Click each image to enlarge.

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.

0:00:10
Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. This is Episode 190 and I am one of your co-hosts, Ben Radford. With me is/are…

Celestia Ward: Celestia Ward here and…

Pascual Romero: Pascual Romero. Hey, everybody.

0:00:36
CW: The gang’s all back.

0:00:37
PR: Woo-hoo! All here.

0:00:54
CW: Yeah. Everybody’s healthy. Everybody’s like ready to actually talk for a short while anyway.

0:00:59
BR: See what we can do. See if we can make sense.

0:01:02
CW: Now, our main topic tonight is an interesting little side branch, or should I say side road, of folklore. Ben, why don’t you explain to the audience kind of what we’re looking at this week.

0:01:14
BR: Sure. I thought we’d look into a sort of a subgenre of folklore, which would be sort of folkloric vehicles. If you spend much time in folklore and looking at different types of urban legends and even fairy tales in some cases, you find that there are certain genres, certain specific types of vehicles that appear over and over again, often in a sinister theme. So we’ve touched on those.

0:01:43
CW: Yeah, we never, sadly, we didn’t get to my mother, the car, did we? The spirit of that guy’s mother who ended up in his Chrysler or whatever it was.

0:01:53
BR: Yes, no, we didn’t get that. Not on the radar.

0:01:57
CW: So housekeeping time. Ben, you’ve got some stuff that’s come out. Tell us about what you’ve been writing.

0:02:02
BR: I’ve got a couple of things that came to fruition. One piece I wrote a long, long time ago. I’m slightly embarrassed to say I’d almost forgotten about it. When I was like, someone’s like, hey, by the way, I just published like, oh, cool. Yeah, I’m yes. I’m glad you saw that.

0:02:20
CW: How do you write a lot of stuff without actually saying you write a lot of stuff?

0:02:24
BR: Well, it’s just it’s just one of those things where, you know, as a writer, you put stuff out there and then sometimes you submit it and life happens and things happen and sometimes it may be published months or years later. In this case, I have an article in the current issue of Fortean Times Magazine, which is a British magazine. I’ve been published there several times before, including on the the Pokemon Panic and Urban Legends and the Popobawa and Chupacabra and whatnot. This time for the Christmas 2022 issue, Fortean Times 426, I have an article on my quest for Iceland’s Elf Church.

0:03:06
CW: That sounds rather Christmassy. I think it’s the perfect time to publish that.

0:03:09
BR: Yeah, yeah, I think I’ve talked some about it on previous episodes, but basically there was a what’s called an elf church, a large rock that was preventing a highway from going through on a peninsula outside of Reykjavik. And I wrote about it for Discovery News and I later on managed to actually go to Reykjavik and I only had a short time there. While I was there, I’m like, well, let me go see if I can track down this elf church and and I did.

CW: Yeah way to make the most of a layover.

BR: Basically I did on top of that. So that’s in the current issue of 40 in times which you can find Online you can also get here in the US at Barnes & Noble and other places in the current issue of skeptical choir magazine I have a my column this time is on a it’s sort of a classic cryptozoological mystery. It’s the Dover Demon case.

CW: Can you give us the elevator pitch for what the Dover Demon is?

BR: So the Dover Demon case occurred in 1977 in Dover, Massachusetts. And it’s sort of this, even within the realm of weird things, it’s sort of an unusually weird thing in that there were three teenagers, arguably four, but basically three main teenagers who claim they saw this otherworldly sort of alien-esque creature, but only once over the course of basically two nights and then it vanished. It’s sort of a classic mystery again. It’s been around since 1977 and I finally got around to taking a skeptical look at it and it is illustrated by, who’s this? Celestia Ward, I think.

0:04:51
CW: It sounds like a hack.

0:04:52
BR: Yeah, very. The art’s pretty crappy, I’ll be honest with you, but it’s the best we could do.

0:04:56
CW: So, well, as long as you didn’t pay anything for it, that’s important.

0:04:59
BR: No, no, no.

0:05:00
CW: Speaking of not paying anything for art – we did a segment about Loeb, the AI art cryptid two weeks ago in the last episode. And since that time, wow, AI art has exploded everywhere. It’s not just exploded in terms of people trying out, you know, various apps to do avatars of themselves. There’s think pieces and hot takes and large moral questions about our culture and, you know, whether or not it’s legal questions. I’d be curious to talk to Andrew Torres about this, about, I’m definitely developing a more nuanced opinion of AI art. There’s definitely questions as to whether or not it is scraping millions of different images from thousands and millions of different artists, or if it is scraping from a dozen people, which that’s, you know, I want to quote a cartoonist I know named John Bean Hastings, he posted a thing. To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism. To steal ideas from many is research. To steal from millions is AI art. And there’s the question, there’s the rub. If it’s like 12 people, then you, I think, have a pretty good case for a lawsuit. If it’s from millions of people, I don’t – anyway, these are big questions. I have a lot more to read. And after people have done some deep dives, we’ll probably have an episode about AI art, if people are interested. Pasquale, are you interested in talking about AI art further?

PR: Oh, yeah.

0:06:38
Yeah, I’ve got a lot of… you know, as you mentioned, you know, my opinions become a little more nuanced as I’ve discovered some more possibilities in that world in terms of how the art is aggregated. But AI and automation in art has always, every time someone makes a leap in that world, it always is the end of the world. It’s been happening in music since the 50s. There’s a lot of different automated things. There’s what’s called the arpeggiator, which actually is something that’s existed, I would imagine, since the 70s. And it can create arpeggios, which are runs of notes within a chord, and it can automate all these things. And music’s always been going through this. Art also has, you know, there’s a lot of techniques that have gotten a lot easier over time and

0:07:28
people using sampling.

BR: We did a show on sampling.

PR: Yeah, sampling is another great example. From a music standpoint, the legality may be a little more gray, you know, and I wonder how that may apply to visual art because in music, while it is pretty easy to win a case when you have literally lifted a sample from a previous recording, as we’ve mentioned in that episode, it gets a little tougher when you’re talking about the flavor of a song or the style of a song, or certain chord progressions being similar. So you know, this is uncharted territory, really, and it’s going to be interesting to see the legal end of it. But you know, speaking as a person who’s been in an industry of this for my entire life because it’s been automated and devalued and, you know, music is unfortunately not worth a lot as a product anymore. It’s interesting to see it on the visual arts side because on one hand I’m like, I think this is something that I’ve seen already.

0:08:34
CW: It feels a little deja vu to you.

0:08:36
PR: Yeah, and so, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. I mean, again, devaluing of art is a real thing that happens when the digital commodification of it becomes so easy.

0:08:49
CW: Well, yeah, repurposing and being inspired. There’s I mean, I mean, I haven’t seen cartoonists this up in arms, you know, since Lichtenstein. And cartoonists and portrait painters and everybody are very unsettled. And there’s going to be a lot more think pieces coming out. I as part of my job in PR, I get to see little forums and places where reporters look for sources. And I’ve seen a couple of leads where they’re actively seeking, like looking for artists who have had their job disappear because of AI art or who have actively lost gigs because of AI art. So journalists are looking for artists to comment. And we’re going to see, you know, what comes down the pike here in terms of how it’s applied commercially. So, yeah, I think it’s, you know, we’re kind of launching into a shallow dive right now. But bear in mind, we’ll do a deep dive after, after the dust has settled a little bit and we have some more information to gauge things on.

