Black Hoodie Alchemy

This week on Black Hoodie Alchemy, we're doing another deep-dive character study as I tell Seedperson1 and Chris all about one of the wildest serial killers I've ever heard of: Carl Panzram. Imagine if Henry David Thoreau kept some of artistic spark, love of philosophy, and awe of nature -- yet also assaulted thousands of people and murdered over 20, some of them even being children.

Immersed in hobo train-hopping culture in the early 20th century, Panzram was known to commit acts like church burnings, murder-and-pillage sprees on stolen yachts, successful prison-breaks, and a ton of robberies that even included former president William Taft. And not only did he do this in America, but he traveled to Africa and South America as well.

Truly tortured at a boy's reform school as a child, following severe abuse during his train-hopping, and then even more severe torture as he served prison time on and off, Panzram eventually came to see himself as a living embodiment of rage and vengeance, and the only thing he truly enjoyed was torturing the human race as much as it seemed to relish in torturing him.

And still, amidst all that, he maintained a deep love of nature, literature, and philosophy, enjoying the works of authors like Oscar Wilde, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Who is this bizarrely human monster and can anyone really understand his motivations? His infamy has fascinated true crime researchers for decades now, and now you can hear the story along with some good ol Black Hoodie Alchemy philosophizing.

Oh, and as some more get-out-of-jail-free cards to all the darkness and morbidity this week, I occasionally break up the conversation and share lesser known facts about Always Sunny with the boys!

We hope you dig it!

DIVE MANUAL AUDIOBOOK⁠

⁠BHA LINKTREE w books, shorts, and much more⁠

⁠Chris on Insta⁠

Seedperson on Insta

⁠Paranormality Magazine w my Sasquatch chaos magick article!

SHOW NOTES:

the pic of Panzram mentioned in the show

⁠Panzram's Journals⁠

⁠Always Sunny Screenrant⁠

⁠Always Sunny Ranker⁠

⁠Panzram All That's Interesting⁠

⁠Taft and Panzram⁠

⁠Panzram Murderpedia⁠

⁠LPOTP Panzram Series

⁠

This week's featured music! Don't forget to support that black hoodie rap and all your favorite independent artists!

Walk Wit the Word - KDB (feat. Unknown Mizery & Don Jon)

Devil's on Holiday - Legitimate x Rex Seshunz

Underworld Politics - School of Thought

Turn it Up - Legitimate x Rex Seshunz

This week on Black Hoodie Alchemy, we are going for the jugular and making this a chat with a heavy LISTENER DISCRETION ADVISED warning, trigger warning, and all that fun stuff. The full descriptions of gore will be left out of our discussion here, but the fact of the matter is that these stories in and of themselves are so gory, terrifying, and true that even talking about them at any length requires a legitimate WARNING.

And with that out of the way, my cohort Chris Fiato joins me with a strong existential, alchemical perspective as we dive into two of the most brutal true stories I've ever heard of in my life.

First it's Hishachi Ouchi -- the world's most irradiated man -- who basically stared into an active nuclear reaction like Bruce Banner, except instead of turning into the Hulk, he melted off his own bones like a marshmallow on a stick for 80+ days WHILE STILL ALIVE. Yes, you read that right, and it's as horrific as it sounds.

Second, it the story of Stalin's gulag on a tiny, unnamed Siberian island where men, women, and children were sent without food or supplies as punishment for their crimes, and told to set up a colony. However, because of the conditions and even the brutal torture from what little guards there were to have control, the island became known in the history book's as Cannibal Island, and it was probably even be worse than what you are imagining.

As we talk about all this, I give Chris some get-out-of-jail free cards by occasionally giving him factoids about the show, The Office, and we try and wrap our heads around these stories from the perspectives of existential alchemy, and even the biblical story of Job.

RELATED CONTENT:

DIVE MANUAL AUDIOBOOK

BHA LINKTREE w books, shorts, and much more

Paranormality Magazine w my Sasquatch chaos magick article!

