The Deerness Mermaid: The Best Attested Nineteenth-Century Cryptid

Simon and Chris dive into a rare cryptid case from Orkney where hundreds of witnesses saw a 'mermaid' swimming in the sea, sitting on a rock, snacking on fish and eels, and tending to her child. Stories of the mermaid went viral in the press. What in the watery world was the creature? Manatee, mutant seal, giant otter or, say it quietly, an actual mermaid? And why, after several years of summer visits to the bay at Deerness, did it vanish from the papers and from history? The duo trade notes about favorite cryptids. Chris goes off on a tangent about giant pink lizards, monsters in the nineteenth-century press and an escaped iguana, and she and Simon nearly come to blows over Cannock Chase and the supernatural/natural nature of unknown creatures.  

The source book for the episode is available here:  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Deerness-Mermaid-Attested-Nineteenth-Century-Cryptid/dp/1915574404/ref

Transcript

Simon: Well, Chris, good to be back with you. And I thought I would start by asking you about your experience with cryptids, the mysterious creatures that inhabit the greater knowns of the planet, be it forests, be it seas and oceans, be it mountains. Have you done much reading in that area?

Chris: I used to do quite a lot when I was a kid. I was really interested in the Loch Ness monster and more sort of the watery cryptids or the reptilian ones. I wasn't that interested in Bigfoot, although I was interested in the Minnesota Iceman that was supposed to be a frozen Bigfoot-type cryptid. But I've always been interested in the unusual ones, the land sightings of the Loch Ness monster or the giant frog the size of a goat seen by a diver named Duncan McDonald in the late 1880s. And we here in Ohio have the Loveland frog, 1972. It seems to have been a runaway iguana. I don't like to destroy people's mystery, but that seems to be the explanation. 

Simon: You said when you were younger, does that almost suggest that you went full in on the ghosts in the end?

Chris: Well, it's more I just kind of got bored with the cryptids because everybody was concentrating on Bigfoot. Today, of course, it's sort of TV's go-to monster, along with the Skinwalker, finding Bigfoot, chasing Bigfoot, the quest for truth. And I think werewolves are also having a moment. But there's just so much out there. And you can only look at blurry photos for so long. You'd like to see some proof this stuff really does exist. And I can't say that it doesn't because we have lots of examples from history, like the gorilla. So there are plenty of times when indigenous peoples told the invaders that, you know, here's a strange monster, and they weren't believed until somebody else actually saw them.

Simon: You became a little bit impatient. That's something fascinating about cryptozoology that isn't there, thankfully, in the study of the supernatural. That the whole point of cryptozoology, in the end, is to find that proof. It's to actually discover. When you find people who are interested in ghosts or fairies or these kind of things, you might get some eccentrics with ghostometers or whatever the latest machine is. But in the end, you don't need to do that.

Chris: The proof is simply not forthcoming. See all these videos where it's like, we have proof of ghosts because we photographed or we videotaped or something. It's like, I don't know what I'm seeing. What proof are we looking at?

Simon: And with this, we launch into today's episode. This is our first real attempt to include a cryptid in the program. And this is the Deerness mermaid, who no one will have heard of because almost no one has written about the Deerness mermaid in the last century. And the Deerness mermaid was a creature that was seen not just once, but repeatedly over several years in the 1890s. Chris, I suggested a short reading just to give listeners a flavour. I don't know if you have that to hand.

Chris: I do. I do. What is said to be a mermaid has been seen for some weeks at stated times at South Side Deerness. It is about six to seven feet in length with a little black head, white neck and a snow white body and two arms. In swimming, it appears just like a human being. At times it will come very close inshore and appear to be sitting on a sunken rock and will wave and work its hands. It has never been seen entirely out of water. Many persons who doubted its genuineness now suppose it to be a deformed seal. There are always people who doubt. It is an unfailing characteristic of this scientific and sceptical age. It seems quite clear that we have at last got a mermaid, as genuine as ever was, and a most considerate mermaid too, to come waving and working its hands at the very moment when Parliament has ceased to trouble.

Simon: That's a lovely introduction there. A few words on Orkney itself.

