[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Their journey had a lot of problems, though. Bering hated Stellar, which made tensions on the ship a bit strained, and he kept him trapped on board for nearly the entire journey. He stepped foot on land only twice, and one of those times was due to the St. Peter wrecking on an uninhabited island.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Bering died there, and today that island, like the sea around him, is named after him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And there you have the general context, but don't worry. Stellar's Journey did yield something that you and I would find interesting. On August 10th of 1741, while sailing a little south of Kodiak Island, the crew spotted an unusual creature. So unusual that they spent over two hours watching it, trying to figure out what it was.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Stellar described it as roughly four feet long, with a dog-like face, pointed ears, and a body covered in long hair.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The coloring was odd, too. Reddish-white on the belly, but gray on the back. He also noted how the creature's face appeared to have a mustache that looked a lot like the stereotypical Chinese mustache known as the Fu Manchu, which is long and hangs down on each side of the mouth.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It wasn't an otter, at least according to Steller's description of it. This animal's body ended in a fish-like tail which it used to swim incredibly fast as well as raise itself nearly halfway out of the water.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it did this over and over too, remaining there for minutes at a time, just sort of watching the humans on the ship, moving its eyes from face to face in utter fascination.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And clearly, the feelings were mutual. Stellar took notes and everyone else muttered and chatted among themselves. They even watched as the creature performed tricks with a large piece of seaweed. And because of all of this, do you know what Stellar called this mysterious animal? He channeled his inner Konrad Gesner and referred to it as a simia marina, the sea monkey.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Over the years, people have debated what exactly it was that Stellar and the others had witnessed. A seal or an otter are the most common explanations. But again, Stellar was an accomplished naturalist. He knew how to spot undiscovered creatures. There are a bunch that still bear his name today, too, like the Stellar's Sea Eagle and Stellar's Sea Cow.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Basically, he knew his stuff, so a lot of people doubt that it was a mistake.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And maybe the answer can be found in a story from two centuries later. Back in 1965, a sailor named Miles Smeaton was out off the coast of Atka Island, which is part of that long curving tail that extends out from Alaska into the Bering Sea.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Smeaton wasn't alone either. His daughter and another friend were also on board. And they spotted something odd.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was an animal about the size of a sheep with long hair all over its body that seemed to be grey on the back and red on the belly. Smeaton's daughter pointed out that the creature's head looked a lot like that of a dog.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If George Steller had taken the time to ask the indigenous peoples of Alaska, he would have been pleasantly surprised. They had their own stories of a creature in the waters there, described as a man-like seal, with the head and face of the former and the body of the latter. And they seem to have acted as bad omens too, which might actually explain his later shipwreck.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In some tales, it's said that if a hunter managed to pull one of these man-seals to shore in their net, it was a sign that misfortune was headed their way. And the creature existed beyond the oral tradition, too, showing up in a number of carvings and painted art objects.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Back in 1910, there was an anthropologist working with the indigenous peoples farther north at the geographical top of the Alaskan coast, at Point Barrow. And while he was working there, he did some hunting, just sort of exploring the area and soaking in the sights and sounds.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One day he spotted a creature similar to the one Stellar had seen. It apparently raised its head out of the water right in front of him. And it frightened him so much that he rushed back to the local village and told the indigenous hunters about it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I can imagine them laughing a bit at him, but also murmuring with wonder. There was a lot of healthy respect for the creature there. But they did tell him that it was a shame he hadn't killed it. Because if he had, he would have been blessed with the power to successfully hunt any animal he wished.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now of course, seal-like creatures aren't unique to Alaska. Longtime listeners of this show will remember discussions about another mythical being known as the Selkie. What's often forgotten though is that Selkie, as a term, comes from the old Scots word Selk, which means seal. And you see that connection in a lot of the stories.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Selkies are often portrayed as seals that can come ashore and shed their skins to take on human form. According to legend, you could tell if a person was one by checking their hands or feet for webbing between their fingers and toes. And in most stories, if their skin is stolen while they are in human form, they'll be trapped on dry land until they get their skin back.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Where did they come from? Well, there are a lot of theories in that little corner of folklore. Some thought that selkies were fallen angels, punished to live on Earth. Others whispered that they were once human, but had committed grave crimes, and were doomed to live forever as seals.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In some stories, selkies can only transform once a year at Midsummer's Eve. In others, it's possible to do so every nine nights. In almost all of the tales, though, the selkies are presented as seducers of humans. One common explanation for when young women went missing was that, of course, a selkie had taken her to be his bride.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Many selkie stories have a sort of happily ever after vibe, with perhaps a hint of darkness. But I want to leave you today with one that's a bit less mainstream, and a whole lot more horrifying.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It comes from the remote Faroe Islands, situated far north of Scotland, sort of equidistant to Norway and Iceland and the UK. And it begins like so many other Selkie stories tend to do.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In the tale, we meet a man who is walking to an evening Christmas church service. His path takes him along the coast, and as he passes a spot with a rocky cave high above the path, he notices two things. One, there seems to be a party going on inside the cave. And two, there's a large pile of sealskins on the beach nearby.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Stopping for a moment, he picks through the skins and plucks out one of the smaller ones, tucking it under his coat. Perhaps sensing trouble, the people in the cave above, elves, it turns out, come running down to the beach, and each one grabs their skin, throws it over their shoulders, and dashes for the water. All but one.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When the rush is over, the man looks up to see one of the young female elves still there, no seal skin in her hand. And you know how this plays out, right? She asks him for her skin back, but the man refuses. He soon uses this as leverage to make the girl marry him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The couple go on to have a number of children, and the man keeps his unwilling wife's magical seal skin locked in a trunk, always keeping the key with him so she can never leave. Romantic, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One day, the husband leaves his seal wife home with the kids while he heads out to attend yet another Christmas service. But when he had changed out of his work clothes into something a bit more fancy, he forgot to take the key with him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So she grabs it, unlocks the trunk, and retrieves her stolen skin. Like I said, that's the typical beginning to these stories. But in the version from the Faroe Islands, there's more.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] After regaining her magical skin, she hides all of the knives in the house and even puts out the fire, hoping that it will disarm her husband, literally and figuratively. And of course, she returns to the sea and to her selkie husband, so happily ever after, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Not really. One day she gets word that her human husband is planning a massive seal hunt. So she uses her magical powers to appear to him in a dream the night before.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] She warns him not to kill the large male seal, who is her beloved husband, and she describes her two seal children to him as well, and begs him to spare them. And the guy? Well, he ignores her. On the day of the hunt, he and the others kill indiscriminately. In the process, the selkie woman's entire family is slaughtered.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Honestly, it's a bloodbath, and the sort of gruesome element that used to exist in a lot of folktales before big media companies started cleaning them up and making them friendly.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Back at the house, the hunter and his friends are dividing up their catch when the selkie woman bursts through the door. Not in human form this time though, but as an enormous troll. She notices a certain smell in the air and glances at the fire where a big pot of stew is boiling away.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Furious at what he and the others had done, she cursed them all.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] People tend to have a certain opinion about how the world around them should function. And sure, there's a lot of variety to those worldviews, with some leaning a bit too far into utopia, and others standing firmly on the side of evil. But at least when it comes to the wildlife of planet Earth, we're mostly unified. Which is why the oddities always stand out to us.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Think back to the first time you ever learned about the platypus, which looks like someone stitched a duck's bill onto a beaver. That always makes people stop and think, because it breaks those unspoken rules. They don't seem...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] At the end of the day, the work of people like Conrad Gestner and George Steller might leave us with volumes of animals that only existed in the imaginations of their day and age. But they also serve as proof of our fascination with the unexpected, the rule-breakers, and the what-ifs.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it still happens today, by the way. You don't need a 16th century naturalist to find examples of creatures that defy our expectations. Just look at the rumors that flew around in 1938 in the summer resort town of Wasaga Beach in Ontario, Canada.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In early June of that year, a mysterious creature was reportedly spotted in the water just offshore. A creature that everyone agreed was seal-like, but not a seal. Descriptions of the animal claim that it was roughly 8 feet long, dark in color, and thick. But despite that, it swam at an unnatural speed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Sightings always happened in the early evening, between 6 and 8 PM, and typically in a spot of water that was about 200 yards offshore where the water was deeper. According to an article from the Daily Sun Times that summer, it has a round head like a seal, and it can swim as fast as any motorboat.