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Haunted At The High Table: The Ghost Who Wanted The Dose · Bite Me The Show About Edibles

1:25
Margaret: At fourteen minutes past nine on Halloween night, an oven in an old farmhouse in Vermont turned itself on.
1:32
Margaret: Nobody touched the dial.
1:34
Margaret: Nobody was standing anywhere near it.
1:36
Margaret: It clicked, it hummed, and the little display started to climb degree by degree until it stopped at exactly 240 degrees Fahrenheit.
1:46
Margaret: If you've been listening to this show for any length of time, you know that number.
1:51
Margaret: That's decarb temperature.
1:53
Margaret: Turns out ghosts do their homework.
2:14
Margaret: Last year, if you remember, I told you about the night a mysterious guest named Shadow Weaver crashed the Bite Me Cannabis Club Halloween party with a recipe for ghostly gummies.
2:25
Margaret: A lot of you wrote in about that one.
2:28
Margaret: Some of you wanted the recipe.
2:30
Margaret: Some of you wanted to know who Shadow Weaver was, and a couple of you asked very politely whether I was okay.
2:37
Margaret: I'm fine, mostly.
2:39
Margaret: This year I've got another one for you.
2:42
Margaret: It happened at our second annual Halloween high table, and it's a story about an old recipe box and a very stubborn ghost and what happens when a whole community shows up for one person.
2:53
Margaret: So grab something cozy, dim the lights, put on some eerie music, and pull up a chair.
3:01
Margaret: There's room at the table for you.
3:03
Margaret: I'll admit I was a little nervous about hosting another Halloween party, but the club voted and the club wanted ghosts.
3:11
Margaret: So on Halloween night I lit every candle I own, plugged in the orange string lights over my stove, and opened the call.
3:18
Margaret: They came in one by one, the way they always do, little squares filling up on my screen like trick-or-treaters at the door.
3:25
Margaret: Susie was back, of course, in the same witch's hat as last year, and already rolling out another batch of her ginger dead men.
3:33
Margaret: Samantha was back too, her little kettle steaming in the background.
3:38
Margaret: She told us she'd been very careful to put it on before the call this year, so that anything dancing in the steam would at least have the decency to arrive on time.
3:48
Margaret: And John.
3:50
Margaret: Oh John, John had moved all of his flour to a sealed glass jar with a clamp lid just in case, he said, and he didn't elaborate.
4:00
Margaret: We had members joining from Ontario and Oregon and Nova Scotia, and then Deb popped in from Queensland, where it was already eleven o'clock the next morning.
4:10
Margaret: She pointed out that this made her the only one of us knew exactly how the night ended, and everybody laughed.
4:16
Margaret: As it turned out, Deb would be the one who cracked the whole thing open.
4:21
Margaret: Every couple of minutes I caught myself glancing at the waiting room.
4:25
Margaret: So did everyone else.
4:27
Margaret: Somebody finally typed it into the chat.
4:30
Margaret: Is Shadow Weaver coming?
4:32
Margaret: Nobody knew.
4:33
Margaret: Nobody arrived.
4:34
Margaret: The waiting room stayed empty.
4:36
Margaret: What we did get was Priya.
4:39
Margaret: Priya had joined the club about three weeks earlier, and this was her very first event.
4:43
Margaret: Camera on, a little nervous, holding a mug of tea with both hands like it was a life raft.
4:48
Margaret: She told us she'd made exactly one edible in her entire life, a batch of cannabter back in September, and she was, quote, about 80% sure it worked.
4:59
Margaret: If you're a beginner listening to this, I want you to know that's exactly how most of us started.
5:04
Margaret: 80% sure, oftentimes less.
5:08
Margaret: Priya had just moved into an old farmhouse in a little town in Vermont, built in the 1800s, creaky floors, a kitchen with a pantry you could practically live in.
5:18
Margaret: She said she'd come to the party hoping someone would walk her through her first real bake.
