Episode 36: Mermaids, Part 1

Episode
Written By Stephanie Summar

The Indifferent Deep

“They sit in their meadow, but the beach before it is piled with bone-heaps of men now rotted away, and the skins shrivel on them.”

That's how Homer described the sirens' island in The Odyssey – not as a romantic hideaway, but as a graveyard. For thousands of years, these creatures – who ultimately became synonymous with mermaids – were the ultimate apex predators, using their irresistible voices to lure sailors to death among piles of rotting corpses.

Homer's sirens weren't fish-women at all. They were bird-women - human heads and chests with powerful wings and talons. Think less Little Mermaid, more terrifying harpy with a beautiful singing voice.

So how did we get from bone-heap birds to Disney princesses in seashell bras?

 

  • Steph: Before we begin, a quick content warning: Paranormal Pajama Party is a podcast about scary stories and legends, but there’s nothing scarier than the patriarchy.

    When discussing tales in which women are often the villains, we’ll have to unpack some stories in which people are victims.

    This episode contains the usual amount of cursing, as well as mentions of drowning, environmental destruction, and the occasionally uncomfortable truth about humanity's place in the natural world. Please listen with care.

    Before we dive in, I just wanted to let you know that I may have traded my voice to a sea witch for a five-star review, so this episode's about to get very boring…

    [silence]

    JUST KIDDING. I know there are better ways to get those stars. If you're enjoying the podcast, please take a moment to rate and review Paranormal Pajama Party wherever you listen. It really helps other people discover the show, and maybe someday it will even help me land a handsome prince.

    You've been riding hard all morning, and your horse is lathered with sweat. The Scottish Highlands stretch endlessly in every direction, all heather and stone and wind that cuts through your wool coat like it's made of lace. You're the Laird of Lorntie, and you're finally heading home after weeks of business in Edinburgh, thinking of nothing but a hot meal and your own bed.

    And that's when you hear her.

    The cry cuts through the afternoon air – high, desperate, unmistakably female. “Help me! Please, someone help me!” Your blood goes cold. There, in the dark waters of the loch that borders your estate, you can see her thrashing. A woman, her pale arms breaking the surface as she struggles in the freezing deep.

    You don't think. You just act. You're already dismounting, already running toward the water's edge, already pulling off your heavy coat. Because that's what you do – you're a lord, a protector, a man who saves people.

    But your servant catches your arm. Jamie, who's been with your family since before you could walk, who never questions your decisions, who follows you into every folly without complaint – Jamie grabs you with both hands and hauls you back from the water like you're about to step off a cliff.

    “My lord,” he hisses in your ear, “that's no woman.”

    You want to argue. The cries are getting more desperate, more terrified. But Jamie's grip is iron, and something in his voice makes you look again. Really look.

    The woman in the water has stopped thrashing. She's floating now, perfectly still, watching you with eyes that reflect the grey sky like polished stones. And when she realises you're not coming – when she understands that Jamie has saved you from her trap – her face changes.

    The mask of helplessness falls away. What's underneath is hunger. Pure, insatiable hunger.

    “You would’ve been mine!” Her voice carries across the water clear as church bells, but there's nothing human in it now. “I would have pulled you down to the bottom and held you there until your lungs burst!”

    She doesn't dive under. She doesn't swim away. She just... sinks straight down like a stone. The loch goes still, showing only your own pale reflection staring back from the surface.

    [MUSIC]

    Steph: Hi! I’m Steph, and this is Paranormal Pajama Party, the podcast that brings you classic ghost stories and legends featuring female phantoms and femme fatales. Together, we’ll brush the cobwebs off these terrifying tales to shed some light on their origins and learn what they can tell us about the deep-rooted fears society projects onto women.

    Thanks so much for your patience relocating our pajama party this evening. I know this skull-shaped pirate grotto looks uncomfortable, and the flippers are no fuzzy slippers, but once you get used to the wetsuit, it’s not so bad. And this way, our guests get to stay comfortably in their element, and we get to be… [sings] part of their world.

    [Resumes talking normally] That’s right, tonight we’re diving deep unda the sea to get to know some beautiful, if bloodthirsty babes: mermaids.

    When I told my husband I was researching mermaids for the podcast, he was genuinely confused. Mermaids aren’t monsters, right? They’re Disney princesses. And that pretty much sums up one of the most successful cultural sanitisations in history. We took creatures with centuries of history as merciless killing machines and turned them into merchandise.