PR: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, AI is already starting to take over other areas as well. Writing is affected by it. Also an area that music actually beat to the punch because even David Bowie wrote with AI back in the 90s. And we’ll cover that when we do deep dive into the topic. You know, this is to say that I think the important thing is artists just, you know, focus on just creating. Like don’t stop and, you know, accept that this is a possibility that it may uproot, you know, the way things work and it may not be for the better in the long run but at the same time, I just don’t want people to feel discouraged by this. That’s really the takeaway that I want people to have from this. It’s just do art, do it for the sake of doing it.

0:10:41
CW: Yeah. I did not know David Bowie dipped into AI back in the 90s. Now, I’m Afraid of Americans makes so much more sense.

0:10:52
It really, yeah, okay. Moving from art to politics, we also, you know, I wanted to mention, I can’t analyze it right now, but I wanted to mention that as a skeptic, and I’m sure other people in our listenership feel this way, it’s a bit unnerving to see how many Trump copycats are popping up and using conspiracy theories to generate, the kind term would be political action, the possibly more accurate term would be attempted coups around the world. We’ve got Brazil and Germany, things like that happening there.

0:11:31
BR: Yeah, I saw something on that. You had Jair Bolsonaro, the legitimately former president of Brazil who’s now been replaced by Lula, who is both the former and current president of Brazil, a leftist. It was interesting because I follow Latin American politics to some extent, and it was interesting sort of seeing what was going to be going on there because Bolsonaro was close with Trump and in many ways modeled his campaign after Trump’s. And they both have this sort of authoritarian tone to them. Both of them were to some extent COVID deniers and so on.

0:12:09
CW: Anti-science and not so big on the truth unless it served them.

0:12:13
BR: Yeah, not so big on that. So initially after Lula won, it was interesting because everyone was sort of holding their breath in Brazil because everyone’s like, okay, well, is Bolsonaro gonna do the Trump playbook of rigged elections? And he’d made moves that he hadn’t formally conceded, but he was making efforts to transition. So it was like, okay, well, I haven’t said that I’m accepting the vote, but I’m not going to explicitly hold it up. And then, of course, as you mentioned, in Germany, there was recent revelations just in the past few weeks about attempted coup and last I heard there’s actually some influences of QAnon and things like that.

0:13:02
CW: Apparently, it’s some German princes which don’t really exist anymore because there’s no royalty in Germany but these guys are distantly related and yeah, we’ll see what happens. Again, something we should be keeping an eye on and might do a deeper dive into later. So I guess this is your opener edition of, Hey, We Should Do a Show About That.

0:13:26
BR: That’s right. We have a lot of topics in store for 2023. So we’ll see.

0:13:33
CW: Not going anywhere anytime real soon. Okay.

0:13:35
BR: And before we go, this coming Friday, the 16th, is actually the anniversary of a famous case from 1997. You know what I’m talking about? I had a role in investigating it.

0:13:46
CW: I do know, but I-

0:13:48
BR: You do know.

0:13:49
CW: Let’s see if the listeners can guess before you tell them.

0:13:52
BR: Well, we did a show on it, ding, ding. Yes, this is the famous Pokemon panic that plagued Tokyo and environs on the 16th of 1997. And it was a famous case and I ended up, I actually investigated it in 2000. So it actually been about three years after it happened. I didn’t have any particular background in medicine or anything like that, but I had some experience in mass hysteria and mass osogenic illness. So I tackled it and I’m pleased to say that between myself and Bob Bartholomew, we co-authored a piece in the Southern Medical Journal and we kind of solved the case. So that’s kind of cool.

CW: 25 years ago. So you would have been in your late 20s.

0:14:35
BR: I was barely out of college. Barely out of college.

0:14:38
CW: Well, well, congratulations retroactively there.

0:14:40
BR: Thank you very much.

CW: OK, well, without further ado, let’s look at some strange vehicles in folklore.

0:14:52
BR: So today we’re talking about, well, first, let me give you a title that I’m especially proud of. I hear Celestia giggling. So today we’ll be talking about vile vans and sinister sedans, vehicular vernacular.

0:15:25
CW: Yes, and Ben, as you may or may not know, the episodes will be titled that so people will be able to read it before they even push play.

0:15:35
BR: You know, I don’t listen to our show. I don’t know if you know this or not.

0:15:38
CW: You just wanted to say that because you were so proud of coming up with that title.

0:15:43
BR: Yeah, it’s got, it’s got syncopation and all sorts of, I mean, this is a, come on, well, you could, you could sing this, right? Come on.

0:15:53
PR: Oh, yeah.

0:15:55
CW: Vehicular vernacular does have a ring to it. And I learned today that vernacular is a term often used by folklorists, correct?

BR: It is. That’s one of the folklore terms that sort of like the like the word, like the phrase urban legend. So to folklorist, it has a specific meaning to the general population. Anything, myth or misinformation, urban legend. So but yes, so that’s that’s what we’re talking about today. So a sort of medley of of mechanical mischievery.

0:16:23
CW: All right. We’ve got to move along before Ben alliterates any further here.

0:16:28
BR: Fine.

0:16:29
CW: I think we’re reaching our limit.

0:16:32
BR: Oh, you can cram all the puns you want into it. I try to squeeze a little alliteration, a little literacy into the proceedings.

0:16:39
CW: Hey, hey, puns are like clowns. You can fit a million into a car, but alliteration requires a little bit more room.

0:16:48
BR: Fine, we’ll move on.

0:16:50
CW: I’ll begin by saying I came across some vehicular folklore in the wild just recently. I was at my mechanic’s shop, and this might be something you guys are familiar with too, from your childhoods or your middle teens or whatnot. An older fellow comes into the auto mechanic, and I’m sitting there waiting for my alternator to be changed out. And he starts talking about this old car he had and how he, in order to deter potential car thieves, he wired up a really big battery to the steering wheel, which was metal as his anti-theft device. And then he said he also had a friend who came up with something involving bug spray that would be sprayed into the eyes of anybody getting into the car that was not the rightful owner. And he was 100% serious, but I was thinking back to all the tall tales I used to hear about alternatives to using car alarms or boots. I’ve heard stories about live snakes being left in the car.

BR: Mad Max, the road warriors, right there.

CW: And I looked around, I didn’t see any documentation of this type of rumor or legend or tall tale, but I did find some decals that advertise your car is protected by a black mamba.

0:18:15
BR: This isn’t some Texan’s euphemism for whatever… his unit?

CW: No.

0:18:21
BR: Okay.

CW: It’s a dangerous snake. It’s a very dangerous snake. dangerous thing. Do you guys remember anybody talking about, you know, weird ways to protect an automobile that that were a little jerry-rigged and dangerous?

0:18:35
PR: Yeah, yeah. I very distinctly remember that the one about the car battery wired to either the steering wheel or the door handle or something. Unfortunately, while batteries do have the car batteries, do you have the amps to hurt someone. It just doesn’t have enough voltage to really do anything.

