ShortHand: Big Witch Special Part 3 - The Witches Take America

0:00Hello. Hello. Welcome back. It's still October. It's still October. And in the spirit of the season. Of the witch. Of the witch. The season of the witch. Well done. Oh. I've been sitting on it for fucking weeks. We're actually doing a bit of a follow-up. Mm-hmm. So if you listen to the shorthand on the European witch craze, you will know that by the 17th century, Europe was completely gripped with witch panic. Witches, the devil's own agents on Earth, seemed to be everywhere. The dark clouds spread from the mountains through Germany and France and eventually right here to Great Britain. Until reports of demonic orgies, child sacrifice, blood rites and dark magic were heard in every corner of the continent.

1:00And it wasn't long before these sinister stories accrossed the ocean and fear gripped the New World. So today we're looking at how witch mania permeated the shores of New England, how gossip from the old world turned into very real fears in a strange new land, and how that fear took root in Salem, Massachusetts, leading to a fifth of the population of a small village being accused of witchcraft. Here is the shorthand. And before we start this, I know it's very anticlimactic to say immediately, but you Americans had absolutely nothing on the Europeans when it came to murdering witches because everyone talks about Salem Massachusetts which as you just said a small village yeah yeah yeah because it's literally one of the only times

1:51it happened in the US but we are going to talk about it we are going to talk about this particular phenomenon how it has its roots in what happened here in Europe like Hannah said but yeah just a disclaimer everyone kind of has this puritanical like little outfit in mind with people going around burning, which literally happened like once. And as you'll find out, it starts really quickly and it ends really abruptly and everyone's kind of just like, should we just not do this anymore? But let's start at the beginning. So where are we starting our story today? In England, of course, in 1629. King Charles I has just decided that having a democracy was really harshing his vibe. So he dismissed Parliament to rule by royal prerogative.

2:37This fucked a lot of people off, especially the Puritans, who were the main losers of this new deal. Puritans were a subsect of Protestants who wanted to reform the church and strip away any Roman Catholic influence. They were all about piousness and hated the golden frills and self-indulgent ceremony of Catholicism. And Christmas. They hated a lot of things. They were really kind of just a bunch of buzzkills in ugly clothes. How can I make life as horrible as humanly possible? That's the Puritans vibe. So Charles, who represented the old school church of England, loved the frills. So he made life a living hell for Puritans. Yeah, like the monarchs are still Anglicans and Anglicans are just Catholics in disguise.

3:21Yeah. And I think a lot of people, especially I think in North America, in the US especially, are taught that the Puritans fled from this persecution. Yes, of course, like they weren't particularly welcome because everyone was like, God, you're boring. You're so boring. But also they left, as you'll find out in the next sentence I'm about to say, so they could go and persecute more. That's what they wanted to do. So a civil war was very much brewing. Therefore, a lot of Puritans and an extra devout clique called the Pilgrims decided to gather their stuff on boats and hit the Atlantic. And the crossing took months. They were often blighted with sickness and lost most or all of the livestock they took on board with them.

4:09When they arrived in the New World, they'd narrowly escaped a bloody war. But life there was every bit as tough. Summers were sweltering and winters brought a deep, cruel freeze. The wilderness seemed to go on forever, vast, uncharted land populated by mysterious tribes. Stories of settlers dragged off into the night by indigenous people spread around the new colonies. Nights were cold and long, infections were rife. Children and babies could die without warning, and no medicines they had seemed to help. They also hadn't really shed themselves of the old English religious tensions. Separatists who wanted a full, fresh start from the English church butted heads with the Protestant conformists,

4:49who were arguing for a reform rather than a complete start again. If you think that the question of what kind of Christian you are seems minor, it isn't, still isn't, and back then, England had descended into bloody chaos over this exact same seemingly minor destruction. Still, against all this struggle, the colonies thrived. According to Mayflower pilgrim Edward Winslow, the New World was where, quote, religion and profit jumped together. I think that happens everywhere. Yeah. As well as escaping religious persecution, the New World also promised plenty of farmable land and economic opportunity. There were five colonies. New Hampshire, Plymouth, Massachusetts, said it, nailed it. You did, well done.

