July Bonus Episode: Digging Into Exhumed with Aaron Mahnke

For this month's bonus episode, we are joined by one of our favorite storytellers, Aaron Mahnke of Lore Podcast, to discuss his upcoming book Exhumed: Unearthing the History of the American Vampire. We discuss this fascinating book which dives into one of history's strangest rabbit holes: the New England vampire panic. We touch on the tragic story of Mercy Brown, corpse medicine, pseudoscience, folklore, and the very real fears that led ordinary people to do some truly diabolical things! Aaron shares the inspiration for the book, some unconventional home theft deterrents, and talks about his favorite moments from his incredible podcast!

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 2:02Speaker 00

  Hey weirdos, I'm Ash.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  I'm Alina.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  And I'm Erin.

• 2:05Speaker 00

  And this is Morbid.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  A very special Morbid.

• 2:22Speaker 00

  A special Morbid. Welcome Erin.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Thank you for coming.

• 2:27Speaker 00

  Weirdos, today we have Erin Mahnke on the show. You probably know him from his award-winning podcast Lore, or perhaps the author of some of your favorite titles. And we have exciting news. Your latest book, Exhumed, comes out August 4.

• 2:40Speaker 02

  It does.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  So soon.

• 2:41Speaker 00

  So soon.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  So soon. Too soon.

• 2:42Speaker 00

  Congratulations.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 2:45Speaker 00

  You're welcome.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  This book is amazing. I got an early copy of it. I feel very fortunate.

• 2:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're on, you're on the back.

• 2:53Speaker 00

  Oh, that's so cool. I didn't even know that.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  Right, right at the top.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  Oh, look at me.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Look at that. You're on there with Amy Bruni.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Oh, hell yeah.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  From Kindred Spirits and Ghost Hunters and Josh Gates.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  Oh, shit. Cool.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  So.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  Good company.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  Good company.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  I feel good about that.

• 3:08Speaker 00

  The very top.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  Oh, look at me.

• 3:09Speaker 00

  Look at you, big red.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  I love it. It's an amazing book. It is like lore on crack. Like, it is so much information that is so interesting. It had, like, my husband started reading it and he was like, "This is amazing."

• 3:25Speaker 00

  He loves it at one point.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's phenomenal.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  So good.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  So, years ago, a couple of years after I started Lore, I created a podcast called Unobscured. And the idea was, you know, we spent 30 minutes on a topic on Lore, but what if we spent a whole season on the topic?

• 3:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  And the first season is on the Salem Witch Trials, which still, people listen to like every year. They get questions about it all the time. It was 10 episodes, you know, like 45 minutes apiece. And there was so much fun in spending just all that time exploring a big, complex topic. Like, you can really take your time and dig deep and build a house, right? You can take your time. And we did four seasons of that, and then I hard canceled it. But Exhumed, in some ways, is sort of like a, like a fifth season.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  You know, it is 20 lore episodes.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  It feels like that.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  It is, yeah.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  That's why I loved it. It was like very homey. I was like, "Ooh, I'm ready for this."

• 4:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  It's cozy.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like a good read for like a thunderstorm, you know? That's the vibe of it.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And I like to approach my writing style for things like this as a little bit more lighthearted. And I don't want people to get bogged down in technicality.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  While at the same time, there is some teaching that has to go on in the book, and we can, we can explore that.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. And when you say that, that is what I noticed immediately about the writing style, is it doesn't bog you down with all these like technical things, but it's giving you the information. But I felt like you were talking to me about it.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Because you have like a little aside where you'll be like, "Right?" Like, you know what I mean? It felt very comfortable to read.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  And there's a few dad jokes. I apologize. Maybe some puns.

• 4:59Speaker 00

  You gotta throw in the dad jokes where you can.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  I expected.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  It's my right.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely it is.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  So, in Exhumed, you examine the Mercy Brown case, but that's not all. It also really examines like the attitudes about life and death that led up to and continued after that case. You've been asking on Lore the question "Why?" for a long time. What was the thing that made you want to explore it so deeply here?

• 5:29Speaker 02

  Well, Mercy Brown was the very first episode of Lore. So, we're talking March of 2015.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  You know, almost 12 years ago.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  I probably wrote it about 12 years ago this coming November.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  And at the time, it was a, it was a cool creepy story.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  That's really all that it was.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  And it's local.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Hey, folks, have you ever heard of this before? Let me tell you about this, right? And, you know, and I built that episode. It was only like 12 minutes long, because I was still trying to get my feet on the ground. Like, what is this format even supposed to be? So, there's a little bit of vampire and premature bear, there's some safety coffin stuff in there, but it's mostly about Mercy Brown.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  And when I wrote and told the story on the podcast, I thought, "Folks just need to hear this wild story." But then what happened is, I kept making lore. And as the years went by, I would, I would write and publish another episode and think, "You know, that, that kind of, this sounds weird, that kind of smells like the Mercy Brown story." Like, there's some aspect of it that, it's almost like it's from the same family. I wonder why I feel like those are connected. And I like puzzles. I like, I like riddles. I grew up playing games like Myst in the 90s.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  Myst, holy shit.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh. So, it's like, you have to pay attention to sounds you heard in one scene, and then you're using them as a code somewhere else. And I was just filing away certain episodes as I went through making lore. And I thought, "Oh, this, this really does feel like it might have some bearing on the Mercy Brown story." And I just kind of gathered those pieces together. And at some point, a couple of years ago, I realized, "This is a book. I need to, I need to write about it," you know?

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Hell, yeah.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  And so, the idea was, yes, we've got the Mercy Brown story, and I can tell it. Actually, I tell it in the very beginning, kind of in the format that people typically bump into it with errors and all. And then, at the end of the book, the last 20% is really covering Mercy's story. But that first 80% of the book is all those other stories that I bumped into along the way that help explain the why, like you said. Why was it, why was it thought that what they did to her post-death was an okay, acceptable thing to do?

• 7:33Speaker 01

  How was that appropriate?

• 7:34Speaker 00

  Valid question.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  Valid question.

• 7:36Speaker 02

  Valid question. Why did they think, "Okay, let's do that," you know?

• 7:39Speaker 01

  And it really works too in the book, because, like you said, it begins with her and ends with her. And when you eat up all that in the, in the middle, when you get back to her, you're like, "Oh, okay."

• 7:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Like, it does make, you're like, "Oh, shit, okay. This doesn't seem as crazy" when you put it in the context of all this other stuff.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  You know? Once you talk about talking blood, it's like.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  That's not weird anymore.

• 7:59Speaker 02

  Who wouldn't want to talk about talking? There's a lot of blood in the book, actually.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  There is a lot of blood.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  I'm a metaphor guy, and I tend to tell people that, look, when we talk about context, what you're talking about is like 3D glasses at the movie theater. You know, if you watch the movie without them, it's going to look a little weird. You're not going to get the whole picture.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Oh, that is a good way of saying it.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  But when you put the 3D glasses on, all of a sudden, like, things are moving at you, and you really get a sense for what's going on.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  That's what context does to a story.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  Whether it's fiction, or it's a historical exploration like this.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  So, for me, I had to equip people so that, yes, by the time they get to that last section of the book, "Oh, my gosh, I have all the tools in my backpack that I need to, you know, go through this mission. I can do this now."

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  It lets you appreciate the story more.

• 8:46Speaker 00

  It does.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Because you can like weirdly sympathize with other people in the story.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  And that was one of the surprising things about it. As I wrote it, I realized, "Oh, they aren't like dumb barbaric people."

• 8:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  Right? Like, you.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  Because it could come off that way at first, when you hear that story.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  Definitely could, yeah. Villagers cut open a dead woman's chest and, you know, burn her heart. It does sound barbaric.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Right? What is that? It sounds barbaric. But, but when you actually dig into it, it's, it's really human.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely it is, which is so scary.

• 9:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Now, speaking of that, the monsters and things that people believe in often tell us a lot more about people than they do about the monsters.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  What do you think vampires and the panic around them reveals about the fears of people in 19th century New England?

• 9:33Speaker 02

  Well, they were dealing with a lot of disease, you know, at the time tuberculosis was, it had been a thing for a very long time, but

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  There's just something about, you know, late 19th century that TB was really

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  just having fun.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Everything was just gross.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Living its life, full chested, right?

• 9:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  And so there's this idea that there's this invisible thing that's robbing their loved ones from them, robbing their livelihood in some ways.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  It's funny, like, just a few years before, maybe it was a few months before Mercy's mother died in the early 1880s, they had actually figured out what was causing TB scientifically. But that was in Europe and it was, you know, it was like a world away from

• 10:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  this farming village outside of Newport in Rhode Island.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  They didn't get the CNN update.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  They did not get that. No, there was no alert on their phone to follow.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  BBC wasn't just coming up.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's like this, it's like a, it's like having a phone call with somebody and there's like a massive delay and they just, they just didn't know. Even by the time Mercy passed away in

• 10:36Speaker 01

  That's crazy.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  early 1892, they, they really weren't putting the pieces together. And at the same time, even if you explain it to them, what they were being told is there's this invisible thing that is making you sick.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  And it's hard to rock your head around.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it also sounds a lot like what they thought a vampire was doing.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  This supernatural force, it is an invisible thing that is sucking the life out of them, just in a different way.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  A little more scientific, you know?

• 11:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  That makes more sense. I feel like a vampire is way more fun.

• 11:04Speaker 00

  It's a lot more fun. I'd rather go at the hands of a vampire than TB.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:08Speaker 00

  You know?

• 11:08Speaker 01

  I would have fallen victim to this whole vampire panic, just, I think I would have wanted to.

• 11:12Speaker 00

  For the fun of it.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  Like, I think I would have chose to.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Even if I was like, yeah, it's probably

• 11:16Speaker 00

  For the theater.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, just for the theater of it all. Like, let's go.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  The historian in the writer me wants to say that, like, she was the, the end, she was the end of like a century of stories like hers. Back to the 1790s with Sarah Tillinghast, also an exeter Rhode Island, by the way.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 11:35Speaker 02

  Book ended by this little

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  village in Rhode Island. And then, then they were, in between, they were all over.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:40Speaker 02

  Vermont, New Hampshire, everywhere. And we call it the New England vampire panic, but there's not a lot of evidence that people were out there at that moment saying so and so is a vampire. What they were saying was, one of the people in the grave who died before the sick person who is currently dying is somehow sucking the life out of people.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  What is that?

• 12:04Speaker 02

  And we, and we know that the word vampire has a history of like appearing on the public record, but we also like almost immediately see it being used as a metaphor. And I talk about this in the book, like you'll see it in newspapers being used as a metaphor for politicians.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  For, you know, was it Oliver Wendell Holmes used the word vampire to talk about women, which was like the most sexist thing.

• 12:26Speaker 00

  I was gonna say rude.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  And I, I hope his wife gave him hell for that, but it was being used as a metaphor and you can't have a metaphor unless people understand what the word is supposed to mean.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  So there, there is the assumption that it was floating around outside of print long before. But there's, there's really no record of, it was kind of imprinted on Mercy's story by an outside newspaper when you first see the word vampire show up.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 12:51Speaker 02

  To them, it was just sort of like, there's something supernatural going on.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's something sucking the life out of people.

• 12:56Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Like a bloodsucker.

• 12:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:59Speaker 00

  Great.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Or in True Blood, a fanger.

• 13:01Speaker 00

  A fanger, yeah.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  Fanger.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  So just in the book as a whole, was there a chapter that like challenged a belief you held previously, just kind of like rocked your world a little bit when you researched it?

• 13:12Speaker 02

  I, that's a good question. The hardest chapter to write was probably the one that was all the philosophy about the human soul.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  I loved that.

• 13:21Speaker 00

  That must be fascinating.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  It did challenge a lot of like preconceived notions I had going in, which was, oh, they always assumed it was in the heart, you know, that kind of thing. And they did cut out Mercy's heart, so I'm, I'm gonna find that. But what I found instead was that it was just everywhere.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  I was gonna say so much more complicated.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, different cultures had different ideas.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  Same cultures went through multiple ideas.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  Some cultures, there were multiple souls, like in Egypt, it was, it was, you know, at the, at the very minimum, nine different souls.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  That's fascinating.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  That had different functions.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  That's wild.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that one really, it was hard to write too, just from a philosophical standpoint. Like, I can explain creepy history and some science, but

• 14:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:03Speaker 02

  we get into the realm of the soul and what is the difference between each of these nine?

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Gets a little murky.

• 14:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, it takes a lot out of you.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, you go all over the place.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Ash has several souls.

• 14:14Speaker 00

  I have a lot of souls.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  Cause she'll, she'll slip into an accent sometimes and we're like, was that a soul?

• 14:18Speaker 00

  It just happens. It might happen today.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:20Speaker 00

  So just know it's a soul.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:22Speaker 00

  You know?

• 14:22Speaker 01

  So just know she's got a few.

• 14:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. I have to say, one of my favorite chapters in the book was corpse medicine, because we covered that pretty recently.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:31Speaker 00

  And I fell down so many different rabbit holes with that.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  That's so fascinating.

• 14:35Speaker 00

  What was the most absurd medical practice that you came across in your research?

• 14:39Speaker 02

  Absurd, well, so

• 14:41Speaker 00

  It's all pretty absurd.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's all pretty absurd. I mean, we can, we can get into blood later, but I think about the, the English king, was it Charles the Second, who had the drops that he carried with him?

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  They called it King's Drops.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:54Speaker 02

  And in, the firsthand accounts of people who had consumed them and what it was doing to them, and then you realize that the, the two main ingredients were like high proof alcohol and opium.

• 15:07Speaker 00

  They were just fucked up.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  They were wasted. And, and every time he felt like a twinge of pain, he was going for multiple drops. Just give me the whole bottle.

• 15:16Speaker 00

  Just drinking them out of skulls, too.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  So no wonder it worked, right?

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:19Speaker 02

  Works in air quotes.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  For a little bit.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. You throw enough opium in anything.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:24Speaker 00

  It's gonna numb out.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  It's gonna work.

• 15:26Speaker 00

  That'll hold you over for some time.

• 15:27Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  In the end, I think he ended up dying of seizures, right?

• 15:31Speaker 02

  Maybe.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  I think he did.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  I don't remember.

• 15:33Speaker 00

  After long-term use of

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Well, I would assume.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  He was also a hobby alchemist. And at that time, alchemists in general tended to work a lot with mercury and like boiling it and creating vapors from it. And so they just consumed so many toxic chemicals.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  I mean, Isaac Newton was, was gray, I think in his 30s.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 15:55Speaker 02

  That when they, when some of his journals went up for auction back in the 90s, I think it was in the 90s or the 80s, they opened up one of the books and found strands of his hair in there and they had him tested and they were, their, their mercury levels were off the charts.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 16:08Speaker 00

  Crazy.

• 16:09Speaker 02

  It's no wonder he couldn't eat, he had, he had digestive issues.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  Died young.

• 16:13Speaker 00

  Oh, my God, mercury will mess you up.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:15Speaker 00

  We just talked about that at our live show, the, it's called the Mad, like Mad Hatter, Mad as a Hatter. That comes from them being poisoned by the vapors from mercury.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 16:25Speaker 00

  It's crazy.

• 16:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  That's nuts.

• 16:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  I think that's what happened in that, that podcast, S-Town. Do you remember that podcast?

• 16:34Speaker 02

  I do remember that.

• 16:34Speaker 00

  I haven't finished S-Town.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  I think it was. It was some kind of poisoning like that.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  That made some shit go down.

• 16:40Speaker 00

  I'm actually kind of surprised that I haven't got mercury poisoning because I love sushi. So

• 16:45Speaker 01

  You do, I'm actually surprised you've never

• 16:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  You love the sea.

• 16:49Speaker 00

  Fingers crossed.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  That I don't.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  It's one of those things that we look back now and we say,

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  oh my gosh, what were you thinking? It's like a liquid metal.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  I know.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  Did you not notice people dying from it?

