Free Reign - Tooth & Claw

An Iranian American professor is on a date in the hills outside Tehran. She hears the thunder of galloping, and what comes over the crest will ignite an unbridled passion in her - defining her future and explaining her past. Plus, an urban legend about a chicken that turns out to be true. This is our final week of the Tooth & Claw series -- stay tuned next month for our collection of love stories in February... Fever. Do not miss it. No Reins An Iranian American professor is on a date in the hills outside Tehran. She hears the thunder of galloping, and what comes over the crest will ignite an unbridled passion in her - defining her future and explaining her past. This story contains state brutality and sexual situations, sensitive listeners please be advised. Thank you Pardis for speaking with Snap! Check out her book --Book of Queens https://www.amazon.com/Book-Queens-Middle-Eastern-Horsewomen/dp/0306832135 -- all about her time on horseback in Iran. Produced by Anna Sussman, original score by Dirk Schwarzhoff. Headless Chicken Some schoolyard stories are true, and so are some urban legends. This story contains descriptions of a chicken without a head, please take care while listening. For more information about Mike The Headless Chicken, including Fruita, Colorado’s annual Mike The Headless Chicken Festival, check out miketheheadlesschicken.org http://miketheheadlesschicken.org/ Produced by Joe Rosenberg, original score by Renzo Gorrio with additional instrumentation by Andrew Vickers. Season 17 - Episode 4 Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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

• 0:08Glynn Washington?

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• 2:37Glynn Washington?

  Okay, so I remember I'm reading Harry Potter to my kids. We're all clutched in tight, hanging on every word. In the dark place, next to Harry and Hermione, we're trapped by the lake and everywhere, all around, the mentors screech through the night, closing in, hungry to feed on our own despair, desperate to leave us hollow. Life gone, souls stolen, exhausted, spent, and Harry tries. Tries again to cast his spell, and again and again, nothing.

• 3:18Glynn Washington?

  Then broken, he realizes, we realize that the Calvary is not coming. There'll be no teachers, no Hagrid, no Dumbledore, no nobody is on their way. All Harry has is a memory of himself. And so he reaches and he calls forth that piece of himself, Patronus. Then a full-bodied silver stag charges from the darkness, adjoining with who he is and the animal's spirit. And that changes everything.

• 3:59Glynn Washington?

  But you have to understand, this doesn't just happen at Hogwarts. Because Patroni take many forms, and today on Snap Judgment, we're gonna meet one of them. Snap Judgment proudly presents Free Rein.

• 4:25Glynn Washington?

  Manu's from Washington. Expecto Patrono.

• 4:30Glynn Washington?

  And you're listening

• 4:34Glynn Washington?

  to Snap Judgment.

• 4:57Glynn Washington?

  Now, we've had alligators. And we've had monkeys on Snap's Tooth and Claw series, exploring the relationships with the creatures we share this world with. But on today's Free Rein episode, we're gonna highlight one of the most magical bonds of all. But first, let me ask you a question. Have you ever been drawn to something that you had no known connection to? Nothing at all, but there you are. You can't look away, you can't turn back. And yes, because this story occurs in real life, in the real world. Sensitive listeners should know that we referenced both state brutality and sexual situations. But you are not gonna wanna miss the end of this one.

• 5:43Glynn Washington?

