Midnight Ghost Shows with Chelsey Weber-Smith

What do you get when you combine a horror movie audience, a spiritualist séance, and a haunted house attraction? Beginning in the 1930s and lasting into the 1960s, midnight ghost shows were ghoulishly chaotic, wonderfully campy 4D theater performances that accompanied the scary movies of the era, beloved by a mostly-teenage audience who often became a part of the show themselves. Schlocky showman Chelsey Weber-Smith tells Sarah about how magicians-turned-ghostmasters used paranormal parlor tricks, gory skits, and marketing gimmicks to create a new form of vaudevillian dark comedy. As horror obsessives, Sarah and Chelsey muse about what it would have been like to attend one of these late night wacky fright fests that paved the way for the happily trashy theater camaraderie of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Digressions include the resilience of the horseshoe crab, dollar store competition, and plot holes in the movie High Tension (2003). More Chelsey Weber-Smith: Listen to American Hysteria Original music in this episode is produced + performed by Magpie Cinema Club (except for Harry Belafonte's Zombie Jamboree which is, in fact, from 1962.) Listen to their cover of Season of the VVitch Produced + edited by Miranda Zickler More You're Wrong About: Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merchYWA on Instagram Sarah's other show, You Are Good Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:12Speaker 00

  Welcome, mortals, to a coolish night of phantoms and monsters. A hellish parade of otherworldly horrors brought to you by me, your ghost master of the evening, Dr. Schlock, known to the uninitiated as Chelsea Webber Smith. My beautiful assistant this evening, Sarah Marshall, will allow me to perform unspeakable terrors upon her for the entertainment of you, my precious, innocent, sacrificial lambs.

• 0:50Speaker 00

  Tonight, I will be presenting to you an informative look at the history of midnight ghost shows. Campy, ghostly, gory performances that from the 1930s to the 1960s accompanied horror movies in theaters. A combination of a spiritualist seance and a stationary haunted house. Beware, this show contains descriptions of hella fake violence, and you may not make it out alive of this twisted amusement.

• 1:31Speaker 00

  Dr. Schlock's Camp of the Damned, right here in the You're Wrong About Theater. I am thrilled and chilled to the bone to make this unbelievable announcement. Sarah Marshall will be hosting a brand-new eight-part mini-series from the CBC on the past, the present, and the future of the Satanic Panic. The podcast is called The Devil You Know and is premiering on October 20.

• 2:16Speaker 00

  Pause for gasps and roaring applause.

• 2:21Speaker 00

  Let me also remind you, if you love You're Wrong About, you can become a patron at patreon.com/You'reWrongAbout, or Apple Plus, to get bonus episodes every month. Most recently, you can learn about the history of one of my ex-girlfriends, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, brought to you by another Mistress of the Dark, but sadly not my ex-girlfriend, Eve Lindley. Oh, and stay tuned for a new bonus episode with another beautiful beast of the underworld,

• 3:03Speaker 00

  Jamie Loftus, called The Year of the Bimbo. May I humbly, ha ha ha, indulgently, recommend previous episodes of You're Wrong About, co-hosted by me, last year's Halloween special, Corn Maces, The Donner Party, and Killer Clowns. Oh, and over at my own haunted home, the American Hysteria Podcast, you can hear Sarah's presentation on Spontaneous Human Combustion, out on October 20th. The hypnotizing music in this episode

• 3:46Speaker 00

  was produced and performed by our resident Rat Kings, Miranda Zickler and A.J. McKinley of Magpie Cinema Club. Now, thank you, my fiendish friends, for listening to this unhinged introduction by me, Dr. Schlock, in preparation for my camp of the damned. So without further ado, I would like, if I may, to take you on a strange journey into the haunted, historical heart of the midnight ghost show. And remember, anything can happen when the lights go dark. You may even discover a ghost

• 4:31Speaker 00

  sitting right beside you. Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

• 4:51Sarah Marshall?

  Welcome all you ghoul cats and kittens to American, oh, wait, we're on my show. Keep it in. What a great mistake. Welcome to You're Wrong About. This is definitely my show and not American hysteria, but Chelsea, you and I get together to talk about goblins and ghouls and ghosts so often that it's hard to remember because my house is your house and your house is my house, I hope. My house is definitely your house.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  You make every house a haunted home.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  Wait, you make every haunted house a haunted home.

• 5:24Sarah Marshall?

  You make this haunted house a haunted home. Yeah.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  There it is.

• 5:29Sarah Marshall?

  Chelsea, you were here to tell us about, the title is Ghost Shows, and I feel like that could go in so many directions. And also, you and I have done a ghost show, but for people who are just joining us, hello, welcome, please sit with us. Chelsea, who are you and what do you do and what do you love?

• 5:47Speaker 02

  Well, my name is Chelsea Weber Smith, and I host American Hysteria, which is a podcast that covers a lot of similar things to You're Wrong About. And yeah, I am here as a massive horror fan, a massive paranormal fan, especially drag of the paranormal. And, you know, I love haunted houses. And what I think we're talking about today is kind of a combination of all the things that I love and all the things that you love. So I am absolutely thrilled to be here.

• 6:18Sarah Marshall?

  And Chelsea, you and I have talked a lot about both the idea of ghosts and ways of faking ghosts for entertainment and where the sort of lines between desire and belief and Charlotte Henry get interesting and blurry. We've talked about Houdini recently on your show. I love that episode. And we talked about the Cottingley Fairies on my show not too long ago. And also, we've done kind of a paranormal Christmas show the last couple of years, which we're recalibrating and making bigger and batter for 2026. But we have done

• 6:53Sarah Marshall?

  Variety show quite a few times now called A Massive Seance. And I wonder before we get into it, what it was like to approach this topic as somebody who is now through American hysteria and also now in a live setting and these shows that we've been doing. And of course, in all the other ways of your life that I'm not thinking of, somebody who not only talks about ghost entertainment, but also does ghost entertainment. What did that make you think about researching this topic today?

• 7:19Speaker 02

  What a great question, Sarah. Thank you.

• 7:21Sarah Marshall?

  Thanks.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think what was so much fun about discovering this kind of forgotten piece of horror history was how much it mimicked what we did together for our live show.

• 7:36Sarah Marshall?

  It's timeless.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  Like, it was like we connected on the unified field, to borrow David Lynch's term. We really, I don't know, we, we like channeled something, we conjured something that sort of already existed. And I think we did that because of our love of camp, our love of drag, our love of kind of the vaudeville spirit.

• 7:56Sarah Marshall?

  Giving Chelsea an exorcism.

• 7:59Speaker 02

  I did get an exorcism to Fleetwood Mac, so.

• 8:03Sarah Marshall?

  As we all should.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  Please keep that on your calendar.

• 8:06Sarah Marshall?

  Chelsea gets an exorcism.

• 8:09Speaker 02

  Ghouls and boys.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  And it really did feel good.

• 8:15Sarah Marshall?

  It felt great to be a part of it. I got to have a tambourine.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  You did.

• 8:20Sarah Marshall?

  And we've talked a lot, especially in this recent Houdini episode, about sort of the belief in the paranormal or just in things that we can't see or understand that makes charlatanry possible and how dangerous that is. But also, you know, if you look at just like true things we know about the actual universe, you know, that we're, we're getting blasted all the time with, you know, atoms being shot out of stars, or I guess subatomic particles, if we're talking about neutrinos, because all the things that I don't even know to mention, because I don't know enough about the world, that we cannot see or perceive, but that still exists and are happening to us. I think it's not at all unreasonable to believe that the limits of human perception are not the limits of what exists.

• 9:05Sarah Marshall?

  And I feel like that tension is going to be with us here today, too.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  Well, it may be a little bit, but it might be less so than you think. Because what we are talking about today. I will just say that they're called midnight ghost shows, also midnight spook shows, but what these really were, were taking the seance performance and turning it into popular culture entertainment.

• 9:35Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  So it was like the way that it kind of crossed over from being like, there weren't any true believers here. It's like they took something that had true believers and turned it into a true kind of vaudevilleian spectacle that people, you know, got to enjoy in, in a way that had no gray area.

• 9:55Sarah Marshall?

  So this is kind of the missing link between spiritualism and the haunted house that you and I would go to today.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Perfectly put. Yep.

• 10:03Sarah Marshall?

  I love it. Well, where should we begin, Chelsea Weber Smith?

• 10:07Speaker 02

  Well, I think I'll just kind of start with a few basics. Midnight ghost shows, as I said, and also known as midnight spook shows. They were these elaborate late night stage shows that almost always accompanied horror movies.

• 10:21Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm. Oh, wow.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  So they either led into or a horror movie ended with the show.

• 10:26Sarah Marshall?

  See, and theaters are like, wah, nobody's coming to the movies anymore. It's like, try harder and also stop charging $19 for a pretzel. But, you know, a separate issue.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  Gimmicks, people. We need gimmicks.

• 10:39Sarah Marshall?

  Gimmicks. Bring back the tingler and also this. Okay. So what period of time are we talking about? And where are we?

• 10:46Speaker 02

  Okay. So we are very much in America. This is a very American art form. It did go to other places.

• 10:54Sarah Marshall?

  We are so in the middle of America that we're in Missouri. Geographically the center, I think.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  They were certainly in Missouri, these ghost shows, but they did go overseas or they went to Mexico. But really this was an American phenomenon and it was in small towns, big towns. The shows traveled around. I mean, you could really go anywhere and find a ghost show, which is pretty wild, considering that you and I, as lovers of this type of history, had no idea about them.

• 11:26Sarah Marshall?

  Yes. And also, what can you go anywhere in America and find today, aside from a Dollar General?

• 11:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a good point. I'm a Dollar Tree man myself.

• 11:36Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, me too. Dollar General, I think just means generally a dollar. And by generally, they mean 13% of the time, whereas Dollar Tree will really get you out of many a jam.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  It really will. It really will. Wrapping paper especially.

• 11:48Sarah Marshall?

  This is not sponsored by Dollar Tree. We're just both frugal.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  So what I'm gonna say, and you already kind of brought this up, but these shows were basically a combination of a spiritualist seance, a magic show, and a stationary haunted house.

• 12:05Sarah Marshall?

  God, can we make one, please, right now?

• 12:08Speaker 02

  Well, let's see. By the end, we might.

• 12:10Sarah Marshall?

  My baby needs it. My baby needs the ghost house.

• 12:14Speaker 02

  So this was a massive craze, especially for teenagers, of course. And these were like shows that would have these massive overflow crowds outside. Like, people would just be begging to get in. There was a very riotous atmosphere.

• 12:31Sarah Marshall?

  Like the Eras Tour.

• 12:32Speaker 02

  Just like the Eras Tour, but lots more skeletons.

• 12:38Sarah Marshall?

  So what time period is this? Is this like before movies or as movies are beginning to be born? Because I know they took a while to do that.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  So from the early 1930s to the late 1960s.

• 12:50Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, wow. So movies are like fully happening, like they're competing.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  Yes, fully happening.

• 12:54Sarah Marshall?

  Because you were saying these happen before the movies and it's kind of like an opening show, like an opening act for a horror movie?

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Yep. Or it was the closing act. Sometimes it was. Yeah, sometimes it came before.

• 13:06Sarah Marshall?

  So it's not competing as much as holding hands, but even so, it's like the only thing you get to see before a movie now is Maria Menounos.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  That's true. That's true. Or I guess Nicole Kidman stepping in a puddle with her stiletto heels.

• 13:19Sarah Marshall?

  Hot bright feels good in a place like this.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  It's such a bad script. I can't believe that that's what they did. I mean, it's also perfect. Things can be bad and perfect, like what we're talking about today.

• 13:30Sarah Marshall?

  Exactly.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  And I want to just mention up top here that, you know, a lot of times I come on the show and I give a very kind of detailed history and a sociological analysis of whatever I'm talking about. Today, we are going to the ghost show and we are not really talking about its cultural significance, if that's okay with everyone.

• 13:49Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, I'll inject cultural theorizing wherever I go without really meaning to. That sounded violent, but yeah, I'm so, please take me to the ghost show.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  You will. All right. I'm gonna be your ghost master. This is a term that was invented.

• 14:02Sarah Marshall?

  You're like coming down the grand staircase in the Titanic. You're like, so you want to go to a real party?

• 14:07Speaker 02

  Well, when a ghost master would enter, eventually it would be something like.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  A giant spider would be lowered and then it would spit out a ball of flame. And then within the smoke, the ghost master would appear. It's fucking awesome.

• 14:23Sarah Marshall?

