951. What's the difference between terror and horror? Why was the word for "bear" so scary that it is lost to history? Jess Zafarris, author of "Words from Hell," goes through these stories and more in a scary, spooky etymology romp to help us get ready for Halloween.
951. What's the difference between terror and horror? Why was the word for "bear" so scary that it is lost to history? Jess Zafarris, author of "Words from Hell," goes through these stories and more in a scary, spooky etymology romp to help us get ready for Halloween.
"Words from Hell" https://amzn.to/3rZVxo0
Find Jess Zafarris online: Useless Etymology, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram
| Transcript: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/jess-zafarris/transcript
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A computer-generated and lightly edited transcript:
Mignon: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and we have an especially fun show this week for Halloween because I am here with Jess Zafarris, who is the author of the new book, "Words from Hell," all about scary, naughty, bad words, which is kind of funny because her past book was a lovely book for children. So one from one end of the spectrum to the other. Jess is the creator of the blog uselessetymology.com. She has a very popular TikTok account about etymology. We briefly did a TikTok game show together, and she is also my new contact at Ragan Communications. So we're working together on the Advanced AP Style webinar that I have coming out next week. So, can't wait to talk about these horrible words. Welcome, Jess.
Jess: Thank you so much. I am so excited to be here, and it's funny that you bring up my first book, "Once Upon a Word," because until Halloween of this year, I will be a children's book author, and then on Halloween when the book releases, I will instantaneously no longer be a children's book author by any means.
Mignon: And I guess before we get started, I am curious, what possessed you to write this book?
Jess: Well, a bunch of ghouls and ghosts, for one, but also just generally a love and curiosity of words. It's always been one of my favorite things to do, and I found while I was writing "Once Upon a Word," the children's book, that there were many words I couldn't include, some of which we will talk about today because they were just too dark. Like I wanted to address a range of animals, and I wanted to address spooky words, but I couldn't include them in my … [the editor] on the children's book told me to eliminate them from the manuscript. So I started saving them in a document, and I also found — I have a fairly large TikTok audience who listens to me talk about word origins — and I found that those folks often were the most excited to learn about words that were just a little bit naughty or had some dirty secrets in their past. So that's a good chunk of the book, but of course, I also have a chapter on horrifying and terrifying subjects, which may be a little too dark for kids, but I think we'll keep it PG at the very least today.
Mignon: Yeah, definitely, definitely. If you're a parent listening with your child in the car, we're going to keep it as safe as we can for you. One of the first things that I thought was interesting that you addressed is the difference between terror and horror. Like those are two different things once you start thinking about it.
Jess: Absolutely. Well, you know, we have associations today, like if you feel terror, you are completely frozen in terror, whereas if you are horrified, odds are you might be watching a scary movie or you might be alarmed by something that your friend does. But the word "horror" is derived from that hair-raising feeling of fright you get when you're thoroughly creeped out. Its original Latin source means to shutter or to bristle with fear, just like the hairs on the back of your neck, which I think is very cool. In Latin, it was also associated with the kind of fear you hear in biblical contexts, like the fear of God. It was a veneration and awe for the gods. And then in English, its meaning varied quite a bit.
In the 14th century, it was more associated with disgust, which is why when you say you're horrified at something, it might be something that's a little disgusting. And of course, there are different types of horror we have in the genre today. There's body horror, which leans more toward that disgusting edge, and then there's more like ghostly horror, which is a little more hair-raising. So we have that association throughout history as well, but either way, it's that shuddering feeling.
The earliest horror stories date back to ancient times, including ancient Greece and Rome. There was, in particular, there was one account from Pliny the Elder who told a story about a fellow philosopher and educator who purchased a house that was haunted by a ghost and had to locate the bones of the deceased in order to put him to rest. And then terror is not actually directly related to horror, despite them sounding a little bit alike, but it is of the same ilk. It's more about trembling or filling with fear. So instead of hair-raising, you have trembling. So if you're horrified, you're shuddering and bristling, and if you're terrified, you're trembling and overwhelmed. It's a subtle distinction, but it's one that remains in the difference between words like "terrified," which always implies fear, and "horrified," which can also mean scandalized.
Mignon: Yeah, and people have asked me this quite a bit, like how did we get from terror to something being terrific, being good?
