Historian Answers Folklore Questions

I am Juliette Wood.

Can I say

I'm Dr. Juliette Wood? Yeah.

Yes, my mother's ghost will come back if I don't say that.

Hello, I am Dr. Juliette Wood, and this is Folklore Support.

[upbeat music]

First question from Jerswar.

How did unicorns go from being thought

of as dangerous beasts

of the wilderness to being possibly the most stereotypical,

cutesy thing for little girls in modern Western culture?

Initially the unicorn was thought of as a real exotic beast.

The Greeks and the Romans really thought it existed

at the edge of the world.

It was fast, it was vicious.

It never really got together

with other creatures except when it was mating,

but it defended its young.

By the medieval period, it becomes associated

with a Christ symbol, the lady and the unicorn.

The unicorn goes to the virgin, puts its head in her lap,

and the hunters can capture it,

and it kind of stays this way for a very long time.

It appears really in the 1990's as a kind

of popular culture thing.

In the 1930's,

JD Rockefeller gave beautiful unicorn tapestries,

famous unicorn tapestries to a museum in New York,

the Cloisters Museum.

So you're beginning already to get the unicorn seen

as something popular, something modern,

rather than a medieval or a classical image.

It becomes a fantasy creature.

A couple of very famous fantasies written about the unicorn

in the 1960s'.

Other fantasy writers take it, take it up,

and suddenly you begin to get it merchandised.

This for example, which is a little box

with a unicorn on it, a little papier mache box,

which you could buy at any craft fair.

Pink ones abound because of the little girls

and the My Little Pony.

What you see here is how folklore works. It's very dynamic.

You have something which starts off

as speculation about a real creature, does it exist,

becomes a medieval image, a Christian image associated

with art and with sort of explanations,

it becomes a modern artistic image in the tapestries.

It becomes written in fantasy

and it kind of suddenly explodes outwards

and you get all these beautiful unicorns,

not only little girls.

Keep in mind that they're also an important pride

symbol as well.

They become something which all kinds

of groups can find meaning in meaning, which was not there

to begin with, but which in a sense is possible in this kind

of wonderful creature.

The next question is from Doctor Booshka.

Why are there so many stories across time

and cultures about mysterious little people?

Miniaturization of sort

of folklore beings is actually something

that has occurred more recently than has

occurred in the past.

You can see this with fairies

kind of shrinking, leprechauns shrinking.

Now, I suppose one of the things that if they're sort

of tiny creatures, you kind of don't see them easily

so they can kind of come out and jump at you.

The thing that comes to mind is in one

of Guillermo del Toro's films,

he had something called the Tooth Fairy, which was so cute

until it got you and ate your bones from the inside out,

and I think he really captured the cuteness

and the horror of these small creatures.

Jerswar asks, where does the idea

for magic wands come from?

Wands have often been associated with symbols of power.

Kings carry them, magicians carry them,

and they were very large.

They really, really said, you know, here I am

and I'm very, very important.

You get in the Middle Ages,

you will often see Merlin carrying a a long wand,

but as magic sort of comes into its own much later on,

particularly when you begin to get sort

of the stage magicians, the wands become, you know, too big

to carry around and therefore they become much smaller.

Once you have a smaller wand, the sense of sort

of calling up the magic sort of occurs.

So you know, you're facing a bubbling cauldron

and you bring out whatever it is in the cauldron

that you want to bring out.

You're facing an enemy

and you kind of zap them with the wand,

and that's kind of carried back over into contemporary

fantasy, which often involves fairies with small wands

or children again, who would look a bit silly

with these great big things.

The next question, tap_tap26.

Are memes technically internet folklore?

That's exactly what they are.

They're something that really has been

created by the internet.

So rather than going from person to person,

they will go from website to website,

and that basically is how internet folklore works.

The next question comes from the zombywolf.

Seriously though, did any one

of you ever find razorblades in your Halloween candy?

Well, I never have.

This is part of the sort of folklore

that surrounds Halloween,

and it's also part of the stranger danger

that surrounds Halloween.

The idea that here are all these sort of innocent sort

of neighborhood children going from house to house,

and you get one person who hates Halloween or hates children

and therefore tries to kill them.

Undoubtedly, children may very well get sick on some

of the things they eat at Halloween, but that's probably not

because anyone's deliberately poisoning them.

What it does reflect is this interaction

of social situations.

