Supernatural Serpents: Flying, Milking and Shape-Changing Snakes

Chris and Simon lift the stone on a nest of ancient terrors, with bosom serpents, snakes on tombs and in graves, helpful household ophidians, and the medicinal horrors of Asclepius’s temple. ('It did what to you?!') Simon tells of his own blood-chilling encounter with a poisonous hisser, while fake snake women, flying serpents, and the perils of vino alla vipera slither revoltingly into the podcast. The duo bicker over cryptozoological creatures’ credibility and ask whether a snake can suckle on a breast or udder: the lap vs suck debate. Also fairies and snakes? Prepare to be amazed amid the Sicilian rosemary. 

Some biblio:

Boss snakes : stories and sightings of giant snakes in North America, Chad Arment

The bosom serpent : folklore and popular art, Harold Schechter

Towards a Critical Anthology of Pre-Modern Bosom Serpent Folklore, Davide Ermacora, Roberto Labanti, Andrea Marcon

Big Snake  The Hunt for the World’s Longest Python, Robert Twigger.

 https://richlandcountyhistory.com/2019/05/08/the-great-serpent-of-lexington/ [this needs to go up as a separate post on the page - wonderful story!]

http://hauntedohiobooks.com/news/creature-feature-the-mexican-mine-monster/

Superfluous snakes – snake showers http://hauntedohiobooks.com/interesting-people/11830/

A Woman-Eating Serpent: Hissssteria over Snakes

http://hauntedohiobooks.com/news/woman-eating-serpent-hissssteria-snakes/

https://www.the-daily-record.com/story/news/2012/08/19/when-wayne-was-whippersnapper-rogues/19462591007/

SNAIX: Vintage Snake Tales http://hauntedohiobooks.com/news/snaix-vintage-snake-tales/

For a superlative story of snake-terror, see “The Cat of the Cane-Brake,” by Frederick Stuart Greene.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/snake-wine-china-vietnam#:~:text=Although%20this%20concoction%20is%20often,from%20rheumatism%20to%20hair%20loss.

https://strongspage.com/places/chester-bedell/ [This and the next one could also be put on the page]

https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/2010/07/11/mike-harden-commentary-atheist-snakes/23668024007/

Transcript

CHRIS  It's the Chinese year of the snake, so I thought we should do something about snake folklore in Forteana, that sort of thing.  Have you ever had any experiences with snakes?  I don't know what kind of snakes you might have grown up with.

SIMON  Well, I grew up with no snakes.  This is the fact of living in a cold county in the north of England.  I grew up on a farm, I spent lots of my childhood and adolescence in woods, and I never saw a snake in that part of Britain.  And I think maybe in all my time in the UK, I saw one snake.  However, when I was in my early s, I came to live in Italy, and after some travelling around, I settled in Italy.  I've now been  years in Italy, and I have frequent snake experiences, including some rather unpleasant ones.

CHRIS  Are there poisonous snakes?

SIMON  Absolutely, there are poisonous snakes.  So when I go for a walk with my dogs, for instance, I have to be careful.  Some families have antidotes ready in the house in case a dog or a person is bitten by a viper.

CHRIS  Goodness.  So what kind of encounters have you run into some snakes?

SIMON  When I was newly married, we were sitting next to a swimming pool next to a Tuscan villa, because Chris, that's what people like me and my wife do.  I can't remember how we borrowed this swimming pool or we blagged it in some way.  And my wife became a little bit shouty because she'd seen a snake at the other side of the pool.  And here, dumb English man stands up and wanting to show his mettle as a proper husband, grabbed a stick and walked in the direction of the snake a little bit too quickly.  And I thought I would just scare it off and it would run into some hole next to the swimming pool.  And this snake just looked at me and then it began to climb into the air.  It reared up.  And so this four foot snake suddenly looked as if it was taller than me.  And it was in that attack pose that snakes have.  And at that moment,  generations of Simon going back to the Palaeolithic was screaming in my ear, you're about to die, you idiot.  And that snake taught me fear.  And since then, I have respected the Italian snakes I've run into.

CHRIS  Respect the viper.

SIMON  What about you, Chris?  Have you had many snake experiences?

CHRIS  I've had absolutely zero.  I was born in a year of a snake, one of the snake years, but we had a few garter snakes around the house.  Really never saw any.  We have three poisonous varieties in Ohio, two rattlesnakes and copperheads, but I never saw any.  And I spent lots of times in the woods.  So just somehow I haven't had much experience.

