Deborah Hyde [00:00:02] Hello, I'm Deborah Hyde. I'm former editor of The Sceptic. I stepped down last year to take a break after 10 years and I've been involved with scepticism for probably 15 years or so. I'm helping to run various groups. I also speak on the maligned supernatural, why people believe in nasty supernatural beings because they're more common than gods. So I thought it was well worth understanding what that side of religion and superstition meant for humanity.
Sahil [00:00:31] Deborah, how many times have you introduced yourself because your introduction is the most efficient introduction I have ever heard. It's like, you know, how to introduce yourself. Like if someone asked me how to introduce myself, I generally go, well, it's just deep breaths. But you are like, really, really, really great. Yeah, eloquent. That's the word I was...
Deborah Hyde [00:00:51] Thank you very much, because I'm enthusiastic about my subject, so I know how to make a pithy version of my subject. I suppose, you know, I love nasty supernatural creatures and have done since I was a kid
Sahil [00:01:01] All right, Deborah, one thing that the world doesn't know about you, the public doesn't know about you?
Deborah Hyde [00:01:07] Something that the public doesn't know about me is that I'm a squirrel magnet. I feed squirrels most days and some of them are friendly enough to eat out of my hand. So I guess you wouldn't predict that
Sahil [00:01:18] Because squirrels run away so quickly.
Huda [00:01:20] That's what I thought .
Deborah Hyde [00:01:21] They do, unless they're used to you and they do. They recognise people and they recognise noises. And you kind of it's a rapport you have to build up over a period of time because they're nature's victims, let's face it. So they will run away from anything.
Sahil [00:01:35] Yeah, they got a really shitty deal in terms of animals. So how did we find Deborah Hyde? I was listening to a podcast and it was a true crime story about this really religious Christian couple who were trying to help this guy's wife, who probably had bipolar and schizophrenia, but they tried to help her out with exorcism and they tried to do that for days and days and days to the point where they had to, like, sit her down and beat her so that they could beat the devil out of her. And eventually she ended up dying. But the thing with that case is that they were doing it from the heart. Yeah. Yeah. So how do you punish someone like that or do you punish them?And I thought that was really interesting that people still believe in exorcism. I think we come from very superstitious countries. As it is, India and Pakistan are both really superstitious. I was very, very keen to know about the Western world and like how exorcism still exists. And then I started reading more about you. I went to your website. And of course, you've done heaps of work on vampires, like how many people can talk about vampires and the supernatural and our obsession with the supernatural, actually.
Huda [00:02:36] So I was actually wanted to ask, so can we get into why you started this work? What fascinated you about it?
Deborah Hyde [00:02:43] And I think there must be several factors to it. There's simply an urge to do something unusual. When I was a kid, we used to go up and see some of my aunties in the north east of England and my mum was very responsible, wouldn't let me watch horror films in case it warped my fragile little mind. But she would let me talk to these women who believed in the most awful things. And we would we would all sit around and talk, you know, it was hair raising, some of the things they were talking about, you know, ghosts and good guide on your right children, bad guy on your left shoulder and things like that. So I absorbed that. And there was a there's a very deep and visceral thrill that you get from that. So I started off with the love of it. And there's only so far you could go if all you're going to do is just imbibe sensationalism that comes from movies and all this kind of thing. But ultimately, if you want to take it further, you have to start asking questions about, well, a lot of these supernatural creatures have very similar traits. Belief in them has arisen at various points in history. And when you start looking at it like that, you realise it's far more about people than it is about vampires and that takes you into a world. I mean, you can spend the rest of your life reading the work of experts on sociology and psychology and anthropology and the way people are and the way people behave. I suppose it started as a thrill and has ended up as a discipline. You know, I mean, I'm very grateful for it, really. I think if you have a passion as you go through your life, you're very, very lucky.
Sahil [00:04:18] I want to ghost story, freak me out!. The first one that really freaked you out.
Deborah Hyde [00:04:23] Yeah, that was when my Auntie Nora was telling me about a woman who was I think she must have been psychotic or suicidal because she said there's a good guide, your sort of angel on your right hand side and the bad guide demon on the left hand side. And it's an old explanation for this sort of two parts of the human soul fighting with each other. And she was at the top of stairs in her house and she felt compelled to throw herself down the stairs to kill herself. That was the bad guide telling a girl, go on, do it. And if she was actually hearing voices, then she was having a psychotic episode, although a lot of people hear voices and managed to...sort of nonclinical population, so it's not as rare as people think, but obviously the idea that there's some kind of supernatural agent, something potent and powerful, could encourage somebody to do something like that. And also, unlike a horror film, this was being postulated as real. The first horror film I watched, which was pretty execrable vampire story called The Return of Count Yorga.
Huda [00:05:26] What the fuck is that? I have literally never heard about that one before.
Deborah Hyde [00:05:28] You don't need to see it, really. You don't.
Sahil [00:05:32] I shit my pants watching...I've always been really scared of watching horror movies. You said that, you know, they had those two voices and the devil and I guess the angel, because we all have that to a point. So this would be a more extreme version of that where someone tells you 'Yup do it'
Deborah Hyde [00:05:50] I mean, it's a sort of psychotic breakdown. And she was probably fine if she if she was just going through one off events when just the stress of life just gets too much and they have these crises points.
Huda [00:06:01] It's really interesting that you said, you know, that there are two parts. One is like the good guy and then one is a bad guy because in Islam.
Sahil [00:06:08] Or girl.
Huda [00:06:10] Sorry yeah.
Sahil [00:06:11] Or a good guy and a bad girl or a...
Huda [00:06:13] Yeah, OK. So I just out of curiosity, because in Islam what it says is there are people on our shoulders on each side and they...one of them writes all your good deeds down and the other one writes all your bad deeds down. And then when you die they kind of present all the evidence. Similar in a way.
