Monster House Presents

It's actually quite unlike anything we've ever seen before.

A giant hairy creature, part ape, part man.

In Larkness, a 24-mile long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland.

It's a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.

It's a creature known as the science show about monsters.

I'm Blake Smith.

And I'm Karen Stolznor.

In 1755, the British Crown decided it had had enough.

French-speaking colonists in what is now Nova Scotia, people who had built lives, families, and a whole culture blending European and Micmac traditions, have been a thorn in the empire side for decades.

So the Brits did what empires do. They tore families apart. They loaded men onto ships head

at one direction, and women and children on the ships headed another, and they scattered this community across the Atlantic.

It has been called the first documented ethnic cleansing in North America, which is not to say it was literally the first.

The genocide of indigenous peoples across this continent was massive and

ongoing, but the Acadian expulsion was deliberately planned, ordered, and recorded by the British

Crown, a paper trail of cruelty, which is the distinction that says more about who the imperial

powers kept records of than who suffered. Eventually, some of those displaced Acadians found their way to the swamps and bayous of Spanish-controlled Louisiana, where they started over.

They brought their Catholic faith, their French language, their recipes, and of course, their monsters.

You see, back in France, the Luguru was a werewolf, a proper lichenthrope, and belief in

such creatures wasn't some quaint relic of the Middle Ages.

The Beasts of Gervodon was terrorizing the French countryside barely a decade after the

Acadian expulsion.

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