From the Vault: It Lurks in the Mine Shaft, Part 1

0:06 Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. Today is Saturday, so we have a vault episode for you. This is going to be a spooky one that originally came out 10-7-2025. It lurks in the mind shaft, part one. Please enjoy. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

0:37 And I'm Joe McCormick. And hey, it's still October, so our Halloween season stuff continues. Today we're kicking off an expedition into the mineshaft to talk about monsters and spooky legends associated with mines and mining.

0:54 That's right. This one should be a fun one. We're going to be, especially in this episode, we're kind of revisiting some ideas that we've discussed more briefly in the past. I did a monster fact that touched on some of this, and we've also talked a little bit, we've gone a little bit into the minds in search of the supernatural beings and traditions, but we haven't really mounted an expedition on this level before. So yeah, this one should be good.

1:20 So as we've covered on the show before, whenever humans venture where they don't quite belong, they inevitably encounter monsters. one form or another. There are monsters of the deep forest and the deep ocean, of the desert and the snow, and there are monsters too that haunt places of human construction.

1:38 Obviously our tombs, the necropolis, even spaces like empty bathrooms at night and lonely expanses of country road. These places too may be home to monsters and monstrous spirits and other entities. Each in their own way, these are all places of mystery, and the monster is in some ways an answer to that mystery. And in discussing monsters, ghosts, and legends associated with mining, we're dealing with a very fascinating environment. Because on one level, the solid earth beneath our feet, or deep within the heart of a mountain, is exactly the sort of place where we do not belong.

2:17 Either we're talking about the grave, or we're just talking about solid earth that affords us no place to exist. or on another level, a cavern or other natural or artificial formation in the earth, some sort of hollow in the earth that we might venture into. And so, as we've discussed in the show before, caves have, of course, long been a place of fascination for humans, you know, well back through prehistoric times. From what we can tell, they seem to have been places that offered a number of resources and ideas. They might offer shelter, water, warmth, And even in limited ways, food. There were also places of strange sights and sounds, places to speak to the future or learn from the past through art. And of course,

3:03 to venture farther into the caverns was to court additional dangers. Then, as now, you could become lost, stuck, or just overcome by deprivation of the senses. And humans also learned pretty early on that these subterranean spaces could also offer substances of additional value to them, such as red ochre, or flint, and other hard rocks, and ultimately copper and gold. Now, to get these resources, humans sometimes had to brave the depths of the Earth, not only descending into naturally occurring openings, but forging their own tunnels and pits, mines for the harvesting of Earth's riches. Now, we can't summarize the history of mining in much detail for these episodes, but suffice to say that the enterprise became increasingly complicated and daring.

3:51 Humans cut deeper and deeper into the earth, and in doing so, perpetually faced safety challenges. Mining could prove really dangerous work, and this was, of course, coupled with the ominous atmosphere of the mine, a world of darkness, of strange sights and strange sounds. Again, sensory deprivation that could bring on... sights and sounds that are not quite real, hallucinations, both visual and auditory. And on top of this, there was this seeming proximity to these various traditions of the underworld, traditions regarding some sort of a mythic underground world that date back at least to ancient Mesopotamia.

4:29 Yeah, that's right. And in many ancient cosmologies you know the underworld was it wasn't a metaphor it was like often literally thought to be beneath your feet in some sense you would go down to.

4:40 It yeah like where do we go when we die underground uh where are we going today to get these precious metals uh we're going underground kind of a daring prospect and i do want to stress though that if you In the future, we may discuss, we'll inevitably discuss mining adjacent topics, at least, even if we don't do a deep dive into mining. And obviously, you don't always have to cut an artificial cave or tunnel into the earth to mine things. But of course, that's the model that is going to factor into many of the examples we're going to be discussing here today.

5:14 Yeah. And we can talk about some more practical distinctions between different types of mining as we go on through this series. But it does seem to me, based on what I've read so far, that Tunnel mining that does go down into caverns and tunnels beneath the surface is the type of mining that gives the most rise to the belief in supernatural entities and beings. It seems to me there is less monstrous, less ghostly, less spiritual associated with, say, open pit mining or placer mining where you're sifting sediment from a stream bed and things like that. probably just because, you know, there you're open to the sky. It's just less eerie, and it is less likely to conjure, you know, kind of spooky, eerie feelings for a number of reasons

6:00 that we can discuss as we go on.

6:02 Right, and then all sorts of additional dangers that don't exist if you're doing an open pit mine or you're, you know, standing in a stream, that sort of thing. Now, we've been thrown around a few different terms here, spirits and monsters. Many of the traditions that we're going to be talking about concern beings that fall roughly into a category that may often be described as fairies or fair folk.

6:28 And as Carol Rose, the folklorist, writes in her works, you know, they might be thought of as beings that exist between heroes and the gods. Folklorist Charlotte Sophie Byrne described them in her 1914 book, The Handbook of Folklore, as, quote, various races of beings, not human and yet not divine, who are supposed to share this lower earth more or less invisibly with mankind. And I really like that definition, more or less invisibly, because sometimes we talk about them being fair or invisible, but other times we talk about how they are small. They're like the leprechaun. And sometimes this ends up just taking on the pure idea of them being very small in stature or being a miniature people.

7:16 But I was thinking about this over the weekend that It is also, it's like they just have a different spatial reality. Like they live in different spatial dimensions, and they can fold themselves in and out of those spaces.

7:29 Yeah, they're sometimes conceived as having a subtle form, one that is only lightly detectable to our senses. Other times they're pictured more as being often hidden, but occasionally coming out into view. But yeah, it fits well with this idea of... You know, like a later science fiction idea of extra dimensional beings phasing in and out of our reality.

7:51 Yeah. And I think that also speaks more to the power that's often attributed to them, because, you know, if you're just dealing with very pop culture leprechaun ideas like, yeah, they have some powers. They may be dangerous to some degree, but there's often a fair amount of danger associated with the the fearful traditions around the world. They they have a lot of power and you don't want to fall on their bad side.