SIMON  So this begs the question of why on earth are we sitting down on a Sunday evening to talk about snakes?  Because I wonder how much they can really tell us about folklore, the supernatural, unnormal areas of interest.

CHRIS  Snakes are inherently scary.  % of people say they're afraid of them.  I think that's pretty close.  And I consider many of the snake reports in cryptozoology, for example, if they're not tall tails, then they seem to be sort of ambiguous creatures.  They flicker in and out of existence.  They leave trails behind the size of motor wheels, but they can never be caught by all the armed posses who are hunting them.  They figure in things like the reigns of snakes that Charles Fort wrote about.  People are always being changed into snakes by witchcraft.  There's loads and loads of magic spells using snake skins and other parts.  And I think that a case can be made that there is a lot of supernatural snake lore.

SIMON  So you're one of these heretics who actually sees cryptozoology as a form of the supernatural.

CHRIS  In some cases, yes.  I can't believe that there's not some physical creatures behind some of the reports that we're getting of, say, Bigfoot or something, a bear standing on his hind legs, obviously not all of them.  But they're just, as I say, too ambiguous.  They don't have a physical reality, and yet there are some physical signs that they've been there.  So where are they?  Where do they go?  People would say, oh, there's a portal.  I wouldn't know about that.  I'm not inclined to say that all these giant snake reports are either true or either false, because there's evidence on both sides, I guess.

SIMON  Well, it sounds like this question of cryptozoology could deserve an episode of its own, maybe in the future.  But for now, let's go a little bit deeper with snakes.  And traditionally, we begin with reading.  So do you have something to launch us into snakedom?

CHRIS  I do.  This is about a flying serpent from South Carolina from .  Last Sunday evening, just before sunset, Miss Ida Davison and her two younger sisters were strolling through the woods when they were suddenly startled by the appearance of a huge serpent moving through the air above them.  The serpent was distant, only two or three rods when they first beheld it, and was sailing through the air with a speed equal to that of a hawk or a lizard, but without any visible means of propulsion.  Its movements in its flight resembled those of a snake, and it looked a formidable object as it wound its way along, being apparently about  feet in length.  The girls stood amazed and followed it with their eyes until it was lost to view in the distance.  The flying serpent was also seen by a number of people in other parts of the country early in the afternoon of the same day, and by those, it is represented as emitting a hissing noise which could be distinctly heard.  Religious revival meetings have been inaugurated in all the churches, and many of them declare that the day of judgment is near at hand.

SIMON  Well, there are a couple of interesting points in this report.  I think we have two themes that you often come across in these uncanny experiences with snakes.  First of all, the size.  This is a huge snake.  Arguably, it's a snake that's just too big to exist.  We'll get to this in a second.  And the second thing is, of course, it's a flying snake.  And that is a surprisingly widespread idea.  You get a reference to this in the Bible.  We have a reference in Herodotus to flying snakes.  Lots of African folklore today includes snakes flying through the forest, this kind of thing. 

CHRIS  Yeah, there are a lot of reports from the United States, particularly the southeast.  And in some of them, the snake is, as they say, winding its way along in a snake-like manner without any wings.  And others say that maybe there's some little fins or something like that, or they're just sort of gliding.  So it's a very odd collection of reports, but it did seem to be popular theme, at least in the papers.

SIMON  Yeah, even I've come across this in much colder Britain in reports, the idea of flying snakes.  And there are two explanations that are usually given for this.  Snakes, when they attack, rear up, as I described before.  But some of them actually launch themselves, and they do leave the ground as they're trying to bite.  The second explanation that's sometimes given is that snakes do climb trees, and possibly they jump between trees, or they fall from a tree.  And glide is too strong a word, but they fall with style.

CHRIS  I wondered, it was just before sunset, and there was a hissing noise.  And I'm like, is it possible that this was some sort of Northern Lights being seen?  Because the Northern Lights sometimes makes a hissing noise.  But South Carolina is a little bit south for Northern Lights.

SIMON  I think that when I hear this, my first reaction is we have a drunk journalist.  Well, yes. CHRIS  But if I'm looking at supposedly rational, but yes, this is more likely to be just made up on a slow news day.

SIMON  Yeah.  This is what in the UK we talked about, penny aligners.  These are the journalists at the very bottom of the journalistic heap, who come up with this great material.  And editors love them, like you say, on slow news days.

