Lunatics Radio Hour
The history of horror and the horror of history.
Lunatics Radio Hour
Episode 136 - Walpurgis Night and May Day Horror with Marie Carter
Abby sits down with author, historian and tour guide Marie Carter to discuss Walpurgis Night, May Day Horror and her new book, Mortimer and The Witches.
From Saint Walburga, to Beltane and The Wicker Man, we cover all of our bases with the storied history of May 1st.
Follow Marie on Instagram at @mariewritesandedits and check out her website: https://www.mariewritesandedits.com/
Also, consider purchasing her books. More information here.
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Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of the Lunatics Radio Hour podcast. I'm Abby Branker sitting here with Marie Carter, and I am so excited because we are going to talk about a ton today Everything from the history of May 1st and May Day celebrations to Marie's very witchy historical book. So welcome, marie. Thanks for being here. Hi, thanks for having me so excited. I actually met Marie because you were a tour guide for a tour that I was on called the Witches of Old New York a few months ago and it was awesome. It was such a highlight. Me and my friend decided to like treat ourselves in the month of October and do something witchy. We had so much fun and we talked to you after and decided that we had to sit down and record together.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's very exciting. I love that tour because it was ultimately ended up being the inspiration for my book, but it was also a lovely, surprising find. I was reading this book called American Witches by Susan Fair and I thought that it was going to be mainly set in New England, because that's where all the famous witch trials took place.
Speaker 2:But then the I think it was an ultimate chapter she talked about this book by someone with the amazing pseudonym QK Philander Dostix PB and said that he'd written this book called the Witches of New York and it was about all these fortune tellers on the lower east side and in Williamsburg, brooklyn, and he visited them all as a reporter and he wrote some really horrible things about women and fortune telling. But it was also a delight to read because for a tour guide it had all the addresses, which was amazing, and there were also so many of them were on Broom Street, which is hilarious.
Speaker 2:I mean, of course, broom Street spelled with a name but, it's still very funny and witchy and it was also full of these visceral, very sensual descriptions of the lower east side, and some of the humor does hold up for today, and it was just a real treat because it was an insight into this world that is so rarely depicted in anything else. And the tour started in 2018 and customers kept asking questions about it, as they do, and sometimes I was just like I don't know the answer to that question, but I'm so fascinated to find out and it just kept sending me down this research hole until I got to the point where I was like I'm so fascinated by this, I have to write a book about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, before we say anything else, you can purchase your book. It's out now. We'll leave links to everything, of course, in the description, so that folks can find it easily. But Marie also has two other books that you've previously published. Do you want to tell us a little bit about those?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the first book is called the Trapeze Diaries. It's a sort of fictionalized memoir, but it's about the time that I learned to study trapeze.
Speaker 1:Amazing.
Speaker 2:I am petrified of heights. I was probably the last person anyone would pick to do anything on a sports team in high school. I was just this introverted nerd who wanted to hang out with her cats all the time, and so for someone like me to take up trapeze was just crazy, and I found like I was very bad at it. It took me a long time to learn it, but as I started to pick up things I never, ever thought I would do in a million years I started, it changed my whole perspective on life. It was like, okay, where else am I short changing myself. So it was a really good way to build confidence. But also, at the same time, I had just moved over to the states from Scotland. My father had died very suddenly of a heart attack a few months before, and so I was kind of coming undone in a way and trapeze sort of helped me kind of put myself back together again in a sense.
Speaker 2:It's so powerful, wow yeah. And then the second book is Holly's Hurricane, which has been described by one reviewer, which I really liked. It was a futuristic novel set in the past. So it's basically about this architect in 2040 and she's in her 60s and she has worked for this very corporate company who has been responsible for tearing down all kinds of historic buildings. And then there's this kind of she has this. There's this huge category for a hurricane that does a lot of destruction in New York. She goes back to the UK, where she's from, and she starts having these strange hallucinations about New York City's past and starts to kind of grapple with ways of working towards a future while also summoning the past.
Speaker 1:Wow, also very powerful and very interesting. How did you and this might be like a super annoying question, but how did you come, like what drew you first, to that idea? The Bowery Boys podcast? Oh yeah, they're great.
Speaker 2:So I went to work in the Woolworth building for a couple of years and I was absolutely in love with that building and I wanted to find some kind of short, not very academic history that I would be able to understand about the Woolworth building. And that's when I came across the Bowery Boys and they had like a 20 minute podcast on it and I was like, oh, this is great. And then I started going through the whole back thing and that really got me fascinated in New York City's history. I mean, I was before. I would often take walking tours and they were essentially the ones who inspired me to end up becoming a tour guide and I found Burris of the Dead. Actually, because I used to live near Brooklyn Heights and I used to go for these long ambling walks around there, and because I grew up in Scotland, which is basically ghost city, I've been taking ghost walking tours since I was a little girl and I used to walk around Brooklyn Heights thinking somebody needs to do a ghost tour here.
Speaker 2:This has got to have lots of ghost stories. And then, when I moved, just a year into moving into Astoria, I heard that this company, burris of the Dead, was doing a ghost tour in Brooklyn Heights and I'm like, oh my god, I gotta go on this. And then from there I just fell in love with the company, and so from all those things, I just started to become really fascinated with New York City's history and also fascinated with this dichotomy of how, you know, new York has this really fascinating history, but it's also tearing down its buildings all the time, and but it also has to, like, make way for the ever-growing population it has. So it's always. It's always like, well, what needs to be preserved, what gets torn down, what needs to be remembered? Why? Yeah, and I also became really fascinated by histories that have been forgotten, that hadn't been included in the history books, and I was always fascinated with why, why, why why?
Speaker 2:why isn't this really interesting story remembered? Why does this get remembered versus this history that gets forgotten?
