Speaker 1: You're listening to an airwave media podcast. Monster Talk is
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Speaker 1: contribute via Patreon or with reviews at monster talk dot org,
Speaker 1: forge slash support. Your contributions, large or small, make a
Speaker 1: huge difference. Thanks. If monsters haunt the shadowlands, the fringes
Speaker 1: of where civilization touches the wild, the ni shitn't surprises
Speaker 1: that areas that are less successible to most of us
Speaker 1: become a fertile garden for all kinds of critters and
Speaker 1: hanks and booger monsters. While movies have taught us that
Speaker 1: the soundtrack to a good scare is an orchestra or
Speaker 1: a pulsing electronic beat, there are places where the dance
Speaker 1: macabre is accompanied by fiddle, by banjo and by jug.
Speaker 2: It's actually quite unlike anything we've ever seen before.
Speaker 3: A giant, hairy creature park a part in Luckness, a
Speaker 3: twenty four a mile long bottomless lake in the Highlands
Speaker 3: of Scotland.
Speaker 2: Get the creature known as the Luckness Monster.
Speaker 1: Monster Talk. Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
Speaker 1: I'm Blake Smith. When I was in high school, I
Speaker 1: was told by one of my instructors that there are
Speaker 1: no true mountains in Georgia, and I've been happily repeating
Speaker 1: this bit of trivia for thirty years. But in preparing
Speaker 1: for this episode, I decided to check and see what
Speaker 1: actually constitutes a mountain, and that's when I found out
Speaker 1: that the official delineation between a mountain and a hill
Speaker 1: has been abandoned for years. I'll put a link to
Speaker 1: the USGS article about this in the show notes, but
Speaker 1: as is often the case, I am delighted to find
Speaker 1: out I was wrong, and hopefully if you've been sharing
Speaker 1: this bit of misinformation, you can now correct yourself as well.
Speaker 1: Why does that matter? Well, the tallest peak in Georgia
Speaker 1: is Brasstown Bald and a few years ago I took
Speaker 1: my family up there because I was close to the
Speaker 1: ancient Petroclyff site of track Rock Gap. I had been
Speaker 1: doing some research about a pseudo archaeology theory around the
Speaker 1: origins of that ancient site, and I'll link to that
Speaker 1: article in the show notes, but I wanted to go
Speaker 1: actually look at the site, and since I'd never been
Speaker 1: up there or to my home state's highest peak, we
Speaker 1: were so close, I decided to visit and on the
Speaker 1: way I came across this road called Booger Hollow Road
Speaker 1: near Blairsville. As you might imagine, this caught my attention,
Speaker 1: and I found myself wondering why was the road called
Speaker 1: Booger Hollow Road? Was there a monster legend there? I
Speaker 1: had heard stories about Boogerman or the Boogeyman from my grandmother,
Speaker 1: and I guess the Boogeyman is the classic monster whose
Speaker 1: important job is to scare children into obedience lest they
Speaker 1: be gotten for their sins. The history of booger monsters
Speaker 1: and mountain culture is a long one. There was a
Speaker 1: town called Booger Hollow in Floyd County, Georgia, near Rome,
Speaker 1: but it has been renamed to Boosville. Apparently this is
Speaker 1: because of a prominent family name of Booze, not because
Speaker 1: of the slang for alcohol. But why the town was
Speaker 1: originally called Booger Hollow is still a mystery of me
Speaker 1: at this time. Other towns throughout the southern United States
Speaker 1: also speak of boogers. There was a town called Booger Hollow,
Speaker 1: Arkansas that had a sort of hillbilly folksy roadside attraction
Speaker 1: set up with a sign that said Booger hollow boasted
Speaker 1: a population seven if you include the coon dog. It
Speaker 1: also had an amusing two story outhouse, which is exactly
Speaker 1: the sort of visual gag that my father would be
Speaker 1: delighted at. There's a lot of folk etymology on the
Speaker 1: Internet that says the word boo shares origins with the
Speaker 1: word booger, but I don't know if that's actually true.
Speaker 1: As fascinated as I am by word origins, running them
Speaker 1: to their sores is often really tough. But that town
Speaker 1: of Booseville, it hints at, whether intentionally or not, the
Speaker 1: ties between the culture of the mountains and the history
Speaker 1: of moonshine and revenuers. I grew up in a family
Speaker 1: it had a mixture of strict religious fervor and a
Speaker 1: history of moonshine, distilling and outdaud behavior. I remember seeing
Speaker 1: a lot of older gentlemen passing around a mason jar
Speaker 1: now and again, and I'm pretty sure they weren't drinking
Speaker 1: pickle juice. Some stories suggest that the legends of boogermen
Speaker 1: might be tied to scaring away revenuers and people intent
Speaker 1: on snatching liquor from stills spirits. To protect the spirits,
Speaker 1: you might say, but whether these legends are based on
Speaker 1: protective hoaxes are genuine belief in supernatural hauntings. The mountains
Speaker 1: around here are full of monsters, and that's why we're
Speaker 1: going to be talking about that in this episode Monster.
Speaker 1: All right, welcome to Monster Talk to as sure Elbine
Speaker 1: and Tiffany Till. We're here today to talk about folklore
Speaker 1: of Appalachia, but we're also here to talk about your
Speaker 1: new project, the kickstarter that was remarkably funded in one day.
Speaker 1: This is Anna O'Brien The Ghost Days Anthology. So let's
Speaker 1: let you guys do some introductions.
Speaker 2: So my name is Jeffany Charel. I am a concept artist.
Speaker 2: I worked for about nine years mostly in video games.
Speaker 2: I have since gone full freelance. I've done children's books.
Speaker 4: Yeah, do you name it? I can, I'll draw it.
Speaker 4: I've always been like a big creature monster fan for
Speaker 4: a long time.
Speaker 2: I was going to be a marine biologist, and so
Speaker 2: I've always kind of had like an aquatic creature penchant
Speaker 2: to a lot of my work. But yeah, Asher hit
Speaker 2: me up about earlier this year. We've known each other
Speaker 2: online for a bit and he was like, come work
Speaker 2: with me on this spooky Appalachian fooklord thing, and yeah
Speaker 2: it was right time, right place, right project.
Speaker 1: So awesome.
Speaker 5: Aw Sure, I'm a journalist. I mostly work on sort
Speaker 5: of like natural history and ecology stuff, but I also
Speaker 5: have carved out a little bit of a sideline writing
Speaker 5: about folklore for anybody who will let me do it,
Speaker 5: which is not really as many people as you'd imagine.
Speaker 5: I mostly got interested in sort of Appalachian folklore because
Speaker 5: I just it was something that I started working on
Speaker 5: as a you know, and writer in high school and
Speaker 5: just kept putting aside and coming back to and putting
Speaker 5: aside and coming back to, and my real interest in
Speaker 5: folklore and writing sort of developed together. So now that
Speaker 5: I mostly am writing nonfiction, it's really nice to kind
Speaker 5: of sit down and do much more imaginative stuff because
Speaker 5: they they don't let you make stuff up when you're
Speaker 5: a journalist. They shout at you. So you got to
Speaker 5: have an outlet somewhere.
Speaker 1: Well, so much for the fake news story. Do you
Speaker 1: you're in Austin? Are you doing okay? I mean I've
Speaker 1: got friends who work down there and they're boiling their
Speaker 1: water still, is that? Are you doing all right?
Speaker 5: Yeah? That's a that's a fun thing there is. Uh Basically,
Speaker 5: the river that runs through Austin Town Lake is currently
Speaker 5: this just soupy brown morass. But it's really neat because
Speaker 5: a bunch of the a bunch of the hill country
Speaker 5: creeks run into it and they're crystal clear. So you
Speaker 5: get these really weird zones where it'll be just like
Speaker 5: pure clear green water, and then it meets the main
Speaker 5: river and there's just like a little bit of swirl,
Speaker 5: but it's like a really clear line. It's uh, it's
Speaker 5: boil water and aquafina.
Speaker 1: Well, I I hope you do. Okay. I love Austin.
Speaker 1: What an amazing town. I'm gonna say a little shout
Speaker 1: out to my favorite coffee shop, which is Hound's Tooth Coffee.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, I love that. Unfortunately, it's almost five
Speaker 1: dollars a cup, right, that's.
Speaker 4: Number to me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a little rich for my blood. But man,
Speaker 1: they make a good cup of coffee. So yeah, salute. Well, anyway,
Speaker 1: we're here tonight to talk about Appalachian folklore, but also
Speaker 1: about your project. Maybe we should start with talking about
Speaker 1: your kickstarter. Even though it's been funded, there's still some
Speaker 1: room for uh oh, maybe let me back up just
Speaker 1: a little bit. What is Kickstarter, because there's gonna be
Speaker 1: some of our listeners who don't even know that much.
Speaker 2: So Kickstarter is a platform in which you can basically
Speaker 2: present the idea for a project.
Speaker 4: And it helps if you have like a good pitch,
Speaker 4: a good.
Speaker 2: Presentation, and you basically say, I have this really cool
Speaker 2: thing that I'm willing to work on, I have this
Speaker 2: much expertise and whatever, I'm like whatever background.
Speaker 4: You kind of just like.
Speaker 2: Provide like a little story so that way people can like,
Speaker 2: you know, get a sense for who you.
Speaker 4: Are and where you're coming from. And then.
Speaker 2: For the sake of transparency, just basically you say I
Speaker 2: need this much money to like make my dreams come true,
Speaker 2: to fund.
Speaker 4: My movie, to fund my app to.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons
Speaker 2: type stuff.