8:14 Especially not in a mine. Right, right.

8:17 Which, you know, because that's one of the things too, it's like once you're in the mine, we've been describing this environment to some degree already, like this is definitely a place where we don't belong, where we're most definitely infringing upon their world and their realm and their rules. So it's this sort of, you know, mysterious or wild place they might be found. And their temperament is also always key because they might be anywhere from benevolent to malevolent though they're often situated somewhere in between. They're not always right in the middle, so they might be largely benign.

8:53 Maybe they can be wooed by humans with offerings and so forth, or they might just be very easily offended. And if you offend them, they might just have a good laugh at your expense, or it might be the end of you. They might play a joke, but just how severe is that joke.

9:09 Going to be? Yeah, because a prank with mining equipment, I mean, that might be just frustration and economic loss, but that might also be death. Yeah.

9:19 And so we'll discuss, they might be like, you know, it'd be funny, what if we did all the humans work for them today? You just don't know exactly which way it's going to fall, right? So just as there's a fair amount of variety in just how they're going to act towards humans, their exact origins vary wildly as well, including everything from the idea of them being transformed humans to personifications of natural phenomena, and in some cases, defeated elder races or even cast down gods. Whatever their origins are, generally they're cast in a place where there's some sort of friction that occurs between their world and our world where these two worlds meet. All right, given what we're going to be discussing here in this episode, I think

10:03 it'd probably be helpful to start with a sort of predecessor, and that is the tradition of the red caps and the blue caps, both supernatural entities from the British Isles, and to a certain degree elsewhere. given the sort of the basic nature of these names.

10:22 Now, these are not necessarily always or even often, in the case of the red cap, I understand, associated with mines, but they have important tie-ins, I guess, especially the blue cap, right? Right, right.

10:35 And I think they're kind of like a nice example of how we have like the non-mine-related entity, and then it can sort of easily shift towards the mine. You know, these are all ultimately, I guess, ideas that we ended up taking with us, and then they changed with us, depending on our work in these dangerous environments. Yeah.

10:50 Yeah.

10:51 So in both of these cases, we're talking about caps. We're talking about either like a literal cap that a creature is wearing on its head that is colored a certain color, or it is something like a cap that you might think of more as a halo or an aura, but we just describe it as a cap because, you know, basically it's relatable. Everybody has a cap. Everybody wears a cap from time to time. You know what we're talking about if we describe something in those terms. And then Also, they're just a wealth of traditions regarding caps that provide various powers or carry with them curses. So caps are, to a certain degree, inherently magical, at least in our magical thinking. Yeah. So let's start with the red cap,

11:33 also known as bloody cap or red comb. This one is one that many of you are probably familiar with to some degree. I feel like I grew up looking through various folklore books that had pictures or ideas of what this creature looked like. And as Carol Rose describes it in Spirits, Fairies, Leprechauns, and Goblins, the red cap in its English usage is a largely evil spirit, sometimes described as a hobgoblin, originating in the folk traditions of the English-Scottish border country.

12:06 I'm mainly familiar with the red cap from a D & D context, actually in Baldur's Gate 3, where they appear as like a vicious, disgusting little David the Gnome. Yeah.

12:17 Yeah, that would be right. Viciousness seems key to how they are depicted. They often appear as a hideous little old man in iron boots and a red blood-soaked cap. So his cap is blood because he keeps using it to soak up blood, generally, I guess, like human blood, and then wearing it on his head. So pretty gross, pretty savage. Where do you find this entity? Well, it's said to haunt old ruins and sites of historic bloodshed.

12:47 And if you venture near such places, it might just kill you. That may be all there is to it. And then use its cap to sop up your blood. Unless you recite scripture at it and drive it away. It's also said that if the blood of this creature's cap ever dries, then it will shrivel up and die. So almost kind of a cop-out. sensibility to it in the sense that it has to keep some part of itself damp. But this time it has to keep itself damp with human blood.

13:16 So that's interesting because here it's like the vampire legend. It's like the monster has a need of its own. It's not just reacting to what you do. Like, it needs blood. And so it's eager to get your blood. It's not just punishing you for, say, crossing the threshold of a ruined castle.

13:33 Right, yeah. This one is definitely more malicious than a lot of the, you know, the more sort of neutral characters fair folk entities you'll encounter. Like this one is actively nasty. And I mentioned English traditions because there are also things called redcaps in other traditions. Like there's a Dutch tradition of the redcap where the redcap is simply a helpful household spirit, not sopping up blood. And I should also point out there are a number of different variations of the English redcap tale, some of which connect the entity with the 14th century Scottish border noble, William II de Soules. sometimes embellished as a villain who was tutored in the black arts, with the imp Robin Redcap

14:15 serving as his familiar. And in some accounts, this cruel lord is eventually boiled alive by the people who suffered under him. And I've also read versions where the Redcap creature is encased in lead and boiled. In reality, I'm to understand, DeSoulis died in prison after allegedly playing his part in a conspiracy against King Robert the Bruce. All right, so that's red caps. Let's switch colors and let's go to blue caps. And this will get us closer to the mines. This is another spirit of English folklore, also known as the blue bonnet. And this entity, according to Carol Rose, was said to reside deep within the earth.

15:02 And you would only encounter it if you happen to venture down into the mines, you know, labored in the mines and reach some depth that humans wouldn't normally encounter. And so this entity is often invisible, but it also might manifest as a light blue flame. You know, this kind of like halo effect, thus its name. And this one wasn't nefarious at all, like polar opposite, really, compared to the red cap. The blue cap would mimic human miners and sometimes put in a full day's work. So moving tubs of coal or ore around. And then the miners would leave out carefully calculated offerings for the blue caps.

