61: Mermaids
Gina (00:10)
Let's just scrap the whole thing. don't, we don't, you know what? It's the new year, new us. We're not doing episodes anymore. We sit here in silence for an hour.
Kathryn (00:17)
god, it is a new year. Okay. Wait, I forgot about that. All right, cool, I can do this. Let's just jump right in. All right, hello! Hi everyone, hi. Welcome, this is I Scream You Scream. We're your weekly scoop of the most chilling histories, mysteries, and paranormal perplexities. I'm Kathryn. And happy new year! I just remembered it's a new year! It's the first episode of 2026.
Gina (00:19)
Yeah.
Sweet.
I'm Gina.
Kathryn (00:43)
We hope that you have had a lovely restful winter so far and we hope you continue to do so because it's still hibernation season. So don't do anything yet. Don't have goals. Just keep being you. Everything's great. ⁓ We're so happy that you're joining us here for the month of January. We're going to be discussing stories about cryptids, which I'm so excited about. We've spent a long time coming. And while we do that,
Gina (00:53)
Mm-hmm.
you
Kathryn (01:11)
We will be discussing the ice cream I'm always so scared to pronounce. How do you say this word? Just say it, it's okay. Me too. So for the month of January, Gina and I will be eating sherbert. If you wanna eat sherbet or sorbet or whatever, that's fine with us. We will be eating sherbert.
Gina (01:16)
Me too! Okay. Well, okay, here's my thing. Sherbert.
Okay.
you
Kathryn (01:38)
A friendly reminder that we have tons of behind the scenes stuff that we post regularly on Patreon, so while you're enjoying your sherbert or whatever it may be, go ahead and join us over there. We always have links in the show notes and everything like that. But until you join us over there, grab a spoon and let's dig in.
Gina (01:58)
Remember when you said how we're both eating sherbert?
Kathryn (02:02)
no, did you say sherbet? Okay.
Gina (02:04)
⁓ no, said sherbert, but I'm actually,
having sorbet because...
Kathryn (02:09)
I
was gonna say I realized what you meant because yeah, tell me, me. Sorry for interrupting.
Gina (02:12)
Yeah. I didn't
realize that sherbet is a different thing here. It's like a type of candy. And so when I went, I texted Tom and I was like, hey, you're out right now. Do you mind picking me up some sherbet? And he sent me back a picture of candy. And he was like this. And I was like, no.
Kathryn (02:32)
That's so funny. What are you talking about, Tom? What the F?
How lucky that he was out. But I also like, between you and me and everyone listening, there a difference between Sherbert and Sorbet? Because they are different, right? Okay, I thought so.
Gina (02:47)
Yes, I looked it up because I
was worried about how off-theme I was going, so I looked it up. I think, if I'm not wrong, if I am, iscreamyouscreampod@gmail.com one of them has dairy and one of them doesn't.
Kathryn (02:53)
Mm.
So Sherbert is the one that has dairy. Don't me how I know that. I did have a traumatic experience when Phil and I first started dating and he surprised me with Sherbert thinking that it was dairy free. And we learned together one fateful night that it in fact is not. So Sherbert is the one that is dairy full, one might say.
Gina (03:05)
You're eating the one that has dairy.
⁓ Romance.
Okay.
Kathryn (03:29)
I just thought the difference was, sherbert came in a big tub, Sorbet was served in a dish at a fancy restaurant. I thought that was, yeah.
Gina (03:36)
thought they were the same thing and just like
people said it differently but apparently that's not the case.
Kathryn (03:43)
Yeah,
I thought that too. ⁓ Well, cool, the more you know. In addition to rainbow sherbert, which is what I am eating, we have a really important announcement about a very adorable animal that exists. The announcement is there is an animal called the pink fairy armadillo and
Gina (03:59)
Yes.
Kathryn (04:10)
Gina and I learned about this yesterday and it's the cutest animal I've ever seen in my life. And that's the announcement. We just want to make sure everyone knows that this animal exists. It's so cute. And that's it. That's the whole thing. Team Pink Fairy Armadillo. That's it.
Gina (04:29)
forever. Because what were, how did we even get onto the topic of pink fairy armadillos yesterday? How did that happen?
Kathryn (04:34)
I
was really hoping you would not ask that question. So here's the story.
I may or may not have eaten armadillo spaghetti at one point in my life. And to this day, I don't know if it really was armadillo or if I was just told it was armadillo because I was in the South. So like iscreamyouscreampod@gmail.com is armadillo meat sauce a thing that people really have? Because to this day, it's been decades and I still don't know if I actually ate it.
Gina (04:45)
⁓ yeah. yeah.
Hehehehehe ⁓
Kathryn (05:09)
on my way to Gulf Shores, Alabama one time. So I was telling Gina this story for some reason, I don't remember why that came up, but then we started talking about armadillos, we started Googling armadillos, and then this very important discovery was made.
Gina (05:13)
You
Right, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I will say, I've been thinking about ⁓ Pink Fairy Armadillo since we talked about it yesterday. I think they kind of remind me of like a naked mole rat a little bit. Right, yeah.
Kathryn (05:31)
⁓ As you should.
100 % yeah, they are like
they're like naked mole rats hot older sister Right That's yeah, absolutely yes, they for sure do
Gina (05:42)
100 %
I love that so much. A pink fairy armadillo would teach its little sister about the Bloody Mary thing. 100%. Yeah, cool older sister shit.
Kathryn (05:56)
absolutely, yeah, yeah,
very excited about this episode, so we gotta just hop right to it after we've been talking for a million years. I'm so excited about this. Yes, I'm listening.
Gina (06:08)
Kathryn listen.
Normally, when I'm researching an episode, I try my hardest to be objective, which means that I don't usually come out of research with an agenda. Usually. Today, I have an agenda, and I'm going to tell you why. The whole reason I picked this topic, which is mermaids, is because for a very long time, I have believed in the possibility
Kathryn (06:18)
you
Love it.
Gina (06:39)
that mermaids might exist. I will be the first to admit that belief was grounded in what some might call blind faith. I like the term whimsical ignorance, but I was always just of the opinion that like, hey, the ocean is really big. Maybe we don't know everything about it yet. So in researching this, my goal was to prove myself wrong. I wanted to know.
if I was being absolutely silly for thinking that there's a possibility that mermaids exist and I was fully prepared to get like 10 minutes into this before biology just slapped me across the face. But that is not what happened. So before I launch into my saga of a tirade, I wanna talk about what your thoughts and feelings are on mermaids.
