CLASSIC: The Weird, Surprisingly Recent Origin of the Tooth Fairy

Summary

Ridiculous History: CLASSIC – The Weird, Surprisingly Recent Origin of the Tooth Fairy

Podcast: Ridiculous History (iHeartPodcasts)
Hosts: Ben Bowlin & Noel Brown
Release Date: October 18, 2025
Episode Theme:
This episode dives into the peculiar, multifaceted, and unexpectedly modern history of the Tooth Fairy. Through personal anecdotes, deep dives into folk traditions, and a surprising amount of economic analysis, Ben and Noel explore how a money-leaving fairy became standard in American childhood—and just how recently that happened.

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Main Topics and Key Insights

1. Personal Histories – The Tooth Fairy in Childhood

• [04:38] Ben confides he was “terrified” of the tooth fairy as a child, disliking both losing teeth and the idea of metal under his pillow.
• [05:42] Noel discusses his own parenting experience and how his child recently realized parents are behind the tooth fairy, thanks to differing payouts between her two homes.
  • “She just finally… was like, Wait a minute. Maybe that was our fault. We should have coordinated a little better.” — Noel [05:38]
• [06:14] Both hosts discuss discomfort about perpetuating mythical “lies” like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
  • “I have resented the Santa Claus lie for a long time, and I'm really happy to be done with that because it really made me feel uncomfortable.” — Noel [06:23]
• [06:29] Point raised that for many U.S. children, the “first conspiracy theory” they’re exposed to is learning the truth about Santa Claus.

2. The Economic Side: Tooth Value and Tooth Fairy Inflation

• [08:09] Casey Pegram (Super Producer) joins to share childhood stories and exchange rates; his payment was $5–$10 per tooth, prompting surprise.
• [08:17] Data: In 2013, the average U.S. payout was $3.70, up from $3.00 in 2012.
• [08:32] Regional Tooth Fairy stinginess: Southern states typically have lower payouts, while the North is more generous.
• [09:31] Delta Dental tracked the average value of a lost tooth, correlating it to the S&P 500—indicating Tooth Fairy payouts rise and fall with the market.

3. “Tooth Fairy Science” and Methodological Skepticism

• [10:00] Mental Floss article cited: Dr. Harriet Hall coined "Tooth fairy science," meaning the pitfall of studying an event (like Tooth Fairy payouts) as though it’s real, when actually you’re studying something entirely different (e.g., parental behavior).
  • “If you are studying… the amount of money that the tooth fairy leaves… what you’re actually studying is the behavior of parents.” — Noel [10:37]

4. Cross-Cultural Customs: Global Tooth Traditions

• [12:08] The tradition of rituals surrounding baby teeth is ancient and widespread.
  • Vikings, for instance, would “offer up” baby teeth.
  • Some European cultures gave teeth to rodents, hoping children's teeth would grow in strong.
• [13:06] Norse and Northern European customs included burning, burying, or wearing children’s teeth for luck or protection.
  • “If a witch were to get hold of your teeth, the witch would have power over you.” — Ben [13:31]

5. Origin of the Tooth Fairy: France’s “Good Little Mouse”

• [14:00] The direct ancestor of the tooth fairy is 18th-century France’s fairy tale, La Bonne Petite Souris ("The Good Little Mouse").
  • In this story, a mouse (secretly a fairy) helps free a queen and knocks out the evil king’s teeth, hiding them under his pillow.
  • This origin ties together the concepts of fairies, rodents, teeth, and pillows.
  • “The mouse… is secretly a fairy… and then knocks out all the king's teeth.” — Ben [14:45]

6. From Mouse to Fairy: The Rise of the Modern Tooth Fairy

• [20:09] The first American reference to a “Tooth Fairy” comes from a 1908 Chicago Tribune column suggesting parents convince children to give up loose teeth by promising the Tooth Fairy will come.
  • [21:07] In 1927, Esther Watkins releases a children’s play titled “The Tooth Fairy,” which solidifies the mouse-fairy character, wings and all.
• [22:13] The Tooth Fairy only appears in encyclopedias in the late 1970s, marking its modernity.

7. Disney, Corporate America, and the Cementing of the Fairy’s Image

• [24:44] For decades, people disagreed on what the Tooth Fairy looked like; initially, it was often depicted as a mouse.
• [25:10] Disney films of the 1950s—Tinkerbell and the fairy godmother archetype—solidify the visual “fairy” in the American mind.
  • “It’s not a long jump to just insert that visual Disney provided…there you got your Tooth Fairy.” — Noel [25:13]

8. Postwar Prosperity and the Child-Centered Family

• [25:33] The economic boom following WWII and the cultural shift to “child-centered” families fueled the Tooth Fairy’s popularity.
  • “After WWII, it became normal for parents to cater…to their children, to kind of dote on them.” — Noel [26:16]
• [26:30] The ritual reframes a traumatic childhood event (losing a tooth) into an opportunity for a monetary reward—an “extremely capitalist” incentive structure.

