History of Pubic Hair

We often think of the way we treat pubic hair as a relatively modern thing. But how did they manage pubic hair in Ancient Greece, or the Middle Ages? Why would someone wear a pubic wig (also known as a merkin)? And why was the pubic hair of suspected witches shaven off? Joining Kate today is Professor Jill Burke, author of How to be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty and Female Creativity https://shop.royalacademy.org.uk/how-to-be-a-renaissance-woman-the-untold-history-of-beauty-and-female-creativity, to help us uncover this history. This episode was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. All music from Epidemic Sounds/All3 Media. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

  Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Would you believe us if we told you there was a podcast that was haunted? Well, there is. It's called Two Girls, One Ghost. We didn't want to believe it at first, but we can no longer ignore it. Two Girls, One Ghost is the most haunted podcast in America. We're talking ghosts caught on camera. Demonic possessions. Cursed mirrors. Bigfoot. Poltergeists. Exorcisms. Near-death experiences. Unsolved mysteries. Missing persons. Each week, we explore the deepest, darkest, spookiest places in the world. Tune in to Two Girls, One Ghost wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen at your own risk.

• 1:14Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. I am here once again with your favoritest of favorite podcasts, Betwixt the Sheets. And probably one of the reasons it is your favorite is because we do stray into the saucier areas of history. And because of that, I have to tell you, this is an adult podcast spoken by adults, other adults, about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects. And you should be an adult too. And if you're not an adult too, be off with you. And if you are an adult and you're hanging around, well, fair dues. We have now told you that this podcast might get a little bit spicy. So if you hang around and you end up clutching your pearls, well, tough to ****, quite frankly, we did let you know. For the rest of you, on with the show.

• 2:01Kate Lister?

  Here in the Islamic bathing houses of the 11th century, some fantastic work is going on. I am here with my fellow European travellers, and guys, it's seriously rude to stare. The body hair of both men and women is being very carefully removed. Not from us Europeans, we're a right hairy bunch, but they are having the whole lot off. Not even a tuft left, they look like eels. Why are they doing this? Well, dear listener, in today's episode, we are finally gonna find out about the history of pubic hair and its removal, and the keeping thereof. And to do that, we will be travelling back to Europe, where a culture of sharing beauty tips and secrets is blossoming.

• 2:44Kate Lister?

  This is one of our most requested episodes, you lot are pub crazy. So to find out more, who else could we possibly talk to other than Professor Jill Berg, who is an expert on Renaissance beauty, and she knows an awful lot about pubic hair as well. So, on with the show.

• 3:10Speaker 02

  What are you calling a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

• 3:15Speaker 03

  I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning him off and putting the button.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

• 3:30Speaker 04

  Goodness, my beautiful dam, goodness has nothing to do with it, Jerry.

• 3:38Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, with me, Kate Lister. Do you want the classic bikini wax, a Brazilian wax, the Californian wax, or the Hollywood wax? Or perhaps you just prefer an entire Brazilian blowout and just go, oh, natural. The way we treat and think about pubic hair is something that most of us are probably familiar with, and there are plenty of options available. But how was it approached throughout history? From the ancient Egyptians and Grecians to Italian women in the Renaissance, they all had fashions for pubic hair.

• 4:13Kate Lister?

  I told you that this has been a very, very heavily requested episode. And one of the many people to request it is Sista, who works at a waxing salon in the Netherlands. And who better, quite frankly, to ask about this one?

• 4:27Speaker 05

  Hi Kate, it's Sista from the Netherlands. I really enjoy the podcast. I love history and I like a good fun fact. I work in a waxing salon and I'm often chatting to customers about those weird facts. Sometimes I talk about how the history of body hair and what we like or dislike about it has really changed a lot. But I'm a bit low on the fun facts and I want or two. So maybe you can do an episode? Thank you. Bye.

• 4:59Kate Lister?

  Well, we would be thrilled to supply you and your customers with some historical pubic hair facts. So get your tweezers at the ready, Betwixters. Me and Professor Jill Burke are gonna get pubic.

• 5:17Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwix the Sheets. It's only Jill Burke. How are you doing?

• 5:23Speaker 05

  I'm, as always, delighted to be talking to you about a subject close to our hearts.

• 5:28Kate Lister?

  And apparently close to a lot of other people's hearts, because this is one of our most requested episodes, history of pubic hair. It just like, people just want to know.

• 5:40Speaker 05

  It's an important topic.

• 5:41Kate Lister?

  It's deceptively important, actually.

• 5:44Speaker 05

  Actually, yeah. I mean, we joke about it, but actually it's very fascinating when you get, you delve into the history. It's gonna be so many puns, when you delve into the history of it.

• 5:54Speaker 05

  Because it's really about how people change their bodies in the light of things that are happening around them and the culture that's around them. But in a way that it's really hard to find out about as a historian. So it's, it's a really good topic for history, I think.

• 6:07Kate Lister?

  And change their bodies in a way that isn't visible to most people. Unless I'm wrong about that, unless you have uncovered cultures where pubic hair was on full display 24/7 and it was like a really big deal.

• 6:20Speaker 05

  Well, there might be.

• 6:21Kate Lister?

  I haven't heard of any of them.

• 6:22Speaker 03

  You know, this is disclaimer. You know, my expertise is mainly in in European cultures. And certainly I'd say in most of European history, that's not been the case. And so a lot of the kind of history and the delving into this, do you keep using the word delve? Yeah, delve into the subject that me and other historians have had to do. You've got to be a bit kind of creative about the kind of sources that you're using. And also aware that sometimes quite small sources, you have to use quite small sources to make quite a big story. With subjects like this, but I've checked, I've double checked everything. I'm gonna try, honestly. And everything that I've been looking at is based on this primary information.

• 7:04Kate Lister?

