Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.
What fascinates me about many claims of the paranormal is how persistent they are.
Once the story of some otherworldly sighting gets around, it's remarkably hard to eradicate belief in it -- not only is there the "well, my mother's brother's best friend's boss's gardener saw it with his own eyes" phenomenon, there's also the problem of confirmation bias. As soon as you're even partially sold on an idea, all it takes is minuscule amounts of evidence thereafter to cement your certainty further.
Take, for example, the curious story of the "ghost ship of Northumberland Strait," which has been reported from the narrow channel of water separating Prince Edward Island from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick for about two hundred years. It's a fully-rigged schooner, eyewitnesses claim, with "pure white sails and masts of gold..." that is also aflame.
The sightings have apparently been convincing enough. In 1900, a group of well-meaning citizens of Charlottetown were so sure of what they were seeing that they piled into a rowboat and rowed out toward the stricken ship, only to have it vanish into thin air before they could reach it. Interest in the apparition was boosted by Canadian singer-songwriter Lennie Gallant, a PEI native who included a song about the ghost ship on his 1988 album Breakwater:
There's a burst of flame and a flash of light
And there on the tide is a frightening sight
As a tall ship all aflame lights up the sky
Tales of the phantom ship, from truck to keel in flames
She sails the wide Northumberland Strait
No one knows her name.
It even merited depiction on a Canadian postage stamp in 2014:
The people who've seen it are, apparently, completely convinced. Seventeen-year-old Mathieu Giguère was interviewed in 2008 about his sighting of a "bright white-and-gold ship" in Tatamagouche Bay, and a local man named Melvin Langille backed him up, saying he'd seen the ship himself only a few months earlier. "I believe in all that stuff," Langille said, "and I don't know what else it would be."
That statement, though, encompasses the dual problems with claims like this. "I believe in all that stuff" predisposes you not to question what you might be seeing, and "... I don't know what else it would be" is the Argument From Ignorance that you hear all the time in discussions of UFOs. "I saw a bright light in the sky, and I don't know what it is -- therefore it must be interstellar visitors from outer space." But as Neil deGrasse Tyson said, "If you don't know what it is, then that's where the conversation should stop. You don't then go on to say, "... so it must be" anything."
As far as the ghost ship of Northumberland Strait, it may well have started out from a real incident. In 2015, the Canadian Hydrographic Service found a sunken ship in Pictou Harbour, sitting on the ocean floor under about twelve meters of water. It's about sixty meters long, has large wooden propellors -- and signs of fire damage. As far as most recent sightings, explanations could be a combination of phenomena like St. Elmo's Fire -- luminous electrostatic discharges from ships' masts during stormy weather -- and mistaking fog banks or mirages for distant ships.
Because if you already believe in something, it doesn't take much to act on your imagination and impel you to interpret what you're seeing as something supernatural.
So that's our curious claim for the day. It's an interesting legend, even though there's probably not much to it in reality. But if I'm ever visiting the Maritimes and I see a flaming white-and-gold ship out at sea, I'll happily eat my words.
After a recent post about the "Beast of Gévaudan," an undeniably real creature that slaughtered between sixty and a hundred of the inhabitants of Lozère département in south-central France during a three-year period in the middle of the eighteenth century, a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link with the message, "What is it with French people getting eaten by monsters? It's a wonder any of your ancestors survived."
My initial reaction was that plenty of other cultures have legends of human-eating monstrosities -- the Algonquian Wendigo, the Jötunns of Scandinavia, and the Japanese Yama-Uba are three that come to mind. But I hadn't heard about any French ones other than the aforementioned Beast, so I decided to check out the source he sent.
The link was to a reference in a book by Carol Rose about creatures of legend, and was about La Velue de la Ferté-Bernard. La Velue translates to "the shaggy one," but if you're thinking about some friendly, sheepdog-like animal, you'll need to revise your mental image. La Velue haunted the region around the River Huisne, in northwestern France -- so at least it picked on a different bunch of peasants to terrorize than the Beast of Gévaudan did -- and is described as being the size of an ox, with an egg-shaped body, and having long green fur through which poison-tipped quills protruded.
Oh, and it could either cause floods, or shoot fire from its mouth. Possibly both.
Folklorist Paul Cordonnier-Détrie did a great deal of research into people's beliefs about La Velue, and published a book on it in 1954. Apparently the consensus is that it rampaged throughout the region in the fifteenth century, eating people and livestock and causing fires and/or floods (whichever version you went for earlier). Like the Beast of Gévaudan, the thing proved remarkably difficult to kill. It even made its way into the city of La Ferthé-Bernard, and when challenged, retreated into the River Huisne, but arrows and other weapons had little effect on it. La Velue, says Cordonnier-Détrie, is "of the same family as the Tarasque of Provence," another human-eating monster, this one resembling the unholy offspring of a lion and a snapping turtle.
So okay, maybe French people did have more problems than most with being eaten by monsters.
In any case, like the Beast of Gévaudan, eventually La Velue met its match. It made the mistake of grabbing a "virtuous young woman" called l'Agnelle ("Little Lamb"), and her fiancé understandably objected to this, so he drew his sword and struck the monster in the tail. Whether he knew this would work or it was just dumb luck isn't certain, but either way he hit the one vulnerable part of the monster, and it "writhed in agony and then died." The victory over La Velue was the cause of much rejoicing, and the site where it supposedly happened -- near the old Roman bridge in the village of Yvré-l'Évêque in Sarthe département -- hosted a yearly festival commemorating the young man's bravery that persisted well into the eighteenth century.
