May 12, 2017 • 29 mins
In this episode we look at how we manufacture fear in the mind with a trip back in history to a psyops mission, a visit to to a haunted attraction, and a peek into the political house of horror, “Doomocracy.”
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
You are about to and to Vault thirteen once who
are transport vehicle arrives at the facility. Please continue moving
forward at all times, do not touch any word or anything.
And you know, Smoothie, please enjoy your stay involves thirteen.
(00:23):
Welcome to the stuff of life. I'm your host, Julie Douglas.
In the last episode, we looked at desperation, and in
this episode we walk through the grotesque ery of fear
that drives desperation. To that end, we step into three
vaults of the imagination, all constructed from myth and all
dealing with one of our worst fears, death m h.
(00:53):
The first of all, it contains an archive of a
psy ops mission in Vietnam that you deeply held cultural
beliefs about the dead to wage psychological warfare. The second vault,
a haunted attraction, contains all the ingredients to tap into
a kind of ancient cave of fears. How's it going,
Holly good? Those twisty rooms and the vortex room, they
(01:16):
genuinely jack with your equilibrium, But you feel like your
body is made, like there's a force that's working on
your body, like I'm falling to the left or rights
we're talking primal mythology here, the idea of a thinning
of the veil between two worlds, life and death. It's
(01:40):
fascinating if you think about it. Each Halloween we put
on a pageant of them a cob we pay homaged ghosts, ghouls,
and the grim Reaper. We even go so far as
to submit ourselves to a haunted house, walking through a
maze of horrors and mock sacrifices of our souls. There's
a lot of elements tied to going into a hunted house.
(02:01):
In many ways, it's a ride of passage. It's the
hero's journey. It's the going into the unknown and showing
that you're grown up and that you're you're an adult
and you're ready to take these things on. In the
third vault, we enter the immersive theater production democracy. You
(02:22):
may agree with me that what people find the most
stridening debate is politics. But first let's talk about the
sound of fear, the wonderland of symbols embedded in the
simplest of tones. What does this sound mean to you?
(02:45):
It could be a leaky faucet, but dig a bit deeper.
Think of a water droplet separated from its source, isolated,
dripping into an empty bowl, displaced apart from the whole.
These quiet moments, sound is amplified, and so is emotion
because each noise we've ever heard has been coded into
(03:08):
our brains as a symbol of some larger pattern, a
pattern that tells a story. Now with that in mind,
imagine it's nineteen seventy and you're a Viet Cong soldier
making your way through the jungle in the middle of
a night when you hear this. What you're hearing is
(03:35):
essentially a haunted house in the middle of a jungle.
The Special Operations Group in the U. S. Army UM
wired up a jungle area outside of an American firebase
with UM with sound speakers, and one night, it was
in the early nineteen in the dead of night, began
playing this kind of supernatural ghost show over these speakers,
(03:59):
and the idea to terrify UM the Viet Cong infiltrators
that had taken up positions in that forest. Oh good.
I'm Nathan Mallett, founder and editor of Military History Now
dot com. Military History Now catalogs the strange, offbeat in
(04:20):
lesser known aspects of military history, all the stuff that
really fascinates Nathan like ghost Heap number ten from the
Vietnam War. The grunts of the wheels of the Green
Machine the name they give the military. The Green Machine
is coming from America with flesh on it. Today is
the day for Utility or Wonderland of heroes and slogans.
(04:41):
In the Green Machine, a grunt doesn't seek out the enemy.
He goes hunting. The Green Machine plays games like Wondering Soul.
Wandering Soul is a tape that has been put out
by the Psychological Operations Battalion and ben wa is used
by the operating divisions and separate brigades broadcast a rally
appeal to the bigcom The tape itself is rather a
(05:04):
weird one with the funeral dirge music in the background
and they flatter talking to his children saying he's died
on the battlefield and he's trying to encourage his comrades
and the rallying joined the just caude. It kind of
reminded me of an episode of Gilligan's Island. Um remember
the old TV series from the sixties. There were some
spies that wanted to chase the castaways off the island,
(05:27):
so they dressed up in white sheets and tried to
make the castaways believe that the island was haunted. Somebody,
I think, and maybe the Pentagon saw that episode and
(05:48):
thought this might work in Vietnam. But this wasn't the
first time the US military engaged in the theater of war.
They did borrow some of this idea that these types
of tactics, so from a from a group in World
War Two known as the Ghost Army. They used a
lot of sort of audio equipment and loud speakers to
(06:09):
fool the Germans post Normandy invasion Europe. So they would
they play over the loudspeakers um the sound of like
one Sherman tanks rolling through the forest. So the Germans
opposite the American lines would think that there was a
massive sort of armored attack waiting to be unleashed on them,
and they would evacuate the area, and in reality that
(06:30):
the American lines were, you know, probably thinly defended. And
so I think ghost Tape was kind of borrowing from
that sort of special operation psychological operations campaign of the
Second World War, and they brought it to Vietnam, but
they sort of they added a sort of the supernatural
element to it. And Ghost Team Number ten. American forces
were trying to tap into deeply held cultural ideas about
(06:52):
life and death of the Vietnamese people worshiped the souls
of their ancestors, but this wandering soul is very different.
