Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Haint Blue

Episode Date: June 17, 2020

Haint Blue is a kind of robin's egg color that you might commonly find on porches of the low country of the Southeastern United States. But what does it have to do with ghouls and ghosts? Listen and learn! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, Jerry's kind of hanging around us like an unwanted spirit, but we doused her in blue paint

as if she were wearing fur in New York in 1985, and she's taken off. Wow, that sounded almost scripted. It was not, man, it was, of course it's not. It was right off of the cerebral cortex, the executive function. AKA the old cuff. Yes, the problem is, is I just diverted

so much brain power to the cerebral cortex that my brainstem made me pee my pants. Have you ever heard of this, paint blue tradition? Sure, okay. I didn't know how much people knew about this. This is something I was familiar with because, well, for many reasons, but one of my good friends is from Charleston and has a paint blue porch ceiling,

and I sort of like the tradition, and now I know a little bit more about it. Yeah, I mean, Atlanta's not exactly like in the low country, like along the Georgia coast or South Carolina coast, but it's close enough that you could see it kind of trickling in, and I think it does. Agreed. So what you're talking about is a specific kind

of paint color that you very frequently see in those areas, in the southeastern, southeast, doesn't get much more southeast than that. That's right. You end up in the Atlantic if you keep going. Yes. That you will see on people's ceilings of their porches, like this very pretty, like light blue,

one of my favorite shades of blue. Me too. Not necessarily paint blue, I'm not like, oh yeah, paint blue's my favorite color, nothing like that, but any kind of like light blue, pale blue, Robin's egg blue. Yeah. All of those are very, very pretty colors.

There's a purpose to this though, like this paint color on the ceiling though, right? Yeah, so the word hate, they think it may have come from the word haunt, but a hate in this low country culture, which we'll get into more in a sec, is a restless ghost, and it's a ghost, like I thought all ghosts were sort of like this,

that has not moved on to whatever world lies beyond, and is still here to haunt the living. Yeah, and it's, this is, haunts are specific to a culture of slaves imported from West and Central Africa, whose ancestors has kind of formed this community along the low country, and who still have this very robust culture that believes in haunts.

The difference to me is between like ghosts, as we understand them in a haint, is haints seem to be much more like all up in your business kind of thing, and they like to mess with you a lot more than like a ghost who's tied to a house, and is replaying their murder over and over every night at midnight.

Yeah, I've spent a little bit of time this one weekend with some Gullah, Gichi folks, and they are- Really? Awesome, and rich with tradition, and have this really, really, really cool accent. Dude, I'll bet their food's amazing too. I know the food was terrible.

I'm kidding. I was genuinely surprised. It's like some of the best food I've ever had in my life. I would guess so. I mean, low country boil, you just had me right there. Yeah, so hudu, there's a specific type of voodoo that goes on in the low country called hudu,

or root work, or conjure, and that's a practice where they use a lot of herbs, in this case, haint blue, to protect people from these evil haints coming into, I mean, sometimes it's a little lighter, sometimes it gets pretty heavy and scary. Yeah, so there's a boo hag, which is one of the best names for a haint ever.

Boo hags are, they seem to be like, what is that sleep paralysis tradition from Ireland, or Scotland, or somewhere over there? I can't remember, there's like a tradition of an old witchy woman standing on your chest while you're sleeping, and we talk about- The Babadook?

I don't think so, but related, maybe the wife of the Babadook. But we talked about in a sleep paralysis episode that is probably where that came from, was having sleep paralysis, and this sounds very familiar, because the boo hag will stand on your chest while you're sleeping too and try to suffocate you.

