Latest / Curious Cat - where science & supernatural collide / Halloween Triple Feature #2 with special guest, Family Plot Podcast

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Halloween Triple Feature #2 with special guest, Family Plot Podcast · Curious Cat - where science & supernatural collide

0:28
SPEAKER_10: Trick or treat.
0:29
SPEAKER_10: I hope this finds you with a little bit of a fanny pack of fat because you've been stealing from the trick or treat cauldron the last week or so.
0:39
SPEAKER_10: I know I have.
0:40
SPEAKER_10: I need to do some abs for sure.
0:43
SPEAKER_10: But this week is dynamite.
0:47
SPEAKER_10: It is my favorite Halloween ever.
0:51
SPEAKER_10: As I look out the window right now, there is fog and there is wood smoke clinging to the last of the golden brown yellow orange leaves in the trees.
1:05
SPEAKER_10: There are cobwebs dripping off of my ceiling.
1:09
SPEAKER_10: Not to be atmospheric.
1:11
SPEAKER_10: They're not the fake stuff that I bought at Walgreens.
1:14
SPEAKER_10: These are because of my neglect.
1:16
SPEAKER_10: I haven't had time to do any dusting.
1:20
SPEAKER_10: And this year, oh, I am so fortunate to be able to introduce you to three members of my podcast family.
1:31
SPEAKER_10: In succession, we have a heck of a triple feature lined up for you.
1:36
SPEAKER_10: You're gonna get to meet the hosts and hear their shows as we drop them into my feed over the next few days.
1:44
SPEAKER_10: Horrifying History, Family Plot Podcast, and Paranormal, the New Normal.
1:51
SPEAKER_10: We are gonna get weird family.
1:54
SPEAKER_10: We're talking about murder, vampire obsessions, and even a traveling exorcist.
2:02
SPEAKER_10: I have put links to all of their show stuff, including their, you know, where you can find them on any uh podcast streams, you can follow their show, you can give them a five-star review, and follow their Patreon and buy their merch if you feel so inclined.
2:23
SPEAKER_10: I feel like Thanksgiving came a month early.
2:27
SPEAKER_10: Feel so lucky.
2:29
SPEAKER_10: So until next week, trick or treat.
2:34
SPEAKER_10: I love you.
3:40
SPEAKER_04: I'm Laura, I'm the mom, I'm Arthur, I'm the son.
3:44
SPEAKER_13: And together we are Family Clubs.
3:48
SPEAKER_13: You guys are so with it this week.
3:50
SPEAKER_13: That's that's wonderful.
3:52
SPEAKER_04: But today we're also joined with a guest.
3:55
SPEAKER_13: Actually, one of our memb one of our extended family, Courtney from Book of the Dead podcast.
4:03
SPEAKER_03: Hi, I'm so excited to hang out with you guys today.
4:06
SPEAKER_04: We're excited to hang out with you.
4:09
SPEAKER_04: Yes, obviously, since I had to interrupt the open to introduce you, because I was like, Yay, another girl.
4:19
SPEAKER_04: They they out they outnumber me, so I gotta get another girl in here with me.
4:24
SPEAKER_13: Yeah.
4:26
SPEAKER_13: Look, uh I'm a humble guy.
4:28
SPEAKER_13: I I I once saw a naked trucker at a truck stop giving me the come hither finger.
4:33
SPEAKER_13: No.
4:34
SPEAKER_04: Yes, we've had this conversation and told that story once or twice.
4:38
SPEAKER_13: Yeah, well, it really happened, unfortunately.
4:41
SPEAKER_13: It was traumatizing.
4:42
SPEAKER_04: Yes, I know.
4:43
SPEAKER_04: It's it has shaped you into the dad you are today, though we wouldn't you for the world.
4:49
SPEAKER_13: It it's one of the reasons that men suck.
4:53
SPEAKER_04: Don't excuse, don't you generalize me, a young man here?
4:58
SPEAKER_04: Do not generalize me with the rest of mankind.
5:01
SPEAKER_04: Absolutely not.
5:04
SPEAKER_04: You're gonna your poor dad's gonna have to bleep.
5:07
SPEAKER_04: I've been home.
5:08
SPEAKER_04: He's a grown man, he can deal with it.
5:10
SPEAKER_04: Okay, all right.
5:11
SPEAKER_04: Let's get back to how they can support the show and that yes, okay.
5:18
SPEAKER_13: We want to take a moment and tell you we are proudly associated with the Dark Cast Network.
5:23
SPEAKER_13: If you like what we do, check out the other network shows for some great listens, like the Book of the Dead podcast.
5:30
SPEAKER_13: Or another show I like, Castles Encrypted, because I always like to throw one in there that I haven't mentioned previously.
5:36
SPEAKER_13: All right, and if you want to help us out, lots of ways you can do that.
5:39
SPEAKER_13: One is through our Teespring merch store where you can get hoodies, stickers, t-shirts, coffee mugs, and coffee mugs.
5:49
SPEAKER_04: Make you a list so you don't have to go through it in your head.
5:54
SPEAKER_04: I don't know why I keep losing the plot on it.
5:57
SPEAKER_04: But I but four weeks in a row, you have to have.
6:00
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it's you're on a little rookier.
6:04
SPEAKER_13: But the point is, whatever you get, it has Arthur's high fashion, unique artwork for you to wear or have on your stuff.
6:13
SPEAKER_13: All good.
6:20
SPEAKER_13: If you can't afford the merch, uh why not join our Patreon for as little as one dollar?
6:26
SPEAKER_13: Obviously, there's only two levels, one and three dollars.
6:29
SPEAKER_13: The one dollar get add three versions of the show delivered first.
6:34
SPEAKER_13: Here's a hint: I'm gonna edit this tomorrow, and the Patreon members will have it then.
6:39
SPEAKER_13: Everybody else waits till Thursday.
6:41
SPEAKER_13: There you go.
6:42
SPEAKER_13: But we also have the three dollar level where you get, you know, special versions of the show, special editions of the show.
6:51
SPEAKER_13: You can find out what it means to be bill fingered.
6:55
SPEAKER_13: We have all sorts of special episodes.
6:57
SPEAKER_13: Also, we'll mention your name right here at this part of the show.
7:01
SPEAKER_13: That's right.
7:03
SPEAKER_13: So, if you can't afford our Patreon, you can always send us a dollar or two through buy me a copy as a one-time donation.
7:09
SPEAKER_13: If you enjoy the show, one thing everybody can do is please share it on social media.
7:14
SPEAKER_04: Share it with friends, share with family.
7:18
SPEAKER_13: With everyone.
7:21
SPEAKER_13: I wasn't.
7:22
SPEAKER_13: I was just I was doing this.
7:24
SPEAKER_03: Are you sharing it with friends and family?
7:27
SPEAKER_04: Well, there you go, that's why he's looking at you.
7:30
SPEAKER_13: You could also leave us a five-star review.
7:33
SPEAKER_13: If you don't enjoy the show, please keep it to yourself.
7:39
SPEAKER_03: Say something nice.
7:41
SPEAKER_03: Just don't say anything at all.
7:43
SPEAKER_13: Weird noise goes here.
7:46
SPEAKER_03: Right here.
7:48
SPEAKER_03: Don't forget.
7:57
SPEAKER_04: So what are we talking tonight?
7:59
SPEAKER_04: Talking about tonight, Dean.
8:08
SPEAKER_07: Hello.
8:10
SPEAKER_07: Welcome to the Family Plot Podcast Elevator of History.
8:16
SPEAKER_07: Get all of your arms, legs, or whatever inside.
8:26
SPEAKER_07: Twelfth floor avalanche of blood.
8:31
SPEAKER_07: That's funny.
8:32
SPEAKER_07: The blood usually gets off on fourteen.
8:35
SPEAKER_07: Did you know, folks, that this building doesn't have a thirteenth floor?
8:40
SPEAKER_07: Due to superstition.
8:42
SPEAKER_07: Well, actually it does.
8:44
SPEAKER_07: We just call the thirteenth floor the fourteenth floor so as not to upset anyone with delicate sensibilities.
8:57
SPEAKER_07: Fourteenth floor and end of the line.
9:01
SPEAKER_07: Dean is here and he's got something really groovy for you today.
9:11
SPEAKER_07: End of the line, folks, going down.
9:14
SPEAKER_13: In the deep hush of a New England night, the kind where the cold feels older than the trees, and the dark seems to breathe.
9:23
SPEAKER_13: A handful of figures slip into a small wooden church.
9:27
SPEAKER_13: Their boots track in the snow, their lanterns throw long, trembling shadows, and every one of them carries the same tight, fearful look.
9:38
SPEAKER_13: The look of people who have run out of explanations.
9:41
SPEAKER_13: A local family is dying, not suddenly, not violently, but slowly, wasting away as though something is feeding on them from just beyond sight.
9:53
SPEAKER_13: The doctors have no answers.
9:55
SPEAKER_13: The prayers have done nothing.
9:58
SPEAKER_13: And one of the elders, a man who remembers stories his grandparents whispered, finally says the word no one wants to hear.
10:06
SPEAKER_13: Vampire.
10:08
SPEAKER_13: Not the cape and fangs kind, not the creature of novels, not Dracula, not Count a Lucard, something older, colder, and rooted in the soil of New England itself.
10:22
SPEAKER_13: A belief that the dead can cling to the living, draining them through invisible threads of sickness and sorrow.
10:30
SPEAKER_13: And so these townsfolk gather not for worship, but for strategy.
10:36
SPEAKER_13: They speak in low voices about graves and signs and rituals.
10:41
SPEAKER_13: They know what must be done before dawn.
10:44
SPEAKER_13: They will break open a burial mound.
10:47
SPEAKER_13: They will perform the old protections, they will try desperately to sever whatever is reaching out from the coffin and killing the living.
10:56
SPEAKER_13: Outside, the wind moans across the frozen fields.
11:00
SPEAKER_13: Inside, the lanterns flicker, and the conspirators steal themselves for what comes next.
11:07
SPEAKER_13: Tonight, we dig into the New England vampire panic.
11:10
SPEAKER_13: And this things were never easy.
11:13
SPEAKER_13: Bloodsuckers are everywhere.
11:15
SPEAKER_13: Episode of the Family Plot Podcast.
11:19
SPEAKER_13: And now, let's take a brief word from our sponsor.
11:26
SPEAKER_01: So much death, said his neighbors.
11:28
SPEAKER_01: A suspicious amount.
11:30
SPEAKER_01: They began to badger him, insisting that an evil lived under his family plot.
11:34
SPEAKER_12: It's time to get back to the show.
11:37
SPEAKER_04: He's just trying to give it a moment.
11:40
SPEAKER_04: And you know, exercise is good for you.
