The Real Origins of "Ring Around the Rosie"

That last recording is full of secrets. It will never see the light of day. But I know a secret now, okay, Michelle and the audience here won't know the secret. No one will know the secret until later. I used to be like that too, like I love secrets that now nobody shares them with me. So now I'm just like I have trouble keeping secrets. If it's funny, like if you just pooped your pants or something, I might tell everybody. Welcome to Scary Mystery Surprise, where we talk about scary things that surprised us around the Internet. I'm Edwin and I'm Michelle. So I think you have a story. I do have a story. I'm ready a surprise. It's such a surprise. Why have people used those sound effects, like you know those party surprise thingies out one of those just the things that you whistled into let oh a slide, whistle holes out and never mind, Edwin, are you ready? I'm ready ring around the rosy pocket full of posies, ascious, ashious. We all fall down and then you're just looking at me like, Edwin, do you know about this nursery rhyme? Of course? Yeah? Yeah, Like I mean about it. I'm not sure if like co rotate or whatever, but like I've heard it over and over and I like singing it sometimes, but myself, do you know what it's about? You don't know what it's about. There's some disease or something like I don't know. Ring around the Rosie is about the plague, but I didn't know it was about like I mean, I don't know much about it. I know it's you don't know history. It's fine. We're going in the time machine today, so it's fine. We don't need history books when we can have our Oh, we can have the time machine and we can witness it ourselves. But how could such an innocent song sung by children everywhere be about something so dark? I feel like a lot of things are like that too. I agree. I think a lot of you just don't know what it's about, need to sing it along. You know the question what do you want to be when you grow up? And we ask all kids about that, and I'm just like, this is terrible because you're overshooting your dream here. They're going to bring you back down. Or if you say something really weird, like for me when I said I wanted to be an ice cream man, and they were like why. I was like, what's wrong with that? They have a lot of friends, and then yeah, I haven't forgotten since I remember who was there, Hosey, I remember you. I remember you. Yeah. It's a lot of pressure to put on a kid, you know. Yeah, you get a bunch of ice cream, You get to talk to people all day. If that's what you're into, that would be my hell on earth. But if you want an ice cream while you're working, you can have ice cream at work. I always imagined they lived in the trucks, but yeah, right, that's what I thought. I thought they used to go in park somewhere and sleep there. Yeah, literally, that's what I thought. And then now it's hashtag van life. Now it's cool. Oh man, I missed being a kid. That was awesome sometimes. Yeah, anyway to the time machine. Here we are in sixteen sixty five London. You have no idea where we are. You can't even picture this in your brain. Again, our houses made out of stone mostly, would I think at this point, I think it's before the Great Fire. Think of medieval London. We're in the medieval times. Does that help? Yeah? I can imagine some kind of music, some medieval music. Yeah, someone's playing a lute. There's probably a horse and carriage going by. Maybe there's a tavern with some loud people in it. But Edwin, this is your first day on the job as a plague doctor. Do you know what that is? Is that the costumes? I remember? Yeah, the iconic leather hat, a stick to remove the clothes of the plag victim. You're suiting up right now. This is your outfit. Gloves, a waxed linen robe and boots. And I'm sorry that black plague. It's a bubonic plug, bubonic plague. And that iconic mask, a mask with glass eyes and a beak, which is interesting that I had glass eyes. The typical mask had glass openings for the eyes and a curved beak like a bird's beak, with straps that held the beak in front of the doctor's nose. It was basically a primitive gas mask. I mean, terrifying, but in theory, that's what it was supposed to be doing, and it was designed to block the foul odors associated with the plague. So here you are, you're suiting up for your first day of work. You got all your gear on and you're out to your first house call. Oh exciting, exciting. You head towards the old Michael Scott estate where a sickness has been reported. Poor Michael Scott's okay, Poor Michael Scott, Poor Lord Michael Scott, ring around a rosie. It's just as you feared, the bubonic plague or black pleg would produce lumps on the affected people with a distinctive red ring around a so called rosy pollen. Michael Scott, the lord of the manor, and his manservant Dwight, have symptoms. Just trying to get this. So we're in a manor house. Lord Michael Scott is along with his manservant who's probably