Ep 2 True Crime & Folklore
Dr. Kristina Downs, the executive director of the Texas Folklore Society, as well as an assistant professor of English at Tarleton State speaks to us on all things folklore and true crime. Links: Crime Lore Podcast Texas Folklore Society
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00:00:23:21 – 00:00:52:14
Speaker 1
Welcome folk friends. We are glad to have you with us here at Fabrica folklore. My name is Vanessa Rogers, and I’m your host on this podcast where we unravel the mysteries of folklore in this part. In this podcast, we attempt to understand ourselves and the stories as we as a society have weaved and are continuing to weave, threading together the tapestry that makes us, us and makes humans.
00:00:52:14 – 00:01:20:03
Speaker 1
Humans and folktales and folklore are not merely stories we tell children, but are living artifacts and hold meaning. And so here on this podcast, we are attempting to uncover the heart and essence of folklore. And today we have an incredible guest. Dr. Christina Downes is the executive director of the Texas Folklore Society, as well as an assistant professor of English at Tarleton State.
00:01:20:13 – 00:02:04:15
Speaker 1
She has worked previously for the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. She is a managing editor of the Journal of Folklore Research for five years, and she is coeditor of Advancing Folklore Six, which considers current issues in the field of folklorist folklore studies. In this episode, we’re going to focus on her research revolving around crime out. We’re going to focus on her work and the cross-stitching of crime and folklore studies and her current book, Pride, examines how crime solving communities and media portray serial killers as contemporary monster narratives.
00:02:04:23 – 00:02:08:05
Speaker 1
Sorry, that is a bit of a mouthful. You are run by.
00:02:08:05 – 00:02:11:05
Speaker 2
Oh, sorry about that.
00:02:11:22 – 00:02:13:15
Speaker 1
Thank you so much for joining us.
00:02:14:20 – 00:02:17:07
Speaker 2
Thank you for having me on. And I’m really.
00:02:17:07 – 00:02:40:22
Speaker 1
Excited today because you are our first folklorist, so I’m going to do a bit of brain picking for you today just so that we have some terminology correct and definitions correct, because I don’t know about the rest of my guest, but I didn’t really have I didn’t really know folklorist was even a profession just a few months ago.
00:02:40:23 – 00:02:44:08
Speaker 1
So this is just really exciting to have you on.
00:02:45:21 – 00:03:00:04
Speaker 2
I think that’s really comment. I didn’t know being a folklorist was a thing you could do until I was looking at graduate school programs and fortunately happened to stumble upon a graduate program in folklore studies and go, Well, that’s a thing I can do.
00:03:01:06 – 00:03:04:03
Speaker 1
And what drew you into that, that field of study?
00:03:05:18 – 00:03:28:21
Speaker 2
So I think in a lot of ways I was always trying to be a folklorist again before knowing that was a thing I could do. I if you look at my undergraduate transcript, my undergraduate degree is in Latin American Studies. But if you look, I ended up with something like 21 credits in English, 19 credits in Russian, and like 16 credits in theater.
00:03:28:21 – 00:03:48:17
Speaker 2
And I had a minor in dance. And you can see I was kind of all over the place because I was interested in a broad spectrum of things. But in all of my classes, I kind of felt like my teachers were telling I was focusing on the wrong things that, you know, I love studying literature. I now teach literature, I love literature.
00:03:48:17 – 00:04:09:09
Speaker 2
But what I was more so interested in was all of the kinds of things behind the literature, all of the things that were influencing an author to help create literature. And in my history classes, I wasn’t so much interested in, you know, the big names as sort of what was going on beneath the surface and what were the stories that weren’t necessarily being documented by official historians.
00:04:09:09 – 00:04:24:04
Speaker 2
And it was kind of a running thing. And when I found out that folklore studies was a field, it was sort of a, Oh, okay, this is where I can go kind of focus on all of those those things that often get brushed under the carpet by other disciplines.
00:04:25:00 – 00:04:32:09
Speaker 1
So can you give us a definition of what folklore is and what people think it might be, but they might be wrong about?
00:04:33:04 – 00:04:55:28
Speaker 2
Sure. So my well, I was told my students by quick and dirty working definition is that folklore is traditional expressive culture. So by traditional I don’t mean old. And I think that’s one of the biggest misconceptions about folklore. A lot of people think that to be folklore, something has to be really old and traditional. Just means that it’s happened more than once with a special meaning attached to it.
00:04:55:29 – 00:05:20:12
Speaker 2
So like the example I always give is, you know, I hit my snooze button at least five times every morning before I got out of bed. That’s not a tradition because there’s no special meaning attached to that. It’s just like deprived for the better. But, you know, if I hit my snooze button every morning so that I can have 5 minutes to meditate or pray, that might be a tradition.
00:05:20:12 – 00:05:29:26
Speaker 2
That would be something that was it had a special meaning attached to it. And that way, when I talk about folklore being your question.
00:05:30:06 – 00:05:30:26
Speaker 1
Good to know. Good.
00:05:31:21 – 00:05:50:12
Speaker 2
When I talk about folklore being expressive, what I mean is that it’s always communicating something. And sometimes that’s a message or moral that your parents giving to their child to teach them how to live their life and how to interact with the world. Sometimes it’s just about esthetics and just about this is beautiful and just about this is entertaining, but it’s communicating something.
00:05:50:29 – 00:06:01:22
Speaker 2
And then culture is it’s always related to a group of some kind. That group can be as large as a nation, or it can be as small as just two people that share something between them.
00:06:03:07 – 00:06:13:15
Speaker 1
Okay. And how would you say a folklorist looks at the world differently than, say, an anthropologist, an anthropologist or maybe a historian that’s.
00:06:14:16 – 00:06:38:27
Speaker 2
Going to borrow an analogy from a friend of mine with folklore and anthropology, which is that he always says this college as if I go. He says that anthropology is kind of the cosmos ology of culture. It looks at things that are really broad spectrum, and folklore is the particle physics of culture. So we’re looking at things very, very, very small, individual level.
00:06:39:10 – 00:07:02:20
Speaker 2
Another way and I’m speaking kind of generally speaking, there’s obviously exceptions to all of this, but anthropology is tend to look at a culture as a whole and that when they do look at individuals, those individuals are there to be a way of understanding the culture. Folklorists tend to go in a little bit of a different direction that we’ll study the culture as a whole, as a means of understanding an individual.
00:07:03:01 – 00:07:16:13
Speaker 2
So we kind of go in a little bit of a reverse order. There’s certainly a huge overlap between our two disciplines, and there’s a lot of folklorists working in anthropology departments of a lot of back and forth between our discipline, definitely.
00:07:17:14 – 00:07:20:11
Speaker 1
And where besides universities, we define a folklorist.
