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Episode 3: Yeh Cursed
64 Plays5 years ago
For episode three we take on cursed objects. Alanna covers some paintings that take "blood, sweat and tears" a little too literally, while Kelsey gives us reasons to get rid of any old dolls laying around the house. So look over your shoulder tomake sure you're alone and tune in for some truly creepy objects. View our website slideshow at your own risk! some of these dolls may cause discomfort.
Correction: I refer to a website in the cursed images portion incorrectly. I should have said ruin my week.com not ruin my day.
linktr.ee/castlesandcryptids Website: castlesandcryptidspod.squarespace.com
Tags: Robert the Doll, Annabelle, Okiku, Letta the Doll, The Crying Boy, The Anguished Man, The Hands Resist Him, Cursed images, Cursed Objects, Haunted Objects
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Transcript
Introduction to Cursed Objects
00:00:20
Speaker
You people are listening to Castles Encrypted. Welcome.
00:00:30
Speaker
Ooh, you poor people. What are you going to hear about today? Well, today's episode is called You Cursed and we're doing cursed objects. And mine's going to be like cursed paintings in particular. Yeah. And I'm covering cursed like dolls and haunted dolls.
00:00:56
Speaker
I mean, there is a shit ton to choose from really, when it comes to current things. The whole museum we were going to go see, thank you COVID. Like missing out on that. Like, I know it'll still be there, but the museum in Las Vegas, that is yes. Yeah. Yeah. But the Tim Burton portion.
00:01:22
Speaker
of the neon sign museum will never be there again. And that's like heartbreaking for me. That's true. That was a limited time dealio. Yeah, we were supposed to go to Vegas. It's fine. Yeah, we would have been there. What we would have been officially halfway through our vacation one year ago.
Missed Museum Experience
00:01:50
Speaker
Oh, it's March. It's St. Patty's Day today. Yeah, we were going to be there on St. Patty's Day, fucking drinking it up. Yeah, in Las Vegas. We were going to go to an Irish pub. But you know what? Now we won't be able to go back. Trump won't be even president, so that'll be good. Yeah, that'll be even better. All right, Vegas, we're coming at you. Yeah.
The Anguished Man Painting
00:02:18
Speaker
Have you ever heard of, this painting is called The Anguished Man? I hadn't. I haven't heard of a lot of haunted paintings. No, but I told you I was going to look these up. So you're going to hear typing every time she tells me a name of one of these. So are you ready? The Anguished Man? The Anguished Man, yes. And according to dreadcentral.com, it's the most haunted painting in the world. Oh, I don't like it.
00:02:48
Speaker
But is it? Is it? Looks like a bird. We don't like it. Okay, I backed out of the Google image search. Okay. Oh, yes, it's for your listening pleasure. It's a head and shoulders of kind of a screaming face. No, no hair, no real features. I mean, not unlike maybe the Scream, the famous painting.
00:03:15
Speaker
Uh, but I want to say Monet, but yeah, screaming is just big gaping eye holes. We'll put a picture on the website. Don't you worry. There's a gaping mouth. And the broad strokes also kind of like the, did I say Monet? Is it Van Gogh? Who does the scream? Ah, Edvard. Munch munch. That's it. I got it. Okay.
00:03:44
Speaker
Yeah, I really don't like this picture. Holy crap. Oh, my God. It's OK. Sorry, I got a little jumbled here. It is currently owned by a man named Sean Robinson. He apparently inherited it from his grandmother who told him it was cursed. It had been locked away in her attic. So when Sean was given the painting by his grandmother, his wife insisted that it be kept in the cellar as she wasn't amused at all by the creepy art.
00:04:13
Speaker
nor the story that came along with it. But it seems the anguished man did not want to be relegated to the cellar, and it wasn't long before a flood forced Sean to bring it into the house. Almost as soon as the painting was brought up, Sean claims that life for his family started to get real strange. So also alongside with the Annabelle doll, speaking of, and Dibbic box, which is also super haunted,
00:04:42
Speaker
The anguished man is considered as one of the topmost 10 haunted items in the world. Sorry, that was all from Dread Central as well. So the legend of the story is that it had been painted using a mixture of the paint and the artist's own blood. And he apparently committed suicide shortly after painting it. So that gives it a creep factor right there.
00:05:10
Speaker
Whether or not that part's true, hard to say. But gives it that ish. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So Sean was given the painting from his grandmother. But shortly after they acquired the painting, his family started to hear whispering and crying at night. Then they saw a shadowy figure. But other than that, there wasn't any real activity from it that I could find.
00:05:41
Speaker
Although having said that, the rights of the story have been bought by La Brea Pictures and they're optioning it into a movie. So we'll see how much they can zhuzh it up. Of course. Honestly, it's kind of a shallow dive. That's what I found. What else? The man that owns it has been named as an executive producer. So maybe I'll take the story with a little bit of grain of salt. Yeah.
00:06:10
Speaker
At one point it was supposed to be on like eBay or it had been listed on eBay at one point, an article had said, but now it's not at all. And he insists that it's locked away and not for sale. Of course not. Now he's going to make a movie about it and make hopefully a couple million. And then he'll try and sell it. Exactly. I don't know.
00:06:39
Speaker
that one. It's gross, though. You're right. It's kind of creepy looking. Yeah, I don't like it. Wouldn't would not recommend hanging in a bedroom. Oh, like, but that reminds me the whole like mixing with your blood. There was a TV show I liked. It was kind of like Pawn Stars.
00:07:05
Speaker
I can't remember exactly what it was called, but it was like an oddities shop. I'm pretty sure it was in Vegas. They actually had an artist that came in to the oddities shop and was looking for like medical equipment because I guess he like pretty much like draws his own blood and then he uses that like as paint.
00:07:32
Speaker
on solely as paint and stuff. So he ended up purchasing from them, I think it was like, um, either like World War One or World War Two, they had like portable blood transfusion kits that were supposed to be used on the battlefield.
Mystery of The Crying Boy Painting
00:07:55
Speaker
So he ended up buying that. But
00:07:59
Speaker
he ended up showing them like some of his work and stuff and he used like the aging and discoloration of his blood as like shading and stuff so he would paint like certain stuff like the earliest part so that it would fade to like the brownish on the paper that like blood fades to
00:08:19
Speaker
And then like the newest stuff would show up a bit brighter. So he used like, almost looked kind of watercolory. It wasn't super pigmented or anything because it fades so much. Yeah. Were you a fan? I honestly can't even remember what the paint can look like. I just remember this guy doing it. But I was obsessed with that show. It had the weirdest stuff ever in that store.
00:08:48
Speaker
That is kind of nauseating. When you were saying that. I was kind of appalled. Yeah, that's kind of is it a male artist? Yeah, he said. Okay. Anyway, you're a female, he'd have a lot more natural pigment to work with monthly.
00:09:15
Speaker
Sorry. Just have to, I guess, like, buy a diva cup or something. All right, are you ready for the crying boy? The crying boy? Okay, let me Google it. So
00:09:43
Speaker
1980s. Little time machine. Yeah, The Crying Boy's name of the painting. So on September 4th, 1985, British tabloid The Sun printed a piece about a mysterious painting that kept showing up unharmed in various house fires. So the following is actually just a quote from a Messy Beast article.
00:10:09
Speaker
Yorkshire fireman Peter Hall was quoted as saying that unscathed copies of The Crying Boy were frequently found at the scenes of fires. He and his colleagues were serious enough about this to vow never to allow the painting into their own homes. Peter's own brother and sister-in-law, Ron and May Hall of Swallow Nest, South Yorkshire, take two guesses where that is, had ignored this warning.
00:10:37
Speaker
fire damage, sorry, his kitchen and living room, but the crying boy in the living room wall. This is not right English. But the crying boy in the living room wall was unscathed. The jinxed painting was destroyed by his family. The blaze was actually caused by a chip pan. The prince survived unscathed. The sun wrote that an estimated 50,000 crying boy prince signed G Braglin
00:11:06
Speaker
had been sold around the UK. They were particularly popular working class households, the sun's readership demographic. Sorry, that quote was a little problematic. I apologize. I liked it at the time, I guess. So the Crying Boy paintings had been mass produced in the 50s and 60s. And an estimated 50,000 copies had been sold in the UK. There was mostly homes, but even a pizza parlor had
00:11:37
Speaker
suffered a blaze where the painting was untouched in the end. It just wasn't burning. Everything else in these houses was burning, but it was not burning. And this tabloid, for lack of a better word, called The Sun in the UK was publishing about it. The Sun, 21st of October 1985. The Perillo Pizza Palace, great yarmas destroyed by fire, but the crying boy was undamaged.
00:12:07
Speaker
There was a pair of sisters-in-law who both purchased the print and they had fire soon after they purchased it, one of which burned all the sisters' paintings except for that one painting, The Crying Boy. And sorry, it's basically just a painting of a boy, like close-up, head, young, blonde boy, tears coming down his face, looking kind of sad, right? Like he's looking pretty lost, but there's nothing else in it. That's all it is.
00:12:37
Speaker
melancholy, but not super creepy, I guess. I don't know. Yeah. When I tried looking it up, a whole bunch of them show up, but it's confusing because I see like two different articles that have two different paintings that they're calling the crying boy. So I don't know which one. Yeah. Yeah.
00:13:06
Speaker
So one woman, Jane Wyatt, heard of this phenomenon of the Crying Boy paging after this article was published in the Sun about it. And she tried to burn her copy of the Crying Boy, but it wouldn't ignite at all. So she claimed. Sorry if I sound skeptical.
00:13:26
Speaker
In many cases, there was a simple cause of the fires that had started them, you know, according to the fire brigade. There was dropped cigarettes, a faulty electrical wiring, stuff like that. Yeah. But it was kind of widely ignored in the panic caused by the article. So people were quick to blame the painting for any bad misfortune they had. One woman from England claimed shortly after she bought the painting, her son caught his private parts on a hook.
00:13:55
Speaker
and she blamed the painting. I'm not sure how that was the same, but I feel badly because that shit sucks. So what does anyone know, if anything, about the artist of The Crying Boy or the painting itself? They were signed Giovanni Bragolin or Bragolin, whatever, but not much was known about him initially. The rumor was that he had painted
00:14:24
Speaker
street urchins, quote unquote, in Italy and Spain. Eventually a book of creepy stories called Haunted Liverpool claimed the real artists had been actually found because they weren't sure if this Giovanni Bragolin was just a pseudonym or not. So the school teacher named George Malloy outed a man named Francois Seville
00:14:54
Speaker
as the artist's real name. Other sources say a man named Bruno Amadio used Giovanni Bragolin as a pseudonym, or Frank Shaw, I'm not sure, Seville. So unclear whether Giovanni Bragolin is a pseudonym for Bruno Amadio or not, but it's probably one of those people.
00:15:22
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. So many articles. And then they all would cite, you know, still still unclear, exactly. But likely, the signature on the painting is a pseudonym for one of these people. Yeah, that makes sense. They think most likely they think this Bruno a Mario guy. Bruno apparently story of the origins goes like Bruno liked painting these street origins hanging around.
00:15:49
Speaker
One of these little street urchins name was Don Bonillo. He accidentally caused a fire that consumed his home and actually killed his parents. So this earned him the nickname Diablo. Some say the boy was adopted and abused by the painter. Others say other articles say that the boy brought him actually good luck until the artist's studio caught fire and he angrily sent the boy away. So.
00:16:16
Speaker
Did he cause the second fire? You know, unknown, right? We'll speculate wildly. So at the same time, in the 70s, the boy passed away in a car crash. A fiery car crash, the article said. Of course. Very poetic. It's also in the 70s, I'm pretty sure. Allegedly, as they'd say on LetterKenny.
00:16:46
Speaker
In October of 1985, about a month after the first article, the editor Kelvin McKenzie made an announcement, send us your crying boys and we'll safely deal with them for you. Because if I didn't make it clear, once they made the first article, there was a lot of people pouring in like saying this shit happened to me. That was where all those stories were coming from. Like, yeah, we hit a fire too. And our crying boy was untouched.
