Short Stuff: Haint Blue

Haint Blue is a kind of robin's egg color that you might commonly find on porches of the low country of the Southeastern United States. But what does it have to do with ghouls and ghosts? Listen and learn!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, you welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's
Chuck Jerry's kind of hanging around us like an unwanted spirit.
But we doused here in blue paint as if she
were wearing for in New York and nineteen five and
she's taken off. Wow. Mm hmm. That sounded almost scripted.
It was not, man, it was it. It was right

(00:26):
off of the the cerebral cortex, the executive function a
k a. The old cuff. Yes, the problem is I
just diverted so much brainpower to the cerebral cortex that
my brain stem made me pee my pants. Have you
ever heard of this uh haint blue tradition? Sure, Okay,

(00:48):
I didn't know how much people knew about this. This
is something I was familiar with because, um, well for
many reasons. But one of my good friends, Meta has
is from Charleston and has a haint blue porch ceiling,
and I sort of like the tradition in now I
know a little bit more about it. Yeah, I mean
Atlanta is not exactly like in the low country, like
along the Georgia coast or South Carolina coast, but it's

(01:12):
close enough that you could see it kind of trickling in,
and I think it does, agreed. So what you're talking
about is a specific kind of paint color that you
very frequently see in those areas in the southeastern Southeast.
Doesn't get much more southeast than that, you end up
in the Atlantic if you keep going um that you

(01:34):
will see on people's ceilings of their porches like this,
very pretty like light blue, one of my favorite shades
of blue. Not necessarily Hain't blue. I'm not like I
hain't blue is my favorite color, nothing like that, but
any kind of like light blue, pale blue, Robin's egg blue,
all those are very very pretty colors. There's a purpose
to this this though, Like this paint color on the
ceiling though, right. Yeah, So the word hain't they think

(01:57):
it may have come from the word haunt. But a
haint in the this low country culture, which we'll get
into more in a sec is a is a restless ghost.
And it's a ghost like I thought all ghosts were
sort of like this that has not moved on to
whatever world lies beyond and is still here to haunt
the living. Yeah, And it's this is haints are specific

(02:21):
to a culture of um slaves. Imported from western Central Africa,
whose ancestors has kind of formed this community along those
the Low Country and who still have this this very
robust culture that believes in haints. Um. The thing. The
difference to me is um between like ghosts as we

(02:42):
understand them and hainte is haint seemed to be much
more like all up in your business kind of thing,
and they like to mess with you a lot more
than like a ghost who's tied to a house and
is replaying their murder over and over every night at midnight. Yeah.
I've spent a little bit of time, uh this one
weekend with some gechy folks and they are really awesome

(03:04):
and rich with tradition and have this really really really
cool accent. Dude, I'll bet their food is amazing too.
And the food was terrible. I'm kidding. I was genuinely surprised.
Now it's like some of the best food I've ever
had in my life, I would guess. So, I mean
low country boil. You just have me right there. Yeah,
So who do There's you know, a specific type of

(03:25):
voodoo that goes on the Low Country called hoo do
or root work or conjure, and that's a practice where
they use a lot of herbs uh in this case
haint blue to protect people from these evil haints coming
into h I mean sometimes it's a little lighter, sometimes
it gets pretty heavy and scary. Yeah. So there's a

(03:45):
boo Hag, which is one of the best names for
a haint. Ever, booh haggs are um. They seem to
be like, uh, what is that that? Um sleep paralysis
tradition from Ireland or Scotland or somewhere over there. Um,
I can't remember. There's like a tradition of a old
witchy woman standing on your chest while you're sleeping and

(04:08):
we I don't think so, but related maybe the wife
of the bob a duck. But the we talked about
in the sleep paralysis episode that that's probably where that
came from, was that was having sleep paralysis. And this
sounds very familiar because the boo Hag will stand on
your chest while you're sleeping too and try to suffocate you. Yeah,
and also steal your skin and where your skin during

(04:31):
the day so they can blend in. And why there
hasn't been a modern horror movie called the Boo Hag
yet is beyond me. I don't know either right or
even just haint. Yeah, so that's one kind of hainte.
And uh, there's things you can do like using hoo
do or root work or whatever. People won't wander around
like carrying little bags of roots and talisman to ward

(04:55):
off haints. But if you actually have a haint that
you're having to deal with in your everyday life, that
you've attracted somehow, um, one of the things you would
do specifically with the boot hag is they have like
an obsessive compulsive disorder according to the Goliguchi, and they
um have to count. So if you do things like
throw rice on your bedroom floor or whatever, the boot

(05:17):
Hag might come to set on your chest and suffocate you.
But instead she's gonna end up sitting there counting rice
all night and then the sun's gonna come up and
she's gonna be toast. Where have we talked about this before?
Because I have a very very distinct memory about something
being distracted because they had to count whatever you threw.

