Lore 272: Tick Talk

We live our lives by the clock and never think twice about it. But history is filled with stories that should make us very, very afraid of time. Narrated and produced by Aaron Mahnke, with writing by GennaRose Nethercott, research by Cassandra de Alba, and music by Chad Lawson. ————————— Lore Resources: Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music https://www.lorepodcast.com/music Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources https://www.lorepodcast.com/sources Official Lore Merchandise: lorepodcast.com/shop https://www.lorepodcast.com/shop All the shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com https://www.grimandmild.com ————————— Sponsors: MeUndies: Get insanely comfy-yet-sexy Undies and Loungewear, and score huge site-wide savings at MeUndies.com/lore https://www.meundies.com/lore, enter promo code LORE. Bubbly Cleaning: Head to BubblyCleaning.com/LORE https://www.bubblycleaning.com/lore to get your first 3 hours of cleaning for only $19. Thanks so much to Bubbly Cleaning for sponsoring this episode! Quince: Premium European clothing and accessories for 50% to 80% less than similar brands, at Quince.com/LORE http://www.quince.com/lore for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Acorns Earl: Acorns Early is a smart money app and debit card for kids that helps them learn the value of money. Head to AcornsEarly.com/LORE https://www.acornsearly.com/lore, or download the Acorns Early app to get started today! To report a concern regarding a radio-style, non-Aaron ad in this episode, reach out to [email protected] mailto:[email protected] with the name of the company or organization so we can look into it. To advertise on our podcast, please reach out to [email protected] mailto:%[email protected], or visit our listing here https://www.advertisecast.com/lore. ————————— ©2025 Aaron Mahnke. All rights reserved.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:42Speaker 00

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• 1:00Speaker 01

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• 1:46Aaron Mahnke?

  We've all heard of the butterfly effect. That idea that one, tiny, insignificant action can ripple out into massive, unpredicted consequences. Like how Gavrillo Princip stopping to eat a sandwich allowed him to assassinate the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, thus starting World War I. And sure, that's a famous one, but there are countless more examples. Like the fact that a simple cup of coffee led to one of the bloodiest moments in history. There are few routines more sacred than our morning cup of joe, right? In fact, sacred is more on the nose than you might think. You see, the first coffee was imbibed by Muslim mystics known as Sufis, who, during the Ottoman Empire, drank the stuff ceremonially while chanting the name of God.

• 2:30Aaron Mahnke?

  Soon, the beverage began to travel, and so naturally, people needed a place to buy it. Some say the world's first coffee shop was called Kiva Han, and it opened in roughly 1475 in Constantinople, Turkey, what is now Istanbul. Other sources say numerous cafes popped up in Cairo, Aleppo, and Constantinople alike. Whatever the case, early coffee shops served the same role in society as they do today. They were places to socialize and to share intellectual discourse, to discuss politics and current events. And because coffee was cheap, these watering holes allowed people of all classes to mingle and converse about the world around them. Flash forward to pre-revolution France,

• 3:15Aaron Mahnke?

  coffee shops still served as intellectual hubs and thus provided a space for French revolutionaries to gather, discuss injustice, plot, and ultimately enact one of the most violent revolutions in world history. In short, some anonymous caffeinated Sufi was the flap of a butterfly's wing that led to the French Revolution hundreds of years later. Time is funny like that. History is one great big Rube Goldberg machine, each moment a link in an endless chain of cause and effect. And if stories from history teach us anything, it's that time is more entangled than we could ever have imagined. I'm Aaron Mahnke, and this is Lore.

• 4:16Aaron Mahnke?

  Imagine that I were to hand you three photographs. The first depicts a child, the second, an adult, and the third, an old man. Now, place them in order in your mind. I'm willing to bet that you'd line them up left to right, starting with the child at the far left, then the adult, followed by the old man. When we think about the movement of time, it may seem pretty straightforward, literally. Except, here's the thing. It turns out the way people conceptualize time actually varies from culture to culture, and a lot of it has to do with the language that we speak. As English speakers, most of us conceive of time as a horizontal line, a line that, yes, moves from left to right. Why? Because that's the direction that we read in.

• 5:00Aaron Mahnke?

  Plop those same three photographs in front of a Hebrew speaker, though, and they'll probably arrange them in the opposite direction, from right to left, just like the Hebrew language. People who speak Mandarin, which is read vertically from top to bottom, often envision time as a vertical line, where the past is up and the future is down. Pretty wild, right? And to spin your head even more, consider that in English, we kind of conceive of time in two directions: left to right, for sure, but also back to front. The future is ahead of us, the past is behind us. And this is visible in our language, too. We're running behind if we're late, and we're looking forward to something in the future.

