The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Vampire Epidemics, Parasitic Mind Control, Sasquatch Science

Episode Date: October 19, 2022

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Get 20% off your first order now with code weirdest. That's code weirdest for 20% off. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton.

Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton.com. Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and heck stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured,

why not sure those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Feltman. I'm Lauren Young, and I'm I'm Laura Krantz. Welcome back to the show, both Laura and Lauren. So nice to have you both here. Yes. Thanks for having me. Yeah, super excited to be back.

Listeners, in case you don't remember, Lauren is one of our beloved Popsie staff members. And it was on last season talking about bird brains assorted. And Laura was on just a few episodes ago, but we loved having you so much that we had to be back. And so listeners, Lord is the host of the podcast Wild Thing. And I believe you also have a new book. I do. That maybe you would like to tell our listeners about. I would love that.

The book is based off of the first season of Wild Thing. It is about Bigfoot. And it is called The Search for Sasquatch. It is for middle grade readers ages 9 to 13. It's out from Abrams Kids, October 11th. And it is nonfiction, which, you probably are, you know, putting your pinky up to your lips and wondering about that. We'll get into that a little bit later.

Ooh, yes, I can't wait. Listeners, many of you already know that Halloween is our favorite time of year on weirdest thing. It's our favorite time of year to do live shows. We've had some great live shows on Halloween. We're not quite back to being able to do that safely at our favorite venue caveat this year, but maybe next year, fingers crossed. We'll be back together to celebrate the weirdest, spookiest time of year. I will bring back my merry topped costume, bunny slippers and all.

I'll get my husband Oliver to dress up as the great butterfire again. It was really just a great night. I think about it a lot. But for now, we are at least all together in spirit to celebrate. Halloween and let's get into it. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, keeping ourselves up at night, et cetera, and we decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little

science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest or spookiest thing we learned this week actually was. Lauren, let's start with your tease. Sure. So my tease is one of my favorite creepy crawlies from a list or from a few that I'm going to share. So there's a long parasitic worm that turns crickets into zombies and possesses them to leap into water and drown themselves.

It's one example of so-called mind control parasites. So I'm really looking forward to sharing. more of these with you. I'm personally on teen parasites. I love my control parasites. I really can't wait to hear more. Laura, what's your teeth? So even actual scientists believe in Bigfoot. Turns out I'm related to one of the most famous of them. And after learning about him, I started to wonder if maybe there was more to Bigfoot than I thought. Ooh. Wow. Well, that's also thrilling to me. And I'm sure many of our listeners are eager to hear how we can have a nonfiction discussion. Yeah. My tease is that I want to talk about real life vampire epidemics and what they can tell us about ourselves.

I think I am so excited about the other two that I want to just get mine out of ways. can be fully in it for parasites and Sasquatch. So yeah, I'll just get into it. So yeah, real life vampire panics. You know, speaking of like scientists studying Sasquatch, yeah, scientists also study vampires. For many reasons, you know, there's the psychological and cultural stuff about like why it is that vampires are such a pervasive, like, um, flavor of a supernatural story that we come up with. There's, uh, you know, the whole, like somebody did a study on like whether, um,

vampires or zombies are more popular in movies depending on like what political parties of power and that pops up again every few years. Um, and then there's like, you know, the medical implications of some of the diseases that might have inspired. zombie myths. There are people who, um, you know, have various mental illnesses or, um, you know, temporary delusions that make them believe that they're vampires. They're people who actually actively consume the blood of other people. So you could say they are vampires. I'm not talking about any of those things right now. I'm talking about moral panics where people really believed that vampires were afoot and like actually reacted accordingly and treated

their corpses accordingly. And this has happened multiple times in history, in multiple places, including like shockingly recently in the U.S. So hold on to your butt. Wow. Okay. Yeah. So to set the scene, a little newspeg back in September, there were a lot of headlines and tweets and TikToks about a new archaeological finding in Poland. It was a grave of a seemingly like pretty well-to-do woman in the village of Pien, and it was around 300 years old. So 18th century. She was wearing a silk cap or at least the little scrappy remains that make archaeologists go

like, this was a clothing, which is always very impressive to me. And she was also buried in a seminary. cemetery, like a religious cemetery, which was not a given at that time. There were a lot of circumstances that could lead you to just be buried in kind of a pit very separate from where they buried people of, you know, good standing. So all of this shows us that she was someone of status, or at least like a member of the community. But she was also shackled to the grave by her big toe, the big toe specifically. Just the toe. padlock around the big toe. And more effectively, she had a sickle placed over her neck, not like laid over her as if like this was her battle weapon and she was laid to rest of it, which would have been also very badass, but speared over her on either end so that you can imagine that if she lifted her neck, her head would have been cut off.

These sorts of physical booby traps along with more symbolic bits of protective magic, which to be clear the padlock around the big toe probably was. They definitely could have more effectively chained her bones up and they just locked up her big toe. So that was probably more of a little protective magic. Those things are generally accepted now as signs that the living feared the dead would rise. So in other words, they thought this lady was a vampire. I'm still so perplexed by the big toe.

Such a detail, such a detail. Yeah, I also had questions about that. I was like, even if it's not like they're chaining up the whole corpse, even if it is symbolic, you'd think like at least get like a good, a good grip on an ankle. The big, anyway, who knows? Maybe they thought toes were particularly important in this small village. in Poland in vampire maneuvering. Yeah. I don't know. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. Um, you know, protective magic gets really funny.

People, people fixate on some, um, some fascinating things like toes. I'm not here to judge. It's not surprising, though, that people were spooked and intrigued by this story. Um, the first thing I saw about it because I was taking a little break from, um, the 24-hour news cycle when happened with somebody on TikTok being like, this girl boss, they were so afraid of her. They put a sickle over her neck. Let her go. Let her robe free. And I was like, I'm not surprised that people are so jazzed about this.

