It Lurks in the Mine Shaft, Part 1

In this sinister episode from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss different folkloric and legendary monsters tied to mine shafts and mining...

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
And I'm Joe McCormick. And hey it's still October, so
our Halloween season stuff continues.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
Today.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
We're kicking off an expedition into the mind Shaft to
talk about monsters and spooky legends associated with minds and mining.

Speaker 1 (00:32):
That's right, this one should be a fun one. We're
going to be especially in this episode, we're kind of
revisiting some ideas that we've discussed more briefly in the past.
I did a monster fact that touched on some of this,
and we've also talked a little bit. We've gone a
little bit into the minds in search of the supernatural
beings and traditions, but we haven't really melted an expedition

(00:55):
on this level before. So yeah, this one should be good. So,
as we've covered on the show before, whenever humans venture
where they don't quite belong, they inevitably encounter monsters of
one form or another. There are monsters of the deep
forest and the deep ocean, of the desert and the snow,
and there are monsters too that haunt places of human construction,

(01:17):
obviously our tombs, the necropolis, even spaces like empty bathrooms
at night and lonely expanses of country road. These places
too may be home to monsters and monstrous spirits and
other entities, each in their own way. These are all
places of mystery, and the monster is in some ways

(01:38):
an answer to that mystery. And in discussing monsters, ghosts,
and legends associated with mining, we're dealing with a very
fascinating environment because on one level, the solid earth beneath
our feet or deep within the heart of a mountain
is exactly the sort of place where we do not belong.
It's either we're talking about the grave, or we're just

(01:59):
talking about solid earth that affords us no place to exist.
Or another level, a cavern or other natural or artificial
formation in the earth, some sort of hollow in the
earth that we might venture into. And so, as we've
discussed in the show before, caves have of course long
been a place of fascination for humans, well back through

(02:21):
prehistoric times. From what we can tell, they seem to
have been places that offered a number of resources and ideas.
They might offer shelter, water, warmth, and even in limited
ways food. There were also places of strange sights and sounds,
places to speak to the future or learn from the
past through art, and of course, to venture farther into

(02:43):
the caverns was to court additional dangers. Then, as now,
you could become lost, stuck, or just overcome by deprivation
of the senses. And humans also learned pretty early on
that these subterranean spaces could also offer substances of additional
value to them, such as red ochre or flint and

(03:04):
other hard rocks and ultimately copper and gold. Now, to
get these resources, humans sometimes had to brave the depths
of the Earth, not only descending into naturally occurring openings,
but forging their own tunnels and pits mines for the
harvesting of Earth's riches. Now, we can't summarize the history
of mining in much detail for these episodes, but suffice

(03:25):
to say that the enterprise became increasingly complicated and daring.
Humans cut deeper and deeper into the earth, and in
doing so perpetually faced safety challenges. Mining could prove really
dangerous work, and this was of course coupled with the
ominous atmosphere of the mind, a world of darkness of
strange sights and strange sounds. Again, sensory deprivation that could

(03:48):
bring on sights and sounds that are not quite real,
hallucinations both visual and auditory. And on top of this,
there was this seeming proximity to these very traditions of
the underworld, traditions regarding some sort of a mythic underground
world that date back at least to ancient Mesopotamia.

Speaker 2 (04:08):
Yeah, that's right, And in many ancient cosmologies, you know,
the underworld was. It wasn't a metaphor, it was like
often literally thought to be beneath your feet in some sense,
you would go down to it.

Speaker 1 (04:20):
Yeah, like where we go when we die? Underground? Where
are we going today to get these precious metals? We're
going underground? Kind of a daring prospect. And I do
want to stress though that if you know, in the
future we may discuss will inevitably discuss mining adjacent topics
at least even if we don't do a deep dive
in the mining. And obviously you don't always have to

(04:41):
cut an artificial cave or tunnel into the earth to
mine things. But of course that's the model that is
going to factor into many of the examples we're going
to be discussing here today.

Speaker 2 (04:52):
Yeah, and we can talk about some more practical distinctions
between different types of mining as we go on through
this series. But it does seem to me, based and
what I've read so far, that tunnel mining that does
go down into caverns and tunnels beneath the surface is
the type of mining that gives the most rise to
the belief in supernatural entities and beings there is. It

(05:14):
seems to me, there is less less monstrous, less ghostly,
less spiritual associated with say open pit mining or placer mining,
where you know, you're you're sifting a sediment from a
stream bed or and things like that. Probably just because
you know there you're open to the sky. It's just
less eerie and it is less likely to conjure you know,

(05:37):
kind of spooky eerie feelings for a number of reasons
that we can discuss as.

Speaker 1 (05:40):
We go on, right and then and then all sorts
of additional dangers that don't exist if you're doing an
open pit mine, or you're you know, if you're standing
in the stream that sort of thing. Now we've we've
been thrown around a few different terms here spirits and monsters.
Many of the traditions that we're going to be talking
about concern beings that fall roughly into a category that

(06:02):
may often be described as fairies or fair folk, And
as Carol Rose the Folklorus writes in her works, you know,
they might be thought of as beings that exist between
heroes and the gods. Folkloris Charlotte Sophie Byrne described them
in her nineteen fourteen book The Handbook of Folklore as

(06:23):
quote various races of beings not human and yet not divine,
who are supposed to share this lower earth more or
less invisibly with mankind. And I really like that definition
more or less invisibly, because you know, sometimes we talk
about them being fair or invisible, but other times we

(06:44):
talk about how they are small, you know, they're like
the leprechaun. And sometimes this ends up just taking on,
you know, the pure idea of them being very small
in stature or being miniature people. But I was thinking
about this over the weekend that it is also it's
like they just have a different spatial reality, like they
live in different spatial dimensions and they can fold themselves

(07:06):
in and out of those spaces.

Speaker 2 (07:08):
Yeah, they're sometimes conceived as having a subtle form, one
that is only lightly detectable to our senses. Other times
they're pictured more as being often hidden but occasionally coming
out into view. But yeah, it fits well with this
idea of, you know, like a later science fiction idea
of extra dimensional beings phasing in and out of our reality.

Speaker 1 (07:30):
Yeah, and I think that also speaks more to the
power that's often attributed to them, because you know, if
you're just dealing with very pop cultural leprechaun ideas, like, yeah,
they have some powers. They may be dangerous to some degree,
but there's often a fair amount of danger associated with
the fear folk traditions around the world. They have a
lot of power, and you don't want to fall on

(07:52):
their bad.

Speaker 2 (07:52):
Side, especially not in a mind right.

