Paranormal Roundup with Trailer Trash Terrors

Are you interested in angels, demons, spirits, ghosts, and monsters? Are you curious about their origins, tales, and influence upon history and on the present day? If so, sit back, relax, and welcome to Southern Demonology, the podcast that explores all of this and me.

Greetings, temporal humans. This is Boudreau, the mildly apprehensive cybernetic ghost from the future. My apprehension is generated by the possibility that the following episode might generate the equivalent of a black hole of southern nerdiness. A serious singularity of southern supernatural speculation. Aren't you amazed at my cybernetic alliteration skills? Keep in mind, Vic Hermanson has arranged this joint episode. Even with his almost complete lack of complex social skills. Count me cyber amazed. Times 10 to the 23rd hour.

Welcome to both season 2, episode 18, of the trailer Trash Cameroon's podcast. Hosted by Vic Hermanson and episode 72 of the Southern Demonology Podcast. Hosted by the surname Challenge Podcaster and renowned academic JJ. This episode is titled simply the Paranormal Rundown. It seems occasionally needs a hand with emulating human emotion. So, ladies and gentlemen, and all other possible entities, get ready for the amazing, the astounding, the utterly unique 2022 paranormal rundown.

Hello, everyone out there in Southern Demonology Land, as well as everybody in TrailerTress Terrors Land. If you're from Southern Demonology and you've never heard me, my name is Vic Hermanson. I'm not a paranormal investigator. I'm not someone who has any real qualifications at all in the paranormal world, except having read more than you can imagine. JJ is a good friend of mine. We have decided to join forces this week and create a podcast that we can each use for our own podcast stream. We may adjust them a little bit, but most of the content will be the same.

And I think you're going to enjoy it. We'll make it as entertaining as we can. I've already introduced myself. I'm Vic Hermanson. I'm maybe here with my pal Boudreau. If you've never met Boudreaux, he's kind of funny. You know J.J. J.J. is the founder of the Southern Demonology Podcast. He is a scholar in Hebraic languages and quite a few other things. And we are joined by David Griffith, who is an actual paranormal investigator. So he's the only one among us who actually has direct experience in the paranormal world.

But I don't think that matters, because tonight we are doing what we call the paranormal rundown. The paranormal rundown means that we have 110 topics, all relating some way to the world of the paranormal. We're just going to choose one at random and we're going to talk about it. We may argue about it. Some of us may say, I don't know a darn thing about that, and I have nothing to say. But we're going to have some fun, and we hope that fun translates to an entertaining show.

I apologize about the few little skips in my speech, but I think I'm just going to leave them alone because it's that kind of show. How was that? That was beautiful. I love it.

Oh dear lord, no. Holy crap, man, I'll take that in a heartbeat. Okay.

Okay. I will introduce the topics. Let's just go ahead and do a topic. Alright. Uh so what I've got here, uh, David and JJ, is a random just a brand-between function and Excel. And I just figured I'd hold the F9 key down for a few seconds and let go. And see what comes up. And we have come up with the first paranormal rundown topic. Number 19, which is crop circles. So, who wants to start talking about crop circles?

I will say that I have seen more than a few documentaries on them. But one of my favorite things is there was an episode of QI. Who has ever seen QI? Not I.

I don't think I have.

What is a I just happened to cross it. Uh, it is a British, it's not a game show. It's more of a talk show, but it was originally hosted by Stephen Fry, and they would bring on four comedians, one of whom was a permanent fixture, and then they would ask them random trivia questions, and if they said the wrong answer, then the loud claxon would go off. But they would talk about anything and everything from how many moons did the earth have to all this other stuff.

But anyway, there was um one segment where they actually hired a professional crop circle creator to do the QI logo in random fields and then try to pass it off as the real thing. And it was it was a beautiful thing. But yeah, if you had to ask my personal opinion, I don't believe in them whatsoever. It's kind of the stupidest way for an alien civilization to try to communicate with us. However, as art forms, they are rather intriguing.

David, have you had any experience with crop circles?

I have not. You know, I've seen documentaries on them and you know, some of them are incredibly intricate and and elaborate. I don't know, uh I don't have an opinion on whether they're real or not, although I I think probably if they are real, it's probably a small portion of them that are. I'd say the majority of them are probably created, especially nowadays. But they may be based on something that did happen at some point.

Well, let's see. I have actually seen a crop circle. Really? In Iowa. My brother lives in Iowa, he's the uh he's a professor at the University of Northern Iowa and there's lots and lots and lots of corn and wheat grown in Iowa. And there was a crop circle that showed up outside of Cedar Falls and one of the fields. It was there when I was visiting him. So he went to see it, and it was pretty darn intricate. Got to walk around and see the actual bins and the stalks. Then I tried being me tried to replicate the bins in the stalks and I couldn't do it.

I tried holding them with my hand and then bending them over. I tried using my foot, I tried using a stick I found, but I couldn't replicate it. They weren't really broken, they were just kind of it was like the tissue had weakened on one side and then it had laid over. And so I came away thinking, man, if these are all made by guys with boards, then they're sure better at bending stalks than I am. Now, I think a whole bunch of them are made with boards and guys with strings, but occasionally I have seen some and read the history about them that seem to just push credulity on that.

You know, I I can't see some of these, how they could have made something that complex that fast, you know, where the crop circle's not there on Tuesday, and it is there on Wednesday, and it's huge. I mean it's a quarter of a mile long, and it's uh you know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of individual little circles and triangles. Now I I can't say that that's not possible, but it couldn't be done with two guys. So I put crop circles in the category of mixed. There are plenty of faked ones, plenty of really silly faked ones. But I think there are some real ones too.

I'm not denying that possibility because goodness knows I have no direct knowledge one way or the other.

That's what it would seem to me. Like you say, there's uh there's some truth in it, and then there's probably a lot of uh faked ones. But I do think it's interesting the idea of you're looking at it and it's weakened on one side, somehow it bend without breaking. And I can't think and of course I don't know corn or wheat, but I I can't think of how you would manage to do that.

Well, I I mean sort I'm not a b botanist, I don't know how you would do that. But it if if I see something and I can't replicate it, then at least that means to me that whoever did this knows something that I don't know. Right.

All right. Let's move on from number 19, which was crop circles. And of course, this is like a game show. If there's something that you if a topic comes up and it just offends you, say, don't want to talk about that one. And we'll move on. Not going to force you to talk about something you don't like. Can I call you a bastard if that happens? Yes, you can. You can call anything you want. I'm I'm pretty thick skinned by now. Alright, our second topic is number 47. And number 47 is well, alright. It's the hairy hands mystery.

And I'm gonna guess that at least one of you has never even heard of the hairy hands mystery.

I've never heard of it.

Is this the the legend that would happen on the back road in some English Shire?

Right.

The the legend basically is that there would be people driving on this road, and that's and a pair of hands would rustle the car and cause it to crash, and that c caused quite a few um like fatalities, correct?

Right, right. A pair of hands, like just out of nowhere? Yeah, a pair of hands just apparently coming from nowhere, not just hands, but hairy hands. Like, I don't know, Bigfoot hands or caveman hands or something. But yeah, that's the the whole idea. People would would report that suddenly their car was taken over by a pair of hairy hands.

So, like grab the steering wheel?

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Huh. When you first said it, I had no idea what you were talking about. I'm like, yep, I have no idea. But yet something tickled the back of my brain. I went, oh god, I've heard that somewhere. So okay, I'm glad my mind was able to fish up something about it.

I bet you I know where you I bet you I know where it came from.

It came from some like Discovery Plus show or something. I don't know.

Might have been that, but I bet you also when you were a kid, you had the Reader's Digest Strange World books. I did not, actually.

Uh the Time Life series went through a lot of different stuff, but I don't think that was enclosed in those, though. Okay.

Well, I I'll start since I I know more about it than you guys apparently. It's just a very British thing. I mean it's a very it's very weird. I mean, you know, why would people report while I was driving along the road heading out to my aunts, and then suddenly there was a pair of spectral hairy hands controlling my car. That's a very strange thing to say.

That is accurate, and that is the only thing that makes me think that there could be some credence to this. Just because it's such a random assortment of things all happening together. Uh I mean, it would take someone who is, you know, either drunk or high, or probably a combination of both, to be able to straight face claim that, yeah, a pair of hands came out of nowhere and you know, my car crashed.

Have you seen the the shows that I guess it was the BBC that did them with it wasn't Isaac Asimov with uh Arthur C. Clarke.

Oh, yes, but the Crystal Skull that was in the intro. Yeah.