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now the first person to spot the creature was a woman named Mary Mar, although this being the 1930s, the papers didn't interview her, instead they asked her husband Thomas the questions. He said that at first he thought it was just an abandoned canoe, so he climbed into his own boat to row out and retrieve it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When he got within 15 yards though, Marr claimed that the shape suddenly sped off and vanished from sight and, I quote, churning up rollers like a steamer. He had lived in the area for over 25 years and had never seen anything like it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Word spread quickly, as news about such things has a tendency to do. And of course, there were theories about what it might be. One man even made a strong case for the creature actually being a loon, which he believed hovered so low over the water that it cast a shadow and made it look massive and dark.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I do need to say though that Mary and Thomas Marr owned a grocery store right there along the beach, directly in line with the evening sightings. And thanks to the rumors and excitement over the legend, that meant that more and more people were coming to visit, and in the process, spending more cash at the Marr's shop.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One reporter noticed this coincidence, and Thomas is even quoted in the paper as saying, No sir, we don't sell beer here. Still, it certainly makes you wonder.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As for the truth, well, no evidence was ever found. For skeptics, that's clear proof that the sightings were nothing more than wild rumor. For the believers, it meant that there was still hope that the creature might be found. Both sides have a shot at being right. That is, of course, until the monster finally shows its face.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I hope you've enjoyed today's tour through some of folklore's oddest animal hybrids. Fish with monk's haircuts, underwater bishops, screaming fish monkeys. You name it, the pages of history seem to have it. But we're not done just yet. I have saved one last tale to share with you. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's hard to shock people who work at a slaughterhouse, but in 1886, that's exactly what happened.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They worked at Franklin Junction on the North Island of New Zealand near the city of Hamilton. Someone had left a 70-pound sheep carcass hanging on a hook only to come back and find it completely picked clean, right down to the bones. But not everything was gone. Whatever had done it had left behind a clue.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Strange, bloody, reptilian footprints that led away from the carcass and out to the nearby creek.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Newspapers of the time referred to it as a Saurian monster, the word hinting at any kind of large lizard. Just think of it this way, Saurian puts the Saur in dinosaur.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Naturally, people started to feel threatened and afraid. Men began to set up watch in the area with rifles in hand while they waited for the monster's return. There were rumors that it was spotted again here or there, with one witness claiming that it resembled a sea serpent with the head of an alligator. Another witness, a boy, said that the monster chased him all the way home.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Other sightings placed the monster in the nearby river. There were many stories of the creature thrashing the waves with its massive tail. Two men who were trying to cross the river in a canoe reported that the beast almost capsized them, and they got a good look at it in the process. Long body like an alligator, massive jaws filled with razor sharp teeth, and entirely covered in shaggy black hair.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Almost overnight, the monster became the boogeyman for everything. Folks remembered how a local Maori girl was found dead near the river the previous year, the flesh stripped clean from one of her arms. Obviously, they said, the beast was responsible.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Here's the trouble, though. New Zealand doesn't have any reptiles that are over a few inches long, and certainly no alligators. Although some people theorize that an alligator could have been brought over from Australia. Except Australia has crocodiles, not alligators.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But what New Zealand does have is folklore. In Maori tradition, there's a creature known as the taniwa, which is sort of like their version of a dragon or a serpent. They typically live in natural places too, like caves and lakes and rivers.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Later that year, in November of 1886, a similar creature was spotted on the other side of Hamilton. One witness claimed that he had seen it over two dozen times and gave the same description as before.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Long snout, seven or so feet long, and covered in black hair. And this time, people of the area managed to capture it. When they did, they claimed that it turned out to just be a grey seal. The trouble is that type of seal doesn't live in New Zealand.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One other person, though, managed to kill the Saurian monster about a year later. A local policeman in Ragland Harbor told the newspapers that he stumbled upon the monster sleeping on the beach, so he pulled out his gun and put two bullets through its head.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The newspaper article also includes the monster's dimensions. It was 12 feet long, 6 feet around, and instead of a tail, it had two weird screw-shaped propeller-like things. Apparently the animal's corpse was even dissected to learn more, and then its skin and bones were removed for preservation, later being set up for display in Auckland.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Which means that we could all go and see it now and figure out what it really was, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, not so fast. You see, just a week after the preserved monster was installed, the store it was inside of caught fire, and everything burned to the ground. Sometimes the truth is evasive.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Just when you have the fingers of your mind wrapped around it, it suddenly slips away.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Manke, with research by Cassandra Dayalba and music by Chad Lawson.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Don't like ads? We've got a solution. There's a paid version of Lore on Apple podcasts and Patreon that is 100% ad-free.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Plus, subscribers get many weekly episodes called Lore Bytes. It's a bargain for all that ad-free storytelling, and a great way to support this show and the team behind it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Lore is much more than just a podcast, of course. There's a three-volume World of Lore book series, plus two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video. Learn more over at lorepodcast.com. And you can also follow this show on threads, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, and click that follow button. And when you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Rumor had stirred the city into a panic. You know how it goes, right? A story begins to be told and a sizeable enough portion of the population buys into it, transforming it into something bigger. Something more powerful.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You see, the king had issued a royal edict the year before that was meant to empty the streets of homeless people all over Paris. The rich nobility didn't want to see them anymore, and that included children, so the police had been rounding them up and taking them to places of detention.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh, and one other little detail. Those police officers were paid a fee for this, per arrest. You can see how that might get out of hand, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So the people of Paris rioted, but not because they were rejecting a royal edict. No, it was because a rumor had replaced the truth and taken control of the narrative. A rumor that said that King Louis XV had become a leper and was bathing in the blood of children to cure himself.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] People protested, threats against the king were made, and, looking back, the seeds of the coming revolution were planted. All because people didn't want to believe the logical truth, but instead clung to a wild, fantastical fiction.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Thankfully, that sort of thing would never happen today, but it certainly begs us to stop and think about the power of rumor and the way in which lies and fabrications can take on a life of their own, often times overpowering the truth in the court of public opinion. And it should cause us to rightly fear those moments. Because if history is any indication, rumor can lead us down some very dark roads.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In June of 1779, just three years after the Declaration of Independence and in the distant lands of the American Midwest, two men were executed for witchcraft. Specifically, they were tried and convicted for poisoning a number of people in a way that seemed like hoodoo magic.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's the story, anyway. But as any longtime listener of this show knows, the story that's told and the actual truth sometimes take different roads. It's the deviation between them, that telephone game leading to a gulf of misunderstanding that holds the most powerful lesson of all.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's a lot we can learn from it. About ourselves, about story, about folklore in general. But before all of that, there was the truth.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Moreau and Manuel were enslaved men living in what is today the state of Illinois. In 1779 though, it was still in British hands, although they had only recently acquired the territory from the French, who were the first Europeans to settle the area. And home for Moreau and Manuel, at this point in time, was Cahokia.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The two men knew each other from the time they spent enslaved to the same Frenchman, but when he died in 1778, they were both sold off to different estates. Despite that though, they still managed to work together.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Manuel manufactured the poisons they sold, and Moreau distributed them to the clients. It was something they had done for years, and had developed a reputation for.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The events of 1779 kicked off when two other enslaved people approached them with a request. This couple had been suffering through horrible abuse from their slave owners, uh, Monsieur and Madame Nicole. The exact request that they had for Moreau and Manuel was to make their mistress gentle. So a deal was struck.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But instead of making the Nichols more gentle, it killed them. And that's not what the clients had asked for. And from everything that I've read about their story, it seems that this was the last straw for the others around them. They had been turning a blind eye to all sorts of similar slip-ups, including prior murders by poison.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, Manuel and Moreau were taken into custody and put on trial.