Pisadiera & Baba Yaga

These are two entities with a number of similarities: They’re both women, often described as crones or hags, and there’s no clear origin point for either of them. But they’re very different as well. They come from different parts of the world. One has a scientific explanation; the other has a fantastical and colorful story that persists and has spread far beyond her origins. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody. Before we get started with this episode, we
have one last live show to announce for We will
be in New Orleans, Louisiana, at the National World War
Two Museum on Tuesday, November six. Okay, we know that
selection day, but we don't want coming to our show
to keep you from the polls. We are both going
to vote early before we leave for New Orleans, and

(00:20):
Louisiana offers early voting as well, so we encourage you
to do so. You can find out more about this
show and get a link to buy tickets at missed
in History dot com slash tour. Welcome to Stuff You
Missed in History class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello,

(00:44):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm
Tracy Wilson. In the interest of a little Halloween fund
this year, I thought it might be interesting to look
at a couple of classic folklore figures. And these are
two entities with a number of similarities. So first, they're
both women. Uh. They are also both usually described as
crones or hags, and there is no clear origin point

(01:06):
for either of them. As a lot of folklore, they
have been around for a long time and they have
been hitting the written record at various points in time,
but their stories existed long before that. But they're also
very different as well, because while both of these UH
figures are part of folkloric traditions, one they come from
different parts of the world UH. And then the other

(01:29):
is that one of them has actually a scientific explanation
and the other does not, But it has a really
fantastic and colorful story that persists and has kind of
spread far beyond her origins, and she's become almost like
a modern fulk hero over a lot of culture she
was never part of to begin with. So we were
talking about two spooky ladies. The first is Piece of

(01:52):
Day that which hopefully I am not completely butchering that
it is Portuguese, not a language I am comfortable with UH.
And the other is Baba Yaga, both of whom would
make great last minute costume ideas if you're wondering. Also
a note on Babba Yaga. I have heard some people
pronounce it baba yaga. It seems to be a little
bit regional in how those play out. Babba Yaga flows
a little more naturally for me, So that is what

(02:14):
I am going with. If you prefer the other by
all means you use it in your daily life. Please
don't be angry at me for not. This is like
Crampus and Friends Halloween edition, yes, which is kind of
funny because Crampas seems more like a Halloween figure. But
as part of our our winter holidays. Yep. So we're

(02:35):
going to start with piece of data and there's a
modern sensationalized version of her that's really just terrifying. Starts
with tales that Warren against eating heavy meals before going
to bed and advise you never to sleep on your back,
with results there are a lot more horrifying than if
you just eat well shrabbit before going to bed. I

(02:55):
did think about there's like there's like a rare bit
through line in our podcast lately. Yeah. Um, and this
is because if you eat a big heavy meal before
going to bed and then you sleep on your back,
then possibly Pisadra is this old hag with wild hair
and claws and razor sharp teeth, and she's going to
come visit you and sit on you in the night,
and if she does, you may very well not survive

(03:17):
the visit. Pisadra will climb atop your chest or stomach
and begin to torture you in your prone, in deeply
drowsy state. She may or may not laugh or giggle
as she goes about her work, applying pressure to your
chest or stomach, possibly even stomping on it so that
you lose your ability to breathe and slowly die. So

(03:38):
maybe the most gruesome aspect of this attack is that
she wants her victims to be incapacitated, but she also
wants them to be awake, so you might try to
fight or scream, but your body won't respond to what
you're doing. So, according to all these stories, when she
attacks in the night, her victims either die or remember
the events as a hazy nightmare. But while modern paranormal

(04:02):
enthusiasts have kind of taken up the Pisada legend and
run with it, its roots are actually in Brazilian folklore.
So if you go to an online dictionary, the name
pizzada translates from Portuguese as stepping foot or tread or.
Folklorist Luis de come out A Kascudo has also examined

(04:23):
and suggested some other linguistic roots for her name, including paso,
which means heavy, and the root of the Portuguese word padlo,
which means nightmare. Folklore based descriptions of the piece of
data cast her in a variety of ways, and even
sometimes as a male figure, although it is much more
commonly a woman. In Saiata state of Brazil, along the

