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It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature, part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24 mile long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland.
It’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
As promised in our flashback last week, Karen and Matt are here with a recap of their trip to England.
If you live in England, you probably saw them, based on all the stops they made.
So let’s get on to some vicarious village vacationing with the veridical voices of Karen and Matt.
You know, Monster Talk.
welcome back uh you guys uh globetrotters that you are uh i was only i was late to the but there was so much going on here which i don’t want to get into but the uh uh i kind of lost track and then the next thing i knew i saw something
from some skeptic venues saying you guys were giving a talk.
And I think that was how I first became aware you were traveling.
But so what was this just a trip to the UK for promoting the book or was there something else going on or what happened?
Well, this was, I guess, predominantly summer vacation.
somewhere in our part of the world, but also a promotional tour for my new book.
So for Beyond Words, how we learn, use and lose language through Cambridge University Press.
So we had gone to the UK last year.
So we went back and it was a good reminder that everywhere in the UK is haunted.
Yes.
Reputedly has its myths and legends.
And some of them are very, very old.
So that was like the entire country of Savannah, Georgia.
It’s amazing.
And so we have Matt, too.
He’s here to to help go through this kind of summer roundup, I guess we’ll call it a summer summary.
Yeah, yeah, summer is summer.
I like that.
So one of the early things that we did, we went to Cambridge again and I gave a talk at the University Press bookstore and we gave a talk to the Cambridge Skeptics.
We’ll go into that in a minute, but as soon as we hit the ground…
We went to Chiswick House, which is known for the site where the Beatles recorded videos.
So before the days of MTV for the songs Rain and Paperback Writer, that was a kind of bucket list thing that our son wanted to do and for me too.
But then we shot straight over to Kent, which is really, really, really haunted apparently.
And we went to Hever Castle.
So for those who don’t know Piva Castle, it was the childhood home of Anne Boleyn and it’s said that she is still there after all of these centuries.
It is just an absolutely beautiful place.
Matt got some phenomenal photographs of the place and it’s said to be haunted by a number of restless spirits, unnamed, but the most famous person there or ghost there is said to be
that of Anne Boleyn, and people believe that she returns there to happier times of her life, and she crosses this beautiful bridge there across the River Eden.
we can use some photographs to supplement the show.
She was dating Henry VIII, is that right, when he got disillusioned with the church?
Am I remembering that right?
Yeah, I mean, that’s, I think, another show in and of itself.
But yes, I guess they would, you could call it dating, a modern term for the fact that, yeah, they…
There was a power imbalance, but that’s always true when you’re king.
Well, they were having a relationship.
I mean, there’s a lot of backstory.
He’d had a relationship with her sister, was one of his mistresses.
Long, long story, but he was disillusioned with his marriage to Catherine of Aragon because they hadn’t had a…
A living son.
And so he I think he thought that he would have the longed for son within Berlin.
And it’s a really long story that led to the dissolution of the monasteries and the Church of England.
So, yeah, definitely another story.
All the haunted skeletons of abbeys all over the UK or over England.
So, yeah.
Exactly, and we’ll get more into that too.
But certainly this is where he was wooing her, particularly near an old oak tree.
I couldn’t pinpoint the oak tree.
I’m assuming it was still around.
I mean, it’s possible.
Lots of oak trees there anyway.
But that was just really wonderful to get to visit the castle and to see that place.
I’ve wanted to see it for a very long time.
It was…
a couple of hundred years ago, bought up or in the early 20th century was bought up by the American millionaire, William Waldorf Astor.
So he turned into a kind of Tudor-style village of guest cottages.
No, we did not see Anne Boleyn with her head tucked under her arm, which is the kind of canonical ghost.
And there’s no real reason why she would be there anyway because she was executed in London, so not in Kent.
So we spoke about this topic with the Cambridge Skeptics, but she’s exactly the kind of person that we’d expect to haunt Peter Castle or to haunt a castle.
And a castle is exactly the kind of place that you’d expect to be haunted.
So, yeah, history really gives us this setting and folklore just writes the script in this case.
But it was just so beautiful.
And we actually stayed at the castle and had a fantastic breakfast there the next morning too.
So it’s really cool that you can go there and stay at the castle.
Now, one of the interesting things that I saw, to me, there are lots of sort of parallels to Great Britain, our trip to the UK, and the TARDIS.
And Hever Castle, I think, is one of those because Hever Castle does not look very big from the outside.
You see photos of it and it looks just like this amazing castle.
You go there and you’re like, really, that’s it?
It’s like the Alamo.
I was lost in the basement for hours.
There’s no basement at the Alamo.
Yeah, you get inside this castle and it is amazing.
Absolutely.
So, you know, I highly recommend it.
So many nooks and crannies and it goes higher and higher and higher and little hidden rooms.
