"Scare Me!"

[00:00:01] Fear is such a good, cheap drug. When adrenaline dumps into our human bloodstreams, it hits like a bump of cocaine or triple espresso. Hearts beat faster. Blood pumps harder. Our sight and hearing get better, briefly. There's a jolt of energy we can feel.

[00:00:22] Too much of this is anxiety-producing, but a little? Oh, it can make us feel very, very alive. But in order to hit that sweet spot, where we've scored the mild adrenaline high we crave but aren't curled up under a table screaming,

[00:00:38] we have to keep the stakes around getting that drug nice and low. Fear isn't fun unless we're pretty certain we'll live through it unharmed. It's why roller coasters draw hour-long lines. And why millions of vulnerable women sit at home alone listening to podcasts about other, similarly vulnerable women

[00:00:56] being murdered alone at home. And it's part of why we here in the USA spend the month of October going absolutely bug-fuck over spooky shit. Humans have been using scary stories to get mildly high together for centuries. Indigenous tribes across the planet used oral tradition

[00:01:14] to tell the OG campfire stories, gathering tribe members together to get freaked out by accounts of supernatural skinwalkers and possibly real forest monsters. One of the first ever haunted house stories was written down by Pliny the Elder in Latin for an audience of fellow old-timey Romans.

[00:01:31] Hundreds of years later, Dracula and Frankenstein would become hugely popular page turners and gothic horror a whole genre which would woo thousands. One of the earliest Hollywood hits was a silent flick about the vampire Nosferatu. And today, horror films are a billion-dollar industry.

[00:01:52] All of this is because humans, despite how anxious we already are collectively, like how getting spooked feels. We're weird animals. But this is a weird show by and for weird animals. Plus it's spooky season. So gather round tribal members and let's honor our ancestors by joining together

[00:02:11] to share some mildly scary shit that maybe makes us feel alive. Except for you, Gary. You're dead. But we love you that way. The following podcast contains adult themes, gritty details from true crimes, and naughty language. Listener discretion is advised. There's no time now.

[00:02:35] I began five years ago in secret, working all night every night right into the dawn. A thousand experiments, a thousand failures. And then, at last, the great wonderful day. She's alive. Alive! Hello, all you spooky nerds. Welcome back to Human Fuckery,

[00:03:00] the only podcast using a true storytelling cockfight to subversively force listeners into learning psychology and history so that they're less shitty to people. I am your host, Dr. Gary. Doctor of clinical psychology and exhausted dog dad who spent most of the day cleaning up vomit.

[00:03:26] Because my husky is a jerk and he keeps stealing and eating the vitamin supplements, I order for myself, broadcasting to you from the spookiest city in America, New Orleans, Louisiana. Joining me today, as always, is my beloved co-host, microbiome super nerd, relapsed journalist, and fellow dog parent, Kimberly.

[00:03:54] If it makes you feel any better, I spent last night cleaning up vomit because my special needs dogo Argentino eats tree branches recreationally and then pukes up mulch, so yeah. Yeah, we're great parents. So great. Just the best. The sounds of retching in the darkness

[00:04:12] and surprise piles of slime, it's just pretty on brand for spooky season, though. It's very 90s haunted house. If they were actually seasonal and didn't happen all year round, yeah, you would be fucking correct. Anyway, it is Halloween, however, which is basically our Christmas

[00:04:32] in the ideal time to feature some true human fuckery fit for the Huluween horror carousel, which is what we're doing today. If you're brand new to human fuckery, here's how the competition works. Kimberly and I draw a topic out of a dusty, mercury-tainted top hat purchased

[00:04:54] from a haunted shop on Royal Street. We each get one week to dig into the archives and find the best story from history's colon that we feel demonstrates the assigned theme. We get another week in the studio to record and score our submissions.

[00:05:15] Then we meet here in human fuckery's fuckery dungeon to present our stories to reluctant judges and have one of us declared the winner. In the process, listeners will, we hope, learn something. Please remember that our intern slash producer slash CEO, Gary the Ghoul,

[00:05:36] kidnaps all judges in the dead of night and forces them under threat of creative death to participate. So listeners should know that judges' rulings are suspected best and always coerced. And since it's a high holiday, we did something a little different with the guests.

[00:05:51] Variety is the spice of life, so we've kidnapped one judge who loves scary shit to the point of actively seeking it out professionally and personally. And one who absolutely despises it and generally won't even listen to this podcast even though she's friends with us.

[00:06:09] Edward, tell us about the horror fan. Regular listeners will recall Justin Wellborn from our season one Halloween episode. Justin is a film and TV actor and producer living in sunny Los Angeles. You've seen his face as one of Walter Goggins' loyal lieutenants on the FX series, Justified,

[00:06:31] as a standout in the classic Final Destination films, and as a baddie or badass in too many horror or police shows to list here. Just Google his IMDb. Justin is currently working on the SiriusXM series Cargo Cult with Road Dogg trucking host Jimmy Mack,

[00:06:54] where the two discuss stories and story craft that move culture down its bumpy road. Last time he was on this show, he inexplicably spoke with a knife in one hand for like 20 minutes, which was excellent. And he is pretty much the polar opposite of our second judge.

[00:07:15] Lori Kramer is a sweet legal secretary who avoids pretty much everything Justin has ever made in addition to this show. She spends her evenings rescuing feral cats and hanging out with her own feline, a dark magic witch currently trapped in a cat's body named Mabel.

[00:07:30] Born and raised in New Orleans, she loves music, taking pictures of everything, and just wants everyone to be nice to people who don't look like them. Gary the ghoul actually had to fake being a feral cat just to get within kidnapping range of her.

[00:07:43] It was like a whole thing. Gary has ingeniously used the differences between our two guests in his torture setup this month. Justin has been swaddled like a toddler and placed in front of a movie screen playing hours upon hours of wholesome, animated Christian children's programming.

[00:08:02] There's veggie tales and the old kind of gay Hanna-Barbera Bible stories, Boz the Bear, it's just a great lineup. Lori has been strapped to a cold metal cadaver table and is similarly being showed every single Texas Chainsaw Massacre variation and spinoff ever created.

[00:08:20] Both will be stuck there until a winner is declared. You know, I almost feel bad for asking Lori to do this one. Okay, but isn't exposure therapy good for people, doctor? Stay with us. We'll be right back. Hello, all you spooky nerds.

[00:08:39] And also normal people with, I don't know, social skills, an air fryer, whatever it is that makes normal people normal. We accept all kinds here and we also accept all kinds over on our Patreon. Nice segue. We get it. Everyone's broke.

[00:08:54] Everyone's got a Patreon and no one wants to fill out yet another online payment form. But if you're listening to this show, then you'll actually love our Patreon. It's got all the best parts of the podcast. Weird stories from history's colon, underscoring and silly sound effects, dark psychology.

[00:09:13] And less of the other leftover stuff. Us, specifically. It's less of us yammering. Every month, subscribers get either one or two, you get to pick, slickly produced, guest free and banter free episodes of Secret Story Time. Our series covering wild stories

[00:09:32] and case studies ripped from the anals of human history. Subscribers also get long form written stories in case you're someone who still likes to read early and add free access to the usual monthly human fuckery competition show and the ability to pick what we'll write about

[00:09:48] or do new episodes on next. You can literally send us a link being like, tell this story and we'll go, okay. It's the best way to make sure we can keep doing this show. And every subscription helps us keep Gary the Ghoul housed.

[00:10:01] It's hard to find a landlord who'll accept a demonic hell spawn with a torture fetish in this market. You can help us keep Gary housed and this show alive by heading over to www.patreon.com backslash human fuckery.

[00:10:16] Just pick a tier, enjoy the dozens of already released episodes of Secret Story Time and wait till you see what we drop next month because yeah, it's some entertaining fuckery. Neither of us are qualified to therapize Lori. To assuage my guilt, I'm going to pretend we are.

[00:10:37] Oh boy. What's the crap name we came up for this episode? Oh, it is total crap. Do the little lead in thing. The subject of today's podcast is The Scary Story Challenge. That is breathtakingly mediocre. I know, but search algorithms like genuinely don't reward creativity

[00:11:06] and we want people to actually find this episode. Plus, the whole point of the episode was to find a true story that has been used to scare people and then retell it. Do you think you found a story that can end your two episode long losing streak?

[00:11:20] I sure hope so because three losses in a row will like break my burned out gifted and talented kids program heart. Like all survivors of the gifted and talented program I need outside validation in order to experience self-esteem now. Like it's a thing.

[00:11:37] Anyway, I went with something that scared the shit out of me as a child. Everyone else will decide if it's scary to them. Lay it on a switch. Actually, first I'm going to do a big old thank you

[00:11:49] and shout out to our newest paying subscribers over on the human fuckery Patreon because they're the only reason we were able to make an episode this month. Jillian, Ciara, Ben the Pirate, Christopher Bradford and Denise you are all heroes helping us survive the abject hellscape of capitalism.

[00:12:08] Truly, thank you. It takes dozens of hours to research, write, edit, record, score, interview, edit again and then produce these episodes and without paying subscribers it's genuinely too much work to do. Now I'm ready to lay it on you. Terrible things never seem to happen to terrible people.

[00:12:33] There are exceptions to this rule, of course. There's exceptions to all rules. But it is an anxious reality that in this life anyway the most terrible things seem to target our most undeserving. Emma Schmidt was undeserving. Born in 1882 to a German family in Switzerland

[00:12:58] Emma sailed as a small child to the United States with her parents, Jacob and Anna Schmidt. The family emigrated in search of reliable work and the opportunity to own land. Like so many other poor transplants to the new country they learned the hard way that the American dream

[00:13:16] is a bit less dreamy than advertised. The Schmidts settled in Marathon, Wisconsin a hardscrabble piece of Midwestern terrain dominated by dairy farms freezing temperatures and dead dusty ground two seasons out of the year. It was a hard place to live.

[00:13:36] Most Wisconsiners wouldn't get reliable electricity until the 1930s. A petite girl with brunette hair described as having a quote, weak constitution Emma sometimes shivered herself to sleep. Around age eight, Emma's mother died a crushing loss for the girl. The pair were devoutly Catholic

[00:13:58] walking the dirt roads around the local church for Mass twice a week reading the Bible together and praying Hail Marys in unison. Her father, an alcoholic non-believer who hated the church as much as he loved booze mocked both for their faith. But his negativity never deterred Emma.

[00:14:18] She loved the Trinity so much she dreamed of becoming a nun though Anna talked her out of it before her death. Her passing left Emma to face a frigid landscape without warmth or ally. Jacob coped by diving even deeper into the bottle

[00:14:34] and becoming more overt in his affair with Emma's aunt Mina a dark-haired woman rumored to be either Jacob's biological sister or cousin. Family records from this time are murky. What we do know is that the pair were involved in some kind of intimate relationship during his marriage

[00:14:55] one they stopped trying to hide as soon as Anna was dead. Mina, notoriously ill-tempered was known in Marathon as a witch. Whether this is because of her incestuous affair with a married man or because she actually practiced magic no one really knows. But remember this detail for later.

[00:15:15] With mom gone, dad absent save for his moments of abuse and Mina displaying open disdain for her lover's offspring Emma turned to God. She prayed daily and trusted her Lord Jesus Christ would guide her through all trying times. But around 1896 when Emma was 14 something went wrong.

[00:15:40] As she sat on her hard wooden pew one Sunday morning Emma heard whispers. Whispers. Whispers. They came from everywhere and nowhere at once. An intense urge to run to the holy water font and smash it in front of everyone seized her body.

[00:16:09] The voice of the priest became a muffled drone buried under a cacophony of orders. Emma shook the voices away refusing to obey. A few days later, during another mass it happened again. Whispered demands, this time telling her to choke her beloved priest.