15:42 in thanks for their practice. Uh, you know, so this is, uh, this one's got, this one's, this one really seems almost downright benevolent and that you would tip your blue cap and make sure that it kept occasionally doing this. Yeah.

15:57 And as we're about to see the blue cap legend here has a lot in common with other, um, well explored mining spirits, specifically the one that I want to focus on now for the rest of this episode, which is the Tommy knocker, also known as the knocker or the knacker.

16:15 This one, of course, I think a lot of us are familiar with its name because we grew up having some degree of familiarity with the gigantic Stephen King book of the same name.

16:26 Does that book have anything to do with Tommy knockers? I.

16:30 I, It's been a very long time since I tried to read it. This was like the first Stephen King book that I read in junior high that I couldn't actually finish. Maybe I would have a different experience if I tried it now, but I think it is not uncommon for people to have difficulty with this one.

16:48 I think King himself has somewhat disparaged it, hasn't he?

16:51 I believe so, yes. Yeah.

16:54 Anyway, so to examine the Tommyknocker tradition, I want to talk about an academic folklore article that I found really interesting, which traces the historical evolution of the knocker or Tommyknocker story from its origins among Cornish miners in the area of Cornwall, which is in southwest England, the peninsula coming down in southwest England out into the sea. So in the area of Cornwall, and that goes back centuries. all the way into 19th and 20th century beliefs of Cornish immigrants and others working in mines in the American West.

17:34 This article is called Knockers, Knackers, and Ghosts, Immigrant Folklore in the Western Mines, published in the journal Western Folklore in 1992 by Ronald M. James. I looked up the author here, and Ronald M. James is a historian and folklorist who's been affiliated with with the University of Nevada, Reno and Iowa State University. So the paper begins with a great little vignette from the later evolution of the Tommyknocker lore. It is a passage from the work of an author named F.D. Calhoun, published in 1986, drawing on his firsthand experience living in mining communities in Grass Valley, California in the early 20th century. So Calhoun is in the middle of talking about an illicit practice of some

18:21 miners at the time who think this was called high grading. They would smuggle out high graded ore from the mines, you know, pack it secretly somewhere on themselves, smuggle it out, bring it home and then mill the ore in their cellars at night. And of course, the milling of ore is an important stage in the processing of raw minerals.

18:42 Usually it involves crushing ore. smashing or grinding down large pieces of rock into a relatively fine powder. And this increases the surface area of the desirable minerals, making them easier to separate and extract from the parts of the rock that you don't care about. And you might do this several different ways. You know, it might involve just hammer, you know, mortar and pestle of some kind or hammer smashing on a surface or some kind of stamp mill.

19:09 But as you can imagine, This secret milling operation would be noisy. It involved the pounding or stamping of hammers or stamps. And this could lead children in the house to wonder what their parents were up to. Why did they hear repetitive hammer blows coming from the basement when they were trying to sleep? And according to Calhoun, these parents would often blame the commotion on the Tommyknockers. So to quote from Calhoun here, Supposedly, the little miners gathered under the house where children were especially good. If they listened and were real quiet after they had gone to bed and were supposed to be going to sleep, they just might hear their little miners. friends hammering away with

19:51 their tiny single jacks. It is surprising how many residents of the mining town still tell of being lulled to sleep by the rhythmical pounding from deep below. If the rock was especially hard and the pounding unusually loud, The children were told that the Tommyknockers must have been using double jacks the evening before.

20:10 Wow.

20:12 Adorable.

20:12 This is adorable and ridiculous at the same time.

20:17 So James says that Calhoun's account, of course, presents some difficulties to the folklorist because he doesn't give exact dates here and he doesn't like name specific people or cite sources. But it can be taken as some evidence for the late evolution of the Tommyknocker concept in early 20th century California.

20:34 Yeah.

20:35 So by this point, according to Calhoun's telling, the Tommyknocker had come to be used, among other roles, as what James calls a fict, citing the terminology of the folklorist Carl Wilhelm von Sydow, actually father of the actor Max von Sydow. but which is told as if true. In other words, a fict is intended to be understood as true by the audience, but understood as fictional by the teller.

21:13 And this is distinguished from legends, which would be third-person stories that are sincerely believed by the teller and expected to be believed by the audience. And then fairy tales or folk tales, which are third-person stories that are understood by both teller and audience as fictional. Because of this asymmetry in the relationship here, ficts are often told by adults to children. And a great example would be nursery bogeys such as Jenny Greenteeth. Presumably, Grandpa does not actually believe that there is a hag living in the water that will pull you down by the ankle. But he knows that the standing water is actually dangerous for less mentally gripping reasons. So he tells the story of Jenny

21:56 Greenteeth in the hopes that it will stick in the child's head and get them to stay away.

22:00 A fict, as you might imagine, is a little bit like a lie.

22:05 Yes, but it's a lie that takes the form of a story. Now, of course, the Tommyknockers in Calhoun's example are not exactly bogeys like Jenny Greenteeth. There are no threats in this story, but they are a supernatural explanation told to believing children by unbelieving adults. To get them to stay away from dangerous knowledge, in this case, the knowledge that their parents are doing something illegal.

22:30 Interesting. Yeah. And kind of rewarding them because the term the terminology there was the exact description was something along the lines of like this only happens in houses where the children are really good.

22:42 Yeah.

22:42 You're very fortunate that the Tommyknockers are here.

22:45 So James says by this point, the Tommyknocker had drifted very far from its earliest known form. And studying this evolution is actually a pretty fascinating exercise that can help us understand how folklore is affected by the immigration process, the immigration of storytellers to new locales, the diffusion of folklore between different ethnic groups, and also how folklore is affected by cultural and technological changes across time. How, for example, Changes in mining techniques and technology lead to changes in what sort of entities haunt the mines. So the belief in supernatural beings that live within mines seems to be quite widespread, as we were just talking about. And we will talk about more examples from different cultures in part

23:33 two of this series. But James says that the form this creature most often takes in European traditions is supernatural. some sort of diminutive old man who makes mischief and plays tricks and either provides useful information to miners, and this could be leading them to riches or warning them of imminent danger and death, or the mining spirit punishes transgressions, defilements, and evil deeds within the mine.

