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Feedback 017 - Who Put Bella in the Witch Elm? (Patreon)

Published:
2023-11-14 12:00:03
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

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Content

We're reading your comments from October and they're horrifically insightful!

Macho Man Randy Savage - The Cream of the Crop!

Comments

Jason Thompson

“The Tower” is rad. Just pure illogical nightmare (in the literal bad-dream sense), no fat to trim, short and sweet.

Jason Thompson

But more importantly… THE GAME!!! 😍🎲 Excited!!

Cole Caron

Newspapers used to fill the same media niche that traffic accidents and beheading videos on the internet fill now. Oh! And the US doesn’t have an official national language.

Sanjay Mathew

I'm probably missing something obvious but how do I access the Discord server?

It's a Ghost.

I don’t know if anyone else remembers it, but I definitely remember when I accidentally said booblioteca in Spanish class in middle school.

Pearce Duncan

Speaking of hoping to get an ending where the ghosts are real, did you chaps ever see Scooby Doo on Zombie Island?

Rafe Ball

Your point about people including difficult words for you guys to read is a good one; Those posting their thoughts on episodes should be mindful of your appetency to avoid an ambuscade of byzantine verbiage. We should all do our utmost to avoid such sesquipedalian tergiversation! And as for Christopher D Singles and his "Sisyphus's", Christopher should be anaspeptic, frasmotic, even compunctuous to have caused you such pericombobulation.

Professor Murder

A few things: 1) The PCs in my D&D campaign have been adopted by a vaguely undead cat named "Church", and I desperately need that sound effect please. 2) I gotta admit, when you did the "Cream of the Crop" Macho Man promo, all I heard was the Crypt Keeper, which works great in its own way.

Eldritch Scerry

Thanks for reading my note! In the cold light of comments show it dawns on me that the episode of Kolchak in question (https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0621534/) was also storied by Robert Zemekis, who would later go on to direct both Michael J Fox and Eric Stolz in The Fly II or Back to the Future. Coincidence?

Kyle Griffiths

please keep putting the Dandelo effect in as often as you can.

Rob Gillie

(comes busting in) Guys! Guys! Guys! Valancourt Press has just published all of Manly Wade Wellman's John The Balladeer stories in a shiny new book! It comes in bourgeois hardback and proletarian paperback, and has an awesome cover. Here's a handy link: https://www.valancourtbooks.com/john-the-balladeer-1988.html Also? I love that mournful ghost cat, so feel free to play it whenever you want. it just cheers me up.

MonsterTalk

Dandelo is just a floating meow and a bunch of charged particles... probably called Dandel-ions by less discrete mad scientists.