11:44
SPEAKER_04: You call me fat?
11:45
SPEAKER_04: No, I'm just saying dancing is healthy.
11:48
SPEAKER_04: And you shouldn't cast aspersions.
11:51
SPEAKER_04: I would never call you an also I used to make unflattering name.
11:57
SPEAKER_04: Plus, your dad is a very good dancer.
11:59
SPEAKER_04: He used to make extra money taking his clothes off before you were born.
12:03
SPEAKER_04: That's my favorite story.
12:07
SPEAKER_04: And Courtney already knows that story, so it's apparently her favorite story.
12:18
SPEAKER_04: Making people laugh.
12:20
SPEAKER_13: I spent 20 years as a stand-up comic.
12:22
SPEAKER_13: I'm still funny sometimes, whether I want to be or not.
12:25
SPEAKER_13: And now let's take a moment for a word from our guest, Courtney from Book of the Dead.
12:30
SPEAKER_04: Courtney gets all the moments as many as she wants.
12:33
SPEAKER_13: She does.
12:35
SPEAKER_13: She can have 9 million moments if she wants them.
12:38
SPEAKER_11: I won't okay, I won't take 9 million.
12:40
SPEAKER_11: I'm just I'm very excited to be back.
12:42
SPEAKER_11: You know, I host, as you said, the Book of the Dead.
12:45
SPEAKER_11: It's a true crime podcast.
12:47
SPEAKER_11: They focus primarily on more obscure cases.
12:51
SPEAKER_11: And I try and focus mostly on the victim as opposed to the killer.
12:56
SPEAKER_11: We don't see sensationalizing of killers over on the Book of the Dead.
13:00
SPEAKER_11: Occasionally I have guests on, usually experts in the field, authors, journalists, uh, law enforcement, psychologists.
13:09
SPEAKER_11: So it's a fun time, and I like to sprinkle in some spooky when I can.
13:16
SPEAKER_11: I love horror movies.
13:18
SPEAKER_11: So if I can work in a horror movie, we'll work in a horror movie.
13:21
SPEAKER_11: I've talked about The Exorcist a couple of times.
13:24
SPEAKER_11: We talked about Halloween.
13:26
SPEAKER_11: We talked about the crow.
13:29
SPEAKER_11: But one of my favorite topics is in fact vampires and the satanic pennies.
13:34
SPEAKER_04: And there's a pop up, he just watched the crow recently with me and he got all excited.
13:40
SPEAKER_04: He's like, what, wait?
13:41
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
13:42
SPEAKER_11: We talked about the crow.
13:44
SPEAKER_11: All about the crow, all about Brandon.
13:46
SPEAKER_11: Crow reference?
13:47
SPEAKER_11: The crow reference, yes.
13:48
SPEAKER_11: So yeah, it's a good time.
13:50
SPEAKER_11: I usually put out episodes every Wednesday, but right now we're doing bi-weekly because I'm I am gets in the way.
14:00
SPEAKER_11: Yeah, I'm tired.
14:01
SPEAKER_11: I do be life and so and life is life next.
14:04
SPEAKER_11: So bi-weekly for now, but we'll be back to the weeklies in probably a month or two.
14:10
SPEAKER_11: Yep.
14:11
SPEAKER_11: But it's a fun time.
14:12
SPEAKER_11: Awesome.
14:13
SPEAKER_13: It's awesome.
14:14
SPEAKER_13: I can tell you that I look forward to every Wednesday hoping you have a new episode.
14:20
SPEAKER_13: So uh every time I see one, I try to make sure in the dark cast uh room I I I yay because I do feel the love.
14:28
SPEAKER_11: I appreciate it greatly.
14:29
SPEAKER_11: I really do.
14:30
SPEAKER_13: I I I do love your show.
14:32
SPEAKER_13: And yes, I I recently I've been sharing some of my favorite movies with Arthur.
14:37
SPEAKER_13: We've been taking Sundays to watch movies, and I showed him the crow relatively recently, and he fell in love with it.
14:46
SPEAKER_13: It's it it it's either his favorite movie or very close to right now.
14:51
SPEAKER_11: Oh, it's fantastic.
14:51
SPEAKER_11: It's so beautifully done.
14:54
SPEAKER_11: It's it's brilliant.
14:55
SPEAKER_11: I love everything about it.
14:57
SPEAKER_13: And and and and one of the first things he said was when we saw Brandon Lee was he's so pretty.
15:03
SPEAKER_03: So he's so pretty.
15:06
SPEAKER_03: So pretty.
15:09
SPEAKER_13: I didn't disagree with that.
15:13
SPEAKER_13: Is there anything else you want to tell us?
15:16
SPEAKER_11: Uh you know, no, I think that's it.
15:18
SPEAKER_11: We can jump right in.
15:20
SPEAKER_11: Or I guess I'll jump right in.
15:21
SPEAKER_13: It's my turn.
15:22
SPEAKER_13: All right.
15:23
SPEAKER_13: Well then you want to take this first little section here?
15:28
SPEAKER_11: Absolutely.
15:29
SPEAKER_11: So in 1990, a team of archaeologists from the Connecticut Office of State Archaeology were surveying a colonial era graveyard in Griswold, Connecticut.
15:40
SPEAKER_11: And this is what in these days is known as the Jewett City area.
15:44
SPEAKER_11: After some local kids had stumbled across human bones in a gravel pit.
15:49
SPEAKER_11: The site turned out to be a family cemetery dating to the late 1700s and early 1800s.
15:57
SPEAKER_11: Now, most of the burials were ordinary, simple wooden coffins, standard Christian interments, nothing unusual until they uncovered burial four.
16:08
SPEAKER_11: The coffin had been reopened sometime in the 19th century, sometime in the 19th century.
16:14
SPEAKER_11: The skeleton inside had been deliberately rearranged.
16:18
SPEAKER_11: The skull was removed and placed atop the ribs, the femurs crossed beneath it in a classic skull and crossbones pattern.
16:26
SPEAKER_11: Now, this wasn't vandalism, it wasn't grave robbing, it was ritual.
16:31
SPEAKER_11: When forensic anthropologist Dr.
16:33
SPEAKER_11: Nicholas Bellantoni examined the remains, he recognized the pattern immediately and matched the documented anti-vampire practices from rural New England, and these were rituals meant to stop a dead family member from feeding on the living.
16:50
SPEAKER_11: The bones belonged to a middle-aged man, likely buried around the 1820s or 1830s, and someone years after his burial had exhumed him, judged him a supernatural threat, and performed the ritual to neutralize him.
17:07
SPEAKER_11: This discovery didn't just make headlines, it forced historians to confront a truth that had been hiding in plain sight.
17:15
SPEAKER_11: New England had a vampire panic.
17:18
SPEAKER_11: Not metaphorically, not symbolically, literally.
17:27
SPEAKER_04: And now let's pause here for a word from our fellow content creators, like our friend Courtney.
17:34
SPEAKER_05: Hey, I'm Jill, the host of the Murder Shelf Book Club podcast.
17:38
SPEAKER_05: Every other week, I feature a true crime book by one of my favorite authors, telling you the story with respect for the victims and loved ones.
17:48
SPEAKER_05: But I don't stop there.
17:50
SPEAKER_05: A psychology educator who's also studied serial killers, I analyze the cases, and I endeavor to explain the whys.
17:59
SPEAKER_05: Why do people do this?
18:01
SPEAKER_05: Told in trilogies, part three is dubbed Second Cast, where I cast a wider net going into some surprising, bone-chilling directions.
18:11
SPEAKER_05: Cold cases, homicides, missing persons, serial killers, and stories from history.
18:16
SPEAKER_05: These both fascinate and appall us.
18:20
SPEAKER_05: This is a true crime book club, so read with me or let me read for you.
18:25
SPEAKER_05: Join the Murder Shelf Book Club podcast and see what I'm pulling off the Murder Shelf next.
18:33
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Brew Crime, a true crime and beer podcast.
18:36
SPEAKER_00: Join me, Mike.
18:38
SPEAKER_00: And me, JT, as we explore the world of crime, conspiracies, or whatever catches our attention.
18:43
SPEAKER_00: This is a podcast where we pick a theme, cover a few cases, and pair them with a brew.
18:47
SPEAKER_06: Between themes, we do what we call Brew Crime News.
18:51
SPEAKER_06: A funny look at current news stories, be it crime, animals, sports, or even celebrities.
18:56
SPEAKER_00: You can find us on all social media at brewcrime.
18:59
SPEAKER_00: Our website is brewcrime.com, and you can find us on any podcast app at BrewCrime Podcast.
19:05
SPEAKER_06: Join us as we discuss the horrible crimes that surround us, and maybe, definitely, tip a bottle or two back as you do it.
19:14
SPEAKER_06: Drink with us weekly.
19:19
SPEAKER_08: Hello, hello.
19:20
SPEAKER_08: I'm Courtney, and this is The Book of the Dead.
19:25
SPEAKER_08: A true crime podcast based out of New Jersey.
19:28
SPEAKER_08: For those looking for a podcast that focuses on the victims and who they were, or cases where the family is directly involved in the telling of their loved ones' stories.
19:39
SPEAKER_08: Each chapter of this podcast is dedicated to the victim they feature.
19:44
SPEAKER_08: Here you can find cases you may have never heard of, or interviews with experts that have dedicated their lives to protect and serve, and occasionally hear from the victim themselves.
19:57
SPEAKER_08: So get comfortable, grab a drink, and settle in for another chapter of the Book of the Dead.
20:14
SPEAKER_04: Tuberculosis, also known throughout the 18th and 19th centuries as consumption, was the slow, was the great slow killer of New England.
20:25
SPEAKER_04: It didn't strike like smallpox or cholera with sudden fevers and swift death.
20:33
SPEAKER_04: It wasted.
20:34
SPEAKER_04: It hollowed people out over months or years, leaving them pale, thin, and ghostlike.
20:43
SPEAKER_04: Families watched loved ones cough blood into handkerchiefs, grow weaker by the day, and fade as though something unseen were draining the life from them.
20:56
SPEAKER_04: By the mid-1800s, consumption was the leading cause of death in America.
21:03
SPEAKER_04: And in rural New England, it seemed to move through households with a terrible logic.
21:09
SPEAKER_04: One member died, then another, then another, each with the same wasting symptoms.
21:18
SPEAKER_04: The problem was that no one understood why germ theory wouldn't be widely accepted until the late 19th century.
21:27
SPEAKER_04: And isolated and in isolated farming communities, medical knowledge lagged even further behind.
21:35
SPEAKER_04: Doctors could describe the symptoms, but they couldn't explain the cause.
21:44
SPEAKER_04: The dead appearing to pull the living toward the grave and reached for the explanations they did understand.
