This Halloween we have five stories of witches from all the way back to around 1125AD to the 1960s. Some of them are actual historic personage, some seem more purely folkloric.
It’s a somewhat longer episode for which I”ll provide somewhat shorter show notes here. So, I won’t going into the details of each story, but just give a sketch of who we’ll be talking about. Aside from all being witches, you’ll see another common thread; four of the five kept avian familiars: roosters, blackbirds, and jackdaws.
The first a 19th-century witch who’s become a part of Connecticut folklore — Hannah Cranna. Though there are stories of her cursing neighbors from her life, the most interesting part of her tale begins with the details of her burial details, with which she was particularly obsessed. The segment begins with a snippet of Mark Fry’s bit of folk-psychedelia “The Witch” — only because it happens to dovetail nicely with a story of Hannah told on an urban legends web page.
Our second witch was also very particular about her burial, but with a more clear-cut rationale: she wanted to prevent the Devil from claiming her soul (and body, it seems) upon her death. This is the so-called “Witch of Berkeley,” who story was first told by English chronicler William of Malmesbury all the way back in 1125. It’s in his Chronicle of the Kings of England (as a sort of digression).
Our third witch, Molly Leigh, is also from England — North Staffordshire, where she died in 1746. Though she fit the witchy archetype of having both a quarrelsome personality and undesirable physiognomy, she was never tried or executed for witchcraft, despite some rumors of minor mischief, such as bewitching beers down at the pub. Her story, like Hannah Cranna’s, focuses more on her afterlife exploits. We play a snippet of a recent horror movie Molly Crows, which uses Leigh’s story as a springboard.
The fourth witch is our most modern: Sibyl Leek, who appeared on the scene in the 1960s during a wave of pop-culture. While she claimed to be a descendant of Molly Leigh, her life seems to have been much more pleasant, centering primarily upon how to best position herself in the media spotlight.
Our final story is is quite an oddity. The story of the self-confessed 17th-century witch, Major Thomas Weir, who became a fixture in legends of old Edinburgh. This is our longest segment, and I’ll leave the rest for you to enjoy as Mrs. Karswell’s reads from our sources, ad the details as are suitably shocking.
From: A compendium about demons and magic. 1766. (Wellcome LIbrary)
Bluebeard and his bloody chamber full of murderous secrets is widely known as one of Charles Perrault’s fairy tales, but it’s part of a larger family of folk tales and ballads we examine in this episode.
Our show begins with a brief summary of this tale in which a young woman is courted by the mysterious and strangely whiskered nobleman, Bluebeard. After lavishly entertaining the woman and her family in his castle, it’s agreed they should marry. Soon thereafter, Bluebeard departs on a journey leaving his bride keys to all the rooms of his estate, all of which to which may use — but one. Curiosity, however, getting the better of her, she unlocks the forbidden door and must face Bluebeard’s murderous rage at her disobedience.
1870s poster for Covent Garden pantomime
Perrault’s 1697 story, which draws upon older folk tales, is primarily known thanks to its inclusion in collections of fairy tales intended for children. Today, however, you’re unlikely to find the gruesome yarn anthologized for younger readers. If included at all, it may be sanitized, as it was in the 1970 children’s record from which we excerpted a clip at the show’s open.
Along with fairy tale collections and cheaply printed chapbooks, the Bluebeard story was largely preserved through theatrical representation. We look at a number of productions from the late 18th and early 19th century that treated the story in a semi-comic or melodramatic fashion, often combining elements of the Italian Commedia dell’arte, such as Harlequin and his antics. Wilkinson provides of some readings of the comedic dialogue as well as stage directions which often made the “bloody chamber” a lavishly designed and spooky centerpiece of the production.
Particularly important to how were think of Bluebeard today is the 1798 production Blue Beard, or Female Curiosity!, which moved the story to Turkey in order to exploit a growing fascination with the East. This image of Bluebeard and indeed its importance in the English-language repertoire is suggested by the inclusion of the play in the 1993 Jane Campion film, The Piano, a story set during this period. The theatrical tradition of representing Bluebeard’s wives as bloody heads severed from their bodies is demonstrated in this scene as well as many 19th-century photographs of such stagings.