Jess: Good question. So something terrific is great, right? In the 1600s, something, and before that, something terrific did inspire terror. Terror is this big, all-encompassing, highly distracting feeling. But in the 1800s, it was extended to encompass anything or any experience that had a huge or distracting impact on you, like a terrific headache. And then by the late 1800s, it first appeared as a word for a person or as an experience that had a massive but positive impact on you. And that's kind of, you see a lot of wordplay and twisting of meaning around the Victorian era when this happened.
Mignon: Well, cool. Yeah, I love how words do that. I just love it.
Jess: So like "smashing" or other words like that in the Victorian era took on sort of a positive connotation despite previously being negative.
Mignon: Right, right, and "egregious" was good, and then it was bad, like word and right. Yeah, words, they switch good and bad more often than you'd think. Yeah. Now, how about "jack-o'-lantern"? That's another great Halloween one. Jack was just a guy, right?
Jess: Exactly, in the same way. So the word ‘guy’ comes from the name of Guy Fawkes and then turned into like a generic term for a dude, and Jack was the predecessor to "guy" in the same way that we say "guy" today. Jack was sort of the proto guy. So a jack-o'-lantern is literally a jack of the lantern, a guy carrying a lantern. In some regions of England, it was also like a "jack-o'-lantern" became the name of a "will of the wisp," which is a ghostly spirit or a light seen by travelers at night that lures them into the darkness. And the overlap between "jack-o'-lantern" and "will of the wisp" is due to the idea that you might mistake this light for the lantern of the night watchman as you approach the town. But, of course, it's all a ghostly ruse that leads you to your doom. Funny enough, if you take it literally, "will of the wisp" means pretty much the same thing as "jack-o'-lantern." "Will" was another generic man's name, and a "wisp" was a bundle of straw used as a torch. So a "will of the wisp" was the "wisp" that the dude named "Will" was carrying, much in the same way that the lantern "Jack" was carrying.
As for the carved pumpkin, though, it was a common practice around the festival of Samhain, which is a predecessor to Halloween in Ireland, to carve faces into turnips and illuminate them with candles, either to represent supernatural spirits or to ward them off because they were fairly generic human faces, and they functioned as lanterns. The "jack-of-the-lantern" concept was applied to them. This is Jack … is the little face in it. And then the tradition extended to pumpkins in the Americas, where pumpkins were plentiful and colorful during the harvest season.
Mignon: Ah, especially authentic if you can carve turnips.
Jess: Yes, exactly. And honestly, any kind of gourd or root vegetable, I'm sure you could have a lot of fun with that. There's also a little folktale about "jack-o'-lantern." About the jack-o’-lantern. In addition to being a generic name for an old guy, you know, any old dude, "Jack" was also often used in stories as the name of a clever trickster protagonist. It became a bit of a trope, and according to one particular story, "Stingy Jack" was a drunkard and a particularly nasty fellow. And one night, Satan catches up with him while he's bragging of his evil deeds, and Satan tells him that he's come for Jack so he can pay the price for his evil deeds. Jack begs Satan to let him have one last night at the tavern before being dragged off to hell, and Satan complies. And then after a night of heavy drinking, Jack suggests again to Satan that he transform himself into a coin so he can pay off the tab, essentially. So Satan does so, and Jack puts the coin, the "Satan coin," in his pocket where he keeps a cross, which traps Satan in the coin, and he promises to release Satan if he gives Jack an additional 10 years of life. So, of course, Satan has no choice, and he agrees.
And then 10 years later, Satan comes calling while Jack is sitting under an apple tree, and Jack, being wily as he is, begs him to enjoy one last apple. And Satan, being pretty stupid for an immortal king of hell who apparently can't see through this ruse, climbs the tree to get the apple. Jack came prepared with more crosses; he places them around the base of the tree, trapping Satan again, and he makes Satan promise that he will never have to go to hell.
Mignon: Should have done that the first time.
Jess: Right, I don't know why he didn't think of that, but Satan is furious, and he is stuck, and he is probably late for his daily rounds of torturing lost souls, so he agrees. Unfortunately for Jack, when he does eventually die, his soul wasn't pure enough to make it to heaven, though, so he was sent back down to earth for all eternity. Satan came to mock poor Jack, who was all alone on a dark night with no light to find his way, and Satan tosses him a burning coal, which he puts inside his carved turnip to make a lantern, and some say he still roams the land to this day.
