0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

0:00:11
Celestia Ward: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. This is episode 186 and I’m Celestia Ward, one of your hosts. With me is…

Pascual Romero: Pascual Romero.

0:00:37
CW: And I know we haven’t had Ben with us lately for these opener segments, but I did get a raven from him. It said he is at the site of one of the cryptid hangouts that we have discussed on the show, which narrows it down to almost everywhere.

PR: Yeah, that’s basically could be anywhere. So yeah, not a real helpful clue, Ben.

CW: So, well, hopefully he’ll get in touch with Carmen Sandiego and we’ll get him back for an episode, sooner or later. This episode is going to be kind of an interesting sort of retrospective about episodes in our past backlog here that we have found spooky or scary or unsettling for any number of reasons. It was kind of fun going back and looking at some of these.

0:01:20
PR: No doubt. And I think it’s, you know, this isn’t like a clip show, you know, we’re actually just kind of talking about these episodes and reflecting on them a bit. So I think I think it’s a lot of fun to just kind of look back at this and maybe, you know, the listener, there’s a listener here or there who hasn’t heard these episodes and you want to get sufficiently creeped out, you can just circle back to them.

0:02:00
CW: Yeah, yeah. And, you know, there’s always new information coming out. So I think we we unearth a little bit of new stuff here and there about the topics at hand and looking forward to it. But in the meantime, I’m gearing up because today, Thursday, the day this episode comes out, if you all are listening today, it marks the first day of CsiCon here in Las Vegas, the Center for Skeptical Inquiry Center for Inquiry, they’re kind of synonymous. I’m not exactly sure how they relate to each other if they are the same entity or a previous name or what, but CFI, the Center for Inquiry is putting on CSICON, the Center for Skeptical Inquiry Convention in Las Vegas at the Flamingo Hotel. And so folks who are here already, welcome. Although I don’t know what you’re doing, listen to a podcast if you have all of CsiCon to have fun at. But if you’re looking for stuff to do over the weekend or on the off time, or if you’re hanging out Monday and Tuesday after the convention, I figured I would just throw out a quick little sampler of what a skeptic might like to see in Las Vegas. There is, of course, the Zach Bagans Not So Haunted Museum, which we’ve talked about on the show. My only advice is to get a reservation because it’s actually sometimes hard to get a ticket into that place on the same day. And don’t expect a whole lot.

PR: I can only hope that it’s hard to get into because so many skeptics are there debunking things and not credulous people giving him money.

0:03:24
CW: Alas, no, I don’t think that’s the case. But as far as I know, there aren’t any psychic shows going on like actual shows. I mean, Thomas John did a very short residency out here at Cleopatra’s Barge, which I don’t even think Cleopatra’s Barge exists anymore. I think they’ve been refurbishing that. And there was, right before the pandemic, there was a show that launched over at Binion’s called Psychics and Spirits with Dahlia Hawking, who was apparently a fifth generation psychic medium and the quote unquote official psychic of Hotel Apache. And this show was supposed to kick off in February of twenty twenty.

PR: Oh, good timing.

CW: Yeah. Yeah. It’s almost as if she foresaw in the stars when would be the best time to open a show in Las Vegas and pick the opposite of that. But the allegedly haunted Hotel Apache does still exist as part of Binion’s. If you want to check that out and look for some sort of haunted experience or see exactly how they promote that, you’re welcome to head to Binion’s Hotel Apache, which dates back to 1932. So, as you can imagine, the logo is a little bit graphically racist, but you can still book a room there and stay there and see if you have any experiences. So if the Flamingo is all filled up, there’s your option right there.

0:04:53
PR: Perfect.

CW: I’ve got to read you some of this here. This is from their website. Quote, over the course of 90 years, the historic Hotel Apache and Binion’s Gambling Hall have had many reports of spirited guests and residents who make it clear that the Hotel Apache and Binion’s Gambling Hall still belong to them. Several employees have been touched, nudged, reported sightings of figures, and ghost hunters have reported high levels on their EMF meters and motion sensors along with mediums seeing actual images of past owners’ family members. Book your next stay at the Historic Honda Hotel, Apache, and let us know what you experience.

PR: I want to say that Vegas probably isn’t short any spirited guests who are harassing the staff.

0:05:44
CW: If you want to be touched in Las Vegas, you don’t need a ghost for that.

PR: Yeah, exactly.

CW: Touched or nudged or harassed, yeah. And I just love it, yeah. Let’s break out this EMF meter in a hotel casino in Las Vegas and see if it registers anything.

0:06:03
PR: Yeah, I wonder if there’s maybe some electricity in the building, you know, moving around.

0:06:08
CW: Yeah, oh yeah, there’s no machines on the casino floor, no, sir, yeah. There are also quite a few practicing psychic shops all over the place in Vegas, including a really cute little tarot card reading wagon in the Fremont Street area. But if you want to just avoid all that, which I certainly could recommend you avoid all that, there’s Banachek’s Mind Games is playing at the Stratosphere. I’ve seen it. It was great. And then there’s a different kind of spirit you can check out at the Lost Spirits Distillery. I’ve done this once before. It’s fantastic. If you like old-timey circus acts and just really bizarre sideshow stuff. I saw a burlesque dancer/ventriloquist there.

PR: Oh wow.

CW: Yeah, and it was in a jungle theme so she had this giant boa constrictor that was like her puppet.

PR: Oh cool.

CW: Yeah, and then lots and lots of rum. You can get lots of rum there.

PR: I’ve gotten a lot of advertisements for that place on my social media and the pictures look amazing.

CW: Oh, it’s so well designed. The space is just beautifully designed. And it’s in the whole Area 15 complex, which you could spend a day or two just right there. The Area 15 is put on by Meow Wolf, which you as a Santa Fe, Albuquerque resident know about.

0:07:33
PR: Yep.

0:07:34
CW: And so, yeah, the Meow Wolf people made Area 15 in Las Vegas, and it’s really cool. Go if you can. And I also wanted to bring up the Golden Tiki, which I mention in this very episode. I bring it up. It’s a really cool bar just kind of away from the Strip. It’s over in the Chinatown section of Las Vegas. They’ve got some amazing drinks of all sorts. It’s definitely a tiki bar. They don’t just have shrunken heads there. They’ve got like a stuffed, gaffed Fiji mermaid, which is that’s kind of meta to have like a fake gaffed version of the Fiji mermaid.

0:08:11
PR: Yeah. Yeah. That’s pretty cool.

0:08:14
CW: Yeah. And of course, last but not least, the Pinball Hall of Fame. Oh man, is that place cool! Way on the south side of the strip. Oh, kind of over by the Mandalay Bay area, but it’s worth an Uber ride or a cab ride or a bus ride to get out there and just, you know, you don’t even have to bring quarters. They’ve got quarter machines there. You can slide in a 20 and play for hours. It does go to charity. The money that goes into the machines does go to charity after overhead is taken care of and they’re not expensive. They keep them at the original price. So if the pinball game cost 50 cents in 1985, it still costs 50 cents.

0:08:53
PR: Yeah, I can I can vouch for that place. I went there on our last visit to Vegas over the summer for Ben’s belated birthday party and just had an absolute blast. I am a huge pinball fan. Like that is my arcade game of choice. And they just have everything there. Just every game I could think of I found it there. Like everyone that I think I’ve ever played is in that building.