21:54
SPEAKER_04: Folklore filled the gap where science failed.
21:58
SPEAKER_04: New Englanders inherited.
22:00
SPEAKER_04: A patchwork of European traditions.
22:04
SPEAKER_04: Slavic tales of the dead feeding on relatives, Germanic stories of corpse of corpse spirits draining vitality, Celtic beliefs about the troublesome dead who lingered and afflicted the living.
22:22
SPEAKER_04: These ideas blended into a distinctly New England fear, not of the caped aristocratic vampire of fiction, but of a dead family member who remained tied to the living through invisible threads of sickness.
22:38
SPEAKER_04: Locals didn't call them vampires at first.
22:42
SPEAKER_04: They spoke instead of the hungry dead, the ones who troubled the living, or simply the cause.
22:50
SPEAKER_04: By the mid-1800s, newspapers like the Providence Journal and the Woonsocket Patriot had adopted the word vampire to describe the rituals families were performing, and the term stuck.
23:06
SPEAKER_04: Those rituals were not metaphorical, they were not symbolic, they were real, and they were carried out across Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire.
23:22
SPEAKER_04: When a family was struck by repeated cases of consumption, neighbors and relatives gathered, often in someone's home or a church, sometimes in a barn, occasionally right there in the cemetery, to discuss what could be done.
23:39
SPEAKER_04: The logic was simple.
23:41
SPEAKER_04: If the dead were feeding on the living, then the dead had to be stopped.
23:46
SPEAKER_04: The first step was exhumation.
23:49
SPEAKER_04: They dug the s dug up the suspected corpse, usually the first family member to die, because the belief held that the earliest victim was the one most likely to be feeding.
24:05
SPEAKER_04: Once the coffin was opened, the examination began.
24:10
SPEAKER_04: If the body appeared too fresh, if the organ seemed full of blood, or if the corpse looked unnaturally preserved, these were taken as signs that the dead were still active.
24:26
SPEAKER_04: In reality, cold winter burials, sealed crypts, and natural decomposition patterns explained most of what people saw.
24:36
SPEAKER_04: But without germ theory, without refrigeration, without medical training, the appearance of a preserved corpse felt supernatural.
24:47
SPEAKER_04: If the community judged the dead to be dangerous, the ritual followed.
24:53
SPEAKER_04: In some towns, they removed and burned the hearts.
24:57
SPEAKER_04: In others, they burned the entire body.
25:00
SPEAKER_04: Sometimes the ashes were mixed with water and given to the sick as a cure.
25:07
SPEAKER_04: Oh Lord.
25:09
SPEAKER_04: Sorry.
25:10
SPEAKER_04: A desperate attempt to sever the connection between the living and the dead.
25:16
SPEAKER_04: In Connecticut, as the Griswold vampire burial discovered in the 1990s showed, families sometimes rearranged the bones into protective patterns such as the skull placed atop the ribs and the femurs crossed beneath it before reburying the corpse with safeguards meant to prevent further attacks.
25:39
SPEAKER_04: These practices were not fringe behavior.
25:43
SPEAKER_04: Ministers wrote about them in their journals.
25:46
SPEAKER_04: Doctors explained about them in medical reports.
25:49
SPEAKER_04: Newspapers documented them with a mixture of horror and fascination.
25:54
SPEAKER_04: And families, terrified and grieving, performed them because they believed they had no other choice.
26:02
SPEAKER_04: Consumption looked like a supernatural attack.
26:06
SPEAKER_04: The rituals were an attempt to fight back.
26:10
SPEAKER_04: Well, I don't think you need to make dinner now because I believe I've completely lost my appetite.
26:17
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I'm not hungry anymore either.
26:20
SPEAKER_04: Okay, well I was hungry before, I'm not hungry.
26:23
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah.
26:24
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
26:25
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
26:26
SPEAKER_04: How do you like drink?
26:27
SPEAKER_04: No, no.
26:29
SPEAKER_04: No.
26:30
SPEAKER_04: Not gonna talk about that because ew.
26:33
SPEAKER_04: Once was enough.
26:34
SPEAKER_04: Thank you very much.
26:36
SPEAKER_04: Once?
26:36
SPEAKER_04: Wait well just once that we talked about it in the show.
26:41
SPEAKER_04: I can't anyway.
26:43
SPEAKER_04: I you know what time it is though.
26:46
SPEAKER_04: Is it my corner?
26:47
SPEAKER_04: It's time for Arthur's Corner.
26:49
SPEAKER_13: Everybody likes Arthur's Corner.
27:05
SPEAKER_04: Hear ye, hear ye!
27:07
SPEAKER_13: Allow me to present Arthur's Corner.
27:10
SPEAKER_13: Yes, actually they do.
27:12
SPEAKER_13: We get almost as many emails about Arthur's Corner as we get from idiots going, When are you gonna cover White History Month?
27:20
SPEAKER_13: When you stop talking like that, Fred.
27:24
SPEAKER_03: The answer is never.
27:25
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
27:27
SPEAKER_03: Because the whole year is basically white every single.
27:35
SPEAKER_02: Hi, hello.
27:36
SPEAKER_02: My name is Arthur.
27:37
SPEAKER_02: This is my corner.
27:38
SPEAKER_02: I'm tired.
27:38
SPEAKER_02: It's been a long day.
27:40
SPEAKER_02: How are we doing today?
27:42
SPEAKER_02: I have crackers.
27:43
SPEAKER_04: Nice, wonderful crackers.
27:45
SPEAKER_04: Uh how are you eating that?
27:47
SPEAKER_04: I'm not.
27:47
SPEAKER_04: I'm just playing with it.
27:48
SPEAKER_04: It's a circle.
27:49
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it it is a circle.
27:51
SPEAKER_02: Good job.
27:52
SPEAKER_02: It is.
27:52
SPEAKER_02: How many circles does it have inside of it?
27:54
SPEAKER_02: No, I'm just playing six.
27:56
SPEAKER_04: Well, there's six circles in the package, and then each circle circle has a bunch of circles on it, so if I math, there would be a lot.
28:06
SPEAKER_04: Okay.
28:07
SPEAKER_04: What about you?
28:08
SPEAKER_04: It's a scientific term.
28:09
SPEAKER_04: Hold on.
28:10
SPEAKER_03: How am I doing?
28:12
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you.
28:13
SPEAKER_03: Well.
28:14
SPEAKER_04: He's he's excited.
28:15
SPEAKER_04: We have uh Corney hanging out with us.
28:17
SPEAKER_04: That's how he's doing.
28:19
SPEAKER_04: Oh, okay.
28:20
SPEAKER_04: Can can I speak?
28:22
SPEAKER_04: No, you can't.
28:23
SPEAKER_04: Go ahead, baby.
28:24
SPEAKER_04: Assassin's me in my corner.
28:26
SPEAKER_04: Don't sass Arthur in his corner.
28:28
SPEAKER_04: That's a little trusty.
28:29
SPEAKER_04: Sass nobody.
28:31
SPEAKER_13: I'm always happy to work with you and your mom.
28:36
SPEAKER_13: You two are the best.
28:39
SPEAKER_13: You're my world, and I love you both very much.
28:42
SPEAKER_13: But it's also very nice to have Courtney along because she's been adopted as a member of the fan.
28:48
SPEAKER_13: Told you.
28:50
SPEAKER_13: So I'm super happy to be here with all three of you.
28:55
SPEAKER_13: And talking about this vampire panic, which was kind of eye-opening to me because, well, it I don't want to ruin anything for later, but I thought this was all oh hundreds of years ago.
29:07
SPEAKER_13: We we nobody does this anymore.
29:09
SPEAKER_13: That's not true, apparently, and we'll talk about that a little later.
29:13
SPEAKER_02: Pocus pocus, except it's actually something people do, and there's basically like cults about it and shit too.
29:21
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
29:22
SPEAKER_03: How are you doing, Courtney?
29:24
SPEAKER_03: Doing well.
29:25
SPEAKER_03: We're doing well.
29:27
SPEAKER_04: He's such a good boy, he doesn't forget our guests.
29:30
SPEAKER_03: I appreciate him.
29:33
SPEAKER_02: For me, I'm just tired.
29:35
SPEAKER_03: School started, and today's my last day off this weekend, so.
29:42
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
29:44
SPEAKER_03: So we had a holiday here in the States.
29:47
SPEAKER_02: And then I have to get back to doing schoolwork, but that's fine, I guess.
29:53
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, you'll do that this evening, right?
29:55
SPEAKER_04: That's what you've been doing.
29:56
SPEAKER_04: You've been doing your schoolwork the night before.
29:59
SPEAKER_04: So you stay ahead of the game.
30:01
SPEAKER_02: I do the level 11 o'clock every night.
30:05
SPEAKER_02: Show up, I do the work, and then I go to bed because then I don't have to do it in the heat next day.
30:13
SPEAKER_13: And the other thing is, is that by by doing your schoolwork that way, you're really building a good grade for yourself, which will help when you're ready to start studying paleontology.
30:26
SPEAKER_13: Yep.
30:27
SPEAKER_03: Which is the study of pale people.
30:30
SPEAKER_03: No.
30:33
SPEAKER_03: So you're a vampire, you're gonna you're gonna be a vampire expert.
30:38
SPEAKER_04: Just we just pat him on the head and ignore him, kind of like a naughty puppy.
30:43
SPEAKER_04: In fact, that's a really good description of your father, a naughty puppy.
30:48
SPEAKER_03: I'm trying not to punch you.
30:50
SPEAKER_13: Because I mean you're testing the Arthur's patience, but I'm sorry, I do not mean to test your patience.
31:00
SPEAKER_04: Are you sure?
31:01
SPEAKER_02: Because I kind of feel like no, you're definitely testing my patience on purpose.
31:05
SPEAKER_02: I know you.
31:08
SPEAKER_04: Um, I was gonna say, you would love to get a reaction even out of our son.
31:13
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you know, this week hasn't been much.
31:17
SPEAKER_02: I haven't been doing much, so we're just gonna move on.
31:20
SPEAKER_02: I don't have to.
31:22
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we're short today.
31:24
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
31:29
SPEAKER_02: Why doctors at the time weren't much help, and trying to understand why New England family families resorted to exhum is that how you say exhuming their dead, it helps to remember that the medical landscape of early America was barely a landscape at all.
31:49
SPEAKER_02: For much of the 18th and early 19th centuries, the word doctor was less a credential and more of a costume.
31:59
SPEAKER_02: Formal medical schools existed, places like University of Pennsylvania or Harvard Medical School.
32:09
SPEAKER_02: But they were they were few, expensive, and taught a curriculum rooted in centuries old humoral humoral, yes.
32:19
SPEAKER_02: Humoral theory rather than anything resembling modern science.