Speaker 1:yeah, absolutely, it's such an important thing and I think not to derail us too too massively, but I think often, sometimes, like I put out a lot of content on social media that's like cemetery, history and people, and that can be a little bit of a loaded topic, right, because there's other great uses for that space. And while I recognize that and agree, you know, and all of that, I think while these things are here, it's like the time to document them and to learn about them and to reflect on them and write and all these other things. So I love that. I think that's that's great and I'm.
Speaker 1:The other thing I just want to point out to listeners is that you have three books out and they're all three incredibly different. You have a memoir, fiction and now historical nonfiction. My first thought was a what a different process I imagined for all three. But also, what is the research and fact-checking and all of that like? Because I think a lot of the people who listen to this show also are very into history for your new book and you know what was that process like for you yeah.
Speaker 2:So I feel like non-fiction history is really my genre because I'm an introvert and memoir and and for some reason, fiction as well. It feels like it hits too close to home and I feel like I have to reveal something about myself in those, yeah, whereas nonfiction is kind of dealing with somebody else and dealing with someone else who's from the distant past yeah yeah, so that has that aspect of writing historical nonfiction has been really nice for me.
Speaker 2:But it was an interesting time to write the book because this is essentially my pandemic baby. Like I got really serious about writing it as a book in late 2019. I was busy putting together the non-fiction book proposal and then the pandemic hit, of course, but in a sense I mean there were a lot of aspects of the pandemic that weren't great, but for me the aspect of like, stay home yeah yeah, go out.
Speaker 2:That helped me personally really get focused, and so simultaneously I had all this time to focus on being creative. But a lot of the archives were closed and it took a long time for them to open back up. So a lot of the initial research was going through things like newspaperscom trying to find the archives, who had put a lot of stuff online. One of the things that was completely so valuable to me was Thomas Butler Guns Diaries, which were made available through Missouri Heritage Museum I think it's called that was. That was really nice and fun. And and this other thing that was interesting about this project as I was writing about this reporter who had pretty much been obscured from from history, it really had been forgotten, and so I had to do a lot of buying of secondhand books books that had gone out of print, combing through very obscure archives that hopefully had digitized a lot of their stuff, and then eventually, once things started to open back up, I could go to places like Harvard University Library and Swiss College Special Collections.
Speaker 2:And it was a lovely process, like once I was able to go to those places, because when you get to those archives you get told things like so Mortimer Thompson had a daughter called Ethel and she ended up becoming this major children's book authors, but I loved holding her little booties and at Smith College Special Collections, like little things like that or a lock of his wife Grace Elgidge's hair, those, those things were really special and meaningful to me once I could you know was able to get out of the apartment and yeah, and and go see things.
Speaker 2:The other thing that I really loved about this process was so there's yet another walking tour that's coming out when the book comes out in conjunction with the book, and this one's gonna trail from Grace Church, union Square, stuyvesant Square and Grammysh C Park. But I have often like walked around those areas just because those are areas that were frequented by Mortimer Thompson and and some of the characters who I really fell in love with in the process of writing this book, for example, is mother Fanny Fern, who was the highest paid columnist of her time and I really loved walking the streets that they used to walk and being in the places that they used to be.
Speaker 2:There was something really special about that. It was like a way of connecting with them, even though they're not around anymore.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it's such an interesting thing I never thought about like holding a lock of somebody's hair, especially when you've spent, I'm sure, months and years researching that person and like, yeah, how grounding that must feel like right, this is a right, this is a real person and this is a part of them. I've never thought about that before. And let me ask you this probably lame question but can you just go to those archives? Do you have to like email them and get permission?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean especially because when I was going there we were in the throes of like just coming out of the pandemic, so they did have a lot of rules about going there. But yeah, you have to make an appointment, but you don't necessarily have to be affiliated with that university to go there. Right, very cool, very cool, so good to know.
Speaker 1:All right, this is like our big question, for for everyone that comes on the podcast. No pressure, of course, but especially curious because you have such an affinity for spooky, paranormal things, like we do witchy things. Have you ever personally had a paranormal and unexplained, any sort of story that you cannot just explain away with normal science as we know it?
Speaker 2:Yes, I'm so excited so, unfortunately, I have to cheat on New York for this story that's great, that's great and go to Savannah. So this was back in February 2003. I just went on a trip. I wanted to see Savannah after reading John Baran's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and I went there by myself. I was staying in a hostel, but it was February, so I'm pretty sure I was the only person there, yeah, and because of that they put me that.
Speaker 2:So the first couple of nights there it was like during the week they put me down in the basement and it was like kind of like this old carriage house type place, yeah, and there so there was this floor lamp that was kind of like away from the bed so you had you have to walk to and it was the only light in the place. So I had to like, if I wanted to turn the light off, I'd have to get out of bed, go over to the lamp, turn it off and come back. The first night I stayed there, I woke up about two in the morning and the light was on and I'm like that that's very weird. Yeah, like I'm not a sleepwalker, I could have sworn. I turned this off in the middle of the night, okay, like so. I get up out of bed, I walk away across to the other end of the room, turn it off, go back to bed. Around five o'clock in the morning I wake up again and the light is back on and I'm like, oh god, this is all right.
Speaker 2:What? This is getting a little weird and I started looking at this lamp to see if it had some kind of timer some kind of contraptions that that made it automatically turn on, and I just couldn't find anything.
Speaker 2:It was just this normal looking lamp that looked like it been there since the 70s, right. So I was just like, okay, it's a little weird, but I'm just gonna forget about it. Yeah, but my day, the next night, the same thing happened and at this point I'm just like, okay, this is really, yeah, weirding me out. That evening I went on a ghost tour because you got to do that in Savannah and I remember the tour guide telling me he was, he was talking about a poltergeist at one point and he said that the family had ended up having a discussion with this ghost and asked it to leave them alone, and and apparently the ghost had left them alone after that. And I was like, okay, interesting, yeah, let's give this a whirl. I mean, it's just me in the room, I feel kind of silly, but okay.
