As usual, this episode contains a lot of racism because it's U.S. history.

I just wanted to give everyone a heads up that this one could be particularly painful.

And now here's the show.

On this season, we'll be exploring our bizarre beliefs, unfounded fears, and fantastical thinking,

how they shape our psychology and culture, and how much of our past we can find in the present.

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber-, and this is American Hysteria.

He was moved to a larger cage that was now littered with bones to suggest that he was a cannibal. We accept one of us, one of us, freak, freak!

It's alive, it's alive, it's alive. It's alive. It's alive.

It's alive. Monsters come from the dark parts. They rise up from the depths of mysterious lakes and seas. They haunt our swamps and forests and live in the shadowy cruelty that we are all capable of. I started out with the expectation of this being a more fun episode, a look at the local monsters of different American

regions and why they showed up when they did. This one will be fun, I thought. We'd have a chill time

talking about Bigfoot and the Chippocabra, the Mothman, and Skinwalkers. But after reading from

W. Scott Poole's amazing book, Monsters in America, I knew I had a more important and difficult

path to take. I quickly became far more interested in how the ideas and language of the

monstrous, as we explored in season one in our episode on drugs, has been used as a tool

throughout American history to paint our social others as dangerous and justify

America's specific kind of ignorant brutality. I encourage you to listen to our episode on drugs

if you haven't already because I feel like this is a companion piece. We'll see how the

monstrous is connected to the animalistic, so much so that they almost became

interchangeable. We'll follow the tales told by slave owners to scare the enslaved into behaving,

and we'll see how black folks were, especially those involved in anti-slavery activism and

revolt, turned into monsters, with Mary Shelley's wildly popular novel Frankenstein

and its Depression-era movie version, serving as popular metaphors for pro-slavery writers.

...