9. Weird Modern Discoveries & Tooth Fairy Horror

• [27:30] Ben tells a story of Georgia construction workers discovering 1,000 teeth in the wall of a historic building—a “Tooth Fairy’s den.”
  • “If the Tooth Fairy were real, that would be her burrow.” — Noel [28:13]
• [28:56] Pop culture: references to horror versions of the Tooth Fairy and the Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson family comedy.

10. Economic Takeaways and Deeper Meanings

• [34:29] The Tooth Fairy tradition becomes a “melting pot” of mice, fairies, pillows, and cash.
• [34:57] 2015: American kids collected a total of $256 million for lost teeth.
• [35:42] Quote from Christina Kilgrove in Forbes on the Tooth Fairy’s economic symbolism:
  • “The Tooth Fairy holds a shorter and less visible pedigree than Santa Claus. But her macroeconomic function in today's society differs only in degree. Santa Claus’s promise is pre monetary—goodness gets you Barbies or a Rambo doll. The Tooth Fairy’s promise is more modern: Anything, even your own body, can be turned into gold… That… is precisely the vaunted magic of free enterprise.” — quoted by Ben [35:42]
• [35:44] Hosts admit the capitalist undertones are a bit “dark,” but fascinating.

11. Around the World: Tooth Traditions Beyond American Borders

• [36:03] Tooth Tossing: In Turkey, Greece, Mexico—kids throw their teeth onto a roof for good luck.
• [36:45] In the Philippines, Korea, India, Vietnam: lower teeth are tossed on the roof, upper teeth on the floor to “encourage growth” by symmetry.
• [37:27] Central Asia: teeth are put into fat and fed to a dog to encourage strong adult teeth, or buried by trees for strong roots.
  • “Please don’t try that. I don’t know how a dog would digest a tooth.” — Ben [37:27]

12. Community Discussion Invitation

• [38:06] Listeners are encouraged to share their Tooth Fairy memories or family traditions, especially anyone who didn’t practice it.
• [38:27] Hosts and producers hang out in their Facebook group “Ridiculous Historians,” inviting feedback and stories.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “The first conspiracy theory they learn about is Santa Claus… that changes the way you think about authority and parents.”
  — Ben [06:29]

• “If you are studying... the amount of money the tooth fairy leaves... what you’re actually studying is the behavior of parents.”
  — Noel [10:37]

• “The mouse… is secretly a fairy… and then knocks out all the king's teeth.”
  — Ben [14:45]

• “It's a melting pot... We fondued it and then it caught on and spread like wildfire.”
  — Ben [34:17]

• “Anything, even your own body, can be turned into gold. That in its final reductive wisdom, is precisely the vaunted magic of free enterprise.”
  — Christina Kilgrove, quoted by Ben [35:42]

• “If the tooth fairy were in fact real, that would be like the Tooth Fairy’s burrow, like den.”
  — Noel [28:13]

• “You can’t handle the tooth.”
  — Ben riffing on A Few Good Men [27:11]

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Recommended Listening Segments with Timestamps

• Childhood Tooth Fairy Confessions – [04:38]–[08:32]
• The Economics of Teeth – [08:32]–[10:00], [34:29]–[35:44]
• Origins of the Myth (French Mouse Fairy Tale) – [14:00]–[15:32]
• Corporate America & Disney’s Influence – [22:13]–[25:33]
• Bizarre Modern Discoveries (1,000 teeth in a wall) – [27:30]–[28:46]
• Global Tooth Traditions – [36:03]–[37:56]

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Tone and Style

True to the trademark Ridiculous History tone, Ben and Noel blend humor, skepticism, and deadpan cultural analysis. They move seamlessly from playful banter (“You can't handle the tooth!”) to research-rich storytelling, highlighting both the absurdity and real-world underpinnings of childhood folklore.

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Takeaway

The myth of the Tooth Fairy, as Kept Alive (and Invented) by American culture, is less ancient than you think—part European mouse, part Disney fairy, part postwar parent hack, and 100% modern capitalist magic. The episode leaves listeners two questions: What family myths did you grow up with, and is there such a thing as an “innocent” childhood tradition?

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For more quirky, well-researched tales, join the Ridiculous Historians Facebook group or dive into their archives for history at its weirdest and most hilarious.