So the Halloween candy,

the poisoned Halloween candy is a kind of not

so much a bogeyman for children.

I think it's more a bogeyman for adults, quite frankly,

the fear that something is going to happen

to their children when they're off doing something innocent.

Starrydoyo, are mermaids and sirens different

or am I stupid?

Well, you're not stupid.

Sirens initially were voiced

and they were seen as birds, vulturous birds

with women's heads,

and what they would do is they would stand on a cliff

and sing and lure the sailors into the water

and to their death.

They represent the threats and the dangers of travel

and the sea.

Now, Ulysses had himself tied to the mast

and stopped his men's ears with wax,

and because of this, the sirens were so frustrated

that they drowned themselves into the sea,

where they acquired fish tails and become mermaids.

Mermaids also stick their heads above the waves

and sing, trying to lure the sailors

to their death, basically.

But in the Middle Ages,

mermaids were also very often associated with sinfulness,

particularly the sinfulness associated with women,

the way they're sort of tempted men

to do things they shouldn't.

But then again, by the time you get to the 19th century,

you have really wonderfully good mermaids,

and by the time you get to Disney, you have a mermaid

who is, you know, a feisty adolescent

and very, very different from anything

that either the Greeks or the medieval world thought of.

This question is from Veer03255.

Why are vampire stories always tied with werewolves?

Both vampires and werewolves are sort of

what anthropologists call liminal beings.

In other words, they exist between life

and death, human beings who don't quite make it past death.

So the idea that sort of a thing would come out

of the grave, which looked, you know, vaguely human,

you find particularly in Slavic countries.

Now with werewolves, wolves have always been

outsiders in society.

They're dangerous, they're the sort of dangerous dog.

So they're also another set of folklore which goes

with them in that sometimes they are cursed

because of something that has done not necessarily

by the werewolf of himself or herself,

but by the family.

They kind of can't die.

They get sort of stuck in the middle.

Neither vampire nor werewolf really actively becomes a

vampire or a werewolf.

So you get this notion of those things which are

beyond human control,

and it's certainly something which I think it's safe to say

all cultures fear.

We're afraid of the dark, we're afraid

of the nightmare world,

and these two characters represent it.

The next question is from Alina_Rayne.

What is the real story behind the Mothman legend?

Anyone here familiar with its origin?

The Mothman was a humanoid creature with wings and red eyes

that was seen in a small West Virginia town in the 1960's.

Basically, you had two couples driving along

and they were passing a disused,

well derelict World War II munitions plant,

and they saw this tall, thin creature

with these great big wings

and these fiery eyes, immediately turned the car around

to leave and they said it followed them.

It got picked up by the national paper.

Some few years later,

two paranormal specialists came to the town,

wrote up the story, called it Mothman,

and started connecting it with sort of events.

Not long after the people had seen this,

a local bridge collapsed with the loss of life,

and it was put forward that the Mothman appeared

to warn people about what would happen.

And when the film was made, it really pushed this idea

of the Mothman as important, so very unusually,

a character which was supposedly scared people,

which professional paranormal writers turned into a

monstrous presence has become a real local celebrity.

This question comes from TerminalReddit.

What were the Conttingley fairies photographs

and what was so mysterious about them?

The Conttingley fairies photographs

were a series of photographs

that appeared at the beginning of the 20th century.

They were taken by two girls in Yorkshire

who claimed they took pictures of fairies

and they were taken up by Arthur Conan Doyle,

who believed in fairies.

Eventually, they were proved to be fakes,

and the girls, once they were grown up,

actually admitted to this.

If you look at them now, it's kind of difficult

to believe that anybody thought there were anything else.

What the girls did is they cut out pictures out

of a picture book, stuck pins in them

and stuck them in the ground.

One of the girls is standing behind them

and the fairies are in front,

and it was pointed out that you know their fairies,

but why have they got 1920's hairstyles and various things?

But so strong was the authority of Arthur Conan Doyle

had people just kept saying, no, they must be real.

They must be real. They must be real.

The next question is from gienthusiast who asks,

what the [bleep] is a wendigo?

It's a very, very nasty monster.

It comes from First Nations, it's cannibalistic.

It haunts the edges and kind of invades places.

It was first sort of identified

and talked about in the 19th century when various people

became interested in the stories

of the First Nations in America.

It's now escaped.