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know the rest. Like I said a moment ago, they were executed for their crimes. And that's when the rumors started. Because it was really easy for people to hear about two Afro-Caribbean men being put to death for mixing potions and elixirs, and walk away thinking that they were witches. Even when they weren't.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It probably didn't help that their original sentence was to be burned at the stake. The judge, a French magistrate mind you, had simply demanded a cruel enough punishment to match the cruelty of their crimes. Soon after though, a colonial court stepped in and changed their sentence to death by hanging.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Things got worse a century later when one historian in Illinois stumbled upon some records about the trial. He misinterpreted some of the notes on the court documents and published a report on the case with those hot buzzwords of witchcraft and necromancy. Overnight, the country was introduced to what was said to be Illinois' first and only witchcraft execution, legally sanctioned by the courts no less.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And everyone bought the story. Even Theodore Roosevelt fell for it. In his 1889 book, The Winning of the West, he writes about the case using phrases like trying to bewitch them and burnt and hanged for witchcraft in accordance with the laws and with the decision of the proper court.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To this day, there are people out there who have heard of the trial of Manuel and Moreau, and they've only ever been told that the two men were burned and hanged by the state for being Illinois' first necromancers. It's a version of history that's clearly a lot more alluring than a story about a couple of poisoners. But it's wrong.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Manuel and Moreau were killers, yes, but their magic was nothing more than chemistry, and their executions were no different from any other murderer of the time. Lives were lost, and two men were executed for murder. That's the truth at the heart of the story.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But rumors, it seems, never die. And as the years have gone on, Illinois began to add names to the list of witches who haunt the state. Whether based on actual factual people, or conjured out of thin air, these new stories demonstrate the power of rumor to hold on and linger.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And as you're about to find out, they've left us with some terrifying tales to enjoy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The details about her are sketchy at best. The people of Williamson County called her Eva Locker and said she lived out on Davis Prairie. Or maybe it was David Prairie. And they first started telling stories about her back in the early 1800s.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One local historian, writing about a century ago, claimed that from 1818 to 1835 there were many great witches in the county, and Eva Locker was chief among them. And as you might expect, the stories about her have only grown in scope and power over the years.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So what was she known for? Well, she apparently kept a towel hanging on her porch that she could milk like a cow. And when she did, it would magically pull milk from neighboring farms, leaving those farmers with no milk of their own.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They also said that she killed local cattle by shooting them with hairballs.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What sort of weapon fires that kind of ammunition, I have no idea, but the people were convinced. They would cut open a dead cow, and find these hairballs in their stomach. Of course, these are better known as Beezors, and they are incredibly common things. But sure, blame them on Eva Locker, I guess.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And when she got out of hand, it seems that there was no one else in the county that had the power to stand up to her. When that happened, it's said that locals went to a preacher named Charlie Lee in the next county over, who had a way of combating Eva's magic.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] How? Well by shooting a photo of her with a silver bullet in a ceremony that had all the pomp and circumstance of a funeral.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Eva Locker, from what we can tell, might not have been a real person. Charlie Lee, however, was. But whether or not his silver bullet worked to cure her victims, well, I think I'll leave it to you to believe whatever you choose.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then there was Black Annie. She was known to the locals of Mount Vernon, a small city in southern Illinois, as far back as 1866. That's when dairy farmers in the area started to notice the figure of a mysterious woman in black.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And yes, stories that mix witches and cows are pretty common, and for good reason. When your livelihood depends on your livestock, and especially your cattle, you're bound to project some wild fears onto them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Those sightings were followed by a panic over milk supplies, leading to Illinois's first, and I quote, dairy war. And don't ask, I have no idea what that means. But Annie would return. On February 19th of 1888, almost 22 years after her first appearance, she was back. And this time her arrival coincided with something tragic. A tornado.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When the twister was done, it left half of Mount Vernon's population homeless, with 450 buildings totally destroyed, and nearly 40 people lost their lives.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So when rumors began to spread that Black Annie, known this time as Cyclone Annie, had been spotted walking through the wreckage in a black dress and matching veil, people panicked. It didn't help that the flattened building she had been spotted near was the local grade school.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then, in 1918, a third scare seemed to grip the city.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This time, locals claimed that Black Annie was chasing them through the streets. Whether they were walking in pairs, riding on horseback, or in a carriage, it didn't matter. Annie would appear out of nowhere and run after them, her black gown and veil flowing in the warm summer air. Something that must have frightened those who experienced it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And Mount Vernon wasn't alone in their panic. A figure similar to Black Annie appeared in the Illinois town of Lebanon in 1921, right down to that vintage black dress and veil. In the 1930s, people in the town of Carlisle reported spotting a woman in a black dress, following them from the shadows after dark.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Naturally, people were left terrified by these stories.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And one final note here. Black Annie might not have been a real woman, but the stories are deeply traditional. It seems that there are similar figures in British folklore that appear in print as far back as the 1600s. And their names? Black Annis, Black Agnes, Black Anna, and Black Annie with a Y.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In a lot of ways, her legend is similar to that of La Llorona, especially how it became a tool for warning children to behave and not play outside in the dark.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In the end though, all of them were just rumors. Yes, the details around them might have been true. The Derry Wars and the Tornado of 1888, for example. But these legendary witches themselves seem to have only existed on the lips of the locals, not the pages of history. The only blood in their veins, it seems, was rumor.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But Illinois still has more tales to give up. And if one event from the 1950s has anything to teach us, it's that rumor can cause people to do terrible things.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Sometimes the wide-open landscape of Illinois can become a vacuum that pulls in all sorts of folklore and rumor. All it takes is a fear, a doubt, or some unexplainable experience to set the event in motion. And in the winter that spanned 1849 into 1850, that's exactly what happened.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] James Spiva and his wife Rume lived in McDonough County in western Illinois, along with their seven children. They owned and farmed a big 40-acre tract of land near Hogwallow Creek, but it wasn't a luxurious existence. Life was rough, the work was hard, and the rewards were few.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] James had a brother, William, who owned his own 200 acres nearby, where he lived with his wife, Phoebe. And James's wife, Rume, had relatives in the area, too. Charles' friend and Abel's friend were farmers just like them, and all of them. The families of James, William, and the friend brothers all attended church together in the home of Abel and his wife, Elizabeth.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, that's the cast of characters, and I know that's a lot to keep track of, but tragedy is rarely built on a simple foundation, and we're going to need most of these players for the events to make sense.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In the winter of 1849, James Spiva came down with a sickness. He was feeling weak and empty, both of which were making him cranky and frustrated.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was so bad that he wasn't able to do the farm work that his family depended on for survival.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But that wasn't the only unfortunate turn of events for James. That same winter, his favorite dog passed away, his cows weren't producing milk like they used to, and some of his other livestock had simply gone missing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now, today we might blame that on a number of reasonable causes. Bad weather, illnesses that cause the animals to wander off and die, that sort of thing. But this was a deeply isolated area, nearly impassable under huge amounts of snow. Isolation and fear are a powerful elixir.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But James talked to his brother William about it and the two men came up with an explanation that made sense to them. James had been bewitched. The proof was his exhaustion, which both of them believed came from James being transformed into an animal each night and forced to attend a witch's Sabbath.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And who was that witch? Well, it seemed that the wife of their neighbor, able friend, Elizabeth, was also mysteriously exhausted and unwell, so bad that she was confined to her bed. They decided that she wasn't really sick at all, just resting from all those wild nights at the Sabbath gatherings.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But luckily for James, William was more than just his brother or a farmer. He was also a witch doctor.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So he had James do something odd. He instructed him to carve an image of Elizabeth on a tree, and then shoot it with a silver bullet. And James, desperate for relief from his affliction, did exactly that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The next day, February 23rd of 1850, James was outside chopping wood. Something that I assume was a sign that the ritual might have worked, and a neighbor passed by and mentioned the local gossip. Elizabeth Friend had passed away that very morning.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh, I knew that, James replied. I killed her. She was a witch, and I shot her with a silver bullet.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And as you might imagine, hearing someone confess to murder so readily inspired this neighbor to run straight to the authorities. I doubt they believed the witchcraft part, but the actual confession? That was pretty damning. As a result, a few days later, James Spiva was arrested for the murder of Elizabeth Friend.