47: The Fair Folk

50: The Patient Ones

What's the oldest fear in the human record? Not vampires. Not werewolves. Not anything that hunts in the dark. It's the person sitting across from you at dinner—the one who poured your drink. In this episode, we're diving into one of history's most chilling archetypes — the woman poisoner. From the prison cells of ancient Rome to a TikTok trend that exploded in 2024, the legend of the woman who knows what grows in the dark has never really gone away. Four women. Four centuries. One very uncomfortable truth about trust, proximity, and the people who feed us. Content Warnings: This episode contains discussion of: poison and poisoning, domestic violence, child death (including infant death), execution, and serial homicide. Please take care of yourself. Sources & Further Reading Locusta * Tacitus, Annals (Books 12 & 13) — the original ancient source * Suetonius, Life of Nero — describes Locusta's estate and students * Cassius Dio, Roman History — corroborating accounts * "Locusta of Gaul: Rome's Imperial Poisoner" — Crime Reads (crimereads.com [http://crimereads.com]) * "Aqua Tofana: Slow-Poisoning and Husband-Killing in 17th Century Italy" — Mike Dash History (mikedashhistory.com [http://mikedashhistory.com]) * Giulia Tofana — Wikipedia (start here, then follow the citations) * "What Is MATGA?" — Fast Company (fastcompany.com [http://fastcompany.com]) * MATGA movement coverage — Newsweek, November 2024 * Mary Ann Cotton — Britannica (britannica.com [http://britannica.com]) * "The Dark Angel of Durham" — Weird Darkness * "The Story of Nannie Doss, the Giggling Granny" — All That's Interesting (allthatsinteresting.com [http://allthatsinteresting.com]) * Nannie Doss — Wikipedia * Nancy "Nannie Doss" Hazle — Encyclopedia of Alabama

49: Folklore's Most Dangerous Women: Creatures of lore

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2499741/fan_mail/new] Episode Description A campfire walk through some of the most feared women in world folklore, from a four-hundred-year-old spider waiting in a Japanese mountain house, to a wailing figure outside an Irish window at midnight. We travel through Slavic rivers and summer wheat fields, down dark roads in South Asia, into Colombian mangroves and the deep Brazilian Amazon, and onto the forest trails of Indigenous North America. What you start to notice, when you put these women side by side, is that almost every one of them was wronged first. Mothers who lost children. Brides who were murdered. Women buried wrong. They came back anyway. They came back hungry. And every culture on earth seems to have remembered them, independently, in its own language, in its own forest, on its own river, at its own time of day. Light a candle. Lock the door. Don’t answer if someone calls your name from past the streetlights. Sources meterial • Lady Anne Fanshawe, Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe (composed 1676, first published 1829). The earliest detailed first-person Banshee account in print. • Karel Jaromír Erben, Polednice (“The Noon Witch”), 1853. Czech folklore ballad foundational to Polednice in modern memory. • Edo-period ynkai collections, including the Taihei Hyaku Monogatari and the Tonoigusa, for Jorngumo in her earliest written form. • W. B. Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888). Foundational survey of Irish supernatural tradition, including Banshee accounts. • Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland (1887). Nineteenth-century compilation of Irish folklore. • Lady Augusta Gregory, Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (1920). Documented Banshee sightings from West Ireland oral tradition. • Tupi-Guarani oral tradition, recorded by sixteenth-century Jesuit missionaries in Brazil, for the earliest written references to Caipora. • Slavic folklore scholarship on the Rusalka and Polednice traditions, including ethnographic work from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries across Russia, Ukraine, Czechia, Slovakia, and Poland. • Indigenous storytellers, writers, and scholars for the deeper teachings of Deer Woman. See contemporary Indigenous-led folklore podcasts, anthologies, and community-published resources. Content Note This episode discusses themes of murder, death in childbirth, violence against women and children, drowning, and historical injustice. It is intended for adult listeners. Stay Curious. Stay Spooky.