Chris: It's an archipelago off the north coast of Scotland. There's about 70 islands. Maybe 20 of them have humans living on them. Many of the islands are just breeding grounds for seabirds and marine mammals. There's a large seal population. At the time of the mermaid sighting, most people were farmers or fishermen. Orkney was under Norse rule and influence until the 15th century. Then the king defaulted on his king's dowry, so it reverted to Scottish rule. As you've noted, Orkney was, with Cornwall, the part of Britain that had the most folklore interest in mermaids. And as for other folklore, there's a lot that comes from the Norse tradition. The Traus, mischievous like a brownie or malign like a draugr. We've got an evil sea demon, the Nukuulavi. There's the Finmen, who might be Inuit in kayaks or actual Finns from Finland. There was also the Hogboon, which was a guardian spirit of a location like a farm maybe. These live in mounds. And the most important local folklore, that of the Selkies. These are the seal people who sometimes shed their skins and came ashore to woo humans. If you could hide the skin, then they'd be trapped in the human world. And there's lots of legends of female Selkies who had children with a human partner, but who abandoned the family when they rediscovered the hidden skin and plunged back into the sea. So there's also in the crypto realm, the strong sea beast. 1808, it was washed ashore and it was identified as a sea serpent. Now we think it was a decaying, basking shark where the gills and the throat tissues just decayed, leaving behind the head and the spinal column, which looked like a long sinuous neck. So those are some of the folklore aspects of Orkney.

Simon: And also for the history of cryptozoology, the strong sea beast is in some ways the start of the modern sea serpent craze that grows right through the 19th century. It's one of those moments where interest spikes in Europe. So Orkney is a fitting place to encounter the Deerness mermaid. I'm just going to try and concentrate on describing her. As I said before, we have lots and lots of witness accounts. And some of these witness accounts are really a very high quality and that there are clearly people who have experience with natural history who are looking at this animal and are mystified. You noted in your reading, Chris, that one of the special things about the Deerness mermaid is that she was never seen out of the water. And something I found interesting is the way that no one could really agree on her size. Estimates go from between 5 to 10 feet, which is quite a lot of difference really. There are very few references to her tail because her tail seems basically not to have been seen. I suppose it's even conceivable there was no tail. When she dived, she would just sink down into the water. And we know that she would spend five or six minutes underwater before resurfacing. This makes her sound like a seal. Also her habit of eating eels and fish. She was often caught having a snack. Sometimes she dived over and she would do one of those cut dives where the head dipped down, but very sharply. So again, the tail didn't flash up. I think the perhaps most unusual thing about her and that really caught attention though was her head. And I'm going to actually read a little bit of a description here because I've never quite understood what this head looked like and why it garnered so much attention. Locals watching were expecting a seal. And again and again, they say that the head did not look like a seal's. Here's one quotation. The head is large and tapering towards the mouth resembling in shape that of a polar bear. Okay. And then this is another quotation. The head and face are human like only that the jaws are described as protruding considerably. So that seen in profile, the face is like that of a pug dog or ape rather than a human beings. And then we have other descriptions saying that the head as a whole was like a pear. And I think that this was the locals way of saying it wasn't that typical fat seals neck where that almost seems not to be a neck. There was notably a neck on the creature. And when it swam, it invariably swam on its back. So it was facing the public out on the shore as it tried to keep up in the water. A final point. There's a lot of talk about its flippers. I say flippers because I'm assuming that's what they were. They seem to have been much higher on the side than is typical with a seal. And sometimes they actually waved out of the water like arms. In fact, it was frequently said that the Deerness mermaid swam like a human being. So it was almost as if there were elbows on the flippers. And there were even a couple of references to the arms going above the head, which reminds me of a description from 1809 of a mermaid in Caithness who was described as doing the same thing. Her arms went up over her head and this really struck the locals. 

Chris: Right. It really is a large number of witnesses. It's really too bad nobody took a camera out because it would have been possible to photograph the beast. A pear-shaped head, I would not have thought that that meant a narrow neck. I would have thought that it would be a pear set sideways making that polar bear profile. There was more of a narrow nose and wider place for the cheeks and the eyes.

Simon: Interesting.

Chris: What's interesting to me is that nobody mentions breasts, which usually we hear about with mermaids. Nobody mentions hair. And we know that seals often play around and have seaweed on their heads. They seem to enjoy that or it's been observed. So that's one explanation given for people seeing mermaids with hair, but that's not mentioned here. So it's an interesting point.

