Episode 254: Human Sacrifice! Does it Work?

The Wizard gives you his take on this intense ritual!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM paranormal
podcast network. Now get ready for us Strange Things with
Joshua P. Warn.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Welcome to our podcast. Please be aware the thoughts and
opinions expressed by the host are their thoughts and opinions
only and do not reflect those of iHeartMedia, iHeartRadio, Coast
to Coast AM, employees of premier networks, or their sponsors
and associates. We would like to encourage you to do

(00:34):
your own research and discover the subject matter for yourself.

Speaker 1 (00:55):
Yet ready to be amazed by the wizard of Weird
Strange with Jos Warren. I am Joshua Woope Warren, and
each week on this show, I'll be bringing you a
brand new my blowing content, news exercises and weird experiments

(01:17):
you can do at home, and a lot more on
this edition of the show Human Sacrifice. Does it work? Well,
It's always worked for me. I'm on the radio. Sometimes

(01:38):
people say, well, you're not really on the radio, you're
a podcast. It's all the same. It's all the same.
Of course, I do work for iHeartRadio, but radio TV
it's all electro magnetic transmissions and I am joking. No,

(02:00):
I have not engaged in human sacrifice. Sometimes I'll tell
a joke and then I have to get sort of
explicit and say that was a joke or I don't know.
People read so many weird things. I got on Facebook
the other day and I said, guess what I'm holding

(02:23):
in my left hand right now. Guess guess what I'm
holding in my left hand right now. And I really
wanted to see if people could guess what it was.
But you know what happened. Everybody went straight for the
dirty stuff. Not dirty dirty. But you know I'm saying,

(02:46):
it's like, no, it wasn't that, But I am going
to tell you on this show what I had in
my left hand, and as a matter of fact, I'm
going to have it in my left hand again here.
But getting back to the topic, you know, human sacrifice.

(03:07):
Life is tough and people are always trying to look
for ways to make it better, even if that may
involve human sacrifice. And sometimes when I bring up a
concept like, oh, life is tough, then there are people
who say, oh, that's negative. I thought you talk about

(03:30):
positive stuff, Josh. Look, there are parts of life that
are positive, but ultimately I mean life is negative because
we all have to die. Have you ever seen that
movie The Princess Bride? Great movie? Carrie Elvis's character, I

(03:53):
guess his name was Wesley. He says life is pain.
Anyone who says differently is selling something. You know, Carrie
elwis related to John elwis the inspiration for the real
Ebenezer Scrooge. So yes, life is tough. If you want

(04:15):
to understand more about that, just go listen to episode
two twenty four of this show called Strange Things, and
that episode is titled is this a rung of Hell?
And again? I say that because you know, life isn't
always tough, but ultimately it is. If you're a pet owner,

(04:39):
you know what I mean, there's a good chance that
you're going to have to, you know, bury the pet
or like I don't want to. I don't want to
get that deep into it, but you know, life is tough.
I was recently meeting with a buddy of mine from Chicago,
Ben Pavelon. As a matter of fact, I did a

(05:00):
little interview with him, and I'm going to try to
place some of that for you, probably not on this show.
I haven't had time to sit down and edit it.
I'm still trying to get caught up from having my
surgery and all that stuff. But I was sitting there
and I was talking to Ben, and I said, you know,
I think that maybe there are only two options in

(05:23):
terms of how you view life. Option number one, well,
this experience is just some kind of a fluke, and
there is no meaning or God or godlike meaning, and
when you breathe your last breath, you are simply gone nothing.

(05:45):
That's option number one. A lot of people believe that
option number two is there is an incomprehensible God or
god like meaning, and you are in a classroom that
teaches you via carrot or stick suffering and reward the

(06:10):
lesson you are naturally meant to learn, and that lesson
may even continue into future lives until you finally learn
it and finally end up in a place of peace
for a long while. I mean, I say, incomprehensible Try

(06:31):
explaining to your dog why we are going to Mars
right now, for example. So although I don't understand it,
I'm just I am just a redneck from western North Carolina.
But option too feels correct to me. The Great and

(06:54):
Terrible Joshua pe weren't. Sacrifice is a really fascinating top though,
because if you start digging into it, you start really
thinking about the idea of just sacrifice in general. It
really is sort of the basis of economics money in

(07:20):
modern day terms. You have to give up something in
order to get something. You don't just get everything handed
to you. You have to give some money you have,
and how do you get that money, Well, you have
to give up something to get the money. You give
up time, you give up effort, and you give up goods.