  Because we think of pubic hair fashion as being something that dates from the nineties. It's very easy to think that with the advent of the Brazilian wax and Sex and the City making us all think about pubes. And there's a sort of temptation to think that from day dot until about nineteen ninety seven, everyone was just full bush, a thicket, just rocking that seventies, that seventies vibe.

• 7:29Speaker 03

  Letting themselves go wild.

• 7:31Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 7:32Speaker 03

  And beautiful. And yeah, no, that's not true at all. So there's evidence of pubic hair removal from very ancient times, so probably ancient Egypt.

• 7:42Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 7:42Speaker 03

  Certainly ancient Greece. And it's a fashion that comes and goes through history. People sometimes tell this this story, like there's a straight line that goes no hair removal to complete hair removal. But that's not how it works. And different cultures and different historical periods have fashions for this. So it's got a history that's thousands of years old with particular points in history where it becomes more fashionable and more possible for women to remove their pubic hair and where people start to discuss it in sources.

• 8:16Kate Lister?

  And has men's pubic hair been subject to as many changes as women's have?

• 8:22Speaker 03

  That is a good question. I think in ancient, I've come across discussions of men's pubic hair. Uh, some of the time, it tends to be in many societies, and again, this is western societies. Masculinity and hairiness are associated with each other.

• 8:39Kate Lister?

  Yes, they are.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  And so although there's a bit of evidence for men shaping their pubic hair in ancient Greece, for example. There's less discussion of men's pubic hair generally.

• 8:53Kate Lister?

  Hmm.

• 8:53Speaker 03

  There's ancient texts that say that pubic hair in both men and women kind of adorns the body. It's there to adorn the genitals.

• 9:01Kate Lister?

  I like that.

• 9:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, that is nice. I think that's a really nice way of looking at it. But there's probably less discussion of men's pubic hair, just tends to hang around men's pubic hair.

• 9:11Kate Lister?

  It does, doesn't it? I hope that they've trimmed it though throughout history. I think that that's important.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  I mean, certainly if you look at sculpture, like ancient Greek sculpture looks very groomed.

• 9:21Kate Lister?

  Doesn't it?

• 9:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:22Kate Lister?

  It does.

• 9:22Speaker 03

  So, and this probably does react, you know, it might well be late to practise.

• 9:26Kate Lister?

  Ah, so in Islamic history and custom, hair removal was incredibly common.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  Yes, there's two separate histories really. So you get this classical history where people sometimes remove their hair. There's less patchy evidence for it. And then you, from the early middle, I'm sorry.

• 9:54Speaker 03

  You get, you know, the start of Islamic bathing practices.

• 9:57Kate Lister?

  Yep.

• 9:57Speaker 03

  So when the bath plays a really important role in many different Islamic cultures. And certainly you start to get European travellers from the Middle Ages, from the 10th, 11th centuries saying, what are they doing? These people in their baths are completely removing all their body hair for both men and women. And that kind of feeds into European practices. In Spain, because Islamic cultures in Spain, right up to the fifteenth century. And Jewish and Christian and Islamic women are sharing beauty recipes, sharing recipes for medicine, sharing recipes for all sorts of cosmetics as well. And also sharing recipes for hair removal.

• 10:36Speaker 03

  And so then when you get the Jewish expulsion from Spain in fourteen ninety two, a lot of these women come to Italy. Italy's the centre of printing in the later fifteenth, early sixteenth centuries. And so then you get these recipes for hair removal start to be spread all around Europe. So I think that, again, we're talking about evidence, it's really difficult to get secure evidence for this, but that seems to be probably how Islamic. Mixtures for hair removal spread around the rest of Europe, but stop. But it's mainly the Mediterranean, there's different kind of, in Germany and England, they're a bit suspicious of hair removal.

• 11:12Kate Lister?

  That sounds about right for us, to be completely honest. There's lots of accounts of British. People and Celtic people being very confused by what they saw during the Crusades, which was mostly people cleaning themselves.

• 11:30Speaker 03

  I mean, you get that a lot in Northern Europe, like, why?

• 11:37Kate Lister?

  God almighty.

• 11:39Speaker 03

  I mean, I suppose that a lot of the hair removal, particularly in hotter places, is to do with hygiene.

• 11:43Kate Lister?

  Oh, it probably is, isn't it?

• 11:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, certainly some of it, I reckon, because if you know the, you know, how common lice were.

• 11:52Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 11:53Speaker 03

  Scabies, that kind of thing, it's really common as well all over the place. And so presumably removing all your body hair would have prevented some of that contact, particularly for little insects like lice would have. Would have prevented.

• 12:07Kate Lister?

  And in Islamic traditions and Jewish tradition, body hair removal is also about being clean. And you see this idea repeating and changing and other people reacting to it, the idea that taking the hair away somehow makes you cleaner.

• 12:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, this is something that you get repeated, right? Up to now, right?

• 12:26Kate Lister?

  Up to now, yeah.

• 12:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, and so that's, you know, it's part of what was happening in baths. You know, a lot of these rituals and what was happening in baths wasn't just to do with what we would think of as washing.

• 12:37Kate Lister?

  Hmm.

• 12:37Speaker 03

  With them soap or whatever, you know, they're scraping the skin as well. And what we might think of as exfoliation. So there's a big range of bathing practices that go on, but it's associated with cleanliness, the idea of hair removal. But yeah, mainly in these Mediterranean cultures, which makes sense because they're hotter. And maybe certainly there's pictures from the sixteenth century, the European pictures, so they're quite, you know, orientalising and they're kind of fetishised. What's going, they really do fetishise in Europe, what goes on in Islamic women's baths, particularly Turkish baths and baths in North Africa and Egypt. And there's pictures of women with like see-through gowns on when you can see that they've got no body hair. So, yeah, it's associated with cleanliness, both ritually.

• 13:22Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  But also probably in practical terms as well.

• 13:24Kate Lister?

