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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.

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0:00:10
BR: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. This is Episode 110 and this is The Head Show. I am your co-host Ben Radford and with me is…

Celestia Ward: Celestia Ward.

BR: Hello there, Celestia.

0:00:36
CW: Hey, Ben. Well, we’re going to talk about a whole lot of different things that are kind of sewn together to in a manner of speaking, involving heads.

BR: Yes.

CW: We just decided to call this the head show.

0:01:04
BR: You know, yeah, I was trying to think of something more clever than that. But it really it’s all it’s all there. It’s the head show.

CW: We’re going to have some listeners expecting that we’re going to be giving out advice on how to trace the alphabet or something.

0:01:16
BR: God knows what our listeners may expect.

0:01:19
CW: Yeah, okay.

0:01:20
BR: But in this particular case, we’re going to be focusing on, well, heads. So we’ll be talking about too many heads and too few heads, which are sort of the two extremes you can go to.

0:01:30
CW: That’s a problem either way.

0:01:32
BR: I thought we’d begin just by sort of giving an overview of it, right, because in many ways, you know, the face is the canvas upon which the personality presents itself.

0:01:41
CW: Well, yeah, expressions are important and facial muscles and that’s all on your head.

0:01:48
BR: Right. But I mean, we don’t identify each other by elbow or toe. I mean, it’s all in the face.

0:01:55
CW: Well, and that’s where the seat of the consciousness is. You’ve got the brain. And I mean, they had historical debates over the heart versus the brain versus where is the identity kept and only recently in human history have we appreciated that our consciousness resides right behind our eyeballs.

0:02:14
BR:Exactly.

0:02:15
CW: We’re going to let you listeners be a little surprised as we kind of roll through each of our little mini segments here, all having something to do with our nuggins.

0:02:24
BR: Nuggins. Yes, that sounds dirty, but it’s not. It’s nuggins.

0:02:29
CW: Noggins with an O. Noggins.

0:02:32
BR: Oh, I misunderstood. Never mind.

0:02:34
CW: Yes. Your mug, your face, your…

0:02:36
BR: The cranium!

0:02:38
CW: Exactly. So…

0:02:39
BR: The cranium. Yes. So, I want to begin with the many-headed monsters and some of the historical versions of those. So in Greek mythology, for example, there were something called the centimanes. Now, can you guess how many heads a centimane has?

0:02:56
CW: I’m guessing a hundred.

BR: No, you would think so. They were said to have 50 heads and 100 arms.

CW: Oh, centimanes. Okay. I guess it would be centetet if it was 100 heads.

0:03:12
BR: Centetet, yeah, something into that. So you know, good luck with, you know, 50 heads and 100 arms. That sounds like a recipe for ADD. I mean, just how you, you know, I can barely function with one head and two arms, so that would be…

0:03:26
CW: Oh, I got a toddler. I could use a few more arms.

0:03:29
BR: Well, there’s also a Viking six-headed monster. a Scottish ogre called Red Eden and had three heads. It was said to have kidnapped the King of Scotland’s daughter in some of the stories.

0:03:47
CW: These also, it seems to me there’s a string of entertainment value too. There’s instances in vaudeville where you get two performers just putting on a big sweater and they’re a two-headed monster. And they can have a lot of banter going on that results from having that many heads. And the Greeks were very theatrical in their mythology. And, of course, we’ve got Cerebrus, the guard dog for hell, and he’s got three heads. So he can bite you on the ass and the front and the foot all at once. And then Hydras, where if you chop off one of the heads, and I find that to be a brilliant and really a metaphor with such staying power, where you cut off one head of the hydra and two grow in its place. So you’re just, you’re screwed. Every problem you eliminate results in two more problems.

0:04:40
BR: And, oh, right, right. It just goes on. And then you can even think of Medusa, who had, of course, a head of snakes. And each one of her hairs was basically a snake head.

0:04:53
CW: Yeah, you know, we should really do an episode on Medusa because there’s so many, even like modern takes on the mythology that go into femininity and the danger of beauty and she just wanted to be left alone, that poor woman.

0:05:11
BR: Yeah, we should do a show on that.

0:05:13
CW: Yeah.

0:05:14
BR: Well, another one of my favorite ones, sort of in my particular genre, is trolls. As you know, I’m a big fan of trolls and fairies and the fae folk.

0:05:25
CW: Oh, you don’t mean internet trolls?

0:05:27
BR: No, no, no. No, I’m not a fan of internet trolls. I’ve been receiving into some of those. No, no, I’m talking about Scandinavian trolls, particularly Norwegian trolls. Trolls are sort of fairly common around those regions from the British Isles, Scandinavia, that sort of thing, and Europe as well. But then the Norwegian trolls in particular are interesting to me because they range from beautiful to hideous, but they’re often depicted as ugly ogres with many heads. Three of them is common, but legends tell of many more. There’s one story of a troll who had five heads. All of them were cut off in a single blow of a sword wielded by a young man named Shortshanks. Pretty gruesome thing. Just one swing and the five ogre heads are in front of you rolling around. And there was a, um, a great, uh, 2010 film called Troll Hunter. And it was sort of a, uh, pseudo documentary, uh, style film. So if people are interested in tongue-in-cheek Blair Witch looking for trolls story, check out Troll Hunter.

CW: Okay.

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0:06:38
BR: Our first foray into the strange world of heads is two-headed animals and people.

CW: Now it’s also easy to see how some of this folklore came about because every once in a while in nature, you end up with an actual two-headed animal, right?

0:07:01
BR: This is true. This is true. The most common ones that I could find were mostly things like turtles and snakes. Every now and then you’ll find a two-headed kitten. Now, again, when you’re talking about heads and stuff, it’s easy to sort of, you know, blur the lines, right? So there are animals that have two faces. And so we’re not necessarily talking about two faces. I mean, there’s a two-faced kitten. The poor thing died, you know, pretty quickly, as you can imagine. But I’m mostly focusing on like two separate distinct heads. And again, this is not uncommon with snakes and turtles and things like that.

0:07:39
CW: And yeah, that’s snakes and snakes and reptiles are just kind of rife with with feelings of other worldliness and folklore and demons and evil creatures, things that slither on the ground. So I can kind of see how you see a two headed snake and you’re a poet and that might inspire you to write about some interesting multiple-headed creatures.

0:08:03
BR: Absolutely. And I’ve seen two-headed calves, for example, in freak shows and side shows and oddity museums and things like that. So they’re not uncommon, as you can imagine, because they’re that badly deformed, oftentimes they die pretty quickly, but on occasion they sort of get into maturity. But of course, probably the most remarkable cases are two-headed people.

CW: And that does happen occasionally and of course they’re not two-headed people, they are conjoined twins that again often do not survive.

0:08:34
BR: Right and there’s different types of twins and twinning and stuff and there’s you know conjoined twins from different parts. Probably the most famous set are the Chang and Eng, the original Siamese twins and they were They were conjoined basically with a band of flesh on their midsection. So they were fully formed. They both had two legs and two arms and all that, except for a bit in the middle there.

0:09:04
CW: Yeah, I read they shared a little bit of a liver, didn’t they?

BR: They did. In fact, I read a book fairly recently called Inseparable, which is about their biography. It was really pretty interesting.

0:09:16
CW: From what I’ve seen of the Chang – and I have seen the cast of them over at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, anybody who’s ever in Philadelphia, go check out the Mütter Museum, M-U-T-T-E-R, it’s phenomenal. It sure looked like they, had they been separated at birth by a surgeon, they probably would have both survived quite easily, I’d imagine.

0:09:37
BR: Probably, I mean of course, I mean that was, that was, you know, the medicine of the time.

0:09:42
CW: Yeah, I mean in 2020, if they had been separated, they would have had a very good prognosis because it was just a small little like almost like they were tethered together, not sharing an entire rib cage and everything else.

0:09:56
BR: That’s true. In fact, I recently visited the grave of Chang and Eng. It was while I was on my trip to West Virginia to investigate Mothman for a TV shoot. I had to drive for six or eight hours between two cities and the grave of Chang and Eng Bunker was on the way, so I stopped in and checked it out.

0:10:18
CW: I did a little bit of reading about conjoined twins and the Chang and Eng, we’re getting a slight digression here, but it’s worth it. The brothers Chang and Eng, the Siamese twins, they married a pair of sisters in the South and from what I read, from one of the little anecdotes I read, the father of these two girls who married Chang and Eng was not upset that they’d be marrying Siamese twins who had made their living as a freak show exhibit. He was concerned because they were Asian.

0:10:50
BR: That’s right. They that was the big sticking point.

CW: That’s where he drew the line.

0:10:54
BR: Therein lies the rub, as they say. Well, although I think his fears were somewhat quelled by the fact that at the time, Chang and Ang were very wealthy, having, you know, been on tour for quite a while. And so they ended up settling in the south. And and they had they had plantation, they actually had slaves at one point. And so I think that the sisters that married Chang and Eng, part of it is, you know, how else is this going to work, right? If they weren’t sisters, how in the world is this even going to work, just relationship-wise and everything else? But it worked and they had a huge family, in fact, to this day, around that region, there’s signs, street signs of Bunker, their last name, Chang and Eng. And to this day, as last I was looking at it, there were dozens or maybe hundreds of their descendants. They get together for a family reunion.

0:11:52
CW: Oh, wow.

BR:Yeah.

0:11:54
CW: Well, Chang and Eng were hardly the first set of conjoined twins, and they certainly weren’t the last.