• 5:42Aaron Mahnke?

  Heck, in Swedish, the word for "future," framtid, literally translates as "front time." But get ready for a real-time warp, because, surprise, surprise, not all cultures see it that way. Speakers of Aymara, an Andean language, use a word for the future that means "behind time." After all, we can't see the future, so it must be at our backs, while we can see the past, as if it were right in front of us. And honestly, that makes a lot of sense. Now, as someone who studies folklore and oral tradition, I have to wonder, what about cultures without a written language? How do spoken cultures order time if they can't link it with the direction in which they read? Well, ask the speakers of Kuuk Tair, an Aboriginal Australian language.

• 6:27Aaron Mahnke?

  When handed those same three photographs, they won't orient them from left to right, right to left, or even up and down. No, they'll arrange those cards differently depending on which cardinal direction they are currently facing, moving from east to west. It's best understood by this quote from Lyra Boroditsky, author of a seriously fascinating paper called "How Language Shapes Thought." Here's what it says: "When they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body, and so on. We never told anyone which direction they were facing. The Kuuk Tair knew that already." Meanwhile, speakers of Yupno, an indigenous language from Papua New Guinea,

• 7:12Aaron Mahnke?

  conceive of time in topographical terms: uphill and downhill, representing the valley in which the Yupno people live. Oh, and don't forget, this is all just how we perceive and experience time, which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with how time actually works. In fact, physicists aren't so sure that distinct categories of past, present, and future even exist at all. And hey, if you aren't ready to take my word for it, how about Albert Einstein? He said, and I quote, "The past, present, and future are only illusions, even if stubborn ones." So, time isn't linear. Well then, what the heck does it look like? Well, many physicists believe in a concept called block time, in which time functions like a landscape,

• 7:56Aaron Mahnke?

  where all past, present, and future events are hanging out together. It's a weird concept to try to wrap your brain around, so if it's not making sense to you, don't feel bad. I was in the same boat until I heard this particular analogy. Imagine an old movie shot on film. The whole story is there, developed on that strip of film, all existing at once, coiled up on the reel. But the projector can only see one frame at a time, moving along in a straight line. According to some theorists, time works a little like that. It's all happening at once, it's all developed, but we can only see one frame at a time. Now, I know what you're thinking, if time is a film strip, shouldn't it be possible to rewind and fast-forward?

• 8:41Aaron Mahnke?

  Well, if a handful of former Vatican priests are to be believed, all you need is the right VCR, which not only exists, but happens to be sitting snug in the Vatican archives. It's called the chronovisor, and it was supposedly created by a Benedictine monk named Father Pellegrino Ernetti. Allegedly, he worked with a scientific team that included the architect of the atom bomb, Enrico Fermi, and former Nazi scientist Werner von Braun. Although there's not even the slightest bit of evidence to support this, we'll just have to take the priest's word for it. Using antennae, metal, and cathode rays, the chronovisor was designed to pick up echoes from the past, the way that a TV can pick up channels and display them on a screen.

• 9:25Aaron Mahnke?

  And according to these Vatican priests, the thing worked. Ernetti claimed to have watched Cicero speaking to the Roman Senate. He saw the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. But Ernetti's boldest chronovisor claimed that he had watched the crucifixion of Christ, which he even snapped a photo of, and then published in an Italian magazine in 1972. Granted, the photo looks suspiciously identical to a cheap Jesus statue hanging in an Umbrian church, but, you know, who am I to judge? Years later, in 1994, as Ernetti lay on his deathbed, his conscience seemed to get the best of him, and he admitted that it was all a hoax. Well, sort of. You see, in some accounts, he conceded that there was never a chronovisor,

• 10:09Aaron Mahnke?

  and that he had made the whole thing up to draw more people to the Catholic Church. But other accounts claim that he only admitted to faking the photo, as well as a transcription of an ancient speech, but swore that the chronovisor itself was real. And they claim any confessions Ernetti may have made were only done under pressure from the Church. Why would they want to keep it hidden? Well, you'll have to ask Pope Pius XII. After all, he's the one who supposedly hid the chronovisor deep within the Vatican archives. Desperate to keep such a powerful weapon from falling into the wrong hands.

• 10:56Aaron Mahnke?

