & Sickle,Al Ridenour joins us to talk about the traditions of European Carnival season. It’s the subject of his latest book, A Season of Madness.

Author Al Ridenour (right) with masked carnival figure.

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.
Well, it’s that season again.
The time of year when the veil between the mundane and the monstrous wears thin.
People are pulling on furs and masks and taking to the street to transform into frightening horned entities.
Well, they’ll be going door to door, performing time-honored rituals and extracting hospitality, usually in the form of rich, fattening food or strong spirits, from neighbors who are half terrified and half delighted, for tradition says you do not refuse the mask.
It’s a time of sanctioned chaos and license misrule, where the social order has slipped upside down and spirits and demons seem to roam the earth once more.
You might be looking at your calendar and thinking, are we doing a late October rerun?
Well, not quite.
Because while some of that sounds a bit like Halloween, I’m actually talking about the traditions of Old World Carnival.
Al Ridenour, author and host of the Bone and Sickle podcast, is here to tell us all about this fascinating season of madness.
Monster Talk.
We’re welcoming back Al Ridenour.
And Al is an author, cultural historian, and folklorist dedicated to the study of folk horror in the real world.
He’s probably best known for his 2016 book, The Krampus and the Old Dark Christmas, which is the only comprehensive English language study of that Alpine devil, and which helped ignite the American fascination with the figure.
And in his latest book, A Season of Madness, Feral House 2024,
Ridenour turns his attention from the wrongs of winter to the rights of spring, documenting the anarchic and often brutal traditions of European carnival.
And beyond his writing, he is the voice behind Bone and Sickle.
Well, he’s not the only voice, but he’s the main voice behind Bone and Sickle, the podcast, which is kind of an…
audio journey into the intersection of horror, history, and folklore.
And he has a background with the Cacophony Society, which I didn’t know before today.
Also with underground art.
And his work bridges the gap between the academic researcher and the macabre enthusiasm of a true fan.
Thank you so much.
That’s a wonderful introduction.
Oh, the missing voice on my show, my co-host is Sarah Chavez, but we call her Mrs. Carswell.
You know, what happened was I remembered that as I was reading it, and I thought, if I say Mrs. Carswell and don’t know her name, it’s going to be stupid.
So thank you for fixing that.
I think of her as Mrs. Carswell, so I don’t think that’s a problem.
Your book, A Season of Madness, deals with European traditions of carnival.
And I think it’s safe to say, I think this is safe to say, that most Americans think of carnival as either a traveling collection of rides run by shady characters or as something that happens in New Orleans.
And…
This may cause a long answer, but that’s OK. We have that kind of a podcast.
But what is Carnival in the European tradition?
I think in your book, you call it the old world tradition.
And how is that different from the American conception?
Well, the other thing that I think Americans think of is a Latin American carnival in South America, particularly.
Ah, yeah, Rio.
Yeah.
So the European carnival traditions involve more clothing to start than Latin American.
So everything you mentioned is something I’ve been dealing with.
First of all, the first people asking me about the freak shows and side shows I’m writing about, because I had to fight that for a long time when I told people about the book.
But yes, we have that idea of Carnival, which is actually based on the European festive season.
because the carnival shows were kind of, they would appear and then they’d disappear and come and go like the carnival season.
But I kind of focused in on old European traditions because the whole project grew out of my interest in the Krampus and the research I had done years ago on the Krampus.
I kept seeing stuff that I thought must be related, and I wanted to include it, but I couldn’t, and I realized, oh, but that’s later in the year, so it’s not related.
It’s also geographically distant.
And eventually I kind of started returning to some of that, and I realized, well, some of it I realized at the time, this is Carnival, but I didn’t know as much about Carnival as I wish I had, and so the book kind of grew out of this kind of…
pathological desire to research things to the very, very, very ends of the earth.
And monetizing your curiosity.
I have a friend who had actually gone to the Krampus Festival.
in Austria a couple of years ago.
And I really got the impression that it was very chaotic and crazy.
And that was borne out by some videos, some promo videos that you sent to us before we started the interview to give us a bit of a taste of this season of madness.
And so from the title of that book, it…
hints at this kind of structured riot and thinking about this too.
Years ago, I wrote about the Roman festival of Lupercalia with regards to fertility of all things.
And so it makes me think of that kind of thing as well.
So can you tell us about, I guess, the connection between the carnival season and historical festivals going back to ancient times and more recent times?
Well, the first three – my book is kind of one-third and two-third.
The first third is history and looking for origins.
And definitely there are connections to customs of the Roman Empire.
I –
From digging into it, it seems less Lupercalia and more the Callens celebrations.
Because the Callens was more white.
Lupercalia was strictly Roman.
It was celebrated in just that city.
But the Callens were celebrated…
Throughout the empire, throughout all the way from Spain up into France and Germany.
And I don’t think, not in Britain, but and then into the east too.
Okay.
So and it also was celebrated into the 10th century.
And Lupercalia had kind of been neglected for a few centuries, several centuries by that time.
So it seems and the descriptions we have talk about stuff that sounds very carnivalesque to us.
It talks about rowdy singing, satirical songs, people blocking their faces or covering themselves in straw.
And there’s definitely a sort of spirit of rebellion that you don’t quite see the same in the Rekelia.
The fertility stuff…
is not as present, but the rudeness is actually more of a feature.
The connection between fertility and carnival is something that I kind of had to fine-tune in my own thinking.
At first, I thought, oh, it’s…
Well, first, I live in Los Angeles.
So at first, I think spring is warm, but it’s not warm when carnival is celebrated.
And it’s not it’s sort of anticipating the coming of life and fecundity and all that.
But it’s not it’s not there yet.
So it’s it’s not the sort of sensual celebration that you would see in Latin America.
So and that kind of a culture thinking, too, obviously.
Right.
And no whipping of women.
Or maybe, I don’t know.
Well, I mean, hey, now.
I’m sorry, no what?
No whipping of women to make them more fertile.
Oh, well, yes.
I mean, that is…
There’s a lot of…
Okay, so what I’ve seen and what I’ve…
Some in person and some much on video is there’s definitely a subtext of men…
who are very often dressed as women, that is, unusually as witches, who sort of attack women.
It sort of seems like something that Freud would say is sublimated sexuality, but there’s lots of kind of grabbing women and throwing them around.
I think you’ve seen some of that on the video that I sent, throwing them in barrels or barrels that are spun around or wagons that are filled with straw.
It’s the same sort of thing you actually see in the Krampus tradition with the people disguised, young men disguised as Krampuses chasing women and smacking them.
That is similar.
Yeah, you have that connection.
I think what I’ve just learned is that the American Midway Carnival, these rides are a mechanized recreation of those old festival antics.
The Scrambler.
Yeah, you actually see there’s a very popular carnival.
I don’t know what to call it.
It’s not a float.
It’s something that’s dragged behind a wagon or horses in the old days.
Now, you know, a tractor or something like that.
But there’s, yes, there is a revolving wheel that people ride on.
And the gearing of it is a little obscure to me.
But the gears, as it rolls forward, spin the wheel around.
Something’s very visual.
You’d have to almost see it.
But they spin the wheel on two different axes.
And either a performer will ride in it or they’ll put a person on it.
But there’s also just sort of something that spins on the Y axis, I guess you would say, that people will be grabbed from the crowd.
Women, usually, will be thrown in.
It’s sort of like a centrifuge.
So, yeah, you’re actually onto something.
There are kind of mobile rides that are towed behind certain, like, tractors and wagons and so forth as well.
part of the early carnival.
And I think those date back to the 1700s.
It reminds me a little bit of kind of early punishments too.
I wonder if there’s a kind of reference to that there.
I mean, just breaking people in the wheel.
A fun punishment, I think.
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
A punishment.
A punishment.
I mean, carnival has fun with all the things we take seriously or dread or…
you know, have very fearful feelings about.
So being grabbed and dominated is something that happens.
You see what I was just describing.
But it’s also, it’s all done playfully.
