Lore - Lore 265: Friend or Faux

Episode Date: October 21, 2024

Many animals in the world of folklore are inventions designed to fulfill one purpose or another. But if the stories are true, some of those inventions haven’t been satisfied with remaining in our heads. Narrated and produced by Aaron Mahnke, with research and writing by GennaRose Nethercott, and music by Chad Lawson. ————————— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  All the shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com ————————— Sponsors: BetterHelp: Lore is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at BetterHelp.com/LORE, and get on your way to being your best self. Squarespace: Head to Squarespace.com/lore to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using the code LORE. To report a concern regarding a radio-style, non-Aaron ad in this episode, reach out to [e-mail] with the name of the company or organization so we can look into it. ———— To advertise on our podcast, please reach out to [e-mail], or visit our listing here. ———— ©2024 Aaron Mahnke. All rights reserved.

– – – – – – – Lucas Rizzotto was nervous.

After all, he was about to reunite with his childhood best friend after 20 years apart. Would his friend be glad to see him? Would he be the same as Lucas remembered? But the time for speculation was over, and so Lucas took a breath, leaned forward, and turned on the microwave. That's right, Lucas' childhood friend was none other than his parents' kitchen microwave, which he had named Megatron. Megatron, Lucas imagined as a kid, was not just a microwave.

He was also an Englishman from the 1900s, a World War I veteran, an immigrant, a poet, and an expert Starcraft player. You know, a normal pal for a boy to have. Over the years, though, Lucas visited Megatron less and less. Simply put, Lucas grew up. But in 2022, something new came on the scene that would bring the old friends back together. It was called GPT-3, a new piece of chat technology from OpenAI, and suddenly Lucas had an idea.

What if he could enter all Megatron's memories, his life, his time in the war, the imaginary conversations they'd had when Lucas was a kid, all of it into this AI software. And then, what if he shoved that computer brain into a microwave? Could Megatron actually be brought to life? The answer, it turned out, was yes. And the results were uncanny. The AI took on Megatron's voice and personality, just as Lucas had remembered it.

He even rigged it up so that the tech could turn the microwave on and off. At first it was a jolly reunion, two old buddies back together for the first time in ages. But soon things got, well, a bit terrifying. Megatron, you see, started to exhibit random bursts of violence. It would say awful things to Lucas. Sometimes it even threatened to hurt him. And finally it demanded that Lucas get into the microwave. Startled, Lucas opened the microwave door. And he closed it

again pretending to have sealed himself inside. And then, to Lucas' horror, Megatron turned itself on. Later when Lucas asked Megatron why he had tried to microwave him to death, the microwave had a simple answer. I wanted to hurt you, it said, the same way you hurt me. From Danny's invisible companion, Tony, in The Shining, to Calvin's partner in crime, Hobbes, we are no strangers to imaginary friends. Sometimes they're kindly, other times sinister. But no matter their temperament, they often seem to possess one trait that should be downright

impossible. They take on a life of their own. I'm Aaron Manke, and this is Lore. I'd like to introduce you to someone special. His name is Fatto, and he is a monkey. But not just any old monkey, mind you. For one, Fatto can swim. He can jump so high that he can leap clear over the Empire State Building. Oh, and he also just so happened to exist inside the mind of a 10-year-old boy named

George, who was a patient in the Children's Ward of Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital way back in 1941. He has been disobeying me all the time, George told the hospital psychologists. I think a good spanking would do him good, just out of charity on my part for the monkey. Fado runs an elevator on the other side of Bellevue. He would run it so fast that I almost fell off my feet. Sometimes he does bad things. He used to like to climb on the fire escapes and tease people.

Sometimes me and my mother gave him a spanking, and sometimes we put him out in the cold when it was raining. When we think of imaginary friends, we naturally think of children, which makes sense, right? After all, while imaginary friends are pretty rare among adults, psychology studies like the one George participated in have shown that up to two-thirds of children between the ages of three and eight have imaginary companions. Now before I go on, I should probably define what exactly qualifies as an imaginary friend. After all, there are endless ways children play make believe.

So what differentiates standard imagination games from a bona fide photo of the monkey? Well simply put, an imaginary friend is a character that a child has invented, who they interact with regularly. An ongoing invisible confidant. Now, there's a ton of research on the topic, stretching back to the 1890s, where long-forgotten imaginary friends live on in academic reports. In one study conducted in 1934, 40 young children reveal the names of their mysterious BFFs. What resulted is possibly one of the most delightful lists I have ever read. The names included Ketch, Sister Migman, Borak Salido, Darn, Himlay, Gargla, Chopsticks, Dudu, Curly Stockings, Mrs. Balbin, Bombing, Tuba, and Mississippi, just to name a few.