CHRIS  Right.  This was, however, in the New York Times.

SIMON  Well, the New York Times never lies.  Yeah.  Okay.  I mean, one other thing I can add in just to make this brew all the more enticing is that there does seem to be a correlation between some hallucinogenic experiences and seeing snakes.  And there's an element in a couple of hallucinogenics, DMT.  And DMT is particularly associated with seeing snakes.  And I'm afraid my pronunciation here is going to be terrible.  I am the squarest of square when we get to drugs.  But I think it's Ayahuasca that particularly has DMT in.  And if you take Ayahuasca, you are very likely to see snakes in some form.  And there have been various explanations for this.  But one of the explanations is just that it enhances in some way what we see.  And floaters in our vision, squiggly lines, can easily, in those circumstances, be made in our lizard brain, suitably enough.  They can be made into one of the key elements in our evolutionary history, snakes.

CHRIS  Oh, that's fascinating.  I never thought of that.

SIMON  If we leave aside, perhaps, the couple of drunk reporters who made up reports like this, maybe one of the reasons we get this is people are in an unusual state and they see something travel through the air.  I find the issue of the snake looked as if it was moving like a snake in the air, very suggestive.  And I wonder if just something was zigzagging through the sky and the vision made it into something looking like a snake.

CHRIS  That's plausible.  The idea of taking a consciousness-altering drug, it goes very well with the th century idea that you were seeing snakes if you were drunk.  I mean, that was an expression that was often used.

SIMON  I didn't know that. 

CHRIS  You were seeing snakes or you had snakes in your boots.  So the snakes were definitely associated with mind-altering drugs.

SIMON  But here we come back to this question that you've already touched on nicely with your statistics, that a third of people are terrified of snakes.  And snakes do loom large in our consciousness.  But for instance, we've had censuses of dreams where different symbols from dreams are put together, and snakes come up a remarkable number of times.  And of course, any good Freudian would leap on the obvious interpretation there.  But snakes are, in terms of our dreamscape, something that people all around the world dream of.  We have a very powerful element here in our, let's say, unconscious.

CHRIS  Yes, exactly.  And if you want to get really out there, you could say that our fears of snakes are related to some primeval remembrance of when we walked with the dinosaurs.

SIMON  I mean, for me, clearly I'm not going along with the dinosaurs bit.  But if you're talking about primates in trees in Africa being terrified of snakes, I'm all with the Darwinians there.  I can imagine that that is passed down.  And let's not get into spiders now.  The spiders are the other creature that seems to have an early phase in our evolution of terrified the EBGBs out of us.  And lots of people have what could be said to be an unreasonable fear of spiders today, whereas little things like electric systems or falling out of high windows barely seems to bother us.

CHRIS  There was a reason to be afraid of those things, a spider or a snake.  So maybe that is something that's carried down.  I mean, there's been some recent work on trauma being passed down in genes, at least from grandparents and actually changing your DNA material.  So why not?

SIMON  I think also there's the even more boring Darwinian explanation that people who were scared of snakes tended to survive.  Clearly, this hasn't been important over most of the world for the last thousand years, but you can see there is a kind of logic with that.  And yet, Chris, let me counter.  If what we're saying is true, then snakes are an extraordinarily frightening thing in the supernatural.  And yet in lots of supernatural systems, snakes actually become quite benign.  They become pleasant, even motherly presences.  And my favourite example of this are the ancient sources about the temple of Asclepius.  Asclepius is the Greek god of medicine.  And I'm very interested in this because Asclepius experimented with dream therapy, more particularly incubation.  You would go along to the temple and you would pay for a place on the floor.  You would fall asleep and you would hope that the god would contact you while you were sleeping.  And once the lights had gone out, the attendants would open the snake doors and tame temple snakes would sliver over the people on the floor.  And we have several steles or inscriptions from antiquity where someone was cured by this process.  And I'll just give you two of these.  There's one guy who turns up with a bad toe that's become septic, very dangerous in the ancient world.  And so he stretches out on the floor and he dreams in the night that the god Asclepius comes to him and touches his toe with his staff.  But he says that the snake licked him.  And it's this process of the snake licking the injured part in the night that's supposed to make the difference.  And then there's another stele of a woman who is infertile and she comes to the temple.  And in her dream, the god Asclepius and behind him there is a snake and the snake makes love to her.  And then when she wakes up in the morning, she feels that she's a different person who knew.  And then she goes away and she has kids.  She's no longer infertile.  Here you're in a system, a religious system.  And there are other examples from around the world where snakes are a pleasant, benign presence. 