And it’s kind of something that I think the participants can kind of have a positive experience of laughing off and saying, oh, well, that wasn’t real.
It’s like we have, you know, we have horror movies to experience that now.
And, you know,
But when Carnival started, there wasn’t such a thing.
So there was another way to kind of experience things that seemed threatening.
But again, laugh them off again.
I just wanted to follow up.
And you said playful.
I got a sense of danger with some of those videos.
And I showed my 10-year-old a video.
I said, do you want to go someday?
And he said, hell no.
So for our listeners, I sent Blake and Karen a video, which was the worst of the worst.
That’s not how I see it.
I see it as the most exciting and wild of the wild.
But it was different carnivals that have particularly chaotic, anarchic elements.
And one of them…
One of them I made, that was after I had written the book, one of them was the first carnival I realized I was missing and that I had to go, a bucket list.
I’ve been to a couple of carnivals, but not this one.
And it’s in Northern Italy.
It’s in the city of Tramina.
It’s called the Egetman Festival.
And I went there last year.
And yes, it’s pretty crazy.
There’s, let’s see, I got smeared with soot or grease and soot, which sort of my face is blacked.
And then I had, let’s see, well, definitely water thrown on me.
I had…
wheat chaff, I guess.
There was a wagon that came through town.
They were threshing wheat, so there was lots of that, and it was blown out through a fan on people.
I had wet laundry slung at me because there was another wagon that had washerwomen who were pretending to wash laundry, and they were throwing water and laundry on people.
There was another wagon that was staged as sort of a…
It was a fisherman’s wagon, so they had people dangling fishing poles off of it.
And so I was smacked by fish that were used as bait, hanging from their fishing poles.
And there was even a wagon that represented the local bike repair shop.
And these are all old traditions.
These go back to the 1800s at least, but I guess bike repair was the thing already back then.
Maybe this came along a little bit later probably.
And the bike repair shop was throwing bike wheels and tires, wheels, not as people.
But yes, it was it was pretty severe.
And there were also like explosions of feathers flying out.
Were these like factory made or were these bespoke?
Oh, dear.
Well, I’m going to ask my question.
So you mentioned wheat and I guess it’s no good if you’ve got celiac disease.
That was my immediate thought.
But are there actually any dangers to these carnivals and to these festivals?
Does anyone ever get harmed or are there ever any accidents that take place?
I think the people that live there know if they should go or not.
I think it’s sort of an inherited caution that you have if you grow up there.
The one in Trameen that I went to was not – I didn’t hear – there was no – and the hotel or person who ran the hotel was also a major participant.
He said that he never –
He doesn’t know Americans that have come before.
So there were not there.
I think there are people from Germany.
This is in northern Italy, but where they speak German.
So there are Germans there.
There are Austrians there.
People from other regions of Italy.
But I think it’s one of those if you know, you know things, I think.
And so people it’s that’s and that’s why I was excited about sharing it, because it’s not even, you know, if you Google, I want to go to Carnival in Europe, you would never find this.
And to me, just I think because I got excited about the chaos and the kind of crazy animalistic qualities of the Krampus, this is the kind of carnival that attracted me.
So as I said, that was like top of my bucket list and had to take care of that one.
I’d also gone to Venice and other carnivals, but this was one I was really, really excited about going to.
I’m thinking about what are the thematic ties?
between these kind of festivals and then horror culture.
And here I’m thinking about things like the influence of masks and that sort of thing.
But then I immediately went to, well, folk horror and how much the festivals you’re describing seem like something where it would be an Eli Roth film and someone goes to a festival and things get way more violent and unexpected and less pleasant than one expected.
Well, I mean, no reason to be coy about it.
I mean, Focor is definitely something that drew me to all this subject matter.
I think, you know, and Focor always revolves around the outsider, the city person going to the country, going to the small town.
And so it kind of comes back to what I was saying earlier about, well, if you live there, you know it.
So we don’t, this is a local carnival for local people, I think.
Yeah, yeah.
I get the reference.
League of gentlemen.
The permissiveness is, like, you would know.
It was implied that you give consent just by showing up, right?
Yes, you do.
And in fact, the thing with… One of the first things that happened when I attended that carnival was a witch, a guy dressed up as a female witch, came up and smeared me and my wife with black…
grease or whatever and it’s kind of a way to mark you once you’re in once you’re marked you’re in and you can anything can happen but i also like you kind of want to be you don’t want to be excluded you want to be in and um i don’t know it’s it’s a very ambiguous ambiguous thing uh region you enter when you when you when you accept that
Yeah.
It’s a twilight area.
Okay.
I didn’t mean it like the show, but then I guess that is kind of the point of the show’s name, but you’re in this mid zone.
You’re in a, you’re in a, Oh, it’s a liminal space.
The academics love that.
Well, I’m just thinking about New Orleans and the Mardi Gras.
I haven’t been to one before.
I’ve been to New Orleans just before and just after, and you certainly get a sense of it.
But why is the American conception of Carnival and Mardi Gras so much more tame than the European version?
Or is it?
Let me also admit that it’s a very curated look at Carnival.
As I was saying, the folk horror, interest in folk horror and the stuff that’s wild, it all came from my…
If people know me as a Krampus researcher, they would understand, but…
I mean, New Orleans has, I guess it’s wild in its own ways.
It’s more about sexual promiscuity, but the drunkenness definitely happens.
I don’t know.
And I don’t know the Latin American carnival, but…
So what happens with carnival festivities that I think all begin as kind of untamed creatures and then are tamed, what happens is they kind of bring with them some risks and dangers and things that city fathers don’t want to happen.
The city starts, municipalities start to organize it and say, we’re going to sponsor this.
Okay, we see what you guys are doing out in the rural areas, but we’re going to sponsor it.
You’re going to do it here.
not other streets.
You’re going to walk down this street and we’re going to give prizes.
And New Orleans has prizes, I believe, for year to year awards that are given.
It’s sort of tamed in that way.
And the same thing happened.
Philadelphia had a wild carnival.
It’s now the Mummer’s Parade.
Now it’s on January 1st now because there’s this whole bleed over between the Christmas season and carnival that Americans aren’t aware of.
But carnival goes way early, can start way earlier than Mardi Gras that Tuesday.
This happened with the Krampus activities also.
It even happened in Bulgaria.
I look at the carnival celebrations in Bulgaria, and it radically changed the nature of the celebrations, and the costumes became much more elaborate.
The kukar is the figure there, and they have these elaborate costumes.
But after the city started organizing stuff and awarding prizes, they grew.
They completely changed.
They became much, much more elaborate.
People were vying with their neighbors to win the prize and get the prestige.
So cities kind of have that way of kind of taking them under their wing and making sure things are channeled in the right way.
Yeah, so this is complicated.
And you actually talk about this a little bit in the book, which is the way that historians, cultural historians, have looked at this stuff has changed over time.
And if you look at things like the Golden Bough, there’s this sort of tendency to sort of roll things all together.
Well, to make everything Neolithic.
Exactly.
Extremely ancient, which is not – Oh, and the unmasking of the real meaning.
This comes up all the time.
I guess what I’m curious about is if you look at these festivals, they don’t seem to have much to do with Christianity slash the church, the Catholic church.
But yet –
they’re inextricably tied to the seasonal festivities.
And I guess to what extent has the church actually managed carnival versus trying to endure it?
Has it ever tried to ban it?
I’m not sure I understand, and maybe it’s not even easy to explain, the relationship that organized religion has with these less organized folk festivities.
Carnival wouldn’t exist without the church.
It’s intimately tied to the church’s seasons.
People really misunderstand medieval culture.
We’re not a religious society, but Lent was an extremely big event in medieval culture.
You actually had to fast, and it was actually a very hard period to get through.
So, you know…
Carnival was the last day of celebration before Lent started, and everyone taking Lent seriously also took seriously the idea to get their jollies in by Mardi Gras, so the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday.
So it’s very clear that a lot of…
Earlier customs, pagan customs, I know you wouldn’t say a lot.
I’ve found stuff in Slavic culture and Polish culture.