Speaker 1 (07:56):
Right, which you know, because that's one of the things too.
It's like, once you're in the mind and we've been
describing this environment to some degree already, like this is
definitely a place where we don't belong, where we're most
definitely infringing upon their world and their realm and their rules.
So it's this sort of you know, mysterious or wild
place they might be found. And their temperament is also

(08:19):
always key because they might be anywhere from benevolent to malevolent,
though they're often situated somewhere in between. They're not always
right in the middle, so they might be largely benign.
You know, maybe they can be wooed by humans, you know,
with offerings and so forth, or they might just be
very easily offended. And if you offend them, you know,

(08:41):
they might just have a good laugh at your expense,
or it might be the end of you. They might
play a joke, but just how severe is that joke
going to be?

Speaker 2 (08:49):
Yeah, because a prank with mining equipment, I mean that
might be just a frustration and economic loss, but that
might also be death.

Speaker 1 (08:57):
Yeah, and so we'll discuss. They'd be like, you know,
it would be funny, what if we did all the
humans work for them today? Yeahs, you just don't know
exactly which way it's going to fall, right. So, just
as there's a fair amount of variety and just how
they're going to act towards humans, their exact origins very
wildly as well, you know, including everything from the idea
of them being transformed humans to personifications of natural phenomena

(09:22):
and in some cases defeated elder races or even cast
down gods. How whatever their origins are, generally they're cast
in a place where there's some sort of friction that
occurs between their world and our world, where these two
worlds meet. All right, Given what we're going to be
discussing here in this episode, I think it'd probably be
helpful to start with a sort of predecessor, and that

(09:48):
is the tradition of the Red Caps and the Blue Caps,
both supernatural entities from the British Isles and to a
certain degree elsewhere, you know, given the sort of the
basic nature of these names.

Speaker 2 (10:01):
Now, these are not necessarily always or even often, in
the case of the Red Cap, I understand, associated with minds,
but they have important tie INDs, I say, I guess,
especially the Blue Cap right right, right, And I think
they're kind of like a nice example of how we
have like the non mine related entity and then it
can sort.

Speaker 1 (10:19):
Of easily shift towards the mind. You know, these are
all ultimately I guess, ideas that we ended up taking
with us, and then they changed with us depending on
our work in these dangerous environments. Yeah, so in both
of these cases we're talking about caps. We're talking about
either like a literal cap that a creature is wearing
on its head that is colored to a certain color, or

(10:40):
it is something like a cap that you might think
of more as a halo or an aura. But we
just describe it as a cap because you know, basically
it's relatable. Everybody has a cap. Everybody wears a cap
from time to time, you know what we're talking about
if we describe something in that in those terms. And
then also they're just a wealth of traditions regarding caps

(11:01):
that provide various powers or carry with them curses. So
you know, caps are to a certain degree inherently magical,
at least in you know, our magical thinking. Yeah, so
let's start with the red cap, also known as bloody
cap or red comb. This one is one that many
of you are probably familiar with to some degree. I
feel like I grew up looking through various folklore books

(11:23):
that had pictures of or you know, the ideas of
what this creature looked like. And as Carol Rose describes
it in Spirits, Farries, leprechauns, and Goblins, the red cap
in its English usage is a largely evil spirit, sometimes
described as a hobgoblin originating in the full traditions of
the English Scottish border country.

Speaker 2 (11:45):
I'm mainly familiar with the red cap from a D
and D context, actually in Balder'sgate three, where they appear
as like a vicious, disgusting little David the Gnome.

Speaker 1 (11:55):
Yeah, that would be. That would be very viciousness. That
seems key to how they depicted. They often appear as
a hideous little old man in iron boots and a
red blood soaked cap. So his cap is blood because
he keeps like using it to soak up blood generally
I guess, like human blood and then wearing it. It's

(12:16):
not wearing it on its head, so pretty gross, pretty savage.
Where do you find this entity? Well, it's said to
haunt old ruins and sights of historic bloodshed, and if
you venture near such places, it might just kill you,
maybe all there is to it, and then use its
cap to sop up your blood unless you recite scripture

(12:37):
at it and drive and drive it away. It's also
said that if the blood of this creature's cap ever dries,
then it will shrivel up and die, so almost kind
of a Kappa sensibility to it. In the sense that
it has to keep some part of itself damp, but
this time it has to keep itself damp with human blood.

Speaker 2 (12:55):
So that's interesting because here it's like the vampire legend.
It's like the munster has a need of its own.
It's not just reacting to what you do, like it
needs blood and so it's eager to get your blood.
It's not just punishing you for say, crossing the threshold
of a ruined castle.

Speaker 1 (13:12):
Right. Yeah, this one is definitely more malicious than a
lot of the you know, the more sort of neutral
fear folk entities you'll encounter, Like this one is actively nasty.
And I mentioned English traditions because there are also things
called red caps and other traditions, like there's a Dutch
tradition of the red cap, where the red cap is
simply a helpful household spirit, not soopping up blood. And

(13:34):
I should also point out there are a number of different
variations of the English red cap tail, some of which
connect the entity with the fourteenth century Scottish border noble
William the Ti de sulis sometimes embellished as a villain
who was tutored in the Black Arts with the imp
robin redcap serving as is familiar, and in some accounts,

(13:56):
this cruel lord is eventually boiled alive by the people
who suffered under him. And I've also read versions where
the Red Cap creature is encased in lead and boiled. WHOA.
In reality, I'm to understand, Desiulis died in prison after
allegedly playing in a part of his part in a
conspiracy against King Robert the Bruce. All right, so that's

(14:26):
red caps. Let's switch colors and let's go to Blue Caps,
and this will get as closer to the mines. This
is another spirit of English folklore, also known as the
blue Bonnet, and this entity, according to Carol Rose, was
said to reside deep within the earth, and you would
only encounter it if you happen to venture down into
the mines, you know, labored in the minds and reach

(14:48):
some depth that humans would normally encounter. And so this
entity is often invisible, but it also might manifest as
a light blue flame, you know, this kind of like
a low effect, thus its name. And this one wasn't
nefarious at all, like very like polar opposite. Really compared
to the Red Cap, the blue Cap would mimic human

(15:09):
miners and sometimes put in a full day's work, so
moving tubs of coal or around, and then the miners
would leave out carefully calculated offerings for the blue caps
in thanks for their practice. You know, So this is
this one's kind of this one's This one really seems
almost downright benevolent, and you would tip your blue cap

(15:33):
and make sure that it kept occasionally doing this.

