Host: Dame Wilburn
Dame: [00:00:03] Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm your host, Dame Wilburn. Today, November 1st is a special day for a couple of reasons. First of all, it's my birthday. But it's also an important day for tons of communities around the world. You may know it as All Saints Day, Día de los Muertos, [unintelligible 00:00:18], but in my community of witches and magic practitioners, November 1st marks the end of one of the most special celebrations in our calendar, Samhain.
Let me back up a little bit. When I was in fourth grade, I had a bully and I decided to take care of him by casting a spell on him. I took my house keys and shook them in his face and said, “You'll never sleep again.” I didn't know if my spell had worked, but two days later, his mother came to me and asked me to lift it, because apparently, he wasn't sleeping. I found my house keys, shook them in his face again and the spell was broken.
Now, I've been teaching witchcraft for about 20 years, and I don't indiscriminately curse people anymore. Witchcraft ultimately is prayer with props. I spend most of my time using my skills to heal people and help people. And I'm not going to lie to you, I use it a lot of times to find a good parking space. But we also celebrate the change of the seasons and how the year moves. And we do them through harvest festivals, starting on what non-witches may know as Halloween or as we call it Samhain. We witches spend this time celebrating life and death.
As fall is ending and winter is beginning, we honor our ancestors and those who have come before us. And it's a time when the boundaries between our world and the spiritual world are a little thinner than usual. In non-wish talk, it means spooky stuff is happening.
Now, whether you believe in ghosts and witchcraft or you're a staunch doubter of all things supernatural, we've all felt a chill down our spine when faced with something we can't explain. So, this week, we have two stories for you about times that have made us question our beliefs about the nature of our world.
First up, Nelson Lugo. Nelson told this story at a New York City StorySLAM, where the theme of the night was Amazed. Here's Nelson, live at The Moth.
[cheers and applause]
Nelson: [00:02:17] My grandmother practices Santería, which means that she's a Santeras, which means that she is a Puerto Rican witch. And I mean that in the most respectful way possible. For those of you who don't know, Santería is what's known as a syncretic religion. It combines the Yoruba faith of West Africa and the indigenous folklore of the Boricua Indians, and then the missionaries came in and it became fused with Catholicism. So, as a result, my grandmother was a devout Catholic who attended mass every single day of her life. She also cast spells, removed curses, prepared baths that cleansed your soul, talked to the dead and saw your future. She also made the best pancakes I have ever had. [audience laughter]
Now, I'm the family skeptic. I always have been. And I never really believed what my grandmother did was real. But she did things that I just can't explain. Like, this one time, using a powder spell, she managed to get a junior congressman off from embezzlement charges. [audience laughter] Uh-huh. And then, this one time, she didn't like her upstairs neighbor. Apparently, she got very loud and very belligerent anytime anyone asked her to keep it down. So, using an incense, an oil spell, she managed to get her to move to another state. [audience laughter]
And then, there was a time she used her magic on me. I've had asthma my entire life and I've dealt with it chronically. But when I was a little boy, this was always a big deal. This was before rescue inhalers were very common. So, the normal protocol whenever little Nelson had an asthma attack was to rush him immediately to the nearest emergency room or he could die.
Well, this one time, I was staying with my grandmother. I must have been 10 years old at the time. I had a very sudden and very severe asthma attack. And my grandmother just bucked protocol, and took me by the hand and led me to the one room in her giant Bronx apartment I was never allowed to go into before, her saint's room. I'm wheezing and my chest is getting tight, and the door opens and I'm just hit with a cacophony of information. There're tables and shelves everywhere. Every square inch is covered with something sacred, like rocks, crystals, beaded necklaces, rosaries, crosses everywhere, pictures of Jesus everywhere.
