After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Medieval Werewolves, Ghosts & Zombies

Episode Date: January 4, 2024

How did Medieval people fight against the Undead? What motivated their Ghosts? And why do stories of Werewolves persist until today?Anthony and Maddy are joined today by Matt Lewis, host of History Hit podcast "Gone Medieval", and by Paul Sinclair whose film Wolflands is available on Amazon.Edited by Tom Delargy and Freddy Chick. Produced by Annie Coloe and Freddy Chick. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code AFTERDARK sign up now for your 14-day free trial http://access.historyhit.com/checkout/subscribe/purchase?code=afterdark&plan=monthly

Wendy's has a new breakfast deal. Mix and match two items of your choice for only $4. Breakfast wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small seasoned potatoes or small hot coffee. Choose two for $4 at Wendy's. Available for a limited time at participating Wendy's in Canada. Taxes extra. This story was recorded by a monk named William of Malmesbury around 1125. It's called The Witch of Berkeley. In this time, an event occurred in England which was not a celestial miracle, but an infernal wonder. I'm sure none of my listeners will doubt the story, although they might in fact wonder at it. I heard of these events from a

distinguished man who swore he had seen them for himself, and I would be ashamed not to believe him. In Berkeley, there was a woman who, so it was later said, was accustomed to wickedness and to practice the ancient methods of augury and soothsaying. She had taken no heed of scandal throughout her life, but she was beginning to grow old and fearful of the battering footsteps of death. One day, as she was dining, a little crow which she kept as a pet uttered a cry that sounded like human speech. This startled her so much she dropped her knife. Groaning sorrowfully, her face suddenly grown pale, she said, Today my plough has turned its final furrow. I am about to hear and undergo great sorrow. The woman took to her bed, and pained by a deadly sickness, summoned her remaining children, a monk and a nun.

In a gasping voice, she said, My children, I have enslaved myself to the artifice of the devil and have been the mistress of forbidden things. In a gasping voice, she said, I do not expect that you can deflect the true judgment from my soul, but perhaps you can help me by attending to my body in the following way. Sew me up in the hide of a deer, and then place me face upwards in a stone sarcophagus, the lid sealed with lead and iron. Bind the stone with three heavy iron chains, and let there be fifty psalms sung each night, and masses said each day to lessen the ferocious attacks of my enemies.

When I have lain secure in this way for three nights, bury me on the fourth day. Although so grave are my sins, I fear the earth itself might refuse to receive me to its warming bosom. All was done as she directed, her children attending to the matter with great zeal and affection. But such had been her wickedness that no amount of piety and prayer availed against the violence of the devil. On the first and second night of the vigil, when choirs of clerics had gathered to sing melodious psalms around her bier, demons pulled apart the outer edges of the door of the church, which had been

bolted with an iron bar. On the third night, around Cockrow, the enemy arrived making the most terrible noise and all of the monastery was shaken to its foundations. One demonic creature, larger and more terrible than the others, threw down the entrance door which was shattered into fragments. The priests stood rigid with dread, hair on end and voices stopped in their throats as the creature approached the sarcophagus with an arrogant swagger. The creature called the woman by name and ordered her to rise up, to which the reply came that she was unable to do so because of the chains that bound the sarcophagus. By the power of your sin you will be unbound, said the demon, and at once pulled apart the

iron chain as though it were no more than a cord of flax. The coffin lid was thrown off and the woman was seized and dragged out of the church before the horrified gaze of the observers. Outside the portals of the church a fierce black horse stood neighing with iron barbs protruding along the length of its back. Onto these hooks the woman was placed and the entire demonic retinue quickly disappeared from sight although their cries of triumph and the woman's pleas for mercy could be heard up to four miles away. Hello and welcome to After Dark, Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal. I'm Dr Maddy Pelling. And I'm Eleanor of Aquitaine. Amazing, that's so great of me.

Yeah, what an incredible scoop we have on this episode today. There was just momentary silence. I'm keeping that in, I'm not saying my name, so you might as well keep going with the introduction, Maddy. Okay, it's Dr. Maddy Pelling and Eleanor of Aquitaine today. It's an amazing pairing. and Eleanor of Aquitaine today. It's an amazing pairing. This episode, we're going to be diving into the murky, strange world of the medieval supernatural. We'll be heading off in search of the Middle Ages' best known monsters and thinking more about the power such beings held in a world in which the magical seemed always close at hand. There, we'll discover terrible, clawed, hairy beasts

and ghosts from beyond the grave, and how they could seemingly return at any moment to preach the importance of good Christian worship. Eleanor, over to you. Today we are going to be hearing stories of revenants, of ghosts, and of werewolves, and telling these stories is not Maddy and I today, as you probably will have deciphered from the opening section of this episode, but it is Matt Lewis. And Matt, if you don't know, is a historian and the co-host of Gone Medieval, which of course is History Hits podcast, all about, yes, that's right, the medieval world. And like us, Matt is drawn to the darker side

of history and is fascinated by the menagerie of beasts and ghosts and werewolves and zombies that prowled the land. So Matt, you are very welcome as today's guest on After Dark. Thank you very, very much for having me. I thought that earlier introduction about Claude Hairy Beast was going to be my intro, but maybe not. And also, I'm slightly tongue-tied talking to Eleanor of Aquitaine. Oh my God, it's really you. She turns up sometimes. Every now and again, she does a very rare appearance on a podcast. This is the one she's chosen today.