It was seved in an echo chamber by the U. S.
Army and as broadcast from a helicopter of a jungle.
Some of the sounds are of the poet I guess,
(07:13):
presumably Vietcong fighters who had been killed earlier, and they
were sort of warning their comrades, you know, you're in
a lost cause. This is terrible. Don't let what happened
to me happen to you. Go home while you still can.
And then interlaced with all of this is the sounds
of children calling for their their daddies and and and
wives or widows weeping, and just sort of gongs banging
(07:38):
and things like that. But it's all sort of echoe
and swirly and kind of just otherworldly. Even if the
Vietcong didn't believe that there were in fact ghosts in
the jungle with them, even if they realized they were,
sort of this was part of a kind of a
supernatural horror show being put on by the Americans. Just
(08:01):
the sounds and the message, it's just it's just more
than a little eerie. So I think even if it
didn't have the full impact, I think it was probably
unpleasant to be sitting, you know, in the dark, listening
to these sounds. Here's the thing. It was late in
the war, and the US was up for trying anything
(08:23):
that might move the needle in their favor. It was
during the period when they were drawing their forces back
out of Southeast Asia, so they were having to do,
you know, more with less, and they were trying to
hand the fighting over to the Vietnamese. Was a big
part of the US effort in Southeast Asia. UM, And
I think it might have been sort of the sort
of an outgrowth of that idea of trying to win
(08:43):
your friends, you know, win over the hearts and minds
of the South Vietnamese, but also try to demoralize the enemy. Um.
That was a big part of of the American effort
in Southeast Asia. How effective was the operation, It's hard
to know. Some accounts say that Ghost Tape number ten
drew aggressive fire rather than retreat. And then there's the
(09:04):
nearby villagers who woke to a chilling cacophony of music
and voices, not exactly something that would win hearts and minds.
We think we know about war and fear, and then
a footnote to history like ghost Heap number ten surfaces
on a site like Military History Now, and it reframes everything.
(09:24):
I just wanted to tell the stories about military history
that don't get reported. With all the real and imagined
terrors in this world, why would we willingly seek out
opportunities to walk into fear, to knowingly give ourselves over
to psychological warfare? Yep, we are talking about a haunted house.
(09:57):
Talk are are randomly demons whose wars I'm very sure
we'll be talking. Most people come to a hommed house
to be scared, to be entertained, to have a great time.
But there are people who get the deeper meanings. They
(10:17):
get the roots of things, the roots of Halloween. They
can see the references that's been Armstrong of another world.
In Atlanta, Georgia, it's one of the most popular Halloween
attractions in the city, in part because of Ben's commitment
to the idea of the hero's journey, something very exciting
(10:38):
to go into a scary environment, to almost be struggling
with the savage beast in a way to have that
adrenaline surge, but yet to know that you're safe. Every
day we suffer bursts of a journal and from anger
in our cubicle, from traffic on the road, and our
entire way we deal with this is repression. We just
repressed it because in our culture it's not appropriate to
(11:01):
scream and yell and go crazy. But you can come
to a place like a horned attraction and you can
let it all out. You can scream and yell, and
it's such a release. It's so much fun. And I
often think the Harnhou's actors are playing the role of
like a predator. It's like you're a hunter, you know.
So they have the fun of stalking prey, if you will,
(11:23):
stalking the patrons and scaring them. So it's all very
deep when you come and you really think about it.
One of another World's big inspirations is HP Lovecraft, the
early science fiction and horror author who plumbed the depths
of primordial ancient evil, the kind of evil that's deeper
(11:44):
and more abiding than humans can ever understand. I felt
a wave of tripe to tangible as a draft from
the tomb. It seems humpow like, like the spawn of
another dimension, like something only partly of mankind, linked to
black gulfs, beyond all spheres of false the matter, space
(12:08):
and time. To that end, every square inch of nether
world is layered in objects that recall this kind of
existential horror. It's like a museum of nightmare images, and
it's world building at its finest. It preys on all
the senses, particularly the vibrations that wend their way into
(12:31):
your ears. The cool thing about a hunt an ounce
that a hunt anounced has over other forms of entertainment
is it has the tactile element because you're walking through it.
And it also has smell because you don't really use
taste much, but you know. But by far it's visual
and sound. I mean, those are the elements. You you
(12:53):
see the monster, and you hear the monster, and the
monster has a deep, guttural, bassy sound in the case
eating size. Sometimes you don't see the monster, you just
hear it, and the sound matters. So those two things
they really tied together to create the complete package to
put someone into a new world. We have a scene
(13:15):
in the attraction where you see a ghost projected on
a It's basically a screen that picks out the lights.
