Lore - Lore 290: Growing Pains

Episode Date: October 6, 2025

They might appear to be nothing more than simple words spoken by the youngest in our communities, but there’s a darkness hidden beneath many of them. Let’s explore the frightening world of nursery rhymes. Narrated and produced by Aaron Mahnke, with writing by GennaRose Nethercott, research by Cassandra de Alba, and music by Chad Lawson. ————————— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  Official Lore Merchandise: lorepodcast.com/shop All the shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com ————————— Sponsors: Squarespace: Head to Squarespace.com/lore to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using the code LORE. Mint Mobile: For a limited time, wireless plans from Mint Mobile are $15 a month when you purchase a 3-month plan with UNLIMITED talk, text and data at MintMobile.com/lore. SimpliSafe: Secure your home with 24/7 professional monitoring. Sign up today at SimpliSafe.com/Lore to get 50% off a new SimpliSafe system. MeUndies: Slide into game changing comfort with MeUndies. Get up to 50% off at MeUndies.com/lore with the promo code LORE. ————————— To report a concern regarding a radio-style, non-Aaron ad in this episode, reach out to ads @ lorepodcast.com with the name of the company or organization so we can look into it. To advertise on this podcast please email: [e-mail]. Or go to: https://advertising.libsyn.com/lore ————————— ©2025 Aaron Mahnke. All rights reserved.

As long as they stay in the trees, you have nothing to worry about. The spirits are called Abiku, and they tend to lurk in the branches of baobab and Iroko trees throughout Nigeria. At least, that's where they hang out when they aren't possessing a human host, a very tiny, human host. The word Abiku, you see, translates to none other than predestined to death. According to Nigerian legend, these spirits belong to children who are doomed to die young. And if that weren't tragic enough, they are said to target the same mothers again and again, becoming the soul of each new baby she bears, remorselessly forcing her to lose child after child. A family might think that they've escaped, might have a son or daughter who lives past infancy,

then into childhood and toward their teen years, only for the Abiku to take them on their 13th birthday. It's hard to imagine a crueller kind of monster. But according to some contemporary analyses, Abiku legends do serve a purpose beyond the misery. It's possible that the superstition developed to help families make sense of genetic illnesses, such as sickle cell disease,

which could cause multiple premature deaths within the same family line. And they aren't alone. From Scottish changelings to the Filipino Chianak, every culture has its own folklore explaining why a child might be taken before their time. And the truth is, while these stories may be about children, they really exist to help adults process something too terrible to name.

Which leaves us with a question. When death comes calling, what stories are the children telling? I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is lore. They are the first poems that we hear. Long before we can read or write, tales of itsy-bitsy spiders and three men in a tub fill our young imaginations. In fact, nursery rhymes are so ubiquitous, it might feel like they've simply always been around. Except, of course, they haven't. No, these nonsense rhymes came from somewhere. And at one point,

they may not have been nonsense at all. Take that old classic song of Little Bo Peep. This little diddy first appeared in print in 1805, and more than two centuries later, it's still one of the most beloved children's songs in the English language. For perspective, Old Town Road broke records by holding the number one spot on the charts for 19 weeks. Impressive, sure, but Lilbo Pea. Spen a hit for 200 years and going. Talk about a banger. Of course, we all know the first verse, right? Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep and can't tell where to find them.

Leave them alone, and they'll come home and bring their tails behind them. Which is cute, right? Cute that is, if you forget the lesser-sung later verse, in which Bo Peep sets off to find her lost sheep, only to despair when she discovers their tails ripped from their bodies and hanging on a tree to dry. And honestly, that darkness is nothing compared to some of the stories about where the rhyme originated. Now, to understand this first theory, you need a bit of background.

In the 1700s, there was an area of East Hastings, Sussex, infamous for black market smugglers. These criminals were famous for popping in and out of East Hastings right under the customs agent's noses. Basically, a high-stakes game of peek-a-boo. Except back then, that game wasn't called peek-a-boo yet. It was known as Bo Peep. And so East Hastings itself came to be known as Bo Peep. Because of this, some believe that Little Bo Peep isn't a song about a shepherdess at all. No, she's actually a customs agent.

