Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Haunted Objects with MonsterTalk - Episode 85
322 Plays7 years ago
It's our second Halloween special and crossover with the MonsterTalk Podcast! Today we're Joined by Blake Smith and Karen Stollznow to talk about haunted objects and where to find them. We talk about creepy dolls, haunted antiques, and cursed 3d printed objects. Enjoy the worlds of two great podcasts colliding!
Recommended
Transcript
Playful Warning and Introduction
00:00:01
Speaker
Warning! Do not listen to this show backwards next to a Ouija board. You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Welcome to the Archaeological Fantasies podcast, episode 85, and Monster Talk Crossover number two.
Exploring Haunted Objects
00:00:16
Speaker
I'm your host, Sarah Head, and I'm joined today with Ken Fader, Jeb Card, Blake Smith, and Karen Stoltzner. Today we're talking about haunted objects.
00:00:24
Speaker
Is that creepy clown doll in the corner trying to kill you? Can you 3D print your own cursed object?
Revisiting Spooky Themes
00:00:31
Speaker
And if you were so possessed, where could you purchase a few of these cursed and haunted objects online? We revisit a few favorites that we've talked about on both podcasts on our super spooky crossover episode of Archie Fantasies and Monster Talk. Get ready to think critically. Are you getting it? Maybe?
00:00:54
Speaker
Diggin' in a trench, monuments, goin' to the... Welcome to Monster Talk, The Science Show About Monsters. Tonight we're actually joining for another Archaeological Fantasies podcast, Crossover. So we've got... Oh yeah! The first one was so popular.
Patreon and Academic Humor
00:01:10
Speaker
And this is going to be a special Halloween spooky edition. All the spooky. So there's a lot of spooky archaeological topics and we're going to probably hit on quite a few. We've got myself and Karen and Sarah and Ken and Jeb from archaeological fantasies, which is art.
00:01:31
Speaker
to fantasies. If you have not subscribed, you are a loser. Subscribe as quickly as you can. I concur with that. We also had a Patreon. So you could give us money if you really wanted to. If you really love us, you would give us. Do all the Patreon. You should give us money and worship us. Yes. Oh, I like I like that. Yes. We're off to a. Yes. We're off to a good start. I didn't know what Patreon was, so I asked and Blake told me it's kind of like a tip jar. So it is. But I told Blake.
00:02:00
Speaker
I told Mike and Karen that I've decided that I'm going to put a tip jar at the front of my classrooms and which students, if they've done a really good job lecturing, they should put a couple of bucks in. Why not? I'm going to do that too. I think it's a brilliant idea. I think that's great. I think you've just transformed academia. Well, the thing is...
00:02:18
Speaker
I just had to fill out an ethics form, so that might not run afoul. But if you want to support Ken, the best way to support Ken at this point would be to buy his 50 sites you have to see before you die in America book. In fact, buy a couple of copies that make wonderful presents for Halloween, for example. Absolutely. In all seriousness, I probably mangled
Haunted Objects and Cultural Impact
00:02:42
Speaker
it. Ken, what is the title of that?
00:02:43
Speaker
Oh, you know what? Shit, man. My problem with the title was I wanted it to be an archaeological odyssey and the publisher told me nobody knows what odyssey means. So it's ancient America, 50 archaeological sites to see for yourself. All right.
00:02:58
Speaker
Excellent, excellent. So we are doing our second crossover. Our first one was on the very serious and important topic of fairies.
00:03:14
Speaker
It's a great episode in all seriousness it gets into how people see the past how they sort of imagine human agency and extra human places and so on but we decided this time we're gonna go all out and go with haunted objects because you're surrounded by objects and they might be haunted try to go to sleep now.
Annabelle and Pop Culture
00:03:38
Speaker
So it's a serious matter. It's a very serious matter. Listen, listen, in Connecticut, we have the the Ed and Lorraine Warren have their own museum. Oh, God. Oh, God. Yes, that museum.
00:03:51
Speaker
And in the museum, I guess it's a Raggedy Andal. You're talking about the real Annabelle. The real Annabelle, yes. But it's a Raggedy Andle. I've never seen it. I was going to ask if you've been there, Ken, in all seriousness. I guess when, I think it's Ed who died.
00:04:13
Speaker
And I guess there was for a few bucks, they gave tours of it. But now they've kind of closed it down. And the only people they let in, they do these dinners that cost a tremendous amount of money, but it's a much smaller crowd. So their business model has changed tremendously. And I'm not about to pay them a whole shit ton of money, like rubber chicken. Well, let's also be fair. I mean, Robert, the doll is the big one. And for that, you need a spooky piano.
00:04:42
Speaker
I'm not saying that that's a prime matter to discuss or anything, but I am.
00:04:57
Speaker
look at it because you would automatically get haunted or something. Oh, the parents would travel. Yeah, exactly. But so it's the kind of thing, it was the thing that drew people in, but then they made a big deal about, oh, don't look at it. Are we still talking about animal or robber? Well, either of us.
00:05:14
Speaker
I just heard her whole story about the Robert Dahl on an excellent podcast called And That's Why We Drink. And that sounds creepy as hell. I think, you know, Jeb, you would actually really like that show. It's half paranormal, half true crime. But yeah, they covered the Robert Dahl and the story for that.
00:05:36
Speaker
Yeah, ours is in our top 10 downloaded like most is that in your top 10. The curator from the museum. Crazy stuff at the it's like, is it true that like you have to ask permission of the doll to take its picture?
00:05:56
Speaker
Yes, and then if you don't, you need to write a letter and apology. Right. That's absolutely true folklore. Yeah, obviously. Here's the deal. Ed and Lorraine used to do tours and they would lecture at universities and they came to my university. So I primed one of my students to ask them about the James Randi Challenge. This is back in the day when it wasn't a million bucks. But I said, go ask them why they never have never accepted the challenge.
00:06:22
Speaker
And Ed said, and I remember it very clearly, that he said, oh yes, I've heard of that. And if I wanted to buy my wife a mink coat, I could do that in a heartbeat by winning that challenge. But we're not in this for the money.
00:06:35
Speaker
No. Are you getting paid for this lecture? And then, you know, brought down the house and people are paying attention. Oh, no. Well, yeah. They were making a good living by doing those lectures, but no, we're not in it for the money. Let me just say this. I'm holding a glass and I am having all the self-control right now to not react to what you just said, Ken. Because good God, good God.
00:07:01
Speaker
Let me ask number five episode or number five. I've most downloaded it. Wow. Well, we're no mission. Yeah. Well, tell them tell them what your number one downloaded episode is. Number one downloaded episode is ancient aliens with Ken. Ken Blankety Blankety Fader. I believe that's written on urban dictionary is how that's that's right. That's what they're explicit.
00:07:29
Speaker
A parental advisory sticker on the download. Do you just put one of them on your forehead? Yeah, I do. Absolutely. In my mouth, actually. I stick my tongue out. That's a little much information. It's funny that Ken finally joined Twitter when he did, and he joined it with the Twitter handle. I think it's like America, ancient America 50 or 50 ancient America or something like that.
00:07:50
Speaker
Yeah, it's something like that. But it was really funny because long before you joined, Twitter was eager for you to join. So we had already decided that your Twitter handle was going to have to be goddamn Kenny Federer fader. And like, when you join in America, Kenny, Evan, Evan, Evan Federer. Yes. But yes, it was already taken. I see your Amanda Palmer already. She's a fucking Palmer. Yeah, there you go.
00:08:21
Speaker
We got a couple of North American archaeology types here. We are all aware of the social media of archaeologists digging up creepy dolls. Are we aware? Tell me more about y'all's experience with that. No, I don't have any direct experience with that at all other than people
00:08:41
Speaker
kind of asking me, that's creepy as fuck, that stuff that you dig up, but do you ever wonder, do you ever worry about the spirits? And I said, well, no, actually. My usual bullshit answer to that is, well, obviously, if there are spirits, they brought me to this site and they wanted me to dig this stuff up.