5:38Thank you. Rhode Island and Connecticut. And the ports of Boston and Salem were alive with trade. See you on Tuesday, Boston. She's actually going there. She's not just calling you a cunt. No. No, I am actually. I will board an Airbus to Boston on Tuesday night. Don't shit yourself. I feel like it's going to be okay this time. I have everything. Montezuma's going to leave me alone. So more and more settlers claimed random patches of land, built towns and named them after their own hometowns back in England. Men worked the fields from dawn to dusk and their wives foraged, darned, spun hemp, grew vegetables, tended to cows, geese and hens, did the laundry and took care of the 24-7 childcare. And because a lot of this was really fucking boring and repetitive, even for the Puritans,

6:32they do almost all of it outside, together. And stories, especially gossip from the old world, helped pass the time. And as we well know, the more sensational those stories, the better. And by 1640s, they started to tell tale of witches. By then, large parts of Essex and Suffolk were shaken by witch panics. Self-styled witch finders were roaming the countryside, going from village to village, seeing devil worship everywhere. Witchcraft had long been held as a folk superstition, mostly referring to solitary folk healers or wise women. We also still do it. Blowing out your birthday candles is witchcraft. Yeah. Do you make it a wish? There you go. But between the 14th and 17th centuries, it grew into a continent-wide conspiracy

7:18that the devil himself was building an army of darkness hell-bent on perverting the entirety of the Christian world. Missions to stamp it out rose to the highest levels of power, and hundreds of thousands of people were put to death for witchcraft across the continent of Europe. Paranoia and self-preservation led people to lose their minds, exposing and accusing each other and betraying their neighbours to save their own families. Which is what happens when you pit people against each other and betraying their neighbours to save their own families. Which is what happens when you pit people against each other. And in the new colonies, it started as little more than idle gossip. But the fear stayed in the back of these people's minds.

7:56Now the Protestants in charge were very wary of magic. Yes, their world was full of the supernatural. Blights, illness and extreme weather were all understood to be the expressions of an angry god. But Puritan rites, and especially the indigenous people's ceremonies, were the frivolous stuff of the heathens. So, at first, the Protestants ignored the warnings of witches. But not for long. Belief in God was like today's belief in gravity. It was taken as absolute fact, and questioning it would mean there was something very wrong with you. So essentially it boiled down to this. If there was a benevolent God, the only explanation for misfortune is another force, an opposing force that is pure evil.

8:49And pure evil, if it could gain power, would stop at nothing to destroy goodness. I will tell you about, I think this just popped into my head because you said theory. No, you said gravity, that's why. I used to have a boss when I worked at a straight charity, a very contrarian man. And once he decided to tell me that he thought evolution was just a story he was i don't believe in the theory of evolution and i was like well maybe gravity's just a theory and you'll float the fuck away from me which is a tim minchin joke and he was like no no no it's different i was like how he was like gravity's a law and i was like you've fundamentally misunderstood the significance of the word theory. I can't.

9:27And he is still running that charity. I checked yesterday. Anyway, back to witches. The idea that evil was slowly chipping away at everything good crept over slowly from England into the New World. The colonizers were afraid that all their freezing, sleepless nights, all their unexplained infant deaths, all the failed harvests, all the paranoid infighting, it could all be explained if the devil himself was sending his agents to inflict that suffering rather than they just made a bad choice. Satan worship, especially witchcraft, was often seen as the direct inversion of everything good and holy. Like we covered last time, orgies would be full of this kind of symbolism, upside-down crosses, the black mass, etc.,

10:11which, if they ever happened, which they didn't. And because fertility, motherhood, sexual purity and godliness were valued in women, a witch therefore must be the opposite. They were usually old or unmarried, sometimes unstoppably promiscuous, anything that went against the system. Witches were said to invade homes in the dead of night or send creatures disguised as mice, birds or snakes to do their bidding. Townsfolk started carving symbols into their door frames or hanging horseshoes or bunches of bay over the threshold to keep the witches out. People still do that. I have got a lucky horseshoe in the back of my car that keep me put up so the witches don't get you yeah exactly or slide a note under my door um yeah liza gave it to one she was like i found it

10:55you want it it's lucky and i was like yep there you go and this is how it started simple village superstition and when the misfortunes, the people figured out some folky retaliation. If someone was thought to have been cursed by a witch, first step was boil their piss. Why not? The witch's essence was said to linger there, and boiling it down in a stone bottle would torment the witch. If your livestock started acting funny or your crops failed, they'll probably bewitch too. Not just because, you know, it was not the right kind of land to be farming or you're just not a very good farmer. So to have one over on the witch that's cursed your livestock and your crops, the villagers would burn those too. Just burn all your stuff