Simon: I think I can counter both of those just a little bit. First of all, it's true that there aren't typically references to breasts, but there is one description and it's a very well-informed description by an observer who clearly took his task very seriously and had a knowledge of natural history. And he said that there were breasts high on the body. Now this high on the matters because with a seal, of course, there are breasts. The seal is a mammal. The seal gives milk to its children. But like with a dog, the breasts, the nipples are much lower on the torso. And yet we have this one description that says, no, actually there are breasts there. The other thing that's worth noting as far as the hair goes, we have so many different descriptions that, of course, some discrepancies crop up. But there are some references to brown hair behind. It doesn't seem to be at all what we would expect of a mermaid with long, glistening hair coming down over the front. So I agree on that. With the breasts, I'm not so sure what's going on, given that one rather unusual description.

Chris: Yeah, I think it was almost like a ridge of hair on the back of the body. Okay.

Simon: And so we do have this very unusual creature. And I think it's just worth throwing one more thing in. You gave us this excellent introduction to Orkney. And you pointed out that there are many of these uninhabited islands that are just full of seals. And in fact, there was an important local industry of going out and clubbing seals. The people who lived on Orkney knew what seals looked like. They had a lot of experience with seals. Now, it's possible that the D&S mermaid was another type of seal, one that was not habitually seen in Orkney. And the fact remains that we should take the witnesses seriously. They saw seals in the sea every day. And yet right from the beginning, there is something about this creature that gets their attention and encourages them to say, this is not a seal.

Chris: It really is remarkable. And as you say, these are people that had millennia of experience with sea creatures. If this is unusual, they knew about it.

Simon: These are people who in full daylight, with expert knowledge of the sea, many of them, people who have been to sea as fishermen say, what on earth is that? One of the things I find most amusing about the D&S mermaid is that it reminds me a little bit of American TV series that I saw growing up where every year there was a new season and there was a new arc. And the D&S mermaid seems to have cropped up really in the very early 1890s, but every year there was something new to keep the reading public excited. And you've been through some of these records too. Do you want to give us just a bit of a sense of some of the adventures she had? 

Chris: Well, the initial sighting I think was in 1887 when the Deerness Farmer reported seeing the creature and his friends laughed at him, but it wasn't until 1890 that he could actually say, look, here's the mermaid and his friends actually saw it too. 18 August, 1890, the mermaid story broke in the British and Irish press, took until 4 September to reach the States. And this was that traditional silly season. This was after parliament was in recess and newspapers had to come up with copy. There wasn't any political news. The mermaid didn't appear for some reason in 1891, but in 1892, she was seen by hundreds of Orcadians and visitors, some very close up. And naturalists became interested. And one in Glasgow apparently offered 200 pounds for the mermaid alive, 150 for it wounded, and 100 for a corpse. So on 21 June, 1892, a Mr. Reed of Bribuster went out in a boat and shot the mermaid. It swam away, it sank, and everybody thought he'd killed it. They went dragging for the body. They couldn't find it. But the next morning there it was, and it was swimming about the usual place. Apparently most of the locals said they were firmly against touching, hunting, or killing it. Maybe believing that it was supernatural and would bring bad luck. And I love this. There was a quote the year after this guy shot the mermaid, dangerous as it is to meddle with the dancing grounds of the fairies, it is nothing in comparison to shooting at or annoying a mermaid or her baron and anyone so foolhardy as to interfere in her concerns or attempting to disturb her, must expect to find no luck in this world, but endless vexations and sorrow. Cows dying, pigs without fat, horses with broken legs, all their geese scanders, and themselves in the hands of the lawyers. The awful harvests of the last two years can be accounted for by the action of the Deerness farmer who shot at her.

Simon: Isn't that amazing? I just love that. But it's just a bit of history there because surely that's the last time someone wrote a letter like that to a newspaper in the English speaking world.

Chris: Maybe.

Simon: I mean, they've been saying these things for the previous 4,000 years, but to actually get it caught in print, this local supernatural explanation. Chris, you've hinted at something happening the year after with the Scottish word bairn in that report.

Chris: Yes. In 1893, there was a big new development. The mermaid was seen with a smaller version of itself, presumably a child. It was white in color. It was swimming in the same way. So that posits a breeding colony somewhere.

Simon: Yeah. I mean, this is really something that's worth stressing. So first of all, we now know without a shadow of doubt that the Deerness mermaid was female. And secondly, there has to be a breeding population within a good swim. There has to be another Deerness mermaid or man more likely around. So this is also an important part of the puzzle.