Transcript

[A]

Fellow ridiculous historians. It's pretty weird when we think about all the strange things that are treated as normal. Imagine if you went to some part of the world that did not have a tooth fairy and you told a child, hey, when you lose your tooth, put it under wherever you're sleeping and a magical creature will give you money.

[B]

I'm pretty sure I've brought this up to you before, Ben, and I think I may have even sent you one of her little missives. But the I want to say Icelandic pop singer Aurora, she made the delightful point that when you brush your teeth, it's the only time you clean your skeleton.

[A]

Beautiful. Let's roll the show.

[B]

This is an I Heart Podcast.

[C]

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[A]

Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Growing up in the west, many of us as children encounter strange myths and traditions. One of the most famous is Santa Claus. But you know, the one that always terrified me was the tooth fairy.

[B]

Is that a fact, Ben? Yes. Yes.

[A]

I had a. I had a. A deep and abiding fear of the tooth fairy. I didn't like losing teeth and I didn't like touching metal. I never have. So the idea that there would be someone who sneaks in and like switches this tooth that I have to sleep on top of with met.

[B]

Right.

[A]

You know, some in the. Under the COVID of darkness.

[B]

It's a perfect storm of nightmare fuel for you, young Ben.

[A]

It's true. It's true, Noel. It's true. What about you? Were you, were you a tooth fairy, kid? Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. And you know, and being a dad myself, by the way, we need to do a quick disclaimer here, spoiler alert for certain child based things.

[A]

Ah, yes, spoiler alert for stuff that's on a need to know basis.

[B]

There you go. Yeah, that's a good diplomatic way of saying so we're gonna do a count. Five, four, three, two, one. Yeah. So my kid just now figured out that the tooth fairy is me and her mom.

[A]

Did you get caught?

[B]

No, I didn't. But it just finally was like, she's like, when she's at my house, she gets a certain amount of money. When she's at mom's house, she gets a certain amount of money. And it kind of started being like, wait a minute, maybe that was our fault. We should have coordinated a little bit better. But yeah, she was into it and I was about it as well, and I see the benefits of it. But Robert Lamb, from Stuff to Blow youw Mind made a really good point about how with things like the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus, we do a really bad job as a culture differentiating between, like, myth and tradition. It has to be taken so literal and become like a lie to children. I have resented the Santa Claus lie for a long time, and I'm really happy to be done with that because it really made me feel uncomfortable.

[A]

And there's some. Yeah, there's some double. Think it's so strange too, because on another podcast stuff they don't want you to know. One of the points that haunted me before for years on that show was most people growing up in the U.S. just statistically speaking, the first conspiracy theory they learn about is Santa Claus. And the conspiracy thing is reals. Can you like that changes the way you think about authority and parents and anyone over 10.

[B]

Do you remember Pete and Pete, the Nickelodeon show? Yeah, the two redheaded brothers. Oh, I love that show.

[A]

I just remember the tattoo. I got the tattoo.

[B]

Yeah, you'd make her dance or whatever. But that show also had a bunch of really cool guest appearances from, like, interesting musicians, like Michael Stipe, first place I ever heard of who Iggy Pop was. But in that show, there's a thing called, like, the International Adult Conspiracy, I believe is what it's called. And that is exactly what this guy. It is an agreed upon lie that you feed your children. And I just felt uncomfortable with it because I'm like, is she gonna ever trust anything I say again?

[A]

Yeah. Yeah.

[B]

Especially if she figures it out herself. And I never, like, come clean.

[A]

Oh, speaking of coming clean, it's time to introduce everybody to our mutual favorite part of our show, super producer Casey Pegram. Casey, I've gotta ask, when did you figure out that the tooth fairy was not, in fact, a supernatural creature? I think I figured it out pretty early on and kind of kept up the illusion a little bit. My parents benefit, maybe, or my own financial benefit.

[B]

Well, that's what I'm saying, because once you stop believing, then the cash dries up.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

What was your exchange rate for a tooth, if you don't mind me asking? I want to say maybe five or ten bucks. Oh, wow.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Pretty rich.

[A]

Yeah. And if you're a child in the United States in 2013, you got an average of $3.70 per lost tooth, and that's 23% jump over last year's rate, 2012's rate of $3 a tooth.

[B]

And it's interesting, too, because this is obviously an average. So some kids might get a 20 spot for their tooth, some kids might just get a buck. And I believe that was tracked regionally and that it was found that in the south where we live, that's where the tooth fairy was the stingiest. And I believe up north is where they were a bit more generous.