Speaker 2 (15:36):
Yeah, and as we're about to see, the blue cap
legend here has a lot in common with other well
explored mining spirits, specifically the one that I want to
focus on now for the rest of this episode, which
is the Tommy Knocker, also known as the Knocker or
the Knacker.

Speaker 1 (15:54):
This one, of course, I think a lot of us
are familiar with its name because we grew up having
some degree familiarity with the gigantic Stephen King book of
the same name the top.

Speaker 2 (16:04):
Does that book have anything to do with Tommy Knockers.

Speaker 1 (16:09):
It's been a very long time since I tried to
read it. This was like the first Stephen King book
that I read in like junior high that I couldn't
actually finish. You know, maybe I would have a different
experience if I tried it now, But I think it
is not uncommon for people to have difficulty with this one.

Speaker 2 (16:26):
I think King himself has somewhat disparaged it, hasn't he.

Speaker 1 (16:30):
I believe so?

Speaker 2 (16:31):
Yes, yeah. Anyway, So to examine the Tommy Knocker tradition,
I want to talk about an academic folklore article that
I found really interesting which traces the historical evolution of
the knocker or Tommy Knocker story from its origins among
Cornish miners in the area of Cornwall, which is in

(16:53):
southwest England's the Peninsula coming down in southwest England out
into the sea, so in the area of Hornwall, and
that goes back centuries all the way into twentieth century beliefs,
nineteenth and twentieth century beliefs of Cornish immigrants and others
working in mines in the American West. This article is

(17:14):
called Knockers, Knackers and Ghosts, Immigrant Folklore in the Western Mines,
published in the journal Western Folklore in nineteen ninety two
by Ronald M.

Speaker 1 (17:24):
James.

Speaker 2 (17:24):
I looked up the author here, and Ronald M. James
is a historian in folklore as who's been affiliated with
the University of Nevadorno and Iowa State University. So The
paper begins with a great little vignette from the later
evolution of the Tommy Knocker law. It is a passage
from the work of an author named F. D. Calhoun,

(17:45):
published in nineteen eighty six, drawing on his first hand
experience living in mining communities in Grass Valley, California in
the early twentieth century. So Calhoun is in the middle
of talking about an illicit practice of some miners at
the time who I think this was called high grading.
They would smuggle out high graded or from the mines,

(18:08):
you know, pack it secretly somewhere on themselves, smuggle it out,
bring it home, and then mill the ore in their
cellars at night. And of course, the milling of ore
is an important stage in the processing of raw minerals.
Usually it involves crushing, smashing, or grinding down large pieces
of rock into a relatively fine powder. And this increases

(18:29):
the surface area of the desirable minerals, making them easier
to separate and extract from the parts of the rock
that you don't care about. And you might do this
several different ways. You know, it might involve just hammer
or you know, mortar and pestle of some kind, or
hammer smashing on a surface, or some kind of stamp mill.
But as you can imagine, this secret milling operation would

(18:51):
be noisy. It involved the pounding or stamping of hammers
or stamps, and this could lead children in the house
to wonder what their parents were up to. Why did
they hear repetitive hammer blows coming from the basement when
they were trying to sleep, And according to Calhoun, these
parents would often blame the commotion on the tommy knockers.

(19:13):
So to quote from Calhoun here, supposedly the little miners
gathered under the house where children were especially good. If
they listened and were real quiet. After they had gone
to bed and were supposed to be going to sleep,
they just might hear their little friends hammering away with
their tiny single jacks. It is surprising how many residents

(19:34):
of the mining town still tell of being lulled to
sleep by the rhythmical pounding from deep below. If the
rock was especially hard and the pounding unusually loud, the
children were told that the tommy knockers must have been
using double jacks the evening before.

Speaker 1 (19:50):
Why durable This is adorable and ridiculous at the same time.

Speaker 2 (19:56):
So James says that Calhoun's account, of course, presents some
difficulty to the folklorist because he doesn't give exact dates here,
and he doesn't like name specific people or site sources,
but it can be taken as some evidence for the
late evolution of the Tommy Knocker concept in early twentieth
century California. So by this point, according to Calhoun's telling,

(20:17):
the Tommy Knocker had come to be used, among other roles,
as what James calls a FicT, citing as FicT citing
the terminology of the folklorist Carl Wilhelm von Sidao actually
father of the actor Max von.

Speaker 1 (20:32):
Sidao, Oh wow, that's amazing.

Speaker 2 (20:35):
A FicT is a legend like narrative that the teller
does not believe, but which is told as if true.
In other words, a FicT is intended to be understood
as true by the audience, but understood as fictional by
the teller. And this is distinguished from legends, which would

(20:55):
be third person stories that are sincerely believed by the
teller and expected to be believed by the audience, and
then fairy tales or folk tales, which are third person
stories that are understood by both teller and audience as
fictional because of this asymmetry in the relationship here, ficts
are often told by adults to children, and a great

(21:16):
example would be nursery bogies such as Jenny Green Teeth. Presumably,
Grandpa does not actually believe that there is a hag
living in the water that will pull you down by
the ankle, but he knows that the standing water is
actually dangerous for less mentally gripping reasons, so he tells
the story of Jenny Green Teeth in the hopes that

(21:36):
it will stick in the child's head and get them
to stay away.

Speaker 1 (21:40):
A FicT, as you might imagine, is a little bit
like a lie.

Speaker 2 (21:44):
Yes, but it's a lie that takes the form of
a story. Now, of course, the Tommy Knockers and Calhoun's
example are not exactly bogies. Like Jenny Green Teeth. There
are no threats in this story, but they are a
supernatural explanation told to believing children dren by unbelieving adults
to get them to stay away from dangerous knowledge, in

(22:05):
this case, the knowledge that their parents are doing something illegal.

Speaker 1 (22:09):
Hmmm. Interesting, yeah, and kind of rewarding them because the
terminology or the exact description was something along the lines
of like this only happens in houses where the children
are really good. Yeah, you're very fortunate that the Tommy
Knockers are here.

Speaker 2 (22:24):
So James says, by this point the Tommy knocker had
drifted very far from its earliest known form, and studying
this evolution is actually a pretty fascinating exercise that can
help us understand how folklore is affected by the immigration process,
the immigration of storytellers to new locales, the diffusion of
folklore between different ethnic groups, and also how folklore is

(22:48):
affected by cultural and technological changes across time. How for example,
changes in mining techniques and technology lead to changes in
what sort of entities haunt the minds. So the belief
in supernatural beings that live within minds seems to be
quite widespread, as we were just talking about, and we

(23:09):
will talk about more examples from different cultures in part
two of the series. But James says that the form
this creature most often takes in European traditions is some
sort of diminutive old man who makes mischief and plays
tricks and either provides useful information to miners, and this

(23:29):
could be leading them to riches or warning them of
imminent danger and death, or the mining spirit punishes transgressions, defilements,
and evil deeds within the mind.