00:09:02
Speaker
And then people usually go away. It's all's will. It's all's will that you've got. Exactly. Exactly. That's going to win us. But now, in Mesoamerica, Jeff, in Mesoamerica, is there a tradition of spooky dolls that the Aztecs or the Maya or whoever made, and that those spirits inhabit those? Well, there's modern things where people put dolls, but they don't mean to be spooky. And this is why I bring it up. I actually kind of have, and I don't want to alienate people, but it's what I'm really good at.
00:09:32
Speaker
Uh, I, uh, yes, yes. Well, I kind of do it modern too. I kind of do it post.
00:09:41
Speaker
But I actually, in all seriousness, have a problem with these sort of creepy doll concepts because, like, look, these are objects which have been made weird and exotic by time. These were things that people really cared about. These were beloved things. And because they look human and because they look, I get why people find them creepy, but at the same time, I'm like, don't exoticize. No, he's talking about dolls or great-grandmothers.
00:10:09
Speaker
I want to jump in here though because you and I briefly touched on this last time we talked and you were sober. So we're going to do this straight up. That was never, that was never an actual state, but continue.
00:10:21
Speaker
But no, the thing about the creepy dolls is when, because you guys know I do a lot of CRM, and for people who don't know, that's contract archaeology. I go out and I walk in lines. You dig that hell out of things. I Swiss cheese the hell out of stuff. But part of it is getting to the sites and walking through the woods. And a lot of the woods is
00:10:42
Speaker
woods behind people's houses. And the reason why the creepy doll thing exists and why I'm challenging the whole statement of, you know, it's a, it's an exoticized item is I have seen people who have taken the dolls specifically for the purpose of creating a creepy space, like nailing them through the head to a tree or the dog graveyard.
00:11:08
Speaker
Yeah I mean and when you're when you're walking through the woods and you have a vague idea of where you are and you're going off of a compass and a topo map and you come across a graveyard where it's just all these little doll heads and doll arms sticking up out of the ground I mean you can't tell me that was done out of love because that's fucking weird. It sounds like me as a kid I didn't like Barbie dolls I was more of a tomboy so if I got those I'd kind of do that to them.
00:11:32
Speaker
Right now I have seen a really great picture of a doll that apparently got hooked in a tree somehow and it had been turned into a wasp's nest. The wasps haven't had a nest, but it's just its head and its arms and then its whole body is a wasp.
00:11:50
Speaker
cool picture I've seen it and I love it and I know it's a field picture but I mean that I would agree with you that's that's an out-of-place object that got turned into something creepy but I have seen
00:12:03
Speaker
I have two rashes that one I'm going to now tape up all the ducks in my house. And secondly, that kind of feels very Mary Douglas because what you're describing are things that are out of place. They are weird because they're out of place. And the thing I get bothered by is the sword and this gets into our haunted objects thing, I think.
00:12:22
Speaker
Things that make sense where they are discarded by people, but because of time and because of where and because frankly, we are weirded out by seeing the human form outside of us, they become creepy. And it's like, look, you dug up a Victorian doll. It's not creepy because it's a different context. Exactly. No, I agree with you there. I agree with you there. Mary Douglas is the shit out of that and nails it to a tree because they want you to feel weird. Right.
00:12:53
Speaker
Success. Also, if it's a baby doll, it's creepy. But if it's a Barbie doll, miso hornet. I'm totally editing that out.
00:13:15
Speaker
That's not the first time you'll say the hornet thing. The hornet thing is really creepy. I saw on Twitter a doll said that a hermit crab had moved into and the easing it as a child. That's pretty messed up. I like that a lot. What about that toy that was filled with the beans and it sprouted?
00:13:39
Speaker
I haven't seen that. I haven't seen that and I don't want to see that. I can't strip it out of my brain. It was a doll. So it was like a human being. Oh my God. Wow.
00:13:58
Speaker
Okay, I'm just gonna say this, having met Blake at Crypticon, if you all think this is a thing he does for the radio? No. Oh no, my friend. Oh my god, you are the same. That's a real deal. You know what I think the worst part of it is, is if you follow him on Twitter, I almost feel like it's like his testing ground for these things on Twitter, and he's like, yeah, that one went over on you, and that all lit on it.
00:14:23
Speaker
I'm pretty sure the world is his testing ground. So in case we have any listeners left.
00:14:33
Speaker
Yeah, we want those because I mean they're already in a place to buy all the all the pickup trucks were selling but But no, we want to talk about haunted objects tonight for Halloween and you know what Halloween should be full of mirth Because it of course it is the time when the veil between the world is finished and that's when you should be Jesus Christ Oh my god. No, I'm laughing and whistling against the graveyard right, but but we want to talk about haunted objects and
00:14:59
Speaker
And I think this fits nicely in the monsters, which we did with fairies. And I also think it fits nicely into the archeology we do. Do we all have, I have some ideas about one, but do we have any particular haunted objects we wanted to talk about before we get into some of what we were planning on talking about? Well, the moving statue of Neb Sinu. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about that. So who knows that story?
00:15:28
Speaker
I could give a brief synopsis. Blake, go ahead. It was noted that... This is in England. Is it? Where is it? Do you remember? In Manchester, England, there's a statue of... It's an Egyptian statue of Neb Sinu. And what was noticed... Hang on, hang on, hang on. Hang on, hang on. Which one's Neb Sinu? Which one's Neb Sinu? Neb Sinu. Manchester-moving statue has been TV shows and whatnot. Right, right, right. But we have to pretend like we don't know what we're talking about. So we've got... Egyptian. Egyptian statue. It's Egyptian. Who is Neb Sinu?
00:15:59
Speaker
Oh, oh, I don't know that. You guys know that. And we have now hit the limit. Oh, yeah. Well, we'll call him some minor functionary who was Egyptian, Egyptian statue. Let's say 3800 year old statue. I know that much. OK, so so basically Middle Kingdom. All right. Little Kingdom. It was obviously looted by the Brits because that's what they do. That's what they do. Hey, God bless God bless them.
00:16:27
Speaker
So it's the statues in a glass display. And on security cameras, it was noticed that the statue was moving on its own and rotating. Like rotating. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. It is sitting and spinning. Right. Exactly. And so over time. Really? Okay. Anyway, I'm old enough to remember the sit and spin. I was going somewhere else, but anyway, yes.
00:16:56
Speaker
So it's sitting and spinning in a glass case. It's legitimately happening. You wouldn't notice it if you're watching it because it's very slow. It's just really goddamn slow. Right. But there was an investigation and the skeptical explanation is that vibration from local traffic was causing it to slowly rotate in the glass. And that means slowly. Like over the course of a day. Yeah.
00:17:22
Speaker
and so you come in you would notice if you were there but over the course of a day it actually did like a three sixty so fine and i was haunted for at least a couple days i figured out what was going on except for a couple days you mean like apparently they're still doing that there there was some show that i forget the name of which but sharon pointed out where there's some recent i think it's like the science channel discovery channel
00:17:46
Speaker
where it was their first episode in 2017. This was like five years ago, wasn't it? Yeah, it was a while back. Something like that. So, I mean, apparently, mysteries never die by mysteries. I mean, things we actually know. But yeah, so the real thing is how many of us have been in houses where trucks or trains or traffic or whatever cause things to move?
00:18:16
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. Yes. Yeah. I used to live next to a quarry and it would, that definitely moves things when they blast. If you put something too close to the edge of a table, you don't even feel it happening, but it's enough to knock it over the table. Who did that? So why were none of these things haunted?
00:18:37
Speaker
the things in the houses that they used to serve. They weren't 3,800 years old, Jeb. That's right. And perhaps more important. Yes, Karen. Maybe they, no, that was me, Sarah. Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. We sound the same, absolutely the same.
00:18:53
Speaker
Oh my God, what's going on? Sarah, say wallaby. Sarah, say wallaby. Anyway, go ahead. I was just going to say, how do you know it's not a house full of haunted objects? And they're just reacting to the noise of the cars driving the truck. They hate these trains. Yeah, and they hate the trains so much that they're moving because they're agitated by the noise.
