Supernatural Hats: From Witches to Freddy Krueger

Simon and Chris flip their lids with a capful of questions about supernatural, magical, and unlucky hats. Why are witch and wizard hats pointed? What is the fashionable color for fairy caps? What headwear does the Leprechaun favor? Chris suggests an ancient origin for magical pointed hats and goes off on a medieval tangent. Simon tops that by pointing out the importance of hats in signaling status, even in the fairy world. Chris, naturally, finds omens of death associated with hats and tells of some unlucky military headwear. Expect to learn the identity of the hat man; how to be the strongest person in your parish; and why you should always buy your wife an Easter bonnet (or die trying). 

Transcript

[Simon] Chris, my understanding is we're back to clothes.

[Chris] We are. We're going to talk about hats today. All kinds of magical hats or lucky hats or fairy hats.

[Simon] Can we pay tribute here to Meri Dickson, who originally suggested this episode?

[Chris] Instigated, I think is the proper word.

[Simon] Instigated, that's the word I like, yes.

[Chris] Do you wear hats yourself?

[Simon] No. When I was in Cubs, I had a hat. And sometimes in the winter, being a baldy, I put on a hat. But my interest in hats is very, very minimal.

[Chris] Yeah, mine too. Although I did have a really wonderful Bomarzo fedora when I was younger and cute. Unfortunately, it got stolen from a car that was unlocked. But normally, I don't wear hats because they make me look like a candle being snuffed.

[Simon] As I've looked at hats, I've increasingly been mystified why anyone bothers, in that I can see why hats make sense if you live in a mountain community, if it's very cold. But other than that, it seems to me that hats really are all about social customs and status.

[Chris] Yes.

[Simon] And when you go back to the 19th century, there is a lot about hats. And one thing I would recommend anyone who doesn't believe me, is go to one of those fantastic early filming experiences from the 1890s or the 1900s, where someone would set up a camera in the middle of a busy European or American street and just film people going by. I'm sure, Chris, you've seen these kind of films.

[Chris] Absolutely. Absolutely. Everyone is wearing a hat.

[Simon] Everyone is wearing a hat. It really is very striking. And more than that, it's clear that hats are a form of social identification, particularly in the European films. So, for instance, if you see someone with a more elaborate, taller hat, they will belong to the better off. If you see someone with a cloth cap, they will belong to the rural or the urban proletariat. Society was hat coded. And this is something that we've almost entirely lost. Though I can't resist saying that I grew up in the 1970s in a fairly conservative valet in Yorkshire. And still, people in their 60s and 70s would wear hats. One of my memories as a child is walking to school and passing all these grey-haired men with their flat Yorkshire caps on.

[Chris] It was also very important in the 19th century, it was for a woman to have a new bonnet every year. And that sort of the Easter bonnet tradition. And it was really, really important to have something new. And I actually did a post about Easter bonnets tragedies, where people committed suicide because they couldn't get the bonnet or their husband made fun of their bonnet. Horrible things like that. But you just had an outsized importance.

And that lasted, to my memory, into the 60s. You went out of the house, you put on your gloves, you put on your hat. It was just a matter of etiquette. And as you say, status.

[Simon] And of course, then there is all that nonsense that being a supernatural podcast, we don't need to get into. But about when you should take off your hat, particularly if you're a man. But happily, we have witches and fairies and leprechauns and other beasties waiting for us on the other side of your reading, Chris.

[Chris] The Kerry Fairies and the Limerick Fairies were pretty equal in all their battles, and neither party could conquer the other. Till at last, the Kerry Fairies happened to surprise my friend Finn on one of their meeting places, where they have power over men, and forced him into their service. They gave him a cap that made him seven times stronger than ever he was before. And then he marched into the front of the battle and beat the Limerick Fairies from the field. To reward him, they made him a present of the cap, and he possesses it to this very moment. And when he puts it on, there's not a man in the whole village who would dare lay a finger on him, for he is stronger than them all.

[Simon] That's an interesting fairy artifact that's made its way into the world. I mean, let's come to fairies in a couple of minutes, but with hats, my absolute number one question is, why do witches have pointy hats? And this is basically why I've turned up today. I want to know the answer to this question. So over to you, Chris.