  Fantastic. Okay, let's all take a second to it. Do you want a giant spider or what would, what would you want if we were to put this on?

• 14:29Speaker 02

  Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.

• 14:31Sarah Marshall?

  You're like, Sarah, I've lain awake thinking about this for eight days and nights.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  I know that I would maybe, I think I would want like a skeleton to be lowered down. That was like wearing my outfit and then like a, you know, like a sudden explode. I think an explosion would be fun. I think fire and flame. And then from where the skeleton lay or when that where the skeleton was, I would appear in my really cool outfit. So ghost shows had basically two phases and we'll get into both of them. But the early kind of 1930s to early 1940s was very seance focused, very ghost focused, very paranormal focused. And then from the 40s to the 50s and into the 60s, it was much more focused on like horror and gore.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  And like just a bloody crazy night. So we will, you know, explore both of those.

• 15:26Sarah Marshall?

  A bloody crazy night.

• 15:27Speaker 02

  A bloody crazy night. I'm so bad at accents famously.

• 15:32Sarah Marshall?

  I know. Well, we're just, and it's funny because we're both trying to imitate the people who raised us and are doing a worse job.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  That's very true. Okay. So here's some of the titles of these midnight ghost shows. All right.

• 15:45Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 15:46Speaker 02

  Dr. Silkenes' Asylum of Horrors.

• 15:49Sarah Marshall?

  Dr. Silkenes.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  Dr. Dracula's Den of Living Nightmares. Raymond's Zombie Jamboree.

• 15:58Sarah Marshall?

  Zombie Camper. Doesn't that sound like a song from like 1962?

• 16:03Speaker 02

  It definitely does.

• 16:09Speaker 02

  We have Dr. Sin in the House of the Living Dead. Dr. Satan's Shrieks in the Night.

• 16:17Sarah Marshall?

  A lot of doctors. Are they like medical doctors or are they, is Dr. Satan have a doctorate in the humanities?

• 16:23Speaker 02

  I'm going to explain that to you in one second. Okay. So we've got Dr. Evil's Terrors of the Unknown and a personal favorite of mine, Dr. Banshee's Chasm of Spasms.

• 16:36Sarah Marshall?

  I'll take you to Dr. Banshee's Chasm of Spasms.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  Meow.

• 16:42Sarah Marshall?

  Honey.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  So as you noticed, Sarah, a lot of these characters who were largely magicians that kind of took on this new project of doing a Midnight Ghost Show.

• 16:55Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, interesting. Yeah, magicians got a magician.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  They got to. And so they kind of went with this kind of mad scientist doctor vibe.

• 17:05Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, interesting.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  Like kind of I E. Dr. Frankenstein a little bit.

• 17:09Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, yeah. And Frankenstein came out like, what, 1931, 32, like, the movie, to be clear.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so like, pretty concurrent.

• 17:17Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 17:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And Frankenstein and his monster will play a role.

• 17:22Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, good.

• 17:22Speaker 02

  If they weren't mad scientists, they often played kind of an Indian guru type, which was, of course, extremely problematic because every single one of them was a white man.

• 17:33Sarah Marshall?

  They were like, it's the 50s. We got to find a way to be racist, even if it wouldn't even come up without us trying really hard to do it. I also, I feel like you're, I'm, this is something you're gonna get to momentarily, but this makes me think of the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

• 17:47Speaker 02

  Well, don't you even.

• 17:49Sarah Marshall?

  I would like, if I may.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  Don't you even talk about it yet.

• 17:53Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, perfect.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  Don't you even talk about it.

• 17:55Sarah Marshall?

  Don't you say Rocky Horror Picture Show to me?

• 18:00Speaker 02

  We will definitely have a Rocky Horror moment. So I just thought it would be worth explaining that part of the reason, the main reason, that people in these ghost shows kind of portrayed this Indian guru archetype was that magic in India, like, stage magic, was pretty superior to American stage magic.

• 18:21Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, really?

• 18:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, even looking at Houdini, he had a period of time where he pretended to be, you know, this Indian magician.

• 18:29Sarah Marshall?

  That's probably why he called himself Houdini, now that I think about it. Don't you love the world in the sense that, like, there are so many things you wonder about? And then there are things that you didn't even get around to wondering about, because never in my life have I had time or been pointed in the direction of being like, what was stage magic like in India in 1930, you know?

• 18:46Speaker 02

  Well, it was dope.

• 18:47Sarah Marshall?

  Chelsea, do you know how long horseshoe crabs have been around?

• 18:50Speaker 02

  No, I don't. I can't say I do.

• 18:53Sarah Marshall?

  Do you want to guess? And, and I'll tell you as a clue that they're known as a living fossil.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 18:59Sarah Marshall?

  Because they are unchanged from, you know, how they were when they first existed long ago. But how long, Chelsea?

• 19:06Speaker 02

  Damn. No friggin' evolution?

• 19:09Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, look, I'm not a horseshoe crab scientist, but they've been, they've been with us.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  You sound like you are.

• 19:14Sarah Marshall?

  And they, they've been with us and they've been horseshoe crabs for a very long time. And I want you to tell me how, how long of a time you guess that could possibly be?

• 19:22Speaker 02

  A hundred million years.

• 19:23Sarah Marshall?

  Four hundred and forty-five million years.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  Damn. How old's the earth? Sound off in the comments.

• 19:32Sarah Marshall?

  Six thousand years, according to some people. But, um, but what about the horseshoe crabs, you guys? And I mean, I, A, isn't it amazing to think that if you're looking, look at a picture of a horseshoe crab. Look at a crab right now.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 19:46Sarah Marshall?

  But if you're looking at that, you're looking at something that you could have looked at at a time in history when we don't really know what anything really looked like, you know?

• 19:56Speaker 02

  It is pretty crazy.

• 19:56Sarah Marshall?

  We know a lot, but like, we don't know really what color a lot of things were. There's a lot we don't know from the fossil record, but we know what horseshoe crabs looked like.

• 20:05Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 20:06Sarah Marshall?

  Again, not a crabologist, and I know they're not crabs. They're actually more closely related to spiders.

• 20:12Speaker 02

  Wow, you do sound like a crab expert compared to me.

• 20:15Sarah Marshall?

  Well, I've, well, get excited about horseshoe crabs in the last few days and keep thinking about them.

• 20:21Speaker 02

  I guess that is true.

• 20:22Sarah Marshall?

  Just to say that like, when the world feels impossibly bleak, like, A, you're not wrong. Like, look, I'm not gonna lie to you. But B, there are so many things that we haven't even gotten around to learning yet. And I just, I just, I don't know. Thank you to the horseshoe crabs.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  Crabs, we need your wisdom now.

• 20:42Sarah Marshall?

  Horseshoe crabs, we need you now more than ever.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  How many fascist governments have you faced?

• 20:46Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, boy. All of them.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  Every single one. God, okay. All right. So now that we've figured that out.

• 20:56Sarah Marshall?

  I guess I had to tell you, Chelsea.

• 20:57Speaker 02

  No, I love the crabs. This is perfect. Every crab is a glamorous woman.

• 21:02Sarah Marshall?

  Every crab is a glamorous woman. Although what's nice is that they've also been around for several hundred million years before anyone was thinking about gender. And I like that, too.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  God, non-binary icons.

• 21:16Sarah Marshall?

  Non-binary survivors.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  That's true. Okay, so I think that an important place to really start here is Sarah, would you like to give us, since we have covered this quite a few times on both our shows, I don't want to go into a very, like, a whole lot of detail, but would you like to give us kind of your, like, quick and dirty rundown of, like, spiritualist seances and that movement?

• 21:42Sarah Marshall?

  Yes. And I will say it also, I'll start out by saying that everything I'm saying I learned from you.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  Great.

• 21:48Sarah Marshall?

  I learned it by watching you. And that essentially, the spiritualist movement, in your conceptualization of it, which I agree with, is connected in a big way to the rise of technology, like the telegraph and to the period immediately following the American Civil War, when suddenly we have technology that allows us to directly communicate with people who aren't there. And also, everyone knows someone who has died, and died pretty traumatically. And where, you know, a big portion of an entire generation, if not multiple generations, has been wiped out. So the way that we have talked about it in the past, this sort of collective grief, plus these changes in

• 22:31Sarah Marshall?

  communication technology that are happening faster than the human brain can keep up with them, I can't imagine that that might remind me of anything that's happening right now, causes, you know, a lot of things, but partly the birth of this new massive cultural movement, which is really more of a religious movement than anything having to do with entertainment at the time, where suddenly there is essentially a belief system called spiritualism, which involves- You know, ideas about the afterlife that people go to this place called Summerland, where they get to attend lectures. And it sounds basically just like Carlton or something.

• 23:09Sarah Marshall?

  It sounds like Palo Alto, but without all the cybertricks. And that also people are spending a lot of time and energy, both making careers as spiritualists who hold seances and also going to seances. I mean, and also if you look at sort of conservative Christianity, and especially charismatic elements within American Christianity, there's so much about American Protestantism in the past 100 years that is about the search for ecstatic experience.

• 23:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 23:39Sarah Marshall?

  And I think that we start seeing this in spiritualism, too, where people are going in order to try and communicate with the people that they've lost or to reach the other side. But it also becomes a place where you can go see a beautiful seance conducting woman who is allowed socially because she's possessed to make out with everyone regardless of gender.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  Most important part, yes.

• 24:01Sarah Marshall?

  What do you want to add that I might have missed in that run through?

• 24:05Speaker 02

  So yeah, I think that was a fantastic walkthrough, Sarah. I think the only things I'll add is kind of

• 24:11Sarah Marshall?

  A float through.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  Exactly. Is what made the seances kind of what they were. And that was that mediums, as they hosted, you know, and tried to speak with the dead and channel the dead, there would also be a lot of parlor tricks. That's where that term comes from.

• 24:30Sarah Marshall?

  Shit, we didn't even get to that in all of our conversations about it.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's it.

• 24:35Sarah Marshall?

  Because there, where do you do a seance?

• 24:37Speaker 02

  In the parlor.

• 24:38Sarah Marshall?

  Why are there not enough seances in America? Because the parlor has been replaced with the TV room. Get it together, you guys.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  Dude, that's my conspiracy theory.

• 24:48Sarah Marshall?

  Well, I mean, now the TV room is where we go to commune with people who aren't there.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  That's a great point. That's a great point. And boy, do I love TV.

• 24:55Sarah Marshall?

  Me too. You know what I love even more? Watching people trying to get me mad on TikTok and succeeding.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 25:02Sarah Marshall?

  I'm just, I'm like a fish who's like, oh, there's a worm swimming in the ocean. I'm gonna get that.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  You're just a powder keg.

• 25:10Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  Is that what you mean?

• 25:12Sarah Marshall?

  Living in a powder keg and giving off sparks.

• 25:15Speaker 02

  So yes, as these mediums were, you know, trying to commune with the dead, there were also these parlor tricks happening where like you would see, and this is kind of the, the stuff that you've seen in movies, the images you, that would come to mind when you think of an old school séance.

• 25:31Sarah Marshall?

  My favorite being the others.

• 25:33Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. But like, you know, the table would float. There would be objects floating around the room. Entities would walk around and touch the people who were in the séance, which they called the sitters.

• 25:45Sarah Marshall?

  Now, I've seen this in movies and my favorite examples are the others and also the changeling, which the others is referencing in this scene, where someone's doing automatic writing, where you're kind of moving your hand across the page and the ghost kind of steps inside you and starts writing with your hand. Did that really happen?

• 26:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was, automatic writing was definitely part of, part of the whole thing.

• 26:05Sarah Marshall?

  And it's, and something like that I find compelling because it's something that like, a person could just be writing that. So it really is based on the strength of either the performance or I think, you know, the person being able to go into some kind of a genuine trance state. And even if nothing supernatural is happening technically, to be able to maybe express something that they couldn't with their conscious mind.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  Totally, totally. And today, kind of the part of the séance we're focusing on are those parlor tricks, right? Are those floating instruments? Are those ghostly apparitions?

• 26:40Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, the spirit trumpet, if you will.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  The spirit trumpet is one of them, where people would listen and hear ghosts only through the trumpet. And there were all of these parlor tricks. There were people who were helping the séance happen. The medium was essentially a magician that was getting people to believe in the paranormal by tricking them with, you know, fake shit. And it was, uh, it was very entertaining for people. There were believers. There were also people who went to séances, especially toward the latter part of the movement, because, you know, it began the mid 1800s and really lasted until the 1920s. So as we got farther along, you know, the, the religious aspects started to fall away and the entertainment aspect started to really rise to the forefront.

