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How Haunted Houses Became A Thing · Ridiculous History

0:00
Speaker 1: Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
0:27
Speaker 1: back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
0:30
Speaker 1: so much for tuning in. I am Ben, and I'm
0:34
Speaker 1: not just welcoming you back, folks, I'm also welcoming back
0:38
Speaker 1: our super producer Max Williams, who's on Adventures, and my
0:43
Speaker 1: co host Mr Noel Brown, who was also on Adventures.
0:47
Speaker 1: You guys were sorely, sorely missed. Thank you so much
0:50
Speaker 1: for returning. I didn't know if you guys were just
0:52
Speaker 1: gonna like start a new show somewhere, Ben, we wouldn't
0:56
Speaker 1: leave you hanging like that. Dude. Friends don't do that
0:58
Speaker 1: to friends. I was totally gonna do that, but I
1:01
Speaker 1: ran out of money as I came back. Well, you're
1:03
Speaker 1: no friend of ours, Max Williams, Well, I leave and
1:06
Speaker 1: you get my brother to replace me. No, no, he
1:09
Speaker 1: didn't he know it was first off, there was no
1:11
Speaker 1: replacing He didn't fill in as producer. Uh Nolan. I
1:16
Speaker 1: talked through the twelve friends that we have, and we
1:20
Speaker 1: of those twelve, we made a list of the five
1:23
Speaker 1: who might do our show with us, and of the
1:27
Speaker 1: to who replied Alex was available. That's an important qualification
1:31
Speaker 1: for guest hosting ridiculous history as being someone we know
1:34
Speaker 1: and available, right right. So it's basically like Nobel Prize standards.
1:39
Speaker 1: You know, when you think of it that way, it's prestigious,
1:42
Speaker 1: is what we're saying. Both of those are prestigious institutions,
1:46
Speaker 1: more like ig Nobel Prize. Yes, yes, which is the thing.
1:50
Speaker 1: And no. Saved this one for you, man, because we
1:55
Speaker 1: are going to talk about something that a lot of
1:57
Speaker 1: people this time of year consider a prestige just institution
2:01
Speaker 1: all its own. The idea of the haunted house, the
2:05
Speaker 1: idea of the recreational haunted house, not amitivial style, but
2:09
Speaker 1: the one where you like pay It seems like they
2:12
Speaker 1: get more expensive every year here in Atlanta, but like
2:14
Speaker 1: you pay for tickets and you go to what's the
2:16
Speaker 1: one we have another world, another world. I have a
2:19
Speaker 1: confession to make, fellas, I have never been to a
2:22
Speaker 1: haunted house because I'm scared of them. That's okay, man,
2:27
Speaker 1: I'll go. I don't like I don't I don't like
2:28
Speaker 1: jump scarce, I don't like uh, I don't like spooky
2:32
Speaker 1: stuff in the dark. I like horror movies, but I
2:34
Speaker 1: often spoil them for myself in advance of watching them,
2:37
Speaker 1: so they don't They don't quite spook me as much.
2:40
Speaker 1: I'm a bit of a whimp. Fellas a bit of
2:42
Speaker 1: a whimp. Now, you just know what you like and
2:44
Speaker 1: what you don't like. You know, that's true, Thank you.
2:46
Speaker 1: I'm not beating myself up. I definitely accept this by myself.
2:49
Speaker 1: But my daughter is now getting to an age where
2:53
Speaker 1: she's intrigued by the things, and I'm gonna have to
2:56
Speaker 1: bite the bullet, guys, and uh and and go and
2:59
Speaker 1: get get proper spooked, because I'm not gonna wait outside
3:02
Speaker 1: while my twelve year old daughter goes in. It's just
3:05
Speaker 1: I can't emasculate myself to that degree. Uh no, sir.
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Speaker 1: But it turns out the the history of these things
3:11
Speaker 1: as attractions is very interesting and is wrapped up in
3:15
Speaker 1: the history of Halloween as we know it itself. Yeah yeah,
3:20
Speaker 1: like okay, So my objection to haunted houses recently has
3:24
Speaker 1: been entirely due to the cost. But I will take
3:28
Speaker 1: a bath on that, and I'll buy a ticket if
3:31
Speaker 1: if you need or if you want someone to to
3:34
Speaker 1: come with you and jump in front of the jump scares.
3:37
Speaker 1: Uh well, as long as you'll as as long as
3:40
Speaker 1: you'll hold my hand. Of course, of course it's very
3:44
Speaker 1: very kind of you, Ben, Um, But no, it is.
3:46
Speaker 1: I love Halloween. I love the spooky season and we
3:49
Speaker 1: all do. I love the weather, the way you know
3:52
Speaker 1: it feels outside, and the smells, and you know, all
3:55
Speaker 1: of the costumes and everything that's all everything around it.
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Speaker 1: I absolutely love. And so it's sort of shocking to
4:00
Speaker 1: me that I have this phobia. So I'm gonna try
4:02
Speaker 1: to face my fears this year. But yeah, I mean,
4:05
Speaker 1: I don't know, Ben, have you ever if you ever
4:07
Speaker 1: made good on the trick part of Trick or Treat?
4:10
Speaker 1: Let's see, I think the statute of limitations has passed,
4:14
Speaker 1: so yes, to an extreme degree. You guys know, I
4:17
Speaker 1: believe in justice, and I have at times my own
4:21
Speaker 1: interpretation of it. I'm very naturally a Halloween person, Folks.
4:25
Speaker 1: In this an audio show. You can't see it now,
4:27
Speaker 1: but over the course of the pandemic, I have acquired
4:31
Speaker 1: as a roommate a life size skeleton which is in
4:34
Speaker 1: the background of all zoom calls. But but yeah, yeah, trick,
4:39
Speaker 1: trick or Treat. This is interesting because it helps us
4:43
Speaker 1: understand that haunted houses as a recreation are a relatively
4:48
Speaker 1: recent idea. If we traveled back to say twelve hundred
4:54
Speaker 1: a d. And Max Noel and I were trying to
4:58
Speaker 1: sell people in some village on the idea of not
5:02
Speaker 1: just going to a haunted location but paying for the privilege,
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Speaker 1: they would think we were crazy and they may well
5:08
Speaker 1: burn us his witches. Yes, it didn't take much, It
5:11
Speaker 1: did not take much. But this story really starts back
5:16
Speaker 1: in the Great Depression, which still is a terrible name. Yeah,
5:20
Speaker 1: his wasn't so great. Um. Also, Black Tuesday, um is
5:24
Speaker 1: the name of the day that the stock market crashed,
5:27
Speaker 1: and there was also a corresponding Black Halloween during the
5:31
Speaker 1: Great Depression, and that was the day when so much
5:34
Speaker 1: trickery was afoot that like I think, people died. There
5:39
Speaker 1: were hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars of
5:42
Speaker 1: property damage. And this was a real problem in those
5:45
Speaker 1: days because there was a whole night uh Mischief Knights,
5:48
Speaker 1: which I believe is the night before Halloween, that was
5:51
Speaker 1: purely devoted to just like pranking and you know, cutting
5:54
Speaker 1: up and doing all kinds of stuff, lots of one
5:57
Speaker 1: upsmanship that ultimately leads to you know, put people in
6:00
Speaker 1: danger and some serious property damage and destruction. Yes, yeah,
6:04
Speaker 1: you're referring to what's also called Devil's Night. Uh. And
6:08
Speaker 1: Devil's Night has led to some serious chaos stuff way
6:13
Speaker 1: beyond toilet paper or the throwing of eggs. We know
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Speaker 1: that parents were very concerned about their kids, especially their sons,
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Speaker 1: getting too wild on these days or during this time
6:28
Speaker 1: leading up to the thirty one and so they picked
6:32
Speaker 1: up a strategy to try to distract these kids. No, well,
6:37
Speaker 1: maybe we talk a little bit about the origins of
6:41
Speaker 1: the Haunted House overall, Like the origins of it date
6:45
Speaker 1: back to nineteen century London, the eighteen hundreds, and they
6:50
Speaker 1: were a kind of they were a kind they were
6:55
Speaker 1: kind of a genre of a larger movement of Macaw entertainment,
7:01
Speaker 1: like Madame Tussaux and so on. Absolutely, in eighteen o
7:04
Speaker 1: two in London, Marie Tousseau um created quite a stir
7:09
Speaker 1: with the you know, uptight stuffed shirt British population when
7:13
Speaker 1: she displayed these wax sculptures of various decapitated French individuals. Uh.
