SYMHC Classics: Three Hellhounds

This 2020 episode covers three of the many supernatural canines and hellhounds in our collective storytelling. Two are similar and from England, and one is a fun figure from southern Louisiana.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday after we name dropped the Rugaroo and are
behind the scenes for our Werewolf of Bedburg episode. We
are replaying our episode on Hellhounds, which is where the
Rugaroo made a past appearance on the show. This originally
came out on October twenty eighth, twenty twenty and if
you're listening to this episode on the day we publish it,

(00:22):
or even the day after, the rugaroofest that we mentioned
at the end is going on right now. If that
sounds fun and interesting. The place to get more information
is still at Rugaroofest dot org. Who wouldn't want to
be in the New Orleans and Homa, Louisiana area right now,
but hopefully you'll check it out. Enjoy. Welcome to Stuff

(00:45):
You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm
Tracy V. Wilson. Crazy. It's almost Halloween. I know it's
the best week of the year, so this seems like

(01:07):
a really good time to talk about sort of a
version of something that I think we've been tiptoeing around
for a while, which is dogs, specifically demon dogs. I
swear I do want to do a domestication of dogs
episode at some point, but there's a lot and they're
constantly finding new things, so I keep getting scared off. Yeah,
and a weird coincidence. This morning, I tweeted something about

(01:30):
how basically needing to do an episode about something lighter,
even though my episodes lately have been pretty fun, just
because there's a lot of stress and chaos happening in
the world right now, and somebody replied that maybe we
could do a history of puppies, and I'm like, this
is almost that kind of and right, I want to
acknowledge it. For some people, dogs are just scary. Not

(01:51):
everybody likes dogs, but there's a reason for that, right.
This is a fear that has been part of many
cultures for centuries, including dog from the nether World, which
go all the way back to the three headed Cerberus
who guarded the gates of the underworld in Greek mythology.
But today, as we inch closer to Halloween, I thought
it would be fun to talk about three of the many,
many supernatural canines and hell hounds that have lengthy histories

(02:15):
in our collective storytelling. And the first two of these
are very closely related. They're both based in England, and
really the second of them makes up the bulk of
the episode. Now the last one is a North American creature,
and it's just incredibly charming and fun. In my opinion,
it's a little bit thematically different than the other two,
but I thought it would be a good upbeat place

(02:36):
to land, particularly, you know, these are fraught times. It's
been a rough year. I love Halloween and creepiness and
being scared as much as anyone, but gosh, it's also
great to laugh if we can, so we'll try for
a little bit of that. And there are of course
loads more demon dog myths throughout the world, so odds
are really really good that this is the start of

(02:57):
a perhaps a Halloween series, and next Halloween will do
more and perhaps more geographically and culturally varied. I have
a list started already for that. But if you have
stuff you want to send us, you can do it.
But right now we're going to talk about some hell hounds.
Sounds like a potential Halloween version of Crampus and Friends,
which has been a winter holiday staple. That is kind

(03:20):
of the thinking nice. So first up is the bar
gest the dog that is part of Northern England's folklore
tradition and is normally associated with Yorkshire, sometimes described as
a goblin or a ghost, and I wanted to mention
the bar Guest in part because of an interesting coincidence

(03:41):
that happened recently on the show. So I was already
working on this episode for a while, and when I
started working on our recent bram Stoker episode, I had
already been kind of doing prelium work on this, and
then unexpectedly the bar Guest showed up while I was
doing bram Stoker research. In that episode, we mentioned that
a ship that had run aground near Whidby had served

(04:02):
as the inspiration for the ship that transported Dracula from
Transylvania to London. And one of the details which we
mentioned that was shared by locals with bram Stoker when
he was doing his research was that a black dog
had emerged from the hold of directship and run off,
and that dog was believed by some people in the
community to have been the bar guest. So the bar

(04:23):
Guest is described as a huge dog and its teeth
are large and prominent. There are a couple of things
that set him apart from another so called hell hound
that we are about to talk about. The bar guest
is not always described as being black. Sometimes he's gray.
But beyond that, this dog sometimes is described as a
shape shifter, including sometimes appearing headless. If you see a

