January 4, 2025 • 14 mins
George Noory and author John Kachuba discuss the legends of shapeshifters, humans who can transform into werewolves and other creatures, the historical figure who inspired the myth of the vampire Dracula, and stories of Jesus shapeshifting in the Bible.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back to Coast to Coast. George Norrey with
you along with John Kochubo. We're taking calls next hour
with John. John. How many different types of shape shifters
are there anyway?
Speaker 3 (00:16):
Oh wow, that's uh. I don't know, George, to be
honest with you, because my my research showed that there are,
I mean hundreds of different types. Yeah. As they said before,
the cultures all around the world, I mean Japan alone.
You look at Japanese ghost lore and their their stories.
(00:37):
There's there's scores and scores of shape shifters. Interesting thing
about Japanese shape shifters there is a lot of them
are actually shape shifting ghosts, which is kind of a
different take on it. So the story typically is that
there might be a woman who is her husband cheated
(00:58):
on her or whatever, and and you know, he kills her,
so she's a she's a victim, right, So she's now
a ghost and she comes back to seek revenge on
her husband or boyfriend whoever was. But in order to
do that, she will she's a ghost because she comes
back and she will shape shift into another person, like
(01:19):
maybe the guy's new girlfriend, so he thinks he's with her,
he's actually with his ghost of his wife, first wife,
who is a shape shifter, and she will kill him.
So yeah, stories, but yeah, it's it's crazy. So there's
there's a bunch of Japanese also are very fond of
having shape shifters that change into inanimate objects. I mean
(01:43):
things like a mop, you know, like, I'm not sure
why a shape shift would want to change into a mop,
but those existing Japanese full for.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
So, do shape shifters generally shift into something physical goal
or is it animated?
Speaker 3 (02:04):
No, it's it's a physical change. I mean they basically
become something else in you know, in reality. I mean, like,
so they actually become an animal. It's not an animation
or an illusion or anything else. It's an actual transformation.
At least that's all the stories position it that way.
Is an actual transformation of one thing into another.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
John, what's the difference between an external and an internal
shape shifting?
Speaker 3 (02:35):
Yeah, these are terms that I used just for the
purpose of kind of shorthanding classifications in the book. But
for an external shape shifter, what I talked about is
the kind of shape shifter that you can actually see
a transformation. So I use an example the famous movie
An American Werewolf in London. You know, and if you
(02:57):
remember seeing that, the transformation on film of this poor
guy transforming into a werewolf was phenomenal. But when it
was done, I mean, there you go. You're looking at
a werewolf. Now you're not looking at a man anymore.
So there's actually this physical transformation. So that's an external
shape shifter. Internal when I was talking about here, we're
(03:20):
shape shifters that don't actually shift physically as much as
they do mentally. So what you have it's sort of
like a you know, a sheep in wolf's clothing in
a way you don't have You don't see a transformation.
You don't see a physical change, but there is a change.
(03:41):
And I use that to explain possibly some people like
you know, serial killers and people like this who for
all practical purposes, well okay, think of Ted Bundy for instance.
Ted Bundy, you know, is this serial killer, but for
all practical purposes. When you saw him, he was this
(04:04):
clean cut, sort of collegiate kind of guy, young guy.
He was helpful, you know, he helped old ladies across
the street. He helped you put your groceries into a car.
So for everything that you looked at him, you thought, oh, okay,
this guy is fine, there's something wrong with him. But
inside he was this murderous killer. And I consider that
(04:24):
a shape shifter. You can say, well, there's psychological damage there.
You know, he was a psycho or whatever. I'm not
a psychiatrist. I don't know the exact term to use
for that, but I still think that, in a way
is shifting. That's something that takes you out of your normal,
everyday humanity. It makes you something else.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
Yeah, there's no doubt about that. Something was wrong with
Ted Bundy, probably when he was a kid.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
What do you think, John, Yeah, well, I mean when
you read some of the histories of people like that,
they certainly come from broken families, they come from being
abused or whatever. It's kind of rare to hear somebody
who's fully adapted and has everything in the world becoming
a serial killer. Not that it doesn't happen, but it's
(05:12):
not typical. But I got another example though. There's a guy.
There's a guy here in Ohio named Guy Spinelli, and
Guy has a there's all kinds of sort of degrees
and belts in martial arts. He knows like any martial
art in the world. But he also does a lot
(05:33):
with things like remote viewing and that kind of stuff.