Oh, I love those. I would watch those all the time as a kid when they would come on reruns.

They're all on YouTube. I love those shows. And like a lot of things on YouTube, some of them are broken up into fifteen different parts, but you can go back and find them. My favorite part of those shows was they would they would head out to the British countryside and they would find this farmer or this lady who was washing her clothes or something, and they would introduce her, you know, today we're talking to Mr. Johnson Smythe of you know, it would be one of the strange British towns, like you know, something on something. Palmarth on Benedict. Oh yeah.

You know, they have all these strange towns, and then he would get up and just give you an absolutely earnest statement. You know, yes, I was driving along, and suddenly there were hairy hands. So but once again it's one of those things that seemed to me like you would have to be a pretty creative author to even come up with that. So but none of us have any real knowledge there.

So is there like a a case where it was documented like the first case of this or some original story?

I'm sure there is, but I don't know it. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to write down these questions. You know, where did the hairy hand start? And one of my absolute favorite ways of researching this stuff is newspapers.com. Because you can go back and find newspaper articles to the 1700s. And believe me, if it if it was reported in England at all, it's in somebody's newspaper.

And some of the most fascinating articles, they have been amazing to be able to read. And the fact that you have shared that just tickles my heart to death.

Well, I'm glad. I, you know, being somebody in the mega nerd category, you're always a little hesitant.

I I don't know what that feels like. I'm certainly not a mega nerd. What are you talking about?

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to not be a mega nerd?

No, I always call myself an Uber Geek. I mean, we have different terminology, but it's all the same. All right, it's all the same.

You know, Ford Chevrolet, but the uh they're both cars. I I I have two sons, both of whom are substantially smarter than I am, and they can be mega nerds. They do, however, have the ability to turn it off when they have to, when it's to their benefit to not be a mega nerd. They're both better at it than I am. I can do it, but I really, really have to be careful. They have an off-switch.

I wish I did. Actually, can I recount to you one of the most embarrassing of memories?

Hey, this is the this is the uh freeform rundown show. Let's hear that memory.

Oh dear lord. So I don't even know why I'm volunteering this information. So I was a very awkward, I have always been awkward, you know, very shy, but really wanting to make friends. And it was my very first week at Harvard, and we had kind of a mixer, and I was trying to get to know everyone that was in our dorm, uh, which was Anderson dorm. And there was a uh a very pretty young lady who was there who was we were all talking, we all got on to postmodern philosophy. And she said, Oh, I don't really know too much about it, but I'd like to learn.

And for some reason, that prompted me to think, you know what? If I wrote a few pages of notes about some overviews on it and then gave it to her, that might, you know, make her, that might like prompt her to want to become friends with me. Yeah, that didn't happen. Uh she just had this like strangest look of, wow, you really are a weird boy. And I went, Yep, yes, I am. And I went back and I never tried that little trick again. Oh God, I still think back to that and go, What a friggin' moron you happen to be.

Can I give you a different perspective on that?

Yeah, please do.

All right. You're older now, and you're an adult, you have children, you know more about the world, and you know those things that that are important. Think about how utterly innocent that act was. Okay, and I I'll use that word innocent because innocence to me is a a very critically important thing. Okay, and our world just takes it and rips it apart every chance it gets. But uh here you were, a young man from the South, trying to figure out how to fit in, responding to something that somebody said that probably didn't even remember saying it. And you gave them an innocent, sincere response.

And that's not the act of a moron.

Ah, that thought does bring uh more comfort than I would like to admit. I still just take the look of shocked. I don't quite know what to do with this, but I'm just gonna smile and nod and politely close my door as fast as I can.

Right. Yeah, well, that was your skill set at the time. That was what you were able to do. That is accurate. Well, I I can remember many, many things I did like that. And the human brain, the human mind, works such that I can think of a time in my past when I was livid, angry, but I can't feel that anger like I did then. I can think about times when I was incredibly happy, but I can't feel that happiness like I did then. But if I think about a time when I was tremendously embarrassed, I can feel that same embarrassment forty years later. Oh Lord, yes.

Every last bit of it. Every last bit face turns red and everything. I know exactly what you mean.

Why does why does our that's kind of our brains torturing us? It is. I mean, I I think that maybe that is a sh uh a clue of how much of a social animal humanity truly is. But yeah, I can I can think back to a school field trip that we had back in fifth grade where we went to the uh the space center in Huntsville, Alabama, and we were all sat down to have lunch, and this was a group of 30 kids, all from town of Van Lair, and I decided to go, I wanted to go take pictures of the Saturn V rocket.

And so without telling anybody, I just left, took pictures of it, had a good old time, came back, and of course the teachers were furious with me because they thought I had been abducted, and I was forced to go sit with these popular girls who I had, even though it was a small class, I still never had interactions with them, even though they lived like a mile up the road for me. And uh yeah, and I was just terribly embarrassed. And I think about that, and I still feel the greatest amount of shame humanly possible. It is amazing.

You can still feel that cold feeling between your shoulder blades. Yeah.

You can still Like David was saying, face red, right? Like the back of your neck just gets chilled. It's just, oh God.

You actually cringe, right? Reliving these moments in your head. You actually sort of recoil and cringe, like, oh, like I want to hide my face.

Can't believe I did that.

Yeah.

I've actually gotten better at at saying to myself, okay, for some reason, there's an evolutionary advantage to you feeling this embarrassment over and over and over again. And so m that's all I can come up with. And everybody I talk about talk to this about, they've experienced the same thing.

Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking. There's some sort of uh benefit we get from experiencing that feeling that way that propels us forward from an evolutionary standpoint.

Hitting the random number generator again. Number 72. And number 72 is the Orang Pendeck. I have no idea.

You're hitting all the great ones that I know nothing about. Good job.

All right. Let's just add one to that. Okay, we have 72. I think it's a fair approach to say add one. Because 73 is Ouija boards.

Oh goodness. I do have a lot on this one. Okay, good. That's where that's where the meat is. David, I w you are the real paranormal investigator amongst us. Why don't you take first of all?

Well, I don't investigate with Ouija boards. And although I I think I've used one in the past once or twice when I was younger. But I think it's interesting to think about how they work. You know, everybody talks about the demonology standpoint, the demonic influence or possessions that may come out of them. I don't know. I haven't dealt with somebody who's been possessed by after using an Ouija board. But I have heard explanations about how that could happen and why they're more dangerous than other investigation tools.

Uh you know, we use EVP recorders, we've used dowsing rods, uh card decks, we've all kinds of different things to do paranormal investigating. So what is it that makes the Ouija board inherently more dangerous than those? And the thing that I have heard and and thought through is in order to move that planchette, you're putting your hand on it. Others are putting their hand on it. You're not asking that planchette to move on its own. The only way it's moving is through your movement.

Now you may say, Well, I'm not asking it to control me, but I think that's sort of implied in how it works is it's whatever is moving it is moving it through your hands. So you're sort of giving permission to move your hands for you. And that is uh, you know, if you think in terms of legal rights, which you know, some exorcists talk about that specifically in some priests, you're giving a higher degree of legal right to use your body, which could give a negative entity permission to do more than just you know speaking by recorder. Sorry about that.

You're thinking of that as being a a foot in the door.

Yes.

And also I would add to that that you are not necessarily dealing with an honorable presence or where you have no idea.

I mean, even if you're doing EVP recordings or you know, probably the closest thing we use, which is what we do sometimes, is is dowsing rods where you're asking them to manipulate uh something that you're holding with their free flowing free-floating dowsing rods. So you're not asking them to move your hand, you're asking them to move the rod. You have no idea what's doing it. I mean, it could be a spirit, it could be uh a demon. You you just don't know.

But it could be subtle electromagnetic uh influences of the earth.

It absolutely could be. And and with dowsing rods, it's it's real sketchy sometimes because they're so easy to manipulate subconsciously just by little hand movements. But that's not the case with a Ouija board. I mean, you've got to something's gotta really move it. And yeah, I think you're you're opening a door, you're you're allowing them to get sort of a foothold, and you have no idea what's doing it.

I agree with all that. When the Ouija board began to be mass-produced, did you know that the point of the game had nothing to do with ghosts or spirits or anything like that? It was rather marketed to speak to your inner self. I had no idea of that at all. I did not either until I'm gonna bring up the name again, till I watched an episode of QI, and there it was, and this was at least a fact that they brought up. I have not verified that independently, but I thought that was really interesting.