Mignon: That's wild. I had never heard that story before. Who knew Satan was so easily manipulated? There's a lot of things going on in that story.
Jess: Very much. What's the song about the golden fiddle? "The Devil Went Down to Georgia." Reminds me a little bit of that one.
Mignon: Yeah, all right. Well, moving on to some of the scary creatures. Stephen Colbert is famously afraid of bears. Bears have always been terrifying, I guess, to humans going way back because, actually, in one of my books, I use the word "bear" as an example of a euphemism. Why don't you explain what's unusual about the word "bear"?
Jess: You are correct; it is a euphemism. In many Germanic languages, including English, the word for "bear" literally means "the brown one" or "the brown thing." So different words, including the word "bear," because a bear was essentially a taboo animal because, as an opponent of hunters, they were frightening. The root of the word "bear" is the same as that of the word "brown." So when it comes to bears, we straight up don't say their name. There is presumably in the past another word for bears that means something else or is just unique to bears, but this word that we use now is sort of a way to talk around it by saying, you know, "harry brown thing." We don't invoke its name by actually speaking it. Meanwhile, words like the Greek "arctos" and the Latin "ursus," which both mean "bear," share a root that actually means "bear." Those were actual words for "bear," rather than "brown thing that's scary.”
Mignon: Interesting that we've lost the original word; they were so afraid of using the word that it's become lost.
Jess: Isn't that interesting?
Mignon: Yeah, and I also, in your book, you say that the Arctic and Antarctic are names related to the word "bear." I didn't know that either.
Jess: That's right. "Arctic" means "of the bear," and "Antarctic" means "opposite the bear" due to where you can and where you can't see the constellation of the Great Bear. It's also interesting, but not related, that polar bears are in the Arctic but not in the Antarctic. It's more of a serendipitous coincidence because the people who use these words probably wouldn't have known whether there were or weren't polar bears in the Antarctic, for example.
Mignon: Right, the whole other side of the world.
Jess: Right.
Mignon: They hadn't been there. Yeah. So, okay, so another scary creature is the banshee. Let's talk about the banshee.
Jess: Yes, this one's really neat. I love it. We don't get a lot of Irish words that get carried over into English; there are some, but many do not appear in English. But this one was adopted directly from Irish, and it's a phonetic spelling of a phrase that means "the female of the elves," which is very cool. The banshee spirit has a lot of varied folklore attached to her. Sometimes she wasn't necessarily screaming, as you often see in modern folklore. Sometimes she's more like a siren who is believed to foretell death with her eerie song.
Mignon: Hmm, interesting. And in the book, you have the Irish spelling of which "banshee" is the phonetic spelling of this Irish word. And speaking of terror, I am filled with terror every time I see an Irish word I have to pronounce based just on the spelling.
Jess: You'll see that I did not say that.
Mignon: The "she" part in Irish is spelled "s-i-d-h-e." Like, I would never look at that and think "she." Just, Irish is just terrifying to me to have to pronounce.
Jess: Earlier, I mentioned the holiday Samhain, which is pronounced and is spelled "s-a-m-h-a-i-n." But I've had to listen to the pronunciation of that several times to get it right.
Mignon: Yeah, yeah, Irish is tough pronunciation-wise. Next, another one is "chimera." So, you know, before I was Grammar Girl, I was a biologist, and so we actually did talk about chimeras, and they weren't scary monsters; they were just two different kinds of cells fused together. So let's talk about the scary kind of chimera.
Jess: Yes, though the cells get their name from the mythical beast from Greek mythology. She's got a lion's head, a goat's body, and a dragon's tail. She's female in this mythology, and her name literally means "year-old-she-goat" or "she-goat who has lived one winter," which is a bit of a mouthful in English. And according to a citation from one of his bestiaries, she was associated with the fire-spewing gas vents found on Mount Chimera, which was named after the myth of the beast in the Mediterranean region of Lycia. And in biology, as you've referenced, chimerism is when one twin embryo is absorbed by the other, resulting in one child with cells or genes from both embryos, resulting in appearance variations like two-toned eyes or two-toned skin, and this terminology reflects the multi-species appearance of the chimera.
Mignon: Fascinating, fascinating. We have one that was surprisingly new to me: the "chupacabra." I had no idea that that name was so new.