0:12:03
BR: Right. There’s actually, of course, a pretty robust history. As you noted, oftentimes, depending on how conjoined they were, they didn’t survive much past infancy. But there are a few early reports. There were the Scottish brothers. That’s how they were known. It’s not clear whether that was actually their name or because this is in the 1490s. And so back then, oftentimes, you were just known by one name because you were certainly if you’re a conjoined twin, there’s only one of you. It’s not like, hold on, which of the conjoined twins are you? Oh, you’re that one. But they were born in 1490 in Glasgow and they were twinned at the waist and they had two complete torsos and one pair of legs. And they were actually taken care of by King James IV and they were educated and they spoke a dozen or half dozen languages between them and they died at 28. Again this is in 1490 and there’s a mysterious print that I, when I was researching this topic, there’s an interesting book called Two-Headed Boy by John Bodenson and he talks about some of these early twins, again twins, two-headed people depending on how you, I don’t want to be politically incorrect, but you can look at him either way.

0:13:17
CW: In medieval times, they were most certainly referred to as a two-headed boy or a person.

0:13:22
BR: Yes, exactly. So in that context, that’s the spirit in which I’m discussing him. There’s a reprint of a very strange print that was published in 1697 of a Turkish man with two heads, and he’s depicted as an archer, and he’s said to have been captured as a prisoner by the Austrians during the Peloponnesian War. It shows him or them nicely dressed and looking perfectly normal, except for the two heads. The odd thing about this is that there’s no record of this figure anywhere in later literature. There’s a print of this man, this two-headed man, but other than that, there’s no reference to him whatsoever.

CW: And so we don’t know if this is an imaginary thing that somebody made a picture of or if it’s representing a real historical figure?

BR: Here’s the thing. So the the belief is that it may have been faked as wartime propaganda. By the Austrians who were trying to show how monstrous the Turks were, because, you know, look at these savages. Some of them even have two heads. So this 1697 portrait of a two-headed man could have been that version of fake news.

0:14:39
CW: Wow. So this is like wartime propaganda racism taken to quite an extreme.

BR: Right. And again, it’s possible that there actually was a figure like that, but if he really was as normal looking other than having a second head, and he’s shown as an adult, he’s clearly in his 30s or 40s, so this wasn’t a child, you would think that an individual that remarkable, who again is depicted as an archer of all things, he’s not handicapped, he’s not begging for alms, he’s a military man, somebody would have mentioned that.

0:15:15
CW: I yeah I can’t. OK that’s if that’s propaganda against the Turkish that’s not really smart propaganda because if I were thinking about enlisting in the army to fight against the Turkish and oh you mean their archers have two heads so their their vision is that much better they can actually get such a great stereoscopic view of their targets that, oh, I’m not going up against that at all. I think that…

0:15:43
BR: I’m out of here, man. You know what? We’re done.

0:15:47
CW: Okay.

BR: But by the 19th century, two-headed people were better known, partly because more of them survived past infancy, and also partly because medical knowledge and curiosity was stronger. So around this is the time of the Enlightenment, infant mortality among everyone was going down. And of course that included babies who were born deformed in various ways, including having extra heads.

0:16:11
CW: A rising medical tide floats all boats.

0:16:14
BR: If that’s what floats your boat, go for it, yes.

0:16:17
CW: It stands to reason if you’ve got a better chance of everybody surviving, we’re going to have a better chance of medical anomalies surviving too.

0:16:25
BR: Exactly. And again, early medicine was coming into the fore. There was less of a taboo, a cultural taboo about cutting open bodies. This is when you had grave robbing and cadavers, for example. You would have people who were going around and, you know, in London, it was a real problem. People were just digging up cadavers and selling them to medical schools. And this is why, you know, on Shakespeare’s tomb, he has a curse against someone who would move his bones. This was particularly problematic for people like Chang and Eng, for example. They were very concerned, and rightfully so, that their bodies and skeletons would be later dug up and analyzed or maybe even put on display after their deaths. But anyway, so moving ahead a little bit, you have probably the other famous exhibited twins were the Tachi twins, Giovanni and Giacomo, born in Italy in 1877, and they had two torsos and two arms each and two heads. And unlike many of the conjoined twins or two-headed men, they were unusually healthy and robust, you know, given the circumstances.

0:17:29
CW: Could they fire a bow and arrow?

0:17:31
BR: They could not, which I find, yeah, if you really, come on, come on, Tachi twins, can you do tricks for us? No. In fact, they couldn’t stand upright, partly because one of them had a club foot and they just weren’t able to do that. In many of these cases, each twin controls one side of the body. One twin on the left will control the arms and legs on the left-hand side and vice versa, but a lot of two-headed people have difficulty in walking for no other reason than it requires a lot of coordination to do. But anyway, so the Tachi twins, they toured with their family for years. Mark Twain met them and described them in one of his stories. I think it was Puddenhead Wilson. They were displayed as the two-headed boy, and they grew rich, and they died in their 60s in retirement.

0:18:20
CW: Wow, all the way to their 60s.

0:18:22
BR: Yep.

0:18:23
CW: Now that’s surprisingly recent, the fact that they were in the time of Mark Twain and everything. Have you looked into any other historical sets of conjoined twins that became known as two-headed people?

0:18:34
BR: Those are the main ones. There are, if you look back in books about teratology and freaks and these sorts of things, there are a few dozen engravings from the 1500s and 1600s that depict various oddities. But many of these are clearly fictional and anatomically impossible, things that you’d find in a Hieronymus Bosch painting. I’ve seen prints of a bird’s head on a human adult figure, which is like, no. I know I’m skeptical, but no, that did not happen. So in a lot of these early early drawings, again, from the 1500s, 1600s, you have what are almost certainly actual depictions reasonably accurate for the time of human deformities. And you have other ones being mixed in with that that are obviously implausible and impossible. And so you have to sort of toss out the two. Now at the time, of course, there were different theories about how this happened. Hippocrates claimed that extra limbs were due to an excess of seed, if you will. The idea was that if there’s too much seed, that is, semen, that the additional would result logically, I guess, in additional limbs, right? And conversely, if there was too little, for example, if someone was born without a leg, the belief was that there was insufficient seed.

0:20:06
CW: Well, this worries me. Did they have any mothers of these conjoined twins that were hauled off for adultery because they perhaps took in seed from too many men to get this twin result?

0:20:18
BR: I haven’t looked into that.

0:20:20
CW: That would worry me if I were living in that time period.

0:20:25
BR: Well a lot of the mothers were blamed in other ways. For example, another common interpretation was something I’m sure you’ve heard of, the maternal impressions.

0:20:35
CW: Yeah, we’ve talked about that before.

0:20:37
BR: Right. So this is where a pregnant woman seeing a scary event would somehow have that mental anguish or terror impressed upon her fetus. If a pregnant woman was terrified by a dog that jumped out at her, the shock would transfer throughout her body and her child might be born with a dog’s face or something like that. And then of course the third one, which is ever popular, is that it’s God’s punishment.

0:21:03
CW: Oh, well yeah, there’s always that.

0:21:05
BR: Right, so if the cows don’t give milk and there’s a drought and if their babies are born deformed, well clearly it’s because humans are sinners and we all need to just be more righteous and these things won’t happen.

0:21:19
CW: Well yes, of course. When all else fails, blame God or essentially let God blame you.

0:21:25
BR: Right, right. In fact, when I was researching this, there was a brief mention I hadn’t even remembered. Apparently this idea of maternal impressions is mentioned in the Bible. I think it’s chapter 30 of Genesis. There’s this discussion of Jacob basically deceiving someone else, I think it’s his father-in-law. And the idea is that the livestock were subjected to some I’m forgetting the exact quotation at the moment, but there’s some reference to that in the Bible. It’s interesting.

CW: Well, that moves us right along to the modern era and a pair of conjoined twins that listeners might recall seeing because they’ve gotten a bit of press exposure. There’s a number of living conjoined twins in America today getting along as well as they can and one of the most well-known are the Hensel twins, Abby and Brittany Hensel. They were born in 1990. There’s tons of stories about them called the two-headed girl and the Hensel twins, how they’re getting along now, and you can find photos of them all over the internet. They were born in 1990 in Minnesota, and they are what’s called a Dicephalic Parapagus twins. I hope I’m pronouncing that right, which essentially means they share a torso, but in such a way that they look like they’ve got, they look like a person with two heads. They look like they are completely one person from the necks down, and then from the necks up, you’ve got two heads branching out there. And they do have two separate spines that sort of conjoin toward the pelvis area. They are highly symmetric for conjoined twins, so they really have the appearance of a single body without marked variation from normal proportions. One kind of looks like she’s shorter than the other, but that’s just because of the angle of where things are. Each one has a separate heart, stomach, and as I said, a spine, and a separate pair of lungs. And there’s only really four sets of conjoined twins that share a torso like this and have survived into adulthood. The others all have congenital heart defects, but so far the Hensel girls do not. They are doing great from all accounts. They’ve both graduated with Bachelors of Arts in education and they both have driver’s licenses. Just like you mentioned, having a pair of conjoined twins learning how to walk, when one conjoined twin can control the right arm and leg and the other can control the left arm and leg. It’s a bit of a coordination dance, but obviously they’ve been doing it for quite some time now. And when they took their driver’s license, they each had to take the test in order to pass.

BR: Damn right. I don’t want people who can’t drive on the road.

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0:24:18
BR: Our next journey is into the absence of head. That is, no head.

CW: Now, what do you mean, no heads? I mean, we don’t have anything to talk about if there’s no heads.

BR: Well, you would think, but in fact, there’s a couple of ways I want to parse this out. First one is the absence of head where the focus is on the body.

CW: The focus is on the body.

BR: So, for example, in ancient Greek mythology, there was a race of men without heads. They just had eyes and mouths that were centered on the chest.

0:25:01
CW: Ooh.