0:18:53
So that myth is a little busted on its face.

0:18:57
CW: I’m remembering another one he talked about, though, putting razor blades on the underside of the car handle the door handle.

0:19:03
PR: Oh, that’s a nasty one.

0:19:04
CW: You guys heard of that one?

0:19:06
PR: That’s very urban legendy.

BR: Yeah, I mean, that’s right up there with razor blades and AIDS-infected needles and coin returns of telephones. I mean, it just seems like overkill. It’s like, you know, to get into your own car, you have to carefully de-booby trap it. I don’t, I’m not following this.

PR: The disarmed traps to get in, it’s like a-

0:19:29
CW: It always, it made for a, ooh, I heard, you know, I heard this, I heard that story of, you know, somebody really overly protective of their car. It’s willing to go through that. And we’ve also got urban legends that are way more urban legendary, like in terms of what you should watch out for as a driver. Like, oh, don’t flash your lights on anybody in opposing traffic, because there’s gang members out there that are looking for somebody that flash their, you know, they’ll drive with their lights off.

BR: The ol’ gang initiation, yes.

CW: Yeah, somebody flashes their headlights to say, hey, hey, turn your lights on. That’s who their next victim is going to be.

0:20:08
BR: I am skeptical.

0:20:10
CW: You guys had to have heard that one if you were around in the 90s, yeah.

0:20:14
BR: That is classic urban legend right there.

PR: Yeah, I think that one might have been referenced in the movie Urban Legend as a matter of fact.

BR: Those who are familiar with legends, Jan Brunvand, who I’m proud to call a friend and colleague and he’s sort of considered the godfather of urban legends or the grandfather of urban legends. He’s written more on urban legends than anybody else and he’s got just extensive stuff on that. So, if people are interested in more on this, check out Jan’s work.

0:20:46
CW: I found one more thing and then I’m going to turn it over to you, Ben, because I know you brought the serious heavy lifting when it comes to specific urban legends and scary horror folklore about cars. But I came across a story that was put on Medium in early 2020, and it manages to combine new technology in cars with ghost hunting. I was a little surprised at this. Kenny Biddle might want to check it out. Now, as with anything on the internet, there’s always the chance that this is satire or not really serious, but the whole article read like it was deadly serious. And it was posted on Medium by an author named Mykeff, and it’s just spelled M-Y-K-E-F-F. He noticed that the sensors on his car, and you may have noticed these new cars, they’ve got sensors everywhere, make sure you don’t back up over your kids bicycle, or hit the you know, hit the other car when you’re parallel parking. He turned off his back sensors, because he was putting a bicycle carrier back there. So it would have been like, you know, alarming every, every second, if he had left them on. And so he believed that the rest of the sensors much like when a blind man develops his other senses in a hyper, you know, sensitory way. He believed the other car sensors got that much stronger.

0:22:10
BR: Okay. Do tell.

0:22:11
CW: And he started noticing the front sensors would go off at odd times randomly.

0:22:15
He couldn’t find a pattern to it and there was no explanation until he figured it out. And I’ll just read this one paragraph to you here. Then one day I had a revelation. These were not false alarms at all. Rather, my car’s sensors were fulfilling their duties perfectly as originally designed and programmed to do. What I eventually understood is that my car is simply detecting invisible entities on the road. I grasp that these collision warning beeps are being triggered by the vehicle’s heightened sensitivity to invisible beings, its sensor behavior made total sense. It was also a somewhat transformative and spiritual event for me since it has opened my eyes or ears to another dimension of life on the streets.” So he does go on and explain why this is most likely ghosts and not aliens.

0:23:14
BR: I wanna make sure he got the right explanation for this.

0:23:19
CW: In case you wanted a differential diagnosis there, but yes, it’s amusing and it shows you how people really think outside the box or outside the sedan when it comes to new technology and stuff that happens.

0:23:34
PR: I just, you know, I’m a technologist for a living, so it’s really hard for me to hear something like that where, you know, disabling a sensor would increase the power of other sensors. That is not how that technology works.

CW: I knew that would bother you.

PR: If you take a wheel off a car, the other three don’t work better. So it’s definitely not the case. And also, if your sensors are going off on your car at random times, I really urge you to take it to the shop because that is a malfunctioning sensor and it could be a safety issue. So don’t jump to ghosts, I mean, unless you’re trying to become one, but you really need to get that looked at. So that’s definitely a safety issue.

0:24:16
CW: Yeah, yeah. I’m there with you there.

0:24:19
BR: I’m wondering if in his house, if he has lights on all around the house and he unscrews the bulbs on all but one light? Is it like as bright as the sun? I mean, how does this work?

PR: Yeah, I mean, that must be the case. Like, if you only plug one thing in and unplug everything else, you plug your drill in and it goes hypersonic.

0:24:41
BR: Yeah, that makes total sense, to quote him.

0:24:45
CW: It had some other hallmarks of, you know, crank writing, like, you know, other scientific discoveries have been made accidentally. So don’t discount this. And I would like I’d very much like some engineers to look at this. So, Pascual, if you want to if you want to write him, I’ll send you the link.

0:25:01
PR: I’m sure I’ve looked at it as much as I need to know that he’s wrong.

0:25:12
CW: So, Ben, what are you bringing us in terms of needy car stories? There’s some scary and there’s some weird.

0:25:19
BR: Yeah. So I just, you know, in the realm of folklore, of course, folklore covers all sorts of things from urban legends to rumors and conspiracies to folkways and, in fact, food and things like that. But really, the legends and rumors really have always fascinated me, and particularly when you sort of drill down into specific themes, ghosts, for example, or railroads or whatever. And in this case, we have cars and vehicles and the role that they play, not just in our daily lives, but in the stories that we tell. As I was going through this topic, I was thinking of some of the horror films and other films that people, you know, popular ones that people have seen that have some sort of folkloric motif to it or some connection to death. So, you know, for example, one that jumps out, it was National Lampoons, where you had the grandmother on the roof of the car.

0:26:19
Was that a European vacation or a Christmas vacation?

PR: That was just vacation, I think, when they went to the theme park.

BR: Wally World.

0:26:27
CW: Yeah. The grandmother on the top of the car. You’re not thinking of the Beverly Hillbillies?

0:26:31
BR: No, that one was still alive, I believe.

0:26:37
But yeah, so we have, so in that case, it’s played for laughs, but I mean, that is a urban legend. I mean, that idea is based on a legend. And then you have horror films, like one of the first times that I saw a scary van being depicted on film was probably the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the original. Spoiler alert, even though the film’s been out for 40 years, the film begins with a bunch of late teens, early 20s in a van crossing through deep, wild Texas. And they-

0:27:12
CW: You’re saying the Texas Chainsaw Massacre is set in Texas and there’s a massacre?

0:27:16
BR: Crazy, right?

0:27:17
PR: And there is a chainsaw, yeah.

0:27:18
BR: And there’s a chainsaw there too, right. In some of the later sequels you see the Sawyer family who is this, you know, the Texas Chainsaw killers and they ended up making barbecue and they also use a van and grab people and abduct them. I saw the film Black Phone, which was, if I’m not mistaken, based on Joe Hill, I think is Stephen King’s son, a short novel by him. And it features a clown-like figure. He’s not actually a clown, but certainly clown-like, and he has balloons abducting people. And there’s a, do you guys ever see Jeepers Creepers?