The main thing about I have played with a Ouija board once in my life, nothing bad happened, it did freak me out, and I have never gone to that well again. However, I have heard a lot of hugely negative experiences that people have had. I think the Art Bell was famous for never like always touching upon an experience he had with Ouija boards that drove him off from that.

But he would never tell you what that was. Yeah, and he never did.

He never I'm sorry, he never discussed it. He mentioned that you know he had a witch send him a very ancient board, and that was the most detail that I have ever heard him go into that explanation. Same thing with his friend who worked for a major airlines, and he always wanted to have him on to talk about his experiences with haunted airplanes, and of course, that never manifested either. But anyway, we actually uh I got together with uh Brandon from uh Cookville Ghost Hunters, where we were talking about Zozo, the supposed demon of the Ouija board, which is complete bullshit.

We pretty thoroughly debunked it on that episode, but yeah, I mean honestly, to me, Ouija boards are almost the same thing as a method that a lot of modern paranormal investigators use called the Estus method. It's essentially opening up doors that you really don't want opened. There is a Japanese version of a Ouija board, which is called Kakurisan, where you on an A4 paper, you write out the whole uh alphabet and hitgana with a high and ea at the top with a uh tori, a gate at the top, and you play it with a uh a uh a Juen, uh a 10 in coin, which has a hole in the middle of it.

And it's kind of like a homemade Ouija board, but you're inviting Kakudi-san to come in and and talk to you. And even though it's a game that a lot of like middle schoolers and high schoolers were play, even in that game, if you do not correctly close it out and tell Kakudi-san goodbye and dismiss her, then you are inviting tons and tons of misfortune, if not death, upon your head. So, you know, even in other cultures where Ouija type of concepts uh are in play, even there you find the same type of dangerous edge to it.

For my own gratification, can you explain who Kikuri-san is?

Uh, she is a spirit. I don't know. There are a couple of like named spirits in Japanese. You've ha you have uh Hanako-san or Hanako-chan, who's the spirit of the toilet, who, if you invite her, then she will royally mess you up. Uh, you have Kuchisake Ona, the slit mouth woman, who will, you know, is an ancient ghost who always wears a mask now, and then she will try to meet young men along the road at night and ask them if they're pr if she's pretty or not. And if you answer wrong, then she'll either kill you or slit your hurt your mouth just like hers is.

So Kakuri-san is very much like that. I know there's a history to it, but I don't remember it off the top of my head.

Have there been any horror movies made about the uh that Japanese version of the Ouija board?

I there have been more than a few short horror tales. You can find that in like Tokyo Tales of Terror, which is one of the best. It's essentially Japan's version of the Twilight Zone, but the creep factor turned up to 11. That was actually, I showed one of the episodes on one of our uh Wednesday movie nights, Shadow Sitting by Their Feet. Mm-hmm that came from that series. But yeah, there's a few episodes in which uh Kakuri San is featured heavily in that.

Well, I will tell my two experiences with Ouija boards. First was that for some reason I got one for Christmas one year, when I was nine, ten, something like that, and did not take it seriously, did not have anything happen to me that seemed untoward, abnormal. It was just at that time in my life, just a silly game that was made a little better than other games, but I tired of it within a week. So now later on I started hearing all kinds of, you know, warnings about Ouija boards and what they can do to you.

I've told you about my my friend, and I'll use his last name because I have no idea where he is now, Gage, the one who was able to contact Father Martin. Mm-hmm. Well, he and I went to a a pretty big mensa party. Houston had a gifted children part of mensa, and there was a local academician who ran that that part of mensa. And so we go to this party, and there are these two kids there that are that are playing with the Ouija board. I estimate that they were ten, no more than eleven or so, and they were just giggling, you know, because the they were getting results from this board.

When we walked into the party, suddenly that changed. And the board over and over, according to these kids, started saying disgusting person, disgusting person, disgusting person. And at this point they're getting a little concerned. And so they say, Who? And the board says something along the lines of tall, fat, loud, tall, fat, loud, tall, fat, loud, which perfectly described Gage. He's still the most intelligent person I've ever met and absolutely once he got going on a topic, would not shut up.

So this spirit, I don't remember there being any name to the spirit, was apparently unhappy that Gage had come to the party. And so they took the time to start interrogating the spirit, trying to get information. And the most bizarre things came out of this of this session, you know, saying that I I was a spirit that once existed on Earth, but now I exist somewhere around Jupiter. Very, very strange things for them to say. And then finally, finally, Gage says, remember, these are 10 or 11-year-old kids. Gage says, Okay, here's a question for you. This big southern accent.

Tell me what the universe is. No time at all. Planchet starts moving around, and the answer it gives from a 10 or 11-year-old kid, two little I think it was a boy and a girl, was the universe is love and indifference. And at that point, I'm thinking, okay, 10, 11-year-old kid telling me that the universe is love and indifference. I'm getting, you know, Nietzsche-level philosophy from 10-year-olds, time to shut this down. So I said, Hey Gage, don't you think we should probably shut this down? And the kids, of course, were not wanting to stop this at all.

They were they were wanting to continue. I said, Look, they're not our kids. Let's tell their parents and let's get out of here. Which is what we did. I didn't know anything about the goodbye, I didn't know anything about, you know, the various rules of the Ouija board. But when I've got a board manned by a 10-year-old telling me that telling me that the universe is love and indifference, that gets my attention. Yeah, I can't say they'll blame you on that one. Holy crap. Yep. That's how I ended up feeling about it. I haven't touched one since then.

There was a there was a time when George Norrie was going to do a Ouija board session on his show. And he got thousands and thousands of letters and faxes and emails and phone calls begging him not to do the show. And at the end, he finally said he wasn't going to. Who is this now? George Norrie. He was the Oh, oh gosh, the quack. The idiot who took over for George Bell. Art Bell. And he really was nowhere near. Look, Art Bell was a genius. Yes, he was.

I mean, there was just something about him that over the years he had developed this ability to get the very best possible information he could out of anyone. And and I I could you can tell in his voice that he's fully aware he's talking to someone who's just straight up lying, or is a total crackpot. But he played it straight always. I don't remember him ever saying something like, you know what, you're just full of crap. We're gonna end the show.

Yeah. In fact, he had several more than a few guests that you know would always try to push his buttons, and it never worked. It was he was a very calm and collected individual. Now I've uh you know, I I never had the chance to listen to Art Bell when I was growing up or when I was in college, uh, wasn't even aware that it was a thing, but I have been rapidly catching up with most of the shows that I can find on YouTube now and been listening to them for a couple of years, and they're fascinating.

But then I was like, wow, let's take a let's take a listen to the modern incarnation of uh Coast to Coast. And I have walked away either enraged or just embarrassed that me there was this one individual who went on and was claiming that the war of the Nephilim was still ongoing, and oh, by the way, I'm also an engineer and I'm about to do a hollow earth experiment. I I was so angry, I'm like, nope, I will never listen to this crap again. It was awful.

Right. You didn't want to waste your time with utter silliness. Exactly. Well, I'm going to put myself in the category of I find Ouija boards, I mean, I guess there's nothing fundamentally evil about the cardboard and the plastic and the the little glass window, but I think it's the sort of thing that entities that have negative intention toward mankind can use to bring those negative intentions about. And I don't touch them. I wouldn't allow one to be in my house, and I'd sure be disappointed if my sons allowed one to be in their houses.

Completely agree. In fact, in uh I had both uh Josh B93 and his father, Father Birdsong, as guests uh on our podcast, and it was they both went and got permission to investigate a family member's house in which they had brought in a young girl who their daughter, the what this family's daughter was friends with, to stay with them, and they found a Ouija board, and you know, a whole bunch of like weird stuff was happening. You can listen to those episodes if you want to hear more.

However, when they try when the family tried to burn the Ouija board, they could not do it, and so they finally just threw it away. Father Martin always talked about the middle plateau and opening doors that you don't know the rules around, that you don't know how to close. It just it does not it does not seem to me like a really good idea.

Well, I know that there are many, many parents now who wouldn't even take the spiritual aspect of it into account. Correct.

Oh, Johnny wants a Ouija board. Yeah, sure. They've got him at Walmart.

Well, and I don't think that parents that bought it for their kids fifty years ago took spiritual aspect of it into account either. I don't think they thought of it as that kind of thing.

Yeah, they just thought of it as a silly game that kids could play.

Yeah, I mean that's really a post-exorcist perspective on it, I think, that it became this super dangerous tool. True. At the same time, I don't think you can dispute that there have been people that have had problems from them, and I wouldn't have one. I think I think it is a risky proposition to to play around with.

