Lore - REMASTERED – Episode 24: A Stranger Among Us

Episode Date: March 21, 2022

Christmas taught most of us that it was acceptable for an odd stranger to invade our home and demonstrate unusual knowledge of our family. But there are far more terrifying strangers than old St. Nick. This classic Lore episode has been updated with fresh narration and production, and a brand new story at the end. ———————— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  All the shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support To advertise on our podcast, please reach out to [e-mail], or visit our listing here.

Folklore is a living thing. In many ways, the stories we tell and the lessons we pass on are like a tree. There are branches that reach out into generations and cultures, sometimes in obvious ways and other times reaching surprising new places. One good example of this would be the folklore surrounding small fairy people that we've discussed here before. Pakwajis, trolls, goblins, puka, and dozens of similar variations are scattered around the world with amazing consistency and reach.

How or why is something we'll probably never know, but it shows us how folklore can spread, how it can migrate, and how it can build upon the past. At the same time though, folklore also has roots, and they run deeper than we might expect. Some stories that we still whisper about in the dark today have crossed the lips of people for centuries, and in some cases millennia. When I hear a story for the first time or discover a new collection of tales that have been widely distributed, I often stop and ask myself the same questions. Where did it come from?

What lies at the bottom of the narrative? What are its roots? Outside of Halloween, there is no other time of the year, at least for European cultures, where folklore rushes to the forefront of everyone's lives with such significance, such power, and such ease as the Christmas season. And rightly so, there is so much to unpack and explore. The tree, the gifts, the food, and the nocturnal visit from a stranger, one who has seemingly stalked our lives all year long, and yet we blindingly welcome into our home.

And if there's one lesson that folklore has taught us over the centuries, it's to be aware of strangers, because they aren't always who they seem to be. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. When we think of coal in our stockings and food and drink left out for a visitor, we rarely pair those ideas with the image of a woman flying through the air on a broomstick. But in Italy, there are those who still tell the story of La Bifana. Bifana's story has been told since at least the 13th century, originally connected with the Christian Feast of Epiphany.

But while many people have never heard of her, the details of her story are eerily familiar. During her visit, Bifana was said to enter homes through the chimney. She is typically depicted carrying a basket or bag full of gifts, but is also known to leave behind a lump of coal or a single stick for children who failed to behave during the year. Before leaving each home, Bifana would sweep the floor with her broom, something scholars see as a metaphor for sweeping away the deeds of the previous year. And then she would eat the food left out for her, oftentimes a meal of sausage and broccoli.

A side note, cookies and milk sound so much better, don't they? Interestingly enough, Bifana is not the only Christmas legend with a passing resemblance to a witch. In the German Alps, there have been stories of another female figure dating back to the 10th century. Some call her Perkta, or Berkta, and later Bertha. Jacob Grimm, while researching his Deutsch mythology, theorized that she was one of the ancient Germanic mother goddesses.

She and her sisters were said to have taught humanity the art of agriculture, spinning wool and cooking. Over time though, her legend began to integrate into parts of the Christmas season. Because of her role in teaching humanity the basics of home management, Perkta's meaning began to shift over the centuries, turning her into the punisher of those who worked during the holidays, failed to feast properly, and much later, hunting down the lazy. And what better time for her to conduct an end of year review, so to speak, than Christmas? Just how did Perkta dish out her punishment on the people of Germany?

Well, a hint can be found in her other popular title, the Belly Slitter. During the 12 days of Christmas, she would travel through the towns and inspect people's behavior. If they had followed the rules and done right in her eyes, they were rewarded. If they had not been good though, she was known to have a very nasty side. And disobedient enough to warrant punishment, adult or child alike, would have their stomachs ripped open. Perkta would scoop out whatever might still be inside, pull out the full length of their

intestines, and then stuff the victim's belly with garbage, straw, and rocks. Now, while a stomach full of refuse might seem a little over the top, that distinction actually goes to another ancient female in folklore. While stories of Grylla, the mythical giant goddess, are far outside the common narrative of Christmas for many of us, for the people of Iceland, she is still a whispered source of dread among children. One of the earliest mentions of Grylla dates back to the 13th century collection of Icelandic mythology known as the Edda, written by Snorri Sturlson.

According to the many stories told about her over the centuries, Grylla possesses the ability to locate disobedient children. She can do this year round, so they say, and because of that, she was often used as a parental tool to coerce children into doing what they were told. It was in the Christmas season, though, that Grylla became even more monstrous. That was when she was said to climb out of her home in the mountain and make her way toward the towns. She would hunt far and wide for all the naughty children and then take them back to her cave.

There, she would cut them up, place them in her stew, and devour them. According to the legend, she never ran out of food. There have been other stories of strangers told throughout the centuries, but not all have happy endings. In fact, there is often more loss than gain when it comes to the visits of some of these legends. In Northern Alps, stories have been told for generations about the traveling stranger known as Belsnickel.

