Fiftieth Anniversary Episode and Listeners' Questions

It's been 50 glorious episodes of nattering and squabbling and dramatic readings about all forms of the supernatural!  Chris and Simon reminisce fondly about how they first met (it involves a baby, a settee and an unfortunate accident). The duo answer questions from readers: when can we expect Fairy Census 3? What is the origin of the phrase 'fairies at the bottom of the garden'? Why does Simon hate Gef? What are Chris' favourite horror reads? They reveal their favorite episodes, share some ideas about supernatural encounters, and discuss 'Is Bigfoot, known to braid horse's manes and take food offerings just a large hairy fairy?' They also give an honest answer to the question of whether they have actually encountered a fairy/boggart/leprechaun... Tune in to find out!

Transcript

Simon: Well, welcome to our 50th anniversary. Chris, it's been an amazing, what, four years? Oh my gosh. Does it feel like 50 episodes to you?

 Chris: No, it absolutely does not. It's like a couple.

Simon: For me, it feels like 25. And I was looking back over the list of the episodes we've done, and I have to say there are several I can barely remember.

Chris: We put it out there and then we move on to the next.

Simon: We've had a number of questions sent in for this episode, some by email, one in person, and most, I think it fair to say, from the Facebook page. And I thought I would start with this one for you, Chris, from John. John asks, how on earth did you two actually meet?

Chris: Well, we haven't actually met in person, unless on some astral sphere somewhere. I can remember the first time, I don't even remember how I got to the Beachcombing blog, but it was in 2011. And the first episode or first blog I read was Mary Anning and the Fire from Heaven. And you opened up with this thing about you were in disgrace for accidentally sitting on 10-day-old Tiny Miss B.

Simon: Oh, my God, I remember that. That really happened.

Chris: Yeah, she was wrapped in a duvet on the sofa, and you just sat down on her.

Simon: It was awful. I can still hear the scream.

Chris: Oh, no. So that kind of grabbed me, especially with you went on to talk about Mary Anning, who was hit by lightning, and that supposedly triggered her genius. And then you mentioned at the end of it, you said something like, perhaps in 50 years time, the good villagers of Little Snoring will be saying of Tiny Miss B. She always had such a vacant look before her father sat on her. Oh, my God.

Simon: I can't believe I wrote that.

Chris: And that just captured me. It just captured me. But I can't remember when I first wrote into you with a comment. I think it might have been, I went looking and I couldn't find it. I think it was about an explorer who was dazzling some indigenous peoples in North America with a Chinese Mandarin robe. But as one does.

Simon: My memory, my first memory of you, Chris, is that this complete stranger wrote to me after a blog post. And it was some information, I think, about Mary, Queen of Scots. And I wrote back and said, but what's your evidence for this? And I just got 800 words of carefully sourced, very Swiss style. And after that, let's say you had my attention.

Chris: Relentlessly informative, I think is the term you're looking for.

Simon: From the very beginning, but relentlessly well sourced as well. Let's not forget. I do my best. Okay. So look, we've got a series of questions here. Now we're going today to go through readers questions. We certainly won't get to the end. I think there were 40 odd questions, but we've put a few of them up here and at least if we can do several. So what's next up on the list? This is from Arthur P and this is from our Facebook page. Have either of you had any personal supernatural experiences? You first. I was hoping you'd take that one away. So in my life, I have had a number of experiences that I think some people would describe as being supernatural, but that I consider to have been audio or visual hallucinations. So in other words, I'm quite sceptical about what the human brain does. 

The word hallucination though, can sound a little bit derogatory, and I don't mean it to. And I think of these episodes in my lives as being moments where I was effectively dreaming while I was awake. And in the same way that I find dreams endlessly fascinating, I suppose for that reason, I find these experiences endlessly fascinating.

Chris: I can say I've had some. There's a sort of a genetic strain. My grandfather always knew when people were going to die, and he would also walk into a house and just sort of stand there. And my aunt would say, what are you doing? I'm just checking the temperature of the house. He was just trying to get the feel for the house. So I've inherited some of that.

Simon: Did you know your grandfather?