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Clearly, when he stood before a justice on April 4th, James explained the misunderstanding and everyone laughed it off. Right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, not exactly. James apparently stuck to his wild story, so Justice Tridwell officially charged him with murder. He was immediately sentenced to be hanged, although that seems to have been altered shortly after.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Death by firearm, a death similar to his claimed killing of Elizabeth, was his new punishment, according to old court documents, right down to being lined up against a tree.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As the story goes, however, as James was being placed against that tree, a lawyer happened to be passing by and asked Justice Tridwell what was going on. Then he informed the judge that since James was not a Christian, the more just thing to do would be to let him go home and prepare to meet God.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] While James was at home though, it seems the sheriff had a change of heart and the execution never took place. Soon enough, the matter was forgotten and James went back to life on the farm. Crisis averted the end. Right? Sort of.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That is until 1855, when James felt that he had once again been bewitched by someone near him. Elizabeth Friend was dead though, so who was his new enemy? Once again he asked his brother William, and once again William had a suspect. It was James' own wife, Rume.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] At this point, one of the brothers remembered a bit of old witch folklore. It was said that you could break a witch's spell by scratching her face and drawing blood. So William suggested that James wait until his wife was sleeping and then give her a little cut on the forehead with a knife. Heck, she might not even notice, he told him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So that's what James did. Fueled by fear and empowered by folklore, he crept toward his sleeping wife and placed the knife against her face. But Rume felt it and suddenly sat up, causing the blade to cut a deep gash down the length of her cheek.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was enough to cause her to go to the authorities and accuse James of murder. He was even arrested and put on trial, spending time in the county jail, but in the end he was found not guilty. Upon his release, James apparently skipped town, moving as far away as possible.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Three years later, Rume filed for divorce. She was thankfully able to move on from such a troubled and paranoid man, but she would carry the scar on her face for the rest of her life. A living reminder of the dangerous power of rumor.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Don't believe everything you read on the internet. For anyone growing up in the 90s, as the online world became the new frontier, that was the common warning from parents and friends. Just because it was typed out on a page or a screen didn't necessarily make it true.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That tendency, though, to believe anything sensational enough to cause people to skip over the due diligence of basic research and fact-checking wasn't new to the 90s. It's still with us today, and we can also find it plastered across the pages of history.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Rumors have always been more appealing than the truth, and far more viral.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But here's a truth that's wild enough to be worthy of spreading around at parties and on social media. Witchcraft is still technically illegal in Illinois, and is punishable by death. How is that possible? Well, it has to do with those old world connections in the pre-United States version of Illinois.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Back in February of 1819, the Illinois State Legislature wanted to make sure that all state laws were built on the same foundation as the original 13 colonies, a principle known as English Common Law.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was smart, in a way, ensuring that all the laws of one state didn't stand in direct opposition to the laws of another. But it also meant inheriting the flaws that came with it. Flaws, like the 1604 Witchcraft Act.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now, England repealed the act in 1736, but Illinois has never formally done the same. In fact, in 1874, they passed the same law all over again, just with some new formatting and clarification. But the felony charge connected to witchcraft made it through the revision, and it's still on the books today.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Thankfully though, it's never been enforced. Should any of the Illinois witches that we talked about today have actually been real, they might have found themselves in some legal hot water. And so might another pair of families.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You see, in 1837, another pair moved to Illinois, all the way from New England. Brothers Avery and Moses settled in Warren Township and began new lives in the growing area. And a few years later, in 1842, another man, also from New England, did the same thing, moving in just a few miles down the road from the brothers.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Both households not only came from the same region, but the same state, Massachusetts, and their connection, unbeknownst to them, ran much deeper than a few miles of Illinois roadway.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You see, back in 1692, Moses and Avery's great-great-great-grandmother, Mary Esty, was hanged on Gallows Hill as part of the Salem witch trials.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One of Mary Esty's primary accusers, by the way, was a young Ann Putnam Jr. It was her testimony that helped justify Mary's execution. Although, she did later write a letter to the church back in 1706 apologizing for her role in the tragedy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I know because I've actually held that letter in my own hands, but it didn't change the cold hard fact that the Putnam name helped destroy the Esty name.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Which makes it all the more awkward, as well as wildly coincidental, that the Esty Brothers' new neighbor in Illinois would also hail from the same area of Massachusetts, a man named Proctor Putnam, the great-great-great nephew of Ann Putnam.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If you're like me, you were probably a little surprised to hear rumors of witch trials and sorcery so far from the colonial region of the eastern seaboard. As an Illinois boy myself, I was honestly not expecting it. But here we are. Rumors and all.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But as amazing as that might be, I haven't even told you all the tales we've found. In fact, there's one more that needs exploring. Stick around through this brief sponsor break, and I'll tell you all about it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But rather than being an article about some pair of socially mobile new money kids causing a stink in high society, this article was about something taking place way out in Illinois. In fact, this story, one that seemed to enthrall big city readers everywhere, took place on a farm.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The Williams family lived in Franklin County, down in the southern tip of the state. In fact, the community they lived in was known as Fitz Hill, which might have been a bit of foreshadowing, as you're about to find out. And it all began on April 1st of 1871.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That was the day both of James Williams' daughters began acting strangely. True to the way the press worked back then, the girls, 16 and 18 years old at the time, are never actually named, so we don't know their full true identity. But what they did that spring certainly made them a household name.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It would begin the same way each evening. After a completely normal day of working, talking, laughing and more, their behavior would change as the sun dipped below the horizon. All at once, both girls would drop everything they were doing and break into an all-out run in a straight line away from the family home.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When they reappeared minutes later, they would both bound and leap up onto the roof of the house, where they performed all sorts of dangerous, complex acrobatics along the roof line. The only things interrupting this odd behavior were their unnatural screams that they bellowed out as they did it, and of course, their fits.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] According to multiple witnesses, the girls would be balancing along the very peak of the roof when, all of a sudden, they would be struck with violent seizures. Again, at the exact same time. Sometimes these fits would cause them to go perfectly still, like statues, and yet not fall off or lose their balance.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know how communities can be, too. The moment word began to spread about the unusual feats of these two sisters, folks began to walk over and watch them. Or travel by horse, even by carriage. Soon there were regular crowds of over 200 people, all entranced by the supernatural acrobatics of the Williams sisters.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] On top of all of that, pun maybe partially intended here if I'm honest, the sisters began to do other things too.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They spoke in a language that no one else could understand. They had a habit of capturing flies and eating them live out of their hands, sometimes to the point that it caused them to vomit. And their movements, even on the ground, had a choreographed quality, as if they were both just puppets controlled by the same invisible master.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now, I know what you're thinking. How long did it take for someone to accuse them of being witches, right? But that's not what happened. Instead, these young ladies turned that idea around and claimed that it was they who had been bewitched. Their initial sprint each evening, they claimed, was the doing of the witch who tormented them, causing them to run to her house each evening.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That June, the girls claimed, in the daytime when they could speak freely, that they were being tortured by a local woman who was an evil witch, but they were unable to speak her name. According to them, if they were to identify this witch to the authorities, she would choke them and cause more fits.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's no record of what ultimately happened to the Williams sisters, which is more than a little frustrating. Their story was covered in all sorts of far-off newspapers, but the opinions were rather mixed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Up in Chicago, for example, the Chicago Tribune called it a good old-fashioned case of witchcraft. But elsewhere, such as Tennessee, there were doubts, like when the Nashville Union and American blamed their behavior on, and I quote, some villainous quack doctor.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The best guess as to their true identity, according to the work of researcher and author Michael Clean, is that their names were Mary and Susan. But no one is really sure. To this day, their story remains a mystery, wrapped in folklore, and fueled by rumor.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Manke, with research by Cassandra de Alba and Taylor Haggardorn, and music by Chad Lawson.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Lore is much more than just a podcast. There's a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video. Check them both out if you want more lore in your life. Information about all of that and more is available over at lorepodcast.com.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you can also follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. And when you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In 2018, a group of researchers were excavating an old hunter-gatherer burial site within a cave in Israel when they discovered something strange.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It had settled into the cracks of the floor, between stone mortars, a mysterious ancient substance that, I will be honest, I personally might have overlooked myself. After all, I imagine tomb floors aren't the most spotless places, right? But these researchers were experts, and an anomaly caught their eye right away.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Despite its surroundings, this residue had nothing to do with death. Rather, what the archaeologists found was a substance long associated with celebrating life. That is,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Booze. Specifically, traces of wheat and barley based alcohol, or as you and I know it today, beer.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But here's the thing about this burial site. It was 13,000 years old. What the researchers had unearthed was nothing short of the earliest brewery ever discovered.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Scientists believe that humans develop the ability to metabolize alcohol long before we were