It now belongs to the sort of general horror fantasy.

But originally it was a much more specific thing,

a representative of the fears of not being able

to survive the winter, fear of what might happen if you kind

of starved to death and didn't have a right burial

and didn't have the right rituals

to get you into the afterlife.

Hurtstopurr asked, is Dracula really inspired

by Vlad the Impaler?

The novel Dracula is quite a complex novel.

It isn't based on Vlad the Impaler so much.

Vlad the Impaler was never thought to be a vampire.

In fact, he's a national hero in Romania

because he repulsed the Turks.

He just seemed a kind of good backstory to this character.

So Dracula doesn't come out of nowhere.

He becomes a creature

who has a a more complex Romanian heritage.

Bram Stoker's story appeared just at the end

of the 19th century.

There had already been several vampire stories.

Most of those vampire stories initially were based

on Lord Byron, which is why you get the glamorous vampire

and the dark clothes

and all the women fall over in love with him.

Stoker decided he wanted to change this a little bit,

so he puts his character in a much more exotic area,

which is then he reworked into what has got

to be the seminal vampire novel ever written.

The next question from smythe70,

Red Rover, Red Rover, anyone?

Well, I think this depends on whether anybody has

played Red Rover.

A game that I played when I was at school

and basically you had two opposing groups

and you called someone over, they had to run across

and crash through the group.

I don't quite understand why it's now become unpopular,

possibly because it's regarded as aggressive or dangerous.

But I have to say it was actually quite a lot of fun to play

because you sort of, when you were called, you kind

of looked down the line

and either found the person you liked least

or thought was the weakest

and charged for them,

which may be revealing something about my background in my

childhood that people might not want to know.

This question is from Quora.

Can you explain the differences between a Sasquatch,

Bigfoot, Yeti and Abominable Snowman.

Yeti and the abominable snowman come from snowy regions.

They're associated with Tibet, so they're white.

Sasquatch and Bigfoot come mostly from North America.

They're hairy and dark because they live in the forest.

All four of them are actually quite similar in

that they represent creatures who live in the margins.

What was interesting about them when they were first

discovered or first identified is that they were often seen

as the missing link.

This was a time when it was thought

that homo sapiens descended from the apes

and somewhere there was a missing link and this was it.

We completely changed our attitude

and they've become sort of independent monsters.

People go hunting for these things and they find footprints

and they find all sorts of things,

none of which really ever is proved to exist,

which is very nice 'cause it means they

can still go hunting them.

Carfarelli asks, when and how did fairies shrink?

Victorians shrunk the fairies.

Fairies initially were as large as human beings.

Sometimes they were larger,

they were more beautiful than human beings as well.

But during the Victorian periods,

interesting things happened to fairies.

Victorians were very interested in the natural world.

They were very interested in insects

and there's something about the insect,

the firefly and the dragonfly.

They were also interested in sort

of pretty fantasy ballet, for example.

So the fairies suddenly acquired ballet skirts.

So you get this kind of diminution

of these fairies simply

because the Victorians are sort of interested in them.

And you also get what could only be described

as an explosion of fairy art.

There are a number of artists

who really specialized in this,

and there are anything from the sort

of pretty fairies in Victorian fairy books

to one particular artist

where the fairies look really like something out

of a fever dream.

But, as far as Scots

and the Irish are concerned, fairies are still large.

The next question comes from pinche_Isaac,

who the [bleep] invented zombies man?

The zombie comes out of a Caribbean culture, which sort

of synthesized stories

and traditions from from West Africa, which is where most

of the slaves came from.

So they were a slave tradition in that the zombie was seen

as a corpse who couldn't rest,

or a person who couldn't really die,

who was enslaved literally by a Bokor

who is a black magician associated with voodoo.

So there's a lot of colonialism here

and a lot of very negative attitude towards beliefs which

were being synchronized

and reworked in the impossible situation of slavery.

But it really kind of comes

to the fore when the United States begins

to interfere in Haiti

and there's a book written the Magic Island,

which is very negative in its view, and it sees the Haitians

and it extends it to other Caribbean peoples

as basically very backwards.

Ex-slaves, descendant from these

West African cultures and really in need of civilizing.

The idea of these sort of voodoo cultures is

that you are possessed in a positive way by these sort

of ancestral beings,

and the zombie is is kind of twisting by these sort

of evil priests, these Bokors

who enslave, literally enslave these characters,

very negative stereotype of the culture,

which is just coming outta slavery on these islands.