11:43because the witch's soul lives in it. Okay. Techniques to identify witches were also developed. One was called clay-demancy. Any guesses what that involves, Hannah? Well, necromancy is sort of death magic. So it's going to be something magic. Yes, that's very interesting for people that are so anti-magic that they seem to be using quite a lot of weird piss magic, clay magic. Clay demancy. Clay. It's a very practical thing you could just do. Oh, is it the pinpricking? No. Drowning? No. Shall I tell you? Yeah. Tie a piece of string around the loop of a key. Yeah. Dangle it and ask your question. If it moves, that's a yes. Oh, right. So like. Like spinning a wedding ring over a pregnant woman's tummy to see if it's a boy or a girl.

12:45Yeah. Or even like a no-board Ouija board. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And another one of these methods for identifying a witch they had was called sieve and scissors. No prizes for guessing that one. Basically, you balance a sieve on a pair of scissors and say a spell. Something like, if Hannah's a witch, let this sieve turn. And if the sieve turned, bad news, Hannah, we've got to get you. Okay, I'll try when I get home. But one of the most popular ways to single out a witch was through something called oomancy. Also called ovomancy. Stab them in the ovary. Oh, yuck. yeah oh is it um it's something to do with an egg yes um correct is it you um you take an egg from their house and you put it over a candle and if there's a little demon inside there which oh that would be way cooler

13:42this just seems to take an egg, drop it in some boiling water and then interpret the shapes that the egg white solidified to. So basically make a poached egg and then depending on how disfigured your poached egg is, see what that tells you about this person. It sounds like they had a lot of time on their hands. Yeah, and it sounds like they're doing a lot of fucking magic. Yeah. So in the 1640s, gossip turned to superstition, which turned to fear, paranoia, and a very real belief in this new threat of evil. Obviously nothing to do that they've moved their entire lives to a new environment, a new climate, and they're using all of the same techniques that they used in England, which is very different. Yeah. And some settlements embrace their fears more than others. Malcolm Gaskell's got a

14:31great book called The Ruin of All Witches which tells the story of America's first witch hunt which happened in Springfield, Massachusetts. And Gaskell also points out how it wasn't just spiritual, it was law as well. The colonies took most of their legislature from English law books. Old tomes like Dalton's Country Justice, an English magistrate's book, included advice on how to spot the secret marks that witches used to feed their imps. According to Gaskell, the Massachusetts legal code ranked witchcraft third in heinousness after blasphemy and idolatry, defining it as fellowship by covenant with a familiar spirit, which means straighten the pooper. And judges had learned from the Essex witch trials that those who were

15:21soft on witchcraft were very soon threaten themselves. So, Springfield, Massachusetts, 1647. Gossip of witchcraft was rife. And for Hugh and Mary Parsons, it would threaten to take over their lives. Hugh was a brickmaker, and Mary had recently come to Springfield from Wales. They met, married, and had three children. They were known round town as being a pretty tempestuous couple. Mary was what we'd know as quite mentally unwell. She had mood swings and would suffer from delusions. Hugh was often prickly and could get threatening if he didn't get his own way. But that was really that, until things started to go wrong in the village. At first, it was just small things. A pudding burst in a cooking pan.

16:19A pair of shears disappeared. One villager, Sarah Edwards, reported that her cow was producing strange, deep yellow-coloured milk. And then people started seeing things. Villagers would suddenly shake and see demons and strange visions, and some of them would even die. And when these things befell children, fingers were pointed at the town's most suspicious couple. Hugh had, after all, recently gone to Sarah Edwards, asking for milk in repayment of a debt and had been turned away. Could he have cursed the cow in retaliation? Sounds like your cow's sick, don't drink that milk. Yeah, sounds like nobody should be drinking that milk at all. And when a neighbour burst in to tell Hugh that his infant son had died,

17:02Hugh seemed remarkably unfazed. He even went to a friend's house before going home, saying, I hear my child is dead, but I will cut a pipe of tobacco first before I go home. This became a prime piece of evidence against Hugh, and suspicions spread within the household too. Hugh demanded to check Mary's body for witch's teats, and then, when he was sleeping, she lifted his nightshirt and did the same. This is toxic, guys. This is a toxic, toxic relationship you've found yourselves in. The pair of them were sent to be tried in Boston, where Mary confessed to causing the death of her son. Probably because they tortured her. Yes, that always helped. Now, mostly, North America's witch panics followed this same pattern.