[00:16:30] A fiery, unfamiliar rage boiled in her chest as she watched the pulpit, sickened instead of comforted. Within a few months, Emma began feeling panicked when she approached the church. The place which had offered her so much solace over a lonely childhood

[00:16:48] now seemed to be surrounded by an invisible force which spiked Emma's blood pressure before she even crossed its threshold. In confession, she admitted to her priest she felt compelled to launch herself through the barrier and strangle him until dead. All of this escalated slowly but steadily

[00:17:08] until Emma could no longer enter what had once been her safe haven. The sight of religious objects filled her with nausea and hate. When her priest tried to give her Holy Communion an effort to cleanse away whatever was causing this Emma accepted the wafer then violently threw it

[00:17:27] and the complete contents of her stomach up everywhere. She also began to experience disturbing visions. Alone in bed at night pictures of men and women engaged in audacious sex acts consumed her driving sleep away and filling her with deep shame. Voices told her to submit, to touch herself

[00:17:51] to stop resisting and indulge. Sometimes she would shout to drown their orders out but this only enraged Jacob. Something was very wrong with Emma and everyone around her could see it. In 1898, at the urging of Father Joseph Steiger Emma was brought to New York City

[00:18:10] to meet with a German priest named Theophilus Reisinger. Reisinger was studying to practice the rite of exorcism and had met Emma years earlier during his time training as a priest in Wisconsin. He was shocked by the new version of the tiny girl he had once known.

[00:18:28] Young Emma had been cheerful, polite, gentle This Emma was sullen, anxious and erratic. Over the course of several interviews with Reisinger she displayed bizarre behavior specifically when the priest tried to pray with her growling and recoiling as soon as he began speaking prayers in Latin.

[00:18:51] The priest noted that Latin itself wasn't the trigger. Switching between conversational Latin and Catholic prayers without interruption Emma only reacted negatively to the prayers despite never being taught these more obscure pieces of religious dialogue. On another occasion, Reisinger arranged an experiment

[00:19:12] blessing part of a plate of food with holy water while hidden from Emma in another room. Once presented with the meal, Emma became furious easily identifying the secretly blessed items and hurling them from the table in anger. In Catholic doctrine, demonic possession is preceded by personality changes

[00:19:33] and disturbing visions and later confirmed by a trio of specific symptoms. Number one an inordinate aversion to holy objects and the church. Number two is understanding languages never taught and three is quote knowledge of events or facts the victim could not possibly know end quote.

[00:19:56] Based on their time together Father Reisinger concluded Emma was likely possessed but he was also not ready to perform a potentially traumatic exorcism on what could simply be a troubled teenage girl. He sent Emma and Father Steiger home asking both to correspond with him regularly via mail.

[00:20:17] Years passed with Fathers Reisinger and Steiger watching as Emma descended further into darkness. According to Reisinger's account when she was about 26 years old in 1908 she suddenly gave up her pious Christian life completely. She threw blessed articles away smashed crucifixes and had thoughts of despair. She became melancholy

[00:20:43] avoided company and finally went to places and persons that cast a shadow on her good character. This last part refers to seedy bars and clairvoyance both regarded by the church as gateways to hell. Efforts were initially made to have her committed to a mental institution

[00:21:04] but a team of psychiatrists and medical doctors jointly declared her quote bodily and mentally quite healthy with no overt signs of disease, insanity or hysteria. After years of watching Reisinger decided it was time to act and met with Emma to perform a simple exorcism in 1908.

[00:21:24] For the sake of time just know this ritual appeared to work but only briefly. Within a handful of months Emma began hearing the voices again and was tormented by violent and sexual visions. She wrote Father Reisinger often over the next several years detailing the voices and waking nightmares.

[00:21:47] She asked for another more involved exorcism. In one letter she reported a voice had told her Father Reisinger was a quote dumb son of a bitch end quote and that Satan would not stop tormenting her until she either submitted to a life of sin or killed herself.

[00:22:07] Reisinger began petitioning the church for permission to perform a weeks long complex exorcism placing Emma under the church's supervision until whatever demons inside her had finally been expelled. And so in August of 1928 Emma Schmidt was brought to the convent of the Franciscan Sisters in Eerling, Iowa

[00:22:29] and given a small room with an iron bed and little else inside. Fathers Reisinger and Steiger arrived soon after. The former wore a special blessed pikes made by the church and containing a piece of Eucharist inside around his neck. What followed would become the most documented religious intervention

[00:22:50] in American history. The exorcism of Emma Schmidt began dramatically on August 18th with Father Reisinger approaching his now middle aged penitent wearing the blessed pikes. He, Father Steiger and the nuns assisting the ritual watched disturbed as Emma first hissed like a cat then began spitting and screaming

[00:23:20] as the pikes was brought closer to her. She wailed that the box hurt her physically sweating and contorting in visible agony. Then she collapsed onto the bed. Her eyes rolled back in her head whites filling her eye sockets. A foamy discharge started to leak from between her lips.

[00:23:41] With both priests and multiple nuns as witnesses a low guttural voice began to fill the room with angry Latin blending with multiple unintelligible whispers. Emma's mouth only partially obscured by the effluvium flowing from it wasn't moving. The voices were coming from inside her body

[00:24:02] amplified until audible down the hall by some invisible force. Father Reisinger commanded whatever was inside Emma to identify itself. Emma began to levitate. The nuns present grabbed her arms and legs pulling her back to the bed and holding her there

[00:24:18] as both priests continued to demand the name of the entity inside. Reisinger brandished his pikes authoritatively splashing her limp body with holy water watching as the skin it touched blistered and burned. Again, he asked for a name. According to Time Magazine With lightning speed the possessed dislodged herself

[00:24:41] from the bed and hands of protectors and her body carried through the air landed high above the door of the room and clung to the wall with cat-like grips. It took three adult male priests total to pry her body from the wall. For the next eight days

[00:25:01] Emma was bound to the bed frame. Despite taking in no food she produced what was described as a humanly and scientifically impossible amount of vomit and urine always directed as a projectile at Father Reisinger's pikes. The filth never hit its target but did cover the priest

[00:25:22] who had to change his clothes three to four times a day. Emma's screams and howls filled the convent driving its petrified full-time residents into their chapel to pray. Some reported that each night around 3am their ward, quote, turned into a hyena, end quote.

[00:25:42] Her room filling with the growls of massive animals and the distinctive cackle of the African canine. A chorus of voices poured from her in Italian, Hebrew and other Slavic languages Emma had never been taught or even heard. Her body bloated, turned red, turned grey, swelled, shrank

[00:26:01] and at one point became so heavy the bed frame bent and touched the floor as if her skin was suddenly made from dark matter. Her lips and eyelids, quote, swelled to the size of hands a sight so grotesque assistants had to avert their eyes to keep from vomiting.

[00:26:23] The room's temperature changed of its own accord switching between stifling heat and frigid cold despite the summer outside. All the while, Father Reisinger prayed and demanded the name of the menace inside her. The first to finally reply was Beelzebub Satan's right-hand man, Lord of the Flies.

[00:26:46] He taunted the priest gleefully laughing that Reisinger wasn't up to the task knew nothing of scripture and would never win Emma for God. On August 26, Reisinger declared part one of the ritual over. He withdrew to rest, study and prepare for session two scheduling its start on September 13th.

[00:27:10] Emma, like most victims in cases of possession displayed no memory of anything from session one. In the weeks between exorcisms she refused food and had to be injected with liquid nutrition to stay alive. If part one of Emma's intervention had been supernaturally disturbing

[00:27:29] part two was a waking nightmare for all involved. Once again, Emma had to be bound to the bed to prevent her from levitating attacking bystanders or clawing off her own skin. Beelzebub returned quickly this time eager to demean Reisinger and Stiger as well. These weak, pathetic sinners

[00:27:52] incapable of winning the woman's soul. This time he told the pair that he was not alone. Emma was not possessed by a single entity but was a flesh avatar for an infinite number of demons tortured souls and evil entities granted access to her by Satan himself.

[00:28:13] Everything changed when Reisinger demanded these other entities come forward. This is when. And remember, this is the testimony of nuns and priests. A voice so deep, so loud, so terrifying filled the convent driving one nun from the building entirely. It identified itself as Judas Iscariot Jesus' betrayer.

[00:28:40] When asked what he wanted with Emma Judas boomed in Latin that she carried the message the Antichrist was returning and would rise to influence in 1952. Reisinger asked why Emma had been chosen as this messenger. The voice of Judas disappeared. A familiar German man replaced him Emma's father, Jacob

[00:29:05] who said he was condemned to hell for trying to rape his daughter. In graphic detail Jacob claimed as punishment for rejecting his sexual advances he and Mina had worked with black magic secretly feeding Emma cursed herbs and promising her obnoxiously pious soul to Satan himself.

[00:29:26] Then Emma began vomiting up piles of what looked like rotting tobacco leaves though she had not eaten solid food in weeks. At this point, Father Steiger lost his shit. He begged Reisinger to call off the ritual advising they give Emma her last rites. The Time Magazine article states

[00:29:46] that he became quote unhappy with the whole affair believing they were in over their heads and fair enough. But Father Reisinger refused reasoning that all things get worse just before they get better. A six-week recess was called to give all parties time to prepare themselves

[00:30:04] to face Satan head on. The formal exorcism of Emma Schmidt ended on December 23rd, 1928 a day before Christmas Eve. Session three was an exhausting chaotic slog through demonic growls shadow figures moving through the room flying spit, vomit and urine and more appearances by Judas, Jacob, Mina and Beelzebub.

[00:30:28] Mina confessed to four abortions and witchery. Jacob begged to fuck his own child. Reisinger did the power of Christ compels you for nine days until the room nearly exploded. But it worked. According to Be Gone Satan a recounting of the ritual printed and distributed

[00:30:51] to 300,000 American Catholics by the church itself Emma's first words as a free woman on day nine of session three were My Jesus mercy, praised be Jesus Christ. Time Magazine assured readers in the 1930s that from that time on the woman always sincerely good, pious and religious

[00:31:15] visited the blessed sacrament and assisted at the Holy Mass. Father Steiger returned to his less colorful life as a Midwestern priest. Reisinger victorious traveled the world performing dozens of exorcisms and researching who exactly the prophesied Antichrist could be. A happy ending for everyone except this is a lie.

[00:31:40] One curated and sanctioned by the Catholic Church's press team and censors to make you yes you, listening feel safe. To make you believe that if you just pray hard enough trust in God enough and have faith you'll never become one of the undeserving. The truth is

[00:32:03] any of us can become the undeserving and Emma Schmidt even with the power of Christ and glory of God on her side never became truly free. But that's a story for another time. Until then Sleep tight. Hello all you spooky nerds and also normal people with

[00:32:29] I don't know social skills, an air fryer whatever it is that makes normal people normal. We accept all kinds here and we also accept all kinds over on our Patreon. Nice segue. We get it. Everyone's broke. Everyone's got a Patreon

[00:32:45] and no one wants to fill out yet another online payment form. But if you're listening to this show then you'll actually love our Patreon. It's got all the best parts of the podcast. Weird stories from history's colon underscoring and silly sound effects dark psychology

[00:33:02] and less of the other leftover stuff. Us specifically. It's less of us. Yammering. Every month subscribers get either one or two you get to pick slickly produced guest free and banter free episodes of Secret Story Time our series covering wild stories and case studies

[00:33:23] ripped from the anals of human history. Subscribers also get long form written stories in case you're someone who still likes to read early and ad-free access to the usual monthly human fuckery competition show and the ability to pick what we'll write about or do new episodes on next.

[00:33:38] You can literally send us a link being like tell this story and we'll go OK. It's the best way to make sure we can keep doing this show and every subscription helps us keep Gary the Ghoul housed. It's hard to find a landlord

[00:33:52] who'll accept a demonic hell spawn with a torture fetish in this market. You can help us keep Gary housed and this show alive by heading over to www.patreon.com backslash human fuckery. Just pick a tier enjoy the dozens of already released episodes of Secret Story Time

[00:34:10] and wait till you see what we drop next month because yeah it's some entertaining fuckery. Well hello nightmares. That was fun. Did did. Did I give you anything. Wow I am so hungry. Struggling so much from low blood sugar right now. Sorry.

[00:34:32] I need a Capri Sun or something. Capri Sun. Fuck why we do this. Do you. Yes. Really scary. Yeah. Well I scared you. You're hard to scare so. No I'm not hard to scare. Well OK I'm not I'm not easy to scare.