Unfortunately, the answer is "probably not much." Unlike the Beast of Gévaudan, whose existence and murderous tendencies are extremely well-documented in primary sources from the time, La Velue seems to be a lot more tenuous. There isn't much in the way of contemporaneous source material to go by; most of it is in the realm of "back in the day there was this terrifying monster...", which honestly doesn't carry much weight.
On the other hand, it's curious how specific the legend is about the places it lived and died. It makes you wonder if there was some kind of creature attacking people back then, that later got embellished and inflated (and equipped with fiery breath and poisonous quills), and became La Velue by a process of accretion.
We'll probably never know. But it does make for an interesting story. Good enough that a version of it ended up in Jorge Luis Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings (although under the Spanish name of "La Peluda").
In any case, if you live in France, I can only hope you're not still having to deal with monsters. The world's crazy enough these days without worrying that you're going to be eaten by a shaggy green thing, or a giant crazed wolf, or a lion-turtle hybrid, or whatnot. Me, if I thought those things were still around, I probably wouldn't ever leave my house.
My puppy Jethro is currently convalescing from knee surgery, following an ACL injury caused by an over-enthusiastic wrestling match between him and his best friend Rosie. The surgery went well, and a week and a half later he's back to his usual ebullient self, but will be on serious exercise restriction for another month and a half.
This means that instead of letting all three dogs out into our big, fenced back yard, I have to take Jethro out on leash several times a day, starting when I get up, usually around 5:30 AM. And when I brought him out a couple of mornings ago, I saw in the glow of the front porch light that there was a fresh coat of snow on the ground -- further evidence that the First Day of Spring doesn't mean that much here in upstate New York.
I was still dressed in my robe and slippers, and when Jethro was done outside we retreated gratefully back into the warmth of my office. The morning dawned bright and clear, and the temperature quickly climbed into the mid-forties. When I looked out of the window later in the day I could still see the line of footprints I made while taking Jethro out earlier, but the effects of the Sun had widened them from the clear indentations of a human wearing rubber-soled slippers into diffuse, open blobs -- and it immediately put me in mind of one of the most peculiar legends of Merrie Old England. Perhaps you've not heard of it; if not, you may find it an interesting tale.
Early in the morning on February 8, 1855 (so the story goes), the people of five small towns in south Devon -- Topsham, Lympstone, Exmouth, Teignmouth, and Dawlish -- woke to find a line of footprints in the snow. The London Times of February 16 reported on the story in detail:
It appears that on Thursday night last there was a very heavy fall of snow in the neighborhood of Exeter and the south of Devon. On the following morning, the inhabitants of the above towns were surprised at discovering the tracks of some strange and mysterious animal, endowed with the power of ubiquity, as the foot-prints were to be seen in all kinds of inaccessible places -- on the tops of houses and narrow walls, in gardens and courtyards enclosed by high walls and palings, as well as in open fields. There was hardly a garden in Lympstone where the footprints were not observed.
The track appeared more like that of a biped than a quadruped, and the steps were generally eight inches in advance of each other. The impressions of the feet closely resembled that of a donkey's shoe, and measured from an inch and a half to (in some instances) two and a half inches across. Here and there it appeared as if cloven, but in the generality of the steps the shoe was continuous, and, from the snow in the center remaining entire, merely showing the outer crest of the foot, it must have been convex.
The creature seems to have approached the doors of several houses and then to have retreated, but no one has been able to discover the standing or resting point of this mysterious visitor. On Sunday last the Rev. Mr. Musgrave alluded to the subject in his sermon, and suggested the possibility of the footprints being those of a kangaroo; but this could scarcely have been the case, as they were found on both sides of the estuary of the Exe.
At present it remains a mystery, and many superstitious people in the above towns are actually afraid to go outside their doors at night.
What is oddest -- and has been reported in multiple sources from the time -- is that the perpetrator, whatever or whomever it was, seemed unperturbed by obstacles. The line of footprints walked right up to the bank of a river, and resumed on the other side as if it had walked straight through the running water. Walls didn't slow it down, either; witnesses say that the footprints indicated it had simply stepped over the wall, as the imprint in the snow showed no change in depth from one side to the other (as it would have if the perpetrator had climbed up one side and then jumped down). The footprints went in more or less a straight line, with only minor deviations, apparently to glimpse into the windows of houses it passed (*shudder*). The most conservative reports claim the line of prints extended for sixty kilometers, far too much for one person (or creature) to cover in a single night.
The snow, as it melted, accentuated the strangeness of the prints, just as it did with the slipper-prints in my front yard. The resemblance to a cloven hoof, with its suggestion of the devil, became more pronounced, and the fear grew to near hysteria. Fortunately (or unfortunately, for those of us who like to know the solutions to mysteries) the events were never repeated, and never satisfactorily explained.