Joe Rupe and I streaming WWZ Horde Mode

SHOW NOTES:

Hishachi Ouchi All That's Interesting

Wendigoon talks Ouchi

Cannibal Island article

Great mini doc on Cannibal Island

Another Cannibal Island article

The Office factoids

This week's featured music! Don't forget to support that black hoodie rap, your indie punk and metal scenes, and all your favorite independent artists! Hold it down for the underground:

Shake, Rattle (snake) & Roll - A Girl A Gun A Ghost

No Light - Spoken Like a True Hero

AndItEndsWithoutYou - InnerWounds

TheScissorInsideMe - InnerWounds

This week on Black Hoodie Alchemy, we have a very information-dense topic! Lots of notes, lots of twists and turns, tragedy and comedy, philosophy and practicality, and a combination of essentially every topic that this show tends to cover. It's wilderness adventure-time!

I'm joined once again by my cohorts Seedperson1 and Chris Fiato, and I share with them ten stories of men who experience what I can only describe as "wanderlust syndrome", which is throwing away all of their worldly possessions to hit the open expanse -- whether it be the Alaskan wilderness, the desert, the mountains, the beach, or elsewhere. Sometimes this syndrome turns out for the best, in the case of people like John Muir, and sometimes in the case of Chris McCandless of 'Into the Wild' fame or Timothy Treadwell of Werner Herzog's tragic documentary 'The Grizzly Man', it can end in the most horrifying ways imaginable.

DIVE MANUAL AUDIOBOOK OUT NOW⁠

⁠MY LINKTREE WITH ALL MY ACTION⁠

⁠SEEDPERSON ON INSTA⁠

⁠CHRIS ON INSTA⁠

⁠BHA DISCORD CHAT⁠ (invite link expires in 7 days but it's easy to find on discord, or you can send it to you on social media)

Here's the list of the names we discuss in the episode:

Chris "Alexander Supertramp" McCandless - a transcendentalist adventurer who foolishly died in the Alaskan wilderness, famous from John Krakauer's book 'Into the Wild.'

Everett Ruess - a young American adventurer from the early 20th century that embodied genuine poetic wanderlust, and who mysteriously disappeared in the Utah deserts.

Carl McCunn - a wilderness photographer who was lost in the Alaskan wilderness during a series of very unfortunate events.

John Waterman - a celebrated and very eccentric alpinist and mountaineer who mysteriously disappeared in the Denali Mountain Range.

Gene Rosellini - another eccentric and philosphical man, like a mild-mannered Ted Kaczynksi, who attempted to live like a stone-age man in the wilderness of Alaska for over a decade before committing suicide.

Timothy Treadwell - a very curious man who lived in the Alaskan wilderness amongst bears for many seasons before staying too late into the fall, only to be eaten alive on camera. He eventually became the focus of Werner Herzog's documentary 'The Grizzly Man'.

August Engelhardt - a strange German man who lived and died on the beach eating only coconuts, claiming that they were the fruit of the gods, only to slowly starve to death in the public eye.

Nathan Campbell - a man who went out searching for the alleged 'Dark Pyramid of Alaska' in 2020 and was never seen again.

John Muir - an ecologist, philosopher, adventurer, and the man on this list that embodies the truest definition of the genuine poetic wanderlust, because he is the only man on this list that doesn't have a tragic ending to his story.

We also bring up to lesser degrees: Aron Ralston of the '127 Hours' fame, Ted Kaczynski the Unabomber himself, and Carl Panzram the serial-killing train-riding hobo from the early 20th century.

Lots to mull over this week! We hope you dig it.

SHOW NOTES:

Carl McCunn NY Times

Nathan Campbell Dark Pyramid

Everett Ruess

Chris McCandless

Gene Rosellini

John Waterman

Timothy Treadwell

August Engelhardt

John Muir

Carl Panzram

INTO THE WILD by John Krakauer

WALDEN by Henry David Thoreau

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

This week's featured music comes from an OG forgotten band that deserves way more respect for their innovation of hardcore, rock n roll, and experimentation!

