Supernatural Smells: Roses, Brimstone, and Decomp

Chris and Simon sniff out some supernatural scents, ranging from the prosaic, like tobacco and flower perfumes to the sinister, like the odor of rotting bodies. They note the link between scent and memory and wonder whether some ghostly scents are just a spirit’s shortcut to announce its presence or even to communicate. 'Odor Mortis', a musky aroma said to predict death, may, it transpires, be a physiological, rather than a supernatural, phenomenon: ask the hospital cat 'Death'. Simon gives listeners a whiff of why sulphur and brimstone are associated with the devil and our fragrant duo examine fairy stenches (mushrooms and sweaty crowds anyone?). Simon accuses Chris of being in the pay of the powerful Sasquatch lobby, while Chris tells of a strange paranormal odor experience of her own and comes up, as always, smelling of roses.

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Book of the month: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1938398645, Josh Cutchin, the Brimstone Deceipt!

Transcript

Simon Chris, I'm here on a very sunny Italian afternoon, wondering what we will be talking about today.

Chris We're going to be talking about supernatural smells. And you might ask why? Well, first, our readers ask for an episode on the topic and their wishes are command. Commonly speak of our senses when we talk about strange and mystical or paranormal events, we see a ghost or fairy, we're touched by an unseen hand, or we hear wrappings, or we hear a banshee's wail. So if we're talking about supernatural sight, sound, and touch, why not smell?

Simon: Why not indeed? I have to say, listeners, that I was pretty sceptical about this episode. I was surprised by just how interesting this topic is. So Chris, as you pointed out to me already today, if I assume that you're always right, I will always be doing well. That should be our mantra. Banshee right, boggart wrong. This is the...

Chris: So do you have a special smell that you enjoy? Or are you a keen smeller? 

Simon: Growing up in the UK and spending a lot of time in woodland, I love the damp smell of the wood. I think that would be my favourite smell of all.

Chris: I was asking my husband and he said that's his favourite smell too. He loves being out in the woods and smelling the woody scents.

Simon: What about you, Chris? Do you have a favourite smell?

Chris: Well, full disclosure here, I have very, very little sense of smell. I can tell when things are on fire, that's about it. And this has been my way since I was a very, very small child, probably three or four from when I can remember, I've never had much of a sense of smell. I think this is called anosmia. And I wish I had an explanation for it. It's been very useful in dealing with things like infant diapers and farts from people in public places. My theory is I had a lot of high fevers as a child, and they say that that can burn out the olfactory nerve. Or I also had a couple of head injuries. And that also is something that apparently makes smelling more difficult.

Simon: Today, we'll be speaking about sulphur-like smells, mouldy smells, fungal smells. Does this mean anything to you?

Chris: Absolutely nothing. Really? Absolutely nothing. I wouldn't know sulphur if it bit me. That's extraordinary.

Simon: So for you, this episode is of great interest, but it is a little bit abstract.

Chris: It is very, very abstract. Now, I have had a few instances where I'm in a, quote, haunted house, and I will occasionally smell something, and then I know that's not of this world, perhaps. I'm picking up something that is elsewhere. But in general, yeah, I'm just useless if you ask me to tell if that meat's gone off.

Simon: Can you try and explain to me what elsewhere smells like?

Chris: It would depend. I can remember once smelling burnt wood, and I was later told we were there on a particular date. It was the 6th of October. And the historian who was with me then told me that that's when this Colonel Logan burned the local Native American village. So I don't know why I would be smelling that, but I was smelling burnt wood, and nobody else in the group smelled it. I looked around thinking, oh, well, there are picnics here. You know, somebody's made a bonfire. Couldn't find anything. So it's just odd.

Simon: It's a little bit unfortunate. It's an example that before you said the one thing you can smell is burning.

Chris: Yeah, that's the only thing I can tell.

Simon: But does that mean that you would never go into a haunted house and smell lilacs, say? That would be an impossibility.

Chris: I've not had that experience, no.