1868 Harper’s magazine article w/ illustrations by Winslow Homer.
Also discussed is 1 1903 Christmas staging of Mr. Bluebeard in Chicago, famous not so much for its musical numbers (such as the song “Raving,” which we hear excerpted) but more for a landmark fire, which claimed the lives of 602 theater-goers.
While there have been dozens of films that play with the theme of women marrying men with mysteriously deceased wives, only a few have directly addressed the tale. We very briefly discuss the 1944 Bluebeard with John Carradine, the 1972 Bluebeard with Richard Burton, and the 2009 French film, Barbe-Bleue (Bluebeard), which is the most traditional of the lot.
In the next part of our show, we look at related folktales including the Grimm’s story “Fitcher’s Bird,” which features bloody chambers that must not be opened, a skull dressed as a bride, a woman rolling in honey and feathers, and a wedding that’s diverted into an execution party. We also look at the English tale “Mr. Fox,” in which a woman spying on her bridegroom discovers his habit
The Grimms also gave us “The Robber Bridegroom,” in which a bride-to-be visits her intended’s home “out in the dark forest,” where she makes unnerving discovery similar to that in Mr. Fox (but with an added element of grisly horror thrown in).
1870s poster for Covent Garden pantomime
As a sort of musical tonic to all these tales of women and the bloody chambers they might end up in, we close the show with two traditional ballads in which the woman more satisfyingly gains the upper hand, and ends up slaying the serial killer she is to wed. The frist of these, is a Dutch ballad “Lord Halewijn” and the second “Lady Isobel and the Outlandish (or “Elf”) Knight.”
We close with a peculiar tidbit from modern life, a weird parallel between ancient folk ballads and a true-crime oddity.
Our episode continues from our last with more terrors of the night, the incubi, sucubi, and the most notorious succubus, Lilith — and the breeding of demons
“Burney Relief” formerly thought to represent Lilith.
We begin with a quick nod to the shoddy treatment the topic of the incubus has received in films, as represented by the 1981 misfire, Incubus. From there, we jump to the Middle Ages, clarifying with a quick quote from Claxton’s Chronicle, the role of the succubus as seducer of men, and the incubus as threat to females. A few words from St. Augustine make clear a connection with other pagan figures with lecherous reputations, and a quote from King Jame’s Daemonologie offers a more innovative notion that the incubus and succubus are two faces of the same demon. Each fulfills what Augustine sees as the purpose of the paired demons — the succubus to collect the male’s semen and the incubus to convey this to the human female.
The offspring of these demonic/human pairings (with infants nursed by the succubi) are called “cambions” by the demonic-obsessed imagination clerics, but in secular folklore are virtually “changelings.” We hear of some legendary cambions, including Merlin, the hero Hagen of the Völsung saga, and Alexander the Great (the last in a tale related by Wilkinson).
Amulet protecting infants from Lilith.
There follows another nod to the cinema’s sleazy representation of the succubi and Lilith (films linked below). From there, we make a brief survey of Lilith in high culture, in Michelangelo’s “Temptation” mural depicting her in the Garden of Eden on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, her brief appearance at the Walpurgisnacht scene in Goethe’s Faust, and the outrageous portrayal of Lilith and Satan in the “un-performable” Decadent play of 1891, Lilith, by Remy de Gourmont.
Michelangelo’s “Temptation” with Lilith as Serpent
Our look at the more ancient history of the figure begins with an Old Testament reference to Lilith as a denizen of an enemy kingdom reduced to a haunted desert wasteland by Yahweh in the book of Isaiah. The Hebrews, we learn, borrowed the figure of the child-snatching, murderous, Lilith from the Babylonians/Akkadian storm and wind spirits known as the lilitu. An individualized and somewhat elevated specimen of this class seems to be the demi-goddess Lamashtu, whom we hear fearfully described in Wilkinson’s reading of an ancient hymn to this destroyer who shares many traits with the Hebrew Lilith. We also learn of a Lamashtu’s second-hand connection to the 1973 film The Exorcist.
After a quick look at Lilith’s later appearance in the Dead Sea Scrolls, we medieval Jewish legends. including The Alphabet of Ben Sirach, which first cast Lilith as Adam’s first wife, the Midrash Abkir, which described Lilith’s rape of Adam and their breeding of demons, and finally references to Lilith’s marriage to the demonic archangel Samael, in The Zohar and Treatise on the Left Emanation, a powerful pairing sometimes referred to darkly as “the other god.” We also find out about other legends with placed Lilith in a harem of wives belonging to Samael, including the demonesses Agrat bat Mahlat and Isheth Zenunim. Wilkinson provides us with a final, dramatic narrative from The Zohar describing the seduction and damnation of a foolish man at the hands of Lilith.