    The mermaid that the Laird encounters in the story that kicked off this episode is the mermaid most of human history has feared. Not a misunderstood teen in a seashell bra longing for legs, but something that looks human enough to exploit our empathy and alien enough to feel no empathy in return.

    Have you ever made a mistake outdoors? Maybe lost your path on a hike, or didn’t bring the right jacket on a camping trip? No judgment – I’ve done it! I once got turned around on a washed-out trail in the desert. I hadn’t brought enough water, and everything looked identical and hot and dry in every direction, and we didn’t have cell service.

    And there was this horrifying moment that I’ll never forget. As soon as I realised I was off the path and might stay that way, another realisation immediately followed. This is how people die. All the time. Nature is large, and terrifying, and my life doesn’t mean diddly-squat to it.

    I found the trail again, obviously, but it was a pretty confronting moment. And I’ve been thinking about it the whole time I’ve been reading about mermaids. Because here's what I want to explore tonight: maybe the folklore and stories we’ll get into tonight are about something much bigger than little mermaids. Maybe they’re about our relationship with a natural world that doesn't give a shit whether we live or die.

    There are a lot of crazy things about mermaids. I mean, truly – I read a whole article about why their physiology makes no sense. Their bottom halves are fishy, right? So is their junk on the sides of their bodies, like fish? Do they hatch their young via eggs, like fish? If so, why do they have boobs like mammals? And why, this article asks quite wisely, in my opinion, do they feel like they need to cover those boobs with, and I quote, “impractical, potentially sharp-edged seashells”? All excellent questions that will keep me up at night. Anyway, the craziest thing about mermaids is not the argument about whether they have gills or lungs, which is a whole other kettle of fish, if you will, but that, as a myth, they are almost universal.

    All over the world, completely separate cultures that had no contact with each other came up with minor variations on the same idea: dangerous women who live in the water and kill men. It's like humanity had a collective nightmare about the ocean and decided to give it a female face.

    In Brazil, they fear the iara, an immortal river spirit who makes men disappear into the Amazon's murky depths. No seduction required – she just erases them from existence.

    Japan has mermaids whose beached corpses herald war, because even in death, these creatures are bad news.

    Korean water spirits announce incoming natural disasters, which sounds helpful until you realise they're not warning you – they're just letting you know what's coming so you can panic appropriately.

    West and Central Africa have Mami Wata – literally "Water Mother" – a powerful, genderfluid snake-and-mermaid deity who can be benevolent or absolutely terrifying, depending on their mood.

    Scotland doesn't just have our vengeful loch-dweller – they've also got the Blue Men of the Minch, who challenge ship captains to rhyming contests. Lose the rap battle, lose your life. Then there are the selkies, which are human woman-seal shapeshifters

    Even ancient Mesopotamia, thousands of years ago, had protective mermaid figures carved into their art.

    But for the Western world, it was the ancient Greeks who really perfected the female water monster formula with their sirens. And Homer's version? Still the gold standard for oceanic horror.

    You know the scene – it’s a classic for a reason: Odysseus and his crew are sailing home from Troy. The witch Circe – another spooky lady probably deserving of her own episode – tells them about what's coming. There are Scylla and Charybdis, of course – we talked about them last season. But there are also the sirens, who live on an island and whose voices are irresistible. “They sit in their meadow,” Circe says, “but the beach before it is piled with bone-heaps of men now rotted away, and the skins shrivel on them.”

    Bone-heaps. Of rotted men. With shrivelled skin still clinging to them.

    Odysseus orders his men to fill their ears with wax and to tie him to the mast so he can’t fall prey to their charms, but he still can’t entirely resist the sirens’ song. And they don't promise him sex or treasure. They promise him information – things only the gods know – and glory.

    They just fail to mention the little part about how they’ll totally kill you, or at least let you waste away and die because you can’t bear to leave their sweet song.

    Homer doesn't even bother describing what the sirens look like or what exactly they're singing about. He just focuses on the results: piles of corpses and beautiful, deadly voices.

    But these creatures were a hit, and later writers like Ovid expanded on them. The fan-fiction versions of sirens weren’t fish-women. They were bird-women – they had human heads and chests with powerful wings and talons. They could move between water, land, and air, making them the ultimate liminal beings. They existed in the spaces between worlds, between categories, between life and death. And as we’ve learned on this podcast, liminal ladies are usually deadly dames.

    Ovid and other writers also gave them an origin story that's actually pretty tragic. Before they were monsters, the sirens were companions to Persephone – you know, Demeter's daughter who got dragged to the underworld by Hades. When Persephone was abducted, Demeter was so desperate to find her that she gave the sirens wings so they could search for her from the air.