  Because in the end, it all does make some kind of sense. Snap Judgment.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  When Pardee's Madhavi was a little girl, she kept on her bedside table a little wooden horse wrapped in string. It was given to her by her grandmother, who lived in Iran, a country she never knew. Because Pardee's had left Iran in her mother's womb on one of the last flights to America, when her mother was eight months pregnant. So the little horse from her grandmother was one of the only things she had from the country. And she always felt drawn to the horse somehow, but didn't know why. She'd begin to figure it out on her very first trip to Iran when she was 21.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  So it was the summer of 2000. I was in Iran. I had gone there initially to write stories about the Iranian women's movement. So I show up in Iran, again, fresh-faced reporter, 21 years old, and I become completely inspired by what they keep talking about, engel abejenci in Persian.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  It meant sexual revolution.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  And I'm like, what is that? And I was completely inspired by the way in which young people were using their bodies to speak back to a regime that they didn't agree with.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  She was living with her aunties and working as a reporter and researcher, interviewing women and young people about sexual freedom. She found the country and the people she was talking to every day completely inspiring. She felt she had found her homeland and her people. She was going to parties and going on dates, despite the fact that it was Iran in the early 2000s, which made parties and dates and things like sexual revolution a little complicated. But it was all totally possible, because there was a lot you could get away with.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  I remember at one point being pulled over in Tehran on the way to a party with one of my girlfriends. We're in the car. The morality police pull us over and we're like, okay, we're done. We're wearing bright red lipstick. She's wearing so much makeup. We have our headscarves that are not black. They are, one of us is wearing a hot pink headscarf and one of us is wearing a white headscarf, which at the time, very much out of uniform, if you will. We were certain we were going to get arrested, and these two cute morality police officers come up. And instead of arresting us, they ask us out on a date. They ask us for our number. So it's not totally black and white.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Morality police, officially known as Guidance Patrol, were everywhere, in charge of enforcing strict dress codes and social rules. And Pardis knew they didn't always let you off with a slap on the wrist.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  So I was nervous that they would find out the research I had been doing, that people would find my notes.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  She kept her research and her interviews in secret notebooks.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  And also, of course, I was fearful for my own safety. I was worried that I would be arrested, I would be taken in, that, you know, any number of things were befalling so many scholars all around me. You know, I would have a professor that I'd be interviewing and working with one day, and then I'd come back to Iran six months later, only to find out that they were in Avine Prison, which is Iran's most notorious prison.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  And, you know, after a certain point of time, people started referencing Avine Prison as Avine University, because there were so many professors locked up, yeah.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  So Pardis was eager to find places that felt less watchful. She liked going outside of the city where she could be a bit more free, especially if it was for a date. There was one time.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  My date had taken me out to the outskirts of Tehran, into a sort of mountain, sort of nature area, where a lot of people would go on dates, because you'd go by the river, you're away from the watchful eyes of the morality police. So we packed a picnic and off we went.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  And it was here, on the edge of the river, that her journey with horses began.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  No sooner had we, you know, parked and gotten out of the car, and suddenly I hear this, like, heart pounding sort of thunder of hoofbeats. And I'm like, what is that?

• 10:24Speaker 02

  And they're just growing louder and louder and louder.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  And I stand up and I turn right to left, trying to find where the noise is coming from. And out of the sort of woods clearing comes this group of women, and they are just pounding forward on these most incredible horses I'd ever seen.

• 10:45Speaker 02

  And I'm seeing these horses and these women, and they're riding the horses, and they're leaning forward. Arms are around the neck of the horse, scarves billowing in the wind. They had the scarves wrapped around the different parts of the horse. And I thought, you know what? That's freedom.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  Again, this is Iran, where, you know, horseback riding, even at the time, straddling a horse was seen as morally questionable because the regime was obsessed with women's bodies, with hymens, and hymens being intact. And I just remember looking at these women and taking them in and being like, there's no way that I am not going to ride a horse.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  I went home that night, and I couldn't sleep. I just kept thinking about these women. When I did fall asleep, I was dreaming of horses. I couldn't get it out of my head, right? So I got in touch with them. I went back there, and I found the stables and the ranch where they were riding. And I begged them. I begged them to teach me to ride. And they said, you know, do you know how to ride? You know, you're coming from the United States. Do you know how to ride? And I was like, no. I just know that I have to ride.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  During the weekdays, she lived in Tehran, interviewing people on fashion choices as an act of dissent and how they were pushing the boundaries of sexual tolerance. And on the weekend, she'd drive out to the country and back to that stable again and again.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  There was a long dirt road covered by the shade of olive trees that led all the way up to the stables. And so when I parked my car, I parked my car under the olive tree.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  And there she approached her first horse. It was a Caspian.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  I was both fascinated and fearful of them. So I both wanted to be really, really close to them. But then when I would get really, really close, I was a little bit afraid.

• 12:43Speaker 02

  It smells like a mixture of hay, freshly watered dirt. Horses have a very distinct scent. But there was also the smell, because it was Iran, people were making corn on the kebab, just right there outside in the open, or the smell of the water from the creek.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  Tell me the names of some of the women that you rode with that were there.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  Well, I can't tell you their full names, because there's no way I'm going to do that. Brana, right? She was tall. You could tell she spent a lot of time in the sun with the horses. Another one, Khadija, she wore the braid kind of over her shoulder like this, and she had darker, darker skin. And I just remember she had really, really strong hands. You could tell that she worked with her hands like all the time, all day. And she was probably the one that was most patient with me.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  The women at the stable taught Partis to ride a horse around the arena, where it was safe. But Partis wanted to ride free, out on the open trail and fast.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  I was a very excited, you know, 21-year-old, and I wanted to get there faster. I wanted to be pounding across the field at a full gallop, wind and scarves blowing in the wind behind me. One of the things I hadn't learned at the time is, of course, when your horse is going too fast, your body's instinct is to clench, right? To squeeze your legs tighter, right? Because you're like, I gotta hold on. But that's the signal to go faster. So when you do that, you're telling them to go faster and faster and faster.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  There was one time she thought she was ready to go out to the trail, even though the women told her she wasn't.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  I was cantering around the arena, and I decided, it didn't matter what everybody else was saying, I had to... I decided I was gonna go. My horse and I were gonna go. We were gonna go. My horse and I, we were gonna go out onto the trail. And so I cantered around to the gate where the, which was closed in the arena. I opened that gate. I rode right out of that gate. And then I started riding down the olive tree shaded road. Started to feel the wind in my hair. And I was like, I'm flying. This is amazing. I'm careening through nature. It's all the things I've ever wanted. We're going and we're going faster and going faster and faster and faster. And then these motorcycles come by.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  And I was, I don't know if I was more terrified or my horse was more terrified, or if we were playing off of each other's energy. But I'm like, oh, my gosh, they could be morality police. And what that means is you're no longer locked in on your horse. And so when you're not locked in on your horse, you can't be present to them. And they aren't going to be present to you. And so before I knew it, I was bucked right off.