The show closes with an examination of the 1966 film, Incubus, starring William Shatner (before he was Captain Kirk). We learn about the curious decision to shoot the film in the artificial language of Esperanto and the alleged “curse” that haunted the production.
This episode examines the terrors that come by night, not-so-soothing lullabies, prayers and charms against the nightmare.
We open with the grim Icelandic lulluby “Móðir mín í kví kví,” which tells the story of a newborn’s ghost haunting the mother who abandoned it. Another lovely, yet menacing Icelandic lullaby follows. “Bíum, bíum, Bambaló” alludes to an unnamed horror drawing nearer and nearer.
We learn that our word “nightmare,” originally designated a nighttime visit by a supernatural creature that pinned down and menaced the sleeper, ie, the “mare,” a word that arrived in English via the Saxons, and was derived from the Germanic “mara.” Recently, we’ve seen versions of this creature popping up in a number of horror films, snippets of which appear in a montage. These are: the 2018 film Mara and the 2011 Swedish film Marianne, both of which allude to the creature in their titles, and 2016’s Dead Awake and Before I Wake, as well as 2017’s Slumberand Don’t Sleep. And of course we include a nod to Nightmare on Elm Street, the film that started it all.
Still from the film “Mara”
Stripped of its supernatural interpretation, the sleeper’s sensation of being pinned down and experiencing the sense of a malevolent presence is recognized by medical community as “sleep paralysis.” But researches of the last century are not the first to attempt to describe the phenomenon in physiological terms. We hear such a physiological take on the subject from 1584, drawn from The Discoverie of Witchcraft, a somewhat skeptical book on witchcraft.
The equation of the mare and the witch in English and Germanic culture is longstanding. The other term sometimes used by the scientific community to describe this phenomenon, “Night Hag Syndrome,” points to this, as the word “hag” is traceable to an ancient German term for witches, “Hagazussa,” which also happens to be the title of an excellent new folk-horror film from Germany. A snippet of the dark and droney soundtrack from that film is included.
Digging in a bit more on the topic of the mare, we learn that how the creature assumed a number of nocturnal forms while appearing in the day as either a witch or an unwitting human cursed by a witch, and hear a 13th-century account of an attack by a mare from the old Norse Norse Ynglinga Saga read by Wilkinson.
Next, we listen to a bit of another lullaby, this one from Russia, “Bayu Bayushki Bayu,” which tells of wolves ready to drag the sleeping child into the forest.
Whereas the “mara” (mare) is the preferred term for this creature in Great Britain (and English-speaking countries), Scandinavia, and northern Germany, further south in Germany, we hear of the “Alp,” a largely identical creature, with an etymological tie to our English word “elf.” The Alp exhibits a wider range of mischievous, elfin traits not common to the mare.
19th-century illustration of the nightmare, artist unknown
This same region is also haunted by the nocturnal “Drude” or “Trute,” which likewise presses and torments sleepers, but is more strongly connected to witches than elves. The word “Drude” is often combined with other words in German to describe witchy concepts, like the “Drudenfuss,” a word for “pentagram.” In the sometimes confusing world of folk-magic, the five-pointed star can be used as a form of white magic to combat darker magic and for this reason was often used on infants’ cradles to repel the Drude as in the illustration here. We also hear of a connection of the Drude to the recently released folk-horror anthology film A Field Guide to Evil.
Austrian cradle with pentagram against the Drude
There follows perhaps the most explicitly terrifying lullaby in tonight’s collection, the Russian song “Tili-tili-bom.”
A number of folk practices against the nightmare are described including methods of trapping the creature. Wilkinson reads us a story from Germany’s Black Forest in which the creature is trapped in a particularly peculiar way. Counting charms, such as those used against vampires are also discussed.
Our show ends with a discussion of traditional bedtime prayers, including “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep,” which we learn can be traced to prayers used in 16th-century witchcraft, ancient Jewish “devil trap bowls,” Babylonian incantations, and a rite created by the 19th-century British occult gropu, The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Along the way, we also hear a traditional southern-German nighttime prayer (Abendsegen) as featured in the 1893 opera Hansel and Gretel.