5:23
Margaret: Well, the high table doesn't need to be asked twice.
5:26
Margaret: Within about 90 seconds, half the call had volunteers.
5:29
Margaret: Now, before we went any further, I laid down my one Halloween rule.
5:34
Margaret: It's the same rule I have every year.
5:36
Margaret: Nobody eats anything until the baking is mostly done and everyone's dose is written down.
5:43
Margaret: And I want to be very clear about this part.
5:45
Margaret: Nobody had eaten a single thing yet.
5:47
Margaret: Everything I'm about to tell you happened stone cold sober.
5:51
Margaret: Edibles don't kick in after 11 minutes, and they definitely don't summon ghosts on a schedule.
5:57
Margaret: Apparently, ghosts don't need them to.
6:02
Margaret: We started tossing out ideas for what Priya should bake.
6:05
Margaret: Brownies, someone said.
6:07
Margaret: Too easy, said Susie.
6:09
Margaret: Gummies, someone else said, and the whole call went quiet for a second, because we all remembered last year.
6:15
Margaret: And then that's when Priya said, Actually, I found something.
6:20
Margaret: Can I show you?
6:21
Margaret: She disappeared off camera and came back holding a little tin box, dented, rusty around the hinges, with faded red apples painted on the lid.
6:29
Margaret: She told us she'd been cleaning out the pantry the week before and noticed one of the boards in the back wall was loose.
6:35
Margaret: She pulled it away and there it was, tucked into the wall like somebody had hidden it on purpose.
6:41
Margaret: Inside there was only one card.
6:43
Margaret: Priya held it up to the camera and read it out loud.
6:46
Margaret: Across the top, in that beautiful old looping handwriting nobody has anymore, it said Hattie's Harvest Cake for the Grange Social.
6:56
Margaret: The ingredients were written in pencil, soft and faded.
7:00
Margaret: Flour, molasses, brown sugar, two apples, grated cinnamon, nutmeg, and a pinch of clove.
7:07
Margaret: And then this line, half cup butter, worked with the druggist's tincture.
7:13
Margaret: At the bottom of the card, there was a word followed by a colon.
7:16
Margaret: Strength.
7:18
Margaret: And then nothing.
7:19
Margaret: The line was blank.
7:21
Margaret: Underneath that, in a completely different hand pressed so hard into the card that you could see the dent from across the screen, somebody had written, do not serve to the Reverend.
7:31
Margaret: Now a quick little history detour because that line about the druggist's tincture is real history.
7:37
Margaret: For a good stretch of the late 1800s and early 1900s, cannabis tinctures sat on pharmacy shelves in a lot of the United States.
7:44
Margaret: You could walk into the drugstore and buy a bottle, and one of the biggest complaints about those tinctures at the time was that you never knew how strong any given bottle was going to be.
7:53
Margaret: One batch was mild, the next one knocked you flat.
7:57
Margaret: So whoever Hattie was, she was baking blind every single time.
8:03
Margaret: We all agreed on the spot.
8:04
Margaret: Priya would bake Hattie's harvest cake, swapping the old tincture for her own can of butter, and the rest of us would bake along.
8:11
Margaret: A 90-year-old recipe brought back to life by the high table.
8:15
Margaret: It felt like the perfect Halloween project.
8:18
Margaret: Priya started measuring out her flour into a big ceramic bowl.
8:22
Margaret: And that's when her camera flickered.
8:25
Margaret: Just for a second.
8:26
Margaret: The picture went gray and fuzzy, then snapped back.
8:29
Margaret: Priya laughed nervously and said her Wi-Fi was terrible out there.
8:33
Margaret: Then she pulled her cardigan tighter around her shoulders and said, Is it just me?
8:37
Margaret: Or did it get really cold in here?
8:39
Margaret: Behind her on the counter, the lid of the tin box snapped shut all by itself.
8:45
Margaret: And then the oven hooked on You could all see it through Priya's camera.
