Welcome to this edition of the High Strangeness Factor. Copyright it on the Paranormal
UK Radio Network. Your host or me, Steve Ford and Adie Mercer.
On the High Strangeness Factor. We have always explored all aspects of the unexplained
and paranormal with a special emphasis and what I call high strangeness areas. We
are going to be talking about one of those today along with one of its
alleged inhabitants. We have a great guest who has done and in depth,
has done in depth research into this area that I will introduce in a moment.
Andy, great to have you back, and have you back with a
computer that is functioning. Yes, I am back. Indeed, our computer
is now fully functioning because it's a new machine basedly the other one more or
less die on me give brief Toory. I actually bought a new one,
not in brand new new, but a new old desktop. Second, I'm
from Amazon, and unfortunately the memory didn't work properly, so I spent ages
putting all together, and then the RAM was the problem, so I had
to start again. They sent me a replacement RAM rather than's the whole machine
back, so it's taking me a while I've lost loads of work because I've
been quite busy working on the next book on my publishing company, and they've
had to redo some of that work, which is very annoying. But I'm
not one hundred percent myself. You might be able to tell from my voice,
and rather nasily. I'm just getting over what was quite heavy Colder appeared
out of nowhere being in the last week, but otherwise I'm not doing too
bad. Well. You sound pretty much like Andy to me, so nobly
and I am. I'm slouching toward a new computer. I keep getting these
messages that says your computer is full, You've got to delete stuff. So
then I got true, we're carefully and hoping I'm not deleting something that's crucial
to the existence of the computers. Now, that was my big panic with
the last one. I thought that, obviously, the worst that happens to
the hard drive to die. I can use all your data, but with
something wrong with the motherboard itself. The hard drive was fine when I plugged
into another machine, so I haven't lost any data, But then I just
had to reset everything on the new one, and that lost some information.
When I discovered that the RAM wasn't functioning properly, so it was all rather
annoying. But it seems to go right so far. Well, I actually
don't mind the expense. Well I guess I do. But I can handle
the expense of a new computer. It's the what I need is I need
a whiz kid to stop by and hook everything up for me, because they're
transferring stuff over and getting Oh god, I just some things. I'm very
proud of myself. I've been able to figure out certain things on the computer
and muddle through. But man, oh man, that's just it's it's it's
terrifying. That's a shame that it wasn't quite so far away. I could
probably do it all for you, I know, I know. Okay,
Well, let's let's introduce our guest. Susie Bastile is an independent researcher of
the elusive and often maligned pug wedgie. As a ninth generation New England resident
pug wedgies with a Boogeyman of her childhood, she now wanders the swamp at
night looking for little men her parents warned her to stay away from. You
can read her thoughts or report your pug wedgies sighting at Pugwodgies dot blogspot dot
com. Susie, Welcome to the high Strangeness Factor. Hi Steve, thanks
for having me. Oh, my pleasure, our pleasure. So you have
been. I think it's safe to say you've become fascinated with something that is
called a pugwdgie, which we will get into a little bit later, but
not much later. And he seems to reside at least one of them,
one group of them seems to reside in an area that people call that the
people call the bridge Bridgewater Triangle in the Freetown State Forest in Massachusett. But
I have to ask you, how is it? How did you get here?
What was your path to be interested in pug wedgies and did you have
experiences as a as a young girl, or in other words, how did
you get here? So I'm going to blame this one on my dad.
Okay, he is from Fall River, Massachusetts, which is right near Freetown.
It's on the southern tip of the Bridgewater Triangle. And he is a
city boy, and I grew up in the middle of nowhere, and he
was not used to that, and he was very afraid of us being out
in the woods. So what he would do, would say, don't go
near the swamp, the puck wedgies will get you. Don't go too far
in the woods, or the puck wedgies will get you, because that was
the story from the town he grew up in. So he used that to
kind of keep us in line a little bit. And then my childhood was
also filled with the X files in unsolved mysteries and in search of and that
type of thing, and that was his doing also, So he totally set
me up to have this obsession later in life. I actually had thought that
he had completely fabricated the whole Puquadji story just to keep us in line.
It wasn't until I think it was twenty thirteen they came out with the Bridgewater
Triangle documentary where they talked about puckuagies and I said, oh, he didn't
just make those up. They're actually a thing. Well, tell us about
your blog. You have dug into the past and you know past references of
pug wedgies and how long has your blog been available? I just started that
back in January too. I had, you know, notes on post its
and cocktail napkins and books all over the place, and I wasn't really doing
anything with the information I had, and when you look for information, it's
all over the place. It it's hard to find information at all sometimes,
so I decided, I need to get this out where people can access it.
So I've just started putting that together fairly recently. I think when I
first started hearing about the Freetown State Forest, I used to years ago.
I used to listen to a podcast called Spooky South Coast, and the South
Coast referred to the South Coast of Massachusetts, and it was it was held
by Tim Wiseberg and they would so I think annually I listened to. One
of their podcasts was a long one where they had people that there was like
a live a live broadcast, and people were stationed all over the Freetown State
Forest. It's like they were checking for for paranormal stuff. You had some
guy along the road looking for uh uh phantom hitchhikers. You had somebody else
looking for pug wedgies and uh you know uh what UFOs and so forth.
So it was it was kind of fun. They didn't really find much of
anything, but it was it was a lot of fun. Whether going back
and forth and people are reporting in from their posts and so forth. I
think it was Lorne Coleman that coined the term Bridgewater Triangle for that area,
although I don't think too many of these places are actually shaped like a triangle,
but you know who knows. So so tell us, can you give
us an idea? What what will what will we find if we Now I've
seen uh you post some uh pictures on Facebook of you at the Hackamock Swamp.
Is that right box swap yep? That's in the Bridgewater Triangle. It's
about five hundred acres just itself, and it's kind of the epicenter of a
lot of weird activity. And what kind of activity would you expect to find
in that area? So you have cryptids like bigfoot, thunderbirds, snakes that
are as big around as a stovepipe. You have ghosts, You have strange
lights that some that seem to be associated with UFOs and some that seem to
be associated more with the paranormal. And you also have puckwadgies of course,
which I don't think those fall into either the cryptid category or the paranormal category
cleanly. I think they're their own beast. Oh okay, so you think
they're they're distinctly separate from some of the other so called cryptids. Oh yeah,
for sure. Yeah, okay, so would you would you? Well,
well, tell us, tell us about pug wedgies. What uh uh?
