October 21, 2021 • 35 mins
In part two of this two-part series, Ben is joined once again with guest host Alex Williams to explore the harrowing tale of the New England Vampire Panic, tracing how increasingly desperate communities resorted to ritualistic desecration of graves to combat the horrors of what some believed to be a supernatural affliction. (And how the rest of the world branded it a 'vampire panic' when the locals probably didn't use that word.)
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so
much for tuning in. This is part two of our
story about the time so many people in New England,
for not invalid reasons, thought that their relatives were turning
into vampires and chasing down the living from beyond the grave.
(00:49):
That's our guest super producer Little Brilliante returning. Wow, did
you just kiss like two fingers then put it up
in the sky? Okay? Nice? Then we also want to
shout out our super producer, Max Williams. It's on Adventures
returning soon, as is my trusty co host Noel Brown. Wait, Ben,
you might be saying you're doing the show without a
co host, ha, No, actually, we were very fortunate to
(01:13):
be joined again with our returning special guests. The creator
of Ephemeral you know him. You love them, longtime listeners,
you've heard them on the show before. It is Alex Williams. Alex,
this is your fourth time on this show and I'm
broadcasting live from the bottom of my tomb. Yes, yeah, yeah,
(01:34):
which I gotta say. You sound great. It is really
nice and dead down here. It's got some good sound proofing.
It's dead on a couple of levels. Right, So, Alex,
previously you and Lowell and I were talking about the
context that led to something called the New England Vampire panic. Folks,
if you haven't heard that phrase before, if you haven't
(01:56):
heard part one of the show, just go ahead pause this,
listen part one. We'll wait for you. Okay, how long
it was, say forty minutes yourself? Yeah, let's just okay.
(02:20):
And we're bad. We're bad. That was a great episode.
Was that really? Uh? Stuff? And by which I mean
the most horrible, depressing, depraved, tragic, exciting stuff. Right. That's
part of why we decided to put this into two episodes, folks.
So for the for those of us in the crowd
(02:42):
who are maybe a little bit squeamish or yeah, maybe
maybe don't react super well to um somewhat explicit descriptions
of some disturbing things, this may not be the episode
for you. We just wanted to do a little disclaimer. Uh, Alex,
you have in particular dug into some dug into some
(03:06):
uh some visceral descriptions of what's happening. But folks, as
you know, if you were listening to part one of
this podcast, people in New England, driven to desperate acts
due to the apparently inexplicable deaths of people in their communities,
began attempting to well successfully exhooming and disenterring the corpses
(03:28):
of their loved ones in an attempt to end their careers.
Has vampires. That's what they thought they were doing, right, Yeah,
so basically what we've lulls in the ground. You're in
my house then, but I'm ailing, and you're ailing. I've
tried everything else that you know, my village friends says,
(03:52):
you know, you should really dig up Law and see
what his body looks like, because there's a chance that
he is exercising some kind of will, maybe some spectral power,
and and and is the one causing Bend to still
be sick. And so maybe late one night we go
and dig up Loll and we see what kind of
state the body was in. That was what people would
(04:13):
do first. Now, if it's the situation where you've been
buried in the winter time, your body is not going
to composee decompose very quickly. New England winter is very harsh,
very very cold a lot of times, and they couldn't
even get the bodies in the ground. They were doing
these above ground tombs things. But apparently so if if
the corps was exhumed and they weren't they were in
(04:35):
good shape, that was a bad sign. Yes, yeah, and
there would be descriptions or you know, if you if
you haven't seen a decomposing body before, then it's very
understandable that's passed by one every day. That would work, right, Well,
we are in an interesting neighborhood and you have a
fascinating commute. You know, you can just take the belt line.
(04:56):
You don't have to go through that morgue. Okay, but yeah,
the point stands, if you are unfamiliar with death and decomposition,
then you might look at someone who has been buried
in the winter, look at their corpse and think, uh,
that guy doesn't look all the way dead. He just
winked at me. He just winked at me. Or it
(05:18):
seems like the you know, the common myth of the
fingernails and the hair quote unquote growing just because the
skin is retracting. I literally learned that today. Yeah. I
was totally a person that thought that they kept growing forever.
And I I like that idea in a little piece
of me died with with the know that that's not true,
right right, that's but that it does very much if
(05:39):
you've ever seen it, it does look like people's fingernails
are still growing. And so you would think, my good friend,
my family member, Lowell has been clearly turned into a
vampire and is operating. Look at his fingernails. Look at
there there was the other other descriptions about this or
similar situations point to things like ruddy cheeks, they looked,
(06:03):
they looked well fed, and things like that. So we
do we have a good example of a story like this.
Let's maybe go to the Brown family. That's I mean,
that's that's the best example there is Knowles, Knowles, honor.
Let's go to the Brown face. I imagine they're not related,
but let's go. First of all, there was Noel Brown,
right famous famously Van Pirett. No, no, no, okay, So
(06:25):
we're talking like this story really begins in the eighteen eighties.
Father George Brown, mother Mary A Liza Brown, and then
daughters Mary Olive Brown and Mercy Lena Brown. You got
all that, Ben, Yeah, they had a son to Edwin Brown. Edwin, Yes,
he probably had a clever middle name that just hasn't
(06:47):
trickled down to us. It was probably spider Man. There
is a very common name at this time. Okay. And
what they lived in Exeter, Rhode Island in the eighteen
nine ease. Exeter was kind of a ghost town then.
Um they called it deserted deserted Exeter. It was a grarian,
(07:08):
it was a border town. There was really not much
going on. The Civil War had sort of ravaged it.
Population was less than a thousand people. So people noticed
when others took sick. Yeah, because it is it is
one of those small communities where everybody does know everybody
for sure. It's not it's not easy to keep a
(07:28):
secret there. And in the historical record we know that
over time Mary Brown and Mary all of Brown, the
daughter and Mercy Lena Brown, were you would say, growing sickly.
They were taking ill, they were doing um worse. It
(07:49):
seemed every day whatever had a grasp of them, which
we now know is consumption. Wasn't the off and on
again type. It was active. At least it was the
active kind for the two marries, the mom and the daughter.