24:01 It's really interesting to think about the role a trickster plays in a dangerous environment that has certain rules. about safety rules in place. And I wonder how much of this is sort of like, okay, if everything goes according to plan, you don't have anything to worry about. But the idea that the trickster spirit is there puts enough doubt that maybe you double and triple check things as they occur.

24:27 Yeah, yeah. It might lead to added scrutiny, which is good. In that case, it would almost be like the Jenny Greenteeth. It's like there are real practical dangers you need to be concerned of, but thinking about this entity causes you to behave more cautiously because an entity is more mentally gripping than real life accidental danger.

24:46 Yeah, it's more like an active threat as opposed to the threat of the thing you didn't think about, the thing you didn't know to be afraid of.

24:54 Right. So the 16th century German mineralogist and metallurgist Georgius Agricola, who lived 1494 to 1555, wrote extensively on beliefs about entities that lurked in mines in a work called De Animantibus Subterraneous, or Of the Underground Animals, the Subterranean Animals. We may come back to this work in part two of the series. I'm not sure yet, but it's likely.

25:22 But speaking of a German creature known to him as Kobolos, or I think this would be the equivalent of the kobold, Agricola wrote that the creature was jolly and loved to imitate human work, like what you were saying with the blue cap. So there's a lot of similarities in these different European mining creature legends. To read from a translation of Agricola, quote, they are called little miners because of their dwarfish stature, which is about two feet. They are venerable looking and are clothed like miners in a filleted garment with a leather apron about their loins. This kind does not often trouble the miners, but they idle about in the shafts and tunnels and really do nothing, although they pretend to be busy in all kinds of labor,

26:08 sometimes digging ore, sometimes putting into buckets that which has been dug. Sometimes they throw pebbles at workmen, but they rarely injure them unless the workmen first ridicule or curse them. the mining gnomes are especially active in the workings where metal has already been found or where there are hopes of discovering them and cause them to labor more vigorously.

26:31 So that's kind of interesting. They're more concentrated in hot zones, you know, in places where there's likely to be a big discovery or where a big discovery of ore has already been made, which is an interesting contrast to, other stories that would, you know, imagine the creature in the mine as the one that lurks in the abandoned mine.

26:52 This is exactly the opposite. It's like, you know, the economic hot zone of the mine is where these things show up.

26:59 I love this detail that, yeah, they might do humans work for them, but they also just might sort of pretend to do work. Yeah.

27:06 Look busy. Yeah. So this paper is focused on a particular version of this widespread mining creature tradition that emerged among Cornish miners in the southwest of England, as I said earlier, where the creatures were known as Tommyknockers, Knockers, or Knackers. James says that the name Knocker may have originally been more widespread, but it really came to be associated with Cornish legend in particular, as mining was a common occupation for Cornish men, and the region of Cornwall itself had been a very important mining hub going back to ancient times, actually. Specifically, Cornwall was Mm-hmm. So these big civilizations that are producing a lot of bronze artifacts during the Bronze Age, a lot of times they might

28:18 be sourcing their tin from very far away. And so they're relying on a lot of trade to support that bronze industry. So getting into the early records we have about what the Cornish knockers were, James compares several sources. Many of these authors are what he calls 19th century or turn of the 20th century antiquarians, collectors of you know, of piece of antiques or of intangible antiques like folklore.

28:48 So these include a folklore collector named William Buttrell, who lived 1816 to 1881, who wrote a column for the Cornish Telegraph in which he documented local folk traditions. James also names a 19th century writer named Robert Hunt and a slightly later writer named Walter Yeeling Evans Wentz. And then after that, there are also some later likely derivative sources and some literary references to Tommyknockers in fiction, which we can mention in a bit. But to generalize from what we have, here's what we know about the Cornish Tommyknockers, the older version. They were usually described as supernatural dwarf-like men with long gray beards and wrinkled faces. Their name, as you might guess, comes from the knocking and tapping

29:36 sounds of uncertain origin that you would often hear propagating through mine tunnels. They were widely regarded as mischievous, playing pranks, causing trouble and fouling equipment. So that's in line with some other things we've talked about. But in some cases, especially if you knew how to butter them up and get on their good side, they could be quite helpful. Now, here's a very strange twist on the legend. Basically, all of the early Cornish sources agree on an origin story for the knockers, and it is this. They were said to be the ghosts or spirits of Jewish people who had been sent to work in the Cornish mines, either in the ancient past during the Roman period or perhaps in the Middle Ages. as some sort of punishment for

30:26 having been responsible in the minds of their Christian persecutors for the death of Christ. Now, according to James, there is basically no evidence for this belief that Jews were sent to work in the Cornish mines during the Roman period or during the Middle Ages. No evidence this actually happened. Of course, Jews certainly were persecuted in various ways by Christians throughout Europe in the medieval period, but there's no evidence this ever involved work in Cornish mines. So it's not entirely clear where this latter belief about the origins of the knockers came from. despite the fact that this has no basis in history, the origin story appears widespread and a very important part of the legend. So it's

31:11 not just like something that one person said at one time. This seems to be a common belief about the Tommyknockers.

31:18 And of course it does, you know, we can compare this to various other traditions where some other culture or other people is in some way transformed into a folkloric entity of some sort. And, you know, even getting back to stuff like the Tuatha Dé Danann, you know, saying that they were like a, you know, connections between that belief and some sort of a fair folk and some sort of a perhaps, you know, predecessor culture and so forth.

31:43 Well, this is interesting. One of the other, I mean, one of the only other explanations of the origin of the Tommyknockers, this is not nearly as widespread, but is the claim that they are the spirits of people who inhabited the lands of Cornwall before the Celts.