Yeah, it’s definitely bigger on the inside than it appears to be on the outside.
Nooks and crannies always reminds me of…
What’s the ghost story, Henry James?
Turn of the Screw.
Good Lord, my stupid brain.
When I think about the estate in that story, I always think it has nooks and crannies for crooks and nannies.
Oh, nice.
I like that one.
There’s never going to be a perfect moment for that.
Always an imperfect moment.
What is an excellent use of a spoonerism, that’s for sure.
Very good.
But we want to touch upon quite a few places that we can do deeper dives into, some that we’ve already visited that we want to revisit as well.
So let’s move on to Pluckley Village in Kent.
Years ago we spoke to Hayley Stevens.
That’s right.
Oh, my gosh.
And I do think that we should revisit it at some point too.
Well, you just did.
I mean for AE to do a deeper dive.
Gotcha, gotcha.
We only visited it.
We didn’t revisit it.
That was 2017.
My gosh.
Oh, wow.
It seems like just yesterday.
It does.
Yeah.
That was episode 130.
Yeah.
But this is said to be the most haunted village in the UK and with lots of stiff competition as well.
But it’s ever growing and increasing in its number of ghosts because it used to be that they had 12 ghosts.
So we’ve spoken about the used-born books before, and that’s where I first heard about the story.
And now they say there are about 16 ghosts.
Wow.
So you have to have stiffs to have stiff competition and ghosts.
So there’s probably more dead people.
But I do love this little bit in the used-born book where they talk about –
the scepticism in the community there because they’re sick of people visiting and because of the reputation at the same time, that’s what attracts people there.
But in the book it says, the villagers do not agree as to whether the ghosts exist, but it seems unlikely that the village should get its reputation for no reason at all.
researchers point out that conflicting opinions about ghosts can often be a sign that they really do exist.
So I love that logic there.
That’s fantastic.
And they’ll still take your money, right?
Yeah.
Or take your money, right?
Absolutely.
So I’ll just run through a couple of quick haunted places there, and then Matt might want to comment on our visit there, but they’ve got the Screaming Woods.
So I love the names of these places.
There’s the Devil’s Bush.
There’s Fright’s Corner, a Screaming Man, a White Lady, Red Lady, a Lady of Rose Court, a Watercress Woman, and lots of haunted churches and haunted pubs, haunted by poltergeists and various spirits.
And we got to visit quite a few of these places.
Pluckley’s a little village, smaller than it used to be, but still quite big.
And, yeah, Matt, anything you wanted to say about Pluckley?
It was – I thought it was a lovely little village, really.
But it’s funny because we went to – one of the really haunted places there is a pub called the Black Horse.
And, you know –
They really are leaning into it.
You know, they have this blackboard next to the fireplace that says, come visit us at the Black Horse Pluckley, the most haunted village.
And it’s like, you know, kind of written in chalk.
And then they have like printouts of the history of Pluckley and all the ghost stories and everything.
And then they have another little blackboard in the back
um let me see if i can uh it sounds very katie perilous yes but uh it’s uh the the blackboard in the back is hangs hip and it says ghost corner uh take a seat and feel the chill so you can sit in the ghost corner and see if you can feel anything uh
It’s a very quaint little place.
Really enjoyed it.
Did not feel anything very haunted there, but I did enjoy they had a sign hanging out the front that said, nobody gets out sober.
Which…
Was true in our case.
Well, Blake got it.
This is off topic, but not off topic.
The pub food, like how is the food?
Because I love British pub food, but I don’t get to get it very often.
It is not…
quite what it used to be.
I mean, you’ve got your kind of traditional foods that a lot of pubs have.
Nowadays, there’s more of a kind of focus on, well, we serve Indian food.
Yeah, they have a curry.
Well, I mean, because of the whole British Raj, there’s a long history of the relationship between India and Britain.
Don’t even get me started on the history of chicken tikka masala, which is amazing.
Anyway, but that’s another story.
Probably not a monster talk story.
But it is another story.
Maybe it is, depending on how it affects you.
Yeah.
Yes.
Well said.
The places, the pubs, I mean, have really good food and they really do appeal to vegetarians, vegans, people who are gluten-free, people from all walks of life nowadays.
So it’s very different.
It’s not what it used to be with the kind of meat and three veg, you know, or shepherd’s pie or Yorkshire pudding.
I mean, they still have those kinds of favourites, but nowadays I think different pubs have different focuses.
We went to this pub in Pluckley and we were prepared to have some lunch, but they didn’t have anything that was available.
They only did sandwiches anyway.
So it really depends on the pub where it is.
London’s going to have a bit more of a kind of melting pot.
kind of flair but uh by and large pop food’s really good and i’m going to say this i’m going to say this people say english food is terrible i think american food sports i think english food isn’t that bad because it really it’s a melting pot and it’s supposedly the case here but uh you know often there’s just everything’s burritos and burgers here yeah you’re peter pandering what
Well, you know, British comedian Jimmy Carr was asked, why is British food so crap?
