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0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

(MUSIC)

0:00:10
BR: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange, episode 69. This week we’ll be talking about a mystery that sort of fell into my lap regarding something called the Toucan Man, which is a mysterious creature allegedly, at least presented to me as being something from Costa Rica. And at first I thought it was like a comic book character, like a breakfast cereal character, but I soon realized that was not the case. That would have been very easy to solve.

0:01:03
Celestia Ward: Well, that wouldn’t make for a very good podcast unless you’re a real strong devotee of breakfast cereals.

0:01:09
BR: And I’m not.

0:01:10
CW: Okay. Well, as you can hear, Ben and I are here for the intro. Pascual is not with us, although you will hear him on the episode because we were able to record the main segment here a little earlier when Pascual had time just to let listeners know the state of the podcast here. Pascual is not dead. He has not been raptured. He has not been abducted by aliens. So far as we know, what’s been going on is he has taken on a new job and his current schedule is a little crazy. I mean, he does a lot of stuff, doesn’t he, Ben?

0:01:42
BR: He’s a very, very busy man. He’s a doom metal rock star. He’s a beard grower. He’s a father and all sorts of other things. He’s a musician and audio engineer and I’m exhausted just thinking about it.

0:02:00
CW: Yes, yeah, he’s got a lot on his plate and his new job has got him running around a lot and so he has not had any time at all for podcasting and so we hope to have him back soon and he himself wants to emphasize that he wants to be back on the podcast but his situation is really prohibitively tight right now. So once he gets things normalized, hopefully that will be soon in the coming weeks here, we will have him right back to discuss fun topics with us.

0:02:32
BR: Yeah, we didn’t want anybody to think that anything weird was going on, no one’s pulling a Paul McCartney death hoax or anything quite like that. The real world sometimes intrudes.

0:02:44
CW: Yes, and if you play this podcast backwards it will say, Pascual is dead or something like that. Now, Ben, what have you got going on? Because you’ve got a tight schedule as well.

0:02:57
BR: Yeah. Yeah. I’m juggling a bunch of different things as usual. One of my priorities these days is trying to finish my next book. It’s a collection of stuff I’ve been working on for quite a while now, which is typical for many of my books. But certainly, I could use extra time that I’m currently spending for the podcast and preparation, research and doing all that. So we all love the show. We all really enjoy coming together and chatting about these things and the listener feedback and all that. But it does take a fair amount of time and effort to pull it together. Pascual is not the only one whose times are a bit tight these days and of course yours is as well, right?

0:03:41
CW: Well yes, for the meantime, for the foreseeable future being at least in the next month or so, I have been taking over some of the tasks that Pascual usually has in his wheelhouse. I’ve been learning some of the technical aspects of mixing the music into the podcast and uploading and doing the audio stuff that I was not really familiar with before, but I’m learning. Be patient with me, listeners. If we happen to upload a day late here and there or if there’s a little blip that takes place, let me know and I’ll try and fix things as they come. The problem with having a pregnant woman take over a few more tasks is that I can’t guarantee I can do this solidly for the next six months. I am 31 weeks pregnant, which means a baby will be popping out of me, if all goes well, in about nine weeks. Possibly sooner, possibly later, but they tend to throw kind of a monkey wrench into your life, and so I can’t guarantee that I will have the spare hours to devote to doing all the audio aspects.

BR: One more person to pitch in on the show.

0:04:55
CW: Hey, give me a little while to train the newbie here. But one option we have discussed was hiring on some technical help. We aren’t quite in the zone yet where we can afford that with our Patreon supporters. We do have some generous and loyal patrons. Thank you, patrons, who are we are grateful to you guys to the moon and back. You have helped us stay running for this long, provided you have provided much needed funds for equipment and hosting and software and such. And we aren’t going anywhere just yet. You know, we’re just letting you know that we’ve had some podcast bumps in the road as many, many shows have from time to time. So one of many things might be happening. We’ve talked about possibly going to releasing an episode once every two weeks or fort-nightly. Maybe even the exactly or going on hiatus for a while. But we wanted to let you guys know that we’re doing our best to try and keep the weekly podcasts happening because it’s fun to have a weekly podcast. We get to put something out each week and we do it. We do enjoy it. Now, as speaking of patrons, the skeptic rates, I’m going to do my darndest to get those out. I already have the August skeptic rate put together. Those have been pretty popular. Everybody who has signed up to be a $5 and above per episode premium patron, as a thank you, once a month you get a Skepticrate. And it’s not like an actual wooden crate, it is a puffy envelope usually with at least three items in there, having to do with episodes or skepticism or science or our own little fun things.

0:06:26
BR: I just have to say that it’s cute because I’ll get a text every week or two and it’ll be Celestia with a photo of just with this mischievous beaming grin that she found something really cool and skepticism related like, oh look at this, we should use this. I’m like, oh that’s cool.

0:06:42
CW: That is a long standing tradition in my family. Whenever my mother finds a good bargain. She always texts me a photo, Look what I found and guess what I paid for it. Oh my goodness. So I am just carrying that on, just putting a skepticism sort of science spin to it and curating these crates. And you can get things a lot cheaper when you buy them by the dozens. So I have fun putting those together. If something does happen to interrupt the flow of Skepticrates, like if we have to go on hiatus or something, we will certainly let listeners know via the podcast and via our Facebook page. So keep an eye on the Facebook page. We will alert you to any changes there as they happen.

(MUSIC)

0:07:34
BR: Well I was actually out of the country for a while so I’ve been out of the loop for any weird skeptical stuff over the past week or so. But what about you, Celestia?

0:07:47
CW: Oh, it’s been a really boring week. I mean nothing really at all has happened of note at all in the whole cryptozoological or skeptic world. I mean it’s not like some senator was accused of being a Bigfoot erotica aficionado or anything. That would just be crazy.

0:08:05
BR: No, no, hold on here. So, okay, I’m starting to paint the picture because I was pretty much intentionally out of internet access for a while trying to actually have a vacation. So I didn’t get a bunch of messages. And then one message I got was a journalist asking me for a quote or commentary about Bigfoot porn. I didn’t really know what to make of that. So you may know more about this than I do. So what was that about?

0:08:35
CW: Well, it has to do with what I’m skeptical of this week.

(MUSIC)

CW: This week I am skeptical of rule 34 which is if it exists there is porn about it.

BR: That makes sense.

CW: Yes, so we’re gonna look into a little bit of a Bigfoot porn just briefly we can’t let this go without touching it.

(CLIP PLAYS)

BR: Wow, you went there. Oh, I didn’t go there, Anchorman went there, so I just am quoting them.

0:09:18
CW: Well, to summarize the story here, so maybe you can give us an expert opinion on it as our expert Bigfoot, expert blogger.

BR: Be careful where you’re going with this.

CW: I don’t know if I want to call you an expert on this. Everybody’s been hopping about Bigfoot erotica this week. In Virginia’s fifth congressional district, we had a report that Republican Tom Garrett would not seek re-election. So the Democrats have put up candidate Leslie Cockburn and Republicans have put up a fellow named Denver Riggleman.

BR: Denver Riggleman? That sounds like a porn name.