What can I say? Well, when I see you, I'm going to have to get you to sign the book I wrote about you then. And can I just say as well that it's so nice to find that there is something deeper and darker in history hit towers than the gone medieval dungeon i always wondered what that trap door in the corner was oh yeah we've gone there we've gone there so matt today we've got you on to talk about the supernatural in the medieval world and we're going to get into werewolves revenants ghosts a whole litany of really terrifying beings. Now, the supernatural

in the medieval world is always, as we said at the start, it's close at hand. It's something that is told by the fireside. It's something that is preached from the pulpit. It's something that every strata of society has some understanding and some fear of, right? So can you give us a sort of an overall sense of the kinds of supernatural beings, supernatural realms that are evoked in the medieval world and why they matter so much? Yeah, I think if you live in a Protestant country, as I do, you know, I'm a Christian,

but I was brought up Protestant. I think it's easy to become disconnected from the Catholic Church's close association with mysticism and the supernatural. The Catholic faith, I think, particularly in the medieval world, is very keen to embrace those things. They accept that those things exist. They exist and they are capable of delivering messages to the living. And invariably, that message will be about correcting the way that you behave in life, because that's what the church always wants you to do, just be better people.

And they can use some of these supernatural stories, beings as lessons, ways to deliver those stories. If you misbehave in life, this is the kind of horrendous thing that's going to happen to you. If you meddle with demons and you step outside the circle while you're talking to a demon, you're going to get dragged to hell. And then you better hope you've got one of the guys in the story happens to be able to convene a council of demons who can get your soul back for you. But lots of the ghost stories will always tend to be about spirits that are struggling because they did something in life for which they didn't atone before they died and they reach out to the living to help them so there is this idea that if you say masses for the dead and prayers for their souls you can speed them through purgatory and your sins

to an extent can be forgiven after you're dead by the activities the actions of the living so even when people are died we still have a duty to think about them and to care for their souls and to continue to pray for the suffering that they may be going through whilst they're in purgatory. And then you get things like, so revenants is kind of a medieval version of a zombie. So the word comes from the French revenir, to come back. And these are much more corporeal beings they're they're always much scarier in the stories because they can do actual physical damage to you an encounter with a ghost will invariably leave you feeling seriously ill for several days but a revenant is capable of doing you actual physical

harm revenants are are noted as killing people in a way that ghosts quite often aren't and revenants are often the remains of people who have been on the on the outside of society during their life so they're those who were kind of on the margins or othered in some way during their life and so their body sits in this weird position of still being othered from the spiritual realm after their death too and and generally the way to deal with a revenant is to follow it back to its grave wait till daylight dig the body up dismember it and burn it that tends to be the only way you can stop these things coming back and getting you it really strikes me from what you're saying there matt that there's so much categorization there's a real taxonomy of different kinds of monsters, different kinds of

threats. And there are all these common sense ways of dealing with them. They're an accepted form of life, they're legitimised by the church. But this way of categorising them, I find so fascinating and that all these creatures, these monsters have very specific characteristics, I suppose. One of the ways that we know about some of these categorizations and these depictions of different kinds of beings is through the medieval bestiary. Can you give us a sense of what that is? Because it's a quite unique medieval phenomenon. I suppose it carries through in terms of taxonomic natural history later on, but it's very much rooted in the medieval world and these beliefs in the supernatural yeah best years are interesting and they tend to

deal more with with less supernatural things so these are beings that people thought might exist somewhere in the world and they range from things like the monopods are a classic who have one really thick leg and one absolutely huge foot which it says in lots of the sources they use as a sunshade because they live in sunny climates so they they recline on their backs and practical practical except that no one ever seems to answer doesn't the sole of your foot get sunburnt if you just hide underneath it all day i don't know if i'm overthinking don't ask too many questions matt just go with it yeah no it's fine except the sunshade thing yeah uh there are supposedly people who don't have a head but they have eyes and a nose and a mouth in their chests

so they're sort of headless beings wandering around somewhere there are the dog men which we might think of something like a werewolf there are lots of medieval werewolf stories which are fascinating too but the dog people you, there's a theory that perhaps they represented the Viking berserkers that used to wear either the hide of a wolf or a bear or something like that over them so that you would literally be confronted by a raging wolf looking thing charging across the battlefield at you to destroy you. And that develops into stories of these wolf men who are desperate to kill people and whatever else. These are all interesting ways of people filling in the gaps in the map. So at this point, we don't know what's on

the farthest edges of the world. You can push further and further. And every time someone travels a little bit further, there's still a little bit more over the horizon. People can wonder about what might be in these far-flung, unseen places. But I think also in the medieval mind, they're quite often a way of thinking about the nature of religion and of ourselves and of our souls. If there are monopods out there who aren't like us, they're humanoid, but they're not like us, do they still have a soul? Do they still belong to God? Should we still be thinking about whether we need to go on missions to them, to convert them? Should we be preaching