(04:44):
country's northeastern shore, this figure is always male and named Pisador,
but in the female form she is often described as
an old old woman, often spind lee with long fingernails,
although there are also regional variations in which she takes
on a more portly physicality, and the South France she
skill a river area near Brazil's eastern coast, the name

(05:06):
is spelled differently. It becomes Pasaderra, with an e after
the P instead of an eye after the P. This
version of the terrible nightmare visitor also is associated with
a specific article of clothing, which is a red cap.
The cap is connected to her power, and according to
this version of the legend, it offers a way to

(05:27):
overcome her. If she attacks you in your sleep. If
you manage to snatch off the cap, her power and
strength will be diminished, and she'll be so desperate to
get the cap back that she'll grant a wish in
order to get it back, so yeah, there's a way out.
There's an escape clause. The legend is that she lurks
on rooftops waiting for people to go to sleep, so

(05:50):
then she can drop into their homes, often through chimneys,
and then do her business of walking on their chests.
And at that point, the folklore version is pretty much
like the version that gets repeated on modern sort of
more sensationalized paranormal sites, she crushes the air out of
her victim's lungs and they experience a slow, agonizing death,

(06:10):
or they are survived but left with a lingering sense
of terror. There's a Portuguese folkloric predecessor to the Piece
of d Era. She's a very similar behavior, but was
a male friar figure called the handhol Fryer or little
handhold Fryer, as that name suggests. This legend was that
he could enter a sleeping person's room through the keyhole

(06:33):
and impede their ability to scream by placing a heavy
hand on their chest. This entity also shares the red
cap detail, and he only brings nightmares. When the person
wakes up, he vanishes. Yeah, it's less of a fatal
situation and more that he will just manifest really bad
dreams into your your subconscious. Brazil's native people's uh have

(06:56):
across different tribes their own different versions piece of data
in their cultural mythology, although they go by slightly different names.
But all of the different monikers that go with this
legend are associated with demons and nighttime, and the descriptions
all follow this same general pattern of a scraggly woman
with wild hair and long fingernails who comes to sit

(07:20):
on a sleeper's chest or stomach. It's really hard to
trace the origin points of this myth and all the
related folkloric figures. They've all been part of an oral
tradition and passed down through generations, shifting and adapting in
various communities and families. Yeah, just like if you have,
like a family story you tell, it often changes from

(07:40):
generation to generation as people add their own details and bits,
or maybe forget parts of it, and the same thing
has happened with this. You may well have also heard
of other entities that are very similar to the piece
of Detra in other cultures outside of Brazil, and even
within Brazil. As we mentioned, there are many versions, and
that's because they all really linked to this same fear

(08:02):
of powerlessness when we sleep. But even more than that,
they all seemed to be expressions of a really common phenomenon,
and that is sleep paralysis. I have an embarrassing story
for you, Tracy. What is it one? Have you ever
experienced sleep paralysis? Now? Well, I mean I not to
the extent that people who talk about like they're very

(08:22):
frightening events have. So I have on and off throughout
my life since I was five. That's the first time
I remember it happening, but I never told anybody about it,
and thought like this was my horrible secret. That was
like the portent of the day when I would just
go mad. Oh no, Like I remember when I was

(08:43):
five the first time, I was um my dad, whose
career Air Force, was away, and I was sleeping in
my parents bed with my mom, and I woke up
and I thought there was a ring of demons dancing
around the foot of the bed and I couldn't move
and they were basically threatening me and my mother and
it was very scary. Um. And this continue you to
iterate in various different versions throughout my life, and it
was not again I just thought like, well, I will

(09:06):
absolutely lose my mind one day, and this is just
the early stages of it. And it was kind of
my weird thing that was fearful in my life. And
it was not until I was I think thirty years
old and in a car on the way to Disney
World with a friend where she started describing an episode
of sleep paralysis, and I was like, wait, that happens
to other people. So I'm completely embarrassed that I did