32:26
SPEAKER_02: Outside major cities, most doctors were self-taught, apprenticed to someone only marginally sorry, one second.
32:39
SPEAKER_03: Goodness.
32:40
SPEAKER_03: Contagious.
32:41
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I know.
32:44
SPEAKER_02: Only marginally only marginally more knowledgeable, or simply men who declared themselves phi physicians.
32:54
SPEAKER_02: Physicians because they owned a horse, a set of lancets, and a good coat.
33:00
SPEAKER_02: What interesting reasoning, but okay.
33:04
SPEAKER_02: Medical licensing was almost non-existent in many states.
33:09
SPEAKER_02: Anyone could call themselves a doctor without facing legal consequences.
33:15
SPEAKER_02: Historian James, James Cassidy, is that his last name?
33:19
SPEAKER_02: Oh friend named Cassidy.
33:21
SPEAKER_02: Anyway, notes that before the widespread adoption of licensing laws in the late 19th century, American medicine was a marketplace of competing healers.
33:37
SPEAKER_02: What you know what I d I don't even want to know.
33:40
SPEAKER_02: Ranging from university trained physicians to midwives, herbalists, traveling surgeons, and outright charlatans.
33:51
SPEAKER_02: Is that how you say and because rural rural families have limited access to trained professionals, they often relied on whoever was nearby, even if that person's medical advice sounded more like folklore than science.
34:08
SPEAKER_02: This was the era of bloodletting, purging, blistering, and quote unquote heroic medicine.
34:16
SPEAKER_02: Treatments that often weaken patients further.
34:20
SPEAKER_02: It was also the era of patient patent medicines, miracle tonics, and home remedies that range from harmless to bizarre.
34:32
SPEAKER_02: Diaries and newspapers from the period are full of cures that today sound like punch lines.
34:41
SPEAKER_02: Poultices.
34:42
SPEAKER_03: Poultices made of an animal dung?
34:44
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
34:46
SPEAKER_03: Like Yes.
34:47
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
34:48
SPEAKER_02: Ewctonics brewed from soot and vinegar and treatments involving everything from tobacco smoke.
35:00
SPEAKER_02: Anemas enemas to mercury-based compounds.
35:07
SPEAKER_02: Are we stupid?
35:10
SPEAKER_13: Well, Arthur, a tobacco smoke-based enema, and enema is when they they they insert something up the butt to kind of clean you out.
35:20
SPEAKER_13: So literally, they're trying to heal you by blowing smoke up your ass.
35:26
SPEAKER_13: Yeah.
35:28
SPEAKER_13: So yeah, there's some stupidity there.
35:31
SPEAKER_02: I think it's time to wrap it up, folks.
35:35
SPEAKER_02: Some of these were earnest attempts to help, others were work of men who, as Josh Gates loves to point out, were absolute lunatics with medical theories that seemed to seem to cold from a fever drain.
35:57
SPEAKER_02: Man crush, by the way.
36:00
SPEAKER_02: You wrote that, not me.
36:02
SPEAKER_02: And into this medical vacuum came tuberculosis, which was slow, wasting, and relentless.
36:09
SPEAKER_02: Doctors could describe the symptoms, but they couldn't explain to the cause.
36:16
SPEAKER_02: They didn't know about bacteria, they didn't understand contagion, and they couldn't tell families why one person died, then another, then another, all with the same hollowed eyed decline.
36:33
SPEAKER_02: When the professionals had no answer, people turned to the explanations they did understand folklore, superstition, and inherited European beliefs about dead preying on the living.
36:48
SPEAKER_02: And rituals, the rituals were real.
36:51
SPEAKER_02: When conception structs struck a household repeatedly, neighbors gathered to discuss what could be done.
36:59
SPEAKER_02: They exhumed the first family member to die, believing that person most likely to be, quote, feeding, unquote.
37:11
SPEAKER_03: What?
37:12
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
37:14
SPEAKER_02: They examined the corpse for signs of unnatural preservations, organs still full of blood, skin that seemed too intact, bodies that looked fresh despite months in the Garrett grave.
37:28
SPEAKER_02: In reality, cold winter burials, sealed crypts, and natural decomposition explained these appearances.
37:37
SPEAKER_02: But without germ theory, without refrigeration, without medic trained medical professionals, these signs felt supernatural.
37:47
SPEAKER_02: If the community judged the dead to be dangerous, the ritual followed.
37:53
SPEAKER_02: In some towns.
37:55
SPEAKER_02: The ritual followed.
37:57
SPEAKER_02: In some towns, they they removed and burned the heart.
38:01
SPEAKER_02: In others, they burned the entire body.
38:05
SPEAKER_02: Jesus.
38:10
SPEAKER_02: Sometimes.
38:11
SPEAKER_02: Sometimes sometimes the ashes were mixed with water and given to the sick as a cure.
38:19
SPEAKER_02: In Connecticut, as the Griswold G Griswold burial discovered in 1990 revealed families sometimes rearranged the bones in protective patterns before reburying the corpse with safeguards meant to prevent further attacks.
38:39
SPEAKER_02: These practices were not French.
38:41
SPEAKER_02: Ministers wrote about them, doctors complained about them, newspapers documented them, and families, terrified and grievy, performed them because the people who were supposed to understand disease, the men in fine hats and good coats calling themselves doctors, and had no answers at all.
39:03
SPEAKER_02: The vampire panic wasn't just superstition.
39:06
SPEAKER_02: It was the predictable outcome of a world where medicine was guesswork, disease was mysterious, and the dead seemed to hold more power than living.
39:17
SPEAKER_02: Thank you, Arthur.
39:19
SPEAKER_13: That was very useful.
39:20
SPEAKER_13: And good.
39:21
SPEAKER_13: You're so talented.
39:22
SPEAKER_13: I love it, Brad.
39:24
SPEAKER_13: Thank you.
39:25
SPEAKER_04: So did a great job, though.
39:27
SPEAKER_13: And now another word from our sponsors.
39:30
SPEAKER_13: If you don't like taking words from our sponsors, here's what you can do about that.
39:34
SPEAKER_13: Our Patreon is only one or three dollars a month, which means for as little as$1 a month, you can get these versions of the show both early and ad-free.
39:46
SPEAKER_04: What are you what?
39:48
SPEAKER_04: Somebody's been attacking my pre-dried Jolly Rancher.
39:53
SPEAKER_04: They literally left me one.
39:56
SPEAKER_04: One.
39:56
SPEAKER_04: I'm sorry.
39:58
SPEAKER_04: One.
39:59
SPEAKER_04: They left me one piece of candy in the bag.
40:01
SPEAKER_04: Who does that?
40:03
SPEAKER_04: I don't know.
40:04
SPEAKER_04: Who leaves you one piece of candy in a bag?
40:06
SPEAKER_04: What?
40:07
SPEAKER_04: That's messed up, man.
40:09
SPEAKER_04: I'm sorry.
40:10
SPEAKER_13: We we have children.
40:11
SPEAKER_13: What you what do you want me to tell you?
40:14
SPEAKER_04: That's messed up, man.
40:16
SPEAKER_13: Anyway.
40:17
SPEAKER_04: Anyway.
40:18
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, was it you?
40:20
SPEAKER_04: It might have been you.
40:22
SPEAKER_04: It was it was you, wasn't it?
40:26
SPEAKER_04: I see the guilt.
40:27
SPEAKER_04: I had one piece.
40:28
SPEAKER_04: I s I see the guilt on your face.
40:30
SPEAKER_04: It was you.
40:31
SPEAKER_13: I had one piece earlier today.
40:33
SPEAKER_04: Uh-huh.
40:34
SPEAKER_04: Okay.
40:35
SPEAKER_13: Anyway, I was in the middle of Patreoning.
40:39
SPEAKER_04: No.
40:41
SPEAKER_04: Just when I discovered the Oh, wobbl, you poor thing.
40:46
SPEAKER_04: Anyway, it's your turn.
40:48
SPEAKER_04: Go ahead.
40:49
SPEAKER_13: Point is, is that if you don't want to stop for these ad breaks, Patreon, one or three dollars.
40:56
SPEAKER_13: And with that, I'm gonna continue to the most famous American case.
40:59
SPEAKER_04: Also, you should never leave someone with just one piece of candy.
41:06
SPEAKER_01: So much death, said his neighbors.
41:08
SPEAKER_01: A suspicious amount.
41:10
SPEAKER_01: They began to badger him, insisting that an evil lived under his family plot.
41:14
SPEAKER_12: It's time to get back to the show.
41:15
SPEAKER_13: Go ahead.
41:17
SPEAKER_13: Mercy Brown! By the winter of 1892, the Brown family of Exeter, Rhode Island had already been hollowed out by consumption.
41:27
SPEAKER_13: First it took Mary Eliza, the mother, then it claimed the eldest daughter, Mary Olive, then it set its sights on Edwin, the son, who fled west to Colorado in the hope that the dry air might save him.
41:41
SPEAKER_13: It didn't.
41:42
SPEAKER_13: He returned home pale, weak, coughing blood, showing the same slow wasting decline that had killed the others.
41:48
SPEAKER_13: And in Exeter, people talked.
41:51
SPEAKER_13: Consumption had ravaged rural Rhode Island for decades, but the Brown's misfortune felt different, too concentrated, too relentless, too much like something was reaching out from the grave and pulling the living down after it.
42:05
SPEAKER_13: Neighbors whispered the old explanations, the ones that had crossed the Atlantic with German, English, and Slavic settlers.
42:13
SPEAKER_13: The dead could trouble the living, the dead could feed on them, the dead could be the cause.
42:19
SPEAKER_13: Mercy Lena Brown had died only weeks earlier at nineteen years old.
42:25
SPEAKER_13: Because the ground had been frozen solid, her body had been kept in a crypt rather than buried, because that was the practice at the time.
42:34
SPEAKER_13: They had what they used to call receiving crypts, which is where they would put bodies waiting for the ground to get soft enough to bury them.
42:42
SPEAKER_03: Sure.
42:43
SPEAKER_03: Anyway, yeah.
42:45
SPEAKER_13: So when Edwin worsened, the town people insisted that the Brown family take action.
42:50
SPEAKER_13: George Brown, a quiet farmer who had already buried his wife and two daughters, agreed to the exhumation.
42:57
SPEAKER_13: He didn't believe in vampires, but he believed in his neighbors and he believed in desperation.
43:03
SPEAKER_13: On March 17, 1892, a small crowd gathered in the cemetery behind Chestnut Hill Baptist Church.
43:12
SPEAKER_13: The minister refused to attend.
43:14
SPEAKER_13: He wanted no part in superstition, but the local doctor, Harold Metcalf, came along.