It wasn't until I believe ten years later that Mercy
(08:13):
passed away, and she did have the tuberculosis that went
dormant and then became active again. The doctors thought they
knew what had happened. The doctors thought they had a
rational explanation. But citizens, what few there were an exeter
at the time, had their own theory. They had their
(08:35):
own belief. And I believe it's after Mercy, After Mercy dies,
then the husband, George Brown is still alive. Right, George
Brown was really not susceptible to tuberculosis. He lived in
amazing but but it's a tragic life that he's lived. Yeah,
(08:57):
he definitely did that one where he watched everyone and
they left die yes around him, and he did everything
he possibly could even think that he didn't believe in
and felt completely uncomfortable with. He did everything in his
power and it all failed. Yeah, because his after his
(09:18):
daughters and his spouse DIY, his son Edwin spider Man
Brown also falls ill. And it's it's his last child
that he has. So you describe it perfectly, Alex. George
does something that in normal times he would never imagine
himself doing. What is that? So it's George Brown lost
(09:43):
his wife ten years ago, his daughter Mary Olive Brown
nine years ago and now he's lost his daughter, Mercy
Lena Brown. Yeah, there are a lot of names, but
I'm doing my best to keep him straight. And there's
you know those urgans. We use the same names over
and over. Do you do the sandwich truss? It gets
(10:04):
very confusing. Um. Anyways, he's got three women in his
family in the grave, and his son Edwin is sick.
They sent him out to Colorado Springs, which was a
really popular place for um sanitarium. The dry air is
supposed to be good um for for your tuberculosis. I
(10:25):
would love for someone to send me to Colorado Springs.
And so his son is. He doesn't want to lose
the last member of his family. Obviously, he doesn't know
what to do. He's in that situation that we described,
and no one is sort of an official capacity, the doctors,
the town officials, the clergy. No one's really got an
(10:47):
answer for him. But there's sort of, you know, unofficial
voices in the community that suggests that perhaps it is
you know, one of the dead family members spirit praying
on his living son. Right. Yeah, And people are people
(11:08):
have a horse in the race here and it's their
own survival because they're thinking, you know, if this is
some kind of supernatural situation, then what's going to happen
when they're done with the Brown family? This creature, this
entity is going to come for someone else. So and
this also comes from Michael Bell. So they say to
(11:31):
George Brown, they say, look, this is serious, and it's
not just your son on the line. It's not just
you on the line. It is everyone in Exeter on us,
all of us. Yeah, and you know, spread out different ways.
(11:52):
But obviously travel isn't a problem for these vampires unless
there's running water and a couple of other superstitious cafaats.
But yeah, people are not joking, you know, it's not
a prank. They are seriously considering this an existential threat.
So this is weird because from what I understand, Alex
(12:15):
George Brown himself didn't really buy the idea, did he.
Everything that I've read claims that he was. He didn't
want to be a part of it. Basically, this solution
that people have been using back into the tenth centuries.
So for when you've got a vampire exercising its will
from beyond the grave like this is you open up
(12:36):
the tomb, you dig up the cough and you crack
that sucker ope, and you look at what's going on
in there. If there's anything fishy, he mutilate the corpse Eventualistically, Yeah,
there's a bunch of different ways. Um. They really seem
to vary in the time and place that you're in,
and even just within New England in this period of
(12:56):
a hundred or so years, it's sort of mattered where
you were, or like Rhode Island, where the Brown family
was was more spread out. Um Uh, it tended to
be more just kind of an individual family gathering to
open up the cough, open up the graves and mutilate
the corpses. Places like Vermont, they tended to do it
(13:17):
as a public spectacle. Vermont very tight, closer living and
literally you'd have like town officials and clergy and stuff
in there, you know, desecrating the graves in a sort
of ceremony. But take it all the way back to Europe,
it seems to me, and I'm sure that there's many
shades are great at this, but that the most common
things to do were like buying the feet of the
(13:39):
course with thorns, run a steak through its heart, maybe
stack it down to the earth so it couldn't get up,
put something into his mouth, beheaded right, and then turn
the head facing down. Sometimes in New England they would
literally just dig it up and flip the corpse over.
They might rearrange the parts. The skull and cross bones
(14:00):
comes up a lot. Our Poul Michael Bell has identified
something like eight plus um graves that were exhumed uh
or thought to be exhumed from this period. He suspects
that there's like at least a hundred more. But the
skull and crossbones comes up a lot. What bones would
(14:21):
you use for the for the crossbones? What bones would
I use? Or what bones are generally used both? Oh?
For me, I guess you know, I think it would
be neat if it were the forearms and and the
whole hand, the whole skeleton hand. Yeah, yeah, but I
think most people probably would just find two long bones, right,
(14:47):
so you would just maybe a thigh bone, maybe maybe
a thigh bone, maybe something cool from the arms, one
of the limbs, a rib cage with a wonky you know. Um,
that's that's is my take. You know, my favorite bones
are the funny bone. I don't remember all their names.
There's there's like three little bones in your ear. Oh yeah,
(15:09):
hammer the anvil and the uh the kumquat rubarb. Yeah,
they hammer the stirrup. Oh yeah, the hammer, the anvil,
the stirrup. I just think that those little bones really
make life cool. Oh yeah, you're you're also an audio file.
(15:30):
What you say an audio file? I can't hear you.
Oh boy. So George Brown is a tragic figure. He's
driven to grief and he he is not there during
this exhumation. Um, but the people who, like you said,
it was regionally varied in terms of what kind of
methods were used and who was expected to be pressent.
(15:54):
So they dig up the mom she did like ten
years ago. She's her body's her corpses, like totally decomposed.
They're like, okay, probably not a vampire. They dig up
the daughter, the first daughter at the time, she died
nine years ago, though totally decomposed. Yeah, probably not a vampire.
Then they exhume Mercy Lena Brown, the daughter that's only
(16:15):
died about two months ago. As I understand, she wasn't
actually in the ground. She was in a tomb above
the ground. I believe, Yes, Yeah, the ground was frozen
they couldn't dig down. She's in this above ground tomb,
so they crack that open. Well, she's not very decomposed, right,
She's got the thing you're talking about where it looks
like her fingernails and hairben ground. She's she's looked better,
(16:38):
but she looks like she's in pretty good shape. It's
about two months after her death. Yeah, and she's also
got the signs of consumption, right, you know, she's she's
wasted away, she's she's maybe got rosy cheeks. Ah, everything
that I've read sounds like the description would be super
normal for someone that had died obviously tragically, but like
(16:58):
under those conditions, it's like a super normal way for
that corpse to look right then, especially in the cold,
very very cold winters. You know, you're basically refrigerated. You're
gonna last a while. But the folks that are there
that night decide, well, that's definitely the vampire. Yeah, and
they and they, This is a really great point you
brought up earlier. It may have been in Part one.