(07:41):
Before I get into whether or not human sacrifice may
or may not work, when I was thinking about this
topic as a show, I was thinking about this little
portion going back to the animal thing from a book
I wrote. This book was published Let's See published in

(08:06):
two thousand and six. It's called Pet Ghosts Animal Encounters
from Beyond the Grave, dedicated to Lauren with love and
on page thirty seven I wrote this. For hundreds of years,

(08:31):
especially in Europe and the Americas, it has been customary
to kill and bury an animal, or simply bury one
alive at the site of a newly constructed church or graveyard.
The spirit of the sacrifice creature is intended to guard
the property against vandals and others with disrespectful intentions. In

(08:59):
that case, the resultant wraith was called an ankhu a
n k ou So. An important estate may require multiple
animals to be sacrificed, and some of the most prominent
were lambs, pigs, cows, goats, and chickens. In eighteen ninety three,

(09:21):
author T. Thistleton Dyer wrote about these phantoms in a
book called ghost World, and he specifically commented on lambs
and churches, saying they often resided in the building's tower.
If the lamb's vision is seen leaping about the grounds
when service is not in session, it is an omen

(09:43):
that a parishioner's child will soon die. H this is
I know, we're not off on a good, good leg here.
It's kind of depressing, isn't it? But it is an
interesting question, isn't it. What's the answer to this? What

(10:04):
happens when you sacrifice a human? Like the Since we're humans,
you think if you sacrifice a human, that's sort of
like the ultimate thing you can do. And also by sacrifice,
I'm not talking about something like like going into war,

(10:28):
because when you go into war, your intention is is
not to lose people. It's the opposite. Actually, you don't
want to lose people. You're trying to protect your people.
You're just trying to kill the other folks. But in

(10:49):
terms of historic human sacrifice, what you really want to
do is say, yes, we are going to intentionally sacrifice
this you being. And I've come to a conclusion about
whether or not the human sacrifice ah well worked or works,

(11:11):
and I will tell you all about that when we
come back from our first break. And it's kind of
interesting how, you know, I was raised up in the
Southern Baptist tradition of the church and and it's you
know it kind of the Bible kind of starts with sacrifice.
Cain and Abel the first murder may have had something

(11:31):
to do with the idea of how something was sacrificed.
So we'll get into that. And then I'm going to
tell you what I have on my left hand, And
no it's not what you probably think I have, but
it's actually still very cool. You know what, If you

(11:55):
like this show and a lot of people email me
all the time and say that they love listening to
this podcast, well it's not easy to crank one of
these out on a regular basis, and if you want
to keep me doing it, you want to support it,
you gotta go to Joshua P. Warren dot com. There's
no period after the p. Go to Joshua Pewarren dot com.

(12:18):
Buy something cool from the Curiosity Shop for yourself or
a loved one, and be sure most importantly to sign
up on the homepage for my free and spam Free
e newsletter. Just put your email address in their hit submit,
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me immediately. Email to you Joshua Pwarren dot com. I

(12:43):
am Joshua pe Warren, and you're listening to Strange Things
on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network.
And I'll be right back. Welcome back to Strange Things

(13:31):
on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network.
I am your host, the Wizard of Weird, Joshua P. Warren,
beaming into your wormhole brain from my studio in Sin City,
Las Vegas, Nevada, where every day is golden and every
night is silver. Ziet Zoom. One of my favorite movies

(13:56):
is The Big Lebowski. I don't know I could probably
play a clip for you, but I don't know. I
don't want to take it, take a chance. I think
John Goodman's character is named Walter and he says, I
got a clip here, and he goes, nothing changes, dude,
nothing ever changes. I think about that quote a lot,