Speaker 1 (23:41):
It's really interesting to think about the role that trickster
plays in a dangerous environment that has certain rules about
safety rules in place, and I wonder how much of
this is sort of like, Okay, if everything goes according
to plan, you don't have anything to worry about. But
the idea that the trickster spirit is there puts enough

(24:02):
doubt that maybe you double and triple check things as
they occur.

Speaker 2 (24:06):
Yeah, yeah, you know, it might lead to added scrutiny,
which is good. In that case. It would almost be
like the Jenny Green teeth. It's like, there are real
practical dangers you need to be concerned of, but thinking
about this entity causes you to behave more cautiously because
an entity is more mentally gripping than real life accidental danger.

Speaker 1 (24:25):
Yeah, it's more like an active threat as opposed to
the threat of the just thing you didn't think about, Yeah,
thing you didn't know to be afraid of. Right.

Speaker 2 (24:34):
So, the sixteenth century German mineralogist and metallurgist Georgius Agricola,
who lived fourteen ninety four to fifteen fifty five wrote
extensively on beliefs about entities that lurked in minds in
a work called De Animantibus subterraneous, or of this underground animals,

(24:55):
the subterranean Animals. We may come back to this work
in part two of the series. I'm not sure yet,
but it's likely. But speaking of a German creature known
to him as cobalos or, I think this would be
the equivalent of the cobald, Agricola wrote that the creature
was jolly and loved to imitate human work, like what
you were saying with the blue cap. So there's a

(25:16):
lot of similarities in these different European mining creature legends.
To read from a translation of Agricola quote, they are
called little miners because of their dwarfish stature, which is
about two feet. They are venerable looking and are clothed
like miners in a fillited garment, with leather apron about
their loins. This kind does not often trouble the miners,

(25:40):
but they idle about in the shafts and tunnels and
really do nothing, although they pretend to be busy in
all kinds of labor, sometimes digging or sometimes putting into
buckets that which has been dug. Sometimes they throw pebbles
at workmen, but they rarely injure them unless the workmen
first ridicule or curse them. The mining nome are especially

(26:00):
active in the workings where metal has already been found
or where there are hopes of discovering them and cause
them cause them to labor more vigorously. So that's kind
of interesting. They're more concentrated in hot zones, you know,
in places where there's likely to be a big discovery
or where a big discovery of war has already been made,

(26:22):
which is an interesting contrast to other stories that would
you know, imagine the creature in the mine as the
one that lurks in the abandoned mine. This is exactly
the opposite. It's like, you know, the economic hot zone
of the mine is where these things show up.

Speaker 1 (26:38):
I love this detail that, yeah, they might do humans
work for them, but they also just might sort of
pretend to do work.

Speaker 2 (26:44):
Yeah, look busy.

Speaker 1 (26:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:47):
So this paper is focused on a particular version of
this widespread mining creature tradition that emerged among Cornish miners
in the southwest of England. As I said earlier, where
the creatures were known as Tomby knockers, knockers or knackers.
James says that the name knocker may have originally been
more widespread, but it really came to be associated with

(27:08):
Cornish legend, in particular as mining was a common occupation
for Cornish men and the region of Cornwall itself had
been a very important mining hub going back to ancient times.
Actually specifically, Cornwall was known for having deposits of metal
such as copper and tin, and it was an especially

(27:30):
crucial source of tin going all the way back to
the Bronze Age, where ten was in high demand for
the manufacture of bronze, which you make bronze by combining
copper and tin. Of these two ingredients, ten was the
much more difficult to source metal and relied on sophisticated
trade and distribution networks. So these big civilizations that are

(27:52):
producing a lot of bronze artifacts during the Bronze Age,
a lot of times they might be sourcing their tin
from very far away, and so they were lying on
a lot of trade to support that bronze industry. So,
getting into the early records we have about what the
Cornition ockers were, James compares several sources. Many of these

(28:14):
authors are what he calls nineteenth century or turn of
the twentieth century antiquarians, collectors of a piece of antiques
or of intangible antiques like folklore. So these include a
folklore collector named William Bottrell who lived eighteen sixteen to
eighteen eighty one, who wrote a column for the Cornish

(28:35):
Telegraph in which he documented local folk traditions. James also
names a nineteenth century writer named Robert Hunt and a
slightly later writer named Walter Yielding Evans WinCE, and then
after that. There are also some later likely derivative sources
and some literary references to Tommy Knockers in fiction, which
we can mention in a bit. But to generalize from

(28:57):
what we have, here's what we know the Cornish Tommy Knockers.
The older version, they were usually described as supernatural, dwarf
like men with long, gray beards and wrinkled faces. Their name,
as you might guess, comes from the knocking and tapping
sounds of uncertain origin that you would often hear propagating

(29:19):
through mind tunnels. They were widely regarded as mischievous, playing pranks,
causing trouble and fouling equipment. So that's in line with
some other things we've talked about. But in some cases,
especially if you knew how to butter them up and
get on their good side, they could be quite helpful.
Now here's a very strange twist on the legend. Basically

(29:41):
all of the early Cornish sources agree on an origin
story for the knockers, and it is this. They were
said to be the ghosts or spirits of Jewish people
who had been sent to work in the Cornish mines,
either in the ancient past, during the Roman period, or
perhaps in the Middle Ages, as some sort of punishment

(30:04):
for having been responsible, in the minds of their Christian
persecutors for the death of Christ. Now, according to James,
there is basically no evidence for this belief that Jews
were sent to work in the Cornish minds during the
Roman period or during the during the Middle Ages. No
evidence this actually happened. Of course, Jews certainly were persecuted

(30:28):
in various ways by Christians throughout Europe in the medieval period,
but there's no evidence this ever involved work in Cornish minds.
So it's not entirely clear where this latter belief about
the origins of the Knockers came from. Despite the fact
that this has no basis in history, the origin story
appears widespread and a very important part of the legend.

(30:49):
So it's not just like something that one person said
at one time. This seems to be a common belief
about the Tommy Knockers.

Speaker 1 (30:56):
And of course it does. You know, we can compare
this to various other two traditions where some other culture
or other people is in some way transformed into a
folklore entity of some sort. And you know, even getting
back to stuff like the Tuava Didan and you know,
saying that they are like a you know, connections between
that belief and some sort of a fair folk and

(31:17):
some sort of perhaps you know, predecessor culture and so forth.