[Chris] I'm afraid I'm going to have to disappoint you, because no one really seems to know. There's loads and loads of theories. For example, in the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215, all Jews were required to wear a pointed cap. And I've seen pictures of this in illustrations and it doesn't really look much like a witch's cap. It looks almost like a Tommy's helmet with sort of a little trumpet on top. And I could be wrong, but apparently this wasn't as enforced in England as it was on the continent. I've also seen that the Phrygian cap from Greece was the origin, because it has a little bit of a peak. It seems a little unlikely to me. I've seen it said that the Quakers' hats, they weren't pointed, but it upset people, because people, they wouldn't take their hats off. And again, this might go back to the Jewish dictate that you don't take your hat off, because it's out of respect for God. But pointed hats and caps are just ubiquitous. So you've got mother goose, you've got garden gnomes. Some of the oldest examples are to be found among the Tharim mummies. This is in the outskirts of China or the edges of the Chinese borders, about 800 BCE, these graves are. And on the basis of the artifacts found, some of these were shamans or shamanesses. They wore these immense, tall, pointed felt hats. They're quite fascinating. We'll have to put some pictures on our page. Some medieval women wore a pointed conical headdress called a henin.

[Simon] That's familiar to me. If I close my eyes and think of pointed hats, the first thing I think about is actually medieval illuminated manuscripts and women.

[Chris]  I'll go out on a limb here and suggest this was something brought back from the Crusades, because among other Middle Eastern headdresses, there's a Lebanese Druze in particular, bridal headdress called a Tantur. It's like a very tall metallic trumpet. And it's given by the husband to his wife on their wedding day. It's worn with a veil. And it's an extremely striking appearance. And it's possibly one of the origins of pointed hats. The henin was known as the bonnet à la Célien, because the Syrian bonnet, when it first made its appearance in Europe about 1428. And these were huge, some of them. Some of them were up to 45 inches tall. I don't know how you balance that. And I'm wondering if this exotic origin somehow transmuted into a mysterious, a supernatural, the other vibe.

[Simon] Does that mean then that wherever the witch's hat comes from, can we agree that in Christendom, in the Middle Ages, a pointy hat like that was female?

[Chris] Yes. Although going a little further, we get the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Mexican and Italian confraternity hoods, which are all tall and conical. And of course, the Ku Klux Klan. These are very intimidating, very ghost-like. I don't know if anybody's done any research on the shapes of fear, but I kind of wonder if tall, pointy things, including hats, are just inherently frightening. Now, some people have posited that the witch and wizard hats represent cones of power. The crown chakra, the cone-shaped energy center that is human energy, or they've also suggested it has to do with pyramid power. This is well above my pay grade. But I think, I just wonder if the shape itself is rather threatening.

[Simon] They're certainly very eye-catching hats. That's for sure. I'm intrigued by this idea that these pyramid hats, let's call them, the female-coded, they're presumably also aristocratic. And I just wonder when you get to witches, maybe there was the sense these were women who were putting themselves above their station into this satanic company of the elect. I wonder if there's some play on gender and class there.

[Chris] There may be class, gender. Now you mentioned satanic. There was a variant of the henon, although I think it was a bit later than the single henon. There was a double henon. So you could go out there with satanic horns. And the religious authorities condemned this as, not as satanic, but as total vanity on the part of women, of course.

[Simon] What about those hats that, again, you see in illuminated manuscripts, where there are two points that almost seem to be growing horizontally out of the head?

[Chris] Right. And that's one of the variants of these double henons. But some of them, those are actually, the hair was put into nets on the side and then you had a veil draped over it. So it's not so much of the hat as it is a hairdressing.

[Simon] As far as the colour goes, we need no comment. Black, of course, a black hat would be very natural for something diabolical.

[Chris] And black also, in the Middle Ages, supposedly it was an aristocratic colour. It was hard to get a pure dark black that wouldn't fade. And so it might have been worn more likely by the aristocrats.

[Simon] Can we put the witches gently behind us now and turn to the much more interesting world, forgive me, Chris, of fairies?

[Chris] Okay. Tell me what you know about fairy hats.

