Nightmare Now

The one about sandworms and other wormy cryptids and creatures

Sources: An interrupted JourneyAbout hypnosisNews Articles:Betty's DeathUNH Image collectionInterview with Betty ( this is the one where she looks grizzled) Lam, Crowley, and New HampshireMoreHypnosis Audio clips1 2Wiki links:Zeta ReticuliThe betty and Barney Hill incidentAleister CrowleyHypnotherapyimages: Loose transcript:Quick recap/their trips upThe hills, barney and betty were a middle aged married couple living in portsmouth nh, in the early sixties Betty was at the time of the incident a 42 year old white social worker living and working right here in portsmouthBarney was a 39 year old black postal worker who would commute to boston for work The third hill was delseyThe pair took delsey and drove up to Niagara falls and montreal for a lovely weekend getawayThe trip was mostly without incident until the drive homeThey were driving down route three and interstate 93 to get from canada to portsmouth, mostly a straight shot south through the state until the last 45min-1hrAfter reaching colebrook they saw a mysterious object in the sky, and dismissed it as a plane or satelliteI'm gonna breeze through this a little because all this is a recap, if you're confused check out last week's episode, and subscribe so you can catch up on all of it, and all the other cool stuff we coverEventually the object comes closer and they get out to look at it, barney goes nuts because there's figures in the craft, nazi looking irish chinese men depending on how far back in the screen memory hypnosis you go. After this they get back in the car and try to book it home with the UFO flying saucer looking craft following them, sometimes disappearing and sometimes getting very close. When they reach indian head resort the craft gets very close and they hear a repeated beeping noiseThe beeping resumes 2 and a half hours later and like 45 miles south and they both abruptly wake up with no memory of the drive since the first beeping. A little shaken the drove home and went to bed, slept for the afternoon and found some weird stuff with their belongingsShoesDressLuggageRings on carAfter a few days, weeks and months of trying to figure out what happened they eventually reported the sighting to nicap. National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena and the airforce.  There's an airforce base in portsmouth. There was, now it's a civilian airport since I think 91 So where we left last week they met major swett, yes that's his name who was Former air forceReading poetry at their churchAmateur hypnotistRecommends them to doctor benjamin simonA psychiatrist operating out of boston comfortable with using hypnotherapy. And we left while they were on the way to their first session with doctor simon Brief aside. Contact with ufologists/air forceSo I wanted to talk about this last session but couldn't really fit it in and in the end it doesn't add much to the story but adds a little bit credibility wise. They reported their stories to a ufologist who documented the facts of the case in the nicap database, which would eventually match up with thousands of other reports The air force was cagey about their response but did actually admit that there was no training flight or military craft out that nightNot that they have to I imagine, but it's another tick for the credibility column They did however find that the air force did pick up some sort of undesignated aircraft that night on radar. How common is that? No idea? Does it mean anything? Maybe but again that's another little tick inching things forward on the believeometerBut for brevity's sake I don't think it's really necessary to yank too much harder on that particular plot thread. Because it doesn't go much further than that unless we really expand our scope out to the entire ufo abduction phenomena rather than this particular case. So they arrive in boston, a little bit early to be punctual and have time to grab a bagel on their way in Fuckin dunkin that's right bud.So then they make it in and are on time for like a consultationSimon proceeds to get the same story as I just told plus  the fact that barney has some anxiety about being a shitty dad because his kids from a previous marriage are out in pennsylvania and aren't being dadded.  He also has stress ulcers Betty mentions her recurring dreams slash nightmares but they don't get much attention until later because it's decided that barney will be going first.THey spend the next few weeks going to visit doctor simon going into a light hypnotic induction, the short version of that is that BnB have to get comfortable with the idea of hypnosis and practice going under several times and reinforcing cue words, in popular media that's like they show up and he hits them with “You're getting very sleepy you'll fall asleep when I say bigfoot. Bigfoot. When you wake up you'll have no memory of this. You'll wake when I say chicken patty.  Chicken patty”Doing that few times allows the subject to go under very quickly and much deeper. HypnosisPatients with things locked away possibly by trauma may be able to access those things through hypnosis.Gets into hologram theory where someone can tell you the names and eye color of everyone at their 5th birthday, I probably can't tell you the eye color of all my best friends, let alone people that attended my fifth birthday, but that fucking B Roll eyeball footage is still in archive which is incredible. Naturally this process lends itself to recall of memories otherwise sealed off, through trauma or even some inserted mental block or screen memory. Essentially the practitioner is lulling you into a state of extreme relaxation, which you kind of have to consciously submit to, it's not usually like the movies where someone can wave a pocket watch and make you cluck like a chicken, specifically not in a therapeutic context like the one that was in play hereOne thing that is really important when taking this story at face value is that the hypnotic state doesn't necessarily produce absolute truth. It will generally (going off on the adverbs today oh my)  it does generally produce what the subject believes to be the truth.So regardless of whether it happened, and personally I'm inclined to believe it did, the hills suffered very real physical and emotional trauma from their experience. With all that said, you are drifting off to the sound of my voice, on the count of three you will have the urge to share your favorite episode of the show with one or perhaps even several of your friends. 1. 2. 3. Sorry I dozed off for a second there. Benjamin simonLike I said earlier, psychiatrist outta boston comfortable with hypnotherapy, especially with amnesiacs I have no idea if that's the termSkeptical of UFO phenomena, but openminded to the possibility that there could be something out there Also interestingly enough served in WW2 as an executive officer in the army's primary psychiatric center in ww2 working on hypnosis and narcosynthesis eg using sodium pentothol (truth serum) and that timeline makes me immediately suspicious of him being wrapped up in MK ULTRA type stuff between WW2 and treating the hills, I don't have any other evidence to support that but he seems like a prime candidate to be involved. Which is interesting. Or notGoalsOpen up amnesiaTreat their anxiety and weirdness, ufo stuff secondary, may be aliens but it doesn't really matter either way if my patient is or isn't abducted by aliens, they're still suffering either way so let's take the time to unpack it one way or the other Descriptions of the sessionsB didn't feel like opening his hands or eyes, defiant bastardBoth exceptionally receptive to hypnotic induction, something like Thy'd forget all unless directed not too, simon wanted the full story before letting them in on itBarney first after 3 weeks of induction, hear his story in full then betty so they couldn't influence each other. Descriptions of their encounterNow we get to the meat of what actually went onFor the sake of continuity I'm just gonna go through barney's point of view, ignoring when hypnosis sessions begin and end except where it's interesting, because the events themselves recollected under the hypnosis are a much more cohesive and compelling narrative. With that being said, some of the hypnosis itself is truly chilling, hearing this grown ass man sob and cry out in fear, saying shit like he's pressing his eyes into my eyes, and please don't let them take me! And things like that. I would include the audio but most of the actual sources of that audio have music over it and not to mention it was recorded 60 years ago so it's not really winning any grammys for audio production you know?I'll still put in some links to some clips of it that you can check out on your own. Sometimes it takes an additional session to get to the next scene, or to pull it out of amnesia. And sometimes they get so worked up Dr simon has to calm them down and or pull them out of it and sometimes they just run out of time in a billable session. But unless it comes up, assume that the whole case narrative is over several sessions. Seeing them from afar before the beeping.EyesIrish nazi chineseDescription in early sessionsScreaming running back Duh doh delsey de dotta det doutta dereThey get back in the car and this is what I talked about last session when the craft appeared to be pursuing them.They didn't really breach anymore new information during the Quote “chase” Skip ahead to the beeping where there memory fades out right around the indian head resort in the middle of NHIt was sometime after this when they came to a roadblock of Some kind. I think I mentioned that last week, but the fact that later on betty had a full on panic attack over coming up to a completely normal roadblock gives this a little more validity Side note, in the end a lot of the skepticism in this story hinges on whether you believe in hypnosis and whether it's legitimate for reclaiming amnesiac memories. Myself I lean more towards legitimacy, but with the caveat that it's difficult but not impossible to lie to yourself, maybe we can ask sarah about this but my understanding is that trauma can absolutely obscure, change, or  conjure memories that aren't entirely accurate. So at absolute worst case on the hypnosis angle the hills 100% believed that what came of hypnosis was what had happened to them. Another skeptical aspect of it is the suggestibility of hypnosis. Which I'll grant that yes there's an inherent suggestibility in the trance state, but we literally have the transcripts. You can read the entire session and theres even notes to where doctor simon makes efforts to clarify, and avoid suggesting or leading the patients. (encouraging repetition to look for consistencies) (only using things they had already saidHe himself even says that he wasn't at all invested in the idea of UFOs and was skeptical of the story altogether. What is interesting is they both gave an extremely consistent account between the two of them with all the details matching up before they themselves were consciously aware of the case narrative. It would have taken extreme coordination between the two of them to keep the story that consistentCui bono?They didn't make money off this, people thought they were crazy, they must have spent a ton of money on the therapy, not to mention gas and time to keep driving up and down route three looking for answersLastly on this tangent about hypnotic veracity that really isn't the only factor that the case hinges on, there's physical evidence. The dress, the snapped binocular strap, the spots on the car, the mysterious dick warts, the stopped watches, stuff was picked up on radar. There's non physical evidence outside of the trance story the panic attacks, the missing time, the fact that the case matches so many in the future. Whether it was aliens, a complete break from reality, a military abduction, who knows what? The fact is that something happened that night, and it haunted them their whole lives.I appreciate a healthy skepticism, truly I do, but dismissing things out of hand without looking at the whole picture and doing the research especially on a case like this isn't intellectually honest by any stretch. So back to the story. They come across a road block and barney is just like yep better turn off here. They enter the woods, yeah barely even a road and go off the highway for a few minutes.  Until they reach a clearing with a fucking huge glowing orange orb in this clearing in the woods.Barney just thinks that's odd and idles the car. In their original memories, which I believe to be implanted screen memories these guys all were generic hi vis vest blue collar guys holding street signs. There was no such record of road or utility work that day that I could find. As the sessions went on the people controlling the detour became the weird irish chinese nazis And finally the diminutive men with big black eyes, bald heads and grey skin. Who could that possibly be. Again, there's notes and challenges showing that Dr Simon didn't push this angle, he may have even pushed back on it. So the final image of these greys walking up to the vehicle while they're awake and aware but unafraid. Kind of this reality distortion mind control field where they make the hills brains rationalize everything as perfectly normal. They get to the car and pull them out. Pull them out isn't really the right word, it sounds too aggressive. Barney at this point senses something is kind of off and wrong. (No shit) so the entities  grab him by the arms after he gets out and he kind of goes limp and his eyes close.  In the early sessions before he can remember and unlock more details he describes a sensation of floatingBetty's description makes this clearer, where the 5 foot tall men are still holding him but he's not responsive as she's being led inside in front of her. At this point betty is breaking the conditioning a little bit and although she doesn't think it's completely coocoo for co-co puffs weird that aliens are making her walk onto a space craft, she's pissed that barney isn't responding because he's sleep walking and nobody is telling her what's happening.I don't want to talk to you talk to my husband. Barney are you hearing thisBarney will be alright we just want to run some tests. Then there's this slapstick moment were barney is too heavy to float-carry forward and like slaps the tops of his feet against the ramp onto the craft, oup watch the shoes there sonny They both get up the ramp and then the group of aliens, six in all I believe, at least that had brought them up. Of course it's a chromed interior. A big circular hallway. There's a map drawn up later during the sessions of what they remember from the craft. Basically it's a flying saucer. It's hard to describe a ship layout without a visual so I'll put those pictures in the notes. Essentially it is the ramp that comes up from the back, the hallway splits at the ramp and circles the outer wall of the craft with 8 seemingly equal sized rooms, they only saw the interior of two of them. At the front of the craft the hallway opened into the viewport that he had seen through the binoculars. The center between the rooms was unknown. Perhaps a bigfoot cage or engine room or something. This is where the two of them get separated, Barney still in his sleepy state (He later would describe this as very similar to the feeling of hypnosis which is interesting)  and Betty in her annoyed but still compliant state. Again, where are you taking him, relax it's just a few testsBarney on board.Barney is brought into the examination room with a pale blue light. Not coming from anywhere. He's still in a trance, so they entities undress him and instruct him to lie down on an examination or operating table. He does so and they begin running tests on him. His recollections seem a little hazier than Betty's because of this trance, so for narrative clarity some of the details come from what the entities told betty about barneys tests while she was undergoing an examination of her own. And like this is fucked up while it's happening and if you're close to the hills, but as an outside researcher 60 years later some of it is genuinely hilarious comedy. Like the teeth thing, I'll come back to thatSo they kind of apply pins and needles all over his body on a handheld device connected to what appeared to be a screen giving some kind of readout or feedbackThey had basically scotch tape, some kind of adhesive that they would have wrapped loosely around his arm. While an extremely sharp razor blade like object sheared of the finest possible layer of skin flakes and cells that stuck to the wrapping, presumably for some kind of analysis.And this isn't in the book, likely because of the somewhat more delicate sensibilities of the time. Keep in mind the interrupted journey was published in 66 But at one part barney is like yes I was told to flip over and a tube of some kind was indeed inserted into my anus about a few inches or so. I understood this to have some sexual purpose. Immediately after the oil dipstick test there was performed a cold cup was placed over his groin. This device would match the mysterious and painful concentric circles of bumps and warts around his dicknballs that would plague him for months after the encounter. The suction cup isn't really described in great detail but have you ever seen a cow milking machine? It was something pretty damn close to that but with one big nozzle instead of 4. There was a “sample” that was extracted using this device likely for DNA purposes.This isn't in the scholarly texts but do you think they gave him any material? Like a penthouse with a grey on the cover or something. There's WAY too many cases of grays showing up with blonde wigs on in order to “Get DNA” for that to not exist. Get over here you little grey minx, yeah bring the pretty one over here to work the machineLike the peter koury story where he bites off the nipple of an alien that's trying to seduce him. He gets his dick all tangled up in the aliens hair it's great. Harrowing experience as always, but it sounds a lot better than a lot of other ones. We gotta do an episode on that once I'm a little less burnt out on alien stuff.God damn that's funny but yeah not what you want. I don't think he could properly give consent and all that.So yeah he was basically scientifically and sexually viloated by aliens that extracted his cum while Betty was in the next room.Gotta reiterate that that's not good, and also not funny.What is funny though is his description of the aftermath in the session, he's like “welp I got off the table and I was feeling extraordinarily happy, I feel relieved, I got big grin on my face and a new spring in my step and that was all they wanted from me. So I popped on my trousers and and closed my eyes and I was guided back down to the car.He's surprised it's still running, he doesn't usually do that, he checks the backseat where delsey is all balled up sleeping. Likely ina trance state herself. He hops in the car and looks back at the craft to see betty also grinning in her afterglow and they get ready to watch the craft leave after she exchanges some words with the captain of the ship. What was her experience like when they parted ways up until now? Was she hooked up to a reverse human milker, hopefully not, but lets find out.Betty's experience.So once they get aboard the craft before splitting up to their separate rooms betty talks to the taller one, presumably the leader. This is where it was we're just gonna do some tests and you'll be back on your way home in no time. She asks why they can't go together. He tells here not enough equipment and space in each room it will take twice as long. Weirdly pragmatic answer right? I don't think I mentioned their outfits yet, they have like slightly futuristic navy style jackets, kind of like a military biker jacket, but a slick clean black rather than like earth leather. The leaders is a little more ornate, maybe a shoulder pad or something.Makes sense to her so they go into the room and it begins in another sort of comedic way where shes standing around doing the john travolta looking around in pulp fiction meme until an alien she calls the doctor or examiner comes in. So funny that waiting in the exam room for the doctor is a weirdly stressful experience not just on earth but across the fucking galaxy. So doctor comes and pulls her arm aside and looks at it poking the flesh, and turning it over to look at the back and then they do the skin scraping procedure again. They seem confused by this, maybe because she's white and barney's black I don't know. Then they do a similar thing where she's in like a dentist chair, they stick a cotton swab thing and clean her ear out and put it on more of that tape where a shorter guy wraps it up and takes it away, then they similarly take nail clippings, a few hairs from her head and the fucking physicians assistant gray takes all of those tooNext he yoinks off her shoes and starts rubbing her feet, feeling up her toes the whole nine yards. I didn't add that okay! It's in the documents! The foot fetish gray gets shooed away Then they ask her to take off her dress and shes like “ oh theres a zipper” and almost before she can finish the sentence the little guy yoinks the zipper down and she's just nervously ohh thank youShe's asked to lie down on the table, and both of them said that the tables were weirdly small, like they were designed for the grays instead. Then they do the same device with all the little non painful needles hooked up to the screen tapping all over her body with that thingBut then the doctor comes back with this big ass like 6 inch long syringe needle and shes like “okay boys the foot massage was nice but I think I best be scootin” They ignore this and inch closer with the giant needle, If you're scared of needles maybe jump forward a minute. She's yelling that she doesn't want them to do anything with it it'll hurt, it's just a pregnancy test.She can't move and He slowly inserts the giant needle into her navel. She's screaming it hurts it hurts make it stop, she said it felt like a hot knife going into her. Later on she's like that's not how we do pregnancy tests on earthWhile shes still screaming though, the leader comes up and tells her it doesn't hurt and slowly waves his hand over her eyes like he's qui gonn jinn. And what do you know she becomes numb and complacent. The pain is gone So now the testing seems to be done and this is a super weird part. The leader kinda dismisses the other doctor and assistant and barney isn't ready yet. Meanwhile cut to barney just having the most earth shattering orgasm of his life thrashing about and kicking over equipment in the next room. Oh my god that's probably why they had this time because barney was causing a scene they had to clean up before they could go. That's cannon nowSo because barney isn't ready, they have a little time to chat, in her head in english, they either had telepathy or some weird translator tech because they would only mumble and hum with their thin lips.This is so amazingwhat an experience ect, i need proofTakes a book with alien writing and he lets her keep it for the time beingand then the funniest part happensThe examiner that was looking at barney bursts into the room and she cant understand what he's saying to the others, but it seems like we gotta check it's teeth. So they doThey start tugging gently on her teeth and ask why they aren't coming out and thats when she remembers barney has dentures that come out and she doesn't and this has them gooped, they have no idea what shes talking about or why someone would do thatSo she spends some time talking about how old age works and time works and other earth concepts they can't quite grasp, a squash for example, or the color yellow meanwhile barney in the next room be like ugugugugug, milker is off the rails and the short grey is trying to catch it all in a bucket. Complete chaos, alarms are going off it looks like the opening scene to a new hope where the aliens ae ducking behind walls and shit Then something really interesting happens with betty and the leader and they take a look at like a star wars style hologram projector map. I'll throw that in the show notes, he explains this is their home area of the galaxy, these are trade routes, these are expeditions, these are colonies ect. They study it together and talk more about earth, will they comeback (not sure). This map will be another important aspect later.She's really pleased and tells him there's no way she'll forget any of this, no matter what and he laughs it off, but then the doc comes in and mutters something to the leader and he kind of looks back at the doc and frowns with his eyes. Apologies betty you can't keep the book I'm sorry, I know it's supposed to be your proof but it's over my head. I'm paraphrasing there but that's interesting isn't it? I mean it stands to reason theres some larger organization calling the shots, but it's neat that it's mentioned. So she's pissed about that but still determined to remember. But now barney is cleaned up, covered in sweat his tie is on his head, and allowed to sleepwalk out so they walk off together like I said, The last thing the leader said to betty is that they could watch them leave.So they stand in front of the car as the whole saucer looking thing starts to power up and begin to almost morph into a big glowing orange ball, another thing you see in close encounters. It whips off soundlessly into the distanceKeep in mind the hazy memory of a moon in the road during the strange detour by the road crew in their initial recollectionThey get back in their car and drive off, and once they're safely back on the highway the beeping starts up again, and this is when they both kinda jolt back to focus, with their memories wiped driving down towards the concord exit. Do you believe in flying saucers now? Damn it bettyQuestions for sarahBarney's 1950s anxiety treatmntsTrauma make brain go goo goo gagaHypnosisFoliex a duex AftermathIn sessions Barney was able to draw the figures, and betty was able to draw the star map, both will be in the notes. The map though is really fascinating. Because she's able to draw it out and keep it. Shes's reading the ny times a full year later and it talks about a cluster of stars that a new telescope had just discovered that matched her star map almost exactly, so yet another weird bit of supporting evidence. The area of the stars known now as zeta reticuliBut to be fair, you can draw a chunk of dots on a map and it'll probably match something out there. This map has been deboonked because the stellar distances don't line up with modern calculations and technology. Which sure it doesn't math out, but that's like saying draw a map of your country by hand under hypnosis and if any of the distances are off at all it's a fake map, its the same shit i was talking about earlier. People will find a minor detail that does not line up and use that to debunk everything without the full context.  Betty's dreamsAlmost verbatim what occurred as they become clearer. Betty and barney stayed married for the rest of their days but sadly barney died just a few years later in 1969, aged only 46. It was a cerebral hemmorhage. Which is a messed up thing to happen just a few years later to a relatively young guy. This whole event might have had something to do with it. Betty died at 85in 2004 of lung cancer, she was a chain smokerBut not before giving talks at ufo conferences, looking into the phenomena and always keeping an eye to the sky The schizo Aleister Crowley takeFamous loser, pervert, and occultist. A story for another time but I'm assuming most people interested in paranormal and weird history podcasts have at least heard of him in some capacity.Has his grubby shit covered fingers in everything paranormal it's come up before I'll do a biography show sometime unfortunatelyLived in new hampshire for a summer in 1916 Stayed at the house of an astrologer frenemy evangeline adams They squabbled about books, they were both moronsRelationship turned sourThats why lake pasquaney doesn't exist.It was the town of hebron nh, which is realIt was here that crowley baptized a toad as jesus and crucified it. In some disgusting ritual. It was here, maybe not this specific disgusting ritual that the entity LAM came to mr crowley.Those of you well versed in occultism may know where this is goingA few short years later he published the image of the otherworldly entity LAM, an image that bore a striking resemblance to the greys. this  purported first contact took place in new hampshire within an hour of the indian head resort where the beeping and abduction took place. Is that a coincidence? I don't know, up to you guys to decide, it's just another weird crowleyan coincidence among many. Another one is that crowley died in 1947, the same year of another one of the greys greatest hits. A little ditty us in the biz like to call the Roswell incident, heard of it? We'll get to it eventually. I'm so sick of aliens right now. What a wild ride. Thanks everyone for tagging along! That about wraps it up folks thank you so much for tuning in, I started something new this week where I'm posting a silly picture on the nightmare.now instagram every day and people seem to like it so check that out might be worth a giggle. I'm on there far too much so if you got a topic you want to get a nightmare now episode feel free to hit up my DMs or comments with those ideas. Thanks again for listening, you guys rock, I'd say sweet dreams but we all know it's only gonna be nightmares now.  

The one where we're glad to be back and covering one of the most famous alien abduction cases of all time, ON LOCATION!

The one where we marvel at how we never put together that O' Lantern is an Irish Name. We examine Celtic traditions, and other folklore from around the world that created the holiday we know and love today!

As we start looking into one of the most famous abduction stories of all time, we check in on a smaller UFO incident right on the periphery, of both the case, and Erik's backyard

The one where we talk the most chaotic 10 seconds in Argentina's history, cruel mortality, and the curious phenomena of bladed prosthetics and the larger than life characters that wielded them.

In this one we talk about the fearsome creatures of the lumberwoods, Where they came from. How William T Cox Assembled the landmark field guide to North American fearsome critters, and of course the Squonk. A cryptid native of Pennsylvania that is so ugly it spends its days weeping until it perishes or dissolves. There's a lot to learn about and more importantly from the poor little buggers

In this one we follow up on the insanity that is the American President's heart and all the times that we the people have had the wool pulled over our eyes via a pair of eggs.

In this one we chat about some current and historical alcohol related scary stories. A fungus that feeds on alcohol vapor from Jack Daniels is slowly consuming a small town in Tennessee. A mysterious disappearance and heist of an underwater gin sphere weighing almost a ton, and the hidden death toll of industrial alcohol additives during the prohibition years of the United States. Pour yourself a glass and lets find out why they call them spirits! (Not actually in the episode, but it has to do with the latin word for breath and supernatural power, related to the apparent alchemical process to make it)

Notes to be touched up 7/29/23, including relevant images, links and follow up reading. for now check John out at his website https://www.lamarcaoutfitters.com/

On this episode we begin our series on times the government has lied to the public about the health of the president, the implications of presidential illness on the world stage, and the insane secret brain surgery that nobody knew about until 70 years later.

The one where we talk about the mad scientist that stole Einstein's brain right out of his head at his autopsy, it's disappearance and the great American roadtrip to bring the brain home decades later.

In the first of our basics of Ufology series, we talk a breakdown of the phenomena, the major entities involved and do a little deep dive on the greys, what they are, what they want, and how to fight them off!

The one where we chat about the time zombie Russians, attacked German forces in World War 1 and won.

In this one we chat about the incident that lead to the death of a caver in the infamous nutty putty cave in Utah.

The one about silly Icelandic sorceries from a bygone age, Necropantsy vs Necromancy, how to steal a neighbor's goat milk, and how to sic the dead on your enemies. Useful information for the whole family!

In this Easter special episode we take a look at the mythical jackalope, the strange case of the Fairfax Bunnyman murders, and other rabbit adjacent creatures.

In this one we talk about a sickening demonic beast from orcadian folklore, is it a cryptid? is it a demon? is it a harmless myth? lets find out together

The one where we talk the recent attacks on sharks by South African Killer Whales, maritime weirdness, and Orca attacks and fatalities on humans.

Sources:https://archive.is/kV4vT#selection-223.0-241.289https://archive.org/details/storyofrearcolum00jameuoft/page/290/mode/2uphttps://allthatsinteresting.com/james-jameson-cannibalhttps://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/travel/a-grisly-drop-of-history-1.755086https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jameson_Irish_Whiskeyhttps://www.bl.uk/collection-items/james-jamesons-account-of-the-emin-pasha-relief-expeditionhttps://www.bizzarrobazar.com/en/2018/12/16/sei-fazzoletti-per-i-cannibali-il-terribile-jameson-affair/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Morton_Stanleyhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emin_Pasha_Relief_Expeditionhttps://books.google.com/books?id=mCSQCjEuU94C&pg=PA356&lpg=PA356&dq=james+jameson+11+year+old+girl+cannibals&source=bl&ots=3BtOZKtC8X&sig=PZlcNbQ5TcxMsTQKifRWAJft72w&hl=en&ei=M5bOTuvFK6nm0QGmpvE7&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result#v=onepage&q=james%20jameson%2011%20year%20old%20girl%20cannibals&f=falsehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_Congohttps://theconversation.com/retracing-belgiums-dark-past-in-the-congo-and-attempts-to-forge-deeper-ties-184903Our tale begins in 1780 when a 40 year old fella by the name of john jameson founded an eponymous little distillery, making a blended irish whiskey still sold today. Interestingly he was a freemason. Not going down that path today, but it does seem to come up a lotShould I have saved this for st patrick's day? Maybe. Eventually it was taken over by john jameson jrThen john jameson the thirdThen it gets less fun and we move onto his son robert and so on and so forth, but this isn't about whiskey really The first john jameson's grandson, of which he had many I'm sure, the dude had eight kids. A man by the name of James Jameson. James jameson's middle name was slygo which is kind of silly in itself. I think that's a town in ireland. Anyway. James had a ton of money to burn, being an heir to the aforementioned whiskey fortune, and the heart of an adventurer.  He tagged along with various expeditions to south america, the pacific islands and africa, dude was living a cool ass life compared to other irishmen that sat around on the island.He ended up giving a bunch of his big game trophies to the british museum, which is kinda fun given how much we talked about them last weekIn January of 1887 he joined an expedition led by a henry morton stanley, a welsh american explorer. It was on this expedition that James would face terrible trials. He would have been canceled today for sure. He had to apply against a few other hundred naturalists or africa enthusiasts for the spot on the expedition, tossing a 1000 pound tip in with his application certainly helped. That's 168,000 pounds in today's money or about 200,000 dollars. I imagine that helped.This expedition, the emin pasha relief expedition, to provide supplies to a besieged diplomat in the congo,Ordered by leopold II who has a somewhat controversial history in the congo, most of my knowledge of the congo comes from 1 line of we didn't start the fire, and the terrible slash awesome movie with the evil white gorillas and tim curry, and my wonderful episode on mokele embeme, but even a cursory inspection of that history shows it's not great.  Short version is 10 million people died trying to get rubber out of trees because leo decided the congo was his. This exploitation continued until the 19 50s and 60s when the belgians finally gave up the congo to rule their own stuffBut they still wanted the resources, and so did the US, thought we'd get out of this one? NawThe CIA basically immediately assassinated the first prime minister of the new democratic republic of the congoMaybe we'll get into it another time. Like I said, not great.So james jameson tagged along on this trip and there's a lot more to this expedition but the part we're focused on was in may of 1888 in the small village of riba riba, had to double check it wasn't that weird lewd metroidvaniaIn riba riba they were having a festival that was said to end in the consumption of human fleshJameson thought they were full of shit and was like can I see my good man?One of the other people on the expedition, reportedly replied “give me a bit of cloth and we'll see” big jafar vibes like last episode. Jameson calls his bluff and produces 6 handkerchiefs for the tribesman there. Funny that this dude has 6 to SPARE, he probably had a hundred coming out of every pocket This is where it gets gruesome. The wheels of handkerchief cloth trade were already grinding  After this exchange, the dancing comes to a halt, and a young slave girl is brought forward, it is explained that she is a captive from another tribe. 6 napkins goes a long way in 1888Now for the squeamish among you, you may want to skip ahead a minute or two. The girl is killed and eaten, if you're wondering what you're gonna miss, go ahead, I'll be here when you get back. This is a direct quote from the 1890 newspaper the london times reporting on the incident“The girl was tied to a tree,” says Farran, “the natives sharpening their knives the while. One of them stabbed her twice in the belly.“She did not scream, but knew what would happen, looking to the right and left for help. When stabbed she fell dead. The natives cut pieces from her body.“Jameson in the meantime made rough sketches of the horrible scenes. Then we all returned to the child's house. Jameson afterward went to his tent, where he finished his sketches in water colors.“There were six of them, all neatly done. The first sketch was of the girl as she was led to the tree. The second showed her stabbed, with the blood gushing from the wounds. The third showed her dissected. The fourth, fifth, and sixth showed men carrying off the various parts of the bodyFUCK alright if you're back from your time skip you didn't miss anything but gruesome details.And that's when the gossip started, jameson was part of a well to do whiskey magnate family was ripe for being thrown into salacious expose news stories. Couple that with a morbid curiosity of the general public in britain with the “Dark continent” this one had papers flying off the shelves.And the crux of the story? That pretty boy whiskey heir had bought a slave for a pittance just to watch her get eaten That's where all the fact checking comes in, everyone is like well did he buy a slave girl to watch her get eaten? And there's some debate on the semantics of that. Which we'll get to in a minute, BUT there's no fucking debate about the girl gettin killed and eaten. WHICH SEEMS TO BE THE IMPORTANT PART HERE. That happened with just about 100 percent certainty. I feel like we're arguing about the wrong thing with the umm ackshullys hereAfter the horrifying event, the group pressed on with their expeditionThey split into two groups with jameson leading the rear group and another officer leading a forward groupThe second officer was killed by natives, and the belgian authorities caught the guy that did it who was executed when jamesons group arrived in the town behind the first groupVery chaotic expeditionMoving on jameson's section head for the bangala river station down the congo river, They traveled for about a week and a half, through sickly bogs, mires and along the river, through snakes, insect, and possibly giant ancient relic sauropods.Jameson fell ill on that last leg of the river, complications from malaria. That'll do it back then. On august 17 they made it to bangala station after a series of jungle ordeals and after breathing a sigh of relief that he made it to the next town, James jameson promptly died from his illness. He was only 31 He was buried in an unmarked grave deep in the jungleThat's a heroes sendoff for sure, wait till my group starts running tomb of annihilation The problem for jameson, that is, ethel jameson, his now widow, was that the dude, being dead Didn't careHad no way to defend himself or his family from the slanderous pressNewspaperAffadavaitsSo heres were things get muddy. The story got reported by the london times Assad farran affidavit that the story was true, jameson purchased the girl exclusively to watch her get crunched upHe also gives a short description of an orgie that jameson was an interested observer in some accountsLast letter to his wife is just whatever farran says it's a lie and don't let it outNot great denial tbhImmediate retractionEmphaticBecause farran had been fired so he's like lets goo!WATERCOLORS!?LegacyJames jameson lived a wild and crazy short lifeForever tarnished by this cannibalism scandalRelegated to a macabre footnote in history Which is more than most people can sayTHere's recreations of the drawings which are fucked up I'll link them with the notes this weekLost like 50 tabs for research on the mummy stuff so I'm going back through my history for thoseWhat a fucked up storyLessons? Don't eat people, don't call people's bluff all the time, sometimes it isn't a bluff OutroYou guys are the best 

In this one we chat about more mummy madness! Curses, shipwrecks, shifting sands, and a whole lot of victorian disrespect for the dead.