00:19:19
Speaker
That does fall into Occam's razor, I think that's appropriate. Yes. When the moving rocks of Death Valley, were those ever assumed to be haunted or was that always kind of, well, we know there's a natural explanation, we just don't know what it is yet. I always figured it was the latter. I mean, people mentioned it because it was weird, but I don't think anybody literally was like, these are effing ghosts or these are effing gin or effing aliens or whatever else.
00:19:46
Speaker
I think I've heard the theory though that they were aliens, that aliens were moving the rocks or it could have been ghosts or something like that. Those are the worst aliens ever. Pointless aliens. But I guess the thing with haunted objects is that haunted objects are usually also stolen objects. They are usually objects that have lost their past. Exactly.
00:20:14
Speaker
they're legitimate past and they often have had one imposed upon them. And that is, I think,
00:20:24
Speaker
possibly a place that we can pick this up. I think we're around our first break. We still got a few. We still got a few. We still got a few. Keep going. Okay, okay. Okay, well, can I say something? Yes, absolutely. Have any of you guys seen The Haunted Collector on TV? I'm not sure which channel shows it, but... I've only... It's been a while, but I've seen a couple episodes. What's the guy's name? Zach Baggins. Join Dzafis.
00:21:07
Speaker
Yeah. Yes. He's he. John's office is actually at Warren's nephew. Yes. For those who don't know. And so he does this TV show is based basically the premise is that he and his team and I think it involves a few members of his family. They go to people's houses where they there are claims that they're having paranormal activity of some kind. And usually it's something
00:21:13
Speaker
Well, there's, yeah, there's that's the one I know. Yeah, that bag. It has a new museum in Las Vegas. That's why I'm thinking, you know, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with his, with
00:21:28
Speaker
ominous as well. There's something very bad going on there. Everything is always demonic. Everything.
00:21:37
Speaker
It is, it is. And they really do start with the whole premise about objects being possessed. And so what they do is they, the team goes into a house and they locate and then remove any haunted or possessed objects. And it's very interesting to me too, because typically they start, the cameras start scanning around the house and you think, oh, okay, that creepy doll or that clown there, that's going to be the haunted object. But no, no, no, these guys are professionals. They know what they're doing. It ends up being something like a smoking pipe or a sword,
00:22:07
Speaker
something unexpected. It's not usually the creepy thing in the house haunted antique roadshow. That's so weird. Sorry.
00:22:20
Speaker
No, I was gonna say, how valuable are these objects that end up being haunted? Well, some of them are quite valuable, and he basically takes these objects because they're... Yeah, does he say, like, now this is so dangerous, I'll take it? He does. He very kindly relieves them of their antiques and other things. How did I not think of this part? I know, it's genius. It's like hell.
00:22:42
Speaker
it's like the old friday the 13th tv show oh yeah yeah except they never solved the case you just come see the you know you pay and see it can you can you go to somebody's house and simply say all those bills in your bill phone that money that's haunted
00:22:59
Speaker
can you know that's actually like a really common uh mystic oh yeah where you tell people to burn off a curse you need to get rid of the money yeah yeah i'll take it off your hand and they do the magic they appear to burn the cash and they actually pocket it there was actually i read about this there was actually a rash of um cons that were going on and apparently they were targeting
00:23:23
Speaker
elderly Asian women with this because apparently when they're, if they're immigrants, they still have that. And so there were people who were taking advantage of that superstition and they were targeting these women on the streets and they're like, oh yeah, there's a curse. And if you bring me a sealed packet of $300, then I can cleanse the curse from you. And they would do it. And yeah, they had a bad laugh. Oh my God, they do it to the billet swap. Yeah, nice.
00:23:52
Speaker
Nicely done. I've got some insider info on this show that I think you guys might appreciate and listeners might appreciate. Yeah, there's your pre-break teaser. Nicely done. You want to go back after this? Yes. Change all of the inside information. Stick around.
00:24:11
Speaker
This network is supported by our listeners. You can become a supporting member by going to arcpodnet.com slash members and signing up. As a supporting member, you have access to high quality downloads of each show and a discount at our future online store and access to show hosts on a members only Slack team. For professional members, we'll have training shows and other special content offered throughout the year.
00:24:33
Speaker
Once again, go to arcpodnet.com slash members to support the network and get some great extras and swag in the process. That's arcpodnet.com slash members. And we are back and Karen, you took us out with an interesting behind the scenes.
00:24:51
Speaker
trivia bits, what have you got for us? With the haunted collector, the haunted collector. Yes, the haunted collector with John Zafis. So this is a little bit of goss that I've got behind the scenes. A friend of mine who is a well-known magician whose name I cannot mention, unfortunately, told me personally that the producers of the show once contacted him
00:25:15
Speaker
And they said, we need you to make some some special effects for the show. Oh, my God. Unbeknownst to the actors, they basically the producers wanted to scare the actors in the show. OK, that's kind of awesome. This is way better than the actors doing something to pretend to be. No, no, no. That's that's like kind of a whole other level. That's amazing.
00:25:38
Speaker
Well, something similar is, I don't know if you guys have heard of fact or fate, I'm sure you have, I know Blake certainly has. It was a show on the sci-fi channel, yes. Yeah, I don't think it's on anymore, but it was basically where they'd just take apparently random, I think, videos from YouTube. From YouTube, yeah. And, so paranormal videos, and they would try to recreate whatever phenomena was taking place, and to decide in the end whether it was fact or fate.
00:26:05
Speaker
And so the producers of that show went to my husband, who happens to do the same sort of thing as me, skeptical paranormal research. And he had a video, it was a promo for a TV show that he was doing at the time. And there was a Ouija board and the plane ship.
00:26:22
Speaker
let across the Ouija board. And so they wanted to use this video and the producers got in contact with him and they said, look, we'll give you $1,500 if you can make the jump of the planchet more pronounced. Jesus Christ.
00:26:38
Speaker
So I actually wrote about this for the James Randi Educational Foundation and for Skeptical Enquirers. So the information's out there on the web. So I'll supply that for the show notes too. But yeah, this just seems to be... Unfortunately, I had a lot of experience with producers and TV shows and this sort of thing.
00:26:58
Speaker
We get a lot of contact for people wanting to have us on as skeptics on their TV shows and it's always the same sort of thing. We need to pit the skeptics versus the believers or you're on a team and one of you is a believer in one of these, you know, a skeptic or two or whatever. We can get some kind of Mulder Scully dynamic.
00:27:17
Speaker
They want that conflict because they think it's interesting. They think it heightens the drama to have two people sniping at each other. Because characters in conflict and you're both interesting characters and... They just want us to come on and say no.
00:27:34
Speaker
I have actually had producers say flat out to me that when I tell them I'm not interested in that, that's a bunch of crap. They say, yes, but you get to play the archeologist. It turns out that I actually have to fucking degree in that just saying.
00:27:53
Speaker
Yeah, it's worth remembering. All this stuff comes out of the fact that the Writers Guild of America had a strike. And the way to fill that time was to come up with this sort of concept of reality programming, which is just film a whole bunch of crap and have the producers down to tell the story they want to tell. So what I'm hearing is, is if you remove all gatekeepers,
00:28:19
Speaker
Just y'all fill that with whatever you want to fill that with. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So I've got a question for you, Karen. So this show.
00:28:28
Speaker
is the notion behind this that these objects are pissed off that they're in somebody's house because they're haunted and they want to be taken back to where they belong. Seems like there's an obvious solution to that. That's an interesting theory but I think it depends on the object that we're talking about. So often their theory for the show is that people have picked up antiques
00:28:51
Speaker
secondhand objects and that they still carry the memory of or that they're haunted in some way and they might be haunted by spirits or the object itself and that's once it so sometimes it might want to go back to the owners but usually it just needs to be I think taken out of the household so that the paranormal activity stops and that everyone's safe and then John Zafis has his museum and I guess can make money out of it.