Simon: Well, I'm really a little bit taken aback by this. I don't know how this will alter the direction of the episode. But one thing I would say right from the beginning is that I have a tiny expertise in smelling in this sense. Three or four times a year, I teach students a few basic lessons in wine tasting. And of course, an important part of wine tasting is smelling, particularly with serious red wines. And one thing that always strikes me is the way that these young students who know very little about wine actually are very good at describing taste. But when it comes to smell, they are hopeless. Part of the more general human condition that for most of us, smell is definitely the least important sense. And we just don't have a very big vocabulary for describing it. What that means is of all the aspects of a supernatural description, the attempt to describe smell is the one I would be... not that I wouldn't take it seriously, not that there wasn't a strange smell, but I would be a little bit suspicious whether the person could render the experience.

Chris: Well, for one thing, we're also obsessed in this culture with smelling fresh, and everybody's got these scented plug-in things that just make me crazy. They give me a headache. I can't smell them, but they give me a headache. So there seems to be very little interest in actual variety of smells in this particular culture. But smell is extremely important to memory. We find that people remember things very quickly when they smell a particular odour.

Simon: Can I give you an example of that happening to me just a year ago? Sure. So in my teenage years, I worked for a time in Kentucky Fried Chicken. Oh my word. And I'm a vegetarian, remember? And I was at that age too. And ever since then, I've happily avoided Kentucky Fried Chicken. But about a year ago, I was in the UK with one of my daughters, and I went out for a walk late at night, just on my own, just to clear my head. And there was a Kentucky Fried Chicken, and I was cutting across a car park, and I went by the back door. And the back door had been flung open, and the smell of the kitchen just rolled out. And it was absolutely the same. And this is 30 years ago. So Colonel Saunders has clearly not changed his secret recipe in that time. 

Chris: Secret recipe. Yeah, there you go.

Simon: This wasn't the front door smell. It was the kitchen smell. And I just went back to being a pathetic 17-year-old, trying not to have fights with drunks.

Chris: The good old days. We're going to be talking about some ghostly scents here. And I find that people talk about how they evoke their dead loved ones. And I'm not sure if this is actual physiological thing, or if it's just wishful thinking or memories. A friend of mine said that after her husband died, she slept with a t-shirt he'd worn, so she could smell his scent.

Simon: I've come across accounts like this. I read one the other day, and it was a woman who gave this heartbreaking detail that her husband had died. And she said the smell that she missed the most was lying on his chest. And, you know, it's a very intimate moment. But you can imagine the quite strong smell that would go with that. And a smell that, obviously, she was very used to and loved.

Chris: I've also known somebody who was very sensitive to scents. And she became very agitated when walking by some antique military uniforms at a museum display. And she had a theory that fear and aggression, pheromones and sweat were absorbed by the cloth and could still trigger responses after many years.

Simon: That's amazing. Were you present when she became antsy?

Chris: I was. I was. And this is not uncommon for her. I've seen it happen before.

Simon: Chris, we've talked a little bit about smells. And maybe we could start now with a reading, because so far, we've not really done justice to the supernatural side of the world of stink and smell.

Chris: Right. Well, this is from actually one of my books, the first in the Haunted Ohio series. And the names have been changed. The ladies didn't want the real names used. Two women students, Christy and Lisa, experienced an appalling odour in the dorm room at Miami University. The dorm, originally part of a women's college, had burned down several times. And reputedly, a male student who'd been visiting his girlfriend illicitly died after he concealed himself in a closet when the alarms went off. Now, that's the stuff of student folklore. But what the two women experienced was all too real. It began with a horrible odour in their closet. They described it as sickening, like rotting sausage. It was both sweet and corrupt, the smell of decaying human flesh. Christy first thought there must be a dead mouse in the wall, but the horror didn't confine itself to the closet. It lingered there for a day or two, then moved into the room itself. Christy and Lisa and their friends were appalled by the stench. You could walk through it, said Lisa, like through a circle and come out on the other side. And the circle, with its unbearable odour, moved around the room, changing its position daily. It edged closer and closer to the door. Then at last, it moved into the hall just outside the girl's door and mercifully disappeared.