• 27:28Speaker 02

  And so when we're in the 1920s, these mediums who are still kind of peddling the idea that they are somehow connected to, you know, the great beyond, we start to see them being debunked by people like Harry Houdini.

• 27:46Sarah Marshall?

  There you go.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  Here we go.

• 27:48Sarah Marshall?

  Very sexy man to be debunked by.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  Very sexy. And again, if you want to learn more about that, we just had an American hysteria episode that Sarah co-hosted with me with Tim Harford from Cautionary Tales.

• 27:58Sarah Marshall?

  Which was such a joy. I loved getting to do that with you.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was great. We learned so much more about Houdini than we knew. And we love Houdini, that dreamy.

• 28:06Sarah Marshall?

  We learned that Houdini was a mommy's boy and we love to see it.

• 28:09Speaker 02

  We love to see it. Most of the time, some of the time.

• 28:13Sarah Marshall?

  Yes, in general, yeah. Like anything, you can take it in the wrong direction.

• 28:19Speaker 02

  You can. That's right.

• 28:20Sarah Marshall?

  Looking at you, Ronald Reagan.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  Oh, Ronnie. Ronnie and his mommy.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  So as I kind of mentioned, midnight go shows are basically the pop culturalization of these seances that at the end were held in theaters, like we're on stage, right?

• 28:39Sarah Marshall?

  We're about to watch the blob. Like it's no secret that this is entertainment.

• 28:43Speaker 02

  Yes. And I think there were some hangers on, you know, there was some like sense that even in the 20s, these things were real. But once people like Houdini were able to really display how their tricks worked, it just kind of was the death knell for, for spiritualism as a actual kind of cultural force.

• 29:03Sarah Marshall?

  Well, and also I am action that like, because obviously as someone who hosts a show called You're Wrong About, I began it in the spirit of like, once you give people the facts, they'll be like, oh no, I behaved in error. Thank you for telling me. And you know what? A lot of people do. And they're the people who like the shows that we do. And so like the fact that those people have not seized control of the country doesn't mean that you don't exist and that you're not out there helping each other through this, but.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  That's very true.

• 29:31Sarah Marshall?

  But.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  But, but, but.

• 29:34Sarah Marshall?

  And it's a big juicy but. A lot of other people are. Kind of immune to facts and logic. And I feel like what I would hazard is a hypothesis is that the nature of seances changed partly because people wised up to a degree and saw parlor tricks in the cold light of day and were like, oh, how silly of me. And also just that, you know, too many mediums got too comfortable bilking people and behaving in bad faith.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:59Sarah Marshall?

  And that that gets noticed. But also, I imagine that the structure of society changes and that going to a theater instead of somebody's parlor became just more in line with the way people were living their lives. Does that sound reasonable to you?

• 30:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I totally think so. I think so. And I mean, just by virtue of it being on a stage really changed, you know, versus being in a parlor.

• 30:19Sarah Marshall?

  Because you're no longer a participant, which is interesting.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  It is interesting. And I would say also that, you know, we were seeing actual congressional hearings that Houdini was speaking at against spiritualists.

• 30:32Sarah Marshall?

  Which speaks to the scale of this as well, that this was a national issue to that level.

• 30:37Speaker 02

  I mean, spiritualism was massive.

• 30:39Sarah Marshall?

  I realize that we invent problems to have hearings about today, but in general, in the past, I think they have been about real things.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. And I think that once we get to our Ben Netgo show, we have everyone kind of being in on this joke. It is camp, it is comedy, it is vaudeville. And as we have mentioned, the Universal monster movies and horror movies in general were becoming really popular in the early 1930s as people were going through all this really awful economic devastation. What we do know about times of depression, perhaps more economic than personal.

• 31:19Sarah Marshall?

  They do go together.

• 31:20Speaker 02

  They do.

• 31:21Sarah Marshall?

  It is depressing to have hungry children.

• 31:23Speaker 02

  That's, it's very depressing. But regardless of that, people usually will shell out for cheap entertainment, right? That's like, that doesn't usually die when we have tough economic times.

• 31:34Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 31:35Speaker 02

  It's bars and, and shows. Yeah.

• 31:37Sarah Marshall?

  That's very interesting. It's interesting. I mean, I, again, I don't, I'm not an economist. I'm not a crybologist. But I think that luxuries and cheap entertainments tend to do well in recessions because people who are super rich are going to stay rich and keep doing what they're doing.

• 31:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:52Sarah Marshall?

  And people who are struggling and who are getting squeezed are going to alleviate that how we can. And God knows, horror movies do the job pretty well for a lot of us.

• 32:01Speaker 02

  God, don't they?

• 32:03Sarah Marshall?

  God only knows where I'd be without them, for that matter. Well, and to speak of the Universal monster movies for a second, what comes to mind for me is we have Frankenstein and like, what, 31, 32, James Wales Frankenstein. Wonderful, amazing movie. We got the Bride of Frankenstein. And we also get Claude Rains was the Invisible Man, and that's an amazing movie.

• 32:24Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. Yep. And we have like Dracula as well.

• 32:27Sarah Marshall?

  Yes. Bella Lugosi. I never drink wine.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  Who will make an appearance later on. Yeah.

• 32:34Sarah Marshall?

  Little Edward is watching with glee.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  Exactly. So, you know, we have kind of the audience ready to go. So what we need is the showman. And we have these movie theaters that are still, of course, looking for more income, especially during this time. And so these magicians kind of had the idea to create these shows that were a supplement to the movies and happened at midnight, which meant that it wouldn't interfere at all with the movies that they were showing. So it would just be automatically more money.

• 33:09Sarah Marshall?

  So after the movies, you would like stay later?

• 33:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 33:13Sarah Marshall?

  Okay. Have you ever been to a, they at least used to do this at the Clinton Street Theater in Portland, where at the end of showing the Rocky Horror Picture Show, the cabaret says, this isn't Ferris Bueller, so go the fuck home. But in this case, you would be correct.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  Yep, exactly. So it's kind of why we believed that the first guy to really create the midnight go show was a guy named Elwyn Charles Peck. And he went by Elwyn, E L dash W Y N. That was his stage name.

• 33:45Sarah Marshall?

  I like him already.

• 33:47Speaker 02

  And his show was Elwyn's Midnight Spook Party. And he actually started it in 1929.

• 33:52Sarah Marshall?

  And he lived with his friend.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. He probably did. I don't have any intel on his sexuality, unfortunately.

• 33:59Sarah Marshall?

  Right. We know nothing about his life, but this is my theory.

• 34:02Speaker 02

  So if you want to head to the document, you can look at a poster of one of his shows that I think would be fun for you to describe.

• 34:10Sarah Marshall?

  Ooh. Oh, and it's, okay.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  Take us there.

• 34:15Sarah Marshall?

  So actually, I feel like it's Elwin, like El Cid or something. That's pretty good, too. Elwin. Okay, so I guess read this poster. Don't be a sissy. I will. Speak for yourself. Come on down to the spook party tonight. Spooks, ghosts, shivers, shudders, thrills. We have a Nosferatu Max Shrek looking face. Nosferatu has also come out recently, I would think. We have a maiden being carried. She's in a swoon, like that lady at the, in the Edward Gory mystery animation. And then in the top left-hand corner, is that or is that not SpongeBob?

• 34:51Speaker 02

  It does look a little like SpongeBob.

• 34:53Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, not literally, but he really looks like SpongeBob. Oh, and then someone has written on a blackboard, you will die, which is the best way to pack them in. In person, on the stage, Elwin, midnight spook party. This is a midnight show and requires a separate admission. So you couldn't even stay after the movie. That's great. You have to buy your way in. Mystery, laughs, thrills, table raising, ghostly spirits, slate writing, wrappings, talking skulls. And I will point out that we also had wrappings in our show.

• 35:23Speaker 02

  We did, and kind of talking skulls a little bit.

• 35:26Sarah Marshall?

  The quote, ghosts sometimes leave the stage, come into the audience and sit with you, but you'll love it.

• 35:36Sarah Marshall?

  On the screen, the vampire bat, fae ray, lion latwill, balcony 25 cents, lower floor 40 cents. Make up a spook party. If you come alone, you'll be afraid to walk home. No children's tickets sold. It's too scary. Okay.

• 35:54Speaker 02

  Beautiful.

• 35:55Sarah Marshall?

  The amount of information on that poster is very impressive to me. Like, if you have questions, they managed to answer them, but in like a fun, ghosty way. I really love it.

• 36:06Speaker 02

  It's great. It's great. I really want to make shirts of some of these posters. Stay tuned.

• 36:11Sarah Marshall?

  We should also have our next show posters be like that.

• 36:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 36:15Sarah Marshall?

  And just say, if you come alone, you'll be afraid to walk home. Bring your friends.

• 36:23Speaker 02

  But you won't be afraid when we do it in Portland because nothing bad is actually happening there.

• 36:29Sarah Marshall?

  Well, okay, here, look, to address Portland, my hometown, which I love so much and which at this moment is perhaps being attacked by the National Guard, like Kent State, there are bad things happening in Portland, but you know who they're happening to? Vulnerable people, who are the people that bad things always happen to. People who are likely to be victims of hate crimes, unhoused people, people dealing with addiction and not getting the resources that the city has, but is not using on them, or who are just, you know, the victims of a city being unwilling to put their effort into the right places, or not having the capacity, you know?

• 37:03Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 37:04Sarah Marshall?

  It's, both these things are true. And so, yes, bad things happen in a city without that being generally the fault of the people that they're happening to. And also, Portland is a, yes, frequently annoying, and also beautiful, wonderful city, full of people who I adore. And if you walk around my neighborhood, you will see lots of fruit trees and lots of fruit that has been set out for people to take. And that is also going on at any time, and people are growing their tomatoes.

• 37:40Speaker 02

  Well said.

• 37:40Sarah Marshall?

  Still, we shouldn't be able to be, but we are.

• 37:42Speaker 02

  You're, somehow, we persevere. Yes. Very well said, Sarah.

• 37:48Sarah Marshall?

  Anyway, very walkable town, very lovely to be in. But yes, when we do the massive seance again, bring your friends, or you'll be scared to go home alone.

• 37:57Speaker 02

  As I mentioned, the show often started with a horror movie, and usually kind of a schlocky B horror movie, the best, of course.

• 38:04Sarah Marshall?

  One of Faye Ray's other movies, in this case.

• 38:07Speaker 02

  So after that, you know, like, if it were opening the show, which it often was, there was like an after horror glow, right? There's this like, you're kind of primed because you get in that mood where everything's a little creepy and scary.

• 38:22Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And also, horror movies at this time are like 75 minutes long, you know, so you're not particularly tired. I mean, a lot of them are that length now.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  We always want a tight 90 when we can get it.

• 38:32Sarah Marshall?

  Another great movie of this time is Island of Lost Souls.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 38:36Sarah Marshall?

  You should watch that if you haven't. Okay, so we've just seen a horror movie. We've read this amazing poster. Like, I am like amped up. I'm ready for anything, basically.

• 38:47Speaker 02

  You should be. So at this point, the host comes on, whether he explodes from a spider or not, there are many ways to enter, but regardless, there would be this kind of, you know, monologue about how the theater was home to a host of ghosts. And, you know, you might just see them tonight.

• 39:05Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God, we did that at our show. I see what you're saying. Wow.

• 39:09Speaker 02

  Yes. So the opening of the show would be very séance-esque. So they would be doing the tricks, like what we call the spirit cabinet, which was kind of a place where a lot of paranormal things would come out from in the séance.

• 39:23Sarah Marshall?

  Like the spirit secretary of the interior.

• 39:25Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. So a lot of times I would open seemingly by a paranormal hand, and then things like a handkerchief would be held by the ghost master and then kind of fly off his hand and float around the stage.

• 39:41Sarah Marshall?

  Nice.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  You know, someone in the audience would be asked to come on stage and help with the spirit slate trick, which is, you know, they'd put chalk slates together. And when they pulled them apart, they would have, you know, strange messages on them and as if by a ghostly hand.

• 39:57Sarah Marshall?

  Or a magician, you know, one of the two.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  Yes. So, you know, you're kind of seeing how there's these magic tricks, kind of simplistic magic tricks, but kind of turned into this séance-y vibe and mimicking what a lot of people already had some reference to. So here's one that I liked. Sometimes they would place a skull on a bench and it would answer questions by clacking its jaws, once for yes, twice for no.

• 40:25Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God. Wouldn't that be amazing? I want to see that on the Drew Barrymore Show.

• 40:31Speaker 02

  Me too, me too. She'd do it. She'd do it for Halloween.