Chris: Let's see. By 1894, somebody wrote a play called The Deerness Mermaid and Orkney Burlesque. Now, this means a comic play, not a striptease. And after that, reports on the mermaid just sort of seemed to diminish, although it was reported as being seen in company with the sea serpent in 1895. In 1896, September, the San Francisco Examiner reports on the Orkney mermaid as if it was brand new, hot off the press news, you know, just recently seen. And it recoups all the stories from the earliest years. And that's the last mention we find in the States. The last report in the British and Irish press came in 1899. And so did the animal vanish? Did the press just lose interest? 

Simon: The last report comes from Orkney itself. And we see in the years before that there are fewer and fewer reports in the National British Repress. And it seems that by, I think it's 1898, we have the last report in the Orkney press of the animal actually being seen. And the report is just very much like the one of the years before. Yeah, it was out there, it's swimming around. Nice to see it again.

Chris: Yeah, yeah. Welcome back.

Simon: Yeah, welcome back. You know, it's the season. And then that's it. And my suspicion is that we see first of all, the British press losing interest. And then it becomes simply a local story. And in the end, probably the Orkney press lost interest as well. 

Chris: I wonder, you know, what would be the reason for not promoting it? I mean, presumably it brought tourists.

Simon: I think it was just an old story and old stories only do so much. And that report that you mentioned about the Deerness mermaid being seen with the sea serpent, it's a beautiful report written by clearly a very capable individual who was very observant. And yet I suspect that was just, what's the phrase that we use in modern TV shows? It jumped the shark. It was just, it was just a little bit too out there. And at this point, British editors said, okay, we're going to print this story. And then we're just going to forget the Deerness mermaid. This would be my take on it. In the end, I'm a loyalist with the Deerness mermaid. And I just like to think of her whiling away her years in relative peace in that bay. And so the happiest version of the story I can come up with is that the press just lost interest and she continued, hopefully with many young.

Chris: I wonder if anybody's looked recently.

Simon: Maybe a great-granddaughter is still there. Yeah. We've tried to avoid so far the question of what on earth the Deerness mermaid was, but we need to come to this. And before we do, I just want to tell you a little story that when I first became interested in this, I put together a source file. That source file is now available as a small book. I'll talk about this a little bit later. And I sent the source file to a marine biologist. I sent all the material to him and I was expecting, if I was lucky enough to get an answer, something along the lines of, oh yes, this is an unusual kind of seal. But instead he replied and he said, hmm, this sounds like an unidentified mammal. And I don't know with what care he read all the reports, but it's not the kind of thing that marine biologists spit up easily. And so with this, let's gently move into the question of what on earth the Deerness mermaid was. Chris, do you want to go first?

Chris:No. 

Simon: Well, look, why don't we do it like this? Why don't I give you some of the suspects? 

Chris: Okay. 

Simon: And then you can get all marine biologists on me and we can see. I mean, the explanations were relatively few, of course. One of the most popular explanations was that this was a manatee. This is a large mammal that probably in the early modern period off the coast of Africa and in the new world was understood by European sailors to be a mermaid. For example, Christopher Columbus famously saw mermaids. We suspect he may actually have seen the manatee. So think of a very, very big seal. Crucially, the manatee has breasts. Breasts at the human height. And so in the water, they do have that slight mermaid quality. Another possibility is that this was an ocean going seal. So it was an unusual kind of seal. And the couple of naturalists who commented seem to have reluctantly come to this conclusion that they acknowledge there were things that didn't work. So there are some seals that you don't find typically in Orkney, but further to the north you would find off Greenland, even Iceland. And so maybe one of these seals had come further down. Well, we have mermaids. Is there an unknown mammal in the North Atlantic? We also have the possibility of some manatee-like creatures who seem to have lived in the North Atlantic, not perhaps in historic times that we know of, but where there are fossil remains and the like that could be the explanation here. Perhaps one other slight variant we could add on this is that there are cases of seals breeding between species and the production of very unusual looking young. At first, that sounds quite convincing, but the presence of a baby suggests otherwise, because typically these seals are not then capable of breeding.