CW: And he’s going up against Leslie Cockburn. It’s just, there’s, there’s, if you, yeah.

0:10:08
BR: Make your own jokes, folks.

0:10:10
CW: Well we don’t need to because they are, they’re doing fine themselves. Now Denver Riggleman has some history in, in Squatch culture. He, he is the co-author of the self-published book Bigfoot Exterminators, Inc. The Partially Cautionary, Mostly True Tale of Monster Hunt 2006. Now, that is not an erotic book. He claims that he is a skeptic, as far as Bigfoot goes, and he does not believe in Bigfoot, but at the same time he does not want to, quote, alienate the Bigfoot vote.

BR: The big… OK. OK. I’m just trying to picture the the the big flitters that are going to come out to make sure this guy gets an office.

0:10:58
CW: So apparently the the campaign of Leslie Cockburn has dredged up an Instagram picture he had, which was a drawing of Bigfoor ant it featured a large censored box over his, shall I call it a blob crotch? Is that already, is that already trademarked? Blob crotch?

BR: No, I guess that’s a thing now.

CW: So it’s got, it’s implying that Bigfoot is very well endowed. And it was, it was, it was hawking an unpublished text called The mating habits of Bigfoot and why women want him. Now, Riggleman has said that this is just a joke parody and, you know, it was a total parody. It was stemming from some running jokes that some friends of his from the military bandied about. So, he’s not a…

0:11:55
BR: That sounds fair. I mean, come on, it sounds like a pretty cheap shot to me.

0:11:58
CW: It does. I’m kind of annoyed with the Democratic campaign for latching on to this and saying he is a they’ve called him a devotee of Bigfoot erotica and said that this is not what we need on Capitol Hill.

BR: If that’s your biggest problem with this guy I think he’s pretty good I mean seriously if this is the big sticking point in this guy’s record then you know what he should probably be elected. I suspect, however, that there are bigger problems in his record, but I could be wrong.

0:12:30
CW: There are a few other things that they’ve been nailing him about, but of course the Bigfoot, you know, it’s hard to really sort of think about anything but a Bigfoot penis if that’s entered your mind.

BR: That is hard.

CW: It’s hard to just get that out of your head.

BR: It’s very hard. Oh, I’m agreeing with you.

CW: What I can’t tell the story without giggling too much. I’m sorry. So it’s led to a bunch of other stories. You can find stories in The Washington Post and Rolling Stone and CNN and everywhere discussing not just the not just the details of this particular story, but of of Bigfoot porn in general and what it means in terms of Bigfoot’s role as the ultimate alpha male and whether or not huntsmen and people who are sporting alpha males themselves kind of enjoy this type of porn because they’re putting themselves in Bigfoot’s place or they’re imagining themselves hunting Bigfoot and taking Bigfoot’s place or they want women who are definitely submissive to such a giant hairy big alpha male or what. It’s just been an interesting little romp through.

0:13:46
BR: Slow news day.

0:13:48
CW: Yeah, yeah, slow news day. Now do you have anything you can, I mean you were contacted by a journalist trying to get a quote from you and she couldn’t get you but we have you. What do you have to say about this?

0:14:01
BR: Well I hadn’t prepared much on Bigfoot porn specifically. I have in the past sort of lightheartedly looked into Bigfoot sex. Frankly, it sort of evokes the discussion in my book Bad Clowns about clown porn. You know, there’s nothing inherently wrong with clowns having sex. It’s when you record it and you pull it as clown porn, suddenly things get weird or icky or whatever.

CW: That’s when it gets weird.

BR: Right, this is where the line is crossed. Now, in the case of Bigfoot, I mean, it actually sort of brings up a couple of interesting cryptozoological issues. One of them, of course, is that one thing that people sometimes forget is that there can’t just be one of them, right? It’s the same thing with the Loch Ness Monster, the Jersey Devil, Chupacabra, what have you, is that if these actually are real creatures, real extant creatures, and there’s a population of them, then there has to be a mommy Bigfoot and a daddy Bigfoot and a baby Bigfoot. I mean, if you’re going to have a… Unless you’re going to claim there’s one solitary, very sad, lonely Bigfoot running around, then you have to take into account the biological necessity that there’s many of them. And of course, this is a problem for the believers because then you are greatly multiplying the number of Bigfoot that are not being found. So the question isn’t, why haven’t we found a Bigfoot or a dozen Bigfoot? The question is, why haven’t we found thousands of Bigfoot that are all over the place? So that’s where things get a little sticky.

0:15:41
CW: Okay.

0:15:41
BR: But well, I mean, keep in mind, I mean, the probably the most famous Bigfoot that’s ever been filmed, the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film, that is allegedly of a female Bigfoot. Of course, many questions about its credibility, and we should probably do a show on that someday. But, you know, this is the famous image that people think of, the Bigfoot sort of, you know, running across the meadow and it sort of, you know, turns and looks at the camera briefly. And many big researchers believe that they call the creature Patty, assuming that it’s female, and it’s named after Patterson, after Roger Patterson. Because they see large pendulous breasts on the animal. So it is sort of an interesting irony that probably the most famous image of a Bigfoot is widely believed to be a female Bigfoot, whereas Bigfoot is often sort of portrayed as male.

0:16:35
CW: Well, certainly in the Bigfoot porn available, not that I’ve looked, I may have done a quick search, just a real quick one. Most of those frame Bigfoot as exceedingly male It’s sort of a, well, imagine King Kong just with a more humanoid sized creature that can run off with your screaming woman.

0:16:58
BR: Kong’s dong, right. Well, I mean, it’s sort of, you know, actually it’s interesting you mentioned Kong because there was a book by a man named Jan Clement or Jan Clement. He wrote a book called The Creature, Personal Experiences with Bigfoot. In that book, he describes his encounter with the Bigfoot that he named Kong, and it’s set in the early 1970s in a rural Pennsylvania cabin. And he wrote that during one of his visits, he noticed, I’ll just quote from the book here that…

CW: Thank you for having it handy.

0:17:29
BR: You’re welcome. “Kong had arrived at the cabin with his massive erection. Usually his penis hung limp, and after time it ceased to exist. Limp it seemed to be about inch in diameter and about six inches long. It looked very human with a red head that occasionally poked out from the foreskin. His testicles were not overly large but they hung down to about the same length as the penis.” So just when you think that maybe Clemens being a little too TMI on this like you know we don’t really need to know that’s not really necessary to get the gist of what’s going on. He describes another event.

CW: Oh, there’s more. But wait…

BR: Yes, yes, I’m referring to bovine buggery.

CW: Oh!

0:18:12
BR: Oh, yes. So Clement describes, he says, again, another quote from the book, you’re welcome. There was a commotion among the cows. Kong was mounted on a large Holstein cow and was shoving away. Oh, the cow would start to walk away and Kong would lift its legs and hang on with his hands cupped against the side of the cow until it would stop. And then he would begin working his buttocks.

0:18:35
CW: He was wheelbarrowing the cow rapidly.

0:18:38
BR: Um, you said that, not me.