• 40:35Sarah Marshall?

  She would. And you know what? That skull would feel very comfortable.

• 40:39Speaker 02

  She would probably cry.

• 40:41Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  Into its Skull, to the skull skull. Yeah.

• 40:44Sarah Marshall?

  Skull will be okay with it.

• 40:45Speaker 02

  It's all right. Sometimes, you know, again, tables would float, light bulbs would float. There was one trick that people just loved for some reason, where two pans would float in the air and one had water in it and then it would pour the water into another floating pan.

• 40:59Sarah Marshall?

  I, I would honestly lose my mind if I saw that happen.

• 41:02Speaker 02

  So I guess that trick's for you.

• 41:06Sarah Marshall?

  Well, cause it's like, it's, you feel like it's tricky to balance something that well. Like even if you're a ghost, you'd be like, oh, oh, oh, I'm losing my balance.

• 41:14Speaker 02

  Uh huh. And I won't be really revealing these tricks, how they work, because I don't know. And that's more fun.

• 41:22Sarah Marshall?

  And also there's a magician's code.

• 41:24Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. I'm not here to break it. I'm not here to be hunted down by roving bands of magicians.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  Another gag that I liked, that also kind of reminded me of our live show, was that they would ask for two audience volunteers, a man and a woman. And the man would be tied with his wrists to two posts that were tightened by the woman. And then there would be kind of a screen put in front of him and he would be illuminated from behind. And it was kind of like an Austin Powers thing. You remember this scene, right?

• 41:59Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, the like, the shadow puppet?

• 42:01Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 42:02Sarah Marshall?

  Wow. I had not thought of that in such a long time. I loved those movies when they came out.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. There, I'm, I haven't watched them in a while, but I have a feeling I would still enjoy them very much.

• 42:12Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  But yes, the Austin Powers thing is like, you can't really see them in their shadows. Look like they're doing all these sexual things, but they're really not. And it's very funny.

• 42:20Sarah Marshall?

  Which again, Rocky Horror Picture Show.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, it's a total direct rip off of Rocky Horror, which is great.

• 42:28Sarah Marshall?

  It's amazing.

• 42:28Speaker 02

  So anyway, this man would be, you know, his, his shadow would be illuminated on this blind that had been pulled down. And suddenly you'd see his jacket and vest and shirt fly off his body and float around behind the screen. But the man appeared not to move, which I think is just kind of sexy and fun.

• 42:47Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, the thing is, there's just, and I think of this whenever people bring out conspiracy theories where they're like, what possible explanation could there be, except this specific thing I'm afraid of? And it's my trans child.

• 42:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 42:57Sarah Marshall?

  Where with so many things, including magic, or just like, I don't know, when you're eating something and you're like, what's in this? How is this prepared? I can't imagine. And it's like, yeah, because. A lot of what we're able to do and how we perceive the world comes down to the knowledge base and the skills base that we have. And so

• 43:14Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 43:14Sarah Marshall?

  I, as a layperson, could not begin to imagine how that could happen. And so part of my brain is like, even if I don't believe in ghosts and I know I'm here for thrills, chills, and spills, like, this is a little bit eerie, you know? And if I'm a magician, then like, I know, I can think of probably a couple of different ways off the top of my head that that's doable. But until you have that experience level, like, if you're forced to fill in the blank with something from your general knowledge base, you might just come up with nothing.

• 43:41Speaker 02

  No, I think that's, that's exactly right. It's a very good point.

• 43:44Sarah Marshall?

  Thanks.

• 43:45Speaker 02

  So another gag I thought you would really like involved a floating skull.

• 43:50Sarah Marshall?

  I love a floating skull.

• 43:51Speaker 02

  Of course, of course. What could be better? So the ghost master would stand in front of the stage's black curtain and suddenly a skull would float from behind the curtain, right? He's standing kind of in front of the stage, which I learned is called the skirt of the stage, the part in front of the curtain, which was great. So

• 44:11Sarah Marshall?

  Nice.

• 44:11Speaker 02

  A skull would kind of float out from between the two curtains, right up to where he was standing. And then when he turned to see the skull, it would like fly back between the curtains, like it was kind of shy, you know?

• 44:23Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah. Skulls do get shy. Yeah. Cause they're not used to not having hair. They feel self-conscious.

• 44:29Speaker 02

  Hey, you know, or a body, I guess.

• 44:31Sarah Marshall?

  Or, yeah, or skin.

• 44:33Speaker 02

  Or skins, or eyes. And this would happen like a few times, this gag would happen.

• 44:38Sarah Marshall?

  That's really cute.

• 44:39Speaker 02

  It's very cute. And then eventually it would stop and hover in the middle of the stage until the showman kind of opened his hand out. And then it would shoot out really fast toward the other side of the stage, which I just think is a lovely, lovely little image.

• 44:54Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I love that. And again, it's like, especially in an atmosphere where like, you control the lighting, you know, you have a certain amount of stagecraft, then like, I'm sure there were a few different ways to do this and make it very convincing from an audience perspective, but also it's like

• 45:09Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 45:10Sarah Marshall?

  as an audience member, like unless you're a total dick, you're not trying that hard to poke holes in it. You know, you just want to have a good time.

• 45:17Speaker 02

  Well, exactly. And like when people were selective from the audience, you know, a lot of times they were planted stooges. But a lot of times they were people from the audience. And if you've ever been to a fair, a state fair and watched the hypnotist, at least that's a thing at the Washington State Fair where a hypnotist kind of brings people on stage and hypnotizes them and everybody kind of does what he says.

• 45:39Sarah Marshall?

  Well, also, if you're being observed by so many other people.

• 45:43Speaker 02

  Yes, that's kind of what it is. It's like this, this need to, to please the audience. But at the same time, like the ghost master might be like, hey, like do this when I say this, just kind of whisper to them and they were thrilled to do it. You know, I mean, people want to perform.

• 45:58Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Because you get to be a part of it.

• 46:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it was like a very audience participation based show as well, which I think is part of its appeal is like the like, ooh, will I be chosen?

• 46:10Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And then you've seen a horror movie and now you get to sort of like have a little taste of not the real thing, but a more embodied version of it, maybe.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. So now we're going to get into the very most important part of the ghost show, the kind of finale that all of this would lead up to. And it is called the blackout.

• 46:33Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, oh, boy.

• 46:34Speaker 02

  So when the blackout came, it would only last a handful of minutes, but every light in the theater would be cut.

• 46:41Sarah Marshall?

  Okay. I thought you were going to say seconds.

• 46:43Speaker 02

  No, it's a handful of minutes.

• 46:44Sarah Marshall?

  That's amazing. And also probably impossible today from a liability perspective, sadly.

• 46:49Speaker 02

  Ooh, you're telling me. Yeah, very, very true. But yes, every light would be cut and it would plunge the theater into like an absolute and total darkness. And that was really important. Like they would ask that all the exit signs, that every source of light be covered to get it as pitch black as humanly possible.

• 47:09Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, it's like the ending of Wait Until Dark.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  Yep. And so as soon as that darkness fell in the theater instantly, it would be like shit just started like popping the fuck off. All right.

• 47:22Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 47:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:24Sarah Marshall?

  I want to go. I would be too scared to walk home. That's very scary.

• 47:28Speaker 02

  It is. It is. So as soon as the lights were cut, you know, all these ghost masters and their assistants, they created like atmospheric soundscapes using pre-recorded tapes, music boxes that they played into microphones. There was like the classic thunder sounds and blood curdling screams and wolves howling and, you know, people moaning and evil laughter, all things you would expect from your typical kind of Halloween soundtrack.

• 47:54Sarah Marshall?

  Again, like I, we've talked in these shows about House on Haunted Hill, the William Castle movie. Because Castle was kind of known as master of the gimmick. And I'm sure you've thought about this too, that as you're talking, I'm like, oh, like, yeah, he definitely did great stuff. He did the tingler. And he, I'm sure like innovated it, but like the idea of a theater gimmick would have been so familiar at this point. And one of my favorite horror movie things, like of any movie, is that House on Haunted Hill opens with a few seconds of pure darkness and like just the sounds of shrieks and cackling and stuff. And it would be so unnerving in a theater. And now I see it. And again, like this doesn't mean that he's a hack. It means that he was adapting something and preserving it so that people like me could see it, where there would have been such a tradition

• 48:38Sarah Marshall?

  of sitting in a dark theater, hearing screaming and cackling and stuff.

• 48:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I mean, William Castle was absolutely inspired by these ghost shows. I mean, there's no question about that.

• 48:49Sarah Marshall?

  Good job, William Castle.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. Keeping it alive. We need a new William Castle and it is us. We are the people who will take up the mantle. I'm sure there are people out there doing this. So.

• 48:59Sarah Marshall?

  There are lots of little William Castles and I'm so happy that everyone is out there making skeletons zoom around.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, please let us know if you do that because I'd love to to hear about it. Okay, so everything's black, creepy sounds are playing. Prior to this blackout, there would have been a kind of like suggestive speech about all the things that might happen in the dark, right? So it would be like,

• 49:23Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah.

• 49:23Speaker 02

  You'll you will see ghosts, you'll feel their hands, you know, so he might say something like, don't turn around if you feel cold clammy hands clutching you or something crawling up your leg. Worms and spiders will fall from the ceiling or get loose on the ground. So then, as soon as the lights went out.

• 49:41Sarah Marshall?

  They have somebody like throwing popcorn at the audience, tell me.

• 49:45Speaker 02

  Uh, yes, that's exactly right.

• 49:48Sarah Marshall?

  Really?

• 49:48Speaker 02

  Yes, so.

• 49:50Sarah Marshall?

  Literally popcorn?

• 49:51Speaker 02

  Literally, they would toss out popcorn kernels more, they toss out rice. So you know, you'd be primed to kind of experience what you're feeling as the horrors described to you.

• 50:03Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 50:04Speaker 02

  Sometimes they'd throw out just wet strings that felt like worms.

• 50:08Sarah Marshall?

  Perfect.

• 50:08Speaker 02

  They'd shoot water guns out into the audience.

• 50:11Sarah Marshall?

  There's a light over at the Frankenstein place.

• 50:18Speaker 02

  And this is exactly, I mean, it has to have been where the Rocky Horror stuff came from.

• 50:23Sarah Marshall?

  Well, I guess that like, I think about this a lot, like you and I exist in 2025, right? But like, we were born in the 80s, we were raised by people from different decades, you know, I was raised by boomers and my dad was actually a bit older than that. And you were raised by different people with sort of different experiences of history. And so the moment you're living in, you're also bringing all the times you've lived in and to a somewhat lesser extent, the times that the people who you know and who raised you have lived in. And so, you know, the Rocky Horror Picture Show coming out in 1975, it feels like it would have been like within very easy reach of human memory to think of a time when people did that at that kind of movie.

• 51:03Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 51:04Sarah Marshall?

  Because if you don't know. And Kelsey, you can speak more to this. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is what it is, not just because it was a movie, but because it became this cabaret theater experience that has persisted now for 50 years.

• 51:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is actually the 50th anniversary of Rocky Horror. So let's say a hearty happy birthday to what is my favorite film.

• 51:26Sarah Marshall?

  Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. And then there's meatloaf under the table.

• 51:32Speaker 02

  Yep, exactly. That's perfect. So in addition to all that, sometimes they throw cooked noodles into the audience, like from the balconies, which I really love.

• 51:42Sarah Marshall?

  Just like when you're having like a neighborhood party for kids and you have them like stick their fingers in peeled grapes and stuff.

• 51:48Speaker 02

  Yes. And the kind of creation of the modern haunted house as we know it is sort of happening concurrently. And I think these two things are feeding each other.

• 51:57Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And you've done shows on that.

• 51:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, we did one, we did a Halloween episode on your show last year. That was kind of a history of Halloween. And then we have an episode called Haunted Attractions that really kind of takes us all through the history of, of the Halloween haunted house. And it's a lot of fun. So another thing that they would do is, I love this, they would take two long poles and hold them kind of at opposite ends of the stage. There'd be a rope tied between them and then they drape wet mop strings all across the poles and then they pull them across over the audience's faces.

• 52:32Sarah Marshall?

  I would lose it.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  I know. Other times they used silk thread and they had told the audience it was spider webs on their faces. That's where I would freak out.

• 52:42Sarah Marshall?

  I would scream, you know this, you've gone through a haunted house with me. I would scream so much.

• 52:47Speaker 02

  I know. And it would be wonderful. And everyone was screaming. In fact, it's like, as soon as the lights went out, it was a perfect opportunity for all of the kind of mischievous people in the audience to start like tapping on their friends' shoulders or like grabbing their ankles. And the ghost masters loved this.