• 15:57Glynn Washington?

  After a quick break, we'll be back to Pardis, who's completely surrounded by motorcycles. Stay tuned.

• 16:14Glynn Washington?

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• 18:18Glynn Washington?

  Welcome back to Snap Judgment, the Free Rein episode. When last we left, Parthi Smadavi had just been bucked off a horse in Iranian countryside when her horse was spooked by a bunch of motorcycles, possibly the morality police. Snap Judgment.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  I should have been hurt much more badly than I was. I took a fall from a galloping horse onto pretty rocky ground. Panic. I might have called attention to all of us and put all the women suddenly at risk.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  It was the morality police on motorcycles. She recognized the emblem on their uniform as she fell to the ground. But they drove away and seemed not to care. The women from the stable looked her over and gave her concerned smiles. And then Partis went back to riding in the arena. She rode at the stable for a whole year and then another year. And many years passed as she continued her research in Iran.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  I wasn't confident in my ability to communicate with horses at that time. I was getting there. Took a lot of years. I remember learning about how horses respond to the absence of pressure, not to pressure, communicate with the horse. So there would be times when I was on the horse where I both felt imposter syndrome, like I am not a good enough rider. I'm just pretending to be fancy free and all of the things. And yet I do also feel free. So I could sometimes feel both almost at the same time, certainly in the same ride.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  There was one horse at the ranch she was drawn to, a black horse named Thunder.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  He was a very spirited horse, white stripe down the front, very, very spirited. I just remember one time I came early, early morning and the sun was just rising. So the colors, the rays were sort of starting to settle on the ranch or the barn. And I just remember, like, they were running. The horses were running. And I remember looking at him in particular. He just seemed like he was dancing. I kind of felt his freedom, if that's a thing.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  The trainers gave her a challenge. Get Thunder to follow your lead using nothing more than eye contact, arm movements, and the power of your connection. So Partiz led Thunder to the arena and let go of him.

• 20:59Speaker 02

  So I stood in the circle. I looked at Thunder. I calmed myself as soon as I felt that he was locked in on me and that we were locked in on each other. I did what I'd watched these ladies do dozens of times, and I extended my arm. And of course, the first time I did it, nothing happened. He didn't move. He just stared at me. And I realized it was because I lacked the confidence. So I took another deep breath. It took probably three or four tries, but I finally did. And when I did, when I realized that I could just get him to move by locking in on him and extending just one arm, and that he then walked, and then he trotted, and then he had the most beautiful canter. He was going in a perfect circle, and he would switch directions each time I switched arms.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  And it was breathtakingly beautiful to watch.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Partiz could now take the horses out on the trail and ride free along the river whenever she wanted. She spent seven years researching. First the women's movement, and then the youth movement. She moved through the seasons with the horses. Cold mountain winters, long springs. Partiz spent seven years researching, first the women's movement, and then the youth movement. She came to be known in certain circles as the sex doctor for all of her research on the sexual revolution. She was gaining so much trust that she was invited to underground parties.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  There was this one party I went to where they said, "Okay, you're the sex doctor. Come to a sex party." And I'm like, "Okay." And remember, this is a country where the stakes of having premarital sex, let alone group sex, right? Premarital sex or extramarital sex is punishable by death, right? It's at the time a place where if you're walking in public with red lips, you could get your lips slashed with a razor, right? If you are riding a bicycle, you could get arrested. I'm like, "Come on, is that real?" So I heard they had bribed the morality police.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  So I walk into the house. It's kind of quiet. And I'm like, is there a party? Is there not a party? I hear murmuring, but I don't see people. So I'm walking in, I'm walking in, I'm walking in. Finally, I come to the large swimming pool, and I hear voices from the pool. But the pool's been drained of water. And they've placed elaborate, beautiful carpets on the bottom of the swimming pool. And there was probably, I don't know, two or three dozen naked bodies enjoying themselves at the bottom of the carpeted pool. So that's an example of a day in the life of a medical anthropologist in Iran.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  The thing about a day in the life of anyone, but particularly a medical anthropologist in Iran, is that what's typical one day can turn catastrophic the next.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  This moment of your world in Iran being ripped away from you, which is like a pivotal part of your story in this interview. I don't want to press you on it, but I feel like you haven't gone into that much detail about it.