Considered to be one of the helpers of St. Nicholas, Belsnickel travels ahead of the big red man and dispenses his own form of Christmas cheer with physical abuse. Descriptions of Belsnickel liken him to the wild men of old with torn and dirty clothes fashioned from animal skins and furs and a face that is covered in a snarled, filthy beard. Stories report that he wears a mask with a long tongue protruding from the mouth. According to the legend, which spans centuries in both Germany and the American state of Pennsylvania, Belsnickel would enter the home of a family and scatter nuts and sweets on

the floor for the children to collect, and then, with their backs to him, he would lash out with a switch made of hazel or birch, whipping their backs and leaving red marks. Belsnickel isn't alone. Another traveling stranger from the same region, one who has seen a rise in popularity around the globe, is a creature known only as Krampus. At first blush, Krampus sounds similar to many of the other strangers in folklore around Europe, but what sets him apart is truly frightening. It is said that Krampus visits the homes of children during the Christmas season, but

he doesn't have a dual nature. There's no reward or special treat when Krampus comes to town. So his sole purpose and passion in life is to dole out punishment on children who have failed to obey and do their work. Like Belsnickel, he too carries a switch, but in most stories there are more than one. Apparently he beats so many children that he needs a few spare branches, so he carries them in a bundle. In addition, he is often depicted wearing chains and some form of large sack or cart,

because ultimately Krampus isn't interested in beating children. He wants to take them. When he arrives in each legend, we are greeted by the appearance of a wild demonic creature with long horns, cloven feet, and a twisted face. After beating the disobedient children, Krampus chains them up, tosses them into his sack before vanishing as quickly as he came, taking the children back with him to hell. The origins of Krampus are still unclear, but some scholars think that the legend predates Christianity.

Instead, they believe that the story has roots in an ancient alpine myth of a horned god of the witches. Even the switch, his weapon of choice, might have been a carryover from the initiation rites of witches, where the novices were beaten and whipped. Far from forgotten, festivals are held throughout Europe to this day that feature many of these legends. Events like Krampus knocked in Germany and the Bafana Festival in Urbana attract tens of thousands who dress in masks and dance and celebrate.

Like Halloween, these are instances where monsters and strangers have been embraced and elevated to something of a children's story. Which is ironic when you understand the roots. Stripping away the details Krampus has from a 30,000-foot view, more than a passing resemblance to Pan, the Greek horned god of nature, shepherds, flocks, and mountains. Along with his musical flutes, Pan was also known for robbing the innocents from people, usually through sexual means. In a culture that saw the threshold between childhood and adulthood as the loss of virginity,

Pan figuratively stole people's children. And when you think of it that way, it's more than easy to see similarities, not only between Krampus and Pan, but between Pan and a character that Disney has helped us all fall in love with, Peter Pan. While he might be able to fly, has no horns, and is missing the cloven feet that Pan sports in every image and statue, Peter Pan fulfills the role perfectly. He arrives at night, carries a flute, and lures our children away to another place. It's a modern story with a familiar ending, but it was far from the first of its kind.

That honor, according to some, falls to a small German village in 1284. You might already know the story, but the truth behind it is far worse than you'd ever expect. In 1284, the German village of Hamelin was struggling with an infestation of rats. Now, I've only seen a few rats myself over the years, but I also don't live in a densely populated urban area like New York City or London. But in medieval Europe, from what I can gather, rats were as abundant as squirrels, only bigger and more disease-ridden.

It's hard to imagine the impact that an infestation of rats could have on a town today. If we found a half-eaten bag of flour in the cupboard, there's a grocery store down the street where we can get more year-round. But in the Middle Ages, food was grown locally and used throughout the year. If rats ate and ruined the food supply, there was little a town could do. Rats met death in many instances. According to the story that has been passed down through the century since then, a stranger entered Hamelin in the spring of 1284.

He was dressed in colorful clothing, possessed what we might call today a silver tongue, and claimed of having a very unusual and also timely skill. He was a rat catcher. As a profession, rat catching dates back centuries, but it's rarely been a safe and sanitary job. The risk of being bitten or contracting some disease carried by the rats has always been a hazard for the job. And while the exact nature of their involvement has been up for debate for decades, most scholars

agree that rats have been a key player in the spread of plague, particularly the Black Death of the 14th century. And there were few truly effective tools at their disposal, which made the job that much more difficult. Some rat catchers used a special breed of terrier, while others made use of traps. But the most effective tool for centuries was the most minimal and inexpensive of them all. Bear hands. And seeing as how most rats preferred to stay hidden inside dark places, this was a risky

technique. The motivation, though, was the meritocracy of it all. The more you caught, the more you earned. And while there's no documented proof of this rumor, it has been whispered for centuries that rat catchers would sometimes raise their own rats in captivity and then turn them in as part of a job, inflating the numbers. This allowed them to pad their paychecks when business was low, but it also earned them a shady reputation.