CW: Oh yeah. It’s been a while.

PR: That’s a fun one.

BR: That was, Pascual, if I’m remembering right, it’s not a van, but it’s like a giant.

PR: Yeah, it’s almost like a, like an old school box truck or like, but the front kind of looks like

0:28:12
an old tow truck with a cattle catcher on it.

CW: Now, filmmakers are not dumb. They know that you can take a vehicle and make it look scary and looming and foreboding and, and creep people out in their movie theater seats as you have it rumbling slowly in the distance and then approaching. But the thing about that is we’ve got cars every day around us all the time. So there’s some interplay that goes on there and that creates legends and rumors and scary stuff happening in real life.

0:28:47
BR: There’s there’s something I mean, there’s something specific about vans and sedans, right? I mean there aren’t really creepy scary stories about you goes or Kia’s…

CW: But everybody everybody knows the black sedans have the government

0:29:01
You know men in black and then the vans have the child abducting clowns. It’s a clear delineation

0:29:08
BR: It’s a known thing right?

PR: Like Lincoln town cars always have mobsters in them.

BR: Right, and that’s a great example. Richie Rich drives a Rolls Royce or whatever. So that’s exactly where I’m going with it, right, is that in pop culture, in our assumptions and beliefs, we associate specific figures and specific characters and specific types of people with specific vehicles. And in the case of vans, there’s sort of two different types. One is ordinary workers. Now, Pascual, if I’m not mistaken, you spent quite a while working out of a van, right?

0:29:48
PR: Sure. Yeah. Many years as a technician out in the field driving around in a big old van. And did you ever get you sort of weird looks or anybody sort of wondering what was going on with you? Or it was clearly marked and it was clear to what you were doing?

PR: Yeah, thankfully the van I was in had company logos on the sides and ladders on the roof, so I didn’t get too many side eyes from it.

BR: Well that’s fortunate. Not everybody is as fortunate as you are, and we’ll talk about that a little bit later on, but as it happens, there are people, just ordinary lay people who have gotten a side have been gotten the side eye and in some cases have actually been chased down and in fact attacked just because they’re driving a van.

CW: It’s a whole different kind of road rage.

BR: But so before we get too far down, so let me sort of give a little hodgepodge of vile vans and sinister sedans. So one case that I wrote about a while back was, did you guys hear about the taxi drivers in Japan picking up ghosts?

0:30:54
CW: I think you mentioned that one time, but we didn’t go into detail about it.

0:30:59
BR: Yeah. So it was a strange case. So it happened about 10 or so years ago. A lot of weird things happen in Japan, no offense.

0:31:08
CW: It’s one of the charms about Japan.

0:31:12
BR: It is. You got Kushisaki-onna in every street corner. You got yokai everywhere. And in this case, you had taxi drivers in Northeastern Japan who were reporting picking up victims of the tsunami in 2011, an earthquake. So in these cases, you had people in… So these were in areas that were especially hard hit by the tsunami earthquake. So it sort of makes sense, right? Because obviously the local taxi drivers, they’re aware of what happened there. It’s very, of course, very traumatic and destroyed a lot of things, a lot of lives. And so once a ghost story sort of takes traction, it circulates. And so you had reports of taxi drivers saying that a passenger would hail them down, they would get in the back of their taxi cab and give an address. And then when they turn around to ask a question, they were gone.

0:32:04
CW: I want to know how many of these ghosts were actually clever people thinking, Aha, I know how to get out of paying a taxi fare. As soon we hit a red light, I’m out of here, you know.

0:32:15
BR: Well, you would think the tax jar would be would be queued in on that. But who really knows?

0:32:20
CW: Yeah, they’re usually pretty quick when it comes to missing fares.

0:32:27
BR: Yes, yes.

0:32:28
CW: Well, in the vein of like haunted taxi cabs or cars, we’ve also got something we mentioned briefly after you guys went to the Zach Bagans Museum. James Dean’s allegedly haunted car, or I guess you would call it a cursed car, because bad things happen to people who bought that Porsche, right?

0:32:47
BR: Yes, the parts to, I think it was Little Bastard, the car axle, which some of us waited for, what seemed like an eternity in a very hot place to see. Very dramatic and, you know, the telling the whole story and the walls come down, you’re expecting to see, you know, the lost Ark of the Covenant or something and it’s a piece of metal.

0:33:09
CW: It’s an axle, yeah. Well, I mean, that’s not the only haunted, cursed car like that. I’ve also read the the the automobile that Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in, also, allegedly, according to some stories, was responsible for killing a few other people after the Archduke was shot in it, like rolling over onto a doctor and stuff like that. But none of these were ever actually found to be true. They’re just, you know, tall tales rise up after somebody famous dies in a car.

0:33:41
BR: Yeah, absolutely. And do you guys remember the roadside attraction called The Thing?

0:33:53
PR: Oh, I’ve been there. Well, um, so, uh, so I guess this is going to be a spoiler alert. Cause they, they seem to really work hard to, uh, keep it under wraps what it is. And it’s, you get teased along a I-10. God, it’s, it’s somewhere between, uh, Tucson and the New Mexico border. I think I can’t, I know it’s on 10 in Arizona and you just keep getting teased by these billboards… Every it seems like every few miles and it’s just like what is the thing? Come see the thing. You know, what is the secret of the thing? And so It just so happens that conveniently it’s at a gas station.

CW: So signage with that like that would so work on me. I’m all about stuff like that.

PR: I mean it worked on me the very first time. I was on tour with my band at the time in a van. So we just pulled over to gas up at this building that said, The Thing with a big giant question mark. And, yeah, we went inside to check it out. Now, I guess it is – I don’t know how much it is to see now. It was like five bucks back then or something. But when we went in to see it, it was a little underwhelming.

BR: Underwhelming? Come on.

CW: Is it one of those vehicles called a thing?

0:35:20
PR: No. So, so there is a vehicle. I think that’s the first thing I want to talk about is that the thing itself is actually supposedly a mummy. And it is in, to me, it doesn’t look like a real mummy. It’s very flat and kind of almost looks like someone made it.

0:35:44
BR: People were flat back then. Yeah. If you look at hieroglyphics, the depictions are very flat. So we know for a fact.

0:35:51
CW: You know, there’s a there’s a fake one that they swap out for the real one when the museum needs it back from the gas station. And so maybe if you went on a Tuesday, the mummy was out for cleaning.

0:36:04
BR: Just like the Minnesota Iceman.

0:36:07
PR: Yeah, so that is the thing. Spoilers. But I believe there’s also, I’ve heard it was a mother and child. The only thing I saw was just one big mummy with holding some object. I get it, which I guess is the child. But and this has been probably 20 years since I saw it But the other thing that was there was that they had a Rolls-Royce there that was supposedly Adolf Hitler’s. So that was that was in a little more interesting, but again, you know it is The claim that it’s Hitler’s Rolls-Royce is backed up by a sign next to it and I think nothing else.

BR: Now to be fair, to be fair, the sign is not hand-lettered, it’s printed.