• 53:04Sarah Marshall?

  Well, and I mean, I just feel like if you have not gone and screamed in like a haunted house or in something like this, or just like had the opportunity to like, Be screaming with a group of people who are also screaming. You really should. I think that people need screaming more than many of us realize today.

• 53:22Speaker 02

  I mean, the haunted house for me is truly like the most cathartic part of my year is my haunted house marathon in the fall. So, okay, so then all of that's kind of happening, but what also happens pretty early on in those few minutes is suddenly there would be a massive like flash bulb flash that would go off from the stage, which not only like was frightening, right? Because it's shocking, but it would also kind of blind the audience momentarily.

• 53:53Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 53:53Speaker 02

  And that would give a chance for kind of things to go into place. And the performers were told to kind of close their eyes so they wouldn't have that effect, which is cool. But the reason, the main reason for this was that they had used like luminous paint on a bunch of different things, like objects, decorations, actors.

• 54:13Sarah Marshall?

  An old science favorite.

• 54:15Speaker 02

  Yep. And the flash from these flash bulbs would charge the paint instantaneously. Right? Yes.

• 54:23Sarah Marshall?

  It's brilliant.

• 54:24Speaker 02

  It was usually phosphorus paint, but sometimes it was radium paint. So that's another episode.

• 54:30Sarah Marshall?

  Boy, we sure were putting radium in a lot of stuff for a while.

• 54:33Speaker 02

  Yep. We loved glowing shit.

• 54:36Sarah Marshall?

  It's almost like we need federal agencies that determine the safety and efficacy of things before we start putting them in our bodies. But, you know, whatever.

• 54:45Speaker 02

  Sounds gay, Sarah.

• 54:46Sarah Marshall?

  And also, yeah, I mean, why do that when you can just, you know, invent a fake cause of autism because your self-imposed deadline ran out and because rather than creating a society that helps support the needs of people with autism, we're gonna just treat them like monsters.

• 55:04Speaker 02

  Yep. That's, uh, that's what we're doing every day.

• 55:07Sarah Marshall?

  And you know what? Look, if you want to see a monster, go to a ghost show. Don't do it at your job. That's all I'm gonna say. More ghost shows for this country. Please, God.

• 55:17Speaker 02

  Unless your job is our job or a ghost master job.

• 55:22Speaker 02

  Okay, so this luminous paint would Be put on balloons, like it would make faces on balloons that would then kind of drop from the balconies or get kind of tossed out into the audience. It'd be sprayed on cheesecloth ghosts that were mounted on poles and like zooming around over the audience.

• 55:40Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, Chelsea, we love a cheesecloth ghost. I won't say more, but boy, do we.

• 55:44Speaker 02

  Find out more about that at our live show. The performers would kind of go out into the audience as ghosts glowing, right? But I think my favorite way that the paint was used is this way. And I'm going to read a quote from a man recalling his time as a boy at one of these ghost shows. I'm going to read it like a little, like a boy, though, because it's fire.

• 56:12Sarah Marshall?

  Okay. Yeah, maybe with a little Newsies accent if you have one in your pocket you've been wanting to use.

• 56:16Speaker 02

  We'll see.

• 56:19Speaker 02

  "One Halloween, when I was a boy, the largest theater in town staged a midnight show, advertising that ghosts would appear in the audience, sitting right next to you. That fascinated me. The theater marquee also promised a horror movie and a stage show featuring a spooky musician. I could understand that kind of stuff, but how could a ghost suddenly appear in the seat next to mine? I found out. The only place a kid might get a penny candy bar was in a downtown pool room, and that's where magic struck. A stranger asked us if we'd like to see the Halloween show at the Majestic. He said we'd only have to do a little work to earn admission."

• 56:57Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, boy, I love it.

• 56:58Speaker 02

  "As instructed, we appeared at the theater 30 minutes early. Backstage, something greasy was wiped on our hands and faces, and we were ordered to sit in the auditorium, widely separated. We received no explanation of what we were supposed to be doing, so we were bewildered, but it didn't matter."

• 57:15Sarah Marshall?

  That is a very late call time.

• 57:18Speaker 02

  "But it didn't matter, because we were also in free. You guessed it, the greasy stuff was phosphorus. After the crowd came in and the lights went on, I glowed in the dark. I wasn't sitting next to a ghost, I was a ghost.

• 57:33Speaker 02

  I didn't catch on until a woman leaned into my face and said, 'My God, kid, what happened to you?'"

• 57:40Speaker 02

  Then I saw my friends shining in other rows and I realized I was in show business.

• 57:47Sarah Marshall?

  Oh my God, I love it.

• 57:49Speaker 02

  I waved my ghostly hands in the air and said boo and laughed menacingly. People were so frightened, they giggled. It was marvelous.

• 58:00Sarah Marshall?

  Oh my God.

• 58:01Speaker 02

  Isn't that just absolutely fucking lovely?

• 58:04Sarah Marshall?

  Yes, it's perfect. And like, ah, I, yes, I love every, I love everything about that story.

• 58:10Speaker 02

  Would you, how would this go if, if they asked you in a pool room when you were looking for a candy bar? What would you have done?

• 58:17Sarah Marshall?

  At this moment or when I was like 11?

• 58:19Speaker 02

  Let's go with when you were 11.

• 58:21Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, boy. Um, I would have probably been in a pool room with my dad, probably because he would be having a beer.

• 58:27Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 58:28Sarah Marshall?

  And I would be like, no, I'm a big scaredy cat at this time in my life.

• 58:32Speaker 02

  That's okay.

• 58:33Sarah Marshall?

  Ask someone else, but today I would be very jazzed.

• 58:37Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 58:37Sarah Marshall?

  Also, I do think that like, just out of like general social anxiety and like burnout, like I do, I always complain about this. I don't leave the house enough. I don't leave the house enough at night. Like I do find it difficult to just like show up for the thing and see what happens. And I feel like this is good validation of like, just, just go ahead and do it. Because sometimes you're, you want to see ghosts and you are the ghost and who could see that coming?

• 59:02Speaker 02

  It's magical.

• 59:03Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 59:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, if it were, would have been me, I think we know what would have happened. I would have been like.

• 59:07Sarah Marshall?

  Yes, you would, you would have been the most legendary ghost that they ever had. And they would have talked about you for years and been like, where is that kid? I wonder what they're up to now.

• 59:18Speaker 02

  I mean, back then you could just get a job as a child. They'd be like, come on tour with us, kid.

• 59:23Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Oh, you would have joined the ghost show circus.

• 59:25Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 59:26Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 59:28Speaker 02

  So another thing they used were called spook paddles and they were also, you know.

• 59:34Sarah Marshall?

  For when the ghosts need a good spanking.

• 59:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Oh, what I should say actually before that, a fun fact is that they really stopped doing the kid luminosity trick because people kept getting punched in the face because they were so.

• 59:50Sarah Marshall?

  Like the kids did.

• 59:51Speaker 02

  The kids were getting assaulted.

• 59:54Sarah Marshall?

  And also, you have to assume that like, at some point in time, there's a good chance that they used radium for that as well. And, you know, we know now that you're not supposed to do that.

• 1:00:04Speaker 02

  Yep. And we can hope that maybe just a little radium that night didn't hurt them.

• 1:00:08Sarah Marshall?

  That would be nice.

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  That would be nice.

• 1:00:10Sarah Marshall?

  But I mean, I mean, to speak to just like, America is a country founded on the almost religious belief that if we love companies, they will love us back. Like, the radium girls famously, I mean, there's a wonderful book about this. It's called The Radium Girls. But they died so painfully and became ill so quickly because they were painting, you know, things like clock faces that used radium in order to glow in the dark. And they were told to lick the points of their paintbrushes to make them pointier. And it's like, I feel, you just feel like things wouldn't have been so bad if they'd spent a few pennies on like, just a tool that they could, just a glass of water, maybe? Why did they have to lick them? You know? So the amount of radium that people were putting inside their bodies, and I think also taking as a health tonic.

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  Oh, God.

• 1:00:56Sarah Marshall?

  Again, there's a reason why, and the blob starts like this. There's a lot of monster movies about this theme, I think, for a good reason. Like, there's a reason the American people can't be trusted to just start putting glowing things inside of our mouths as soon as we see them. I know we want to, but we really shouldn't. We need to be protected from ourselves.

• 1:01:14Speaker 02

  It's very, very reasonable. Yeah. So, there were lots of other gimmicks that happened that would make it look like Ghost Bath Spider's eyeballs were running around, you know, in the theater.

• 1:01:27Sarah Marshall?

  And also, like, the power of suggestion is never stronger than when it's dark, I think.

• 1:01:31Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely.

• 1:01:32Sarah Marshall?

  You know, the audience would do so much of it for you, which is just good economics.

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  Absolutely, absolutely. So, that is how a typical blackout would go in the beginning, okay? By the 1940s, as these, you know, more seance-oriented shows turned more into horror-oriented shows, there would be sometimes a monster that would be loosed in the theater. And we'll get into that as well.

• 1:02:00Sarah Marshall?

  Yes.

• 1:02:02Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:02:03Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, Rocky.

• 1:02:05Speaker 02

  So as the shows were evolving, teenagers really became the main audience. And this is, you know, because we know what kind of the, the changes brought by World War II, there was just a little bit more focus on the teenager.

• 1:02:24Sarah Marshall?

  Well, and teenagers have access to the automobile,

• 1:02:26Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:02:27Sarah Marshall?

  which I think opens up a lot and a lot for them acting as consumers.

• 1:02:30Speaker 02

  Yes, they really become consumers in this time. And many had never seen a stage show, right? They had been going to the movies as kids, but the stage had really started to die out. Vaudeville was dying out tragically, right? So teenagers, of course, famously have kind of a short attention span and they want shit to go hard, right? So they needed more transgressive content than a ghostly seance. They needed horror. And if they didn't get enough horror, they were known to trash the theater in anger, kind of like our recent incident with the Minecraft movies.

• 1:03:09Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, although that wasn't about not enough horror, right? That was just like a meme or something?

• 1:03:14Speaker 02

  It was just a meme, basically.

• 1:03:15Sarah Marshall?

  If you must trash a theater, at least do it because you're disappointed you didn't get enough horror. Like, even though I don't endorse it, but I can understand it.

• 1:03:22Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. More horror.

• 1:03:25Sarah Marshall?

  You know what movie I would have trashed a theater after was, I don't care that I'm spoiling this, that French movie High Tension from 20 years ago, where you think that this like cute lesbian is like chasing down a trucker who's abducted her friend and killed her whole family. And then it turns out that she is the trucker because lesbians are murderers. It was incredible. And you're like, how is she chasing the guy in the truck who'd abducted her friend? Like, who was driving the other car?

• 1:03:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a good point.

• 1:03:54Sarah Marshall?

  There are five people out there right now who are also personally victimized by High Tension and are just as mad as I am to this day.

• 1:04:03Speaker 02

  Well, one time, well, when I was a kid, I would have trashed the theater, but this was a home video incident. And it was that I got a home video version of A Little Princess. And for whatever reason, it was the one that had the locket.

• 1:04:18Sarah Marshall?

  Yes, the locket. I remember that. It came with a locket like under the plastic of the VHS clamshell case, you guys.

• 1:04:25Speaker 02

  It was awesome. Yeah. And there was something wrong with my VHS, so it stopped right before you find out if they take the other girl who lived in the attic, you know, the one she becomes friends with that, like when she gets adopted.

• 1:04:40Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:04:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. So like she gets adopted, but I didn't know that because my VHS cut off and I thought that was the end of the movie. And I was like, take her, take her with you. And

• 1:04:52Sarah Marshall?

  Becky.

• 1:04:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I didn't find out until I was like in my twenties that that was the end of the movie.

• 1:04:58Sarah Marshall?

  This is like my mom when I was a child, in order to try and get me to read Jane Eyre, because she really believed I was gonna read Jane Eyre when I was like nine. And like, trust me, that was not gonna happen.

• 1:05:07Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:05:08Sarah Marshall?

  She withheld the real ending of Jane Eyre from me until I was in college. I would be like, what's Jane Eyre about? She's like, well, she runs away when she finds out Rochester has a secret wife and then she meets Sinjin and, you know, and then they get married. And it's a marriage of companionship rather than love. And she gets an inheritance. And I was like, well, that sounds awful. I'm not reading that. And then we watched like a Masterpiece Theater of Jane Eyre in like 2007, where it got to the real ending, which if you don't know what it is, I'll keep my mom's agenda going and not tell you. And I was like, Mom, I would have read it if I knew that happened.