(09:30):
not know and did not even though I am a
person who loves to research things, I think to look
up this thing, yeah, and see if it was common.
It's so common, it happens just so many people. Yeah. Well,
and I like, I've had a couple of incidents in
my lifetime where I like, I had a really scary
dream and could not move, but like, not not to
the extent that like people who wind up going and

(09:52):
being diagnosed with any kind of sleep disorder have described. Yeah.
And one of the things I know I do is
I continually, even now, even though intellectually I know what's
going on, and sometimes I'm conscious enough to be like, oh,
this is happening, but I always have that moment in
my sleep where I try so hard to make a
noise that sometimes I make what is apparently a very

(10:14):
frightening noise. I only know because my husband is like, WHOA,
that's terrifying. I'm gonna have nightmares about that. So this
phenomenon that Holly has been experiencing was first described in
writing by Hippocrates circa four but people were surely experiencing
it way before that. It's been linked with sexuality and

(10:38):
with the concept of demons who paralyzed their victims and
raped them at various points in history, so like the
succubus and incubus, smiths are kind of tied in with it.
Over time, those associations have diminished, though, And coming up,
we're going to talk a little bit more about what
sleep paralysis actually is and sort of how it works,
as much as we understand it. But first we're gonna

(11:00):
pause and have a quick sponsor break. So now, sleep
paralysis is recognized as a relatively harmless but very unsettling
sleep disorder. It can be linked to other things, but
it in and of itself is harmless. The exact nature

(11:21):
of how sleep paralysis happens is actually the subject of
ongoing study. It seems that the visions of demons or
evil presences, which are common in instances of sleep paralysis,
are the result of hypnogogic or hypnopompic hallucinations. So hypnogogic
hallucinations happen at the onset of sleep. Hypnopompic hallucinations happen

(11:42):
as a person is waking up, and it is likely
that this is because the the rem cycle of sleep
is disturbed and so that transition into or out of
it is jarred, and there is a normal brief paralysis
that does happen at those points of sleep. But in
the case of sleep paralysis, the sleeper achieves a level
of consciousness during those times, and that is why the

(12:03):
brain puts together these very scary possibilities. There's probably a
genetic predisposition to experiencing sleep paralysis, and all kinds of
stressors can trigger these experiences. Anxiety, jet lag, post traumatic
stress disorder. Even just routine life changes like changing jobs
or moving to a new place can contribute to all

(12:26):
kinds of sleep disorders, including sleep paralysis. Sleep deprivation can
also cause the shift into ram sleep to happen at
an abnormal rate, which can lead to sleep paralysis. It's
also really, really common. Between twenty five and fifty percent
of Americans are estimated to have sleep paralysis. Yeah, and
this science is all, like I said, still being studied.

(12:47):
There was one thing I looked at that said, well,
for a long time, we thought it was more common
in women than men, but then we did this other
sample group and that didn't pan out at all. So
they're still figuring out, like exactly what the sort of
classic person who might get sleep paralysis is. Because some
people will have it just once or twice in their lives.
Other people like me have it all the time. It's

(13:08):
just a weird thing. We don't know. Uh. But sleep
medicine as a field, which is really what I'm getting at,
is still relatively young. Researchers have only been truly digging
into the science of sleep cycles for less than a
hundred years, so for centuries, people have been trying to
explain these weird, scary moments of feeling intensely that something

(13:28):
some creature had crawled atop them as they slept and
paralyzed them, forcing awaking nightmare upon them which they had
no power to combat or even scream about. While Hippocrates
wrote a description of what really seems like sleep paralysis
way back in the fifth century BC. It wasn't until
the sixteen hundreds that the disorder was written about medically

(13:49):
as a diagnosis. That honor goes to Dutch physician and
anatomus Icebrand von diamer Brook, who was treating a woman
who had these recurring nightmares. Was not all that long
after the word nightmare became more associated with the general
umbrella of bad dreams, because before the four hundreds, the
word more conveyed the idea that a witch or a