[A]

Yeah. So this is weird. I'm not gonna say who and my family, but there was also a practice that I thought was normal, wherein it was kind of a surprise or a gamble to see how much money the tooth fairy would leave you, because our tooth fairy in our family was, like, pretty. Pretty discerning. And so some teeth would get more money because they were better somehow. Like a canine tooth that had a point was considered, you know, a nice. It's like tulips. It was like tulips, except with just this invisible fairy creature.

[B]

Yeah. And speaking of, like, you know, tooth fairy money as some sort of financial indicator, Delta Dental, who I believe we actually go through, through our company, a dental insurance company, actually track the average exchange for a tooth from 2000 up to 2016, and they correlated it with the changes in the S&P 500 market and found that it was pretty close.

[A]

Oh, wow. Interesting.

[B]

And this is super interesting, Ben. This is a lot of. This is from a fabulous article from our friends over at Mental Floss. The tooth fairy inspired this researcher to come up with something called tooth fairy science. Do you want to talk about that, Ben?

[A]

Tooth fairy science? Yeah, it's important, but it's not near as whimsical as it sounds. An Air Force flight surgeon, skeptic and critic of alternative medicine named Dr. Harriet hall coined this term to essentially describe the importance of making sure some event, object, or phenomena is real before attempting to study it.

[B]

That's right, because the example here is if you are studying the amount of money that the tooth fairy leaves and averaging it out, you might think that you're just studying the behavior of. To the tooth fairy or tooth fairies, but what you're actually studying is the behavior of parents. And so if you are studying a thing that doesn't really exist, there might be another thing that is actually doing the thing that you're studying that you never even considered. And so it's just an important way to create good data and also to plan good studies.

[A]

Yeah. And this is Interesting because we're looking at so many cultural things that describe the tooth fairy. One of the things that I think is fascinating, it's something we were focusing on for this episode, is the origin of the tooth fairy because there are so many things like Santa Claus, Christmas trees, the Easter Bunny, things of that nature that we accept growing up as normal things. Even though many of these will be tied to a religious practice, secular kids practice them because Christmas or Hanukkah, that kind of stuff is just cool. You know what I mean? And what I think will surprise a lot of people here is that the origins of the tooth fairy are at least the tooth fairy as we understand it in the U.S. the origins are fairly recent. We can trace back ancient tales of tooth related rites of passage.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

That stuff is really fascinating.

[B]

Like toothpaste tossing, the throwing of the teeth, which appears across several different cultures, which is really interesting. The Vikings did it, especially baby teeth.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. The offering of a tooth to a rat because it would make your like a rat or a rodent of some sort, because it was thought to ensure that the child's teeth would grow strong.

[B]

And that's really interesting when we get into the modern day tooth fairy myth, or at least the story that likely was the cause of it, where the tooth fairy is in fact a rodent.

[A]

Yes, yes, it's true. So we know that at least in Europe, the ritual of how to handle one's shed baby teeth is global. There are just different rituals around it. Like you said, Noel, this tradition in Europe at least dates back to the earliest written records in Norse and Northern European cultures. And during the Middle Ages, there were superstitions about children's teeth. Like you had to burn your baby teeth to save a child from hardship in the afterlife. Or you would wear children's teeth to bring you good luck in battle, or you would bury teeth to hide them from witches. And it's interesting because back then it was thought that if a witch were to get a hold of your teeth, the witch would have power over you. It's kind of weird, right?

[B]

It is a little weird.

[A]

So what's this original story? Cause we can kind of trace it back, right?

[B]

It's neat, but it's really cool because it kind of incorporates some of the things we were just talking about. So it turns out that the tooth fairy, the origins of the tooth fairy date back to 18th century France, when a fairy tale called oh boy, I'm gonna try to do Casey Proud. La bon petit soiree.

[A]

La bonne petit Souris.

[B]

Souris, yeah. And what does that translate to, sir?

[A]

It's like the good little mouse.

[B]

Oh, it's the good little mouse. And it's the good little Casey on the case. So this is the story of Le Bon Petit Souris. The good little mouse. There is an evil king who imprisons a good queen. And the queen is sort of like a, you know, a Snow White type figure. She can talk to the animals and all that, and so she gets a little mouse to help her out of this jam.

[A]

That's right. That's right. And the mouse, luckily for her, turns out not to just be an intelligent, plucky little rodent. Also, the mouse is secretly a fairy and once revealed to be a member of the Fair Folk or a Fae, the former mouse frees the queen and then knocks out all of the king's teeth.

[B]

Yikes.

[A]

At which point, as you would naturally do in fairy tale logic, he hides these teeth under the king's pillow and then eventually, essentially, he has the king killed.