00:29:20
Speaker
Kind of like in the old medieval concept of laying a ghost and that has been sort of carried forward. There's the fiction of M.R. James where like most of his story is about a haunted object here, a haunted object there that just needs to be sort of neutralized.
00:29:37
Speaker
He takes it and he's just isolating them like Annabelle. He's keeping these things behind glass doors. And so I don't know. I think that he thinks too somehow that he can just protect himself and people from these objects. I find it interesting that a glass case is always...
00:29:59
Speaker
Well, I'm sorry, Sarah. I found it interesting that glass case. What? We've been having it. We've been having a few cut ins and cut outs. Yeah, I was going to say the audio. So I was going to jump in that we've mentioned this on the show.
00:30:18
Speaker
the National Park Service uses a version of this to actually prevent people or to dissuade from stealing pieces of petrified wood from the petrified forest. And also in Hawaii. Yeah. There's actually a book now that compiles the letters that people have sent.
00:30:36
Speaker
at the park service by people say returning years later sometimes returning pieces of petrified wood that they illegally picked up in the petrified forest and asking that they be forgiven because their lives have become pure shit.
00:30:51
Speaker
since they picked up that piece of wood. So there's some curse or something haunted about those pieces that, oh my God, if you put it back, they even told, they even told the ballpark service in some of these letters. This is why I picked it up. Please put it back in the same place so that the curse will be removed from me. That's how I feel about my dissertation. But, uh, I've been petrified wood. Don't tell me that. You'll never get bored with it.
00:31:21
Speaker
We need somebody to be doing rim shots on a snare drum in the background. I don't think there are enough snare drums, yeah. But no, but that reminds me of the scare gifts. So a book, again, I love promoting this book.
00:31:39
Speaker
because it's not mine, Roger C. Luck cursed, the mummy's curse, the history of a dark fantasy. He talks about the origin of haunted objects, and he talks about how every time one of these things gets promoted, there are all these scare gifts of people sending shit back to the British Museum or other places for the exact same reason. Like, oh my god, no, no, no, no, no, no.
00:32:04
Speaker
And the one he talks about is the unlucky mummy. Now I know we've talked about that.
00:32:11
Speaker
Yeah, Blake and Karen, do you know the unlucky mummy? Have you heard of this? I'm assuming this is not tied. No, it's before. Before, yeah. Oh, I don't think so. No, don't make. It's a mummy case for much later in Egyptian history, like a later dynasty. But it became very much associated. It's really, in many ways, the origin of the idea of the mummy's curse and people that get injured and die around it.
00:32:40
Speaker
And one of them was a reporter. I want to say Bertram. I'd have to go back and look up his name. I am screwing this up now. But I'll link us all this stuff in the show notes again. That was a good friend of Arthur Conan Doyle.
00:32:57
Speaker
Right. And when he died at an unexpected age, Doyle blamed elementals because Doyle had sort of dallied with the supernatural and the occult and spiritualism before he went kind of full-throated on it.
00:33:11
Speaker
This is the same guy that also inspired the Hound of the Baskervilles. He had sort of collected lore about Dartmoor black dogs, and when Doyle visited him, literally the guy that drove him to his Dartmoor house was named Baskerville.
00:33:30
Speaker
And so this was sort of that individual. When this got returned to, or sort of mentioned in the press, people sent in droves the shit that they had been stealing from Egypt and other places to the British Museum in the same way that people send stuff back to Hawaii, or they send stuff back to the petrified forest. This is not a new concept.
00:33:57
Speaker
Did you guys ever see the episode, and I'm ashamed to say this, but of the Brady Bunch? Oh, yes. The Tiki, the Tiki doll. Someone had to say it, Ken. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, exactly. Well, this is one of the beautiful things. These ideas still make sense to people for very good reasons.
00:34:17
Speaker
They fit into very specific ideas. It's not like that thing came from Pennsylvania. As much as we're talking about the length and or breadth of Pennsylvania, these things come from exotic places where a president clearly could never come from.
00:34:39
Speaker
Fuck the 21st century. Whole great being involved in that surfing accident. Yes, exactly. They had Vincent Price in it. That man must have needed to pay the rent. Oh, so do we all know that Vincent Price was an artifact collector? No, I do not. He was an art collector. I didn't know he was an artifact collector. That fits with the whole Vincent Price image, though, really.
00:35:01
Speaker
So we've had Donnie Yates on our show, who's an expert in international antiquities, crime, and international antiquities legislation, and laws, and regulations, and so forth. We've had her on before, and she is one of the brains behind the fantastic site, Trafficking Culture.
00:35:20
Speaker
And on there, you can find discussion as well as on her anonymous Swiss collector blog, which talks about this, of Vincent Price, who was a spooky actor and blah, blah, blah, also a thriller. Stranger Things is coming out next week, whatevs. But he also kind of sold himself as a sophisticated person. He was like he sold cookbooks.
00:35:42
Speaker
Not spooky cookbooks, just cookbooks. Like he was like, I do these things. And part of that was he collected Zapotec urns in his house. And that was sort of part of his image as a sophisticated person.
00:36:14
Speaker
these horror movies. He was an interesting guy. And as a horror fan, I love his work. I recently learned that his daughter did a book in which she claimed he was bisexual, which I thought, well, I mean, I don't think that's as important now as you know, it's not quite that shocking of a revelation. But regardless, you know, it's like it's it's
00:36:17
Speaker
which is fascinating.
00:36:38
Speaker
He was such a metrosexual character regardless of that. Like his interests were so culturally broad. He was involved in so many things. His work promoted the work of Poe. His work promoted the work of so many different artists and like so many of his movies while they were kind of like, I camp.
00:37:03
Speaker
They tie into so many cool literary tropes. I just love Bryce. Wasn't he wonderful in Edward Scissorhands? Yes, he was. Sorry, Sarah. Well, I know Jumpsieda, but have you guys watched the Scooby-Doo Mystery Incorporated cartoon series that ran, I want to say, three to four years ago?
00:37:28
Speaker
Yeah, we talked about it on with the Zacharias kitchen tie-in. Yeah, our guard Gothic odd. Yeah, well, they've got a Vincent Price character on there. I forget his last name's van Gould and I forget what his first name is but the guy that's doing his his voice is just
00:37:45
Speaker
kind of spot on actually. I mean, you can tell it's not Vincent Price, but he's pretty dang good about it. But it's just interesting how they've interpreted Vincent Price's spooky persona into the Van Gould character because the Van Gould character is, well, it's Vincent Price. And so of course, he's the star of all of these super campy, goofy movies that the Scooby gang watches. But then when they pull him out,
00:38:10
Speaker
he's he's also this like he's he's a thespian and he's like trying to make uh the greatest play ever and he's like he's he's an acting he's an act but he's also like an insecure character i mean like he's not like insecure is the wrong way to put it but they really made him have depth which is interesting for a kids cartoon that they even went that far but i think it's because they're portraying him i mean it's supposed to be vincent bryce and i think people have especially people in the horror genre have such a love for him
00:38:40
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Well, I'm going to name drop now. And, uh, yeah, yeah. Get ready. Um, so Victoria price came out to Denver. She went to Starfest horror fest here a couple of years ago. And, uh, for some reason she became friendly with my husband and some of his colleagues. And so we actually went out to dinner with her, which was fascinating experience. We went to a restaurant called Linga, which used to be a former mortuary.