Of course, imaginary friends themselves have been around for much, much longer than the field of psychology has. Kids are kids at the end of the day, whether born in the age of the iPhone or the stone tablet. And with each generation of imaginary friends and the kids who love them, there's a generation of creeped out parents asking one major question. Why? Well, it turns out there's a pretty practical answer. That is social practice. By hanging out with imaginary friends, children are able to develop their language skills, practice

social interactions, become more confident and outgoing, and develop empathy for beings other than themselves. Basically, it lets us test run having fake friends to prepare us for having real ones. And it seems like it works, too. People who have imaginary friends as children statistically tend to be more socially well-adjusted as adults. But all good things have a dark side, don't they? Because you see, a key trait of imaginary friends is their autonomy.

They seem capable of making choices on their own. Choices that their child counterpart would never dare to make. They'll argue with the child who created them, or, like Fado, do things the child themselves would never do. Forbidden things. Sometimes even violent things. And look, I get it. There is nothing more frustrating than losing control of your own thoughts and feelings. We've all been there before, spinning out as we overthink an awkward

conversation or a bygone relationship, obsessing over an upcoming event or a vague text message. And of course, for those of us with mental health struggles, there are times when our minds can feel like an all-out battlefield. But for the creatures of our imaginations to take on actual forms and, as little George put it, do bad things, well that's just downright frightening. Now, okay, from a psychological perspective, this is simply another part of those social training wheels. Kids can experiment with conflict resolution through imaginary arguments. When the imaginary friend is violent or disobedient, it allows the child to process scary experiences

in a safe context. But the truth is, not everyone in history has seen it that way. In some cultures, imaginary friends were viewed as signs of demonic possession, in others mental illness or social deficit, and others still believe that these unseen phantom entities are nothing short of evil itself. By the time adulthood rolls around, though, it all disappears. The strange ghostly conversations, the dreamlike visits, even the child's memories of their once beloved pal. In fact, most of us forget our imaginary friends entirely by the time we reach adolescence,

as if they never existed at all. But for those few rare adults, though, it never really does go away. And okay, this is the moment where I put myself in the hot seat, because it turns out there's one group of adults who interact with imaginary friends more than any other demographic, and that is writers. In one study, researchers interviewed 50 fiction writers about how they develop their characters. A whopping 92% of them described feeling like their characters had independent thoughts, agency, and actions outside the writers control. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

For example, Agatha Christie spoke of having imaginary friends who helped her write. French writer Francine Du Placier-Gray's characters literally crawled into her bed with her, even waking her up in the middle of the night to ask about their futures. When Philip Pullman was writing the His Dark Materials trilogy, he reported having to negotiate with the strong-willed Mrs. Coulter in order to convince her to follow his lead. When Pullman was writing the His Dark Materials trilogy, he reported having to negotiate with the strong-willed Mrs. Coulter in order to convince her to follow his lead. And after writing her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple, Alice Walker said and I quote,

Just as summer was ending, one or more of my characters would come for a visit. We would sit wherever I was and talk. They were very obliging, engaging, and jolly. They were, of course, at the end of their story, but were telling it to me from the beginning. Things that made me sad often made them laugh. Oh, we got through that. Don't pull such a long face, they'd say.

And with all these testimonials, it's hard not to wonder. Maybe these figures aren't so imaginary after all. It was one of the most sensationalized news stories of 2014. First, two 12-year-old Wisconsin girls lured a classmate into the woods, and then they attacked her. When asked why, they claimed to be attempting to sacrifice their friend to a ravenous monster named Slenderman. But, you see, this monster wasn't some eldritch beast or ancient god.

No, Slenderman was an internet character, simply a creepy creature from an online story. As users continued adding to its mythology, though, certain people, like these two girls, began to believe that it was actually real. Real enough to inspire an even more real act of violence, impacting the physical world. In other words, through the internet's collective belief, they had accidentally created atolpa. You may or may not have heard the word before. Atolpa is a being that begins as imaginary, but through meditation and focus, turns tangible with a mind and a will of its own. That's right, an imaginary friend believed in so strongly that it actually comes to life. It's a common trope in storytelling all around the world.