Well, I think we're all agreed on the fact that we're not going to be doing any Ouija board sessions. Uh on either Southern Demonology or Trailer Trash Terrors or anywhere that that David is.

Definitely. I have a question before we go for further.

Yes.

Uh JJ, you mentioned the Estes method being as risky uh or something along those lines as a Ouija board. Can you explain why? First off, explain what it is. Because I don't know.

That's a really good point. The Estes method, and this is I have never done this, so I can't claim direct knowledge. I first heard about this actually when interviewing Paranormal Will, where a person will put on noise canceling headphones, they will play white noise through them, and then people will be in a circle around them and ask questions, and then question the answers are supposed to well up inside of the individual, even though they cannot hear anything, and then they will begin to speak these answers that are coming from some unknown source.

To me, and I actually brought this up, could you know, could this be dangerous? And even you know, Will had stated that this seemed to be like a really great avenue for a possessing spirit to be able to travel along, and I couldn't see a reason why that would not be the case. I mean, it's kind of the exact same principle of you are leaving yourself open, you're in front of a doorway, and you never know what's going to come out of it.

Now, I've had the chance of talking with the demon folklorist, who is a wonderful guest, and I think her interpretation of this concept of doorways was a really great one. You know, it's not that there's a demon just always waiting out there somewhere, waiting to get you. It's more the fact of probability that the more doors that you open, the more doors that you allow to remain open, the greater the chance of something that you do not want crossing that threshold is.

Okay. So I think I I get the why. The Estes method as uh I have used and and have seen used before was not using a white noise generator. Uh-huh.

It was using a ghost box. Which is a frequency sweep uh radio uh device, right? It's picking up radio signals. And the intention there is to isolate the person listening to the responses in the ghost box from the person asking or people asking the questions. So the person giving the response does not have any idea what the questions are, therefore they cannot interpret the responses through the radio frequency suite within that context. And I've not viewed that as a dangerous activity, right? That's no different than listening to it uh through a speaker.

What you're doing is is trying to uh protect the integrity of the answers by not letting the person know what the questions are.

Yeah, and I would say that is a much safer way of going about it because you're not ri you don't have a person who is just sitting there exposed. Rather, you're letting that conduit of answers be a spirit box. And I would say that is a much safer way of going about it. I'll I like that method a heck of a lot. Better than the other ways that I've heard that to be practiced.

Yeah, I think that makes sense.

Well, sometimes I feel like a p a coward and sometimes I feel wise. But I'm very, very protective of my mind. I don't drink anything. I haven't had any alcohol except communion wine since I was 19 years old. I won't use any kind of illicit drugs, I won't take any medications without having a doctor tell me very clearly why I need to be taking that medication. But after seeing the the ten-year-old boy tell me that the universe is made of love and indifference, I don't want to open my mind up at all for anything to get in there to compete with me.

I can understand that and I actually completely agree. I have never I mean besides nicotine and caffeine, I do have never done any drugs to alter my state of mind. When I was in college, I drank a few times. And when I did, and I got drunk or very drunk, which are only a handful, I would always like think, okay, another hour and I'll be back to normal. And I always thought of myself that I'm truly a citizen of Hobbes Leviathan. That would be always be the last thought in my head for some strange reason.

And I've had a few drinks since then, but never to the point of even being close to inebriated. And uh yeah, I mean, to this point, I mean, to this day, if I have a beer a year, it's usually only in a social situation.

So I want to go back to Hobbes. Were you thinking you were existing in a state of nature?

No, I thought that I was being completely selfish because you know the the people that in order to escape a state of nature, they created a living, breathing monster that would never allow them back to that you know, nasty, brutish, and short experience. And so to me, I mean Hobbes viewed that as a good thing. I have never taken that same viewpoint. I've always viewed, you know, it's either you're damned if you do or you're damned if you don't.

And to me, to be, you know, to create such a living anathema that controlled your lives completely was not just an act of desperation, but it was an act of pure selfishness. And for some reason, I equated me being in that state to being one of just absolute selfishness.

So that's fairly insightful. And the number that comes up is 52, and that is Hollow Earth.

I think I just made my feelings abundantly clear on my conversation with uh coast to coast AM. I think it's utter bullshit.

Yes, I'm gonna go with Utter BS2. David I mean, we should dig some holes. Are you a descending voice?

Or I have no idea. I I I do think that there are some interesting uh cave uh stories, but I don't know about a hollow earth story.

So well there there you can do the the equivalent of a CAT scan on the earth using seismic methods, and it ain't hollow. There are some incredibly extensive cave systems.

Absolutely. And some of the like I I watched the uh SciShow YouTube channel because they always have some like really quirky kind of information that comes out. But yeah, I mean, there are some amazing caves. Like there was one that was found in I think it was Mexico, and turned to find out that they were, you know, they were hoping to use this for a uh a power generator, I believe, but once they got down there, they realized it was you know like 150 degrees in temperature, and it's because they're of these amazing crystals that are growing, and they're massive.

They're I've seen them huge amethyst crystals that are 12 feet tall. Gigantic yes, crazy. And they were trying to actually remove them and drain the water that was down there, and they'd have to wear, you know, uh hazmat materials to uh because you can't be down there for that long, and they had to be completely sealed because of the it would actually like draw the uh moisture out of your lungs and you would suffocate while in the air. It was just crazy stuff until they realized, nope, we can't do any of this, and they just shut the whole thing down.

It just gets to be a place that grows beautiful crystals. Exactly.

Now, have you guys seen the uh series called Hellier?

Sounds really familiar, but so it's on Amazon.

Greg and Dana Newkirk and and a handful of other guys, actually one of the guys who I believe created the Estus method um from the Stanley Hotel. But they have it's a great first of all, it's a fantastic series. There's two out two seasons of it. Uh it's really well done, it's well filmed and and uh it's sort of like a perfect for paranormal researchers and stuff we really get into. But caves come up in that a lot. And they talk about the cave systems in Kentucky and how extensive and massive they are and all the stories around the things coming in and out of these caves.

Very, very interesting.

What do they say comes in and out of the caves?

Well, the the the premise of the show is that they've got this the he had a paranormal investigation team when he was younger, and years after they stopped doing it, he gets this email from a guy that wants him to come investigate these goblins that are that come out of this cave in in this guy's backyard. And there's there's a whole lot to the story and there's some interesting things, but stuff that involves these caves are possibly extraterrestrial.

Wow.

Possibly aliens. They they talk about a uh Kentucky goblin case that was back in I can't remember, uh 50s or something.

So the McMinnville case.

What's that?

McMinnville.

Yeah, that sounds right. So uh, you know, very some similar uh similarities between what that case and what they were talking about. And but yeah, there's there's all this all this activity that is supposed to be in these caves and it it's an interesting show. It's definitely worth a watch. It's one of the things one of the shows more paranormal shows that I've enjoyed most over the past, you know, five, six years was was watching that.

I'd like to use that as a jumping off point for a conceptual set of thoughts that I have, if you guys don't mind. Go for it, sure. Okay. It has to do with the way that academia and the mainstream media deals with average citizens. So you've got the McMinnville case where these people who've lived in rural Kentucky for a long time, they've been their entire lives. They've been hunters, they've been fishers, they know the animals, they've been fishermen, they know that area. They know the fauna that's there. And they're not idiots.

You know, they're people who are fully capable of carrying on a very complex conversation and they know the world. But it doesn't take very long at all for the investigators, for the mainstream media, for academia to say, well, these are a bunch of and essentially what they're saying is these are a bunch of ignorant yokels who are seeing either bard owls or sand cranes. And they went nuts when they saw these bard owls and sand cranes and behaved in a way that they've never behaved any other time in their life. And thus they totally dismiss what these very intelligent people have to say.

Now they're gonna say, well, how can you say they're intelligent? Because I've talked to them. You know, so I I've told you, I mean, I used to be I was in Mensa in Houston. This means nothing, but I you know, qualify for triple nine, kind of push Sigma four. And what I found over time was, yeah, these guys are brilliant when it comes to standardized tests, but when it comes to understanding life, man, a lot of these guys are total doofuses. And then I would go and I would go out west of Houston, I would and I made some friends with a number of the rice farmers out there, you know, yokels.

And I found that they were extremely good at understanding the complexities of of life, of how people live, of how people interact. And they weren't stupid at all. So it really irritates me when I see people insult this family in Kentucky, this McMill this McMinnville family. Because I can guarantee you they're not yokels, and they're not the kind of people who are easily lured into a state of hysteria.

