Episode 80: The Yeti or Abominable Snowman

Did you have trouble picking out clothes for school this morning? Are you looking for a way to show your love for unspookable and other Soundsington media podcasts? Don't worry, we got you. Soundsington media is now on Dashery by T Public, offering t-shirts, hoodies, shorts, hats, stickers, and more from all your favorite shows. I may be wearing an unspookable hoodie right now. If you want quality swag from your favorite shows, you can go to our brand new Dashery Storefront by following the link in our show notes. Soundsington media! Hey unspookable listeners, it's getting to be that time of year again. A lot of you might feel a chill in the air. Trees have lost their leaves, snowflakes are starting to fall, and you're keeping an eye out for any eight-foot tall, bare-ape monsters. Dig out those winter hats and snow boots, and we'll dig into the abominable snowman on this episode of unspookable. The Yeti is like a giant ape with white fur that lives in the mountains depicted usually in media as a giant snow monster, sort of like Sasquatch, but snowy Sasquatch. It's basically a giant Sasquatch except white and kind of bigger and throw snowballs. Picture this. A party of explorers have been traveling through freezing cold terrain. Somewhere in their journey, four of them got lost and are now cornered in a cave by an enormous monster. The creature is at least three times their size, covered in white fur, and has a mouth full of huge, pointy fangs, all the better to eat them with. This is the abominable snowman. The doomed explorers cower in fear as the creature prepares to turn them into lunch. But just then, the explorers' friends find the cave. They lure the creature out of the cave, drop a huge boulder on its head, and then, while it's out cold, remove all of its gigantic fangs, one by one. When the beast awakens, toothless, the explorers chase it off the edge of a cliff, but it isn't going down alone. The furry monster takes one of the explorers with it, and the two of them plummet into the icy darkness. You might be wondering, a boulder to the head, pulled teeth? This must be from some grisly horror story, right? Not quite. This is a scene from stop-motion animated TV special Rudolph the Red Nose Raindeer. Don't worry, the abominable snowman, or as he's nicknamed in the special, Bumble, does survive, changes ways, and joins all the friends for a big holiday celebration. But what about the real world story of this cryptid? Is it quite so monstrous? Or so silly? Does it even exist at all? You might know the abominable snowman by one of its other names, the Yeti. The snowy counterpart to our forest friend, Bigfoot. The Yeti has long been said to live in secret in the Himalayas, a staggeringly tall mountain range that spans much of central Asia. Right on the border between the country Nepal and the autonomous region to bet, the Himalayas hold the highest peak on Earth, Mount Everest. Standing tall at 29,031 feet, the mountain has long held significance in Nepalese and Tibetan culture. It's known as Sagarmata, or Goddess of the Sky in Nepal, and Goddess Mother of the Earth, or Chumalongma in Tibet. That sense of awe and reverence seems to extend to everyone who sees it, including climbers from all over the world. Around the 1920s, mountaineers started traveling to Nepal and Tibet to see if they themselves could reach for the highest point on Earth. Over the decades since, not all of these climbers have made it out alive, but some of the ones who did came back with stories of strange tracks in the snow, and furry beasts who walked on their hind legs and emitted high-pitched shrieks. But the Yeti's story begins long before these explorers came to tell it. A group of people, known as the Sherpas, who migrated from Tibet to Nepal in the late 1400s and early 1500s, have their own relationship with the Himalayas, and their own relationship with the Yeti. In fact, the name Yeti comes from a word in the Sherpa dialect of Tibetan language, Yeti, which loosely means "cliff dwelling bear". Of the Yeti, Sherpas recognize two different types. The first is the Chute, meaning "live-stock bear", confirmed to be the Himalayan red bear. The second is the Mite, or Mette, which means "human bear". This creature, the Mite, is the one that legend describes as a separate species, not quite human, ape or bear, but somewhere in between. Images, as well as stories from centuries ago, paint a picture of a wild creature who walks on its hind legs, is covered with dark reddish fur, has a cone-shaped head, no tail, and long muscular arms. This Mite also has religious significance, with images of it decorating Buddhist temples. One monastery in Nepal even has a furry, reddish, cone-shaped object on display. Their claim, this is a 300-year-old Yeti skeletal. So, how did we get from this human bear to the version of the Yeti that we saw and root off the Red Nose reindeer? Well, in the 1920s, British writer Henry Newman misunderstood a Tibetan name for the Yeti, Mite Kangmi, meaning "approximately human-like bear of snow" and mistranslated it into the abominable snowman. The name, sounding not just mysterious, but also "dangerous," became extremely popular in English-speaking media. And the more the Yeti was reported on, the more obsessed people became. By the 1950s, traveling to the Himalayas to go Yeti hunting was a full, blown craze, which, if they are real, might have made Yeti's harder to find. Ten