to monsters? Do they have a soul in the same way that we do? I think it's a way of people exploring those kinds of things, the differentiation between humans and animals and whether there's anything in between that. Is there a grey area somewhere? This grey area in between, I'm really drawn to that and I think it's really fascinating. And you mentioned there, Matt, about revenants and the idea that once you die, you could potentially return. And the form in which you return after you've died is pretty terrifying. And this is a story that people tell again and again throughout medieval Europe, isn't it? So can you give us a sense of some of the stories that people say about revenants

and what exactly they are and why they're relevant to the medieval world and medieval society? Yeah, revenants are, as I said, they're kind of a more corporeal version of a ghost. They're the ones that can do you actual physical harm. They don't come to you. So quite often a ghost will come to you

with a request for help there are ghost stories of you know a friar who died who appears to someone and and explains that his soul is stuck because he'd stolen some silver spoons while he was alive and not returned them so he directs this person to where he'd stashed the silver spoons and they're returned and that is enough to free his soul from this kind of torment of eternally wandering in the forest at night hoping that someone will find you revenants are slightly different in that they don't tend to have that idea of redemption they want to come and hurt you and there is no way you can save them you have to destroy them and and we get quite a lot of

stories of people i mean there's one that's a quite a sad revenant story where the revenant seems to go around telling people how to stop it it doesn't want to do this it's it's saying you know go and find my grave and burn my body please i don't want to do this anymore kind of an unwilling zombie that doesn't want to hurt anybody quite often some of these interactions will take places in the doorways or portals, they call them, of churches. So the entrance to churchyards, the doorways to churches, that threshold between the world of the living and the world of the spiritual is an important place to engage with these things. We get revenant stories where these revenants will go to towns and

villages at night and terrorise their neighbours. So there's one story of a guy who dies and each night he returns to visit his wife in bed and he tries to climb on top of her in bed. So this poor woman is confronted by the putrefied, rotting corpse of her husband trying to clamber on top of her in the middle of the night back from the dead. Apparently she puts up with this for three nights before she does anything about it. But then she gets kind of all of the town to come down and

hang out in her bedroom and wait for this thing to come when it turns up they all kind of hit it and chase it away and it leaves and then he goes to visit his two brothers and torments them for a little bit until they do the same sort of thing and then he's forced out into the the fields where he starts harassing the the cattle and all of the animals of the town and village. So again you see that othering of this person being slowly pushed further and further away from society and ultimately then the only way that they can save him is that they consult a priest and normally they would want to dig the body up and burn it but in this instance they're actually given a document to excuse him for all of his sins.

And they go and dig his grave up and they place this document on the chest of the corpse inside the coffin. And then it stops. As soon as he's absolved of his sins, it can be stopped. But it isn't him that's asking it to be done in the instance of a revenant. be stopped but it isn't him that's asking it to be done in the instance of a revenant it's interesting to me there matt that what this revenant in this story is coming back to is his property in life and i suppose there's a juxtaposition there a contrast there that's being drawn attention to about owning physical things in life so he you know he goes to the cows he goes to his his home his wife, who I suppose in the medieval world, women are considered the property of their husbands. So he's going to

kind of reclaim all of that material wealth, when actually he should be focusing on the health and wealth of his soul. And once that is dealt with, he's quietened. Would you say that's a fair interpretation of that story? Yeah, there's a number of these stories which are about people being ordered to return deeds to property or to hand over land that they're holding which they shouldn't have so there is a the moral of this story i guess is to do with that obsessive connection to the material world which will then anchor your your soul it will stop you leaving if you're that kind of obsessed with the material world it will hold you and it won't let you move on to this more spiritual plane which ought to be your ultimate aim and the the worry

for the the people hearing these stories then is that you will literally you will be a rotting corpse that will wander around places indefinitely until someone fixes this for you you won't be able to ask for help but you will be reliant on the community to fix this for you but that you shouldn't have obsessed about those things in life you shouldn't have stolen property you shouldn't have felt that that was the most important thing because now it's the lead weight that is stopping your soul kind of ascending to heaven. I mean there's even one revenant story which turns into a vampire story. So this revenant kind of roams around everywhere and everywhere that he goes people fall ill and people think it's kind of a plague that this dead body wandering around the town is bringing with it and so eventually they follow the

revenant back to its grave, wait till morning, dig the grave up with the idea that they're going to dismember it and burn the body but when they crack the coffin open they find that this body is really red-faced and swollen and full of fresh blood so they drive a stake through it and fresh blood kind of spurts out everywhere from it and then they do dismember it and burn the body but what they draw from this is that this was actually a vampire that this was someone who was the plague that had been killing people wasn't actually a plague it was a vampire who was sucking people's life from them and taking it back to his grave with them and then you do get these kind of what are called deviant burials which are quite often