And he’s like, well, he’s like, it really depends on your perspective.
We have Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay, and you have, you know, Ronald McDonald and the Burger King.
So…
You know, really, when you get down to it.
Bye, Fiore.
Yeah.
Where is Flavortown located?
Flavortown is right between Soggyville and Crunchytown.
I do, again, think that we should do individual episodes on these topics, but we’ll have to keep moving along to Cane Rock.
But before we do, I do want to say, St. Nicholas Graveyard, right next to the St. Nicholas Church there.
Don’t tell the kids.
They’ll be so sad.
he’s making a list checking it twice he’s gonna find out who’s naughty and nice
We went into the church.
It was beautiful, beautiful old church.
And like I said, there are locations in the town that are really leaning into this ghost history.
And then you’ve got hanging on the bulletin board right inside the church.
It says, new book from Cantorley Publishing, Pluckley, The Making and Faking of a Ghost Story.
Wow.
In the church, yeah.
In the church.
I just wanted to note that the church is over 900 years old, so it goes right back to William the Conqueror.
It’s been there a minute.
Ten hundreds, yeah, amazing.
But definitely go and visit Pluckley if you can.
It’s just a beautiful little village and it’s just got a lot going for it.
But then we dashed to Cambridge and I gave a talk at the bookstore.
Then we gave a talk to the Cambridge Skeptics, as mentioned.
So we want to give a shout out to the organisers, Chris Gifford and Andrew Dart, and also Dave, who attended our talk.
and came up and talked to us afterwards.
And he has relatives near the whole Chinnery ghost story.
He has relatives near the cemetery.
And so we’re going to stay in contact so that we can revisit that topic too.
He will pay a visit.
He’ll be right there in the back seat if we need him.
Got it.
Exactly.
Backseat driver.
But yeah, it was really cool to meet him.
And he’s going to help us more with that investigation because he’s going to do some on the ground work.
Yeah.
Yeah.
These things never end.
We can keep adding to them.
But we also after my talk at the bookstore, we went to the Eagle Pub, which we mentioned, I think, last year.
But Matt, you want to talk a little bit about that?
Yeah, the Eagle, it’s an interesting place because it’s been on that site there in the middle of Cambridge since 1353.
So it’s been a minute.
That’s almost two o’clock.
Yes, exactly.
And it’s, you know, there were, it really kind of became a World War II Royal Air Force bar, you know, during World War II.
And a lot of the service men were there and they would, they would sign their names into the ceiling with like cigarette lighters and candles.
So you can still see all these kind of burned-in signatures at the top from them.
And it’s got an interesting Cambridge connection.
Watson and Crick announced DNA discovery at the Eagle in 1953.
Oh, yeah, the double helix, yeah.
Yeah, so it’s got those kind of cool things going for it, but the ghost story there is this window that is kept permanently open.
And I have photos that the window is actually open every time we’ve gone there.
And, of course, a great hallmark of whether or not it’s true is the story varies.
But there was a fire upstairs that either a little girl or two boys –
And it’s interesting because in the past, they often always gave more value to boys.
But in this case, two boys equals one girl.
So obviously, the girl has more value.
I bet Rosalind Franklin thinks so.
I think so, too.
DNA burn!
So the thing is, now, because they died in – whoever there died in a fire, this window is now kept open all the time because –
If it’s closed, then the ghosts there feel like they can’t breathe and they start freaking out.
And there have been fires subsequent there whenever the window was closed, supposedly.
So we did see that.
But it’s a good example of a physical feature being part of the legend.
And it’s kind of cool.
Yeah.
And speaking of English food, too, they had proper chips there, as they called them.
So chips.
not being crisps, but hot chips.
So fries, but not French fries, really thick cut steak ones.
Like thick fries, yeah, yeah, cottage fries.
The English contribution to world cuisine, the chip.
Funny that everywhere you had proper this or proper that.
So whether it was proper chips or proper scones or everything done properly, as opposed to what American variant there is, I guess.
Exactly.
Now, I do want to mention something that I found interesting when we were doing our talk with the Cambridge skeptics is often.
We would talk about things in the U.S., and they would know exactly what we were talking about.
But we talked about Hever Castle and Pluckley, and not everybody knew that Pluckley, for example, was the most haunted village in the U.K. That’s true.
We mentioned the hairy hands, and we mentioned the devil’s footprints, and a lot of people were like, what?
What is this?
So it’s like things that were happening right there.
They really didn’t know.
And yet at the same time, I think Great Britain is great for leaning into its sort of historical ghost, you know, lore.
But at the same time, they don’t pay that much attention to it.
There’s so much of it.
And, well, yeah, I do think that there is a kind of numbness to it because it is all around.