Peregrine - A Girl A Gun A Ghost

(Curse of) the Horse Latitudes Pt. 2 - A Girl A Gun A Ghost

Bear Witness - A Girl A Gun A Ghost

Beware the Tales of Scorpains - A Girl A Gun A Ghost

The Fox is Restless (The Lamb is Found) - A Girl A Gun A Ghost

Welcome back, folks! This week on Black Hoodie Alchemy, we have the final installment of the post-patreon infusion to the main feed. Yes, the patreon was a thing we tried for a couple months, but decided to conserve our energy and momentum for one feed for the time being.

I'm joined once again by my cohorts, Seedperson1 and Chris, as we continue to unpack the concepts revolving around what we are calling 'Existential Alchemy in Practice.' We've discussed surreal and unexplainable memories from childhood, the strange modern-day concept of "lost media" and how this relates to surreal memories, black mirror philosophy and the concept of wild internet rabbit-holes, and much more.

This week, we bring all this into the discussion of family curses and epigenetics - using modern science to try and understand older folk magick and philosophies - and the overall idea of 'horticulture of the psyche.'

Since horticulture as a concept has so much to do with alchemy and Hermeticism, it's very easy to see how the principles of horticulture can be applied to psychological health! Yes, we get into beekeeping, holistic medicines, cannabis growing and genetics, we bring up the famed Alaskan Thunderfuck/ Matanuska Thunderfuck cannabis strain, and much more!

We hope you dig it.

DIVE MANUAL AUDIOBOOK

MY LINKTREE WITH ALL THE ACTION YOU NEED

my feature in Paranormality Magazine about my potential Sasquatch encounter

SEEDPERSON ON INSTA

This week's featured music! Don't forget to support that black hoodie rap and all your favorite independent artists!

WaxWaner - Dakota Slim

DYG - Darkroom

I Gave You Power - King Mizo x Rex Seshunz

Origami Starlight - Umang x BBZ Darney

This week on Black Hoodie Alchemy, we're releasing the third of four episodes from the now-defunct Patreon feed! Patreon will be back eventually, but no dates are set right now and I've decided that, for now, I do not want to split my time and attention up so much when it comes to my show.

So this episode comprises the third installment of Chris, Seedperson and I analyzing "Existential Alchemy in Practice" by sifting through the unexplainable, surreal, and highly symbolic aspects of our lives.

This week we build off our investigation of surreal, dream-like childhood memories - including a consideration of young children and the paranormal, and we also talk about the idea of Lost Media.

Lost Media is art that we remember from our childhoods, media that usually made an indelible impression on us - yet we cannot find a single trace of its existence in today's world. Today, people have whole internet forums dedicated to trying to find the things that scared or inspired them as very young children.

The idea of lost media, especially considering the surreal and unexplainable experiences that we often find in our youth, is quite an open-ended rabbit-hole for analytic psychology that we found extremely interesting.

It's all this and a whole lot more, so we hope you dig it!

DIVE MANUAL AUDIOBOOK OUT NOW

my linktree, with my books, website and much more

Seedperson on Instagram

This week's featured music! Don't forget to support that black hoodie rap and all your favorite independent artists!

WaxWaner - Dakota Slim

Divide - Salt

Gutted - Salt

Towers of Babylon (feat. Chief Kamachi) - Babylon Warchild

Welcome back to Black Hoodie Alchemy, folks! This week is another chat I had with my good friend and fellow alchemist, Seedperson1. It's also a chat that was recorded in February of this year, and was originally put into the now-defunct Black Hoodie Alchemy patreon feed. (Candidly, we'll likely do a patreon again at some point, but it ended up being a greater strain on my schedule than I thought it would be, and there was not a huge amount of listener interest in it for now anyway.)

In this conversation, we build off of our last chat in episode 84 talking about existential alchemy and the inner process, and this time we get into things like maintaining sanity amidst conspiracy theory rabbit-holes, the black mirrors of technology and the potential black magick behind them (archetypally speaking, at the very least), the dark obsessions that so many people have with "influencer fame", and we even bring up the supposed underground pyramid in Alaska again in retrospect.