[Simon] Well, not what I know, what I've learned. This week has been one long, nonstop revelation. I began knowing relatively little about fairy hats other than our typical fairy laws of dress that we've already discussed on other occasions, namely that fairies dress uniformly, so they have the same style, and that they wear antiquated or exotic clothes.

A little bit like what you were saying before, they have to be different in some way. Going into this, I expected those two rules to be followed, but I thought there would be an absolute anarchy, an absolute chaos of different hatting conventions in my home ground of Britain, Isle of Man and Ireland. And yet I was surprised, actually, just by how uniform the hatting traditions are. Now, for me, there are three colours, I would say, that stand out, and very much they have an order. So which would you guess is the most popular colour? Red. 

Right, by a long margin, I didn't expect this. I knew, of course, about the William Allingham poem about little red-capped fellows running up the glen, but I didn't realise how widespread that was, and I didn't realise how old the tradition was. Our first reference to red-capped fairies goes back to the early 17th century. And then what about second and third place? Green and brown. Right, neither of those are correct, in my view. And of course, we have our own, we have a long history, Chris, you and I, of battling with our Excel sheets here. But the colours that I discovered were, there were quite a few references to blue headwear, and particularly in Scotland. And this seems to relate to the idea that the old-fashioned Highlanders would wear a blue cap. The other colour is actually black again, and black comes up relatively frequently. Red and black everywhere. Blue seems to be more a Highland Scottish tradition. Now, there are other colours as well, and one I particularly enjoyed, because there are some very outlandish hats, was a blue turban worn by the King of the Trowels in Orkney. So it takes all sorts. But if you don't mind, can we talk about this red colour? What does it mean? Explain it to me.

[Chris] It's a colour of power. Aristocrats wear red robes when they go to court. It also is very visible. What that signifies, I don't know. Supposedly, some of the red cap fairies soak their cap in the blood of their victims. That's lovely.

[Simon] There is also this difficulty, particularly in English and Scottish folklore, that we have a figure called Red Cap. And here, I must say that for years, I've wanted to do a study of this figure, because I've come across references all the way down deep into Yorkshire, and all the way up to the edge of the Scottish Highlands. And my impression is that Red Cap means many different things. However, on the Scottish borders, and as far south as Yorkshire, there are references to this idea that the cap contains or is dyed with human blood. And so this is another possibility. Just thinking aloud, and as someone who has no dress sense, no fashion sense, is it possible that red and green match in some ways? Because, of course, green is the classic fairy colour. And so that we can take for a given. But what does it mean in fashion terms to have green clothes and red headdress?

[Chris] I really have no idea. I mean, it's a common trope in the William Allingham poem is what green jacket, red cap and white owl's feather. I'm wondering if we can associate it at all with tartans, but they're a bit later than we're talking, I believe, in terms of the folklore.

[Simon] Not only are they later, but also this motif is just too widely spread. It's found everywhere. It's found in Cornwall, it's found on the Isle of Man, it's found in Wales, it's found everywhere. It's a pan-British and Irish fairy tradition. I'm a little bit mystified by it. Can I ask you this? You referred before to the idea that red is a royal colour. Is it fair to say that in the Middle Ages, most people would have had headdress, but that someone from the lower classes would never wear red? Is that possible?

[Chris] It's a relatively cheap dye to get from the plant. It's called madder dye. Cochniel, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, is a much more expensive dye. It comes from beetles and it was imported. So that might be the more royal version of red, but anybody, I think, could get the madder dye and it was not that expensive. I'm trying to remember what was used to dye green cloth before we had Paris green, the arsenic, arsenical dyes of the 19th century. But there were plenty of plants that would do the green dye. I just wish I could remember the type.

[Simon] I think purple continues to be this imperial colour, the colour that the poor didn't have access to. But I'm not quite sure, and it sounds to me as if someone as well in these things as you isn't either, about the social value of red. So we'll have to leave this for another time. But for future fairiests, there is a great study to be done here. Because if you put together the idea of red hats, red caps, and then the figure, quote unquote, the red cap, it all becomes very interesting indeed.

