DF Unplugged: GennaRose Nethercott

May 29

[Intro]
Perry Carpenter:
Hey there, I'm Perry Carpenter, one of the hosts of the Digital Folklore Podcast. Welcome to Digital Folklore Unplugged edition. Unplugged is a new additional episode type that we're trying out. And when we say Unplugged, we mean that we are stripping away much of the narrative framing and the production elements that we use in our standard episodes, and we're giving you access to very raw or only slightly edited interviews. Today's guest is GennaRose Nethercott.
GennaRose voiceover:
I'm GennaRose Nethercott.
Perry Carpenter:
GennaRose is a folklorist, an author, a poet, and is also a researcher and producer for the podcast Lore. She won a National Poetry Series award for her book, The Lumberjack's Dove. And her most recent book, Thistlefoot, is a re-imagining of Baba Yaga that she somehow effortlessly we use together with American road adventure, the complexity of sibling relationships and even puppetry. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. What you are about to hear is a roughly 45 minute excerpt from our full one hour and 30 minute interview with GennaRose.
If you're a Patreon supporter and you want to hear the additional 45 minutes, you can head over to Patreon and get access to the full interview where in addition to today's topics, you'll hear about GennaRose's life as a child clown, her quest to secure a Bell Tower to work from, what it was like to win the National Poetry Series, the writing of Thistlefoot and more. All of that's over on Patreon. We pick up here with a discussion of folklore, urban legends, and the interesting time we find ourselves in, which is enabled by social media and other forms of mass public online expression. And if you're brand new to the Digital Folklore Podcast, that other voice that you hear in the discussion is our co-host Mason Amadeus. Okay. Let's get unplugged.

[Cut to main interview]

Perry Carpenter:
When we shift gears and think about internet folklore, how do you feel like the internet has changed or enhanced what folklore is?
GennaRose Nethercott:
Okay, so this is the perfect segue to talk about this thing that I was really hoping we get to talk about.
Perry Carpenter:
Okay.
GennaRose Nethercott:
Have you guys ever heard of the Gutenberg Parenthesis?
Perry Carpenter:
The Gutenberg Parenthesis?
Mason Amadeus:
Gutenberg Parenthesis?
GennaRose Nethercott:
Yeah.