There's about a dozen plastic Smurf figurines in the corner for some odd reason. [audience laughter] And over here, there's a large toy horse next to a bust of a Native American man with a real feather headdress. I'm starting to really get tight, and my chest is getting filling with mucus and I'm getting scared. she hands me these flowers to give to this four-foot handmade doll called Mama. I'm supposed to kiss this doll on both cheeks. she begins chanting and praying this ancient, whispered secret language that had a whole lot of S's in it [chanting spells] And then, she grabs silk handkerchiefs and powders and oils and she's dousing the handkerchiefs as she's rubbing my chest, all the while just chanting this secret prayer. And I am freaking the hell out now. I am really scared and my chest is getting really tight.
And she sits me on the floor and she puts a white bowl right by my feet. It just feels like there's an elephant just sitting on my chest. I'm gasping for breath and I'm crying and I'm sweating from the exertion. And then, out of nowhere, there's now a live chicken in the room [audience laughter] and there's now a sharp knife in her hand. she lifts up the chicken and she lifts up the knife and she just slits this chicken's throat and there's blood. There's so much blood just coming out of this chicken into the bowl. And then, and then, and then, I could breathe. [audience laughter] I have no idea how she did that.
Now, the adult skeptic me. The adult skeptic Nelson believes that the ritual combined with the sensory overload created placebo effect, and my body rushed with adrenaline that allowed my lungs to function. It's also entirely possible that I was just too fucking terrified to have an asthma attack at that moment. [audience laughter]
However, little Nelson, the scared little boy who couldn't breathe, who loves his grandma, he believes it could have been magic. Now, I guess the question becomes, does it really matter? I don't know. I'm just very amazed and very grateful to be alive. My grandmother passed away four years ago, and I miss her very much. I think about her all the time. When most people think about magic, they think about bunny rabbits and top hats and Harry Potter movies. When I think about magic, I think about a 4’11’’, soft spoken Puerto Rican witch whose pancakes I miss very much. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Dame: [00:07:33] That was Nelson Lugo. Nelson is a magician and storyteller. He learned magic by reading Harry Blackstone Jr. Books and became a storyteller by never winning a Moth StorySLAM. He's been a ringmaster for the Big Apple Circus and co-hosts a podcast called the EPIC PIEcast. We followed up with Nelson about his story and he said, “It amused my grandmother a great deal when I became a magician. She once said to me, for someone who doesn't believe in magic, you should practice a whole lot of it. I still don't believe there is any real truth to esoteric explanations of how the world works. I am, however, softening to the idea that magic can, through a shared experience, bring people closer together.” Nelson As a witch, I can attest to that.
I met my wife by casting a spell, not knowing that she was casting one for me. I told the story of meeting my wife at a Moth Mainstage and you can listen to that on our website, themoth.org. I also met a lot of witches while I was on the road. And to them and any other witches listening, I want to say blessed be.
Now, I know we don't all have regular run-ins with magic and witchcraft. So, here's a story that you may all find a little more relatable. Phil Plait told this story at a Mainstage event in Fort Collins, Colorado. Here's Phil, live at The Moth.
[cheers and applause]
Phil: [00:09:05] I've been an astronomer my whole life. Now, I mean that literally. When I was six years old, my parents bought a crappy department store telescope and set it up in the driveway outside the house. I saw Saturn through that thing. And as soon as I looked at those rings, I knew what I wanted to do the rest of my life. I mean, I loved science and I consumed it any way I could. I was the stereotypical brainy nerd kid that everybody made fun of, and I didn't care because I loved science so much.
And as I got older, that love just grew. I loved good science, but also my irritation with bad science grew as well. Stuff that sort of sounds sciencey but is really just nonsense. Astrology, ghosts, ESP, telepathy, UFOs, anything like that that's supernatural or paranormal. And if you told me you believed in it, [chuckles] oh, I'd let you have it. If you said, “I just saw a haunted house,” I would tell you about trick photography and how thermal changes make the walls creak and how our brains misinterpret things to make them all spooky. But I decided to study science in school and astronomy as well. When I went to graduate school and got my master's degree, I'd set my sights on dying stars.