7:20
Speaker 1: And they were so accurate because she actually created death
7:26
Speaker 1: masks from folks who were decapitated at the guillotine during
7:30
Speaker 1: the French Revolution, and she set up this exhibit in London.
7:34
Speaker 1: It became a permanent exhibit. She dubbed this attraction the
7:38
Speaker 1: Chamber of Horrors, which we know is almost like a
7:41
Speaker 1: trophy kind of name. Now that's like, you know, been
7:43
Speaker 1: used to death pun intended or not, I'm not even
7:46
Speaker 1: sure anymore, but yeah, it's a name that still is
7:49
Speaker 1: tied to a particular wing of of that Wax museum
7:53
Speaker 1: UM today and often times if you go to Madame
7:55
Speaker 1: Tussau Wax museums across the country or around the world,
7:59
Speaker 1: even they'll be know the celebrity part, but then they'll
8:01
Speaker 1: be like a section where it's a little bit more
8:03
Speaker 1: like serial killers and you know, like um, murdered people
8:07
Speaker 1: and things like that. But it wasn't until the turn
8:09
Speaker 1: of the twentieth century UM that a kind of theater
8:16
Speaker 1: of the macabre sort of popped up UM in Paris. Actually, yes,
8:21
Speaker 1: grand goody, this this is amazing because they were at
8:26
Speaker 1: the time notorious for onstage depictions of real body horror,
8:33
Speaker 1: real splatter punk stuff. You might call it today. The
8:37
Speaker 1: theaters director and this is described by Rebecca mckindrey and
8:42
Speaker 1: Fangoria magazine. All horror fans will know Fangoria. The director,
8:47
Speaker 1: guy named Max Maury, once bragged that he judged performances
8:53
Speaker 1: not so much by ticket sales as by how many
8:56
Speaker 1: people passed out from shock in the audience or from schlock.
9:00
Speaker 1: You could say, this is a cool piece I found
9:03
Speaker 1: out about activities like this in interview with a Vampire
9:09
Speaker 1: the film adaptation. You guys, remember how there is this
9:12
Speaker 1: theater that is doing like a play about them parism
9:18
Speaker 1: in the Devil. But it turns out that they are
9:20
Speaker 1: actually grabbing humans and drinking their blood. Right, isn't that
9:25
Speaker 1: Antonio Bandaris's character, Um, isn't that scene? Yeah, he's there. Yeah, Well,
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Speaker 1: I mean, you know, they definitely had like all kinds
9:33
Speaker 1: of revolutionary kind of stage effects that they sort of created,
9:38
Speaker 1: like knives that would squirt you know, fake blood, and
9:42
Speaker 1: like you know, they would use like cow intestines or
9:45
Speaker 1: pig and trails to simulate you know, humans being disembowed.
9:48
Speaker 1: Um that there were also tho some versions of there
9:50
Speaker 1: were a little more um stylized kind of where you know,
9:54
Speaker 1: you would slit somebody's throat and then just like red
9:56
Speaker 1: ribbons would just shoot out and it's a really cool
9:59
Speaker 1: kind of um low tech effect that I actually still
10:02
Speaker 1: see sometimes in depictions of this kind of theater. But
10:05
Speaker 1: it was largely kind of a revolt against like, you know,
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Speaker 1: the status quo and against censorship and stuff. And it
10:12
Speaker 1: really was at the time some of the most kind
10:14
Speaker 1: of edgy, dangerous, you know theater that anyone had ever seen. Yes,
10:19
Speaker 1: and theater should be an active revolution. That's at least
10:22
Speaker 1: that's what that's always been my take. There's a great
10:26
Speaker 1: description of this theater from Devin Ferraci over at Birth Movies, Death,
10:31
Speaker 1: which is a fantastic website. Uh, and they point out
10:34
Speaker 1: something I didn't know, which is the Grand Guigno Theater
10:38
Speaker 1: is technically the home of the first scream Queen Paula Maxa.
10:44
Speaker 1: She died on stage like thirty thousand times. Check out
10:48
Speaker 1: that article. If you have a second it goes in
10:49
Speaker 1: a different direction. But that's like, that's a haunted house
10:53
Speaker 1: vibe for sure, even if it was, uh, clearly a
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Speaker 1: theatrical production. You've fast forward a little bit further. In
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Speaker 1: nineteen there's this fair ground in lip Hook in England
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Speaker 1: that debuted what they called a ghost house. This was
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Speaker 1: one of the first, if not the first. This was
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Speaker 1: one of the first kind of commercial horror attractions. They
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Speaker 1: had all this stuff that Noll you're not particularly into
11:22
Speaker 1: with haunted houses, dim lights, shaking floors, demonic screens. Max, Yeah,
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Speaker 1: just like that. Just my blood, my blood hath curdled
11:35
Speaker 1: and highly recommend a Brief History of the Haunted House
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Speaker 1: by Chris Heller from Smithsonian Magazine, which the sources we
11:42
Speaker 1: used for this episode. Um so yeah, that would have
11:46
Speaker 1: been very much one of the earliest examples of a
11:49
Speaker 1: haunted house attraction, very very low fi, but at the
11:53
Speaker 1: time would have really freed people out. I'm sure if
11:56
Speaker 1: I had been around this time, I would have just
11:58
Speaker 1: as hesitant to go into these as I had to
11:59
Speaker 1: go into our more hi tech haunted houses today, which
12:01
Speaker 1: we are about to get to in the form of
12:04
Speaker 1: the early twentieth century. I do also want to put
12:13
Speaker 1: in my line before before we roll pass this, I
12:15
Speaker 1: want to put in my line for those early haunted
12:18
Speaker 1: houses terror for a tuppence. I'm just gonna write mottos
12:22
Speaker 1: for uh for institutions of yesteryear A tuppence that's like
12:27
Speaker 1: a what is that like a penny? Father? Like hey, hey, hey,
12:31
Speaker 1: penny some sort of some sort of negligible denomination of
12:34
Speaker 1: British currency. Yes, but this state of Halloween, like you
12:38
Speaker 1: were saying this, these things didn't exist in the US.
