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Episode 590 - Jerry Jarvis's Wig (Patreon)

Published:
2022-04-08 18:07:33
Imported:
2026-06
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Discover the wisdom and horror of the wig - it's Jerry Jarvis's Wig by R.H. Barham, better known as Thomas Ingoldsby!

That's not all - we're joined by writer and creepy attic popularizer Jamie Brittain!

Special thanks to reader and research-genius Rafe Ball!

Next week: The Apparition of Mrs. Veal 

Comments

Tony Lindberg

So just in case you will ever cover more of The Ingoldsby Legends, I went ahead and picked up that book from an used books shop for a price (including shipping) that was on par with a moderately sized hamburger menu from any fast food restaurant. So I won't be ruined by this purchase at least. If you do cover more stories from it you have to invite Jamie Brittain again to suffer through it with you, as his humorous take on things were a real treat to listen to. The copy I got is the second edition of The Ingoldsby Legends, a bound hardcover book with gold leaf letters on the spine and pages yellowed by time. Sadly it does not have those illustrations mentioned on the wikipedia-page. There is however an illustration of the author Richard Harris Barnham on one of the first pages. Because I JUST listened to this episode now in August 2023, I am about a year's worth of stories behind you still. But because I got the book in the mail today, I will "catch up" to where *I* am now, by reading Jerry Jarvis's Wig. That is actually the second to last story in the book before the section of poems begins.

Rafe Ball

Re. Joseph’s unusual coat-donning technique - I’m pretty sure he's doing a Martin Sheen (or rather, as this story predates The West Wing by almost 160 years, Martin Sheen is doing a Joseph Washford)! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8BzByjH4q0

Matthew Alderman

Dibdin! He’s a whole story to himself, essentially the inventor of the one-man show and something close to an eighteenth-century Victor Borge/Weird Al!

Richard Horsman

LOVED THIS. I was also immediately reminded of "Hell Toupee", the Amazing Stories episode about a possessed toupee that makes its wearers do crimes. I hadn't thought of that in decades, and now I want to go watch it again.

Long time hater

Chad, what haunted object compelled you to list every example of this trope other than the Treehouse of Horrors where homer received at HAIR TRANSPLANT after Snake was executed by the (whichever) State???

Ben A

What a wonderfully bizarre story. Thank you all, especially Jamie, for bringing this to our attention. Chad, you read my mind about the wig being a Friday the 13th cursed object. The curse you suggested sounded so much like what would have appeared on that show. Let’s not forget that was a series that involved cursed gloves that melted its owners’ hands, many cursed jewels activated by blood, a harrowing cursed trepanator, and even a cursed pool cue. If you two want a campy bonus episode at some point, I’d recommend an episode of Friday the 13th… (Also, wasn’t there somewhere that lampooned Bill Shatner’s toupee as an action hero spy?)

The Spider Incident

This was great! A nice shift after the heavier material last month

Alan Ricks

Top 10 episode! Why is Netflix and Amazon wasting all their money when material like this is in the public domain??!

Adequately Excellent Entertainment

Okay. So I’m pretty sure there was an episode of Amazing Stories, or possibly the Outer Limits reboot in the 90’s, had an episode about a toupee that was similarly cursed. Though the toupee could move around of its own accord. HOWEVER, it was less powerful than this Brown George in that it could only get bald, or balding, men to put it on and only control the person who was wearing it. SPOILER ALERT . . . . . . It ends with the authorities figuring out that the toupee was the culprit and imprisoning it in an acrylic box like it’s Magnito or something. A night shift guard comes in for his first day on the job. The MASTERFUL puppetry of the toupee just laying there despondently somehow, in spite of being motionless. Then perking up hopefully when the guard takes his work-issued hat off, revealing a partially bald head was chilling! CHILLING I TELL YOU!