(04:47):
bar guest, that means you are going to die soon.
If you only catch a glimpse of it, your death
might take a little longer to arrive. Yeah, I feel
like this would create a whole community of people that
hear dog noise and clamp their eyes shut. But in
terms of the written record, a lot of the more
persistent qualities of the bar guest story and its legend

(05:10):
seemed to come from the book Notes on the Folklore
of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders. That
book was written by William Henderson in eighteen seventy nine,
and in this collection of folk tales that he kind
of gathered oral recollection from people and wrote it down,
Henderson shares more details about the bar guest as a
harbinger of death. So he writes, quote on the death

(05:33):
of any person of local importance in the neighborhood, the
creature would come forth a large black dog with flaming
eyes as big as saucers, followed by all the dogs
of the place, howling and barking. If anyone came its way,
the bar guest would strike out with its paw and
inflict on man or beast a wound which would never heal.

(05:53):
My informant, a Yorkshire gentleman lately deceased, said he perfectly
remembered the terror experienced when he was a child at
beholding this procession before the death of a certain Squire
Wade of new Grange. Henderson also put in writing some
details about the bar guests shape shifting that have persisted,
writing quote, A friend informs me that glasen Zykes, near Darlington,

(06:17):
is haunted by a bar guest, which assumes at will
the form of a headless man who disappears in flame,
a headless lady, a white cat, rabbit or dog, or
a black dog. So many things. The bar guests can
be whatever it wants. The bar guest legend is popular

(06:38):
enough that you might have bumped into it before if
you've read Roald Dalls the Witches, or played the Witch
or video game or Forgotten Realms or Dungeons and Dragons,
or engaged with any number of other entertainment options you
might have crossed paths with mentions of it. Yeah, I
think it comes up in the Lord of the Rings
game online. The bar guest is everywhere part of it.

(07:00):
It's because it's just a fun word to say. But
the bar guest is also hardly the only hell dog
of Great Britain. There have been many, many names for
very similar beings. So there's the capaldweight, trash striker or
shriker you'll sometimes see. There's the Welsh counanon and the
Isle of Man's mouta d'Or. But perhaps the most famous

(07:20):
alternate to the bar guest name is the iteration of
this English hell hound that we are going to talk
about next, and who actually started this episode because I
love saying this name black shuck. Yes. So. In fifteen
seventy seven, Abraham Fleming wrote an account of an event
at the parish church in a town near Norwich that

(07:40):
created a version of this English legend that still persists
until today. That account was titled and just Buckle Up
because it is one of the one of those one
of the titles we love so much. The title was
a strange and terrible wonder wrought very late in the
parish church of bon Game, a town of no great

(08:01):
distance from the city of Norwich, namely the fourth of
this August, in year of our Lord, fifteen seventy seven,
in a great tempest of violent rain, lightning and thunder,
the like whereof hath been seldom seen, with the appearance
of an horrible shaped things sensibly perceived of the people

(08:22):
then and there assembled drawn into a plain method according
to the written copy by Abraham Fleming, in addition to
the length art, just all the delightful spellings that are
coming on. I even cleaned that up a little bit
to make it easier. We've taught. We did our whole
episode about you know, grammar and spelling and how things evolve.

(08:45):
And this is a case where Fleming had his own flourish,
particularly when it came to vowels. There's actually some comparative
writing in other pieces where people are trying to f
you're out if it's Fleming and they start talking about
he kind of does that same weird spelling here. This
might be the same right here, because those things were

(09:08):
not codified yet. So this pamphlet with that incredibly long
name actually tells the tale of two appearances of a
large black dog The first is at Saint Mary's Church
in Bongay on a day during services when there was
an intense thunderstorm, and in the pamphlet it is written
that the quote whole church was so darkened yeay, with
such palpable darkness that one person could not perceive another.

(09:33):
Then during this storm their quote appeared in a most
horrible similitude and likeness, a dog of a black color.
This dog, according to Fleming's story, was so terrifying that
it made the parishioners think that Doomsday had arrived. The
dog ran between two people who were praying and wrung
both of their necks, but killed them while they were praying.