coming tomorrow

Episode 23A eulogy for ‘22Documentaryhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQ1PDsNRfTk&ab_channel=RealWildMountain lion infohttps://web.archive.org/web/20101121100620/http://cougarnet.org/cougarfacts.htmlhttps://a-z-animals.com/animals/mountain-lion/https://www.nwf.org/Educational-Resources/Wildlife-Guide/Mammals/Mountain-LionMap:https://www.flickr.com/photos/santamonicamtns/33781179435/in/album-72157670897770258/News beats (Some paywalls) Don't pay them.https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/10/us/los-angeles-p-22-mountain-lion-mauls-zoo-koala-bear-killarneyhttps://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-famed-p22-mountain-lion-found-under-los-feliz-home-owner-says-20150413-story.htmlhttps://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-11-21/big-cat-kills-chihuahua-in-hollywood-hillshttps://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/hollywood-cat-p-22-mountain-lion-los-angeles/672285/?fbclid=IwAR2vsgJwcSLPweYgQaSI5_A1RZHi6RqXLez4udvoFnb171BJzwECwz1-3oshttps://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2022-12-16/essential-california-p-22-mountain-lion-legacy-essential-california?fbclid=IwAR36K8iqSX0lra7OOap05QXPDTIYwC_eNj4WuFslkFlK0r8QLLDmQc1wqNshttps://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/p-22-la-celebrity-mountain-lion-photographer-1234649904/?fbclid=IwAR23yJRWiWIvjxvpO_7X8xcSXgCN56vFRQwQgfx0OydCpK0DX56jJgLtmTkhttps://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/article/a-cougar-ready-for-his-closeupWiki links:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cougarhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-22https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_405_(California)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallis_Annenberg_Wildlife_CrossingHow to helphttps://annenberg.org/initiatives/wallis-annenberg-wildlife-crossing/https://www.facebook.com/p22mountainlionofhollywood/https://savelacougars.org/https://friendsofgriffithpark.org/p-22/More videoshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eufGfQulp0U&ab_channel=KCETSoCalConnectedhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWFFvFmzkVA&ab_channel=ABC7Attributionshttps://freesound.org/people/shelbyshark/sounds/513332/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gm2x6CVIXiE&ab_channel=YangBan-HoSteve winter for photosAs for what we've got today though, it's something a little different, it isn't really horror so much, unless you're a chihuahua, in which case be very afraid. But it's a story that's been bouncing around in my head for the last month or so. I think there's a lot of metaphor and coincidence when it comes to a sendoff for 2022 and more topically P-22.Towards the end of the episode I want to give some quick thoughts on the state of the show and the state of my life going into 2023, but if you're just tuning in because you found me from some arcane algorithm, or if you googled how to bag cougars, (Which you'll find I won't be much help with) I'm sure you want to jump right into the action. So with a quick belated Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year, and without further ado let's pounce right into today's topic.P-22 was a mountain lion that lived in the heart of Los Angeles in a small territory consisting of Griffith Park, and later on the surrounding city. For those of you that don't know LA well or at all, Griffith Park is home to that big ass observatory in Grand theft auto five, and the iconic HOLLYWOOD Sign. He became a celebrity in the city of celebrity and like many celebrities in hollywood, sometimes he did great good for his species, and other times he swallowed koalas right out of their pen. Looking at you gary busey. His life brought awareness to wildlife and kickstarted a project to help wildlife in the LA area. He was eventually brought down by the people of LA, not unlike the rest of the country, but his relationship with them proved fatal just about a month agoP-22 began his life in the Santa Monica mountain range, as many mountain lions do. I think big cats are cool as hell, peep episode one if you want to hear an amazing tiger story, and keep an eye out for future cat episodes down the lion. The Tsavo man eating lions, vengeful russian tigers, weird british ghost panthers, the great zoo suicide of 2011, depends on whatever mood I'm felineBut I think it's spectacular we have them in America, mountain lions and I think there are even jaguars or panthers in Florida now. Life and times of P-22Before we talk about the tragedy at the end of the story I think it's best we do a record scratch//freezeframe yup that's me I guess you're wondering how I got here situation so let's jump back in time, to somewhere between 2009 and 2012 on the 101 or 405 highways near los angelesThe Interstate 405 alone is 8 lanes across both ways. That's a big fucking highway and if any if the drivers in LA are as bad or worse than the ones in LA, which is an assumption I have no problem making, it's a dangerous proposition to cross. I rarely want to cross more than a two lane road in small towns unless I'm playing fucking frogger. Now imagine you're a 2 or 3 year old mountain lion or puma, or catamount, or mountain screamer or cougar or red tiger or any of the myriad of names we call felis concolor. You're entering adolescence and leaving the protective care of your mother to stake out a territory of your own. Unfortunately the santa monica mountain range doesn't have a whole lot of extra real estate so you need to venture westward towards human civilization, if you stayed around here the dominant male cat would kill you sooner or later This was P-22s predicament. When the going gets tough, the tough get going and he had to make the choice between certain death at the paws of the dominant male or 90 percent death crossing over 10 lanes of traffic on some of america's busiest highways. He somehow dashed across the 101 AND the 405, where many animals and cougars meet their doom and made his way into griffith park.Griffith park like I mentioned earlier, home of the hollywood sign and surrounded by human civilization. It was an area of about 9 square miles. Mountain lions usually claim an area of 280 square miles. So an insane choice for the cat but what is he supposed to do? go  back across a dozen lanes of busy traffic or just swang at his new pad where no mountain lion has been for probably hundreds of years. It was free real estate, and cats don't know exact statistics on how bg their homes should be, because they can't read biology textbooks. So P-22 made his home there in the park, peacefully eating mule deer, coyotes, and escaped chihuahuas. Fast forward to february of 2012 and Humanity got its first glimpse of the soon to be famous cat. He was caught on a wildlife trailcam looking for bobcats and coyotes and the guy is like that's a lion's ass! Immediately the national park service wanted to tranq him and fit him with a radio collar. It was a big deal. No lions got this close to humanity. Jeff sikich with the national parks service set up traps and eventually captured him in march They tagged him with a radio collar and dubbed him P-22, the name that would go on to be quite possibly the most famous puma ever, and simply standing for P as in puma and 22 because he was the twenty second puma captured and collared in the study.So it began, his observed life in griffith parkHe showed up in a variety of newspapers over time, la times ectPeople were excited to see him on hikes or later on as the tech became more mainstream, ring cams or other CCTV footage in the hollywood hills, because he would occasionally prowl through those suburbs. As time went by, he was more frequently spotted in civilized areas outside of the parkYou can see all kinds of footage of this. Prowling under stairs, running across the street, just walking down a sidewalk casually. It's really awesome. They're the fourth largest Cat species worldwide if we don't count sightings of relic smilodon. behind, I'm guessing, Tigers, lions, and jaguars. Cheetahs would be next, just guessing. If I'm wrong @ me on twitter or instagram or facebook or whatever. They clock in at 117-220 pounds generally and hit up to 8 feet long snout to tail tip. Way smaller than a tiger, if you want to know more tiger stats feast your ears on episode one. Still way bigger than a dog or a cat or anything else that'll be wandering the streets of LAPublished in late 2013 was a national geographic story with the now iconic image of P-22 crossing the ridge at night with the Hollywood sign off in the background. The cameraman set up motion detector cameras for 15 months in the park and finally got some great shots. Most of the other great shots couldn't be collected because people kept stealing the cameras. Following the Nat Geo stories, I'll link all this in the show notes, and I'll actually do that this time.More and more people became interested in the life and times of P-22.There's something remarkably human and relatable about him. One documentary put it well where it describes him, alone on a friday, stuck because of traffic, and unable to find a mate. We've all been there. He never ended up finding a mate just because the odds of a cougar making it out there across those highways to his territory were astronomical. He would stroll the city, like I mentioned, but the city took him on as a part of their own local culture. There are several murals, tons of facebook groups, hiking teams, fan clubs, you name it! People would see him on hikes, in their security cams or just roaming around. Some wanted him gone but the general vibe I get is that people were really proud of the big cat, as a neighbor, and as a symbol of the coexistence of nature and humanity As we over-expand and turn this place into a coruscant style hellhole we need to do what we can to keep giant predators living side by side with us. In 2014 we came across I think the first time I ever saw P-22, and that's when he was acting erratically according to his collar Authorities trapped him again and found he was suffering from disease, parasites and the dreaded mange. He looked bad, in short. That's another Iconic image, P-22 looks like the worst hangover of your life, scraggly unkempt hair, droopy eyes, dried mucus, and a general malaise marked his appearance The national park service tranqed him, cleaned him up and loaded him up on antibiotics and when he was captured again six months later he was in peak physical shape, this is where the meme comes in. They show the before and after picture of his treatment and in the after, he looks alert and regal. People were happy with his recovery and it was at this time a few other mountain lions were killed on the dangerous highways and where P-22 really found his greater purpose, or rather where we found it for him. He was already a symbol of urban wildlife and essentially became an ambassador in spirit for the wallis annenberg wildlife crossing, a proposed wildlife bridge over the 405, that would be the largest of it's kind in the world. It would be essential a highway overpass/underpass but instead of a road, it would be forested and maintained to keep the feel of the landscape, providing a safe way for all sorts of animals to cross the exceedingly deadly 405.I love this they have em in europe, and other places that care about animalsI'm pretty sure that as of now the crossing has broken ground and the construction has begunI'll throw a link to that in the show notes I think this is really awesome and really important, and 22s lasting legacy but I don't think it makes great show material necessarily so I'm not gonna go on too much about it, but I'm sure there are some crowdfunding options or cougar rehab organizations, if you want to lend them a hand somehow.Make sure it's the right kind of cougar thoughBut as his final glorious legacy, it's up to you to say if the end justifies the means and this is where the means get meanAfter recovering from mange and everything, The cat coasted for a while on his celebrity status. It seems most locals had at least heard of him but the sources I was looking at were obviously p-22 centric so I can't really asses what the actual feel was in LALet me knowPeople were content to catch a glimpse of the legendary critter on hikes or through local news reports and were overall happy to have himThe articles didn't touch on this too much but I'm sure there was a subset of people indifferent or straight up “shoot that varmint” before he kills a kid or something and I can see both sides but also I generally prefer cats to people anyway so if somebody's gotta be lunch to keep the big cats around wellBut like every true crime documentary, there's the part where everything is going fine, UNTIL IT WASN'T cue the music sting and the inverted image of P-22 His range was perilously small compared to other mountain lions his age and size, and he was no doubt lonely and restless. After all in the wild he would have likely mated by now. Additionally one of the main problems that he and many other animals in the entire ecosystem out there is rodenticide poisoning.People try to get rid of rats and pestsRats and pests eat the poison but take a long time to dieIt all stays bioavailable when they're preyed on or even just in the soilIt trickles up the food chain to the point that like 90 percent of the rescued wildlife in the areas is poisoned by it one way or another.They're all disoriented and internally bleeding It sucks just keep your place clean and put your trash away and you won't have the problemSo lonely, restless, and not thinking clearly, P-22 begins to roam further outside griffith park, showing up more and more frequently over the next few years, sometimes LION on peoples porch in broad daylight, I'm sure dogs and cats probably went missing But in 2016 it all came to a head.It was a weird year for zoos, peace be upon harambe's nameOn second thought it was a weird year for everyoneKillarney the koala, a robust 18 pound brave female koala, aged 14, so no spring chicken was doing her nightly walk about her enclosure, she was reportedly the only one brave enough to walk on the ground at night and paid with her life for it.On March 2nd of 2016 P-22 was spotted on security footage prowling outside the LA Zoo on the outskirts of Griffith park. The next morning Killarney was missing. Clumps of fur were discovered in her enclosure but none of the other koalas were gone. Later though, her remains were found chewed up 350 yards away. GPS data couldn't conclusively point at P-22 because there was a 2 hour gap in his GPS Tracking that night.  THE PERFECT CRIMEAnyway killarney, kill for short was mauled to death and the zoo was very sad, but they also said IF, big “Big if true” as to whether he killed her. It could be a bobcat, or SKC, spontaneous koala combustionDon't kill ‘22 he's just acting within his natureOver that same time period and later up until his untimely death, ‘22 increased his erratic behaviorHe showed up throughout the surrounding city and suburbsGot under peoples porchesAttacked dogs Ate a chihuahuaAte another chihuahuaAttacked another chihuahuaHe hung on, appearing sporadically in sightings until December of 2022He was captured after a report in a los feliz owners backyard on december 12th,where he would get a medical evaluation while tranquilized and have his gps collar battery changed, as usual.He was found to have huge trauma to his abdominal organs, and GPS data matched up with a reported collision with a vehicle and a mountain lion earlier that week. Not only the trauma damage, but long term health problems like heart disease and kidney failure were plaguing P-22 at his evaluation.IT was with heavy heart the decision was made At 9am on December 17th, 2022, the king of LA's reign came to an end.P-22 was euthanized, too beat up to be safely returned to the wild, see episode #1 if you want to know what an injured big cat can do to a human populationNow he reigns in cat heaven, with an all you can eat chihuahua buffet, maybe he'll finally meet a mate, maybe it's the champawat tigress, does that biology or spirituality work out on any level? I don't know and it doesn't matter, it's all a hologram anyway. This episode is actually coming out just in time, because P-22's celebration of life is going to be livestreamed this Saturday, February 4th, I'll have a link to that in the notes if you want to see it. I'll probably tweet that out too. And so the king of california is gone, but far from forgotten. His story serves as a reminder of the need to live in peace with urban wildlife. And saving big cats in general. I'm proud to bring this story into 2023 and I have a lot of awesome stuff planned for this year. We're doing youtube,we're doing sponsors? Any takers? We're hitting 3 thousand downloads, we're inspiring people to make their own art, we're educating the masses on big cats, big foots, big conspiracies, big legends, big history and so much more. I want to thank you guys for listening this far, and if you don't care about the sappy stuff, you know it's only gonna be nightmares from now onBut if you do, thanks for listening to this show, whether this is your first episode or you've binged the whole catalog, you're the reason I do this.The support has been unreal since launch and it's really a dream come true. I want to bust my ass this year and maybe get to a point where this can pay maybe a bill each month, and maybe a few years from now pay all of them. I'm happy to have you along, 2022 had some of the best and worst days of my entire life, I married my best friend with the support of all the people I care about, started this very podcast finally, and had he trip of a lifetime on my honeymoon, At the same time we battled all kinds of tragedy both close to home and abroad.I Cannot wait for the next 11 months ( I really did slack a bit there huh) for spooky bullshit here at nightmare now, more getting together with friends and family, more adventure and more of all the stuff that makes life awesomeSo thank you, the listener, one more time.And let's take a moment to learn from P-22 and take that into the new year.You may not be in the perfect habitat, without all the freedom to roam that you think you need, but even where you are you find your people, and you can make a difference. Whether it's crushing your chihuahua enemy analog, or blazing a brilliant new path forward for others like you On the flipside, don't be afraid to take that leap, cross your 10 lanes of 405, to find the place where you belong. And lastly remember you may not fully know the impact you have on others. ‘22 didn't know he was admired by thousands across LA, The US and the world, he just did what he was gonna do no matter what. Carry that shit with you this year and it'll be greatGoodnight to you, goodnight to 2022 and goodnight of course sweet prince, P-22I'd say Sweet dreams, but you all know it's only gonna be nightmares now!

Notes 12/20

notes 12/9

Mad science, genetic manipulation, and BEES!?  It all began in 1922 with the birth of bright eyed baby boy Warwick Estevam Kerr, I guess it actually began 120 million years ago when bees first evolved, but 120 million years is a lot of history to cover in a single episode so we'll skip ahead to WarwickThe Son of scottish immigrants to the US and then to Brazil, he led a life mired in scienceHe was an agricultural engineerEventually got his doctorateWorked at universities, becoming a professor, a department head and even a dean, A research director and more.Interestingly he studied at columbia with a theodosius dobzhansky, famed geneticist, and also the great grandson of fyodor dostoyevsky, small world I guess. No relevance to the story Most importantly of all the things warwick kerr did outside of those contributions to society were his dabbling in mad science, and his constant experimentation and research of Beeeees In short he dreamed of creating the worlds most powerful bee, and he succeeded.In the americas, meaning north south and central we were using european honeybees to produce honey. Obviously europe is not a tropical climate like much of south america, so in his home country of brazil kerr tried to interbreed a species of bee that could do better at producing honey in such a climate. There were african bees from Tanganyika, a UK colonial territory in what is now modern day Tanzania; it existed from 1916 to 61. This was the east african lowland honeybee. Adept at producing honey in a hotter climate. Way more than the europeansMore aggressive than european bees, sending out attacks with 3-4 times as much of the attack force of european bees. And they pursue threats further awayThey swarm moreThis means they move to a new hive quicker while eurobeeans would rather wait it out.They evolve with much less focus on keeping a hive warm so they have energy to spare in their behaviorNot to say the african bees don't have their own problems which might be more horrificThe cape bee female impersonates the african bee queen and just moves into the hive, if you've got the bee species confused now that there's three don't worry it gets more complicated and the bees themselves are confusedEspecially when the cape bee infiltrator queen can lay eggs parthenogenetically, meaning she don't need no man and produces live viable eggs asexually. These eggs hatch into clones of herself that can also make clones of themselves until the fake bees take over the hive and collapse it. Back to Kerr in 1957. He imported these african lowland bees to interbreed with his italian bees, that, although they don't make as much honey when it's hotHe figured that the two bees combined over a few generations could combine their strengths and you would get a kickass warm weather honeybee that could make honey better than a european bee, and one that picked up the more laid back less aggressive temperament from the european bee. That's when it all went wrong.  Kerr was using queen excluders on his 29 combined beehives, a screen door cuck room so they couldn't breed with the local european bees. In late october of 1957 a beekeeper that was covering for him or visiting the facility or something, as far as I can tell his or her name is lost to history. Saw the bees struggling to move around the screen.took the screen off all of the hives. My understanding is that it was a screen per hive but maybe it was around the facility,Don't you think after the third one they would realize maybe these are SUPPOSED to be like that? NOT 25 more queens later? Maybe they got out and just immediately killed him in thousands of furious stings, I really can't find much on this guy.  I've got a completely unfounded conspiracy theory that I'll get into later.So he lets these genetically manipulated superbees out into the wilds of brazil. Of course they immediately get out of the beehives and start breeding with the native populations allo over the place and start rapidly expanding north and south. The entire amazon basin had been consumed by 1970. The cross bred bees, called africanized honeybees, and unofficially, the killer bee! were ruthlessly efficient at replacing the native populations and once pandoras box was open there was no closing it again. AThey reached central america in 82 leaving a swath of beestuction in their fluffy black and yellow wake. By 85 the killer bee had taken southern mexico and had been spotted in an oil pipe shipment in californiaIn 1990 the first permanent colony of killer bees was discovered in texas. Over the next several years the bees continued their inexorable tide northward, overbreeding, killing and replacing the native european bees. Skip ahead to the 2010s, there's human deaths and attacks inUTAHGEORGIATENNESSEECOLORADOAS FAR NORTH AS MARYLANDWE CAN'T HOLD THEM FOREVERClimate changeSo what makes them killer bees anyway?Aggression. Bee apologists and a “Scientists” will be like it's more of an acute defensiveness. African bees, have to compete with scorpions, ants, termites and the ever popular honey badger, known for it's uncaring callousness in the face of a single beesting. Because of this heritage the africanized bee demonstrates this lethal “Defensiveness” in a number of ways. Deep breathThey have more guard bees. They have a wider guard/alarm radius (1600 feet) from which just walking by can disturb them, loud noises, vibrations, funny looks, ects will all set them off. They are more easily provokedThey will pursue threats to the hive greater distances (¼ mile) that's a longer distance for a half an inch bee than it is for a person, keep that in mind. They're fucking relentless. You think you can jump into a pond like on winnie the pooh, and sure that works for the friendly neighborhood european bee, but these will buzz around the surface of the water waiting for you to come up for air in order to sting your stupid fac for existing within a quarter mile radius of their hive.They send the pain. Again and again Their sting isn't inherently more venomous than a european bee, or more painful or anything. It's estimated that 500-1100 stings is lethal but depending on the location of the sting 100 could do the trick. But they send many times as many attack bees as the natural counterparts, both proportionately and far overall number because:They group in far larger numbers than the native hives. They sting 10 times as much as the europeans, in greater numbers, in a wider radius, and more easily provoked, what's not to like? They also live in the groundBecause why notMost importantly they kill. About 2 people per year. And well over 1000 overall. Those stats don't add up at all. 65 years, 2 people is 130. 870 people were killed in the great bee war of 89?They also kill animals, pets, horses, wild animals, cows, nothing is sacred to them. Kerr was labeled a madman by the brazilian government and the world but it seems like everyone kind of got over it He did get into several science hall of fame type things and died a respected figure in beekeeping history at the ripe old age of 96 in 2018 at his home in sao paulo brazil. That just leaves one question? Who was the mysterious beekeeper that let them all out that fateful october in 1957? Who indeed. A little over a decade before B Day in october of 57 was a little something called ww2. Nazi party members, Collaborators, SS officers and more assholes were desperately trying to escape the third reich collapsing out from underneath them. Where could they go? If only there was a part of the world that already harbored an unusually large number of german expats and had for some time now. That somewhere was south america, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay and brazil, all over the place, there were germans and fascist sympathizers in the governments of these places, especially argentina, but I'll cover this phenomena of South American Nazis, Hilter Clones, Jewish Nazi bounty hunters and lost treasure in another episode, probably series, that shit is insane. Was that an innocent but dim-witted ordinary beekeeper? Or was it a young adult clone of hitler himself, or less fantastically some other nazi scientist jackass? Could be, who knows? Probably not though, but the timeline works out and it just seems like a hellboy plot or something. NAZI SCIENTIST SPLINTER GROUP RELEASES DEMON BEES TO ATTACK AMERICA FOR REVENGE. Once again, we have our movie premise. That's all I got for tonight folks, thanks for listening, check out the site at nightmarenow.com to get in touch! We've got some awesome suggestions and a special shoutout to everyone that had my little show in your spotify wrapped. I love to see it!

The enfield horrorI've got a real treat for you this week one of my favorite cryptids.This was 1973 which as we get deeper in our episodes over time you might notice that number a lot because in my anecdotal research over the last few years that seems to be the one where a good chunk of the weirdness in the united states happens. I'm talking bigfoots,So many Fucking UFOSAliensOther random one off cryptids Different high strangeness,MIBSTimeslipsOther crazy stuff The early 1970s midwest is gonna be in the paranormal history books down the line and I don't think a lot of people are necessarily connecting all those dots.Lastly I wanna give a quick plug to curious cryptidsIt's from curious cryptids that I actually drew inspiration for today's show, and in particular today's nightmare. The ENFIELD HORRORI always thought this was a cool creature when I read about it as a kid in ripleys believe it or not or some other adjacent publication but this book reminded me of the weird creature that terrorized enfield illinois in the spring of ‘73 so without further ado lets leap right into it.First sighting (Chronologically) Greg Garret a young lad of 10 years was happily catching fireflies in his backyard when it began that fateful night, april 25th 1973Greg was attacked by the creature as it leapt out of the woods, and tore his tennis shoes to shreds It ripped his shoes apart, I couldn't find anything about whether Greg's feet were okay but since there's no mention of it I assume the horror literally just tore up the shoes. And left his dogs intact. He described the creature with gray slimy skin, short claws on two small arms and here's the real kicker. 3 clawed legs. I want to know how he was tearing up shoes on three legs, did he plan one leg and go to town ith the other two or pull like  reinforced excavator move with two legs in the dirt and tear it up with the other one. How many animals do you know with three legs, naturally that is, I'm not talking about lucky the jack russel terrierHe ran back into his house where his parents though nothing of the incident, they probably smacked him around for destroying his shoes though, I have no evidence to support that other than baseless assumptions about early seventies illinois. This sighting wasn't actually the first one reported though. That honor belonged to the mcdaniel family about an hour later. Jil 12 and her older brother henry junior mcdaniel 15 were home alone while their father henry mcdaniel was working late. This was right up the road from the garret's place so that's a little bit of corroboration. 10 pmHe gets inside finds his kids going nuts telling him there's a monster trying to get in. first it scraped the door then tried to rip their AC out of the wall. He's pissed because his kids are still up and then goes and checks and the AC is actually awryThe kids are going ape saying that it's been trying to get in for a half hour up to and including the last five minutes when he pulled up and came inside. He opens up the door and standing in the porchlight is the enfield horror.3 legsShort bodyTwo little arms coming from the breast area 4 ½ feet tallGrey in colorBig pink eyes the size of flashlights He's like fuck what the heck is that, slams the door shut as it's coming towards the house and grabs his 22 pistol that's just chilling next to the door. I love this country.Mcdaniel opens the door again to find the creature perched just beyond his porch stoopHe shoots 5 times. The first time connecting because the creature let out a hiss like a wildcat and recoiled backThe next 4 shots all seemed to miss because after the first the creature took off, covering the 50 feet to the treeline in just 3 leaps. That's like 17 feet each jump.He didn't see it again, and called the police, who showed up around midnight, this is another important detail. That gives it credence. If he's just making shit up and haphazardly blasting bullets into the neighborhood it's probably best to not call the police. Together they find strange tracks, like a dogs with 6 pads instead of five and with an abnormal pattern, could be related to the thing having 3 legs. There were also scratches on the siding of the house.The Next day the police asked around the neighborhood and found greg garret, which is where we get his report from earlier.This is where we get the first newspaper article in the mt vernon register describing mcdaniels sighting and report from the night before. Things are exciting in town, as you would expect from a monster sighting Days passed as the town was still abuzz with excitement Nothing happens until may 6th 10 days laterWhen the local radio station gets a call from Henry mcdaniel himself, to report seeing the creature once moreMcdaniel hears dogs howling near his home and does what every red blooded american does at a mildly distressing sound, grabs his gun. He grabs his gun and goes to investigate,This time the creature was quote languidly sauntering down the railroad tracks like it was fucking stand by me. Mcdaniel reportedly said it didn't appear to be in any hurry, and I like that a lot. Just vibing and thriving, not caring that it's on the wrong planet or reality. The creature isn't a threat so mcdaniel lets it just walk off into the sunse and calls into the radio station This is where things start to both heat up and cool off in the story. After this second sighting the town goes wild and more importantly reporters and other people with an investigative bent start pouring into the town and what has since become a tired horror movie cliche comes true in real life. The sheriff roy poshard jr shows up and threatens to arrest mcdaniel if he deosn't stop causing hysteria. Presumably because it's gonna ruin the turnout for their mule days festival.It's that same next day that the DJ from the radio station shows up on the scene to capture footage and record interviews ect. He was rick rainbow. Hey folks it's double R Ricky rainbow reporting round the clock from kokomo indiana with the morning corn, anyway here's the REO Speedwagon.He and his cameraman set up (Why) they have a microphone going before they're set to filmThey see an ape man and follow it and manage to catch no footage but audio of it's cryA mix of a woman screaming in fear and the laughter of a baby, this audio doesn't exist anywhere insofar as I can tell. He later interviews mcdaniels who swears the veracity of his claimsOne thing I love about stuff with exact dates is finding the soundtracks via the top 40 hits of that week. Honestly the radio must've been jamminTie a yellow ribbon on the old oak treEBut then bangers like:Drift away Stuck in the middle with youFrankensteinWalk on the wild side And debuting that week no song other than THE MONSTER MASH By bobby boris pricketNeed I say more?Cut to a few days later Roy Poshard jr and his deputy have to drive quickly over to the neighboring woods on account of gunshots and screamingWhat do they find but a monster hunting party of five 58 beers deep brandishing knives, shotguns, pistols and several brain cellsThey said they had just seen the creature and had almost blown it back to mars which honestly seems like a great time, not safe, but maybe a drunk airsoft monster hunt or somthing. What they saw was a rustling in the bushes and just laid into the bush like it was sonny's car in the fucking godfather. Sorry if that's a spoiler but that movie came out a year before the enfield horror did so it wouldn't have even been a spoiler back then. Despite lighting up the rustling bush the creature hissed and took off into the woods, but I think we can mostly discount this sighting at the bush on account of the drinkThey were charged with hunting violationsRunning off into the night was the last time the creature was ever seen.Also of note Famed cryptozoologist, loren coleman happened to be in town when he was just starting out tracking down fortean mysteries like this guy. He doesn't do much in this particular story but shows up takes the tape and footage from rick rainbow and just leaves without elaborating furtherNext time I visit the cryptid museum in portland I'll demand we release the enfield monster scream 10 minute version taylors versionLater on Greg Garret recanted his story of having his shoes ripped up, seemingly under his mothers duress, which fair.So what  happened?There's a lot that quote unquote experts and skeptics might have you believe so lets go down the list. You have your usual suspectsMass hysteriaAlways a go to cop outMistaken identity for a raccoon or dogMy man was rational and sober according to the news article and the cops,He called the cops not through 911Not known for being a pranksterWasn't panicked until after the sightingNow we have the most likely explanation A FUCKING KANGAROOThink about it small clawed handsThree legs, the tail Weird footprints Unfamiliar creature Could be captive, which is why it wanted to get into buildings and wasn't afraid of humansLeaping 17 feet in a single boundBoom case closed right? See you guys next weekSure maybe, and that's where a lot of people leave it, some moron had an exotic animal and it got loose, this happens all the time right?WrongNot in australiaI don't care how exotic, or how rare who doesn't know what a kangaroo isGiant red eyesSlimy gray skinOkay maybe it's diseasedBut the real smoking gun that blows this out of the water in my opinion comes from really digging into th newspaper articlesHenry mcdaniel served in the army, confirmed, there's an obituary, military record the worksWhere was he stationed before he became an antique dealer single father?AUSTRALIAWhere he said they basically had roos as pets on the base If there was anybody in the whole midwest that would know a kangaroo from a racoon or alien or whatever anomalous aberration this thing was it was gonna be henry mcdanielHe got a good look at the thing, again sober and sound of mind according to all reports. He put a bullet in it at close range, for those of you who haven't fired a pistol before, it's not all john wick hawkeye stuff you need a pretty good bead on something to get a good shot and unless you're lucky or very skilled you gotta be fairly close range.But where does that leave us? I don't think it's a kangaroo although that is a good theory and covers a lot of bases, it's mutually exclusive with too much of the evidence. It really is a monster, never seen since. But possibly seen before, 30 years earlier in the 1940s a devil monkey creature was spotted harassing people in the woods just 40 miles north of enfield, could it be related? Who knowsThe area has also seen it's fair share of UFO sightings, but as far as I can tell, nothing that really fits the timeframe.Then there's the release of monster mash, what did boris prickett know, is this one of those whole town got dosed with LSD scenarios? I don't knowAs far as people hoaxing it for money, I don't think that's the case because nobody got anything out of it, mcdaniel was probably harassed the rest of his life by bigfoot nerds and got two local radio interviews. It is just one of those weird cases where something happens for a little bit, gets everyone riled up and then stopsI think this is some sort of dimensional anomaly far from home PersonallySomeday I hop someone makes a movie about the events of illinois spring 1973 because it really has all th great elements of a creature feature.Small town dramaCops shutting it downDrunk monster hunting possesMultiple escalating sightingsA unique beastPeople in fearPeople in denialIf I can fund it someday I willhttps://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/thesouthern/name/henry-mcdaniel-obituary?id=25073460https://cryptidz.fandom.com/wiki/Enfield_Horrorhttps://www.gelcubicle.com/store/p/curious-cryptids-soft-cover-bookhttps://www.newspapers.com/image/30409597/?clipping_id=7318965&fcfToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJmcmVlLXZpZXctaWQiOjMwNDA5NTk3LCJpYXQiOjE2Njg1NjkzMTQsImV4cCI6MTY2ODY1NTcxNH0.yhpSLG_82xPsA2Gbdpwr2pkIis1CcAgtQ0SBSU3VvLkhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_kangaroohttp://tylerscryptozoo.blogspot.com/2016/01/devil-monkeys-escapees-or-something-else.htmlhttps://medium.com/@chrisdarkes/strangers-in-the-night-156983eb0d7dhttps://top40weekly.com/1973/05/05/us-top-40-singles-week-ending-5th-may-1973/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJU2cz9ytPQ&ab_channel=Movieclips

Penguin Book of the UndeadPeter Jackson's  Dead AliveI was half wrong about potatoes Spirits of malice1009-1018 ADBrandenburg Germany formerly Wasleman EventsPriest shows up, a bunch of people chillin in the cemetery, dying to get inPriest doesn't recognize anyone, strange for 1010s because it wasn't exactly a melting potWhen he gets inside he sees some lady that recently died, she is telling him all his stuff is taken care of but he'll be dead soon. Dignitaries and guards also saw ghosts holding candles and prayingThey vanished when the observers got close thoughLaterBishop here was made aware of the scenario and was like you need to stay there and cleanse the place. He sleeps there and ghosts toss him out on his cotBishop says do it again or no ballsThis time at midnight the ghosts lifted up his bed and dropped him on the altar and immolated him, he was covered in holy water and gear but they didn't care.They burned his body “until only fine ashes remained.”“As the day is conceded to the living, so the night is the dominion of the dead.The Blackened hearts of StapenhillSometime between 1118 and 1150 somewhere in Anglo Norman EnglandAbbot Geoffrey of burton writing about saint Modwenna What happened2 shmucks defending the monks at the monastery decided that wasn't good enoughMonks steal their crops to get them to come back They flip out with the count and attack the granariesThen the count sends knights to destroy the monastery's crops.Monks+ abbot knew they're trying to get them to fight back and get killedInstead chill in the church and moan at saint Modwenna's bones.Insane battle scene where 10 holy knights fought off sixty of the counts men when they didn't get the don't fight memo in a ridiculous slapstick battle. w/ power of god.The two flunkies that started this whole thing just died immediatelyThey're buried that night but seen the next dusk carrying their own coffins around/ bears, dogs, or other animalsThey brought ghost plague and they were so ugly everyone died (minus 3)The count says screw that and repents The other three including Drogo ( the money man) didn't die but fell illWith the monks they dug up the rapscallions and found their face linens covered  BLOOD Creepy pasta is not new See above where (this definitely happened bro trust me)Time to rebury themCut off the headsStick them between the legs/aka up the a**Rip out the heart like Mola ramCook it until it pops and a bunch of crows fly outNo more ghosts, no more sicknessThey all left for the next town over and abandoned the city.THE EVIL WELSHMAN1140-1208WalesWalter map wrote this in “on the trifles” a satire of oral sources and historical narrativesWhat happenedTrust me bro Will Laudun was a knightSome evil Welshman died and rose up 4 days later, this apparently doesn't warrant explanation, nor does it merit more than a cursory glance, it wasn't just Jesus, you could be a welsh prick and just show upSo they kill him again in one sentence, chop off his head with a shovel and hose him down with holy water, I need to get hosed down with holy water after that googling. But that didn't cut it. A phantom showed up, but without a zombieThe phantom challenges William by calling his name 3 times and will follows the demon back to it's tombAre we demon's bloody Marys?Will cuts off the ghost demons head, and it falls back into the graveEveryone that was sick heals, “We know for certain the outcome of this case, but we do not know the cause.”Rampaging revenants1130-1200William of Newburgh collected tales for the history of English affairs“Numerous examples from our own time are at hand and testimonies of the fact are abundant” -on corpses walking the earth. Trust me bro my cousin hunter saw it it's totally real. Buckingham countyWhat happened:Big fat guy dies, next night he shows up in his wife's bedroom and almost crushes her under his prodigious girth, 2 nights in a row.3rd night he shows back up but she's having a slumby with some townsfolk and they tell him to get the heck out and he leavesSame happened with the guys brothers but they also warded him off.Next the whole town is on watch while this left for dead 2 boomer waddles around trying to squash people eventually in broad daylight. Invisible to some people but they could still hear and presumably smell himThe townsfolk talk to the local priest, he sends it up the chain and the bishop is like f**k, another one? We get these all the time, all over England. Ya gotta burn himThe priest thinks that's icky so writes him a nice letter of absolution, opens the grave and puts it on him and reburies the tomb. This ends the rampageWhat else happens?In a different part of England, because this was so common an occurrence: A wicked wealthy man had died, and like the rest of them, he casually got up and literally I quote from the historical text: “Pranced hither and thither, accompanied by loudly barking dogs” He terrified his neighbors and went back to his tomb at the crack of dawnThe townsfolk describing this are my favorite characters in the whole podcast, except maybe Robert Liston, time me gentleman still makes me chuckleI picture Monty python commoners delivering the hither and thither lines and “We fear we may be beaten black and blue by this undead monster” and what I think is hilarious besides the obvious of that is theirs no description of the man or his howling hellhounds10 of the bravest village people, dug up the guys corpse, ripped him limb from limb and burned the pieces Next evil spirits made everyone sick. Definitely not from ripping apart a week old corpse. WHAT NEXT?Another dies, this time a priest that hunts with dogs Starts haunting the church with a quote “Great groaning and hideous murmuring” Monks don't care because they kick ass for the lord He haunts his old mistress, she tells the monks to do something4 monks stake out the tomb and it's all quiet. When 3 are asleep he crawls from the graveMonk freezes and gets his courage back, buries a battle axe in him and the monster fled away, though not as quickly as it had came, you know on account of the battle axe.The tomb eats it, they dig it up he's covered in goreWhat next, I'll give you three guesses they rip him up and burn him“I have told this story in plain language, exactly as I  heard it myself from devout men”WHAT NEXTHappened at castle anatisAn evil wealthy man Becomes lord of the castleHe increased his vices instead of trying to go clean whatever that means, he got a wife Heard rumors she was a hoor, servant helps him sneak into his own bedroom, sees her getting railed  by the neighbors Teenager. He faints the teen takes off, she's like honey what a terrible dream you had.Fainting back then basically meant you died the next day so the priest that told William this story showed up to give him his last rites and he says wait till tomorrow then croaks without them.There's cool shit about medieval times like sword fighting and feastsOf course, get this, he wakes up dead. Dogs show up and start screaminEveryone feared being beaten black and blueThe dead man cause another plagueMany people died many leftTwo brothers, whose father had died of corpse breath, decided to take action into their own hands while everyone else was doing palm SundayThey uncovered the corpse “Swollen to an enormous size, its face bloodied and bloated beyond measureThey stabbed it with the shovel unleashing a never ending torrent of bloodThey take it out rip it apart, cook the heart and roast the bodyAll the disease and stuff stopped“Now that I have explained these events let us return to the course of history”That's just in a history book more or less. CrazyIn conclusionI wonder if there's anything to thisSome of the articles refer to this never happening before or sinceIt's so funny how stuff says the same and all the horror tropes are thousands of years oldWhy don't these stories pop up today? Are they fake or was this really everyday life back then?