[00:34:54] But I don't see you at scary movies and jumped out of my skin and you're just like. I'm much more psychological in terms of the things that I'm afraid of the stuff you know where people jump out and do stupid shit like that. I find it annoying.

[00:35:11] Honestly that is. You look annoyed during spooky movies most of the time because some of it is annoying you know but there's some of it is just like ooh that's scary you know it. So this did it for this. This was not annoying. This was genuinely scary.

[00:35:29] I mean it had all the weird and strange things tied up in all of it. It definitely you know it's my go to it's my favorite. It's my favorite genre Catholic horror shit. I really loved like you know the conjuring things like that even

[00:35:46] though the Warrens are kind of like not not exactly credible but you know the iconography the symbolism like even the nun was visually it's association to yes to Catholicism. And you know even even we've talked about this before like TV show like evil you know just

[00:36:06] because of how much of it is rooted in Catholicism. Like it'll get me a little bit. You know it'll be like give me the heebie-jeebies it won't like oh fuck I'm awake for the rest of the night but it'll give me the heebie jeebies so this did it.

[00:36:22] I enjoyed it a lot. It was really good. Thank you. You know I have questions like anybody reasonable who listens to this where I'm like is this just like a severely traumatized person who desperately needed love and support being tormented by her religious advisers.

[00:36:42] But also she was begging for these exorcisms. She begged him for years. And then that one part where she's like Satan says you're a dumb son of a bitch. I was like I giggled at that because it might have been just her wanting to see.

[00:36:59] I was like I was like was she just trying to provoke a bad girl. Right. Was she just trying to provoke this guy's ego into doing it because she wanted it. And so part of me was like if this is the framework within

[00:37:12] which you're raised it's the only thing you've ever known. It's the only way you know how to orient yourself and it is the thing that is most important to you. Sure. Like you and I have both met people who even after escaping religious sects

[00:37:26] or cults have been like severely traumatized and still been like I need to have a relationship with God and I don't know how to do it because I left the cult. And you're just like whoa like what and the idea of just not having that positive relationship

[00:37:42] with the church is literally like it's traumatic to them. So part of me empathized with her. It seemed like she was desperate to be able to go back to that safe space. I just you know there's questions to me about whether the way they all handled that when

[00:37:58] when in the documentation they're explaining hey there were multiple people begging to read this person's last rights and injecting her with liquid nutrition because she was barely alive. You're like God this sounds horrible. But I think plausibly this this was her struggling to cope with what was happening

[00:38:20] to her from her father. I think that was the blister that popped. Yeah. It trying to to consider one hand this devout faith and the belief in all of this the scripture the doctrine but at the same time trying to contend with how could God let this

[00:38:39] happen to me. Wasn't God supposed to keep me safe. Right. You know. And so the the the logical I should say the psychological manifestation being that well it's not God's fault. The same way we don't blame our parents for things when we're young. We blame demons we blame.

[00:38:54] I mean not that children necessarily blame demons but in this case she blamed demons like children tend to blame themselves for things when there's unrest in the home and this was a way of blaming herself. Yes. I've got these bad things in me. I've been possessed you know.

[00:39:12] And so I think quite possibly that's what she was going through. But you know it doesn't have to be either or that's the beautiful thing about considering the human condition from a psychological or spiritual perspective. It could have been both. And just for people listening

[00:39:27] who might not know this is the story that the that inspired the exorcism. It's not the only story that William the author was another one with a little boy that was kind of loosely tied up in that story as well. But this one I had never heard before.

[00:39:42] He did a lot of research like a lot of research. This one was news to me. Yeah. But this was at you know the young girl with the dark hair and the now she was middle aged by the time this big exorcism happened. Yeah. I stumbled across the

[00:39:57] story you know years ago and just a lot of podcasts have talked about it. But I found that the way that it was reported and presented was very sensationalist and sometimes just totally factually inaccurate. Three different articles that I found about it were just riddled with things

[00:40:18] that you can just by digging deeper. It's not true. Sure. And then all of the podcasts not all of them but the majority really seem to stop it like and then she was better. And it's like I want to do a whole there's so much

[00:40:32] that goes into explaining the way that she was not better at. I do need to do a separate secret story time episode on it. But I do want people to know she was not better. Yeah. The exorcism didn't work the way they said

[00:40:45] also Father Risinger is a nut like truly he just he deserves his own blast. I mean he's I he seems he was described by his peers as someone who became a quote annoyance to us and the Catholic Church. He made I am an exorcist his identity

[00:41:07] to the point where people felt like he was doing exorcism because she was trying to break the wheel. Yeah. He was trying to teach us about what was really happening. About the Illuminati. Yes. Yeah. Right. He was trying to suppress him. Right. And you know the

[00:41:19] anti-crisis coming in 1952 and right. All of that. But I don't want to spend too much time talking about my story though because we have really good guests today and we're probably going to ramble a lot. So what are you going to what my ass

[00:41:33] with this week since I'm just losing streaking my way through this show. I'm not going to call it an ass weapon because you know you told a really wonderful story. And you're very supportive. I appreciate that. I mean look if I tore your stories apart

[00:41:47] like I'd have to tear myself down to an extent since I score them. So it. Yeah that's true. I take at least 25 percent credit for all of your wins. Thanks. So yeah. Men have been taking credit for women's work for millennia. Your mic's breaking up. Yeah.

[00:42:06] For some reason it's just I don't know. It's just coming through as histrionics. Tell me a story. I'm going to tell you a story about an urban legend come to life. Jennifer Swagger was an extremely loving child like many young kids with Down syndrome. Her demeanor was comparatively

[00:42:30] described as that of an angel with sparkling eyes a gentle smile that brought comfort to everyone she met. It was July 9th 1987 and little Jen was enjoying summer break just as your average 12 year old might. Though she lived in a safe part of Staten Island Jen never strayed

[00:42:55] too far from her home. Nonetheless the allure of sunshine fresh cut grass and the activity of other children well often enticed her off the porch charged by what seemed like an entire new world to discover. Jen was the type of young gal

[00:43:14] that you'd might say never met a stranger. She was friendly and endeared herself to just about everyone she'd meet. But unfortunately on this day the trusting innocence that accompanied Jen's disability would finally betray her. Jennifer was taking a short walk from her house when she was

[00:43:39] approached by a middle aged man on a green bicycle from under her dark shoulder length hair tiny hands shielding her view from the sun. She peered up at the silhouette eventually offering one of her heart bursting grins. Within moments the man convinced

[00:44:01] Jen to take his hand and they began to walk further out from her home. One can imagine that she might have been thrilled by the prospect of covering more ground exploring streets and sidewalks that were once foreign to her. A world opening its arms just as

[00:44:20] she readily accepted all those she met. Tragically Jennifer Schweiger would never be seen again. Jen's story leaves us with too many questions but unfortunately these questions had been asked before. Her kidnapping wasn't an isolated occurrence. The mysterious disappearance and dozens more child vanishings in

[00:44:48] the Staten Island region had been plaguing the entire town for decades. To answer these questions left behind and to grapple with the collective anxieties surrounding fear loss and the unknown. The stories of these missing children would eventually creep their way into campfire tales and

[00:45:12] oral accounts retold each year around Halloween. It seems it became more plausible that the perpetrator of these crimes might be more monster than man and thus an urban legend was born. Now the term urban legend was popularized in 1981 with the publication of The Vanishing Hitchhiker American Urban Legends

[00:45:40] and their meanings. Now the title of the book refers to one of the most well-known urban legends that of a person traveling by vehicle usually a car who meets a mysterious hitchhiker. After providing transport for the beleaguered traveler it's later discovered that traveler was a ghost.

[00:46:02] Now as with other urban legends The Vanishing Hitchhiker has many variants. But one differs based on local particulars. For the families of Staten Island their troubling specter was a new iteration of a notorious figure appearing across hundreds of years often used to frighten kids into good behavior.

[00:46:28] The Boogeyman. Sometimes known as the sack man, el coco, the lubia, spring-heeled jack or even slender man. This hobgoblin continues to take new form with each generation. But for kids on the northeast coast of the United States in the 60s, 70s and 80s this devourer of

[00:46:52] children was simply known as Cropsey. Cropsey was thought to have been brought to life in response to these various disappearances. It was a tragic tale that of a man escaping a mental health hospital scarred, disfigured and burdened with a hook for a hand. He would kidnap children that

[00:47:16] stayed out too late or wandered into the woods and then drag them down into tunnels beneath the asylum where he would then murder and maim their fragile bodies. Validly terrifying shit. But to understand Cropsey like all urban legends, we must first understand the world from which he emerged.

[00:47:43] Staten Island, often referred to as the forgotten borough, is the least populated of New York's five. Prior to and even despite rapid development in the 1960s, Staten Island has always maintained a bucolic atmosphere primarily occupied by woods, marshes and farmland. The vast spaces of unoccupied

[00:48:09] shadows left considerable room for local minds to fill these darkened corners with their projections of fear, a dumping ground for nightmares. And to some extent this inclination had become destructively suitable for the borough after the New York government in 1948 opened a literal landfill aptly named Fresh Kills.

[00:48:38] The landfill covered 2200 acres, processing nearly 30,000 tons of residential waste per day. By 1955, the intended temporary space was now not only the largest landfill in the world, but the largest man-made structure on earth, once purported to have been seen from outer space. Staten Island was a graveyard for

[00:49:06] social fabric, buried under the shadows of Manhattan's endless skyline and heaps of garbage from its people. But it wasn't just garbage that was left behind and forgotten in this forgotten land. Staten Island had also become a dumping ground for New York's unwanted children.

[00:49:29] You see, it wasn't unfounded that the legend of Cropsey involved that of a murderous killer escaping a mental institution. Willowbrook State School was a state-supported institution for children with intellectual disabilities located on Staten Island from 1947 until 1987. At the time, it was the largest state-run institution for people

[00:49:57] with mental disabilities in the United States. But despite its intended purpose as a treatment facility dedicated to the care and rehabilitation of society's most unfortunate, Willowbrook, in plain view, bore unsettling secrets worthy of the most deranged entries into the Michael Myers Halloween franchise. Designed for a capacity of 4,000

[00:50:28] residents, Willowbrook maintained a population of 6,000. To give you some context on its living conditions, throughout the first decade of its operation, outbreaks of hepatitis, primarily hepatitis A, were common at the school. To control the outbreaks, the medical staff at Willowbrook consulted researchers Saul Krugman and Robert W. McCollum.

[00:50:57] Krugman found that hepatitis developed in 90% of children admitted to Willowbrook soon after their arrival. Although it was known that hepatitis was caused by a virus, it wasn't known how the virus spread. Krugman used the children of Willowbrook to answer those questions. One of his studies involved

[00:51:18] feeding live hepatitis from literal human shit to 60 healthy children. Krugman watched as their skin and eyes turned yellow, their livers grew bigger. The children would vomit and refuse to eat. He reasoned that it was justifiable to infect, quote, retarded children with the hepatitis virus because, well,

[00:51:43] most of them would get it anyway. A public outcry forced the research project to be discontinued. Senator Robert F. Kennedy, he toured the institution in 1965 and proclaimed that individuals in the overcrowded facility were, quote, living in filth and dirt, their clothing in rags, in rooms

[00:52:05] less comfortable and cheerful than the cages in which we put animals in a zoo. It's a snake pit. Furthermore, a 1972 expose by journalist Geraldo Rivera further elevated the institution into national infamy, taking us inside the horrifying corridors of what had become more than just a mad house.

[00:52:33] It's been more than six years since Robert Kennedy walked out of one of the wards here at Willowbrook and told newsmen of the horror he'd seen inside. He pleaded then for an overhaul of a system that allowed retarded children to live in a snake pit.

[00:52:46] But that was way back in 1965, and somehow we'd all forgotten. I first heard of this big place with the pretty sounding name because of a call I received from a member of the Willowbrook staff, a Dr. Michael Wilkins. The doctor told me he'd just been

[00:53:00] fired because he'd been urging parents with children in one of the buildings, building number six, to organize so they could more effectively demand improved conditions for their children. The doctor invited me to see the conditions he was talking about, so unannounced and unexpected by the school administration, we

[00:53:16] toured building number six. The doctor had warned me that it would be bad. It was horrible. This is what it looked like. This is what it sounded like. But how can I tell you about the way it smelled? It smelled of filth. It smelled of disease.