12:42
Speaker 1: They started in Western Europe first. And the idea of Halloween,
12:48
Speaker 1: like we explored years back in the origins of Halloween
12:51
Speaker 1: and stuff they don't want you to know. YouTube and
12:53
Speaker 1: audio version available now wherever you find your favorite shows Halloween.
12:59
Speaker 1: That the way it came to the US is fascinating
13:03
Speaker 1: because we've got Irish and Scottish immigrants bringing a traditional
13:08
Speaker 1: Celtic end of summer festival to this new land. And
13:12
Speaker 1: and if you want to sound smart in front of
13:14
Speaker 1: your friends, are the very least not sound dumb. It's
13:16
Speaker 1: not pronounced sam Haine, it's pronounced saws going. You see
13:20
Speaker 1: it printed tho it looks like sam Haynes. Wasn't that
13:23
Speaker 1: the name for the traditional Celtic kind of proto Halloween celebration.
13:28
Speaker 1: I think I think Sawin is a Gaelic festival that's
13:32
Speaker 1: also the end of the harvest season though so it's
13:36
Speaker 1: supposed to be I think technically held on the first
13:39
Speaker 1: of November, but the party starts on October thirty one.
13:43
Speaker 1: There's still really there's still very I think closely related
13:48
Speaker 1: in the modern secular imagination of the West. I mean,
13:52
Speaker 1: it was also what Halloween turned into All Saints Day
13:57
Speaker 1: or all Hallow's Eve. And by the time we get
14:01
Speaker 1: to the turn of the century in the US, Halloween
14:05
Speaker 1: has taken the path that so many holidays take in
14:09
Speaker 1: this country. It's become an excuse to party, to break
14:12
Speaker 1: some social taboos, to get a little souced and saucy, uh,
14:17
Speaker 1: to eat too much of something, to make mischief, to
14:21
Speaker 1: pursue your vices. It was way less, you know, rambunctious.
14:27
Speaker 1: Oh these kids kind of pranks, right, We're not talking
14:30
Speaker 1: about just festooning a tree with toilet paper or Jeffer
14:34
Speaker 1: do the one. You know, I didn't mean to be rude.
14:36
Speaker 1: I forgot to ask, you know, were you a trick
14:38
Speaker 1: during your day? Lad? Okay? Well, the statute of limitations.
14:43
Speaker 1: I don't believe I ever played a trick in my life,
14:45
Speaker 1: not a day of my life, which probably means I
14:47
Speaker 1: haven't really lived, to be honest. Scared hunted houses and uh,
14:50
Speaker 1: a rule follower, That's that's me. Real stick in the
14:53
Speaker 1: mud over here. But yeah, they they didn't have trick
14:58
Speaker 1: or treating, because, as we're gonna get to, a trick
14:59
Speaker 1: or tree is a much more modern invention than I
15:03
Speaker 1: think either of us realized. But what they did have
15:06
Speaker 1: was dressing up in these horrifying costumes. Frankly, if you
15:10
Speaker 1: look at the like you know, historical photos of the time,
15:13
Speaker 1: they're these like blank stare kind of like death masks
15:18
Speaker 1: um that just look like they're made of burlap sacks,
15:21
Speaker 1: like something like a like a like a movie slasher
15:24
Speaker 1: would wear. You know. They called this tradition guy sing
15:28
Speaker 1: and they would you know, wear these bizarre masks and
15:31
Speaker 1: like you know, dance and make merry like you're saying.
15:34
Speaker 1: And common Halloween tricks in the US these days where
15:38
Speaker 1: things like taking somebody's wagon and maybe even their livestock
15:44
Speaker 1: and put them on the roof of a barn, or
15:47
Speaker 1: tearing vegetables out of gardens, or tipping over outhouses whether
15:53
Speaker 1: whether or not someone was in them, then also allowing
15:57
Speaker 1: like livestock to escape. And this happened so often that
16:00
Speaker 1: in some regions we find October thirty one was known
16:05
Speaker 1: as gate night because people would remove gates across their communities.
16:10
Speaker 1: This is all these things were happening before the automobile
16:14
Speaker 1: became very prevalent, and when the automobile kicked in and
16:18
Speaker 1: people were able to afford to drive, the range of
16:22
Speaker 1: their trickery likewise extended. We're seeing people removing manhole covers
16:28
Speaker 1: from streets, or busting tires, or even making fake signs
16:33
Speaker 1: to confuse motorists and lead them astray. So there's a
16:36
Speaker 1: great book to we should recommend by Lisa Morton. It's
16:40
Speaker 1: called Trigger Treat, a History of Halloween. It is a
16:43
Speaker 1: fantastic read, and Morton says that at first these pranks
16:50
Speaker 1: were more or less innocent, and they often occurred in
16:55
Speaker 1: more rural communities. But then as cities got bigger, kids
16:59
Speaker 1: took the prank into cities and it became more and
17:02
Speaker 1: more destructive. What kind of stuff are we talking about
17:05
Speaker 1: when we say more and more destructive? Oh, I don't know.
17:08
Speaker 1: Like sawing down telephone poles and utility bowls and things
17:12
Speaker 1: like that, disassembling people's like wagons and vehicles even and
17:17
Speaker 1: like putting them on roofs and putting them back together,
17:19
Speaker 1: which I thought was a pretty awesome one, very very
17:22
Speaker 1: uh so so much effort that goes into these um.
17:25
Speaker 1: One of the scariest ones involved like placing obstructions, like
17:30
Speaker 1: really dangerous obstructions and roadways and covering them up with leaves,
17:34
Speaker 1: which actually led to a significant traffic pile up. Yeah,
17:39
Speaker 1: setting fires, breaking windows, uh, splattering people with bags of
17:46
Speaker 1: flower filled with ashes. Uh. At least there wasn't anthrax. Yeah, yeah,
17:52
Speaker 1: it was before then. Things really hit a tipping point
17:55
Speaker 1: in eighteen seventy nine when about two hundred young men
17:58
Speaker 1: boys really in Kenti, Uckey team up to stop a
18:02
Speaker 1: training by lane an actual dead body and actual corpse
18:07
Speaker 1: across the tracks. And then people start stealing bodies too. Yeah,
18:13
Speaker 1: as med students, so you know how to party. In
18:15
Speaker 1: nineteen hundreds, some medical students from the University of Michigan
18:19
Speaker 1: stole a headless corpse from an anatomy lab and they
18:22
Speaker 1: propped it up against the front door of the building.
