Latest / Sasquatch & Sourdough / Ep. 19 | Mermaids Gone Wild! | Sasquatch & Sourdough Podcast
Transcript
- 0:03SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Sasquatch and Sourdough, the podcast where we embark on a journey into the depths of the unknown.
- 0:10SPEAKER_02: History of life.
- 0:11SPEAKER_00: Weaving together threads of ancient scripture.
- 0:16SPEAKER_00: Tales of high strangeness.
- 0:18SPEAKER_00: Tell them about the twinkle.
- 0:20SPEAKER_00: Whether you're a seeker of truth.
- 0:23SPEAKER_04: We believe it's the heart of the house.
- 0:25SPEAKER_00: We're simply hungry for what about the Twinkie?
- 0:29SPEAKER_00: Sasquatch and sourdough invites you to join us on the journey of discovery, wonder, and delicious.
- 0:35SPEAKER_04: They fill your method, your theory, sir?
- 0:40SPEAKER_00: So grab your backpack and sharpen your senses.
- 0:46SPEAKER_00: And prepare to explore the sacred mysteries of our highly strange world, whatever before.
- 0:52SPEAKER_00: And that is the whole problem with alien.
- 1:46SPEAKER_03: We're back in the kitchen.
- 1:48SPEAKER_03: Good to be here.
- 1:49SPEAKER_03: It's so exciting.
- 1:51SPEAKER_03: Um, so you guys have probably noticed like we took a little bit of a break after the holidays because I just can't after Christmas.
- 1:59SPEAKER_03: It's been a lot.
- 2:00SPEAKER_03: Between like Christmas, snow, sickness, David Lynch dying.
- 2:07SPEAKER_02: Oh, David Lynch dying.
- 2:09SPEAKER_02: So he had emphysema.
- 2:12SPEAKER_02: Was it emphysema?
- 2:13SPEAKER_02: It was.
- 2:13SPEAKER_02: Yeah, he had emphysema.
- 2:15SPEAKER_02: And the story I heard is that during the LA wildfires, yeah, he had to be evacuated from his home.
- 2:22SPEAKER_02: And he can't walk without the assistance of oxygen.
- 2:26SPEAKER_02: Oh my gosh.
- 2:27SPEAKER_02: So it it took him out, you know, because he had to leave, I guess, his oxygen behind.
- 2:33SPEAKER_02: I mean, I guess he didn't have like a roly tank that he could.
- 2:36SPEAKER_03: I mean, I it would be like no, but it was crazy.
- 2:39SPEAKER_03: People were, I mean, it was just people were it's awful.
- 2:42SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
- 2:44SPEAKER_02: He was such a bright shining star.
- 2:46SPEAKER_02: Like, I was looking at like clips of him all morning.
- 2:49SPEAKER_02: And one of my favorite clips is he was being interviewed by someone and they were like, So, how's your day going?
- 2:54SPEAKER_02: He's like, Well, I just had two cookies and a coke.
- 2:57SPEAKER_02: I feel phenomenal.
- 3:00SPEAKER_03: He really was.
- 3:02SPEAKER_03: He was neat, he was so good.
- 3:04SPEAKER_03: Like, actually, Russell Brand did a great, like, little not even a video.
- 3:08SPEAKER_03: He did like a post of like talking about him, and it was just so well written.
- 3:12SPEAKER_02: Yeah, he affected a lot of people.
- 3:14SPEAKER_02: A lot of people were really enamored with him.
- 3:16SPEAKER_02: He was very humble.
- 3:17SPEAKER_02: Yeah, he wasn't like I'm a superstar, like bow down before me, you know.
- 3:22SPEAKER_03: He was just a very humble man, and he just he really understood like what it was to be like an artist and creative and just and weird.
- 3:32SPEAKER_03: Yeah, like wasn't scared to be weird.
- 3:34SPEAKER_03: No, yeah, we need more of that.
- 3:36SPEAKER_03: We do, I know, we do again.
- 3:38SPEAKER_03: And the cool thing was that we had to like I was looking, I was doing the same thing, like looking through like you know, videos and stuff, and I totally forgot that he did Elephant Man.
- 3:47SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah, I know you said that.
- 3:48SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and so my son was like the elephant man, like who's that?
- 3:52SPEAKER_03: So then we got into like I was like, well, his name was like John Merrick, and that was just such a sad story to begin with.
- 4:00SPEAKER_03: Yes, it's a hard one.
- 4:01SPEAKER_03: So we were going through that, and then it dawned on me.
- 4:05SPEAKER_03: I was just like, I made this like weird connection.
- 4:07SPEAKER_03: I was like, oh my gosh.
- 4:09SPEAKER_03: That means that like right now, John or not John, David Lynch is like in heaven with John Merrick.
- 4:17SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and Laura Palmer.
- 4:19unknown: And Laura Palmer.
- 4:22SPEAKER_03: So yes.
- 4:23SPEAKER_03: Um, and if you're not familiar with any of his stuff, please just go watch Twin Peaks.
- 4:27SPEAKER_03: All right, and do it, do it now, which is usually what I do in January.
- 4:31SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah.
- 4:31SPEAKER_02: Like that definitely deserves a rewatch.
- 4:33SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
- 4:34SPEAKER_03: You know, after all of this.
- 4:35SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 4:36SPEAKER_03: So watch Twin Peaks, get inspired, be creative.
- 4:39SPEAKER_03: Um, but so anyway, like, yeah, it's been New Year's, like the new year has been crazy.
- 4:43SPEAKER_03: So we've pulled back a little bit.
- 4:45SPEAKER_03: Um, Crystal's schedule has changed.
- 4:47SPEAKER_03: So things around the pod have like kind of, I don't know, naturally fell back into like a new sort of rhythm.
- 4:54SPEAKER_03: And so if you guys have noticed, like we started doing Fellowship of the Fringe.
- 4:58SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna invite just content creators, podcasters to come over and hang out and talk about like all the deep weird stuff.
- 5:07SPEAKER_03: So we're still doing all of our interviews and all of our stuff like Sasquatch and sourdough is more like the charcuterie board.
- 5:14SPEAKER_03: And then if you want like the deeper, like the beef stew that's been simmering, fellowship of the fringe, you know, you can kind of you can get that there.
- 5:22SPEAKER_03: So that's great.
- 5:23SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's all of our stuff, really like housekeeping stuff.
- 5:26SPEAKER_03: But so um what else did I want to talk about?
- 5:30SPEAKER_03: Oh yeah, I was gonna talk about how I like totally acted like mommy dearest earlier, but we don't need not unless you want to.
- 5:39SPEAKER_03: No, your wires, just the wires.
- 5:42SPEAKER_03: The Christmas.
- 5:45SPEAKER_02: I wanted to get rid of Christmas, and there was just like wires everywhere.
- 5:47SPEAKER_02: And I am also still living with Christmas.
- 5:50SPEAKER_02: So it snowed here in Maryland.
- 5:52SPEAKER_02: Um on the weekend that we were all supposed to take our lights down.
- 5:55SPEAKER_02: I don't know about the rest of Maryland, but we decided to leave our lights up because it looks really pretty in the snow.
- 6:00SPEAKER_02: Our lights are up.
- 6:01SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so it looks phenomenal.
- 6:03SPEAKER_02: Thinking that word again, in the snow.
- 6:05SPEAKER_02: Phenomenal.
- 6:06SPEAKER_02: And um, yeah.
- 6:07SPEAKER_02: So we're still living with Christmas.
- 6:09SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's just part of life now.
- 6:10SPEAKER_02: It's never going with it.
- 6:12SPEAKER_02: Like it though.
- 6:14SPEAKER_03: I know.
- 6:15SPEAKER_03: The joy the joy.
- 6:16SPEAKER_03: But now the joyfulness is over.
- 6:18SPEAKER_03: Ugh.
- 6:18SPEAKER_03: So yeah, we um so we had a really fun New Year's and we actually had a really fun new year's.
- 6:24SPEAKER_03: We had like a really nice party with our friends.
- 6:27SPEAKER_03: And the best conversation.
- 6:29SPEAKER_03: We had the best conversation because Crystal decided to share with us um an episode of something that she watched.
- 6:38SPEAKER_03: So go ahead, just take it away because it's okay, great.
- 6:40SPEAKER_03: Yeah, the floor is hers.