Simon: Well, pleasant as always. I suppose one thing to say straight away is that when I've read accounts of supernatural smells, one of my first explanations, particularly with sulphur-like smells, is that there are a series of neurological conditions that can create exactly that smell. So in other words, the smell has no factual presence, but it's something that we perceive within our brains. Some epileptic fits begin with a sulphurous smell. It can be a sign of strokes. It can be a sign of migraines getting particularly bad. I think some sufferers from Parkinson's also have this experience. And so it's nice to kick off with an account where there are two people smelling the same thing.

Chris: Right. And even more than that, because some of their friends were smelling it as well. So Lord knows what that was about.

Simon: And you interviewed them personally? I did. Were you taken up to the room or was this a memory of something from the past?

Chris: No, this was from the past. I didn't actually visit the university on that occasion.

Simon: Well, perhaps another thing that we could bring in about smell that has to be relevant for the supernatural. A smell is very unusual in that we quickly get used to it and tune it out. Of course, you can do this with other senses as well. And the classic one is the ticking clock, that I can be in a room with a ticking clock and we've all had this sensation. After three minutes, no one hears the tick anymore. But the difference is this, that if I want to hear the tick, if you get me on the phone and say, is the clock ticking? I can stop and listen. If you go into a rather musty bedroom and are there for 20 minutes, it's not just that you don't notice that musty smell. It's that you can't notice it anymore. You've tuned it out entirely. And I think that makes smell unique among the senses.

Chris: I personally haven't had that experience, but I know people who they can't tune it out. It's just there and it's going to bother them no matter what.

Simon: I think a smell has to be incredibly strong for that to happen. Certainly, this has been my experience. I mean, the classic one that house sellers always warn about is the smell of dogs. If you have dogs in a house, they do give this characteristically damp, animal-y, doggy smell. Now, I live with two dogs and my house doesn't smell of dogs for me. But when I went away for a month and came back, I could smell dogs. So there definitely is this business of getting used to smells and then tuning them out. But I acknowledge what you say that in the case of a very strong smell, and this might be one of them, then maybe smells stay around. The one thing as we go through smells today, I sometimes wonder if supernatural smells break that rule, that people don't tune them out. And I wonder if that is perhaps a clue that something slightly different is going on here. But let's see the examples we come up with.

Chris: I'm thinking about cat smells as well in houses and people who are hoarders, they absolutely can't smell the terrible smell that's coming from their house. Let's talk about some senses, warnings or omens of death, because as usual, I'm a little ray of sunshine. First, we have the smell of death or odour mortis, as a gentleman named A.B. Isham. He was a medical professor in Cincinnati. And he wrote about midnight, 11th May, 1879, I was called in to see a patient he labels M.G., who was aged seven. She'd had several months previously been under my care, but with impaired digestion and defective assimilation. I found her in articulo mortis. Upon entering the room, there was a plainly perceptible musky odour. There was no musk about the house, nor had any other perfumery been employed. Death ensued in about an hour and a half. The smell, as said, was closely allied to that of musk, yet the impression upon the olfactory organs was more delicate, more subtle. Besides, there was an indescribable feature pertaining to it, which served to impress the respiratory sense and trouble respiration, a vague sensation of an irrespirable or a noxious gas. To the convalescent loungers of sharp olfactory sense about the wards of Stanton Hospital, the smell was familiar and was determined the death smell. It was not uncommon to hear the expression, someone is dying, for I smell him.

Simon: Here I should say straight away that I have a very good Spanish friend, and she confided in me many years ago that she can smell death. And she had been in a number of situations where people had died, again, deathbed situations. And she said that one of the reasons that she knew the end was coming was even before the breathing starts to take on that characteristic rhythm, she said she could smell it. And she's someone I would trust blindly.

Chris: I've got other accounts of physicians who said that they could smell and foretell a death within 48 hours by some sort of peculiar earthy odour. And in a delightful turn of phrase, a Devonshire woman said she knew a relative living abroad was dead because she smelled his coffin. And speaking of musky smells, it's a Jamaican belief that the smell of musk when there's no musk nearby is a sign of death. So there may be something to the actual physiological component of this. Is it supernatural? All this talk of odour mortis irresistibly reminds me of Oscar the Cat, who predicts death at a Rhode Island nursing home. If somebody's about to die, he comes and curls up on their bed.