(14:11):
demon had come to the sleeper in the night. Yeah,
that's one of those things that gets cited as a
problematic aspect in untangling historical instances of sleep paralysis because
the word nightmare has shifted meanings and in this sort
of several hundred year period it was getting used both ways. Um,
so that makes it a little tricky. And even though

(14:32):
we have had sleep science working on explaining sleep sleep paralysis,
the experience is so intense and it feels so very
real to many people that they still seek other explanations.
I mean, it really does sometimes feel like there is
a person over you, and it is hard to accept
that your brain has just made this up. Um and
this is likely at the heart of a number of

(14:53):
alien abduction stories. A lot of sleep researchers talk about this.
Many people who experienced sleep paralysis report feeling as though
their bodies have been dragged or even carried through the air.
Those are sensations that are also common in abduction stories,
so there is some research going on to link exactly
how those work together. So if you don't want to
be visited by piece of data this Halloween season or anytime,

(15:17):
make sure you get plenty of sleep on a regular schedule,
and don't sleep on your back. That's not just a
piece of folklore. Sleep scientists caution against sleeping on your
back as well as do people who have to sleep
in the same room as snores. Of course, you can
always take your chances though, that you'll somehow manage to

(15:38):
steal her cap if you happen to be visited by
one of the ones that has went on. Yeah, and
then you can get a wish. I'm waiting. I'm waiting
for you, piece of data. I want that cap and
it's going to happen again, so I may as well
think about it that way. Just plant plant, train your
brain for some cap snatching. I'm gonna do it. Maybe
if I could train one of the cats to help me,
and that would really help out. Here's an interesting thing

(15:59):
I will as an aside, nobody really cares. Since having cats,
the instances have gone down, and I wonder if my
brain is trying to process something like that, and they're like, no,
it's just a cat on you. I don't know, but
they've helped um. So we're gonna switch gears now and
talk about Bobba Yaga. And if you saw Aunt Man

(16:19):
in the Wasp, you have heard of Bobba Yaga, or
perhaps you recall that that was John Wick's nickname in
the film of that same name, because he was so
intensely brutal, and that is a characteristic of Bobba Yaga,
and the Bobba Yaga legend is of course played for
laughs in the first film and to invoke fear in
the second. Those two ideas might seem at odds, but

(16:40):
the tradition and lore around this figure are extremely fluid,
so it's kind of not that weird. So much like
a lot of the figures we've talked about in our
Crampus and Friends holiday episodes that I referenced at the
top of the show. Bobby Yaga has been used to
scare children into behaving well, into staying in bed at night,
but her identity has a lot of facets that can't

(17:01):
really be characterized in that way. Additionally, because of her
inconsistent nature and this vast array of portrayals that she's had,
Bobby Yaga has influenced and inspired a lot of different
types of art. Her origins are really murky, but she's
born out of Slavic folklore. She's unrelated to any other
belief system. She's not a demon or a spirit associated

(17:23):
with any religion. She's not a witch exactly, although she
certainly has some supernatural abilities and can command elements. It's
pretty easy to draw a line to some pagan roots.
But Bobby Yaga's story is really its own story. She's
just Bi Yaga, and there are aspects of the Bobby
Yaga character that do persist across most of her iterations.

(17:44):
One is that she lives in a house that has legs.
I love this so much. Those legs look like chicken legs,
and the house can rise up and travel around or
spin by walking on them. It's a lot like Howell's
moving castle uh and when offense is mentioned around the home.
It is made of human bones, and it sometimes has
skulls on top of the posts. Bobba Yaga is an

(18:06):
old woman like Pizzadela, with a long hooked nose, but
she has iron teeth, and she has also pretty consistently
a cannibal in some cases, though, Bobby Yaga is noted
for her wisdom and her knowledge, so much so that
people are said to go looking for that house on
chicken legs so they can ask her questions. It's always
a dangerous proposition, though, because she may decide to eat

(18:30):
you instead of answering your questions. She asks people questions
to test them, and the penalty for the wrong answer
is death. When she travels, she flies in a mortar
or sometimes in a kettle made of iron. She carries
a pestle both to steer and to use as a weapon,
and she has a broom that she uses to erase
all traces of her as she goes. And there are