[00:53:31] And it smelled of death. How long have you been at Willowbrook? Eighteen years. How is it living on the ward that you live? Disgrace. Is it disgrace? Yes. Though New York would sign a consent decree in 1975, dwindling residency and a slew of lawsuits would see the facility

[00:53:52] close its doors for good in 1987. And that's when, for many people, Kropzee was driven out of the shadows. This brings us back to the disappearance of Jen Schweiger, having taken place just months after the closure of Willowbrook. Eyewitness accounts led police to

[00:54:17] the arrest of a man named Andre Rand, born Frank Roushon. Rand was a muscular 43-year-old. He had a balding scalp, a cleft chin, and a deeply intense stare. Many claim he was last seen with a green bicycle walking the young girl into the woods near the former asylum.

[00:54:43] In terms of the Kropzee legend, Rand clearly didn't have a hook for a hand, nor was he an escapee from a psychiatric hospital. But just as all legends transform in their telling, there is reason to believe that Andre Rand was indeed the monster that the

[00:55:03] children of Staten Island were warned about for so many years. Rand was not a patient, but a custodian, orderly, and physical therapist at the Willowbrook State School, living amongst the horrors perpetuated behind its doors. After the facility was closed, many of the staff, they were

[00:55:27] simply unable to move on with their lives, their minds seemingly broken alongside those they had attended to. The result? A network of former employees now occupied the tarnished ruins of the former school. Andre was one of them. Rand checked all the boxes. In 1969, he was arrested for the

[00:55:55] kidnapping and attempted rape of a nine-year-old girl in the South Bronx. Police discovered Rand and the girl in his car, parked in a vacant lot. He pled guilty to sexual abuse and served 16 months. In 1979, he was accused of raping a young woman and a 15-year-old

[00:56:16] girl, but neither pressed charges. In 1981, Rand offered a nine-year- old girl a lollipop and tried to entice her to ride in his Volkswagen. When she refused, Rand followed her into her home and searched for her while she hid under a rug. No charges were filed in that

[00:56:39] case either. In 1983, Rand picked up 11 kids in a school bus. These kids were at the Staten Island YMCA, and Rand appeared, convincing these kids on the bus and rather than returning them to their homes, he kidnapped them for five hours, eventually taking them out into pitch

[00:57:01] darkness to play hide-and-go-seek in the woods near the asylum. Rand was charged with unlawful imprisonment but only spent 10 months in prison since none of the children were harmed. In terms of Jen Schweiger, a massive 35-day search took place to find her. With Rand in custody, they

[00:57:28] eventually combed the grounds of the abandoned Willowbrook School. It was there, 150 feet away from his discovered campsite. A little arm and a little foot were found protruding from a shallow grave. Andre Rand told the Daily News he had never met the 12-year-old girl

[00:57:50] and was placed under suicide watch. When I heard she was found dead, I cried. I just broke down, Rand said. I wasn't planning on anything like this to happen. It just happened out of the clear blue. I'm sure in my mind and heart, I

[00:58:09] had nothing to do with it. That doesn't sound very convincing. Regardless, maintaining his innocence, Rand stood trial for Jen Schweiger's murder. The prosecution, however, devoid of any hard evidence, relied heavily on eyewitness testimony. The Staten Island jury could not reach a verdict on the murder

[00:58:33] charge but instead convicted Rand of a first-degree kidnapping charge. He was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. Rand's conviction set off a firestorm, reopening investigations into the abandoned children. Compelling evidence linked him directly to at least six additional disappearances, convincing many folks in the area

[00:59:00] that Cropsey was sourced from the actions of Andre Rand, an alleged crazed killer that the press would eventually nickname the Pied Piper of Staten Island. Prior to his incarceration, over the years, Rand's family had received disturbing and antagonistic phone calls in the night, taunting the whereabouts of

[00:59:25] their loved ones. Police came forward and cited evidence that took this story way off the rails. They said that Rand was involved in satanic worship and necrophilia. They suggested he was abducting children to be sacrificed in black masses. The family had been in contact with

[00:59:46] a splinter church of Scientology, often associated with Satanism, and the same church said to be influential in the Son of Sam killings between 1976 and 77. Despite the claims, none of this was proven. But authorities remained aware that by the year 2008, Rand was allegedly involved in a

[01:00:05] conspiracy to kill his own children. The family had been in contact with the church for over a decade, and the church had been investigating the case. By the year 2008, Rand would be eligible for parole. So, in 2002, kidnapping charges were brought against Rand in relation to the 1981

[01:00:28] disappearance of another young girl, Holly Ann Hughes. Rand reportedly confessed Holly's murder to an inmate and compared himself to the serial killer Ted Bundy. And in the largest criminal trial in history, Andre Rand once again was convicted of kidnapping and sentenced to another 25 years to life in prison.

[01:00:52] Now, during the initial investigation in 1987, Reverend Charles G. Muskeet, a former minister at the Church of the God Within, at the urging of local police, once gave Rand shelter. His home was bugged, and Muskeet reported that Rand admitted to kidnapping Jen Schweiger, and he

[01:01:15] suggested that his killings were motivated by an urge to spare unwanted and handicapped children from their own tortured existence. It was an effort to cleanse the world of imperfection. When Rand was finally arrested, detectives interviewing the man believed they had nearly extracted a confession.

[01:01:40] In an effort to shake something loose, they showed him a tape of the expose on Willowbrook. After viewing the footage, he began to cry, exclaiming, Do you see how it was? We were victims too. Moments later, his eyes rolled back in his head, and he began to

[01:02:04] rock back and forth while drooling. He wouldn't speak again for three days. In the end, it all seemed to circle back to Willowbrook. Could the reason behind these abductions and killings be found in the lost secrets of this now crumbling school? Was the urban legend born not

[01:02:26] merely out of societal anxiety, but as a means of reconciling with its own failings? A forgotten burrow, a dumping ground for nightmares. Today, the legend of Cropsey has all but faded into obscurity, making space for new boogeymen to emerge from our fears. But maybe this Halloween, before

[01:02:54] you dismiss the stories you'll hear, consider the possibility that monsters with things like hooks for hands may have at least one foot steeped in reality. Andre Rand, now 78 years old, remains incarcerated at Great Meadow Correctional Facility and will be eligible for parole in July 2037. He'll be 93 years old.

[01:03:26] Now, did you remember when you picked this story where I went to school? I didn't remember. Well, look, I know you went to Wagner College, but I had no... Right. I'm not like, oh, yeah, that's Staten Island. Sweet Southern boy. Yeah, yeah. Way too Southern.

[01:03:47] No, I went to school on Staten Island, so I was familiar with this. This one touched you. It did. As soon as you opened up and then as you were framing what Staten Island was like and how it was treated and then you announced

[01:04:00] the formation, I was like, I hope he's going to mention the landfill. Please don't forget to mention the landfill. I was like, fresh kills. I was like, there it is. Yeah. Can't leave that out. That really sets the tone for everything that comes after. You told...

[01:04:12] You explained what the island is like. You explained what the culture is like. You explained how they're treated by the other boroughs. The literal afterbirth of New York. Yes, yes. And that's not a put-down. I'm saying that Staten Island was neglected, you know? I mean, hence the forgotten

[01:04:29] borough. Yes. No. And, you know, it is difficult to get to, too. It's the only part of New York that you can't just sit on a subway train and be like, OK, I'm there. You have to take a ferry to get

[01:04:40] over to it or you have to drive over a very expensive bridge. Yeah. But I thought, God, I had heard about Willowbrook, but I had absolutely no idea that it was like that. I just knew that it was this old, creepy kind of like...

[01:04:57] Had you ever driven past it? No. That's a lie. I had driven by the area one time when we were like driving around looking at spooky shit. But, like, I was intoxicated. Like, I wasn't driving. Good times. Thank God. Yeah. No, I was not the driver.

[01:05:15] But I just, I didn't know the story. Look, there's a lot of... Your friends would have just put you in the landfill and just kept on going. No, no. It was very popular. There was a publication in New Jersey where I grew up called Weird New Jersey.

[01:05:28] And it would just print about, you know, all sorts of weird things in the tri-state area. So, what you would do is get together, you know, in your late teens when you finally have some free time and some... Some agency. Some agency. And you would get a little

[01:05:41] intoxicated and then you would go to places like this abandoned slaughterhouse or this, you know, fucked up, burned down casino or this. Yeah. And so I knew about that, but I only knew about it as like lore. Right. I had no idea it had this horrendous nightmare.

[01:05:55] Oh my God, the audio of him asking the resident what it's like to be there and him saying it's a disgrace. Mm-hmm. Like, you're just like... I know that they were framing them as retarded. The ableism of this fucking story just, like, got under my

[01:06:12] skin so much because at the time, developmentally disabled and I'm not independent, you know, adults who weren't independent were still being framed as like they don't have any emotions, they don't have any feelings, they're basically animals. Yeah. And then you talk to one of them

[01:06:32] and they're like, this is a disgrace. And you're like, what? The actual interview that goes on much longer, it would have detracted from the linear progression of the Cropsey story. Sure. But he goes on to talk about how many years he's been stuck in

[01:06:51] Willowbrook and how he was there for 18 years at the time of that interview and he was only educated for five of those years because they said he was too old. So for the rest of his life after that first five years, he doesn't get to learn anything.

[01:07:07] And Geraldo's like, what would you like to study if you could? And, you know, in his very challenged way trying to say, I would love to learn this, I would love to learn this, I have these interests and these interests. These are whole ass fucking people.

[01:07:25] Geraldo ended up interviewing him on his talk show like a generation later. I mean, Willowbrook closing was the best thing that ever happened to this man. Like truly, he had a life again. It sounds like Willowbrook closing was the best thing that happened in a lot of people's

[01:07:40] lives, except for one. That really did not work out well. What a scary character. For sure. Just, you know, the idea that the things that you dismiss as silly stories are, you know, really true and the things most likely, you know, to come and get you. Right.

[01:07:59] It's great. And this time of year is just like rife with that material. Yeah. The urban legend, it takes center stage on Halloween. And so for me, you know, I just asked the universe that question. I was like, okay, urban legends, we hear a ton of them.

[01:08:17] Did we discover that any of these might have actually been real? Right. Did any of them come true or what have you? And this one was a story that I found interesting and compelling that jumped out at me and made me really want to tell the tale.

[01:08:32] Well, you did an absolutely awesome job. It creeped me out definitely, but more than anything else, like it filled me with the sort of fear that is attached to there but for the grace of God go I. Like that could be, we are all

[01:08:47] one stroke car accident, weird medical event, falling off a ladder, slipping down the stairs, stepping over the cat, disaster from that potentially being a place that we're trapped. Being dumped somewhere. Right. And it's how, and I, you know, I'm not getting on a soapbox here, but it's how.

[01:09:07] Get up, get on that soapbox. I'm going to stack two of them on top of each other. Perfect. Now you're still a foot shorter than me. Yep. Totally, I was going to make the exact same joke, but no, it was a story that it's like, oh, thank

[01:09:20] God it's not like this anymore. But also there are still people who still think about disabled and mentally challenged in quotes people this way and are like just stick them somewhere and fuck them. And like knowing that I live in a world where people think about

[01:09:36] other human beings that way is chilling. It chills me to my bone that there are people that are, that think that way and think it's okay. Yeah. I have one of my childhood friends, Matthew, his brother has Down syndrome and not like a light version of it.

[01:09:54] He's in the thick of it. He's a middle-aged man now. Is he able to live independently? Not independently. However, since he's been able to, he has worked at the grocery store day in, day out bagging groceries. And I mean, he loves it.