The lambs? Well, they're smugglers, which makes the tales, of course, none other than the smugglers' loot. Now, look, this story seems like a bit of a stretch, and that's probably because it is. The theory is just that, it's a theory, and it isn't the only one either. Another claim holds that Little Bo Peep is none other than Mary Queen of Scots losing her followers, aka her sheep, after her second marriage. At the end of the day, though, the true origin remains shrouded in shadow, because sometimes we folklorists reach a dead end and simply don't know what to do.

But forget sheep. What about cats? Hey, diddle-diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon. The little dog laughed to see such a sport, and the dish ran away with the spirit. This rhyme first appeared in print in 1765, but some scholars believe its origins stretch back much farther. In fact, a play from 1569 included the line, They Be at Hand, Sir, with Stick and Fiddle, they play a new dance called Hey Diddle Dittle.

Could this be a clue that the nursery rhyme existed in the 1500s? Or what about the fact that medieval monks had a tendency to doodle fiddle fiddle playing cats in the margins of illuminated manuscripts. Is that related, or is it just coincidence? Of course, there are plenty of more elaborate rumors. Some say the song is related to the worship of the Egyptian goddess Hathor, others that it alludes to biblical events, or even that the cat in the poem,

refers to one of a variety of historical catherine's, such as Catherine of Aragon or the wife of Peter the Great. But alas, I'm here to burst every one of those bubbles. There just isn't any evidence that a single one of those explanations is true. Yes, there's a sliver of a chance that the rhyme is referring to a ball game called Cat that would have been played at old-timey inns, accompanied by fiddle music, but the truth is, just like with Bo Peep, we simply don't know. Sometimes tracking down a nursery rhyme can feel like tracking an animal who only leaves a footprint

every 100 years. Luckily, though, some footprints are bigger than others. Like, for example, the kind left by a shoe so big, it can house an old woman and more children than she knows what to do with. Now, a shoe may seem like a rather odd choice of dwelling for a growing family. But actually, the little old woman who lived in a shoe is less random than you might think. You see, hidden in this particular nursery rhyme is a bit of British superstition. Shoes, it turns out, have long been used in British folklore to represent fertility, Just like historical maidenhood, a shoe is a personal private item owned by a woman until marriage.

It's even hidden under her long skirt. And with that in mind, it starts to make a lot more sense why so many fairy tales, from Cinderella to the red shoes, feature romantic young women with magical footwear. In fact, in one old English folk custom, a woman trying to have a baby could improve her chances by putting on the shoes of a woman who had just given birth. And hey, if a normal size shoe can encourage pregnancy, then what happens if you have a giant house-sized shoe? Well, you might just end up with so many children that you don't know what to do.

There are, unfortunately, terrible diseases all over the world. Illnesses that can dissolve your bones or make you break out in boils, Or heck, just plain kill you. There is one sickness more contagious than all the rest, and most frightening of all, it only seems to affect children. In Britain, it's known as the dreaded Lurgy. In Japan, it's Engacho. But if you grew up in the United States,

you know this terror by another name. I'm talking, of course, about kudis. Now, okay, fine, kudis doesn't actually exist. But don't tell a 10-year-old that, because kids have been inoculating each other against this imaginary playground disease for over a century. Like many childhood traditions, Cooties didn't originate with children at all.

The term Cooties actually started as a World War I era nickname for the body lice that soldiers contracted in the trenches. Then before that, the term itself may have been derived from the melee word Qutu, which refers to biting insects that feed on blood. Now, no one is sure how it gets from Malaysia to the Western Front, but whatever the case, the word seems just as contagious as the cooties themselves, because once the soldiers got home, American children quickly adopted it as their own. What exactly is the cooties disease?

Well, sometimes it's likened to the plague. Other times, it's enmeshed in the fear of the opposite gender. After all, as any little girl can tell you, boys have cooties and vice versa, right? In short, though, it's an imaginary illness that kids pretend to contract through games of what's called cooties tag, which is basically regular tag, except that getting touched gives you the cooties. But don't worry, if you happen to catch this monstrous malady,

there are cures, and lucky for you, cootie shots are available for free on playgrounds across the country. No health insurance required. The supplies are simple, too. All you need is a retractable pen, which a friend will click against your arm while chanting, circle, circle, dot, dot. Now you have the cootie shot.