Yeah, and also steal your skin, and wear your skin during the day so they can blend in, and why there hasn't been a modern horror movie called the boo hag yet is beyond me. I don't know either, right? Or even just haint. Yeah. So that's one kind of haint,

and there's things you can do, like using hoodoo or root work or whatever. People wander around carrying little bags of roots and talisman to ward off haints, but if you actually have a haint that you're having to deal with in your everyday life, that you've attracted somehow, one of the things you would do specifically with the boo hag

is they have like an obsessive-compulsive disorder, according to the Goligichi, and they have to count. So if you do things like throw rice on your bedroom floor or whatever, the boo hag might come to sit on your chest and suffocate you, but instead she's gonna end up sitting there

counting rice all night, and then the son's gonna come up and she's gonna be toast. Where have we talked about this before? Because I have a very, very distinct memory about something being distracted because they had to count whatever you threw. It was the Eastern and Central European vampires

that had that same origin. I believe so, yeah. I knew it sounded familiar. Should we take a break? Yeah. Was that sudden? That was like a left hook. All right, go gather yourself and we'll be right back.

Okay. We'll be right back. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars,

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, we're back to talk about more hints. There's another hint called a plat eye, which also sounds very scary. They are shapeshifters and they can be anything. It says here in the House of Works article,

anything from a beautiful woman to a two-headed hog. And the scary thing about a plat eye is that there aren't a lot of defenses against the plat eye, save maybe leaving some whiskey out and or pouring it on the ground or something and the plat eye may stop to lick that up. Right. But otherwise you're out of luck with the plat eye.

Yeah, they say that once a plat eye is attached itself to, you're, there's not a lot you can do. You can maybe search yourself and see what kind of, as this one expert put it, what kind of grave spiritual offense you've committed. Like, what have I done? I'm trying to make it right, you know? Yeah.

But the, I also saw that you might end up with the plat eye attached to you if you go looking for buried Confederate treasure, because they say that plat eyes are frequently ghosts of people who were murdered and improperly buried by a Confederate treasure in order to protect it indefinitely. Oh, interesting. Yeah.

So be careful if you're gonna go looking for Confederate treasure buried in the low country, take a little whiskey with you and pour some out for the plat eyes. That's right. So that sort of brings us to this haint blue. And I'm sure you're wondering when you guys gonna talk about the title of this podcast.

Right. And it's now, and we did a great show on Indigo. And so we don't need to go over all of that again, but Indigo just very briefly was a plant that thrived in the low country and slaves were used to cultivate the Indigo. And it was a big, big cash crop for the South. It's the reason Georgia legalized slave for, remember?

Yeah, that's right. So this blue was available to the Gullah-Gichi people, even though the color and the spiritual power of this blue is sort of all over the world, but they would have this blue and it sort of became the color that they would use because it reminded them of the sky and of the ocean. And the idea was that you paint this on your porch

or on a door, maybe, and it tricks these spirits into thinking that they're in water or they can't cross or they're in the sky or something like that. Yeah, because there's one thing you can say about haints and that is that they're kind of gullible, it sounds like. At the very least, they have a lot of faults and flaws that can be manipulated by people who know what to look for. Yeah, they're dumb.

The problem is, is if you're visiting somebody on their porch and they have a haint blue ceiling on their porch, there might be a haint hanging out in there. So they didn't make it into the house, they could still be on the porch. So FYI, never visit your neighbor. And we should point out that this has got a rich tradition in this low country culture,

but it has very much become part of the mainstream and a very kind of it color for front porch ceilings and stuff like that. And there's nothing wrong with that, but I think educate yourself, know where it comes from, know a little bit about the tradition if you're gonna do something like that, I think. Yeah, totally.

I mean, at the very least be able to say what that is instead of like, isn't that pretty blue? Who knows where it comes from? Who cares? I had a Volkswagen Beetle that was Robin's Egg blue. Such a great color, man. It was gorgeous. It's tough to beat a good Robin's Egg blue.

Agreed. So way to go, Gulligichi people. That's pretty awesome as far as traditions go and keep up the good work battling hates. You got anything else? Nothing else. All right. Well, if you want to hear more about this,

start this episode over because short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.