And he's done work with Navy seals, with special Forces.
He's done work for the government. And I remember talking
to one of his students who said that he and
guy were in a bar one time and they were
just sitting there minding their own business, having a drink,
(05:54):
and some guy came over. He's the word guy. Guy
with a small g here came over to the table,
and he was totally drunk, and he just started, for
whatever reason, insulting guy. Uh just you know, I don't
know what it was. But the guy just stood up
and he looked at the guy and the student. Guys
(06:16):
student who are sitting at the table, said, I don't
know what happened. He said, all I know is that
this this drunk guy was standing there looking at Spinelly,
and all of a sudden, he said, I saw something
in guy spinell his face. He said, I don't know
how to describe it other than I think of a tiger.
And he said, the drunk just kind of his eyes
(06:38):
went wide and he just kind of raised his hand.
He backed off like okay, man, okay, okay, and whoa.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
Yeah, he shape shifted into this whatever, right, and.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
He did it. And see, to me, that's internal because
again it wasn't like the student described him as like
a tiger kind of face, but he wasn't a tiger.
He wasn't looking at a foot blown tiger. But there
was something in guy's expression in his face that told
his drunk you don't know what you're dealing with here,
you know, and I'm going to show it to you
(07:12):
and to me that again as an example of kind
of an internal.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
Shape shifter, How did you go about doing the research
in shape shifting? How do you dig that up?
Speaker 3 (07:23):
Well? I mean the first thing I always do, mainly
because I'm a writer and a voracious reader, is I
look at whatever is already written out there. So you know,
I went through I don't know, scores of books about
shape shifters, but I went to some really old ones too,
Like there was a book the title see if I
remember it's called, It's called treat Us on the Apparitions
(07:46):
of Spirits and on Vampires are Revenants. It was written
by a Benedictine monk in seventeen fifty one, and this
month his name was Augustin Kellman went around Europe, went
so all the you know, various countries in Europe looking
for vampires and ghosts and writing love and sort of
this encyclopedia. So he had shape shifters and that was
(08:09):
a good place to start there for Europe. But I
also traveled extensively, and I was in France, I was
in Portugal, Italy, Romania, Belarus, Ukraine, just doing research on
shape shifters and you know, especially ones that were sort
of known for that site. So, for instance, in France,
(08:30):
I spent a lot of time in the countryside that
was ravaged by what they called the Beasts of Jevadome
in the eighteenth century, which was this huge, feral kind
of animal they said, kind of like a wolf that
basically massacred are killed over one hundred people in the
course of a couple of years throughout France. So I
(08:53):
did that kind of research on the you know, on
the ground wherever I could, at the locations where things
were occurring, and that was fun doing that.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Dracula was originated from a real person called the Impaler yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
Yeah, so Ram Stoker, you know, who wrote the novel Dracula,
never set foot in Romania, but he it seems like
he modeled his vampire perhaps on Vlood of Vlod the second.
And he was known as the impaler because that was
(09:30):
his particular method of killing prisoners of war or people
he just didn't like. He would impale them on a post,
which was not a good way to go. But so
the last name, the family name dropped pool. It translates
into Romanian roughly to devil. So here you have led
(09:53):
the devil, right, that is where it comes down to.
But he was pretty ruthless, and he was kind of
blood thirsty, ruthless kind of medieval ruler in the fifteenth century,
although probably no more than the other medievals who were
also pretty blood thirsty as well. But he had his reputation,
as I say, for impaling people and because of his
(10:16):
his ferocity, I guess I would say, and his sadism.
There were stories about him later on after his death
that perhaps he had been a vampire, and I think
that's where you know, Stoker kind of went off on
that and used those stories about him as a model
for his count Dracula. But when I was in Romania,
(10:39):
I went to the sites where that were historically associated
with flood, so like the home that he was born in.
I went to one of his old palaces, which is
now just ruined. I went to actually supposedly his burial site,
which was on a little church, little tiny church on
an island, and he went out to buy a clauseway.