But most of our carnal customs are much, much later than the baptism of Europe and much later than the Christian era.
And again, I was always confronting this with people talking about the Krampus as an ancient, ancient tradition.
It’s just it’s actually a 19th century tradition with reaching back to stuff that goes back to the 17th century, perhaps.
But Carnival is kind of the same.
The earliest Carnival stuff we read about that sounds recognizable.
is from Germany in the 14th century, the Schimbachlauf, which had costumes and crazy parades.
But before that, the carnival festivities were tied.
They were celebrated in Rome by the pope.
So there’s no way to – I know people – I know everyone wants me to tell them that carnival is actually a pagan tradition that the Christians appropriated.
That’s kind of the meme folks like, but that’s –
Not the case, really, except maybe in certain Slavic cultures.
So they really are tied together.
And it was St. Augustine wrote about the city of God and the city of the devil.
So the carnival was kind of a chance for Christians to experience the city of the devil, you know.
how exciting and how dangerous and how much of a hangover do you have from this?
It was sort of a way for people to get it out of their system and to realize, you know, I kind of like this safe system that the church has given us.
So it was, you know, we have the later theories of the safety valve, the, you know, kind of letting off steam.
19th century steam era theories about society.
But it’s, yeah, they’re definitely tied together.
The whole idea that you had to get this, get your party out of your system by Ash Wednesday was the generation of Carnival.
City of the devil.
You got to have a little disrespect.
Al, this is Monster Talk, so let’s talk a little bit about the monsters of Carnival.
Are there any particular recurring monsters that come into play?
Well, the ones that I… Yeah, the ones… And again, these figures, you know, the figures themselves don’t come from the church.
They come from folk tradition.
So there are different regions that have different kind of embodiments of Carnival.
They generally represent good luck and…
fertility uh but fertility uh in the sense of you know your good crops good babies have kids so when i was researching my grandpa’s book there were certain figures that particularly reminded me of that figure and they were monstrous and uh had horns um a couple of them one of them was the slovenian um current and then there’s also the bush show in hungary and uh
They both have sheepskin.
They were heavy, shaggy sheepskin costumes.
They both wore bell belts, which is now I realize is where the bell belt of the Krampus came from.
And they both also originally engaged in house visits like the Krampus.
The different anthropologists have pointed out that the Krampus seems to be an older tradition.
Doesn’t mean it’s an ancient pagan tradition, but it means it’s an older tradition where young men or teens that went house to house being wild and wearing sheepskins because this is what they did.
They had raised sheep in those regions and wore bells because the livestock didn’t need them during the winter or the early spring when carnival is celebrated.
But this Krampus tradition added St. Nicholas as a kind of chaperone.
So there you have the kind of idea that the church is appropriating things or kind of forming things.
So in Slovenia, there’s the Kurenti, and then in Hungary, you have the Busho.
And they both look very Krampus-like.
The Busho actually even has the long red Krampus tongue.
It looks sort of like, it’s very stylized, so it’s kind of confusing.
It looks kind of like a necktie, if you don’t know how to read the face.
The faces are a little confusing.
But it has a wooden mask, as does the courant.
So, again, when I was originally researching the Krampus book, I kept seeing these figures.
Then in Bulgaria, you have the kukeri, which are also used like animal hides.
Not only animal hides, but also animal…
heads and limbs and so forth.
In the west of Bulgaria, they have these figures that are kind of like, it’s almost like you’re wearing an animal parfait on top of your head.
It’s all these different parts of taxes, I mean, animals.
But there’s also a type of animal, it looks kind of like Chewbacca.
But they have a very long, tall cap that they wear that’s covered with fur.
So it’s kind of like a cross between Chewbacca and Cousin It.
So there’s these various furry monsters.
And then in Sardinia, there’s also a lot of figures that are costumed looking like…
different hoofed animals uh horn there’s lots of horns lots of goat uh goat horns are worn multiple goat horns like the pierston or the krampus also so you have all of these creatures that are very much like you know have this kind of savage animalistic feel
Throughout Europe, I mean, Bulgaria is very far away from Germany, a little closer to Austria.
And then you have also the different characters that are called bears in France and Spain, especially at the border between France and Spain.
And they’re also kind of a savage…
Wild man.
They don’t look like bears.
Usually there’s one, one of the towns they actually use a taxidermy bear head, but they’re basically like, because, you know, they look like, they look like they’re called bears because in medieval Europe, they didn’t know Simeon’s.
So the bear was the kind of the closest thing to a wild man.
So a beast.
So we have that, those characters too.
So all of these things are kind of reminding me or making me think of a
of the Krampus, just the kind of animal qualities.
And then, you know, I started to read up and I realized, oh, the dates are wrong.
It’s nothing to do with St. Nicholas Day, of course, but it does have to do with Christmas because Christmas will bleed into carnival in strange ways.
Interesting.
So…
A lot of the depictions show, and modern images, show masks being used.
And you mentioned masks.
What is the role of the mask here?
Is it hiding the face or revealing the heart?
That’s too poetic.
That’s very pretty.
Hiding the culpable identity, I think, is part of it.
It’s also, Carnival is about license.
It always has been about license.
It was a license you had before Lent started.
So Venice is one of our early Carnival models.
Rome had a Carnival that was unrecognizable, but Venice had a culture of masks.
They actually had, Venice actually used masks outside of Carnival.
Venetians would wear masks as a sort of symbol of local affiliation and pride, the way Scotsmen wear kilts.
So meetings, municipal meetings, people would wear masks to those.
And then it also, because if you’re voting on a proposition, you maybe don’t want to have your identity, have your allegiance known, you would wear masks.
But also masks would be worn in the…
Well, the very first casino in Europe, masks were always worn there.
So people, the higher upper class could gamble with the lower class.
People couldn’t suss out whether you had a lot of money, that you were worth the gamble or the wage.
So there’s, yes, there’s that.
I think the use of masks, I mean, we associate masks with America.
What we know about Carnival has a lot to do with Venice, but masks went back before that.
And…
I think we think of masks in the Venetian context only, but characters in the Kalans were masked too.
And this idea of the face that’s blacked with soot and grease goes back to the 4th century, to the Kalans.
And
It’s so that’s another way to kind of disguise yourself, you know, to block your face out.
It’s not a racist thing.
Get over your 19th century American prejudice.
It’s blocked faces are part of mumming traditions in Britain.
Britain doesn’t really have the carnival, but all.
but all carnival traditions everywhere everywhere the black face is part of it and it’s the cheapest way to people are always burning firewood and firewood and they always have grease so it’s the cheapest way to disguise yourself and i think even certain regions the krampuses will just black their faces too so we have we have different ways and i think it’s i think it is disguising yourself and kind of distancing yourself from whatever behavior you might produce
I guess that’s my answer.
Yes, it’s not.
I don’t know that it’s expressing yourself.
I guess it is expressing yourself because we all produce bad behavior naturally.
Well, I wonder if it’s another class reference to to blacken your face with you would have had a lot of kitchen maids and scullery maids and.
The old insult, black guard, referring to kitchen workers and people who had blackened faces from working in the kitchens and all the sort of that kind of stuff.
And yes, and oddly, chimney sweeps, too.
And we have the idea that chimney sweeps are lucky.
That’s a well-known thing.
As lucky as can be.
Have you not seen Mary Poppins?
Exactly.
So I’ll admit it, I kind of rolled my eyes at this.
I was mocking the idea, an idea I was sure Disney had tried to inject into the world, that Chimney Sweets are good luck.
And Al Ridenour is gracious enough to not mock me for my ignorance, so thanks for that, Al.
Because I’m guessing I’m not the only person walking around thinking that Chim Chim Cherie from Mary Poppins is just a catchy make-em-up nonsense song, it turns out that no, the song is tipping its hat to a genuinely old superstition.
Now, some superstitions feel like they’ve got a practical core, a little safety advice wrapped up in supernatural packaging.
Don’t walk under a ladder, for instance.
Yeah, don’t do that.
You could knock it over.
Someone could drop a tool, spill paint on you.
It’s easy to avoid.