Speaker 2:So that night when I got home, I just sort of sat into the middle of the room. I was like, hey, I'm just here for like a few more days and this thing you're doing with the lamp is really freaking me out. I would appreciate it if, just for the next couple of days, you could stop whatever you're doing. Yeah, that night no lamp, like the lights stayed off. Then the next day, because it was weekend, they moved me from that basement room to the upstairs where there was no one staying. But they wanted to have a couple go into the the basement room and again, like nobody was staying in the room that I was in. But that morning around six o'clock I was woken up because I felt something scratching verbally at the back of my neck and at first I was just like oh, this is just a dream.
Speaker 2:I you know I'm probably just having a weird dream. But as I was starting to get more and more conscious, I was like no, like I'm really. I'm really, I'm wide awake now. So I turn around and nobody's there and I'm like okay, that that was really weird. I turn back over, start to try and go back to sleep and again like I feel this scratching at the back of my neck and at that point I just turn around, I put the light back on. I couldn't go back to sleep after that. I was just like no, yeah, so invasive yeah, it was um.
Speaker 2:That was an interesting stay, and I've never had any other experiences quite like that, where it just seems like there's constant activity going on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, wow, I'm just like imagining being alone in that situation. Out of not being brave at all, I would have been like, okay, here we go back to New York. Wow, that's interesting. So we recently put out an episode. I say recently.
Speaker 1:This summer we put out an episode where I went to my hometown and one of my very old friends from high school has bought a house that dates back to 1725 and has had sort of like it. The episode devolves right as she shares like the experience that her and her young children and her husband have had there and it's Insane. But it reminds me a lot of ways of that, because she had, like certain, a lot of it's like while she's sleeping She'll like if someone is holding her hands and at first I was like, oh, that's kind of lovely and she's like, but it's like, don't touch me, like I didn't say you could. You know it feels invasive to her and it's really really interesting. Yeah, okay, savannah is. I have to admit I've never been, but it's like my number one destination Bucket list place right now. So I hope to go this year.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely check out the cemetery. Yeah, it's a. It's a very atmospheric place.
Speaker 1:Yeah, actually one thing. I'm curious what you think about this, because something I do on Saturday morning sometimes, which is maybe sad, but like on tiktok, tour guides in All kinds of places. Like a lot of times in Scotland or in Savannah or in any kind of place with interesting history, we'll be walking around giving like tiktok virtual tours and I'm like, oh, I'll watch this for a few minutes and I've ended up watching quite a few in Savannah and it's really kind of what's getting me excited to go. That sounds fun. Yeah, yeah, that's like a fun, fun thing. You know you don't get paid for it. But the topic that we are gonna talk about now may seem Random, but it's not totally random, because we're going to talk today about the history of Walpurgis night, of Beltane, of Mayday goes by lots of different names, lots of different regional variations, and we'll get to how this kind of has a fun connection to Mortimer by the end of the episode, which is a kind of a nice tie-in to leave us off on.
Speaker 2:Oh, I should add. So I think I've only mentioned that his pseudonym was QK Philander do sticks PB, but his real name was Mortimer Thompson, which is where the Mortimer Thompson, mortimer and the witches comes from in the title.
Speaker 1:There you go. Yes, perfect, very important. So before we get into it, let me just tell you some of the sources that we looked at, and of course these will also be In the description if anybody wants to check them out on their own. There's a very, very interesting Atlas obscure article by Kristen J Soleil called which Kitsch in Dark History in Germany's Harz Mountains, Woodlands, dark and Days Bewitched a history of folk horror, which is a documentary that I love and I think has sort of made its its way through the horror community. But a lot of the Horror that overlaps with these holidays, of course, is folk horror, because we're talking about sort of pagan history Boston Public Library article called the Beltane in the last day of Riv-down, a historycom article just called the history of May Day, an NPR article by Emma Bowman what is May Day history? And then, of course, the Bowery Boys historycom. We have a few different articles. One is May 1st is moving day, or at least it was, and an article from Beltaneorg A detailed history of Beltane, and then, of course, as always, we use Wikipedia and IMDB to help get us sorted in the first place.
Speaker 1:Walpurgis Noct or Walpurgis Night is traditionally celebrated on the evening of April 30th and the day of May 1st in Estonia, finland, sweden, germany and Latvia, and the festival takes its name from Saint Walburga. Saint Walburga was born in what is now Devon, england, in 710 AD, so, of course, dating back quite far. Essentially, we'll talk a little bit about her life briefly, but she traveled to Germany during her lifetime, founded a double monastery there, which means a monastery that holds separate communities for both nuns and for monks, which is a new thing that I learned about while researching this. She was the daughter of Saint Richard, who was a Saxton Prince, and her brothers, and so when she traveled to Germany, she went there with her brothers, and there she became a nun, and at first she lived in the convent that her brother had actually founded. It's also so, and maybe you have a thought on this, but I find it so interesting that there's so much available Information about folks from 710 AD.
Speaker 2:Yes, how and where does this infer? How do they get this information? And now it's on the internet and yes, yes, truly fascinating, before there was even printing. Yeah, yeah, and a lot of it is like, um, obviously they're they're pulling things from firsthand diaries and accounts and things.
Speaker 1:But the fact that it's all like sorted nicely for you in articles and there's like images of all of the paintings of her, it's just, it really makes our life easy. So one of her big notable Accomplishments was that she converted the locals of the region to Christianity. She died on February 25th 1779 and she was made a saint on May 4th Of the same year. The feast also celebrates the movement of her relics in 870 AD to Eichstadt, which is a town in Germany. It was claimed that while her relics were moved it created sort of a trail of miracles along the way.
