Episode 1: Family Folklore

[originally posted to Patreon on 23/5/25]

TRANSCRIPT:

SARI: Do you have any family folklore, you know? Like every family has their own weird ass stories and shit.

FRANKIE: Dude, my family was full of that. Also, the whole village was full of that, like weird stuff. You know, the guy who would buy your warts.

 S: What? Say more.

 F: When you were a kid, because little kids don't wash their hands and so they get warts. 

S: Hippie kids like you. 

F: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We weren’t raised by soviet parents who were soviet about washing the hands so we just like rubbed them in dirt and then rubbed them on ourselves so you'd get finger warts um and then you would go to the guy in town would buy your warts for like a quarter which was sick because back on those days you could nearly buy a candy bar with a quarter. nearly 

S: nearly but not quite

F: And then he'd be like, you know, wrap it up, keep it clean, but don't look at it and don't touch it. And it's none of your business. That wart belongs to me.

S: Because it's mine. 

F: Because it's mine. He bought it from us. And then eventually the wart would go away. 

S: Nice. What was his name? Was he like a weird? 

F: Yeah, everybody in town was weird. Everybody in town was bizarro and weird. 

S: Buckworty. 

F: Buckworty. That was his name. Yeah. Buckwort Bill. Buckwort Bill.

S: Did you also used to think like he he kept them somewhere or 

F: Yeah like we thought no no he planted them in his garden 

S: Oh he needed wart trees 

F: yeah yeah yeah little more wart plants and we're like thats soo cool

S: of course 

F: But it's just like a low-level version of what like peasant parents did in the olden times of like you know don't go into the woods or the monster will eat you

S: Much nicer, less traumatizing. 

F: I don't know, okay so my mom one time, I remember vividly, we were driving down this road called Branscombe Road and it was like me and my cousin and our friend were all sitting in the back and my mom and her friend were driving us somewhere and they were like, did you guys ever hear about the Branscombe Strangler? We were like,No, what is that? 

S: Is Branscombe a place? 

F: It's the road that we're driving on and it's like famously to get from our village to like the highway through super windy through the forest they're like the Branscombe strangler would strangle people and then his hand got chopped off and sometimes they say the dismembered hand still wanders up and down Branscombe road we were like that's so scary and then a mom stuck her hand out the window and started banging on the roof of the car and she was like it's the Branscombe strangler we're like ahhh  so 

S: Also props on them I think I think my parents' stories were way less creative, they just like don't do this

 F: There's no explanation, just don't do it 

S: It is the law comrade Stalin said so

F: No, but surely there was like weird shit that they said. 

S: There was a couple, but I think they're quite generic. Like I've heard it from a lot of people, like if you swallow, if you're eating an orange and you swallow a seed, it's gonna, a tree's gonna grow out of your ears. 

F: Oh, see, ears is different. Mine was always like up the throat. 

S: Well, up the throat, out of your mouth. 

You know, that's quite unusual.

S: Mine was ears and I remember one time I did swallow a seed and then they like kept it going for like a good three minutes of me freaking out that there's something and everyone's just like muhahah which is mean, but not creative, I would say. 

F: But like also, you know, what does it do? Nothing.

S: Like, yeah, you can, you can, you know, like seeds are made to be fucking swallowed and pooped out, you know? 

F: Yeah. Also, like, it's funny because back in the day, the olden times, ye olde times,

 tS: he olden days, 

F: Like we assume that these little pieces of warning and folklore and fairy tale or whatever. were told in order to keep people safe 

S: Uh-huh, 

F: And it just feels like our parents in that weird like boomer, Gen X generation

 S: Boomer for me. 

F: All right. Well, mine were like Gen X they're on the on the cusp. They were just like kids are dumb, man, and I think it's funny that they're dumb

S: I think mine was just like, how do we make them abide by state control? I don't know. I can't think of a different reason. 

F: Ours was just pure entertainment. But the older I get and the more I'm around other people's kids, the urge is definitely within me to like, tell them some weird shit.

S: Freak them the fuck out yeah.

F: It is, to be fair, I think harder to do nowadays because kids have so much access to the internet. Like I was working at a local festival in my neighborhood and I was hired to be a storyteller they also hired a woman with a horse who's dressed up as a unicorn because Scotland's national animal is the unicorn so I was telling the kids you know I had it like in a little paddock and I was in there with the horse (unicorn) and I was like oh we just arrived this morning we found this unicorn in the park and they were like nooooo

S: Fuck you, lady. 