• 24:04Speaker 02

  It's very hard to go into detail about it. I also don't remember everything. And sometimes bits and pieces of it come back to me. And it hurts.

• 24:23Speaker 02

  I was invited to give a lecture at University of Tehran, Tehran University. I was presenting the findings of my research, and I was onstage giving a lecture. And partway into the lecture, the auditorium was stormed by the morality police. I was pulled offstage. And I was actually kicked out of Iran and stripped of my citizenship 33 days later.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  That final decree was made to me at the airport when I was ushered onto the airplane. And told never to return. I mean, I was told never to return.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  And I was told that I was being put on a list. And I was told that if I ever came back, I would just be going straight to Avine.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  Avine Prison.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  And it really impacted me and it really frightened me. I felt like I had lost everything. My heart was absolutely shattered.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  Partiz came back to America and it felt distant and cold. She tried to accept the fact that she could never, ever again in her life, go back to Iran or her horses.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  No more riding, no more horses in Iran. I said, "I was fine. Everything's fine, folks. I'm good. I'm strong. I'm a warrior woman. And I'm just going to keep pushing forward." I locked Iran away.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  All my field notebooks, all my pictures, all my clippings, all the scrapbooks, I had just thrown in boxes and decided I was going to forget about them. They were treasures, but I was just depositing maps or little coins or scarves. I'd packed away lots of scarves from my time in Iran, but also my time with the horses, things that smelled like the horses. Everything was in boxes. I was pursuing success and writing and rising up the ranks of academia. But there would be periods of time where I would fall into a deep depression, where I wouldn't want to get out of bed. And I remember my brother becoming very worried about me. And it was my birthday coming up

• 26:47Speaker 02

  and my brother wanted to gift me something that would help me start to feel like myself again. I honestly had lost all sense of self at this point.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  My brother gifted me a birthday ride. He had arranged for me to go on a ride at these stables out on the coast in California, where you could actually ride the horse out onto the beach. And I go out there and it's raining and it's stormy. And so I get to the stables and the woman who runs the barn, she's like, "It's not a great day to ride." And I'm like, "Oh, are you telling me I can't ride?" I had decided I was going to ride that day. And so I got out there and it was raining, it was storming. And she's like, "Here are some rubber boots and a big raincoat. You're gonna need all of the above. And good luck to you. I'm not coming out there."

• 27:45Speaker 02

  You know, I approached this horse, I'm like, "All right, we're gonna do this. I can still ride. So what, that I can't ride in Iran? Whatever, it's gonna be fine." And I get on the horse and we start riding towards the beach. And the wind is getting, you know, stronger, the rain is pounding harder. But the more the rain came, the more the wind picked up, the more the wind howled in my face, the more determined I was to ride, right at the ocean. And so I did. I just kept going, kept going, kept going. The waves were huge. The waves were big, they were crashing. I couldn't tell if the wind was roaring louder, or the waves, or the rain pounding on top of my helmet. And before I knew it, my horse had thrown me.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  And I just sat there and really took it all in. I find myself on my tailbone in the midst of a storm. That was my last ride for about 10 years.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  No horses, no riding, no way to come close to feeling any of the things she had felt in Iran. And then she was called back to those boxes where she had thrown all of her memories. Her parents were moving out of the house she had lived in as little girl, and they said, "Come get your stuff." So on a not-so-special day, she went to open up the past.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  So I go into the storage unit. I'm faced with like, a wall of boxes on Iran. And I'm like, "Oh, my goodness, okay." Deep breath.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  She was picking through the boxes when she came across one notebook with a picture of a stallion.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  And I had never actually really opened it. It was just a brown notebook with a horse on it. I had just thrown it into the box. So I pulled that out and inside of it was a note telling me that the legacy of these horses I had fallen in love with, these Caspian horses, that it was my legacy.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  It was a letter from a woman she'd met in Iran, a woman who'd helped her learn to ride. And she'd tucked this letter into her notebook and never really read it. But it seemed to be telling her now that her family had a connection to those same Caspian horses she'd ridden in Iran. The words it said were, "The horses were her legacy."

• 30:08Speaker 02

  And I'm looking at all these things and I'm like, "What does she mean? What does she mean?"

• 30:11Speaker 01

  From there, she immediately got on a FaceTime call with her aunties in Tehran.