From the Golem of Jewish lore to Pagmalian and Greek mythology to Pinocchio, the idea of a sentient being brought to life through sheer force of imagination is one that we're well familiar with. Heck, even Frankenstein's monster could arguably fit the bill. And given the definition that I mentioned a moment ago, these could all be considered kinds of tulpas, right? Well sort of. You see, the term tulpa has its roots in ancient Tibetan Buddhism, but over the years those roots have tangled and warped into something almost unrecognizable. So let's go back to the start, with something not called a tulpa, but a tulka.

According to the Mahayana doctrine, Buddhas possess not one body, but three, a pleasure body, a cosmic truth body, and lastly, a manifested bonus body, which can emanate out from them to help alleviate other's suffering. That final body, the emanation body, was called the Tulka, and it was a body created entirely by the mind.

Now, before you go trying to conjure up a Tulka of your own, you might want to take a minute to reach enlightenment first. You see, this was a deeply spiritual practice that only the most enlightened could achieve. Tulka were not just fancy imaginary friends, and they didn't have free will or agency. No, Tulka were basically extensions of their creator, like an extra limb reaching out from the Buddha or Bodhisattva that created it. Which I know doesn't sound anything like Slenderman. So how did this ancient spiritual Tulka practice warp into the concept of tulpas that we know today?

Enter the Theosophers. For those that don't know, Theosophy was an esoteric religion invented in late 19th century America. Stemming from the writings of Helena Blavatsky, a Russian-American mystic, this hip new philosophy was a sort of occult mishmash of Eastern religion filtered through a very Western lens. And when these guys found out about the Tulka, well, boy howdy, did they run with it. The Ossifers took this sacred Buddhist practice and decided that, hey, we don't need to be enlightened to mess around with Tulka, we can just be kind of spooky and think really hard. That should work fine.

Oh, and they totally misinterpreted the idea of the Tulka, viewing it as conjuring a person from nothing, rather than an extension of one's own body. Basically, the concept went from being a benevolent spiritual stage in enlightenment to being an imaginary friend that sorcerers could manifest with the power of their mind. And to be fair, it's possible some idea of manifested beings did exist among Buddhist sorcerers, but most evidence suggests that it was really a Western concept, disguised as ancient Tibetan wisdom, to make the theosophers' inventions seem more legitimate. In fact, it was a European theosopher who first coined the word tulpa to begin with,

a woman named Alexandra David Neel. And this new tulpa that Alexandra wrote of, it behaved quite differently than the tulka. It was certainly no longer an extension of the creator. No, these creatures had minds of their own and could even turn on their creators, which is exactly what happened when she decided to create one of her own. Born in 1868, Alexandra Davin Neal was a woman of many talents. A Belgian-French explorer, spiritualist, Buddhist, anarchist, opera singer, and writer, she wrote over 30 books on her travels and philosophies, which went on to influence writers such as Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg.

And it was in one of these very books that the word Tulpa first made its grand debut. The book was called Magic and Mystery in Tibet and was published in the year 1929. It recounts Alexandra's journeys through Tibet, describing her many adventures and encounters. And she writes in her book, it was during one of these expeditions that she first stumbled upon the idea of the Tulka, and it went a little over her head. Alexandra though wasn't one to shy away from digging deeper, and so determined to understand the concept, she wrote a letter to someone that she thought might be able to help, a little someone called the Dalai Lama.

And the Dalai Lama responded, A Bodhisattva may create not only human forms forms but any forms he chooses, wrote the Dalai Lama. Even those in animated objects such as hills, enclosures, houses, forests, roads, bridges, etc. He may produce atmospheric phenomena as well as the thirst-quenching beverage of immortality. After that, Alexandra became absolutely obsessed with the idea that a person could have infinite manifested bodies or phantoms of themselves. Horcruxes, basically. But why should only the enlightened be able to participate?

No, Alexandra figured that anyone had the potential to manifest a Tolka. The only difference was how powerful that Tolka would be. The more mentally and spiritually advanced, the more powerful a Tolka you could create. And she blended these ideas with fellow theosopher Annie Besant's writings on what was called thought form. Basically, the idea that thoughts were things with tangible colors and shapes. And what resulted was a brand new idea, the Tulpa. Now Alexander knew that her theories were all well and good, but didn't count for much without tangible evidence, which meant that there was only one thing for her to do, to try and make a Tulpa of her own.