- 6:41SPEAKER_02: Okay, so my new favorite thing in the world is Florida Man.
- 6:47SPEAKER_02: There's a show.
- 6:48SPEAKER_02: I think it's on Prime.
- 6:49SPEAKER_02: Um, so basically, it's if you've ever heard about Florida Man, it started where people were plugging in their birthdays and then writing the word Florida Man afterwards.
- 7:00SPEAKER_02: So there's a different headline for every day of the year about something wild that a Florida man just done.
- 7:06SPEAKER_02: And it doesn't have to be a man necessarily, it can also be a woman.
- 7:10SPEAKER_02: So one of my favorite episodes of this new show on Prime, which is also titled Florida Man.
- 7:15SPEAKER_02: Florida Man.
- 7:16SPEAKER_02: It's about these women that um cosplay mermaids for a living.
- 7:21SPEAKER_02: And um, that's very popular in Florida.
- 7:24SPEAKER_02: It's sunny, it's shiny, there's it's mermaids.
- 7:26SPEAKER_02: We need a mermaid at this event.
- 7:29SPEAKER_02: So um, it's a group of women, and as any woman or man knows, when you put a whole bunch of women together, they tend to get a little catty.
- 7:37SPEAKER_02: Yep.
- 7:37SPEAKER_02: Or a little mermaidy.
- 7:39SPEAKER_02: So um the one lady was upset with the other lady, and she I hate to say it, but she called her fat.
- 7:51SPEAKER_02: And she took that very offensively.
- 7:54SPEAKER_02: So they decided to get into a huge fight, and the one that was called large decided that she was going to like go all out and just ruin this woman's life.
- 8:05SPEAKER_02: Oh my gosh.
- 8:06SPEAKER_02: So she bought the house next door to this woman just to mess with her.
- 8:11SPEAKER_02: She was a practicing witch, and she would go out in the backyard and perform rituals with her, with her police husband, her cop husband, naked with animal blood, appeared all over themselves.
- 8:26SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
- 8:27SPEAKER_02: So the lady that called her not such a nice word was terrorized for months and months and months and months by this witch couple naked, covered in blood in the backyard.
- 8:38SPEAKER_03: It's insane.
- 8:39SPEAKER_02: I know that's a Florida man story.
- 8:41SPEAKER_03: In this case, it'd be a Florida woman story.
- 8:43SPEAKER_03: You're not like you're so far beyond dabbling at that point.
- 8:49SPEAKER_02: Like, once we get into like, I'm sacrificing an animal out of revenge, blood, and ritual sacrifice to torment someone, it's beyond like ultimating.
- 9:01SPEAKER_02: Like, you bought property and all of this because someone called you fat?
- 9:05SPEAKER_02: Like, come on.
- 9:07SPEAKER_02: Haven't we gotten to a time and age where we're not so affected by people's body weights or our own body weights?
- 9:13SPEAKER_03: No, but I have to say, like, I would imagine that there is a lot of competition in professional mermaid.
- 9:20SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 9:21SPEAKER_03: What do you call that?
- 9:22SPEAKER_02: Like, I don't know.
- 9:23SPEAKER_02: I I tend to view it as cosplay, but they're actually making really good money doing this.
- 9:29SPEAKER_02: So it's it's a profession.
- 9:30SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
- 9:31SPEAKER_02: You're a mermaid professional.
- 9:32SPEAKER_03: Well, we've had like we've gone to like kids, like little girl birthday parties where like the princesses, like you hire a princess.
- 9:39SPEAKER_03: So I would imagine that's like you hire you.
- 9:41SPEAKER_02: Do you can hire the mermaids for birthday parties?
- 9:44SPEAKER_02: Okay.
- 9:44SPEAKER_02: They also do a lot of swimming in um like aquarium settings.
- 9:48SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
- 9:48SPEAKER_02: And um, they're oh so this is actually off topic.
- 9:52SPEAKER_02: I didn't even remember this.
- 9:54SPEAKER_02: We went on a sunset cruise in Ocean City and we met a real life mermaid, and she was in like the full-body jumpsuit of like the scales and everything.
- 10:03SPEAKER_02: And I was like, Oh, I love your outfit.
- 10:04SPEAKER_02: And then we just started talking.
- 10:06SPEAKER_02: She was like, I'm a mermaid, and my gosh, that's awesome.
- 10:08SPEAKER_02: My little girls were like in love with mermaids, and they were like, You're a real mermaid.
- 10:13SPEAKER_02: The cutest.
- 10:14SPEAKER_02: She was so cool.
- 10:15SPEAKER_02: She like took pictures with our family, and she like posed the girls and like gotten pictures with them, and she didn't expect any money or anything.
- 10:23SPEAKER_02: She was just being a great.
- 10:25SPEAKER_02: So she went on a sunset cruise on purpose to talk to the captain to see if they needed an on-deck mermaid that could jump in the water and perform for them like during their cruises.
- 10:36SPEAKER_02: I don't know how that all went, but oh, that's ultimate marketing.
- 10:40SPEAKER_03: Yeah, she like legit yeah.
- 10:42SPEAKER_03: She marketed her.
- 10:42SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna do that, and then she like she was like, I'm gonna show you what I can do here.
- 10:47SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so I'll actually tell you her, she has an Instagram handle.
- 10:52SPEAKER_02: Um, it's Mermaid Marie.
- 10:54SPEAKER_02: Oh, Mermaid Marie.
- 10:56SPEAKER_02: He will go in.
- 10:57SPEAKER_02: She's also like a diver, and um she well, what was what was she?
- 11:03SPEAKER_02: She was one of those rescue divers originally that go down onto the water and rescue people.
- 11:09SPEAKER_02: Oh wow, yeah.
- 11:10SPEAKER_02: And she knows how to do like CKR and she knows how to hold her breath really well.
- 11:14SPEAKER_02: Yeah, she was just a really neat person, but anyway.
- 11:17SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's how you do it.
- 11:19SPEAKER_03: Yeah, mermaid Marie, good.
- 11:21SPEAKER_03: Yeah, um, crazy witch mermaid covered in cat blood, that bad.
- 11:25SPEAKER_03: Like that's yeah.
- 11:26SPEAKER_03: I don't know why we had to clarify that here, but you heard it first.
- 11:31SPEAKER_03: I just like that is insane to me.
- 11:33SPEAKER_03: Like getting back to that, like you have to like let's put it in perspective.
- 11:36SPEAKER_03: Like, somebody was just like, Okay, you're a fat mermaid.
- 11:40SPEAKER_02: Um there's a market for that too.
- 11:42SPEAKER_02: There's also well, yeah, there's a market for anybody being a mermaid, right?
- 11:46SPEAKER_02: We don't all look the same.
- 11:48SPEAKER_03: Then you were just like, okay, you called me a fat mermaid, so you know what I'm gonna choose?
- 11:51SPEAKER_03: Like, I know what I'm gonna do.
- 11:53SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna buy the abandoned house next to you and terrorize your life.
- 12:00SPEAKER_03: Right.
- 12:00SPEAKER_03: Oh, that's Florida man.
- 12:03SPEAKER_03: So the reasoning we're talking about because then we started talking, I was like, oh, that's right, we have to do a mermaid episode.
- 12:08SPEAKER_03: Because we love mermaids.
- 12:09SPEAKER_03: Because we love mermaids.
- 12:10SPEAKER_03: Who doesn't love a mermaid?
- 12:12SPEAKER_03: I know.
- 12:13SPEAKER_03: Mermaids.
- 12:14SPEAKER_03: So you kinda but that's cool because that ties into like you had a story about mermaids in Berlin.
- 12:20SPEAKER_03: Meryl.
- 12:21SPEAKER_03: Berlin, Maryland.
- 12:23SPEAKER_02: So there's this um museum in Berlin, Maryland.
- 12:26SPEAKER_02: It's called the Museum of Mermaids or the Mermaid Museum, actually.
- 12:31SPEAKER_02: And there was actually a good article done in the Smithsonian Man in the Smithsonian magazine about this museum.
- 12:40SPEAKER_02: So basically, it's just like a bunch of pictures and sculptures and like folklore and pop art, stuff like that.
- 12:48SPEAKER_02: Um it's I think it's open from 11 a.m.
- 12:51SPEAKER_02: to 5 p.m.
- 12:52SPEAKER_02: So you gotta get there early.