[01:10:12] And I saw him just the other day walking to work by himself, threw him a wave, you know, and he remembers me. He remembers my name, everything. I mean, this is a person who despite his limitations has still enthusiastically contributed. Participated. And participated in what

[01:10:33] it means to be alive, what it means to be a human being almost every day of his life. Oh, he's contributing to his community as well. And you and I both know that he's a very, very completely able-bodied people with fat bank accounts who despite having every

[01:10:50] advantage decide that they're not going to do that. I know a lot of able-bodied people that work less than he does, than Daniel does. Yeah. So yeah. But the scariest part of your story for me was the implications of the society around us and that we're living

[01:11:06] in a lesser monster. And that there's this, there was this monster out there who was the crystallization of these people. Yes. You know what I mean? He was the crystallization of what Willowbrook was. Yes. But also he was another. I mean, I am not sympathizing with him.

[01:11:23] Oh no. He was a nut. He was a victim. Driving home our underlying theme of this season, which seems to be hurt people hurt people. Good feeling that's going to be every season for sure. Yeah. No, you probably. But it really seems like this

[01:11:36] season is like, man, we just keep coming back to that. But I don't want to ramble. Let's Gary. Oh, you're way. You got your Halloween costume. I look fucking adorable. All right. Could you bring in the guests? Hi, guys. What's up, guys? Welcome. Happy Halloween. Happy Halloween.

[01:11:56] That was terrible. Yeah, that was terrible. Don't do that to me again, please. Please. I'm vaguely converted now. Cucumber is very nefarious. There's some there's something about the phallic, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, well, so welcome to this episode of of horrible, scary shit, scary

[01:12:18] shit. If we did it right. We don't know. You're going to tell us. Yeah. For the people who did not hear our Halloween episode season one, Justin, introduce yourself. Tell us why you are here and why you might know a few things about scary stories.

[01:12:36] Well, my name is Justin and I've known Kimberly and Edward for quite a long time. And I've done a few horror movies down the road. Yeah, I did a final destination movie, a movie called The Signal, the remake of The Crazies. I played a lot of bad guys.

[01:12:52] So I have some perspective. I kind of before I got into doing horror movies, I really made a study of watching them. And that's kind of carried on to this day. And I'm really just out there looking for something to scare me at this point.

[01:13:07] Knowing how the sausage is made is a little bit different than enjoying the sauce. Has knowing how the sauce is just being made it harder to scare you? Hundred percent. Yeah, hundred percent. The kind of things that when I mean, I could not watch horror movies as a

[01:13:21] child because I was such vivid nightmares. Same. And now just regular life gives me nightmares. So I kind of horror movies to just kind of drain it away from me. And yeah, I mean, I love a movie that can frighten me. I love a good story

[01:13:39] that can really creep me out. Maybe haunt my memories for a while. I feel the same way. The day to day news, you know? For sure. For people at home who can't see it, Laurie is literally recoiling in the opposite direction of the zoom screen as

[01:13:57] if Justin's answer is a threat to her very existence. Let's move on. That would not be unheard of today. Very existence. Natama to what you want to be. Laurie, can you introduce yourself to our audience and then tell us in your own words how you feel about horror

[01:14:16] stories? I'm Laurie Kramer. I'm I am I am not a fan of horror stories. I think I was terrified so much as a child from randomly passing by a room that had a scary movie on it that I was never going to watch again

[01:14:33] or want to have to deal with that ever. And you're right, there is enough scary stuff in the world that I don't I don't need to add to it. So, OK, I want to try. I mean, I really the psychologist in the room should be should be

[01:14:49] helping me with this. We can't turn these into therapy sessions. No, no, no. We've already agreed it's very paying someone else for that. Exactly. So did something happen when you were a child? Did you what was the first thing that you saw on a

[01:15:02] screen or was it a ghost story? A Girl Scout kit? Like what first set this total aversion scary stories off Bloody Mary in the bathroom? Yes. In elementary school. That's a solid one. This is a good answer. An urban legend. Yes. Yeah. OK, yeah. Where where you set

[01:15:23] the scene for us. Where was this school? What school was it? What what was the name of the terrible girl making human? I don't remember where this was in the school like during P.E. class. So a few of you were like, fuck it, let's go do Bloody

[01:15:37] Mary. Yeah. And then when we were summoned, it was it was Clifton Algenas. It was on Paris Avenue in Gentilly. It's not there anymore. Sure. Yeah. We were probably sixth grade, seventh grade. And a couple of the girls were like, hey, I found out about this really,

[01:15:53] really cool thing that we can do with like mirrors in the bathroom and turned out the lights. I don't even remember. I don't like I think I blocked out the chant. Like, I think you had to say her name a couple of times

[01:16:04] and she would appear in the mirror. Yeah. And I think the hysteria among people can produce actual like for sure. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You can induce psychosis for sure. We were in the bathroom for maybe 10 minutes, like looking in the mirror and talking about Bloody Mary.

[01:16:22] And then all of a sudden somebody was like, oh, my God, there she is in the mirror. She is in the mirror and she had long hair and blood was everywhere. And I just remember like the door flew open and like all of us just like

[01:16:32] fled the bathroom. And I was like, never hanging out with these girls again. Yeah. Wow. OK. And so after that, you were just like, I've been trying Bloody Mary all October long just to try and get a date here in L.A. This bitch has got to be

[01:16:48] fucking most of the people on social media. Now, you don't use a mirror. You go to. You just got to go to hinge. You just have to go to that in your profile. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No. Let me know what shows up when you.

[01:17:03] Yeah, I think it's going to work out. Yeah. No, I actually never did the Bloody Mary ritual as a kid. I was too scared. Oh, really? I was like, I'm not I'm not risking it. I don't want to see this bitch. OK. It just wasn't a thing.

[01:17:17] I didn't do it as a kid either. I was raised pretty churchy, not like evangelical churchy, but still pretty churchy for the nurse northeast. And I was just like, this is not a thing that good girls do. Yeah. And also the girls who

[01:17:30] wanted me to do it in the bathroom were like notorious for, like, luring people under the guise of friendship to do something and then something. And I was just like, no, no, no, no. Put your head in the toilet. Absolutely. I never did it, but

[01:17:46] I do remember a bunch of girls and Girl Scouts doing it and me also being like, now I'm going to sit this one out. But did you guys do sleep ins at your church too? Yes, we did. Did y'all have scary stuff at sleep ins? No, no.

[01:17:59] Yeah, I was a churchy church. I don't know how our like the church that I went to ended up doing it like we had scary stuff at sleep ins as well. And they were Catholic. No. Southern Baptist. Oh, fuck. That is scary. That's because the scary

[01:18:12] was already there. Yeah. No, no. The scary was covered. Were you a scary kid, Justin? No, I think I was actually a really pretty sweet kid overall. I don't know. I don't mean like were you like frightening other than like. Like I said, I had a pretty

[01:18:32] vivid imagination. A pretty vivid imagination. But yeah, it got away with me for quite a long time. Somewhere inside of, you know, hitting puberty and enjoying, you know, rock and roll and finding out about girls. It came like Ouija boards and heavy metal music. Yeah.

[01:18:56] You know, awesome things like that, that it suddenly became like, OK, I'm going to harness these powers. I'm going to bring this into my life and I will wield the hell fire. And that pretty much became a life path. It's an overcoats, you know, so

[01:19:12] this is basically you just grew up and play D&D as a lifestyle. You know, I'm taking the other half as annex. Oh, my God. Yeah, so this is a first talk about Ouija boards. And all of a sudden I was like, fuck, that was compartmentalized

[01:19:27] like third grade. I had totally forgotten about that. I was like, motherfucking Ouija board. Did you once? Yeah. And never again because it freaked me. Good at it. I mean, I got invited to parties to do with kids and then you're kind of like freaking them

[01:19:44] out and learning about tarot cards and stuff. And I was like, oh, I'm going to be a kid and learning about tarot cards early in life. It really means death. It means death. You know, I don't believe in certain Ouija board experiences.

[01:19:59] I believe that any group of people projecting a lot of things into an object or a circumstance can make a thing happen or have a shared hallucination. OK, but I believe bottom line, though, can you access spirits with it? Can you open a door?

[01:20:17] I believe that if you have the right people, have the right setting, you you can summon spirits with a dildo and a jar of olives. You just been there. I've done that. Tonight is going to be. So my feeling is that any tool can be used

[01:20:38] if you have the right people. And but also that's I'm I don't think that the average person can just like we're going to sell that as a box set on the Web site. Get your new spirit vessel. That's it. All guests from this

[01:20:54] point forward are getting a jar of olives and a dildo already off the rails. We're like 15 minutes. Good stuff. All right. So let's let's try and bring it back to talking about story craft. Justin, what scares you prior to the last three years?

[01:21:11] What used to scare you besides reality? What was the boogeyman for you going in the ocean over my head? That's a pretty good one. John just really fucked me up as a little kid. And I still even though you're like, I know statistically and I know that

[01:21:27] sharks are going to be, but I'm pretty fucking sure that going up to my knees, I'm not going to be eaten pretty much there. I have no say in what happens in that miasma of chaos and and underneath the fucking oceans. There's a reason we left.

[01:21:40] So the oceans are pretty terrible. I will watch shark movies and they still give me the like, oh, you know, whenever it's it's really right there, especially if it's well done. So deep, deep blue sea. How did deep blue sea affect you? The first time you watch it

[01:21:59] was was hardcore. Now I watch it just to watch him. It is funny, but it really does kind of have to do a lot more in the physical world being lost, say in the forest, in the jungle. I've had experiences where

[01:22:15] I was in Nepal for a little while and I got lost for a couple hours up in the mountains as it was getting darker. Oh, fuck that. Really, really stressful. Sure. Don't like that. Being lost in the woods is a pretty good one because you were primal

[01:22:30] imagination pretty much takes off with you. Right. Right. Is it primal imagination or is that just like biological trauma? Like I mean, most of the time. Here's the thing. It's like that movie The Edge where most people die in the wilderness from shame. They give up.

[01:22:51] They're so upset that they have done it that they do not think clearly. You're right. Now we begin to get that feeling and that begins to croak in on you. So certainly like that, especially if you don't know where you are or you don't know where you're supposed

[01:23:06] to go or you're totally turned around. Those kind of things really can short circuit that biological imperative of like, hey, man, if I kind of dig a hole and lay here and throw a bunch of stuff, including my sleeping bag, which I have on me,

[01:23:17] I'm going to make it through the night. Right. You know, if the Yeti doesn't get me. But one way or the other, it really begins to panic you, especially if you're that far out and there's nobody else to reassure you. Right. Right. Lori, what is the thing that

[01:23:36] you're most afraid of? I'm afraid of everything. Right. Lori, what what scares we may have to focus this. Yeah. No. So so the most everything. And was it always this way or did it happen with time? No, it's pretty much always this way.

[01:23:57] OK. I don't know how I watched somehow. I snuck into a room where people were watching The Omen. Oh, God, that's a bad choice for you to make. I don't we just don't watch movies like this. I know that as soon as I

[01:24:10] start to feel anxious, I have to go to my happy place where I can see, smell, hear, you know, things that make me happy. So as soon as I start getting nervous, I go to the beach. OK, so you do. Do you share Justin's

[01:24:24] fear of being submerged in the dark miasma of the ocean? Oh, yes. I go to the beach, but I don't go in the ocean. At all. I'll I'll do like Justin does and I'll I'll do yeah, I'll go to the knees and I'll go

[01:24:39] out. I can go to the shoulders. Well, we've been asking the guests, but what scares you? Besides just general existential dread? No, this is we're not doing that episode. We could. A fear of death has been definitely the biggest thing for me. And so that that terror

[01:24:56] around death can get its little tentacles and all kinds of stuff. I made it a point in my life to do the things that I was afraid of, to expose myself to all that shit that scared me. The I think one of the last

[01:25:11] times I had a panic attack was when I was scuba diving and it was just being underwater. I felt the enormity of the ocean and how small I was. I couldn't get to the surface fast enough. I thought I was going to

[01:25:25] die, like even though I had oxygen in my mouth, everything like I was totally fine. Full blown panic attack mode, like hyperventilating, disorienting, being out of control. And sometimes that can be supernatural. Sometimes it can be, you know, some weird fuck following you on the

[01:25:41] street or something creepy like that, or the lights going out your neighborhood. I've been guilty of all of it. I hated horror films throughout most of my life. I just forced myself to watch them. And even now I can enjoy them, but it's not my first choice.