0:25:03
BR: Yeah, right. So these were actually described by Pliny the Elder in Historia Naturalis. And they were said to live in North Africa or Ethiopia. Again, these were stories that circulated and they were written about as ostensibly true accounts. And during the medieval era, legends were often confirmed by writers such as John Mandeville who either said they had or reported other people’s sightings. And so, you had this interesting blend of this legend that was, scare quotes, verified by later people who went to these exotic lands and came back with these elaborate stories, whether it’s Marco Polo, others as well. And in fact, this race, which were called Blemye or Blemye’s, they were mentioned obliquely in Shakespeare, actually, in Othello. Act 1, scene 3 mentions, quote, men whose heads grow beneath their shoulders. Again, keep in mind that during the time that Shakespeare was writing in around that era, the world was much less explored. So stories of travelers that went to Asia or to Africa or the deepest parts of the world and came back with these stories and legends of, there were stories of the camel leopards. Do you know what the camel leopards were?

0:26:24
CW: No.

0:26:25
BR: Giraffes.

CW: Oh!

BR: So there would be, they’re spotted like, yeah, so there was people talking about these camel leopards that they saw in Africa. Well, it turns out they were what we now recognize as giraffes. And so there was this really exoticism, this Orientalism of that age that was particularly, primarily in the West, but elsewhere as well, where people were just fascinated by anything that was exotic and bizarre. And when you had these travelers, some of whom may have made up the stories, like Marco, a lot of Marco Polo stories were, are, are…

0:27:02
CW: Fanciful?

0:27:03
BR: Fanciful, yes.

0:27:04
CW: Okay.

BR: Anyway, so that’s, so it’s not surprising that a lot of the writing of that time, including Shakespeare, would reflect some of that.

CW: Okay, okay, so we got we got headless men who have their facial features on their torsos called Blemis. I think I’ve seen a routine featuring those where it’s just a shirtless man with a giant top hat over his head and then some lipstick painted around his belly button. I wonder if they did that back in the day, too, and that’s how they started the rumor. Anyway, moving right along.

BR: So the other one I want to touch on in terms of headless figures were stories of headless figures such as ghosts. Probably the best known is Washington Irving’s novel, 1830 novel, Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

CW: Oh, yes, very popular and many, many movie versions and cartoon versions of that.

BR: Yes, and Irving, who if I’m not mistaken was Scottish, he was inspired by Irish folklore. And there’s a type of fairy called the Dullahan, and it was a headless rider on a powerful black steed using a human spine as a whip, which is creepy enough as it is.

0:28:24
CW: Yeah, yeah, that’s definitely creepy.

BR: It gets creepier because he carries his own head under his arm as he gallops through the countryside. And if you see it, you hope he keeps riding because if he stops, he calls out the names of those that are doomed.

CW: Oh, so there’s a bit of Cassandra in this legend as well.

BR: Yes, exactly. So you have the notion of these portents, the banshees that will wail and call out the names of the dead and the soon to be dead. In Irving’s version, the Headless Horseman, which again the other one is based on, he sets out on horseback each night searching for his head, which was lost during the Revolutionary War. And if he can’t find it, which of course he doesn’t because therein lies the story, he takes another one. You may recall the similarities to La Llorona.

0:29:19
CW: Oh yeah, lost her children so she looks for somebody else’s.

0:29:22
BR: Exactly. So you have this blending of the questing ghost and the idea that there’s this evil spirit that’s mournful and searching and if La Llorona can’t find her own children, she’ll take yours. And if the Headless Horseman can’t find his own head, he’ll snatch yours.

CW: Eww. Creepy. Well, at least I know that all the examples of headless things are definitely going to be folklore, because you can’t really have something survive without a head in real life.

0:29:53
BR: Well…

0:29:55
CW: What do you mean, well?

0:29:56
BR: Therein lies the story.

0:29:57
CW: Oh, do proceed.

BR: This is a perfect opportunity to bring up Mike the Headless Chicken.

CW: Okay.

0:30:03
BR: For those who don’t know the story of Mike the Headless Chicken, it’s pretty self-explanatory. Chicken named Mike without a head. It’s all right there.

0:30:13
CW: Was it born without a head? Did somebody… I’m not familiar with this legendary Mike the Headless Chicken.

0:30:19
BR: Okay, well, this is before he became known as Mike. His being named occurred afterwards, as you can imagine. On September 10, 1945, there was a farmer in a place called Fruita, Colorado. Farmer’s name was Lloyd Olson, and he had a wife named Clara. And there was a batch of chickens that he was dispatching to sell, market, or to eat, as farmers do. But one of them would not die. One of them refused the beckoning of the Grim Reaper, the Grim Clucker, if you will.

0:31:06
CW: The Grim Clucker. This is what sounds like one bewitched chicken.

0:31:10
BR: So the story goes that he cut the heads off all these chickens and as he was cleaning up, one of them was still alive up and walking around. This unnerved the farmer, as it should.

CW: As it would me, yes.

BR: And normally, I don’t know how often you decapitate things. I don’t do it regularly. I haven’t done it since I was a kid and even back then it was probably just ants or something. Were I a farmer, such as Lloyd Olson or his wife, I will be creeped the hell out. Now granted, they do this for a living. They cut up the heads off chickens. That’s a Thursday for them. This is not something I do.

CW: Now there is a common refrain, I’m sure you’ve heard it, of, hey stop doing that so-and-so, you’re running around like a chicken with your head cut off. So that indicates that other chickens having their heads removed might run around for a little bit and then die. Did this Mike the chicken live for an extraordinarily long time or would it just do the cursory run around and then die?

0:32:13
BR: It lived for a year and a half.

0:32:17
CW: A year and a half?

0:32:18
BR: 18 months, which is about a year and a half.

0:32:21
CW: How? How? How?

0:32:23
BR: Exactly, right? So this is a bizarre story, but it’s a true story. I’ve looked into this. I verified this. So Lloyd Olsen cuts these chickens in half. One of them just gets up, doesn’t care if he has a head or not, walks around like he owns the place, and he’s like, what? I mean, I’m guessing, right? So Lloyd decides, well, this chicken has some moxie. And you know what?This is a this is a robust chicken. And if if he wants to live that much, well, I’m going to try and help him out. So.

CW: Oh, my gosh. Did he feed this thing with an eyedropper into its neck hole?

BR: I mean, that’s exactly what he did.

0:33:02
CW: Oh, I guess I guess I could care for a headless chicken as well.

BR: You could. And you may have to one day. So pay attention. So so so Lloyd and Clara named this now headless chicken Mike, for reasons that aren’t clear, hopefully it wasn’t from one of their children, but who knows. And they used an eyedropper and they dropped water and grain directly into its esophagus.

0:33:27
CW: Wow.

0:33:28
BR: Pretty gross if you ask me, but you know what, you cut the damn thing’s head off, so own it. The other issue was clearing its throat with a syringe, because of course, when you don’t have a head, there are certain functions that your head normally does that if you no longer have that head, as disgusting as it may be, you have to do these things. So the main thing was making sure it had food and water, dropping it right into this flabbing gullet thing, and clearing out the mucus from its throat, because otherwise it would expire. And the quote from Olson, he said that Mike was, quote, a robust chicken, a fine specimen of a chicken, except for not having a head.

0:34:08
CW: Wow. Now, did they tour with this Mike the chicken or did they just?

0:34:12
BR: They did, because why wouldn’t you, right? This is 1945. This is war era, time era. What are you going to do? You’re a farmer in a tiny place called Fruitya, Colorado. Of course you’re going to tour with your chicken that you thought was going to be dead in your stomach yesterday.

CW: Wow, okay.

BR: So, yeah, so they took it on tour and he’s like, I ain’t no, I may be a hick farmer, but I ain’t no fool.

0:34:35
CW: This chicken’s going to…

0:34:36
BR: I got a headless chicken and you don’t.

0:34:38
CW: This chicken’s going to make us rich, Martha, rich.

0:34:41
BR: Exactly. So, after a week or two, he realized that it was not going to expire any time soon, at least as long as he kept feeding it.

0:34:50
CW: Let’s take the show on the road.

0:34:52
BR: Exactly. So the local newspaper covered it and they sent a reporter and it’s like, yeah, so looks like old Olsen’s got a headless chicken. I would love to be the reporter, have to go do that one. So it turned into a big thing. There was a slideshow promoter traveled nearly 300 miles from Salt Lake City to see this thing. News got out, this of course pre-internet, but you can imagine how this is like the ultimate viral for 1945. Sure enough, they went on the road with it and for 18 months they made a mint off this chicken. At one point, they did take it to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and Lloyd said, how is it this chicken doesn’t, is still walking around without a head? And they determined after looking at the chicken that the blade, the axe blade, had missed the jugular vein and that a blood clot had actually prevented Mike from bleeding to death.

0:35:53
CW: Oh my god.

0:35:54
BR: So it was this weird quirky coincidence of where it was just, it wasn’t unintentionally a chorus, but it just so happened that old Lloyd wasn’t quite accurate enough with his axe and that basically his beak and eyes and ear and everything else and face was removed with a hatchet, but most of his brain, like 80% of it by mass, was still there. All the parts that still regulated the breathing and the heart rate and the hunger and digestion, all sorts of things were still intact.

0:36:30
CW: The brain stem stuff, the basics.

0:36:34
BR: Exactly.

0:36:35
CW: Wow, yeah, I got to say, I couldn’t resist. I googled an image of this. There’s video of this chicken. They actually have his full name, which is Miracle Mike, the headless chicken.

0:36:45
BR: Well, yeah.

0:36:46
CW: You’re giving this creature short shrift by not presenting his entire name.

BR: By not presenting his miracle, even though I’ve just described exactly why it’s not a miracle. Now, I should add in a sort of a gruesome lurid twist, once word got out, other less scrupulous people tried to duplicate.

CW: They tried to make more Mikes.

BR: Yes. So there were a handful of people. I didn’t want to read too much into it, but apparently there were at least a handful of people who decided they were going to see if they could make their own headless Mike Gravy train.