31:58 Yes, that would definitely tie in with various other traditions you find, especially throughout the British Isles.

32:04 One version of this origin story, the Jewish miners' origin story, appears in a novel from 1851 called Yeast, a Problem by the English priest and social reformer Charles Kingsley. In this book, a Cornish character explains what the knockers are to another character by saying, quote, They are the ghosts the miners hold of the old Jews, sir, that crucified our Lord and were sent for slaves by the Roman emperors to work the mines. And we find their old smelting houses, which we call Jews' houses, and their blocks of tin at the bottom of the great bogs, which we call Jews' tin. As a point of historical fact, by the way, it was, of course, the Roman authorities under Pontius Pilate who crucified Jesus, not the Jews. However,

32:53 setting aside whatever anti-Jewish attitudes may be contained in this ideological myth, It's interesting to note the way that the physical artifacts of prior industry feed into beliefs about supernatural beings that occupy the same space. What is in fact the remains of mundane mining from decades or centuries ago becomes either the physical imprint of work from a mythic past, you know, done by people who you imagine were there but were not actually there, Or from a ghostly present.

33:27 It's like this is the stuff left behind by the supernatural creatures now. You know, that connection between physical artifacts left by real people in the past to supernatural beings reminds me of our series on Elfshot.

33:41 Yeah, absolutely. How do we make sense of these artifacts? Yeah, people from the past or... something a little bit different, people that we just can't see, people that are hidden from us.

33:53 James notes several ways in which common beliefs among the Cornish miners about the knockers both do and do not match this ahistorical origin story. The knockers were said to not work on Saturdays because it was their Sabbath, but also it was said that they did not work on Easter, All Saints Day, or Christmas. Uh, on Christmas, it was said that they sang carols and held mass deep at the bottom of the mine.

34:20 Ooh, I do love a good Christmas mass held by, um, non-human entities.

34:25 Yes. We did episodes on that at one point, didn't we?

34:28 Yeah. About the undead.

34:29 The, the, the pious undead. Yes. Having Christmas mass.

34:33 Yeah.

34:34 Oh, that was fun. I just had to look it up. I was remembering the story of Bishop Teatmar.

34:38 Oh, Teatmar. Okay. I do. I remember that name now.

34:43 Yeah. Tietmar of Merseburg, I think, and who talked about the undead, the zombies going to church.

35:02 So.

35:02 Also, the Tommyknockers did not like when miners whistled and did not like being spied on. Sometimes miners would be overcome by curiosity and would want to watch the Tommyknockers work and spy on them.

35:16 Yeah. Frequent thing not to do with the Fair Folk. Do not go spying on them. They don't want you to.

35:22 Right. Despite being the ghosts of people, they were described as having many things in common with other she figures such as elves and fairies. So this is something I think I'll probably mention several times here. There's a fuzziness about whether are these ghosts of people or are they like another species, these she beings, these fairy folk. And I think that question is just sort of hard to answer because I think often there actually was a blurriness between these concepts. These fairy folk were often said in one way to actually be spirits of people from long ago, even though they were treated as basically a magical species that wasn't quite human. James explains this fuzziness by saying, quote,

36:09 Thus the She, the above-ground fairies of Ireland, are often associated with the ancient tribes displaced by the Celts. The Tommyknockers can be understood as underground elves who attracted the array of legends and beliefs associated with ancient Jewish miners. Like many other European supernatural beings, the Tommyknockers show a muddling of the distinction between ghosts, particularly the long dead, and elves. So yeah, it could be a kind of collision of different traditions here. Maybe you've got an underground elf-like creature or fairy-type creature who lives in the mines.

36:46 And then you also have this folklore tradition, this story about Jewish miners in Cornwall and people long ago. And then people just kind of combine these stories.

36:57 Yeah.

36:58 So what did the original Cornish knockers do? Well, it seems a lot of the stories about them focused on their reactions to the behavior of human miners. Usually, if you were respectful to them and you were well-behaved, you treated them with courtesy, and you obeyed the general rules of good behavior, they would either leave you alone or they would even be very helpful. They might lead you to riches. But if you were nasty or neglectful to the spirits, or if you were just a bad person in one way or another, the knockers would get revenge.

37:34 There are a number of stories featured here. I'm going to mention a few that James brings up. There's the story of the Cornish miner Tom Trevorrow, collected by William Betrell in the 19th century. So in this story, Tom, for some reason, got angry at the knockers in the mine, and he ordered them to be quiet. In fact, he spoke harshly to them, saying that if they did not shut up, he would, quote, scat their brains out. Also, Tom is having some supper in the mine or around the mine, and his supper is a kind of Cornish baked good called a Fuggan, F-U-G-G-A-N, which appears to be some kind of heavy cake or pastry, maybe often packed with meat inside. They wanted some. He refused to share his food with them. And this was also a no-no,

38:22 because sharing a food offering with hobgoblins, brownies, and other household spirits was a common practice in the British Isles. You might set out a dish of milk by the hearth for the hobgoblin or the household spirit. And so the knockers, they sing in a rhyme to Tom. They say, Tom Trevorrow, Tom Trevorrow, leave some of thy fuggin' for Bucca or bad luck to thee tomorrow. I think it's kind of rhyming Trevorrow with tomorrow. By the way, Bucca, B-U-C-C-A, is another type of Cornish spirit, which is occasionally associated with mines, but more often with the sea, actually. Here, there seems to be some overlap between the Bucca and the Knockers, but they're both, again, mythical beings that can

39:05 kind of blur together. Anyway, the Knockers or the Bucca, they want some of that cake, but Tom is like, no, this is my cake. And the Knockers said again, Tommy Trevorrow, Tommy Trevorrow will send thee bad luck tomorrow. Thou old curmudgeon, eat all thy fuggin and not leave a digin for Bucca. Digin means a little piece, I think, like a crumb.