• 16:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  But at the same time, like, in a hundred years, are people gonna be looking at us and saying, chemotherapy? Are you kidding me?

• 17:04Speaker 00

  Probably.

• 17:05Speaker 02

  Like, you poison the body to the point of death to kill cancer?

• 17:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  What were you thinking?

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Like, what were you thinking?

• 17:10Speaker 00

  Or like, hey, holding your phone 24/7? What's that doing?

• 17:12Speaker 01

  Having it in your pocket next to your vital organs? Like, putting it in your, your bed next to your face?

• 17:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, but they didn't know better.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:19Speaker 00

  Right.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  You know, they just didn't know any better.

• 17:21Speaker 00

  And we don't either.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  The worst part is we kind of know better.

• 17:23Speaker 00

  I know, we do know a little.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, but more will come out, I'm sure.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Well, they'll find out how stupid we are later.

• 17:29Speaker 00

  It's just, it's the next generation's thing.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, it'll be, they'll do with it.

• 17:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Now, another chapter that I really loved was the Hand of Glory.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  I love the Hand of Glory.

• 17:39Speaker 00

  It's a wild concept.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  It's so crazy.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  For people who love to accessorize.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  Like, this is your chapter.

• 17:44Speaker 00

  And I do.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  And I do.

• 17:46Speaker 00

  They do.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  They do love it. Now, for people who are listening who don't, are like a Hand of Glory, can you give us a little synopsis of what it is?

• 17:53Speaker 02

  Oh, definitely. So a Hand of Glory was a tool of folklore. Now, there's a couple of different purposes with, or uses with it, but it starts with literally a human hand. Okay? Often the hand that was cut off of a thief.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  And that's important because it's, it's a, it's a, it's an example of what's known as sympathetic magic. And sympathetic magic is Built on the concept of like is connected to like. There's also a branch of sympathetic magic that's like, things that have touched something have passed on some of their power to things.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  But a good example would be, most people have heard someone say, eat walnuts, they're good for your brain. And then they'll point to an open walnut and say, look, it even looks like a brain.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  So there's a lot of herbs, if you go look through the vitamin section at a CVS or something, you'll see things like blood wart and like a word with wart after it. And it's often named after a body part. And it's because somebody looked at the plant and said, wow, that looks a lot like the human body part. Let's name it after that. And I bet it's useful in treating that. Right? So that's sympathetic magic. It's this idea that God wrote the purpose of a thing into its physical appearance. So within this realm, we have the hand of glory. And the hand of glory was a hand, a human hand, that was often dried, pickled, you know, they drained it of blood, they set it out in the sun. There's a whole recipe in the book, quoting from somebody from a few hundred years ago.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  I love the recipes.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  You know, you hang it on your door for a while and you know, the end result.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Like a bundle of flowers.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  It's on the door knocker.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  You can use it in the meantime.

• 19:33Speaker 02

  And what you end up with is essentially a mummified human hand that either wicks are attached to the fingers.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  I love that so much.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  So that you can burn the fingers as candles.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  Or the hand is dipped in wax and you simply light the fingers on fire themselves. Like, either way. Because of its association with theft, you had a couple of uses for hand of glory. One is that you could, as a thief, carry one with you. And if you had it when you broke into somebody's house, no one would be able to wake up from their sleep. It was like carte blanche, freedom to do whatever you wanted in their house. Right? So it was like, you imagine somebody with it on a chain, hanging off their hip, like, I am all set. I've got this dead hand with me.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  But make shit out of noise. What could go wrong?

• 20:21Speaker 02

  On the other side of it, also connected to theft, people who had a home and wanted to protect themselves could have a hand of glory in the house. And that was supposed to ward off evil.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  Like a talisman.

• 20:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  Which if there's a hand hanging off your door. I'm not hitting you up. I'm not gonna break into that house. Like, that would make sense. That's fair. I'd be like, they mean business in there. So they're not messing around. I think it makes sense.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  Yep, yep.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  I love it.

• 20:45Speaker 02

  It's just, it's delightful to think that people had this.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Just hanging around.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  Mounted human hand with some, you know, half burned fingers on them.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  I love that. And just imagine, I'm sorry, I have to go here, the smell. Yeah.

• 20:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, what did that, that was not a Yankee candle.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  No, no. That's not what I look for in a candle, you know? But I think everything smelled. That's true. So maybe, I think it wouldn't even.

• 21:05Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Like, you'd be like, that's just another smell. Yeah, maybe the wax like slightly obscured the death. Maybe.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  Right?

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. You never know. They all smelled. Oh, that is for sure.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, it might've improved things, honestly.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  It honestly. Exactly. At least you're getting like a burning smell. You know, something. To cancel out everything else.

• 21:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  The poop in the streets. Yeah.

• 21:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, and you know, every version of a hand of glory, I feel like they have like a slightly different recipe, if you will.

• 21:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  Is there one historical account of like a recipe or a hand of glory situation that made you be like, that's enough research for today. I think I'm gonna check out.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  Through the magic of editing, I am gonna, I'm gonna look really quickly here.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  I got this.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  Just cut out the next 10 minutes of me flipping through. I mean, so, chapter six is called overly sympathetic. And there's a lovely drawing of a.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Lit hand of glory.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  Of a lit hand of glory. And, you know, I start off by talking about like, why hands? Because hands were like this really symbolic thing in a lot of belief systems.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  I get that, too.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  Other examples.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  You know, like hands, I feel like are individualistic. I'm a Gemini, so Gemini rules the hands. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. I always look at people's hands. I know, you are fascinated by hands. I'm like a hand person. Yeah, yeah.

• 22:23Speaker 02

  Maybe it's not in the italic that I want it to be in, but there is a really good recipe in here that I just, I was struck by the deliberate nature of it. I mean, it, it's like Betty Crocker, step by step. Here are very specific things that you need to do.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  Don't measure with your heart. Like, you have to use the measurement. Three quarters of a cup of blood, please. Yeah, this isn't like vanilla extract.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  It's really eye opening. So I highly recommend digging into that chapter.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, get into that chapter, cuz. Yeah, chapter six, everybody. Hands of glory, forever. And what's crazy about hands of glory, like we were just talking about, is that people really believed this worked, like, really believed. Like steadfast. Why do you think that people put so much faith into that specifically?

• 23:07Speaker 02

  So if, all you need is a handful of moments where it seems to have worked for people to say, see? So like, you know, one of the things that I have in the book is, is an article from an Irish newspaper from mid 1800s where there, I said, it's like the police blotter in your local newspaper, right? So and so had a break in at her house. But they attempted to use a hand of glory and, you know, they did X, Y, and Z, and the thieves were thwarted. And, you know, you throw a couple of reports like that in a newspaper and people start to believe that, yeah, this is, this is gonna work.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it's like confirmation bias. If that's exactly what it is, yeah.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  But it's also gross enough that very few people actually went about making them.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  So there aren't, there's like a pub in England that used to have one on display. They claimed to have found it in a wall, but then it was stolen, irony of ironies, like a talisman against theft was stolen a couple of decades ago and they've never gotten it back. There's also a museum that has one, but there aren't a lot of them extant. So it's, we also look at that and say, is it just a lot of story with very few examples? And people believed that it would work.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah. Would you have fallen for it back then?

• 24:22Speaker 02

  Back then, probably.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  I feel like I would. I was ready to just, yes. Yeah. Yes.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  It's the hand of a thief.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  That's the thing, it's so. I might believe it now. Yeah. Like you said, you put that on your door, I'm not coming over. No, it kind of makes sense. You know? I don't know if I believe it for the thief, I believe it to thwart against. To thwart, yes, that's where I like it.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  Also, the weird thing where you have to douse the flame, like, there's a story in there about, and it's a, it's kind of legend, it's kind of fact, but of a pub that was being robbed by a traveler who came, set up the hand of glory, said this magical phrase, and the, everybody in the house who was asleep stayed asleep. But the, the housemaid who had been instructed to stay awake and take care of this traveler's needs was still awake, so she didn't go to sleep. And she was able to run to the kitchen and get milk and extinguish the flames, cuz that's what you do, you use milk to extinguish the flames.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Obviously. Interesting.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  So hand of glory is lactose intolerant, apparently?

• 25:17Speaker 01

  They go dairy intolerance, there we go. Yeah. Hey, let's go. Well, a lot of us are. Yeah, I mean, you know, join the club. It wouldn't work in my house. Now, you have researched for lore as well, some really crazy cursed objects. Where do you think the hand of glory ranks among those objects?

• 25:35Speaker 02

  It's definitely on the far side of like the gross scale.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  There are other, I guess, more neat and clean cursed objects, you know, like the car that Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in, you know, was said to be very cursed and James Dean's car, things like that. But as far as like gross cursed objects?

• 25:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  That's high up there.

• 25:57Speaker 02

  It's right up there.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  I would say so. Yeah. It's a tough one to make.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  Like, you gotta get a person that you can take their hand. So that's, that's a lot.

• 26:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  You gotta commit to it.

• 26:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I made a lot of hand puns in that chapter and I just wanna.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  Love it.

• 26:11Speaker 02

  preemptively apologize to anybody.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  They hit every time. Don't even apologize. No apologies. What you had to do.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  Never for dad jokes and never for puns, do you apologize here?

• 26:20Speaker 02

  Sometimes they just present themselves and you have to.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  You gotta take them.

• 26:23Speaker 02

  You have to take them.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can't let them pass by. You're speaking our language. You really are. We love a dad joke. I feel like we've kind of foreshadowed this topic a bit, talking blood. I love this concept. Yeah. I had never heard of it before the book. So tell me, do you think that people genuinely expected the blood to reveal the killer? Or do you think it was more about putting this like psychological pressure on somebody who might confess?

• 26:47Speaker 02

  It's hard to say, you know, a couple centuries later, because, I don't want to spoil stuff, but there were some fairly recent examples, non-European examples, of people thinking that the blood of like a murder victim would cry out who their killer was.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  I'm obsessed with that.

• 27:06Speaker 02

  I, I do, I do really wish that the social aspect was understood and known, because the idea of, so, just to quickly summarize this, there was this idea that someone who was murdered, the blood in their body would react to the touch of the killer. So people have heard the phrase trial by fire. There's, there's a whole different group of trials. There's trial by water, you know, the whole witch thing where they, they duck the witch under the water. Does she float, does she not? That's, that's a trial. There's a whole series of trials and they're usually founded in some aspect of Christian theology.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  And trial by blood is also known as cruentation. And it just has to do with this idea that you find a body, somebody got stabbed, and let's bring all the suspects in and they'll touch the body and something will happen if the killer touches the body. The, the wound that has been closed up will bleed fresh blood or the flesh will bruise. And it won't do that for innocent people.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  That was the belief. God was going to speak a truth through some physical reaction.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  They really did believe it. Like, they really did believe that, that there was a religious aspect to this and that it was happening. But I, there's really a part of me that. I want there to have been like a manipulation going on as well of,

• 28:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  You know, they like the story that I told in the book of of one cruentation had the entire village processed through the hall first before the guy that everybody suspected. He was the last. He had to stand in line. He had to doubt.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  Sweat it out.

• 28:47Speaker 02

  Sweat it out. Yeah. And I, I want to believe that that was on purpose.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:53Speaker 00

  It has to be, right?

• 28:54Speaker 02

  To force a confession of, you know, like, I won't do it, guys. I won't do it. I'll just, I'll just confess right now.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 28:59Speaker 02

  You know?

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Or just watch him like physically melt down as he's about to. It's like,

• 29:03Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  Innocent people would be like, all right, well, it's not gonna happen. I didn't kill this person.

• 29:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  But yeah.

• 29:08Speaker 00

  I guess we'll just get this over with. What a weird practice.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  But there were instances where it was used and they used the results from these cruentation tests in court.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:17Speaker 00

  Gnarly.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  By the way, you're going to the gallows now because you touched a body that had a sewn up wound and blood came out.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  And a little trickle of blood came out.

• 29:25Speaker 00

  Clearly did this.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, clearly it was you.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  That's like spectral evidence.

• 29:29Speaker 00

  It is.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  It's exactly. It's like, that's wild that that was just used legally.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  Right.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  But they also used to think, I, like in some places or times, they used to think that like, the last image of someone's killer would be captured in someone's eyes. Yeah. And I loved that.

• 29:44Speaker 00

  That is right.

• 29:46Speaker 02

  Didn't they do like all sorts of photography experiments?

• 29:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, they would try to see. I loved that idea.

• 29:51Speaker 00

  That would be a great episode.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  I know, isn't that really interesting?

• 29:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  It's super interesting.

• 29:55Speaker 00

  Now, I wonder, I mean, you answer this question in your book, but why do you think blood specifically became the thing that people thought would reveal this truth?

• 30:03Speaker 02

  So there are, there were moments in writing the book where I thought, why am I talking about this topic? For, for reference, like I sat down with my research assistant, Sam, and we, like, I said, here is where I think we need to go. Let's build an outline. You'll start researching. We'll find places where maybe we're a little off and we need to adjust, or we'll expand, that kind of thing. And every now and then I had this thought of, is this really important to Mercy Brown? But what you had to understand about Mercy Brown's story was that they were looking for signs of fresh blood in the corpse of the, of the supposed, you know, call them vampire, call them a, you know, whatever. Well, why were they looking for signs of fresh blood? Well, blood meant something to people in

• 30:47Speaker 02

  previous eras, and it's because they believed that the blood, the, the human blood was like the, the connective tissue that held the soul and the body together. And that gave blood a very special power. It was, it was the glue. You had, you had a layer of the human body and you had the soul, the material and the spiritual, but there had to be something that glued them together and blood was it. This is why epilepsy comes up a lot in the drinking of blood in the book because for like 2,000 years, people believed that what was happening in an epileptic's body when they were having a seizure was that they were somehow, they were, they weren't dying, they, they weren't dead. They were like, one scholar called it quasi-dead.

• 31:32Speaker 02

  I'm not dead yet.

• 31:35Speaker 02

  They were like almost dead because what was happening physiologically, their soul and their body were separating and they needed an infusion of fresh blood to like re-glue them back together again. So blood became this really important thing in a lot of cultures for a lot of reasons, but it was because there was some vitality in the blood.

• 31:54Speaker 00

  Right.

• 31:55Speaker 02

  And that's where, like, you have a dead body, but the, the blood is still, there was an assumption that when you died, there was a linear process. At, at life, you have runny blood. And as, as your body decomposes, that like congeals, it becomes thicker and thicker until it's just a dry dust in your veins.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:15Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 32:15Speaker 02

  But in reality, what happens is you decompose and it gets a little thicker.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 32:20Speaker 02

  And then you decompose some more and it actually thins up more. And they, they went in with this false pretense of, well, if it's runny, it's got a lot of life left in it. And so that life could communicate things to us. God can use that and point to a killer.

• 32:34Speaker 00

  It's so fascinating.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  Isn't it?

• 32:36Speaker 01

  That's so crazy.

• 32:37Speaker 00

  I understand why they believed it to some extent, you know?

• 32:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  You can see where it comes from.

• 32:42Speaker 00

  Right. Like, it's not crazy.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  No.

• 32:44Speaker 00

  But it is crazy.

• 32:46Speaker 02

  It's not that they sat down and said, what is the most batshit idea I'd be coming up with?

• 32:50Speaker 00

  Right.

• 32:51Speaker 02

  They, they worked through it with logic. They were,

• 32:53Speaker 00

  They did.

• 32:53Speaker 02

  They were doing the best they could with what they had at the time.

• 32:56Speaker 00

  The tools they had.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  Exactly. They had no way of knowing that it, it, it goes from runny to congealed and thick to runny again.

• 33:02Speaker 00

  And how would they?

• 33:03Speaker 01

  So when they see it go runny again, they're like, well, something made that happen.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Because that's not natural.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  There must be life left in there.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's life.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Like, that's wild.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  It is.