CHRIS  In Bohemia, apparently there were household snakes and I shouldn't even try to mangle this.  I think they were called hospodar, I think.  And they live behind the household oven or below the threshold.  And if you killed them, you'd destroy the happiness, the wellbeing of the whole family.  If the snake died, then the master of the house was going to die too.

SIMON  Yeah, this stuff is really well documented, particularly in the Baltic areas.  So what used to be the Prussian Baltic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, these areas here, we have really quite recent records to these house snakes.  Like you say, this very strange connection with the stove of the house.  And I used to think that these were somehow spiritual presences, a little bit like the Scottish brownie, but in Estonia.  But no, they were real snakes.  And there are descriptions of people feeding the snakes.  And apparently snakes can be quite domesticated.

CHRIS  Lots and lots of stories in the th century papers about, for example, babies getting attached to a snake and sharing their milk with the snake.  And of course the parents freak out.  But there's also been cases where a pet snake would jump in front of the baby and block a rattlesnake that was trying to attack it, that sort of thing.

SIMON  Yeah, lots of these ideas of snakes in the family.  I mean, I can't let you get away though with the sharing the milk because let's spell out what that means in the th century.  It means the baby suckles on one breast and the mother wakes up in the night to think, well, that's strange.  I have two babies, one on each breast, and I only have one child.  And she looks down and to horror, there's a snake there.  My colleague, Davide Ermacura, has written extensively on this.  The idea that snakes are milk stealers, not just from human beings, but also from cows, for instance.  So if you go into the barn in the morning and the cow has no milk in its udders, it's because a snake has been in the night.  And Davide did some quite impressive research.  And I can now tell you with his authority that snakes can lap at liquids, but they cannot suck.  So this is just an absolute non-starter, folks.  So please, no emails about waking up in the middle of the night.

CHRIS  These were not infant suckling babies.  These were toddlers who had a bowl of milk and bread and they would share that with the snakes that would lap at it.

SIMON  That's credible, but can we accept that the whole breast business is not?

CHRIS  Please.  Yes, please.

SIMON  Okay.  So immediately dispel this vision.  Well, Chris, I feel that as we're moving into the area of the human body, I'm going to hit you now with perhaps the most disgusting part of snakes in the supernatural.  And this is the bosom serpent.  Is there anything you'd like to add?

CHRIS  I've got stories of these sorts of things.  We had a woman in Ohio who supposedly died of lizards in her stomach.  And the coroner refused to have the doctors sign the death certificate to that effect, even though they supposedly actually did find lizards in her stomach.  But yeah, there's so many, so many stories.  But here's a favorite.  This guy, he was a farmer.  He had a live snake in his stomach that had been troubling for years, and somehow they got it out.  And now the snake has become a pet in the family.  Okay.  He says the reptile will twist and writhe in the jar in which it's kept and nothing will quiet it until they let it out.  And then it crawls out to a dish of milk set on the table, which it drinks almost like a kitten.

SIMON  Right.  So we have lots and lots of these stories in newspapers.  And whereas I referred before to drunk journalists, here I have no doubt many of these stories are based on real convictions of real people.  We have ideas going all the way back into the ancient world and indeed beyond that certain animals can take up residence in our body.  The term in folklore is the bosom serpent, and Chris with lizards has shown that it's not just snakes.  But let's say usually it is snakes.  Snakes are the typical animal.  And I could tell you lots of different stories here, but one that David is particularly interested in and that I'll share with you is what's sometimes called the pious fraud.  And it's really where technology and folklore hit each other at  miles an hour.  What happens is a woman turns up in a doctor's surgery and she says, doctor, I've had these pains for years in my stomach and actually there's a snake living there.  And the doctor, knowing his local rustic population, plays along with this and he gives her a purgative that will make her vomit.  And so after a little bit in the studio, this poor old lady bends over and throws up and the doctor throws into the pool of vomit in the pool, a small snake.  And so he's trying to cure her with a demonstration that the ordeal is over.  He's going along with the patient's fantasy.  She sees this snake and leaves and she's absolutely overjoyed.  But then a week later, she comes back to the surgery and the doctor says, but you saw we got rid of the snake.  And she said, doctor, I'm sorry, but before you got rid of it, it had babies.  And there are lots and lots of these stories about doctors trying to get rid of the snake and failing.

