Behind the Scenes Minis: Complicated Werewolf

Holly discusses the complicated nature of the Loudun possessions. Tracy talks about the ways that entertainment media can cause fear. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:33Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx, listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:04Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 1:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  Robert, Mick, Bill, and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love, and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune in to Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:07Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 2:18Holly Frey?

  Hello and happy Friday. I'm Holly Frey.

• 2:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 2:22Holly Frey?

  Uh, we talked about the possessions at Luton this week.

• 2:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yep.

• 2:27Holly Frey?

  This is one that's been on my list for a long time and I find it super fascinating. One, it's, it's one of those things that I find myself getting frustrated at because people that are really into the occult will use these instances of historical mass possessions in religious orders as proof that, you know, it must be a real thing because they're religious, they're fighting against demons, and yet there they are. And I'm like, oh, we should have a discussion. This is, and that's why this is a good example, because there were people that came forward and went, no, this whole thing is being used as a tool to get back at people that other people don't like and to try to

• 3:11Holly Frey?

  firmly entrench the Catholic Church as superior to the Protestant Church in this community.

• 3:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right.

• 3:19Holly Frey?

  And I love it for that reason.

• 3:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, this is, the other episode that we are recording in today's session is about a similar place and time. And like, this was a chaotic, difficult time to live in.

• 3:35Holly Frey?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  Like, we've got the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, large-scale disease epidemics, wars, like, so much stuff all happening. And then a group of people in a religious community, fairly isolated from everybody, adding a whole additional layer of like, the social and psychological things going on.

• 3:59Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 4:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 4:02Holly Frey?

  I mean, I, I think it also evidences, it's a very tricky subject because I don't want to denigrate or insult anyone's religious views. I do think, though, anytime you have an organization that puts itself...

• 4:18Holly Frey?

  Beyond the reach of transparency and any legal repercussions by saying, no, we're inherently, we have to be secret. It's for the greater good. That's just like a hotbed of potential exploitation.

• 4:33Tracy V. Wilson?

  Mm hmm.

• 4:34Holly Frey?

  And I really think, I mean, it seems so obvious to me, obviously, through the lens of the modern eye, to be like, oh, they recognize that Urbain Grandier was like, why don't we just throw open the doors, get rid of all of this dogma? We can talk openly about religion and what it means to be religious and not be so, you know, secretive about it. And they were like, that guy's got to die somehow. We have to figure out a way. Which is very fascinating. Listen, he also, though, was seemed perfectly happy to use his charms for his own wiles because he clearly wanted to get rid of the celibacy rule.

• 5:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right.

• 5:16Holly Frey?

  To, to make it cool for him to have sexual exploits with a lot of people. Which also, you know, becomes a whole other issue to debate.

• 5:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 5:27Holly Frey?

  Because there's a power dynamic involved in a religious figure. There's, there's a lot of problems there. Don't get me wrong. I'm, I don't want to make him into the hero of the story, although he did appear to be the victim. But this is also the, the thing, right? There's so much.

• 5:44Holly Frey?

  Humans are inherently gonna mochinate for their own best interest.

• 5:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 5:49Holly Frey?

  Or desires. And that's a, that's just inherently problematic. I don't know how to fix it. We haven't figured it out clearly in several hundred years.

• 5:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  I was gonna say, it's been hundreds of years. I'm so tired.

• 6:03Holly Frey?

  I'm so worn out. I really did do like reading a lot of the modern assessments of it that are careful and really thoughtful and try to take into account all of the things we do know while acknowledging all the things we don't and we can't.

• 6:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right.

• 6:20Holly Frey?

  You know, that, there's also the element of some of the people involved in these claims of demonic possession. Were probably faking and knew they were faking.

• 6:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  Sure.

• 6:31Holly Frey?

  And others 100% believed they were possessed.

• 6:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 6:35Holly Frey?

  And they are all grouped under one heading, so it makes it very hard to parse out and pick apart what was real and what was not.