0:37:22
CW: Oh.

0:37:23
BR: Hopefully, there were chickens that were going to be eaten anyway. I don’t really know. But anyway, none of them worked out. So some of them, once people realized that they had the scientific reason why it was still living, of course, then you could try and cut off. But that’s pretty gruesome, right? Trying to cut off just enough to have not have a head, but enough to keep a brain stem. It’s pretty gruesome.

CW: Tell me they limited their efforts to chickens at least.

BR: The best of my knowledge. Yes.

0:37:51
CW: So what happened to Mike after he finally did expire? You said 18 months later?

BR: So apparently the Orson’s cat ate Mike’s head.

CW: Okay.

BR: So Mike’s head went to the cat and as for the body, it’s kind of a, the whole thing is kind of tragic in its own creepy way, but the way that Mike eventually died was they were on tour selling tickets to see the headless chicken at carnivals for 25 cents. And let me just say, had I been alive at that time, I would not have been above paying 25 cents to see Headless Chicken.

CW: Now, you’d have to cut your way in front of me in line because I’d be wanting to see that thing too. Call me gruesome if you want, but I’d be first in line. They were in a hotel in Pheonix and he began to choke. Lloyd realized that he had forgotten the eyedropper from the previous day’s show. And he was unable to clear Mike’s airways and because…

0:39:08
CW: Did he try mouth-to-neck resuscitation or anything like that?

0:39:12
BR: I hope not. I really hope not.

0:39:14
CW: Okay.

0:39:15
BR: So, anyway, so the legacy lives to this day. Mike is no longer with us, of course, having died in Phoenix in 47. But to this day in Fruita, Colorado, there is a Mike the Headless Chicken Festival.

0:39:30
CW: Oh, really?

0:39:31
BR: It is May 29th and 30th, 2020. So mark your calendars. It is described as, quote, dedicated to the amazing story of one chicken’s will to live.

CW: All right.

BR: There’s music, there’s artisan booths, there’s delicious food, there’s a 5K run, there’s a peep eating contest.

0:39:50
CW: Well, speaking of delicious food and peep eating, you told me what happened to him, how he expired, but what actually happened to his body? Did they taxidermy him or fry him up?

0:40:02
BR: That is a great question. I don’t actually know. I didn’t come across that.

0:40:06
CW: We don’t know his final resting place.

0:40:09
BR: I, I mean, we don’t know what happened to his head because eventually they admitted to it. That’s, that’s, that’s an excellent question. I don’t know. I would, I would assume.

0:40:17
CW: Kenny Biddle, find out what happened to that chicken. Kenny, find out where Mike’s body is!

(MUSIC)

CW: Next up in our cranial cornucopia, we have beheadings.

0:40:35
BR: You said that with such glee. I find that a little off-putting, but I’ll deal with it.

CW: I’m going to put some sound effects. It’ll be cool.

BR: Okay, fine. Yes, beheadings. Let’s talk about the separation of the head. We talked about Mike and things like that. So let’s talk a bit about beheadings. It is a sort of a gruesome topic. So, you know, it is people’s heads being cut off. It’s not necessarily cute or funny, although sometimes it kind of is. But there’s some sort of disturbing stuff here, but it’s part of the show. This is what we’re talking about.

0:41:14
CW: Well, we’re talking about some strange aspects of it.

0:41:16
BR: Yes, yes. We’re not making light of it, except when we have to. So yeah, when most people think of beheadings, they think of events far away in time, like Marie Antoinette’s, you know, let them eat cake and that sort of thing. But beheadings around the world are actually fairly common. It’s really only in modern times that cutting a person’s head off has been seen as barbaric. In many places throughout history beheadings and cutting people’s heads off in guillotines was was actually considered fairly routine. For example in England in the past beheadings was actually preferable to other common forms of execution.

CW: It was seen as the humane choice, wasn’t it?

BR: It was, yeah, absolutely. And of course, it’s sort of the pick of a bad lot, right? So like, okay, well, you can either burn, you can either be burned alive or disemboweled. You’re like, you know what? I’m going to go with option C. Yeah. So when you look at the history of executions, again, there’s lots of ways of dispatching people. And even today, it’s interesting. And when you look at the arguments for capital punishment, people argue back and forth about whether there actually is a humane way of doing it. People use the gas chamber for a while in the electric chair and there’s lethal injection.

CW: Yeah, and I can think of all of those. I can think of instances where some expose has popped up and said, you know, people wanted this as a humane choice. Well, here’s this instance where this person suffered horrendously.

0:42:46
BR: Right.

0:42:47
CW: And something went wrong. Yeah.

BR: Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, there probably is no painless, pleasant way to kill people. I mean, killing people is nasty business. But again, back in the day, as you pointed out, beheadings were considered to be sort of the preferred way to go. Hangings, on the other hand, were reserved for the common folk, the lower classes. So oftentimes, for example, pirates who were particularly despised, they would be hung and oftentimes they would be hung in public places and their bodies displayed as they decayed and things like that. But yes, so for the most part, hanging was for the lower classes and beheadings was for the upper crust. Although to this day, beheadings remain officially sanctioned in several Middle Eastern countries. That’s their rule of law. That’s how they do it. Part of the reason, of course, is that it is such a shocking thing. You know, we’re used to seeing people with their heads intact. And as we discussed at the top of the episode, you know, a person’s head and all their faculties, to see it separated from a body is really horrific.

0:43:53
CW: There’s a finality to it. If you see somebody get shot, you’re thinking, oh, they might recover.

0:43:59
BR: But yeah, you’re not going to recover from this one. But in fact, we don’t even need to go to the Middle East because up until fairly recently, there were lots of beheadings at our borders in Mexico.

0:44:11
CW: Yes. Yeah.

0:44:12
BR: And particularly in 2000s, there were all sorts of beheadings going on. There was in Mexico, Veracruz, Acapulco, Guadalajara, particularly in the 2000s, in the early 2000s, Mexico was a hotbed of beheadings. We don’t really think of it that much these days, partly because it still happens on occasion, but it’s decreased quite a bit. But for many years in Veracruz and Acapulco and Guadalajara, there were dozens of bodies that were dumped headless on city streets. In some cases, they were hung from overpasses. And this was mostly done by one of the drug cartels, the Zetas. It was primarily to, as we touched on earlier, to strike fear in the public who might disobey them. It was a very powerful message, striking fear into, for example, police officers who might pursue them, anybody that might resist their extortion tactics. In 2010, there was a Mexican police chief who was investigating the homicide of an American man, and he was killed and his head was put in a suitcase and left outside a military base. In that same year, there were three severed heads that were delivered to the main town square near a Catholic church in Palomas, just left in the city square. There were gruesome cases where there was literally a duffel bag full of heads that were dropped off at a police station. It just, gruesome stuff, and again, most of it was the drug cartels, primarily again, the Zetas. In Acapulco in 2011, for example, there were 15 men found dead, 14 of them had been decapitated. Again, they weren’t hidden, they weren’t buried in mass grave, they were left intentionally out in the open to terrify people. And along with the bodies, there were notes identifying the victims as members of El Chapo’s drug cartel. So basically just saying, if you work with our rivals, this is what happens to you.

0:46:06
CW: Yeah, well, drug gangs across the world have been notoriously brutal and vicious. And, I mean, heck, there was a whole TV show about it filmed in your town.

BR: Yeah, yeah. Game of Thrones. I mean, you know, that’s lots of beheadings in Game of Thrones, right, because it’s such a visceral, terrifying thing. And beheadings are actually a fairly common tactic in prison riots in Brazil, for example, between rival gangs. Every year or two, I see a news story about some gang prison riot in Brazil, and there’s a reference to beheaded prisoners. Again, just, yeah, it’s pretty gruesome stuff.

0:46:47
CW: It shows dedication. Just like you’ve got a human being who’s reached a point where they are so bereft of mercy that they would actually be able to separate the head from the body of a human being there’s there’s something just about that.

0:47:01
BR: Yeah there’s again it’s shock value and and they recognize that and they use that to their advantage and I don’t want to dwell too much more on it because again, it’s kind of morbid stuff. But think, you know, hundreds of years ago, the severed heads of criminals were displayed proudly atop poles, for example, in landmarks and bridges. London Gate, for example, London Bridge, that’s where they get the phrase, you know, head on a pike. People entering a town would be greeted by severed heads on spikes. And the message was, if you commit crimes in this city, this is what happens to you. In those days, it was a message from the government to outlaws to behave. And these days, particularly, for example, in Mexico or up until recently, it was the opposite. Right? It was it was a message from outlaws to the government to leave them alone.

0:47:52
CW: Well, this that is kind of a ironic twist in the way that beheadings have been looked at, because, as you mentioned, they were originally thought to be the more humane way to kill somebody. Of course, we’ve got a huge historical event that is very much associated with beheadings and that is the French Revolution and the guillotine. And that also has led to some, I don’t know if you’ve heard these rumors, but I never really looked into it until now, in terms of the, whether or not there’s truth behind the legends you hear of scientists and doctors of the time trying to do whatever experiments they could on the severed heads from the guillotine.

0:48:32
BR: Yes, I know of them, but I have not researched it, so I’m eager to hear more.

CW: Well, there’s a bit here. Now this goes throughout the whole 18th and 19th century here. I found a notation about, in 1887, a French scientist attempted to attach the severed heads of some executed prisoners fresh from the guillotine to the bodies of large dogs. And you were just talking about Game of Thrones. That was very reminiscent of what actually happened to a an important character in the Game of Thrones in one of the early season.

0:49:06
BR: No Spoilers!

0:49:07
CW: It was an early season. You would have seen it.

0:49:09
BR: I still haven’t seen the whole season.