I completely agree. I mean, uh it's actually kind of the same thing when you are dealing with either paranormal topics or you are dealing with anything possibly extraterrestrial, and then you throw academia into the mix. There is such a stigma against anything that is not a mainstream concept that you will not find any serious, you know, investigation or uh experiments being done against them and because people are afraid of losing their tenure.

Here they're afraid of losing their reputation in the academic world, which is a very real thing, and I can understand that. But the fact that we are just as biased and prejudiced, even though we live in a quote unquote scientific world where we won't even entertain the idea that other things might be out there, it's just kind of patently ridiculous.

Well, I mean, probably the thing that I spend more time thinking about than anything else is epistemology. How do I know what I know? How did I get that to that point? What are the skills that allow me to gain that knowledge and integrate it with other other pieces of knowledge to come up with new concepts? And I I found a long time ago that it doesn't really make a lot of sense to limit my data set.

Have you ever read Sight and Zeit, Be In a Time, Heidegger's, uh, Magnum Opus?

No, I've never been a I I I I'll have to admit that I never took the time to sit down and read Heidegger.

It is an effort. Um, you essentially he essentially created an entire set of lingo in order to examine being. And it is a pain in the ass to get through. Well, I remember I was in governor school and a uh one of the teachers there told us that yes, this is the most complex book that you will ever read. And I'm like, okay, challenge accepted. I gotta look at this bad boy. Went and checked it out and like, yep, no idea what in the world's going on here. I actually had a uh an older professor in college teach a course in Heideggerian linguistics just to get a handle around it.

But once you've got that terminology down, I mean, even though he was a uh a Nazi, and I hate that, I mean, it's it's such a shame that the last great master philosopher of our age held such repugnant concepts, but every single bloody page of that book holds such a wealth of information, it is staggering. Like, and you can literally spend two hours on like two pages and just try to dig to digest the information that comes out of that. Yeah, I have yet to read all of it, but I've gotten through a substantial bit in my life, and yeah, it is it is a truly amazing thing.

Same thing for Carl Bart, if you want to switch to the theology side of the house with his church dogmatics, but I'd like to there was a period of time in my life when I felt a challenge to go through those sort of books.

I can remember wading through Wittgenstein, spending several months and being happy that I had done that. So, yeah, that's probably something I need to do. I love Wittgenstein, by the way. Yep, I had no particular problem getting into that mode of thinking.

Yeah, his concept of language games is uh, oh god, I I I fell in love. I I love I hate to admit it, but I really do love postmodern philosophy. I'm not saying I agree with it all, but yeah, I mean, if you apply postmodern concepts, then you could really see how the universe is truly indifferent to everything. And then you mix in the fact how you know quantum physics is it's very different than classical physics because classical to physics it is deterministic and quantum physics is entirely probabilistic.

I mean, you take those two things and you try to wrap your head around it, and you're like, hmm.

Okay, now we've lost half our audience. Yeah, sorry, sorry. So so it's time for F9 again. Unless you guys are getting tired because I'm having a blast. No, no, no.

Keep going. Okay. Although Dave is probably gonna be like, what the frick.

Okay. I'm just trying to think of authors that I've read. You know, let's see, Stephen King, Tom Clancy. Those were really tough, the big long books, Robert Jordan, you know, but I've never been a Jordan fan.

JJ, that was exactly what I was gonna say. I I've just never been able to get into Robert Jordan.

You either love it or you don't. I hate the guy who picked it up, but Stevenson? Sanderson, Brandon Sanderson. Sanderson, thank you. I cannot stand him. I I don't know.

I thought Sanderson did a fair job of finishing the series. I did not enjoy Sanderson's writing on his own. I I tried to read one of his books, I forget which one, but uh I didn't enjoy it as much. But Robert Jordan put so much detail into his stories that it turned some people off. It's like, well, I could have written that book that was a thousand pages long and probably about four hundred pages. But I enjoy the detail because it just helps flush out the universe in your mind.

You like diving down into that complex world.

Absolutely. And you know, I read all it was fifteen books, and I've read them multiple times, and I I really enjoy the the story, the characters, the concept of how magic works in that universe, and and even the you know, the way it ends. It was it was very good. But not everybody likes the all the detail that's in those books.

Well, all right, let me let me ask you about two other series of books. First off, a book that was written by one author and then the series was completed by another author, his son. That's the Dune series. Okay, so the last Dune book by Herbert was what? Chapterhouse Dune? Yeah, I think maybe. Yeah, it doesn't really matter. But that was what, book number six or seven?

Yeah, I I think I may have started Chapter House, and that may have been the point to where I just it didn't have the excitement of the first three or so books. The the first three books just drew me in. And then after that it just kind of got I got lost in the story. It wasn't as it didn't grab me as much.

Well, my favorite part of Dune was God Emperor of Dune. And most people who are big Dune fans really hate the the books done by his son, Brian Herbert. And I don't. I I I like them. I th I think he did a pretty good job. Now there's some there's some silliness in there, but man, I can't think of any big sweeping fantasy sci-fi novel that doesn't have some silliness. Sure.

JJ Noon Man? No, I am not. I I'm never in I did like the the soundtrack that came out from the sci-fi series in which they had done that soundtrack is amazing, but in terms of the books, I've never bothered to read them. I've been always much more of an epic fantasy kind of person.

Okay. All right. So then what about the uh Atlas Shrugged with Magic and Dragons, which is Terry Goodkind?

I've read the first probably four books of that series. Mm-hmm.

And and they were good. I forget why I stopped reading those. Uh I may have been waiting for the next one to come out and it took too long. I don't know.

Well, I I can tell you one thing about Goodkind. He was he was like this. Uh I think he there would be a book that was just amazing. You could tell that you know his heart and soul and his mind and was in there. And then the next book would be, well, I had a booked you August 7th. There was a contract. I had to get that paycheck. There was a contract I had to fulfill. And and I found that extremely frustrating.

Yeah, I I read the the Shonara series way back in the day. Uh-huh. They were fine. I I detest anything Ayn Rand. I mean, the the fact that her stolen philosophy is just absolute bullshit to begin with. But yeah, no, I was always more of a Piers Anthony person.

Okay.

I've read everything, especially Xanth. I think that's where my love of puns came from. Everything he wrote was just well, it was either like sexually deviant or it was amazing. And I don't there was never like a um a middle ground for him. Well what about Heinlein? I read one of his books, which was uh the the cat who goes through what whatever the the yeah I oh that was like the worst of his books.

Yes, you you didn't you didn't choose a good one. Uh no, I I uh I like the idea of grokking, which grokking is a wonderful idea.

But everything else was just sheer idiotic. I'm like, nope, don't like this at all.

Well, I started high in line with I guess what probably most people do, Stranger in a Strange Land. And then he was really good there for a few years. Had some really strange sexual ideas, but I could put up with that. But when he wrote the number of the beast, I remember which okay, so the the concept is that the number of the beast is six six six. Well, in his world that means six to the sixth power to the sixth power, which is some incredibly massive number. And that's the number of accessible parallel universes.

And of course, he had a machine that would let you jump between these universes, and all kinds of adventures could ensue. But man, he got weird. He he was talking about what he spends met a lot of that time talking about. Incest and how that's a good idea because you can concentrate genetic talent.

So dear lord.

I ended up throwing the book across the room.

Well, there has been actually a video that has been popping up on TikTok all over the place of some random politician idiot saying that, oh yeah, there's nothing morally wrong with incest. And I'm like, nope, don't want to hear that whatsoever.

Nope. Nope. That that's that's uh I'm sorry, I'm just gonna make a moral judgment. Incest is wrong.

Accurate. And I come from a state in which marrying your first cousin is still perfectly legal and acceptable.

And I'm like at 14.

Yeah, I'm like, nope, don't want that. My favorite author of all time, still to this day, is L. E. Modessett Jr. Alright. Give me fur give me more. I I don't know this author.

It's a good author.

The Magic of Recluse is probably his most famous series, but he's written everything from high fantasy to very in-depth science fiction. But the thing I love about all of his books, and they all could he kind of suffers the same problem that other writers do, where it's essentially the same character in every single book, no matter how different they are. But oh my god, he goes into such minute details on the political philosophies, the realities of how nature is.

It's just the intricacies and how people have to be able to read between the lines and to be able to grasp all of this hidden knowledge that comes up. It it's kind of amazing. And I I just I love every single book about those. I I I gobble those up every single time.

Well, okay, once again, that's a new author I need to put on my list. Okay, I'm gonna head toward the F9 again, guys. Go for it. Uh, and I want to let the audience know that that will be the last excursion deep into Nerdland. We will uh we'll stick to the topics more.