• 33:13Speaker 02

  You also see this in a lot of early vampire folklore in like Serbian culture where there, there are people who are deemed just more likely to become a revenant or a vampire after death. Alcoholics, people who are irreligious. It's, it's essentially like you run through the list and you realize it's all the social outcasts.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  It's all the people who did bad things.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  Well, it turns out that people who do bad things in society, two, three, 400 years ago, they don't get buried in the same way. They don't get put in a nice shroud in a coffin and buried in the ground at a good depth. They're usually thrown in with just a piece of cloth around them. And what happens is that makes the decomposition process

• 33:55Speaker 01

  Very different.

• 33:56Speaker 02

  differently than it would inside of a box.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  And so they go and maybe they, maybe they open the grave by mistake or they go to check on something and they find that the body has done something very unusual. Well, of course it has.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  You set it up for this moment to have this unusual state. So they,

• 34:13Speaker 01

  You othered them.

• 34:13Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  Confirmation bias essentially.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  They, they built the system that created the bodies that made them believe in vampires by, by labeling, it, it's just,

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  It makes so much sense.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  It was all set up. They're, they're set up to fail.

• 34:28Speaker 00

  I was just gonna say.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  Like, they're set up to be vampires.

• 34:32Speaker 00

  Right.

• 34:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  You know?

• 34:44Speaker 00

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• 35:49Speaker 00

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• 37:56Speaker 01

  Now, moving just like, kind of like, parallel here to talk a little bit about lore. Cause I love lore.

• 38:02Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Lore was the first podcast I ever listened to. And I have to thank Dub Dub, our-

• 38:07Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  One of my best friends who introduced me. She wanted to be here today because she was like, I want to meet her and think she couldn't get childcare.

• 38:13Speaker 02

  Thank you, Dub Dub.

• 38:14Speaker 00

  Oh, she'll die.

• 38:16Speaker 02

  No, don't die.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  Don't die.

• 38:17Speaker 00

  Of happiness.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  But you've been doing lore for over a decade now. How long has it been?

• 38:22Speaker 02

  It'll be 12 years in March.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  That's crazy. So I have to ask, what made you start the show to begin with? I know you started with Mercy Brown. What, what made you want to go further?

• 38:32Speaker 02

  I wanted to be a novelist. I wanted to write, you know, like Stephen King type, you know, spooky stories, right?

• 38:39Speaker 00

  I feel like you could.

• 38:40Speaker 02

  And he dips a lot into folklore.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 38:45Speaker 02

  You know, like, like Pet Sematary.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:47Speaker 02

  He's dipping into Algonquin mythology and stories. And I, I self-published a handful of thrillers like that. And what I tried to do is I would go look for good New England things like that and weave them in.

• 39:01Speaker 00

  We have so many good New England things.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. And when you weave them in, it kind of grounds it. Like, people say, I've heard of that. And it makes the rest of the story more believable. But I would find more than I needed. And so I had this like overflowing folder of stories of like real life things that had happened. And I thought, I can't use all of these. But I was also self-published and, you know, you'd write a book and sell five copies. And it was a little disheartening. So I thought, well, if I could increase my email list, because, okay, we have to remember, this is like before the podcast wave. This was, this was back when-

• 39:32Speaker 01

  You were at the very beginning.

• 39:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:34Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  I mean, Mailchimp was barely a thing.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:38Speaker 02

  I don't remember how I was doing my email list at the time, but, but I thought I have like 60 people on my email list. And if I could increase that, then I've increased how many people might buy a book.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:48Speaker 02

  So I thought, I'll give them something for free that will be of value. And they'll sign up for my email list in return and I'll sell enough books to buy a cup of coffee.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 39:58Speaker 00

  Win, win.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  Win, win.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  That's all we want.

• 40:01Speaker 02

  So I, I wrote one. It was the Mercy Brown story. And then I wrote another. I think I wrote four of them. And I looked at the PDF. At some point, I realized, holy crap, this is 10,000 words. And at the time, cell phones were like half the size that they are today.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 40:16Speaker 02

  You know, they were tiny. And I thought, I'm going to be giving people a PDF to pinch and zoom and read on this tiny little smartphone. It's just not worth it. And so I, I gave up.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  I'll just tell it to them.

• 40:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I gave up. I dragged the icon for this Pages file over to my trash can. I was about to let go. And I thought, well, wait a minute. I listen to audiobooks. Maybe it would be more convenient if people listened to me tell them these stories. So my next plan was to record those stories, put them in a zip folder, and give them a link to download it.

• 40:47Speaker 00

  Just all of them.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  From Gumroad or someplace like that. And, and that was my grand plan. And the audio was so horrible.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 40:55Speaker 02

  So horrible.

• 40:56Speaker 00

  Been there. Yeah.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  I was in a, the attic of my old house was horsehair plaster, hardwood floors, IKEA furniture.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 41:03Speaker 02

  Everything was reflective.

• 41:05Speaker 00

  Those pretty much are our first pod lab in the laundry room.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  In a laundry room.

• 41:08Speaker 02

  In a laundry room.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  In the attic, essentially.

• 41:09Speaker 02

  Metal appliances, right?

• 41:10Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. Things just digging off of everywhere.

• 41:12Speaker 02

  I might've been actually reading the script off of a glass-fronted monitor. Like, pick, pick all the things you could do wrong. I did them wrong.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 41:20Speaker 02

  And so I had to put some music underneath it to-

• 41:23Speaker 01

  That's one of the things I love about lore.

• 41:25Speaker 02

  I had a dead in the echo and take care of that tininess. And then I, I sent a couple of them to a buddy of mine and I said, what do you think? And here's my plan, zip link. You know, they're going to download the file and they can listen to it however they want. And he said, don't do it. Don't do it. This is a podcast.

• 41:42Speaker 00

  And you're like, what's that?

• 41:43Speaker 02

  No, a podcast is like a couple of guys sitting around talking about technology. Because that's what it was for a really long time. Because to make a podcast used to be a highly technical thing.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  Hosting your file, broadcasting an RSS feeds signal on the internet, all that stuff.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, you weren't just doing it from your-

• 42:01Speaker 00

  You guys don't realize what goes into it.

• 42:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's a little bit easier now.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  It is easier.

• 42:05Speaker 00

  A bit, yeah.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  Maybe too easy?

• 42:07Speaker 01

  I know. Yes.

• 42:08Speaker 00

  That's why there's 40 million.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely too. There needs to be a tax on a microphone, I think at times.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  I think so. Yeah, yeah. But I, I took him at his word. I said, okay, I'll, you know, I think he mentioned Serial at the time. He's like, no, there's a show called Serial. They're like playing with storytelling within podcasting. And this is storytelling. You should do it. And I was like, all right, I'll try it. So at the time, I was a graphic designer. I did branding for companies. So making the podcast artwork was no problem. I went to Squarespace because I'd already been hearing ads for them elsewhere and set up a website and figured out how to work through iTunes at the time, not Apple Podcasts, but iTunes. And get it all broadcast. I hosted it on Libsyn. It was like five bucks a month unlimited downloads. Yeah, it was great.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  What was our first one? Was it Blueberry?

• 42:55Speaker 00

  Blueberry.

• 42:55Speaker 01

  Blueberry.

• 42:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I remember them. Yeah. And, and then I launched it. And that day, that first day, I had nine downloads.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 43:04Speaker 00

  That's a big deal. Day one.

• 43:06Speaker 02

  Day one. Yeah.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  Truly, day one.

• 43:08Speaker 02

  I might've been one or two of them.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Hey, that's all right.

• 43:11Speaker 02

  Whatever.

• 43:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was still a few more.

• 43:13Speaker 02

  Over the last decade, I've met, I think, a couple of hundred people who've said, oh, I was, I listened to you since day one.

• 43:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:19Speaker 02

  I love the, I love the idea of it, but no.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  You couldn't have all done it.

• 43:22Speaker 02

  You couldn't have all done it.

• 43:22Speaker 00

  You're like, there's actually only seven of you.

• 43:26Speaker 02

  I'm one of the nine.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  I need to know the seven people need to stand up right now. I need to see.

• 43:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, um, yeah, that was, that was it.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  I love that.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  March 15th.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  What a cool way to start it, though. I love that.

• 43:38Speaker 00

  That's a great way to start. And thanks to the friend that made you do that, right?

• 43:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  Truly. And now, one of the things I love is the music behind it. It's Chad Lawson, right?

• 43:47Speaker 02

  Chad's amazing.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  Who does the score?

• 43:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  The scoring, it is, if you're not listening to lore, I don't know what you're doing right now. Because it is the coziest, like my kids, like there's certain episodes that I'll let them listen to if they're like not too spooky.

• 44:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  And they love it. It's like very soothing in the car, like the music, your voice is very soothing.

• 44:06Speaker 02

  There's an ASMR quality to it, right?

• 44:08Speaker 01

  There really is.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  And is there a topic that you've covered on lore that you, it was like a rabbit hole that you just couldn't get out of? And like constantly find yourself going back to?

• 44:18Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I mean, maybe not to my listeners' delight. I, if I've gotten any compliments, I'm sorry, any criticism over, over the last decade, it has been, why so many witch stories?

• 44:30Speaker 01

  Oh, that will never be criticism here.

• 44:32Speaker 02

  Because there are a ton of them.

• 44:34Speaker 01

  And they're fascinating.

• 44:35Speaker 02

  They're fascinating.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  They are.

• 44:36Speaker 02

  They're often like about a single community and they have their, their personal community personality as being projected onto the events that happen. They, they're always fascinating. And so every time a new one comes up, it has a new spin. And to me, it's worth telling the story again.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:52Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 44:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:53Speaker 00

  We've told quite a few witch trials and they're all different and all horrible, but fascinating.

• 44:58Speaker 02

  But fascinating.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  And I think the Salem witch trials, I'm like, I don't know how anybody gets sick of learning of that or hearing about that.

• 45:04Speaker 02

  No.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  I learn something new about that all the time.

• 45:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:07Speaker 01

  I think that is one of the most fascinating things.

• 45:09Speaker 00

  It is.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  Ever.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. And one of my personality traits is I like to tell people they're wrong about something they thought they knew.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:15Speaker 02

  I don't, I take great delight in that.

• 45:17Speaker 00

  You guys have that in common. You guys absolutely have that in common.

• 45:21Speaker 02

  I like to say that it's because I want to be a teacher, but I want to teach them that.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  That's a nice way of saying it.

• 45:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I just, I like to say-

• 45:26Speaker 01

  I just like to be right.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's not right.

• 45:27Speaker 00

  What's your star sign?

• 45:28Speaker 02

  What's that?

• 45:29Speaker 00

  What's your star sign?

• 45:30Speaker 02

  Uh, Leo.

• 45:31Speaker 00

  Okay, there you go.

• 45:32Speaker 02

  Does that, does that fit? I don't know anything about that.

• 45:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think so. And not in a bad way.

• 45:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. So like with the Salem witch trials, you'll hear people say, oh, it's just moldy bread.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 45:40Speaker 02

  Why are you spending so much time talking about it? It was moldy bread?

• 45:42Speaker 00

  So much more to it.

• 45:43Speaker 02

  Moldy bread was a theory for like one month in, I think, 1976. Somebody put it forward in a journal and a month later, it was retracted.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:51Speaker 02

  That was it.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:52Speaker 02

  But it's a simple answer.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:53Speaker 02

  And simple answers have the longest legs. They go the distance.

• 45:57Speaker 00

  They please the masses.

• 45:58Speaker 02

  Right, right. Which is why so much of what happens in Exhumed stuck around for so long because in a way, they were very simple answers.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  Right. And they're easier to digest. People can be like, oh, moldy bread. That's why that happened.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  They won't do that again.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  Or it was a property dispute.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:11Speaker 02

  No, it wasn't a property dispute.

• 46:12Speaker 00

  Nope, that wasn't it. There's so much more that goes in.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  That's also horrifying if it was just a property dispute. Like, damn.

• 46:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. That honestly, those are also probably my rabbit holes and probably yours too.

• 46:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  Whenever there's a witch trial somewhere, I, I can't, I can't look away. I have to know what's going on there.

• 46:30Speaker 00

  I love a witch trial and I love a scandal. I love a good scandal.

• 46:34Speaker 01

  You do love a-

• 46:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:35Speaker 00

  Like an old money scandal. Those are the rabbit holes I fall down.

• 46:38Speaker 02

  So dig into, there's an Italian witch trial, I want to say 1500s, in a town called Triori.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 46:44Speaker 02

  T-R-I-O-R-I.

• 46:45Speaker 00

  We feel like I've seen this. Yeah.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, that one's, it's, it's just so different. It's like a very different aspect of European culture. And I think it has a little bit of the drama of like, you know, a nasty priest who's, you know, there's abuse and, um, a lot of- You know, patriarchy in full

• 47:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:03Speaker 02

  Display.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  That's up my alley. Yeah. Let's go. I love a messed up priest. So do you. I do love a messed up priest. Yeah.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  That's why I love midnight mass. Yeah.

• 47:12Speaker 02

  I have yet to see that, but I will say

• 47:14Speaker 01

  I still have to see it too.

• 47:15Speaker 02

  The newest knives out.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 47:17Speaker 02

  Wake up dead man. Oh.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  I haven't seen the newest one. It's really good. It is. It's really good. Okay. Yeah. All right.

• 47:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, it'll be right up your alley.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  All right. Cool. You need to watch midnight mass.

• 47:24Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  Look at us just swapping things. It's like a spooky little New England village too, like fishing. So it's got those vibes to it.

• 47:31Speaker 02

  Uh, Widows Bay is next on my list to watch.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 47:33Speaker 02

  I haven't seen any of it, so.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  We've been yelling at Aiden to watch Widows Bay. I actually watched it all in one day.

• 47:39Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh.

• 47:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, we had a day off. It was raining and I said, I know what I'm doing.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  It took John and I like so long to watch. Yeah. I almost wish that I, I don't suggest watching it all in one day because now I'm like, I want to do it all again.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  I'd like to stretch it out. Yeah. It's so good that we are, and we never get to watch it. Like John and I will take a hundred years to watch a show. We have kids. The kids go to sleep, we'll sit down to watch it. Inevitably, one of them will come down and eat something or have a stomach ache or a nightmare and we'll have to do the whole thing. They dairy. So we get like 10 minutes of a show at a time where we can like stretch it out. Mm hmm. And Widows Bay was like just enough where we were able to finish it. But even now I'm like, I want to start it again and rewatch. I do too. That's how good that show was.

• 48:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  That's an immaculate show. I think too, it's one of those shows where on a rewatch, you might pick up things you didn't the first time. So.

• 48:26Speaker 02

  I love that.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's so fun. And it's got really good New England vibes. I was literally, you took the words out of my mouth. I was just gonna say that.

• 48:34Speaker 02

  Well, and I'm North Shore. Like I've, I've driven south to be with you.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:38Speaker 02

  But, um, Rockport and Gloucester, where they filmed it.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  That's where they filmed it.

• 48:42Speaker 02

  I was just in Rockport a couple of weeks ago.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, we want to go because you can just like walk around all the filming locations.

• 48:47Speaker 02

  I can't wait to watch the show and like picture it from that.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  From that angle.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  Cause Rockport is Widows Bay. Like it's just.

• 48:53Speaker 02

  That's amazing.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  That's it. You're gonna see it and just be like, oh, that's that. You'll probably be like, I've been there. And everybody in that show feels like they're from New England. Like they just, it's right. My girl Rosemary. Love Rosemary. Like, I just get it.

• 49:05Speaker 02

  I love it.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  But speaking of New England. Yeah, it worked out. It kind of worked out perfect. Why do you think that New England is like such a hub of the spookiest legends and stories?

• 49:17Speaker 02

  So a lot of folklore comes from fear.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 49:19Speaker 02

  Right? And there's a, there's a lot of the United States that was settled in relative safety.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 49:27Speaker 02

  There's a lot of nuance to that and people can pick that apart. But, but it, in New England, it was sort of like you were on the edge of the known world in the early 1600s and there was a lot more danger. I mean, when people want to talk about what really caused the Salem witch trials, one of the big factors was that there were settlers. So what is now the state of Maine, used to be part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, like extended all the way up there. And there were settlers way up in like Wells, who were essentially at war with the Native Americans because they had wandered into Native American territory and started to take land.