00:07:21:24 – 00:07:49:10
Speaker 2
There’s a lot working at museums. There are a lot working in state arts agencies. I think most every state in the United States has at least one kind of state folklorist that’s in charge of documenting and kind of assisting in traditional practices in their state. And sometimes those are in like a humanities department and sometimes those are in some kind of state arts agency.
00:07:50:17 – 00:08:11:08
Speaker 2
Groups like the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress has several folklorists. You do have a lot of folks working in archives, and you have a lot of folks that are creative writers. You know, there’s a lot of, for example, fantasy authors that have backgrounds in folklore studies. Really cool thing about a folklore degree is that it’s a really flexible degree.
00:08:11:08 – 00:08:21:04
Speaker 2
So while there are a ton of jobs out there that specifically want some of the folklore degree, there’s a lot of things that you can apply for or degree towards.
00:08:21:19 – 00:08:32:21
Speaker 1
And so you were talking about if you are the executive director of the Texas Folklore Society, what does the Texas Folklore Society do? And is it similar to two other states have those societies as well?
00:08:33:25 – 00:08:58:11
Speaker 2
Other states do have them. We are the largest and the oldest continually operating folk or society. So we’re pretty proud of that. That was founded in 1909. And one thing that does make our society a little bit unique is that the majority of people in the Texas Folklore Society are just people who love folklore. So they’re not necessarily people like me that have degrees in folklore.
00:08:58:12 – 00:09:23:03
Speaker 2
They’re just someone who got interested in it, either through studying their families or their community or just thinks it’s cool. Most other state folklore societies are a lot more degreed holding folklore. So people that are working in the field of folklore studies or that are a little more kind of professional, we have a mix in the Texas Folklore Society, and I think that’s something that makes us really cool.
00:09:25:00 – 00:09:27:18
Speaker 2
Solidified.
00:09:27:18 – 00:09:41:22
Speaker 1
Do you think that maybe it’s so old because, you know, being from Texas and I know that a lot of people would come to Texas to visit, they always mention how proud Texans are of Texan culture. Do you think that might have something to do with it?
00:09:42:23 – 00:10:06:12
Speaker 2
I definitely think it has something to do with it. Certainly in terms of the size and the resilience of the Texas Folklore Society. You know, at one time, I think probably every state, not necessarily every state, but most states had one, and a lot of them have kind of just kind of fallen away through lack of interest. I think the fact that Texans love their state so much is absolutely something that’s helped this organization stay as active as it is.
00:10:06:12 – 00:10:29:02
Speaker 2
And we have over 300 members and that’s pretty large for a state folk organization, are kind of founding, does kind of tie in with that. It’s actually a great, perfect Texas story. So we were founded by a professor at Texas A&M and a professor at University of Texas Austin. So kind of that to make for access from the state and to make it even more appropriate.
00:10:29:02 – 00:10:31:20
Speaker 2
They met at a Thanksgiving football game.
00:10:32:13 – 00:10:32:29
Speaker 1
Of course.
00:10:34:09 – 00:10:55:06
Speaker 2
I don’t remember if that was an Austin or College station. And their names are John Lomax and Lana’s pain. And they kind of just started saying, you know, well, there’s this American folklore society. We need a Texas branch of that. And Lomax actually had recently graduated from Harvard, where one of his teachers had said, you know, if you’re going to Texas, you should find a folk society.
00:10:55:06 – 00:10:57:20
Speaker 2
There. And so you did.
00:10:59:10 – 00:11:15:08
Speaker 1
AL Cool. Okay, let’s see. Let me see some of the questions. Okay. So let’s get into a little bit about your true crime. And so can you explain how crime fits into folklore?
00:11:16:24 – 00:11:38:05
Speaker 2
Sure. There’s a lot of different ways. And what I look at what got me into it, it’s interesting what I’m not at, or least I wasn’t for most of my life, really, someone who was into true crime. I never read the book, know true crime books. I didn’t watch all of the shows. I mean, I did well, I remember watching Unsolved Mysteries as a kid.
00:11:38:06 – 00:11:58:25
Speaker 2
I think it was about, Oh, I was someone who got really freaked out by learning about true crime. And so I kind of steered away from it deliberately and as happens, seems to be a thing with me in my life. I stumbled across by accident just kind of poking around on the internet, but online crime solving forums. And I kind of sat there for a minute.
00:11:58:27 – 00:12:23:00
Speaker 2
I don’t know what’s going on here, but there’s something really interesting going on culturally, and these like crime solving communities. And but finally kind of struck me as I knew there was something that was kind of poking around the back of my brain was that the way that people were talking about crimes very closely paralleled, the way that people tell legends and the way that people share legends.
00:12:24:16 – 00:12:27:25
Speaker 1
And the definition of what a legend is, so that we’re clear on that.
00:12:28:18 – 00:12:54:11
Speaker 2
So a legend is a story which is presented as true. And I can poke around with the notion of truth legends. And a lot of times even people that are telling and hearing legends know as they’re telling and hearing them that they’re not true. But they’re still going to be told as though they’re a true story, but they’re usually about real people that might be a real person interacting with something supernatural.
00:12:54:11 – 00:13:25:10
Speaker 2
So it might be a person encountering a ghost or a cricket or something. Sorry about that. Because, you know, Progreso starts happening, so maybe the person interacting is something supernatural, but your main character is going to be a regular human and also in kind of a regular run of the mill person. Legends take place in specific times and specific places, though you sometimes have the same legend taking place in multiple specific times and multiple specific places.
00:13:25:10 – 00:13:44:16
Speaker 2
So here in Texas, one of our famous legends are the ghost tracks in San Antonio, where they say that a school bus was hit by a train and if you put your car on the train tracks and put your car in neutral, it will go roll uphill off of the train tracks. And they say that’s the spirits of the children pushing you to safety.
00:13:44:16 – 00:14:02:12
Speaker 2
And people will put flour on the back of their car. So you can see handprints showing this and there’s ghost tracks in several other places as well. So there are several other places that have really similar stories that say, Oh, here’s where. And it’s often a bus full of children or a group of children that were killed somehow or another.
00:14:02:29 – 00:14:24:03
Speaker 2
Sometimes it’s a bridge. So the train tracks, but you have the same kind of thing, the vanishing hitchhiker, where you have a man who’s driving at night and he sees a woman on the side of the road and it’s usually raining and of isolated area. And he pulls over an officer a ride. She tells him where she’s going and he gives her his coat because she’s shivering.
00:14:24:03 – 00:14:40:23
Speaker 2
And then when he pulls up to the address she gave him and he turns to let her out of the car, she’s not there and he’s confused. So he goes to the door to check and see if she got it. Okay. And an older woman answers the door and says, Oh, that was my daughter who died 25 years ago tonight in that exact spot where you encountered her.