(17:21):
They probably don't use the word vampire. They probably use
some other words. Some there's something describing a spirit, maybe
something that is a regional dialect lost to history because
the media of the time, they will go contemporaneous media
excuse me, will describe it to outsiders as vampiresm but
there's not a lot of evidence they said vampire. We
(17:43):
do know for sure. They decided something terrible was afoot
and supernatural, and so according to the beliefs that they
were practicing, uh, Mercy's heart and liver were removed and burned,
and then they hooked the ashes of what they burned,
mixed it with water and gave it to Edwin Brown,
(18:07):
the boy, to drink. And they thought this would cure
him of his affliction and prevent any any of the
undead from influencing him. This proved to be incorrect, as
he passed away two months later. I mean, it's a
it's a terrible, terrible story, but it really happened, and
(18:28):
George Brown went along with it. And you know, they're
all buried next to each other in a I mean
that whole family that's still an active cemetery and Exeter
and and they're all there. I mean I read one
article that put it like and Mercies buried there between
the father that had her exhumed, the brother that drank
her heart liver. That is the one of the really
common um cure solution that you see in New England
(18:53):
was cutting out the vital organs. Do you know how
many vital organs? How many vital organs are Do you
mean like in the world altogether, or like the average human,
I mean in a single human body. Well, it's interesting
because the kidneys are vital organs, but they roll in
a pair. So if we counted them as one, I'd say,
(19:14):
let's see liver, lungs, heart, brain, does the does the
pancreas make the list? Well? Skin, it is an organ. No,
everybody forgets about skin and skin is an organ. So
this that I pulled said, the heart, lungs, kidneys, liver,
and spleen, spleen, the spleen bro The brain doesn't count.
(19:37):
Now you don't need a brain. No, I think you're right.
I think you're right. Um it's a term that I
hear and I've just I've wanted about. Um. I think
you're right that the brain is pretty vital except for
making this show. Yeah, so we're we're adding some levity
here because we are talking about really disturbing stuff, and
(19:58):
you can also see other cases. Is like you mentioned
alex in Vermont with the case of Frederick Ransom, you
can also see that they believed, at least in the
case of the Brown family, they believed that they were exercising,
you know, critical thinking. They didn't think anybody was acting
crazy because they didn't do this to the corpses of
(20:20):
the Marys. The corpses of the Mary's appeared to have
rotted and not to be preserved. And the Brown exhumations,
as as you pointed out, even though this made Rhode
Island known as the vampire capital of America or whatever
the breathless headlines where it's the Brown exhumations are just
(20:42):
one of many more that were in the area around
this time. And I appreciate that you pointed out Michael
Bell's work saying, Okay, I've found over eighty things that
somehow qualify as vampire rituals. And he also who says
I think this started at least by seventy four, if
(21:06):
not earlier, and it persisted. This is the crazy part.
It persisted all the way to eight after Coke found
the bacteria that causes tuberculosis. Excuse me, Consumption two is
(21:30):
super modern, right, I mean, there's phonograph records that are old,
that old, I think, Yeah, I mean the motion pictures
are about to be a thing in a few years,
automobiles coming around pretty so yeah, I mean, yeah, that's
that's that's that's just right around the corner. It seems
like the media really had a field day with the
(21:51):
Mercy Browns story. Yes, I mean even still, um, I
read when one place talking about you've been to Salem, Massachusetts. Briefly,
they really, you know, sort of have as a town
leaned into the which trials thing is kind of a
kitchen you know, sort of tourist tourist trapped kind of
and exit is not like that at all with as
(22:11):
I understand, I have not been an exit. I've been
to Salem, but exit apparently does not lean into that
sort of direction at all. Though, like I said, the
graves are still there. But the media at the time
really seems to have had a field day with it,
a lotted the word vampire all around. Yeah. Yeah, and
in a way that may have harmed more than it helps,
(22:34):
but it definitely had an effect on culture, and it's
one that remains with us today. We know that, as
you said, there were variations and what people thought was happening,
their variations in the way they tried to address it.
But the things that were the things that we're categorizing
as vampire rituals all describe a situation where a grave
(22:58):
was desecrated. That it's exactly what happened. And there are
things that people didn't even know about until like the
nineteen nineties when I think it was some kids playing
who originally discovered this mass grave in Griswold, Connecticut, and
they found these bodies had the skeletons at least had
parts of parts of their anatomy shattered and rearranged into
(23:22):
those skull and crossbone patterns you mentioned. See folks, we
we we got there. That was that was foreshadowing. That
wasn't just our mutual love of pirates. You know, there's
one there was one of the things that I that
I read about a symptom that people would, you know,
think of when they when they dig up the corpse
and look at the corpse. One of the things that
(23:43):
they would say, oh, that's a vampire is if it
looked bloated like it had just eaten. Yes, that would
be the well fed aspect, right, yeah, which would just
be from what like the gases of like just natural
decomposition breaking down. Yeah, probably gas is produced by the
I was gonna say entities, but as Helen's super too,
(24:05):
supernatural gases produced by the very tiny things digesting. Uh,
this is yeah, this is unfortunate that gas does happen.
But this is also before modern. Yes, it's before modern.
Is Beano still count as modern? Why don't they name
it bean? No? Hey, bro, it's it's clearly memorable because
(24:27):
I just dropped it in here. It's just I've never
heard it, not said it in an awkward way. You know,
maybe we just need some some to do our quiet
storm voices and do a Pino commercial even then and stuff.
Oh should have taken Pino exactly. So this is um.
(24:48):
This is interesting because for people who are outside of
the New England area at this time, as you said,
feels really surprisingly modern. People who are reading about this
because does get a lot of headlines, they think it
looks kind of primitive, a lot of like a lot
of folks in Europe and so on. They're saying, you know,
(25:12):
we're in a new era. It's the eighteen hundreds. We're
into science now, we're learning about the world. We have
agreed as a civilization that this universe is both understandable
and worth understanding. What the heck is happening over there
in Well, they probably didn't call them the colonies at
(25:32):
that point unless they were very stuck up in very British.
But a few years after the American Revolution, yeah, you know,
but it's like thirty the little lesson thirty years. There
are some that will always call them the colonists and
the colonies. Look at these the primitives in the colonies
clearly been tainted by folklore. Yeah, whatever the case was,
(25:55):
it was it was not seen as a normal thing.