• 50:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:04Speaker 02

  And they were rightly defending themselves. So these white Christian colonists were, were referring to the Native Americans as the devil and that the devil was out to get them. And the, the conflict was so bad that they were actually like reverse migrating back down to Salem. And so you had in Salem, people flooding in, having lost family members. They were wounded. They had been fighting with the devil. Like, like for them, fear was like this mist all around them, just trapping them in. And that's, I think in, in New England, a lot more common than you might find in like where I grew up, Illinois.

• 50:43Speaker 02

  By the time my hometown was settled, like the United States had forced Native Americans far, far away. And so that element of fear wasn't there.

• 50:54Speaker 02

  I think in New England, you just get a lot of it. You also get a mix of a lot of different, there's a mix of, of faiths. You've got Protestant, Catholic, the Puritan element of that. Um, there is, there's mixtures of cultures.

• 51:08Speaker 02

  There's just different waves of it and it, fear just becomes this really common thread through it all.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  And it's a monster, fear is definitely in all these stories.

• 51:19Speaker 02

  Because when you're afraid and you don't have the answers.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:21Speaker 02

  The human instinct is to invent an answer that fills in the gap, you know?

• 51:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:27Speaker 02

  And so you see that with Mercy's family.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:30Speaker 02

  You see, um, you know, George Brown loses his wife first. Uh, about a year later, he uses, he loses his oldest daughter. And then, um, his son, his only son gets sick and there's some weird stuff going on here. He's the only one they send out to Colorado to get better.

• 51:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:49Speaker 02

  Right? Like, yeah, the man can tell.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  He gets to go get better. He gets to breathe fresh air.

• 51:52Speaker 02

  And while he's gone, Mercy gets sick and dies. He comes back after her death. They're afraid, right? Like they've lost, and, and it's interesting. I, I wanted to, I wanted to make sure that I, I noted this. So whenever you hear Mercy Brown's story, you hear about those four. You hear, George has got a wife who dies, the oldest daughter. Edwin is sick and then Mercy dies. That's all you ever hear. But there are so many other kids. So Mary Eliza is the mom. Mary Olive is the oldest. And then you've got, um, Edwin, Annie, Mercy, Hattie, Jenny and Myra. I mean, when, when George's wife dies, there's a two-year-old in the house.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  Holy shit.

• 52:33Speaker 02

  That, that's how like, people picture just a couple of teenagers who pass away, but it's like this bustling farmhouse, right?

• 52:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:39Speaker 02

  His, a couple of years after his, his wife dies, his father dies, not from tuberculosis, but still like that grief thread is still there. And I think George's mom is living in the house with them. And so you've just got all of this, this fear being mixed up. And it's really the community who's afraid. At some point they're like, hey, there's a lot of Browns who are dying.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  What's up with your family?

• 53:00Speaker 02

  So let's, let's take care of this fear.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 53:02Speaker 02

  By doing this thing, right?

• 53:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:04Speaker 02

  And what's ironic is that it doesn't work, right? Like Edwin, spoiler alert, dies.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:10Speaker 02

  And then after that, um, three years later, in 1895, both Jenny and 25-year-old Annie also pass away from consumption. In 1899, their youngest sister Myra dies from consumption as well. Like, so tuberculosis is taking all of them out.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:26Speaker 02

  The only one to live is, uh, is Hattie, who actually lives until 1954.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  That's crazy.

• 53:34Speaker 02

  I put in the book here, cause I like, I like putting people in a, like a, a frame of reference to help people understand.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:40Speaker 02

  She learned about her sisters and her mom being exhumed to look for signs of what was essentially a vampire and lived long enough to see the premieres of I Love Lucy, The Ed Sullivan Show and American Bandstand.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  When you contextualize that.

• 53:54Speaker 02

  Telephones.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 53:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's mind boggling.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  That is absolutely mind boggling. Crazy.

• 53:59Speaker 02

  So she lived through it.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. I would say so.

• 54:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  I would say so. She's the definition of I've seen some shit.

• 54:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  She said, you don't know what I've been through. She's seen it. Wow.

• 54:10Speaker 02

  So yeah, and fear is at the, at the heart of all of what was going on.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  It is.

• 54:14Speaker 02

  Like reacting to a fear, inventing an answer to calm fears.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Right. To make you feel better about what's going on.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  In some ways that makes what I do for a living kind of boring. It's like, yeah, 12 years of making lore, but the answer at the end of the day is

• 54:26Speaker 01

  Fear.

• 54:27Speaker 02

  People were afraid in the end of the story, right?

• 54:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, but our brains do some messed up things when we're afraid, you know? That's the thing. The, the way people react to fear is so scary. I mean, the Salem witch trials, Puritans are wild. Wild. They're wild. Yeah, absolutely.

• 54:41Speaker 02

  Haven't stopped doing it since.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Nope. Nope. We keep on doing it. We don't learn a damn thing.

• 54:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:47Speaker 01

  History repeats itself. It sure does.

• 54:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  Now, what would be the creepiest legend that you feel isn't talked about enough? Was there one that you saw that you were like, why is this not Bigfoot?

• 55:00Speaker 01

  That's the one. Yes.

• 55:01Speaker 02

  Creepiest legend. I mean, I, I, some of the creepiest get talked about because they're super creepy. Mothman, for example.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I love Mothman.

• 55:10Speaker 02

  The, the, yeah, the, like the seeing Mothman as like a portent of doom and then looking at the events that happened, there's some really creepy things going on there.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  I love an omen, like a harbinger. Yeah. Oh, harbinger. So creepy.

• 55:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. Creepy in a different sense. You know, have you, have you ever done the story of Mary Toft? The woman who gave birth to rabbits?

• 55:32Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. I was just reading about that the other day. That's so strange. You brought that up.

• 55:37Speaker 02

  It's creepy in a different sense.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure is. It's spooky. It's got something.

• 55:43Speaker 02

  What she did with those rabbit parts.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  Girl, what she did. Girl. That is. That's another one we need to cover. I just put that on my list recently. Yeah.

• 55:53Speaker 02

  Although I have to say, I'm surprised that Gwyneth Paltrow hasn't, you know.

• 55:57Speaker 02

  Tried some of those.

• 55:57Speaker 00

  Figured that out with.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  Hasn't added it into the Google lineup.

• 56:00Speaker 00

  With the G company.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  She has time.

• 56:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know.

• 56:03Speaker 01

  TM.

• 56:04Speaker 00

  There you go.

• 56:05Speaker 01

  What is faltrough?

• 56:06Speaker 00

  Now, I wonder, because this happens to us a lot. Have you ever started researching one topic and then you fall into a completely different topic that you stumble upon along the way?

• 56:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so a decade ago, I thought that was distraction. Right? Like, like, like the inability to focus on something. But the more episodes you make, you know this, that you need more episodes if you're going to keep going.

• 56:26Speaker 00

  Right.

• 56:26Speaker 02

  You start to realize that those moments are the moments where you need to make a note, put a pin in it, set it aside, follow that rabbit, rabbit trail later. And that becomes another episode.

• 56:36Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 56:36Speaker 02

  Because the best stories are found in the midst of researching a story.

• 56:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:41Speaker 02

  Right? Like, oh, yeah. It's the side thing, the related thing, which is, I mean, it's why this book is, is what it is. Because you, you research one thing and you realize that there's five other things connected to it.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  And those are the side things.

• 56:52Speaker 00

  Links to each other.

• 56:52Speaker 02

  And they become something later on.

• 56:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:54Speaker 02

  So for lore, we do, I don't know how you guys plan out stuff, but like, we do an annual writer's room.

• 57:00Speaker 00

  Whoa.

• 57:00Speaker 02

  And so.

• 57:01Speaker 00

  That's so cool. We're not gonna do that.

• 57:03Speaker 02

  We do, we do lore every other week and then in, in between, we do lore legends. And those tend to be a little bit more toward like the urban legend, maybe a little less factually grounded. The idea that there's still valuable stories to tell.

• 57:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:16Speaker 02

  Right? Music's slightly different. Format's the same. And so we'll do an annual writer's room for lore and then six months later, one for legends. And it is the whole team of researchers and writers together pitching for like a day or two straight over video chat, pitching a story idea, like, here's my micro outline for it. I think that we should do act one on this, act two on this, act three. The epilogue at the end of the episode can be about a related story about this.

• 57:44Speaker 00

  Oh, that's cool.

• 57:44Speaker 02

  And then we like brainstorm and, and throw sources at each other. And we'll, we'll try to, over the course of maybe a day, day and a half, lock down 25, 30 stories.

• 57:53Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  That's so fun.

• 57:54Speaker 02

  So I'm, I'm planned out to the beginning of 28 right now.

• 57:58Speaker 00

  Oh, wow. I'm planned out to like a couple of weeks from now.

• 58:01Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, damn.

• 58:03Speaker 02

  Living on the edge.

• 58:04Speaker 01

  And honestly, that's us being like, look at us.

• 58:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's us being like, whoa.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  Look at us go.

• 58:09Speaker 00

  That's a cool concept. We're gonna, we're gonna give that a try, baby.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  I know. I feel like that's such a better way to do it. Cause sometimes we're like, we're like mood podcasters.

• 58:16Speaker 00

  We are mood podcasters.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  We're like, we'll be like, I don't feel like telling the story today, so I'm gonna switch at the last second.

• 58:22Speaker 00

  Oh, sometimes I'll have a completed story and then I'm like, I don't want to tell it today. I'm gonna move on to this one.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, we'll switch.

• 58:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  Which is not the way to do it.

• 58:29Speaker 02

  No.

• 58:30Speaker 01

  If I'm, if I'm being quite honest.

• 58:31Speaker 00

  I mean, there's something to be said about it.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  Sometimes.

• 58:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, it works out sometimes.

• 58:34Speaker 02

  You have to talk about it. So if you're gonna talk about it, you might as well love it, right?

• 58:38Speaker 00

  Exactly. You have to be in the mood to talk about it.

• 58:40Speaker 02

  And the good news is it's done when you are in the mood.

• 58:43Speaker 00

  That's the thing.

• 58:43Speaker 02

  It's there.

• 58:44Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 58:44Speaker 02

  It's waiting for you.

• 58:45Speaker 00

  That's the thing. That's what I always tell myself to make myself feel better about it.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  It's done, so we can use it.

• 58:49Speaker 02

  Right. Exactly.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  There we go.

• 58:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  But yeah, we're constantly on the edge.

• 58:51Speaker 00

  We do that a lot. Now, I wonder, because again, this has happened to us. Is there ever a piece of folklore that you stumble across that you either desperately want to debunk, debunk but can't? Or that you almost don't want to debunk that you do?

• 59:06Speaker 02

  Oh, wanting to preserve the, that, that raw innocence of people believing something. Right? Again, back to my personality trait of liking to burst people's bubbles. I don't know that I've ever wanted to preserve the belief in something.

• 59:22Speaker 00

  I was gonna say, I don't know how it feels.

• 59:24Speaker 01

  See, I'm the total opposite. I'm like, no, I don't want to ruin this for you. It's so fun.

• 59:28Speaker 00

  I'm like.

• 59:30Speaker 02

  But I'll handle it as a storyteller.

• 59:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course.

• 59:33Speaker 02

  I will, I will tell people in an episode, but that's not true. But I'll do it after I've told them the story.

• 59:40Speaker 00

  And they've had the fun of it.

• 59:41Speaker 02

  From a point of belief.

• 59:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:42Speaker 02

  Right? Like, here is the story that people tell and cling to. And I, like, I really want them to experience the story.

• 59:48Speaker 00

  Almost like you set up Exhumed with the Mercy Brown story.

• 59:51Speaker 02

  I'm just sorry to say that, like.

• 59:53Speaker 00

  It didn't go that way.

• 59:54Speaker 02

  It didn't actually, and here's, here's the three reasons why.

• 59:57Speaker 00

  Right.

• 59:57Speaker 02

  Right?

• 59:57Speaker 00

  You're like, am I really sorry to say? I don't know.

• 59:59Speaker 02

  Because I'm, you know, I like fact. I like research. And if the research says that can't have happened.

• 1:00:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  You know, there was a story we did of a haunting in DC, like one of the mansions in DC had this, you can do a ghost tour of it now. And the, the basic gist of it is that this family had two daughters when they were in their teens or so. Each one, like years apart, fell down the stairs and died.

• 1:00:26Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  Damn.

• 1:00:26Speaker 02

  And yeah, they lost both their kids falling down the stairs. And so of course, they tell you the story on the stairs during the ghost tour, right?

• 1:00:32Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 1:00:32Speaker 02

  Well, those daughters are in a graveyard and their gravestones have dates on them.

• 1:00:38Speaker 00

  Uh oh.

• 1:00:38Speaker 02

  And the dates do not match up with the stories.

• 1:00:40Speaker 00

  Oh, no.

• 1:00:40Speaker 02

  And it turns out that we know how they both died. One of them was from an illness like tuberculosis.

• 1:00:44Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:00:45Speaker 02

  You know, it's like, it's, it's quaint to want to hold on to that.

• 1:00:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:49Speaker 02

  I can see the, the drama and like the appeal of a story like that. Go ahead and tell the story all you want, but at the end of the day, the evidence is there that says it didn't happen.

• 1:00:58Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:00:58Speaker 02

  And I, I feel like I wouldn't have integrity if I didn't, at the very least, say, by the way.

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  We do have this gravestone.

• 1:01:07Speaker 00

  I have to tell you the truth.

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  We do have records.

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  Have you ever come across the story of the Casket Girls in New Orleans?

• 1:01:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:13Speaker 00

  That one is so interesting, but then you get through it and you're like, yeah, that probably didn't happen like that.

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  Exactly. But so many people love the idea of that story.

• 1:01:20Speaker 00

  It's so fun. The idea of it is awesome.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  Cause how fun is that?

• 1:01:24Speaker 00

  Like, and especially with New Orleans.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  But the truth of it is.

• 1:01:27Speaker 00

  Pretty awful.

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, the truth is way worse, so.

• 1:01:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:31Speaker 00

  That's why it's always fun to lean on the.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:33Speaker 00

  The fun of it all.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  That they were vampires or just smuggling.

• 1:01:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, I want, you know what? I want to give those women that power back.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, you were vampires destroying the village.

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:01:42Speaker 00

  Now, what episode of lore would you say are you most proud of, if you could pick one or even two?

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  So proud from a couple of different aspects. So I'll say from a research standpoint, Emily Segee and the doppelganger folklore.

• 1:01:55Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:01:56Speaker 02

  Because when I sat down, when I made that episode, it was still in the realm of, of me doing everything. I found the topic, I researched it, I wrote it, I published it. That's why it was every other week initially.

• 1:02:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's a lot of work.

• 1:02:09Speaker 02

  Ton of work to do, yeah. And wanted to do the, the research right. So I would, as anybody does, start online and look for resources for Emily Segee. Whether it was a book or an online article, it was always the same story. It was the same details rearranged by some new writer. But they only had a certain number of Lego pieces to work with. So the story always had the same pieces. And that frustrated me because it made me feel like there wasn't a core, original, more nuanced version of the story. And I really, I don't know how, but I, I pushed until I found a German book that was available on like books.google.com.

• 1:02:51Speaker 00

  It's always on like the 11th page of Google.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, yeah.

• 1:02:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I remember having my laptop open to this German book and then holding my phone with like Google Translate app.

• 1:03:01Speaker 00

  Stop it.

• 1:03:01Speaker 02

  Pointed at the screen and, and reading the German words being translated into English on my phone. And realizing I had found source material behind the story that had more names, more dates, more places.

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  Nothing is better than that.

• 1:03:15Speaker 02

  It just feels like.