  I just got back from a week in Pompeii and I was lucky enough to talk to the head curator of the site, Sophie Hay there. And she showed me around the brothel and it was amazing. But one of the things she said did stay with me because I knew I was going to be talking to you. And she said, when the brothel in Pompeii was excavated, they found evidence of razors. And there was a lot of washing and hygiene equipment, as you might expect, but they found lots of razors there. Which has sort of led to this discussion around, would that have been the people that were working there shaving the clients, like shits and giggles? Or as I suspect it might have been, is they removing their own body hair?

• 14:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's quite possible, or each other's body hair.

• 14:09Kate Lister?

  Or each other's body hair, yeah.

• 14:11Speaker 03

  Because there's a lot of associations between sex work and body hair removal.

• 14:17Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 14:18Speaker 03

  Historically, you know, some of it is, it's really hard to, sometimes to extricate.

• 14:23Kate Lister?

  Hmm.

• 14:24Speaker 03

  Historical insults, right? Oh, you know, this is so shit with sex workers and therefore it's sinful on what actually happened in practice. But certainly in the sources that I know the best, there's a connection between sex work. Hair removal and immigration.

• 14:39Kate Lister?

  Oh, I wasn't expecting it to go there. Wow, okay.

• 14:42Speaker 03

  And a lot of these Jewish immigrants who came to Italy did work in this kind of world where women didn't have much money, were more likely to do sex work and were also more likely to do the kind of jobs like hair removal.

• 14:55Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 14:56Speaker 03

  Beauty stuff. So it might have been the same. It's very difficult because it's thousands of years different because I'm looking at fifteen hundred. But it wouldn't surprise me if it was kind of similar if poorer women, but also the women who were more likely to do the kind of

• 15:10Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 15:10Speaker 03

  beautician work, but hair removal work. And that's, and that's also what happened in baths later on as well. Baths also become a centre for hair removal, but are also a centre for sex work.

• 15:19Kate Lister?

  What that shows in Pompeii is clearly someone was having their hair removed.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:23Kate Lister?

  In the brothel. So that suggests some kind of fashion.

• 15:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think so.

• 15:29Kate Lister?

  When do we kind of get to the point where we've got any more kind of concrete evidence that we can get our fingers into and be like, this was a definite thing that was happening?

• 15:39Speaker 03

  There's a great text that I probably talked about before last time called Ela Lotzana and Alucia, which is a funny play about an immigrant from Spain who comes to Italy and sets up like this beautician. And they talk about removing pubic hair, that women come to them and they say, we want to get our pubic hair removed because that's how our husbands like it. Or they say, we want to get our pubic hair removed. Most of the Roman women don't do this and it's, you know, it's better for us to get so that, you know, we stand out from the crowd. This is like fifteen twenty four. So there's evidence then that gives a good amount of evidence that people are starting to think about this as a fashion.

• 16:15Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 16:15Speaker 03

  And that men are starting to expect it. And it's interesting with classical art, if you look at like sculptures of Venus, they never have pubic hair.

• 16:22Kate Lister?

  They never have pubes, do they?

• 16:24Speaker 03

  No.

• 16:24Kate Lister?

  Do you think that that is like related to the fact why so many of the statues have tiny little willies? With the women, they just don't have any detail there at all. It's like a Barbie doll.

• 16:34Speaker 03

  It's interesting that there's no pubic hair on statues of Venus in the Middle Ages, in the fourteenth century, fifteenth century, you do get pubic hair.

• 16:42Kate Lister?

  Who put pubes on Venus?

• 16:43Speaker 03

  Many images of Venus, yeah, particularly in Northern Europe and in Germany, but also in Spain. So this fashion, when you get the interest in, you know, in classical sculpture and the Renaissance, then they start removing all the body hair from all their nudes. But before then, you do get depictions of pubic hair. So I think they go hand in hand. I think this, you know, what's happening in the visual record probably both reflects and affects the way that women think their bodies should look and that men are expecting to see in women. Because you know, there's that famous story of the art critic John Ruskin, who

• 17:22Speaker 03

  allegedly anyway, yeah, really shocked by his wife's heavy grey pubic hair. Because he was expecting her to be, you know, like a classical sculpture. But I think that's one of the, also one of the fascinating things. This difference between expectation

• 17:37Kate Lister?

  And the reality.

• 17:38Speaker 03

  Of what people's bodies bodies look like under clothes and what visual culture tells people to expect.

• 17:43Kate Lister?

  Hmm.

• 17:43Speaker 03

  And your actual, real, living bodies.

• 17:46Kate Lister?

  By the time you get to the Renaissance, and this is your area of study, and I don't know the Italian texts that well. But I do know that British texts, there's quite a few of them, by which I mean four or five, but in historical terms, that's in this particular subject of clothes.

• 18:02Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 18:03Kate Lister?

  And they talk about pubic hair removal as being the Italian custom, that it's something Italian women do, the Italian wenches do it. And there's quite a lot of, again, confusion and bafflement from the Brits about this.

• 18:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, the reason why they associate with Italians is that a lot of the makeup texts, the recipe texts that get published in the 16th century are Italian. So you get things like Alessia Piamontes's Book of Secrets.

• 18:31Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 18:32Speaker 03

  And that is first published in Italian in 1558, I think. And then it's translated, it goes all over Europe and there's several editions in English. And the English editions, the first, the earliest ones, change the text about hair removal.

• 18:47Kate Lister?

  Really?

• 18:47Speaker 03

  And they say, yeah, they say, oh, this is to remove the hair from the, the chins of young men.

• 18:54Kate Lister?

  No, it's not.