Speaker 2 (31:22):
Well, this is interesting one of the other, i mean,
one of the only other explanations of the origin of
the Tommy Knockers that this is not nearly as widespread,
but is the claim that they are the spirits of
people who inhabited the lands of Cornwall before the Celts.

Speaker 1 (31:37):
Yes, then that would definitely tie in with various other
traditions you find, especially throughout the British Isles.

Speaker 2 (31:43):
One version of this origin story. The Jewish miners origin
story appears in a novel from eighteen fifty one called
Yeast a Problem by the by the English priest and
social reformer Charles Kingsley. In this book, a Cornish character
explains what the knockers are to another character by saying, quote,
they are the ghosts the miners hold of the old Jews, Sir,

(32:07):
that crucified our Lord, and were sent for slaves by
the Roman emperors to work the mines. And we find
their old smelting houses, which we call Jews houses, and
their blocks of tin at the bottom of the great bogs,
which we call Jews ten. As a point of historical fact,
by the way, it was, of course the Roman authorities

(32:27):
under Pontius Pilot who crucified Jesus, not the Jews. However,
setting aside whatever anti Jewish attitudes may be contained in
this ideological myth, it's interesting to note the way that
the physical artifacts of prior industry feed into beliefs about
supernatural beings that occupy the same space. What is, in fact,

(32:50):
the remains of mundane mining from decades or centuries ago
becomes either the physical imprint of work from a mythic past,
you know, done by people who you imagine were there
but were not actually there, or from a ghostly present.
It's like, this is the stuff left behind by the
supernatural creatures. Now you know. That connection between physical artifacts

(33:14):
left by real people in the past to supernatural beings
reminds me of our series on Elfshot.

Speaker 1 (33:19):
Yeah. Absolutely, How do we make sense of these artifacts? Yeah,
people from the past or something a little bit different,
People that we just can't see, people that are hidden
from us.

Speaker 2 (33:32):
James notes several ways in which common beliefs among the
Cornish miners about the Knockers both do and do not
match this ahistorical origin story. The Knockers were said to
not work on Saturdays because it was their sabbath, but
also it was said that they did not work on Easter,
All Saints Day, or Christmas. On Christmas it was said

(33:55):
that they sang carols and held mass deep at the
bottom of the mine.

Speaker 1 (34:00):
I do love a good Christmas Mass held by non
human entities.

Speaker 2 (34:04):
Yes, we did episodes on that at one point, didn't we.

Speaker 1 (34:07):
Yeah about the undead, the pious.

Speaker 2 (34:10):
Undead, Yes, having Christmas Mass? Yeah, Oh that was fun.
I just had to look it up. I was remembering
the story of Bishop teet Maar.

Speaker 1 (34:18):
Oh okay, I do I remember that name now?

Speaker 2 (34:22):
Yeah, tet Maar of Merseyburg, I think, and who talked
about the the undead, the zombies going to church.

Speaker 1 (34:40):
Uh so.

Speaker 2 (34:41):
Also, the tommy knockers did not like when miners whistled
and did not like being spied on. Sometimes miners would
be overcome by curiosity and would want to watch the
tommy knockers work and spy on them.

Speaker 1 (34:55):
Yeah, frequent thing not to do with the fair folk.
Do not go spying on them. Don't want you to. Right.

Speaker 2 (35:02):
Despite being the ghosts of people, they were described as
having many things in common with other she figures, such
as elves and fairies. So this is something I think
I'll probably mention several times here. There's a fuzziness about
whether are these ghosts of people or are they like
another species, these these she beings, these fairy folk. And

(35:26):
I think that question is just sort of hard to
answer because I think often there actually was a blurriness
between these concepts. These fairy folk were often said in
one way to actually be spirits of people from long ago,
even though they were treated as basically a magical species
that wasn't quite human. James explains this fuzziness by saying, quote,

(35:47):
thus the she the above the above. Ground fairies of
Ireland are often associated with the ancient tribes displaced by
the Celts. The Tommy Knockers can be understood as underground
elves who acted the array of legends and beliefs associated
with ancient Jewish miners. Like many other European supernatural beings,
the Tommy Knockers show a muddling of the distinction between ghosts,

(36:11):
particularly the long dead, and elves. So, yeah, it could
be a kind of collision of different traditions here. Maybe
you've got an underground elf like creature or fairy type
creature who lives in the mines, and then you also
have this folklore tradition, this story about Jewish miners in
Cornwall and people long ago, and then people just kind

(36:33):
of combine these stories. Yeah, So what did the original
Cornish Knockers do well? It seems a lot of the
stories about them focused on their reactions to the behavior
of human miners. Usually, if you were respectful to them
and you were well behaved, you treated them with courtesy

(36:53):
and you obeyed the general rules of good behavior, they
would either leave you alone, or they would even be
very hell helpful. They might lead you to riches. But
if you were nasty or neglectful to the spirits, or
if you were just a bad person in one way
or another, the knockers would get revenge. There are a

(37:14):
number of stories featured here. I'm going to mention a
few that James brings up. There's the story of the
Cornish miner Tom Trevorro collected by William Battrell in the
nineteenth century. So in this story, Tom for some reason
got angry at the knockers in the mine, and he
ordered them to be quiet. In fact, he spoke harshly

(37:34):
to them, saying that if they did not shut up,
he would quote scat their brains out. Also, Tom is
having some supper in the mine or around the mine,
and his supper is a kind of Cornish baked good
called a fuggin fugga n which appears to be some
kind of heavy cake or pastry, maybe often packed with
meat inside. They wanted some, He refused to share his

(37:58):
food with them, and this was also a no no
because sharing a food offering with hobgoblins, brownies and other
household spirits was a common practice in the British Isles.
You might set out a dish of milk by the
hearth for the hobgoblin or the household spirit. And so
the knockers they sing in a rhyme to Tom. They say,
Tom Trevoro, Tom Trevoro, leave some of the fuggin for

(38:21):
bucca or bad luck to thee tomorrow. I think it's
kind of rhyming Trevoro with tomorrow. By the way, Bucca
b u c c A is another type of Cornish spirit,
which is occasionally associated with minds, but more often with
the sea. Actually here there seems to be some overlap
between the Bucka and the knockers, but they're both again

(38:43):
mythical beings that can kind of blur together. Anyway, The
knockers or the Bucka, they want some of that cake.
But Tom is like, no, this is my cake. And
the knockers said again, Tommy Trevoro, Tommy Trevoro, will send
thee bad luck tomorrow, old curmudgeon, eat all they fuggin'
and not leave a digeon for bucca. Digon means a

(39:06):
little piece, I think, like a crumb. But still he
refused so the knockers cursed him, and after that he
had no luck finding riches in the mines, and then
James says, quote in desperation, he took up farming. A
despised fate for a Cornish miner.