CW: Yeah, it’s a big, big building. And we’ve also got these really weird, like old, old, tiny, like Coney Island games, like this one where you got to like raise the little metal bar, like carefully on each side to balance a little ball bearing and put it in certain holes. And just clever stuff. Like people are ingenious in how they come up with games of skill and chance.

PR: Yeah, definitely I did Again, that place can’t can’t say enough about it had a ton of fun there. So and it’s a cheap date I mean, it’s it really is.

CW: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well onto the you know, the wider world of news and current events. Um, Let’s see. What are we skeptical of this week, Pascual?

(MUSIC)

PR: So this week, a lot of people on the internet are skeptical, and maybe I’m a little skeptical of their skepticism. So as probably almost any of our listeners would know, Alex Jones just got sued for pretty much a billion dollars.

0:10:28
CW: Yeah, the judgment was handed down and it was glorious.

PR: A lot of cause for celebration there. The accountability is very high at the moment and I’m glad to see that that happened. But a lot of people on the internet are, you know, and understandably so, a little bit cynical about it. They don’t think that just going to pay it, he’s just going to…

CW: hide his money. Yeah, he’s going to hide his money and it doesn’t matter. He’ll just hide up in appeals.

PR: Yeah, the appeals process. So I started reading into it and then thankfully, before I got too deep into my reading, our friends at Opening Arguments, Andrew and Thomas, ended up doing a really good overview of why Alex Jones is in fact very screwed right now.

0:11:15
CW: I love opening arguments and Andrew Torres, P. Andrew Torres, lawyer extraordinaire, has saved me from a lot of reading too. That’s his thing. He reads, he understands the law and he deciphers it for you so that you don’t have to read 100 pages of some kind of lawsuit or judgment. Yeah.

0:11:36
PR: Yeah, and that show, not to spend all day advertising their show, but it really is a great companion piece to any current event that involves legalities. They will help you understand what everything really means in a way that the news never seems to quite get. And I don’t have much reason to think that Alex Jones has really a chance of snaking his way around this situation.

CW: Give it give us the reader’s digest like bullet points here for why we should be happy and not cynical about this judgment against him.

PR: Sure, sure. You know, let’s start with people who are saying, well, there was tort reform and it’s going to reduce the total award. First off, that is only in Texas. It is true that the case in Texas probably will, well, it definitely will be reduced because that’s how punitive damages have been affected in that state by, you know, people who are trying to really protect corporations but they always spin it like, well, if you get sued, you don’t want to owe $60 million, you only want to owe $30 million. You know, it’s like, well, I mean.

0:12:50
CW: Billionaires, they’re just like you.

0:12:52
PR: Yeah, again, I think I would be screwed at a six-figure lawsuit, so let’s just put it that way. But the Texas number, yes, it will be reduced. That’s not really at play here because this billion dollars is a decision in Connecticut that has nothing to do with Texas.

CW: Connecticut and Texas are two different states. Very far away from each other. For those of you who aren’t from here, I know it’s not necessarily intuitive, but Connecticut’s way out on the northeast and Texas many, many, many miles south and west.

CW: They are very far apart from each other, both geographically and philosophically.

0:13:29
PR: Yeah. So the $965 million is compensatory, so it’s not even punitive. So even if it were in Texas that law wouldn’t necessarily apply.

CW: So is there are there more punitive damages coming later for him in Connecticut?

0:13:48
PR: Yes, we haven’t even gotten to the punitive.

CW: Oh, this is so glorious. Oh

0:13:52
PR: Be sure that it’s gonna jump over the billion mark pretty quick. The thing is is that this case has a cause of action that evades any cap on punitive damages. So basically it’s just the amount of money that he could be sued for at this point is it’s hard to even imagine how much it’s going to go up. And the jury, they carefully considered the awards for defamation, slander and emotional distress. This wasn’t just throwing the book at Jones. The fact that the jury actually went down from victim to victim and delineated, okay, this person certainly suffered more because people showed up at their house, there were things happening, they were very specific to them. This person was named X number of times on his show, and so they were subject to more harassment. They really measured out what every single person’s damages looked like.

0:14:50
CW: So they created receipts for what they were looking.

0:14:53
PR: So it wasn’t just an angry reactionary, you know, we’re going to sue you for a billion dollars thing. It was a lot of people and a lot of separate, very different numbers based on how their individual cases looked. And that is going to testify to the reasonableness of their actions if this is appealed.

CW: So they can only really appeal it if it’s not reasonable?

PR: That’s the thing, yeah. So it’s only reviewable for abuse of discretion. So the only basis you can appeal this on is, is this unreasonable? And so you have to be able to prove that before you can even fight back essentially. Again, when you compare case to case to case in this one big lawsuit, you see that it really wasn’t, you know, because they measured everything out pretty carefully. So with all that in mind, nothing really will disturb this verdict on merits. Again, the pushback, there’s nothing to push back on.

CW: Now, can he appeal though? I mean, just to drag it out for time’s sake.

PR: He can appeal, but filing an appeal does not stay the judgment, which means that when he files an appeal, it doesn’t mean that the clock stops on him paying them back.

0:16:16
CW: So he can’t get out of this by appealing and appealing and appealing. In order to appeal, he has to still pay the judgment.

0:16:24
PR: Yeah, well, and so he can appeal without paying the full judgment, possibly. A court might consider a stay of the award if he posts a bond.

CW: So that’s pretty much like paying it. You’ve got to borrow today.

0:16:37
PR: So here’s the yeah, he would have to get first off, he’d have to generate. I mean, something this size, it would be hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah. And you’d have to figure out a way to come up with a liquid hundreds of millions of dollars. You can’t just, you know, like, and there’s not…

0:16:52
CW: I live in Vegas, I know how bail bonds work.

0:16:59
PR: Yeah. I don’t I don’t think the guys that Dogg the Bounty Hunter hires are going to be lending him anything. But yeah, yeah, he could appeal possibly get a stay on the on the judgment if he paid a bond that was that big. But that means that he would go into this, and his lawyer knows this, if he would go into this paying hundreds of millions of dollars for something he knows he’s gonna lose. So he’s already gonna put that money in and then lose. So there’s no real reason to do that at all.

CW: Now I kinda hope he appeals so that he screws himself over even further.

0:17:35
PR: Just double screwed. And so, um, free speech systems and info wars, those are his companies. They’re, they’re currently in chapter 11 bankruptcy. So like his, his money is being watched like a hawk right now.

0:17:50
CW: Oh, so he can’t be like, Oh, I’m going to hire my mom as a consultant and pay her a billion dollars. He can’t do that.

0:17:57
PR: It’s funny you say that because he tried something like that. And he, I think it was with his father, I don’t have this in front of me, but he did try something like that and they caught it immediately.

0:18:10
CW: Oh, I’m so glad he’s on a very short leash.

0:18:14
PR: He is on an extraordinarily short leash. And here’s the thing about bankruptcy. The plaintiffs in this case are now his largest creditors in the bankruptcy. So they currently are basically at the front of the line in the bankruptcy. So this anything, I mean, it just is it’s very nearly impossible for him to even dodge away from this, even for a second, using his companies. And the lawyers of the plaintiffs have every motivation to just watch him like a hawk. I mean, they will be watching him.