8:52
Margaret: The little green numbers on the oven display climbing 150, 180, 200.
8:57
Margaret: Samantha leaned right into the screen.
8:59
Margaret: Priya, did you set that?
9:02
Margaret: Priya hadn't moved.
9:03
Margaret: She was standing a good six feet away from the stove with her hands in the air like somebody had pulled a gun on her.
9:08
Margaret: I haven't touched it.
9:09
Margaret: She said, I swear I haven't touched it.
9:12
Margaret: The number stopped.
9:13
Margaret: 240.
9:15
Margaret: And Priya went very pale, and she said very quietly, that's the temperature I used.
9:21
Margaret: When I decarbed my flour for my butter the first week I moved in.
9:26
Margaret: The chat went completely silent.
9:29
Margaret: Which, if you've ever been to a Bite Me Cannabis Club event, rarely happens.
9:34
Margaret: John was the first one to speak.
9:36
Margaret: He sat up straight, cleared his throat, and said, Okay, nobody panic.
9:40
Margaret: We've done this before.
9:42
Margaret: And Susie said, We have not done this before, John.
9:45
Margaret: Last year the ghosts were cute.
9:48
Margaret: I'm not gonna lie to you, friends.
9:49
Margaret: I had goosebumps, real ones.
9:52
Margaret: Then Priya's ceramic bowls started to move.
9:57
Margaret: It slid slowly all the way to the edge of the counter and tipped.
10:01
Margaret: Not off the counter, just over on its side, so the flowers spilled out across the butcher block in a soft white fan.
10:09
Margaret: And as we watched, something moved through the flower, like a finger tracing, slow and deliberate.
10:17
Margaret: Two words.
10:18
Margaret: How strong.
10:20
Margaret: Nobody said anything for a really long time.
10:23
Margaret: Then the recipe card, which had been sitting on top of the tin, lifted off the counter in a little draft that shouldn't have been there and floated to the floor, face up, with that blank line staring right at us.
10:36
Margaret: Strength, colon, nothing.
10:39
Margaret: And that's when it clicked for me.
10:41
Margaret: She wasn't trying to scare anybody.
10:43
Margaret: She was asking a question.
10:45
Margaret: The same question every single one of us should be asking every time we make an edible.
10:49
Margaret: How strong is this?
10:53
Margaret: Debu was sitting in broad daylight in Queensland and was frankly the least spooked of all of us, had already started digging.
10:59
Margaret: Within about 10 minutes, she'd found the website for the Towns Historical Society, and in their archive, there was a little write-up about the Grange Harvest Social of 1931.
11:11
Margaret: She read it to us.
11:13
Margaret: There were two cakes on the dessert table that year, sitting side by side.
11:17
Margaret: One was plain, one was Hattie's.
11:20
Margaret: And somewhere between the kitchen and the table, the cakes got switched.
11:24
Margaret: Half the town got very, very high.
11:26
Margaret: The Reverend, according to the write-up, delivered an unscheduled 40-minute sermon on the spiritual significance of squash.
11:34
Margaret: Then he lay down under the pie table and took a nap.
11:37
Margaret: Nobody was hurt.
11:38
Margaret: Mostly people just remembered it as the night the grange got a little weird.
11:42
Margaret: But Hattie never lived it down.
11:44
Margaret: She was so embarrassed that she put the recipe away and never baked that cake again.
11:49
Margaret: And that blank line, strength, colon, just stayed blank for 95 years.
11:56
Margaret: Hattie didn't do anything wicked.
11:58
Margaret: She did exactly what everybody did back then.
12:00
Margaret: She guessed.
12:02
Margaret: She had no way of knowing how strong that tincture was, so she guessed.
12:06
Margaret: The trouble with guessing is that sometimes you guess wrong in front of the entire range, including the reverend waxing poetic on butternut squash.
12:15
Margaret: I think a lot of us have a little bit of hattie in our story.