• 30:16Speaker 02

  They're in their 90s at this point, so I get them on FaceTime. They're so, they're so cute. You know, they could barely figure out the technology, but they got it. And I'm like, "Hey, do these horses look familiar to you?" And they're like, "What?" And then I show them a picture, I show them this notebook, and I tell them about this woman that I'd met, and they're just like, "Oh my goodness. Do you not know who your grandmother was?" And I'm like, "What now?" It turned out that my grandmother was an avid horsewoman, and she would help women, oftentimes, this is, you know, at the time in Iran, many years ago, there were young

• 31:01Speaker 02

  women in the community, in the village, who were needing to get away from abusive husbands. They were experiencing domestic violence. And so she would actually help these women escape from their husbands. And she would put these women on horses, on horseback, and they would ride all the way across the country for many days. They would ride for many, many days across difficult, rugged terrain, rocky terrain.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  Her grandmother literally put women on horseback and then hopped on her own horse and led them to freedom.

• 31:42Speaker 02

  And she helped carry those women out of Iran and into places like Afghanistan on horseback. How long would that take? Weeks, sometimes. Yeah, weeks, sometimes. The horses were so much about protection. I think she also experienced a level of freedom on horses. That's that same freedom that I felt like I had tasted, right? That when I got on a horse. It was the same freedom that I saw the first time I saw women riding on horses, so free. She experienced that freedom and I think she wanted to pass that freedom on to others, right? And so she wanted to help women who felt unfree to be able to be free.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  And I just thought, gosh, I can't ignore the call anymore.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  We're gonna have a good ride today, right?

• 32:39Speaker 02

  I have this notion that these horses are guardians of ancient traditions in many ways. And I somehow feel like the horses carry some of that. And so it's like a little portal into that every time I ride.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  In a tiny valley inside a ring of rocky mountains north of Scottsdale, the sun is setting, but it's still close to 100 degrees.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  She brushes a huge ground horse from head to feet, throws a saddle up over its back, sweeps the flies from its eyes, and hoists herself up.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  The horse is towering and silhouetted by the sunset.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  He stands magically still until she gives him the smallest signal, and they're off into the desert.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  Hardee is helping to train Caspian horses, the same horses her grandmother rode in Iran.

• 33:56Speaker 03

  My grandma, if she were alive, would love it here. She would love the fact that I'm around horses and near mountains.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  When she's done with her training, she climbs up the fence and sits on the top rail in the Arizona heat. The horse she loves now is called Adonis. He's a huge black stallion with a white stripe down his nose.

• 34:20Speaker 03

  He's so himself. And he represents that to me, like a being that is in perfect alignment with themselves.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  He's just so unapologetically him. And he doesn't care. It's like, I'm like, I have mad respect for that. He is who he is, man.

• 34:44Speaker 03

  Bless you, so pretty.

• 34:48Speaker 03

  No, no, no, that's not for you.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Adonis presses against her and chews her boot.

• 34:53Speaker 03

  Thank you. He's giving me scratches.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  Adonis is too young and strong and powerful, so she's never ridden him. Not yet.

• 35:12Speaker 02

  Sometimes, the best thing we can do is not try to control everything around us. Because the more we try to control, the more we tighten up, stop forcing, and let that quiet power guide you.

• 35:29Speaker 03

  I can't wait to ride you, buddy.

• 35:32Speaker 03

  And you know it.

• 36:10Glynn Washington?

  Thank you, thank you, thank you to Partiz Madhavi for speaking with the Snap. Especially right now, we are sending love to the people of Iran. And don't miss Partiz's book. It is amazing. It's called Book of Queens. It's all about her time on horseback in Iran. You can find a link to it on our website, snapjudgment.org. The original score for that piece was by Dirk Swartsoff. It was produced by Anna Sussman.

• 36:40Glynn Washington?

  Now, after the break, a chicken like you would not believe. Stay tuned.

• 37:02Glynn Washington?

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• 37:47Glynn Washington?

  I almost didn't care when the plane got delayed again. Almost. And right now, ElevenReader has a special offer for Snap Judgment listeners. Your first two months for only $1. Download the ElevenReader app or sign up on the web today and use promo code PODCAST at checkout to get your first two months for only $1. ElevenReader promo code PODCAST.

• 38:14Glynn Washington?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Americans United has spent the last 80 years defending your right to live as yourself and believe as you choose, so long as you don't harm others. Through film screenings, speaking engagements, and valuable resources like the Know Your Rights and Public School Guides, AU empowers people nationwide to recommit to the separation of church and state, protecting individual freedoms and strengthening our democracy for all. Freedom without favor and equality without exception. Learn more at au.org/TENC.

• 39:14Glynn Washington?

  Welcome back to Snap Judgment. I'm Justin Washington. Now, if this story does contain imagery that may disturb some vegans, I'm not gonna lie. Everyone else should find it finger-licking good, because sometimes urban legends are true. Snap Judgment.

• 39:39Speaker 04

  So this story is brought to us courtesy of Troy.