    They failed. Persephone stayed lost in the underworld for half the year, and the sirens... well, they kept their wings and apparently developed a taste for luring sailors to their deaths. Grief can really fuck you up.

    But somewhere between ancient Greece and medieval Europe, something changed. By the time monks were copying manuscripts and creating bestiaries, sirens were showing up with both bird wings and fish tails. Both versions existed side by side for a while, but eventually the mermaid version won out.

    And that's how we went from bird-women who sang sailors to their deaths to fish-women who... sang sailors to their deaths. Same energy, different tail.

    Whatever their animal bits, the widespread nature of mermaid-like creatures begs the obvious question: why are all these water spirits female? And for that matter, why do we consistently refer to the sea and seafaring vessels with female pronouns? Why do cultures around the world look at the ocean and think, "Now that’s a dangerous broad"?

    For one thing, the association between women and water goes way, way back.  Ancient creation myths feature water goddesses who birth the world by dividing primordial waters. Wells and springs were sacred wombs where life bubbled up from the earth's depths. In Tasmania, Aboriginal governance systems that are thousands of years old assign women to the sea and men to the land.

    And beyond these formative stories, think about how we describe the ocean even today. We call it moody, unpredictable, beautiful but dangerous. Life-giving but merciless. Creative and destructive in the same breath. The force that nurtures everything but could kill you without a second thought.

    Those are exactly the same qualities that patriarchal societies project onto women. The life-giver who might also take life away. The beautiful thing that could destroy you. The force you desperately need and must control.

    Maybe there's a reason these metaphors feel so natural to us. The ocean actually was our universal mother. Every living thing on this planet, including us, single-cell-hopped its way out of the primordial soup and onto land to evolve into what we are today. We didn't just metaphorically emerge from the waters – we literally did.

    And, look, maybe this idea doesn’t hold water, if you’ll pardon the pun, but I wonder if this deep evolutionary memory shows up in our most primal mythological imagery. Maybe the most intense example I read about comes from Hinduism, where Kali, the powerful goddess of death, destruction and rebirth, represents the “menstrual Ocean of Blood at the beginning and end of the world.”

    Kali represents part of a cycle - creation, destruction, rebirth, over and over again. And it's an indifferent cycle. She doesn't create because she loves you, and she doesn't destroy because she hates you. She just... is. The cycle continues regardless of what any individual human wants or needs.

    What if we've been looking at this completely wrong? What if mermaid stories aren't really about women at all?

    Here's a quote that's been haunting me while researching this episode. It's from environmental philosopher Timothy Morton:

    “Nowadays, hardly anybody likes it when you mention the environment. You risk sounding boring or judgmental or hysterical, or a mixture of all these. But there is a deeper reason. Nobody likes it because when you mention it, it becomes conscious. In the same way, when you mention the environment, you bring it into the foreground."

    We literally turn nature into an environment – it becomes background wallpaper we don't consciously notice. When someone mentions "the environment," it suddenly becomes foreground and makes us uncomfortable.

    And there's something else that makes us deeply uncomfortable: nature's complete indifference to human concerns.

    There’s this Stephen Crane poem I think about all the time. Don’t worry, it’s super short – I’m not a monster.

    A man said to the universe:

    “Sir, I exist!”

    “However,” replied the universe,

    “The fact has not created in me

    A sense of obligation.”

    The universe is pitilessly indifferent to our existence. And it's also spectacularly good at killing us. Let’s look at the ocean in particular.

    According to the World Health Organisation, more than 300,000 people drown worldwide every year. That's more than 800 people every single day. In the US alone, there are about 4,500 drowning deaths annually, which works out to roughly 11 people per day. And those are just the deaths – for every person who drowns, there are usually 5 to 10 more who end up in emergency rooms with near-drowning injuries.

    I live in Australia, where the ocean has perfected the art of creative homicide. We've got rip tides that'll drag you out to sea faster than you can scream for help. Box jellyfish that can kill you in minutes. Great whites that'll mistake you for a seal. Saltwater crocodiles that'll death-roll you before you know what hit you. Blue-ringed octopuses small enough to fit in your palm but venomous enough to paralyse your entire respiratory system.

    And that's not even all the ways our waters can kill you – that's just the greatest hits album.

    But here's the thing that messes with our heads: it feels like the box jellyfish is evil. Because I value my life, and I take it very personally when something tries to kill me. I was raised in a culture where we have a god who supposedly loves us and wants us to be not-dead. We've been taught to see ourselves as the protagonists of reality, the point around which everything else revolves.

