Transcript edited for length and clarity.
Clay Wallace, WUKY
Every year, folklorists gather for the Conference of the International Society of Contemporary Legend Research. Last year, they gathered in Stockholm. This year: Lexington.
I spoke with one of the event's organizers outside Mortimer Bibbs Public House in Frankfort, Kentucky, where a good portion of the 60 folklorists attending the event are gathered for lunch. The turnout is above-average, and the second time the group has met in Lexington.
Jeanmarie Rouhier-Willoughby, professor of Russian Studies, Folklore and Linguistics at the University of Kentucky
The Lexington one was so good last time, people have been talking about it for thirteen years and wanted to come back.
Clay
What is it that keeps people talking about it?
Jeanmarie
First of all, Central Kentucky is a very interesting place in terms of legends. And secondly, the history of the region and the things you get to do here are actually much more interesting than most people give them credit for.
Obviously, the horse culture is important. Obviously, for tourism, bourbon is important. But there are a lot of legends. There's a lot of interesting American history. And so the small towns of Kentucky that seem kind of mundane for the people who live here are actually really charming.
People often just drive through it and don't even think about how exciting it is for people from other states or countries to come see it.
Clay
What makes a place folklore rich? What makes Lexington and Central Kentucky folklore rich?
Jeanmarie
I think almost any place could be folklore rich, but it's often, sadly, violence. Violent aspects of history are often turned into legend. Unexplained phenomena.
So, Frankfort has a legend of a dogman. There are sightings of goblins in Hopkinsville. Now, of course, we know Hopkinsville goblins from the 1950s, but I have students who live in Hopkinsville who have collected stories about these creatures coming out of caves on abandoned mines. So the mysteries of the world that surround us often are the source of legends.
Clay
The ISCLR's focus is contemporary legends. That's contemporary to the teller and audience, like urban legends. Of the 60 attendees, 45 have prepared presentations for the conference. I talked to a few of them. Here's Jesse Fivecoate.
Jesse Fivecoate, folklorist & anthropologist at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
I'm based at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill right now, getting ready to move to The Ohio State University in the fall.
Clay
And what are you going to be presenting on this week?
Jesse
I'm presenting on legends and rumors and conspiracy theories expressing fears and anxieties about agentic AI: autonomous AI that can do tasks on its own, reconfigure its own workflows, and liken to something like thinking.
Those fears and anxieties are: is this thing conscious? Is it getting to be as knowledgeable as humans? And what does that mean about humans when we have technology doing very similar things?
Clay
What is the overlap? Where do we see that sort of theme in folklore?
Jesse
We see it in these traditions within urban legends or contemporary legends. We have this each time new technology comes out, there's this expression of not understanding this technology.
What does this mean? Is this going to fundamentally change society?
We have a lot of different things happening. We're in an ecosystem of information that is heavily influenced by conspiracy theory, So there is already a lot of distrust in institutions, and then you add on top of this growing data centers that are taking resources away from communities and a profit-driven structure about this new technology where people feel like they don't have control.
It gets expressed in a lot of different ways. One of them being: we are losing something here by giving up these things to agentic AI.
Clay
And Fivecoate wasn't the only one presenting about AI. Here's Brandon Barker from Bloomington, Indiana.
Brandon Barker, assistant professor, Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University Bloomington
I'm presenting a talk called "Beating the Dead Horse: Clever Hans in the Age of Artificial Intelligence."
Right at the turn of the 19th into 20th century, there was this horse in Germany that could do math, that could speak different languages, that could answer complex problems by scraping its hoof on the ground the correct number of times. It turns out the whole thing - even though the owner didn't even know what he was doing - was a great charade. The owner was unconsciously cueing this horse to stamp the right number of times by tensing his shoulders whenever the correct number of times had been met.
So, a whole country basically had tricked itself into thinking that this horse was a whole lot smarter than it actually was. And, at this very moment, the AI scientists are worried about when they're being tricked by the AI into thinking that it's smarter than it is - and they're calling it the Clever Hans concern.
Clay
Besides AI, other topics presented include Kentucky-specific supernatural legends, environmental legends, internet legends, how legends can harm, and even a panel on why you might see West Virginia's most famous cryptid, The Mothman, on the cover of a romance novel.
Kristina Downs, folklorist and assistant professor in the Department of English and Languages at Tarleton State University
I presented on monsters as an object of sexual desire.
Clay
Tell me about that!
Kristina
A lot of what I talked about focused on the whole internet phenomenon of "Mothman is my boyfriend," and why Mothman got framed by the internet as being the perfect boyfriend, like an attentive and gentle lover.
He's usually represented in these pictures as being really cute, really cuddly, and really not sexually aggressive, versus Sasquatch and Bigfoot that sometimes get kind of represented as "the bad boyfriend," because they're a little bit more humanoid.
But then I also talked a little bit about serial killers who are also monstrous, but sometimes also framed as objects of desire.
Clay
So, what are the takeaways about how we can understand what our inclinations or fears are in relation to what we imagine about these monsters?
Kristina
I think a lot of it, interestingly, is kind of this very queer movement of breaking down the norms of, basically, "You can't tell me who to be attracted to; you can't tell me who I am. If I want to love Mothman, I can love Mothman."
You'll see him used a lot. A lot of these images have rainbows in them or, you know, "Mothman hates homophobes" and things like that.
And there's even a little bit of that again when we get to the human monsters. Jeffrey Dahmer gets employed sometimes in this way, too, which is maybe less comfortable. It's easier because Mothman isn't real, right? I mean, maybe he is - I don't know! But I'm less afraid of being attacked by Mothman than I am afraid of being attacked by another human.
I think it's a little bit of parody, a little bit of inversion, and a little bit of breaking expectations deliberately and seeing where we can play in a benign violation of social norms.
Clay
The conference runs through the end of the week. Next year, they'll be meeting in Europe.