Other superstitions are harder to rationalize, like spilling salt and throwing it over your shoulder.
I have no idea what that would accomplish except wasting more salt.
But chimney sweeps?
In a world where there’s coal stoves and open fires, keeping your chimney clean really could prevent horrific house fires.
So it’s not hard to imagine how that basic truth got mythologized.
How a clean chimney means good fortune slid into the sweep himself is lucky.
The belief goes back at least to the 1700s and gets especially entrenched in the late 1800s, right when the sweep’s own advertising starts leaning into it.
Shaking a sweep’s hand, tipping your hat, these gestures were said to bring good luck to the non-sweeper.
And the idea that it was lucky to spot a chimney sweep on your wedding day became so widely believed that you could find newspapers joking about it from the 1910s all the way through the 1950s saying sweeps were earning more money showing up at weddings than actually cleaning chimneys.
The superstition even brushed up against royalty.
There are stories that at the wedding of Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Philip made the point of stopping to shake the hand of a conspicuous sweep outside of Kensington Palace, a little insurance policy for a propitious marriage.
And there’s older folklore that tries to anchor the whole thing to George II of Great Britain, a runaway coach supposedly saved by anonymous sweep, and voila, royal gratitude turns into public superstition.
But here’s the darker layer, and I can’t prove this, but it seems possible that the whole lucky sweep legend, plus the fact that British sweeps often wore secondhand black finery associated with the funeral trade, helped soften the public image of a job that historically was brutal.
The industry leaned heavily on exploited child labor, it exposed workers to toxic chemicals that could lead to skin cancer, and it had lots of other grim realities.
So yeah, maybe it was lucky to see a chimney sweep, but it certainly wasn’t lucky to be one, especially around the turn of the 20th century.
So the idea that chimney sweeps are lucky, also it’s like a weird overlap.
Also milkmaids are lucky though, but that’s a whole different thing.
It’s a very suitable profession for sure.
Well, Al, with all your research, has this impacted your feelings about these events, going and attending them and things like that?
Has it changed your opinion about the communities that keep these old traditions alive?
Well, I mean, my research made me want to go.
I mean, I’m trying to I don’t know that I will be able to get a carnival tradition started in Los Angeles.
There are Los Angeles actually has.
Germans are very absent in their carnival tradition.
So there are German societies that have carnival.
It’s not the kind of carnival that I looked at, though.
So there’s a North German and South German carnival.
The Southern German is a bit more folkloric and a bit more like what I’ve researched and been interested in.
The Northern German carnival is very…
let’s say.
Okay.
Whatever you like, kind of let fly whatever German stereotypes you have for that.
But armies of people costume the same, which happens a little in the South too.
But yeah, I don’t know if I’m ever, I don’t know if I would ever be able to start a carnival stuff here, but I’m, I’m working on, I’m working on some costumes.
Some of them, we can borrow some of our Krampus season costumes.
Yeah, I don’t know.
I love that these things happen.
I have an infinite bucket list of places I want to go as I discover stuff in my research, and I’ll never get to all of them.
But I’m checking them off one by one every year, and maybe I’ll have to just make some of them happen here.
I don’t know.
But, yeah, no, I have a fondness for all those cultures.
Those are, those are things that I would, I would love to experience and love to bring to other people.
Very cool.
Yeah.
So I.
So, Al, I know offline I asked you about this.
I wasn’t sure if you wanted to go into it or not, but I’m a big fan of season one of True Detective.
And it’s not a core thing, but they talk about that the killers are part of this secret society and they practice the old carnival ways.
I used to be a pirate hideout.
I was an intern in plantations and whatnot.
Had a very rural sense of Mardi Gras.
You know, the men on horses, animal masks, such.
Courier du Mardi Gras.
That’s right.
Now, they had an annual winter festival.
Aren’t heavy on the Saturnalia.
A place where that Santeria and Voudon all mash together.
Have a look.
On the winter festival.
Leinfeld.
Antlers.
Masks.
And they show some photos of some children wearing strange, you know, outfits and the adults wearing almost like clan-like costumes.
And there being parades and marches.
And it’s very, it’s a little unclear exactly what’s going on, but it’s supposed to be sinister and ancient.
Right.
Yeah.
So pedophile is supposed to be, pedophilia is supposed to be a carnival custom.
Yeah.
According to my research, that’s not part of it.
I think they had to drop that.
Yeah.
Ancient Greece and Rome.
A couple of things.
So rural Cajun carnival is very much.
So again, we’re going to the folklore connection attracted me.
And what I focus on in the book is the rural carnival and.
So in rural regions, you don’t go to the city and see the procession through the main street.
You have people visiting your home.
It’s like the Krampus tradition, another thing that kind of made me interested or kind of connected me with this topic.
The costumes they wear also look very much like – and there’s been research on this, I know, connecting it to –
medieval French customs.
But the costumes they wear, the tall caps they wear are not clan.
I am so tired of this.
It’s the same with Easter processions.
The capuchon are the tall caps they wear.
Tall conical caps are part of carnival…
Everywhere, every country I looked at had tall caps and blacked faces.
So people, Americans lose their minds because they only know 19th century American history.
This is something that goes back centuries and centuries.
And I don’t understand, I can’t necessarily explain it, but…
Well, the tall cap was a naughty thing, you were in the Inquisition.
So there’s something, I don’t know.
Other anthropologists say it represents the other, the aspiring to the greater world, the…
greater world of the spirits.
You’re representing the spirit when you’re dressing these costumes.
I think it was just a fun way to make yourself look taller by putting a cone on top of your head.
But yeah, so the caps aren’t Klan hats.
I understand this context.
It is America.
It is America in the South, but the Klan ruined pointy hats in the same way.
They ruined pointy hats, yes.
The Nazis ruined the toothbrush mustache, right?
Yeah.
That’s true.
That’s true.
It is in America, yes.
So I know they wanted people to associate it with that.
I’ve been to a bunch of Holy Week activities in Europe, and they wear the conical caps, and it has nothing to do with shame or the Inquisition.
It’s just kind of annoying that Americans interpret everything through our political lens and our –
history only beginning in the 19th century so i i we do yeah yeah you’ve got to keep it in context but i think you’ve got good intentions for it but we need to wrap up now and we’ve got a final question we’re just not sure like can i discuss this we’re not sure if we have ever asked you about your favorite monster we don’t have it on record anyway so uh even if you have answered this perhaps you can we can revisit the question so what’s your favorite monster
It doesn’t have to be a carnival monster, I guess.
It could be whatever you think is a monster.
I didn’t want to answer this in my Krampus episode, but then I probably said the Krampus, so that doesn’t count.
I guess this is a phantom of the opera count as a monster.
Eric?
Yes, Eric.
I think he does.
I think so.
He certainly is a monstrous personality.
Well, I just watched the Phantom of the Opera.
My wife insisted I watch the musical.
I’ve never seen it.
Oh, you watched the Andrew Lee Webber one.
Yes, the musical.
The only fan for the opera that exists is the 1925 version.
But she wanted me to watch the musical, which is gorgeous.
They do beautiful staging of the Palais Garnier.
The opera house looks gorgeous.
The operas look gorgeous.
But that’s, please, please, please avoid that movie.
Yes, and it was always, I grew up in the Monster Kid era, so I loved Lon Chaney because Forrest Ackerman told me Lon Chaney was a genius.
So I have all the kind of film, 1920s and 30s films in my soul that the Monster Kids have.
So I’m going to go ahead and give that as an answer.
I love it.
Thank you so much.
I loved your book.
It’s beautiful.
It’s so dense with information and cool info.
Really great idea.
Yeah.
Well, thank you.
There’ll be a link in the show notes.
Check it out.
And you’ve got to go listen to Bone and Sickle if you don’t.
Fix that.
Go subscribe.
Anyway, thanks.
I look forward to seeing whatever you’re working on next.
Thank you.
Pleasure being here.
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 us chatting with Al Ridenour about his beautiful and fascinating book, A Season of Madness.
Check the show notes for links to his book and some monstrously beautiful photos that Al shared with us.
Be sure to check out Al’s show, Bone and Sickle.
If you love folklore and traditions partnered with intricate sound design, you’ll dig it.
Plus, it’s all wrapped up in a delightful radio spook show garb.
Monster Talk theme music is by Peach Stealing Monkeys.
Thank you so much for making us a part of your listening life.
This has been a Monster House presentation