(11:03):
The interesting thing there actually on my website there's some
pictures of me standing by their grave and people can
see it. But so the grave is just this slab,
a long slab or rectangular slab of stone in the
floor of the church. In the nineteen thirties, some anthropologists
opened the grave and I'm not sure exactly what they
(11:24):
were looking for, but what they found was that it
was empty, and that was supposed to be where Vlood
was buried. So now we have to wonder is he
really a vampire and is he out of his grave
someplace and somewhere else. So I don't know all kinds
of speculation on that story.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Now, there are a lot of people who portray themselves
as real life vampires. I've interviewed many. But do you
think the shape shifting into vampirism is real.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
I don't know about shape shifting into vampire, but you know,
to your point, there are there are communities of people
that call themselves sanguinarians who ingest human blood. They say
they need that to live on and they get that blood.
They don't get it by biting people in the neck
in the middle of the night, but they do get
(12:18):
it by donors, just as if you're giving blood. They
screen people and they do it medically hygienic ways. But
there are people that maintain they need human blood to survive.
So you know, they don't respond well if you call
them vampires, but they fit that mode. But they're sanguinarians.
(12:39):
So yeah, there are communities.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
Like that, John Bidlook they speaking. Does the Bible talk
about shape shifting?
Speaker 1 (12:48):
You know?
Speaker 3 (12:48):
That was an interesting thing that I found. There was
a theologian out of the University of Utrek in the
Netherlands name his last name is Vonderbrock. I forgot what
his first name was, but he was translating an ancient
Coptic text that was in the Morgan Library in New
York and it has to do with the passage in
(13:09):
the Bible and the New Testament where Judas is going
to betray Jesus and he gets this set up and
they say to him, well, he says, well, how will
I know him? Because in definitions, because you know, he's
a different kind of person. Well, the translation in this
(13:29):
Coptic text, according to this theologian says literally, and I'm
going to paraphrase it because they don't have the actual
words in front of me. But he says, the confusion
was that Judas would not that the people who are
going to rest Jesus would need some kind of a
sign or some kind of a way of identifying him,
because he appears differently to different people. And the text
(13:52):
says that sometimes he appears ruddy, meaning kind of you know,
with like a reddish complexion. Sometimes they say he appears
wheat colored, which would be kind of light, They say old, young.
So what is this? Why why would this text say
those various things? I mean, those could just be metaphors,
(14:15):
I suppose for saying that, well, Jesus appealed to a
lot of people, so they saw in quotes, saw him
differently or did it actually mean that he that he
had the ability that he did appear to people differently
depending on his audience and who he's speaking to and
who who did he need to look like to maybe
(14:37):
get his words across, his message across.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to coastam
dot com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back to Coast to Coast. George Norrey with
you along with John Kochubo. We're taking calls next hour
with John. John. How many different types of shape shifters
are there anyway?
Speaker 3 (00:16):
Oh wow, that's uh. I don't know, George, to be
honest with you, because my my research showed that there are,
I mean hundreds of different types. Yeah. As they said before,
the cultures all around the world, I mean Japan alone.
You look at Japanese ghost lore and their their stories.
(00:37):
There's there's scores and scores of shape shifters. Interesting thing
about Japanese shape shifters there is a lot of them
are actually shape shifting ghosts, which is kind of a
different take on it. So the story typically is that
there might be a woman who is her husband cheated
(00:58):
on her or whatever, and and you know, he kills her,
so she's a she's a victim, right, So she's now
a ghost and she comes back to seek revenge on
her husband or boyfriend whoever was. But in order to
do that, she will she's a ghost because she comes
back and she will shape shift into another person, like
(01:19):
maybe the guy's new girlfriend, so he thinks he's with her,
he's actually with his ghost of his wife, first wife,
who is a shape shifter, and she will kill him.
So yeah, stories, but yeah, it's it's crazy. So there's
there's a bunch of Japanese also are very fond of
having shape shifters that change into inanimate objects. I mean
(01:43):
things like a mop, you know, like, I'm not sure
why a shape shift would want to change into a mop,
but those existing Japanese full for.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
So, do shape shifters generally shift into something physical goal
or is it animated?
Speaker 3 (02:04):
No, it's it's a physical change. I mean they basically
become something else in you know, in reality. I mean, like,
so they actually become an animal. It's not an animation
or an illusion or anything else. It's an actual transformation.
At least that's all the stories position it that way.
Is an actual transformation of one thing into another.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
John, what's the difference between an external and an internal
shape shifting?
Speaker 3 (02:35):
Yeah, these are terms that I used just for the
purpose of kind of shorthanding classifications in the book. But
for an external shape shifter, what I talked about is
the kind of shape shifter that you can actually see
a transformation. So I use an example the famous movie
An American Werewolf in London. You know, and if you
(02:57):
remember seeing that, the transformation on film of this poor
guy transforming into a werewolf was phenomenal. But when it
was done, I mean, there you go. You're looking at
a werewolf. Now you're not looking at a man anymore.