(14:22):
just in terms of how life evolves, because you see
these cycles the repeat over and over, and you know,
when it comes to human sacrifice, let's see, Yeah, sacrifice
in general as an exchange is just it's something that's

(14:45):
always been around in some form. And I don't know
if you've read the Bible, but you know, I you
know what I'm talking about to some degree. But I
always like to go back and revisit stories and make

(15:06):
sure I haven't misremembered things. And in the Bible starts
out with, you know, the first murder, Cain killed his
brother Abel, and Cain offered, well, God wanted a sacrifice
from these two brothers, and Cain offered the fruit of

(15:29):
the ground, while Abel offered the first born of his
flock and their fat portions. So in other words, it
wasn't human sacrifice, but it was animal sacrifice. And God
accepted Abel's offering but rejected Caines, which led to Cain's
jealousy and ultimately the murder of Abel. So what that

(15:53):
means is that, you know, Cain, he was a farmer
and so he raised you know, fruits and vegetables. But
Abel was a shepherd, and so he had lambs and whatnots.
And God liked the blood better. He liked the blood better.

(16:18):
And then again that made Cain jealous. And then so
so Cain, who was sacrificing vegetables, killed his brother Abel
because that Abel was offering up blood sacrifices according to

(16:39):
the Bible. And so that right off the bat was
one of the first times in my life when I
started thinking about the idea that like, oh God likes
blood sacrifices. That sounds real nice. What a nice guy.
He created us and he wants us to kill everything,

(17:02):
I guess. And then of course you move on in
the Bible, and there is the binding of Isaac. Let's
see here Book of Genesis. God orders Abraham to sacrifice
his son Isaac on the mountain called Jehovah Jirah in

(17:27):
the region of Marah Mariah. I guess it is. I
am not a scholar. I told you as Abraham begins
to comply, having bound Isaac to an altar, he is
stopped by an angel of the Lord. A Ram appears
instead and is slaughtered instead. God commands. God commends Abraham's

(17:51):
pious obedience to offer his son as a human sacrifice. So,
you know, when you grow up in the south here
in this country, you hear these stories, all right, So
I just tell you that because that's part of my
exposure to the sort of thing. All right, let's get

(18:13):
into it now. Are you ready? Okay, So let me
ask you this. Of all of the cultures that you're
aware of, what culture do you think was best known
for sacrificing humans? So the idea is that, all right,

(18:37):
we got bad weather, we need to sacrifice a human.
The prettier, the better looking, the better kind of thing.
Oh we got, you know, a poor season for crops.
We got you know, an enemy is coming to get us.
What culture do you think was number one? It turns

(18:59):
out a carently, according to the almighty Internet here that
everybody says the Aztecs, the Aztec Empire. And I'm looking,
I'm reading a little bit about the Aztecs right now.
And the Aztecs were basically Mexican was a Mexican culture

(19:26):
around the Valley of Mexico. Uh. And then finally the
Spanish conquistadors came in and defeated them. All right, fine,
what was the second one? Uh? The second was the Inca.
All right, well, let's look up the Incans here and

(19:48):
see what the deal is with the Incans. Shelley Incan Empire. See,
if you want a podcast, you just have to see
here and look up stuff on the internet. The Incan EMPI,
higher known as the Realm of Four Parts, was the
largest empire in pre Columbia, pre Columbian America. All right,

(20:09):
so it's down there in South America, and finally the
Spanish came and conquered them. All right, what's next next?
We have number three on the list, the Mayans. I
know a little bit more about the Mayans because I

(20:31):
went down and export some Mayan pyramids around. I guess
I was in Belize and says here, the Mayan civilization,
you know, the Mayan civilization just kind of died out.

