Simon and Chris are pixelated by household helpers, those elusive, often hairy beings like Brownies, Tomten, and Skrats who muck out stables, scrub pans, rock babies, edit podcasts and occasionally fetch the midwife, all in exchange for a humble bowl of porridge. Our domestic duo explore why these spirits have such complicated relationships with clothing, what draws them to a home (or sends them storming off), and wonder aloud if you can still hire one in today’s difficult real estate market. Along the way, the two squabble over whether houses go up or down in value with a helper, the emotional climate of homes, and the surprising requirements for crafting your own supernatural assistant (spoiler: toes and horses are involved). UK helpers are compared with their Scandinavian, North European, and North American cousins. While Simon berates Chris for her shocking ignorance of the Swiss variety, Chris lectures Simon on a brave new world of railway-building brownies on the other side of the Atlantic.

Chris and Simon wing it through the strange world of feather folklore — from cursed peacock plumes to pillows that prevent the dying from slipping away. Do feather crowns signal a heavenly reward or a witch’s curse? Simon’s disturbed by beds hiding feather rats and spectral bouquets; Chris dares to suggest a rational explanation. There's a detour into swan-lined pits, angel relics, deer hunting and the suspiciously decorative world of Victorian featherwork. Listener beware: this one might leave you checking your pillow twice.

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

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

Chris and Simon lift the stone on a nest of ancient terrors, with bosom serpents, snakes on tombs and in graves, helpful household ophidians, and the medicinal horrors of Asclepius’s temple. ('It did what to you?!') Simon tells of his own blood-chilling encounter with a poisonous hisser, while fake snake women, flying serpents, and the perils of vino alla vipera slither revoltingly into the podcast. The duo bicker over cryptozoological creatures’ credibility and ask whether a snake can suckle on a breast or udder: the lap vs suck debate. Also fairies and snakes? Prepare to be amazed amid the Sicilian rosemary.

Some biblio:

Boss snakes : stories and sightings of giant snakes in North America, Chad Arment

The bosom serpent : folklore and popular art, Harold Schechter

Towards a Critical Anthology of Pre-Modern Bosom Serpent Folklore, Davide Ermacora, Roberto Labanti, Andrea Marcon

Big Snake The Hunt for the World’s Longest Python, Robert Twigger.

https://richlandcountyhistory.com/2019/05/08/the-great-serpent-of-lexington/ [this needs to go up as a separate post on the page - wonderful story!]

http://hauntedohiobooks.com/news/creature-feature-the-mexican-mine-monster/

Superfluous snakes – snake showers http://hauntedohiobooks.com/interesting-people/11830/

A Woman-Eating Serpent: Hissssteria over Snakes

http://hauntedohiobooks.com/news/woman-eating-serpent-hissssteria-snakes/

https://www.the-daily-record.com/story/news/2012/08/19/when-wayne-was-whippersnapper-rogues/19462591007/

SNAIX: Vintage Snake Tales http://hauntedohiobooks.com/news/snaix-vintage-snake-tales/

For a superlative story of snake-terror, see “The Cat of the Cane-Brake,” by Frederick Stuart Greene.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/snake-wine-china-vietnam#:~:text=Although%20this%20concoction%20is%20often,from%20rheumatism%20to%20hair%20loss.

https://strongspage.com/places/chester-bedell/ [This and the next one could also be put on the page]

https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/2010/07/11/mike-harden-commentary-atheist-snakes/23668024007/

The Green Children of Woolpit: Fairies or Foreigners? Simon and Chris celebrate the new and definitive book by John Clark on the Green Children of Woolpit: two children with ‘leek-green’ skin who, in the middle of the twelfth century, said that they came from a twilight place called ‘St Martin’s Land’. They wore strange clothes of an unknown fabric and spoke a language none could understand. Strangest of all, they ate only beans. Had they strayed from fairyland into Suffolk or were they lost, starving children orphaned by tragedy? Simon and Chris try to sort out some of the curious details of this very curious story and also bicker about Jinn, weird birds, kosher food and Excel spreadsheets.