43:21
SPEAKER_13: Perhaps out of curiosity, perhaps out of duty, perhaps he was one of those guys with a nice coat and some landsets.
43:28
SPEAKER_13: We know.
43:28
SPEAKER_04: We don't know.
43:29
SPEAKER_13: Yeah.
43:30
SPEAKER_13: Then they opened Mercy's crypt.
43:32
SPEAKER_13: Because she had been stored above ground in the coldest months of the year, Mercy's body was unusually well preserved.
43:39
SPEAKER_13: Her skin still clung to her bones, her hair remained, and when doctor Metcalfe examined her heart and lever liver, not lever, he found blood.
43:49
SPEAKER_13: Not liquid, but present enough to alarm the crowd.
43:53
SPEAKER_13: To the doctor, this was simply the result of refrigeration.
43:56
SPEAKER_13: To the townspeople it was proof.
43:59
SPEAKER_13: Newspaper.
44:00
SPEAKER_13: Newspapers later described the scene with a mix of fascination and horror.
44:03
SPEAKER_13: The Providence Journal reported that Mercy's heart and liver were removed and burned on a nearby rock.
44:10
SPEAKER_13: The ashes were mixed with water and given to Edwin as a cure, a ritual meant to sever the dead's hold on the living.
44:17
SPEAKER_13: It didn't work.
44:18
SPEAKER_13: Edwin died two months later.
44:20
SPEAKER_13: I'm surprised it took him that long.
44:21
SPEAKER_13: But the ritual wasn't about curing him.
44:24
SPEAKER_13: It was about control, about doing something in a world where disease moved invisibly, where doctors had no answers, and where families watched their loved ones waste away as though drained by an unseen hand.
44:38
SPEAKER_13: Mercy Brown became the most famous case of the New England vampire panic, not because it was unique, but because it was so well documented.
44:47
SPEAKER_13: Ministers wrote about it, doctors wrote about it, newspapers printed it like the Woonsocket Patriot, which is like the mu my favorite name in this thing.
44:57
SPEAKER_04: We have a we have a fulfillment center for my work out of Woonsocket Road Islands, so it's a pretty common name for me.
45:08
SPEAKER_13: And decades later, folklorists and historians pointed to Exeter as the moment when the old world's fears collided with the new world's ignorance.
45:17
SPEAKER_13: Mercy's story is often told as an oddity, a strange superstition from a bygone era, but in 1892 it wasn't strange at all.
45:27
SPEAKER_13: It was the logical outcome of a community fighting as a disease it didn't understand, guided by traditions older than the United States itself.
45:36
SPEAKER_13: And when old archaeologists uncovered the Griswold vampire burial in 1990, they confirmed what Mercy Brown's case had already made clear.
45:45
SPEAKER_13: New England's vampire panic wasn't fiction, it was history, and it was absolutely real.
45:51
SPEAKER_13: And every time one of us says Griswold, I picture the family from vacation.
45:56
SPEAKER_13: I I just I don't know.
45:58
SPEAKER_04: National Lambson's vacation, yeah.
46:00
SPEAKER_04: The Griswolds.
46:11
SPEAKER_04: She is amused by you, my love.
46:14
SPEAKER_11: Oh, is in the best way.
46:18
SPEAKER_11: So long before archaeologists uncovered the Griswold vampire burial, and long before Mercy Brown's name became synonymous with the panic, New England had already built a quiet, unsettling history of exhumations and rituals meant to stop the dead from feeding on the living.
46:35
SPEAKER_11: These weren't isolated incidents.
46:38
SPEAKER_11: They formed a pattern stretching across rural towns from the Connecticut River Valley to the Rhode Island Hills, a pattern of fear, folklore, and desperate attempts to understand a disease no one can see.
46:49
SPEAKER_11: One of the earliest documented cases comes from Windsor, Vermont in 1793.
46:55
SPEAKER_11: The Huntoon family had been devastated by consumption, and when yet another member fell ill, neighbors urged the patriarch Captain Isaac Huntoon to take action.
47:07
SPEAKER_11: According to local accounts preserved in town histories, the family exhumed the body of a recently deceased relative, removed the heart, and burned it on a blacksmith's forge.
47:17
SPEAKER_11: The ashes were mixed with water and given to the sick family member as a cure.
47:21
SPEAKER_11: It didn't save him, but the ritual was remembered and whispered about for decades as one of the first vampire incidents in the region.
47:29
SPEAKER_11: A few decades later, in Woodstock, Vermont, the Spaulding family faced a similar tragedy.
47:35
SPEAKER_11: Consumption swept through the households, and when the youngest son began to decline, the townspeople insisted that the dead were to blame.
47:43
SPEAKER_11: So in 1830, the Spauldings exhumed the body of a recently deceased daughter.
47:49
SPEAKER_11: A local newspaper later reported that her heart was burned and the ashes administered to her brother.
47:54
SPEAKER_11: The ritual was carried out in broad daylight with neighbors watching, convinced that they were witnessing a necessary act to save the living.
48:02
SPEAKER_11: Then there was Jew at City, Connecticut, a case so dramatic it reads like folklore, but it is preserved in 19th century newspaper accounts.
48:12
SPEAKER_11: In the 1850s, the Ray family lost several sons to consumption.
48:17
SPEAKER_11: When the last surviving son began to show symptoms, the townspeople urged the family to act.
48:23
SPEAKER_11: They exhumed two of the brothers, burned their remains, and scattered the ashes.
48:29
SPEAKER_11: The Norwich courier reported the incident with a mixture of horror and fascination, noting that the townspeople believed the dead were preying upon living.
48:37
SPEAKER_11: This case lingered in local memory so strongly that when archaeologists uncovered the Griswold burial in 1990, just a few miles away, they immediately connected it to the same tradition.
48:49
SPEAKER_11: Another case unfolded in Manchester, Vermont, where the Burton family suffered repeated losses in the early 1800s.
48:57
SPEAKER_11: Local histories describe how the community gathered in the cemetery, dug up the suspected corpse, and burned the heart.
49:04
SPEAKER_11: The ritual was performed not in secret but as a communal act, a grim acknowledgement that the living had to defend themselves from the dead.
49:12
SPEAKER_11: These cases, whether from Windsor, Woodstock, Jewett City, Manchester, or elsewhere in New England, form the backbone of the New England vampire panic.
49:22
SPEAKER_11: They show that Mercy Brown was not an anomaly, but the culmination of a long tradition.
49:28
SPEAKER_11: In each town, the pattern was the same.
49:30
SPEAKER_11: Consumption struck a family repeatedly, doctors had no answers, neighbors whispered old European beliefs, and the community turned to rituals older than the nation itself.
49:41
SPEAKER_11: All of these incidents, including that of Marcy Brown, the case that had become the panic's most famous chapter, show how super show how superstitious fears collided with real disease.
49:53
SPEAKER_11: It was the moment when the old world's fears collided with the new world's press when the vampire panic stepped out of folklore and into documented history.
50:02
SPEAKER_11: Taken together, these cases reveal a region grappling with a disease it couldn't understand.
50:07
SPEAKER_11: They show communities trying to impose order on chaos, guided by traditions carried across oceans and reshaped in the cold New England soil.
50:16
SPEAKER_11: And they remind us that the vampire panic wasn't a single event, but a cultural phenomenon, a decades-long struggle against an invisible enemy that felt supernatural because science had not yet cut off, had not yet caught up.
50:29
SPEAKER_11: New England's vampire history is a strange, unsettling, and deeply a strange, unsettling, and deeply human.
50:37
SPEAKER_11: And it's only the beginning.
50:39
SPEAKER_11: Because once you step outside New England, you find that vampire panics weren't just an American problem.
50:45
SPEAKER_11: They erupted across Europe, the Balkans, the British Isles, and in some cases well into the modern era.
50:53
SPEAKER_03: And now a ultimate word from our sponsors.
51:03
SPEAKER_01: So much death, said his neighbors.
51:05
SPEAKER_01: A suspicious amount.
51:06
SPEAKER_01: They began to badger him, insisting that an evil lived under his family plot.
51:12
SPEAKER_12: Really?
51:13
SPEAKER_12: What?
51:14
SPEAKER_04: The vampire panic world tour.
51:17
SPEAKER_04: Really?
51:19
SPEAKER_04: I think that's a cool movie.
51:21
SPEAKER_04: I mean it's sh such a weird show.
51:23
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, true.
51:25
SPEAKER_04: I guess that's that's a interesting way of looking at it.
51:30
SPEAKER_04: New England's vampire panic feels strange and uniquely American until you look outward toward Europe, the Balkans, and even modern rural communities, and realize that the fear of the dead feeding on the living is one of humanity's oldest and most persistent anxieties.
51:51
SPEAKER_04: The same rituals that unfolded in Vermont barns and Rhode Island cemeteries were happening in different forms across continents and centuries.
52:02
SPEAKER_04: One of the most striking parallels comes from Cornwall, England, where archaeologists recently uncovered graves dating back several hundred years that bore unmistakable signs of anti-vampire treatment.
52:18
SPEAKER_04: Bodies were buried face down, a practice meant to confuse or trap the dead should they rise.
52:25
SPEAKER_04: Some graves contained stones placed atop the corpse or heavy weights meant to pin the body in place.
52:34
SPEAKER_04: In a few cases, the skull had been removed or the bones rearranged.
52:40
SPEAKER_04: The same protective patterns seen in New England's Griswold burial.
52:45
SPEAKER_04: These Cornish graves weren't marked as unusual at the time, but they were simply part of local folk practice, a quiet acknowledgement that the dead could be dangerous if not properly restrained.
53:02
SPEAKER_04: These modern cases echo the famous Austrian and Serbian vampire panics of the early 18th century, which were so widespread and so dramatic that they helped create the very word vampire in Western Europe.
53:20
SPEAKER_04: In the 1720s and 1730s, reports of vampirism swept through Habsburg military territories.
53:30
SPEAKER_04: Soldiers stationed in Serbia and in northern Greece wrote official reports describing villagers exhuming corpses, burning hearts, and performing rituals nearly identical to those seen later in New England.
53:46
SPEAKER_04: The cases of Arnold Peoli and Peter Phlogewitz became international sensations.
53:57
SPEAKER_04: Peoli, a former soldier, was believed to have become a vampire after falling from a hay wagon and dying.
54:06
SPEAKER_04: When villagers began dying afterward, his body was exhumed and found fresh, prompting ritual burning.
54:15
SPEAKER_04: Plotowitz's case involved multiple deaths attributed to his restless corpse, and his exhumation was witnessed by Austrian officials who described the body as complete and undecayed, with blood at the mouth, classic signs of vampirism in local belief.
54:37
SPEAKER_04: These reports circulated through Europe's newspapers and scholarly journals, shocking Enlightenment thinkers and inspiring early vampire literature.