The post S05E19: A Season of Madness – Old World Carnival with Al Ridenour appeared first on MonsterTalk.

In part two of our two-part interview with Owen Davies, we continue the discussion of witches and witch prosecutions with thoughtful considerations of the meaning of witch and how it can be an identity or an accusation.  Be sure and catch both parts of this fascinating chat. 

Some related viewing/reading:

A curious case of Black Magic in Norfolk

Blake’s article about the “PA Hex Hollow” murders (Skeptoid #996)

Books by Owen*:
Grimoires: A History of Magic Books

Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History

Magic: A Very Short Introduction

Folklore: A journey through the past and present (with Ceri Houlbrook)

The Oxford Illustrated History of Witchcraft and Magic 

America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft After Salem

*We use Amazon affiliate links for books when available

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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Witches are a peculiar monster.
As monsters go, they’re close to unique in that in order to combat them, you eventually find yourself at a forked path.
The well-trodden path, bright and lit, leads to a comforting place where you can be 100% certain that all the problems ailing you will go away if you can just get rid of that pesky monster whose power is absolutely diabolic and evil.
The methods for getting rid of the monster vary, but they promise to bring closure even if they don’t restore what’s been lost.
The other path, it’s dark and crooked, and you can barely see where it’s heading.
And if you start to go down that path, every comfortable explanation will be ripped away, and you’ll come to question every belief in your life.
And at the end, instead of the monster, there’s just a humble table, sitting in a shadowy clearing, and upon it, a single object.
There is something poetically apt about that object on the table.
It’s an old technology, surrounded by folklore all its own.
Myths and legends about its use and meaning, the dangers it holds, the fascination, they fill volumes.
And given that we’re using it to fight witches, it’s especially apt because the best examples of this object require the metal silver.
The stories about the need for silver to combat witches are numerous and graphic, and the historic link between the metal and the undoing of witches is old and deep.
But this is no bullet or knife, and if you really want to defeat the witch forever, you’re going to have to pick it up and use it.
Together, we’re going to walk that more difficult path, and I’m going to ask you to pick up what’s on that table.
You may have already guessed what it is.
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.
Welcome to part two of our conversation with historian Owen Davies.
In part one, we talked about the persistent myth that witch hunts in America ended with the Salem trials.
In part two, we’re going to talk about the real dangers and real complexities of fighting witches.
Stories about horrific witch hunts still emerge from parts of Africa and often make their way into American and European tabloids.
Those stories bother me for several reasons.
First, they’re usually written in a way that implies witch hunts are something that only, and I’m air quoting here, primitive people have to deal with.
That’s an over there problem.
That’s a those people problem.
But that simply isn’t true.
And I don’t mean it’s not true because witches secretly exist in the so-called first world.
Forget that.
Forget colonialism for a moment.
Forget even the question of whether witchcraft is real.
Let’s just take an intellectual step back and look at the hidden premise of this kind of coverage.
that witches are not real, and that only ignorant or superstitious people would ever believe otherwise.
Now, for the record, I am a skeptic when it comes to witchcraft having literal magic power.
I don’t talk about that much, largely because I have many friends who practice Wicca, paganism, or other magical traditions, and I generally regard those practices as the way I do any religion.
But witch is a magic word.
It’s a word with the power to turn a person into a monster.
Now, there’s other words that work this way, like Nazi or pedophile.
But the difference is that there are real Nazis and there are real pedophiles.
And there are even real people who self-identify as witches who attempt to reclaim or rehabilitate the word after centuries of demonization.
But they’re not witches in the sense that matters here.
As Owen Davies points out in the interview, a witch, in the accusatory sense, is always an evil entity.
A witch is not a kindly, herb-burning, peace-and-love hippie feminist.
A witch is a monster, a source of misery, misfortune, and supernatural harm.
So when someone’s accused of being a witch, they’re being labeled as something other than human.
The term itself is dehumanizing.
It’s demonizing.
If you don’t grasp that fact, then the European witch trials require elaborate socioeconomic explanations.
Scholars propose mass hysteria, ergot poisoning, patriarchal repression, complex modern theories that attempt to rationalize what otherwise looks like an incomprehensible wave of violence against people who could not possibly have done the things they’re accused of.
But explaining misfortune as the result of a witch’s curse isn’t irrational if your worldview is supernatural.
In a cosmology where invisible agents actively work against a benevolent divine order, witches make sense.
And once witches make sense, the urge to fight them also makes sense.
The real danger with witches isn’t magic.
It’s accusation.
Any epistemology that allows witches to exist will eventually make room for destroying them.
That belief system is only irrational from the outside.
Asking someone who genuinely believes in the supernatural malice of witches to abandon that belief is far more difficult than you might imagine.
So let’s continue our conversation with Owen Davies, where we’ll take a deeper look at some of the aspects of the witch.
Monster Talk.
All right, we’re welcoming back Owen Davies to continue our conversation about witchcraft and following on his book, America Bewitched.
We talked about what witches are and the history of the post-Salem persecution and trials around witchcraft in America, which have not stopped.
And here, I want to talk more in part two about…
how witchcraft is so dependent.
on people’s beliefs and not necessarily the beliefs or behavior of the person accused.
It’s such a strange situation there.
But the whole word witch is so loaded with meaning and various meanings.
Karen, as our listeners will know, has written an entire book just about the word bitch, which rhymes.
And it’s like, I feel like a similar volume or maybe a collection of volumes could be written about the word witch.
It’s often a euphemism for bitch.
I’ve seen in a range of sources witch and bitch going together a lot.
Oh, yeah, like hand in hand.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I had fallen into thinking about witchcraft in basically three ways.
People who self-identify as modern neo-pagan witches.
Witches of folklore, like your Baba Yaga type, old crone in the woods.
And then the third is the one I think about the most, which is the witch as accusation.
That not identity, but like it’s what you get accused of.
Like, I don’t know if in fact, I don’t remember reading about any maybe where the accused also identified as a witch.
Like it’s very unusual.
It’s something that is attacks.
It’s an attack.
Right.
So but I.
I saw a lot of parallels in your work and, and I, and I just wanted to see if you could talk a little bit about those, if those are the right categories.
Yeah.
With, with, with how that’s played out in your own research.
I have three categories, three categories of which, which, which I think works pretty, pretty neatly.
So the ones of the trials are called conflict, which is their, their accusations born of conflict, you know, within families, within neighbors, et cetera.
And the accusation derives from a conflict.
Those people might not have had a reputation as a witch at all.
It’s only when misfortune or conflict happens that suspicions arise that they are a witch.
So that’s a conflict witch.
That’s the basis of trials, the trials and accusations.
As you say, there’s also a folkloric witch.
who is stereotypical, and that does bleed into conflict, which people have stereotypical notions, but people can look like a witch, behave like a witch, in terms of being of a certain age, having…
certain physiognomy, being marginal in the community.
Weighing the same as a duck.
And often begging so that their poor marginal women live on.
And they existed.
These were women who existed, but they didn’t necessarily ever get accused.
They never end up being beaten up or anything.
They were kind of the village witch, folkloric witch.
They looked witchy.