03: REMASTERED: Ghostly Exposure: Postmortem & Spirit Photography

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2499741/fan_mail/new] A grieving widow develops a roll of film and finds her dead mother in the back seat. A WWI airman steps into a squadron portrait two days after his funeral. A Boston photographer swears he can capture the dead — and P. T. Barnum takes the stand to prove him wrong. Tonight, the photographs that came back heavier than they went in.  Before the smartphone, before the camera roll — before there was a way to carry your dead in your pocket — people wanted to keep the faces of the ones they loved. Some of them tried very hard. Some of them, it seems, succeeded a little too well. In this remastered episode, we’re climbing back into the strange, tender, deeply uncanny history of postmortem and spirit photography — from Victorian iron posing stands and painted-on eyes, to William Mumler’s scandalous Boston studio, to the back seat of a quiet Ipswich car on a Tuesday afternoon in 1959. Featuring the Mabel Chinnery photograph, the ghost of Freddy Jackson, the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall, the haunted faces in the wake of the S.S. Watertown, Mary Todd Lincoln’s most famous portrait, and three modern firsthand-style accounts that have been quietly circulating online — the kind of photograph you delete six times, and it keeps coming back. Postmortem Photography & Victorian Death Culture • Stanley, Liz, and Sue Wise. “The Domestication of Death: The Sequestration Thesis and Domestic Figuration.” Sociology, vol. 45, no. 6, 2011, pp. 947–62. JSTOR. (jstor.org/stable/42857592) • Slate Magazine: “The Eerie History of Spirit Photography and Child Mortality in the 19th Century.” October 2017. (slate.com/human-interest/2017/10/spirit-photography-and-child-mortality-in-the-19th-century.html) • Victorian Visual Culture blog: “Photos of the Dead.” December 2020. (victorianvisualculture.blog/2020/12/14/photos-of-the-dead/) William Mumler & Spirit Photography • Cao, Maggie M. “Spirit Photographs and the Civil War.” American Art, vol. 31, no. 2. • Kaplan, Louis. The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer. University of Minnesota Press, 2008. • Court records of The People v. William H. Mumler, New York, 1869. Freddy Jackson • Goddard, Sir Victor. Flight Towards Reality. London: Turnstone Books, 1975. • The Black Vault Case Files: “The Ghost of Freddy Jackson.” (theblackvault.com/casefiles/the-ghost-of-freddy-jackson/) Mabel Chinnery • Sunday Pictorial, April 19, 1959 — original publication and expert analysis. • Anomalies database (Garth Haslam): “1959, March 22 — Mabel Chinnery’s Strange Photograph.” (anomalyinfo.com/Stories/1959-mabel-chinnerys-strange-photograph) The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall • Country Life magazine, December 1936 — original publication of the photograph by Captain Hubert Provand and Indre Shira. • BBC News: coverage of Raynham Hall and the Brown Lady. (bbc.com/news/uk-england-36389581) S.S. Watertown • Service News, Cities Service Company company newsletter, 1924–1925 — primary publication of the photographs and crew accounts. • Hervey, Hal. “Ghosts of the Watertown.” True Strange Stories, 1929. • Foster, Michael Dylan. The Book of Ynkai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore. University of California Press, 2015 — for context on shinrei shashin in Japanese popular tradition. • Behrend, Heike, et al., eds. Spirits in Politics: Uncertainties of Power and Healing in African Societies. Campus Verlag, 2015 — for a broader cross-cultural context on photography and the spirit world. • Instagram: @letstalkspookypodcast • Email: letstalkspookypodcast@gmail.com • Subscribe/follow wherever you listen, and please leave a review — it helps more spooky souls find the firelight.

