The Bloody Bones

0:00The Wonderland murders shocked Los Angeles, and exposed a dark underworld of drugs, betrayal, and violence hiding behind the glamour of Hollywood, later inspiring books, films, and decades of speculation. But the real story is even darker than the movies. They thought it was a robbery gone wrong. What detectives found inside this small house on Wonderland Avenue was a bloodbath so brutal, even seasoned investigators were shaken. Four people dead, no forced entry, and one name that kept surfacing, John Holmes. Join us every week on a Laughal Axe as we uncover the people who seem ordinary at first, but reveal something far more dangerous underneath. This is the podcast for people who crave the full story without the filler. Subscribe now to Unlawful Axe wherever you get your podcasts. How do you want to split it? Actually, dinner's on me. Don't get big money. Well, I got a Venmo balance that I can spend

1:00with my Venmo debit master card, so. Well, I Venmo'd you three times last week, so it's kinda on me, actually. Yeah, you send it, I spend it. Did my money get like green card-eated? Yeah, it's chicken shorba. We want it that? I can't believe you like ate my Venmo. Spend your balance instantly with the Venmo debit card, no monthly fee or minimum balance. Venmo balance account required to get a card and use a balance. Venmo master card is issued by the bank or bank NA. Need a boost? Sometimes all it takes is tapping into your inner cool. Icebreakers Gum helps you unleash the confidence within. Each two releases a rush of icy flavor powered by cooling flavor crystals, sending a wave of refreshment to reinvigorate all your senses. Icebreakers convenient pack fits everywhere from car cup holders to backpack pockets so you can find your cool wherever you go. Grab Icebreakers Gum online or at a store near you. Hey, strangers. We want to acknowledge before we begin this episode, which features Dolly Parton, that it was written recorded and produced before her death. She was one of my personal heroes

2:00and I am still mourning her. I'm Lauren Orton and this is one strange thing. The show where we search the nation's news archives for stories that can't quite be explained. Strangers, as weird as it sounds to say, right now, during the special anniversary year, our country is young. 250 years, that's practically an adolescence after all, in the grand scheme of nations. That said, it's been plenty of time to develop our own rich folkloric traditions. Some have been borrowed from the original inhabitants of North and South America's. Others have traveled within slave peoples and immigrants from every corner of the world. Today, we want to discuss a rather gruesome American tale, one that has embedded itself in a lot of variations

3:02across this great big country. After all, morality and horror are always a good combo and depending on where you grew up, especially in the American South or the Midwest or Appalachia, you might have heard the name or the names, Raw Head and Bloody Bones. Perhaps it might have been used to get you to come inside at night, to go to sleep, to stop misbehaving. Often, it's treated as a single phrase, Raw Head and Bloody Bones, but you might just encounter Bloody Bones, or maybe simply Raw Head, or scratch eyes, or tall Betsy, or one of a dozen combinations or iterations or side characters that all harken back to the same idea. A warning to children who are prone to misbehaved. If you're bad, the monster will get you. So it's understood that good behavior is the only protection. Sort of a Santa won't bring presents to bad kid sentiment, except involving extreme violence.

4:04We found many local stories across the archives, dating back more than a hundred years and from all over the United States. Better come on in the house, or Raw Head and Bloody Bones will get you, or straighten up and behave, or else face the wrath of tall Betsy and bloody bones. Or, we always understood Raw Head and Bloody Bones would catch us out by ourselves sometime and get us. Maybe that's him out of the cemetery waiting for somebody. Or, we used to go deep in the woods, but we never went far because we were afraid of Raw Head and Bloody Bones, who we were told lived in the dark places. Or, now I never saw Raw Head and Bloody Bones, but we all knew about that fellow. The family kept him in their attic. He was there for the sole purpose of swooping down on naughty little boys. Strangers, we could keep going and going and going. There are so many tales long recalled from childhood, though perhaps not so much now in the 21st century,