CHRIS  Well, I can tell you, I heard that same exact story  years ago from a woman who was a patient advocate for people who perhaps were from East Asia and had different beliefs.  And she swore that one of the doctors did exactly that and put a snake into the vomit.  So that was good news.  But it's just odd that that same premise would endure that long and actually in modern medicine.

SIMON  Well, when Davide listens to this, he'll be getting in touch, I suspect, Chris, because he hunts down examples of this story with great assiduity.

CHRIS  Well, there were also fraudulent snake eaters, so to speak.  I've got one from .  This woman was named Annie Brown and she was called the notorious snake woman.  She claimed that she had a snake that would come up through her throat and protrude from her mouth and then retreat back down to her stomach.  She was seen at some local infirmary and the physician, seeing the snake's seized her by the throat to prevent swallowing and made her disgorge the reptile, which proved to be nothing more or less than a piece of black India rubber.  She'd slip it down her throat and then move it up and move it back down.

SIMON  I feel that we should leave bosom serpents behind as quickly as possible because I'm not sure I can take much more of this.  Now, on your list of suggestions for snake folklore, where I was a little bit skeptical, there was one that piqued my interest and it is, and I'll quote your exact words here, snakes and graves.  What on earth are you talking about here, Chris?

CHRIS  Well, let's segue from bosom serpents to this by the story about a live snake discovered in a corpse's stomach.  In the process of embalming this guy, the undertaker was horrified to discover a live snake in his stomach, three to four feet in length, supposedly.  And they said it explained the unfortunate man's last illness because he had an inordinate appetite, especially for uncooked food, and a sensation of weight and uneasiness in the stomach.  But anyway, snakes in a grave.  We'll begin first with the story of Chester Bedell of North Benton, Ohio.  This guy was a real outlier.  He was a self-proclaimed atheist and everybody was scandalized by that.  His wife tried to force Presbyterianism on him and he began a whole crusade against the church and he was labeled an infidel.  So he had a bronze statue of himself made to be placed on his grave and he was depicted holding his anti-Christian creed, trampling a scroll labeled superstition, or some people said he was stamping on a stack of Bibles.  So he died in  and he was said to have challenged God on his deathbed.  If there is a God, he was reputed to have said, let snakes infest my grave.  Well, obviously God was not mocked, because the rumor spread that if you approached the grave, the ground would seem to writhe and churn with hundreds of snakes, common garter snakes, black snakes, copperheads.  And the faithful came from all over the United States to see these snakes proclaiming the truth of the gospel.  So were they real snakes?  Were they an optical illusion?  Some people said it was just the local boys catching snakes and throwing them on the grave and then hiding to see if people got frightened.  So it was a plague of serpents on his grave. 

SIMON  Does this grave exist?  If you look for it online, been there?

CHRIS  It does.  I have the Find a Grave reference, which we can put on our page.  Now his statue was taken away and hidden by his family, because they were tired of the old scandal, and people kept shooting the statue.  When you see it now, it's full of bullet holes.  People get upset when you challenge their religious beliefs in the area.  So I haven't visited the grave.  I'm not sure if I would tread lightly or not.

SIMON  But you suggested, Chris, that this wasn't the only example of this.  There were other snakes in graves?

CHRIS  This is a really interesting story, because there's so many variations of it.  There was a young woman, in the first article I found, she's just called Miss Lorch.  She was lowered into the grave, and a black snake, a large black snake, crawled through the mourners and fell into the grave onto the coffin.  And many of the superstitious people there regarded it as an omen of evil.  They went home, and a short time later, Miss Lorch's brother was stricken and died without regaining consciousness.  And he'd only been married a week before.  His father-in-law, when he tried to revive his son-in-law, also went down, and he was in critical condition, supposedly.  So what's interesting about this is that they said that snakes had been found frequently at the cemetery before.  On a recent occasion, a number of boys found  near a grave and killed them.  That's an awful lot of snakes.  But nobody wanted to touch the snake.  It'll bring bad luck.  And they wouldn't touch it, so they just buried it alive, although I'm sure it could dig itself out.  But what's interesting is that the snake was described as an evil omen, and the people died.  The names of the people change with the different syndication of the article.  First she's called Lulu Lorch, and then she's called something else.  And Louise, and Emily.  Also you find that the snake is described as just a dark cloud gliding into the grave.  And in one case, it was just the brother died of grief, and the snake isn't mentioned.  So it's kind of an interesting sequence, if you can read all of the articles.  But supposedly it was a four-foot-long snake, wriggled through the crowd, and darted into the grave, and it refused to be dislodged from the coffin lid.  The young man, the brother of the deceased, did die almost immediately after that.  I have that documentation.