In this episode we catch up on what the whaler's are doing, how they plan to overcome hunger, thirst, madness, the elements and a the great whales that dog them themselves. Detailed notes and sources to come tomorrow 9/2/22

Whaleship Essex part 2IntroRecap from last week on dragon ball Z/ quick mention that this is a 2?, 3? ParterOne of the most famous maritime disasters that inspired moby dickWhaling was a lucrative business that kept the industrial revolution lubed up and bright1819 the Essex took off from nantucket , mass, the whaling capital of the world, mostly with new crew. Right from the get go faced hardship, almost knocked over, extra whaleboats destroyed.A dearth of whales and an unsuccessful hunt, followed by a few successful ones.A mysterious captain tells them of the promised land, the offshore ground when they stop in south america, and the location is thousands of miles into the deep pacific.  They take a detour to cause an apocalypse on the galapagos islandsWhen they reach the offshore ground they are attacked by hellbent whale, for unknown reasons and the Essex begins to sink. That's where we left it so lets get into itBefore the sinkingCollecting suppliesThey spent two days tied up to the essex while the tides ripped it apartSearching for more supplies by day and cursing the world for their predicament at night. By the second day the essex was in pieces, and sharp ones too, watches had to be set to avoid punctures in the boatAll around them the yellowy whale oil floated and stank and coated everything, a cruel irony, what they had come for, and that the essex was like a whale, on it's side expunging the oilDeciding on a planOn the third day they had drifted some fifty miles away from south america during a stormy nightThings were not gonna get better next to the boat, so a council was called.Pollard, chase and joy gathered on one boat and talked optionsHead west, but cannibals so the mates overruled that Head back the way they came past the galapagos, but that's against the wind, and the currentHead northwest to hawaii, but storms and nightmarchers keep them away there Head south for other smaller islands and eventually the west coast of south america. Before deciding on option #4They would have been fine going southwest probably. Psychologists say this shit is not good in a disaster until things get really fucking dire to improve morale. People NEED to be told what to do. Fishy mate, cuck captainInventory and crewFood for around 60 days, Consisting of:HardtackThey rationed 6 oz of it day about a ¼ of the calorica needs of a 5'8” 145 lb dude Tortises were 4500 calories per man if they were slaughtered.THEY WERE JUST CHILLING MOST OF THE RIDE, LAST OF THEIR SPECIES.Tobacco, the a whaler would normally go through 70 fucking lbs of tobacco on a trip, so most of them got nicky sick withdrawal. Crew overall was 9 nantucketers, 5 coofs, six blacksEach boat had 200 lbs hardtack, 65 gals, h2o 2 tortoises, chase and joy got a pistol, pollard took a musket. Pollard's boatCrew5/7 nantucketer,  2 coofsOwen Coffin, barzalli ray, charles ramsdellChase's BoatCrew2 nantucketers, 2 cape cod coofs, 2 blacksJoy's BoatAnother cruel irony to be on the joy boatCrewHimself, 1 coof, 4 blacks,Setting up the whaleboatsSails with sewing needlesBuilding up the sides to keep water out, critical, without it they would sink later.Keeping the food dry-ishNightfall? Met with despair compared to the hope of the dayShipping outDespite their efforts the food became soaked with seawater, causing every bite of salty bread to dehydrate them further.Heading for south america was dependant on their own efforts rather than the chance of a whaleboat. Dead reckoning, the only way anyone could track where they were or at least estimate, was through dead reckoning, tracking speed and direction via compass and tossing a line of a certain length and recording how long it took to get to the end of the rope to track speed.Whaleboat repairChase's boat went up, and pollards pulled up along side in order to to nail shit in place.Morale suffered despite repairs Killer whale pollard,An orca attacked and took a bite out of the boat like scruff mcgruff taking a bite out of crime. They had to poke it ‘“It seemed as if fate was wholly relentless, in pursuing us with such a cruel complication of disasters”Cruel irony of being hunted by whalessalt Kidneys gotta work overtimeThe boats gotta be bailed constantly, again if they weren't reinforced it was ogre.Day eight they kill a tortise on the uss Chase.4500 cals, like earlier, about a thanksgiving dinner for you  fat fucking yanks out there.Renewed morale, didn't save anyDay 12 Pistol shot brought everyone together'Beating away the crew of the other boats they all thought Day 17 There was a brutal gale but everyone managed to stay togetherLightning struck all around them, everyone layed down, Morning came after the storm and still all 3 boats were within rangeDecember 9th (day 19)They could have hit tahiti in a week, but decide to press on with the original plan. Then they lost contact with pollard but regained it the next day with a gunshot.Chase the primary architect of the narrative, slpt with a gun on the chest and if people talked shit he'd divy it up evenly, nobody did.if they did he's shoot the mf that went after his bread.On Dec 14 (Day 24)Rations cut in half, 3 oz per day for each memberThey started to drink their pissTongue during hypothermiaDries outBlood comes out of the eyes because of course it does.You feel like death is upon you One of them looked over the boat and found barnaclesA KING FEAST.Too weak to pull folks backHad to get yoinked upThey tried to row on the 15rh, but even with 2x rations they were fuckedDec 19th (day 29)Land sighted, by will wright “ land HO and all the whalboats head for shore.They shot into the air with no responseChase speared a fish, the consumed immediatelyThey found a trickle of spring waterThe most restful sleep they had had since the wreckGreat feast upon exploration's return from pollard birds, eggs, crabs ect.8 skeletons 1 a child, dead from a previous shipwreck, all from dehydrationWater spring from the island400 miles southwest was pitcairn islandBy christmas eve the birds began to fleeDec 26th  (36)It was time to go, food was extinguished. 35 days since the wreck and a week on Henderson island.3000 miles from chileTom chappel, Seth weeks, Will wright, all coofs, and seeing joy was toast they decided to stayPollard promised them rescue if he survivedThey cried when everyone leftDeath “Stared them in the face” but when fading away from the island they had a bellyful of water and food, renewed resources and renewed hope.

In late 1819 the whaleship Essex set off for a routine whaling trip before getting attacked by a freak whale. Sources: In the heart of the seacool pic of whales asleepWhaling industryspermacetiWikis:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_(whaleship)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_Chasehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_whalinghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_oil Loose transcript: Hi everyone. And welcome or welcome back to nightmare now the show where we take a look at all things scary, unknown or otherwise horrible, we talk history, myth, monsters and more and boy do I have a whale of a tale for you today. I feel like not a lot has changed over the course of the week so I can spare you any personal updates this week, and that works out well anyway because dear god this is a long involved story to get into. We're finally doing another full deep dive episode and man have I had a time putting this one together. I've clipped up my notes and outlines a couple of different ways and I just can't find a way to put it all together in one episode without skipping a week to pull it together. So this is going to be our very first sequential series. I feel like aside from technical issues I've gotten the hang of putting out a show mostly every week. With that being said I'm not doing these full super deep dive long form episodes as often as I want, but at the same time, I've been digging deeper for the shorter ones and even they're getting longer as I get the hang of this, so eventually maybe they'll meet in the middle over time.Anyway I'm glad to have you along for the ride, but I'm afraid it'll be a harrowing one. In the early months of 1821 a whaleship happened across a peculiar sight in the distance, a small whaleboat, heavily modified through slapdash construction. It had a makeshift sail, reinforced sides,  and it had obviously been drifting for quite some time. There didn't appear to be anyone on board as waves lazily lapped against the small craft. All the same the captain of the whaleship turned about to investigate the pathetic little boat. When the crew could finally see over the deck into the sun bleached whaleboat, they were met with a violently unsettling sight. Two creatures, sinewy, thin, and emaciated. The floor of the boat was riddled with bones. Human bones. The creatures were curled up on either end of the boat and slurping on the marrow from the bones like something that would give bram stoker nightmares. Pale and wide eyes bulged out of their heads, sore covered skin pulled taut over their gaunt skulls and frail frames. They had beards red from dried blood and a madness about them. On seeing the witnesses to their bone collection funerary raft they jealousy gathered up as many of the bones as they could carry and recoiled back. Unwilling to surrender all that sustained them, and the last remnants of the crew they once captained. The crew of the whaleship looked down at th ghouls in abject horror.  (RECORD SCRATCH) YUP THAT'S ME, I guess you're wondering how I got in this situation, well, it's a whale of a tale my friend. Name's george pollard, and like many others my story begins thus. There once was a man from nantucket…Lets dive into these murky depths. The whaleship essex facilitated one of the more famous maritime disasters in history, maybe behind the mutiny on the bounty and the shark attacks on the uss indianapolis, and I guess probably shackleton's ill fated voyage too. I guess I could go on, and on all those topics I certainly will. In future episodes. I think there's something hugely compelling about maritime disasters. There's the isolation of it, the secret chemical X in any great horror movie, certainly in my two favorites, the thing, an alien. And then there's the human element. There's something about the intersection of survival, isolation, the will to live, and the classic man vs nature struggle that resonates deep within our cultural consciousness. For each person there is the competing values of hope, tenacity, despair, fear, stubbornness and resilience and so many more factors, and for each person there is a breaking point. Some never reach it, some perish before hand, and some do, and at that point we either see an alien facsimile of humanity, or potentially humanity distilled into its purest form. Innocents turned killers, nobles turned barbaric survivors, cowards can become heroes. For the crew of the Essex, we witness all of the above and more. During the 1820s when the event took place, it really became the talk of the world for a time. A ship from nantucket massachusetts, the whaling capital of the world was attacked and sunk by a freakish sperm whale. 21 people shipped off that day and most of them don't ever make it home, and truth be told, not a single one of the survivors really came back at all. The men were changed irreparably. And perhaps when I finish this series, you'll understand why. Today the Essex disaster is just a footnote of 1800s trivia. Known mostly because a certain whaling author wrote something a lot of us had to read in school. A little novel called moby dick. When I read it in high school, I definitely spark noted some chapters, mostly the ones that tried to be more of a definitive guide on whaling rather than a novel, but the core story is hard to avoid. Captain ahab in his ludicrous quest for revenge, a great white whale, and the famous attack of the titular whale. But this quest didn't spawn entirely from the mind of herman melville, who was himself a one time whaler before he found success writing, it was loosely based off of the true story of the ESSEX. Melville heard accounts of the tragedy and sought out survivors to give his novel the oomph it needed to be read or spark noted hundreds of years later. This series I'll try to bring that real story to life as best I can, and maybe add a little bit of levity along the way. Thanks for being patient last week, I really wanted to get this one right and push the limits of what a nightmare now show  can really be. I hope you enjoy, lets get into the belly of the whale.Now outside of new england it's tough to understate the effect of whaling in the region, and outside of massachusetts doubly so, and outside of the tiny island of nantucket probably 100 times moreso. The island is just 14 miles across at it's longest but it was the epicenter of whaling in the entire world. Whaling of course being the dangerous and lucrative enterprise of hunting whales, mostly for their oil. Made by boiling down the literal tons of blubber on a whales body. The main use of whale oil was of course, light. A society able to keep lamps going throughout the night was a huge advantage. But it didn't stop there, not in houses and businesses alone. Streetlamps let a city's business continue deep into the night, lighthouses made more whaling possible in a feedback loop. But no, the usefulness continues,  without whale oil there would not have been an industrial revolution in the 1800s that lead to the world as we know it today. We can wax poetic about whether or not the industrial revolution was good for humanity as whole when we cover the unabomber but for now we'll leave it at the fact that without industrialization we would be living on a planet devoid of the glory of the boneless chicken wing, a luxury only an industrial society could ever hope to achieve.  Whale oil was the lubricant in guns, machinery, and typewriters, and even until fucking 1973 whale oil was used in transmission fluids in modern cars. It was a long time before this stuff retired. Most industrial purposes were replaced after the invention of kerosene but whaling continued long after. We still use a chemical called ambergris today extracted from the intestines of sperm whales for perfume of all things, I think there was a blacklist episode on that at one point. Furthermore baleen, the fibrous filters of baleen whales like the humpback or blue whales was used in a variety of fashion products like hats and umbrellas, blubber could be used to make whale margarine. Which reminds me, A while back I was looking at protein to calorie ratios of food and holy shit whale meat is top tier fitness food. You get almost 30 grams of protein per 100 calories it's insane. Then we get into your real money fish. Yeah I know whales are mammals, I don't care I can call them fish. The sperm whale. Named for the spermaceti sloshing around in their big fat heads. And we still don't know what it's for. Biologically speaking that is. It is a special type of milky white,waxy, gooey clean burning, odorless oil compared to the crap they burn off of blubber. So when whaling they would cut open their heads and be like damn there's buckets and buckets o cum in their brain, that's the good shit. It was a higher quality oil. And that's how sperm whales got their name. Literally their heads are full of what 19th century whalers thought looked like cum. Like I said a minute ago, biologists still have no idea what the goop sloshing around in their heads is for. Some theories point to it being a excellent medium for echolocation where sound can travel 3 times as fast in spermaceti than it can in water and others say it's for buoyancy, like the whales can suck up sea water, cool it down and increase the density making it easier to dive, or blow it out to warm it up and make it easier to surface. Ultimately, none of it is pertinent to this episode so we're moving on. The Eessex  had been on several whaling adventures so far but the previous captain was retiring or taking on a new ship, ultimately it isn't important to the story, ifyou want more detail check out the wonderful source for today's episode, IN THE HEART OF THE SEA, by nathaniel philbrick, funny I knew a nate philbrick in high school hope he's doing all right these days. I don't want to go too deep into nantucket and the powers that be controlling the essex and it's crew before they pulled up the anchor but it's a lot of the bullshit you expect, nepotism, financiers and people with cash on the line deciding who is in charge, first mate, and other unimportant details. Suffice to say that funding and staffing a whaleship was a substantial expense and it really had the potential to pay off, given the lucrative nature of whaling in nantucket at the time. It was grueling work for the whalers and an interesting life for family back home, most people didn't have their fathers around because the ships were out for years at a time. Families oftentimes would be married within a few months, get pregnant and the dude would take off and hope he got to meet his three year old when he got back. There's some interesting dynamics at work there, where women had a large amount of power in society, compared to other areas at the same time. So fuck the financiers, they really didn't have anything much to do with the story especially in a dramatic podcast form, lets talk about the cast of the show, the crew of the essex. As listed in the book and ship records, I'm not gonna go through every last person's life story but we're talking at least an overview. I guess we should start with one of the main characters, the essex itself, a whaleship 87 feet long and displacing 238 tons of water it was fairly standard for the time. The previous captain daniel russel helmed another ship while his first mate george pollard took over as captain of the essex. It's said repeatedly that russell took the luck from the essex, a previously successful whaling ship, when he left. Following george pollard in command, a nantucket boy, was the first mate, owen chase, whom spoiler alert survives, and is widely responsible for us knowing this story at all. Both nantucket lads. And that's important too, because there's a strict hierarchy on nantucket whaling ships, less of a hierarchy I guess because that's the chain of command, but more of a preference. In trust, picking crew for the smaller whaleboats themselves, and general station and accommodations nantucket natives were number 1, it was an extremely tight knit community, most of which were quakers, following the nantucket guys wearing their trust me I'm local t shirts were the coofs, a derogatory term for off islanders, they could be better whalers, sailors and the like but 9 times outta ten they came after the nantucketers in the pecking order. Lastly were blacks. I don't really know what to say about that one I don't think anybody's surprised there, pre industrial america generally wasn't the most accommodating place and time for black people.  After the two officers you had second mate matthew joy, 3 boatsteerers, the guys working the rudders in the whaleboats themselves, 1 steward of the ship, 13 general sailors, there's that lucky number again huh, and the cabin boy, thomas nickerson. Totalling up to 21 people on the boat. I don't think you need all the other names right now, I'm not trying to overwhelm you like it's game of thrones or anything, as people come up (And sink down) in the narrative I'll try to remember to keep you abreast of their station.Fast forward through some political drama between the owners of the ship, people saying goodbye to their wives and mothers and it was finally august 12, 1819. The day of the launch. And watching launches on nantucket was pretty much the only thing anyone did for fun, there weren't any video games yet. Not only did you have all the women in children but also the extremely judgemental retired whalers, watching for every mistake, so they'd have something to talk about the whole time you're gone. Haters been hating a long time, and boy oh boy did stuff go wrong all the time, oftentimes half the crew were taking their first voyage out at these launches, imagine you're starting a new job and not only do you have to figure it out, it's dangerous and literally everyone you've ever known is watching. I'm sure it didn't make it any easier. As soon as they're out of earshot from town too, the experienced crew start swearing like… well, sailor and slapping the new guys around, a stark contrast from the uiet calm of quaker nantucket. So all the new guys, some as young as 14 just start getting screamed at immediately, swab the deck or I'll gut ye and all that good stuff and they see their home fading from view over the horizon and are just like what the fuck have I gotten myself into. A common thought perhaps, but most of the time they hadn't gotten on an utterly doomed voyage like the essex. And then the seasickness, this is true they would tie pork fat to a string, make you swallow it and yank it back up out of your mouth, apparently that's how to fix it.  Sounds gross.Just a day later the bad omens began. A huge storm approached off the side of the boat and in an act of hubris or hesitation instead of sailing directly into the storm, better yet, sailing away from it, they waited till the last minute to try to turn and let it hit from the stern. In delaying this maneuver,  the storm hit full strength from the side, the worst possible outcome. The wind, gusts and waves hit from the largest possible surface area, and the essex began to tip over.  With a great creaking and groaning in the howling wind the ship tilted almost 90 degrees sideways, almost sinking two days into the voyage. Just as they thought they might need to cut the masts loose in order to right the ship she lurched back upwards as equilibrium took hold. Some of the sails had been shredded in the carnage, one of the whale boats had been smashed in between the ship and the waves, leaving only 2 in working order and no spares. Captain pollard and the mates debated returning to nantucket for repairs but instead opted to forge ahead, taking chances in supply ports to repair the ship and get a new whaleboat. It seemed preferable to the shame of returning empty handed. Just days from leaving home. Plus the likeliness of people ditching the boat as soon as they got there, the old pork submarine life ain't for everyone after all.After the excitement from the get go you have a nice slice of life sailing montage for months, on september second they reached the azores islands off the coast of europe, scooped some supplies, and dipped south towards the cape verde islands west of africa. Here they managed to snag an extra whaleboat, bringing their total to 4 after repairing the one damaged in the storm. They also made a lucrative trade offer with a ship that had gone aground in the verdes trading, a barrel and a half of beans for thirty squealing hogs! These delightful creatures supplemented literal tons of food  for the journey. Salted meats, bread and hardtack. A sort of disgusting hard bread to meet the minimum caloric values people needed. Somewhere along the line pollard, chase and joy picked their crews for their respective whaleboats, with the captain and firstlmate  getting all the nantuckets and leaving joy with the coofs and blacks. This would of course come into play when they finally saw their first whale in early october, off the coast of south america between rio de janeiro and buenos aries.  With a THAR SHE BLOWS The hunt begins. They got within a nautical mile of the whale and jumped into the whaleboats, only 3 people remaining on the essex to keep it afloat. The remaining 18 divided between the 3 whaleboats set off racing one another to be the first to get up next to the beasties. Chase's boat was the first one to catch up to the sperm whale and the harpooner, a man by the name of benjamin lawrence hesitated when faced with the awesome size of the whale. It blasted it's spout over them, and just as he seems to finally come to his senses and aim WHAM all six of them are thrown into the air. THe whaleboat splinters as another whale breaches and tears it apart with its tail. The other two boats have to rescue the people in chase's boat because get this, they can't swim! You would think you take your whole life learning how to become a whaler that might be worth looking into, on account of you know, THE FUCKING WATER. So the whales get away and the whole crew is pissed, they're down another whaleboat and they've been underway for almost three months at this point with nothing to show for it except a fucking barnyard full of emaciated hog. A few days later they got a second chance and this time when they launched the boats someone got a hit. And the description of a kill is brutal, to my whale fans you probably just want to skip ahead five minutes here.  Once a harpoon strikes true on a sperm whale it fastens to the creature and the whale boat gets tugged along in the ol nantucket sleighride, I'm sure now that's some vile urban dictionary term these days involving dookie but back then it described the whaleboat being tugged along by the stuck whale. The whale would pull the boat something like 20 mph while the whale would tire itself out before surfacing for the last time. It would pull them all over but once a whaleboat was fastened, there wasn't a whole lot it could do except launch the whaleboat into the sky, but most of the time they didn't think of that. When they eventually tired out the mate or captain would have his chance to hit the creature with the killing lance. A specialized harpoon designed to tear up the creatures's internal organs, but through tons of blubber it was hard to hit true, sometimes requiring 15 stabs to really get in there. The surefire indicator of  success was a gruesome sight indeed. The creature would breath out through it's blowhole and blast out a crimson spray of blood seawater and snot, it was choking on it's blood and living it's last minutes in abject terror. The whalers called this a fired chimeny as the largest creatures on earth shot out red  mist with each breath. It's admittedly sad, but whaling these days is pretty much dead outside of specially permitted indigeonus peoples. So that's good. When the whale was struck true at some point it's labored struggle would end suddenly and the creature would float up on its side ready for the grim harvest to come. The greenhorns on the crew weren't really sure what to do at this point, at least spiritually and emotionally, all this talk hyping them up for the kill and then seeing one of god's mightiest creatures writhing and spraying them with his blood  really did a number  on them psychologically. It didn't take long for the more experienced among them to snap the new guys out of it  but I really think threre's something very profound in that minute of silence when nobody is cheering when the whale finally gives up the ghost and before the harvest kicks off. There's emotional highs and lows all at once, they're covered in blood, sad at the death of an almost mythical creature, proud at their ability to take it down and happy with the promise of a fat check when they got home. I find that internal conflict so interesting. When they finally bring down the massive beast it's time to harvest it. IT takes until nightfall to take the carcass to the ship and that's when the real work begins. They would rip off the blubber with saws, spears and hooks to peel th whale in five foot wide tapestries of meat, blood and oil, yanking them up onto the deck to be boiled down. And separated belowdeck. When the whale was completely peeled the head was severed and brought upon deck, a hole was cut open and the cabin boy was thrown into the skull with a bucket to make sure not a drop of the spermaceti was wasted. Like literally tossing a child into the whale's skull to scoop every last drop of the precious spermaceti. While thomas nickerson was doing that and trying not to puke unsuccessfully, the rest of the crew chopped the sheets of blubber into 1 by 1 strips that go boiled in copper trying pots to extract the oil. The more seasoned sailors would take the bits and pieces that wouldn't turn into oil and just fucking chow down on em, partially to show dominance, partially to skip eating the revolting hardtack. The boiling processToo revolting to describe. In all descriptions. The revolting process could take up to three days, sharks attacking the corpse all the while. Finally things were looking up. They looped around CAPE HORN, Say that 3 times fast if you're not immature like me. Around the horn they saw some penguins so that's nice. A few whales later they reach the western coast of south america and meet up with a few other whalers in a popular resting spot. This was late october where they met another whaleship captain whose boat had sunk and he was stuck in south america. He was shitfaced all the time and seemed to be doing plenty fine in south america. He told pollard and the mates about the legendary offshore ground. A part of the deep ocean where all the whales chilled out far from shore where you could fill a two year whale oil quota in a week. After some debate they decided to head for this legendary stretch of water in the fucking geometric center of the pacific. Like it's almost impossible to get any farther from a mainland if you tried. But it wasn't without a little stop after they resupplied in south america. The essex sent it's crew onto hood island of the galapagos. And this shit is just depressingly funny and sad. Turtle appreciators skip ahead here.  SO they land at hood island of the galapagos to harvest some tortoises. They had slow metabolism, so they didn't need a lot of food to keep on the boat. So they have 21 people, close to thirty hogs, and a fuckton of tortiseses. They would scoop these guys up, probably 80 plus years old to throw on the boat. They collected 180 of these fuckers. For slaughter. They're just chilling. Darwins tortoises evolved precisely for each island. ENTER THOMAS CHAPPEL, one of the natucketer boatsteerers, who brought a tinderbox onto the island. Just  prankKilled thousands, To this day a wasteland 200 years later. Fast forward to the disaster site. 1000 fucking miles west of the galapagos. And they're already 600 miles offshore.  Again you can't really get farther from a true shore than these guys. And bam it's time to hunt more whales so they send out the boats and owne chase's boat gets slapped by a tail immediately so they have to return to the essex. When they get back to the essex they see a fucking 85 foot bull sperm whale  headed straight for them. It's unclear why it did this, was it divine intervention? Was it sledge hammers slamming in repair that looked like a mate? Some other evil posession of that monstrous whale? We dont know. It hit the essex at maximum speed and caved in many of the planks in the hold water began to rush in and the essex began to tilt towards the widening hole. It knocked the crew into the air and holy fuck did it set them up for one of the most evil survival tales in human history. Chase, thought about stabbing the monstrous whale that had struck them but, hesitated thinking that the whale might destroy the rudder in a spasm upon being struck with a harpoon. He probably should have taken the shot due to what happened next. The whale swam in a circle and hit the boat again. A deathblow. The essex was irreparable after that. The whaleboats saw the carnage and the essex flip over, and returned to the main ship despite being surrounded by money whales. Water was filling up the holds, the ship was beyond saving, all thoughts of financiers went out the window. It was a game of pure survival. The whale turn around and struck again. Slamming into the already weakened and rotten, 20 something year old Essex. That was all it took the ship was beyond all hope. The hold was filling with water, whale oil was lighting on fire on the surface of the water for purely dramatic effect. The people still out in the whaleboats headed towards the wreck, to see what the could salvage. And it was then that one of the black sailors saved the whole enterprise. Diving into the sinking ship as it filled with water, william bond managed to retrieve atlases and compasses rom the captains and first mate's quarters, without these naviagational aids, literally every soul on board would have been lost to the sea. This episode is dedicated to my man billy bonds, without which, I wouldn't have a show, but just a grim footnote in the annals of history. And unfortunately that's where I gotta leave ya. The ship is sinking, hope is nearly lost, they're almost 2000 miles from the shore, and well over 5000 miles from home in nantucket. I hate to do this but that's where I'm gonna leave you this week, Pollard, chase, joy and friends watching as a whale tears their only hope of getting home asunder, something altogether unheard of until this point in history. It's gonna be late when I finish editing this so expect show notes tomorrow. As this is our first true sequential series let me know what you think at nightmarenow.com I love that you're here and I can't wait for you to tune in next week for the next stage in the journey and tragedy of the whaleship essex. We'll get back to shorter night bites now but I wanted to try to push the envelope tonight with this series. I hope you like it and please tell your friends or reach out to me. Without listeners, I really don't have a show so I love to hear from you, and sharing means a lot. I'd say sweet dream but we all know it's only gonna be nightmares now. Tune in next week for part two to see the crew face hardship, cannibalism, pshyological damgae and maybe someone making it hom despite all odds! 

In this episode we look at Hawaii's night marchers, spirits that shepherd souls along the island at night, and we chat about unified paranormal theory. What a fun topic to look at, we're definitely gonna cover more on future shows! Linkies:night marchersNight Marchers againGuess whatMore myths I didn't get toSome first hand accountsMonsters in hawaiiMenehuneMenehune CryptoConcerning hobbitsLoose Transcript:Hi Everybody thanks for tuning in an welcome or welcome back to another episode of nightmare now the show where we hunt down horrors and harrowing historical happenings, hailing from the Himalayas, the Holocene and in this here helping, haunted hawaii! My name is erik byrne and I'm the horrible host, here to bring you a heaping hoard of awesome stories from the fiftieth state in the union all alone in the pacific! I hope everyone is doing well today when you listen to this and when you're not listening to this, I'm having a pretty busy week but what else is new there you don't want to hear that. Big congratulations to my good friends Dan and Asia on their wedding that was a blast, I don't know if I brought that up last episode, and looking forward, a huge early congratulations to Maddie and Caleb on theirs this coming weekend, I'm so excited!  Kitty cat is good, needs his nails clipped but we're hanging in there and we're glad to have you here with us today. The idea for this episode comes from one of my friends on twitter going by Koa ah nooeh nooeh, I'm probably butchering that pronunciation, and I will continue to do so throughout the show, just by virtue of being a white guy trying to figure out how to say stuff in hawaiian. I better learn quick though because we're booking a trip out there after the wedding, and I'm trying to be at least the second most ignorant person there, as long as I'm not the biggest a**hole I'm happy with that. So they reached out and I asked if they had anything cool they wanted me to cover, and they provided me with a couple of links on a phenomena that is both uniquely hawaiian but also has ties to high strangeness the world over. That is of course the night marchers, or as they are known in hawaiian as hoowa kai e po. Again if I mess up all these words, at least I tried, which is more than can be said for a lot of the haunted hawaii clickbait articles I came across this week so cut me some slack. What do the night marchers do? What makes them interesting? you may be asking. Well they certainly don't run in daylight. The night marchers as the name suggests are spirits that march, at night. Not a very imaginative title but hey it's a translation. Folks are always saying, look at them marching at night, nobody asking why. Or how? More interesting by far are those latter two descriptors. Let start with what and then move on to why and how.So you've just got done with a long day of surfing, ok maybe that's a stereotype but whatever,  most of my cultural knowledge of hawaii comes from Surfs up, Moana, and blue hawaii plus a bunch of pearl harbor trivia. 1959 50th state, almost 20 years after the japanese attack on pearl harbor. Oh man do we have some great WWII content coming down the pipe for you guys, I feel like when you hit thirty lawrence fishburne shows up with sunglasses two pills Red is WWII history and Blue is just like model trains, and before you ask taking both pills and building WWII model train stations is generally not an option in polite society. Pretty sure that's some kind of watchlist. I don't know what pill leads to a podcast but here we are.Anyway, model trains aside, you're done surfing and you hit your tent for the night to get some shuteye and off in the distance in the jungle you hear some chanting and the faint sound of drums growing ever closer. You look up to see a brilliantly illuminated full moon and turn your gaze back to the island paradise you've set up camp on. A dense fog has rolled in and  obscured much of the far off road.  In the distance you see a faint bobbing light, getting closer than another and another and maybe 20 more. They're torches, and out of the gloom figures begin to emerge. A scent of death, decay and fresh blood lingers in the air Floating just off the ground, they would march quite literally through the jungle and anything else for that matter, cars, houses, trees, stones, nothing physical could halt their procession. Well there was. Hawaiian lore say that they don't like the ti plant. Apparently that s**t is like a citronella candle to these guys, they hate it like vampires and garlic. So they will keep goin through your condo association but if your apartment has a ti plant in it they will just kind of take a sharp 90 degree turn and then go around it, probably scaring the f**k out of old tito in the apartment next door. As the ghostly entourage comes closer you see their rippling, bronzed muscles, some of the articles were pretty d**n horny. Six 4, rippling abs, traditional tattoos, I thought I stumbled into some erotica for a minute there.They carry torches, spears and other traditional weapons, and generally take no notice of the living. The chants continue past your tent and you shrink back behind the tent flap further, fearing the ethereal battalion passing by your campsite. It grows cool and your fire goes out as they approach, continuing to chant all the while. A figure come into view, apparently escorted by the entourage. Legends say it could be a god, the spirit of an old hawaiian king or perhaps some great warrior or even a newly deceased native hawaiian of noble ancestry. As he appears you see his elaboate headgear and mask turn to your direction. Some primal instinct awakens within you and drives your gaze downward, good thing too, you're not sure why but, when you later look into the legend or listen to nightmare now and leave a 5 star review you learn that the old stories talk about ancient traditions where warriors would escort their king or nobles into an area with drums chants and blasts from a conch yeah I'm going conch shell and if you made eye contact with the king or tribal leader or whoever it was great disrespect. A disrespect met with a dire punishment. Making eye contact as a commoner meant the warriors would execute you right there. Or in the case of the night marchers much later, you might just have a death curse placed on you. It's kind of unclear if the ghosts straight up kill you or just make you get hit by a car the next day or something. Either way you were smart enough to avert your eyes this time. The procession continues past you without further incident, the drums fading off into the distance, you've survived, but you're changed by the experience. You finally get the courage to look outside and you see a trail of large glowing footprints fading in the direction of the torches, now ascending a mountain without any trail or road or the like. Hawaiians and people coming to the island have reported this phenomena as early as 1883, there wasn't really a written language on the island before that but stories were passed down long before that in oral traditions. I guess that kind of covers most of the why, spirits of ancient warriors escorting the gods or nobles around to where they need to be. Reminds me of a service project my fraternity used to do where you could call a number and one of our fat nerds would walk you home from a party so you didn't have to drive or go home alone. They probably would have had a lot more luck with that if we all looked like the rock but whatever that was before my time. As for how I kind of misspoke and yet also cover that they float through stuff and where they come and go and when it happens, the night marchers march at night. As for what you should do, if you smell the decay, hear the chanting and drums, and worse yet see the bobbing of torches and muscular, tan, glistening man meat  what you need to do, and this may save my life when I'm over there, and might save your life too some day so I'll say it twice.  Definitely not procrastinating and running out the clock. When you become aware of the night marchers they say to throw yourself facedown in the dirt and a quote “project an aura of submission and respect”  That's right face down in the dirt and be submissive to the hulking pillars of chiseled ancient warrior spirits. You know what on second thought, a make d**n sure it's night marchers otherwise that's a good way to get robbed or sexually assaulted. It's one of those phenomena that you need to call an audible and do it live. If it's ghosts bend over, if it's an army of crackheads or something, do literally anything else. I don't have much of an outline for this but I kind of want to spitball some thoughts on all this lore and how it ties to the paranormal and spirituality as a whole, if Nightmare Now is your first foray into the world of the scary, crazy, unexplained or weird, then welcome! Again great to have you! But for those of you looking for another paranormal fix or researching this s**t for some time you can probably see where we can go with this. *I believe in ghosts, 100%  without a doubt. I'll do an episode on persona experiences and phone it in eventuallyI believe looking into this stuff makes it look into you, see MIBsIt's all unified. *multiple phenomena *Literal spirits*Recordings *orbs *Scenarios are different and can include multiple types like this one Think about all the different spectral armies throughout history. I wanted to dip into volcano spirits, fueds with hog gods and the pygmy bigfoot cousins the menehune, whomst I could potentially link to a larger phenomena of small pacific hominids, from bigfoot in the northwest, the menehune in hawaii and all the way over to rock apes in vietnam and the orang pendak out in sumatra and the so called hobbits from flores indonesia. WHAT ARE THEY HIDING take out the tropics and you have small hominids the world over. Gnomes, and elves in scandinavia, LEprechauns and fairies, the hildefolk in iceland and then you have the similarities of all those legends and their methods when compared to modern encounters with Grey aliens. But I think ya'll aint ready for that conversation yet. I don't think I'm ready for that conversation to be honest, not without a couple of long island ice teas, that's when I really start connecting dots and look like charlie in always sunny trying to figure out where the mail goes to. This one is running longer than I wanted so I'm gonna call it but we'll definitely be revisiting hawaii on the show, Literally for the honeymoon, and definitely  for volcano gods, haunted hotels, pearl harbor and probably more.  Thanks so much to Koa ah nooeh nooeh, and if you have something you want me to look into deeper hit me up on any of the socials, nightmarenow.com or nightmarenowpodcast@gmail.com As always it's great to have you, I feel like I'm finally hitting my stride a little bit and I don't have any plans of stopping, I'll throw links to all the stuff I talked about and some of the stuff I didn't get to in the show notes for your reading leisure pleasure. I'd say sweet dreams but we all know It's only gonna be nightmares now. Catch ya next week.  