As a side note, one of the most famous rat catchers in London's history was a man named Jack Black, who claimed that his black tan terrier was the father of all the black tan terriers in London and who pioneered the art of breeding rats and keeping them as pets. Even wore an outfit made entirely of scarlet cloth with a big wide sash across his chest that had two cast iron rats on it. He was probably also a riot at parties, but I can't confirm that. It's just a hunch. The man who walked into Hamelin that June wasn't any less of a character if the legends

are to be believed. He wore an outrageous outfit, although his was reportedly one of multi-colored fabric that was known back then as Pied, which was typically a sort of blotchy pattern, and he carried a tool that no rat catcher claimed to use. A flute. The mayor of Hamelin trusted the man. Maybe it was the not-so-subtle illusion his appearance made to the ancient stories of the god Pan, a deity who tended flocks of animals and played a flute.

Maybe it was the man's marketing ability that silver tongue and outrageous outfit. Perhaps he overpromised and won the mayor's approval. Whatever the reason, this stranger was said to have struck a deal. He would catch all the rats in town, he told the mayor. He would lead them out of town and away from their lives, and he would do this with his musical instrument, a pipe that he claimed would lure them away. Now, I don't know about you, but I would have been skeptical. The mayor, though, well, he was desperate.

Sure, they haggled over the price, but in the end, the stranger won. The exact amount of money differs from version to version of the story, but in all of them, it's an exorbitant sum. And that's the point, Hamelin was so desperate they were willing to overpay for a solution. And then he got to work. According to all the stories, and even the children's tales we were raised on, the piper picked up his flute and began to play. As if driven by some magical force, all of the rats in Hamelin scuttled out of their

hiding places and began to crowd around him. Streams of them, thousands of them, all writhing in a mass at his feet. Then, when it seemed like they had all come out, he marched out of town and down to the Visa River. The stories say that he was beyond successful. Most accounts say that all but one of the rats drowned in the river that day. Hamelin's troubles were over. For a while.

You see, the piper returned later to collect his money. He had done the job they had hired him to perform. The rats were gone. But for some unknown reason, the mayor refused to pay him. The stories don't say why, but we can speculate. Maybe it was because the stranger didn't return with any of the bodies to show for his work, as was the custom for rat catchers. How could they pay him per head when there were no heads to count?

At any rate, the mayor turned the stranger away, and the man, clearly taken advantage of, stormed out of the village. But now before turning to face the people of Hamelin and proclaiming a curse on them, he would return one day, he said. And when he did, he would have his revenge. Remember, this is a story that's been passed down for over 800 years. Most of what we know about the real events is pure legend based loosely on scattered reports of a stained glass window in the church there in Hamelin.

The window itself was lost in 1660, but there are drawings of it that predate the destruction, as far back as the 14th century. And the earliest mention of these events is a 1384 entry in the Hamelin town chronicles. The events were recorded, of course, because the stranger did return. According to the story, though, he had changed his clothing, trading in his colorful robes for the uniform of a hunter. Gone was the salesman. The stranger was back for vengeance.

While the adults were all in church on June 26th, the stranger strode into town and began to play his flute again. This time, rather than crowds of writhing rats, it was the children who clambered out of the houses. They flooded the streets, gathering around the strange visitor. And then, when they were all present, he marched them out of town, never to be seen again. There are, of course, a number of morals to this story, but one that has stuck with us for centuries remains ever true.

Never trust a stranger. Folklore is full of strangers. In many stories, it's flat out amazing just how much freedom people have given them in their lives. Even stories of someone as benign as Santa Claus have an element of danger when you view them from outside the cultural fishbowl. Here's a story of a strange man who stalks our children year round, noting their behavior and secret desires, who then breaks into our home, eats our food, and leaves a few presents

to prove he was there. For the people of Hamelin, though, that stranger cost them far more than a plate of cookies. Their ill treatment of the man who came to town led them to the loss of their children. And as difficult as it is to believe, the story of Hamelin is true. Part of it, at least. Scholars are in agreement that the rats were a later addition to the tale, showing up about 300 years after the events were said to have taken place. But as far back as the records go, there has always been a stranger, a visitor from the

outside, who leaves with the children. And although it's taken a very long time to figure out why, some historians think they have the answer. To understand the truth, they say, we have to understand the political culture that Hamelin found itself in. In 1227, about 50 years before the events in Hamelin, a battle took place on the border between what was then the Holy Roman Empire and Denmark, pushing the Danish border north of modern-day Germany.

