Nightmare Now

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 sea

cool pic of whales asleep

Whaling industry

spermaceti

Wikis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_(whaleship)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_Chase

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_whaling

https://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 process

Too 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  prank

Killed 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 marchers

Night Marchers again

Guess what

More myths I didn't get to

Some first hand accounts

Monsters in hawaii

Menehune

Menehune Crypto

Concerning hobbits

Loose 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 eventually

I believe looking into this stuff makes it look into you, see MIBs

It’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 [email protected]m 

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:

triskaidekaphobia

Friday the 13th rooted in the bible

Apollo 13 

Why is friday the 13th unlucky

stats

Baldr, Hodr, Vali, Loki

That bitch

NERDS

Loose transcript

With 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 maine

Joshy chamby chames

ghosts of ny

writings of chamberlain

see page 896

quivering moustaches

more sources

I'm not a school child, MLA format can suck a fat one 

anotha one

google the gettysburg address

Hey 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.org

The Madman's Library

KISS Blood

Saddam's book club

Anthropodermic book science

Anthropodermic bibliography

Narrative 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 prison

Fate 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/39

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_of_the_Opera_(1986_musical)

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-water-tank-beneath-palais-garnier-paris-france

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdGhGX6z8BA&ab_channel=HistoryMatters

https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k283653v.image.langFR

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/gaston-leroux/the-phantom-of-the-opera/alexander-teixeira-de-mattos

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Commune

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaston_Leroux

http://blog.feinviolins.com/2012/05/phantoms-inspiration-chaos-in-paris.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palais_Garnier

Hi 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 penguins

Wiki: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draugr

Loose 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 Report

Wikis: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_in_black

Images

Loose Script:

The MIBs in Portsmouth

Hey 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 1997

For 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. 

09

Mrs 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 [email protected]

That 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.html

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/reallife-scoobydoo-villain-gets-four-months-for-haunting-a-castle-5344742.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scooby-Doo

Loose 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!