A sketch of the footprints, as drawn by several people who saw them first-hand
The Devonshire footprints were credited by some as a visitation not by Satan, but by one of his uniquely English cousins -- Spring-heeled Jack. The first reported sighting of Spring-heeled Jack was in London in 1837 by a businessman walking home from work. The gentleman described being terrified by the sudden appearance of a dark figure which had "jumped the high railings of Barnes Cemetery with ease," landing right in his path. The businessman wasn't attacked, and was able to keep his wits sufficiently about him to describe a "muscular man, with a wild, grinning expression, long, pointed nose and ears, and protruding, glowing eyes."
Sort of like the love child of Salvador Dali and Mr. Spock, is how I think of him.
Others were attacked, and some were not so lucky as our businessman. A girl named Mary Stevens was attacked in Battersea, and had her clothing torn and was scratched and clawed, but survived because neighbors came to help when they heard her screams. The following day Jack jumped in front of a coach, causing it to swerve and crash. The coachman was severely injured, and several witnesses saw Jack escape by leaping over a nine-foot-high wall, all the while howling with insane laughter.
Several more encounters occurred during the following year, including two in which the victims were blinded temporarily by "blue-white fire" spat from Jack's mouth.
Although publicity grew, and Spring-heeled Jack became a character of folk myth, song, and the punch line to many a joke, sightings became less frequent. Following the footprints in the snow-covered Devonshire countryside in 1855, there was a flurry of renewed interest (*rimshot*), but the last claimed sighting of Spring-heeled Jack was in Lincoln in 1877, and after that he seems to have gone the way of the dodo.
As intriguing as both stories are, all of the evidence points to pranksters (and, in the case of Mary Stevens, an unsuccessful rapist). With the Devonshire footprints, the length of the track line is almost certainly an exaggeration, or at best a conflation of tracks from different sources -- a few of them by a hoaxer to get things going, followed by people blaming every human or animal track they see in the snow afterward on the mysterious walker. As far as Spring-heeled Jack goes, I'm not inclined to believe in Jack's phenomenal jumping ability, except in cases where Jack jumped down off a wall -- that requires no particular skill except the agility to get up there in the first place, and after that gravity takes care of the rest. It seems to me that a combination of nighttime, fear, a wild costume, and the witnesses' being primed by already knowing the story creates a synergy that makes their accuracy seriously in question.
The fact remains, however, that both of them are very peculiar stories. I remember reading about the Devonshire footprints when I was a kid (I didn't find out about Spring-heeled Jack until later), and the idea of some mysterious non-human creature pacing its way across the snowy English countryside, silently crossing fields and farms and streets and rivers, peering into the windows of homes at the sleeping inhabitants, was enough to give me what the Scots call the "cauld grue." Still does, in fact. Enough that I was glad when the fitful March sunshine finally eradicated my slipper-prints in the front yard -- which goes to show that even a diehard rationalist can sometimes fall prey to an irrational case of the creeps.
Yesterday's post, about the remarkable similarities between mythological gods and goddesses in cultures widely separated in space and time, prompted my cousin Carla, who lives in New Mexico, to ask me if I'd ever heard of La Llorona.
I responded that she sounded familiar, but I couldn't recall any details.
"It's a legend all over the Spanish-speaking parts of North, Central, and South America," she explained. "I think there's a version in Spain, too. Each culture has a slightly different take on her, but basically, she's the Weeping Woman' -- someone who was involved in a tragedy, and now as a ghost can be heard crying in the night. Sometimes, rarely, seen as well. If you hear her, you're in deep trouble. So next time y'all come visit, if you're out for a walk at night and hear a woman crying, haul ass right outta there."
Like the gods I wrote about yesterday, La Llorona has astonishingly deep roots. The 1519 Florentine Codex, one of the most important extant documents about pre-colonial Mesoamerican history and beliefs, speaks about a crying woman as a fearful portent:
The sixth omen was that many times a woman would be heard going along weeping and shouting. She cried out loudly at night, saying, "Oh my children, we are about to go forever." Sometimes she said, Oh my children, where am I to take you?"
There's an even earlier parallel in Aztec mythology, the goddess Cihuacōātl -- who gave birth to a son Mixcōātl but abandoned him at a crossroads. Cihuacōātl comes back to the spot at night, hoping to find him but only finding a sacrificial knife instead. She can be seen and heard there weeping for him. (It ended happily enough for Mixcōātl; he was rescued, and grew up to be the god of the hunt.)
La Llorona has, like the gods I discussed yesterday, evolved a bit from her presumed roots -- although wherever you find the story, there are plenty more similarities than differences. In a typical version, she was the wife of a rich ranchero who found out her husband was cheating on her, and in a fit of insane rage drowned their children in a river. Immediately remorseful, she threw herself in as well, but her spirit is unable to find peace -- she now haunts the riverbank, clad in a dripping white dress, wailing miserably.
The regional differences are fascinating. In Mexico, she's mostly considered a monstrous figure, and her sin of drowning her children unpardonable (despite her provocation). Interestingly, the rise of feminism in Mexico has led to some women identifying with her, and considering her the victim rather than the villain -- further evidence that attitudes toward beliefs can change over time. In Guatemala, the legend has it that La Llorona was a married woman who got pregnant from another man, and drowned the baby when it was born to avoid her husband finding out. In Ecuador, she's a tragic figure whose lover died, and she went insane and drowned their children -- and now, her disembodied spirit searches perpetually along the riverbank for them. In Venezuela, she's a bereft mother whose children died of a sickness, and was driven so mad by grief that she's still looking for them in the afterlife.