This episode finds the Devil where you’d least expect him: stories of possessed nuns and demonic attacks on the rigorously devout.. It’s a bit of a follow-up to our last episode on Ghastly Saint Stories.
We open with a clip from the 1999 film Stigmata, in which we hear it asserted that those marked by God with the stigmata are also more likely than others to be subject to attacks by Satan. Not a great film, but these types of characters straddling the line between the holy and damned, are our subject of our episode.
Our first case is that of 19th-century South Tyrolean stigmatic Maria Theresia von Mörl. Her reputation for holiness drew tens of thousands of devout visitors, but this holy figure was also beset by by beastly manifestations, which Wilkinson details for us.
Stigmatic Maria von Mörl, subject to demonic attacks.
A more famous 16th-century personage bearing diabolical stigmata would be Magdalena de la Cruz, abbess of the Franciscan Convent of Santa Isabel de los Angeles outside Cordoba, Spain. We hear of her childhood, characterized by saintly (and gruesome) emulation of the Savior, her alleged miracles, and her early years as abbess, during which she instituted a particularly harsh program of mortification. She seems to have gone a bit far with a particularly presumptious miracle that lost her followers, eventually admitting to bit of a demonic involvement.
Magdalena de la Cruz.
We’re getting to the famous possessed nuns of Loudun, France, but first I provide a little background on earlier demonic outbreaks in convents of 17th-century France, which seem to have set the pattern fr Loudun. Along the way, some documents recording curiously animalistic behavior of possessed nuns are briefly explored.
Our Loudun segment opens with a clip from a trailer for Ken Russel’s controversial 1971 film The Devils, which we learn was based on a 1960 play based on a 1952 nonfiction book on the subject by Aldous Huxley. We also hear a snippet from the lovely 1961 Polish film by Jerzy Kawalerowicz, Mother Joan of the Angels, which loosely adapts the Loudun story, picking up where Russel and Huxley’s narrative ends. Another Pole who interpreted the story was Christoph Penderecki, who in 1961 wrote the opera The Devils of Loudun. We hear a bit of Penderecki’s music under our account of the Loudun phenomena.
Still from Russel’s “The Devils”
The Loudun story primarily revolves around two characters: Jeanne des Anges, Mother Superior of the convent, who becomes obsessed with Father Grandier, a parish priest with a reputation for sexual indiscretions. Des Anges, interprets erotic dreams about the priest as diabolic visitations, a fear that quickly infests the entire convent. Wilkinson reads for us an account of the extraordinary symptoms exhibited by the nuns who believed they’d been possessed. The story does not end well for Grandier, though des Anges, as we learn, goes on reporting more fantastic details of her struggle against Satan, eventually producing a strange but much coveted holy relic.
After our Loudun segment, you’ll hear a clip from the film The Exorcism of Emily Rose, and a bit later, the German film Requiem. Both are based (the former more freely) on the case of Anneliese Michel, a young Bavarian woman, who died in 1976 shortly after a series of exorcisms. We hear a bit about her psychiatric issues, which proved untreatable by conventional means, and the process of minor and later full rites of exorcism the family turned to. I’ve included Michel’s story alongside possessed nuns as Michel’s followed a similarly rigorous spiritual discipline, one which oddly became more aggressive in tandem with the growth of her “demonic” destructive and self-destructive behavior. We learn of Michel’s belief that her suffering under demonic forces served a redemptive role as penance for others and of a small, but devoted following she has drawn among Catholics who believe she was chosen by God as a “victim soul,” a concept we discussed in the last show. We also hear a snippet of disturbing tape recordings made during the exorcism. The show ends with a news story about the house in which these events took place and the strange rumors it engendered.
Our collection of ghastly stories of saints highlights notions of extreme self-mortification as a spiritual practice along with a preoccupation with the saintly body after death.
While these aspects of Catholicism are anathema to secular outsiders and jarring to many contemporary adherents, they’ve been embraced by the Gothic. We begin with an illustrative clip from John Huston’s 1979 adaptation of Flannery O’Connor’s Southern Gothic classic Wise Blood.
The case of 15th-century Florentine Maria Magdalena de’Pazzi provides an example in terms of extreme mortification from an early age. Wilkinson reads some passages noting her ingenious use of found materials in her program of suffering. Along the way, we note some more traditional tools of self-punishment like the cilice, or hair-shirt and its varieties.