5:07when different boogie men have sprung up from the recesses of the digital world. Still though, the memory is there. Or, perhaps we should say the memories, because as we said, it's not one specific monster haunting the dreams of children east, west, north, and south. And, as we said, the name's very. And sometimes Raw Head and Bloody Bones are one creature and sometimes two. Occasionally, Raw Head is Tommy Raw Head. The most popular version, though, we think is the combination, ahead and some bones. As Deep South magazine explains, quote, one is a skull stripped of skin and libeled a bite called Raw Head. And the other is equally terrifying companion, a kind of dancing headless skeleton called Bloody Bones. So the flayed head and the dancing skeleton, they are sometimes treated as parts of a whole, terrifying enough, or totally separate entities that bite and scratch, and most importantly, terrified children

6:09who don't listen to their parents warnings about dark woods and straying off paths, or getting out of bed at night. We found accounts of people from the mid 19th century and the early 20th century. The heck, even Dolly Parton has weighed in to recall the frightening tales of her childhood, and a promised punishment for naughty little kids who dared to leave their beds. They should stay put. As she wrote in 1970, and then sang, actually, quote, but Mama had the awfulest way of making us be good. She'd tell us that Raw Head Bloody Bones was waiting just outside that he'd come in and get us if he knew I was crying. Dolly grew up in Sea Revealed, Tennessee, and would have been a little girl in the late 1940s and early 1950s. And we actually saw quite a few references from around the same time. A reporter in Missouri in 1955 invoked Bloody Bones to explain a haunted cemetery. A humor writer and Alabama in the same year described the family who discovered Raw Head hiding

7:10in their attic. You heard a bit of that story at the top of the episode. Based on the archival news that we found, the stories were still being passed around in the 1970s and even in the 1980s, mostly through parents who'd been threatened with the same be good boogie men when they were young. It's clear that Raw Head and Bloody Bones and whatever combination is a popular folk figure in the United States and has been for a long time. So we thought it would be interesting to try and find out where the story had originated and why it had such stain power because when it comes to threatening children and to good behavior, well, we think a headless skeleton and a skinless head are quite the effect of tool. Very ginnex, at least thematically, scare them straight. How do you want to split it? Actually, dinner's on me. Okay, big money. Well, I got a Venmo balance that I can spend

8:11with my Venmo debit master card, so. Well, I Venmo'd you three times last week, so it's kinda on me, actually. Yeah, you send it, I spend it. Did my money get like green card-eated? Yeah, it's chicken shorba. Want it, that? I can't believe you like ate my Venmo. Spend your balance instantly with the Venmo debit card, no monthly fee or minimum balance. Venmo balance account required to get a card and use a balance. Venmo master card is issued by the bank or bank NA. To ghost haunt houses because they have unfinished business, or because you have unfinished races, there they are. It's further evidence that everything happens for a reason. For a limited time, you can get a big Mac meal for just $8. That's a burger, fries, and a drink. They don't call it an extra value meal for nothing. Get a big Mac meal only at McDonald's. Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing. To examine this American folktale,

9:12we first delved in to wear the myth and its variations popped up. As we said, the tails are most popular in the American South and Appalachia and some parts of the Midwest. So we're interested in both time and place. The earliest written references we found to raw head, bloody bones, or both, were in very different situations. One actually was rather famous, although not spooky. In 1799, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter regarding the power of stories for controlling people through fear as a political tool and said in part, quote, and I am for encouraging the progress of science, knowledge branches, and not for raising a hue and cry against the sacred name of philosophy for owing the human mind by stories of raw head and bloody bones to a distrust of its own vision and to oppose implicitly on that of others. To go backwards instead of forwards, to look for improvement, to believe that government, religion, morality, and every other science were in the highest perfection in ages of darkest ignorance

10:15and that nothing can ever be devised more perfect than what was established by our forefathers. So though the reference isn't to his own life per se, it does establish the story as something well known enough to make an off-hand remark about in post-revolution America. We saw plenty of others from the early 19th century and in a similar vein, like an 1837 financial piece which compares baseless fears to belief in bloody bones and rohead. It's interesting to us how casually the comparison is made, sort of the sky is falling for the 18th and 19th centuries, but there were stories operating more practically too. There are many children who, at least for a time, were sure that a bloody head would be waiting to snap at their ankles, or that dancing bones might carry them off into the night. When it comes to the South, particularly before 1960 or so, raw head and bloody bones tales are present in every facet of society, from the wealthy landowners