Chris: Yes, I knew him well. Very sensible engineer, sort of a fellow. You wouldn't think he was a very mystical type person, very practical. But he did have that ability. And apparently, his father had the ability to see ghosts, as he did. He was walking along some road where he lived, and he told everybody about this, that there's this guy that just sort of hangs around this one lamppost. And I say hi to him every night, walk by. He's a ghost. And he didn't know who he was, or he didn't say who he was. So it was just that kind of a sort of a matter of fact, having those kinds of experiences. I don't talk about it too awfully much, even though I've written some books about ghost experiences, because people look at you funny.

Simon: I've noticed that in our podcast episodes, maybe in 50 episodes, been two times that you've talked about an experience you've had. One that I particularly recall was you getting Pixieland in a car.

Chris: Right, yeah. Pixieland in Blanchester, and I think Worcester, or maybe it was Lebanon. Yeah, I mean, I've driven so far around the state, and there were just a couple of places. It was I can't get out of town. I'm circling and circling and circling, and it's like, turn those pockets inside out, and then, okay, I'm out. And I don't know why. There's just a couple of places in Ohio that have that effect. Now, this comes from Boggart Stones, this next question. It finally happens. You're out one day, and finally and irrefutably encounter a fairy, boggart, or leprechaun. It's right there in front of you. It's not a trick of the light. What do you do? I run the other way myself.

Simon: I think that studying the supernatural teaches you, if nothing else, that these are potentially dangerous experiences, and you should probably be somewhere else. So, is there some kind of consensus there? 

Chris: I think so. I mean, there's centuries of fear-based folklore about this. So, be sensible.

Simon: I did once tell a story on the podcast about the time I was walking in the wood at night. Do you remember this? So, I live very close to a haunted wood, and in the 15th century, the Madonna was seen there by three young girls. And one night, I was walking through the dark, and I'd just come up to a cross on the road. There's literally a seven or eight foot cross. And I suddenly saw out of my peripheral vision, this gigantic woman dressed in blue, walking towards me with her face just lit up, this angelic light coming out of her face. And I found my gut reaction really interesting. I just screamed, Christ! And reached out and touched the cross, and then looked, and it turned out to be a very tall Dutch nun who was staying in the monastery. And she had gone for an evening walk, and she was reading the rosary on her cell phone. This was why her face was all lit up. But I remember the fear from that experience, and it was probably quite well grounded.

Chris: Well, given the history of the place, I mean, you had reason to think that this might be something unusual.

Simon: That's right. This is from another Facebook reader, Zigzag. And I like this question a lot. I was wondering this afternoon what you would make of this. What would you say to a sceptic who thinks supernatural folklore is complete rubbish and sees no value in researching it?

Chris: Well, I have always said, I'm not trying to convince anybody of the reality of either ghosts or whatever supernatural creatures. They can be enjoyed as just oddball glimpses of history, as real stories, or just as something to give you the shivers. And I've always said, I can't prove one syllable of the ghost stories I've researched or experienced. But one reason to research supernatural folklore is to study how people react to the unknown or to the scary. I've said before that I think that there's some part of our brain, a very old part of our brain that almost requires a dose of the mysterious to stay healthy. We always need something that's a mystery, that's unknown. But that's just a theory. It's well above my pay grade, really. 

Simon: I think the problem with this episode is it sounds like we're going to keep agreeing with each other, which is really out of character. Oh, no. Yes. What can we do? Yeah, I go along with everything you've said there. When students ask me about studying fairies or studying ghosts, and I want to be a serious professorial teacher, I always say, look, I don't study fairies and I don't study ghosts because I don't think you can. I don't think they're amenable to study, but you can study beliefs.

Chris: Yes. That's the thing.

Simon: You can study beliefs as a historian through time and they give you insights into human beings. And I think you could be Richard Dawkins. You could be an absolute aggressive materialist and yet still find the study of the supernatural interesting. And I just make a final nod to that very important thing that you said, that we will always be like this. We will be on our spaceships near Alpha Centauri and we will still be seeing ghosts and fairies. It's not going to go away. It's just part of who we are. And so whether you're a believer, an agnostic or an outright skeptic, this is something that is well worth studying.

Chris: Well said. Let's see. Leah says, what was your favorite Boggart and Banshee episode ever?