They were witchy types.
And that, you know, and then of course that, you know, and there’s a fairy tale element to that and which is the witch in fairy tale.
So yeah, exactly.
They’ve got conflict witch, you’ve got the kind of the folkloric witch.
And then the category which people don’t think about much is the accidental witch.
And this is the smallest category, really, in terms of witch trials and stuff.
But they are there.
And accidental witch is when basically cunning folk are involved.
And there’s a divination ritual to identify who is the witch who’s been doing this to me.
You perform a ritual.
And the basis of most of these rituals is that it draws the suspect to reveal themselves.
So they come knocking at the door, et cetera.
And that is the witch.
They might have been your best friend up until that point.
You might have lived with them as good neighbours for 30 years.
But if you turn up at the wrong moment during that ritual, you become a witch.
And your life is turned upside down.
And some of these stories are just as sad as some of the conflict witch ones.
Because the person who’s accused can’t understand.
They’ve been in good repute.
They’re not folkloric witches.
They’re good citizens.
And all of a sudden, they’re accused of witchcraft.
by one person and that spreads around the village or community and then before you know it, you have to leave.
I’m curious about something that Blake touched upon where you mentioned the witch as an accusation, a title that’s thrust upon an unwilling recipient.
Have there been cases that you’ve come across of people who’ve been willing recipients in the sense of being accused of witchcraft and, well, hell yeah, I’m a witch and I…
turned him into a Newton and they’re fine to take that label and believe that they do have powers.
And I’m not talking about false confessions as such.
No, sort of.
Yes, sort of.
So when we’re talking particularly about those marginal women begging, often widowed, living by themselves, outcast types, unfortunately.
Now…
they still would never call themselves a witch.
That’s just too dangerous.
That is just too dangerous.
Right through, you know, people are being shot dead in the States in the 1950s, 60s and 70s just because you’re being called a witch.
You’re not going to call yourself that.
But they sometimes, sometimes would play upon the reputation they had.
So that’s a different matter.
You wouldn’t call yourself a witch, but you would behave, you would use it.
So if people are suspicious of you and you actually want to extract charity from people,
or don’t want to be bothered or pestered, then you might build upon that reputation.
There are some examples.
It’s not common.
It’s not common.
That’s an empowering thing in those cases.
Interesting.
Exactly.
It can be a bit empowering on a very small scale.
That actually struck me in the book.
I had not really considered the scenario of the beggar woman.
as witch because people don’t want they feel guilty about not paying her and you know and and she’s you know she’s somebody who you can be afraid of or or or not like coming around you know and just when some bad thing happens boom there’s your go-to right yeah so it’s like it’s like there’s a this sort of hidden motivation
uh you know i i don’t know it it’s just surprised me like just how someone’s own guilt for how someone else has to live leading to like this way to get out of that if they’re gone if it turns out that they’re evil you know that that’s that’s all to the betterment of your poor ego or whatever yeah i mean that was that was um famous keith thomas thesis 1971 religion decline imagine can he propose this was kind of the main reason for witchcraft accusations this guilt
this guilt and women.
And feminists, you know, a couple of decades later, quite rightly criticised this, saying, because Keith Thompson took about why there were women, other than through the idea that they were poor, elderly women, etc.
So that became quite prominent.
These were completely dismantled now, but there are cases.
The reason why he came to this was because there are cases in the early modern period, and there are cases in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.
You know, it’s…
It’s only when society itself changes and you don’t need…
This comes back to your point, Blake.
You know, if we come to a point where women have to go begging from their neighbours, you know, just to live, there’s a prime kind of key moment snapping where…
accusations might return you know i hope that’s not a hypothesis we have to see played out yeah hopefully so the rise of neo-pagan witchcraft uh has been very tied up with feminism and i didn’t really invite you on here to do a feminist chat but i was it just seems like women self-identifying as witches and feeling empowerment would trigger
misogynistic backlash, but I didn’t know if that’s a real thing that’s gone on or if that was, I was just curious about that.
Not so much.
I mean, out of Wicca and that milieu of the 50s and 60s, we see the rise of what’s called the goddess movement.
And so you have Wiccans who are worshipping not just a horned deity, but also a female deity, and that can be the earth goddess mother.
Then we get quite a distinct sort of idea that
you know, in the Neolithic in Europe, that they were basically goddess worshippers.
And that was actually put around by some eminent archaeologists.
So there was, at the time, there seemed to be a confirmation from academics, scholars, that there was an age of the goddess worship in Europe.
But out of that came then neo-pagan goddess worship, and that’s quite an interesting movement.
That’s quite strong in…
certainly in Britain today.
I don’t know so much how well it’s fared in America and Australia at the moment, but certainly there’s a part of it which is focused on Glastonbury.
There’s a Glastonbury goddess movement.
Now, again, these people don’t refer to them.
Some of them will probably refer to themselves as witches in a neo-pagan sense.
Some of them won’t.
It’s become much, much more plural in the world of non-Christian spiritual
worship where people can even be christians and still think about the idea of the earth as earth mother and worship that so it’s a that’s changed from the 50s and just as neopage witchcraft has changed
Well, that’s like Margaret Murray’s Witch Cult in Western Europe.
It’s so influential.
Yeah, yeah.
And I guess I’m supposing that Gardner probably took some of his ideas from it.
Oh, he did.
No, no, he read it and he communicated with it.
Yeah.
Oh, okay.
Well, there you go.
Yeah.
So that’s really taking a…
I think what’s a pretty thoroughly discredited idea of this survival of an ancient religion.
But giving it sort of, I guess, academic bracing before you roll it out, you know, as a new religion, that’s fascinating.
Yeah, very cunning.
Owen, you mentioned Christianity and…
witchcraft accusations seem very much associated with Christianity as a label rather than an identity.
But you also talk about witch hunters in Indigenous cultures.
So did you get a sense that fighting witches predates contact with Christianity?
The same type of figure exists.
I mean, that’s why studying witchcraft beliefs in America is so fascinating, because it is such a melting pot.
So you’ve got your indigenous American population, you’ve got African-American population from slavery, and then you’ve got dozens of different European countries, you’ve got Asians.
It’s a massive melting pot.
So what it shows is that different religions all share a similar idea in the same type of figure.
They might not call it a witch, but it’s normally something, you know, a name witches would relate to, to the kind of, you know, what is the old English term, witch, as well.
So, yes, I mean, witchcraft is elements of the idea of harmful, spiteful, envious women using harmful magic is near universal.
So it sounds like witchcraft or witch accusations are an emergent property of a community at some point of humans.
It seems like at some point you start to get you want to have an explanation for weird things that are happening.
And you’ve you’ve run out of little people in here, a giant.
And, you know, maybe it’s your neighbor, you know, I mean, so.
What Christianity does in the early modern period, which is tied to the witch trials and to witchcraft accusations globally in Christian societies, is the King James Bible translation and other translations from the Greek and Latin texts, whereby the term witch is essentially used.
the term witch, as in the Witch of Endor.
And I’ve written a whole article about the Witch of Endor and history and folklore a couple of years ago, tracing this.
So in the Bible, you’ve got the Witch of Endor.
She’s not called the Witch of Endor in the Bible.
She’s called the Woman of Endor.
And then you have various things like thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, for example.