0:49:10
CW: No, this is the early like this like season two. Anyway, these rumored or real experiments sound gruesome and needless, but remember this was also the time of a great public fear about premature burial. And everybody had questions about when is a human being dead? When is a human fully dead? When does that happen? Where is the seat of the soul, is splitting the head clean off somebody’s shoulders really the fastest, most humane way to kill a person? And do they actually die, or are they silently suffering in that head for some time? There was actually a debate over hanging versus guillotine. Some people worried that the severing of all those nerves, bundled in the back of the neck right there, just resulted in a conscious head feeling tremendous pain from all those nerves for quite some time, which is, I mean, that’s a horrifying thought. Now, they could actually ask victims of hanging what it felt like because unlike beheadings, some people got rescued from their hanging midway through and they survived. And the people that they did talk to who experienced this, you remember Brad Pitt did this in a movie I think.

0:50:28
BR: Yeah, yeah, typically because the drop didn’t snap the neck.

0:50:32
CW: Yeah, so sometimes you’d have people survive and they reported that they didn’t feel pain during the hanging, just they lost consciousness and they saw some flashes of light and this is not something you can ask victims of the guillotine.

BR: Unless you believe that you can contact the dead in which case you can just ask a psychic medium or use a ouija board.

0:50:50
CW: I’ll get right on that. Yeah, medically speaking, upon decapitation, the brain and the head would experience a severe drop in blood pressure and oxygen delivery. So that would lead to an almost instant brain coma, even if the actual death of the brain took a few minutes, which it does. But Dutch scientists in 2011 did some EEG experiments on mice, and they found that electrical activity in the brain comparable to conscious levels exists for about four seconds after decapitation. Four seconds can be a bloody long time. Those experiments were always purportedly in the name of humane solutions to how to execute people. I found an interesting write-up about these severed head experiments. I’m talking about fresh from the guillotine type stuff, by an expert who got rather famous for wanting to find humane ways to kill people, or rather assist them in killing themselves. I found a 1985 article in the Journal of the National Medical Association written by none other than Jack Kevorkian, MD.

0:51:55
BR: I remember him.

0:51:56
CW: Yes, it was titled, A Brief History of Experimentation on Condemned and Executed Humans, and he goes on condemned and executed humans. And he goes into detail of some of the severed head experiments. And if you don’t mind, I’m going to read a little bit from what Dr. Kavorkian wrote. Quote, the expanding controversy over the possible persistence of consciousness in severed heads was fueled not only by proliferation of this type of research, but also by the prevailing custom of reporting detailed results in ordinary newspapers. On one hand, it was alleged that spontaneous muscular twitches and contractions in a freshly severed head, devoid of blood, manifested the possibility of conscious perception of pain, lasting perhaps for a quarter of an hour. Contrary opinion rested on the assumption that there was a direction of flow of an hypothesized life essence called nerve ether, or nerve fluid, which filled the cerebral ventricles. This fluid was said to be derived from blood and was considered to be identical to electricity, to animal spirit, to phlogiston, to fine half-gas, or some peculiar vapor. It was postulated that sensibility or consciousness was engendered by the centripetal flow of the fluid along nerves to the brain and excitability or contractility by the centrifugal flow. Consequently, almost instantaneous loss of blood upon beheading totally stopped the supply of fluid to the brain and thereby eliminated any possibility of consciousness, whereas remnants already en route peripherally along nerves accounted for latent or elicited reactivity. Repeated experiments merely polarized the conflict.” So there you have Kavorchian describing that, I’m sure you picked up there, Benjamin, the fact that the newspaper’s coverage of these experiments and these executions was a huge part of creating this controversy over exactly what people saw, I’m sure things got exaggerated, etc. Anyway, Kavorchian goes on to describe more experiments. There’s one on a German man, or at least on his head, in 1803, where the cut end of his spinal cord was touched with a probe, and a finger was jabbed toward an open eye, causing, reportedly, his eye to shut closed, as if it sensed it was about to be poked.

0:54:18
BR: Eww, this is not cool.

0:54:22
CW: The head was held up to the face of the sun, to see if he would squint. The man’s name was shouted in one ear and out the other, or in one ear and then the other.

BR: Science!

CW: Yeah, and all the responses were noted. A finger was inserted into the mouth as the spinal cord was probed and the finger was bitten.

BR: I would hope so.

CW: Now these experiments were contradicted a few months later by ones done on seven heads out of 20 guillotine prisoners. They used seven of the heads in a different part of Germany. I found out through all this, by the way, that the guillotine was very much used in Germany as well as France. And these experiments involved galvanic response to electricity. They were using Leyden jars, kind of like Ben Franklin had used for collecting charge. Remember those? This round involved a team of nine doctors and three med students and the med students had the lovely job of catching the heads under the scaffolds and collecting them and getting them back to the rooms where the doctors were ready to work on them.

0:55:24
BR: And I assume they also were tasked with with getting signed informed consent forms?

0:55:30
CW: I’m sure they had all their P’s and Q’s in order there. Anyway, with these multiple heads after a ton of experiments, the doctors concluded that any signs that others had interpreted as consciousness was questionable and could have multiple causes, such as temporary blood flow popping into this or that, you know, vessel due to the head hitting the basket or getting an electrical shock, etc. etc. So in other words, they were skeptical. They were skeptical, but again, it’s not, you know, we don’t know exactly. It’s clear how these experiments and their popularity in the press really kind of percolated in public imagination and of course the fiction. And it’s hard to really not immediately think of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which was published just 15 years after these experiments I’m talking about right now. Because we’re talking about sewing heads on and reanimating with electricity and all that. And it just really kind of congeals into a Frankenstein story. There were tons of anecdotal stories and they get circulated even today. Doctors asking condemned prisoners to blink or leave one eye open or do various things after their head has been taken off their shoulders. You know, yelling at the head, poking it with pins, making it smell ammonia or exposing it to candle flames. All sorts of really terrible things, but again, they’re doing all this in the name of trying to be humane, which is kind of ironic, but there you have it.

BR: Yeah, I mean, I guess you could make the argument that I mean, it’s it’s counts, it sounds gruesome and all that. But I mean, they are dead.

CW: I mean, well, that’s just that they’re trying to, if you might even learn something, they’re trying to find out how dead they are. I mean, in the words of Miracle Max, how, completely dead or just partially dead, you know?

0:57:17
BR: And right, so look at this chart and blink twice if you’re this dead.

0:57:23
CW: Anyway, during the French Revolution, an executioner’s assistant reportedly held aloft the freshly severed head of a woman named Charlotte Corday, and he smacked her on the cheek. Witnesses claim that they saw Charlotte’s head move Charlotte’s eyes move toward the executioner angrily and a look of disgust came over her face. Now the guy who did this the assistant lost his job. His name was Legros, according to what I found he lost his job and was imprisoned for three months for doing this little experiment, because the French actually had a very strict etiquette when it came to beheadings and that was a little improper for him to do.

0:58:03
BR: Suitably civilized folk.

0:58:04
CW: Other instances of beheadings have had other people from like war veterans to car accident people saying that they witnessed the head expressing shock or terror or grief as it realized it was dead, I guess is the way you would assume to process that. But these are all kind of tricky anecdotes to give credence to since the part of the brain that registers expressions like fear and disgust is a pretty reflexive part of your brain. Babies make those expressions all the time without really conscious thinking or effort. So the facial movements, if they’re really happening in instances like I described, might just be as intentional as when a severed arm twitches. It’s just reflexive nerve noise. So there’s a lot of confusion when it comes to what exactly goes on in the brain after it is separated from the body. But I figured I’d go into a little bit of a dive there and talk about some of the actual things that humans have done to severed heads over the centuries.

0:59:05
BR: Interesting. I kind of want to take a shower after that.

0:59:11
CW: Yeah, we should probably talk about an urban legend or something as a palate cleanser after all that pokey ouchy stuff. Let’s say we talk about Walt Disney’s Frozen Head. In order to talk about Walt Disney’s Frozen Head, first I have to talk a little bit about reanimated heads and how they have been a popular vision of humanity’s future. I’m sure you’ve seen Futurama. They’ve got a whole hall of presidential heads and everything in that show, you remember?

0:59:51
BR: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’d forgotten. Yeah, so the severed head there and you mentioned obliquely the film Reanimator with Jeffrey Combs which is a famous grade B horror film. And I always go to one of my favorite TV shows, Max Hedrum, in which he wasn’t actually decapitated, but the head was sort of regenerated in a virtual way.

1:00:16
CW: But, yes, I could see that.

1:00:19
BR: Well, I mean the head is – if you can keep the head alive, it really kind of indicates that you can keep the person because the person is the head. Now, there’s a somewhat famous in patent circles patent by the number of 4666425 taken out by a fellow named Chet Fleming, which is actually an assumed name used by a lawyer named Patrick Kelly. And it describes a device that could keep a severed head alive without the body. Now my brother who’s a patent lawyer explained this to me once. It’s technically a it’s described as a device that could keep an animal head alive because you can’t actually patent something that’s made to keep a human head alive. For some reason he had to call it an animal head.

BR: There’s actually a law that says you can’t patent something that’s designed to keep a human head alive? I don’t think they want. Wow.

CW: I don’t know the legal ease involved in that, but you know, something that could be, but that’s the gist. Something where you need a decapitated head to make the device work seems a little sketchy, but anyway.

1:01:25
BR: Yeah, I wouldn’t want to be the patent guy, so prove this thing works. All right, give me a minute. No, no, no, no, no, I’ll be back tomorrow. No, no, just in theory.

