Episode 205: Bit by Bit

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This is the story of the one.

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Sometimes the unexpected is also the most exciting.

Don't get me wrong, I'm usually a planner.

I love mapping out a schedule or building a roadmap for a new project.

But every now and then, the unexpected is a welcome change.

For the archaeologists working in northern Sudan back in 2018, I imagine they had similar hopes.

They were working in an ancient cemetery that had already revealed a small collection of human remains, but it was a little 3,000-year-old pyramid-shaped tomb that held the promise of surprise.

Typically, structures like that were the resting place of high-ranking officials, so I imagine the team was gearing up for something amazing.

Something different.

And yes, what they found was certainly unexpected, but it was way outside of their assumptions.

It was a horse.

And not just any horse.

This skeleton was completely intact, without a single bone missing.

And there were even pieces of the animal's coat still clinging to the bone.

At 3,000 years old, that's practically unheard of.

Yet here it was, still in the same position it had been buried, looking almost lifelike.

Oh, and one more thing.

Inside the horse's grave, archaeologists also found the iron bit that that had been buried with it.

Turns out it's one of the oldest pieces of worked iron ever discovered in Africa, and it shows us a powerful truth.

For thousands of years, the rise and evolution of humanity has had one common ingredient ⁇ the horse.

And it's no wonder so many cultures have made a home for horses in their daily lives, or that countless mythologies and ancient stories include them.

But while all of that is fascinating, much of it pales in comparison to the darker tales where horses serve as so much more than simple transportation.

So saddle up and come along, because we're going for one thrilling ride.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

It all started with protein.

Some 50,000 years ago, horses were nothing more than another animal that our ancestors would hunt for food, right alongside mammoths, bears, deer, and others.

They were, to borrow the phrase, good eats.

It turns out protein was super important to how humans grew as a species.

As hunter-gatherers, fuel was essential to give them the energy to do all that hunting and gathering, so their food needed to be packed with nutrients.

And horse, I'm sorry to say, was one of the best, with 50% more protein than beef.

Of course, we eventually learned to partner with horses instead of eating them.

Historians think that switch happened around 3500 BC, somewhere out on the expansive grasslands north of the Black Sea.

But it didn't stay there.

Before long, horses as transportation and labor animals spread far and wide.

And maybe because it felt like horses had always been there, a part of our lives and daily struggles, they soon became part of the stories we told around the fire at night or in public gathering places, which is why you can find them scattered all throughout global folklore and mythology.

The Greeks had Pegasus, that white-winged flying horse born to supernatural parents Poseidon and Medusa, and while they had no specific horse goddesses, they did attach horse-like features to figures like Athena, Hera, and Demeter.

And in stories where Greek gods transformed into animals, the horse was always a common favorite.

Farther east in India, we are told that the goddess Saranyu tried to escape from a bad marriage to Vivisvat by shapeshifting into a horse.

Although sadly that didn't end well for her.

Oh, and their two sons, the Ashvans, they are described as twin horsemen, often depicted traveling by chariot.

Speaking of which, in Nordic mythology we have Sleepnir, the favorite horse of Odin.

It's said that because of its eight legs, it was the fastest horse in all the nine realms.

Perhaps that's why Odin always rode Sleepnir when he wanted to visit the world of the dead, knowing that he could escape thanks to the horse's speed.

The Celts from Gaul had Epona, whose name literally just means horse.

Once the Romans arrived in Central Europe, they took the cult of Epona and transported it back home, where it thrived.

And the Welsh had their own goddess, Rhiannon, who is described as a beautiful woman in golden silks riding, you guessed it, a white horse.

And when an animal is that important to so many cultures, it's common to have celebrities.

In fact, history has a number of famous horses for us to enjoy.

And the first of those might be Bucephalus, companion to Alexander the Great.

So important was that horse that when it died in battle in 326 BC, Alexander declared an entire city to be built on the spot of its death, named, of course, Alexandria Bucephalus.

It flourished for a couple of centuries, but today its precise location is unknown to historians.

Another conqueror's horse is also on the list, Marengo, the war horse of Napoleon Bonaparte.

There are a lot of stories about how strong this horse was, with some claiming the steed carried Napoleon from Paris to Moscow and back again, a trip of over 3,500 miles.

But when Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, the British captured Marengo, which might explain why the horse outlived its little owner.

Today, you can find Marengo's skeleton on display at the National Army Museum in London.

Oh, and speaking of Waterloo, the man who defeated Napoleon, the Duke of Wellington, had his own famous horse with him there as well.

Copenhagen was a bit younger than the French horse, but the British victory there endeared him to the public back in the United Kingdom.

Just how famous was he?

Well, it was apparently common for people to take snippets of hair from his mane and tail and actually turn it into jewelry.

