S3 Ep 2: Where History Meets Haunting: Folklore, Ghosts & Legends with Rissa Miller

... activity or ghosts, um, we tend to think of folklore as something old, uh-

[laughs]

... fairies, witches, ghosts-

Yeah, yeah, yeah

... or superstitions.

What does it look...

What does modern folklore look like?

So, um, I think that would lean more into what we think of as urban legends, right? It looks like us.

It looks like the worlds we live in.

Because always these stories reflect who we are and where we are in time and our technology.

So monsters come in different categories, right? The monster of the past is the mummy or Dracula.

But then we also have the monster of science, which Mary Shelley brought us first with Frankenstein, of course.

Our monsters of science now look a whole lot like AI [laughs] and a whole lot like the robot takeover.

And then we also of course have the doppelganger, the werewolf, the, the monster that can look just like us, which we might now call mimic or werewolf.

Those are still lovely.

I mean, I'm still pro-werewolf.

All of these different kinds of beasts stay with us, they just change with our technology, with our current situation.

So I grew up around the time where everybody was scared about radioactivity, right? Three Mile Island melted down when I was a really, really little kid.

When I grew up, everybody talked about how if you go anywhere near Three Mile Island, it's terrifying because there are eight-feet-tall glowing raccoons that are vicious.

I remember being told this story on the playground as a little girl by other kids.

This is how folklore spreads.

Usually like a friend of a friend, right? My cousin went out there hiking and saw this, you know, humongous glowing raccoon with giant fangs.

Okay, nobody saw that.

[laughs] That's...

It's the most ridiculous thing you've ever heard.