Rowan & Pine: A Feminist Folklore & Mythology Podcast - October 17, 2025


Pine Cones： The Man Who Wasn't There ｜ Rowan & Pine Spooky Shorts 🎃

Pine Cones： Sedna ｜ Rowan & Pine Shorts Episode Forty-Eight： Spooky Shadow People - The Feeur (with Megan)

Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

122.02

Word count

1,543

Sentence count

89

Harmful content

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn't there.
00:00:12.480 He wasn't there again today. I wish, I wish he'd go away.
00:00:18.160 you've probably heard these lines before said in a film by a mysterious character
00:00:32.140 included in a book of ghost poems or even whispered as harmless childhood nonsense
00:00:37.740 but there's something about them something sticky 16 lines no real story and yet it clings
00:00:47.260 Because it names something we all know, but rarely say aloud.
00:00:52.600 That feeling of not being alone when you should be.
00:00:59.960 The poem, colloquially The Man Who Wasn't There, was written around 1899 by William Hughes Mearns, an American educator and writer.
00:01:10.980 He wasn't a mystic or a folklorist.
00:01:13.520 He taught creative writing and psychology.
00:01:16.560 But Mearns believed imagination was the bridge between the seen and unseen,
00:01:21.620 between childhood and the uncanny.
00:01:25.420 Biographical accounts say Mearns turned a late-night ghost story into a short rhyme.
00:01:30.900 Some sources say a student or friend told him of a man on a stair who vanished when approached.
00:01:36.700 But no surviving journal entry or letter by Mearns has been found that records that exact anecdote.
00:01:42.840 The story of the poem's origin sits partly in biography and partly in legend. First performed
00:01:51.000 as part of a student play at Harvard called the Psycho Ed, it took on true fame when published
00:01:56.620 12 years later. This time it bore the strange subtitle Antigonish. Antigonish is a quiet town
00:02:06.060 in Nova Scotia and around that same time the name had begun to drift through newspapers and
00:02:12.460 paranormal circles. Town beset by fire spooks. In early 1921, reports emerged from a small farm
00:02:26.020 near Caledonia Mills in Antigonish County. The MacDonald family claimed their home was under
00:02:32.040 siege by invisible forces. On a stormy night in the January of 1922, spontaneous blue fires
00:02:41.260 broke out around the home, nowhere near their stove. Wet towels and patches of wallpaper
00:02:48.900 would burst into flames. Objects moved on their own.
00:02:55.100 A young girl named Mary Ellen lived there and soon she became the focus of the haunting.
00:03:02.280 Neighbours spoke of seeing her clothes ignite without harm and of hearing voices call her name
00:03:07.560 when no one was around. The story spread so far that the American Society for Psychical Research
00:03:14.120 sent an investigator, Dr. Walter Franklin Prince, a psychologist and theologian who catalogued
00:03:21.200 38 fires in one night. And though his final report suggested human agency, perhaps Mary Ellen herself,
00:03:30.540 in a dissociative state, the legend of the Antigonish fire spook had already taken root.
00:03:36.140 So when Mairn's haunting little poem was published that same year
00:03:41.040 a rhyme about a man who appeared and vanished on the stairs
00:03:44.800 many readers connected the two
00:03:47.380 They assumed the poem was inspired by the ghost in Nova Scotia
00:03:51.880 but it wasn't
00:03:53.400 The poem had been written earlier
00:03:56.060 Still, the timing was uncanny
00:03:59.120 Two unrelated hauntings tied together by a name
00:04:03.500 and by that shared sense of something unseen.
00:04:10.100 But when I came home last night at three,
00:04:13.200 the man was waiting there for me.
00:04:16.200 But when I looked around the hall,
00:04:18.900 I couldn't see him there at all.
00:04:22.700 3am. The hour of the poem's return.
00:04:27.180 In folklore, it's the witching hour,
00:04:29.840 or sometimes the devil's hour,
00:04:31.560 a moment when the veil between worlds thins. Witches fly, spirits stir, and sleepers are at
00:04:40.000 their most vulnerable. In medieval belief, it inverted the holy hour of Christ's death at
00:04:47.560 three in the afternoon, turning midnight's mirror into shadowed mockery. But even outside superstition,
00:04:54.640 there is something strange about that hour. Modern sleep research tells us that between
00:05:01.520 2 and 4am our temperature dips, blood pressure lowers and the brain sometimes stutters between
00:05:08.880 dreaming and wakefulness. When you wake suddenly then, eyes open, heart racing, you're half in the
00:05:16.440 dream and half in the room. It's when people most often report feeling a presence, not sensing,
00:05:24.640 feeling as though someone stands just behind them or over them breathing in sync that sensation has