Carla was right, there's even a version in Spain, which I find curious if the legend has Indigenous Mesoamerican roots; a woman named Elvira (not that Elvira) who led such a tragic life that she gradually becomes a wraith-like, weeping specter. There's no mention of children or water -- common themes in the other iterations -- so I wonder if this one is "genetically" connected to the others, or only related because of there being an image of a crying woman.
After all, there are also parallels to similar legends in other cultures, particularly the Slavic Rusalka -- a malicious water-spirit sometimes said to be the lost soul of a drowned woman, who will grab handsome young men while they're swimming and drag them to their deaths -- and the Bean Sí (usually anglicized to Banshee) of Irish mythology, a wailing woman whose cries herald the death of a family member. Unlikely these have any direct connection to the La Llorona stories, although considering how far back the roots of cultural cross-fertilization sometimes go, I do wonder.
In any case, there's another example of the evolution of folklore for your entertainment. Something to keep in mind if you're ever out on a dark path near a riverside, and you hear crying. Me, I still haven't quite recovered from finding out about the Black-eyed Children (I was so traumatized by this urban legend that I wrote an entire trilogy of novels about it so you can be traumatized, too). In fact, given all the creepy things that supposedly roam at night, maybe it's better you just stay inside your house where it's safe.
Thursday's post -- about a strange legend from England called the "fetch" and similar bits of odd folklore from Finland, Norway, and Tibet -- prompted several emails from loyal readers that can be placed under the heading of "You Think That's Wild, Wait'll You Hear This."
The first submission in the Weirdness One-Upmanship contest was about a Japanese legend called Kuchisake-onna (口裂け女), which translates to "the Slit-mouthed Woman." The Kuchisake-onna appears to its victims as a tall, finely-dressed woman with long, lustrous straight black hair and the lower part of her face covered, carrying either a knife or a sharp pair of scissors. She comes up and says, "Watashi wa kirei desu ka?" ("Am I pretty?") This is also kind of a pun in Japanese, because kirei ("pretty") sounds a lot like kire ("cut"). In any case, by the time she asks the question you're kind of fucked regardless, because if you say no, she kills you with her knife. If you say yes, she lowers her face covering to show that her mouth has been slit from ear to ear, and uses her sharp pointy object to do the same to you.
The only way out, apparently, is to tell her, "You're kind of average-looking." At that point, the Kuchisake-onna is foiled. It's a little like what happens if a vampire tries to gain access to the house of a grammar pedant:
Vampire: Can I enter your house?
Pedant: I don't know, can you?
Vampire: *slinks away, humiliated*
So if you're ever confronted with a Kuchisake-onna, it will be the only time you'll ever come out ahead by telling someone "Eh, you're okay, I guess."
A man about to meet his fate at the hands of a Kuchisake-onna. The three women on the left don't seem especially concerned. (From Ehon Sayoshigure by Hayami Shungyōsai, 1801) [Image is in the Public Domain]
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Kuchisake-onna has made multiple appearances in movies, anime, manga, video games, and at least one mockumentary that was taken seriously enough that people in Gifu Prefecture (where the film was set) were cautioned by one news source not to go outdoors after dark.
The second reader who contacted me asked me if I'd ever herd of the Panotti. I speculated that it was some kind of Italian finger food that was a cross between pancetta and biscotti, but of course that turned out to be wrong. The Panotti were a race of humanoids with extremely large ears who appeared in Pliny the Elder's book Natural History. The reader even provided me with a picture:
A, um, Panottus as pictured in the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493) [Image is in the Public Domain]
The Panotti, said Pliny, lived in a place called -- I shit you not -- the "All-Ears Islands" off the coast of Scythia. The guy in the picture looks rather glum, though, doesn't he? I guess I would, too, if I had twenty-kilogram weights hanging from the sides of my head.
A reader from Hawaii wrote to tell me about a legend called the Huakaʻi pō, which translates to "Nightmarchers." This extremely creepy bit of folklore claims that dead warriors will sometimes arise from their graves and march their way to various sacred sites, chanting and blowing notes on conch shells. Anyone who meets them will either be found dead the next morning, or will soon after die by violence. The only way around this fate is to show the Huakaʻi pō the proper respect by lying face down on the ground until they pass; if you do that, they'll spare you.
That'd certainly save me, because if I was suddenly confronted at night by a bunch of dead Hawaiian warriors, I'd faint, because I'm just that brave.
The reader wrote:
People still sometimes plant rows of ti trees near their houses, because the ti is sacred in Hawaiian culture and the Nightmarchers can't walk through them. Otherwise the Nightmarchers will walk right through your walls and suddenly appear in your house. So without that protection, even staying indoors isn't enough.
Last, we have the Mapinguari, a cryptid from Brazil that I'd never heard of before. The reader who clued me in on the Mapinguari commented that he would "rather meet a fetch, or even a tulpa, than one of these mofos," and when I looked into it I can't help but agree:
A statue of a Mapinguari in the Parque Ambiental Chico Mendes, Rio Branco, Brazil [Image credit: photographer Lalo Almeida]
These things -- which kind of look like the love child of Bigfoot and a cyclops -- also have an extra mouth where their belly button should be, because apparently one mouth isn't sufficient to devour their victims fast enough. They're denizens of the Brazilian rain forest, and the name is thought to come from the Tupi-Guarani phrase mbaé-pi-guari (mbae "that, the thing" + pĭ "foot" + guarî "crooked, twisted"), because in some versions of the legend their feet are attached to their legs backwards so anyone seeing their footprints and trying to flee in the opposite direction will get caught and eaten.
