When You See It

Djinn sightings and experiences have been reported for millenia, so what do the djinn look like, and how do you know if there's one right next to you?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to the Hidden Gin, a production of I Heart
Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minky. When I

(00:30):
was a kid, there was this family that we were
pretty close with and kind of grew up with. In fact,
they had four boys, all my age or older, and
they reveled in telling us jin stories every time they
could get me and my younger siblings alone. They told
us about a time when they were traveling in rural
South Asia on the way to their ancestral village, bouncing

(00:51):
along in a rickety train. It was a hot night,
and the train windows were pushed down, so the dust
that rose from the tracks created to haze both inside
and outside the string of cabins. Things had quieted down,
suppers had been unwrapped and eaten. The last of the
young boys who were hawking boiled eggs, fried lentils, and

(01:12):
thick sweet hot tea had passed through the train one
final time. Most of the other passengers were asleep, either
slumped over a loved one next to them, or with
their heads thrown back over a seat, their bodies steadily
rocking back and forth with the movement of the train.
The younger two brothers were likewise asleep, curled up against

(01:32):
their mother, who had pulled a cotton shawl partially over
her face to filter out the dust, or maybe it
was so no one could see her mouth slack and
open as she snored. It wasn't unusual to see other
passengers with their faces covered by different means, with shawls, blankets,
even the occasional broka. In the cramped quarters. It was
one way to have some limited privacy and make sleeping

(01:55):
in public a little bit more comfortable. Now, there is
one woman in the cabin who was covered entirely in
black from head to toe, sitting on the berth across
the aisle from the two older brothers who were still
wide awake. They were still pretty young, barely in the
double digits and only a year apart, which meant they
spent most of their waking moments trying to find ways

(02:15):
to mess with each other. On that particular night, as
the boredom got to them, they traded kicks and pinches
and elbows, testing each other. Their goal was to keep
from yelping and waking up their mom, who would likely
take a slipper to them if they did. They giggled
under their breath, still jabbing one another, and then they
noticed the woman in black turned her head towards them.

(02:37):
The bottom half of her face was covered in the
black veil of a borka, but the top half was exposed.
Her large black eyes were wide open, lined with coal,
staring at them intently. The boys froze under her unblinking gaze.
Whether a few moments passed or entire minutes, it's hard
to say, but to the brothers it felt like in

(02:59):
an eternity. And then still silent, the woman turned her
head the other way to look out the window, and
as she did so, she stretched her legs in front
of her. Her black gown rose to reveal her feet, which,
to the shock and horror of these brothers, were bent
completely backwards. I'm Rabbia Chadar, and I'll be your guide

(03:22):
into the ancient world of the hidden gin. Welcome. I
heard that story, or some variation of it, countless times
from those brothers who swore that they witnessed a woman
whose feet were on backwards in the dead of the

(03:43):
night on a train to their village. When they told others,
elder relatives what they had seen, they were casually informed
that that woman was definitely a gin. It was a
sure sign of a gin trying to pass as human.
They could transform to a certain extent, but their eat,
for some reason, still ended up backwards, or maybe they

(04:04):
wanted to keep it that way so they could frighten
the unsuspecting with a flash of their feet. Essentially, and oftentimes,
the gin manifest themselves to us as they please, shifting
into human or animal shapes to enter our dimension, but
never revealing what they really look like to us, which
is understandable because apparently their original forms are so fierce

(04:26):
and terrifying we wouldn't be able to handle it. One
legend tells of a gin that revealed itself to none
other than Alexander the Great. It was huge, as large
as a building, with seven heads, and every head had
two faces, four blazing eyes, a monstrous mouth full of
flaming teeth, and the massive nose of a bull. Strangely, though,

(04:49):
it had the feet of a duck, a massive duck,
but duck feet. Nonetheless, it's not likely you'll see a
gin in its original form, though that would just give
it away, and they usually don't want that. But there
are some manifestations that seem to be most common when
it comes to gin encounters, which will help us recognize
a gin when we see one. But remember, we only

(05:10):
see a gin when it wants us to. And it's
also said that they only appear to those who believe
in them. Otherwise our senses are closed to their realm.
They can hide from us, and they do, but it's
said that they cannot hide from certain animals. Now, there
are many cultures that believe animals can see or sense