0:18:52
CW: Oh, yeah, it will pay to watch him. Yes.

0:18:55
PR: Yep, exactly. Well, because he’s going to owe the lawyers fees after all of this also. So basically every dollar that goes to Alex Jones is being completely scrutinized by a bankruptcy court. Like he has no moves left on that. But if he tries to generate personal income, he’s not in current, he’s not currently in personal bankruptcy, so the court can literally attach all of his bank accounts and assets in a collections attempt, just the same as if you don’t pay your credit card bill. He can play deadbeat, but he can basically just get his bank accounts basically garnished. Any collections attempt that’s within legal reach, they can do because, again, he’s not in bankruptcy, so they have access to that as a matter of collection.

0:19:43
CW: So they can get him coming and going.

0:19:45
PR: Yeah. So, and again, further damages are forthcoming. You got punitive. He also has what’s called the Connecticut Uniform Trade Practices Act, which will be more charges that he’s basically getting sued for, and then he has to pay for all the attorneys. So he just has no legal room.

0:20:05
CW: Wow, that is a wonderful summary and I’m glad this has gotten so much air time. I don’t know how you were watching the news when it all came out, but it seemed like every station, every outlet, every paper, every online source was just like, hey, look what happened to Alex Jones. And yes, I want it screamed from every rooftop that if you decide to conspiracy monger for profit and you don’t give a crap about who you’re hurting, this is what can happen to you. So don’t do it.

0:20:35
PR: Yeah, do not do it. And what I really hope this kind of sets a precedence for is, is a lot of that QAnon like stoking rumor and stoking conspiracy theory, because, you know, they’re probably not going to go for, you know, Bob over here posting crap on Facebook. But, you know, if if a public figure starts repeating that stuff, you know, you’re putting yourself on the line and words have consequences.

CW: Yeah, absolutely. Speaking of consequences, we also have some news in the skeptical legal world that doesn’t involve Alex Jones, surprisingly enough. Wow, that’s rare these days. CFI, the Center for Inquiry, I mentioned earlier at the top of the show, has had an ongoing lawsuit attempt against CVS and Walmart. Basically, CFI is arguing that pharmacies like this are committing deceptive practices when they display homeopathy up against real medicine, like on the same shelf, in the same aisle. If you’re looking for a cure for your child’s cold or pain relief or something like that, and you go to a place to buy something like this, you might accidentally buy the crap that doesn’t work, that’s never really been tested, never been shown to work, never proven. Now, what is it Tim Minchin said? It’s either been proven not to work or never been proven to work. So if you’re putting that right up against aspirin and ibuprofen and, you know, actual medicine that is proven, then it’s deceptive. So this lawsuit had been struck down earlier in a lower court, but the D.C. Court of Appeals or one of the that it was like the highest court in the District of Columbia. A judge there ruled that, no, this is not a case that you can just dismiss at the outset. CFI might need to gather more evidence to prevail in court, but for now they have won the right to actually be heard in court. And so that’s good news.

0:22:40
PR: That’s great. Just speaking as a parent who’s had to go into a medicine aisle, I don’t know if you’ve had this experience.

0:22:47
CW: Oh, I have.

0:22:48
PR: But at the drugstore right by me, which is a CVS, you go in and you’re looking for cough syrup or an expectorant or something to knock out the mucus. And as you’re looking through, it’s like there’s no delineation between something that is just honey or like sugar and nothing or something that actually has a medication in it. And I know that there’s a lot of people who argue, well, you know, what does it hurt to do? Well, the thing is, is there was a time that we had a sick child that the doctor instructed us to look for specific types of cough syrup. And you know, it was mixed in with all this like honey-based, like homeopathy stuff. And maybe even if it wasn’t dangerous, I mean, the danger is that if I grabbed that instead of the medicine that the doctor recommended we use, things could have gotten worse. And it’s really frustrating. It shouldn’t be on me to figure out is it real or not.

0:23:48
CW: And parents everywhere will attest to the fact that you aren’t exactly at the top of your game when you’re going to the pharmacy at like one in the morning for medicine for your sick child. You probably have had no sleep. And you’re a little bit frazzled and desperate and worried about your kid. I actually bought homeopathic stuff on accident when I was looking for a teething remedy when my kid was really having some teething pain and I remembered there was like or a gel there was some stuff that I that my mother gave me that was like numbing, and I went to and you you could feel it it was like and it actually was an analgesic or whatever they called a numbing agent that you put on the gums. And I found, oh, here, this is for babies. Great. You know, I pick it up and yeah, all it had was like chamomile and like some nice smelling and tasting herbs and water. And it actually said homeopathic on it, but it was really small font. And I was so mad.

0:24:45
PR: Yeah. And then they even mix in the active ingredients with the homeopathic stuff, and they’ll call it homeopathic like, you know it’s just it’s yeah, you’ll see like oh this has melatonin in it, but it’s also homeopathic. It’s like well the melatonin is what’s doing the thing not the whatever you put in it, but yeah, it’s – as a parent I’m I’m glad this is moving forward because yes that experience alone tells me that we need to do something about that.

0:25:18
CW: Yeah. And last of all, my last sway, so we got kind of a lot of sway here this week, but I wanted to talk about a headline that came across my desk or across my Facebook feed. Get a load of this headline from the New York Times. How did a World War Two ghost boat end up in a shallow lake in California. I mean, that’s just riveting. I mean, there’s a ghost boat. It’s mysteriously moved from wherever it was to a shallow lake in California. We didn’t fight World War II in California. How did this happen? And a ghost boat. I’d love to see a show like that. The Ghost Boat. We’re going to start writing that right now. That sounds fun. Anyway, so the headline was actually way more exciting than the actual story and the solution to the mystery, which was all spelled out in the article. The lake we’re talking about here is Lake Shasta in California. Have you heard of that one?

PR: I’ve actually spent a lot of time out on that lake, so I’m very familiar.

0:26:19
CW: Ah, okay. I liked the beverage Shasta back in the 80s.

0:26:23
PR: Also from that area too.

CW: Okay. And anyway, yes, this was actually similar to another story we’ve talked about in that the boat showed up because of the mega drought and climate change and waters receding from their previous levels. So we’re going to put a pin in that and move on here. Now, this boat was rumored that one of these military boats, called a Higgins boat after its inventor, was submerged somewhere in Lake Shasta. And a fellow was actually looking for it, a guy named James Dunson, who’s like a firefighter. He was specifically searching for it and would hike and do some hikes along the shoreline. And one of these days recently, he found it. It was just right there, partially exposed, thanks to the receding waters. Now this particular Higgins boat that found its way into Lake Shasta had carried troops into battle during the invasion of Sicily in 1943.

PR: Okay. Those are like the boats you see in Saving Private Ryan and so forth.