[Chris] I've done a short study of the colours worn by fairies. I don't recall much purple, if any. So if we're going to talk about them as the aristocrats, why aren't they wearing purple? The other thing that fascinates me about, we've got an entity called by a cap, the red cap. There's a North country entity called thrummy cap from the bonnet, which he's said to be wearing. He's described as...

[Simon] Help me please with thrummy, Chris. What's a thrummy?

[Chris] I will explain in full. A thrum cap were originally worn by sailors. What you do is you take fabric and you poke bits of yarn or wool, just end pieces, scraps that nobody else could use.

You poke them through the fabric and then it's fold or shrunk to hold the yarn fringes in place. And the result looks like you're wearing a shaggy rug rolled into a cone. It's very warm. And it was a useful way to use up scraps. I've known people who've actually made and worn these. This entity is a queer looking little old man. And he's usually in the vaults and cellars of old castles. And he tends to drink the ale or whiskey so that the casks empty quicker than they should have been.

[Simon] It's interesting to think of metanomically named supernatural beings. Now that sounds terrifying, but all it means is supernatural beings that are named for parts of their physical appearance, in this case clothes. And I remember that in Scotland, one of the names, one of the early modern names for the fairies is the green skirts. 

[Chris] Oh, I hadn't heard that. 

[Simon] Well, we have red caps. Now we have your unpronounceable THR cap. I wonder if there are any others. This is something we'll have to leave for another time.

[Chris] We will, yes.

[Simon] I wouldn't be surprised if there were a couple more hiding away. The other fairy hat that we have to deal with, though personally, I don't think these wretches are even fairies, is the Irish leprechaun. And I remember, Chris, about three or four years ago, you giving me a good talking to about a leprechaun's appearance, and I think secondhand clothes. What does the leprechaun's hat signify? Because it's that quite tall hat. Is that fair?

[Chris] We've got a couple of type, what's called the flower pot hat, where it narrows towards the crown. And what I think of those as being worn in the Regency. They had a buckle on them, and they were a very fancy aristocratic hat. And I think the reason the leprechauns wear them, the English were sending their used clothing to Ireland. And so what did you have? You had these Regency flower pot hats, and you had the tailcoats. So the leprechauns ended up looking like a decayed Regency buck or something. They're also seen in three-cornered cocked hats. Again, it's this archaic hat, and that might be another thing that the English were sending to Ireland.

[Simon] We certainly do have some unusual shaped hats. I think the three-cornered hat is fairly common, and that's also found in British ghost lore. My guess is it just became a signifier for an earlier period at a certain point. I've heard a lot about sugarloaf hats. Are you familiar with that?

[Chris] I know what a sugarloaf hat is, but I don't associate them with the fairies. It's a tallish hat, but it has a rounded crown. A sugarloaf was actually sugar pressed into a mold, and you scraped bits off of it. And it was this tall conical thing with a rounded top. And that's what the top of the hat looks like.

[Simon] It strikes me that some of these hats we're describing come close-ish to our modern conception of the witch's hat. In other words, they're quite tall and tapering. Is that right?

[Chris] Yeah, I think so. I mean, look at the gnome hat, the traditional gnome hat, which is conical and pointy. It could pass for a henin if you put a veil on it. So yeah, they do seem to be pointed hats. And even the red caps that some people mention fairies wearing, they say they were pointed caps. So they're not the flat caps of your average rural person.

[Simon] What is the difference between a cap and a hat? I think of a cap as just being something very casual and a hat being something a little bit more involved. Or are they just synonyms?

[Chris] I've seen them used for the same thing. I mean, I've seen people referencing fairies with queer tall caps. Okay, what does that mean? It means a hat. Normally, we think of caps as being the flat caps or having a more soft fabric texture, not as structured, not as formal as a, say, top hat made out of beaver or silk plush, because those had inner linings and things. A lot of caps are just unlined or they're more soft. Caps tend to have a bill if they have anything as opposed to an actual brim going all the way around.

[Simon] Understood. Are they more male then?

[Chris] Possibly. When I think of 19th century women wearing caps, that's a different type of cap. It's almost like a baby bonnet shape, only worn by a woman. That kind of cap was worn 17th, 16th through the 19th and early 20th century.