39:27 But still. he refused. So the knockers cursed him. And after that, he had no luck finding riches in the mines. And then James says, Folks, we've said it time and time again. Always tip your goblin. How hungry are you that you can't even spare a Dijon for Bucca? Yeah, just a Dijon.

39:54 That's all he's asking for.

39:56 So there's another story. It's a famous one about a guy named Barker who discovers an old mine with an opening where he can watch the knockers working below. Yeah, that's oh, that's how you get into trouble. He believes that they can't see him. They don't know he's there. So he spies on them until the end of work one day. At which point the knockers each start calling out that they're going to leave a tool. You know, I'm going to leave my hammer on the, on the chair, you know, saying where they're going to leave a tool.

40:26 And then finally the last one says, I'll put my hammer on Barker's knee. And suddenly Barker felt a great pain in the knee and he was never able to walk on that leg again. Wow. So the knockers knew he had been spying and they punished his curiosity. And so among the Cornish miners, if you had arthritis, you could say, I'm as stiff as Barker's knee. That was a kind of saying. Another legend recorded by Robert Hunt has elements of both reward and punishment. This time the punishment is for greed. So the story goes like this.

40:58 An old Cornish miner and his son named Trenwith witnessed knockers hauling very good ore up to the surface of a mine that they haunted. And the miners made a deal with the knockers. If the miners could be allowed to work the knockers' mine, they would give the knockers 10% of their profits. The knockers agreed, and things went well until the father died and left Trenwith in charge, his son.

41:24 Trenwith is described in the story as selfish and avaricious, and he decides he's going to cheat the knockers and keep all the profit for himself. That's such a bad idea. The knockers, of course they know that he did that. They curse him, and he loses all his luck. And then, quote, he took to drink, squandered all the money his father had made, and died a beggar. Interesting thing in several of the stories here, the knocker's magical attack against offenders and enemies is not a direct attack, but an attack on luck. You cross them and you will henceforth have bad luck in the mine or just bad luck in general.

42:06 So now that you've crossed the knockers, you are just rolling natural ones on all your attempts to find valuable caches and veins. And usually this ends up with you having to leave mining as a profession and end up in some other revolting fate, apparently including farming. But this brings us to the second part of the story, which is the question of how the characteristics of the Tommyknocker legend change when it is carried over into new locales and new cultures. So in the 19th century, lots of Cornish people immigrated to the United States, where they became very important in the fledgling Western mining industry, despite their relatively small proportion to the overall workforce. This immigration was

42:49 in part driven by economic changes. Apparently at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, there was a substantial decline in the price of copper and tin, the two metals that formed the backbone of the Cornish mining industry. And also, after thousands of years of mining at this point, many of the most exploitable known deposits had already been heavily extracted. So, you know, you've got your depleting caches and the price is going down. On top of that, beginning in the 1820s, there was a general economic depression in southwest England that affected basically everyone, whatever their trade.

43:26 So metal mining in Cornwall appeared to be a declining prospect. But experienced mine workers could take their skills to new opportunities, such as digging tin and copper in Michigan in the United States or digging for gold or other metals in California, Colorado, Utah, Montana. And so Cornish immigrant miners in the western United States were often called Cousin Jacks. I think the origin story of this is that, you know, the boss at the mine would say, we need more workers. You know, can you bring some more people like you? And they would say, yeah, I've got a cousin Jack back in Cornwall we can bring over. Now note that there were different extraction methods used at the time for various metals. There was placer mining,

44:11 which is where you're searching for ore and maybe loose gravel or soil in a stream bed, open pit mining, and then also underground hard rock mining, the kind of tunneling mining. And the latter was the method with which the Cornish had the most valuable experience. Other forms of mining were could better make use of inexperienced labor in, say, an open pit mine. And it's interesting, I think, that the type of mining with which the Cornish had relevant experience, deep hard rock tunneling, is the kind that is, facially at least, most likely to give rise to legends and supernatural beings for the obvious environmental reasons. You've got dark, creepy tunnels, echoes and bizarre sound phenomena everywhere. And also

44:57 lethal dangers due to cave-ins, gas, and all kinds of stuff.

45:02 Yeah, there's just like the full array of sensory experiences and dangers that are going to really sort of pressure cook any kind of belief.

45:14 Yeah, and so as a result of the way they fit into the need for the mining labor force, the Cornish culture actually contributed greatly to to the emerging mine labor culture of the American West. And James mentions a bunch of stuff here, such as cuisine. Apparently, in the mining West, there was a big popularity of Cornish pasties, which is a type of savory turnover, often filled with meat and vegetables. And this wasn't just with the Cornish.

45:42 This became popular with miners of all ethnic backgrounds. There was a techno culture that was imported where mines in the American West used a particular kind of water pump that was common in Cornish mines. There's something called Cornish wrestling popular among Western miners. I didn't have time to look that up, so I don't know how that's different from other wrestling.

46:03 I mean, just about every culture has some variation of a wrestling tradition. And it makes sense that the Cornish would have one as well.

46:12 But then, of course, the belief in the Tommyknockers. And so after this, in the paper, James goes into this extensive review of what other scholars have written about the belief in mine-inhabiting spirits in the American West, including California, Utah, Colorado, Oregon, and Montana. And the extent to which those spirits are related to the imported Tommyknocker lore, also to the extent that the legends are related, how the Tommyknocker lore relates seems to have evolved in its new context. So I'm not going to mention everything that James covers in this regard, but I want to discuss some highlights that struck me.

46:50 First of all, in the American West, there was some diversity of forms. Sometimes American Tommyknockers were thought to be benign, even helpful, leading miners to valuable bodies of ore, like you would follow the tapping sound, and that would lead you to claim great riches. Other times, the Tommyknockers represented a sinister threat within the mine, and the tapping sound that they made actually spelled doom, indicating that a cave-in was imminent. So you've got exactly opposite things indicated by hearing the tapping.