18:25
Speaker 1: Gave people a real shock when they showed up to class.
18:28
Speaker 1: And as I was sort of hinting out earlier, things
18:30
Speaker 1: really did start to get super real in around nineteen
18:33
Speaker 1: o two, when when things just went too far. As
18:36
Speaker 1: these kinds of things tend to do, it's all about
18:39
Speaker 1: one uptionship and kind of trying to like outdo everybody
18:41
Speaker 1: else's pranks and and eventually you crossed the line into
18:44
Speaker 1: the danger zone. There was a ton of destruction in
18:49
Speaker 1: Cook County in nineteen o two, um and the Cook
18:52
Speaker 1: County Herald had a very interesting little kind of editorial,
18:56
Speaker 1: I guess, encouraging people to defend themselves from this kind
19:00
Speaker 1: of mischief. Here's the quote is in Arlington Heights, Illinois.
19:04
Speaker 1: By the way, most everybody enjoys a joke, are fun
19:07
Speaker 1: to a proper degree on suitable occasions, but when property
19:10
Speaker 1: is damaged or destroyed, it's time to call a halt.
19:13
Speaker 1: We would advise the public to load their muskets or
19:16
Speaker 1: cannon with rock salt or bird shot. And when trespassers
19:20
Speaker 1: invade their premises at unseemly hours upon mischief bent pepper
19:25
Speaker 1: them good and proper so they will be effectually cured
19:28
Speaker 1: and have no further taste for such tricks. They know
19:32
Speaker 1: how to turn a phrase back down and new paper fold.
19:34
Speaker 1: You have either of you guys, ever been shot with
19:36
Speaker 1: rock salt? No, but I've seen in the movies and
19:38
Speaker 1: it looks very unpleasant. Okay, Yeah, Well, as someone speaking
19:44
Speaker 1: from personal experience, it is not pleasant, it's still dangerous,
19:48
Speaker 1: and people did take this advice as the As the
19:51
Speaker 1: discourse turned towards self defense. In this regard, some folks
19:56
Speaker 1: were taking up arms. In fact, in nineteen o seven,
20:01
Speaker 1: the some kids had stretched a wire across the sidewalk
20:05
Speaker 1: to trip pedestrians in Tucson, Arizona. One guy tripped and
20:09
Speaker 1: when he fell on the ground. From the ground, he
20:12
Speaker 1: took out his firearm, a revolver, and he shot one
20:16
Speaker 1: of the pranksters dead. And then a woman in Indiana
20:19
Speaker 1: and Logan Sport was scared to death. Literally her heart
20:24
Speaker 1: stopped after her daughter answered, you know, on the door
20:30
Speaker 1: and she screamed because a group of boys had a
20:34
Speaker 1: like a jack lantern and we're just like and put
20:37
Speaker 1: it in front of her and she you know, that
20:39
Speaker 1: sounds like a normal jump scare, but she must have
20:42
Speaker 1: had a pre existing heart condition. Again, Uh, these just
20:47
Speaker 1: keep going. A guy almost loses his eyes sight two.
20:51
Speaker 1: A girl nearly loses her arm after being hit with
20:55
Speaker 1: stones and thirty Yeah, there were kids in fairfaxt count
21:00
Speaker 1: in Virginia who were setting off dynamite like on their
21:04
Speaker 1: school grounds. They were causing traffic accidents and stuff. Not
21:08
Speaker 1: not cherry bombs are like black cats, dynamites, dynamite, that's insane,
21:14
Speaker 1: Like we know miners, we can We're we're miners who
21:17
Speaker 1: know miners, we can use dynamite. And then this is
21:20
Speaker 1: where we get to the Black Halloween of nineteen thirty three,
21:24
Speaker 1: because before the Great Depression, there were a lot of
21:27
Speaker 1: people who are like, you know, to quote Biden, they
21:30
Speaker 1: were like, this is malarkey. But the economic disaster created
21:36
Speaker 1: this period of widespread social unrest on a profound level
21:40
Speaker 1: that a lot of people hadn't experienced before. And this
21:45
Speaker 1: made arguably it made the kids a little bit wilder
21:48
Speaker 1: with their antics, but also the public was responding they
21:52
Speaker 1: had had it up to here with so many things
21:54
Speaker 1: by this point. And this is where we get to
21:56
Speaker 1: what you were alluding to earlier nol in nineteen thirty three,
22:00
Speaker 1: where people were flipping over cars, sawing down telephone polls,
22:04
Speaker 1: and just breaking stuff the way in nineteen eighties rock
22:08
Speaker 1: band would destroy hotel rooms and America was like, we're
22:12
Speaker 1: not your hotel room, you whipper snappers. No, we're not
22:16
Speaker 1: get off my r collective lawn um. And you know,
22:20
Speaker 1: it's the Great Depression, so it's not like they had
22:22
Speaker 1: any money to fix this stuff like talk about talk
22:25
Speaker 1: about uh, let's see, what's a polite way of saying this,
22:28
Speaker 1: um taking a crap where you eat, you know what
22:31
Speaker 1: I mean like and then not being able to clean
22:33
Speaker 1: it up. I'm sorry that's the disgusting metaphor, but it holds.
22:36
Speaker 1: I mean, this is a very short sighted you know,
22:38
Speaker 1: this is literally you know, doing damage to infrastructure at
22:41
Speaker 1: a time where money was an absolute the shortest possible supply.
22:45
Speaker 1: So you know, they didn't exactly outlaw Halloween, but something
22:51
Speaker 1: had to give. But thankfully, um, you know, a lot
22:54
Speaker 1: of the city's realized that prohibition doesn't really work, usually
23:00
Speaker 1: probably because of lessons learned from you know, that actual
23:03
Speaker 1: prohibition thing where they you know, wouldn't let people drink
23:05
Speaker 1: booze and so they just you know made it themselves
23:08
Speaker 1: and and had illegal speakeasies and all that. This was
23:11
Speaker 1: probably right around the time that prohibition was was beginning
23:14
Speaker 1: to uh completely unravel and it was it was about
23:17
Speaker 1: to be reversed. Um. So instead of you know, outlawing
23:20
Speaker 1: Halloween outright, they decided that maybe we can pay these
23:24
Speaker 1: kids off. Uh, so to speak, or at least give
23:27
Speaker 1: them something else to funnel their you know, rambunctious energy into. Yeah,
23:33
Speaker 1: they they came up with, Uh, it's almost it's very
23:37
Speaker 1: similar to the idea of it after school program, but
23:39
Speaker 1: for Halloween. They said, look, we don't have we we
23:44
Speaker 1: want to distract these kids. We want to give them
23:46
Speaker 1: something different and less destructive to do. Maybe we could
23:49
Speaker 1: throw a party, but they looked around and said, you know,
23:52
Speaker 1: unless we're the one percent that has extracted all the
23:56
Speaker 1: value out of American society, we can't. Oh, we we
24:00
Speaker 1: don't have the scratch to throw a party. So we're
24:03
Speaker 1: going to have what we'll call house to house parties.