[Simon] Having listened to you here, I would sum things up and let's see if you can sign off on this. I would say that fairies had a wide range of hats, as we've seen, with two or three colors. What makes these hats special is that they were probably unlike the hats that the local agricultural working populations were using. It's yet another example of the way that fairies stood out. They were human and yet they were slightly different. There was something a little bit off.

[Chris] Right. I can remember we did the episode about the dancers.

[Simon] Kaikaled.

[Chris] Yes. Those guys were wearing handkerchiefs on their head and they looked human, but they didn't look human. There's always something just a bit off, even with the clothing.

[Simon] The handkerchiefs, what color were they? Red, of course. I think red with yellow dots.

[Chris] They were spotted with yellow, yes.

[Simon] Well, we bid farewell to the fairies and now we turn to more general supernatural hats. What else have you got for us in your files of the impossible?

[Chris] I was really, really disappointed. I thought I would find loads and loads of stories about haunted hats, something that would make you possessed by a wearer.

[Simon] This would be a physical hat, not a supernatural hat, but one that had supernatural qualities because it had been imbued.

[Chris] Exactly. There's a fictional story called The Haunted Hat by Richard Knight that describes a murderer whose thoughts were so tremendously radiated like electricity that they stored themselves up in this telltale hat. Anybody who put it on then began to think like the murderer, but that's a fictional story. I have not found any actual examples of this, unfortunately.

[Simon] I mean, I hate to drag us kicking and screaming back to the fairies, but one thing I missed out with the fairies were the various magical hats that, in fact, you gave us in your beautiful reading at the beginning. This is just, apart from a couple of invisible fairy hats, there are no possessed hats, let's call them.

[Chris] No, no, that haunt people or a ghost hat that suddenly appears and then disappears, that sort of thing.

[Simon] For me, hats are so strongly identified with people in the 19th century.

[Chris] Exactly.

[Simon] So, surely we would expect something like that. It seems that something's missing there. Any idea?

[Chris] Well, what I have found is that we did an episode on clothes slashing poltergeists, the Hoffman family of Worcester, Ohio, and hats seem to particularly fascinate those destructive polts. For example, the Hoffmans had a reporter visiting and this guy's hat was hung on the hat rack in full view of everybody. Nobody went near it, but it was found slashed to ribbons by some narrow blade, they said, like a doctor's lancet. The Stratford, Connecticut poltergeist case, the Phelps home, the son, Henry, seemed to draw a lot of the polts ire and several times his caps were torn apart while they were on his head. He put on another one and it was ripped up. They said a small hole would open in the crown and it extended in a short time, the whole thing was torn into pieces.

[Simon] And I suppose there's no other item of clothing that is so personal in a way. You're attacking the head of the person.

[Chris] You're attacking the head of the person. Now, I've noted in some poltergeist cases, beds always catch on fire or they're ripped apart. So, it's almost the equivalent, some focus. There's certain things that the poltergeists seem to focus on. And yeah, caps are one of them. I'm trying to think of any other... That's just sort of the general case. Now, here's another sort of a supernatural hat. Spiritualist John Murray Spear, he tried to make the new motive power, a messianic perpetual motion machine. This was the one that he supposedly had a woman pretend to birth. But his spirit guides inspired him with an idea for a sort of telepathic stock ticker. And mediums in all the major cities in the country would telegraph commodity and stock prices to one another by wearing special caps into which were woven wires that would then string off into various directions representing the compass headings.

[Simon] This is the beginning, isn't it, of a science fiction topos. These are the mad scientists in movies that have wires coming out of their heads.

[Chris] Yes, those metal beanies and those skull caps with their antenna. The most common thing I find in hats in a supernatural vein is the hoodoo hat.

[Simon] Meaning an unlucky hat.

[Chris] An unlucky hat. And there's a lot of superstitions about hats. I was shocked. I was looking at one of my Wayland handbooks and there were probably 300 reports from different people, do not put a hat on the bed. It will cause death. It will cause destruction. It will cause bad luck. It will give you a headache. It will give you ill health. On and on and on. And I'm just fascinated by why this would be. What is it about putting a hat on a bed?