No pen on hand? Well, no problem. A few easy folds of a piece of paper, and you can make a contraption known as a cootie catcher, which acts as a pincer to tweez the speckled cooties off of an infected friend. Manipulated by the fingers, the device contains various flaps that can open and close to not only snatch up those pesky cooties, but also reveal written messages or fortunes, hence its other most common name, the fortune teller. Now, all of this leads to one question. Why are kids so creepily obsessed with infecting one another with a fake plague? Well, perhaps the answer lies in history itself. You see, Cooties really started catching on.

Sorry, no pun intended there. Well, maybe the pun was intended, but you get the idea. It started catching on in the early 1950s. You know what else was rampant then? Polio. That's right, an illness that not only disproportionately affected children, but had no available vaccine at the time. If kids couldn't protect their friends from polio,

At least they could save one another from kudis, and thus feel a tiny bit safer in an uncertain world. A game? It's never just a game, is it? There's always something else hidden beneath the surface, a curiosity or a fear, driving children to play-act their way to understanding. And all too often, the root is death itself. Another playground mainstay exhibits this all too well, that is, jump rope games. Now, at first glance, it might seem like jump rope rhymes, recited to the rhythm of a turning rope, are simply intended to help keep time for the jumpers. But if you listen closely to the lyrics, something darker is at work. Take this popular rhyme. I had a little bird. Its name was Enza. Opened up the door, an influenza. Now, that had a long life as a

wordplay joke before kids ever picked it up, but suddenly little Enza started hopping into jumprope games across the nation. When? Why, smack dab in the middle of 1918. That's right, the same year the Spanish flu decimated the world, or as it was more formally named, Influenza. By the time the pandemic subsided in the spring of 1919, around a quarter of the world's population had contracted the flu, and three to five percent of the world was dead. During the Works Progress Administration, the WPA, payroll cuts of the mid-1930s, Folkloreist Lucy Nolton recorded jump-roping children chanting WPA-WPA, you're let go, go get your pay.

While during World War II, kids skip rope to a rind that went, Charlie Chaplin went to France to show those French girls how to dance, salute to the captain, bow to the queen, and turn your back on the Nazi submarine. The world can be a scary, violent place. Even as adults, we feel this every day. But for children, a population with no power, no control over their face, that uncertainty is all the more looming. And if a child can't change that fate,

at the very least, they can sing about it. But what happens when singing isn't enough? What happens when death comes anyway? Well, sometimes the only thing left to do is gather your friends, roll up your sleeves, and perform a little necromancy. You never expected to die at the tender age of 13, but here you are flat on your back with your arms crossed over your chest. A perfect corpse. Although your eyes are closed,

you can hear your friends giggling around you, sprawled atop their sleeping bags. The air smells like bubble gum and nail polish, and someone's borrowed their mom's incense burner to really set the mood. You try not to cough. After all, dead girls don't cough. Ready, you hear someone say, and suddenly you feel your friends circling around you, scooting in close. They each extend two fingers, one per hand, and slide them beneath you with precision. And then, with only those fingers, they attempt to lift you from the floor. It fails, of course.

You're way too heavy to lift with only a finger. But the air is too full of laughter. At least that's what you think, until someone in the circle begins to chant, light as a feather, stiff as a board, light as a feather, stiff as a board. The others have joined in now, a chorus of girls all repeating the same strange phrase

as once again you feel their fingers slide beneath you. Light as a feather, they recite in unison, stiff as a board, and then you begin to levitate. It's a staple of slumber parties nationwide. Even if you've never played light as a feather, stiff as a board yourself, you've probably heard of it.

It pretty much screams 1990, sleepover core right up there with spin the bottle and truth or dare. Except, well, this isn't a game from the 90s at all. The first record we have of it is actually from the 60s. Now, you might be thinking the 1960s, but think again, because the evidence that I'm about to share with you just so happens to have been written on July 31st of 1665, more than 350 years ago. The diary belonged to an Englishman named Samuel Pepys, who was famous for documenting everything from the Great London Fire to the restoration of the Stuart Monarchy in his detailed daily journals. In fact, so many big moments from history show up in these pages, you could easily

gloss right over a little moment in which a group of kids raise a friend from the dead. In the July 31st entry, Pepys recounts a conversation with a friend of his named Mr. Brisbane. The two were speaking of, and I quote, enchantments and spells, when Mr. Brisbane brought up a rather odd sight he had witnessed while traveling in Bordeaux, France. Apparently, Brisbane had seen four little girls kneeling in a circle, each down on one knee. In the center of their circle, a little boy lay flat on his back, as if, to quote the journal, he were dead. The girls recited a short poem in the round, each one whispering the next line into her neighbor's ear. The littlest of them was so young she kept messing up the words, but still, the children