Simon: Oh, my God.

Chris: And I wrote in The Face in the Window about a cat aptly named Death who smelled the same kind of doom for patients at the Cincinnati City Hospital. So I know there's dogs who are trained to scent cancer. And some diseases like Parkinson's have distinctive signature scents. There was a recent news story about a super smeller who actually diagnosed her husband with Parkinson's. So who knows?

Simon: Can I also just throw in there as the scent of death, this isn't supernatural at all, but I'd like to pay tribute to a British folklorist, Helen Frisbee, very good writer. And a few years ago, Helen did a talk on death and what happens to the body after death. And memorably, she opened one by one, a series of jars that contained the smell of the body after a day, after a week, after. I thought that was incredibly daring for a lecture. I wasn't there. I heard about it at second hand. It may be folklore, but if she did it, Helen, I admire you even more.

Chris: Hats off. 

Simon: Hats off.

Chris: Well, after the odour of death, we have an actual olfactory omen at the Morva Coal Mine in Wales. In March 10th, 1890, 87 men and boys died. The mine was known as a gassy mine, and it had a long and deadly history. There were at least four or five explosions with many people killed. So it was known as the pit of ghosts. And with such a history, people are going to be easily spooked. And there were lots of reports of omens like noises and apparitions. And a strange flowery scent believed to predict trouble. They said, at times, a strong and most remarkable perfume spread itself all over the mine, the odour being like that from clusters of roses, clematis, and honeysuckle. Nothing could be seen, but scent of the most exquisite kind was honestly stated to have been frequently inhaled. I'm trying to figure out what kind of a toxic gas found down a coal mine might produce such a scent.

Simon: What I find interesting about that is, in preparation for this episode, and on Chris's advice, I reread Josh Cutchen's book on supernatural odours. We'll be talking about this later, I'm sure. But what struck me, Chris, was what I would call the banality of supernatural smells. That if you tell me a smell, I'll tell you what supernatural area it comes from. And what I like about that example there is it's completely not what you would expect. You would not expect the smell of danger to be some flowers down a coal mine. You would expect brimstone. You would expect rotting flesh. And so this is one of these rare examples that is perhaps worth picking out.

Chris: Absolutely. It is really such an unusual occurrence, and I still wonder what's the chemistry involved. But one of the weirdest supernatural scent stories I've found was an account by one Dr. George B. Richmond of what might be called dead letters. In 1855, he claimed that a trunk containing hundreds of letters from friends and relatives had an intolerably offensive odour of decomposition. He found that 60 of the letters were from correspondents who died of various diseases like consumption and cholera. The letters from those longest dead were the most offensive in smell. And he had the theory that the paper somehow absorbed the, quote, nerve aura of our bodies from the hand, and that aura is subject to decomposition.

Simon: It's a lyrical story. Personally, I'm going to register here suspicion because I cannot see this guy opening the letters and checking the actual death date and then putting his nose to the piece of paper to do the sums. But I love the story.

Chris: Well, there were sceptics even at the time and said, you know, it's not unusual for paper to get a musty odour or something like that. So, yeah, there were sceptics even then. So on to Brimstone.

Simon: In my favourite century, the 19th century, there are many indirect references to Brimstone, the idea being that the devil smells sulphurous when he arrives. I have to say that in the accounts from the 19th century, it's more theoretical than practical. And so that there are examples where the devil appears and he's noticed because he has horns, because he has a tail or because he has cloven hooves. I can't think of very strong examples. I'm sure you'll have some, Chris, where sulphur comes out. But I was curious where the idea of sulphurous smells come from. And I learnt, if I ever knew this, I'd long forgotten it, that in the Book of Revelations, there's a reference to Brimstone and the devil. This had passed me by. My personal theory was that the devil in Western tradition is particularly associated with these explosions and disappearing acts. And I think that in early modern and modern theatres, that is connected with the smell of gunpowder, you know, the flash of light and suddenly the person's not there anymore. So that was my guess on it. But it does seem to have these antecedents going way back into Christian tradition.