[Simon] But isn't there a lot more etiquette with hats? I'd hoped to avoid this earlier. But when I did mention the controversy about under what conditions you should lift your hat to someone, I can imagine that superstitious beliefs would revolve around such an important, such an invested part of our clothing.

[Chris] Yeah, I really haven't found anything to do so much with etiquette. There's no explanation as to, oh, it's impolite to do this with your hat. It's just more unlucky or it's dangerous.

[Simon] Fair enough. But for me, when you said unlucky hats, I was thinking there would be a specific hat that was unlucky, not that you would do something with your hat that would bring you bad luck. Yes. In your files, do you have any nasty hats?

[Chris] Absolutely. And you find these stories and you wonder, was this just an April Fool's joke where somebody says, I bought this new straw hat and I took it home and everything went wrong. I'm a traveling salesman and I couldn't get an order to save my life.  I went home, I took the hat off and everything went fine from then. So from now on, when I get a new hat, I keep it for a few days and see how my luck is. But then there were really deadly ones. There's a story from American Civil War. And this was a soldier's hat. And they said that this Yankee was killed. So one of these Georgian soldiers picked up the hat, put it on and wore it. Hadn't had it on his head for more than two hours when he was shot through the head. Almost the same hole that the bullet had entered had killed the Yankee. So another soldier picked it up from the same company, less than an hour, he too was killed. Another guy picked up the hat, was killed. So four men who'd worn it were shot through the hat in almost the same place. I thought this was too good to be true, but I went to the regimental rosters and found the names of these people.

[Simon] By their death dates as well?

[Chris] Well, yeah, they were in the list of casualties. Then there was a hoodoo helmet from 1915. This was a story, German helmet taken as a souvenir by a British soldier. And every time the helmet changed hands, the owner would be killed or badly injured.

[Simon] So we have two military examples that makes perfect sense. But I was hoping there would be something in a knitting circle or some woman's hat that brought colossal bad luck. You didn't find anything on those?

[Chris] No, just the ones that were, if you didn't get the hat, you committed suicide or you threw yourself off a bridge. Just horrible how invested people were in their hats. But I did not find an unlucky woman's hat. They're exclusively men's.

[Simon] And from what you're saying, exclusively military as well.

[Chris] I've got several examples of, like I said, the straw hat, the traveling salesman. And they just go on and on and on about how many things happened.

[Simon] I wonder whether there are other objects like that. For instance, do we have any stories about a hip flask stolen from a German soldier and every person who possessed the hip flask died shortly after? Or are we seeing something a little bit special with hats?

[Chris] I think we're seeing something special with hats. I have not collected stories of haunted objects, and I'm sure there must be something about something stolen from a German or the enemy, whoever they might be. But I really have not found, the hats seem to be kind of a focus. There's at least one story about a ghost who ordered a hat. This woman walks into, I think it was an Indiana milliner's shop and orders her hat and gives a name and then never comes back. And they found out that she had been dead at the time she ordered the hat.

[Simon] A woman came back from the dead, not to visit her kids, but to order an Easter bonnet.

[Chris] Well, it wasn't necessarily an Easter bonnet, but she wanted a new fashionable hat.

[Simon] It speaks to the importance of hats in this society. It's just something that today I think we find quite difficult to imagine. Well, on the subjects of difficult to imagine, when we decided to do hats, I managed to get the assignment of looking at the hat man. Are you familiar with the works of the hat man?

[Chris] I've just seen it pop up in, I'm going to say, in the last 20 years, as it's almost like there was some kind of port that advertised using a picture of a sort of a silhouette of a Spanish man with one of their large-brimmed, flat-topped hats and a cloak. And I always associate the hat man with that image. 

[Simon] It's certainly an internet phenomenon. We can say that it's a peculiar combination of sleep hallucination with an image that has been propagated through the internet. So, of course, lots of people have hallucinations on falling asleep, on waking up, and sometimes in the middle of the night. And I've shared before with you how I am sometimes assailed by spiders in this way. However, the hat man is a relatively recent phenomenon. I think the earliest reference to it dates to the shadow men, which are the early 2000s. And the hat man is a figure who frequently appears in these waking nightmares, where someone is lying in bed, often, of course, paralyzed, because that's part of the phenomenon. And they will look towards the door and they will see the silhouette, your word exactly, of someone with a hat, just standing in the door. Naturally, a male figure, so a threatening figure. And this is where a lot of the fear comes from. And I think that here we find ourselves in a world where hats are really quite rare. And this is probably why the hat man exists. In other words, this is a throwback to something earlier, something strange, something out of the normal. But of course, the hat as well is a way of identifying this figure.