And it depends on the books that you’ve read and what stories you’ve grown up with, I think, what you’ve had exposure to.
Well, I think it’s just an accepted thing.
Hauntings are just there.
They’re always there.
And part of the talk was me talking about how compared to the U.S., people in the U.K. will see one UFO to every 10 UFOs seen in the U.S. And I said, unless you count alien big cats, which did not get as big of a laugh as I was hoping for.
That’s so sad.
That’s so sad.
That’s the thing, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
They’ve been on my mind all morning, so yeah.
Oh, yeah, yeah, I bet, I bet.
As you do.
But I said, you know, I said, to be fair, we have Bigfoot.
That’s true.
In response to their alien big cats.
Unfortunately, we need to keep moving along.
I don’t know how we’re going to fit everything in at this rate.
Squish it.
We’ll squish.
Well, so moving on, if we hadn’t had enough of university campuses, then we certainly got our fill when we went to Oxford.
Next.
And I want to give a shout out to our friend Marcus Winderman.
We caught up with him and he and his wife, Olga and daughter, they showed us around and we paid a visit to the King’s Arms pub, which is said to be one of the most haunted locations in Oxford.
And it’s mostly haunted by apparently a pair of unseen academic spirits.
It’s too bizarre.
kind of fighting Oxford dons.
Like their research, there’s frequent sightings.
But people claim that they hear the voices of two older men who are arguing loudly at the bar in fluent ancient Greek.
So a very Oxford thing to do.
And then some of the stories are conflated too.
Other people talk about a ghostly conversation that they overhear where people are bickering over the quality of the pub’s port.
So this is exactly something you would do, Blake, talking about the port, whether it’s good or not.
And then the argument ends with the sound of like a physical blow and then there’s just silence.
So someone dies, obviously, but there’s also a ghostly pianist.
People say that they hear the spirit of a former musician playing the pub’s piano there late at night.
And…
family of ghosts too so i think this is interesting there’s another story and this is something that you we see a lot in the uk these stories on repeat as we’ve talked about before uh so in in this particular pub there was a fire can you believe it supposedly well on the premises and that unfortunately an entire family perished there and that they continue to haunt the premises so
Again, we didn’t experience anything.
I don’t think that necessarily we went there for that experience.
It was more to have a drink.
Sure.
And again, the food was very good and from all over the place.
I mean, we had salads that were really good there.
But yeah, it’s a mixed bag of food across pubs in the UK.
But anything you wanted to add, Matt, about Oxford?
Not in particular.
I did find it to be just a beautiful place.
And the museum that we went to was extraordinary.
And I just, I can’t recommend it enough.
It’s just had a slightly different vibe than Cambridge.
And you have to visit them both to really get what the feel of that is.
Yep.
And that is the Pitt Rivers Museum.
Yes.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
And it’s free, and it is, oh, Blake, you have to go there.
You would absolutely love it.
It’s just, it’s a Victorian museum, and it’s just a cabinet of curiosities.
They’ve got about 500,000 artifacts, so, you know.
I think they have a witch bottle there that’s kind of famous, the silvered witch bottle, if I remember correctly.
Oh, they had early examples of writing and just lots of, you know, paranormal stuff.
But, you know, a lot of thievery, obviously, which…
happened particularly with the germans and the english yeah a lot of things that probably shouldn’t be there um but uh it’s just i mean they have so much stuff it’s a real jumble like oh i remember it was because margaret murray uh who was famous for that book the witch cults uh in western europe she she donated the the witch bottle to the museum that’s why i remember that okay yeah oh yeah but there is a lot of that sort of stuff they’re musical instruments very early
guitars and lutes and ouds and things and weapons.
I’ll put a link if I can find it.
I think there’s actually an online tour where you can actually walk through the whole museum, if I remember correctly.
I think, yeah, there’s videos on YouTube, but definitely go there if you can.
And you need to go there several times to really see everything.
And there are other museums there as well.
It’s just a…
Absolutely fantastic place.
But, yeah, free museum.
It’s really incredible.
And Mark took us there.
We had a great time.
So then we dashed from Oxford to Stonehenge.
So we were really trying to cram everything in.
We saw Stonehenge and the Magna Carta in one day.
Wow.
At the Salisbury Cathedral.
But I think Matt’s going to talk to us a little bit about Stonehenge because, I mean, long history, but it has its reputed ghosts as well.
Yeah, I mean, if you’re a fan of Spinal Tap, you know the history of Stonehenge.
So there’s really no need for me to restate everything.
It’s interesting.
It’s 4,500 years old, but it was built in stages.
So when you look at it 4,500 years ago, it wasn’t all just there.
And the stones come from completely different places in Great Britain.
You know, you’ve got some of them came from southern England, some that came from Wales, some that came from northeast Scotland.