Jeb Card

Not to wychsplain, but the Hagley Woods "Bella in the Wych Elm" is actually a lot more interesting and has a key Lovecraft connection. Some basics - Wych Elm is the name of the tree, but .... the story did in fact take on a witch element! - As mentioned on the show, a young woman's skeleton was found by boys hunting for eggs during WWII (I believe 1943). There is quite a bit of detail on what she had on her person as much of it was decaying but not gone: clothes, shoes, a ring which is assumed to be a faux wedding ring due to its cost, etc - The graffiti is a key part of the story. It started popping up during the investigation, not later. Chalked or otherwise placed in various locations around the woods (which are south of Birmingham IIRC). - Donald McCormick, a writer on mysteries and often not taken as a super-reliable one, wrote Murder By Witchcraft in the 1960s. In this he suggested that "Bella" was maybe a spy, for ... reasons. But as you might guess from the title, he also tied her to witchcraft. Why? - McCormick's book combines two cases: Bella, and the Lower Quinton Murder also known as the Charles Walton Murder. On 14 February 1945 (I'd call it the worst Valentine's Day, but then I think back ...), two years after Bella's skeleton was discovered, elderly farm laborer Charles Walton had his throat cut and a baling fork shoved through him, pinning him to the ground. The Met (aka Scotland Yard) sent it's top investigator, Robert Fabian, to investigate. It was Fabian's last case, which is important. - I pulled the case file when I was in London back in 2015. Much of the investigation involved questioning Italian POWs who were interned in the area. With Italy out of the Axis and the war winding down, POWs were on very light security, were able to leave the camp and even do work for hire, etc (apparently this occurred elsewhere with Allied camps holding Axis POWs, though I don't know this topic well). They didn't really think it seems that a POW was responsible, but it was an avenue to show effort. Instead, Fabian primarily figured it was Walton's boss, Alfred Potter (IIRC), but they couldn't prove it. In handwritten note in the report, Fabian says he thinks Potter is the best suspect but they can't do anything without more evidence, and the locals were not cooperative. - Fast forward to 1950. Fabian is retired from the Yard, but now is turning himself into a very early (first?) true crime celebrity. He writes several books and then pioneers a radio show and then early television as Fabian of the Yard. Lower Quinton was his last case, and either he had a serious change of heart about the case that is not reflected in the actual case file from five years earlier, or he was spicing up his last case to promote himself. He authored in very early 1950 a news article about how this case involved witchcraft, that Walton had been a cunning man and as a boy had seen a spectral black dog (he doesn't use the term cunning man, and this seems quite unlikely), and that a decades earlier murder of a woman by a man wielding a pitchfork and screaming she was a witch, was connected (in reality he thought everyone was a witch and was clearly paranoid and delusional, she was just an innocent victim) - Ever since Dennis Wheatley in the 1930s secret witchcraft had been a slowly building concept in England. In many ways, Britain underwent it's version of the Satanic Panic in the 1950s and 1960s, for reasons I'm not going to get into here. But ... - Another influence is that of Margaret Murray, who becomes directly involved in the case. She was considered in the public eye the leading authority on witchcraft and was the biggest proponent of the Old Religion idea ever since the 1916 or so initially in folklore articles but especially with The Witch-Cult in Western Europe in 1921 and then two subsequent books - She was a massive influence on Gerald Gardner in his instrumental role in helping create Wicca in the 1940s and 1950s. She wrote the foreword to Gardner's book Witchcraft Today which is considered the beginning of the public existence of Wicca and Gardner called her the godmother of the witches - As I'm sure a lot of listeners recognize, Murray is namechecked in Lovecraft. But as I've written elsewhere, Murray is a far bigger influence on Lovecraft than is usually discussed. I believe you can see the shift to Lovecraft's real material ("I have my Poe stories, where are my Lovecraft stories") after he reads Witch-Cult. The timing isn't certain but he seems to read the book in the same year but maybe later, but if so that's a huge coincidence, as Rats in the Walls. It directly influences The Horror at Red Hook. But most importantly, I've argued based directly on Lovecraft's Commonplace Book that Murray is one of a few major influences on The Call of Cthulhu, and continues to influence the whole "mythos" (I've tired of the term for reasons not related to Lovecraft himself) from there on. In his Commonplace Book, Lovecraft directly calls what will become the Cthulhu Cult a worldwide "witch-cult" his term. Lovecraft also expounded at length in a letter to Robert E. Howard about how Murray was cutting edge anthropology (not really) and how it was true and the witch-cult was at Salem - Anyway, Murray (who was 86 at this point) read Fabian's article, and suddenly got involved. She likely knew by 1950 of Gardner's New Forest Coven work, and by this point had become full-on conspiracy theory about the witch-cult, claiming it was a key part of the British royals and related people, with various historical deaths actually ritual killing of the king human sacrifices, and that ritual killings still occurred in a few places. My best read is that "knowing" that Gardner had "discovered" her witch-cult in the New Forest, she wanted to find them for herself. - So in the autumn of 1950, Murray represents the Folklore Society at a science and trade show in Birmingham (she was, though I don't think in 1950, President of the Folklore Society). Lower Quinton, where Walton was murdered (I've been, it's a very small place, no offense), is east of Birmingham. So she went there, posing as an older art student, and got to asking people about the case. - She would then go on and talk about this in the papers. She did believe that Walton was ritually murdered, and gave various reasons that don't hold up to scrutiny. - There is no record of her involvement in the Met case file. But I think she did work with local detective Spooner, who says in the press she did. - It had been disputed if Murray was involved in the Bella case. She wasn't involved but earlier this year I finally found a newspaper article that includes mention of it. It's from the same round of interview articles in 1950 that are usually quoted for her investigation. But in this one, it went further, and she commented that she also believed the Bella case was witchcraft So overall, it is a weird tale with Lovecraft connections. I've written in a bit more detail about it elsewhere, and talked about it on a podcast or two, but the basics are above. Thought y'all might enjoy

Avlin Starfall

Thank you all for reading out the correction to my Dead Space comment and I'm glad it was corrected even before my new comment. I hated I made that mistake on the name when it's one of my favorite games ever and I really don't want to spread misinformation. So thank you all and now I will go die on embarrassment. Lol

Steve

I'll take it on Lieutenant. The American pronunciation is pretty close to the French original. The English is stupid.

James Anthony

I've fallen behind on my queue, so just getting to this episode. Listening I can't help but wonder how with Poe in the air as you read this, you never thought to use his term for the call of the void, "the spirit of the perverse". He describes it in an essay and uses an example almost exactly like the heroine finds herself in at the top of the Tower of Sacrifice