Monsteropolis: We Like Giant Turtles

From the World Turtle to the Beast of Busco, join Seth, Heather and Aaron for a deep dive on all things giant turtles. 

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SHOW NOTES:

Monsteropolis - Turtle Town

NEWS - We got a DISTRIBUTOR for Lost Contact lined up. Hey! This means you kids get to see it soon, along with some other stuff (right? Am I remembering this right?) that’s not presently available (is this wrong?). 

 

(At time of air) - Ape Canyon is screening at the Kiggins Theatre in just a few days! (5/22) 

 

Heartland, Archives, Decoded, Appalachian, BTT all be going on. Finale for Paranormal Horizons! Head to Youtube. Go there now, you can do that while you listen. Hit that subscribe button. They’ll all call you Subscribe-o

 

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Monsteropolis: Turtle Town. A sub neighborhood of Monsteropolis, like Ape Street, Octopus Alley and Thunderbird Boulevard. Let’s do these the whole show instead of the show. Bigfoot Borough. Turtle Town is a quaint little (big) neighborhood. And it’s gotta be big, because it’s full of real big turtles. Not Ninja Turtle big, those guys were big but like size of a bus big, eat your house big, ride across the ocean on their backs if you forged an unbreakable bond with them by saving their home land from a dragon big, stuff like that. 

 

TURTLES are REPTILES. They live in the WATER, but they breathe AIR. They have SHELLS. What a WEIRD ANIMAL. 

 

If you think about it, turtles are almost like their own cryptid already. Not as weird as the Platypus but still pretty weird. I mean. Shells? Some of them live to be super old too, like 100 years or so. 

 

Intrinsic weirdness aside, there are a lot of legends and cryptid encounters associated with turtles. 

 

THE WORLD TURTLE - Present in a lot of mythologies. Basically the idea is that the WHOLE WORLD sits on top of the back of a giant turtle. Turtle world. Turtle Planet. 

 

The oldest version we know about seems to come from Hindu mythology. The god Vishnu appears in the avatar of a giant turtle named Kurma, which had a mountain on its back. 

 

It also popped up, seemingly independently in First Nations lore, such as the Iroquois and Lenape, who portray it as a giant sea turtle. 

 

It’s cool to think of ancient societies observing the world around them and going, “Oh yeah, all this is on a turtle.” If you think about how they would have observed turtles in the wild, you know, algae and stuff growing on their backs, they kind of look like little models of earth. 

 

Historians and scholars also talk about themes that would likely have been in play, such as longevity and continuation, which were important to some of the First Nations tribes and really have been important to human societies for most of history. People would have noticed that turtles lived a long time and also kind of represent security and strength. That’s cool. 

 

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/world-turtle-cosmic-discworld

 

THE BEAST OF BUSCO - A big old turtle legend from Indiana. Local to Churubusco, Whitley County, Indiana, also referred to by the nickname Turtle Town, which I did not know when I tentatively named this episode. According to one online source,

the nickname originally stems from ‘Little Turtle,’ the name of a sagamore (chief) of the Miami tribe, but it’s later become associated with the giant turtle sighting at Fulk Lake.

 

• First sighting is said to come from 1898 by a guy named Oscar Fulk who spotted it on a large lake on his property. Like, really large, 7 acres apparently. 
• FIFTY YEARS went by. Then in 1948, two men named Ora Blue (that’s a name right there) and Charley Wilson were fishing on the same lake, when they reported seeing a similar creature - just a huge, huge turtle, which they described as looking like a snapping turtle with huge spiky shell “the size of a dinner table,” and now all I can think about is Bowser from Mario Bros. 
• Gale Harris, who owned the property at the time of the second sighting, got really into the whole thing, and launched multiple expeditions to try and capture it, including one wherein he drained the 7 acre lake. They tried nets and damming streams and all kinds of stuff. They never found the turtle and it nearly bankrupted him. 
• The local media picked it up a few months after the Blue/Wilson encounter, and it became another Cryptozoological staple. Thrill seekers, monster hunters and now internet weirdos (like us!) became fascinated with the story, and it hangs around in the new millennium. 
• Turtle Brother is supposed to be around 50