00:14:40:24 – 00:15:01:06
Speaker 2
She was hit by a car. And then how often there’s Akoto where he goes to her tombstone the next day and finds his jacket folded neatly on the on her tombstone. And that story we can date to at least the 19th century where it’s a person driving a carriage who pulls over and picks up and it’s all told all over the world.
00:15:01:06 – 00:15:20:16
Speaker 2
I was teaching this one time to one of my students who is from Ecuador, looked at me really confused, and she said, No, that happened in Guayaquil. I know exactly where that story happened. Nothing American. So there’s a place in Chicago. It’s called Resurrection Mary that’s very famous. So these stories kind of move around, but they’re usually set in a specific time and place.
00:15:20:16 – 00:15:42:18
Speaker 2
And then also the other thing about legends is that they do have some kind of message or moral usually in them, but they’re not openly stated. So it’s not like a fable that’s going to end with the slow and steady wins the race or something like that. But usually you can kind of figure out easily there is some kind of instructive thing about telling it like, you know, so be careful when you’re driving late at night or, you know.
00:15:42:27 – 00:15:48:14
Speaker 1
Yeah, but you were saying that you were seeing this in the crime solving communities online.
00:15:49:15 – 00:16:09:17
Speaker 2
Right? So seeing that the stories the people were kind of constructing and they were constructing them communally. So one person would say, you know, I think this happened, and then the next poster would kind of operate as though that thing that person had offered up was true and then say, well, and that then this kind of add on to the story until you have kind of a coherent narrative developing.
00:16:09:17 – 00:16:31:24
Speaker 2
And that’s kind of been constructed by this group and that would have a lot of the same characteristics of legend in terms of one another characteristic of legends we talk about as validating formulas. So something that is built into a legend story to prove that it’s true. So that’s what this happened to a friend of a friend of mine, or I’ve seen the spot where this happened.
00:16:31:24 – 00:16:49:29
Speaker 2
I know that it’s true, right? All of those things you have, the legends. You have also in these stories that are coming on, the kinds of like music. Well, I’ve been to this place and this is what I think happened based on that. Or I know someone who knows someone who connected with the case. And this is what they told me.
00:16:49:29 – 00:16:51:28
Speaker 2
And so that that was really interesting.
00:16:53:01 – 00:16:56:19
Speaker 1
And so that’s what really brought you into this field of of looking at crime.
00:16:57:10 – 00:16:59:05
Speaker 2
Right.
00:16:59:05 – 00:17:32:25
Speaker 1
Okay. And so I like you in that I find that I’m a mom and I feel like a lot of people in my peer group and a lot of moms are super into true crime. But I have never been really interested in crime and myself. But there’s obviously some sort of attraction to it. What is it, do you think, that attracts so many people to like, watch these TV shows and there’s so many different podcast about crime and true crime?
00:17:34:13 – 00:17:53:05
Speaker 2
Yeah, I think there’s a couple different things. I think the one that is fairly obvious to me is that it gives people kind of a sense of control. You know, I get I think everybody’s afraid of crime. That’s something that’s, you know, we’re afraid of being hurt or afraid of, you know, somebody who wishes us ill or something happening to someone we love or we care about.
00:17:54:16 – 00:18:17:22
Speaker 2
That’s an almost universal fear. And I think that hearing for some people, hearing about it and learning more about it gives them some kind of sense of control over it. Like, okay, if I know enough about it, then I can protect myself. I know, like how to look for a serial killer. I can’t get attacked by one. If I know you know how to avoid a predator, then I can keep my kids safe.
00:18:17:22 – 00:18:41:19
Speaker 2
I can look for the right signs. And I think in a world that can be really scary, it gives people some kind of sense of control over it. I think that sometimes it’s a desire to understand the understandable, you know, how can someone do some of these really terrible things? They’re I think for some people are really pushed to like, understand what what turns a person into a monster.
00:18:41:19 – 00:19:09:02
Speaker 2
How does a person who is theologically as just like me do something that’s so unimaginable to me as a you know, as a sane person? I also think and this is the part that I kind of struggle with my self to explain and to understand is that there is an entertainment factor in there. And I think you can’t have that.
00:19:09:02 – 00:19:27:26
Speaker 2
And we can’t ignore the entertainment factor. We can’t ignore the fact that some part of the reason people are engaging with us is because they find it entertaining when there’s a lot written on, particularly the fact that women seem to be really interested in true crime and why this this seems like such a not a thing that women would be interested in.
00:19:27:26 – 00:20:13:23
Speaker 2
And why are they? And I think, you know, if you look at like kids toys, like girls have kitchen sets and teapots and dolls and things like that, things that are sensitive with domesticity, boys have, you know, toy guns and toys in there as a toy. Soldiers and boys kind of have this other thing to, you know, let maybe like a pressure valve and what any kind of violent impulses that I don’t I mean, this is maybe first a psychologist to understand that I think that it does give women a way that’s a little bit more socially acceptable to engage with as it was kind of fascinating to me when I started giving papers at
00:20:13:23 – 00:20:35:01
Speaker 2
conferences on true crime related stuff. And the first time I did, you could tell the conference organizers hadn’t expected it to be a well-attended panel because we were first thing in the morning on Saturday and we were in a small room and it was ended up being standing room only. It was a really popular panel and every person who got up at the end to ask a question prefaced it with, I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I really like true crime.
00:20:35:19 – 00:20:39:07
Speaker 2
And so they were all like, Oh, the.
00:20:39:07 – 00:20:40:15
Speaker 1
Guilt is in.
00:20:40:15 – 00:21:00:13
Speaker 2
Right? By the fourth time I was like, okay, I think, you know, you’re among friends. You don’t have to apologize for lying. But, you know, I think it is kind of maybe a way to experiment, experience something terrible and like a I don’t know, I’m still trying to work that part out.
00:21:00:13 – 00:21:15:28
Speaker 1
Yeah. And you sent in a lot of what you see in these groups and in and media. Is this desperation of the and the criminals from humanity. Is that right?
00:21:16:10 – 00:21:18:20
Speaker 2
Yes.
00:21:18:20 – 00:21:24:09
Speaker 1
And a painting of them as as modern day monsters. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
00:21:24:27 – 00:21:46:07
Speaker 2
Okay. So again, I think it’s this desire to kind of understand and for example, although I hate to talk about it because I think people need to stop talking about it, but Ted Bundy is one of the, you know, probably one of the best known American serial killers. There’s just this thought, these made for TV movies and documentaries, and that keeps coming up over and over again.
00:21:46:07 – 00:22:00:03
Speaker 2
And one of the things that people always feel the need to bring up about him is that he was good looking and he really was that good looking. But why does it matter that he’s good looking? Why does that have anything to do with the things that he did.
00:22:00:28 – 00:22:04:02
Speaker 1
Other than attribute value to good looking people? Don’t we?