• 1:03:16Speaker 00

  Mad respect.

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:18Speaker 00

  That is like.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  That is, that's top notch.

• 1:03:21Speaker 02

  I'm, I'm proud of that one.

• 1:03:22Speaker 00

  You should be.

• 1:03:23Speaker 02

  Did I invent a new medication for some horrible disease? No, but I, I found some sources.

• 1:03:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:30Speaker 02

  What felt like no other writer about that story felt like it was worth time spending to find.

• 1:03:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. And had gone that far.

• 1:03:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I, I was proud of that. From a storytelling aspect, I love episode 12, Half-Hanged.

• 1:03:44Speaker 00

  Oh, I love that one.

• 1:03:45Speaker 02

  Mary Webster.

• 1:03:46Speaker 00

  I love that one.

• 1:03:47Speaker 02

  17th century woman in colonial Massachusetts accused of witchcraft. And this, the, the victory and like the middle finger to the establishment that that story is.

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  Such a good story.

• 1:04:01Speaker 02

  I love it.

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  Half-Hanged Mary.

• 1:04:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  We talked about that.

• 1:04:03Speaker 00

  We have talked about that.

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  I love that story.

• 1:04:05Speaker 02

  And that, so, and she is a real woman. Margaret Atwood is descended from her.

• 1:04:10Speaker 00

  That's so crazy.

• 1:04:11Speaker 02

  And Margaret Atwood wrote a poem and it's like in 12 stanzas about the last 12 hours of her life. And at the end of the poem, you know, this is a woman that was accused of being a witch. And she's like, I'm not a, like, they shipped her off to Boston and then.

• 1:04:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:24Speaker 02

  For a court and she came back acquitted. She, you know, nobody's.

• 1:04:27Speaker 00

  You guys gotta be kidding me.

• 1:04:28Speaker 02

  Right. It was just because she was cranky. She wasn't religious. She wanted people to get off her property.

• 1:04:32Speaker 00

  Good for her.

• 1:04:33Speaker 02

  You know, she was standing up herself.

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  Sounds like me.

• 1:04:34Speaker 00

  She was a powerful woman.

• 1:04:36Speaker 02

  She was poor and the powerful people in town wanted to just blame everything on her. And they, they blamed her for the illness of their town leader, you know, their, their cult leader. And they, they hang her and he still dies from his illness. But in the morning, she gets up off the ground and walks away. And so in Atwood's poem.

• 1:04:54Speaker 00

  I love it.

• 1:04:55Speaker 02

  She ends with this line that's something like, I wasn't a witch before, but now I am.

• 1:05:00Speaker 00

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  And you get shivers when you hear.

• 1:05:02Speaker 00

  Yep. So good.

• 1:05:03Speaker 02

  I love it.

• 1:05:04Speaker 00

  So good. That's so good. Would that be the first episode that if somebody was just starting lore today, would you tell them to start with?

• 1:05:10Speaker 02

  Dig it. Also, from a formulaic standpoint, like you'll get a good sense of how lore is structured. I'm gonna give you a lot of New England, kind of like witch legends. There's even some wizard legends in there, which you don't bump into a lot.

• 1:05:21Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:05:22Speaker 02

  And then, and then you dig right into the context of, of Mary's story.

• 1:05:26Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:05:26Speaker 02

  And what happens and, uh, yeah, it's, I like it. It's a good place to start.

• 1:05:30Speaker 00

  All right.

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so too.

• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:32Speaker 00

  I heard it here first.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  You did.

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  Now, a lot of your stories revolve around people having a lot of faith in things. Like we talked about the hand of glory.

• 1:05:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  And we can look back on that and we can laugh at it.

• 1:05:42Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  What do you think is gonna be our hand of glory in 200 years that people are gonna look back and be like, are you guys serious?

• 1:05:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:51Speaker 00

  You thought that would work?

• 1:05:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. We talked about chemotherapy already, right? And, and surely there has to be a better way.

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:57Speaker 02

  I, I imagine a century from now, I hope it's less than that.

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, hopefully soon.

• 1:06:02Speaker 02

  It'd be great if it's a decade from now.

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  Oh, that'd be great.

• 1:06:05Speaker 02

  But we would have to fund the sciences, wouldn't we?

• 1:06:07Speaker 00

  We sure would.

• 1:06:08Speaker 02

  We would, yeah.

• 1:06:08Speaker 00

  That's a step. We're not really down to fund anything right now.

• 1:06:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:11Speaker 00

  Yeah. We're funding something.

• 1:06:13Speaker 02

  Well, you know, we could fund crypto, I guess. That would cure cancer.

• 1:06:15Speaker 00

  We're funding something, it's not science. Right.

• 1:06:17Speaker 02

  But I think that that's one of the big ones, just the extremes that we're going to for something. You know, I think about some of the early material in Exhumed, talking about blood transfusion. And they were on like the right path.

• 1:06:32Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:33Speaker 02

  Of course, sheep's blood might not have been the right path, but.

• 1:06:36Speaker 00

  You know, you have to start somewhere. I get why they thought, blood, blood. Experiments. It's all red.

• 1:06:41Speaker 02

  But we don't think at all about blood transfusion today.

• 1:06:43Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:06:44Speaker 02

  It's just a normal part of medicine.

• 1:06:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:46Speaker 02

  And I, it does make you wonder, what are the things that we'll look back on? And see as either they were right on, they had it, they just didn't fully understand it. Or, boy, were they way off base.

• 1:06:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:00Speaker 00

  That's what I'm excited to see is the thing that's like blood transfusion where we're like, oh, you were so close.

• 1:07:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:07:05Speaker 00

  You were this close. Yeah, what are we so close to right now?

• 1:07:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:08Speaker 00

  I'm also still freaked out by like, I love blood transfusions, like A plus, yay for blood transfusions. But. You've had two. I have O negative blood, so I can only take O negative blood. And I can give to anyone, but I had to have a blood transfusion after I had my twins. And I like panicked and I was like, I can only have O negative blood. And they were like, I know, like, we went to medical school, we know that. And I was like, are you sure you're gonna poison me? Like, I freaked out. Well, most likely, when you do get a blood transfusion, aren't they going to likely give you O negative? Since it's universal donor. What they usually are gonna give you, but I just was so freaked out about being poisoned by someone else's blood. I was like, I just had my first children, don't kill me. Don't kill me. Yeah. It's like, oh, my God. That's valid. It's weird. Anybody who's had a blood transfusion, it's weird.

• 1:07:51Speaker 00

  Cause all of a sudden you're like, I'm just getting someone else's blood, like, what?

• 1:07:55Speaker 02

  Or people who have an organ from someone else, right?

• 1:07:58Speaker 00

  It must be so strange.

• 1:07:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:00Speaker 00

  Cause, but like, thank goodness we can do that. Mm hmm. That's a rabbit hole to dive down. Yeah.

• 1:08:05Speaker 02

  It is, there's, I, did I touch on that in the book? I feel like I talked a little bit about.

• 1:08:09Speaker 00

  You did talk about.

• 1:08:11Speaker 02

  There's this ideal image of a complete body. And even when we, you know, you're a healthy person who's gotten a kidney from somebody else. You frequently talk about, you'll, decade later, you'll still talk about it as someone else's kidney. Like, you are an incomplete, your, your, your life has been saved. It's a miracle of medicine, but there's still something about it that like, doesn't jive with our ideal of the perfect human, intact human body.

• 1:08:35Speaker 00

  It's not mine, so it's not.

• 1:08:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is strange how we think that.

• 1:08:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:39Speaker 00

  It is.

• 1:08:50Speaker 00

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• 1:10:25Speaker 00

  Now, and after all these years, what do you think folklore says about people, about humans?

• 1:10:32Speaker 02

  We're very creative. We're very, we're very hopeful.

• 1:10:38Speaker 02

  You know, we can focus on fear, that's, that's fine, but I think the answers that people have invented over the centuries or millennia, it, there is a hope kind of lingering in the corner that, hey, guys, we figured it out, you know? Or, or we can conquer this challenge or problem, or get around this unknown. There is a hope there that I think is really admirable.

• 1:11:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:04Speaker 02

  Going through the book and writing the story in that order really made me appreciate how, how very much not barbaric these people were. By comparison, yeah, there's some weird stuff.

• 1:11:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:17Speaker 02

  But they were just trying, they were human. They wanted to be hopeful and find a solution. And, you know, I think that's something to take away and say, I hope we always are.

• 1:11:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:29Speaker 02

  A very hopeful species.

• 1:11:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. If we lose that, what do we become? Yeah, what do we have?

• 1:11:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:36Speaker 00

  I like that.

• 1:11:36Speaker 02

  And there's also, at the same time, we are, we as people are just lovers of story. You know, whether you want to write them or you just enjoy them, very few people would say, I don't want to deal with stories at all. Those are, those are weird people.

• 1:11:51Speaker 00

  I was just gonna say, I don't want those people around me.

• 1:11:53Speaker 02

  There's something sociopathic about that.

• 1:11:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:56Speaker 02

  I don't want to, I don't want to watch TV or movies or read a book.

• 1:12:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't want to hear tales.

• 1:12:01Speaker 02

  We, for the most part, love story.

• 1:12:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:04Speaker 02

  And I love that, something like podcasting where, yes, we're sitting around microphones talking. And sometimes there's cameras involved, but we could have a campfire in between us.

• 1:12:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:14Speaker 02

  You know, in the woods.

• 1:12:15Speaker 00

  It would be the same vibe.

• 1:12:15Speaker 02

  And we'd be doing the same thing that our ancestors did.

• 1:12:17Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:12:18Speaker 02

  You know, 20,000 years ago, or 100,000 years ago, telling stories, right?

• 1:12:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:23Speaker 02

  So.

• 1:12:23Speaker 00

  I love that.

• 1:12:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:25Speaker 00

  I think that's perfect. I think that's a perfect answer. I love it. Well done. All right, well.

• 1:12:29Speaker 02

  Pat myself on the shoulder.

• 1:12:30Speaker 00

  We're not done with you yet because we always end on a game.

• 1:12:33Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 1:12:34Speaker 00

  So are you down for would you rather?

• 1:12:36Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:12:37Speaker 00

  Okay, that's good, that works out.

• 1:12:38Speaker 02

  Unless the question is, would you rather play a game or?

• 1:12:42Speaker 00

  Imagine if you just said no.

• 1:12:43Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:12:43Speaker 00

  Are you down for would you rather? You're like, no.

• 1:12:45Speaker 02

  For those who can't see, she's just handed me a hacksaw. I'm very worried.

• 1:12:50Speaker 00

  What's gonna happen here?

• 1:12:52Speaker 02

  Keep your left foot or keep your right foot?

• 1:12:54Speaker 00

  What do you think? Surprise. We've decided to become Jigsaw. Yeah. All right, so inspired by episode two of Lore, The Bloody Pit on the Husack Tunnel. A really good episode. Great episode. Would you rather hear phantom voices calling your name whilst inside the tunnel?

• 1:13:08Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:13:08Speaker 00

  Or see somebody standing at the entrance, but they disappear every time you blink?

• 1:13:16Speaker 02

  I think the more preferable would just be to see something.

• 1:13:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:19Speaker 02

  Hearing things? I'm sorry.

• 1:13:22Speaker 00

  It's a lot.

• 1:13:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:23Speaker 00

  It's overstimulating.

• 1:13:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:24Speaker 00

  That's really overstimulating.

• 1:13:25Speaker 02

  No amount of adult diapers could help me in that situation.

• 1:13:27Speaker 00

  Truly. Yeah. What do you think? I'd probably feel the same way, just because sound overstimulates me. So as soon as voices started, I'd just be like, ugh, like, that would be it. I'd be useless. I picture this as like a lot of voices, like disembodied. Yeah.

• 1:13:43Speaker 02

  Just imagine that in, in what is essentially a manmade cave.

• 1:13:45Speaker 00

  That's the thing.

• 1:13:46Speaker 02

  The echoing, the resonance.

• 1:13:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. And here's the thing, that would freak me out.

• 1:13:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:50Speaker 00

  But what if there's a real person that I'm seeing and I have to deal with them?

• 1:13:54Speaker 02

  I get that.

• 1:13:55Speaker 00

  That's true. I'd much rather deal with the disembodied voices.

• 1:13:57Speaker 02

  Right, because you could, you could reason that away.

• 1:14:00Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:14:00Speaker 02

  It's, it's an echo of my footsteps or whatever it is. But when you see something.

• 1:14:04Speaker 00

  That's harder.

• 1:14:05Speaker 02

  That's, that's a lot harder.

• 1:14:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:07Speaker 00

  So if you have mace, so then you're okay. I usually do. Yeah.

• 1:14:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:11Speaker 00

  So you might be all right.

• 1:14:12Speaker 02

  Does mace work on a ghost? Have you, have you guys confirmed this?

• 1:14:15Speaker 00

  I have never maced a ghost, so I do not know that, but. But what if, what if it's not a ghost? Yeah, what if it's an animal? What if the person that you see at the end of the tunnel is real?

• 1:14:24Speaker 02

  That's funny, years ago, you and I talked about doing an episode of Morbid and like, coming on and talking about just an old creepy true crime case. And we talked about the Hammersmith ghost.

• 1:14:32Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:14:32Speaker 02

  Hammersmith or Hammersfield?

• 1:14:34Speaker 00

  Hammersmith, I think.

• 1:14:34Speaker 02

  Hammersmith.

• 1:14:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:35Speaker 02

  And it, and I think I've done this as a live show story before, where this was in London. And the, people kept seeing this white apparition walking around and like, in, I don't know, true, go get him fashion, people, people formed mobs to go out and hunt down this ghost.

• 1:14:53Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 1:14:53Speaker 02

  And eventually somebody found him and shot the ghost. And the ghost died and the ghost bled, because the ghost was a guy who worked.

• 1:15:00Speaker 00

  It was just a guy.

• 1:15:00Speaker 02

  He was a, he was a mason who worked with stone dust all day in white clothes.

• 1:15:04Speaker 00

  And so he was just covered in the dust.

• 1:15:06Speaker 02

  Like a Scooby Doo cartoon, right?

• 1:15:07Speaker 00

  Oh, the poor guy.

• 1:15:08Speaker 02

  And he got killed because people thought he was a ghost.

• 1:15:11Speaker 00

  Damn, that's actually on my list, too. You're naming all my things.

• 1:15:13Speaker 02

  I'm sorry.

• 1:15:14Speaker 00

  No, it's great, it's like foreshadowing. Yeah, love it.

• 1:15:17Speaker 02

  Stay tuned.

• 1:15:17Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly. That's true. All right, my next one is inspired by episode three, The Beast Within.

• 1:15:24Speaker 02

  Oh, yes.

• 1:15:25Speaker 00

  Now, would you rather travel through a medieval German forest at night? Or spend one night inside Bedberg while everyone believed there was a werewolf afoot? So you're either with people or you're alone in the woods?

• 1:15:39Speaker 02

  See, what you're asking me is, would you rather endure the company of fearful suspicious people?

• 1:15:45Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:15:45Speaker 02

  Or the dark woods and whatever they contain?

• 1:15:48Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:15:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think I'd rather be in the dark woods.

• 1:15:52Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:15:53Speaker 02

  That's a, that's a, would you choose the bear question?

• 1:15:55Speaker 00

  Yep. It absolutely is. Do you want people or a German forest at night? Yeah, I'll take the German forest. Or a German forest at night alone? That's unanimous. Yes. I think we all agree with that one. Like, no. Just like I choose the bear. Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:16:11Speaker 02

  Bedberg was, was mind boggling because not only was it a whole community, people who thought it was all real, but the guy that they accused thought it was real, too.

• 1:16:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:19Speaker 02

  He's like, guys, I put a belt on and I rubbed my body with some salve that I made.

• 1:16:23Speaker 00

  It's like, I think you're right.

• 1:16:24Speaker 02

  It made me turn into a wolf.

• 1:16:25Speaker 00

  I think I did it. Yeah.

• 1:16:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, like.