24:07
Speaker 1: The entire block chips in to do whatever they can.
24:10
Speaker 1: So if you're if you're a would be prankster, you
24:13
Speaker 1: go to the first house, you get a costume. Maybe
24:16
Speaker 1: it's it's some simple usually it's like a sheet boom,
24:18
Speaker 1: you're a ghost. Next house gives you some candy. That's cool,
24:22
Speaker 1: and then uh, this sounds a lot like tricker treating,
24:26
Speaker 1: as Lisa Morton points out, and that's where the idea
24:29
Speaker 1: comes from. It comes from the idea of these house
24:31
Speaker 1: to house parties. Because not only were the children given
24:35
Speaker 1: a purpose, given a series of task that would keep
24:38
Speaker 1: them from flipping over cars, but they were also going
24:42
Speaker 1: to be more easy to monitor because you know which
24:46
Speaker 1: houses they're going to, and you know, you kind of
24:49
Speaker 1: know their route. So this is this is where Morton
24:55
Speaker 1: bust myth that I think a lot of people believe in.
24:58
Speaker 1: She says, one of the most common misconceptions about Halloween
25:01
Speaker 1: is the trigger treating is some ancient ritual that goes
25:04
Speaker 1: back thousands of years, but she confirms it really is
25:08
Speaker 1: less than a hundred years old. And if you when
25:12
Speaker 1: you get to the end right the end of your
25:15
Speaker 1: house to house root, you'll see a haunted house situation
25:20
Speaker 1: set up kind of in the basement. And and this
25:23
Speaker 1: is people are familiar with this. I'm sure you take
25:25
Speaker 1: the kids down the stairs. It's very very dark. And
25:29
Speaker 1: then you would play that game that some people might
25:32
Speaker 1: be familiar with where you you get a story and
25:35
Speaker 1: you're like passing around bowls of something in the dark,
25:37
Speaker 1: and one of them peeled grapes, and they're like, oh,
25:43
Speaker 1: there's these human brains. It's you know, like spaghetti or something.
25:48
Speaker 1: A lot of weird uses of food, some of the
25:51
Speaker 1: stuff sounds very unsanitary, like apparently walls would be hung
25:55
Speaker 1: with strips of raw liver that you would like feel
25:59
Speaker 1: as you you know, stumbles are away through the dark,
26:02
Speaker 1: classics Williams classic total. Yeah, I want to pranks for
26:06
Speaker 1: that guy ass raw liver, the old raw liver trick um.
26:09
Speaker 1: But yeah, you know they'd be like weird sounds and
26:12
Speaker 1: moans and howls, scream Yeah, exactly, a lot of a
26:17
Speaker 1: lot of very d i y solutions here, damp sponges
26:20
Speaker 1: and hairnets apparently hanging for the ceiling and picture like, oh,
26:24
Speaker 1: d get it off me. You don't know it's a
26:27
Speaker 1: it's a gross damp sponge. Yeah, definitely jump scares someone's
26:31
Speaker 1: dressed as a dog and then they jump out and
26:34
Speaker 1: they're barking. This happened to me and I was so impressed.
26:38
Speaker 1: I was a kid and I was trick or treating
26:39
Speaker 1: one time where it looked like someone had the the
26:43
Speaker 1: safe kind of like a lot of parents don't want
26:46
Speaker 1: to go spooky, so they go with a fall theme
26:48
Speaker 1: and you've got like some hay bales, some squash, some
26:51
Speaker 1: pumpkins or what have you. This one had that and
26:54
Speaker 1: it had like a scarecrow by the door, and there
26:56
Speaker 1: was a little dish that said honor system, just take one,
27:01
Speaker 1: and so it walked up and was gonna take one.
27:04
Speaker 1: And then the scarecrow moved, it ran at us. It
27:08
Speaker 1: grabbed a kid, and I turned around and tried to
27:12
Speaker 1: fight it, and then Nicky told me to calm down, man,
27:18
Speaker 1: you're not cool. No touching. You know that's the rules.
27:21
Speaker 1: I even know that you haven't never been to a
27:23
Speaker 1: hunted house. You're definitely not supposed to touch it. But
27:25
Speaker 1: the other kids all ran. The other kids all ran
27:28
Speaker 1: except me. I was the only one who tried to
27:30
Speaker 1: help that other kid. Geez, I'm proud of you, Ben,
27:33
Speaker 1: I'm proud of you always cheping in helping out the
27:35
Speaker 1: little guy. Totally. He's a man of the people. No man.
27:42
Speaker 1: That would have pissed me off to no end. I
27:43
Speaker 1: would have been like, nope, Calloween is canceled. Going home, um,
27:48
Speaker 1: And then they would, you know, have a little lo
27:50
Speaker 1: fi kind of effects like a cat's painted on cardboard
27:54
Speaker 1: outlined in um glow in the dark paint, which is
27:57
Speaker 1: a thing. And this also aided a sense of community,
28:01
Speaker 1: right and get to know your neighbors and all of
28:03
Speaker 1: that in the same way that the moderntor or treating does.
28:13
Speaker 1: And so with this stage set, we see that the
28:17
Speaker 1: story of early haunted houses in the US is a
28:21
Speaker 1: story of these small kind of nonprofit affairs, their community based.
28:27
Speaker 1: You know, you probably later know everybody who was involved
28:30
Speaker 1: in the creation of it. And that's that's kind of inspiring.