- 12:54SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
- 12:54SPEAKER_02: Berlin's a little teeny tiny town.
- 12:56SPEAKER_02: It's like a little beach town, like kind of like outside of Ocean City.
- 12:59SPEAKER_02: It's yeah, 30 minutes before you get into Ocean City.
- 13:02SPEAKER_02: It's um it's on the historic landmark.
- 13:06SPEAKER_02: Um, it's a very haunted town, actually.
- 13:08SPEAKER_02: There's a lot of ghosts in that little town.
- 13:11SPEAKER_02: I actually have a book about that too.
- 13:13SPEAKER_02: So the Mermaid Museum is on the top floor of the old Oddfellows building.
- 13:19SPEAKER_02: Now, if you've ever heard of like the sacred order of the Oddfellows, they're another um like they they get into like ritual.
- 13:28SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
- 13:28SPEAKER_02: And um, it's like a fraternity basically for men.
- 13:32SPEAKER_02: It's been around for a very long time.
- 13:34SPEAKER_02: And the building itself is haunted because of the Oddfellow rituals that used to happen there.
- 13:41SPEAKER_02: They used to have like initiation rites of like real skeletons, human skeletons.
- 13:46SPEAKER_02: And um, some of the so it's like reported or rumored that some of the skeletons from the Oddfellows are still in the building, like either like buried behind walls or like walled, you know, like walled up.
- 14:00SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so the first thing I think of is Edgar Allan Poe and like breaking up the wall with you know that was telltale heart.
- 14:08SPEAKER_02: No, no, that was the black cat.
- 14:10SPEAKER_02: The black cat and the clasp of Montyato, I think.
- 14:13SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
- 14:14SPEAKER_02: Uh-huh.
- 14:15SPEAKER_02: Black cat was so big.
- 14:16SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
- 14:17SPEAKER_02: But anyway, so um, so the building itself is haunted, which is like one thing.
- 14:21SPEAKER_02: The other thing is all the mermaid lore, which is just so cool.
- 14:25SPEAKER_02: But there's like so many articles on this little building.
- 14:30SPEAKER_02: Um, let's see, right here.
- 14:33SPEAKER_02: So if you've ever looked at like mermaid stuff, there's this um thing that people used to do in the 19th century where they would take the head of a monkey and the bottom half of a fish and taxiderby them together and pretend that it was a mermaid.
- 14:54SPEAKER_02: Um, so actually, P.
- 14:55SPEAKER_02: T.
- 14:55SPEAKER_02: Barnum, you know, of Barnum and Bailey, yeah.
- 14:58SPEAKER_02: He was one of the people that promoted these taxidermied mermaids.
- 15:02SPEAKER_03: They were like curiosities.
- 15:04SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
- 15:04SPEAKER_03: Oddities.
- 15:05SPEAKER_03: Oddities.
- 15:05SPEAKER_02: Which is perfect in the odd fellows.
- 15:07SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
- 15:10SPEAKER_03: And isn't the odd fellows?
- 15:12SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 15:13SPEAKER_03: Just a lot of strange stuff.
- 15:15SPEAKER_03: I heard we didn't come across Oddfellows.
- 15:18SPEAKER_03: I feel like we maybe in our Alex Shea episode, I feel like that keeps coming back.
- 15:22SPEAKER_03: Is like these the more we look into stuff, obviously we're gonna find like synchronicities and things like that.
- 15:27SPEAKER_02: But like I feel like Oddfellows stands out to me for she had a connection, like she went into an old Oddfellows building.
- 15:33SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
- 15:34SPEAKER_02: So we didn't know much about them, just like you don't know much about like skull and golf bones.
- 15:38SPEAKER_03: Right.
- 15:38SPEAKER_03: It's like another order that's like kind of secret, but then there's also so many rumor, just like you're doing weird stuff, so weird stuff's gonna kind of happen.
- 15:51SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's you're doing something that's not usual.
- 15:54SPEAKER_03: And one word, I don't know.
- 15:56SPEAKER_03: Just wouldn't human skeletons again.
- 15:58SPEAKER_03: We talked about this like off off-camera where it's like, yeah, I don't like that.
- 16:02SPEAKER_03: Like when I was looking into the John Merrick, like the elephant man thing, like he put himself on display like as a curiosity to like make money.
- 16:11SPEAKER_03: Like he knew that that was like a way that he could kind of, you know, for like his family.
- 16:15SPEAKER_03: Well, no, because he was thrown out of his family, his mother died.
- 16:18SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah.
- 16:18SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I had to I did like my because my son was curious, so I had to deal with my deep dive.
- 16:23SPEAKER_03: He dive into the elephant man.
- 16:26SPEAKER_03: And um, so anyway, like yeah, he just he basically his father remarried after his mother died, and they didn't want to deal with him, like they abused him um because he needed a lot of medical care and it cost a lot of money, so they just kind of like threw him out, and then he you know went different places, but then he he found himself connected to um some of these, I guess, managers of like oddity tours, things like because the curiosity stuff, yeah, basically they're free shows, yeah.
- 16:54SPEAKER_03: Um, but those at that time that people like loved that stuff.
- 16:57SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it was like how like and world fairs, things like that.
- 17:01SPEAKER_03: Like, that's how you saw the weird, curious things of the world.
- 17:05SPEAKER_03: I think, yeah, that's basically we're all his bones are still like on display.
- 17:10SPEAKER_03: So that's what we were talking about.
- 17:11SPEAKER_03: Because I was like, I don't like that.
- 17:13SPEAKER_03: I don't like the idea of like people's actual skeletons.
- 17:17SPEAKER_03: For some reason, just like it just kind of creeps me out.
- 17:19SPEAKER_02: Like I feel like I mean, you need that for like scientific research.
- 17:23SPEAKER_02: Sure.
- 17:24SPEAKER_02: Like we're talking about that earlier.
- 17:25SPEAKER_02: Yeah, like okay, it's one thing to have a skeleton for scientific, like biological, you know, reasons.
- 17:30SPEAKER_02: Right, right.
- 17:31SPEAKER_02: And it's another thing just to have one standing in your living room because it's like cool and like dothing.
- 17:36SPEAKER_02: Like, look at God human skeleton in my living room.
- 17:39SPEAKER_03: I know, and then you said like it just like it would like once it lies at night, and that's I just think of how Fun Haunted Hill with that skeleton, just like your brain goes wild.
- 17:47SPEAKER_02: Right, you know, it walks at night.
- 17:49SPEAKER_03: I couldn't do that.
- 17:51SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so but yeah, so getting back to like the mermaid, like so yeah, we're just kind of like putting together a monkey's head.
- 17:57SPEAKER_03: Yes, and like the oddities, yeah, right.
- 18:00SPEAKER_03: That's like what a skeleton or what an actual mermaid would look like.
- 18:03SPEAKER_03: But we know that that's not exactly what people have been seeing, like sailors, you know.
- 18:10SPEAKER_03: Okay, yeah.
- 18:10SPEAKER_02: So I had a good story.
- 18:12SPEAKER_02: I mean, this is very well-known story, Captain John Smith.
- 18:15SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
- 18:16SPEAKER_02: He was traversing the Chesapeake Bay, he saw um, he saw a mermaid, and he described it as having very large eyes, long greenish hair, and um kind of like a round face.
- 18:31SPEAKER_02: Obviously, he was seeing a seal or a manatee.
- 18:34SPEAKER_02: So with like seaweed on its yeah, I but there's so many sailor stories about seeing mermaids, and most times it was probably all times, but who knows?
- 18:46SPEAKER_03: It was just mistaken identity of um sea mammals or driftwood, that's a big thing that people would say, like, oh, you're just misidentifying driftwood, but I don't know.
- 18:55SPEAKER_02: Like when you're in the sea that long, I'm sure your brain plays tricks on you.
- 18:59SPEAKER_02: Yeah, because you're just staring at like a black spance of nothingness, and then something pops up out of the ocean, and your brain probably goes haywire, like trying to decipher what it is.
- 19:10SPEAKER_02: And like a human's brain will naturally tend to try to make faces out of things you don't understand, and try to um your brain will trick itself into thinking you're seeing something usual that it's not unusual.
- 19:24SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 19:25SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 19:26SPEAKER_03: So I found um back to where the footprints end.
- 19:30SPEAKER_03: I can't recommend this book enough.