But it's worth noting that it's very unlikely that this woman did anything particularly menacing or even vaguely supernatural to inspire those fears in the people who buried her. The archaeologist who found her noticed that she had a very prominently protruding front tooth. And they were like, maybe that was enough to make her a suspicious figure to her neighbors. And it's not, I mean, this is all pure speculation. This is just me telling stories. But you can imagine like a rich, like the kind of witchy, independent rich lady who lives

down the lane with a snaggle tooth and everybody like leaves her bee. But then when she dies, they're like, that lady was definitely like a something that was up with her. So anyway, we do see throughout history that being an independent woman makes one more likely to be pegged as generally malevolent, untrustworthy, in league with the devil, etc. But I really appreciated that tooth detail, even though it was like maybe totally unrelated to what happened to this particular woman. We have no way of knowing for sure without more records or more indicators in her grave. because it gets out something really important about vampire burials. Yes, plural, because these happened with some frequency all over the world.

According to Stanley Stepanik, who's an expert on Slavic languages and literature from the University of Virginia, these beliefs and practices were common enough that there was an official ban on vampire burials in 14th century Serbian legal codes. Yeah, so somebody thought they were a real issue. And they show up outside of Eastern Europe too. I saw one interesting explanation for why so many of these things are in Poland and surrounding areas, which was that like until people in Slavic areas started converting to Christianity, which is around the 7th century, all of their dead were cremated. that was part of that regional pagan belief system.

So it totally makes sense that the very concept of like putting your dead people in the ground like whole was just like really off putting to them. And that that might have created this scenario where people were just very primed to be like, but if you don't bird them, what if they just come back? Which, to be fair, given how little we knew about the human body in the seventh century, I think it's a really, if you've never kept dead bodies around before. It's a valid thought. It's a really like, how do we know? Well, and I bet some people did come back because maybe they weren't dead.

And then they're like in this, yeah, they claw themselves out of the grave and everyone's like, holy. Yeah, all it takes is one time where like somebody is about to go on the ground. You're like, oh, like, ah. And then, you know, again, all takes us one time. But yeah, so we see this happening probably more frequently than most people would expect. So in 2014, for example, in another Polish village, dozens of miles away from the one I just mentioned, researchers found five sets of human remains with a similar sickle setup. And there's been some controversy around this.

Some researchers think that those individuals were immigrants and others say that like they were locals. And the reason that matters is because like it does seem likely that sometimes fear of outsiders played into the fear of the vampire. I'll get into that a little bit more later. So that expert on Slavic language I mentioned previously from the University of Virginia, I read an interview where he talked about the word Melsferatu, which is now, you know, ubiquitous vampire term. Sometimes people will say, oh, that translates to like person who brings disease. And he was like, not true, debunk, but it's more complicated, but more interesting than that. That term has been showing up in vampire lore since the 1800s.

And it's actually thought to be an incorrect transliteration of the Romanian word, Nesuferet, which literally means the inseparable one, which sounds a lot sillier. But he says the way it's often used evokes the idea of someone who is unclean, which of course could mean someone who carries disease, but could also mean, I've talked about this on Weirdest Thing before in our episode. where I talked about the Uncanny Valley, where there's a lot of indication that we have a very strong evolutionary drive to avoid pathogens. And that that may at least lay the groundwork for us kind of seeing people as either being in our group or out of our group. As I said on the episode about

the Uncanny Valley, some people tend to like really run away with this idea and use it as an explanation for like why people are horrible racist. And I'm like, you know, uh, what other things we evolved to do is to like not stand on high buildings. We do that all the time. It really seems like you, you know, you cannot use your lizard brain and, and get over that. But anyway, it does make sense that like it, it was healthy to evolve a sense of like, I understand what my, um, exposure bubble is from day to day. And when a stranger comes into town, and they're, you know, coughing. Maybe we should be wary of them.

But, you know, wary can mean staying six feet away, not thinking they're a vampire. So that's all. I like to jump to the like worst possible scenario. Yeah, I mean, fair enough, fair enough. Some other examples of vampire graves that, again, make it seem like it may have been about a fear of disease, which is really understandable. I mean, disease still freaks us out, and we know what bacteria and viruses are now.

And at this time, people really had absolutely no idea what was going on, what was causing an outbreak. So there's this spooky Italian cemetery from around the fifth century known as Le Necropole de Babini, which is the children's cemetery, the baby cemetery. And it's all children from an era of a malaria, epidemic and there are a couple of children there, 10 and 3 years old, who are weighed down with stones. There's another Italian vampire with a mouthful of stones in a plague grave.

And I've actually seen historians argue that this practice, which was like blaming the epidemic on one of the first people who died and trying to do some kind of protective magic to like keep them from emerging from the grave and spreading it, which is like what they thought was happening. Um, I've seen historians argue that this was actually like for the time a very humane and reasonable way of dealing with the fear and panic around disease because you were blaming someone who had already died as opposed to like burning someone at the stake being like this person is making everyone sick. And I, I found that. Uh, I was like, that is something to think about is all relative. Um, but I will say that while obviously these like super ostentatious vampire burials

and rituals are the ones. ones that are the most fun to talk about. People were actually killed because their neighbors thought they were parasitic blood drinkers in 1144 in Norwich, England. We see the first recorded instance of blood libel, which is this still very pervasive extant belief that Jews ritually murder Christian children and drink their blood. And in 1190, Crusaders passed through that same town and massacred 17 Jews, many of them children and threw them down a well. These individuals have since been identified as Ashkenazi