Speaker 4: If you go, there's nerds out there listening.
Speaker 1: But there's a couple of us, yeah, I think.
Speaker 4: Feeling there's a nerd community that listens.
Speaker 1: It's on the Facebook group. It's been amazing. Every time
Speaker 1: I say something about Dungeons and Dragons a role playing it,
Speaker 1: everybody goes crazy, which is great.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, that's like I do art for those types
Speaker 2: of games too, so like that's my people. But but yeah,
Speaker 2: so like there's a huge gaming community there, video games,
Speaker 2: tabletop games, making movies, like like a lot of times
Speaker 2: like uh famously was it was it, Joss Whedon somebody
Speaker 2: like super.
Speaker 4: Famous people will come in and be like and I'd
Speaker 4: also like more millions of dollars.
Speaker 2: But anyway, so like it's just a really good place
Speaker 2: and an arena in which you can crowdfund a project
Speaker 2: and just gain a lot of traction for something that
Speaker 2: you're starting to build. And we did it in like
Speaker 2: a day and.
Speaker 1: Yeah our minds, Yeah, yeah, I imagine. So well, the
Speaker 1: cool thing about it is that you know a lot
Speaker 1: of people as creators. You know they may make something
Speaker 1: that may be wonderful, but then you know you have
Speaker 1: there's all these gatekeepers along the way. You know, you
Speaker 1: have to get an agent and find a publisher in
Speaker 1: traditional modes, but all the technology exists for self publishing.
Speaker 1: But even if you self published, you can't know for
Speaker 1: sure if you'll cover the cost of all your work.
Speaker 1: So this is a very cool approach. And I mean
Speaker 1: we've seen several of these that we've had on the show.
Speaker 1: But and I've obviously I've contributed to some kickstarted things
Speaker 1: in the day. Most of the time I end up
Speaker 1: doing something like where you can just do a contributing. Hey,
Speaker 1: good guy, good luck guys, right, you know, the little
Speaker 1: one dollar. I appreciate what you're doing because my finances
Speaker 1: aren't there great. But I'm really delighted that you guys
Speaker 1: got funded because this looks like a really fun project. So,
Speaker 1: by the way, the art work looks amazing, the writing
Speaker 1: looks amazing. What drove you guys into this? I mean
Speaker 1: it sounds like as sure you were sort of driving
Speaker 1: the sort of thing towards a character you'd already created.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So basically what happened was I was in high school.
Speaker 5: I was writing a lot of short fiction and you know,
Speaker 5: before I went to college and got way too busy,
Speaker 5: and I just had this this idea for her, for
Speaker 5: a character who would be a kind of like a
Speaker 5: wandering character who could run into all these interesting folkloric
Speaker 5: and mythic things that I was really interested in reading about.
Speaker 5: And that character. As that character developed and became Anna O'Brien,
Speaker 5: it became like it became this trying to think of
Speaker 5: how to put this, it became like this process of
Speaker 5: discovering this really interesting historical world that growing up in
Speaker 5: Atlanta was like really close geographically to me too, and
Speaker 5: so my my interests in sort of like the landscape
Speaker 5: of Appalachia and the folklore of Appalachia all kind of
Speaker 5: like got boiled into this character. And the more interested
Speaker 5: I became in the character, the more interested I became
Speaker 5: in the world, and vice versa. And so ultimately I,
Speaker 5: you know, a couple of stories and when I could
Speaker 5: like carve out a little bit of time of which
Speaker 5: who could you know, go to like a different holler
Speaker 5: every week and sort of have a different adventure. And
Speaker 5: then I had some I had some medical stuff happen
Speaker 5: earlier in the year, and I was like, you know what,
Speaker 5: I've been sitting on these stories for a really long time.
Speaker 5: I've been sharing them with friends. I'd really like them
Speaker 5: to be in a place where people can see them
Speaker 5: and like them. And so I got in touch with
Speaker 5: Tiffany was like, Hey, could I commission to cover from you?
Speaker 5: And and she was like, Oh, this is really cool,
Speaker 5: and so we just started talking about maybe doing a
Speaker 5: book together, and it kind of like snowballed from there.
Speaker 1: That's fantastic. How are you I mean, I want to
Speaker 1: get to the monsters, but how are you doing the
Speaker 1: publishing part? Like the who are you working with for
Speaker 1: actually getting out the books?
Speaker 5: So, what we were initially planning on doing was doing
Speaker 5: incrame print on demand, which is cheaper because obviously you're
Speaker 5: only printing the books that you need. We're currently shooting
Speaker 5: for a stretch goal of eleven five hundred dollars. We're
Speaker 5: currently sitting at eleven thousand, so I think we'll probably
Speaker 5: hit it. But that will allow us to do a
Speaker 5: full print run of five hundred books through the printer
Speaker 5: print Ninja. And we are completely self publishing this, Like
Speaker 5: when it's done, we'll be able to, you know, put
Speaker 5: it up on Amazon. We'll be able to try and
Speaker 5: get it into bookstores, you know, put it in libraries.
Speaker 5: But it's going out just under us, like we don't
Speaker 5: have an actual publisher that we're working with.
Speaker 1: That's but that's very cool. What about a are you
Speaker 1: doing anything for?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 1: Are you who's doing your editing? Are you doing it yourself?
Speaker 5: Or so I had done some initial editing on it
Speaker 5: and then we've got a really fantastic film critic named
Speaker 5: Gretchen Falker Martin who came on to be an editor.
Speaker 5: The manuscript is actually it's completely written, it's completely edited,
Speaker 5: all of the initial art is done. We have a
Speaker 5: stretch goal for more art. If we hit that, that'll
Speaker 5: be great. But basically what we're just trying to do
Speaker 5: now is like get the money in order to make
Speaker 5: this thing something that you can hold in your hands.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, that's very cold. Yeah, rocking it.
Speaker 4: It basically already exists.
Speaker 2: It's just now like the stretch will serve to like
Speaker 2: make it like even more shiny and more beautiful.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you guys were kind enough to share early looks
Speaker 1: for me and Karen. By the way, Karen couldn't be
Speaker 1: here this week, but thank you very much for letting
Speaker 1: us have a look. It looks beautiful and I'd really
Speaker 1: love to see a hardback of it myself. So that's
Speaker 1: I hope you reach your stretch calls. I grew up
Speaker 1: in the North Georgia mountains, you know, and even so
Speaker 1: I was I was surprised at how little of the
Speaker 1: folklore I ran across, you know, just in sort of
Speaker 1: natural oral history or oral tradition. Most of the stuff
Speaker 1: I learned from reading fiction or reading books about folklore,
Speaker 1: and you know, things like the fox Fire books. And
Speaker 1: as one of the inspirations you talked about was Manly
Speaker 1: Wade Weldman and his Silver John stories. So that's an
Speaker 1: interesting sort of character and some fiction people may or
Speaker 1: may not be familiar with. But can you talk about
Speaker 1: how you got your source material? Like where did you
Speaker 1: go to to find out about this folklore?
Speaker 5: Sure? So one of the main sources that I used,
Speaker 5: and I really literally just started like years ago, just
Speaker 5: started collecting books of apple folk ways and folklore, and
Speaker 5: you know, some of them are really quite useful, stuff
Speaker 5: like Strange Tales of the Dark and Bloody Ground is
Speaker 5: a really good And then the deeper I got, I
Speaker 5: started getting into books like Witches, Ghosts, and Signs by
Speaker 5: Patrick Gaynor, which is a really fantastic compilation of mostly
Speaker 5: Virginia ghost and witch law. And then the most and
Speaker 5: really the most useful book was The Silver Bullet and
Speaker 5: Other American Witch Stories, which is compiled by Hubert Davis,
Speaker 5: which is this really fantastic treasury of various like American
Speaker 5: witch narratives and motifs and folklore. And one of the
Speaker 5: things that I found in the course of researching this,
Speaker 5: and you know, also reading stuff like James Mooney, Uh,
Speaker 5: you know, Minion Legends of the Cherokee Is. There's all
Speaker 5: of this, There's all this material, but there's there's so
Speaker 5: few good books that are just general overviews of like
Speaker 5: Appalachian specific folklore. It's all reached compilations. It's all, oh,
Speaker 5: here's folk lore of the Smoky Mountains, here's folklore of Tennessee,
Speaker 5: here's folklore of North Carolina or West Virginia. So in
Speaker 5: order to really get that sense of like what the
Speaker 5: regional motifs are, you have to get all these books
Speaker 5: and like read them and just compare notes and and
Speaker 5: sort of try and put together a broader understanding of
Speaker 5: the sort of like folklork systems that you're working with.
Speaker 1: You know, I find it interesting that I grew up
Speaker 1: calling it the Appalachians, and up until like a fairly
Speaker 1: recent episode of Monster Talk, I just always thought that's
Speaker 1: what it was. But I apparently a lot of people
Speaker 1: say Appalachian and I hear you saying that. Did you
Speaker 1: did you notice that or did you run into that before?
Speaker 1: The difference in the pronunciation or the pronunciation.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I don't actually know where that comes from the way.
Speaker 5: So I grew up when I was younger saying Appalachian.
Speaker 5: And then when I spent time sort of like driving
Speaker 5: around in North Carolina for sort of unrelated reasons, but
Speaker 5: I'll take any opportunity to get up into western North Carolina,
Speaker 5: I heard people say Appalachian and somebody actually corrected me,
Speaker 5: You say appalation, but actually it's like throwing Appalachia.