• 1:16:27Speaker 00

  Who doesn't want that?

• 1:16:28Speaker 02

  You couldn't win.

• 1:16:29Speaker 00

  No, I really couldn't back them. Yeah, because not even the guy that they're accusing is crazy. Shit, can't believe I did this. We're all in on the joke here, all right? Sure. All right, next one is inspired by episode 113, Word of Mouth, Exploring Corpse Medicine. And we're giving you three options here to be nice.

• 1:16:45Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:16:45Speaker 00

  Would you rather be prescribed powdered mummy, moss from a hanged man's skull, or a human fat ointment?

• 1:16:55Speaker 02

  Okay, we can toss the human fat ointment out the door.

• 1:16:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:57Speaker 02

  Cause that's, that's literally just like reduced human fat.

• 1:17:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:17:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, like to the point where, yeah.

• 1:17:05Speaker 00

  And just greasy.

• 1:17:06Speaker 02

  Like a lotion you can rub on your hands.

• 1:17:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. And really, what's that gonna do for you? It's greasy.

• 1:17:12Speaker 02

  I, I'm afraid of mushrooms, and I know that that's not moss, but I was.

• 1:17:17Speaker 00

  Similar.

• 1:17:18Speaker 01

  But you know mushrooms were in there.

• 1:17:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it's, it's like, would I want to eat some strange moss? I don't know that I want to do that. So I'm gonna go with mummy powder. And I'm gonna say that because sometimes it was ground up mummy. And sometimes it was ground up bitumen, the, the black substance that was used.

• 1:17:36Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:17:37Speaker 02

  That's a, that's a fascinating bit of folklore.

• 1:17:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is.

• 1:17:40Speaker 02

  I don't know if it, it's hard to capture it in a story, but in the book I cover this idea that like, the asphalt on our roads, it's, it's a petroleum product.

• 1:17:50Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:17:50Speaker 02

  Right? And it's come up out of the ground all over the world for forever. And they used to call it bitumen.

• 1:17:56Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:17:56Speaker 02

  And for early days of Egyptian mummification, they actually covered the bodies in it to seal and preserve them. Uh, but it happens to look a lot as a sticky, black liquid. Like what would happen if you just mummified somebody without it and let them sit in the grave for a long time?

• 1:18:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:18:12Speaker 02

  The body fluids come out and they kind of congeal into a black sticky substance.

• 1:18:17Speaker 00

  Like tar.

• 1:18:17Speaker 02

  Like tar. And so people started to confuse that stuff with actual bitumen, which like, early Arabic writers prescribed as medicine for all sorts of things.

• 1:18:27Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:18:27Speaker 02

  And so eventually that bitumen started to be confused with this exudate that came out of the bodies. And so people were taking that instead.

• 1:18:35Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 1:18:35Speaker 02

  And then they were like, well, if we're taking this, the, the body itself that it's on.

• 1:18:38Speaker 00

  Must be useful.

• 1:18:39Speaker 02

  Probably useful as well.

• 1:18:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:18:40Speaker 02

  Um, and so there's a Persian word for bitumen that is mamiya. And that started to cause the powder to be called mummy. And then the bodies were called mummies. And now we call all preserved corpses mummies.

• 1:18:53Speaker 00

  It's just a mistranslation.

• 1:18:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:18:55Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:18:55Speaker 02

  But every time you drive on the road, you're basically driving on.

• 1:18:57Speaker 00

  On mummy.

• 1:18:58Speaker 02

  Something connected to that folklore, which I think is great.

• 1:19:00Speaker 00

  It's all metaphors, you know?

• 1:19:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. So all that to say, if I had to pick between the three of them, I would pick the mummy powder because there is the chance it's just a natural substance.

• 1:19:10Speaker 01

  You know, I think I'm gonna go with your answer for that very reason.

• 1:19:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:14Speaker 01

  Now that I know that, I'm like, all right, that's a risk.

• 1:19:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:17Speaker 01

  It's a risk, but the other ones, you know what you're getting into.

• 1:19:19Speaker 00

  That's the thing.

• 1:19:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:20Speaker 01

  Just straight up.

• 1:19:21Speaker 00

  You know you're getting straight up moss from a skull. Yeah.

• 1:19:24Speaker 01

  Or, or.

• 1:19:25Speaker 00

  Human fat ointment.

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  Anything greasy, I'm out. Like greasy on my skin.

• 1:19:30Speaker 00

  I know. I guess the only plus for the human fat ointment is that you're not ingesting it. It's going on your skin.

• 1:19:36Speaker 01

  See, I have a thing with my hands having anything on them or like greasiness on me. I have like a texture issue.

• 1:19:43Speaker 00

  But even the powdered mummy, sometimes they just like packed wounds with it. So.

• 1:19:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:48Speaker 00

  You could, you could also do that.

• 1:19:49Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 1:19:49Speaker 00

  Then you're not ingesting it.

• 1:19:50Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 1:19:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm sticking powdered mummy.

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think I'm gonna go with that too.

• 1:19:55Speaker 00

  All right.

• 1:19:55Speaker 01

  Look at us.

• 1:19:56Speaker 00

  Unanimous again.

• 1:19:57Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:19:58Speaker 01

  Now, the next one.

• 1:19:59Speaker 02

  Like minded. Okay.

• 1:20:00Speaker 01

  Is inspired by chapter one of Exhumed.

• 1:20:02Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:20:03Speaker 01

  And it's called Blood and Glory. Would you rather witness George Washington's bloodletting to his death? Or witness the meeting where people seriously propose trying to reanimate his corpse? Both are pretty interesting.

• 1:20:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, they are. I mean, they essentially drained half of his body's blood over the course of a day.

• 1:20:23Speaker 01

  That's unbelievable when I found that out.

• 1:20:25Speaker 02

  And he was up walking around dictating his last will and testament to his wife.

• 1:20:30Speaker 00

  That's gnarly.

• 1:20:31Speaker 02

  I would be unconscious.

• 1:20:32Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:20:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:34Speaker 01

  I don't know how much I lost when I had the twins, but I was.

• 1:20:37Speaker 00

  You were so scary.

• 1:20:38Speaker 01

  Half dead.

• 1:20:39Speaker 00

  You were so scary.

• 1:20:40Speaker 02

  If I don't get enough coffee, I'm out of it.

• 1:20:41Speaker 00

  Literally. I was gonna say, if I don't get eight hours of sleep, I'm not functioning.

• 1:20:44Speaker 01

  I drank enough water the other day and I thought I was dying. My Oura ring was like, you, you're dead. Like something's happening.

• 1:20:49Speaker 02

  Exactly. So he didn't have enough blood.

• 1:20:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:20:51Speaker 02

  And yet he was dictating his will.

• 1:20:53Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:20:53Speaker 02

  So there's a part of me like with some morbid curiosity, lowercase m.

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  Not to you.

• 1:20:59Speaker 02

  Don't, don't hit me with the lawsuit for using that word. I would just, yeah, I'd kind of wanna see.

• 1:21:06Speaker 01

  That whole thing play out.

• 1:21:07Speaker 02

  Process.

• 1:21:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:08Speaker 02

  I also asked this question in the book and I, you have to wonder, what did they do with all the blood?

• 1:21:13Speaker 01

  I wonder that. Like where does it go?

• 1:21:15Speaker 00

  They probably just tossed it out the window.

• 1:21:17Speaker 02

  I mean, that, that's what logic says.

• 1:21:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:20Speaker 02

  This was the era of Gardi Lu, like.

• 1:21:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:23Speaker 02

  You fill a chamber pot, you toss it outside.

• 1:21:25Speaker 00

  That's my thought process.

• 1:21:26Speaker 02

  Throw out 80 ounces of blood.

• 1:21:28Speaker 01

  Of George Washington's blood too.

• 1:21:30Speaker 02

  George Washington's blood.

• 1:21:30Speaker 00

  They might have, cause I think they were past the point of, you know, drinking it or.

• 1:21:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:34Speaker 00

  Doing anything with it.

• 1:21:35Speaker 02

  There's a historical thriller in there for you. Somewhere in American, in a museum, there's like a vial, like a.

• 1:21:40Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:21:41Speaker 02

  Box of vials of his blood.

• 1:21:42Speaker 01

  And someone finds it.

• 1:21:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:43Speaker 01

  Some like random.

• 1:21:44Speaker 02

  We're gonna clone George Washington.

• 1:21:45Speaker 01

  Inventory clerk.

• 1:21:46Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:21:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:47Speaker 02

  Dan Brown, if you're listening.

• 1:21:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like call me.

• 1:21:51Speaker 02

  So while it would be fun to listen to the doctors arguing, especially when the whack job shows up at the end and he's like, no, let's put some sheep's blood in him.

• 1:22:00Speaker 00

  Let's do it.

• 1:22:00Speaker 02

  We can still bring him back to life.

• 1:22:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:02Speaker 02

  That would be fun. I wanna see what, what, I wanna see the blood works.

• 1:22:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:05Speaker 02

  That's what I wanna see.

• 1:22:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:07Speaker 01

  What about you? Are you going with bloodletting?

• 1:22:10Speaker 00

  This is a tough one because I hate to say this, but I think when they were trying to reanimate him, it might've been to hear those conversations and to hear the thought processes.

• 1:22:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:19Speaker 00

  Might be pretty fascinating.

• 1:22:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:21Speaker 00

  And I don't really love blood. I'm a little squeamish around blood. So.

• 1:22:25Speaker 02

  That would get you around that.

• 1:22:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, that would.

• 1:22:27Speaker 01

  There would be some of that.

• 1:22:28Speaker 00

  Yeah. That's a tough one. I think I'm gonna go witness the, witness the meeting where we're, we're coming up with ideas.

• 1:22:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:35Speaker 02

  I can see it.

• 1:22:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'm going with the bloodletting.

• 1:22:38Speaker 00

  They're going, yeah, I mean, you were an autopsy technician.

• 1:22:41Speaker 01

  I feel like I, I should be there.

• 1:22:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:43Speaker 01

  It just makes sense.

• 1:22:44Speaker 00

  I think so.

• 1:22:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:46Speaker 00

  All right. Next one. Inspired, Erin, by your overall vibe. Would you rather have front row seats to one of history's most famous autopsies? Or one of history's most famous seances?

• 1:22:59Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:23:01Speaker 01

  This one's hard.

• 1:23:01Speaker 00

  This is so easy for me.

• 1:23:02Speaker 01

  I mean, I know what I would pick, but.

• 1:23:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. Everybody listening knows what you and I would pick too.

• 1:23:08Speaker 02

  I, I think a seance in the, in the heyday of the spiritualist movement.

• 1:23:15Speaker 00

  Yes, like table tipping.

• 1:23:16Speaker 02

  Yes, with like one of the key celebrity mediums at the time. Henry Douglas home.

• 1:23:23Speaker 01

  Maybe some ectoplasm coming out of somewhere.

• 1:23:24Speaker 00

  I was just gonna say that.

• 1:23:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:23:27Speaker 02

  There's, that's another topic that I dipped into a lot.

• 1:23:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:23:31Speaker 02

  Over the years with Laura.

• 1:23:32Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:23:32Speaker 02

  Um, various celebrity mediums and the, the rackets they ran.

• 1:23:37Speaker 00

  Oh, fascinating.

• 1:23:38Speaker 02

  That'd be fascinating to do.

• 1:23:39Speaker 00

  Terrible people.

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:40Speaker 00

  Terrible people.

• 1:23:41Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:23:42Speaker 00

  But yeah, I agree. Seance for sure.

• 1:23:44Speaker 02

  Terrible people. I mean, there, there were charlatans, but so creative.

• 1:23:48Speaker 00

  Oh, absolutely.

• 1:23:49Speaker 02

  The things they did, the tools they created.

• 1:23:51Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. Yeah.

• 1:23:52Speaker 01

  It was actually brilliant, some of the things they did.

• 1:23:54Speaker 00

  They were smart.

• 1:23:55Speaker 01

  You should've used that for better, for like better society.

• 1:23:58Speaker 02

  Seriously.

• 1:23:59Speaker 00

  I mean, I guess in a way they're trying to make people feel better.

• 1:24:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:02Speaker 00

  You know?

• 1:24:02Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:24:03Speaker 00

  We could spend all day talking about that.

• 1:24:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, you absolutely could. I, you know, my initial inclination is autopsy.

• 1:24:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:09Speaker 01

  Cause.

• 1:24:10Speaker 00

  That's what I thought you would pick.

• 1:24:11Speaker 01

  But I'm like, I've seen a lot of autopsies.

• 1:24:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:13Speaker 01

  So now I'm sitting here after you guys just thought it, I was like.

• 1:24:16Speaker 00

  You haven't seen that.

• 1:24:17Speaker 01

  I haven't, I haven't been around a historical seance. So.

• 1:24:21Speaker 00

  Are we all joining each other?

• 1:24:22Speaker 01

  I think I'm gonna join you guys.

• 1:24:23Speaker 00

  All right.

• 1:24:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:24Speaker 00

  This is great.

• 1:24:25Speaker 02

  If we're requesting attendees, like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have to be at the table, right?

• 1:24:30Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:24:31Speaker 02

  Cause he was all in on spiritualism.

• 1:24:32Speaker 00

  Oh, hell yeah.

• 1:24:33Speaker 02

  Attended them constantly.

• 1:24:34Speaker 01

  He'd be like, let's go, girls. Let's do this.

• 1:24:36Speaker 00

  I feel like I would've done that back then too. How do you stop going to one once you see one?

• 1:24:40Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:24:40Speaker 00

  I know.

• 1:24:41Speaker 02

  You know? Right.

• 1:24:41Speaker 01

  Once you start.

• 1:24:42Speaker 00

  Like I gotta see this next one. What's this all about?

• 1:24:44Speaker 02

  Yep. Chasing the next high.

• 1:24:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:48Speaker 01

  More ectoplasm, please.

• 1:24:49Speaker 02

  Yes, please.

• 1:24:51Speaker 01

  Now, my next one is inspired by chapter 18 of Exhumed, Pieces and Players.

• 1:24:55Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:24:56Speaker 01

  Would you rather explain germ theory to an 18th century physician?

• 1:25:00Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:25:01Speaker 01

  Or explain vampire folklore to a modern infectious disease expert? I feel like I know what this will be.

• 1:25:08Speaker 02

  I think I'd rather explain the vampire folklore.

• 1:25:11Speaker 00

  And that's what I thought you would say.

• 1:25:12Speaker 01

  Cause that's kind of what you're doing anyway.

• 1:25:13Speaker 02

  I feel like the audience would be receptive.

• 1:25:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:15Speaker 02

  I don't think going back in time and explaining germ theory would have. I, I could have been burned as a witch.

• 1:25:24Speaker 00

  I was gonna say, they may have just hanged you.

• 1:25:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:27Speaker 01

  I know. That's, see, I love nothing more than to make someone understand.

• 1:25:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:34Speaker 01

  Something that I.

• 1:25:35Speaker 00

  You guys touched on that.

• 1:25:35Speaker 01

  Like, so I feel like my inclination is like, I wanna make you believe germ theory. Like I could make you believe it.

• 1:25:42Speaker 00

  You think you could? Like you'd be successful?

• 1:25:44Speaker 01

  I'm really persistent.

• 1:25:45Speaker 00

  That's true. I know this about you.

• 1:25:46Speaker 01

  I will not stop.

• 1:25:47Speaker 02

  The, like.

• 1:25:48Speaker 00

  I mean.

• 1:25:49Speaker 02

  The frustrating part is that.

• 1:25:50Speaker 01

  Until I'm burned at the stake.

• 1:25:50Speaker 02

  There will be listeners who, not listeners of the show, but like you go back in time and you talk to people, there will be people who listen to you and say, sorry, I don't, I don't believe it.

• 1:25:58Speaker 00

  Just know.

• 1:25:58Speaker 02

  Like all the facts can be presented.

• 1:26:00Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:26:01Speaker 02

  And yet they believe this very, very.

• 1:26:06Speaker 02

  It's like Bizarro World.