SIMON  The only example I can give you of snakes in an underground place like that is from popular culture.  I think the first Indiana Jones film, the joke that Indiana Jones hates snakes, and he ends up in this underground tomb, and doesn't he say, oh my God, it's snakes, not snakes, anything but snakes.

CHRIS  Anything but snakes, yes.  And they're everywhere.  Yeah.  And then one ends up in the airplane cockpit.

SIMON  Well, I don't have snakes in graves.  I suppose I can throw at you, this will be fairly tame by your North American standards, but there are a series of folk stories from Europe of people, and particularly women, who turn into snakes.  The most famous example is, and I never know how to pronounce her name, Chris, but Melusine, who is the head of one of the French noble families from Aquitaine.  And her husband marries her, she has children, but she forbids him to see her naked while she's dressing.  And at one occasion, he does so and he sees that part of her body is like a snake.  And at this point, she escapes and there are different versions of the story.  And there are lots of European examples of this, including remarkably from the North of England, where, as I say, snakes just aren't that common, where a beautiful woman is in some way has a serpent identity.  And to be married, the husband needs to get over this in some way.  And usually by doing that, she then becomes a normal human being and the marriage proceeds and they have children and so forth.  And then, of course, there are very exotic examples of this at the other end of Euro-Asia.  There are all the Nagas in the Sanskrit word, but one that has travelled very, very widely with Hinduism and Buddhism, the idea that some people can become snakes or that snakes can become people, an idea, of course, also that's very powerful in Hindu nations of reincarnation.  So, Chris, do you have anything to add?  Because what disappoints me about these stories is at least in Europe, they're not, they're folk tales.  They're stories about a distant past that never was.

CHRIS  Well, I've got one from, let's see, where is it, Pennsylvania, I think, a farmer and his wife and three daughters somehow got on the wrong side of a witch.  And she took her revenge.  When visitors came to the house, the girls, without any warning, whatever, would suddenly be changed into snakes and be crawling back and forth along the top ridge of the paneling and then they'd be restored to their natural form.  And it says, this curious transformation occurred quite frequently and the circumstance soon attained widespread notoriety.  About the end of the third month, the spell was broken and everything went on as before.  So what do you make of that?  I mean, that doesn't make any sense.  But we do have people known as snake women.  Here's another one that's probably from a drunken journalist.  This comes from  and the article is headed, Hunt Animal Half Snake Half Woman, Mountaineers to Search Moonshine Region for Strange Human Creature Who Resembles a Reptile.  A mountaineer on a visit to Jamestown, Virginia, said that he claimed to have actually seen this.  He said, there's tales of a wild woman with the skin of a snake who traveled upon the ground like a reptile and subsisted on living prey.  So supposedly they were just tall tales.  But these guys were convinced that it was a real person.  This guy says he's seen her.  She's more like a snake than a woman, said she's about  years of age and so she looks so much like a reptile she might be regarded a missing link between it and the human race.  More like a snake than a woman.  She's covered with a scaly skin, sheds it twice a year and glides among the trees and rocks looking for prey.  He's seen her eat these things alive, swallowing them like a reptile.  So there were several articles about these guys going to try to capture the snake woman.  And it says that the snake woman's mother still lives in the area and is regarded as a witch by her neighbors.

SIMON  But I love the fact that they were so closely observant that they tell us that she sheds her skin twice a year.

CHRIS  Yes.  Now, here's the kicker.  The weird snake woman whose capture in the wilds of Virginia was recently recorded in the newspapers.  She's now being shown as a curiosity.  We should have seen this coming.  We should have seen this coming.  And this was at the Jamestown Exposition in .  So we should have seen it coming.

SIMON  Well, I'm impressed that the U.S. has been able to create these wilderness stories about snake women.  It reminds me of some of the wild men in the U.S. stories I came across, where occasionally there were references to people actually beginning to leave their human form.  And I remember one from Florida, I think it was, where someone actually had gills because they spent so much time in the water.  So the same principle there, I suppose.