(09:55):
The dog also bit another man, leaving scorch marks. That
man survived. The steeple of the church was struck by lightning,
and the mysterious dog disappeared, leaving behind only claw marks
in the pavers and the door of the church. But
this was, as we mentioned, only one church that experienced
a terrifying canine visit that day. The dog also appeared

(10:17):
at Holy Trinity Church about seven miles away in a
town called Blitheburg. Fleming described it this way, quote the
like thing entered in the same shape and similitude, where
placing himself on a main bulk or beam, whereon sometime
the rude did stand. Suddenly he gave a swing down
through the church, and there also, as before, slew two

(10:40):
men and a lad, and burned the hand of another
person that was among the rest of the company, of
whom divers were blasted. This mischief thus wrought, he flew
with wonderful force to not little fear of the assembly
out of the church in a hideous and hellish likeness. Yeah.
So in both cases, giant, terrifying black dog arrives, kills

(11:04):
a couple of people, injures some others, and vanishes. And
we're going to talk about the way that this story
took on a life of its own in just a moment.
But first we will pause and have a sponsor break.
Fleming's write up about the fiendish dog who attacked the

(11:27):
churches is the start of a century's long tradition of
stories about that dog, who was eventually named black Shuck
as the story was passed down. We'll talk about the
first time that name appears in writing in a moment.
When Fleming wrote this account, he was an editor and
publisher who went on to become an ordained minister. And
this document, which has come to be known sort of
casually as the Wonder Pamphlet, is just as much a

(11:50):
sermon as it is a report of a dog attack.
It includes passages early on in it about this whole
thing being a warning not to stray from fate. He wrote, quote,
God warneth by signs from heaven, by fiery appearances from
the air, by wonders wrought on earth, strange and unusual.
There is also language in the pamphlet about how man

(12:12):
has engaged in all manner of ungodly behaviors, and then
it tells these dog stories, and then it concludes with
a prayer. So this appears to be a scenario where
Fleming is reporting these events based on news that someone
else had relayed to him for when there's no way
he could have been in both of those churches where

(12:32):
the appearances happened one after the other for another. His
first printing of the Wonder Pamphlet, and the detail of
the church door being marked by the beast's clause was
attributed to the wrong location, and he corrected it later
on in subsequent printings. Because Fleming later became a minister.
It seems that when people have referenced his work, there's

(12:54):
been some timeline confusion, and they characterized the writer as
a clergyman who was working at one of these churches
where it allegedly happened. He was not a clergyman at
all yet at the time, definitely not one working at
one of these churches. No, he was a publishing man
living in London. What did happen though, was that this

(13:15):
pamphlet was put into circulation very soon after the thunderstorm
of August fourth, fifteen seventy seven, which was a real
thunderstorm that's documented. I mean, it was a very popular pamphlet.
It seems a lot of people believed those stories in
it about the dog attacks, and while still working in publishing,
so before he became ordained, Fleming had the second part

(13:35):
of this story published in the Holland Shed Chronicles, with
one notable exception which we'll talk about in just a moment,
so for context. Holland Shed's Chronicles was a large collaborative
history of the British Isles that was initiated as a
project by printer Rayner Wolf in the late fifteen forties.
The multi volume work was first published in fifteen seventy seven.

(13:57):
Then in fifteen eighty seven a much and an update
was published under the stewardship of Abraham Fleming. So even
a decade after this first writing, Fleming was still writing
about that thunderstorm. Additionally, by this point Fleming had plenty
of clout he was considered an expert on that particular storm.
Hollandshed's Chronicles was considered an important source of historical information,

(14:20):
and it was famously used as a source by writers
like Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. So you might think
that the inclusion of the black dog story in this
chronicle is really going to cement it as sort of
settled history at the time, But in fact there is
no mention of the dog in this account. So this
is the version as it appears in Hollandshed's On Sunday,