You can see right through it. You see the back wall,
and as the ghost comes out, you know, the floorboards
start cracking and snapping, and you hear the actual physical
sounds of real wood moving. But there's a rumbling and
(13:41):
what happens. We have a thing called a butt kicker,
and a butt kicker is a type of speaker, But
what it is, it's a huge metal enclosure with a
magnet that moves much like a speaker does, you know,
in a cone, but it actually creates a physical vibration,
so the entire floor vibrates to the sound. So you
hear the sound of this roaring and a floor is
shaking and you're watching the you know, the things crack
(14:04):
and move towards you, and you're seeing this ghost and
the whole thing is is very unreal, and it's taking
sound and actually making it physical. You feel that then
takes us on a tour of the attraction so we
can experience the assault on our senses for ourselves. Now
(14:26):
we're walking through the spider room with the spider sacks
hanging down. I said, glad, the lights are still on
a little bit good nostration. You're gonna grab your walk out,
throwing you very little free foot wide opening fog, and
(14:52):
just when you think the worst is past you, that
you've cleared the big hurdle, another round of sound waves
hits you. This act. They sometimes have step pads and
they can step on the creative sound unexpected air blasts.
(15:14):
Every part of the attraction is carefully orchestrated, down to
the moment that you enter the parking lot and you
queue up in line. This is when an actor known
as a slider comes creaming towards you, sliding on his knees,
dragging metal tipped gloves over the concrete to create a
trail of sparks. So you come here. You hear screams
(15:39):
in the parking lot of people being scared. You hear
the sliders scraping steel on the concrete, which also your
happy fun. I was looking in the love late ron
light when my eye sight. We actually choose to make
the outdoor more festive and feeling. Um. We've done everything
(16:01):
over the years to make it sound creepy, but what
we like better now is we play like Halloween songs.
If you will, you know Godzilla by Blue Oyster Cult
or you know the Monster Mash, or just all kinds
of kookie fun songs to create a more of a
festival street atmosphere. Because a good haunted attraction rides the
razor's edge between Halloween on one side and horror on
(16:24):
the other. Halloween is all the good, fun, happy moments.
You know, too far to Halloween, it becomes too kitty,
too far into horror. Horror is the thrills, excitement, but
too far into horror becomes too morbid, too nasty. So
a good attraction, my mind, rides the middle line. But
(16:47):
then the closer you get into the interior of the attraction,
the more the sound becomes real. I'm about to go
into this as we like to call it, it's the
click click click of the roller coaster going up, preparing
you for the drop. Once you get into this room,
it's darker, it's more moody. You know, there's different announces
that you're seeing creepy things. But the fun part is stopping.
(17:07):
Now you're about to go. You're about to enter that
ancient cave. You're about to face your fears. That also
trains the staff and group psychology. They talk about archetypes
and the behaviors that go along with them. So you
know that stoic haunted house expert, Well, that person is
(17:29):
usually looking for minute details while the hero was up,
but under the cover of darkness and terror, that hero
may just turn out to be the person who sacrifices
someone from the group, shoving them out in front to
save himself. They also talk about things like fear of clowns,
fear of darkness, the idea that the deepest fear, the
(17:51):
root fear, is the unknown. Why are you afraid of
darkness because you don't know what's in it? Why are
you afraid of clowns because you don't know the intention
the person is masked. It's fear of the unknown? What's
out there? There's something out there I don't understand. And
this way another world creates a physical maze to work
(18:14):
out the mental ones that we run through in our
minds when it comes to the unknown. But what happens
when you enter a haunted house that seizes on fears
that are all too real in a world of endless
apocalyptic realities, unbeh of nightmares masquerading a salvation u this
(18:38):
fall one event will perfectly capture the mood of our
current collective imagination. They're bringing drugs, creative time and artist
Pedro reys invite you to experience the haunted house that
already exists in our minds. Will be left behind. Democracy
(18:59):
a house, a political horror that's from democracy and immersive
theater play put on in the fall of two thousand
and sixteen by artist Pedro Reyes. We were working working
in the Brooklyn Army Terminal, which is a massive concrete
structure was built for the First World War, and this
(19:25):
was a place where bombs and all the kind of
uh weapons were made for the first time Second World Wars,
and and it still feels like a military zone. As
soon as audience members showed up at the terminal, they
were placed front and center in the plays action. You
climbed in his van, and his van and the chauffeur
(19:48):
won't talk to you. He's playing the right wing white
supremacist radio. Then suddenly this van is stopped by the police.
This is an army terminal. We don't give towards it
unless you have a government issued ide. You and everybody
in this vehicle is now trespassing. I'm gonna have to
(20:09):
detain everybody needs vehicle. Who your vehicle to the right
right now? Okay, but you're not sure where there is
the side of the play or not, because they tell
you that it was a restricted area, that the stard
(20:29):
shouldn't be going in these parts, that this is a
military sounded to the working all the way down the
quick let's go where they're treated brutally by these actors,
which are addressed as riot police. Inside the buildings, warrens
(20:57):
of rooms presented psychological minefields, and in one of them,
the opioid epidemic taking hold in the US was explored
with an actor begging for help. I'm gone, I need
to perfectly care im not able. Then she tries to
persuade people from the audience who helped her to get
(21:21):
fields from the doctor because the doctor won't give her
any more guilt. She's very curious because you know, like
the people in the audience were refusing to help her.