[B]

Oh, so that's not creepy at all.

[A]

Well, we could do. You know, I'm sure everyone listening this has heard stories before about how much more morbid and graphic the original version of fairy tales are. You know what I mean? So don't let the patina of Disney feel goodery fool you about the true nature of fairy tales. But that's fantastic, right? So this goes back to what we were saying earlier about the cultural thing with rodents.

[B]

That's right. Rodents and teeth and the sacrifice of teeth, the offering up of teeth and the pillow even. Exactly. Yeah.

[A]

And Doug, here we have the Limu emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.

[B]

Uh, limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.

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Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you [e-mail] Liberty Liberty, Liberty.

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Liberty Savings Ferry unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates Excludes Massachusetts. Hey, it's Ed Helms. And welcome back to snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode.

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Sorry Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today.

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I forgot whose podcast we were doing.

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Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of SNAFU with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. All I know is what I've been.

[A]

Told and that's a half truth is a whole lie.

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Did not kill her or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y' all said it. They literally made me say that I.

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There's a vile sickness in Abbas Town. You must excise it, dig into the deep earth and cut it out. The village is ravaged. Entire families have been consumed.

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You know how waking up from a dream, a familiar place can look completely alien.

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Get back everyone.

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He's got knacks. And if you see the devil walking around inside of another man, you must cut out the very heart of him, burn his body and scatter the ashes in the furthest corner of this town. As a warning from iHeart podcasts and grim and mild from Aaron Manke, this is Havoc Town. A new fiction podcast sets in the Bridgewater Audio universe starring Jewel State and Ray Wise. Listen to Havoc town on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Devil Walks in Abbostown. So let's fast forward a little bit to an especially pivotal article that was written in 1908.

[B]

That's right, because one of the earliest mentions of the Tooth Fairy, which. That is not the language used in the play, right?

[A]

No, no, it's more.

[B]

It's the cute little Mouse Fairy. Right. There's teeth involved in the pillow, and that kind of cements the whole mythology of the Tooth Fairy, but it doesn't really have a name yet. So in a column in the Chicago Daily Tribune in 1980, 1908 called Household Hints, somebody writes in and suggests that I'm going to quote it. And this is also cribbing this from this Mental Floss article that has a list of unexpected things about the Tooth Fairy. Many a refractory child will allow a loose tooth to be removed if he knows about the Tooth Fairy. If he takes his little tooth and puts it under the pillow when he goes to bed, the Tooth Fairy will come in the night and take it away. And in its place will leave some little gifts. And then you got a play that comes out in the late twenties by Esther Watkins called the Tooth Fairy.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And that's history.

[A]

And this was a re release of that original French story, the Good Little Mouse. It was in English. It was in 1927 specifically. And this is where the Mouse Fairy character becomes cemented with some of the imagery that we have seen before, the wings in particular. And there are scattered references afterwards around this time to the Tooth Fairy in the first half of the 20th century, but it doesn't really hit its boom. It's Malcolm Gladwell esque tipping point until after World War II, because one of the most popular stories in Collier's magazine in 1949 mentions the tooth Fairy. And this, you know, this makes it a little bit more legitimate. But from what what we found, the Tooth Fairy didn't even enter an encyclopedia until what, the late 70s?

[B]

That's right, yeah. A very modern and American creation.

[A]

Yeah, it's much more recent than you might think. And according to some people who have researched the history of the Tooth Fairy, such as Michael Hingston over at Sal Lawn, we can't overestimate the amount of influence corporations had over the creation of Tooth Fairy. So we said. So, like, you know, the old story with Santa Claus before the Coca Cola Santa, the appearance of Santa varied widely. He might be really skinny, his costume differed, but once a soda company Made this sort of pleasant, ruddy cheeked guy who was always wearing the same costume.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

They sort of codified this icon, first in the US and now around the world. That's how people think of Santa Claus often. So he points the finger at another corporate entity that sort of solidified the idea of the Tooth Fairy. And you can find this article, it's called Don't Tell the the Real History of the Tooth Fairy. In this, he delves into the work of perhaps the most influential, most prominent tooth fairy researcher.

[B]

Scholar.

[A]

Yeah, Tooth fairy scholar, Rosemary Wells. Right, exactly.

[B]

Rosemary Wells. And she saw what we've been seeing, that the practice of, you know, dealing with teeth in a ritualistic way, I guess, for lack of a better. Yeah, I know. Was a thing across cultures, but. But there was precious little known about the origins of the Tooth Fairy. And she's the one who kind of dug in and found a lot of this stuff and really went to town. She interviewed all kinds of folks, anthropologists and parents and kids, and came out with a series of articles to get to the heart of this mythical creature, the root character. The root. Indeed. The root.