So anyhow, thanks to the readers who responded to Thursday's post. I guess we humans never run out of ways to use our creativity to scare the absolute shit out of each other. Me, I'm just as glad to live in upstate New York, where I'm unlikely to run into Kuchisake-onna, Panotti, Huakaʻi pō, or Mapinguari. Around here the main danger seems to be dying of boredom, which I suppose given my other choices doesn't seem like such a bad way to go.
One of the strangest tales out of old England comes from the turbulent reign of King Stephen, which lasted from 1135 to 1154.
Stephen was the grandson of William the Conqueror; his mother, Adela of Normandy, was William's daughter. When the legitimate heir to the throne, William Adelin (son of Henry I) died in the "sinking of the White Ship" in 1120, it set up a succession crisis as Henry had no other legitimate sons. So when Henry died in 1135, Stephen seized the throne.
The problem was, Henry did have a legitimate daughter, Matilda, who basically said "Oh, hell no" (only in Norman French). And honestly, Matilda's claim to the throne was better, according to the law of primogeniture. But (1) Matilda was a woman, which back then was for some reason a serious problem, and (2) she was arrogant to the point of pissing off just about everyone she came into contact with. Personality-wise, though, Stephen was not a lot better. So they squared off against each other -- and thus began the First English Civil War.
The result was what always happens; years of back-and-forth-ing, and the ones who suffered most were the common people who just wanted to survive and put food on the table. It wasn't helped by the fact that both Stephen and Matilda seemed to excel most at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Both of them came close to winning outright more than once, then did something so catastrophically boneheaded that they blew their chance. (If you want an interesting perspective on the war against the backdrop of some entertaining fiction, Ellis Peters's charming Chronicles of Brother Cadfael are set during Stephen's reign.)
Eventually, everyone got fed up with it, including the two principals. In 1153 Stephen more or less capitulated, and agreed that if Matilda would give up her claim to the throne and cease hostilities, he'd name her son Henry (the future King Henry II) as his heir. Treaty signed. Stephen only lived another two years, Henry became king, and the Plantagenet dynasty was founded.
So it was a mess, and in fact is sometimes called "the Anarchy," which isn't far off the mark. And it was from during this chaos that we have the odd story of the "Green Children of Woolpit."
Woolpit is a town in Suffolk. Its curious name has to do with wolves, not sheep; it was originally Wulfpytt -- a pit for catching wolves. In any case, some time during the war, when things were at their worst, two children showed up in Woolpit, a boy and a girl. They spoke no English (or French either, for that matter), only a strange language no one in the area recognized, and refused all food except for raw beans, which they ate voraciously.
Also, their skin was green.
Naturally, this raised more than a few eyebrows, but they were taken in by one Sir Richard de Calne, a nobleman of Norman descent who lived near Woolpit. The boy died soon afterward, but the girl lived, was baptized with the name of Agnes, and gradually learned to speak English. She adjusted to her new life, although remained "very wanton and impudent," according to one account. When she was able, she told her caretakers that she and her brother had come from a land where the Sun never shone, and the sky was a perpetual twilight. Everything there was green, she said.
The place was known as "St. Martin's Land."
The brother and sister had been herding their father's cattle, she told them, and had heard the sound of cathedral bells coming from a cave in a hillside. Curious, they entered the cave, at first losing their way, but eventually coming out near where they were found in Woolpit.
Two contemporaneous writers, Ralph of Coggeshall and William of Newburgh, both give accounts of the Green Children, which substantially agree. Over time the green color of Agnes's skin gradually faded until she looked more or less normal. She eventually found work as a servant, but rose in status when she married Richard Barre, a scholar and justice who worked for both Henry II and Richard I. The details of her later life are unknown.
First, it seems pretty certain that something real happened -- i.e., that it's not just a tall tale. There are too many apparently independent references to the story to discount it entirely. Needless to say, though, I'm not inclined to believe that they were aliens, or some of the Fair Folk, or any of the other fanciful quasi-explanations I've heard. It's been suggested that the green color of their skin was due to hypochromic anemia (also known as chlorosis), which can be caused by chronic iron deficiency, which would explain why the coloration went away in Agnes's skin once she had a better diet.
It's also been suggested that their lack of knowledge of English was because they were Flemish. Both Stephen and Matilda had invited in Flemish mercenaries to help them in the war, and some of these settled in England permanently. It might be that they were the children of some of these Flemish settlers.
But.
If the cause of the green coloration really was malnourishment, the condition should have been much more widespread, because as I noted earlier, during the First English Civil War just about everyone was starving. And hypochromic anemia doesn't really make you green, it makes your skin waxy, yellowish, and pale. The children's green color was striking enough to merit emphasis, which suggests strongly that it was something no one who saw the children had ever seen before. As far as their being Flemish, their guardian, Sir Richard de Calne, was a well-educated nobleman; both of the principle chroniclers, Ralph of Coggeshall and William of Newburgh, were multilingual. There is no way that if the children had been speaking Flemish, none of them would have recognized it, especially given how many Flemish soldiers and merchants were in England at the time.