forged on until the poem was complete. Peep's recorded. the poem in its original French, but translated into English, it went a little something like this. Here is a dead body, stiff as a stick, cold as marble, light as a spirit. We raise you in the name of Jesus Christ. And with that, each girl put one finger under the boy, and to Brisbane's astonishment, the boy floated right off the ground, lifted as high as the girl's arms could reach. Understandably, this seriously freaked Brisbane out. Surely he thought it had to be a trick. Maybe the boy was just very, very light. So, determined to get to the bottom of this creepy display, Brisbane fetched the house's cook, a rather large and, I quote, lusty man. The cook

lay down, and the little girls repeated the demonstration, and lo and behold, they lifted him as easily as they lifted the small boy. And, okay, I just have to include this excerpt from the diary where Peeps asks Brisbane, and I quote, whether they were Protestant or Catholic girls, and he told me they were Protestant, which made it the more strange to me, because Catholic kids are making their friends fly all the time, I suppose. Suffice to say, Peeps was totally fascinated by this story, and so am I. It shows that even though the chant itself has changed, kids have been playing some version of Light as a Feather for a long, long time, and to have shown up so concretely in 17th century France means that it was probably an established thing well before that. Some scholars

believe it may have even originated way back in the 14th or 15th centuries, inspired by what were called mystery plays. These mystery plays were massive traveling pageants that depicted biblical stories, including the resurrections of Jesus and Lazarus. It's not hard to imagine children completely entranced by these spectacles running home to act the scenes out with their friends. Now, I should tell you,

there's another reason that Samuel Pepys may have found the story notable enough to include in his journal, a reason that has everything to do with other entries surrounding it, documenting the rest of the summer of 1665. Because here's the thing. Those other entries weren't about children's games at all. Oh no, they were entirely dedicated to something else that had overtaken Europe that summer, a force that was snuffing out thousands of lives every week. That is, the Great Plague of London. Once again, it seems the world of make-believe had become a mirror for the real world. Except one small caveat.

Lights as a feather, stiff as a board, isn't fully make-believe at all, because the wildest thing about those levitation spells, they just so happen, to actually work. Okay, fine, it isn't magic. The secret behind light as a feather isn't witchcraft at all, but science. Basically, the act of lifting in unison evenly distributes the dead girl's weight,

so that each lifter is only supporting a tiny fraction of her with her fingers. And fingers? Well, it turns out they're surprisingly strong. Believe it or not, the world record for just a pinky finger deadlift is a whopping 242 pounds. Add to that the fact that the rhyme of the chant helps to synchronize the movements precisely, and it's hard not to see how one sleepover's worth of girls could manage to lift a single kid. The world is, as I said, a frightening place, whether from sickness or accident or just old age, we all die eventually, and one of the strangest thresholds of childhood is learning what that means.

Now, sure, these games and rhymes, they may seem dark, but in a way they're just the opposite. They're weapons that kids from every era in history have used to fight back against the scary stuff of everyday life and makes sense of the senseless. Let me give you one last example. Most of us know Miss Mary Mac. You know, she's dressed in black and has silver buttons down her back. Yeah, that one. While there are different variants of this clapping game across the world,

Americans have sung a particular version since 1915. In this one, Miss Mary Mac asks her mother for 50 cents. to watch the elephant jump over the fence. Now, some claim that's a reference to the USS Merrimack, a 19th century American warship. On the other hand, the inclusion of the elephant has caused some to believe that Mary Mac refers to a historical circus performer,

perhaps one who worked with elephants. But to be honest, my researcher did not find any real-life figure that could back up this claim. But do you know what scholars have found? An old English riddle describing a strange figure. Mary Mac dressed in black, silver buttons all down her back, and then daring the solver to name her. It's a tough one for sure, but I will give you a clue.

What if those silver buttons weren't buttons at all, but a row of gleaming silver nails? That's right. The answer to the riddle is that Miss Mary Mac is none other than a coffin. I hope you've enjoyed this hopscotch through childhood folklore and the haunting histories behind the scenes. It's clear that no matter where in the world or when in time you look, games and nursery rhymes are an integral part of being young.