[Chris] Some of the stories I've read, he's wearing the hat and you don't just see a silhouette, he's grinning. He's sort of grinning in a diabolical manner, which makes it even more threatening. I just wonder if it originated with this... It was Sandeman's port and Sherry advertisements, with this very, very, I think, threatening silhouette of the fellow in the cloak.

[Simon] My guess is that it begins with Freddy Krueger, this supernatural evil force in the nightmare on Elm Street films. Now, I've never seen these, but I do know what Freddy looks like, because in the 90s, he was everywhere on movie posters, on the covers of videos. It was a very, very common image. There you do not have silhouette, but you have someone in semi-darkness who has this characteristic hat brim on, in a period when that was already starting not to be normal. Again, we have a kind of a weird paranormal democracy, where lots of people are looking at this stuff on the internet, they have issues with sleep hallucination, and partly just because of the inevitable similar processes of sleep, and partly because of sharing experiences online, they settle on this new diabolical figure.

[Chris] We've also got creepypastas that are just making this stuff up and seeing how far it goes. It's kind of like the Slenderman myth, that people suddenly begin seeing Slenderman or believing in Slenderman. I'm not sure why these things catch on, but as you say, they're on the internet and people get influenced.

[Simon] It might be useful to think of them as a supernatural version of the meme. It's amazing how rapidly memes travel through our social media groups, through WhatsApp messages, through things that you run into on the internet. Maybe on a higher level, we're also starting to see these shared images emerge.

[Chris] It's not necessarily a new thing. We certainly have ghost panics in the 19th century, early 20th century. We did an episode on the women in black in Pennsylvania. Social panic over these people in headdresses.

[Simon] And with the women in black, of course, an important part was the veil. So we also have a similar idea that the hat is seen, but the face is not really seen in terms of the hat man's silhouette. I suppose the lady in black as well, it's this imposing headdress, but no face to make sense of.

[Chris] Right. Perfect. Yes.

[Simon] Saying goodbye then to the hat man, for me, the really important thing I've learned is just the way that hats were so desperately important for much of the modern period, up until maybe my and your childhood. And that we perhaps risk not taking these as seriously as we should, just because the hat has almost passed from our world.

[Chris] It has. And yet in mythology, and I'm sure it continues in fantasy fiction and stuff, we've got magical hats that still, we think about what can't a hat do? It makes you invisible, or it gives you flight, or wisdom, or speed, or luck, or something. So that still hangs around in fairy tales and fantasy, I think.

[Simon] My guess would be though, that slowly those hats will become more and more obscure to us, because I don't see the hat coming back into fashion. And when Tolkien, for example, wrote Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, what made you invisible? Not a hat, which was, invisible hats were an important idea in the sense to us. So I wonder if, in a sense, they'll remain, but only as fossils, and as fossils, they will make less and less sense to us.

[Chris] I'm wondering if anything will come of space helmets or something like that. But that's just pure speculation. Yeah, I don't see hats making that much of a comeback. There's certainly fashions in hats, and people still value them, like at the Kentucky Derby, or at Ascot, you have to have a hat, it's part of the dress code. So they're not completely dead, but they're confined to very specific places.

[Simon] I've been in touch today with my Canadian family, and thinking of them, it strikes me that one hat that has had a really good half century has been the baseball hat.

[Chris] Oh, yes, I should have mentioned that, yes.

[Simon] I wonder, is there anything, can we find any supernatural angle on the baseball hat?

[Chris] I wish, I wish I could see a story about, they all have messages, whether they're a logo, or a sports team, or your political affiliation, and I'm thinking, a hat that would change messages depending on whose company you were in. Someone needs to patent that.

[Simon] Chris, that's brilliant. And I think it's not beyond our present technology.

[Chris] No, not a bit, not a bit.

