S06E06 🐈‍⬛Evil Cats and Revelatory Revenants👻

Blake and Karen welcome back historian Dr. Joseph Gagné, a specialist in New France who teaches the colony's history at Université Laval, for a seasonal visit to the winter of 1704. That year, a French and allied Indigenous raiding party fell on the frontier village of Deerfield, Massachusetts, and marched more than a hundred captives north to Canada. Among them was the town's Puritan minister, the Reverend John Williams, whose memoir of captivity in Catholic Quebec was written as theological propaganda. But tucked between the sermons are three strange stories that caught Joseph's eye: a gray cat that crashed a dawn mass, a soldier's dream from purgatory, and a dead man with news from hell.

Joseph explains how a historian handles a tale with one teller and no corroboration, and why the most useful clue in a ghost story is often the dull detail nobody meant to include. It's an exemplary excursion into Holistic Monster Studies.

Extended show notes at MonsterTalk.org

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