(05:37):
It was the Eastern and Central European vampires that had that, say,
wasn't I believe? So? Yeah, I knew it sounded familiar.
Should we take a break Yeah, was that sudden? That
was like a left hook. All right, go gather yourself
and we'll be right back. Okay, yea, all right, we're back.

(06:20):
Let's talk about more haints. There's another haint called a
platt i, which also sounds very scary. They are shape
shifters and they can be anything, um it says here
in the House Stuff Works article, anything from a beautiful
woman to a two headed hog. And the scary thing
about a plaid i is that there aren't a lot
of defenses against the platt i save maybe leaving some

(06:44):
whiskey out and or pouring it on the ground or something,
and the plat i may stop to lick that upright,
But otherwise you're out of luck with the platt i. Yeah.
They say that once the platt i is attached to itself,
to your there's not a lot you can do. You
can maybe search yourself and see what kind of um,
as this one expert put it, what kind of grave
spiritual offense you've committed? What have I done? And try

(07:06):
to make it right? You know? Yeah? Um, But the
the I also saw that you might end up with
the plaid i attached to you if you go looking
for buried Confederate treasure, because they say that plaid eyes
are frequently ghosts of people who were murdered and improperly
buried by a Confederate treasure in order to protect it.

(07:28):
Indefinitely interesting. Yeah, so be careful if you're gonna go
looking for Confederate treasure buried in the Low Country, take
a little whiskey with you and pour them out for
the plaid eyes. That's right. So that sort of brings
us to this paint blue. Uh. And I'm sure you're
wondering when you guys going to talk about the title
of this podcast, and it's now and we we did

(07:50):
a great show on indigo, uh and so we don't
need to go over all of that again. But indigo,
just very briefly, was a plant that thrived in the
Low Country and slaves were used to to cultivate the
end Togo and it was a big, big cash crop
for the South. It's the reason Georgia legalized slavery. Remember, Yeah,

(08:10):
that's right. So this blue was available to the Gulligichi people,
even though the color and the spiritual power of this
blue is sort of all over the world, but they
would have this blue and it sort of became the
color that they would use because it reminded them of
the sky and of the ocean, and the idea was
that you paint this on your porch or on a
door maybe, and it tricks these spirits into thinking that

(08:34):
they're in water, or they can't cross, or they're in
the sky or something like that. Yeah, because there's one
thing you can say about haints, and that is that
they're kind of gullible. It sounds like, at the very least,
they have a lot of um uh faults and flaws
that can be manipulated by people who know what to
look for. Yeah, they're dumb. The problem is is if

(08:56):
you're visiting somebody on their porch and they have a
haint blue see laying on their porch, there might be
a haint hanging out in there. So they didn't make
it into the house, they could still be on the porch.
So f y, I never visit your neighbor. And uh,
you know, we should point out that this is has
got a rich tradition in this low country culture, but

(09:18):
it has very much become part of the mainstream and
a very kind of h color for front porch ceilings
and stuff. Like that, and there's nothing wrong with that,
but I think you know, educate yourself, know where it
comes from, know a little bit about the tradition. If
you're going to do something like that, I think yeah, totally.
I mean, at the very at least be able to
say what what that is instead of like that pretty

(09:39):
blue who knows where it comes from? Who cares? I
had a Volkswagen Beetle that was Robin's egg blue. Such
a great color, man, it was gorgeous. It's tough to
beat a good Robin's egg blue. Agreed, So way to go,
Goligichi people. That's pretty awesome as far as traditions go.
And keep up the good work. Battling haints you anything else?
Nothing else? All right? Well, if you want to hear

(10:03):
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