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, all right, wow here, I don't
Speaker 1: that's really funny. Okay, okay, yeah, because I mean the
Speaker 1: range itself stretches a long way, so you know, I
Speaker 1: grew up in it. But my sister took me to
Speaker 1: task because she said, when I say that, it sounds
Speaker 1: like I'm saying we grew up as hillbilly's and that's
Speaker 1: not really the same thing. So hardly now my grandmother,
Speaker 1: I would say, she did. I mean, my family was,
Speaker 1: you know, all into moonshining and all kinds of other things.
Speaker 1: But but yeah, so we were, we were not hillbillies.
Speaker 5: Well, honestly, it's it's interesting that you bring that up, though,
Speaker 5: because there's actually one other book that I wanted to mention,
Speaker 5: which is really sort of foundation to this project which
Speaker 5: is called Rampollo by Steven Stall, and it has nothing
Speaker 5: to do with folklore, but it's all about the sort
Speaker 5: of logging and mining of of Appalachia and how you know,
Speaker 5: the sort of American conception of the mountaineers went from being, oh,
Speaker 5: you know, they're these wonderful pioneers that were taming the
Speaker 5: wilderness to oh, they're these backwards hillbillies who couldn't find
Speaker 5: their way out of a paper bag, and really they're
Speaker 5: not really using those forests anyway, so we can probably
Speaker 5: just cut them down and sell the timber and just
Speaker 5: leave them to be poor. And it was this really
Speaker 5: interesting thing because when we talk about Appalachia, there's all
Speaker 5: these really negative, nasty stereotypes about it that still really persist,
Speaker 5: and in a way, like hillbillies themselves are kind of
Speaker 5: like monsterized in sort of popular culture and stuff like Deliverance.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, I was just actually looking back at that,
Speaker 1: you know, with the death of Burt Reynolds, looking back
Speaker 1: at Deliverance, and there's still a lot of resentment up
Speaker 1: in North Georgia around the way that the people there
Speaker 1: were sort of presented in the movie. I mean, it
Speaker 1: was just a movie, right, you know, I hardly ever
Speaker 1: squeal like a pig is at my point, I guess reason.
Speaker 4: No, I actually just watched that movie recently for the
Speaker 4: first time. That's a Yeah.
Speaker 1: That's a trip. Doesn't it make you want to go rafting?
Speaker 4: Not?
Speaker 2: So, I'm just like I was just more alarmed at
Speaker 2: like what John Voight looks like.
Speaker 1: Now, oh yeah, yeah, where he came from.
Speaker 4: I was like wow.
Speaker 1: But No.
Speaker 2: One of the books that very similarly doesn't have anything
Speaker 2: to do with folklore. It kind of touches into it
Speaker 2: a little bit is Night Comes to the Cumberlands by
Speaker 2: Harry Caudle.
Speaker 4: It's an older book.
Speaker 2: It's from nineteen sixty two, so there's a lot of
Speaker 2: language that.
Speaker 4: We don't use anymore.
Speaker 2: It poorly represents a lot of people, but it is
Speaker 2: kind of one of the first like overviews of why
Speaker 2: why that, like why the entire region came to be
Speaker 2: how it is, And a lot of it is just like, yeah,
Speaker 2: basically like the people that lived there weren't seen as people.
Speaker 2: So blow up the mountain, we tear the trees down.
Speaker 2: We're just gonna tape everything that we can and you
Speaker 2: see a lot of this like with you know, just
Speaker 2: even today, like the coverage of the region.
Speaker 4: But yeah, I found a lot.
Speaker 2: Of difficulty in trying to find specific bits of folklore
Speaker 2: that were kind of like because.
Speaker 4: Like people talk to each other. There was a solid.
Speaker 2: Culture that formed very early on across the Appalachian Mountains,
Speaker 2: but it's always covered in this kind of like very
Speaker 2: piecemeal sort of way. Whenever it's you know, condensed into
Speaker 2: any sort of like folkl worked ome or like it's
Speaker 2: either like specifically about the Cherokee myths of the region,
Speaker 2: or it's specifically about the Hoodoo tradition of the former
Speaker 2: slaves that lived in the region or something like that,
Speaker 2: like or it's like even the book I mentioned only
Speaker 2: covers the Cumberlands and that it doesn't account for the
Speaker 2: Smoky Mountains, it doesn't account for the Blue Mountains. So
Speaker 2: it's it's very piecemeal in terms of like what information
Speaker 2: you're able to access. So yeah, it's really interesting just
Speaker 2: trying to trying to dig in and find anything that's cohesive.
Speaker 5: We read a lot Nowntain, there's a lot of there's
Speaker 5: a lot of research that went into.
Speaker 1: Us, but it is it is not super mainstream though
Speaker 1: it's it's still relatively obscure. I'm trying to figure of
Speaker 1: the only other big besides Manley Wade Weldman. Uh. The
Speaker 1: only other thing that comes to mind is Earl Hamner Junior.
Speaker 1: And you know, he did some work on The Twilight
Speaker 1: Zone that kind of touched on this stuff a little
Speaker 1: bit before you went in to do the Waltons. That's
Speaker 1: a turn wow, yeah it is. But I mean he
Speaker 1: did some really interesting episodes on on the Twilight Zone
Speaker 1: that that that touched on. And there was one where
Speaker 1: that the kids go into the pool what it be
Speaker 1: called the chim Poole, And then there's one where a
Speaker 1: guy uh it that they don't call it. Well, it's
Speaker 1: basically a wear cat story, but it's a it's it
Speaker 1: kind of ties into uh not the wampus Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: kind of like a wampus Cat, but it's a it's
Speaker 1: more it kind of like ties the Wampus cat story
Speaker 1: into something like the Cat People movie, the val Lewton.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, so I mean to me, yeah, so anyway,
Speaker 1: but let's let's talk monsters a little bit. So what
Speaker 1: kind of monsters come up in this in the in
Speaker 1: your book here, like what what can people expect, uh
Speaker 1: when they read this?
Speaker 5: So many there's a bunch we've got. The book sort
Speaker 5: of kicks off with, and there's a lot of a
Speaker 5: lot of appearances by figures from the Cherokee oral tradition,
Speaker 5: like the Awa, which is this sort of like big
Speaker 5: spindly malevolent spirit of madness. There's a raven mockers that
Speaker 5: show up, which are these sort of like Cherokee they're
Speaker 5: called witches, but really they're more like these malevolent spirits
Speaker 5: that cluster around dyeing people. They're invisible, and they they
Speaker 5: suck out all the remaining years of the life that
Speaker 5: person would have led. There's hags that change their skin.
Speaker 5: They're the black Shuck shows up in a sort of
Speaker 5: like fairly ambiguous way a couple of times. And then
Speaker 5: there's also there's a couple of monsters in there that
Speaker 5: are sort of of my own invention, but you know,
Speaker 5: in that like fine manly Wade Wellman tradition, they're invented,
Speaker 5: but they kind of are invented to be like they
Speaker 5: might have come out of a folk tale. So there's
Speaker 5: a thing called the the Hog of the Bow. Also
Speaker 5: fairly like like a big razorback that's also a bit
Speaker 5: doggish and you know, has this big, like snaky fo
Speaker 5: tongue and is also a little bit chatty because I
Speaker 5: like monsters that talk because it's more fun that way.
Speaker 5: If you, if you and you're your protagonist in the
Speaker 5: monster can have kind of a conversation.
Speaker 1: Sure, a little bit. Uh yeah, what's their monstervation exactly?
Speaker 2: But if you, yes, it helps to be able to
Speaker 2: bargain with a monster, honestly, Like if you have that ability,
Speaker 2: like I mean, there's there, they always have an angle,
Speaker 2: you're able to make a deal.
Speaker 4: That's fine.
Speaker 1: So so you said you grew up in Atlanta initially,
Speaker 1: like that was where you were early es.
Speaker 5: Sure, yeah, in Atlanta and in Dallas.
Speaker 1: I had some really good text mix in Dallas. Uh
Speaker 1: that's as far as Yeah, I went to the Conspiracy
Speaker 1: Museum and uh and then the sixth Floor Museum and
Speaker 1: ate some text mex and then moved on. So yeah,
Speaker 1: that's my care, that's that's the experience. Basically. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: saw the grassy know I moved on yeh, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: there you go. So but but guess what, there's a
Speaker 1: there's a Dallas Georgia, which doesn't have either of those things,
Speaker 1: nor does it have good text Max.
Speaker 6: Win.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I'll probably trim this section down a bit.
Speaker 4: I expected, just like shooting the ship.
Speaker 1: So, yeah, how did y'all find out about Monster Talk
Speaker 1: out of curiosity? Oh?
Speaker 5: I've been listening for years.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I actually know, I really.
Speaker 5: Know how I came across.
Speaker 1: A well, cool congratulation. I'm glad. Congratulations to me. I
Speaker 1: guess is what I trying to say?
Speaker 4: Long time listener, first time caller.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've always wanted to call it your radio show
Speaker 1: and say longtime caller, first time listener, and I've never
Speaker 1: had the opportunity, but man, I want to.
Speaker 5: Oh that'd be not annoyed that I didn't think of that.
Speaker 2: Ye, seriously, you guys have gotten me through so many
Speaker 2: long crunch deadlines, like being awake at like three in
Speaker 2: the morning drawing things for Star Wars or some ridiculous monster.
Speaker 4: And then like it's a it's fantastic to be on
Speaker 4: the show.
Speaker 1: That's awesome. Yeah, we were both very excited about this. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm glad to have you. I I really the manly
Speaker 1: Wade Wellman stories. You know, they're not I don't think
Speaker 1: they're super widely known, but it's actually there's this crazy
Speaker 1: thing where like it's one of the first scary stories
Speaker 1: I ever read was a Manly Wade Wellman story. My
Speaker 1: grandmother sil John story. It was it was the one
Speaker 1: with the behind her and I can't think of the
Speaker 1: name of the story.