54:48
SPEAKER_04: They also helped cement the idea that vampires were not aristocratic monsters, but ordinary dead people who refused to stay put.
54:59
SPEAKER_04: Farther west in Bulgaria, archaeologists have discovered dozens of medieval graves containing vampire stakes.
55:08
SPEAKER_04: These were iron rods driven through the chest to pin the corpse to the earth.
55:13
SPEAKER_04: Some skeletons have their teeth removed and their limbs bound.
55:18
SPEAKER_04: These burials date from the 11th to 14th century, long before Bram Stroker, Brahm Stoker, long before Hollywood, long before the vampire became a romantic figure.
55:35
SPEAKER_04: They represent a practical physical attempt to stop the dead from rising.
55:40
SPEAKER_04: In Greece, the belief in Viracolus?
55:46
SPEAKER_03: Drycolacus.
55:47
SPEAKER_04: Drycolacus.
55:49
SPEAKER_04: I never would have gotten that.
55:51
SPEAKER_04: Which is a corpse that wanders, harms, or drains the living persisted well into the 19th century.
55:57
SPEAKER_04: Travelers' accounts describe villagers burning bodies, dismembering corpses, or placing heavy stones atop the graves.
56:06
SPEAKER_04: The Greek Orthodox Church even issued statements condemning the practice, which only proves how widespread it was.
56:15
SPEAKER_04: Even Ireland had its own version, the Derog Du, a female remnant who returned to drain the life from living.
56:26
SPEAKER_04: While Irish folklore didn't produce the same widespread panics seen in the Balkrans, archaeological archaeological finds show burials with stones or bricks placed in the mouth, which a common European method of preventing the dead from biting or speaking.
56:53
SPEAKER_04: And then there's Poland, where archaeologists have uncovered seventeenth century graves containing skeletons with sickles placed across their necks or abdomens.
57:05
SPEAKER_04: The idea was simple.
57:07
SPEAKER_04: If the corpse tried to rise, the sickle would just simply decapitate it.
57:14
SPEAKER_04: These burials were found in ordinary village cemeteries, suggesting that fear of the restless dead was woven into everyday life.
57:24
SPEAKER_04: And in a few small rural villages in the Balkans, locals have invaded their local cemetery to give a few bodies the anti-vampire treatment, including burning the heart of the corpse and mixing the ashes with water so family might take them as a remedy.
57:43
SPEAKER_04: I'd be interested to see if that ever worked to save anyone, because all of the people that we've described in our show died anyway.
57:53
SPEAKER_04: Seems like, you know, the that whole definition of an insanity to keep doing the same thing with the expectation of a different result.
58:04
SPEAKER_04: Anyway, sorry, I just had to bring that up because ew.
58:11
SPEAKER_04: And in a few small rural villages in the Balkans, locals have invaded their local cemetery to give the bodies the anti-vampire treatment, including burning of the heart, the corpse, mixing the ashes.
58:26
SPEAKER_04: Sorry, I repeated that.
58:28
SPEAKER_04: So the family might take it, take them as a remedy.
58:32
SPEAKER_04: Gives a whole new meaning to the word heartburn, and then some.
58:37
SPEAKER_04: But if Cornwall offers a glimpse into the past, the Balkans provide something even more startling.
58:45
SPEAKER_04: Vampire panics that continued into the modern area era.
58:52
SPEAKER_04: In rural Serbia, Bosnia, and Macedonia, the leaf in the vampire vampire, a restless, harmful dead person, never fully disappeared.
59:05
SPEAKER_04: In 2012, the Serbian village of Zarzoji made international news when the locals re-buried a man's remains after claiming he had returned as a vampire.
59:23
SPEAKER_04: The mayor issued a public warning, villagers placed garlic and crosses around their homes.
59:30
SPEAKER_04: It was centuries-old tradition reasserted itself.
59:35
SPEAKER_04: In the age of smartphones and satellite TV.
59:38
SPEAKER_04: It wasn't a joke.
59:40
SPEAKER_04: It was a community responding to fear the same way their ancestors had.
59:45
SPEAKER_04: Taken together, these global cases reveal a pattern as old as humanity.
59:51
SPEAKER_04: When disease strikes without explanation, when misfortune seems targeted, when death feels unnatural, people turn to the oldest stories they've ever known.
1:00:02
SPEAKER_04: They dig up the dead, they restrain them, they burn them, they try to sever whatever invisible thread seems to bind the living to the grave.
1:00:12
SPEAKER_04: New England's vampire panic wasn't an isolated oddity.
1:00:17
SPEAKER_04: It was part of a worldwide tradition, a shared human response to fear, grief, and the unknown.
1:00:25
SPEAKER_04: And the Balkans remind us that tradition isn't entirely gone.
1:00:30
SPEAKER_04: In some places, the dead still trouble the living, and communities still respond the way their ancestors did.
1:00:38
SPEAKER_13: Tales old as time, beauty and the blood-sucking beast.
1:00:43
SPEAKER_04: I think you worked on that one for a while.
1:00:46
SPEAKER_13: Actually, it just occurred to me while you were reading it.
1:00:48
SPEAKER_04: I see.
1:00:49
SPEAKER_03: Arthur, you want to take this next bit?
1:00:51
SPEAKER_03: Sure.
1:00:53
SPEAKER_03: Looks like it.
1:00:54
SPEAKER_02: When you look back at the New England Vampire Panic, it's a it's him doing to treat it as a curiosity, as a curiosity, a strange moment when frightened farmers dug up their relatives because they didn't understand tuberculosis.
1:01:13
SPEAKER_02: But the real legacy of the panic isn't the rituals or the the exclamations.
1:01:20
SPEAKER_02: It's the reminder of what happens when fear grows faster than knowledge.
1:01:26
SPEAKER_02: The panic unfolded in a world where disease moved invisibly, where doctors were often untrained or misguided, and where families watched loved ones waste away with no explanation.
1:01:40
SPEAKER_02: In that vacuum, folklore rushed in.
1:01:43
SPEAKER_02: Old European stories about the hungry dead, the restless corpse, and the revenants who drains the living who drains the living.
1:01:55
SPEAKER_02: These became tools for un understanding the inexplicable communiters.
1:02:01
SPEAKER_02: Communities didn't turn to vampires because they were foolish.
1:02:05
SPEAKER_02: They turned to vampires because they needed answers.
1:02:09
SPEAKER_02: And the answers they had were centuries old.
1:02:13
SPEAKER_02: That's the legacy.
1:02:16
SPEAKER_02: Fear thrives in the spaces where knowledge is then.
1:02:20
SPEAKER_02: The people of Exeter or Woodstock or Jewett City weren't international.
1:02:31
SPEAKER_02: Irrational.
1:02:32
SPEAKER_02: Weren't irrational, sorry.
1:02:34
SPEAKER_02: You're fine, just melting.
1:02:36
SPEAKER_02: They were doing what humans have always done, reaching for the simplest explanation that fits the emotional truth of the moment.
1:02:44
SPEAKER_02: A family is dying, something is draining them, something must be causing it.
1:02:49
SPEAKER_02: And if the living can be can't be blamed, then the dead must be.
1:02:54
SPEAKER_02: Modern historians like Michael Bell, who spent decades documenting these cases, argue that the panic reveals a deeper truth about human behavior.
1:03:07
SPEAKER_02: When confronted with complex problems, people often prefer explanations that feel personal, even if they're wrong.
1:03:15
SPEAKER_02: A vampire is easier to understand than a bacterium.
1:03:19
SPEAKER_02: A restless dead relative is easier to confront than an invisible pathogen.
1:03:25
SPEAKER_02: A ritual is easier to perform than waiting helplessly for silence to catch up.
1:03:31
SPEAKER_02: And that pattern hasn't gone away.
1:03:34
SPEAKER_02: We may not dig up graves anymore, but the same psychological mechanism still operates.
1:03:40
SPEAKER_02: When people don't understand a threat, whether it's a disease, a political movement, an economic shift, or a social state change, they often reach for the simplest, most emotionally satisfying explanation.
1:03:54
SPEAKER_02: Sometimes that explanation is a conspiracy.
1:03:57
SPEAKER_02: Sometimes it's a scapegoat.
1:04:00
SPEAKER_02: Sometimes it's a medical forical monster.
1:04:03
SPEAKER_02: The New England vampire panic shows us that monsters appear when we don't have enough information, or when the information we do have feels too complicated, too slow, or too frightening to accept.
1:04:17
SPEAKER_02: In the 19th century, the monster was a vampire.
1:04:21
SPEAKER_02: In the modern world, the monster might be a political ideology, a social group, a scientific theory, or a faceless other brain blamed for whatever feels threatening.
1:04:34
SPEAKER_02: The legacy isn't about vampires.
1:04:36
SPEAKER_02: It's about how communities respond to fear.
1:04:40
SPEAKER_02: It's about the way people cling to familiar stories when confronted with similar with unfamiliar dangers.
1:04:47
SPEAKER_02: It's about how folklore becomes a coping mechanism.
1:04:51
SPEAKER_02: It's about how misinformation fills the void left by uncertainty.
1:04:56
SPEAKER_02: And it's about how even today the my human mind prefers a simple villain to a complex truth.
1:05:05
SPEAKER_02: The New England vampire didn't fade because people became braver.
1:05:10
SPEAKER_02: It faded because knowledge expanded.
1:05:13
SPEAKER_02: Germ theory arrived, medical licensing became standardized, tuberculosis was understood, the invisible, the imminent enemy was named, studied, and eventually controlled.
1:05:25
SPEAKER_02: Once the real cause was known, the supernatural explanation lost its power.
1:05:31
SPEAKER_02: That's the final legacy.
1:05:33
SPEAKER_02: Monsters die when knowledge grows.
1:05:36
SPEAKER_02: And whenever knowledge falters, whenever science is doubted, whenever expertise is dismissed, whenever fear outpaces the understanding of old pattern threatens to return.
1:05:51
SPEAKER_02: Maybe not with vampires, but with something that fills the same psychological role.
1:05:56
SPEAKER_02: The panic reminds us that the lines Between folklore and fear is thin that the defense against monsters, literal or metaphorical, is understanding.
1:06:10
SPEAKER_13: For a phenomenon rooted in rural fear, grave digging, and medical ignorance, the New England vampire panic cast a surprisingly long shadow across modern culture.
1:06:22
SPEAKER_13: It didn't just leave behind newspaper clippings and odd burial patterns.
1:06:26
SPEAKER_13: It left behind ideas, images, and a mood that eventually seeped into literature, folklore studies, and even the creation of the modern vampire myth.
1:06:37
SPEAKER_13: The most famous thread in their legacy begins in Exeter, Rhode Island, with Mercy Brown's death in 1892.