00:22:04:19 – 00:22:25:25
Speaker 2
We do. And I think it makes the portrayal worse that he looks normal and yet he does these terrible things. If we can if we could make all of our serial killers look like monsters, then we would feel safer, right? Because we could just avoid the people that look like monsters. But it’s the fact that and I would say, you know, again, I don’t find Ted Bundy to be that attractive.
00:22:25:25 – 00:22:48:28
Speaker 2
Of course, I can’t divorce what I know about him from his picture. But I think I would say more than being attractive, he just looks average. He looks very normal. He’s was clean cut. He was dressed like a normal guy, whatever normal means. And so whereas if you look at traditional monster stories, the monsters always look like monsters.
00:22:48:29 – 00:23:15:18
Speaker 2
The other either gigantic or has, you know, spikes all over them or, or horns or, you know, Oh, there’s something, right? Yeah. Something physical about them that makes the monstrous. And we don’t have that with our our monsters. We’re kind of left in modern society confronted with the fact that humans are monsters and so how do we kind of negotiate that?
00:23:15:18 – 00:23:36:20
Speaker 2
And I think what you see is people trying to find a way to move move these people further and further away from the category of human. And you’ll see a lot of adjectives used. You’ll see them called monsters very frequently, but you’ll also see them called, you know, things like animals or predator or or words that we use to associate with monsters.
00:23:36:20 – 00:23:42:15
Speaker 2
If you look at something I’m working on right now with serial killer nicknames and first of all, there’s a little.
00:23:42:15 – 00:23:46:09
Speaker 1
Yes, give us a few interesting serial killer nicknames.
00:23:47:06 – 00:24:18:29
Speaker 2
I mean, there’s quite a few that have something like the Vampire of Sacramento. So there’s the there’s a vampire serial killer in Argentina also. And about those guys that had something to do with their methodology. But we’re also kind of putting this literal monster identity attached to them. There was one in Detroit who’s never been caught called who’s referred to as Bigfoot, and just mostly based on the fact that he was a large man based on what they know he was.
00:24:19:23 – 00:24:44:25
Speaker 2
And so, again, like we’ve made us human into a little more literal Krypton as a means of trying to keep ourselves. So you’re trying to make him You had a lot that are compared to animals in other there’s there’s one in Russia. I forget his real name who was called the hippopotamus. That’s probably the most strange animal, but it’s interesting.
00:24:44:25 – 00:24:45:08
Speaker 1
Yeah.
00:24:45:27 – 00:25:20:26
Speaker 2
There’s a couple, you know, things with the alligators I think are have been used in quite a few and there’s quite a few that are just the monster of that formulation seems to be really common in Italy. And I’m still trying to figure out of that. And I don’t speak Italian, so that’s yeah, there’s a lot of like the Monster of Venice, the monster of Milan, the monster of whatever there is a lot of things like the demon of whatever legends obviously standpoint.
00:25:20:26 – 00:25:48:00
Speaker 2
But in there there was a Russian female serial killer was referred to as Satan in a skirt. And I think there’s a whole other day when we get it in alliterative alliteration. But when we get into female serial killers, I think there’s an extra kind of discomfort there with, you know, women are supposed to be nurturing and we’re supposed to be mothers and we’re supposed to be caregivers and kind of givers of life.
00:25:48:00 – 00:26:13:24
Speaker 2
We’re not supposed to be takers of life. And you see a lot of the discourse on female serial killers talking about how masculine they are. So, for example, got was a woman who killed several of her husbands and suitors in northern Indiana in the early 20th century, as she is called, the black widow of La Porte, which is where she was from.
00:26:13:24 – 00:26:36:14
Speaker 2
But she’s also, if you look at descriptions, people say, well, you know, she was really tall and she had really broad shoulders and she had really big hands. And you’ll even see people at the time say, I don’t even know if I think she was really a woman. And a lot of the you know, she gave birth to several children, but she certainly was biologically a woman, or at least all the evidence points to that.
00:26:36:14 – 00:26:53:17
Speaker 2
But it’s a well, she can’t really be a woman and do these terrible things. So she we have to make her into some kind of something that we can understand to make us feel a little safer and that like, okay, we’re right. A real, real regular person can’t do this. It has to be, you know.
00:26:55:23 – 00:26:58:17
Speaker 1
To make them into a boogeyman, right?
00:26:58:27 – 00:27:21:12
Speaker 2
Absolutely. And I think, you know, and this is the thing I see on these true crime communities is that some of these particularly ones that we don’t know as much about that either they were never caught or we don’t know they’re full victims. Israel Keyes is one that kind of has become a boogeyman figure. That is the go to explanation for any unsolved crime between certain time periods.
00:27:21:12 – 00:27:34:25
Speaker 2
It’s it was probably Israel. Keyes may have been nowhere near there. We may have proof that he was nowhere near that. But we can we can pull him up because he’s sort of very much of this kind of boogeyman type category.
00:27:34:25 – 00:27:44:08
Speaker 1
I see differences, stark differences between female and male serial killers. And that in their ways of of murder.
00:27:46:02 – 00:28:20:11
Speaker 2
For the most part, there are you know, women are much more likely to use things like poison. They’re also seem to be a little more calculating and less kind of set off by a compulsion, which is why while there’s many fewer known female serial killers, a lot of them have much higher body counts because they often operate for a longer time before they’re caught, because there seems to be more of a degree of control over it, they’re more likely to do it for things like they’ll get tested for money.
00:28:20:12 – 00:28:26:21
Speaker 2
You know, she kind of woman and with the promise of marriage and then kill them and take their money.
00:28:26:21 – 00:28:43:24
Speaker 1
So yeah, I feel like the only two women serial killers that I’m familiar with is when I just read a book called Before We Were Yours. And and it was about, Oh, well, there is a lot of elements, but there was a.
00:28:43:24 – 00:28:44:08
Speaker 2
A.
00:28:44:11 – 00:29:22:14
Speaker 1
An orphanage and the woman’s name was Georges Hand, and she was estimated to have killed about 500 children and upwards of about 500 children, mostly from neglect. And for children that she didn’t feel were adoptable, she just kind of disposed of. So it was for profit, I think more so than for compulsion, like you were saying before. And the other one I knew of and a woman who ran it was way back in the day who ran a a weight diet, a weight clinic.
00:29:23:00 – 00:29:30:03
Speaker 1
And were you you went to lose weight and she basically starved women to death. Do you get that thought that one?
00:29:30:03 – 00:29:36:20
Speaker 2
I can’t remember her name, but the place was was it nicknamed like Starvation Heights or something like that. The place where she.
00:29:37:22 – 00:29:39:17
Speaker 1
Yeah. And do it like people just like.
00:29:40:02 – 00:29:40:15
Speaker 2
Died.
00:29:40:15 – 00:29:50:14
Speaker 1
In her care. But she believed in what she was doing, even though she was killing all these women who were coming to her spa. Yeah, that is interesting.