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, humans. With primates consuming fermented fruit.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Some anthropologists even think that humans invented agriculture itself out of a desire to brew alcohol.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And if that isn't proof that our species has basically had the same priority since day one, I don't know what is.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Close your eyes and picture a scene with me. You're at a wedding. The ceremony has ended and waiters in white button-downs have begun circling the dining room, delivering food and drink to the guests. Suddenly you hear a chime, like a thin bell ringing. Someone at a nearby table is clinking their butter knife against their glass.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And yes, you know exactly what that sound means. It's time for a toast.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The practice of giving toasts is so common that we may not recognize it as folklore at all, but in truth, this ritual comes right out of the realm of superstition.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] According to one historian, the explanation for why we clink our glasses is that the bell-like noise would drive off the devil.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And toasting superstition doesn't end there either. The ancient Greeks would toast to the dead with water instead of wine to symbolize their river voyage to the underworld.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so even to this day, it's considered bad luck to toast with water in your glass, lest you call death to the dinner table. In Spain and France, it is essential to make eye contact while toasting. The punishment if you break it? Seven years of bad, uhm, intimacy with your partner, if you know what I mean.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In Japan, it's unlucky and poor manners to pour your own cup of sake. Others must pour it for you and vice versa. In another superstition, two people drinking from the same cup of wine or beer will find their futures forever entangled. So be careful who you offer a sip to.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh, and a quick aside, the word toast itself comes from the 17th century, when people would put actual bits of herbed bread into their wine to improve the taste and soak up some of the acidity. I can't imagine that that was good, but hey, don't knock it till you've tried it, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Speaking of wine, it's usually considered unlucky to spill wine. Unless of course you're British and the wine is spilled on you, in which case that is lucky. Got a sailing voyage ahead? Well, pouring a glass of wine into the waves can calm an angry sea.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh and if you want to get a person drunk on just one glass of wine,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now if the fingernail thing weren't gross enough in the 17th century, romantic young Englishmen would stab themselves and mix their blood into their own wine before toasting to the women they loved.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then of course there's the Catholic transubstantiation, in which wine becomes Christ's literal blood when drunk.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And all of a sudden, a piece of wet toast doesn't sound so bad, does it?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now of course, not all superstitions celebrated drinking. Some demonized it. During the temperance movement of the early 1900s, for example, it was associated with Satan himself.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One propaganda cartoon likened a sip of alcohol to, and I quote, the devil's toboggan, depicting a drunkard on a slide plummeting right into his own grave.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The devil himself was known to partake too. There are numerous folktales from around the world about people getting the devil drunk in order to defeat him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like the one in Mexican folklore, where a man selling pulque, a traditional fermented agave drink, wormed his way out of a deal with the devil by getting the devil so drunk he passed out and burst into flames.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Or a Scottish folk tale in which a Highlander, not the kind that cuts off your head with a sword, beats the devil in a wrestling contest after getting him drunk on his finest bottle of whiskey. But it isn't just the devil who enjoys a well-mixed cocktail. In fact, the original party animals were the gods.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In ancient Egypt, almost all their gods loved to toss back a stiff drink. And how do you worship a drunk god? Well, by drinking yourself. A lot. Osiris, the god of death and the afterlife, was even said to have been responsible for teaching humans how to brew beer and wine.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And in death, families would often bury their loved ones with their finest brew to try and impress Osiris.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it wasn't just the Egyptians. Many cultures believe that intoxication brought you closer to the gods. Puritans even referred to alcohol as the good creature of God.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then there's the ancient Mayan god of drinking, Akan, whose name literally translates into… Belch.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] His best friend happens to be the god of creativity, which reminds me of Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, who could inspire frenzied fits of passion, religious devotion, and creativity in his drunken followers.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Looking back, it seems that divinity, artistic inspiration, and alcohol have been linked throughout human history.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And no spirit is more tied to creative genius, nor more wrapped in folklore than absent.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's a well-worn ritual. First, the bartender places a glass in front of you, containing a crystal clear emerald green liquid. Atop the glass balances a flat silver spoon, slotted with intricate carvings.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's a sugar cube on the spoon, and the bartender pours a stream of water over it, so it passes through the sugar, through the spoon, and into the green liquid below. Your translucent drink goes pale and milky, as if by magic. You take a cautious sip, and it tastes of licorice and herbs, like a bitter pinch.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now you may as well say hello. After all, you have just met the Green Fairy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Absinthe is a highly alcoholic liquor made from Artemisia absinthium, a type of wormwood. While there are other herbs in the recipe like fennel and green anise, wormwood is both the primary ingredient and the most controversial. The leafy plant grows in Europe, Siberia, and the United States, and it's one of the most bitter plants on Earth.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then there's the fact that wormwood contains fujone, a chemical with hallucinogenic properties. But absinthe didn't always have the reputation it has now. It actually began as a medicine.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As far back as 1552 BC, the ancient Egyptians used medicinal wormwood, which we know because they wrote it down on a papyrus scroll that survives to this day. The ancient Greeks had a medicine called absinthean, made by soaking wormwood leaves in wine and spirits.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The word amcythian actually means undrinkable because of how bitter the stuff was. But it must not have been totally undrinkable because they drank it plenty to treat menstrual pain, jaundice, anemia, and rheumatism, and even to aid in childbirth.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In the second century CE, wormwood tinctures were used for stomach problems and swooning. And in fact, the nickname wormwood came from the fact that it was used to help get rid of stomach worms. Jumping forward to the 1700s, the first modern absinthe recipe was believed to have been invented by a Frenchman named


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I know this is going to sound like a cartoon character. Dr. Pierre Ordinaire.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The first absinthe distillery opened in 1797 to produce it en masse, but even then, it was still purely medicinal.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That is, until 1840, when French was busy conquering and colonizing Algeria. And bear with me here, I swear the Algerian thing is relevant.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You see, French soldiers abroad often got sick in the unfamiliar landscape, and they were given absinthe medicine for things like fevers to prevent dysentery and even to ward off insects. They would mix it into their wine to cut the bitterness, and then they found that it had quite a fun, boozy kick to it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] By the time the troops got home, they had developed a taste for what they called laverte, or the green, which then spread to civilians. Absinthe as an alcoholic beverage was finally in fashion.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I told you that would be relevant. Now around the same time, the French grape vineyards were wiped out by an insect infestation called phylloxera. Wine became more scarce and more expensive. But do you know what was neither? Absinthe.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's popularity boomed, and it wasn't uncommon to start the morning with a glass of absinthe and end the day with a l'urverte, or the green hour, where you would have, well, more absinthe. And it wasn't just French. It's popularity spread across Europe and even to America.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now remember, intoxication has been linked to artistic inspiration for thousands of years, and absinthe trickled right into that legacy. It's no shock that the cheap, readily available, and very strong alcohol became popular among artists. Some were so inspired by the drink that it even leaked into their art.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Painters including Edouard Manet, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri de Luz-Lutract, and Pablo Picasso all made paintings depicting people drinking absinthe. In fact, one of Toulouse-Lutract's paintings was a portrait of van Gogh himself drinking absinthe.