Chris: I guess I'm skeptical about manatees because they don't like cold water. They generally have very warm water habitats. Their faces aren't as pointy as this one seems to be described, and they're big. They're huge. I don't know if there's a smaller sub-variant of manatees, but this doesn't seem to be as large. Then we could think of Steller's sea cow, which also was an immense, immense creature, and that was supposedly extinct by this time, but there's always been rumors that it survived on remote islands. But again, it's very large, when I was looking at baby seals, they seem to have flippers that move more readily than they're not as up to the sides as adult seals. Is the arm movement something to do with it's an adolescent seal? But swimming like a human, that's a whole different thing. When they said swimming on their back like a human, I'm thinking of the backstroke where you don't have to bend your elbow. You're just sort of paddling.

Simon: I'm not really sure what's meant by that, swimming like a human, but on the back. I think it has to be some form of primitive backstroke, the kind that many of us do when we're in the water, but not really trying, that you're propelling yourself a little bit. You're more staying afloat than actually moving in the water. Chris, I agree with this. Manatees never been recorded in British waters. However, it has been pointed out that a number of creatures, including turtles that are from the same ecosystem have found their way across the Atlantic, probably after the mother of all storms or circumstances like this. The problem with a manatee as well is we need a breeding population. This really narrows the possibilities. And you also have this awkward fact, and we haven't talked about this yet, but she only appeared in the summer. She appeared around May, hung around, and then disappeared in September or October. Now that should mean that she is summering in Orkney and that she's going to Orkney as the weather is getting warmer. That would mean logically that she was spending the rest of the to the south. I wondered sometimes if maybe she was actually always around the shore of Orkney, but her behavior changed in the summer.

Chris: I was wondering about that too. And you're talking about swimming on the back. It's like, okay, the creature is swimming on its back. How come you're not seeing lower appendages? How come you're not seeing a tail or feet or something? 

Simon: I have this silly theory that, of course, Chris, I'm just sharing with you, and this is not to be circulated elsewhere, but that maybe the DNS mermaid was just a bit of a diva. And she seems to have enjoyed all the human attention. And I just have this idea that she's there swimming in the water saying, look at me, look at me, look at me. And she's looking up at the crowd of people staring down at her. I was expecting skepticism.

Chris: No, no, no. Because some seals are very happy to associate with humans, but that just triggered an idea. And I don't know enough about this to really make this a total assertion. Sea otters, because they love human contact. They are known to frolic around humans and seem to be attracted to humans. So nobody's talked about sea otters. 

Simon: Right. And sea otters can also be quite big. They certainly can swim on their back, though they don't do so habitually. Something that we've not really brought up here is the question of the colour. The colour wouldn't match sea otters. But again...

Chris: Albinistic. 

Simon Yeah. Okay. So we could have one, but then you have to explain why the younger one also has the same colours. It's a little bit like Green Children, where every avenue becomes a cul-de-sac. And again, with sea otters, we have to remember that the Orkney folk, they're not day trippers. They know everything that lives in the water. And they didn't just see this creature once at 11 o'clock at night with the northern lights above. They saw her constantly over weeks and months and years.

Chris: And it struck me as some tourists got into a boat and came very, very close, within a few feet, looking at this. So I don't know. It's how I wish there'd been a photograph. Of course, it would have been blurry and it would have been lost on the way when they were sending it to the Smithsonian. So no use.

Simon: Here we come to a wider question about cryptozoology, which has always fascinated me. And that was the way that we always come so close to this breakthrough discovery and then someone drops the camera in the water or the Iceman thaws, or whatever it might be, or gets lost in the post, like you say. To what extent should someone like ourselves, who is interested in the supernatural, in fairies, ghosts, etc, also be interested in cryptozoology? For instance, I know an Italian folklorist who is very emphatic on this. He says, cryptozoology is folklore. It's just the modern version of folklore. And if you study cryptozoology, you are studying folklore. Do you have views on this?

Chris: I do, to some extent. I just read an article about the dinosaur in the Congo, the Mokole Bembe. And this is fascinating, because locals said that it was at first a spiritual being, not a real dinosaur. But all that changed when the white man came to Africa, and they thought it was a literal flesh and blood reptilian. And it became kind of a piece with the people who were making models of the dinosaur for the Crystal Palace. So Darren Nash, who's a paleontologist and author, said that everything we now regard in this canon is based on European explorers, not what the actual people in the Congo said. They thought it was a spiritual beast. So we've got that kind of issue.

Simon: So in a way, you're backing up what you said earlier, when you said there are these few examples of creatures, like the gorilla, say, that's made its way into the canon of scientifically accepted creatures. And there it was the case that it was the opposite, that Europeans arrived, they didn't really believe this creature existed, but locals said, no, no, it really does. And sooner or later, they bumped into it.