Deborah Hyde [00:06:32] Yes. And I think people also generally underestimate the degree to which people have exchanged religious ideas as well. So especially in Eastern Europe, for example, the Ottoman Empire prevailed over a lot of Eastern Europe and until actually fairly recently. And so in the Balkans, you get a great fusion of ideas. Some originally come through from pagan times, some are Eastern Christianity, and there's Islamic ideas as well. These ideas do fuse. And the other thing that I really like to say is that the order between religion and superstition is not particularly hard. I think people generally, if they haven't done a lot in this area, tend to think that religion is respectable and superstition is silly, but actually they're not that different. To classify them in that way is well it is rude. And, you know, it really doesn't follow the evidence. Superstition is a way of discounting somebody else's improbable beliefs. And the way people experience their religious lives is a part of one integrated whole. And you might know the things that you're not supposed to tell the priest or the imam, but you still believe them and they have a very active part in your life and your rituals and possibly your conversations with the people who you still interact with every day.
Sahil [00:07:50] So I'd actually want you to define scepticism for the general population, because I guess there's a fine line between being sceptic and being a cynic. I think scepticism is actually quite important for survival, otherwise. Well, we are all pretty impressionable. And we were told when I was raised as a kid that you don't question. You just believe. So what made you go into scepticism? And if you could define it.
Deborah Hyde [00:08:14] I would say scepticism is using an evidence based view of life and that will travel into a lot of corners of life. I don't have any problem with people believing anything, and I know that religion can be a great source of comfort to people, you know, therapeutic for people who do believe in it.
Sahil [00:08:31] So you're saying that God doesn't exist according to you and why do you say that?
Deborah Hyde [00:08:38] There's not particularly any evidence that God exists? There is an awful lot of very good evidence that explains how human beings have come up with it. If you were to ignore the need for comfort, the usefulness of pulling together in sort of tribal groups for survival, the way that our cognitive systems get things wrong all the time, the way that different human beings in isolated groups will come up with the same supernatural ideas again and again. So they are working with the same cognitive apparatus. There's a list as long for the number of reasons why people would come up with God, even though it isn't there, and really certainly not many reasons to believe in an interventionist God. If you say that God is something that stands above everything that is non-interventionist and that is creator of the universe and is unknowable. OK, fair enough. But then that's an untestable hypothesis. Some people believe that and that's fine. But when people start saying, 'Oh, God wants me to do this or God did that' well, that's a testable hypothesis. And it usually turns out not to be true. And the big issue that I have with religion is not so much that it's somebody's own personal internal life. It's the fact that it gets outside them and they start to come up with rules and compulsions for other people in relation to their reproductive rights or sexual freedom. That's where it bothers me. If you have religious institutions running education systems, you know the Jesuits said, give me the boy of seven or eight or whatever, and I will give you the man, you got a kid early enough, you're going to fill them with the fear of God and produce lots of people who believe in those postulate or who are scared to scared to question them.
Sahil [00:10:17] So when you speak about evidence, especially when it comes to scepticism, do you primarily rely on scientific evidence? Is that the only form of evidence that can actually prove stuff for people? Because a lot of times we have visual evidence and people have seen things. Can that be taken as evidence or does it have to be proved by science?
Deborah Hyde [00:10:35] Well, there's this data and then there's kind of meshing the data so it comes out meaningfully. And there is also the understanding that you have to collect the data under very controlled circumstances. Otherwise there could be all sorts of confounding variables. So if it's just simply a matter of somebody seeing something, well, the more people that see it is good, the better the lighting conditions is good. If you get something on video, that's good, you know, all of these things start to lessen the possibility that people have just misseen something. And we know people missee things and misperceive things all the time. Our brains aren't good for truth, they're good for survival. And so you'd better be on very high alert for anything that could cause trouble. So if you jump because you see a poltergeist twice a day, then you're still alive and you can still produce young, but you only get to ignore a tiger once. So being on high alert is just one example of the way that we misperceive things. The thing with science is that it sort of rationalises the data, if you like, and then works out the probability that you will have got this result just by coincidence as well.
Huda [00:11:42] I'm just thinking now because I'm like I've had experiences when I was a kid of ghosts and now I don't.
Sahil [00:11:49] You don't or you just choose not to pay attention?
Huda [00:11:52] See, that's the thing now.
Sahil [00:11:54] Because as children, I just feel children are so much more open to ideas and thoughts.
Huda [00:11:58] And they're more imaginative. Well, they are. Lot of kids are quite imaginative. They've got...
Sahil [00:12:04] So you're saying things that you saw. You imagine them?
Sahil [00:12:07] Well, I mean, like you're doubting it...
Huda [00:12:10] I'm doubting it.
Sahil [00:12:11] Are you?
Huda [00:12:11] Yeah,.
Sahil [00:12:11] Really? But you actually have a great story, though.
Deborah Hyde [00:12:14] Go on then, let's hear your story.
Huda [00:12:16] So the house that I lived in was barely old and I was convinced that somebody was living in it other than us. On multiple occasions I had seen a black figure walk through the halls. I would sleep with the light on because I was too scared to sleep with the light off. And when I was at other people's houses, like sleepovers and stuff, they would always turn the light off. And I was like, I want to be able to do that. So one time and the only reason I did it is because even though I had the lights on, I would hear somebody running up and down the hallway and into the kitchen and like pots and pans getting thrown around. I just decided I'm going to be brave and I'm just going to ignore it because it's going to happen anyway. I was going to turn the light off, so I took my lamp off and I went to bed and I woke up suddenly. I don't know if I was half awake or whatever it was, but I think I tried to sleep it off. And then I woke up and I looked at the doorway and there was this black figure standing there. And I'm trying to ignore it and I'm trying to act like I'm not seeing it. And then I close my eyes and suddenly I felt it run towards me and push me into my bed. It's hands on my chest. I open my eyes. It ran out. I was like, I'm never turning the light off again.