11:16to the merchant class to the poor, and among enslaved people and their descendants. And perhaps the most interesting research into regions specific raw head and bloody bones tales was done among the residents of the coastal Gulf, particularly the Gullahici communities of the lower Atlantic region, basically a stretch of coastal inland, running from North Carolina down to North Florida. There's much more we could say about Gullahici culture, like the popularity of painting porches haint blue to ward off spirits. But for now, we want to talk about monsters. And we know a lot about them thanks to Zora Neal Hurston. We will not have to clue in the English majors, the anthropologist, or the Harlem Renaissance enthusiast to Hurston's bio. But in case you've never run into her work before, know that she was one of the most important American modernist writers, an experimental novelist and storyteller who blended magic and dialect and sprawling stories into works like, their eyes were watching God.

12:17She was also an accomplished cultural anthropologist who studied diaspora folklore across several countries. What's interesting to our episode, though, is that on one of her many field work expeditions, Hurston traveled to the Gulf Coast. And there, she heard plenty about raw-head bloody bones. Of course, she heard about Bogeyman, Mintous Care Kids, straight. But some of the stories were very different than the tales told in other parts of the country. For instance, High Walker and Bloody Bones is a story relayed in the late 1920s to Hurston by a man named Adi Frazier. Apparently, he was fond of the strange and unusual, so, our kind of guy, and supplied many of the horror-themed folktales in her collection. Anyway, the story goes that a man named High Walker decided to walk into a cemetery one day, or a bone yard as Frazier called it. When he gets there, he makes an interesting choice. He calls out to the skeletons that are buried underground

13:18and demands that they, quote, rise up bloody bones and shake yourself. And, well, they do. They rise, they come together, they shake themselves, and they lie back down. Then the man does it again to prove to himself that he can. As Frazier explained, quote, when he'd get off a little way, he'd look back over his shoulder and shake himself and say, High Walker and bloody bones, and the bones would shake themselves. He knew that he had power. You'll notice a distinct lack of terrified children in this version, and a lot more necromancy than you might have been expecting based on our coverage thus far. We have not heard any other bloody bones raw head stories like it, and according to Zoranel Hurston, 80 Frazier told this one at a tall tale contest that came with a $5 prize for the best scare. Frazier seems to have combined two different strains of myth here, raw head bloody bones, and High Walker,

14:18a figure who we suspect is a variant of the better known Hyjon the Conqueror. Hyjon is a staple in African-American folk tradition, a trickster sort of character, usually described as an African prince, kidnapped into slavery who freed himself, and became deeply connected to powerful roots in Houdu. And maybe that trickster angle is important, because while the usual raw head bloody bone stories were common in Gullah Gigi tradition too, there's an interesting layer noted by historian Natalie Days. She told the state newspaper, quote, "'Part of the lesson is, if you're not going to be obedient, you had better be crafty, because if you're disobedient and guileless, then oh well, too bad." That's not to say that other regions lack twist and turns on the raw head in bloody bones motif. For instance, we came upon a version of the story published in an anthology of Appalachian fairy tales and collected around 1950 by a regional folklorist.

15:19In this version, a young girl with an evil stepmother, you know the drill there, is sent on a particularly dangerous chore to draw water from a well at the end of the world. The idea there, of course, being that the girl would ideally be killed along the way. But as heroines are apt to do, she instead befriended dangerous animals and avoided every single pitfall. And then things got, well, they got weird. At the well, she dropped it down the bucket to get the required water. But instead she brought up, quote, an ugly old skeleton who begged her, quote, "'Wash me, dry me and lay me down easy.'" And she did. She dabbed that very damp pile of bones with a hankership and she set it out to bask in the sun. Unbelievably, this happened at least four more times until this girl was basically surrounded by a spirit Halloween's worth of clattering skeletons. Ones that were very grateful for her help

16:20and that granted her all sorts of wishes and the form of weird bone manifestations. Like she must be poor from the way that her clothes look. I hope every time she combs her hair, money will fall out. An oddly specific thing to say, but lo and behold, when the girl made it home safe, we bet you can guess what happened the next time she decided to get ready with me. Her hair was full of silver coins. Here, of course, we do see that classic fairy tale trope of kindness being rewarded. But the bloody bones ankle is an odd variation on helping the monster. Think pulling the thorn from the lion's paw and reaping the benefits of a selfless act. Although these skeletons are never called bloody bones in the tale, the story is classified as such, which means, at least to us, that the skeleton itself was a folklore symbol that carried meaning from one story to another, no matter what it exactly got up to at any given time.