F: Yeah, it was so hard to get them on my side. I had to go for like the really like five-year-olds. Where I was like, as an eight-year-old, you should believe any lie an adult tells you. But they, you know, they've been watching Cocomelon and fucking, what, Narc the dog, what's the name of that show? 

S: Uh, wait, Paw Patrol. 

F: Narc, I think Narc the dog. 

S: Chases on the case, man. Yeah, yeah, a little fucking Narc. I'm sorry I know those things, but I do.

F: Yeah its embarrassing

S: But like this kind of removes the mysticism it's like oh look even our children are rational it's like fuck that children aren't meant to be rational 

F: Exactly but also there are like the permanent ones right like this uh tooth fairy, tooth fairy Santa, sometimes the easter bunny

S: We got Santa, but we got like again, the soviet version of Santa 

F: Love that he's like you get only what you work for

S: He's only he's also he wears blue and is skinny, you know it's like we don't feed our Santa he is poor he is poor Santa 

F: He's meant to represent the concept of mortality 

S: Absolutely um 

F: That's not fun what was he called? 

S: Ded Moroz so like uh

F: Sounds jolly 

S: So like a grandfather frost 

F: Oh yeah that's less fun than Coca-Cola colored 

S: Coca-Cola obese santa yeah 

F: Yeah a lot less fun 

S: Yeah but like again it's it's just like to control the kids you know it doesn't actually have because they go naughty and nice and you know naughty and nice are like the terms like terrorism you know you can say it for like anything anyone who disagrees with you 

S: First time we're doing these little like voiceover essay things, we've already compared Santa to terrorism 

S: Right, because he goes like they're bad, and then he can just decide 

F: Big brother 

S: Well yeah what's what bad and good is fuck you santa who made you our moral fucking compass so yeah they're just like instead of saying, I think it's right or wrong, they go, No, Santa thinks that. 

F: This magical fat man in the sky. Yeah. 

S: At least own up to your moral code, parents. 

F: Well, I find like the Tooth Fairy to be a really interesting one because it's non-denominational. Like Santa and Easter Bunny are innately Judeo-Christian, but the tooth fairy is pure capitalism. She buys, it's commerce, it's consumerism. She buys from you, you get something in return, it's always cash. 

S: You even sell your teeth. 

F: You sell your teeth to a mysterious fairy. You shouldn't care if you're good or bad, because business doesn't care if you're good or bad. The tooth fairy will take your fucking kidney. Yeah, yeah, if you don't have any teeth, you owe that bitch teeth. Oh man she'll take an ear yeah yeah that's not, she just starts pulling them 

S: But i wonder if any of these actual like lies are you know the only one i could think of that was practical because i used to love fucking putting my feet on the wall when i was sleeping and it's too cold and i'd get sick and they said that some sort of fucking turtles will come down from the ceiling and eat my toes and i was fucking petrified of that but i didn't put my feet on the wall so like functional it worked

F: You should get your little feet off the wall. Jesus Christ. 

S: Yeah, maybe that's what they want. Maybe they didn't care about me being sick. It's just like fucking your feet are dirty, bitch.

F: Yeah, you got footprints up your wall. I love that, though. See, like that's fairly creative. Turtles will like spider climb down the walls and eat your toes. Absolutely. Amazing. 

S: Turtles, turtles, you know.

F: But you know, like it's... 

S: Not too scary.

F: Yeah, yeah. Like kind of banal. 

S: Yeah. But kind of like they have these choppers that actually work. 

F: Also, like, like we're not afraid enough of our parents that they need to outsource some punishment to mythical or you know otherworldly weird 

S: I was afraid there was enough fear in that dynamic yeah 

F: They didn't need to invent more but it sounds like honestly the best part of being a parent but then it becomes like within the family like me and my cousins all are like oh yeah they used to tell me that too and it becomes family folklore that then gets passed down there's stories of like all that guy in the woods, which I don't think anybody, I don't know if it's true or not, but I remember hearing a story about some old guy that lived up in the woods and they found like a couple of bodies or maybe it was just one body with all these like big gashes in it and they thought it was like a mountain lion attack which is weird in and of itself because mountain lions don't attack people and they found out it was the old guy in the woods like murdered him with a butcher's hook

S: Wait, so that's just like a story? 