00:29:51:08 – 00:30:19:10
Speaker 2
Yeah, there’s quite a few, you know, And there’s Jane Taban, who was a nurse and who killed her patients. And it didn’t get noticed for a long time because most of them were already in poor health. That’s why they were in the hospital. And she did a lot of giving overdoses of tranquilizers and then bringing people back and she is estimated to have killed over a hundred people as well.
00:30:20:04 – 00:30:48:26
Speaker 1
Well, I am I read this book recently, it was called and it was called If the Shoe Fits. And it was a retelling of a Cinderella story. And I found it interesting and I wanted to bring it up because she changed the narrative in the story to instead of having the stepmother and stepsisters as villains, she changed them to be supportive.
00:30:48:26 – 00:31:16:00
Speaker 1
And it was a modern, modern day retelling of Cinderella. And I thought that was a really interesting choice because one of the things that you mentioned in your one of your lectures was that folktales require monsters, and that’s one of the main criteria. But in modern day and contemporary literature, we’re kind of changing the villains to be not quite so clear cut.
00:31:16:06 – 00:31:28:29
Speaker 1
And in fact, in the retelling of this story, there wasn’t even a clear cut villain. There is. I’m not actually clear in who the villain was in this story, although there was conflict.
00:31:29:12 – 00:31:29:19
Speaker 2
Mm hmm.
00:31:31:20 – 00:31:49:22
Speaker 1
And so I was just curious about your take on how are we changing as a society in terms of like, we need a boogeyman in a real life, but not necessarily in literature or what are your. I’m not really sure what my question is here, but I just thought that that was really interesting.
00:31:50:17 – 00:32:12:18
Speaker 2
That was really interesting. And I haven’t read that book. It’s, you know, I think in that case, also maybe reflective about different ways of viewing our I don’t know, just kind of what women are likely to be up against in the world. Mm hmm. And, you know, I love the idea of them working together and being supportive instead of enemies.
00:32:13:10 – 00:32:38:09
Speaker 2
But, you know, one thing I think that is lost on modern audiences when we hear Cinderella is, you know, that’s the stepmother conflict and all of the anxiety that people historically had over inheritance when, you know one child is going to inherit everything and you don’t have male heirs, you know, you see that a lot of these folk, Disney is a way of kind of learning about the culture that produced them.
00:32:38:16 – 00:33:00:20
Speaker 2
And so, you know, nowadays, I mean, not that we don’t have issues with inheritance and things like that today, but it’s, I think, less of a constant concern for people and more so like maybe, you know, fighting against just patriarchal society together or, you know, it might be, you know, I mean, our conflicts differently.
00:33:00:20 – 00:33:13:10
Speaker 1
When they came back in that time period, inheritance usually went to like the firstborn son and then the other two, the other children didn’t really get anything, so they didn’t have to parcel things out into smaller parcels. Is that right?
00:33:13:25 – 00:33:32:16
Speaker 2
Right. I mean, you know, it depends on the specific time and specific place. And there’s, you know, variation. But usually it was, you know, where there’s the firstborn son, God is not everything, at least most things. And then it’s just kind of, you know, trying to find their own way. This is also interesting.
00:33:33:23 – 00:33:34:25
Speaker 1
I would say something else.
00:33:36:07 – 00:33:57:12
Speaker 2
I’m but, you know, it’s also why a lot of times don’t have heroes in these stories. It’s the youngest child. They’ll often be three children and that’s the youngest child. That’s the the kind of unlikely hero. Well, that’s because the youngest children were more likely to have to go and make their way in the world. They were not going to have things as easy as their older siblings were that.
00:33:57:29 – 00:34:03:29
Speaker 2
So as a young child, I’ve always appreciated.
00:34:03:29 – 00:34:07:08
Speaker 1
I have been noticing that in the stories I’ve been reading to my children.
00:34:09:10 – 00:34:25:21
Speaker 1
Can we talk a little bit about the podcast that you had? I didn’t mention it in your bio, but you had a podcast called Crime War, where you looked at the intersection between legends and and folklore. Can you talk a little bit about that podcast?
00:34:26:19 – 00:34:49:24
Speaker 2
Yeah, and I always tell people were officially still just on a hiatus. We may be back. We have four episodes that have been recorded and never released because I’ve just never gotten around to editing them. And I got a new job and my podcast is in the final stages with his dissertation and just kind of focused on other things.
00:34:49:24 – 00:35:20:03
Speaker 2
But what we did there was mostly focused on urban legends and looking at kind of what those urban legends told us about our views on crime and the kind of what the world was like. And then we looked at the truth behind them. So are there real life parallels are there? So, for example, poison, Halloween candy, the stories about kids getting poison or razor blades in their Halloween candy, and those have been going around for quite a long time.
00:35:21:01 – 00:35:42:14
Speaker 2
And the reality is that that’s not something that has happened from strangers that generally when someone’s bet a child’s been poisoned by tainted candidates, by a family member, there are you know, there’s a notable story in Texas where a father didn’t kill one of his children and tried to kill another child and also tried to cover it up, tried to poison a neighbor child.
00:35:44:00 – 00:36:00:24
Speaker 2
And he was caught. But, you know, he tried to say, oh, well, I got this from this one house on the street that was kept. The door was lights were out. But I knocked on the door anyway. And this guy just handed me these Pixy Stix that turned out to be poison in them. But the stories are never that it’s a parent hurting a child, as always.
00:36:00:24 – 00:36:21:29
Speaker 2
But it’s, you know, some creepy guy at the end of the street or the hippies of the, you know, a block away or it’s, you know, oftentimes in the eighties with satanic panic. And so it is these devil is that are after our children. And then after after September 11th. And it was like terrorists are going to, you know, go after our children that way.
00:36:21:29 – 00:36:45:17
Speaker 2
And it absolutely tells you where our kind of cultural fears are at the moment. But it’s interesting that we don’t talk about parents killing their children because that’s, I think, a little too horrific to talk about. And so that’s one thing that’s interesting in a parallel that fairy tales have with true crime legends done and that legends, the villain is always the stranger lurking in the shadows.
00:36:45:17 – 00:37:10:22
Speaker 2
It’s always the it’s always stranger danger kind of villain. It’s not someone close to you. And of course, you’re in much more danger statistically from someone close to you. As a woman, you’re most likely to be murdered by your intimate partner. But those don’t make good legends, as you know, because I think it’s so longer to talk. But it’s so terrifying to think about that That danger could be so close to home.
00:37:11:15 – 00:37:11:27
Speaker 2
Yeah.
00:37:12:09 – 00:37:16:04
Speaker 1
Do you have a favorite urban legend?