00:17:15
Speaker
it was lying face down on the floor, like totally unburned and people were freaking out because of the article. So the editor said, send them in for me. And more than 2,500 paintings poured in. People didn't like the thought that they might be cursed and lots had their own unique experiences with the Crying Boy. Oh, sorry, more people writing in.
00:17:42
Speaker
A male stripper's fire eating act went wrong after he taunted his wife's The Crying Boy painting. I don't know what that means. Fire eating act went wrong. It doesn't sound good. No, that's like after her sword swallowing act went wrong. Like that invokes a certain image. I mean, yeah, fire eating is not safe in the best of times. Yeah.
00:18:14
Speaker
A man named Brian Parks destroyed the crying boy after a fire left his wife and two children in the hospital and his home was completely raised to the ground. The fire was pretty devastating. So now the prints of the picture are coming in pretty hot and heavy to the Sun newspaper because they asked for them. They originally had planned to perform some sort of exorcism they thought they might be able to.
00:18:43
Speaker
but now just the sheer volume of them prompted them to kind of change their plans. So they found an open area in the town of Reading in the UK and sent them on fire in a giant bonfire on Halloween night, 1985. Yeah, so lean, get your lean. Throw some bras on there. Oh no, wait, not the 60s.
00:19:09
Speaker
Um, after that time calls about the paintings did slow and eventually stopped. Yeah. About six months after the initial article reports started to emerge that if you were like nice to the painting, it would be nice to you and bring you good luck instead of any bad luck or fires. Um, so this is the pendulum swinging the other way, or maybe the other side of the coin. There was a man named Bob Cherry from Glasgow.
00:19:38
Speaker
claimed it brought him very good luck. He was having car trouble one day, and when he broke down, he noticed a discarded piece of art leaning against a trash can. Once he put the picture in his car, the car probably started back up again when he had been having trouble getting it started in the first place. He had no problems with the car ever since, and also, quote, within a week of rescuing the crying boy from the dustbin, he had won 20 pounds of bingo, four pounds on the football pools, and 11 pounds on a fruit machine.
00:20:09
Speaker
So he was a happy camper. So don't taunt him when you're a fire breather, I guess. Which is funny because I think a lot of those dolls, that's what you hear is like, don't be mean to them. It's like this whole don't anger that presence, which I'll maybe joke about here a little bit, but at the same time, I wouldn't dare fucking try and anger those presents. No, thank you.
00:20:38
Speaker
So was it cursed? And if so, like for what purpose and by whom we still don't know, but we do know it would be hard to curse something like that when there was so many different, uh, like it's mass produced, there's different prints and all this stuff. Uh, but there was a comedian slash self proclaimed personal investigators, Steve punt, who decided to try and find out for himself.
00:21:04
Speaker
He bought his Crying Boy painting, or brought his Crying Boy painting to Sir Ralph Harvey, a Wiccan High priest. Harvey invited a psychic, psychic rather, named Annie Mills. The minute the two walked into the room with the painting, Annie started shaking uncontrollably and felt an uncomfortable presence. Harvey believed that it could be exercised still, however. After that, honestly, I couldn't find more about that part of it.
00:21:35
Speaker
But the guy Steve Punt, the comedian, they have the clip on his show where he tries to burn the painting to kind of debunk it, slash whatever. And he did find out that it was very fire-retardant and not much burned, even when he set it directly on fire, except for the string that held it.
00:21:56
Speaker
So that caused it to fall over if you tried to burn it caused to fall over face down, which is how a lot of the paintings were found. So that kind of explained that part of it. Yeah. Cause I feel like out of everything that's on fire, um, in the, in like a fire and everything, it's going to be the walls. It's not really going to be the floor on fire. It'll be like things on the floor on fire.
00:22:23
Speaker
but the floor typically won't go on fire. So if that string is burning and that's all that's holding these pitchers up and the pitcher lands, however way on the ground, there isn't air circulation around it, it's not necessarily gonna burn ever. Right, because of the path of air flow. Yeah, because it doesn't have proper air circulation around the sides. Yeah, and as Pat always points out who,
00:22:53
Speaker
was like a demolitions explosives expert in the army. That's not what they call it, but for shorthand, he's always like, yeah, bombs are like path of least resistance, right? Like they're gonna, that's where they're gonna go. So if you duck out of the side of them and there's something or the whole whatever movie or Indiana Jones, it is where he gets into a lead line fridge. It's like, yeah, that probably could
00:23:22
Speaker
It could protect you, but yeah, it's all about where you're standing, where that shit's going on. That's where you go to. It's just like having a huge fire explosion and you're hiding behind a cement pillar and it just engulfs around you, but it doesn't circle back and hit you because that's not really how the airflow is going to happen. Right. It just made me think of the one, I just watched one of those shows where it's like,
00:23:49
Speaker
what would you do that and if you don't choose the right answer it's like in all these crazy situations it's like you would have died and the one is like i think it's i want to say a tornado and it's like do you get under the underpass or do you stay away because under the underpass is going to become like a vortex of airflow and i think the answer is stay the fuck away from the underpass
00:24:15
Speaker
But get back to being on that the next time we're under and passing a tornado. Yeah, right. It happens all the time. Weekly. Well, damn it, we live in Alberta now. It's a possibility. And we're coming to the end of days. But anyway. So you're right, not all the crying boy pictures were the same. There wasn't even always the same blonde boy on them. And sometimes it wasn't even a boy.
00:24:44
Speaker
there was even known to be a set of crying girl paintings. Yeah. So there were, yeah, like some of the paintings, there was like a knockoff Scottish artist who made, who made similar to the original and stuff like that. So there was different crying boys. And I experienced the same thing. I like Google it and I'm like, well, yeah, there's this blonde boy and then there's this other blonde boy and then there's this dark hair boy and it's, yeah,
00:25:12
Speaker
You're like, okay, it's mass produced. There's a bunch of them. It kind of takes a bit of the myth out of it for me personally. Yeah. Like I'm looking at a collage of three different newspaper articles and two of them have one picture and one of them has a different picture, like a different painting.
00:25:37
Speaker
And you can buy it on Etsy now and this and that and whatever. So it's just kind of like, you're like, Oh, it's funny because the one that shows up the most times on Google images when you just Google the Crying Boy painting is neither of the two that show up in these newspaper articles from, but I do see the girl ones. She's got like a little piece about the girl. Um,
00:26:07
Speaker
Some said that hanging the Crying Girl painting alongside the boys painting would negate the bad energy. Cancel it out, you don't have bad, yeah, you're gonna have okay luck, it's not gonna matter. But others said that hanging the Crying Girl painting beside the Crying Boy made it even worse. They were all the same style, that was the only thing. So my overall verdict on that one is like kind of mass hysteria, inflamed by the media a little bit.
00:26:36
Speaker
Yeah, I look at it stuff like that as okay, so say all these fires happened anyway, then they would have happened. And I mean, yeah, it's a 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, whatever, fires happened a lot. Electricity was bad. Like talking about a pizza place going up in flames, like restaurants go up in flames all the time.
00:27:06
Speaker
especially back then. So I feel like if you find a single common thread throughout history, you can choose back anytime they've found a single common thread between a bunch of them, it's been blamed for every single one all of a sudden. Yeah. Yes. And to steal a line I heard on wine and crime, is it, you know, correlation, not causation.
00:27:33
Speaker
from, yeah, it's happening in some households where there is that painting, but does that mean it costs that? But it's happening in, like, fires where something, ooh, is in damage is happening millions of times, probably a year across the world. Right. But if no one's writing an article about it, are you gonna, like, write in about it and everybody realize? Yeah, yeah, I think so. And
00:28:02
Speaker
I don't know. But at the same time, it's funny because I'm not a super skeptic. And I do believe that, you know, if people write in, they saw something on the Internet and then a bunch of other people wrote in, it doesn't mean that they're wrong just because a bunch of people are writing about it. You know what I mean? On the flip side of that. I feel like I'd be more willing to believe that if it was a series of pictures that he had and they were all originals and that it wasn't mass produced, but like each one of the originals caused this or something.
00:28:32
Speaker
I'd be believing that. I don't believe 50,000 originals, but like mass produced ones caused this. Yeah, exactly. All right. Quick words from our P-break sponsors. That was
00:29:01
Speaker
two haunted paintings. Yeah. I have one more. One more. Yeah. You may
The Hands Resist Him
00:29:11
Speaker
have heard of it. It's called The Hands Resist Him. I love the title. It's the one I'm thinking of. Yeah. Yeah, that's the one I'm thinking of. I came across it in my research too.
00:29:31
Speaker
Um, it showed up on a bunch of lists for haunted dolls because of the painting itself. Oh, that tracks. Yeah. So I did see pictures of it, but yeah, it's creepy. Yeah, but in a kind of way where I kind of like it, like if I did choose between that one and the crying boy and the anguished man, I would pick the hands that sorry, how the hands resist him. Uh, no.
00:30:01
Speaker
I would pick the crying boy and I would just, if I didn't have to, as long as I don't have to display him, I would just put him in a box and fill the box with concrete. Yeah, I suppose I was going on the assumption that you'd have to keep him up somewhere. Yeah, no. The boy in the picture looks so angry. He's just like full on
00:30:30
Speaker
glaring at you. Yeah, let alone the hands on the window pane just fucking creep me out. Yeah, I okay. So I kind of love it. I kind of love the creepy name. You're right. I don't know if I'd want to actually have it. I was just kind of thinking of like, you know, lesser of three evils. I liked the paint style of this one more like, you know, the not the
00:30:56
Speaker
brushstrokes, whatever. I'm not an art person. It looks more like like a very like detail like where the realism I think is what they call it. I'm not realism good at that. Yeah. So the hands resist him is also known as the eBay painting. But
00:31:25
Speaker
I hadn't heard of it before. Yeah, it's really cool. It's interesting. So the artist is named Bill Stoneham. It was painted in Southern California in 1972. So it's pretty young, you know, under 50. She looking good.
00:31:48
Speaker
There's no horrible story behind this one. No blood in the painting. This Bill Stoneham or Stoneham, whatever, was under contract to produce two paintings per month for the gallery owner, Charles Feingarten, that he was working for. So it was under contract. But yes, as you said, with the doll, it depicts a young boy and like a life-size girl doll.
00:32:14
Speaker
Yeah, that's why it came up in my research is because of the girl doll in the picture in the painting. Right, which is like life sized. And I've never had any of those kind of Barbies that were life sized or anything, although I've heard of them. So I find that part kind of sinister already. Just saying.
00:32:37
Speaker
So they're standing in front of a darkened store window and a doorway. We will put links on our website in the show notes, of course. But yeah, it's a darkened store window. And then through the darkened window, all you can see coming out of it are pressed against the glass as these disembodied hands reaching for the viewer. So yeah, it is kind of sinister, which we love. Yeah.
00:33:07
Speaker
Said to be extremely haunted, the owners have claimed the figures move within the painting, entering the dark room within. So the backstory, the artist says it's inspired in part by a family photo of him and his sister on a road trip. The window or doorway in the painting is actually a quote, representation of the dividing line between the waking world and the world of fantasy and impossibilities. Okay. That's kind of cool, I think.
00:33:38
Speaker
Nice to have a bit of background of what the artist actually intended, I guess, out of it. Right. Some of the symbolism. So you're not just taking it as a stark reality of what it looks like. I can get that. You can see that, how they're disembodied or whatever. I get that. Right. So it's not supposed to be a haunted house, per se, I guess.
00:34:07
Speaker
Yeah. So yeah, the window or the doorway is the representation of the dividing line between the waking world and the world of fantasy. The doll is a guide that will escort the boy through life. The hands are alternate lives or possibilities. So roots his life may have taken. It's interesting. That makes it sound like
00:34:35
Speaker
I don't know, it looks so creepy, but when you describe the elements of it like that, it almost sounds like a positive painting. I know! But that's not at all how it comes across when you just look at it. Which is interesting. Was he going for an overall eerie tone? Is that just kind of how his mind looks on the inside? Yeah, that's the fun of art, I guess. Yeah.