categorized as vampire burials so you get people that are buried with stones lodged between their their jaws and you get people who are bound in chains or that appear to have a stake or a an iron pole through their heart or something like that which look a lot like what we would think are ways of dealing with vampires but probably points more to an idea that there was a genuine concern that revenants could exist, that this body could rise from the grave, and that if this was someone who had died having been excluded from the community in some way, outlawed, or in some way not a core part of the local community that they had been othered in life, they could come back. So this was a kind of final othering of them that they didn't get a proper Christian burial, that their burial even

had to be different and separate from everybody else's to take account of the fact that the way they'd lived their life might mean that they could come back and terrorise the community afterwards. I'm just wondering, Matt, as you're describing all of this, firstly, the idea of revenants and zombies, I suppose, as we would recognise them. There is something in this about like the walking dead, isn't there? Where, as you're describing it, I'm really thinking plague and death spreading amongst communities. But the other question I had was, how are these stories coming to us? How do they get handed down? I'm thinking in terms of medieval literacy rates. I'm thinking about who these stories are for, where they're being, how they're being spread amongst communities. And then who, if anybody, decides, right, let's write this down. How are these coming to us today?

The ones that we have surviving today are most often written down by monks. And I think that's because there is always a conscious effort to write some kind of religious moral story into them about the correction of your sins or living as pure a life as you possibly can, because you don't know what's awaiting you when you die. I think there are a lot of monks who, I mean, there's the Byland Abbey Scrolls, which is a collection of ghost stories from Byland Abbey up in Yorkshire. And that just seems to have been a monk who was probably just fascinated by this stuff, who was jotting down notes. But quite often what we see are really abbreviated versions of a story. So the Byland Abbey stuff is kind of condensed ghost stories.

So I think what we have to imagine is that most of these stories will be told around a campfire in the middle of the night and they will be oral tradition stories that may have been around for hundreds and hundreds of years and perhaps pagan stories that will have had a christian edge put onto them but this idea that there is scary stuff out there in the dark has always been something that has frightened but fascinated human beings at the same time. And so many of these stories, what really chimes with me in terms of modern ghost stories is so many of these stories, if you read them, the Witch of Barclay, for example, that we heard earlier is a great example. They will always start with, i heard this from a man who saw it i heard this from someone in the local community this happened in the next village to me

so it's always really proximate to the person that said it's not like you know somewhere in the far and distant past in a distant land there's no star wars in the galaxy far far away this is always on your doorstep. And if you think about ghost stories that we think about being told around campfires today, they will always start with, you know, someone at my school once had this happen to them. And that is always that human connection of as small a removal as you can possibly have from the story so that it's immediate. Well, talking about ghost stories and talking about sitting around cozily listening to eerie tales from the past,

Matt, I believe you have another little ghost story for us that if our listeners are at home, make yourselves cosy, settle around a fire if you have one, and listen to Matt's next installation. Yes, so this is one from those Byland Chronicles

and it relates to a man named Snowball. It is said that a certain tailor of the name of Snowball was returning on horseback one night from Gilling to his home in Ampleforth and on the way he heard, as it were, the sound of ducks washing themselves in the beck and soon after he saw, as it were the sound of ducks washing themselves in the beck and soon after he saw as it were a raven that flew around his face and came down to earth and struck the ground with its wings

as though it were on the point of death. Then it flew off with a great screeching for about the space of a stone's throw. Then again he mounted his horse and very soon the same raven met him and flew at him and struck him on the side and threw the tailor to the ground from the horse upon which he was riding. And again it flew off with a horrible screaming as it were the space of the flight of an arrow. And the third time it appeared to the tailor in the likeness of a dog with a chain on its neck. to the tailor in the likeness of a dog with a chain on its neck and when he saw it the tailor strong in the faith thought within himself what will become of me i will abjure him in the name of the trinity and by the virtue of the blood of christ that he speak with me and tell me his name and the cause of his punishment and the remedy that belongs to it

and he did so and the spirit panting terribly and groaning, said, Thus and thus did I, and for thus doing I have been excommunicated. Go therefore to a certain priest and ask him to absolve me, and it behoves me to have the full number of nine times twenty masses celebrated for me. Hither you shall come back to me on a certain night alone or otherwise your flesh shall rot and your skin shall dry up and fall off from you utterly. The tailor conjured the ghost to go to Hodgebeck and to await his return and the ghost said no no and screamed and the tailor said go then to Byland Bank whereat he was glad. to Byland Bank, whereat he was glad.