DIVE MANUAL AUDIOBOOK

BLACK HOOD ALCHEMY DISCORD

my linktree with my website, book links and more!

This week's featured music -- don't forget to support that black hoodie rap and all your favorite independent artists!

Building Pyramids - Unknown Mizery x Odweeyne

Sticky Bomb - Unknown Mizery x Odweeyne

Royal Flush - Unknown Mizery x Odweeyne

God's Image - Unknown Mizery x Arkeologists

Welcome back to Black Hoodie Alchemy, folks! This week is all things Sasquatch -- not only do we analyze some of the folklore and typical content in the sightings, but I also am pleasantly surprised to report to you all that I have my own Sasquatch story to share with you! It happened over the weekend of April 2024's Solar Eclipse, it was auditory with several people around, and it happened multiple times. Oh yeah and there was a Sasquatch hunting board-game involved! But you'll have to listen in to learn more.

From a hairy hominid, to mystical gatekeeper of the forest, or even a poltergeist of the wilderness, my guests and I take a look at this topic from several different angles, and we even contrast them to sightings of "skinwalkers" and "dogman" at the end.

MY BOOK HUNT MANUAL

DIVE MANUAL AUDIOBOOK OUT NOW

my linktree to everything you'd need to follow up on my action

Best link I found to the Sasquatch SIERRA SOUNDS

(The opening is stick-beating, followed by the whooping, and right afterward, listen a little closer to hear what I can only describe as snickering-death-rattles. I heard the hollers and the rattles.)

related episodes:

#52 - The Goblin Universe

#29 - Psychedelic Horror & Paranormal Activity

#21 - Unexplainable Phenomena & Mental Health

#5 - Demonology & Poltergeists

Where the Footprints End - Josh Cutchin x Tim Renner

Angels in Vermillion - PD Newman

Beasts Between the Rivers - Martin Grove

JC Johnson - Cryptid investigator and former exorcist

Martin Grove's Dogman interview, recommended by Chris

This week's featured music is brought to you by the extremely talented and multi-faceted musicians Zig Mentality. And we even have another collaboration between them and Cleopatrick! Very stoked to be bumping these tracks.

BMF #11 - ZIG MENTALITY

When You Force It - ZIG MENTALITY

What Weighs on You - ZIG MENTALITY

BMF #14 - ZIG MENTALITY x CLEOPATRICK

I & I - ZIG MENTALITY

This week on Black Hoodie Alchemy, we have a podcast-swaparoo with my homie Joe Rupe, host of Lighting the Void, and we're both celebrating the fresh release of my audiobook Dive Manual: Empirical Investigations of Mysticism. With the paperback released in 2020, Joe has lended his narration and editing talents to help me bring this book into audio form, and since he took the time to read the entire thing -- including all the outtakes and re-reads -- he now has quite a bit to say about it all.

I admittedly have a hard time explaining this book briefly, but it is data-driven research about my own investigations into mysticism, magick, and the religious experience. I look heavily into scientific concepts like Jungian psychoanalysis, sleep paralysis, dream analysis, phantom limb syndrome, memetics, and chaos theory. In addition, I also investigate the mechanics and history of things like alchemy, astrology, tarot, numerology, reincarnation, the Trees of Life & Death, Hermeticism, Gnostic Christianity, Taoism, Buddhism, Kabbalah, Paganism, and much more. Lastly, it has at times a semi-fictional framework that includes me as the narrator guiding you as the reader through the proverbial diving experience.

There's more I could say, but I will leave it at that for now! It's a winding journey about insanity, neuroticism, catharsis, unexplainable phenomena, and ineffable transcendence.

Don't forget -- if you dig Dive Manual, check out my second work Hunt Manual: 21st Century Demonology & Forteana. Joe has plans to bring this to audiobook form soon as well!