laying on the floor while Michael Scott's on the bed. They have swelling at their lymph nodes located on their groin area and under the arm region. So your lymph nodes are here, here, here, groin. Some are developing into large blackish blue egg sized lumps. Dwight has a few the size of apples that have festered and oozed various bodily fluids. Lord Michael Scott has a series of additional symptoms. These include fever, pain, chills, sweating, upset, and diarrhea. Dang, the works. Almost always when these symptoms appear, it's followed by death. Now that you've diagnosed them, you proceed with your treatment. You're cutting edge treatment. A pocket full of possees, Michelle, Why you sprinkle them with fresh picked posy flowers to help with the smell, which sounds kind of nice. Actually not very helpful, but I bet it would be nice to be sprinkled with flowers, you know, I mean you know what they say though, like if it's something smells and then you just add something that smells good, you end up with like this sweet garbage smell. Yeah, you know, body fluids. You're probably leaking out of all ends at this point eight like two hours ago. So well, yeah, you decide to lance one of Dwight's pussy blue lymph nodes to help with the swelling it oozes. Next, you try your most cutting edge solution, blood letting. You let leaders of the clearly toxic blood drain into a bucket. This will surely help ashes ashes. What medical school did I I don't know the school of standing there, I guess the school of I wonder if this is the time when people were still barbers and doctors. I'm not quite sure. I think you just put on the outfit and decided you were a doctor that day. No needless to say, Lord Michael and Dwight are now dead. Uh oh no, Now it's time to try and stop the spread. According to those who observed the effects firsthand, all it appeared to do is take brief physical contact with the clothing of someone who was sick to pass the disease onto someone else. Some doctors even claimed that the spirit leaving the body of the deceased infected others as it passed by. So you know, let's cremate those bodies to prevent the spread. If needs be, the whole house will be burnt down. You have Dwight and Lord Michael's body dragged out of the house and put on the body carts to be burnt, and then we all fall down. As you head for home, you start to feel nauseous. You take off your mask and you feel a lump on your neck and when you touch it, it ruptures. It starts oozing puss. No, no, you think it was only my first day. You are dead by morning. Wow. Over fifty million people dead from the Black Death one third of Europe's population in fact, did fall down. Wow. Many of those who appeared healthy one day could be dead a few days later. It was uncommon, though possible, for someone to survive a week or two before he or she died. Compounding problems further, those with the disease would typically be asymptomatic for the first few days, and so no one would be aware they caught it. This means successfully isolating people from the rest of society was impossible. The plague also decimated livestock, so pigs, cows, chickens, goats, sheep also would get it and die. So this is like everybody got it. She sounds like COVID, But I mean it sounds like COVID, but this is more graphic. I think. I think it's more like if COVID had looked like this, we all would have stayed home. Everyone would have isolate it. Everybody would have put on masks. Everyone would have been like, I'm going out in a hazmat suit. But COVID didn't have like the big graphic boils and stuff like that. Does that happen now? Like, can people get sick of that? Now? Yes, you can still get sick of it. Oh that's terrible. Yeah, but in certain areas that kind of thing. You know, if you want to know the future, look at the past. Baby, We do have to. We have to look back to look to see forward. Like it's I think COVID was closer to the Spanish flu, wasn't it? Or yeah, I agreed. So anyway, it's a gruesome little nursery rhyme. Right, it's like another weird way to teach kids about death, like where the red fern grows or Bambi, you know that need to teach kids about death. But get this, none of that's true. Well for starters, this theory that Ring around the Rosie is all about the Black Flag and death and disease only dates back to the mid twentieth century. So the first written down version of Ring around the Rosie dates back to the eighteen fifties, and it's pretty different from the one that we know today. So here are a couple versions of the first written down versions of it. A ring o roses, a pocket full of posies, one for Jack and one for Jim and one for little Moses, a kerchie in and a kerchie out, and a kerchie all together, which is curtsy but it's Kerchie or another version around the ring of roses, pots full of poses. The one who stoops last shall tell whom she loves best. Yeah, me too. Here's another one, Ring around the Rosie, bottleful of pozy. All of the girls