• 1:26:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:08Speaker 02

  That doesn't happen anymore, but back then that's a problem.

• 1:26:10Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:26:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, that never happens.

• 1:26:13Speaker 02

  Um, the cemetery scene where Mercy's body is, when they exhume her mom and then her sister, and then she's brought out of this above ground, essentially a walk-in freezer where she's been for a couple of months. That scene is a great example of that because you know, you've got the doctor who is always portrayed as like this old dude. He's a young doctor who worked in New York City. And he was from the Providence area. So he came back. So he's like this young, up on modern science physician, working in a small village. And they have begged him to do this. They've begged him to exhume the bodies and look for signs. And he's like, guys, you're not going to find what you're looking for. Scientifically, this, what you believe does not exist.

• 1:26:57Speaker 01

  And they're like, we don't care.

• 1:26:58Speaker 02

  And they're like, we don't care. So finally they convinced George Brown. And he's like, fine, if you guys want to do it, you guys can do it. He's not going to be there. All the stories say that George is in the graveyard. He was not there that day.

• 1:27:09Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:27:10Speaker 02

  The doctor is finally convinced by giving money, like they're like, we'll pay you to do it.

• 1:27:15Speaker 01

  And he's like, okay, fine. I'll whatever. I'll indulge you.

• 1:27:18Speaker 02

  He cuts open Mercy's body and he says, look, signs of tuberculosis. All of the pieces are here. This is exactly what you'd expect for a body that was kept in a cooler for two months and not buried in the ground. And everybody looked at it and said, signs of a vampire, or whatever they were calling it at the time.

• 1:27:34Speaker 01

  And they all died of TB.

• 1:27:36Speaker 02

  Supernatural. This is all supernatural.

• 1:27:38Speaker 01

  And then they all coughed up blood into their handkerchiefs for a minute. Yeah.

• 1:27:41Speaker 02

  They had the evidence, like literally.

• 1:27:43Speaker 01

  Right in front of them.

• 1:27:44Speaker 00

  Staring them in the face.

• 1:27:45Speaker 02

  And presented to them and they could not believe it.

• 1:27:47Speaker 00

  But like you said, the same thing happens today.

• 1:27:50Speaker 01

  It's true.

• 1:27:50Speaker 00

  And it's because fear. It all goes back to fear, I think.

• 1:27:53Speaker 01

  It does.

• 1:27:54Speaker 02

  Fear and simple answers.

• 1:27:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:27:55Speaker 02

  Yep. Those are easier paths to follow.

• 1:27:58Speaker 01

  And that would make me crazy. Cause when someone simply will not take, like that's how you've seen me in that situation.

• 1:28:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:04Speaker 01

  Where somebody just refuses to take facts, it will drive me to the brink of insanity.

• 1:28:09Speaker 00

  Sometimes just to mess with her.

• 1:28:11Speaker 01

  It's never fun. It's never fun.

• 1:28:13Speaker 02

  Imagine you are a visitor from the future in 1892 and you're trying to explain this to people and they will not believe you.

• 1:28:20Speaker 01

  Like, that would make me crazy.

• 1:28:21Speaker 02

  Madness.

• 1:28:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:22Speaker 00

  And you're a woman, so they just kill you.

• 1:28:24Speaker 01

  They would just burn me at the stake.

• 1:28:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:26Speaker 00

  It would really not work out. I was gonna say it would work out better if you were a man and then you told us that story.

• 1:28:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that wouldn't work either.

• 1:28:31Speaker 00

  I think you need to shit. You gotta shift.

• 1:28:33Speaker 01

  Oh damn.

• 1:28:34Speaker 02

  I think so.

• 1:28:34Speaker 01

  I really want to convince them.

• 1:28:35Speaker 00

  But we could have been unanimous. I mean, you can stick with it.

• 1:28:38Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:28:39Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:28:39Speaker 01

  I'll give it a try.

• 1:28:40Speaker 00

  Inspired again by your overall vibe. Would you rather time travel to witness one famous historical mystery? Or solve one famous historical mystery today from your desk?

• 1:28:56Speaker 02

  Well, solving it today would be a lot of work. And I'm busy.

• 1:28:59Speaker 00

  You are busy. You have a lot going on.

• 1:29:01Speaker 01

  I get you.

• 1:29:02Speaker 02

  I've got a book tour coming up. I'm not really sure. I've got that on my schedule.

• 1:29:06Speaker 00

  Squeeze that in.

• 1:29:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:09Speaker 02

  But then going back in time and witnessing a mystery kind of suggests that you're like, you're watching a murder happen and not doing anything to stop it.

• 1:29:18Speaker 01

  Yes, that's true.

• 1:29:19Speaker 02

  There's some moral ambiguity there.

• 1:29:20Speaker 01

  There is.

• 1:29:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:29:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:21Speaker 01

  Cause it feels like a Jack the Ripper thing. Like you go back to Whitechapel and you're seeing who he is.

• 1:29:26Speaker 02

  You not stop that?

• 1:29:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I would have to.

• 1:29:30Speaker 00

  But could you?

• 1:29:31Speaker 02

  So let me, let me compromise and say, I would have liked to have gone back to the, the beginning of the Jack the Ripper investigations. And help them make smarter choices.

• 1:29:44Speaker 00

  Yes. I think you feel exactly the same.

• 1:29:47Speaker 01

  Steer them in a different direction.

• 1:29:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:49Speaker 02

  We don't know so much of that story because of incompetence.

• 1:29:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:29:54Speaker 02

  And I, I feel like if somebody just went back in time and slapped them around a little bit.

• 1:29:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:59Speaker 02

  And what are you doing?

• 1:30:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. They need like a parent back there. They'd be like, all right, sit down. We gotta get this under control. You're all being crazy.

• 1:30:08Speaker 00

  Maybe you could appeal to them with dad jokes.

• 1:30:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:10Speaker 02

  I could. I could. Yeah.

• 1:30:11Speaker 00

  Get your way in there.

• 1:30:12Speaker 02

  Use a metaphor or two. I'm good at that.

• 1:30:14Speaker 00

  There you go.

• 1:30:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:15Speaker 01

  I think that would work.

• 1:30:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think I would want to go back in time.

• 1:30:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:20Speaker 00

  And do something about it that will add that piece on to it, you know?

• 1:30:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:23Speaker 01

  That's true. Cause I feel like solving one today would be really cool. But then like, what happens after?

• 1:30:29Speaker 00

  I'm actually surprised you two didn't pick that because then you have to convince people why you're correct.

• 1:30:33Speaker 01

  But and that's the thing. I feel like you really have to be solid. Cause like, how many people have thought they'd solve Jack the Ripper?

• 1:30:39Speaker 00

  A million.

• 1:30:40Speaker 01

  Don't get me started on that. And they never have. And they never probably will. But, and you'd have to convince them of it. And it's the same thing as the germ theory. I feel like people are just setting their way.

• 1:30:50Speaker 00

  They are.

• 1:30:51Speaker 01

  So I don't know.

• 1:30:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. So we can go back and try to change it.

• 1:30:56Speaker 01

  I'm going back and I'm watching and trying to, if I can partake in trying to change it.

• 1:31:00Speaker 02

  Tripping somebody, just stick your foot out and trip somebody.

• 1:31:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, there you go.

• 1:31:03Speaker 01

  But then it's like the butterfly effect that where you just like ruined the rest of history.

• 1:31:07Speaker 02

  You altered the entire timeline.

• 1:31:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like the tapestry of the rest of the world.

• 1:31:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:31:12Speaker 00

  You never know.

• 1:31:13Speaker 01

  But I don't know. Now in 2026, I'm like.

• 1:31:16Speaker 00

  Maybe it'd be better if you changed.

• 1:31:18Speaker 01

  Maybe I will trip someone back then. See what happens.

• 1:31:21Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:31:23Speaker 01

  See how it shakes out, you know? Let's just try. Now the next one is inspired by, exhumed again. Would you rather have to diagnose an illness before germ theory? Or a murder before fingerprinting?

• 1:31:36Speaker 02

  Ooh.

• 1:31:38Speaker 01

  Not diagnose a murder, but solve one.

• 1:31:42Speaker 02

  I, I think I would rather diagnose the illness. So Galen is sort of thought of as like the father of modern medicine. Of course, he was what 2,000 years ago.

• 1:31:56Speaker 02

  And he was very evidence focused. If I remember correctly, Hippocrates was. And then Galen was like, oh, let's talk about humors and let's do this stuff. And, and

• 1:32:08Speaker 02

  there was in a lot of illness diagnosis, sort of a, a flow chart approach. You look for these pieces of evidence and then you find them on your chart, whether it's literal or in your brain, and then you follow the options over. And then they eventually lead you to, well, this is what you do.

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

  That's what it is.

• 1:32:23Speaker 02

  And then all the answers were bloodletting.

• 1:32:25Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:32:25Speaker 00

  Wow. So awesome.

• 1:32:27Speaker 01

  There you go. Let's just take the blood.

• 1:32:29Speaker 02

  Right. Well, people talk about the four humors and it's like black bile, yellow bile,

• 1:32:35Speaker 02

  blood, and then there's, I forget the other one, but, but you can also refer to them as another term for them was all blood based.

• 1:32:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:42Speaker 02

  It was like black blood.

• 1:32:45Speaker 01

  Yellow blood.

• 1:32:45Speaker 02

  Yellow blood.

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  Like it was all blood.

• 1:32:47Speaker 02

  Eventually all came down to blood.

• 1:32:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:49Speaker 02

  Which is why they just bloodlet everything.

• 1:32:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. The word plethora that we use for like, today we have told a plethora of stories, right? Plethora literally meant you had too much blood.

• 1:33:01Speaker 00

  No way. I'd never do that.

• 1:33:03Speaker 01

  They're like, you gotta get rid of that. We gotta let some of that.

• 1:33:06Speaker 02

  Let's let some of that out. So.

• 1:33:07Speaker 00

  Oh man.

• 1:33:08Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:33:08Speaker 00

  Damn.

• 1:33:09Speaker 02

  So I guess in some way I would like to go back in time and diagnose an illness because I could just close my eyes and say, all right.

• 1:33:16Speaker 00

  Bloodletting.

• 1:33:16Speaker 02

  Give me two ounces of blood and then we're done. Yeah.

• 1:33:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. There you go.

• 1:33:21Speaker 02

  With it. Yep.

• 1:33:22Speaker 01

  I feel like, yeah, cause that would be really easy. Just go in and then everybody claps for you and you just get to.

• 1:33:27Speaker 02

  What an amazing physician.

• 1:33:28Speaker 01

  Wow. That's true. That's true. I, I feel like I would want to solve a murder.

• 1:33:32Speaker 00

  I agree.

• 1:33:33Speaker 01

  Before fingerprinting.

• 1:33:34Speaker 00

  I agree. Cause when we tell those stories, they're so fascinating, like the.

• 1:33:38Speaker 01

  How they actually got anything solved.

• 1:33:40Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:33:41Speaker 02

  Would you use cruentation?

• 1:33:43Speaker 01

  Cruentate? What is cruentation? Oh, that's the, that's the blood talking. Yeah. Yeah. I would. Oh.

• 1:33:51Speaker 00

  Just for the fun of it.

• 1:33:52Speaker 01

  Bring them in, have them touch the body, see what happens.

• 1:33:54Speaker 02

  I would want to use, I would want to use it as like a social tool.

• 1:33:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:33:58Speaker 02

  To force a confession.

• 1:33:59Speaker 01

  I want the psychological aspect to be present.

• 1:34:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. I don't want to stand in court and be like, look, the body bled, so he's the killer.

• 1:34:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:34:05Speaker 02

  I don't want to do that. Yeah. I have more integrity than that.

• 1:34:08Speaker 01

  Witness what's going on right now.

• 1:34:09Speaker 02

  I want to manipulate the criminal.

• 1:34:10Speaker 01

  I want someone, in fact, I'm gonna, you're gonna walk up and I'm gonna hold my hand over your pulse.

• 1:34:14Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:34:15Speaker 01

  And I'm gonna feel it, what's going on there.

• 1:34:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:34:17Speaker 01

  I want everybody observing the sweat that's dripping down the brow. I want all of that.

• 1:34:21Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:34:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. I like it. I'm solving a murder. Period. Let's go.

• 1:34:26Speaker 00

  All right. Our next would you rather is inspired by Elena's deep obsession. Would you rather know exactly what Jack the Ripper looked like? Or know exactly what happened at Roanoke County?

• 1:34:38Speaker 02

  Oh, Roanoke, hands down.

• 1:34:39Speaker 01

  Elena said that's exactly what you would say.

• 1:34:41Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:34:41Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:34:42Speaker 02

  I mean, what the guy looked like.

• 1:34:44Speaker 00

  Doesn't do much.

• 1:34:45Speaker 02

  It doesn't do much. At that point, we're drifting into like the realms of phrenology. If your, if your head was shaped like this, you had a propensity toward this. That was, I don't want to dip into that. I would, I want to know. I think we know what happened at Roanoke. They went and integrated into the Native American population.

• 1:35:04Speaker 01

  And they tried to leave it out.

• 1:35:05Speaker 02

  And they tried to leave it out.

• 1:35:07Speaker 00

  Got lost in translation.

• 1:35:09Speaker 02

  Named the tribe they, they merged into.

• 1:35:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:12Speaker 02

  But I want, I want to see the cause, the, the process. I would love to watch that.

• 1:35:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:20Speaker 00

  All play out.

• 1:35:21Speaker 01

  Watch the person like inscribe it on the, on the tree.

• 1:35:24Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:35:25Speaker 02

  And I would also like to be there like 50 years later when Elizabeth Dare is, you know, this, you know, older blond haired white woman, living in a community of Native Americans, speaking their language.

• 1:35:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:39Speaker 02

  You know, she's probably got tattoos.

• 1:35:41Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:35:41Speaker 02

  Like, like, I want to witness the last remnants of the English settlers as they're being absorbed into a more diverse culture. And this would have been really cool to see.

• 1:35:53Speaker 00

  Make a great documentary.

• 1:35:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:35:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:56Speaker 02

  Cause there are legends of like blonde, I'm sorry, of blue eyed indigenous people in that Virginia area.

• 1:36:04Speaker 01

  Oh shit.

• 1:36:04Speaker 00

  So that does make sense.

• 1:36:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:06Speaker 00

  That is interesting.

• 1:36:07Speaker 01

  I like that.

• 1:36:08Speaker 00

  That's a rabbit hole I'd like to get out of.

• 1:36:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:10Speaker 01

  Oh man. Yeah. Oh.

• 1:36:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:36:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think I agree that, cause it's like, it's not saying know who Jack the Ripper is.

• 1:36:17Speaker 00

  Just what he looks like. What are you gonna do with that?

• 1:36:19Speaker 01

  And at that point too, back then you're like, I don't know.

• 1:36:22Speaker 00

  Probably had a mustache.

• 1:36:23Speaker 01

  Some guy probably had a mustache, you know?

• 1:36:25Speaker 02

  He probably looked like H.H. Holmes, you know?

• 1:36:27Speaker 01

  Literally.

• 1:36:29Speaker 02

  Who he was not.

• 1:36:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. No.

• 1:36:31Speaker 00

  Don't, don't get us started.

• 1:36:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. Don't worry. I agree. And honestly, it's so dark back then. You're really only gonna see like the outline of someone. So you're gonna be like, I don't know. It's a person, I guess. Maybe they had a hat on.

• 1:36:44Speaker 00

  To know it's Jack the Ripper, are you also witnessing a brutal murder?

• 1:36:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like, what am I gonna do here?

• 1:36:49Speaker 02

  Are you just watching him eat fish and chips?

• 1:36:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:51Speaker 02

  You know?

• 1:36:52Speaker 00

  Like, I don't really want to watch anyone eat. So.

• 1:36:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:55Speaker 02

  Murder a Filet-O'-Haddock.

• 1:36:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like, what am, what am I watching?

• 1:36:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. What is this?