So you think. So we think.

I guess I could I could be thwarted in the design. It's good to have goals. Good to have goals. Okay, F9 time. Okay, the number that came up is 96, which is teleportation, about which I have almost no meaningful knowledge or anything astounding to say.

I don't either. I mean, there was I could always go into some of the incredibly pedantic arguments that some of our friends would have around Star Trek, you know, teleporters and all that kind of good stuff. Or the other thing would be the recent Nobel Prize that was granted for local realism and you know how entangled particles can it doesn't matter how far away from our each other they are. They if you measure the spin of one, then the spin of the other is gonna be in the exact opposite direction almost 100% of the time. But yeah, that's about all I know of any kind of like teleportation.

Yeah, I'm gonna I'm with you on that one. I do know those two things, but it's not a deeply interesting subject to me.

What about what about the teleportation of objects? So in you know, some paranormal cases, and especially in cases with potential demons, you have objects disappear and appear elsewhere. The idea of when exorcisms happen sometimes people spit up objects that came from somewhere. So there's some sort of teleportation involved in that.

Please talk about that more.

Well in cases where people have a more serious haunting or oppression or something along those lines. Sometimes you have stuff just disappear. Right. You know, I put my keys here, they're not here anymore. I put them there five minutes ago. I know I put them there. I don't know where they went, there's nobody else here. Oh, now they're on my dresser. You know, that type of stuff does seem to happen. To be fair, in my case, I just have a terrible memory. So stuff can teleport around to me all the time and I just wouldn't remember.

Well, right. I mean, I I'm the you know, if you the old cartoonist version of the absent-minded professor, well, absolutely.

I have the most fascinating case in point of that. So my dad was hugely into black magic, something that my mom did not agree with in any way, shape, or form. But anyway, uh they had just recently gotten married, they came in and they put the marriage certificate on top of what she's always described as a book of spells that he had. Overnight, that certificate was gone, it was never found again, and at that point, she banned anything even remotely similar from being in the house for the short time they were married.

But yeah, I I have uh she has told that story to me time and time again, and I do not doubt a single word of it.

May I ask you some questions? Yeah. Where does one become a practitioner of black magic in Tennessee? Are we talking witched covens? Are we talking folk magic? What are we talking about here?

I don't know the specifics. Now, he was not from Tennessee. Okay, he was actually from Washington State. Okay, but he uh was stationed at Fort Campbell, which is near Clarksville, Tennessee.

Okay.

So that's how she got she came to know him, and after they were married, she actually went back to Washington State. So I think that's where that influence came from. But again, uh this was a long time ago. I had like maybe 15 conversations with my father before he passed away.

So well, I was thinking about the uh and this uh don't think less of me, but what I was thinking about was the movie Pumpkin Head. Have you seen the movie Pumpkinhead? Uh, not in a very long time. I did not watch that one. Pumpkinhead is a a folk demon of vengeance. And there's a farmer, and his son is run over and killed by who else but drunk rowdy teenagers. And so the he's played by Lance Hendrickson, does a great job.

And so he goes to the local, I don't know, uh, herbalist, witch lady, this ancient woman who lives up in the hills, and if you give her what she wants, she will summon Pumpkinhead for you. And of course, her her cabin is just like you would see in any of these movies, it's full of dead animals hanging around in a cauldron steaming and this kind of thing. But it does get across the whole idea of folk magic pretty well. I just wondered if maybe that's where your father had come from.

No, no, he did not. But that's a very valid question. Because I have known a lot of older generation people where I'm from who you know it's not it goes well beyond just folk tales and remedies. It goes quite a bit further than that. And uh I have seen some things that I still cannot explain to this very day. Would you care to tell me about that? If we did, we'd probably be here for a lot longer. Let's hit the F9 key instead. Okay. I'm trying to be good for once.

All right, let me ask you a question. Is that a uh a permanent deferral or a temporary deferral? Temporary. Okay. So I can write down that at some point JJ will talk about folk magic and the things he's seen. Okay. All right, F9 key. And I promise you I'm not cheating. I'm actually letting it do the work.

Oh, I believe you.

Alright, all right, looking away, letting go. 28. Dragons.

Oh, I love dragons. Me too. So I I will start if you don't mind. Please do. My mom, me, we were so I was dirt poor growing up. Uh, I mean, I still remember going to certain places and grabbing huge blocks of cheese, which in later in life I'd realize was, you know, government handout cheese. So, you know, it we didn't live a fancy life, but my mom worked her ever-living ass off to provide because it was her and my grandmother and myself.

I love the stories of how your mother and your grandmother raised you and how hard they worked.

It yeah, it's it's still kind of amazing to this very day, honestly. But uh, my mom, she, if there was something that I really wanted, like she would work overtime, she would bust her ass to do it. And I didn't really realize that, which is still one of the things that fills me with with more than a little bit of shame thinking about it today. However, there was a book, uh series of books that were actually produced by again, Time Life, and it was all about dragons and mythological creatures.

And I saw an advertisement for that in TV, and oh god, I lusted for that, and she bought them for me, and every few months another edition would arrive at the house, and I would pour over these things. But one of the best books was on dragons, and I still have every single one of these things.

Uh, but it taught you everything from you know how to distinguish the age of an Asiatic dragon, the various forms that Western dragons took shape of, the lindworms that Marco Polo supposedly encountered while you know roaming China, they were just filled with such amazing details that I mean, I think that's what truly got me into epic fantasy, that and Piers Anthony Zanth books, uh reading them when I was younger. So do I think they really existed? No. Do I think that they ever existed? No.

But the sheer majesty and the amount of lore that exists upon them today is it is truly staggering, and is just one of the most even if they never did, just the fact that we have breathed such life into these imaginary constructs is something I will always be grateful for.

David, your turn.

Well, I I think dragons are awesome, but I've yet to hear of any uh anything that makes me think that yeah, there's there's definitely some truth behind it. I wish there was. And and I'm open, but I haven't also done any real searching either. So I don't know. Maybe.

Well, my approach in China, apparently, there are still people who truly believe in the physical reality of dragons. And there are certainly a lot of people who believe in sort of the spiritual reality of dragons. And I have seen photos of found dragon skeletons that have been put back together, and so there will be this I don't know, eighty foot long thing that looks kind of like a large snake with with legs, which I think is probably put together from lots of different animals, lots of different fossil finds, but also really interesting. And man, do they ever make great movies?

That is accurate. I mean I mean, so a couple of my favorite movies are Dragonslayer, which is n which is now an old movie. Yes.

But really well done. Yep. I don't know. I think that I think that movie stands up even in the effects area. But man, in the story area, it's just fantastic. You know, and you when you start to realize how accurate they got that. I mean, what they're talking about is England when it was still dominated by the Romans. And man, they got that right, and just a great dragon. And then um Reign of Fire, where they find the they're digging down below London for a new subway or something.

They wake up this dragon, and that dragon re-enters the world, and apparently all dragons are constantly pregnant, and pretty soon the world is completely overrun with dragons. And then they they have this great, great scene in a castle where there are all these orphans who have been orphaned by dragons, and the two people who are running the the castle, one of them is Christian Bale, they're doing the no Luke, I'm your father uh play. They panda these kids, and this they're just a hundred percent mesmerized by this play. So anyway, dragons make great movies. I have never seen Rain of Fire.

It's a good movie.

I will have to pick that out. I have to go back and watch Dragonslayer now. I haven't seen that in years and years.

I haven't seen it in at least 20 years.

But I know I watched it multiple times.

Oh, yeah, same year. Well, on my Amazon movie list, I've got you know, they're just side by side. Have you know so I go back, it's it's they're for me now they're three o'clock in the morning can't sleep sort of things where I want to watch something that's constantly fun.

Completely understand that female. Yep.

Okay, back to F9. I guess I should put my glasses back on so I can see what comes up.

You have to come up with a really cool sound that it makes while it's searching for the numbers.

I've already got it. Okay, cool. All right, let's see. What did it come up with? 77. And what is 77? Oh, I kind of like this one. People from nowhere. A la Casper Hauser and the Man from Tar Ed, and various other times in history when someone has shown up and nobody really has any idea where they came from.

Yeah, I've always been fascinated by the various documentaries that come up on these individuals. I don't really have an opinion one way or the other. I think they're just kind of interesting concepts. But I mean, to tack on to those older stories, the not just the fact that people come from nowhere, but the fact that so many people go nowhere that they just wind up missing, and the sheer amount of them. Have y'all ever seen the series of um I think it's two movies called Um Missing uh 911 or 411?