12:18
Margaret: The batch that was way too strong, the batch that did nothing, the time we gave something to a friend and crossed her fingers.
12:24
Margaret: Right about then, the cold got worse.
12:27
Margaret: Priya could see her breath, literally see it, little puffs of fog in the light from her laptop.
12:33
Margaret: And she said in this small voice, I don't think I can do this.
12:36
Margaret: I think I'm just gonna turn everything off.
12:38
Margaret: And that's when the high table did what the high table does.
12:42
Margaret: Susie said, Honey, you're not doing this alone.
12:45
Margaret: We're all right here.
12:46
Margaret: Samantha held her own jar of can of butter up to the camera and said, I'm baking it with you.
12:51
Margaret: Deb said, I've got all morning.
12:53
Margaret: And John unclamed his precious jar of flour very dramatically and said, For Hattie.
13:00
Margaret: And I said, Priya, I don't think she wants to hurt you.
13:03
Margaret: I think she's been waiting for somebody to finish her recipe.
13:06
Margaret: I think she wants someone to fill in that line.
13:11
Margaret: So we got to work, all of us, from three different countries in about five different time zones.
13:17
Margaret: The first question was the one Hattie never got to answer.
13:21
Margaret: How strong was Priya's butter?
13:23
Margaret: This is where I got to be very proud of our newest member because Priya, bless her, had done her homework back in September.
13:30
Margaret: When she made that first batch of canab butter, she'd run her numbers through the bite me dosage calculator and written the estimate down on a sticky note.
13:38
Margaret: She went and got it off the fridge.
13:40
Margaret: About 10 milligrams of THC per tablespoon.
13:44
Margaret: John took over the math out loud, slowly, the way you'd walk a nervous friend across a frozen pond.
13:50
Margaret: Hattie's recipe called for a half cup of butter.
13:53
Margaret: Half a cup is eight tablespoons.
13:55
Margaret: Eight tablespoons at about ten milligrams each is a give or take, eighty milligrams in the whole cake.
14:03
Margaret: So how many pieces?
14:04
Margaret: Priya asked.
14:05
Margaret: And Susie, who has been making edibles longer than some of our members have been alive, said 16.
14:11
Margaret: Not 12, not nine, sixteen, eighty milligrams cut into sixteen squares, works out to about five milligrams a square.
14:19
Margaret: A nice, friendly starting dose for a beginner and for a lot of us who aren't beginners, too.
14:25
Margaret: I'll say it here the same way I said it to Priya that night.
14:29
Margaret: The numbers are an estimate.
14:30
Margaret: Home infusions always are, unless you send a sample up for testing.
14:34
Margaret: But an honest estimate written down is a world away from Hattie's blank line.
14:39
Margaret: One of those is a starting point, the other is how the reverend ends up under the pie table.
14:45
Margaret: Samantha took the next job, mixing.
14:48
Margaret: She made Priya melt the butter and stir it into the molasses for a full two minutes before anything else went in.
14:53
Margaret: Stir it like you mean it, she said.
14:55
Margaret: Hot spots are how one square ends up with twice the dose of the next square to it.
14:59
Margaret: Deb's job was the labels.
15:01
Margaret: She'd already pulled out a roll of masking tape and a marker on her end, on the other side of the planet, just to show solidarity.
15:07
Margaret: Write it on the container, she said.
15:09
Margaret: Write it on the card, write it everywhere.
15:11
Margaret: If it's not labeled, it doesn't leave the kitchen.
15:14
Margaret: And my job was mostly to keep everybody calm and on track, which if you know this group is a full-time position.
15:20
Margaret: Here's what I noticed as we worked, though.
15:22
Margaret: Every single time we got a step right, the cold eased off a little.
15:27
Margaret: When John finished the math, Priya stopped being able to see her breath.
15:32
Margaret: When Samantha had the batter smooth and even, the flickering in Priya's camera stopped.