00:35:03
Speaker
Oh, you're right. It is. It's kind of at odds with its sinister appearance. When you first look at it, you're like, no, this is like painted for a horror movie. Yeah, like it. Yeah, like almost like a thing about like all the movies where it's like you have your picture taken and it's after the film or whatever, more so like older movies. But like after the film was developed, something was behind you. Like that's what this painting was like after the painting was painting.
00:35:33
Speaker
painted, you realized there was something behind you. Like, yeah, it's, it's, it's a haunted thing. It's just like, it's everything else we're talking about. Like the doll could be Annabelle. Like, yeah, it's just, it's awesome. But then when you say, yeah, the thing behind you is the possibilities that your life could have taken. And then it's like, Oh, it's not like they're grabbing at you. Yeah. It's just like, Oh, that possibility like could have been really positive. Like,
00:36:03
Speaker
Yeah, on something. No. So the other explanation or thought behind it is that the boy is looking towards the future, or that the viewer is looking back into their past. I didn't think about that too hard. I didn't want to. I don't know. I'm not really ashamed to admit it. Like I can look at a painting and stuff like that. But
00:36:33
Speaker
maybe I'm not deep enough emotionally to be like, well, that's symbolic of this. And that represents her that. And I'm like, I just, I don't know. I like it or I don't. Yeah. I feel like sometimes stuff is like too analyzed. Right. Yeah. Like, do we have to be posh? Like, oh, this is that. Yeah.
00:37:04
Speaker
Okay, I may have been thinking about that guy on Family Bot. The guy on Family Guy with the giant chin whose name is like, Farthington Higginbottom. Okay, but this part is cool. So speaking of art, I appreciate this art as well. So the art, the painting rather, was inspired partly by a poem written by the artist's wife at the time.
00:37:32
Speaker
So the poem witness follows. He is of seeing visions. His strokes reveal them in a rush of color, of madness, of mystics. And his head is the highest center. It must confront its enemy. The hands resist him like the secret of his birth. His presence is the sanctum heartbeat felt in darkness and in passion.
00:37:59
Speaker
his sounds the sole gift to that silence. And that was written by his first wife, Rowan, which I thought it was very beautiful poem. I don't know. Yeah, it goes in like with what he intended the painting to be. Mm hmm. So not tend to be sinister. Yeah. So that kind of explains like the boys
00:38:29
Speaker
facial expression, I guess, in the painting is better described in the poem, like standing face to face against something. Right, you're looking down at your reality or your expectations of your life or whatever. Yeah, because he doesn't look like he's like glaring you. So that does work too. Yes. Okay, so we'll get to it. So here's a quote from the artist Bill from the website.
00:38:59
Speaker
Because I don't know, like you can't have a picture of the image on your website, I think is what I came across while researching it. So I don't know if we're going to be able to have it or just have a link to it. But everyone will be able to find it, obviously. Yeah. So here's the quote from Bill.
00:39:22
Speaker
Both the owner of the gallery were hands was displayed and the Los Angeles Times critic who reviewed my show were dead within a year of the show. I'm sure it was a coincidence, but some of what I paint resonates in other people opening the inner door or basement. By the way, I still have no idea what happened to the character actor who bought the painting at the show. In brackets, editor note, it was John Marley who died in 1984.
00:39:50
Speaker
or how it ended up abandoned in a building, though I could speculate, Bill. So that's a little bit what the artist thinks about what happens to people that owns the painting, which we're gonna get into. There is a book written, I learned, it's called The Hands Resist Him, Be Careful What You Bid On by DK O'Neill.
00:40:16
Speaker
So this John Marley mentioned in the quote, the actor who bought the painting at a show, he played Jack Waltz in The Godfather. He had the famous scene in The Godfather where they find a horse head in the bed. Oh, yeah, give everybody the scene, if not the movie. So digging a little deeper, the art critic that they talk about that supposedly died within a year of the show, the art show that it was featured at,
00:40:46
Speaker
Uh, his name was Henry Seldes and he did die a few years after the show. So the art show was at the Fine Garden Gallery in Beverly Hills in 1974. And the art critic who reviewed it, Henry Seldes died in 1978. So not exactly a year after the show, but four years. So fairly quickly. Yeah. He was quite young. He had been about to turn 53.
00:41:14
Speaker
The death appeared to be a suicide, no signs of any struggle or anything really weird. So it's kind of just ruled as, you know, suicide or accidental. So the gallery owner that supposedly died within a year of the painting being hung at the art show, Charles Chuck Feingarten died in 1981. I didn't have his exact age, but he took over the gallery in 1945.
00:41:41
Speaker
So I think he was fairly old. To be fair. To be fair. Yeah, he was at least 40s. Probably didn't take it over when he was one though. So at least 67. Yeah. Um, so that one's whatever you make of that. So the actor that bought the painting, John Marley from the Godfather,
00:42:10
Speaker
As mentioned, he died in 1984. This was after open heart surgery, so it wasn't really suspicious either. So before he had died, he had given away or sold the painting. It was a bit unclear, but it ended up being unearthed in February 2001 and turned up on eBay. There was an ad that said the following. When we received this painting, we thought it was really good art. At the time, we wondered a little why a seemingly perfectly fine painting would be discarded like that. Today, we don't.
00:42:40
Speaker
One morning our four and a half year old daughter claimed that the children in the painting were fighting and coming into the room during the night. So it had been found abandoned in a California brewery turned art space. We should go there after COVID after our Vegas trip. Brewery turned art space. We were such artists. What is it? Bougie. Yeah. Yeah.
00:43:11
Speaker
Uh, so yeah, been found there and then a family took it home and they began experiencing activity right away. After the foreal complained of the painting showing the weird stuff like the children fighting in it, they put a motion sensitive camera on it. It captured the boy in the painting being marched out of the painting at gunpoint. So the doll appears to have some sort of object in her hand in the painting. So
00:43:37
Speaker
in the camera changed to like a gun and she forced the boy out of the painting like a gunpoint that way. Oh, wow. Which is very strange, I must admit. Yeah, crazy. So that or they would see the boy crawling out of the frame. Also, yuck. Yeah, anytime you have any sort of movement that's like crawling or
00:44:07
Speaker
in anything. It's a thousand times creepier than it needs to be. No, thank you. We've all grown up, you know, especially us with the ring and the stop motion cameras and the yeah, the creepy and the jerky and it's not good. Yeah, I don't like things that are like flashes, like like strobe lights or anything. Our brain worst nightmare. Um,
00:44:37
Speaker
somebody I know like convinced me to go to a haunted house two Halloween's ago. And so 2019 2019 or 2018 and oh my God. So there was like a really long hallway and there was this girl dressed up. I think she was kind of dressed up like in a like a hospital gown, but she looked like crazy.
00:45:06
Speaker
like hair was all crazy and like stuff was on her face and she's like standing at the hallway like facing you and it goes from like a lit up hallway to like pitch black and then it starts like strobe lighting but not quickly where it's like a one Mississippi and then it goes out for like half a second and then it's on like it was like a really slow it was like blink blink blink it wasn't really fast and every time it lit up again
00:45:35
Speaker
And this hallway was probably 20 feet long. So every time it lit up again, you could tell she had been like walking towards you. So every time it lit up and at one of the flashes, her arms were up and she was full on sprinting at us with all of nowhere. And oh my God, the screens all lit out. And she ended up getting really close to us and
00:46:04
Speaker
the bottoms of this like hallway they had built for the haunted house, the corners of the walls were kind of at like a 45 degree angle. So like the foot like right up against the wall, instead of being like down to the floor, or whatever for like the first foot, it kind of
00:46:28
Speaker
went out at a 45. So when she's running, she's running down the middle of it. And then in one of the flashes, you see that she had like, she was actually on the one wall. And then like, she had like jumped off one of the 45s hit the one wall. So she had like, she was like,
00:46:49
Speaker
almost looked like she was stuck to it. Like her hands were planted on it. Like she was a spider like rolling on the wall and then she launched herself to the other side of the wall on the next flash. And you didn't hear any of this. Like it was dead silent. And oh, it was the scariest thing ever. Because she stood at the hallway for probably a good 30 seconds not moving. And before like the light suddenly went out and then it started strobing.
00:47:17
Speaker
like can you imagine the timing involved on that like that'd be so scary because it sounds like special effects oh yeah oh they're at me yeah next thing you know yeah like because she's walking towards you and like you had to walk past her to get through the hallway so like yeah we should walk down the hallway
00:47:42
Speaker
And then and she's just standing at the end of the hallway, just staring at you like not moving. And we're just like, oh, my God. And then it's like suddenly it was like triggered. And it was like, yeah, it was like next level. Crazy. That's a big bag of nope right there. Right. Yeah. Nobody will ever convince me to go in another haunted house.
00:48:05
Speaker
You know, I thought I traumatized my daughter Rain on one of those because we took her to one, it was on like a family vacation, you know, back to the East Coast, see my family were like on PEI, and there's always like tons of family shit to do there, right? Like I was just like to go to the wax museum there and the Ripley's believe it or not, like I loved it. But then it was like, it was a little haunted museum and she was yeah, six or seven, I would say. So
00:48:34
Speaker
Like, I don't know, she's always been kind of a tough kid or whatever. She was like, yeah, I want to go, you know, and then we kind of just thought whatever we like, that's cool. We went and we were there with my mom and like, by the end of the haunted house, my mom's just carrying rain on her shoulder. Rain's just got her face buried in my mom's shoulder because she was just kind of terrified. She was like, yeah, I guess maybe you were a little too young for that. But, you know, they always think they're ready. It's so funny because now
00:49:04
Speaker
I don't know if this is my fault, but she just is not, she loves horror movies. Oh yeah, I was gonna say your daughter watches like all the horror movies. Well, you know, we could have, it made me, we traumatized her, but she seems to really enjoy them. So I can't say that she seems to be mad at me for it. We'll see late years later in therapy. It was a good haunted house. Yeah. Some of them are really cool. Like this one had some,
00:49:34
Speaker
visual effects. So at one point you're like walking on a walkway above and it looked like someone was in a dungeon like way below you, but they probably weren't. Yeah, it was really cool. Really well done. The one that you were at sounds really good too. Yeah, it's the huge one in town, Deadminton. Like the one where there's like 200 actors or something every year. And it takes you like 45 minutes to get through it. Like it's intense. Like I pretty much
00:50:04
Speaker
Like this hallway thing was like, probably like halfway through it. And at that point I was just like, done. Like I was just like, and obviously if you ask to leave, they're gonna let you leave, like they'll take you through. And they take pride on the number of people that they get to chicken out.
00:50:30
Speaker
I guess this last year, so 2020, October, they even with COVID, they had the haunted house going on. And I guess they had the most number of people leave or asked to leave ever. They broke their own record. It was like 215 people.
00:50:55
Speaker
Probably more people went to it because if it was a COVID safe thing, which I know it was because as you say that I've driven by Deadminton, which for those of you that don't know is an Edmonton haunted house. Yeah. And yeah, I drive by and it's like, Deadminton parking here. And I'm like, holy shit, that is a big event. And now that I work on this outside, I'm like, yeah, I see that and it looks fun.
00:51:18
Speaker
You know, like it seems like as big as like a corn maze you can do or something, right? Like it seems huge. Yeah, they they build like four sets in there. Like it's. Oh, my God, it's like the one they do at Universal Studios, like if it's anything like that, that is the ultimate scare fest. That one like movie, sometimes they have people from The Walking Dead working on the one, at least the one in
00:51:45
Speaker
Universal Studios, Orlando. They had that guy, Greg Nicotero from The Walking Dead, working on the Halloween Horror Nights in Orlando. I was a travel agent before this guys, before the pandemic. Before that brought that to a crashing halt. But anyway, been redeployed, it's fine. And with the
00:52:14
Speaker
Did I finish the hands resist him? I think I almost did. Yeah, it was put up on eBay. Yeah, that's right. Okay. So it went viral. People started sending in emails complaining of mysterious occurrences that happened to them after they viewed the painting online. Everything from blackouts to illnesses was reported.