What do they What are their origins? I mean, where is it?
It's a Native American tradition. Yeah. So the word puquaji is actually
an Ojibway word and they're in Canada, like just north of the Great Lakes,
the tribes that are in the Bridgewater Triangle area. It's a Wampanog tribe.
Their original word was Bagua genie for them. We think it's some at
some point they adopted the word Puckwagi from the Ojibwe tribe, and that's supposed
to mean little man of the wild who disappears. And I think that's a
pretty good name for them. So, well, what I understand, Well,
I was going to ask what they look like, but I understand that
they are shape shifters. They are shape shifters, which kind of makes some
of these sightings hard to determine if they are puckwadges or not, because you
have the traditional description, which is, you know, two to four feet
tall, smooth, gray skin and then they have porkupine quills on their head
and back. That's the traditional by the book description of them. But they
are said to shape shift. So we have sightings that don't align with that
traditional description so much. But we don't know if that's their true form,
or if they've shape shifted, or if it's a comple different creature. Now
have you encountered a pugwodgy yet? Not yet? I am determined. How
long do you have to travel to get to the Freetown State Forest from where
you live. It's about an hour and twenty minutes from me. Oh that's
nothing, okay, Yeah, you could go out there on your lunch hour
just about, well just about, so you know. I tried to Andy.
I tried to send Susie a link to a podcast I heard some years
ago, about two thousand and eight. It's a Ghost Chronicles radio Ron Kohlick
and Maureene Wood and they would go to areas and it wouldn't be a video,
but it would be audible, and they would go to areas and Maureene
Wood wasn't sensitive, and often she would be sort of overcome by the local
spirit there. She was very susceptible to that sort of thing. So they
did this this uh this deal where they went with uh uh. It was
Chris Belzano who was written a couple of books on the Bridgewater Triangle. Uh
oh, trying to remember the the the head of the uh Ghost Village Radio
and his name is escapes me for the moment, but it will come to
me. Anyway. There was a group of people and they split into two.
They went into the Freetown State Forest and the purpose was they were looking
for pug wedgies. And there's there's an incident where they you know again it's
it's it's it's uh audible. So they they took a pic They were taking
pictures that there's somebody and they were using a pendulum. They were asking the
pendulum where to where to go to find the pug wedgy. So you know,
I'm assuming the pendulum is swinging in a particular area. You can't see
it. So they they get the feeling that something's out there and they take
a photograph and it must have been a polaroid or something, because they talk
about the photograph forming on on the on the on the picture, and they
talk about they they supposedly saw this hideous looking face they described as sort of
an inverted skull. Now, I don't know what an inverted skull is,
but it doesn't sound very very promising. And uh, Maureen would then,
and I think, Susie, did you find part of this on that website?
Yeah, there's it's on YouTube. If you looked up Puck Wedges attack
on YouTube, it'll come up. Okay, Well, well Marowen would all
of a sudden you hear her like it's like something has overcoming her. I
don't think that. It doesn't sound like she's faking it. It sounds like
a sequel to the Exorcist. And she's hissing and growling, and and Ron
Kohlick is is saying, you know, uh uh Maureene marine that get you
know, get you know, could push this thing out of you. And
somebody else is saying, get the holy water. So they've got holy water
there too, hoping to uh, it'll affect Pug Wedges. Anyway, it
was, it was, it was, it was fast. I did.
I did find it on my Uh it's buried on my computer. I almost
lost it, I think, And uh, it's just it's it's just very
interesting. If I can I think I can make a copy, Susie,
and maybe someday I can, you know, I think I can even send
to these via that might transfer to uh uh to people. But anyway,
it's it's interesting, but I you know, I don't know if it's really
a pug woodchie that they encountered. Do you have any any sense, Susie
about what what happened there? Yeah, it's you know, first of all,
I don't think Holy Water would work on a pucklogy. That would not
be my line of defense. I think they would laugh at it. Probably.
That's the only time I've heard of a Puckology possession, which is kind
of what it sounded like. But you know, I would never rule it
out. But that area has so many other things in it. I don't
know how you would narrow it down, right. I mean, it could
it could have been. It's it's filled with all kinds of paranormal activity.
You know, how do we really know what it was? If something else?
Chris Belzano said when he was describing pug Wedges that they they show up
or manifest or whatever along with shadow people. Have you do you know anything
about that? Yeah, I've heard that just kind of like general stories like
this is what happens there are they are said to appear with a shadow,
a huge shadow person behind them that seems to be controlling them. Really it's
interesting, but I haven't heard that in any specific sightings, so it's just
kind of like general lore that you know, somebody's cousin knows a guy that
said that type of thing. Right, Okay, Now, how widespread is
the pugwadgie phenomenon. I know that you discovered some lore about them in Indiana.
Yeah, in Indiana they have It's Mound State Park, I believe it's
called They have what they call Puckwadgie's there and it's the Delaware tribe that those
are associated with. But they have blonde hair and it's always described as like
a bowl cut. Well at least they're they're well kept, you know they
are. And they are always described as wearing blue, blue clothing. And
I've also heard that in the Wisconsin area there has been sightings with very similar
descriptions. Blue clothing, blonde hair, bowl cut, everything. And didn't
you say some of them are supposed to wear smocks. Yep. In Indiana
they like to wear the blue smocks. So it's got to be a blue
one. You know that. That kind of threw me for a little bit
first, but I thought, well, heck, fairies were little green tunics
and red caps. I mean, what's the matter with a blue smock.
There's actually duendes which are from like Central and South America. Those are said
to wear red caps, just like gnomes from European lore. Also, something
in dressed in blue is ringing vague bells or something from Eastern Europe as well,
which I can't remember the details, but being dressed or being blue,
I don't mean smurf something else. Now there's something East European folklon. It's
just ringing the back of my head and I can't recall the details, but
something about being dressed in blue. So that's interesting. There's a parallel.