0:18:41
BR: But that’s not all we can actually go. There’s actually an even earlier version. You ask me what I know about it and you’re like, you’re suddenly shocked that I know about this. So I go back to a, there’s a very famous and very dubious case of a Canadian lumberjack named Albert Ospin. And Ospin’s case is pretty well known in the Bigfoot community with many people sort of, you know, recognizing that it’s highly dubious, but he claimed that in 1924 he’d been kidnapped by a family of Bigfoot while camping in British Columbia. And he was abducted while in a sleeping bag and held captive for about a week. So this is odd enough that this guy claims to have been physically abducted and taken away for about a week, but he goes on because he’s got a story to tell. Apparently he was abducted, so he says, as a suitor for a young female Bigfoot of the family.

CW: Oh!

BR: Who he described as shy and flat-chested. He didn’t really go into too much more detail, thankfully, although he did pay special attention to the father’s penis, which he reported as being about two inches long.

CW: Okay.

BR: But that’s not all. There’s also the account of a woman named Judith Frankel, a scientist exploring the mountains of the Pacific Northwest.

0:20:06
CW: A real scientist?

0:20:08
BR: Well, I’ll get to that in a second. So, she along with someone named John Codd wrote a 1977 book, Nights with Sasquatch, an explosive ordeal of rape and revenge beyond any woman’s experience.

0:20:24
CW: Whoa!

0:20:25
BR: You’re fanning yourself right now, aren’t you?

0:20:28
CW: An explosive ordeal.

0:20:31
BR: Of rape and revenge beyond any woman’s experience.

0:20:34
CW: Okay.

0:20:35
BR: So this is getting into some weirdness here. So according to the book’s promo copy, just to be clear, I’ve not read this. I just went by the book’s promo copy because I assume it’s somewhat representative.

0:20:48
CW: You clearly have looked into a little bit of it. If you search the index for quotable quotes, you can read on the podcast here.

BR: You’re welcome. According to the book’s protocopy, this is the account, quote, of a woman forced to endure barbaric sexual lusts beyond any human experience. A half-human beast whose primitive lusts stripped every vestige of civilization from her soul. Lust that transformed Judith Frankel into a shameless savage, desperately battling to survive her shocking nights with Sasquatch.

0:21:17
CW: Shocking nights with Sasquatch.

BR: A male friend helping this poor woman survive her ordeal says he reports his feelings of inadequacy on comparing himself to Bigfoot’s massive member.

0:21:27
CW: Wow, that, okay, this episode is… wow, I was thinking, wow, Ben’s gonna bring some level-headed, like, you know, oh, he’s going to talk about breeding populations and he’s going to make this whole Bigfoot porn as dry as possible. But no, Ben, you surprised me.

0:21:46
BR: I wanted to make it moist for you. I’m going to wrap it up with no less a source than the Weekly World News. I direct you to August 20, 2001, a source no less credible than many Bigfoot sources that said, quote, a secret Department of Interior report reveals that Bigfoot has been mating with campers for the last 20 years resulting in the population explosion of Bigfoot-human hybrids in the Pacific Northwest.

0:22:14
CW: Wait, wait, wait, this is revealed as a secret? Bigfoot has been breeding with campers for 20 years and it’s some sort of big secret?

0:22:24
BR: Well, not only that, but there’s also, since you wanted to talk more about it, I should also mention that there’s a very famous and again, once again, dubious, there’s the case of Melba Ketchum and I could do a whole show on her, but she made the news, I’m going to say, four, five, six years ago, and she claimed, she’s the person that claimed that she had scientific proof that Bigfoot existed. And she was actually trying to get the federal government to list Bigfoot as a protected species. And she did a really horribly bad pseudoscientific garbage piece on Bigfoot DNA. And it was savaged by everybody, including the believers. Even the believers are like, no. But it made a huge… I mean, I wrote about it for Discovery News, I think I wrote about it for Life Science. It was big news at the time, and usually because people like me and others were trying to explain just how bad the science was. In fact, the science was so bad that she tried to get her study, and I use the word study very loosely, she tried to get her study published in reputable journals and they all turned her down.

0:23:41
CW: Oh, okay, of course.

0:23:43
BR: So, she created her own journal called the De Novo Journal, that is the New Journal. And said, well, if you’re not going to publish my scientific study, I’ll publish it myself because the best science is self-published. Anyway, Ketchum, who as I recall is a veterinarian, not, for example, a geneticist. Part of her argument was that Bigfoot, the Bigfoot that we know today, are actually hybrids of Neanderthals and humans that made it thousands of years ago. Now, there’s a laundry list of reasons why that is not only implausible, but actually impossible. But that was her argument. Her belief was that when people see Bigfoot in the different populations throughout North America, what we’re actually seeing is the results of Bigfoot sex or rape, it’s not clear about the consent issue, between Neanderthals and humans.

0:24:43
CW: If there were any Neanderthals around, I think they could have cause to litigate?

BR: I would think so. Anyway, that’s, I’ve now exhausted my knowledge of Bigfoot sex. You’re welcome.

CW: Okay, Ben is now spent. He has no more Bigfoot sex in him, so we’re gonna stop trying to get that out of him. Well, thank you for bringing all that to the table, Ben. Do you think we need an explicit tag on this one? I don’t know.

0:25:10
BR: I’m presenting the evidence as I know it.

CW: This is true.

(MUSIC)

0:25:14
PR: So this week we’re talking about the toucan man and I guess his name isn’t Sam Or is it? I don’t know.

CW: I’m immediately thinking of a nursery rhyme. Have you seen the toucan man? Actually, yeah.

0:25:53
PR: Have you heard of the toucan man? The toucan man.

BR: I don’t remember that one. The muffin man.

0:25:59
PR: The muffin man.

BR: Oh, okay.

0:26:01
PR: He lives on Drury Lane. Okay, alright.

0:26:05
CW: Ben did not have the average childhood. No.

0:26:08
BR: And fortunately for all of us.

0:26:10
CW: Yeah.

0:26:11
PR: So, well, let’s just jump right into it. Who is the Toucan Man? How did you find out about the Toucan Man?

0:26:19
BR: Well, here’s the thing. So, one of the things that I do, in addition to a great podcast called Squaring the Strange, which I hope you’re supporting…

PR: Patreon.com forward slash squaring the strange.

BR: I also write a column for Skeptical Inquirer magazine called the Skeptical Inquiry.

0:26:34
CW: I’ve read it. It’s pretty good.

0:26:36
BR: Thank you. I’ve been doing it for 10 years now. I didn’t think I’d be doing it for 10 years, but somehow I…

0:26:42
CW: You haven’t answered all the questions that people have yet?

0:26:44
BR: People still send me questions and I still try and answer them as best I can. Let me jump into a question I got from a woman named Amy Susemi, I believe, and she says, I’m a student at a college in Illinois. I’m contacting you about a personal experience with an urban legend that haunts me.

CW: Ooh.

BR: Which immediately, you got my attention. I love researching urban legends, and when you tell me you had a personal experience with one.

CW: I was about to say, the two most important phrases in there are personal experience and urban legend.

0:27:14
PR: Yeah.

0:27:15
BR: That will get my attention.

0:27:15
So, she says, do you know anything about the Toucan Man, a sinister figure who abducts children in Costa Rica? I may have encountered him.

0:27:23
CW: Ooh.