17:50Bad or unlucky events built up local tensions boiled over and then a few oddball people took the rap. In 1648 Margaret Jones for example was hanged on Boston Common for witchcraft and a few years later in Hartford, Connecticut three people were hanged on Boston Common for witchcraft. And a few years later, in Hartford, Connecticut, three people were hanged on the same suspicion. But again, as you can see, it's kind of like one here, a few more there. And granted, the population is a lot smaller. But like, it really wasn't at the kind of epidemic scales that we saw in Europe, where we're just like rounding people up. And actually, it would be 50 years before the events, the infamous events that everybody talks about,

18:31happened in Salem, Massachusetts. In 1690, on the other side of the pond, a glorious revolution had taken place. Everyone had finally agreed the parliament was better than the divine right of kings, and Charles's daughter Mary II took over. All of which led to a very significant shake-up of how the colonies were run, which is absolutely entirely way too much to get into here. But all you need to know is that for this time, the governor of New England was replaced, and the new one had no authority. While they decided just how the situation was going to be run, given the massive political upheaval back in England. Basically, a brand new steaming helping of civil unrest and religious conflict also broke out. And in the small village of Salem, that meant small petty town squabbles about land and religious independence often bubbled over into much more.

19:30This Salem was not the grand port city of Salem. We're talking about the nearby Salem village, which is now known as Danvers. So I wonder then if you actually go to Salem, Massachusetts now where they've got all the witchy houses and the witchy shops. It's not actually the real one. I have no idea. I guess you'd have to go to Danvers by the sounds of it. Back then, its 500 residents lived strict, isolated lives and put up with all of the hardships that we've talked about so far, plus frequent battles with indigenous people and French settlers. After a long, often violent debate, the people of Salem had been allowed to have their own minister. And after more squabbles, they'd eventually settled on someone called Samuel Parris.

20:10But Parris turned out to be a harsh and divisive leader, and he only drove the community further apart. And then came the winter, one Parris' daughter, Betty, played a game with her 11-year-old cousin, Abigail, called Venus Glass. This was a version of that omancy that we talked about earlier. And it wasn't just used for spotting witches. It was a kind of all-purpose fortune-telling game. Still, among the community, any kind of magic was considered heresy, and Betty's dad was the town's highest religious authority. The girls knew that if they were ever found playing Venus Glass, the punishments would be harsh. So with very strong sleepover dare vibes going, Betty and Abigail secretly dropped an egg into a glass of warm water

21:04and asked the profession of their future husbands. Now, according to some reports, the girls grew terrified when the egg white morphed into the shape of a coffin. And in January, Betty began behaving strangely. She would run around screaming. She'd bark like a dog, throw things, make strange sounds, contort her body and crawl under furniture. She reported the feeling of being pinched or stabbed with pins. Shortly after, Abigail was doing the same. And this continued for a whole week. So Samuel Parris called a local doctor. Doctor being quite a loose term, I imagine. The doctor found nothing physically wrong with the girls, so he diagnosed them as being under an evil hand. In other words, his professional medical diagnosis was that they were bewitched.

22:01And at the supposed discovery of witchcraft, fear gripped the village. Before long, the affliction spread further. Twelve-year-old Anne Putnam Jr. and 17-year-old Elizabeth Hubbard both fell into violent fits, contorting their bodies and screaming. And all four cursed girls agreed who was responsible. They pointed the finger at three women. Number one, Sarah Osborne. She had taken over the family farm when her husband died, a move that many disapproved of. She also, due to illness, hadn't been able to attend church for months. Again, burn the witch. big no-no then there was sarah good who was a poor beggar with an infant daughter and another child on the way and lastly the four girls also named a slave of the paris family known only as tituba now she's

22:59believed to have originally been from south america and taken taken to Barbados to be forced into slavery. And I think it's very telling that, look at who they point the finger at. Even at a young age, these girls already seem to understand who people would have found suspicious. They pick three women who are kind of on the fringes of society for various reasons. Yeah, where people are like, yeah, that's Gant. Exactly. The beggar woman, the church absentee and the slave with her rumours of voodoo. On the 29th of February, all three of these women, on the evidence of these four girls, were arrested. The village wanted answers because the curses were spreading. And soon enough, there were 12 girls in total believed to be under a black spell.

