The Monstrefact: The Alp-Luachra of Irish Folklore

Irish origin on the show. So I'd like to discuss not a leprechaun or a banshee, but rather the out Blue Ucra, an invisible creature that crawls down your throat while you're asleep and then proceeds to eat the contents of your belley. Now. I initially read about this creature in the pages of Carol Rose's Spirits Fairies, Leprechauns and Goblins and Encyclopedia, and then looked up one of her

primary sources on the subject, Irish author Douglas Hydes. Beside the Fire from A ninety The entity is also discussed in James mccullop's Dictionary of Celtic Mythology nineteen ninety eight. But here's the basics. One allegedly can inquire the out Blueucra by sleeping near a stream. The invisible creature, sometimes described as being a kind of fairy, other times a sort of invisible newt, will crawl down the sleeper's throat

and eat the food in his stomach. Once it has set up shop down there, the creature will just continue to eat any food or most of the food that the human swallows. As a result, the poor victim of the alp lucra grows weaker and frailer despite always eating, because an evil spirit in his belly is actually eating all of the food. The solution, as described by Hyde, is to just eat a whole lot of salt beef and then lie with your mouth open over a stream.

The thirsty out leucra will then eject itself desperately in need of a refreshing drink. Kellop also adds that in some stories, the invisible creature, also known as the joint eater, will sit beside the victim. There also seems to be related tails out there, one in which serpent eggs in the water of running Brook that eve ingested will cause snakes to hatch in your stomach, and these apparently can only be removed by fasting and then positioning oneself mouth

open in front of a bowl of milk. This according to one wwn in an eighteen ninety one review of Hyde's book in the Journal of American Folklore. So there's a twist of magic and folklore humor to these tales, obviously,

the eating of the salt beef and so forth. But at heart we can't help but be reminded of real world intestinal parasites such as tapeworms here, with McKellop also mentioning this in his analysis, humans have known about tapeworms for a very long time, the descriptions of them sprinkling and popping not throughout the writings of the ancient world.

And so in the story of the alp Lucra we seem to combine this knowledge with the universal concept of a spiritual or invisible force that brings illness while also warning us about the more subtle dangers associated with bodies of water. And obviously we have any number of folklooric creature that is warning us about the more overt perils of the water, creatures that will drag you down into

the waters and drown you, and so forth. But here you know, various internal parasites do occur in water, and a tale like this could be warning us about those sorts of dangers as well. But hey, hopefully, today, the day after Saint Patrick's Day, you did not wake up next to a running stream and there is not a demon inside your belly eager to consume all or most

of your next meal. Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster, the Artifact or Animalia Stupendium each week, and you can find episodes of all of these in audio form in our audio archive. Wherever it is you get your audio podcasts. As always, you can email us at contact at Stuffdblow your Mind dot com.