Jess: Yeah, I didn't either. I could have sworn that before 1995, people talked about chupacabras, but apparently not. "Chupacabra" literally means "goat sucker," after its penchant for drinking the blood of livestock. It sounds much cooler in Spanish, but the name of the beast was coined in 1995 by Puerto Rican comedian Silverio Perez. Though, monsters like this and cryptids of this nature have appeared in folklore for a long time, so the idea of a blood-sucking livestock beast, eating beast, is not new, but the name itself apparently was coined in 1995.
Mignon: Huh. Do you know if he was making a joke about it when he named it? Do you know the context?
Mignon: You know, I actually don't have that in front of me right now. I've heard the story before, but I'm going to…I’ll have to get back to you on that one. Episode two, maybe.
Mignon: Okay, that's fine. So, if I'm going from a new one to a couple of very, very old ones. Dragons are quite old.
Jess: Dragons, yes, indeed. You know, dragons today aren't always presented as malevolent beings or monsters, but they've certainly been the target of slayings in European folklore and throughout the years in many cultures. They're often considered things to conquer or metaphors for the challenges we face in life. But personally, I'm a big fan of dragons, so I am anti-slaying.
This word is Latin in origin or, well, originally Greek. Also, Latin. Greek English got it from Latin. "Dracon" and "Draconum" mean a huge serpent or dragon in Greek. It also probably referred to a sea serpent, specifically, which makes sense. A lot of sea creatures look dragon-like when they're cresting from the water. Perhaps the actual creatures of the deep inspired sea monsters that led us to contemporary images of dragons. Either way, according to Robert K. Barnhart, who edits a number of etymology dictionaries, the literal sense of the Greek word was "the one with the deadly gaze," which sort of calls upon other Greek monsters with murderous eyes like basilisks and gorgons. In Greek and Latin mythology, the term sometimes referred to any great serpent, even one that wasn't mythological. Like in "The Iliad," Agamemnon wears a blue dragon motif on his sword belt, but it's just as likely that the Greek word in the Iliad was used there to refer to a snake, like a blue snake.
Dragons didn't necessarily have legs until the Middle Ages. Most dragons at the time had four legs and additional wings, while two-legged dragons were called "wyverns." "Wyvern" comes from an old French and ultimately a Latin word. The old French means "snake" and also was a word for a javelin, which I think comes from the snake concept. It's a weapon that's shaped like a snake. And then it's ultimately from the same Latin source as the word "viper." Wyverns have more distinctive characteristics; they'll have an arrow-shaped tail tip. You can see this in heraldry from the Middle Ages.
Some people, some nerds, including myself to some degree, will argue that a dragon with two wings and two legs, like the ones you see in "Game of Thrones," are technically wyverns. I'm not prescriptive on this front. I think they also qualify as dragons. I don't know where you stand on this.
Mignon: I don't have a strong opinion on the dragon-wyvern debate. My husband probably does.
Jess: Not a fierce point of contention.
Mignon: Aren't the very oldest dragons from China?
Jess: That is correct, and I love Chinese dragons. They are beautiful in the way they appear in artwork. They have those long bodies and more mammalian faces. They're the oldest in recorded mythology, appearing all the way back to the 16th century BCE. The Mandarin name for dragon, which I'm not going to pronounce with the right level of inflection because the different tonalities influence meaning in Chinese, but it essentially looks like the word "long" when you transliterate it into English. It's thought to be onomato-poetic, so it echoes. It's meant to echo the sound of thunder, which would be maybe an echo of their roar, the sound they make.
These wingless flying dragons were also sometimes called "Tianlong," meaning heavenly dragon or celestial dragon. We also see dragon-like creatures also appearing in Indian religious stories. Notably, the three-headed Vedic serpent "Vritra," which — excuse my pronunciation — whose name means "the enveloper," who is the personification of drought.
Mignon: Nice, yeah, you're talking about Chinese being a tonal language reminded me of a completely fascinating but also completely unrelated tidbit. Studies have shown that Chinese people are more likely to have perfect pitch. It's a language that very much depends on the tone of the word, like whether you go up at the end or down at the end. Just being exposed to that kind of language at a young age, researchers think, makes people more likely to have perfect pitch.
Jess: That's really interesting.
Mignon: Yeah, it's fascinating. So they think that we all have this ability, and the people who don't speak those kinds of languages sort of lose it or it's developed in people who are exposed to that at a really young age.
