The Supernatural in War

Dark Histories

Ben Cutmore

History

4.8 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 1 November 2021

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Prior to the First World War, ghostly apparitions across battlefields tended to be confined to large scale skirmishes fought in the skies. In America, Modern folklore has helped to spawn a cottage industry within the tourist trade of Civil War battlefields. The equation of such high death rates, paired with intense levels of trauma seems to equate to an acceptance that wars were surely the perfect breeding grounds for the supernatural. Though this doesn’t always appear to ring true, war is, nevertheless, a ripe area for some very bizarre stories. SOURCES R. Machen A., (1915) The Angel of Mons: The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War. London, 1915. Runcorn Guardian (1915) Angel At Mons. 27 August, 1915. P.5. UK. Davies, Owen (2018) A Supernatural War: Magic, Divination and Faith during the First World War. Oxford University Press, UK. Carrington, Hereward (1918) Physical Phenomenon and The War. Dodd, Mead and Co. New York, USA. Liverpool Echo (1916) The Trench Ghost. 21 November, 1916. P.3. Liverpool, UK Bird, William R. (1930) And We Go On: A Memoir of The Great War. The HUnter Rose Co. LTD. Toronto, Canada. Psychic News (1941) Edition No. 455, 08 Feb 1941. Vu Hong Van, Nguyen Trong Long, Trinh Thi Thanh, Tong Kim Dong & Pham Van Luong (2020) Folk Beliefs of Vietnamese People. Book Publisher International, UK. BBC Witness History (2017) US Psychological Warfare in Vietnam. BBC World Service, 21 July, 2017. ---------- For extended show notes, including maps, links and scripts, head over to darkhistories.com Support the show by using our link when you sign up to Audible: http://audibletrial.com/darkhistories or visit our Patreon for bonus episodes and Early Access: https://www.patreon.com/darkhistories The Dark Histories books are available to buy here: http://author.to/darkhistories Dark Histories merch is available here: https://bit.ly/3GChjk9 Connect with us on Facebook: http://facebook.com/darkhistoriespodcast Or find us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/darkhistories & Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dark_histories/ Or you can contact us directly via email at [email protected] or via voicemail on: (415) 286-5072 or join our Discord community: https://discord.gg/cmGcBFf The Dark Histories Butterfly was drawn by Courtney, who you can find on Instagram @bewildereye Music was recorded by me © Ben Cutmore 2017 Other Outro music was Paul Whiteman & his orchestra with Mildred Bailey - All of me (1931). It's out of copyright now, but if you're interested, that was that.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Prior to the First World War, ghostly apparitions across battlefields tended to be confined to large-scale skirmishes fought in the skies.
0:09.0	In more modern times, American folklore has helped to spawn a cottage industry within the tourist trade of civil war battlefields.
0:18.0	The equation of such high death rates, paired with intense levels of trauma, seems to equate to an acceptance that wars were surely the perfect breeding grounds for the supernatural.
0:29.0	That this doesn't always appear to ring true.
0:32.0	War is, nevertheless, a riparrier for some very bizarre stories.
0:39.0	This is Dark Custries, where the facts are worse than fiction.
0:47.0	Hello and welcome to season 5 of episode 17 of Dark Custries.
0:51.0	I'm Ben as always.
0:53.0	I hope you're all having a fantastic Halloween weekend, happy Halloween.
0:58.0	Before we start, we've got a little update to give you about some kind of interesting podcast stuff.
1:04.0	For a little while now, Halley, who helps me out with the organisational side of the podcast, has been working hard on untangling the mess that I made of the Dark Custries merchandise store.
1:18.0	When I set it up, I was like in typical poor organisational fashion.
1:23.0	I just made a mess of it, really.
1:25.0	So Halley's been untangling the merchandise store and getting it all sort of reset up and actually usable now.
1:33.0	It has been kind of usable, and people have used it up until now.
1:37.0	But it was a bit, I don't know, I guess I just set it up all badly.
1:42.0	For Halley's basically gone in and untangled it all, made it a bit easier to use and uploaded some new to soundings and things like that.
1:50.0	As I kind of like relaunch of the merchandise store, there's a sale going on at the moment until the second of November.
1:58.0	So it's only like over the next sort of 48 hours, really.
2:01.0	But I think it's 35% off.
2:03.0	So if ever you were interested in like Dark Custries t-shirts, hoodies, things like that, then now's your chance to get them at a good sale price.
2:13.0	So yeah, thanks very much to Halley for sorting that out.
	...

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