Plus, if all the children had done was go through a cave in a hill and come out of the other side, they can't have been far from home. We're talking Suffolk, in flat East Anglia (Suffolk's highest elevation is only 128 meters!), not the freakin' Rocky Mountains, here. Why did both of the children think they'd been transported far away -- far enough away that they couldn't just walk back across the hill and then home? (It's possible, of course, that they had been abused and didn't want to go home. But still. Surely if all they'd done was cross a few hills, someone would have recognized them as locals.)
So the prosaic, rational explanation of the story doesn't itself hold up to scrutiny.
Likewise, claims that the story of the Green Children was a moralistic tale invented as a social commentary on "the threat posed by outsiders to the unity of the Christian community," as historian Elizabeth Freeman put it. seem as far-fetched as suggestions that they were aliens. As I said earlier, the independent accounts of the children, as well as their interactions with real historical figures, indicate that they did exist -- whoever they were, and wherever they'd come from.
So we're left with a mystery that I doubt will ever be resolved to everyone's satisfaction.
Understand that I'm not advocating for any kind of paranormal explanation; whatever did happen back in twelfth-century Suffolk, I'm sure it had a rational, scientific cause. I'm just saying we don't know what it is. Odd to think, though, that since Richard Barre and Agnes had children, very likely there are people in Suffolk (and those with ancestry there) who descend from the surviving "Green Child."
If you're one of them, consider where that drop of your blood might have come from. And let me know if you ever find yourself with a craving for raw beans.
In C. S. Lewis's novel Perelandra, the protagonist, Elwin Ransom, goes to the planet Venus. In Lewis's fictional universe Venus isn't the scorched, acid-soaked hell we now know it to be; it's a water world, with floating islands of lush vegetation, tame animals, and a climate like something out of paradise.
In fact, to Lewis, it is paradise; a world that hasn't fallen (in the biblical sense). Ransom runs into a woman who appears to be the planet's only humanoid inhabitant, and she exhibits a combination of high intelligence and innocent naïveté that is Lewis's expression of the Edenic state. Eventually another Earth person arrives -- the scientist Weston, who is (more or less) the delegate of the Evil One, playing here the role of the Serpent. And Weston tells the woman about humanity's love for telling stories:
"That is a strange thing," she said. "To think abut what will never happen."
"Nay, in our world we do it all the time. We put words together to mean things that have never happened and places that never were: beautiful words, well put together. And then we tell them to one another. We call it stories or poetry... It is for mirth and wonder and wisdom."
"What is the wisdom in it?"
"Because the world is made up not only of what is but of what might be. Maleldil [God] knows both and wants us to know both."
"This is more than I ever thought of. The other [Ransom] has already told me things which made me feel like a tree whose branches were growing wider and wider apart. But this goes beyond all. Stepping out of what is into what might be, and talking and making things out there, alongside the world... This is a strange and great thing you are telling me."
It's more than a little ironic -- and given Lewis's impish sense of humor, I'm quite sure it was deliberate -- that a man whose fame came primarily from writing fictional stories identifies fictional stories as coming from the devil, within one of his fictional stories. Me, I'm more inclined to agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures."
Our propensity for telling stories is curious, and it's likely that it goes a long way back. Considering the ubiquity of tales about gods and heroes, it seems certain that saying "Once upon a time..." has been going on since before we had written language. It's so familiar that we lose sight of how peculiar it is; as far as we know, we are alone amongst the nine-million-odd species in Kingdom Animalia in inventing entertaining falsehoods and sharing them with the members of our tribe.
The topic of storytelling comes up because quite by accident I stumbled on Wikipedia's page called "Lists of Legendary Creatures." It's long enough that they have individual pages for each letter of the alphabet. It launched me down a rabbit hole that I didn't emerge from for hours.
And there are some pretty fanciful denizens of the "alongside world." Here are just a few examples I thought were particularly interesting:
The Alp-luachra of Ireland. This creature looks like a newt, and waits for someone to fall asleep by the side of the stream where it lives, then it crawls into his/her mouth and takes up residence in the stomach. There it absorbs the "quintessence" of the food, causing the person to lose weight and have no energy.
The Popobawa of Zanzibar, a one-eyed shadowy humanoid with a sulfurous odor and wings. It visits houses at night where it looks for people (either gender) to ravish.
The Erchitu, a were...ox. In Sardinia, people who commit crimes and don't receive the more traditional forms of justice turn on the night of the full Moon into huge oxen, which then get chased around the place being poked with skewers by demons. This is one tale I wish was true, because full Moon days in the White House and United States Congress would be really entertaining.
The Nekomata, a cat with multiple tails that lives in the mountains regions of Japan and tricks unwary solo travelers, pretending at first to be playful and then leading them into the wilds and either losing them or else attacking them. They apparently are quite talented musicians, though.
The Gwyllgi, one of many "big evil black dog" creatures, this one from Wales. The Gwyllgi is powerfully-built and smells bad. If you added "has no respect for personal space" and "will chase a tennis ball for hours," this would be a decent description of my dog Guinness, but Guinness comes from Pennsylvania, not Wales, so maybe that's not a match.