48: Changelings

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2499741/fan_mail/new] On Christmas Eve in 1689, a Swedish farmer and his wife carried their ten-year-old son to the manure heap at the edge of their farm and left him there overnight to freeze. They believed, sincerely and devoutly, that he was a changeling — and that the elves would come in the night and return their real son by morning. He was not the first child this happened to. He would not be the last. This week, host Shauna takes you deep into the changeling tradition — into where the lore came from, what our ancestors believed a changeling was, and the documented historical record of what they did to the children they were certain were not their own. From a courtroom in Tralee in 1826 to a Lutheran pulpit in Wittenberg in 1532 to present-day West Africa, this episode walks through five hundred years of folk diagnosis, folk cure, and the children who paid the price. Sources & Further Reading • The Gotland Trial Records, 1690 — bound in the Swedish dombok (court book), held in the Swedish National Archives, Stockholm. Studied in detail by Ilmar Arens and Bengt af Klintberg in Rig: Kulturhistorisk Tidskrift, 1979. • Martin Luther, Tischreden (Table-Talk), volume 5 — first printed 1566; standard scholarly edition in the Weimar edition of Luther's collected works (Weimarer Ausgabe). • Ralph of Coggeshall, Chronicon Anglicanum, c. 1200 — British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian DX. • Tralee Assizes Trial Records, July 1826 — the case of Ann Roche; contemporary court reports and transcripts, excerpted in 19th-century Irish folklore writings. • John Francis Campbell, Popular Tales of the West Highlands, 1860–1862, four volumes — The Smith and the Fairies is in volume 2. Public domain; available free at archive.org and on Project Gutenberg.

47: The Fair Folk

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2499741/fan_mail/new] Episode Summary On the night of March fifteenth, eighteen ninety-five, eight people in a small Irish kitchen watched a man named Michael Cleary set his wife on fire. Not one of them tried to stop him. They all believed the same thing he did: the woman on the bed wasn't his wife anymore. The fairies had taken her. In this episode, we use the death of Bridget Cleary as a doorway into something much larger. We trace fairy belief across five cultures and two centuries —through documented court cases, ethnographic records, modern road bends, and a billionaire's fall — to ask the splinter-under-the-skin question: why does almost every culture on Earth, independently, agree that there are beings just adjacent to us, and That there are rules? This is fairy folklore as our great-great-grandparents understood it. Not the wings and wishing dust of the Disney version. Something older. Something stranger.Something a man would burn his wife alive over, with eight witnesses who agreed he was doing the right thing. Sources & Further Reading On Bridget Cleary and Irish changeling cases: • Angela Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary (1999)— the definitive scholarly account. • Joan Hoff & Marian Yeates, The Cooper's Wife is Missing: The Trials of Bridget Cleary (2000). • Carole Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies andVictorian Consciousness (1999) — for documented Welsh and Irish changeling cases. On Welsh and broader Celtic fairy belief: • Elias Owen, Welsh Folk-Lore (1896) — first-hand 19th-century ethnography. • Katharine Briggs, A Dictionary of Fairies (1976) —the standard reference. • W. Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (1911). On Icelandic Huldufólk: • AP and BBC reporting on the Álftanes case (2013–2015). Let's Talk Spooky · The Fair Folk · Show Notes 4 • Terry Gunnell, University of Iceland — academic work on Icelandic folk belief. On Filipino engkanto belief: • Francisco R. Demetrio, S.J., "The Engkanto Belief: An Essay in Interpretation" (1969). • Maximo D. Ramos, Creatures of Philippine Lower Mythology (1971). On the Sean Quinn / Aughrim Wedge Tomb story: • Irish Independent, "Sean Quinn's downfall is fairies' revenge say locals in Cavan" (2011). • RTÉ, biography excerpt of Sean Quinn (2022). Connect with the Show letstalkspooky.com For listener stories, episode requests, and feedback: visit the website's contact page. If this episode moved you, the kindest thing you can do is share it with one person who likes this kind of story, and leave a rating wherever you listen. It helps more than you'd think.