(20:52):
I mean, I remember that I was at this place
called wam and I and they were saying that nobody's
exactly sure what happened to the Mayans, but they all
just kind of like windled up. So the top three
cultures from what I can tell, who engaged in human

(21:12):
sacrifice where the Aztecs, the Incans, and the Mayan or
the Maya, and they all fell. And then next on
the list is the Chimu. This Peruvian culture preceding the

(21:33):
Inca practiced mass child sacrifices and they're not around anymore.
And then from there you get into you know, other
cultures like the Carthaginians, the Shang dynasty of ancient China.
But I guess what I'm my point is that, you know,

(21:57):
on a podcast, this is not like a dissertatee. I'm
just kind of giving you food for thought, so you
can go look more deeply into these things if you
want to. But it seems to me that these civilizations
that engaged in human sacrifice all fell. And herein I

(22:25):
guess Central and South America. You know, the Spaniards when
they came over, they were just ruthless, but at least
they were trying to be Christian, Like, I mean, that
was the idea. You know that it didn't work out
most of the time. And so my conclusion, my conclusion

(22:51):
is that no human sacrifice does not work. And it's
an interesting thing to think about, know how powerful of
a sacrifice are you supposed to give? But I would
say that maybe what's more important is having a mindset

(23:14):
where you are charitable and you try to believe in
the golden rule doing to others as they do into you,
because historically it seems like that that seems to work
out better. We're already up on another break, believe it

(23:34):
or not. All right, So finally when we come back,
I'm going to tell you what I have. Man, this
thing is heavy. I think it's like five pounds. I
got this thing in my left hand right now. Stop that.
If you're thinking dirty things, it's not dirty, Okay, I
told you it's five pounds. And and then I also

(24:00):
have something interesting to tell you about the storm Area
fifty one event. Do you remember when that happened? Storm
Area fifty one, twenty nineteen. I think it was Excuse me,
there's a new program out about that, so I'll touch

(24:21):
base on that for you as well. Five hundred and
eighty one thousand dollars. That's how much a guy won
using our wishing machine. Can you believe that? Go? To
joshuap Warren dot com. Click the link with the Curiosity Shop.

(24:43):
Check out the wishing machine the tepaphone five hundred and
eighty one thousand dollars. I won a lot of money
playing around with these things, but not that much. Maybe
you are the next person though, five hundred and eighty
one thousand dollars ours. I am Joshua Pee Warren, and

(25:04):
you are listening to Strange Things on the iHeartRadio and
Coast to Coast a M Paranormal Podcast Network, and I
will be back after these important messages. Welcome back to

(25:57):
Strange Things on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM
Paranormal Podcast Network. I'm your host, Joshua P. Warren, and
this is the show where the unusual becomes usual. During
the break, I had a little bite of low maine.

(26:23):
You know what the differences between low maine and chow
maine low maine versus I think I know this already,
but I want to make sure. Okay, So low maine
are noodles that are typically boiled and then tossed with
a sauce and other ingredients. Chowmaine are typically stir fried

(26:45):
until slightly crispy. It's it used to be a lot
easier to find low maine, but now it's, uh, it's hard.
At least it isn't in my world. I like low
main better than chow main. Of course, you'll you have

(27:05):
to eat it with chopsticks. I'm pretty good with chopsticks.
I was looking up the history of chopsticks. It says
they have been around since the Shang dynasty seventeen sixty
six to one twenty two BCE. I'm sure that means
nothing to any of us, but you just know, it's

(27:26):
a long time ago. So I could sit here in
Okay ten inches long twenty six centimeters ten inches long.
That's how long the original chopsticks were. I don't know.
It's kind of interesting, isn't it when you think about
how people used to eat a long time ago? And

(27:50):
it's still fun though, Like I like eating with chopsticks
just because it's it's a challenge and it slows me
down a little bit, you know, you get to play
with the dexterity and whatnot. It's always interesting when you
think about things that happened a long long time ago.

(28:11):
And I have in my hand right now, are you ready?
Are you ready, here's the answer. It's a piece of wood.
I have in my left hand a large slab of wood.
But it's petrified wood. It's petrified and when I was well,

(28:42):
let me put it this way, I've always thought that
petrified wood was pretty amazing. And let me ask you this,
where do you think most of the world's petrified wood
comes from. I'll do the two most of the woods.

(29:08):
Excuse me, most of the petrified wood in the world
comes from Arizona. And petrified wood, of course, is the
product of well, I'll just tell you what happened in Arizona.
In Arizona, from what I understand, they had a volcano.