Kathryn (07:28)
Okay, well, I'm gonna try to make this quick because she's only doing this for you dear listeners because she knows damn well that my thoughts and feelings on Mermaids are 100 % exist, no doubt in my mind. I'm just here to like listen to new arguments I can make beyond that which I've already been making. And they one of my favorite things.
to talk slash hear about. So yes, 100 % on board. No questions or doubts whatsoever.
Gina (07:57)
Amazing.
Excellent. Well, if you too are someone who loosely believes in mermaids but is looking for some fun new arguments to throw at naysayers, you've come to the right place because I'm about to tell you so very many of them. quick warning before I get started. I will be mentioning folklore that contains murder. So if that's not the vibe today, no worries. Also as a secondary aside, when I say the word mermaid, I'm talking about the female and male of the species.
Technically the right word for this would be mer or merfolk but I kind of figured like people use the word mankind to describe all of humanity like all the time. So I'm gonna use the word mermaids to describe all of mermaid kind and we can just roll with it. Sweet. So, you might be asking yourself the same question I had at the beginning of my research, which is are mermaids a cryptid?
Kathryn (08:40)
Yeah.
I love this. I love this.
Gina (08:58)
It turns out Googling that leads you to some very heated arguments with strangers online. So what I'm going to say is that Merriam-Webster's dictionary defines cryptids as quote, an animal that has been claimed to exist but never proven to exist. And to that someone might say, ⁓ mermaids aren't really an animal. According to the lore, they're more like aquatic humans. To which I say humans are animals. Therefore, mermaids.
Kathryn (09:08)
you
Okay.
Yeah!
Gina (09:27)
are cryptids and thus concludes the first section of this episode.
Kathryn (09:32)
Okay, that was fast because
that was one of the things that I was curious about because what did I say to you? I was like, I didn't know mermaids were an option for this one because I've never thought of them as a cryptid but also kind of, I mean they're included in imagery and stuff like that about cryptid, you know, like I don't know, they're kind of halfway between cryptid and fey but maybe those are two different.
Gina (09:44)
Mm-hmm.
Yes.
Kathryn (10:00)
parts of the same thing, you know?
Gina (10:03)
Well,
and a lot of people are in, because I was in the same camp too. When I thought about doing Mermaids, I was like, does that technically count? And I think a lot of people have this mindset. And one of the reasons why is because cryptids usually start with sightings. So think Mothman. Think Beast of Bray Road. People see something happening, and then the lore kind of builds from there.
Kathryn (10:06)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Mmm, yeah.
Gina (10:24)
But mermaids actually started more or less as deities way back in the day. So stretching back thousands and thousands and thousands of years all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia, we had a god named Ea. And Ea was a god of, among other things, freshwater.
Kathryn (10:28)
Mmm, okay.
Gina (10:42)
and he was depicted as having the body of a man and the tail of a fish. And then we also have a similar Babylonian tradition from around 4000 BC with another god named Oannes, who, similar to Ea, was described as kind of like a man-fish hybrid thing. So right away, I thought it was interesting that the earliest figures we can trace mermaid lore back to are masculine.
because you tend to think of mermaids as being inherently feminine. And it's not until we get to ancient Syria in 1000 BC that we learn about what people call the first, quote, real mermaid. Her name was Atargatis, or Derketo. When the Greeks started retelling this, her name was Derketo. So that's what I'm gonna call her, because it's a little bit easier for me to say, but they are the same person. They refer to the same. So Derketo.
Kathryn (11:10)
Yeah.
Gina (11:36)
was a goddess of fertility, but she didn't start out looking like a mermaid with the fishtail and all that. The most common version of her story goes that she fell in love with some hot young mortal named Simeos and she got pregnant with his baby. But she was really embarrassed to have had an affair with a mortal because she was a god. So her plan was to jump into a lake and become a fish as a way of kind of hiding her shame. Which like, you know.
Kathryn (12:06)
Yeah, why not? Sure.
Gina (12:06)
More power to you. Yeah, why not?
But her fellow gods didn't want to let her hide her beauty because she was very beautiful. So they only let her transform her lower half into a fish while her upper half remained a human.
Kathryn (12:20)
What a compromise. Damn, okay, sure.
Gina (12:22)
I know. Yes, and
she was she was worshipped in this form for a really, really long time. And fun fact, she later came to be regarded as a form of Aphrodite. so that's fun. And then on the topic of the whole Greek mythology branch of this, we also, of course, have Triton, who was the son of Poseidon with the upper body of a man, lower body of a fish, also notable for being Ariel's asshole dad in The Little Mermaid, of course.
So when you take all of that original lore and you combine it with modern interpretations of mermaids, which are like hot girls, seashell bra, singing with a pet crab, a lot of people consider them to be way more myth than cryptid. But personally, I think comparing the very old to the very new skips a whole lot of this middle bit because a lot
happened in between Ancient Greece and Disney starting its animation cash grab. And one of the things that happened is that we saw legends and stories and sightings of mermaids crop up in tons of different cultures all around the world, more or less independently of each other, which I always find to be kind of a compelling, interesting thing.
And yes, in a lot of those cultures, they were still deities or spirits or something like that. But at the core, there seems to have always been this recurring idea throughout human history that there is a version of us that lives underwater. Which as a side note, because it's fascinating, there is a pretty big difference between freshwater and saltwater mermaids, which I didn't know about before I started researching this.
And the differences mainly come in the way that they're discussed or represented throughout history. So a lot of the times, freshwater mermaids are the ones who are divine or spirits or godlike or some kind of supernatural cosmic force. Whereas saltwater mermaids tend to be talked about as creatures that either do or could exist.
outside of the whole godliness and that kind of thing. And obviously there's exceptions to this, but those are just the general patterns and kind of the lore that we see, which I thought was really cool. So let's talk about the different types of mermaids that have been brought up as a potential over the years. We're very familiar with the Western European version of a mermaid, which are kind of seen as like equal parts seductive and dangerous.
beautiful feminine creatures that might crash your ship and every now and then maybe they talk to a human or take a human lover or something like that. But not all European stories about mermaids went like this. There is a very famous story of a ⁓ woman named Melusine. Have you heard of this before?
Kathryn (15:11)
No.
Gina (15:12)
Okay, so it's a French story, uh-huh. And her story, it's
a very long one, so I'm not gonna have time to tell the full story today, but to get to the part that's mermaidy, all you need to know is that her dad broke a promise to her mom, which resulted in Melusine taking revenge on him when she got older by locking him in a mountain to die.
Kathryn (15:37)
What?
Gina (15:39)
Yeah, suspend your disbelief. So, locks him and a Mountain, and her mom learned about this and she was pretty pissed because he was still her husband, first and foremost, and also it was Melusine's dad. So she cursed Melusine to become a two-tailed serpent from the waist down every Saturday, and in this form, she was frequently found in water. Long story short, Melusine winds up inspiring the Starbucks logo. That's where she comes from.