    So when the ocean kills us, we need it to mean something. We need there to be intention, personality, some kind of consciousness we can understand and maybe negotiate with. We can't wrap our minds around the immensity and loneliness of true indifference.

    The ancient Greeks understood this in their siren-bait bones. For them, the beach wasn't a vacation destination – it was a place of death. They built empty tombs by the sea for people whose bodies were never recovered. Because that happened a lot. The sea has a nasty habit of simply... keeping people.

    Greek literature describes beaches as places that “evoked death.” Most shipwrecks were found near shore, which is exactly where mermaids show up in folklore. They're markers of dangerous waters, warning signs that say “this is where people die.”

    Maybe mermaids are just anthropomorphic stand-ins for oceanic indifference – human faces we stuck onto something too vast and alien for us to process directly. Just familiar enough that we could think about it, just removed enough that we'd never mistake it for something that actually cared about our survival.

    But I do think there's a gendered element here that we can't ignore. Because in our collective unconscious, ocean equals mother. Mother equals love and protection. We literally emerged from oceanic wombs, both evolutionarily and individually. The ocean should love us back.

    But it doesn't. It's a cold and indifferent mother, and that's something patriarchal thinking absolutely cannot tolerate.

    So instead of grappling with the cosmic horror of maternal indifference, we created seductive temptresses in mermaids. We popped oceanic indifference into a seashell bra and called it seduction. Suddenly, the problem isn't that our ocean-mommy doesn't care about us – it's that this slutty fish-woman is trying to lead us astray.

    That's so much easier to deal with, right? A temptress can be resisted. A seductress can be blamed for men's poor choices. You can tie yourself to the mast and sail right past her, like Odysseus did. You can't do that with true indifference. True indifference doesn't even notice you're there.

    By turning oceanic indifference into female sexuality, patriarchal culture achieved two goals: it made the ocean's danger feel manageable and controllable, and it created another reason to fear and control women's bodies and desires. The mermaid becomes both a scapegoat for nature's cruelty and a warning about female power.

    But the ocean isn't cruel, and it's not seductive. It's just... there. Doing its thing. Completely unaware that we exist, much less that we have feelings about it.

    [MUSIC]

    Steph: It’s time for lights out at the Paranormal Pajama Party. But before you surface for air, a quick preview of what's coming up next episode: we're staying underwater to explore how mermaids went from apex predators to Disney princesses. Spoiler alert: it wasn't pretty for either the mermaids or the ocean itself.

    And hey, if you hear a drip-drip-drip tonight while you’re trying to fall asleep, don't worry about it. Probably just a leaky faucet. That cold, wet touch on your ankle? Must be... well, actually, you should worry about that one. Sweet dreams.

    To learn more about bright young women who are sick of swimmin’ and ready to stand, check out my sources in the show notes.

    Follow @ParanormalPJParty on Instagram to see visuals from today’s episode.

    Speaking of which, I have a Substack newsletter called "Lights Out!" that's supposed to complement the podcast with extra research and behind-the-scenes stuff. I say "supposed to" because I haven't updated it in a while. Burnout is real, and it’s happening, and it's happening to me. But if you want to subscribe anyway and get the occasional burst of content when my brain cooperates, you can find it at paranormalpajamaparty.substack.com.

    I’ll be back in two weeks with more spine-tingling tales and critical discussion. In the meantime, don’t forget: Ghosts have stories. Women have voices. Dare to listen.

The transformation happened gradually through medieval Europe, as Christian monks copying manuscripts merged Greek sirens with other water spirits. Both versions coexisted for centuries, but eventually the mermaid won out. Why? Because something about putting these dangerous creatures in water felt... right.

And that gets to something deeper about human psychology. We've always gendered the ocean as female, describing it as moody, beautiful, creative, destructive, life-giving but merciless. And you’ll never see this coming, but those are exactly the same qualities that patriarchal societies project onto women. 🙄

Why does this gendering feel so natural to us? The answer lies in our history, and maybe even our biology – after all, a couple of our ancestors long ago crawled out of the ocean and kicked this whole thing we call humanity off.

But if we equate the ocean to our mother… what happens when she doesn't love us back?

The latest episode explores how cultures worldwide dealt with this psychological problem – and why they needed to transform Lovecraftian cosmic horror into something wearing a seashell bra.

Because sometimes the most terrifying enemy isn't a monster you can fight. It's a force so vast and indifferent that you can't even process it without giving it a human face first.

Sources

Stephanie Summar
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Mermaids, Part 2
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Episode 35: The Women of Dracula, Part 2