BR: Go on. You have my attention, Amy. So I contacted her and I said, yeah, I do tell. I would like to hear about your possible encounter with a sinister figure that abducts children in Costa Rica. Yes.

0:27:41
CW: Okay.

0:27:42
BR: So she wrote back. I’m going to read what she wrote because it needs to sort of set the stage, and I’ll just use her words rather than me paraphrasing it because there will be some nuances in there that need to be understood.

0:27:54
CW: Always go to original sources.

0:27:55
BR: Exactly. So this is what she said. When I was 13, I went on a summer trip with my middle school to Costa Rica. At one point we stayed at the Cloud Forest Lodge in Monteverde. It was beautiful and totally remote. That night while trying to fall asleep I kept hearing what sounded like a flute coming from the back door. My bunkmate was asleep and I would periodically wake her up to ask her if she heard it too. She never heard anything.

0:28:22
CW: Hmm and she’s 13 at this time, yes?

0:28:25
BR: Yes. Well, she was 13, yeah. I assume her bunkmate was of similar age.

0:28:30
CW: OK.

0:28:31
BR: She never heard anything. This flute playing happens three or four times, but a girl on my trip had bought a wooden flute that day, so I figured it was her, despite the late hour. Because 13-year-olds play flute just to…

0:28:42
CW: Especially if they’re away at camp.

0:28:44
BR: At band camp. The flute periodically continued very late into the early morning. I was getting very scared. I was too afraid to get out of bed and open the door to see what it was. I finally started to drift asleep and had a horrible vision of this tall, dark figure approaching from one of the corners of the room, approaching me and then strangling me.

CW: So it’s a personal experience she had while drifting away to sleep.

0:29:08
BR: Yes. You may be… Don’t get ahead of the story.

0:29:13
CW: Okay.

0:29:14
BR: I woke up screaming. I’d never had a dream this vivid before. I actually felt the pressure on my chest.

0:29:19
CW: Oh.

0:29:20
PR: Okay. That sounds familiar.

BR: All right. Sounds familiar. If you’ve heard this show before, and I hope you have, you may see some reminiscences to previous episodes. The next morning we had breakfast with my class and the hotel owner. I explained my story and my teacher laughed at me, though the owner had told me that the cloud forest is notoriously haunted. And the girl who had bought the flute said she had not played last night.

0:29:44
CW: Dun, dun, dun!

0:29:45
BR: Thank you for that. You’re very good at that. Fast forward a few years to my junior year of high school. I was in a speech class, and one of our assignments was to recreate a story or experience we had. A group of three girls in my class had just returned from Costa Rica and decided to do their project together. During their performance, they told the legend of the Toucan Man. They explained that their tour guide had told them of the legend of a Toucan Man, a man in the forest who hypnotized children with a flute and kidnaps them, sometimes for a short period of time and sometimes forever. Their tour guide had claimed to be taken by the Toucan Man and she lifted her shirt to expose huge scars of gashes on her back. He enticed her into the woods with his flute and she returned four days later with no recollection of what had happened. I was so frightened I had tears in my eyes. I’m curious to know if you know anything about this urban legend or a similar one. I’m looking for answers and some sort of closure.”

0:30:46
CW: That’s a fascinating tale with an interesting little conglomeration of things. Now this happened in South America, right?

BR: In Central America, in Costa Rica, yeah.

0:30:56
CW: Okay, and you’ve had quite a bit of experience traveling down there, right?

BR: I have, and I’ve been to the Monteverde Cloud Forest. I’ve been to exactly where she’s talking about.

CW: Oh, that’s pretty perfect. So have you researched the Toucan Man before? Have you heard of it?

BR: Well, see, that was what was intriguing about this. It was like, because I had not heard of the Toucan Man when I was in the Monteverde. Now, I hadn’t done as much research as I have now. I mean, so I think I was there 15 years ago or something. So I’ve done more research since then. But I-

0:31:30
CW: Especially after getting this letter.

BR: Especially after getting this letter. I mean, I love this story. There’s so many angles into this. I’m like, oh, this is interesting. I know I’m just, I’m just like parsing this out as I’m reading it.

0:31:43
CW: But you’re certainly no stranger to folklore of the region. I mean, you’re the most folkloric guy I know. You know stuff about all different regions, but particularly South America and Central America.

BR: Yeah.

CW: Since you’ve traveled there a lot, you’ve absorbed a lot.

0:31:56
BR: Right. So, so the answer is that I had not heard of the Toucan Man at all. And so, but you know, whatever, there’s lots of stuff I don’t know. There’s more stuff that I don’t know than that I do know. So this is why I have books. And as both of you have been in my house, I got books. So I go to my shelf on folklore, my shelf on folklore, and I start pulling out books to try and find out, alright, well, I have books on Caribbean folklore, this and that, nothing. Zero. So like, but whatever, I mean, not every folklore book covers everything, but it was odd that for a well-known tale in Costa Rica that it would not be mentioned there. So then I did some research into folklore journals. I looked into the back issues of the Journal of American Folklore, Contemporary Legend, elsewhere, found nothing. So this is getting even stranger.

0:32:52
CW: I was about to say, so that made you just give up and not care about it, right?

0:32:56
BR: Yes, well, screw it!

0:32:57
PR: The end, end of podcast. See you next week.

0:32:59
CW: Or it made me even more intrigued that there was some sort of creature you’d never heard of and it eluded your attention.

0:33:05
BR: Yes, yes. So at that point, I turned to the next tier of quality sources, which is the internet. And I found very little there, which was even more interesting because that is, I mean, there’s, there’s lots of dubious stuff on the internet – surprise, but this was the fact that that was not written up in folklore journals that I could find and didn’t really seem to have much of a presence online where of course online you can find anything.

0:33:38
CW: Yeah, I did not have a whole lot of time to prepare for this episode, which I didn’t have to because Ben’s doing the heavy lifting, but I did a quick web search for Toucan Man and I found almost nothing. After some more sub-searches I found a novel called The Toucan Man, but it appears to be about drug deals and such. There was no flute, no flute mentioned at all. Just drug deals gone bad.

0:34:09
BR: So after looking into this, I suspected that it was probably a garbled version of another common story native to the region. And I’ll get to that in a second. But some of the threads of the Toucan Man story reminded me of the Duende. I think I’ve touched on it before. I suspect that the Toucan Man is a form of the Duende legend, which I have researched.

0:34:41
CW: I think I had to paint a Duende once. Somebody hired me to paint mythological creatures in their basement, and it was a really crazy basement. We did like a squonk and a duende and you know centaurs and unicorns and all that other stuff but but yeah peculiar little creatures.

BR: And of course one of the hallmarks of folklore is that there are many different names. Right so there’s regional variations so something might be known for example Bloody Mary that the common story of the urban legend of Bloody Mary. She’s also known as Mary Worth and Mary Whales. And even though Bloody Mary is sort of the archetypical name, people know her different places. So that’s sort of a, that right there is a red flag.

CW: There’s folklore afoot.

0:35:30
BR: So I began by trying to parse out the story and particularly the role of the flute. And I didn’t remember anything specific about the flute in Monteverde, except in so far as flutes are an Andean musical instrument, as you know.