Simon: I've got an easy answer to that. It was actually one of your crazier episodes. So for listeners who don't know, we take turns choosing the topic and Chris chose time slips. And I really thought, oh my God, what science fiction guff is this? And yet I remember having two fabulous weeks leading up to the episode because I just started reading all this madness and there's some really great stories. But again, as a historian, you could trace not just the phenomenon, but the history of the idea. And so I found that really interesting. If I can just squeeze in as well, my favorite moment from an episode, I think it was in your readings. As we know, your choice of readings is somewhat controversial, but twice you have actually read out one of your poems. And I really love those. And I think I particularly like the Green Children one.

Chris: I was just thinking about that one this morning. I was pleased with that. It's, you know, if I can't come up with a good, you know, we've said everything we can say about the thing and it's like, okay, let's just make up a poem. And I've got a whole collection of Fordian poems that I probably should throw out there. So my favorite episode, I liked the Byland Zombies and the Caesarius as a proto-Fordian, the medieval ghost stories. I really enjoy those. But I did like the Timeslips episode also, because that kind of thing really interests me.

Simon: I've been getting some emails from listeners and also on the Facebook page, some people put up their favorite episodes. One of the things that heartened me was that no one agreed. Not a single person said the same thing.

Chris: Excellent.

Simon: Exactly. It means that we must be touching different bases in different episodes.

Chris: Yeah. I need to ask this question and it came from Dorian. Why does Simon hate Jeff, the extra clever little mongoose?

Simon: So this is a, can we call him a mammalian poltergeist from the Isle of Man. Is it 1930s, Chris? Yep.

Chris: Started in 1931.

Simon: It's a story that hits my boggle factor, the boggle factor being when you just stop taking things seriously. And I'm very much into poltergeist, but when they start writing, speaking through walls, being photographed, and when there's a rather temperamental young adolescent on the property, I'm afraid my faith goes out of the door. And I know that sooner or later, we're going to be doomed to an episode on Jeff, but it won't be me who chooses him. Chris, let me turn the question around. Why do you like Jeff so much?

Chris: I'm fascinated by talking poltergeists. I'm fascinated by the way that they follow this pattern where they start rapping and then they start scratching. And then some of them eventually start talking or they leave notes, that sort of thing. And whether it's fake or not, we find things way back in the Middle Ages doing the same exact things. I'm really interested in that pattern. Jeff himself, you know, I'd put the blame on the father rather than the adolescent. But, oh yeah. I think, well, they may have all, they were probably all in on it, but in general, yes, it's boggle factor, as you would. I still enjoy reading about the case.

Simon: But it's also fair to say that we have a fabulous book on Jeff.

Chris: Yes.

Simon: Oh, it's Christopher Joseph, isn't it?

Chris: Yes, Joseph. Jeff, The Strange Tale of an Extra Special Talking Mongoose.

Simon: Yeah. So we have this very good book, but if I can just put my first disagreement down with Chris, that you've put the finger actually on what I don't like about Jeff. I like patterns and I think this isn't part of a pattern. It's just so atypical as a case that I can't really take it seriously.

Chris: I don't see it as atypical at all. Jeff is out there riding under omnibuses, listening to the local gossip and bringing home stories about what's going on that the people at home have no knowledge of. That happened in like the Bell Witch story.

Simon: Well, look, I'm very gratified that we've put down the battle lines that we can return to when we actually do the full length episode.

Chris: Maybe in the spring. It's coming.

Simon: I would really look forward to reading that wonderful book by Chris Joseph again. So I'm all for that. Okay, next question. This is from Elizabeth. Do you have a preference for ghosts or for fairies? Ghosts all the way. I'm absolutely, of course, fairies. And I think if someone was to say to me, what's been the best thing about doing the podcast? And it's been wonderful talking to Chris, but it's actually been wonderful, particularly to sit at Chris's knee and learn about ghosts, because though I don't like ghosts, I recognize it for studying the supernatural. You have to understand them. And I really think Chris has a level of knowledge that maybe 10 or 12 people in the world today have. And so listening to her talk about ghosts for me has been a great privilege. But if I can just poke back at you, Chris, you say definitely ghosts, but you like fairies. I don't like ghosts. You like fairies.

Chris: I'm not sure like is the word. I just feel like they're almost supposed to be off limits or something. They're just not my topic. I mean, I've certainly done enough work on them, but it's almost like there's this subliminal warning saying, don't step into the fairy mound, or don't step into the fairy ring. You'll be lost forever. So yeah, I'm really more camp ghosts.