(29:29):
This is a long time. I think the youngest piece
of petrified wood that you can possibly find is like
five thousand years old, so I mean we're predating Jesus
there by quite a bit. But most of it's millions
of years old. And what happened in Arizona was there
was a big volcano and all uh and also a

(29:54):
lot of the wood I guess was kind of a submerged.
Water was sort of swampy back in those days, so
all this volcanic ash came down into this water. And
it sealed out all the oxygen, and wood needs oxygen
in order to decay, and so it didn't have that oxygen,

(30:16):
and so it just stayed sealed there for an unimaginable
amount of time. And then what happened was that eventually
the minerals kind of seeped into the pores of the wood,
if you want to put it that way. And then finally,

(30:38):
when the wood did rot, it was reproduced by the
minerals that had seeped into the pores. And that is
why you have a big, giant, nice piece of petrified
wood like I have in my hand right now. Some
of these pieces of wood are these petrified wood pieces
are very very expensive. I mean, if you find a

(31:01):
nice stump, I mean that thing can easily be like
five six thousand dollars. But this is a this is
a good chunk. And I bought it because that I
was I don't know, somehow or another I was looking
at petrified wood and somebody had gotten on eBay and

(31:23):
listed this thing, and they were here in Las Vegas,
and I guess they were going to hurry to get
rid of it, and so it was a really good price,
so I bought it. But it's just amazing to hold
something like this in your hand and see all the

(31:44):
little details and it it looks like a little actually
this piece that I have. Maybe I'll see if Lauren
if I can remember it. Maybe I'll see if Lauren
can put it on my Instagram. Joshua Pee Warren podcast,
that's my Instagram. It kind of it reminds me of
Devil's Tower in Wyoming, you know, that was the place

(32:06):
that was featured in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
It kind of has that texture to it and all
those riations. But sometimes I look at stuff like this
and it's just boggles my mind, boggles the mind. A
lot of old stuff has been preserved out here in

(32:28):
the desert, you know. Of course I'm in Nevada, and
like I was saying, most of that petrified wood comes
from Arizona, even though it's found all over the world.
The other day, I was watching Netflix and they have
a series and it's called train Wreck, and so they

(32:52):
just feature different types of events that have happened over
the years where things went awry, and so they have
a one called storm Area fifty one train Wreck storm
Area fifty one there on Netflix, and that incident. Let's
see that happened in twenty nineteen. I'm not going to

(33:15):
go over all that because it's a long story, and
if you have Netflix, you could just watch it on
your own. But you may remember that this young man,
I guess he was in his early twenties, he decided
that he was going to essentially play a joke, and
so he got on Facebook and he said he'd listened

(33:39):
to Joe Rogan interview Bob Blazar, I believe, and Bob
Blazar was talking all about Area fifty one. He probably
heard some other people as well, Jeremy Corbel, and so
he just as a joke. He said he had like
forty five people who followed him on Facebook, and he
decided sit down and and say, well, let's they can't

(34:05):
stop us all. Let's go storm Area fifty one. You know,
let's go, let's go rush this place. And those of
you who followed my work back at that time, you
may remember that I was very interested in what was
going to happen. I did not endorse this, but I

(34:28):
also knew that it was. It was. It was ridiculous
because here's you know, from what I understand about Area
fifty one. Uh, it's an underground base. And if even
if you stormed the fences, it would take you, I mean,
you'd have to go like fifteen or twenty miles across

(34:52):
some of the most harsh desert terrain in the world
with traps, you know, booby traps and rattlesnakes, scorpions, god
knows what. And then if you actually made it to
one of these areas where you could go down, then
you would have to well you'd have to fend off guards,

(35:14):
and then you'd have to know all these codes and
then but you know, you'd get down there and then
the doors would open, and then there would be more
guards and more codes, and it's just like it's an
impossible it's an impossible thing. There are some people who say,
now we don't even have good technology to build an