Jews and given a proper respectful burial. And the studies on their genes have actually taught us a lot about the Ashkenani lineage. There was actually a new report on their genetic markers just a few weeks ago. And you don't have to look too closely at like the 18th, 19th and early 20th century vampire tropes to see like a lot of anti-Semitism. So I'm just, that little aside is just just to say, maybe see a connection there and think about, yes, we do see these burials of people who seem to have been like still respected as members of the community. And they were like, it's not their fault. They died. And now we just have to keep them in their graves. But similar beliefs were actually quite dangerous for people who are alive and, you know, kind of harness

these fears of the other, the idea of someone who was like leaching off of. you and stealing your vitality. And there were actual vampire epidemics, or so historians call them, the great vampire epidemic of the 18th century, was when the idea of vampires like really entered the zeitgeist and became like a downright common explanation for the spread of disease. It may have been tied to pelagra, which is a condition caused by a vitamin B3 deficiency. It had a lot of the same kind of like sensitivity of sunlight, you know, wasting away, bad breath, which is definitely a vampire trope. And that would have arisen as more of Europe started to live primarily on corn because the B3 in corn is not inherently bioavailable. Fun fact, in Mesoamerica,

where corn originated, people prepared maize in an alkaline solution like ashy water. which makes its vitamin B3 bioavailable. So it means you can basically live on it and it's super healthy. Europeans who took the corn back to Europe apparently did not get the memo. They were probably like, why do they keep washing it in ashy water gross? And so they all got this horrible disease, which I kind of feels a little fair. But anyway, now we know that about corn. So fun fact.

But before the arrival of corn in Europe, diseases like rabies could have helped kind of shape the myths and then maybe, you know, the, I have seen a couple of historians say that maybe the spread of this kind of B3 deficiency may have like really triggered people to be like, oh, my gosh. And as for white people became so convinced that the dead were rising, some historians point to the fact that urbanization, like the Industrial Revolution coming on the horizon, meant that for the first time in human history, hundreds or even thousands of corpses were being crammed into cemeteries

that sat right next to bustling human settlements. Often in simple shrouds due to poverty. And so that meant people being like inadvertently disinterred by like scavenging animals or flooding was suddenly way more common than it had ever been before. So it may have just been that people were, The average every day person was more likely to like see a random corpse. Just randomly.

Oh, wow. Lucky them. Yeah. And several physicians of the era started spreading this idea that some of the corpses in question weren't decomposing as quickly as they should have. But it's generally accepted now that this was just because they didn't really know how decomposition works. They hadn't had a lot of opportunities to study it.

and they weren't really good at understanding small sample sizes. So they would just be like, there was a lot of confirmation bias where like somebody would think that there was a weird vampire epidemic. And they would be like, you have to look at this corpse because it just like popped up out of the ground. And they would be like, wow, yeah, you know what? This corpse does not look as rotten as I believe corpses should look. And they just like didn't know.

So it was all just not really based on much of anything. Now, the U.S. also had its own vampire panic, as promised, in the 1800s and like into the late 1800s, really recently. So there was an epidemic of tuberculosis in New England, and it got blamed on dead people literally draining the life out of the relatives they'd left behind. TB tends to spread within households, and it also takes a while before it causes symptoms. then those symptoms can, like, you know, worsen at really varying rates. So it seemed mysterious to people. It almost seemed like a curse.

Like somebody would die. And then like 10 years later, three more people in the household would die. And so there was a lot of people trying to just like figure out ways to explain why this was happening. And so the logical explanation as far as a bunch of people in New England were concern was that one person would die and then they would be leaching the life force of the rest of the household.

Natural conclusion. Absolutely. No, I will say that this wasn't like, by the time this was happening in New England, a lot of people were like, this is ridiculous. There's actually Thoreau wrote about this happening. And he was like, what the heck is going on with people? And I will say the same was true of, you know, the, the blood libel massacres that I talked about back in the 12th century, there were like, you know,

religious figures from a few cities away being like, what the heck are people doing? This is bananas. So, you know, nobody. At least there are some, yeah, voices of reason. Exactly. Yeah. I don't want anyone to. Yeah.

In my book, I was really careful to be like, we have a tendency to really dunk on people who came before us. And I do want to make it clear that this was not a universal belief, but in New England, it became a very common one. And one of the best documented cases was the exhumation of Mercy Brown in Rhode Island in 1892. Lots of podcasts have told her story. I actually just read Jude Ellison Doyle's book, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers, which is so good. It's about how the feminine has been treated in both crime and horror throughout history. And it's so good for anyone who likes sort of like feminist and gender studies or also just likes horror and like weird historical stuff.

But Jude talks about Mercy Brown a little bit, which was very exciting to me because I was already thinking about talking about her on the show. And yeah, so Mercy, what's interesting, she was actually the third member for Family to dive consumption. which, you know, seems to not follow the logic of how this was supposed to work. But when the local doctor dug all of their corpses up, she was the one who seemed suspiciously intact because she had literally just died. The other two people had died like years before. And she had also been kept in a freezing crypt for two months.

So like, yeah, of course she hadn't started decomposing. She was frozen, but, you know, people just didn't know anything. and they like to pretend they knew a lot. Isn't that just how the world is? So to save her brother Edwin, the village actually took her heart and liver and burned them and mixed them into a tonic for him to drink. It did not work.

He died of consumption two months later. He had very bad tuberculosis and drinking old organs was not going to make him any better. So that, those are the story of, the kind of recent vampire epidemics as we know them. And yeah, I mean, I think it's fascinating that like vampires are a thing we like continue to fixate on. And I mean, like one of my favorite shows is what we do in the shadows. I love that we have come to a place where vampire comedy is a thing.