Linkies:triskaidekaphobiaFriday the 13th rooted in the bibleApollo 13 Why is friday the 13th unluckystatsBaldr, Hodr, Vali, LokiThat bitchNERDS Loose transcriptWith all that out of the way, why are we here today? That's a little unintentionally existential. I just mean what are we talking about today. I'll get existential on the hologram earth episode but that'll be at another time. If any of this is real at all. Today however we're talking a fun little word: Triskaidekaphobia! The fear and aversion of the number 13. It's bad luck we've all heard that right? I know I have but I never really gave it more thought than that, it's a weird superstition and nothing more.  But most superstitions have at least a little bit of folklore, historical precedent or other ghoulish tale surrounding them. So what better day to take a look at this ubiquitous superstition surrounding the number 13 than the thirteenth episode? Maybe a Friday the thirteenth, but that doesn't really work for releasing on thursdays. But we'll see if we can get one out on time won't we. Why thirteen though? Nobody really knows for sure, although we do know it's mostly a western tradition. Middle easterners don't trust the number 39, which happens to be thirteen thrice. And many easern countries and cultures do what they can to avoid the number 4 apparently because the word for number four in chinese, vietnamese, japanese and korean is close to their word for death. So mostly the thirteen thing is a western thing. And there's really no consensus on why that is so I'll throw a couple of theories at ya and you can decide for yourself which explanation is most likely to impress the emo chick you're trying to take home at the party. Don't act like you don't subtly think you're intellectually superior because you listen to obscure occult history podcasts, you can't bulls**t me I know why you're really here. And I'm happy about it. I'm thrilled to be your wingman when you bring up this stupid stuff later. Anyway here's a few theories as to why the number 13 is considered unlucky in the west, the first and most likely historically seems to come from norse mythology. And I'm proud to announce this show is brought to you by thor love and thunder, in theaters this saturday, nah I'm just f**king with you, one day we might have a sponsor though, won't that be nice? So thirteen, Norse mythology, where are we? We have a lovely supper with a bunch of the gods hanging out having a grand old time especially my man baldur. The god of jo and gladness, he was just having himself uite a rumpus getting wasted with 11 other gods. Flashback to when baldur was having prophetic dreams of his death, his mother frigga, wife of odin, yeah he was thor's brother. His mother went to every entity in the universe collecting an oath from every single one of them that they would not hurt her son. Loki shows up, that f**king rapscallion and asks casually, hey is there anything that didn't agree not to hurt baldur? She's like no, but come to think of it I never asked mistletoe. It's probably fine right? And boom loki poofs away.  *Back to the dinner, everyone goes back to one of their favorite hobbies, trying to kill baldur. Loki is the 13th guest and is not invited but shows up anyway. Might have something to do with him having sex with horses, I don't know.  *Loki gets hodr, baldur and thor's brother, even more wasted, who is blind to boot and he's like throw this at him here I'll help you throw it. He gives hodr a mistletoe spear and helps him aim and wouldn't you know it, it kills baldur instantly. *In short it births the tradition that if thirteen people are at a dinner table one of them will be dead by the end of the year. In baldurs case it was the end of the night. We'll revisit that theme in just a minute. Can you think of anyone else that had an ill fated supper with 12 others? HMMMMM*Baldur didn't go unavenged though, wait you think someone blamed and killed loki? Nope, they made sure there was justice so odin f**ked a giant named rindr to give birth to a son Vali, who reaches maturity the day he's born. And I thought a year of puberty or whatever was bad, jesus, hey there's a spoiler. So Vali rockets from infant to middle age in a matter of hours and kills his blind half brother hodr, and is then pretty much never mentioned again in the norse sagas except that he survived ragnarok. I feel like it wasn't really hodrs fault that much was it?  Loki eventually gets his comeuppance when they rip out the entrails of his son and use them to chain him up under a drooling serpent until the end of the world, I'm not an expert on norse mythology, but I think he's still there getting acid venom dripped on him chained up with his son's poop chute. I wonder how many times he got away with murder and stuff on the it's just a prank bro defense? So 13 gods show up to a twelve god party and someone dies big time. That seems to be the earliest thing historians point to, as for the origin of the aversion to 13. Lets jump ahead a little bit, the close listeners probably can already tell where this is going. Dinner for 12 and a guest of honor? Something's ringing a bell with that one. Of course You have Jesus and the last supper. Who was the 13th one at the table? One of history's most well known traitors, up there with loki and Benedict Arnold,  one Judas Iscariot.  That's not actually in the bible, the order they sat down, that is. So maybe John sat down last I don't know. It certainly adds dramatic tension if he sat down last. After the dinner Judas sold Jesus out for 30 pieces of silver, leading to his arrest and subsequent crucifixion and resurrection. That's where friday comes into the whole mess. Pretty much everyone agrees the crucifixion took place on a friday, hence the holiday good friday. You see a pattern here, 13 was a bad egg, maybe that's why they come in dozens, Jesus gets killed on friday. Naturally these things come together, at least you would think so right? Not exactly. Both Friday and 13 were unlucky for a long time after these happenings but the first recorded use of Friday the 13th together  as a concept wasn't until 1913. This actually came from the American tradition of holding executions on fridays.  Although that's when the Romans would hold crucifixions as well so you'll be forgiven for thinking that it's older. With both that grisliness and the historical unluckyness of 13th it was just the sum of those two superstitions.   Another fun sticking point for Romans and 13 was that witch covens back then would reportedly claim 12 members. Leaving a 13th seat open for WHO BUT? THE DEVIL! Going back into the bible, some scholars believe Eve tempted Adam with the fruit on a friday, and additionally that Cain killed his brother Abel on a friday as well. There's a lot of history that coalesces into this big superstition. All that smushed together counts as number 2, so here's number 3: Numerology. I don't generally put a whole lot of stock into numerology because it is really really easy to twist numbers and letters so that everything comes out to 666 or thirteen or whatever but I'm not gonna completely discount it either, I actually just did my numerology calculations and found it to be quite accurate, but I think that's mostly just forer effect at work. I'll toss a link in the notes at nightmarenow.com if you want to try too. But numerologists make some convincing points about 13, and more importantly 12.  There's a lot riding on 12 in our universe and cultural consciousness. 12 months, 12 apostles, 12 tribes of Israel, 12 eggs, 12 hours in a day, 12 days of Christmas,12 gos on mount olympus, 12 inches in a foot, 12 inches of, forget that last one it's a family show. The factors 3*4, 2*6,give you 3 plus 4 plus 2 plus 6 equals 12. It's really got a lot going for it. Thirteen is a prime number and doesn't do anything particularly notable besides being unlucky. So there's the numerological aspect of ruining how f**king awesome 12 is. Lastly some people will tell you about how Friday the 13th 1307 is the day that king Philip in France thought the knight's templar got too big for their britches (they started a banking system),  burned all the knight's templar at the stake and ALLEGEDLY brought ruin to their order. That did indeed happen on that date, but it doesn't really click as a Friday the 13th concept for another 600 years. We'll go deeper into all that crazy when I finish some books on the freemasons and their links to the knight's templar, the crusades and of course the GRAILLL. Maybe we'll live stream some treasure hunts, we'll see what the nightmare now infrastructure is like by then. Friday the thirteenth wasn't perfected as a concept until much later though in 1980 when Jason Vorhees first wrought havoc on camp crystal lake. Actually I guess it isn't technically Jason until Friday the 13th part II in 1981. You might whine that that is a spoiler a little bit but the movie came out 42 f**king years ago. Go see it if you haven't yet. So now we're back to the beginning of the show, where I've taken you on a whirlwind journey through time to discover that the true meaning of friday the thirteenth was in you all along, and also take a year off the end of your life to help with your friends burst appendix like moundshroud. But what does it actually do in modern times?Triskaidekaphobia, or the fear of the number 13 is estimated to afflict 10% of Americans and more worldwide, and they're dumb. The only time you should fear a number is when you're six and you saw that seven ate nine, I still wake up at night screaming thinking about it. So much blood. THis article went on to talk with great sympathy about how triskaidekaphobia goes untreated in most cases. No s**t. If it's really that bad where you take off every friday the 13th off work get some help I guess. Interestingly this fear causes an estimated loss of 8 to 9 HUNDRED MILLION Dollars in lost revenue each day it occurs, People don't fly, they don't travel, they don't go to work and they don't take monetary risks and they definitely do not get married. This happens one to 3 times per year, never zero, and never 4 or more. Statistically there's some fun stuff going on with the Gregorian calendar that makes this work. It operates on a 400 year cycle so the next time Friday the 13th is in October is next year isn't that fun! So let's see October 13th 1623, George look that up. Friday! Boom. neat if ultimately unhelpful information for your consumption. So some years that's a cool 2.7 billion in losses because people are scared of a number. These ancient stories and religions have far more of an impact than many people like to give them credit for. We have a myriad of hotels and skyscrapers missing the 13th floor, we have airports that don't have a 13th terminal, streets that don't have an address at 13, skipping it entirely or doing something dumb like 12 ½ in place of 13. Airlines and busses often won't have 13th rows of seats. All these seem completely idiotic to me, because they're obviously still there physically but the numbering labelling just skips them. Like what does that actually accomplish?I guess one last thing the triskies would be butthurt if I didn't mention is the notorious Apollo 13 mission where pretty much everything went wrong on the way to the moon. An oxygen tank exploded and they had to slingshot around and land back on earth manually.  Could be a 13 curse, could be unrelated bad luck or faulty control limits and engineering checks or it could be a psyop to impress upon the american psyche that coming back to earth was possible using a slide rule to have a convenient answer to why apollo 11s computer would have never been technically capable of doing the telemetry calculations to get to the moon or earth at all. But that's just ridiculous right? Maybe we'll see in another episode. All in all this stuff is pretty interesting and I never really gave it any thought besides the slasher movie franchise and a general cultural awareness of the phenomena. So it's pretty neat to see where all of this might come from. I know a lot of people call it bad luck but I'm nothing short of thrilled for the future of the show hitting it's 13th episode and I can't wait to see what the fortune and future holds for it.  

The links are on my other laptop they're coming soon I love you!

20th maineJoshy chamby chamesghosts of nywritings of chamberlainsee page 896quivering moustachesmore sourcesI'm not a school child, MLA format can suck a fat one anotha onegoogle the gettysburg addressHey everybody, welcome back to another Thursday episode of nightmare now! Where we laugh about lurid lore and learn about lost languishing laments in layman's terms and lay on the levity talking about loss, life, love and in today's show, liberty. I thought it might be fitting to do our first foray into ghost and war stories on the week of memorial day. And what better american veteran to cover than the man, the myth, the legend, MC dolla bill ya boi george washington himself. Memorial day was first celebrated as a holiday in 1868, known then as decoration day to honor union soldiers in the civil war. Now as far as George Washington and the civil war goes you've got a couple of takes on it. The joke take is that sure, Washington was there in the flesh. The broke take is that Washington wasn't there at all, after all my man died in december of 1799 and the civil war wasn't for another sixty years or so. From April of 1861 to May of 65. The Woke take is that Washington's ideals and legacy inspired people on both sides to fight for the America that they believed he founded. But then we get up to the straight bespoke take that George Washington's ghost literally showed up at gettysburg in july of 1863 with a f**king lightsaber to turn the tide of battle like he's obi wan kenobi. This episode of Nightmare Now brought to you by disney plus. Glad to have you all here and I'm very excited and pleased to announce, thanks to you yes you with the headphones, that we hit 500 overall downloads, that's a fun milestone and I'm super pumped about it and the future, watching that number grow, but more importantly what that number represents, and that's you the listener deciding to listen to this greasy little show when there's millions of others out there competing for your time. It truly means a lot to me so thank you all so much!Now back to our regular scheduled programming about jedi george washington. Some of you history nerds may have heard this story before, I know I have, but I never actually looked too far into it until this week. And especially all the non americans listening might not have heard this either but lets just jump right into it. As far as the civil war goes we're zooming in on major part of it, the battle of gettysburg, but we're gonna keep zooming in further to one of the more famous parts of that most famous battle. Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th maine infantry holding the strategic little round top. Gettysburg and even this particular skirmish within the three or four day battle of gettysburg are kind of outside the scope of this episode. I defineitely want to do a deep dive on the civil war, and probably gettysburg specifically, but the short version is like 6000 people died and like thirty thousand f**king people were injured, and most of them probably died later because medicine in the civil war was bascially just amputation and hoping for the best. Lotta blood lotta screaming, bullets blew apart in you and you died of infection most of the time. Not really a good time for anyone I reckon. Gettysburg ended up being one of the turning points, if not THE turning point of the American Civil war. The defense of the little round top, was part of the reason that the union won gettysburg because like the obi wan kenobi analogy from before, it was the high ground. Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine fought off two waves of a larger force of confederate troops to defend the hill but eventually ran very low on ammo. With another wave incoming chamberlain and his famously quivering mustache yelled to fix bayooonnnneeettteeesss! And led his boys to charge down the hill in a last ditch defensive offensive bluff. Nobody is gonna fault the confederates for scattering after this lunatic gambit, because seeing your buddies shot is one thing, but seeing them skewered on a bayonet by a whole company of charging berserk soldiers is another thing entirely. This scattering and screaming and battle of quivering mustaches is a quintessential moment in american history. So how does george washington, I wanted to be dramatic and add his middle name there but apparently middle names weren't' really a thing until the 1830s. Kind of a neat little tidbit there. Anyway how does george washington fit into all this?While the story is mostly legend, it's actually referenced in primary sources about the battle from members of the 20th Maine themselves and even Joshua Chamberlain himself. Big fan of this dude, being a Maine boy myself I gotta rep the home team. Sorry to all my war of northern aggression listeners. So picture the scene, the 20th Maine infantry division, at it's maximum comprised of a little over 1600 people, I don't  know how many of them were actually at gettysburg, because a number of them had died or otherwise been taken out of battle by a faulty smallpox v a c c i n e, (not trying to have this episode pulled for disinformation) that'll have to be another episode. So they're walking in towards Gettysburg. They don't have tanks or cars or anything obviously but they come to a fork in the road. They're map is  totally out of date and they have no idea which way to go, one road leads to where they need to go and the other will send them down a wild goose chase away from the battle in the coming days. Not to mention it is at this point nearing the dead of night and even if their map was correct it would be hard to read and hard to navigate. According to witnesses an imposing man on horseback, dressed in revolutionary costume and a tricorn hat emerged conveniently and unexpectedly from behind a tree and pointed them in the right direction, saying that they were going to be needed in the ensuing fight. The men didn't really have anything else to go on and the man had a familiar look to him that they trusted. He seemed like he couldn't lie. Something something cherry tree. A few days later the 20th Maine was in their most famous battle and ammunition was running horrifically short. If you saw jeff bridges in gettysburg or listened to the last five minutes of the show you know what happened next, the famous bayonet charge. But what the movie and textbooks generally leave out is that the mysterious figure that guided them down the right, fateful road made yet another appearance at this pivotal moment. So chamberlain weighs their options, if they stand and fight without ammo they're f**king toast, if they retreat, the confederates take the round tops and gain a huge tactical advantage over the entire hill, I'm sure there's people that wrote alternate history novels about this exact scenario, if they took the round tops it could have changed the whole outcome of gettysburg and the civil war as a whole, suddenly we've got two different united states and confedearte states in modern day.  Luckily we don't have anything like a two party system that doesn't get anything done today, and we have a working government for the people by the people! Just as chamberlain was giving the order to Fix bayonets, man that's fun to do, my mustache isn't nearly long enough to do it justice right now but I'll work on that, just as he was yelling to fix bayonets, the figure appeared, this time it was clear. It was george F Washington. Since my man didn't have a middle name his middle name in the nightmare now continuity timeline is f**king. George f**king Washington himself was there at the battle of little round top right behind Joshua Chamberlain and yelled FIX BAYONETS, CHARGE! And then George Washington unsheathes his curved saber from its scabbard and as he pulls it out the thing lights on fire. (Lightsaber noise) This renews the union soldiers resolve and they all charge with him. He's up on his horse wearing his full revolutionary war gear and supposedly runs down and breaks up the confederate line in front of the rest of the 20th maine. Allegedly the confedereate troops below focused fire on him and his white horse but to no effect, so he was bulletproof as well. His sword is on fire, and at this point it's obvious to those around that it is truly George Washington, not some revolutionary war cosplayer like they thought when they first saw him at the split in the road.Georgie boy charges forward with the rest of the 20th Maine into the confederate line who I believe is composed of the 15th Alabama infantry. They aren't ready for the madcap bayonet charge, ghost of the first president or not and it helps turn the overall tide of the battle. After the initial carnage George Washington isn't seen again. At least not at Gettysburg, there's like a million other stories about george washington's ghost at his home and in other important american places. But this was the coolest and the most fitting for memorial day though. We have to ask ourselves though, is it real? I mean let's handwave whether ghosts are real and for the sake of argument say that they are. I would agree with that but I think ghosts are a complicated kind of phenomena that I'll put some more thoughtful discussion towards in another episode. But even treating the world as if ghosts are 100% real, what is the veracity of this claim? Is this historical fanfiction? The neat part is that if it is just presidential fanfiction, it started right away. First hand reports told this story, it's in the primary sources! There was an investigation! After the civil war, Lincoln's secretary of war Edwin Stanton opened an investigation into the event. Hopefully like the whole little round top and not just burning up post war tax dollars on a ghost hunt but whatever. In said investigation a few of the soldiers that were there testified that they had indeed seen him that day. Joshua Chamberlain himself when interviewed said quote “We know not what mystical power may be possessed by those who are now bivouacking with the dead.  I only know the effect, but I dare not explain or deny the cause. I do believe that we were enveloped by the power of the other world that day and who shall say that Washington was not among the number of those who aided the country that he founded?” unquote it's pretty f**king cool right?  Kinda weird that George Washington was from Virginia and repped the union but it also made sense that he would want to be on the side to attempt to keep his country together. I don't know. In the end it's a really cool ghost story that has a lot of primary sources backing it up, it's thematic, it's patriotic and I love it. Special thanks this episode to everyone that sacrificed for this country. As Lincoln said “We have come to dedicate a portion of that podcast, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.”Thanks to all of em and thanks to everyone listening, as always, I'd say sweet dreams, but we all know it's only gonna be nightmares now

Anthropodermic Bibliopegy is the process of binding a book in human skin.  Today we talk the history, and notable examples of this ghoulish practice.  Sources: "Thunder, Very Close, Rain, A.wav" by InspectorJ (www.jshaw.co.uk) of Freesound.orgThe Madman's LibraryKISS BloodSaddam's book clubAnthropodermic book scienceAnthropodermic bibliographyNarrative of the life of James Allen, alias George Walton, alias Jonas Pierce, alias James H. York, alias Burley Grove, the highwayman : being his death-bed confession, to the warden of the Massachusetts state prisonFate of the blenden hall Loose Transcript:Hi everyone, welcome to another fabulous episode of nightmare now! The show where we brave brutal books and bring out blasphemous bloody business for breaking up a banal bus ride or business meeting. Hope everyone is having a great week, mine's chaotic but at least I don't have polio. My laptop switched the microphone part way through the original recording so I went to edit and half of it sounded like I was screaming like a lunatic into walkie talkie in a tunnel, the other half sounded all messed up because I was using the wrong microphone. The audio is beyond my capabilities to repair without summoning some kind of audio demon so here we are talking about a cursed media. Again.  Work is still crazy and gets crazier by the day so I think for now I am going to move release days to thursday mornings starting next week, I hope to eventually get the research synthesis turnaround a lot faster as I streamline the workflow but for now I think doing the show on weeknights is gonna help with consistency and my sanity a lot more than procrastinating with the homies on the weekend and then trying to outline, record, edit and promote monday night till 3am. So keep an eye out next Thursday for next week's show. I think that's more than enough housekeeping stuff for now so let's just  dive right into it, Today we're talking about a crazy little thing called anthropodermic bibliopegy If you're up on your latin or history you may be able to figure out what that means, but if you're not it's the lovely art of bookbinding… with human skin. A practice with a wide reaching and surprising history. My main source today is the lovely coffee table book I received as a gift, from myself, The Madman's Library, by Edward Brooke Hitching. Luckily, or unluckily depending on who you ask the madman's library is just bound in regular old paper, whatever cardboard paste stuff they use to bind modern books. It's really cool, basically hitching was the son of an antique book collector and from a very early age fell in love with books, especially rare, unusual and unique books. Within its pages he collects and references hundreds of such books including ancient religious texts, giant dusty codices, bestiaries, grimoires and more, you could do a whole podcast on weird books alone, so we'll definitely be coming back to this one. One chapter in particular I want to highlight in our first foray into literary curiosities is the one entitled “Books made of Flesh and Blood” which immediately caught my eye. It starts off innocuous enough, with traditional books bound in cowhide or rabbit fur or snakeskin,  things like that, that were common practice since the dawn of book binding. From barely worked tanned hide to elaborate, ornate skin designs, there's a whole spectrum, but specifically we're looking at books bound in human skin but we we wouldn't be covering it on the show if I, I mean you the disturbed listener didn't want lovely Literally “hand” crafted journal, like made by hands from hands. Perhaps a tasteful nipple skin latch to keep your embarrassing thoughts about your crush truly secret from prying eyes. Ed Gein would probably have a couple of these laying around if he could read. So what would possess somebody to do this exactly? Well for one thing, it's a hell of a conversation piece. And it sends a hell of a message to boot. Oftentimes a book bound in human skin was a list of misdeeds of an executed criminal. It was sort of a punishment beyond death for the convicted and it saved a goat or cow, isn't that nice. You had the accounts of murderers crimes bound in the murderers own flesh which is metal as f**k and probably houses some insanely bad juju. It wasn't just murderers though, for example you had traitors getting the same treatment. Most of the time after death. Speaking of treatments that's a good segue. How do you take human skin and make it suitable to cover your fifth grade textbooks? Apparently there were 2 main ways of getting the skin ready. That's of course after you have the skin of the person. I can't get into the pretreatment because, well, there's more than one way to skin a person… If I reveal how many I know I feel like I'll get some calls from the FBI.  Anyway, once you have the skin, hopefully humanely sourced. You could soak it in lime water, take off the hair and chunks and goop afterwards, and just go to town with tannin compounds to tan the hide. The alternative is just to go the foul bachelor frog route and blast it with piss. A surprisingly versatile tool any problem solver needs in their metaphorical toolbox.The ammonia dissolves the fidddly chunks and pubes and guts  and gets it ready for stretching and drying. And if you're feeling real fancy, and you want a nice sheen and luster on the cover of your new skin book, all you had to do was give it a rubdown with a nice rustic stain varnish cocktail made by mixing dog dookie, bird poop and water. I mean if you're gonna do it, do it right I guess.  There's some great stories in here about notable examples of these books and the people that made them, and also the people they're made out of. The first one actually goes back to a previous episode, the one on Robert Liston, so check that one out for more info, alternatively, if you've got a time machine skip ahead a few months till when we do a deeper dive on burke and hare, resurrection men, and the body snatcher arms races. But the short version was that william burke and william hare were a pair of scumbag murderers, with a get rich quick scheme that was basically just cutting the natural death middle man out of the cadaver trade, murdering victims and selling the bodies for medical research, but when they were caught, partially thanks to our boy liston,  TIME ME GENTLEMEN! Again check that one out!  Hare I believe got some kind of squealer plea immunity deal or something to sell out Burke and get out of the hangman's noose himself. Naturally Burke wasn't so lucky. He was hanged for his crimes on january 28th 1829 and then immediately dissected and flayed. A fitting end for his crime spree of selling bodies for dissection. I don't remember that part of alanis morissete's ironic.They took the newly flayed skin and turned part of it into a wallet for the prison guard that kept an eye on him and they took more of the skin to put a complete document of the trial and evidence of his case in writing into a neat little skin book that currently resides in the surgeon's college in edinburgh along with his skeleton. They really used all the parts of this dude. This practice continued pretty much until it fell out of vogue in the late 1800s, it wasn't really as popular to be skinning and tanning human hide anymore, at least not outside of texas that is. There was one other notable criminal skin book that a friend mentioned to me when I brought this topic up. Thanks Gabe! He called my attention to a book currently housed in the boston athenaeum (a thuh nee um) called the Narrative of the Life of James Allen, alias Jonas Pierce, alias James H. York, alias Burley Grove, the Highwayman, Being His Death-bed Confession to the Warden of the Massachusetts State Prison. They really didn't care much for brevity back then, side note theres also a great chapter on weird book titles in the madman's library that make that one look like a haiku.  So james allen, aka jonas pierce, aka the highwayman ect ect was a highwayman. I guess that much is obvious but whatever. He was in the state prison in Massachusetts and his health was failing, he wasn't on death row or anything, just kind of old and sick and in jail. He knew he was on the way out and wrote down his death bed confession but here's where it gets weird. His last wish was that when he died, they use his skin to pind two copies of his f**king confession and memoirs. One would go to his prison doctor that was taking care of him at the end of his life and the other copy went to a John A. Fenno Jr. The story with him was that James Allen, being a highwayman, or maybe just a big johnny cash fan, tried to rob this guy at gunpoint years ago before he was in prison, and john was the only guy he robbed that ever fought back or resisted and James Allen found a weird admiration for that courage later in his life. The highwayman, James, actually shot the other guy John, but the bullet richotected off his suspender buckle or something and he survived. James Allen was so moved by this display of bravery in the face of certain death at his hands that when he died he had the other copy of his skin bound confession presented to John Fenno Jr. You gotta imagine waking up to get the mail back in the day walking out in your f**king bunny slippers and the post man stops by and is just like taop of the mornin to ye mr fenno, I gots me a parcel for ya from the state prison” you cautiously unwrap the sring on the package, hands trembling and it's just the memoirs of the guy that tried to murder you bound in his own skin with a little note that just says, “ you got scrote and I like the cut of your gib laddy”  like what do you even do? Th..thanks I guess and put it up on the shelf. Full disclosure I don't actually know what's in the book but I found an internet archive link to the full book if you want to know more, I'll throw that into the show notes at nightmarenow.com. Let me know if there's anything cool in there it's only like 40 pages or so. Later on fenno's daughter donated the book to the athenaeum after her father died and it has remained there ever since. This case has been pretty well documented and even was proven to be genuine man leather by an organization called the Anthropodermic Book Project. They were another cool source for this episode because these are the guys that test all these books  via peptide mass fingerprinting. This is a process where they take a tiny sample of the book digest it with enzymes and run the resulting digestate through a mass spec machine to compare the spectra of the peptides in the collagen in the skin from known values for mammals like goats, cows, deer and humans. For the non-lab science inclined they basically turn a piece of the skin into juice and run the juice through a machine that says what animal it is. Think karen from spongebob dissolving seaweed to find out it's 50% sea and 50% weed. Kinda like the turtle from finding nemo. One book was about pituitary issues causing gigantism or other hormonal abnormalities, and that was bound in the skin of a literal giant from a ringling bros circus standing eight foot six. There's not a whole lot of detail available on that particular case but at least it's on theme right?Like I said the whole human skin books industry started to collapse in the late eighteen hundreds but there are a few exceptions, this one's apocryphal but apparently some lady had a book binder wrap up their love letters in her dead husband. That was in f**king 1958! Again not a whole lot of detail on that one but there's at least an implied consent there.The earliest form of the practice is, of course, a bible. Dating back to at least the 1200s bound in the skin of a young woman. And I've seen enough criminal minds to know that this s**t probably still continues here and there to this very day.Another semi famous, yet non criminal case was of a huge, anonymous fan of camille flamarrion. A french author focusing on astronomy. Camille commented on how soft and smooth this gal's skin was and she was super into it. A real i f**king love science type broad. This is your typical nasa t shirt wearing neil degrasse tyson groupie type. That reminds me I need to send him a mean tweet for talking s**t about UFOs the other day. Anyway, this chick was pale and glamorous mostly because she had tuberculosis. Anyway she was about to kick the bucket from the consumption and her last wish was to HAVE HER SKIN DONATED TO HER FAVORITE SCIENTIST PERSONALITY. To be turned into his next masterwork.I guess there wasn't a whole lot of paperwork or government oversight in 1882 france, because and this is a direct quote. “In accordance with her wishes, her skin was taken by the celebrated Paris physician Dr Ravaud, who delivered the roll of skin to Flammarion's residence himself. He told Flammarion he had flayed the ‘marvellously attractive young woman', whose name he was forbidden from revealing, just ‘a few minutes after she passed on'.” unquote. After that a copy of camille's latest space novel was bound in her skin and theres actually a picture of it in the book, it's quite elegant.When I eventually release a patreon or something so I can quit my job I'll have notebooks in my own skin available to my highest tier subscribers in the event of my death. Seems like a fair tradeoff. That kinda closes the book on notable cases of human skin books, actually there's a copy of the french constitution bound with the skin of a revolutionary, but after that we've covered the flesh, but that's only half of flesh and blood. That's right you guys are lucking out today, because I have a whole second half of this topic. Books written in (Toccata) Human Blood… This might be a little bit easier or harder to stomach for people based on how you feel about blood. On the one hand you've got the fact that people didn't necessarily die to use their blood in a book, although I guess you could say the same for skin in modern times with skin grafts and whatever but I didn't find any evidence of that, that's pure speculation. But on the other hand it's blood and that makes some people flip out. If you're not into the blood, you probably haven't listened this far but also now is your last warning for avoiding a whole lot of slicing, quills in fingers and really metal manuscripts. If you gotta shut off the show, remember I'll see you on thursday instead of tuesday because I really can't do tuesday anymore famalam. I'm not fooling anyone saying I'm gonna be working on weekends, so it ends up me being up till three am outlining, recording and editing on monday, spreading those out over a few weekdays will lead to a much healthier mental state and workflow for me. Worst case you can delay listening and play it tuesday morning. I've spoken with a few listeners and it doesn't seem like this will be an issue. I'm also gonna take this week to pull together the facebook page because I've got family and friends asking for it. Thursdays at seven it is! I love you all! If you can stomach the blood let's get to in the second part of the show, what good are books bound with flesh if they don't have blood running through their inky veins?  We're talking books written in human blood.Now depending on how you feel about blood the books written in blood are generally less brutal than the ones bound in flesh. Based simply on the fact that getting blood is a lot easier on a person than getting their skin. It's much less damaging to prick your own finger and write in blood than it is to have your back flayed. You're much more likely to survive the former.What you find in blood writing pretty often is monks, are monks? That's a weird grammar thing. We'll go with is, what you find is a lot of monks. Monks gonna do monk things, so a lot of times they would copy manuscripts in their own blood as a form of piety. They would slice their fingertips, make little cuts on their chest or ugh slice under the tongue. Didn't they do that on jackass? That seems really f**king painful, not skinned painful but definitely unpleasant. It seems like the lighter the blood appeared on the page the more pure of heart the writer was so that's a neat little metric to test yourself with. And test themselves they did, draining blood from their fingers just to get another page done, there's some great pictures of these you can find online that you can see where on the page the coagulants in the blood actually started to clot on the page and then trail off and become lighter until the next prick to get more blood ink. It's really f**king cool in my opinion, interestingly some of the text that is copied in these blood manuscripts describes a pious buddha ripping off his own skin for paper, using his own blood for ink and snapping a finger bone for a quill. Like bro chill! I'll drive you to staples!Aside from monk manuscripts, of which, theres a lot of them, there's a few more crazy examples I want to get through. One of the most interesting is Saddam's Hussein's blood Qur'an. This is absolutely the most notable recent addition to the flesh and blood books. In 1997, Saddam Hussein as a nice little sixtieth birthday present to himself, commissioned, from a renowned scribe, a copy of the Qur'an written in his own blood. I guess eveyone goes through their rawr XD goth phase at different times. He said quote “My life has been full of dangers in which I should have lost a lot of blood but since I have bled only a little, I asked somebody to write God's words with my blood in gratitude.” unquote In a letter to the media a few years later in 2000. Reportedly he was hooked up to exsanguinate around 27 liters of blood, not all at once, to be mixed in with ink, to write out the three hundred and thirty six thousand words in the Qur'an. So after a few years this was actually achieved, whether it's actually all his blood might be up for debate but they did produce a Qur'an written in his blood. Needless to say, Saddam's lucky to not be losing a lot of blood line really didn't age well. The quote “war on terror” clownfest started and we're gonna yadda yadda yadda all that and by 2006 Saddam was executed for his war crimes. Interestingly enough, I came across  in my research that in addition to all the f**ked up s**t he did as the dictator of Iraq, he still had time to write FOUR f**king novels? ROMANCE NOVELS? About a medieval Iraqi leader falling in forbidden love with a beautiful girl. Allegorical to represent the Iraqi people while he seduced her in spite of her husband, read as the USA. I guess his rawr XD phase was longer than we thought. The others were historical fiction, and one included a particularly ham fisted scene where the hero destroys two towers in the land of christians and jews. Not touching that one. I guess he's not exactly a role model, but it  really says something about making the time for your creative pursuits even if your'e erm… busy with your job and responsibilities. What's interesting from my admittedly limited understanding of the islamic faith, it's blasphemy to produce a Qur'an in this manner, and another blasphemy to destroy a Qur'an no matter how it was made so the state of saddam's blood Qur'an is in a weird catch 22 where it shouldn't exist but nobody wants to destroy it. As far as I can tell now it's scattered in a few vaults in Iraqi government buildings. Phew, really hope I didn't offend anybody there. Obligatory I love all my listeners. Now, MOVING ON. Marvel comics did a limited run KISS comic 1977 that they mixed in a vial of all the band member's blood into the ink in the printing factory at marvel. So that happened, a little bit more of a sensational marketing gimmick but it's verified and worth including. That one is kind of hilarious in it's own right without me editorializing, especially if you're familiar with the more idiotic ways KISS has merchandized. I'll put a link to the KISS KASKET in the show notes for the uninitiated. Lastly we've got one that isn't actually written in human blood per se, but the original copy of Fate of the Blenden Hall, was a diary written about the harrowing shipwreck ideal of the crew of the blenden hall, by its Captain Alexander Greig. The problem was that while a desk and paper washed up like it was a cartoon, there was no ink. He had to keep a record as his captain's duties so he needed to make do with the next best thing. His 82 day account of the survivors of the wreck, including illustrations, was done entirely in penguins blood. Damn, talk about unhappy feet. Shipwrecks though, now that's a great topic!That's what I got today guys, it's good to be back! Again sorry I skipped a week but I think changing up the release is the best thing to do, it was totally arbitrary to begin with and this will give me a couple more weekdays to get s**t done instead of just doing research on the weekend and trying to do all the rest on mondays. Thank you all so much for all your support, it means the world to me and I can't wait to keep the show going in perpetuity. For updates, show notes, memes, banter or anything else you might need, check out nightmarenow.com for links to the rest of the socials. You guys are the best, I'll see you on thursday! I'd say sweet dreams, but we all know it's only gonna be nightmares now! 