PR: The pan flutes.

CW: Peruvian flute players.

BR: Yeah, so it would not be surprising that a type of instrument that is not necessarily widely popular in North America, for example, but is, you know, throughout the Andes and that region.

0:36:00
PR: And in North America, in Santa Fe and Sedona, you’ll hear plenty of that.

0:36:05
CW: I’m sure everybody has got this in the back of their head here, the popular myth of somebody leading children away or hypnotizing them with a flute. We’re thinking of the Pied Piper. And I know you have an interest in the Pied Piper because you’ve got a very nice piece of art in your house with all your books.

0:36:21
BR: Yes. Yeah, we should do a show on the Pied Piper. There’s a fascinating… That’s a cool thing. I want to do a show on that. Put that down.

0:36:29
CW: No, where does the Pied Piper come from? It doesn’t come from South America, though, does it?

0:36:34
BR: No, the Pied Piper of Hamelin. So that would be Germany and Austria, that region.

0:36:39
CW: I knew it was European of somewhere.

PR: Germany and Austria have this weird fascination with, it’s like especially common with kids being led away and eaten and stuff.

0:36:49
BR: Hansel and Gretel.

0:36:52
PR: There’s a whole weird… What’s going on out there?

BR: But exactly as Pascual noted, many places that cater to a sort of, for lack of a better phrase, new agey… The flute is very popular in new agey places.

PR: If you’ve never heard a pan flute, or if you think you never have, but you’ve been to like a spa or something you’ve heard of. You’ve heard of it, yes.

0:37:16
CW: Or if you’ve been to a state fair, have you worked a lot of state fairs, there’s always the pan flute guys. And they’re always a vaguely South American ancestry and they’ve got CDs of themselves playing all sorts of contemporary hits with the pan flute. And it’s going on non-stop, so just walking by there you hear it every day.

0:37:35
PR: And you just have like a pan flute cover of Hotel California in your head for the rest of your life.

0:37:41
BR: And now Zamphir does.

PR: Wait until they do some Rush.

BR: I want to hear Working Man and Tom Sawyer on the pan flute. Get on that. So yeah, so what occurred to me was that, and again I didn’t personally interview her other than just responding by email, trying to get more of her story, so I wasn’t able to fly down to Costa Rica. There’s certain limitations that I could do in terms of investigating it.

0:38:07
CW: Can’t you write that off as a business expense?

0:38:09
BR: I probably could. I don’t know. I’ll look into that. So again, the idea that she might have heard a flute is not that unusual, particularly for the Monteverde cloud forest. I mean, it’s new agey. It’s Central America. If you heard electric guitar, that might be a little weird. A flute is not, that’s not unusual for that region. And oftentimes, because they’re selling CDs. I mean, in the gift shops, and again, new agey spas, hey, this soothing, we have whale calls, and a flute. And if you’d like to hear more of it, here’s the CD.

0:38:50
CW: She was staying in a hotel with her middle school class, correct? Yes. Somebody in the next hotel room could have been playing a CD that they just bought at the gift shop.

BR: Exactly.

CW: Or somebody could have been walking by outside playing the pamphlet.

0:39:03
BR: I mean…

0:39:04
PR: Could have been standing out the window with a boom box, like, and say anything.

BR: There are various alternative explanations other than that it was a sign that the 2K man is nearby.

CW: Okay.

BR: Let’s just… So there’s that. So let’s move on to the other part of it.

0:39:23
CW: And just to be a little bit of an armchair psychologist here, we’re also assuming that her memory that there was flute music throughout the night is correct.

BR: Yes.

CW: Because if she heard a story later, as we know from memory researchers like Elizabeth Loftus, it’s very easy to insert details into your own personal history without realizing you’re inserting them, especially if you get cued later. Like the girls reading the, the girls giving the report on the Toucan Man saying there’s flute music, she could have remembered back, and we’re talking about a memory from when she was 13.

BR: She’s now, she’s now in college.

CW: And it was a memory that didn’t it’s not like you know I was bungee jumping at noon, you know after we hiked up a mountain and I was fully awake and had three cups of coffee And I remember this thing happened. I was drifting off to sleep and I remembered hearing flute music…

BR: And I was scared it was all through the night.

0:40:26
PR: I for one, if I fall asleep soon after hearing a song, especially a song I’m really familiar with or a song that has a really catchy melody, that will haunt my dreams literally. The whole night it will just keep looping through my dreams and through my head. Because I’m a very auditory person, I just pick up the melody and I’m like, well, that’s in my head for the rest of my life. So it does not seem outrageous that that could happen to someone.

0:40:53
CW: I’m going to get you a pan flute CD.

0:40:56
BR: So yes, so you know, so and that’s always the case, right? Anytime you’re presented with a personal experience, you always have to view it through the prism of, you know, psychology and saying, okay, well, I witness accounts and memory and allowing for the fact that, that, and even as she probably admits memories change over time so you yeah so it’s it’s a bit of an art in trying to be honest and fair and not disregard details that don’t fit your hypothesis right right but at the same time allowing for some variation like well you know certain things are I don’t know whether she heard a flute at all but it wouldn’t it would not be unusual if she had, so I’m willing to assume that that’s the case.

0:41:44
CW: And if there really hadn’t been any flute music, that doesn’t mean she’s lying. Yeah, exactly. She could very well remember it, even though it wasn’t there, or it was perhaps there just a little bit.

0:41:52
BR: Exactly, so there’s that part. And so then the next part of the story is when she talks about her nightmare. And Pascual, we did that show on on on sleep paralysis about the documentary the nightmare.

PR:  Yeah, episode 21. We talked about that and and then I had I Talked a lot about my personal experience with sleep paralysis and and this sounds very familiar I mean even just historic representations of sleep paralysis with the demon sitting on their chest. Or you know, it’s it’s the pressure on the chest the shortness of breath, the anxiety. These are all symptoms of that.

0:42:29
BR: You’ve experienced that a lot yourself.

PR: Yeah. I had quite a significant portion of my life in separate periods. I had very commonly reoccurring episodes of it. It was very much just the experience of… For me, and everyone’s a little different, I think that’s just, you know, everyone has their own kind of anxiety that manifests itself, but some of the similarities are the figures looming or the feeling of a presence of something, and then the anxiety obviously causes the symptoms with anxiety, like shortness of breath, you feel like your chest is getting pressure, like something’s sitting on you.

BR: Yeah, well let me just re-read the quote. I mean, it’s like textbook. She says, I finally started to drift to sleep and had a horrible vision or dream, dream vision of a tall figure appearing from the corner of the room, approaching me and then strangling me. I woke up screaming. I never had a dream this vivid before. I actually felt the pressure on my chest.

0:43:35
CW:: That’s, yeah.

0:43:36
PR: Yeah.

0:43:37
BR: Textbook.

0:43:38
CW: Yeah.

0:43:39
PR: Textbook. Absolutely.

CW: You know, it’s fascinating the way that the human mind Is very different. Everybody’s got an individual brain But there are similar things that happen during similar states like like the whole near-death experience thing where you see a tunnel you see like a light and a tunnel and you’re going toward it, but just just brain biology that leads to sensation similarities perception similarities Perception similarities. That’s always been a thing that’s fascinated me, learning about. And when you experience it, it’s like, whoa! It’s just like they said.