00:37:16:04 – 00:37:44:21
Speaker 2
I think my favorite. And I don’t know if it’s my favorite at this point in my life. I don’t know if I can really say it’s my favorite because I like it or die favorite because it’s a really good teachable legend and it works really great for me in classroom settings and stuff. But I really like the color in the backseat, which is the story of a woman who’s driving at night and there’s a truck following her that keeps flashing its brights at her and she’s keep trying to switch lanes or turn to get away from it.
00:37:44:21 – 00:38:06:14
Speaker 2
And it keeps following her and it keeps flashing its brides over and she’s getting progressively panicked and finally pulls into her driveway and runs for the door, screaming for her husband to come out. But and the truck pulls in behind her. And instead of following her, the truck driver gets out and goes to her backseat and pulls in and out of her back seat and it turns out that there’s a man in her backseat with a knife.
00:38:06:14 – 00:38:27:05
Speaker 2
And this trucker noticed that it was flashing his brights because every time the man raises the knife at the truck driver, it flashes bright his brights and the person would drop back down. And I, like I always tell people, and this is true, but my mother told me this story when I was 16 and she told it to me as a true story and say, this is a legend.
00:38:27:05 – 00:38:51:09
Speaker 2
So this happened, you know, and it’s so easy to forget. It’s something that’s very teachable, but a fairly common experience experience, I think, with women at my age. And that we heard this about that time often from our mothers. And it’s that, you know, be careful when you’re at your sticks and you’re going to finally have the freedom to leave the house on your own, to go out without your parents to look out for you.
00:38:51:09 – 00:39:07:12
Speaker 2
So we need to make sure that you’re going to be safe. You need to check your back seats. You need to be aware of your surroundings as you’re getting into your car in an empty parking lot to pay attention to these things. And it’s interesting, I’ve surveyed my students. I’ve had a lot of female students who were telling the stories.
00:39:07:12 – 00:39:10:10
Speaker 2
I’ve never I once had a male student who was told the story by a parent.
00:39:11:06 – 00:39:12:09
Speaker 1
Interesting.
00:39:12:09 – 00:39:33:18
Speaker 2
And so it’s getting at this, you know, this idea that women are more vulnerable. And I statistic I’d like to throw out for my students to blow their minds is that 75% of murder victims in the US are men, which I’m not saying that’s a good thing. Obviously, murder is terrible no matter what. But I think if you look at news coverage or you look at the way we talk about it, you would think women are much more likely to be victims than men are.
00:39:33:18 – 00:39:44:27
Speaker 2
And in fact, men are likely to be victims. And I don’t know, maybe some of that is because men don’t expect to be victims and they’re not taking basic precautions. I don’t know that that’s more likely to.
00:39:44:27 – 00:39:51:26
Speaker 1
Get in a fight. Maybe they’re more likely to get into an argument and does intervene.
00:39:52:12 – 00:40:15:27
Speaker 2
I think certainly I think that a lot of it’s that kind of thing. Then, of course, there’s some of those are associated with drug trade and gang violence and things like that. But that’s a fairly small percentagewise. But yes, it’s interesting that and so much many of the dynamics, Erin, that like she thinks that the danger is this car that’s following her and it’s actually something much closer.
00:40:15:27 – 00:40:34:21
Speaker 2
She thinks it’s a truck driver or a truck is how I mean, and part of it is well, that there have been several serial killers who were truck drivers and that’s how they eluded the police for so long. So they were operating cross-country. There’s kind of this fear that’s developed around truck drivers. And of course, most truck drivers are perfectly nice.
00:40:34:21 – 00:40:47:10
Speaker 2
Law abiding citizens. But and that sort of plays on that as she’s assumed that’s the danger, but it’s actually something even closer. It’s also interesting, just nice and spooky. And yeah.
00:40:47:29 – 00:40:56:12
Speaker 1
Well, I personally loved the podcast. I did listen to the whole thing, but I did listen to three and one day because I found it very addicting. So I do hope that you continue it.
00:40:57:08 – 00:41:05:12
Speaker 2
I’m glad we really helped you. You know, I really love it. And we have a lot more about mapped out. And I just you know, as you’re aware, your podcast takes a lot of work.
00:41:06:02 – 00:41:12:14
Speaker 1
Yeah, definitely. And what would drew you to that topic in particular for a podcast topic?
00:41:13:24 – 00:41:33:09
Speaker 2
So that was, you know, the minute I started studying to write and stuff, a lot of people started saying You need to have a podcast. And I was joking, yeah, because what the world doesn’t have enough of is true crime. Podcasts obviously was and I was determined I wouldn’t do it if I couldn’t come up with like an angle that I felt like was unique on it.
00:41:33:09 – 00:42:00:00
Speaker 2
And I think that I had something that I could bring to it that nobody else would. And I played around with a couple of different ideas initially. You know, I kind of looked into, I thought a lot and had a lots of notes about doing something that was a little more investigative and thinking like, well, what what can I as a focus bring to actually investigating something and what just my knowledge of culture and groups and things, what could that bring to it?
00:42:00:00 – 00:42:16:00
Speaker 2
And I really was really excited. I was in over my head with that and that I didn’t necessarily need to be poking around in that. And I’m not that’s not a critique of investigative podcasts. I think some of them have done great things, but I think just be really careful about doing that. And I don’t feel like I was prepared to.
00:42:16:00 – 00:42:40:04
Speaker 2
There was no way I was going to do something like that without talking to, for example, victims families. And I didn’t feel prepared to do that. Let’s make that again. I think that can be done very well and has had great results. But I didn’t feel like I was qualified to do that and I wasn’t going to go retraumatized somebody and like bring up the worst thing that had happened to them in their life, just for my own, whatever.
00:42:40:04 – 00:42:57:09
Speaker 2
So I know that I’m kind of dropping this thinking like that. And I wouldn’t say with either one of those. There’s kind of two different versions about that I spoke to with them. I won’t say that either one of this is completely abandoned, that I might go back at some point in my career to those things. But I just didn’t feel like at that point I was ready.
00:42:57:09 – 00:43:20:28
Speaker 2
And it was actually I ever told my friend that kind of ABC idea inadvertently this. But I was talking with a friend of mine and she had said she was reading a book that I had recommended to about a serial killer. And she said, You know, I have to tell you, though, as much as I like the book you telling me about, it was way more interesting than reading this book is.
00:43:21:15 – 00:43:46:24
Speaker 2
And I kind of triggered something in my brain about I have a background as a storyteller of a background in performance and another life as a circus performer. Before I became a folklorist. Actually, contemporary is amazing, but it’s, you know, that is the ability to tell a story is something that I do feel like. I don’t know that I’m like the greatest that, but I think I am a little more in tune to the ability to tell stories.