Speaker 1:Saint Walburgo was honored in Germany and was known for combating witchcraft, whooping cough, pests and rabies. So some very specific attributes yeah, pre-vaccination, exactly Her ability to do things in a way that was very important. Her ability to scare off the witches is important Because it's believed that witches ran quite rampant on this night, right on the night of on st Walburgo night. It's like one of the tropes which we'll get into a little bit, that this was like the night when all the evil and the witches came out. So it's kind of connected that in life she was known to repel those things. I'm going to quote a little bit from Wikipedia here because I think it kind of helps paint the picture for us. Quote in German folklore while Pergus night was believed to be the night of a witches meeting on the Brocken, the highest peak in the hearts mountains, a range of wooded hills in central Germany, to ward off evil and protect themselves in their livestock, people would traditionally light fires on the hillsides, a tradition that continues in some regions today. In Bavaria, the feast day is sometimes called hexen not Literally witches night, on which revelers dress as witches and demons, set off fireworks, dance and play loud music, which is said to drive away the witches and winter spirits away. And quote, which honestly sounds like Wonderful party.
Speaker 1:In the Czech Republic, april 30th is known as the burning of the witches, which is quite rock and roll and dark and Scary, celebrated with massive bonfires, and then, when particularly dark and thick smoke plumes arise, it's thought to be the witches fleeing, some even burned puppets that are created to resemble witches.
Speaker 1:On this night and I want to pause too, because I feel like I sort of just jumped right into this, but At least for me. Coming from the united states, I'm super familiar with Mayday, right people. We even had kind of like some Mayday celebrations when we were kids in the spring, and I'm aware of Beltane as someone who's like really into pagan history, but I actually hadn't heard of while Pergus night until you reached out about this topic and I didn't realize kind of like the Connection to witches and all of these other little offshoots and regional variations of this that we're talking about here. So it's quite interesting and I'm not sure maybe if you have a different perspective growing up in the uk, if this is just like more broadly known or if it's still a little bit niche over there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's, it's definitely German Slash austrian things. Yeah, it's well. Park is knocked isn't really celebrated that much in the uk, but there there are other variations of it which I'm. We're getting to, but I feel like it is better known over there than it is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, so interesting, also convinced just as a side note that if anything Catastrophic god forbid happens in the world, that Austria should be where we all go. It just feels like a utopia for me. In Lincolnshire in England, cow slip, which is a type of plant they were actually hung through the second half of the 20th century which symbolically was an effort to ward off evil spirits.
Speaker 2:On April 30th, oh, I just want to quickly add my mom and stepdad are in Lincolnshire now and they are in Boston, like the original Boston where they have the gel seals, where where they Kept the pilgrims, oh wow, and it does have some of that sort of pilgrim witchy kind of vibe to it. Yeah, a lot of the original buildings still exist, that's so cool. Yeah, and and the? Um female preacher and Hutchinson, yeah, who ended up being killed in the Bronx area. Uh, she is originally from Lincolnshire as well, wow, yeah it also.
Speaker 1:it feels like a um and I'm saying this in the best possible way like, in a very like, like this ritualistic superstition of like hanging these plants, and you know, and I love like, like something simple like that too is, if anybody is looking for ways to kind of honor their ancestors or history, it's like such a simple thing you can actually do to like, on April 30th, hang up, you know, a cow slip plant. If you can access one, I don't know how how rare they actually are, or something similar.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, or whatever is your local, your local flora. Yeah, so Estonia, finland, germany, the Netherlands in Sweden, all have their own versions of Walpurgis night Today. In some regions folks will still light bonfires to celebrate Walpurgis night. The lighting of the bonfire again, is thought to scare away the evil spirits, and in a little bit we're going to talk about how connected that is to Beltane right and some of the other celebrations that all happened to fall on May 1st.
Speaker 1:The more devout make a religious pilgrimage to Germany, where the relics of St Walpurgis are kept, and they actually get vials of her oil.
Speaker 2:Did you know about this? No, I did not, but that sounds cool.
Speaker 1:I you know this is probably. I did not grow up in a super religious household, so I had never heard of St Oil's.
Speaker 2:How? How do they get these?
Speaker 1:Great question I actually did some research on this because I was like what is this?
Speaker 1:So there's two different ways, probably more, but two different ways that I could find that they obtain the oils of saints and essentially it's if you are at the spot of where relics are kept, which again, because I am not religious, I didn't know. Relics mean usually the remains of or personal items of right, so it could be a scepter or a piece of jewelry or the skull of that saint. It could either be like water that I'm sure you know in like a miracle setting is coming from the tomb itself there's a spring in the tomb or spring near the tomb or well near the tomb or the sometimes oil hanging than like manmade lamps. They think that it becomes blessed because of the proximity to the relics. There's actually a documented situation where a child was blind and went to see a different saints relics, not a saint Walburga, but the mother kind of went rogue and put her hands in the oil of a sconce and put it on her son's eyes and according to legend, he could then see immediately.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, interesting.
Speaker 1:So they're meant to be healing, I think, spiritually, physically. It sounds like Saint Walburga's relics or oils are mostly meant to be like physically, like to help sickness and disease and that sort of thing. I think there's different lore associated with all of the different ones.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it kind of reminds me a little bit of Mother Shipton's Cave in Nairsborough in Yorkshire.
Speaker 1:I don't know anything about this, oh.
Speaker 2:I just went to visit there this last summer and she was born in a cave in Nairsborough and grew up to make all these different predictions, including about the Great Fire of London, and so this cave where she was born has like I don't know what the scientific term is, but like there's lots of water that drips from the cave and it kind of petrifies things. So all kinds of celebrities have come along like people from the Great British Bake Off and have thrown things over the cave and they've become petrified over a time and they look really cool, but they sometimes also sell like little vials of water from the cave for people to take home.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. That's. My parents actually just did a big trip through England and Scotland and they went to the baths and brought me back a vial of the water.
Speaker 2:I love that place. I really want to go. I really want to go.