Simon: This is probably one of the things that makes the podcast work, that we represent different constituencies. Whenever I have doubts about a future project, I always say to myself, Simon, you serve at the pleasure of Oberon, King of Shadows, and I'm very much under the banner of the fairies.

Chris: Okay. Emily says, has Simon or Chris ever changed each other's ideas? That's a difficult one. That is a difficult one.

Simon: I mean, I've certainly learned a lot. I'm not sure if you've ever changed my opinion on something. I mean, I'm sure you have in small ways. I remember our argument on Boggarts. I felt that I got halfway to changing your opinion.

Chris: You did. You did. I mean, you made the point that there are ghosts in a lot of communities. That's not my view of Boggarts, but I view them as sort of a separate entity. But you presented the evidence. Here it is. This is primary source evidence that these folks called them ghosts. So fair enough.

Simon: But you can't quite bring yourself to say that I changed your mind on something.

Chris: No, no, no. Well, I guess. Yes. Okay.

Simon: I give it. Well, delete this after, don't worry. Look, just to give an example of how great it is to listen to Chris. For instance, on our last episode, we were talking about haunted furniture, another one of Chris's batty ideas that turned out to be quite fun. Just the way that ideas fly off Chris, like sparks off a forge. We were talking about clocks and the way clocks are associated with human beings. And when the human being dies, the clock stops. And Chris said, maybe it's because the sound of the clock sounds like a human heart. And Chris, I've no idea if that's something that you'd been brooding on for the past 20 years, whether you read it on Wikipedia four weeks ago, whether it was just a spur of the moment thing, but you always have these brilliant little insights I so appreciate. But it's not changing an opinion exactly, but it gives me the opportunity to steal your ideas.

Chris: Well, I'd written about that when I had written about some other haunted clock, and I just came up with that idea because it does. It sounds like the human heart. Totally.

Simon: And intuitively, it makes perfect sense.

Chris: And while we're doing this mutual admiration society, I'm grateful to you because you've always made me dig deeper. I've always had to really have my evidence marshaled and not just do the superficial. I really feel like you've helped me be a better researcher. So I thank you for that.

Simon: Wow. Well, that really is a compliment, but particularly coming from one of the Swiss nations. So thank you. Thank you very much. We've got another question here. Now, this is Arthur again from our Facebook group. This was an interesting one. What do you feel the impacts of the internet and social media is on contemporary folklore?

Chris: I am a bit negative about it, and that's not really fair. I'm such a traditional 19th century folklore person that when I see people altering stories, it bothers me. It's like, well, no, no, that's not the traditional story. That's not the real story. And I'm also upset when I see, and again, this isn't fair, gamers tend to sort of appropriate some folklore, and then they start to change it in terms of what is a goblin and what is an elf and that sort of thing. And you're starting to see this seep into folklore publications. And I'm like, wait, wait, wait, that's not real.

Simon: I think that what internet and social media has really done is it's not changed folklore so much as it's changed society. And what you need to think about is the unit of community. We're all in communities. And for most of human history, the community has been the people who live next door to us. And what has been amazing about the internet and social media is the way that it's allowed us to create communities. And Chris, you and I know each other, thanks to this fact. Yes, it allows us to create communities of interest that are non-geographical. And so folklore is in the end all about the circulation of information. And our traditional geographical communities have basically short circuited. I don't know the names of most of the people on the street where I live, but I know the names of lots of people in the Fairy Investigation Society on Instagram, say. And this changes everything. And so I think the real change isn't so much in folklore, it's the circuits around which folklore runs. And they're no longer geographical.

Chris: Yeah, that's completely fair.

Simon: Repeating some of our questioners here, because some people asked multiple very good questions. And this is another one from Zigzag. What are your thoughts, Chris, on a hypnotic regression popularly used to recover alien abduction memories?