• 6:44Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 6:45Holly Frey?

  Because to them, some things were real that other people would say were not. And that makes it very tricky.

• 6:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah. Well, and it's been a while since I've done an episode on this theme, but I have kind of a fascination with like, the especially medieval era mystics, some of whom were having experiences that to today's ear, like, they don't sound like a mentally well person.

• 7:12Holly Frey?

  Right.

• 7:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  They sound like someone who is having some kind of delusion going on. But I'm like, really interested in them and their experiences and how many of them like sincerely believed the things that they were describing to people. And how that simultaneously like grew out of the place and time they were living and set them apart from the place and time they were living.

• 7:37Holly Frey?

  Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I really am super fascinated by Jeanne Desange figuring out this path where she could say, no, no, I was in fact, once I was cleared of demons, there was divine spirit that entered me.

• 7:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  Mm hmm.

• 7:55Holly Frey?

  I don't know what to make of the scars on her arm.

• 7:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  Mm hmm.

• 8:00Holly Frey?

  It's the 1630s, so there's no photos. And also, this kind of master stroke of being like, I, I operate in this structure of the church where they are happy to suggest and believe and, and promote the idea that I was exorcised and that, you know, I then became in touch with higher angels.

• 8:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  Mm hmm.

• 8:25Holly Frey?

  And also, by the way, my angel said, what you said was wrong, and now you can't fight me because you already validated him.

• 8:34Holly Frey?

  I like, that is masterfully played. That, that part to me is very interesting. It's like she found this weird way through to empower herself. Yeah, it's all very, it's all very fascinating. I love doing any of the possession stories because.

• 8:52Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right.

• 8:53Holly Frey?

  One, the beauty of them is that. Because of all of these psychological aspects we've mentioned, there's no one truth.

• 9:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right.

• 9:02Holly Frey?

  So you can't say definitively anything and it just becomes a fun examination of what was going on.

• 9:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  Especially the ones in long ago history.

• 9:10Holly Frey?

  Yes. I do, I do like how much just legal battling there was in this one.

• 9:18Holly Frey?

  I love the idea that Grandier was just like lawsuit, lawsuit, lawsuit, just throwing them out like shuffling cards. He just sued everybody that irritated him, which is kind of, kind of fu- fun. Probably not for anybody involved with his life, but fun to read about.

• 9:35Holly Frey?

  Uh, I hope, I hope, I hope nobody's possessed. I mean, I have feelings. I have my own beliefs and thoughts. They may disappoint people.

• 9:48Speaker 04

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• 10:16Speaker 05

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• 10:18Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 10:39Speaker 05

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• 10:46Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 10:53Speaker 06

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• 10:59Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 11:10Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 11:16Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 11:59Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 12:22Speaker 06

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• 13:23Tracy V. Wilson?

  We talked about werewolves this week.

• 13:25Holly Frey?

  Sure did.

• 13:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  Especially specifically a guy named Peter, probably, whose name was spelled so many different ways. We had to stop and have multiple clarifying conversations while we were recorded.

• 13:40Holly Frey?

  Which, which pronunciation would you like me to use here?

• 13:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  I was like, it doesn't matter. I don't actually know that that was really what his name was. But yeah, so I, I was just looking for stuff to talk about in October. And I stumbled across this and realized, I was like, oh, we haven't done this. And actually, we have not talked that much about werewolves. And I did kind, I wanted to talk about how like this, as the big witch trials in early modern Europe and North America were happening, there was also this werewolf focus. I wasn't quite prepared for the level of gory-ness, even though the last time we talked about a werewolf, it was Gilles Garnier, and that was gory. I just had kind of forgotten.

• 14:26Holly Frey?

  I feel a little bit like a monster.

• 14:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 14:30Holly Frey?

  Because I was like, I thought this was gonna be gory.

• 14:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  Well, so the parts of it that really got me, the, like, the parts of me that I was like, oh, okay, I was not expecting that.