(05:32):
the unseen storms on the horizon, for example, or even
natural disasters. It's well known and well documented that days
before the horrific two thousand and four tsunami that brutalized
South Asian coastlines, local animals were acting out of sorts
from India to Sri Lanka to Indonesia. There were dozens

(05:53):
of reports well before the massive waves hit of dogs
that refuse to go outside, elephants that led to higher ground,
and zoo animals coward in their shelters. There is nothing
necessarily supernatural about any of it. After all, many animals
have vastly different ranges of sound and sight that human
beings do, and according to indigenous cultures, they're just simply

(06:16):
more connected to the natural phenomena around them, which explains
why animals may be also more likely to feel or
sense gin or other creatures we can't see and probably
don't want to see. They say to beware when a
donkey brace, because it's surely seeing a devil. But you
don't have to own a donkey to witness the sixth

(06:37):
sense animals have for the unseen. Every dog and cat
owner has seen at some point their furry companion stare
with alarm at a point in a room where apparently
there's nothing to see, or they'll growl, flatten their ears,
crouch at some invisible threat. And then there are the
three am crazy's, when cats suddenly began tearing around the halls,

(06:59):
slamming into walls, bursting with a manic energy that doesn't
exist at any other part of the day. No one
is exactly sure what causes this middle of the night
feline mania, and there are some theories about it, but
none of them account for why this happens at a
time otherwise known as the witching hour, that time of
night when black magic is strongest, when the cover of

(07:22):
darkness is deepest, and when those of us with a
touch of insomnia often spring awake in bed only to
see a negon glow from a bedside clock telling us
it's three am. Whether or not animals see gin, we
do know this. Sometimes the animals around us are in
fact jin themselves. While shape shifting gin have the ability
to transform into pretty much any kind of animal, dogs, cats, scorpions, camels, lions,

(07:48):
and even insects like beetles. It seems the most common
creature you may come across that could be a hidden
gin is a snake. And it's no coincidence that Adam
and Eve were tricked by a serpent in the garden.
The serpent was the devil himself disguised, and the devil
in some traditions, is in fact a gin. There's a

(08:09):
story from seventeenth century Egypt in which a famous holy
man named Alhredi had died, but people believed that he
had returned, reincarnated as a large snake. The snake had
made the holy man's shrine on the Nile River its home,
staying curled up at all times in the crevice of
some rocks near the grave. In his lifetime, Alhredi was

(08:29):
known to be a healer, a pious man with miraculous
powers to cure the sick, but after his death, those
powers seemed to have become vested in the great serpent
that guarded his shrine, and as long as that snake
was there, the miracles continued. The locals had different theories
about Alhredi and a snake. It could have been that
he was never a human being to begin with, but

(08:52):
instead that he was a benevolent gin who transformed himself
into a human so he could help heal people. Then,
after living the human life and dying a human death,
he turned into the giant snake to continue to bless
those that came to the shrine for help. Interestingly, Coptic
Christians in the region had a different take on Alhredi.

(09:13):
They were well aware of his miracles, but they didn't
think he was a kindly jin. Instead, they believed that
he was the incarnation of the demon king Ashmadi, the
same Ashmani that King Solomon enslaved to build his temple
along with legions of other gin. Regardless, it seems everyone
on all sides did agree to one thing. That snake

(09:36):
was definitely Alhredi. The animal manifestations aren't always perfect. Sometimes
the shape shifting will result in beastly hybrids, serpents with
dozens of arms and legs, or creatures with canine teeth,
heads like birds, and horse like hose. Then there are
those jin who don't quite come together at all, the nestnas.

(10:00):
The nestnas appear as half formed human beings, with half
a head, one arm, one leg, half a torso, and
half a face which may be positioned anywhere on its body.
Some say these malformed creatures only inhabit the wilderness of Yemen,
and others say they can be found on desolate islands
in the South China Sea. They can't speak, having only

(10:23):
half the vocal cords necessary, but they can make strange,
sad guttural sounds, rather fitting for their disposition. That's because
the nestnas are weak gin. They're terrified of human beings
instead of the other way around. They flee when people
get too close, hopping away with a quickness on one leg,
escaping as fast as possible lest they get captured. And