Speaker 1 (39:25):
Folks, We've said it time and time again, always tip
your goblin.

Speaker 2 (39:29):
How hungry are you that you can't even spare a
digeon for bucca?

Speaker 1 (39:32):
Yeah, just a digon, that's all he's asking for.

Speaker 2 (39:35):
So there's another story that's a famous one about a
guy named Barker who discovers an old mine with an
opening where he can watch the knockers working below. Yeah,
that's uh oh, that's how you get into trouble. He
believes that they can't see him, they don't know he's there,
so he spies on them until the end of work
one day, at which point the knockers each start calling

(39:57):
out that they're going to leave a tool. You know,
I'm gonna leave my hammer on the on the chair,
you know, saying where they're gonna leave a tool, And
then finally the last one says, I'll put my hammer
on Barker's knee, And suddenly Barker felt a great pain
in the knee, and he was never able to walk
on that leg again.

Speaker 1 (40:15):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (40:16):
So the knockers knew he had been spying, and they
punished his curiosity. And so among the Cornish miners, if
you had arthritis, you could say, I'm as stiff as
Barker's knee. That was the kind of saying. Another legend,
recorded by Robert Hunt, has elements of both reward and punishment.
This time the punishment is for greed. So the story

(40:36):
goes like this, An old Cornish miner and his son
named Trendw witnessed knockers hauling very good ore up to
the surface of a mine that they haunted, and the
miners made a deal with the knockers. If the miners
could be allowed to work the knocker's mind, they would
give the knockers ten percent of their profits. The knockers agreed,

(40:57):
and things went well until there died and left Trendw
in charge. His son, Trenwith, is described in the story
as selfish and avaricious, and he decides he's going to
cheat the knockers and keep all the profit for himself.
That's such a bad idea. The knockers, of course, they
know that he did that. They curse him, and he
loses all his luck, and then quote he took to drink,

(41:20):
squandered all the money his father had made, and died
a beggar. Interesting thing. In several of the stories here,
the Knocker's magical attack against offenders and enemies is not
a direct attack but an attack on luck. You cross
them and you will henceforth have bad luck in the mine,

(41:42):
or just bad luck in general. So now that you've
crossed the Knockers, you are just rolling natural ones on
all your attempts to find valuable caches and veins, and
usually this ends up with you having to leave mining
as a profession and end up in some other revolting fate,
apparently including farming. But this brings us to the second

(42:03):
part of the story, which is the question of how
the characteristics of the Tommy Knocker legend change when it
is carried over into new locales and new cultures. So,
in the nineteenth century, lots of Cornish people immigrated to
the United States, where they became very important in the
fledgling Western mining industry, despite their relatively small proportion to

(42:24):
the overall workforce. This immigration was in part driven by
economic changes, apparently at the end of the Napoleonic Wars
in eighteen fifteen, there was a substantial decline in the
price of copper and ten, the two metals that formed
the backbone of the Cornish mining industry, and also after
thousands of years of mining, at this point many of

(42:44):
the most exploitable known deposits had already been heavily extracted,
so you know, you've got your depleting caches and the
price is going down. On top of that, Beginning in
the eighteen twenties, there was a general economic depression in
Southwest England that affected basically everyone, whatever their trade. So

(43:05):
metal mining in Cornwall appeared to be a declining prospect,
but experienced mine workers could take their skills to new opportunities,
such as digging tin and copper in Michigan in the
United States, or digging for gold or other medals in California, Colorado, Utah, Montana,
and so Cornish immigrant miners in the Western United States

(43:28):
were often called cousin Jack's. I think the origin story
of this is that, you know, the boss at the
mine would say we need more workers, you know, can
you bring some more people like you? And they would say, yeah,
I've got a cousin jack back in Cornwall we could
bring over. Now, note that there were different extraction methods
used at the time for various metals. There was placer mining,

(43:50):
which is where you're searching for ore and maybe loose
gravel or soil in a stream bed, open pit mining,
and then also underground hard rock mining tunneling mining, and
the latter was the method with which the Cornish had
the most valuable experience. Other forms of mining could better
make use of inexperienced labor in say an open pit mine.

(44:13):
And it's interesting I think that the type of mining
with which the Cornish had relevant experience, deep hard rock
tunneling is the kind that is facially at least most
likely to give rise to legends and supernatural beings for
the obvious environmental reasons. You've got dark, creepy tunnels, echoes
and bizarre sound phenomena, and also lethal dangers due to

(44:37):
cave ins, gas and all kinds of stuff.

Speaker 1 (44:40):
Yeah, it's just like the full array of sensory experiences
and yet dangers that are going to really sort of
pressure cook any kind of belief.

Speaker 2 (44:53):
Yeah, And so as a result of the way they
fit into the need for the mining labor force. The
Cornish culture actually contributed greatly to the emerging mine labor
culture of the American West, and James mentions a bunch
of stuff here, such as cuisine. Apparently there was in
the mining West there was a big popularity of Cornish pasties,

(45:14):
which is a type of savory turnover, often filled with
meat and vegetables. And this wasn't just with the Cornish,
and it's became popular with miners of all ethnic backgrounds.
There was a techno culture that was imported where mines
in the American West used a particular kind of water
pump that was common in Cornish mines. There's something called

(45:34):
Cornish wrestling popular among Western miners. I didn't have time
to look that up, so I don't know how that's
different from other wrestling.

Speaker 1 (45:42):
I mean, just about every culture has some variation of
a wrestling tradition, and yeah, it makes sense that the
Cornish would have one as well.

Speaker 2 (45:51):
But then, of course the belief in the Tommy knockers,
and so after this in the paper, James goes into
this extensive review of like what other scholars have written
about the belief in mine inhabiting spirits in the American West,
including California, Utah, Colorado, Oregon, and Montana, and the extent
to which those spirits are related to the imported Tommy

(46:13):
Knocker lore, also to the extent that the legends are related,
how the Tommy Knocker lore seems to have evolved in
its new context. So I'm not going to mention everything
that James covers in this regard, but I want to
discuss some highlights that struck me. First of all, in
the American West, there was some diversity of forms. Sometimes

(46:35):
American Tommy knockers were thought to be benign, even helpful,
leading miners to valuable bodies of ore, like you would
follow the tapping sound and that would lead you to
claim great riches. Other times, the Tommy knockers represented a
sinister threat within the mine, and the tapping sound that
they made actually spelled doom, indicating that a cave in

(46:57):
was imminent. So you've got exactly opposite things indicated by
hearing the tapping.