Chris: I am extremely skeptical about it. I have been hypnotized, I think, once in my life. And I was just sort of snorting to myself at what I was seeing or supposed to be experiencing, because I'm like, well, wait a minute, I'm a historian, that's not right. Whatever it was I was seeing. And I have a psychologist friend who, well, going back to when I was, one of the times I was hypnotized, I was seeing, this was at the time of the satanic panic stuff. And I was seeing this satanic imagery, cups full of blood and things. And I came out of it, and I'm like, what? What the heck was that? I've not been abducted or taken by a satanic community for a sacrifice or anything. And the psychiatrist said, she feels that there's certain levels of subconsciousness, where we have this very archetypal imagery. So you get to this level, and you're going to see pitchforks, and hell, and Satan. And this level, you're going to see aliens, or this level, you're going to see elves. That's, you know, it's just a theory. I don't know how it would actually work. But I'm extremely skeptical, because I know that there's ways people can be led without meaning to be led. And the imagery we've seen on television and in movies is so pervasive, I just, and then all of a sudden, you know, we're seeing gray aliens, where we used to see blonde Nordic space brothers. It just seems like too much of its influence just by popular culture.

Simon: It's also fair to say, I like fairies, Chris likes ghosts, but I think neither of us send Valentine cards to the aliens. We're not huge aliens fans. As far as hypnotic regression, I've also had one experience of being hypnotized for past lives. And in fact, I've written about this, I found it an incredible experience. It was about three years ago. And I would say, now looking back, I'm 52 of all the things that have happened to me in the past 10 years, I think that those three afternoons I spent with the hypnotherapist were probably the most significant in terms of my personality in the last decade. I really think that these three afternoons changed who I am. And all this to say that these are really, really powerful tools. So I'm not at all talking down to them. But I'm very skeptical about the idea that the information you're getting, be it a past life, be it an alien experience, be it an experience of sex abuse when you were a child, I would be very, very skeptical about the reliability of that information. I think the information is extremely powerful, radioactive, if you like. But to think of it as being, yeah, something that gives us actual information on a past event, there, like you, I think, Chris, I'd be very skeptical. Next question. Is Bigfoot known to braid horses' manes and take food offerings, just a large, hairy fairy? If not, why not? Chris, can I answer this really quickly? Yes, he is. He is a large, hairy fairy. You're absolutely right. Chris, do you object?

Chris: I don't study Bigfoot much, so carry on.

Simon: You've got to remember that the great thing about living in central Italy is I don't think there are going to be consequences for this. But if I lived in Ohio, I'd think twice before saying Sasquatch was a big, hairy fairy.

Chris: We have the grass man. And the grass man supposedly builds nests and shelters out of twigs and things. And I showed one of these to my husband, a picture of one of these and he's like, that's where the deer bed down for the night. But who knows? There's a lot of very rural areas in Ohio and a lot of people studying Bigfoot here. So I wasn't there. I can't say. And I've had people report to me that they've had experiences with Bigfoot.

Simon: I mean, let's run this into the next question, Chris. This is Justin M. Justin is immensely knowledgeable about cryptozoology and how it interacts with folklore. And Justin has written, my colleague and friend David Roddy asked me the other day if there were historical Woodrose wild man accounts in the UK similar to modern Bigfoot sightings in the US. What I would say there is that in the Middle Ages, I can only think of one example, and that is the wild man of Orford. And the wild man of Orford actually is much closer to a mermaid than a traditional wild man. This is the guy who's captured from the sea. And every day, I think it's in the 13th century, they would take him out for a quick, I mean, almost like taking a dog for a walk. They would let him go out into the waves a bit and he would come back. But he is described as being a wild man. As far as more recent accounts, I think this applies to the US as well. And here again, I'm not going to make friends in the cryptozoological community. But in 19th century Britain, there are certain parallels between men and sometimes women living in the woods and in the wilds. These are actual people who, for whatever reason, are shunning human society. And the traditional idea of wild men, a nice example of this is the idea that these people are capable of making almost supernatural leaps, that they can leap 12 feet over a fence, this kind of thing. And you find something very similar in the US, though arguably in the US, the accounts are even more impressive. Chad Armand for the United States has a fascinating book of early Sasquatch sightings from the 19th century. And many of them are basically wild men, people who have shunned human society, and are given these supernatural connotations. And I'm going to finish with this horrible final sentence that could really get me in hot water. But I think when you look at modern Sasquatch sightings in the US, the genealogy is not to a physical creature. It's not to American Indian law, though I accept there is some of that. It's primarily to this very European idea of the wild man being a tramp, outcast, someone living in the swamps or the woods. And we really need a book length study on this, because there's lots and lots of material out there.