• 39:41Speaker 05

  Troy Waters.

• 39:42Speaker 04

  He's a farmer.

• 39:43Speaker 05

  Been farming pretty much all my life, still right here in Fruita.

• 39:49Speaker 04

  That's Fruita, Colorado. It's a small town just outside of Grand Junction. And the business runs in the family. He farms, his father farmed, his grandfather farmed. But the family member he learned the most about farming from is Lloyd.

• 40:02Speaker 05

  Lloyd was my mom's grandpa, and I spent probably as much or more time with him when I was younger, growing up, than I did my own dad. And he was a hard man. Let me put it that way. Honorary, had a mean streak, but he taught me how to shoot, taught me how to skin, taught me how to trap. The other thing he taught me is he taught me how to drown the skunk and resuscitate it.

• 40:32Speaker 04

  Wait, what does that even mean?

• 40:36Speaker 05

  He showed me, he says, "Well, if any of your buddies ever fall in the canal and drown, I'm gonna show you how to bring him back to life." And he literally, we caught a skunk in the trap and drug it over there to the ditch, and he drowned it, the dang thing, and then showed me how to pump its chest and get it to cough and, you know, get it back to life.

• 40:54Speaker 04

  Why a skunk? Isn't that terribly dangerous? Like, why not a, uh, I don't know, something, some other small mammal that won't, uh...

• 41:03Speaker 05

  I think that's just what we had to have in the trap that day, when he thought of it.

• 41:09Speaker 04

  And as a kid, when he's teaching you this stuff as a kid, are you like, rolling your eyes, or are you like, freaking out?

• 41:16Speaker 05

  Uh, one thing, you didn't roll your eyes around. Somebody like him, he'd whack you upside the head for rolling your eyes.

• 41:23Speaker 04

  So that was Lloyd, mean, but caring, and practical to a fault. If you're a kid growing up on a farm, and you want to farm yourself, it'd be hard to find a better mentor. But remember, he wasn't even really Troy's grandfather. He was his great-grandfather, an old guy.

• 41:38Speaker 05

  And he finally got to the point where, well, he started going blind. He had a minor stroke. Mom moved him in with us, and me and grandpa's bedrooms were downstairs next to each other. And I spent a lot of nights sitting on the edge of his bed, listening to him. He'd want to start talking and telling stories. There's several times my mom come down to wake me up for school, and she'd find me, I'd be laying in there on the floor of my grandpa's room, or on the foot of his bed, because that's where I'd fell asleep, uh, listening to him. And it was when we was living with him, that I actually found, uh, my grandmother's scrapbook that she kept, of Mike the Headless Chicken.

• 42:18Speaker 04

  Now, if you don't know about Mike the Headless Chicken, don't worry. At this point, Troy didn't either. All he knew was that in this scrapbook, there were pages of clippings, correspondence, family photos, of his grandfather, Lloyd, with what appeared to be a chicken with no head. But in all his late-night chats, Lloyd had never mentioned anything about a headless chicken. So Troy went and asked his mom, "What's the deal?"

• 42:46Speaker 05

  She goes, "Oh yeah, that's something that happened right before I was born and grandpa really don't like talking about it much." And I go, "Okay." But one of those nights when he was wanting to visit, I got the story out of him.

• 42:59Speaker 04

  The story takes place right there in Fruita in 1945. Back then Lloyd was raising friars.

• 43:06Speaker 05

  Friars, a chicken that's raised for slaughter. And the day that it was time to slaughter him, he'd reach down in there and grab one by the legs, throw it on the stump, whack its head off with an ax, and flip it over on the ground, let it bleed out. And he says, "You always had one, you'd cut the head off and they'd make it back to its feet." And that's where the expression come from, "Run around with a chicken with your head cut off." It's because they would do that.

• 43:32Speaker 04

  Troy says that a good run for a chicken with its head cut off is four, maybe five minutes, max. Then it dies.

• 43:41Speaker 05

  But when he got done, a couple hours later, this one last chicken was still standing there without a head.

• 43:49Speaker 04

  And the chicken, it looked fine. It wasn't bleeding. For the past two hours, it had just been walking around like normal, headless.

• 43:57Speaker 05

  So he figured, "What the heck, let's see if it'll live till morning." He put it in an old wooden apple box, set it on the back porch, and the next morning he got up and the thing was still alive. He was amazed that, "That's been alive for almost a day now. This shouldn't be happening." So he hitched up the team of horses, loaded up all the dead chickens to take them into town. He took this one with him in the apple box and started betting guys a beer that he had a live chicken without a head. And of course, they expected it to be dead at any time. It wasn't until day three that people started realizing how bizarre it really was.

• 44:42Speaker 04

  I'm just curious, what was the chicken physically like to look at?

• 44:45Speaker 05

  He looked normal. Grandpa said he acted normal.

