It’s Tuesday again! Time for your weekly dose of the Spooky, culled from around the web, the world, and life. Every week I’ll have something new to send a shiver down your spine.
This week’s theme is Tanis. As in, the podcast. Specifically, I want to talk about one of the references to Tanis that the show makes.
For those unfamiliar, Tanis is a podcast by Pacific Northwest Stories, the same folks that make The Black Tapes Podcast. I wrote a review for episode 1 of Tanis. My review for episode 1 wasn’t overly positive, but after listening to episodes 2 and 3 I am of the opinion that it’s absolutely worth listening to. (Episode 4 will likely be out this week.) I’ve expressed some thoughts about episode 2 and 3 on reddit, and if I have time I’ll try to compile those thoughts into a second review in the near future.
One of the things that Tanis absolutely nails is that it has some creepy stories, told in an interesting way, which results in an experience that’s genuinely frightening if you listen to it with a serious, imaginative attitude. For instance, the bit about the elevator game. I’ve forgotten more creepypastas than most enthusiasts will ever read, but Nic managed to make me truly afraid of what I was imagining in my mind–and I was sitting in a crowded coffee shop in the middle of the day. That’s a rare feat for someone as jaded as I am, and for that reason alone, if you have never listened to Tanis, go do so as soon as possible. Episode 1 is still irritatingly slow and remains in my opinion poorly crafted narratologically, but the context it provides enhances the later episodes, and pertains directly to what I’m going to talk about in a moment.
Tanis, the podcast’s namesake, is supposedly this sort of mythical metaphysical presence that migrates around the world and seems to imbue whatever part of the world it inhabits with strange happenings. As I’ve said pretty much everywhere, this is the weakest part of the podcast, and because it is the organizing theme of the podcast, this weakness is the source of much of my frustration with the podcast. That said, the references, many of which are fictional texts, built up around the myth of Tanis in the text-that-is-fictional are fascinating and extraordinarily well done.
18 Year old Pacific Northwest Stories intern Alex Reagan. This photo was taken about six months before she narrated her first segment (the interview with Professor Adams that never aired).
In many cases the references are in fact real, or real with a twist, to the point that it requires nontrivial effort to sort out where the truth ends and where the fiction begins. They even went so far as to spin up the fictional Pacific Northwest Stories in preparation for The Black Tapes. In-universe, Pacific Northwest Stories has supposedly bee around for years, and there are even pictures of Alex Reagan on their site that were supposedly taken when she was a young intern many years ago. As the fictional indeterminability of references is one of the hallmarks of what makes a Spookypasta, I’m close to being ready to call it the best-crafted Spookypasta of the year.
I want to talk about one of those references.
In episode 1, at around the 19-minute mark, Nic mentions that “[t]he name Tanis is actually mentioned in a few stanzas of an unfinished work by Romantic poet and visual artist William Blake, called Songs of Sorrow, discovered more than a century after its author’s death.”
I’ve actually studied Blake, so this reference in particular was exciting to me. Is this a real reference, or is this a fictional text written by a real author? The result doesn’t actually matter; the fact that I have to ask the question is sufficient to make this good Spookypasta, but what kind of Chairman would I be if I didn’t investigate this literary mystery?
I started my investigation with a quick search of Blake’s known poems for “Songs of Sorrow.” As you can see, there is no such poem. That bit though about the poem being in a collection found a century after Blake’s death? That’s true–there was a collection of Blake poetry, sometimes known as The Rossetti Manuscript, published after Blake’s death. However, “Songs of Sorrow” is not among these.
From there I referred to my Norton, and was unsurprised to see that “Songs of Sorrows” was not listed.
At this point I was willing to call “Songs of Sorrows” a fictional text, but I decided to ask an expert just in case. Professor Laura Bloxham of Whitworth University is the foremost Blake scholar in the Pacific Northwest, and I figured she would appreciate this mystery. Surely if anyone knows the answer, it would be she. I asked her about “Songs of Sorrows,” and this is what she said:
“There is not a poem or collection of poems by Blake called the ‘Songs of Sorrows.’ There are a number of Blake poems with the word ‘sorrow’ in them. Dante Gabriel Rossetti found some manuscripts and published them some years after Blake’s death. I could not find a reference to Tanis in the Blake dictionary, generally a good source for references. Google identifies Tanis as an ancient Egyptian city, but then you probably know that. Good luck with the sleuthing.”
So there you have it, folks: “Songs of Sorrows” is a fictional text*, bound up in a covering of truths. This pasta just keeps getting Spookier!
I want to thank u/princesstelephone for putting together transcripts for Tanis. They have assisted me greatly in my research. If you want to get involved in the Tanis discussion, leave a comment or head over to the PNWS subreddit.
*Dr. Bloxham asked me to let her know if there is a scholar who can prove her wrong about “Songs of Sorrows,” so if anyone has contradictory information we’d both love to hear about it in the comments!
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