There was something Eastern Europe. I'm sure it's Eastern Europe. Are you familiar
with the Pangaea theory with the Appalation mountains? Yeah? Yeah, So New
England and England used to be pretty close together, and the Appellations are the
same mountain range that the Scottish Highlands are, So there are theories that some
of these creatures are the same but maybe evolved separately on different continents after they
split. My sense definitely, Yeah, absolutely, Susie. You expect that
these are flesh and blood creatures, not something that is uh, I don't
know, I don't I don't want to say no dimensional, but something.
You know, there are other other so called cryptids out there that seem to
be very sort of ethereal and manifest and disappear. What what do you think?
Uh? What do you think these things are? I mean, that's
that's quite a question. But do you have any inkling as to what these
things might be? I put my bet on them not being physical corporeal beings.
They do tend to disappear a lot. The Mohegan tribe has the maki
ohe Suggs. They're eastern Connecticut. They this is one of my favorite things.
Those guys will not say a word if you see one, and they
will point and when you look in the direction that they point, they disappear.
Are there any other uh get in somes of this this area that uh
uh you know out in the northeast that other other critters, other cryptids,
other traditions besides these guys. Yeah. New England's kind of a spooky place.
Lots of ghosts particularly, but we also do have bigfoot sightings or I
call it bigfoot, but some of them might be a little bit different.
In the hawk Mock Swamp there is a particular place where they're sightings of it's
kind of like a cross between a big foot but looks more like an orangutane
than a gorilla like a traditional bigfoot might. And there's also little foot sightings.
Boy, they really have just about everything there. Uh, what you
said there was seems to be a distinction between what some of the uh,
the UFOs or whatever, that seemed to be more like perhaps classic UFOs or
flying saucers, whatever you want to call them, but others seem to be
just sort of what meandering lights. Yeah, they're called type wonkas is the
Wampanog term for them. It's very similar to the European will of the wisp.
If you're familiar with those. Yeah, yeah, they're often associated with
puck wedgies spotted together. What's supposed to happen with puck wedgies is you'll see
a type a wonka and it'll be moving, so you want to follow it
to see what's going on, and it will either lead you to a puck
lodgee or it's a puck wedgie controlling it and it might lead you off of
a cliff. Isn't there a special cliff? There? A well known cliff
that people talk about, the acinet Ledge. Yeah, it's in the Freetown
State Forest. There's debate but what happens there is people will be compelled to
jump blowing. You can look it up to it's google able. Happens today,
and there's also strange accidents there too. It's an old quarry, so
it's pretty tall. There's also another story about it's a lady in white type
of story, but she's supposed to be an Indian princess. They didn't have
a princess type thing the Wampanog tribe, so I'm not sure about the validity
of that story. But there's debate on if it's the puck wedgies lowering people
off the cliff or if people are picking up the sadness of this lady in
white and feeling compelled to jump. Tell us about the folklore about how I
think there was a time when humans got along with pug wedgies, but then
something that was some kind of rift appeared yeah, so this is specific to
the Wampanog tribe. Also, the story is that puck Wedges used to live
in peace with the Wampanog tribe. They would still play little tricks on them,
just be a little bit mischievous, but they got along for the most
part. And then the creator hero figure to the Wampanog tribe came in.
His name was Mauship, and the puck Wedgies got jealous that the Wampanog people
were paying all their attention to this giant, so a lot like a little
kid who wants attention. They started to act up and they just got on
the Wampanog tribes nerves. So what they did, the Wampanog people went to
Maoship's wife, because if you want something done, you go to the wife.
That's how it's been throughout history apparently, and they asked her, you
know, can you do anything about these people. You have to get Mauship
to handle this. So what Mauship did was he gathered up all the Pugwadgies
in his arms, he shook them to disorient them, and then threw them
as far as he could. And he is a pretty big giant, so
they went pretty far. The ones that made their way back and survived were
mad, and that's how the rifts started. There was that mad anger,
mad insane. It could be a little bit of both. There's only time
frame for this sort of thing. I mean, we took these really ancient
past or more recent in terms of timescale. That one's pre Europeans, so
you'd be looking at like the late fifteen hundreds at the latest. There's to
be clear. That story comes from a book written in nineteen thirty four.
It was called The Narrow Land by Elizabeth Raynard, and she had interviewed Redshell,
who was from the Mashpee Wampanog tribe. He was a tribal historian.
What we think happened was because he could not just freely speak, he used
Puckwadgies as a stand in for the Europeans he actually wanted to talk about.
So when he's saying like they're mean and they do this and that and X,
Y and Z, we think he was really talking about the Europeans because
what the Puckwages did when they came back was they killed Mauship's five sons.
And then Mauship was so distraught over this that he killed himself. Uh uh.
You know, it's interesting because there are there seem to be some patterns
that show up here. The giant snake thing, that's something that comes up.
Even at the Skinwalker Ranch in Utah. That was people were saying that
they saw these large snakes and some of the reservoirs out there, along with
all the other bizarre stuff that's supposed to happen out there. And it's interesting
you mentioned that these these lights show up along with the pug wedgies and sometimes
they seem to have some kind of control over them. It seems, uh
andy, that there are so many places where you have cryptids on the ground,
people are saying these things. There's some kind of activity in the sky.
I mean, if you look at stan Gordon and the bigfoot sightings and
the strange lights in the sky, and even back to eighteen ninety seven the
airships and on the ground in Ohio and there was people were seeing some kind
of a bigfoot in in Adams County where the Serpent Mound is and they were
all seeing these large black panthers. So it's just very interesting that the Bridgewater
Triangle seems to have some of the same incidents. The giant snakes go back
pretty far to those are like colonial sightings, so back in the late sixteen
hundreds, early seventeen hundreds, and they're always they The way they described them
was they were wide as a stovepipe, because that's their reference was. But
I've heard like about twenty five feet in New England. You don't get animals
that big. A snake like that would not survive the winter here. So
those are interesting sightings for sure. The giant snakes, just that suggests they
might be something other than corporeal. Yes, along with and the you know
the a lot of these bigfoot creatures, whatever they may be, even though
some seem to be a bit different uh in description. Uh. They're also
extremely elusive, which suggests that they they might be able to, i don't
know, to materialize or de materialize, or perhaps move into another realm that
we can't see. Yeah, there's theories that there's some kind of portal in
the Bridgewater triangle. I've also heard theories of the portal being to another dimension
or being to the Scottish Highlands, following up on the Pangaea theory. Oh,
very interesting, I've ever you know, that's very interesting. I never
heard that that the that these mountain ranges are actually connected, and that maybe
a lot of the the UH manifestations, folklore and so forth may have actually
may actually be connected because of that ancient connection with the land masses. One
of the theories about how these internected ideas from cultures who never had any communication
with each other have similar concepts. I mean, you know, I mean
my sort of background in psychotherapy, pctive unconscious, that kind of thing called
youngzie is. I work with that of course as part of my thinking.