• 1:05:43Speaker 02

  See, they underestimated us. We want, they don't know what we want. They fuck us up, our mom and dad.

• 1:05:50Sarah Marshall?

  My mom also miscalculated, speaking of ghosts, because she decided to introduce me to the book by like putting me in my bath when I was like, could not have been older than seven. And we had like, my parents remodeled in the eighties, so they had this big jacuzzi tub. And I was only allowed to be in like, I don't know, 18 inches of water, so I didn't drown. And so I remember just being like mostly cold and like un-immersed and listening to Dame Wendy Hiller read the opening of Jane Eyre, which is about Jane being locked in a room where somebody died and having a ghost bother her. And I was just like, I feel like I'm being visited by a ghost right now.

• 1:06:31Sarah Marshall?

  Also, my mom, like, a lot of the time, it paid off. Like, she just gave me Leonard Cohen's first album when I turned 14, as if that was a thing that everyone did when their daughter turned 14. And that worked out great. The J and R thing was just too early. It's okay, Mom. I love it now.

• 1:06:46Speaker 02

  We love you, Mom.

• 1:06:49Speaker 02

  Okay, so now that we're in the horror shows, I'm gonna kind of set some of the different scenes that you might see at these ghost shows, okay? And I guess it's important to say that these tricks, because they're magic tricks, basically would be kind of repurposed in different ways by the different ghost masters that were out there, right? You can imagine these tricks done with just different circumstances and characters. So, in one, a scantily clad woman. There were lots of scantily clad women in this era.

• 1:07:17Sarah Marshall?

  You know, I don't think the word scantily is used for any other context, except for the clad-ness of a woman.

• 1:07:22Speaker 02

  That's very true. It's very true. So she would be chased around by a man in a gorilla suit, and then she would kind of faint, and then the gorilla would grab her and drag her to the table and lay her on the table, and then the gorilla would start ripping off her arms and legs and throwing them into the audience.

• 1:07:42Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, no. Well, I thought you were gonna say clothes, so, you know.

• 1:07:46Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 1:07:47Sarah Marshall?

  I like that. I mean, I, okay, I guess I'll choose dismemberment over sexual violence, although I didn't expect to have to make that choice today.

• 1:07:55Speaker 02

  You know, I know, I know. Like I said, we're not getting into, we're not getting too deep into the, into the political issues here.

• 1:08:02Sarah Marshall?

  Yep. But the point is, people liked it, so we can learn from that, I suppose.

• 1:08:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:08Sarah Marshall?

  That, I mean, that is an impressive trick, though, right? Just from a misdirection perspective.

• 1:08:12Speaker 02

  It is. And then, like, she'd be covered in a sheet, and the blood would soak through the sheet, and then eventually the showman would shoot the gorilla with a pistol, and it would die on stage, so.

• 1:08:23Sarah Marshall?

  God. It's kind of like a very low, but it's like your cousin does a sweeted version of King Kong.

• 1:08:29Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:08:30Sarah Marshall?

  I also like how I'm like, how barbaric. Today, we merely pretend to saw women in half.

• 1:08:36Speaker 02

  Well, there'll be a little of that soon. Okay, so in one problematic skit called Jungle Voodoo, a young woman would appear in a leopard skin costume and do a sexy dance to the beat of drums offstage, which is totally fine and not awful at all. And then as she danced, a large net would be lowered onto her. And then two performers dressed as safari hunters grabbed her while she was in the net and struggling and like, no, let me go. And then the net would be hoisted up and an incantation would be said by the ghost masters, a flash of lightning would strike,

• 1:09:18Speaker 02

  and then the net would fall and the young woman would have disappeared and inside were the bones of a skeleton.

• 1:09:24Sarah Marshall?

  Wow. Wow. It's so interesting that so much of this is like, what if we could use magic to kill?

• 1:09:31Speaker 02

  It's definitely a theme that is occurring in the ghost show.

• 1:09:35Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, it is also like, I mean, speaking of horror, like showing the things we can't speak out loud, it's just, I welcome it for so many reasons and partly as a fossil record of the themes that we didn't have the courage to admit to in a more conscious way and how so many of the monster movies of their 50s are like, you know, starting with King Kong, if not earlier, are like, what about when the monster picks up a hot woman and carries her away? And it's like, what are, what are we saying with that?

• 1:10:05Speaker 02

  Interesting. Yeah, I mean, there is, again, there are so many things to pick apart here, and it's all deserving of analysis, perhaps another time.

• 1:10:15Sarah Marshall?

  Although to quote the kid in the Cider House rules, King Kong, much like Aunt Ronald Reagan, just wants his mother, perhaps.

• 1:10:21Speaker 02

  Hey, you know.

• 1:10:23Sarah Marshall?

  Still stomped on a lot of people to get to her, though.

• 1:10:25Speaker 02

  That's very true. So another skit would involve a man performing as a hunchback. There were many hunchback performers because of Frankenstein, right?

• 1:10:37Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Well, and I feel like the hunchback of Notre Dame is actually, like, there was a, I think, a Lon Chaney movie of that that had been very popular. So I feel like that would even be in The Zeitgeist. And of course, people do love Richard III. Okay, anyway.

• 1:10:52Speaker 02

  So, okay, another one, yeah, would be this hunchback would find again, usually a female volunteer from the audience. I know. And then would hypnotize her, put her on this wooden table. And I'm guessing that this was usually a stooge, right? A stooget, maybe we'll say.

• 1:11:11Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, stooge.

• 1:11:13Speaker 02

  Yes. And she'd be laid out on that wooden table and they'd bring out a full sized buzzsaw. Okay. And then they would, they would cut her head off with the buzzsaw. The ghost master, in this case, Raymond was his name, would, you know, grab her severed head and there would just be blood pouring off the table. He'd grab her head, run into the audience with the head raised over his head. And then he would jump on the theater seats, kind of like Roberto Benigni did when he won that Oscar.

• 1:11:46Speaker 02

  And then he'd like on the armrests, he'd run across everyone, like, you know, jumping over everybody's legs. He'd run into the lobby up in the balcony and he would raise the head above his, you know, he'd raise the bloody head up and then walk along the edge of the balcony and then jump down from the main floor. And then he'd run back on stage and announce, and now ladies and gentlemen, someone is about to die. It could be you. And then the blackout sequence would happen right then.

• 1:12:14Sarah Marshall?

  Okay. I mean, that is a strong opening. I do, just to do a little bit on themes.

• 1:12:21Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 1:12:21Sarah Marshall?

  It's interesting that we have to align women murdering with disabled people.

• 1:12:26Speaker 02

  That's very true. It's very.

• 1:12:28Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And like, I'm not trying to cancel ghost shows, but like, again, just to point like the monster movie. And I mean, even King Kong, if you see it as, and I hate to hand one to Tarantino, but he believes King Kong is an allegory for slavery. And I don't think he's wrong about that. I think there's like a lot of interesting racialized subtext, especially if you watch the whole movie. And so this idea that monsters in these scenarios, both on stage and in movies at the time are representing what sort of white male patriarchal America is trying to disown is like, not me, not that. That's what wants to victimize women. I simply marry them to death.

• 1:13:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep. No, that's very, very true. And I do like your point of like, this being almost some kind of id that's acting out on stage. Right?

• 1:13:17Sarah Marshall?

  I spent a lot of money on that English degree. I gotta use it somehow.

• 1:13:21Speaker 02

  So yeah, I mean, there were many other versions of the similar thing like where King Kong.

• 1:13:28Sarah Marshall?

  They had kind of a format.

• 1:13:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, they had a format and it was, you know, usually some kind of violent, bloody thing. Sometimes, you know, a woman might be pulled from the audience or something and thrown off the balcony using a dummy and misdirection and, you know.

• 1:13:46Sarah Marshall?

  Pretty good. I mean, not that what you give the public is what they always want or whatever they wants. God knows they tell you that. But I feel like one of my short, I think, maybe analyses of why we see so much violence against women in media is, and especially sexualized violence is, you know, not all men, not all women, but if we're gonna generalize for a second, men like it because they like it.

• 1:14:12Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:14:12Sarah Marshall?

  And women like it because it's thought provoking to see an allegory of the thing that you're going through anyway.

• 1:14:18Speaker 02

  That's very true.

• 1:14:19Sarah Marshall?

  And sometimes it even makes you realize how bad life is.

• 1:14:22Speaker 02

  So here's a, an interesting one. All right. This seems kind of a unique, but there were definitely, you know, in addition to this violence, there was definitely like a sexual element to some of these shows. There was a lot of, you know, hypnotizing of women. There was a lot of, again, those kind of scantily clad outfits and dances and kind of even, even burlesque once in a while. But here's kind of a fun one. So in one kind of climactic scene that would happen before the blackout, there would be two women on stage, and these were assistants, and one would be playing a corpse that was lying on a satin couch. And then there would be another woman who was kind of praying

• 1:15:04Speaker 02

  beside her. Then suddenly the lighting would change and the one playing the corpse, the woman would sit up and you would see from the new angle that half of her was a hot blonde and half of her was Satan, which is a pretty cool thing, like right down the middle, right?

• 1:15:21Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Although who's to say Satan isn't a hot blonde, frankly?

• 1:15:24Speaker 02

  I mean, quite frankly. And then she stood up and did kind of like this sexy dance that. Made it look like she was being seduced by the satanic half of her body while the other woman

• 1:15:36Sarah Marshall?

  Oh.

• 1:15:36Speaker 02

  Kind of trying to pull her and save her into her other body. And then the Satan half.

• 1:15:41Sarah Marshall?

  Women will do anything to have an excuse to grab our own boobs, honestly.

• 1:15:45Speaker 02

  That's true. And have a little les out time. Cause then the Satan half tore off the woman's black dress, revealing, you know,

• 1:15:53Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, no.

• 1:15:54Speaker 02

  A scantily clad body. And then the blackout came and everything went fucking ape shit, as it always did.

• 1:15:59Sarah Marshall?

  That's beautiful.

• 1:16:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's quite a.

• 1:16:03Sarah Marshall?

  That's stripping in a way that can even please very scary Christians because it's not you taking your clothes off. It's about the danger of Satan. It's educational.

• 1:16:13Speaker 02

  And I'm wondering if that's part of why they did it that way. I don't know.

• 1:16:16Sarah Marshall?

  I think so.

• 1:16:18Speaker 02

  Well, let's, let's, let's go with it.

• 1:16:19Sarah Marshall?

  It's also, I guess, a pretty fun premise.

• 1:16:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a fun premise. So you'll remember, you know, that we've had some Universal monster movies involved in these shows and they really did start just explicitly using Dracula and Frankenstein especially.

• 1:16:36Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:36Speaker 02

  And there would be kind of a situation, maybe where Frankenstein's creation would be being assembled on stage underneath a sheet. They'd be bringing, you know, different limbs and the head and all the.

• 1:16:49Sarah Marshall?

  Made out of parts of all the women they tore apart earlier.

• 1:16:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. We're making a really cute Frankenstein, a non-binary Frankenstein. And then there would be like sparks, like very much that Rocky Horror scene where they're making Rocky with kind of goofy gadgets and practical effects. And then suddenly the creature would sit up and throw off the sheet and there he was, Frankenstein's creation, not Frankenstein, okay, Frankenstein's monster. And then he would go out into the audience and choose a teenage boy. So. At least we've got a boy on stage that will be brutalized.

• 1:17:25Sarah Marshall?

  A lot.

• 1:17:26Speaker 02

  So they would then cover his head with a bag and the ghost master would just chop his head right off. Blood would be pouring on the table.

• 1:17:36Sarah Marshall?

  What a head cutting off. I'm surprised.

• 1:17:38Speaker 02

  A lot of head cutting off.

• 1:17:39Sarah Marshall?

  They really felt confident about that trick.

• 1:17:41Speaker 02

  They really liked that trick because there would, because there would be blood everywhere. And then they'd get to, what else but grab the head and run out into the audience and kind of kick off the blackout.

• 1:17:50Sarah Marshall?

  That's what you do with a head.

• 1:17:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:51Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:51Speaker 02

  And you kick off that, the most important part of the show. So there were always kind of these lead ins to that moment, right? That were the most extreme part.

• 1:18:01Sarah Marshall?

  I want to see like full head football, you know?

• 1:18:04Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. And eventually Dr. Silkeni, as we mentioned before, he would get a cease and desist letter from Universal Studios because they were like, you can't do this.

• 1:18:16Sarah Marshall?