00:39:06
Speaker
in Denver. So she absolutely loved this place and we got a free meal out of it because the owner found out that she was Victoria Price and pretty much sat with us for the entire meal. Any free meal story is a great story. Please tell me that they recycled the
00:39:25
Speaker
The ovens in which, say, cremated human remains are being made alive. Oh, pizza. There's something in there. Open fired pizza. And by ovens, we mean ovens. No, I was like, I went to school at the University of Pittsburgh, and a year or two after I graduated, I visited, I went back and visited, and I ended up watching, in Pittsburgh, Night of the Living Dead,
00:39:51
Speaker
with the son of one of the people from Night of the Living Dead. This is all Romero. This is all Romero country. And we're literally watching this. And like at the bottom, because they made it very real, there's all the like, if you are in trouble, go to and they were naming like hospitals like three, three minutes away, and like two minutes away. And I'm like,
00:40:14
Speaker
This got really, really weird. It's like, oh yeah, no, no. The hot girl and the guy who get burned at the gas station when they go to the gas pump. That's my dad and my mom. Aww. Because they were producers. They were producers of the show. So let me ask you all. So we are both archeology fans, because of course we're talking about Vincent Price, so you know we're doing that.
00:40:36
Speaker
we're also doing monster talk uh in all the monsters you can think of in all the monsters you've dealt with and and preferably more the ones people actually believe in not so much the black lagoon slash creature but enough about evansville um
00:40:52
Speaker
Are there objects? Are there idols? Are there other things you can think of that kind of get tied or images or objects or the archaeological into any of the sort of the monsters you've covered so far? You can sort of think of them. We're not talking about haunted objects. Well, that's a good question, but off the top of my head.
00:41:13
Speaker
Blake. Oh, I keep thinking about this because you get into sort of like this religious symbology for like tying to like fighting monsters with religious artifacts or silver or these sort of levels. Yeah. Yeah. You've done the piece of Jeve at all.
00:41:30
Speaker
Yeah, it was. And I love the fact that the Beast of Shavadon, the silver bullet is all my research indicates that there was no silver bullet in that story until our good friend John Keel added it in the 19th. Jesus Christ. Yeah, it was just it was not a part of the original material. It was added in the 1970s. I love that fact. I had forgotten that that's where you went. That was not theatrical. That was an actual that was an actual Jesus Christ.
00:41:59
Speaker
For those of you who don't know why we did this, Blake and Sharon and I went to CryptidCon and we're working on a thing. It turns out that John Keel is the prophet of the unified field theory of the paranormal. I like to say how John Keel, how John Keel killed all paranormal literature, right? Well, I had to say, I think that was mine.
00:42:26
Speaker
That is yours for sure. That's yours for sure. No, that was mine. Now, John Keel hauled the paranormal. Exactly. I learned from you. I learned from the master. But let's, I mean, in all seriousness, we have one I think we'd like to talk about when we take the break in a moment, the Hexum heads. But before we get to that, I'm trying to think, I mean, when we get to say Bigfoot, there is the hairy man, pictogram, picked a graph.
00:42:55
Speaker
which we which we have talked about on our cryptozoology episode and we we discussed and i'm just gonna i'm not gonna strain that topic but nicely done nicely done i got that very subtle though not not subtle at all
00:43:13
Speaker
But in all seriousness, I'm not an expert on that. And we've discussed that one on the show. I'm trying to think of any others that really incorporate sort of objects. A lot of these incorporate discussions of indigenous knowledge or sort of pre-modern knowledge, again, I think, kind of telegraphing where we're going with the hexa heads.
00:43:36
Speaker
how many of these really get into, I guess these are discussions I'm having in terms of the human material culture versus sort of whether they're considered spiritual or flesh and blood kind of cryptids and wild creatures. I mean, like there's no idol to the Loch Ness monster except for, you know, today, but, uh, there is actually a statue of champ next to Lake Champlain. I've seen it. Yeah. It's, um,
00:44:04
Speaker
I it's unfortunate because I kind of think of in terms of one of the things that I like to think of is if the monsters were real, your skeptic might be well educated enough to be the person to go to, you know, sort of that character like the TV host in Fright Night, someone who knows the war well enough to like tell you how to fight it. Like, I don't think they're real. But if they were, here's what you need to do. You know, I try. I try to be that way. I try. Yeah, I want to be prepared. Right. Exactly.
00:44:33
Speaker
I want to change it slightly because there's been no tangents in the previous part of the show. I thought this whole episode was a tangent. Have you all seen the Toyota commercial with Adrian Schein?
00:44:51
Speaker
Yes. No. I saw that in class the other day. It's wonderful. So Adrian Shine, for those of you, and I think we'll kind of lead out on this, Adrian Shine is the deeply bearded
00:45:07
Speaker
I don't think that's an actual verb. It's like ZZ Top versus Nessie. Yes, yes. And Adrian Schein in the 1970s very seriously took Nessie and also Monster in Lake Morag, or like Morag and Morar, I forget exactly how that goes, but was seriously cryptozoologically in the 70s looking for these creatures as flesh and blood. And he became eventually very skeptical and ended up leaving, leaving, excuse me,
00:45:36
Speaker
things like project deep scan and other More serious and then looking for things like nematodes went like understanding the ecology of Loch Ness that became Clearly skeptical voices and he is now Sort of the head of like the Loch Ness project and like the visitor center if you go to drum the drockett on the shores of Loch Ness near Urquhart castle and
00:45:59
Speaker
He did a commercial, I want to say probably about 10 years ago now, for Toyota, where he's giving his random talking head, blah, blah, blah, Nessie be wonderful. And then there's a CGI Nessie flopping around in the water behind him. And he literally runs off at full kilt tilt to go after this thing because, oh my God, it's Nessie in the law.
00:46:26
Speaker
and it is highly, highly amusing. Are we talking about the same one where Nessie actually picks the pickup truck up and then throws it, but the cool thing is the pickup truck, even having it brought into the lock, they start it up and drive the hell away.
00:46:44
Speaker
Yeah, that's it. That's it. They did a couple other ones. But yeah, it's actually Adrian F and shine doing this thing. And he has been more recently featured by Google and other bits. And I guess I guess the point here is
00:47:00
Speaker
You could think about Loch Ness, you know, it's this haunted monster or something, but Urkid Castle is, in a sense, the haunted object. Because if any of you are going to fake a Nessie picture, you're going to have that effing castle in the background. For scale, if for nothing else.
00:47:16
Speaker
So since we've gone to the British Isles, when we come back, I think we should talk about, I think we should talk about spectral werewolves. I think that's a thing we should do. I think the where sheet man is far more important. The where sheet man. The where sheet man is way more fun than that, sorry. I think that's where we're leading this sewing discussion. All right. Well, let's go to break. And when we come back, we will start in on where sheet man.
00:47:43
Speaker
Interested in archaeology? Want to hear from experts in the field about the latest discoveries and interpretations? Check out The Archaeology Show every other Saturday and let hosts Chris Webster and April Camp Whitaker take you deeper into the story. Check out The Archaeology Show at www.archpodnet.com forward slash archaeology and subscribe, rate, and comment on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, and the Google Music Store. That's www.archpodnet.com forward slash archaeology. Now back to the show.
00:48:11
Speaker
And we are back and we want to move on to a, I think more people know what these artifacts are than some of the other things we've talked about, but the Hexum heads, uh, which are, and people know what these are because they listened to our podcast and yes, we did a show on this. Yes. So.
00:48:33
Speaker
So yeah, whatever that is. Yeah, tell us about these and why we keep going on about where sheep men and that's because where sheep man is because where sheep man is amazing. So we did we did a whole show on on the Hexum heads, which are dug up out of a garden in council housing in Hexum in Northumberland in northern England in 1971. And
00:49:02
Speaker
This is a thing that if you go into, um, Oh, let's, let's conjure up various adjectives. We won't actually use, but, uh, spectral places, um, are fairly infamous for being ridiculously haunted objects. These objects are, are again discovered in 1971 and they are very quickly nominated as Celtic in origin.
00:49:32
Speaker
And again, if you've heard us discuss this, the very concept of Celtic doesn't mean that they're not Celtic languages, it's not the means of the Celtic fringe, but that word in no small part due to colonial relations that go to the 19th and earlier centuries has a lot of exoticness built in. If I go looking for things with Celtic online, I'm sure there'll be images of Stonehenge and other very mystical images that will come out of that, even though those don't necessarily have anything to do with these things.