Sahil [00:13:24] And it happened to not just you?
Huda [00:13:25] It hasn't happened to just me. My sister, she used to hear whispers, so she used to bang her head on the pillow every single night. My parents were like, 'What's wrong with her?. My brother he's so they're younger than me. They both said that we hear that every single night. So we were too scared in that house. As soon/ as we moved out
Sahil [00:13:42] But your parents never heard it?
Huda [00:13:43] My dad once admitted that there was something there. But then ever since then, it's like I talk to him about it. He's like, 'Oh, really? Ok.' I'm like, you admitted it.
Deborah Hyde [00:13:52] Why did your sister bang her head against the pillow? Was this a ritual to stop it getting to her or was it unconscious?
Huda [00:13:58] I think she said that it was making her uncomfortable. So when she banged her head against the pillow, the noise would drown out.
Deborah Hyde [00:14:05] Oh, that's interesting. Okay, so several things from that story. First of all, fantastic story. That's really brilliant because it's kind of like escalated all the way up. Yeah. The first thing I would say is just because God doesn't exist, it doesn't mean that ghosts don't. Quite often it's just a logical inconsistency that people will just lump every supernatural phenomena into one group. I don't know what happened to you because I wasn't there and we didn't get any data. But what I would say is that there are some places that feel more haunted than others. There's a lot of work being done on it. And there are all sorts of environments that probably lead to people feeling that something's more haunted than other places. That's been worked on by Professor Jason Braithwaite and Professor Richard Wiseman. First of all, if somewhere's old, people are more likely to think is creepy, there's some belief that if you're in a thin corridor, that people are more likely to be on high alert, the idea is that you will sort of your most primal brain knows that there are only two ways to get out. You can't really run. So environmental factors like that can make people more predisposed to to believe that there's a ghost there. I've stayed in a haunted castle in Raven Glass in Cumbria, in England. I've actually I slept in the haunted room as well. And this is you know, it it's cold. It's a castle. And the other thing is that have you heard of sleep paralysis?
Huda [00:15:32] I have heard of sleep paralysis, yes. Yes.
Deborah Hyde [00:15:35] So sleep paralysis is a strange condition where all sorts of things happen when you're asleep, you know, your brain turns off a load of buttons. You don't make movements because you'd act out your dreams. You don't realise what's going on in the room. So if those buttons get switched off in the wrong order, then you can get a peculiar hybrid of sleeping and conscious states. So you can be correctly aware of your surroundings. You can be correctly aware of your own body. But there are dream phenomena intruding into your consciousness and for some reason they are mostly scary. They don't have to be, but they are mostly scary. It's thought that people misperceive the fact that they are breathing in a really low, inadequate way because in their sleep the body doesn't need much oxygen, but they misperceive that as something pressuring their chest because your body is immobile when you're asleep, then you might be suffering from paralysis and you might feel that you can't move your body to protect yourself from whatever this thing is. I've had it a lot, too, and I've also had it with with ridiculous things standing at the doorway. So I know that it could be some monkey will be some stupid little robot or whatever, and the feeling of fear is still there. So I say that probably your experience was down to the fact that you knew that the house was old. There would be clues about it all over the place, that it was potentially creepy, and then there was cultural contagion from you and your siblings that didn't spread quite so easily to your parents because they're a bit more rational and a bit more powerful and also more powerful than children are. And then I would say you had an experience of sleep paralysis and it can be incredibly, profoundly scary.
Huda [00:17:12] So even though we moved out and I never experienced any of that since my brother in the in the newer house that we moved to and it was a built fresh house, he actually got thrown against a wall once he woke up and/
Deborah Hyde [00:17:24] Middle of the day or when he was...
Huda [00:17:26] Middle of the day. He was asleep. And he was it was the next morning he was still in bed, like asleep. I heard a loud bang. And I'm like, what the hell is that? So I ran to his bedroom and he was just on the other side of his bed on the floor. And he was like waking up, going, what the hell just happened? And I'm like, you tell me what just happened. And he goes something threw me. And I'm like, What the fuck? He's never slept walked.
Deborah Hyde [00:17:48] Yeah. I mean, there's there's no way of specifically knowing with things like that and the fact that your brother was waking up and getting up again makes me think it's a kind of a mixture of conscious and unconscious. But of course we can't be certain. We can't know. Well, all I can say for someone in that situation is two things. First of all, the examples of people actually really getting hurt are just so few that even if this is real and this truly, objectively exists, then don't worry too much. It'll be annoying rather than dangerous. And the other thing is that with sleep paralysis, what really works is if you can practise sort of emanating love and acceptance because the fear itself begetting. I wake up loads of times with hooded figures at the bottom of the bed, I know what it is and it's annoying. And I'm you know...
Huda [00:18:40] That cycle of...
Deborah Hyde [00:18:41] And then after two seconds, it evaporates. So if you can feel something other than fear, then it helps to break the spell.
Sahil [00:18:48] Going back to when you lived in that castle, what happened that night?
Deborah Hyde [00:18:52] Oh, this is a great story. This is it's a lovely place. It's very isolated. And Dr Jason Braithwaite does a lot of research there. And I know him. He's a friend. So we all went up there. I went up there with my partner and Jason was doing various experiments. He's been running a long project there for many years. So Carl, my partner, and I participated in this. We were with Ian Topping, who runs a brilliant website called Mysterious Britain. And this haunted room, Jason and Ian took the one half of it, there is a partition across it. And Carl and I had the actual haunted room. So we all went to bed at three or four in the morning. I'm just drinking tea to keep myself warm. And so we lay there in the haunted room. And I said to Carl, I need to wee, of course, drinking gallons of tea. And of course, the thing is, when you're in a haunted castle, the loo isn't just down the corridor. You have to go down the haunted corridor, down two sets of haunted steps across the haunted well into the little haunted servant's quarters. And, you know, it's kind of like it's a good joke.