The Sânziană of Romania, who is a fairy that looks like a beautiful young woman. Traditionally they dance in clearings in the forest each year on June 24, and are a danger to young men who see them -- any guy who spies the Sânziene will go mad with desire (and stay that way, apparently).
The Ao-Ao, from the legends of the Guarani people of Paraguay. The Ao-Ao is a creature that looks kind of like a sheep, but has fangs and claws, and eats people. It is, in fact, a real baa-dass.
A statue of an Ao-Ao by Paraguayan sculptor Ramón Elias [Image is in the Public Domain]
The Tlahuelpuchi, of the Nahua people of central Mexico. The Tlahuelpuchi is a vampire, a human who is cursed to suck the blood of others (apparently it's very fond of babies). When it appears, it sometimes looks human but has an eerie glow; other times, it leaves its legs behind and turns into a bird. Either way, it's one seriously creepy legend.
The Dokkaebi, a goblin-like creature from Korea. It has bulging eyes and a huge, grinning mouth filled with lots of teeth, and if it meets you it challenges you to a wrestling match. They're very powerful, but apparently they are weak on the right side, so remember that if you're ever in a wrestling match with a goblin in Korea.
So that's just the merest sampling of the creatures in the list. I encourage you to do a deeper dive. And myself, I think the whole thing is pretty cool -- a tribute to the inventiveness and creativity of the human mind. I understand why (in the context of the novel) C. S. Lewis attributed storytelling to the devil, but honestly, I can't see anything wrong with it unless you're trying to convince someone it's all true.
I mean, consider a world without stories. How impoverished would that be? So keep telling tales. It's part of what it means to be human.
It sounds like some obscure country line dance, but the real story is more interesting, and it comes with a connection to a curious Native legend that turns out to refer to a real historical event.
The Klickitat People have lived for centuries on both sides of the Columbia River, up into what is now Skamania and Klickitat Counties, Washington, and down into Multnomah and Clackamas Counties, Oregon. They tell the tale of Pahto and Wy'east, the two sons of the chief of all the gods, Tyhee Saghalie. The two young men did not get along, and fought over who would rule over which parcel of land. Their father shot one arrow south and the other north; Pahto was given the lands around where the northern arrow landed, and Wy'east the territory surrounding where the southern arrow fell to the ground. Tyhee Saghalie then shook the Earth and created a great bridge across the Columbia River so the two could visit each other.
But soon trouble broke out again. Pahto and Wy'east both fell in love with the same young woman, the beautiful Loowit, and began to fight, burning villages and destroying forests and crops. Tyhee Saghalie tried to reason with them, but to no avail. In the end he grew angry himself and shook the Earth again, destroying the bridge; the cataclysm created a flood that washed away whole forests. He turned all three into mountains -- Wy'east became Mount Hood, Pahto Mount Adams, and the lovely Loowit Mount Saint Helens. But even in mountain form they never forgot either their anger or their burning love, and all three still rumble and fume to this day.
What is fascinating is that this odd story actually appears to have some basis in fact.
In around 1450 C.E., an earthquake knocked loose about a cubic kilometer of rock, soil, and debris from Table Mountain and Greenleaf Peak. The resulting landslide -- the Bonneville Slide -- roared down the Columbia Gorge, creating a dam and what amounted to a natural bridge something like sixty meters high across one of the biggest rivers in the world.
The dam couldn't last, however. The Columbia River has a huge watershed, and the lake that built up behind the dam eventually overtopped the natural "Bridge of the Gods." The whole thing collapsed -- probably during a second earthquake -- releasing all that pent-up river water in a giant flood. It left behind geological evidence, both in the form of a layer of flood-damaged strata west of the slide, and the remains of drowned forests to the east, where trees had died as the dammed lake rose to fill the gorge.
Despite the reminder we got in 1980 -- with the eruption of Mount Saint Helens -- it's easy to forget how geologically active the Pacific Northwest is. Not only is there the terrifying Cascadia Subduction Zone just offshore (about which I wrote two years ago), the other Cascade volcanoes, from Silverthrone Caldera (British Columbia) in the north to Lassen Peak (California) in the south, are still very much active. Right in the middle is the massive Mount Rainier, visible from Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia on clear days, which is one of the most potentially destructive volcanoes in the world. Not only is it capable of producing lava and pyroclastic flows, it's capped by huge glaciers that would melt during an eruption and generate the catastrophic mudflows called lahars. The remnants of two historical flows from Rainier -- the Osceola and Electron Lahars -- underlie the towns of Kent, Orting, Enumclaw, Puyallup, Auburn, Buckley, and Sumner, and in some places are twenty to thirty meters deep.
The Earth can be a scary, violent place, but somehow, humans manage to survive even catastrophic natural disasters. And, in the case of the Bridge of the Gods, to incorporate them into our stories and legends. Our determination to live in geologically-active areas is due to two things; volcanic soils tend to be highly fertile, and we have short memories. Fortunately, though, we couple what seems like a foolhardy willingness to take risks with a deep resilience -- allowing us to live in places like the Cascades, which are bountiful, and filled with a perilous beauty.
My mom was an extremely devout Roman Catholic, and I still recall her instructing me to "pray to St. Jude" when I was worried about a bad outcome.
At some point I thought to ask her, "Why St. Jude?"
"Because he's the patron saint of lost causes," she explained.