00:43:46:24 – 00:44:18:29
Speaker 2
And so that was where I kind of came with the ideas. Okay, it’s going to start off with me telling the story and you listen to podcasts you never get. So it starts off with me telling a legend, and that’s where that came from. And I had been bouncing around a lot of these ideas with my best friend, and at the time housemate Jesse Coach is another folklorist and had he previously done a different podcast called Encounters, and he got kind of I noticed he was getting really interested in it and kept getting more and more engaged with the ideas, and he kept thinking, you know, you should do this.
00:44:18:29 – 00:44:33:05
Speaker 2
And yeah, it kind of makes me want to podcast again. And I finally just said, Jesse, do you want to do this with me? Do you want to be involved? The person I well, you know, I do, but I don’t really have the time. And so we kind of arranged it so that he didn’t have to do any research.
00:44:33:05 – 00:44:43:18
Speaker 2
And he was just kind of my conversation partner, which were good ideas, where I was telling everyone he’s the baby brother I never had or wanted one, so we can chat pretty well.
00:44:43:21 – 00:44:46:05
Speaker 1
So yeah, yeah. Hi. Group banter.
00:44:47:14 – 00:44:54:01
Speaker 2
It was a it was a gradual process, but I think I was proud of what we came up with which is again, why I really would like to go back to it someday.
00:44:54:01 – 00:45:07:13
Speaker 1
But yeah, I definitely hope you do. It is It’s a very interesting topic and so anyone who is interested in listening to it is called Crime Law, and it’s on most podcasting streaming.
00:45:08:03 – 00:45:08:23
Speaker 2
And.
00:45:09:09 – 00:45:26:22
Speaker 1
Okay, so back to I wanted to talk a little bit about I wanted to go back to the crime solving communities because I like I said, I’m not really into to crime myself, so I wasn’t familiar with this. But you said this is a pretty extensive there’s quite a few of them, right?
00:45:27:13 – 00:45:50:28
Speaker 2
There are. And some of them are very large. You know, some of them are kind of small and centered on like one case or one location, but some of them are really with, you know, thousands of thousands of members. And, you know, one thing I always feel like I need to tell people about studying true crime communities as much as I’m dealing with really dark material, you know, like there are times where I have to kind of step away from it because it gets to be a little bit much for me.
00:45:50:28 – 00:46:13:13
Speaker 2
But I also see really beautiful things in terms of people that are willing to just give there. If there’s nothing that they’re going to gain from this. It’s just like some people out. And I saw one time where someone had posted about a grandparent that had been murdered and the case is never closed and they were kind of interested in maybe looking into it.
00:46:13:22 – 00:46:31:29
Speaker 2
And immediately people that lived near where it happened said, well, you know, I live near that courthouse and I have to go on my lunch break and poll records for you if you let me know what you need. And they were trying to talk about maybe getting in contact with somebody who was in jail and someone else said, you know, I don’t like to talk about this, but I was in prison for a little while when I was in my twenties.
00:46:31:29 – 00:46:54:03
Speaker 2
And one of the easiest ways to get the attention of someone who’s in prison is to put money in their commissary account. And, you know, all of a sudden people just jumping in and volunteering information and volunteering to help when they had nothing to gain from any of that. That is really beautiful. And there’s something about, yeah, maybe there is, you know, all the bad things that are going on.
00:46:54:03 – 00:47:01:29
Speaker 2
Maybe that, you know, there is some good like some kind of, I don’t know, civic responsibility or something that people just have.
00:47:01:29 – 00:47:09:19
Speaker 1
But it’s really nice. And do you find that the communities are successful? I mean, are there a lot of crimes that end up being closed?
00:47:10:24 – 00:47:37:01
Speaker 2
Not a lot. And I and I should say also there have been times where it’s gone completely off the rails and someone’s been sent in, has been accused of harassed, and there’s some really terrible things that have happened to. But where they’ve had the best success, I think has been with identifying identified bodies. John and Jane Doe’s prison spent a lot of those recently that identified with genetic genealogy, which is of course growing.
00:47:37:01 – 00:47:41:28
Speaker 2
And some of the genetic genealogists are people that kind of got into it from those online crime solving world.
00:47:42:09 – 00:47:43:00
Speaker 1
Oh, wow.
00:47:43:16 – 00:48:06:27
Speaker 2
So it’s been an interesting relation there. But in terms of building family trees, these are not the geneticists for the most part, but of like one of the I think more famous cases is a man who was known for years as James, as a Grateful Doe. His real name is Jason Callahan, but he was a man who was killed in a car accident and it was just an accident.
00:48:06:27 – 00:48:38:23
Speaker 2
He wasn’t actually a crime victim, but he had no ID on him. He had been a hitchhiker, and the only clues to his identity were that he had Grateful Dead tickets on him. And for 20 years he was completely unknown and someone started posting his photos and reconstruct to kind of drive through, contracting his face online and started using Grateful DOE groups online to spread this word.
00:48:38:23 – 00:48:58:20
Speaker 2
Say, okay, we know this guy like the Great Masquerade, Grateful Dead groups. Yeah, I was there and eventually someone else said, Oh, I knew that guy. I don’t know his last name, but his first name was Jason and came up with Mark’s photos and it circulated until his mother actually saw the photos and said, I know who that is.
00:48:58:20 – 00:49:17:29
Speaker 2
That was my son. He’s been missing. And of course, this is a sad outcome that she didn’t know her son was deceased and she found that out. I was I’m sure that she was still alive, but at least she has closure. At least she has answers. At least he has his name back. So there been things like that.
00:49:17:29 – 00:49:49:11
Speaker 2
There haven’t. I don’t of any actual crimes being solved purely by amateurs. Again, there’s been there has been and I don’t know where to put the law the line on amateur or not. And if you’ve heard of the Bear Brook case, it was a woman and three children whose bodies were found in barrels in a place called Bear Brook in the at some point they identified the man who killed them, but he was deceased by the time they identified him.
00:49:49:11 – 00:50:17:13
Speaker 2
And they could not identify who this woman and the children were. They knew that two of the children were related to the woman and one of the children was not. And it was a librarian who ended up just kind of poking around on ancestry farms, looking for people who were looking for missing loved ones. Not that they had necessarily identified the people as being endangered, missing, just kind of, hey, you know, my uncle had this daughter and I don’t know what happened to her.
00:50:17:13 – 00:50:22:00
Speaker 2
And she was able to piece together through that and figure out who the woman and the two daughters were.
00:50:22:17 – 00:50:23:08
Speaker 1
Oh, wow.
00:50:24:08 – 00:50:28:02
Speaker 2
So there have been situations like that, though.
00:50:28:02 – 00:50:47:06
Speaker 1
Like I know one of the more famous podcasts was Serial. And he recently the from the first episode from the first season he was released, didn’t have anything to do with the podcast. And like the people who listen to the podcast that do do you know anything about that?