  Which I, I, I was wondering about the legality of this because it's like you have a character. I assume it's the likeness, right? Because Frankenstein's monster goes back to Mary Shelley and that book came out, what? End of the 18th century, start of the 19th. But then the sort of like Boris Karloff version, I guess, would be the thing that Universal owns.

• 1:18:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:35Sarah Marshall?

  And then I wonder about like, what, I mean, what are the legal ramifications of like putting Frankenstein's monster on stuff to this day? Because he ends up on everything. Like, are we still paying Universal for that?

• 1:18:47Speaker 02

  It's a good question.

• 1:18:48Sarah Marshall?

  If you're in Frankenstein law, let us know.

• 1:18:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. Or in, I guess, what is it when they, it's like a common?

• 1:18:56Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, the public domain.

• 1:18:58Speaker 02

  Public domain.

• 1:18:59Sarah Marshall?

  For literature after 95, 95 years after publication.

• 1:19:02Speaker 02

  But it never happens for movies?

• 1:19:04Sarah Marshall?

  I don't, I don't know how it works for movies. I know that there are some movies that they accidentally left the copyright logo out of, like for example, Charade. They just like forgot to put it in. And so there's many terrible transfers of Charade. But yeah, I don't know. It's a, we got to do an episode later on Frankenstein law. Let's put that on the shelf, too.

• 1:19:24Speaker 02

  Okay, great. Pop, pop it in.

• 1:19:26Sarah Marshall?

  It's a normal brain on the shelf there.

• 1:19:28Speaker 02

  So basically, Universal and Dr. Silkeni and kind of from there, the ghost shows in general, reached an agreement where they would promote the new films from Universal and pay a small fee, right?

• 1:19:43Sarah Marshall?

  You cut off my head, I cut off yours.

• 1:19:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you know, really, everyone won at that point. And even an extension of that, like, as some of these Universal monster movie stars started to no longer be getting work in horror, they would go on tour with these ghost shows as special guests. So like Bela Lugosi went, Glenn Strange went. And, you know, it was just a great, another kind of just celebrity gimmick.

• 1:20:08Sarah Marshall?

  It's an early Comic Con kind of a thing.

• 1:20:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. And actually, this is to total aside, and we're not going to get into it, but Jimmy Stewart got his start as an assistant for midnight ghost shows.

• 1:20:18Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, he did.

• 1:20:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, right?

• 1:20:20Sarah Marshall?

  Well, well, well, Mr. Silkeni, I, I just don't feel right about cutting that pretty young girl's head off.

• 1:20:29Speaker 02

  Maybe he didn't do the cutting. I can't say. I don't know. I think he was actually a little on the earlier side.

• 1:20:34Sarah Marshall?

  He was in charge of mixing the phosphorus or something.

• 1:20:37Speaker 02

  I think he was more on the séance era, but I can't tell you. I'm not sure.

• 1:20:41Sarah Marshall?

  Write me a play about that.

• 1:20:43Speaker 02

  I know, right? So that's going to draw to a close a little bit of what the ghost show was like. Because at this point, the market's getting saturated, right? More and more people are trying to do them, and a lot of them are just cheap imitators. It's not what it was before. People are losing interest. The audiences are becoming rowdier. They're like vandalizing everything and they're throwing shit on stage, throwing bottles and like nails, and they even are sometimes breaking screens. One time, a teenager literally blew up his movie seat with a homemade bomb, and the shrapnel from it hit a girl in the leg, and luckily she wasn't too injured, but it did like draw blood.

• 1:21:26Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, that's pretty terrifying.

• 1:21:29Speaker 02

  You know, because we're getting like into, yeah, we're getting into the late 50s, you know, into the 60s, and teenagers, it's just, it's a new breed.

• 1:21:38Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:39Speaker 02

  Television's here.

• 1:21:40Sarah Marshall?

  Also, guess what? There's a deer outside my window right now.

• 1:21:43Speaker 02

  Oh, that's nice. That's a really different thing to what we're talking about.

• 1:21:50Sarah Marshall?

  It's fall.

• 1:21:53Sarah Marshall?

  So it's interesting that teenagers ultimately become too destructive for the ghost show and not to point all the blame at teenagers. I'm sure some adults were just getting rowdy and being like, it was the teens. But yeah, I'm sure, you know, the increasingly, I wonder too about just like media sort of pushing these kind of old time theatrics into corniness and maybe giving them less power to terrify.

• 1:22:19Speaker 02

  That's definitely true. And then, you know, we also have people moving from the cities to the suburbs after World War II. We have television coming in the 1950s. So people want to watch movies at home. They don't need to go out to the theater, all that rigmarole. You know, we start to see like Alfred Hitchcock Presents on CBS. We start to see Screen Gems create shock theater using all the Universal monster movie classics. We see even like former ghost masters becoming late night horror movie hosts like Dr. Evil, which is funny. He was a, he became a host. And then, you know, people like Vampire, all these local horror movie hosts were coming out and it just kind of adapted, right? It again

• 1:23:02Speaker 02

  kind of transformed itself. It was still campy. It was still comedic. It was still drag, but it was happening on TV.

• 1:23:10Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Or yeah, a little bit later, but you know, in the 60s, we have Rod Serling in The Twilight Zone. And that's like a very scary story on contemporary themes, delivered conveniently to your very own living room.

• 1:23:22Speaker 02

  There you go. There you go. And, you know, there was another thing that you mentioned that was one of the most massive changes in teenage culture of all time, and that is the car, right? So at this time, because teenagers are driving around in cars but still want entertainment, we get the drive-in movie.

• 1:23:44Sarah Marshall?

  There you go. So I, and I guess there's like less. I would imagine just for many reasons, but partly because you can't control lighting. There's less capacity for that kind of theatrics there and for the kind of vaudevillian-ness.

• 1:23:56Speaker 02

  Exactly. They would perform mostly on like makeshift stages in front of the big movie screens, or they're, they would like drive a flatbed truck in and park it in front, or they'd just stand on top of the concession stand, which is pretty sick.

• 1:24:10Sarah Marshall?

  That's pretty good. Yeah.

• 1:24:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. And really, they just kept doing the same kind of violent tricks that were just less complicated. It would be like, hey, kid, come on stage. I'm gonna chop your head off and replace it with a dummy head.

• 1:24:23Sarah Marshall?

  But the thing of being in the pitch dark screaming together, it seems like got lost.

• 1:24:28Speaker 02

  That's gone.

• 1:24:29Sarah Marshall?

  And also, everyone's in their own individual vehicle, you know?

• 1:24:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:24:32Sarah Marshall?

  It's so interesting, because I'm used to being, to just like, only being able to see drive-ins through Extreme Nostalgia. It's interesting to think of them as the new fangled thing that's running out the old fashioned ghost show.

• 1:24:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, they were called Passion Pits, right? That was the nickname for them.

• 1:24:46Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, wow. Right. People had other stuff to do.

• 1:24:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. And like, you know, people wanted to get scared so that they could cuddle up, right? They wanted to kind of have this excuse to-

• 1:24:56Sarah Marshall?

  It was long ago and it was far away. It was so much better than it is today. Speaking of Meatloaf.

• 1:25:03Speaker 02

  Yes. Speaking of our patron saint, I don't know, did he turn out to be a bad man? I don't know. Can't remember.

• 1:25:09Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, but, but you know, when Eddie didn't love his teddy, they said he was an awful kid. But when you threaten your life with a switchblade knife-

• 1:25:17Speaker 02

  What a guy.

• 1:25:18Sarah Marshall?

  What a guy. Makes me cry.

• 1:25:21Speaker 02

  Oompa did.

• 1:25:22Sarah Marshall?

  Oompa did.

• 1:25:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, yeah, there would just be like a lot of guillotine tricks where kids' heads were cut off, replaced with dummy heads and blood spurting out and, you know, people close to the stage would be covered in red liquid and-

• 1:25:39Sarah Marshall?

  Beautiful.

• 1:25:40Speaker 02

  You know, they would have Frankenstein show up and Frankenstein might, you know, get shot in the eye with a gun and blood would squirt out and then he'd bump into a coffin covered in chains and the chains would fall and Dracula would pop out and he'd go into the audience and bring her on stage.

• 1:25:56Sarah Marshall?

  That would be fun. But man, he got fake blood all over the wrong kid's convertible and then his dad sues you.

• 1:26:03Speaker 02

  Seriously, seriously. You know, but then it would be like, yeah, like a woman's head would get cut off and it was just, and the monsters would run around and, and it, it, it just, people enjoyed it, but it wasn't working. It just, it wasn't gonna last.

• 1:26:17Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Cause there are things that like arise organically and it seems like this did in the sort of theater setting. And then you try and port it over, you know, it's like so many things that we tried to make happen on a Zoom and just were not really zoomable. And like, you know, you do it while you have to and you do it when you have to. But yeah, it just feels like not the right environment for the ghost show to thrive in.

• 1:26:38Speaker 02

  Yes. And so, you know, slowly we just kind of forgot about the ghost show.

• 1:26:45Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm. Until a little ghost named Chelsea Weber Smith came along to remind us.

• 1:26:51Speaker 02

  I feel like, uh, it's worth kind of zooming all the way back to the beginning to talk about some of the publicity stunts that they use to promote these shows. Cause I love a good publicity stunt. I love gimmicks. Famously, all frills, all gimmicks is me. So one of the things that they would do is they would find a local kid and they'd ask the kid to dress up as a ghost and protest outside the theater.

• 1:27:17Sarah Marshall?

  Perfect.

• 1:27:18Speaker 02

  It would be like, the ghost master is unfair to ghosts. And, uh, you know, so that was, that was cute. That would get people's attention.

• 1:27:26Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, that's cute. We should do that for our show. We should steal a lot of these ideas and say that we're keeping history alive.

• 1:27:32Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I, we, there is a lot to discuss here.

• 1:27:36Sarah Marshall?

  Wonder how dark we're allowed to make the theater and for how long.

• 1:27:39Speaker 02

  That's what I'm wondering.

• 1:27:40Sarah Marshall?

  If we can throw spaghetti at people at all. Not, not with sauce on it.

• 1:27:45Speaker 02

  I know. I don't know. We want to make sure we treat them with respect.

• 1:27:48Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, not the audience. Like we don't need to treat you with respect. I mean, the staff.

• 1:27:52Sarah Marshall?

  Yes, yes, of course.

• 1:27:58Speaker 02

  So sometimes the ghost masters would hold press conferences from coffins for photo ops.

• 1:28:03Sarah Marshall?

  You love talking about anyone who gets in a coffin on purpose.

• 1:28:06Speaker 02

  I know.

• 1:28:06Sarah Marshall?

  And I want to hear about every single instance of it from you.

• 1:28:09Speaker 02

  I know. They would, local drugstores, department stores would agree to display coffins and signs in their show windows.

• 1:28:17Sarah Marshall?

  Beautiful.

• 1:28:17Speaker 02

  There was one New York-based showman who created a street parade to promote his ghost show that included a horse-drawn hearse. And then he was there behind riding in a limo and he had a walking band playing as well in kind of this parade-like setting that sang this song that, I don't know the melody, but the lyrics went, "It ain't no sin to take off your skin and dance around in your bones."

• 1:28:43Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God. That's perfect.

• 1:28:45Speaker 02

  Sometimes, I don't really know how this worked, but showmen would drive cars around blindfolded and it would attract like thousands of people. And they'd be like, "Come to our ghost show." And they, you know, they used a lot of skeletons and they just put them all over the theater. When people were coming in to see other movies, there'd be like artificial graves and fake grass and vases of flowers. And these just like, what I imagine were just such beautiful tableaus in the, in the lobbies of these theaters.

• 1:29:16Sarah Marshall?

  I love it.

• 1:29:16Speaker 02

  They'd do this really classic shit with the ambulances parked outside. They had stretchers outside. They'd have, you know, nurses, people dressed as nurses, standing outside the theater. And again, they'd have hearse's parked out front and, you know, anything that was like, "You might die for real."

• 1:29:36Sarah Marshall?

  Yep. Which I think there's just like a sense of fun, especially if you're kind of an interwar period of like, the fun being that you're pretending and like you're in so much more danger than you are. You know, like how the classic Disney rides generally start with the premise that we're going to take a little ride. Oh, no, we're all going to die. Like in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, they're like, "You are going to die." And then you see a bunch of pirates.

• 1:30:00Speaker 02

  And then the other thing they did, which is what I would have been first in line for, were the giveaway gimmicks, because I love merch. I'm a merch hound. So they would maybe give you like a die cut skull mask, which was, you know, basically a cardboard mask with a elastic string attached to it. You remember those maybe from the 90s.