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The artists, drawn to myth and whimsy, referred to the drink as the Green Fairy. They idealized being drunk, and just like the ancient Mayans and Greeks, they too associated drunkenness with a sort of muse figure who would bring inspiration and brilliance to their work.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In the words of Arthur Rimbaud, the poet makes himself a seer through long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. In other words, to be a poet, a good poet, even a great poet, you had to be drunk first.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Green Fairy herself was personified in art as a beautiful, emerald winged woman, burying a tall, swirling glass. The whole culture around Absinthe had developed a sort of magic attached to it, with the belief that it had the ability to alter the mind and heighten creativity.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Before long, absinthe had become synonymous with bohemianism.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But as much as artists idealized it, the public was less convinced. Actually, absinthe was beginning to gain a reputation of rotting the mind, and even being responsible for the decline of French culture. Addiction to absinthe even earned its own ominous name, absintheism. And it got darker, too.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] More and more doctors and citizens had begun to come forward condemning the drink for causing violent personalities, addiction, lunacy, and even murder.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was a sweltering summer day in Comuni, Switzerland, and Jean-Luc Frey awoke hot and thirsty. He dragged himself out of bed, pulled on his clothes, and spent the morning of August 28th of 1905 as he always did, with a glass of pre-work absinthe.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Lufray was a 31-year-old French laborer living in Switzerland. A big, burly man, he was no stranger to hard work. In his youth, he had spent three years as a soldier in the French army, but now he was a family man with a wife, two young daughters, and another kid on the way.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As his wife cooked breakfast, he had a second glass of absinthe. Why not? After all, it would be a long day. There was the family farm to tend to, then hours of grueling manual labor at the job site where he, his father, and his brother all worked. And when that was done, he planned to go mushroom foraging before heading home.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But his boots needed waxing before he could forage in the muddy woods, so he told his wife to do it. She ignored him though, so he shouted at her. But eventually he gave up and went outside to tend to the cows.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Soon, Lou Frey, his father, and his brother all headed off to work, stopping for a creme de menthe and cognac and soda on the way. It was only 5.30 in the morning. At lunch, he drank six glasses of piquette, local wine, and then he had another glass around 4.15 when work got out.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] After that, the men left and decompressed from their long day of labor. Where?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] At a bar, of course, to drink brandy-laced coffee. When Lou Frey and his father finally made it home, they sat at a table and downed another liter of piquette. Not between them, mind you. A liter each.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Meanwhile, Lufre's pregnant wife looked on, shaking her head. Stop drinking and go milk the cows, she said. Milk them yourself, he replied, pouring himself a hearty cup of coffee. Laced with homemade brandy, of course.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A shouting match broke out between Lefray and his wife. She accused him and his father of being lazy drunks. Lefray didn't take kindly to that and yelled at her to shut up, but she refused, yelling back the words, try and make me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now I want to give you a bit of warning here, because what happens next is pretty grisly. Jean Lufray stumbled to the closet and pulled out his long barreled bolt action verletti rifle. Then he shot his wife in the face. His father, watching horrified, fled for help.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] For a moment, all was silent, and then there was a rustle by the door. Lufre's four and a half year old daughter Rose had heard the gunshot and come to the kitchen, only to gape in shock at her mother dead on the floor. With eyes glazed, Lufre shot her too. Then he stepped into the room and shot his two year old daughter Blanche in her crib.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Finally, in perhaps a terrible moment of clarity, he turned the rifle on himself. But the barrel was too long.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He tried to rig it up with string but it didn't work. And when he fired, all it did was shoot himself in the jaw.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It wasn't long before his father returned, police in tow.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Word traveled fast about LeFray's case, and specifically the fact that he had consumed absinthe at the day's start. It would be another six months before the LeFray case finally made it to trial. On February 23rd of 1906, Jean LeFray was shuffled into the courtroom, his fate shadowing along behind him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The defense pleaded insanity on account of Lou Frey's intoxication, of course. But surprisingly, they weren't mentioning the fact that he had drunk enough wine and cordials to straight up embalm himself. No, the defense relied solely on the absent.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Without a doubt, he testified, it is the absinthe he drank daily and for a long time that gave Lou Frey the ferociousness of temper and blind rages that made him shoot his wife for nothing and his two poor children whom he loved.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It seemed that Lou Frey's lawyers were using Absinthe's degenerative reputation to try to absolve their clients. That defense didn't hold, though. After all, Lou Frey had only had two tiny glasses of the stuff at the beginning of the day, too. And thankfully, the judge didn't think getting blackout drunk was a very good excuse to murder your whole family.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He was convicted of quadruple homicide for his wife, his two daughters, and his unborn child. Lufre was sentenced to 30 years, but three days later, he hanged himself in his cell.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The defense of absinthe madness may not have held up in the court of law, but it did hold up in the court of public opinion.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Word of Lufre's trial traveled fast, and its connection to the Green Lady went with it. The other god-knows-how-many drinks Lufre consumed were forgotten, but memory of the absinthe remained.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was no longer just a cheap drink for vagabond artists. This stuff was dangerous. Less than three months later, the region of Switzerland where Jean Lufray had lived banned Absinthe entirely. Over the next few years, more bands swept across Europe and then around the world.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The days of the green fairy and its light-hearted bohemian branding were over.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Absinthe had transformed from medicine to muse, and from there it had become a monster.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] History is like dominoes. An ancient Egyptian doctor created an herbal tincture to treat sickness, and nearly 3,000 years later, the poet Charles Baudelaire was writing flowers of evil, a glass of that same tincture in his hand. One small action rippled through time, affecting untold future generations.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And because a drunken, abusive husband in 1905 killed his family, bars in the year 2000 were still prohibited from carrying that man's drink of choice. I'm always amazed at these links, like invisible webbing tying humanity together across space and time and memory. Absinthe may have been banned.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But its tale isn't over yet. And like all the best stories, this one has a twist ending.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Enter the contemporary New Orleans chemist and absinthe maker, Ted Brough. In the 1990s, Ted acquired two bottles of pre-ban absinthe, that is, absinthe that had been made before the drink was made illegal, and he chemically tested them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What he discovered was that they contained barely any Thujone. Remember, Thujone is that chemical in Wyrmwood that supposedly causes hallucination, or, in other words, the chemical that would be responsible for these so-called Absinthe Madness. And yet these bottles contained only traces of Thujone, certainly not enough to cause lunacy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But maybe it had just degraded with time? After all, the absinthe in these bottles had sat unopened for decades.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Luckily, Tedbro was a thorough scientist, and he was trying to get to the bottom of a mystery. He started distilling his own absinthe using pre-ban recipes and pre-ban equipment, recreating it exactly as it would have been made in Jean Le Frey's day.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In 2008, along with a group of other scientists, he conducted further tests on both his own and the pre-bottled absinthe, only to find the same results. Barely any fujone. Apparently the distillation process strips almost all of the fujone out, long before it's ready to drink.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's easy to get caught up in story, isn't it? Myths are powerful, and magic is alluring. Who wouldn't be enticed by a cursed cocktail with the power to inspire great art or drive a person to madness?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But here's the thing. What Tedbro discovered is that absinthe was always just alcohol. 140 proof alcohol, sure, but still just alcohol. Absintheism was nothing more than alcoholism, with a preference for the green fairy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In the end, it seems what gave Absinthe its power all along, like so many other things throughout history, had been something both enticing and dangerous. Folklore.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like so many things in this world, absinthe is one of those substances that is dangerous at the extremes. For most people it was a special treat, just a beverage with personality and nothing more.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Too much of it though was thought to cause madness, and a society hell-bent on the opposite end of banning it entirely found themselves victim to the fear-inducing powers of folklore.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But it's not the only beverage with a story. We may have served you a shot, but believe me, there's also a chaser. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] On this show, when we say the word spirit, we're usually talking about ghosts. But as we all know, the word has another meaning, right? Alcohol.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If you're like me, you've probably wondered why we use the same word to mean both a human soul and a glass of scotch. Now, while I wish I could distill down the answer into a single bit, no pun intended, I swear. The truth is a little more complicated. While we don't know for certain where the link began, there are a few theories.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One theory is that Aristotle gave distilled alcohol the name Spirits in 327 BC, because drinking it filled you with, well, a strange spirit. Now, he wouldn't have used the English word spirit, of course, but the ancient Greek equivalent, Numa, which could have translated later into spirits as we know it today.