Kathryn (16:08)
That's fun. of all, I was really sad when you said Saturday. I don't know why. was just like, oh, what an inconvenient day to be cursed. That's like date night. yeah. Anyway, okay, that's interesting.
Gina (16:08)
I know right?
The best day. It is the best day. Mm-hmm.
Yes, so that's kind of painting with a broad brush. That's kind of Western European mermaids in a nutshell. Like, you know, they're fun, they're sexy, we take it, we commercialize it, that kind of thing. But it still has those core elements, right? Like gorgeous, there's ⁓ cunning, there's also this kind of wildness inherent in the way that Westerners tend to think about mermaids.
Kathryn (16:35)
Mm-hmm.
Gina (16:44)
And we do see elements of this reflected in Eastern cultures as well. So in China, for example, we have the jiaoren which are really similar to our version of mermaids in that they have upper body of a human, lower body of a fish. But there's some folklore here that their tears are said to turn into pearls that they sometimes gift to humans.
Kathryn (17:09)
Hey, that's nice.
Gina (17:10)
Yeah,
pretty sweet, right? they're also supposed to be very good at weaving. Yeah, big, big textile industry under da sea But yes, just like Western mermaids, they're also thought of as like very beautiful, very appealing. But the same could not be said for Japanese lore, which features something called a ningyo which are these kind of mermaid like creatures, but they're more
Kathryn (17:15)
Sure, makes sense.
Gina (17:37)
of like just a very ugly fish with a human face?
You might have. Yeah, we'll put one in the video.
Kathryn (17:43)
I think I've seen an illustration of this before. Probably in folklore or something. Yeah, for sure.
That sounds alarming. Yeah.
Gina (17:53)
Terrifying. And
then we get to places like Indonesia and Australia, which obviously, you know, they have very different stories about mermaids. But again, there's these pillars of being alluring, being dangerous, being kind of ethereal. And then there's the whole continent that I haven't even mentioned, Africa. And actually, I have a semi recent story about a mermaid sighting in Zimbabwe. So yes, so in Zimbabwe in 2012,
A construction project on a reservoir was halted because the workers reported seeing mermaids in the area and they didn't want to upset the mermaids by continuing.
Kathryn (18:33)
Wait, I love that. What?
Gina (18:35)
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Yeah, that's awesome. So it's this, again, idea of them being like dangerous or vengeful or just like something that you don't mess with. Right. So we have mermaids or versions of mermaids showing up again and again and again all over the place, all in ways that more or less align with each other. So to me, I was like, wow, points for team mermaid. This is a good sign.
Kathryn (18:41)
Mm-hmm.
Don't mess with them, right?
Gina (19:03)
Like, this doesn't prove that mermaids do exist, but what it does show is that people across time and across the world keep having experiences that they interpret as something human-adjacent being in the water, which is notable.
So yes, we have mermaids popping up all over the place, all of these different areas, all of these different cultures. But a lot of people see this as less of a product of mermaids existing and more a product of humans just wanting to use mermaids as a symbol for something. Like if you're telling a story, especially when like oral storytelling was the main way of passing information along.
And if you need to reference the fact that bodies of water are beautiful, but also fickle and deadly, using a mermaid to embody those traits makes the story a lot more powerful. Like it's a very easy formula that cultures everywhere repeated and could have arrived at independently because it's just that good. So yeah, fun fact about maps for my map friend, because I know you love maps. ⁓ That's.
Kathryn (19:56)
you
Yeah, that makes sense.
do.
Gina (20:10)
Part of the reason why on very old maps you'll see mermaids depicted in certain areas of the water. And that was basically a shorthand warning that that area was dangerous. Yeah. Isn't that cool?
Kathryn (20:20)
What? Wait, what?
That's so cool.
I love that so much. That's like two of my favorite things. Dude, I love a mermaid and I love a map.
Gina (20:28)
Maps and mermaids.
Well, not to immediately dampen the mood, but we do have to talk about the Christian element of mermaid symbolism. I'm so sorry. Because it gets, it kind of gets into like why we think of mermaids as women rather than a mix of ⁓ male and female. So.
Kathryn (20:40)
Okay.
when everything changed.
Mm.
Gina (20:55)
As we touched on a little bit at the beginning, a lot of the older interpretations of mermaids are when you see like the mermen, quote unquote, or a mix of male and again is pretty different than a modern interpretation where you think about the little mermaid, you know, they're mostly chicks. And as always, religion is largely to blame for this. is...
where I started to stray away from my original goal a little bit here because the more I read about religion's role in portrayals of mermaids, the angrier I got, as is my way. So this isn't going to help us prove that mermaids exist, but humor me for a second because it is actually kind of interesting, if horrible. So for a quick bit of history, if you didn't know this already, women were not always viewed as the, quote, weaker sex.
There were two key things that caused this to happen or for us to be labeled in this way. The first one was the agricultural revolution and the second was the rise of the Catholic Church. Now, obviously there's a million, bajillion other things that happened other than those two things, but those are kind of the two big pieces. That's where we see gender roles first being built and then being reinforced. And the Catholic Church is largely responsible for the reinforcing part of it.
because the church was ruled by men and they wanted to keep it that way. So in order to do that, they had to make it known that women were not fit to lead religiously, politically or otherwise. So they had to start demonizing femininity and a beautiful but dangerous creature like a mermaid becomes a very convenient symbol of female vanity and temptation. So for example, Mary Queen of Scots,
When her husband was murdered, there was propaganda insinuating that she was responsible for it, and they insinuated it by depicting her as a mermaid, with the implication being that she was this beautiful temptress that turned on her husband, and now he's dead.
And this is part of the reason why it's really hard for people to talk about mermaids in a literal sense even today, because it's been ingrained in us for hundreds and hundreds of years that mermaids are, above all else, a storytelling device rather than a biological being.
Kathryn (23:11)
Sorry. Okay, continue. Yes. That means yes, you're beautiful. Continue.
Gina (23:12)
A sneeze of affirmation, thank you. Thank you so much.
But then something interesting starts happening. We start seeing mermaids show up in actual travel logs and in sailor reports, one of which comes from Christopher Columbus.
in the 1400s. Did you know about this?
Kathryn (23:44)
Christopher Columbus? No, I didn't know about this. 1492 when he sailed the ocean blue. He saw a mermaid in the ocean blue.
Gina (23:45)
Yeah, who sailed the ocean blue? He sure did.
He saw three.
Allegedly he saw
Kathryn (23:56)
Why it? I'm sorry,
I'm not messing around right now. Of all the shit we had to learn about this guy and no one ever told me about this.