Speaker 5: Actually actually was lying on my floor the des.
Speaker 1: Desk on Jendro Yep, that's the one. Yeah, And so
Speaker 1: what happened.
Speaker 5: In these people don't know is a is a little
Speaker 5: mountain cabin.
Speaker 1: Oh see, here's the thing. This is embarrassing. But my
Speaker 1: great grandmother who lived to be almost one hundred and five. Wow, well,
Speaker 1: her daughter lived to be one hundred and her son
Speaker 1: is my grandfather, is one hundred and two and still
Speaker 1: seems to be doing fine. So she gave me this
Speaker 1: book and it was I believe it was one of
Speaker 1: the Alfred Hitchcock collections which had that story in it.
Speaker 1: And I really liked it so much, so I must
Speaker 1: have been about seven that I took all the pages
Speaker 1: out and stuck them onto my favorite tree. So that is.
Speaker 5: A very Appalachian thing today.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and my mom, my mom was like, why did
Speaker 1: you tear up that book, and I'm like, I'm decorating,
Speaker 1: what are you talking about? Yeah, but now I can't.
Speaker 1: I've actually I've got aspirations to repurchase that book, which
Speaker 1: is not very expensive, but that would be, to the
Speaker 1: best of my knowledge, the first monster book that I
Speaker 1: ever personally owned. Uh and uh, and so I want
Speaker 1: to get it and put it back in my collection.
Speaker 1: Like I still have my first HP Lovecraft book, which
Speaker 1: I had lost, but my brother in law bought me
Speaker 1: a copy, so thanks Andy. Anyway, anyway, like.
Speaker 5: Acts of my Father kind of thing. You know, it's
Speaker 5: not the same book, but it is the same book, so.
Speaker 1: Exactly where's the exactly? So sorry? But yeah, Wellman and
Speaker 1: silver John stories basically introduce people to a lot of
Speaker 1: real folklore and a lot of fake lore. But it's
Speaker 1: funny though, because as I've done this show, and as
Speaker 1: you've probably noticed his listeners, a lot of what is
Speaker 1: fiction becomes folklore. Yeah, there's there's definitely some kind of
Speaker 1: genetic material being swapped back and forth between fiction and
Speaker 1: folklore and actual sightings. And I find that fascinating.
Speaker 5: So there's a really there's a really interesting example of that,
Speaker 5: which is one of manly Wade Wellman's most famous creations
Speaker 5: is the gardenell, which is a sort of a cabin
Speaker 5: that's actually a big carnivorous plant that is maybe sort
Speaker 5: of a cryptid but also maybe sort of a malevolent spirit.
Speaker 5: And he that creation shows up in a couple of
Speaker 5: his short stories. And then something that you see people
Speaker 5: like reporting that they run into, but you do see
Speaker 5: people talking about it and just assuming that he got
Speaker 5: it from folklore as opposed to him just making it
Speaker 5: up out of whole cloth. So like, I definitely I
Speaker 5: don't remember what book I read this send, but I
Speaker 5: definitely remember reading a book that that just had had
Speaker 5: a gardenell in it. It didn't call it a gardenell,
Speaker 5: but it was. It was very clearly a manly Wade
Speaker 5: Wellman gardenell. And you go back and look at when
Speaker 5: the book was written, and it was written fairly recently,
Speaker 5: and I guess whoever wrote it either didn't do their
Speaker 5: homework or just figured it's a good story and they're
Speaker 5: just doing their to get it injected into the folklortion.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that is interesting. It's just I well, you
Speaker 1: know what, at some point I'm going to finish doing
Speaker 1: my research on memes. Uh. And then and then I
Speaker 1: want to get Susan blackmore on. And Susan used, Yeah,
Speaker 1: she used to be a paranormal researcher and and then
Speaker 1: became a skeptic, and now she reached researches psychology and uh,
Speaker 1: and she's gotten really interested in memesince wrote a book
Speaker 1: about it. And I want to have her on to
Speaker 1: talk about that, because she's got this cool crossover because
Speaker 1: not only, uh, did she study, you know, the paranormal,
Speaker 1: which I'm interested in, but she also studied memetics. Because
Speaker 1: if you studied the paranormal long enough, you start to
Speaker 1: start thinking about how did these ideas get transferred? Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just like and and I mean, whether they're real
Speaker 1: or they're not. You know, I think we all know
Speaker 1: where I fall on that, But but I'm still interested
Speaker 1: in them. I'm interested in I find them fun and fascinating,
Speaker 1: entertaining and scary, and but they also seem to speak
Speaker 1: deeply do what it means to be human. And part
Speaker 1: of that is how we share ideas and I can't
Speaker 1: get away from that. So but let's let's let's talk
Speaker 1: about some specific monsters. A little bit you mentioned wampus cats.
Speaker 1: Do they Yeah? Yeah, do they show up in your stories?
Speaker 1: Because I actually know the answer this sort of but.
Speaker 5: Sort of tifvy. It sounded like you had something you
Speaker 5: were thinking of.
Speaker 4: I'm just gonna say we have we have a mask.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the first story has that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's basically Anna's first adventure. She's kind of
Speaker 2: by fortune and fate. She's kind of given this very
Speaker 2: powerful uh, it's kind of a maguffin. It kind of
Speaker 2: kick starts the whole her whole journey.
Speaker 1: Probably a wampus a traditional wampus cat, though, is what.
Speaker 5: So the thing with the wampus cat that's really interesting
Speaker 5: is that it's this sort of thing. It's this it's
Speaker 5: often described as being either like a big, sort of
Speaker 5: like gnarly looking cougar or just is a cougar, or
Speaker 5: it's like sort of a ghostly cougar, or it's a
Speaker 5: cat that walks on two legs. And the legend around
Speaker 5: the wampus mask seems to intersect in sort of weird
Speaker 5: ways with the wampus cat legends. So the first story
Speaker 5: in the collection is based loosely on a Cherokee folk
Speaker 5: tale from Tennessee about a woman whose husband is is
Speaker 5: insane by this spirit of madness, the Awa, and so
Speaker 5: the Shamans make her a the medicine men make her
Speaker 5: this mask which will frighten the monster away. And so
Speaker 5: when I was reading into it, I found all these
Speaker 5: different versions of the story, and there was a more
Speaker 5: recent version of the story where actually there's no demon
Speaker 5: of madness. There's just this woman who wants to see
Speaker 5: the secret rituals that the men are doing, and so
Speaker 5: she makes her this cat mask, and the medicine men
Speaker 5: catch her and turn her into a cat as a
Speaker 5: sort of like punishment. And I haven't been able to
Speaker 5: figure out where that particular version comes from, but it
Speaker 5: seems like there's this whole complex of stories around this weird,
Speaker 5: unnatural cat, maybe a person who's been transformed or is
Speaker 5: maybe like a sort of memory of this woman who
Speaker 5: wore this cat mask to beat this evil spirit. And
Speaker 5: it's also like a really handy term just to apply
Speaker 5: to cat that you see in the woods that you
Speaker 5: don't know what it is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's to me, it's this will sound weird, but
Speaker 1: one of the earliest exposures I have to the Wampas
Speaker 1: cat was actually from the computer game Hunt the Wampus,
Speaker 1: and it. Later on there was a really cool game
Speaker 1: called Mule, which was spelled like m dot U dot
Speaker 1: l dot e, which is yes, yeah, which is multiple
Speaker 1: use labor implement. That was a dandy bunting game from
Speaker 1: Ozark Entertainment. So i'm the fact that they were Ozark.
Speaker 1: I don't know if they brought in yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know if they brought in the wampus from the
Speaker 1: Hunt the Wampus game or from local folklore, but it
Speaker 1: really had nothing to do with the main part of
Speaker 1: the game. The main part of the game was a
Speaker 1: really fun sort of cooperative yet competitive trade game on
Speaker 1: another planet. But at the same time, you could earn
Speaker 1: extra money if you went out into the mountains and
Speaker 1: hunted the wampus on the planet you were colonizing. So
Speaker 1: that's a little bit of nerd trivia there. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: it's neat because the Wampus falls into all kinds of categories.
Speaker 1: It falls into uh, traditional folklore, and then it falls
Speaker 1: into cryptids because people see them as sort of phantom cats,
Speaker 1: and that falls into the alien big cat, mysterious cat
Speaker 1: species sort of stuff that we talk about a lot.
Speaker 1: So the Cheroke. He had Wampa stories before American was
Speaker 1: colonized by Europeans.
Speaker 5: Well, that's a little that's a little difficult to parse.
Speaker 5: This is something where I have to I have to
Speaker 5: be straight up like obviously, I'm coming into this as
Speaker 5: an outsider, and my understanding is entirely based on what
Speaker 5: I've read, and I referenced this book earlier, and I
Speaker 5: want to sort of plug it again now that I'm
Speaker 5: in front of my bookshelf and looking at it. James
Speaker 5: Mooney was this ethnographer who did this really incredible this
Speaker 5: really incredible long term study of the sort of like
Speaker 5: history and formulas and mythology of a bunch of Indian groups.