Chris: Well, and when you think of what the picture of hell is, it's it's sulphurous. It's full of flames and bad smells. 

Simon: But bad smells isn't necessarily sulphurous. 

Chris: That's true.

Simon: I can imagine other smells that are bad smells, so the smell of excrement, which is almost universally disliked, or the smell of rotting flesh. I don't see there's any inevitable reason why you should have sulphur. And a couple of explanations that came my way was that sulphur is often associated with the ground because of volcanoes. Volcanoes have quite sulphurous smell. 

Chris: That's what I'm thinking of. Yeah.

Simon: Yeah. And you also have sulphur baths in some places that come naturally from the soil. But I have to say, I mean, for Britain, there's none of that. We don't have any live volcanoes that I know of, sulphur baths. I might regret saying that. So I'm still not really clear where this comes from, but I bet in some way is connected to this idea of the sudden disappearance of the devil, because that really is in the 19th century a marker of the devil.

Chris: But in Britain, you do have those stories about seeing people running or being chased into the volcano, like Mount Etna, by demons. And that's a part of British folklore, isn't it?

Simon: It is. And I wrote a paragraph about it in my new book and then cut it out because of some cruel words from you, Chris. And in all seriousness, one of the reasons I cut it out was because I wasn't actually sure how deep that went into British folklore, whether it was more of a learned myth or whether it was something that people told each other.

Chris: Well, we also find it in connection with witchcraft and with the fairies as well. I've got a story from 1890. They had an inquest on this 11-week-old baby. Mother and father thought that the death of the child was due to the witchcraft of the child's step-grandmother.

Simon: This is from East Anglia. I remember this account. 

Chris: Yeah. She died a few hours before the child and said that the child wouldn't live long after her. The father saw smoke coming from the perambulator, the baby carriage. And the mother said that the body was hot and dry and smelled of brimstone. So it was not sufficient evidence to show the nature of what had actually happened.

Simon: I love these accounts. I think one point I'd return to from what we said before is that I do think we're pretty bad at describing smells. And I think that under sulphur or brimstone, my guess is there's a fairly wide spectrum of smells that are jammed into there. That would be my guess.

Chris: Okay. Well, that's very possible. There's a wonderful story about, as we talked about in one of our previous episodes, a fairy funeral. And this priest saw the funeral going by and decided to follow it because it's the polite thing to do. And he said that he saw all these people with a coffin, carriage, hearses and all go into a hole in the wall, not bigger than what leads to a wasp nest. And he says, yeah, I'm going to follow you. And he thrust the butt end of his whip into the hole. But when he took it out, the lead with which it was loaded was all melted and he couldn't carry it anymore because it smelled so strong of brimstone.

Simon: Yeah. That's a Connacht story. I remember that one. I like it very much. Again, what does brimstone smell like? I think burning leather could have a slight brimstone-y smell. I think we've got to be a little bit more careful with smells than with other impressions from the senses, just because of the difficulty of actually describing what's happening.

Chris: That's true.

Simon: We've done, let's tick them off, death. We've done the devil. We've put the witches and even, how dare you, the fairies in there. And now, surely it must be the turn of ghosts.

Chris: Yes, absolutely. What we find are perfumes and tobacco are probably the most common, the most benign ghostly scents. And some ghosts are even identified by their signature scents. There's a former owner of Ohio's Buxton Inn, a lady named Bonnie Bonnell. She's known by her gardenia perfume. And again, Miss Victoria, a ghostly actress who haunts Dayton's Victoria Theatre, wafts her rose perfume everywhere. I've also got a story about a young man named Charlie who loved violets. He died young. His mother put a bunch of the flowers into the coffin and periodically the scent of violets would fill the house, leading the family to believe that Charlie was there. And his mother wrote, since we could not see him, this was surely a beautiful way for him to impress us with his presence. And that really sums up how ghostly smells can evoke the lost people. 

Simon: So just to be clear, we're smelling something that they were already strongly associated with in life. This is the pipe smoker. You smell his tobacco. 