CHRIS  It could be.  There were also hermits who surrounded themselves with reptiles.  So they called them, you know, the snake woman or the snake man.  There was one, this was reported in , and she lived alone with these snakes.  And those who found her, they said her dead body was literally covered by a writhing mass of snakes, which they had to be killed before they could be removed, for they turned viciously on all approaching the remains.  On her heart was found coiled a giant rattlesnake.

SIMON  But doesn't that remind you, Elizabeth, Chris, of some modern stories of so-called cat women?

CHRIS  Yes, it does.  Because all of these women that they were reporting on had lots and lots of snakes and took care of them, and they bonded with the snakes, apparently.

SIMON  My guess would be if you wanted to chase that story further back, you would find it in some of our th and th century stories about wise women and their familiars.  The box under the bed where the toad is kept, this kind of thing, interesting.

CHRIS  You don't hear that many snake familiars in the th and th century witch stories, though.

SIMON  I can't think of any.  I can think of toads.  I can think of mice.  I can think of big beetles.  I can't think of a snake.  It's a curious...  I mean, do we have there the island phenomenon where there are no snakes, and in Britain at least there were almost no snakes?

CHRIS  That might be, that might be.  But another omission I was kind of shocked to find is I couldn't find any snake ghosts, no phantom snakes.  I mean, you had phantoms in the sense of you were imagining them because you were drunk, but no actual serpent ghosts.

SIMON  Look, I'm not surprised we don't have serpent ghosts, but I'm surprised, I've never thought of this, but that snakes don't appear in shape-changing traditions in Europe to the best of my knowledge.  In other words, when you have that strange creature who becomes a headless bear, then a rolling wheel, then a bag, then a fire, then becomes a horse, then becomes a giant rat, it has quite a big repertoire.  I've never, I think, come across a snake in that repertoire, but I've come across birds, I've come across fish, but I can't think of any example of snakes.  And in fact, the only examples I can think of now are not with shape-changing, but with exorcisms.  This has to be connected to the bosom serpent complex, but sometimes there's the idea that the priest drives out the demon and at a certain point, a snake emerges from one of the orifices of the body.

CHRIS  Speaking of people turning into snakes, we do find a little bit of the prenatal influence, the maternal influence stories.  I had a woman in Ohio, her complexion was darker than her parents.  She had kind of an olive skin and she had a real affinity for snakes.  And in fact, she became a snake charmer in a circus.  And she claimed that when her mother was pregnant with her, she was terrified by an immense black snake that chased her and that the shock darkened her skin and gave her a strange power over snakes.

SIMON  And so here, Chris, we should kick in that there is this longstanding belief, not just in Europe, but throughout the world, that if a pregnant woman has some kind of shock, that this can influence the development of the fetus and it can, in extreme cases, actually, the fetus begins to mirror whatever the cause of shock was.

CHRIS  Have you got any connection of fairies with snakes?  I've seen only one single reference to that.  And that was that in Sicily, Rosemary is beloved by the fairies and the young fairies under the guise of snakes lie concealed under its branches.

SIMON  Now, I've never come across this.  Obviously, in some traditions, there is the idea that fairies take on the form of animals.  I've never come across a fairy taking on the form of a snake.  No, that just sounded odd to me.  Of course, another area of the snake supernatural and snake folklore are the many, many charms.  And here, even in Britain, we have some examples.  I bet you have a huge number in your compendium, Chris.

CHRIS  Well, I have some.  And as I was researching this, I was glancing through an old Fortean Times from  and ran across a story about this Chinese man who was unexpectedly bitten by a venomous snake when he opened a bottle of medicinal wine.  Apparently, there's this thing called snake wine.  The more venomous, the better.  You put the snake into rice wine or grain alcohol.  The snake's essence is said to enter the wine and supposedly the venom is neutralized by the alcohol, but there's some doubt about that.  And it's used for various medicinal purposes and as a virility enhancer.

SIMON  Absolutely.  This is the case in Italy.  In the Alps, there is what's called grappa alla vipera.  And what you do is you get a viper in a bottle.  You fill the bottle with grappa, so it's very strong spirit.  The snake passes on, let's say, and passes on its poison into the grappa.  And then two or three years later, you have this very potent mix.  And it makes for incredible photographs because you see the photograph of the bottle with the viper inside.

CHRIS  Yes, I've seen the photos.  Well, apparently, they're not completely sealed.  And so snakes can become dormant and they can survive in these conditions for several years.  And this isn't the first recorded attack on somebody by a wine snake.  Apparently, there were other incidences in , , but this guy survived after hospital treatment.  Thank goodness.