The man of whom we speak was ill for some days, but then got well and went to York to the priest who had been mentioned, who had excommunicated the dead man and asked him for absolution. Then the tailor went to all the orders of the friars of York, and he had almost all the required masses celebrated during two or three days and coming home he buried the absolution in the grave as he had been ordered. And when all these things had been duly carried out he came to the appointed place and made a great circle with a cross and he waited for the coming of the ghost. The spirit came at length in the form of a she-goat, and went thrice round the circle, saying Ah! Ah! Ah! And when he conjured the she-goat, she fell prone upon the ground,

and rose up again in the likeness of a man of great stature, horrible and thin, and like one of the dead kings in pictures. And when he asked whether the tailor's labour had been of service to him, he answered, Yes, praised be God. Know therefore that on Monday next I shall pass into everlasting joy with thirty other spirits. And then the tailor asked the ghost of his own condition and received answer. You are keeping wrongfully the cap and coat of one who was your friend and companion in the wars beyond the seas. Give satisfaction to him or you will pay dearly for it. And as they went their different ways, the ghost that had been aided by him advised him to keep

all his best writings in his head until he went to sleep. And keep your eyes on the ground and look not on a wood fire for this night at least. And when he came home, he was seriously ill for several days. Wendy's has a new breakfast deal. Mix and match two items of your choice for only $4. Breakfast wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small seasoned potatoes or small hot coffee. Choose two for $4 at Wendy's. Available for a limited time at participating Wendy's in Canada.

Taxes extra. Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, Catherine Parr. Six wives, six lives. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, I'm joined by a host of experts to tell the stories of the six queens of Henry VIII, who shaped and changed England forever. Subscribe to and follow Not Just the Tudors from History Hit's where you get this being more of an oral tradition that's been noted down kind of in a format that will allow people to expand on that as they tell the story a little bit.

But there's also lots of really interesting elements in there about what medieval people thought of ghosts. A ghost is a spirit that has done something in life. Maybe it's not the most serious thing in the world. You know, they've stolen some silver spoons that they haven't returned. The ghost tells the guy, it tells the tale of Snowball

that his biggest sin at the moment is keeping a cap and a coat that he's borrowed from someone who's since moved away and now he doesn't know where the guy is. You know, some of these sins aren't huge, but nevertheless, it's important that you purge your soul of all of these things

before you die and so the lesson to the living would be you you have to make sure that you are living a pure life because even the smallest thing can follow you beyond the grave and it can lead to your spirit being forced to wander around the woods until you find someone who's willing to help you and that could take who knows how long and you're excluded from heaven while all of this is going on for i've a two-part question as i so often do number one why is he called snowball what's in the in the manuscript it says a tailor named and then there's a space and snowball so we don't know snowball is a surname or a nickname but there's clearly a blank and i wonder whether i think lots of these ghost stories

are probably meant to be played to an audience. So you think about a stand-up comedian today, they will go to a town and they will talk about the next town along the rivals in derogatory terms. They will make it kind of local and feel a bit more true and a bit more organic. So he talks about towns of Am ample forth and all places like that those could easily change to be a town that people know that's far enough away that it's it's slightly

distant but actually they know about it perhaps they work in the name of a tailor from a local town or village that they might know so the blank space could be anything and then somehow snowball gets put in there maybe that's just a nickname that's used for it we get the ghost saying you know i did such and such in the story these are my sins such and such you could insert something in there you know what would the local audience think was maybe a mediocre sin or what might they think was really bad or what could be something that maybe there's a local story that someone did something that you could work into that you know that the local story of the guy who stole a load of money from the abbey maybe that could have been his sin who knows and i think sometimes where they say such and such or they leave gaps it's it's it's where people can work their own versions of the

story i love that and i love the idea that they're invoking the areas and that you can almost travel with them. There's a sense that the areas haunt the story just as much as the ghost does or just as much as the revenant does. Speaking of which, we've touched upon what medieval ghosts were, looked like, why they were there, what they wanted. The same with revenants, zombies, as we might refer to them today. Tell me a little bit more about medieval werewolves. So the medieval world is littered with stories of werewolves too. And they're actually quite often not horrendously terrifying animals. I'm going to be cautious about how I say this in front of

Anthony, I guess, but Ireland is full of werewolf stories. The Irish are notorious werewolves. Oh yeah, no, you don't need to be cautious. I've never heard one, but I believe you. There are, according to medieval stories, there are families of genetic werewolves in Ireland who hand this curse down through the generations. There are some stories in which the werewolves pass the curse onto other people,

so they're looking to divest their family of this curse, so they'll look for a way to pass it on to other people. And that's maybe where you get the idea that if you're bitten by a werewolf, you become one, because they're looking to shift that curse onto somebody else. You quite often get werewolves that can talk to people, so'll engage with people we get some accounts from from monks who say i met quite a nice werewolf he's quite a decent guy now we had a good chat uh you know and he was just worried about providing for his wife and his children you know nothing too unusual about him he was really good it's actually quite rare that you get a werewolf story in which the wolf is is simply a mindless animal that wants to attack people.