00:52:41
Speaker
not unlike some podcasts I've heard where they're like, after we talked about Robert the dog, people called in like, Holy shit, this thing didn't work. Which, again, I think, you know, somewhat has to be taken with a grain of like, shit goes wrong. Just because you're listening to something for time doesn't mean it's that's fault, but it's kind of creepy still. So yeah, my verdict. So from now,
00:53:12
Speaker
Blackouts to illness, it went viral. A gallery owner named Kim Smith bid and bought the item, bid on and bought the item for around $1,000. So it remains in storage in her gallery in Michigan today. So that one is safely away. And that's the end of that one. Okay. I would have expected to like it of, I don't know, maybe like sold for more.
00:53:40
Speaker
Then you got to wonder sometimes if that's why people don't tell stories about the artwork is to try and like, yeah, get more money for it. Oh, yeah. And paint something like shit painting and then be like, the shit's on it. Right. Buddy on Strange Brew podcast the other day was reading some of the
00:54:02
Speaker
haunted whatever descriptions on eBay. It was kind of funny and hilarious. Oh, yeah, there's an entire podcast. Yeah, I can't remember what it's called. I think I found it when I was like looking at podcasts. Um, but I there's a podcast it actually they don't do it anymore. It only lasted like a year.
00:54:27
Speaker
And it was two brothers that literally their entire podcast was just them going on to eBay and reading the descriptions of like haunted dolls. And that was their podcast. Yeah, I was gonna say depending on their voices, I'm here for it. So yeah, I guess my verdict on that one is it sounds like it kind of could be could be haunted because
00:54:56
Speaker
Well, at least it wasn't mass produced. It was one guy. I get what he was thinking and what he was going for when he painted it once you hear his interpretation of it and all that. But yeah, it's still mysterious. It's still creepy to me. It's still kind of unexplained. So you know what I mean? It's still got that supernatural factor for me, which I really like. It's not completely debunked or anything.
00:55:26
Speaker
So the other thing is a little short dive I took on, you know, cursed images versus cursed paintings.
Cursed Images Phenomenon
00:55:37
Speaker
Oh, because I don't know, these younger generations seem to be obsessed with things that are cursed, like cursed images. And I was like, well, what what does that mean exactly versus say a cursed painting?
00:55:54
Speaker
you know, cursed paintings, paintings have been around for centuries, obviously. And so therefore, when you're usually referring to something like that, it's, you know, they're, oh, it's an evil painting, it's haunted, that kind of thing. Yeah. So, okay, cursed painting, haunted painting, right? That's what I think of. But cursed images is just, you know, something like a,
00:56:21
Speaker
a new vernacular term that wasn't in our vocabulary more than like five or six years ago, as I learned. There was a Cursed Images Tumblr launched in 2015. In July 2016, there was a Cursed Images Twitter account that gained popularity and then kind of exploded at that point. Not exploded, but I don't know. It's definitely in the vernacular these days.
00:56:50
Speaker
You know, because like I said, my daughter's always going, you're cursed. And I'm like, okay, this is one of those. It's a thing. The New York Times Magazine did an article online called What Makes a Cursed Image?
00:57:07
Speaker
Which I was like, yes, please tell me. So the picture for the article shows this young boy in like the late 70s or 80s, it appears he's wearing like this pale blue t shirt that says, Dick, the birthday boy in all caps. All right. And that's especially what makes me think it's late 80s or something. I don't know. And posing with like
00:57:34
Speaker
an animatronic kind of looking plastic face bear mascot. Oh, awful. I mean, I remember going to this place. Yeah, I think it was on PEI. Like it was like a family place. Yeah, they had some animatronics. Yeah, that or what I've learned from my kiddo was Five Nights at Freddy's. They're like,
00:58:02
Speaker
creepy animatronic teddy bear looking people. So I think they're very Five Nights at Freddy's. So the article talks about what makes the cursed image the parameters are such that almost anything could really qualify, in my opinion. Yeah, the Twitter account username at cursed images told several news outlets
00:58:27
Speaker
Cursed images to me leave you with a general uneasy feeling. There could be a certain qualities like someone looking directly into the camera or an orb floating in the background. So any bad photo you take, no. Another article I read mentioned it's something that makes you question the existence of the picture. Like how did I get there? For example, cursed image 3920 from at cursed images on Twitter
00:58:57
Speaker
Is a photo of a fiberglass cow TV showing a news report about Saddam Hussein? Yes, it's an image. Do we need to see it? I don't know. What makes it cursed? I don't know. Yeah. I feel like I am not somebody that believes in like the curse images thing really at all like
00:59:24
Speaker
I'd say like haunting the people that view it or like the people that own the images or whatever that weren't like in the images themselves because I feel like paintings and stuff there's like a there's like a passion or like time or effort that was put into the painting by somebody more so than like a picture like I get like pictures like setups and stuff can take a long time but if you
00:59:52
Speaker
translate that to like how long these people like poured over these paintings. I don't think it's super comparable unless you're taking so especially if you're not taking some like professional type picture like somebody going with their phone or camera or whatever and just taking a picture of something is different than somebody like
01:00:20
Speaker
slaving over a picture for days or months, like working on a painting. Exactly. Yeah, and I was trying to like see the difference between them because it almost sounds like they're really comparable when you hear like cursed image versus cursed paintings as I titled this section, but it's like they're not really
01:00:45
Speaker
obviously cursed at all. You know what I mean? Like it's just kind of look to me. I'm just like, okay, so these are things that people just see that they're like, ew, I hate it. So it's cursed. Yeah. Yeah. So to, to that effect or to that point, there was a list of cursed images from a site called ruin my day.com.
01:01:12
Speaker
And my favorite weird ones that didn't give me like hemorrhoids were, there was a picture of stairs, a set of stairs covered in bread slices just laid on the stairs just flat like a carpet. And somebody was walking up the stairs leaving their little footprints, the little bread footprints. That just makes me uncomfortable.
01:01:36
Speaker
It does. It makes you feel like why are you doing that? Put the bread back in there. Also reminded me of a forensic files where they found someone's footprint in the hamburger buns. Couldn't believe it. That's an awesome one. I actually found a YouTube channel that has all the original like forensic file episodes. Because I haven't watched a lot of them because I was like too young when they were really like on TV and stuff. And I
01:02:05
Speaker
Yes, I only loved Unsolved Mysteries myself as a kid. We are starting to get into Forensic Files now. And I like it better because it wraps it up more, right? I mean, you're like, we'll get an answer at the end of the episode. Yeah, because I don't have cable or anything. I don't want to download hundreds of episodes of this freaking TV show just to watch them once. No. No, there's a bunch on Prime, is it, I think? One of those.
01:02:36
Speaker
It's not one of those services. Yeah, I actually recently finished the Unsolved Mysteries that they had on Netflix that rebooted it. They've done two parts of like six episodes. Yeah. I think I might have seen some of it. I did reference their podcast for an upcoming case.
01:03:06
Speaker
Shit, what was I gonna say? I remember, oh, yeah, I was talking to my sister, Ressa, about watching, like, yeah, I'm like, yeah, I remember we watched Unsolved Mysteries, like, and that guy's voice and the fact that the mysteries were unsolved creeped me the fuck out. Funny that, like, now, like, for a while, like, I wouldn't say I was, like, super into true crime or anything like that. And then, like, now, I don't know if I'm coming to a resurgence because it's
01:03:33
Speaker
there's podcasts and stuff like that. But yeah, it's kind of cool. And now, yeah, my daughter will come running down the stairs if we put on forensic files, which is kind of hilarious. Yeah, I watch like a lot of that stuff. I like the like mystery aspect of it. I was obsessed with all like the CSI shows when I was younger. And then after I kind of
01:04:02
Speaker
got over that. I was obsessed with like serial killers and started watching like Dexter and stuff like that. Yeah. No, but that's funny. CSI, you were right. Because I was like talking about that who song.
01:04:21
Speaker
Who are you? And you're like, I think it's CSI Miami, but that's not it. But it was regular CSI when I Googled it. By the way, flashback to episode one or two, one. CSI. When I was laughing about Mass Singer. Yeah, that was CSI on Los Angeles or something, because there was CSI Miami, CSI New York.
01:04:46
Speaker
Yeah, it was like just listed online as like CSI. And I don't really watch them. So I, yeah, I think that it's just, I was like, okay. I only ever really watched, I watched like CSI Miami, like religiously. And then I, um, watched like, got sick of him pulling off his sunglasses. And then I'll never get over them making and doing that in supernatural.
01:05:16
Speaker
This looks like a, I can't remember what the line is. Oh my God. Oh my God. Yes. It looks like they do make a nice homage to that in Supernatural, the TV show. Yeah. Sorry. I have a couple more. Not that they're just random because
01:05:42
Speaker
These were like my favorite cursed images. Somebody walking on bread upstairs. Sounds like ridiculous that that would be a cursed image. Bread stairs, like an image to make your mother curse you. Don't you be wasting my bread. That cost money. That's all the milk we have. Anyway, that's all the bread we have.
01:06:13
Speaker
Uh, no, I got nothing. Okay. Uh, there was also, I was gonna make a stupid pun. Uh, the, another cursed image was a person's nose ring looped into their key ring, which was inserted into the door knob, which did make me uncomfortable. Cause I can barely like handle it. If I bring, gets too tight on my finger and I can't get it off. I'm like, Oh my God, get it off, get it off. And it's like.
01:06:38
Speaker
nose ring was connected to the key ring and the key ring was connected to the door knob. I did not like it. I should show you this list because there was also a dog. What was the name of this website? ruinmyday.com. We'll put it in the show notes too.
01:07:05
Speaker
a dog sitting in a living room that was mostly entirely taken up by a massive like Christmas tree bottom. It was like, you know, it's a regular short room, but like, it was like this like six foot wide Christmas dream bottom and like it went all the way up to the top of the floor of the ceiling. And then it got cut off at the top, but it didn't really look like the top. It looked like the middle. There's a dog sitting in the living room looking at the tree and like
01:07:34
Speaker
the tree is taking up the most of the living room. But you can see a small TV that's barely like kind of being covered by the tree and then elf is playing in the background and you're like, Oh, it is Christmas. This must be someone's attempted a Christmas tree. You'll have to see that one. Maybe I'm trying to find it and it said like the website didn't exist. And I tried just looking up ruin my day haunted images and I can't get it.
01:08:04
Speaker
Okay, we'll have to post a link, I'm sorry. The cringiest ones though. I don't know, I think you're aware because of horror movies we watch, but I don't like eyeball stuff. Oh, I had one girl, my youth group, it was a non-religious youth group. And we used to watch like B horror movies, like the worse the better. And she had a whole thing about eyeballs.
01:08:36
Speaker
I really, I really can handle a lot of gore, but eyeballs kind of get to me. It's just one where I'm like, turn away. Don't want to hear it if you're pop. Popping them. OK, so that's why these are my cringiest picks for cursed images. There's a close up of someone's eyeball, like obviously a girl, probably because like, you know, mascara on whatever. Speaking of mascara on, there's glitter, like big chunks of glitter on their eyeball.
01:09:06
Speaker
on their eyeball, not just under the eye on the eyeball. And they're like holding their eye open, it's close up and they're like, look at the glitter on my eye. And I'm like, why? It's just like any time I wear mascara again, and I haven't worn it for a long time, my eyes hurt like all day because of the mascara flakes like going into your eye.
01:09:29
Speaker
Oh, I did get that with earrings today because of COVID, meaning like, I haven't been wearing a lot of earrings because the masks will just rip them off. And then I wore my earrings today to have like a backing and stuff. And so they're more secure. But then I'm like, Whoa, my ears are like freaking out. Like, what are you putting inside me? Yeah, yeah, there's just no use to it. I have to say though, quick, quick sidetrack. Um,
01:09:55
Speaker
one of the movies we've watched actually no so what she used to do is she used to go to I think it was Walmart um and go in their movie bins where it was like um dollar movies and she found these like bundles of like five or five or ten like B rated like horror movies in like this little bundle together
01:10:20
Speaker
These movies were like 50 to like 70 minutes long. They were really short. One of them, which series we watched, the first two, possibly three of them were like, it was the Haunted Bong series. It was ridiculous. It had some after I recognized, didn't it?