  The concept is seductive: the ability to travel through time. Countless sci-fi stories have explored the idea, but that's unfortunately all they are: stories. Not to be a killjoy here, but physicists tend to agree that time travel isn't actually possible. There are a bunch of reasons why, a big one being that the amount of energy needed to build a time machine would be more energy than there exists in the entire universe. Bummer. And yet, that leaves us with a pretty big mystery. How do we explain something that numerous, regular, everyday people have claimed to experience? The concept of a time slip. Now, we aren't talking about Marty McFly and the DeLorean here. Time slips aren't facilitated by a machine.

• 11:40Aaron Mahnke?

  In fact, they aren't actually on purpose. Instead, this is the kind of time traveling that happens randomly and without warning, totally bewildering an unwitting victim. Take the experience of a middle-aged woman named Miss EF Smith from rural Scotland. On January 2nd of 1950, Miss Smith was walking home from a friend's cocktail party, her little dog in tow. She hadn't intended to walk, mind you. After all, she lived 10 miles away in the town of Letham, and it was late at night. But when icy rain caused her car to slide into a ditch, she was forced to abandon it and start trudging along on foot. Shivering against the cold, Miss Smith marched down country roads. She passed acres of farmland and silent hills.

• 12:25Aaron Mahnke?

  And finally, almost eight miles later at 2 o'clock in the morning, she reached the outskirts of Letham. And there, she saw them. It was a group of people, and they were carrying flaming red torches. They wore strange garments, tunics with tight pants underneath, and antiquated rolled headgear. But the most jarring part would have to be the bodies. The ground was strewn with corpses, corpses that the torch-bearing people were sorting through, one by one. "They were obviously looking for their own dead," Miss Smith would later report. "The one I was watching would bend down and turn a body over, and if he didn't like the look of it, he just turned it back on its face and went on to the next one."

• 13:10Aaron Mahnke?

  Smith's little dog began to growl, but just as she arrived at the town, the figures disappeared. And that was that, they were simply gone. So, who exactly were those people? And more importantly, who were the dead? Well, both Smith herself and investigators from the Society for Psychical Research came to the same conclusion. Miss EF Smith must have witnessed the aftermath of an event known as the Battle of Nectonsmere, a battle I might add that took place in the year 685. That's right, it seems that Miss Smith had slipped nearly 1,300 years back in time. The garments she'd seen, along with the red-handled torches, roughly matched how ancient Pictish

• 13:53Aaron Mahnke?

  warriors would have looked during Nectonsmere. The battle was an absolute slaughter, which would explain the bodies. Plus, many have long believed it had indeed taken place on the outskirts of Lethem. In short, all signs pointed to time travel. At least it did, until 2006, when new research revealed that the battle had likely taken place in an entirely different location. Which leaves a chilling question: if it wasn't the Battle of Nectonsmere that Miss Smith had witnessed, what on earth was it? Yes, it's true that she was alone and exhausted, and she would have seen this all through dark rain, and she was probably a little drunk, too. Maybe Miss Smith had only thought that she had spotted those figures, but it's a lot

• 14:38Aaron Mahnke?

  harder to dismiss what happened just seven years later to three 15-year-old Royal Navy cadets in Suffolk, England. One Sunday morning in October of 1957, William Lang, Michael Crowley, and Ray Barker were sent out on a map-reading exercise. They were tasked with navigating across four or five miles of countryside to reach a small town called Kersey, a picturesque little village regularly drawing a bustle of tourists to its quaint, postcard-perfect streets. As they approached, the cadets could hear the church bells ringing and glimpse the steeple through the trees. And yet, when they finally entered the town, something was off. The village was utterly deserted.

• 15:21Aaron Mahnke?

  No tourists, no residents in the streets, no open businesses. The only store they found was a filthy cobweb-ridden butcher shop in which rotting carcasses of oxen had been hung, now green with age, as if abandoned weeks before. Not only that, but there was no sound anywhere in the town. No birds or engines, and most notably, no church bells. In fact, the church they had seen from afar was no longer there. But the strangest part of all, there was not a single sign of modernity. No cars, no telephone wires, no TV aerials. The architecture of the houses looked almost medieval, and when the boys peered through

• 16:02Aaron Mahnke?

  windows, they found the rooms barren and empty, devoid of people and furniture. And while it had been autumn when the cadets set out that morning, the leaves on the trees in town were a bright spring green. The boys, as you can expect, were freaked out. One later recalled, and I quote, "The place felt quite evil and hostile to us." Oh, and as if it weren't already creepy enough, the young cadets were also struck with a terrifying certain sensation that they were being watched. After about half an hour of exploring, these three cadets fled, returning to base to report their experience to their superiors, who, of course, dismissed them and laughed it off. But paranormal investigators have a different opinion.