Gina (24:06)
Yeah, he saw three mermaids near Haiti and he said, quote, this is going to piss you off. They are not so beautiful as they are said to be for their faces have some masculine traits.
Kathryn (24:18)
What a dweeb. Okay, Chris.
Jesus Christ. Like you're so cute What an idiot fuck that guy
Gina (24:22)
You know what? Right?
like you're seeing a creature that according to you is probably capable of wrecking your ship and you're like, you looked hotter in your picture. Yeah, fuck that guy.
Kathryn (24:34)
It's like, ⁓ what a butter face. Fuck that guy, dude.
Man, I got real excited and you took me back. You took me back to where I'm supposed to be with him. I was really like, I was like, my God, a point for Christopher Columbus? No, plot twist, all right, thank you.
Gina (24:44)
Yeah, yeah
Yeah, he manages
to take the coolest thing in the world and still make it suck.
Kathryn (24:54)
What a fucking idiot. Alright.
Gina (24:55)
Yeah, yeah. So a lot of people think that what he was actually seeing here was manatees. Have you heard this before that like mermaid sightings could just be manatees?
Kathryn (25:08)
I've heard of seals. I've not heard of manatees, but that makes sense, because seals have their own legends and lore. So I do love the idea of a manatee mermaid, though, just floating and bopping you with their nose, you know, like, as they do. I'm just imagining Ariel floating around and like, boop.
Gina (25:10)
Okay.
Me too.
Yes.
Right? Like the long hair, but like manatee.
Kathryn (25:36)
It's all manatee,
but just what like with a red wig on Okay, I do like that yeah
Gina (25:40)
Yes.
But yes, I had heard the manatee thing before I started looking into this and I had always kind of struggled with it because I was like, how could you look at a manatee and think that it's a mermaid? But to be fair, like he probably didn't see the manatee's entire body. He probably just saw the heads popping up out of the water. And when you're on a big ship, like you're a little bit far away from him, I guess.
Kathryn (25:49)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. ⁓
Gina (26:09)
you could kind of understand it. And also when he would have been sailing, manatees wouldn't have been something that he was familiar with. So he could have just been like interpreting what his eyes were seeing, which was a manatee, through the lens of something he did know, which was a mermaid.
Kathryn (26:17)
Yeah.
Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Because I am also inclined to be like, do manatees behave similar to mermaids in the way they swim or whatever? that depends on whether or not you've seen a mermaid. Like, you know, who knows how they actually move through the water?
Gina (26:40)
Yeah.
they are like, I know, I mean, they're obviously wild animals, but they're not very mean. Like where my parents live in Florida, there's an area where you can go kayaking that manatees live and they'll come right up to you. They're super nice.
Kathryn (26:48)
Mm-hmm.
No.
Yeah.
Have you ever seen those videos that are like, cause like you're not supposed to touch them or interact with them at all. there's, I, I, on my feet, I always get these videos of like,
Gina (27:02)
Mm-mm.
Kathryn (27:08)
It'll be captioned something along the lines of like, Manatee is trying to get, like trying so hard to get me to break the rules because they're so docile. They'll like come up and try to like boop you or whatever. There was one about a, there was like a scuba diver or something who was like swimming away from it so as not to touch it per the rules. And the Manatee was just like, hey, where are you going? Where are we going? What are you doing? And he kept like booping them. Yeah.
Gina (27:15)
Aww.
Come back, buddy! ⁓
Kathryn (27:36)
Yeah, that was
the attitude of it. It was like chasing him, but not in an aggressive way. was just like, it was almost like it was playing, but this poor scuba diver was like, get away from me. I don't want to get in trouble. And this man, he's like, what, what's wrong, bud? Like, where are going? Yeah.
Gina (27:43)
Yeah.
I would find that so hard. There was one time I was in that,
was kayaking in that area by my parents' house and there was a baby manatee that came to say hello.
Kathryn (27:57)
I
love a baby manatee, they're so sweet. I've never seen one in real life.
Gina (28:01)
and I couldn't do anything about it. so
big, they're so fat, they're so cute.
Kathryn (28:06)
Yeah, manatees are adorable. Yeah, they're like little sea puff balls.
Gina (28:10)
Yeah.
Big Manatee fan. But I will return to my argument. Not every mermaid sighting can be explained away by manatees. And henceforth, I shall give you an example. So another pretty famous sighting came in the 1600s from a guy named Henry Hudson, who reported seeing a mermaid while looking for a northeast passage in the Arctic. He wrote, quote, She was close to the ship's side, looking earnestly on the men.
Kathryn (28:19)
Excellent.
Gina (28:38)
From the navel upward, her back and breasts were like a woman's, her skin very white and long hair hanging down behind of color black. In her going down, they saw her tail, which was like the tail of a porpoise and speckled like a mackerel. Two things. One, doesn't sound like a manatee. Two, there are no manatees in Arctic waters. So what gives?
Kathryn (29:02)
Bye.
Man, I was gonna ask you if there were any Arctic or Antarctic sightings because I'm imagining like a half seal but a baby seal like a pretty white tail and all that. I'm imagining like an ice princess mermaid. I wanna be that.
Gina (29:14)
Yes.
So it's funny that you bring up seals because a lot of people think that they were actually just seeing seals. Either seals or beluga whales. Which, like, to be fair, I have the same thoughts about that as I do the Columbus thing. Like, I think, how can you mistake a beluga whale for a human? But I guess if you're on a ship, you're far away, it could happen, especially if you've never seen one.
Kathryn (29:25)
Yeah.
Well, and also, like, we talked a lot in the Flying Dutchman episode, stuff gets distorted and you see things that in a way that you might not really be seeing, but that could also be an argument for, like, if you're seeing a mermaid, could also just look like a whale or a manatee.
Gina (29:46)
Mm-hmm.
Maybe they have really
good camouflage, I don't know.
They have those octopus genes.
Kathryn (30:00)
Wait, this is fantastic.
Do octopus? There is no better argument for the existence of aliens than the existence of octopus. That's a tangent, but just that's my thoughts on that. Please continue to mermaid, sorry.
Gina (30:15)
I want to talk about octopuses so bad. I love octopuses. Okay, we'll talk about mermaids first and then can talk about an octopus later. Yeah, I'll call you tonight when I'm in bed and we can talk about. All right. But yes, mermaids. So sightings of mermaids continued through the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. And by that point, public interest in them was pretty high.
Kathryn (30:17)
I know.
Yeah, we'll talk about them later, yeah. Yeah. Okay, so.