[A]

That was a joke from a previous episode.

[B]

Sure. It was a callback.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. So she dove into this and became known as like the global expert on these traditions, the evolution of this in the Zeitgeist. She even opened up the Tooth Fairy Museum in her home in Deerfield, Michigan. So people who study this will tell you that there are several factors that led to the Tooth Fairy's agreed upon depiction here in the U.S. first, we should mention for a long time no one agreed what the Tooth Fairy looked like.

[B]

Right? That's right. It wasn't really a prominent feature. It was just kind of a winged, tiny creature.

[A]

A thing that happens.

[B]

Yeah. Especially since the origins were it being a literal mouse.

[A]

Right, right. So this changes a little bit. The animation giant Disney starts using fairies and fairy godmothers in the 1950s in a lot of their films. Like Tinkerbell and Cinderella.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

So you get this image of like, this is what a fairy looks like.

[B]

That's right. It's not a long jump to just insert that visual that Disney provided the public consciousness with. And there you got your tooth Fairy.

[A]

Yeah. It's like, hey, this is what a fairy looks like. Now that one's just a tooth themed fairy, for lack of a better phrase.

[B]

Exactly. I've always pictured the Tooth Fairy as being a Tinkerbell esque figure.

[A]

Yeah. You know what? I'm right. There with you, man. There's another thing that happens here right around the same time because we said the tooth fairy didn't really blow up till post World War II. US, right. This is an economic boom. There's an increase in prosper. If you're living through the Great Depression, you might not have a nickel to give a kid.

[B]

Absolutely not. And that would be a frivolous use of a nickel.

[A]

And then secondly, at least as it's argued in Forbes magazine, the child centered view of the American family doesn't really come into play until post World War II. Now, again, this is Forbes, but the author argues that after World War II, it became normal for parents to cater.

[B]

To their children to kind of dote on them.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Yes. Before they had them out working in the fields or whatever.

[A]

You know, there's an interesting idea here too, which is equating a painful, scary experience for children to some sort of reward.

[B]

Yeah. Like, you be brave, get that tooth out. You got a dollar coming your way or a nickel or whatever.

[A]

Super capitalist.

[B]

Not to mention, you can even double down on that and make it about like, hey, if you brush your teeth real well, the tooth fair will give you more money or whatever, you know.

[A]

Oh, nice.

[B]

Well, parenting. Parenting. Jiu jitsu, my friends.

[A]

Did you do that?

[B]

Of course.

[A]

That's a great.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I'm impressed with you. So we. I think we already talked.

[B]

Now she knows I'm a dirty liar. So, you know, nothing I say will ever stand again.

[A]

You tell her you're a dirty liar who kept her teeth clean.

[B]

That's true.

[A]

It might be a Jack Nicholson moment for you, like in that. What was. What's the name of that film?

[B]

A Few Good Men.

[A]

A Few Good Men.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You can't handle the tooth.

[B]

That's funny. That's cute, Ben.

[A]

I like that.

[B]

Speaking of handling the teeth, that's another part of the whole rigmarole is you got to kind of sneak in like a thief in the night and abscond with the tooth from under your sleeping child's pillow and then shove it somewhere. I have a drawer full of baby teeth somewhere.

[A]

I always pictured you as that kind of guy.

[B]

Yeah. Speaking of that, though, you told me a really interesting story about someone who stumbled upon a cache of teeth in a building, in the walls of a building here in Georgia.

[A]

Yes, that's true. In October of this year in Valdosta, Georgia, which is in South Georgia for people unfamiliar with the state, there were some construction workers who were at the TB Converse building and they were trying prepare the place for they were essentially trying to renovate it and they wanted to get it ready for a new commercial tenant. And that's when they discovered around 1,000 individual teeth buried in a wall on the second floor.

[B]

If the tooth fairy were in fact real. Yeah, I know you are just shuddering your way through this one. I appreciate you sticking. Sticking with me taking one for the team, but that would be like the Tooth fairy's like burrow, like den.

[A]

Perhaps that's what they do with the teeth. Right? That's the. To me as a kid, that was.

[B]

A weir sick, isn't it?

[A]

What the hell is that fairy doing with those teeth?

[B]

Like the bone collector.

[A]

Right, right, like the bone collector. Any. I mean, if you think about it, this is a weirdly common trope. Like cereal mascots. You know, like the Lucky Charms guy. He's just taking all these charms. What's he doing with them? It's freakish.