So you kind of get this going from a racist stereotype

to an understanding of these cultures

and how they function to this notion of, well,

maybe we can explain it scientifically.

This question is from Quora.

How has the legend of a Loch Ness monster evolved over time?

The Loch Ness monster

or Nessie as he is affectionately called, is supposed

to live in Loch Ness.

He was first observed in the medieval period by one

of the most famous of the Scottish Saints.

It's included in his biography, a biography written

by a fellow monk who wrote this up very seriously.

The saint had forgotten his book on one side of the loch

and he asked one of his young acolytes

to swim across the loch and get it.

He got it and was swimming back halfway

through the loch up comes the monster

and basically the saint says, don't dare touch him.

And the monster of course listens

to the saint and disappears.

You don't hear much about him for a while.

And then again in the 1930's the Loch Ness monster kind

of comes onto the scene and has never left

and people kind of look back to this

and say, oh, well there's always been a

monster in Loch ness.

People have seen the monster swimming.

It's been said to be seals, logs, strange waves,

all sorts of excuses.

People have faked the monster.

There's a small monster and you can tell it's a fake

because the waves aren't right

and as biologists have said, well,

the problem is there probably

aren't enough fish in Loch Ness

to keep a large creature alive.

However, it's also one

of these monsters which local people have

taken to their heart.

He's a big or she or it,

however you wanna call it, is a big tourist draw.

And while the the locals sort of say, no,

we don't believe in them, we are quite happy for tourists

to come and visit us.

AskEurope subreddit.

What's your country's version of the tooth fairy?

Well, as an American, my version

of the tooth fairy is the tooth fairy,

but it's a fairly modern reworking of a character

who more often is a mouse.

I'm not sure whether there's a specific folkloric reason

for the mouse, but a creature

that was often found in the older houses

and often had little burrows somewhere

and often collected bits and pieces.

Obviously it's going to collect the children's teeth

as well, but so often these things are not

so much this happens and this happens

and this happens as you look back and think, oh well this

and this and this is in the environment

and I can put it together in a certain kind of way

and have a folk story.

The next question is from Daisy Jane.

One, did you all have a rabbit's foot for good luck,

usually are on a key chain?

Rabbit's feet kind of go back quite a long way.

Rabbits, because they were prolific,

were thought of as very lucky.

Nowadays I think we would sort of sympathize with the bunny

and not want a rabbit's foot.

So we've substituted it with all kinds of good luck symbols

and sort of key chains with something on it,

'cause they allow you to find the keys.

But I think the practical has sort of been overtaken

by the fact that what people put on their key chains are

often very important to them personally.

So you're beginning to get not just a good luck charm,

but a kind of how I want to project myself to the world.

It's interesting, very interesting

what you get on key chains currently, it's the Labubu dolls,

which are sort of scary versions of the trolls.

Some people are saying they're actually demonic creatures,

but people like them, they buy them in boxes

where they don't see what they're going to get

and they reveal something particular.

So it's something very personal.

Something almost has come out of a grab bag that is mine

and no one else's.

ImpressionCool5341 is asking, what is Slender Man's origin?

Slenderman originated on the internet as an internet meme,

as a kind of mysterious bogey man who goes

after mostly young children.

He's tall, thin, dark, no face.

He's completely covered in sort of almost like a shroud,

a tight fitting shroud.

He belongs in a whole class of either faceless

or masked nightmare characters.

Think of Freddy, think of Jason, think of V for Vendetta.

Even Pennywise, these characters who don't look human

and who aren't human and mostly will attack young people.

There was a very tragic situation of two girls

who killed someone thinking

that Slender Man ordered them to do it.

Very disturbed girls, very unusual that this sort

of thing happens, but of course it becomes a cause celeb

and a wake up cry

that you know what's happening on the internet

that our children are beginning to beginning to see.

It's kind of downplayed now.

He's become a character which you kind

of find in horror films.

It's a character who is much talked about and much less

because he's not so new kind of much less, less frightening.

Brenteaaa, I'm not even gonna try to pronounce that.

Saw there's a full moon out tonight,

and I had a thought, why do werewolves only change on the

full moon and why have I never thought about this before?

The Full Moon in werewolf folklore again is a

fairly modern one.