17:21And that is probably a good segue to talk about time and place in another way. Where this really all started and in what form? As you might have guessed from the Thomas Jefferson letter dated 1799 and referencing the tale as a kind of golden oldie, raw head bloody bones definitely predated the establishment of this nation. And when we started there, we ended up traveling in a reading rainbow kind of way across the Atlantic Ocean to the United Kingdom. Plenty of British references, they hint that raw head in bloody bones is much older than its written record. The heck, we saw references made as early as 1548, that implied that the monster was an ancient figure even in that time. The Oxford English Dictionary shows us the boogie man popping up here and there, in plays and poetry, and even in the writing of philosopher John Locke. With all of that lovely and in-depth information, you would think that we'd be able to pin down

18:23just where the story originated once and for all. And whether it's essential purpose was to terrify naughty children and to submission. You'd think that we could, except for one strange thing. Even in its British permutations, raw head and bloody bones shift and change, moving from nursery warning to evil fairy to water demon, depending on place and time. Just like in the US, the story changes as it drifts from one old wife to another and another and another. The famed British folkloreist Catherine Briggs refined a classification system for the United Kingdom's folklore. Most stories slotted in fairly easily to three divisions, trooping fairies, solitary fairies, and nursery bogies. Bogies being, of course, the British term for boogie man. Most stories could easily slide into one or another, but across her various books, Briggs placed raw head

19:23and bloody bone stories into at least two. And her seminal work, the 1976 and encyclopedia of fairies, Briggs wrote, quote, bloody bones lived in dark cupboards, generally under the stairs. If you were heroic enough to peep through a crack, you would get a glimpse of the dreadful crouching creature with blood running down its face, seated, waiting on a pile of raw bones that had belonged to children who told lies or said bad words. And if you peep through the keyhole at him, he got you anyway. So, in that form of nursery boogie. But there's also this, an incarnation as a kind of malignant fairy that she groups in with similar creatures like the kelpie. Quote, in Lancashire and Yorkshire, Tommy Rawhead or Rawhead and Bloody Bones is a water demon, haunting old moral pits or deep ponds to drag children down to their depths. Now, one could argue that we're still dealing with a kind of nursery monster here,

20:23in that the monster protects children from danger by being a danger. Stay away from the real threat of the water or the pretend threat of a skinless head and his companion, the dancing skeleton, will get you. But it's still odd, at least to us. A water demon, like a kelpie, for instance, would not usually be relocated to a cupboard for the convenience of scaring the bejesus out of a toddler. But that's true of the American versions, too. The name seems to carry over, even when absolutely nothing else does. The monster in the attic is not a polite set of bones at the bottom of a well, nor is it remains reanimated by a trickster or a disembodied head waiting to snatch Dolly Parton away, should she set one foot out of bed. But then again, perhaps it is, because the monster has stayed alive and all of its confusing and dismembered glory, but shifting to suit the needs of the population who adopted it, de-guard against lakes or woods

21:25or highlight kindness or power or anything the human imagination could conjure. The meaning shifts, but the name remains. And perhaps that's why it stayed. Well, if not alive, then undead for 500 years or more. Whatever we people can imagine, well, raw head and bloody bones are willing to be that and to frighten us all the same. We hope you'll join us next time for another real life story from the fine print of America's local papers. From the lives of regular people, just like you and me, except for one strange thing. One strange thing is an independent podcast to support the show and to hear more of the entirely true and enticingly peculiar, you can check out our premium offerings. If you'd like to subscribe on Apple Premium, you'll get both premium and ad-free and early access episodes,

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23:29Yeah, you send it, I spend it. Did my money get like green card-aided? Yeah, it's chicken shorva. Want it back? I can't believe you ate my Venmo. Spend your balance instantly with the Venmo debit card, no monthly fee or minimum balance. Venmo balance account required to get a card and use a balance. Venmo master card is issued by the bank or bank NA.