00:05:33.680 a name in neurology the felt presence phenomenon and it's been studied for over a century
00:05:41.680 common in neurological conditions or stressful states polar explorers like ernest shackleton
00:05:47.920 wrote that quote it seemed there were four not three in his musings about his journey
00:05:53.760 this niche version of felt presence called the third man or third man syndrome occurs only in
00:06:00.720 extreme survival or isolation situations it's usually categorized by the feeling of a supportive
00:06:07.600 unseen companion providing comfort or guidance whether it's self-preservation or madness
00:06:15.680 it's something deep in the way we sense ourselves but when it happens in the dark
00:06:20.240 It feels like a haunting, a haunting, a haunting.
00:06:30.140 Oh, go away, go away.
00:06:33.800 Don't come back anymore. 1.00
00:06:36.300 Go away, go away.
00:06:38.460 And please don't slam that door.
00:06:44.260 Every culture has stories of this presence.
00:06:47.300 something that stands close but never steps into the light.
00:06:51.900 In Ireland, it might be called the fetch
00:06:54.080 and it's sometimes ghostly double seen before a death.
00:06:58.780 In Norway, it's the vardoger,
00:07:01.080 a person's essence arriving moments ahead of their body.
00:07:04.760 Around the world, people speak of shadows,
00:07:07.960 figures glimpsed at the edge of vision, felt before they're seen.
00:07:12.520 Folklorists describe it as the moment
00:07:14.560 the soul touches the boundary of another world.
00:07:17.620 In religious settings, it's often seen as a benevolent or comforting spiritual experience.
00:07:23.460 Either way, it's old. Older than poetry, older than superstition.
00:07:29.780 Mearn's Man Who Wasn't There fits perfectly into this lineage. He's the echo of that invisible
00:07:35.700 presence, the one our minds conjure when isolation grows loud. The haunting that doesn't knock,
00:07:42.580 just simply exists.
00:08:04.980 The early 20th century was an age obsessed
00:08:08.180 with psychology. Sigmund Freud wrote about the uncanny, the strange familiarity of something once
00:08:14.580 repressed. Carl Jung spoke of the shadow self, the parts of us we refuse to see. Miernes was teaching
00:08:21.660 during that same era and it's hard not to hear those echoes in his poem. The man who wasn't there
00:08:27.100 might not be a ghost at all. He might be the unseen double we carry. Guilt, memory or grief.
00:08:34.140 manifesting at the top of the stairs asking begging to be acknowledged
00:08:39.560 psychiatrists in the 1940s even used the poem as shorthand for hallucinations of presence
00:08:48.240 these moments of paranoia when someone feels watched but cannot say by whom it became a way
00:08:55.300 of describing not a haunting but a human mind haunted by itself invisible companions and unseen
00:09:02.620 watchers have always walked beside us in story. In Celtic lore, the Shi, the fairy folk, could
00:09:09.560 only be seen from the corner of the eye. In Scandinavian folklore, the Natmara pressed 0.79
00:09:15.320 invisibly upon sleeping chests, its presence known only through the weight of breath. In Japan,
00:09:21.760 the Zashiki Warashi, child spirits, left behind silence when they moved on. Each one speaks of
00:09:28.540 the same tension, the living brushing up against something that does not belong to life.
00:09:39.520 Mairn's poem has never gone away. It's been sung. Glenn Miller turned it into a jazz tune
00:09:45.780 in the 1930s. It's been filmed. The Coen brothers borrowed its title in 2001 for a story about a man
00:09:53.360 fading into invisibility. 2003's Identity used it as a chilling framing device of an
00:10:00.160 unravelling mind. It appears in psychology texts, ghost anthologies and internet forums
00:10:06.520 alike. It has outlived its author because it names an experience that is older than
00:10:11.260 belief. The invisible guest. The echo on the stairs. The presence you can't explain and
00:10:19.220 can't quite forget.
00:10:23.360 In the 2020s, neuroscientists at Durham and Geneva
00:10:30.440 used robotic interfaces to reproduce that felt presence in volunteers.
00:10:36.620 By disrupting the brain's map of its own body,
00:10:39.760 they could make people swear there was someone standing right behind them.
00:10:43.360 In other words, we now have the science to summon Mairn's ghost.
00:10:47.860 But even knowing that, the poem still feels no less haunted.
00:10:52.320 Because there's something in the words.
00:10:54.520 Something that makes you feel it too.
00:11:07.280 Maybe that's why it endures.
00:11:09.680 Because every one of us has met the man who wasn't there.
00:11:12.840 In the quiet of 3am, in the hallway mirror, we turn and there's no one.
00:11:18.660 But still, we feel him watching.
00:11:21.420 welcome to october on roan and pine this is the beginning of your spooky spooktober content for
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