- 19:32SPEAKER_03: Um by Timothy Renner.
- 19:35SPEAKER_03: Uh he's just he just did such great research.
- 19:39SPEAKER_03: So where the footboot or where the footprints ends is High Strangest and the Bigfoot phenomenon.
- 19:45SPEAKER_03: He took like this is from volume one.
- 19:47SPEAKER_03: He just took like every type of folklore that has a connection to like Bigfoot and made this amazing, like two-volume work.
- 19:55SPEAKER_03: That's awesome.
- 19:56SPEAKER_03: Um, so he there is a Merr Squatch, apparently.
- 20:00SPEAKER_03: I can't even picture what that looks like.
- 20:02SPEAKER_03: Amazingly.
- 20:03SPEAKER_03: Um my gosh.
- 20:08SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 20:08SPEAKER_03: So basically, you know, mermaids and mermen are so reportedly supposed to be half human, half fish fairies.
- 20:15SPEAKER_03: Um and so this kind of says, um, let's see here, hang on.
- 20:22SPEAKER_03: Um, North American springs were invariably revered by the Indians as seats of earth spirits.
- 20:29SPEAKER_03: So getting back to the earth spirits, right?
- 20:32SPEAKER_03: Uh, wrote Jim Brandon in The Rebirth of Pan to list all of these places around the country where oddities happen at the confluences of water courses, would be to fill the rest of this book with catalog and um entries.
- 20:46SPEAKER_03: And so he goes on to say that witnesses sometimes cite swimming Bigfoot.
- 20:52SPEAKER_03: Um, and so that's extensively chronicled uh in the book Raincoast Sasquatch.
- 20:57SPEAKER_03: And so that goes like indigenous tales of Bigfoot diving for shellfish, like to like actually more like contemporary sightings.
- 21:05SPEAKER_03: Okay.
- 21:06SPEAKER_03: And so uh here's one.
- 21:08SPEAKER_03: This is actually from that.
- 21:09SPEAKER_03: So that was a book by Robert Ally, A-L-L-E-Y.
- 21:15SPEAKER_03: And this is a reprinted letter that was sent to researcher John Green describing a 1960 dockside sighting from Alaska.
- 21:24SPEAKER_03: So the witness glanced up to see a human-like figure standing in the water, halfway between the shore and the boat, just standing and staring at him.
- 21:33SPEAKER_03: It had arms like a man and a head.
- 21:35SPEAKER_03: It was probably wet and looked grayish color all over the head and body.
- 21:39SPEAKER_03: It had round eyes, not big, like beady.
- 21:44SPEAKER_03: And then it says, When the boy unfroze, he screamed bloody murder and ran blindly over the tied up boats, back up the ladder and toward the shack, still yelling his head off.
- 21:55SPEAKER_03: The men came running, some with lights, and about 30 of them saw the thing.
- 21:59SPEAKER_03: They showed Several lights on it as it as it dived underwater and swam away.
- 22:04SPEAKER_03: They could see it underwater swimming like a frog, arms forward over its head, but not doing a crawl stroke.
- 22:11SPEAKER_03: The legs kicked like a frog.
- 22:13SPEAKER_03: So I don't know.
- 22:14SPEAKER_03: That doesn't really sound like that's not a mermaid.
- 22:17SPEAKER_03: No.
- 22:17SPEAKER_03: Your legs are together and you have a tail.
- 22:19SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
- 22:20SPEAKER_03: And scales.
- 22:20SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and that doesn't really.
- 22:22SPEAKER_03: I mean, the frog leg motion is like one thing, but I mean I could swim like a frog.
- 22:26SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 22:28SPEAKER_03: That's fun.
- 22:29SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
- 22:30SPEAKER_03: It's actually a pretty easy strip.
- 22:31SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
- 22:32SPEAKER_03: Hold on, what does this say?
- 22:33SPEAKER_03: Something moving powerfully through the water, but not using its arms.
- 22:37SPEAKER_03: The witness quickly fled in his boat.
- 22:40SPEAKER_03: This technique certainly strikes one as distinctively merfolk-like, as do the swim fit.
- 22:46SPEAKER_03: Okay.
- 22:47SPEAKER_03: Um, okay.
- 22:48SPEAKER_03: So that I mean does.
- 22:52SPEAKER_02: Uh let me see if I can find another one.
- 22:54SPEAKER_02: So I hear the name Mer Swatch.
- 22:56SPEAKER_02: And I picture a very hairy mermaid.
- 22:59SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
- 23:00SPEAKER_02: Very hairy, very scary mermaid.
- 23:02SPEAKER_03: Right?
- 23:05SPEAKER_03: Oh, so this gets back.
- 23:06SPEAKER_03: So this is kind of interesting though.
- 23:08SPEAKER_03: Hold on.
- 23:09SPEAKER_03: Oh, this is like two fishermen following a skunk ape.
- 23:14SPEAKER_02: Off the Gulf of Mexico, I changed.
- 23:16SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 23:18SPEAKER_03: Oh, in Florida.
- 23:19SPEAKER_03: In Florida.
- 23:21SPEAKER_03: Wait, wait a second.
- 23:22SPEAKER_03: What does it say?
- 23:23SPEAKER_03: Um that's the skunk ape down in Florida.
- 23:26SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so Bigfoot of lower latitudes display an aquatic affinity as well.
- 23:30SPEAKER_03: In 1955, a Mrs.
- 23:32SPEAKER_03: Darwin Johnson of Indiana was swimming 15 feet offshore in the Ohio River, Ohio, when a large flurry oh, sorry, a large furry hand with claws grabbed her knee and yanked her underwater before she escaped, leaving scratches.
- 23:47SPEAKER_03: Some nearby claimed to have witnessed a UFO that day as well.
- 23:51SPEAKER_03: Perfect.
- 23:52SPEAKER_03: A fisherman cast his net into Washington's uh Nooksack River in 1967, only to discover a hairy man tugging back from the water.
- 24:03SPEAKER_03: That is creepy.
- 24:04SPEAKER_03: And then in 1972, fishermen allegedly followed a skunk ape 29 miles into the Gulf of Mexico off Placida, Florida.
- 24:12SPEAKER_03: Florida skunk ape.
- 24:14SPEAKER_02: I would imagine that they would be aquatic stout apes because they live in a bayou or a swamp, you know, essentially.
- 24:20SPEAKER_02: And they would have to be able to swim.
- 24:24SPEAKER_03: This is calling them apes of the sea.
- 24:27SPEAKER_03: This is interesting.
- 24:29SPEAKER_03: Murfolk were um, so this is uh there are further connections to draw between uh Simeons and Merfolk.
- 24:36SPEAKER_03: So in this in this book, uh Timothy Renner, he gets it's very, very sort of concise paragraphs, so it's a lot of information, yeah, like in in big sort of chunks.
- 24:46SPEAKER_03: So I kind of like that.
- 24:47SPEAKER_03: You have to kind of like really read through it.
- 24:49SPEAKER_03: That's nice, yeah.
- 24:51SPEAKER_03: Um and then it because he can he just like connects it to like so now we we went from like myrrh squatch to like now we're getting into ogres, so it's kind of connecting all of the docks to folklore.
- 25:03SPEAKER_03: It's really, really interesting.
- 25:04SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so he says merfolk were not restricted to the sea either.
- 25:08SPEAKER_03: A tale from Unst describes mermen shedding their tailskins before dancing on the beach.
- 25:14SPEAKER_03: That's interesting.
- 25:16SPEAKER_03: In 1741, explorer George Wilhelm Steller cited what he referred to as a sea ape with a whiskered dog-like head and fish-like tail off Alaska's uh shummigan islands.
- 25:30SPEAKER_03: Because Steller is credited with describing several species later proven genuine.
- 25:34SPEAKER_03: Some cryptozoologists speculate myrfolk represent an undiscovered aquatic ape.
- 25:40SPEAKER_03: Right.
- 25:40SPEAKER_03: While compelling, our discussion focuses on myrfolk vis-a-vis fairies.
- 25:45SPEAKER_03: Okay, so he's kind of taking it back to that.
- 25:47SPEAKER_02: I mean, well, that kind of makes sense too, like an evolutionary standpoint.
- 25:52SPEAKER_02: We have your um your mammals of the sea, and that had to be some type of evolutionary phenomenon where mammals had to take to the sea and you know lose their feet or but also kind of ties back to the fact that we just have no idea what is under our ocean.
