Podcasts: The Oral Folklore Tradition Resurrected
Photograph by Barbara Fisher
“Books insist on being either fact or fiction. But daimons, like the stories about them, are not so easily classified. They straddle the border between fact and fiction, as they do so many borders.”
When I started doing the 6 Degrees of John Keel Podcast last year, I had to do a lot of research into podcasting and put much thought into the hows and whys of it.
It wasn’t even my idea to do a podcast, honestly, and I hardly ever listened to podcasts myself. Truthfully, I wasn’t even sure what a podcast entailed.
My friend, Jacqueline Bradley had suggested it because I had told quite a few stories of my own paranormal experiences in various spaces in social media, but in no sensible, easily accessible form. It was all scattershot—comments on this or that media post by another person, or in a thread that was a book review of an atmospheric novel that leaned into fairy lore or in a social media post about my art. I never really endeavored to tell my own experiences in a way that made them make a lot of sense, or in a personal context.
To me, they just weren’t that special. They were just the weird things that have happened all my life.
Well, I brushed that first casual suggestion off fairly easily but she repeated it about six months later when I made a post in a FB group dedicated to strange subjects asking if other people had been experiencing an uptick in odd occurrences or paranormal events in the past few months.
She pointed out that if I listened to podcasts, I’d have access to other people’s experiences, and even better, if I did a podcast, I could tell my own stories and embolden people to tell theirs.
So, I began to think about it seriously. And I started listening to podcasts. And as I listened, I gradually was drawn into paranormal podcast culture and realized that Jacqueline was right—podcasting fits right in with one of my strongest personal qualities—it’s about telling stories.
See, I grew up in Appalachia, and there, we still tell stories. On weekends growing up, we sat around and “visited” with aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, family friends and what did we do while we were there?
We hung around on porches or at kitchen tables, or under shade trees and told family stories that came in various flavors and genres, but all of them were told as true.
We had adventure stories from my Dad of how he missed the Cuban Missile Crisis, even though his ship was sent on her maiden voyage early because of it. We had funny stories from the farm about how my Mom and her brothers got a whipping for riding the milk cows like horses. We had sad stories about how my Gram’s father was killed in a railway accident. We had love stories, and silly stories and off-color, naughty stories, but my favorite ones were the weird stories.
Disappearing farm dogs who left bloody paw prints behind. While out in the wilderness in the middle of the night, an aunt heard the hauntingly beautiful sound of a choir filtering down from the starry sky, but her boyfriend who was right next to her, heard nothing. Grandma’s blind friend who touched her face and felt her hair and said it was black, even though he couldn’t see, because he could feel colors in his fingers.
I grew up among skilled raconteurs, so I know my way around the telling of a story, especially a true one. It’s in my blood and bones, just as sure as the clay and coal of my native land shaped my soul.
Once I twigged that podcasting is at heart about telling stories, I started researching the technical aspects of it and listening to podcasts critically, finding ones that I particularly resonated with.
Which is when I found Timothy Renner’s “Strange Familiars.”
Listening to Tim tell his experiences of exploring the weird landscape of Pennsylvania, and his careful drawing out of listeners stories of The Other, I got hooked by the whole gestalt that is paranormal podcasting. And that’s when I gathered my team, talked them into taking this big step with me and started building our own podcast.
And from the beginning, Morganna, Kendra, Zak, Chris and I all realized we were doing something pretty special, and that kept us going. even through some technical difficulties and personal trials and tribulations. The learning curve was steep, but we managed it because we had a mission: we wanted people to understand that the paranormal wasn’t para-anything. It was pretty normal. Might even be commonplace if only people felt safe enough to tell their stories.
I knew it was probably a little bit deeper than that; I felt sure that there was more to it, but I was too busy figuring out what microphones and recording systems to use to really put those amorphous feelings into concrete form.
But last week, I started re-reading Patrick Harpur’s excellent book about The Other, Daimonic Reality and I ran across a passage that crystallized exactly what it was about podcasting that so special that it grabbed me and refused to let go.
In Chapter 5: “A Little History About Daimons,” Harpur writes:
“The decline of oral culture, too was seen as contributing to the decline in daimonic belief. The prosaic printed word was more forceful, more focused than the stories which fed on the expression and gestures of the teller....Oral culture was further undermined from the eighteenth century onwards by the uprooting of the poor from the land, and their move to a life in the cities where, with no time for leisure, their own “folk” culture starved....”
Oral culture refers to the tradition of storytelling, and the passage of information by way of oral transmission. This tradition has been with us since prehistoric times; long before humans developed written language, we’ve been talking to each other and sharing information via stories, songs, poetry and memorized litanies of useful knowledge.
In the context of oral culture, or oral tradition, I don’t only refer to storytelling as merely an entertainment for the tribe. Of course, it did serve that function.. Without novels, radio, movies or television, humans needed something to pass long hours of darkness in the caves when it was too dangerous to go out and face toothy predators laying in wait for a tasty human morsel to blunder by.
But oral tradition and folklore serve many other purposes among humans besides entertainment. It contains useful information. Tribal and regional histories, religious beliefs and cosmologies are preserved in folklore and oral tradition. The knowledge of what plants are fit for consumption and what are not was carried down orally. How to make tools and art, heal illnesses and broken bones, how to birth babies, how to hunt, how to grow and prepare food, how to tend domestic animals—all of this knowledge came to us through oral tradition.
Most importantly for the context of this essay, however, is the knowledge of The Other, or as Patrick Harpur would call it, Daimonic Reality, that was passed down through the tradition of storytelling.