0:27:34
CW: Yeah, yeah, I guarantee you have seenthese particular boats, the little troop boats that like spit people out on the beaches. And this boat was, like I said, it was in the invasion of Sicily. And then later that year, in 1943, it was in the battle of Tarrawa and during that battle it sank, but it was later salvaged. So Mr. Dunderson, who found the boat and the Forest Service, who apparently started calling it the ghost boat, they don’t have any idea how it got from being salvaged to being on the bottom of Lake Shasta. So obviously, somebody bought the boat and used it, brought it to California, and then it sank in Lake Shasta. But the speculation is that whoever that might be is already dead by now. So maybe that’s why they’re calling it the ghost boat. But there’s there’s absolutely no reports of any hauntings having to do with this boat. They just don’t know how it got there. Now, there were twenty three thousand Higgins boats that were made during World War Two. So that’s a lot of boats. These are small boats. These are not huge. They’re not battleships. They’re like little workmen like boats. And they really were credited with changing how amphibious war was fought. They were super effective at deploying troops right onto the beach, as we’ve all seen in like every war movie. After the war, many of these boats were repurposed and sold at government surplus sales. And so it’s not hard to imagine how a boat like that got to any lake in America. So but apparently only about 20 of them really remain today. So that’s the estimate. Anyway, they are popping up. One showed up in a barn in the Midwest. And remember, I said, put a pin in that whole climate change receding waters thing?

0:29:39
PR: Yeah.

0:29:40
CW: Due to the receding waters at Lake Mead, right in my neighborhood here, Higgins boat turned up there in July of this year.

0:29:47
PR: Oh, wow.

0:29:48
CW: And I somehow missed it. I can’t believe I missed the headlines on that, but maybe because they didn’t tag it as a ghost boat, it didn’t like, it didn’t register with me. Now the one in Lake Mead was used after the war to survey the Colorado River for a while and then it was sold to a marina here and eventually they used it as an anchor for a breakwater in the sediment. I’m not sure exactly what that means like they just sank it and wanted it in a certain place and it became one of the things that scuba dive tours would always sort of swing by and look at.

PR: Oh okay cool.

CW: So if you’ve ever scuba dived in Las Vegas back when we had a lake that that was one of the things you might have seen.

0:30:29
PR: Cool. Just an interesting note about Lake Shasta, ghost boats aren’t the only thing ghostly in that lake. There’s also the ghost town of Kennett, California. Right at the, I think it’s pretty near the base of the dam. And it was a little copper mining town that was just sitting in the valley there until the lake was built and they just flooded the town. Somewhere deep down there, I know the article said shallow lake, but it is about 500 feet deep. Somewhere down there, there is the town of Kennet. I don’t know if there’s much diving. The lake isn’t a real clear lake, so I don’t know that you’d be able to see much way down there –

CW: But it makes it even spookier.

PR: I know it was it was fun swimming there with some of the kids in my buddy’s family and keep telling them stories about that lake being under there and they all freaking out and jumping out of the water above some ghost town and…

CW: Some say you can still hear the townspeople yeah

0:31:36
PR: Yeah, who were all relocated. They didn’t leave them there.

0:31:41
CW: So it wasn’t like a surprise submerging of the. Well, I didn’t realize that Lake Shasta and Atlantis shared something in common there.

0:31:50
PR: Yeah.

0:31:51
CW: All right. Well, why don’t we get to our main topic, which is going to be discussion of some spooky things and kind of a retrospective of episodes that have creeped us out and why.

(MUSIC)

So we thought for this episode, we’d kind of take a little break from our standard deep dive into a particular topic, and we haven’t really done a retrospective topic in a while, kind of a roundup of our favorites or things that we might want to cover in more detail or add to or whatever, but it’s getting to be Halloween-y time and we’ve done a number of spooky topics but we thought we’d kind of bring up our favorites. That sound good to you guys?

BR: Let’s do it!

PR: Yeah!

CW: Now it’s squaring the strange, not squaring the scary. But a lot of stuff we’ve talked about has been kind of chilling. And we kind of explain it. Part of the reason why we sort of explain some of this stuff is to sort of tamp down on what makes it scary. But there is some kind of tingly enjoyment of, oh, that’s really spooky. Who wants to start?

0:33:13
BR: I’ll start. It was an interesting challenge to sort of comb through our episodes and sort of see which things sort of genuinely frighten me, because, you know, sort of by nature of what I do, I look at the folklore and the skeptical side of things, and so I generally take a sort of academic intellectual interest in these topics and not necessarily sort of emotionally charged visceral ones. So…

CW: Yeah, I’ve heard you and Kenny Biddle both say like if you were ever, you know, face to face with a ghost, you don’t understand the concept of why people would run away, run toward it. It’s like a brand new thing you can discover, you know?

0:33:55
BR: Yeah, we’d be like kids in a candy store saying this is super cool. Let’s find out about it. Not like, oh my God, run away. But that being said, there are a couple that pulled that. I’ll start, I sort of listed three. I’ll start with probably one of the earliest episodes, in fact, was on the rolling calf. And yeah, episode number five, in fact, digging way back. And one of the reasons that that particular monster intrigued me was just because it was so weird. It was, for those who don’t remember or didn’t hear the show, the rolling calf is this three-legged calf with chains around its body. And I first encountered it in Jamaica in researching Caribbean and Jamaican folklore.

0:34:43
CW: You first encountered it? Like, you had a face-to-face with a rolling calf?

0:34:46
BR: I encountered people who said they had seen it. It is typically seen in shadows or in silhouettes and in darkness. It has these weird, creepy, gothic little ticks. It cries lava-like tears of flame that flicker in the darkness. You have this demonic figure. But one thing that really creeped me out about it was, people would describe it to me, and because it’s a three-legged calf in many of the incarnations, it doesn’t walk right. And so there’s a sort of unnatural thump, thump. Like I said, there’s chains around the body, so there’s this clanking of chains, which is kind of creepy in the darkness. And then you have this unnatural thumping as it goes along in the darkness, maybe to come and get you. Those things together just creep the hell out of me. One of my creepiest ones is the Jamaican rolling calf.

0:35:49
CW: That really was high up on your list when we first started talking about topics. Bulls are just scary on their own. If you’ve ever been to a farm or watched footage of people dealing with bulls, they can be unpredictable and really hurt you. And animals in general can be super dangerous if they’re injured or in pain. And that ghost story has elements of that in there. Like you’ve got this huge, massive, dangerous beast and it’s like got three legs and has chains around it and is clearly suffering and therefore very dangerous.

0:36:24
BR: Yeah, just every part of that story just gives me the willies.

PR: Yeah, that one was, when you mentioned the name of the topic, I was like, that just sounds kind of silly, like a little calf playing around on a grassy hillside, rolling around. And yeah, it was definitely what you described in the episode was very scary, especially in comparison to the image I had in my head. And it was, yeah, I agree. That is a really creepy bit of folklore, and it is the kind of scary folklore that I always love. Those stories, they always grab me a little better than the conventional Western horror story because it’s in the culture, you know?

BR: Yeah, absolutely.

0:37:07
CW: And if I’m not mistaken, did the Rolling Calf come up again when we did Adventures in Bogey Sitting, the boogeyman?

BR: It may have, briefly, yeah.

CW: Because I mean there’s a reason why the rolling calf comes after you and it’s not just random.

0:37:25
BR: Yes.

0:37:26
CW: You’re doing something wrong.

0:37:28
BR: It appears to scare people or get them to correct some behavior, for example.

0:37:35
CW: Yes.