- 26:09SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah.
- 26:10SPEAKER_03: That is a conversation that's like really big right now, yeah, because of all the like UFO stuff.
- 26:14SPEAKER_02: I have a good story about that too.
- 26:16SPEAKER_02: Um, about the flying Dutchman.
- 26:17SPEAKER_03: Oh yeah.
- 26:18SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- 26:19SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 26:19SPEAKER_03: But that's just kind of the thing, is like we just have no idea.
- 26:22SPEAKER_03: There's so much stuff that's in the in the ocean that we just don't even we have no clue.
- 26:27SPEAKER_03: Um, let me see here.
- 26:29SPEAKER_03: Wow, there's a like a lot in here.
- 26:35SPEAKER_03: Okay.
- 26:37SPEAKER_03: So the most famous historical account of an aquatic and wild man comes from Ralph of Hogashell, a British monk who penned Chronic Chronicon and Ang and I'm not gonna I don't know what to say.
- 26:53SPEAKER_03: Spell it.
- 26:54SPEAKER_03: Uh Chronicon Anglicanum in 1200.
- 26:59SPEAKER_03: Oh wow, okay.
- 27:01SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna read this whole thing because this looks awesome.
- 27:03SPEAKER_03: Okay.
- 27:04SPEAKER_03: Men fishing in the sea caught a wild man in their nets.
- 27:07SPEAKER_03: He was naked and was like a man in all his members, covered with hair and with a long shaggy beard.
- 27:13SPEAKER_03: He eagerly ate whatever was brought to him, but if it was raw, he pressed it between his hands until all juice was expelled.
- 27:21SPEAKER_03: He would not talk, even when tortured and hung up by his feet.
- 27:25SPEAKER_03: I don't know how we're doing that.
- 27:27SPEAKER_03: Brought into church, he showed no signs of reverence or belief.
- 27:30SPEAKER_03: He sought his bed at sunset and always remained there until sunrise.
- 27:34SPEAKER_03: He was allowed to go into the sea, strongly guarded with three lines of nets, but he dived under the nets and came up again and again.
- 27:43SPEAKER_03: Eventually, he came back of his own free will, but later on he escaped and was never seen again.
- 27:50SPEAKER_03: So what the heck was that?
- 27:54SPEAKER_02: That's 1200.
- 27:55SPEAKER_02: That's 1200 nose.
- 27:57SPEAKER_03: That's crazy.
- 27:58SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it just like that's really cool.
- 28:03SPEAKER_02: Story.
- 28:03SPEAKER_02: Where was that?
- 28:04SPEAKER_02: Where British man.
- 28:07SPEAKER_02: A British monk.
- 28:10SPEAKER_02: There's so many things in this world that we don't know.
- 28:13SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
- 28:14SPEAKER_02: It's just if you try to chronicle everything, it's impossible.
- 28:17SPEAKER_02: It's insane.
- 28:17SPEAKER_02: There's so many stories of the unknown.
- 28:19SPEAKER_02: And I can't stand it when people are so closed-minded.
- 28:22SPEAKER_02: Like you have to categorize everything because we don't have any skeletons.
- 28:27SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
- 28:28SPEAKER_02: It's like, well, they could have burial practices that we don't know about.
- 28:31SPEAKER_02: Or they could be shot through a portal into another dimension that you don't know about.
- 28:34SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
- 28:35SPEAKER_03: I know.
- 28:36SPEAKER_03: I know.
- 28:37SPEAKER_03: I know.
- 28:37SPEAKER_03: It's like don't.
- 28:38SPEAKER_03: I I just said this on like three podcasts that I was just on and talking about.
- 28:42SPEAKER_03: Like, don't autopsy the mystery.
- 28:44SPEAKER_03: Like, why can't we just have the mystery?
- 28:46SPEAKER_03: Just have the mystery.
- 28:47SPEAKER_03: You know?
- 28:47SPEAKER_03: Why do we need to dissect everything?
- 28:50SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it just ruins it.
- 28:51SPEAKER_03: Like the proof seekers.
- 28:53SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 28:53SPEAKER_03: I don't want for like I think I get wrapped up in that like sometimes though, where I just like I need to overthink everything.
- 28:59SPEAKER_03: And it's just like, no, why can't we just like tell a fun big foot story?
- 29:02SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 29:03SPEAKER_03: Like everything is already so serious.
- 29:05SPEAKER_03: Like your feed is so serious right now.
- 29:07SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 29:07SPEAKER_03: Like, I want to hear about the weirdo guy in the water from the 1200s.
- 29:14SPEAKER_03: That's crazy.
- 29:15SPEAKER_03: It's fortunate that fourth and it's still back.
- 29:20SPEAKER_02: Probably just as curious of them.
- 29:21SPEAKER_02: Yeah, what was that?
- 29:22SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna have to look into that.
- 29:23SPEAKER_02: Maybe he was like a like a sentry, you know, and like sent from his people to like figure out, well, check it out, figure out what these weird white people are doing on the on the surface.
- 29:33SPEAKER_03: What are these weirdos doing?
- 29:34SPEAKER_03: Timothy Renner, if you're listening, help.
- 29:36SPEAKER_03: Help.
- 29:36SPEAKER_03: We need to know.
- 29:40SPEAKER_02: So can I read this flying Dutchman story?
- 29:42SPEAKER_02: Yes, I won't get into that thing.
- 29:43SPEAKER_02: So this is from a book that was put out in the 70s.
- 29:47SPEAKER_02: It's called Kate May Ghost Stories.
- 29:48SPEAKER_02: So it's like so 70s right now.
- 29:52SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna have to like put a picture of it up.
- 29:53SPEAKER_02: It's by David J.
- 29:55SPEAKER_02: Slaybold and Charles J.
- 29:57SPEAKER_02: Adams III.
- 29:58SPEAKER_02: So Kate May is in New Jersey.
- 30:00SPEAKER_02: It's on the eastern coast, like very close to us.
- 30:04SPEAKER_02: Um, so this one is about uh, let's see.
- 30:07SPEAKER_02: Uh commercial fisherman, Dick Hess of Goshen, Cape May County, has been going to sea in search of its bounty for more than 25 years.
- 30:16SPEAKER_02: He is familiar with the lore of the seagoing individual and aware of the long list of superstitions and traditions that are part of a sailor's buried being.
- 30:25SPEAKER_02: He is doubtlessly familiar with the legends such as The Flying Dutchman, the phantom ship that is said to fly the seven seas, the sea witch, which lurks around the Delaware Delaware breakwater and guards the treasures of ancient wrecks.
- 30:38SPEAKER_02: So if anybody knows a sea witch.
- 30:41SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- 30:43SPEAKER_02: There's I have another book too about uh shipwreck of the Delaware coast.
- 30:48SPEAKER_02: There's there's a lot of them.
- 30:50SPEAKER_03: Um so there's a big sea witch festival every year in Delaware, like five where my mom we have to go to the share.
- 30:56SPEAKER_03: Yeah, with like one where my mom lips.
- 30:58SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's it's so fun.
- 31:00SPEAKER_03: And they make like floats and there's parades, and it's like super cool.
- 31:04SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 31:05SPEAKER_02: So I'm gonna skip through most of this, but basically, um so all was quiet, and the two men on the weather deck were admiring the solitude of the evening and the particularly star-spangled sky.
- 31:16SPEAKER_02: In an instant, a bright light came out of nowhere and slashed across the sparkling overhead vista.
- 31:22SPEAKER_02: At first glance, it appeared to be nothing more than a brilliant and alarmingly close shooting star, a fairly common sight on clear nights at sea.
- 31:30SPEAKER_02: But Dick and Jackie watched intently as the white light seemed to hover a distance away.
- 31:35SPEAKER_02: They paid particular attention to its speed towards the Cayman, at a speed the two men estimated at forty to fifty miles per hour.
- 31:45SPEAKER_02: That's crazy.
- 31:46SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
- 31:46SPEAKER_02: So um I'm gonna go further.
- 31:48SPEAKER_02: The light seemed to be attracted to the boat and continued to come closer until it shined up from under the hull of the Cayman.
- 31:56SPEAKER_02: It seemed to be sizing up the vessel as it paused for a few seconds and shot away from it quickly, disappearing into the depths.
- 32:03SPEAKER_02: Again, no wake, no sound.