[01:25:56] Yeah, no, I get that. More of a merchant in ivory kind of guy. You know? But some of them do blow me away. Some of them really are incredible. Like as a genre, there are some horror films that are really just amazing pieces of film.

[01:26:11] Okay, what's your favorite horror movie? Oh God, I think my favorite, we talked about this last year, was the one that scared me the most, which was The Exorcist. Okay, so you're still there. I have seen it so many times. Okay. But yeah, that

[01:26:25] was the one that kept me up for sure. Yes, I think we did talk about this last year and same. Justin, which favorite horror movie? You know, I kind of go into it. I think in the last few years seeing Hereditary in the theater was probably the scariest.

[01:26:41] And then Midsommar also already asked her, you know, backed up. These are movies that truly like creeped me out, fucked me up. I didn't know where they were going. I literally stood outside the theater and the audience was just talking to one another about what scared them for

[01:27:01] 20-30 minutes afterwards. And a good movie will produce that sort of thing. You go out to some of these Marvel movies and you're like, oh great! And then you never think about it again. Right. Hereditary, you just, it doesn't leave you. You think it's gonna be

[01:27:17] this, but it's that. And it did definitely play into my love of the demonic, supernatural and witchery and all those kind of possession things that we kind of talk about in some of this. And Midsommar is completely something that is just like, people are fucked up.

[01:27:37] Their beliefs and their rituals and things like that can be as bright and shiny as the midday sun and be as terrible. Just as terrible. That was one of the last movies I wanted to punch in the face. If I could. It was haunting.

[01:27:57] It was, but at the same time I was resentful of it. I was just like, you suck. You were so unhappy in the car when we left the theater. I was. I just thought it was a... I thought we were in a fight. I was like, what's wrong?

[01:28:13] And he was like, it was a fucking movie. He's like this poor cuck in a bear suit. And I was just like, he was so hateful. But I respected it. I respected it. I just wanted to punch it in the face. Alright. I'm gonna go with favorites.

[01:28:31] My favorite scary movie is still Exorcist, but Justin is right. Hereditary was the last movie I remember going, oh no! I think Justin said... It was Toni Collette crawling on the ceiling. That's what did it for you. You know me so well. Oh my god.

[01:28:51] Did your mommy issues emerge? Oh yeah! No, without question. But actually the bigger thing, the thing that I struggle... My fear, the thing that freaks me out the most, more than a boogie man anything is the idea of going insane or being insane. I don't have a fear

[01:29:13] of death. I have a fear of being insane. And that girl crawling out of the TV in the ring. Yes! 1000% we covered that last year. Up and down. 1000% Samara. That is the most sane thing you can be, by the way. Yeah, I feel justified in that.

[01:29:31] The girl is straight up sane. Legitimately terrifying. But so what Hereditary did in those scenes where the sun turns and he sees his reflection in the glass and it does something and he's like, what's wrong with me? That fills my chest with that cold, creeping...

[01:29:51] Knowing somebody is in the room that all you can see is shadows and then suddenly it's coming out of the shadows for you at a dead run. That is the sort of thing that just talking about it gets my heart pumping. Oh man. Lori is really struggling

[01:30:07] when she's doing so great. She's not going to make it through. It takes a little while for it to kick in. Lori, what's your favorite scary movie? Do you have one, Lori? Y'all are talking about movies, like I've seen them advertised

[01:30:21] and I was like, yeah, I'm not doing that. But I have seen Poltergeist. Okay. That's good. That's a good one. And that's genuinely scary. And it scared the shit out of me. And I just remember that little lady walking out and jingling and going, this house is clean.

[01:30:39] And it's like, it's so not fucking clean. You're a liar! You're a big fat fucking liar! Let's see, what else have I seen? The Nightmare Before Christmas is my favorite Halloween movie. That is a great Halloween movie but it does not count as a scary movie.

[01:31:01] Unless you're under five, in which case the oogie boogie bug thing, fair. Another one that I saw with a bunch of people at the movie theater was the Blair Witch Project. How'd you do? Because that was kind of scary. I feel like I basically clawed through my seat.

[01:31:19] So you just dug in? I dug in, I was completely wiped out after it was over. I wanted some kind of result. I want my movies to have a good happy ending. Oh. Justin was trying to stump for the craft of cinema

[01:31:43] for a second and then he just... I saw that movie and the publicity for it was that this really happened. Yes, it was. In the line waiting to get in, people were talking about this is like, I don't know if it's

[01:31:55] a documentary but it's supposed to be like this. Yeah, I remember all that. A lot of the people that made the movie and things like that, they were university students and they were really going out there and putting it out and they were really smart about it.

[01:32:09] Because the publicity was so good and the idea that this was first person experience and that it was genius. So coming out of there, there really was a sense like, well, that didn't really happen but I had such a good time seeing it because

[01:32:25] don't put baby in the corner! Some feelings that... You had seen a different kind of movie than a lot of horror movies. It wasn't blood or it wasn't alien, it wasn't this overwhelming supernatural. It was all the suggestion kind of like your imagination is

[01:32:47] making the bridges and that's what you're filling in what wasn't actually shown to you. And what was brilliant about that particular movie and about some of my favorite things that scare us. Again, that's like being lost in the woods. You are literally just making up things and conjecturing

[01:33:05] all these things, disaster scenarios, and that's making it worse for you than actually what's happening to you at the time. Right. Just so you know, Lori disagrees. Lori thinks that's all garbage. She wants a happy ending. And I have a... there's an

[01:33:19] ex-boyfriend that's now calling again that wants me to go camping and I'm like, that's just not happening. That is 1000% a setup for you to be murdered. Yeah, without a doubt. My ex-boyfriend's calling and he wants me to go camping with him? That's a no. Maybe car camping?

[01:33:35] Maybe car camping? Okay. Camp Crystal Lake. What was your breakup with this man like? Was this a good breakup or a bad breakup? It was bad. Do not fucking go camping with this man. It's a terrible idea. I hate this. Speaking of things I hate,

[01:33:49] why don't we get into these stories? Because one of the reasons I wrote the story that I did was to do the Edward thing, which is like my fear of exorcism or being possessed. That was one of my biggest fears as a kid. I have tackled a lot

[01:34:03] of exorcism stories and read a lot about it because as a kid I was like, this is a... again, church kid, you know, I'm a small girl, all these stories are about small girls of a weak constitution. Every exorcism story seemed to be

[01:34:17] about me so my way of starting to try and get over it was just be let me learn about as much of this as I possibly can. It's working. I still got creeped out hearing the fully scored version of my own story though. I wrote it,

[01:34:33] I know how it ends, I know this. Edward puts a jump scare I didn't know was going to be in there and I shout alone in my house like it's not my own fucking story and I was like oh cool, I have to live

[01:34:43] with that for the rest of my life. Then you became convinced the jacket on the back of your door was alive for the rest of the night? Yeah, so I have a black hoodie and I hung it on the top of the door as I got back

[01:34:57] from walking the dog and then I walked away and then I came back in the low light and I was absolutely convinced that there was a spectral shadow figure floating at the top of my room and then was like this... I am not

[01:35:13] an adult, like I am just a stunted adolescent in a sort of adult body and no one should let me do anything was the moment I was like cool. I had to text him and be like guess who just thought her own sweatshirt

[01:35:27] was a demon in the house we have to do a different show. But in terms of exposure you know, you're doing great, your story was awesome. Thank you, I And maybe you'll help a lot of other folks expose themselves. I don't know that that's what I'm trying

[01:35:43] to do, but I like the way you phrased it. Yeah, no, that's great. I also think that Edward should do more Eastern European accents. It's our story that one way or the other we are good priests and give advice. The accent was like yeah, now we're in.

[01:36:03] We have a problem on this show too that like the accents start really strong and then they all skew towards Borat. 100% of the time We never re-record them either, we just were like it's fine. We're hacks. No, we're hacks. Let us take best takes.

[01:36:23] Here's what I can promise when we get 50 subscribers on Patreon, I will make sure the accent work is on point. Justin, what were your thoughts on The Tale of Poor Emma Schmidt? First off, I love a good exorcism story all the way

[01:36:39] around. Exorcist is one of my favorite movies. I have watched the Emily Roses and the Ways and I'm fascinated by it. I just watched The Rite with Anthony Hopkins. Oh God, yeah. That's a super fun movie exorcism wise. I really enjoyed this one

[01:36:57] because A, I didn't know it was kind of the exorcist story. It's very low. I couldn't figure it out as I was listening to it and that was a lot of fun. I love the time period because there's a really different feeling to it than say the 1970s

[01:37:19] or the 60s where Edward's story takes place or modern times when we talked about the haunted Japanese condos and things like that. It's a very different feel when you have a cell phone than when you are dealing in late 1800s, early 1900s and you still have such...

[01:37:37] I mean this is still... electricity is not really a very common thing in many people's lives and not the same way. Antibiotics are not around. We don't really have the same sort of understandings that we kind of or jumps in technology that we have now. Fascinating. I love

[01:37:59] the amount of detail that you gave to me. Especially the there is no human or scientific way to have that much vomit or urine in your body which I'm like... Sometimes I feel like that and sometimes I hurt myself but that's a pretty amazing

[01:38:15] image and I think that's what I keep to the fact that it was definitely the exorcist story. This is from their accounts too. I wish I could say, ooh I'm a brilliant storyteller and I added that detail. No, this is from Father Risinger's account. Like I had to

[01:38:31] change my clothes 3-4 times a day this should not have been possible. Now this is also why I hold it suspect. It's because it's priests and nuns and people that are highly religious in their upbringing, in their... in the way that they're possibly rebelling against it or their

[01:38:51] mental instability is rebelling against it. I've always been suspect of and I enjoy the... It's Latin, it's not Latin. They know the sacred thing versus the secular thing but they never show up and it's suddenly like Gojjar the Nepalese demon. You know, it's never...

[01:39:09] It's something that they're not really unfamiliar with. It's not some Chinese demon. It's not some other... It has to take the form of something that they are brought up in and filled with on some level and then they're surrounded by priests and nuns and man when you said

[01:39:27] if you thought phase one was bad, phase two, God I was like Oh No! And this horrible exorcism I mean just beat her with a stick while you're at it and I mean God just these are terrible psychological I'm not sure which is worse

[01:39:45] being at the horrible insane asylum no that does sound worse actually than an Edward story but you know I mean a quote unquote modern mental institution or being strapped to a bed by a bunch of religious zealots who are trying to get a demon out of

[01:40:03] you. That's my fucking worst nightmare. Oh yeah, it's horrifying and it also seems to me like a huge amount of abuse that has been sanctioned by the church, by these people by their parents, by themselves what I always wonder about too though is you know they're like

[01:40:23] alright we went away from the first time you know we did the first trial and then we came back six months later how does this woman live her life if you literally got beat I was thinking the same thing honestly I was like six weeks

[01:40:37] at the grocery store how are you just fucking dealing with anything in your life? She was literally in that room the entire time so starts in August and they had these three sessions but she does not leave the convent of the Franciscan poor, these poor

[01:40:57] women who just wanted to have a quiet life in Iowa just being like hey we're just gonna do a little thing upstairs which will be in and out you'll barely notice us and then they're like so every night at 3am she turned into a hyena and you're like

[01:41:11] oh that was a great detail by the way too nothing like a hyena person to really spice up the evening but there was a first exorcism the one that was kind of exorcism-like diet exorcism I was saying like and he was like well that one kind of worked

[01:41:29] we'll see keep in touch let me know how it went and then they went back for the full Monty you know later on I just don't understand how that, how you can get on with life if you were truly possessed and I have looked into it

[01:41:47] and people do, they live their lives that's one of the cool things about the right the movie, these people go away and it's when they get in the environment of the exorcism that it comes out and the priest brings it out and they really it begins to manifest

[01:42:03] in them and I cannot help but think that there is some cause and effect to that sure if a priest says things like levitate well you also said that a guy came back from the dead you also said you can take