• 18:57Speaker 03

  It's not what it's for. Like, whereas the Italian texts quite explicitly say it's to remove hair from anywhere on the body. And then, so you get those books and things like Giovanni Monalison and Nenti, which I wrote about in my, in my book, that has a whole section on body hair and says, if you don't remove your body hair, especially if you're going around looking like a wild beast, you can't blame your husband for leaving you and going off with another woman. And so it's like, by the 1560s in Italy, if you don't remove your body hair, you're not the norm. And it looks like that again. You know, with this abundance of texts about, you know, five. But in England, yeah, it's, it just doesn't translate that. Yeah.

• 19:39Kate Lister?

  The ones that I've looked at, there's a real sense that like, Bush is lush. Like, I often think of it as, when I was teaching the students, I was like, the way that the Italians and us today look at it is like this kind of super smooth. Like, you know, it's like a baby bird. There's no hair on it at all. Whereas the Brits seem to have this idea of like, it's almost like a big, thick, full thatch of lusciousness, like, like a cat with a silky coat. And their view in the Italians is like a balding mangy cat with, and they, they look at it with the same kind of, ew.

• 20:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's so interesting, this cultural difference. Say merkins, which, you know, I haven't come across those in Italian texts at all. Whereas, so this idea that you could actually have a pubic wig would be like, why? In Italy, because they, they do kind of fetishize, there's really strict about what you should look like in Italian texts. And they've got such an amount of visual culture, you know, nudes, female nudes really saturate their visual culture from the 16th century onwards. They just kind of pop up everywhere, all over the place. And so I think accustomed to seeing women without any pubic hair. So that's, I think that's what they expect.

• 20:50Kate Lister?

  That's what they expect. Whereas the Brits, they wanted like this kind of lush pelt and you can find like odd insults turning up of, who was it? Was it John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, who talks about having sex with someone and it was like rustling because the merkin was, was moving. And he's like really revolted by this patchy pubic hair thing. And

• 21:13Speaker 03

  That's amazing.

• 21:14Kate Lister?

  For anyone who's listening, doesn't know what a merkin is, can you just explain that? And why on earth you would use such a thing?

• 21:21Speaker 03

  Well, a merkin is a wig, but for your pubic area. And so they're just like furry triangles, aren't they?

• 21:27Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 21:27Speaker 03

  It's almost got a mythical status, a merkin, really. Because again, it's really hard to find very much out about them. But certainly they're not used, I haven't come across them in Southern Europe.

• 21:38Kate Lister?

  No, they wouldn't be.

• 21:39Speaker 03

  They're tuned to be just talked about in England.

• 21:41Kate Lister?

  We haven't, I don't think we've actually found any of them. We've got like references.

• 21:46Speaker 03

  Replicas, yeah.

• 21:47Kate Lister?

  Replicas, references. I think it was John Wilmot again who talks about somebody using fat, like goose fat or something. And then like putting hair on top of that and trying to like, like so that.

• 21:58Speaker 03

  Sounds lovely.

• 21:58Kate Lister?

  It sounds delicious, doesn't it? It sounds absolutely yummy. But why would you do this? Why would somebody not have all their pubic hair to the point where they needed a wig? And they, you know, to create this luscious pelting.

• 22:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, that's something that is interesting because there's like smallpox epidemics.

• 22:17Kate Lister?

  Yep.

• 22:17Speaker 03

  And smallpox causes you to lose your hair, both on your head, but in other places too. And there's just a lot of skin problems.

• 22:25Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 22:26Speaker 03

  And disease that they don't really have many options for getting rid of. So I'm talking about things like scabies particularly, or various pox, a lot of different kind of lice. And I suppose if, it'd be interesting to find out in the English context, if you're removing pubic hair to get rid of lice, for example, pubic lice.

• 22:44Kate Lister?

  Probably were, weren't they?

• 22:46Speaker 03

  Your merkin would come in handy.

• 22:49Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 22:49Speaker 03

  Because it would suggest you don't have pubic lice.

• 22:52Kate Lister?

  I suppose syphilis as well, that's knocking around, isn't it?

• 22:55Speaker 03

  Quite a lot of syphilis, particularly obviously if you're a sex worker or just married to a guy.

• 23:02Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 23:03Speaker 03

  Unfortunately. So, yeah, and, and again, and you know, there's treatments as well. So they're using things like mercury and arsenic as treatments for these things as well. So maybe again, it's part of treatment that you remove body hair, even in an English context, I can imagine that would be something that you might want to do.

• 23:19Kate Lister?

  It's, there is a link between patchy pubes and illness. You can see that, like where it crops up in the, in the English texts.

• 23:28Speaker 03

  Because when we read all these beauty texts, you, you imagine people's having bodies that are similar to our bodies today. But actually, they're just afflicted by all these illnesses that thankfully we can normally get rid of if you have them nowadays.

• 23:50Speaker 03

  I'll be back with Jill after this short break.

• 24:06Kate Lister?

  Autumn is underway at last, which means the nights are closing in and everything in nature feels like it's just slowing down, except us, of course. For most of us, me included, the world still has a lot of demands on us that can feel like a lot to deal with. There will be a time in all of our lives when we could use therapy, but often when you try to do that, it's still way harder than it should be. Finding a therapist is hard enough, but finding one who actually takes your insurance? That's where most online therapy platforms fall short. Many don't work with insurance at all, which means you're stuck paying the full cost out of pocket or paying for an expensive monthly subscription.

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• 25:28Kate Lister?

  Hello, Betwixters. I am jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up a camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there, and the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Would you believe us if we told you there was a podcast that was haunted? Well, there is. It's called Two Girls, One Ghost. We didn't want to believe it at first, but we can no longer ignore it. Two girls... Girls One Ghost is the most haunted podcast in America. We're talking ghosts caught on camera. Demonic possessions. Cursed mirrors. Bigfoot. Poltergeists. Exorcisms. Near death experiences. Unsolved mysteries. Missing persons. Each week, we explore the deepest, darkest, spookiest places in the world. Tune in to Two Girls One Ghost wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen at your own risk.

• 26:45Kate Lister?