Speaker 5: But the only book of his that actually made it
Speaker 5: out of this huge opus that he was planning on
Speaker 5: writing before he does. Yeah, since Sacred Formulas of the
Speaker 5: Cherokee and that thing is a gold mine. First person
Speaker 5: interviews and and sort of like materials that he got
Speaker 5: when he was talking to mostly the Eastern Band, but
Speaker 5: a little bit of Eastern Band as well, and sort
Speaker 5: of like cosmological stuff and and traditional sort of you
Speaker 5: know what folklorets call wonder stories. And also there's a
Speaker 5: lot of really good monsters in there, as you might imagine,
Speaker 5: like the Oukatana, which is, you know, the big horned serpents,
Speaker 5: and but with stuff like compis cat. There are there
Speaker 5: are folk tale that are Cherokee that seemed to be
Speaker 5: folded into the legend now. But whether or not they
Speaker 5: were originally for me personally speaks not an I's done
Speaker 5: a lot of research. I had trouble piecing together where
Speaker 5: even the name comes from. Originally it sounds like an
Speaker 5: Indian name, but I just don't know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Well, what other monsters appear in the text
Speaker 1: that you would like to talk about?
Speaker 5: Uh, Tiffany, you want to talk about raven monkers?
Speaker 4: I was about to say, can we talk about raven monkers?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so the raven Mocker you don't really especially I
Speaker 2: especially appreciated Ausure's version of them.
Speaker 4: They don't really have a face. It's kind of just
Speaker 4: like a ceramic mask sort of thing.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: And this group of just like endemic witches who were
Speaker 2: kind of plaguing in the land basically are like worshiping
Speaker 2: the raven Mocker as a kind of an upstart god
Speaker 2: essentially and doing dark deeds to kind of like usher
Speaker 2: forth it's a rival sort of. It's there's kind of
Speaker 2: a Lovecraftian bent to the story that I really like.
Speaker 4: Our great secret knowledge.
Speaker 2: So the Raven Macker itself in is a Cherokee legend.
Speaker 4: I'm unsure if it's something that.
Speaker 2: Appeared pre colonization or post colonization or like like where
Speaker 2: the divide is basically, but it's.
Speaker 4: Essentially just a dark spirit that is.
Speaker 2: Related to death rights. So like I think Asha mentioned before,
Speaker 2: like essentially it kind of hovers over you. It appears,
Speaker 2: and it sucks the all the remaining years that you
Speaker 2: have left to.
Speaker 4: Live out of you and takes that for itself.
Speaker 2: So if you are going to die in eighty years,
Speaker 2: it lives eighty years more.
Speaker 7: So it's kind of like it's very heavy and very existential,
Speaker 7: very quickly, and the only person who can defeat it
Speaker 7: is like a particular type of well trained shaman essentially.
Speaker 1: And so if.
Speaker 2: I if I recall correctly, you can't see it, like
Speaker 2: it doesn't really take physical form, So there's kind of
Speaker 2: a like ghostly element to it that I really like
Speaker 2: as well.
Speaker 4: So it's like it if.
Speaker 2: It wants to be seen, it can take certain forms
Speaker 2: and things like that.
Speaker 4: But but I am large the only person who.
Speaker 2: Can actively see and be like, there's a raven mocker
Speaker 2: is a super train of like like like well versed
Speaker 2: shaman in these in these particular rights in trying to
Speaker 2: depict them in physical artwork, it's kind of interesting because.
Speaker 4: Like how do you depict the undepictable?
Speaker 5: But yeah, yeah, yeah, like what does it look like?
Speaker 4: It's indescribable?
Speaker 1: Was it was Eldridge? And what's the problem. I don't
Speaker 1: at all. It practically draws itself. I don't see what
Speaker 1: the issue is.
Speaker 2: That's I was saying, like that's the problem with like,
Speaker 2: like anytime you you attack the L word lovecraft onto anything, it.
Speaker 4: Is just like, well, what does it look like? It's indescribable?
Speaker 2: It's completely up to whoever has drawn it before or
Speaker 2: whoever is created that try before. But I tend to
Speaker 2: I don't know, like in my personal work, since I
Speaker 2: am like I love creatures, I love like palaeontological reconstruction,
Speaker 2: I try to like ground it a little bit in reality,
Speaker 2: but then just like tweak it a little bit to
Speaker 2: where it's a little bit like that doesn't make sense
Speaker 2: or those joints don't work, or why is its hair
Speaker 2: flying around or something like and give it to like
Speaker 2: like an otherworldly flavor or something like that.
Speaker 4: So with the Raven Mocker, I tried to not give
Speaker 4: it edges like I did.
Speaker 2: I did a version of the Ravenmacker where it's upper
Speaker 2: half basically doesn't have edges, but the lower half has
Speaker 2: these long spindling legs and these awful little like feet
Speaker 2: that are kind of grabbing onto the surface that it's
Speaker 2: sitting on.
Speaker 4: And then of course horrible dead eyed mask.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm very impressed with all the artwork. It looks amazing.
Speaker 4: Thank you.
Speaker 1: Can you describe Anna's abilities?
Speaker 5: The way I would describe Anna's abilities is it's a
Speaker 5: little vague in that way that the sort of abilities
Speaker 5: of most folkloric which is are a little bit vague.
Speaker 5: She has some element of just sort of raw magical power,
Speaker 5: but mostly everything that she does is training and technique
Speaker 5: and sort of wandering around. Is almost like she would
Speaker 5: not think of herself in this way, but as an
Speaker 5: ethnographer who's going around picking up this folk knowledge and
Speaker 5: incorporating it into her sort of like retinue of tricks.
Speaker 5: But really her her biggest powers that she's very observant
Speaker 5: and she's a good talker, which is very important when
Speaker 5: you're sort of a smallish woman facing down rabbiting but
Speaker 5: somewhat chatty monstrosities been there?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, so did you? Did you include the snelly gaster?
Speaker 5: Snelly gaster is not in this one, but I do
Speaker 5: want to get to it in the future story.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 5: Also there's there's the There's a great mons which is
Speaker 5: from Murphy, North Carolina, which is Tlanousi. The giant leech,
Speaker 5: which is one of these great monsters that shows up
Speaker 5: in a Cherokee folk tale about this place where two
Speaker 5: rivers come together and there's this enormous like ten twenty
Speaker 5: thirty foot leech that people when they try and cross
Speaker 5: the river. And you know, most of these stories end
Speaker 5: with and then a brave person went and like killed
Speaker 5: the leech, and that story ends with, well, then a
Speaker 5: brave person to try and kill the leach, and we
Speaker 5: found his body later and the leech had eaten his
Speaker 5: eyes and nose. So we just don't use that part
Speaker 5: of the river anymore.
Speaker 1: I have relatives up in Murphy. That's that's very cool.
Speaker 1: I didn't know that.
Speaker 5: It's a really cool spot. If you ever get a chance.
Speaker 5: It's very It's sort of like a little floodplain's forest
Speaker 5: that's down at the bottom of a canyon, and it's
Speaker 5: very When I first went, it was flooded out. But
Speaker 5: it's got this very nice kind of like spooky, swampy
Speaker 5: vibe of like quartz and like slowing vines, and it
Speaker 5: looks like the kind of place you might expect to
Speaker 5: see it.
Speaker 1: Leach A Tippany, you said you had been interested in
Speaker 1: being a biologist marine biology, a marine biologist in particular.
Speaker 1: Did you get to draw any water monsters for the book.
Speaker 4: Not quite yet.
Speaker 2: I although, like one of the things that I have
Speaker 2: heard in my during over the span of my whole career, honestly.
Speaker 4: Is that looks like a water creature.
Speaker 2: Like whether or not it's actually if it's like a
Speaker 2: house or a car or something like that, it'll be
Speaker 2: that looks.
Speaker 4: Like a water creature. Like Okay, so I guess like my.
Speaker 2: Like endemic sort of like I like or fish and
Speaker 2: goblin sharks and all sorts.
Speaker 4: Of like weird deep sea things with teeth.
Speaker 2: Like for a long time, I was super into studying
Speaker 2: whales and dolphins and stuff like that.
Speaker 4: So like that's something.
Speaker 2: That people have always said about my work, whether or
Speaker 2: not I'm actually drawing water or things in.
Speaker 4: The water at all. So it's kind of interesting.
Speaker 2: It's that's sort of like it's art subjective, but like
Speaker 2: whatever people receive from it, like I'm happy to provide.
Speaker 4: So that's something that people have always picked up on.
Speaker 4: It's kind of interesting.
Speaker 1: I mean, I could just imagine what you I think
Speaker 1: if you had gotten into that, I think the the
Speaker 1: illustrations you did with your papers would have been amazing.
Speaker 1: I mean, your artists, these are some really good draw
Speaker 1: probably scarier than a lot of people are used to
Speaker 1: seeing in a in a science paper.
Speaker 5: But yeah, I've seen a lot of folklore art that
Speaker 5: is kind of it's kind of cute or it's sort
Speaker 5: of like a mannered in this very like I am
Speaker 5: presenting a painting of a folk tale, and Tiffany's feels
Speaker 5: really like you took a sketchbook to a witch's sabbath
Speaker 5: and just drew what she saw. So it just has
Speaker 5: this wonderful like sketch from life energy to it. You're
Speaker 5: not pulling some Pickman's model shit with us.
Speaker 1: Are actually.
Speaker 8: One day I'll see them, Oh, actually the way that
Speaker 8: I like, I grew up.
Speaker 2: With a mother who believed and was it if it
Speaker 2: was paranormal ghosts, aliens, bigfoot things in the water, like
Speaker 2: she believed it all and so like I hardcore like
Speaker 2: wanted to be a cryptozoologist up until I was like
Speaker 2: wait a minute, like and like in my like teens,
Speaker 2: so like the idea of folklore and natural history being blended,
Speaker 2: I don't I don't know, Like I've always had kind
Speaker 2: of like a natural sensibility for that.
