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Cat and Jethro, box of oddities.

The show examines weird things.

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That is really mysterious. The strange. The bizarre. The unexpected. Cat and Jethro, Box of Oddities. Listen on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. The Box of Oddities. The Box of Oddities.

Pretty early on in the first year of producing this podcast, before I really discovered my zeal for rational skepticism, I tried my hand at telling some spooky ghost stories from European folklore.

I started by telling the story of the Wiesfrau, the white lady of the old schloss,

which corresponded with numerous other legends of female spirits that appeared in gossamer

white dresses in other German palaces, whose appearance was

always said to presage some disaster, and whose origins I traced back to Norse mythology, and

even connected to the ubiquitous folklore surrounding Santa Claus. Then, in a follow-up episode on

so-called tutelary spirits, I explored the many

other European stories about strange beings encountered by royalty as an omen of imminent catastrophe.

From the ancient Greek daemon to the Roman genius, these protective and guiding spirits were said to attach

themselves to places and families. And from the white, black, and red lady spirits of numerous

cultures to the ghostly white turn-falkan birds, said to only appear in augury of some

dark turn of fate for the Habsburgs, most have been

associated with royalty. And as I recently started to read about another famous story of ghostly

...