But the very idea that obviously alllird masses were one mass at one point and
things could well have developed separately as the landmass has moved to pass I've come
across before, definitely. Yeah. There is also kind of an outbreak of
strange known animal sightings in this area. There was an ocelot, alligators,
seals, EMUs panthers cited, an African lion was cited. But these are
all in the seventies. It was just that one time period. And I
actually was talking to someone earlier today who said that they had family in that
area at that time that had practically a zoo. So how many of these
are escaped animal like pet animals. Yeah, not sure, but they their
family did have a bear that got out at one point the rehoo booths.
Am I pronouncing that correctly? Massachusetts? Okay, I'm glad you corrected that.
Okay. Was it Did it look like a regular lion? That was
somebody who worked with animals identified it specifically as an African lion. Okay.
There was some kind of Wild West show there. He worked there, and
apparently they had an African lion there that was accounted for, so it was
not the same lion. So it might actually have a reasonable explanation. There's
a gentleman named Kurt oh Is that McCoy. He wrote an excellent book called
White Things, and he discovered just some really bizarre aspects of folklore. A
lot of it was in West Virginia, but he was the theme was these
different kinds of bizarre creatures that were white, and there was one was a
white lion that was showing up in these different areas and it was very elusive,
and the suggestion was it was something more paranormal than physical. So I
just wondered if this might be the same thing. But this sounds like this
poor guy just escaped from some kind of a circus like affair. Yeah,
and that one the police actually got involved in. There were prints, but
the prints were described as ten inches long and four inches wide, which seems
I'm not sure. I don't know how big an average lions paw is seemed
a little bit big to me. Yeah, but this was like local animals
were being killed during that kind of outbreak. And there was a creature sited
in the same neighborhood at the same time that was described as being yellowish black,
which I'm not sure what yellowish black is, maybe like a dirty yellow.
But it was walking on its hind legs like upright, It's different the
Phantom Menagerie. Let me do my our station identification here. You are listening
to the Highest Strangeness Factor. Copyrighted now the Paranormal UK Radio Network. Today
Andy and I are talking to Susie Basquille about the Bridgewater Triangle, the Pug
Pug, puck Woodgies and all kinds of paranormal incidents. I have to ask
you, well we first first, I want to I want to say,
are there any are there any authors, any researchers that you kind of gravitate
to any any particular books that have meant a lot to you in your in
your search for Pugwuggings or just the paranormal in general. So I've I tend
to like the older accounts. Once you get towards Internet, you get people
kind of copycatting old stories that they've already heard. I just saw, actually,
someone on YouTube that was basically mimicking Maureene's story with the Puckwagi possession.
Oh really, yeah, yeah, that one. It was quite interesting.
And you know, I like to get mad about Puckwaji stuff, So I
was, all right, you're very, very protective of those guys. They've
been given a bad name. All of the the sighting, the older sightings.
They are not mean, they're not dangerous at all. Nothing bad happens
to these people. And then you get the idea that Paquajis are mean and
bad and evil, and then all of a sudden, all of the stories
you hear are mean, bad and evil stories. Well, I hope if
you encounter one, they appreciate the fact that you have been kind of their
uh, promoting them, and kind of their front man, so to speak,
front lady actually, But I mean people say the same thing about five
foot two redheads. They say we're mean too. Oh I'm married to one,
thank you, and I was married to one. Okay, that's second.
After the show, we're going to be talking about redheads. Okay,
walked through it. Is there paranormal there or there? Well, since we're
on redheads, I have to ask you. I'm looking at your notes here,
what is the redheaded hitchhike? Ah? He is my favorite character besides
Puck Wedgies from the Bridgewater Triangle. Does this have to do with phantom hitchhikers?
Yes, ah, because that's something that has come up a lot around
that area. But go ahead. Yeah, he is a very specific fandom
hitchhiker. He's on Route forty four in Rehoboth near the Seconk line for anyone
that wants to go try to find him. He's described as a well built
man in his mid to late forties, and usually he's wearing jeans and a
flannel shirt, and he has red hair, usually disheveled, but sometimes more
put together and clean shaven. I've heard too, there's a discrepancy about his
eyes, though some people describe his eyes as normal, but something's wrong with
them, like just not quite right, or some people describe them as black
and lifeless. Other people have said his eyes glow, but he always will
kind of behave the same. Sometimes you'll see him hitchhiking. If you stop
to pick him up, this will start. But sometimes he'll just appear in
your vehicle. I think people don't pick up hitch hikers as much anymore,
so you may have had to change tactics there, but he does now just
appear in your vehicle and he will remain silent, ignore your questions, and
then he will start laughing maniacally and then just disappear. I'd rather have them
as a front seat driver reactions. So you look at the back of the
call that someone says that good lutles. So when you when you go through
these these different stories and uh, you know they again these as as Andy
knows and people who listen to the show, I have always been fascinated by
these, these areas, these high strangeness areas where all these different types of
phenomena seem to occur in the same geographical area, sometimes over decades and decades,
even hundreds of years. And it's always seemed to me that if we
focus on these areas, there's gotta be some reason why. Uh. You
know, we had at Point Pleasant, West Virginia. We didn't just have
the moth Man. We had strange lights, we had men in black,
we had animal mutilations, poultrygeist phenomena. Of course you've got the Skinwalker ranch.
Uh. And you know, you've got all these different places, and
I have to wonder, you know what, when you go through this,
Susie, do you are there are there some that seem more credible than others.
I mean, I've always had a hard time with the phantom hitchhiker thing,
although some people swear that they, you know, these things have really
happened. Uh, do you uh, do you have any kind of an
internal uh gauge or whatever that when you go through these stories to see what
might be legitimate and what what might be a little more fanciful. Yeah.