But if you live in the United States, those nursery rhymes are often referred to by another name, that is, Mother Goose Tales, which begs the obvious question, who exactly was Mother Goose. The answer may surprise you. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it. This episode of lore was sponsored by Squarespace. As a former freelance graphic designer and a current small business owner, I know firsthand how tough it can be to craft a brand and a website around who you are and what you do,

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and enter the promo code lore. meyundies.com slash lore, promo code lore for up to 50% off. Meyndies, comfort that's made for fall. I know this one will be a deep cut, but does anyone remember the 1990 made for TV movie called Mother Goose Rock and Rhyme? It takes place in the fictional world of Rhymland, where all nursery rhyme characters, or Rymies, live. Trouble hits Paradise when Mother Goose, the creator of Rhymland, and everyone in it, goes missing. And it's up to her denizens to figure out what went wrong.

Which, sure, might seem like a reasonable enough premise for a kid's movie, if all these characters weren't played by rock stars. Yes, you heard me right. I'm talking about Little Richard as old King Cole, Blondie's Debbie Harry as the little old woman who lived in a shoe. Simon as Simple Simon, and all three members of Zizi Top as the three men in a tub. Throw in Cindy Lopper as Mary, and for some inexplicable reason, Woody Harrelson as her lamb, all headed by a Lilbo Peep played by Shelley Duval, and you've got yourself a really weird time. Oh, and did I mention, it's a musical. Honestly, I'm not totally convinced that the whole thing wasn't just a bizarre fever dream.

But what makes this movie special, other than the insane things I've just mentioned, is that here, Mother Goose isn't just a name in a book, but a real person. Which begs the question, was she? And if so, how did she become the matriarch of nursery rhymes to begin with? Well, according to legend, Mother Goose started out not as a mother at all, but a girl. Her name was Elizabeth Foster Goose, or in some cases, Elizabeth Vergoose, and she was said to have been born in Boston sometime in these 1600s. And the story goes, Elizabeth grew up to marry a man who had already had ten days.

children, and then the two of them had six more. Grandchildren, of course, followed, and suffice to say, with that many kids running around the house, you'd have to come up with some pretty unique ways of keeping them entertained. And for Elizabeth, her go-to tactic was singing. Now, Elizabeth didn't have a very good voice. As one writer put it, she sang in, and I quote, not the most melodious strains. And while the children adored her songs, some adults had a different opinion, namely Elizabeth's son-in-law, the printer Thomas Fleet, which was bad luck for him because he and his wife happened to be the parents of Elizabeth's first grandchild, to whom she sang day and night. Eventually, an annoyed Thomas Fleet figured out that if he was going to have to listen

to this old woman basically honking, he may as well cash in on it. And so in 1719, he published an edition of Elizabeth's rhymes titled, For the Nursery, Mother Goose's Melodies for Children. He's said to have given it this title, not just because of the woman's last name, but due to the fact that his mother-in-law sounded like a goose when she sang. The book contained every single mother goose rhyme that we know and love today, really an incredible compendium for little ones and folklore scholars alike. Except, while there's an itsy-bitsy problem with this book, and thus with the entire origin story in general,

you see, no copy of the volume has ever been found to exist. In fact, it appears that the first actual printed use of the phrase Mother Goose Tales was not in English at all, but in the early 1600s, in France. By the end of that century, a Charles Perot collection featured an illustration of an older woman reading stories to children beside a sign that read, Contumere Luar, or Tales of My Mother Goose. Apparently, the phrase was already well known in France by then, and was basically used in the same way we might say old wives' tales.

More generally, Mother Goose, as a phrase, was just a generic name for a country woman. Eventually, the term seems to have made it into English parlance until it became a household name in the late 1700s. So then, what's the deal with that whole story of Elizabeth and her oodles of grandchildren? Well, it appears that we owe the tale to none other than the great-grandson of the printer in the story, Thomas Fleet. And no, it was not passed down to him through the generations. It seems that this great-grandson made the entire thing up on his own.

Yes, Mother Goose herself is simply another invented character, one that's fit for a nursery rhyme. This episode of lore was produced by me, Aaron Manke, with writing by Generos Nethercote, Research by Cassandra DeAlba, and music by Chad Lawson. Just like you, I'm not a fan of hearing ads. I've got a solution, though.

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