15:37
Margaret: When the grated apple went in and the cinnamon and nutmeg and clove went in after it, that sweet, dark, spiced molasses must have filled her kitchen because she closed her eyes and said, Oh, that smells like a grandma's house.
15:52
Margaret: And I swear to you, friends, I smelled it too, in my kitchen, hundreds of miles away.
15:58
Margaret: Molasses and apples and clove.
16:01
Margaret: Then, just as Priya scraped the last of the batter into her pan, the oven clicked again.
16:09
Margaret: The display dropped from 240 and climbed back up, slow and steady to 350, exactly the temperature the cake needed.
16:18
Margaret: Nobody said a word.
16:20
Margaret: Priya just looked at the oven for a second, then said thank you to nobody in particular, opened the door and slid the pan in.
16:29
Margaret: The cake took about 40 minutes.
16:31
Margaret: We filled the time the way the high table always does.
16:34
Margaret: Stories, bad batch confessions.
16:36
Margaret: Susie admitted to a batch of peanut butter cookies in 2019 that she still refers to only as the incident.
16:42
Margaret: When the timer went, Priya pulled the cake out, dark and glossy and cracked across the top, just the way a good molasses cake should be.
16:51
Margaret: She let it cool.
16:52
Margaret: She cut it very carefully into sixteen squares.
16:55
Margaret: The pan looked a little sad.
16:58
Margaret: Susie said.
16:59
Margaret: Perfect.
17:00
Margaret: Then Priya picked Hattie's card up off the floor.
17:03
Margaret: She set it on the counter right in front of the camera, and she picked up a pencil.
17:08
Margaret: And on that blank line, after 95 years, she wrote about five milligrams per square.
17:15
Margaret: Start with one, wait two hours.
17:18
Margaret: She read it out loud to all of us.
17:20
Margaret: Her voice shook a little bit on the last part.
17:24
Margaret: At first nothing happened.
17:26
Margaret: Then the flower, the flower that had been lying spilled across the counter this whole time, began to move again slowly.
17:32
Margaret: Those two words, how strong, smoothed themselves out, and in their place, traced by that same slow, invisible finger, two new words appeared.
17:43
Margaret: Thank you.
17:45
Margaret: And behind Priya, just over her left shoulder, we saw her.
17:49
Margaret: She was faint.
17:50
Margaret: More like a photograph left out in the sun than a person.
17:54
Margaret: A woman in a long apron, grey hair pinned up in a bun, flower on her hands right up to the wrists.
18:00
Margaret: She leaned over the counter, looked down at the card for a long moment, then she looked at Priya and she smiled.
18:07
Margaret: Not a spooky smile, the kind of smile your favorite aunt gives you.
18:11
Margaret: She looked straight into the camera.
18:13
Margaret: At all of us.
18:14
Margaret: All those little squares from all over the world.
18:17
Margaret: She reached out with one flowery finger and tapped the line at the bottom of the card.
18:22
Margaret: Do not serve to the Reverend.
18:25
Margaret: And she laughed.
18:27
Margaret: We couldn't hear it, but we could see it.
18:29
Margaret: And then she was gone.
18:33
Margaret: The oven turned itself off.
18:35
Margaret: The kitchen warmed right back up.
18:38
Margaret: Priya said she could suddenly hear the crickets outside again, and she hadn't even noticed they'd stopped.
18:45
Margaret: We each had one square.
18:48
Margaret: Some of us more than one.
18:51
Margaret: And then we waited the full 90 minutes, and then some like responsible grown-ups.
18:55
Margaret: Deb ate hers with her lunch.
18:57
Margaret: And I'll tell you, it was a lovely, gentle, cozy high.
19:01
Margaret: The kind that makes you want to stay on a call with your friends for another three hours, which is exactly what we did.
19:07
Margaret: It was close to two in the morning when people finally started saying goodnight.