So maybe it should come as no surprise that upon Copenhagen's death, the Duke kept the location of his grave a secret for fear that people would come hunting for souvenirs.

A heartfelt tribute to a courageous companion for sure.

But throughout history, horses have done more than carry us into battle.

In fact, judging by the stories we find in folklore, they have been the vehicle upon which some pretty frightening things have arrived.

And naturally, I want to tell you all about them.

Like so many things, this one is a gift to us from the Irish.

Because if there's any sort of granddaddy of horse-adjacent folklore, it's the Dulahan.

But to understand some of this figure's meaning, we need to go back further to an old Celtic god named Kromdov, whose name literally means the dark and crooked one.

It's said that the Dulahan is the physical embodiment of that god, depicted always as a headless rider on a black horse, often with that head tucked under one arm.

Sometimes, rather than a single horse, the stories about the dullahan have him riding on a full-fledged black carriage, pulled along by a team of black horses, who he whips with a repurposed human spine.

Horses, by the way, that are being driven so hard by their masters that fire actually spits out of their nostrils and sparks off their hooves.

And look, I know a lot of legends have some sort of headless rider figure, but the Dulahan is believed to be the oldest, the darkest, and the most chilling.

And because of that, it's also most likely the root of all the rest, including America's legend of Sleepy Hollow.

But it's amazing how many other headless rider stories are scattered across England.

For example, one man writing in the 1960s recorded that the little town of Brill, about 10 miles outside of Oxford, had not one, but four different horsemen legends.

Not four versions, but four unique separate figures, each with their own backstory and characteristics.

One was said to be the ghost of a Roman soldier, while another was seated atop a black hearse.

A third was described as a cavalier from the English Civil War era, and the final ghostly rider had no story at all, but simply haunted one of the roads into town.

Farther north in Stratfordshire, there are even more variations on the headless horseman theme.

One story tells of a dark rider who travels the road outside the village of Ancot.

Some say it's the spirit of a murdered peddler, while others believe it's a great knight killed in battle, or maybe one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

It all depends on which story you believe.

This rider had been described as sitting atop a white horse rather than black, but headless like so many others.

And over the years, a handful of locals have reported actual encounters with it.

In fact, one man came face to face with the headless rider at a crossroads just after World War II, and he described it as an awful, gory sight.

But England doesn't have a monopoly on headless rider stories.

In fact, back in Europe, Germany has its own contribution to the larger folklore, and they call him Hans Jegenteufel.

The general legend says that anyone who commits a crime punishable by beheading, but somehow gets away with it without getting caught, will find that punishment after death in the form of wandering headless through the woods.

which is how Hans Jegenteufel ended up prowling the forests of Germany back in the early parts of the 1500s.

And as difficult as it is to believe, one woman in 1644 claimed to have actually met this headless ghost.

It said that she had gone into the woods one day to gather acorns from someone else's property, in other words, theft, only to be startled by the sound of a great horn being blown in the distance.

A moment later, a loud crashing sound began to approach her, so she hid her stolen acorns, and just in time too.

When she looked up, there was a man on horseback before her, his head tucked neatly beneath one arm, and there, hanging from his belt, was the horn she had heard.

And then the man spoke, You have stolen an entire sack of acorns, and yet no one has tried to punish you for it?

No, the frightened woman replied, knowing full well what the ghostly man intended, but I pray for your forgiveness.

The headless man went on to tell her that begging for forgiveness was the right thing to do, and then explained how he had become cursed to ride through those woods.

Frustratingly, though, I can't find the ending of the story, so I have no idea whether the woman suffered for her crime.

Clearly, though, if she shared the experience with others, she literally lived to talk about it.

Which is a happy ending considering the alternatives.

Because if you dig deep enough into the folklore around dark riders, headless or not, one theme always seems to rise to the surface: ghostly horsemen often show up to deliver something that most people want to avoid:

Death.

Headless riders terrorizing locals is a frightening picture for sure, but it's just the tip of a darker iceberg.

If you remember the two variations of the dullahan, one on horseback and one atop a carriage, then you know we've only covered half the story.

Nearly as common as headless horsemen are stories of phantom coaches, or coaches of death.

Why are they called that, you might wonder?

Well, because they are believed to literally deliver death to your door.

In fact, in some legends, simply encountering the headless coachman is enough to end your days in the land of the living.

One story written down for us many years ago involved a team of men working on road repair outside the town of Sanford-on-Thames.

The writer said that it was impossible to get anyone to stand as night watchman over the work site for more than one night in a row.

Their fear?

That being out at night too long increased the likelihood that they might encounter the death coach.

And it's the sort of folklore that runs the full social ladder, from local workmen all the way up to royalty.