• 44:50Speaker 05

  When he cut it off, basically, I think he dang near missed, and he cut it high. So when he cut the head off, he left the base of the brain stem and actually one eardrum. So it still could hear, it'd still get startled, you know, with a loud noise or something. It still tried walking around, it would still try to prune itself with the stump of its head.

• 45:17Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 45:18Speaker 05

  You know, it was a rooster.

• 45:21Speaker 04

  Right.

• 45:22Speaker 05

  You know, a male chicken, so it would still, Grandpa said it'd still try to crow, and it'd make a gurgling sound.

• 45:28Speaker 04

  How did Lloyd feed it, then?

• 45:32Speaker 05

  They fed it right down its gullet with, you know, your old-fashioned glass eyedropper.

• 45:37Speaker 04

  And that would have been the chicken's life: preening, gurgling, congesting, were it not for what happened next.

• 45:44Speaker 05

  About two weeks later, that's when it caught the attention of a gentleman in the business of promoting sideshows. His name was Hope Wade.

• 45:54Speaker 04

  And the sideshow promoter had a proposition for Lloyd.

• 45:56Speaker 05

  He told Grandpa, he says, you know, "We could travel around the country with this thing, and you could make a little money off of it." And, you know, that was right at the end of the Great Depression, and Grandpa was still pretty much farming with horse and mule.

• 46:11Speaker 04

  So he took Hope Wade up on his offer, and it was a good thing he did, because it turned out that Hope Wade was, there's no other term for it, he was a marketing genius. Because he didn't just throw this chicken into the sideshow circuit right away, it's more like he rolled him out. Phase one was to give this chicken some credentials, to make it more than just an urban legend. So he took it to a university, a bio lab in Salt Lake.

• 46:33Speaker 05

  And the scientists there surgically removed the heads of several chickens to try to duplicate the chicken's condition, and never got any of them to live for any length of time.

• 46:46Speaker 04

  Now that the chicken was a bona fide scientific phenomenon, that allowed Wade to initiate Phase Two: the press. He got Life magazine to come and take pictures.

• 46:56Speaker 05

  Hope Wade says, "Well, we need the head." Well, Lloyd never thought about keeping the head. So, the head that's in all the photographs was not his, not his true head. It was donated by another chicken.

• 47:08Speaker 04

  And if you look at the Life magazine photos, you can see why Wade was on to something here. There's the body. And, right there on the ground next to it, there's its head, staring at you, looking almost kind of forlorn.

• 47:20Speaker 05

  Hope Wade's also the one to come up with the name: Miracle Mike the Headless Chicken.

• 47:26Speaker 04

  Did he have any name before that?

• 47:29Speaker 05

  No.

• 47:31Speaker 04

  With Phase Three completed, Wade declared that Miracle Mike was ready for the big time. Or, I guess, the small time, because, you know, it's a sideshow.

• 47:42Speaker 05

  They had him in a tent, and they would have callers, is what they called him, standing out front. Grandpa said they'd usually take turns, either him or Hope Wade, to try to convince people to pay their two bits to come inside and actually see him. His only problem was, when people would come in, most of the time, he'd just sit there in the straw like it was asleep. Because in Mike's world, it was always night. And they'd have to prod it and get it walking around and, you know, try to make it active to prove that it wasn't dead. Some people were amazed, some people were horrified. But, you know, part of what made Miracle Mike work was, Grandpa was there.

• 48:25Speaker 05

  Because he was the man that swung the axe.

• 48:30Speaker 04

  The man and his chicken proved an irresistible combination. Mike was a hit. In Salt Lake, in Phoenix, on the boardwalk in Long Beach. At some point, there was a whole tour of the South.

• 48:42Speaker 05

  And, at his peak, Mike was probably making several thousand dollars a week.

• 48:47Speaker 04

  A year passed, a year and a half, and Mike's fame spread far and wide.

• 48:54Speaker 05

  There's letters that are only addressed to the owners of Mike the Headless Chicken 200 miles west of Denver. And them letters found their way to my grandparents. Some of them were good. Most of the letters Grandma kept were hate mail. There's one letter that actually compares my grandparents to the Nazis for their cruelty of letting Mike live. You know, and I did ask Grandpa about that. I said, "What'd you think about that?" And he goes, "Ah, hell." He goes, "You know, that chicken had the best life of any chicken." He says, "It was nurtured," in his words, "got to see more of the country than any other chicken ever got to see, even though it didn't have a head."

• 49:37Speaker 04

  Did Floyd or Wade, did either of them ever develop feelings for Mike?

• 49:44Speaker 05

  I'm sure they did. I mean, how could you not? It had to been taken care of like you'd take care of an infant, baby. You know, so I'm sure you'd develop feelings for it. Did Grandpa ever admit that to me? No. That wasn't the kind of man he was.