If you believe in the paranormal, I assume you have some understanding that humans have been in contact with seemingly non-corporeal or semi-corporeal intelligences since we began walking upright and communicating via spoken language.
This body of knowledge called “folkore,” has not only served as entertainment, but has also imparted useful knowledge which has helped humanity survive our encounters with apparitions, spirits, daimons, or The Other who exist in our world beside us, albeit, usually unseen, unheard and unrecognized.
As noted by Harpur above, the oral traditions regarding these beings, were somewhat disrupted by the development, of written language. However, the big interruption came with the movement of the lower classes from rural communities into cities which began in the eighteenth century and then picked up speed during the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century. It continued unabated with the development of mass media in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
I am not against literacy,—far from it. I love reading and have existed most of my life with my long nose stuck deeply in a book.
Anyone who listens to our podcast and reads the show notes knows that the hosts and guests are all inveterate readers who will suggest entire lists of books for the gleaning of further information on any given topic.
And thanks to anthropologists and folklorists (who rose to prominence as academics in the nineteenth century), folklore has been preserved in books which are read by everyone, not just academics.
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, better known as “The Brothers Grimm,” collected, transcribed and translated European folktales that have formed the basis of the fairytales that we all know from childhood. Their stories have stepped from the page and into visual media through film and television, most famously made by Disney, but they’ve also been adapted by studios around the world. Charles Perrault was a French writer who took folktales for his inspiration, and while Hans Christian Anderson was writing original stories, he used motifs gleaned from folklore so well, people nowadays often assume they were originally folktales.
Most of our ideas of what witches, fairies, ghosts, ogres, werewolves, angels, djinn, spirits, elementals and demons are come from the diligent work of folklorists who went around listening to traditional storytellers and transcribing their words.
But, as noted above by Harpur, there’s a problem with writing down and then reading the tales of the daimons.
We lose something in the translation from oral to written communication—we lose the storytellers’ voices, their gestures, their expressive language. We lose the hushed tones used to describe the awful encounter their grandmother had, with a dire apparition in the darkest wood on a dreary late October evening. We lose the quaver in the voice that comes from recounting a vision of a lady clothed in light seen one May Eve at dawn in the teller’s sixteenth year.
And that is a great loss indeed.
Mere sterile words in black and white on a page, no matter how poetic and descriptive, cannot adequately convey the awe and dread that such encounters inspire in those who experience them first or even second hand.
Here I must note that there is a difference between the tales that we call fairy tales or folktales and stories in what we call fairy lore or folklore.
The tales the Brothers Grimm gathered and wrote down were clearly primarily meant to entertain people of all ages. They were meant to while away the long hours of cooking, gardening, carding and spinning wool, weaving, and other such handwork that people often did collectively. While they contained fantastical elements and non-human intelligences galore, and they impart morals, reinforce social norms and share wisdom when it comes to dealing with supernatural beings, they were not meant to be taken as “truth,” or as the testimony of a person who had an extraordinary experience with “The Other.”
Those sorts of stories, stories that contain the names of the people to whom they happened, that were describing experiences either within living memory of the teller or close to it—those are what I consider to be the basis of fairy lore and folklore. Those testimonies which were collected by writers such as the Reverend Robert Kirk in seventeenth century Scotland or by anthropologists such as Walter Evans Wentz in Ireland, Wales and Scotland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries contain information which was useful for people who experienced non-human intelligences in their daily lives.
Those sorts of stories are the ones we are hearing now in the twenty-first century on podcasts.
And in hearing them on podcasts, we may lose the visual aspects of storytelling—the leaping shadows of the fire’s light and the expansive, eloquent gestures and facial expressions of the story teller—but their voices are perfectly preserved.
The rhythm of the story comes to life on a podcast.
We will catch the cadence of excitement as the story moves forward, and the pause as the teller slows down to emphasize a point. Every caught breath, every hushed whisper, every drawn out syllable that drips with the awe of a relived moment of beauty or horror leaps from the speaker and comes to life in the listeners’ psyches.
We hear the nervous laughter that comes in a rush as a particularly absurd detail is exposed, as well as the caveats that tumble forth unbidden: “You may think I’m crazy, but….”
Even the choked throat of held back tears, or the involuntary sob when the tears come anyway are revealed as experiences tell their stories to a patient, empathetic host.
All of these vocal cues convey so much more of the flavor of an experience than words on paper can ever hope to.
Timothy Renner once said that he felt that collecting the stories people tell on Strange Familiars is important, and I think he is right. Not only are he and many other podcasters collecting the stories of established modern folkloric figures like Bigfoot or Sasquatch, but connections to older fairy and folklore traditions are also caught in these tales and brought forward into our modern, social media-driven lives.
Emergent folkloric creatures such as UFOnauts, Flannel Man and Phantom Clowns are also recorded, and in capturing these stories, and reeling them in, podcasters can trace patterns that may lay hidden otherwise. This way, we can witness folklore develop in real time..
What does all this mean?
I think it means that oral culture, like The Other, or like Daimonic Reality, cannot fully be banished from our material world.. Books, radio, movies and television dealt it a blow for a while, but it’s returning and I think that is not only a good thing, but an extraordinary thing. It tells me that oral culture is stronger than we ever gave it credit for and its resurgence speaks to the resilience of the human spirit in the face of changing technology.
It also tells me that technology cannot sever our connection to the shadowy world of The Other.
It’s still with us, and the voices of experiencers are here, reminding us of that connection.
And The Other is listening.
