The Worker's Cauldron

We are back and in  time for Halloween we are discussing, among other things, the first pagan pride “Witch-In” in New York’s Central Park on October 31, 1970. The organizer of the event, an eccentric Sicilian-American named Leo Martello, used his experience in the gay liberation movement to craft a (somewhat problematic) political identity for the emerging Wiccan religion. We discuss his life, influences, and how he related to the gay liberation movement after the Stonewall uprising.

Bonus: Cian Gill of the Wide Atlantic Weird Podcast joins us to discuss how 19th century folklorist “discovered” The Gospel of the Witches, which would later form the foundation of Martello’s stregheria

Sources:
Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon
Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon
Ethan Doyle White, Wicca: history, belief, and community in modern pagan witchcraft
MIchael Bronksi, A Queer History of the United States
Leo Martello, Weird Ways of Witchcraft, and Witchcraft: The Old Religion
Off the Grid, Out of the Broom Closet: Gay Activist & Village Wiccan Leo Martello
Rosemary Ellen Guiley, The Encyclopedia of Witches, Witchcraft and WiccaGay Liberation Front Platform Statement, December 2, 1970
Harry Hay, “Statement of Purpose—Gay Liberation Front, Los Angeles, California”

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This episode we speak to UCLA social historian Robin Derby, whose upcoming book, Werewolves and other Bêtes Noires: Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands, focuses on manifestations of demonic animals on the island of Hispaniola.  We talk about the links between colonization, capitalism and monsters--particularly the mysterious figure known as the bacá.

Further Reading:

Robin Derby and Marion Werner: The Devil Wears Dockers: Devil Pacts, Trade Zones, and Rural-Urban Ties in the Dominican Republic

Peggy McInerny: Shape-shifting and storytelling in Hispaniola 

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Sometimes monsters take on the most unlikely form. Today we talk about the night doctor, a shadowy medical menace that appears in Black folklore at the beginning of the 20th century. Fear of the night doctor reflected a very real history of racist medical abuse in the United States.

 CONTENT WARNING: this episode contains discussions about dissections and unethical medical experiments that some may find disturbing.

References:

Night Riders in Black Folk History
By Gladys-Marie Fry

Medical Apartheid
By Harriet A. Washington

Bodies in the Basement: The Forgotten Stolen Bones of America's Medical Schools
By Dolly Stolze

Night Doctors
By Colin Dickey

Fear Of The Dark: The Night Doctors In Folk Belief And Historical Reality
By Mark Laskey

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The Chupacabra is undoubtedly one of the most well known cryptids. It is a recent monster, emerging in Puerto Rico only in 1995. We discuss what was going on in Puerto Rico in the 1990s, the spread of the Chupacabra to Mexico after the North American Free Trade Agreement where it merged with President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, and how it became associated with both coyotes suffering from mange and immigrants in the 2000s.

We are joined by Brenda Salguero and Dr. Orquidea of the podcast Monstras: Latinx Monsters and Folklore, Dr. William Calvo-Quirós, author of “Sucking Vulnerability: Neoliberalism, the Chupacabras, and the Post-Cold War Years,” and Dr. Ed Guimont of the Impossible Archive podcast.

Bonus: The time a teddy bear was victimized by El Chupacabra, Scully and Mulder get problematic, and kangaroo chihuahuas 

References

William Calvo-Quiros: “Sucking Vulnerability: Neoliberalism, the Chupacabras, and the Post-Cold War Years”

Robert Jordan Michael: “El Chupacabra: Icon of Resistance to U.S. Imperialism”

Lauren Derby: “Imperial Secrets: Vampires and Nationhood in Puerto Rico”

Silvia Rodriguez Vega: “Chupacabras: The Myth of the Bad Immigrant”

Scott Corrales: Night of the Chupacabras

The 1996 "Chupacabra Homepage"

Asher Elbein: Chasing the Chupacabra, A Lonestar Legend

Benjamin Radford: Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore

Joe Bandy: Bordering the Future: Resisting Neoliberalism in the Borderlands

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This week we take a look at the strange moving statues phenomenon that attracted hundreds of thousands of Irish Catholics to shrines across the country in the summer of 1985. The moving statues were part the bleak social landscape of Ireland in the 1980s, and a series of scandals leading up to that summer ignited something of a social movement that politicized the alleged miracles.

We are joined by Victoria Anne Pearson of University College Cork and Cian Gill of the Wide
Atlantic Weird Podcast who help contextualize the strange occurrences. 



J. Ryan and T. Kirakowski, Ballinspittle, Moving Statues and Faith  

Sharon Tighe-Mooney,  Irreconcilable differences?: The fraught relationship between women and the Catholic Church in Ireland

Nell McCafferty, A Woman to Blame: the Kerry Babies Case

Michael Allen, From men, to women, to children: some changing paradigms in the anthropological understanding of religion

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Finally, we travel to Vietnam, where both National Liberation Front fighters and American GI’s allegedly encountered Bigfoot-like creatures in the midst of the Vietnam War. We discuss how Vietnamese scientists respond to the Nguoi Rung or forest people in light of the nation's astonishing biodiversity..