01:10:48
Speaker
Um, which made me laugh. I don't know. Somebody like that. And I recognize them. I think I'm thinking of a different one where his hands taunted. Yeah. And then there was another horror movie you watched that was about a zombie. Um, so this guy like murders somebody in his backyard and the guy he murders end up, ends up coming back as a zombie.
01:11:18
Speaker
And the guy that murdered and buried the guy in his backyard is trying to become a comedian. So when the zombie comes back to life,
01:11:31
Speaker
he like comes back to life and the dude is in his barn practicing his stand-up comedy and the zombie like comes in the barn and hears the comedy routine and starts laughing. So he decides the zombie's like a good audience to practice his jokes on because the zombie is just like, that's not funny. And... It wasn't Sean with the dead or whatever? It was an awful movie.
01:11:58
Speaker
Oh, at one point, he comes into the house. And I think there's a plumber in there. And the zombies like in the house and the plumber is like working on like one of the bathrooms and like sees the zombie or something. And like,
01:12:15
Speaker
tells the zombie like, you look terrible. You should, oh, you probably are dehydrated. It's important to get eight glasses of water a day. And like, that it was like this two minute PSA about getting enough water. Like. Zombie water, get your zombie water. No weirdest movie ever. I wish I could remember. It was in one of these sets.
01:12:45
Speaker
we ended up getting like two or three of these sets of movies. And they were, I mean, it sounds like a first image. So funny because we're killing ourselves laughing between this guy deciding a zombie, the dude he killed that came back to life as a zombie is the perfect one to practice his stand up routine on to like a plumber trying to give a PSA about how important hydration is.
01:13:16
Speaker
Like a real concerning audience. It's like a movie. Like somebody wrote this script. People auditioned for this. They filmed it and edited it. And it's on a DVD. Like, oh my god. Did you want? I think it was Troll 2 that Rasa, my sister, made me watch. Oh, like kids, maybe. And there was like, no. No, no, no, not Trolls.
01:13:46
Speaker
I want to say troll too, but it's like evil trolls and it's 80s and there's like a scene where there's a bunch of corn and it's like a corn sex scene and that's, I don't even know how else to describe it, but anyway, you'll just have to watch it. Okay, I have like three cursed images. I'm sorry, we could be done with it.
01:14:14
Speaker
Nobody cares about these horrible images. Yeah, I bet you do. This is disturbing. I don't like the eyeball one. People want to hear about bread stairs. About bread stairs? That just makes me so happy. I can't wait to see that.
01:14:38
Speaker
I feel like it's some more viral video about like walking on weird items up the stairs. I'm going to walk up. Yeah, cheap white bread. And it's just like got a footprint in it. And it reminds me of this forensic files because they find like a footprint in these, like there was hamburger buns scattered all around this bathroom. I can't even remember the rest of it, but they were integral to the investigation. It's a hamburger bar.
01:15:08
Speaker
Okay, so there was three more of my cringiest cursed images from that website. There was like a man whose arm was photoshopped to end in a giant finger instead of like a hand. I know, it wasn't great, but relatively almost probably normal and easy to achieve via Photoshop.
01:15:36
Speaker
Okay, the next one was bare feet under a public restroom stall. It's like bare feet on a plane. Just don't want to see it. No, I think they talked about that in a good place. Why are you going to hell? Have you overtaken your feet? It sucks up on a plane. I think about that part a lot now that I work at this place. There's been some really weird
01:16:06
Speaker
personalized license plates. Let me tell you, I don't even know. We have a car. No, that was someone's email. There's just a weird one. Yeah, the government releases a list every year of the ones that are submitted and rejected. And some of those are pretty funny. But also if you have like, say a Mustang, that's like a 69.
01:16:33
Speaker
You can just say like 69 stang, 69 horse, like, you know what I mean? Like there's some stuff that can sound dirty, but you can get away with it. Or I guess there was a big thing about someone in like, okay, I don't remember where in Canada, honestly, but his last name was Grabher and allowed to have it as a license plate.
01:17:00
Speaker
Yeah, he had been driving around with that license plate for like decades. Which is like, okay, at some point, the whole, you know, political correctness can go a little bit too far. He's driving around with it for decades. It's his last name. And now you're going to tell him he can't have it because it sounds like, you know, something the president of the United States might have said with pussy on the end.
01:17:28
Speaker
Yeah, I think I ended up allowing him to keep it. Yeah, I can't remember. He got the license plate to try and show support of what Donald Trump had said. That would be like another story. But this is his last name. It's not a swear word or anything like that.
01:17:55
Speaker
No, it is weird though what people will get though. Yeah, it is weird funny ones. So when I'm like behind somebody in their vehicle, and it's just like a combination of letters and numbers and I'm like, but I don't see like the dash or anything or like, where it goes like, um, because what's the format? It's yeah, letter, letter, letter and then
01:18:17
Speaker
usually three numbers, three letters, but depends on if it's a motorcycle or not. So when I'm looking at a license plate, is that personalized? What is it trying to tell me? And then I just start trying to decode license. And sometimes they're really funny.
01:18:43
Speaker
Some of them are yes. And then like, we we tell each other the more music ones at work, because we basically, that's kind of like a do at work, as you know, is like process for members that are part of our organization, like their process, their registration, and then mail it out to them. And then so yeah, we just see funny ones sometimes, sometimes it's like, a car for her, just like random ones where you're like, that's not even something big to you.
01:19:12
Speaker
one of them would say it looked like race car, but you can't have anything that has to do with like COVID-19 or anything like that. Yeah. Yeah. I'm kind of glad to be honest. Okay. So literally I wanted to finish out what I had on my little list after the big feet under a public restroom stall was, it was a picture of a balloon or possibly a condom. Cause it looked like a thin,
01:19:43
Speaker
you know balloon. It was filled with like spaghetti sauce, noodles, you know, kind of like SpaghettiOs and that was put under someone's pillow and you could see it being placed over their pillow. That is a cursed image. I get it. I get it now. I think I do. No, I don't. I didn't wonder how that came to be. Somebody took a balloon and filled it with SpaghettiOs like
01:20:12
Speaker
Oh, no, did I say the one? Okay, when I was starting to list some of the ones on the Twitter account that were supposedly cursed images, that cursed image 31 was just for boys around a computer, which to me I'm like, yeah, like 2020. Like there's no
01:20:28
Speaker
rhyme or reason. So that's it. That's the difference between cursed paintings and cursed images. Cursed paintings could be haunted. Cursed images are just whatever f**king you want it to be. Yeah, apparently all it takes for an image to be cursed is eye contact with the person taking your picture. That was one of the interesting things. Somebody making eye contact. Like, oh my god. So look at the camera. Look at the camera. Over here. Say cheese. It's a cursed image.
01:20:59
Speaker
There are so many things now too with the TV shows and mockumentary style where they do look at the camera so that makes it funny. The August is one of your first images. It is. I always watch, oh yeah we were watching hockey tonight and then during the anthem Connor McDavid, you know, yeah.
01:21:21
Speaker
He's a star player on the Oilers hockey team, I should mention, but yeah, he like, he saw, it was like he saw the camera zooming into him. Cause they're all just standing in a line, like waiting for the anthem to be over, right? You know what I mean? They're shifting from side to side. They're, they're trying to be respectful. This isn't the time where they're spitting on the ice, but they're trying to be respectful. And he like looks over and he looks right in the camera and then it's like zooming in on him. And I was like, whoa, that was like a Jim Halpert moment.
01:21:50
Speaker
Yeah, it was kind of funny. Good. I have a bit of information in general about why so many people just find these like myself, show me a porcelain doll and I'm going to get creeped right out. Just every time doesn't matter.
01:22:16
Speaker
Doesn't matter. A little background to the psychosis. Yeah. So the earliest haunted dolls were puppets, effigies, and voodoo objects, which were often created by early people for either religious or ceremonial purposes. The puppet. Yeah, the puppet.
01:22:43
Speaker
How you doing, Popit? Hello, Popit. That's their favorite thing to say. And so the fear of dolls is called the paedophobia, which I had to look up multiple times to make sure it wasn't just pedophilia or anything to do with pedophiles.
01:23:12
Speaker
My last name is Peter, so sometimes my nickname has been Petey. I've had various people call me that, so I took offense. Yeah, no, this is like pedo. So it's P-E-D-I-O-P-H-O-B-I-A. Pediaphobia. Weird. Yeah, like pedioms from the pedophilia.
01:23:36
Speaker
Yeah. Drain. I would have thought that would have had to do with feet or something. Yeah. Ask me. The fear of pedicures. The fear of defeat. Yeah. Fear of defeat. So this is classified under fear of humanoid figures, which is called auto-matinophobia.
01:24:05
Speaker
Automatonophobia. Try and say that. Autoerotic expectation. Okay, got it. And it's related to popophobia. Okay, popophobia. Yeah, so that one's a fear of puppets.
01:24:23
Speaker
So the reason why people say Marian that Oh, yeah, I, I tried to look up specific haunted ones. Um, but it was really hard to track down. A lot of times you'd find information about them and then you'd read like two pages on that they were debunked and it was just like a viral video prank. So yeah, it was kind of difficult to do. Yeah. So.
01:24:53
Speaker
A lot of the fear and everything and phobias that come out of these objects is due to the fact that these dolls often look eerily human, but are not. So this actually confuses parts of the brain that process facial clues and body language. So the body often does not know whether or not to perceive the doll as a threat, sometimes causing the person to watch the doll and wait for it to move. So it's kind of like this fascination where you just keep looking at it, but your brain is actually
01:25:24
Speaker
forcing you to do that to see if it's going to move or not, which is why so many people find it creepy. Almost biological, like instinctual kind of thing. Yeah. You can't really help it. Because they look so human. Yeah. So one thing because they're so
01:25:45
Speaker
All right. Yeah. Yeah. One thing I tried to look up that I really wished I could find a case on, which again, I got debunked. The most famous one I could find was debunked. I'm not going to mention it. It's stupid. If you look up haunted ventriloquist dummy, you're going to find it. So ventriloquist. Really? Yeah, it was some like World War II puppet that people had in a glass case and
01:26:15
Speaker
Um, he had like motion sensors on and he suddenly like started blinking and stuff, but like underneath, you could see that clearly there was wires, um, and stuff leading up to the glass case he was in. So. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's bad. Yeah.
01:26:35
Speaker
That makes the fun out of it. Yeah, because I was like, Oh, sweet. I finally found like a legitimate ventriloquism line. But yeah, so I do have a bit of information about ventriloquism. Oh, okay. So it was originally started as a religious practice. And the name ventriloquism comes from the Latin word for speak from the stomach, which is ventur meaning belly.
01:27:04
Speaker
And lo koi meaning speak, so it was literally just belly speak. Record scratch? What? Yeah. Yeah, it's a religious practice. So noises made by the stomach were thought to be voices of the unliving who lived within the ventriloquist. Sorry. The voices of the supper's past. Yeah.
01:27:35
Speaker
My before, that came before. This food isn't sitting right in my stomach. It must be a god. My coconut shrimp is talking to me now. So the ventriloquist would interpret the sounds from their stomach as words and speak to the dead or often tell the future, which I thought was hilarious.
01:28:05
Speaker
Oh my god, let's interpret anything shall we? Yeah, so this was also referred to as gastromancers by the Greeks and it was practiced for ritual or religious purposes by Zulu, Inuit and Mora Maori people. Maori. So okay, yes, from like New Zealand and the Pacific Polynesia and that.
01:28:34
Speaker
Yeah. So the transition from religious to entertainment happened in the 18th century due to traveling fun fairs and market towns. Though at the time voices were altered to make it sound as if they were coming from far away instead of using a puppet. So people at this time would like throw their voice like throughout the room. So it would sound like it was coming from like the back of the theater.