- 32:05SPEAKER_02: The show was over.
- 32:06SPEAKER_02: There never was enough time to wake the captain and crew members, and while the brief but memorable event was unfolding, neither Dick Hess nor Jackie Hall could release themselves from the grip of the hypnotizing and baffling light.
- 32:19SPEAKER_02: Ugh.
- 32:19SPEAKER_02: Isn't that cool?
- 32:20SPEAKER_02: It's like a UFO.
- 32:22SPEAKER_02: That's what it says.
- 32:22SPEAKER_02: It says they can only figure reluctantly as they may that it really was a UFO.
- 32:28SPEAKER_02: It's not an explanation they're comfortable comfortable with, but it's the best they can do.
- 32:32SPEAKER_03: So again, because we keep finding these like synchronicities, there always seems to be a Bigfoot.
- 32:40SPEAKER_03: Like it's a UFO, like there's always something.
- 32:44SPEAKER_03: There's I almost so and I wonder if we're gonna like start getting into this.
- 32:48SPEAKER_03: Like as we like grow the encounter map and we kind of make all these connections.
- 32:53SPEAKER_03: I wonder if it's it's almost like elementals, right?
- 32:55SPEAKER_03: Like, so something happen there's an event, there's something happens in our natural realm, yeah, but something's occurring in the supernatural, and then is it affecting like our air, our earth, our you know, our water?
- 33:11SPEAKER_03: Like, I wonder if that's like if we could draw those correlations.
- 33:14SPEAKER_03: That's just wild.
- 33:15SPEAKER_02: I actually skipped an important part of this story, but it says the light was actually beneath the surface of the waters, it was shining up from the sea as the boat approached the light.
- 33:28SPEAKER_02: Both men shuddered.
- 33:30SPEAKER_02: They were seeing like underwater UFOs in the 70s, and they were saying perhaps it was an aircraft that crashed into the ocean.
- 33:40SPEAKER_03: Those I feel like recently that kind of stuff is being debunked because of the way that like the water, like the they can tell it's not it's just from deep down because of the way that the water like it reflects.
- 33:54SPEAKER_03: I don't know anything about science, so I'm probably just I don't mean yeah, but that's like kind of like they're already sort of debunking that sort of stuff.
- 34:01SPEAKER_03: Yeah, let the scientists figure that out.
- 34:03SPEAKER_03: But that's crazy because we're seeing that now.
- 34:06SPEAKER_02: Well, I mean, it was just disclosed that we have underwater unidentified space, yeah, not space, unidentified craft coming out of our oceans and flying up into the you know into the ether.
- 34:19SPEAKER_03: What if it is like totally disturbing the marine kingdom?
- 34:22SPEAKER_03: I mean, you guys can go down.
- 34:24SPEAKER_03: I don't want to do that here because I will probably just want to like lock myself in a closet at that point.
- 34:29SPEAKER_03: That's if that's if I go into like the deep dive of like marine kingdom, people love that, yeah.
- 34:35SPEAKER_03: You know, the supernatural, the spiritual, all that sort of like the elementals again coming out, but like well, you know that the movie The Abyss, right?
- 34:43SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean that explains it perfectly.
- 34:46SPEAKER_02: They saved him, yeah.
- 34:47SPEAKER_02: They took him into a little bubble of oxygen.
- 34:50SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we're like, oh, we're not so bad.
- 34:53SPEAKER_02: We saved you.
- 34:55SPEAKER_03: Um, so we this this past holiday season, uh, so my mom was in Delaware and we visited her.
- 35:02SPEAKER_03: We went to Lewis, and they have this really cute little like it's like a trolley tour of all the lights in Lewis.
- 35:10SPEAKER_03: So it started in like 2020 when everybody had to like kind of stay home and they would decorate their houses and do these big displays of like Christmas lights.
- 35:19SPEAKER_03: Oh.
- 35:19SPEAKER_03: And so they took the trolley, like started doing tours around Lewis.
- 35:24SPEAKER_03: So it was really cute.
- 35:25SPEAKER_03: Um, so we decided after that we went to the um, there's a museum in Lewis that it's called, I'm gonna really ruin this, but it's like the the Wandale Museum.
- 35:37SPEAKER_03: It's kind of like their, I guess, like sort of their historical society.
- 35:40SPEAKER_03: Okay, yeah.
- 35:41SPEAKER_03: But it it's it's really fascinating.
- 35:43SPEAKER_03: It deals with like a lot of shipwrecks.
- 35:45SPEAKER_03: It's a whole ton of ship.
- 35:47SPEAKER_03: If you love shipwrecks and like shipwreck maps, they have like a whole map of like shipwrecks of the entire Chesapeake.
- 35:56SPEAKER_03: I love that.
- 35:57SPEAKER_03: It's really fascinating.
- 35:58SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so we spent some time there, but it was cool because the um one of the curators was like, Oh, have you have you seen our merman?
- 36:08SPEAKER_03: And I was like, uh no, but now I'm ready.
- 36:11SPEAKER_03: And it's exactly one of those things.
- 36:14SPEAKER_03: One of those little like the ape's head with the finish body.
- 36:19SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and so I want to pull it up because I took I took pictures of it.
- 36:23SPEAKER_03: You should post a picture of that.
- 36:25SPEAKER_03: I want to, because it's it's so it's just like super creepy.
- 36:29SPEAKER_03: Uh, the way that I mean, I guess like if if you're in a pinch and you just want to create something really weird, like you would, I mean, it makes sense like somehow you get some sort of ape's head.
- 36:39SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 36:40SPEAKER_03: Um, but it it's just really the creepiest thing.
- 36:44SPEAKER_03: But the cool thing is they have they they found one of them.
- 36:49SPEAKER_03: Um, I'm trying to pull out my picture here because I my phone closed it.
- 36:53SPEAKER_03: It's a really cute museum for like if you have it's not really like one of those places you would go if you have kids that they're gonna be entertained.
- 37:00SPEAKER_03: But this is like a little like curiosity that they sort of had on display.
- 37:04SPEAKER_03: So I had my son with me, and they were like, oh, if he's interested in weird stuff, and I'm like, I don't know about him, but I am.
- 37:12SPEAKER_03: Sure am.
- 37:13SPEAKER_03: I sure am.
- 37:13SPEAKER_03: Sure me.
- 37:14SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
- 37:16SPEAKER_03: Um, let's see here.
- 37:18SPEAKER_03: Oh, so it's the Fiji mermaid, basically.
- 37:21SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 37:21SPEAKER_02: There's a story about that in the mermaid museum in Berlin, also.
- 37:25SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 37:26SPEAKER_03: So they say it's uh it was it was likely I think it was they found it in like 1985.
- 37:32SPEAKER_03: And so the figurine is made of wire, clay, fish skin, tooth, animal claws, wood, paper mache, and natural fiber.
- 37:40SPEAKER_03: So the sounds like a fun hobby.
- 37:42SPEAKER_03: I know we're just gonna make like the Jaffa loop.
- 37:46SPEAKER_03: Let's make mythical creation.
- 37:47SPEAKER_03: Just gonna make paper mache and papier mache.
- 37:52SPEAKER_03: Um, so yeah, it's formally referred to as the Zwanendale Fiji mermaid.
- 37:59SPEAKER_03: It was likely created in Japan during the 19th century for the foreign market.
- 38:03SPEAKER_03: In the beginning of the 12th century, a visiting sea captain gifted this object to Sarah Martin's family of Lewis, Delaware.
- 38:11SPEAKER_03: Um, and so her ended up there.
- 38:14SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 38:15SPEAKER_03: Her uh nephew was the captain of the Overfalls uh light ship, and he lent it to the museum for display in 1941, 63, 78, and then in 78, Ella Carpenter took ownership of it and continued to loan it to the museum.
- 38:31SPEAKER_03: So that's kind of this uh I was like it's it was not, and it was funny because the curator was like, it's definitely not what you expect it to be, and it really wasn't because it's like the weirdest looking creepy thing ever.
- 38:43SPEAKER_03: I'm totally gonna pose like it doesn't, I can never even describe it because it's just this weird, it's a it's like a fish skeleton with ribs, it's gross and like a monkey head and a monkey head, yes, that is an oddball curious thing.
- 38:59SPEAKER_03: You freaking put this in a museum.