Speaker 1:Bath is beautiful yeah yeah, now we all know about the oil of saints and the really funny thing is is that it's not all saints. So you have there's lists online, obviously, but there's like certain, it's quite a few, it's like upwards of 40 or 50, but there's 40 or 50 specific relic sites where you can like obtain the oils, and I think you know some of them. You have to kind of get yourself and some of them the nuns locally like hand them out to people in vials, but very, very interesting. So Walpurgis Night is a carryover from pagan practices and you can see the obvious tie into May Day. On the first, when you trace back a lot of major Christian holidays, typically you find the pagan festival that predated them Right. We've talked about this a lot on the podcast with Valentine's Day, we've talked about it with Christmas almost all of them right and it kind of comes from and I'm not a historian so I'm not claiming to be the expert on this, but just based on a lot of the research we've done there's sort of this period of overlap when pagan communities and Christian communities were trying to coexist and so, as a way to sort of quell a lot of the differences that were coming up, some pagan festivals were reskinned as Christian sort of holidays. Right, and that is a very like layman's explanation of how we kind of got here.
Speaker 1:Again, I'm going to quote from Wikipedia just to give us a little bit of context here. Quote the day of Walpurgis Night coincided with an older May Eve festival celebrated in much of northern Europe with the lighting of bonfires at night. A variety of festivals of pre-Christian origin have been celebrated at this time, halfway between the spring equinox and summer solstice to mark the beginning of summer, including Beltane in Ireland and Britain. Folkloreist Jack Santino says quote her day and its traditions almost certainly are traceable to pre-Christian celebrations that took place at this time on the 1st of May. End quote Art historian Pamela Berger noted Walpurgis Association with sheaves of grain and suggests that her cult was adopted from pagan Argyrian goddesses.
Speaker 1:End quote. So that's all very fascinating to me too, because it seems like you know, again, greater minds than I have done a lot of work trying to trace back, like how these kind of all of these days coincided and of course, like her death and the day that she became a saint. You know is of legend to be May 1st, but sometimes you wonder if the dates are fudged a little to make it work, or not so let's talk a little bit about May Day.
Speaker 1:May Day has ancient origins marking the halfway point between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. Since ancient times, may 1st has marked the commencement of summer across many, many cultures, as is very clear here, even within you know the microcosm of Europe. It's a festival honoring the tradition. From colder weather to warmer, the days will get brighter longer. The sun will return, crops will grow again. One interesting thing about all of these festivals and so many festivals with historic roots are that and this is kind of a new thought that I was exploring with this is that they are community driven rather than family driven, right? So when we today, for the most part in the US, celebrate things, a lot of the times it's with your family at Christmas, and I guess the one that's kind of community driven is Halloween, you know, where everyone kind of goes out and trick or treats, but a lot of the time it's it's besides maybe going to church or something. For the most part it's kind of like time at home.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about some of the celebratory traditions of May Day. The May Pole is a long wooden pole with various decorations, including garlands or painted designs, mostly used in Germanic pagan festivals. Sometimes the May Pole comes with a May Pole dance, and the exact origins of the May Pole and its related activities are not precisely known, which I find to be quite interesting, because we know all about St Walperga from 710 AD, so this obviously goes back much further. Some experts think that the May Pole dance specifically may have started as a fertility ritual, which, you know, I think we see a lot with with pagan festivals. Other activities include picking wildflowers, which is such a lovely thing to do, and, as seen in Midsomer from 2019, crowning a May Queen. Have you seen Midsomer?
Speaker 2:I have not, but I remember as a child, like I don't know if this was through some ancient memory or something, but I know that we used to pick daisies in the springtime and then we used to like make little slits in them and then make a chain out of them and then put like a crown of daisies on our head.
Speaker 1:That's so sweet, Did you? Did you celebrate May Day or any kind of version of that?
Speaker 2:I think there might have been a I'm trying to remember a bank holiday associated with that. But I was sort of having a little chuckle as you were talking about the May Day dance, because I I've done some events with the St George's Society, which is like the oldest charity in New York City, and they try to do a lot of their fundraising event themes around. You know British traditions and we did this treasure, this kind of treasure hunt, scavenger hunt thing with them and one of the challenges was to upload a video of you doing a May a pole dance, a May pole dance, and I was with my partner and his younger cousin and they interpreted May pole dance as like like a pole dance, and I was.
Speaker 2:So I was like there trying to do my weird interpretation of what I thought was a May pole dance, like just like running around this, like this center, the center of this May pole, and doing like some kind of medieval skipping dance. And they were doing this like stripper type pole dancing against the fence.
Speaker 1:So funny it was quite funny, that sounds like a fun charity event.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I it's. It's so Midsomer. We're gonna talk a little bit about horror at the end, because of course we are. But Midsomer is fascinating because of many reasons, but notably it has a very intense May pole dance scene and in the film, of course, you know, we're a little suspicious of the folks who are practicing.
Speaker 1:You know these traditions and they're very, they seem very kind of like from another time, but they they kind of give everybody out like hallucinogenic tea and so they're doing this May pole dance. They don't speak the language, they're not sure it's happening right, so it becomes this very like twirly, dizzying, intense scene in the film, my actual nightmare. Spring celebrations of kind of this tradition right date back to the Roman Republic around 509 BCE, with festivals that honored flora, dionysus and Aphrodite. Those traditions were adopted by pagan tribes across Ireland and Scandinavia. In Sweden this festival is called Valborg and a no longer practice tradition includes younger townsfolk visiting the edges of the forest and collecting greenery and plants to decorate local homes with. And I believe when I was researching this it also said that they would pay these you know, like kind of young adults in eggs for the, for the twigs and the greenery that they found.
Speaker 2:Oh nice, yeah, it's a nice barter system.