  If you were a lady in Italy who needed to take your pubes off because that's just what your husband expects because he saw it on a statue and it looked nice. How, how would you do that? I mean, because I'm thinking like now you can nip down the shop and get a disposable razor, but they, the razors they had at the time were those cutthroat razors. And I would feel very cautious about putting that near my chuff, wouldn't you?

• 27:11Speaker 03

  This is ancient Greece. They didn't use razors in the Renaissance, but there's an ancient Greek image from a vase of someone using one of those razors.

• 27:18Kate Lister?

  Oh, my God.

• 27:20Speaker 03

  Pubic area. Yes, there is. But there's another one where someone burning them off, burning their pubic hair off with a lamp.

• 27:26Kate Lister?

  All right, yeah, I'll take the razor.

• 27:28Speaker 03

  I know. Given the choice.

• 27:31Kate Lister?

  My God.

• 27:33Speaker 03

  So in the Middle Ages, so this again is comes probably from Islamic bath culture, spreading through Europe. They used a paste made out of arsenic and quicklime.

• 27:43Kate Lister?

  Of course they did.

• 27:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. So you'd make this paste. You'd often use it in a bath because there's not a lot of running water, remember in this period. So you go to the public baths.

• 27:53Kate Lister?

  I'm like being next to the person who's decided to put that smear that on themselves.

• 27:58Speaker 03

  You're smearing that all over your body.

• 28:00Kate Lister?

  Oh.

• 28:00Speaker 03

  And then you have to, it's like Veet, right? It's like these, these are the paste. And you have to time it. And of course they don't have watches. Clocks, but not in baths. And so they say things like, say the Lord's prayer twice.

• 28:14Kate Lister?

  Holy God. Oh, wow. Okay. Nice.

• 28:17Speaker 03

  So you say, you say the Lord's prayer twice or whatever they do. And then you start to try and take it off your skin. And if you don't take it off quickly enough, it starts to burn.

• 28:29Kate Lister?

  I bet it does.

• 28:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. So it's all about timing. And then it says, and get the bath attendant or the maid to kind of pour water all over you really quickly. So you take it off with a cloth. And then you pour water all over yourself to get rid of it.

• 28:42Kate Lister?

  Does it work?

• 28:43Speaker 03

  You know, they won't let me try it.

• 28:45Kate Lister?

  No, I bet they won't. I know you've done some experiment.

• 28:46Speaker 03

  Health and safety gone mad.

• 28:51Kate Lister?

  All right. Yeah. Okay. Let's, let's not try that one.

• 28:53Speaker 03

  I think it would work because it's very highly alkaline and that's how feet works. It just burns.

• 28:58Kate Lister?

  Those modern day depilatory creams, other brands are available. They're shit. They're shit. They don't work and they stink.

• 29:07Kate Lister?

  They're crap.

• 29:07Speaker 03

  And you also, you, you've time, time to leave them on for long enough before they start.

• 29:12Kate Lister?

  They still burn. They still burn. They smell terrible and they don't, they're all hair.

• 29:17Speaker 03

  It's like lots of, lots of like hairs that don't come out. They're really rubbish.

• 29:22Kate Lister?

  It's like hundreds of years on and it's still all kind of shit.

• 29:26Speaker 03

  I wonder though, if the really hard stuff, you know, that quick lime, if we were allowed to try it.

• 29:33Kate Lister?

  People would as well. We should, we should probably say, please for fuck's sake, don't try it.

• 29:38Speaker 03

  Absolutely don't try it.

• 29:40Kate Lister?

  Please. But how about something like waxing or sugaring or threading? Surely someone must have worked. I don't know the history of waxing if they, cause I know that they use like, you can't just get a candle and do it. That would be awful. And like you sort of melt it on you. You had to have special wax. But was there any evidence for that?

• 29:58Speaker 03

  I'm being very strict with myself here, but the only references I've heard for pubic hair removal is this mixture with quick lime and other things that definitely don't work like ants eggs and cat dung. Things like that, that probably I don't, I just don't see how they could possibly work. But they do have waxing. They use things like tree gums. So like pine resin that's really, really sticky. You put it on, you leave it to dry and then you rip it off.

• 30:22Kate Lister?

  Yep.

• 30:23Speaker 03

  They use that. They use sugaring in some, sugar's quite expensive.

• 30:27Kate Lister?

  Oh God, it is, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, that's true.

• 30:29Speaker 03

  Probably wouldn't use sugaring.

• 30:30Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 30:31Speaker 03

  Probably later on in, in, you know, when you get into the, when sugar gets cheaper in the eighteenth and nineteenth. And she's, I don't see why they wouldn't use sugar. And they definitely use things like, you know, waxing with sheets of cotton. They do exactly the same thing as we did. It's a quite a simple process, really, really waxing.

• 30:47Kate Lister?

  I wonder if they were using it on pubic hair. It seems very strange that we would have evidence that they would opt for like this quicklime stuff over like wax. That to me sort of suggests that they hadn't put two and two together because why on earth would you use that over waxing?

• 31:03Speaker 03

  Unless they think there's other reasons for it. So for example, arsenic was often used to get rid of lice and as an insecticide generally. It also whitens skin a little bit. So it might have been there were other reasons to use this paste.

• 31:18Kate Lister?

  That could be.

• 31:19Speaker 03

  They did just thread eyebrows, but I think that might be a bit complicated in pubic hair.

• 31:23Kate Lister?

  There's, there's mention about in, in Roman texts about men in baths having their hair plucked, their body hair plucked with tweezers presumably.

• 31:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, with tweezers. Yeah, there's definitely, but that would take a long time.

• 31:35Kate Lister?

  That would be horrible.

• 31:37Speaker 03

  And yeah, it would be really painful.

• 31:39Kate Lister?

  Yeah, like your whole bush just plucked out. Oh, no.