The audience is also in character. It was very interesting
to see the psychological dynamics and this way democracy was
(21:48):
very much a social experiment. The audience reflected our society's
judgment of others and how we tend to regard addiction
as a moral failure. Another social experiment occurred in a
boardroom of a fictitious company, and it required participants to
either save the jobs of five thousand people or fire
(22:09):
them and claim a one million dollar bonus package. And
if you decide to take the package, you take the list.
If you take the list, you are right and you
are against at a very fancy party. And if you
decided to save the workers, you take of the sairs
and and then you're the health You're given an apron
(22:34):
and you have to their drinks to the other gifts.
In a school room of the future, Rais envisioned a
classroom with no teachers, just screens with educational avatar who
lectured a kind of revisionist history. And in another room
there was a future where there were no parks, just
(22:54):
a headset outfitted in virtual reality. And you see the
reach park in in through the VR ships because there's
no more facts in the future. And and this is
something that Trump is doing, you know, like Trump is
in terms wants to turn natural parks into places where
(23:17):
they can be drilling or they can be tracking or whatever.
That seemed like a sci fi scenario three months ago,
and now it's happening. Today I'm signing a new executive
order to end another egregious abuse of federal power. The
order would review the status of twenty four national monuments
(23:38):
created over the past twenty years. Major sites in the West,
including the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, are under review.
The half million hecked Are protected area is home to
Native Americans who oppose possible changes. Rant says that all
of these issues are political. It's the parsing out of
(23:59):
what's private public, and what's a shared world, the role
that we all get to decide we want to live in,
and in part that was the impetus for democracy. Democracy
is a kind of very fragile process. When the countries
are becoming less rich, people tend to become more conservative.
(24:19):
They want an easy fix. It's a it's a psychological
phenomena that you want to have the fear of a
father who's gonna come and and fix things. That allows
often for the arrival of a siren that will, you know,
(24:40):
like just take advantage of the situation and school everybody.
So that's what happened in the United States, what has
happened in many other countries also, So it's a global phenomena,
which leads to the one problem with democracy as supposed
to a hunt of house where you exit and then
you know so here you actually the countercasto, and your
(25:04):
still in the middle of the color house that studies
unfolding ariety every way. Democracy has disappeared in several other
great nations, not because the people of those nations disliked democracy,
but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity,
(25:28):
of government confusion, government weakness. Finally, in desperation, they chose
to sacrifice liberty. Ultimately, democracy is a reminder things don't
change by itself, but you have to take part in
the process. We in America know that our own democratic
institutions can be preserved and made to work. But in
(25:53):
order to preserve them, we need to act together to
meet the problems of the nation boldly, and to prove
the practical operation of democratic government is equal to the
task of protecting the security of the people. My eight
(26:21):
year old hates October. At every turn she sees symbols
of mortality, skeletons, coffins, and mummies, and every few days
she tells me she doesn't want to die, and my
heart breaks a little because there's nothing I can do
to change the equation of existence. Instead, I try to
(26:42):
explain that Halloween, haunted houses, horror movies, and even our
worst fears repeated on nightly news broadcasts, those are just
psy ops missions in reverse. I explained that we take
this fear that wears us down and we confront it
in its ultimate form, deaf, and in this way we
(27:04):
always find our way back to life. No doubt that
when I tell my daughter this, I'm also consoling myself,
telling myself that staring down the grotesqueries of life is
part of the hero's journey to come out on the
other side, battled and bruised, but better for it. And
(27:24):
the next episode we'll look at how we are all
inextricably wired together. We're all connected in a very deep way,
and yet we all forget that. Thank you to Nathan
Mallett for walking us through the psy Ops mission Ghost
Tape number ten. You can find more of Nathan's research
on military history. Now Many things to Creative Time and
(27:46):
Pedro raise for discussing democracy with us. You can see
more of Pedro's work at pedro rays dot com. And
thank you to Ben Armstrong for pulling back the curtain
on the fear machine that is nether World, and to
Holly Fry of stuff you missed in history class, thank
you for holding my hand through a nether World. Stuff
(28:06):
of Life is written an executive produced by me Julie
Douglas and co produced by Noel Brown. Editorial oversight is
provided by contributing producer Dylan Fagin and Head of Production
Jerry Rowland. Original music is by Noel Brown. This episode
also featured music by Tristan McNeil, Aaron Grubbs and Dylan Fagan.
Additional music is by the band Breathers. You can find
(28:27):
more of their music at Breathers dot band camp. This
episode also features that Hopeful Future is all I've Ever
Known by Chris Zabrievsky, and you can find more of
his work at Chris Zabrievsky dot com. You can find
the Stuff of Life on Facebook and Twitter, and you
can email us at the Stuff of Life at House
to Works dot com. That's Harry and Part of It
(28:54):
The Laundry Room te
You are about to and to Vault thirteen once who
are transport vehicle arrives at the facility. Please continue moving
forward at all times, do not touch any word or anything.