(14:43):
the fourth of August, between the hours of nine and
ten o'clock in the forenoon, whilst the minister was reading
of the Second Lesson in the parish church of Blithsburg,
a town in Suffolk, a strange and terrible tempest of
lightning and thunder strike through the wall of the same
church into the around a yard deep, drove down all
the people on that side above twenty persons, then renting

(15:06):
the wall up to the vestra, cleft the door, and
returning to the steeple, rent the timber, break the chimes,
and fled toward Bongay, a town six miles off. The
people that were stricken down were found groveling more than
half an hour after, whereof one man more than forty
years and a boy of fifteen years were found stark dead.
The other were scorched. The same or like flash of

(15:29):
lightning and cracks of thunder that rent the parish church
of Bongay, nine miles from Norwich, rung as under the
wires and wheels of the clocks, and slew two men
which sat in the belfry when the other were at
the procession of suffrages, and scorched another which hardly escaped.
So it's interesting that the deaths and injuries are mentioned here,

(15:50):
but they're attributed simply to lightning strikes and not the
sudden appearance of a hellish dog. And there are records
that indicate that those deaths and injuries did in fact happen.
I mean, it's totally within the realm of possibility that
if lightning strikes the steeple of a church, people inside
may be killed, but there's just no reference at all

(16:11):
to a dog causing them, So maybe the decision was
made to remove that flourish of the Hellish canine In
later years, and again going to the church records, there
is a mention that there was a payment made to
a professional dog whipper named John Hines quote for whipping
dogs out of the church at prayer time on the

(16:33):
day of the storm. This was actually a profession. People
would bring their dogs and sometimes the dogs would get unruly,
and they would keep professional dog whippers on hand. This
sounds horrible and I don't like it, but they would
get the dogs out of the church so that the
proceedings could go on. So it's possible that the original
write up of the story, again probably relayed to Fleming
by someone else not witnessed by him, conflated some events,

(16:56):
that there was an unruly dog in the church that
had to be forcibly removed, and that separately lightning strikes
killed several people and injured others. Despite that change in
the later version of the story that Fleming edited the
legend of the Suffolk appearances of the dog, which might
have been a demon, was established, and that story persisted.

(17:17):
So to be clear, this was certainly not the first
account in England of a terrifying black dog that was
characterized as supernatural. Dating back to some time between the
eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Anglo Saxon Chronicle included the
sighting by multiple witnesses of a pack of black dogs
quote with eyes like saucers and horrible running through the woods.

(17:40):
In this case, the dogs weren't alone, but they appeared
to be on a hunt that was led by mysterious men. Yes,
that's another version of the story, these wild hunts. So
the name black shuck first appeared in the eighteen hundreds,
and then it seems to have been applied retroactively to
a lot of these stories. It first came up in
writing by Red and E. S. Taylor in eighteen fifty,

(18:02):
and he wrote about it in the periodical Notes and Queries,
Quote this phantom. I have heard many persons in East
Norfolk and even Cambridgeshire described as having seen a black,
shaggy dog with fiery eyes and of immense size, and
who visits churchyards at midnight. One witness nearly fainted away

(18:22):
at seeing it, and on bringing his neighbors to see
the place where he saw it, he found a large
spot as if gunpowder had been exploded. There. A laine
in the parish of Overstrand is said is called after
him Shuck's Lane. The name appears to be a corruption
of shag as Shucky is the Norfolk dialect for shaggy.

(18:44):
Is not this a vestige of the German dog fiend?
The other frequently cited mention of black Shuck is one
that was written in nineteen oh one, and this time
the legend kind of gets another upgrade this go around,
in the form of black Shuck's appearance being important of death.
Our guest had been associated with as a death porton,
but this is where black Shuck kind of comes in

(19:05):
with that same association. This was written by William Dutt
in a book that was titled Highways and Byways in
East Anglia. And this is kind of a lengthy excerpt,
so because I want to include all of the ways
that he kind of solidifies this legend. So Tracy and
I are going to take turns with it. So it
starts quote, if this were a stormy night instead of