Jess: I wonder if you were to learn to speak Chinese or Mandarin, if you could perhaps improve your sense of pitch.
Mignon: I don't know. I haven't seen studies on that. I don't know if it's something you have to do when you're very, very young or if you can develop it older. It's fascinating.
Jess: Very cool. I know little kids are such sponges when it comes to language and music, in particular, so it would make sense that it becomes easier if you are exposed at that age.
Mignon: Yeah. So another super, super old, scary beast is the werewolf.
Jess: Yes, okay. I love this one. It's one of my favorite things to talk about, actually, because it also has some funny, gender-interesting elements to it. Or at least, I tend to extrapolate them. So the first element of "werewolf" is the Old English word for "man." "Were" means "man" here, so a werewolf is literally a man-wolf. It's a little funny when people will use the term, the prefix "were" to create other animal hybrids. It still makes sense. So "werebear" is man-bear, and you'll see those in things like "Dungeons and Dragons."
Werewolf lore is very ancient but it appears in Proto-Indo-European mythology between 4500 and 2500 BCE. Lycanthropy, the state of being able to turn into a wolf or wolf hybridization, has appeared in almost every culture around the world with any proximity to wolves.
But many werewolf legends in the Western world came from Germanic-pagan lore. The second part of the French word for werewolf, "loup-garou," is even Germanic in origin, which is not super unusual for French words, but since French had so much Latin influence, you don't always necessarily see it in modern words. Incidentally, the word "loup-garou," the French term, is redundant. It means "wolf-man-wolf" because "loup" is from the Latin word for "wolf," and "garou" breaks down into the Germanic elements meaning "man-wolf." So it's "wolf-man-wolf."
Then the "man" element of "garou" is cognate with the "were" part of "werewolf," so we have a lot of cross-pollination here. The "man" element that we see there isn't in the non-gendered human race sense of "man," but it literally means "male person." Like a werewolf is quite literally a man, a human male person, or a person who identifies as a man, and the word "wolf," which in my opinion means that theoretically we would have an alternative for a woman who is a werewolf, in which case you would use the Old English word for "woman," which was "wif," w-i-f, the predecessor to the word "wife," which at the time just meant "woman." So, a "wifwolf" would be the word for a female werewolf in that case.
Mignon: I completely expect one of my listeners to now use that in a novel.
Jess: Can’t wait to see it.
Mignon: Let Jess know if you do that.
Jess: Yes, I want to hear about it. Tag me.
Mignon: So another one that surprised me is, so demons were not originally bad. That was surprising to me.
Jess: Yes, that is true. Demons were once gods. The original Greek source of the word "demon" wasn't a word for an evil creature at all but instead, it was a word for a deity, usually a lesser god, so not necessarily one that you would find on Olympus but one that influenced some other aspect of life. Even in Latin, the word "demon" simply meant "spirit" and not necessarily an evil one.
It became associated with malignant spirits because the Greek word was eventually used in translations of Christian texts to describe the gods of non-Christians and heathen idols and unclean spirits. So we have Christianity messing with this word and making it more negative.
By the time the word arrived in English in the 12th century, it was associated completely with evil spirits and devils. Before that, in English, a demon, which like the concept existed, but the word for it in English was Helchnicht, or literally, Hell Knight.
Mignon: Mm-hmm.
Jess: So quite literally a word from hell.
Mignon: Right, right. You know, a lot of these have come from interactions between humans and scary real-life animals that they lived in close proximity to or, you know, the idea of spirits. But the next two we're gonna talk about come from fiction. Like we're talking about National Novel Writing Month…a couple of novels. So like Frankenstein, you know, is a scary beast we think of on Halloween that Mary Shelley wrote about. Was "Frankenstein" inspired by any Greek or Roman mythology or anything like that, or was it purely an invention of Mary Shelley's mind?
Jess: Well, a little bit of both. We've got some blending here. There's this fantastic story about how Shelley came up with the story for "Frankenstein" and even the name Frankenstein. When she and her husband and wordsmith, her fellow wordsmith, Percy, were visiting poet and politician Lord Byron. They were hanging out, they were probably having some fun together at his beautiful estate, and they held this competition to see who could come up with the best horror story.
And Mary claimed to have had a vision about the monster and the name that very night. Of course, Frankenstein is the name of the doctor who created, or not the doctor, the scientist who created the monster, but it's often associated with the monster due to the fact that it's one of the first monster stories, or pieces of horror fiction that's widely recognized.