Chris: Yeah, that kind of thing. And there's more prosaic smells. Local historical house here in Dayton, volunteers have smelled ghostly odours like fresh baked cookies and boiling green beans in the empty kitchen. There was an incident that I thought was hilarious, a Victorian house near Findlay, Ohio. A couple were restoring it and there was an incident where they came in through the back door into a former scullery, which was now their laundry room, and were greeted by a very strong smell of turnips or radishes. The smell was so strong it burnt their eyes and noses. So it's almost like a time warp. You're smelling the scent of past food preparation. As for ghostly tobacco scents, there was a woman I spoke to who kept smelling cigar smoke in her home. She wasn't a smoker. She lived alone and she even found fresh burn marks on the carpet. She somehow sensed that the cigar smoking ghost was a heavyset man who was worried about something. She thought it was perhaps the former owner of the house and he was worried because he couldn't find his wife, who was then in a nursing home. Well, she stopped smelling the cigar smoke when the widow of the former owner died and thought that he was finally reunited with her, but he was smoking up a storm coming around the house. One of the oddest ghostly scents I've been told about came from another Dayton house. The tenants saw this ghostly woman and she was sort of an electric blue colour and they smelled a burning electrical smell. They described it as like ozone from a lightning strike and they had the wiring checked and nothing was out of order. So it wasn't an actual electrical malfunction. An even stranger, a historian friend of mine, the late Rick Crawford, was driving through a valley in southern Logan County, Ohio at dusk one September evening in 1993. He realised that the entire valley floor was covered with this blue mist. It was sort of hanging five to six feet off the ground and he looked for a fire but couldn't even see a house or a barn in that very isolated part of the county. And he rolled down his window and he could smell a scent of wood smoke and of food cooking throughout the entire valley. Later, he mentioned the smoke to some of the local residents and they kind of smiled and said, oh, you noticed that too. And they told him that it always happened at dusk, the smell of cooking and smoke, because it was the custom of the Shawnee to cook their main meal at dusk. 

Simon: Beautiful. I love the idea of a haunting that is solely olfactory. It's just the smell. It reminds me of some of those great stories where we just hear ghosts or just hear the supernatural bells or hear the voices, but instead here you're smelling and you're spelling the very best thing of all food.

Chris: Lovely story. Well, I could probably do a whole episode on the ghastly elemental stenches of Elliot O'Donnell's works, but I'll finish my ghostly sense section with a story from somewhere in England. The narrator doesn't ever give a real name or location. She calls the 17th century house Holly Tree Cottage. And she told of hearing shuffling footsteps, a body rubbing against the wall of the stairs and trying to track down the invisible creature. She flung open her door to the landing and found nothing but a most revolting and horrible odour. I never encountered anything so terrible as that stench. It was the essence of decomposition. She said from that time we were never free from this visitation. Even in the broad day, the shuffling uneven steps would come down the stair accompanied by the odour of death. Now she had a friend staying over who complained that she was awakened by soft fingers fumbling over her face and an overwhelming odour of corruption. She realised immediately she had to deal with something not of this world and sitting up quickly enquired what it was. What are you and what is it you want me to do for you? But the thing, whatever it is, only puffed out corruption at me. 

Simon: It sounds to me a little bit like an MR James story because I think there you get references to the smell of corruption or the idea of the dead as being this a natural corrupt form.

Chris: It's interesting. I've seen two versions of this, one written by the person and the second written by someone else who investigated it. So moving on, what are we going to talk about next?

Simon: I must do honour to the fairies, of course. I went looking through my records to see whether the fairies have been associated with smells and naturally I was not disappointed. There were a couple of patterns that come out in 20th century works and 21st century works. I looked particularly through Marjorie Johnson and the fairy censuses and I think there are basically two kinds of smells. One is vegetation smells that could be anything from the green of leaves also through to flowery smells. And then on the other side, and I found more interesting in a way, was a number of references stretching from Marjorie Johnson through to the 2020s, where fairies were connected with a fungus like smell, a fungi, a mushroomy smell. And mushrooms do have that extraordinary smell that for me is a strange combination of earth and death. It's rather musty, but it's more than just must. And not really clear why fairies should have that smell. I don't know if you have any ideas, Chris. I suppose fairies are from underground. They smell of the earth. Maybe there's that kind of idea. Of course, there is the connection with mushrooms and fairies that could work. Any ideas there? 