[01:42:17] food and turn it into a bunch of more bread and fishes and all these things hey those are all great stories but I'm not necessarily going to put a priest up against a doctor you know as far as did they had a medical professional going that bitch levitated

[01:42:33] right, right, it does feel different right all religious officials attending to this highly religiously influenced individual girl woman who had unfortunately been subjected to this, now all this being said I loved this story it has so many wonderful horrifying details and it's all the

[01:42:55] crunchy stuff that I enjoy about a good exorcism story and obviously like her father shows up, I'm saying I raped you and we sold you to the devil and blah blah blah in the exorcism like damn it damn it and he's like oh no

[01:43:15] when his mother shows up that's insane so yeah that's stuff that just makes you ripple with like there's an evil out there and it's in me now for the people at home um, Lori is a striking tall statuesque entity and um she has shrunk like six inches

[01:43:33] as she curls like a question mark into her own feelings about this so you look like you want to say something what do you want to say? well I mean the part that stuck out for me and I was like I actually had that experience one time

[01:43:47] in communion was the wafer vomit wait, wait you threw up a wafer and grape juice because you had like a stomach flu or because you felt consumed by like a wave of hateful nausea I felt consumed by a bunch of hateful nausea like I don't understand

[01:44:05] I mean I understand this is supposed to be like the body and the blood of Christ and I think that all of a sudden I was like cannibalism if this is the body it really tastes like shit and I just really don't like it

[01:44:17] and it did all come up so I was like you know I actually think that I had her experience for like not the big I think I was for about ten minutes on a Sunday or maybe you were just getting a little tired of some

[01:44:31] maybe you were just full of this shit is that possible? maybe so can I ask how old you were at the time that this incident happened? let's see I was baptized at 16 so probably between 16 and 17 sounds like a great age to start rejecting some nice people yeah that's 100%

[01:44:53] yeah that's a self actualization and it was so funny because I lost it all because when I was little I used to be really really jealous of the people that could go up to the table and get like I want some of that wine

[01:45:07] I want some of that and then you realize when you get up there some crudité of Christ as someone who hates scary stories what was it like for you to listen to this story? it's terrifying how did it feel? it felt like I wanted to just completely

[01:45:25] turn myself inside out like I don't levitating? no not interested don't want to see it, don't want to be a part of it but because Laurie is thorough she listened to the story twice I did? oh my god oh what you are such a good guest

[01:45:41] we have guests who didn't even make it through one episode one time unfortunately when you said like we're really going to talk about it I was like motherfucker now I have to go back and do it again I was like okay I'm going to be as prepared

[01:45:53] as I can but I was also very jealous that it's like even though I vomited the first time I would love to be able to completely have an explosion in church in the middle of a whole big huge quiet thing I'm kind of envious of someone who

[01:46:11] can do that she didn't actually do it, she thought about doing it she didn't actually do it she did break religious artifacts but never in the church crucifixes and stuff like that but it was like her collection of religious stuff so you're admitting on the air

[01:46:27] that you would like to go rage room on a pulpit that has got to be a common feeling though I mean you're in a quiet room, this is an inappropriate setting let's start fucking shit up I mean that is let's flip some tables flip it over

[01:46:47] fuck your god fuck the god bring it on Edward you Edward you were raised as a very sweet, you know, devout Catholic did you ever puke up the Eucharist or feel yourself consumed with the desire to start fucking shit up in the church which apparently is

[01:47:09] a way more normal thing than any of us thought? I mean the impulse to do something inappropriate was always kind of there it's because there's a pressure coming from the opposite direction saying that like you have to not be a certain way and so, you know, just

[01:47:27] throughout my life I've envisioned murdering so many people and not even out of anger just because what would be the consequences of this and walking myself through the whole process that's not actually an illness it's a normal kind of progression of thought but

[01:47:45] the only experience I had like that in church I was an altar boy and sometimes I would serve Mass like five, six times a week and oh god there was one of these times we were doing the Way of the Cross which is where you

[01:48:01] essentially, you say a prayer at every different metaphorical station of God's journey or I should say Jesus same thing right if you believe in the Triune Holy Spirit his journey to the top of the hill to be crucified and I was carrying incense and I

[01:48:19] breathed in too much of it and I blacked out that was as close as I got to having an outburst I was just like fuck my life I was it Station four of the cross I was feeling J.C.'s plight

[01:48:33] they just had to take me in the back and I just took off my little gown and I just laid there How old were you when this happened? I think 12 Aww There was always one kid every year in kids choir who either threw up or

[01:48:49] blacked out because Oh I did that as well I threw up I was in the choir as well Did you lock your legs? No, no, no, no I was just sick and I didn't know it Well that's different, that's different

[01:49:01] There's always that kid who nobody warned them not to lock their knees and who has never been in front of a group of other human beings staring at you which actually triggers the human fight or flight if you're not trained like there's a reason that people get frightened

[01:49:15] Sure, yeah you have to be inoculated to stress Right, there's a reason that public speaking doesn't come naturally to a lot of people because the theory is that our ancestors never would have had the entire tribe's eyes trained on them unless they were in very serious

[01:49:31] fucking trouble. Right, about to be expelled About to be expelled or killed in really deep shit maybe about to be murdered and eaten maybe about to be the sacrifice Hey boo, thanks for being the good virgin We're gonna put you on this slab and eat

[01:49:43] So the theory is that the reason people tend to feel very uncomfortable when everybody's looking at them is that biologically historically that has not ended well for people. Right. So it's, I don't wanna I'm not a mental health professional so I don't wanna say that

[01:49:59] the number of things that you're afraid of is abnormal that's an unreasonable judgement for me to make but I would say that, Laurie, your your public speaking anxiety, uh, valid and warranted You believe that it happened? I I question it. So it could have

[01:50:15] like as the- Oh it totally could have happened but I think that it could be like my Bloody Mary experience Mmhmm. Like if you have a bunch of people in a room who are like religious fanatics Mmhmm. And one person's like, oh somebody's hanging out on the ceiling

[01:50:33] Right. I think the power of suggestion is a pretty amazing and really scary thing Yeah, makes my good moods fly Yeah, I mean I mean, flying sounds like it's really cool but I don't wanna be chained to a bed and I don't wanna be

[01:50:51] like stuck up on a ceiling I'd rather be like out in the sky somewhere Right. So you don't wanna cling to the wall like a cat above the door They said over and over again like a cat and I was like, cats do not

[01:51:05] cling to the wall above the door like a lizard. Like there's so many other things that spiders I was just like, what? No cat anyway. You know it's a very straightforward account um, of exorcism but the epilogue is coming in another episode and so

[01:51:25] what I wanna say about my story is that I do think it's possible that it happened but like both of you, I also think that the power of suggestion and being raised with this is how things are there's good, there's evil, they're constantly at war

[01:51:41] with each other. You are the thing that they are warring for. If you don't you know, if you even lean a little bit towards the enemy the enemy will take you. Like that is a fucking nightmare. If you told if you took God and the devil

[01:51:55] out of it and told me you know, the ghost of an Aztec warrior and you know, an Irish maiden named Brigid, you know, Saint Brigid like if you gave me iconography from any other things and then raised me for 30 years to be like, these two

[01:52:11] are warring for your soul. I would start believing all sorts of wild shit like, you know, so I do think it's fair to question the narrative of anything you know, built especially like Justin said in this particular time period this is a time period where

[01:52:27] we don't have a lot of science to explain a lot of things. We don't have a lot of data. People don't share information as broadly or as quickly so you know, the loudest person in your town who speaks over people with the most confidence whatever

[01:52:45] bullshit he comes up with could be the thing that everybody believes all of the time. Do you know what I'm saying? Like it's a period of time where it's easy to believe a lot of things. But I personally think that the epilogue of her story calls into question

[01:53:03] whether this actually happened or not I don't think that that actually changes whether it's a scary story. Well, I'm definitely interested in hearing that epilogue because I want to know like, okay, well if there's an addendum to this! Okay, so let me just to jump on the

[01:53:19] idea that imagine that you were a young person, a woman specifically, in a very patriarchal, religious society and you were given such focus to the attentions that are in... You're imagining things about sex and you're imagining things about violence or maybe you actually have

[01:53:37] a mental illness of some kind and it is just culminating and being reaffirmed by all these people around you and suddenly the focus is all on you man, there's such an ability to bring that stuff out there and I don't mean to compare

[01:53:53] it completely to acting but man when you're the focus and it's all on you baby, you can pull some stuff out of you that is the true spirit of performance is frightening is stuff that especially a society that is kind of, you know, L7 and very tight-knit

[01:54:13] and, you know, anally retentive! When women start screaming and shouting profanities and talking like the devil, yeah man all of a sudden your world is rocked and you are assured that this woman is possessed and backing up what you already believe I love believing that the story is

[01:54:35] awesome. I love believing the details and getting into it but do I believe that it could actually... I feel really bad for the woman to take it. Oh god, yeah regardless of whether traumatized and least helped Yes, yeah What is clear is that her dad

[01:54:55] was a trash person who did do some very traumatizing stuff to her and Edward you can speak to a combination of your mom dying, your dad making sexual advances on you and then being around this nasty whether Mina was feeding her possessed herbs, who actually cares

[01:55:13] she was known around town as being a heinous cunt and I reserve that word only for actual heinous cunts and that's what the dialogue around her Aunt Mina was so like, what are the chances that mom dies dad's been banging a family member the whole time

[01:55:31] tries to bang you, doesn't work out, now he's mad at you and he's bringing Mina around. What's the chance that this would give somebody like a fractured version of reality personality disorder The descriptor I was actually going to use there's no guarantee

[01:55:47] that it's going to manifest into someone believing they're possessed by a demon but a fracture, absolutely I'd be more shocked if someone walked away from a situation like that without some kind of psychotic break or psychological break I should say it's just an abundance of trauma

[01:56:05] for sure, but you start kind of teetering on the cross section of spirituality and psychology and trying to find the distinguishment between these two things, if there is a distinguishment between these two things but at least from a psychological perspective in meeting people where they are

[01:56:23] if someone believes that there's a mind and a spirit that's what you have to work with it just sucks that this young lady wasn't treated from the other end of the spectrum, that it was just full bore we're going to exercise you over

[01:56:37] and over and over again until you become this emaciated thing that's vomiting out tea leaves or what have you it sounds like she could have used some help from a variety of different modalities I have tremendous empathy for Emma Schmidt I have questions about what

[01:56:59] actually happened to her and I also don't want to be the asshole who was like you're just mentally ill there's no way it could have possibly been that is there possible that some supernatural shit went down? Yeah anything's possible do you believe in the human spirit? Yes

[01:57:15] it goes without saying just the spectrum of life that if you believe in the human spirit you have to make space for the potential of a malignancy of said spirit at certain points I do believe in malignant energies and I do believe that they

[01:57:29] can attach to people and do weird shit but the challenge that I think a lot of people face is when we start personalizing when we start saying this is Beelzebub, this is Lucifer this is so and so and that sometimes undermines said malignancy because you start getting into

[01:57:47] the discussion of like this is what this young lady was exposed to her whole life and so of course she's going to construct this narrative based off of this source material that she's been fed and so it must all be fake and the truth is

[01:58:01] no that's just what she calls that stuff. Right. Do you know what I mean? That's a great point You know the naming of devils and demons is as old as the idea of having to deal with them all the way back to Babylon and so forth then again

[01:58:15] I also look at people now that diagnose themselves and give a great deal of you know I'm this and I'm this and they name their demons or their own people love to diagnose themselves these days or diagnose you which is even worse

[01:58:31] and say I've got this on you and I would much rather somebody go you got the devil in you boy than like hey man you know what's wrong with you? You're an avoidant personality with narcissistic tendencies and maybe ADHD too and I'm like no it's Beelzebub bitch

[01:58:47] That's a good answer for that next time That's the devil in me man Laurie you looked like you wanted to say something Well I was wondering if because I've heard stories like if you take a criminal and you put him in solitary confinement then if that person