0:37:36
PR: So, my first pick is the topic that is very close to my heart in the episode we covered, episode 9, titled Until the Light Takes Us. It was the story of the Norwegian church burnings and the black metal murders that happened in the early 90s. For obvious reasons, that one’s scary, because it actually happened, and it was a really dark period in the metal music world. But what made it so scary for me was that not only was it kind of my introduction to the darkest side of metal as a young man, I was a teenager. Well, yeah, I was in my early teens at the time. At the time, it felt kind of, you know, a little bit cool and creepy. And it was like, oh, yeah, metal guys really are pretty intense. But it kind of sunk in quickly, like what if people I’m around were like this? And what if someone tried to kill me? And what if my friends wanted to burn down a church? Is that something I’d really be prepared to do? And so it kind of sunk in early that it was kind of a creepy and scary thing. But as I got older, I realized the thing that was so scary about it for me as a musician was the way public image was shaped by stuff like that happening, especially because it happened kind of at a time that the satanic panic was starting to really kind of, you know, the 80s were over and it was starting to feel like it was dying out. You weren’t seeing specials about it on TV anymore. And then all of a sudden this happens and it’s like right back out in the front MTV’s talking about it and it’s all over the music magazines and stuff and really it just it You know, it’s when you look back on it as a musician it’s just it’s like man this stuff just it makes it so hard for you to put out your art and and do things that are kind of scary and provocative without having to worry about the way people are going to feed back on it, especially because things like this actually did happen. And before then that wasn’t really a thing. I mean there were there were some, you know, off cases, but this was like a whole group of people that got involved with a series of church burnings and several murders were involved. It just really, yeah, I don’t know. It’s a very scary thing to think about. So to me, that’s one of the creepiest topics we’ve ever breached, just because it was such a dark, dark and heavy topic.

BR: You know, it sort of strikes me in a parallel might be Satanists who, you know, maybe entirely peaceful people, but then you do have occasional, very rare people who kill people allegedly in the name of Satan, like the Matamoros case and others, where you have these sort of self-styled Satanists, Ramirez, the Night Stalker and others who are arguably not even doing anything remotely resembling actual Satanism but it gets conflated in the public’s mind and then so suddenly you’re having to have that extra baggage if you profess your beliefs.

PR: Absolutely.

0:40:45
CW: Yeah, that’s definitely touching something you love and tainting it, making it less palatable for the general world, which means you can’t do it as easily.

0:40:55
PR: Yeah, yeah, definitely. So Celestia, what do you have on your plate for this episode?

0:41:02
CW: So I picked kind of a couple different episodes that I found scary. There’s definitely some that I found scary on a societal level, and I’ll just tick those off right now here. I think episode 95, which is MLM mania about certainly it’s scary to think, oh my gosh, I might be in this financial situation where I need money and then I might get sucked into something. And maybe not me because I’ve put the effort into, you know, to do the research with you guys and other skeptics about how terrible MLMs are. I see people on my Facebook fringes who are like, yeah, I just became a such and such representative And it’s like you want to shake them and say no run away, run away you are getting sucked into something that’s very scary and can ruin your life!

BR: There’s not what you think it is.

CW: Yeah, so that just just touching on how many people have had their Finances ruined by MLM. So that was a scary one was the herbal abortions that we covered in Episode 175. And that was just this year. That was that was around May. And, yeah, it was a very big worry that we’d have a lot of women and young girls, you know, found themselves pregnant in the wrong state after Roe v. Wade was overturned. And they might turn to something a little more, you know, folk knowledge about what sort of herbs you should avoid if you’re pregnant. And they can make themselves very sick or they can die. And sure enough, we were kind of ahead of the curve with that. We put this out in May and I just did a quick search and the New York Times covered it in July and NBC News and a couple of other big outlets were having people tell their stories of, hey, I tried to have an herbal abortion and it went horribly wrong. Here’s what happened, you know. So definitely a societal harm worry in terms of more of a political aspect of like, oh, well, here’s how laws have changed. And here’s the societal cost for that. And that’s also scary.

BR: Yeah, that makes sense.

CW: Yeah. But as far as like, spooky, scary Halloween stuff, I got to give it to Sharon Hill. We talked to her about about endless bottomless pits back in episode 145. And that was back in April of 2021. You guys remember talking to her about endless holes?

0:43:23
BR: Yes, that was actually one on my list.

0:43:27
CW: Oh, okay.

0:43:28
BR: Yeah, I totally agree. That was a case of where, just the idea of this bottomless sinking into the ground. I mean, we normally think of the ground we walk on as being very, you know, terra firma. That’s where the firma comes in, right? It’s stable, it’s not gonna swallow us up, and then you have this sort of Sarlaccian just pit. And I don’t know, I’ve always had this weird thought, this odd thought experiment of, if I fell into a bottomless pit, what would that be like? And I pictured it being falling into darkness because, of course, that’s, you know, typically scary. But if it’s bottomless, then, you know, after a while, I mean, you get windburn. You’d starve to death. You know, I could just you’re flailing around. It was just this terrifying sort of nightmarish vision of if you actually did fall into a bottomless pit. And, and of course, at some point, maybe after 18 hours or two days of falling, I’d be hoping for death. And I’d be hoping, of course, you can’t hear anything or see anything. And so I’d be sort of hoping that all of a sudden, you know, I’d hit a floor somewhere and end the whole thing.

0:44:43
CW: So there was an, uh, there was part of a Marvel movie, I can’t remember exactly which one, where Loki gets thrown through a couple of portals that Doctor Strange creates and so he just keeps falling endlessly. And he does that for a while and then they finally stop it and he’s like, I was falling for a bloody half hour, you know, so bad. But yeah, it’s not so much the falling for me that creeps me out about bottomless holes because I’m aware enough, the rational part of my brain does effectively tell me that there’s no such thing as a bottomless hole. You’re going to hit the bottom or you’re going to get stuck in it.

0:45:28
BR: One of the two.

0:45:29
CW: Yeah, you’re going to. I grew up, I forget what age I was when baby Jessica fell down that well. You guys remember that news story?

0:45:37
BR: Yeah, I do.

0:45:38
PR: Yeah, sure do.

0:45:39
CW: Oh, God, the idea of falling into a hole that you just get stuck into and you can’t get out and you’re a small child, you don’t understand what’s going on. You can sort of see the daylight, but it’s so far up there and nobody can get you. Terrifying, utterly terrifying. And then I met somebody, one of the people I worked with on the carnival circuit. They actually had, they grew up in another country and they had wells that were just holes in the ground. And one of this person’s siblings when they were a small baby just learning how to toddle around and walk, boop, right down the hole. And that child did not come back up, did not live. That was just, oh, I used to have so many brothers and sisters and now I have this many because, you know, that they only live to the age of two or whatever and Hold on to the hole. Yeah, that was it. Yeah Wow. Yeah, and so and anything Oh, man since I got pregnant and had a kid you get these hormones that kind of change the way you think and the idea of any Kid coming to harm in such a you know, can’t can’t stop it. They’re just there and then they’re gone utterly terrifying to me now. So yeah, that’s why there’s multiple layers of frightening stuff when it comes to bottomless holes.

0:46:54
PR: Yeah, and as a parent, I completely agree. It does hit completely different once you’re a parent and boy, does it make your stomach drop just imagining any of that stuff.

0:47:05
CW: Yeah, your spidey sense because you’re worried not just about you, you’re worried about this third party now, this like, you know, this offspring that you are totally responsible for and they have the power to move around and do things when you’re asleep When your back is turned when you’re doing something else with another kid and it’s like, oh you got to be worried about you know Just you just want to like Bubble wrap the whole world and make it safe for them, but there’s no way to do that Yeah, yeah, and I don’t know if you guys have you seen I think there’s a movie out now or it’s it came out a while ago about the rescue of those boys in the cave.