[Simon] You could change your political affiliation depending on who walks in the room.

[Chris] Well, it'd be a useful cover.

[Simon] If we are correct in our analysis of fairy clothes and hats, in the 2070s, people will be seeing fairies with baseball hats. It would be a throwback to an earlier time. So that's something to look forward to.

[Chris] Yeah, but we don't see, you know, in the 1970s, nobody was seeing fairies in the 1920s cloche, or a beret from the 1930s.

[Simon] So I think you could be a little bit off there. I think that if you go to seeing fairies, you do start to see some pre-war clothes, flapper fairies. It's not a big thing, but I think you do have this chronological drag, and slowly, these things will become more common as they become more outlandish to us. Well, we come now to further reading. Oh, gosh.

[Chris] Yes, quite.

[Simon] Further reading on supernatural hats. Thank you, Mary. Well, no, in all seriousness, I think one person who deserves to call out here is there's a British fairiest named John Cruise. And John writes a blog called British Fairies. And I remember, and unfortunately, I didn't go and check this before the episode, but I do remember a couple of years ago, he did an interesting blog post on the way that hats are found among the fairies. And I think he pushed the idea of red hats quite seriously. And it was my foolishness that I didn't take him more seriously at that time. But he also did something that I found interesting, that he looked at earlier references to fairies. And I think he suggested, and making up these numbers, but ballpark, he said that about half of all fairy sightings have fairies with hats. But when you go to the fairy census, fewer than one in 10, or maybe even one in 20 fairies are described as having hats.

[Chris] I know, I noticed that.

[Simon] But if what John says is right, I don't have any numbers or statistics, but my guess is there's something to that. Again, what we're seeing here is a time lag with hats slowly being eliminated from the fairy world as well.

[Chris] Yep. I think you're right.

[Simon] Anything else for reading?

[Chris] There's precious little out there. I'm afraid I'm going to have to write a book on haunted clothing or something.

[Simon] I love this idea of you doing a book on haunted clothing. Can we just rehearse the chapters? But there would be one on hats. There would be one on dresses.

[Chris] Particularly wedding dresses.

[Simon] Wedding dresses. There would be morning clothes.

[Chris] There would be, let's see, jackets, gloves, jewelry. Yes. Trying to think if there's any on underclothing or corsetry, but I'm sure I could find something.

[Simon] I would buy that book, Chris. I'm someone who has a very low interest in clothes, supernatural or otherwise. I look forward to it being written.

[Chris] I do have a couple. I've done some blog posts and we'll share these on the website. If you want to look at the pictures of the Tarim mummies, there's a wonderful book. There's a wonderful book on the mummies with the tall felt hats. It's called The Mummies of Urumqi and it's written by Elizabeth Barber, who's an expert in prehistoric and historic textiles. So there's lots of pictures and lots of information in that.

[Simon] So what have you got, supernatural hat-wise, to show us out tonight?

[Chris] Well, this is the end of a story. It was a longer story told in 1894 about a newspaper reporter who was called rather obviously in the tale, Bob Scrutiny. Now, Lala, that was Bob's wife's name, wanted an Easter bonnet. And Bob was in short, he didn't have any money at that point. And he said, I'd never denied you anything, but you're going to have to go without a new bonnet this Easter. Well, she teased and scolded, wouldn't listen to reason and finally worked herself into such an uncontrollable state of anger over the really trivial deprivation that I'm hanged if she didn't break a blood vessel or something and die right then and there. They buried her on Easter Sunday in the big family vault. Bob wore a crepe on his hat and looked haggard. One day he came to the office and complained of dreaming constantly about his wife. Some young fool laughingly asked him if she wanted that bonnet yet. Bob turned white and said, yes, she asked for her Easter bonnet. So pathetically. This went on for weeks. One night he came to the office late and remarked that he had bought that bonnet. And the next time she came to him, he proposed to give it to her. About two hours later, the night police reporter brought in the story that Scrutiny had been found dead at the Woodland Cemetery. We questioned the reporter eagerly. He had not committed suicide, we learned, but there he lay with one hand clutching at the bars of the gate of the tomb where his wife lay buried and near him lay an empty bonnet box.