There's a legend that every year, on the anniversary of Anne Boleyn's execution, she arrives at her childhood home of Blickling Hall, seated in a black carriage drawn by four headless horses.

The dead queen is said to be dressed in white, and she holds her severed head upon her lap.

But there's one variation on the death coach folklore that's especially powerful.

In Ireland, the legend has the same flavor as that of the Banshee, in that it's a haunting that's said to be limited to the old families of wealth and power.

But where the Banshee announces the arrival of death by wailing loudly, the death coach does it in a different way.

It's said that if the phantom coach is heard approaching, one can avoid death from stopping at your property by throwing the gates wide open.

It's counterintuitive, I know.

You would think opening the gate would make it easier for the carriage to roll up and deliver bad news, but the opposite is true here.

The death coach, it seems, is drawn to closed gates.

And this is how things played out one evening in June of 1806 in Ireland's County Clare.

That was where an elderly man named General Ralph Westrop lived safely inside his luxurious manor house house complete with walls and a front gate.

But old Ralph wasn't doing so well.

In fact, on the night of June 18th, he was deathly ill in bed.

So naturally, his family was gathered around him, praying for a miracle and yet fully expecting death to arrive at any moment.

But at some point in the middle of the night, his two sons went outside for some fresh air, and that's when they heard the sound.

It was a common enough sound to be sure.

Carriages rumbled down the roads nearby all the time, but at this hour, well that meant that it could only really be one coach in particular, one pulled by headless horses.

The death coach.

Both men rushed to the front gate just as they caught sight of a ghostly carriage rumbling into the paved courtyard in front of the house.

Just in time, as the carriage began to slow, they threw the iron gate wide open.

Thankfully, The death coach continued on.

But a moment later, they heard it stop at the neighbor's estate.

Afraid that they had delivered death to someone else, both men dashed down the road, hoping to catch the gatekeeper in time to tell him to open it up.

But when they arrived, there was no carriage to be seen, and the gate was still locked.

Calling out for help, someone in the neighbor's house came down to see what the commotion was all about, and after hearing their story, ran to check on the gatekeeper inside his booth nearby.

They found him asleep and feverish and carried him inside to recover.

But by morning, the man was dead.

It's hard to go too far into the pages of history without bumping into horses.

From the chariots of ancient Egypt to the streets of 19th century New York, horses feel like one of those rare historical constants, always there, always moving things forward, sometimes even literally.

And I can't help but wax poetical about what we lost as a society when horses were replaced by automobiles.

In the same way that something inside us broke when we stopped growing and raising our own food and started buying it in bulk from chain stores, I sense that we as people are worse off by not having that daily relationship with these powerful, noble creatures.

Me, I'm lucky to live in an area of the Northeast that's famous for its horses.

Anytime I take a drive, all I have to do is glance off into the fields to spot a handful of them, casually hanging out.

Today though, horses seem to be symbols of a lost age, a better time, and a piece of the past that's comforting and good.

Clearly though, that hasn't always been the case.

Even just a century ago, if one were to imagine death traveling some great distance to deliver bad news to you or your family, there was only one way to picture it traveling ⁇ by horseback.

Headless or not, a dark rider galloping down the road in the middle of the night must have been a terrifying prospect.

The story of General Ralph Westrop seems to suggest that death is something we can all escape, but clearly that's not an option.

Which is why I enjoy another story from County Clare, because it plays with our hopes and expectations.

On the night of December 11th of 1876, a servant working inside the house of a family by the name of McNamara was going about his evening rounds.

His master, the Admiral Sir Burton McNamara, was away on business in London, but the household was a machine that needed to run smoothly and consistently.

It was in that quiet hour of the night that this servant heard a troubling sound.

the rumble of many horses and the clatter of carriage wheels.

In his recounting of the experience, the man explained that because of the manor's remote location and the time of night, he knew that it was no mortal vehicle and he knew what it represented.

Rushing down to the front of the property, he found all three gates shut.

As quickly as he could, he opened them one after the other.

It was such a close call that the man literally threw himself against the last gate and landed face down in the gravel as the black, horse-drawn carriage slowed and then continued on.

Crisis had been averted.

Or had it.

You see, no one in the house died that night, but that might simply be because the person Death was looking for wasn't actually home.

The following day, far away in London, a servant called upon Admiral McNamara, but no one answered.

So he let himself in, only to discover that a journey that started in Ireland the night before had finally reached its end.

The Admiral was dead.

Horses are one of the most significant players in much of global folklore, and I hope today's exploration made that entertainingly clear.

But not all of their adventures are rooted in headless riders and deathly coaches.

In fact, if you stick around around through this brief sponsor break, I'll tell you one more horse tale that's sure to wet your whistle.

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Horses can swim.