The full moon was always associated with strange happenings.

Mad men were thought to become more mad at the full moon.

People were thought that they shouldn't look at the full

moon, particularly if you were looking through glass,

you ought to curtsy to the full moon and acknowledge it.

So the full moon has this uncanny nature,

but once werewolves became part of horror literature,

it begins to accrue these other kind of superstitions.

Turning into a werewolf in the full moon is one

of those sort of accretions.

Tenaciousdeev asks, everyone knows about vampires

and werewolves, but are some lesser known creatures?

One of my favorite characters are griffins, the sort

of lion, eagle ones, which you see a lot in architecture,

but also which have this wonderful story as associated

with them about how they guard gold.

The other character who I think is fascinating

is the Hippogriff.

Rowling did not invent the Hippogriff.

It actually comes from a medieval poem.

I think what I like about Griffins

and Hippogriffs is that they're hybrid characters

and they're a mixture of two very important beasts.

The lion, the king of the beast, the sort of eagle.

Again, these sort of powerful creatures,

but when they get hybridized,

they become much more domesticated

and much more user friendly.

And I think it's quite interesting to see the arc

that these characters take as they move from,

let's call it elite culture, into sort of architecture

and pictures and art,

and then finally into modern popular culture, which is so,

so enamored of fantasy.

This one is from the AskHistorians subreddit,

why did women become associated with witchcraft and magic?

You have both men and women who were prosecuted as witches.

Numbers are difficult to establish,

but certainly no matter how you, how you cut it,

more women were were killed as witches than men.

It's a misogynistic thing.

It's assumed that basically women are more devious than men.

But there was also this notion

that women were more powerful than men.

And women's power was not so much the fighting power,

the power of strength,

but the power of something internal to them.

The obvious thing is they produced the children,

but it's also seemed that they had a kind of mystical power

as well because of this,

and so there's this notion that they're sort

of more in touch with things that are intangible.

The next question is from the Twilight subreddit.

What makes Twilight vampires unique

among all the different types of vampires in vampire lore?

Well, Twilight represents a new strain in vampire lore,

which is not traditional.

It's very much part of modern sort of fantasy writing,

and it's often called the horror romance,

where the young boyfriend is a vampire.

Well, basically if you're gonna make him into a boyfriend,

you can't have him sleeping in a coffin all day.

You can't have him disappear in a puff

of smoke when the sun shines.

So you're gonna have to invent a new kind of lore.

That said, sleeping in coffins all day

and disappearing in a puff of smoke is actually part

of the sort of literary vampire lore

that was created in the 19th century.

So all you're really doing here is not

so much changing the folklore that was associated

with folk vampire figures,

but the kind of literary folklore associated

with the literary vampire.

The next question is from final hour, how did the concept

of the Grim Reaper come into existence

and why is he portrayed as he is?

The grim reaper is simply the figure of death.

He reaps the souls, hence the scythe,

and he's clothed in black as if he shrouded.

'Cause for many, many centuries,

the dead were simply shrouded.

They weren't buried in coffins

and it wasn't really any idea of

what a decayed body looked like.

So you get this idea of the figure of death being a reaper.

The next question comes from wastevens.

Did the Brothers Grimm make the children's stories

they collected darker

and more violent than the original, oral traditions?

The Brothers Grimms actually collected stories surprisingly

from women's storytellers for the most part.

The Grimm's fairytales were published five

or six times during the Brother's lifetime,

and they changed the stories as they went along, not

so much making them darker as making them more bourgeois

because they were being addressed to a middle class,

so they were beginning to express the values of

that middle class.

They were quite dark to start with.

Fairytales can be very dark.

They're sort of dealing with sort of structures in society,

and so you get unpleasant things like deaths, cannibalism,

transformations, witchcraft, magic,

and the Grimms used this,

but I think if anything, they could be accused of kind

of taming it a bit.

Some people sort of say you shouldn't scare kids,

so you shouldn't tell them these stories.

But the positive thing is that these are stories.

Children know that the narrator is gonna stop

and the book is going to be closed.

So it's a scare within a safe space,

and it's a way of allowing children to deal with the fact

that life is not always going to be wonderful

and yet not actually be frightened or threatened.

This question is from SammyJamez.

A lot of Disney's versions

of popular fairytales have more optimistic portrayals

and endings, but the original versions are often

bleak and depressing.