Sahil [00:19:54] I need to wee now.
Deborah Hyde [00:19:58] And so Carl said to me 'Do you want me to come with you?. And I said, 'No, I'm a sceptic' so I was determined to do this thing by myself, so I went downstairs, went to the loo. I won't you know, I won't argue with you. It was very unpleasant. It was a... I'm a sceptic, but I do I'm a subject to psychological influences, as everyone else is. Well, I came back and got back into the haunted room, into the haunted bed and, you know, went to sleep. And then the next morning, Carl said to me, we were just eating breakfast. And he said 'Was that Ian that followed you back'
Huda [00:20:35] Oh No! Stop it.
Deborah Hyde [00:20:36] I said, 'No, No, Ian and Jason have gotten an ensuite loo in their room next door'. I said, 'I was alone'. And he said, 'I heard boots on the floor.' And I was wearing socks. And we went outside afterwards and the carpet that was out there was a carpet outside. So you couldn't make a boot noise on the corridor?
Huda [00:20:56] So does your partner believe in... Or is he just a sceptic like you?
Deborah Hyde [00:21:02] No, he's worse than I am. No, no, he absolutely is. He said, 'All right, well it was an auditory hallucination because of stress' so it is a brilliant story, but he absolutely point blank refuses to believe it was anything supernatural.
Huda [00:21:18] And what do you believe?
Deborah Hyde [00:21:19] I think it was probably an auditory hallucinations because just...
Sahil [00:21:25] When you're that stressed, were you really that stressed?
Huda [00:21:27] I think she was low key.
Sahil [00:21:29] I don't think so.
Deborah Hyde [00:21:30] It was unpleasant. Yeah. Yeah. I wouldn't have gone for another wee.
Huda [00:21:36] You're like 'no more tea for me'
Sahil [00:21:37] You go in for a wee but you need to take a shit
Huda [00:21:39] By the end of the month.
Deborah Hyde [00:21:41] I would have held it all in.
Sahil [00:21:43] Can we stop talking about wee, I really need to we. I'm not even kidding. And you keep on drinking tea in front of us and we are drinking tea as well. It's all a big cluster fuck of wee. Umm question. This one's really confused me because there's too many people in society and government who say many things. But aliens?
Huda [00:22:02] I actually was no joke thinking about aliens.
Sahil [00:22:04] We actually pause for a second and we do wee.
Deborah Hyde [00:22:08] Well, I'll tell you what I'll have one as well.
Sahil [00:22:10] OK, let's all go.
Deborah Hyde [00:22:11] I warmed my tea up too.
Sahil [00:22:19] We literally did the same.
Huda [00:22:21] All righty.
Sahil [00:22:22] Aliens like this is just a matter of too much speculation and debate. So I'm very, very keen to know, given all the evidence that that we know of a huge number of videos that people have seen, including the CIA's, you know, releasing video saying that they have seen unidentified objects. Well, what's your view on this?
Deborah Hyde [00:22:44] I don't know much about aliens, but I suspect that the rules of aliens the same as the rules of ghosts and vampires, if there is a technologically superior race that has come here, then, you know, I don't think we've got enough evidence to suggest that it's there. We've got an awful lot of evidence to suggest that people get things wrong. And also these appearances happen when there's a technological leap where superpowers are testing their technology. I mean, I think the stealth bomber was probably when that was being tested before we knew about it was probably cause of all sorts of alien sightings. So I don't really know a lot about aliens, but I know we get things wrong.
Huda [00:23:26] Do you believe in magic then, Witches and witchcraft? Because we have wickens that practise...
Sahil [00:23:32] Like black magic?
Deborah Hyde [00:23:33] Yeah, witchcraft is an interesting one because it is such a big subject and all societies have their version of witchcraft. And you start with the point that there is real power which is unseen and that some people can manipulate it and the people who manipulate it for antisocial reasons of witches. So presumably a priest giving you a blessing is a certain kind of power, but it's being channelled through the correct processes. So if somebody is being defined as antisocial, people tend not to define themselves as antisocial, though witchcraft is sort of an outsider view on it. If you're going to have a witch hunt, for example, if you're going to blame people, there are always other circumstances that are involved. It's not as though all of a sudden they just decide that, you know, Penelope down the road has been sort of skinning cats or something. It's far bigger than that. The big witchcraft crisis in Europe, people often think it happens kind of way back in the dark ages when people were a bit stupid, actually, they weren't stupid. And it happened in early modern times. It was to do with political and social upheaval and religious upheaval. So it was really the 16th and 17th centuries. So those big witch hunts arose legally out of heresy law, but took on a very different life of their own, as we were talking earlier about people not seeing a border between their own private religiosity. So they may be Christian, but they may also feel that there are certain ritual practises that they can use for medicine. There's an awful lot of evidence that there were you know, there are cunning people, both men and women, who had a certain amount of valid medical knowledge and a certain amount of what we would regard as superstitious medical practises as well. People would go there to find lost items or to to get whatever therapeutic interventions were available. I mean, if you will, your cattle got ill, really. There was very little you could do. Yeah. So witchcraft is usually far more about the society and the surrounding circumstances than it is about an individual. I would say, Wickens, a new religious movement, which is perfectly valid, no reason that they should be less respectable than people who've been religious for the last six hundred or two thousand years, or it's just, you know, it's a self-conscious way. It's generally associated with environmentalism and with trying to live a sort of harmonised life with the environment. A woman called Margaret Murray, a very good Egyptologist, but unfortunately, she she went into European history as well, less successfully. And she wrote a book where she proposed that there had been a self-conscious pagan cult of which is in Europe, and that they were targeted in the witch hunts. And it just doesn't stand up to scrutiny. So some people actually believe that they feel like they're continuing a religion which has been going for thousands of years, but it's every bit as respectable to invent a religion in the 1960s. I mean, after all, somebody had to invent Christianity at some point.