(10:46):
they better get away because in some parts they're hunted
by locals, not just to kill them, but to devour them,
because apparently the flesh of the nestnas is reportedly delicious
and sweet. If nestnas are the weaklings in the gin realm.
Towards the other end of the spectrum, there is a
dangerous shape shifting gin that you want to avoid at

(11:06):
all costs. This gin has the ability to constantly and
terrifyingly keep transforming in order to confuse and days its victims.
And that gin is called the ghoul. That's right, Google,
The word we've all used at some point to describe
someone unpleasant is actually the Arabic word for a very

(11:27):
specific kind of gin, sometimes taking the shape of several
animals at once, reported at times to have the head
of a cat and the tongue of a dog, other
times appearing in their monstrous forms hunched and hairless, razor
sharp teeth and snakelike tongues, model skin, and cavernous dead eyes.
Ghouls in habit the most desolate places, keeping as far

(11:50):
as possible from human civilization. They lurk in deserts and cemeteries,
where they hide among ruins, biding their time for people
passing by, people who are likely to disappear forever if
they make that unfortunate encounter. What a hapless soul does
stumble across their path. Goals will entrance them all the

(12:11):
weight of their debts by repeatedly transforming from one thing
to another shape, shifting with speed from one hideous creature
to another, confounding their victims. This way, the goal drives
their victim mad before making their kill to satisfy their
hunger for human flesh. Gules are said to be among

(12:31):
some of the oldest jin, ancient and evil. They are
so powerful that other jins serve them, and sometimes human
beings also become their slaves, both willingly and unwillingly. A
medieval Egyptian folk tale relates that the ghouls came into

(12:54):
existence in the land of Yemen through the unholy union
of the smoke from a fire, the seed of a wolf,
and human seed inside a woman's body. How all of
these things found their way to the womb, I'm not sure,
and I'm also not sure I want to know. Nonetheless,
the ghouls that were birth haunted the legendary Valley of
the Ghouls in Yemen. In actual place, these beastly siblings

(13:18):
were eventually slaid by a king, but there are of
course legions more. Some of those legions reside in the
Cave of Ghouls located in Egypt in Mount Burka. A
story from the late eighteen hundreds tells the tale of
a man traveling with a group of people past this cave.
He fell behind his party, and as he wandered along

(13:39):
looking for them, a woman mysteriously appeared out of nowhere
on the mountain side. She was beautiful, as women often
are in such stories, and she stood in the man's path,
giving him two choices. He could either sleep with her
or she would kill him. She was, as you may
have realized, a ghoul. Now you can easily guess which
choice the man took, and after their liaison, he was

(14:01):
allowed to go his way. But a year later, the
same woman appeared before the man, this time with a
baby girl, his daughter. She left the child with him
and disappeared. The man raised a little girl, and eventually
she married a man from his tribe and went on
to have children. Now, before we go on with the story,
let's pause here to talk about the particular kind of

(14:22):
gin that gave birth to this little girl. That beautiful
woman outside the cave of ghouls was a particularly dangerous
type of ghoul, called a sila, and unlike the beastly
forms that other gals take. The Sila often takes the
form of a seductive woman. The Sila stalksman and often
not only eats her victims, but she toys with them,

(14:43):
first making them dance and scamper around full of terror,
before finally putting them out of their misery. In order
to trap her prey, the Sila often pretends to be
a woman traveling alone and seduces lone male travelers until
they're so far off the beaten path us they have
no hope of escaping, just like what happened in our

(15:04):
Cave of Ghoul story, and killing aecila is no easy
task for a number of reasons, but if there's any
creature capable of it, it's the one that ghouls are
unable to transform into. The wolf. Wolves hold a special
place in old Arab customs as symbols of protection. It

(15:25):
said that the wolf is so powerful against malevolent gin
that wolf teeth or even a wolf's eye are used
as charms to ward off evil and mothers have long
sung lullabies invoking the name of the wolf to scare
off evil spirits from children. You see, the wolf is
the only animal that ghouls are actually scared of, and
they have reason to be scared, because wolves actively hunt

(15:48):
the most dangerous goal, the sila, that temptress that lures
unassuming men to their deaths. A thirteenth century polymath by
the name of Zecharia al Kaswini described at hunt like this.
The wolf sometimes hunts her at night and then eats her.
As he tears into her, she raises her voice, saying,
save me. The wolf is eating me. But once a