Chris: Right. Yeah. So we've got the reverse here with this particular monster. Yeah, I find monsters to be really ambiguous. As I said, the photograph is always out of focus, or it gets lost in the mail. And okay, we could say it's the universal trickster at work. But let me go off on a little tangent about different types of cryptid reports, because I'm very familiar with the monsters reported in the 19th century papers. I mean, you've got the out and out hoaxes, the Fiji mermaids, the devil skeleton that came from Japan. And there's lots of pranksters pretending to be monsters. And then there's stories of monsters told in great detail, with witnesses who are real local individuals. And I've spoken to this before, and I'm baffled by some respectable judge or a minister or a politician would allow their name to be used in a fake paranormal or monster story. We've got boatloads of stories about the sea serpents. They were probably the most common silly season story. And there we're dealing with reports, as you say, from real individuals who knew what they were looking at. They might reasonably have good observational skills and a solid knowledge of local marine fauna. These were captains and fishermen and sailors. So I don't know what we're dealing with in some of those cases. But then we have these cases where the context has been misunderstood. And I always point to the story of the giant pink lizards of Ohio. They were said to live in a place called Catlett Creek Valley. This is Pickaway County, Ohio. Now, the cryptozoologist, Mark Hall, in his book, Natural Mysteries, identified Catlett Creek Valley as Skippo Creek. Now, a long time ago, I read his explanation, but I can't remember his exact reasoning for choosing that place. He and other cryptozoologists have stated that the pink creatures were described as about six, seven feet long, and they had large horns like a moose. They lived in Skippo Creek and were, quote, frequently reported by early settlers in the area. And they supposedly died out when a drought destroyed their watery habitat. Well, the story comes from a single source. It's titled, A True Account of the Giant Pink Lizard of Catlett Creek Valley Being a Tale of South Central Ohio Pioneer Days. This was by Erasmus Foster Darby, which was the pen name of David Webb, who created the Ohio Valley Folklore Series. He wrote some 200 folklore publications. But context is everything. He recorded some ghost stories. But generally, when he writes about animals, it's in sort of a jocular, homespun vein with titles like The Vegetarian Mosquito or Hyacinth, the Sweet-Scented Polecat. The pink lizard story is a tall tale. It's got an obvious temperance moral, because Webb describes the creatures in detail. They're pink. They've got these horns and things. They're sort of like the classic pink elephant seen by drunks. But there's a detail in the story that none of the cryptozoologists seem to have noticed. The settlers stopped seeing them because there was a drought that died up the water used in the local brewery or distillery. That's the context. And it's a part of a series of amusing and lighthearted stories. And I should note that the author repeatedly uses the phrase, folksy tales, in his titles and writes that they're based on local folklore. And that should alert us. Also, the point that he says a true tale, that's the dead giveaway.

Simon: Ron James, the American folklorist who's written also in the 19th century press and stories there, makes this point that was probably just bleedingly obvious to anyone back in 1880, but has since been forgotten. That many of these pranksters, among them Mark Twain, when they wrote these stories, would deliberately put in a line that an attentive reader would recognize, gave it away. And this business about the pink lizards and the drought not so much affecting their habitats as affecting the local brewery seems to be the relevant sentence here.

Chris: Right. It's a dead giveaway. And for some reason, this has been overlooked. And this story has spread into very respectable publications, encyclopedias of cryptozoology and stuff. And it's simply not a story of a true cryptid. It's just a tall tale.

Simon: So here we have a situation where cryptozoologists have not, in the end, practiced good source discipline.

Chris: Right. And unfortunately, I've seen in a series of cryptozoology publications, it's like they're citing themselves. And it's very frustrating to watch. But so much of the modern cryptozoology does seem to be modern. There's not a lot of history. I mean, I can see the possibility of a large animal maybe evading human contact and say, the Klamath Mountains, or the Almas, or the Caucasus, or Western Mongolia. But when there's sightings of Bigfoot in Kanak Chase, or in Ohio, where it's been dubbed the Grassman. The Grassman, it's called that from the large dens it supposedly makes out of grass and from its diet, which reportedly consists mainly of tall grass from Ohio fields. Well, we've looked at the pictures of these dens, and it's like, that's where deer bed down. That's all it is. It's not a giant hairy man. People report seeing these things.