Christine M

The discussion about apple theft reminded me of a delightful vignette in Douglas Adams's "So Long and Thanks for All the Fish." Arthur Dent recounts a bizarre interaction he had over a packet of biscuits in a train station: https://textuploader.com/rwlk

DaveG

Chad, loved your singing. Very Bowie-Esqe

Stacy Schumacher

We all know about Chad's musical skills at Goth-Rock (PBM) and Americana-Folk (Silver John), but who would have guessed he could add Regency-Dandy to his repertoire? That was fantastic.

Zane Graves

I need to see this entire story done as a sketch on RuPaul's Drag Race.

KateSherrod

I demand a musical segment on every subsequent episode. You have the personnel, clearly. I'd love an mp3 of that by the way. I wonder if perhaps Pitch Black Manor could do a full rendition. Also "Sometimes bald is better" sent me straight into the afterlife. I am, posthumously yours, an ex-Kate.

KateSherrod

(Also, I had an entirely mundane and even altruistic interpretation of the original gift of the wig - the prevention of sunburn and sunstroke! So the turn this took was even wilder for me!)

Adequately Excellent Entertainment

On the subject of the flowers, I think it’s relevant to note that they were tulips. Tulip Bulbs were the focus on what is considered the first large scale speculative bubble and subsequent crash. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania) Even after that, tulip bulbs would have been quite valuable for breeding future varieties of tulips. Really any kind of flower that can have seeds or pollen harvested from it would have been some kind of big deal because there were competitions for flower breeding. Whether it was done by some totally average Joe in his garden shed, or by some horticulturally obsessed rich guy in HIS garden shed, or some prestige hungry rich guy paying a professional to tinker with flowers in his garden shed… if the variety produced was particularly successful in competitions, the seeds/bulbs could make you a pretty penny. So the neighbor taking the Tulip could be anything from petty local politics to outright industrial espionage.

Adequately Excellent Entertainment

Also also, I listened to this episode late Friday night, and then on Saturday I was at a friend’s house talking about a cosplay I want to do (Stained-glass Scarlett from the current run of Moon Knight by Jed McKay). My friend jumped up and disappeared into a large closet and came out with… A WIG. The perfect wig for my cosplay actually. I asked, how much she wanted for it and she said I could just have it. So… I’m just saying… hide your apples y’all.

Jim Cannon

That was delightful. Everything I ever hoped for in a cursed wig story, down to the heavy-handed moral at the end. This was before transportation, clearly.

Colm Kearns

I was eating breakfast when I heard that Brown George-dollar bill joke. A more visceral horror than any ever imagined by the tales you've covered...

Ben Mund

I think we're missing out on a rich literary subgenre of weird tales based around wigs cursed solely by the fact that they were owned by mildly evil people. Just imagine the horror imbued in wigs previously owned by people who talk in movie theaters, time share sales-pitch writers, and podcast listeners.

Steve

In the UK we don't have lawyers. We have solicitors and barristers. Barristers are the ones who work in court, at the bar. Solicitors solicit oaths. As a careers' advisor, my wife has had many cases of students saying they want to go into soliciting, which, as you point out, is very much not what solicitors do.

Steve

I want to know how the wig got all its evil powers. Was Jarvis such an appalling person, or do the rich and powerful just exude crime the way a gardener sweats? Perhaps it was previously owned by my ancestor "Hanging" Judge Jeffreys, who turns up in one of M. R. James' funniest stories, Martin's Close (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin%27s_Close). Or perhaps the ridicule to which all wearers were exposed has turned the wig and made it the enemy of mankind?

Jeremy Impson

To round out the list of other media that used a similar concept, there's also R. L. Stein's Goosebumps novel *The Haunted Mask*, which itself was turned into a TV episode, as reviewed here: https://youtu.be/tHqjJyuYP2g

Rafe Ball

Our old friend August Derleth wrote a haunted wig story - “A Wig For Miss DeVore” in Weird Tales May 1943 (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1P8RW1kMy6venlSG2-TFrCzNOobAGQYpd/view), which was adapted as an episode of Boris Karloff.’s “Thriller” series in 1962 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIOT31YH9-Y). The Weird Tales story is pretty ho-hum, but the synopsis of the adaptation sounds like a definite improvement, and is described on the ‘Big Gay Horror Fan’ website as, “One of the gayest hours of horror ever”!