0:36:59
PR: Yeah, someone actually paid to have the sign made. Other than that, though, that’s all I really remember from it. I know there were a few other various things, but some Western relics or I mean, it has a 1937 Rolls Royce at it, which, if nothing else, is just a pretty cool car to see in person. But whether that’s Adolf Hitler’s car or not, I feel like it’s maybe unlikely. It just seems like a gas station in Arizona is an odd place for it to end up.

0:37:39
CW: Did they have Hitler’s sweater right next to it that you could try on if you wanted to?

0:37:42
PR: Oh yeah, no, no, no, just, just the car.

0:37:45
But I think it would have been great if they just have like Hitler’s mustache, you know, frame next to it or something.

BR: There you go. Just as plausible. I mean, I, as I understand it, there, there were a couple things and, and it was like, okay, here’s Hitler’s car. The thing is we can’t prove it

0:38:06
PR: That’s the thing

0:38:10
BR: The thing is, you’re not getting your money back and we can’t prove it that’s the thing

PR: there’s no it’s just legal immunity based on semantics.

CW: That’s that’s true. There’s no promise that they’re breaking to any patrons.

0:38:29
PR: Nope. No.

0:38:34
CW: Is that just one, Ben, of the many roadside, road-associated bits of urban legendary that we can see in person?

0:38:43
BR: Yeah, there’s certainly more than just that one. Although that’s probably the best known one certainly here in the American Southwest. But, you know, it’s part of, of course, a broader tradition of the folklore and legends. And a while back we talked about the Japanese taxi drivers taking ghosts to different places. And of course, that is actually one of the most universal urban legends of all time, which is the vanishing hitchhiker story. So, oh, yeah, yeah, that’s it’s sort of the yes, it’s sort of the I mean, if any time a folklorist is asked, OK, what is an urban legend? Give me an example of urban legend. You pull up the vanishing hitchhiker because everyone’s heard it. Now, most people, they don’t know that term is legend or they they may challenge you on it. And so like, oh, you know, give me an example of urban legend. I mean, I can give you, you know, a couple hundred, but I’ll go to the vanishing hitchhiker and be like, well, yeah, but that that really happened. I mean, my cousin told me about this and, you know, you weren’t there, dude. And so suddenly you go from being the esteemed expert folklorist to being some jerk, you know, trying to pull one over on him.

0:39:59
CW: Or if the person you’re talking to is intellectually nimble, then it’s a great example to show, yeah, urban legends are all around us, and you probably know a bunch that you didn’t even know were urban legends.

BR: Yes, exactly.

CW: And The Vanishing Hitchhiker also, I know you’ve brought it up before in terms of there’s a whole lot of spawn from that urban legend. It’s like the ground zero for, it’s like the patient zero for a bunch of other tales that are similar but diverge a little bit?

BR: Yeah, I mean that’s one of the characteristics of urban legends and folklore more broadly is that it appears in different versions and variants depending on where the story is told. So urban legends will be localized. So for example here in New Mexico you may hear urban legend about an ankle slasher who’s hiding under cars at the Cottonwood Mall, which isn’t too far from my house. If it’s in Vegas, it’ll be a different mall and elsewhere. So typically, the stories are tailored and told. Keep in mind that urban legends are told as true. That’s part of their definition. So whether the teller themselves necessarily believes in it or not is no other matter, but it’s told as true.

0:41:16
It’s told as this really happened or this happened to a friend of a friend or whoever else. Anyways, I just realized we actually haven’t told the urban legend story. I’m guessing listeners will know what it is, but I’ll just give a quick outline just to set the stage. So basically, as I mentioned, there’s lots of different versions and variations all around the world. The Japanese taxi post-tsunami is one example. But basically the framework is that it’s usually on a, at nighttime and there’s a lonely road and there is a one person or sometimes a couple driving and all of a sudden they see a hitchhiker by the side of the road asking for help or has their thumb out or something. Different versions, sometimes it’s a young girl, sometimes it’s an old woman, a traveling salesman type figure, whatever else. And they, of course, pull over and because it’s a lonely road, there’s no help nearby, no convenience stations, it’s a rural area. And they say, oh yeah, get in, I’ll be happy to help you out. Where are you going? And they will oftentimes say something sort of quietly or inscrutably, not quite sure what they said. They sort of, okay, well, we’ll just go on ahead. Sometimes they’ll point to a light up ahead in the distance, suggesting that’s where they live, that’s where they’re going. So they go, don’t worry about it, we’ll get you there in no time. It’s cold outside, happy to give you a ride. And as they’re driving along, the driver and or the passenger are sort of like, the person’s being really quiet, they’re not really saying anything. Sometimes they’ll turn around and the person’s gone. The hitchhiker’s gone and they’re freaking out and they’re like, well, this is the weirdest thing. We didn’t hear the door open, what’s going on? So they will sometimes pull into the nearest house or the one that was indicated by the light ahead. And they’ll knock on the door saying, I hate to bother you, I know it’s late at night, but I had the weirdest thing happen. I had a young girl a couple of miles back in the darkness say that she lived here, we gave her a ride, do you know anything about it? And the person who opens the door says, oh yes, that sounds like my dear Susie. She died 10 years ago on this very night. And then oftentimes there’s what’s called proof. So there will be the kicker the the sort of the twist at the end is that they will go and look in the back of the car and there are some sign that the it wasn’t just a dream so

CW: The shawl or a lollipop

0:43:49
BR: Exactly. So they left I had or a shawl or and you know, take your pick and then…

PR: Hitler’s sweater

0:44:01
BR: Exactly.

0:44:02
So that’s in a nutshell, that’s a vanishing hitchhiker. But so that’s one form of sort of it’s told as a as a frightening story again it’s got a little twist to it, a little sort of mystery to it. But there are other types of urban legends that deal with more sinister things such as vampires. Have you heard about those?

CW: Having to do with vehicles.

0:44:26
BR: Yes.

BR: Is this like where you invite the vampire into your car and then you’re screwed?

0:44:30
BR: No, but that’s that’s that’s a good that’s a good guess. No. So again, sort of going back to the broad idea of vans and sedans sort of being two classic archetypes of of scary vehicles where the people who are inside those either driving around or being driven by somebody, they are powerful, they are mysterious. In a lot of cases, the vehicles are described as having tinted windows or no windows at all. They’re usually either white, black, or in some cases, red. But it’s never like blue or yellow or green. It’s always one of those.

0:45:14
CW: To me, honestly, the scariest vehicle is not a full black one or a full white one. It’s the one with 85,000 bumper stickers on it, talking about being a sovereign citizen and stuff. Those are the ones I really try to avoid.

PR: Yeah, yeah, that’s smart.

0:45:29
BR: With good reason. That is a worthy alarm bell.

CW: But yeah, I want to hear more about this vanpire.

