Mandrake

“The mandrake root (Atropa mandragora) grows naturally in the shape of a human being. Because of this it was once believed to have great magical properties and would fetch a high price when sold. The more it looked like a human being, the higher was the price that could be obtained. Because of this, many magicians were not averse to modifying the plant as it grew. They would find a young mandrake and carefully dig it up. Examining it, they would cut away small pieces to make it look more human, even carving a face into it if necessary. They would then place it back in the earth and let it grow for another month or so… by the time the mandrake was fully grown, when dug up it looked as though it had grown naturally looking exactly like a human being, and so it could be sold for a very high price.” Signs, Symbols & Omens by Raymond Buckland.

Kuchisake Onna

Japan panic: the slit-mouthed woman

Kuchisake onna goes kawaii: Kyary Pamyu Pamyu. Is she pretty?

Stories of 口裂け女, the slit-mouthed woman, emerged from urban Japan in the late 1970s. At first they were particularly passed around between school children, then in the mass media. By the first half of 1979 Asahi Shinbun was highlighting kuchisake onna as a buzzword (hayari kotoba) of the year. In true, random Japanese style one of the others was “rabbit hutches”.

Occasionally Kuchisake onna was reported as a genuine physical threat, a criminal would-be kidnapper or murderer rather than a supernatural being. At times she was somehow both a real world abductor and a folkloric monster simultaneously. (See Hyaku-monogatari for the Edo origins of modern yōkai storytelling) Satoshi Kon’s extremely uneven but in places brilliant series 妄想代理人 Mōsō Dairinin [Paranoia Agent] is obviously heavily inspired by the mass hysteria over Kuchisake onna. A woman with long hair and a white mask– of the kind sold everywhere and very common in Japan to cover the mouth and nose when a person is ill, or against pollution– accosts you in the street and she asks something like “Watashi kirei?” (“Am I pretty?”) or “Atashi bijin ka?” (“Am I a beauty?”) If you agree that she is, she replies “Kore demo?” (“Even [like] this?”) as she tears off her mask to show that her mouth is slit open across the cheeks, from ear to ear. If you tell her she isn’t pretty, she becomes enraged and pursues you with a knife or scythe. The reason for her disfigurement and rage varies with the telling: sometimes it’s a plastic surgery disaster, sometimes a dreadful accident, sometimes self-inflicted. The same goes for the means of escaping her: repeating certain words, offering certain gifts, reaching a certain place before she catches you.

Spring-heeled Jack and spring-heel ‘Jacks’

Advertisement from Eagle comic, 1960s.

People nowadays complain a lot about health and safety regulations, but really… would you want your child or anyone who was near to your child taking “larger-than-life” steps in these? Nothing could be further from the space age and from being “like an astronaut on the moon” than two industrial springs welded to the bottom of crude (and probably razor-sharp) metal plates, held on with what look very like cat collars if the illustration is at all accurate. Oh well, at least in Britain the spring-heel ‘Jacks’ may have cost you 22’6 and possibly the use of your legs, but the trip to the local Accident and Emergency department was free!

Somebody was evidently thinking of the Spring-heeled Jack of popular Victorian culture, as seen in the Penny Dreadful cover above. From a few relatively restrained reports in and around London in the 1830s of a weirdly costumed pervert who leapt away and disappeared rapidly, Spring-heeled Jack quickly spun off into popular fiction, folklore, mass hysteria and numerous copycats. In the 21st century we’d say he went viral, and in the process he grew claws, wings, glowing eyes, skin-tight clothes, the ability to breathe out strange gases or fumes, and other typical attributes of a malevolent folkloric figure.

Sporadic sightings continued throughout the country until the turn of the twentieth century. Usually these incidents followed the template set down during the initial attacks: a masked or helmeted figure appearing seemingly out of nowhere with the apparent intent to terrify, grabbing and/or molesting the victim, then springing away over a wall or hedge. A number of copycats were sought by the police, arrested and a few convicted for overt SHJ attacks or for mostly unrelated ones that happened to fit in some way with the popular SHJ narrative. No actual, verifiable, “real” Spring-heeled Jack was ever caught or identified.

Mike Dash wrote a very comprehensive paper about Spring-heeled Jack, if you’re interested in reading more about the subject. He seems to be one of the only people to actually go back to primary, contemporary sources and do some sensible research, instead of  just regurgitating half-remembered Big Book of the Supernatural anecdotes.

Dash also wrote a really fascinating and entertaining book called Tulipomania a few years ago, about the eponymous craze and ensuing financial bubble that resulted from tulip bulbs becoming a hysterically sought after commodity in the 17th century. His blog is good, too.

Get your spring-heel ‘Jacks’ here, boys! Only 22’6. Ideal for a evening of hiding in the bushes and sexual assault. (Eyes like glowing coals from Hell not included.)

“Numskull Stories”

Photomontage by Alistair Gentry, 2011.

I’m writing a book set in the Nineteenth century, so I’m delving into lots of obscure stuff while researching it. Not that I don’t read obscure (and frankly sometimes stupid and ridiculous) books under normal circumstances, but sometimes a man in my current position just has to avoid actually writing anything because he’s wasting a lot of time finding out what those excessively huge candelabra in the middle of an upper class dinner table were called… it’s an epergne, by the way. You’re welcome.

And so at last to the point, via the houses: in Folkloristics: An Introduction (a textbook published by Indiana University Press, written by Robert A. Georges and Michael Owen Jones) the authors quote in turn Stith Thompson’s The Types of the Folk-Tale (2nd revision, Helsinki 1961) and provide a seemingly complete but not really complete taxonomy of traditional story categories. Now you know that when I say obscure I mean it.

I’m interested in taxonomies, whether they’re sensible and help our understanding of things, or completely nuts and actually make matters more confusing. I think the following list lies somewhere between the two in some kind of quasi-academic, Borgesian territory; that’s why I liked it. It starts sensibly and logically (“Fish”), veers off into the insanely specific (“Stupid Ogre”), then just gives up and shrugs with “2400-2499 Unclassified Tales.”

I note also that “Numskull Stories” is probably more of a thriving sub-genre than it’s ever been thanks to the proliferation of the media, paparazzi, scumbag phone-tapping so-called journalists, and the internet in general. What are Hello! magazine, tabloid gotchas and sites like Gawker or FAIL Tumblrs if not an endless torrent of Numskull Stories? In the case of Hello! and its ilk, however, the new and distinctively 21st century development is that we’re presumably meant to approve of the numskulls and aspire towards being numskulls ourselves… as many people quite evidently do.