Speaker 1 (47:02):
Yeah. Is it a blessing or a curse? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (47:05):
Maybe the sound makes you rich, Maybe it's telling you
you are about to die.

Speaker 1 (47:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (47:09):
Sometimes it was even said that the time. This seems
from what I can tell to be less common, but
sometimes it was said that the Tommy Knockers, or a
malicious sub type of knocker called Devil Tommy Knockers, caused death,
caused cave ins, falling rocks, and timbers, tunnel collapses, things
like that. So not just foretelling your doom, but making

(47:30):
it happen. And this malicious quality survived in some miner's
lore even after the Tommy Knocker legend itself died. The
folklorist Carolyn Bancroft recorded a saying in the Minds of
Colorado that dangerous falling rocks were caused by an entity
called not a Tommy Knocker, but the guy in the
red shirto. I thought that was a little spooky.

Speaker 1 (47:52):
Yeah, it kind of calls back, at least vaguely to
the idea of a red cap, because how that shirt
gets so red?

Speaker 3 (47:58):
I have suspicions.

Speaker 2 (48:25):
So Confusingly, In some communities, miners use the term Tommy
knocker to refer to not a being, but to tapping
signals that miners would use to intentionally communicate with each other,
like I'm Tommy knocking to, you know, send a signal.
Other times, the mischief of Tommy knockers was used to
explain any weird occurrence within the mine, a missing tool,

(48:49):
a malfunctioning piece of equipment. This they're kind of like
grimlins in this regard. They could be represented by little
clay effigies that miners may or had made for them
and would leave near the entrance of a mine, and
the tradition of giving little food offerings to the knockers
sometimes did continue in the American context, though not everywhere.

(49:12):
So you might leave a pastry or a bit of
tallow in front of one of these clay effigies near
the entrance to a mine, that's giving it to the
knockers as a you know, hey, I'm doing my part.
I'm giving you a tip. Please treat me well. And
what seems like a big difference between the American version
and the Cornish version is the origin story. This idea

(49:33):
about ancient Jewish miners sent in the Middle Ages or
sent by the Romans, that's gone in the American context.
In the American West, the knockers were usually just said
to be the ghosts of dead miners. References to Tommy
Knockers appear in newspapers throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
and I want to read one funny example from eighteen

(49:56):
eighty four in the Evening Chronicle of Virginia City, Nevada,
that James includes. So here's the article.

Speaker 3 (50:02):
Quote.

Speaker 2 (50:03):
Last night, two men who were prowling around in the
Baltimore mine at American Flat got scared nearly out of
the township by the queer sights in an old drift.
They went into the mine for the purpose of seeing
whether there was or enough in sight to profitably extract
on tribute. Climbing into a stope, they heard the click
of hammers and were much surprised, as they supposed no

(50:25):
one had been there in years. Following up the sound,
they were astonished to see two striking hammers work on
the head of a rusty drill, which was deftly turned
by unseen hands. And though not a soul was in
sight except themselves, they heard a lively conversation but could
make out no words. They looked and listened for some minutes,

(50:47):
when fear took hold of them and they ran out
of the mine quickly. At the toolhouse, they related their
experience and were laughed at, But to prove that their
heads were clear, they conducted a couple of skeptics to
the spot and found the hammer still at work. The
men insisted that they did not deceive themselves, and those
who went with them say that the above statements are facts.

(51:09):
I love how no names are given. There is also
a newspaper story from Virginia City, Nevada of miners who
see a floating lantern going up and down a mine
shaft and they think, oh, it's being carried by an
invisible spirit. That must be a Tommy knocker. But they
later discover there's a practical explanation here. The superintendent of

(51:30):
the mine was plumbing the shaft with a lantern dangling
from a wire, and the slow is going up and
down and they're like, that's a ghost. James also talks
about fiction of the time, which you can find a
bunch of examples of fiction incorporating these types of folk beliefs.
So they're nineteenth century stories and novels that mention the
Tommy knockers and the mines. But a main change to

(51:52):
Hammer Home, apart from the origin story change is also
the distinction of the subtle shift, and it is somewhat
subtle from elf like beings to ghosts. This again is
confusing because in the Cornish context, these elf like beings
are said to be the spirits of humans from long ago,
but are treated less like human souls and more like

(52:15):
an elf for kind of otherworldly being a different species.
I think again, there's just some fuzziness here that goes
back a long long time in what exactly elves are,
and some elf like qualities remained in these later American tellings,
for example the clay effigies that seems to be more
like the elves or the gnomes than human ghosts, and

(52:36):
of course the tradition of food offerings is more like
the Cornish form. Another major change in the tradition is
what the spirits did for the miners. The Cornish knocker
legends are much more moralistic. The Tommy Knockers reward good
moral qualities in miners and they punish wickedness. Meanwhile, in

(52:57):
the American context, there is essentially no moralism. There's no
rewarding good and punishing evil. There's a little bit of
you know, appeasement, rewarding if you give them the food
offerings with the effigies, but there's no real moral quality
consideration in how they behave towards you instead, the relationship
is just transactional and practical. What the Tommy Knocker primarily

(53:21):
does in America is in either a helpful or sinister way,
it warns miners of imminent danger. And James explains this
in part by appealing to the idea of different moral
cultural environments where these legends propagate. He says, in traditional
Cornish culture, excessive greed, ambition, and curiosity are policed and punished.

(53:47):
The moral of these stories is do not be too greedy,
take your fair share, don't be too curious or inquisitive,
mind your own business. And in talking about this, James
draws on a framework I'm an author named George Foster
to describe this as a morality based on the concept
of limited good and this is a common way of

(54:08):
thinking in many cultures, where it essentially views the world
as a kind of closed, zero sum system, where being
a good person is equated with a kind of egalitarian humility,
where you know, one of the main things that's discouraged
is when people attempt to quote major change in their
economic or other statuses, and the underlying assumption behind that

(54:32):
discouragement is my gain would be everyone else's loss. So
you know, there's a limited good. American culture was very different,
almost the opposite. There was a culture of admiring acquisitiveness
and ambition and curiosity, a worldview that is not zero sum,
limited good, but a positive sum world where it's good

(54:54):
for people to achieve, to go out and achieve all
the success they can and it it doesn't necessarily hurt
anyone else for them to do. So, you know, I
was thinking about this. I think obviously there can in
reality be some insight in both world views. Of course,
it is true that there can be positive some interactions,
and one person's success doesn't have to come at somebody

(55:17):
else's suffering. You can like create wealth, you can add
new value to the world. Then again, sometimes success does
come at somebody else's suffering. And when we are racing
towards success, mad with ambition, it's easy to be blind
to the ways that our gain actually is somebody else's loss.
And so like having stories in place to make you

(55:37):
think about that is actually valuable.