CW: Now this is like 40 some odd years ago somebody took this patent out and it’s what’s called a prophetic patent for a device that does not exist yet, but it might someday. A Washington Post article from 1988 quoted Fleming or Kelly if you want to call him his real name says that it quoted him saying that he thinks scientists will eventually build such an apparatus and he acquired the patent to it to prevent anyone from building and using such a machine in secret without any public debate. Now he was quite an imaginative futurist himself, and I’ll quote from the Post article here, “…letting his mind wander, Fleming even envisions head-controlled spacecraft, speeding through the quiet of space towards Mars or more distant planets. The human head would have the intellect to guide the machine. The machine would keep the head alive. As unpredictable situations arose, the human head could alter the plans, adjusting, compromising, surviving.” So literally he’s imagining, he’s imagining like it is pretty expensive to send a whole human body up in space. If you just send the head, problem slightly solved. We can all just be like RoboCop type versions of ourselves and travel the galaxy that way Huh now this this raises ethical questions out the wazoo or I guess out the next stem and Some experts have said the idea of being only a head would be utterly horrific like an existence worse than death But then again, then I mean tell that to somebody who’s a quadriplegic they’re essentially a head without use of their body and so who gets to live as just a head if you can actually extend the life of somebody by keeping their head alive beyond the death of their body. Is that something that you reserve for a genius or somebody who’s really rich and powerful which leads us to Walt Disney, and whether or not he had his head frozen for posterity and perhaps it sits now guarded under glass beneath the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. That seriously is one of the rumors that it’s specifically under the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. Now, the whole notion of cryogenics and Walt Disney just kind of happened to coincide. The 1964 book by Robert Edinger, The Prospect of Immortality, covered of immortality covered a lot of cryogenic possibilities. And Disney had a bit of a reputation for pushing technology and shaping things to his considerable creative will. He was by far an amazing innovator and he was really interested in the futurism and what the world of tomorrow would be. And he was working on Epcot, the experimental prototype city of tomorrow. A little bit of trivia if you ever have to tell somebody what Epcot stands for, that’s what it stands for. Now, I gotta say a little tangent here, I highly recommend the Imagineering Story, which is a television series narrated by Angela Bassett. You can get it on Disney Plus, and it shows this aspect of Disney really well. He definitely was a dreamer, an innovator, and he liked to get things done. And he could also be a little secretive in how he got it done. So that fuels some rumors. Now, it’s possible that Disney was aware of cryo and cryogenic possibilities. There’s lots of articles that came out after Edinger’s book came out, but there’s no actual documented evidence that shows he took notice of it, really. On the contrary, we have good documentation that he was cremated and the first man to be cryogenically treated underwent the process two weeks after Disney’s death. So it’s kind of like he almost just missed that cut off and the two things were in the news pretty close together. You had the country mourned for Walt Disney and then two weeks later on the news, they’re hearing about the first person frozen after their death. So of course, it’s going to become linked in the public’s consciousness back then in the 60s, right?

1:05:39
BR: Right, but you said that even though he was obviously a futurist and dreamer, he had no particular interest or knowledge of cryogenics?

1:05:47
CW: Not that his family said no, he never mentioned it and it’s not clear whether or not he’s ever even heard of it, but it’s possible that he did. All I’m saying is that knowing his personality, it’s possible he heard of it, but he never made mention of it. Now, two books on Disney pushed this conjecture. The book Disney’s World came out in 1986 by Robert Mosley and then another one called Walt Disney, Hollywood’s Dark Prince, came out in 1993 by Mark Elliott. These books were pretty much both largely debunked as not really well researched and relying a whole lot on rumors. Elliott’s just seemed to be a bunch of things cobbled together that he heard when he asked around and the more salacious the rumor the better. Mosley’s book that was published a little bit earlier has been criticized for pushing certain points of view and for being poorly researched and again relying mostly on rumor. Interestingly, the 1986 book mentioned cryonics exactly once. but the 93 book mentions it a handful of times and goes into some specifics. For instance, Mosley added specific details saying that Disney was concerned that the cryo research might not advance quickly enough to revive him in time to correct whatever mistakes would be made in the Epcot project he was building. And he also said in the book that when Disney’s lung was removed because you know he died of lung cancer he made sure the surgeons preserved it just in case they’d need it when he was revived So, you know, he’s adding very specific details and bumping up the rumors with what makes it seem plausible because these are details Right, and there was also a 1972 interview done with Bob Nelson who is president of the California cryogenics Society at the time, and he stated, quote, The truth is Walt missed out. He never specified it in writing, and when he died, the family didn’t go for it. They had him cremated. I personally have seen his ashes. Now, this expression by the president of the Cryogenic Society has been taken to mean exactly the opposite of what it states. By selectively quoting, you know, oh, well, he missed the boat, it kind of indicates, oh, well, that must have meant he was interested in it. So people have kind of twisted that around to mean, oh, Disney was really interested, but they said the family didn’t go for it. But if Disney was interested in something, he probably made it happen.

BR: Yeah but endorsement from him would be would would be a solid. I mean, if there’s if there’s anybody who would benefit from that story, it’s him.

CW: Oh, yeah, absolutely. The California Cryogenic Society would have had a huge I mean, talk about a great spokesperson, even if it’s a posthumous spokesperson, a great spokesman. So Disney’s daughter, Diane, she wrote in 1972, the quote, There is absolutely no truth to the rumor that my father, Walt Disney, wished to be frozen. I doubt that my father had ever heard of cryonics. So, as I said, there are some aspects of Walt Disney’s personality when repeated through the rumor chain, no doubt helped kind of fuel these rumors. Disney had apparently heard from a fortune teller that he would die at the age of 35. And he had some bouts of depression and during those times he might he he was known to brood about a possible early death. And he did this even after he passed the age of 35. And, you know, but that’s again, that’s not unusual. Who doesn’t have depressive spells? And if you are depressive, who doesn’t think about dying? Disney was also sort of a secretive type. It’s not a secret that he was secretive. It was well known. He had projects upon projects that he kept on the down-low, and that made sense, until they were ready for public release. And just in terms of his personal life, he liked keeping that away from the spotlight as well. Connected to that, Disney had also specified that he wanted no funeral. Again, it’s not an unheard of request. I know several people who don’t want funerals. It’s just kind of a privacy issue. They don’t like funerals. They don’t want one for themselves. And another thing that people point to in regards to this rumor is they say news of his death was quote delayed for several hours. Now, this was way before the Internet. There was no TMZ running around. Disney had not publicized the fact that he was gravely ill. He in fact, he had some cover story saying that he was in the hospital for a re-aggravation of an old neck injury from playing polo. So nobody, nobody outside his medical circle really knew that he had lung cancer and was dying. So he had managed to obscure that so that no press was surrounding the hospital. Nobody was anxiously awaiting news. Nobody was holding a vigil and right and so it’s not a surprise that news of his death didn’t get out to the general public until his family had been contacted and the heads of various Disney departments had been nothing suspicious about that. And he had a quote secret funeral. Well, yeah, he had a secret funeral. He had a private funeral. He had a funeral with just his family members, which is not unusual at all. And as I tried to track down how this rumor started originally, and it’s really kind of impossible to say, but Snopes actually suggests it might be due to a type of culprit responsible, allegedly, for a lot of the subversive content in kids’ shows that we talked about on our last episode. And that is, quote, one Disney publicist has suggested that the story was started by a group of Disney studio animators who, quote, had a bizarre sense of humor.

1:11:38
BR: That does not surprise me.

1:11:39
CW: When the chips are down, blame the animators. They have an odd sense of humor. I suppose I could believe that. So that’s pretty much the story about Walt Disney’s supposed frozen head. Now, what are you going to follow that with, Ben? Do you have any interesting folklore or anything creepy or funny?

1:11:56
BR: I do.

(MUSIC)

BR: I’ll be talking about a type of Japanese folklore, a yokai, the Rokuro Kubi. She’s an otherwise ordinary looking Japanese woman.

CW: She? It’s a female?

1:12:18
BR: It’s a female, much like Kuchisake Onna, for those who remember the episode we did on her. Except, so she looks like any relatively young, attractive Japanese woman might be walking down Tokyo Street, except that she has a head that can extend, like Mr. Fantastic in the Fantastic Four. From a long neck. Right. So there’s actually two different versions of this particular yokai. Again, one version is where you might see her face from around the corner. She’s actually a block away because her head is coming off and stretching out, creeping you out. The second type, which is known as the Nukikubi, has a head that comes off her body.

CW: Oh, detachable… Yeah, so here’s the story of the Nukikubi is that after dark, her head flies through the night sky looking for human victims to eat.

1:13:18
CW: Eww!

1:13:19
BR: So, the head jumps off her body, flies around, and it eats bugs or grubs or small animals, but it has a particular taste for human flesh. And there’s more than one of these. So if you happen to be in Japan and you see a woman’s severed head flying in the night sky, that’s probably what it is.

1:13:39
CW: Oh, and hopefully she won’t have friends with her if there’s more than one.

1:13:42
BR: But there is one final topic I want to do a bit of a deep dive on.

CW: Do tell.

(MUSIC)

BR: I am, of course, talking about shrunken heads.

1:13:51
CW: I’ve seen some of those in Beetlejuice. Tell me how those work. shrunken heads. I’ve seen some of those in Beetlejuice. Tell me how those work.

BR: There’s a wide variety of heads that have come off of victims of course. We’re not going to be doing a whole episode just on that but there are different versions of it. So for example there’s head hunters in Borneo. Oftentimes the heads are taken as trophies. Heads are, as we’ve been talking about, heads have a sort of a special meaning or significance in culture, in ideas about magic and things like that. So there’s various headhunters around the world. There’s some in Borneo. Probably the most famous ones are the Jivaro, or also known as the Shawar Indians in South America.

1:14:47
CW: Now you use the present tense verb there. You said headhunters are all over parts of the world. People still get their heads shrunken and collected like this or is this a practice that kind of died off in the past centuries?