01:29:04
Speaker
instead of actually coming from them. How dramatic. Yeah, so this is weird. So a gentleman by the name of Fred Russell, he's regarded as the father of modern ventriloquism. And in 1886, he had a permanent residency at the Palace Theatre in London. And his act was a back and forth act with a cheeky boy dummy he had named Koster Joe.
01:29:38
Speaker
So that's a little bit of both because I might really wish I could give you guys a case on like an actual haunted ventriloquist dummy because I feel like with like goosebumps and
01:29:50
Speaker
stuff like that and a lot of horror movies. A lot of horror movies like the ventriloquist demi and in my opinion is like one of the creepiest things ever. So I was really disappointed I wasn't really able to track down an actual case but yeah it was kind of interesting. It kind of reminds me of the history of it.
01:30:15
Speaker
I was gonna say, yeah, I don't know why it reminds me of Chuckie. Cause I guess he's not really Vantage Philiquis. Like he's supposed to be like kind of that battery operated doll, but like, you know, his, his face and like the, like when their mouths just move, like in the bottom jaw just kind of comes down all. Yeah. Yeah. All gross. And you're like, that's not natural. Yeah.
01:30:43
Speaker
So I do have some information about some specific haunted dolls. So the first one we're gonna talk
Haunted Dolls Exploration
01:30:52
Speaker
about. Oh, I love haunted dolls. Yeah, is probably one of the absolute most famous Annabelle. I'm sure almost everybody's heard about Annabelle. If you've watched the movie. Yeah, but I didn't know until I actually,
01:31:13
Speaker
looked at pictures of Annabelle that she's a raggedy Ann doll. She's not what's depicted in the movies at all. Actually looks like quite a cute little like raggedy Ann doll, in my opinion. I think sometimes they, they judge it up, as you would say, or almost like, make it more creepy, judge it down. Yeah, like Annabelle. And they try to make it like, oh, yeah. Yeah, Annabelle in like the movie almost looks like a porcelain doll with like,
01:31:44
Speaker
For lack of a better analogy, like the Wendy's girl, like red hair and pigtails, but looks like a porcelain doll and Annabelle in real life is actually like a raggedy and like cloth doll with like yarn for hair, like looks nothing like the movie depiction. But I think I even heard a brief story about a haunted porcelain doll. It's not like they're not
01:32:11
Speaker
out there maybe not it wasn't a long story like I say maybe not enough to make a movie out of or a podcast case or whatever but it was like a shallow dive so I mean they I guess they but like it's like yeah they just sometimes in the movies just have to dramatize things so much and they take it
01:32:32
Speaker
you know, find that they're artistic liberties. Yeah. So Annabelle, so she's currently enclosed in a glass case in the collection of famous paranormal investigators, Ed and Lorraine Warren. So
01:32:50
Speaker
Yeah, I love them. I love all the movies. I like them. They're, they're pretty cool. So Annabelle's a famously haunted Raggedy Ann doll. She was given to a young nursing student by her mother in the year 1970. So this doll reportedly would move around the apartment when they were not home. The doll also left notes asking for help.
01:33:18
Speaker
Um, and at one point allegedly attacked her roommate's boyfriend. Yeah. So one morning, um, blood was found on Annabelle's dress. Um, the girls living in the apartment, uh, called the psychic who revealed that the doll was possessed by the spirit of a girl named Annabelle. And at this time is when the Warrens were called. Um, and they were actually given over possession of Annabelle and they opposed her.
01:33:48
Speaker
ever since in their collection. Right, because they do kind of do that to provide, not a sanctuary, that's not really the right word, but like, they just try to keep it out of harming other people's way. Yeah. They have all those collective like haunted things, yeah, and they're like little museum, but not a museum for people to go and look at, it's just more to keep them under wraps and try and keep them as safe as possible, which is really cool.
01:34:17
Speaker
So another cool one, if you haven't heard of the doll itself, you've probably heard of its adaptation in movies. So this is Robert the doll. Oh, he's like my favorite that I've heard stories about. Yeah. So Robert the doll, he's actually the inspiration for the Chucky doll in the child's play series.
01:34:43
Speaker
Right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. Actually looking at Robert the doll, he's pretty freaking cute. I like don't get weird vibes. Some of these ones, like when you look at, you understand why people associate them with being haunted. But honestly, Robert the doll is just a cute little boy doll in like a little sailor's outfit with a tiny dog. Like he's so cute.
01:35:11
Speaker
The outfit is cute. I'll grant you that. But like it was so wooden face is so like pockmarked with those like holes and stuff. Like I was listening to a description and they were like, he looks like he's an anaphylactic shock. Because his face is just kind of, you know what I mean? Like it's not like sharp features or whatever. It's just kind of like eye sockets and
01:35:35
Speaker
an amorphous blob almost. Oh, that might have been pictures you were looking at. But he's got like, he's got like marks in his face from what I've seen. Do you know what I mean? Not like from what I saw. The sailor's outfit, but then like, when you zoom in at like the face and stuff, it's just like, I think it was made of wood. I don't know. Yeah, it just looks really like the crap it
01:36:02
Speaker
like something was termites were eating away this little face or something. We'll put some pictures on the website. I think his face is made of cloth. So he's probably just being slowly eaten by moths.
01:36:23
Speaker
Probably, which just adds to the creep factor either way. So Robert is a life-sized doll and was reportedly made by the famous Steve Toy Company in Germany. It was given to the Florida artist Robert Eugene Otto as a birthday present when he was a child in 1904. Eugene, that's my dad's name. Yeah.
01:36:51
Speaker
So the doll wears a sailor suit. Eugene, the doll. The doll wears a sailor suit, which is believed to be the childhood outfit of the real Robert. So the doll is reported to change expressions and move around on its own. Is the real Robert meaning like the soul that haunts the doll? Or the Robert that owns him?
01:37:18
Speaker
like Robert Eugene Otto. Robert Eugene Otto, like a outfit he wore as a child is the outfit that Robert the dollar is. Ew, I didn't know that. That's kind of a gross detail. It's actually like quite common in these. Yeah. I don't like it. So it's just even more like if something's gonna haunt your like, if you're
01:37:48
Speaker
kid were to unfortunately die and they had a doll that looked like them. Seems to me they'd be more likely. We will talk about that in a few minutes because I have a doozy of a story.
01:38:02
Speaker
So Robert the doll is reported to change expressions and move around on his own. And the doll has been blamed on or Robert the human boy, often blamed his misdeeds on the life sized doll. And also reportedly had conversations that were heard between Robert and the doll with the doll often responding. So this is other people that like in a different room that could hear both of their voices.
01:38:31
Speaker
Yeah. So the doll was also blamed for financial collapse, broken bones, car accidents. So not very good. And Robert the doll remained at the house until the owner's death. And new owners kept the doll for approximately 20 years. And
01:38:53
Speaker
but I think when they left or moved, the doll now resides in a museum in Key West. That's all it's really said, and he's on display. I was surprised it wasn't in Zach Bagan's one in the museum of haunted whatever things in Vegas, actually, but no, he hasn't. No. Was that the end of the road, but the doll? Yeah. Because I have one more thing to say about him.
01:39:24
Speaker
I was listening to the other lovely Canadian podcast, Strange Brew, and he was talking about how Ozzy Osbourne had Robert the Doll or a cloth replica version of Robert the Doll. It's like you said, he got blamed for things. I guess the kid that owned them would be like, Robert did it. Robert did it. I always found that really creepy.
01:39:52
Speaker
I guess Ozzy got it in like 2019 and it was like, yeah, I looked it up and you could read stories to where he'd be like, he blamed it for like, he had health issues that year that he got it. And I think they talked about it on him and his son Jack. They had a show where they were like traveling around the world, like not the Osborne's one where they just sat around at their house and stuff, but like, I can't remember what it was called, but it's like they were, him and Jack were traveling all around. And yeah, I guess.
01:40:22
Speaker
I don't know, like they talked about hand to doll and they all this bad luck happened to him and he was like, okay, Jack, I believe in this doll now, whatever. All this stuff is happening. And I was like, what? I don't remember that. But yeah, it turned out it was like, he, he blamed it on, you know, his misfortune that year or whatever. So in his interest, yeah, for sure. That was cool. I like Aussie.
01:40:52
Speaker
So the next one is kind of a shallow dive. And it's a doll called Mandy. So Mandy is kind of mischievous in like a funny way, sort of.
01:41:14
Speaker
So, Mandy must be kept in her own display case as she is known for knocking over other dolls that she was displayed with. Which I thought was just hilarious, her just like shoving over other dolls and being like, I'm the only one that gets to sit. Like, yeah. Me, I'm a diva. Yeah, I may have come across her. Is she, is she porcelain?
01:41:42
Speaker
Because I was anyway, I originally looked these up when I was doing it, but I do not remember what they look like at all. Okay, okay. I listened to that one yesterday that I was talking about. So I think, I think that might've been the porcelain doll that I was reading. Sounds like a creepy looking porcelain doll that looks like it got punched in the face. Yeah.
01:42:08
Speaker
It has like scars on one half of its face, like around its eye. It looks like it got cut in a face with like a sword. Like, yeah. Wow. So staff at the... That's crazy. Quincelle? No. QSNEL? Yeah. Staff at the QSNEL Museum report missing lunches and visitors cameras
01:42:34
Speaker
failing when people try to take her picture. So apparently she steal, not only does she knock over other dolls, but she steals lunches and makes visitors to the museum's cameras not work when they want to take a picture of her. Yeah, and she is porcelain you just said. Yeah. Okay, that like, it's all gross. Yeah. Yeah. The next one I think is by far the creepiest doll I looked up.
01:43:04
Speaker
doing my research. It is called Letta. L-E-T-T-A. When you look her up, she just looks like a little gremlin. Like, just, oh. Yeah, I do not like her face and anything, her hair. I don't think I heard that one. Yeah, so Letta's pretty creepy. It reminds me of that actress, Letta. What then? Oh, I said,
01:43:34
Speaker
Letta's pretty creepy. Okay. So Letta is also known as Letta me out, which I thought was kind of funny. And she is actually a child sized figurine that is approximately 200 years old, and is made out of carved wood and real human hair. So when you look her up, they show pictures of her sitting in a chair, she looks
01:44:04
Speaker
Like this eyes of like a seven or eight year old, like real creepy. Like they have pictures of her sitting in like a children's chair. That's kind of creepy. I don't know why they got to do that life size thing. Cause they did that with Barbies too. So it's not like they haven't done it in modern times and it's just kind of weird. You know?
01:44:28
Speaker
The Dolls owner claims that they found her in the 1970s while exploring a deserted home in Wagga Wagga, Australia. Wagga Wagga. Wagga Wagga. Wagga Wagga. The Muppets. Oh, I never watched The Muppets. Oh, that's foggy there.
01:44:50
Speaker
So the owner reported items moving in the house, stuff marks on the floor. The owner's children complained of nightmares and waking up screaming that Letta was talking and moving on its own. Dogs reportedly turn aggressive whenever they're near the doll. And some people claim that they've even seen the doll move. What?
01:45:20
Speaker
Thanks, I hate it. Yeah, thanks. So owners attempted to sell Letta, and they had actually arranged a purchase. They put her in the vehicle, drove to the drop off where they were literally going to sell her. But when they got there, they discovered that they were physically unable to remove the doll from the vehicle.
01:45:48
Speaker
So they put the doll in the vehicle, drove to the purchase location and attempted to sell her, but they physically could not remove her from the vehicle. Like, yeah. Can you imagine? It's just like it's cemented down or something. So the sale actually didn't go through because they were unable to get the doll out of the vehicle.
01:46:16
Speaker
Um, and Letta actually currently tours with the owner that found her, I believe in the 1970s. And you can take pictures with the doll on your lap. So they tour around the country and you can take pictures with her. So, which is crazy. Yeah. There's pictures online of people with her sitting on their lap, which is real creepy. Like, yeah.