28:34
Speaker 1: How did we get from there to these massive productions
28:38
Speaker 1: that cost you know, as much as fifty bucks a
28:41
Speaker 1: ticket in some cases, Well, it's because part of a
28:45
Speaker 1: civic group called the Junior Chamber also known as the
28:49
Speaker 1: j c S. I I owe a lot to these folks,
28:53
Speaker 1: and my child has does, because they're the creators of
28:56
Speaker 1: something called trails of terror. If you have grown up
28:59
Speaker 1: in the South, you might be familiar with something some
29:01
Speaker 1: religious organizations do called tribulation trail. You guys, ever heard
29:05
Speaker 1: of that one? Not that one specifically, but we're gonna
29:07
Speaker 1: get to it. I have been to one of these
29:09
Speaker 1: things called hell houses, where they essentially used spooky Halloween
29:14
Speaker 1: tactics to you know, teach a less about indoctrinates you
29:17
Speaker 1: and you know, save your mortal soul or whatever. I also,
29:20
Speaker 1: when I think of this um Trails of terror the
29:24
Speaker 1: closest animal that I have growing up with those things
29:27
Speaker 1: like a haunted hay ride, you know where you'd like
29:29
Speaker 1: be on the back of a truck and going through
29:31
Speaker 1: this like hay Field or whatever, and they'd be like
29:33
Speaker 1: spooky stuff popping out as you go. Yeah. Yeah, I
29:35
Speaker 1: would love to hear if other people have experienced things
29:38
Speaker 1: like tribulation trail um. The ones I saw were very
29:43
Speaker 1: well done objectively, and they were you were walking through
29:47
Speaker 1: the Book of Revelations and all the the Book of Revelations,
29:52
Speaker 1: there's a lot of trippy psychedelic stuff in there, and
29:55
Speaker 1: they're very creative, I would say, grand munual level creative
29:59
Speaker 1: with depicting these things. And I was like, how do
30:01
Speaker 1: you how do you get all these burning cars? How
30:04
Speaker 1: much money is this church putting into this? Oh, that's funny,
30:07
Speaker 1: you say. I've been the one hell house thing that
30:10
Speaker 1: I went to had outsid out front just to show
30:13
Speaker 1: people where it was a totally demolished car, presumably from
30:18
Speaker 1: a drunk driving accident. That was part of the theme
30:20
Speaker 1: of that particular hell house. So now organizations have stepped
30:25
Speaker 1: in and it becomes something kind of like it becomes
30:28
Speaker 1: a social attraction, sometimes a fundraiser, sometimes just a straight
30:33
Speaker 1: up business to make some cash for the organization. But
30:37
Speaker 1: it's still not a cultural icon. It's still kind of
30:40
Speaker 1: like how local community centers might have a pancake breakfast
30:45
Speaker 1: or something. It wasn't until the one and only Walt
30:48
Speaker 1: Disney decided to build a haunted house that it became
30:53
Speaker 1: a cultural icon. This is Disneylands Haunted Mansion, opened in
30:59
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty nine, almost twenty years after inception of the
31:04
Speaker 1: idea took a long time, and our our good friend
31:09
Speaker 1: friend of the show, Holly Fry from Stuff You Missed
31:11
Speaker 1: in History Class, has singlehandedly, I think, supported this institution
31:16
Speaker 1: for a number of years. Oh yeah, she and her
31:18
Speaker 1: husband go to Disneyland, uh in Disney World like multiple
31:21
Speaker 1: times a year. But she is also a avid um
31:26
Speaker 1: Haunted Mansion and just the whole Disney imagineering kind of
31:30
Speaker 1: world historian. And back when I was the producer for
31:33
Speaker 1: Stuff he was in history class many years ago, she
31:35
Speaker 1: interviewed the expert to the the expert in the field
31:39
Speaker 1: of imagineering who had just come out with a book
31:41
Speaker 1: on the Haunted Mansion, because it really was kind of
31:44
Speaker 1: this flagship attractionly, Like you said, it was you know,
31:47
Speaker 1: twenty years in the making, um and that's because it
31:50
Speaker 1: almost needed you know, like many of the things that
31:52
Speaker 1: the Disney Company did, they had to create the technology
31:55
Speaker 1: to to do the things, to pull off the things
31:58
Speaker 1: that they wanted to pull off. And one of the
32:00
Speaker 1: neat tricks that they used for the Hunted Mansion was
32:02
Speaker 1: something called Pepper's Ghost, which creates these super complex illusions
32:07
Speaker 1: that almost really stand alongside something like a hologram today.
32:12
Speaker 1: It uses refracted light to project and kind of shape
32:15
Speaker 1: these images that really seem to have dimension and scale
32:19
Speaker 1: and like you know, float right right next to you.
32:22
Speaker 1: And that's the that's what made it so popular and
32:25
Speaker 1: so iconic. That's what differentiated it from a tribulation trail
32:30
Speaker 1: or a community haunted house. It's the technology. You weren't
32:34
Speaker 1: just seeing sheets hung on a tree or something painted
32:38
Speaker 1: or someone just jumping out at you, going oh. What
32:41
Speaker 1: you were seeing instead was something that seemed to be
32:44
Speaker 1: actual shimmering figures. They spoke, they sang, they moved, which
32:50
Speaker 1: wasn't just someone in a rubber mask. It was a body.
32:54
Speaker 1: It could be a bodyless head now floating in a
32:57
Speaker 1: crystal ball. Right, that's really impressive stuff, super cool and
33:01
Speaker 1: just really quickly to backtrack, Um, I didn't mean to
33:04
Speaker 1: come off a sounding as though the Disney Company invented
33:07
Speaker 1: the Pepper's ghost effect. It actually was developed in the
33:10
Speaker 1: early eighteen hundreds by John Henry Pepper, uh, and he
33:13
Speaker 1: used it for theater, and then it was often used
33:15
Speaker 1: for like you know, phony seances and things like that
33:18
Speaker 1: or um, you know, theatrical productions. But of course, like
33:21
Speaker 1: everything they did, the Disney imagineers like fine tuned it
33:25
Speaker 1: and honed the effect and used it in a way
33:27
Speaker 1: that had never been seen before. It was just absolutely stunning.
33:30
Speaker 1: And I have to say that I have been to
33:32
Speaker 1: the Haunted match as well. Yeah, yeah, I like it. Yeah,
33:39
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's not really scary. Yeah, it's very
33:42
Speaker 1: very very tame, but super fun and uh and really
33:44
Speaker 1: you know, well executed holds up to this day. Yeah,
33:48
Speaker 1: it was that. Gonna count it for you, buddy face man. Yeah,
33:53
Speaker 1: that's what. There you go. And so this is the
33:58
Speaker 1: real watershed moment for a haunted houses as an industry
34:02
Speaker 1: in the US. The success of Disney's Haunted Mansion spreads
34:07
Speaker 1: across the country those j cs I mentioned earlier are
34:11
Speaker 1: now legit famous for their haunted houses, so much so
34:15
Speaker 1: that they eventually create their own how to do a
34:17
Speaker 1: haunted house guide for other people. Uh. There's a place
34:21
Speaker 1: called Berry Farm not Berry Farm in California that makes
34:25
Speaker 1: its own Halloween evening attractions and that turns into this
34:29
Speaker 1: slate of events that goes across multiple weeks during the season. Yeah,
34:33
Speaker 1: they call it not Scary Farm actually during that time.
34:36
Speaker 1: They do it here in Atlanta. Six Flags Over Georgia, UM,
34:40
Speaker 1: really really fun. They have several different haunted houses and
34:43
Speaker 1: they have this like you know, folks and spooky costumes
34:45
Speaker 1: kind of just roaming around the the amusement part. Really
34:48
Speaker 1: really really Funsants Fair has a haunted village that I'm
34:52
Speaker 1: quite excited to go to. Right. That's aw. You still
34:56
Speaker 1: get a turkey leg? Is the thing? You can still
34:59
Speaker 1: get that ginormous curcula max you get it? Is it
35:02
Speaker 1: a spooky turkey leg? It is haunted? It is it
35:05
Speaker 1: is a haunted turkey leg. It'll certainly haunt you later. Yes, yes,
35:12
Speaker 1: it's cursed. Uh. Also we should mention this is one
35:15
Speaker 1: of my favorites. There's a guy named Bob Burns, who
35:18
Speaker 1: was working for a long long time. He became famous
35:22
Speaker 1: in the late sixties and seventies through the eighties for
35:26
Speaker 1: these incredibly detailed recreations of horror movies as haunted houses,
35:31
Speaker 1: and that's a big draw for people to walk through.