Gina (30:44)
And with that, of course, came people who wanted to exploit that interest. The most famous instance of this was P.T. Barnum's Fiji mermaid, which looked like a very small mummified mermaid. We've all probably seen a picture of it at some point or another. It was actually a fake, and it was a combination of a monkey and a fish body that had been taxidermied together. So that's not the only time something like this has happened. It's happened quite a lot with mermaids. And the reason I bring it up
is it's an example of a wider issue that made people continue to build an association with mermaids as being fake or a hoax or a mistake. And we still see a lot of that legacy of disbelief continuing in the skepticism towards mermaids today. But that doesn't mean the sightings have stopped. There was the story from Zimbabwe that I mentioned earlier, and in 2009,
People in Kiryat Yam reported seeing a mermaid off of the coast, and they said it looked like a combination of a dolphin and a little girl.
Kathryn (31:50)
Okay, I was wondering if you were going to bring up dolphins because in my head, my whole life, the thing that makes most sense to me would be a dolphin mistaken for a mermaid or vice versa because to me, they're so human-like and playful and interactive and they remind me of a playful child.
Gina (32:04)
Mm-hmm.
Kathryn (32:15)
To me that makes the most sense personality-wise and size-wise to be compared to a mermaid.
Gina (32:20)
Mm-hmm.
That's what I think too. And we're gonna, we will dive into the, like how this could have evolutionarily worked in a bit. And I think, yes, but yes, 100%, we are, as usual, we are aligned, same page. But yes, so there's this combination dolphin little girl, they said that, or reports said that she only came out at sunset. And when she did, she would just like play around in the water. She wasn't like trying to, know, hunt or really like complete.
Kathryn (32:25)
Yeah. Okay.
Okay.
Same page.
Gina (32:52)
a task she was just flipping around, having the time of her life. And what's notable about this is that it wasn't just a bunch of people seeing this and then all deciding to file a report on it together. People were reporting this completely separately from each other without ever having interacted with or knowing anyone else who saw her. Which again, is pretty compelling.
Kathryn (33:17)
That always has me immediately like, yeah, that's 100 % true. Like, if you have no connection and you're not trying to just do some weird hoax or whatever, where did you say this was? What area was this again? Okay, okay. Interesting. That is compelling.
Gina (33:22)
Mm-hmm
So this was Israel.
Yes. Ultimately, they never wound
up finding her, but... And so, you this is not proof that mermaids exist, blah, blah, blah. But at the very least, we do have to admit that something was happening here that people could not and still cannot easily explain. So, It's time for the science portion.
Kathryn (33:50)
Yeah.
Okay
Gina (33:57)
When people, including myself, argue in favor of mermaids existing, there is this really popular stat that gets thrown around that something like 95 % of the ocean is unexplored, therefore how could we possibly know that mermaids don't exist? am here to tell you it is so much worse than that. Or better, depending on whose side you're on.
So here are the facts. As of this year, we have mapped about 20 %-ish of the seafloor using sonar. And the sonar part is important because it's the machines doing the mapping for us. And the way that sonar works, it's not like taking a video or a picture of everything that's in the ocean. Sonar uses sound waves to estimate the size and shape of the, well not size, more so the shape of the seafloor in a specific patch or patches.
It's built for hard reflective surfaces, things like sunken ships, submarines, rocks, the actual seafloor. It is not built to consistently identify things like soft bodied animals. If it were, we wouldn't have only discovered the giant squid on camera in 2012. So using the if mermaids are real, technology would have captured them by now argument is inherently flawed.
because the technology that we've been talking about is not fit for this purpose. So keep that one in your back pocket. And when we look at how much of the seafloor humans have actually physically seen, it gets even better. Because according to the NOAA, which is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, humans have only actually explored, get ready, less than 0.001 % of the deep ocean seafloor.
For context, that's an area roughly the size of Rhode Island, and 90 % of the ocean is deep ocean.
Kathryn (35:59)
So everything you're saying right now is like partially one of my biggest interests and something that I am so afraid of. I don't ever want to know or experience. So I'm constantly at this weird crossroad push and pull, whatever you want to call it.
about the ocean because of everything you just said.
I'm not afraid of the ocean, but I'm not not afraid of the ocean either. I have like a respect for it in regards to the fact that I know it could easily kill me. With that being said, I do kind of want to go down there and see if there's mermaids. Like that is specifically something I want. Like if someone was like, hey, I saw a mermaid. If you, just have to go deep diving one time and you will see them.
Gina (36:34)
Yeah.
Kathryn (36:55)
100 % would go, would be horrified and scared the whole time.
Gina (37:00)
Same, I am a land mammal. I love the ocean very much. I love the water. I love being on boats. Deep under the sea where even if I started swimming up as fast as I could, I still wouldn't make it in time. That's not for me. I'm not a huge fan. Yes, same.
Kathryn (37:01)
Yeah.
No, not for me.
I want to want that. Yeah, I want to want
to do that, but I don't. Okay, when I learned, when you're scuba, do you know this? When you're scuba diving, you have to pause at a certain point in order for your pressure to regulate so you don't implode upon coming to the surface. What? Excuse you? I'm sorry, but that's a hard no from me. In no way, there's just no way.
Gina (37:29)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. like,
we'll get to this ⁓ in a bit, but I have a theory about where I think mermaids live. And it is not a place where humans can swim to. It is so wildly inaccessible to the human body that like, even if we could do it, we shouldn't.
Kathryn (37:53)
Yeah,
sorry, Cinnamon's joining us. ⁓ I also have theories about where, ⁓ she just bit my neck! Cinnamon! What the? She said, you shut the fuck up, they don't want you to find them. Vampire Kitty, my god! She literally just like, I just felt these two little scrapes, those were her teeth. What the F, Cinnamon?
Gina (37:56)
Hello.
She's like, you don't have theories.
you
She's been doing that a lot
lately. I think she bit you twice yesterday.
Kathryn (38:21)
She has been doing that
a lot. I don't know why she's doing Anywho, I also have theories about where...
There are mermaids, but I will wait until the end because I want to hear more about this because I don't know if I believe my own theory, but it's been my theory for decades, so it's going to continue to be.
Gina (38:40)
my gosh, okay.
I'm so excited to hear about this. All right, sweet. So anyway, yes, to summarize that whole bit, when people say a lot of the ocean is still unexplored, correct them, because it's not just a lot, it is a massive, unimaginably huge portion of the ocean that is also worth noting, the ocean contains more life than anywhere else on earth. And every single year we discover
thousands of new species living within the ocean. Scientists estimate that of the total number of species we think live in the ocean, we have found maybe a third of them. Maybe.
Kathryn (39:19)
I do have to interrupt because this is the single most important fact to illustrate why I believe in mermaids and just cryptids in general. Because we are discovering new species all the time. You're going to tell me that you simply don't believe in something that people have seen just because people have written stories about it and it's now considered a fairy tale?
barbaric. That's absolutely ridiculous.