in our town ring for little Josie. So no mention of ashes or falling down. Okay, look, I'm not saying they're good. I'm just saying they were the first versions of Ring around the rosy. So the plague did cause ring rashes, and doctors did use flowers to ward away the disease, and they would carry a pocket full of posies. That was another way to get rid of, you know, the disease. That's all true. But if the song really does date back to the plague of sixteen sixty five, then someone would have written it down before the eighteen hundreds, right yeah, yeah. And also it would have been written in Old English. It would be way different from today's version. It just feels a little like common sense. Are you singing it didn't exist? I'm saying that didn't exist. I'm saying the ring around the Rosie did not exist when the plague happened. So it's a myth that people are like, oh, it's about the plague. Do you think people could have come up with it after as they're telling the stories about Yes, I have one hundred percent think that's what it is. I think it's folklore. It's meta folklore. It's folklore happening in real time, just like the Serbian Dancing Lady, because I think it says more about us now and projecting onto back then. Wow, Michelle, you know what that means, right? What we have to come up with one about COVID before someone does it two hundred years from now. Yeah, you're right, You're right, we do have to, but we're still in the time. I just don't think it's going to Yeah, it's not going to Yeah, someone in two hundred years will come up with a weird little rhyme about COVID. COVID. Uh, they all died COVID, COVID. It was a terrible thing. I think it's too like you know how you say it. I don't think people who are dying of the plague, you know, like most of the population was wiped out. I don't think people were a little like nursery rhyme. Yeah, because it's terrible because I mean people that we know, you know, we know somebody who lost somebody because of COVID. So like, yeah, you're right, it's not ripe for child rhymes yet. Wait years and then we can come up with something. But the plague. We can sing little rhymes about that all day long, you know, the Black Death and all that. Yeah, man, but it's just interesting what it reveals about our culture today. It's catchy. I mean, yeah, ring around the road, the ash ashes, we all fall down and you spin in a circle and then you fall down and that's the whole thing and you're dead. Yeah. Yeah. Also weird fact that I couldn't fit in my plug part because it wiped out so much of the population of Europe that like most people of European descent have about a fifteen percent immunity to the bubonic plague. Now, isn't that weird? Which is why we carried all those diseases with us whenever we went to a new place and basically wiped out cultures everywhere, when Europeans went everywhere everywhere. Yeah, because anybody who lived after the plague had this built in immunity. So whenever we get into topics like that, I'm always like, uh, freaking Europeans. But then it's like, but it is what it is, right, because I mean it's weird going to learn like history of Mexico or Central America, South America and then you go to Spain and then you learn their history and you're like, they helped the world, Like they spread their technologies, that's what they say. They spread you know, technologies and all these things that they have. But I'm like, I don't know. I always wondered, like, what would have happened had this not been There's a book called what if about It? Oh? Really, that's interesting. I'd love to read something like that. But like, one of the only countries that was never taken over by Western stuff is Japan. Isn't that weird? It was never colonized? Wow? You know, after World War Two it's been occupied, but it was never colonized, which is interesting because it's you know, maintains its culture so carefully. So wow, that's awesome. I mean the US is still trying to do all these things now, and now the US is the enemy to a lot of other countries. Oh yeah, but it's like a whole I don't know, it's we can't do anything about it. That's what's here on Scary Mystery Surprise. We can't do anything about current politics, but we can't speculate about Ring around the Rosie and how it is. Basically like focal are happening in real time, which I thought might be a good show name folklore real time because I mean, yeah, folklore supposed to send you back, but like, now that's happen. Yeah, I like it's ring around the rosy pocket full of posy ashes, ashes, we all fall down. It's the wrong song, which you can pretend what song is that? I don't know, perfect way to end the show. Well, anyway, what are we going to talk about next week? Edwin? I don't know. I think it'll be a surprise. Oh yeah, hey, bye bye everybody. Scary Mystery Surprises hosted by Michelle Newman and Edwin Kovarubias. This podcast was edited and sound designed by Sarah Vorhez Wendel, a v W sound