(35:38):
underground base like that, but it's too elaborate. Lauren recently
sent me this interesting story about King Solomon Solomon's shemir.
Have you ever heard about that? It's spelled s h
A m i R Solomon's shemir, And apparently in some

(36:06):
Jewish tradition, like Hebrew tradition, this was an amazing new technology. Well,
maybe I shouldn't say new. This was an amazing technology
that Solomon could use in order to create underground tunnels

(36:29):
and fortresses and secret hiding places. Somehow, I'd never heard
about this before. Solomon's Shemir basically kind of a nano
a nano technology, but also maybe living. It kind of
blurs the line between living and not living, you know, artificial,

(36:55):
organic and inorganic. You know that kind of thing. So
oh myn my goodness. We're almost up on a break here. Okay,
when we come back for the break, I'll tell you
a little bit more about this thing called Solomon's Shemir,
what I found about it. I got a very interesting

(37:16):
uh well, I got a nice email from a listener.
I'll read that to you and then let's see what
else gott Oh yeah, Polybius. You ever heard of Polybus Pete?
An arcade game that may or may not have existed.
I'm Joshua Pee Warren. You're listening to Strange Things on

(37:38):
the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM paranormal podcast network.
I'll be right back. Welcome back to the final segment

(38:23):
this edition of Strange Things of the iHeartRadio and Coast
AM Paranormal Podcast Network. I am your host, Joshua P. Warren,
and I got this, uh this message, this email from
Dave in New Mexico. He says, Hey, Joshua, just wanted

(38:47):
to say your current podcast, Strange Things is still pretty
much my best and only go to's and that real
of listening entertainment. But it's because you've earned much respect,
at least from my fifty five year old mind, by

(39:08):
ensuring you give your audience the most trustworthy information you can.
I grew up in the eighties. Things were much simpler
back then. You know, you're no spring Chicken either. It
sounds like ha ha, just kiddie round, sir. In this
age of Internet information being so many people's only form
of continued learning, Well, it means a lot, sir, that

(39:33):
ye're out there too. Kind of a long way to
say thanks from this listener for being one of the
good guys. Well, thank you, Dave. I'm trying. I'm trying.
You know, it's hard. It's hard because I yeah, I

(39:56):
grew up without the Internet, without cell phones, and now
the whole world has just transformed dramatically, and so I
remember how in many ways the world was a better
place frankly before all this technology, because you weren't just

(40:17):
constantly bombarded with information and mind control all the time.
So I feel like I have lived to see a
pretty dramatic shift in technology. So but hey, thank you
for listening, Dave, and I hope there are a lot
of other people like you out there who appreciate that.

(40:44):
I do want to get to Polybius because that kind
of goes back to the nineteen eighties thing. It's an
urban legend. But first, let me finish up on Solomon's
shamir sha m i R. Apparently in some of these
Hebrew texts, the shmir was a worm or a substance

(41:11):
that had the power to cut through or disintegrate stone, iron,
and diamond. Solomon is said to have used it in
the building of the First Temple in Jerusalem in place
of cutting tools. For the construction of Solomon's Temple, which
promoted peace, it was inappropriate to use tools that could

(41:32):
also cause war and bloodshed. Reference throughout the Talmud and Midrashim,
And again I don't know if I'm pronouncing this right.
The shamir was reputed to have existed in the time
of Moses as one of the Ten Wonders created on
the eve of the First Shabbat, just before God finished creation.

(41:58):
Moses reputedly used the sh mirror to engrave the stones
and the priests and the priestly breastplate of the High
Priest of Israel. I'm looking at a picture, a depiction
of this from seventeen oh seven, and it kind of
looks like a little it's kind of like a little

(42:18):
tear dropped shape worm with sharp teeth. And you know,
I took time and I read about this, and look,
I don't know, I don't know. I don't know if
there if there's anything to this or not, but it
almost seems like that, you know, it's it's an again,

(42:41):
like a nano in theory, like a nano technology size
of a barley corn. Okay, I'm reading this right now.
I'm sorry. I didn't do enough research before this show,
but I did read a little bit about this, and