Sahil [00:26:29] And you mentioned vampires. I was really...
Huda [00:26:33] I've never thought that vampires even existed. I actually thought there was just a horror thing.
Sahil [00:26:40] I thought it was a movie thing. Yeah. Like, I always thought it's a movie thing. It's a cultural thing that. Well, we just watch it on TV.
Deborah Hyde [00:26:46] Well vampires were the aliens of the day. We don't believe in vampires now. Us three and probably the people listening to this podcast, there is still the occasional peculiar event in Eastern Europe, which suggests that people kind of believe in it there. And even though vampires probably don't exist, the fact is that they were very, very compelling, belief, for a certain group of people at a certain time. And that means something about humans. So that's a very interesting factor. To summarise vampires, really what we've got is Eastern Europe, as I was saying earlier, with those different influences of religiosity, the Turkish Ottoman Empire wasn't particularly liberal and was very unpleasant in many, many ways, taking off children to... Things like that. But one way in which they were more liberal was that you could practise your religion as you wished, provided you weren't Catholic, because Catholic was the religion of the Austrian empire, which was the Turkish Empire's foe. So people were free to come up with a sort of hybridised ideas of what was going on. Vampiric type creatures exist in folklore all over the world. Something supernatural is sucking away your vital energy is common because diseases exist all over the world that do do that. Mm hmm. Tuberclosis for example. So if you watch, if you've got somebody and you don't microbial disease and you're looking at somebody close to you and they're just withering and dying, then to assume that the blood is being taken out of them or the life essence is being taken out of them is not that much of a leap. I mean, it's it's just a poetic notion of what's really happening. And the interesting thing about vampires is that they were just treated as part of just part of the background where they were rather like people in England and Ireland and Northern Europe believed in fairies for so long. But it takes a foreign culture coming in and looking at people and going 'What're they doing?' So it's so often takes a foreign commentator to come in and look. And in fact, politically, that happened in the early 18th century is that the Austrian empire rolled back the border a little bit, ended up administrating a lot of people who previously been administrated by the Ottoman Turks. And to them it was offensive because they were Catholic, that people were digging up corpses and desecrating them. In actual fact, these people were just doing an old folk ritual in response to wasting disease, usually tuberculosis or something that they had done for hundreds of years. The symbolism is kind of easy to understand, really. If you've got a vampire, then you cut its head off because nothing can be potent without its head. You put it face down in the grave so that when it starts digging its way out, it's actually digging its way deeper. You you don't have to stake it through the heart. You can stake it through any part of its body. It's just pinning it into the ground. So an awful lot of this stuff that we take as superstitious or mysterious, actually, when done in its kind of native format is pretty logical and understandable. And it arose from the fact that we now can look at books and look at the Internet to find out how people decompose and they don't all decompose according to the same rules and at the same rate, it depends on the soil pH, what the person died of, what the temperature of the soil is. So it seems as though these people would dig up their dead, would find some of them in what looked like good condition and just not understand. They thought that they still looked alive. They looked healthy.
Huda [00:30:26] I was going to say, like, even with the vampires don't like garlic, is it because it's a health remedy?
Deborah Hyde [00:30:30] Garlic is a mild antiseptic. It's actually pretty good if you don't have antibiotics.
Sahil [00:30:36] The breath is though. Garlic breath is pretty bad.
Deborah Hyde [00:30:39] The day after if you're talking to somebody. So garlic or asfeotida or the sort of smelly types of things, smells are thought to be potent to get rid of things all over the world. Also you see a Catholic or an Eastern Orthodox priest walking through the church and everything, and they're swinging that thing with the smell. Yes, very potent smells. It just happens to be a bit nicer than garlic. Smells powerful. It can repel things.
Huda [00:31:04] It's funny that it's so connected, though. I never even considered it.
Sahil [00:31:07] Talking about priest, I am still surprised that exorcisms exist. I'm not really sure why, but I mean, the videos that you watch on TV with all these pastors like saying the prayers and people have these weird sounds coming out of their body and you're like, holy shit,
Huda [00:31:23] They look actually demonic.
Sahil [00:31:25] Yeah, they look demonic. What's your research on that and why is it still happening or is it effective? Have you spoken to people who might have gone through it or...?