23:45Tituba was the first to stand trial. She had been found by Samuel Parris, taking part in yet another piss-based ritual. Tituba, apparently, had baked a witch cake, which was a mix of Betty's urine and rye flour, and then she fed that to a dog after she'd cooked it, and she said that she did that hoping that the dog would identify who was harming Betty. And when Tituba was tried, at first she denied everything but eventually she confessed to a string of heretical crimes. She said that she'd stood next to a hairy beast and signed its book in blood. No doubt, after yet more torture. She also said that she had been forced to do this by Goody Good and Goody Osborne. And apparently, the first time I saw The Crucible,

24:28I was very confused by this, but now I understand. Goody was a polite form of address for women at the time, kind of equivalent to Mrs. because it's short for good wife, and it's slightly under mistress. Mistress as in, like, lady of the manor, not adulterer. Yeah. And you don't have to be a genius to work out why Tituba confessed. She's a slave woman on trial for bewitching the daughter of her master. Absolutely nobody was ever going to back her up. And it would have been clear to Tituba herself that if these people didn't hear what they wanted to hear, then she would hang. Plus, many of her confessions, as Ceri rightly pointed out, came after beatings from Samuel Parris himself. But still, it worked, and that May, Tituba was released.

25:12With this president of confession as absolution, accusations spread through Salem. Pretty Catholic of you for your big Catholic-hating selves. Again, this is what I i mean they really did like a i'll come back to this at the end of the episode but yeah they're they're very much like if you just confess we'll let you go now false confessions were therefore given to save the accused and their families and there are even reports of this said outright to accused witches, that they would be hanged if they didn't confess and freed if they did. So it wasn't just like people were assuming. They were being told outright. Kind of like when police now, they say, oh, you know, just confess and we'll let you go home.

25:56But here they actually did. They were like, just confess and then we'll let you go. And if you're wondering, like, what on earth are they thinking? It's classic Christo logic. Better to confess and ask for forgiveness than deny. And if you're wondering, like, what on earth are they thinking? It's classic Christo logic. Better to confess and ask for forgiveness than deny. At least 172 people were formally accused in the village of Salem alone. Remember, there's only 500 people that lived there. Sarah Good's four-year-old daughter was also imprisoned and eventually also testified against her own mother. Now, if you were hoping that her husband might come through for her, bad luck. In court, her husband testified that she, quote,

26:32was a witch or would be one very quickly. Good enough for me. That'll do. And Sarah Good gave birth in jail. The baby died. By spring 1693, more than a hundred people had been imprisoned. Fourteen women and six men were executed. All but one were hanged. The other, Charles Corey, was pressed to death. But then, when the governor of Massachusetts' own wife was accused, he quickly suspended trials. Sentences were amended, prisoners were released, and the arrests stopped. And just as quickly as it all began, Salem's witch panic was over. Even people like Mega Puritan and Big Anti-Witcher, Increase Muffer, sure, agreed that it was time to give it all a rest. He said, quote, There are various theories about what really happened in Salem.

27:38One argument is that a fungus infected these girls' brains or that a condition spread through the village that swelled the brain and caused hallucinations. And as we've covered in countless stories, there are also many reasons that religious people, especially those in the ages before modern medicine, might think themselves to be possessed. What else could it have been though, since we don't really have any evidence for any sort of disease? Perhaps these children little girls just didn't want to get in trouble. Betty and Abigail were just 9 and 11 and both related to the famously harsh town minister and they had meddled in the dark arts. They were no doubt terrified of punishment and might do

28:18anything to try and escape it and we've all done it, not to the point where someone got pressed to death but like when you're a child you do just lie and lie and lie and then back yourself into a corner don't you so maybe when adults suggested that there could be someone else to blame or something else maybe the girls were encouraged i also i have theories so you hear a lot about the kind of like could it have been ergot poisoning like you said first could it have been some sort of like mass hallucination could there have been some sort of poison in the water something i'm like maybe but like we didn't really have any evidence of that and the whole of fucking europe was at it so it does true true true to me it feels much more like social contagion right i

29:00think what it is and i've seen people argue against this but i this is this is my opinion and like maybe people think it's controversial though i don't really understand why is i think the girls fucking loved the attention they loved the attention and they loved the power can you imagine you're just like they're kids they're so young and i think suddenly all of the adults in the room are paying attention yes true notoriously during a time where kids probably weren't really like paid that much attention to. No, because like by the time you're 11, you're middle-aged. Exactly. And everyone's like busy trying to keep everyone alive. So like nobody's really like, you know, nurturing your blossoming young soul.