- 39:03SPEAKER_02: Well, even though why don't we make this?
- 39:06SPEAKER_02: That sounds like a great hobby.
- 39:08SPEAKER_02: I think we need to get into that.
- 39:09SPEAKER_02: Like taxiderming like body parts onto other bodies of animals.
- 39:14SPEAKER_03: I don't want to get to that, but I have a ton of paper mache, so it sounds like something right up my daughter's app.
- 39:21SPEAKER_03: There you go.
- 39:22SPEAKER_03: Why don't you guys just like give us your idea of the crystal paper mache, your weird animals together?
- 39:27SPEAKER_03: A menagerie.
- 39:29SPEAKER_02: So speaking of um shipwrecks off of the Delaware coast, I just wanted to talk about this really cool thing that I found in this book.
- 39:36SPEAKER_02: So this book is by Pam George.
- 39:38SPEAKER_02: It's shipwrecks on the Delaware Coast, tales of pirates, squalls, and treasure.
- 39:44SPEAKER_02: And so it's um, so it's called The Curse of the Moon Cussers.
- 39:50SPEAKER_02: Cool.
- 39:51SPEAKER_02: So pirates and privateers would go out into the sea and rob people, but there were also um thieves that would operate on land.
- 40:01SPEAKER_02: So they would take a lantern and tie it to a nag, which is a horse, and um make like make it look like it was a ship and a light, like closer to the shores.
- 40:14SPEAKER_02: So the way they would travel through the shoals would be they would try to fog the coast um so that they could navigate through the shoals around um Delaware.
- 40:23SPEAKER_02: And um, so they would go closer to the light, thinking that that's where the natural path where the ships are supposed to um go through.
- 40:30SPEAKER_02: Oh wow.
- 40:31SPEAKER_02: And then they would end up shipwrecking on the shore because they got too close.
- 40:36SPEAKER_02: Right looking at this light, thinking it's a ship, and then they can't turn around that quickly, so now they're shipwrecked on the shore.
- 40:43SPEAKER_02: And the people on the shore would go and um, you know, loot the boat or whatever.
- 40:48SPEAKER_02: So it says that some say that is how Nag's head, North Carolina got its name.
- 40:55SPEAKER_02: Oh wow.
- 40:56SPEAKER_02: Is by attaching the lantern to the nag.
- 40:59SPEAKER_02: Oh see your microphone.
- 41:01SPEAKER_02: Oh, thank you.
- 41:01SPEAKER_03: I never knew that.
- 41:03SPEAKER_03: Sweet.
- 41:04SPEAKER_03: I just found that out like today.
- 41:05SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
- 41:05SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
- 41:07SPEAKER_02: So, um, what was it?
- 41:09SPEAKER_02: So they were called moon cussers because if the moon was bright, it would show them on the shore and the ships wouldn't fall like wouldn't fall for it.
- 41:20SPEAKER_02: So they would like curse the moon.
- 41:22SPEAKER_02: Like, damn moon, you you befowed us again.
- 41:29SPEAKER_02: That's crazy.
- 41:31SPEAKER_03: I like that.
- 41:32SPEAKER_03: Yeah, who knew?
- 41:33SPEAKER_03: Oh wow.
- 41:34SPEAKER_03: Man's head.
- 41:35SPEAKER_03: All right, so I found one more.
- 41:37SPEAKER_03: This is interesting because it's really, again, an unexpected resource.
- 41:42SPEAKER_03: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Fairies by Fritz Zimmerman, another awesome resource.
- 41:48SPEAKER_03: Um, he had a thing about um merman and mermaids.
- 41:52SPEAKER_03: Um let me see if I can, it might take me a minute, so I'll just do this.
- 41:58SPEAKER_03: He talks about the net.
- 42:03SPEAKER_03: So he he talks about the net.
- 42:06SPEAKER_03: Uh let me see what he says here.
- 42:09SPEAKER_03: And it's another thing that like it's everything kind of just like runs into each other.
- 42:13SPEAKER_03: So it's next merman and mermaids.
- 42:17SPEAKER_03: Um, let's see here.
- 42:19SPEAKER_03: Neck, like any CK?
- 42:20SPEAKER_03: Any CK, yeah.
- 42:23SPEAKER_03: So the neck no more upon the river sings, and no mermaid to bleach her linen flings upon the waves in the mild solar ray.
- 42:32SPEAKER_03: It is a prevalent opinion in the north that all the various beings of the popular creed were once worsted in a conflict with superior powers and condemned to remain till doomsday in certain assigned abodes.
- 42:46SPEAKER_03: Um, so then he goes on to like list like the dwarfs, the elves, um, hill people, and like where they were like they were like sent to caverns, uh, dwarves and trolls were pointing to the hills, elves uh to the groves and leaky trees, and then the mermen, mermaids, and necks, the sea, lakes, and rivers, the river man, the small waterfalls.
- 43:09SPEAKER_03: So this is actually um this is Danish folklore that he's kind of pulling this from.
- 43:15SPEAKER_03: Um, and so let's see what he says here.
- 43:19SPEAKER_03: They are regarded as possessing considerable power over man and nature, and it is believed that though now unhappy, they will be eventually saved as it is expressed.
- 43:30SPEAKER_03: So this is Danish folklore.
- 43:32SPEAKER_03: Uh, the neck in Danish is a river spirit.
- 43:37SPEAKER_03: The ideas representing him are various.
- 43:40SPEAKER_03: Um, sometimes he is represented as sitting uh on summer nights on the surface of the water, uh, like a pretty boy with golden hair hanging in ringlets and a red cap on his head.
- 43:52SPEAKER_03: Sometimes, as above the water, like a handsome young man, but beneath like a horse.
- 43:57SPEAKER_03: Weird.
- 43:58SPEAKER_03: At other times, as an old man.
- 44:00SPEAKER_03: With a long beard, out of which he rings the water as he sits on the cliff.
- 44:06SPEAKER_03: In the last form, Odin, according to the Icelandic sagas, has sometimes revealed himself.
- 44:12SPEAKER_03: So this, like, he does a really good job, like kind of tying all of the folklore and myth, like into like the mythology of different like cultures in this book.
- 44:22SPEAKER_03: Um, but so this is actually kind of a cool little story from it's told in parts of Sweden.
- 44:28SPEAKER_03: Two boys were one time playing near a river that ran by their father's house.
- 44:33SPEAKER_03: The neck rose and sat on the surface of the water and played on his harp.
- 44:37SPEAKER_03: But one of the children said to him, What is the use, neck, of you sitting there and playing?
- 44:42SPEAKER_03: You will never be saved.
- 44:44SPEAKER_03: The neck then began to weep bitterly, slung away his harp, and sank down to the bottom.
- 44:49SPEAKER_03: The children went home and told the whole story to their father, who was the parish priest?
- 44:54SPEAKER_03: He said, They were wrong to say so to the neck, and desired them to go immediately back to the river and console him with the promise of salvation.
- 45:02SPEAKER_03: They did so, and when they did, uh when they came down to the river, the neck was sitting on the water, weeping, lamenting.
- 45:09SPEAKER_03: They then said to the to him, Neck, do not grieve so.
- 45:14SPEAKER_03: Hold on, do not grieve so.
- 45:15SPEAKER_03: Our father says that your Redeemer liveth also.
- 45:19SPEAKER_03: The neck then took his harp and played most sweetly until long after the sun had gone down.
- 45:24SPEAKER_03: This legend is also found in Denmark, but in less agreeable form.
- 45:29SPEAKER_03: A clergyman, it is said, was journeying one night to ah, I'm gonna just not pronounce this right.
- 45:36SPEAKER_03: Roshkild in Zealand.
- 45:39SPEAKER_03: His way led by a hill in which there was music and dancing and great merriment going forward.
- 45:44SPEAKER_03: Some dwarves jumped suddenly out of it, stopped the carriage, and asked him whether where he was going.
- 45:50SPEAKER_03: He replied that he was going to church.
- 45:53SPEAKER_03: They asked him if if he thought they could be saved.
- 45:56SPEAKER_03: To that, he replied he could not give an immediate answer.
- 46:00SPEAKER_03: They then begged that he would give them a reply by next year.
- 46:03SPEAKER_03: Uh when he next passed and they made and they made the same demand, he replied, No, you are all damned.
- 46:11SPEAKER_03: Scarcely had spoken the word when the whole hill appeared in flames.