Deborah Hyde [00:31:35] It depends what kind of exorcism. There are the the sort of huge traumatic exorcisms which are probably aren't good for anybody. The Catholic Church is a bit and the Church of England are a bit hesitant to do the all singing, all dancing sort of exorcism talks. Actually, I went to a conference about four years ago where they were talking about demonic possession and exorcism, and the Catholic priest was the most sensible person in the room. So I think the Catholic Church is very long in the tooth and doesn't fall into any obvious traps. Every time it kind of competes with science on its own level, it loses. And so as a result, the Catholic Church is generally very kind of wily about all this sort of stuff and quite often will have bodies which are associated with the church, probably subject to it, but they don't they don't mandate it. So there's kind of that slight distance if they do anything particularly funky. What you tend to find with exorcism these days, the two most common places are evangelical groups in many places. I'm thinking of the US because that's what I know a little bit more about. And evangelical groups are a bit immune to logic. They're very self-contained socially, so they don't need to deal with with criticism. You know, it's just you talking to the choir, really. And they're also not old enough and rigorous enough like the Catholic Church, to not step on the obvious, you know, sort of grenades. Thing about America. I spent a lot of time in America. It can be a very isolating place. I think the fact that it's on a continent means that it can kind of be socially, it can create itself. To take something of that personality that used to be in the U.K. or used to be in England as I was growing up. Less so now, because in reality, you know, we sort of travel an awful lot more to the EU. We have more international relations. But just in the United States, you can go from, you know, the Rockies to Florida, you can go through all of these geographical changes, but you don't go through cultural change. You buy the same Coca-Cola, you buy the same food, you see the same Wal-Mart. And so there's an awful lot of people in the United States who haven't travelled either physically or mentally. And you can get close to evangelical religiosity as a result of that. So that's one version of exercise and another that is causing a great deal of concern is in Africa. I've written about that a few times and there are lots of African groups on the ground that are really trying to do something about this. And that comes, again, from social and economic crises. You hardly ever find someone being beaten to death for an exorcism who has money, who's an adult, who is at the centre of a social group. Really, if you've got a community which is desperately, desperately poor and then you have a five year old without a parent, that person is is an economic liability. You've got to feed them and they can't give you anything. And so you can work out a way of legally and morally getting rid of them. And that is when you decide that they are possessed. That's a bit more consciously, of course. But if you look at all of the victims, they are adopted or foster children, foster children without the proper parental protections in place, people without protection in their social group. If you go back to normal functional situations where people are poor but they're not desperate, then you can quite often find witchcraft. Accusations functioned in the same way that it was a way of kind of ceasing social relations with somebody. You know, we don't have to engage in any kinds of exchanges anymore. You're just on the outside, as far as I'm concerned. And exchanges are the way that poor people live. You know, we have to live in communities where no good by ourselves.
Sahil [00:35:33] So you said it's really bad in Africa. So what? Well, so what's happening are they...?
Deborah Hyde [00:35:37] Only in some places, and it's just in places where there has been a lot of dislocation or where there has been war, you know, just an upset. People have funky beliefs all times, but it comes to a crisis point from the behaviour and from churning out in the world. That's outside circumstances.
Huda [00:35:59] So I'm from Pakistan. We had... my dad said to me, 'Oh, you know, one of my friends, he's bought an apartment'. Now, this apartment, he said it's been built on a graveyard. He's so he's like there's been a few issues. And so apparently my dad's friend said that there's a vibe in the house and all this sort of stuff. Like he's like, I've seen things here and blah, blah, blah. And he got a imam to come through and bless the house. And the imam left, like all these sort of suras that there are these suras around the house to kind of ensure that there was no bad spirit around there. So it's a very common...even if it's not exorcism as such, it's sort of...
Sahil [00:36:42] Getting rid of the demons,
Sahil [00:36:44] Getting rid of the demons. Yeah.
Deborah Hyde [00:36:45] Well t he thing with Islam as well is that belief in Jinn is a perfectly respectable, integral part of Islam. So it's that you are kind of stepping slightly outside and integrating a pagan element. Yes, really, it is quite clear what Jinn are and what they do in Islam. And believe and fear of the dead is universal.
Sahil [00:37:06] So what happened? Did it stop the bad vibes?
Huda [00:37:09] Apparently it did, but it took a few took a few routes to kind of get it. Apparently there was like people in apartments below who for no reason slipped in their bathroom.
Sahil [00:37:19] You think the spirits just wanted rent it. Like I get angry when we don't get rent. Maybe it is placebo.
Huda [00:37:27] That's what I was going to say. I think it is. I mean, it can be.
Deborah Hyde [00:37:29] I mean, that's the thing about possession and exorcism is that you can't always assume that somebody is sort of going to be beaten to death. Sometimes if somebody is distressed, then it might be therapeutic to feel that they have the support of a community and the supernatural support of their their God against whatever crisis they're going through. Interestingly, with Islam, it just reminds me that there's a kind of there are many Greek terms for vampires. Greece is a place it absolutely infested with vampires and that, you know, again, with a very strong Islamic strain there because of the the Ottoman Turks. And there's one of the words is Annika Fluminos, which means it means somebody who sits up in their graves. Basically, it means that they're sitting up, but it suggests that they weren't before and that I've always wondered nobody else has suggested this, but I've always wondered if that was an Islamic influence, because in Islam, after you die, you're supposed to be sat up in your grave and interrogated by a couple of angels to decide which place you're going to.
Sahil [00:38:31] Really?
Huda [00:38:31] Yeah. Yeah. There's a set of questions that you get asked as soon as you get buried. And yeah that determines whether you're going to go to hell or heaven.
Sahil [00:38:39] Oh, shit, that's why Hindus just bloody burn the bodies...
Huda [00:38:45] To ignore the questions.
Deborah Hyde [00:38:45] I'm not talking to any angels
Sahil [00:38:48] Yeah and that I find extremely interesting as well that I'm very surprised where that idea came from to to burn bodies and, you know, and then throw the ashes away in water. The whole idea is so bizarre to me.
Deborah Hyde [00:39:02] The interesting thing is that usually I don't know about the ecology of burning bodies in India, but I'm guessing that there is a ready fuel source generally in northern Europe, you bury bodies just because burning them is really expensive in calories. Did you know in calories how much it took to consume a human body? It's a lot. So it was generally either a prestigious way of giving someone death rites or it was a way of getting rid of someone when you had to you had to get rid of their power. There was a vampire called Peter Bludogovic, for example. I went to his grave in Serbia and they lit him up and burnt him. And people often ask me, well, why don't they just burn everybody? And you've normally got to have a concentrated fuel source because, you know, death rites tend to follow whatever the local ecology is, the Parsis for example...
Sahil [00:39:58] Yeah, I was going to say the Zorastrians.
Deborah Hyde [00:40:00] Yeah, they they had these these platforms and you would be eaten by birds and vultures. So I'm guessing in places like that that for some reason it wasn't good to bury people and you didn't have the fuel to burn them either.