411. I haven't watched it, but I've I've heard of it.

This is the David Pilates stuff. Yeah, it's really good. I haven't read the books, but I did uh I first ran across him listening to his uh Art Bell conversation. Really compelling stuff, and of course, he would never say one way or the other if what he's talking about involves anything, you know, related to cryptids or the paranormal or what it may be, he allows the audience to come up to their own conclusions, but some of the stuff in which he goes over is just absolutely compelling.

Well, that is fascinating. And if you spend as much time hiking and in the woods, I mean, my sons and I have hiked literally thousands of miles, and we have been in places that were that are so remote that if you were to go off the trail twenty feet, you very well might not find your way back. And I I lived in constant fear of you know somebody just stepping off the trail to to urinate and not telling us, and then suddenly we're minus a person. Never happened, but it sure was something that I was afraid of.

I could imagine. I would mean especially if I had my own flesh and blood with me, I would be petrified of that.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Do you remember a I don't know if it was an it was if it was an outer limits or uh it was one of those spooky shows from the late fifties, early sixties. Mm-hmm.

Where the opening of the show is talking about how many people disappear every year. And then it switches to these kids growing mushrooms in their basement. And apparently it's all part of a some sort of uh alien plot to use the mushrooms to take over the minds of the kids and to abduct the parents. That's not ringing any bells. Okay. David, any bells with that at all?

No, but uh but I like the story. Keep going.

Well, first off, I've got to find out which one it was. But I remember I remember just how creepy it was. You know, and that the father has the son, he's trying to to get him to do things, you know, like, ah, can't you play baseball or football? No, Dad, I want to grow these mushrooms in the basement. And so he does. And the father begrudgingly puts up with this, and then I can remember at the end of the movie, the father comes down into the basement, and this really creepy looking kid, you know, this with this bizarre, haunted smile, is saying, Oh, you're hungry, aren't you?

You'd like some of these mushrooms, wouldn't you, Dad? You're hungry, aren't you? And of course you get the feeling that dad is doomed. And uh so yeah, it was it was way creepy. A lot of a lot of those 50s, 60s anthology series were pretty dang creepy.

I was just looking it up. There is a uh a Ray Bradbury series.

Maybe that's what it was, yeah.

That and it was in the uh 89 Boys raised giant mushrooms in your cellar. Well, I think there was something before 89. Oh, I'm sure it is. I I've never even heard of this one, so I'll only have to go look these up.

So since we've discussed Ray Bradbury, and I've just decided that I don't care if this thing it's kind of a it's kind of a fractal podcast. That's one way of putting it, yeah. So it's like a drunkard's walk. You really don't know where it's gonna go next. It's going somewhere. It's going somewhere. But the um one of the scariest dang things that I've ever seen was a Ray Bradbury theater called The Jar. Have you guys seen The Jar? No. Don't think so.

Okay. One of my first season podcasts is you know, one part of the podcast is The Jar. Me just reading this Ray Bradbury story. I I kind of allow myself one piece of fiction by somebody else per season. But it's a really, really scary show. Okay, it's you've got this very unsophisticated man who's lonesome and not very popular, and he's married to the queen of all shrews. I mean, this woman is horrible. She belittles him, she insults him, constantly harps on how stupid he is, and she has affairs with other men.

Well, he goes to a carnival and he sees this jar that's got something floating in it, and he doesn't have any idea what it is, but it really fascinates him. And so he makes a deal with the carnival owner to buy that jar. And of course the carnival owner sells him sells him the jar for much more than it's actually worth, and then he takes it back home and he starts showing it to his neighbors and the people who live in that little town. And pretty soon he's the best entertainment in town.

So every night he'll put the jar out, and all these people will come and they'll speculate about what's in that jar. And there are things like, Oh, it's a part of the early part of creation. That's something that God himself touched. And then there's a lady saying, Oh, my baby disappeared into the swamp when he was six. I think that's what's left of him. And so the wife, Thede, who loves to torture this man, becomes jealous of the fact that now he's popular in the town.

So she goes with the guy she's having an affair with to the carnival, and he talks to and talks to the um the carnival owner, and finds out that of course the jar is just full of string and wire and paper mache and excelsior and different things they've put in there, and takes away his joy of being able to show the jar.

And Thede is always they have this little game they've Play where if he wants to have marital relations, he will say something like here giddy kiddie gidddy giddie giddy gitty Apparently he does at least get marital relations occasionally but he does this and then the next day the jar is somewhat different because it contains Thede's head. That'll work in the TV show they they care, they notice that oh that's Thede. She's in the she's in the jar. But in the original story, it's just like, well, of course.

Anything that ancient and that powerful and that touched by God, it can change as it wants. So it looks like Thede. We're still gonna come every night and talk about what's in the jar. Nice.

And it's it's just that Ray Bradbury creepy feel. And he was he was the very best at that. Alright, so that's another assignment. You need to either watch the watch the jar, read the story, or listen to that podcast.

I will definitely find I will watch the show and I will listen to the podcast. W what did this start out as?

People from nowhere.

People from nowhere.

And that was a long meandering path to a head in a jar.

Well, can you think I mean I can think of a couple of people from nowhere. There's Caspar Hauser, who apparently was somebody, you know, part of European royalty, who had been hidden away in a castle for a long time, barely knew how to read, and once he came back on the scene, somebody showed up and killed him. And that's that's historically known. And then the one that they tried out all the time is the uh the man from Tored. Yep. Uh yeah, you're you're a Japanese guy. That's probably a story that gets passed around over there.

Not really. I've I mean it could be. Uh I've I'll always have just heard about that uh from random documentaries for some strange reason.

Well, it's um it's not a very good story. You know.

It's a man who shows up at I don't remember which airport he he comes to, but anyway, he comes to one of the big airports in Japan and shows his passport, and of course he's from this country called Tared. And they say, Tared? That's not a Tared. And so they make him show where Tared is on a map. He shows them a place that would be in the real world equivalent to Andorra, and then they put him up in a hotel so they can figure out this this enigma and he's gone the next day. And that's the that's the end of the story. Yep. And I guess those are the only two instances of that I know.

Well, there's another I don't remember what people call this. I think it's something silver, but there was a man who showed up at a beach, and he had, you know, he was dressed in a suit, and he had taken his uh socks and shoes off, and he died while sitting on the beach, and no one knows where he came from. He had no identification on him. This became like a huge story for some bloody reason or another. Have you ever does that ring any bells? Just very vaguely. But that's the only other like case that I can think of along those grounds.

Well, there are people who exist in the world clearly, and it's unclear where they came from or how they became wealthy or educated or powerful. I mean, Sa St. Germain kind of fits into that category. Of I mean, wasn't that a situation where suddenly he was present in European courts and everybody was in love with him and he was amazing, but nobody could really figure out exactly where he came from? True.

Yeah, I have no idea. I you know, it seems like it's too easy for for people to change their lives, travel. I mean, it's not as easy now, but it years ago I can imagine it would be pretty easy to go somewhere and create a new life for yourself and seem like you came from nowhere.

Well, I think I think Gurdjieff kind of did the same thing, although he didn't claim to be immortal. So Okay, well we got some good uh side conversation on that one. The conversation itself wasn't that great. We are at one hour and fifty minutes and twenty seconds. I would suggest that we do one more. We find one that everybody really likes, so we can just ignore the rules. If we don't like it, we just go to the next one. Fair enough. Sounds like a plan to me. Okay, hitting F9. Number fifty-seven. It's like a bingo game. Loch Ness Critters. I don't think there's a lot of meat there.

I'm hitting F9. Unilaterally hitting F9.

Fair enough. Although I used to love the story of the Loch Ness monster, but Oh, I did too. Oh, me too. Yeah, me too.

All right, you guys want to talk about Loch Ness monsters?

Nope, that's as deep as that as that went. I love the story.

Yep. Although I I would say I still remember the one episode of Greatest American Hero where the Loch Ness monster ended the series or something like that. I just I still can picture that in my head, and I haven't seen that show since I was a little kid.

I never saw the show. But is he finds the Lochness monster? He's interacting.

They they think that there's nothing there, and he flies away, and then you see this thing erupt from the lock. Oh, okay.

Yeah, that's how it kind of ended, if my memory serves right. But again, this is probably going on like 38 years.