And it’s just and these things are huge.
And we’re talking.
It takes a village.
It takes a village.
It does.
So it’s really interesting.
It’s not just the stone circle.
It’s this huge sort of ceremonial landscape.
I mean, we’re talking this is like a huge field.
And, of course, there are sheep making the most interesting various varied noises that sheep can make.
I want to say about that, that one of the claims, one of the paranormal claims of Stonehenge is that there are unexplained sounds.
And we think they’re pretty well explained by the sheep.
Just the sheep alone.
Yeah.
Didn’t Dickens write about that?
Isn’t that what Bleat House is about?
Bleat House.
Very, very possible.
be surprised by how many sheep are there.
And we got there as early as we could.
And you can actually walk this path from the visitor center to Stonehenge.
And just when you see it, it’s overwhelming.
It’s one of the most overwhelming experiences I’ve ever had to see it.
It’s like a global heritage site, but yet if you watch the news, there’s all these frequent discussions about putting a road through.
Really?
Really?
Well, there are roads all around there.
Again, we turned up really as early as we could, and there are buses around.
There are camper vans.
People…
parked all around the perimeter and I think we got there early enough that we got some good photographs without too many people around but there are always people there and we stayed there for I think an hour hour and a half just walking around Stonehenge and at that point it was absolutely full of tourists a really really jam-packed I mean people from all around the world but just hundreds of people already so
unexplained sounds.
I’m not sure that you ever really get the opportunity to not have people around, but they have shadow figures and floating lights and a lady in white.
If you can believe that, a lady in white.
I mean, that’s never been heard of anywhere before.
Except in the forthcoming stories.
Exactly.
Can you get married there?
I don’t know what they allow.
I know they have like on the solstice.
How much money you got?
Well, I have almost none.
I’m saving up to none.
Well, then you’re not getting married there.
Yeah.
Yeah, you can pay more to get into the kind of inner circle.
You, of course, can’t touch anything, but I’m not sure.
There’s a museum there.
Perhaps you could get married on the premises, but maybe not necessarily in that circle area.
That reminds me of the Empire State Building.
In the Empire State Building, you go to the observation deck, but then there’s an additional up to the dirigible area.
You have to pay to go up a special elevator to get to that part.
It’s for the exclusive inner circle.
I’ve looked it up.
Yes, you can hold a symbolic wedding ceremony or hand fasting at Stonehenge, but it is not legally binding on its own.
Wow.
Okay.
There you go.
You can arrange a private one hour access to the inner circle.
So how private?
No more than about 30 people.
And you can hold a ceremony surrounding the monument as well.
Wow.
But you will be near regular public crowds, but there’s no legal registry there.
So you need to sign paperwork at a courthouse or something.
So yeah, you can, you can hold a ceremony.
So there you go.
For those who would like to hold their nuptials at Stonehenge, you can.
So it is interesting, a lot of the paranormal claims there.
You have a lot of the ones, you know, like I said, the floating lights, the strange sounds, the apparitions, unusual sensations, you know, from energy that’s there apparently.
And, of course, you know, Eric Van Donaghan, who gave us the ancient astronauts –
ideas about how it was built um and then you know you’ve also got the idea that giants built it uh and merlin was involved um the whole thing with the druids doesn’t match up chronologically um
you know, that they’re healing stones and all this kind of stuff.
But the latest one has been shadow people.
And that one is just not an established historical claim, you know, or tradition.
But more lately, people have been seeing shadow people there.
Now, you have to keep in mind that during certain parts of the year and when the sun’s at a certain level, there are real, very dramatic shadows there.
So that’s very different from supernatural shadow people.
Now, one other thing that I want to bring up about it, Stonehenge is interesting because you have Stonehenge in your mind of what this just amazing, impactful location is like.
And you get there and it’s actually a lot smaller than you expect.
And at the same time, it’s much…
Matt’s just not impressed by anything.
Well, wait a minute.
I’m expecting it to be Stonehenge like in Spinal Tap size.
So would I be impressed or not?
Well, it depends.
If you’re talking about the sequel, you won’t be impressed.
If you’re talking about the first one, yes, you’ll be very impressed.
But no, the thing is…
Just being there for a few moments, it seems to almost grow in its significance, you know, just being there in its presence.
So suddenly it becomes a lot less about the actual physical size of it and the impact of it.
So it’s very cool.
Yeah, that same day we paid a visit to Salisbury Cathedral too, which is just phenomenal, and got to see one of the four copies of the Magna Carta that’s there.
So that’s the royal charter signed in 1215.
He’s very important today, I think, still, that states that royal authority is limited by written law.
but it’s just a very important piece even today to just the idea of freedom and protection of the average person.
Yes, but that was another really overwhelming thing to see.
It’s in this tiny little room.