[B]

I know. He's also really skinny too, so he's always not eating at all.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. And it's not like the Tooth fairy is putting the teeth in its mouth and getting a bigger smile though. That's a great idea for a horror story.

[B]

And there is in fact a spooky tooth fair fairy, I believe. Not to mention a silly tooth fairy starring the Rock. And then subsequent I believe straight to video sequels. Larry the Cable Guy.

[A]

So I would love to see Tom Waits as Tooth Fairy. It's like a haggard old wizard with like tiny wings. And he comes in, he's like, gotta keep quiet.

[B]

Mr. Pocket.

[A]

Mr. Pocket.

[B]

That's great. Yes. If you guys haven't seen Tom Waits in the Ballad of Buster Scrubs, we.

[A]

Gotta let it go, man.

[B]

Absolute delight.

[A]

Every now and then I rinse it out and I need to be rinsed.

[B]

Tonight and I need it more. My kid wears a bed and the smell never leaves. I don't know what to do. I'm always in the dark, the sweat and dead Sean smells like a dark downy rinse Fights stubborn odors in just one wash. When impossible odors get stuck in. Hey, it's Ed Helms. And welcome back to snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode.

[C]

32 lost nuclear weapons. You're like, wait, stop.

[B]

What? Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player who still wore knee pads. Yes. It's gonna be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Scheer made me feel good. I'm like, oh wow, Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched you're here.

[C]

What was that like for you to soft launch into the show?

[B]

Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today.

[C]

I forgot whose podcast we were doing.

[B]

Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's, let's, let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of SNAFU with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. All I know is what I've been.

[A]

Told and that to have truth is a whole lie.

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For almost a decade, the murder of an 18 year old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

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My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist producer and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.

[B]

I did not know her and I.

[A]

Did not kill her or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y' all said. They literally made me say that I.

[B]

Took a match and struck and threw it on her.

[A]

They made me say that I poured.

[B]

Gas on her.

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From lava for good. This is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame.

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America, y' all better wake the hell up. Bad things happens to good people and small towns.

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Listen to Graves county in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad free, subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.

[A]

There's a vile sickness in Amstown. You must excise it, dig into the deep earth and cut it out. The village is ravaged. Entire families have been consumed.

[B]

You know how waking up from a.

[C]

Dream, A familiar place can look completely alien.

[B]

Get back everyone.

[A]

And if you see the devil walking around inside of another man, you must cut out the very heart of him, burn his body and scatter the ashes in the furthest corner corner of this town. As a warning from iHeart podcasts and grim and mild from Aaron Manke, this is Havoc Town, a new fiction podcast set in the Bridgewater Audio Universe starring Jewel State and Ray Wise. Listen to Havoc town on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Devil Walks in Abbostown. So I feel like we have learned a lot here. The Tooth Fairy is, at least the way we understand it, is so much more recent. It's that cross pollination of this mouse that sneaks into a kid's bedroom and then this general idea of the quote unquote, good fairy. Right. We just sort of smushed them together, America style. Melting pot, a melt. There we go.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

We fondued it and then it caught on and spread like wildfire. I feel like there's also an economic aspect to this too. You know what I mean?

[B]

Sure.

[A]

It's not like, put your teeth under your pillow and you get to spend more time with your loved ones. It's put your teeth on your pillow. Here's $3.70.

[B]

Yeah. And those dollars and nickels and tens and twenties and God, I wonder if any kid ever got a hundred. Surely, surely. Yeah. Somewhere. Must be nice. Anyway. Yeah. Add up in 2015 to $256 million. That is bonkers.

[A]

Yeah. And there's. Okay, I found the quote that I wanted to recite here about the economic part. And I appreciate you putting in that huge number, that statistic for us. So going back to Christina Kilgrove's article in Forbes, she says the Tooth Fairy holds a shorter and less visible pedigree than Santa Claus. But her macroeconomic function in today's society differs only in degree. Santa Claus's promise is pre monetary goodness gets you Barbies or a Rambo doll. The Tooth Fairy's promise is more modern. Anything, even your own body, can be turned into gold. That in its final reductive wisdom, is precisely the vaunted magic of free enterprise.

[B]

That is dark.

[A]

Yeah, I know.

[B]

And Spot. Actually, man, do you want to rattle off a couple of these other maybe non monetary traditions at the end here or should we just leave it with that amazing quote?

[A]

I don't know. Let's. Maybe we can find something a little less dark.

[B]

Dark. Yeah. Let's talk about some of the other traditions that persist.

[A]

Let's travel around the world. So we've been to the United States, but we talked about. We talked about tooth tossing, right?