What we mean is there are not a lot of
people in Western Europe at the time going, uh yeah,
I mean sometimes, yeah, you gotta do it, Yetta dig
them up, flip them over, it happens. I mean, that's
that's the jam. No one was really saying that in
Western Europe, and instead they were saying this is they
(26:17):
were describing it as uh as a d evolution of sorts. Culturally, socially,
they were saying, this is like the darkest age of unreasoning,
ignorance and blind superstition. And it was lumped in with
stories of werewolves and witches, another European folklore, tall tales
(26:41):
that were generally in Western Europe considered to be myths
by that time. Right, And there's this interesting piece of speculation,
and maybe this is maybe this is where we start
to draw to a close here, Alex, did you hear
that some folks believe this might have inspired the Draculus
we're remembering part one We talked about how post bram
(27:03):
Stoker vampires or vampiresm and culture is very different from
pre Stoker. So I don't know, I like the theory.
It's so it was so surprising to me that this
predated Bram bram Stoker's Dracula because of the way that
you really see it in the in the newspapers at
the time, local papers, but also you know, larger circulation
(27:25):
papers banding about the word vampire applied to these cases.
And I just figured that it was kind of maybe
top of mind for people because because the novel was
so famous. But the novel did come after, but it
came really close on the heels, right, So how quickly
can one write a novel? And he was based where
bram Stoker is from, Ohio, Oh right, right, like columb Cincinnati. Yeah,
(27:50):
I think he's he's not from Pennsylvania. I think he's
a natty boy. No, we're kidding, We're kidding. Bram Stoker
is an Irish author. Well that's not funny, no, no,
And that's kind of on him for not having the
foresight to be born in a place that would be
funnier in the context of this show. But so the idea, right,
(28:11):
is that two is when the Mercy Browns story, Well,
that's when it happens, and it's also when the chatter
is going on about it in the American newspapers. How
quickly could he have like gotten that, ingested it, consumed it,
and then you know, manifested it into a novel and
got it out. Yeah. It's interesting because there was a
(28:34):
clipping from New York World in eighteen nine six that
was later found in bram Stoker's papers. His theater company
had been touring the US at this time, in so
he probably ran into that reading just the local news.
And his novel Dracula was published in eighteen nine seven.
(28:55):
So one of the big debates is how much time
do you need to write a novel? Like that's enough time,
you think? So other people are arguing, they're they're arguing
in favor of this, and they're saying, Okay, how is
Lena not the character of Lucy? Right, they'd say, take
Mercy and Lena and you sort of squash them together
and you get Lucy and stuff. That was close enough. Yeah.
(29:19):
And also it's, uh, it's very common for fiction authors,
novelist or short story writers to take inspiration from real
life events. You know, it's I would say that's more
often than not. That's what actually happens. The interesting thing here, also,
the optimistic thing is that people aren't digging up their
(29:41):
loved ones anymore for uh on suspicion of vampirism or
supernatural nefarious activities. Yeah, just to just to see them.
Yet nothing creepy about that. And and generally that's believed
that that is because science came in, like science assumed
(30:03):
a more a more prominent role and was able to
explain some of what led to these infections, what led
to the communication of consumption. And then knowing that knowing
this explanation, people were in a better place to understand
and combat it. And that is luckily overall a happy
(30:28):
ending to this week's series on the New England Vampire Panic,
and we talked about some grizzly stuff. Alex. I really
appreciate your hanging out today. I love that we're able
to do a two parter. Thank you as well. Uh
Mr Lowell Brilliante our guest super producer Ben. I have
a nagging question. Yeah, there's something about this that I
(30:52):
that doesn't sit like I just don't understand. Okay, I'm
Edwin Brown. Yes, I've got my sisters. You've cut my
sister's art and liver out. You've burned them to ash.
Maybe I inhaled the smoke as you were burning them.
You've mixed that ash into water. You've made a tonic
with it, maybe but a sprig of Freshman or whatever.
And you've given that to me and I drink that.
(31:13):
What did I get? Like if it was gonna work?
What is the sort of the logic and the folk magic.
There's this idea that's kind of like sympathetic magic. You're
kind of treating like with like so you are taking
I mean, it's it's the old idea that the the
poison or the source of an illness somehow transformed or
(31:37):
going through certain rituals or treatments, can itself become the
cure for that condition? Or within within the poison we
find the answer kind of idea that, no, I don't
know the specifics in terms of why it needed to
be the heart and the liver or rather than say
the lungs and the kidneys. That's a good question, but
(32:00):
that it does seem to have a logic, the ideas
that by digesting or consuming some essence of a thing,
you are maybe inoculating yourself against it. But that's such
a science the way to think of it, though, like
what's the what's the spiritual angle on that? What's the
(32:22):
metaphysical angle on it? I'd be very interested to hear
the metaphysical angle, And I think maybe it's something we
look into, right because we're gonna hang out a little
bit after this, so let's look into that together. I
don't know about anybody else, but this is certainly worked
up an appetite for me. Quite a thirst, yes, quite
a thirst, I would say, and not just for knowledge,
(32:44):
but of course not human blood. Yes, how much of
you drink at one time? Do let us know? Ridiculous
At iHeart media dot com. You can also contact us
on social media but while you're on the internet, may
I recommend, uh, may I recommend checking out loll brilliante
(33:05):
show that he's working on when he when he's not
hanging out here with us. It is Prodigy. It is
available wherever you find your favorite podcast. Alex, you also
have a show. It's aphemeral, it's kick ass. I'm not
just saying that because my pal Nolan I have appeared
on a couple of episodes. But more importantly, we want
to know why why? What is the what is the
(33:28):
metaphysical logic? Perhaps behind this the specificity of these vampire rituals.
I don't know, Alex. Saturday Night Live rules dictate that
the next time you're back it will be your fifth
time guest toasting, which means we have to give you
a special jacket. Cool. Yeah, well but this was my
(33:50):
third time. We just did two episodes because for that
counts is for Just think about what kind of jacket
you want and remember that special doesn't necessarily mean great.
Mean I should say that fan Ro's got Halloween stuff.
All October. We did a thing about her carving Carnival
of Souls. We're doing a story about adaptation thing. Uh,
(34:12):
really great creepy story about demonic possession in a scrap book,
which I know sounds wonky as hell, but like it's
it's a classic story, really really think scary. You'd like
to say that, yeah, well, okay, thank you bleeping scary. Yes,
And I can personally vouch for that episode of Carnival
(34:32):
of Souls is one of my favorite horror movies. And
I think you will be surprised to learn just how
deeply Alex and Trevor and Max Williams worked together, Like
how deeply you all delved into that story. So I
I say that not just as a friend, but as
a fan. Do check out the show. It is free
(34:55):
wherever you get your podcast. That's gonna be all for
us today. Happy haw woween everyone, Stay safe out there,
and we'll talk to you again real soon. For more
podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so
much for tuning in. This is part two of our
story about the time so many people in New England,
for not invalid reasons, thought that their relatives were turning
into vampires and chasing down the living from beyond the grave.