(16:12):
wolf has a hold of his prey, no one will
rescue her, and ultimately Ceila is devoured by the beast.
Now no wolf appears in the Cave of Ghoul story. However,
and unfortunately, the daughter of the Ceila had to be
disposed of in another way, because, according to the tale,
after the daughter of the Ceila was raised, married off,
and had her own children, her father made a discovery

(16:34):
that worried him deeply. One night, he came across a
grave that had been violated, dug up, it's deceased inhabitant
unearthed and parts of the body eaten. The father worried
that maybe his daughter had something to do with it,
given her origins, and because he knew that gals primarily
feasted on human flesh. Dead or alive. He hurried to

(16:56):
his son in law and told him his fears. So
the young man began keeping an eye on his wife
and discovered that she was indeed making nightly outings. He
followed her one night as she crept out of the
house to the local cemetery, dug up a grave and
began to feast on the body. He was horrified, and
that night, when she returned to their bed, he killed her,

(17:16):
crushing her to death. But their children lived on, married
and multiplied, and to this day, in the area close
to the Cave of Ghouls, the descendants of that couple
still survive, and they are known as the al Guila.
Tales of Ghouls are spread far and wide, not just geographically,

(17:38):
but also throughout time. Long before the Cave of Ghoul story.
Nearly six centuries prior. In fact, an epic travel log
was written by a contemporary romance author by the name
of Rustiquelo da Pizza. He had had the fortune of
being detained for two years in a prison with an
explorer who regaled him with fantastic stories of his travels

(17:59):
and a ventures. Da Pisa compiled the stories together in
a volume called Quote The Book of the marvels of
the world, each yarn more amazing than the last. You see.
This explorer that Da Pisa had been detained with described
crossing entire continents from Constantinople to bot that through the
magnificent Karo Kora Mountain range onto Beijing, and circling through

(18:23):
the South China Sea, the Bay of Bengal, and up
the coast of the Arabian Sea off the eastern shore
of Africa. And this explorer spent nearly two decades in
the court of Kubla Khan, the grandson of the great
genghis Han, serving the Mongol Emperor, and he had seen
and heard it all. This explorer, well, it was none

(18:45):
other than Marco Polo. And that book, well, it's better
known in our part of the world as the travels
of Marco Polo. Polos travels along the Silk Road took
him at one point to a vast desert at the
center of trade routes between China, Tibet and Turkestan. The
desert was so vast that some said it took a

(19:07):
month to cross it at its narrowest point, and it
took a year to cross it at its most wide
And while their watering holes dotted throughout the desert was
otherwise devoid of life, no animals, no people, nothing that
could be hunted and eaten. And yet it wasn't completely empty.
There is a marvelous thing related of this desert, which

(19:30):
is that when travelers are on the move by night,
and one of the chances to lag behind, or to
fall asleep, or the light, when he tries to gain
his company again, he will hear spirits talking and will
suppose them to be his comrades. Sometimes the spirits will
call him by name, and thus shall a traveler. Oft
times we led astray, so that he never finds his party,

(19:51):
and in this way many have perished. Sometimes the stray
travelers will hear, as it were, the tramp and hume
of a great cavalcade of people away from the real
line of road, and taking this to be their own company,
they will follow the sound, and when day breaks they
will find that a cheat has been put on them,
and that they are in an ill plight. Even the

(20:13):
daytime when hears those spirits talking, and sometimes you shall
hear the sound of a variety of musical instruments, and
still more commonly the sound of drums, Paulo had also
heard of a terrifying monster found in the wilderness of
Iranistan and Iran, the famed and feared role Bibon, meaning

(20:33):
the ghoul of the waste. The ghoul was huge, dreadful
to behold, and lurked in the waste lands of Central Asia,
gobbling up travelers right off of their horses. Now, Marco
Polo had not confessed to seeing this ghoul himself, but
he had heard it referred to many times by locals
he met in his travels, and while he seemed to

(20:53):
believe in the desert spirits that lured travelers astray, Paulo
didn't put much stock in the role Baban stories. It
could be that he thought, as others did, that the
ghouls of the desert waste lands were simply a projection
of the fear even the bravest soul feels when facing
the desolation of a vast, deserted place. The isolation, the silence,