BR: Vanpire, that’s very clever. So actually, so I’m going to I’m going to quote briefly from an excellent book by a folklorist named Louise White. And she wrote a book titled Speaking with Vampires, Rumor and History in Colonial Africa. And if you read my book, Tracking Chupacabra, I quote briefly from this book, partly because there’s connections to vampires. So White did ethnological, anthropological research in East Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa generally, in some cases going back to the 1950s. And it was fascinating because a lot of the stories that were circulating, and this actually ties in with things we’ve talked about in the show before, such as organ theft, kidney theft, and of course, vampires. So what you found is that in a lot of cases, particularly in East Africa, the vampires have careers. So they’re not just, you know, Bela Lugosi looking like a count in a in a coffin. They are sort of more mundane vampires. And these vampires, literally vampires, they’re said to suck the blood out of people. They have day jobs.

0:46:52
CW: Like, you could have Vlad the Uber driver show up?

0:46:55
BR: Vlad the Uber driver. Now, I’ve actually had an Uber driver named Vlad.

0:47:02
CW: Of course you would.

0:47:03
BR: I like to talk to Uber drivers.

0:47:06
CW: What can I say?

0:47:07
PR: I just want to mention, when I was a teenager, my buddy had a 1969 Impala and it was named Vlad the Impala.

CW: Oh, I love those.

BR: That’s pretty clever. Clever. I like that. So again, going back to East Africa, a lot of the times when East Africans talked about vampires, again, it wasn’t the sort of almost campy Western version of vampires. These were sort of everyday people who have new vampires who were working among them and were sort of threatening them under the guise of authority. So for example, oftentimes firemen were thought to be vampires. People in the local fire brigades were said to drive around in cars or vans and grab people off the street and then take them away, sometimes to be put into a pit in the local fire station and then drained of blood.

0:48:02
CW: Oh, no, that’s… I mean, you got like… Firemen are people you want to be safe and not rumored to be villainous blood-sucking, you know, goons.

BR: Yes. Yeah.

CW: That’s… I mean, I’m surprised that firemen, people who are in the fire department, were targeted this way. You’d think it would go to, like, the tax man or lawyers or something like that, rather than firemen.

0:48:29
BR: You would, but again, there’s a couple of twists here. One is that, so typically the vampires are assumed to be in positions of authority. So these would be police officers, in some cases doctors, and firemen, things like that. And when I was researching the organ theft legends, particularly in Brazil and in South America, the same thing came up where there were these rumors that were circulating that to this day the rumors are still out there. And a lot of people in the favelas, the slums surrounding Rio de Janeiro, for example, and Sao Paulo, they won’t go to the doctor because they’re afraid that if they go to a hospital, their organs will be stolen from them.

0:49:15
CW: Man, these are some harmful, harmful rumors.

0:49:19
BR: Yes, exactly. So under the auspices of, you know, of medical and police and things like that and fire, people are coming in and taking things from them. So it’s just fascinating when you dig into it. And so I talked about the different colors, usually black or white, in some cases red. And in the 1950s and 60s, there were the Europeans who lived in East Africa, they had their own rumors about whites being pulled off the roads and being beaten and killed for driving in red vans, for example. But typically, the Africans themselves were less concerned about the color of the van than things that were on it. So oftentimes in these rumors, there would be something that would set this van or vehicle, maybe sedan, apart. So there would be a cross on it or there would be a shiny metal object on it or a unique hood ornament. A second ago, Pascual mentioned the Jeepers Creepers vehicle with the very distinctive cattle guard thing.

0:50:25
CW: So flaring out your vehicle is a very bad idea in some parts of the world.

0:50:29
BR: Yes, yes, exactly. And in addition to the different ornaments and things like that, one of the telltale signs of a sinister van is a lack of windows or curtains on the windows. And, of course, you can see why, right? Because if you can’t see what’s going on inside, then it must be something mysterious and nefarious. That’s the same principle with Area 51, right? They won’t let us on there, therefore it’s aliens.

0:50:57
CW: Yeah, yeah.

0:50:58
BR: And there was one story I was reading about a district officer in Kenyanka who gave, there was a geologist who went there, a white guy, and he was given a red van to do his work. And everyone was like, no, no, no. Do not, first of all, paint that van. Number two, they actually, the local had modified the van so that you could actually see inside it. The idea being that this white geologist would be safer if anybody who wanted to could look inside his van and see that it wasn’t filled with children or body bags or whatever else. So, yeah, so that’s a real concern over there.

0:51:43
CW: See, these are things you don’t really think about if you’re going to a foreign place, but you got to be up on the local advice from when it comes to folklore.

0:51:53
BR: Yeah. And I’ll just give you one other quick example. In Kenya in 1968, there were rumors circulating that you should not hitchhike, and certainly not in accepting rides in vans and sedans, because the cars were outfitted with special back seats that could drain your blood.

0:52:14
CW: That’s interesting technology, okay.

0:52:18
BR: Yeah, the idea was that there is these, again, sinister sedans and vile vans that had seats in them that all of a sudden, you know, it’s the doors lock and your, you know your arms are clamped down and you’re drained of blood by syringes and some sort of.

CW: It is a vanpire! I love it.

0:52:42
PR: Can I stop real quick for just a quick note? I funny enough, there’s a song that I wrote about 12 years ago called Blood Diesel, that’s about a car that runs off of blood, based on a short story of one of our band members. I can make that song available, you know, just to share something when we share this episode, because it’s just funny that it’s totally about this.

0:53:08
CW: Yeah.

BR: Hells to the yes.

CW: Well, hopefully if that part remains unedited and in there, that means we have found a way to link it to people so that people can hear your song on the Squaring the Strange Facebook page.

BR: There you go.

CW: Well, Ben, knowing you, you’ve got a psychological angle on this too. Is there any psychological research or reasoning behind why vehicles can be so scary?

BR: Well, there’s a couple of things.

0:53:34
One of them, as I mentioned, is that the vehicles, they’re big enough. You can suspect some nefarious, sinister things are going on inside. And they’re powerful vehicles. They’re not tiny little motorcycles that don’t have any grumps in them and things like that.

CW: I’ve never heard any bad rumors about a tuk-tuk.

BR: No, not yet, but maybe we can start one.

0:54:06
CW: But every stranger danger story involves a guy beckoning some kids over to a van.

0:54:10
BR: Yeah, and as we talked about on the show before, this topic blends in with so many other aspects, right? It blends in with stranger danger, it blends in with the satanic panic in some ways, and it ties in with the phantom clowns and urban legends. There’s so many different angles into it, including psychological priming. So exactly as you said, I mean, when the public gets it in their heads that this type of vehicle is associated with bad things going on, and not just bad things, we’re not just talking selling stolen car stereos out of the back, we’re talking murders, we’re talking organ theft, we’re talking child abductions, right? Child trafficking rings. So these are hot button topics that of course frighten parents and they scare people and that’s one of the bases of QAnon, right? And things like that where people believe for various reasons and again, we’ve given many examples on the show before. There’s this evil thing going on and if you just share enough warnings on social media, people will be equipped to deal with it. Or to, you know, it may save one child’s life. You know, if you see that again, right? And a real life example of this happened in 2002, where, do you guys remember the DC Sniper’s case?

0:55:32
CW: Yeah, very well. I had just moved away from the Baltimore DC area and I was a little worried about my friends.