Gina (39:48)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
I completely agree. And the counter argument to that is usually like, all right, well, we have found all of the big species by now. Anything else that we're finding is the little tiny organism guys that live in the ocean, which is not true. In 1976, we discovered a new type of shark called, ready for it, the Megamouth shark.
Kathryn (40:03)
Yeah, how do you know? Sorry.
Gina (40:12)
And guess what? It's not small. It is between 13 to 18 feet in length, which is four or five and a half meters. It was massive and we had missed it all of these years. And why did we miss it, you ask? Because it lives in extremely deep waters oceans, most of which are completely unexplored.
Kathryn (40:33)
yeah, I don't understand how people can have arguments to any of this. Like, so we haven't officially discovered this one species yet. Why? Like, what? Who cares? Why does that mean they don't exist? People are dumb.
Gina (40:34)
you
Mm-hmm. Yes. When people
make the, if mermaids exist, we would have found them by now argument. It is so wrong because it's so incredibly clear that the data and the methodology that we have used do not back that up. Like the science does not back up mermaids don't exist. It backs up a mermaid's might or might not exist, sure. But you can't say definitively that they don't. And yet, if you do.
Kathryn (41:13)
Mm-hmm.
Gina (41:20)
any amount of research on mermaids. You will come up against a bajillion people who insist that they are either A, not real at all, or B, not real as we think of them. I disagree with both of these statements, but I'm gonna start by tackling the second one, which is something you and I have talked about before. We were talking about it only yesterday, this whole if mermaids exist, they're not, you know, blah, blah, blah, that argument. So let's explore why people say that.
Kathryn (41:39)
Mm-hmm. Yes.
Gina (41:49)
A lot of it comes back to evolution, and I will go on record saying that evolution is one of those things that I always think I understand, and then I see someone online bitching about how no one understands evolution, and I second guess myself. So if you're like hip to evolution, and you know better than I do, iscreamyouscreampod@gmail.com Let me know, please, genuinely. But basically, the argument is for mermaids to exist in the way we think of them.
which is basically an intelligent aquatic human-like race. There would have had to have been a very specific and very weird branch of evolution a million, trillion, gazillion years ago. There's a version of this that's called the aquatic ape hypothesis.
which basically says, well, maybe our ancestors had a bit of an ocean phase, maybe the primates returned to the ocean, or some of them did for a little bit, and they evolved into basically humans with tails. And in the context of mermaids, the evolutionary argument against this are things like there not being any fossil evidence And even if it did happen, for it to work, mermaids would be marine mammals, like,
a dolphin, like a whale. So where they would have to live underwater but regularly come up for air. And if that's true, if they're regularly breaching the surface to get oxygen, you would think that we would have documented more of them by now, or there would have been more like pictures or sightings or more like verifiable evidence that we could look at. I will say the ⁓ aquatic ape hypothesis is widely rejected.
It's really more of a thought experiment than anything, but it's just one of the numerous potential evolutionary pathways for an aquatic semi-human being. So even if something like an aquatic ape isn't biologically possible, that doesn't mean that mermaids are impossible. It just means, well, maybe they're not an aquatic mammal. So here's the reason why I think the arguments against this are stupid. One, we don't fully understand every branch of evolution. We still don't.
And there are still whole ocean ecosystems that we have never even seen. So the idea that some lineage from something somewhere way back when could have evolved into something intelligent, human-like, and aquatic is not inherently ridiculous, because all it is is an admission that we don't know everything. That's it. Secondly, about the whole, but there's no bones, there's no verifiable pictures, there's no videos. Yeah.
If I didn't want to be found, I wouldn't let people take pictures of me either. And also when something dies in the water, remains like its bones don't just sit there forever. The ocean can and does dissolve things like bones. And that process is accelerated at extreme depths because of things like pressure and the way that that impacts all the chemical reactions that happen when something decomposes. So in a fully deep ocean, and we're talking like
thousands and thousands of meters deep here, bones can dissolve in as little as a few months to like maybe a few years without even accounting for things like scavengers coming along and helping the process. And that's assuming that mermaids have bones.
Kathryn (45:13)
Yeah,
okay, that's so interesting. I've never heard anyone make that argument. Like, if they're a sea creature, who's to say, like, they have that part of human in them, you know?
Gina (45:21)
Mm-hmm.
Yes,
if they were closer to something like a shark, is very cartilage heavy, their remains would dissolve even faster, which made me ask the question, is there an area in our is deep enough to get rid of remains that is unexplored enough for a species to easily hide there? And the answer is yes. They're called the abyssal planes And according to the NOAA, they take up over 70 % of the ocean floor.
Kathryn (45:29)
Mm-hmm.
Gina (45:53)
and they are some of the least explored places on the planet. So that's where I think mermaids live.
Kathryn (46:00)
the deep dark habitat combined with the number of sightings does add up to me because I feel like there wouldn't be that many more because people haven't been exploring the deep sea for that long.
of this is just like objective proof for mermaids for me. realize that's like a very short version of all of the research that people have conducted over the years, but I'm just like...
Gina (46:19)
Hehehehehe
Kathryn (46:30)
I don't know. I will say, OK, so I don't know where mermaids live, but I think that where they are being hidden slash protected is Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. And the reason why is what better place to hide a mermaid than a freshwater lake where people aren't really looking for them. And it is quite deep.
Gina (46:45)
I buy that.
Kathryn (46:59)
for a lake and Shedd Aquarium does a whole bunch of research and they have like a whole behind the scenes area. We went on the behind the scenes tour a couple years ago. They got tanks and tanks and tanks full of shit that no one's seen, that they're like researching and rehabilitating. There's a whole behind the scenes place. We didn't even get to see everything. What did we not get to see? Probably mermaids.
Gina (47:00)
Hmm.
That's so cool.
Kathryn (47:25)
If I was a mermaid and I was trying to hide somewhere, think that Shedd Aquarium would be a very safe place to be.
Gina (47:32)
I think so too. I think that's a great idea. And can you imagine being on the secret mermaid research task force? Ugh. I could totally see that for you. Hell yeah.
Kathryn (47:38)
Yes, I can. think about it almost every single day of my life. Yeah. Yes,
there was a chapter of my life where I did want to be a scientist. Specifically, I wanted to work with elephants. But like, what I actually would want to work with is mermaids. And so far, that job does not exist to my knowledge. Maybe it does. I don't know. But
Gina (47:53)
Hmm.
yet.
Kathryn (48:02)
If there are any mermaid researchers out there, icecreamystreampod at gmail.com. Let me know how to get involved because it is a lifelong dream that is unfulfilled as of this day.