Speaker 4: So the idea of you're watching.
Speaker 2: An animal, is the animal like roaring all the time
Speaker 2: or posing like aggressively all the time.
Speaker 4: No, So like why would you draw a bigfoot doing that?
Speaker 4: I don't know, Like.
Speaker 2: There's a logical like leap for me at least in
Speaker 2: that I want to depict things as if you were,
Speaker 2: like the viewer was witnessing the monster, because if you
Speaker 2: were seeing the monster, you would be the viewer. So like,
Speaker 2: I don't know, that's kind of the sentibility that I
Speaker 2: try to approach all of my like like quote unquote
Speaker 2: paranormal or shinky or horror type.
Speaker 5: Of things with I want to I want to jump
Speaker 5: in on that also because one of the sensibilities that
Speaker 5: I kind of tried to bring to these stories is
Speaker 5: that they're they're sort of like folklore inflected fantasy, but
Speaker 5: they're really deeply rooted in the sort of like lived
Speaker 5: ecology and the lived history of the Southern Appalachians. And
Speaker 5: I really like looking at folklore and these sort of
Speaker 5: like supernatural ecosystems as ecosystems where yes, which there are
Speaker 5: also salamanders like under the logs and the when the
Speaker 5: forests are cut down by loggers, Like it's not just
Speaker 5: the salamanders that are affected, it's the sort of like
Speaker 5: spooky entities that are affected in some way too, and
Speaker 5: just trying to like build this world. The thing that
Speaker 5: I think George R. Martin is brilliant about in Game
Speaker 5: of Thrones is that he presents a medieval world that
Speaker 5: medieval people kind of thought that they lived in and
Speaker 5: takes all that sort of like beastiery stuff and like
Speaker 5: magic and far off lands, takes it seriously. And we're
Speaker 5: kind of doing the same thing in this book, where
Speaker 5: it's if you read these these stories collected and stuff
Speaker 5: like the Silver Bullet, people lived in a world where
Speaker 5: witches were real and ghosts were real, and these various
Speaker 5: monsters were real. And also the bank might repossess your house,
Speaker 5: and also you know it's getting harder and harder to
Speaker 5: make a living on the home place, and also you've
Speaker 5: got to harvest the corn, and all of this is true.
Speaker 5: So there are these sort of injections of the uncanny.
Speaker 5: But also if you're someone like Anna O'Brien, who's this
Speaker 5: young witch who's like, this is her life now, everything
Speaker 5: is important because everything is real, and that means that
Speaker 5: dealing with which is just as important as dealing with
Speaker 5: someone who's lost something and needs to find it.
Speaker 1: Gotcha, that makes good sense. So you mentioned this this
Speaker 1: book The Silver Bullet and other American witch stories, and
Speaker 1: obviously if you've listened to monster Talk, you know that
Speaker 1: I am really interested in silver bullets. Tracking down and
Speaker 1: discovering that the silver bullets were much more associated with
Speaker 1: witches than with were wolves up until the nineteen forties. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like wildly, Yeah, I mean it's I mean, it's like
Speaker 1: silver bullets were really, really, really important but for witches
Speaker 1: and shape changers, not were wolves in particular. And so
Speaker 1: I didn't know this book existed. That's really cool. I'll
Speaker 1: have to track it down obviously, I'll put a link
Speaker 1: in the show notes. But when you were looking at
Speaker 1: witch lore of the Appalachians or Appalachians, I'm having trouble
Speaker 1: fighting my roots, so.
Speaker 5: This Embrace your Roots. It's that kind of podcast, that's right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, when you're looking in at the witches the Appalachians,
Speaker 1: did you see a lot of stories involving silver bullets.
Speaker 5: There's a couple. Yeah, I'm actually like holding the book
Speaker 5: right now. There's a lot of stories about They tend
Speaker 5: to appear a lot in stories about shape changing witches,
Speaker 5: which are common of course throughout America and British folklore,
Speaker 5: but turn up in the Appalachians. There will be cases
Speaker 5: where there's these there's these animals that are maybe kind
Speaker 5: of not animals, and people will shoot at them and
Speaker 5: the guns won't fire, and then you know, they get
Speaker 5: a medicine man come in and you know, smell them
Speaker 5: a silver bolt and they'll shoot it. And then the
Speaker 5: next day someone in town is limping. They're like, aha,
Speaker 5: it with you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's all except that it's a witch and not
Speaker 1: a werewolf. Right, Yeah, it's that that that whole trope
Speaker 1: gets moved over to werewolf floor. And I just find
Speaker 1: that fascinating. It's the uh I wounded, I knocked the
Speaker 1: zero off, and then there's some main town that's got
Speaker 1: a bandage on their air, you know really.
Speaker 4: So it's like an energetic little bit.
Speaker 9: So a lot of the the colonial perspective that came
Speaker 9: to the Appellations was from Scott's Irish descent, and so
Speaker 9: you almost seek like a one for one transition of
Speaker 9: folklore from the British Isles to Appellations.
Speaker 4: So that's where you get like black dog mits like
Speaker 4: black shuck, he follows you.
Speaker 2: He may prelude a death in your family. There's lots
Speaker 2: of like death superstitions. If you see a bird, it's
Speaker 2: a death. If a mirror crag, Yeah, those are they're
Speaker 2: really good. But then like so even like the ghost
Speaker 2: lore of like what to do with a ghost, how
Speaker 2: to conjure a ghost, how to talk to a ghost,
Speaker 2: how to dispel a ghost, like a lot of these
Speaker 2: come directly from the British Isles, and so like one
Speaker 2: of the long term projects that I've got going on
Speaker 2: now is an exploration of like lesser known kind of
Speaker 2: local English book color from different provinces and stuff like that,
Speaker 2: because it's me and it's like it's creaturey and it's
Speaker 2: kind of spooky. I tend to lame to the spookier
Speaker 2: and the creatury sort of stories, so like these are
Speaker 2: the things that I've attracted to. But there's a lot
Speaker 2: of like literal one for one, parallels with Appalachian folk lore.
Speaker 4: So a lot of the like lost brides appearing in
Speaker 4: the river.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of river folklore which has which actually
Speaker 2: comes a lot from like water goddesses and old like
Speaker 2: Anglo Saxon stuff from the.
Speaker 4: British Isles and over Roman there's a lot of water
Speaker 4: stuff in general.
Speaker 2: But this like gets translated in the seventeenth, eighteenth, early
Speaker 2: nineteen hundreds as like baptism stuff. So there's a lot
Speaker 2: of like interesting like like as the culture shifts around it,
Speaker 2: and as the cultural connotation like transforms into like what
Speaker 2: we think of as Appalachia today, like the folklore kind
Speaker 2: of gets.
Speaker 4: Dragged along with it.
Speaker 2: So there's I don't know, it's just it's it's a
Speaker 2: really interesting like like at the same time holdover but
Speaker 2: at the same time, like it's right on the cusp
Speaker 2: of everything that's happening societal like as the history of
Speaker 2: Appalasia has progressed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've noticed that as well. And a lot of
Speaker 1: the way the folklore comes over from Europe. Brother, well,
Speaker 1: if you look at uh, it's true for everywhere that
Speaker 1: it comes from. If you look at food and who
Speaker 1: do as it came over from Africa and got sort
Speaker 1: of transformed. But also even the.
Speaker 8: Word itself, like the idea of goofer dust, like going
Speaker 8: and getting graveyard dirt, and if you get the dirt
Speaker 8: then you can acquire the powers of whatever the person possessed.
Speaker 4: Like like I was just digging into that the other day.
Speaker 1: It's really interesting, nice fun, nice fun.
Speaker 4: The person who was.
Speaker 2: Wealthy and if you get their graveyard dirt, then you
Speaker 2: also will become wealthy.
Speaker 4: Or if they're really good at the link.
Speaker 1: Oh that's really cool. That's a really cool sympathetic magic.
Speaker 1: I don't think I know that. Yeah, And then there's
Speaker 1: what I was gonna say is that things like from
Speaker 1: France you had the loo Guru, which was more of
Speaker 1: a in Europe was kind of a classical werewolf, but
Speaker 1: when it came to America and got down the rude, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it became more of like a boogeyman who lives out
Speaker 1: in the swamp, you know, like a sort of it'll
Speaker 1: get you if you're bad kind of creature, which quite
Speaker 1: a bit different. But have I I don't remember if
Speaker 1: I've talked about it on the show before, but you
Speaker 1: have you had that great Uh yeah, we had two
Speaker 1: episodes on it. But I can't remember if I told
Speaker 1: my black Dog story. I don't remember if oh no, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah I did, and uh but I don't know. So
Speaker 1: if I've told this story before, my apologies. You know.
Speaker 1: But when I when I was getting ready to get
Speaker 1: in the Navy, I had to lose some weight, and
Speaker 1: uh so I was and I love jogging, but I
Speaker 1: still needed to lose some weight. Uh just my build
Speaker 1: is very thick, and so I could run like twelve miles,
Speaker 1: but I always was on the borderline for fitness according
Speaker 1: to the body measurements. I hated that. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: anyway is also yeah, yeah, but so I hear it's true.
Speaker 1: Yeah I was. I was in fantastic shape as far
Speaker 1: as like what I could do, but apparently you know, anyway,
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter. But I ran all the time, but
Speaker 1: I typically would work all day and then run at night.