There's a really good story in a book called The Lays of Marie de France. So this is written in the 12th century by a French female poet and writer. And she writes the story of Bisclave, the werewolf. So she says in Brittany, there was a knight who was incredibly handsome. I guess he has to be. He's very well respected. He's in with the king and all of that kind of thing. He's married to a beautiful noble woman, of course he is. But each month he vanishes for three days and nobody knows where he goes or what he does in these three days that he's missing. And one day eventually his wife kind of broaches the subject

and she sort of says, you know, I need to know what's going on. Are you having having an affair or something like that and he kind of resists telling her what it really is and he says you know if you know what it is you won't want to be with me anymore and she was like no it can't be that bad and so eventually he says for three days every month during the full moon I become a werewolf and I go and hunt in the forest so I have to take off my human clothes I leave them under a boulder next to this church on the way into the forest. I'm a wolf for three days, I hunt animals in the forest and then I come back and I can put my human clothes back on and it's all restored. But it's the act of putting on his human clothes again that turns him back into the night. And his wife then is utterly shocked, does not want to be married to a werewolf, and so she

contacts this local knight who she knows has a bit of a crush on her, and she says, you know, I need my husband dealing with, and if you deal with my husband, I'll marry you, and she gets this knight to follow her husband when he wanders off to this church, when he folds up his clothes, wanders off into the woods, and then this other knight kind of steals his clothes, wanders off into the woods and then this other knight kind of steals his clothes so that when he comes back three days later his clothes aren't there and he can't turn back in to a human being. And so this man just disappears for a long time. Eventually his wife marries this other knight and they begin their life together and a year or so later the king is hunting in the woods when his hounds chase down

a wolf. And when it's cornered, it runs over to the king and begs the king for mercy. So it speaks to the king. The king is utterly amazed, thinks this is incredible, and adopts the wolf as a kind of pet, takes it back to his castle. It lives in his household. It sleeps among his household men. It isn't a danger to anybody. Then one day the king has a feast at which the knight who is now married to Bisclave's wife turns up and the wolf attacks him several times. And everyone's amazed because this wolf has never behaved this way before. And eventually, you know, this knight is happy to leave and make himself scarce. But then the king returns to the forest to hunt again

and while he's in the area Bisclave's wife kind of comes to do homage to the king you know she puts on her best dress and shows up to do homage to the king and now the wolf attacks her and it bites off her nose and biting off people noses is quite a common medieval form of punishment for something and so an advisor points out that this wolf has only ever attacked this woman and her current husband. And this woman is the wife of a knight who had disappeared. And so this advisor says to the king, there must be something about this couple because he doesn't behave this way to anyone else. And so the king eventually has this woman tortured until she admits everything. She admits ordering this knight to go and steal the clothes.

So the king sends her away to fetch Bisclavey's clothes and bring them back to him. They lock the wolf in a room with Bisclavey's clothes, leave him for a period of a few hours. And when they open the door, Bisclavey walks out. And so everybody is amazed. The woman and her new husband are both sent off into exile and Bisclavey is kind of restored to his life as a noble knight. But there you see, you know, this guy is trapped in the form and a new husband are both sent off into exile and bisclav is kind of restored to

his life as a noble knight but there you see you know this guy is trapped in the form of a wolf but it's like a pet around court he's not a threat to anybody except for the people who've caused him to be trapped like that and he will he will attack them when he sees them and it just takes someone to make that link between the fact that the only people he's mean to are this married couple who who the former husband has disappeared again in the Mike, you've got that useful dichotomy of light and dark, of good and evil. And in this case, I think as well, you have civilisation and something that is othered. And it's interesting to me that the idea of the werewolf and of the monster more generally in the medieval world, is sort of transitions out of being local gossip, local storytelling,

into the world of sort of medieval knightly quests. And I suppose in that regard, the monster becomes, it's a useful opposite for the knight who represents good Christian values and a way of living, a way of living as a man, a way of sort of leading people, leading medieval society. And that the monster is a foil for that at various points, and that he only is accepted back into the fold when he has been civilised, or this idea that he transforms back into a man when he's given his clothes is very interesting to me. And it, again, it speaks to that gray area in between the light and dark where these worlds are bleeding into each other and a strange transformation of people into monsters and back again that

the monsters that are described in the medieval world that exist in these stories are not separate beings they're in all of us and that they can be tapped into and exercised i suppose from us at various points yeah and i think one of the things that interests me across kind of all of these medieval versions of ghosts revenants werewolves is the fact that it's never that you can solve your own problems on your own it's always a community effort it has to be the community that does it if you're dead you need the help of someone who is living to deliver this stuff bisclavay needs this advisor to connect the dots and then someone to bring him his clothes so that he can regain his human form again and the revenants need quite often the

community to come together to find the body and dig it up and destroy it it has to be a community will to deal with this menace and that really reinforces a lot of medieval thinking about the responsibility of the community you know again we've probably lost that in today's world we have quite a lot more individualism than would have existed in the medieval world but the medieval law required the community to be responsible for finding criminals within the community. And in the same way here, the community is responsible for dealing with the sins of its members and for correcting those things and for helping all of them. Even when someone is dead, your responsibility to them hasn't ended. I think that is the key takeaway from all of this, particularly in the context of the medieval world. And you'll know more about this than I will, Matt. But it's as soon as you said

that, suddenly everything aligned in my head where I went, yes, it's community. It's about community building and it's about bringing those communities together through story, through fear. Sometimes there's an element of control coming in there, of course, particularly when we align it with the early church. But it cements people together. These are shared experiences, shared fears, shared stories, shared entertainment sometimes, I suppose. And there's something community bonding about that. Well, listen, I think that's a good place with the community in mind, the medieval communities in mind. It's a good place to wrap things up for today.