0:55:37
BR: Yeah, so for those who were too young at the time or otherwise miss it, there were several terrifying weeks in 2002 where snipers, as it turned out, there were two of them were shooting people randomly in the D.C. area on the Beltway. And it was called the Beltway sniper. I follow the case pretty closely because I was I was writing for Discovery at the time and it was a scary case, of course, as you can imagine, it made international news and it was just terrifying because it was just random attacks, there seemed to be no rhyme or reason, people were just getting shot and in the end, there were, I think, 10 people killed over the course of three weeks.

0:56:19
CW: Yeah, and there was always reports of either a van or a box truck.

0:56:24
BR: Right, exactly. And so this is where this ties in, right? Is that for virtually the entire time this was national news, for almost three weeks, the public was told to be on the lookout for a white van and or a white box truck, as you said. This was based upon several eyewitness accounts who said, yes, I heard something, and I looked over and there was a white van, so that must have been coming from there. Nobody was ever close enough to the shooters to see anything specific. It was always sort of at a distance. But in the case that there was one particular attack in Virginia, where witnesses reported seeing a white box truck speed away. So again, just all over the place, there were just day and night composite images of the vehicles saying, you know, everybody be on the lookout for a white van. And as you can imagine, there were thousands and thousands of tips. Why? Because there’s thousands and thousands of white vans and white box trucks in the Beltway area, in the DC area.

0:57:33
CW: Yeah, and oddly enough, that doesn’t make people calm down, like, oh, it’s probably nothing. It makes everybody freak out even more because they’re everywhere.

0:57:40
BR: Right. You’re seeing you can’t drive more than 20 minutes without seeing a white van or a white box truck. So, you know, if you’ve got it in your head, you’ve been told over and over and over again that this is what you should look out for, then it’s no wonder that the police were inundated with reports because, of course, they were. But there was another twist to the story, which didn’t get a lot of attention at the time. But after one of the attacks, one on October 3rd, witnesses reported seeing an older model dark automobile. At least one witness said it was a Chevy Caprice that looked suspicious or like it might be involved. This was reported to the police. But again, two weeks earlier, the narrative had been set. It’s like, no, we’re looking for a white van. White van, white van, white van, maybe a white box truck, but it’s white and it’s big and it’s boxy. That’s what we’re looking for. Well, sure enough, the two killers were eventually captured in a dark blue 1990 Chevy Caprice. It was interesting because when people went back and looked at it, like, well, hold on here. We’ve been told the entire country have been told for almost three weeks to look for a white van. And and oftentimes is a white guy in a white van. It turned out to be two black guys in a in a dark blue Chevy Caprice.

0:59:11
CW: I never thought about that case as indicative of psychological priming. But yeah, of course everybody was looking for a white van or a box truck. And my husband actually used to own a Chevy Caprice. My mother-in-law still does own a Chevy Caprice. Those cars are huge and full of metal. It’s actually not a bad choice. If you’re a deranged sniper that wants some thick metal around you and also be able to shoot people. It’s a tank, it’s a modern tank.

0:59:42
BR: And as I recall, they had actually modified the trunk to do the sniping. So anyway, it was just, it’s an interesting story. And anyway, it’s an interesting sort of case study in eyewitness testimony and reliability on one hand, and also the quickness and the tendency for people to lock onto what is a scary vehicle, what is a suspicious vehicle. Well, it’s a white van. And once you zero in on that, once that’s your frame of reference, then of course you’re going to see them everywhere due to psychological priming and confirmation bias. But it’s also going to distract you, at least in this case, from the real actual perpetrators and the real actual vehicle they were in.

CW: You know, I wonder if there are any marketing companies that do vinyl wraps for vehicles who point out it’ll make your company vehicle look great and whoever’s driving it won’t be in danger of being accused of being a murderer.

BR: That is a plus. There’s always that. There’s actually a case here in New Mexico in August of this year in Farmington, where there was a woman that had claimed that she had been abducted by two men in a black van in front of a busy car wash in Farmington. And, Pascual, you’ve been to Farmington, right? Been through there?

PR: Yeah, I was just through there a few weeks ago as of this recording, in fact.

BR: Yeah, I’ve been there a couple of times, and it’s a curious little town. It’s sort of very rural, very, how would you describe it?

1:01:17
PR: It’s like a, it’s a very small city, but it’s got a lot of farms in it and, and, and farms surrounding it. There is like a town in the middle of it and it’s, it’s just a little bigger than what I’d call a tiny town.

1:01:31
BR: Tiny plus town.

1:01:33
CW: Farming town, okay.

1:01:35
PR: Yeah, a tiny city that’s got farms around it.

1:01:38
BR: It is near the Four Corners region, for those who don’t know, and it’s also heavily Republican, for what that’s worth.

1:01:44
CW: So, Ben, would you say it’s a town where nothing ever happens, and if you hear something did, it’s probably a fake story?

1:01:52
BR: That is not a bad summary of where I was going with this. Thank you.

1:01:56
Anyway, it’s not too much of a story, but it is worth bringing up, because it is very recent and it is about this. So again, there was a woman that claimed that she was walking in front of a car wash in front of lots of people and a black van zoomed up, a door van opened and she was abducted and then taken in. And it just went, it went viral. And again, as you can imagine, you know, as it should, if it were true. So again, this was, this was early August of this year. The police heard the story, like be on the lookout for a black van with painted windows. And it’s being shared on social media, it’s being shared on Facebook and Instagram and elsewhere.

1:02:40
CW: Well, if I can jump in real quick, the rumor was started, the story was told by the woman who was allegedly kidnapped. Did she say she had managed to just get away at a light post or something?

1:02:53
CW: Yes.

CW: So it’s one of those where and I think we did a show on fake kidnappings.

BR: We did. Yes. Yeah So if people are interested in the phenomenon, I mean, it’s fascinating. There’s a whole show on that. But yes So that’s basically what happened was that she claimed she’d been abducted then she managed to get away and then she gave this description it later turned out that she had made up the whole thing and she admitted that that was the case. And interestingly, to his credit, the Farmington chief of police went on social media and number one excuriated social media for basically hurting the case. And number two, asked them to leave her alone. He said, look, this is a woman, she’s got issues going on, mental issues and otherwise. Yes, it was it was a fake abduction, but it was she didn’t mean any harm. And the police chief of all people told people to calm down and back off. So that was sort of interesting little.

CW: Oh, good for him.

BR: Yeah, I actually thought that was a good approach to take.

CW: So she had legitimate mental issues that caused her to falsify this report?

BR: Yeah, and it’s one of those things where, again, it’s a tricky situation because you don’t want to, obviously, you don’t want to discourage people who are actually abducted from reporting. And I’ve never thought that was plausible anyway. I mean, if somebody is arrested and even convicted and does a couple of weeks of jail time for falsely reporting an abduction. That’s not going to deter somebody who was actually abducted.

CW: I mean, I wouldn’t think so.

BR: Yeah. Like, well, I actually was abducted and, you know, and I’m not going to report it because this other woman who made hers up, you know…

1:04:37
CW: Well, I’m starting to run all the scenarios in my head now. And if if like an abusive partner abducted you and you wanted to report it, but then they were like, no, I’m going to tell them you’re faking it and you can do jail time. I could see how there’s there’s always a situation where somebody might be afraid of going to the police. There’s always going to be a situation. But this woman, she wasn’t because I remember you talked about some people who there is a woman you talked about that made up a story about being kidnapped by clowns because she was late for work.