• 31:45Speaker 03

  That's why it's not nice.

• 31:47Kate Lister?

  It would have grown back by the time.

• 31:50Speaker 03

  By the time you got out of the bath.

• 31:53Kate Lister?

  Yeah, all right. So that one's not going to work. That's kind of crap.

• 31:55Speaker 03

  I think the main way they did it was this paste and razors. They did say in the sources, you shouldn't use razors because the hair grays back thicker.

• 32:03Kate Lister?

  That's true. That's true.

• 32:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, it kind of grows back coarser, doesn't it? Because you've chopped the kind of fine ends of it. So, yeah, they do say not to use razors. And also, yeah, the cut throat, you know, maybe it would, given they've not got any safety razors, that wouldn't be.

• 32:17Kate Lister?

  Am I right in thinking that there's a witchy association between pubic hair and?

• 32:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's quite sad.

• 32:24Kate Lister?

  I hadn't seen this one come in at all. It's very sad and very, there's a straggled route to this one. But what's the link between pubic hair and witchcraft?

• 32:33Speaker 03

  Well, people, when they were accused of witchcraft, the inquisitors would have them completely shaved from top, you know, below them in the neck downwards. And sometimes their head as well, in order to check to see if they have hidden signs or amulets or magic implements that the devil has put there. So there's evidence for this in witch trials in northern Italy, near Lake Como in fourteen eighty five, in which somewhere about a hundred and twenty women were killed. And it's like a shaming ritual, but it's also like this kind of humiliation, you know, to have that done in front of men.

• 33:13Speaker 03

  And so in Germany, in the fifteen twenties and thirties, just as the witch craze is starting, it's before you get this massive swathe of people just chasing down witches. They do have this obsession with pictures of people staring into pubic hair. There's a few. There's just people staring at pubic hair as if there's something secret hidden there.

• 33:33Kate Lister?

  I'm not familiar with the trials in Germany and Italy, but I know a few about the ones in the, in the UK. And were, were they doing what the inquisitors here were doing, which was, yeah, they're looking for like bite marks or but like something that the devil left his mark there.

• 33:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, or sometimes just like kind of tokens or amulets that could be kind of concealed.

• 33:54Kate Lister?

  Hidden in your pubic hair. The devil's left an amulet in your pubic hair.

• 33:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, it's like an excuse, isn't it, to just degrade women as much as possible.

• 34:06Kate Lister?

  Do you know what? The shaving women has a really long history as

• 34:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:10Kate Lister?

  a shaming thing. And it's usually the head that is shaved. And you see that like right up until, I still see it today, I suppose, but certainly after the Second World War, when in France, when women were being accused of being Nazi collaborators, they'd be paraded in the street and have their head shaved. Pubic hair removal is kind of, I, I think that it sort of plays into that as well in these witch trials.

• 34:34Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And also in a man's space, because when we're talking about pubic hair removal, normally in, in say bathhouses or at home, you'd be in a female only space.

• 34:44Kate Lister?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:45Speaker 03

  So what you're doing is, is taking that kind of very intimate female only experience and putting it out and exposing it in front of a bunch of men who were, when you're on trial. It's really awful. Even the inquisitors who are writing about this, they talk about this in the Malia's Malafakaran, which is this really famous witch hunting manual that comes out that's written by the Germans in the late fifteenth century. Even they say it's a really shameful thing.

• 35:12Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 35:12Speaker 03

  And that we don't actually do this in Germany because it's too shameful.

• 35:15Kate Lister?

  I mean, and that comes to something if the fucking Malia's Malafakaram is going, that's a bit too far.

• 35:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. So you can imagine how, how much stigma there is, even to expose women like that, to expose their nakedness like that. It's awful. Yeah.

• 35:28Kate Lister?

  There's an undeniable sexual undertone to a lot of these trials across Europe, like this insistent on searching in women's genitals to the point where they're going to

• 35:35Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 35:36Kate Lister?

  shave them and it's horrible.

• 35:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's really awful. And, you know, you see all these, and it's like this, thousands of thousands of women are involved. And it's, you know, because of the way that people talk about witches and it's kind of funny and all this kind of thing, we kind of forget the actual horror of these witch trials sometimes. But this kind of invasion of the most intimate parts of the body is, is part of this history as well.

• 36:01Kate Lister?

  Do you think that that kind of leaked out into a sort of a wider narrative around pubic hair? And maybe witchcraft, I was gonna, maybe not completely witchcraft, but the idea that there's something subversive about not having pubic hair.

• 36:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. Not having pubic hair has often been associated with people who are on the edges of like, of society. We've talked about sex workers, we've talked about

• 36:25Kate Lister?

  People with syphilis.

• 36:26Speaker 03

  Witches, people with syphilis, yeah. It's kind of not respectable.

• 36:31Kate Lister?

  Yeah. And of course, the people who definitely don't have pubic hair, that we often don't talk about in these things are kids.

• 36:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:37Kate Lister?

  It's a strange signifier that as an adult, you would remove this sort of marker of you are fully pubescent and you are no longer a child, isn't it?

• 36:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. And that's a disturbing thing. That is actually a disturbing thing about what it suggests. Does it suggest, say, you know, girls were getting married often at fourteen to sixteen? You know, what does it suggest about male taste in?

• 37:01Kate Lister?

  Yep.

• 37:02Speaker 03

  In women's bodies. So there's also this undercurrent of things, you know, it's like everything to do with like altering the body. Sometimes you can say, oh, this is to do with women's agency and it's to do with women doing what they want with their own bodies and using their bodies to kind of get ahead in society, whatever. And then sometimes it's about men's taste and taking away women's agency and treating them, wanting them to be more childlike. So it's always like all these things, it's complicated. Yeah.

• 37:34Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Jill after this short break.

• 37:54Speaker 06

  In a world where swords were sharp.

• 37:57Kate Lister?