Thank you so much to Matt Lewis for those lovely medieval stories. It was very nice for Maddy and I to sit back and listen to stories this week. So thank you, Matt, for sharing those stories with us. Now, if you're a regular listener to After Dark, you'll know this is the point

at which we usually say goodbye. But today we have an extra special interview for you, and it's all about werewolves. As any fan of horror films will know, the werewolf has hardly been left behind in the mists of time. Instead, its presence can still be felt as it stalks its way across our TV and cinematic screens. It's a figure that still looms large in our imaginations today and one about which we still tell tales. With all of that in mind, our next guest is Paul Sinclair. And Paul lives in Yorkshire, which for our international listeners,

and if they are unaware of where Yorkshire is, it's in the north of England. And it's famous for many things, including its wild landscape and some incredible historical and heritage sites throughout the county. But for many years now, Paul has been investigating claims of werewolf-like beings seen in that very landscape. Now, these are stories that hold still a special power. After all, the tales we tell ourselves about our homes, the familiar places close to us and around us, and the shadowy edges, they're all part of our identity. Hello, Paul, and thank you for coming to After Dark.

You're welcome, and good to see you, Anthony and Maddy. And, yeah, you said stories, and, you know, in many instances, they're not stories, These are people's experiences. And it's not a subject that I stepped into thinking, oh, gosh, there's some reality to this. In fact, I thought there were no reality at all to it. But the reports keep coming in. I get, I wouldn't say hundreds of emails a year, but I get a lot of emails. And the locations seem to be key in East and North Yorkshire. But I'm sure these things are reported all over the world. I'd also like to say that I don't think there's any correlation

to full moons and silver bullets and all that nonsense. These people are seeing and experiencing something. And they come from all walks of life. You've got different levels of education. And usually it's not people who've stepped into this subject, should we call it the subject, this genre, looking for it. With that in mind, tell us how you came to this subject and these stories and these experiences in the first place. What drew people to you to get them to share those experiences with you?

How did they find you and how did they know that you were researching this werewolf mythology, this story or this history? They didn't know I was researching it. I researched the unexplained. This is multi-phenomenon because I think there's common threads to everything that we're looking into. A lot of these things are seen around ancient earthworks and burial mounds, Neolithic sites. I mean, am I creating new folklore? I mean, we can ask ourselves that, but folklore is only people's accounts before the written word. So how did I come to do it? Writing the first truth-proof book,

which is about multi-phenomenal events like UFO sightings, I got reports from this little village in North Yorkshire called Flickston, which is about 12 miles away from where I live, of a strange fur-covered animal that's bipedal. And I thought it were nonsense. I really did. It's not something I'm, I don't even watch horror films or Star Trek or anything. I'm just not interested in it. But then I got more reports. Then I did a little bit of investigation and I found out that locals to the area claimed to have seen this thing. Then you realise that it goes back generations and then you look into the areas of East and

North Yorkshire and you can pick up the folklore that runs along the coasts of the Phantom Hounds with huge glowing eyes. And there's old writers, there's a guy called Howard Brealey from about 120 years ago who talked about the Barghest of East Aiton. A huge hound with glowing eyes that is said to haunt the forests and landscapes of that area. And when you look where East Aiton is, it's a few miles from Flickston. Yes, so I didn't jump into it thinking, I'm going to write a book about the werewolf, because it kind of evolved.

The evidence leads wherever it leads i find what you're saying fascinating um and i also have to say as someone who did live for several years in north yorkshire i do think there is there's obviously a really deep tradition a historic tradition of um imagining or seeing some of these animals in the landscape and i'm thinking in particular of the bar guest that you mentioned there. And of course, Charlotte Bronte mentions it in Jane Eyre. Yeah, when Jane Eyre sees Mr. Rochester's dog, Pilot. Side note to listeners, my dog is named Pilot after Mr. Rochester's dog. She mistakes his dog for the bar guest and she's absolutely terrified. So there's very much this history of seeing these kinds of animals. Now, Paul, tell me this, the people who are coming to you and explaining these,

these sites or these experiences that they're having, what exactly are they describing to you in terms of, in terms of what they're seeing, what this creature might look like? And what can that tell us about how they tell their experiences, how we tell stories. Are you noticing patterns in how they explain things to you, patterns in terms of the details that they're giving you? There are patterns and there are links by location. I could give you loads of examples, but I realise time does not allow. Three men living in Rotherham, which would be about 120 miles away,

decide that they're going to go wild camping, not drinking and some boozy lad's weekend. They pick a place called Broxah Forest on the edge of East Yorkshire. And if you're familiar with it, you might know. Incidentally, the Broxah in mythology was a shape-shifting demon. So they're in a forest called Broxah Forest. They descend into a 700-foot ravine. Not exaggerated, it's not 400. It's over 700 foot.

When they get there, it's getting quite dark. One member of the party, and I've interviewed two of them and we've got them on film, you know, they've willingly gave their accounts of what they claim to have seen and experienced. Suddenly started saying, we need to leave. There's something watching us. So there's almost like there's a perceived feeling of fear being created that's come over them. This continued, it's dark, they can't get out of the ravine, they're not familiar with the area, they've just found this, they know this is going to be remote and they've driven to this place.