Perry and Mason in unison:
No.
GennaRose Nethercott:
Okay. Oh my gosh, strap in, you're going to love this. Okay, so there is a scholar named L.O Sauerberg of the University of Southern Denmark that is who came up with this idea. The concept of it is that it's the idea that before the invention of Gutenberg's printing press, oral communication was the predominant means of passing along information. So the folkloric process was the predominant means of communication. And what I mean by that is with oral tradition, it is multi-author, not single authored. It is spoken, not written down, which means that it is transient, it's shifting. It is not static the way that literate culture is static. It is sort of transmitted from person to person to person, and it shifts with each new transmission, all of the elements that come with folklore and that come with oral tradition. That was the way most information and storytelling function before the printing press.
With the invention of the printing press, literate culture took over as being the predominant culture making sort of style, I guess. So suddenly, the predominant means of communication became static, written, single authored, and literate, which is all totally different than an oral process. Now that remained the case up until the internet. So now that the internet is in full swing, suddenly we have gone back to a much more oral style process of communication where we get our information from multiple authors, like it's gone to the people instead of to the elites that have this control and gatekeeper of the information. It is constantly shifting. It is contributed to by many different people, many different sources. That's how something like Slender Man comes to be, is like you've got all these different contributors that create this story as well as just the way we get our news. I mean, I'm not proud of it, but I feel like I get most of my news by coalescing all the Tweets I read, and I think many of us can say that.
And so essentially for the first time since before the invention of the printing press, the folkloric process has once again become the predominant means of communication. The printing press just kind of interrupted that process that we have now returned to. However, the main difference between the original oral tradition and the internet version of that is, well, two things. One is it is incredibly expedited, right? So something that would've taken years to travel around the world, centuries even, a story to travel around the world now takes a matter of seconds. And you see, I mean, with meme culture, a meme goes in and out of style in a matter of hours or days, so it's super expedited. And two, there is kind of a paper trail. We can go back and find the very first Slenderman piece and find a single author who created it. So it's become this sort of hybridity between literate culture and oral culture with a bit of a lean toward the oral again. So that is the Gutenberg Parenthesis.
Mason Amadeus:
So this is something that we've talked about a fair amount with different people that we've been interviewing, but I don't think it's ever quite been put in that context. And that is really a lot to chew on and think about.
Perry Carpenter:
Yeah. When you get to that, just getting to the purity, I think, of human expression in groups and then also having that paper trail, there's also the other thing that comes with the internet, which is... And I have a cybersecurity background, so in cybersecurity you think about three things all the time, confidentiality, integrity of information, and availability of information. That integrity piece can be shifted around, right? I can still potentially go back and shift some bits and bites and leave a false paper trail if I want to. Or if archive.org isn't as good as it should be, sometimes I might lose some things. So I really like the Gutenberg Parenthesis, but I wonder if maybe as folklores, there should be some dedicated effort to additional preservation techniques so that some of those pieces that could go wrong with integrity and availability could potentially be rectified.
GennaRose Nethercott:
Sure. I mean, I think it's that same paradox that folklore collectors were grappling with in terms of collecting oral tradition, which is as soon as you do collect those pieces and make them static, they are no longer in the form that made them folklore because you've brought them over into a literate form. But yeah, I think it's the same. I think that this was this real movement to collect and preserve oral tradition and I imagine that there will be a very similar movement to collect and preserve internet culture in the same way. I know that at University of Indiana Bloomington, for example, where they have one of the world's leading folklore graduate programs, a number of the students in that program are studying internet culture as their folklore masters thesis. So I think there's already movement to try and preserve these things. But I do also think that the very nature of a folkloric anything is that it's impossible to preserve all of it because there are infinite mutations of it. There're infinite versions of every piece of information. And that's what makes it what it is.
Mason Amadeus:
I think it's an interesting byproduct of the hybridity of it that it is both static and a lot of the times and has a paper trail and also very changing that it's like that. And there is a lot of archiving effort going on already in a way that is kind of folkloric, like a lot of open source efforts to archive and save and preserve. There's the big ones, like Know Your Meme and Internet Archive, but then there's also all sorts of whatever micro community you're in, you'll find people stashing away things on Google drives and passing around links to stuff that doesn't exist anymore.
Perry Carpenter:
Taking screenshots and everything else, trying to make sure that nothing gets lost.
GennaRose Nethercott:
And even so, it's still all digital until there's... It's not actually a paper trail, right? We are using the word paper trail, but if there's some sort of electrical global catastrophe and just the internet doesn't exist anymore, that is lost. But eventually we're going to fling into the sun, so nothing is actually permanent.
Perry Carpenter:
It's always good to have perspective.
Mason Amadeus:
The Gutenberg Parenthesis is something that's really interesting to me that I've never thought of in that way and I haven't ever heard of it, so I haven't had much time to chew on it. But the medium itself, and like you said, the hybridity between oral culture and static printed literate culture, immediately my brain is spinning on parallels between disinformation and misinformation because there's a lot of that and botting and astroturfing and those kinds of things that happen to try and create what feels like a fake upswell of support for something. But I imagine that always happened.
GennaRose Nethercott:
Yeah, I mean, propaganda has always existed, in oral tradition and in literate. And I mean, the thing is too with the parenthesis, it's not like folklore went away during the era of the printing press and in the pre-internet post Gutenberg time. And I'm not sure what professional folklorists view or what their opinion of that theory is. It may be controversial. I'm not sure. Again, I don't have a graduate degree in folklore, so I'm not really privy to the academic side as much in terms of what the contemporary academic opinions of these theories are. But I just find it a really interesting thing to think about, especially in terms of internet culture like how it's shifting the predominant way that we communicate with each other and how also so often folklore is viewed as this form that exists in antiquity when it really is very, very similar to this incredibly modern means of communication.
Mason Amadeus:
That's something that we butted up against. Our initiation into doing this entire project came from a place of total ignorance and then was opening a door to the wonderful wide world of what folklore actually is, because at least for me... I can't speak for Perry, but for me it was very much like, "Oh yeah, like creepy, weird old stories." And it is not that.
GennaRose Nethercott:
It's the stories people tell. Urban legends, for example, had a similar kind of process of realization around them where there was a folklorist who was a professor at the University of Utah, I think his name is Jan Harold Brunvand. His parents were Norwegian if you couldn't tell by the name.
Mason Amadeus:
I had a guess.
GennaRose Nethercott:
Yeah. So Jan Harold Brunvand, he's still alive, was teaching folklore as a professor, and he started noticing something really interesting about the way that his students were talking about folklore, which is that they were discussing it in those same terms as viewing it as these weird old stories that had nothing to do with their lives. And then they were going back to their dorms and whispering these tales of hook handed men killing kids at Lover's Lane and hitchhikers disappearing from back seats.
When Jan heard these stories, he was like, "This sounds quite a bit like folklore." And this was before the idea of the urban legend was a popular concept. And so what he did was he challenged his students to tell him every single one of these stories that they could think of, and he began cataloging them. He became the person who popularized the urban legend as a folkloric form and ended up writing... I have a ton of his books, but they're like... He has just books and books and books filled with all these urban legends that he collected. I think his most well-known book is this is called The Vanishing Hitchhiker. It's like an academic text on urban legends. It's called American Urban Legends and their Meanings. But yeah, so he has piles of books. I mean, for the listeners, you can't see me right now, but I'm holding up a fairly significant stack of chunky books. This isn't even all the ones of his I have.
Yeah, so it's this idea of those moments of realization where you're like, "Wait a second, I'm a person right now. I'm a folk. If I'm a folk, I must also have folklore." People who are telling these old stories were modern people when they were telling them.
Mason Amadeus:
It's really easy to forget that and to look at it through a daguerrotype lens of this was old times, but it wasn't when it was happening, which is obvious, but it's not at the same time. The other thing about that too is that I think a lot of people don't understand the importance of studying it. Something that we've kind of stumbled into discovering is that there are colleges that are losing or cutting their folklore programs due to lack of funding or just a general lack of appreciation for it. And so one of the other things we wanted to do with this as we've started learning more and more, is to try and just make more people aware of the value of studying folklore.
Perry Carpenter:
We'll be back with more of our interview with GennaRose Nethercott after this.
Welcome back.
Mason Amadeus:
Writing prompt. In a short way, can you describe the importance of studying folklore?
GennaRose Nethercott:
Yeah. Well, I guess on the one hand, I think that those cuts that we're seeing, this is something we've seen throughout history, is an undervaluing of folklore, and it is 100% a class issue. Folklore is the communication means of the working class. It is not controlled by the elite. It is controlled by the proletariat. So of course, elite institutions do not see the value in the wisdom and culture of the proletariat. And that's a tale as old as time. So it's no surprise to me that that's always the first thing on the chopping block.
But in terms of the importance of it beyond just being a valuable proletariat art form essentially, is what I was talking about at the beginning of this episode, which is the idea that folklore is a mirror for a culture. And by studying your folk tales, you can learn what a community's values are, what a community's fears are, what their scientific understandings are, what their taboos are, what their belief systems are, the way that they treat each other, and what those values are. Like anything you want to know about a culture, about a people, you can learn by just looking at a fairytale that they tell or a ghost story that their grandmother whispered to them in their kitchen. It's more than just like a fanciful tale. It is the skeleton of people's lives. And to discount folklore and the value of folklore is to discount the value of people's lives.
Mason Amadeus:
Particularly because that's what people are keeping alive just by talking about and sharing.
GennaRose Nethercott:
Exactly. And again, they are reflections of who are doing the telling. So if you say... I mean, and that's why folklore gets on the chopping block. It's that classist thing where by saying we don't care about folklore, you're saying we don't care about the people telling these stories and their lives and their values and their cultures.
Mason Amadeus:
It's amazing how pervasive class issues that are in everything if you step back and abstract it. Something that occurred to me before that I stuck a note down and forgot was with the advent of the internet, and I guess I want your opinion on this because it's a half-formed thought that occurred to me, something that we get to do now because of the open nature of the majority of the internet is peak into other folk groups we don't necessarily belong to. Because whereas with oral tradition, you would have your family folk group, your friends, whatever communities or hobbies or job or whatever you're around. But now I can go look at, I don't know, AI Twitter, which is, well, something as I'm tangentially interested in, but then you see all of the language and all of the community and then the culture and vibe around that. And I feel like that's inherently different about the internet.
GennaRose Nethercott:
I mean, I think there's pros and cons to this where it's really exciting that for the first time you're able to have a really close-knit communities with their own language and tenets and belief systems that are not based on geographical location. One of the things that I think is really lovely about internet community is it allows, for example, like a queer kid in rural Mississippi to suddenly find other people and solidarity and community that they may not find in their geographical location. So it allows for people to find their people. On the other hand, this is how QAnon happens, where it's a feedback loop that if you end up in the wrong ones, you get sucked in and suddenly you're... You always land it like blood libel somehow.
Mason Amadeus:
Right.
GennaRose Nethercott:
I don't know how the every single conspiracy theory, it always goes back to like, "Oh, it's the Jews now."
Mason Amadeus:
Right. I was going to say it's all goes back to antisemitism, which is the oldest thing.
GennaRose Nethercott:
Well, and it's because that first real conspiracy text was an anti-Semitic text. And so all conspiracies holes lead back to that original text, which is just very disgusting.
Mason Amadeus:
Just great. Yeah,
GennaRose Nethercott:
Truly just silly.
Mason Amadeus:
And also, I feel like with the weirdness of permutation that comes from the incredible strangeness of internet culture, it's very easy for people, particularly young people or isolated people, to slip into these pipelines that lead them to these dangerous groups without consciously realizing that it's happening. Or even dog whistles that go missed by people and then get spread through something else and become more popular. I don't have a-
GennaRose Nethercott:
And that's how the incel community has come together. I think that's the thing with folklore in general that is really worth discussing, is it is often viewed not just as antiquated, but as very quaint and cute. There's this cottage core energy to the way that people view folklore. And that is sometimes true, but usually not. Like I've been talking about where folklore exists as a way for communities to talk about taboos or really the uglier sides of reality, but in a way that puts a veil over them that makes them seem innocuous, folklore is not a cutesy, innocuous thing. It is fully a way to spread propaganda. It is fully a way to spread othering. It's a way to brainwash, and it is how you end up with incels. It is how you end up with QAnon. And it's always been that way. This isn't a new internet thing.
Changelings are one I referenced earlier where in changeling folklore you will often see a... Almost every changeling story, if you listen closely to the descriptions of changelings and changeling folklore, which are for those unfamiliar changeling, is in usually a Scottish, Irish, English like Celtic folklore. It's when the fairies steal your baby and replace it with a fairy baby and your baby's been taken off to fairy land, and now you have this fairy baby in your house, which looks a lot like your baby, but you can tell it's not quite the same. And if you look at descriptions of changeling children in traditional stories, they almost exactly mirror descriptions of common birth defects and congenital disorders. And so it was this way for parents with a child with a birth defect or a child who may be sickly in some way to say, "Oh, no, no, no, this isn't my baby. This is a fairy baby."
So on the one hand, you have this way of if a child is maybe passing away for the parents to feel more peace with that, that their child is actually somewhere safe. But you also have this insidious other side of that where changeling stories always end with how to get rid of the changeling and get your own baby back. And that involves putting the changeling in a fire or leaving the changeling at low tide and waiting for high tide to come in. And so it's essentially a socially acceptable form of infanticide fueled by this story that allows that heinous act to become acceptable. And there have been court cases around this where people have committed... There's a famous court case where a man convinced a whole town that his wife was a changeling and they killed her. And then in court, his argument was she was a changeling.
Mason Amadeus:
Really? I had not heard of that.
GennaRose Nethercott:
Yeah, I think it's in Scotland. So folklore, if you look at it on the surface, it is pretty and whimsical, and that is its purpose. It's purpose is to take something that's too much to talk about without that whimsy and drape whimsy over it in a way to obscure it, both to allow people to address things, but also sometimes for harm. And we very much see that in the internet.
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah. And I think there's some inherent power to the way that our brains are wired when you attach ideology to narrative and community and identity, where to go into that or into pipelines towards maybe things that at the start of them have thought you'd never would've believed. People, I feel like inherently were community creatures. And as you start to fall into this community and get to know these people, you feel an inherent desire to defend or take on some of the aspects of things and what they believe in. And particularly when there's stories that are pervasive and things like that, it really is an effective way to get into people's heads, I think.
GennaRose Nethercott:
And it's like it feeds into itself. Which I mean, that's one of the things about folklore and the folklore process that is so fascinating to me, is that it's almost alive on its own. It is this breathing thing that has a way of surviving. One of my favorite examples of internet culture and folklore is, this is so fucking bonkers to me, is have you read that Vice article about Tulpamancy that came out a few years ago?
Mason Amadeus:
No. But there was the Tulpa theory around Slenderman. I'm familiar with the concept of Tulpa, which is that feed... It's actually in our first episode that is not out yet, a creature that exists by feeding it attention. It exists by being served that mental energy. "Yum, yum. Eat them up, make me stronger."
GennaRose Nethercott:
Yeah. So I am really obsessed with this one particular application of the Tulpa in modern culture where... So Tulpamancy originally was sort of a blend of Buddhist mysticism and theosophy where the idea that if you meditate enough on an imagined figure and if you have enough people, like enough monks or theosophers meditating on an imagined figure that you can manifest that figure. And so it has this older spiritual origin, this idea and this word. And then internet furries found out about it, and the furries started using the practice of Tulpamancy in order to manifest their furry alter egos who would then take over their bodies, and then they would go in chat rooms and the talk to each other.