Zignorge, a Sherprä mountaineer who, alongside New Zealand mountaineer Edmund Hilary, was the first to summit Mount Everest and said that he believed the Yeti was out there, but that they didn't show themselves because they liked seclusion and solitude. With more and more explorers traveling to the Himalayas to find them, it makes sense that we would see Yeti's less and less. Right? So, did all these explorers find any evidence of the Yeti at all? Not really. Well, while some mountaineers reported seeing Yeti's from afar, all that these Yeti hunting expeditions ever really found were bits of hair, done, and unusually large tracks in the snow. If you look up the Shipton photograph, for example, you'll see the most famous photograph of one such footprint. Shipton said the tracks were 12 inches long and 6 inches wide, had five toes each, and appeared to show two creatures walking together in the snow. But were these tracks real? Some think they were just bare or linger monkey tracks that appeared larger because their edges had melted. Others think the tracks were made up by the explorers themselves. One explorer even accused Shipton of begging him to keep the Yeti story going so that the press would keep paying for his climbing expeditions. Next time it snows, why not try making your own Yeti tracks? Use your gloved hand to add extra toe indents around a set of footprints and see if you can get your friends to believe in the Yeti too. If those tracks were a hoax, it wouldn't be the first time a set of big tracks fooled a Yeti enthusiast. Ivan T. Sanderson, the biologist who invented the word "crypto-zoology" was a leading Yeti expert, even going on talk shows to show off plaster molds of Yeti footprints. But he might have been too eager to believe in fantastical cold weather creatures. In 1948, a set of enormous three-toed footprints appeared on a beach in Florida, and Sanderson himself claimed that they were evidence of a 15-foot tall penguin. Forty years later, the pranksters responsible confessed that they had just attached giant cast iron feet to high-top sneakers and trumped across the sand. Hokesfoot Princess Side, how do we explain so many mountaineers across centuries sharing their own sightings of the Yeti? The most common explanation is that Yetis are Himalayan red bears standing on their hind legs. Bears are are actually quite skilled at walking on two legs, and they do look oddly human while doing it. If you wanna laugh, we recommend looking up some videos. Do you think you might mistake these bears for yetis if you saw them in a snowstorm? Or for that matter, if you had altitude sickness? Let's talk about altitude sickness. Above 26,247 feet, there's an area of Mount Everest called the Death Zone. Because above that height, there isn't enough oxygen for a person to survive. That's why climbers trying to climb Everest always bring oxygen tanks with them, and have done so since all the way back in 1922. One 2017 study gathered over 80 stories from climbers who at that height experienced hallucinations. One such climber, Jeremy Windsor, was sure that he met a fellow mountaineer named Jimmy while ascending in 2008. Jimmy had encouraged him to change his oxygen tank and keep going, and stayed close behind him as they climbed. Windsor heard Jimmy's tools scrape the ice, heard him breathing into his oxygen mask, had felt his weight on their shared line, and yet, just as they reached the final ridge, Jimmy vanished. The climber realized that Jimmy had never been real. This phenomenon is called third-person syndrome, and it describes situations where people in extreme circumstances like shipwreck survivors or Everest climbers report feeling the presence of another person, encouraging them on and offering them guidance. Now, if altitude sickness can cause hallucinations, it makes sense that someone up at those heights might see a Himalayan red bear or Langer Monkey, and imagine it's a Sasquatch-like beast of folklore. That said, this podcast is dropping in what they say is a magical time of the year. So let's lean in to the magical side, because that study we just mentioned gets a little stranger. While researchers did find that some of the climbers who experienced third-person syndrome had other symptoms of altitude sickness, some of them didn't. In that case, the researchers said there would be no biological reason for the hallucinations to happen at all. It makes one wonder, are these experiences just hallucinations? Is it possible instead that something more mystical is happening on the mountain known as the goddess of the sky? Could the voices or people helping these climbers along be spirits or ghosts? And if Mount Everest can be home to mysteries as far out as that? Could the Yeti, too, exist in a more mysterious, maybe more magical way? Just as Jeremy Windsor could never have proof of his climbing companion, Jimmy. Maybe we don't have to prove that the Yeti exists to believe that it's real. Thanks for listening to Unspookable. I'm your host, Elise Perision. This episode was written by Miden Wood, produced and edited by Nate Duford. Our theme song and additional music composed by Jesse Case. Our logo was created by Natalie Qn, special thanks this week to our guests, Looon and Elliot. If you enjoy the show, make sure to tell your friends. You can leave us a reading or review in your podcast player of choice, or share an episode on social media. 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