More about the Hoop Snake

Season 2, Episode 11: The Race

The Hoop Snake is a fearsome critter from the US and Canada.  There are sightings dating back to colonial times, and it was popular enough to be in a Pecos Bill story.  The snake grabs its own tail and rolls like a wheel, straightening out at the last second to skewer its prey with the sharp spike of its tail.  It's hard to tell if its poison kills its prey on contact or if its prey dies because it's been skewered.  You can escape a hoop snake by hiding behind a tree, so the tree is skewered instead of you, or by jumping over a fence, which the snake will have to straighten out to crawl through, thus slowing it down.

There are other mythological snakes around the world that latch onto their own tail.  The most well known is the Ouroboros, which is a symbol for infinity, or all being one, and was very popular in the iconography of alchemy, which had a strong focus on living forever.  August Kekulé, a famous organic chemist, discovered the structure of Benzine in 1865 after having a dream about the Ouroboros--a story that's about as truthful as Newton discovering gravity when an apple fell on his head, but whatever.

It was a wacky dream!

There is also the poisonous Tsuchinoko of Japan, which can bite its own tail and roll like a wheel, but can also speak lies and jump a meter into the air where it then preforms a second jump while still airborne.  There's also the Jormungander of Norse Mythology, the serpent that grew so large that it surrounds the world and it able to bite its own tail.  Ragnorok begins when it lets go of its tail.  Since the hoop snake is such a recent legend, it's fair to say that stories of the hoop snake are informed by its predecessors. 

It's also fair to say that there are a bunch of snakes in the South-West, and they are terrifying.  Coming up with a goofy snake makes it a little less frightening, while at the same time warning people to give snakes some space because they might chase after you at fifty miles an hour.  Also, the Mud Snake (a real snake species) likes to coil up in a loop, and has a pointy little tail that it points at predators to get them to back off, even though it can't actually sting or poison anything with that tail.

For this story, I thought, if Hoop Snakes were real, surely someone would have one and use it for something weird.  Since they chase things at high speeds, a drag race seemed a good idea.

More about the Jackalope

Season 2, Episode 4: The Jackalopes

The jackalope is a fearsome critter of North America.  It's a jack rabbit with antlers.

Stories about horned rabbits have cropped up across the world, but the American variant traces its roots back to Douglas Herrick. Herrick was a hunter and taxidermist, and in 1932, he put together the first taxidermized jackalope by stitching antlers onto a rabbit. That first jackalope was displayed in the La Bonte Hotel in Douglas, Wyoming, where it became a big tourist attraction. Other taxidermized jackalopes followed to the point where many people thought (and still think) that they must be real.

While most stories about monsters come from a place of trying to explain the unknown and giving yourself a little scare when you think, “well, it might be true,” stories about jackalopes are more tongue-in-cheek with both the teller and the listener knowing it doesn’t exist. Stores in Wyoming sell jackalope milk, but the New York Times notes that that’s ridiculous, because milking a jackalope is too dangerous for a sustainable business. They only breed during lightning storms, and even though the rabbit part would lead you to believe that they multiply, the antler part of them makes the process difficult, thus their scarcity. You can lure out a jackalope with whiskey, its beverage of choice.

Jackalopes can imitate human speech and learned to sing from cowboys around camp fires. They use this skill to avoid capture by leading hunters off track, shouting, “Over here!” and “Not that way!” and “Help! Help!” in the voices of the hunter’s buddies.

More on the Dullahan

 Season 1, Episode 9: Lost Your Mind

The dullahan is a kind of Irish fairy.  They usually ride around on horseback with their head tucked under one arm.  The head is gruesome looking with a smile that stretches across the face and skin that looks like stale dough or moldy cheese.  Sometimes they drive a carriage, which is made out of bones and driven by six black horses that move so fast that the friction of the wheels sets fire to bushes on the sides of the road.

It's said that when the dullahan stops riding, someone will die, and when they ride up and say your name, they call your soul from your body and you drop dead.  The eyes in its head can see all around, so it holds its head aloft in order to see the whole countryside and find the home of a dying person.  If you happen to spot a dullahan riding across the country, instead of saying your name, it may just throw a bucket of blood on you or blind you in one eye.  They have an irrational fear of gold, so carrying some with you is a decent defense.

The dullahan is inspiration for the Headless Horseman in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, but my favorite fictional dullahan is from the 1959 live action Disney movie, Darby O'Gill and the Little People, where the banshee calls the dullahan to take Darby's dying daughter away, but Darby offers himself in her stead, which leads to a scene of him sitting around in the dullahan's creepy bone carriage while on his trip to the afterlife.

I took some extreme liberties with this one.  There's no evidence at all that dullahans could put their heads back on their shoulders and have the heads look not creepy enough to interact with people.  But I thought the extremeness of their strangeness was a good jumping off point to tell a story about the friction between honoring your roots and assimilating into American society.

More on the Snow Wasset

 Season 3, Episode 10: Regina

The snow wasset is another fearsome critter from North America, listed in William T. Cox's "Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods."  The snow wasset lives in the snowy areas around the Great Lakes and north to the Hudson bay.  It's a monster created to explain what happened to lumberjacks who vanished in the woods in the winter.  They were eaten by snow wassets.

The creature travels around under the snow, feeding on hibernating animals, but also if given the chance leaping out of the snow to attack prey.  They look like long weasels or otters, and are said to be "four times the size of a wolverine and forty times as active."  In the summer, they grow little, stubby legs so they can move around, but in the winter, they shed those legs and move by wriggling through the snow.  They also change color with the seasons for better camouflage: white fur in winter and green fur in summer so they can blend into the cranberry bogs where they hibernate.

I'm sure the snow covered Midwest must have been terrifying during pioneer times and the lumberjack heyday when people would vanish into the stow with some regularity.  But there's something about the Chicago snowdrifts that stay for weeks and weeks on the edge of every sidewalk and in the corners of every parking lot.  They draw the eye when I'm walking home alone.  Could something be lurking there, ready to pounce?  The primal fear of the unknown under the snow is still alive and kicking in my lizard brain. 

I wanted to write about a pack of snow wassets attacking a snow plow, but I eventually felt that there wasn't enough going on there to maintain the whole A-plot of an episode.  In the Regina episode, the snow wassets stay in the background as a threat that looms in the unknown.