Submission to the natural process can also be a form of mortification when it comes to the carnivorous habits of insects. We hear some stories in this regard from the hagiographies of Ita of Killedy, St. Macarius of Alexandria, as well as Rita of Cascia.
St. Rita of Cascia 18th-century, artist unknown.
The story of Belgium’s holy woman Christina the Astonishing includes not only fantastical tales of self-destructiveness, but also her resurrection from death at the age of 21. Some listeners will be familiar with Christina from the song of that name by Nick Cave, from which we hear a clip. Christina’s ability to smell “the scent of human corruption,” we also learn, was shared by saints Joseph of Cupertino, Saint John of the Cross, and Gemma Galgani, to name a few.
Christina the Astonishing appearing in the 1630 Fasti Mariani calendar of saints
There is a complimentary concept to the smell of sin, namely the ” Odor of Sanctity” often said to waft from the body of a saint. In saint stories, this seems to be most often mentioned in contexts least likely to be associated with pleasant smells, that is, sickness, death, and long after death when the body should be at its most foul. We hear a particularly odd story in this regard from the hagiography of 14th-century Dutch Saint Lidwina.
Next up is the topic of saintly incorruptibility, or the unnatural preservation of a body after death. We learn a bit about what standards are here applied when it comes to cannonization and hear a few outstanding cases.
The capacity to occasionally move after death is also attributed to number of these mummified saints. We hear some rather unsettling stories illustrating this — St. Rita of Cascia and Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi again, as well as the blessed Pietro of Gubbio, and an earthquake story involving the animated corpse of St. Eustochia of Messina, Italy.
The remainder of the show looks at stigmatics, those said to bear marks similar to the five “Holy Wounds” received by Christ in his Passion. We hear a creepy, old recording telling the tale of “Little Rose” Ferron, a 20th-century stigmatic from Rhode Island as well as some graphic first-hand accounts of visits with stigmatics Therese Neumann (Bavaria) and Maria Domenica Lazzari (South Tyrol). Some remarkable watercolors of Lazzari here.
We end or collection of ghastly saint stories with some particularly ghastly stories of holy people ingesting unholy things for the sake of holiness (St. Catherine of Genoa and St. Veronica Giuliani) as well as St. Catherine of Siena, who also provides a final anecdote as a sort of palette -cleanser.
In this episode we look at legends of musicians and marksmen said to have made Faustian deals with the Devil.
We begin with ThePhantom of the Opera, a story which does not exactly share our theme, but was set against the backdrop of a staging of the opera Faust by Charles Gounod. The story, written in 19111 by French journalist and writer Gaston Leroux, also has a macabre connection to Der Freischütz (“the marksmen,” for our purposes), the German legend of a marksman who enlists the Devil’s help in a test of marksmanship. This particular connection is discussed at the conclusion of our show, but is one of several historical incidents said to have inspired Leroux’s novel. The establishment of a subterranean lake beneath the Paris opera house and an unfortunate accident with a chandelier in 1896 are discussed in this context.
1925 Phantom poster showing underground lake
Next, we hear some clips from Brian DePalma’s 1974 rock-opera-horror-comedy Phantom of the Paradise, a retelling of the Phantom story within the setting of the fictional Paradise rock club. Conveniently enough, DePalma’s film inserts not one but two Faustian pacts with the Devil into its storyline and provides an intro to the topic of the trope of rock musicians making deals with the devil.
After a nod to the overt introduction of Satanic themes into rock-and-roll by the band Coven in their 1969 album Witchcraft Destroys Minds and Reaps Souls (discussed in our last episode), we flash through a few other examples of the trend in the 1960s to arrive at the legend of Robert Johnson’s alleged deal with the Devil at “the crossroads.”
Robert Johnson
This bit of folklore, which seems to have been spun out of traditional Vodoun and European notions of the magical significance of crossroads, did not attach itself to Robert Johnson until long after the musicians death, and was in fact, first attached to another blues musician by the name “Johnson” (Tommy) long after the death of the latter. We hear brief snatches of Robert Johnson’s songs “Cross Road Blues ” and “Me and the Devil Blues,” said to have inspired the connection of this legend to R. Johnson.