00:50:02
Speaker
So these two little, I believe, Sarah, you describe them as looking not unlike Apple dolls. They do. They look like the pictures that I've seen of them. They look like if anyone's ever seen an Apple doll where you take an Apple and you peel the skin off of it and then you carve a face into it and you let it shrivel up and dry. They're terrifying, but they're really kind of cool. And that's exactly what these Hacksome Head things look like. And I think there's a reason for that.
00:50:26
Speaker
Well, they and they look like they're made of stone. Well, well, we'll get to that. Right. But they look like like they look like little Apple dolls. And the reason you know what they look like is you've seen point to list drawings, which of course means that they have been properly recorded by archaeologists, which they were because they were taken as as Celtic in origin when they were discovered. And they went through a number of hand
00:50:54
Speaker
and Paul Screaton, who is something I believe are in lay lines and other sorts of issues, has written the definitive book on the Hexum heads. It's also made a documentary, which I believe is literally called Heads, exclamation point. That makes it. That's the exclamation mark. In your opinion, are they Celtic?
00:51:21
Speaker
Oh, we'll get to that. We'll get to that. And now they stone. Oh, my God. So are they stoner? Are they Celtic? Answer a narrative pause. But so these things end up in the hands of archaeologist Anne Ross, who is actually quite quite very much an expert on Celtic things in late 1960s, early 1970s. Well respected. And she puts them in with a larger collection of quote unquote Celtic heads that she has been
00:51:51
Speaker
collecting. The problem is, is that when she does this, she gets haunted by spectral werewolves. As happens? As one does. As one does, yeah. So, with occupational hazards. Well, okay, but you left out all of the haunting that happened before she got hold of them, though. I left out, but I was going back to. So, in Hexum itself, proper. No, no, no. You're not wrong to question my narrative, because it really wasn't a very strong narrative.
00:52:20
Speaker
But no, in Hexen proper, the people that find it don't have any real problems. But their neighbors get haunted in the middle of the night by what can be very delicately called, were sheep man. Yeah, half man, half sheep.
00:52:47
Speaker
all wear do we know the ramifications oh man blake that was good that slipped on by i missed that i was gonna i was gonna say fuck you now in in more seriousness the the description of
00:53:08
Speaker
vellum, in my opinion. You know, you know, when jab is the voice of of maturity, things have gone horribly, horribly wrong. But but to be all in all serious. Yeah. Wow. OK, that's fair, though. In all seriousness, when we say where she man, we're describing something with
00:53:34
Speaker
It was described as the head of a man, the upper body of a man, lower body of a sheep, which sounds kind of demonic. The neighbor sort of described a nocturnal assault, to which I would say, go look at sleep paralysis. But anyway,
00:53:52
Speaker
But they wanted to move out of the house and the sort of idea that these two stone Celtic heads that had been dug out of the earth in Northumberland in 1971 had spread. Anne Ross, the archaeologist in another part of the country, then starts describing that she, even though she had been obsessed with werewolves early part of her life, is seeing spectral werewolves in her house.
00:54:19
Speaker
Which which Sarah when we covered this People seem to love the fact that you were baffled by the fact they were okay with this That and Ross family were describing Like when we did this the first time we explained that They the family would see these giant werewolf esque
00:54:47
Speaker
manifestations, and just go, oh, okay, and just keep going on with their daily life. Like, I think at one point, there was like a giant werewolf manifestation at the top of the staircase, and the daughter was and the daughter was taking food up to somebody or she was carrying something to her father, to her father. And she was just like, Oh, hey, giant werewolf guy. And just kept on her going. I'm just like,
00:55:11
Speaker
Well they are British. I mean they're so British. Can you imagine her walking by and going, morning? My husband's had that kind of thing where his ghost hunting group have been called around to people's houses and they call it three in the morning and oh you've got to come around and you know we've got spinning heads and all kinds of
00:55:34
Speaker
crazy things taking place. So you've got to save us. And so, okay, well, we'll come straight around now. Oh, no, you can't because, uh, yeah, well, I've got a hairdresser appointment or, uh, and so can you come around in two, two weeks from Tuesday? Well, it seems evidently proper.
00:55:51
Speaker
I don't fully understand how council housing works, but I believe the rent is low. So there is like an offset, right? Well, but you're sort of trapped in it. And so they actually requested, uh, we want out and they actually got it. And the, the, the, the official reason was, oh, well, well,
00:56:12
Speaker
The house is too small, but it seemed apparently in context to be like, also, you don't want to live there because of spectral wear sheet masks. Right, right. So these two, Celtic.
00:56:25
Speaker
And I know this is audio, but Celtic air quotes. Air quotes. Air quotes. Yeah, yeah. Heads were where I had been studied by an archaeologist and they had actually been like drawn and recorded and all that as they were real. And again, Ross was studying these very seriously. And you can go look up her books on this. However, when this got a hell of a lot of attention because of where sheep man and special werewolves in the press, sheer terror.
00:56:55
Speaker
sheer terror, sheer terror, all the sheer terror. In 1971, 1972. This got a little more attention. And at one point, Desmond Craigie, a local man who had worked in construction said, um, excuse me, I lived in that house.
00:57:17
Speaker
And I decided to make doll heads for my children, which is maybe why they look like apple dolls out of the concrete concretions that I had been making. And at the same time, Ross had sent the heads, these alleged 2,500-year-old Celtic heads, for elemental or compositional analysis, basically taking slices off, looking at them under petrography, other sources, other analyses.
00:57:45
Speaker
The first one was like, oh, these look legit for various reasons. The second analysis that came out basically around the same time as Craigie going, I can absolutely say I made these, and then he promptly made some in his kitchen sink, was like, yeah, these are concrete. All right. So we have concrete evidence. We have concrete evidence. But in essence, these things that had allegedly whistled up
00:58:12
Speaker
aware sheep man and or a demon, if you want to see it that way, and special werewolves and bad luck and car crashes and other things. Again, you can look at sort of the literature on this. Nonetheless, had very serious, strong concrete evidence that they had been made 15 years earlier out of concrete.
00:58:35
Speaker
We're seeing now, I mean, I understand this happened in the 70s, but what have they done for us, Unge, lately? No one knows. I see what you did there.
00:58:49
Speaker
I see what you did there. I can't make eye contact, no camera. But the actual. Metaphorically, metaphorically. Nothing's metaphorical. But the actual disposition of them is actually not known, and that would be fascinating to know. But they were fairly decently studied in the 1970s. They got in the hand of Don Robbins, who was a big fan of Stone Tape theory and similar ideas in the 1980s, which is the idea that objects sort of
00:59:18
Speaker
record ancient electromagnetic memories and replay them sort of like ghost recordings which has kind of given way to quantum entanglement in the 21st century because it's a terrible place. But we don't know where the actual ones went and whether Don Robbins has them or others. This is something that Screaton actually discusses in his sort of again definitive book
00:59:42
Speaker
on the Hexum heads, and I think it's in quest of the Hexum heads, if I remember the correct, that we can find that. We'll put the link in the show notes. Yeah. But this is the fascinating part. The unlucky mummy case I mentioned earlier has no actual curse. That's entirely a Victorian thing. The Hexum heads are from the 1950s.
01:00:06
Speaker
they have no purchase on antiquity. Indian burial ground curses, native burial ground curses, that's basically about 100 years old. The idea of indigenous curses on European settlers is a bit older, but that's largely a European sort of guilt slash colonial fantasy. These things all have to do with modern society
01:00:33
Speaker
and basically wanting to re-enchant the landscape, not to vapor the shit out of this. That's the thing I find fascinating about haunted objects. This is the thing I find fascinating about Robert the Doll. Robert the Doll is just a goddamn doll.
01:00:48
Speaker
creepy looking doll. Sure. But nonetheless. Right. Right. We talked about that briefly in the Robert the doll episode that we did where, you know, any curse story has this sort of built in success rate because what you're doing is you're doing this filtering where you say, OK, every bad thing.