01:46:41
Speaker
I don't think I want to know she's like one, one doll like her head is the size of a person's head. Like this doll is like very creepy. Like, I really want to be just looks like like a cartoon like which out of a face carved from wood. That's like smiling like it just a wreck this smile. Yeah.
01:47:10
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, thank you. I'm good. So I have a slight detour because I wanted to save my favourite for last. So slight detour. We are going to talk about a haunted doll island in Mexico. Oh, yes.
01:47:35
Speaker
I'm a little bit familiar. It just sounds disgusting. Yeah, so it's been covered. I think there's only, what? I think it's the ghost hunters and then Buzzfeed Unsolved when they were doing their supernatural episodes that have traveled to the island because it's only- I heard ghosts and adventures went there. Yeah, ghosts and adventures. I don't know. I watched ghost hunters and I don't remember if they went there.
01:48:04
Speaker
I did like those guys, they were a little bit kind of practical, like the more scully of the scully and molder, like the more skeptical. Where like, it seems a lot of people like ghost adventures, but they like are like the guys kind of cheesy. I'm like, Oh, yeah. So this haunted doll island is located in Mexico, and it's filled with hundreds of dolls. So the island actually is made of
01:48:32
Speaker
chinampas, which it was actually invented by the Aztecs, which is kind of cool. So there at this time, like a lot of the waters and everything were flooded, so it was really hard to farm. So the Aztecs invented these chinampas. So they're floating islands made from interwoven wreaths with stakes that formed beneath the water's surface, creating underwater fences to keep dirt in place.
01:49:00
Speaker
they were able to like keep adding dirt in these like fences and then they were able to build these like little like 10 feet by 10 feet islands so then they farmed on those islands and then to get from each of these chinampas or islands from one to another you had to be in like a boat so this island is essentially
01:49:22
Speaker
That's made up of dozens of these leftover from the Aztecs. There's like little bridges and everything. There's a lot more dirt now than there was in this island is like accessible only by going down the river.
01:49:38
Speaker
Kamalco, which is south of the center of Mexico City, and is very close to the Estadio Azteca football stadium. So it's actually one of the main attractions, of course, if you're traveling through these channels by boat.
01:49:57
Speaker
So dolls of various styles and colors are found throughout the island and were originally placed by the former owner of the island, Don Julian Santana Barrera.
01:50:11
Speaker
Uh, so Julian believed that the dolls had to chase away the spirit of a girl who had drowned near one of the Chinampas, um, years ago. So when this little girl had drowned, which they've never proven that this little girl ever existed. Um, and he has actually said that when he found the body of the little girl, he apparently found a doll floating nearby and assumed that it belonged to the little girl.
01:50:41
Speaker
And because he was kind of an outcast, um, and was kind of living off the grid, he grew food and pretty much people coming up and down the channel would just trade with him for food that he grew on these tranapas. So on the doll floating nearby, assuming it belonged to the girl, he hung it from a tree as a sign of respect for her death. And, uh, when Julian died,
01:51:04
Speaker
in 2001 of a heart attack, sources say he was actually found floating in water close to the same spot where he claimed that this little girl had drowned. So you're correct. So in addition to the island being featured on Ghost Adventures and Buzzfeed Unsolved, it's also featured in the Amazon Prime show lore. Is that where you've heard about it?
01:51:35
Speaker
Uh, probably I've definitely heard it on a few podcasts, I think so far. So, but like not, not always drives, though. It's really interesting. Cause I'm like, I don't know what it other than, yeah, like. Like when Buzzfeed unsolved went there, they pretty much, it was really creepy. There was like a different types of dolls there too. Not like Teddy bears, stuff like that, that are left. Um, people you've,
01:52:04
Speaker
dolls and stuff for Julian and the little girl. But right, I guess the island, if you watch the Buzzfeed Unsolved episode at least, it's one of their first episodes. They do it when they go to the Winchester House and they went to one other location as well. So it was like a 45 minute long episode.
01:52:30
Speaker
which they don't do anymore. And they pretty much ended up fleeing from the island because there was so many spiders everywhere that were large, large spiders that they feared that they could end up being bit by these spiders. So they ended up leaving. Oh my god. Yeah. That's scary. Yeah, so that's why they ended up leaving. They were originally planning to stay, I believe overnight on the island, but they ended up leaving shortly.
01:53:00
Speaker
I think after the sun went down because the spiders were really getting bad. So they pretty much ran off the island and back to the boat. Yeah. So in addition to literally hundreds of dolls, the island also contains a small museum that Julian had made that were out of articles from local newspapers about the island.
01:53:27
Speaker
And the previous owner, there's a little store there and three rooms, one of which was actually a small bedroom was like a bed roll like just laying on the ground, which is apparently where Julian slept.
01:53:44
Speaker
And in this room is the first doll that Julián collected, as well as Augustinta, which was his favorite doll. So if you do watch the Buzzfeeder Unsolved episode, it shows you which doll was the first one that he found, as well as which one was his favorite doll. So some of the visitors place offerings around this doll in exchange for miracles and blessings.
01:54:14
Speaker
And some others change their clothes and maintain it as a form of worship. So they are kind of treated as like a religious kind of like, yeah. Like a shrine or something almost. Yeah.
01:54:38
Speaker
Definitely just not somewhere. I want a vacation though. It's very creepy. Like given you're surrounded by hundreds of dolls and then you're surrounded by thousands of spiders. Like, yeah. Was that one your favorite one? No. Oh, that is. Yeah. That's not my favorite one. So, no. That was really good though. I've enjoyed it so far. Yeah. I only have one.
01:55:07
Speaker
case left and it's slightly deeper dive because I just found it crazy. Yeah. I like crazy. So my last haunted doll is actually one that when I was looking up all these haunted dolls, when you look at and Google like haunted dolls and look at the lists that are supposed to list a bunch of them,
01:55:37
Speaker
They created lists like the same six over and over and over. And only in one list did I find the one that I thought was the most interesting. And that's the one that I chose to do kind of like a deeper dive on. And that was because it was only listed on one list once. And it's actually not a creepy doll. It's actually rather cute.
01:56:09
Speaker
And the story around it. No, this one's not creepy at all. Like the story around it is kind of sad, but it's actually not very like scary or anything for a doll. Okay. So this doll is named Okiku.
01:56:39
Speaker
That's how I'm choosing to pronounce it. I've definitely not heard of it. Cool. Yeah, I never had either. And so Okiku was purchased in 1918 by a man for his two-year-old sister who was named Okiku. So Okiku, the doll.
01:57:03
Speaker
Yeah, so I didn't really find much about like how old he was. Um, for him to be referenced to as a man, buying a doll for his two year old sister, but he was a man at six. So
01:57:26
Speaker
The doll, Okiku, is approximately 40 centimeters tall and is dressed in a cute little kimono and has raven black hair that's cut like sharply cut at shoulder length. So cute little like traditional. Yeah, it's actually a traditional hairstyle.
01:57:48
Speaker
um, for these dolls. So Okiko, the girl, loved the doll and apparently carried it with her everywhere and treated it as if it was her own little sister. And she is the one that named it after herself as she saw them as weird duplicates. Yeah, so she had like the same hair and she thought the doll looked like her. So she named the doll after her and like, acted like the doll was her little sister. Yeah, she wanted a little sister. That's cute.
01:58:18
Speaker
Yeah, so in 1919, when Akiku was only three, one year after getting the doll, she died tragically of yellow fever. I know you were going to say that. Yeah, of course. So while she lay gasping for air, she was reportedly clutching the doll.
01:58:44
Speaker
At the time, the family actually wished to bury her with the doll because they had been so close.
01:58:53
Speaker
but because of the circumstances of yellow fever, which I found kind of strange. You think if she was like clutching it, and obviously if yellow fever was as contagious and as it's made out to be, they probably would have wanted to bury it with her. But apparently at this time, for some reason, the government prevented the family from burying her with the doll. Oh.
01:59:21
Speaker
Yeah. Okiku the girl has now passed away and instead of her being buried with her favorite doll, the doll was placed in a traditional family altar in their house to honor their daughter. So it was, yeah. So one day, it's not creepy. Like that's why I kind of liked this one because for all the stuff that goes on,
01:59:50
Speaker
This doll actually isn't bad. It doesn't hurt anybody. But it's just kind of strange. So one day when a family member was walking past the doll and looked at the altar for their daughter, they noticed that the hair on the doll was growing. So one shoulder length and your bob straight at the bottom now hung past the waist of the doll and was in different textures and colors.
02:00:19
Speaker
So yeah, so it was around this time that the family actually started dreaming of their daughter. And once a week apparently the doll would be at their side. So there was some lights flickering, banging sounds, strange voices heard around their daughter's birthday, as well as the anniversary of her death.
02:00:46
Speaker
So it was at this time that the family contacted shamans who concluded that their daughter's soul was trapped in the doll. So because she had died clutching this doll, her soul was trapped in the doll. So the family did move houses and at this time
02:01:12
Speaker
They didn't want to take the doll with them as they believed that the soul trapped in the doll needed to stay close to her grave. They thought if they took the doll with her, it would mean that their daughter's soul died. So they asked that she stay close to her grave so that her soul could stay in this little doll, even if they weren't around. Yeah, so they gave the doll to a local temple.
02:01:41
Speaker
And in the time that the temple has had this doll, they have confirmed the following. The hair does in fact grow as the family described. And clippings were actually taken by the temple and sent away for a scientific analysis. And it was confirmed that the hair on the doll was in fact human hair.
02:02:09
Speaker
Oh, wow. Which is always the twist. So the hair at this time, and remember in 1918, this doll's hair was a bob at about shoulder length. So at this time, the doll's hair has grown past its knees. This doll is 40 centimeters tall. So it has grown quite long. They never cut it here.
02:02:35
Speaker
They have cut it. So this is in between cuttings. Yeah. So the hair has grown past the doll's knees. It is trimmed by a monk at the temple who had a dream that the little girl, Okiku, came to him asking him to cut her hair. So he cuts the doll's hair for her. But no one has been able to explain why the doll's hair keeps growing.
02:03:03
Speaker
Yeah, no shit shouldn't be growing. It's not embedded into living flesh. Right? Yeah. So the doll has become more infamous and stronger as years pass. There's now claims that her hair grows faster and wilder. And apparently that her mouth is slowly opening. So there's Yeah, there's now apparently kind of
02:03:32
Speaker
a belief that if you peer or if you dare to peep inside her mouth, that you'll see little baby teeth growing from her little porcelain gums, which is creepy. But before you decide to like make that, think that this little doll is creepy, if you actually Google this little doll,
02:03:59
Speaker
It is so cute in its little kimono. And its hair is really long. Like, its hair is so long. It's probably beautiful hair too, I'm sure. It's like stringy black, like straight hair. Stringy black. Ew. No, that sounds like the ring. I'll have to look at it. Yeah, it's a cute little doll. Like, yeah. And that's the end of that. Yeah.
02:04:27
Speaker
It is crazy. I've never heard of that one. Yeah, I tried to find a bit more information. But this was pretty much comprised of all I really could find about her. I haven't put on any podcasts or anything. Yeah, I don't think she's very well known.
02:04:57
Speaker
But like she lives at this temple still, the monks cut her hair. There was also claims I didn't include it. There's also claims apparently that the doll has fingernails that grow. I don't really, that was only one source that I ever saw. The rest of it just talks about her hair.
02:05:19
Speaker
They're like, she is drinking her green tea, her hair is growing, her nails are looking lustrous. Yeah, but if you think about the fact that this doll's hair has, like the family moved in 1938.
02:05:36
Speaker
And like the family said before that, that the doll's hair was growing. So at least since 1938, when she's been living in this temple, these monks have been cutting her hair and her hair has still grown from being shoulder length to past her knees, like in between cuttings. So like this hair. They're kind of almost a little creepier, strange in their own right.