1:15:05
BR: I’ll come back to that.

CW: Okay.

BR: So the Jivaro or the Shuar, they live in the foothills of the Andes in northern Pruden, eastern Ecuador. And they’re particularly known for being fierce warriors, which if you don’t want your neighbors to mess with you, that’s the reputation you want to have.

1:15:27
CW: Yeah, that makes sense.

1:15:29
BR: Being known as a fierce warrior tribe is a benefit. People don’t mess with you if you’re known for being vicious. They’re also known for, for example, the Ayahuasca, hallucinogenic drinks and blowguns and things like that. My father actually visited the Jivaro in 1962 and spent some time in the jungle with them and he showed me a couple of photos of them. He was talking to me one time about, he was talking to one of them and the warrior he was talking to was particularly proud of his ability with a blowgun. And my dad’s like, oh, you know, what can you really do? You couldn’t really do anything. And he takes out the blowgun and he shot, I think it was like a lemon or some small fruit the size of your fist from way up in the tree. And I was like, wow, okay then. He was suitably impressed. You don’t need to prove that to me.

1:16:24
CW: Well, I’ve met your father and one of the striking things about your father is his head is normal sized.

1:16:29
BR: It is.

1:16:30
CW: There’s been no shrinkery that’s happened.

1:16:32
BR: Within the Radford range. So the Jivaroare, they still exist. Obviously, as with many South American tribes, they become, of course, more and more acculturated. But in addition to being known for the fighting in the Ayahuasca, they’re known for shrinking heads. There are many shrunken heads in the world. Most of the shrunken heads you find are fake. So something like 80 to 90% of the shrunken heads you’ll see are fake. That is, they’re goat skin, they’re sloth, they’re monkey, they’re not human shrunken heads.

CW: If anybody wants to see a vast array of fake shrunken heads. There’s a place called the Golden Tiki here in Las Vegas and they’ve got a Golden Head Museum with there’s a particular artist I don’t know their name who sculpts celebrity shrunken heads and they’ve got dozens if not hundreds of them at this Tiki bar so just a little note to any of you who want to come to visit Vegas and see some shrunken heads.

BR: Are these living or no longer living celebrities?

1:17:38
CW: Many of them are living celebrities. Yes.

1:17:40
BR: Oh, OK, that’s interesting. All right. So the likelihood of them being real is zero. Still cool, though. So anyway, so most shrunken heads are fake. That doesn’t I mean, they’re they’re real. They’re just not real human shrunken heads of the ones that are real. Only about 5 percent or so are actually shrunken by the Jivaro tribe. So again, there’s lots of fake shrunken heads and there are much fewer actual human shrunken heads and of those, most of them were not done by the Jivaro tribe.

1:18:18
CW: Still, that brings so many questions. How does one Jivaro tribe or otherwise, how does one shrink ahead?

1:18:26
BR: Well, so you have to understand why they do it or why they did it. And again, this is this is not a joke. This is not a legend. This is documentation. We know this actually happened. So they would oftentimes the Jivaro or the Shuar would attack other tribes in the region, primarily a group called the Achuar, A-C-H-U-A-R. And so there was a lot of fighting among the groups and the Jivaro worldview is very superstitious. It’s profoundly steeped in magical thinking and there’s a lot of suspicion, hostility, and in the Jivaro worldview, if you remember, you know, a couple of those back, we talked with Leo Igwe about the roots of superstition in sub-Saharan Africa and West Africa.

1:19:20
CW: Yes, yes, he was a very memorable guest.

1:19:23
BR: Very memorable guest. And one of the things he talked about, or we talked about on the show, was when you exist in a society that has these magical beliefs and these beliefs about witchcraft and whereabouts, that oftentimes events are bad things that might otherwise seem like an ordinary accident or just a mundane bad thing that happens, they’re interpreted as malicious. They’re interpreted as, this bad thing happened to me because of a magical attack. So for example, if there’s a minor things can happen, anybody can twist a leg or anybody can get sick eating bad food. But if there’s like a serious injury, a tree falls on you or something, that happens, that to them is clear evidence that a neighboring tribe has intentionally targeted them. So an accidental death will be seen as magical malice and therefore something to be avenged. So in this context, most of the heads that the Shuar shrunk were from the Achuar tribe. And so what they would do is they would have raids on neighboring villages, and this is pretty common. Villages and tribes raiding each other is pretty universal. But in this particular worldview from the Shuar, there’s three types of souls. And I don’t wanna get into it too deeply, but it’s important to sort of understand in terms of the context as to what a shrunken head means to them and why they do it. So one of the souls, one of the types of souls is called a mulesak or an avenging soul. The idea is that the, that type of soul only comes to existence when a person’s killed. And at the time of death, the person’s avenging soul leaves his corpse through its mouth.

1:21:16
CW: Ew, okay.

1:21:17
BR: So you can maybe guess where this is going. So the Hebrew would attack a nearby tribe and they would do these pre-dawn raids and sometimes they would set fire to the roof of the hut. They would use lances or guns or spears to kill the people inside. Oftentimes there’s this misperception that the shrunken heads were trophies.

CW: That’s the misconception that I’ve held on to, yeah.

BR: Yeah, they’re in the… they’re not trophies to the Shoar. To the Shoar, they’re fetishes. They’re objects that have power. They’re a means to an end. So it’s not that the Jivaro or the Shoar would raid somebody else, kill them, and cut their head off as a trophy to put in their home to say, look, I’m more powerful than them. That’s not what was going on. So what they would do is they would, again, they would attack the other tribes basically as a matter of course. And that’s sort of like, you know, inter-tribal warfare was routine. You didn’t need much of an excuse to go on a war hunt. And so what would happen is they would, again, they would attack a neighboring tribe. They would take basically anything of value. They would take beads or machetes or axes. But one of the things they were primarily seeking was the head of the victim that they believe had wronged them or had attacked them magically. They would basically, in preparation for ritual, so they would take the head and then they would basically shrink the head. And there’s a couple of different ways of doing it. I won’t go into all the details unless you’re really curious.

1:22:52
CW: I’d like to know how these heads get shrunk.

1:22:54
BR: Okay, well the first thing you do is of course you take the skull out because the skull being bone won’t shrink.

CW: Okay, that clears up a big question for me.

1:23:04
BR: Step one, right. So they would typically simmer the head in water for about 45 minutes and they would sew the mouth shut, which is why in shrunken heads you see the lips being sewn shut.

1:23:17
CW: And you mentioned like an avenging spirit would come out of the mouth, right?

1:23:21
BR: Right. And so, yeah, so it was because they were afraid that if they didn’t sew the mouth shut, if they didn’t try and basically… And they would also rub soot on it to darken it. And the idea was that they knew that after this raid, the enemy spirit would seek revenge, because again, revenge plays a big part in their worldview. And so to try and prevent that revenge, they would sew the mouth shut, because that would keep the spirit, which would otherwise try and take revenge on them, within the shrunken head itself.

1:23:56
CW: Like capturing a djinn or something. It would keep the avenging spirit.

1:24:03
BR: Exactly. So they would sew up the lips and they was so at the eyes and they was so at the back of the neck to try and trap the soul in there and then they would put hot rocks and pebbles inside the head and they’d use sand to heat it up again. There’s a couple couple different techniques. Basically that that’s the same process. They would scrape out the fat and then they would just let it smoke. They wouldn’t put it directly on a fire because that would oftentimes, in shrunken heads, the hair is intact typically. And obviously if you put it directly on an open fire, the hair will burn. So they’re…

1:24:39
CW: This is fascinating. So they essentially turn the face and the head skin into like a leather pouch.

1:24:45
BR: Yes.

1:24:46
CW: Wow.

1:24:47
BR: So, yeah, so that’s what would happen. But one of the interesting aspects of this is that the value was in the ritual itself. And so the shrunken head, or what’s called the sansa, its value wasn’t in the fact that it was a shrunken head of an enemy. In fact, sometimes, according to some reports, it would be thrown away or would just be put underneath, you know, something in the back room. It wasn’t valued as a prize possession in and of itself, because again, it wasn’t a trophy. It was part of a process. And so once the ritual had finished, its value had largely gone away. And one of the interesting aspects about it is that it wasn’t until later on that the value of shrunken heads was basically sort of commercialized. So to them, it was a fetish. It was something to get magical power from and to perpetuate or to try and stop this cycle of revenge. And this is from like the 1850s to the 1930s, 1940s.

1:25:57
CW: So the actual resulting shrunken head was more of a byproduct of what they wanted to accomplish. So they figured the task was done. This is like the this is like the copies of your tax return. It’s just something you file away.

1:26:10
BR: Right. And then so what happened was that the the Shuar were they began to have a reputation, number one, as fierce fighters, which, you know, if you don’t want to be messed with, you have a reputation for killing your enemies and taking their heads.

1:26:23
CW: Collect enough heads and, you know, tongues start to wag.

1:26:26
BR: Exactly. And so oftentimes again the after the ritual the sansa had no public or social value and So there was this interesting dynamic where once it became known that this this headhunting of the head shrinking was going on they had pressure from for example Christian missionaries and from the Ecuadorian government to not do it anymore because to outsiders or to other people, it was this weird, bizarre, savage thing that didn’t make Ecuador look good. To them, they didn’t see it that way. That was just part of their… They weren’t doing it to be cruel or sadistic.

1:27:05
CW: Yeah, it’s just their Tuesday.

1:27:06
BR: Yeah. Exactly. And so what happened was that, again, the shrunken heads, as they became better known, they began to be commercialized. And so they had pressure from the government and from missionaries and others to stop doing this practice. But at the same time, all of a sudden, well not all of a sudden, but gradually, the heads themselves began to be collector’s items.

1:27:30
CW: So once you have a supply that’s being choked off, the demand is going to increase and the value is going to increase.