You can’t take photographs and everyone’s in this kind of long line and you only get a couple of seconds to really look at it, but it was just a really beautiful, moving thing to see.
And so after Stonehenge and seeing the Magna Carta, we went to Bath.
So we actually stayed in Bath for a couple of days.
And that is a really beautiful place to visit as well.
What I thought was interesting is that they had, so you had the Roman settlements there.
That’s what it’s mostly known for, the Roman baths.
But one of the most popular stories is that of phantom marching legionnaires of Roman soldiers.
Um, and this is the one where they were like partially below the ground and, and I think it tied into stone tape.
I think so.
That is actually this from York, that particular, but I do think that it traveled to Bath because it’s along the same kind of line.
So I think you just get a running theme of that a lot in the UK where these stories are transported around.
These Romans have lots of times to march from city to city.
Yeah.
Well, they also have a ghostly lady in white there.
So I really do think it’s a matter of those stories being just transported from York to Bath.
They’ve got a grey lady as well.
And stories of phantom carriages too and phantom monks.
So is this sounding familiar at all?
It is.
But have you thought about like we have great ladies, ladies in black, ladies in white.
Is it possible that the afterlife is just not in color?
Is that what’s maybe what’s going on?
Well, there’s ladies in red, there’s ladies in green.
So I think it’s just one lady with a nice wardrobe.
Yeah.
But I mean, part of this was research for another book that I’m working on right now about women and monsters.
So certainly it was really interesting to come across so many ladies in white, but yeah, ladies of all different colors.
But yeah, Bath is just a fascinating place to visit.
Was there anything you wanted to say about Bath?
I need one.
I guess we could move on to Dartmoor.
Yeah, you sent me photos.
That was beautiful.
Yeah, the hairy hands.
I didn’t send you any photos of actual hairy hands.
Well, you don’t see them.
You just feel them.
I don’t know.
That was all very mysterious.
But one of the fun things about it was there weren’t many other people.
Maybe a few more than you might expect, but they were just people driving to and from where they were going and where they were coming from.
And no one was going there to see the hairy hands.
That was just us.
And on a lot of these situations, it was just us going to see these things that we were seeing.
And asking locals about them, yeah.
Right, right.
Now, it’s interesting when you drive here in the States, you’re out on a rural road.
There’s the road and then there’s kind of an embankment down and then there’s usually a barbed wire fence.
And then maybe there’ll be some like livestock or something on the other side of that barbed wire fence.
Not so here.
There is just…
Road and pasture are all kind of the same thing.
And the livestock often like the road better than they do the pasture.
They’re very tame.
And just like Stonehenge, they’re everywhere.
They’re everywhere.
So, yeah, we’re…
There were traffic jams because of livestock.
There’s gorgeous horses.
I’ll have to send you some photos there.
Like it was a mother and a foal just standing in the road.
And I’m like pulling up closer and closer, kind of trying to hopefully make them think, hey, maybe I should move.
Well, after all these circus train wreck photos, it would be great to see some horses that aren’t dead by a train car.
So, yeah, I would welcome them.
Yeah.
I don’t know if they were wild or not.
Yeah, well, that’s the thing is they were in the wild, but they were not afraid of the car at all.
They just looked at us like, yeah, what are you going to do, hit us?
We don’t believe you.
So I actually had to get out of the car and shoo them away.
Yeah.
But they were beautiful, just beautiful animals.
It was like green acres, only it’s like green hectares, I guess, right?
Yes.
Yes, exactly.
It was truly stunning countryside.
But I’ve got a question, Matt.
Yes.
Which is the bridge?
Well, and that’s the fun one.
The locals actually, the locals that know about the legend call this particular bridge the Hairy Hands Bridge, but it is not labeled as such.
There’s another place called Two Bridges that’s very near there that is often mistaken for the Hairy Hands Bridge.
But this one is called Second Bridge, and it goes over Cherry Brook.
And Cherry Brook, actually, there are bridges that go over it.
But this particular one that goes over Cherry Brook is the Harry Hands Bridge.
And I actually, I have some audio here that I can play of me approaching the bridge and what it was like.
So if you don’t mind, I can play that really quickly here.
It’ll just take me a moment to…
To share the audio.
And I want to say, too, that if you blink, you’ll miss it.
That is very true.
That is very true.
It’s weird there’s this discussion about which is the right one, because usually you’ll brook no argument.
Well, of course.
Of course.
So let me know if you can.
So for the listeners, I’m looking at lots of pictures.
Yeah, yeah, and it’s really weird because I don’t know what just happened there.
Oh, we went to the Cancun one.
Isn’t it cool how you can sort them by location?
That’s neat.
I see a white cat.
The white cat of Exeter.
Yeah, where was that?
That was in Dartmoor, yeah.
That was in Dartmoor, yep, yep.
That was a terrifying cat.
So I’m thinking it might have been a ghost.