Now, these are stars that are a lot like the sun. But when they shuffle off this mortal coil, they blow their outer layers into space. And these form eerie, translucent shapes, apparitions. They're beautiful. A lot of the time, this stuff just dissipates, just falls away into space. Sometimes though, they would collide with other gas clouds and they would collapse to form stars, breathing new life into them. They would form planets and moons. And us, you and me, we are made literally from reincarnated star stuff.
So, it was these dying stars I set my sights on to get my master's degree using a telescope at the Fan Mountain Observatory in rural Virginia. Now, when you go on an observing run like this, for astronomy, preparation is half the battle. I reserved telescope time weeks in advance. I made up my target list, I had the coordinates written down, I even made finder charts so that I'd recognize them on the sky when I saw them. I figured when I started observing, I'd be ready for anything.
Well, the first few nights at the observatory, they went pretty well. I had learned the equipment's eccentricities and I started to get good data. But I have to admit, the long nights were getting kind of boring. Telescopes are on purpose, put far away from people, away from city lights. When you're sitting out there by yourself, it's just lonely. I started looking forward to when the sun would come up, and the morning would be there, and I could wrap up my work and start the long drive home. I'd get home exhausted, get a few hours of sleep and then have to get up again, be at the observatory by 5 o'clock and start prepping for that night's observations all over again.
Well, I fell into a routine. I'd get up, I'd shower, I'd make a couple of sandwiches, I'd grab a book and I'd be on my way. By the sixth night of the observing run, I had been oversleeping a little bit more every day. And by that time, I overslept enough to give myself a pretty good panic. I threw my routine out the window, and I had to go to the astronomy department at the university to pick up a few things I needed. So, I rushed over there. I was getting all my stuff, and I'm walking out the door to go to the observatory and I realize I don't have a book.
These observatories are lonely, and the telescope basically guides itself during long exposures. If you don't have a book, you're going to be really bored. There's no Internet, no cell phones, not this time. So, I'm standing in the astronomy department thinking, what am I going to do? I was like, “Oh, wait, my friend has a bunch of science fiction books in his office.” So, I ran down the hall, threw open the door, saw his bookshelf, grabbed the first one sitting there. Didn't even look at it. Threw in my bag, got in my car, drove off to the observatory. Made it just in time. Takes a couple hours to get everything set up.
And by 9 o'clock, the sun had set, the sky was dark, I'm ready to observe. Unfortunately, the weather wasn't cooperating. Some clouds had rolled in, and I didn't know when they were going to roll out again. So, I decided to hunker down, wait it out. Plop myself down in a chair, reach into my bag, pull out the book and it's The Exorcist. [audience laughter]
Did I say that observatories are remote and lonely? [audience laughter] I'd been working a vampire schedule for a week. I hadn't seen another human being for six days. I'm miles away from anybody and in my hand is the freaking Exorcist. Well, now, let me set the scene for you here. I am sitting in the observer's room. It's a cramped room separated by a door to the dome. And the dome is, of course, where the telescope sits and that's kept very dark. The observer's room, the lights are kept low as well. And the only illumination is really just a bank of old-fashioned computer monitors. And these display diagnostic information, target name, coordinates, time of day, things like that. The middle one was called the autoguider monitor.
And the Autoguider is a little telescope that sits on the big telescope. And when the big telescope is pointed at your target, a dying star, in my case, the autoguider is looking at a nearby star and it locks onto it and makes sure that the telescope is tracking correctly. I'm looking at the autoguider screen which is being fed by a video camera from that telescope. And it's blank, it's cloudy. I got nothing else to do but kill time, so I start reading.
If you're not familiar with the story, The Exorcist, [audience laughter] it's about a little girl who is possessed by a demon and it makes her do horrible things. Her head spins around, she vomits pea soup, she swears like a sailor and she basically makes life really hard on her family and a nice but troubled Jesuit priest. [audience laughter] This is the scariest thing I have ever read. Every page I turn, my blood pressure is going up. And of course, all of the really scary stuff in the book happens when somebody's alone at night.