1:27:37
BR: Exactly. So eventually the shuar or the Jivaro would begin began creating these sanses for export. I mean, they still use it in rituals, but I mean, they’re like, again, these are these are people living in the jungle. I mean, they’re they don’t have much. And if you if you can sell something to some European trader for one hundred dollars, especially in 1860 or something, that buys you guns, that buys you things to trade.

1:28:04
CW: Wow. Oh, that’s a very, that’s a very messed up cycle.

1:28:08
BR: It is. It is interesting. And it was really interesting digging into the history of shrunken Heads. And actually, a friend of mine who’s unfortunately since died, collected shrunken Heads.

1:28:17
CW: I notice you haven’t named your friend. You’re keeping your friend anonymous. And I mean, and I’m not going to ask too many questions, but does your friend who may or may not be you own any illegal, actual human shrunken heads?

1:28:32
BR: That’s a good question. One thing about the Sansas, the shrunken heads, is that they’re this really weird blend of human remains and cultural artifact. Right? So on one hand, it’s like something that any Native American group anywhere in the world might have used. On the other hand, it’s also someone’s human head that used to be on a person.

1:29:01
CW: Art.

1:29:01
BR: It’s art, it’s something. And so I have held a shrunken head, a real shrunken head in my hand. And it’s weird. It is unnerving. I mean, it’s the size of an orange. And it’s real, I mean, it’s not, I also have a fake one, actually. But I mean, the one that I was holding, and I’ve seen at least four or five real ones, it’s weird to look at it and realize this was another living, breathing human’s head. It’s exotic, it’s creepy, it’s all those sorts of things. And so I’m, my friend, the shrunken head collector, his name was Bill Jamison. He died about five years ago.

1:29:40
CW: Okay.

1:29:41
BR: And he lived in Toronto. And when I was living in Buffalo, New York at the time, Joe Nickell and I actually went to go visit Bill at his home. And he had this amazing collection. You walk into his, his, his, this is his house. This is not a museum. This is his house. And he’s got shrunken heads on this wall. He’s got statues over here. He’s got, you know, just exotic weird things from all over the place. And he showed us his collection. He was a wonderful guy and he was a collector. And yes, he owned several shrunken heads. We talked about him and we interviewed him about him. And I have photos of some of his collection. So there are shrunken heads in various museums. There’s some at the Smithsonian. There’s some at another Indian museum in New York. They are legal.

CW: Under certain circumstances, like if you’re a museum curator?

1:30:43
BR: Well, it’s a complex issue, right? Because on one hand, they’re bizarre and exotic and sought after collectibles because they’re shrunken heads and they’re unusual. As I mentioned before, most shrunken heads are fake and of the real ones, most of them are not made by the Shuar. There are other people who have made shrunken heads. For example, there was a guy in Austria in the early 1900s who wanted to see if the stories that travelers brought back about shrunken heads actually worked. He’s like, these people were in Ecuador and they met the Hebrew and this is how they set to shrink it ahead. Let me see if this works. And he apparently shrunk four of them from, I think, executed prisoners. So, in most cases, the person whose head it is was already dead, or they were killed in the process of otherwise, and I don’t want to be flippant about it, but otherwise normal inter-tribal warfare. I don’t know how else to put it. So, the vast majority of them were other tribes. So, there are, I think I’ve seen three Western heads, shrunken heads. There was one guy that Bill had that was clearly, it was a redheaded man, clearly a Westerner, probably Irish. Very unusual. Again, the vast majority of them are are other natives. Anyway. So he had some and he also had mummies. He had, you know, Bill had this amazing collection.

1:32:13
CW: This is really kind of setting off a whole lot of parallels in my head about about mummies. And, you know, the the commercialization of artifacts that are also people is just a whole, whole thing. And, and, you know, we started this episode with the notion that there’s something special about the head and somebody collecting, you know, shrunken feet, shrunken hands, shrunken ears, whatever. There’s something just extra weird about imagining a human head, all the face and everything getting shrunk down and sitting on a shelf somewhere or sitting in a hut in South America somewhere. There’s just something really strange about turning that into a fetish item.

1:32:58
BR: Yeah, anyways, to sort of more fully answer your question, so the headhunting has stopped basically for a variety of reasons, partly because it’s now illegal. The trade in human heads and other body parts as artifacts is, of course, a culturally, ethically sensitive issue.

1:33:21
CW: That doesn’t always stop something.

1:33:24
BR: No, no, that doesn’t always stop something. But of course, a lot has changed in Ecuador in the whole world in the past 150 years. So sort of the time when this was mostly going on was again 1850s to 1930s or so after which time again there was pressure from the outside to have them stop doing it and of course these days I mean there are still The Shuar the Jivaro living in in Ecuador. I mean you can find them. I was reading a Journal article about it and they were talking about how they were not embarrassed by shrunken heads even though to some people who don’t understand it they sort of see this as sort of the mark of a savage and sadist and even whatever else. They just see it as part of their culture. And they quickly point out, of course, that it’s likely that nobody alive has shrunk a head. It is undeniable that their forefathers did it. That’s what they did. But in 2020, nobody is really shrinking heads these days. But the knowledge is still there. So that was an interesting part in one of the articles I was reading is that even though today the Sansas are not still made, they could be made because that, particularly for those still living in the jungle and the Jivaros and the Shuar still there, that worldview is still with us, right? And so, or still with them. So it’s not so much that the Sansas or shrunken heads are not made because they’ve renounced that worldview. They’re not made for various other reasons, but certainly they could go back to that if they need to be, because it isn’t part of their DNA. Does that make sense?

1:35:02
CW: Well, it kind of does make sense. You’re saying that it’s not like they wanted to stop and stopped of their own accord. They still have the worldview that makes, that would make a population kind of want to do that. It’s their tradition. So yeah, that’s that’s that’s the thorny thicket there.

1:35:18
BR: It is that’s that you know again, that’s that’s one reasons. I find shrunken heads so interesting There’s so many different aspects to them and I you know, I’ve seen shrunken heads in museums I saw shrunken heads at Bill’s apartment in Toronto I’ve seen a couple shrunken heads at in side shows and and you know in carnivals and stuff and There’s there’s a couple different ways that you can tell a real one from a fake one. Do you want to know what they are?

1:35:42
CW: Sure.

BR: I’ll give you, there’s actually about two dozen different ways. I’ll give you two.

1:35:46
CW: Let’s give our listeners a few.

1:35:48
BR: Okay. So typically, well, the bad fakes are pretty easy to spot because again, they’re often goat skin just over a mold. So for example, if you go to Ecuador or Peru, in some of the tourist places, you can find so-called, real shrunken head for $25. You can buy them online, the same thing as well. Or the fake ones, you can’t buy real shrunken heads on eBay, of course. But for example, oftentimes, the snout is more pronounced because in the process of the head sort of being shrunk, that’s one of the things that happens.

1:36:23
CW: So the snout’s more pronounced in one that was once an animal head or are the snouts more pronounced in a human?

1:36:31
BR: The snout is more pronounced in the human ones because the head actually deforms. When you look at a real sansa, a real shrunken head, one thing that’s interesting is of course the hair doesn’t shrink. You have this tiny head the size of an orange and you have oftentimes when they’re displayed, you know, two or three feet of long black hair.

1:36:54
CW: Wow.

1:36:55
BR: Because again, the hair itself doesn’t shrink. And if it’s done properly, it doesn’t burn either because it’s not subjected to fire.

1:37:01
CW: So all the hair follicles just kind of shrink together. So it’s just like thick mass of hair?

1:37:08
BR: Exactly. So that’s actually, so the two best ways to see whether the shrunken head you’re looking at is real is look at the nose, the nose hairs. Real shrunken heads, you can find the nose hairs.

1:37:22
CW: Oh my gosh, I think that’s a lot closer than I want to get to a real shrunken head, Ben.

1:37:29
BR: I’m just giving you information. The same thing also with ears. They look exactly like tiny human ears, whereas in the fake ones, it’s very difficult to fake a human looking ear at, you know, one quarter scale.

1:37:42
CW: Interesting. Well, stuff I never thought I would learn. Thank you, Ben.

BR: You’re welcome.

CW: Well, listeners, we hope you have enjoyed our little tour through head related strangeness.

1:37:52
BR: Head related strangeness, she says. I think we’ve covered most of the things we’re going to talk about on the head show. We ran the gamut.

1:38:02
CW: Yeah, this will end up another long episode. Enjoy. It’s the first episode of 2020 for us. And hopefully one of many this year.

1:38:10
BR: That’s right. So thank you all once again for listening and your patronage and your support. We appreciate it. And we hope you’re enjoying squaring the strange into 2020.

1:38:20
CW: All right, everybody. Take care.

1:38:21
BR: Bye bye.

1:38:22
We would like to extend heartfelt thanks to our sponsor-level patrons Amy Fruchauer-Kelley, Dr. Angela Matkey, and Elizabeth Leggett. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor or just throwing us a buck or two per episode, check out patreon.com forward slash squaring the strange. Every little bit helps us keep the lights on here and we could not keep bringing you content without the support of our generous friends. If you’re short on cash but want to provide moral support, remember to recommend us to a friend.

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If you’re short on friends, hey, remember that each five-star review helps us get higher on the podcast charts. Squaring the Strange is a production of Two Heads Studio LLC. Copyright 2018. Theme music by Shriekback. Additional music by Memory, Keytard and Feathered, and Pasqual Romero. Additional support provided by Ashley Romero, Robert Sunbeam, and of course our listeners and patrons. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of Squaring the Strange and do not necessarily reflect

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the views and opinions of Two Head Studio, Kronos Creative, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers, or any affiliated organizations and employers. Inquiry, our advertisers, or any affiliated organizations and employers.

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the

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