Speaker 1:Beltane is a Gaelic May Day festival dating back to ancient times across Ireland, scotland and the Isle of man, as famously you know, depicted in the Wicker man, which we'll talk about.
Speaker 1:Beltane is a regional example of a May Day festival which spans Europe Historically. It's tied to the beginnings of summer, again, as with all of these festivals, and it's celebrating the light, the coming of the light in the sun and the shift towards abundance and growth. Beltane, or literally bright fire, involves many rituals tied to fire meant to protect the season of growth, cattle and livestock and the people. As the festival evolved over time and throughout regions, evidence has suggested that massive bonfires were present, like very, very massive, you know, like Burning man style, maybe even bigger, I hope to think, bigger. I hope that they they did the festivals in a bigger way than Burning man could.
Speaker 1:Additional evidence suggests that animal sacrifices were part of this festival, which shouldn't be incredibly shocking. We've we have episodes out on the history of Sao Nguyen, history of Yul, and there was human sacrifices involved in a lot of those. So it's kind of par for the course. In some regions, beltane included the decoration of a May bush with flowers and ribbons and, of course, feasting was always involved, along with visiting hollywells, which sounds so lovely.
Speaker 2:So I have mentioned, I grew up in Scotland and when I lived in Edinburgh they would have this massive Beltane Fire Festival which would take place on one of the well-known landmarks called Cullton Hill. Unfortunately, I never got to go. I mean number one. I'm an introvert, so like crowds are a lot for me and I've also been like an old lady since I was 10 years old and I made my bedtime at 10 pm.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I never went, but I was always fascinated by it and read a lot about it and it's one of those festivals that had been forgotten for a long time and then they wanted to bring it back. So I think it was sometime around the late 80s, early 90s. Maybe like five people would go up to originally it was Arthur Seat, which is another one of the sort of famous hills in Edinburgh, and they would carry out this Beltane Ritual with lots of fire, and then I think it became a victim of its own success. Now like about 10,000 people show up and it's all kind of nude, painted acrobats doing all kinds of wild and wonderful things and a massive fire on the hill. It does sound incredible. I love looking at the photos of it, but, yeah, past my bedtime.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I hear you on that. Do you know, are they burning anything in particular? It's not like were they're building a structure and burning it, or is it just sort of like a big, big, normal bonfire.
Speaker 2:I believe it's a normal bonfire. I don't think it's anything quite like the Wicker man, the Wicker man, yeah, that's what I'm wondering.
Speaker 1:I feel the same way where I almost just said that's a bucket list item for me to go do that, and then I'm like I would probably have a panic attack.
Speaker 1:But theoretically, it's a bucket list, yeah yeah, and if it's not clear, right like, the point is that there's so many different versions of this, like local different versions of celebrations, that are all kind of mostly tied to the same thing, though there is certainly, I think, a difference between the May Day Beltane side of the camp, right, where it's clearly kind of tied to the seasons and the crops and all of that versus Walpurgis Night, which is what we're originally talking about here, which is a little bit more of an honoring of a specific saint and her ability to sort of cast out the witches and the evil and even, in general, right, a knight that's meant to sort of cast out evil is a little bit different, but can't ignore the fact that they're all squarely on the same date and so clearly there's some similarities there, and they all involve bonfires. So, yeah, that's our connection point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we do love a good bonfire in the UK. Oh my gosh, we also have our Guy Fox Night on November.
Speaker 1:I was. So my dad is a marathoner and we as a family went to Dublin when he ran the Dublin Marathon and it was like a perfect storm. Where it was the marathon, it was a bank holiday, it was Halloween and I will say I've never been quite so overwhelmed in my whole life as walking back to our Airbnb in the night with the parties and the people in costumes and it was like so it felt like we were in a carnival, you know so, like in the bonfires and parks, and it was wild and fun. Okay, so we're going to talk a little bit about some of the horror films associated with this date, the date of April 30th, into May 1st, and then we're going to round out with because I know people are listening and they're waiting and they're yelling at me about this about some of the other modern holidays associated with this date. So that's coming, don't worry.
Speaker 1:As always, there's actually quite a bit to unpack when you think about how May Day and horror intersect, and I think at first it might seem like an interesting intersection because May Day is known as this festival of spring and this bright, sunshiny, flowery event, but in reality, when we just talked about everything that we just talked about. You understand, whether it's Walpurgis Night, which is clearly dealing with evil and witchcraft, or whether it's like a Beltane or May Day, you're still kind of dealing with darkness and tragedy and the shift into brighter things. Perhaps the most iconic May Day horror film is the Wicker man from 1973. This British folk horror masterpiece has certainly become a cult classic and Marie has watched it for the first time and I want to hear what you have to say.
Speaker 2:Oh, no, oh my god, I was so ashamed when I realized I 'd never watched it because it's set in Scotland. It's an absolute classic and I don't know why it's taken me so long to watch it. I'm curious about your opinion on this, but I have to say as I was watching it I mean, I think the police detective is supposed to be the hero, but I honestly, by the end of the film I was kind of like, okay, I'm really getting annoyed with this. Yeah, you're rooting for the locals.
Speaker 1:I was rooting for the pagans and the locals and I don't know whether that was deliberate on the filmmakers part or. No, I think it's. I don't know that it was, but I agree with you and I think part of it is like us looking through the lens from our perspective. It's satisfying in a way, because you are rooting for the pagans, as you will. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yes, I kind of wanted the heathens to come through.