As a result, a whole new territory opened up that needed colonists. Then-called locators were assigned to travel the land and find volunteers to populate this new territory. They often wore colorful clothing. They were eloquent speakers. They were, in a sense, a lot like today's door-to-door salesmen. The empire needed farmers and craftsmen and soldiers to protect these new lands. But it was hard to find people willing to uproot their lives and travel north, especially when

that new land was alongside a contested military-heavy border. It was a hard sell. So when the locators came knocking, rather than shipping off a handful of adult volunteers, the townsfolk would sometimes get creative, instead of paying with their own lives. They would sell their children to these men. The proof, it turns out, is in the phone book and on Google Maps. Many town names along the line between Hamelin and Poland bear a striking resemblance to town names from medieval Germany, oftentimes even showing up more than once.

More compelling, surnames from the 1284 Hamelin town records still show up in phone books in Pomerania, a region of Poland along the Baltic Sea. The folklore, you see, tells a colorful story, one that's as easy for children to swallow as a spoon full of honey. But the truth that the story hides turns out to be far less palatable. An entire town, desperate for a solution to their economic and social challenges, actually sold their children off to recruiters, hoping to colonize new lands. It's a plot reminiscent of M. Night Shyamalan's The Village, in that these people constructed

a fantasy around certain events and then passed that lie on to later generations, in order to justify their actions and avoid questions. In the end, an outsider did indeed come to Hamelin that day, but he wasn't the one who took the children. Now it turns out that the true monsters were already there, living in the house next door, shopping in the markets, farming in the fields. The most dangerous stranger, it seems, isn't the outsider. It's the one who hides among us.

History is full of stories of mysterious strangers. And while many of them can be found in Christmas folklore, I hope that the tale of The Village of Hamelin shows just how common they are in everyday life. And as you might have guessed, I have another favorite example set aside to share with you. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it. I'm going to be very upfront with you from the start. No one knows who he was. We don't know his name or where he came from, and we certainly don't know the purpose

behind his very unusual, very extraordinary life. All we have are stories. If you lived in a small section of New England during the three decades between 1858 and 1889, you might have seen him pass by. At the very least, you would have heard the murmurs that rippled through your community in the aftermath of his visit. But by then, it would be too late, because he was often gone as quickly as he'd shown up.

There were rumors, of course. Some said he was a French exile forced to live and travel in America. Why? Well, it was rumored that his English was pretty poor, but he could often be heard speaking in French. But on most of the rare occasions that he actually interacted with locals, he used grunts and broad gestures instead of words, perhaps because that's what felt most natural to him. Like I said, we don't know his name.

But this mysterious stranger was witnessed by enough people that we can at least paint a compelling picture of what it might have been like to encounter him. There's even a photograph, and when the story is over, you can go and look for it. But let me warn you, seeing him will do nothing to answer the riddle of who he was. All you can count on is being unsettled. He walked everywhere he went, despite the prevalence of horses in his day. Roughly his route is documented as a loop that passed through Danbury, Connecticut before heading west to White Plains, New York.

Then it was northward to Brewster, east to New Britain, and then back south again. One big loop, roughly 365 miles of walking. Every time he completed a circuit, he simply started up a new one. Over and over again for 31 years. And all of it done with the same outfit on, the one that earned him the only name we have to identify him. Leatherman. It's not the most creative of nicknames, to be honest.

But thanks to his leather coat, leather boots, leather, well, everything, and lack of any other identifying features, it's the best his contemporaries could do. Of course, there were all sorts of stories about him, but they were nothing more than legends. Some said he was a Roman Catholic because they thought they noticed he avoided eating meat on Fridays. Others said a French prayer book was found among his possessions after he died. And of course, there were legends of a treasure, too.

Because here was a guy who walked in a massive, 365 mile loop without stopping for three decades. To pay for food along the way, people assumed that he would have to have a small fortune hidden away in one of the many caves that he used as a way stop. But of course, no one has ever found that imaginary treasure. After his body was found in 1889 in a cave outside the town of Mount Pleasant, New York, he was buried in nearby Ossinan. In 2011, his grave was opened and all remains of his burial were moved to a new site that was farther from the nearby highway.

The hope was that they might find some genetic material that could be analyzed, but all they managed to dig up were coffin nails. Leatherman might not be passing through towns today, but his story still makes the rounds. If you've ever heard the 1998 Pearl Jam song of the same name, now you know the backstory behind it. A mysterious stranger on an unusual journey who wore a trail through the culture of New England so deep that it's still visible today. Any of us would be lucky to do the same.

This episode of lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with music by Chad Lawson. Lore is much more than just a podcast. There is a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video. Check them both out if you want more lore in your life. I also make and executive produce a whole bunch of other podcasts, all of which I think you'd enjoy.

My production company, Grim and Mild, specializes in shows that sit at the intersection of the dark and the historical. You can learn more about all of our shows and everything else going on over in one central place, grimandmild.com. And you can also follow this show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. And when you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi.

And as always, thanks for listening.