And you know, Smoothie, please enjoy your stay involves thirteen.
(00:23):
Welcome to the stuff of life. I'm your host, Julie Douglas.
In the last episode, we looked at desperation, and in
this episode we walk through the grotesque ery of fear
that drives desperation. To that end, we step into three
vaults of the imagination, all constructed from myth and all
dealing with one of our worst fears, death m h.
(00:53):
The first of all, it contains an archive of a
psy ops mission in Vietnam that you deeply held cultural
beliefs about the dead to wage psychological warfare. The second vault,
a haunted attraction, contains all the ingredients to tap into
a kind of ancient cave of fears. How's it going,
Holly good? Those twisty rooms and the vortex room, they
(01:16):
genuinely jack with your equilibrium, But you feel like your
body is made, like there's a force that's working on
your body, like I'm falling to the left or rights
we're talking primal mythology here, the idea of a thinning
of the veil between two worlds, life and death. It's
(01:40):
fascinating if you think about it. Each Halloween we put
on a pageant of them a cob we pay homaged ghosts, ghouls,
and the grim Reaper. We even go so far as
to submit ourselves to a haunted house, walking through a
maze of horrors and mock sacrifices of our souls. There's
a lot of elements tied to going into a hunted house.
(02:01):
In many ways, it's a ride of passage. It's the
hero's journey. It's the going into the unknown and showing
that you're grown up and that you're you're an adult
and you're ready to take these things on. In the
third vault, we enter the immersive theater production democracy. You
(02:22):
may agree with me that what people find the most
stridening debate is politics. But first let's talk about the
sound of fear, the wonderland of symbols embedded in the
simplest of tones. What does this sound mean to you?
(02:45):
It could be a leaky faucet, but dig a bit deeper.
Think of a water droplet separated from its source, isolated,
dripping into an empty bowl, displaced apart from the whole.
These quiet moments, sound is amplified, and so is emotion
because each noise we've ever heard has been coded into
(03:08):
our brains as a symbol of some larger pattern, a
pattern that tells a story. Now with that in mind,
imagine it's nineteen seventy and you're a Viet Cong soldier
making your way through the jungle in the middle of
a night when you hear this. What you're hearing is
(03:35):
essentially a haunted house in the middle of a jungle.
The Special Operations Group in the U. S. Army UM
wired up a jungle area outside of an American firebase
with UM with sound speakers, and one night, it was
in the early nineteen in the dead of night, began
playing this kind of supernatural ghost show over these speakers,
(03:59):
and the idea to terrify UM the Viet Cong infiltrators
that had taken up positions in that forest. Oh good.
I'm Nathan Mallett, founder and editor of Military History Now
dot com. Military History Now catalogs the strange, offbeat in
(04:20):
lesser known aspects of military history, all the stuff that
really fascinates Nathan like ghost Heap number ten from the
Vietnam War. The grunts of the wheels of the Green
Machine the name they give the military. The Green Machine
is coming from America with flesh on it. Today is
the day for Utility or Wonderland of heroes and slogans.
(04:41):
In the Green Machine, a grunt doesn't seek out the enemy.
He goes hunting. The Green Machine plays games like Wondering Soul.
Wandering Soul is a tape that has been put out
by the Psychological Operations Battalion and ben wa is used
by the operating divisions and separate brigades broadcast a rally
appeal to the bigcom The tape itself is rather a
(05:04):
weird one with the funeral dirge music in the background
and they flatter talking to his children saying he's died
on the battlefield and he's trying to encourage his comrades
and the rallying joined the just caude. It kind of
reminded me of an episode of Gilligan's Island. Um remember
the old TV series from the sixties. There were some
spies that wanted to chase the castaways off the island,
(05:27):
so they dressed up in white sheets and tried to
make the castaways believe that the island was haunted. Somebody,
I think, and maybe the Pentagon saw that episode and
(05:48):
thought this might work in Vietnam. But this wasn't the
first time the US military engaged in the theater of war.
They did borrow some of this idea that these types
of tactics, so from a from a group in World
War Two known as the Ghost Army. They used a
lot of sort of audio equipment and loud speakers to
(06:09):
fool the Germans post Normandy invasion Europe. So they would
they play over the loudspeakers um the sound of like
one Sherman tanks rolling through the forest. So the Germans
opposite the American lines would think that there was a
massive sort of armored attack waiting to be unleashed on them,
and they would evacuate the area, and in reality that
(06:30):
the American lines were, you know, probably thinly defended. And
so I think ghost Tape was kind of borrowing from
that sort of special operation psychological operations campaign of the
Second World War, and they brought it to Vietnam, but
they sort of they added a sort of the supernatural
element to it. And Ghost Team Number ten. American forces
were trying to tap into deeply held cultural ideas about
(06:52):
life and death of the Vietnamese people worshiped the souls
of their ancestors, but this wandering soul is very different.