https://www.nineteenthcenturydisability.org/items/show/39https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_of_the_Opera_(1986_musical)https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-water-tank-beneath-palais-garnier-paris-francehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdGhGX6z8BA&ab_channel=HistoryMattershttps://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k283653v.image.langFRhttps://standardebooks.org/ebooks/gaston-leroux/the-phantom-of-the-opera/alexander-teixeira-de-mattoshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Communehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaston_Lerouxhttp://blog.feinviolins.com/2012/05/phantoms-inspiration-chaos-in-paris.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palais_GarnierHi everybody and welcome back to another episode of nightmare now the show where we put fright at the forefront and face our fears forever. This is episode nine and I'm not showing any signs of stopping, slowing down, losing sleep, sure but stopping never. Holy hell what a week it's been, working backwards I had a lovely triple mothers day, with meal and flowers and the whole shebang, So big shout out to all the moms out there this one goes out to all of you, most people have a mother or at least know one so tell them you love em! Further back  we celebrated my future brother in law's college graduation so that was awesome, man those commencement speakers don't know when to shut up! Start a podcast like the rest of us, and for the love of god work on your mic technique! I have never been more sensitive to mouth sounds and lip smacks in my whole life than I have the last few months. I guess that comes with the territory of  editing yourself talking for a few hours a week, I still don't know if I'll ever get over hearing how my voice reverberates differently in the world than in my own skull but we've got plenty of time to figure it out, Either way big ups to all my homies graduating these few weeks. We're all proud of you. I guess. Ok turning back the clock a little further, we get to my lovely family trip to New York City, to see The Phantom of the Opera,  Which incidentally starts just like this podcast does, an explosive jump back through time.  There's only so many ways I can apply pyrotechnics in an audio medium like this so I'll begrudgingly say that they did it better. Just this once. Wait till you see how many explosions I'll have when I start doing live shows. Naturally, all this driving and sitting and being present with my family on both sides was not conducive to doing a whole lot of research and development on my reclusive horror comedy podcast, I really should have made QR stickers for NYC, I was thinking to myself wouldn't it be f**king awesome if this broadway show was based on a real deformed man with a melodious voice murdering people in a theater? I did some research and it isn't. Well it was a good try. Andrew Lloyd Webber's phantom of the opera, which came out in 1986 was not in fact based on any kind of true story whatsoever. It was based on a book, a French mystery novel Le Fantôme de l'Opéra. By Gaston LEroux. The book however, BAHHHHH BUMMM BUMMM BUMMM BUMMM BAHHHHH was in fact based on a true story. I wish I could just throw the clip in there. But I gotta remix it just a lil bit so I don't get executed by Broadway lawyers. Gotta love the Wahwah. That's right there really was a tragedy resulting in death and grievous injury in an old timey opera theater. Please remain in your seats everyone, it was only an accident, an accident huahuaahauhauha! I'm inclined to sympathize with the phantom because his name is Erik and he grew up as the weird kid but my fiance says he's creepy when he writes a horny play and murders several people to get close to an actress. How does she think we met? So If you're unfamiliar with the Phantom of the Opera, go see it if you ever get the chance, I can't get over how awesome the show was and how great it is to see a little bit of live theater again. But the spoiler free plot is that a man, twisted by deformity from birth, lives in a lake under an opera theater, collects a protection racket from the owners and works a side gig as a music tutor. Really a community man. He eventually falls in love with a chorus girl and pulls some strings, well, more pulls some nooses to make sure she's the star of the opera they're putting on, beyond that you get into some major spoilers but I think that's all the info you need to enjoy this episode. Obviously the phans with a ph might get a little more out of it but oh well, it's stuck in my head. Ask anyone I work with. So what did happen to inspire this story?  Let's start from the author, Gaston leroux. No idea if I'm saying that right, I never took any French in school. I think my high school French teacher actually got fired because she brought a nalgene full of vodka every day. I really don't know if that's true but  I remember hearing it and laughing at the time. At this point I don't f**king blame her. I don't know how teachers deal with high schoolers without a literal liter of vodka. Anyway, Gaston leroux had a shotgun blast career, originally studying law, graduating as a lawyer and then immediately receiving a massive inheritance of a few million francs in 1889 and subsequently gambling and spending it away lavishly until 1890. Holy s**t that must have been a hell of a year. So after his year long project X debacle he decided he didn't want to be a lawyer and became a journalist and theater critic. This'll come up later. obviously. He also covered the Russian revolution in 1905 which is a whole can of worms. We'll get into some crazy Russian history eventually but not in today's episode. After that he retired from journalism and settled into a comfy life of writing detective fiction. He was basically the french analog to arthur conan doyle and sherlock holmes.  In 1907  he published his seminal work, and I had to double check that that word didn't mean relating to semen, and that it more meant the artist's most important and influential work, but apparently it's both. Go figure. Maybe my best episode and my seminal work will literally just be about cum, we'll see. So his seminal work though, was the phantom of the opera based on current, at the time, events and also his investigative journalism on the palais garnier (Pal-eye garn-e-ay) which from now on in the show will be referred to as the paris opera house because I don't speak french. People say it's a romantic language, but Americans sound awful speaking french. According to my listener info, france and india are tied for my number #2 countries so I don't know if it's a couple of french folks tuning in or 1 dedicated listener that's listened to every single episode so far, but either way that's awesome and another reason I decided to do this episode. Thanks for listening, wherever you are! Sorry for putting your shoutout directly after the semen talk but that's just how the dice roll ami! Anyway Gaston wrote his novel after he was inspired by the events of May 20th 1896, at the Paris Opera house. Wherein a performance was taking place. I got all this information from French newspaper articles from may 21st and 22nd 1896, the day after the event, run through google translate a few different ways. That's right baby we getting contemporary sources. To my French listener, if you have a better translation of the archived article, found in the show notes, hit me up and I can run corrections next week. Picture if you will the end of the first act of an opera, helle, which I'm not familiar with, a woman singing an impossibly high, extended note, her heaving breasts barely contained in her corset, adorned with a viking hat and braids,  the note ends and the audience rises to clap and applaud. All is going well, as the show has the last few nights and then there is a flash from above and a horrible rending noise of snapping steel cable. Screams cut through the applause and with a crash it seemed like the ceiling was coming down into the crowd. A whole new meaning to bringing down the house!What exactly happened though? SUPPOSEDLY, if you believe The quote OFFICIAL NARRITIVE, electrical cables wrapped around the steel cables became stripped, heated up and melted from the current. This caused a cascading collapse of several of the counterweights holding up the SEVEN f**kING TON CHANDELIER. That's like dropping a T REX on someone. My chandelier is like 10 pounds. Luckily that's literally what the counterweights were for. Each section was a set of discs weighing seven hundred and ninety two pounds. People rejoiced quickly that they just got hit and bruised by pieces of drywall and stuff but it was soon discovered, unfortunately, seven hundred and ninety two pounds is a lot of f**king weight to drop on somebody. So even though only one of these counterweights fell, instead of the whole chandelier like in the novel, the nearly eight hundred  pounds slammed through the ceiling and the fifth floor and fell directly on seats eleven through thirteen on the fourth floor mezzanine. Although people were initially relieved that there wasn't any major injuries, just contusions and shock, they eventually were proven wrong when people combed through the rubble on the fourth floor and found a 12 year old girl covered with blood, crying for her mother who was trapped. Rescuers set to work clearing the rubble from the fourth floor where the counterweight had come down. Much to their horror they found the mutilated body of a madame chomette, the young girl's mother. Her skull and right side of her body had been completely crushed under the weight of the falling iron and she had died almost instantly. Man that's f**king sad. Someone in the next seat over had been struck by a live wire and been electrocuted unconscious but survived. The young girl survived but was left without a mother and presumably severe psychological trauma and ptsd, one of the wrought iron discs continued through the fourth floor down to the third and hit another woman's leg. It just clipped her but a weight that size still ripped all the flesh down to the bone in her lower leg. Ugh. Pretty much everyone else escaped with concussions or contusions and the psychological trauma inherent in all that carnage. An electrical short circuit caused by the snapping cables flailing around caused a fire to break out on the roof but firemen were able to get up there fairly quickly before any devastating structural damage was done.Now we gotta take a second to go back to Leroux's investigative journalism. He uncovered that underneath the paris opera house was a set of prison cells used to imprison objectors to the Paris Commune, which as far as I can tell was a sort of socialist takeover of paris that lasted two or three months, they were losing wars at the border, the armies were spread thin, so a volunteer national guard was left to defend Paris, and much to their chagrin they weren't really getting jack s**t for it. The parisian government at the time, when war cooled down at the border didn't want these uppity national militia hanging around bellyaching so they asked them politely to turn their guns in. This kind of thing usually only goes one way unless you're Australia in the 1990s so of course fighting breaks out and the national guard takes over the city, forcing the old government to flee. This left the national guard and parisans to elect a new left wing government while the old government and ruling class kinda regrouped in versailles. They weren't exactly thrilled with the shenanigans in paris and were gonna march in and kill the revolutionaries. Seeing that trying to hold paris with a tiny outgunned force wasn't really a winning proposition, the commune marched on versaille hoping to pick up peasant support on the way over. There wasn't that much. They got their a*s kicked and ran back to Paris. Then the actual french army went and marched on paris and pretty much wiped the revolutionaries out because they really hadn't gotten farther than the planning stages of a new government and couldn't agree on anything. I found a nice little mini doc on that I'll link in the notes.  Anyway the short lived commune of paris locked dissenters and undesirables in cells beneath the opera, just twenty or thirty years before the disaster with the chandelier's counterweights. Almost an exact timeline for one of those prisoners to escape and haunt the theater from a young age, lining up almost exactly with the novel and the play's timeline of events. Now everything up to this point is one hundred percent true history. After this things start to become hazy. This next section is actually true as well though now that I think about it. So when the dude designing and constructing the paris opera house, garnier, broke ground on the place in 1862 water bubbled up from beneath. Keep in mind that in the novel and play the Phantom's lair lies on the shore of an underground lake beneath the opera house. The level of groundwater in the foundation was overwhelming even with contemporary pumps running 24/7 in the hollowed out foundation; they couldn't keep the water out. In fact they had to redesign the whole f**king thing! The whole foundation needed to rebuilt to accommodate a massive new concrete cistern to divert the water. A cistern that still exists to this very day. I'll throw some pictures of it in the show notes for the curious. A series of catacombs and tunnels that nobody knows quite the whole plan for. Conveniently, the plans for the tunnels underneath were lost, or were they stolen? Cue it again jamie! There is a legend that persists to this day that the whole structure was built above an underground lake. It's starting to add up isn't it? Lose yourself to the music of the night and accept that the phantom of the opera could very easily be a real historical figure. That's not necessarily the claim I'm making but it all lines up, the timelines, the setting, the events, and even a plucky investigative crime journalist slash theater critic to tie the whole thing together.  I'm sitting here with my playbill from the show and 17th century newspaper clippings up on a cork board like I'm looking for pepe silva. Of course though, we're lacking a motive, Or are we? I found this primary source from 1846 which included a number of lectures on the societal treatment of people with deformities and birth defects from 1846, and if those words aren't the current accepted nomenclature, let me know I'm not trying to offend anybody here. Anyway here's the quote: “the deformed have been regarded as loathsome in body, and depraved in mind; they have often isolated themselves from their fellow creatures; persecution of them has ever been sanctioned by the Mosaic ceremonial, which admitted the unblemished alone to the dignity of priesthood… still is the deformed man exposed to the derision of the heartless, and is shut out from the world simply because nature has played some freak by which he differs from his fellow mortals.” Regarded as freaks and subhumans, someone who was, say, locked up, forced to wear a mask and take up residence in an underground lake, hearing nothing but the peals of the opera above him for years, subsiding on I don't even know, hot dogs, pretzels and popcorn? Watching from the shadows, learning the intricacies of theater rigging, music and performance? I'm just saying it isn't the most unrealistic story ever told. We've gone now past the point of no return, and with any luck, the phantom of the opera is truly there. Inside your mind. I had a lot of fun putting this one together, I hope you enjoyed it, as always I hope your thrilled to be here like everyone in the playbill I got. It truly means a lot to me that you take the time to check out my show and I only hope that I make it worth your time. If you've got a topic you want me to check out or any other feedback you can reach me at nightmarenow.com that's got all the social media links, I should hopefully have my facebook page up by next week but for now you can get me on instagram, twitter or by email, and all that is available on the website. Lastly, all I ask of you, is that you think of me fondly, and maybe voice that in a review or rating somewhere, it helps out a lot! As always I'd wish you all sweet dreams, but we all know it's only gonna be the music of the night--mares now! Catch ya next week! 

Book of undead penguinsWiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DraugrLoose transcript:Hi everybody and welcome back to yet another episode of nightmare now. I'm the host, Erik Byrne and this is the show where we vacation vicariously to viking valhalla and venture vocally through voodoo, venom and the vacuum of space. Today let's stay a little bit more grounded towards the first part of that phrase. Life is good here, after I stopped doing my alien research, the sightings in the woods mostly stopped, so that's nice. For more on that check out last week's episode! Better yet, binge the series! Although I'm on my third borrowed car because of mechanical issues, so I'm pretty sure I'm still the target of light sabotage from the men in black. No matter, they can't stop the signal and neither can anything else except my need to sleep or procrastinate. I'm working on a longer episode on a horrific high seas adventure I hope to air within the next couple of weeks that I'm really excited about but for now we've got some historical scandinavian spooks. Let's just jump right into it! We've got an awesome viking ghost story, or is it a zombie story? I guess it's kind of a little bit of both in a weird way. We'll get to that in a minute. My source for this story is this neat little book I picked up called the penguin book of the UNdead, penguin like the publishing company, put this out and it's kind of a curated collection of snippets and apocrypha from various historical texts that reference the undead, ghost, ghouls, ghasts, zombies, vampires all kinds of cool s**t. It goes from ancient hebrew stuff, scandinavian sagas, ancient egyptian mummies, the roman empire all the way up through the renaissance it's awesome. I'll throw a link in the show notes if you want a copy for yourself or a friend or whatever. It's a cool read and I'll probably rip out a few chapters for shorter episodes like this one. Not all in a row we're still gonna mix up the feed but it's cool nonetheless. So this story is from apparently a few different sources referenced within the book of the undead I've got here and maybe even a couple more besides. Basically in the thirteenth century the danes and norwegians and swedes and everyone else up there were, let's call it introduced, to christianity and with that giant airquotes “introduction” came mostly screams, clanging swords and rape, but more importantly for our purposes today, the gift of literature. From then on the Scandinavians wrote down their current and past history and oral traditions. Curiously scattered among those histories, and sometimes even removed from the sagas, or legends and stuff, were tales like this one: Asvith and Asmund were an inseparable pair of viking berserkers. Great friends that did everything together. The soundtrack to this next section I want you to imagine Queen's “You're my best friend” over this next montage, I'd play it over this part but that would absolutely be the end of this show. If you think a living dinosaur or plane hijacking is horrifying imagine queen's lawyers. If you're not into queen, some alternatives include imagining vikings collapsing in andy's room to randy newman's “you got a friend in me”, imagine vikings, I shudder to say, twerking to Saweetie and Doja cat's “best friend” and if none of that appeals to you there's always witch doctor from the mokele mbembe episode which is applicable in just about every scenario. I'll have to throw it on the wedding playlist. Any way, no matter what the score is to this montage, you have the best of best buddies Asvith and Asmund having the time of their lives pillaging and killing together, I'm picturing big jacked bearded dudes frollicking over grassy hills in the sunlight but also lopping off people's heads with battle axes. Maybe throwing in some romantic blades of glory style lifts and choreo. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and (SLICE WILHELM SCREAM) So Asvith and Asmund would do all their raping and pillaging, constantly challenging each other to feats of strength. Who could fell a tree faster, who could ford a river in their canoe quicker, which one of them could kick a severed monk's head farther, who could pee harder, you know, Guy stuff right. The fun part was that they would always tie. They had the same size dongs, they could both run just as fast, and they had an equal kill count. All that jazz, a regular old simon and garfunkle these two. I honestly have no idea if those two actually got along, maybe hall and oates? This isn't really a music show, at least not at it's heart, we've talked a lot about music this episode so if you're new I guess I understand the confusion. We'll do some music stuff sometime, there's a lot of freaky stuff in that field from fleetwood mac fingerblasting each other to the point of madness, marky mark fighting the vietnam war well into the eighties or elvis presley killing john F kennedy.Anyway, Asvith and Asmund, best buddies until the bitter end. It was because they were so close and definitely not lovers that they made the dastardly pact that made the second half of this story possible. They made a blood pact between them, because they were so evenly matched, one would challenge the other to a final test of strength. Whoever outlived the the other had to be entombed with them for three days in their final resting place. Buried alive. At the end of three days they could leave the tomb, at last the tie would be broken. I'm picturing the who gets the family bible song in step brothers at the end of this trial as one of them takes a last wistful look at his blood brother. You know speaking of family bibles, this seems oddly christian for a couple of pagan vikings, entombed for three days only to emerge gloriously? Food for thought I guess. The prophecy and oath was destined to come to pass, mostly because humans aren't generally immortal and eventually Asvith succumbed to some sort of wasting disease. That's really a bummer, I feel like my man was definitely hoping for a warrior's death, but hey, prostate cancer and tuberculosis don't discriminate. So as any good friend would do and I expect any of my listeners to do should I meet an untimely demise, Asmund was entombed with three days rations in a viking burial mound along with the corpse of Asvith and his horse and dog. I can't say for certain if the dog and horse were alive at the time of burial, thirteenth century scholars weren't super into details like that, more broad strokes folks. Actually I found it, in another retelling of the story, unfortunately they were alive and just chilling with asmund.And that's about all we know for like six minutes. Again, 13th century scholars, not great at narrative pacing. Then again neither am I, I'm jumping all over the place.  They say basically right after the burial, This swedish dude named Erik shows up with his army. I think it's more likely two days post burial. He sounds like he's very handsome and strong, and smart and would make a great podcaster. So Erik comes along, not much info is given, including his last name, but he's got flowing hair, arnold schwarzenegger's body and tons of five star reviews on itunes, and he sees this burial mound and, being a viking himself, realizes that there's a good chance there's treasure in the mound and commands his men to hack the thing open with mattocks to get at the gooey treasure cream filling at the center of every viking burial mound.They crack open the mound and much to their surprise it's cavernous. There's a vast hollow space within the hill, atypical for these sorts of mounds. Not having access to the foresight of indiana jones, uncharted, skyrim, or nic cage's national treasure films they think it's a good idea to just lower someone into the inky black crypt below in a bucket with a meager torch for light. This is easily a movie scene, The young viking descending in a bucket, into the cavern, lit from above while asmund dashes across the foreground. He hides just out of sight of the torchlight. As soon as the bucket touches down cut to Erik and his vikings watching the guy and the torch lower down and touch the ground and then, wham! he gets tackled by some black form and the torch goes spiraling into a puddle of blood and then goes out in time with a muffled scream. A few seconds pass like hours as they look down into the hole and feel the rope tug three times, the universal sign for PULL ME THE f**k UP AND GET ME OUT OF HERE. Hastily they yank up the bucket from the blackness, to see a northman's helmet and graying beard being pulled up but looking down. Lightning just flashed outside my window while I'm writing the outline, we'll include that too They bring him all the way up out of the mound and he finally turns, illuminated by a flash of lightning to reveal his gruesome visage. It isn't the scout they sent down into the tomb. It's Asmund. His gray beard streaked with crimson blood, his face pallid, as if he had lived his whole life away from sunlight, claw marks raked across the left side of his face and his ear was missing entirely. His clothes were torn and ragged. Dude looked irreparably f**ked up. Upon seeing this ghoulish warrior emerge from the tomb Erik and the rest of his party just took off running. People just didn't mess with that sort of evil back in the day. While everyone is just taking off, which is hilarious in it's own right, Asmund just shouts, quote: “Why are ye so amazed to look upon me! Emptied of all color? Truly, any living man becomes diminished among the dead!”Quickly they realize that Asmund is actually a living man and they hear his tale. THe most surprising part of that is that they wouldn't have just cleft him in twain as soon as he emerged from the depths below. I've always wanted to say cleft in twain in context, woohoo. Asmund goes on to explain, presumably while the scout is still in the hole just like, guys? Anyone? Hello? Asmund explains his oath and that he needed to spend 3 days with his homes corpse, presumably clarifying several times that he wasn't gay. Asmund goes on to explain the early part of his long weekend in the crypt passing uneventfully and then waking to the sound of horrific moaning and growling from Asvith's resting place. Asvith had risen from his eternal slumber for a f**king midnight snack. He had become a draugr, A scandinavian revenant. A hybrid between a ghost and a zombie, the restless spirit possessing the undead flesh of the deceased. A Zombie warrior of superhuman strength, a pungent odor of death and long claws define their kind, along with the insatiable hunger of the undead. Asvith had risen as a draugr and consumed the dog in the burial mound and then ripped apart and ate the horse. But that wasn't enough for the draugr. Asvith's soul was long gone, his body was a ghoul motivated by hunger and greed to seek and destroy anything it could, especially grave robbers. Easily interpreting as both the former or the latter the undead advanced on his former best friend clawing at his face and tearing his ear off the side of his head. Asmund finally drew his sword and managed to lop the artist formerly known as asvith's head clean off it's unholy body. Thinking quickly with the head rolling around, spitting, growling and biting at his ankles he kicked the headless draugr back into it's coffin and staked it through the heart because some things are just f**king universal. After everything was explained Asmund helped get the scout out of the tomb and with him grabbed some of the treasure that lay within. At this point his best friend was well and truly gone, maybe to Valhalla, maybe to somewhere else, but either way he wouldn't need the treasure. Erik was paid some of it for helping rescue Asmund from the mound inadvertently and that's pretty much where the  trail goes cold. At least in this book, there might be more in the actual texts but this book mostly has a few pages of excerpts and editorials for each story.  One of the amazing things about this is the story appears in the 16 volume tome “The deeds of the danes” Which isn't like a bunch of tall tales and legends but a generally accepted historical document. Detailing the history of the danish people from the founding of king Dan's kingdom all the way up through eleven eighty seven and there's very little besides this that modern people would consider overtly supernatural or paranormal. In a weird way that adds another weird bit of credence to the tale. And I guess there you have it folks. They don't teach draugr in history class, at least none of the courses I took. But the fringes of history are full of weird outliers like this. Whispered half truths, passed down oral traditions, scattered sightings and tales of the dead walking the earth in innumerable forms. It's probably nothing though… I feel like I have to have that caveat on the end though. Having men in black f**k up the alternator in my loaner cars is one thing but having an ancient norse warrior rip my ear off is another thing entirely. My monitor headphones wouldn't fit right! I need that ear to bring more Draugr stories.Next time you're plundering old nord tombs in skyrim and one of these guys comes clickety clacking towards you, before you lop his head off with the savage strike or whatever that perk is called, remember, he, or she, could have been someone's best friend. So that's basically what I've got this week for you guys. Your homework this week is to tag and share this with your best friend and debate who's decapitating who when push comes to undead shove. I've had a lot of crazy stuff going on at work and stuff this week and I know the last two weeks have been a day late which is making me seriously reconsider my seven AM release timeslot.I'm gonna adhere to that as best as I can, and this one is at least gonna come out today, but it's gonna be something I'm taking a look at over the next few weeks. If you have any opinion on the matter one way or the other, or better yet literally any other opinion on the show, you can find all the socials, Email and other episodes at Nightmarenow.com . I love you guys for sticking with me this long, and continuing to do so. Go out this week and start your own quest. Start that podcast or novel or business, take that lesson or course, dust off that old skateboard or musical instrument. You're worth taking the chance on yourself.  Anyway, I'd wish you all sweet dreams while you're chasing those life dreams, but we all know it's only nightmares now! Catch ya next week! 

Men in black: A preliminary ReportWikis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_in_blackImages Loose Script:The MIBs in PortsmouthHey everyone, and welcome or welcome back to another episode of nightmare now, the show where we muse on the mysteries of the multiverse every week and cover macabre machinations and morbidities monthly. I'm your host, Erik Byrne and man do I have a freaky topic for you today! But first some exciting news from our sponsor. Me, it's just me. I pay to host the show and website. I'm the sponsor, but anyway we surpassed 300 downloads the other day and we're live in a few more countries and platforms! I'm getting some feedback from people who I haven't known for year or even at all, so if you don't know me personally and you're still checking out the show, thanks! We're glad to have ya! Ok lets get down to business with the topic tonight. I think this is our first alien show proper, but I'm sure there's gonna be plenty more, unless these guys show up and wipe my brain, That's right we're talking the MEN IN BLACK, the second scariest thing under that title, the first has gotta be that pitbull tie in song for the third MIB movie. Our source this evening is robert Bulls “Men in Black: A preliminary Report” from 1997For the uninitiated, and no the 1997 will smith and tommy lee jones movie and sequels aren't a primer on this stuff, but great nonetheless, For the uninitiated, men in black are part of conspiracy theory dating back to the late 1940s, post World war II when the world was engulfed in saucer mania. Pilots reported flying saucers, people saw glowing orbs that learn to fly, or that were learning to walk again. These were known as foo fighters, though some would claim that these foo fighters were just a pretender trying to get the best of you. I could go on everlong about the orbs sighted, breaking the sound barrier and performing seemingly impossible ariel stunts but I think it would kind of throw a monkey wrench into the plan for this episode. You'd be sitting there listening expecting men in black content and I'd just be talking about orbs, you'd unsubscribe and shrug and say there goes my hero, I guess. In the panic of saucers and foo fighters people were seeing all sorts of crazy s**t in the sky, some of it may have been aliens buzzing the planet to check out the grand canyon or trying to pick up earth chicks and some of it could have been advanced government military technology prepping for the earliest stages of the cold war. Give it a few years when eisenhower got into office and it was probably both. But President eisenhower pimping out americans for vivisection in exchange for alien technology is a whole nother can of worms that warrants an episode all on it's own. Damn I'm getting myself all wound up here, it's just that the ufo phenomena is a subject that, like a tar pit, is as wide as it is sticky, murky, deep and greasy. I'll get to all this stuff in due time though. For now, the men in black. Upon seeing all this wild s**t in the sky people would chat up their friends and coworkers or the newspapers or whatever, they didn't have podcasts to avoid social interaction back then. If witnesses got too chatty about what they saw, or if they started looking too deep into the phenomena that's when they showed up. You'd be sitting around the kitchen table when the phone would ring. Now who could that possibly be at this hour, what a rascal! You'd pick it up and the voice would say in an eerie facsimile of human speech that it was a UFO researcher that wanted to hear about your experience. You'd agree something like now, sure son we can set something up CLICK They would hang up. And within seconds there would be a knock on your door. You open it to see a tall, unusually thin man dressed all in black maybe with one or two others.  “Hello Mr Listener, we spoke earlier on the phone, We'd like to come in, perhaps ingest a water glass.” Their clothes are always carefully manicured, complete with sharp pleats as if they had come right off the rack. Unusually pale, larger than normal eyes, Is anya taylor joy an MIB?Sometimes completely hairless, no eyebrows, facial hair, nothing, other times a greasy combover, These guys set off every uncanny valley warning alarm you have. Aside from their unsettling appearance, people who encountered them reported unusual behavior. Like they had to take a crash course on human society by watching movies and then trying to fit in, being vaguely aware of human behavior but utterly unable to comprehend nuance. Like they would ask for water to ingest and then just rest a hand in it or something like that. Other times they were more aggressive, shoving and threatening people with ice cold hands. But some things were always the same. A feeling of unease, the intruders asking if they had seen anything unusual, days after the witness had seen a ufo or other phenomena. And a warning, implicit or explicit. To not look into this further, and to not tell anyone what you saw. They claimed to be from the government and usually drove black cadillacs. People still encounter the MIBs to this very day. There's a lot more to the MIB phenomena as a whole and I want time to read a book or two, to put together a long episode on them from their origins to notable encounters, but today I'm gonna take a look at one wild set of encounters that didn't take place in 1950s roswell, but instead right here on my street in 1977 portsmouth new hampshire. Additionally I'm too afraid to do the full research right now for what it's worth. I've been house sitting for a friend out in the woods this past week and every time I take the dog out at night I get the feeling that someone is watching me, just beyond the porch light. A bush rustles, A twig snaps and I book it inside. Sitting by the fire late at night and reading about them showing up and threatening people really gives me the f**king creeps. Our story begins with a Mrs. Evans. She used an alias, so don't go harassing old women named Mrs Evans, portsmouth people. Although if you do know who it is and feel like she'd be up for an interview, let me know at nightmarenow.com the icons on the site will take you to all the social media or email links you might need.Mrs Evans was at the local grocery store, literally I can picture walking there from here, not in 1977, I wasn't alive yet, but the road there still exists. So she's at the grocery store looking at the national enquirer or whatever was in the checkout aisle back then. When she sees him, dressed all in black, with a fedora. There's actually a sketch of this one I'll throw in the show notes, Mrs Evans was apparently an artist.. He had stark white skin and jet black eyes. Already freaky, but then there's weird details. He had wide shoulders and a tiny waist like he had a corset under his suit jacket. And later he walked with a stiff gait, apparently with no curvature of the spine. I don't think I've ever really noticed the curvature of a strangers spine unless it's like, igor level f**ked up but it's an interesting thing to point out.  The Man, I guess we'll call him a man even though he could very well be an alien, was being handed his change by the cashier, whom he was ignoring. Instead opting to stare backwards at Mrs Evans in the checkout line with an eerie glare. Eventually the cashier managed to get his attention and give him his change and he left but the encounter was unnerving. Evans chalked it up to the guy being a creep and pushed the thought from her mind. That was all well and good until she leaves the store and he's standing there as if he's expecting her, I mean why wouldn't he, it was probably the only way out of the grocery store. But I digress. 09Mrs evans at this point just wants to get the hell out of there with her groceries and kind of takes off speed walking towards her home. The Man in black starts going the same direction, and by the time they leave the parking lot his long strides have him walking five or six steps ahead of her. He hasn't said a word or anything at this point, just given her that glare in the store. Suddenly he makes an almost robotic 90 degree turn to the left and  heads down a side street, Mrs evans wants to ignore him and move on towards home but her curiosity gets the better of her and she looks to her left to see if he's gone, having hopefully walked down the other street and out of her life but she's got no such luck. She drops a bag of her groceries and her blood goes ice cold. The man is standing in the middle of the street staring directly at her. At this point she's passed the street the man supposedly went down so either he silently sprinted to catch up to her or he teleported or some other kind of spatial f**kery. He still doesn't make a sound nor does he make an expression on his pallid face. He just stands there nodding like that f**king jack nicholson gif from anger management. He nods three times and completely vanishes, she said it was like a light turning off and he was gone. He didn't move, he didn't fade out, just a blink and he wasn't there anymore. God can you imagine if that's at night? He pops up right next to you under a street light and then disappears. I couldn't find a time of day for this story other than late august of 1977. It's so damn creepy it gives me the chills.I wrote some more of this outline today but last night the stuff in the woods escalated. Maybe it's late, maybe I'm paranoid but I swear I saw a f**king grey run by just outside the backyard light. Bout three, four feet tall, greyish seemingly bipedal. The dog looked up at it too, so it wasn't just my imagination. I guess it could be a deer, but I know about all the stories about looking into this kind of phenomena, doing this kind of research is usually exactly how people end up having run ins with the MIBS, so I'm excited to get on with some more i don't know grounded topics so I'm not being harassed by aliens while I'm trying to enjoy my non show related, non work related time.  As the book presents, though, that wasn't the last mysterious encounter mrs evans suffered, again, if any of my friends in portsmouth, is this your grandma I guess 1977 could be just your mother, let me know,  I'll be gentle, I swear. She seems cool as f**k and I believe what she's putting out. So that's it, end of show. I wasted 20 minutes of your day to see a gangly rude albino jack nicholson. That was it. See ya next week.f**k off you think that's all I got for an episode, I know it's late today but give me a break I'm getting harassed by greys, in an unfamiliar environment. That wasn't the last of Mrs evans peculiar encounters, in fact it wasn't even the first! As a child she reported poltergeist activity, As a young woman in the 1960s she reported seeing a man in a quote air force uniform with a sad affect” that walked with her for a week but never again. That one doesn't sound paranormal, just a dude shooting his shot. Later in 1977 she saw a UFO now this is where things get juicy because aside from the thirsty airman who I really don't believe was an otherworldly entity, her life was fairly normal. She sees a UFO in winter of 77 with her husband. We've got multiple witnesses here, that's important as far as UFOs go. In late 1978 and early 79 she reports burns and lacerations on her skin after quote “restless nights” for those of us familiar with the lore, this is textbook alien abduction and experimentation, and the portsmouth area is honestly, well known for alien abductions, Iv'e had a cigar or two at night in my yard and I haven't seen s**t but exeter, the next town over is the site of the famous, or infamous, depending on how dramatic you want to be betty and barney hill abductions of the early I want to say 1950s. They'll get their own episode someday, maybe even on location, I'm pretty sure there's a monument to them out on 101. She cops to A DOZEN or so UFO sightings from December 1978 to november 1979, it seems like after her original encounter she was intertwined with the phenomena. Why that is is entirely unclear.And this is kind of unusual, she didn't see UFOs until after encountering the MIB. Normally it's the opposite. You see the UFO and then the MIBs try to shut you up after the fact. Interestingly enough Mrs Evans' father reported a UFO as early as 1973, which could point to some familial link, common in abduction and visitation cases like this. I'm gonna start jumping all over her timeline though because the experiences she had after the fact are simply put, unbelievable. And we get to start going into her poor husband, the man that thought he was constantly being cucked by the men in black.Good ol' Joe Evans, I'm one hundred percent making that name up so if that's your name, sorry. Ol Joe evans walks into the kitchen one day, and sees his wife mrs evans, lets call her sandy from now on, it's an alias after all, so sandy is cooking up some fire 1979 Chili or horrific jello cake or something and joe walks in to see his beloved wife, and standing behind her, a gangly man dressed in a neatly ironed suit, He asks who the f**k is this! And sandy turns around and screams, she didn't realize he was even there. The MIB who quote “Didn't look solid” unquote appeared to phase STRAIGHT THROUGH the kitchen door and disappear into the night. Another time a year later Sandy was working in her garden and Joe came home to see the same lanky dude hanging out behind her, probably hip thrusting away without her knowledge as she bent over to pluck carrots from the soil. Furious he thought he was getting cucked again, he shouted who the f**k is that what the f**k is going on and shge again, turned around and screamed and the MIB ran straight through the hedge in their yard as if it wasn't there. Kind of funny to think that maybe she was getting some side action and the dude was covering himself in flour or something to hide it but the sheer amount of sightings and documentation makes me think he wasn't getting cucked by any average human. Another time and the date isn't specified, Sandy saw a man in a flight suit of some kind, olive skinned with his hands up over his head that walked right by her, keeping his hands up like a surgeon, in the “Scrub up position” With quote the baleful eyes of a fish. This to me doesn't seem like an MIB. They usually have extremely pale skin and are often quite tall. It sounds like here she ran into the f**king great cornholio looking for TP, but it was worth including for the beavis and butthead reference. Another time, she saw a van with a mysterious midget appearing from within it and walk by ignoring her. Again, I don't think this is paranormal, I think it was just a little person trying to go about his business, some of these accounts really didn't need to be published but robert bull, the author of the book, felt the need to be exhaustive. Later though she was working on the hedges again, and suddenly the hedges parted, revealing two faces that she thought were just neighborhood children, foolin around. But then she noted that they weren't in fact children, but older and inhuman in form, the only noise they made was the kissy noise one uses when one wants to summon a cat, and then they reached out of the bushes with misshapen hands like fleshy lobster claws without the shell. She ran into the house and was unable to scream, when she came back out with her husband joe, no lobster children were to be found anywhere. But what she did see was a shadowy figure walking down the road. A figure that Mrs Evan's own neighbor would eventually confess to see prowling around her own home That's a huge detail, that's multiple witnesses and corroborations of the story. As far as I'm concerned I believe all this happened. As for her getting piped up by an MIB, the jury is still out but I'm sure Joe Evans doesn't feel great about it.  As I write this I'm lookin out the window to see if I can catch any of this craziness. This is all in my home neighborhood. I live right near this grocery store.Jeez hearing this s**t makes me wonder if I should move out of this alien infested town. All though most of the spooky s**t I see is crackheads hanging around gosling meadows, not exactly an otherworldly existential threat.I'm gonna riff off some of the smaller encounters she had after the initial one at the grocery store here, these don't have dates or as much description as the others, but I feel like they're more than interesting enough to include. Mrs Evans reported a blood-like, jelly like red substance coating objects in her home spontaneously. This is interesting because this is something you see in a lot of haunting or poltergeist style cases in the lore. I believe that somewhere out there waiting to be hashed out and dictated is a unified theory of paranormal experiences. The deeper you go in this field the more you recognize disparate phenomena overlapping in an ever complicating venn diagram. Aliens are related to old timey fairy lore, are related to government coverups are related to hauntings and ghost are related to cryptids and more. I truly believe that there's more linking bigfoot, aliens, space, earth, the depth of the ocean and the mind, and the human psyche than we can truly know right now. Jumping off that train of thought Mrs evans reported puffs of yellow smoke, smelling of quote wet zoo animal and sulphur”. This ties in demonolgoy and biology into all the bulls**t I talked about a second ago. ITS ALL CONNECTED. Mrs Evans has still further strange experiences, She reports her purse floating from her table to her hand, firebolts shooting from her fingertips and her tea kettle letting out ethereal howls without having any water or even a stove on. She's a one woman microcosm of fortean phenomena! She reports some premonitions of IRA attacks and plane crashes and stuff but I honestly feel these are a more spurious reach than the rest of the thing's she's going through.Robert bull collects all this over a series of interviews in a preliminary report and goes on to follow up when Mrs Evans agrees to go under a psychiatric examination. THey report no signs of schizophrenia or other mental disorders, and Sandy Evans Reports “Never touching a drop” with regards to booze or other substances. Robert comes to the conclusion that she's just an extraordinary woman with extraordinary experiences. Her husband really was just made as hell that ebay time he would be gone he'd come home and a tall gangly dude would be giving his wife a shoulder massage and then float through the f**kING WALL when he called out. Again if anyone knows these guys real names and if their up for an interview, let me know at nightmarenowpodcast@gmail.comThat just about wraps up the tale of Mrs Evans and the portsmouth MIBs, but I'm sure there's more to uncover right here at home. I'm recording in a haunted house after all! Thanks again for everyone listening, Thanks for 300 downloads, that's huge! Tell your friends about the show and if you've got something you want me to cover and riff off of send it my way. As always, I'd wish you all sweet dreams, but we all know it's only gonna be nightmares now! Especially for me with the Greys running around my woods! See ya next week! 