47:23 Yeah, is it a blessing or a curse?

47:25 Yeah, maybe the sound makes you rich, maybe it's telling you you are about to die. Sometimes it was even said that the Tommyknockers, this seems, from what I can tell, to be less common, but sometimes it was said that the Tommyknockers or a malicious subtype of knocker called devil Tommyknockers, caused death, caused cave-ins, falling rocks and timbers, tunnel collapses, things like that. So not just foretelling your doom, but making it happen. And this malicious quality survived in some miners' lore even after the Tommyknocker legend itself died. The folklorist Carolyn Bancroft recorded a saying in the mines of Colorado that dangerous falling rocks were caused by an entity called not a Tommyknocker, but the guy in the red shirt.

48:11 Ooh.

48:11 I thought that was a little spooky.

48:13 Yeah, it kind of calls back, at least vaguely, to the idea of a red cap, because how that shirt gets so red, I have suspicions.

48:46 So confusingly, in some communities, miners use the term Tommyknocker to refer to not a being, but to tapping signals that miners would use to intentionally communicate with each other. Like, I'm Tommyknocking to, you know, send a signal. Other times, the mischief of Tommyknockers was used to explain any weird occurrence within the mine. A missing tool, a malfunctioning piece of equipment. They're kind of like gremlins in this regard.

49:16 They could be represented by little clay effigies that miners made or had made for them and would leave near the entrance of a mine. And the tradition of giving little food offerings to the knockers sometimes did continue in the American context, though not everywhere. So you might leave a pastry or a bit of tallow in front of one of these clay effigies near the entrance to a mine.

49:40 That's giving it to the knockers as a, you know, hey, I'm doing my part. I'm giving you a tip. Please treat me well. And what seems like a big difference between the American version and the Cornish version is the origin story. This idea about ancient Jewish miners sent in the Middle Ages or sent by the Romans was That's gone in the American context. In the American West, the knockers were usually just said to be the ghosts of dead miners. References to Tommy knockers appear in newspapers throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. And I want to read one funny example from 1884 in the Evening Chronicle of Virginia City, Nevada that James includes. So here's the article, quote, Last night, two men who were prowling around in the

50:27 Baltimore mine at American Flat got scared nearly out of the township by the queer sights in an old drift. They went into the mine for the purpose of seeing whether there was ore enough in sight to profitably extract on tribute. Climbing into a stope, they heard the click of hammers and were much surprised, as they supposed no one had been there in years. Following up the sound, they were astonished to see two striking hammers work on the head of a rusty drill, which was deftly turned by unseen hands. And though not a soul was in sight except themselves, they heard a lively conversation, but could make out no words. They looked and listened for some minutes, when fear took hold of them, and they ran out

51:11 of the mine quickly. At the tool house they related their experience and were laughed at, but to prove that their heads were clear, they conducted a couple of skeptics to the spot and found the hammer still at work. The men insisted that they did not deceive themselves, and those who went with them say that the above statements are facts. I love how no names are given. There's also a newspaper story from Virginia City, Nevada of miners who see a floating lantern going up and down a mine shaft and they think, oh, it's being carried by an invisible spirit. It must be a Tommyknocker. But they later discover there's a practical explanation here. The superintendent of the mine was plumbing the shaft with a lantern dangling

51:54 from a wire and So it's going up and down and they're like, that's a ghost. James also talks about fiction of the time, which you can find a bunch of examples of fiction incorporating these types of folk beliefs. So there are 19th century stories and novels that mention the Tommyknockers in the mines. But a main change to Hammer Home, apart from the origin story change, is also the distinction of the subtle shift, and it is somewhat subtle, from elf-like beings to ghosts. This, again, is confusing because in the Cornish context, these elf-like beings are said to be the spirits of humans from long ago, but are treated less like human souls and more like an elf or kind of otherworldly being a different species. I think, again,

52:40 there's just some fuzziness here that goes back a long, long time in what exactly elves are. And some elf-like qualities remained in these later American tellings. For example, the clay effigies, that seems to be more like the elves or the gnomes than human ghosts. And of course, the tradition of food offerings is more like the Cornish form.

53:02 Another major change in the tradition is what the spirits did for the miners. The Cornish knocker legends are much more moralistic. The Tommy knockers reward good moral qualities in minors, and they punish wickedness. Meanwhile, in the American context, there is essentially no moralism. There's no rewarding good and punishing evil.

53:25 There's a little bit of appeasement rewarding if you give them the food offerings with the effigies, but there's no real moral quality consideration in how they behave towards you. Instead, the relationship is just transactional and practical. What the Tommyknocker primarily does in America is, in either a helpful or sinister way, it warns miners of imminent danger. And James explains this in part by appealing to the idea of different moral cultural environments where these legends propagate. He says, in traditional Cornish culture, excessive greed and ambition and curiosity are policed and punished. The moral of these stories is do not be too greedy. Take your fair share. Don't be too curious or inquisitive. Mind your own business. And

54:18 in talking about this, James draws on a framework from an author named George Foster to describe this as a morality based on the concept of limited good. And this is a common way of thinking in many cultures where it essentially views the world as a kind of closed zero-sum system where being a good person is equated with a kind of egalitarian humility where, you know, one of the main things that's discouraged is when people attempt, quote, major change in their economic or other statuses. And the underlying assumption behind that discouragement is my gain would be everyone else's loss. So, you know, there's a limited good.

55:00 American culture was very different, almost the opposite. There was a culture of admiring acquisitiveness and ambition and curiosity, a worldview that is not zero-sum limited good, but a positive-sum world where it's good for people to achieve, to go out and achieve all the success they can, and it doesn't necessarily hurt anyone else for them to do so.