[B]

Yeah. It's true in countries like Turkey and even Greece or Mexico. So kids throw their teeth onto the roof. Why? I don't know.

[A]

That's where they belong.

[B]

Good luck, I guess. I'm not sure. Ben, you mentioned something earlier about how it would maybe encourage healthy growth of adult teeth. But in the Philippines, Korea, India and Vietnam, only the lower teeth get tossed.

[A]

Oh, I remember this because the upper teeth go on the floor.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

And the idea is that through, I guess, sympathetic magic or attraction, the new tooth will grow toward the old one.

[B]

Smart.

[A]

Makes sense, right?

[B]

It does make sense.

[A]

And then there are other tooth tossing things where sometimes the kid will yell out a wish while they're tossing a tooth.

[B]

Got it.

[A]

Which makes, I guess, makes more sense to me for some reason because it feels like an exchange. Very instant exchange.

[B]

Well, I don't have a tooth to throw, Ben, but I wish we could just keep talking about teeth forever. But I don't think you'd make it. You're shuddering at this point. You're literally, you're in a cold sweat.

[A]

Yeah, but we're doing this for the ridiculous historians.

[B]

That's very true.

[A]

I'm doing it for you. All throughout Central Asia, if you have a kid that loses a tooth, remember it's traditional to put the tooth into some fat and feed it to a dog. Please don't try that. I don't know how a dog would digest a tooth. This is done because the idea is that the grown up tooth that replaces it will be as strong as a dog's tooth. And if there's no dog around, bury it by a tree so that the new tooth has strong roots. That's, that's, that's a quote from a mental floss.

[B]

That's wonderful. That's wonderful.

[A]

So do you have kids? How did you handle the tooth fairy growing up? You know what I mean? I'd love to hear from people who didn't really have it as a thing in their house, because not everybody does.

[B]

Absolutely. Or if you're a parent, how do you feel about the tooth fairy lie? Let us know. You can write to [e-mail] or you can hit us up on our Facebook group, the Ridiculous Historians, where we just have a good old time hanging out by the Internet fire, you know, warming.

[A]

Ourselves, burning our teeth, drinking hot cocoa.

[B]

Together with the other ridiculous historians that hang out there. It's a lot of fun. Casey gets on, Jonathan Strickland the Quizzter gets on. Or as you like to call him, Ben the Quizzler.

[A]

Just to take him down a peg.

[B]

You gotta take him down a peg.

[A]

When he gets big.

[B]

He is a haughty boy.

[A]

Sometimes he gets big a little too big. A little big, little big. So thanks also to Alex Williams, who composed our track, thanks to you, Noel Brown. And it sounds like you've done a pretty solid job navigating the ethically fraught path of parenthood.

[B]

Well, you know, when it all came out, she definitely didn't hate me or distrust me, so I guess I'm doing okay. We'll see you next time, folks. Foreign for more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. What's that sound? That's the sound of Downy unstoppable scent beads going into your washing machine and giving your clothes freshness that lasts all day long. There it is again. It's like music to your ears. Or more like music to your nose. That's freshness is irresistible. Let's get a Downy Unstoppables bottle shake. And now a sniff solo.

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Nice.

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With Downy Unstoppables, you just toss wash wow. For all day freshness. Hello, America's sweetheart. Johnny Knoxville here. I want to tell you about my new true crime podcast, Crimeless Hillbilly Heist from Smartless Media, Campside Media and big money players. It's a wild tale about a gang of high functioning nitwits who somehow pulled off America's third largest cash heist. Kind of like Robin Hood, except for the part where he steals from the rich and gives to the poor. I'm not that generous. It's a damn near inspiring true story for anyone out there who's ever shot for the moon, then just. Just totally muffed up the landing. They stole $17 million and had not.

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Bought a ticket to help him escape.

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So we're sitting like, oh, God, what do we do? What do we do? That was dumb. People, do not follow my example. Listen to Crimeless Hillbilly Heist on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ed Helms, host of Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode.

[C]

32 lost nuclear weapons. You're like, wait, stop. What?

[B]

Yeah, it's gonna be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of fabulous guests. Paul Scheer, Angela and Jenna, Nick Kroll, Jordan Klepper. Listen to season four of SNAFU with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sacred Scandal is back, the hit true crime podcast that uncovers hidden truths and shattered fans faith. For 19 years, Alena Sada was a nun for the Legion of Christ. This season, she's telling her story.

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Surviving meant hiding. Escaping took courage. Risking everything to tell her truth. Listen to Sacred Scandal, the Many Secrets of Martial masiel on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart podcast.