Sorry this one's out a bit late everyone, hope you enjoy some lighter fare this week! Links:http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2010/12/117_78466.htmlhttps://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/reallife-scoobydoo-villain-gets-four-months-for-haunting-a-castle-5344742.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scooby-DooLoose Transcript:Hey Gang and welcome back to another Repisode Rof RightRare Row. This week and probably next week we're doing night bite episodes while I plow through the next book I'm reading for one of the full length episodes but that doesn't mean I won't give you guys scooby snacks of fun spooky stories that you crave in the meantime. If you guys haven't figured it out by now by the obnoxious voices, overt name drops or literally just reading the title of the show. Well split up gang cause the mystery machine has broken down in the podcasting swamps and there's a creepy castle up on the hill, THat's right TODAY we're talking real life scooby doo villains. I've got a few tales of people that thought they would have got away with their hoaxes and crimes if it wasn't for us meddling kids, our dog and newfangled internet radio. Like Zoinks audience, let's jump right into it. Grab a sccoby snack, hopefully it's an edible and get ready!For those of you that aren't familiar with scooby doo or any of its spinoffs, it was a fun, if formulaic saturday morning cartoon that first aired in 1969 and still continues in some form or another to this day where four teens and a talking great dane solve mysteries, usually of people in monster costumes attacking people, covering up robberies, scaring people to plummet property values in out and out fraud, and various other variations on that theme. There have been live action films and quite frankly a staggering amount of crossovers with other celebrities both real and fictional. Seriously, find a list somewhere of all the scooby doo crossovers and tell me avengers was the biggest crossover. They met the three stooges, batman and robin, Urkel, checks notes, halsey? Sherlock holmes, speed racer and the f**king harlem globetrotters on top of a bunch of others. It's interesting but this isn't a scooby doo lore podcast, and I'm fairly certain the show and spinoffs have had enough of a cultural impact over the last 50 plus years  that people have some idea what the hell I'm talking about. I always loved the show when I was a kid and I came across a few of these stories that really aren't enough for their own episode but all share that same “would have gotten away with it too” DNA of posing as monsters for their own nefarious ends. Without further ado let's try to crack the first case open here, The year is 2005, if you're as numb to the inexorable march of time through the two thousands that was like 4 years ago. If you're not, that was 17 years ago. We find ourselves in northern italy in the thundering rain, our groovy van has a flat tire at the foot of a hill and briefly illuminated by a flash of lightning we see a castle surrounded by mountains. With the first flash we see an eerie figure silhouetted in a window in a tower, with the next flash it's gone. Between the thunderclaps you swear you hear an ethereal moaning and clanging over the sound of the rain splashing against the windshield. A man approaches through the fog and downpour, please, you gotta help a me! There's a phantasm in de castle! Over the last few weeks, the castle, now an inn hotel thing has had guests complaining and the owner, his name isn't given so we're just gonna go with luigi has been fraught with fright. At the stroke of midnight in castle coldrano moans and shrieks can be heard throughout the halls. Pots and pans clang together but when the noises are investigated, there is no trace of anything being amiss. Doors would slam shut, paintings eye's seemed to follow people that walked the halls and quote “minor vandalisms occurred” I really tried to find a police report or something more concrete than a news article for this one but the castle is right on the border of austria and italy, and I don't speak italian or kangaroo. I know austria and australia are different I'm just kidding. It seems like a lot of the court documents and stuff like that are pretty well sealed up so I couldn't get any names or more specific details on what sort of minor vandalisms were occuring. It could be anything from drawing dicks on the paintings to knocking over suits of armor to just hammering holes in the wall so I really have no idea. What I do know is that mario was terrorized by unexplained poltergeist activity for months before exhausting other options like gangs of teenagers and dogs before finally giving in and calling the cops. He hadn't had a good night's sleep and he could never catch the haunting in the act, just the noise and carnage left in its wake. After all the complaints the police set up hidden cameras in the locations most prone to the paranormal activity and captured the ghoul in the act. Was it the ghost of a long dead lord of the keep, perhaps a butler, cursed to roam the halls in perpetuity? Nope, far scarier. It was a very much alive, 42 year old polish woman. She had been dressing in white and sneaking around in dumbwaiters and stuff to get around the castle. She would come through some unlocked staff door or something every night and howl and moan in polish yelling s**t like zahbka, keilbasa, ushkush manoush, mrouvka, preeba manouk zahbakano, clanging pots against the wall breaking s**t and generally being an unbelievable nuisance. Why was she doing this? An undisclosed work dispute with her husband and the owner. Tis is so god damn funny. Her husband, also annoyingly, unnamed in ANY article I could find on this worked for luigi at the castle. It really makes you think what the hell was it that wasn't worth quitting but was worth having your wife haunt the place every night for weeks! She was trying to scare away guests and future business from the place that as far as I can tell, her husband still worked! Was he passed over for a raise or what happened? If anyone has more details on this story, please please get in touch with me, I've got all the links to contact me through email or social media at nightmarenow.com. If it was such a minor dispute that they didn't put it in any of the reporting on the case, I'm just picturing luigi upping the prices of a f**king fire flower in the company vending machine by a red coin and that was just a bridge too far for polish boo. That's the last mario bit I have I promise. I love italy and can't wait to visit someday. So the scoob and the gang yoink her powdered white hair off and reveal who it is to the police after she's caught on video disturbing the peace. And again I need to reiterate this isn't a scooby doo lore podcast, this is a real case from 2005. The unnamed woman mutters something to the effect of “Ooswaby me tuna sue-ho, goodibi ni vif-triance she jitze”. Or I would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for you meddling kids in polish. I told you we're a global show! Who needs duolingo when you have practical polish lessons right here on the pod! Anyway polish lady, let's call her izabella, gets caught in the act and through what I imagine was a freakin hilarious court case, gets sentenced to 4 months in prison for her tresspassing, vandalism and I guess hooliganism charges. There's no word on what the couple is up to these days, but the castle coldrano has pretty favorable reviews on italian yelp and as far as I can tell there's no mention of poltergeist activity in any of the reviews. In this economy though, I sincerely doubt this was a one off case. If you're the proprietor of a quote unquote haunted establishment, double check that your employees are doing alright! In fact if you're a proprietor of a non haunted establishment, check on em too, a little bit of preventative ghost busting goes a long way! It's classic scooby doo though, haunt a place, wreck the business, drive down the property value, and commit some sort of fraud. Let's move on from italy and her haunted castles though and go further east to korea, now it's unclear where in korea because this story takes place in nineteen oh one, forty four years before korea split into north and south korea in 1945.So we find our mystery machine with an overheated radiator at the entrance to a goldmine. In front of the yawning mouth of the mine lies an altar, ceremoniously decorated. Atop the altar, staring directly towards you is a perfectly spherical eyeball, glowering, watching. You look to your teenage compatriots as a Korean man runs out of the mine, drops a pickaxe and some sifting tools in front of the altar and takes off like a bat outta hell screaming that he's sorry to the spirits. You hear a chuckling and a dude walks out from behind a big tree. This is patch eye pete. I don't know if it's just because his name is pete, or my imagination is just not working at one AM but the only thing I can picture for his description is f**king stinky pete the prospector from toy story two. If you're wondering about a reason the episode was late it's definitely the 38 hours in paint pasting brendan fraiser's just f**k my s**t up eyes onto stinky pete that's in the episode art today.ANYWAY, stinky pete comes out with a gaping hole where one of his eyes should be and scoops the eye up off the altar. He introduces himself as patch eye pete. Maybe he doesn't have a gaping hole, given his name he must be wearing an eyepatch. Oh well, Cest la vie. I''m not redoing the stinky pete image, You'll just have to imagine the eyepatch. What the heck is going on here? Let me explain he says, and he continues to explain in the third person so the host doesn't need to do a ridiculous prospector accent for the whole story. He explains that he works for the oriental consolidated mining company. It's a night bite and it's my birthday so I'm not gonna do an exhaustive coverage of western interests exploiting eastern countries for mining, try dan carlin or something. The short version is the company employed native koreans in their gold mine and boy were they a pain in the a**. Equipment would go missing all the time because selling the picks, dynamite, rope and other mining equipment was a lot more lucrative, and a hell of a lot easier than busting your a** to get  the gold out of the earth for someone else. They would literally put the stuff in their quote “voluminous hair.” and walk out.Obviously this is a problem for the westerners that own the mine, that patch eye pete represents. Yes, that is his only name across three or four different articles I could find on the guy. Some of those that aren't redundant will be in the show notes. First name patch eye last name pete. Anyway he decides the only way he's gonna stop the theft of his mining equipment is taking advantage of the korean's propensity for superstition and traditions. So patch eye pete calls a meeting of his work force, says a few gibberish words not unlike me trying to speak polish a minute ago. Then he puts his hand over his false eye and jams his fingers into his eyes like he's at a slipknot concert, screaming all the while, and yanks out his fake glass eye. Makes a big to-do about it right? Then he places the eye onto the altar in front of the mine and explains to all the local workers he can see through the eye and he'll know if anyone steals anything out of the mine and a great curse would befall them. I bet he had an accomplice stand in front of the eye while he looked away and correctly identified how many fingers the partner was holding up, for dramatic effect. They believed him completely that he could see out of the eye and just like that the thefts from the mine stopped overnight. That's technically a reverse scooby doo villain at that point isn't it? Using fake paranormal phenomena to stop crime? Whatever, close enough. Either way this respite only lasted a few days to a week, because when patch eye pete came back to check on his equipment he found a bunch of it missing again. He's like COME ON! Then he goes over to check on his eye and I would love to see the facepalm that happened next. His eyeball had a coffee cup over it. I mean… sound logic I guess. Cover the eye and the foreman can't spy on you. Imagine how smart that dude with the coffee mug must have felt? So patch eye pete grabbed his eye and went back to the old drawing board for more meddling koreans antics. If I cup over the eye was gonna block his hitherto, completely nonexistent, scrying abilities, he was gonna need to really come up with something good. Luckily for him and his mining equipment he did just that.Patch eye pete's next scheme is almost literally the plot of 1969's scooby doo episode, mine your own business, just 68 years before it originally aired. Gramophone technology was fairly new at the time, and especially so in korea. Over there, the technology hadn't really found purchase in the societal consciousness yet. Doubly so for the blue collar koreans dependent on stealing dynamite and pickaxes from their own job sites. Pete set up a gramophone with a message of howling and moaning in korean saying something to the effect of this: “WE THE SPIRITS OF THIS MINE, will haunt the souls and souls of ancestors of all who steal or have stolen from this mine for eternity.”  Over and over again. THe gramophone was set deep in the mine so with all the echoes it truly sounded like ethereal voices deep within the mountains were well and truly pissed about the missing supplies.Within 24 hours pretty much all of the missing equipment had been returned to the front entrance of the mine. That's so funny to me. Unfortunately we don't have a whole lot of other information on what happened after this, presumably the thievery stopped from then on out. Good job patchy! I've actually got a couple more but I'm kinda running close to the shorter night bite time at this point and the episode is already a day late, so maybe we'll do a part two down the line for a couple more crazy cases like these. If you know of others get in touch with me at nightmarenow.com! Thanks everyone  for understanding this is coming out a bit late, with Easter and my birthday happening at the same time, on top of my computer being annoying. It's been a bit of a hellacious week to just put out a short one. I'll be back next week hopefully at our regular time to cover an amazing Men in Black encounter right here in New Hampshire!I've got some late night editing to do so I'd say sweet dreams but you all know it's only gonna be nightmares now! Catch ya next week! 

Nightmarenow.comTranscript of the flightMayday DocumentaryWiki links:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-10https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Express_Flight_705Suicide hotline: 800-273-8255Loose episode transcriptHey everyone, welcome back to Nightmare now! The show where we cover all the mortifying mysteries of this material plane and more. Again I'm thrilled people are checking out my little show so if you're new we're glad to have you! I got some feedback about screaming to much about analytics, noted, but I'm pretty logical and data oriented so all the listener graphs and location stuff is super interesting to me. For all you guys and gals that have reached out to be guests on future episodes, I'm super excited to have you and it's gonna be a blast, but none of that can happen until I get a new computer. This laptop has a nasty habit of disconnecting from the microphone and keyboard. Man if you guys got to hear how much cursing I have to cut out just from technology issues alone this podcast would be rated NC-17 for sure. With all that said in hopefully less than a minute versus ten minutes of life updates and show new so let's jump into the topic tonight. Imagine if you will. You've ordered a product from amazon or some other online seller. You excitedly go to the seller website and get a fedex code to track your nightmare now merch. Man I should've delayed this episode until next year when everyone will be buying T shirts, It would have made it much more impactful. Like B Witched says though, cest la vie, I'm locked in now. Much to your abject horror, you see your package is delayed. You begin to fly off the handle because your stickers aren't getting there until next tuesday. What lies behind that little red box that says shipping delay. Today we're gonna take a look at one extreme, and completely true shipping delay that happened almost 28 years ago almost to the day. Today we're learning about the ill fated federal express flight 705. This is a wild story that a lot of people don't know about, especially if you're my age or younger and you weren't watching the news in 1994. If you don't know anything about this story, strap in, keep your belt buckled and strap in for some f**king turbulence, it's gonna get bumpy. It was april 7th 1994. It was a cool morning in Memphis Tennessee, just under sixty degrees, and the skies were clear, UNTIL THEY WERE FILLED WITH BLOOD. Captain Dave Sanders, first officer Jim tucker, and flight engineer Andy Peterson were doing their pre flight checks for a routine fedex flight to San Jose, California, to drop off some mail or CD's of Ace of Base's the sign, the number one song for that day. I love checking out what the #1 song of days is to put stuff culturally in perspective. So while this HORRIFIC DISASTER is taking place in the sky, you have some jerkoff in jnco jeans and frosted tips jamming out to I saw the sign in his s**tty saturn S series on the ground below.The crew has a last minute hop on, basically fedex airline employees could hitch a free ride on a plane going where they needed to go. This is before 9/11 so nobody really gave a crap about airport security yet, despite a litany of hijackings in the seventies and eighties. But even then nobody expected that sort of thing from an employee, disgruntled or otherwise.  And Auburn Calloway, He was f**king disgruntled. Can you be gruntled? Is that just satisfied? Words are weird. Auburn Calloway had it all, and subsequently lost it all. He was a stanford graduate and a top navy pilot, and one of the first black men to ever do so. He had a wife and kids and by all accounts a promising career ahead of him. He transitioned out of the navy and went on to be a commercial pilot, and after that a flight engineer with fedex. Something he presumably saw as a slight downgrade each time, over these years his marriage crumbled and they split up. At the time of the incident Calloway was going to have to appear in an investigation for discrepancies in his flight time logs and likely lose his job. He was still sending money to his family and I guess he just saw the writing on the wall that, if this investigation went through, his professional career would be pretty much over. He's going through his stuff, he hates his job and then he finds his way out. To secure his family's future, to end his pain, to get back at the company he hates, all at once. His life insurance policy, weighing in at a hefty two and a half million dollars if he dies in an airline accident. Adjusted for today's economy that's north of four and a half million dollars. Over the next few days he plans his attack, planning to be on flight 705 as the engineer with a man and much smaller woman pilot crew. In a stroke of luck for the original crew he was a part of, they were 1 minute over their allowable flight time. With just a little more of a headwind on their last flight the events of april 7th could have become one of the worst disasters in airline history. Determined to follow through on the plan despite not being able to be on the crew, he takes the jumpseat I was talking about earlier. He wires over all the liquid money he can to his ex wife, packs his guitar case, leaves his will on his bed, and takes off for not a do or die scenario, but a do AND die plot of a f**king action movie. Flash back to the actual crew boarding and doing their pre flight checks, The breaker on the cockpit voice recorder is tripped, that supplies power that lets it, well record voice in the cockpit. No awards for creativity but these things need to be straightforward. Calloway had gotten on early and popped this out, hoping it was missed in the pre-flight check, making it so there would be no audio evidence in the event of a crash. Luckily Andy Peterson caught it, twice. Yeah calloway snuck in and unplugged the breaker a second time and Peterson saw it again. Presumably acted like a skyrim guard, said it must be nothing and watched it for five seconds, satisfied it didn't pop out and went back to the checklist. If Calloway tried that again, my understanding was that it would ground the plane, so he wasn't gonna press his luck on that front. Instead he would wait for takeoff to make his move. You can find the transcript of the whole flight, I'll link it in the show notes, but at the beginning you have the usual cleared for takeoff stuff and the crew shooting the s**t together, seeing where each other lives ect. They see Calloway come into the cockpit, expecting him to just chat with them for a little bit of the flight and that's when it hits them. Wham! Calloway had come in from the other room after opening his guitar case, he wasn't here to play free bird, in the case he had four hammers, a knife and a f**king speargun. He comes in with two of the hammers and whacks Jim tucker so hard it smashes a baseball sized hole his skull and sends bone shards into his brain. He's completely stunned out for the next 45 seconds or so. He can't move or really react but he's still conscious.  Calloway is raining down attacks like he's got the hammer in smash bros and whacks Peterson so hard his skull also fractures and seperates his temporal artery so he starts bleeding out right there and continues to do so for the rest of the quote “flight”. There's a great documentary about this whole thing that's available on youtube that includes a dramatization and everything. That's actually where I got most of the info for this show, but it shows all of this stuff going down. Check that out in the show notes. While Tucker is still dazed, Sanders and Peterson jump up to try and take control of the situation, Calloway runs back into the galley to grab his spear gun and screams that it's a real gun and not to try anything fun or I'll kill all of you!” Even though the crew is already beaten and bloody, Peterson the engineer grabs the spear and tries to wrench control of it. It's at this point tucker, still trapped in his seat starts to regain at least some of his movement but he's still effectively paralyzed on his right side and completely disoriented. Tucker uses the only thing he can to fight back, confined to the seat himself, he uses the plane. He inches his one working arm up to flight controls and puts the plane into a climb. Keep in mind this isn't a small snappy jet or a maneuverable biplane or something like that. This plane is a DC-10, almost 200 feet long and with a hundred sixty foot wingspan. If it were outfitted for passengers rather than mail it could seat almost 300 people. It's not designed for any airshow antics. When the plane climbs suddenly it throws Calloway, Sanders and Peterson dozens of feet back into the wall in the galley of the plane. Now s**t gets even crazier, The crew is fighting Calloway, it's two on one but the odds aren't really in their favor, I don't think that I mentioned that Calloway is a f**king martial arts expert as well. The dude is basically a bond villain. Sanders and Peterson both are already beat the hell up and bleeding out after getting smashed with hammers. They really don't stand much of a chance against the relatively unharmed Calloway. He intended to beat the crew to death with the hammers rather than just shoot everyone to make their injuries more consistent with a plane crash, for when authorities investigate the wreckage. Jim Tucker is still in the copilot's seat and can't really turn his head to look back there but he hears the brutal scuffle between the other three, he has no idea who's winning or who's even alive. Peterson and sanders are shouting for him to just put it on autopilot and get back there but he still can't move out of his seat. He does the only thing he can and starts rolling the plane like he's trying to get to the secret path in starfox 64. The plane is flying sideways now and everyone back there gets thrown into another wall. They're all scrambling for the hammers and speargun. Then tucker rolls the plane back the other to a hundred and forty degrees, for the geometry challenged, plane go up people fall back, plane go to one side people fall to that side, plane go all the way back to the other side and almost upside down people get thrown and pinned against the ceiling like they're in the hallway from inception except with more blood and hammers. After that Tucker slams the plane into a dive that sticks everyone to the back wall like they're on a gravitron. They're all thrashing around back there trying to gain control of the hammers. Everyone including Calloway had taken some heavy hits from the hammers back there. It looks like a hallway on the ishimura from dead space.All three of them are covered in blood, the seats are ripped up, there's papers and jackets and s**t flying around everywhere, there's bloody foot and hand prints on the f**king ceiling and at this point nobody is clearly winning the brawl. When Tucker puts the plane into the dive there's yet another problem. The plane is rapidly heading towards the ground, but far more rapidly than it should be, the planes aren't supposed to go over 695 kilometers per hour but this thing is headed towards the ground at over 860 kilometers per hour. He realizes that the throttle on the plane is still on full power after takeoff. The wing elevators are shaking and close to coming off, the massive jet is almost supersonic but he's only got one working hand so he has to let go of the yoke in order to get at the throttle and kill the engines. After this, coming out of the dive he manages to level the plane without the tail and elevators and stuff completely ripping off the fuselage and he's finally able to start radioing in to air traffic controllers. All this happens within about a MINUTE of calloway first attack with the hammer. It's extremely rapid and there's a million things that could have gone wrong. So he radios in and asks for armed intervention and ambulances with permission to land back at memphis. While he's talking he flip flops the plane back and forth with a roll. After Peterson and Sanders seem to get the upper hand they yell at Tucker to throw that B***h on autopilot and get back here and help. That's crazy I just imagine him going back there, struggling very much to do so because he's effectively parlyzed on one side of his body and he gets back there and everyone just stops being a cloud of dust with fists and feet coming out of it like its some old school cartoon and they're just like if you're back here then who's flying the plane? Turns out nobody was, the f**king gyros hadn't stabilized after all that crazy aerobatics so he's just like screw it and I guess ghost rides the whip? Like just kicks it in neutral and hopes the autopilot takes over. When Tucker gets back there he finds the other two have pinned and disarmed Calloway and they agree to have Dave Sanders land the plane because he's the captain and that's protocol. The whole thing seems pretty damn far from protocol but I'm not a pilot. Sanders hands Tucker the spear and they keep Calloway pinned down while Peterson is still, severely bleeding from his head and kinda flopped on Calloway to help keep him down. Sanders gets back in the pilot's seat and on the radio, the air traffic controllers just heard radio silence during this exchange so they thought the hijacker took over or something. Tucker can barely feel the spear in his hand and says if you move I'll kill ya. Kind of a nice poetic moment in the chaos since that's what Calloway said only moments before when he first pulled out the speargun in the cockpit. Complicating things further, Sanders doesn't have his GLASSES on and his eyes are full of blood so they almost miss the turn for the airport and in all the commotion. Calloway chooses right then to start fighting again and almost gets back to his feet until Peterson slams him with the hammer multiple times in the head and he drops. Air traffic control is like you're all set up with a swat team and an ambulance, do you have the situation under control? And I love this, Sanders, over the sound of screaming and hammers and airplane warning beeps is just like “we appear to have it under control.” Calloway is trying to push people's eyes out, he's biting, he's fighting like an animal and screaming. Sanders throws on the autopilot again and goes back fully intending to kill calloway. The other two tell him it's under control, but in doing the auto pilot he approaches the airport too fast.  I don't know how many ways I can say they're not out of the woods yet, here's another complication, but here's another one. The plane is too heavy to land on the smaller runway they've been allocated since because physics. As simply put as I can, it has too much fuel, fuel that would normally be used up on the way to San Jose. No comment on whether or not it can melt steel. Because it's too heavy and the approach is too fast it will take brakes applied over a longer runway to bring the plane to a stop, they can't use that runway. If all three crew members were in the cockpit in a scenario like this the flight engineer could dump the fuel to make it weigh less. Obviously it's only Sanders, the other two are guarding and subduing Calloway. OF COURSE, the fuel dump switch is all the way on the other side of the cockpit and he can't step away from the steering controls. Because of this and the speed they need to hit another runway at ninety degrees to the first one. He needs to take a ninety degree turn and then pull it around, BACK 180 degrees and level it out to hit the new runway. Miraculously Sanders is able to pull off this maneuver and land the plane quote “safely”.They burst the doors and EMTs and SWAT are able to get onto the plane. They take everyone to a nearby hospital where they're treated for their injuries. Investigators find a suicide note on the plane telling calloway's family he loves them and he's doing it for them and all that lunatic bulls**t but a plan seems to come into focus, with the overfueled jetliner, and the crew dead, Calloway could have flown the plane right into fedex headquarters to take half the company with him. A disaster the likes of which was unimaginable, except for maybe in that tom clancy book that predicted a plane crashing into the world trade center. remember, this is ‘94  nine eleven hadn't happened yet, but that's for another episode. Auburn Calloway was sentenced to life in prison for attempted air piracy. Jim Tucker, Andy Peterson and Dave Sanders were all awarded a gold medal for heroism but sadly none of them were deemed fit to fly after the incident due to the injuries they sustained. There's interviews with all three of them in the doc, and they just wistfully look into the distance like, every time I see a plane I get sad and wonder where it's going. s**t is heartbreaking. Everyone survived though yayyy! That's probably why a lot of people haven't heard of this hijacking story. That and a certain football player involved in a notable car chase just months later kind of eclipsed most of the news in 1994.One thing I don't get and I can't find an answer to is why the hell calloway brought a suicide note with him while at the same time going through a complex plan to make it look accidental, disabling the recorder, killing everyone with hammers so they wouldn't suspect foul play, crashing the plane, but then you just send the money to your ex wife, have an incriminating suicide note and spend a week prior to crashing a plane getting your affairs in order. I guess most of that is circumstantial evidence but what the heck man. That's pretty much all I got for today everyone, Throw me a rating and review if you've got the time. Smashing the 5 star button builds muscle mass. I'd say sweet dreams, but we all know it's only gonna be nightmares now. See ya next week!

