This is Side Door, a podcast from the Smithsonian with support from PRX.

I'm Lizzy Peabody. Once upon a time there was a sweet little girl. This little girl was a little

like Lisa Simpson. She always wore the same outfit. It was a bright red cape with a hood,

and this personality quirk earned her a nickname.

Little Red Riding Hood.

One day, Red's grandma gets sick.

Her mom cooks some soup and makes a list of favorite podcasts and sends Red into the woods to bring this care package to her grandmother's house.

But once Red is in the woods, she tells a wolf where her grandmother lives.

And the rest, as the Grandbrothers tell it, is a horrifying nightmare.

I was always amazed that riding hood would mistake a wolf for her grandmother.

Even dressed up, a wolf is still a wolf.

It's a story Hansus grew up with in Germany.

Today he's a paleontologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

These are all wonderful tales that go way back.

I mean the brother's Grimm just compiled those tales. Some of them

date back to the early Middle Ages, some possibly even earlier. And Han says

it's not an accident that the story gets a little hairy once Red enters the forest.

Forest always were a place of mystery, so there has always been some mixture of fascination

and fear about forests.

So that's why like even in Germanic and Celtic mythology

forests have always had a very important position.

These attitudes about forests persisted for centuries, well into the era where Europeans

...