  And hygiene was actually probably better than you think it is. Two fearless historians.

• 38:02Speaker 06

  Me, Matt Lewis.

• 38:04Kate Lister?

  And me, Dr. Eleanor Yanaga, dive headfirst into the mud, blood, and very strange customs of the Middle Ages.

• 38:11Speaker 06

  So for plagues, crusades, and Viking raids, and plenty of other things that don't rhyme, subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  Would you believe us if we told you there was a podcast that was haunted? Well, there is. It's called Two Girls, One Ghost. We didn't want to believe it at first, but we can no longer ignore it. Two Girls, One Ghost is the most haunted podcast in America. We're talking ghosts caught on camera. Demonic possessions. Cursed mirrors. Bigfoot. Poltergeists. Exorcisms. Near-death experiences. Unsolved mysteries. Missing persons. Each week, we explore the deepest, darkest, spookiest places in the world. Tune in to Two Girls, One Ghost wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen at your own risk.

• 39:11Kate Lister?

  I spoke to Professor Helen King a while ago, who is the expert on all things Greek and gynecological. And I put the small willy question to her. I was just interested. I was just interested to what she would say. And I've never heard anyone give this response before. I was like, oh, okay. She thought that the tiny willies was actually a marker of childhood because they worshiped the boy, the boy body in Greek history and in Roman history, and right up to the Renaissance, this idea of like, boy love, the young, the young man. Yeah. And then suddenly, like, the conversation wasn't funny anymore. I was like, wow, okay, Helen. But I thought that's interesting. And then maybe like what you were just saying

• 39:52Kate Lister?

  there about the women not having pubic hair on those statues and those images, maybe that's a hark back to childhood, too.

• 39:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting. Certainly in the early part of the Renaissance in Italy, you do get this real interest in young boys. You think of the sculpture by Donatello called the David, as in David McGlyth, the Bronze David, and he's not got any pubic hair and he's definitely meant to be kind of younger, but also there's kind of uncomfortable, whether it's kind of fetishisation, sexualisation or not, or whether it's, you know, whether that's not an appropriate question, that's a big debate amongst art historians still. But then you get things like Michelangelo's David, who is definitely a man.

• 40:36Kate Lister?

  It's definitely, it's definitely a man. He's got manly stuff going on, but he does have a little boy's holly. Just does.

• 40:44Speaker 03

  There was actually, in some of the texts on sculpture, they're very into proportion, in the Renaissance bodily proportion, and they do talk about the ideal proportion of a penis, yeah.

• 40:53Kate Lister?

  What did they? And do they say it should be a little one?

• 40:55Speaker 03

  I'll have to measure it out and see, because I haven't done that yet.

• 41:00Speaker 03

  Next time, next time I can tell you about that.

• 41:02Kate Lister?

  I'm getting us off topic now. We should get back to pubic hair. By the time you get to the Victorians, like through the 18th century into the Victorians, we're now getting like photographic evidence and sort of some of the earliest pornography, and it looks like there was pubic hair removal being practised around it.

• 41:18Speaker 03

  I think so. And actually, these books, you know, that recipe for arsenic and quick lime goes right through to the 19th century.

• 41:25Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 41:25Speaker 03

  So people are constantly using it. They're using it in America, they're using it in, you know, because printing goes all over the world. So they're using it everywhere and people are wanting against it for good reasons. And so, you know, you'd be better off shaving and things like that. But it looks like people are still, still using it and still removing their hair. But obviously, again, with the edges of society, it's presumably not particularly respectable women who are having themselves photographed naked. So it speaks to this kind of maybe unconventional world of women who conflate sexuality.

• 41:57Kate Lister?

  It does, doesn't it? When do pubes become political? Because pubic hair, it is a feminist issue now. Like the arguments about going back again to that childhood thing about like, why would you want to move your hair so you can just look like a little girl? And the fact that like even today in 2024, there is no real way of removing your hair that isn't either results, if you shave it, you'll end up with like loads of little ingrown hairs and it'll, it's just shit and it's tops itchy as hell. You can go to a waxer, but even the best waxer who can do it really quick, it's just fucking hurts.

• 42:30Kate Lister?

  So there is a kind of like, why are we doing this? But when did that start to happen? That feminists decided pubic hair, this is what we're going to talk about.

• 42:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I think this is, this debate used to be massive.

• 42:41Kate Lister?

  Huge.

• 42:42Speaker 03

  A few years ago, that you shouldn't remove your pubic hair because it's really anti feminist to do so, or any body hair, armpit hair as well. And do you remember that time when celebrities like Julia Roberts?

• 42:52Kate Lister?

  Julia Roberts.

• 42:54Speaker 03

  Came and she had armpit hair and everyone was like, wow.

• 42:56Kate Lister?

  On the red carpet and that was front page. God knows what they would have done if she got her pubes out, but she had armpit hair and that stopped the world's press.

• 43:06Speaker 03

  It really did. And so I think it's calmed down a little bit now, that debate. But it's certainly in the seventies, you know, second wave feminism, people were really vehement about, you know, almost betraying feminist ideals if we remove their body hair. Because, you know, you were bending to male ideas of what women's bodies should look like. So it was a key kind of matter for debate, this kind of what you did personally became very political. And, you know, last time I talked about this a few years ago, when I first started working the subject and people were like expecting me to get really angry about other people removing their pubic hair.

• 43:47Speaker 03

  I don't mind.

• 43:49Kate Lister?

  You can get up the energy, put dreadlocks in it if you like.

• 43:53Speaker 03

  Exactly. But, you know.

• 43:55Kate Lister?

  Macaroni pasta and sparkles, whatever you want.