19:11
Margaret: Priya was the last one to leave.
19:13
Margaret: She said, Thank you for not letting me quit.
19:16
Margaret: And then she was gone too.
19:17
Margaret: And just as I was about to close the call, a message popped up in the chat.
19:22
Margaret: Nobody knew had joined.
19:24
Margaret: Nobody was in the waiting room, but there it was, in the same elegant, old-fashioned font.
19:30
Margaret: She waited ninety-five years for someone to answer her.
19:34
Margaret: Well done, Bite Me family.
19:37
Margaret: Shadow Weaver.
19:39
Margaret: And then the call ended itself.
19:41
Margaret: I sat there for a moment.
19:43
Margaret: Then I got up to put my squares in the freezer because yes, I baked along too.
19:47
Margaret: I opened the freezer door, and there, way in the back, behind the frozen peas, was a container.
19:53
Margaret: I didn't recognize.
19:54
Margaret: Something infused.
19:58
Margaret: I could smell it.
19:59
Margaret: No label, no date, no dose, nothing.
20:02
Margaret: I do not remember making it.
20:05
Margaret: But on the lid, written in faded pencil, and that beautiful old looping handwriting nobody has anymore, were three words.
20:13
Margaret: How strong, dear.
20:15
Margaret: I laughed out loud.
20:17
Margaret: And then I went and got a marker.
20:21
Margaret: So, is it a true story?
20:23
Margaret: It's as true as any story told on Halloween night.
20:26
Margaret: But here's what I know is true.
20:28
Margaret: The scariest thing in any kitchen isn't a ghost.
20:31
Margaret: It's an unlabeled container in the back of the freezer.
20:34
Margaret: Hattie wasn't careless.
20:35
Margaret: She just didn't have what we have now.
20:38
Margaret: She didn't have a way to estimate her dose.
20:40
Margaret: She didn't have a community to check her math, and she didn't have anybody to tell her to cut the cake into 16 pieces.
20:46
Margaret: She had a bottle of mystery tincture and her best guess.
20:50
Margaret: And when the guess went wrong, she carried it alone for the rest of her life.
20:54
Margaret: Priya didn't have to do that.
20:56
Margaret: When it got cold and scary and she wanted to shut the laptop and walk away, a whole table of people from three countries said, No, we've got you.
21:04
Margaret: One person did the math, one person handled the mixing, one person made the labels, and the beginner, the one who was only 80% sure, got to be the person who finally answered the question.
21:17
Margaret: But that's what this community is for.
21:20
Margaret: Nobody here has to bake blind.
21:23
Margaret: And I'll be honest with you, a label is in a force field.
21:26
Margaret: My own dad once helped himself to a square of my infused cake from the freezer, one that was labeled.
21:32
Margaret: He got very, very high for the first time in his life.
21:35
Margaret: And we laugh about it now, but at least I knew exactly what he'd eaten and exactly how strong it was.
21:41
Margaret: And that made all the difference and how that night went.
21:44
Margaret: So this Halloween, do Hattie Proud.
21:47
Margaret: Write it down.
21:48
Margaret: The dose, the date, what's in it.
21:50
Margaret: A little masking tape and a marker is the cheapest insurance you'll ever buy.
21:55
Margaret: And if you want a place to keep track of it, every batch and every dose, that's exactly why the Bite Me Dose Diary exists.
22:03
Margaret: I'm pretty sure Hattie would have loved it.
22:05
Margaret: And if you've been listening to this show for a while and you're still making edibles on your own, come join us at the Bite Me Cannabis Club.
22:13
Margaret: Thank you so much for spending part of your Halloween with me.
22:17
Margaret: If you see a little extra flour on your counter this week, maybe don't wipe it up right away.
22:22
Margaret: Read it first.
22:24
Margaret: Happy Halloween, my friends.
22:26
Margaret: I'm your host, Margaret.
22:28
Margaret: And until next time, stay curious and stay high.