It was seved in an echo chamber by the U. S.
Army and as broadcast from a helicopter of a jungle.
Some of the sounds are of the poet I guess,
(07:13):
presumably Vietcong fighters who had been killed earlier, and they
were sort of warning their comrades, you know, you're in
a lost cause. This is terrible. Don't let what happened
to me happen to you. Go home while you still can.
And then interlaced with all of this is the sounds
of children calling for their their daddies and and and
wives or widows weeping, and just sort of gongs banging
(07:38):
and things like that. But it's all sort of echoe
and swirly and kind of just otherworldly. Even if the
Vietcong didn't believe that there were in fact ghosts in
the jungle with them, even if they realized they were,
sort of this was part of a kind of a
supernatural horror show being put on by the Americans. Just
(08:01):
the sounds and the message, it's just it's just more
than a little eerie. So I think even if it
didn't have the full impact, I think it was probably
unpleasant to be sitting, you know, in the dark, listening
to these sounds. Here's the thing. It was late in
the war, and the US was up for trying anything
(08:23):
that might move the needle in their favor. It was
during the period when they were drawing their forces back
out of Southeast Asia, so they were having to do,
you know, more with less, and they were trying to
hand the fighting over to the Vietnamese. Was a big
part of the US effort in Southeast Asia. UM, And
I think it might have been sort of the sort
of an outgrowth of that idea of trying to win
(08:43):
your friends, you know, win over the hearts and minds
of the South Vietnamese, but also try to demoralize the enemy. Um.
That was a big part of of the American effort
in Southeast Asia. How effective was the operation, It's hard
to know. Some accounts say that Ghost Tape number ten
drew aggressive fire rather than retreat. And then there's the
(09:04):
nearby villagers who woke to a chilling cacophony of music
and voices, not exactly something that would win hearts and minds.
We think we know about war and fear, and then
a footnote to history like ghost Heap number ten surfaces
on a site like Military History Now, and it reframes everything.
(09:24):
I just wanted to tell the stories about military history
that don't get reported. With all the real and imagined
terrors in this world, why would we willingly seek out
opportunities to walk into fear, to knowingly give ourselves over
to psychological warfare? Yep, we are talking about a haunted house.
(09:57):
Talk are are randomly demons whose wars I'm very sure
we'll be talking. Most people come to a hommed house
to be scared, to be entertained, to have a great time.
But there are people who get the deeper meanings. They
(10:17):
get the roots of things, the roots of Halloween. They
can see the references that's been Armstrong of another world.
In Atlanta, Georgia, it's one of the most popular Halloween
attractions in the city, in part because of Ben's commitment
to the idea of the hero's journey, something very exciting
(10:38):
to go into a scary environment, to almost be struggling
with the savage beast in a way to have that
adrenaline surge, but yet to know that you're safe. Every
day we suffer bursts of a journal and from anger
in our cubicle, from traffic on the road, and our
entire way we deal with this is repression. We just
repressed it because in our culture it's not appropriate to
(11:01):
scream and yell and go crazy. But you can come
to a place like a horned attraction and you can
let it all out. You can scream and yell, and
it's such a release. It's so much fun. And I
often think the Harnhou's actors are playing the role of
like a predator. It's like you're a hunter, you know.
So they have the fun of stalking prey, if you will,
(11:23):
stalking the patrons and scaring them. So it's all very
deep when you come and you really think about it.
One of another World's big inspirations is HP Lovecraft, the
early science fiction and horror author who plumbed the depths
of primordial ancient evil, the kind of evil that's deeper
(11:44):
and more abiding than humans can ever understand. I felt
a wave of tripe to tangible as a draft from
the tomb. It seems humpow like, like the spawn of
another dimension, like something only partly of mankind, linked to
black gulfs, beyond all spheres of false the matter, space
(12:08):
and time. To that end, every square inch of nether
world is layered in objects that recall this kind of
existential horror. It's like a museum of nightmare images, and
it's world building at its finest. It preys on all
the senses, particularly the vibrations that wend their way into
(12:31):
your ears. The cool thing about a hunt an ounce
that a hunt anounced has over other forms of entertainment
is it has the tactile element because you're walking through it.
And it also has smell because you don't really use
taste much, but you know. But by far it's visual
and sound. I mean, those are the elements. You you
(12:53):
see the monster, and you hear the monster, and the
monster has a deep, guttural, bassy sound in the case
eating size. Sometimes you don't see the monster, you just
hear it, and the sound matters. So those two things
they really tied together to create the complete package to
put someone into a new world. We have a scene
(13:15):
in the attraction where you see a ghost projected on
a It's basically a screen that picks out the lights.