So sometimes kind of the things that are a little more out of left field
actually seem more credible to me because it's never been heard before. It's not
like the phantom hitchhiker that's all over the place, like everyone has heard those
stories. Right when you come out saying I saw a troll in the woods,
No one has ever benefited, like their their social life doesn't get better
when they come out and say something like that, just like you know UFO
stories, Bigfoot sightings. You know you're taking a risk when you go public
saying something like that, whereas you know a ghost story, no one's gonna
really some people might roll their eyes at you, but you know it's not
as big of a deal anymore. I don't think. So it's the people
that like put their reputation on the line and we're like terrified afterwards that it
feels a little bit more credible to me personally. And it's a very pervasive
type of lore. Like every culture has little people stories too. Yeah.
Absolutely, have you ever looked into as I think I've mentioned in some of
our communications that I am a follower of John Keel and uh and uh.
I think I also maybe told you about the drinking game. And but just
Andy, there's people out there right now that are taking a swig of some
kind of adult memory. I I know it, but you know, I
just can't I get the shakes if I don't talk about John Keel. So
what was I going to say about John Keele? Now that I guess I
just wanted people to get drunk. Uh, you know, halfway through the
show. But uh, I had a great you know what, I had
a great point here, but it just kind of evaporated. It'll come back,
Oh yeah, yes, okay. I was was going with with with
John Keel and Jacques file At another major influence. And Jacques Valle wrote two
books uh uh looking at the UFO problem as Nuts and Bolts, and then
he kind of threw up his hands and he wrote Passport to Magonia, and
Uh, I don't know, are you familiar with that book at all,
Susie, Yeah, yeah, okay, not as familiar as you are,
I'm sure, but I can quote it for bat them. But anyway,
Uh, nobody takes a drink when I mentioned jock Ole as far as I
know. But he that's where he, of course looks into various traditions of
folklore, uh, the the fairies and the gnomes and so forth, and
sees interesting parallels with some modern day UFO experiences. Uh. The pug Wodgy
doesn't really seem to fit that. Uh that there was there was a rash
of sightings in supposedly in South America in the fifties. I think, do
you remember those Andy They were like hairy creatures with claws that supposedly came out
of these craft and attacked these uh, these two truck drivers one time.
You know, I really there was supposed to have been a wave of those.
They sound a little bit like pug Wedgy with long nails, but I
don't. I don't think it quite fits. But that was always very kind
of suspect of those. And then in later years I heard that the supposedly
the CIA planeted some uh little men's stories in South America. Now I don't
know if that's true or not, but shame on them if they did,
because that kind of you know, spoils the whole uh uh database. But
anyway, I think that I've always found that very fascinating that the what we
think of as these elementals or or little people or fairies or whatever, uh
has seemed to have been carried all the way into uh the modern day with
some of the UFO experiences. Now we're stuck with the grays Man and they
the grays to me, are are boring as hell. I wish we could
go back to the good old days. We had some really really cool uh
aliens or whatever they are like Kelly Hopkinsville my favorites. Oh yes, yes,
and you know flat woods and uh the uh what was the one in
California, Cisco Grove, California. They were a little bit like grays,
but uh they were they were very uh uh inadequate and trying to catch this
poor guy up in the tree. I mean you would have thought they had
a tractor beam more a net or something, but these poor SAPs are trying
to climb the tree to get him and the guys that were on a hunting
trip or something like that. Yeah, and then this robot like thing comes
underneath and and opens its jaws and this this gas comes up and he passes
out and he has to tie himself to the tree branch. I mean,
I I've heard that that person experience that has come forward in more recent years.
He was anonymous for a while, and it sounds like he had a
real experience. I mean that's just just, you know, beyond bizarre.
But I don't know that I can make a connection between uh, you know,
uh the uh uh Jacques Vallet uh uh Passport to Magonia and pug Wedgies.
Uh. They kind of are and maybe maybe they're their second cousins or
whatever. But they don't seem to be well they but they are associated with
strange lights though, And that's that's interesting. That's the most universal, isn't
it. This strange lights phenomena seems to be present in so many of the
different forms of experiences that people have had and strange sightings. As you said,
they start off as lights and becomes something else. But the Pugwadji,
I mean it sounds like the kind of things you get in Europe as well,
just small creatures who have who can be mischievous and act up and cause
problems. It fits that kind of idea. You find it all the way
across Europe as well, So there's certain parallels over here. I'm in England
obviously, but it's one of those things that, again, if you are
to interdimensional beings or creatures, they could pop all over the world and be
seen perhaps differently by different cultures, but have a similar form that then looks
a little different to any on the background of the culture they appear in.
So yeah, I had actually suspected because the Bridgewater Triangle area is where Plymouth
Colony was and I had looked into it thinking like maybe the Puritans brought over
some Europeans and folklore, and that's where we got some of these things.
But apparently the Puritans did not mess with Fay folk at all. They that
was not part of what they believed in. They had no interest in it
whatsoever. Perhaps the leadership may have been, but perhaps the more sort of
individual people may have had some more of an interest or at least an awareness
of their own sort of creatures if you like the culture of where they've come
from, the can coming from the UK, you know. Funny enough,
And at the moment, I'm actually working on a friend's book I'm published on
these book is coming out next and it's all about Essex witchcraft and talking about
the idea of connections between people who would be working to get a church on
a Sunday would be say the Christians who are definitely going to church with Sunday,
but also at the same time they were practicing magic as well, and
saw no difference between the two. Now, hi church would have been taken
against any kind of witch corp of magic, so you'd think, But we
uncover stories of local vickers who would use magic and that sort of thing.
They didn't have sort of sharp difference between the two as you might have today.
So although Puritans in their ideology, if you like, would have no
truck with which car magic at all, those who were followers of the faith
may still have had sort of hankering backs to previous generations who would have had
a duality between the two ideas. So it's still possible. I mean,
when it comes to Puritans, we've got the writers of the leaders, if
you like, but they average sort of Joe public member of the Puritan movement.
We don't know so much about this is actually right in your Salem,
Massachusetts. Also, this area has had several types of i'd say hysterias breakout.