0:47:44
BR: The cave, the cave diver.

CW: The cave divers. Yeah.

0:47:47
BR: I have not seen it. I’m looking forward to it.

0:47:50
CW: I will not see it. You can’t make me. I won’t.

PR: Yeah, it’s terrifying and claustrophobic. And yeah, it’s a frightening story.

CW: Yeah, and you’ve seen, you guys are both friends with Dr. Angie. She occasionally sends around photos of her scuba diving adventures and anywhere there’s like cave diving and regular diving and they have these signs up underwater that just kind of says, stop, do not scuba dive beyond here unless you’re a cave diver because you will die.

0:48:20
BR: Yeah, that was, it reminds me, there was a documentary I saw a year or two back, I think it was called Dave’s Not Coming Back or something. It was about a scuba diver in South Africa of all places. There was, I think it’s an abandoned well or something, but there’s just this huge hole in the end. I won’t spoil the story, but basically there were extreme divers going very, very, very, very deep. And because the complexity in it’s not just the well but the caves, you can’t go up too fast because of course you’ve got the bends and so you can only go to certain levels. And a diver was actually lost down there. And so the story is about these other divers who are friends of his trying to recover his body. And in the process, someone else got stuck.

0:49:10
CW: Oh, man.

0:49:10
BR: Avoid this if you’re easily creeped out, but it is an interesting documentary. Again, I think it’s Dave Not Coming Back or something.

0:49:18
CW: Yeah, well, that kind of spoils it right there. We know Dave’s not coming back.

BR: Well, it could have been a joke.

CW: These extremities of the earth and how some people, not all people, I’m not, but how some people are drawn to conquer extremities. Like you have these cave divers where you can’t get their bodies back because they’re just gonna be down there. You can’t get them back. And then people on Everest where other people climb Everest, but you can’t bring the bodies back. There’s just no way to really do that. And that’s scary all on its own there.

0:49:50
BR: Well, on a slightly related note, in terms of sort of visceral human things that we did scary shows on, I’m going to go to our episode on sleep paralysis.

0:50:01
CW: Oh, dang it. That was my other one, too. We had two of the same ones.

0:50:05
BR: Well, you know, just just the I as I mentioned on the show, I’ve I’ve had sleep paralysis, I think twice, and it’s just so vivid and genuinely frightening. And even even even in my own head, when I when I’m pretty sure this is what’s going on, it’s still scary as hell. So yeah, that was one that’s on my list.

CW: Yeah, I had it on my list because you’re kind of trapped. If you’re in a dream state, you can’t will yourself out of it. I know some people say, oh, you can with lucid dreaming. But no, no, if you’re in a nightmare, you’re often just kind of trapped in it. And to sort of have that touch your waking world where the nightmare is taking place, you know, as you look into the darkness of your hallway in your home from your bed and it’s intruding into your waking conscious perceptions, that’s very scary to me. That’s like blurring the line between reality and nightmares, you know?

PR: Yeah, and that’s one of the topics I had thought about, but then I don’t know, it’s a weird one for me because as I mentioned in that episode, that’s something I spent a lot of time in my life dealing with, and many other sleep disorders that thankfully are now treated and I sleep very well now. But at that point in my life, it’s hard to explain how frightening it is because yeah there are those people that are like, oh you just need to do this or that or you know. I mean yes, there are reasons it happens and treatment can help. Treatment can go a very long way if you’re doing the right things. You know, also things like exercise and eating well and you know going to sleep at a good hour and not overextending yourself.

0:51:59
CW: Let’s not be ridiculous here. Come on.

0:52:02
PR: But, but the truth is that, you know, when it happens, I mean, and for me it was happening, you know, on a regular enough basis that it was at least once or more per week for, for quite a while in my life. And it was that experience. And I think I described it in the episode. It’s been a while, while since I’ve listened back to it. up or when I’d come, quote unquote, quote unquote, come to in, uh, in an episode, um, it was like I could see through my eyelids. Um, it was like, I could tell I was asleep, but I just could see. And, and it was always that there was a light coming through my bedroom doorway and that someone was standing in the doorway just watching me. And even as rational as I, as I am and as well as I can kind of ground myself in reality when I’m experiencing something very disorienting or confusing, the fact of the matter is that it just happens and your mind just can’t get away from it. That’s the part that’s scary because I can’t just go back to sleep and I can’t just force it out of my head. I just have to experience it for a minute and then it just eventually goes away. And those episodes were pretty darn frightening. I mean, like I said, it was always a figure standing in the doorway and it was like I could see through my eyelids. I mean, I could tell I was asleep, but I just couldn’t close my eyes and ignore it. worthy of being a scary topic that both of you agree on.

CW: And we should be mentioning the episode numbers because these are, you know, some people may have discovered our podcast like last year, and maybe they’re wondering which ones to run back and check on if they want something spooky. That was episode 21 that covered sleep paralysis. And it was, gosh, about a little over five years ago, it was August of 2017.

PR: So the next episode that I wanted to bring up is somewhat related to my other one. Go figure. I’m always thinking about the same stuff. But the episode 163 titled – it was in our Moral Panic series, and this one was Music Danger.

0:54:21
CW: Oh, yeah.

0:54:22
PR: And while really when you listen to the topic, it’s not the scariest topic. It was a fun discussion, but we did talk about things like going to court over lyrical content. And that, again, to me, in a very practical sense, is a very scary thing.

CW: It keeps you up at night wondering who’s going to take you to court wrongfully.

PR: Yeah, I mean, you know, thankfully, you know, music has come a long way and censorship has come a long way and people tend to be pretty understanding that music is art and even if you don’t like it, it just kind of is what it is and you can just not listen to it. I know people like Ben Shapiro sometimes have their comments, but for the most part, it’s not really a big deal anymore. But occasionally, you just have to wonder if you’re just going to catch the wrong ear, especially nowadays in the reactionary politics we live in. The fact that you might say the wrong thing and it could get you in some real trouble with people, which runs entirely counter to the First Amendment. But again, people did go to court over a young man that died by suicide. And you know, it is such a scary thought to think that one day you could just be living your life and you know, you get served with papers or you know, suddenly someone, a cop is at your door, you know, saying there’s a warrant or something, you know, because or because you wrote a song that inspired a murder or inspired someone to commit suicide. And it’s just a really scary thought because it’s one of those things that it’s like you’re just putting words on music and whether you mean anything serious by it or not, it should be allowed in this society. But you could find yourself on the wrong side of the law anyway. And thankfully, those cases ended favorably, or at least as favorably as a case about people dying could be as an artist. But again, it’s a real spooky thought. And I think everyone should at least have a little bit of a sense that we do all want to fight for the right to say things. Not that speech shouldn’t have consequences necessarily, but that speech should never be something that can get you in legal trouble, especially when it’s in art.

0:57:00
CW: Yeah, yeah, artistic expression is, you know, especially if you start making your living that way. It can be very frightening to think that, okay, I’ve kind of, I’ve put a lot of years into learning how to do this, and I like doing it, and I’ve kind of built my identity around it and and oh hey guess what the the zeitgeist of the moment now means it’s coming way under scrutiny you know and people are gonna get in trouble legally for doing the thing that I’m doing and yeah I can understand how that would give you sleepless nights as a working musician.