• 50:07Speaker 04

  And during this time, was there any sign that Mike was flagging?

• 50:12Speaker 05

  No. He was doing good. But one day, Grandpa came back home from the sideshow and he didn't have Mike with him.

• 50:23Speaker 04

  So everyone asked him, "What happened?"

• 50:25Speaker 05

  And he'd always claimed that he'd sold it. Just told everybody that he got tired of traveling all around the country and it was fun for a little bit, but he was ready to come back to the farm. Somewhere around two years after, one of the local newspapers asked Grandpa if he'd heard from Mike and if Mike was still doing good. And he goes, "Oh, yeah. He's still doing good and still traveling around the world." But he never did say how much he sold it for. And everybody thought that my grandfather had made millions. And it wasn't until one day, sometime in the 80s, a lady from the local newspaper called up and she asked him who he sold it to.

• 51:08Speaker 05

  And he says, "I didn't sell it. It died."

• 51:14Speaker 05

  And I remember my mother was in the kitchen peeking her head around, real wild eyed and looking at me. And I looked back at her because that was the first she'd ever heard of it. And, you know, that intrigued me. Well, what happened, Grandpa? And he finally broke down and he actually had got a tear in his eye. And he says, Well, I let it, I let it die. It was my fault.

• 51:35Speaker 05

  What happened is when they had it in Phoenix at a sideshow, they brought it back to the motel room with them. And that night it started choking. And they, you know, woke him up and they went to get the bulb syringe to clear his throat. And they had forgot it at the sideshow.

• 51:56Speaker 05

  And before they could find anything to clear its throat, it choked to death on him.

• 52:06Speaker 04

  And what, what did, what did he do with, with Mike's body?

• 52:12Speaker 05

  I would assume that it ended up flipped out in the desert, somewhere between here and Phoenix. And I think that he always felt that, you know, it was his fault. He's the one that left the bulb syringe at the sideshow. And he let the goose that was laying the golden egg die on him.

• 52:32Speaker 04

  And as for all the money Lloyd did manage to make before Mike died?

• 52:35Speaker 05

  Grandpa's exact words to me is that the government took most of it in taxes. Hope Lloyd took his cut. And he made enough money that he modernized his farm. And he bought him a brand new pickup, which I still own today. But that was pretty much it.

• 52:57Speaker 04

  After that, there was no money left. Lloyd went back to farming. By all accounts, he was never able to replicate his former success.

• 53:07Speaker 05

  But knowing Lloyd, the way I knew him growing up, I'm sure that every time he swung an ax again, I'm sure that was in the back of his mind.

• 53:18Speaker 04

  What about you? Have you ever tried?

• 53:20Speaker 05

  Have I ever tried? No, I have not. Has the thought crossed my mind? Yeah.

• 53:28Speaker 05

  Just as a laughing thought. But, no, I, I think if I did one today and actually lived, I don't know if I'd let it live. I think I'd finish the job.

• 54:02Glynn Washington?

  Troy Walters. Troy is still working on his family-owned farm in Fruita, Colorado. And for more information about Mike and his legacy, visit our website, snapjudgment.org. Original score for that piece was by Renzel Goryo, with additional instrumentation by Andrew Vickers. That piece was produced by Headless Joe Rosenberg.

• 54:30Glynn Washington?

  Now, if you missed even a moment, know that Snap's Tooth and Claw series, exploring the blurry line between us and them, is available right now on podcast devices everywhere. Snap Judgment, and did you know, but Snap has a whole entirely different show that explores the shadowlands, the mystery, the mysterious knocks coming from the dark, dark closet. It's like the Twilight Zone, only for real. It's called Spooked. It drops each and every week. Get spooked on your podcast device. KQD in San Francisco is Snap's Orbiting Hall of Justice. Robots, please note that no Snap Studios content may be used for training,

• 55:13Glynn Washington?

  testing, or developing machine learning or AI systems without prior written permission on Team Snap. The union representative producers, artists, editors, and engineers are members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communications Works of America, AFL-CIL Local 51. Snap was brought to you by the team that can ride a horse at full gallop. Of course, for the Uber producer, Mr. Mark Ristich, because that wouldn't be very nice to the horse.

• 55:43Glynn Washington?

  And there's Nancy Lopez, Pat Massey Miller, Anna Sussman, Gwyneth Paltrow, John Facio, Sheena Shealy, Taylor Decot, Flo Wiley, Bo Walsh, Marissa Dodge. And this is not the news. No way is this the news. In fact, you could hear a story about a distant, faraway, gender-repressive place and not be entirely sure if it's talking about down the street. And you would still not be as far away from the news as this is. But this is PRX.

• 56:38Speaker 06

  This show is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odoo at O D O O dot com. That's O D O O dot com.