01:01:09
Speaker
that happens to me, I can attribute it to Robert the Doll. So you start to think about what bad things have happened since you encountered Robert the Doll, and then any bad thing you start to think of, oh, it fits. Oh, there it is. So when you go there as well, you've got the communal reinforcement with people, thousands of people who've written in these letters apologizing to him for having taken a picture without his permission. And
01:01:32
Speaker
Exactly. I agree. We talked about that a little bit in a Robert the Doll episode. I think curse-based approaches to this view, that fits totally into the cognitive bias, which we're born to. This is how our brains work. We're looking for explanations for stuff.
01:01:53
Speaker
And and and it's so easy to fall into the curse mentality. And I feel like, you know, as a skeptic, I hope I'm sort of somewhat immune to the sort of that sort of thinking. But it's a really human way to approach this stuff. You're looking for explanations. A curse is a perfectly good right. Patterns are there. The path of Phoenia is a hell of a drug.
01:02:15
Speaker
It really is. And, you know, you know, the whole goal of Monster Talk is to sort of approach this with here's, you know, let's let us explain that that, you know, biases can make things look really plausible and let us explain that there's.
01:02:32
Speaker
really good reasons why it can seem real, but it won't hold up in a real, you know, sort of clinical approach and learning critical thinking skills can save you money as well as alleviate fear, which is how I love feeling spooky. I love spooky stories and apparently I love whiskey, but uh, one of those things did not need to be admitted to.
01:02:56
Speaker
Interestingly, they're gonna be releasing the last bit of the Kennedy Papers, is that next week? And I've heard- Thanks to Congress. That people who embrace these conspiracy theories, they don't wanna believe that this asshole got a lucky shot off that day. They'd much rather believe there's this enormous conspiracy involving communists and fascists and Fidel Castro and the US government.
01:03:21
Speaker
because that makes sense because there's, although it's terrible, there's a sense to it rather than, well, you know, sometimes a guy gets off a lucky shot. Yeah. Steve Novella talks about that a lot on the skeptics guide of the universe where it's the idea that this is such a big concept. It doesn't seem right.
01:03:42
Speaker
that someone so small could take out such a big character, right? Like there's the imbalancing. I'm gonna disagree with this though. That seems to be very much a NPR New York Times perspective. And I'm not joking, like that's a, the world should make sense because I'm in a place where it makes sense. I think a lot of conspiracy theory is very much coming from a place of disassociation and not being tied to the movers and shakers or
01:04:12
Speaker
the perceived movers and shakers of a society. And most of the, the, the sort of description of that idea of like, Oh, it adds order to an orderless universe. Like at least somebody's in charge, even if it's evil Illuminati, that kind of comes from people that expect to be in charge. And this, this, this is probably not that we've had tangents in the last hour. I completely agree with that idea because I think some of the people
01:04:40
Speaker
I mean, I agree that the conspiracy theory itself is empowering to the individual who has it, but I don't think it's in a way of them trying to become the mover and shaker. I think it's more of a attempt to control what they don't understand or what's... I mean, for some people, things just don't make sense.
01:05:05
Speaker
And so they have to come up with their own theories about it, and that gives them comfort, and it becomes part of their identity. I think there's an element of grievance. I think there's an element of grievance against a larger society, and I'm not going to invoke which one of us called the election. Well, no, and I'm not disagreeing that there isn't a grievance with a larger society, and I'm going to ignore you because I do not acknowledge the last election.
01:05:32
Speaker
That's the problem. That's the problem. I like to throw out this little reminder that that that everything only makes sense when you look at it at the end and look backwards. Right. So we find like this is one of the big problems people have with evolution. Right.
01:05:48
Speaker
Evolution is a filtering process. There's always the survivor fallacy that we can think about when we think about how we view any kind of filtering process. Evolution filters out the things that didn't make sense. We don't see things that don't make biological sense because they die at birth. They die before birth.
01:06:12
Speaker
But when you're left with this pattern of, oh, look at all these beautiful, amazing, complicated creatures, there has to be a designer. Yeah, one of the designers is natural selection because that allows a number of inexplicably complicated things to happen, but only the ones that are viable actually live to survive, to reproduce, right? Blake, can I get you to grade my papers?
01:06:38
Speaker
Why do you say that? Oh, no reason. No reason. Well, no, but there's an interesting tidbit for that one though, because in the past that has been true, like only the viable survive, but now we've got modern medicine and so now we are able to make the non-viable viable. And so that's, again, we're talking about biases and we're using modern perspective to look at the past and you can't do that.
01:07:01
Speaker
Well, I guess the thing is, is that any of these conspiracy theories could be true, but you have to apply science and critical thinking to them. How do we filter out the nonsense? Because if you're not going to filter them, they're all equally valid. And that's that's the other problem theory is. Yeah, it's a really common thing you'll hear in non scientific shows is all these theories are equally valid. Well, they're not.
01:07:26
Speaker
because some of them can survive the filter science. We need to hear both. Blake, you weren't there. No, we don't. Yeah, and that comes up again and again. Exactly. Yes, it does. It's like seeing the forest for the trees.
01:07:43
Speaker
I wish I could walk. No. I'm so glad we don't have the camera, so you can't just see me sitting here shaking my head. Yeah, yeah. Talking. This is definitely the most, I've never been inebriated on a show before, but I'm having a good time. I really wish I could say that. I'm glad that you came on our show to be inebriated. I feel honored that you decided, you know what?
01:08:11
Speaker
I'm going to get drunk on Archie. I'm going to Sarah. Sarah, as an archaeologist, I'm going to agree with that non ironically. Anybody, anybody who wants to accuse us of being unprofessional, we're not getting paid for this shit. My wife never listened to my show. This would be the one my wife listens to for sure. I'm sure of it. Yes. So.
01:08:39
Speaker
So if we're nearly out, and it sounds like we probably are. I'm just putting us all out of our misery. Please do. But in all seriousness, we've talked about the nature of the exotic and monsters. We've talked about unlucky mummies. We've talked about Hexum heads.
01:09:02
Speaker
We've talked about Where Sheet Man. We've talked about how one cannot simply examine anecdotal evidence because it's often selected for from afterwards. So let's ruin all of this. And you all have asked us for our favorite monsters. And I don't think we have a question in that regard in terms of your favorite haunted objects.
01:09:29
Speaker
Let's ask that right now. Let's ask that of all of us. Let's do that right now. Like this is, this is our sort of our Halloween episode and we've clearly taken on the adult version of Halloween this time. Uh, but if we all had to kind of come up quickly with our, our, our sort of favorite haunted object, what would it be? Hmm. Again, because I'm hearing my favorite haunted object has got to be Annabelle.
01:09:54
Speaker
the doll of Ed and Lorraine Warren. They've got, what, three movies out of that thing? Well, if you start with the Amityville Horror and then The Conjuring. Oh, you got four. You got four, yeah.
01:10:10
Speaker
There's two contourings, there's like three. There's an Annabelle, there's Amityville Horror. Yeah. Yeah. They all, yeah. So that one, I think in terms of having a good business model, that probably is your best. What percentage of the GDP of Connecticut is that? Hey, listen, I pay taxes, so I'm all for it. Yep. All right. God damn it, they paid my salary. I'm a state of order. So Canada's Annabelle.
01:10:38
Speaker
Oh, okay. Well, I guess I'll go next to just having a single object. Uh, this is something I wrote about years ago, uh, again for the James Randi educational foundation. And it's more a kind of phenomenon of people selling their personal haunted objects on eBay and Etsy and even Craigslist. I think I know this is going, but continue. Oh, well, you know, I've been kind of general here, I think. I thought you were going to go with the Dybbuk box.
01:11:06
Speaker
No, I wasn't. No, not that specifically, but that's an interesting one. Perhaps you can take that one. But just over the years, I've come across so many examples of dolls and haunted jewelry. And there's a practice of people stealing trinkets from graves.