02:06:05
Speaker
the way that some Buddhist monks like in Nepal, you know, they're very extreme ones. They like stop eating a lot of things and then they only eat certain things sometimes. They're like kind of leading up to their death so that their like bodies will be mummified easier. I feel like I'm not telling it really right, but it's like,
02:06:33
Speaker
crazy dedication to what they're trying to do. And it's, oh, you're like, what the heck? Like you're just getting your body ready and it's just a vessel and they're just treating it like that. And they're just like almost starving themselves. I don't know. I, I'd have to look it up more, but it was definitely like, that's extreme. Yeah. But if you,
02:07:03
Speaker
Anybody listening, do yourself a favor. Look up all the dolls I mentioned. If you want to look up at a super creepy one, look up Letta. And then finish it off by looking at a cute little doll that's like, has a little flower in her hair and has a cute little kimono. Forever growing hair. Yeah, like this doll's hair has grown from like her body proportions. Her head is maybe,
02:07:33
Speaker
a fifth of what the rest of her body is. So for the fact that she went from shoulder length, like her hair has probably grown, like she's 40 centimeters tall. So her hair has probably grown 30 centimeters. They've let it grow, let alone all the time, all the times that they've cut it in between that. Yeah. Hard to grow out of a shortcut, that's for sure. Seems like it takes forever. Yeah.
02:08:04
Speaker
Yeah, she's, she's very cute. She's got a little, a little golden shrine. She's got like gold all around her flowers. Yeah. She's pretty cute for like a little doll that's over a hundred years old. Most of them look pretty creepy. In my opinion, she's like, she looks like she could be sold on the shelf today easily. Like she's in fantastic condition. I wonder if
02:08:35
Speaker
that lack of creepiness factor is why she isn't maybe as well known as say Robert the doll or someone that might look a little creepier or they could make, you know, a creepy movie about it and make it seem a little more sinister than it is because they'd be like, Oh, look at it. Yeah. See like everything. This one, they're like her hair grew. Yeah. Like when you look her up,
02:09:04
Speaker
Um, everything pretty much says that she like puts like other haunted dolls to shame. Like in that she's the creepiest, but she's not like, like Annabelle where people woke up and found blood on her dress. Like rather than them having dreams and stuff of her, her family and lights like green.
02:09:33
Speaker
A haunted doll. It would be her, right? Like that would be a pick because. Okay. Agreed. Me too. Yeah. She's really cute. Not likely to harm yourself or others. No, I like it. Yeah. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. Cause you're cursed.
02:10:03
Speaker
Yeah. You've been cursed. You broke the mirror. You got that haunted painting. By the way, my mom just like always, yeah, she'll go to auctions and things and then totally the type of person to have like a random person's portrait in her house. You're just like, do you know that person in the black and white part? No. Oh, you shouldn't do that. Kid. Oh, totally.
02:10:34
Speaker
It's like antiquing. But I've never had any personal paranormal activities, so I can't really say shit. And in some ways I'm glad for that. My parents, one of their first houses that they owned had a problem with the lights in the garage. And every time they left the garage, as most people do, they turned the lights out.
02:11:03
Speaker
Um, yeah, but no matter what, anytime you would go into the garage, the lights were on again. Um, even if they had turned them off when they left. Oh, really? Yeah. I don't know. Sometimes I'm like, cause mine will come on sort of automatically. So then I'll come out and they look like they've been on and you're like, well,
02:11:30
Speaker
Did you just turn on it or have you been on this whole time? Oh, yeah. Oh, man. Yeah. I will be posting a picture of each of the dolls for sure on the website.
02:11:44
Speaker
Yes, you will. Yeah. So if you want to follow along, we are posting the episodes on our website and it's kind of a blog format so you can follow along. And we have some pictures. I'm trying not to do too many pictures. I know some things have like dozens and dozens of pictures per episode. Sure. Yeah.
02:12:13
Speaker
You could look them up further if you want to, but it's good to have just the reference. If someone's like talking about a person or how they look, it's nice to be able to be like, okay, here's a picture where they. Yeah. Yeah. So we're going to post like at least a couple pictures, like for each of our cases each week, but it's not going to be like a whole huge slide show thing of pictures. So.
02:12:44
Speaker
No, I'm sure there are pictures available online of everything. Yeah, but I will post a picture of each of the dolls so that you guys can look at them as I tell you how creepy and or adorable I thought they were. Yes, and you can Google us. I'm not sure exactly if it's still got the castles and cryptids dot where space maybe dot com.
02:13:11
Speaker
But it's still Squarespace. But when you Google Castles and cryptids now, it shows up. Until today, it didn't show up when you Googled us. So I think it's because I attempted to Google us about 20 times a day every day for two weeks straight. So I'm pretty sure I single-handedly messed up Google's algorithm. And then it's like, wow, this website's in high demand. Oh.
02:13:42
Speaker
Yeah. And on that note, our Patreon is also upcoming, coming soon to a Patreon near you. I do like just seeing like, yeah, what people want to see for content for their Patreon. Like I kind of got some ideas for some of the Patrons that I subscribe to, you know, and what I kind of like to see over here, but we definitely like to hear feedback.
02:14:09
Speaker
Yeah, content. Yeah, definitely gonna be some bonus episodes and things like that. So stay tuned. Yeah. Well, perfect. Oh, that was really good. I like your cases. Thanks. Yeah, yeah, you have to if you're gonna look up any of them. Well, you said you hadn't heard of leada either.
02:14:40
Speaker
No, not at all. It's just L-E-T-T-A. Robert the doll. The doll, I think those are really the only two main ones I know. Robert the doll, Peggy the doll. Which both, I think were covered extensively and that's why we drink and I just love a good deep dive on something. You know, if there's enough that there, you know, you can be like. Peggy is creepy.
02:15:09
Speaker
Oh yeah. Yeah, Peggy looks creepy. She wasn't on the regular list of the top six or what he kept seeing. Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh, I recommend them sometimes for like the deep dives on the paranormal and stuff.
02:15:30
Speaker
The Winchester House that you mentioned earlier was one that Em covered in their first episode. Then they were like, I think they were at like 200 or something and they were like, kind of wanted to go back and recover some of them where they were like, we didn't know how to research maybe as well back then. And then they like redid Winchester House. And I was like, wow, like sometimes I'm just impressed the amount of content and information someone can get out of one case.
02:16:00
Speaker
like one deep dive where you're like, whoa, you know? Like I definitely prefer that oftentimes to like maybe a 30 minute kind of shallow dive where you just get the bare bones. You know what I mean? Like you know about it, but then maybe you have to like listen to five things or read five articles before you get some new source of information where if you get one big deep dive on it, you're going to get,
02:16:27
Speaker
all of that. Oh, like when we get to the hotel episode, I did a case that I really wasn't familiar with, but there was quite a few different actual sources on it. When I did look it up, like there was podcasts, you know, some articles. There's obviously usually like a Wikipedia, which I try not to rely too much on, but it was kind of like, holy shit, okay, I don't really know this one, but there's actually, you know, different opposing views and stuff.
02:16:55
Speaker
It can almost get confusing. Cause then it was like, like the timeline was getting a little convoluted. I had to go back. I'm like Wikipedia, at least you have a timeline. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mine. Mine is like so weird. I like. That's our next one, right? That's our next is our hotels from hell episode. Yeah. That's gonna be good.
02:17:26
Speaker
excited. Yeah, like Nana Peggy the doll did not show up. I don't think on anything I looked up. I think I heard it on That's Why We Drink. I think. Yeah, like this says she's in the Zach Bagans haunted museum in Las Vegas that we were planning on going to. We would have gotten to see her too. Definitely Christine from And That's Why We Drink watches ghost adventures. She'll always talk about Zach Bagans and like
02:17:57
Speaker
It's funny because I think she talks about for a while, like he like blocked her because she was like messaging him too much or something. I don't know. Sometimes there's shit that's funny. Like it's funny. Like the one host M got like verified on Instagram, like without almost even trying like way before the other host. And so it kind of became like, you know, uh,
02:18:19
Speaker
the comic to be like a gag. And she was like, Christine was like blocked by Zach Baggins or something at one point. Or they'll call him like Zach Bagel-Bite. I don't know. That's funny. I just, I don't know what to talk about and they call him like kind of horny. So I don't really always want to watch it where I like, like Ghost Hunters, we've watched a lot of seasons up.
02:18:49
Speaker
And they're like, the two main guys, they're like plumbers during the day. They're very much like kind of not necessarily totally skeptical, but you know what I mean? Like they're there to debunk stuff as well, if they can, right? So yeah, it's an interesting perspective. That's for sure. Yeah. I was so upset though, that I couldn't find like
02:19:17
Speaker
Because I wanted to do my entire thing about like haunted like ventriloquist dolls because I thought that would be like the creepiest thing ever. And then I couldn't find a single one.
02:19:31
Speaker
Wow. That's annoying. And then when I was trying to Google like haunted dolls, a lot of it was just like Etsy on how to make your own haunted doll. And then Amazon and eBay on haunted dolls that are just dolls people buy from like Value Village and put on the internet is haunted. Totally.
02:19:53
Speaker
So I was like, oh, he was reading some of the descriptions. It was like, super haunted, blah, blah, blah. It's like where people are trying to like, talk things up and you can tell. You're like, okay, buy this. It haunted me, it haunted my daughter. Yeah, we felt so strange around it and it's all tap. Thanks for tuning in to episode three.
02:20:19
Speaker
Yeah, curse. But you won't be now, I promise. We have cleansed you of this episode. Save. Sage blessing to you via the internet. When in doubt, Sage it out. Exactly. Yes, we're very pure spirit. But we want you to join us next time to continue the blessings. And next time we'll be talking about hotel crimes. So
02:20:49
Speaker
true crime next week. Yeah. I'm excited. There's some shit that goes down in hotels and we're not just going to cover like the, what everyone's talking about right now. Like I think if we do cover Cecil hotel or anything, it's going to be not just Alisa lamb because in my opinion, her case is installed and unfortunately it's just,
02:21:19
Speaker
sad. I don't think there's a lot of like mystery to it. Um, and other than like, uh, Yeah, I like it. Like I agree. It's fucked up and it's good to be covered. But I know that there's obviously a six part mini series like out on Netflix. So there is a lot going on with that hotel. I'm sure we couldn't even cover it in a one parter. So I think we'll,
02:21:45
Speaker
Well, we're going to avoid that one for right now, but that means we're going to get some really obscure, really fucked up ones that you probably haven't heard before. I think I had to go to page 18 or 19 of Google in Hotel Crimes or Hotel Murders, I think I looked up, to find anything that wasn't above the Cecil Hotel.
02:22:11
Speaker
Yeah, that was gonna be harder to find. Yeah. And that's why I appreciate when you get a story where you're like, maybe you're watching a show or you're listening to something, you're like, I have not heard of this. And you're kind of like, whoa, leave that for another day, I guess. Another haunted or mysterious hotel crimes. Mine's... Yeah, probably one you've not seen on Netflix. At least mine I had not heard of, but I love it. It's interesting.
02:22:40
Speaker
is kind of confusing. There's a lot of like discrepancies in the reporting and names of people and stuff, but the information that I could track down is pretty consistent from one topic to the other. So yeah, I think it's really good. It has pretty much a little bit of pretty much anything you could hope in a true crime story. It has. So it
02:23:10
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, yeah, that's gonna be a good episode then because mine is probably pretty much like like eight other like topics like you could have picked this case. Like there's so much going on. Okay, it's good. We're doing this like on a day where we have a whole night. That's gonna be awesome. All right.
02:23:35
Speaker
All right. Well, join us next time on Castles and Cryptids.
Preview of Next Episode
02:23:39
Speaker
Yeah. Castles are fucking haunted. We will get to them when we will get to the cryptids. In fact, we're thinking I had a Patreon idea and it's out there on the tiers. You know, choose your own cryptid, kind of a fan picker. If you're going to do a certain tier, you can pick what the episode you want to hear about. You know, theme is going to be. So I think that's going to be fun too. So we'll see.
02:24:04
Speaker
We'll see how that one goes, but there's definitely going to be lots of cool stuff to come. So catch us next time. Bye bye. All right. Bye bye.