1:06:45
SPEAKER_13: Her story was widely reported.
1:06:47
SPEAKER_13: The Providence Journal covered it.
1:06:49
SPEAKER_13: Regional papers picked it up, likely the Woonsocket Patriot.
1:06:54
SPEAKER_13: I just love that fans.
1:06:57
SPEAKER_13: And by spring of that year, the tale of a young woman exhumed for suspected vampirism had traveled far beyond New England.
1:07:04
SPEAKER_13: It reached New York, it reached Boston, and crucially, it reached London.
1:07:10
SPEAKER_13: Bram Stoker was working on Dracula at the time.
1:07:14
SPEAKER_13: He was a voracious reader of newspapers, especially American ones, and he kept scrapbooks of odd stories, medical curiosities, and supernatural accounts.
1:07:25
SPEAKER_13: Scholars like Michael Bell and Paul Barber have pointed out that Stoker had access to the very paper that carried the Mercy Brown story.
1:07:34
SPEAKER_13: In fact, one of Stoker's notes for Dracula references New England and Vampire, though he never explicitly cites Mercy by name.
1:07:43
SPEAKER_13: Did Mercy Brown inspire Dracula?
1:07:46
SPEAKER_13: We can't say with absolute certainty.
1:07:48
SPEAKER_13: Stoker never wrote I base loosely Resterna on Mercy Brown.
1:07:53
SPEAKER_13: But the timing is uncanny.
1:07:55
SPEAKER_13: Mercy's exclamation happened in March 1892.
1:07:59
SPEAKER_13: Stoker finished Dracula in 1897, and the parallels are striking.
1:08:04
SPEAKER_13: A young woman wasting away, a community convinced that she's being drained by a supernatural force, and a ritual involving her body meant to stop the spread of death.
1:08:15
SPEAKER_13: Whether Stoker consciously borrowed the story or simply absorbed it through the cultural ether, Mercy Brown's case is close enough to Dracula's creation that most scholars agree it likely influenced him.
1:08:27
SPEAKER_13: But the legacy doesn't end with Stoker.
1:08:30
SPEAKER_13: The New England vampire panic helped shape the modern vampire in subtle ways.
1:08:34
SPEAKER_13: Before the panic, vampires in literature were aristocratic predators, elegant, seductive, foreign.
1:08:41
SPEAKER_13: After the panic entered public consciousness, the vampire gained a second identity, the familiar dead, the person you know, the relative you buried, the loved one who returned not as a monster of romance, but as a monster of grief.
1:08:55
SPEAKER_13: The idea that the vampire is a revenant tied to family appears in later folklore studies, horror fiction, and even modern vampire cinema.
1:09:05
SPEAKER_13: The panic also influenced folklore scholarship when anthropologists and folklorists in the 20th century began cataloging global vampire traditions.
1:09:16
SPEAKER_13: New England's cases became a key example of how old world beliefs survived in the New World.
1:09:22
SPEAKER_13: Michael Bell's Food for the Dead and Paul Berber's Vampires, Burial and Death, both treat the panic as a crucial link between European revenant lore and American cultural history.
1:09:34
SPEAKER_13: The Griswold burial, Clark, discovered in 1990, cemented the panic's place in academic study by proving that rituals weren't just rumors, they were physically real.
1:09:46
SPEAKER_13: And then there's the broader cultural legacy.
1:09:49
SPEAKER_13: The panic became a symbol of how communities respond to fear.
1:09:53
SPEAKER_13: Modern writers, historians, and podcasters, you use the panic as a case to study and as a case study in how misinformation spreads, how folklore fills gaps in knowledge, and how people cling to simple explanations when confronted with complex problems.
1:10:15
SPEAKER_13: Yes, yes, some of them were very bad.
1:10:18
SPEAKER_13: The vampire panic appears in documentaries, museum exhibits, and college courses, not because of the supernatural, but because it reveals something deeply human.
1:10:27
SPEAKER_13: It shows us that when knowledge falters, monsters rise.
1:10:31
SPEAKER_13: That's why the New England vampire panic still resonates.
1:10:34
SPEAKER_13: It's not just a spooky footnote, it's a mirror.
1:10:38
SPEAKER_13: It reflects how communities behave under pressure, how fear becomes contagious, and how the dead can trouble the living even when they never rise from the grave.
1:10:49
SPEAKER_13: And Mercy Brown, the quiet girl from Exeter, whose heart was burned on a cold March morning, remains the most haunting reminder of this.
1:10:59
SPEAKER_13: Now, before I leave this, I want to give you an example of a modern monster.
1:11:05
SPEAKER_13: Here in Missouri, Amendment 3 is up for a vote.
1:11:08
SPEAKER_13: And what Amendment 3 says is that it is illegal to perform any sort of transgender surgery on children because it's part of the, and I'm gonna put this in quotes here, transgender agenda.
1:11:26
SPEAKER_13: Now, this is fear.
1:11:28
SPEAKER_13: Now, it's true, it's fear coming from a political source.
1:11:32
SPEAKER_13: It's being fear being used against a certain group of people, because if you're actually know a transgender, you realize they have no agenda beyond simply surviving and being accepted.
1:11:45
SPEAKER_13: Oh, how how how horrible.
1:11:49
SPEAKER_13: And that we do not need an amendment to ban surgeries that aren't being performed.
1:11:58
SPEAKER_13: Nobody is performing transgender surgeries on children.
1:12:02
SPEAKER_04: How about an amended to bring down the costs of living or the costs of groceries to feed said children so that people can afford to do that and pay the rent?
1:12:13
SPEAKER_04: Just a thought, just an idea.
1:12:15
SPEAKER_04: Crazy, crazy that.
1:12:27
SPEAKER_13: And it's that same thing that lets those people go, What is this?
1:12:33
SPEAKER_13: A mixture of my uncle's heart and water?
1:12:35
SPEAKER_13: Yeah, I'll drink that.
1:12:36
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, no.
1:12:38
SPEAKER_04: No.
1:12:39
SPEAKER_13: And now let's take a final word from our sponsors, and then we'll get into our summary and final thoughts.
1:12:47
SPEAKER_01: So much death, said his neighbors.
1:12:49
SPEAKER_01: A suspicious amount.
1:12:51
SPEAKER_01: They began to badger him, insisting that an evil lived under his family plot.
1:12:55
SPEAKER_12: It's time to get back to the show.
1:12:57
SPEAKER_12: Courtney, you are our guest, so I will let you begin.
1:13:00
SPEAKER_11: Panics and I I use the term panics to cover all the panics.
1:13:05
SPEAKER_11: You have the satanic panic, the vampire panic, you have just all sorts of panics.
1:13:11
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:13:11
SPEAKER_11: They're just yeah.
1:13:13
SPEAKER_11: It's they're all very fascinating to me because it's you really see that fear and that misunderstanding, and people take it and run.
1:13:22
SPEAKER_11: It just they run with it.
1:13:25
SPEAKER_11: Um, obviously, like, you know, people now today look back at what people were doing back then, and it's a lot of well, that's ridiculous, that's stupid, why would they ever think that?
1:13:36
SPEAKER_11: But that's all they knew.
1:13:38
SPEAKER_11: That's all they that's what they knew how to combat it was okay, let's it it's caught it's gotta be coming from the dead, let's burn their heart, let's shrink their ashes.
1:13:46
SPEAKER_11: Like that's gotta help us in some way.
1:13:50
SPEAKER_11: And I think it's it is it's an interesting commentary on how we evolve in some ways and how we don't evolve in others when we respond to things that make us panic.
1:14:01
SPEAKER_11: It's very interesting.
1:14:03
SPEAKER_13: You're so smart.
1:14:05
SPEAKER_03: I'm so glad you're here.
1:14:09
SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
1:14:12
SPEAKER_03: Wow, just I um I don't know.
1:14:18
SPEAKER_04: As a matriarch of a family, I can see if you're losing all of your children, if you're losing your siblings, your loved ones, wanting to do something.
1:14:30
SPEAKER_04: I I cannot see using pieces of my dead relatives in order to try to retain my living relatives.
1:14:47
SPEAKER_04: To me, that does not make sense, but then I've never been really one to go along with the crowd.
1:14:55
SPEAKER_04: I just I would have to say I'm sorry.
1:14:57
SPEAKER_04: There are certain things that are just death would be better then.
1:15:02
SPEAKER_04: And one of those is consuming someone else's dead body remains.
1:15:09
SPEAKER_04: I just um we're all gonna go.
1:15:12
SPEAKER_04: We'll be together somewhere.
1:15:14
SPEAKER_04: I just you know I I I I would have that we all have our stopping point.
1:15:21
SPEAKER_04: That is my line, that's my due.
1:15:23
SPEAKER_04: Do not pass go, do not collect$200.
1:15:27
SPEAKER_04: I will not be consuming anyone in this family, extended or otherwise, to keep myself alive.
1:15:35
SPEAKER_04: It's not happening, just no.
1:15:38
SPEAKER_13: But better death than drinking some of Uncle Charlie.
1:15:42
SPEAKER_04: Absolutely.
1:15:44
SPEAKER_04: Absolutely.
1:15:46
SPEAKER_04: Uncle Charlie and I will have a good laugh about it on the other side because I'm no.
1:15:52
SPEAKER_04: Just no.
1:15:53
SPEAKER_04: And I just it's it's it's like the kind of reminds me of it the insanity of people saying that drag queens shouldn't read to children because that's harmful to the children.
1:16:10
SPEAKER_04: It's it's like it's an idea that if you stop and use your common sense, how do the two things correlate?
1:16:21
SPEAKER_04: It doesn't make any sense.
1:16:22
SPEAKER_04: Why would you consume the body of someone who has already died to stop from dying yourself?
1:16:31
SPEAKER_04: The two things just don't correlate.
1:16:34
SPEAKER_04: They they don't they don't ma it doesn't mesh.
1:16:37
SPEAKER_04: It doesn't make any sense.
1:16:40
SPEAKER_04: You know, a lot of things back then, you're like, okay, maybe I could see it.
1:16:43
SPEAKER_04: That's not one of them.
1:16:45
SPEAKER_13: Yeah, but uh and just no.
1:16:48
SPEAKER_13: But in the 1960s and early 70s I don't care.
1:16:52
SPEAKER_13: Wait, no, I'm telling you.
1:16:54
SPEAKER_13: In the 1960s and early 70s, there was a treatment for allergies, and that what they would do is they would expose you to an allergen, then they would take your urine and inject it back into you.
1:17:10
SPEAKER_04: Also, again, not doing that either.
1:17:13
SPEAKER_04: No, it's it's waste for a reason.
1:17:17
SPEAKER_04: It it goes out, it does not come back in.