And, you know, I like to hope that maybe that's because we are like, a little less afraid of the other and the unknown. And now it's sexy and funny when someone is really different from you, which is as it should be. But that's just my little woke take on the evolution of the vampire myth. But yeah, people are spooky. What can I say? Fact is often a lot scarier than fiction. So just think about the plague the next time you watch Twilight.

The next time. Because once wasn't enough. All right, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts. Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? And talking about mood.com, they have an incredible line of cannabis gummies and a lot more. and you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com with promo code weirdest. I'm not a smoker myself, but I do love the occasional weed gummy to, you know, help me go off to Dreamland, and I can't have one right now because I have a new kit,

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Do you all remember animorphs? Of course. Sorry, I was drinking soda. Of course I got really excited. Of course I remember animorphs. No, I don't. Yes. Oh, okay. Well, I will give you, yes. So I grew up reading and watching Animorphs and looking back, it should have honestly been categorized as like horror science fiction. So I found it really fitting to kind of introduce my segment with this anecdote. So for those who don't know, Anamorphs was a book series in the late 90s that was also adapted into a TV show where these kids essentially had the power to transform into animals by touching them. But they had these powers in order to fight this

alien villain species called the Yerks, which are these parasitic gray slug-like creatures and their sort of method of taking over the planet was by being parasites that would wriggle through your ear canal and like meld itself to the brain to take over control of the human host. Oh my God, that's like my worst nightmare. I remember the scene from one of the episodes of the TV show where one of them wriggled in and it really haunts me and it's not even like that's like a unique horror trope like the Matrix has the wriggly worm um con gets a wriggly worm situation in star trek um but the one in animorphs I think was just so unexpected that was a children's TV show exactly like you're not

expecting it and it just it sticks with you and now you're asking your parents for ear plugs at night and they're like why it's not loud and they're like you're like the worms obviously the worms exactly the parasitic worms that are going to take over my brain um yes so that also stuck with me as a child uh but now as an adult i know that at least to my knowledge there aren't actual worms that climb into human ears attached to brains but uh this does uh there are actual real life parasites that do this kind of mind control over other types of organisms. And people and popular media like in animorphs call these parasites zombie parasites because they often turn their hosts into walking brain dead creatures,

which it felt appropriate to talk about during Halloween. But in parasitology, this is often known as host manipulation, where a parasite essentially alters the host's behavior in often self-destructive ways that ultimately benefits the parasite. And there are a whole bunch of these parasites that utilize this method to do a variety of helpful things. So they do this to travel to more favorable habitats, to get food, to reproduce,

or to complete part of their life cycles. So I've got a roundup of some of my favorites. Many of the ones that I'm going to list, actually I wrote about in a previous story for Public Radio Science Friday, where I actually interviewed a parasitologist Tommy Lung, Oh, fun. Who also writes this really great, yeah, really great blog called Parasite of the Day.

I highly recommend checking it out. It goes beyond just zombie parasites. And then I also found some more parasites in our own archives. So I'll dive right in. And since we've got worms on the brain from my little animorph throwback, I couldn't resist myself. I'm going to start off with the one that I teased out earlier, which is called a nomadermorph worm, more commonly known as the horsehair worm. So these are pretty thin but quite long worms and they can grow, which I found out, this blows my mind,

they can grow up to four feet in length in their final adult stage. Yeah, and that all manages to get wrapped up inside a tiny little cricket. But before we get to the crickets, the horsehair worm's life actually begins as an egg in a body of water like a stream or like, usually, to my knowledge, it's freshwater bodies. And then once they hatch into larvae, they get eaten by a mayfly larvae. And those are actually their first host. So this is a parasite that has multiple hosts. It'll latch onto the insides of the mayfly until the mayfly turns into an adult.

And then, you know, they'll fly off to land where they become prey to crickets. And so in this, once the cricket basically eats the mayfly, hopefully it does. in this new found host, the worms will grow and coil themselves up inside the digestive track of the cricket. And so it basically is growing inside there. And it will eat the cricket meat and fat from the inside out to the point where the poor little cricket even loses its chirp. But the horsehair actually needs this cricket alive in order to move on to its next stage of life. So it'll boost chemicals in the cricket's brain to force it to kind of mindlessly amble to a body of water. And the crickets, unsurprisingly, are not known for swimming.

So if they happen to land into water, they'll easily become, you know, bait to fish. And the moment, you know, they fling themselves into water and they hit the surface, the horsehair will begin to, like, emerge from the cricket's rear end. sometimes crickets can carry multiple horsehair worms. So like, okay, so if you watch videos of this, it's a little disturbing. This is horrifying. Yeah. I do recommend watching the video because I find it fascinating for me personally.

There's a really great video by Deep Look, KQED's Deep Look, which shows like multiple horsehair worms emerging from these crickets. But actually, it's interesting because if the crickets, some of the crickets, some survive drowning in the water, they'll, they could walk away from this parasitic relationship totally unscathed. Oh, wow. Also, I was like, that's pretty great for a cricket, like, if you can survive that sort of traumatic experience of carrying that parasite. Then they have to go to therapy, cricket therapy. Yeah, right? Getting rid of like a four-foot-long worm out of your body doesn't sound like a... When you're a cricket. Long cricket. Yeah. I would need therapy

after getting rid of a four foot long person. I'm a five foot four, five foot five foot five person. Exactly. Yeah. No. When I found out about these things, I was, I was just like, I can't believe something like this exists. But it's really kind of an incredible way of living life, I suppose. Okay, so moving on. The next parasite I have, this is another one of my favorites because the images of this one is quite silly to me. So there's a nematode. parasite that requires, again, multiple hosts in order for it to grow and reproduce. So the first host, it will begin by infecting a specific species of ant, and it will change the color of this ant's abdomen from black to a bright red color. It will then, like, manipulate