(00:49):
That's our guest super producer Little Brilliante returning. Wow, did
you just kiss like two fingers then put it up
in the sky? Okay? Nice? Then we also want to
shout out our super producer, Max Williams. It's on Adventures
returning soon, as is my trusty co host Noel Brown. Wait, Ben,
you might be saying you're doing the show without a
co host, ha, No, actually, we were very fortunate to
(01:13):
be joined again with our returning special guests. The creator
of Ephemeral you know him. You love them, longtime listeners,
you've heard them on the show before. It is Alex Williams. Alex,
this is your fourth time on this show and I'm
broadcasting live from the bottom of my tomb. Yes, yeah, yeah,
(01:34):
which I gotta say. You sound great. It is really
nice and dead down here. It's got some good sound proofing.
It's dead on a couple of levels. Right, So, Alex,
previously you and Lowell and I were talking about the
context that led to something called the New England Vampire panic. Folks,
if you haven't heard that phrase before, if you haven't
(01:56):
heard part one of the show, just go ahead pause this,
listen part one. We'll wait for you. Okay, how long
it was, say forty minutes yourself? Yeah, let's just okay.
(02:20):
And we're bad. We're bad. That was a great episode.
Was that really? Uh? Stuff? And by which I mean
the most horrible, depressing, depraved, tragic, exciting stuff. Right. That's
part of why we decided to put this into two episodes, folks.
So for the for those of us in the crowd
(02:42):
who are maybe a little bit squeamish or yeah, maybe
maybe don't react super well to um somewhat explicit descriptions
of some disturbing things, this may not be the episode
for you. We just wanted to do a little disclaimer. Uh, Alex,
you have in particular dug into some dug into some
(03:06):
uh some visceral descriptions of what's happening. But folks, as
you know, if you were listening to part one of
this podcast, people in New England, driven to desperate acts
due to the apparently inexplicable deaths of people in their communities,
began attempting to well successfully exhooming and disenterring the corpses
(03:28):
of their loved ones in an attempt to end their careers.
Has vampires. That's what they thought they were doing, right, Yeah,
so basically what we've lulls in the ground. You're in
my house then, but I'm ailing, and you're ailing. I've
tried everything else that you know, my village friends says,
(03:52):
you know, you should really dig up Law and see
what his body looks like, because there's a chance that
he is exercising some kind of will, maybe some spectral power,
and and and is the one causing Bend to still
be sick. And so maybe late one night we go
and dig up Loll and we see what kind of
state the body was in. That was what people would
(04:13):
do first. Now, if it's the situation where you've been
buried in the winter time, your body is not going
to composee decompose very quickly. New England winter is very harsh,
very very cold a lot of times, and they couldn't
even get the bodies in the ground. They were doing
these above ground tombs things. But apparently so if if
the corps was exhumed and they weren't they were in
(04:35):
good shape, that was a bad sign. Yes, yeah, and
there would be descriptions or you know, if you if
you haven't seen a decomposing body before, then it's very
understandable that's passed by one every day. That would work, right, Well,
we are in an interesting neighborhood and you have a
fascinating commute. You know, you can just take the belt line.
(04:56):
You don't have to go through that morgue. Okay, but yeah,
the point stands, if you are unfamiliar with death and decomposition,
then you might look at someone who has been buried
in the winter, look at their corpse and think, uh,
that guy doesn't look all the way dead. He just
winked at me. He just winked at me. Or it
(05:18):
seems like the you know, the common myth of the
fingernails and the hair quote unquote growing just because the
skin is retracting. I literally learned that today. Yeah. I
was totally a person that thought that they kept growing forever.
And I I like that idea in a little piece
of me died with with the know that that's not true,
right right, that's but that it does very much if
(05:39):
you've ever seen it, it does look like people's fingernails
are still growing. And so you would think, my good friend,
my family member, Lowell has been clearly turned into a
vampire and is operating. Look at his fingernails. Look at
there there was the other other descriptions about this or
similar situations point to things like ruddy cheeks, they looked,
(06:03):
they looked well fed, and things like that. So we
do we have a good example of a story like this.
Let's maybe go to the Brown family. That's I mean,
that's that's the best example there is Knowles, Knowles, honor.
Let's go to the Brown face. I imagine they're not related,
but let's go. First of all, there was Noel Brown,
right famous famously Van Pirett. No, no, no, okay, So
(06:25):
we're talking like this story really begins in the eighteen eighties.
Father George Brown, mother Mary A Liza Brown, and then
daughters Mary Olive Brown and Mercy Lena Brown. You got
all that, Ben, Yeah, they had a son to Edwin Brown. Edwin, Yes,
he probably had a clever middle name that just hasn't
(06:47):
trickled down to us. It was probably spider Man. There
is a very common name at this time. Okay. And
what they lived in Exeter, Rhode Island in the eighteen
nine ease. Exeter was kind of a ghost town then.
Um they called it deserted deserted Exeter. It was a grarian,
(07:08):
it was a border town. There was really not much
going on. The Civil War had sort of ravaged it.
Population was less than a thousand people. So people noticed
when others took sick. Yeah, because it is it is
one of those small communities where everybody does know everybody
for sure. It's not it's not easy to keep a
(07:28):
secret there. And in the historical record we know that
over time Mary Brown and Mary all of Brown, the
daughter and Mercy Lena Brown, were you would say, growing sickly.
They were taking ill, they were doing um worse. It
(07:49):
seemed every day whatever had a grasp of them, which
we now know is consumption. Wasn't the off and on
again type. It was active. At least it was the
active kind for the two marries, the mom and the daughter.