Drums Along the CongoWiki links:Mokele-mbembephantoms and monstersSound effect credits: https://freesound.org/people/IchBinJager/https://freesound.org/people/jamesrodavidson/https://freesound.org/people/nickerick03/Loose Transcript:Wooo hooo Welcome back everybody, to Nightmare Now, I'm your Host Erik Byrne and if this is your first night terror with us, welcome aboard, please keep arms and legs severed or otherwise, inside the podcast at all times. Today we're getting into a subject near and dear to my heart, Cryptozoology, or is it palentology? Or just zoology? I guess it depends on the evidence we can pull together and a certain willingness to suspend disbelief. If you're not willing to suspend disbelief, I'm glad you're still listening. We're gonna get into some more true historical stuff next week. Probably. Basically as I predicted would happen as a chronic procrastinator I have completely squandered the buffer I had by prerecording the first few episodes. I figured hey I'll throw a few in the tank and it'll give me a bit of time to really knock it out of the park and give me time to go on vacation or something later but I guess (F--k it we'll do it live!) So here we are, merely a day or two ahead of airtime. My laptop is throwing up errors, my fan died, not any of you guys, just the little USB one that keeps me cool in the Airquotes “Studio”. It's really just a glorified closet, and if you want to see a picture come say hi on our instagram page @nightmare.now it'll be there. Speaking of which, with this being the first recording post launch I am flabbergasted with the amazing response I've gotten, I hit 100 Downloads within the first week, I have a bunch of people checking out the instagram and twitter and I get texts from a few listeners within hours of an episode releasing. Thanks mom! For links to all that social media bulls--t and how to get in touch with me check out the icons at nightmarenow.com and pretty please gimme those juicy 5 star ratings and reviews wherever you're listening it helps out a ton.With all that housekeeping out of the way finally we can lumber in to today's topic. I'd cue the jurassic park theme here but the real nightmare would be john williams copyright claim on my show and nobody wants that.  Maybe I'll pull a vanilla Ice in post and add a high hat cymbal to exonerate myself from any kind of intellectual property infringement. (insert track) That's better. I'm gonna do my best movie trailer voice now. It's amazing how annoying your voice sounds on a recording versus in the reverberations of your own skull, but it's something I'll just have to live with. Here we go: BWAAAA IN A WORLD. EXACTLY LIKE TODAY'S WORLD BECAUSE IT IS TODAYS WORLD BWAAAAATHERE ARE SECRETS ANCIENT SECRETS BWAAAAALYING IN WAIT WAITING TO BE REVEALED. SECRETS 66 MILLION YEAR IN THE MAKING(for copyright reasons) BWAAADEEP IN THE CONGOLESE JUNGLE,IN THE DEPTHS OF LAKE TELEA BEAST SLUMBERS BWAAATHIS TUESDAYMOKELE-MBEMBE RISES ONCE MORE (ROAR)TO APPEAR ON A PODCAST(BWAAA) That's right folks we have a real treat set up for you today, we're looking at Mokele-mbembe, the god beast and potential surviving dinosaur, or colony of dinosaurs deep in the jungle in the heart of Africa. Our main source today is the book drums along the congo where journalist and explorer rory nugent documents his own personal quest to get a glimpse at the beast itself. I'll throw a link in the show notes if you want to check it out yourself, it's not a long read and it's a fun little swashbuckling on site adventure through the jungle.Who, or what is mokele-mbembe though? There are accounts from westerners all the way back in 1776 when french missionaries found huge unexplainable footprints in the congo. Before you say anything, it's bigger feet than bigfoot, he's gonna get his own episode or two later. Later on mokele-mbembe was first reported widely in the western world in 1909  by a zoologist named Carl hagenbeck in his book beasts and men, soon after picked up by the washington post in 1910. I managed to find the news article actually, that'll be in the notes but it describes the possibility of a half elephant half dragon monster. Later zoological expeditions heard terrifying thunderous sounds and roars in the region and still others found clawed footprints  larger than an elephants. Elephants are present in this region but they don't have claws. Mokele-mbembe means “one who stops the flow of rivers” in the local language of lingala. The congo river basin and lake tele is certainly a more ancient, more primordial area of the planet. Featuring giant prehistoric ferns and temperatures that never really drop below seventy degrees and rarely come out of the high eighties. Fahrenheit for you non yanks, that's 26 to 28 degrees celsius. I need to be conscious of my global audience now that we're world wide, according to my analytics we've got listeners in france, india, sweden, the uk, new zealand, canada and here at home across the US. Thank you all! The humidity hovers around 85-100 percent, making it incredibly muggy all the time. Huge jungle trees stretch to form distinct layers of jungle in the canopy, mid canopy and the ground. As a biologist I found all this stuff super fascinating when rory covered it in drums along the congo, where you have, you know, a hundred square feet of jungle forest and effectively three or more different ecosystems the higher into the trees you go. Different amounts of sunlight, heat and whole separate sets of species populate each zone. In the interest of not making a three hour show just about jungle ecosystems I'll refer to this stuff only where it's relevant, or horrifying, as you'll see later once we get into the jungle parasites and other dangers just to get out to lake tele to even try to find mokele mbembe, man that's fun to say. So even before we get our boots wet in a neverending crocodile infested mire, get arrested by congolese authorities, get attacked by poisonous snakes or leopards, (for more about why big cats are scary check out episode one!) and become riddled with malaria, we have to know what we're even looking for. Now, descriptions of mokele-mbembe have varied over time but the central concept is usually the same. He, or she I suppose, is effectively a sauropod dinosaur. For those of you who weren't as obsessed with paleontology as I was when I was a kid. And still am, let's be honest, sauropods are the big long neck dudes. Tons and tons of flesh and muscle in a lumbering body, a huge tail, and a head atop a ridiculously long neck. Little foot for my land before time fans out there. So mokele mebembe basically fits that description. A sauropod dinosaur ranging in size from a hippopotamus to a towering thirty five feet tall or so. After that general description we kind of have a pick and choose smorgasbord of trims and upgrade packages for it. Many accounts describe a single sharp tusk or horn, picture something like a narwhal for that. Among those accounts it uses the tusks to poke around and slice off it's alleged favorite food, the malombo fruit. It's kind of like a cross between a soft coconut and a lemon. They grow on vines. Other less herbivorous accounts depict mokele mbemebe spearing hippos, elephants, leopards, crocs  and especially people on its tooth and drowning them in its waters. Don't piss it off I guess. Most descriptions agree that he's a brownish, greyish or rusty color, but beyond that some say it's scaly, some say slimy and still others say it has short slick fur like a seal. I don't think anyone has been able to get close enough to touch it and live to tell the tale though. After that you start to get out to the more fringe descriptions, like a line of sharp spines along its spine. Along with spikes at the end of its muscular tail. The locals mention that it has deep blood red eyes too.Mokele-Mbembe lives in and around lake tele, and also supposedly in underground caves in the region. Now I love this idea, I'm definitely going to do a future episode on the accounts of hollow parts deep within the earth supposedly housing mammoths and dinosaurs and other crazy s--t, it's one of my favorite parts of esoteric crypto lore and I have some cool books on that stuff kicking around somewhere. Anyway, the lake, caves and perhaps most importantly the rivers is where mokele mbembe makes its home. It uses the rivers to get around, because they snake throughout the entire region and give access to it's full territory and malombo fruits without it having to knock down a ton of trees and stomp through the forest. Skeptics would point to this as a convenient lack of evidence, but generally, f--k skeptics. Live a little. Or listen to the more accurately historically sourced episodes.  Some people say it's a physical, undeniable biological creature, a relic from the late jurassic period. Obviously it wouldn't live that long and would have to breed or otherwise reproduce until now. The climate and jungle ecosystem could technically support such a creature, maybe not at the upper range of its size descriptions but certainly at a large elephant size. It wouldn't have many if any natural predators and other animals have survived relatively unchanged for much longer and are taken for granted. Obviously we have the living fossil coelacanth, but think too about other animals. Sharks, alligators and crocodiles, other species of fish and lizards. Some stuff survives and justs gets smaller. The animal kingdom goes the same way as freakin ipods. You got the big prehistoric chunkers that could hold eight songs and eventually you get the ipod mini. Same applies to dinosaurs. It's science. What's the alternative though? To a living fossil? Local tribes and even more developed settlements in the area revere mokele-mbembe as a god-beast. A Spirit of the jungle and river. In a survey done in 1980, over half of the respondents there reported that they were christians, but even 90 percent of them reported seeing a witch doctor at least twice each year. This is a region dominated by ancient tradition and a lot of the voodoo stuff that us Americans attribute to Haiti and the Caribbean really originate here. I won't dive too deep into that today because I've got a whole episode planned on haitian voodoo and the zombie phenomena there where I'll go more in depth on all that craziness. Scopolamine is a helluva drug though I'll give you that much as a little teaser. But anyway the people, in this region especially of the congo, believe that spirits control everything. There's spirits for water, for air, for weather, for food, for guns, for love, for life, for the trees, for the sky, for the spring, for the animals, for families, you f--king name it. So many people consider mokele-mbembe to be either a spirit given form or some sort of spirit flesh hybrid. In a way we're all spirit flesh hybrids aren't we? This could explain certain lacking physical evidence even in the face of numerous eyewitness accounts.There's one part in the book we're rory and his guide are talking about death and spirits and the like that really made me laugh where he's talking to his guide, and the guide is upset because they receive news that a guy in a neighboring village has died. Turns out it's worse that it's the guides enemy than if it was his friend because now his family is gonna get cursed by the dead guys family and accused of spirit murder because they'll think his family cursed the dead guy. Rory asked him if they did curse the dead guy and he's just like “hell yeah we did, f--k that guy!” turns out the congolese justice system isn't exactly the most efficient machine around so most people turn to spirits and voodoo curses in lieu of litigation. In short, even among the christian or undecided population of the congo, old traditions based around fetishes voodoo and witch doctors carry a hell of a lot of importance in peoples day to day lives.I've also heard people describe the loch ness monster and other more dinosaurian cryptids as ghosts of dinosaurs so that's a fun third option for the people playing along at home, I don't really think that's the case here but their guess is as good as mine.  Then of course there's the possibility of it all being bullsh-t entirely but if that's the case I'm out a show. Towards the end I'll probably throw in some skeptical explanations just to be fair and balanced. For the purposes of the rest of the show however, I think we'll be looking at it as if it truly is a lost dinosaur lineage, avoiding capture and death deep in the jungle for millions of years. I think now is as good a time as any to paraphrase rory nugent's  trip through the congo, mostly because his book was the highest rated and available on kindle versus a lot of the more referenced texts on mokele-mbembe being out of print or prohibitively expensive. WHAT ARE THE PUBLISHING COMPANIES HIDING? THE PEOPLE WANT TO KNOW! So my man rory has listed himself as a journalist slash explorer, personally I would lead with explorer but that's just me. He takes a couple of courses in jungle survival and spends a night in central park without getting mugged basically. After that it's basically off to the races. Imagine a cutaway to to an indiana jones cutaway with the planes and the bum ba dumm dumm ba ba daaa, man I'm really trying to get sued by john williams today huh? So you see the plane flying across the atlantic, maybe the plane stops in france and then pops down to africa. Into the southwest region of the congo. He starts taking pictures of birds and s--t because he's into that kind of thing and is immediately arrested  for being a capitalist spy. He's apparently got a high enough charisma roll to talk himself out of it, if you'll forgive the expression, I started a dnd game with a few friends so that stuff has been at the front of my mind. It helps because it's another more creative energy keeping me sane while I slave away as a lab analyst. Why do you think I started this show anyway? So Rory gets arrested and basically for the remainder of his trip he is assigned chaperones for his time in the congo. Kind of like the pope episode a few weeks back I really don't want to get into the politics of the Congo and why they're worried about capitalist spies. Suffice to say that Russians, Cubans and the Chinese had a pretty big hand in the development of the present day congo. As far as I knew about the Congo before I started researching this episode was the sh--y Congo movie from 1995 with the gray cannibal apes, a cyborg gorilla and tim curry almost saying the N word. That movie and like twenty eight pages of joseph conrad's heart of darkness. I'll finish it someday. Luckily I learned a lot about the region and culture and potentially fake monsters dwelling within it. Again we're a global show. Rory gets assigned a chaperone and there's a lot of great scene with this dude, Ambroise constantly busting his balls because truth be told he doesn't want to be hanging around babysitting this dumb mundele, that's the word for insincere whitey in lingala, all day long. He's giving him s--t about how if he has to go into the jungle he gets overtime and stuff, and this expedition is gonna help finance his new refrigerator. He gets into all kinds of little adventures in the capital of the congo, brazzaville while he's trying to secure a travel permit to get to the wild northern region where mokele-mbembe supposedly lives. And he completely confirms the westaboo trope. In every non american country there's always a few people that base their whole identity on american culture, they do a great version of this in that show welcome to sweden. In fact there's this whole subculture over in sweden called the raggare that go all out for 1950s americana. I really hope that they've committed heinous crimes or something so I have an excuse to cover them. Anyway rory meets all kinds of people obsessed with american movies from 20 years earlier and more importantly the huge sporting event that was the rumble in the jungle. A famous boxing match between george foreman and muhammad ali that ali won in a big upset in 1974 in zaire. Which eventually becomes the democratic republic of the congo. Some people were so obsessed that they had the entire radio broadcast memorized. The fact that rory had once shook hands with ali, was actually a huge help in securing those permits. Even still there were times when he had to wait in a sweltering office for nine hours only to have the secretary be like, ssss ahhh, the paperwork guy isn't in today cest la vie huh? Eventually he acquires the permit and ships up north. Not before getting a blessing from a witch doctor near brazzaville. The witch doctor told him what to do and he said OO EE OOOH AAHHH AHH TING TANG WALLA WALLA BING BANG. not really, just as soon as anyone mentions a witch doctor some MKULTRA programming from the alvin and the chipmunks movie kicks in and that's all I can think of, the old one not the weird uncanny valley cgi ones. He would've been better off with the s--tty gimmick song though because what really happened to get the witch doctor's blessing was much worse. He had to strip down, and no it's not brazzersville perverts, nobody was stuck in a washing machine. He had to strip down and the witch doctor screamed and spit in his face and dumped a fanta bottle of crocodile oil and honey all over him, again modern society and ancient tradition clashing with the fanta bottle, I love it. This concoction was an invitation to every winged insect within a mile to crawl around on him and suck up the honey and by extension any evil spirits. You know with a bunch of parasitic wasps crawling around my dick and balls I'd probably take my chances with the evil spirits. I guess it's better than having robert liston operate on you. Unfortunately for ambroise and his fridge though they said f--k you and your overtime and sent him off with a dude named innocent. Him and innocent take a plane north to impfondo and fly over this city that I would love to do some more research on that's just a bunch of barges lashed together and stacked on top of each other in the congo river. The pilot has a little extra fuel and flies them over lake tele so they get the aerial view before touching down on a tiny airfield in the jungle. From above tele is a serene black lake surrounded by a black mire with twisted and gnarled trees on all sides. Through the swamp weaves dozens of inlets and rivers and coves, all potentially housing the lost sauropod. They say they haven't had anyone fly in in over six months because the airfield is only usable if it doesn't rain for three days, a rare occurrence in the jungle. They are effectively stuck there and locked in once they land and their pilot takes off. It's a hundred and eighteen degrees when they touch down and from here on out it's all on foot or by canoe. Rory has some pens and pencils and bubble gum to offer the children of the villages and the tribes and everyone one of them is just like f--k off, cash or nothing. I love that juxtaposition he encounters in all these villages. Like it's still a primitive way of life but not untouched like out on sentinel island or anything like that. So there's people fishing with spears and clutching voodoo fetishes but at the same time they're wearing nike tracksuits and Rams Super bowl champions two thousand two hats, sorry tflo if you're listening, at least you got yours this year! One of the biggest parts of the cargo they're lugging around is literally crates of liquor and pounds of salt, because the traditional gift to a tribal chief is a handful of salt and a bottle of booze. He brings a whole crate of scotch to each village to get in with them and that leads into more than a few hangover style shenanigans where he wakes up suspended in a tree or in a pile of wriggling fish. But hey? When in rome right? They pick up a couple of jungle guides and other people on their quest whilst they go around placating all the surrounding village with booze and cigarettes. Eventually they hop in some canoes and hit the river towards lake tele, but not before being scammed five or six times by different villages.In one of the first major outings on the canoes they run into a giant crocodile that they annoy with a thrown spear. After getting hit with a spear the croc takes a beeline at the canoe and innocent hits it in the neck with another spear at the last possible moment. If he hasn't realized it by now, rory sees that the travel through the jungle aint gonna be a walk in central park. Of course they cook and eat the croc because at this point they need to hunt for food. Speaking from personal experience, alligator tastes like, well, it unironically tastes like chicken. Just a rubbery, greasy chicken. According to the book, the crocodile didn't taste much different.After this the book reminds me of a game of amazon trail. It was like the oregon trail but instead of dying of dysentery in a covered wagon, you got eaten by piranhas in a canoe. I know I know, the amazon is in south america and the congo is in africa but many of the same principles apply, give me a break ok? Eventually they hit a few random encounters with a poachers canoe and try to scare off a poacher by just blasting their ak-47 into the air. He's apparently not around, it's more tense in the story but it's not really important to the mokelembembe plot. Later on down the river they see a jaguar lapping up water and  even see a pair of pygmies hiding in the water watching them, using reeds to breathe. That's scary as f--k. They could just pop out and hit you with a blow dart and eat you. Maybe they wouldn't eat you but nugent recalls tales he read in his youth about the yakas in this region that would kill and eat people traveling through this region. I've got a couple of episodes planned about cannibals, in fact I originally had an idea for a podcast about cannibals called to serve man, but f--k that would be depressing right? That tangent is basically just to illustrate how f--king scary it is to run into the more remote and warlike tribes out there in the jungle. It's one thing to sit in a closet and make jokes and talk s--t but it's another thing entirely to glide through the water in canoe, trying to remain silent as you see small humans watch you through yellowed eyes, under the river water like you're in the f--king dead marshes in middle earth. Good lord that's terrifying. Eventually he runs into a few brits doing their own expedition to lake tele for a geological survey and to see if they can find any new species or what have you and they're led by this dude colonel rothermel, and I'm basically picturing rourke from disney's atlantis, just some former military guy leading a bunch of nerds through a hostile environment. I know at least a few of my listeners will know exactly what I mean. The brits are one their way back from the lake and they pretty much laugh their asses off at the fact that rory and innocent are looking for mokele mbembe and offer to offload some of their equipment. Here rory talks about some other expeditions to lake tele throughout the last few hundred years. I think it's worth doing the same The brits didn't see s--t. Back in the eighties a guy named roy mackal went out there and got a picture of it… that got ruined by water. He was also some kind of young earth creationist, and his book was like thirty bucks so I wasn't getting that. Later on another expedition that partially inspired rory's came back and gave a presentation in new york, and much to everyone's quote unquote surprise, their only pictures were also… ruined by water.  At this point I'm like what the f--k, why are we reading this still but I'm here for the jungle adventure, I'm also locked in because I don't have another topic prepped. And I believe god damn it! There's dinosaurs out there! At least according to hundreds of schizo blogspot pages I came across, and they can't all be wrong right? Finally they come to the last, sort of “civilized” village. And with a little help from scotch and salt they narrowly secure a vote to allow them into the deepest part of mokele mbembe's sacred lair. One of my favorite parts of this exchange is when innocent translates what the village council says after the vote. He's just like “They ask mokele-mbembe not to kill us and thank us for the booze.” right on. Rory asks the witch doctor in that village if mokele-mbembe might be a goddess rather than a god and he just laughs in his face and is like no way mudele!The group of six gatherers their last bit of supplies and gets ready for weeks in the wilderness by foot and canoe. They sit through one coming of age ritual in a village and head off, with only one village saying that they should go home, the rest effectively sponsoring their quest. Here, and several other spots in the book, he talks about skin borers. Disturbingly matter of factly. These are parasites that burrow into your skin and get into the bloodstream. I'll quote the book here holy f--k.“These worms begin life no larger than a match head, but given the right conditions, they can grow to the size of a small snake within the leg, their growth arrested only by knee joints and ligaments. Eventually they eat through the calf and exit from the skin just below the knee.” He never gives a proper name for these parasites so I really couldn't find anything more about them, skin borers just comes up with a bunch of wood boring beetles on google. Compared to parasites that eat your f--king knees, they're well, boring. I've got a great book on parasites I'll eventually do an episode on, sarah you don't need to listen to that one, it's fine, I understand. They continue on playing another few days of congo trail, avoiding death by malaria, and nile crocodiles and skin borers. The only food some nights is fried grubs like they're in the f--king lion king, Slimy, yet satisfying. A lot of disney this episode huh? Other nights they've got monkey or crocodile, with one of the guides making sure to make a slurry of the brains for desert. He says it's the only way to gain the creatures power and spirit. With that I feel entirely vindicated in trying to convince people that eating the eyes of the lobster is the only way to gain it's grip strength for all these years. To my gym bro listeners, monkey brain protein shakes? Yes or no? Let me know at nightmarenowpodcast@gmail.com! One thing that he goes out of his way to mention is identifying monkeys by their vibrant scrotums. I felt it was worth including because we've had a lot of scrotum talk on this show, why stop now?Watching the monkey cook kind of gives me the impression of a cartoon where people are trapped on a deserted island and you envision your compatriots as succulent hams. Rory describes the monkey skin tightening over the fire and looking more humanlike and more tasty each minute. The jungle really can change a mofo. They eat all kinds of crazy s--t out in the jungle, monkeys, hogs, monkey's hogs, snakes, Which I've also eaten and taste like greasy chicken, grubs, plants and more. They use dirt for seasoning, I might have to try that next time I do pulled pork.One day rory goes off on his own to collect some butterflies and look at birds and he hears a huge roar and a bunch of small trees being knocked over. This is effectively the climax of the book so buckle the f--k up. He starts joggin through the muck and mire of the swamp around lake tele. After whatever monster is tearing through the trees. When he eventually catches up to it he sees a massive heaving grey and black creature grabbing at some fruit. It's a f--king silverback gorilla. It looks at him inquisitively, perhaps sensing a primate kinship, and then roars, he gets the hell out of there and runs headfirst into a forest clearing where everything is freakishly quiet. Within seconds five pygmies surround him from the underbrush. Yellowed teeth and eyes glaring from behind armed, presumably poisoned crossbows, spears and blowguns. They're only four and a half feet tall, one on one he might have a chance to whack one and get out but not surrounded. All his memories of stories of cannibals and mutilations come flooding back and he tries to reason with them by pointing to a bird he recognizes and flapping his arms. They hoot and holler at him. He slowly pulls out a harmonica and plays a s--y bit of piano man for them which they seem to like and hands off the harmonica to the one that seems to be the leader, who blows a few sour notes into it and smiles.This likely saved his life, so follow up on at least one creative pursuit or two in your life. Get that charisma score up! While screwing around with the harmonica, they didn't immediately murder him. He notices the leader has an infected cut on his foot and pulls out his medical kit to try to treat him on his knees. Immediately negotiations go sour when he tries this, the leader shrieks and kicks him in the throat. Rory backs up slowly and desperately tries to show them the bird sitting in the tree. I s-t you not this is how he escapes: he flaps his arms like a lunatic and points at the bird, they all finally look and he just takes off running. Literally LOOK OVER THERE! POCKET SAND! Jesus christ I hope he brought extra pants because I would be s--tting myself, running through the jungle hearing the whoops and shrieks get further and further behind you. They know the jungle but 3 foot legs can only carry you so f--king far. He's still lost too! After tracking the gorilla he lost his way and wandered until nightfall. Forcing him to sleep alone in the jungle. I can't believe he could even sleep. The next morning he awakes with a lungfish flopping against his face. That means water is nearby! He finally makes it back to his canoe and finds the rest of the group the next morning. With one more monkey brain protein shake they finally reach the shores of lake tele. After spending a little time on the shore they see something far off break the surface of the water. Like a periscope breaching the ocean. The group goes wild and they all fall to their knees, rory goes crazy too, offering them ten, then fifteen thousand francs to get him closer in the canoes. They ignore the offer and tell them to shut the f--k up and get on his knees, this is the moment. Innocent tells him the others are cursing him and to go for it so rory gets in one of the unoccupied canoes and shoves off towards the anomaly. He gets ten, twenty, thirty feet out when he hears an unmistakeable sound (CERCHICK) the rest of the group has their weapons trained on him and innocent. Rory snaps two blurry ( of course they're blurry) photographs and comes back to shore. One of the guides, Gabriel, admonishes him. “God can approach man, but man NEVER approaches GOD. He would have killed us all.” After he got back to shore the whole group was just relaxed again. No mention about the fact that they were in a mexican f--king standoff five seconds ago. They all watched the beast about a half a mile away for seven minutes and thirty two seconds before it submerges again. I'll put that picture in the shownotes. After that it's basically denouement, de new maw? I honestly am less confident in that word than I am in all the local lingala words. Let's unpack. First. I'm pissed nobody got speared by mokele mbembe's tusk, so that was kind of a let down. Second I can't get f--king oo ee ooo ahh ting tang wall walla bing bang out of my head. Maybe I'll cover that in the parasite episode. Third. One of my favorite stories about mokele-mbembe I couldn't find a good place to shoehorn in yet that I want to make sure I mention. So one of the BBC expeditions back in the seventies made a much more cordial contact with the pygmies. They showed them a book of animal pictures and they're flipping through them and they're like leopard, hippo, elephant, crocodile sure sure we see that s-t all the time, and then they show a picture of a moose and they're like WHAT THE F--K IS THAT THING! Later on after showing a gorilla and a few other monkeys, they throw in an apatasaurus and they just are like matter of factly yeah that's a gorilla that's mokele-mbembe. I love that, they have no modern schooling, they can recognize all the animals in their region and a f--king dinosaur like it's nothing and then they see a moose or bear and they think it's the devil. They treat mokele-mbembe like a foregone conclusion. Sigh.. I guess I gotta cover the skeptical point of view. I'm fine cutting that off for a brief second to shill for a minute. I'm so grateful for all of you guys listening truly madly deeply. I'm living the dream and swearing on the radio, nobody tell my boss. We're already starting to build a community across social media and s--t, but I've got some homework for you guys before next week. Last week I think I asked you to subscribe wherever you listen.This week I want you to throw me a 5 star rating wherever you're listening. I work hard on the show! If you want to give me less than five stars I guess you can keep that to yourself or email me at nightmarenowpodcast@gmail.com to tell me how to improve, I'm always looking for feedback! Next week I'm gonna ask you to share the show with your friends and family or something crazy.Brr I just blacked out for thirty seconds, must have been the marketing persona taking over. Anyway, why might moklele-mbembe not be real slash alive. A lot of the arguments overlap with nessie, it's very tough to keep a breeding population going for 65 million years, especially without turning up any bodies. But taking that apart, this is an animal with potential mystical powers so we can just that to any of the rest of the debunking the deboonkers points. Furthermore, many large animals are capable of burying there dead. Look no further than elephant graveyards, a wild phenomena on its own. Let alone in the jungle with potentially the fastest natural decomposition in the world. As for the breeding cycle I have no earthly idea. Dinosaurs lay eggs generally I guess, maybe in the caves? Another option is literally seeing an elephant in the water. From far off a trunk could be a neck and they're a greyish brown color. Fair enough. They still don't have claws like the found footprints. Lastly the stories of mokele-mbembe might have been unfairly signal boosted. Remember the pokemania of the 90's or later on in twenty sixteen when pokemon go first came out? That was basically the late eighteen hundreds but for dinosaurs. Everyone and their grandma wanted to see dinosaurs. Because the first dinosaur bones had only recently been found. Maybe I'll cover the bone wars, that's a really interesting story in and of itself. Oh and one more thing, I couldn't really fit this anywhere else, but there are tales from some of the tribes and villages that a few pygmies managed to spear and kill a dinosaur. Everyone that ate the meat died though. Kind of anticlimactic, kind of hilarious. Anyway, I'll leave it up to you to decide if dinosaurs still walk the earth, at least until I cover the texas pteranodons. Heh. I've got a huge smile across my face. I love this s--t! Until next week, I'd say sweet dreams, but we all know it's only gonna be nightmares now! 

Links:Atlantichttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Listonhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burke_and_Hare_murdersLoose Transcript:Hi everyone and welcome or welcome back to another episode of nightmare now. I'm the host, Erik Byrne. Today's episode is gonna be another short one, lets say truncated or even amputated. It opens up a whole topic of medical horror like a bonesaw to an artery. I'd love to do more episodes on the wider subject of the insane stuff humanity used to call medicine, but I'll split that up and sprinkle it into the feed at large over time. I don't want to spend too many episodes in a row on one particular topic. Maybe if I was doing this in seasons or something, but for right now I'm gonna jump all over time and space like I've got cosmic ADD. Maybe down the line I'll curate collections of episodes on broader topics like medicine,  history or animals, but for that to happen I need to pump out more of that thick squidgy content. So without further ado I would like to jump right into the blood and guts of today's episode. I give you the fastest knife in the west end, the slickest slicer south of the north sea, Robert liston!Robert liston was a prolific surgeon in britain from around 1818 to his death in 1847. He was born in late october of 1794 to a minister and inventor in Scotland. He grew up fascinated with medicine and anatomy and after a rudimentary schooling as a boy went on to attend medical school in edinburgh (edin-bruh). He left for a while to study under this guy william blizard in London and eventually returned to edinburgh to teach anatomy there before becoming a surgeon and then kind of bounced between london and edinburgh throughout his life. He got canned in edinburgh and moved to london, came back then went back to london where he lived out the remainder of his days. He married a wine merchant's daughter along the way who isn't mentioned in most of the articles and the one's she's in don't even really give her name. Give the ladies some coverage too c'mon! Given her absence in most of the literature here I, I don't think there's much relevance to me covering her either. Sorry mrs Liston, I'm sure he couldn't have done it all without you. We'll take a brief second to pour out a whiskey for the happy couple and make a note to find some strong women leads for future horror stories on the show. Back to old robert, that covers most of the biographical information of any relevance to the medical insanity we're going to be jumping into today. I think he'd appreciate the brevity and cutting to the chase as you'll soon find out. So during this time period of history, people had a Fairly good idea of how most of the human body worked and how to fix a lot of the medical issues people had. But it certainly was far from perfect. I mean even today we're far from perfect. Reminds me of a time I tried to give blood like two years ago and they had to take the needle in and out 3 or four times because they weren't getting any flow. After squeezing the stupid rod for ten minutes and not filling a drop of the blood bag, 2 nurses and a doctor later some tech figured out that they had crimped the wrong tube. They just gave me the coupon for the free whopper or whatever and told me to get out of there, so there's kind of individual incompetence like that and societal incompetence like the fact that back then other surgeons thought you were a pussy if you washed your hands before or after a surgery. Most notably and most relevant at the time though was that speed of the operation was of the essence. The longer you went with an open body cavity or bleeding stump from an amputation, your chances of dying skyrocketed up. You lost more blood, you became more susceptible to infection, (although that wasn't really well understood at the time), and you just have an overall lower chance of survival. Enter Robert Liston. He really, really leaned into the faster surgery good, slow methodical surgery bad. And now we're getting into the reason this dude gets his own episode on my prestigious show. Picture this, your leg is green and sickly from some horrible 1800s infection probably just from stepping on a tomato that somebody stored their sewing needles in or something. Before antibiotics and other more modern inventions or discoveries it was just kinda like, that's gotta go. And then it's we let you keep your shrek leg and you're guaranteed to die, or we chop that s**t off and you've got like a one in four chance of dying. Han solo was right when he said never tell me the odds I guess. Dr Liston's whole schtick was that given a faster surgery you had a more likely chance to survive, why not take that to its logical conclusion and go for the speedrun records? Liston wasn't called the fastest knife in the west end for nothing, he would perform an operation to amputate a limb, that means from the first slice, having the flesh cleaved away, the bone sawn through and the stump stitched back up in Twenty Eight seconds flat. I can barely imagine that. Most podcast ads are about thirty seconds so next time you're listening to something that isn't this show, take note when there's an ad and imagine someone being strapped down with buckles, held down by assistants, have their hand sliced off and sawn through, all the while screaming and writhing, blood squirting everywhere while Liston is looking down on him with his knife literally in his mouth because he doesn't have time to put it down to switch to the bone saw. Then stitched back up to become captain hook, and he yells at his assistant with a wild look in his eye “time! how fast was that?”  Seriously, every article on this guy is called some variation of “time me gentlemen! Time me” because that was his catch phrase before a surgery. He would show up and make sure people had their stopwatches out before he got started. Everyone just had those in 1800s england. Aside from all the blood and screaming, twas a silly place.Liston may have been a cocky lunatic but he basically had every right to be. He was easily the fastest surgeon around and he had a far better mortality rate than most hospitals and other surgeons could claim at the time. I mentioned earlier his one in four surviving operations versus one in eight to ten averaged out elsewhere. Beyond the RBI he's working with, liston was overall a pretty good guy, sure a bunch of people died under his knife, but who hasn't gotten zapped playing the operation game once or twice. He would actually hang out outside of rival hospitals and when people got turned away because they were quote un quote “beyond helping” he would be like “look, no guarantees but your gonna die if you don't get some kind of treatment and I'm right here with my liston knife and stopwatch if you want a chance to live… maybe…” Yes a liston knife, he invented himself a new kind of amputation knife to speed up the procedures. And he would just chop em up right there. Maybe he took them to an operating room, the literature is unclear. It's funnier if you imagine he's doing this in the parking lot of a rival hospital. Through getting victims, erm patients like this he probably saved a good deal of lives that didn't have much of a shot at survival anyway. Pioneered isn't really the right term but, liston certainly championed, making people comfortable and assuring them stuff was okay, when it was most definitely not okay. He wasn't always the most, let's say “tactful” with this, in one example a guy was getting a foot amputated for frostbite but he got cold feet. Huh? Huh? Cold feet? Anyway he panics before the operation and locks himself in a bathroom. Liston tells him from the outside “it's all gonna be fine mate”, and just hears back “noooo I'm not ready” He replies, “I am, you're gonna be alright, but I got tea time in 3 and a half minutes!” He breaks down the door like he's f**king jack torrance “EERS ROBBY” yanks him out and straps him down. Successfully performs the operation and the guy goes on to be a renowned boat captain. I don't know if it was actually frostbite but the pun was too good to pass up. Furthermore, on being a great guy, he stood up for hygienic practices that were not yet commonplace at the time, for example washing your hands. He would argue with more senior surgeons about so-called experience, saying it didn't matter as much how long you've been doing surgery, it was rather how many surgeries you had done that accumulated experience, something that I would tend to agree with. If any surgeons are listening let me know at nightmarenowpodcast@gmail.com what you think, or fact check me or whatever you like. One more really interesting side note on liston is that he was also tangentially involved in catching a pair of serial killers operating in london in 1828, for more information on that take a gander at the Burke and Hare murders. This was a rabbit hole, maybe a hare hole I couldn't really go down to deep on this episode but the gist of it was that in this era, corpses for surgical practice and medical study were extremely difficult to get ahold of, basically the only way to get one legally  (with a big airquotes around legally because even this was shady) was if the deceased was some guttersnipe or foundling with no familial ties, found dead. Or if you wanted to go the more nefarious route, paying a ghoul or graverobber for a fresh body right out of the cemetery. I'll definitely cover all this grave robber stuff on a future episode because there's a whole ghastly arms race of people getting better at stealing bodies and people making all kinds of ridiculous inventions to prevent it after they died, like a giant wrought iron cage around their coffin. Medical students and schools would have to pay for these bodies, and to these two guys burke and hare, it was good enough money that after a girl died in their motel and they sold the body they figured they could just cut out the grim reaping middle man and just kill people and sell the bodies for a great rate on account of the freshness. Maybe we'll go more in depth on them in another episode but thats the basic gist of the case as far as relevant details to Liston.So one day Liston was dealing with this dude, Robert Knox, who was another surgeon and pretty close to a sort of archetypal “rival” character to liston. He shows up at his office, or operating room or lab or whatever it is  and sees this girl that suspiciously got there within HOURS of her death, for experimentation. God what a f**king ghoulish time right? He paid Burke and Hare 8 pounds for her. Adjusted for inflation, that's like 930~ish british pounds or a little over twelve hundred us dollars. Liston thinks this whole thing is weird, and then Dr knox puts her naked body in this lewd display preserving her in whiskey for a long time, like months, before he's set to do the autopsy. That seemed extremely disrespectful to the body of this woman, Mary Paterson, even for the time period. Liston sees all this still happening next time he comes by and just beats the everliving f**k out of knox, Liston was 6'2'' and pretty jacked, I don't know if I mentioned that yet. After he puts knox on his a** he take's mary's body and tells knox to f**k off, and gives her a proper burial. Later on the police would finally catch Burke and Hare by interrogating Knox, but not before they killed sixteen people for cash. Liston wasn't all great all the time, however. He may have been the fastest surgeon around but that didn't always lend itself to making him the most careful. I want to take a few minutes and go over some of his most famous screw ups. Some of the sources swear the veracity of these claims and some of them say they might be apocryphal, embellished or outright fake. It's more fun if we take all this at face value because old Robert had himself a few big oopsies under his belt by the end of his career. One notable one that he didn't technically f**k up, it's just wild is this dude had a scrotal tumor that weighed like fifty pounds. He had to carry his nuts around in a wheelchair. I think I saw a TV show where that happened in modern times and the dude just wore an upside down hoodie as sweatpants. That's definitely a nikola tesla “you will witness man made horrors beyond your comprehension” moment to have that on TV. Who would do a piece of exploitative media like that on horrific topics? Hmm…Moving on. As far as I can tell the guy lived, I don't know if he could spread his scrotum skin to turn into a flying squirrel at the point but I'm afraid to do any more research on that. Speaking of nuts there was another case where liston was amputating a leg and got quote “Overzealous” during the operation and in his attempt at breaking the land speed record of a knife went right through and lopped off the guy's testicles too. In his defense he did manage to take the leg off in under two and a half minutes. I just don't know if taking the testicles off counts as a bonus time or penalty time. I also can't find word on whether or not that guy survived or not. Maybe he didn't want to at that point. It's not an easy time to be alive overall especially with one leg and no nuts. Another hilariously gruesome operation, and this time I'm using the term operation very loosely, was when Liston was brought, a young boy. The boy had a red pulsing mass on his neck and liston got into an argument with another surgeon about what to do. This is where his legendary confidence didn't do him a whole lot of favors. While arguing about whether or not the growth was a run of the mill skin abscess or a more deadly carotid arterial aneurysm, Liston reportedly paused mid sentence, yelled POOH, Who ever has heard of an aneurysm in one so young as this!!” He then whipped a scalpel out of his pocket and sliced it. Arterial blood started shooting out immediately and the kid died very very soon after that. He was how do we say, “Dead wrong” Finally we reach his most famous case, which may be partially, or entirely fake, but again for the sake of EDUTAINMENT value here we're gonna take it at face value. This is the only reason most people have ever heard of Liston. He was performing a routine, As routine as this slapdash bloody affair could get, amputation of a leg again. Presumably he was trying to beat his speed record. So he's there, the patient is there tweaking out because he's about to lose a leg, and he's got a few assistants helping hold this mf down. Furthermore he has a couple of people watching, either to learn from him or just because I don't know video games weren't invented yet and watching people get sawed apart was the next best thing. There's a reason they're called operating theaters after all. Right? I wanted to narrate this like an old timey horse race or friggin UFC fight or something being likeHe's starting right from the word go, old knifey comes out of the gate swinging and starts sawing with reckless abandon timothy you ever see anything like this in all your broadcasting years? Oh there's the blood, he's splitting a bone and oh what's this what's this, Collateral! I've never seen anything like this! That gets old quick, anyway, he hacks through the leg and everything, and I mean everything, part of the table, and more importantly two of his assistants fingers. That's gotta be a speed record at least for a triple amputation right? No he's going for a bigger record. So while listons cleaving through multiple limbs like he's doing a mortal kombat finisher he swings even wider afterward and rips the bonesaw through an onlookers coat. This is an old man and after seeing a leg and two fingies get tossed onto the ground the fear from thinking he's been stabbed by the blade liston's working like it's a f**king black and decker turkey carver the old guy has a heart attack and dies right there on the floor. He didn't even get so much as a nick, just straight up fear killed him. Scarecrow would be proud.  So he's gone. Nothing they can do about the old fella, so they go back to look at the patient and the new assistant slash patient. Liston and the other assistants rush these guys to the hospital in to see what they can do but both the assistant and the original patient develop an infection from slicing through each other. And both of them succumb to those infections within days. It wasn't uncommon what was uncommon was Liston performing the worlds first, and as far as I know only surgery with a three hundred percent mortality rate. That's crazy I don't care who you is. You try to fix one person and and end up killing three and still get a statue of yourself put up one hundred years later. Any statue people make of me will inevitably be torn down once the masses discover my vulgar podcast.Liston's career wasn't all blood and gore however. In fact he was partially responsible for ending his own wild west brand of hibachi surgery. He ended up being the first person to do a public surgery with the aid of anesthetic. He even had to roast americans while he did it even though we invented it. He said something to the effect of “let's see how these yankee shenanigans work lads” and did a surgery on a dude after blasting his nose full of chloroform. Reportedly the guy woke up after the chloroform, WITHOUT A LEG, and asked when the operation was gonna happen and he was scared because he wasn't ready, boy did he get a rude awakening when they lifted the sheet for him.That was a big hit, and from then on people have been using anesthetics so you don't have to do a speedrun every time you do a surgery ever since. That was 1846. He died about a year later from ironically, an aneurysm and is remembered today through content hungry podcasts. That wraps up the story of robert liston, now it's up to you to decide! Was he a lunatic murderer or a good doctor doing the best he could. I recorded this in advance as well but this is the last one. After this release things are hopefully week to week or at least every two weeks. I'll have had a website built by now at nightmarenow.com. That's where you'll find the shownotes, pictures, blog posts, all the links to the sosh meeds and anything else you might want to find about the show. Again, I'm so glad you took the time to take a listen to my little project here and I can't wait to grow this show and community together! Have a great week everyone!