55:25 You know, I was thinking about this. I think obviously there can in reality be some insight in both worldviews. Of course, it is true that there can be positive some interactions and one person's success doesn't have to come at somebody else's suffering. You can like create wealth. You can add new value to the world. Then again, sometimes success does come at somebody else's suffering. And when we are racing towards success, mad with ambition and it's easy to be blind to the ways that our gain actually is somebody else's loss. And so, like, having stories in place to make you think about that is actually valuable.

56:00 Yeah, and I can't help but think about all this within the context of, like, a strict mining culture, too. Like, I wonder if it makes sense that the Cornish traditionally, you know, had this emphasis because you're a tight-knit crew. You depend on each other in a dangerous environment, and maybe there is more of a sense of, like, You know, nobody stand out. Nobody go for personal glory because we all have to depend on each other here.

56:26 Yeah, I think there's a lot to that. Absolutely. So the American forms of the Tommyknocker legend lose the moralistic message, the moralistic message discouraging greed and curiosity. In the American context, greed and curiosity are just fine, but you need to take practical steps to protect yourself from economic loss and mortal danger. So the knocker becomes a source of practical problems in the form of like sabotage and pranks or of information of omens about practical problems such as deadly accidents.

57:01 To quote James here, quote, the Tommy knockers were omens of danger, giving the miners something on which to focus their interpretations of subtle signs of cave-ins. The miners could not necessarily distinguish between the diverse, subtle sounds in the mine and and failed to realize consciously that when the timbers of the mine moaned one way, it was safe.

57:23 But when the mines echoed with another sound, it meant danger. Much of 19th century mining expertise was based on experience, not science. As late as the 1930s, George Orwell was able to observe English miners relying on the, quote, feel of the mine. And then here it quotes Orwell. I love this passage. An experienced miner said, claims to know by a sort of instinct when the roof is unsafe.

57:49 The way he puts it is that he can feel the weight upon him. He can, for instance, hear the faint creaking of the props. The reason why wooden props are still generally preferred to iron girders is that a wooden prop, which is about to collapse, gives a warning by creaking, whereas a girder flies out unexpectedly. The devastating noise of the machines makes it impossible to hear anything else, thus the danger is increasing. So I love this. This is something we've talked about before. Supernatural beings imagined as the physical embodiment of sensory intuitions. So I have some experience in an environment and thus I can associate subtle sensory cues with coming effects. But this association is a

58:37 little bit below my ability to consciously put it into words. So instead, there's some kind of being that is here giving me a warning.

58:45 Right, right. So the reframe this insight is information coming from some external source.

58:51 Yeah. So in the American context, the Tommyknocker legend is about practical warnings, which is something that it has in part in common with the Cornish version. But this is the only emphasis now, no longer the moralistic enforcement. It's the practical warnings. And I think this type of subconscious awareness of sensory cues in the mind, that makes a lot of sense as to where those practical signals are actually coming from. I mean, other times it might just be your imagination. But in some cases, it could seem to be actually quite prescient because you're relying on little sounds you're hearing, feeling the weight upon you. Also interesting how technological changes over the history of mining could have

59:35 contributed to changes in the Tommyknocker lore or the decline of lore altogether. There are a number of things to mention here. I'm thinking about how Orwell calls out the sound of the heavy machinery, making you no longer sensitive to those little creaks that give you the four warnings. So the sound of the machines may have changed the environment of the mines in other ways. to become less conducive to Tommyknocker lore. I bet a quieter mine is eerier.

1:00:03 If you don't have stuff like, you know, loudly thrumming in your ear, if you've got a somewhat quieter mine where small sounds can echo and propagate more easily and don't get drowned out, I would just suspect that makes you think that there are creatures about. Yeah, yeah.

1:00:20 I mean, one of the things we've talked about on the show before is the sensory deprivation in these environments, and that includes sound. And you're hearing less, you're hearing strange echoes, and it can take on all sorts of strange life in your head. But as we're discussing here, it could also give you the ability to pick up on these little changes that can be detected via human hearing.

1:00:42 Another thing that James calls out is, this might seem very simple, but I think there's a lot to it, the replacement of lanterns with electric lighting, making minds less gloomy. You know, the electric lights in the mind, that's a different environment.

1:00:56 Absolutely. I mean, you can just think of movies for this. Like, what cave set looks better? The gloomy cave set, the gloomy tunnel set, not the fully illuminated one. If you can just completely flood the chamber with light, that takes away a little bit of its mystery, right?

1:01:11 One more thing I thought was interesting is that James introduces a framework for thinking about how these stories change when they come across the Atlantic by citing a scholar named Stephen Stern. who talks about common patterns in how legends and oral traditions change when the tellers immigrate to new lands. According to Stern, there are very common patterns.

1:01:34 So when somebody moves from one place to another and takes oral traditions with them, this is how the traditions tend to change. Quote, From longer to shorter, from complex to simple, from sacred to secular, from supernatural to realistic, from communal to individualistic. I think you can see a lot of those, maybe not all of them, but a lot of those elements in the changes that occur with the Tommyknocker legend.

1:02:01 Yeah, yeah, there does seem to be this shift from, for instance, the communal to the individualistic. Yeah. Going from this is this thing that we all know about and we all believe to this is that thing that, you know, old Tom told me about. He keeps talking about this.

1:02:15 Yeah, and also on that count, the individualistic versus communal shift the shift away from the limited good morality that says, like, you know, I'm just going to stay as a peer with my coworkers here. I'm not going to try to strike out and do a lot better than them to this American context where it's like, you know, if you can find a vein and get the richest, that's great, but you better watch out for the cave-in. So that's all I've got on the Tommyknocker legend, but I think we will have a lot more to talk about with mining spirits and entities in the tunnels for the next episode.

1:02:50 That's right. We'll come back with some more European examples, but also some non-European examples of entities associated with the mines. All right. As always, we'll remind you that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short-form episodes on Wednesdays, and on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.

1:03:14 Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J.

1:03:17 Posway.

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