It wasn't until I believe ten years later that Mercy
(08:13):
passed away, and she did have the tuberculosis that went
dormant and then became active again. The doctors thought they
knew what had happened. The doctors thought they had a
rational explanation. But citizens, what few there were an exeter
at the time, had their own theory. They had their
(08:35):
own belief. And I believe it's after Mercy, After Mercy dies,
then the husband, George Brown is still alive. Right, George
Brown was really not susceptible to tuberculosis. He lived in
amazing but but it's a tragic life that he's lived. Yeah,
(08:57):
he definitely did that one where he watched everyone and
they left die yes around him, and he did everything
he possibly could even think that he didn't believe in
and felt completely uncomfortable with. He did everything in his
power and it all failed. Yeah, because his after his
(09:18):
daughters and his spouse DIY, his son Edwin spider Man
Brown also falls ill. And it's it's his last child
that he has. So you describe it perfectly, Alex. George
does something that in normal times he would never imagine
himself doing. What is that? So it's George Brown lost
(09:43):
his wife ten years ago, his daughter Mary Olive Brown
nine years ago and now he's lost his daughter, Mercy
Lena Brown. Yeah, there are a lot of names, but
I'm doing my best to keep him straight. And there's
you know those urgans. We use the same names over
and over. Do you do the sandwich truss? It gets
(10:04):
very confusing. Um. Anyways, he's got three women in his
family in the grave, and his son Edwin is sick.
They sent him out to Colorado Springs, which was a
really popular place for um sanitarium. The dry air is
supposed to be good um for for your tuberculosis. I
(10:25):
would love for someone to send me to Colorado Springs.
And so his son is. He doesn't want to lose
the last member of his family. Obviously, he doesn't know
what to do. He's in that situation that we described,
and no one is sort of an official capacity, the doctors,
the town officials, the clergy. No one's really got an
(10:47):
answer for him. But there's sort of, you know, unofficial
voices in the community that suggests that perhaps it is
you know, one of the dead family members spirit praying
on his living son. Right. Yeah, And people are people
(11:08):
have a horse in the race here and it's their
own survival because they're thinking, you know, if this is
some kind of supernatural situation, then what's going to happen
when they're done with the Brown family? This creature, this
entity is going to come for someone else. So and
this also comes from Michael Bell. So they say to
(11:31):
George Brown, they say, look, this is serious, and it's
not just your son on the line. It's not just
you on the line. It is everyone in Exeter on us,
all of us. Yeah, and you know, spread out different ways.
(11:52):
But obviously travel isn't a problem for these vampires unless
there's running water and a couple of other superstitious cafaats.
But yeah, people are not joking, you know, it's not
a prank. They are seriously considering this an existential threat.
So this is weird because from what I understand, Alex
(12:15):
George Brown himself didn't really buy the idea, did he.
Everything that I've read claims that he was. He didn't
want to be a part of it. Basically, this solution
that people have been using back into the tenth centuries.
So for when you've got a vampire exercising its will
from beyond the grave like this is you open up
(12:36):
the tomb, you dig up the cough and you crack
that sucker ope, and you look at what's going on
in there. If there's anything fishy, he mutilate the corpse Eventualistically, Yeah,
there's a bunch of different ways. Um. They really seem
to vary in the time and place that you're in,
and even just within New England in this period of
(12:56):
a hundred or so years, it's sort of mattered where
you were, or like Rhode Island, where the Brown family
was was more spread out. Um Uh, it tended to
be more just kind of an individual family gathering to
open up the cough, open up the graves and mutilate
the corpses. Places like Vermont, they tended to do it
(13:17):
as a public spectacle. Vermont very tight, closer living and
literally you'd have like town officials and clergy and stuff
in there, you know, desecrating the graves in a sort
of ceremony. But take it all the way back to Europe,
it seems to me, and I'm sure that there's many
shades are great at this, but that the most common
things to do were like buying the feet of the
(13:39):
course with thorns, run a steak through its heart, maybe
stack it down to the earth so it couldn't get up,
put something into his mouth, beheaded right, and then turn
the head facing down. Sometimes in New England they would
literally just dig it up and flip the corpse over.
They might rearrange the parts. The skull and cross bones
(14:00):
comes up a lot. Our Poul Michael Bell has identified
something like eight plus um graves that were exhumed uh
or thought to be exhumed from this period. He suspects
that there's like at least a hundred more. But the
skull and crossbones comes up a lot. What bones would
(14:21):
you use for the for the crossbones? What bones would
I use? Or what bones are generally used both? Oh?
For me, I guess you know, I think it would
be neat if it were the forearms and and the
whole hand, the whole skeleton hand. Yeah, yeah, but I
think most people probably would just find two long bones, right,
(14:47):
so you would just maybe a thigh bone, maybe maybe
a thigh bone, maybe something cool from the arms, one
of the limbs, a rib cage with a wonky you know. Um,
that's that's is my take. You know, my favorite bones
are the funny bone. I don't remember all their names.
There's there's like three little bones in your ear. Oh yeah,
(15:09):
hammer the anvil and the uh the kumquat rubarb. Yeah,
they hammer the stirrup. Oh yeah, the hammer, the anvil,
the stirrup. I just think that those little bones really
make life cool. Oh yeah, you're you're also an audio file.
(15:30):
What you say an audio file? I can't hear you.
Oh boy. So George Brown is a tragic figure. He's
driven to grief and he he is not there during
this exhumation. Um, but the people who, like you said,
it was regionally varied in terms of what kind of
methods were used and who was expected to be pressent.
(15:54):
So they dig up the mom she did like ten
years ago. She's her body's her corpses, like totally decomposed.
They're like, okay, probably not a vampire. They dig up
the daughter, the first daughter at the time, she died
nine years ago, though totally decomposed. Yeah, probably not a vampire.
Then they exhume Mercy Lena Brown, the daughter that's only
(16:15):
died about two months ago. As I understand, she wasn't
actually in the ground. She was in a tomb above
the ground. I believe, Yes, Yeah, the ground was frozen
they couldn't dig down. She's in this above ground tomb,
so they crack that open. Well, she's not very decomposed, right,
She's got the thing you're talking about where it looks
like her fingernails and hairben ground. She's she's looked better,
(16:38):
but she looks like she's in pretty good shape. It's
about two months after her death. Yeah, and she's also
got the signs of consumption, right, you know, she's she's
wasted away, she's she's maybe got rosy cheeks. Ah, everything
that I've read sounds like the description would be super
normal for someone that had died obviously tragically, but like
(16:58):
under those conditions, it's like a super normal way for
that corpse to look right then, especially in the cold,
very very cold winters. You know, you're basically refrigerated. You're
gonna last a while. But the folks that are there
that night decide, well, that's definitely the vampire. Yeah, and
they and they, This is a really great point you
brought up earlier. It may have been in Part one.