(21:14):
the nothingness for miles in every direction could be enough
to disorient the most level headed among us, and in
that condition, howling dust storms could both look and sound
like a beast rising into the sky. For the travelers
that survived those journeys fantastic tales to tell would certainly
be a badge of honor, and for those that didn't well,

(21:36):
it might be kinder to think they were just snatched
up by a ghoul than the alternative that they just
couldn't cut it, or the tales could be precautionary, a
warning to those seeking to set off into the wilderness,
a threat of imminent danger to those who didn't stick
close to the tribe, which is just with the lesson
from another ghoul story, this one from the fifteenth century

(21:57):
in Valdad, also just might be. In this story, the
son of a wealthy merchant falls in love with the
daughter of a poor old wise man against his father's wishes,
and that, dear listeners, is the disobedience and rebelliousness that
this story may have been crafted to prevent. Nonetheless, the
story goes on that the father eventually relented and allowed

(22:19):
his son to marry the beautiful young girl, and their
marriage was celebrated with all the ceremony in bling that
was expected of the wealthy family. The sun was elated
with his new bride, but was disturbed that she would
never eat. She would just leave her food untouched. At
every meal, he shrugged it off. Maybe she was just
shy in her new home with his new family and
didn't feel comfortable eating in front of them. But one night,

(22:42):
the new groom awakened to find himself alone in bed.
His beautiful wife was nowhere to be found. He stayed
awake waiting for her, and she didn't return till an
hour before the sun rose, Creeping quietly back into their bed.
The next night, he decided he would only pretend to
sleep to see if she again left their bed, and
she did. He followed her at a distance out of

(23:04):
the house and all the way to a cemetery, where
he saw her step into a large tomb with an
open door. He cautiously entered after her, only to behold
a ghastly sight. A circle of ghoules feasted on bloody,
decomposing corpses, and among them was his lovely young bride,
munching away with them. The man hurried home, terrified, but

(23:27):
said nothing to his wife when she returned to their
bed hours later. The next day, when she again refused
to eat, he finally couldn't take it anymore. He screamed
that he knew her secret, that she fasted all days
so she could feast every night with the ghouls. The
wife silently rose from the table and retreated to their bedroom,
where she waited for her groom. He eventually joined her,

(23:50):
uneasily getting into bed, neither of them saying a word.
Both silent and tense, that night, she didn't leave her
husband's bed at all. Instead of sneaking out for her
midnight meal, she waited patiently for the first signs of
slumber to overtake him. Then she pounced on her hapless groom,
teeth bared towards his neck, attempting to draw and drink

(24:12):
his blood. He awoke immediately and fought back, struggling to subdue.
The fight was vicious. She had a shocking super strength,
but ultimately he was able to kill her with a
blow to the head. The next day, he buried her,
but she didn't stay buried. Three days later, she arose
from the dead and returned to her formal marital bed
to once again try and suck her husband's blood. He

(24:36):
fled an escaped her, and the next day returned to
her tomb, where he found her cold dead body. This time,
he took no chances. He burned her corpse to ashes
and scattered them in a river, and it worked. She
never returned. Now, you may have noticed that while this
woman was fond of eating corpses as wouls do, she
was also pretty focused on sinking her teeth into her

(24:58):
husband's throat. So if this particular goal sounds very much
like a vampire, there's good reason. The connection here runs
thick as blood. Thou shall not eat the blood of
any flesh at all, because the life of the flesh

(25:19):
is in the blood, and whosoever eat it shall be
cut off. Leviticus spells it out pretty clearly that consuming
blood for God fearing believers is not just a no no.
It means being condemned to exile, to being cut off
from family and community and from God himself, and driven
into darkness because of their blood lust. Well, that's where

(25:40):
we find vampires, hiding, shunned from the rest of the world,
in the world of the Gin, much like the vampires
of our imaginations, there are some who are driven by
pure blood lust. The first of those are the paless.
The palest are Gin associated with the desert, and they
have a peculiar way of satisfying their cravings. They have

(26:01):
what you could call kind of a foot fetish. The
payless will wait until the intended victim is asleep and
then lick the bottoms of their feet until they bleed.
It said that these gin aren't very bright or even
really too dangerous, but the fact that they can manage
their feet licking without waking anyone up does take a
certain level of skill. Luckily, it's not too hard to