Sahil [00:40:12] Maybe that's the cause of India's pollution. I never thought about that. It's all the bloody burning we do. It's like and be using so much fuel and releasing like so many carbon particles in the air.
Deborah Hyde [00:40:22] It's a possibility. I don't know. It's a possibility. I know that in India now, there are an awful lot more crematoriums. People tend to do that there, which is going to be cleaner. But yes, there must be a lot of...
Sahil [00:40:32] I mean, now we have electric ones, so we burn the bodies. So the electric sort of electric pyres. What a what a waste of coal. Just cut them up and put them.
Huda [00:40:40] Cut em?
Sahil [00:40:42] What's wrong with cutting. Most serial killers did that.
Huda [00:40:45] Ok, we're not serial killers.
Sahil [00:40:46] It would fit. It would be really, really easy. So for a sceptic then either it has to be I guess it has to be scientifically proven, there has to be data or the other thing is coincidence?
Deborah Hyde [00:40:58] Yeah, I think we have a very strong tendency to link things into a narrative. You can see in films. My my other half is a screenwriter and he he refers to these.
Huda [00:41:09] He's a screenwriter?
Huda [00:41:10] He would be getting so many stories from you.
Sahil [00:41:13] Yeah. But being a screenwriter he's like 'No, there couldn't be a pair of boots'. Like he's so, so... at the same time you have to be in a fictional world to be writing stuff
Deborah Hyde [00:41:23] He's very, very imaginative. Just doesn't believe in any of it.
Huda [00:41:27] That's, that's great. That's good. Yeah. Sorry continue
Deborah Hyde [00:41:30] Well we both sleep well at night. Put it like that. You know, we don't lie there quaking at the poltergeists.
Huda [00:41:34] Yeah exactly. You'd have a great night.
Huda [00:41:36] I still don't know what Poltergeist is. Can you please tell me?
Deborah Hyde [00:41:39] Poltergeist is literally it's a German word and it's basically a throwing ghost. It's a it's a ghost that interacts with the world in not just a perceptive way. But it will throw things or at start fires.
Sahil [00:41:55] Shit.
Deborah Hyde [00:41:56] As far as I know, the actual word, probably the belief was around an awful lot more before that. But the word was first mentioned in writing by Martin Luther and he mentioned it as one of the abuses of the Catholic Church. And I think what he meant by that was that when people believed in Poltergeists they would go to their priest and for a fee, the priest would get rid of the Poltergeist. Martin Luther wasn't keen on the church or encouraging people in superstition.
Sahil [00:42:24] Sorry going back to...you were talking about coincidences.
Deborah Hyde [00:42:27] Well, I recently took part in a really good podcast about the Battersea Poltergeist. I don't know if you guys can get it in Australia. It was a BBC production, so it might be licenced to Australia at some point. And it was produced by a guy called Danny Robbins. He did a fantastic job of taking what I think is a fairly open and shut case of an attention seeking girl and making a nine episode suspenseful podcast about it. Was it or wasn't it supernatural? And thing that struck me about that particular case was that there were a lot of different phenomena which started out small. And then, you know, they went on to other things. And the whole point about it was that there was not necessarily any reason to believe that the things were linked. The people were predisposed to create a narrative. And then once you create a narrative and you think that you've got an agent, you think that you've got something which is intelligent and has a sense of itself, then it has intentions and it wants this and it's doing that because of this. So the potential for story making, the human potential story making, I think had a huge effect in that particular case and in many others.
Sahil [00:43:42] Can you briefly tell us about the case so that we can get our listeners to go and listen to the full podcast?
Deborah Hyde [00:43:47] A lot of people have heard of the Enfield Poltergeist, which is something that happened in North London in the 1970s. This is a very, very similar case. It happened in south west London in the 1950s. And it's a less heard of case. Poltergeists usually occur around young women, sometimes around young men, but certainly around people going through puberty. And this phenomenon happened around a young woman called Shirley Hitchins, and it followed her around for many years. The thing that I found interesting in that I've written an article about the Sceptic magazine, the next time that comes out is that there was a supernatural investigator called Harold Chibbett, I think, and he was really desperate for this to be the case of a generation. He wanted fame. Nice man and everything, but he really believed in it. He brought other people in, created a lot of momentum, made it into a big story that wouldn't have been if he hadn't been there. So I think the role of the facilitator, the amplifier, this usually male expert who comes in and tells everybody what's actually happening is tremendously important in these cases. You know, it's really good. I mean, the producer, Danny Robbins, has done a great job of making a suspenseful podcast of something which is probably at its core, not particularly substantial writing.
Sahil [00:45:12] Well, he created a narrative as well. That's what he did in the story. And that's that's that's really cool. Like it's how we see the world.
Huda [00:45:19] Yes. We see it in narrative.
Sahil [00:45:21] Yeah. Like, nothing can't just be, there has to be a story behind it.
Deborah Hyde [00:45:24] And also, if you can infer a causal relationship, then you can predict one as well. It just gives you a bit more agency. It means that you can you're a bit more in control of your situation if you know there's a thing that likes to do this than, you know that thing is going to like to do that this evening as well. Yeah. So I think it's all about power in a powerless society.
Sahil [00:45:44] I was literally going to say it makes you powerful, right? Like people who can come up with a narrative that makes you go, holy shit, I didn't think of that. He thought of that or she thought of that. That must be this person must be supernaturally powerful, like they have certain abilities that I don't.