Simon: Well, I wouldn't be surprised if people have seen the great pink lizards as well. Because of course, when something becomes a fact, it's out there, it's in the air we breathe. And so experiences start to be filtered through that. Let me come at this from a slightly different angle. I've been impressed in my time in Supernatural Studies by a number of writers who write about cryptozoology, but in a way cross the boundaries between Supernatural Studies and cryptozoology in a way that really, perhaps you and I can't claim to do. We're very much on the other side. And I think that increasingly, many of them seem to recognise that there are so many parallels with supernatural systems that this stuff has to be taken into account. And the person who has now become emblematic for me of this process is Joshua Cutchin, who has written these books where he says, oh, look, aliens are like this. Oh, look, fairies are like this. Oh, look, Sasquatch is like this. Oh, they're all quite similar, actually. This is a really interesting way to look at it. And I find the writing of this school, we should call them the Crypto Supernaturalists or something. The writing of this school is really interesting. One of the consequences of writing on this theme is it has freed up people to actually, in a way, start to take down notes of more cryptids and in more unlikely places, but giving space to modern folklore. Now, coming from a small island with not much wilderness, this has been a godsend because you now have lots of people saying, well, I was out in this wood in Nottinghamshire looking for wild men. And 40 years ago, a cryptozoologist would have said, you are absolutely out of your mind. But of course, if you say that a wild man is somewhere between a homosapien and a fairy, whatever that might mean, then suddenly activities like that start to make more sense.

Chris: Right. Well, I've been hearing a lot about Canic Chase. You've got black-eyed kids, you've got werewolves, you've got big cats, you've got Bigfoot, black dogs. And I saw this in Wikipedia. It says, however, no conclusive evidence has ever been produced verifying these claims, and they may be best thought of as forming part of local folklore. So it's like this new burgeoning modern folklore. We did have the alien big cat flap, though. Said cryptozoologists would laugh at people looking for wild men in the British countryside, but there were a lot of reports maybe 30 years ago on the alien big cats, and occasionally you still see them today.

Simon: But let me give you an example of that where I think wisdom can get you a lot further than eyewitness reports. I'm going to be quoting someone by name here, so I hope I've remembered this story correctly. A few years ago, I was in what we could call a Fortean or anomalist chat group, and there was a news report about how a lion had been seen on the edge of this small English town. So basically an alien big cat, and strangely no circuses or zoos had reported lions going missing. And so SWAT teams were brought in, the local police surrounded the area, and a news report was written, and it was shared in this group. Bob Rickard, who was the editor of Fortean Times, someone with impeccable credentials and experience, basically said, okay, we all know how this is going to end, and laughed about it in the group. And sure enough, five or six hours later, the police had finished their sweep of the area, and there wasn't anything to be found. Bob had already lived through that experience on other occasions as editor of Fortean Times. You know, five people have seen the lion, it's over there in that wood, the helicopters come in, nothing's there. So I just give that as an example of, can be best seen as examples of local folklore. I like that description very much.

Chris: As far as observation, I just wonder though, you know, what's triggering this? We know that, for example, high cortisol levels, when you're associating with stress and trauma, that can cause problems with visual perception, attention, memory, cognitive functions. So maybe being in a state of fear influences what you see, and what you remember. You know, something's moving in that bush, and all of a sudden you're on high alert, and you think you see something, or your brain is filling in the gaps to see a lion, or an alien big cat of some other kind.

Simon: I suppose that what you say is true, in that we are hardwired for survival, happily. And so that if we find ourselves in a certain place, and for whatever reason, we have some kind of trigger that suggests we might be in danger, it's very possible that we might see things that aren't necessarily there. But of course, and Chris, we've tried to cross this bridge many times and always failed. What's really interesting is what people see. And the fact that for a generation in Britain, everyone was seeing alien big cats. And, you know, what will be the next thing to come up on the bingo card, we'll have to see. But I like the idea of cryptozoology being modern folklore very much. I think a lot of cryptozoology within Western countries can safely be put into that category.

Chris: Yeah, I do agree with that. I have run across some writings, though, that where it's putting all crypto creatures into the folklore category, and basically deriding local peoples who have experience in the field. And they're seeing this, or they're reporting this, oh, no, that's just a folklore pattern. You know, you're seeing a hairy man, oh, yes, that's very typical of, you know, this kind of folklore, and sort of dismissing those people out of hand. So Richard Firth Green said something in his book on medieval fairies about, let's pay the people of the past the courtesy of acknowledging that this is what they actually believed in, instead of deriding their quote, unquote, superstitious beliefs.