35:33
Speaker 1: I think that one might actually maybe get to me
35:36
Speaker 1: a little bit if I depending on what I was
35:39
Speaker 1: walking through. You can see a full list of everything
35:42
Speaker 1: he did. Probably one of one of the most prominent
35:45
Speaker 1: ones is the alien recreation he did in nineteen seventy nine.
35:50
Speaker 1: I'm I'm sure to each your home, but it's really impressive,
35:53
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, he did one of John Carpenter's the thing.
35:57
Speaker 1: Lots of classic like nineteen sixties horror movies, Frankenstein's labuh,
36:02
Speaker 1: Forbidden Planets, creature from the War War exactly, War of
36:06
Speaker 1: the World's, all that kind of stuff that would have
36:09
Speaker 1: been super cool to check out and in the l
36:11
Speaker 1: A area, if I'm not mistake, Yeah, and then we
36:13
Speaker 1: we saw you'll you'll see the person in d c
36:17
Speaker 1: Atkins claims that they're one of the first to open
36:20
Speaker 1: a professional interactive haunted house business, which called Blood Manner
36:25
Speaker 1: over Maryland and seventy one. But you know who wasn't
36:29
Speaker 1: a huge fan of this, Evangelical Christians who believed that
36:33
Speaker 1: this was spreading, um, it was popularizing unholy things. And
36:38
Speaker 1: that's where we get the Hell House is n seventy
36:40
Speaker 1: two Jerry Folwell and Liberty University and then Haunted House
36:46
Speaker 1: industries are also beginning to move and step with Hollywood's
36:49
Speaker 1: horror industry. Yeah, they're they're they're a little corny, but
36:52
Speaker 1: I kind of I quite like them. The Netflix the
36:55
Speaker 1: movies that made us, I think it's what it's called.
36:57
Speaker 1: Um there's a new series of that just came out
36:59
Speaker 1: that's I think horror movies. It does Halloween, does Fright
37:03
Speaker 1: of the Thirteenth, and it does a Nightmare on Elm Street.
37:05
Speaker 1: And I didn't quite realize that, like New Line Cinema
37:09
Speaker 1: was like a super fledgling kind of indie you know,
37:12
Speaker 1: UM Film studio and they the guy who was the
37:16
Speaker 1: you know, the main backer, I forget his name now,
37:18
Speaker 1: but they talked about this in the little series. Um
37:21
Speaker 1: he staked everything on Nightmare on Elm Street being a
37:24
Speaker 1: big hit, and of course it was, and you know,
37:27
Speaker 1: films like that and Halloween, which is also a very
37:31
Speaker 1: low budget kind of indie that just you know, was
37:33
Speaker 1: distributed independently, really got Hollywood to like embrace you know, horror,
37:39
Speaker 1: and and there's this like kind of eighties slasher horror
37:43
Speaker 1: boom that created this you know, super high demand for
37:48
Speaker 1: you know, the most splattery haunted houses that you could
37:51
Speaker 1: you can imagine which people trying to one up each
37:52
Speaker 1: other with like how much they could handle, Like how
37:54
Speaker 1: extreme can we get with our haunted house? Um? That
37:58
Speaker 1: is in many ways can too far to this day. Um,
38:02
Speaker 1: if you know about we've talked about places like McCamy
38:05
Speaker 1: manner where you have to sign a waiver um and
38:08
Speaker 1: they can definitely touch you. They like put you in
38:11
Speaker 1: a coffin and it's a freaking sadist I who I
38:19
Speaker 1: talked about this on stuff they'll want you know, I'm
38:21
Speaker 1: fairly confident that they're making their money through illegal gambling
38:25
Speaker 1: and Vegas. Yeah, that on it. But uh, what McCamey
38:30
Speaker 1: is doing is a crime. I completely agree, But it's
38:34
Speaker 1: not if people sign the waivers. I suppose there's even
38:36
Speaker 1: ones that like, you know, you can you pay to
38:39
Speaker 1: have someone kidnap you, even abduct you and then take
38:42
Speaker 1: you to one of these situations where they like, you know,
38:44
Speaker 1: mercilessly psychologically torture you for hours and hours and hours.
38:48
Speaker 1: But that's really not what we're talking about. You're right,
38:50
Speaker 1: that's something different. It's just kind of of course, everything
38:53
Speaker 1: tends to end up in the most extreme place eventually.
38:56
Speaker 1: But we've got Larry Kirshner, the president of the Haunted
39:00
Speaker 1: House Association UM, because that became a thing, saying that
39:04
Speaker 1: if you went to a haunted house in the nineties
39:06
Speaker 1: and nineties, you would have seen a lot of Freddy Krueger,
39:09
Speaker 1: Jason Pinhead. The haunted house industry really followed the movie
39:12
Speaker 1: industry at that time, which makes sense. Yeah, and now
39:16
Speaker 1: we see that the the for profit haunted houses are
39:21
Speaker 1: quickly quickly outpacing the work of nonprofit groups like the
39:27
Speaker 1: Junior Chamber j c's. However, this was not all um
39:32
Speaker 1: a story of a rise to fame and prominence, because
39:37
Speaker 1: Haunted house has had some problems. In New Jersey, a
39:40
Speaker 1: haunted house caught fire, trapping and killing eight teenagers within,
39:45
Speaker 1: and so a lot of these attractions got shut down
39:48
Speaker 1: as a result. Politicians were saying, hey, if we don't
39:51
Speaker 1: ban these things, let's at least get some some stronger
39:54
Speaker 1: safety rules here. Volunteer organizations couldn't deal with the tougher
40:00
Speaker 1: safety rules, so they got forced out of business. And
40:03
Speaker 1: then going back to what Larry Kirchner was saying, Uh,
40:06
Speaker 1: the j c S. The reason you don't see a
40:08
Speaker 1: bunch of their haunted houses around today is because they
40:11
Speaker 1: were fairly basic. It was based on the idea that
40:14
Speaker 1: people would volunteer. But then when you have other folks
40:17
Speaker 1: running it as a business, tons and tons of advertising,
40:21
Speaker 1: it's it's hard to you know, keep your slice of
40:24
Speaker 1: the pie because the whole pipe plate is getting more expensive.