• 43:58Speaker 03

  You know, I'd like to go on record, I don't mind what people do with their pubic hair. But at the same time, it's very interesting how politicised that debate got in the seventies, how it represented this kind of years of oppression. And I can understand why, because it is work, you know, it is body work. But a lot of that body work, I'm not just talking about hair removal, but it can be pleasing as well. You know, it's not, it's not just painful. There's also good things about it as well. So it's always a bit more nuanced, I think, than just saying it's the patriarchy.

• 44:27Kate Lister?

  And of course, the proliferation of porn, which we've always had, like you've spoken about the nude statues and the nude. So it's always influenced us, although, you know, it's not porn, it's erotic, whatever you want to say, but images of nude bodies. But the fact that we can now access porn as easily as we can. I mean, you might remember as I do, that really the only way you were going to see porn as a kid is if you found it in a hedge.

• 44:48Speaker 03

  Yes, by the side of a railway. You can look at it in a newsagent.

• 44:54Kate Lister?

  Yeah, I remember that. You'd find like stashes and like rips pits and maybe someone at your school would have a video that they were sending around and everything. But now if you've got a mobile device, you can see anything that you want. And that's got to have had an impact on.

• 45:09Speaker 03

  I think so, yeah. Because there's some evidence that pubic hair removal is much more common now. It's started to go up, you know, with the advent of the internet and it's age related as well. So people who were between 18 and 30 are much more likely to move their pubic hair than people who are older. So it's definitely a cultural thing. It's completely related to the availability of internet porn and because it's normal. Again, it's what's normal. And what he can see. It's visually normal. So that makes people think it's normal to remove their body hair and also for women to remove their body hair because men, it's more mixed.

• 45:47Kate Lister?

  They've never really had to deal with this crap, have they? Maybe a just a bit of a quick trim and they are on their way.

• 45:54Speaker 03

  Because it's what men are expecting as well, even more than women, maybe because a lot of men might not have had much experience of seeing women's bodies. So that's the way that this encounters women's naked bodies is mainly via porn. Yeah. So in fact, anybody should be very grateful for people showing them their bodies.

• 46:13Kate Lister?

  Just quietly grateful, I think.

• 46:15Speaker 03

  Whatever state they happen to be in. Just say thank you.

• 46:19Kate Lister?

  It's kind, it's sort of a weird one anyway, because I don't know the history on this, but I'd be willing to bet that nowhere in the history of men, straight men having sex with women, has there been a man that's gone, well, it was a bit untidy, so I thought I should just go home.

• 46:32Speaker 03

  If they do, they should go home.

• 46:34Kate Lister?

  They should go home, quite frankly.

• 46:36Speaker 03

  That's unacceptable.

• 46:38Kate Lister?

  That's, that's unacceptable. He's going to be a shit shag, quite frankly.

• 46:41Speaker 03

  I think a lot of these pressures are not to do with individuals and not to do with like individual that you might meet and whatever, but it's more to do with the sense of pressure, the sense of we're guessing what other people, what people are going to be expecting.

• 46:54Kate Lister?

  We're guessing what they're going to expect. Absolutely. And as a final question to you, I know that you're a lecturer at the university and I was too, which means that we have regular access to Gen Z and their conversations. And it does seem that there is something afoot with the youngsters when it comes to body hair. They're bringing it back, Jill. I've noticed.

• 47:15Speaker 03

  I think it's great.

• 47:17Speaker 03

  No, I mean, again, people should do whatever they want, but I think it's great that, you know, a big fan of Gen Z generally, big fan of teaching eighteen to twenty two year olds, love it. And they're just really feisty.

• 47:30Kate Lister?

  And they don't give a shit about body hair. Like, like, we've got, like, Julia Roberts, when that was absolute front page news, like, oh, my God. And now it's like a whole classroom full of Gen Z and all the women have got hairy pits. Nobody really gives, it's not even a statement.

• 47:43Speaker 03

  No, it's not a statement. It's like, I couldn't be bothered. Or I just don't want to.

• 47:47Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 47:48Speaker 03

  And that's absolutely fine. I'm too right.

• 47:50Kate Lister?

  So I think they're going to come through and probably save us off. But then eventually, eventually there'll be another pushback against it.

• 47:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Because all this stuff, if history teaches us anything about this, it's that it comes and waves and it goes, comes and goes again.

• 48:03Kate Lister?

  Well, as long as they're not using arse.

• 48:05Speaker 03

  Yes. I hope we haven't inadvertently brought that into fashion.

• 48:08Kate Lister?

  No, let's not bring that one back. Oh, Jill, you have been wonderful to talk to. You always are. And if people want to know more about you and your research, where can they find you?

• 48:18Speaker 03

  Well, I am at the University of Edinburgh in the History Department. And you can always buy my book. It's called How to Be a Renaissance Woman.

• 48:26Kate Lister?

  Very good.

• 48:27Speaker 03

  It's out with profoets and paperback. So it's not massively pricey. It, you know, it's quite good. I like it.

• 48:32Kate Lister?

  Very good. Thank you so much for talking to me today. I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

• 48:36Speaker 03

  Thanks so much for talking to me. Thank you so much about pubic hair. It's so great to talk to another pubic hair aficionado.

• 48:49Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Jill for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and follow along, whatever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject, or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you could email us at [email protected]. Coming up, we have the next installment in our limited series, The Secret Lives of the Six Wives and Michelangelo's Sex Life. Those two things do not have any crossover, by the way. But those episodes will be with you very soon. This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheet, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  Would you believe us if we told you there was a podcast that was haunted? Well, there is. It's called Two Girls, One Ghost. We didn't want to believe it at first, but we can no longer ignore it. Two Girls, One Ghost is the most haunted podcast in America. We're talking ghosts caught on camera. Demonic possessions. Cursed mirrors. Bigfoot. Poltergeists. Exorcisms. Near-death experiences. Unsolved mysteries. Missing persons. Each week, we explore the deepest, darkest, spookiest places in the world. Tune in to Two Girls, One Ghost wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen at your own risk.