Speaker 1: I was a night runner, and I loved it. But
Speaker 1: as i'd run around my little hometown of Cartersville, there
Speaker 1: was an area where I would pick up a dog,
Speaker 1: and the dog belonged to a lady named miss I
Speaker 1: probably don't shoot so name. Her name was Miss jolly Is.
Speaker 1: I think she's passed on now, but she had this
Speaker 1: weird looking Her husband, I think ran a junk yard.
Speaker 1: But the dog had one eye missing, and it had
Speaker 1: this huge underbite. But it was a big, thick lab,
Speaker 1: black lab. And so at night when I would go running,
Speaker 1: that dog would would come. It would like see me.
Speaker 1: It would hop off the porch and it would run
Speaker 1: with me for a couple of blocks, and then it
Speaker 1: would give up and then go back home. It didn't
Speaker 1: chase me, it just ran alongside with me. Right. So
Speaker 1: I go off to the Navy, I got a boot camp,
Speaker 1: I go spend some time in the Middle East, and
Speaker 1: I come back to my hometown and my parents tell
Speaker 1: me that this dog has passed away. And I was
Speaker 1: sad to hear it because I'd gotten kind of used
Speaker 1: to it. But as I continued to run. One night,
Speaker 1: I was running and suddenly that dog appeared, and it
Speaker 1: was clearly the same dog. It had one eye and
Speaker 1: a huge underbite. It's not something you could miss, and
Speaker 1: you know, normally it ran alongside me, but that night
Speaker 1: I left it behind. So so the next day I
Speaker 1: went and asked Miss Jolly about her dog. I said,
Speaker 1: Miss Jolly, my parents told me your dog I had
Speaker 1: passed away. But last night, I swear I saw it,
Speaker 1: and she gave me a funny look. She said, well,
Speaker 1: they told me that I had to keep it chained up,
Speaker 1: and I didn't want to, so I told everybody it died.
Speaker 1: I just let it out at night.
Speaker 5: Oh my god.
Speaker 1: So yeah, so it wasn't actually dead. It's dead now,
Speaker 1: but holy cow, that scared the poop out of me anyway.
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, so black shuck rings real, real, dear
Speaker 1: to me.
Speaker 5: The shuck is in the book. It's sort of like
Speaker 5: major appearance in one story and more supporting than another.
Speaker 5: And having traveled in Latin America, there's all the obviously,
Speaker 5: you know, street dogs and pariah dogs, and it's really
Speaker 5: interesting to be around them because when you're around dogs
Speaker 5: in America, they are by and large very much pet
Speaker 5: sort of think of them and as man's best friend.
Speaker 1: I love dogs.
Speaker 5: I grew up with dogs, but go down to Guatemala
Speaker 5: or Columbia and they're just dogs out on the street
Speaker 5: living their lives, don't really have anything to do with
Speaker 5: or any interest in humans. And then you remember, oh,
Speaker 5: dogs are like medium sized predatory mammals and are potentially
Speaker 5: quite dangerous. Yes, And there's something about the Black Shuck
Speaker 5: in particular that for me is this like very It's
Speaker 5: an autonomous dog. You know, it's definitely a dog. It's
Speaker 5: not a wolf. It's a dog, but it's not a
Speaker 5: people dog. And sometimes there are these stories about the
Speaker 5: Black Shock accompanying young women on the road at night
Speaker 5: and protecting them from harm. And sometimes there are stories
Speaker 5: about the Black Shock following people for years. Sometimes it's
Speaker 5: more of a metaphor. It can be like a metaphor
Speaker 5: for depression.
Speaker 1: It can be.
Speaker 5: It can be a really grim omen It can be
Speaker 5: in some stories like obviously like the Beast of Bungay
Speaker 5: is it's a directly murderous enter.
Speaker 2: So there was a case in the sixteen d either
Speaker 2: fifteen hundreds or sixteen hundreds.
Speaker 4: And this is also the part of the This is
Speaker 4: one of the pieces that I did for my English.
Speaker 2: Folklore project where a church suddenly burst into flames and
Speaker 2: lots of people were electrocuted to death, and there is
Speaker 2: a strange association between lightning and a black dog. There
Speaker 2: are multiple witness reports of a black dog bursting in
Speaker 2: through the church doors, and supposedly still if you go
Speaker 2: there today.
Speaker 4: I haven't been there, but there.
Speaker 2: Are burn marks on the church door where supposedly the
Speaker 2: dogs scratched at the door to get in.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we've done, Yeah, we did. We've done two episodes
Speaker 1: on black dogs, and one was with folk lorese David Waldron.
Speaker 1: So if you want to hear an hour on that,
Speaker 1: you can go back to our show notes or and
Speaker 1: find that episode too. Yeah. It kind of reminds me
Speaker 1: of the Jersey Devil, where you know, there's the folklore
Speaker 1: and then there's this really cool religious and political history
Speaker 1: behind the folklore that I find as interesting, but it's
Speaker 1: not nearly as widely known. And that's just it's one
Speaker 1: of those things when you when you there's the scary
Speaker 1: monster part and then there's the hey, what does this mean?
Speaker 1: And as you say, metaphor figures right into that and
Speaker 1: sometimes that is literally the monsterification of other religious groups
Speaker 1: or other political groups or other social groups. As you say,
Speaker 1: even even Hillbillies themselves have been turned into monsters in
Speaker 1: some ways, which is just ridiculous.
Speaker 4: Monsters are always political.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess so. So I was gonna say, they're
Speaker 1: doing a monster conference and just a little bit south
Speaker 1: of Austin coming up next April, I believe Joseph Laycock.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I know Joe. So Joe is trying to
Speaker 1: put together a conference called Gods and Monsters, and I
Speaker 1: actually owe them a paper I need to put together.
Speaker 1: But the one of the things that he said in
Speaker 1: his invitation to submit articles was a quote that said
Speaker 1: monsters are meaning machines, right, which is wonderful. But but
Speaker 1: but sometimes they're also monsters, right.
Speaker 5: And that's that's sort of a balance that we we
Speaker 5: try and strike in this book, which is that the
Speaker 5: monsters are are there as monsters, you know, stuff like
Speaker 5: the Hags and the Raven Mocker and the Hog of
Speaker 5: the Bogs and the Aware. They're all they exist perfectly,
Speaker 5: really well as monsters. But when I was writing these stories,
Speaker 5: I was kind of trying to find things to say
Speaker 5: with the monsters. You know, when the black Shuck shows
Speaker 5: up the first time, it is as a monster, and
Speaker 5: when the black shock shows up the second time, it's
Speaker 5: as a much more ambiguous and sort of figure of
Speaker 5: mental illness, of trauma of depression, which as somebody I
Speaker 5: mentioned this earlier, but I might have cut out as
Speaker 5: somebody who deals with mental illness and depression. Like that's
Speaker 5: something that I feel like when I could really like
Speaker 5: dial into and it gives the stories a lot more
Speaker 5: heft if the supernatural is also the supernatural is is
Speaker 5: many ways, is many times a poetic way of looking
Speaker 5: at history, and history that won't stay buried, you know.
Speaker 5: A ghost is just the paswer that won't lie down.
Speaker 5: A monster is is an element of the unknown or
Speaker 5: a thing that scares us that you know, gets all
Speaker 5: this baggage sort of pile onto it. And the baggage
Speaker 5: is the fun bit, right like, because without baggage, a
Speaker 5: monster is just a toothy thing. And there's a lot
Speaker 5: of toothy things in the world. But the baggage is
Speaker 5: the it's the cultural stuff and the history and the
Speaker 5: politics and the religion, and that's really what I think
Speaker 5: makes a monster interesting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, if you think about all the ways
Speaker 1: monsters are presented in our culture. I mean even in
Speaker 1: the most what some people might consider not to be
Speaker 1: great cinema, but things like the Friday the Thirteenth franchise,
Speaker 1: where where monsters become symbols of punishment for sexual transgression,
Speaker 1: or with where Will stories where monsters represent the sort
Speaker 1: of the duality of man and the rage versus reason
Speaker 1: kind of approach. I mean, yeah, they're they're beautiful in
Speaker 1: that way, but man, depression is such a real monster,
Speaker 1: and it's it's so challenging because the way it SAPs
Speaker 1: your ability to get things done or your interest in life,
Speaker 1: or it can steal from you all the things that
Speaker 1: are important.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's so it's like a vampire and it's like
Speaker 1: it's like a curse, and it's like, uh, it's like
Speaker 1: a demon. It's like so many things. All these stories.
Speaker 5: It's like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean they they these these things. It's
Speaker 1: like I wish they were real, because it would be
Speaker 1: so much easier to deal with a demon that it
Speaker 1: would be depression. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, like I suffer from a lot of
Speaker 2: the same life as an artist, but like that's a
Speaker 2: lot of this the same that I focused with, like.
Speaker 4: Dealt with a lot of the time, like a lot
Speaker 4: of the time, remember the years.
Speaker 2: So that's definitely a place, and especially like I said,
Speaker 2: growing up with a person who believed in the literal
Speaker 2: existence of aliens are gonna get you, ghosts are gonna
Speaker 2: get you. Like those were a little bit less so
Speaker 2: my speed than the more so the like let's go
Speaker 2: find the lot ness monster, Like that's more mine, Like okay, cool,
Speaker 2: it's less.
Speaker 1: Threatening, it is, right, right, But at the same time it's.
Speaker 10: Still kind of inhabits that same basic like like socio political,
Speaker 10: like psychosomatic sort of core where it still is representing
Speaker 10: like whether or not it's your actual trauma, it's somebody
Speaker 10: else's trauma. So that's kind of the place that I
Speaker 10: always approach to, like especially like like I said, the
Speaker 10: Raven Mocker or like these things that are like they
Speaker 10: don't have definition, how do you describe the in the
Speaker 10: indescribable like and then I have to actually at some
Speaker 10: point I have to put a pencil to paper and
Speaker 10: actually draw the thing.