• 16:45Aaron Mahnke?

  It's believed that the three teenagers had slipped back in time to the mid-15th century. And there's compelling evidence for it, too. For one, the large church tower in town- would not be completed until the late 1400s. And the butcher shop they saw? That same spot in modern Kersey, while currently a private residence, had been a butcher shop in the past. Then there was the lack of furniture, which would have been common in the 15th century as the average country cottage dweller couldn't afford much, with residents keeping their belongings in baskets or boxes instead. But of course, there's one final detail in need of explanation. Who was it that the boys felt watching them? Well, according to some theories, the answer is simple.

• 17:29Aaron Mahnke?

  The eerie watchers were none other than the people of bustling, modern-day Kersey. Fact or fiction, one thing is clear. Time slips into the past are a perplexing situation. And honestly, it's difficult to know exactly what to make of it all. But history tells us that there's something even more terrifying than tumbling into the past. The glimpse of a future that you're powerless to change.

• 18:12Aaron Mahnke?

  Leslie had decided that a quiet Saturday morning was in order. As a housewife in 1974, she would have been on her feet much of the week, cleaning and cooking and keeping up the home. But finally, it was time to relax. And so that morning, she settled in to watch a movie being shown on TV. Just as she got comfortable, though, the screen went blank, and the broadcast was interrupted by an emergency bulletin. It was horrible news, too. The anchor reported that a massive explosion had just taken place at the Nipro Chemical Plant in Flixborough, England, just 25 miles away from the town of Grimsby where Leslie lived. According to the newsflash, a pipe at the plant had failed,

• 18:54Aaron Mahnke?

  causing a chemical leak and igniting a massive cloud of vapor. The explosion was like a bomb going off. It shattered the plant's windows and cracked the foundations of nearby buildings. Out of the seventy-two employees on shift at the chemical plant that day, twenty-eight had been killed, with another thirty-six badly injured. Off-site, fifty-three more people had been wounded due to their proximity to the building, and Leslie watched in horror as the dead were numbered and the culpable chemicals named. And then, the newsflash ended, and her movie resumed as normal. Later that day, two friends joined Leslie for lunch, and as they chatted and caught up,

• 19:37Aaron Mahnke?

  she realized that neither of her guests had heard about the explosion yet. She told them the tragic story, just as the newsflash had reported it. Come nightfall, Leslie and her husband sat down to watch the evening news. Naturally, the anchors discussed the Flicksboro disaster, but there was something odd about the reports. You see, the evening news gave the time of the disaster as just before 5:00 PM. Leslie was confused. After all, hadn't she seen the bulletin that morning? Her husband teased her about getting the time wrong, while Leslie assumed that it had been the evening news anchors who were mistaken. But either way, the couple went to bed and nearly forgot about the whole discrepancy. And they might have, if not for the next morning's papers.

• 20:21Aaron Mahnke?

  There, the reporters also asserted that the explosion had taken place at 4:53 in the afternoon. Frantically, Leslie called her friends who had been over for lunch, long before 4:53 PM. Had they remembered her telling them about the explosion? Or was she losing her mind? Much to her relief, both friends affirmed that, yes, Leslie had absolutely told them about the disaster at lunchtime, numbers and details included. In fact, they were so adamant about this that both would later sign official statements, insisting as much. Leslie was not going mad, but what she had experienced was much, much worse. She had known about a horrifying event, hours before it had taken place.

• 21:05Aaron Mahnke?

  "When I realized what had happened," she later told the Grimsby Evening Telegraph, "I felt cold and started shaking. I kept thinking, if only I'd known, I could have warned the factory that something was going to happen. I might have been able to save the twenty-eight people who lost their lives." The story of Leslie Brennan, or Leslie Castleton in some reports, is certainly a strange one. Was it a time slip, second sight, or something else? I imagine conspiracy theorists might interpret the story as sinister evidence that the explosion was planned, and that the broadcast was pre-recorded. But if that's the case, why would Leslie have been the only one to see it?

• 21:46Aaron Mahnke?