So to me this is the exact example of why folklore is so exciting to me in the way that it manages to survive in that this is a practice that started in this Buddhist mysticisms theosophy world. And in order to survive, it has adapted itself to applying to furry chat rooms in the 2000s in a way that is just as potent. So it's almost like a being or a virus. Or not a virus because I don't think it's negative, but it's a creature that's finding how it can survive in these different contexts. I love that particular adaptation that feels so surprising, but actually kind of makes perfect sense.
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah, it does. It's that recontextualizing and reuse. And with the advent of the internet being able to learn about things like a Tulpa or whatever, very much easier, because that I can't imagine would be something... It's hard to imagine life without the internet when you're someone who works from home and googles everything all the time. But to find out about that, unless you had somehow had a brush with the theosophy, yeah, it is so fascinating.
GennaRose Nethercott:
I really recommend reading that Vice article about it. If you just google Vice Tulpas, it'll probably pop up. But it's really interesting.
Mason Amadeus:
The internet's newest subculture is all about creating imaginary friends. Tulpamancy. Dope. I'm going to keep that tab open.
GennaRose Nethercott:
Yeah, it's a wild article.
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah. And it is interesting how you said that folklore is like this own third entity that is keeping itself alive and spreading, and all these various aspects are.
GennaRose Nethercott:
And it feeds off our belief.
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah. And there was in Jeana Jorgensen's book, Folklore 101, I'm going to paraphrase this horribly. She said something along the lines of like folklore is a way to have a look into the what is actually on people's minds and what they're keeping alive. And it's interesting how currently everything is such a conglomeration of older things and new things mashing up in this weird way. I feel like it's hard to figure out what the internet is doing. If the internet didn't exist, what would the study of folklore look like? What would our various folklores look like? How different would it really be? Because the speed is the obvious thing.
GennaRose Nethercott:
I mean, I think you can see that in the fact that folklore existed for the internet and people didn't study it. So yeah, one of the interesting things about that book I was referencing, the Brunvand book, The Vanishing Hitchhiker, is that the first edition of that book I think came out in the '80s. And so it is a study of urban legends but before the internet, which urban legends are this very modern mode of folklore, but they're very much an '80s folklore. Many urban legends are really rooted in the '80s, and especially because the '80s were the era of stranger danger, which is such an urban legend feeding fuel that... Yeah, that's a good example of one where you can see what modern folklore looks like without the internet, but still having its contemporary energy behind it.
Mason Amadeus:
When we had a chance to talk with Chelsey Weber-Smith, I don't know if you're familiar with them, the podcast American Hysteria, which goes into moral panics, urban legends and all sorts of stuff, one of the things that they brought up was the Stranger Danger moral panic and how that manifested in different ways. And you're right, it really is-
GennaRose Nethercott:
And that was really an interesting one, because that was a deliberately manufactured panic where the authorities purposefully released false data about the number of children who go missing-
Mason Amadeus:
Oh, they did? I didn't know.
GennaRose Nethercott:
... to deliberately freak everybody out. Yeah, no, they released a number that was absolutely insane about the number of children who go missing. And what they did was they released the number, including kids who ran away from home as the same figure of kids who are kidnapped. And so the number they released was tens of thousands, when in reality it was this tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of that and most of the children in that data were kids who'd run away from home and came home a couple days later. But it was enough to spark this moral panic. And the authorities didn't correct it because they deliberately wanted people to kind of... I don't know. But it's always a benefit to keeping people frightened, you know?
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah, and keeping people fixated and focused on something other than the other actual problems that are affecting them. That one in particular is interesting to try and think about what they were distracting from. Because one of the things that Chelsey brought up was the issue of kids being harmed in their own home or not supported in their own home, because it's a lot easier to talk about a big boogeyman, a stranger in a van coming to steal you than it is about generational trauma and things like that.
GennaRose Nethercott:
And that's the same strategy that folklore always takes, right, is that it creates a fictional monster so that we don't have to look directly at the real ones because if we were to look the real monsters in the eyes, it would be unbearable.
Mason Amadeus:
Right. But also, are you familiar with Monster theory?
GennaRose Nethercott:
Ooh, I don't think so. Ooh, tell me.
Mason Amadeus:
So that's in our first episode as well, because we talked with Vivian Asimos, who introduced us to the concept and then gave a little brief on it. It's basically seven thesis that describe monsters in the stories that we tell, and then the different ways that they represent different things, like one of them is the monster's body is a cultural body where the literal depiction of the monster has a lot of cultural significance to it. The one we focused on the most that was interesting is about monsters always representing the... My brain is saying condescension, that's not the word. Transgression of boundaries and categories. The monster is a harbinger of category crisis where it's always like a vampire is breaking living and dead, Slenderman's breaking reality and fiction.
GennaRose Nethercott:
Yeah. There's an incredible essay by Theodora Goss about that same concept. And so I'm really obsessed with this idea, which is that what makes something monstrous is a contradiction within its own body. So it is not the thing itself we are afraid of, but it is this chafing. So yeah, the vampire is living and dead. The werewolf is animal and human, the witch as feminine, but dangerous. And these contradictions, these chafings are actually what causes that feeling of the uncanny. This also connects back to an essay by Freud called The Uncanny. Have you ever read this?
Mason Amadeus:
No.
GennaRose Nethercott:
This piece is great. I like to take Freud with a grain of salt.
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah, and Freud can be a little bit, yeah, but...
GennaRose Nethercott:
He's a vibe. But this essay of his is really excellent. And I feel like as a writer too it's like an amazing cheat code essentially for how to manufacture a feeling of unease in a reader. What he talks about is that the difference between horror and fantasy in fiction is that fantasy is a fantastical thing happening in a fantastical world. So we're not afraid of dragons. Dragons, we don't consider monsters because they exist in the context they're supposed to exist in. However, a monster or horror is a fantastical thing happening in our world. And so with that thinking, it's not the thing itself we are afraid of. It is the concept of something existing in a context where it shouldn't. So once again, it's that chaffing sensation, not the thing itself.
So in a ghost story, you never hear a ghost story where all the characters are ghosts and they are in the world of the dead. What makes a ghost story frightening is an interaction between the living and the dead. So this shaping where these two things don't belong, like a proximity that feels wrong. And it's the same with monsters where they embody that chafing and that proximity, and that's what causes us to have this feeling of unease.
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah, and it's interesting when you look at the ones that are more societally based and try and abstract away exactly what... Like you said, witches being across between femininity and being dangerous, what does that fear mean? What is that pointing to?
Perry Carpenter:
After the break, the conclusion of our interview with GennaRose Nethercott.
Welcome back.
GennaRose Nethercott:
The monsters, again, that's how they provide this mirror and reflection of a culture and their fears and their biases is it shows you what a culture thinks doesn't belong next to each other. And with feminine and dangerous, that's a perfect reflection of you can tell that a culture thinks that women are supposed to occupy a certain space by what then is monstrous if they deviate from that and what those deviations mean about a community's values.
Mason Amadeus:
But now we have the subreddit, witches versus patriarchy, and that's cool.
Perry Carpenter:
Nice.
Mason Amadeus:
There is one thing that we have touched on a little bit, and it just occurred to me that we're actually doing a whole episode on it. Well, we're not doing a whole episode on it, but we're using it as a springboard into lighter topics. And that is Man Door Hand Hook Car Door Hook Hand man.
GennaRose Nethercott:
Yay. What a man hook hand man door he is.
Mason Amadeus:
Yes, indeed. He can be described with the following words. That story, I don't know if you wanted to give a telling of it, because I think we could use some of the things we were talking about with monsters and things like that. And have you be in that one as well?
GennaRose Nethercott:
Sure. I love Hook Hand Man Door Hook man. So there's a number of hook man in urban legendary, but I believe the most famed of them all is one night a teenage couple are driving down the road. Maybe they're coming from a party, maybe they're coming from the prom, maybe she's wearing a yellow dress, maybe it's blue. I can't quite remember. In every telling, it changes. But they're listening to the radio and they're flipping through the channels. "Oh, here's a lovely song," but it's not quite lovely enough. So they flip the channel again, and the news is on. On the news, they hear that, "Oh no, an escaped mental patient, homicidal maniac has fled from the institution and is on the loose." Someone with like a... Here, do any of you have a good radio voice?
Mason Amadeus:
I worked in radio for eight years.
Local news reports, a dangerous convict has escaped from the local mental asylum. Be on the lookout for a man roaming the streets with a hook for a hand.
GennaRose Nethercott:
"A hook for a hand? That sounds terrible, but this is no concern of ours. We're just simply driving along the road, having a lovely date in my beautiful pink chiffon dress.' The car comes to a stop. They either run out of gas or perhaps the tire pops, so perhaps they just pull over to the side of the road for a bit of youthful canoodling. Usually there's something wrong with the car because the boyfriend has to go get help, either go walk down the road to the gas station and get some gas or walk to try and get a phone to call and get a tire change. And he tells the girlfriend, "Here, just wait in the car. I'll be back soon. We'll get the car up and running. Things will be fine."
And so she sits in the car and she waits and she waits, and she waits and she waits. It seems like she's been waiting an awfully long time given the length that this chore was supposed to take. And eventually, she gets frustrated and she gets out of the car. And then meanwhile, rewind, as she's in the car, there's this scratching on the roof, sort of the sound of branches of a tree scratching, scratching, scratching on the roof of the car. Eventually, she wonders where her boyfriend is. So she gets out to go looking for him. And when she turns around, she sees that the scratching on the roof was not a branch at all, but it was the tip of her boyfriend's nice shiny dress shoes, scratch, scratch, scratching along the roof of the car as he has been hung from the tree above his head. And in the door there is left just a single hook stuck in the handle of the door.
Now, in some versions of this story, the couple gets away and they drive home and they get back to their driveway and they successfully get out. And that's when they open the door and they find the hook lodged in the handle, a near miss, a gentle escape from the clause of death.
Yeah, there's a number of other hook hand legends. Cropsey or Copsey. I can't remember if there's an R.
Mason Amadeus:
Copsey.
GennaRose Nethercott:
Copsey is one of them, which is a-
Mason Amadeus:
I remember.
GennaRose Nethercott:
... Staten Island urban legend about a hook handed escaped maniac. This is worth looking up because there ended up being an actual series of... Basically he was like a summer camp legend where he was this hook handed maniac who escaped from this abandoned mental institution and hid out in an old tuberculosis facility that was on Staten Island and would steal children and drag them into the sewers underneath the tuberculosis facility. And it turns out, during the same period of time that this urban legend was being circulated, there was an actual child serial killer hiding out in that same space, stealing children. So it turned out-
Perry Carpenter:
So it sounds like the Staten Island experience just in general.
GennaRose Nethercott:
Oh God. Staten Island, don't be mad at us.
Perry Carpenter:
[inaudible 00:41:23].
GennaRose Nethercott:
But yeah, this was one of those rare instances where so often folklore or urban legendary has a seed of truth at its beginning and then it blows. But this was the reverse, I think, where it was an urban legend that then actually became true.
Mason Amadeus:
But it wasn't technically ostension because it wasn't deliberately acted out. Although, that's a good question. Does ostension require intent?