(17:21):
They probably don't use the word vampire. They probably use
some other words. Some there's something describing a spirit, maybe
something that is a regional dialect lost to history because
the media of the time, they will go contemporaneous media
excuse me, will describe it to outsiders as vampiresm but
there's not a lot of evidence they said vampire. We
(17:43):
do know for sure. They decided something terrible was afoot
and supernatural, and so according to the beliefs that they
were practicing, uh, Mercy's heart and liver were removed and burned,
and then they hooked the ashes of what they burned,
mixed it with water and gave it to Edwin Brown,
(18:07):
the boy, to drink. And they thought this would cure
him of his affliction and prevent any any of the
undead from influencing him. This proved to be incorrect, as
he passed away two months later. I mean, it's a
it's a terrible, terrible story, but it really happened, and
(18:28):
George Brown went along with it. And you know, they're
all buried next to each other in a I mean
that whole family that's still an active cemetery and Exeter
and and they're all there. I mean I read one
article that put it like and Mercies buried there between
the father that had her exhumed, the brother that drank
her heart liver. That is the one of the really
common um cure solution that you see in New England
(18:53):
was cutting out the vital organs. Do you know how
many vital organs? How many vital organs are Do you
mean like in the world altogether, or like the average human,
I mean in a single human body. Well, it's interesting
because the kidneys are vital organs, but they roll in
a pair. So if we counted them as one, I'd say,
(19:14):
let's see liver, lungs, heart, brain, does the does the
pancreas make the list? Well? Skin, it is an organ. No,
everybody forgets about skin and skin is an organ. So
this that I pulled said, the heart, lungs, kidneys, liver,
and spleen, spleen, the spleen bro The brain doesn't count.
(19:37):
Now you don't need a brain. No, I think you're right.
I think you're right. Um it's a term that I
hear and I've just I've wanted about. Um. I think
you're right that the brain is pretty vital except for
making this show. Yeah, so we're we're adding some levity
here because we are talking about really disturbing stuff, and
(19:58):
you can also see other cases. Is like you mentioned
alex in Vermont with the case of Frederick Ransom, you
can also see that they believed, at least in the
case of the Brown family, they believed that they were exercising,
you know, critical thinking. They didn't think anybody was acting
crazy because they didn't do this to the corpses of
(20:20):
the Marys. The corpses of the Mary's appeared to have
rotted and not to be preserved. And the Brown exhumations,
as as you pointed out, even though this made Rhode
Island known as the vampire capital of America or whatever
the breathless headlines where it's the Brown exhumations are just
(20:42):
one of many more that were in the area around
this time. And I appreciate that you pointed out Michael
Bell's work saying, Okay, I've found over eighty things that
somehow qualify as vampire rituals. And he also who says
I think this started at least by seventy four, if
(21:06):
not earlier, and it persisted. This is the crazy part.
It persisted all the way to eight after Coke found
the bacteria that causes tuberculosis. Excuse me, Consumption two is
(21:30):
super modern, right, I mean, there's phonograph records that are old,
that old, I think, Yeah, I mean the motion pictures
are about to be a thing in a few years,
automobiles coming around pretty so yeah, I mean, yeah, that's
that's that's that's just right around the corner. It seems
like the media really had a field day with the
(21:51):
Mercy Browns story. Yes, I mean even still, um, I
read when one place talking about you've been to Salem, Massachusetts. Briefly,
they really, you know, sort of have as a town
leaned into the which trials thing is kind of a
kitchen you know, sort of tourist tourist trapped kind of
and exit is not like that at all with as
(22:11):
I understand, I have not been an exit. I've been
to Salem, but exit apparently does not lean into that
sort of direction at all. Though, like I said, the
graves are still there. But the media at the time
really seems to have had a field day with it,
a lotted the word vampire all around. Yeah. Yeah, and
in a way that may have harmed more than it helps,
(22:34):
but it definitely had an effect on culture, and it's
one that remains with us today. We know that, as
you said, there were variations and what people thought was happening,
their variations in the way they tried to address it.
But the things that were the things that we're categorizing
as vampire rituals all describe a situation where a grave
(22:58):
was desecrated. That it's exactly what happened. And there are
things that people didn't even know about until like the
nineteen nineties when I think it was some kids playing
who originally discovered this mass grave in Griswold, Connecticut, and
they found these bodies had the skeletons at least had
parts of parts of their anatomy shattered and rearranged into
(23:22):
those skull and crossbone patterns you mentioned. See folks, we
we we got there. That was that was foreshadowing. That
wasn't just our mutual love of pirates. You know, there's
one there was one of the things that I that
I read about a symptom that people would, you know,
think of when they when they dig up the corpse
and look at the corpse. One of the things that
(23:43):
they would say, oh, that's a vampire is if it
looked bloated like it had just eaten. Yes, that would
be the well fed aspect, right, yeah, which would just
be from what like the gases of like just natural
decomposition breaking down. Yeah, probably gas is produced by the
I was gonna say entities, but as Helen's super too,
(24:05):
supernatural gases produced by the very tiny things digesting. Uh,
this is yeah, this is unfortunate that gas does happen.
But this is also before modern. Yes, it's before modern.
Is Beano still count as modern? Why don't they name
it bean? No? Hey, bro, it's it's clearly memorable because
(24:27):
I just dropped it in here. It's just I've never
heard it, not said it in an awkward way. You know,
maybe we just need some some to do our quiet
storm voices and do a Pino commercial even then and stuff.
Oh should have taken Pino exactly. So this is um.
(24:48):
This is interesting because for people who are outside of
the New England area at this time, as you said,
feels really surprisingly modern. People who are reading about this
because does get a lot of headlines, they think it
looks kind of primitive, a lot of like a lot
of folks in Europe and so on. They're saying, you know,
(25:12):
we're in a new era. It's the eighteen hundreds. We're
into science now, we're learning about the world. We have
agreed as a civilization that this universe is both understandable
and worth understanding. What the heck is happening over there
in Well, they probably didn't call them the colonies at
(25:32):
that point unless they were very stuck up in very British.
But a few years after the American Revolution, yeah, you know,
but it's like thirty the little lesson thirty years. There
are some that will always call them the colonists and
the colonies. Look at these the primitives in the colonies
clearly been tainted by folklore. Yeah, whatever the case was,
(25:55):
it was it was not seen as a normal thing.