So the term witch is used, although even at the time it was pointed out that that was a poor translation from the Greek.
And the Greek term for the woman of Endor was Pythoness, in other words, a prophet diviner.
It wasn’t…
Right, exactly.
It’s not a witch as understood.
And the label that was…
So at the same time, a label is being applied to these poor women accused of crimes they didn’t commit.
The Bible itself was used as a main defense that such people existed, even though that’s based on a mistranslation of the type of person that’s referred to in the Bible.
And the fascinating thing is, is by the 18th century, and again, American evangelicalism and British evangelicalism are key to this, is the preachers start referring to her as a witch.
So it’s not in the Bible at all.
And yet over and over again, you’ll get sermons talking about the witch of Endor.
And you get these Bible-thumping preachers describing her as this old hag, you know, and what a horrible, evil old woman she was.
The Bible doesn’t even describe what she looks like.
She’s just a woman.
And so when we talk about Christianity’s impact, it’s actually much more subtle than that.
It’s because it’s the ways in which the English version of the Bible, which is used by evangelicals in West Africa as defence of the continued persecution of witches today.
And I’ve been involved with a couple of organizations who are writing materials to try and circulate amongst evangelical mega pastors in West Africa, pleading with them to stop referring to this because it’s not in the Bible.
And it’s still being used and it’s being used by Christian preachers for their own cynical means.
which is leading to suffering.
So that’s not necessarily Christianity.
It’s a perversion of the sense of the Bible.
Do you have to have a sort of Manichean…
binary religious structure in your community to make this so dangerous?
Like, I could see, like, I’m wondering, because in places where they don’t have that kind of worldview, is the witch’s fate a little kinder?
I don’t know.
Or do people still go for the death?
No, because ultimately, religion endorses and supports these views, generally, one way or another, inadvertently or explicitly.
But actually, it all basically comes back down again to interpersonal relationships, misfortune, envy, spite.
You know, it’s a very simple but potent set of ingredients which can then be manipulated or can be then used or adopted for religious purposes or by state, by the state.
But ultimately, ultimately, it derives from interpersonal relationships.
human condition yeah yeah absolutely i mean i i’m always reluctant you know because i’m a bit of a critic of the old comparative anthropologists of 100 years ago and james fraser and stuff we just put everything in a multiple so look we can identify this here we can identify that there we can identify it in you know you know in in in australian aborigines and we find it in the polish peasant there you know but but there there are yeah you’re right there are there are you know fundamental human
responses emotions ideas um which are pretty much universal which is why again you know in america you can all essentially speak the same language you have 100 different languages but you’re all talking about the same sort of person yeah you know and uh you know i tried to do that in the book because i do you know i there’s a i do three case studies there and one is a a native american tamer case who basically goes and kills six people with a rifle
And that’s within that community.
And then I do one, which is about two German migrants and their family.
And another one, which is about going back to sort of more 18th century, well, Scottish, you know, ancestors, but all believing the same thing, all ending up in death.
I think it’s worth noting a lot of the cases, even if the person who did the witch killing had to face justice.
they were unapologetic and felt they had done the right thing.
Like this, this is no light thing.
This is a very serious epistemological conclusion that this was the right thing to do.
I got quite deep into one of the cases there.
It’s the one from 1920.
I just can’t remember his name.
There was a taxi driver in America.
And I traced him.
So he killed a woman who he thought was tormenting her in the shape of a cat.
And it got so bad that he went and shot her.
This was the 1930s.
he ended up being, like they all do, they all end up being, by the way, the witch that the American courts were, they all end up being declared insane rather than how could you possibly believe this?
When they’re not insane, they just believe in witchcraft.
It’s two different things.
Anyway, I managed to trace him right through the asylum system, right through until he got released, I think.
So this is the 1930s, and I traced him to an appeal in the early 1980s where he tried to get released.
And I’ve got the interview transcript of it.
And it’s extraordinary.
So after all these years, he’d shot this woman who was in his 20s.
He still was evading whether he said he regretted it.
He said he regretted it and wished it hadn’t happened.
But he still did not deny that she wasn’t a witch.
And he found all sorts of ways not to say that.
He still thought she was a witch.
How do you differentiate then between mental illness and belief?
That’s a really fun, I’ve written a whole book on that.
It’s a really tricky one.
And there’s a whole chapter on the courts and how they try and deal with it.
There is a chapter in The Miracle of a Witch on insanity as well.
But it is really, it’s an absolute hot potato for courts.
And particularly, particularly when spiritualism takes off.
So by the 1880s, 1890s in America, the American legal system is tying itself in knots about this issue.
So for example, there’ll be a witch killing.
So it goes to court.
And then the plea, obviously, by the defense is that my client was temporarily insane.
He was insane.
Why would anyone possibly kill someone because they’re a witch in this day and age?
So my client was clearly temporarily insane.
The client keeps quiet, still believes in witches.
and that they did the right thing um but then the the prosecution you know going uh complicating the issues as well because they’re saying hold on so are all spiritualists insane as well then you know
Because they believe that you can talk to ghosts, you can talk to the dead.
Are they insane?
And by that time, it’s so well established that no one’s going to say that everyone who’s a spirit is insane.
But then to say that somebody who believes in witches is insane just because they believe in them.
You see what I mean?
It gets more and more complicated.
It gets more and more complicated and hasn’t got, you know, really is still a hot potato.
today wow it’s it’s it’s fascinating what normally happens is they all end up being declared insane because essentially the courts judge jury don’t want to see someone executed for killing someone who executed a witch because rather like what i was saying about salem at the beginning that doesn’t it’s difficult to compute you know oh hold on we’re we’re saying that this person is guilty and really believed in which one of these people actually exist in america still
Must be mad.
There’s a kind of a defence mechanism, an unsaid defence mechanism and all this.
So let’s just shift them off to the same silence.
So hardly anyone ever gets executed for killing a witch.
It’s sobering.
It’s a sobering thought because this is touching people who are our grandparents.
Yeah.
Yeah, it’s recent.
Yeah, exactly.
This is not centuries ago.
This is happening in our own time that we know people.
Yeah.
It’s uncomfortable for a lot of people.
Are there other key ideas, pernicious myths about this period?
or this topic that you would like to see propagated, even if it’s futile.
This is a good audience to talk to because we’re one of those, we’re all the people who are well actually, you know, at the parties.
One of the ones which has been, which is both persistent and being renewed, particularly say by Sylvia Federici’s book, is the idea that witch trials are all about the taking of land from women.
You’ll see this over and over again.
So her thesis was the idea that a lot of the people accused were women who held land in a patriarchal, capitalistic society, and that it was a systematic campaign to remove land ownership from women, right?
So you accuse them of witchcraft, and under the laws, which is partially wrong again, their land is expropriated.
Boom.
So it’s capitalistic, and it’s patriarchal and misogynistic.
This is everywhere now.
If I went on Twitter, I refuse to call it X, I’m not really doing anything with it anymore anyway, but I used to do just a bit of a mischief and I would point out misnomers about the witch trials and this would be one.
I could guarantee you I’d immediately have people contesting it and they would say, you’re a man, you don’t know.
I’m sorry, no, I’m a historian and historians know.
And I can explain it.