GennaRose Nethercott:
I don't know.
Mason Amadeus:
Perry?
Perry Carpenter:
I think it requires that to be the inspiration. So it would be like, did he go, "Oh, I've heard this thing, so I guess I should go do this and live here."
GennaRose Nethercott:
I don't think that's what was happening.
Perry Carpenter:
Yeah, I probably don't think that was it-
Mason Amadeus:
It was Cropsey. I did just find an article.
Perry Carpenter:
With the other variance of it though, what do you think the why is behind those? Why do you think that those urban legends kind of surfaced and got propagated in so many different variants?
GennaRose Nethercott:
So with the hook hand legend as well as many other really parallel urban legends to that, which are often these summer camp stories where it's morning kids, basically it's ways to keep kids in line, right? And so many urban legends, so many folk tales in general are designed to keep people in line or to encourage certain kinds of cultural behavior. So if you go back as far as Kelpie legends, this is one I talk about a lot, I've talked about this in interviews before because I love them, but with Kelpies, which are these beautiful, sexy, sexy horses that wander along the shoreline and offer young virgins a ride on the sexy horse. But if you go on a ride on this sexy horse, you fuse to its skin and are dragged into the sea and devoured. Sometimes this sexy horse transformed into a very hot young man. So obviously, this was a way for parents to tell their daughters not to sleep around, but it was too taboo to say that directly. So instead they would say, "Don't go sleep with this horse."
Mason Amadeus:
Beware of the hot horse, yeah.
GennaRose Nethercott:
Beware of the hot horse. And so this has been happening forever. It's this way for adults to keep children from deviating. And with stories like the hook hand and these urban legends that are really rooted in this stranger danger that we talked about a moment ago, it was to keep kids from straying too far from home. Usually these hook handed men were lurking in abandoned buildings that may not be structurally sound, lurking in the woods where the kids could get lost or get hurt. And so it's never enough to just say, "Don't go there." But if you create a monster that will enforce and punish that transgression, you're much more likely to succeed.
Also, something that's really worth noting in these kind of monstrous, punishing urban legend figures is that they very often have physical deformities. And so it's this othering technique as well. The hook handed man is someone who is missing a hand. There are other camp urban legends who have a terrible limp, and that's how you know it's them. There's this real sort of emphasis on othering people with physical disabilities as something dangerous and frightening, which I think is very telling, again, in terms of the values of the communities telling these stories.
Mason Amadeus:
And upsetting.
Perry Carpenter:
Exactly, yeah.
GennaRose Nethercott:
Yeah. So I mean, to me, this is what's exciting about folklore, is it's almost it's to find the ugliness beneath the shininess, I guess, is really fascinating to me.
Mason Amadeus:
Because like you said before, that's what it's trying to cloak in whimsy.
Perry Carpenter:
Exactly.
GennaRose Nethercott:
Exactly. And especially as an American, so much of our culture is about romanticizing harm. So much of the way that we address our history is romanticizing harm. There's something very narratively fascinating to me about something that is both beautiful and harmful simultaneously and the fact that those are not necessarily mutually exclusive. This is why one of my favorite places in the world, is Coney Island, because at Coney Island, on the one hand, you're looking at this beautiful Ferris wheel, you're like holding a cotton candy, and then you look down and there's like a bloody rubber glove on the ground at your feet. It's that same chafing, that same juxtaposition that causes the uncanny that invents a monster. And the fact that those things are not paradoxical, but in fact feed into each other and rely on each other in order to exist and continue.
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah, it's an unholy symbiosis that, yeah... I forgot Coney Island was a thing until just now.
GennaRose Nethercott:
Oh man, it's so great. I love it so much. That has a whole fascinating history too in terms of Coney Island in the Victorian era being started as a place where people could safely indulge in sexual deviancy.
Mason Amadeus:
Really?
GennaRose Nethercott:
Look it up. It's a whole thing.
Mason Amadeus:
Yeah. I did not-
GennaRose Nethercott:
Yeah, I mean, I can't get into it now. It's a whole story.
Mason Amadeus:
Oh, wow.
Perry Carpenter:
So we've kept you for a really long time and I know that you probably need to go. Is there anything that is going on in your life now or with the production of Lore that you want to let people know about?
GennaRose Nethercott:
I'm on tour with Thistlefoot right now. In the first half of January, I am going to be driving all the way up the California coast with a puppet show in tow animating chapters from the novel. It's pretty fun and whimsical, for lack of a better word, but also there's like a lynching in it. So it's that combination of using whimsy to discuss things that are actually sort of challenging and painful. I, as I said, am a researcher for the podcast Lore by Aaron Mahnke, which is a really fun folklore podcast. You should check it out if you haven't heard it.
Some of my favorite episodes that I personally have researched are... I wish I could remember the titles of the episodes, but there's one that is on talismans, and specifically the use of talismans in World War I among fighter pilots, lucky charms that fighter pilots used in order to sort of steal themselves for battle. And then there's one that I did that I really love on will-o'-the-wisp, which are ghost lights that appear in every culture, and the descriptions of them are very similar. What was another of my favorites? Well, some of my favorite episodes that I didn't work on that were before my time, the very first episode of Lore ever seven years ago is about the New England Vampire Hysteria and Mercy Brown, which is one of my favorite examples of folklore affecting history. If you don't know about the New England Vampire craze, it's really, really wild and definitely worth listening to that episode.
Yeah, check it out. We're doing all sorts of cool work and we're doing a bunch of different shows through Grim & Mild, which is Aaron Mahnke's production company, and all of them are like weird, cool folklore podcasts.
Perry Carpenter:
Awesome.
GennaRose Nethercott:
So yeah, we have a really sweet team of folks doing some real cursed sleuthing on the daily.
Perry Carpenter:
I love that. All right, I know you're about out of battery and probably about out of voice as well, so I'll stop on this.