(19:26):
a stormy day, the old fisherfolk of the coast would
say it were just the time for black Shuck to
be abroad, for he revels in the roaring of the waves,
and loves to raise his awful voice above the howling
of the gale. He takes the form of a huge
black dog and prowls along dark lanes and lonesome field footpaths,

(19:46):
where although his howling makes the hearers blood run cold,
his footfalls make no sound. That's such a great turn
of phrase. This passage goes on. You may know him
at once, should you see him by his fiery eye.
He has but one, and that, like the cyclops, is
in the middle of his head. But such an encounter

(20:08):
might bring you the worst of luck. It is said
that to meet him is to be warned that your
death will occur before the end of the year. So
this ends quote. So you will do well to shut
your eyes if you hear him howling. Shut them, even
if you are uncertain whether it is the dog fiend
or the voice of the wind you hear. Should you
never set eyes on our norfolk snarl yaw, you may

(20:30):
perhaps doubt his existence, And like other learned folks tell
us that his story is nothing but the old Scandinavian
myth of the black Hound of Odin, brought to us
by the Vikings who long ago settled down on the
Norfolk coast. Scoffers at black Shuck there have been in plenty,
but now and again one of them has come home

(20:50):
late on a dark stormy night, with terror written large
on his ashen face, and after that night he has
scoffed no more. Such a good little write up. As
the years have gone on, things have kind of reached
a point, or at this point, you could go to
any number of towns and communities in England and find
an assortment of location specific sightings of black Shuck that

(21:13):
are part of local lore. Just kind of scrolling around
through the Internet, I found so many that are, like, yes,
black Shuck visits this one bridge in our town, every
you know, fortnite or whatever, Like every town seems to
have some variation of it. Coming up, we will talk
about some modern developments of the black Shuck legend, but
first we will hear from some of the sponsors that
keep Stuffy missed in history class going. There are, as

(21:45):
we mentioned before the break, some interesting modern events in
the Black Shuck story, including one that started in twenty
fourteen with the announcement of an archaeological find. Now this
news broke via the UK paper The Daily Mail, which
is known to publish some less carefully vetted stories. On
May fifteenth, twenty fourteen, it ran a story with the

(22:05):
headline is this the skeleton of legendary devil dog black Shuck,
who terrorized sixteenth century East Anglia. Folklore tells of seven
foot hellhound with flaming eyes. I was curious and I
went to see if we had talked about this in
the twenty fourteen edition of Unearthed. We had not, probably

(22:26):
because I don't source Unearthed from the Daily Mail. I
checked as well, and I was I had the exact
same thought process. It's like this would never show up
in Tracy's notes. So this story leads the reader to
the possibility that this archaeology team may have found the
remains of this legendary hellhound. It includes the following text quote.

(22:48):
It was discovered a few miles from two churches where
black Shuck is said to have killed worshippers during an
almighty thunderstorm in August fifteen, seventy seven. What's more, it
appears to have been in a shallow grave at precisely
the same time as Shuck is said to have been
on the loose, primarily around Suffolk and the East Anglia region.

(23:09):
This article then goes on to mention that testing of
the remains will determine if they are indeed from the
correct time period to ascertain whether it is the dog
from Fleming's Tail. And of course this got picked up
by other news outlets and it's spread really really quickly,
and it is fun to think about the possibility that
there's physical evidence for something that has only been legend.

(23:32):
But if you've ever wondered what happens to the archaeologists
involved when a story like this breaks, here is your
chance to find out. Brendan Wilkins, the project director at
the group dig Ventures that conducted the dig, wrote a
post on the dig Venture site about the experience and
the sensationalism of the work that he and his team
did in October. He wrote it in October. Their team

(23:53):
was doing work earlier, but the post that he wrote
was published in October twenty fourteen. So that post begins
like this quote. As I scanned the headlines that fateful morning,
I felt a chill go down my spine and my
blood run cold. I read, re read, then read it again,
shaking with disbelief as a terrifying and sinister thought began

(24:14):
to emerge. They were talking about us. We were in
the Daily Mail. As an archaeological projects director, I pride
myself on being on the right side of what's loftily
known as the public understanding of science. So reading about
the quote seven foot hell hound with flaming eyes we
had apparently discover at Lyston Abbey knocked me for six