Gina (48:07)
My god. Please.
to a mermaid researcher. That's like...
Kathryn (48:15)
God,
that'd be so cool.
Gina (48:17)
It's like my wildest dream. I'm blushing just thinking about it.
Kathryn (48:20)
Honestly, I
like have a crush on this theoretical human. Yeah.
Gina (48:23)
Me too.
Okay, there's one more argument that we have to dismantle real quick and then we will talk about our thoughts and feelings. this last argument, it's a little bit more higher level. ⁓ So we're gonna step out of like the stats and the science here for a second. And this argument goes that the desire to discover mermaids has nothing to do with actual science.
Kathryn (48:27)
Anyway. Okay.
Gina (48:48)
and everything to do with a deeper kind of philosophical human drive towards the unknown. Because we're naturally very curious creatures, right? That's why we love coming up with ideas, we love sharing them with each other. You know, we took over the world and invented SpaghettiOs. That's like our whole thing. So it's only natural that when we are faced with a huge amount of literal uncharted waters, we want to find something in them that changes the way we understand life and the world around us.
The NOAA has a quote that kind of talks about this a little bit that says, no evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found. Why then do they occupy the collective unconscious of nearly all seafaring peoples? That's a question best left to historians, philosophers, and anthropologists. So basically, it's this idea that
whether or not mermaids exist isn't really a scientific or biological question. It's more about the nature of human curiosity, which as always, I take issue with. And I think part of it comes back to defining what we mean when we say the word science, because science is not a collection of facts that we know. It's not a repository of data somewhere. It's not a list of what is true and what is not true. Science is a method.
that relies on creating theories that stretch beyond what we already know. It relies on human curiosity to drive it forward, and it would not exist if we stopped asking the question, what if there's more? What else is out there? So to be clear, I'm not saying that a lack of evidence means that mermaids do exist, but I am saying that we don't fucking know whether or not they exist. So I disagree with
You know, the question of whether mermaids exists only belongs in history, philosophy, anthropology, that kind of thing. I disagree with it because asking ourselves to think about what else is out there is the first step of science. So in summary of my mermaid given what we know about how little of the ocean we have actually seen.
Kathryn (50:55)
you
Gina (51:03)
the huge staggering volume of species that we admit we have not discovered, and how quickly deep sea environments can erase evidence of mermaids existing, I don't think it's dumb to believe that mermaids exist. In fact, I think that acknowledging that we cannot definitively say whether or not they do or they don't is pretty damn smart. And that's where I landed with it. It's a case of belief. Mermaids exist. Hurrah forever.
Kathryn (51:29)
Excellent. No notes. I think what makes it quote unquote not a science issue is the semantics of how you approach it. Like
I believe that mermaids exist. scientist is gonna like, poo-poo that statement. I think saying there is a possibility that mermaids could exist is a little more scientific, you know, like without associating any like belief or faith or any of that. If you just pose it as like do mermaids exist, then they'll eat that shit up.
Gina (51:52)
Mm-hmm.
Kathryn (52:06)
There is a scientist somewhere who wants to know whether or not mermaids exist. I know they exist. ⁓ But I think it's like the idea of a belief in the fact that they exist that is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, there is no evidence. Yeah, I find the whole concept of bringing the scientific argument into folklore and all of these quote unquote, like weirder topics is so fascinating and frustrating.
Gina (52:10)
100%.
Yeah.
Kathryn (52:35)
because
of everything you just said, the whole purpose of science is discovering. But man, they get so stuffy about it, don't they? Like...
Gina (52:44)
And I feel like a lot
of the time it's not even actual scientists who get stuffy about it. It's people with a casual interest in science that are trying to overcompensate for not knowing enough about it.
Kathryn (52:49)
No.
I was purposely not bringing that up because that shit pisses me off so bad because that is exactly it. It's like, someone who took like evolution 101 their freshman years like actually there's no scientific evidence of mermaids.
Gina (53:06)
Actually.
You know what it reminds me of? Actually, it reminds me of that one episode in Friends where Phoebe and Ross are talking about evolution.
Kathryn (53:15)
I bring up that episode all the time. I love that episode. That is such an important way of thinking of, yes, yeah, because that's exactly what it is. You've got the scientist factual blah, blah, blah guy, and then the woo-woo spiritual girl. people think that Phoebe is supposed to be a dumb character. She's not dumb at all. She just says weird shit, which, I don't know.
Gina (53:20)
Me too.
Mm-hmm.
Kathryn (53:44)
I think of that all the time in this science versus spirituality versus high strange versus whatever. because that's exactly how those conversations, that's exactly how I wish those conversations would go. But I typically don't.
Gina (54:00)
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Yeah, if you ever want to see the dark side of humanity, Google do mermaids exist because you'll find a whole bunch of really mean people.
Kathryn (54:10)
God, don't wanna,
⁓ man, that stresses me out so bad. like, I don't even know what's in there and I'm already mad. I don't wanna know. I like my echo chamber.
Gina (54:19)
You don't, yeah, you don't wanna see. But overall, I'm very happy with this.
Same, I'm comfy cozy in my echo chamber. I'll stay here as long as I can. But yes, I was very comforted to know that the evidence that mermaids don't exist doesn't exist.
Kathryn (54:28)
Yeah.
I love that. I just am so happy you did mermaids, but I'm also I have two wolves inside of me. One of them is just happy leaving this discussion where it is the other one really wants to go check out the arguments and to get involved with them online. And I don't really want to do that.
I'm struggling between the two.
Gina (55:00)
I wonder,
this is one of the times when I wish I knew how to build a bot army.
Kathryn (55:06)
About like a robot army?
Gina (55:08)
Not like an army of robots, like, you know, bots online, like, people will just spin up bot, yeah, yeah. I want to, yeah, like I want to use my belief in mermaids for evil, but then that also might give a bad name to...
Kathryn (55:12)
like a Spambot or... Yeah, okay. Like a baby robot.
Okay.
See, that's the thing, you gotta be careful with that because then they're gonna be like, wow, look at these crazy people, their leader Gina is cuckoo, and then we're gonna, yeah, you gotta be careful with that.
Gina (55:24)
Yeah.
Yeah,
anyway, yes, do you by chance have a story for me?
Kathryn (55:34)
well thank you. That was fascinating.
I do. have a, I'm going to consider it a very special scary on top today because I was very excited about this topic. So I wanted to stay on topic. So I found a creepy pasta that has to do with the ocean. And as I was reading through it, it actually was a little bit more on topic than I was anticipating. So this one is called bring us more.
Gina (55:57)
⁓
Kathryn (56:09)
by Peter Cyrus and again I got it from Creepypasta so it's not true.