(43:01):
I said that first, now, this is kind of interesting
for storage. The Shemir was meant to have been always
wrapped in wool and stored in a container made of lead.
Any other vessel would burst and disintegrate under the Shamir's gaze,

(43:28):
so imagine like a little indestructible worm, like a little superman,
and you give it a task, and that thing goes
out and just goes you know what, and starts eating
and carving and engraving things. Says King Solomon used the

(43:54):
shamir to engrave gemstones. He also used the blood of
the spar mere worm to make carved jewels with a
mystical skill or design. All Right, I don't know. I
mean I this show is called Strange Things. I just

(44:15):
bring stuff up and if you find something interesting, you
can go look into it for yourself. Some of these
things are just legends, myths, just you know, bunk. But
what do you think about this Polybius? You ever heard

(44:36):
of this? This is considered an urban legend. Here's how
this is spelled. P Lybius. Urban legend about a lost
arcade video game from the nineteen eighties. I can't wait
to see what emails I get. I guarantee you there

(44:56):
are people who are going to email me and be like, dude,
this was not an urban legend. I played Polybius. P
l y Bius. Urban legend about a lost arcade video game.
According to the legend, a new game appeared in arcades

(45:16):
around Portland, Oregon, in nineteen eighty one, and it became
quickly controversial because the gameplay was supposedly psychoactive, abstract, and dangerous.
Children who played the arcade game were said to suffer
from amnesia, seizures, night arrores, hallucinations. It's almost like this

(45:42):
thing was invading her mind. And I never actually watched
that movie, The Ring, but it kind of reminds me
of what people talk, what people say about that says.
Despite these adverse effects, the arcade cabinet was described as
so addictive the players returned to Polybius repeatedly until they

(46:04):
went insane, died, or vanished. The lack of any surviving
Polybius cabinets is explained by men in black, who were
said to record data on the players before removing all

(46:25):
of the arcade machines. There is no evidence that Polybius
ever existed. The earliest known print reference to the game
is in the September two thousand and three issue of
GamePro I Guess That's a Magazine. The earliest online reference

(46:46):
to Polybius as dated to nineteen ninety eight. There is
no evidence that the supposed publisher existed. Snopes has called
it a modern day version of the earth early eighties
urban legends about men in black recording the high score
initials saved in arcade machines. But the urban legend has

(47:11):
had a lasting cultural impact. It has persisted in video
game journalism and appeared in music, television, film, performance art.
Two notable video games titled Polybius were released in two
thousand and seven and twenty seventeen, claiming some degree of

(47:34):
connection to the purported arcade game, and in fiction, the
game and legend have been used to evoke nineteen eighties nostalgia,
supernatural themes, and conspiracy theories. Okay, I never heard of it,
but you know I was born in nineteen seventy six,

(47:55):
so maybe I was a little young for that. But
I guarantee you now that I've talked about this, I'm
going to get some emails, and if you played Polybius,
p O L y b I us, email me. Let
me know. This might be one of those sort of
Mandela effect type things, dead celebrities phenomenon. I think you

(48:23):
know what I'm talking about. But if you go to
Wikipedia and you look up Polybius, there's actually a picture
of what appears to be the screen for this game.
All right, it's been another crazy one all over the place.
But hey, as long as you're having fun, we're all good.

(48:45):
That's going to do it. So now if you can
close your eyes, take a deep breath, and let's all
meditate together on the good Fortune tone. That's it for

(49:18):
this edition of the show. Follow me at Joshua P. Warren,
Plus visit Joshuapwarren dot com to sign up for my
free e newsletter to receive a free instant gift, and
check out the cool stuff in the Curiosity Shop. All
at Joshuapwarren dot com. I have a fun one lined
up for you next time, I promise. So please tell

(49:41):
all your friends to subscribe to this show and to
always remember the Golden Rule. Thank you for listening, Thank
you for your interest and support. Thank you for staying curious,
and I will talk to you again soon. You've been
listening to Stray Things on the iHeartRadio and Coast to

(50:03):
Coast AM Paranormal podcast network.

Speaker 2 (50:21):
Well, if you like this episode of Strange Things, wait
till you hear the next one. Thank you for listening
to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network,