Speaker 1:As always, honestly. So overall, you were a fan, you were into it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love the madey costumes. They were really fun and the imagery at the end of that the wicker man itself. I was like, wow, that house striking is that. But yeah, it was so interesting because obviously I'm coming from a modern day perspective. But I was sympathizing with the pagans because they were outsiders. And here was this Christian man coming in with his very obstinate ideas about you have to be a good Christian and being very rigid, and the locals were having a lot of fun. Oh god, this guy is really annoying.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's not your place, my friend.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely Get out of their business.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and just like. Yeah, like you mentioned the costumes, like everything about it. The wicker man is perfectly haunting and especially, I think a lot of its success probably too, is it leaves you dangling for a little while. You're not sure what's happening, you're not sure where it's going, and it's kind of like this cult. You feel like this, like oh, what is all of this? And you're learning this new thing. So, yeah, I think it's an incredibly successful film, and if anyone hasn't watched it, I would highly recommend that you do, especially on May 1st this year, which is just a few days from now. So, yeah, please do.
Speaker 1:Obviously, you know the wicker man is famous for being campy and totally bizarre in the best possible way. It was directed by Robin Hardy and it stars Christopher Lee as the detective that Marie and I do not support, and it was based on the novel by David Peiner called Ritual, which I actually have not read, so I would love to do that. There's also a 2006 remake starring Nicholas Cage, directed by Neil LeBue, and I haven't seen this, but I remember when my parents went to see it in the theaters in 2006, you know, and they said to me, like this is the kind of movie you can't watch till you're 45.
Speaker 1:Oh my god, so that's my only Wow yeah yeah, so someday, someday when I'm 45, I'll watch it.
Speaker 2:I wonder what the warnings are and that you know how they're like nudity.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. The funny thing with my parents is it really could be anything you know.
Speaker 2:I like the warnings that are like language.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, what kind of language. Modern horror lovers are very familiar with Ari Astor's Midsomer. We've already talked about it today because it's one of my favorite films. It's a purely fiction lens, but it does represent, as we talked about again, some traditions associated with May Day historically the May Poll, the May Queen, the May Day Dance. It's.
Speaker 1:I always talk about Midsomer and people probably are sick of me saying this, but I also think it's fascinating because it's a horror film that takes place in bright, bright, bright daylight for the whole thing, and it's kind of haunting and troubling in a blunt, different way, without hiding behind shadows and soundtrack and things like that. So content warning in some ways on that film. It's, you know, certainly a true horror film, but if you're kind of up for it, I think it's one of those horror films that actually did something a little bit different, which is hard to do in this day and age. There's also some smaller films to mention the Wicker Tree, for instance, which is from 2011. It seems to have a pretty positive, smaller kind of following behind it, and there's also an excellent documentary, one of my favorites Woodland's Dark and Days Be Witched A History of Folk Horror from 2021.
Speaker 1:It talks a lot not only about May Day themed horror but also the influence of pagan, wickin and folk practices on horror in general. So that's a little bit of a broader. It's quite long, but if you have the time it's very much worth watching. Circling back very quickly to Walpergus Night, I just have an interesting note here that I found on Wikipedia that the Church of Satan marks Walpergus Night as an important satanic holiday. The group was founded on April 30th 1966. Again by Anton Leves. We talked about him quite a bit on our episode on the history of black masses, so that might be an interesting follow-up to this if anyone hasn't listened to that yet. This date was specifically chosen because of its traditional association with witchcraft and it's roots in the spring equinox.
Speaker 2:I wonder how the Satanists celebrate if the tradition is that it's about casting witches out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it must be in sort of like an ironic way, like it's the night of the witches. So here we are. I don't know we'll have to, we're still here. Yeah, you can't cast us out Like ironically celebrating you know, something on Christmas or something like that. You know, I don't know loosely, I'm loosely trying to tie it together. So now let's talk a little bit about May 1st today and even dating back, but just dating back more recently in history, because there's some other non-spooky connotations with the day that will kind of tie us back to a Mortimer here. So the first is that May day in New York City used to be moving day, and I didn't know this.
Speaker 2:You told me this, yeah, this was something I found out from the Bury Boys. But for a certain period of time it would be like every single New Yorker like their lease would be up at the same time. I guess this is when you know only a small handful of landlords had the leases, like the Aster's, yeah, and the lease would be up on that date, and so all the New Yorkers would have to go like take their stuff out on the streets and find a new place to go live, and it just sounded like utter chaotic craziness, yeah yeah, truly, I don't remember if it was from the Bury Boys or you, but just pointing out that it was like the worst traffic day possible because everybody was moving all of their stuff.
Speaker 2:Exactly exactly. They would have all these carts out on the streets. Well, this will come up when I read the Mortimer piece. But they could charge whatever. The movers could charge whatever they wanted.
Speaker 1:Because everybody was desperate to have their stuff moved, yeah, so tell us a little bit about what you're going to read for us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, as I mentioned, Mortimer Thompson was the man who wrote under the pseudonym Keefilander Dostix Peebee, and he wrote that series of articles that eventually became a book called the Witches of New York. After that was published he did one more piece where he went to the South and he actually went to one of the largest slave auctions that there ever was and he went into skies and pretended to be interested in purchasing slaves, but he did it as an expose to show the horrors of slave auctions. And then he served in the Civil War for a little bit on the Union side and after he got out I think he was really devastated by the loss of his two wives. He started drinking a lot and he wasn't as prolific as he used to be, but there was a time for a couple of years in the late 60s where he was writing for this pulp magazine called Street and Smith. So this is where this article comes from Dostix Letters May Day in New York.
Speaker 2:It must be that in some ancient day the malevolent spirit came from Tofut to Manhattan Island on the 1st of May and bewitched all the inhabitants thereof, and that they never got over it yet. Regularly, just as certain as the 1st of May comes around, do all the dwellers in New York City and thereabouts go raving, stark, staring, destructively mad. They don't have to be put into street jackets or confined in padded rooms like other crazy people, for they don't, as a general thing, develop any very vicious desire to hurt each other or anybody. But for all this, any unprejudiced stranger would unquestionably declare them one and all fit only for the lunatic asylum and would recommend that they be transported without any necessary delay. This peculiar New York madness displays itself in everybody suddenly going to work, pitching all their furniture outdoors, dragging it thrantically through one, a dozen or a hundred streets accordingly to the length of the fit, and then wildly taking possession of some old, empty shell of a house and pitching all their traps into a tiggledy-piggledy pel mel without the slightest regard to order, comfort or convenience. In a few weeks the furniture gets somehow shaken down into some sort of order again. The children get well of their jammed fingers, their crushed toes, their wounds and bruises generally. The women get over their coughs and colds. The men recover their equanimity after the plunder of their purses. The universal madness subsides and all is serene for another three quarters of the year.