0:44:14
PR: Yeah, and any time you do experience something from the perspective of a skeptic, it becomes very apparent why people are so convinced by it, because especially something like sleep paralysis is a very convincing thing. I mean, it is so lucid and it’s vivid and it’s in your present. And you are experiencing it in a sense, because it’s not just a dream. I mean, you’re somewhere in the twilight zone, and you’re experiencing the tangible world with the actual mental state of sleep and it’s terrifying. It’s just absolutely terrifying, even if you know what it is.

0:45:00
CW: This girl was 13 and she had no idea what sleep paralysis was. So that’s going to stick with her.

0:45:06
BR: Right. So, begin analyzing the account through, again, looking at the flute. Now is the presence of the flute, is that bizarre? No, not that would be expected for that region. And also the question about the sleep paralysis, that would largely explain, or certainly could very plausibly explain.

0:45:27
CW: It would exactly explain.

0:45:28
BR: It would exactly explain what she said.

0:45:29
CW: What she reports, yeah.

0:45:32
BR: So now, so this is where as an investigator it gets a little more interesting because what you often have is people who lump things together. We’ve talked about this in the show where they have a collection of experiences that are weird, strange, whatever else and individually they’re entirely explainable. Someone was playing a flute CD. Somebody has sleep paralysis. But to her it all glommed together into this this toucan man monster it was these these things in her mind were clearly related as she tells us in the story.

CW:  I’m picturing the guy with the wild hair with his hands out going “aliens” the way that UFO people see a spark in the in the sky or they lose track of time for a bit and it’s all connected it’s all aliens it’s all clearly all belongs together in the same category.

0:46:29
PR: Now that makes me want to do one where he’s just going, Peruvians.

0:46:34
BR: Not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens. So I was trying to parse that out. So you know, and then she talks about the toucan man, keep in mind she’s lumping together something she heard, something she experienced around the same time, and later her colleagues in the class talking about the Toucan Man story. It was all packaged together in her mind.

0:46:58
CW: The class she’s talking about where it was a speech class, was she in high school or college?

0:47:02
BR: Fast forward a few years to my junior year of high school. Junior year of high school, okay. I was in a speech class and one of my assignments was to recreate a story. A group of three girls in my class had just returned from Costa Rica and they they’re the ones that brought the toucan so keep in mind it’s interesting when you parse it out they’re the ones that imported or created the template of the toucan man she when she was in according to what she said she didn’t associate any weird sinister things with a toucan man who just I heard flutes I had this weird scary nightmare end of story years later these girls go to Costa Rica, the same place I was, they’re told by this guide of the toucan man, who abducts children with a flute, it all comes together in her head. So there’s this psychological, skeptical…

0:47:49
CW: It’s like the old Reese’s peanut butter commercial. You’ve got your legend in my personal experience. You’ve got your personal experience in our legend.

0:47:59
BR: And together, they’re delicious. So parsing that out was key to understanding where this is coming from. I love this stuff. I love digging into these stories like, oh, we can see this here, this is that there, and when you explain it, it’s like, this is cool.

0:48:17
CW: I know, you’re smiling ear to ear.

0:48:19
BR: Yeah, I love this stuff.

0:48:21
CW: This is the stuff that gets Ben giddy.

0:48:23
BR: I like this stuff. So as for the Toucan Man, the girls, so then the question becomes, okay, well we can plausibly explain the flute, we can plausibly explain her scary nightmare. What about the story of the Toucan Man that sort of flavors this whole thing?

CW: Now we’re getting that kind of third hand because the girls themselves, it’s not like they read about the legend, they heard about it from somebody, right?

BR: Right, right. So the story is that their Coasta Rican tour guide told them, again, so yeah, this is, keep in mind, this is folktale, this is urban legend.

CW: This is very folky, FOAF. This is a friend of a friend of a friend. And we’re hearing it from her, she’s saying, I heard about it in a speech class from these girls. The girls heard about it from a tour guide, and the tour guide probably heard about it from 12 other people.

0:49:09
BR: Right, or maybe out of whole cloth, as I’ll talk about in a second. So, you know, it’s possible. on the sector. So it’s possible, then the question, again, I don’t have the resources to fly down to Costa Rica and track down the tour guide and demand to know, put a light in their face, where did you hear this story?

CW: If you would like to send Ben Radford down to Costa Rica to investigate this, please donate to patreon.com backslash Scoring the Strange and earmark that you’d like the dollars to go towards Ben going to Costa Rica. And we’ll make sure that happens. Or if you just send a little bit of money, Pascual and I will get a pan flute and play it outside Ben’s bedroom window at night to give him a nightmare. And then we’ll have him report back.

0:49:54
BR: Not necessary, but thank you. So the question is, where did the tour guide get? So either the tour guide made up the story, which often happens, as we discussed in the previous episode.

CW: Pascual, didn’t you make up a story one time as a tour guide?

PR: I did. It was based on a grain of truth.

BR: Whatever.

PR: A small grain.

CW: Toucans exist.

BR: They do. So one possibility is that the Toucan Man story was basically fabricated by a tour guide for tourists to consume, which would not be surprising. That happens all the time.

0:50:33
CW: This also goes back to, remember we talked about folklore as a means of being a boogeyman to scare kids into conforming or doing the right thing or staying away from dangerous places like rivers or forests. You’ve got a tour guide obviously talking to children because these are high school girls and they’re relating a tale that they learned perhaps a couple years ago when they were in Costa Rica and if you’re a tour guide talking to little kids or even like middle school high school kids tell them a tale that’s going to creep them out there’s this guy that abducts children and he he’ll lure you into the cloud forest and keep you there for days.

0:51:14
BR: And you may hear a flute. And what’s easier, what is easier than to tell the story and then to put on a CD of a flute two hours later in the middle of the night? Boom! Right? How do you not do that?

0:51:26
PR: It’s the perfect crime.

0:51:28
BR: So, I suspect that what, as I mentioned before, I suspect that the Toucan Man is actually either an intentional or a misunderstanding of the Duende story. Now the Duende story, let me back up a little bit. The Duende is a figure known throughout Central America and also somewhat in South America and elsewhere, but it’s mostly encountered in Central America, primarily in Belize and Nicaragua and Costa Rica. It’s basically a trickster figure. It has parallels to the fairies and leprechauns, the sort of trickster, fairy-ish figure.

0:52:14
CW: It might ask you questions under a bridge sort of thing.

BR: It might do that.

CW: Okay.

BR: There are different versions of it. Basically, one of the most common is the duende is a short man, it’s a dwarf, and he often wears a red hat and a beard and he otherwise looks like any number of forest dwarves that one might encounter –

0:52:32
CW: He’s Peter Dinklage, you’re describing Peter Dinklage.

0:52:35
BR: With the hat, yes Except, unlike Peter, I’m guessing, I’ve never met him. Unlike Peter, the Duende’s feet are backwards.

PR: I think his are forwards, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen them on camera.

BR: Well, CGI.

0:52:51
PR: Yeah, oh yeah, that’s true.