You can see right through it. You see the back wall,
and as the ghost comes out, you know, the floorboards
start cracking and snapping, and you hear the actual physical
sounds of real wood moving. But there's a rumbling and
(13:41):
what happens. We have a thing called a butt kicker,
and a butt kicker is a type of speaker, But
what it is, it's a huge metal enclosure with a
magnet that moves much like a speaker does, you know,
in a cone, but it actually creates a physical vibration,
so the entire floor vibrates to the sound. So you
hear the sound of this roaring and a floor is
shaking and you're watching the you know, the things crack
(14:04):
and move towards you, and you're seeing this ghost and
the whole thing is is very unreal, and it's taking
sound and actually making it physical. You feel that then
takes us on a tour of the attraction so we
can experience the assault on our senses for ourselves. Now
(14:26):
we're walking through the spider room with the spider sacks
hanging down. I said, glad, the lights are still on
a little bit good nostration. You're gonna grab your walk out,
throwing you very little free foot wide opening fog, and
(14:52):
just when you think the worst is past you, that
you've cleared the big hurdle, another round of sound waves
hits you. This act. They sometimes have step pads and
they can step on the creative sound unexpected air blasts.
(15:14):
Every part of the attraction is carefully orchestrated, down to
the moment that you enter the parking lot and you
queue up in line. This is when an actor known
as a slider comes creaming towards you, sliding on his knees,
dragging metal tipped gloves over the concrete to create a
trail of sparks. So you come here. You hear screams
(15:39):
in the parking lot of people being scared. You hear
the sliders scraping steel on the concrete, which also your
happy fun. I was looking in the love late ron
light when my eye sight. We actually choose to make
the outdoor more festive and feeling. Um. We've done everything
(16:01):
over the years to make it sound creepy, but what
we like better now is we play like Halloween songs.
If you will, you know Godzilla by Blue Oyster Cult
or you know the Monster Mash, or just all kinds
of kookie fun songs to create a more of a
festival street atmosphere. Because a good haunted attraction rides the
razor's edge between Halloween on one side and horror on
(16:24):
the other. Halloween is all the good, fun, happy moments.
You know, too far to Halloween, it becomes too kitty,
too far into horror. Horror is the thrills, excitement, but
too far into horror becomes too morbid, too nasty. So
a good attraction, my mind, rides the middle line. But
(16:47):
then the closer you get into the interior of the attraction,
the more the sound becomes real. I'm about to go
into this as we like to call it, it's the
click click click of the roller coaster going up, preparing
you for the drop. Once you get into this room,
it's darker, it's more moody. You know, there's different announces
that you're seeing creepy things. But the fun part is stopping.
(17:07):
Now you're about to go. You're about to enter that
ancient cave. You're about to face your fears. That also
trains the staff and group psychology. They talk about archetypes
and the behaviors that go along with them. So you
know that stoic haunted house expert, Well, that person is
(17:29):
usually looking for minute details while the hero was up,
but under the cover of darkness and terror, that hero
may just turn out to be the person who sacrifices
someone from the group, shoving them out in front to
save himself. They also talk about things like fear of clowns,
fear of darkness, the idea that the deepest fear, the
(17:51):
root fear, is the unknown. Why are you afraid of
darkness because you don't know what's in it? Why are
you afraid of clowns because you don't know the intention
the person is masked. It's fear of the unknown? What's
out there? There's something out there I don't understand. And
this way another world creates a physical maze to work
(18:14):
out the mental ones that we run through in our
minds when it comes to the unknown. But what happens
when you enter a haunted house that seizes on fears
that are all too real in a world of endless
apocalyptic realities, unbeh of nightmares masquerading a salvation u this
(18:38):
fall one event will perfectly capture the mood of our
current collective imagination. They're bringing drugs, creative time and artist
Pedro reys invite you to experience the haunted house that
already exists in our minds. Will be left behind. Democracy
(18:59):
a house, a political horror that's from democracy and immersive
theater play put on in the fall of two thousand
and sixteen by artist Pedro Reyes. We were working working
in the Brooklyn Army Terminal, which is a massive concrete
structure was built for the First World War, and this
(19:25):
was a place where bombs and all the kind of
uh weapons were made for the first time Second World Wars,
and and it still feels like a military zone. As
soon as audience members showed up at the terminal, they
were placed front and center in the plays action. You
climbed in his van, and his van and the chauffeur
(19:48):
won't talk to you. He's playing the right wing white
supremacist radio. Then suddenly this van is stopped by the police.
This is an army terminal. We don't give towards it
unless you have a government issued ide. You and everybody
in this vehicle is now trespassing. I'm gonna have to
(20:09):
detain everybody needs vehicle. Who your vehicle to the right
right now? Okay, but you're not sure where there is
the side of the play or not, because they tell
you that it was a restricted area, that the stard
(20:29):
shouldn't be going in these parts, that this is a
military sounded to the working all the way down the
quick let's go where they're treated brutally by these actors,
which are addressed as riot police. Inside the buildings, warrens
(20:57):
of rooms presented psychological minefields, and in one of them,
the opioid epidemic taking hold in the US was explored
with an actor begging for help. I'm gone, I need
to perfectly care im not able. Then she tries to
persuade people from the audience who helped her to get
(21:21):
fields from the doctor because the doctor won't give her
any more guilt. She's very curious because you know, like
the people in the audience were refusing to help her.