Because of lightweight portability making it ideal for providing music at taverns and secular gatherings, the violin was historically a favorite instrument of the Devil. Baroque composer Giuseppe Tartini reinforced the notion in his story of a dream in which the Devil had become his servant and provided him his Violin Sonata in G minor, better known as the “Devil’s Trill Sonata.” Wilkinson relates his account of the dream, and we hear a bit of the piece.
“Tartini’s Dream,” by Louis-Léopold Boilly (1824)
At least until the advent of rock and roll, the diabolical musician par excellence, however, was violinist and composer Niccolò Paganini (1782 – 1840). Rumors that dogged his career included that of a pact with the Devil, the manifestation of the Devil onstage during his performances, lightning bolts flying from his bow, and that the soul of a women he murdered resided within the strings of his instrument.
Paganini’s diabolical mystique owed much to his unprecedented virtuosity and theatricality on stage, libertine lifestyle, and unusual appearance, which German poet Heinrich Heine described “a corpse risen from the grave, a vampire with a violin.” As for his libertine lifestyle, we hear a bit from a film particularly dwelling on this — Klaus Kinski’s Paganini(1990) directed by and starring the notorious German actor, whose identification with the role appears to have been somewhat pathological.
(Forged) daguerreotype of Paganini (1900)
The macabre postmortem odyssey of Paganini’s body after being denied burial in consecrated ground by the bishop of Nice is discussed at some length. In the background of our Paganini segment, we hear a bit of his Caprice No. 5 played by Sumina Studer.
We then turn to the Freischütz, the German legend of of the Devil providing a huntsmen a number of magic bullets, the majority which are charmed to hit whatever the shooter wishes, while a small fraction remain exclusively under the Devil’s control. While it’s mostly known in its literary or operatic form, I provide some evidence of the story as a matter of actual folk belief, namely a confession made in a Bohemian court by an ambitious hunter charged with visiting the crossroads(!) where he attempted the ritual to create these charmed bullets in 1710.
Freischütz set design (source unknown)
With the aid of Wilkinson’s dramatic reading, we retell the literary version of the tale from Johann Apel’s 1811 collection of (mainly) traditional ghost and horror stories called The Book of Ghosts. An interesting connection between this volume and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is also discussed.
Next we discuss Der Freischütz, an 1821 opera by German Romantic Carl Maria von Weber. It’s a bit cheerier take on the story than Apel’s but does include a sublimely gothic scene in which the magic bullets are cast. We hear a bit about the staging of that scene (moved from the crossroads to a haunted gorge, “Wolf’s Glen”). Behind that description, we hear a chorus of “owls” from the that scene in von Weber’s opera. Our Freischütz discussion also opens with a bit of the overture.
“Wolfs Glen” set design for 1822 production of Der_Freischütz
We also hear some bits from the 1990 avant-garde retelling of the Freischütz legend by Tom Waits and William Burroughs — The Black Rider.
The episode ends with the story of how a human skeleton ended up onstage in an 1841 production of DerFreischütz. It’s a tragic tale of an unhappy romance that likely inspired Gaston Leroux to have his Phantom buried beneath the opera house in order to be near to his beloved Christine Daaé after death.
The legend of Faust is the archetypal deal with the Devil. This episode looks at the figure as represented in folklore, local legends, plays, puppet shows, literature, films, and opera.
A precedent for the tale seems to be the story of St. Theophilus, a cleric in 6th-century Adana (in modern Turkey) who, as legends have it, summoned the Devil to help elevate him to the status of bishop (and, yes, there is some repentence involved in this one, seeing as how he went down in Church history as a saint). He is the subject of a 13th-century French play, The Miracle of Theophilus, which happens to be the source of a chant to summon Lucifer written in an unknown language — one, which made its way into Wiccan traditions via Gerald Gardner, and which even ended up in the lyrics of the 1969 album Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls by the band Coven. The segment starts with a snippet from this cult album.
There does seem to have been an actual magician, astrologer, or alchemist by the name of Faust wandering southern Germany in the late 15th and early 16th century, though very little is known of his life other than passing references in a few letters and some town records noting that individuals by this who were banned for fraudulent or roguish activities. We look at a few of these historic references.