00:50:47:24 – 00:51:18:19
Speaker 2
I think yeah, I think it definitely has something to do. I think in terms of which is another kind of intangible with a lot of these things is just getting cases attention. You know, I think it’s unlikely that without the pressure created by the podcast and by people who heard the podcast and then they listen to it, I don’t know that his case would have gotten looked at by authorities the way that it did to eventually realize I, I haven’t followed the latest development.
00:51:18:19 – 00:51:47:09
Speaker 2
Now he was let out and I know that they were running DNA on new evidence that had been found. And so I don’t know if they got anything conclusive that or not, but they have said that. But they don’t plan to pursue new charges. And I know that the reality is mostly departments are overworked and don’t if they have any kind of case department at all, which a lot of police departments don’t, they’re really short staffed and a lot of times it’s just cold.
00:51:47:09 – 00:52:11:12
Speaker 2
Cases are just kind of something that people work on in their spare time. And often people don’t have spare time and victims families are often given advice like send cookies with a picture of your loved one on it to the officer who’s in charge of your loved one’s case. Because anything you can do to kind of keep them in your home and keep your loved one in their mind is going to make them more likely to look into the case.
00:52:11:12 – 00:52:11:20
Speaker 2
And.
00:52:12:01 – 00:52:12:14
Speaker 1
Right.
00:52:12:14 – 00:52:23:26
Speaker 2
So I think podcasting and these online communities can sometimes help create pressure on and create interest to get a case resources that it would otherwise have.
00:52:24:18 – 00:52:31:15
Speaker 1
Do you know of police departments are ever like utilizing these these communities? I mean, especially if they were like local communities.
00:52:33:00 – 00:52:56:03
Speaker 2
I don’t I don’t know of too many. I know that there are situations that address this is one that kind of at least at one point went off the rails. But after the Boston Marathon bombing, there was a big push by the Boston police say if you were at the marathon and you have photos or video or anything, can you please share that so that, you know, we can help identify, you know, anything?
00:52:56:03 – 00:53:18:07
Speaker 2
And that’s a case where someone got misidentified. Someone had posted that one of the bombers was someone she’d gone to school with and she happened to be his name was not your party. He happened to be missing at the time. And then people started acting on the assumption, Oh, he’s definitely one of the bombers. And his family was harassed, they got death threats, and it actually turned out that she had died from suicide.
00:53:18:25 – 00:53:42:26
Speaker 2
And so this family is not only dealing with this horrible tragedy that their loved one is gone, but they’re also now being publicly harassed because their loved one is a murderer. And I don’t think the person who posted that had any ill intention. I think she just maybe underestimated how fast things could spread. She just tweeted, oh, I think that guy I went to school with and it all spiraled out of control from there.
00:53:42:26 – 00:53:52:11
Speaker 2
So I don’t know if because it went off the rails there, if that’s maybe made police departments a little more hesitant to come try to use that name.
00:53:52:16 – 00:53:55:20
Speaker 1
But yeah, I would definitely make sense.
00:53:56:08 – 00:53:56:17
Speaker 2
Yeah.
00:53:57:27 – 00:54:14:05
Speaker 1
Well, running out of time is there anything that we haven’t covered that your research is surprising or interesting that you feel like our listeners would be interested in hearing about?
00:54:14:05 – 00:54:40:06
Speaker 2
I’m trying to think probably the one that is just kind of a funny thing. So there’s a term used in focus studies called us attention, which is basically acting out a legend. So this is like when you go to the San Antonio ghost dress and put your card or you’ve heard that this happened. So you go there to that place to kind of try to live out what happens or any kind of haunted spot.
00:54:41:06 – 00:55:03:26
Speaker 2
But fingers have also said, you know, it’s also a kind of our attention if we something happens to us and we interpret that through having heard a legend. So I don’t know if that was out of the bag as I talked about it on one episode, that I had an experience where I was driving. I got into my car late at night and was driving home down a dark wooded road, and I started smelling men’s cologne.
00:55:04:09 – 00:55:21:00
Speaker 2
And I completely convinced there was a man hiding somewhere in my car because I couldn’t come up with any other reason that there would be men’s cologne in my car. And actually turned out it was the soap at my friend’s house. That’s not like there’s cologne I hadn’t noticed until I was in a really enclosed spot. But that was a good example of me.
00:55:21:00 – 00:55:46:10
Speaker 2
I interpreted this random thing through the one because I’d heard this legend and I. This is something else I see. I think a lot of these crime solving communities, I’m actually you just see this generally on social media. Someone has a weird interaction and Target and they’ve heard all these stories about human traffickers stopping at grocery stores. And immediately that weird guy I talked to must have been a human trafficker.
00:55:46:10 – 00:56:14:25
Speaker 2
And they start spreading, you know, be wary that we’ll see, you know, and I think you see that in some, again, like online postings that I feel like any woman in a certain age, in certain parts of the country, had an encounter with Ted Bundy at a shopping mall, like there’s so many people saying, oh, yeah, you know, I ran into this guy at a shopping mall on this date, and then I later on recognized him and the picture of Ted Bundy and probably some of them were probably some of those are legit.
00:56:15:00 – 00:56:35:20
Speaker 2
I’m sure he had times where he tried to target women and failed. But I’m also pretty positive some of those were just other creepers. I mean, there’s a lot of guys that are not that party, but I think it’s a form of us to do that. People are they know about Ted Bundy, and so they’re interpreting this unsettling experience they had 30 years ago with a man or had it been Ted Bundy.
00:56:36:02 – 00:56:39:27
Speaker 2
Right. It could be something else. So. Yeah.
00:56:41:04 – 00:56:59:17
Speaker 1
Exactly. Well, how interesting. So thank you so much for joining us today. This is super enlightening and a different look at a crime than we normally get from the crime podcast in the podcast universe.
00:57:01:00 – 00:57:03:03
Speaker 2
Well, this is a lot of fun.
00:57:04:00 – 00:57:19:06
Speaker 1
Yeah. And you know, you that you studied so much, you have so many other areas of research. We might just have to bring one at a later date to, to talk about some of your other areas because some so many of them were are fascinating. So I’ll have to look at that at a later date.
00:57:19:23 – 00:57:21:18
Speaker 2
And just let me know.
00:57:21:18 – 00:57:45:14
Speaker 1
And so thank you. Thank you, friends, for listening today. All the links we mentioned will be on our website. WW w dot fabric of folklore dot com And as always, if you enjoyed the show, please let us know you can do that by chiming in on our Facebook group and by subscribing by liking and giving us at least 1000 stars on iTunes.
00:57:46:16 – 00:58:06:10
Speaker 1
But most importantly, you can help us by telling that you have that you meet about our show, you can meet, you can tell your neighbor when you run into them at their at the mailbox about the coolest podcast that is having you rethink everything you’ve known about life. So I hope to see you back soon and.
00:58:07:19 – 00:58:28:01
Speaker 3
See you next time.