So I do remember one Art Bell episode where he had a guy on there who had a tooth, or what looked like a tooth, and he claimed that the Lochnest monster was a huge eel, an eel that never sexually matured, which is apparently in the eel world, what uh makes you stop growing. And so it just kept growing and growing and growing and growing and getting bigger and bigger. He had this tooth that was about, I don't know, three, four inches long, you know, sharp and pointed. It looked pretty formidable. But it turned out later to be the antler of a munjack deer.

Which I thought you want on me.

Okay. Number six from the random number generator is the Antichrist. Oh Lord. I mean, I I know you can talk about the Antichrist probably till about next Thursday.

I I can. However, see, to me, the book of Revelation is probably one of the most horribly abused books of the entire Christian New Testament. And that's saying a lot given how much torturous readings are given to either John or to Paul. But yeah, I I don't think we would have nearly enough time to address this one particular topic, at least to me.

Okay. Well, I think it's clear that at some time in the next foreseeable future, we need to do another one of these shows. Yes. And we probably need to I I mean, I'm assuming that if people listen to this show, they're gonna say, Man, I want to be a part of that. And they'll probably write to you or me and say, Hey, can you please bring me on the next paranormal rundown? I mean, actually, you could do an entire, you could make a podcast just entirely out of this.

And honestly, I would love to do that. I mean, w it's normally us three with maybe a few other people that show up to our Wednesday movie nights in our Discord server. And those are almost always the highlight of my week. Unless I'm like half asleep from being up late the previous night or something. But we have such amazing conversations about wacky and serious horror movies. It, you know, uh I I have loved every single bloody minute of this. Yeah, I agree with you.

Okay. Well, we have a good topic here, I think. It's topic number 83, and I'm just going to use one part of it instead of the entire topic, and that is satanic panic.

Oh dear lord. Man, you're bringing up like this is bringing out all the heavy hitters at the very end of the show. Well, I mean, we could we don't have to go through every bit of it. Oh no, I I I love the the topic. I mean, especially because I'm a big fan of uh Dungeons and Dragons, and I was actually hit with my own version of Satanic Panic because of my association with that game.

Okay. I believe, and if David doesn't disagree, that that's probably a really awesome story, and that we should conclude the show by JJ telling his story of being hit with Satanic Panic. So are you cool with that?

No, that's fine. I you know, I had my own being forbidden to do Dungeons and Dragons at the same time for that same reason. So no big long story there, but I'd like to hear it.

Dungeons and Dragons was much aligned in the 80s due to the entire what was it? The the student was belonged to the University of Michigan or something like that. Went down into the into the uh the steam tunnels and you know was lost, finally found, but there was an investigator who found some paraphernalia around Dungeons and Dragons and thought that you know he had invented this whole world and and that the game was to blame for him slipping into this alternate reality in his own brain. Of course, none of that was true.

However, that was enough for an entire group to come out and and try to misalign the game as being satanic and everything else. And of course, that only raised TSR's popularity by a good bit and thrust them truly into the limelight. But regardless, I began playing Dungeons and Dragons when I was in middle school, and it wasn't well ran. We were using, you know, uh the first the very first edition to do things, weird house rules. I mean, it was just kind of crazy, but yet it was such a wealth of monsters and undead and ghosts, and I absolutely loved every single thing about it.

I got really engrossed in it, tried to buy some of the source materials, and I remember my mom sitting me down one night and telling me that this is all of the devil, and if you continue to play it, then you will go to hell. And my mom is not the strict religious sort, and the fact that this came completely out of nowhere, it shocked me to my core. Like this is a woman who told me you can pick whatever religion you want.

I don't care, you know, just make sure that you're living by it and that you agree with it, and but yet to have this hard line come out, and I think some of it came from my dad's previous associations with black magic or whatever you may want to call it, but I think a fair bit of it also came out from this entire seepage of satanic panic from the 80s that welled up, and I was an unfortunate bystander that was caught in the in the crossfire of it. Did it stop me? No. I suddenly felt like an enhanced fear of it, but I refused to let that kill my passion.

And although in recent years I have not been able to play, well, because of the pandemic, and even before then, when I was living in another part of northern Virginia, I began playing again. There's uh two different gaming stores around me, and I went and I picked up a male stalker of all things, and uh had to stop because of his relentless communications, which is still just really bloody bizarre to me. Yeah, I want to get back into it. In fact, I've tried to start a group in the Discord server.

I really want to run a custom campaign that I've been developing off and on, set in one of the stranger domains of Ravenloft. But yeah, uh I always view that period as a really kind of strange anachronism of my childhood.

Well, my my brother played Dungeons and Dragons a lot. I never did. But I can see that the feeling that it would give you, you know, that incredibly rich world of more monsters than you can imagine and being able to make them interact. And you know, so I suppose if you were somebody with a great imagination, you could be a really good dungeon master. And I I did hear recently that there's some lawyer who has bought the old McMartin preschool, which was where a lot of this stuff seemed to be centered in terms of the press really going nuts. And he's trying to renew all that stuff.

Saying things like, you know, these kids really were put on a plane and flown into a mountain with a secret door. Just things that to me and I think probably to most people seem completely ridiculous. Amen. But it anyway. Well, uh JG, what have you thought about this evening?

It has I have always enjoyed branching conversations, and this was the best of both worlds. Where we had a little bit of structure, we had the ability to go off on random tangents as they came up, and overall it was just three good friends. We may not have ever met face to face, but by God, we get together every week and we have a blast, and we do, and this was just a fantastic playground in order to talk, hang out, and have a good time. I loved every single thing about it.

I did as well. Great list of topics, you know. Did a great job with that. Just you know, what a wide range of uh of things to talk about.

And well the list can grow. So if you've if I've left things off, you know, please send me those topics, and occasionally I'll run into something that's I haven't I didn't put that on the list yet. But now I I enjoyed this. I look, I just I'm sitting here just feeling smiling, feeling warm, feeling happy, feeling like you know, you don't have to be lonesome all the time if you're a mega nerd or an ultra geek or whatever you want to say. And I think there are probably more of us out there than we realize. Amen.

So, as a closing to the show, if you are listening to Southern Demonology, I suggest that you navigate to JJ's Discord server, become a member, meet some of the people there. It's one of the nicest groups of people I've ever run into. In fact, it's about the only place that I've been on the internet in the last, I don't know, five years where existing this long, it hasn't deteriorated into crazy people who hate each other. Because that is what Go ahead.

I am a no-drama kind of person. I like everything to be stayed and calm and friendly. The few times in which things have drama has erupted, it was quickly squashed, and it just stays the same, which is what I like.

It's a I think the Discord Server is a great place. I think it's a uh a real representation of JJ's personality and his mind. He made a podcast about one of the most implausible subjects. And people are finding that just because of his passion and his knowledge and the people that he brings on, it's extremely entertaining. I hope also that if you are Okay. I would also say that if you are on if you are listening to JJ's show, please take a few minutes and come and listen to Trailer Trash Terrors.

It's a totally different kind of show, but it also I think is pretty entertaining, pretty weird, and touches on some unusual topics.

And I I will actually add on to that. I had the pleasure of interviewing Victor back March of this year, something like that. Something like that. And it was not only one of the best interviews that I have ever been able to do, but Victor is actually the person who, after hearing his audio quality, really like made me kick up my own game. Because then I was using a little snowball microphone, had been for the past four something years, and yeah, actually like upgraded all of my audio equipment.

Not that I still sound, you know, anywhere near as good as what he does, but uh he was my inspiration for that. And after listening to his podcast, I mean you get to see creativity unchained. I'm much more dry, I'm much more academic, but uh Victor is just a wealth of creativity, and I cannot recommend his podcast enough.

Well, that's really nice of you to say, JJ. And uh it all comes from the heart, my friend. And David, thank you so much for being a part of this. I think we'll sign off, and I would say let's try to do this again, at least, you know, within the next two months, because we've only covered about 10 topics, and this will easily grow to 150 just from what we've talked about tonight. So, from Trailer Trash Terrors Headquarters, and from Southern Demonology Headquarters, I'd like to say thank you for listening, and good night to everyone.

And Victor, thank you for hosting this and putting this together. It was a fantastic idea. You're welcome, JJ.

I really enjoyed it as well. Thanks so much.

You're welcome, David. Okay, there's a silent. Uh, so I guess we're gonna say that's that's a wrap.

Thank you for listening to Southern Demonology. Find us online at Southern Demonology.com where you can find all of our social and podcasting links. Also, if you have a moment, please feel free to rate this podcast and leave any encouraging feedbacks that you may have. As always, I am JJ and it has been a pleasure getting to talk to you today.