(26:21):
outwit this kind of gin. All you have to do
is sleep feet to feet with another person, so nothing
can get to the bottom of your foot. Apparently, the
payless either don't know or don't care that they could
get blood from other parts of your body. The payless
may give you a good giggle, but there's nothing funny
about another blood sucking creature found in Hindu folklore that's

(26:42):
not only believed to be a gin, but some call
the original vampire. Hundreds of years before Glad the Impaler
came onto the scene in Romania, the vetala already existed
in Hindu folk core and tradition. A terrifying evil species
of gin, the vetala were thought to inhabit the reanimated

(27:06):
corpses of the dead. They often haunt ternal grounds, which
are above ground sites with the dead or left to
either putrefy or be cremated. They are super strong, super smart,
and super hungry for the blood that sustained them. One
of the most famous stories by the Vitala is found
in an ancient sanscrit book hailing from the eighth century

(27:27):
called the Vetala Pachisi, which means the twenty five Stories
of Atala. The story revolves around the famous Indian king
victrum Aditya, who was an actual historical figure from the
first century that reached mythological status over the sentries. There
are different interpretations and versions of the story, but the
basic premise is this the mighty king was asked by

(27:50):
a sorcerer to help capture of Atala that could be
found hanging from a tree in a graveyard. An eighteen
seventy adaptation of the story by the British Oriental list
Sir Richard Francis Burton recounts the encounter of King Victram
and the vampire like this. Approaching the tree, he sat
there for a while to observe the body, which hung

(28:11):
head downwards from a branch a little above him. Its eyes,
which were wide open, were of a greenish brown, and
never twinkled. Its hair was also brown, and brown was
its face. Its body was thin and ribbed, like a
skeleton or a bamboo framework, and as it held onto
a bow like a flying fox, by the toe tips,

(28:31):
its drawn muscles stood out as if they were ropes
of coin. Blood it appeared to have none, and as
the raja handled its skin, it felt icy, cold and clammy,
as might a snake. The only sign of life was
the whisking of a ragged little tail, much resembling a
goat's king Vicram climbed the tree and sliced the branch

(28:54):
the beast hung from with his sword. He scrambled down
the tree trunk to get ahold of the creature, but
it slipped out of his grasp like a worm, and
levitated with legs up and once again grabbed a tree
branch with its toes. The Vitala swung back and forth
from the branch, laughing in the king's bewildered face. The
king tried again and again and again to cut down

(29:15):
the beast and capture him, but each time the Vitala
rose back up into the tree unbothered. Finally, the Vittala,
growing tired of the game, asked the king, who are
you and what do you want? His Royal highness responded
that he was Raja Victram, the great King of the land,
and it was his mission to take him back to
the sorcerer as he had promised to do. Hearing this,

(29:38):
the Vitala suddenly became coi and agreed to accompany the
king if only he was allowed to tell him stories
during the journey, and in those stories pose riddles with
this condition. Every time the king answered one of the
Vitala's riddles, the demon would escape and return to his tree.
But as long as the king remained silent, either out

(29:58):
of humility or because couldn't answer the question, the Vitala
would remain in his custody. Now this might seem kind
of counterintuitive and contradictory to most such stories that involved
conditions with riddles, but you see, this was a test
of the king's pride, and he accepted the test. And
so they took off, and the vampire told King Vicram

(30:20):
story after story after story, twenty four in all, and
in each story a riddle, and every time the king,
unable to control his ego and pride, would respond to
the Vitala's riddles with an answer, and every time he did,
the Vattalah would slip away, journeying back to his tree
in the graveyard, and the king would have to start

(30:41):
all over. Finally, after hearing the twenty five story and riddle,
King Victram pressed his lips together, refusing to answer. This
overjoyed the Vitala, who then revealed a secret to him.
The sorcerer, he said, was no friend of the king, indeed,
he was his enemy in disguise, out for the King's blood,

(31:03):
and the Vitala himself was in fact a trap the
sorcerer had placed for the king. Once revealing the secret,
the Vitala extracted itself from the body it inhabited, letting
out a slow, low hissing sound as it left. Thanks
to the secret spilled by the Vitala, King Victram was
able to trick and kill the sorcerer, thereby growing in