The vast majority of women who are accused of witchcraft, whether it’s 500 years ago or 100 years ago, didn’t own land.
That’s because they lived in a patriarchal society where they didn’t often have opportunity to own land.
So you can’t explain it on that basis.
They would have to be all sort of wealthy landowning families that were being accused of witchcraft.
And there are a few examples.
And, of course, you can pick out four or five in your book and talk about those.
But that is not representative of the whole lot.
So that one is just so set in now.
It’s kind of the new version of they’ve moved away from necessarily being genocide and stuff.
But now it’s about procreation land.
It really steams people up.
So you just say, try and point out it’s wrong.
Well, the patriarchy is still to blame.
It’s not a matter of… Well, exactly.
It’s counterintuitive because essentially these poor women who are accused are not women who will be able to possess land because of the patriarchal society in which they live.
Exactly.
You know…
Still goes back to that, but yeah.
Sorry, that’s the latest one.
Anyway.
Yeah, I have heard of that, and I think, Blake, we’ve kind of touched upon that with cases like the Hungarian bathroom.
So I think that was a theory too, and there might be more credence to that than the claims of witches.
But I just wanted to ask you, Owen, this is, I guess, opening up a can of worms too, but I’ve heard a little bit I don’t know too much about.
about it at this point, but the Pendle Hill witch trials, and I believe that those predated the Salem witch trials.
Do you think that in any way those kind of spurred on the Salem witch trials that influenced what happened here in America?
No, not really.
No.
I mean, again, that’s a slight bugbear of mine because whenever there’s a documentary about witch trials in Britain, they always focus on the Lancashire witch trials of 1612, Pendle Hill ones, 1612.
It is a highly atypical trial, highly atypical case.
And yet, whenever the media pick up on Britain, you always get it.
mentioned as a priority, like the headline, are we going to talk about the Bendel witch trials?
And then there’s the small handful of us witchcrafters going, no, talk about something, another trial, talk about normal trials that the vast majority of people had an experience of and were involved in, not what essentially happened.
It’s a sensational case, and partly because the king gets involved in it.
You know, and there’s a, you know, the pamphlet is, you know, it happens in 1612, you know, King James VI had been on the throne for a few years.
He’d written a book about demonology when he was, you know, Scottish King 1597.
And so it’s highly unusual because he gets interested in the case.
And the reason why we know so much about it is a guy, one of the sort of officials, Lancaster jail, Thomas Potts, basically writes this big report, which is essentially a kind of report for the king personally, you know.
So this is really atypical.
And of course, there are fantastic stories that tell, you know, the extraordinary confessions that take place, which takes into the realms of witches flying and meeting and gathering and all these sorts of things, which are very much derived from fairy tales stories.
So it’s a fascinating case.
It’s a fascinating case.
But it’s highly, highly atypical.
And you could say the Salem trials are atypical in the scheme of things, of American trials as well.
And do you think at that point anyway that King James had kind of given up on those beliefs, or do you think he was still a proponent of all of these beliefs?
Yeah, no, he gets increasingly more sceptical.
So he starts out a believer because he thinks that his bride, the witch has tried to basically kill him and his bride, returning from Denmark, by causing a storm.
So he believes in that.
But slowly he starts turning and he gets more sceptical the more he looks at the evidential basis of it.
He never really truly expresses it in those terms because it’s a law.
You basically have to stop the law to say, hold on, these witch trials are absolute nonsense.
There’s no evidence.
Let’s, let’s, let’s.
Let’s call off the witch trials, you know.
So it’s nothing like that happens.
No, unfortunately.
Yeah, yeah.
He clearly becomes more sceptical about the nature of the evidence.
It doesn’t mean he doesn’t believe there are people called witches.
He’s just clearly sceptical about the legal evidence of proof.
So interesting.
Exactly.
So, you know, in the Lancashire Witch Trials, you’ve got, you know, a young girl telling all sorts of stories and saying, hold on, this is a 12-year-old girl or whatever.
That’s the sort of thing people start ringing more and more alarm bells.
Why are we accepting this evidence in court?
So that’s his position, really.
But then obviously the witch trials carry on.
Witch trials, again, are largely dead in Britain by 1620s.
And it’s only because of the Matthew Hopkins episode during the Civil War that it suddenly explodes again.
There were hardly any trials in the 1630s and 40s.
Again, whatever country you take, there’s really interesting chronologies of the ups and downs of this and where some countries decide.
In some of the German states, for example, they basically terminate them by early 17th century.
They’re done.
They’re finished.
Palatinate in Germany.
No more witch trials after like 1600.
A neighbouring state will carry on persecuting through to 1700.
Clearly, we’re going to have to bring you back on to delve more into these topics because it’s so complicated.
It’s complicated and fascinating, and it’s hard to find good experts who will take the time to come join us.
So I really appreciate it very, very much.
Thank you.
Now, it’s your first visit with us, so we have a signature question we like to ask first-time guests, which is, what, and this is a very unfair question, but it’s a habit now, so we can’t stop.
It’s a fun question.
What is your favorite monster?
Okay.
I’d call it more of a bogey, but I’m quite fond of Jenny Greenteeth, which is more of a bogey than a monster.
I only know her orthogonally from the story of the Scottish vampire that the kids go hunting in the 1950s.
Ginny with the Iron Teeth.
You’ve got Ginny with the Iron Teeth as well.
Tell us about the Green Teeth.
Ginny Green Teeth is regionally specific.
It’s around Cheshire and Lancashire, primarily.
And…
First start hearing her sort of late 90s.
Jenny Greenteeth lives under the water.
She’s a sort of hag-like female water ogre, bogey monster.
And obviously she has green teeth.
And ponds, I don’t know, duckweed.
Ponds get covered in duckweed, little green leaves.
They cover the whole pond.
That used to be called in parts of Liverpool Jenny Greenteeth.
So she gave a name to the plant as well.
So basically she lives in stagnant water.
And she basically, you know, if children get too close to the water, she’ll drag them in and eat them.
I’m not going to make a comment about British teeth.
The really interesting thing about Jenny Gray, she starts off as a rural sort of monster, but then populates post-industrial parts of Manchester and Liverpool.
So you’ll get old mill and pit buildings.
with a pit pool and you’ll find jenny creed teeth in there you know so you don’t want kids wandering around post-industrial coal mines and things so you say oh jenny green teeth inhabits the pool at the old mill there do not go near that pool because she’ll drag you in
So, yeah, Ginny Green Teeth.
She saves lives.
She saves lives, exactly.
That’s so interesting.
It just makes me think of Aboriginal legends.
They had similar ideas of when he drags you into the billboards, as they’re called, and, yeah, similar stories in the United States.
And so, again, it’s a universal, but it’s around.
It is.
I mean, that’s why we call them bogeys, really, because they’re bogey figures.
But, you know, bogeys can be in fairy tales.
You know, the giant’s going to meet you if you don’t go to bed early.
But this is what’s interesting about her.
And as you say, the other example you just mentioned, Karen, is that they’re out in the landscape.
You know, they’re actually meant to populate the environment rather than just being…
an abstract figure from fairy tales who will come and torment you if you don’t go to bed early.
That is fascinating.
We’ve never had that answer before.
It’s rare to not get an answer that we’ve heard before.
At this point, yeah, that’s true.
Owen, thank you so much for making time for the show and our audience.
Thank you.
Thanks a lot.
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 two of our conversation with historian Owen Davies.
Check our show notes for links to Owen’s many books covering the fascinating history of magic, witches, and how various groups have interacted with these ideas and concepts.
Monster Talk theme music is by Pete Stealing Monkeys.
As always, thank you for listening.
This has been a Monster House presentation.

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