  Some researchers believe that Leslie experienced a premonition, one that manifested itself in the form of a news announcement to make it easier for her to accept and comprehend. You know, cosmic powers dumbing down a message into a format that a 70s housewife might understand: TV. Which feels a little patronizing, if you ask me. Others claim that the Flicksboro case is evidence of something called "time television", and yes, it's exactly what it sounds like. It's the idea that electromagnetic pictures from the future may have the ability to manifest on certain television sets in the present. Honestly, it sounds a bit like the Chronovisor, which might be good news for all you time-travel

• 22:28Aaron Mahnke?

  nerds hoping to stumble into a time slip of your own. After all, it means you won't have to break into the Vatican for a glimpse at the past or the future. Just kick back, relax, and turn on those Saturday morning cartoons.

• 22:54Aaron Mahnke?

  Time is a strange creature. Some moments seem to slip through our fingers before we're ready to let go, like our wedding day or a particularly joyful vacation. Other moments, though, seem to drag their feet, teasing out our most awkward or miserable experiences. And if the stories we've heard today are true, sometimes time can stop altogether. It's called the stone tape theory, which claims that certain events, especially intense or traumatic ones, can leave such a strong impression on the environment that they are essentially recorded into the place where they happened. Events like, say, the Battle of Enactonsmere, or the Flicksborough explosion. This theory is used to explain certain hauntings, too.

• 23:38Aaron Mahnke?

  Ghosts who appeared in places where awful violence has occurred. And in that vein, time slips can also fall under the stone tape umbrella. It's called that, by the way, because, according to the theory, rocks are especially good at recording past events. The past, literally written in stone. Now, you might be wondering why, if this is a thing, we aren't all stumbling through creepy hologram apparitions of the past every time we visit places like, say, Gettysburg or Wounded Knee? Well, according to the Randalls and Huff Encyclopedia of the Unexplained, for most of the time, nothing is there. Then, certain conditions, such as electromagnetic energies in the atmosphere, or the arrival of someone with developed psychic powers,

• 24:22Aaron Mahnke?

  could act as the trigger which sets the recording off. And they might be on to something there. Especially that last bit about certain people having a knack for picking up these recordings. You see, the Flicksborough explosion wasn't the last premonition Leslie from Grimsby would experience. In fact, it wasn't even the last explosion she would predict. One morning in June of 1980, she was walking to a friend's house when she suddenly had an invasive thought about how awful it would be if there was a gas explosion. She was shaken, but she didn't mention it to her friend. Several hours later, though, a house on that very street was destroyed by, you guessed it, a gas explosion. Now that's what I would call a blast from the past.

• 25:22Aaron Mahnke?

  Time is tricky in more ways than one. I hope today's tour through these bits of folklore and real-world events has left you thinking about time in a very different way. Be it factory disasters or ancient battles, some moments in time simply feel more cursed than others. But if the legends are to be believed, it isn't just dark events that come with a curse. Sometimes the evil hides in the very hour of the day, and we've put together one last story to show you what I mean. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it. This episode of Lore was sponsored by MeUndies. Love is anything. Whether you're married, single, focusing on friendships, or stuck in a never-ending spiral of situationships, everyone deserves to celebrate love.

• 26:06Aaron Mahnke?

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• 26:49Aaron Mahnke?

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• 27:32Aaron Mahnke?

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• 28:17Aaron Mahnke?

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• 29:01Aaron Mahnke?

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• 29:46Aaron Mahnke?

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• 30:45Aaron Mahnke?

  Many people refer to 3 a.m. as the devil's hour or the witching hour. But have you ever wondered why the seemingly random spot on the clock earned such a sinister reputation? Well, some claim that the answer lies in the Bible. According to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus died during, quote, "the ninth hour", which, in modern timekeeping terms, is 3 p.m. According to legend, because of this, Satan decided to seize the opposite hour for himself, that is, 3 a.m. And because of that, there is a veritable bounty of superstitions surrounding this so-called devil's hour. It's said to be when the devil is most powerful, as well as a time when witches rule the night. Some believe that if you wake up suddenly at 3 a.m.,

• 31:30Aaron Mahnke?

  it means the devil has paid you a visit. And honestly, there might be something to that. In terms of sleep science, most people are in their deepest part of their REM cycle at 3 a.m. And being woken up by a noise at that point can be especially jarring and disorienting, leading to the terrifying phenomenon known as sleep paralysis. It makes sense that such an experience might lead people to believe that they were being beset upon by the devil. In 2017, a YouTube trend called the 3 a.m. challenge encouraged people to perform specific actions at that hour, claiming that they would encounter paranormal activity if they did. The actions themselves were simple, things like playing with a fidget spinner or talking

• 32:13Aaron Mahnke?