SIMON  I wonder if the snake survived.

CHRIS  Yeah, did the snake survive?  I doubt it.  But snakes, it's the usual, the skin of the snake that bit you.  If you were bitten by a snake, you're supposed to put the skin of the snake on or the fat of the snake on and see if it will cure you.  Rattlesnake skins were supposed to be anti-witch specifics.  There's an interesting belief that a snake never dies till sundown.  If you kill a snake, it's going to linger until darkness comes.  The rogue who wears a snake's head sewed in his hat will never suffer long imprisonment.  And if you wear a bracelet of the skin of a black snake, it'll bring you good luck and fortune if you're a gambler or a sporting man.

SIMON  There is an interesting tradition from Western Europe, and it's probably Celtic in origin, of what are called snake stones.  Have you ever come across this, Chris?

CHRIS  The beazoars that are supposed to keep you from being poisoned?

SIMON  I mean, they have various qualities.  And in fact, you reminded me of it because in our earliest source, we learned that snake stones stop judgments going against you.

CHRIS  Hadn't heard that part.  I'm familiar with these stones used as an antidote for poison.  It's also supposedly it's bad luck for a young man to give his sweetheart a snake bracelet or ring.  She will have bad luck whenever she wears it, which is interesting.  Queen Victoria's engagement ring was a snake.  So it's very popular on mourning rings, though, to have snakes with its tail in its mouth, Ouroboros, I think that's how it's pronounced, symbol of eternity.

SIMON  We've been through the universe of snakes, and I have to say it was rather more colorful than I expected.  But what about our poor listeners who are desperate for more snake stories, but will soon be saying goodbye to them?  Where can they pick up on snakes?

CHRIS  Oh, there's a wealth of information out there.  One of my favorite books is Boss Snakes, Stories and Sightings of Giant Snakes in North America by Chad Arment.

SIMON  Oh, I love Chad Arment's work.  That is a book I will get.

CHRIS  You need to get that book.  And then I was rereading the other day Big Snake, the Hunt for the World's Longest Python by Robert Twigger.  Very, very entertaining because there was actually a reward out for the longest python that you could find.  Let's see.  Now, this is more in the folklore remedy, Towards a Critical Anthology of Premodern Bosom Serpent Folklore by Davide Ermacora and Roberto Labanti and Andrea Marcon.  And I have several other newspaper and posts that I've done on snakes.  I did one on a woman supposedly eaten by a snake in Japan and done some work on the snake showers and other vintage snake tales.  So we'll post some of those on the page.

SIMON  And above all, our Facebook page where all good people come.  Now, Chris, I have a couple of other books I can throw in.  There is a book called Snakes, the Facts and the Folklore by Hilda Simon.  And this dates back to the s.  And I have to say it was a little bit disappointing.  I was hoping for more.  It seemed to be more about snakes than about folklore, really.  And another book which is in the same category, more about snakes than folklore, is Diana Morgan, Snakes in Myth, Magic and History, The Story of a Human Obsession.  It does have some nice material, but again, perhaps not the wide ranging book I hope for.  And of the books you mentioned, the one that I'll be rushing out to order is the Chad Armand book, because I have his book on wild men in the th century.  And I learned a lot from that.  I think he's someone with a real flair for chasing records down.  So that will be something that I enjoy.  And with that, we have the dilemma then of how to wrap up today.  Do you have anything for a final reading?

CHRIS  Well, I do.  This came from a doctor that I'm acquainted with.  And she told me this story.  She worked part of a residency in the gynecology department of a free clinic in a large Midwestern city.

SIMON  So this is not going to be a story that you read out.  It's going to be a tale that you tell.  You're passing on folklore directly.

CHRIS  There you go.  So this was told to me by a friend, not of a friend, but a friend.  This young teenager came to the free clinic complaining of a fever and abdominal pain.  They started her on antibiotics.  They did a scan of her abdomen.  And it revealed not what was expected.  They thought maybe it was an ectopic pregnancy or pelvic inflammatory disorder.  But there was a snake's skeleton coiled in her uterus.  The doctors couldn't believe their eyes.  And surgery, of course, had to be performed to clear out the infection.  The uterus, complete with snake, was removed.  And when the doctor left the residency for her next post, the snake's skeleton was on display in the doctor's lounge, framed.  No explanation was ever given.  And I really don't want to know.