• 1:30:21Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah. It was like kind of a cheap promotional thing, I think, a lot even then.

• 1:30:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Feels like something you'd actually get at McDonald's or something during Halloween. They really popped off on Halloween, McDonald's did.

• 1:30:33Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Well, McDonald's, like they used to give out videos, I remember. Again, they're like, why won't people come to our restaurant? It's like, give people stuff. You used to be better. Don't you remember? We do.

• 1:30:44Speaker 02

  Teeny beany babies, say it with me.

• 1:30:50Speaker 02

  So sometimes they would hand out faint pills, and that would be like a single candy pill that you were supposed to take if you had a heart attack.

• 1:30:58Sarah Marshall?

  That's so freaking cute.

• 1:30:59Speaker 02

  I know.

• 1:31:00Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:31:01Speaker 02

  They would give you faint checks that if you fainted, you would get into another movie free.

• 1:31:07Sarah Marshall?

  Which, again, just like encourages you to faint and then make the show look scarier.

• 1:31:11Speaker 02

  It's true. It's true. For a measly, what, I don't know what it costs.

• 1:31:14Sarah Marshall?

  25 cents in the balcony, 40 cents in the front row. Yeah.

• 1:31:17Speaker 02

  Exactly. So you could also get a faint pass. That would be like, if you passed out, you would have this card that you put your name and address on so that they could take you to the hospital or take you home after you fainted. Again, this was before Stranger Danger.

• 1:31:32Sarah Marshall?

  It's just nice to have a business, even if it's a, even if it's for a stunt, it's nice to have a business promise to take care of you if you faint, because they don't even do that at clinics now, I don't think.

• 1:31:41Speaker 02

  They do not.

• 1:31:42Sarah Marshall?

  You're like, call an Uber. Leave me alone.

• 1:31:47Speaker 02

  They'd have like these optical illusion, like magic eye cards that they would hand out, you know, that would change. You know, you remember those, right? You like turn it one way, it was one thing, you turn it another.

• 1:31:57Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:31:58Speaker 02

  Or if you like cross your eyes, it'll look different, you know?

• 1:32:01Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Like the kind of thing that Riker is always showing you at the start of Beyond Belief.

• 1:32:06Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly, exactly that. They would sometimes give out ID bracelets, which is what I most want, is a ghost show ID bracelet. I don't know where they are. Again, if you've got one, please. You know, then it started to be like rubber shrunken heads, because there was a lot of, I didn't get into it, but there was a lot of shrunken head content, like they would, you know, it was very problematic. There was like a witch doctor theme, for sure.

• 1:32:29Sarah Marshall?

  Which, again, we can, yeah, of course, but which we can see little hints of, you know, I mean, also mid sanctuary, I think that was kind of a fascination for

• 1:32:38Speaker 02

  It was, yeah.

• 1:32:39Sarah Marshall?

  American white people in a way that, again, just reveals sort of how wild and racist our culture is. But there's like, you know, that's the kind of thing where there are these little footnotes left behind, like, you know, in Beetlejuice, in that case.

• 1:32:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can take a little ride on the old Disney jungle cruise and really experience that in the modern era. And then, you know, they'd hand out rubber spiders, rubber snakes, just anything that that a kid would really enjoy having. And I imagine there was a lot of collecting going on with that. And that, that's really nice. I really like, I really like that. It feels like you could really have a community around those objects.

• 1:33:19Sarah Marshall?

  You're more likely to want to go out if you're, you know, you might get little toys, or you might get a novelty item, or you might faint, you know, that's like, very compelling compared to today where they're like, well, it's bigger than at home. And also, you can't eat any of your own food or talk to people, so.

• 1:33:37Speaker 02

  And so, you know, as I mentioned, they slowly died out. And by the early 70s, they virtually did not exist at all anymore. But then, in 1975,

• 1:33:53Speaker 02

  a little film called The Rocky Horror Picture Show came out and fucking tanked in the American box office. It did not do well.

• 1:34:01Sarah Marshall?

  Because Americans do not understand camp historically.

• 1:34:04Speaker 02

  No, no, we're not great at it. Did better in the UK. But famously, as we know, once theater started showing it at midnight, then it started to really take off. And it was really a direct call back to the ghost shows that had happened before, at the late night double feature picture show, you know, kind of the

• 1:34:26Sarah Marshall?

  By RKO, oh, I want to go.

• 1:34:29Speaker 02

  Exactly. And, you know, there's just this, all of the campiness was there, all of the violence, but done in like a very tongue in cheek comedic way is there, you know, even the shadows, as we talked about, like the shadow trick is in there.

• 1:34:44Sarah Marshall?

  Man, yeah, I love that.

• 1:34:46Speaker 02

  And a cult following developed around these midnight shows. And just like they did in the ghost shows, people would throw things on stage, you know, we'd throw rice during the wedding. They would bring newspapers to put over their head when it rained and people would, you know, shoot water guns out into the audience. And, you know, there are so many, so many elements to Rocky Horror that are interactive and that make the movie come alive and become something else entirely.

• 1:35:15Sarah Marshall?

  You know, what's a joke I have always loved and remembered is Janet saying, oh, I don't like men with a lot of muscles. Do you remember what the audience callback to that is supposed to be? Or sometimes it is?

• 1:35:26Speaker 02

  No, what is it?

• 1:35:26Sarah Marshall?

  Because again, this is something that like started, I believe, pretty improvisationally. And then it became kind of a script and like a ritual that people did. But when I at 13 or 14 saw this at the Clinton Street Theater, big rite of passage, I was wearing a

• 1:35:40Speaker 02

  Big.

• 1:35:40Sarah Marshall?

  A little homemade magenta costume. When Janet says that, you're supposed to shout, yeah, just one big one. And boy, did she.

• 1:35:49Speaker 02

  It's so good. It's so good. It's so good. It definitely took on a raunchier tone, for sure. Once it was, I mean, because it was 1975, it was the 1970s by then. So, you know, all bets were, were kind of off.

• 1:36:02Sarah Marshall?

  There were a lot of sweet transvestites who didn't have any other place to express that. And I feel like we've talked about this elsewhere. We did a Yor good about Rocky Horror Picture Show. And it's like, it's nobody's job to love it. And I, you know, I know that there exists very reasonably, the argument that Frank Enfroder is a transphobic character. And I won't argue against that. But also, I'll say that in 1975, and for a long time, You would just take whatever representation you could get. And also that, you know, this kind of a theatrical experience is also proof of the fact that the media we love isn't necessarily because we want to emulate everything about it, but because the characters

• 1:36:44Sarah Marshall?

  and the story are able and the campiness are able to bring us together to find the people that we need in our lives.

• 1:36:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's absolutely like anything so much that you can critique fairly. But what I think is the most important is the fact that it created a community. It created a common experience and the ghost shows did that as well, right? It was this ability to go to one place with a bunch of strangers and experience what I would consider an ecstatic kind of spiritual experience, at least in my version.

• 1:37:19Sarah Marshall?

  Yes.

• 1:37:20Speaker 02

  I also think in addition to Rocky Horror, these must have been really influential on walk-through haunted houses that were developing around this same time. You know, by the seventies, we really have it happening.

• 1:37:33Sarah Marshall?

  Cause this would kind of be the thing that you would look to for inspiration.

• 1:37:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. And these were just really stationary haunted houses that you could transform into into a walk-through eventually. Yeah. So everything that we know about Halloween, everything that we experience when we go through a haunted house, when we watch midnight movies and experience horror, like so much of that is brought to you by our midnight ghost shows. And I think that learning about this has been so much fun for me and so incredible because, you know, maybe no heads were cut off and probably that's for the best, but so many aspects of this did happen in our live show and we did arrive to them just through maybe like the trickle down understanding.

• 1:38:20Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, through emulating the media that we knew. But I think there's also, to speak of the unified field, there is. There's a very strong internal logic and a sense if you've, you know, done a little bit of work on stage, maybe in your life, or been an audience member, because you get a good sense of it then, too, that, I mean, one of the real things happening as a theater is the energy that the people bring into it. And it's your job to kind of sculpt and facilitate that energy, taking the shape that will transform the night into something bigger than the sum of its parts. And that is very much a spirit that you welcome in. And it's a spirit that everybody brings in when they, they come in and sit down.

• 1:38:59Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:39:00Sarah Marshall?

  And also to call back to our corn mazes episode, is a haunted house not a labyrinth?

• 1:39:06Speaker 02

  Hmm, absolutely. Yes, absolutely. I would call it a labyrinth, you know, in, in the best case, when people really fucking give a shit about their haunted house and don't just make a terrible excuse for a haunted house. And that's a different, that's a different axe I have to grind.

• 1:39:22Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 1:39:22Speaker 02

  One that will not cut off a woman's head.

• 1:39:24Sarah Marshall?

  Just don't cut off anyone's head with it. Oh, my God.

• 1:39:26Speaker 02

  We did the same joke. But yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, again, it's like, there are many, many things about this that we could really dive into and critique.

• 1:39:35Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And also many things we can explore more in a joyful way.

• 1:39:40Speaker 02

  I know. And it's like, this thing is transforming during the post-war years into something more brutal after we experienced this really brutal war. You know, there are lots of interesting sociological perspectives, and I encourage everyone to, to do that thinking out there. But this was really my attempt at bringing you some Halloween content.

• 1:39:59Sarah Marshall?

  I love it.

• 1:40:00Speaker 02

  And just getting to experience what one of these shows was like.

• 1:40:02Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, I just want you to turn off the lights and throw spaghetti at me. And then I'll just, that's the Halloween of my dreams.

• 1:40:09Speaker 02

  I can make that happen.

• 1:40:11Sarah Marshall?

  Chelsea, thank you so much. Everyone who doesn't listen to American Hysteria really should, especially on a long, dark drive, because there are some episodes that have genuinely scared the pants off of me while educating me at the same time. And your show is so good in so many ways. But one, one thing I want people to know if they don't is that you are so good at creating that theatrical experience, like inside of a person's brain while they're listening. So immersive and I love just like the ghost mastering that you're able to do in audio makes me so happy and so scared sometimes.

• 1:40:46Speaker 02

  That is an incredible compliment. Thank you so much for that, Sarah. We really try.

• 1:40:51Sarah Marshall?

  I remember listening, I forget which episode, I think it had to do with UFOs, but it was beautifully sound designed as well. And I listened to it while I was at a cabin by Mount Hood and I slept with the lights on afterwards.

• 1:41:02Speaker 02

  I think that was our alien abduction series. Yeah, it's a freaky one.

• 1:41:07Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I was just like, I am gonna just lie here stiff as a board until I pass right out. Every light was on.

• 1:41:14Speaker 02

  Amazing. Well, I would like to also encourage people to to come over to our show for our Halloween episode on Bloody Mary.

• 1:41:23Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, God, yeah.

• 1:41:24Speaker 02

  It's a fun one.

• 1:41:25Sarah Marshall?

  Speaking of things that have made me scream.

• 1:41:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, if you want some real social commentary, I'll be going hard.

• 1:41:30Sarah Marshall?

  Heck, yeah.

• 1:41:31Speaker 02

  Sarah, thank you for giving me this platform. As soon as I started researching, I was thinking about making it one of our main fully produced episodes. And I was like, there's no way I cannot bring this to Sarah Marshall. I just knew that I needed to deliver this bloody head right to your hands. And I'm just very grateful to you.

• 1:41:51Sarah Marshall?

  And I love it so much. And I will take it home and treasure it. And I will feed it spaghetti. Have the best creepiest time and may you scream in public as much as you dream. And I'm just so happy to share every scare with you.

• 1:42:08Speaker 02

  Thank you, Sarah. You make every haunted house haunted off.

• 1:42:18Speaker 00

  Thank you, dear and dastardly audience. But wait, listen, there's a moral panic out there. And the only way to stave off the hysteria is by subscribing now to the devil you know, Sarah's new eight part mini series out on October 20. This episode was brought to you by

• 1:42:46Speaker 00

  Der Schlocks: Camp of the Damned. Created by me, Chelsea Webbersmith. And thank you to my astonishing assistant, Sarah Marshall, for allowing me to grace this sadistic stage for you. The editor and producer of You're Wrong About is Miranda Zickler. The music you heard in this episode was also produced by Miranda Zickler with magician, I mean musician, A.J. McKinley. Check out their project, Magpie Cinema Club, for more.

• 1:43:26Speaker 00

  And make sure you listen to American Hysteria. I mean American Hysteria, wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time when the lights go out and the ghosts rise from their graves to sit beside you.