I get to a pivotal scene. The mother is sitting in the living room and she hears a noise coming from her daughter's bedroom upstairs. She decides to investigate. She walks over to the staircase. She puts her foot on the first step, and suddenly, supernaturally, the pipes in the wall start banging. With every step she takes, the banging gets harder and louder. When she gets to the top of the staircase, it's a cacophony. She reaches for the doorknob, and opens the door and suddenly the pipes stop. She looks into the darkness, and I suddenly realize that something in the observer's room has moved. [audience laughter] I froze. I was frozen.
I didn't want to move my head. I didn't want to move at all. So, I just used my eyes, and I looked at each monitor one by one. And when I got to the autoguider screen, which should have been blank, instead, there was a vaguely geometric and extremely distressing pattern of light on it, glowing in the darkness. But it's cloudy. It shouldn't be showing anything. So, that means that there's something in the dome room. [audience laughter]
I turn my head and look over at the door, and it is outlined in bright red light. [audience laughter] I've seen a hundred bad horror movies. And in every single one, a door outlined in bright red light is a really bad sign. [audience laughter] I am not some witless adolescent. I am a scientist. [audience laughter] So, I decide to investigate. I stand up and I walk over to the door and I reach for the doorknob. And the emotional part of my brain says, “Are you freaking kidding me? The door is outlined in bright red light.” The scientist part of my brain and the lizard part of my brain battled it out. The scientist won.
Grabbed the doorknob, I throw the door open and I'm dazzled by really bright light coming out of the dome room. My eyes are watering. I'm squinting. It takes me a second, and I realize the telescope is sitting there, but it's glowing bright red. I look around, and I look up and I see there are four red lights, one every 90 degrees around the dome room. They're shining down on the telescope, and they're warm. It took me about a minute before the thought occurred to me that, “Hey, maybe I should use the landline and call the observatory director and ask him.”
The first thing he does is swear at me for waking him up in the middle of the night. But then, he tells me, “Look, the lights are set automatically. When the humidity gets too high, they come on. The water in the air will condense on the mirror and fog it up, and this prevents that.” I realized that the light I saw on the autoguider screen was just the red lights amplified by the telescope, further amplified by my jumpy imagination. And at that moment, the supernatural became just natural.
Well, the weather cleared, I got my observations, I got my master's degree. I went on to get my PhD, and I've gone out and I've promoted good science as much as I can, and tried to debunk bad science as well. But that night in the observatory, arguably the most scientific place on Earth, surrounded by science, computers, and a telescope and the universe itself, for a moment, I doubted my entire worldview. [audience laughter] And I learned an important lesson. And that is, even the most rational person can be spooked if the circumstances are right. And I also learned something else, maybe even more important. No matter how much of a hurry you're in, look at the title of a book before you rush off with it, [audience laughter] because in science and in life, the devil's in the details. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Dame: [00:19:42] That was Phil Plait. Phil is an astronomer and science communicator. He writes a blog called The Bad Astronomy Blog, hosted at scifi.com, where he lets his infectious joy and passion for science flow freely. He is frequently on Twitter, tweeting puns, science and pictures of his goats, @badastronomer.
That's all for this week. And on this Samhain, may your ancestors bring you joy and love from beyond the veil. Until next time, from all of us here at The Moth, as we witches say merry meet, merry part and merry meet again.
Julia: [00:20:24] Dame Wilburn is a longtime storyteller and host at The Moth. He's also the chief marketing director for Twisted Willow Soap company and host of the podcast Dame's Eclectic Brain.
Dame: [00:20:34] Podcast production by Julia Purcell, with help from Rowan Niemisto at WDET. The Moth Podcast is presented by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at prx.org.