I know this probably sounds obvious, but I just want want to make sure we're on the same page before I move forward.

Horses might be most at home galloping through wide fields of grassland, but they can actually travel through water pretty well too.

In fact, aquatherapy is a training method for a number of show horses, because it allows for strong exertion without the impact helping them to avoid injury.

But when I tell you that I want to talk about water horses, we're going to need to leave all of that other stuff behind.

Now, there are a lot of cultures around the world that have some form of water horse.

Australians have the bunyip and Germany has the Nixie.

Up in Scandinavia there is the Bakenhasten or brook horse and ancient cultures had their own names for them too, like the hippocampus.

But few countries have a more rich and textured folklore about water horses than Scotland.

They called them the Ek Ushka, but most people know them as kelpies.

And for centuries, there have been a lot of ideas about what they are and where they come from.

I won't have time to explore all those avenues with you today, but I do want to focus on one of the more common, that Kelpies are servants of the devil.

It's said that the Kelpie is a shapeshifter who is gifted their power by Satan himself in order to equip them to harvest souls for him.

Their job in a sense is to deliver the spiritual goods while their payment is on the physical side, namely, they get to eat the bodies.

Now the way they hunt is supposed to be very tricky.

You see, see, a Kelpie can't actually just run up and attack a person.

They need to be touched or attacked first by a human.

So they tend to shapeshift into the form of a beautiful horse, all decked out in a fancy bridle, and then wait for someone to come along and try to ride them.

Once the person is in the saddle, the Kelpie shouts in victory, leaps into the air, and then dives deep underwater to devour their prize.

And this, of course, is why Kelpie are only supposed to be found on roads near water, where weary travelers can be lured by the promise of a free horse and get close enough to the water for that big splash at the end.

And that's how the story is meant to unfold, as it does in countless stories about the creatures.

Two centuries ago, however, a Scottish folklorist named William Grant Stewart published what is believed to be the first collection of folklore from the Scottish Highlands, and in it is a Kelpie story that breaks the mold.

In it, a man named James MacGregor has an unusual adventure with a Kelpie near his home along Loch Ness.

You see, McGregor was known throughout his area as a bit of a sorcerer, and when he learned that there was a Kelpie hunting and killing people in his area, he set out to stop it.

McGregor knew his folklore well.

He knew Kelpies hunted travelers near water, and so he picked the most likely spot to find it.

And find it, he did.

There it was, in the space between the road and the water, a beautiful horse that seemed to be casually nibbling nibbling on the grass.

So MacGregor approached it, pretending to be a thankful, weary traveler.

As he came within arm's reach of the creature, though, MacGregor quickly drew his sword and slashed the blade across its head, cutting the flesh as well as the bridle itself.

In fact, he managed to free the metal bit, which fell to the grass.

With a flash, he picked up the bit from the ground and shoved it into a pocket.

Hey, the Kelpie said to him, why would you go and do something like that?

I I didn't attack you after all.

Ah, McGregor replied, but you were about to, weren't you?

You've killed a number of people in this area, and I'm here to stop you.

What ensued was a long conversation between the warlock and the kelpie.

The creature made it clear that it wanted that bit returned and would go away peacefully if it happened, while the man made it clear that he didn't trust the beast and would not be handing its bit back, especially after the Kelpie revealed that that bit was a magical object that gifted it with the ability to shapeshift.

Without it, it was forever stuck in the form of a normal, everyday horse.

Knowing that he had the upper hand, McGregor turned and walked away.

The entire trip home, the Kelpie, stuck in the shape of a horse, followed and begged to have its bit returned, but McGregor refused.

After all, without its power, the Kelpie could no longer harm the people of his area.

After arriving at his house, McGregor tried to enter, but the Kelpie ran to block his access to the door, a door topped with a Christian cross carved of Rowan.

So McGregor walked around to the side, tossed the bit to his wife through an open window, and then returned.

Learning the bit was already inside, the Kelpie gave up and left.

And according to Stewart, that metal bit from the bridle stayed in McGregor's family for generations.

And how did he know?

Because the man who told this tale to him, a man named George McGregor, was descended from him.

George was known as the Arch Warlock of the North, as Stewart writes, from an illustrious line of warlocks, a line that apparently started with good old James McGregor and that stolen Kelpie bit.

And as proof that the story was real, George McGregor showed Stewart not only the bit, but also the sword that cut it free.

Some years after publishing the story, Stuart returned to the area to follow up on it, only to discover old George McGregor had passed away.

But his children had inherited the sword and the bit, although by that time they claimed the magic of the items had essentially worn off.

It's often said that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink, which may very well be true, but no adage can ever be entirely correct.

And when it comes to folklore, those changes often come at us bit

by bit.

This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Sam Alberty and music by Chad Lawson.

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