the ant to, like, raise its butt into the air, which, again, look up pictures of this, because to me, it looks kind of silly. And when the ant does this, the kind of cherry red abdomen is mistaken for a berry to birds. And so a bird will hopefully ultimately eat the ant, along with the nematode, and the parasite will then lay its eggs inside the bird's digestive track, which ultimately are hopefully pooped out, and then the process repeats itself. To my knowledge, the parasites don't hurt the birds, but fortunately for the aunt, the aunt gets eaten. So that's kind of an unfortunate demise. So there's more like ant parasite relationships that I've stumbled upon. So the next one that I found out about, which is probably perhaps like the most

famous one, is the cordyceps fungus. I don't know if either of you've heard about this one. Yes. Yes. But that's just because I'm a fungus nerd. The fungus among us. Yes. So this one is pretty famous because it inspired the zombie video game, The Last of Us, for any of you who enjoy playing video games. I haven't played it, but I love storytelling, immersive horror video games. And I believe in the story, it's a mutated form of this fungus that basically causes all the zombie mayhem in the story. So in real life, the cordisups fungus can infect the ants, infect ants, and possess them

to walk to an ideal spot in a forest for reproducing and spreading. The fungus will kill the ant by bursting this massive, budding, fruiting body structure from the skull of the ant and releases out the spores. And the carcasses that are left behind are these sort of haunting, desiccated ants that are frozen in this like crusted over brown like kind of fungus. And sometimes they still have these like stalks on their heads. Again, the images of this are are very incredible. I highly recommend. Oh my God.

And there turns out to be actually a number of fungi species that that do this similar kind of parasitic relationship, sort of, you know, raising, I guess, corpses from the dead and making them do things. in his parasite blog, Tommy Long wrote about another fungi that targets millipedes in a very similar way by like basically infecting the host and proliferating, changing the millipedes behavior, and then like bursting out in these like kind of puffy fungal like growths. And then like, you know, doing the whole cycle again.

So fun, fun stuff. And he also noted and interesting too that it's not just fungi that do this, but there's certain viruses that also do this in caterpillars and stuff. So behavior of manipulation is like really common in the, in wildlife, apparently. Isn't toxoplasmosis Gandhi like another one of those? That's the next one I was going to talk about. Okay. That's the only one I know because we have cats and I'm just like, I'm being manipulated.

Thank you. That was like perfect segue. That was actually the next one that I was going to talk about. It's the second, the next one on my list. So yeah, so this one actually I feel like perhaps like cat owners might know about. So I didn't know about this one until like I was looking through our archives for like more parasites that do this sort of like mind controly behavior. And so yeah, so Neil Patel wrote about toxoplasma Gandhi, which hopefully I think I'm pronouncing that

correctly, which is the famous like cat parasite. And it's a parasitic bacteria that's known to reproducing cats and is transmitted through their poop. So any warm blooded animal, including humans, can get infected if they come in close contact with this parasite-filled poop. And the parasite, though, is more famously known for altering the behavior of rats and mice by making them, like, less scared of cats. And studies found that the infected mice are even attracted to cat urine, which

increases the odds that it'll be, like, lured in to the predator and eaten. In other animals, toxoplasma, Gandhi, can cause brain cysts and can alter levels of certain neurotransmitters and hormones, which result in, like, change judgment and personality and can also impact mental health. But before like cat owners like freak out, there's actually no scientific evidence that has been linked to these biological, biochemical changes or symptoms in humans. It should be noted though that there's some studies in scientists that say that pregnant and immunocompromise people, as well as babies are at risk of developing fatal taxoplasmosis from the parasite. But most people don't even realize that they're carrying this parasite. So don't freak out.

if you're a cat owner and you are you're exposed to this like parasite-filled poop, you're most likely fine. But I found that the like the whole rat and mice manipulation thing, like that like definitely was so fascinating. I was like, what? I did not know about this. It was very, very interesting. Okay.

So my last one, my last example, which I feel is very Halloween and I'll close out, are parasitic wasps. There's one particular parasitic wasp that turns caterpillars into zombie-like bodyguards. So the wasp will impregnate the caterpillar with dozens of its eggs, and it triggers the caterpillar to essentially cease moving. And then the eggs will eventually hatch inside the caterpillar. And these, like, again, videos. Watch the videos of this. The wormy larvae will, like, wriggle out from this, like, poor caterpillar's body.

And as this is happening, like, the caterpillar will actually thrash around. not from pain, apparently. It's supposedly to ward off predators that might otherwise snap up and eat the larvae, which I find that was like really fascinating to me. I don't know. There's another wasp, the tarantula hawk wasp, which I think is pretty well known. It does something very similar to spiders, but the larvae will actually eat the spider host from like the inside out while the spider is like paralyzed and alive. And if any of this sounds familiar, it's likely because this behavior is found in one of my favorite movies of all time, Alien. I don't know if you all are a fan.

I love that franchise. It's probably like one of my all-time favorite, like, science fiction movies, science fiction horror movies. If you haven't seen it, there's the alien, which requires a host, and it's the whole chest-bursting creature, parasite. It's a great movie. It's a great movie for Halloween. I highly recommend.

I guess they're to, like, conclude my, like, listical. of zombie parasites. So like it's very easy, I think, to be grossed out and freaked out by, by them. But you really don't have to be afraid for the most part. Many of these species won't ever affect you. Several of the parasites that I mentioned are actually host specific. I personally find parasitic relationships really fascinating. And biologists are actually learning a lot about evolution and ecological relationships

from these very interesting and really clever, sometimes gruesome means of survival. So while the thought of like, you know, losing your free will like an animorphs might seem like entirely terrifying, it's a really fascinating trait that parasites have evolved in order to survive and thrive. So that's my little shout out to parasites and also parasitologists for all their hard work. Also, the insect world is metal. Yes. Agreed. I'm a big insect fan too. Insects and parasites. I'm on team insects and parasites. I'm on team insects and parasites. I know that there are always, you know, evolutionary psychologists who are like, what if some of the viruses we get affect our behavior? And a lot of it is just like purely speculative. But you know what really freaks me out is how rabies makes you hydrophobic. So for listeners who don't know when you exhibit rabies symptoms, which is really bad news, because like once you start exhibiting symptoms.