So there's actually this physical transformation. So that's an external
shape shifter. Internal when I was talking about here, we're
(03:20):
shape shifters that don't actually shift physically as much as
they do mentally. So what you have it's sort of
like a you know, a sheep in wolf's clothing in
a way you don't have You don't see a transformation.
You don't see a physical change, but there is a change.
(03:41):
And I use that to explain possibly some people like
you know, serial killers and people like this who for
all practical purposes, well okay, think of Ted Bundy for instance.
Ted Bundy, you know, is this serial killer, but for
all practical purposes. When you saw him, he was this
(04:04):
clean cut, sort of collegiate kind of guy, young guy.
He was helpful, you know, he helped old ladies across
the street. He helped you put your groceries into a car.
So for everything that you looked at him, you thought, oh, okay,
this guy is fine, there's something wrong with him. But
inside he was this murderous killer. And I consider that
(04:24):
a shape shifter. You can say, well, there's psychological damage there.
You know, he was a psycho or whatever. I'm not
a psychiatrist. I don't know the exact term to use
for that, but I still think that, in a way
is shifting. That's something that takes you out of your normal,
everyday humanity. It makes you something else.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
Yeah, there's no doubt about that. Something was wrong with
Ted Bundy, probably when he was a kid.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
What do you think, John, Yeah, well, I mean when
you read some of the histories of people like that,
they certainly come from broken families, they come from being
abused or whatever. It's kind of rare to hear somebody
who's fully adapted and has everything in the world becoming
a serial killer. Not that it doesn't happen, but it's
(05:12):
not typical. But I got another example though. There's a guy.
There's a guy here in Ohio named Guy Spinelli, and
Guy has a there's all kinds of sort of degrees
and belts in martial arts. He knows like any martial
art in the world. But he also does a lot
(05:33):
with things like remote viewing and that kind of stuff.
And he's done work with Navy seals, with special Forces.
He's done work for the government. And I remember talking
to one of his students who said that he and
guy were in a bar one time and they were
just sitting there minding their own business, having a drink,
(05:54):
and some guy came over. He's the word guy. Guy
with a small g here came over to the table,
and he was totally drunk, and he just started, for
whatever reason, insulting guy. Uh just you know, I don't
know what it was. But the guy just stood up
and he looked at the guy and the student. Guys
(06:16):
student who are sitting at the table, said, I don't
know what happened. He said, all I know is that
this this drunk guy was standing there looking at Spinelly,
and all of a sudden, he said, I saw something
in guy spinell his face. He said, I don't know
how to describe it other than I think of a tiger.
And he said, the drunk just kind of his eyes
(06:38):
went wide and he just kind of raised his hand.
He backed off like okay, man, okay, okay, and whoa.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
Yeah, he shape shifted into this whatever, right, and.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
He did it. And see, to me, that's internal because
again it wasn't like the student described him as like
a tiger kind of face, but he wasn't a tiger.
He wasn't looking at a foot blown tiger. But there
was something in guy's expression in his face that told
his drunk you don't know what you're dealing with here,
you know, and I'm going to show it to you
(07:12):
and to me that again as an example of kind
of an internal.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
Shape shifter, How did you go about doing the research
in shape shifting? How do you dig that up?
Speaker 3 (07:23):
Well? I mean the first thing I always do, mainly
because I'm a writer and a voracious reader, is I
look at whatever is already written out there. So you know,
I went through I don't know, scores of books about
shape shifters, but I went to some really old ones too,
Like there was a book the title see if I
remember it's called, It's called treat Us on the Apparitions
(07:46):
of Spirits and on Vampires are Revenants. It was written
by a Benedictine monk in seventeen fifty one, and this
month his name was Augustin Kellman went around Europe, went
so all the you know, various countries in Europe looking
for vampires and ghosts and writing love and sort of
this encyclopedia. So he had shape shifters and that was
(08:09):
a good place to start there for Europe. But I
also traveled extensively, and I was in France, I was
in Portugal, Italy, Romania, Belarus, Ukraine, just doing research on
shape shifters and you know, especially ones that were sort
of known for that site. So, for instance, in France,
(08:30):
I spent a lot of time in the countryside that
was ravaged by what they called the Beasts of Jevadome
in the eighteenth century, which was this huge, feral kind
of animal they said, kind of like a wolf that
basically massacred are killed over one hundred people in the
course of a couple of years throughout France. So I
(08:53):
did that kind of research on the you know, on
the ground wherever I could, at the locations where things
were occurring, and that was fun doing that.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Dracula was originated from a real person called the Impaler yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
Yeah, so Ram Stoker, you know, who wrote the novel Dracula,
never set foot in Romania, but he it seems like
he modeled his vampire perhaps on Vlood of Vlod the second.