Chris: That's my thought is that they are connected with mushrooms because of fairy rings. And you also have this new idea that people taking eating certain fungi see little people and there's tonnes and tonnes of art showing fairies with mushrooms. So I'm not quite sure why that artistic representation, but I think the fairy rings is probably the key.

Simon: It may be. I should say that before the Great War, I could only find one satisfactory reference to fairy smells. And this was an account from Yorkshire where a woman who was questioned said that she'd never seen fairies, but she'd smelled them. That begs a number of questions. And when she was asked, what do fairies smell of? She said, well, if you ever go to a church which is crowded and you're there for a while, it's that smell. Now, what does that even mean? I interpret that to mean that rather tweedy, sweaty, dank smell. This is Yorkshire, remember, so it's a damp country. That would be my guess. Any ideas there, Chris?

Chris: And then that would have been a Church of England church, so there wouldn't have been incense. Am I correct?

Simon: Not at the date this account comes from. The Church of England started to get excited about incense later in the 19th century. But this date in Yorkshire, not a bit of it.

Chris: Not a bit, yeah. Now, there is that early account from 1670 with an apparition being demanded whether a good spirit or a bad, returned no answer, but disappeared with a curious perfume and a most melodious twang.

Simon: I remembered the melodious twang. This comes from John Aubrey. So here we have fairies, perhaps as more almost angelic spirits.  This is the kind of thing you would expect with something on the good side of the ledge, yeah?

Chris: Yeah. I mean, do you find bad smells associated with fairies ever?

Simon: Well, look, I have to say, I'm not a huge fan of mushrooms. But this is one of the problems with smells. There are a couple of smells that are almost universally disliked. But actually, after that, we disagree violently about whether a smell is good or bad. And I don't know with your reduced smell, Chris, whether you're familiar with the smell of gasoline, paraffin, petrol, as we'd say in the UK. I think that smell is loathsome. I hate it. But some people like the smell.

Chris: Chris I think I've been able to smell it when I'm pumping gas at the pump, but it doesn't bother me unduly, unless I'm breathing too much of it. And you definitely don't want to breathe too much of it.

Simon: If you think of the smells associated with Catholic heroes, let's say, so this is the Madonna appearing, angels appearing, saints appearing, again and again, we have this reference to these flowery, floral scents. And I would have expected a bit more of that with fairies. And we have that John Aubrey quote that I'd forgotten about. But otherwise, at least in the modern world, we get a rather different kind of smell, the earthy Brian Froode kind of fairy.

Chris: That's it. Yeah.

Simon: So perhaps we could talk about further reading. And I think here it would be a great opportunity to talk about Josh's book. It's The Brimstone Deceit. One thing that really interests me about Josh's book is he's gathered together some really lovely examples of people having this strong smell within an encounter. And here, I would just say that when we are in frightening situations, and I've had this a couple of times with wild animals that I've unexpectedly met, as soon as you're in that fight or flight mode, I think you are very, very sensitive to smells. And I can imagine that happening in a supernatural account as well, particularly perhaps out at night, out in the countryside, this kind of thing. And I noticed, I went and checked, but in Jenny Randall's original, I think it's 1977 article about the Oz Factor. She mentions 12 things that can be associated with this tuning out of our normal reality. The classic one is a sudden silence. She also mentions smells as being one of the things that might be a signal that you're stepping into the twilight zone. Any other thoughts about Josh's book?

Chris: Well, as you said, he's just gathered a wonderful collection of all kinds of, from different encounters, encounters from UFO and alien encounters, Sasquatch, all kinds of unusual and Fordian places where, Fordian events where scent is involved. And no one has ever done this. This is a really unique book. Nobody's done this kind of collection. His other book, The Trojan Feast, also features a few examples of the supernatural sense. So I recommend both of those. 