There really isn't any courts of action other than like trying to trying to just keep you from dying. So get go to a doctor if anything ever bites you. Get that taken care of. Get that looked at. Asap because we have a rabies vaccine. If you get it as soon as something bites you, you'll be totally fine and isn't that great.

But what's really freaky is that one of the many symptoms, is that people can't swallow. And it's not just that it hurts to swallow or they can't physically do it, but people will sometimes develop this like really intense, like spasming physical and emotional reaction to the idea of swallowing. So you'll see these videos of people who are exhibiting hydrophobia, like trying to bring a cup of water to their lips. and like trembling in what looks like terror.

And the reason, it's fascinating and terrifying and like confusing that it creates such an intense, like full body and sometimes emotional response. But the reason behind it is that if you have more saliva in your mouth, when you bite someone, you're more likely to pass rabies to them. No, of course, humans don't go biting each other when they have rabies. even if they like get um aggressive or confused like we just don't not the primary motive normal list of behaviors so even when you're aggressive and confused and you know it's just very unlikely that you're going to go chomp someone but you know a dog like a dog biting is part

of their normalistic behaviors so when they're freaked out and aggressive they will probably bite and yeah it's that collection of saliva that helps um rabies transmit. So, yeah, we do some, there are like a few creepy examples of like host behavior control in humans. And rabies is the one that like really freaks me out. Even though it's kind of, it's funny because it's like not really, it's, it's something that like doesn't actually really help rabies, given modern human behavior.

But we still get the freaky side effects of it. So that's, yeah. That's, yeah, that's wild, yeah. Well, on that cheery note, we'll take a quick break. And be right back with some more facts. Lots of places can expose you to identity theft. Oh, no. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second

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millions of deals on flights, hotels, hotel, and rental cars, you can go see the game live. Don't just dream about the trip. Book it with Priceline. Download the Priceline app or visit Priceline.com. Actual prices may vary, limited time offer. Okay, we're back, and I want to hear about Bigfoot, please. Doesn't everyone want to hear about Bigfoot?

And even if they don't, they're going to. So, in 2006, I was working at NPR in Washington, D.C. and I was flipping through the Washington Post, reading the news, catching up on all that good D.C. gossip. And I came across this article that was titled, Using His Cranium, Grover Crance's last wish was to remain with his friends, and he has. Krantz, huh? That is my last name. So I keep reading, and the article includes all these fun facts that Rachel, you are now going to really appreciate. The guy had signed up to let his body decay at the Tennessee Body Farm. I love that. And for people who don't know, this is a place where they'll leave bodies in the trunk of a car or in water or out in the hot sun to figure out how a corpse decomposes differently depending on the circumstances.

And then all that info gets used in forensics, which is both creepy and kind of awesome. And helps keep us from being like, oh, that body decomposed wrong so they're a vampire. Exactly. Look how much we learned. Coming full circle. Yeah. When you said that, I was like, oh, she's going to like this. So that was the first sort of strange thing.

And then he also made plans for after this whole decomp thing for his skeleton and the skeletons of his three Irish wolfhounds, which, FYI, were already dead. He'd just kept the bones. Thank you for him. Yeah, I just wanted to make sure people knew he wasn't a dog murderer. So he made arrangements for all these skeletons to go to the Smithsonian for their collection. And then on top of that, he was a scientist. He was a tenured professor. He taught physical anthropology and human evolution at Washington State University,

where he was very well liked by all of his former students and many of his colleagues. And then finally, there's this paragraph at the end of the article that's kind of buried in there. It is amazing, and I'm going to read it to you verbatim. Krantz was a legend in anthropology circles and semi-famous in the wider world, too, as the eccentric professor who drove around the Pacific Northwest with a spotlight and a rifle searching for Sass. Squatch. I mean, yeah, that's the kind of writing that has you doing a double take. So this guy's a professor. He is a scientist. He was out in the woods looking for Bigfoot. And I started to wonder at that point if somewhere in my childhood I had missed some sort of

important fact that said Bigfoot was actually real. Because at the time, I definitely thought that Bigfoot was just sort of a big joke, you know, a campfire myth, a source of some truly delightful tabloid headlines. like I'm having Bigfoot's baby. But now I'm confused. And I'm intrigued. And I still wondered if we were related because this guy was from the Salt Lake City area,

which is where my dad's family was from. So I asked my dad, who asked my grandfather, who was like, yeah, he was my cousin. He used to show up at the family picnics with calipers and measure everybody's head. So, you know, scientists from the earliest days. And also when my grandfather, who was several years older,

was going through medical school at the University of Utah, he smuggled out the hand of a skeleton to give to Grover because he knew Grover was so fascinated by anatomy. My family is fun. Anyway, the point is, I'm related to this guy, and this is all background for where I'm getting to. I'm related to this guy who I come to learn is not just a scientist who is looking for Bigfoot,

but the scientist who is looking for Bigfoot. And it turns out he'd been the kind of, country's preeminent academic expert on the topic and was considered one of the four horsemen of Sasquatchery. This is the lesser-known relative of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. This is getting so wild. This by itself gives me tons of fodder for cocktail party conversations, as you can imagine. And for years, I trot these little facts out all the time. I've got a relative in the Smithsonian. No, he doesn't work there. He's just his bones. He believed in Bigfoot, like all this kind of stuff.