Legends regarding the figure are more plentiful. We hear of a number of supposedly dangerous grimoires attributed to Faust said to be kept at sites in Germany and also discuss a number of legendary feats of magic (including conjuring an entire castle along with a sumptuous, if unsatisfying, banquet for castle guests). We also have a look at a number of towns offering “evidence” that they were the site where the Devil came to claim the doctor, including one town that rents a room in an ancient inn where the grim event was said to have transpired.
Frontispiece “The remarkable life of Dr. Faustus, a German astrologer and enchanter” (1838)
The meat of our show is a look at the earliest written narrative on Faust, a chapbook published anonymously in Frankfurt in 1587, The History of Doctor Johann Faustus. We hear a dramatic, even cinematic, passage describing Faust’s summoning of the Devil in Germany’s Spessart forest (an area rich in folklore and home to the Brother’s Grimm). Also related are Faust’s whirlwind tour of of Hell, a number of comic supernatural pranks he plays, and, of course, the dramatic hour of reckoning and its grisly aftermath.
Richard Burton in his 1967 film, Doctor Faustus
We next hear some snippets from one of the legend’s most prominent film treatments, the 1967 Richard Burton-Elizabeth Taylor vehicle Doctor Faustus. Though the subject of numerous negative reviews, the film may appeal to horror fans thanks to its visual styling similar to a Hammer film of the period. The wonderful 1926 German silent, Faust, by F.W. Murnau (director of Nosferatu) is also mentioned.
Marlowe’s Faustus
The script for Richard Burton’s film was the classic of Elizabethan stage,TheTragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe. Though the story presented by Marlowe is rather similar to the chapbook version previously discussed, we hear of a few comic additions made then jump forward a bit in theater history to William Mountfort’s pointedly comic 1697 work, The Life and Death of Dr Faustus, Made into a Farce, with Harlequin and Scaramouche. Wilkinson shares some monologues from the play spoken by two of the Seven Deadly Sins. We also have a look at the legend’s treatment in Faust puppet shows popular in Germany and Bohemia, a tradition that proved influential on the 1994 Czech film, Faust, Jan Švankmajer’s must-watch stop-motion/live-action treatment of the story. We hear bits of the audio from the Švankmajer film as well as a couple more Faust films, the Peter Cooke-Dudley Moore comedy Bedazzled (1967) and the nicely dreadful 2000 horror-superhero film, Faust: Love of the Damned.
From Jan Švankmajer’s Faust (1994)
The show closes with a look at Faust at the opera, namely Hector Berlioz’ 1846 work,The Damnation of Faust(with a nod to Charles Gounod’s operatic take on the tale). In particular we look at a famously disastrous staging of the Berlioz work by the Paris National Opera in 2015.
Vampire mythology first appears in the West in works as early Romantic authors meld themes from folk ballads of resurrected lovers with Balkan folklore of the undead.
Valentine’s Day seemed a fitting occasion for this show’s look at the vampire’s tragically romantic tendency to prey upon those they love.
We begin with a (very seasonal) snippet of one of Ophelia’s “mad songs” from Hamlet, “Tomorrow is St. Valentine’s Day.” The song speaks of a lover’s clandestine nocturnal visit to a partner’s bedchamber. It represents a class of folk song called “night visit ballads.” A more ghoulish subset of these deals with lovers who happen to be dead, or undead actually.
From The Book of British Ballads (1842)
We hear two sample songs of revenant lovers from the 16th-17th century: “Fair Margaret and Sweet William” (referencing “cold corpsey lips”) and “The Suffolk Miracle,” which bears comparison to the German poem “Lenore,” much beloved by the Romantics and Gothics, and mentioned in Dracula as discussed in Episode One.
Next we discuss the “Vampire Panic” that took place in Serbia in the 1720s-30s. We hear of Petar Blagojević, who was said to have been exhumed and found incorrupt with fresh blood at his mouth and flowing from his heart once properly staked. We hear of a similar case involving the foot soldier Arnold Paole, whose staking produced more disturbing results and whose alleged vampiric deeds led to two distinct waves of panic.
Illustration (colorized) from 18th century vampire panics in Balkans.
We learn how these reports were assimilated by the literary world, with an early example being German poet Heinrich August Ossenfelder’s 1734 poem “Der Vampir.” Then we look at a more nuanced suggestion of vampirism in Goethe’s “The Bride of Corinth,” a poem based on a classical account of revenant lovemaking, the story of Machates and the undead Philinnion.