(31:26):
power himself. And all this because he was able to
just once show a little humility. Now, the Vitala isn't
the only vampiresh creature in Indian folklore. In fact, there
are lots of them. The stories about the origins and
how they terrorize people vary, and you can hear all
those echoes in European vampire lore, but most of them

(31:47):
have a few things in common. That you'll find vampires
lingering and living among the human dead and graveyards and crematoriums,
that they yearned for human blood, and that, like the
gin woman in the train at the beginning in this episode,
you'll find that their feet are turned backwards. As you

(32:10):
may have guessed it by now, there's no one definitive
way to identify a gin, but you'll probably know one
when you see it. The only time you might not, however,
is when a gin takes what I think is the
most dangerous and sinister form, transforming into someone you know,
which has been known to happen. Jin can and will
take on the appearance of not just any human, but

(32:32):
an actual human who's already living, or sometimes a human
who's very much dead. They can then play tricks on
the friends and loved ones of that person, lying to them,
persuading them to do things or believe things they shouldn't.
Imagine how easy it could be to mislead someone that way,
and how much trouble it could get an innocent party in.
But then there is that one way to make sure

(32:53):
the person you're dealing with is really who they say
they are, because for some reason, the gin can shape
shift to trick you. But the one thing they can't
change is their feet. Their feet will either be backwards
or they'll be cloven hose, like in the story of
the beautiful Queen of Sheba, who was reportedly born of
a gin mother and a human father. But even she

(33:14):
couldn't shake the gin jeans, and in some accounts, while
she was stunningly beautiful, she did in fact have hairy
goat legs, hoves and all. Now we'll close out with
the story closer to home and closer in time to
us from New Mexico. According to the book The Vengeful
Gin in Ninete, the uncle of the questa New Mexico

(33:35):
police chief, was driving home late one night on a
lonely highway. A woman appeared out of the darkness, walking
on the side of the road by herself, dressed strangely
enough in a red evening gown. There was no telling
where she had come from. The highway was empty, and
he hadn't passed any abandoned cars. He pulled over and
offered her a ride, and she hopped into his pickup

(33:56):
truck quietly, not saying a word. After a few silent men,
it's the man turned to his passenger to ask her
what she was doing in the middle of nowhere that
late at night, and was horrified to find her dress
had fallen open, revealing legs like a goat and cloven hooves.
But before he could react or even scream, she poof

(34:16):
vanished into thin air. I guess the lesson to all
of us is, then, when in doubt, check the feet.
Thanks for joining us this week. Next week we'll be
back to take you another step into the world of
the Hidden Gin. Until then, remember we are not alone.

(34:39):
If you loved today's episode, I'm going to ask you
a big favor. Please stop my iTunes and leave me
a rating and a review, even if it's just one
short sentence. Not only is that how other listeners discover
the podcast, but it's also what keeps the podcast going.
And for every thousand reviews that I get on iTunes,
I'll release another Patreon episode absolutely free. That's right, We're

(35:02):
on Patreon, so if you're a Gin enthusiast, check out
the Companion Patreon series at patreon dot com slash Hidden
Jin again. That's Patreon dot com slash Hidden Gin and
remember Jin is spelled d j I n N. That's
where you're gonna find an amazing series of interviews between me, scholars, experts, artist, historians,

(35:23):
and everyday lay people who have had extraordinary experiences with
Jin and everybody can check out the first episode absolutely free.
It's me and my husband sharing our gen stories and
it was a lot of fun. And if you have
any Gin stories, well, I'd love to hear from you.
Email me at the Hidden Gin at gmail dot com.
Once again, it's the Hidden Gin Gin with a D

(35:45):
at gmail dot com and you might just hear back
from me, or you might hear your story on the show.
And finally, don't forget to follow us on social media.
We're on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram with the handle the
Hidden Gin. There you can wheat, post, insta, dm me.
I'd love to hear from all of you, and believe me,
I read every single message. The Hidden Gin is a

(36:11):
production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from
Aaron Mankey. The podcast is written and hosted by Robbia
Chaudry and produced by Miranda Hawkins and Trevor Young, with
executive producers Aaron Mankey, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. Music
for the show was provided by smith Sony and Folkways Recordings.

(36:32):
Our theme song was created by Patrick Cortez. For more
podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.