Chris: Yep, I agree. There's also controversy in the community, the folks who are studying this, whether these are physical creatures or whether they're just fairies or something supernatural that comes and goes through a portal, that sort of thing. Because in Ohio, for example, if we're talking about big feet, what do they eat? They're large, large creatures, seven foot high. We're not seeing that, you know, chickens are being unusually stolen or killed, that sort of thing. And it's just difficult to know what the actual logistics are for something that large, if it was a human, well, not human, if it was a physical creature. So like the Loch Ness Monster, there's been some talk that these are supernatural creatures, they're ghosts of Neanderthals or ghosts of something from the past. And that's, again, something I really couldn't speak to.

Simon: One of the changes here in terms of studies is that in the last 15, 20 years, a series of academics have noticed that cryptozoology is ripe for study, that it's interesting in its own right as a kind of modern folklore. And this is a positive step, but most of these studies have been really quite mediocre. And this is something where I hope the next generation, things will open up and there'll be a lot more dialogue between the different camps.

Chris: Let's see our next question. This is from Anastasia. When can we expect fairy census number three?

Simon: Okay, this is a very painful question. Because for me, the fairy census is like Olympics, they come around every four years or so. And I just associate them with months and months of work. And it's really boring work at the end. I know that sounds strange, because they're so exciting to read. But when you're actually trying to get all of them in place with all the right rubrics, it really is tiring. So it may be two years, it may be three years.

Chris: How many items do you have so far for the third?

Simon: I don't honestly know. And what usually happens is that at a certain point, I look and I find I've got 300. And I think, I need to start getting out there and pushing a little bit, getting a few more in. And then in a year or 18 months, I'll be able to do it with 500. One thing I would say, I might regret this afterwards. But if I get to 1500 references, now, I'm almost certainly going to regret this afterwards. But if I get to 1500, and certainly if I get to 2000, which was my ballpark estimate of the end of the project, I think I could really start to write some good academic reflections. And so that's something that might put a fire under my bottom when I get closer. But for now, yeah.

Chris: We'll hold you to that.

Simon: Yes, I feared you might. Right, Chris, but let me strike back at you now. This is Matt, and no ghosts, I'm afraid, we're still with fairies. What is the origin of the fairies at the bottom of the garden idea?

Chris: I was looking at the actual terminology of that. And the earliest is the poem by Rose Feilman, 1917. There are fairies at the bottom of our garden. It's not so very, very far away, etc., etc. And it was set to music by an English composer, Liza Lehman. So it really spread. It was just such a lovely twee, sort of a fairy. It was just such a lovely little fairy poem. And she made a career writing about fairies and fairy poems. I find that it went sort of from that, or maybe it was before that, that fairies found themselves only at the bottom of the garden, because they were reinterpreted by the theosophists as nature spirits and elementals. And that was a totally new role, you know, definitely at odds at traditional British and Irish folklore. P.G. Woodhouse did a wonderful job of parodying the genre with his characters, Madeleine Bassett. She holds the view that the stars are God's daisy chain, that rabbits are gnomes in attendance on the Fairy Queen, and that every time a fairy blows its wee nose, a baby is born. R.I.P. Brilliant.

Simon: I don't think I've heard that before. That was really lovely.

Chris: P.G. I just love that. We also find the idea of garden gnomes. Garden gnomes became extremely popular in the late 1800s. Sir Charles Isham at Lampert Hall, Sir Frank Crisp at Friar Park Henley, had these little gardens with little scenes of dwarf miners. Charles Isham had one scene showing the mining gnomes on strike. So they were in everybody's garden. I've seen loads and loads of photos from like the Garden Museum in England, showing people with their garden gnomes. And they come up for sale at auction periodically. They were made in Germany. And they have the typical gnomish outfit of, you know, pointy toed shoes, very medieval, tights, pointy hats, jerkins, and they usually carry garden tools.

Simon: R.I.P. In that period, we have Cottingley, first photographs in 1917. We also have in the 20s, Cicely Baker and the Flower Fairies. Now all of these, Chris said the most important things, it's the Theosophists. And what I think of is the domestication of the fairies, that the poor fairies are dragged off the heath and down from the hill and into people's rose gardens.