I pondered on that for a moment. "If he's in charge of lost causes," I finally said, "wouldn't he be the worst person to pray to? Shouldn't I be asking for help from someone with a better track record?"
My mom, who had many fine qualities but was born without a sense of humor, didn't appreciate my attempt at levity. She took her saints seriously.
St. Jude is hardly the only Catholic saint whose story is a little on the odd side. Consider, for example, St. Rita of Cascia, who lived in the fifteenth century in Perugia, Italy. Rita at first seemed like she was destined to live a completely ordinary life. She was the daughter of a moderately wealthy couple in the town of Roccaporena, and upon reaching marrying age was wedded to a nobleman named Paolo di Ferdinando di Mancino. Mancino turned out to be a nasty piece of work, and was verbally and physically abusive to poor Rita, but by her "humility, kindness, and faith" she was able to convert him to better behavior. They had two sons, Giangiacomo Antonio and Paulo Maria, and everything was going on swimmingly until a guy named Guido Chiqui, who belonged to a rival family, stabbed Mancino to death.
Well, Rita was understandably upset, especially after all the effort she'd put in to turn her husband into a nice guy, and she was even more chagrined to find out her two sons were planning on taking revenge and murdering Chiqui, so she prayed that they be spared from doing something that would land them both in hell forever. God obliged by making them both die of dysentery.
So be careful what you pray for, I guess.
Rita, now husbandless and childless, decided to join a convent, where she died in 1457. She's now the patron saint of abused people.
A painting of St. Rita of Cascia from her tomb [Image is in the Public Domain]
Then there's St. Lidwina of Schiedam, a fourteenth-century Dutch woman who was injured while ice skating at age fifteen, and afterward supposedly didn't need to eat anything. Despite this -- and the alarming and bizarre claim that she "shed skin, bones, and parts of her intestines, which her parents kept in a vase and which gave off a sweet odor" -- she lived another thirty-seven years, and upon canonization became the patron saint of chronic illnesses... and ice skaters.
Seems like if I was an ice skater, I'd want to pray to someone who hadn't nearly died doing it, but that's just me.
Then there's the third-century St. Denis, who was a Christian bishop among the Parisii, a Gaulish tribe who lived along the banks of the River Seine (and for whom Paris is named). St. Denis went around preaching, and apparently was so well-spoken that he converted a lot of local pagans, which pissed off the local authorities. They appealed to the Roman Emperor Decius, who gave the order to arrest Denis and his friends Rusticus and Eleutherius. After a stint in prison, all three were beheaded with a sword on the highest hill in the area -- what is now called Montmartre.
So far, nothing too odd. But after Denis was beheaded, his body stood up, picked up his own head, and walked three miles with it, his head preaching a sermon the whole way. At some point evidently even holiness couldn't propel him any further and he collapsed and died (again) -- on the site where the Basilica of St. Denis currently stands. But this is why many images of St. Denis are shown with him holding his own head:
Besides being the patron saint of both Paris and France as a whole, guess what else St. Denis is the patron saint of?
Headaches.
Another third-century saint who is mostly famous for how he died is St. Lawrence, who came from the town of Huesca in Spain. He preached all over southern Europe but got himself in trouble when he was in Rome in 258 C.E. by recommending redistribution of wealth to the poor. (If you can imagine.) The powers that be decided Lawrence needed to go, and they came up with a nasty way to do it -- they chained him to a grill and roasted him over an open fire. Lawrence, defiant to the end, yelled at his executioners, "You can turn me over, I'm done on this side!" And this is why he's the patron saint of cooks... and comedians.
But the weirdest claim I've seen along these lines is an obscure seventh-century British saint, St. Rumbold of Buckingham. Rumbold was supposedly the grandson of King Penda of Mercia, who was a prominent pagan, but his parents (names unknown) converted to Christianity. Rumbold was born in 662 C.E. and only lived three days -- but was born able to talk. His first words were allegedly "Christianus sum, Christianus sum, Christianus sum!" ("I'm a Christian, I'm a Christian, I'm a Christian!"), which even if you're devout must have been creepy as hell. Afterward Rumbold politely requested baptism, and preached several sermons before expiring.
There are several places named after him, including St. Rumbold's Well in Buckingham:
The best part of the whole story, though, is that Boxley Abbey in Kent had a famous statue of St. Rumbold, that was small and light (because, of course, he was a baby), but sometimes inexplicably would become so heavy no one could lift it. The deal was, the monks said, that only someone who was holy and pure of heart could lift the statue. Well, when the Dissolution of the Monasteries happened during the sixteenth century, and Boxley Abbey was abandoned and largely torn down, it was discovered that the statue was fixed to its heavy stone base by a wooden pin that could be released by a person standing unseen behind the alcove. So, basically, one of the monks would check out whoever was trying to lift the statue, and decide if they were holy enough to pull the pin for.
Sometimes even Miracles of God need a little human assistance, apparently.
Anyhow, that's our cavalcade of holiness for the day. Unsurprisingly, I think the whole thing is kind of weird. I feel bad for the saints who got martyred -- no one deserves that -- and even for poor St. Rita with her life-long run of bad luck. I don't think I'll be praying to any of them, though, however much our country could use some help from St. Jude at the moment.
Or even from talking babies and guys walking around carrying their own severed heads.