[01:59:05] is left in solitary confinement with no communication with anybody in the outside world their brain chemistry is going to change So I imagine that her being in whatever room she was in something if she's not getting any contact with anybody She was getting contact with nuns which in

[01:59:25] the 1920s in Iowa is not the full spectrum of human interaction that we have Reaffirming the belief system all around her And so yeah she's in there basically being tormented not giving an opportunity to be out with other people and so I think that the mind just

[01:59:47] deteriorated and deteriorated and it's absolutely horrible and terrifying So you know the part where she was swelling So I work with people who have a genetic disorder that we are hype we have mast cells they're these parts of your histamine system that don't work right and so

[02:00:11] sometimes people with really really severe mast cell disorders even from water from emotional stress from trauma from not sleeping from inhaling a chemical like incense they will literally degranulate mast cells until their body is full of histamine and their lips will swell up

[02:00:31] and they'll go into anaphylaxis and they'll be covered in rashes and so I'm reading this and I was like oh that's so terrible that's a sign of Satan Oh well she could have had an undiagnosed mast cell disorder I mean what is wrong with you

[02:00:41] but there are actually you can play that game where you can explain a lot of supernatural shit Only if she had been born later I think we can all agree that had Emma Schmidt been born in a different decade things could have potentially gone differently but speaking of

[02:00:57] It's always something like a convent or a room where nobody ever takes you out to a beautiful meadow A wonderful seaside vista There's nothing calming about any of this I mean you can haul a cot out to a meadow man

[02:01:15] It's the sort of thing that when you go to a retreat you go to a beautiful place or you go to something that brings on calm Canyon ranch Yeah Maybe just go Just go brother I think you got the seed of a really successful

[02:01:33] business there but we're going to talk about that in another episode. I want to move over to Edward's story Let's jump to Staten Island That's scary enough I went to college on Staten Island and yes I went to Wagner College which is a beautiful school in

[02:01:53] the middle of a mafia owned neighborhood Downwind depending on the day of a couple different chemical plants and the Fresh Kills landfill So ironically Wagner College is frequently on the Princeton Review's list of most beautiful campuses in the United States It's the rest of the

[02:02:15] Yeah I don't want to shit on Staten Island but Staten Island already has been shit on so many times. Well Fresh Kills has been closed It has been closed but it was very much open at that point I am middle aged now

[02:02:27] Those were the last days, those were the death throes of Fresh Kills 9-11 was kind of that was it Well when you dump a bunch of bodies in a place people start to go I think we're done here They recovered 29,000 pieces of human remains from

[02:02:43] Fresh Kills after 9-11 Yeah I mean it had no place in the story really but I just thought it was an amazing factoid. Congratulations for learning that, I'm really happy for you I appreciate it Let's start with Lori this time. Lori what were your

[02:02:59] initial impressions of Edward Store? How did you feel about Cropsey? I mean I told you as soon as I find out about a girl with Down Syndrome being kidnapped by a fucking lunatic I was like okay yeah this is totally not cool Yeah I mean when I was

[02:03:19] there was a burned down monastery not far from my college campus and of course we would go there to underage binge drink and do drugs that's what you do at night as an 18 year old with a brain that is still just basically wet dog food

[02:03:39] it doesn't make any of the right decisions ever To any of our 18 year old listeners we love you Just know that it's going to take about another decade before you can make the right decision and it's not your fault and we love you and for you

[02:03:53] we forgive you and we have all made horrendous decisions in our early teens so we would go to this burned down monastery and we would go there and you know freak each other out and get drunk and there would be keg parties and everything

[02:04:07] but because I was going to school in Staten Island with a bunch of kids who were from the area you would be like I'm gonna go pee and they'd be like don't let Cropsey get you so when he sent me this

[02:04:17] story I was like oh my god you're doing the Cropsey story and he was like I can't believe you actually have heard of this did it scare you? It fucking terrified me That's a good thing and because learning that he had been a custodian in the facility

[02:04:35] I remember, this was after we had my grandmother in the nursing home that was out in Harahan but I remember about the people who like the janitors and the people that worked in the nursing home really taking some horribly unfair advantage That's another episode for sure

[02:04:53] of some very very sick people and all I kept thinking was like thank god nothing like that would have happened with my grandmother but like that scares the shit out of me is thinking that someone, I don't know that I would want to be a

[02:05:05] custodian in a mental health facility Being an ordly or a custodian I'm sure there's many lovely folks working at mental institutions throughout the world but like this one in particular was hell on earth 6000 people 6000 people that is so little and you're probably right

[02:05:23] that was the kind of folks that would not just get hired there but would choose to stay there and the practitioners would walk in go I can't wait to help these people go oh fuck you're just torturing these people and then turn around and leave

[02:05:37] Well you saw in the little clip of the expose that I inserted that one doctor that tried to get parents to speak out What a stand up guy was let go like they were silencing these people and so it took fucking Geraldo to show up unexpected

[02:05:57] and walk through this place and set the whole thing on its head My question is how poorly run was it that Geraldo shows up with cameras and they're like yeah why not I was like how It was fascinating Justin what was your impression of the story

[02:06:15] Well I actually had seen the documentary on Cropsey so when it began I was like oh I know this story it's been many years I kind of learned about it I feel like I've actually seen some actual footage of the place and definitely some of the people

[02:06:31] that came forward and were like it's this bad when the guy begins describing I wish I could tell you how it smells how can I describe how it smells that's the part that makes me want to yak because you just know you've been in a hospital

[02:06:45] or a retirement home that you just know that kind of faint now bring that into the fore it just reminds you of all the ways that they dealt with people that they either just wanted to shuffle away because they've got some mental illnesses or severe mental

[02:07:01] illnesses throughout all of time chain them to the wall, put them on the bed shock them, throw them in some ice horrifying to begin with Give them some hepatitis Oh my god All the kids are getting diseased and I mean but again this is the 70s you know

[02:07:21] hey kids what's going on, want a lollipop? get in my van my favorite part was when he got onto a school bus and took all the kids to go play hide and seek in the dark that is such a 1970s sort of oh what a mischief

[02:07:41] we're gonna put you in jail for a little while how about a little mischief that's what the moment when you told me the story what his prison sentence was for kidnapping a bus full of kids I was like this right here and interestingly enough our secret story time

[02:08:01] that we released earlier this month about a girl named Mary Vincent who was hacked up by a rapist, the reason part of the reason that now if you kidnap a school bus full of kids and do something like that you will get a longer

[02:08:17] prison sentence it's because of the legal precedent that hurt her so if you want to learn about why eventually we stopped doing stupid shit and saying I think these people should maybe not be around our kids for significantly longer you can learn about why in our most recent

[02:08:31] story. And that affected Andre Rann's conviction in 1987 that's why he got 25 years right? Yes so and you hear it happen from a school bus you got like what three years and then one way or the other when we come out the other end 25 yeah 10 months

[02:08:47] to 25 I get out when he's 93 oh okay you're still causing trouble but it also reminded me like I grew up in Atlanta when the Atlanta child murders were happening and so it was now that was a the first time I had ever been told you got to

[02:09:05] get in before it's dark even though no conclusion children were ever taken or anything like that it was such a nightmare and parents were just freaked out and no idea what's going on this is 1970s where serial killing is suddenly like a mass activity that's

[02:09:21] just all over the place from you know interstates and the news and people are actually able to kind of put these things together as not just random events so you know Wayne Williams is there doing his thing and we kind of felt it and that was our

[02:09:39] cropsy in the way that there was a real thing happening we didn't know what it was there's a boogeyman out there and we really felt this thing I particularly feel nothing but just horror and sympathy over what these poor people in this

[02:09:57] institution had to go through what the doctors that tried to expose it and are being just shut down because of lack of what state funds and publicity is bad and blah blah blah and then this guy who is probably also dealing with some severe

[02:10:11] mental trauma of some kind now I don't have any sympathy for him but I certainly understand that from a fucked up environment you make fucked up people and this guy obviously was really on the bell end of you know some bad stuff to be able to start

[02:10:31] pushing that on such young kids, he's got other adults, he's obviously dealing with some nightmarish you know dark night of the soul stuff and he has every reason to be a nightmare for parents and urban mythology and things like that it makes

[02:10:49] total sense the fact that this guy actually could ever get out seems kind of remotely absurd you know little girl and we're pretty sure you did some of these other things we're just talking to him let you out that's just the way

[02:11:03] it is you know but hey man you know the system okay I really to terrify a community like that is pretty monumental with how bad you really are I will say that this story made me more sad and sickened than actually scared because it's such a real

[02:11:25] it's so real there is no real room in my imagination for how shitty it gets it's like watching that summer series on Netflix you're like well this feels terrible to watch but Evan's pretty good I'm watching drill another hole in this person's head yeah the only real

[02:11:45] space it leaves us is how often it really happened that's exactly right and god I'm almost positive there's nothing but how much credence you want to lend to certain detectives saying he was a satanist he was involved in black masses that's the part where I started howling

[02:12:05] bullshit alone in my house Damien Eccles satanic panic shit well it goes to the process church and all that they love I remember the satanic panic stuff I remember my friends because I did play Dungeons and Dragons and liked Iron Man posters saying you know

[02:12:23] you're with the devil now yeah that well born kid really in that transit where you're like I don't even know what you're talking about man and you're connecting me with these things that this guy was cracked his mother spent a lot of her life in an asylum

[02:12:39] and he would go visit her not only is it the environment he grew up in but the institutions that are completely failing both society wise and that local state level that just suddenly is like wow you know yeah you can come mop

[02:12:55] the floors here with a bunch of vulnerable people yeah we'll have no repercussions on you know what's going on as a person who has a disability sure this kicked me in the nuts because those nuts yes my my lady nuts my mast nuts my

[02:13:17] those stories definitely had the like there is a pure there just seems to be an innocence lost outside influences whether you're actually well that was the devil and the exorcism right or it was the priest and nuns that are backing him up

[02:13:35] or that it's the institutions that kind of made this guy who he was you know having to deal with this as you pointed out his mother and things like that he's just already in a very delicate place and then this poor girl

[02:13:51] I mean god you started the story out so just she's the apple of the eye and the sweet smile and then I was like this is not gonna go well it's not gonna go down well so it's getting to be that time kids yeah

[02:14:07] this is the big moment Lori which story are you choosing as this weeks winner don't stop being my health coach but I have to choose Crobsy okay alright I mean I'm I'm definitely gonna take sugar away from you and then I'm gonna take fair

[02:14:25] you have made very clear your stance on you are picking this story because it really happened and you feel scared by it I feel terrified by it and like I said I feel like it's still these beings are still in our existence oh they definitely are

[02:14:41] yeah Justin that little witch scared you funny enough I'm gonna go with the exorcism because that story was so scary to me to listen to I don't have the records for it it loses the human touch and so as a genuinely scary

[02:14:59] story and one that made me go the hyenas the amount of pure amount of vomit and urine you know that's a lot man and so I'm definitely going with the exorcism for the scare me factor even though it is not necessarily part of my true world mythology

[02:15:21] I'll definitely you know it'll creep up it'll creep up in that way where you're like well maybe well listeners know what this means we're gonna turn it over to social media which means Edward will be mad at me because Edward believes that there's an internet conspiracy where the

[02:15:41] internet will always pick me even though they consistently write about how wonderful his work is and how excellent he is as a storyteller and everything else but also you won the last two episodes so I'm not mad so we're gonna turn it over

[02:15:57] I'm happy to leave it in the hands of our listeners Gary you are gonna have to turn both TVs off and release the guests thank you the cucumber is going to possess Justin and we're never gonna hear from him again so thank you for my olives laughter

[02:16:17] and that's the show guys I appreciate it thank you this was fun ridiculous silly stuff as per usual this episode may be a wrap but if you want some more great Halloween content we've got Tony award winning Broadway star and horror film veteran Michael Cerveris

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[02:17:32] leaving us a 5 star review anywhere podcast stream or following us over on Instagram at humanfuckerypodcast or Twitter at humanfuckerypod if you hated this episode as always my name is Jordan B. Peterson and you can express your disappointment publicly anywhere you want Jesus Christ until next month stay safe

[02:18:00] keep it kind and please stay weird