Like in the seventies you had all the animal sightings. I don't think
all of those are actual animal sightings. Apparently, like the police department phone
in several towns were ringing off the hook with all these animal sightings. And
to me it feels more like a psychological thing, like maybe one or two
people did see something. But I think that area I just took it and
ran. Yeah. Yeah. Also I was thinking when you talk about things
coming over across the ocean, a lot of people in Newfoundland carried over some
of the traditions about the fairies and so forth, and there were all kinds
of beliefs about if you're out there picking berries or whatever, you had to
have bread with you because if you didn't, the fairies might grab you and
take you away. You had to I guess you had to appease them with
bread or something. I don't know. I hope it was fresh bread,
fresh baked anyway. But it's interesting because that kind of goes into some of
the Missing four one one stuff because of the story out of New Foindland that
uh uh uh, this this boy didn't bring the bread with him and he
disappeared for about three days. He showed up later kind of in a stupor,
as some of these people do that in the Missing four one one books,
and was unable to say where he'd been or what had happened. So
I thought that was kind of interesting. But this it seems that those traditions
came from Europe over to New Foindland and didn't actually reside there. And and
then there's the uh uh, you know, the uh uh, I forget
what they called these fairies or whatever. This this one guy in Newfoundland swore
that one lived in his barn, and it would braid the mane of his
horse. And the the the braiding of the main of horses is connected to
Bigfoot Uh, even the Uh the Nain Rouge. This little red devil is
supposed existed in the Detroit area a few centuries ago. So it's just very
interesting that these connections all, you know, all come up. Now.
I don't suspect that the pug Wedgies have ever been accused of braiding horses manes.
They have not, but there is a connection there because in this area
you leave a basket full of fruit under a tree when you go into the
woods so little people will not get you. That's from the Mohegan tribe,
the mckeah weee Suggs, and that was there was actually an interview with a
Mohegan woman. It was nineteen oh three. She passed away in nineteen oh
six, but she had told stories of like her grandparents interacting with the last
living mckeea we sug couple and trying to heal one of them that was dying.
And so their lore is that they were physical beings, but they died
out sometime in the eighteen hundreds. What about are there incredible thunderbird sightings in
the area. Are there a lot of them? Do you know? Or
how does that work? There was actually one that was cited by a police
officer and he got a lot of blowback from that, but still stuck with
his story. That was nineteen seventy one in Mansfield, mass He actually the
sighting happened on the corner of Bird Street and it was it's right near Bird
Hill. We don't know why they're named that. It was just a coincidence.
But he was driving around he saw a dark figure that he said was
about six feet tall, and he thought it was a hitchhiker at first,
so it must have looked more humanoid, And as he drove closer to that,
just huge wings erupted and the creature flew straight up into the air,
and he went back to the station and reported this, oh boy, well,
one of the so called classic mothman sidings was actually much more like a
thunderbird. Tom Yuriy didn't really see the six seven foot tall creature with red
eyes and a ten foot wingspan. He did see something that was a huge
bird with about a ten to twelve foot wingspan, and he was vehement that
it was not an osprey or anything recognizable, and I was able to speak
to him one on one, so that it's interesting that, you know,
here you have this hybrid mothmand thing, a sort of humanoid but very very
strange and with wings that didn't flap. But also you're getting you know,
other types of phenomena in the same area, like thunderbirds. Yeah, and
that's thunderbirds is a sue legend. They're not close to the wampan og so
it's kind of interesting that they have similar creatures in both cultures, right,
and it does seem to be kind of prevalent in many many Native American cultures.
And what else we must be missing some stuff. I know you've done
a lot of research and digging into this stuff. What are some of the
areas that we haven't asked about that you know about? So we've talked about
Midwest papuags. Those are my favorite, I think I mentioned yes briefly,
So those are also interesting. They will come into your house, whereas Puckwadgi's
are just in the woods. But they're very similar. Besides that, they're
known to be just a little bit mischievous, like they might hide your car
keys oh, things like that hapened. I might have my own duende here,
but it might be adhd also. But they have actually people have told
stories of they accidentally destroyed what seemed to be a little person's home and then
all of a sudden their life just fell apart. Do well, that's not
good. Yeah, I worry that that's in now their situation of like how
puquadgies have been maligned, and people just think everyone whose short is mean.
Now, I don't think Annie, and I, well, I'm not terribly
tall either, so I you know, I'm a little toolder. Perhaps I
have nothing against short people. And there's been some interesting sightings recently out of
South America, Argentina. I just saw one. A woman saw she heard
something. She thought it was animals fighting, and she went towards the sound
and a cat had a little person kind of cornered and had already taken a
few swipes at it because it was bleeding, and she kind of showed the
cataway, and the little man just kind of like looked at her and nodded
to say thank you, and then disappeared. On your blog, I think
you have an incident where I think it suggested it's a pug wedgie and a
woman's out walking her dog and the dog alerted on it. Yeah, there's
several sightings that involved dogs. My favorite is her name was Joan. She
was from Freetown. Her dog's name was Sid. She was walking her dog
in the Freetown State Forests and the dog started acting strange and kind of led
her off the trail a little bit, and she looked up and saw this
little being. She was about ten feet away, she said, so she
got a pretty good look at it. She said it was two feet tall,
gray skin. She described it as looking like a troll, but it
had a chipmunk face and hair on its arms and head. And my favorite
part is she said she couldn't tell if it was wearing clothes because it's belly
hung down so low. I hope it didn't see me in the Freetown State
Forests. And after that sighting, like she and the dog got away fine,
nothing happened. But after that sighting, it was at least three times.
She said she was woken up in the middle of the night and she
caught that same creature peeking in her bedroom window. And she said she was
fully awake. She wasn't dreaming. She definitely saw it peeking in the window,
and she actually moved out of the area after that. Have you ever
seen any credible photographs or footage which alleged to be a pug wedgie that you
think might be credible? Absolutely not. Okay, yeah, don't hit your
bets there, Susie. You know, well, you know, I think
we're all kind of used to the uh oh god blob squatches and the pictures
with the red circles on there. You know, there's stuff in there,
and you and you look and I'm I'm trying to even imagine something there and
it just isn't there. I yeah, I see it for puck wedgies too.