F: I don't know. Yeah, see, I don't know. 

S: It's like, don't go to the forest, basically. 

F: But it's like local folklore where like, I don't know, it wasn't even told to us as a kid to warn us from going off into the woods. It was more like, this is a local legend. 

S: But it seems to have that purpose in mind, right? Like, don't be there in the dark on your own. 

F: Yeah, don't stay out in the woods in the dark on your own. But then we'd have good things as well. It'd be like, let's go up and see the leprechaun tree. And it was one big, almost candelabra-shaped tree that we would walk up to and like it was a little bit of a hike. It felt like a little magical and stuff.

S: My great-grandpa went off to explore Alaska and was never found. So I used to like think about like him. 

F: He just has a second family up there. 

S: He moved three kilometers away. And then they were like, he's lost forever. We're never finding him.

F: And he was like, I got an Inuit wife now. I don't need you people. Yeah. Hmm. I forget as well that Russia and Alaska were so close. 

S: Absolutely. 

F: And I'm like, oh yeah, he could have just like, then I'll wait for the, to freeze over and then just cross over the land bridge. Yeah, I feel like family folklore adds like, even the other side of my family where the folklore is less magical and horrible in nature, there's still stories about people you know, your uncle did this, your dad did this, when they were working in the grocery store, when they were doing this, doing that, and it becomes like more accessible you know it's less there's a severed hand gonna get you and more like this person usually it's what after somebody's died the stories get exaggerated and exaggerated to like all these almost heroic figures who were mischievous fool trickster trickster like figures and they did this and they did that and that adds a layer of almost like more relatable folklore on top but i think it adds to the the family tapestry. And it does sound like the best part of having kids is passing them. 

S: Yeah, traumatizing them. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so be hippies, y'all. Tell your children nice, magic-y things. 

F: No, tell your children crazy shit that they will then inevitably tell a therapist about. 

S: Like, have you talked about the disembodied hand with your therapist?

F: No, because it has, it didn't, like, it scared me, but I wasn't traumatized. The things I was traumatized by was like, like one of my relatives telling me that, like, you know, I hope, I better hope I remain skinny forever. That's fucked up. Why? I don't need, what? Don't say that to an eight year old. The fuck?

S: Right less less family folklore more just mean 

F: Yeah yeah more just like saying weird shit to children 

S: Putting their own trauma onto you 

F: Yeah exactly whereas like telling a kid that like there's fairies out in the woods 

S: But I guess like trauma is like bodily reaction to teach you something you know there was like um i was listening to the podcast about like how we used to hate kids like a hundred years ago 

F: I still hate kids well 

S: Yes we still hate kids but 

F: But other people love kids 

S: Exactly they're like oh they're the angels the kids are the innocents and you know shit like that well before they used to say like oh they're fucking demons they're really they are demons but anyway so if you wanted to teach your kid something in life you know the example was a guy took his son to the execution, it was in France, I think somewhere in Paris in the 18th century, you know, so that he saw what happens if you cross the king or if you something and then he took him back home and beat the shit out of him because apparently like a beating will stick in your head. You know what I mean? 

F: You don't think watching a human being die would stick in a child's head. You gotta have the beating on top. Just in case, you know? Just in case. Just in case you do that. Whenever you give them a good lesson, you beat the shit out of them. And make it memorable, like ahh that time my dad broke my nose. And then you wonder why people are so fucked up

S: But you know, he abided by the law after that

F: Did he? You don't know that, maybe he grew up to be Guy Fawkes, boooom What purpose does like familial hyperlocalised folklore serve in a world where warnings do not need to come via scary stories and beatings?

S: Or we fucking travel all the time you know, not many people stay in their area. So if i learned all my folklore from saida or you learned it from westport, then you moved and now it doesnt matter anymore.

F: Yeah, there are no bears in the whole of the UK. All my bear knowledge, useless.

S: And now I would like for some turtles to nibble on my toes, and I try to put my feet on the wall, but it doesn’t work.

F: So yeah obviously this is a new format that we are trying out to explore folklore topics. If you have any topics you want us to discuss in a vaguely educated and not at all researched way, send them in, call in now, get on the horn

S: At 1-800- fuck yourself

F: Suck it