• 14:40Holly Frey?

  Eating the brain.

• 14:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  The, no, it was the, like, attacking pregnant women and tearing the fetus out of their body. Like.

• 14:48Holly Frey?

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  That, it was just, I was not, I was somehow, I was like, oh, that, that was more than I was expecting here. And then like, eating, eating the hearts of his victims. I was like, ah, not really.

• 14:59Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 15:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  Liking that. And had no idea when I got into it that there was also going to be like an incest element to it.

• 15:08Holly Frey?

  Yeah, that's, the, the sexual assault and whatnot is probably the part that I find the, the most unsettling, but I don't, I don't know why I don't perceive it as gory, even though those are all horrific things. I think part of it is because I don't trust that any of this is accurate.

• 15:25Tracy V. Wilson?

  Oh, sure, sure.

• 15:26Holly Frey?

  So my brain is just like, well, that's what they said, but I don't. It's not, it's not to diminish how frightening a possibility that is, but just like, I think because of the nature of like. These broadsheets and how many that we've, you know, discussed throughout the run of the show that are like, well, they kind of made stuff up to sell more copies that I I just perceive none of it is real.

• 15:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 15:50Holly Frey?

  Which is, is why I think I'm like, meh.

• 15:52Tracy V. Wilson?

  I have a different level of immersion in reading something versus if I'm watching a movie. Like, there have been movies that I have watched that I have, that have scared me so much that I have been able to like, feel the fear in my body.

• 16:13Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 16:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  As a physical experience. And I've read some books that are supposed to be really scary that like, that just has not been how I engage with like, the content of a book versus a movie that I'm watching.

• 16:29Holly Frey?

  Right.

• 16:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  Or maybe a TV show that's really scary. So anyway, I, we had a lot of things to read from. I tried to leave some of the like, atypical spellings in there.

• 16:44Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 16:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  But I did clean a lot of them up because this particular document had a lot of Vs that should have been Us.

• 16:55Holly Frey?

  Right.

• 16:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  And Us that should have been Vs. And a thing that took me a little while to remember, Js that looked like Is. There were a couple of words that I kind of stared at for a minute where I was like, I don't know what in the world this could possibly, oh, that's a J, not an I. Okay.

• 17:15Holly Frey?

  What are you getting at?

• 17:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah. We've talked about our love of unusual spellings before the push to standardize the spelling of everything in English.

• 17:31Holly Frey?

  This whole thing just makes me think about what we do in the shadows, so.

• 17:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 17:36Holly Frey?

  That's where my brain was the whole time.

• 17:37Tracy V. Wilson?

  Makes sense.

• 17:38Holly Frey?

  It's werewolves, that's werewolves. Oh, how I miss that show.

• 17:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  It's a very good show.

• 17:44Holly Frey?

  I will say, I am less of a werewolf person if we're in the zone of, you know, classical monsters.

• 17:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  Uh huh.

• 17:54Holly Frey?

  Than some others, and I don't know why, but I do love the fact that a girdle makes you a werewolf. I know it's not the girdle in the modern sense.

• 18:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  Uh huh.

• 18:02Holly Frey?

  But it makes me laugh so hard. It makes me want someone to draw a cartoon of like someone in a granny style girdle.

• 18:09Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right.

• 18:10Holly Frey?

  Turns them into a werewolf.

• 18:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah. I originally was trying to figure out whether I needed to explain why sometimes it was described as a belt and what, why sometimes it was described as a girdle. Because at the time, sometimes those words could be used almost interchangeably. They're both like a, a sort of accessory. That makes a cinching part around roughly the middle of your body.

• 18:40Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 18:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  But like the belt and the girdle can have slightly different in terms of like the garment and what is being done with them. And then I was like, this is not actually that important to the story.

• 18:52Holly Frey?