BR: Yes.

CW: So it wasn’t a situation like that. This poor woman does have some mental…

1:05:18
BR: That did not happen.

CW: Okay.

1:05:20
BR: For those who are worried about it, yeah. And that’s actually tying with another one of the topics. I’m not going to get into it because we did a show on that, but yes, the phantom clowns.

1:05:30
So, yeah, as we talked about in the previous episode, there were reports in the 80s and through to this day of vans, typically white vans, being driven by child-abducting clowns. And fortunately, of course, it never actually happened. There were never any children who were abducted by clowns, but it was another example of these rumors that circulated. And keep in mind, of course, that that was, it wasn’t just that they were clowns. I mean, clowns, as we talked about, can be inherently scary. But if you’re going to claim that they’re abducting children, were they abducting them too?

CW: To the woods, obviously, but…

1:06:11
BR: Well, there’s the Hansel and Gretel thing, but yeah. So there are a couple of real-life cases. I’ll just sort of touch on one. And it’s actually a topic that I mentioned briefly in the Sueso several months back. And that was a case that happened in June of this year. Do you guys remember the man in Mexico who was abducted and tortured and killed because of the rumors?

1:06:34
CW: I remember you mentioned one from years ago that was pulled out of his utility van.

1:06:41
BR: Well, so in this case, it happened again in June of this year and it was a lawyer and political consultant from Mexico City. His name was Daniel Picano, and he was visiting his family in the rural town in the Pueblo Mountains, not too far from Mexico City. While he was there, rumors circulated on WhatsApp that he was there to abduct children, either to traffic them or to take their organs. And I touched on this briefly in a previous show, but what I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know at the time was that part of the reason that he was he was pulled out of his van and Set on fire and killed Was this there was these rumors the circulator on whatsapp who that claimed? He was a child doctor, but the other part of it was that Local children had recently claimed that a red van had scared them before Picano showed up to the town, the small town. And when police investigated, they found it was owned by somebody visiting from neighboring town. There was no child abductors. There was nothing bad going on, but the children had, for whatever reason, seen this red van and freaked out and thought that something sinister may be going on. Daniel Picasso shows up in a van into this scenario, not knowing that there was this pre-existing rumor that was circulating just, you know, just shortly before he drives in with his van and it fit the assumptions. It was like, well, here’s this stranger. He’s actually from Mexico City. He wasn’t he wasn’t from another country, but he wasn’t from the area who came in with with out of out of state plates in a van. And the rumors circulated that he was there to to abduct or kill or rape children. And that went from there and he ended up being killed. So, again, it’s in these cases, you know, I sound like a broken record, but these these rumors and conspiracy theories can have dangerous consequences sometimes.

1:08:51
CW: Well, Ben, you’re never really a bucket of sunshine when it comes to all the consequences of rumors and how they can literally be deadly. Do you have anything lighter to end on, please?

1:09:03
BR: I have something slightly lighter. So I’ll just mention that, again, obviously the case of Daniel Picano in Mexico is an outlier. It doesn’t happen all the time. It’s sort of a perfect storm of bad things. But here in the States and elsewhere, and there’s rumors that have circulated in Belgium and France, really all around the world, of these vans, and again, usually white or dark. I was reading a news article about a woman in Vernon, Michigan, named Joy Jones, who had, she had eight kids and a husband and she bought a white van and didn’t think anything of it because it fit all the kids. But soon she was getting the side eye from people in the neighborhood. People would sort of look at her weird and so she would actually be sitting in her white van outside of her school, her kids’ school, waiting to take the kids home and people would call the police because this woman is sitting in a white van outside of the school.

1:10:08
CW: That surprises me that they’d call the police on a woman in a van because usually you see that you think, oh, that’s the that’s a Sunday school driver or, you know, it’s always the the dudes in a white van that are super suspicious.

1:10:20
BR: Yeah. And again, I don’t know the details. It could have been they couldn’t actually see who was in the van. Maybe it was tinted windows, I don’t know. But again, it speaks to this sort of social assumption or framework that white vans are inherently suspicious or maybe up to no good, when in fact, of course, white vans are ubiquitous. I mean, white vans are used in utilities. I mean, they’re just all over the place. And yet, they do in just the right or the wrong framework, they can be interpreted as being something very sinister.

1:10:58
CW: Well, I do have something significantly lighter that we can end on. We do go over superstitions, many of them are dangerous, some of them are harmless. And I did manage to find one having to do with vehicles that will only cost you an omelet’s worth of effort here. If you would like to protect your car from bad luck, according to a Persian and Armenian superstition, all you have to do is place one egg in front of each tire of the vehicle. Then you get in the car, drive slowly forward and crush the four eggs, and your car will be protected from bad luck.

1:11:37
BR: Hmm.

1:11:38
CW: Results are not guaranteed.

1:11:40
BR: Yeah, I wonder if you can get a discount on your insurance if you send in the four broken eggs. See, I did it. Here’s the proof.

1:11:47
I want a 15 percent reduction. Thank you.

CW: Or at least get a coupon for a power washer so you can clean that crap off your driveway. You would think.

1:11:54
CW: Well, that was a fun topic as usual. We’re going to all get into our giant white box truck and head off into the sunset here. But we are working on plenty of topics. As we mentioned, we’ve got a… what’s the opposite of a derth? We’ve got…

1:12:29
BR: A plethora?

1:12:30
CW: We’ve got a whole basket of topics. We are, you know, we’ve got this constant list that’s just, we’re churning through. And then once we think we’re getting halfway through it, like we add 10 more topics because that’s the way the world works. So we hope everybody has a really wonderful holiday time. And, you know, you can always send us suggestions for topics. If you’re looking for a gift for us, that’s a wonderful gift. Another gift would be to visit our Patreon page and throw us a buck or two. We’ll spend it on coffee or pizza or, or donuts. Yeah, or, or a subscription to the services that we must subscribe to to get the podcast running. So take care, everybody. Have a wonderful holiday time.

Bye bye. See ya. We would like to extend heartfelt thanks to our top-tier, sponsor-level patrons, Amy Frusciaro-Kelly, Dr. Angela Matkey, Elizabeth Leggett, and Laura Ellis. Thank you for your continued support of our podcast. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor, or just throwing us a buck or two, please please visit Squaring the Strange on patreon.com and browse our selection of patron rewards. Every bit helps us keep the lights on here, and we are grateful to our generous friends who help us bring you quality content. If you are short on cash and want to just give us moral support, remember to recommend us to a friend, mention us on social media, or give us a review on your favorite podcast dispenser. If you have comments or topics you’d like to see covered, come join our community on the Squaring the Strange podcast discussion group on Facebook. Squaring the Strange is a production of Two Heads Studio LLC. Copyright 2021. Theme music provided by Shriek Back. Additional music by Memory, Keytard and Feathered, and Pasquale Romero. Additional support by Ashley Romero, Robert Sandin, and Alicia Jarvis. The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of Squaring the Strange and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Two Heads Studio, Kronos Creative, Center necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Two Heads Studio, Kronos Creative, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers, or any other affiliated organizations and employers.