Drix

Man, this episode was an instant classic. A ludicrous story about a haunted wig? Check. Chad debuting the acoustic version of PBM's newest single?(I'm attempting to manifest this). Check. JAMIE BRITAIN. Check. Great episode guys. On an unrelated note, I don't know if you're casting around for future stories at all right now, but I'll throw out "The Horror Horn" or "How Fear Departed the Long Gallery" by E.F. Benson. Horror Horn has a bit of a wintery vibe going for it, whereas the Long Gallery is more of a ghost story with some weird, gruesome events in it. Looking forward to Mrs. Veal next week!

Ethan Cordray

Um, *actually* ovicide in this context means "sheep murder," not "egg murder". As in, the sheep-murdering that he'd just been dreaming about. Though technically the word can also mean egg murder., so you're not exactly wrong.

Eric - Speaker in Digressions

Somehow my YouTube recommendations served up Emerson, Lake and Palmer performing "Fanfare for the Common Man" today, which helped shed extra light on Jamie Brittain's commentary, although I did not end up listening to their whole performance.

Eric - Speaker in Digressions

So I woke up with Dibdin’s “Wig Gallery” song stuck in my head and did me a Google. Apparently the saying “The wisdom’s in the wig” was expected to be recognizable decades later in the US. Here's some thrilling commentary on the connection between hair and wisdom in an 1860s Massachusetts newspaper, from a much longer piece on the history of beards: “The beard was the badge of the philosopher, though probably there were wise men without beards, for Persius distinguishes Socrates as the ‘magister barbatus’ [bearded teacher]; and in aftertimes, when shaving was the fashion set by Alexander the Great, the beard was assumed in such ostentatious proportions by the philosophers, that the saying arose, ‘A long beard does not make a philosopher’ and when a would-be philosopher was found out, it was said, ‘his wisdom stopped at his beard’; — just as we say, ‘All the wisdom's in the wig.’” From “About Beards” by someone allegedly named “Temple Bar,” published in “The Cambridge Chronicle,” Volume XVI, Number 48, 30 November 1861, via online archives on the Cambridge (MA) Public Library site. I’d put in a link but Patreon would nuke it. My search also turned up a reminder of the instrumental track “The Wit and the Wisdom” on Hüsker Dü’s album “Flip Your Wig,” but that’s probably not relevant. OR IS IT? Anyway, I'm now looking forward to an "evil beard" story some time.

Peter Larsen

Now I am rethinking the meaning of "Wig in the Box" from *Hedwig and the Angry Inch*

Peter Larsen

I mean, the story is funny, but it's also legit horrible. A decent man gets ruined by a demonic item. It's a wig, so that's funny, but, still... Also, I was sad about the cat.

Robby H.

Could this story be about syphilis? I remember reading somewhere that men used to wear wigs because syphilis was on the rise back then and it used to cause hair loss. I could be wrong but doesn't late-stage syphilis also cause madness? So to bring it back to my original sentence, could this story be about Joe getting a venereal disease and gets hair loss; then Jervis offers him his wig to cover it up, then Joe went mad and started to hear voices and goes through his criminality arc? Maybe I'm just seeing things that aren't there, but oh well. P.S. People with mental illness are actually less violent than the neurotypical community (though suicide rates among the mentally ill are much higher than those who don't have a mental illness)

Brown Jenkin Himself

Throughout my 27 years of living I believed a cat burglar was legitimately a theif who went around stealing cats from homes. I haven't had a shocker like this since I learned that it's a LAPtop, not a LABtop. And now I have to try and comprehend THIS story??? This episode was definitely a spoonful.

Chris Stevens

I really enjoyed the discussion of this crazy story except for the nonsensical dismissal of Yes music and prog rock in general. To each his own I guess. (Although i will agree that ELP can be pretty self indulgent at times.. :-) )