It's not as common because no one besides me and two other people talk
about puck wedgies, but I have seen it more recently too, like it
seems to be picking up some steam. Is a video on YouTube where someone
was using an EMF detector, which I'm fine with that, like they could
be some kind of spirits or entities. I'm glad people are kind of thinking
outside of the box and approaching it in different ways. But there was something
that scared this woman and she jumped, dropped everything, and the man the
woman was not the one making the YouTube video. The man who was making
it kind of zoomed in on a bush where you could kind of see something
that sort of looked like a face, and he said it was definitely a
puck logie. H. So that's the kind of things that you see out
there for pucklgy sightings. Not necessarily you know, a blurry picture with a
circle, but same type of thing. I know you've been on a search
for books and and you've already you did find some old articles in your on
your blog spot about pug Wedgies and the way they certain teams were used used
the name for their their sports team or whatever. But I know you've you've
had a rough time trying to find references and books that talk about pug Wedgies.
Have you found any that have some good information? Cris Blonzo's book,
right, there's Dirk Woods. I think it's called It's got a sequel to
it too. I think, uh, something about the Bridgewater Triangle. I
think I think it's Ghosts of the Bridgewater Triangle. Yes, that's it.
Yeah, he's got Bill Russo's sighting in there. That's probably one of the
most well known pug wedgie sighting, so that one I did get some use
out of. There's also a book called hack Amock Place where the Spirits Dwell
by Peter Tower. That one is probably my favorite. I've gotten the most
out of that. It's a little older. It goes more into history,
exploring different theories and kind of more like the background of it all. Are
you guys familiar with the stories of the moon eyed people supposedly in Ohio?
I think I don't know, very familiar. Yeah, they I don't know
much about them. I did find a couple of really old books on American
history, and forgive me, but John Keile mentions them in the Mothman Prophecies,
and they were supposedly they shunned the light, and the Native Americans drove
them out of Ohio. I think maybe into West Virginia. I don't know.
I just wonder if there's any any tenuous connection there with pug wedgies,
but probably not. So are you do you research anything else these days?
Are you really focused on pug Wedgies. I've been more focused lately, but
I still enjoy anything strange, and especially anything I can find a puck wedgy
connection to I went down that rabbit hole the other day. We were talking
about with the thunderbirds and the Chicago mothman sighting, Oh right, right,
some of those do seem to line up, kind of formulating a theory that
there might be some connection between bigfoot in little people too, because a lot
of the areas that have bigfoot sightings have little people sightings. Also. Yes,
there's there's a book called Cherokee Little People Are Real, and I have
not read the book yet, but there is quite a tradition among various Native
American tribes of these small, diminutive people that are supposed to exist. So
what's what's your what's your next step? Are you? Are you just going
to continue, uh, focusing on well searching for How often do you get
out to the the Hakamack Swamp to look for these little guys? Maybe like
once a month? Okay, springtime it seems to be when most of the
stories I've found credible of sightings have happened. They're all March April May in
there, So springtime I'm going to try to get out there more. I
think I might need to get a dog, because that's the other common denominator,
and I kind of wonder like, are we walking past puck wedgies all
the time and if we don't have a dog to alert us that it's there,
we just walk right past it. Well, you need to have some
kind of a T shirt that says pug Wedgie Power or something like that so
that they know you're on their side. I'm wearing one right now that says
pluck Wedgy Whisperer. Ah. Well, that's your your logo that people can
see, and we'll see on the banner that you, Susie Bestill are the
pug Wedgy Whisperer. That's pretty cool. Uh well, is there anything anything
else you want to cover before we close out? Do we want to talk
about the Bill Russo siting because there's always speculation that that might actually not be
a puck wedgie? Okay, yeah, tell us. Yeah, he was
out. He was working late nights at the time. He got home around
midnight, and this happened in the early nineties. He'd gotten home from work
and his dog needed to go out. His dog's name was Samantha, So
he's important to get the dog's names and how is he in this general area
of the Freetown State Forest. Yeah, he was from Rainham. He grew
up there. He lived under what they call the high tees. They're like
those big power lines. And Okay, the swamp was actually kind of like
abudding his property. He was like right near the swamp. Okay, So
on this night, when he went to take his dog for a walk,
they decided to go a different path than they normally do. I've heard it
say he just decided to go a different way. I've heard other people say
that the dog kind of led him in that direction. And this is kind
of a rural area. So there was only one street light on this road
that he was walking the dog on. Before they got to the street light,
the dog starts acting strangely, kind of a low grumbling route growl a
little bit. And when he gets close to the street light, he sees
that there's a little creature there, and he actually hears like a high pitch
kind of screeching. At first. He said the creature was about four feet
tall, and he said it had three to four inch long black fur,
and he said it had a pot belly, It was unclothed, it had
large eyes, and it had a chipmunk face. And the way he described
it was he could tell it was in the early phases of old age,
so it looked it just had a more haggard look, looked a little bit
older. And when he got closer, this creature started saying, you want
chu kia kia, over and over again. And he got a little bit
closer, and it kept saying it a little bit more forcefully, and it
started beckoning to him to come. He did not fall for the trap that
he thinks it was him, and the dog decided it was time to go
home at that point. But what he thinks it was saying was we want
you come here, Come here, is what he believes it was saying.
So his description doesn't fit the traditional pluckuadgie description. Some people might think that
has to do with the shape shifting, or it's just, you know,
a really old story like it could have been like a game of telephone and
been exaggerated, and maybe this is what pluckuagies actually look like. But there
is also a camp of people that thinks he actually saw a little foot,
not a Well in your mind, you have no doubt that these beings,
whatever they are, are real. It depends on your definition of real.
I think people are really seeing something, right. The more recent credible sightings
I've heard have just been from me talking about paquajis to random people and them
saying, oh, I think I saw one of those. I thought I
was crazy. Yeah, anywhere from somebody was telling me they saw one when
they were little in a Meyer's bathroom. Oh geez, next time, next
time I go into a Walmart, I'm gonna be very careful. Well that's
that's interesting, uh, you know, and it kind of makes sense because,
uh, I mean, how many people know what a pug wedgy is?