Chris: That was just echoed everywhere. I mean, you find it in children's costumes, you try to find it in theatre, you find it in art, postcards. Let's see the next question. This is from Mark. My constant fairy question is the origins and first mentions of wings and pointed ears. They're ubiquitous these days, but are never mentioned in any folklore I've read.

Simon: R.I.P. First of all, for me, the most exciting thing I ever discovered about the supernatural is that these supposedly permanent forms change. And the beings that are wingless in 1500 have almost compulsory wings come say 1950. And you have similar changes with ghosts, for instance. As far as fairies go, I've talked about the wings before we even did an episode on this, but very crudely, there were little clues here and there that some people are experimenting with wings in the early modern period. But it's really in Britain in the late 1700s that a group of artists start to experiment with putting wings on fairies. In the 1800s, this spreads into fiction and children's illustrations. With Cottingley, we have photographs of the same. And this just spreads into the general culture so much so that already by the 20s and 30s, when people see fairies, they tend to see them as winged beings. Ears are also interesting. I mean, ears, ultimately, the idea of pointed ears becomes a symbol of the other. They're all over our culture. And this almost certainly dates back to ancient Greece and the idea of Pan or the Satyrs as being probably half goat. This is the origin of that. And you can see this idea again, slowly being absorbed into British art. But I think that if you wanted to look at a broader picture, say centuries rather than decades, a larger lesson that I've never written about, but I think is technically correct, is both the wing and the pointed ear represent the devilification of fairies, which is counterintuitive because, of course, fairies are going in the opposite direction. They're becoming cuddly toys of the supernatural world. They're becoming these friendly beings. And yet the wings and the pointed ears, I think, come from devil imagery in the early modern period. Can't argue with that. I was waiting excitedly because there was this silence. I thought she's going to go for me. She's going to go for me.

Chris: No. And the pointed ears, I was thinking those were a relatively modern, I mean, 19th or 20th century, but I'd forgotten about Pan. So that's perfect.

Simon: One of the things I love when you go back to Pan is we think of this being who is half human, half wild, but he's wild in a manner of speaking. He's a goat. He's not a deer. He's not actually a creature of the wild. He's very much within the human circle, if that makes sense.

Chris: I see what you're saying. But there's wild goats.

Simon: Okay. Okay. So maybe in ancient Greece, this was a thing. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. Right. This next one we've actually dealt with recently, but I so love what Chris said about it. I thought it was worth asking again. Are there British and American stories of supernatural creatures jumping onto the backs of people? This is from Morton. It is a common feature in German and Scandinavian folklore for witches, revenants, and werewolves and the like. But what is the origin? And do boggarts also jump onto the backs of people?

Chris: Now, I remember you talking about some, you've written about boggarts that jump onto the backs of people. And we may have covered that in some of our road ghosts. That's right. But the origin, I really couldn't say. I mean, I'm assuming you're traveling by horse and something jumps up behind you. You're going to absolutely freak out, whether that's a boggart or a bandit. But there are some examples in the United States. There was a ghost horse with a man on it. And I know that sort of violates ghost horse protocol. But Boye says, this was from the 1880s, that one night the man on the phantom horse jumped up behind Dad. The ghost left his horse and jumped up on Dad's. And he rode as hard as he could. 

And he fired his pistol behind him, but he couldn't shake the ghost off until he'd gone one half of a mile. And then the thing dropped off. It's like, geez, what the heck was that?

Simon: One of the things I learned when we did Road Ghosts from Chris is there's quite a lot of this in North America. And given that this seems to be both Celtic and Germanic, and given the immigrant stock of the United States in the 1800s, I suppose it's hardly surprising that this legend crossed the Atlantic. As to the origin, I'm afraid I can't do any better than Chris there. I suppose that there are two things. First of all, horses spook. And so this is something that you could relate to that, though we see other aspects of the supernatural there. And then the other point is being on a cart or being on a horse, going up a hill late at night and just feeling that there's a weight, an invisible weight. Usually when I come across this reference in Britain, it has to do with going up hills. And I'm not trying to ruin the supernatural here, but I think that is worth mentioning. Well, look, we've had some great questions. Chris, what about if we round off with a question from Zigzag? Because I think we're starting, the clock is ticking down. I'd love to know your answer to this. What are some films or TV shows that felt like they really captured things you love about supernatural folklore?

