They came to our eyes because they'll see clear the sky different from the other we talk each

Welcome to Strange Familiers. How you doing tonight else?

I'm doing okay. Super excited about tonight's show. It's a hermit show. The title is the living ghost so maybe people thought it was going to be a ghost show, but it's a hermit show.

The old switcher. The bait and switch. Well, this hermit was known as the living ghost. I had a postcard of them, two postcards with images of them.

It was one of those guys. He was a hermit. The postcard said hermit John Stink. It's an interesting name. I was pretty sure he was Native American just by looking at it, but beyond that I didn't know much about him.

I got one postcard and then a second. I just kind of put him in my hermit collection and as I'm writing the book, the way I'm writing the hermit book is I'm just pulling out a picture from my collection.

And some of the guys I know about already and some I don't. Some I have to look up and then I look up. You see their story and I kind of write about their story.

Most of these guys and women, most of these people have really interesting stories one way or another. Some sad, some not sad.

It's almost like they're human beings. I guess so. I think everybody has a pretty interesting story.

Some of these folks you can't find much of a story. I've been surprised at how many actually do have stories though and how many of their stories were documented.

If you just pick a random person in a photo that's identified, sometimes it's really difficult to find too much more about them than they lived in such in such a town and such as such a year.

There are a couple of hermits who I couldn't find much information on. But this guy, like I said, I kind of put him aside and when I pulled out his picture by random, I'm just, you know, as they come to the top of the pile or whatever.

Okay, I'll write about this guy now. I started reading about him like, oh wow. What a story. What a story. John Stink, the living ghost. Before we get into that though, I want to thank our patrons. Thank you patrons. Thank you so much for your support.

If you like what we do, if you like strange familiars and you want to help, you can become a patron at patreon patreon.com slash strange familiars.

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So before we get started talking about John Stink, I want to read a kind of caveat here.

Is this part of our normal historical caveat that it's going to be that plus? Yeah, some parsing truth from legend when it comes to John Stink may be nearly impossible.

The information for this podcast was taken from a combination of online sources and newspaper articles from the time of John Stink's life.

We wish to be respectful of Osage culture. It should be noted therefore that the legends attributed to John Stink and the Osage people may not reflect the actual beliefs of the tribe as much of the information was being reported by white reporters and published in non indigenous newspapers.

We would welcome someone from the Osage nation to come on the show and discuss their culture and beliefs in terms of death, ghosts and John Stink. I don't know if that would ever be possible, but thought we put that out there.

As we often note, we will be reading newspaper articles from the early 1900s having to do with John Stink's life.

Many of the terms in these articles would not be used today. The language and attitudes expressed in these newspapers did not represent our beliefs or those of strange familiars in general.

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