So when you when you describe, start describing this to people, and
then you know, maybe they have some kind of point of reference. Yeah,
and it's not always necessarily a paqudgy exactly, but there might be other
little people out there. There's something that people are seeing. Well, when
you look at a volume of of whatever the fairies or or or these beings,
I mean, there are just endless, endless types of of critters,
of of of of of creatures from you know, all kinds of different countries
and so forth, and traditions, so, uh, being, who really
knows and if what this guy saw, if if the pug wedgies are.
If they're real and they can shape shift, perhaps they don't always manifest in
exactly the same way. Yeah, and that area has always been weird.
Some people think that it was King Philip's War because that's where that happened,
that you know from all the Native Americans that were killed there. But the
Native Americans before King Phillip's War had lore about the Hacamock Swamp. It actually
the name means place where the spirits dwell ah, and they they would bury
their dead there. But they also said that's where Hobamock lived, and he
was their deity for death and disease, which the Europeans called him the devil,
But the Native Americans looked at, you know, death as a necessary
thing, so he was not like an evil being to them. But they
were definitely that was a sacred place for them already, and it had association
with spirits and different creatures, and they would actually hide in the swamp because
the Europeans were all afraid of the swamp. There's another kind of a dark
aspect that I have heard about the uh this area, and that is that
supposedly, maybe I don't want to go here but it's a place where bodies
have been dumped from maybe crime from the Boston area or whatever. Is that.
Well, there's so there was the free Town Satanic cult murders. Oh
man, I just opened the door there, Andy. Yeah, so there
there were several murders that they ever solved them, that never catch the perpetrators.
They did. It was he was like a drug dealer, pimp type
character and he was killing sex workers. But then they were they were performing
rituals and they found all kinds of crazy stuff out in the woods. And
that was in the Freetown Fall River line right at the southern tip. When
I was little, because my dad's from Fall River, when we would go
up to visit family, we would get like, oh, this is the
Lizzie Borden house and this is where the Satanic cult murders were. And my
mom would get so mad and my dad for it. Well, you know,
if if this place has had a long history of death and high strangeness
or whatever, you wonder if that you know this this person that obviously isn't
terribly well balanced, if if somehow he was attracted to this area because of
the just because of the area. Interesting, Yeah, and Fall River is
not a small town. It's you know, a decent sized city. But
you have this area right near it, the Freetown State Forest, which is
secluded. So if you're gonna, if you're you live in the city and
you need to go hide, to body or do bad stuff, the forest
is the perfect spot for it. Well, that's good to know. Uh,
it'd be a long drive for me. But you know that wasn't a
recommendation. Okay, I understand. I understand. Well, uh, Susie
uh uh? Do you want to give it out any contact information and maybe
talk about how people can find your blog again? Yeah, it's puckwogis dot
blogspot dot com. You can report sightings there anonymously. You can find me
on Facebook always talking about Puckwoji Susie Bestial. I'm also on TikTok Instagram.
Susie Bestial will get you to meet either way. I am more than happy
to talk to anyone that has seen a little person and I will not think
that you're crazy, So feel free. If you don't want to talk to
me, you can use the contact form on the blog and I will not
bother you if you don't want to be bothered and you have a very interesting
pin post on post on Facebook that that says you're very happy to talk to
anybody be a messenger about cryptis and so forth, but you're not interested in
dudes saying hey, baby, you want to go for coffee. Sometimes.
I did have someone use the contact form on my blog to ask what type
of little men I liked jeez, So in case that's not clear, it's
not that type of little man. Let's goot down. I hope people get
that message. Well, Susie, it's been an absolute pleasure. I mean,
I know virtually nothing about pug wedgies and the lore and the uh Freetown
State Forest. So I really appreciate you sharing your information. And I hope
you come back when you have more things that you've discovered. I hope I
have more things to come back on and talk to you about. Well,
we can, we can always find something we can. We can go more
into the giant snakes and uh, we can talk about John Keele. What
the hell? Yes, I'll start working on John Keele connection. Oh excellent,
excellent. You know what one thing when you talked about, uh going
back to some of the old sightings. I like to do the same thing.
It's a little different lately, uh uh. And I think Andy will
appreciate this. I have been going back and reading some of the old contact
d literature back when the uh they claimed a lot of people claim they were
in contact with the Space Brothers. And I'm reading a lot of these old
uh uh newsletters that they printed back in the field fifties, when it was
perfectly okay to say flying saucer, and back in those days there was the
Detroit Flying Saucer Club, and they didn't know the difference between people that were
a little bit out there, like Georgia Danski that said he met a Venusian
in the desert and uh uh. The gentleman that ran the Project Blue Book,
Edward Rupelt, so that, you know, one person is very credible,
the other just kind of out there. They didn't didn't have any idea
about that. And there's something I don't know, just very uh, maybe
nostalgic, maybe maybe kind of like I would love to go back to the
old days and live through some of that, you know, when when we
really didn't know, we really thought that maybe some of these people were contacting
uh uh uh. You know, it's the beautiful space brothers from from Beyond
that we're going to save us. But so anyway, it's always a lot
of fun to go back and do the research uh from uh, from the
past. But anyway, it's been a real pleasure to have you here and
uh and Andy. Uh, it's been been a lot of fun. Yes,
absolutely, I'm so a bit quiety and but this cold has left me
a bit lazily. It's hard to speak sometimes. But yes, it's been
interesting, definitely very interesting. Okay, I'm going to everybody sit tight.
I'm going to do our clothes out here. The High Strangest Factor was created
by Steve wd and Andy Mercer and his copyright and on the Paranormal UK Radio
network. I want to thank our fearless leaders Irene Allen, Block, Mark
Johnson and Andy Mercer here at the network. Also for Andy also for producing
the show and composing the closing theme, and thank you to Brian Zeller for
composing the opening theme. I can also be heard weekly on Mac Maloney's Military
X Files as a correspondent on this and many other platforms. In fact,
expect to see Andy as a guest in March on Mac show. Indeed,
Yes, that'll be a blast, and I am Steve Ward. You're a
humble host here on the high strangest factor I've displaced Michigander deep in the Ohio
Valley and west by God, Virginia, inches from downtown Point Pleasant, living
on the same road that Mothman chased two couples on November fifteenth, nineteen sixty
six. Thank you all for listening, Andy and I will see you all
again at a fortnight or thereabouts. Take care,