A man washed ashore last week. He looked as though he had not eaten in weeks and was barely clinging to life. I along with much of the town was elated when we discovered it was Will Harper, and that he would make a full recovery. The fishing vessel named Prosper had set sail three months prior
It never returned. Eighteen men, including Will, were all presumed to be dead. However, with Will's return came stories. Stories of how they had found an island lush with jungle with friendly natives and enormous wealth.
He told stories of how the crew had found a paradise and wished not to leave. Only Will was up to set sail back home and tell their families that they were not returning. However, as the only sailor on the return trip, he did not last long as a squall overtook him quickly, sending his ship down to the depths and leaving Will alone at sea for weeks. At first, people didn't believe him.
The Prosper was a small enough vessel and Harper a competent sailor enough to make it back in one piece. Surely he was not telling the entire story. But as the days went by, his story did not change. In fact, the more he told it, the more lit up with joy in describing the place he became. Only a few days had passed before he was trying to get another crew together to sail back to the unknown paradise.
With his fantastical tales and unwavering faith, he eventually was able to muster a s- Sorry. I'm running out of I haven't breathed this whole time. Okay. Let me start the sentence again. With his fantastical tales and unwavering faith, he eventually was able to muster a small crew and another fishing vessel named the Vandal, of which I too joined purely out of curiosity.
Gina (57:50)
Ha
Kathryn (58:07)
Four days ago, we set sail with Will leading the way, the Captain Frederick Gold in command, and 13 others who wanted to see what this unknown island paradise had to offer. The Vandal had made quick work getting out to sea, but struggled to maintain heading with this inexperienced crew of adventurers and thrill seekers.
Captain Gold was perturbed by their lack of experience and quickly becoming seasick, but Will kept his eyes facing east toward our destination. Yesterday, Will finally exclaimed loudly that he could see it just over the horizon, and we only had barely a couple of hours to go. After three days at sea, we began to do what we could to steer and speed the vessel toward where Will had said the island was. After an hour,
We began to see something breaking through the clouds. We all smiled in anticipation as we sailed. As the shape on the horizon got bigger, our excitement grew bolder. As our excitement grew bolder, we looked at the shape harder. As we looked at the shape harder, we saw the lie. This was not a lush island paradise that Will Harper had described. Instead, we saw a jagged outcropping of
of nothing but rocks breaking the surface of the sea. Before we had time to correct our course and make our way back home, the wind picked up aggressively, filling our sails and pushing us toward the jagged rocks. That's when I heard it. Over the yelling at will, the sound of the wind and the waves and the desperate commands from Captain Gold, I heard it. A melody, a soft lullaby piercing through the air into my soul.
Filling my heart with peace I had never felt before. Every other sound faded away and then I saw them. Maidens swimming in the sea through the rocks. Beautiful women with silky jet black hair, pale blue skin and tails of that of a fish. Will was the first to jump in. One of the maidens swam over to greet him and as she breached the surface I realized she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life.
Her presence was overwhelming and soon more sailors were jumping off the boat and swimming over to them. As the sailors swam, the melody grew softer and I could hear a honey soaked voice fill every one of the pores of my body with ecstasy. Welcome home, she said. With that, I jumped in. As I flew off the bow, I could see more women circling the other sailors, their melodies joining that of the first, filling the air with a cacophony of song.
I didn't care. I was no longer anxious or afraid. I was full. I was light. I was happy. And nothing would ever feel as good as listening to these voices. Through the echo of song, I heard a cry. I didn't care. Then more muffled behind the melody. The blue water around me slowly turned red. But I didn't mind. As I moved toward the songs, an arm that was without its sailor got in my way. I just moved it.
Nothing was going to keep me from the voices of the angelfish before me. I found myself almost to the rocks when she swam to me. Her hands circled my arms and pinned them to my sides as I looked into her eyes for the first time. Black, empty, soulless eyes. The melody intensified as her mouth was the only part of her face to stretch into a smile. Her pale blue lips
revealing too many rows of razor sharp teeth. She pulled me close, tears of joy spilling from me as her icy skin froze toward mine. Her sharp whisper cut through the melody with a single request, bring us more. Today, I woke up on the shore. The one who found me says I've been gone for three months, but it only feels like it's been a single day.
I can still hear the melody faint in the back of my head, but it's fleeting and fading quickly. I need to go back, and I need to bring more.
Gina (1:02:25)
That was so on theme! Dude, I loved that! That was so creepy.
Kathryn (1:02:28)
Isn't that spooky? Yeah, it was. Yeah,
I know. I love it. I was like real sucked in when I was reading.
Gina (1:02:36)
I did.
That's, there's something, I mean, we've talked about the fact that the ocean is scary and stuff, but the, the idea of floating in the ocean while it's being scary is one, I think it's my version of like your zombie apocalypse. Like I would, I would be out.
Kathryn (1:02:44)
Mm-hmm.
yeah.
Which is funny because that is also on my list of immediate no. Like being lost at sea, I like to think it is a, like an unreasonable fear of mine, but it feels very reasonable. Like, I don't know, how hard is it to just get swept out to sea? It doesn't feel that hard. People live all over coastlines. People are on ships all the time.
Gina (1:03:02)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Doesn't feel that hard. Yeah.
Yeah, I have nothing to say that can make you feel better about that. It's dangerous.
Kathryn (1:03:26)
Yeah, I don't like open water in particular. That's like... I don't even like being in the deep end of a pool, okay? Like that's where my like... Yeah. Yes. Yes! I wanna say that's valid. I know it's not, but it feels like a valid fear. Yeah.
Gina (1:03:34)
Me neither, I'm always like, what if a shark like figured out how to breathe chlorine?
But it feels, it's a valid fear
when you're swinging your little feet in the deep end and you don't know what's down there. It scares me. Same thing as like basement, like running up the stairs of a basement after you turn the lights off. Same feeling.
Kathryn (1:03:51)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yep,
yeah, it is the same feeling. Cool, well, love a mermaid episode. If anyone out there has any mermaid stories, for the love of God, please send them to us. What a magical experience that would be. Even if it's not magical, even if it's spooky, still tell us. So yeah, iscreamyouscreampod@gmail.com Any stories you have, send them on over. And then always send stickers to people who leave us reviews, so go on and do that.
Gina (1:04:02)
Huh.
Yes.
Yes, please.
Kathryn (1:04:26)
take a screenshot, email it to us along with your address and we will send you some stickers. yeah, happy new year everyone. I'm very excited to continue with our Sherbert episodes. ⁓ And yeah, until next time, keep it cool.
Gina (1:04:33)
Happy New Year!
Keep it Creepy!