Speaker 1 (55:40):
Yeah, And I can't help but think about all this
within the context of like a strict mining culture too.
Like it, I wonder if it makes sense that the
Cornish traditionally, you know, had this emphasis because you're a
tight knit crew, you depend on each other in a
dangerous environment, and maybe there is more of a sense
of like, you know, nobody's stand out, nobody go for

(56:01):
personal glory because we all have to depend on each other.

Speaker 3 (56:04):
Here.

Speaker 2 (56:05):
Yeah, I think there's a lot to that, absolutely, So
the American forms of the Tommy Knocker legend lose the
moralistic message. The moralistic message discouraging greed and curiosity. In
the American context, greed and curiosity are just fine, but
you need to take practical steps to protect yourself from
economic loss and mortal danger. So the knocker becomes a

(56:29):
source of practical problems in the form of sabotage and pranks,
or of information of omens about practical problems such as
deadly accidents. To quote James here quote, the Tommy Knockers
were omens of danger, giving the miners something on which
to focus their interpretations of subtle signs of cave ins.

(56:50):
The miners could not necessarily distinguish between the diverse subtle
sounds in the mind, and failed to realize consciously that
when the timbers of the mine moaned one way, it
was safe but when the mines echoed with another sound,
it meant danger. Much of nineteenth century mining expertise was
based on experience, not science. As late as the nineteen thirties,

(57:13):
George Orwell was able to observe English miners relying on
the quote feel of the mine. And then here it
quotes Orwell. I love this passage. An experienced miner claims
to know by a sort of instinct when the roof
is unsafe. The way he puts it is that he
can feel the weight upon him. He can, for instance,

(57:33):
hear the faint creaking of the props. The reason why
wooden props are still generally preferred to iron girders is
that a wooden prop which is about to collapse gives
a warning by creaking, whereas a girder flies out unexpectedly.
The devastating noise of the machines makes it impossible to
hear anything else. Thus the danger is increasing. So I

(57:55):
love this. This is something we've talked about before. Supernatural
beings in imagined as the physical embodiment of sensory intuitions.
So I have some experience in an environment, and thus
I can associate subtle sensory cues with coming effects. But
this association is a little bit below my ability to

(58:17):
consciously put it into words. So instead, there's some kind
of being that is here giving me a warning.

Speaker 1 (58:24):
Right, right, So reframe this insight is information coming from
some external source.

Speaker 2 (58:30):
Yeah, So in the American context, the Tommy Knocker legend
is about practical warnings, which is something that it has
in part in common with the Cornish version. But this
is the only emphasis now, no longer the moralistic enforcement,
it's the practical warnings. And I think this type of
subconscious awareness of sensory cues in the mind that makes

(58:53):
a lot of sense as to like what where those
practical signals are actually coming from. I mean, other times
it might just be your imagine, but in some cases
it could seem to be actually quite prescient because you're
relying on like little sounds you're hearing, feeling the weight
upon you. Also interesting how technological changes over the history
of mining could have contributed to changes in the Tommy

(59:15):
Knocker lore or the decline of lore altogether. There are
a number of things to mention here. I'm thinking about
how Orwell calls out the sound of the heavy machinery
making you no longer sensitive to those little creeks that
give you the four warnings. So the sound of the
machines may have changed the environment of the minds in

(59:36):
other ways to become less conducive. To Tommy knocker lore,
I bet a quieter mine is eerier if you don't
have stuff like, you know, loudly thrumbing in your ear.
If you've got a somewhat quieter mind, where small sounds
can echo and propagate more easily and don't get drowned out,
I would just suspect that makes you think that there

(59:56):
are creatures about.

Speaker 1 (59:58):
Yeah, yeah, I mean one of the the things we're
talked about on the show before is the sensory deprivation
in these environments, and that includes sound, and yeah, you're
hearing less, you're hearing strange echoes, and it can take
on all sorts of strange life in your head. But
as we're discussing here, it could also give you the
ability to pick up on these little changes that can

(01:00:18):
be detected via human hearing.

Speaker 2 (01:00:21):
Another thing that James calls out is this might seem
very simple, but I think there's a lot to it.
The replacement of lanterns with electric lighting, making minds less gloomy,
you know, the electric lights in the mind. That's a
different environment.

Speaker 1 (01:00:34):
Absolutely. I mean you can just think of movies for this,
Like what cave set looks better the gloomy caves set,
the gloomy tunnel set, not the fully illuminated one. If
you can just completely flood the chamber with light, that
takes away a little bit of its mystery. Right.

Speaker 2 (01:00:49):
One more thing I thought was interesting is that James
introduces a framework for thinking about how these stories change
when they come across the Atlantic by citing a skull
named Stephen Stern who talks about common patterns in how
legends and oral traditions change when the tellers immigrate to
new lands. According to Stern, there are there are very

(01:01:11):
common patterns. So when somebody moves from one place to
another and takes oral traditions with them, and this is
how the traditions tend to change. Quote from longer to shorter,
from complex to simple, from sacred to secular, from supernatural
to realistic, from communal to individualistic. I think you can

(01:01:34):
see a lot of those, maybe not all of them,
but a lot of those elements and the changes that
occur with the Tommy Knocker legend.

Speaker 1 (01:01:40):
Yeah. Yeah, they seem to be this shift from presence
the communal to the individualistic. Yeah, going from this is
this thing that we all know about and we all
believe too. This is that thing that you know, old
Tom told me about. He keeps talking about this.

Speaker 2 (01:01:53):
Yeah, and also that on that count, the individualistic versus communal,
the shift away from the limited good more that says like,
you know, I'm just going to stay at as a
peer with my coworkers here. I'm not going to try
to strike out and do a lot better than them.
To this American context where it's like, you know, if
you can, if you can find a vein and get

(01:02:14):
the richest, that's great, but you better watch out for
the cave in. So that's all I've got on the
Tommy Knocker legend. But I think we will have a
lot more to talk about with mining spirits and entities
in the tunnels for the next episode.

Speaker 1 (01:02:29):
That's right, we'll come back with some more European examples,
but also some non European examples of entities associated with
the minds. All right. As always, will remind you that
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and
culture podcast. With core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short
form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside
most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film

(01:02:51):
on Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 2 (01:02:53):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode any other, to suggest a
topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
can email us at contact stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:03:13):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (01:03:16):
For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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