  I also, well, I, I mean, that's actually a thing that I find really fascinating because I also wonder about that particular type of garment being the one chosen that is transformative. Because of course, things that cinch in your body are transformative in some cases.

• 19:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 19:14Holly Frey?

  Have not always been accepted. Like I, my tight lacing diatribe hasn't come up in a long time, but like we, we in the modern era, I say we in the grand sense of we, not, not me, because I read a lot about it. There is a proclivity towards talking about how tight lacing was this weird habit of the past. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, there were always people who were like, that's not good for you. And so this idea of something that transforms your body in a possibly painful way. Or an uncomfortable way, being the thing that makes you into a monster is just a fun avenue to explore.

• 19:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  Oh, sure. Sure. Like, there are also stories that are clearly fictional stories about werewolves, like werewolf lore, fiction, poems, things like that, from around this era and the medieval period, that it's also like a belt or a skin, like have some similar things to like these werewolf stories from contemporary with the witch trials. So it's like, is this sort of just a thing that was drawn from existing ideas or not? But I also liked how sometimes it's it's an ointment or an unguent, and either the devil gave you the unguent, or

• 20:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  like, the devil gave you the recipe, so you could go make your own unguent to become a wolf.

• 20:38Holly Frey?

  I feel like there is so much money to be made with a skincare line called The Devil's Unguent.

• 20:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 20:47Holly Frey?

  Whoever among you is a modern apothecary of skincare elixirs, run with this. I will buy it all. I will buy-

• 20:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  Holly has given you the idea.

• 20:58Holly Frey?

  Will buy the entire line.

• 21:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah. I also, it caused me to have various thoughts about the modern world that we're living in now. And having moved from print culture into online culture, and how easy it is for misinformation to spread and feed on each other into a cycle.

• 21:22Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 21:23Tracy V. Wilson?

  That the thing that is spreading with the misinformation then informs things that happen, and then that feeds back into the misinformation cycle, like as evidence.

• 21:33Holly Frey?

  Yeah. I mean, it also, I feel like we are experiencing the parallels of what has come up in a couple of recent episodes, with times of great upheaval also being times when people cling to ideas of mysticism-

• 21:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  Oh, sure.

• 21:55Holly Frey?

  Or, you know, magic being a thing. And I feel like we're in a little bit of that right now, so.

• 22:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did not choose this episode because of current parallels. I chose it because of werewolves.

• 22:08Holly Frey?

  Not swearwolves.

• 22:13Holly Frey?

  That's maybe why I don't like werewolves if they don't swear so much.

• 22:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 22:18Holly Frey?

  I'm, I'm here for the rougarou and the rest. See ya.

• 22:25Tracy V. Wilson?

  I was telling Patrick what I was working on and he was like, oh, is it a werewolf? Or is it a luguru? And I was like, oh, luguru is just a French werewolf. And he was thinking, I don't remember which video game he was specifically referencing, but like, there is some video game where like a werewolf is one tier of enemy. And a luguru is like a more difficult version of the werewolf enemy. It's got more hit points, got to take more damage.

• 22:53Holly Frey?

  And then there's the Cajun rougarou that will just bring you fabulous food.

• 22:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah. You went to the rougarou festival that time, didn't you?

• 23:00Holly Frey?

  I haven't.

• 23:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  Okay.

• 23:02Holly Frey?

  I keep trying to go and the timing never works out.

• 23:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  I thought you did get to go one time. I made up a fiction in my head where you got to do this thing that you have wanted to do.

• 23:14Holly Frey?

  One year, it's gonna work for me.

• 23:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, anyway, that's our wandering discourse about werewolves and the rougarou festival. Whatever's happening on your weekend, I hope it's great. I hope if there is a strange werewolf running around your town, that it's just a person in an outfit, having a good time, not harming anybody in any way. Uh, we will be back with a Saturday classic tomorrow. We will have something brand new on Monday.

• 23:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 24:06Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 24:37Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 26:11Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.