Simon: I feel that these two books are very much of a type. They are early cutting. And as always with Josh's books, they're definitely worth reading. So let me return to a point I made earlier that essentially I stole from Josh, where I talked about the banality of supernatural smells. And if you tell me a supernatural smell, I'll tell you where it comes from. One point that Josh makes where he starts to take issue with that is he says, when you look across the gamut of supernatural experiences, sulphur is over-represented. And he makes the case that sulphur can also be found in other types of accounts. I think, for instance, in Sasquatch accounts where there, the banal expectation would be a musky animal smell. I'm not completely convinced by that. I respect the fact that Josh has read obviously far more accounts about supernatural smells than we have. But if it is true, I think it's a fairly small trend. Did you have any thoughts on that, Chris? 

Chris: I didn't. I don't really follow the Bigfoot research that much, although we had a big flap here in Ohio earlier this summer. But I'm not really tuned in to all that research. 

Simon: I love the way that whenever we talk about Bigfoot or Sasquatch, you suddenly become prim and proper.

Chris: Why? 

Simon: Well, I feel that you have some Bigfoot enthusiasts on your tracks or something like this, but...

Chris: No, no, no. It's just not an interest of mine, the way UFOs aren't a particular interest.

Simon: Well, that will be our next episode, of course, Chris. We're going to roll UFOs and Sasquatches into one and see where this takes us. Good luck. You see, if we could do something about Sasquatch cloves or alien cloves, I would have you. I just need to put together a little proposal about what aliens wore in the 1970s. And I think you would be up for this. OK, so we've been talking about Josh's book. Clearly, we both enjoy it. I found that the final bit about alchemy, this is at the very, very end of the book, lost me a little bit. I'm not really an abstract thinker. I don't think I would have been an alchemist in the 15th or 16th century. Are there any other books on supernatural smells? I'm going to venture a no, but I bet Chris has something.

Chris: Well, The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism by Herbert Thurston has a number of religious mystery scents because we find the odour of sanctity everywhere in saints' lives and around incorrupt bodies of saints and relics. So that's got a good selection of religious. But other than that, there's really very little. You'd have to search other books on the paranormal for those kinds of stories because there's not a specific compilation. I have some blog posts which we can put up, which have things like horses that sent death or black dog that created a scent that made people throw up. And there's a mysterious odour of incense at Glastonbury.

Simon: I never heard that one. Sorry, I was getting mixed up about Glastonbury. Sorry, Chris. I was thinking you meant the rock concert. I bet there was that.

Chris: Yeah, there's a mysterious smell at Glastonbury every summer.

Simon: Yeah. So I would also just throw in that in the 2000s and 2010s, there were actually two or three books, maybe even four books by scholars in different parts of the humanities that were multi-author volumes on smells. I seem to remember that Sir Keith Thomas even wrote a chapter on Elizabethan farts or something like this. But I'm pretty confident in saying there's nothing supernatural in those books because I went and looked. I would have expected at least something about the smell of sanctity, like you say, saints, this kind of thing. So not much reading to do there. I think also you and I can agree we're not about to write a book on supernatural smells. Interesting as this is because Josh got there before us. And so that means the only tick we have left is our final reading. I'm very curious to see what you came up with here, Chris.

Chris: Colonel Bowen was a professed atheist and a man of dissolute life. At the time of the apparition, he was in Ireland and his wife at their house in Gower. One night in December 1655, she being in bed, a person in the likeness of her husband presented himself at her bedside. There was a great noise, much like the sound of a whirlwind and a violent beating of the doors or walls as if the whole house were falling to pieces. The night following, the noise of a whirlwind began again with more violence than formerly. And the apparition walked in the chamber, having an insufferable stench like that of a putrefied carcass, filling the room with a thick smoke smelling like sulphur, darkening the light of the fire and candle. It appears that the smell of a carcass, some while dead, was observed more than once. And some person receives blows, the bruises from which were visible in the next morning. The apparition was seen several times. It would come with a cold breath of wind. The candles burned blue and almost out, and with sad smells of brimstone and powder.