29:39So suddenly this nine-year-old, this 11-year-old, however old the others are, they're all like in teens. They're all either preteens or teens. Suddenly they get all of this attention from the most important people in the village they get to point the finger whoever the fuck they like and anything they say happens they get to like twist about and contort and everybody is watching them kids love putting on shows i think that's true attention power all of that they were like they were gagging for it and the adults believed them and and so my thing with the adults believing them is i think some of them believed them i think some of them believed them and i think a lot of the others didn't believe

30:16them but it was a very handy solution to other problems because what happens is this is why i think the girls are doing it for power because obviously i don't believe that there are witches so they're pointing the finger very specifically at women that they know they can take down yeah slave beggar widow let's point the finger at them they know what they're doing and it works then i think the adults start to see oh this is working we can get rid of some people and what could i do to maybe get rid of my neighbor and get my hands on his tasty tasty land which seems to have a better harvest than my fucking shit piece of land yeah especially when you add in the idea that it was quite lawless at that point because of everything that was going on in england the governor didn't have any powers

31:01they were in a real state of flux at that time. So suddenly it's kind of like the starting point again where every bit of land could be up for grabs. That's a good point. What could I do? And like these petty squabbles over things like land rights, etc. I think some of the adults saw this as an opportunity to maybe, because it wasn't just women, it was men too. Get rid of them. Get rid of this pesky family. I'll take their fucking land. I'll take it as compensation because they cursed me. Who's going to question me? Don't fucking think so. If you do, I'll call you a witch. It's like the sectioning episode from Peep Show. And I think genuinely I am very cynical about how I think in Europe people genuinely believed in it.

31:41How much people believed in it here or how much they saw it as an opportunity to like they said allow religion what did he say allow religion and uh profit to hop together or something i think people saw this as that kind of opportunity and also we've talked about this before the idea of social contagion particularly in teenage girls is the most proven thing time and time and time again for some reason teenage girls seem to be more vulnerable to social contagions and they there's various reasons that that could be there's ideas that girls start to experience more negative feelings earlier than boys like as soon as they hit puberty they're also we talk to each other more there's more like conversations between girls so that could be something to do with like

32:29how these ideas are spread so guys from like two girls that could have got into trouble so that could stand for that theory as to why those two covered it up to four to suddenly like how many ever did we say that's true i think it's a combination of adult manipulation for profit and social contagion and power and control for the girls and i think this exactly what you shouldn't do which is let the kids run the roost yeah and also it's not really an additional point just backing up you said before it's a fucking it's lawless man like it's you know people are getting dragged off in the middle of the night like it's uh yeah it makes sense so yeah so i think absolutely in europe you can say the idea that when things were going wrong of

33:09course this is what people are pointing to i'm sure there is an element of that in this mass exorcist case of course it was times were hard for them and that's why i say some of them did believe in it and i think what you need is the mass population to be scared and be ready to jump on this and then there were just a few people that were like come on the guy's like doing this and there's also evidence that the guy who was running this show he was kind of like he did some writing so he was like he didn't really believe in any of this and as soon as the fingers pointed at his wife he's like right we're done and i think how quickly it starts and how quickly it ends also shows that, I don't know, it's more of a sudden burst than a wildfire.

33:50But that's just my theory. But yeah, that's it, guys. I think it's a pretty good one. That's the Witches Part 3. Witches Trinity. There you go. That's much better. And, you know, I think we were saying this could be the final one. I don't think so. I think there's stuff we can do with witches in other countries. We've done it before. We did a Patreon bonus episode many years ago on like witches in Tanzania, I want to say, somewhere in Africa and how they were, you know, persecuting. Albino people. Albino people with albinism. I think you're right. I think it was Tanzania. But there's definitely more things we can cover here with regards to witches, especially in the modern age, especially in different

34:28parts of the world. But that is it. We've done Europe. We've done the US. Next up, who knows where we'll go, but it won't be next week. We'll be doing something else. But yeah, thanks for listening, guys, and happy October. And we'll see you next week for something else.