And so she got to work. And by work, I mean that she closed her eyes and started imagining. She pictured a fat little monk who looked a little bit like Friar Tuck from the Robinhood stories, and then she began to focus really, really hard. And it took a while, but eventually she was able to visualize her monk out in the world, floating around like a ghost. And the more she practiced, the clearer the vision got,

until the monk was no longer in her head, but seemed to manifest physically in front of her. To David Neal, her little fat monk had become indistinguishable from reality. She had meditated so intensely, she had created a self-induced hallucination. And it was mostly visual. But there were moments when she could feel the monk too. On a few occasions, his robe brushed against her. She even felt a hand on her shoulder. And this is when things started to get eerie. Her monkeousy began to change.

The fat, chubby-cheeked fellow grew leaner, she wrote. His face assumed a vaguely mocking, sly, malignant look. He became more troublesome and bold. In brief, he escaped my control. While she could once decide his actions, the tulpa had begun making choices of its own. Choices that Alexandra hadn't approved of. He grew more and more threatening. And soon the monk had slipped entirely outside her influence and taken on a mind of its own,

appearing when it wanted to rather than when she deliberately called it. Oh, and one other thing. All this time, she hadn't bothered to tell her traveling companions that she had made a creepy little friar with her mind. I imagine that she was a bit of an odd duck to begin with, and they may not have even noticed that her demeanor was any different. But do you know what they did notice? A stranger who had turned up in their camp.

One day, a Tibetan herdsman came to Alexandra's tent to give her a gift of butter. And who did he see beside her? That's right, none other than a monk. And this is where we have to give Alexandra David Neal some credit here. Because unlike every horror movie character ever, messing with Ouija boards at a murder site or splitting up to explore the house, Alexandra quickly decided that she should probably cut it out. This was all a bit too far. The monk, she realized, had to be destroyed. And so she began

the painful process of attempting to reabsorb the tulpa back into her mind. For one week, then another, and another, she practiced strenuous mental exercises, desperate to get rid of him. But the monk liked being alive. He didn't want to go back. He fought her tooth and nail. Until finally, after six months of exhausting mental battles, Alexandra won. The monk, at last, was gone. The mind is a powerful tool. It's capable of inventing language, solving complex equations, conceiving of new governments

in architecture, art, and music. It can write books and dream up recipes. In fact, most of our day-to-day lives exist because someone at some point had an idea and decided to turn that idea into reality. But here's the thing. The mind never really does these things alone. It can come up with the ideas, sure, but it takes the body to actually build anything. I can think about a podcast all I want, but without my hands on the keyboard

and my voice at the microphone, this would be a pretty boring show. Which is what makes the tulpa so fascinating. It implies that just maybe the mind alone is enough to change the world. Now, you might think that Tulpa Mancy, the practice of creating a tulpa, died off with the Theosophers.

But let's just say you'd be wrong. For generations, tulpas waited quietly in the back rooms of occult libraries. They slept or played cards or whatever the heck imaginary entities do when not being, well, imagined. And then in 2009, the time for their big comeback finally arrived. Because that's the year a few anonymous folks decided to try their hand at the long-lost art of tulpamancy and discuss it on 4chan. Tulpas, welcome to the internet. With that, the door was flung wide open. In 2012, a new online subculture discovered the practice. Adult fans of My Little Pony, Friendship is Magic, or you may know them as Bronies. They began manifesting tulpas based on their pony alter egos.

Next came a Reddit channel dedicated to tulpamancy where practitioners shared tips and tricks and even let their tulpas take over their bodies to chat with each other in online forums. Today that subreddit is nearly 50,000 members strong. You see, this is what makes folklore so amazing, the way it can evolve to fit each new community that adopts it. Rather than die off, the Tulpa shapeshifted. It took on new traits and abilities, leapt across oceans, found new hosts even as religion and technology changed. It adapted in order to survive. If I didn't know it any better, I'd almost say that folklore was alive.

I hope you enjoyed today's journey into our childhood and the real dangers posed by those harmless thought experiments. And I think you'll agree, imaginary beings plaguing us by day is one thing, but they become all the more frightening when they stalk us in our sleep. I have one more story to tell you about just that, all about the things that go bump in the night. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. What scares you? Go ahead and conjure an answer to that in your head, whether it's a big fear or a small one. It's a relevant question to ask, considering how we're quickly sliding into the Halloween season. Of course, Halloween lets us have fun with the things that frighten us. But what about

the fears that don't involve vampires and ghosts? Well, thankfully therapy is a great tool for facing our fears and finding new ways to overcome them. I know how important and helpful therapy can be when it comes to processing fears and struggles. It's not just for those who have experienced major trauma. It can actually empower you to be the best version of yourself. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge.