Speaker 4: So like like that's something that I always have in
Speaker 4: consideration when designing.
Speaker 1: Well, I've got a house fool of aspiring author artists.
Speaker 1: Rather when author. Yeah, well I have. I have three
Speaker 1: children and all of them love creating art, and I
Speaker 1: was just going to ask you, what what what do
Speaker 1: you use to do your art? Like how what medium
Speaker 1: are you working in?
Speaker 2: So for a long time I worked digitally. I was
Speaker 2: a super photoshop person. Honestly coming back to traditional artwork
Speaker 2: and just doing like soup.
Speaker 4: So all the things that I'm doing.
Speaker 2: For Anna O'Brien ghost Days are just well, the the
Speaker 2: cover art is an actual physical painting and all the
Speaker 2: interior spots are just pencil on paper.
Speaker 4: So coming back to that has kind of been like
Speaker 4: a journey.
Speaker 1: I've been trying to get my daughter to use a
Speaker 1: u a, you know, an art pad with her Mac
Speaker 1: and she's just not that interesting. She likes to pick
Speaker 1: up paper and ink and she'll paint with anything or
Speaker 1: draw with anything in the real world, but doesn't seem
Speaker 1: that interesting digital. And I think, unfortunately people are going
Speaker 1: to expect her to know the digital side. So I'll
Speaker 1: keep hammering at her because no both right, why not?
Speaker 1: No both?
Speaker 6: You know what?
Speaker 4: So, like I learned how to use Potoshop on the job.
Speaker 4: Nobody taught me. I went to a super ledie art school,
Speaker 4: so you know, like that comes when it comes. If
Speaker 4: she wants to go into that direction, then that's fine.
Speaker 1: But like, no, she'll do it exactly like I say.
Speaker 1: Or no, I know what, I'm the most laid back dad.
Speaker 1: I'm ridiculous. Yeah, before you go, if you've listened to
Speaker 1: the show, you probably know what I'm about to ask. So,
Speaker 1: oh man, all right, guys, what's your favorite monsters?
Speaker 4: You go first?
Speaker 5: Black Shock?
Speaker 1: Okay, that's just so you any particular reason besides what
Speaker 1: you've already talked about.
Speaker 5: It really is that autonomous dog thing. It's like it's
Speaker 5: one of I like spirits that they show up and
Speaker 5: you don't quite know what you're getting from them. That's
Speaker 5: sort of tilt toward the spooky. But also like have
Speaker 5: all these really complex facets, and you know, I just
Speaker 5: like dogs.
Speaker 1: I know when I get from them, I get a
Speaker 1: twenty percent increase in speed amazing.
Speaker 4: Plus by agility.
Speaker 1: That's right, Sorry, go ahead, Yeah, I just like uh,
Speaker 1: I like dogs.
Speaker 5: I like spooky dogs. I like spooky dogs that you
Speaker 5: don't know what they're gonna do.
Speaker 1: There you go, spooky do spooky do?
Speaker 5: I like?
Speaker 1: Go ahead, Tiffany, your turn.
Speaker 4: I'm gonna go with cad Borosaurus. Yeah, I've always been fascinated.
Speaker 2: By the pleasea saurid type like sea serpent, family of
Speaker 2: sea monsters.
Speaker 4: But that was one of the first ones I remember in.
Speaker 9: The nineties there was all the like paranormal shows and everything,
Speaker 9: and that was one that I saw that was.
Speaker 4: Like, we found a body.
Speaker 2: There is a physical specimen, but some idiot threw it away,
Speaker 2: and I was like, I remember being like eleven years
Speaker 2: old just being like you more and like like I'm
Speaker 2: eleven and I'm going to tell you what's what this
Speaker 2: is for science? Listen, and so.
Speaker 6: Like I remember being that child and being like we
Speaker 6: have to go back, we have to get into their
Speaker 6: keborosaur's body, and so like that was like one of
Speaker 6: my first intersections of folklore and like interest in science.
Speaker 4: So it's like both of those were branching cats for me.
Speaker 4: Have those same times.
Speaker 1: So yeah, and I bet, I bet you use an
Speaker 1: art caddie all the time now.
Speaker 2: Honestly, like, whenever I go back to the crypto videotype stuff,
Speaker 2: that's one of the first like prompts that I start
Speaker 2: with is like, let's go back to ken Porosaurus.
Speaker 4: So yeah, we shirek some busted wheels out here.
Speaker 1: There's how many c stories are there about? Well, we
Speaker 1: found a body, we pulled it. It was really weird looking,
Speaker 1: but it's stank. We had to throw it back in
Speaker 1: the water.
Speaker 4: It was too stink. You better throw it in the trash.
Speaker 1: I was in the Navy. It's got to be pretty
Speaker 1: skank before say they would just throw it overboard itself.
Speaker 1: It does.
Speaker 5: It's true, it's true. There's actually that just reminds me
Speaker 5: of one one lass is actually an ozark story. But
Speaker 5: Ozarks are basically just the western apple Achians. For all
Speaker 5: offense and purposes. There's a story of of this big
Speaker 5: tusked lizard called a gow row okay that supposedly lives
Speaker 5: in the cavern in these like deep caverns and devils
Speaker 5: in th hole in the in the Ozarks, And somebody
Speaker 5: supposedly shot a couple and like shipped them off to
Speaker 5: the Smithsonian. But wouldn't you know it, they never showed up.
Speaker 1: And no, Yeah, how do they even stay in business.
Speaker 1: They're losing those things. They're losing giant human skeletons. Is
Speaker 1: there no quality control in the Smithsonian. It's ridiculous.
Speaker 5: Yeah, let's let's give them the benefit of the doubt
Speaker 5: and just assume that the roads weren't so great back then.
Speaker 1: Oh that's a good point. That's a good point. Yeah.
Speaker 5: They You know, if you want some interesting history for
Speaker 5: your local museums, Yeah, no, for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was gonna say, the history of the Smithsonian
Speaker 1: is really interesting. I mean, the amount of money that
Speaker 1: went to create it is astonishingly large. It's really amazing.
Speaker 1: And it was covered on one of the seasons of
Speaker 1: Connections of the series by James Burke, who is a
Speaker 1: historian and TV presenter, and it's I can't summarize it here,
Speaker 1: but I'll try to find the episode and put it
Speaker 1: in the show notes on YouTube or something, but it's
Speaker 1: really neat. I think it was like one of the
Speaker 1: shorter versions of maybe season two or season three. Not
Speaker 1: really important for this conversation, but I do like my
Speaker 1: museums and the history of how they become the way
Speaker 1: they are is fascinating to me. Well, thank you so
Speaker 1: much both of you for joining us tonight on Monster Talk,
Speaker 1: and congratulations on being funded. And I hope that you're
Speaker 1: able to take this and get a little more out
Speaker 1: of it and maybe get those hardbacks out. This is
Speaker 1: really cool and the artwork's beautiful and the writing looks great,
Speaker 1: and I haven't read the whole thing, but what I
Speaker 1: did read was really interesting, and so I'm really interested
Speaker 1: to see the final product.
Speaker 5: Well, thank you so.
Speaker 4: Much, Blake, thank you, thank you so much.
Speaker 1: Monster you've been listening to Monster Talk, the science show
Speaker 1: about monsters. I'm Blake Smith, and you just heard an
Speaker 1: interview with Asher Elbine and Tiffany Terrill, the creators of
Speaker 1: a new illustrated book project about Appalachian folklore called Anna
Speaker 1: O'Brien Ghost Days. A link to the kickstarter is in
Speaker 1: the show notes at MonsterTalk dot org. I hope you'll
Speaker 1: check it out and if it's to your liking, that
Speaker 1: you'll support it. But act fast, because it took me
Speaker 1: longer to get this episode out than I wanted, and
Speaker 1: there's not much time left on the kickstarter. A link
Speaker 1: to it and a bunch of other stuff that we
Speaker 1: talked about in this episode are at the show notes
Speaker 1: at MonsterTalk dot org. Monster Talks an official podcast of
Speaker 1: Skeptic Magazine, and the views and opinions expressed on this
Speaker 1: show are those of myself and my guests and don't
Speaker 1: necessarily reflect the opinions of Skeptic Magazine or the Skeptic Society.
Speaker 1: We hope you've enjoyed this episode of Monster Talk. Each
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Speaker 2: There was a dude I knew in art school who
Speaker 2: only made girls panties and that was his art. Like
Speaker 2: that was fine, Like fine, I'm sorry what he made?
Speaker 1: Panties?
Speaker 7: No?
Speaker 4: No, I didn't make panties.
Speaker 1: No, what did you say he made?
Speaker 2: There was some art school kid who was like, we
Speaker 2: were in a narrative drawing class and he kept making panties.
Speaker 1: Are you're talking about the undergarment?
Speaker 5: Yes?
Speaker 1: Okay, all right, just making sure, all right.
Speaker 2: Sidetrack, But I could keep I have more stories from
Speaker 2: art schools.
Speaker 1: No doubt, no doubt.
Speaker 5: I'm so glad I did not go to art school.
Speaker 1: I got to play a colicolo game with a bunch
Speaker 1: of artists from SCAD, which was I wish that was. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, they've owned a big school in Atlanta. It
Speaker 1: looks really really cool. Speaking of artists, I need to
Speaker 1: take a huge on yu wi uh