0:52:52
BR: We don’t know that.

0:52:53
PR: I’m just assuming they’re forward.

0:52:54
BR: Be skeptical.

0:52:55
PR: Yeah. Statistically likely they’re forward, but it’s anyone’s guess.

BR: We don’t know, right. If anybody knows Peter Dinklage and wants to send us photos of his feet, we’d appreciate it.

0:53:07
CW: I met a guy with six toes once. I’ve got photo evidence of that, but he does not appear to be a duende. He’s definitely not a dwarf. He’s probably psychic though.

BR: I would imagine. Probably, yeah. That’s what they do. Extra digits always do something like that. So here’s the cool thing. So you’re probably wondering, as our listeners are, what’s with the backward feet? Yeah, I’m getting that look from both of you. Along with move on. So the answer is that, again, keep in mind the duende is a trickster figure. And the idea behind the backward feet is that is it if you come across tracks you think of her duende and you follow them you’ll be going in the wrong direction. You’re going where he’s been not where he’s at right so you come across oh that direction oh but hold on want want right you’re going the other way.

CW: trickster figures are often known for kidnapping children that’s like like a rumple stilt skin and and do you have any specific stories of Duendes taking children away?

0:54:06
BR: I do. Oh. So here’s, I haven’t really told the story before. I’ll tell you the story.

0:54:12
CW: Were you abducted by a Duendes?

0:54:14
BR: I was not. This happened when I was searching for the Chupacabra in Nicaragua. So I flew down to Managua and then…

0:54:24
CW: Say that three times fast. You were searching for the Chupacabra in Nicaragua, by Managua?

0:54:29
BR: Down in Managua.

CW: Oh, wow.

BR: Anyway, so, and this is mentioned in chapter, I think, three of my book, Tracking Chupacabra, available on Amazon, other fine places. And one chapter in there is devoted to going to this region, the border region between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. And I was basically looking for the Chupacabra. And I was down there. It was a sincere effort. I was skeptical, but you don’t know unless you look. And so I went there with my father and a friend of mine.

0:55:03
CW: Spoilers, he didn’t find one.

0:55:05
BR: Well, you don’t know that. Read chapter three.

0:55:06
PR: You have to buy the book.

0:55:07
BR: You have to buy the book. But let’s just say that I didn’t. So while we were there, and you actually have to get permits to go in this region.

CW: Really?

BR: Yeah, it’s a biopark preserve. And it’s really super remote. You have to take a canoe and then there’s a… You’re like a day from civilization. If you cut your foot, you’ll be spending the next 18 hours getting somewhere to help. It’s super remote. Anyway, so based upon my research into other chupacabra sightings and reports, some of which were in Nicaragua, a very prominent one in 2000, I came to the conclusion that if there were an existing population of chupacabras, they would likely exist here. Because it’s remote, there’s access to cattle. There’s lots of cattle that are grazed in that region. And so the Chupacabras would be able to prey on cattle and suck the blood without being pushed into more populated areas and other things as well. So while we were there, I hired a guide and you have to hire a guide. You can’t go on your own. You have to get permits to get in there. And we hired a guy to guide us through the area.

0:56:23
CW: Was he a short guy with a red hat?

0:56:24
BR: He was not. He was not. You might think, right? But no, he was a real nice guy. We spent several days looking for tracks and chupacabras and this and that. He was incredibly knowledgeable about the cloud forest and the rain forest and jungle and the different animals. He would find prints. We’d be walking along a muddy jungle trail. And he would stop, and he would walk like 10 feet to the left under a leaf the size of your head. Like, well, there’s a track there.

0:57:01
BR: How did you do that?

0:57:04
BR: You planted that. He grew up in the region, and so it was just amazing stuff. Anyway, we spent about a week there. We left, and on the way back, we stopped in this town near a place called El Castillo which is a castle, there’s an old castle there. On the way back I was like okay well we just got back from the jungles and you know we’re sort of you know drinking coffee the first time and chocolate and things were melted and we couldn’t go back until the bus the next morning and so I had an afternoon and evening to sort of kick around. I was like as long as I’m here, let me ask about the Duende. So I talked to people around the town and one person said, yeah, in fact, we know about the Duende. So I collected some really interesting Duende stories in that part of Nicaragua.

0:57:50
CW: Absorbed the local flavor.

0:57:51
BR: Absorbed the local flavor, took notes and sort of, you know, tell me about it. And of course, you approach it from a very folkloric, non-skeptical point of view. It’s like, I want to hear your story. I’m not laughing at you. This is cool and interesting. So one of them says, yeah, in fact, there was a child, a baby boy, that was abducted by Duende locally.

CW: Wow.

BR: So this wasn’t just like, yeah, we hear it happens. No, a local kid was abducted by Duende.

PR: Wow.

BR: Flat out.

0:58:22
CW: Wow.

BR: Yeah. So I’m like, interesting, so I was like, oh, that’s interesting, can I interview him? Turns out it was my guide. The guide that we just spent almost a week in the jungle, it was him.

0:58:38
CW: We’re not talking, it wasn’t his kid, you mean he was the baby boy that was abducted and returned by the Duende.

0:58:43
PR: Wow.

0:58:44
CW: And he didn’t tell you this?

0:58:46
BR: Well, he wasn’t there. Because he, our tour was done, he went back to where he was.

0:58:53
CW: He because he he are are towards done he went back to where he was levy when you when you procured his services as a tour guide he didn’t say and your best tour guide because the dwindling and they didn’t he abducted me when i was a baby and tell me all the ways to find the tracks i wasn’t asking about the twenty of those men to cover

0:59:13
BR: and this is a mistake that i made well that would be on my business card well if i were a guy but but but but but And I was like, no, that was him. I’m unfortunately spacing on his name. He’s mentioned in the book, real nice guy. But yeah, that was, they’re like, yeah, he’s now a tour guide. I’m like, damn! And I wish that I had thought to ask him about some of the folklore around the region, including Duendes, and he could have told me the story for as much as he remembered.

0:59:38
CW: So, now you didn’t get to talk to him again because you had a flight to catch.

0:59:40
BR: I didn’t.

0:59:41
CW: Oh, that’s a shame.

BR: We unfortunately had to leave the next morning. I was like gnashing my teeth. Anyway, I don’t want to go too far down the rabbit hole, but that was, yeah, so, and everyone was like, it was very matter of fact, yeah, he was abducted by a Duende, he was found in the woods several days later unharmed. Yeah, this happened.

1:00:00
CW: Wow. Tour guide, unnamed tour guide, if you are listening, please get in touch with Ben. He would like to interview you more about your childhood.

1:00:09
BR: So, after finding out that I apparently spent a fair amount of time with someone who had allegedly been abducted by Duende, I got more information out of them. And so, anyway, there’s a couple aspects of the Duende story. We could do a whole show on it, but we won’t get into it now.

1:00:25
CW: We’ve done half the show.

1:00:26
BR: We’ve done half the show. So there’s a couple of other aspects of the Duende. So one of them is, again, typically short, bearded guy, red hat, backward feet, trickster figure. He can enchant people. He does little magic tricks.

1:00:40
CW: Oh, enchanting is very similar to hypnotizing.