That’s why it was white.
It was the cat in white.
Oh, yeah.
So this is… We got video here.
This is exciting.
Okay.
So here we are walking to the bridge.
The Harry Hands Bridge is what the…
Okay.
Here comes a car.
We’re going to see if the car makes it.
Um… Yeah.
Okay.
Hmm.
No.
They made it.
Okay.
Well…
All right.
It’s beautiful here, though.
But what you can see with that footage is how under the right or the wrong conditions, that would be very dangerous.
Oh, yeah.
No, these are narrow.
Yeah.
If there’s snow, if there’s ice, if there’s…
fog, that would be really dangerous.
Americans, anything like that hazards to the roads.
Yeah, just some people standing out in the middle of the road with an iPhone videoing them.
But the problem is the roads themselves.
The Romans made very narrow roads and they’re the same roads.
And they’re all haunted.
They’re very…
For many centurions ago.
Yes.
Let’s say they’re hairy.
But so while we were in the area, we also explored a little bit more about the devil’s footprints.
You want to talk about that, Matt?
Yes.
Now, that was a very interesting thing because a recent Monster Talk episode we really went into in depth on the hairy devil’s footprints.
The devil’s footprints when the devil visited Devon and Exeter one night after a snowfall.
So we went around to several of these places, and again, there are no plaques, there’s no, this is the location of, and Great Britain is great about that.
You know, we went by…
all these different markers of places where, you know, Edgar Allan Poe was or whatever.
I mean, they’re all over the place that they let you know what happened here.
But when it comes to this… John Lennon urinated here.
Exactly, exactly.
Ozzy Osbourne bit the head off a bat in another country here.
There’s all kinds of great stuff like that.
But when it comes to a celebrity as big as the devil himself…
they had no markers anywhere about anything.
It was like just melted away with the snow.
If you know, you know.
If you know, you know.
But we did go to several of these places.
We found no lasting evidence that the devil was actually there.
We went to the River X.
We were in Topsham, Exeter.
We went through Exmouth and Dawlish.
I did want to get down to Torquay, which is where Fawlty Towers was set.
We didn’t get to make it this trip, but he went all the way down there.
He went all around.
Yeah.
He’s a traveler.
But like I said, no plaques or markers anywhere saying the devil walked here.
And, you know, it’s just there’s a great contrast because, again, it’s something that the current generation of people living there really know nothing about.
And yet the rest of the world, you know, you go to YouTube and it is just this widely reported thing, both the hairy hands and the devil’s footprints.
Everybody outside of the UK knows about it.
People like us, legend tripping, going to visit these sites and locals just, meh, for the most part.
But we’ve still got two more places we wanted to mention.
One is the Cotswolds.
I’ve always wanted to go there.
It’s a very large area too, so it’s not like it’s one town.
It’s lots of little towns with very cutesy names and lots of ladies in white again.
And there’s a place called Presbury.
And that’s said to be one of the most haunted villages in England.
So it’s something like Pluckley Village that a lot of villagers, they claim to.
But there are lots of pubs that are haunted by poltergeists.
lots of stories of ghostly monks and nuns and spectral stage coaches.
So again, we have that theme running throughout the UK and very reminiscent of Bally Rectory too, but the same kinds of stories.
And again, going back to Henry VIII, I mean, not only Henry VIII and the disillusion of the monasteries, but certainly just a lot of lore, which is just interwoven into these places and the same stories everywhere.
Matt, you want to say anything about the Cotswolds?
Beautiful.
Great for photo ops.
Great for photo ops.
Still lots of very narrow roads.
So after the Cotswolds, we went back to London and we spent a bit of time there.
We still didn’t get to Highgate Cemetery.
I know that that’s high on the bucket list for use.
But, I mean, there’s so many places that we wanted to visit.
One of the places that I wanted to go to is another pub called the Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese.
And you’ve got to be careful because there are two of them.
There’s the Cheshire Cheese, and then there’s the Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese.
So the latter one is a very old place.
It was rebuilt in 1667 following the Great Fire of London.
So it is very old.
But this pub is said to be the haunt of Dr Samuel Johnson, who wrote one of the earliest dictionaries of the English language, and also Charles Dickens.
It’s supposedly the home of
Polly the parrot too, which was a… Norwegian blue, I believe.
But, yeah, the parrot sketch.
Remarkable bird, the Norwegian blue.
Beautiful plumage, isn’t it?
The plumage didn’t enter into it.
It still did.
But Polly was an African grey parrot who lived there for about 40 years and she died in the 1920s.
And so she’s still like a taxidermy piece there, stuffed.
specimen there at the bar.
Now that’s what I call a dead putter.
But apparently she was well known for having a potty mouth.
So she could swear, I think, in multiple languages.
So there are lots of supposed ghosts there, including that of Charles Dickens and Samuel Johnson, it is said.