Deborah Hyde [00:45:58] And I think that's the interesting thing also about certain kinds of religious figures, because, you know, there are two... There's a market approach to religion, which is not something that you say to your local priest because he'll get pissed off with you. But you can have very institutionalised forms of religion where you have qualifications and hierarchies and it's like any other job, you know, if you're going for archbishop or whatever, you put your CV in and you try and write your list of virtuous works and you become a priest, not because God has chosen you, but because you've done your degree and you've gone through a very hierarchical procedure and you can't be a priest without it. On the other hand, if you've got a new religious movement, if you've got, say, for example, spiritualism where you are directly in touch with spirits and you invoke them on behalf of your audience, then with that it's the same thing. You become a priest or a priestess, but you have to do it with the sheer force of your personality. People who tend to do that, don't have qualifications as an option. You know, they're not going to go and get a degree in theology, but they can be powerful or mysterious. They're different models of Christianity. All religions get to the point where they have that rock model.
Sahil [00:47:11] And that's exactly what the Church of Scientology has done. I mean. I've never seen such a useless religion that's become so massive, it's it's it's amazing. That is an example of business done right.
Huda [00:47:22] It would do with the target audience. It's like there's a specific audience that they're going for. Do you think that there are certain personalities or traits or like vulnerable people or something?
Deborah Hyde [00:47:34] Yeah, it's such a huge subject that it's very difficult to narrow it down. Apart from anything else because there are so many ways of being religious, researchers sort of argue about the differences a lot. And some people will define some kinds of scales and other people will go, no, my scale works out more. But what all this draws attention to is the fact that people are religious in different ways. There's extrinsic religiosity, which is very ritual lead. You know, you might go to your local church or your local mosque. You have a social group. You also have a professionial group. You might get advancement in job opportunities.
Huda [00:48:08] Marriage, marriage proposals, because...
Deborah Hyde [00:48:11] Marriage is exactly right. So really kind of hard core social values. And then there are people who are intrinsically religious and they are more likely to you know, they'll do yoga or meditation. They might have personal experiences. They... It's a lot more internal for them that they might be a hermit or sort of turn internally and examine themselves. So whether you believe quite in that scale or not, it does evoke the fact that people are religious or superstitious in different ways. And so you get to have different personality traits according to that. The great psychologist William James thought that there were religious geniuses who had it and who invented it and that people followed them. And I don't think people believe that anymore, really, because we're all religious or superstitious in our own ways who tend to go for the stuff that isn't really particularly evidence based people who might believe in very superstitious things. For example, score higher on absorption. They're more likely to be able to really concentrate on a movie, story or things like that. There are personality traits that are associated with different types of religiosity.
Sahil [00:49:23] And just for kicks, I was researching this character and I went to the Hillsong Church and the Hillsong Church thing. When you go in there like that, the size of the theatre in which these churches are, it's like as big as a stadium, like the Old Trafford Stadium, you know, like they're massive and they've got the best quality of sound and light. And it's like the best party that you can go to without drugs. It's an amazing party without drugs. And everyone...people are crying and people are just saying the name of the Lord. And I'm like, oh, my God, these people actually believe this. And they're not dressed like the typical pastors. They're dressed like like punk rock bands and stuff like that. So they are. So now they're different. They're very daggy... Like these are good looking, charismatic people who are on stage singing and dancing.
Deborah Hyde [00:50:08] Don't know if this church falls into that category, but certainly if you've got more Celtic type organisations, then typical thing to do to get someone in to begin with is to love bomb them with lots of great experiences. Make sure that lots of people around constantly tell them how great they are and just just make feel high.
Sahil [00:50:29] Exaclty so go to a rave party instead.
Huda [00:50:31] Don't don't don't take Sahil's advice.
Sahil [00:50:34] Yeah, well, I don't think Deborah was going to go anyway.
Deborah Hyde [00:50:37] How do you know?
Huda [00:50:38] Oh you might.
Sahil [00:50:39] I know. I know for a fact. I know. When was the last time you went to a rave, Deborah? Yeah. Okay, exactly. You would rather go to a castle that's haunted.
Deborah Hyde [00:50:51] Yeah, I do like castles. I got a soft spot for castles and the medievel churches. And you've got a goth club called Slimlight in London.
Sahil [00:51:01] Slimelight. That's a good name.
Huda [00:51:02] What's the next part of your research going to be?
Deborah Hyde [00:51:05] At the moment, I'm doing several bits of work and also just in the background, I'm constantly trying to write this flipping book that seems to be taking forever.
Huda [00:51:13] What's it called?
Deborah Hyde [00:51:14] Working title is :Unatural predators. And it's... We all know about natural predators, tigers and lions and things. These are ones like vampires. And I'm working on fairies at the moment. So I just wanted to do kind of a popular paperback type book, an introductory thing for people about how all of these all of these tropes that we have in our horror movies and entertainment were originally somebodies sincerely held religious beliefs. And it's just interesting to see where those beliefs have come from. And I started with the Zombies chapter, for example. Nice, because zombies are...
Huda [00:51:51] I would actually say, that zombies are more of a believable factor than vampires in a way nowadays, especially with all the zombie movies that are coming out and like with virus and stuff like that.
Deborah Hyde [00:52:03] Yeah, well, and zombie movies also are very malleable, very useful because you can use them to explore social breakdown. You know, they can be turned to an awful lot of purposes for kind of like the larger theme of a story,
Sahil [00:52:18] And it questions a lot of things about humans and society in general, so it's a very useful for that kind of stuff.
Deborah Hyde [00:52:24] I'm trying to produce a movie at the moment, which turns out to be a rather hard thing to do. Writing various articles and things like that and writing one for... I think it's an Australian publication, actually, the Vampire Journal. So, yeah, lots of stuff just keeps coming in.
Huda [00:52:38] Thank you so much for coming on.
Deborah Hyde [00:52:41] I've really enjoyed talking to you. Thank you for inviting me.
Sahil [00:52:43] This really amazing, exciting. Thank you, Deborah. Thank you for your time.