  to their phone's virtual assistant, interactions that the devil's hour would allegedly transform into something haunted and sinister. Some people point to the Amityville Horror Murders taking place at 3 a.m. as proof of its evil nature. Movies like The Conjuring and The Exorcism of Emily Rose also rely on this trope as an extra boost of horror. But if witches, the devil, sleep paralysis, and terrible murders aren't enough for you, if you live in certain parts of New Mexico, the devil's hour comes with yet another threat to worry about. Her name is La Mala Aura, which means "the bad hour." She usually takes the form of an elderly woman with a demonic face and appears to

• 32:56Aaron Mahnke?

  humans at, you guessed it, 3 a.m. She's said to wander lonely areas of the countryside and manifest at crossroads attacking late-night travelers. And, trust me, you don't want to catch a glimpse of this lady, because if you do, it means one of your loved ones will soon die. The most common story told about La Mala Aura concerns a woman who goes to visit her friend late at night while her husband is away on a business trip. She drives down the black starless highway and eventually reaches a crossroads. There, to the woman's terror, a figure appears right in the center of the road, a figure that looks a lot like an old woman. The driver slams on her brakes, and the crone vanishes, only to reappear next to the car

• 33:39Aaron Mahnke?

  window, complete with demonic red eyes and razor-sharp teeth. With her heartbeat thudding, the driver speeds away, but the figure keeps up with her, scratching her clawed hands against the glass of the window. Eventually, the woman begins to outpace the demon, but in her rearview mirror, she sees it growing larger and larger, until the creature is the size of a tree. At last, the figure disappears in the distance, and the woman arrives at her friend's house, terrified and panting. She tells her friend what she had seen, but rather than ease her nerves, her fear only grows when her friend relays the legend of Lamala Aura, and what such an encounter means. The next day, the still-shaken woman and her friend drive back to the woman's house,

• 34:24Aaron Mahnke?

  and are greeted by the police, who deliver tragic news. Her husband, they say, was shot and killed on his business trip, at the exact same hour the woman had seen Lamala Aura. Lamala Aura doesn't always appear in human shape, though. Sometimes she arrives in the form of a large sheep's fleece, which you would think would be the preferable option, if not for one small detail. It's said that whoever sees this particular version of Lamala Aura will permanently go insane. But perhaps no one describes the malevolent power of the dreadful Devil's Hour better than the master of the marvelous and macabre himself, author Ray Bradbury. In his classic novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, Bradbury has the following to say:

• 35:09Aaron Mahnke?

  "Oh, God," he writes, "midnight's not bad. You wake and go back to sleep. One or two's not bad, you toss, but sleep again. Five or six in the morning, there's hope, for dawn's just under the horizon. But three now, Christ, 3 a.m.? Doctors say the body's at low tide then. The soul is out. The blood moves slow. You're the nearest to dead you'll ever be, save dying. Sleep is a patch of death, but three in the morn, full wide-eyed staring, is living death."

• 35:56Aaron Mahnke?

  This episode of Lore was produced by me, Aaron Mahnke, and was written by Jenna Rose Nethercott with research by Cassandra DeAlba and music by Chad Lawson. Just like you, I'm not a fan of ads, but I'm grateful they keep the lights on here at Lore HQ. That said, if you want to avoid them, I've got a solution for you. I make a paid version of Lore that is 100% ad-free. It's available on Patreon and Apple Podcast subscriptions and gives you a much better experience. Plus, subscribers there also get weekly mini-episodes called Lore Bites. It's a bargain for all of that ad-free storytelling and a great way to support this show and the team behind it. Of course, Lore is much more than just a podcast. There's the book series available in bookstores and online,

• 36:39Aaron Mahnke?

  and two seasons of the Lore television show on Amazon Prime. Learn more over at lorepodcast.com. And you can also follow this show on YouTube, Facebook, Threads, and Instagram. Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. And when you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.

• 37:14Speaker 03

  What's that?

• 37:15Speaker 04

  My fresh detector.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  Uh, your what?

• 37:17Speaker 04

  There it is.

• 37:18Speaker 03

  What is it detecting?

• 37:20Speaker 04

  Fresh produce, fresh meat.

• 37:23Speaker 03

  Okay, what happens if it detects something really fresh?

• 37:28Speaker 04

  Apparently, we celebrate.

• 37:30Speaker 03

  At Food Lion, you can count on fresh food at fresher prices when your fresh detector is going off. Head to your local Food Lion or shop at foodlion.com.

• 37:41Speaker 05

  This is Jason Timp from Hoops Tonight with Jason Timp. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it starts with a great deal on an off-road-ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. Built on a reputation for quality and reliability, Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which can mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.