(18:52):
some murkier aspects of her lower most of which have
no explanation. So, for example, she can have daughters that
there is no father involved. We don't know how she
procreates um, and these daughters are really almost like minions
rather than like her beloved offspring. She can also transform
into other shapes, such as a tornado like whirlwind. When

(19:12):
she wants to kidnap children to eat, you can just
spin up and snatch them that way. And she is
also sort of a mother figure to the forest who
is respected by animals. And she sometimes even takes on
a sort of mother Earth cast in various stories, and
she's the guardian of the water of life. In some
versions of her tail, she travels alongside death and eats

(19:33):
the souls of the recently deceased. To further complicate things,
Bobby Yaga is sometimes described as one of three sisters,
but all three sisters are also named Baba Yaga. This
might be a way to reconcile these various different aspects.
There's also a Bobby Yaga mythology in which she's definitely
a guiding entity, teaching manners by rewarding the people who

(19:55):
behave properly and with respect. Yeah, even in the ones
way where she is characterized as pretty evil, there's a
lot about like the rules of engagement with her about
you can only ask me a certain number of questions.
If you know too many things in this life, you've
become old. This has also led to one sort of
spinoff of her tail that whenever she answers someone's question,

(20:19):
it ages her, So that's why she's so careful about
testing them before she will answer questions. Knowledge is power,
but apparently also ages you. Uh And. One of the
sources that I came across while I was looking at
Boba Yaga was a translation of assorted Russian folk tales,
and Boba Yaga appears in many of them. So when
we come back from a quick sponsor break, we are

(20:40):
going to share two of those stories, because one shows
her dangerous nature and one shows her more helpful nature,
although she is also scary in it. So in the
first of the stories that we will share from this
uh sh And folk tale book, Bobby Yaga features in it,

(21:03):
but it starts with forty one brothers. They have their
own weird backstory. They were hatched from eggs by a
childless couple. One of the things I love about old
folk tales is how completely wonderfully weird they often are,
and this one delivers. But they go out into the
world to search for forty one sisters to marry, and
in their travels they come across the home of Bobby
Yaga and they tie their horses outside and kind of

(21:25):
expect some hospitality, and she is really angry that they
presumed that they could just stop at her house, but
she does give them food and drink, and then she
brings forth forty one daughters for them to marry. One
of the brothers gets a tip from his own mystical
helper figure that's on a journey with them. He says
that all the brothers should switch their clothes with their

(21:45):
bribes before going to bed. Then at midnight, Bobby Yaga
calls all the servants of her house to decapitate the
uninvited guests, but the servants kill Bobby Yaga's daughters because
of this whole clothing change, and the forty one brothers
put their bride's heads on steaks and then place those
around Bobby Yaga's home. She's so angry she starts chasing

(22:07):
the men with a fiery shield that burns everything that
she turns it to. One of the brothers in this
story had stolen Bobby AGA's handkerchief, which was magical, and
used it to make a bridge over water and away
from the spire and then get rid of the bridge
so that Bobby Iaga couldn't pursue them. Yeah, and that's
how the story ends, like, Yeah, we tricked Bobby Yaga

(22:27):
and all her daughters are dead. Hooray we beat the
witch heg Um, which is kind of weird. Again, folklore
has some really great weirdness in it. But the other
story that we will talk about is really the most
famous of all the Bobba Yaga stories, and it's called
Vasilisa the Fair and it has some parallels to the
Cinderella story, particularly that the fair maiden Vasilissa was forced

(22:51):
to endure terrible treatment at the hands of her stepmother
and step sisters, who all envy her grace and beauty.
And Vasilisa had the help of a doll, however, which
was given to her by her mother before she died.
So Vasilisa fed her doll and told it all her troubles,
and then in return, the doll did a lot of
her chores for her. While Vasilisa's father was traveling, her