0:57:32
BR: So probably the the scariest one, the most the most genuinely frightening one, we actually did two episodes on, and those were episodes 106 and 136 with Leo Igwe. And those are the real life and in some cases very current witchcraft accusations, primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa, and in Leo’s case in Nigeria, in West Africa. I won’t reach at it because I mean people really should really check out the original episodes but so much of what what I do as a skeptic and sort of what we do is sort of is exposing and trying to explain things that are sort of abstract you know why why we really did land on the moon why there isn’t good evidence for Bigfoot, ghosts, EVPs, urban legends, things like that. But in these cases, of course, you have people, usually women and people who are disadvantaged or maybe disabled in some way, who are being accused of witchcraft and casting evil eyes on people and basically black magic, and being in some cases ostracized from their villages with nowhere to go, in some cases physically attacked and even burned alive. And it’s just that that to me is genuinely frightening. And I am so grateful to Leo and the work he’s doing to help stamp out some of the really pernicious superstitions.

CW: Yeah, yeah. Some of the instances he recounted, including one where a man in power gathered up a whole mob and attacked his own mother, his own mother, brought her out and threw her onto the fire and everything and she survived. But oh my, can you imagine your own child being so convinced that there’s some kind of evil coming from you and you’re a witch and you deserve death?

BR: Yeah, he, as I recall the story, he’d, the guy that went after his mother, he had a dream, a nightmare.

CW: Yeah, he had a nightmare and he believed it.

BR: Yeah, he believed The visions in his nightmare were the spirits telling him true stories about the world, which itself is terrifying.

0:59:43
CW: Yeah, when you’ve got somebody in power like that, anywhere that believes dreams are real, that’s a…

0:59:52
PR: Yeah, I’d hate to think the world that would exist if I ruled it and ruled it by my dreams. Yeah.

1:00:00
CW: Yeah, well, one of the last ones that I found scary, I think I put myself into other people’s shoes too much. I’m too empathetic. I just, I hear something and I tell a story and then I imagine what would it be like to go through that. And so I found the head show very disturbing. That was episode 110.

1:00:22
BR: I remember it well. That was a creepy episode.

1:00:27
CW: Yeah, episode 110. And I just looked at it was in January of 2020. So, yeah, a lot scarier stuff was around the corner if it was January 2020. But just the the details of what happens or what maybe happens when you get decapitated and the experiments that they did way back in the day on prisoners that were decapitated and, you know, what have you, you know, it makes you wonder like, what, what if I died that way? What if, uh, what if I was one of, you know, Henry the Eighth’s wives, what I have actually seen the inside of the basket as it approached me, cause my head was falling into it. You know, if you, if you lose your head in some other accident, do you see your body like flying away as your head rolls away, you know, or is it some kind of nerve shock that just completely severs your consciousness instantly? These are the things that keep me up at night, wondering, you know, what would that be like? And oh, gosh, what a terrible thing to see as the last thing you see as a conscious person is that.

1:01:33
BR: Unless, of course, you’re Mike the Headless Chicken, in which case he managed to survive for quite a while and went on tour.

1:01:40
CW: Mike, the Headless Vhicken, gave us some some well-earned levity in that in that episode.

1:01:47
BR: Mike did not find it funny to be clear.

1:01:49
CW: Now we also talked about shrunken heads in that one, and that’s a little spooky in and of itself. Just, oh, can you imagine? Taking a human head and all the skin that makes you, you, anything that kind of messes with the face kind of weirds me out. I’m so attached to faces and I draw them for a living. I study them. I like reading people’s faces and, you know, the emotion on their face and expressions and all that. And the idea of taking that and boiling it and turning it into something that resembles a coin sack, It’s a little bit gruesome and frightening to me.

1:02:29
PR: Yeah.

1:02:30
BR: Yeah, it’s creepy. As I mentioned, I’ve held a shrunken head, and it’s weird. It’s one thing if you’re holding like a skull because it’s sort of more abstract. Well, here’s a skull, like in anatomy class or whatever else, because it’s bone and it’s sort of depersonalized.

1:02:46
PR: Sure.

1:02:47
BR: When you’re actually holding a small other person’s head in your hand, it’s kind of like, ew, and wow.

1:02:54
CW: Yeah. If anybody wants to see shrunken heads that aren’t really shrunken heads, there is a tiki bar in Las Vegas called the Golden Tiki, and that’s their whole theme. They’ve actually got a sculptor that does celebrity shrunken heads, which is kind of a nice gig. You don’t actually have to make it look like them a whole lot. You just kind of have to do a shrunken head and like put the little, you know, stitches into the eyes and the mouth and everything. And if they’re carrot top, you put a bunch of curly orange hair on it and you’re done. So yeah, you can check out their collection at the Golden Tiki if you’re ever in Las Vegas and want to see some shrunken heads. But, but yeah, the actual idea of shrink shrunken heads kind of scary. Now, there are some topics we haven’t covered as far as things that we could look at in the future that are kind of scary. And I think I mentioned once before, I can’t remember when, that I genuinely find the idea of those abandoned or maybe not abandoned number radio stations. I find them irrationally creepy. I don’t know why. If you’re not familiar with what I’m talking about, Brian Dunning did an episode on these back in 2008. It was Skeptoid episode number 107. And I remember listening to that just going, Oh, yeah, I think I’ve come across those and they just, just you hit a radio station, it’ll be like the static will will fade. And you’ll clearly have a signal there but it’ll just kind of go doot doot doot doot you know and this weird mechanical like like ghost in the machine they’re just kind of like broadcasting something where are they broadcasting from what is the purpose of this is this some sort of code is there is there espionage afoot is this is this ancient are the people who set this up long dead? Where is this being broadcast from? Is it nearby? Is it far away? You know, do you guys care at all about number radio stations or am I the only one that it kind of freaks out?

1:05:01
PR: Oh, I think they’re fascinating. I totally think that would be a great topic and just or at least a great part of a topic on just broader weirdness out in the world that, you know, is actually happening just because they’re so it’s just such an odd thing and it’s it you know it’s not clear what’s happening when you happen upon it and that’s I think what adds to the scariness.

1:05:25
CW: See that’s that’s actually what I really liked about the TV show lost before it started really sucking yeah cuz they had this that was there that was their hook you know yeah oh you have to type in these numbers in this sequence on this thing. Otherwise something bad will happen we don’t know what you know. Oh, there’s this weird signal. There’s this this there’s a stack and then it became all weird and like oh, we’re really in heaven or hell or something.

BR: Hey, no spoilers.

CW: Oh I think that was widely publicized. The only people that spoiled that show were the writers.

PR: Yeah, but just just watch the first maybe three or four seasons and then pretend it ended there, you’ll be fine.

1:06:01
CW: But that’s what made it really creepy and intriguing to me was like, okay There’s people that have been here and done something and set something up. But what is it? You know?

PR: Yeah, absolutely I think I’m fascinated by that. Yeah, what other scary stuff would you guys want to look into for future episodes?