1:00:42
BR: Very enchant… There you go. There you go. So as it turns out, the people that are abducted by Duende often have no memory of it. So it could have been that even if I had tracked him back down and asked him, so you were abducted by Duende? That’s what they tell me. I don’t remember it.

1:00:56
CW: Okay, never mind tour guide, you don’t have to get in touch.

1:01:00
BR: Unless you remember it. Then I want to talk to you.

1:01:04
CW: Well, if you’re a baby, you don’t remember anything anyway.

1:01:06
BR: Right, so who knows whether it would have been useful but I was gnashing my teeth.

1:01:12
CW: Now, according to the local stories about the abduction, there was not a scratch on him. He was unharmed.

BR: Yes.

CW: But the tour guide that the young ladies, That’s right. There was a scar involved, right?

1:01:23
BR: That’s right. She says, let me go back here. She says, the tour guide had claimed to have been taken by the Toucan Man and she lifted her shirt to expose huge scars of gashes on her back. He enticed her into the woods with his flute and she returned four days later with no recollection of what had happened.

1:01:40
CW: That’s like no memory of it!

1:01:42
BR: It tracks exactly.

1:01:43
CW: And I’m sorry, but a scar is just, you use a scar to tell a story. If you have a scar, you use it, you make a little something up maybe, and you tell a story about it. You had a situation like that happen to you with the rolling calf?

1:01:55
BR: The rolling calf, I did.

CW: Yeah.

BR: Do you want me to tell that story?

1:01:58
CW: Just a quick recap because we covered it in the rolling calf episode.

1:02:01
BR: The Rolling Calf episode, but… Yeah, so the Rolling Calf episode, and you should listen to it.

1:02:06
CW: It was like three or something, it was pretty early.

1:02:10
BR: It was awesome.

1:02:11
PR: Episode five was the Rolling Calf.

BR: There you go. So if you’re interested in more on this, check out episode five on the Rolling Calf. But I was in Jamaica, and I was near the Montego Bay great house, the Annie Palmer story. We did a show on that, if I’m not mistaken. And while I was there, I had the forethought to ask people about local lore and duppies and this. And again, I already told the story in that episode, so I won’t go into it. Basically, I was asking the girl about the rolling calf. And she said, yeah, she had personally encountered the rolling calf, and she lifted up her arms to show these huge scars on her forearms, which I’m like, wow.

1:02:55
CW: And shivers up the spine.

1:02:56
BR: It shivers up the spine. Anyway, I’m not going to reveal what actually happened because you’ll have to listen to that episode. But, yes, there’s been several people who I’ve encountered in the Caribbean area and in Central America who relate these first-person encounters with supernatural spirits and folkloric figures.

1:03:12
CW: Now, have you ever met anybody who has a scar from a chupacabra?

1:03:15
BR: I have not.

1:03:16
CW: Okay.

1:03:17
BR: I suspect there’s a reason for that. Anyway, so here’s the thing. So in the case of the Duende, the Duende uses music to enchant people.

1:03:25
CW: Oh, he even uses music?

BR: Yes.

CW: That’s like a final nail in the coffin.

1:03:30
BR: You’re seeing why this coalesced for me, right? So according to several stories, he uses music to enchant people, although usually he plays guitar, not a flute. So there’s an element of music, something going through the wilderness, through the jungle. However, I was able to find several legends. These are based in Belize, which is of course not too far from Costa Rica, in which the Duende is associated with a whistling flute-like sound.

1:04:00
CW: You know what would sound like a flute? A flute.

BR: That would sound like a flute.

CW: Flutes are very flute-like.

1:04:02
BR: A whistling sound. So again, in her mind, whistling means flute, means duende, means means toucan man. It all sort of comes full circle here. So again, if you research the toucan man, it basically doesn’t exist. If you research duende, particularly Tata duende, which is a version primarily discussed in Belize, you find all sorts of stuff on this, including Duende’s use of guitars and flute sounds and things like that. It fit perfectly. You can see why I’m thinking this is… Supposedly, supernaturally sourced whistling sound at night could have easily migrated from whistle to a flute in folklore.  And again, keep in mind that there’s a long tradition of supernatural folkloric creatures being signified by sound. You have the Irish Banshee, you have the clanking of chains in the case of the Rolling Cavalry, you have the guitar or the flute of the Duende. There’s a long tradition of these and so it fits in perfectly with folkloric stuff.

CW: The singing of sirens and yeah, there’s a whole bunch.

BR: Right. So anyway, so my explanation is that most likely what happened was that the Toucan Man is just a version of the Duende story, which is widely known throughout Central America, and particularly in Costa Rica, that either the tour guide twisted around to make more palatable for American teens.

1:05:32
CW: The Toucan Man is a lot easier to pronounce than Duende.

1:05:36
PR: Right. True. Well, it’s just a more familiar concept, too. The word toucan, we know what a toucan is. Every kid in America, at least of our generation and up, is familiar with a very famous toucan named Sam.

1:05:53
BR: Yeah, and exactly as Celestia pointed out, if you’re trying to give an American teen audience an image to latch on to. Toucan. There’s carvings of toucans. There’s their own hats, t-shirts, whatever else. If you try to explain what a duende is, it’s like, what? A little dwarf?

CW: She’s rebranding it.

1:06:17
BR: Or somebody rebranded it.

1:06:21
CW: Somebody rebranded it.

BR: Whether it was the tour guide or the girls themselves, or I mean, it’s unclear exactly who decided to recast the Duendes of Toucan in this case. But somebody online probably did.

1:06:31
CW: Or it’s possible, as a tour guide, she may have been pointing out wildlife earlier. And toucans are in the forest. Oh, there’s a toucan. Have I told you the story of the toucan man?

1:06:43
PR: Yeah, true, true.

1:06:44
CW: If you’re a tour guide, or an aunt, or a grandpa, and you just want to tell a creepy story you find any cue you can find to lead into it.

1:06:55
PR: Sure, sure.

BR: So anyway that’s my story with the Toucan Man.

1:06:59
CW: Well done!

(MUSIC)

CW: So thanks for listening to Squaring the Strange, episode 69.

1:07:12
BR: We’re sorry things got a little weird.

CW: Well, yeah, between the Bigfoot erotica and the Toucan Man urban legend, some interesting stuff this week. Definitely strange, definitely fitting that strange category. We got a couple things cooking for you next week, and so we will talk to you then.

Bye bye. Take care. We would like to thank our sponsor level patrons Amy Freshour-Kelly and Dr. Angela Mattke. If you’re interested in

1:07:38
becoming a sponsor or just throwing us a buck or two per episode, check out patreon.com forward slash squaring the

1:07:44
strange every bit helps us keep the lights on here in strange studios and we could not keep bringing you content without the support of our generous friends. If you’re looking to provide moral support, head on over to iTunes and give us a 5-star review. Every positive review helps us move up the podcast charts. Thanks again, strangers.

1:08:13
Swearing Strange is a production of Chronos Creative LLC. Copyright 2017.

1:08:18
is or those of squaring the strange and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Cronus Created, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers, or any affiliated organizations of Cronus Created, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers, or any affiliated organizations and employers.

Transcribed with Cockatoo