(23:14):
stepmother sent her into the forest to the place where
Bobby Yaga's hut was, hoping that Vasilisa would be snatched
up and devoured, but the doll helped guide Vasilisa's path
kept her from getting too close to Bobby Yaga's hut.
The story specifically mentioned the bone and skull fence. One night,
when all the candles of the house had gone out,

(23:34):
the evil step sisters sent Vasilisa specifically to Bobby Yaga
to ask for light. She was scared, but her doll
told her that if she carried her on the trip,
If she took the doll, she would be safe. So
on the way to Baba Yaga's hut, she was passed
first by a white horse with a horseman all in white,
and then a red horse and a horseman all in red,

(23:55):
and then as she approached the hut, a black horse
with a horseman clad entirely in black. Later in the story,
she finds out that this is like the different phases
of the day, which Bobby Yaga has some control over.
But this third horseman vanished as he approached the door.
Vasilisa saw this because she was also coming upon the hunt. Finally,
so Vasi Lisa heard Bobby Yaga traveling toward her hut

(24:17):
from the woods, flying in her mortar, and she was terrified,
but told Bobby Yaga her stepsisters had sent her to
ask for fire, and surprisingly Bobby Iaga was receptive to this.
The terms were that the girl had to stay and
do work to get the fire, and if she failed
in the tasks that she was given, she would be eaten.
So for several days, she's given a series of tasks

(24:40):
to do every day while Boba Yaga is out flying
around doing her Bobby Yaga things, uh and each day
the task list lengthened, but Vasilisa was able to get
everything done thanks to her doll. And this seemed completely
impossible to Bobby Yaga, and so she questioned Vasilisa about
how she was managing to do all this, and Vasilisa

(25:00):
told Bobba Yaga that it was through her mother's blessing.
This led to the old Hags saying that Vasilisa had
to leave as quote, no one blessed may stay with me,
and so she sent the girl on her way with
a skull with burning eyes. This was her means of
bringing fire back to her house, but when she got
the skull home, it's fire burned the stepmother and step sisters.

(25:23):
So the story goes on from there, although Bobby Yaga
is no longer in it. Basilisa's fate continues to improve, though.
She ends up married to the Tsar and her father
lives with her and they're all happy again. I love
the weirdness of Okay, there's like a whole spinning of
flax in there. There are If you look at many

(25:43):
Bobba Yaga stories, you start to see ingredients that we
know from all of the various fairy tales we have
seen from various cultures. There are just those consistent things
that happen. There's even some great beanstock stuff. And sometimes
Bobby Yaga does the fi fi faux FuMB that we
at least that grew up in the United States in
the second half of the twentieth century got in our
our jack and the bean stock version. Uh and so uh.

(26:06):
The other thing I wanted to talk about is some art.
So while there are many works of art based on
both Pizza Data and Baba Yaga, Baba Yaga also inspired
the composer Modesk Masursky when he wrote the ten Movement
musical composition Pictures at an exhibition. He included one segment
that's the ninth of them, titled The Hut on Hen's Legs,

(26:26):
which is a musical personification of Bobba Yaga hunting for
a human snack. Pictures that an exhibition is actually structured
around the idea that each movement of the piece is
based on a piece of art by Russian artist and
architect Victor Hartman. So really this is a double dose
of art inspired by the Bobba Yaga legend. That whole
thing has its own story of Victor Hartman died rather

(26:49):
suddenly when I think he was thirty nine, and so
Masursky was friends with him, and it was very troubling,
and that was kind of what led to this this
piece being done. You have probably heard this piece, whether
you know it or not, because it is probably the
most famous of Masursky's pieces, and people will often play
it in concert, and it's lovely. The heartmon painting of

(27:09):
Baba Yaga's Hut is not like any of the others
I have ever seen. It's done in as though. The
hut is in the style of an ornate Russian clock,
so it is a lot more quaint and a lot
less sinister than Bobba Yaga's House is normally depicted. So
if you find yourself in front of a hut with
chicken legs late at night, tread carefully, be polite. You