(24:37):
How on earth did this happen? How could we contain it?
And was this the end of any shred of archaeological
credibility I would ever have. It was very illuminating to
read his very honest account of his reaction. That find,
as he mentioned, happened at Lyston Abbey, which is a
bit less than seven miles from the second church that

(24:57):
was terrorized in the Fleming account from fifteen seven twenty seven. Specifically,
these remains were found while they were excavating what had
once been a monastery kitchen building there. The dog's burial
definitely postdated the monastery's use, although when that burial happened
was unclear, but in his post Wilkins states that he
never thought these were the bones of black shuck, and

(25:20):
that really the more exciting finds of archaeology are not
in the dig but in the analysis later. He then
shares what he learned about this dog. It was seventy
two centimeters tall at the shoulder, that's very roughly about
two and a third feet. He compares it to the
size of a Great Dane or a mastiff, and because
the dog had worn teeth and an arthritic ankle, it

(25:43):
appears to have lived for a long life. They weren't
able to conclusively date the sample. They got three different
date ranges as possibilities, all of them well after fifteen
seventy seven. They were between sixteen fifteen and sixteen ninety.
Seventeen thirty and eighteen ten are sometime after nineteen twenty.
Wilkins writes that quote, far from being the final resting

(26:05):
place of a bloodthirsty hell hound, it was clear that
our dog skeleton had been laid to rest with care
and consideration. So the more likely scenario here is that
it was a working dog that was essentially retired, and
unlike many working dogs, it was lovingly cared for long
after this dog would have been able to do its job.
Wilkins states things very plainly quote, were these the bones

(26:28):
of a seven foot hell hound with flaming eyes? Unequivocally no.
Though dig venture may not have found the infamous Suffolk
hell hound, there have been some efforts to track the
black dogs, not just of England but throughout Europe. In
twenty fifteen, as part of a project called Public Archaeology
twenty fifteen, researcher Nick Stone started plotting out a map

(26:50):
of the various sightings of black Shuck, the Barguest, and
other manifestations of this black dog myth. The Public Archaeology
twenty fifteen project's mission to quote undertake a year of
public engagement, led equally by archaeologists and non archaeologists, aimed
solely at the creation of public engagement with archaeology, where

(27:11):
the definitions of all central terms remain open to debate
for the duration of the project. So they didn't want
to necessarily like end up with a bunch of papers
at the end, but they wanted to get people interested
in how archaeology worked and how it could be something
that everyone engages with. So participants submitted proposals for projects.
Twelve were chosen, six by non archaeologists and six by archaeologists,

(27:34):
and this was one of those projects. Stone's map is
interactive and when you click on one of the points,
a pop up of the story linked to that spot appears.
They sorted the sightings by color, with singular dogs represented
with red, wear creatures in blue, shape shifters that fall
outside of the werewolf moon myth as purple, and wild

(27:55):
hunt dogs in dark green. So looking at this map,
it does seem like the idea of the singular demon
dog roaming the country is most popular in Britain and Ireland,
and other types spread throughout Europe. It's very fun, and
that is based on oral history. It's not like doing
the dig down of like, was this a plausible story? Oh? Sure,

(28:17):
collected stories. Yeah. So. Our last entry, as we mentioned
at the top of the episode, is a little bit
of a departure from Blackshuck and the Bar Guest, and
it is in southern Louisiana because Cajun culture has its
own version of a scary kind of using air quotes. There,
folklore canine figure the rugaroo is similar to a were wolf,

(28:38):
usually depicted with a human body and a doghead. And
this name, of course, if you speak French or into folklore,
probably sounds familiar, but not quite what you've heard before. Yeah,
that's because the French word for were wolf is loo garoo.
Loop means wolf, and while the origins of the word
garoo may have suggested that it can change forms, most

(29:00):
modern translations just punt it straight to werewolf, even without
the loop part in front of it. It is most
likely that the story of the werewolf traveled with people
from France and Acadia as they move south and then
over time and with usage, the l at the beginning
of the word became an R. At this point, both
of these are considered acceptable in the area. Yeah, you