*John Clark, The Green Children of Woolpit: Chronicles, Fairies and Facts in Medieval England (Exeter New Approaches to Legend, Folklore and Popular Belief, 2024)

***This episode has been our Jonah and has been cursed from the beginning! We are re-releasing it because the first version had fuzzy audio***

Chris and Simon wind up the old gramophone and share some numbers from angelic choirs, the nodding ones beyond the grave, and from the rarely good people in the hollow hill. Sing along with a banshee! Trill to a phantom air from Dartmoor! Rhapsodize over an orca’s mermaid song! And shake your tambourine at yellow bats, breeding foxes, Dolly Parton and finger-chewing nereids! Are our listeners in harmony with the Music of the Spheres or are these mysterious melodies something more mundane? Kudos also to our organ player from Ohio and to the poltergeist who follows us through the recording

Bibliography

Paracoustics: Sound & The Paranormal, edited by Steven T. Parson s & Callum E. Cooper

Music from Elsewhere, Haunting Tunes From Mythical Beings, Hidden Worlds, and Other Curious Sources, Doug Skinner, 2024. Has music notation. “anomalous music” including fairy, trow [troh or trouw ow and troll music, Spiritualist music, “music of the sky people”

No Earthly Sounds- Faery Music, Song & Verse, John Kruse
Music and the paranormal : an encyclopedic dictionary

Melvyn J. Willin (Author)

Shaman of Oberstdorf: Chonrad Stoeckhlin and the Phantoms of the Night

By Wolfgang Behringer chapter on unearthly music in the Alps

The Music of “An Adventure”, Ian Parrott, 1966

Barbara Hillers: “Music from the Otherworld: Modern Gaelic Legends about Fairy Music” in Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, Vol. 14 (1994), p59

Ríonach Uí Ógáin: “Music Learned from the Fairies” in Béaloideas Bay la Gish 60-61 (1992-3), pp197-214

Chapter on fairy music in The Peat-Fire Flame: Folk-Tales and Traditions of the Highlands & Islands, Alasdair Alpin MacGregor 1937

https://archive.org/details/peatfireflamefol00macg/page/30/mode/2up?q=gigha&view=theater

Lovely and Mysterious: The Music of Fairyland, Chris Woodyard, Fortean Times October 2014

NAD A study of Some Unusual “Other-World” Experiences, D. Scott Rogo

NAD Vol. 2 A psychic study of the “Music of the Spheres”, D. Scott Rogo

Musica Trascendentale, E. Bozzano, 1943

Get lost in familiar places? You're not alone! Simon and Chris are bewildered by supernatural disorientation, including cases of people being pixy-led by Newfoundland fairies and Balkan witches. Discover traditional defenses against non-human misleaders, from carrying bread to wearing clothes inside out (and yes, sometimes even stripping naked!). While our hosts consider scientific explanations - glitches in human compasses, they grapple with bizarre reports of impossible landscapes: gardens without paths, eighty foot hedges, and fields that trap their victims. Plus, one host recounts their own uncanny pixy-led experience in a car. Care to guess who?

Our readings from this month
Janet Bord, Fairies: Real Encounters with Little People

Dermot Mac Manus, The Middle Kingdom [stray sod]

John Gregorson Campbell, Superstitions of the Highlands & Islands of Scotland, - Gaistig on the Island of Coll

Jeremy Harte, Explore Fairy Traditions

Mirjam Mencej, '‘Something Came Over Him’: Narratives on Being ‘Carried by Witches’ and Their Possible Connection to Altered States of Consciousness', Preternature 7 (2018)

Barbara Rieti, Strange Terrain: The Fairy World in Newfoundland

Chris Woodyard, http://hauntedohiobooks.com/news/the-lost-children/ - disorientation in the woods

S. Young, ‘Pixy-Led in the South West’, Transactions of the Devonshire Association 148 (2016), 311-336 https://www.academia.edu/35045282/Young_Pixy_Led_in_Devon_and_the_South_West

S. Young, ‘Four Neglected Pixy-Led Sources from Devon’, The Devon Historian 85 (2016), 39-49 https://www.academia.edu/33316277/Young_Four_Neglected_Pixy_Led_Sources_from_Devon

Any others to recommend?

Chris and Simon ring the changes on bell folklore: bells mysteriously rung by polts (or rats or monkeys or blackbirds), bells ringing in churches beneath the waves and in coalmines, and bells with the power ('supernatural bleach') to drive away plague, the Devil and the Fae. Bells toll as death omens the 'death-bell' or ringing in the ears predicts imminent death, and Big Ben chimes thirteen when a royal is about to die. Chris finds a-peal in some physics experiments testing whether bells drive away thunderstorms and Simon chimes in with mermaids and their watery bells. Also, Great Aunt Moll, fierce disagreements over servants, and tips on how to keep your teenage kids in at night...