It's near Reesty Bank, which means rancid. That sounds nice, doesn't it? But suddenly Jim says that we looked over into the darkness and it was about 40 feet away and a pair of amber eyes lit up. Now, either these guys are lying or that we've got three people imagining the same thing. Self-illuminating. We don't have animals with bioluminescent eyes.

We know we have that in the oceans of the world, but as far as I'm aware, we don't have animals that display bioluminescence. He said they were human-shaped and they're about three foot off the ground. All the time, witness number three. I've always called him witness number three because he doesn't want to speak about it on camera or on recording, but we know what he's seen. He's getting more agitated and they're frightened he's going to run off into the darkness.

And as Jim said, I couldn't think of an animal to assign those eyes to. They were big, even though they're only about three foot off the ground. An amount of time passes, 15, 20 minutes. He's getting more agitated. So Jim said, I stood up, walked towards it and made a few hissing and shooing sounds. He said, they disappeared. And then I turned around and looked at witness number three's face. And I looked at Steve's face and they've got looks of horror on their face.

And when I turned back, this thing is now stood upright, seven foot in the air, and I can see the outline of it. He said, for all intents and purposes, it's, as their words, a werewolf. Now, I'm not saying everybody's telling the truth. I actually do believe that they're seeing something akin to a werewolf. Now, I'm not saying everybody's telling the truth. I actually do believe that they're seeing something akin to a werewolf, regardless of how hard it is for people to get their head around. And I can respect anybody that says seeing is believing. But I believe these men are telling me the truth about what they've seen. Of course, none of that makes it real because we wouldn't be dealing with unexplained phenomena if we had the answers for it. We wouldn't be sat here doing this now, would we?

So this thing observes them, doesn't move. They thought it was growling at first. He says, so we know there's some physical substance to this. He said, because we realised it was its breathing. It was so deep and guttural. And in Steve's words, he said, in the end, I couldn't even look at it. He said, I was so frightened I just wanted it to end as daylight entered the forest this thing had gone and I don't mean they saw it

run away or anything it had gone so that's just one account from one of the forests in North Yorkshire incidentally it's the it's the entrance to the Forge Valley which is Hackness is the entrance all of these names might mean something, they might mean nothing, but Haknes is thought to have once been called Hachanos, meaning with the whiskers. I don't know where that applies to anything, but you've got all these strange, quirky names. We know that in ancient times there had been a lot of association

to the wolf, so we would have had names that signified the wolf because it was seen as a powerful beast throughout time but we touched on flickston earlier which is in north yorkshire a few miles away from these forests and king athelstan i think in 937 ad a thousand and eighty five years ago sort of wrote that a portion of land within Flickston should be forever known as Wolfland. Does that mean that there's werewolves roaming Flickston? Of course it doesn't. He's just named it that. But it's interesting that he had a refuge built at Flickston to protect travellers from wolves, which would have been prevalent, and an infestation of savage beasts. The bear had been extinct 1,500 to 2,000 years prior to that. So it could all be mythology, it could all be nonsense,

but what was the infestation of savage beasts? And why are these reports still being told in present day? What's so fascinating about this, Paul, and listening to you now, and how that feeds back into what we were talking about with Matt Lewis earlier in the episode, is that there is, and you spoke about this, Paul, and listening to you now, and how that feeds back into what we were talking about with Matt Lewis earlier in the episode, is that there is, and you spoke about this, Paul, yourself a little bit earlier, you spoke about the tradition over generations of these sightings. And actually, what joining your conversation with Matt's conversation, what's very, very clear to me is that these conversations we're having in medieval times and they are still

happening now. And that's the tantalising thing about the legacy of these histories or these sightings, depending on who's telling them and what they believe they're seeing. It's fascinating stuff, Paul. Before we wrap up, tell us quickly about your documentary, Wolflands. Wolflands is a collection of first-hand accounts. It took three years to make and it's just people's encounters with things that we could only describe as the werewolf. I'm not asking anybody to believe 100% that what these people are saying is true, but please remember that they've got nothing to gain by retelling these

stories. And they've come openly and very sincerely. I mean, it's on Amazon Prime. It's there for anyone to watch and look at it objectively. Well, I think that's a really good place to leave it. So if you want to check out Wolf Lens, as Paul says, it's on Amazon Prime. I think it's been really interesting to draw a link between what we've been discussing with Matt and now what we've been discussing with Paul, just keeping that kind of generational thought alive and looking at how mythology and sightings and belief, how it all changes,

morphs and solidifies itself across different generations. So thank you very much, Paul and Matt, of course, for contributing to that conversation. If you have enjoyed this conversation, you can find After Dark, Myths, Misdeeds that conversation. If you have enjoyed this conversation, you can find After Dark, Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal wherever you get your podcasts, as you know, because you're listening to us right now. Leave us a review and follow us and join us again next time for more history from the darker sides of the past. Thank you. Well, thank you for listening to this episode of After Dark. Please follow this show wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour.

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