But I knew I wanted to do more with the story. I just didn't know what. And then 10 years later, the opportunity presents itself when I learned that Grover's fourth wife, number four, lived about 30 minutes from me in Colorado. And I was like, I'm going to go talk to her and see if there's something more there to explore, which there was. And that became the backbone. This whole, like, relative scientist, Bigfoot guy is the backbone for the first season

of my podcast, which is wild thing. which in turns becomes the backbone for this middle grade nonfiction book that's out in October called The Search for Sasquatch. Nonfiction, you're saying, and you're raising your eyebrow. You're like, hmm, hear me out. I know there is no scientifically accepted evidence that Bigfoot is out there roaming around the woods at the Pacific Northwest or any other state for that matter, except Hawaii. It's too far to swim.

I interviewed a lot of people from scientists to squatchers, as they call themselves, to skeptics, to superfans. And I'm not going to go into all the gory details, but I will say that where I used to be sure there was no such thing as Bigfoot, I've altered my stance just a little bit. Because basically, while I'm not sure Bigfoot currently exists, there's nothing that says Bigfoot couldn't have done so in the past. And I'm going to give you a couple of examples that are kind of grounded in reality here. that might make you think a little differently about this phenomenon as well. First off, how many of you are familiar with the gorilla? Raise your hands. Sure, yeah.

So for thousands of years, since the ancient Greeks, the gorilla was considered a myth. Like there were stories of this that showed up in some of the Homeric poems. There was like stuff in ancient Greece that talked about this like hairy wild man in Africa. And everyone was like, total myth, totally made up. you could get yourself kicked out of the Royal Academy of London if you showed any interest in looking for this creature in Africa. It was a joke and so were you for even considering the idea. So then in the mid-1840s, a European naturalist gets a hold of some bones that confirm the animal's existence. Ignore the fact that the locals knew that the gorilla was out there.

They were like, this is literally here. this but yeah we've seen it if we had a camera we take photos that that technology doesn't exist yet but it's totally there and they're like no you don't know what you're talking about anyway so then another decade goes by before an explorer by the name of paul duchayou managed um he manages to hunt down and kill an actual specimen poor gorilla uh and then he ships it back to europe people go ape uh they crowd into museums. They write songs about it. There was a gorilla ballet. And everyone was like so excited about this because here's this creature that all these serious scientists, that anyone who was like respected in the sort of educated crowd, they said it was totally mythical. And then when,

it's actually real. So if the gorilla, this is what gives Bigfoot people a lot of hope. If the gorilla could hide for a millennia, why couldn't Bigfoot? And there are, all these like eyewitness accounts, stories, myths, and legends about a big hairy ape-like creature that have been handed down over generations, similar to like the guerrilla stories, have been handed down for thousands of years. They come from indigenous peoples in the Pacific Northwest, other parts of the U.S., as well as other countries, Russia, China, parts of Europe. So you can see why there's some parallels there and why people are like, okay, Bigfoot could still be out there. I'm not sure I'm in the camp of Bigfoot is still out there. But,

But there's something to be said for hearing the same story from a lot of different people in different places for like hundreds of years. So, for example, there are all these tales about giant floods from all over the world in the Bible, the Quran, ancient Mesopotamia, South America, Australia, India. And it turns out that there might be an element of truth in all of them. geologists have found evidence that around 10,000 years ago, when the Earth was much cooler, there were these enormous dams made of ice. And then when those broke, it caused these huge floods. There's also evidence that when large meteors from space hit Earth's oceans, they caused giant waves and floods. So you see where the background for all of those flood myths being sent by God kind of come from.

And events like those have been a reason that those stories get passed. down over the generations. So my thought is, you know, where there's smoke, there's a fire, and it could be true for Bigfoot as well. So even if Bigfoot isn't around now, there might have been some sort of creature like this that existed in the distant past and the stories were handed down. This is all speculation. I just want to put that out there. And dear, dear cousin Grover knew that without a body or a big piece of a body or now DNA, although he didn't have access to that back when he was doing his research. There's no scientifically acceptable proof that Bigfoot exists or existed.

To be clear, Grover did consider Bigfoot to be a flesh and blood creature. There's a lot of people who were like, Grover or Bigfoot is a time traveler who, when the parallel dimensions are very close to what another and the fabric is very thin, he will pass through. And I'm not sure I buy that one. I can definitely imagine. like fierce subdivisions of the Bigfoot community, where they're the people who have like a very, the very like reasonable, open minded sort of approach you just outlined very eloquently. And they're like, please stop talking about us in the same breath as the people who think

he's an interdimensional time traveler. Yeah, 100%. And that's like a big point of contention. and Grover put up with a lot of people who were like, you know, I saw one, it talked to me in English, it lives in my basement. He's like, he was like very polite about it and sort of listen to their stories because you never knew if there was going to be someone who had something truly useful. So yeah, he really did think Bigfoot was a flesh and blood creature, one beholden to the same laws of physics and biology as the rest of us. And, you know, he thought there was a full breeding population because you couldn't have one Bigfoot that lasted like thousands of years. it would have to be, you know, male and female big foots and baby big feats.