DIVE MANUAL AUDIOBOOK HERE

my linktree to my books, website, comedic character shorts & more

This week's featured music is brought to you by the extremely badass rock n' roll talents of ZIG MENTALITY, including some of their collaborations with their well-known homies CLEOPATRICK. I'm very excited to be able to bump these killer musicians and you really oughta check em out!

Best Direction - ZIG MENTALITY

Hate to Say I Told You So (The Hives Cover) - ZIG MENTALITY x CLEOPATRICK

BMF #13 - ZIG MENTALITY x CLEOPATRICK

Triggered Emotion - ZIG MENTALITY

This week on Black Hoodie Alchemy, we have another special guest: the wonderful, talented and laid-back Ronnie Pontiac. Ronnie is the author of books like 'American Metaphysical Religion: Esoteric and Mystical Traditions of the New World', he's part of the punk rock duo Lucid Nation with his wife Tamra Lucid, and he also just so happened to work as the great Manly P. Hall's research assistant and substitute lecturer for the last seven years of Hall's life.

For the first half of the show, we talk about the legacy of Manly Hall as seen and experienced by Ronnie and his wife, who were completely taken under the wing of Hall and his wife in a relationship that eventually grew to feel like grandparents and grandchildren.

Ronnie shares many candid stories about Manly Hall and gives us further insights into his philosophies and personal conduct, but beyond this we also get into Ronnie's work 'American Metaphysical Religion', and what it means to consider American spirituality from an outside perspective that focuses less on labels and more on actual conduct.

The insights from these perspectives are huge, and include contexts like, for instance, all of the alchemists that were prevalent in Colonial America. Yes, the history of America is a whole lot more esoteric than the 'Pilgrim' stereotypes would lead us believe, and with all this context, Ronnie helps me take a look at modern American spirituality as well.

And if that wasn't enough, we also get a little bit into the philosophies of DIY punk rock and even astrology!

It was a great pleasure sitting down to chat with Ronnie, and we will definitely be getting him back on the show before too long -- we hope you dig it.

my linktree with my books & more

Ronnie on Instagram

Ronnie on 'Medium'

Ronnie's books on Amazon

Tamra's book about Manly Hall

This week's featured music is brought to you by the wild punk talents of LUCID NATION -- music done by the guest and his wife, Ronnie Pontiac and Tamra Lucid!

Penetration - Lucid Nation

Food Chain - Lucid Nation

Privilege - Lucid Nation

Dad - Lucid Nation

Welcome back to Black Hoodie Alchemy, folks! This week is coming in from the Black Hoodie Alchemy patreon feed, which I have decided to roll into the main feed of the regular show. Given the inconsistency of my own schedule, not wanting to split my show feeds apart, and the fact that patreon listenership can be a long game sometimes -- I am consolidating things just a bit!

With my cohort, friend, BHA listener and fellow alchemist, Seedperson1, this week we dive into the deeper aspects of alchemy in everyday life to include unraveling the idea that so many of us wrestle with, yet often do not acknowledge: how about those weird surreal memories from our childhood?

Damn near everyone has got one if they think hard enough -- some sort of memory that seems more like a dream than anything else, that no one else seems to remember, and perhaps even has some paranormal or mystical tones to it. Are they just dreams? Why do they stick out to us so much still throughout the span of our lives? Why do they seem to exist as strange existential riddles in the back of our heads, and what might these riddles be able to tell us about ourselves if we to unravel them?

PS: if you are in the show description looking for the name of the strange eastern-mystical portal that I was describing this week, it is called a SRI YANTRA.

my linktree to my books, video shorts and more

BHA DISCORD

DIVE MANUAL AUDIO BOOK ON AUDIBLE (NARRATED BY JOE RUPE)

This week's featured music from my homie and fellow magician, Keats Ross AKA Dakota Slim. Don't forget to support all your favorite indie artists!

Knell - Dakota Slim

WaxWaner - Dakota Slim

And Lo! - Dakota Slim

Yosotros - Dakota Slim