And he was known as the impaler because that was
(09:30):
his particular method of killing prisoners of war or people
he just didn't like. He would impale them on a post,
which was not a good way to go. But so
the last name, the family name dropped pool. It translates
into Romanian roughly to devil. So here you have led
(09:53):
the devil, right, that is where it comes down to.
But he was pretty ruthless, and he was kind of
blood thirsty, ruthless kind of medieval ruler in the fifteenth century,
although probably no more than the other medievals who were
also pretty blood thirsty as well. But he had his reputation,
as I say, for impaling people and because of his
(10:16):
his ferocity, I guess I would say, and his sadism.
There were stories about him later on after his death
that perhaps he had been a vampire, and I think
that's where you know, Stoker kind of went off on
that and used those stories about him as a model
for his count Dracula. But when I was in Romania,
(10:39):
I went to the sites where that were historically associated
with flood, so like the home that he was born in.
I went to one of his old palaces, which is
now just ruined. I went to actually supposedly his burial site,
which was on a little church, little tiny church on
an island, and he went out to buy a clauseway.
(11:03):
The interesting thing there actually on my website there's some
pictures of me standing by their grave and people can
see it. But so the grave is just this slab,
a long slab or rectangular slab of stone in the
floor of the church. In the nineteen thirties, some anthropologists
opened the grave and I'm not sure exactly what they
(11:24):
were looking for, but what they found was that it
was empty, and that was supposed to be where Vlood
was buried. So now we have to wonder is he
really a vampire and is he out of his grave
someplace and somewhere else. So I don't know all kinds
of speculation on that story.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Now, there are a lot of people who portray themselves
as real life vampires. I've interviewed many. But do you
think the shape shifting into vampirism is real.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
I don't know about shape shifting into vampire, but you know,
to your point, there are there are communities of people
that call themselves sanguinarians who ingest human blood. They say
they need that to live on and they get that blood.
They don't get it by biting people in the neck
in the middle of the night, but they do get
(12:18):
it by donors, just as if you're giving blood. They
screen people and they do it medically hygienic ways. But
there are people that maintain they need human blood to survive.
So you know, they don't respond well if you call
them vampires, but they fit that mode. But they're sanguinarians.
(12:39):
So yeah, there are communities.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
Like that, John Bidlook they speaking. Does the Bible talk
about shape shifting?
Speaker 1 (12:48):
You know?
Speaker 3 (12:48):
That was an interesting thing that I found. There was
a theologian out of the University of Utrek in the
Netherlands name his last name is Vonderbrock. I forgot what
his first name was, but he was translating an ancient
Coptic text that was in the Morgan Library in New
York and it has to do with the passage in
(13:09):
the Bible and the New Testament where Judas is going
to betray Jesus and he gets this set up and
they say to him, well, he says, well, how will
I know him? Because in definitions, because you know, he's
a different kind of person. Well, the translation in this
(13:29):
Coptic text, according to this theologian says literally, and I'm
going to paraphrase it because they don't have the actual
words in front of me. But he says, the confusion
was that Judas would not that the people who are
going to rest Jesus would need some kind of a
sign or some kind of a way of identifying him,
because he appears differently to different people. And the text
(13:52):
says that sometimes he appears ruddy, meaning kind of you know,
with like a reddish complexion. Sometimes they say he appears
wheat colored, which would be kind of light, They say old, young.
So what is this? Why why would this text say
those various things? I mean, those could just be metaphors,
(14:15):
I suppose for saying that, well, Jesus appealed to a
lot of people, so they saw in quotes, saw him
differently or did it actually mean that he that he
had the ability that he did appear to people differently
depending on his audience and who he's speaking to and
who who did he need to look like to maybe
(14:37):
get his words across, his message across.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to coastam
dot com for more
The Best of Coast to Coast AM News
Host
George Noory
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