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Similarly, in the New Testament, being filled with the Holy Spirit is likened to being drunk, which could have created an association between liquor and the Spirit.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In the words of the drink historian Elizabeth Pierce, the word spirit initially meant breath or life, and that's where we get respiration or expiration if you die, or even inspiration. That means that the breath of God coming to you to give you ideas.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And since breath and wind are invisible, Pierce claims that the word evolved to refer to other invisible things too. Like ghosts. Now this next theory takes a whole different approach, but hey, etymology is a crazy thing, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We'll start with the word alcohol, which is thought to come from the Middle East. Originally, it was either alcohol or algal, both of which are very different words.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Al-Ghal is, in the Quran, a spirit or devil that causes intoxication. So therefore, when people became intoxicated on liquor, some etymologists think that it was given the same title as the intoxicating devil.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So far, same idea, right? Being drunk makes you feel like you're possessed either by demonic or holy forces.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Therefore, spirits the drink and spirits the ghosts aren't too different. It's the same basic idea Aristotle and the New Testament were working with.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then there's alcohol, or as you may have heard, it's just coal, spelled K-O-H-L.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's right, the charcoal black eyeliner, famous for giving flappers their smoky look. Coal has been a beauty product for thousands of years and it's created through a process called sublimation, very similar to distillation. So some linguists believe that the name for the cosmetic ended up being used to refer to


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, anything distilled. You know, like how some people use the brand name Kleenex when they mean a tissue. Kleenex, Xerox, Hoover, alcohol.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now, think about the process of distillation itself. You evaporate a liquid and collect the vapor. And what is vapor? It's the misty, incorporeal essence of a thing. Sounds quite a bit like... spirits.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Perhaps that's why other alcohol, like wine and beer, isn't called spirits. It's only distilled liquor that is. Liquor made by creating a ghost-like invisible vapor.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's a lot, I know. While liquor itself may be clear,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] History rarely is. When you think about it, there's so much overlap between spirits the drink and spirits the entity, it's hard to pin down just one point of origin.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's distillation and its vaporous nature. There are religious links to the Holy Spirit and gods and devils alike. And then of course, drinking this stuff fills a person with a sort of uncanny spirit, changing their personality, almost like being possessed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Surely, Jean-Luc Frey could attest to that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So the next time you come across a ghost in a dusty Victorian mansion or haunted hotel, listen closely. Is it really saying boo? Or could it be booze? I'll let you be the judge.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As always folks, thanks so much for watching. Credits for today's episode are in the description below.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Lore has been a podcast since 2015 with over 415 million downloads to date. You can learn more about the show plus the book series and television adaptation over at lorepodcast.com.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And of course, be sure to click on the subscribe button and the bell icon so that you don't miss future episodes. And if you enjoyed this episode, click that thumbs up. And you can also follow the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for lore podcast, all one word, and then click the follow button. And when you do say hi, I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for watching.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The untamed frontier is still there, beyond the towering skylines and the windswept canyons of the city. Just past the well-manicured suburban lawns, there are forests and lakes and rivers just waiting to be explored.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Nature can be calming, as any photo of the autumn foliage in New England can prove.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Some people love to be near the ocean, amidst the crashing waves and the scent of salt air. And a walk through a dense forest with birds chirping above and critters rustling the leaves at our feet can remind us that we are but one small piece of a much larger puzzle.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But behind the lush greenery and beneath the soothing waves, there is also danger.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It can come on strong like the neck-breaking winds of a hurricane, or it can be as silent as a shark gliding through the water. Unfortunately, we rarely recognize we're in trouble, until it's far too late.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In the middle of North Carolina, just outside of Raleigh, sits Chatham County. With a population of 76,000, it's a predominantly white part of the state with a deeply problematic history, as black lynchings were common during the 19th century.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's also home to one of the most famous rivers in America, Cape Fear, which was the setting of a thriller novel by John D. Macdonald published in 1957, as well as two film adaptations in 1962 and 1991.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Cape Fear River forms where the Deep River and the Haw River converge in a Y shape. It was said to have been named during the 16th century by two explorers, Sir Richard Grenville and John White, who nearly wrecked their ships on the Cape.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Cape Fear flows through eastern North Carolina to the Atlantic for 191 miles and was one of the earliest economic hubs within the state. Ships would transport everything from goods to passengers along that river.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In 1740, four Scotsmen from Argalshire came to the area and planted roots. Their names were Duncan Campbell, James McLaughlin, Hector McNeil, and his brother Neil McNeil. And yes, Neil McNeil was his real name.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They purchased several large tracts of land where the Deep and the Haw rivers met and built a town called Lockville.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Lackville became the place to start a business, and with the influx of entrepreneurs, also came a need for somewhere to grab a drink. So a man named Ambrose Ramsey, seeing that there was money to be made in this growing little burg, opened his own tavern. He called it, appropriately, Ramsey's Tavern.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was built near where the river converged, not far from the new residents and the homes that they had built. The tavern became much more than just a neighborhood bar, though. It was the most happening spot in Lockville, because it was practically the only spot in Lockville. Over time, the tavern also cemented itself as an important part of American history.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The Revolutionary War brought British forces to North Carolina shores in 1781. As they fought the Continental Army and continued to lose men, they retreated down the coast. Surviving Redcoats commandeered Ramsey's Tavern and a nearby mill for a makeshift headquarters so that they could nurse their wounds and rest before resuming the fight.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But the tavern's role in America's origins went far beyond being an ad hoc infirmary and a strategy room. It was also home to something else.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You see, back then, one of the rivers most prominent features was a big white sandbar.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Late at night, after they had filled their bellies with beer and whiskey, soldiers and townsmen would stumble out of the tavern and head home, passing the area where the rivers met. And there, beneath the glow of the moonlight as the water rushed past them, they would see them perched on the sandbar, combing their hair. Mermaids.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Unsurprisingly, the first mermaid sightings at the entrance to the Cape Fear River were not taken seriously. After all, who would believe a bunch of drunks heading home from the bar? But more and more people started to see the mermaids lounging outside the tavern where the waters converged.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But why there? What had brought them out of the ocean and upriver? The people of Lockville believed that the briny depths of the Atlantic had been damaging to the mermaid's precious hair, so they had swum up to the river to wash out the salt.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Of course, the men never saw the mermaids while they were on their way to the tavern. They were only ever visible hours later in the dark after the patrons were good and drunk. Could they have been women from town out for a swim in the river late at night or the hallucinations of inebriated workers after a long day at the mill? It's anybody's guess.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Regardless of the truth, the people of Lockville started referring to the area as Mermaid Point, a name which it still holds to this day.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now in Scottish lore, mermaids were seen as unlucky omens, their appearance foreshadowing some kind of death or disaster. And maybe the mermaids laughing and relaxing along the sandbar really were bad omens. Because the town of Lockville, like the men emerging from the tavern in drunken stupors, couldn't stand on its own two feet forever.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It wasn't long before the whole operation collapsed, leaving Ramses as the last vestige of a failed entrepreneurial experiment. Sadly, its proximity to the Cape Fear River proved to be its downfall. A flood in the late 1800s washed the tavern away, and with it, any remaining traces of the once-blooming mill town.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Looking back, maybe the creatures the men saw every night really were mermaids, because anyone who got too close, whether they were business magnates, tavern owners, or intrepid explorers, all ended up the same way. Drawn to cape fear, with promises of good fortune, only to have it all swept away in the end.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] About 200 miles northwest of the Cape Fear River lies Lake Norman. It's nearly 34 miles long and 9 miles wide, and it covers a spread of 32,000 acres.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's not the largest nor the deepest lake in North Carolina, but it has a beauty and a character that sets it apart from the rest.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's also referred to as the state's inland sea, complete with almost 60 small islands dotting its waters.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But Lake Norman wasn't always a lake. It had begun life as a river, home to the native Catawba people who had occupied the surrounding land for 6,000 years. And as usual, white settlers eventually arrived and drove the Catawba away, taking the land and the river access for themselves.