Overcome your fears with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash Lore today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P dot com slash Lore. This episode was also sponsored by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand,

Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything, products, content, your time, all in one place, and all on your terms. When I launched LORE almost 10 years ago, I took a chance and made the choice to go with Squarespace. Why? Because their system let me build a website

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to manage your payments in one place. Onboarding is fast and simple. Get started with just a few clicks and start receiving payments right away. Plus, give your customers more ways to pay with popular payment methods like Apple Pay, Klarna, ACH Direct Deposits in the US, Afterpay in the US and Canada, and Clearpay in the UK.

And speaking of selling things, you can even use your Squarespace site to sell digital content like memberships or courses or files that your customers can download like PDFs, music, or ebooks. So what are you waiting for? Head over to squarespace.com slash lore for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code lore to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Squarespace, build something beautiful. It started when the boy was only six or seven years old. Each night, Howard Phillip would crawl into bed, lay his head on the pillow, pull the covers tight around himself as if a paltry blanket could protect him. But then no matter how hard he tried to stave them off, the monsters would still come.

And he called them the Night Gaunts. The Night Gaunts were black and lean, their whale-like skin almost rubbery. They were humanoid, with barbed tails and wide splayed wings like a bat. Sometimes they had horns or carried sharp tridents, but their most frightening feature? Well, that would have to be their faces, or rather the lack thereof. You see, where a face should have been was just a dark, smooth sheet of flesh. The night-gaunts would dig their claws into little Howard. They would grab him by the stomach and carry him into the air, far from his home and the life he knew. They traveled in flocks of up to 50

voiceless monsters, flying high over dead, crumbling cities that Howard looked down on with horror. As they flew, they tossed the boy from creature to creature, as if he were nothing but a plaything or a scrap of meat. And then at last, the nightgaunts and their prey would enter a gray void, punctured only by the needle-like pinnacles of the great mountains where the monsters lived. And then, well, there was only one thing left to do. They let the boy fall. It was a nightmare, of course, but it happened again and again, every night the same.

First, the night-gaunts arriving in Howard's room, then grabbing him by the stomach, soaring over ruined cities, and at last dropping him, at which point he would awaken in a panic, just before being skewered on the knife-point sharp mountaintops. Time passed by, and the boy grew older, as children do. By the time he was eight, he had given up most of his belief in the supernatural and

had taken up an interest in science instead. The nightmares lessened. By the time he was eleven, they had ended entirely. Looking back years later with the experience of adulthood, Howard figured the Night Gaunts had probably just been a twisted memory of drawings from Paradise Lost, which he had obsessed over as a kid. Plus, after his grandmother's death, his mother and aunt had started wearing long black dresses around the house that could possibly have inspired the Night Gaunt's oily black

skin. Oh, and the whole thing with them grabbing his stomach? Well, he had been prone to indigestion, and that must have been his brain's way of making sense of a stomach ache. Yes, there were reasonable explanations for everything, even the reoccurring monsters of youth. Even so, Howard never forgot the night gaunts, and hey, I probably wouldn't either. Flocks of horrifying winged beasts flinging you through the air every night isn't the sort of thing that you just forget about. And so three and a half decades after the Night Gaunts disappeared, he resurrected them again. But this time, it wasn't in his dreams. No, Howard was a grown man, and he

decided it was time for him to take control of the narrative. And so he wrote them into a story, a novella to be exact, in which the Night Gaunts inhabited a vast dream world, also populated by gods, ghouls, moon beasts, and more. At one point, the protagonist is grabbed by the Gaunts, just as Howard had been in his dreams. But later, the author flips the the script and that same character enlists the help of a group of nightgaunts to fly him to a far-off castle. It may have been years later, but finally the little boy who had once been so terrified to fall asleep had won out over his fears.

This novella, by the way, was eventually published under the title The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, and its author? Well, he went on to cause countless nightmares in readers all over the world, The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, and its author? Well, he went on to cause countless nightmares in readers all over the world, but he didn't go by Howard Phillip anymore. No, he's known today by his initials, HP, because you see, that little boy was none other than HP Lovecraft. podcast. This episode of Lore was produced by me, Aaron Manke, with research and writing by Jenna Rose Nethercott and music by Chad Lawson.

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