01:11:26
Speaker
Oh my god, it's kind of horrifying. They might take the little mementos and things that people leave on graves for their family members. So it could be little toys, especially upsetting if it's children who've died. And then stealing those and then saying, oh, they're haunted and selling them on eBay. They're haunted now. Stolen. Is that?
01:11:52
Speaker
still a thing. I mean, my understanding was is that is that eBay at some point actually forbade the selling of a cult stuff like you could.
01:12:03
Speaker
Go ahead, go ahead. They did actually attempt to do that. They were really cracking down on the sales of paranormal objects and even things like spells and curses and prayers and ambulance, talisman, all that sort of thing. So people just started fighting workarounds. It was kind of lucky in the early days of Napster where people would still upload music and they just changed the spelling of the name of the song. So these are not occult objects on sale. These are pirate occult objects on sale.
01:12:31
Speaker
kind of. You'll have people saying things like, oh, here's a doll. And I'm not saying it's haunted eBay, but other people have told me that it might be possessed. And so just using all kinds of strange paranormal disclaimers, but it is still taking place. You can still go on to Etsy and eBay and find these objects and time machines. Well, I mean,
01:12:53
Speaker
There's a whole market. I'm not saying this is a haunted object, but it might be a haunted object. I'm just saying. There's a whole market. It's just like haunted object eBay that you could go on and just sell your stuff. I've got several friends who are part of the Wiccan community and I know that there is a
01:13:13
Speaker
It's not to sell haunted objects, it's to allow them to sell the things that Etsy and eBay won't let them sell things like spell packets and prayers and that kind of stuff. But yeah, you get the haunted objects on there as well. How about you want to bet somebody's already bought the domain hauntedobjects.com?
01:13:44
Speaker
Oh, that's a that's a new thing. But so, Blake, Blake, I'm going to go with the Hope Diamond. Oh, hello, bastard. Now, have you seen it? Have you seen it? Oh, no, I've never seen it except on in search of. But it's always been a favorite sort of. Yeah, seriously. Oh, my God. You have to come to DC and see it. It's beautiful. It's absolutely beautiful. And it really is blue. It like it's it's.
01:13:57
Speaker
as long as they're not like 3D scanning and printing or anything.
01:14:12
Speaker
it's beautiful on tv and and uh you know thankfully the smithsonian has has survived the curse and made it into the business so that's good for them i would i would pay money if they had a little button where if you push it goes
01:14:31
Speaker
You're old enough to know what that is. I totally know what that is, yeah. A poor rendition of the In Search Of theme. The views expressed in the show are those of the producers and only represent a subset of the total number of possible views. Amelia Earhart. The Loch Ness Monster, yes. What's the incidental music?
01:14:50
Speaker
Yeah, I love it. It is the best. I keep trying to figure out how to put a soundtrack behind us when we're talking. But I'm just like, I can never find the right music. And we just kind of go off on tans. It's too much for me to have. Like, I feel like at that point, I just I need to have Monty Python music in the background. But yeah, I'm pretty I'm pretty sure we just I'm pretty sure we just found the perfect music. And that's not the exact. That's fine recognition of the search up theme.
01:15:18
Speaker
I'm just gonna take that clip of Jeb doing that and just like work it into the background. It's perfect. Do it, do it. So who has not said theirs? You? Is it just me? All right. I haven't said mine. Go ahead. What do you got? Totally. Oh, um, well, I was gonna do haunted 3d objects, but I'm really fascinated by that.
01:15:43
Speaker
Haunted 3D objects. I'm fascinated by this concept of a printed 3D object that is still somehow haunted, even though it's fucking made out of plastic. Well, plastic never dies, so... This is true.
01:15:59
Speaker
There's that. It'll all end up in the horrifying island of Rilyeh, of plastic in the center of the Pacific. When you 3D print the objects, do you have to print them in the same material? Like, do I have to go find, like, ceramic resin in order to reprint the haunted doll from hell? Or do I have to find, like, wood filament to reprint, I don't know, haunted tones? It's two of the two of the 3D corn-based polymer.
01:16:27
Speaker
It really depends so, you know when you go into a 3d printing program You have to you have to set the percentage of the fill and you know this Sarah So as I think there should be for the printing of 3d objects for your patreon There has to be the percentage of how much shit you're full of
01:16:44
Speaker
for the the the the printing of this and i'm not like pointing at anybody who's 3d printing their haunted objects but um but yeah uh and so the haunted objects for you for me i gotta say the crystal skull oh i didn't think of that one nice yeah nice yeah because oh my god they're full of crap
01:17:09
Speaker
And the first two letters are the same, but they are, you know, they have been, they have been tested by so many people now and they are clearly the product of late Victorian. And not that we've been drinking, but now you drink for Victorian late Victorian craftsmanship. And yet they are never going to goddamn die.
01:17:34
Speaker
They are now an icon of crazy-ass bullshit archaeology, and that's not going to change. And the British Museum is like, this thing is full of shit, but we still put it on the first floor. Come, please come see it. And they're not the only one. And I kind of get it. I mean, they're pretty objects, but that's not why people...
01:17:52
Speaker
care. There are plenty of other pretty objects because there's just something about this idea of 20th century technology cast back into the past with all this mystical crap about them and spies and F Mitchell hedge, FA hedges and Mitchell hedges and all this other garbage. But that said, I've seen his original objects. I've seen his original things. And I think that's probably my favorite.
01:18:16
Speaker
And if this is a drinking game, do we have to drink Crystal Skull vodka to go along? I have that. We've got some upstairs. There you go. I have two empty bottles of it downstairs, so I don't need any more. Did you feel spiritually enlightened when you drank it? Yes.
01:18:37
Speaker
It's filtered by diamonds. Herkimer diamonds? Herkimer diamonds. Triple filter by Herkimer diamonds, which also, in case you're wondering, is kind of sort of charcoal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a clever marketing idea, for sure. Oh, shit, yes. Yeah, yeah, yes. But all right, so we've done Hunted Objects, impossibly our most directly and linear episode ever.
01:19:04
Speaker
It was a very succinct episode, yes. Everyone stayed on topic. I was highly impressed. Yes. It was like a court, Herkimer, Quister, Crystal, Quartz, clockwork. So I look forward to our next Monster Talk archaeology fantasy's podcast crossover.
01:19:24
Speaker
Now here's the deal, for the listeners, for all the listeners of this, if you're confused at the end, listen to this backwards, it makes perfect sense. Everything you've heard today has been back masked.
01:19:42
Speaker
words, and you're near a Ouija board. We are not responsible for any portals to an ultra dimensional hell opening and, or your soul being sucked into it. You take that into your own hands. Metaphorically speaking, we will ask for people to sign disclaimers before you listen to a bad metaphorical. This is the start of the show then.
01:20:06
Speaker
I just had to put a disclaimer. Warning, do not listen to this show backwards next to a Ouija board. Maybe better off with a do not listen to this show under any circumstances. Yes, just leave it right there. Which makes it more forbidden.
Halloween Wishes and Closing Notes
01:20:23
Speaker
More forbidden. Do not listen to the next hour and 20 minutes of this show. Yes, gentlemen and ladies, thank you very much for joining me for your crew. Great, great fun.
01:20:34
Speaker
Thank you, guys. Happy Halloween. Likewise. Likewise. To everyone who has survived this long, happy Halloween. Happy Halloween, yeah.
01:20:49
Speaker
Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed it. Our music was provided by Archaeosuit Productions. If you like what you've heard, please subscribe and rate us on iTunes or Stitcher and share us wherever you use social media. You can contact us with your questions, comments, or angry email at archaeophantices at gmail.com. You can follow the podcast at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com slash archaeophantices.
01:21:13
Speaker
You can follow the blog at www.archefantasys.com and get updates on Tumblr and Twitter at Archefantasys. You can also look for us on Facebook. If you're looking for the show notes for this episode, go to the podcast website at www.archeologypodcastnetwork.com slash Archefantasys. Thanks again for listening.
01:21:45
Speaker
We don't do dinosaurs. This show is produced by Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.