And, like, you know, he thought this species was possibly related to a species of ancient orangutang found in China known as Gigantapithecus. So he's not romantic about this at all. And he told an audience at one point back in the 1970s that he just wanted to know the answer so he could move on with more important work. And his direct quote is, I do not particularly enjoy. the search for the Sasquatch. I would like to see the finish of the search, but the search itself, the activity, mystery, the intrigue, the romance of it. I find it a little bit of a drag,

and I've got other things to do. I've got a regular profession of studying human evolution. He says that, though, but then he keeps doing this up until 2001, 2001, 2000, I can't remember 2001 or 2002. I think he doth protest. Yeah, just a little too much. So, like, he did it, he was, he focused on it for the rest of his life, along with the other stuff he was doing. But he truly was fascinated by this possibility. I think he saw it as an opportunity to sort of see how evolution had changed and see sort of like an earlier version of humans and where we might have split off and like what that looked like, just from a purely evolutionary anthropology perspective. So, but ultimately, Grover was a man of science and so much so that this is a nice little end cap to this, he continues to teach to this. this day, his bones and the bones of his favorite dog, Clyde, ended up on display in the Smithsonian's

National Museum of Natural History, and you can go see them to this day. And it's this, it's based on a photo of Grover in someone's backyard with the dog on its hind legs, with its paws on his shoulder, and they recreated that exact photo with the skeletons. So anyway, long story short, the point of the book, and I think of Bigfoot in general, is giving you the ability to explore this gray area between myth and science. And yes, you need to use the scientific method and think critically. And that's what I talk about in the book. And that's what I'm kind of encouraging kids to do.

But you also have to kind of be open-minded enough to consider the possibility of Bigfoot or at least why Bigfoot might be important to us, even if we don't find him, her, they, it, the tribe of Big Feet. And this kind of gets back to your point earlier, Rachel, about the other. Because, you know, from a psychological standpoint and from a human standpoint, we have always sort of defined ourselves as like being, you know, inside the castle wall protected from the evil of like Grendel or some of the other big monsters that have defined our existence. Like that's, we're fighting against that. And I think Bigfoot, maybe he's not evil,

but there's still that element of like, there's this thing out there and it's different from us. And he's blurry. Yeah, he's so blurry. Unbelievable blurry. I mean, I think like, I do really appreciate the like very like open minded pragmatic reflection on the idea of Bigfoot because while it is pretty out there and like not very likely at all based on all available evidence that there is like this thing that's still out there hiding, ducking in and out of people's photos. it is like actually extremely likely that sometime in relatively recent speaking in like, you know, the last 10,000 year mark human history, there was something like this that got these stories started. And, you know, there was a time like during, I'm only 30. And I remember, you know, being a kid old enough to watch like poorly made. infotainment documentaries on the history channel. And it was like, yeah.

And Neanderthals barely overlapped with humans and we immediately beat them out. And that's how, you know, humans were pretty much the only humans the whole time that we've existed and blah, blah, blah. And now we know there were like lots of species of human living at the same time, including at the same time as our current species and it even like, you know, has really stretched our definition of what it's fair to call a species because there was lots of intermingling. So all of that makes me feel like it is actually like really not unreasonable that, again, if we're talking thousands of years in the past, there was like some other hominid that people were

like, oh yeah, you got to stay away from that big hairy guy. Yeah. Well, and you know, you make a good point. Like at one point that they know of, there were at least eight hominid species that occupied Earth at the same time. And those are the ones we know about. We're constantly finding new fossils and new species. You know, within the past few years, there have been the Denisovans, which were found

in cave in Russia. There's Homo Noletti, which was found in Africa. There's Homo Floresienzis. This is found on the island of. Java. And those are the ones we found fossils for. And if you stop to think about it, it's very hard to become a fossil in many ways, because you've got to die in the right place at the right time, with the right conditions. You have to be buried by the right kind of material. And then that material has to erode away. And someone has to find you and be careful enough removing you that

you're not damaged. I mean, if you start to think about all the things that go into becoming a fossil, there's a lot of things that we don't know about in our history that are kind of kind of interesting to think about. I love it. That is so fun. I, yeah, I had the chance to go on a Sasquatch hunt once, but it was from a strange man who messaged me on Facebook, and he made it very clear that if I didn't go,

it would be because I was a member of the lamestream media who was afraid of learning the truth. and I thought I am 22 years old and I don't know you and you want me to get in your van. So yeah, I am afraid of doing that. Actually. But, you know, maybe who knows? Maybe I missed my chance to. Well, I have some sources.

If you really want to do one, I know a very nice woman in Oregon who will happily take you out there. That sounds so much better. I will seriously consider it. I love that. I definitely, I will definitely have to check out the book. Remind me again what it's called. It is called, let me show it again, The Search for Sasquatch.

It's so pretty, too. It is pretty. There's all kinds of like really nice illustrations in it, not a blurry photo to be seen. Did that on purpose. Wow. So what was the weirdest? Spookyest thing we learned.

Oh, the bugs, hands down. That's going to haunt my nightmares, my dreams. Like, I'm just, every bug I look at, I'm going to be like, are you evil? Are you evil? Yeah, I agree. Oh, I was going to say vampires because I feel like I just learned so much interesting stuff about history and disease. And just like perceptions of humans and stuff. Like particularly the language bits also like we're really fascinating to me.

Oh yeah. Just how much can be lost in translation. But I also love parasites too. So I have to take the win. I'm sorry. But I do. Thank you so much. I am glad you enjoyed the vampire tale.

And Laura, thank you so much for joining and sharing your Sasquatch lore. And I hope that listeners will, check out your book and of course your podcast Wild Thing, which also gets into a lot more detail on this. Yeah. Well, thank you for having me again. This was a lot of fun and very spooky. And I'm going to gently remove all bugs from my house. I won't kill them, but they are going to get evicted. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms. So subscribe wherever you're listening now. And if you like what you hear, please, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. It helps other weirdos find the show. For more information on the stories you heard in this episode, come find us at popsai.com slash weird. You can buy our

merch, including Weirdest Thing t-shirts, tote bags, and mugs at popsai.threadlist.com. The show is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, with editing and audio engineering by Jess Bodee. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening, Weirdos. comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building.

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