The audience is also in character. It was very interesting
to see the psychological dynamics and this way democracy was
(21:48):
very much a social experiment. The audience reflected our society's
judgment of others and how we tend to regard addiction
as a moral failure. Another social experiment occurred in a
boardroom of a fictitious company, and it required participants to
either save the jobs of five thousand people or fire
(22:09):
them and claim a one million dollar bonus package. And
if you decide to take the package, you take the list.
If you take the list, you are right and you
are against at a very fancy party. And if you
decided to save the workers, you take of the sairs
and and then you're the health You're given an apron
(22:34):
and you have to their drinks to the other gifts.
In a school room of the future, Rais envisioned a
classroom with no teachers, just screens with educational avatar who
lectured a kind of revisionist history. And in another room
there was a future where there were no parks, just
(22:54):
a headset outfitted in virtual reality. And you see the
reach park in in through the VR ships because there's
no more facts in the future. And and this is
something that Trump is doing, you know, like Trump is
in terms wants to turn natural parks into places where
(23:17):
they can be drilling or they can be tracking or whatever.
That seemed like a sci fi scenario three months ago,
and now it's happening. Today I'm signing a new executive
order to end another egregious abuse of federal power. The
order would review the status of twenty four national monuments
(23:38):
created over the past twenty years. Major sites in the West,
including the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, are under review.
The half million hecked Are protected area is home to
Native Americans who oppose possible changes. Rant says that all
of these issues are political. It's the parsing out of
(23:59):
what's private public, and what's a shared world, the role
that we all get to decide we want to live in,
and in part that was the impetus for democracy. Democracy
is a kind of very fragile process. When the countries
are becoming less rich, people tend to become more conservative.
(24:19):
They want an easy fix. It's a it's a psychological
phenomena that you want to have the fear of a
father who's gonna come and and fix things. That allows
often for the arrival of a siren that will, you know,
(24:40):
like just take advantage of the situation and school everybody.
So that's what happened in the United States, what has
happened in many other countries also, So it's a global phenomena,
which leads to the one problem with democracy as supposed
to a hunt of house where you exit and then
you know so here you actually the countercasto, and your
(25:04):
still in the middle of the color house that studies
unfolding ariety every way. Democracy has disappeared in several other
great nations, not because the people of those nations disliked democracy,
but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity,
(25:28):
of government confusion, government weakness. Finally, in desperation, they chose
to sacrifice liberty. Ultimately, democracy is a reminder things don't
change by itself, but you have to take part in
the process. We in America know that our own democratic
institutions can be preserved and made to work. But in
(25:53):
order to preserve them, we need to act together to
meet the problems of the nation boldly, and to prove
the practical operation of democratic government is equal to the
task of protecting the security of the people. My eight
(26:21):
year old hates October. At every turn she sees symbols
of mortality, skeletons, coffins, and mummies, and every few days
she tells me she doesn't want to die, and my
heart breaks a little because there's nothing I can do
to change the equation of existence. Instead, I try to
(26:42):
explain that Halloween, haunted houses, horror movies, and even our
worst fears repeated on nightly news broadcasts, those are just
psy ops missions in reverse. I explained that we take
this fear that wears us down and we confront it
in its ultimate form, deaf, and in this way we
(27:04):
always find our way back to life. No doubt that
when I tell my daughter this, I'm also consoling myself,
telling myself that staring down the grotesqueries of life is
part of the hero's journey to come out on the
other side, battled and bruised, but better for it. And
(27:24):
the next episode we'll look at how we are all
inextricably wired together. We're all connected in a very deep way,
and yet we all forget that. Thank you to Nathan
Mallett for walking us through the psy Ops mission Ghost
Tape number ten. You can find more of Nathan's research
on military history. Now Many things to Creative Time and
(27:46):
Pedro raise for discussing democracy with us. You can see
more of Pedro's work at pedro rays dot com. And
thank you to Ben Armstrong for pulling back the curtain
on the fear machine that is nether World, and to
Holly Fry of stuff you missed in history class, thank
you for holding my hand through a nether World. Stuff
(28:06):
of Life is written an executive produced by me Julie
Douglas and co produced by Noel Brown. Editorial oversight is
provided by contributing producer Dylan Fagin and Head of Production
Jerry Rowland. Original music is by Noel Brown. This episode
also featured music by Tristan McNeil, Aaron Grubbs and Dylan Fagan.
Additional music is by the band Breathers. You can find
(28:27):
more of their music at Breathers dot band camp. This
episode also features that Hopeful Future is all I've Ever
Known by Chris Zabrievsky, and you can find more of
his work at Chris Zabrievsky dot com. You can find
the Stuff of Life on Facebook and Twitter, and you
can email us at the Stuff of Life at House
to Works dot com. That's Harry and Part of It
(28:54):
The Laundry Room te
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Special Summer Offer: Exclusively on Apple Podcasts, try our Dateline Premium subscription completely free for one month! With Dateline Premium, you get every episode ad-free plus exclusive bonus content.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!