ImagesWiki Links:Cadaver synodPope FormosusThe Referenced article:The Cadaver Synod: Strangest Trial in History Loose transcript:Hi everyone!  Welcome back to episode 2 of Nightmare now! The show where we make up the taglines as we go! We discuss all the horrible happenings of humanity and all the extreme eerieness of everything else.  I'm your host erik byrne but before we really get into the rotting guts of this episode I want to get a few clerical things out of the way real quick here:First thanks for tuning in whether it's your first or second episode welcome.Episode 2 is a huge milestone, because according to some bulls*** statistic I read somewhere, 12% percent of all podcasts don't even make it this far. So thanks for everyone's support! All ten listeners of the first episode, you tha real ones. I want to be transparent up front here with my plans for the immediate future and long distance future for the show. Doing a big fully researched episode like the tiger one last week is a lot of work, but at the same time it's my first go around here. I'll get better, I promise. What that means, at least for now is, I can't read multiple sources, write an outline and jokes, record, edit, promote, upload and do all that alone every single week. That doesn't mean I don't want to bring you all the spook every week but I'm thinking maybe a shorter episode every two weeks or something to keep it coming. I want to keep the quality high so these ones won't necessarily need books and books of research to cover the full story in a satisfactory way. This episode is gonna be a little bit like that. We'll see just how long it ends up being but honestly I couldn't even find a book on this topic anyway, but it's wild and right up our alley so without further ado I present to you all, the synod horrenda, known in english as the cadaver synod.It was  january of  897 in Rome, and the vatican was winding up for what would prove to be maybe the second most embarrassing moment for the papacy, after you know, the rampant sex abuse but that's for another show. The current pope stephen the sixth, or possibly the seventh?? Most of the sources I looked at didn't seem to agree on this detail, like at all, look it up every other article or thing about it switches between them but for our purposes we'll call him the sixth. Everyone in this story is dead so the only people I'll offend with that are medieval scholars anyway, so sorry to you guys.  So stephen the 6th was putting together a synod. We're just gonna gloss over the fact that the whole time i was doing research for this I thought it was SAI NOD but apparently it's sinnod. For those of you that don't know what that is like I didn't it's basically a religious assembly, particularly in this context like a court trial. Stephen was effectively the prosecutor, the judge and the jury of this trial himself, which is a little corrupt but not too crazy in the annals of history. What sets it apart is the defendant. The previous pope, pope formosus. Are you seeing the problem here? As far as i know The new pope is not announced or elected or whatever, until the previous one has died. Pope formosus had died on april 4th 869. His corpse had been rotting in st peter's basilica for seven months. That really didn't matter to stephen, who was presumably a little bit insane, so he ordered that the corpse of formosus be exhumed from its tomb dressed in his sunday best vestments and brought into the papal court to stand, well you know, sit trial. The rotting worm infested corpse was propped up onto a throne to just take all the verbal abuse thrown at it. There's a painting of this that's f***g incredible. Maybe I'll make it the episode art or something, I'll at least link it in the show notes. But it looks like ace attorney meets dawn of the dead meets a literal god damned iron maiden album art. It f***ing rules I want it on a T shirt. And this actually happened! Formosus is sitting there with no eyes and stretched, decayed, greying skin all propped up with the hat and everything while stephen is just giving him the phoenix wright OBJECTION point. So naturally formosus isn't really very good at defending himself from the charges levied against him, being dead and mute. But he wasn't completely helpless, they threw the skelepope a bone by having a young unnamed deacon sit behind the throne and answer as him in his defense, but this kid was obviously told to not do too well, the case was supposed to be a slam dunk after all. This is one of my favorite parts of the story even though it's not super well documented. Unfortunately most of the documents regarding the cadaver synod were destroyed later on when people realized how fucking batshit insane it was and they were like maybe we leave this bit out of the lore for a while. But back to the young deacon, imagine you're sitting behind this LITERALLY ROTTING IN FRONT OF A GIANT AUDIENCE CORPSE, and it's getting  grilled about stuff like where were you on the night of march 27th and you just have to do your best jeff dunham and be like “I was dead your honor” Well how about the july the 13th?Still dead. Amazing. But the real charges against formosus fall into a political sort of category, at least most historians seem to think so. So before we close out the trial of formosus, I know you're on the edge of your seat wondering whether or not stephen is going to find him guilty. I'll give you two guesses. But I think it's important to give a little context to this whole affair. First off, basically everyone but stephen rightly thought this was totally gross and insane. This kind of thing was not common at the time, it was completely wild back then too. And not just the immediate surroundings of this macabre trial were crazy. This was a tumultuous time for the the papacy in general, so much so that it got a reputation as the quote “iron age of the papacy.”Most of this hinged on the fact that more or less the pope was the only one that could crown a new holy roman emperor, and because of this and the power that it brought, the papacy didn't always attract the most uh, scrupulous people to be involved with it. So basically all these families and factions vying to become emperor would try to make one of their supporters a pope, or have other high ranking members of the church killed or exiled to further their own ambitions. There's a fabulous article about this by this guy, donald wilkes junior that really helped putting this episode together that goes into a lot of detail about this so called iron age. It's all very game of thrones. I'll link to that in the notes. So in the 8 years from eight ninety six to nine oh four there was nine popes compared to there being nine popes from 1900 to 2 thousand. With all this intrigue and murder the papal turnover was pretty damn high. Some were poisoned, some clubbed to death, others thrown in jail to rot, and others died in giant air quotes mysterious circumstances. Read that as probably also murdered. So it's in the middle of this crazy violent century of the catholic church in rome that this ridiculous trial takes place. Historians suggest that the specific motivations for the synod most likely were due to a sort of rivalry between formosus and steven, where both people were sort of members of opposing factions vying for the emperorship. Is that the right word? Empire? Whatever. So stephen was in with the previous emperor guy the third of spoleto and formosus encouraged this other dude arnulf of corinthia to invade and usurp this other guy… guy. The third. So he does and formosus makes arnulf emperor. This made a number of people very upset for reasons that are honestly beyond the scope of my research today. Maybe we'll go back and do a deep dive on the iron age here some other time.So when formosus dies in april, holy crap I forgot about this part, steven wasn't actually the next pope. It was this guy boniface, bony face? Bonifachy?   the sixth. He got in right after formosus died but he died 13 days later from the gout. So that happened. In and out, like I said, high turnover rates on the popes.After that stephen takes over and he's part of the opposing faction to formosus. And all that craziness sets the stage for the cadaver synod.So we go back to the synod, we've got a rotting corpse on a throne, we've got stephen hurling insults and doing a whole inquisition on this body and we've got some teeenager hiding behind said throne and answering yes or no or denying any of these quote unquote charges as best as he can, which would make a f***g awesome alternate universe saturday night live sketch where they did all history. One thing we didn't touch on yet though was the fact that this wasn't a 2021 covid zoom trial. There was plenty of other people kicking around. There was a whole audience slash jury of people watching this shitshow take place and I can't help but thinking about them like this: Imagine your boss shows up and wants to do some kind of stupid leadership, synergy, team building insert your own buzzword here exercise and you're just like f***k it, its better than working right?I imagine the whole thing was catered and stuff and what are you gonna do? Tell the pope he's being a ridiculous a-hole? I feel like that's a shortcut to being hanged for heresy. This is the perfect example of how I'm doing the “Night bite”  episodes differently. I don't need to look that up. You're not here for a citation for your medieval history PHD. Do they get hanged? Hung? Some other form of execution? Who knows? Who cares? This is nightmare now after dark, cite the main episodes, we're playing it fast and loose here. Just like pope stephen was. So while he's grilling the body of formosus, not literally it didn't get that crazy, they were catholics not cannibals. That's for another episode. While he's aggressively interrogating the body and the deacon is doing his best to defend this corpse from behind the throne, stephen shouts out the charges, violating the church canon by becoming pope in the first place, coveting the papacy and perjury. It's unclear whether the perjury was in the trial after he was dead or in some other capacity but it's even funnier to imagine it in that trial. Just stephen shouting down the deacon while he's trying to do the shaggy, wasn't me” bit from behind this body. And getting called out for lying under oath. Unfortunately any transcripts of the cadaver synod were destroyed so we don't really know how long the trial lasted or what exactly was said but what we do know is mostly from testimony of people that were there and what they wrote elsewhere and from this long form twenty thousand line poem called the ring and the book. As for the length  You have to imagine it was at least a long afternoon ordeal. However long it took, the verdict was reached with very little deliberation. Guilty. Of all charges. Shocking right? And he put up such a good defense! One interesting part of the defense actually, might have been God himself appearing as a witness. Reportedly there was a minor earthquake in the middle of the trial as if to be like yo, cut this shit out or take it out of my house. I couldn't find more than one source to corroborate that though so it might be bullshit. Who knows? Either way it didn't help formosusus case at all; he was still found guilty.On to the sentencing: if you thought the trial was grisly, get a load of this: becaues formosus was found guilty, and they couldn't exactly give him the death penalty, they instead decided to strip him of all aspects of his papacy starting with his clothes and then the three fingers on his right hand, the ones that a pope uses to bestow blessings onto people. Next they invalidated every proclamation and act that he ever did as pope. Another funny bit of this was that one of formusus actions as pope was actually what made Stephen a bishop initially. By invalidating that does he invalidate his own papacy? Apparently not, and he just kinda glosses over that detail, much like I'm going to. At least I pointed it out right? And finally they dressed him up as a commoner and buried him in a grave for foreigners and heathens. But his troubles didn't end there. Maybe they already had, you know, he was dead after all, so that brings up all sorts of afterlife questions that are beyond the scope of what I'm trying to accomplish here. But the corpse's troubles didn't end there. Almost immediately after he's buried in this heathen cemetery, Stephen is like, screw that, he aint getting off that easy. So formusus is exhumed again, take a shot every time this guy gets dug up or buried and you'll have a good buzz going by the end of the episode. So they exhume him from the foreigner cemetery and toss his body into the tiber river.The tiber river was basically where they threw anyone and anything they wanted to get rid of permanently Shortly after that a monk pulled the body out of the river and presumably preserved it somehow. After this the corpse reportedly performed miracles. What's interesting about that is not a single one of the sources I had could describe what those miracles were, they all just said exactly that “Reportedly performed miracles” unquote. We're left to speculate, so how I interpret that is he gets pulled out of the river and just does the WB frog Hello muh baby hello my honey hello my ragtime gal, jig dance and then collapses into a waterlogged pile of bones barely hanging together. Flash back over to stephen, while formosus is off performing miracles on the banks of the tiber, stephen is facing down an angry mob at the vatican. Turns out a massive macabre show trial of a popular pope's dead body wasn't well received by the masses. A few months after the trial there was a revolt and Stephen was removed from his post, forced to wear the clothes of a peasant and then thrown in prison. As if that wasn't bad enough, after spending a few months in prison, he was strangled to death by a cellmate. Again high turnover, iron age yada yada yada. Being pope aint easy like it is today. Here we are then. Formosus is long dead, Stephen is short dead. You'd think that's where the story ends right? Wrong. One of the popes after Stephen the sixth was this dude Theodore the second and he was a formosus fan. He said the whole affair was, I'm paraphrasing here, an irredeemable f**show. OL theo 2 called his own synod that nullified the whole thing and reinstated formosus. The problem with that is that they had to get his body back from the monks and dress him up, bring it back to rebury it at saint peter's basilica… Again. Drink if you're following along. The next pope John the ninth also agreed that the trial was a sham and doubly nullified it. Additionally they made it illegal to hold  trial against a corpse. A rule you would think would be unnecessary, but hey they're their for a reason, just like making tying an alligator to a street sign is illegal in indiana someone has to f***k it up before they make it a rule. again you might think that the story ends there, and again you'd be wrong. After those two popes came this dude sergius the third. This guy was a real bastard. And he was not a formosus fan. He was actually at the proceedings of the cadaver synod and was one of the few people that was just like “hell yeah screw formosus, this rules.” So when he became pope he decreed that the synod was in fact legit and even went so far as to add an extra plaque on stephen's tomb that said he was a rad dude and ahead of his time with the cadaver synod, and that formosus was a piece of s**t. History did not remember Sergius the third favorably. He was the only pope to order the murder of another pope and also he fathered an illegitimate son as pope. I'd like to reiterate here that I'm by no means an expert on catholic law or theology, but I'm pretty sure the pope isn't supposed to be knocking chicks up. After sergius the third, people generally agree that the whole cadaver synod was an insane, illegal, ridiculous blemish on history and formosus basically did nothing wrong. And that, folks, is where this story ends. Formosus stands vindicated after being used as a macabre prop in one of the most ridiculous events of the time period. Stephen and Sergius lie in disgrace and the catholic church has other matters to attend to. I'm erik byrne, signing off for this week's nightmare now episode, I'll see you next week! In the meantime check out my website, That at the time of recording isn't set up haha, but at least i've got instagram at nightmare dot now. Twitter is coming soon and Hopefully I'll have a way to link all of that by the time I get this uploaded. Thanks everyone for listening and if you've got it in your heart throw ya boi a like, subscribe and a review on apple podcasts or whatever. In the first few weeks of a show releasing is where all that makes a huge difference so every single one counts big time. Thanks again for listening, it means so much to me that you think my show is worth your time. Any questions or comments shoot me a line at nightmarenowpodcast@gmail.com.  Catch you next week! 

 No Beast So FierceManeaters of KumaonImagesWorld Wildlife fundsome cool tiger sense facts:6x better night vision than us,0.2 to 65 kHz that can hear breathing, heartbeats or swallowing, Special whiskers to sense all kinds of stuff, Padded feet make them nearly silent while they walk. They're like predator. Invisible silent and they'll rip out your spine in one go.Wiki links:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumaon_divisionhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChampawatChampawat Tigerhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupal,_Nepalhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_attackNews:https://abc7news.com/san-francisco-zoo-attack-sf-tiger-christmas-day/9072741/Youtube links:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0kzdu_wTM0&ab_channel=WildFilmsIndiahttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jac_K-XB5A&ab_channel=Unbelievablefactshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f9CsToZpeY&ab_channel=AnimalogicMusic Special thanks for the intro and outro musicFreesound.org usersClaiber7901videogLoose Transcript: (full of typos, but that's okay!)Welcome everyone to Nightmare Now the show where we'll learn about all the horrors of our universe and psyche and hopefully have ourselves a laugh along the way. I'm your host Erik Byrne and on this episode we're gonna take an in depth look at the true story of a killer. A serial killer operating on the fringes of society at the turn of the twentieth century. A killer that dismembered and ate her victims. A killer with a kill count not ten, not twenty, not dozens but hundreds of victims. A killer that was a Bengal tiger. The champawat tiger single handedly killed four hundred and thirty six people in northern India and Nepal in the early 1900s. My main source for this episode was the book No Beast So Fierce by Dane Hucklebridge. It's a good read and if you like the story you're about to hear check out the book in the show notes for a more in depth look. We're gonna start out here with a stat sheet. I want you to see what a tiger is made of. If you have a house cat handy take a look at him right now imagine that but 60 times larger! This is the worlds largest living feline, and second in history overall only to the Smilodon or sabre tooth tiger. They can range from four, five hundred pounds all the way up to seven hundred pounds and extraordinary specimens tipping the scales at over eight hundred pounds. They range anywhere from ten to even thirteen feet long with their tails included. That is a very big kitty. Lets talk equipment. First of all musculature. On our housecat George you can see his clearly defined muscles and he's only 11 pounds or so so when we ramp that up to six to seven hundred pound cat we're talking serious strength. Even without claws a single swipe of a tigers massive paw could knock your head clean f***ing off your body and easily break bones. They have a jaw that can bite down with over a thousand psi which can crack through a water buffalo's head. And wielded with that force are a set of 3 to 4 inch fangs. Big enough to slam into a brain or rip out a spine. On their front paws they have ten claws that are also about four inches long. That musculature isn't just there to knock heads off, it's built for speed and finesse too. Capable of short bursts of forty miles per hour speed and the demonstrated ability to leap thirty feet through the air to pounce. They are fantastic swimmers and comfortable on land and in the water. They are very smart hunters and adaptable when it comes to their prey. They'll cripple larger prey by the legs and drive others towards the water where they are far easier to take down. They're solitary animals generally but the cubs stay with the mother for about 2 years learning all these and other ways to kill. There have even been some recorded incidents of tigers mimicking the sounds of other animals to lure them out. Like predator. The predator comparison becomes more apt when we take into account its spine ripping behavior and spectacular stealth ability. When it wants to be seen and heard though, you'll know. A tiger can roar at a hundred fourteen decibels which is like being next to 25 lawnmowers going at once. They'll eat pretty much anything they want. A tigers diet includes but is presumably not limited tofish, turtles, badger, rabbit, mice, bears, wolves, sandar deer, water buffalo, crocs, pythons, seals, even elephants, rhinos, leopards and of course, the reason we're talking about them today. Humans. We'll get into how the eat a little bit later but suffice to say for now that it isn't pretty.Tigers are basically perfect killers, like sharks in the water they're predatory evolution perfected. But even still they don't usually go after humans. They like bigger meatier game but when certain factors coalesce you have an unmistakable recipe for a man eater. We talked about the tigers' equipment earlier. teeth and claws, jaws and paws. These are all integral parts of it's hunting kit. When there's an injury the tiger has to adapt, maybe it can't crush a buffalo's neck so easily anymore. Maybe it can't keep up with a fleet footed deer quite as well anymore. A national park in india did a fantastic study of tiger attacks on humans in their area from nineteen seventy nine to two thousand six. Some of the conclusions were that sixty six percent of the tiger victims were kind of stooped down with their backs turned. They never see it coming, but perhaps more importantly, I scrooched down human in tall grass looks a heck of a lot more like normal prey than one walking around and making all kinds of noise. Even more incriminating was that most of the tigers that were actually able to be examined displayed injuries to their teeth or paws and in the cases of tigers that actually scooped people right out of their villages. Every single one was impaired like this.  And of all the attacks over all, 90% of them occurred in areas where prey density has fallen and the habitats were degraded. Looking at all this a clear pattern emerges. It's hard to foist a term like motive onto an animal versus a human but lets make the case. These man eaters at the time of their first kill are acting out of desperation. They're hungry, their habitat is being encroached on, and they're unable to get their normal prey. They take a shot at a clumsy primate that's on their turf, and even to an injured tiger, humans are no match. That's when it clicks. We're made of meat. We're readily available. We're weak and we're slow. When a tiger realizes all this after grabbing a farmer by the throat and dragging him into the jungle screaming without so much as a struggle, a very very dangerous animal is born. And of those dangerous animals, there was none so dangerous as the champawat tiger. She was born sometime in 1899 or 1900 in Nepal. We can imagine that she had a relatively normal childhood? Cubhood? What do you call it? I guess it's not important. But at some point she was injured by a hunter or a poacher's bullet. That shot was the catalyst for the better part of five hundred deaths. When a tiger attacks a human usually they don't have a chance. You're just scrooching down to cut some grass or take a piss or something than in less than a second you hear that tremendous roar and you have 40 cumulative inches of claws entering your back before those vicegrip jaws clamp down on your neck and it's over. And that's before even taking into account the sheer force that six hundred pounds of muscle moving at highway speed will do just on impact alone. If by the grace of god someone can survive the split second impact like getting hit by some f***ed up mad max knife car intelligent enough to hit from behind and go for the throat, all the tiger has to do is shake it's big head and tear those claws through you and you're f***.If you don't believe me just do a quick google images of tiger attack autopsy. The hole that one fang can put in a human neck is nightmare fuel. In the book Hucklebridge sources a number of different well documented tiger attacks in all sorts of scenarios. There's tigers that swim out and rip people out of a boat, tear people from trees, literally burst through walls of peoples huts to drag them away screaming like a god damn pitcher of orange flavored, bloodthirsty cool aid man. And a particularly brutal one where two young children watch their father get pounced and dragged away into the jungle, recounting the story having grown up fatherless. Speaking of growing up fatherless I think it's time we looked at the other side of the arena, The hero, so to speak of this story: Edward James Corbett. This dude was a legend. We'll get to know him a little better over the course of the show but let's start with the basics He went by Jim Corbett, which is how I'll mostly be referring to him for the rest of the show. Jim was born the eighth child of sixteen of Christopher William and Mary jane Corbett in Nainital, in northern India, July of 1975. If I'm messing up the pronunciation of any of these places in India and Nepal bear with me. His parents had come over from Britain years before and lived in India for some time. The book goes into a lot of great detail about his family history and the larger scope of British presence in India during that time, but that's kind of beyond the scope of this show for now, so if you're interested check out the book. The short version is that britain was going all over the world to kind of make everywhere like britain. Obviously this model doesn't work for ever and is usually met with some resistance. Violent or otherwise. So the british indian relationships are often tenuous. With all that being said. Growing up as a white kid in the jungle you're gonna take the hand your dealt. Corbett did just that, going to school in the colony and town they were at and at the same time going out and befriending the locals to learn more about the amazing natural world around him. In this unique upbringing he became kind of a missing link between the two cultures where he could rub elbows and play cricket with the rich brits and the next day go out for a hunt with a village elder in the jungle. At six years old his father died of a heart attack so growing up with those connections to local men became even more important to forming the man he would become. His mentor gave him his first weapon and taught him everything he knew about tigers and other wildlife of the jungle. At the time he first heard of the champawat tiger, he was working at a train station likely sometime in 1903. A british friend of his told him of rumors of a single tiger snatching people away in nearby nepal. I'll throw a map in the show notes that gives a pretty good estimation about jim and the tigers movements over those few years. Unfortunately we don't have a lot of great records about the tigress herself in her early days in nepal. Most of the historical records point towards the cat killing two hundred people before being driven out of the country. Bounty hunters were called in, part of the nepalese army, absolutely eveything they had available they threw at her and she evaded or killed and ate all of it. The sources we do have about the tiger leaving nepal are mostly conjecture. But historically tiger hunts were accomplished by a huge amount of noise, guns, elephants and screams driving the tiger into a suitable killzone. The champawat tigress managed to escape all that and finally arrived in india. Now is as good a time as any to talk about the math at work here. An adult tiger needs one hundred twenty five to a hundred thirty five pounds of meat per week to survive. By all accounts the champawat tiger was killing a person a week for eight or nine years. A person in india and nepal is gonna about fit that quota. We can figure one person a week for a year is fifty two people a year, multiplying that by eight years and we get four hundred and sixteen, and by nine years we get four hundred and sixty eight. The math works out well enough with the corroborating sources that the kill count was somewhere close to two hundred in nepal and continued at that pace for for another four, four and half years in the kumaon area of india just west of it's previous territory in nepal.In 1907 Corbett is contacted by another hunter about a tiger that needs to be put down. of  course, it's the champawat. He's surprised that it's still going after he puts together that shwe was the one he heard about back in 1903. When he hears that everything locals or british have thrown at this tiger had failed he agrees to take the job. But with a couple of fun caveats. This bit is straight out of a movie. I'm paraphrasing but he says, I'll take the job but first you need to recall every other hunter or soldier already contracted to go after her, and get rid of the bounty on her head. I'm not doing this for the money, I'm not doing this for the skin, I'm not doing it to be a poacher I'm doing it because it's my duty for the colony. At the time you were a tiger for two main reasons. You were either a british pansy looking for yucks or an indian poacher looking for bucks. So their was the desire for getting a fur pelt from them and what really kicked everything into high gear was bounty hunting. During the british expansion in india tigers were seen as a pretty big problem. Both symbolically as the tiger represented the untamed natural india compared to a civilised british colony and also literally due of course to 700 pound cats eating people and livestock. When turning in a single tiger you could get the equivalent of months and months of pay as a lower class indian it's no wonder why tiger hunting skyrocketed.  Over eighty thousand tigers were killed in 50 years. With both the locals and europeans taking shots at tigers wherever they could, you ended up with a lot of very angry very dangerous wounded cats.  So another thing that's important to consider here is the gun culture in india at the time, I'm not sure that's the right word but lets roll with it. I don't really have time to dig to deep in to the colonial politics of the time, I'm not an expert so if you're interested pick up the book. The short version is that the british show up in india, try to domesticate it and make it more like a proper english colony. The problem with this is people usually don't take kindly to subjugation, revolutions ensue and are subsequently put down, a big one in 1857. After this the brits basically go on a gun grabbing rampage and so functionally nobody has weapons and those that do are generally rusty pieces of s***. Anything beyond the rusty piece of s*** tier is prohibitvely expensive and also illegal.Corbett has just begun thinking about how he's gonna bag the tigress when a man breathlessly runs into the village saying that the tiger has killed another person in pali, 60 kilometers away.  He gathers up the six or seven kumaonis  that he's recruited, packs up his gun and supplies and starts the trek towards pali. The hunt had begun.The group takes off towards pali. And they are hooffing it big time. they carry their gear because keep in mind cars are a long way off at this point. The model T doesn't come out until the next year and rural india wasn't exactly first on the list to get them. So they're hiking at 30 kilometers a day to make it to pali in two days. For us americans that about thirty seven thirty eight miles total and about nineteen miles per day.When they finally arrive they're surprised to find it a ghost town. There is nobody in the square or on the street and they call out basically just to scream if anyone is there. And then the smell kicks in. the whole village smells like p*** and s***. A few of the villagers cautiously emerge from their homes. The whole village has been locked down and everyone has been inside for days. People are literally staying inside their houses s*** their pants with fear. They're too afraid to even go out to dump the human waste or gather more food. So on top of those unsanitary conditions they're also beginning to starve. A few villagers explain that the demon tiger is here and it has been for a few days. At night they cower from it's roars in the jungle. All this makes everything all to real to corbett. If he didn't know it wasn't an ordinary tiger before he sure did now. He asks to see the kill site but nobody in town is willing to go anywhere near that accursed place. Corbett needs to see the tracks and other markings from the tiger to get a better picture of the size of her. Again we're hit with the distrust of whites in india. Even when corbett can speak the language and grew up there nobody is willing to risk going out to the kill site. Corbett takes the message and decides he needs to earn their trust. The first night he goes out alone and sits next to a tree, trying to keep watch all night. Corbett writes down in his own book just how terrified he was sitting out there alone. He says he saw dozens of tigers behind the trees, tricks of the light. His teeth chatter from the terror and the cold and eventually he falls asleep hunkered down under this tree. To him it's a miracle he survives the night. The tiger  was still without a doubt nearby, possibly even watching him that night. To me it's a miracle he survived the night too, especially considering the nighttime capabilities of a Bengal tiger. Their eyes have night vision six times more sensitive than our own, and their radar like ears can pick up the faintest sounds like a breath or even a heartbeat. Couple those with their bigass padded paws that make them nearly silent as they walk, he wouldn't have stood a chance if she was hungry. While the village were impressed with his bravery or stupidity they still refused to take him to the kill site.  He takes off into the bush with a few of his crew for a little while until he finds a few goorahl deer sitting up on a ridge. That's good eatin. He readies his rifle and fires, bam the deer falls down the hill, but the shot scared out two more . BAM BAM he hits both of those at two hundred yards like he's putting together a call of duty montage. All three animals fall and he brings them back to the village. Finally, when given food a villager agrees to take him to the site, and explains what happened. They were all out in the field and the girl climbed up into the tree and got ripped out of it with such force that the skin from her hands still clung to the bark. They followed the trail of dried blood and eventually made it to a clearing. This place looked worse than carries prom night, there was blood everywhere but no tiger, and even more disturbing, No body, at least not intact. Just a few scraps of flesh and bones that would have fit in a restaurant to go box. F***. Looking over the pawprints corbett judges the tiger to be female, around 12 years old. This tracks well with everything we already know about her time in nepal and across kumaon. We get into the feeding habit of the tigers here: So these tigers can basically scoop anything by the neck and just take off. That's how it can snatch people so damn easily. They can drag 500 lb water buffalo around so they can pick up an indian woman like they're playing fetch. The average indian woman today is 5 feet tall and weighs 120 pounds.  tigers scoop their prey and find a nice secluded location to basically gorge themselves for a few days. Once it's in a suitable locale they'll just start chomping and ripping away at the meat starting with the butt. They'll eat for an hour or so, then just lounge till they're hungry again. Is this the right script? Is that my saturday plans or a tiger? They will repeat this cycle until everything edible is consumed. The place is basically gonna look like the set of the thing, just a few shards of bone left and a lotta blood. They have sandpaper-like tounges to strip away flesh, several types of teeth to help tear apart meat and consume everything. A starving tiger can eat a cow in 4 days so estimating the time to eat a person is somewhere in the neighborhood of 2-3 days. When they are done they just leave behind this crime scene and go somewhere else to hunt for the next meal. When they take off like this they can become difficult to track over such a huge territoryTigers in their territory move on a constant patrol while they hunt. After the whole process I just described takes place and the tiger moves to a new location it repeats. Realizing this the village people werent able to track it perse but were able to sort of tell when it was in the area. Mostly because one of them would get carried off screaming. When this occurred, the whole village would lock down until the tiger moved to a new locale.This certainly contributed to the tigresses colossal kill count was that there's a hugely delayed response  when the tiger attacks someone. Nobody really has guns due to some uprisings against british takeover of indian most notably the one in 1857  So they have to send some dude over on foot to a place with british govt, and getting the wheels of government moving in order to even to dispute a goddamn parking ticket is nearly impossible so setting up a bounty and hiring a hunter contractor to go after it will take like a week. By the time the hunter gets over there there's nothing left but splotches of blood and little bits of bone and the tiger is 30 miles away to do it again. If you thought herding cats was hard imagine trying to do it with  govt assistance and the cats are 700 pound killing machines. Back to our story: When they bring home what's left of this girl, they ask around to see where the tiger is now or where it might be headed. Nobody really knows but the consensus is it's going back to champawat village. The tiger operates in a huge swath of land all around kumaon, kumaon itself is about the size of wyoming and the champawat tiger was responsible for 95% of the tiger fatalities in the region during that time.  but the nexus of the deaths and sightings is right in champawat.They pack up and get ready to hike up to champawat. Jim Corbett arrives in champawat on may 9th 1907 with his kumaoni buddies plus one or two extra guys from pali brave enough to try to end the reign of terror. In corbetts memoir he makes an interesting note about the tashlidar, who from what I can understand is some sort of village elder/ caretaker like figure. This isn't a local indian politics podcast. Sue me. He makes a note about how the guy was gonna spend the night at his bungalow and just says screw it and walks home last minute. I've done my fair share of long walks home at night but this is in a time and place where any average dude is afraid to walk the streets without a group of at least four people just in case one of them gets attacked and carried off. This dude just peaces out and walks 4 miles home alone in the dark. He spends the night basically having nightmares of getting ripped apart by a tiger and barely sleeps a wink. After all the research I did on tigers I cant say I blame him. But he's actually going after the most notorious one in history. I'm sitting in a closet just making jokes about it. When corbett wakes up he's chatting with his squad of  six or seven  guys trying to assess where  the tiger might strike next and what their move should be, he's doing the 1907 version of where we dropping boys?” and as if on cue this dude runs down the road screaming that the tiger has grabbed another girl. Victim 436. When he gets to the site of the attack he does a quick interview about how it went down and he's surprised to find that the tiger snatched this girl up in broad daylight, in a field, surrounded by a dozen other people. It was very good at what it did. A little bit more about tiger stealth, A tiger is able to conceal itself in knee high grass, approach almost without sound and jump out with ludicrous speed. They are well camouflaged, you might think orange isn't a great camo color, but look at hunters. They wear bright orange tree camo. Prey animals dont see it. And animals that do, like us would even have trouble picking out the orange from light filtering through the trees. Corbett tells the villagers to stay inside and wait for him to get back. starts tracking after the tiger from the site of the attack and finds a swath of destruction in its wake. There's hair, clothing and blood leading into the treeline. Partway along the course of this blood trail he hears fast footsteps behind him and goes and whirls around thinking he's about to be desert and almost shoots a villagers head off. We have a unique scenario here where we can kind of hear corbetts internal monologue in a way because he recorded his thoughts on the hunt in his books. I've got some juicy bits from maneaters of kumaon in just a minute.Luckily he doesn't unload his weapon on this poor bastard and the guy explains hes here to help because he is one of the only guys in town that actually has a gun. Imagine you're on the trail of this legendary tiger and something comes crashing through the bush behind you without warning. I would have gunned him down accidentally and been thrown in indian prison.  The problem is this dude is an oaf. He's loud and doesn't know much about hunting so he's more of a liability. He makes the guy climb to the top of a tree and just sit there until he gets back. He can't send him back because then the guy would have to go back alone. That's just a little part of the story that's so f***ing funny to meAfter leaving the guy up on top of the tree he finds the tigers feeding zone and hoo boy it's a doozy. From his own words:“Splinters of bone were scattered round the deep pugmarks into which discolored water was slowly seeping , and at the edge of the pool was an object which had puzzled me as i came down the watercourse, and which I now found was part of a human leg. In all the subsequent years I have hunted maneaters I have not seen anything as pitiful as that young comely leg -- bitten off a little below the knee as clean as though severed by the stroke of an axe. Out of which warm blood was trickling.”Jesus. For the record pugmarks are the tiger tracks. While he kneels down to inspect the carnage he hears a growl  in a split second whips around and fires off both barrels of his weapon. This is it. The tiger is f***ing here. In his haste he misses both shots but the gunblast sound alone is enough to give the tiger momentary pause. It dashes off the collision course, drops the body of the girl and lets out a colossal roar. The tiger roars and just takes off with the body in her teeth. And jim just follows right after it even though he's only got one bullet left. But a person isn't gonna keep pace with a tiger under pretty much any circumstance and after a few hours the trail goes cold. And night begins to fall. If you're taking your chances with a single bullet with a murder tiger from hell you're brave, if you're doing it at night you're stupid.He goes back to grab the villager off his tree that he's STILL SITTING on. While the stooge comes down off the tree he looks out at the valley. Jim knows that almost being the tigers next meal and hopelessly trying to keep up with it through the undergrowth is not a winning strategy and would end either with him being ripped apart by the tiger or losing it in the night as it goes off to its next victim which could be dozens of miles away. It has to be here. And it has to be tomorrow. In the movie of this I direct once that fat podcast money comes, this where I put the heist scene where they show everyone laying down the blueprints and also cut to each part of it as it's being planned. I can't remember if that's an oceans 11 thing or usual suspects or what, I guess it's not important.  I'll fix the movie trivia when we do our bank robberies episode. But this is where corbett gets his crew together. All he has to do is convince a bunch of people that are already so f***ing scared they won't even leave their house to take a s*** when the tiger is around, to join him in a hunt, the likes of which they have never done before. Not to mention the fact that they are in an area that has had its fair share of horrors come directly from britain to help out jim corbett the whitey. Easy right?He asks his guide in the town to help rally the troops so to speak, and heads to bed. The next morning he sets up hoping to get a few hundred people to help bring down the beast. This is beowulfs assault on grendels lair, this is going after smaug, this is ahabs white whale, this is f***ing legendary. Annd nobody show up then at ten am his buddy from the village shows up with the oaf from the other day. It's a nice gesture but it's not enough to slay the beast by any stretch. Twenty minutes pass and two or three more show up, then a few more,  five here three more there. And by noon almost 300 people show up. Many of them with illegal guns, the elders in the village hinted that nobody would care about the guns JUST THIS ONCE.So they've put together this literal ragtag army of farmers and craftsman wielding old guns, sticks, makeshift spears, wood axes, basically anything they can pick up. Corbett meets one lunatic with a hammer that had two sons and his wife eaten by this thing. This was a les mis style moment where the people rise to fight against natures tyranny. I want to take a quick second to reiterate that this is a 100% true story. It's unbelievable. The tiger is somewher down in a nearby gorge feeding on that poor four hundred and thirty sixth victim. There's only one way out of the gorge short of climbing the ridges on 3 sides. The team lines up equidistantly all along the top of the ridge. And corbett and his buddy from town hide alone at the mouth of the gorge with his gun ready. All was set up for corbett to give his signal for everyone around the ridge to just start making a f***load of noise from all 3 sides, throw rocks and cause disturbances to flush her out into where corbett was waiting. There was one problem. You guys remember that scen in lord of the rings where the one eyed dude accidentally shoots an orc too early and f***s up the whole seige? That happens, the people on the ridge get antsy and someone blasts off a gun prematurely and everyone else follows suit. The problem is corbett and his buddy aren't in place. He has to run 500 feet to get to his planned position and the tiger comes careening out of the forest like a f***ing bat outta hell. There's no time and theres just a split second of realization likely from the tiger and corbett both that only one of them is getting out of this alive. But he hesitates! His buddy doesn't and takes a shot with his piece of s*** shotgun and misses wide. The panic messes up corbetts shot as well.  It's just enough to throw the tiger off though and she runs BACK into the gorge. They messed up their one chance. … The people up on the ridge however, well out of sight of any of this behind the trees here the gunshot and they all assume corbett shot the tiger. THey shoot off their guns into the air and start cheering. THis second wave of sound is enough to give the operation a second chance. The tigress runs back out from the gorge where corbett is waiting. Corbett sees the tiger fly out of the gorge and raises his rifle and fires off a shot that actually hits her back flank. She twist in a rage and agony and turns to face him and charge. He fires again and hits her in the shoulder. I assume after that he s*** his pants. Jim corbett carries a double barrel rifle. He's got no bullets left. He's got a VERY F****** ANGRY maneating tiger and she isn't down for the count yet. He has one shot insane chance at survival. He has to run to his buddy from the village and get HIS gun. He makes the breathless dash and in doing so the tiger finally sees what all the searing pain she's experiencing is from. Zeroed in on corbett she charges. His partner from the village must have his eyes go wide from shock as it dawns on him what jim is doing. Corbett is gesturing for him to THROW his gun to him while he runs by! He tosses the old shotgun into the air, disarming himself and that gun must have hung in the air for what seemed an eternity in that split second. Corbett catches the shotgun and whirls around with the tiger twenty feet from him ready to leap, moving at forty miles per hour. He raises the shotgun and The champawat tiger is dead at his feet. Upon investigation of the body they could see the cause. The cause of all the mayhem and carnage, of all the literally ripped apart families, all the fear, all of it. The tigress's teeth were wrecked long ago one fang taken clean off and another broken in half. She was unable to hunt her usual prey.  It was some unknowing hunter that had done this to her and set her on this path. Nature isn't evil.In the village people celebrated, they were free from the grip of fear. There's a substantial epilogue to this story though. The champawat tiger may have been the first super maneater in 1900s india but she would be far from the last. THe conditions of habitat destruction, colonial encroachment, industrialization, poaching and all that werent going anywhere anytime soon and many more tigers and leopards claimed many more lives, some estimates put the toll close to a million people over the last five hundred years or so.Jim corbett went on to hunt a few more of these notable maneaters including  a leopard that had at least one hundred and twenty nine confirmed kills. He went on to publish his memoirs and several other books about his time in the indian jungle and those all sold fantastically well. In his later years he dedicated himself to tiger conservation founding a national park to preserve them that now bears his name. In 1907 there was an estimated 100 thousand tigers in the wild and now there's somewhere in the neighborhood of four thousand in the wild. Fur trade in china ( We'll get into china don't worry) and other countries, poaching and tigers losing ninety percent of their habitat presents a bleak picture but not an impossible one. Many governments have put together a pact to try to double tiger populations by 2022. If you want to help out tiger conservation, first, don't kill them. Secondly I'll put in some links to the world wildlife fund in the show notes     

Welcome to the show! Here's a little taste of what's to come. First one's free! (So is every other one.)