But, yeah, I’ve got, to me, shocking news anyway, and that is that even though Samuel Johnson, Dr Samuel Johnson, lived just up the street and there’s a museum where he lived, that there’s no actual evidence that he frequented the pub.
Now, we went there and we sat in his seat and there is a large portrait of him hanging above this seat.
And so people are going there to visit this pub because he supposedly went there.
But there’s no evidence that he visited the place because…
Contemporaneously, James Boswell wrote a biography of Dr. Johnson, and he didn’t write about Johnson ever frequenting the place.
Yet there are it’s just commonly accepted that he he went there.
He was a barfly.
Other writers, including Dickens, went there.
So I would I would say it’s still a diction area.
Well, it seems to me like these stories maybe go back to the Victorian era where.
Oh, yeah.
Waiters would kind of point things out and say, oh, look, there are weak stains here on the wallpaper of Charles Dickens or Dr. Johnson, and that they would get tips for pointing these things out.
So it seems like it’s a more recent story.
So I was disappointed because we went there before I knew that there was no evidence of him actually visiting the place.
So they’re just kind of capitalising on the legacy because he did live right nearby.
And there’s even a statue to his cat, Hodge.
I had a cat named Hodge after his Hodge.
So there are lots of statues there of him and lots of evidence that he lived in the area, but no evidence that he actually…
visited the, the year old Cheshire cheese.
And perhaps he did, perhaps he did, but there’s no proof of it anyway.
So I was still in the general area.
Right.
I mean, so, yeah, I mean, yeah, well, we went to his house.
We went, you know, he probably went there.
So yeah, he might’ve gone to his house.
And apparently he does definitely haunt his.
premises, his former premises.
So people hear unexplained footsteps on the upper floors and they experience a kind of intense brooding atmosphere in the room where he compiled his dictionary.
So there’s that.
Very brooding.
So here’s what it looks like.
Nice.
That’s a big old house.
Was it, was, I mean, was that an apartment building or did he own the whole thing?
My gosh.
For listeners, it’s like four stories, I guess.
I mean, it looks like there’s attic space has rooms, too.
Well, I’m not sure.
Let me look it up really quickly.
I mean, it’s a lot of room.
I mean, of course, he probably had to need a lot of room for all the papers with the entries and whatnot.
Cut this out, but yes.
So he rented the entire, it’s a five-story townhouse.
Wow.
So it’s 17 blocks square.
So he didn’t just lease a single room or a flat.
He rented the entire place.
So he moved into the place in 1748 because he needed a massive amount of space to coordinate his dictionary.
It was a very large entry.
Yeah.
But he paid, yeah, apparently 30 pounds per year to lease the whole building.
Wow.
So can you imagine how much that’s worth today?
But it was basically, he turned it into his own publishing workshop.
Yeah, yeah.
It’s quite a story.
Yeah.
There’s Hodge.
Yeah, there’s Hodge.
But yeah, I mean, we’ve just only touched upon a lot of these stories.
And I know, Blake, a lot of these places are on your bucket list too.
Oh, for sure.
I know you’ll get there.
No, exactly.
I don’t know how I’ll get there, but someday.
I really do need a month.
I need at least a month to see all the places I want to see.
Oh, absolutely.
But yeah, we can dive deeper into some of these topics in future and still plenty more to see.
uk is just an amazing place it is for history and folklore and um just
Those who live there are very fortunate, and please, listeners, write in and tell us your stories and places that you visited, and we’ll definitely talk about them again.
Well, thanks for going.
Thanks for bringing these tales back.
There I am.
Oh, that’s nice.
That’s a great photo.
Yeah, but there’s proof.
Samuel Johnson.
Yeah, that’s proof he was there.
Oh, this is the pub, not his house.
Okay, yeah.
No, that’s proof he was there.
His picture’s right there.
Yeah.
His photograph, yeah, that’s a Polaroid.
Yes, that is an actual photo.
That’s really cool.
Well, he’s got dishes on the menu dedicated to him and drinks dedicated to him, the things that he ate and the things that he drank.
So it’s really just to know that those are more recent stories is so funny.
All right.
Well, I hate to cut it short, but I have to fly.
I bid you adieu.
We’ll talk soon.
Sounds good.
Good luck.
See you.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard a recap of Karen and Matt’s recent trip to England, where they managed to squeeze in an amazing itinerary of Monster Talk-friendly activities.
I really hope to get there someday myself.
I had hoped that by this point in my life, a TARDIS would have shown up, but alas, not yet.
Because getting photos to show up in show notes seems to be hit and miss and mostly miss, I’m putting a link to the photos from their trip, but they’ll be posted and hosted at our Patreon site.
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Hardcore scientific stuff.
Okay, so ghosts.
When a human body dies, which hole does the ghost come out of, north or south?
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