1:17:20
SPEAKER_04: No.
1:17:21
SPEAKER_11: I think humans do things out of sheer, like the weirdest things out of sheer desperation, including like around urine.
1:17:27
SPEAKER_11: It's it's it's desperation, and I think desperation is irrational.
1:17:31
SPEAKER_04: It's some things just like it's it's like I've heard that that as people using urine as as a beauty treatment too, like washing their face with it and stuff.
1:17:41
SPEAKER_04: And again, like there are some things that are just not worth it.
1:17:45
SPEAKER_04: There's a whole micro.
1:17:46
SPEAKER_04: I don't care if that means I'm never gonna have a wrinkle if I wash my face with potty every day.
1:17:54
SPEAKER_04: The potty shall not meet the face unless there is an accident with an infant.
1:17:59
SPEAKER_04: That's it.
1:17:59
SPEAKER_04: That's the only reason that potty should meet the face ever.
1:18:04
SPEAKER_03: Like ever.
1:18:06
SPEAKER_03: Like poor Courtney's gonna have.
1:18:12
SPEAKER_03: So I the reasons don't reason.
1:18:16
SPEAKER_04: They don't, it doesn't, it doesn't mesh.
1:18:19
SPEAKER_04: It just sometimes you just have to know when to say no.
1:18:24
SPEAKER_04: And this would have been one of those times for me.
1:18:28
SPEAKER_04: It's like if you if take me, because I'm not eating uncle bread.
1:18:34
SPEAKER_04: I'm just I'm not here.
1:18:37
SPEAKER_04: Just line me up, take me out, take care of, get it, get it over and done with.
1:18:43
SPEAKER_04: That that is not how we're fixing that problem.
1:18:45
SPEAKER_04: Just take out the rest of the family.
1:18:46
SPEAKER_04: That makes way more sense to me.
1:18:48
SPEAKER_04: And then you don't have to work because no, just no, all the no.
1:18:53
SPEAKER_04: So that is my that that's that's my my final thought is just this is all the no.
1:18:58
SPEAKER_13: Now you were starting to say something, I didn't catch it all.
1:19:02
SPEAKER_13: So I I but I I just uh when we were talking about drinking Uncle Fred, I think.
1:19:09
SPEAKER_13: Or maybe when she was talking about rubbing pee on your face, I'm not sure.
1:19:12
SPEAKER_11: Oh, there's a whole My Strange uh uh My Strange Addiction episode about it.
1:19:16
SPEAKER_11: Is there?
1:19:17
SPEAKER_11: Well yes, a woman she was diagnosed with cancer and she was going down the homeopathic route and she came upon urine therapy and she drank it, she bathed in it, she used it as like eye drop, she used it as everything, and she was insistent that it was curing her melanoma.
1:19:40
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
1:19:42
SPEAKER_04: Good for her.
1:19:43
SPEAKER_04: I I can't imagine sitting in the same room with her was enjoyable for the folks from the TV show, but maybe they're kind of funny that it doesn't bother them.
1:19:53
SPEAKER_04: I just I mean they saw a bunch of crud.
1:19:56
SPEAKER_13: I think she misunderstood the word.
1:19:59
SPEAKER_13: I think they would they when they said you're in therapy, they weren't spelling it you are I-n-e.
1:20:06
SPEAKER_04: You are in therapy.
1:20:09
SPEAKER_04: You're on it today.
1:20:11
SPEAKER_04: All the puns and jokes.
1:20:12
SPEAKER_04: Check you out.
1:20:15
SPEAKER_13: Well, it somebody believes in me, and I like that.
1:20:21
SPEAKER_02: Arthur, you're up, bro.
1:20:23
SPEAKER_02: It feels like it should be common sense.
1:20:26
SPEAKER_02: I don't care when this was, it feels like it should be common sense.
1:20:30
SPEAKER_02: If you put something in your body, it shouldn't be what your body is getting rid of.
1:20:36
SPEAKER_02: And it definitely shouldn't be from another person when they're dead.
1:20:43
SPEAKER_13: I I mean Yeah, I just Notable exception to be made for like the guys from Alive, the the people who crashed in the Andes who had to eat other people.
1:20:54
SPEAKER_13: I'm not saying I would do it.
1:20:56
SPEAKER_03: I might choose to die, but it's your choice, but desperation is is yeah.
1:21:06
SPEAKER_03: I cannot see myself ever being that hungry.
1:21:09
SPEAKER_03: Nope.
1:21:13
SPEAKER_03: It's just dumb.
1:21:15
SPEAKER_03: It's just this is dumb.
1:21:18
SPEAKER_03: Oh in the right mind.
1:21:20
SPEAKER_02: Let someone get get sick, and then just be like, oh yeah, you're sick?
1:21:26
SPEAKER_02: Oh yeah, let's eat your body then.
1:21:29
SPEAKER_03: Let's use your b whoa No, just no, no, all the no year it was.
1:21:40
SPEAKER_03: I really, I really don't, I don't give a crap.
1:21:44
SPEAKER_13: I understand that.
1:21:45
SPEAKER_13: The only thing I will say in their defense is you're dealing with people who who were who didn't have a lot of learning.
1:21:56
SPEAKER_13: And so when a guy shows up who says he's a doctor, and mind you, they weren't licensing them, I could have showed up and said I'm a doctor.
1:22:04
SPEAKER_13: And I absolutely shouldn't.
1:22:06
SPEAKER_13: I don't know enough.
1:22:08
SPEAKER_13: Totally true.
1:22:10
SPEAKER_13: And I say things trying to be funny, someone might believe me.
1:22:15
SPEAKER_13: Like I used to tease Laura all the time, let's not feed the children.
1:22:19
SPEAKER_13: That way they don't learn to associate food with growing, and then we'll never have to feed them because they'll be strong and whole and never eat.
1:22:27
SPEAKER_13: And I was joking, I was being funny.
1:22:30
SPEAKER_13: But if I'm going around claiming I'm a doctor, someone might believe me and actually try that nonsense.
1:22:38
SPEAKER_04: That was that was his thing when I got pregnant with Arthur that I needed to not feed Arthur when he was born because then he wouldn't expect it, and we'd never have to feed him.
1:22:50
SPEAKER_04: That was that was his great rule of thumb there for raising children that children only need to be fed because we feed them and therefore they expect to be fed.
1:23:01
SPEAKER_04: So if if you don't feed them when they're born, they don't expect it, and therefore they never need to be fed.
1:23:07
SPEAKER_04: And of course, we we know realistically that that is not the case, but he he doesn't just say a joke once and let it go.
1:23:16
SPEAKER_04: No, he really commits to the bit, Courtney.
1:23:20
SPEAKER_04: He he really he goes all in.
1:23:22
SPEAKER_04: He doesn't let it go.
1:23:26
SPEAKER_13: But my point is if I were a doctor claiming this, some fool might try to do it.
1:23:35
SPEAKER_04: Still be ridiculous, but okay.
1:23:37
SPEAKER_13: Yes, I agree.
1:23:40
SPEAKER_04: There are definitely there are definitely people out there that are not the smartest a lot of the people here in America who might have helped elect an idiot to office.
1:23:53
SPEAKER_04: So an army sorry, that was my out loud voice.
1:23:58
SPEAKER_13: It's okay, we'll get a couple angry emails and I'll ignore them.
1:24:04
SPEAKER_13: It's fine.
1:24:06
SPEAKER_13: But yeah, I mean that's my only that's my only way I can see a defense is that some of these people literally were ignorant.
1:24:18
SPEAKER_13: Like the definition of the word ignorant.
1:24:21
SPEAKER_13: Yep.
1:24:21
SPEAKER_13: And so when someone came along who claimed to have medical knowledge, they followed them blindly, right?
1:24:29
SPEAKER_13: Yeah, and and I I don't blame them for that, but I do think that at some point you have to have a line, and and potty and body parts should be on the other side of that line.
1:24:41
SPEAKER_13: Yep, and other than that, my only other final thought is is that humans are uh what's there's a great line in the original Men in Black.
1:24:51
SPEAKER_13: Humans are panicky, dumb, stupid animals, and you know it, because we get scared and then we go and then we act like complete idiots.
1:25:02
SPEAKER_04: And something that the X-Men comics was always really verbal about was that humanity fears what they don't understand, and I think that all of this boils down to that we as a race fear what we can't comprehend what we don't understand, and fear causes people to do irrational things like eating body parts, I guess, and bathing in urine.
1:25:33
SPEAKER_13: Okay, you just dropped an X-Men quote.
1:25:36
SPEAKER_13: I I can't top that.
1:25:37
SPEAKER_13: I think this is where we wrap up the show.
1:25:40
SPEAKER_03: Ten minutes our show.
1:25:44
SPEAKER_13: Uh I X-Men quote.
1:25:46
SPEAKER_13: Yeah, okay, good.
1:25:48
SPEAKER_13: Good.
1:25:49
SPEAKER_13: Thanks for listening.
1:25:50
SPEAKER_13: Thanks for keeping us in the Good Pods Top 100.
1:25:53
SPEAKER_13: Thanks for being members of the fam.
1:25:55
SPEAKER_13: Thanks to Blue, Lexi, Laura, and Hitler.
1:26:00
SPEAKER_13: Thanks to Edward October of Octoberpod for our elevator history of history.
1:26:05
SPEAKER_13: The man is truly the voice of indie podcasting.
1:26:08
SPEAKER_13: Thanks to the fine artists at Pixabay who provide us with our weird noises and other sound effects.
1:26:14
SPEAKER_13: Thanks also go out to our production partner, Southern Gothic Media.
1:26:20
SPEAKER_13: Thanks, of course, to Courtney from Book of the Dead Podcast.
1:26:24
SPEAKER_13: She is our our New Jersey member of the fan.
1:26:28
SPEAKER_04: And amazing.
1:26:30
SPEAKER_13: And amazing.
1:26:31
SPEAKER_13: Thanks to Bill Barrett.
1:26:32
SPEAKER_13: Last name spelled B-E-H-R-E-N-D-T.
1:26:36
SPEAKER_13: Why do I spell it?
1:26:37
SPEAKER_13: Because Bill's the guy that does our theme music.
1:26:39
SPEAKER_13: If you need music, you can reach him at Bill Barron at spcglobal.net.
1:26:43
SPEAKER_13: Thanks to Paige Elmore of the Pop Culture Diary, who continues to combine her love of Canva with Arthur's artwork for logo art for us now and then.
1:26:53
SPEAKER_13: Thank you, Paige.
1:26:56
SPEAKER_13: Thanks to Aaron Gunerk of the Big Dumb Fun Show, who continues to promote us locally.
1:27:01
SPEAKER_13: And join us next week as we can discuss the Conny's murder from 1900.