40:27
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean a lot of these have production level,
40:29
Speaker 1: you know, on par with you know, what you see
40:32
Speaker 1: in TV and film. But today there is kind of
40:35
Speaker 1: a cool little, you know, cottage industry um around haunted houses. Um,
40:40
Speaker 1: the number of professional haunted houses over the preceding decades
40:44
Speaker 1: absolutely exploded, and according to our guy Kirshner, UM around
40:50
Speaker 1: hundred UM haunted houses operated across the nation. And I believe,
40:55
Speaker 1: um so I can only imagine that's uh, you know,
40:58
Speaker 1: grown from there though, I would you should see how
41:01
Speaker 1: the pandemic affected haunted houses, because it is obviously very
41:04
Speaker 1: close quarters. Um, certainly some folks might be a little
41:08
Speaker 1: germophobic about them. And I'm sure that you know, masks
41:11
Speaker 1: will be required now in place. Yeah, they may already
41:14
Speaker 1: feel a lot of folks already feel like they've lived
41:16
Speaker 1: through a haunted house. So question more of the same
41:19
Speaker 1: at this point. Like, so you see them expanding now
41:23
Speaker 1: past the typical house. There's a really cool and south
41:26
Speaker 1: of Atlanta which is set in this it's outdoors and
41:29
Speaker 1: like this pink ball arena kind of thing, and I
41:32
Speaker 1: have a friend who runs that. I like going to
41:34
Speaker 1: check that one out. For some reason, I'm more comfortable
41:37
Speaker 1: with the ones outside. And maybe that's that's pre pandemic,
41:40
Speaker 1: but I think that's gonna that's gonna be a trend
41:43
Speaker 1: we see as well. Um, there's the ones, you know,
41:46
Speaker 1: like I mentioned earlier, with religious groups who want to
41:50
Speaker 1: find a new creative way to spread their message. There
41:53
Speaker 1: are even like p s A houses now haunted trap
41:58
Speaker 1: houses we saw reports of, and they warn you about
42:01
Speaker 1: the horrors of real life things like opioid addiction. It's
42:06
Speaker 1: funny because the guy in charge of that trade group
42:08
Speaker 1: we mentioned earlier, Kirchner, he himself doubts that the haunted
42:12
Speaker 1: house is gonna be around forever. He says, every business
42:16
Speaker 1: will eventually fail, so we just want to last as
42:18
Speaker 1: long as we possibly can. And this is where the
42:23
Speaker 1: Smithsuanian writer that we mentioned earlier, has this wonderful line
42:27
Speaker 1: that I quite love. They say, Halloween without haunted houses,
42:31
Speaker 1: now that's a scary thought. That's journalism right there. Man.
42:35
Speaker 1: This guy Krishner is a real bummer though. He literally
42:37
Speaker 1: says every business will eventually fail, so we just want
42:41
Speaker 1: to last as long as we possibly can't. All right, man,
42:44
Speaker 1: I guess that's a pragmatic way of looking at it,
42:47
Speaker 1: but but kind of a downer. But yeah, just like
42:49
Speaker 1: in the Great Depression, though, we still have these neighborhoods,
42:54
Speaker 1: you know, you know, bowl of grapes in the dark
42:56
Speaker 1: kind of situations, which is super cool. Um, it's great,
43:00
Speaker 1: And honestly, I've certainly seen much more elaborate ones too,
43:03
Speaker 1: were a folksful band together and like build something out
43:06
Speaker 1: like in a big garage, or do something maybe involving
43:09
Speaker 1: multiple homes that are that are next to each other
43:11
Speaker 1: like um, you know, or or like combining the use
43:14
Speaker 1: of different yards and things like. Yeah, and folks, we
43:16
Speaker 1: know This was a bit of a long one, but
43:18
Speaker 1: we hope you enjoyed going on this journey with us,
43:21
Speaker 1: because tis the season, as they say. Uh, I had
43:25
Speaker 1: such a blast with this one. I am man so
43:28
Speaker 1: glad you guys are back in this haunted house of
43:30
Speaker 1: ridiculous history. I'm glad to be back man, and and
43:34
Speaker 1: thanks as always of course, uh, to our pantheon of
43:38
Speaker 1: fantastic podcast spooksters. We're talking about gay Bluesier, We're talking
43:43
Speaker 1: about the one and only Max Williams. We're talking about
43:46
Speaker 1: Alex Williams, who composed our soundtrack. We might even you
43:51
Speaker 1: know what. It just occurred to me. I bet you know.
43:55
Speaker 1: I bet you that Jonathan Strickland ak the Quister, has
43:58
Speaker 1: not only been to a lot of houses, but I
44:01
Speaker 1: bet you he's beformed in some. Oh. I have no doubt.
44:03
Speaker 1: I have no doubt. Uh. And he definitely the type
44:06
Speaker 1: of guy that had grabbed you by the shin. Get
44:09
Speaker 1: get a swift, get a swift kick in the bald
44:11
Speaker 1: head for me, my friend. They got the voice he
44:15
Speaker 1: would use Transatlantic, yep, Transatlantic, and the Sinister Quister laugh
44:20
Speaker 1: would play pretty well in the dark. I just picture
44:23
Speaker 1: I just walk in the opposite direction. I just picture
44:26
Speaker 1: him going the Children of the Night. Oh how they
44:30
Speaker 1: screamed for me. I have on to Sako blog Nah
44:34
Speaker 1: say yeah, man, we love you, Jonathan. If you're here
44:38
Speaker 1: at this so but hey, while you're on the internet,
44:41
Speaker 1: which you presumably are, why not check us out on
44:44
Speaker 1: Facebook where we have a Facebook group here. The Facebook
44:48
Speaker 1: is rebranding because they've been taken so much heat lately.
44:51
Speaker 1: What's gonna be I don't think it's gonna solve the
44:54
Speaker 1: problems that. Oh no, it's literally like a band aid
44:58
Speaker 1: where it's like, hey, how about instead of address saying
45:00
Speaker 1: you know, our role in like you know, all this
45:02
Speaker 1: proliferation of fake news and all of that good stuff,
45:05
Speaker 1: that we'll just change our name. Yeah, I mean Facebook.
45:09
Speaker 1: And you could argue social media in general is itself
45:12
Speaker 1: a kind of haunted house and function. So they'll probably
45:16
Speaker 1: name it what they call the metaverse, or it'll refer
45:19
Speaker 1: to that somehow. That's what they're really trying to build
45:22
Speaker 1: right now. And yeah, yeah, and it's a neat idea,
45:26
Speaker 1: but it would be a neat idea in the right hands.
45:29
Speaker 1: Is the most great thing I could say, And the
45:31
Speaker 1: means time our little sliver of Facebook is is perfectly pleasant. Uh,
45:35
Speaker 1: not controversy at all, barely any fake news. It's all
45:38
Speaker 1: just a bunch of cool history nerds sharing memes and
45:41
Speaker 1: and and having a good old time, so popping over
45:43
Speaker 1: to ridiculous historians on Facebook. If you want to be
45:45
Speaker 1: a part of that, you can also follow us, not
45:48
Speaker 1: just as a show, but as individuals. Find me on Twitter,
45:51
Speaker 1: where I am at Ben bull in hs W. Find
45:53
Speaker 1: me on Instagram, where I have, in a burst of creativity,
45:57
Speaker 1: named myself at ben bullan o w l I at.
46:01
Speaker 1: Catch me exclusively on Instagram, where I am at how
46:03
Speaker 1: now Noel Brown? I think that doesn't? What's the next time? Folks.
46:17
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I
46:19
Speaker 1: Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to
46:22
Speaker 1: your favorite shows.