• 1:36:59Speaker 00

  Yeah. Roanoke it is.

• 1:37:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. Cause if I can't have a name and identity to come back with, I don't, I don't want to see it.

• 1:37:05Speaker 00

  This doesn't happen that often that we're so unanimous in these.

• 1:37:08Speaker 01

  And mine have like evolved, I think.

• 1:37:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. Good for you, girl.

• 1:37:12Speaker 01

  Look at me. Growth. All right. Now we're gonna do a quick little rapid fire this or that.

• 1:37:17Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:37:17Speaker 01

  Okay. So, okay.

• 1:37:19Speaker 02

  Through the magic, through the magic of editing, I will answer quickly.

• 1:37:22Speaker 01

  Really quick. Salem witch trials or New England vampire panic?

• 1:37:27Speaker 02

  New England vampire panic.

• 1:37:28Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 1:37:29Speaker 00

  Salem witch trials.

• 1:37:30Speaker 01

  Salem witch trials for me.

• 1:37:32Speaker 00

  All right. Ghosts or cryptids?

• 1:37:34Speaker 02

  Cryptids.

• 1:37:35Speaker 01

  Hmm, ghosts.

• 1:37:37Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:37:38Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I think I, I think I'm going with ghosts.

• 1:37:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:37:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:42Speaker 00

  I think, but cryptids, oh.

• 1:37:44Speaker 01

  It's a tough one.

• 1:37:45Speaker 00

  It's a tough one. I thought about it as I wrote it.

• 1:37:47Speaker 01

  I thought I knew that one.

• 1:37:48Speaker 02

  See, I'm working with possibilities. Okay, so, um, New England Vampire Panic and Salem Witch Trials. We really know a lot about the Salem Witch Trials at this point. I mean, it's been studied ad nauseam. The New England Vampire Panic has so many unanswered questions.

• 1:38:03Speaker 00

  True.

• 1:38:03Speaker 02

  That's what's more fascinating to me. There's, there's just a crap ton of what in the world caused this to happen?

• 1:38:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:12Speaker 02

  We still don't actually know where they got the information to even suggest. Well, dig the bodies up and cut them open and look for.

• 1:38:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:38:19Speaker 02

  Like, that was a thing.

• 1:38:20Speaker 01

  Where did that come from?

• 1:38:20Speaker 02

  The signs they were looking for was known in Europe. Um, there's this weird thing that happened in writing the book. I got, I got about, I don't know, three quarters of the way through and I realized, I was summing up a bunch of things in one chapter and I realized, oh, all of those are German details.

• 1:38:35Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:38:36Speaker 02

  Just very, very weirdly. Those are all like parasitosis, um, the, the executions where blood was being drunk at the, the execution site. Like, all of these things were, like, German footprints were everywhere in the room where it happened.

• 1:38:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:50Speaker 02

  And I want to know why. I do.

• 1:38:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's interesting.

• 1:38:55Speaker 02

  The first recorded, uh, New England Vampire Panic, like, exhumation was late 1700s, like, 1790s. And we're talking like, a generation after the Revolutionary War. The British brought Hessian mercenaries over. Um, actually, I was in the UK last week, um, was speaking with archaeologists because that's the program that one of my kiddos wants to go into.

• 1:39:20Speaker 01

  That's badass.

• 1:39:20Speaker 02

  And, and this archaeologist was dealing with, um, a military site outside of Winchester in, in southern England that was a staging ground for those Hessian mercenaries as they came over. And I was able to ask him, would they have brought German physicians with them?

• 1:39:36Speaker 01

  Oh shit.

• 1:39:37Speaker 02

  And he said, oh, absolutely, they would have had that. And it was common for those Hessian mercenaries to get to a place like North America and say, I kind of like it here. I want to stick around.

• 1:39:46Speaker 01

  So there you go.

• 1:39:46Speaker 02

  So my theory, my working theory is that some doctors, it could have only been one or two, stayed after the Revolutionary War and just wandered the countryside, helping villages out with medical problems.

• 1:39:56Speaker 01

  Oh shit.

• 1:39:57Speaker 02

  And they passed it on to, you know, through practice, they passed some of these beliefs on. By the time you get to like 1790s, it's starting to become a common thing.

• 1:40:07Speaker 00

  That makes a lot of sense.

• 1:40:08Speaker 01

  That really does.

• 1:40:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:40:09Speaker 02

  So for me, when you say Salem Witch Trials or the New England Vampire Panic, there's so many more questions I want to answer.

• 1:40:14Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:40:14Speaker 02

  With the Vampire Panic, that, that's why I go that way.

• 1:40:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:40:17Speaker 02

  And then what was the second one you asked me?

• 1:40:19Speaker 01

  Uh, ghosts or cryptids?

• 1:40:20Speaker 02

  Cryptids just have more possibility, I feel like, like.

• 1:40:24Speaker 01

  They're varied.

• 1:40:25Speaker 02

  We've been trying to tape and photograph and record ghosts for so long.

• 1:40:28Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:40:29Speaker 02

  But we keep finding new species of creatures.

• 1:40:32Speaker 01

  That's, that's what got me like, I was like, oh.

• 1:40:35Speaker 02

  There's possibility of answers there.

• 1:40:36Speaker 00

  Ghosts.

• 1:40:37Speaker 01

  Ghosts are so fun.

• 1:40:38Speaker 02

  I know.

• 1:40:39Speaker 00

  And a lot of times I feel like cryptids, like you said, it's like, just an animal we haven't discovered yet, you know?

• 1:40:43Speaker 02

  Sure, there, there, yeah. A little bit of disappointment at the end of that.

• 1:40:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:46Speaker 02

  Oh, it's just a lemur.

• 1:40:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:40:48Speaker 01

  But I want to believe in Bigfoot so much.

• 1:40:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:40:51Speaker 00

  But is he just like a bear?

• 1:40:52Speaker 01

  No, I think he's a Bigfoot.

• 1:40:54Speaker 00

  Is he a bear that hooked up with like a cousin it, I guess? I don't know.

• 1:40:58Speaker 01

  I, I don't know.

• 1:41:00Speaker 02

  Is he some branch of, uh, like homo erectus or like, is it some?

• 1:41:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:41:09Speaker 02

  Like.

• 1:41:09Speaker 01

  That like didn't evolve in the same way?

• 1:41:11Speaker 02

  Was it the, the, the Denovians and Neanderthals and there's all these different branches and there were hybrids and like, is it from?

• 1:41:18Speaker 01

  They just hanging around? It's like Nessie.

• 1:41:20Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:41:21Speaker 01

  Like, is that just, is she just hanging around in there?

• 1:41:24Speaker 02

  Right, it's true.

• 1:41:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:41:25Speaker 01

  I know. It proves that, all these questions, that it is interesting.

• 1:41:28Speaker 00

  I'm gonna go with cryptids.

• 1:41:29Speaker 01

  I love ghosts. Like, I, if, I think it depends also on like, what I'm, why I'm choosing.

• 1:41:35Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:41:35Speaker 01

  I love ghosts.

• 1:41:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:37Speaker 01

  But there is a lot more to ask about cryptids.

• 1:41:39Speaker 00

  I'd like to spend more time with ghosts.

• 1:41:41Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 1:41:41Speaker 00

  And I've seen ghosts, then I know it, so, you know?

• 1:41:44Speaker 01

  I'm, I struggle with that one. I love it.

• 1:41:46Speaker 00

  No, I've seen them.

• 1:41:47Speaker 01

  I don't know. No, I mean, I struggle with like, which I'm gonna pick.

• 1:41:49Speaker 00

  Oh, I was like, no, no, no.

• 1:41:51Speaker 01

  No, no, no. No, I've seen some of that shit.

• 1:41:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:54Speaker 01

  Uh, all right, galvanism or alchemy?

• 1:41:56Speaker 02

  Alchemy.

• 1:41:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:41:58Speaker 02

  There's just so much more. It's more punk rock, isn't it?

• 1:42:00Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:42:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. Galvanism is just somebody sticking a corpse with a, an electrified rod.

• 1:42:05Speaker 01

  Being like, it moves.

• 1:42:06Speaker 02

  But, yeah, but boy, alchemy.

• 1:42:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:42:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's rock and roll.

• 1:42:12Speaker 02

  Fun fact, uh, and I cover this in the book, the, the philosopher's stone wasn't a stone. It wasn't a rock. It was a powder.

• 1:42:20Speaker 01

  So it's like, why? Why?

• 1:42:21Speaker 02

  They called it a stone because it, it had a, um, a stable state.

• 1:42:28Speaker 01

  Oh, that makes sense.

• 1:42:28Speaker 02

  Like a stone.

• 1:42:29Speaker 01

  Oh, okay. But you always picture like, I picture like a smooth.

• 1:42:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, like a river, a river rock or something.

• 1:42:35Speaker 01

  Super smooth.

• 1:42:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42:37Speaker 00

  I gotta skip it.

• 1:42:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I gotta skip the philosopher's stone.

• 1:42:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, alchemy across the board.

• 1:42:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:42Speaker 00

  Finally, very last question, number 13. Medieval Germany or Victorian England?

• 1:42:50Speaker 02

  Ooh.

• 1:42:51Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:42:54Speaker 02

  Medieval Germany.

• 1:42:55Speaker 00

  I think I'm, I would go there too. Cause again, we know a lot about Victorian England.

• 1:42:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:59Speaker 00

  It's fascinating.

• 1:43:00Speaker 02

  Any culture that employed a, a town executioner?

• 1:43:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:05Speaker 02

  Who carried like a three and a half foot long sword?

• 1:43:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I want to know about that.

• 1:43:09Speaker 02

  I just.

• 1:43:10Speaker 00

  Tell me more.

• 1:43:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:12Speaker 00

  What other weird shit did you do?

• 1:43:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had to know about that.

• 1:43:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:17Speaker 00

  Look at us. We were unanimous on so many of those.

• 1:43:19Speaker 01

  You were quick too.

• 1:43:20Speaker 00

  You were really quick.

• 1:43:21Speaker 01

  The magic of editing.

• 1:43:23Speaker 02

  We were just watching the episode of Friends last night where Phoebe has that game where she's like, all right, I'm gonna ask you these questions and you have to answer right away.

• 1:43:30Speaker 01

  That stresses me out so much.

• 1:43:31Speaker 02

  Meat or vegetables? Meat. You know, you're going through the thing and, uh, that's what, that's what we just did.

• 1:43:36Speaker 01

  That was.

• 1:43:36Speaker 00

  See, you prepared.

• 1:43:37Speaker 02

  Rapid fire.

• 1:43:37Speaker 01

  You were ready. You didn't even know it.

• 1:43:39Speaker 00

  That's fun. That was so much fun. Thank you so much for hanging out with us.

• 1:43:43Speaker 02

  Oh, this was a blast.

• 1:43:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, this was awesome. We have to do this again.

• 1:43:45Speaker 02

  We should.

• 1:43:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:46Speaker 02

  I record by myself, so I don't get to talk to other weirdos.

• 1:43:48Speaker 01

  See?

• 1:43:49Speaker 02

  You know?

• 1:43:50Speaker 01

  We brought you here for that.

• 1:43:51Speaker 00

  You're always welcome now.

• 1:43:52Speaker 01

  Gotta bring you out of the cave.

• 1:43:52Speaker 02

  Oh, thank you.

• 1:43:53Speaker 01

  You're part of us.

• 1:43:54Speaker 00

  Everybody, go get Exhumed. You can order it right now. You can preorder it and it will be available August 4th.

• 1:44:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:44:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's either 4th or the 6th. I've got, we've got the events on the 4th. We should talk about this for a second.

• 1:44:04Speaker 01

  I was just gonna say, we're gonna be at the Wilbur.

• 1:44:06Speaker 02

  So, well, obviously we're in the Boston area. There's a great theater in Boston called The Wilbur and, um, it seats like a thousand people.

• 1:44:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:13Speaker 02

  And Elena's gonna join me there on the 4th, which, is it a Tuesday night?

• 1:44:17Speaker 01

  I think it is, yeah.

• 1:44:19Speaker 02

  It's like a book with ticket event, so come, you buy your ticket, but you also get the book and then I'll be there. My philosophy for signing things is I'll stay until everybody's taken care of.

• 1:44:29Speaker 01

  That's badass.

• 1:44:29Speaker 00

  Good men.

• 1:44:30Speaker 02

  So, if you get a book and you want me to sign it, I will sign it for you there.

• 1:44:33Speaker 01

  Hell yeah.

• 1:44:33Speaker 02

  But we're gonna talk more in depth about it.

• 1:44:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:44:36Speaker 02

  Revisit some of these questions and ideas and have fun with it.

• 1:44:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:39Speaker 02

  It's gonna be a blast.

• 1:44:40Speaker 01

  It'll be fun.

• 1:44:40Speaker 02

  So I, I'll probably do a reading or something from the book too, maybe read like.

• 1:44:43Speaker 01

  Oh, cool.

• 1:44:44Speaker 02

  The initial false version of her story from the prologue.

• 1:44:48Speaker 01

  Oh, I love that.

• 1:44:50Speaker 02

  Just to set that up. So that is August 4th.

• 1:44:52Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:44:53Speaker 02

  Preorder link for the book, tickets for like that event or any of the other book tour events that I've got on my schedule, just go over to aaronmankey.com/Exhumed.

• 1:45:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:45:03Speaker 02

  And these amazing ladies will put those links in.

• 1:45:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, we will link it.

• 1:45:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's just my name, aaronmankey.com/Exhumed. Yeah.

• 1:45:10Speaker 01

  You can remember that.

• 1:45:11Speaker 02

  The thing that you know, that a lot of people don't know, is that, um, for pre-orders, like, you could put a book up for preorder for like 10 months.

• 1:45:20Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:45:20Speaker 02

  All of the preorder sales count toward the very first week of its release for book sales. That's how people hit the New York Times Bestsellers list.

• 1:45:27Speaker 01

  It's a big.

• 1:45:28Speaker 00

  We gotta get you there.

• 1:45:29Speaker 02

  Preorder, preorder, preorder. So, um, I'm begging the morbid army to go out there and, and.

• 1:45:35Speaker 00

  Let's go.

• 1:45:35Speaker 02

  And help.

• 1:45:36Speaker 00

  And this will come out beforehand, so you know your job.

• 1:45:39Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:45:40Speaker 01

  You know what you have to do.

• 1:45:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, for sure.

• 1:45:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:43Speaker 00

  All right. Well, thank you again for joining us.

• 1:45:44Speaker 02

  You're welcome.

• 1:45:45Speaker 00

  And everybody, we hope you keep listening.

• 1:45:47Speaker 01

  And we hope you keep it weird.

• 1:45:52Speaker 00

  But not so weird that you don't preorder Aaron Mahnke's book and get him on the New York Times Bestseller list of authors.

• 1:45:57Speaker 02

  Otherwise, I'm gonna give you a hand of glory.

• 1:46:00Speaker 00

  Yes, they'll give you a hand of glory, otherwise.

• 1:46:03Speaker 02

  That sounds like a weird.

• 1:46:04Speaker 00

  It did sound euphemistic.

• 1:46:05Speaker 02

  I'm not gonna give anybody a hand of glory.

• 1:46:07Speaker 00

  I won't do that, I promise.

• 1:47:33Speaker 03

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• 1:48:03Speaker 00

  Nearly 50 years after Stephen King's Carrie became a cultural phenomenon, Mike Flanagan is reimagining the iconic story for a new generation. After her father's sudden death, Carrie White enters public school for the first time and must navigate a viral bullying scandal, the relentless pressure of the social media age, and the awakening of mysterious telekinetic powers that rise alongside her adolescence. You know, the usual. Carrie is a story about how small acts of cruelty snowball into something catastrophic, a theme that feels as painfully relevant today as it did 50 years ago. I feel like maybe even a little bit more because we are all hooked on social media and we all know that can be a terrifying place, but not quite as terrifying as the prom scene. Carrie is now streaming on Prime Video.