(27:32):
don't want to get eaten by Bobba Yaga. I want
to maybe make friends with Bobba Yaga and hang out. Yeah. Um,
Back in my college days, many many years ago, um,
like I read a number of sort of feminist analyzes
of various scary hag and crone and which myths um,

(27:56):
with Baba Yaga being one of them, um, and and
like reading it as more of like this was a
powerful woman figure that people were scared of. Yeah, I
mean I think, uh, even with piece of Daila, right,
It's interesting that the male version of her doesn't kill people,

(28:17):
he just brings them nightmares, but once that transitioned to
became a woman figure, she was much more deadly. It's
just kind of an interesting thing to note. But yeah,
Baba Yaga is is um one of those ones that
is very fascinating. And because frankly, her name is fun
to say, I think people really latch onto it and
love it. But I would just like to show up
at her house and be like, hey, friend, do you

(28:39):
want to hang out and I'll do your hair like
I don't know. She just needs a manicure and to
hang out and have somebody actually talked to her. UM.
I am doing a little bit of a mail bag
roundup of postcards because we've gotten a lot of them
lately and I've been letting the pile stack up. And
one of these is one of my favorite postcards we've
ever gotten because of the message on it. The first

(29:00):
one is from our listener. I think it is a Cody.
This is another victim of the mail service stamps. He
has been traveling and he went to India and he
wanted to send us a postcard from India, but did
not find any postcards. Apparently India does not sell them.
I don't. I don't know that from personal experience, so
I'm trusting you on this one, Cody. So he ended
up going to Dubai later and sent us a postcard

(29:21):
from there to tell us about his travels. Thank you
so much. Um. Another one is from our listener. I
think it is Dina or Dinah. She went to the
Tenement Museum, which is amazing, and she said I finally
made it after hearing about it on the podcast. Thanks
for introducing so many great and interesting topics. She also
sends us a suggestion. I'm so glad she went that

(29:41):
museum is amazing. Everybody who goes to New York should
go there if they get a moment. We also got
uh one from Janine and this is about our A
C episode. She said, Hi, ladies, I'm so excited to
finally have something interesting to contribute. I listened to the
A C episode yesterday and immediately thought of this step well.
In a tiny ancient village in India, the people would

(30:04):
climb down these steps to get water and then come
back up again. There are thirty five hundred steps and
it was built a thousand years ago. It's incredible and
it looks like an Escher painting, except that it makes sense.
She took her eighty year old grandmother to view this
step well last fall, and she sent this one of
her pictures from the trip, and it is very beautiful.
She has a good eye for composition. Uh. Next one

(30:26):
is uh a Niagara Falls one, and this is another.
It's a cute picture from Niagara Falls. It is from
I think our listener Claren. Maybe UH. If I get
your name wrong, I'm very apologetic. Uh. She she visited.
I think it's as she visited Niagara Falls and was
completely amazed by it. Uh. And of course she says,

(30:46):
I had to revisit the episode on Annie Edson Taylor
when I detoured up to Niagara. The falls are breathtaking
and I cannot imagine a sixty three year old woman
going over them in a barrel. Uh. Yeah, me either,
but I am terrified of such thing. And this is
one of my favorite postcards we've ever gotten. It is
from our listener Paula, and you will hear why it
is one of my favorites. It's just a beautiful postcard.

(31:07):
It's a picture of Paris around nine. So, Paula writes
Holly and Tracy, I love the podcast. I wanted to
send you a postcard to celebrate my first international trip.
Y Uh. Your show made me want to go out
and see the world and make my own history. That
is amazing. This postcard delights me. I'm gonna keep this
one forever. Um, So thank you, Paula. Thank you everyone
who writes us postcards. I wish we could read them

(31:28):
all and we can't. But once in a while I
will continue to try to buzz through a few. If
you would like to write to us, you can do
so at History podcast at House of works dot com.
We are also at missed in History pretty much anywhere
on social media. You can also go to miss in
history dot com to visit our website. We're all of
the episodes that have ever happened to exist in an
archive form, and we invite you to come and hang

(31:49):
out at missed in history dot com and subscribe to
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