Chris: Love is perhaps not the right word. I spent my youth absolutely terrified of watching spooky shows. I can remember some science fiction shows that just freaked me out completely. But I do like The Haunting of Hill House, the first one with Julie Harris, the old version. Just black and white, very subtle. You've got just sort of this muttering in the background as she's trying to sleep and a sort of a shadowy profile, but is it really a profile on the wall? Just very, very subtle. I don't like gory horror movies. I have no stomach for that. So something subtle like that I enjoyed. And The Twilight Zone scared the heck out of me when I was a child. How about you? 

Simon:Well, I guess my idea of the supernatural is the less said and the less shown the scarier things are. I love that line about eroticism in novels that the sexiest thing is a bedroom door closing. The idea being that what's hidden is actually magnified. And so in a way, I find TV and films incredibly disappointing for the supernatural. I'm not that excited about ghosts anyway, but I think that perhaps the only show that I've ever watched that I enjoyed with ghosts in that I found scary but entertaining at the same time is The Shining.

This is Kubrick's version. Thinking about fairies, though, and films and television, there's something very similar. Live action just ruins anything to do with fairies. In fact, I would get any fairy film or TV show that was live action banned. The best, the best fairy moments I've witnessed on the screen have been in the last 15 years or so with my daughters watching cartoons. And sometimes I found cartoons extraordinarily moving in that supernatural sense. And I'll just give the example of Studio Ghibli, which is this Japanese. That they have some magnificent films and the very best film. And I would say one of the great films of the last, what, 30 years is Totoro, which is about this troll that lives in the countryside. And there are whole scenes in that film that I think are just absolutely marvellous. Chris, can I widen this question now, though, to you? What about literature? If you were thinking, let's change the question. So what are some books, novels, short stories that felt like they really captured things you love about supernatural folklore? So it's got to be fiction, I think.

Chris: Right. Yeah. Again, The Haunting of Hill House. I mean, I really do like Shirley Jackson's work. I'm trying to think because I don't read that much fiction. I don't have time. Let's see. A Spectre in the Hall. Susan Hill's The Woman in Black, of course. And the film adaptation of that that was on television with Pauline Moran. Oh, absolute perfection. But let me find the name of this. Another book I've enjoyed is The Spectre in the Hall by Josephine Boyle. And I can't say exactly why that resonated with me, but it actually has stuck with me over the years.

Simon: How about you? Well, one of the things I found with supernatural fiction, first of all, I enjoy supernatural fiction much, much more than supernatural TV or film. But I can't think of a single novel I like. I love short stories.

Chris: Yes, I should have mentioned. Yeah. M.R. James, of course.

Simon: Of course, because you often mention M.R. James. It just comes instinctively to you. And I think the nature of the supernatural is it's not really fit for the novel. It would be interesting to speculate why, whereas it works incredibly well in short stories. When I think supernatural novels, I end up reverting to kids books that are actually more fantasy. We've talked about some of these Katharine Briggs's Hobarty Dick. I mean, that's a lovely book, but I suppose it is folklore. But for horror, for fear, I think short stories are the absolutely the maximum there. And there's that period from what, the 1890s through to the 1930s, a little bit like the golden age of crime writing, where horror, there was some incredible horror writers out there in the English speaking world.

Chris: The British Library has put out a series of ghost and horror stories that have many of which have been sort of forgotten. And they put out these thematic studies. I've got one called Minor Hauntings, which is about child ghosts. And they're really engaging to the things you don't haven't normally seen in anthologies.

Simon: But it's fiction, correct?

Chris: Yes, it is fiction. So the British Libraries put out this whole series. And I'm not sure what the overarching name of the series is.

Simon: Well, first of all, thank you so much to all our listeners who've written in with these questions. And then thanks to you, Chris, as well. I really enjoyed the last hour. And it would be too much to ask you for a final reading, I suppose.

Chris: Well, one of the questions asked was, do you have a favourite rhyming spell? And this isn't really a spell, but it's one of my favourite folklore rhymes. I've done this before, so I'll do it again. It's the magpie rhyme. One for sorrow, two for birth, three for a wedding, four for a birth, five for a parson, six for a clerk, seven for a babe buried in the dark.

Simon: Wow, Chris, go out on a high note, hey?