(29:22):
could hear it said either way. And the origin of
the rugaroo, like so much folklore, has its roots in
keeping people in line, and this has grown into a
number of different legends to scare different groups of people
with unpleasant consequences for inappropriate behavior. So possibly the oldest
version of the rugaroo myth is related to lent. The

(29:43):
story goes that the rugaroo hunts down Catholics who don't
observe lent or who fall short in their promises to
give up their vices during that time. According to Jonathan Foray,
executive director of South Louisiana Wetlands Discovery Center, there's even
a tale that if you fail in your lent observances
for seven consecutive years, you will become a rugaroo yourself.

(30:07):
And of course, a dog man from the swamps is
the perfect figure to scare children into doing as they're told.
Bad behavior equals the rugaroo will come and eat you up.
Adults and children both have also been encouraged to do
right by the people in their community lest they be
cursed and turned into a rugaroo through magic. If that happens,

(30:29):
the only way to fix it is to transfer that
curse to someone else, and to do that you would
have to trick them into cutting you so that your
rugaroo blood is drawn. But here's why the rugaroo is
more fun than scary. The best ways to avoid the
rugaroo making a stop at your house, other than good behavior,
those always involve math. The rugaroo struggles with counting, but

(30:53):
is also simultaneously compelled to do it. This idea crops
up in like vampire mythology. Sometimes so and apparently he
can count to twelve but not higher than twelve. So
if you leave thirteen pennies on your doorstep, he'll stop
and try to count them before he comes in, but
he'll get superplexed as he tries to make sense of
how many there are, So you can he just will

(31:14):
never enter the home because that thirteenth penny just throws
him for a loop. Just keep starting over. Yeah, it's like, wait,
I didn't get this right one. I love this story
so much. If you don't want to stack pennies, you
can also leave a calender out on your doorstep, because

(31:35):
apparently the rugaroo will try so hard to count the
holes in that calender, but of course he loses his
place every time. Not only are there too many, but
they're like in a big circle, and keeps starting over
until he just wanders off at frustration. It seems like
maybe all of those decades of living in the swamp
have given him some interesting peccadillos and behaviors. Yeah, as

(31:59):
far as I I know, I am not a rugaroo,
but I think I would become frustrated and wander off
if I tried to count the holes in a colander.
I would be like, I need a sharpie. I'm gonna
section this out. If you are as fascinated by the
rugaroo as i am, you can also attend the annual
Rugaroo Fest that takes place every year in home A, Louisiana,

(32:22):
which is just a little bit southwest of New Orleans,
where storytellers continue to pass on this story through oral
tradition of the rugaroo, and all proceeds from this festival
go to the South Louisiana Wetlands Discovery Center. It is
normally the last week of October, so happening now as
we publish this episode, although of course this year in

(32:42):
twenty twenty, things have changed a bit due to the pandemic.
So there are some fun online activities and if you're
in the area on Fridays, what they've been doing because
it is Louisiana, there is delicious food at that festival normally,
so they started doing a pop up drives through would
pick up on Fridays of some of the goodies that

(33:03):
you would normally get at the festival. This Friday, the
thirtieth is your very last chance. If you are anywhere
in the area. You can look up the info on
their website, which is rugaroofest dot org. That's r o
U g A r o U f E s T
dot org. I have a friend who loves loves loves

(33:24):
werewolf myth and legend, and she and I are already
plotting to attend this next year if it happens, because
it sounds like the most fun time ever. Yeah, I
just I love it. I love that this is like
a fun version of a werewolf story. To end, are
are Halloween programming with because we all need a little

(33:46):
more fun. Think about that poor rugaroo counting. Part of
me wants to bring him some flash cards and upgrade
his knowledge. That's the GARO. Thanks so much for joining
us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of

(34:08):
the archive, if you heard an email address or a
Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show,
that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is
History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us
all over social media at missed Inhistory, and you can
subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, the

(34:29):
iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff
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