Next we have a look at two other important early uses of the vampire motif in literature — two Orientalist poems — Thalaba by Robert Southey and Lord Byron’s The Giaour. Both reference Balkan folklore and superstition, and footnotes to Southey’s work include a lengthy narrative of an absurd and gruesome vampire panic on the Greek island of Mykonos in 1701. Wilkinson reads prettily from this account. Along the way, we have a look at Greek vampires in Val Lewton’s moody 1945 film Isle of the Dead starring Boris Karloff.
Byron’s contribution to Gothic literature (as host to Mary Shelley during her early writing of Frankenstein) is illustrated with another snippet from Ken Russel’s cinematic work, his 1986 film Gothic. More central to our theme, however, is The Vamyre by John Polidori, Byron’s personal physician who also shared in the evenings of ghost stories that inspired Shelley.
We learn how The Vampyre grew out of Byron’s The Giaour, of the influence its vampiric character exerted on Stoker’s Dracula, and of the unlikely spin-offs the story generated.
Polidori’s “Vampyre” misattributed to Byron in first printing.
Then we have a look at Tolstoy’s lesset known 1839 vampire novella The Family of the Vourdalak and its treatment in Mario Bava’s 1963 horror anthology Black Sabbath, also featuring Boris Karloff.
Tolstoy’s story also happens to be set in Serbia, bringing us back to the country’s long history of vampirism, the famous Serbian Vampire Sava Savanović, and the bizaare 1973 Yugoslavian film featuring Savanović, Leptirica.
We close with a strange story of the the Serbian undead from the year 2012. A musical setting is provided.
This episode examines the Lambton Worm, a dragon legend that inspired works by Bram Stoker and Ken Russel as well as well as the curious role of milk plays that story and in superstitions surrounding witchcraft.
The show begins with Wilkinson and Ridenour reviewing a phone message from Blake Smith of the Monster Talk podcast, then proceed to briefly examine the 1989 Ken Russel Film The Lair of the White Worm, mentioning along the way his other film Gothic, which would be of interest to listeners.
Publicity image from the film
Bram Stoker’s final novel The Lair of the White Worm, upon which the Russel film is loosely based, is sadly far from his best work, written late in his life during a time of ill health. The story revolves around an aristocrat, Lady Arabella March, suspected of harboring an ancient, monstrous creature within a well hidden on her estate. While the novel is a bit of a muddle, it does contain some intriguing descriptive passages that Wilkinson reads for us.
A snippet of a song from Russel’s film, presented as a folk song telling the story of the local worm legend is played and revealed to be a slightly revised version of an actual 1867 ballad about the Lambton Worm of Northeast England. The legend tells how John Lambton of Lambton Hall hooked a weird and highly inedible creature while fishing, discards the beast, and lives to regret it. Without giving too much away, the story also involves a bloody battle with a dragon, a witch, a curse, and a lot of milk.
From English Fairy Tales (1913). Illus by iHerbert Cole & R. Anning Bell
The legend and song (which is written in the local Sunderland dialect) have become part of the identity of residents of County Durham and towns along the river Wear. In 2014, an entertaining symphonic retelling of the legend was presented in Durham Cathedral by The Durham University Brass Band, and we use a clip or two in the show. Most other clips are from one of two folk-play-style pub performances of the story by The Jeffreys and Hexham Morris.
We also look at a connection between the 1973 folk-horror classic The Wicker Man and the Lambton Worm legend.
The peculiar fondness of dragons for milk is next examined, beginning with a number of other dragon legends from England, some medieval tales briefly mentioned, and even an American newspaper from the 1930s.
Tilberi display from The Museum of Icelandic Sorcery & Witchcraft
We then turn our attention to the “beastly sucklers” of the title. These include various animals into which witches transformed themselves or created in order to steal milk (sucking it from livestock by night). They are mlk-hares, the troll-cat, the troll-ball, and the Icelandic tilberi.
The show ends with a quick look at a couple other dragon ballads that also include witches, including the particularly strange “The Laily Worm and the Machrel of the Sea” in which a king’s daughter is transformed into a mackerel then obstinately refuses to be transformed back.
Byron’s contribution to Gothic literature (as host to Mary Shelley during her early writing of Frankenstein) is illustrated with another snippet from Ken Russel’s cinematic work, his 1986 film 