Simon: Yeah, I agree passionately with that. I would just problematize it in one way. Earlier on, you were talking about this difference between, let's say, a spiritual being and a physical being. And I am not clear that the difference would always be easy to make for someone from outside going into an alien culture. And I suspect that in many of those cultures, the difference didn't exist or barely exist.

Chris: That may be true as well. Yes. Well, let me quote a friend of mine, Joe Citro from the Vermont Ghost Guide. This is about ghosts, but I think it applies to what we're doing here, too. He says, I know the tales are real. They have tenacity and power. They affect what we think and what we believe, though, at least for now, their subjects continue to elude so-called definitive scientific scrutiny.

Simon: Well, Chris, I really enjoyed that. Can we wind down with some further reading? Now, for the DNS mermaid, there is very, very little. I have an article that is waiting in the editorial queue at Fortean Times on what the DNS mermaid really was, not that I have any definitive answer. I'm also bringing out this source book. So if you go on Amazon and type in DNS mermaid, it will be available, or at least it will very soon be available. It's just going through the final stages of editing. And I think that's pretty much everything for the DNS mermaid. I don't know, Chris, if you have other things more generally on cryptozoology, maybe some favourite reads that you could recommend.

Chris: That one's a tough one. Now, I did read some excerpts from Tracking the Chupacabra, the Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore by Benjamin Radford. He has some good things to say about how these things get started. And he seems to have identified correctly where the chupacabra first got its start and the woman who saw it first, where her sighting came from, from a science fiction movie, oddly enough. So I think he's got an interesting way of looking at, as he says, fact, fiction, and folklore. So that might be worth looking at. Otherwise, I'm just kind of at a loss in terms of crossovers between cryptozoology and folklore. It seems to sort of harden into different camps. I do have lake monster traditions across cultural analysis. I find it disrespectful.

Simon: I'd love to hear about the disrespect.

Chris: I find it disrespectful to the indigenous peoples. He's very focused on the folklore, and he has lots and lots of patterns and things where this pattern follows. We have lake monsters who always live in a lake without a bottom, and the dead never are given up by the lake, and there's always a whirlpool. It's fascinating pattern matching, but I find it a bit disrespectful to the people who have actually told these stories.

Simon: But why disrespectful? Because it's outside their system of storytelling, or it's reducing it just to reason?

Chris: He seems to be just dismissing, you're all mistaken in what you're seeing, and you're seeing these things because it's some sort of pattern in your brain that is a universal pattern found in folklore across the world. So he seems to be dismissing the actual sightings.

Simon: So for you, it's again, to use Richard Greene's phrase, a lack of courtesy.

Chris: Right. Yeah. There's loads and loads of material there, and it's fascinating to see the different parallels of, oh yeah, the bottomless lake. Oh yeah, the dead never come back up. And there's a tunnel from the lake to the sea or things like you always hear about Loch Ness. So that's a good part of it. I just felt he gave scant courtesy to the indigenous peoples.

Simon: And I suppose I could just chip in. I already mentioned Josh Cutchin's works. His first three books, for me, represent that attempt to cross over following in the footsteps of books like Passport to Magonia.

Chris: I was going to mention Passport to Magonia and Jacques Vallée's work because he makes those same kinds of connections. And he was one of the first, I believe, or if not the first to make those. Yeah.

Simon: Well, look, that's a brilliant series of books for anyone who are interested. We just need something to play us out. And I've heard rumours of a 19th century poem about the Deerness Mermaid.

Chris: Yes. This is The Mermaid's Lament from the Orkney Herald, 1894. Oh, all ye Orkney maidens fair, come listen to my lay. I am an orphan mermaid, and I live near Mercaday, in Deersound's winding estuary where the great North Sea waves swing. Tis there I comb my long green hair and wring my hands and sing. Oh, I sing a mournful melody, for I am in sore distress.

I've lost my dear old mammy at the place called Tankerness. She was over gathering cockles and limpets for the tea, when a great sea snake came round the mool and carried her out to sea. Twin dingus show and bribester, I wander all the day. My hair, which once was deep sea green, is turning now to grey. Never again I'll be content to live on the Deerness shore, for I cannot forget the terrible sound of the great sea serpents' roar.