Speaker 2:He goes on a little bit more, but I'm gonna skip to the part where he gets to his particular May Day experience. So he says now, expressly to avoid the May Day moving, I gave up housekeeping six months ago and went to boarding with a lady who solemnly assured me that she was not going to move in May. I thought myself happy and was disposed to turn up my nose to the poor folks I saw anxiously looking for houses and getting ready for their annual overtures. Well, my landlady didn't move, but others on the 1st of May did. When I came home at night, the hall was full of trunks and all the rooms were piled with furniture.
Speaker 2:I climbed into my own room after some tribulation and there found a jolly little party of four gentlemen sitting around my center table playing urkher, while two more were talking lunch on my Rosewood bookcase, which they had laid bottom upwards and were using as a table. My bottle of private and particular brandy stood empty on the floor while two more of the party lay on my bed with their boots on, fast asleep and very drunk. This entire party were using my foot bath for a spittoon and seemed to be making themselves very much at home. They greeted my advent with a loud yell and invited me to come in and sit down and enjoy myself. The soberest of the party then volunteered as an explanation. He said that the men were nailing down carpets in their room and putting in the furniture and that, finding my room the only quiet place in the house, they had taken liberty of fellow boarders to take possession. He concluded by introducing his fellows and by asking me to another bottle of the same brandy.
Speaker 2:When I got these amiable gentlemen out of my room and reckoned up damages, I found that the oil and vinegar from their salad had ruled four out of my choice set of Dickens's work and left a huge lake over the serene countenance of Rachel the actress. My carpet was ruined, my bed was spoiled, furniture smashed so that for my share of the May Day I got as much as if I had moved myself. If New Yorkers must go mad every year, why can't they arrange not all to go crazy on the same day? If you can answer, please do and oblige yours distractedly. Q K Philander Dostix PB.
Speaker 1:Oh, my goodness, what a writer. Yes, what an old vision he evokes.
Speaker 2:He does have a very good sense of humor and way with words.
Speaker 1:Yeah, do we trust him as a narrator? Do we think it's exaggerated? Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm sure as a humor writer he definitely exaggerates things, and I mean, especially when I was reading witches of New York there were a lot of things I think he put in there for effect to get a laugh out of his readers.
Speaker 1:I mean the best kind of writer in a lot of ways. But we know we have our issues with him too.
Speaker 2:Yes indeed.
Speaker 1:The other thing to talk about when it comes to May Day is International Workers Day. So I'm gonna quote from Wikipedia here, which is from the entry on International Workers Day. Quote International Workers Day, also known as Labor Day in some countries and often referred to as May Day, is a celebration of laborers and the working classes that are promoted by the international labor movement and occurs every year on May 1st or the first Monday in May. Traditionally, may 1st is the date of the European Spring Festival of May Day. As we know, in 1889, the Marxist International Socialist Congress met in Paris and established the second international as a successor to the earlier International Working Men's Association. End quote. So it's so interesting to me that this randomly also is Labor Day in a lot of places, but New York's moving day for many years.
Speaker 2:It's like wild. Well, maybe because the laborers got to charge more. There you go, there you go In the middle ages.
Speaker 1:the administrative year also ended on April 30th. Thus May 1st ended up being a day of celebration amongst workers, craftsmen and merchants. So certainly some tie in there, I suppose, to historic calendars and such.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Marie, first of all, thank you so much for being here and being down to do this after hijacking the end of your tour and talking to you and making you talk. It was such. First of all, I have so many things to plug for you because the tour itself was a highlight of my October, which is very high stakes. So thank you for that and tell us first where folks can sign up for your tour if they want to do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I work for a company called Burrs of the Dead and they are wwwburrsofthedcom and we have all kinds of tours going on throughout the year.
Speaker 2:So I know my boss, andrea, is doing a special Love and Death Valentine's Day tour which will have passed yeah for next year, but for next year, and I will be starting Mortma and the Witch's Tours, which will be going, as I said, around Grace Church, gramercy Park and all of that and we're going to be offering that a few times this year Amazing. And then, once Spring rolls around, we'll have our usual Roosevelt Island, astoria, brooklyn Heights, greenwich Village, ghost Tours, forgotten, dark Histories of Lower Manhattan, and we are also going to be doing a couple of new tours this year. So we're hoping to do True Crime in Brooklyn Heights and we're also hoping to do something for Gramercy Park.
Speaker 1:Very cool, oh, very cool. Ok, I am excited to go on more of those. And now also, in addition to that, marie has three books that you can peruse. So again, wardware and the Witch's, which is her newest, that we've talked about a lot today, the Trapeze Diaries and Holly's Hurricane.
Speaker 1:I'm going to leave links to everything in the description, but I imagine all of your books are broadly available at most retailers. Yes, they are Excellent, and it's published by Fordham University Press. Is that right? So that's correct. Consider buying there or bookshoporg and, most importantly not most importantly, but just as importantly follow Marie on social media so that you have a sense of when her next book comes out, which I'm sure is inevitable at MarieWritesInEdits and her website is also MarieWritesInEditscom. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much. I am truly such a fan. I am in awe of someone who is writing so many books across so many different genres, and it just feels very kismet that we have connected in now are doing this. So thank you for being down to share all this with us today, and I hope we do something again in the future.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:This was fun Yay, ok, bye, everybody, talk to you soon, bye, ok, bye.