Bonus material: The applications of Friedrich Engels to Bigfoot research

Sources:
Kon Tum: The truth about the horror and bloodthirsty "forest man with no tail"

Nguoi Rung: mythical or missing ape

Kregg P. Jorgenson, Very Crazy GI! Strange but True Stories of the Vietnam War

Loren Coleman & Jerome Clark, Cryptozoology A To Z

Nguyen Dinh Khoa, Forest Man of Vietnam (Nguoi rung)

Bernard Heuvelmans, Neanderthal: The Strange Saga of the Minnesota Iceman

Helmut Loofs-Wissowa, In Search of Unidentified Relic Hominoids in Southeast Asia

Rock Apes of Vietnam: Jungle Cryptid of the Vietnam War?

Vietnam 40 years on: how a communist victory gave way to capitalist corruption

John Mackinnon, In Search of the Red Ape

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This week we follow the tracks of the mysterious Yeren, aka "China's Bigfoot," and discuss how revolutionary Chinese scientists have grappled with the development of a “people’s science” as it relates to the country's enigmatic cryptid.

Bonus material: The taste of Bigfoot meat


Sigrid Schmalzer: The People’s Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China

Lauren Chen: Dreamers, crackpots or realists? The diehards on the trail of China’s ‘Bigfoot’
The legend of the Wild Man is alive and well and transforming remote villages in northwest China into booming tourist towns

Bigfoot and the Yeren: A dialogue with Joshua Blu Buhs and Sigrid Schmalzer

Science for the People

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How a select group of explorers and scientists from the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of Mongolia came to believe that a species of primitive, human-like creatures called Almas or Almasty haunted the mountains of Central Asia.  Also, we interview Dr. Ed Guimont on the role socialist science fiction may have had on a leader of the Soviet expedition to find the Yeti. Check out his podcast, The Impossible Archive, here.

Sources
Boris Porshnev, The Soviet Sasquatch
Artemy Magun, Boris Porshnev's Dialectic of History
Translated Essays from  Porshnev, Koffman, and Damdin at the Relict Hominoid Inquiry
Ingvar Svanberg and Sabira Ståhlberg, Wildmen in Central Asia
Edina Dallos, Albasty: A Female Demon of Turkic Peoples
Monstertalk, The Zana Problem

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In our season 3 finally, we pay homage to the great tradition of Christmas Ghost stories by looking into the haunted house. Jumping off from classic gothic literature and the wave of supernatural horror movies at the dawn of neoliberalism, we dive into the popularity of haunted house stories in modern reality television. We discuss the frightening undercurrents of domestic violence, the re-entrenchment of “traditional” gender roles, and the horrors of unstable housing markets.

Bonus: Some LEGO facts, possessed bowels, Cedric Jameson

Sources for our most reference heavy episode yet (sorry):

Avery Gordon: Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

Julia Leyda, “Demon Debt: PARANORMAL ACTIVITY as Recessionary Post-Cinematic Allegory" in Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film

Diane Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, Jeannie B Thomas, Haunting Experiences: Ghosts in Contemporary Folklore

Dale Bailey: American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction

Annette Hill, Paranormal Media: Audience, Spirits and Magic in Popular Culture

Drew Beard, Horror Begins at Home: Family Trauma in Paranormal Reality TV

Karen E Macfarlane, “If You Have Ghosts: Haunting Neoliberal Real Estate in Paranormal Reality Series” from PopMec.com panel “The Ghosts of Capitalism: Neoliberalism and the State”

Owen Davies: The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts

Colin Dickey: Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

Douglas Kellner, "Poltergeists, Gender, and Class. Horror Film in the Age of Reagan," Cinema and the Question of Class

Amy Lawrence, Paranormal Survivors: Validating the Struggling Middle Class

James Houran,V. K. Kumar,Michael A. Thalbourne &Nicole E. Lavertue, “ Haunted by somatic tendencies: Spirit infestation as psychogenic illness” in Mental Health, Religion & Culture 

Frederic Jameson, Historicism in “The Shining” 

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In this edition of the Workers Cauldron, we are headed over to the strange world of TikTok, where a new folklore is developing around creatures appropriated from indigenous American spiritualities.  These spirits, oddly euphemized as “Flesh Pedestrians” and “Windy Bois," are said to steal unwary hikers off trails and into the deep forests of North America. We break these stories down, and discuss how this form of appropriation sidesteps the very real history of colonialism, to the horrors of Canadian residential schools to Kit Carson’s brutal attempt at ethnic cleansing in the American Southwest.

Bonus Material: Deer that are not deer. They are #notdeer

Sources:

Shawn Smallman, Dangerous Spirits: The Windigo in Myth and History

Jack Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism

Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock

CBS "We're not just relics of the past": How #NativeTikTok is preserving Indigenous cultures and inspiring a younger generation

Dazed Digital: Skinwalkers: the creepy creatures terrifying TikTok

Noah Nez ,Native Skeptic, Skinwalkers

Adrienne Keene, Native Appropriations, Magic in North America Part 1, ugh

Long Walk: Tears of the Navajo

Robert Fletcher: Connection with nature is an oxymoron: A political ecology of “nature-deficit disorder”

JD Sword, Not Deer,  or a Deer?

SPECIAL SHOUT OUT TO WIDE ATLANTIC WEIRD AND The BEER LADIES PODCAST

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