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Beginning in 1906, Duke Power Company installed hydroelectric dams to provide water to the region. Ten dams were created over the next five decades, with an eleventh dam being the one to finish the river's conversion into a full-fledged lake.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The nearby residents were pushed out and forced to relocate. By 1964, Duke Power Company had turned the river and 23,000 acres of the surrounding land into the largest man-made freshwater body in North Carolina.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was named Lake Norman after a former Duke Power president. But what Duke Power didn't realize was that such a massive undertaking would attract some unwanted attention, from the unlikeliest of places.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Over the last 30 years, Lake Norman has been the site of no fewer than 20 UFO encounters.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They've been spotted flying across the area since 1968, usually over the power plant owned by Duke Energy. And they are as upset as the former residents who were driven from their homes. At least it seems so. Or maybe they're fascinated by seeing a mighty river tamed into a calm lake by human engineering.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Nobody knows for sure, but these reports have made North Carolina number four in the country for UFO sightings.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] However, the sky over Lake Norman isn't the only place where unexpected phenomena have occurred. Plantations once stood on the surrounding land, and even within the lake itself prior to its flooding. The area's tumultuous history comes to life before visitors' eyes every now and then.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Visitors to the area claim to have heard the sounds of children playing in the distance. The spectral bodies of enslaved people have been seen hanging from trees, ghostly remnants of the area's dark and violent past. And on some occasions, Revolutionary War soldiers charge into an endless battle for the future of a country that they'll never get to see.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But aside from the phantom soldiers and the UFOs, Lake Norman's most popular resident is that of a creature many have seen. He haunts its murky waters even though he's no ghost. He propels his slender body with the help of his flippers and a tattered dorsal fin on his back, and he's known as the Lake Norman Monster.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now, the Lake Norman monster, or normie for short, has been described several different ways over the years. Some believe that he resembles a giant snake or eel. Others claim that he's an enormous catfish, while a few say that he's more of a Nessie-type creature.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Normie sightings have only been reported over the last few decades, but they were frequent enough for one local resident, Matt Myers, to record them for posterity. He's collected over 40 reports dating back to the 1980s, many of which describe an encounter with a massive creature gliding beneath their paddleboards or bumping into their canoes.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Fishermen out on the lake have felt something so big and strong catch their lines that it snapped them before vanishing into the depths.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Other common reports describe enormous waves appearing in the lake on otherwise tranquil days.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One scuba diver in 1980 had been 80 feet below, searching for old bottles and antiques in the buildings that had been flooded by the lake when he came upon a house. The windows of the home were still intact, and its front porch, although collapsed, was still attached to the building. It didn't look like there was any way inside.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So the diver swam around to the side of the house where he came to a big hole, big enough to swim through, and he peered through its inside only to stop short at the sight of a giant fish about eight feet long with a mouth three feet wide.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The diver just floated there watching the fish, which didn't seem to notice him before swimming away.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One of the most descriptive encounters came from a witness named Hannah in 2011. She claimed that she'd seen a ten foot long snake with large scales and a mouthful of teeth swimming in the lake.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So over the years, numerous theories about the creature have emerged. Some believe normie to be nothing more than a lake sturgeon, a type of fish that can grow up to six and a half feet long and weigh as much as 200 pounds.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's also possible that normie could be a freshwater eel, or just a humongous catfish. Fishermen have caught large Arkansas blue catfish in the lake before, and rumors have spread concerning a human-sized catfish lurking in the waters near the dam for almost 40 years.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One of the more unlikely theories is that Normie is an alligator. And although there have been no definitive gator sightings in Lake Norman, they have wandered into the banks of other nearby lakes before.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But Lake Norman is not a natural lake. It's a product of industry, and so it's not out of the realm of possibility for normie to follow suit.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Hydroelectric power isn't as clean of an energy source as some might think. The coal ash produced by Duke Energy has contaminated the water to dangerous levels for residents who rely on it for their drinking water. The company tried to cover it up, but the truth came out in a 20,000 page report in 2018.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If they were trying to hide the effects on the lake, what else were they hiding? And what might have their pollution done to the animals living inside it?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] According to one witness, their best friend's father had worked for the power plant nearby. He talked about how the contractors hired to check the underwater equipment would refuse to go down there because of the giant fish waiting for them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It sounds like something out of a horror movie, I know. A soulless corporation ruining the environment and mutating an innocent creature into a terrifying beast. But until whatever truly lies beneath the waters of Lake Norman has been officially identified, we're left with a frightening reality to swallow. Anything, it seems, is possible.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Not all that slithers is cold-blooded. North Carolina's lakes and rivers aren't the only places home to mysterious and terrifying creatures.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In Iredale County, north of Charlotte, a beast has been seen by hunters and farmers dating back to the late 1800s. It has been known to emerge from the woods and make off with livestock, from plump pigs to 1500 pound cows. It leaves nothing behind but bones and footprints in the dirt, and it's called the Santa.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Witnesses say the santa is feline in appearance, with reddish or gray fur all over except for its bald head. It sees through a pair of beady eyes and moves on long spindly legs.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Its front feet are webbed, they say, and its rear feet are like bears' paws. One footprint that was found measured 8 inches long and 4 inches wide, although it was unclear whether it had come from a front or a back foot.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The santa hunts with the help of a long beaded tail with eight hard knots embedded throughout its length. Whenever it finds something that it would like to eat, it swings the appendage and knocks out its prey before carrying it off.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And those unlucky enough to have heard its cry have described the sound as the blood-curdling wail of a human infant.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now, reports of the santa first started appearing in the 1890s. The Statesville Landmark, a paper out of Iredale County, began tracking the creature's sightings in a series of articles that referred to it as The Glutton.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A police officer from Statesville reportedly shot at The Glutton one Thursday night near the fire department. It had been chasing a dog. According to the article, its tracks were seen Friday morning in the branch below Mr. Joe Young's blacksmith shop.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The following day, a hunter named John Colbert encountered the creature's tracks while squirrel hunting. He said he had never seen anything like them before in his entire life as a hunter.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] His hunting partner, J.W. Brown, believed them to be from a catamount, a large wild cat that used to roam throughout several eastern states and even part of Canada.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Meanwhile, a man named Major Pendleton had been frying some fish at his home when the glutton leapt from the trees and approached the house growling, his sharp teeth on display.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The stories about the mysterious creature attacking people and animals throughout the county continued to pour in. Clint Summers claimed that it had eaten several of his pigs, while a Dr. Mott had lost 15 cows to the beast's hunger. But where had it come from?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Rumors spread that the Beast had escaped from a sideshow in Greensboro, which had offered a $200 reward for its capture and return. Although, if that were true, it would have made the sideshow the only venue that wanted the glutton kept alive. You see, everyone else in Iredale County was out for blood.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A local tannery offered a $50 reward, as did the county commissioner. Speculation grew as residents and law enforcement tried to make sense of its features. Was it really a catamount? Or maybe a cougar? Some people believe the glutton to be an antelope on a cord of its long legs.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The press eventually gave the creature its official name of Santa, without any explanation of the name's origin or its meaning. From then on, that's what it was called.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Another outlet, the Carolina Watchmen, had a theory more in line with a monster movie than a scientific fact. It suggested that the Santa could have been an ancient creature from the Cenozoic, Mesozoic, or Paleozoic eras that had been preserved in the coal mines beneath Asheville until its accidental release. An idea that clearly has a Hollywood feel to it, I know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The legend of the Santa took a major twist in 1894 when a witness came forward with new information on its behavior. The witness had allegedly seen the Santa glowing in a luminous body, shedding its radiant light for hundreds of yards around before turning into a black dog.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Sightings continued well into the 1930s. Locals told papers all about how they'd heard animals scuffling in the middle of the night, only to find that the santa had killed and eaten their family pets.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And of course, without fail, the Santa would always be seen again.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The world around us is full of dark corners, shadows that hold countless mysteries for us to whisper about. In a country as large as the United States, one that still holds countless acres of untamed wilderness, it shouldn't be a surprise that the hills and forests are populated with creatures that sound more like fiction than fact.