How come many of these famous fairytales are very bleak even

though they were made for children?

I think one has to sort of point out

that fairytales were not made for children.

It's the Victorians who decided

that fairytales are a children's genre.

Fairytales were told by adults to adults often

after the harvest.

They were told in work situations, they were told

by professional narrators who traveled around.

The Victorians decided, no, no, no,

these are suitable tales for children.

So I think Disney isn't sort

of taking them into being more optimistic.

He is certainly addressing an audience where he wants a kind

of feel good factor.

Although any Disney fairytale,

although it ends happily,

will invariably have a scary monster.

The witch is really scary.

In Snow White,

the queen in Sleeping Beauty turns into a horrible dragon.

Disney always liked to scare before he lets you be happy

and sort of go off into the sunset.

The next question is HerpaDerpaDumDum.

Why are the depictions of banshees

in modern media completely different to the depictions

of banshees in traditional Irish folklore?

In Irish folklore, the Banshee is the banshee,

the fairy woman,

and she's a sort of supernatural figure that appears

before a death and cries

and wails sort of indicating that a death may be coming.

She has nothing to do with the death itself.

And it comes from something which you get in Irish folklore,

the keening women

and at funerals, women were hired to mourn the dead

with these loud cries, with these sort of desperate cries,

but the dead person was dead.

Now again, what happens when the banshee has taken

over into horror literature,

she's made much more of an individual and personal thing

and she becomes this kind of monstrous creature.

Again, horror fantasy writers have a lot more flexibility

than the traditional sort of purveyors of folklore.

This is from the Ask Scientific subreddit.

Why do gremlins always take stuff apart on planes?

Gremlins were invented by the pilots of World War II.

They blamed anything that went wrong on, oh,

the gremlins must have done it,

but the gremlins kind of didn't have any shape.

It was only subsequently that they were drawn as these sort

of strange little sort of mischievous beings.

And it was really only with the Gremlin films

that you get these kind of vicious little monsters.

This next questions from comes from GimmesomeLoki.

Why is the Christian devil depicted with a pitchfork?

Well, the idea of the pitchfork is something which is used

to kind of move useless things around, hay

or manure or whatever.

And so the Christian devils

who are simply tormenting the souls of the damned,

they're tormenting souls who have completely lost the right

to be considered individuals.

So it's almost a further dehumanization of these souls.

Next question is from cinnamonremote.

My Google skills are failing me.

Eldest child wants to know what tree you need

to be buried under to prevent the faes snatching your body.

Well, I can tell you

what trees you shouldn't be buried under,

and for the most part, they're apple trees.

If you even sleep under an apple tree,

the fairies are likely to snatch you.

The definition of a fairy tree.

You will find often, particularly in Ireland

and in Scotland as well, a bit in the center of a field,

which is a tree surrounded by a little fence.

And the idea is that this is the fairies come to

or it's the entrance to fairy land

and they have to be protected to some way.

This question is from Quora.

In Hans Christian Anderson's Little Mermaid,

the mermaid's penalty

for having legs was feeling like she was walking on thorns.

Why did she get a penalty if she didn't do anything bad?

Hans Christian Anderson is writing in the 19th century,

and he was very interested in notions

of Christianity and behavior.

Behind this is a very common folklore trope

of a supernatural being who wants to acquire a soul

and therefore has to go through a number of trials.

In the story, the little mermaid is told that she can dance.

Obviously the legs are painful.

It's as if she's walking on knives and thorns.

It's part of the test. How badly do you want a soul?

And what happens at the end is she actually told you can

have your soul if you kill the prince.

And she refuses to do this, proving herself

to be a really worthwhile creature.

So it's actually a positive story about the little mermaid

rather than a negative story about how she loses a prince.

ClearcutPunk is asking what superstitions,

cryptid, folklore do you not really believe in,

but avoid and or abide by just in case?

None.

As a folklorist, I'm much more interested in the phenomena

than I am and whether they're real or not.

However, as a person coming from an Italian background,

I had a grandmother who when she discovered she had sort

of red haired grandchildren, made sure that we wore coral

because it protected us from the evil eye.

Whether it actually protected us, I don't know,

but I still have the coral charm,

which she gave me when I was a child.

I no longer wear it.

I'm not sure I believe in it, but I wouldn't give it up.

I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did.

This is folklore support and I hope to see you next time.

[upbeat music]