Mignon: There was that one tidbit in your book that I did not know, that the monster's name, the monster actually had a name, and his name was Adam.
Jess: Mm-hmm, that's right. If you're an English major, or one of your English major friends has pedantically explained to you at a party, Victor Frankenstein is the creator, not the monster. Victor considered naming the creature Adam after the Adam in Genesis. Because in the story, it's a little more oblique the way the monster is formed. It's not necessarily explicitly stated that he's sewn from various dead body parts. It mentions that he pulls together a sort of facsimile of a human from…we don't know quite what. It's a little more vague in the book than it is in the film adaptations, which is where we really got the idea of a thing that's sewed together from different pieces.
And Adam in the book is also quite a bit smarter. It's quite sad because when he creates Adam, when Victor creates Adam, he’s so terrified by his own creation that he changes his mind and just calls him "demon," "monster," and "wretch," which, as it turns out, really hurts his feelings and creates problems for everyone because he runs away and goes on this journey of self-discovery.
And then Mary Shelley also called the character Adam in the book's epigraph, so it's often accepted as the monster's actual name. In the book the process of creating him is a bit ambiguous. It involves chemistry and alchemy. One of the lines where we get the idea of the stitched-together monster is that Victor writes that his raw materials came from the dissecting room and the slaughterhouse, so perhaps corpse parts involved, at the very least.
So another thing that may have influenced Mary, aside from just like a random dream where she thought of the name Frankenstein, could be that she had recently visited Frankenstein Castle with Percy which overlooks the city of Darmstadt in Germany they had just been there a few years earlier. And in Frankenstein castle an alchemist named Johann Konrad Dippel had experimented with human bodies so maybe the idea whether she realized it or not at the time had come from that experience. I’m not sure whether it's repressed or whether she was protecting her claim of originality, but either way it means it literally means Franconian Mountain or free stone in German.
Mignon: Fascinating. Cool. Well, you know, "Frankenstein," of course, made me think of "Dracula," which is another, you know, scary novel written, you know, after" Frankenstein." "Frankenstein" was written in the early 1800s, and Dracula was written in the late 1800s. But you talked in your book about the vampire craze of the 1720s. So, you know, if you think that "Twilight" was a vampire craze, you know, people have been doing that for a long, long time. So, let's talk about vampires. We're running out of time; we're gonna wrap up. Let’s finish with vampires. That seems appropriate for Halloween.
Jess: Absolutely. So one of the most mysterious things about vampires is that we actually don't know the origin of their name. It's quite a mystery, but we know a few things. One was that the English word was adopted from either French or German, probably due to German literature. They had a kind of a stranglehold on the monster fiction of the time. We also know that the word was adopted into German from Serbian, and that the Serbian word came from Hungarian. Slavic languages have words for vampire that can be traced back to an old church Slavonic word, "upiór" but what that means is unclear. It could be from a word meaning “witch.” It could be from aSlavonic word meaning "stick" or "thrust" into someone or something. It could also be connected to vampire lore as an expression of cultural anxieties around sticking and thrusting, for example, for the time. It first appeared in a 1734 anonymous manuscript called "The Travels of Three English Gentlemen from Venice to Hamburg." The manuscript went unpublished until 1745 when it was compiled into "The Harleian Miscellany," which was edited by Samuel Johnson, who also wrote one of the most influential dictionaries in the English language.
Mignon: Our guy Samuel Johnson.
Jess: Exactly. You know he's in that meme where he's squinting at the paper too. The manuscript quotes a passage from a German text that details what would come to shape English Gothic vampire fiction, including sleeping in graves, and sucking blood, and death by staking and burning. But one of the things that may have led to this manuscript was the vampire craze that you mentioned. Vampires became a fixture of German literature around…following the 1720s when two suspected real vampires, named Petar Blagojevich and Arnold Powell, I believe, were exhumed in Serbia under the Habsburg monarchy. They were found, apparently they hadn't decomposed, and they had blood on their mouths. So, whether this is true or not is unsure, but people definitely believed it was and attributed some deaths to them around the time.
Mignon: Terrifying, I'm sure.
Jess: Very spooky.
[Truncated. At this point we ended the show and directed people to YouTube for an extended interview where we discussed six or seven additional words.]