PR: So I I kind of am I would say like a almost an amateur cartographer. I really love maps and I spend a lot of time on, I play a game called GeoGuessr, which is a game where they will plop you down somewhere in the world on Street View and you have to figure out where you are. Oh, weird. Yeah, it, and, but I’m also just fascinated, like just find interesting places. It fascinates me when I find something like, you know, Russia is full of very interesting things because they always had a lot of these weird facilities all over the place and stuff. You’ll come upon the weirdest thing in the middle of the woods and there’s no clear roads going to it and it’s like just a building or an object that makes no sense. And there’s sort of this thing with like Google Earth, Google Maps mysteries where you know people see things in the ocean. They’re like what the heck is this thing? What is this you know weird shape underneath the waves by this beach? And you know what is You know, what are these weird shapes in the sand? And those mysteries that to me are just fascinating.

1:07:44
CW: That’s originally how they found that, that that monolith in the desert a while back, right?

1:07:51
PR: Yep. Yeah.

1:07:52
CW: It made the news and then spurred a bunch of copycat monoliths everywhere.

PR: Yeah. And we talked about them, I think, a little bit on the show. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, they get popping up.

1:08:01
CW: There’s like one every other day.

1:08:06
PR: And, and there have actually been crimes that have been solved using aerial photography and Google Maps. I believe there was a missing person in Florida for quite a long time, and someone was looking at the community in Google Maps and looked in a canal by a house and saw a car underwater and they actually reached out to authorities. The authorities pulled the car out and found a missing man in the car and all from some guy like me who just likes looking around at earth from the sky. And yeah, there’s just a ton of really interesting mysteries. You can look up articles. There’s a lot of articles on Google Maps and Google Earth mysteries. A lot of them have been solved, but there still are a few out there that people are kind of speculating on.

1:08:54
CW: Yeah, yeah, and there’s one, you know, some topics we haven’t covered yet because they’re a little too small and out there. And then there’s some topics I can guarantee you we haven’t covered because they’re too big and we’re not sure exactly how to wrap our arms around them. And one that I find very scary would be looking at cults like as a broad topic. Cults, what are they? How do people get into them? How do you get people out of them? How do people get brainwashed while they’re in them? And I remember a while back we did the episode on burning effigies and I talked about that show Midsommar and how I just I was not able to watch that. I found myself unable to look away when there was a quick little explainer and it kind of made me think, well, maybe I’ll watch this and if I can handle this, then I’ll watch the movie. Nope, nope, decided I couldn’t handle watching the movie. Cults are scary ass things. And you had mentioned, Pasquale, that it’s scary because, you know, as a materialist, as an atheist, I can’t be like, oh, yeah, that that horror movie about demons is that that can really happen. That’s really scary. No one will watch it and go, oh, OK, they made another one of those. What nice fiction they’ve made. But something about cults. Yes, that could happen in the world view, you know.

1:10:16
PR: Yeah, I always say that. I mean, I think I mentioned it in the episode that I find cult horror in that folkloric horror to be particularly scary because there’s just no getting around the fact that it’s possible to be, you know, I mean, yeah It’s maybe a little far-fetched that a cult might kidnap you and hold you against your will although it’s not out of the realm of possibility but just the idea of people being mentally trapped in a cult and the idea of, you know just like not being able to think for yourself. I mean that to me just always it’s always been one of the most frightening, you know bits of horror and I think because you know cults do exist and yeah do very strange things.

1:11:00
CW: See, for me, it doesn’t need to be a danger that like has a percentage chance of like ensnaring me It doesn’t have to be like, okay what are the odds that I might be attacked and killed by a cult or I might fall in with a cult and be brainwashed into somebody I never thought or ever wanted to be. What are the odds of that? Well, infinitesimal, obviously. But it freaks me out that cults are real. They have entrapped people. They have brainwashed people. They have harmed people and murdered people. And even going way back in history, you know, the idea that some children were offered as sacrifices because of, you could call it an ancient religion or you could call it a cult, but if you’re cutting open the chest of a child to bring yourself good luck, that’s terrifying to me that people have done that. And you just imagine, okay, what did that kid think at the time? Oh my God. You know?

1:11:58
PR: Yeah. And again, to circle back to being a parent, I mean, the idea of a child getting wrapped up in something like that is just pretty terrifying.

1:12:08
CW: Yeah. Ben, do you have any deep-seated fears that we haven’t covered yet on the show? Or are you just a man free of fear?

1:12:13
BR: Well, I wouldn’t say either one, really. I just, yeah, I mean, again, probably the scariest one is one I already touched on, which would be to be accused of being a witch, or having harmed somebody without even knowing it. I think we did a show on the evil eye. And one of the beliefs about the evil eye is that you can actually cast an evil eye on somebody without even knowing that you can do it. And, again, it sort of ties in with witchcraft accusations and things like that. to have people around you, whether cult leaders or a mob of people, who are so certain that they’re right. They’re so certain that their interpretation of whatever’s going on is right, and you don’t share that worldview, and you don’t share those premises. You can argue and try and talk rationally, talk them out of it rationally and say, look, this is not, I don’t know what you’re talking about. This is not real. I didn’t cast a spell. This is not a thing. And they don’t care. They’re not going to listen to you because they don’t share that worldview. And so that to me would be terrifying, would be to, you know, be surrounded by a mob who wants to harm me for reasons that I know are false and I’m trying to explain are false and they don’t want to hear it.

1:13:40
CW: It’s almost like it’s kind of the trope that you see in zombie movies. The unpersuadable, irrational mob. Like, you can’t talk them out of anything. They’re just coming for you and you can’t do anything about it. And yeah, when you’re a skeptic, when you’re a communicator, when you’re a writer, your job is to persuade people, to inform them, to talk to them, to communicate. And it’s like, if you’ve got a mob of people that will not listen, then you’re one. It’s like having your one best skill or weapon just completely nullified.

BR: Yeah. I mean, you know, you can’t you can’t offer a mob, you know, references. Right. It doesn’t work that way.

CW: Well, actually, well, actually, we’re going to kill you now because you’re a foreigner in this village and one of the children is sick and it’s your fault. Well, on that note, that’s those are some of the things that legitimately scare us. Hop on over to the Squaring the Strange Facebook discussion page and share some of your fears with us. We’d love to hear from listeners about what legitimately frightens you. And it can be like frightens like an old ghost story you heard or a monster tale or, or something societal, like something about psychology that makes people. We’re all ears and we will be doing more episodes and we can always use things for our episode list, which is incredibly long, but we don’t mind making it longer.

(MUSIC)

1:15:20
PR: Well, that was a lot of spooky fun. I’m glad we got a chance to go through all those those memories of the show.

1:15:34
CW: Memories. Yes. And speaking of memories and going back to stuff, next episode, we’re going to be heading back to a familiar little stomping ground we like to play in. We’re going to be talking about something Bigfoot related. And I know you’re thinking, is there anything that Square and the Strange hasn’t covered already about Bigfoot? There is. We’re going to have a guest on, Sharon Hill, who you’ve heard before on Squaring the Strange. And she and Ben have a particular topic that they both get very excited about. Excited and frothy and kind of angry about, actually. It’s a would-be scientist and author named Melba Ketchum. Does that ring a bell for you?

PR: I’ve heard the name, but I don’t know much about her. Well, there’s some interesting hijinks involving her and a DNA study and a Bigfoot hair, and we’re going to get into it. Next episode, everybody. Until then, everybody, take care.

1:16:48
See ya.

1:16:51
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