- 46:16SPEAKER_03: What?
- 46:17SPEAKER_03: That's crazy.
- 46:18SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 46:19SPEAKER_03: So this is the net, and then it just kind of goes on from there.
- 46:22SPEAKER_03: This is like a connection between like fairies, I guess, more so than actual myrrh people, like we're used to in the seas, but I've never heard of net.
- 46:31SPEAKER_03: I've never either.
- 46:32SPEAKER_03: I don't know exactly what you were saying.
- 46:34SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 46:36SPEAKER_03: And E C K.
- 46:37SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 46:38SPEAKER_03: But it kind of makes sense with the I don't know.
- 46:43SPEAKER_03: I kind of I like the idea of that, like it makes sense that like that's where the hill people go.
- 46:49SPEAKER_03: That's where we get dwarves.
- 46:51SPEAKER_03: This is where we get elves.
- 46:52SPEAKER_03: Like, kind of like you were saying with like the the spirits of the earth.
- 46:56SPEAKER_03: Like it makes a lot of sense if we kind of put it that way.
- 47:00SPEAKER_03: Right?
- 47:02SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 47:02SPEAKER_03: The elementals again.
- 47:05SPEAKER_03: Um, hold on.
- 47:06SPEAKER_03: He said the neck is a very severe, it's very severe against any haughty maiden.
- 47:12SPEAKER_03: Oh, okay.
- 47:13SPEAKER_03: So he's definitely, I guess they're more male.
- 47:16SPEAKER_03: But that's that's interesting because I feel like this and then the where the footprints ends, it's more like male and not like yeah, you know, when you think you're mermaid, you'd be like yeah, aerial.
- 47:27SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
- 47:29SPEAKER_02: You know, like the siren.
- 47:32SPEAKER_02: The siren, yeah, due to your death.
- 47:35SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
- 47:35SPEAKER_02: So that has we didn't even like talk about that, which is like the basic.
- 47:39SPEAKER_02: That's the basis.
- 47:40SPEAKER_02: Basic mermaid.
- 47:41SPEAKER_02: Like we were saying earlier, when you're out at sea for so long, your brain does play tricks on you.
- 47:47SPEAKER_02: And I guess these men, they didn't have women on their ships because they were considered um bad bad luck.
- 47:54SPEAKER_02: Bad luck, yeah.
- 47:55SPEAKER_02: So they probably went so long without seeing a woman that they saw this seal on the ocean and you know, thought it was a drowned woman.
- 48:03SPEAKER_02: Let me go save her at the hero complex.
- 48:05SPEAKER_02: And I also haven't seen a woman in a year, so I'm gonna go get her.
- 48:09SPEAKER_02: I agree with not having women on ships, though.
- 48:10SPEAKER_02: I would just be I would be terrible.
- 48:13SPEAKER_02: Well, I mean, maybe if you segregated the sexes, like if you just had a ship of women and a ship of men.
- 48:19SPEAKER_02: That sounds terrible too.
- 48:21SPEAKER_02: I think I could do it.
- 48:22SPEAKER_03: No, I can only be on a boat with a bunch of women.
- 48:25SPEAKER_03: I don't yeah, no.
- 48:28SPEAKER_03: I would just be in the I don't know, in the hole.
- 48:31SPEAKER_03: In the hall.
- 48:32SPEAKER_03: I'm just gonna sit in the hall and control.
- 48:37SPEAKER_03: Here's your slop.
- 48:38SPEAKER_03: Leave me alone.
- 48:39SPEAKER_03: I've got an extra sloppy for you.
- 48:41SPEAKER_03: Come on.
- 48:43SPEAKER_03: Wash the pots and not listen to any of you women.
- 48:45SPEAKER_03: Oh my gosh.
- 48:46SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 48:47SPEAKER_03: Voice the sails.
- 48:49SPEAKER_03: Poop deck.
- 48:50SPEAKER_03: The poop deck.
- 48:52SPEAKER_03: Okay, go through deck.
- 48:53SPEAKER_03: Poop deck, I think.
- 48:55SPEAKER_03: I think we've reached the end.
- 48:57SPEAKER_03: This is the end.
- 48:58SPEAKER_03: Of its fine menagerie.
- 49:01SPEAKER_03: Oh.
- 49:02SPEAKER_03: Um, so yeah, that's our uh I don't know.
- 49:05SPEAKER_03: I feel like we just kind of do little primers.
- 49:07SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 49:08SPEAKER_03: Like this is not exactly if I were to like look at a thing and be like, oh, mermaid or mer people, I wouldn't think that we let because you know, you would tell that original story, right?
- 49:16SPEAKER_03: Isn't it like a French story?
- 49:17SPEAKER_03: Or do we get aerial from?
- 49:19SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it is.
- 49:19SPEAKER_02: It's French.
- 49:20SPEAKER_02: Well, I thought Hans Christian Anderson like took the original story and made it into like the little mermaid.
- 49:27SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
- 49:27SPEAKER_02: And that's actually a really gross story.
- 49:29SPEAKER_02: Very dark.
- 49:30SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
- 49:31SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
- 49:32SPEAKER_02: She was like taken and not allowed to go back.
- 49:34SPEAKER_02: And like, didn't something weird happen?
- 49:36SPEAKER_02: Like her feet got like yes, like bloodied from not being able to stop dancing or something strange.
- 49:43SPEAKER_02: Or am I thinking of something else?
- 49:44SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
- 49:45SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
- 49:45SPEAKER_03: Oh no, that was like the wasn't that the problem dancing princesses?
- 49:48SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- 49:48SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
- 49:49SPEAKER_03: I disagreed because I because it either way, yeah.
- 49:52SPEAKER_02: There was something about the sea foam.
- 49:55SPEAKER_02: The sea foam was like not good.
- 49:57SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I can't remember, but yeah.
- 50:00SPEAKER_02: It wasn't like your cute little mermaid that you know from Disney.
- 50:04SPEAKER_02: No.
- 50:06SPEAKER_03: Little mermaid.
- 50:07SPEAKER_03: So yeah.
- 50:08SPEAKER_03: Um, that'll do it on our little primer of mer.
- 50:10SPEAKER_03: Myrrh people, mer squatch, shipwrecks.
- 50:15SPEAKER_03: Well, we covered a lot.
- 50:16SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 50:16SPEAKER_03: All in Delaware.
- 50:17SPEAKER_03: Eastern Shore.
- 50:18SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 50:18SPEAKER_03: If you guys aren't like around or from the Eastern Shore and you can get here, we've got a lot of really we have like some cool lore.
- 50:25SPEAKER_03: Little shots and yeah.
- 50:26SPEAKER_03: Yeah, we'll definitely have to do like a trip to Berlin.
- 50:29SPEAKER_02: Well, there's a lot more to it, too.
- 50:31SPEAKER_02: There's a lot of like haunted history in Berlin.
- 50:33SPEAKER_02: There's a little haunted history in um Ocean City and Delaware and all these little historic towns.
- 50:39SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
- 50:40SPEAKER_02: The little historic towns have like a plethora of you know information.
- 50:45SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
- 50:46SPEAKER_03: I know.
- 50:47SPEAKER_03: All right, good.
- 50:48SPEAKER_03: All right, well, guys, uh, thank you for listening and until next time.
- 50:53SPEAKER_03: Bye.
- 50:54SPEAKER_03: Bye.
- 51:09SPEAKER_01: You have been listening to Sasquatch and Sourdough.
- 51:12SPEAKER_01: I'm Christina, and thank you so much for tuning in.
- 51:15SPEAKER_01: Sasquatch and Sourdough is so much more than just a podcast.
- 51:19SPEAKER_01: We are a community of kindred spirits, united by our curiosity and fascination with the extraordinary.
- 51:25SPEAKER_01: And we want to bring you into the conversation.
- 51:28SPEAKER_01: So whether you've had a brush with the unexplainable, seen something that you can't quite wrap your head around, this is your space.
- 51:37SPEAKER_01: We invite you to join us as we break bread and break down the barriers between the known and the unknown.
- 51:43SPEAKER_01: If you want to share your story, you can email us at saswatch and sourdough at gmail.com or send us a DM on Instagram.
- 51:50SPEAKER_01: Until next time, remember the truth is out there.
- 51:54SPEAKER_01: God is with you, and everyone always ends up in the kitchen.