What we mean is there are not a lot of
people in Western Europe at the time going, uh yeah,
I mean sometimes, yeah, you gotta do it, Yetta dig
them up, flip them over, it happens. I mean, that's
that's the jam. No one was really saying that in
Western Europe, and instead they were saying this is they
(26:17):
were describing it as uh as a d evolution of sorts. Culturally, socially,
they were saying, this is like the darkest age of unreasoning,
ignorance and blind superstition. And it was lumped in with
stories of werewolves and witches, another European folklore, tall tales
(26:41):
that were generally in Western Europe considered to be myths
by that time. Right, And there's this interesting piece of speculation,
and maybe this is maybe this is where we start
to draw to a close here, Alex, did you hear
that some folks believe this might have inspired the Draculus
we're remembering part one We talked about how post bram
(27:03):
Stoker vampires or vampiresm and culture is very different from
pre Stoker. So I don't know, I like the theory.
It's so it was so surprising to me that this
predated Bram bram Stoker's Dracula because of the way that
you really see it in the in the newspapers at
the time, local papers, but also you know, larger circulation
(27:25):
papers banding about the word vampire applied to these cases.
And I just figured that it was kind of maybe
top of mind for people because because the novel was
so famous. But the novel did come after, but it
came really close on the heels, right, So how quickly
can one write a novel? And he was based where
bram Stoker is from, Ohio, Oh right, right, like columb Cincinnati. Yeah,
(27:50):
I think he's he's not from Pennsylvania. I think he's
a natty boy. No, we're kidding, We're kidding. Bram Stoker
is an Irish author. Well that's not funny, no, no,
And that's kind of on him for not having the
foresight to be born in a place that would be
funnier in the context of this show. But so the idea, right,
(28:11):
is that two is when the Mercy Browns story, Well,
that's when it happens, and it's also when the chatter
is going on about it in the American newspapers. How
quickly could he have like gotten that, ingested it, consumed it,
and then you know, manifested it into a novel and
got it out. Yeah. It's interesting because there was a
(28:34):
clipping from New York World in eighteen nine six that
was later found in bram Stoker's papers. His theater company
had been touring the US at this time, in so
he probably ran into that reading just the local news.
And his novel Dracula was published in eighteen nine seven.
(28:55):
So one of the big debates is how much time
do you need to write a novel? Like that's enough time,
you think? So other people are arguing, they're they're arguing
in favor of this, and they're saying, Okay, how is
Lena not the character of Lucy? Right, they'd say, take
Mercy and Lena and you sort of squash them together
and you get Lucy and stuff. That was close enough. Yeah.
(29:19):
And also it's, uh, it's very common for fiction authors,
novelist or short story writers to take inspiration from real
life events. You know, it's I would say that's more
often than not. That's what actually happens. The interesting thing here, also,
the optimistic thing is that people aren't digging up their
(29:41):
loved ones anymore for uh on suspicion of vampirism or
supernatural nefarious activities. Yeah, just to just to see them.
Yet nothing creepy about that. And and generally that's believed
that that is because science came in, like science assumed
(30:03):
a more a more prominent role and was able to
explain some of what led to these infections, what led
to the communication of consumption. And then knowing that knowing
this explanation, people were in a better place to understand
and combat it. And that is luckily overall a happy
(30:28):
ending to this week's series on the New England Vampire Panic,
and we talked about some grizzly stuff. Alex. I really
appreciate your hanging out today. I love that we're able
to do a two parter. Thank you as well. Uh
Mr Lowell Brilliante our guest super producer Ben. I have
a nagging question. Yeah, there's something about this that I
(30:52):
that doesn't sit like I just don't understand. Okay, I'm
Edwin Brown. Yes, I've got my sisters. You've cut my
sister's art and liver out. You've burned them to ash.
Maybe I inhaled the smoke as you were burning them.
You've mixed that ash into water. You've made a tonic
with it, maybe but a sprig of Freshman or whatever.
And you've given that to me and I drink that.
(31:13):
What did I get? Like if it was gonna work?
What is the sort of the logic and the folk magic.
There's this idea that's kind of like sympathetic magic. You're
kind of treating like with like so you are taking
I mean, it's it's the old idea that the the
poison or the source of an illness somehow transformed or
(31:37):
going through certain rituals or treatments, can itself become the
cure for that condition? Or within within the poison we
find the answer kind of idea that, no, I don't
know the specifics in terms of why it needed to
be the heart and the liver or rather than say
the lungs and the kidneys. That's a good question, but
(32:00):
that it does seem to have a logic, the ideas
that by digesting or consuming some essence of a thing,
you are maybe inoculating yourself against it. But that's such
a science the way to think of it, though, like
what's the what's the spiritual angle on that? What's the
(32:22):
metaphysical angle on it? I'd be very interested to hear
the metaphysical angle, And I think maybe it's something we
look into, right because we're gonna hang out a little
bit after this, so let's look into that together. I
don't know about anybody else, but this is certainly worked
up an appetite for me. Quite a thirst, yes, quite
a thirst, I would say, and not just for knowledge,
(32:44):
but of course not human blood. Yes, how much of
you drink at one time? Do let us know? Ridiculous
At iHeart media dot com. You can also contact us
on social media but while you're on the internet, may
I recommend, uh, may I recommend checking out loll brilliante
(33:05):
show that he's working on when he when he's not
hanging out here with us. It is Prodigy. It is
available wherever you find your favorite podcast. Alex, you also
have a show. It's aphemeral, it's kick ass. I'm not
just saying that because my pal Nolan I have appeared
on a couple of episodes. But more importantly, we want
to know why why? What is the what is the
(33:28):
metaphysical logic? Perhaps behind this the specificity of these vampire rituals.
I don't know, Alex. Saturday Night Live rules dictate that
the next time you're back it will be your fifth
time guest toasting, which means we have to give you
a special jacket. Cool. Yeah, well but this was my
(33:50):
third time. We just did two episodes because for that
counts is for Just think about what kind of jacket
you want and remember that special doesn't necessarily mean great.
Mean I should say that fan Ro's got Halloween stuff.
All October. We did a thing about her carving Carnival
of Souls. We're doing a story about adaptation thing. Uh,
(34:12):
really great creepy story about demonic possession in a scrap book,
which I know sounds wonky as hell, but like it's
it's a classic story, really really think scary. You'd like
to say that, yeah, well, okay, thank you bleeping scary. Yes,
And I can personally vouch for that episode of Carnival
(34:32):
of Souls is one of my favorite horror movies. And
I think you will be surprised to learn just how
deeply Alex and Trevor and Max Williams worked together, Like
how deeply you all delved into that story. So I
I say that not just as a friend, but as
a fan. Do check out the show. It is free
(34:55):
wherever you get your podcast. That's gonna be all for
us today. Happy haw woween everyone, Stay safe out there,
and we'll talk to you again real soon. For more
podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
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