Mason Amadeus:
I'm out of food.

Perry Carpenter:
Thanks so much for listening, and thanks to GennaRose Nethercott for spending time with us.

You can check the show notes for links to GennaRose's books, her website, and social media information. If you like what you heard and you want to hear more of our interview with GennaRose, you can head over to Patreon for an additional 40 minutes of GennaRose's awesomeness. And if you like this format and you want us to do it more regularly, just let us know. You can reach us at hello@8thlayermedia.com.

Digital Folklore is created and produced by 8th Layer Media and is distributed by Realm.

Thanks for listening.
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Welcome to Digital Folklore… Unplugged Edition.

“Unplugged” is a new, additional, episode format type we’re trying out.

Digital Folklore episodes labeled as “Unplugged” will be much more like traditional interview-based podcasts. Whereas our standard episodes tend to focus on a fun way to present a single topic or set of tightly related topics, Digital Folklore ‘unplugged’ is about showcasing our interviewees… and so will often touch on a wide range of topics in a single interview.

Today’s guest is GennaRose Nethercott. She is a folklorist, an author, a poet, and is also a researcher & producer for the podcast Lore. She’s won a National Poetry Series award for her book, The Lumberjack’s Dove… and her most recent book, Thistlefoot, a reimagining of Baba Yaga that she somehow effortlessly weaves together with American road adventure, the complexity of sibling relationships, and puppetry…

What you are about to hear is a roughly 45 minute excerpt from our full hour and 30 minute interview with GennaRose. If you’re a Patreon supporter, you can head over to Patreon for access to the full interview where you’ll hear about GennaRose’s life as a child clown, her quest to secure a bell tower to work from, what it was like to win the National Poetry Series, the writing of Thistlefoot, and more… That’s all on Patreon.

We pick up here with a discussion of folklore, urban legends, and the interesting time we find ourselves in, which is enabled by social media and other forms of mass public online expression….

Ok, let’s get unplugged…

Guest: