Flashback: Zombies, Cults & Demons

FLASHBACK to December 2013:
A FAMILIAR VOICE returns to MonsterTalk as Dr. Karen Stollznow joins us to discuss her (then new) book, God Bless America.

Items of Interest
Haunting America on Amazon

More information on the case of Anneliese Michel

Wade Davis’s book on Haitian zombies — The Serpent and the Rainbow

More reading on the Satanic Panic — In Pursuit of Satan: The Police and the Occult

Music
Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Monster House Presents.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
This week for our summer Flashback tour, we returned to
December of twenty thirteen. My co host, doctor Karen Staalsnal
had two books out at the time, the ghost themed
book Haunting America and the religious focused work God Bless America.
In this episode, she discusses her research into zombies, cults,
and demons for her latter volume, it's actually quite unlike

(00:34):
anything we've ever seen before.

Speaker 3 (00:38):
A giant, hairy creature, part ape, part Matt in.

Speaker 1 (00:43):
Luckness, a twenty four a mile long bottomless lake in
the Highlands of Scotland, get a creature known as the
Luckness Monster.

Speaker 2 (01:12):
Monstert Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I'm Blake Smith and.

Speaker 1 (01:20):
I'm Karen Stolesner.

Speaker 2 (01:21):
All right, so Monster Talk welcomes back Karen Stolesno, who
has recently published two great books, first Haunting America, which
is available on the kindle from Amazon, and the brand
new work God Bless America Strange and Unusual Religious Beliefs
and Practices in the United States, which is also available
as an ebook, but it's also a very attractive tangible edition.

Speaker 3 (01:40):
You can check the show notes for link on that
welcome back, Karen, Thank you Blake.

Speaker 2 (01:44):
Typically on Monstertruck, we've tried to steer away from religion,
but I think Karen's new book does cover some topics
that will be near and dear to monster lover's hearts.
It's got voodoo and exorcism and even a cheter on
the Church of Satan and how it compares to the
allegations of state cults in America.

Speaker 3 (02:01):
So this should be fine.

Speaker 1 (02:02):
Yeah, And I think there's a lot of overlapping with
skepticism and humanism absolutely.

Speaker 2 (02:08):
So first of all, how did a linguist like yourself
come to write a book about unusual religions?

Speaker 1 (02:14):
Well, I think as an outsider coming from another country,
something I've always been interested in is culture and coming
here and seeing groups like the fundamentalist Mormons and the
Amish and Mennonites, and certainly these beliefs and practices that
we don't have in Australia. I was fascinated by them,
and I started writing a book years ago called Red,

(02:35):
White and True Blue about my experiences as an Australian
living in the States. And there are a lot of similarities.
We have the same language, not the same dialect, but
the same language. Because there are so many similarities. When
there are cultural differences, they can really be quite a golf.
So I wrote that book, and this is a kind
of companion book to that, but about religious beliefs and practices.

(02:56):
That's why I wrote this book.

Speaker 2 (02:58):
The book is about unusual religious practices, and I don't
disagree with your choices, But how did you decide which
religions were unusual enough to be in the book.

Speaker 1 (03:07):
Well, I'm not saying that there won't be a sequel
in future to cover some of the other religious beliefs
and practices that aren't covered in this one, but I
wanted to go with ones that are very popular, some
that Americans are very fond of, like the Amish, and
ones that we have a lot of stereotypes about as well,
and we don't really understand myths and misconceptions. To clear

(03:28):
a lot of those up, so I looked at minority
beliefs and practices, but also ones that are very very
infamous or famous from.

Speaker 2 (03:36):
A monster perspective, I think, let's start with voodoo because
it ties into zombies, and I know most people know
it from zombies and voodoo dolls, but there's a lot
more to it, as you cover in the book.

Speaker 3 (03:50):
You talk about that a little bit.

Speaker 1 (03:51):
Absolutely, it is a religion. I think a lot of
people just think of it in terms of those stereotypes
of zombies and voodoo dolls, but there's certainly a lot
more to it now. It's as for the voodoo dolls alone,
they're not the cute poppets that you think of that
they had in England a couple of hundred years ago. Instead,

(04:11):
the real voodoo dolls are made of things like wax
and sticks and rope and wood, and they're not usually
something that you stab like a pin cushion so that
you cause pain in a corresponding part of someone's body.
They do function as an effigy, so there's a lot
of sympathetic magic in voodoo, but they can also be
used for good spells too. They can be used as

(04:32):
a talisman or to attract good luck amulets as well,
so they're used in lots of different ways.

Speaker 3 (04:38):
Where did a voodoo come from?

Speaker 2 (04:39):
With you describe it as kind of a hybrid religion
of Western Africa and Catholicism, So can you talk about
that a little bit.

Speaker 1 (04:48):
Well, it's got a very long history. It originally came
from I think the fond and New People and West Africa,
and it was transported to Haiti when the the French
colonies were set up there and they transported slaves, so
it started there, and there are different variants in other
countries too. There's Ken Domblay which was brought over by

(05:11):
slaves to Brazil and Santa Maria, which was brought over
to Cuba with slaves. Voodoo was independently brought to the
United States as well with slaves who were brought here,
so there are lots of different variants, different spellings of
it as well. But by and large, the religion doesn't
have any doctrine, so there's no voodoo Bible or anything

(05:34):
like that. There's no church. It's more of an oral
tradition and it's changed over time. As you were saying,
it's syncretized with Catholicism. So when it was taken to
countries like Haiti into the United States, the slaves were
subject to something called the Code Noir, so that was
the slave code which was set up by the French colonizers,

(05:55):
and this basically said that the slaves had to convert
to Catholicism within about a week of their arrival, so
they weren't allowed to practice their religion anymore. So working
as slaves, this was something that was very important to
these people. So they held on to their religion, but
they had to protect it. They had to practice it
in secrecy and to hide it as much as possible.

(06:17):
So the way that they did that was to blend
Catholicism into their beliefs, and so they started using Catholic
saints to represent the Voodoo spirits, and they started using
Catholic prayers and novenas, and so it really caused this.
It's called syncretization, a melding of the two religions. Are

(06:37):
the polytheistic, well they're monotheistic. They just believe in a
single God, but it's not quite the God of that
Americans would be familiar with God that you can petition
with prayer, and one who is involved in our daily lives. Instead,
these spirits actors and intermediary. So they're known by different

(06:58):
names in different religion Jens for Voodoo, they're known as
Lower or Risha for Santa Area, and so they function
as intermediary between us and between God, and they apparently
participate in our daily lives. So when we have misfortune,
they cause that and they bring good luck if we
treat them well. So the spirits are kind of like

(07:21):
the Catholic saints. They were believed to be once people
who lived and had exceptional lives. Sometimes their relatives, sometimes
their representations of things in nature like the sun and water.
So there are some similarities to Catholicism, but certainly monotheistic,
but have a plethora of spirits.

Speaker 3 (07:42):
Right.

Speaker 2 (07:43):
And in addition to these saints that we may recognize,
they have, the West African gods are now treated in
sort of the same way. They're also kind of like
saint like entities.

Speaker 1 (07:53):
Yeah. For example, Papa Lagba, he's a famous one. You
might see in some voodoo shops in New will Leans
images of him, the statues and faces of him. Usually
he's got Cowerie shells for eyes and so he is
mildd usually with Saint Peter, so he's recognized as Saint
Peter holding the key to heaven. So they're just they're

(08:14):
blended in with the Catholic saints.

Speaker 3 (08:16):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (08:18):
So if you wanted to set up a voodoo practice
or a voodoo there wouldn't be necessar to be a church,
but there would be ceremonies.

Speaker 3 (08:26):
Are their leaders within the group.

Speaker 1 (08:28):
Or Yeah, they don't have popes or bishops, but they
do have priests and priestesses, so they're a bit more
progressive than the Catholic Church. So they in that regard,
they're not like Catholicism, but they've got priests who are
known as hoogens and priestesses who are the mambos.

Speaker 2 (08:44):
Yeah, so what's a hold on or hold on on?

Speaker 3 (08:48):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (08:48):
Yeah, I think probably because yeah, you drop the h
which Americans often do too with words like herbs.

Speaker 3 (09:00):
They do, they do, right, It's a long way to go,
but I was just trying.

Speaker 2 (09:04):
I could remember what they were, but I thought it
would be a voodoo mystery, would be a hood on it.

Speaker 1 (09:09):
But one thing I wanted to say as well, I
hope that you enjoyed all of the puns in the book.

Speaker 3 (09:16):
Oh they're great, and it's yeah, I mind. You're not
as overt as I am.

Speaker 1 (09:25):
No, No, I'm sorry. I did my best.

Speaker 3 (09:28):
Don't be, don't be. I think they're funnier when they
slip up on you. Wait a minute.

Speaker 2 (09:31):
We talked about there's leadership, but how do the rituals,
I mean, how does one get qualified or become a
part of a voodoo Did you just read a book
or do you need to be trained.

Speaker 1 (09:42):
Or there's certainly the opinion that there are different kinds
of voodoo, that there's a real authentic voodoo and that's
practiced by the priests and priestesses, and that there are
more amateur types. But I think there are all different
types of voodo. It's not necessarily that one is more
pure and others are more corre. So I think they're
just different. So if you want to get involved, I

(10:10):
mean usually a priest or a priestess, they believe that
they're somehow touched by God or contacted by the spirits,
and that they're chosen in some way to be involved
in voodoo. But again, there are lots of different types
in this country, lots of different rituals that are practiced too.
Because there's no doctrine. The main way that people practice

(10:32):
voodoo is through ceremonies and through rituals. So that could
be through spells, which are kind of like recipes. Maybe
there's a famous honey jar recipe where someone takes a
jar with a candle in it and they add some
kind of honey or molasses something to sweeten that and
just thereby metaphorically to sweeten the spirits. And of course

(10:54):
if you go to New Orleans and some of the
tourist shops there, you'll find things like amulets and talisman
and gree gree and mojo and so people who practice
voodoo as well, from priests and priestesses through to just followers.
They might have an altar as well, so you might
see those if you go to New Orleans, you go
to one of the museums there.

Speaker 2 (11:14):
Yeah, you're just reminded me of the last time we
went to New Orleans. I went to a voodoo shop
and bought a little a good luck voodoo doll and
then on the bottom of it said it was me
in China.

Speaker 1 (11:27):
Some of those are just really cheap trinkets and very tacky,
and I mean they're still them right beside Johnbalaire and
coffee with chicory. So I don't think it's meant to
be the real thing, even though you'll hear in hush
tones there that maybe someone who works in a store
can direct you to the real authentic stuff if you've
got the money for it. So it's all a bit
of a ripoff, but you know with the altars that

(11:51):
you'll see there, and people have altars at home as well,
and so they might I'm just trying to think of
an example there. They're usually used for things like spells,
or they might be used for devotion as well, for
worship to a particular spirit. And so they might have
a table or some kind of surface that's covered maybe

(12:11):
with velvet, and might have sequins and ribbons and various things.
And they'll include candles and statues of saints, Catholic saints,
and maybe incense and voodoo dolls, and they'll have offerings,
maybe things like food and I'm sure you saw in
New Orleans too lots of cigarettes, yes, lots of money
and sometimes marijuana and other things too.

Speaker 3 (12:34):
Oh yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (12:35):
These are all things to appeal to the spirits and
to petition.

Speaker 2 (12:38):
At least in the New Orleans style, it's seemed mostly
about trying to get reality to go the way you
wanted to, like to intent, like to oh yeah, the
larks or romance.

Speaker 1 (12:52):
Oh yeah. There's crossover with New Age spirituality as well.
A lot of it's about affirmations and intent, and there's
certainly a lot of spells which are intended for good
and folk medicine and blessings and stuff like that. There's
certainly a lot of bad as well, but getting back
to the rituals are also group ceremonies. They do the

(13:13):
standard stuff that other religions do, like weddings and funerals
and baptisms and healings. And you can also get married
to spirits as well. Sometimes if you petition them for something,
they might ask as a favor that you married them,
and so it's kind of like a polygamy where you
can marry as many spirits as you like and still

(13:33):
have earthly partner as well.

Speaker 2 (13:35):
It must be really disappointing when you find that neither
your wife nor your voodoo god will have sex with you.

Speaker 1 (13:43):
Ah, I'm sure it happens.

Speaker 3 (13:48):
Just you know Papa Egg, but he's not that into
me anymore.

Speaker 1 (13:52):
I think he likes a bottle of rama and a
good cigar instead.

Speaker 3 (13:55):
Right, he's old. He needs Papa legg By viagra.

Speaker 1 (13:59):
So yeah, that's a good one. But they've all got
their favorite things, and so if you want something from them,
you have to give them that, whether it's French pastries
or whether it's jewelry. And if you don't give them
what they want, then they can cause all kinds of
harm and misfortune in your life.

Speaker 3 (14:16):
I want to talk about zombies now.

Speaker 2 (14:19):
Obviously there's a sort of pop culture shift that's happened
in zombies since George Romero's Not a.

Speaker 3 (14:26):
Living Dead film happened.

Speaker 2 (14:27):
But before that film, zombies almost always meant a voodoo
type zombie, something raised by ritual or it is really
unclear whether they meant something, at least in pop culture,
whether they meant something that was dead and brought back
to life or something that was living in kind of
a half life. But can we talk about that a

(14:47):
little bit.

Speaker 1 (14:47):
Well, yeah, I think one of the definitions of a zombie,
I mean, zombie is also a snake spirit in voodoo
spelt Z's z MBI. But zombie. There are different ideas
of what a zomb years. Usually it's a reanimated corpse.
I think the kind of stereotypical or prototypical zombie is

(15:08):
a person who is taken to the brink of death
and then they're reanimated somehow, so it can be a
thing of revenge. There's a great fear in Haiti of zombification,
so much so that it's actually illegal under the Haitian
penal code. That's how much people believe in it to

(15:29):
this day. And so if someone dies in the family,
they might have someone who keeps guard over that body
for days to even weeks to make sure that and
one of these evil sorcerers known as a book or
doesn't come by and steal the body and use that
body for either to bring that person back as a
zombie or to use that person's body parts in spells.

(15:52):
Usually there's some kind of poison that is used for
these real zombies, and again they'll be taken to this
point of near death and so much so that the
family will bury that person and they're in this kind
of state where they're not quite dead, and then they're
revived by the sorcerer and then turned into a slave,

(16:13):
maybe to work on a plantation.

Speaker 3 (16:17):
Yeah, that's a terrible thing to happen. Although in some
ways though.

Speaker 2 (16:22):
I mean, being a slave, having your entire life control
by some slave master is not radically different from being
a zombie. I mean, except that maybe as a zombie
you don't lament your situation as much.

Speaker 1 (16:35):
Yeah, I think you don't quite have Your personality is
gone so you're in this kind of half dead state.

Speaker 2 (16:41):
Yeah, there's a lot of In fact, in real life,
there's a lot of sort of drug related ways we're
a person can pretty much end up being in a
slave like situation with addictions.

Speaker 1 (16:55):
Yeah, absolutely, in these because these sorcerers don't use anything
like that. It's all about various potions and poisons.

Speaker 2 (17:04):
So were there any real examples of zombies that came
up in your research.

Speaker 1 (17:09):
There are a number of examples of real I've seen
quoti thinkers of zombification, and usually they've been verified by
family members. So this is a strong belief of this
in the country still to this day. And there's a
famous story that of Clervious Nassis. I'm not sure if
you've heard of him before.

Speaker 3 (17:28):
I have, but maybe people in the listening audience have not.

Speaker 1 (17:31):
It's probably the most famous case treated in The Serpent
and the Rainbow of a fellow who turned up on
his sister's doorstep in about nineteen eighty three, but he'd
been dead twenty years already, and so his story is
that he fell ill one day and went to hospital,
and after a couple of days of spitting up blood

(17:52):
and vomiting, he was in a bad way. He died,
and so his family buried him, and then over time
mourned him and forgot about him. And then he allegedly
came back, and his story was that he hadn't actually died.
He'd gone into this state where he was neither alive

(18:15):
nor dead, and then he was revived after he had
been buried, he was revived by one of these because
these sorcerers who then set him to work in a
sugar plantation for a couple of years. And so this
was some kind of revenge act that had been brought
about by his brother, some kind of family grievance, and

(18:36):
so he did this to him. And so eventually this
master on the sugar plantation died, and he wandered the
country for about sixteen years, just waiting for his brother
to die. And when he did, he came back and
was reunited with his family, and they were convinced that
this was him because he just knew so much about
the family history. And so there are actually other cases.

(19:00):
Is a movie I think it's called Imposter, and it's
a story of a I think maybe an orthan or
a criminal in another country who wants to come to
the United States did some research and found the story
of a boy who had been murdered and basically assumed
his personality and came to this country and was just
welcomed with open arms by the family because they really

(19:23):
wanted to believe that their son had come back to them.
So there are a number of cases of zombification in Haiti,
and usually they turn out to be cases of mental
illness and mistaken identity. And there was one study which
was done and there were about three people who were

(19:44):
tested and it was found that their DNA disproved that
they were actually family members, but they had been welcomed
into the family. They didn't look as old as the
people who died. They were clearly different people. But with
just such a strong belie in voodoo in the country,
they were just very willing to believe that these people
had come back. It's a very strange situation.

Speaker 2 (20:12):
Even now, Haiti has a really bad situation economically, technologically.

Speaker 1 (20:19):
Oh yeah, the healthcare situation is really bad there, and
that's why voodoo and who do medicine is just so
popular in this country too. A lot of people who
practice voodoo here and there may be about a million
practitioners they will use orthodox medicine in conjunction with folk medicine, right.

Speaker 3 (20:38):
I guess what I was getting at is it's not
I mean, it's.

Speaker 2 (20:41):
Easier to fake or get away with a sort of
a voodoo impersonation of a zombie there, because here you
could relatively easily get a DNA test and find out
whether this person was really your return relative.

Speaker 1 (20:57):
Oh yeah, and I think, as you were discussing popular culture,
zombies in this country are different things since the Night
of the Living Dead. There something that's caused by a
virus or a plague, and it's a contagious condition rather
than being a state of animation of being a zombie.

Speaker 2 (21:15):
You may recall a long time ago we did an
interview with the author of a book called The Zombie Autopsies,
and he talked about how that if a zombie case
came into the hospital, people wouldn't assume it was a zombie.
They would assume this person had a medical problem. They
would be trying to treat them. And it's like, you know,
of course, which is the worst that you could do
with zombies? You know, yeah, they're awfully biby.

Speaker 3 (21:38):
You know.

Speaker 1 (21:39):
Yeah. Yeah, And there was the CDC who used the
whole idea of the zombie apocalypse to try and explain
to people what they'd do in the situation of a
crisis exactly. So, have you seen The Serpent and the
Rainbow or maybe read the book.

Speaker 2 (21:53):
I read some of the book, I have seen the film.
I realized that the book's a lot more serious.

Speaker 1 (21:58):
Yeah, that's written by an ethnobiologist by the name of
Wade Davis. And so he went in search of the
poison that's used by these evil sorcerers. And so he,
I think, was led down a lot of paths where
people claimed to give him the real thing, and so
he was misled by some of these sorcerers, and then

(22:20):
eventually he came across the real thing, and so that
was taken to a laboratory for examination and found to
contain all kinds of interesting things. There was a neurotoxin
called pufferfish there were remnants of that, and something called
Jimson weed, which is a hallucinogenic, and also lots of

(22:40):
yucky stuff like dried up bits of toads and lizards
and spiders and babies bones, and so these were tested
by scientists and shown that they the doses of the
actual ingredients that might do something like the puffer fish.
The doses just too small to have any kind of

(23:01):
real effect.

Speaker 2 (23:03):
Yeah, that's it's interesting because I wanted to get him
on to discuss this, and that'd be great. I've been
working on tracking him down, but I don't want to.
I don't want to be like an attack episode at all.
I just was like to learn more about the cultural impact,
because I think the idea that it was purely a
chemical process has been pretty much debunked. But he also

(23:25):
made a lot of interesting points about the social role
of the controlling power of voodoo and the threat of
being made into a zombie to wield power.

Speaker 1 (23:37):
Yes. Yeah, And there's a similar thing in Australia. They
call it. It's an Aboriginal Australian Aboriginal belief in something
called pointing the bone. So if you do this to someone,
it's a kind of revenge spell or a way to
maybe kill a person. You have bad intentions whenever you
perform this. So when you point the bone, that's supposed

(23:58):
to cause a person to us and to wither away
and die. And there was an incident many years ago
with one of the Australian prime ministers. I think it
was John Howard, and an Aboriginal leader was very angry
with him for something that he did, and so he
pointed the bone at John Howard. And of course he
didn't believe in it, so nothing happened. But for people
who do believe in it, they really do lose that

(24:21):
they have that failure to thrive.

Speaker 2 (24:23):
You know, even here in America some politicians have gotten
in trouble for pointing their bone.

Speaker 1 (24:29):
In a very different way.

Speaker 2 (24:33):
But in our seriousness, the power of voodoo to wield
psychological control was probably worst exemplified with what Papa Doc
Duvalier and his son baby Dyke.

Speaker 3 (24:46):
Right.

Speaker 1 (24:47):
Yes, he was the president of Haiti and there was
a real personality cult that was around him, and I
think in many ways he kind of revived a lot
of interest in voodoo during his tenure, and so he
often claimed to be a voodoo priest, and I think
even said that he was Jesus Christ and God. And

(25:09):
so he speaking about spirits, he would model his image
on one of the spirits known as Baron Samity, who's
one of these evil spirits. He've got good spirits and
bad spirits, and he's the spirit or the lower of Death,
and Papa Doc would wear sunglasses and a black suit
and would even change his accent, so he sounded like

(25:31):
this spirit the way that people perceive this spirit, and
he would really oppress his people with that, and it
was a very evil, tyrannical regime that he was running there.
I think there were about some maybe thirty thousands people
that he killed off.

Speaker 3 (25:48):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (25:48):
Yeah, he disappeared a lot of people and they've never
been found. So that's probably the darkest way that it
legitimately gets wielded. But I mean, it sounds like from
what your book describes, it's not you know, it's mostly
I don't want to say, completely harmless.

Speaker 3 (26:06):
But it doesn't seem.

Speaker 2 (26:07):
Particularly grim as are disturbing the way like it's always
portrayed in movies.

Speaker 3 (26:13):
I'll see.

Speaker 2 (26:14):
In nineteen ninety seven, I took a paranormal themed road
trip across the United States. I went to a lot
of UFO sites, and the only voodoo place I went
was I went to New Orleans to see the grave
of Marie Levau, the voodoo queen of New Orleans.

Speaker 3 (26:31):
You know, is she still a popular figure in voodoo?

Speaker 1 (26:35):
Oh? I mean she died. I can't think of here,
maybe eighteen eighty one, even though there are claims that
she's still alive and that it seems like she had
a daughter who looked just like her and a granddaughter
who looked like her. So there was this perpetuation of
the myth that she was living to some biblical age.
So she's still a big presence in New Orleans after

(26:56):
all of these centuries. So she's very interesting. Was a
very interesting woman. She was a free woman who was
of a mixed background, and she's still known as the
Voodoo Queen of New Orleans today. But she started out
as a hairdresser and then she decided to wasn't really lucrative,
so she decided to learn her new craft from a

(27:19):
doctor John, mysterious doctor John. And so there's a lot
of controversy about her in the way that she's perceived today,
a lot of contradiction. I think people see her as
the voodoo Queen of New Orleans, but at the same time,
she died a devout Catholic. People see her as being

(27:40):
very good and kind. She used to assist slaves in
being freed, and she do all kinds of kind things
for the poor. And yet at the same time, here
she was selling curses and cures and charms and blackmailing
people running brothels. So she's really this really dichotomy, yes, yeah, yeah,

(28:04):
so yeah, there's also just the claim that, as I said,
that she had just lived her a very long time
and people were very scared of her, and so to
this day people go and visit her tomb, which I
think is in the Saint Louis Cemetery, number one, I
think shell and there it's the big tomb with all
of the crosses on it. People tend to draw three crosses,

(28:27):
and I think with a lot of Catholic prayers too,
they usually involve the number three or the number nine somehow,
this repetition of a prayer or something like that. And
so people might walk around the tomb three times and
then knock three times and make some kind of request,
and then leave her a gift as well, because food
is very polite.

Speaker 3 (28:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:48):
Well, when I went in ninety seven, I mean, her
tomb was just covered with all kinds of marks, and
there were queens and candles out front and all kinds
of little.

Speaker 1 (28:58):
Offerings, flowers and oh yeah, they close to the cemetery.
Early nowadays, but people used to. I think people still
try to break in very high walls around the cemetery,
but people break in and do all kinds of crazy things.

Speaker 3 (29:14):
You know.

Speaker 2 (29:15):
Since we're talking about the cemeteries of New Orleans, I'm
not through something out here that I find very interesting.

Speaker 3 (29:22):
And I haven't seen much published on this, but I
did do a lot of research on it.

Speaker 2 (29:25):
There's this story going around about the cemeteries in New
Orleans that the reason they use above ground burials is
because the water table is so high in New Orleans
that if they dug to bury somebody, that the coffins
would just bounce up out of the ground if there
was a flood, and flood's fairly common as we saw, yes,

(29:49):
But my research indicates that that's not the reason they're
using above ground burials. It's actually because of during the
history of New Orleans, they had a period where they
were controlled by the Spanish, and the Spanish style of
being became very popular. And if you ever go to
Spain and look at graveyards, they looked very very similar.

Speaker 1 (30:10):
And yeah, I was going to say, I thought that
that would be some kind of tradition instead a European tradition,
and I think that they also took advantage of the
heat in New Orleans, and so they would bury your
body and then maybe a couple of years later, another
family member would die and be interred into the same tomb,
and because of the heat, they would turn into a

(30:33):
kind of human jerky, I guess. And so it was
a way of being able to reuse these tombs, but
it was more a style. I think that sounds like
a good urban legend, though, well, yeah.

Speaker 3 (30:42):
It's extremely widespread.

Speaker 2 (30:43):
I only found a very tiny amount of literature that
referenced the Spanish influence, and most everybody else just repeated
the story that it was to stop the coffins from
popping out. But even yeah, a little bit different in flight,
I was going to say, I did some scale model experiments,
and my findings were that if you buried deeper than
say three feet, you wouldn't even in a good flood,

(31:07):
you wouldn't get the coffin popping out. It just didn't happen.
It doesn't take very much dirt to keep something down.
Washouts different, like if a big, you know, flood came
through and pushed the dirt away, that's an entirely different story. Clearly,
that really does happen after hurricanes. Sometimes you do see
coffins that are floating down the road, but that's because
they've been dug out by the motion of the water,

(31:27):
not because they just literally popped up when the ground
got wet.

Speaker 1 (31:36):
Yeah, and then you've got the Cheeseman Park here in
Denver and the occasional happening of some bones which pop
out of the ground because they were just buried quite shallow.

Speaker 2 (31:48):
I love Cheeseman Park. The story about what happened there
is fantastic.

Speaker 1 (31:53):
Oh yeah, it was only a couple of years ago
that we had found well not us personally, but some
some bones had been found in the park. I think
it was a bicyclist who was going through and found
a skull or something, and instead of calling the police
or some kind of government authority, he just called the

(32:13):
local radio station and told them about it.

Speaker 2 (32:16):
This is just this is really not really related to
this topic. But I'm going to just see if I
get the story right. You can correct me if I'm wrong.

Speaker 1 (32:23):
But maybe I don't know what well.

Speaker 2 (32:25):
Cheesement Park was originally a very large cemetery outside of Denver,
and what happened was there was sort of a civic
minded move to turn it into a park instead of
a cemetery, but they needed to move the bodies in
order to do that, and so they put a wall
up or fence up around the cemetery and began the

(32:46):
process of moving all these bones.

Speaker 3 (32:48):
But they subbed it out to the you know.

Speaker 2 (32:50):
The cheapest contractor, and discovered after the fact that the
contractor had just been throwing you know, different body parts
into different coffins, you know, using the smallest, cheapest coffins
to transport things out.

Speaker 3 (33:05):
And just in general, we're desecrating what.

Speaker 2 (33:08):
Most people consider to be a you know, a sacred burial.

Speaker 1 (33:11):
Yeah, splitting up bodies too, so that he could he
was i think paid per body, so he was splitting
bodies up into multiple just truncating them and putting them
into multiple grapes.

Speaker 2 (33:24):
And of course, now you know, that sort of creepy
story has led to people suspecting that there are restless spirits,
and there's lots and lots of ghost stories about people.

Speaker 3 (33:34):
Seeing you know, sad lonely anachronistically clothed ghosts in the region.

Speaker 1 (33:43):
It's also a popular cruising spot well well, well, going
back to pointing the bone, but exactly, let's move on to.

Speaker 3 (33:57):
A topic that I find very interesting. I think the
listeners will.

Speaker 2 (34:00):
Two, which is we just just talked about how in Voodoo,
possession is considered to be a good thing. But in
most of Western culture, when you talk about possession, you're
talking about demons, and you're talking about dark forces taking
over our bodies and causing us to do terrible things.
So let's talk about exorcism and demonic possession.

Speaker 1 (34:21):
Yeah, well, I mean, as you said, in voodoo, possession
is a positive thing. It means that you're more holy,
not less. And so if you go to some kind
of ceremony, maybe a healing or a wedding of a
human to a spirit, then it's kind of like a
pentecostal or charismatic events where people will just get into

(34:43):
this kind of frenzied state after dancing and drumming for
hours and so kind of like handling snakes or drinking
strict nine, they'll get to a point where they become
possessed by a spirit, and often afterwards that they'll do
all kinds of crazy things. They might dip their hands
into boiling oil, or they might cut themselves with raisors

(35:05):
or eat broken glass. Usually, as it's practiced in the
United States, they're going to be eating hot chilies or
drinking alcohol instead. And often they will claim afterwards that
they have no memory of this kind of spiritual amnesia.
They can't remember all the crazy things.

Speaker 2 (35:19):
That they do, eating hot chilies and drinking alcohol. That's
like every night in Texas.

Speaker 1 (35:24):
That's right, yeah, and my household, not for me, but
for others.

Speaker 3 (35:29):
Demonic possession has become a big.

Speaker 2 (35:32):
Cultural thing in America at least, But there seems to
have arisen during the seventies, is that right. I mean,
it didn't seem like it was very popular before that,
but then after Will and Peter Bladdie's book The Exorcist,
it suddenly exploded.

Speaker 1 (35:45):
Yeah. I think there have been periods of its popularity
throughout time. Often people will think that Jesus Christ was
their first exorcist, But exorcism and demonic possession really goes
back thousands of years to ancient societies like the Babylons
and the Egyptians and Greeks and Romans. And they might
take a clay pot which could represent someone's demons, and

(36:07):
then smash that to somehow get rid of their demons.
So yeah, this has gone up and down in popularity.
During the medieval era as well, it was very popular
and of course through biblical times. But I think what
brought it to the four in modern times is The
Exorcist and gosh or it was the.

Speaker 3 (36:27):
Roman Polanski Rosebarri's Baby.

Speaker 1 (36:30):
Yes, with as a spawn of Satan.

Speaker 3 (36:32):
There was the Element as well, which is a little different.

Speaker 1 (36:35):
But yeah, and then in recent years too, you've had
a number of other movies that have come out, like
The Last Exorcism and The Right, which have just maintained
that popularity of demonic possession and exorcism.

Speaker 2 (36:48):
It does give you this sort of avert right as
a person who's very skeptical, right, it would be fantastic
if half, or if a third a tenth of the
stuff that seems to happen on movie screens happened in
real life. I mean, I don't wantnybody to suffer, but
you know, if someone's head spins around and they can fly,

(37:09):
that's pretty spectacular proof of something paranormal.

Speaker 1 (37:12):
Yeah, there's a book by Michael Qunao, I think it's
called American Exorcism and he talks about those kinds the
things that you might find in Malachi Martin's book. He
calls those fireworks, and those are the things that just
don't happen, the xenoglossia, speaking some kind of unknown foreign language,
supernatural strength, these things don't seem to happen. Instead, it's

(37:35):
just very mundane things like lust and maybe alcoholism, addictions
to pornography. Basically, everyone is possessed all of the time.
If we just look at the current beliefs in New
Age exorcisms and deliverance ministries and Catholicism, it really maybe
with the Catholics, they might view some of these lesser

(37:57):
symptoms as being demonic affliction nor oppression instead of demonic possession.
That's right, right, it's more serious, and that would require
a major exorcism instead of just a minor one where
they might just say a couple of prayers to get
those demons out of you.

Speaker 2 (38:14):
Maybe that's a meaningful metaphor for people. So like, if
you have an uncontrollable urge to drink or an uncontrollable
urge to watch on an internet porn then you might
think to yourself, Oh, I'm oppressed by a demon that's
making me do that.

Speaker 1 (38:29):
Yeah, Satan's escape goten. The devil made me do it
and all of that. It's a good excuse.

Speaker 2 (38:35):
Yeah, I wonder if there's any studies on the efficacy
of demonic exorcism in alleviating these symptoms.

Speaker 1 (38:44):
Usually, I don't think there's too much success. They by
and large will need to as you see in a
movie like The Right, They'll need to do these exorcisms
over days and weeks and months, and they still might
not be successful.

Speaker 3 (38:57):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (38:58):
Yeah, and mister Malichai Martin's Hostage the Devil, Now, I've
actually had multiple listeners email me asking if I was
going to cover that book on the shell, can you
talk a little bit about the book, and.

Speaker 1 (39:08):
It's actually you could bring him on the show through
a Frank's box.

Speaker 3 (39:11):
Or yeah, he's a little bit dead now.

Speaker 1 (39:14):
So yeah, his Hostage to the Devil is a very
interesting read, and it's the kind of stuff that you'll
see in the Exorcist books. Flying off shelves and a
woman being raped by a giant spider, so all of
these fireworks that I was talking about earlier. And he
left the church. He was a Jesuit priest and he

(39:37):
renounced all of his vows except for that of celibacy,
even though he was quite well known amongst the ladies
and was known to have affairs, and he started writing
a lot of salacious stuff about the Catholic Church. And
I really tend to think that Hostage to the Devil
is just another one of these works of fiction. They're
just too over the top.

Speaker 2 (39:57):
Yeah, it does have They call it the extras vulgar
displays of power.

Speaker 1 (40:03):
Right, very vulgar.

Speaker 2 (40:05):
So exorcism itself though we have this sort of I
guess you could say I would call it benign exorcism,
where you might just be trying to help somebody within
an issue like there, you know, like we talked about
with drinking or some other thing that's plaguing them about
their personality.

Speaker 3 (40:21):
But there's darker sides to it as well.

Speaker 2 (40:24):
I've seen a lot of cases where people have been
the victim of exorcism and died.

Speaker 1 (40:39):
Yes, they're usually with the home jobs. You'll hear about
cases where someone is on methamphetamine and they decide that
their little daughter is possessed and that they need to
beat the crap out of her and to get the
demons out. And then she dies. Lots of very unfortunate
stories like that, and small religious groups too that try

(41:01):
to pray away the gay in homosexual people, and those
who manipulate people with disabilities and mental illness. So it's
very very much a dark site. I mean, it's all
pretty dark, to be honest. There are a lot of
people out there manipulating people who have a belief in this.

Speaker 2 (41:20):
Yeah, so we In particular, there's a case that happened
in Europe in the seventies about a girl named Analis Michelle,
and her exorcism took place over ten months, and then
during the excorism, I guess she had a reduced intake
of food and liquid. I was gonna say that there's
audio tapes of her exorcism. I think I'd like to

(41:41):
stick a little bit of that end here. Is quite disturbing,
it is.

Speaker 1 (41:44):
Yeah, it's not something you want to listen to you
before going to bed. Pretty upsetting, And I want to.

Speaker 2 (41:50):
Interrupt here for a moment and share a little bit
of the audio from one of Analisa's exorcism sessions. Keep
in mind that her case took place in the mid
nineteen seventies, after the film The Extra had already come out.
Based on the evidence from the trial surrounding her death,
it seems much more plausible that she was mentally ill
than that she was simply faking it or that she
had actually had a true demonic possession.

Speaker 3 (42:11):
Here's the audio clips.

Speaker 2 (42:40):
Skin now to compare. Here's some audio from the film
The Exorcist.

Speaker 3 (43:02):
Hey boy, that's as mine.

Speaker 2 (43:05):
And finally, here's a clip from a young woman being
subjected to an exorcism by the quote real exorcist Bob Larson.

Speaker 3 (43:12):
We'll get to him in just a few.

Speaker 2 (43:14):
Moments across of Christ's name.

Speaker 4 (43:23):
Who are you? I think that's rage? Are you?

Speaker 3 (43:40):
Rage?

Speaker 2 (43:41):
As you can hear from these clips, there's a pattern,
a similarity that to skeptical listeners might sound like they're
acting out, that they're mimicking the prototype that was given
to them in the film The Exorcist.

Speaker 3 (43:53):
Was Analyst really possessed? Or was she mentally ill? Or
could medical and psychiatric care have cured her.

Speaker 2 (44:00):
All we can say for sure is that had she
been given medical treatment, at least she wouldn't have died
in the horrible way that she did.

Speaker 1 (44:07):
She I think had staffed herself thinking that she was
going to die in a tone for the sins of youth.

Speaker 2 (44:14):
Yeah, and ultimately the priests and her parents were charged
with negligent homicide.

Speaker 1 (44:19):
Yeah. She suffered from I think schizophrenia and epilepsy, and
she was untreated, unmedicated, and decided to try exorcisms instead
and underwent a huge amount of the maybe sixty odd
exorcisms that of course did nothing for her, and she
just withered away and died and it was a very
sad story.

Speaker 3 (44:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:39):
Really, quite recently I heard some people on a radio
show who were supporting There were proponents of the idea
that she literally still even now, after all the court
seemed to clearly indicate that she was sick, physically sick,
mentally ill, and what she really knew was medical treatment.
But they still believe she actually was possessed by demons.

(45:01):
But the demons they say she was possessed by were
like the demon Adolf Hitler.

Speaker 1 (45:05):
Really, I mean, oh, she actually thought that she was
possessed by Nero and Judas Ascariot and Hitler at various times. Yeah,
but I'm astounded at how prevalent the belief in demons
and evil spirits is to this day. And I gave
a talk at the Amazing Meeting this year back in
July about exorcisms, and that particular lecture went online just

(45:29):
on YouTube, and I'm shocked at the backlash that I've
received from believers about how ignorant I am and how
demons do exist and you know, we've made them in
our own image.

Speaker 2 (45:40):
Well, even if demons do exist, I don't think that
gives anyone the right to take someone else's hostage, you know,
capture them and force them to be subjected to these
very dangerous rituals.

Speaker 3 (45:53):
There's a big difference.

Speaker 2 (45:55):
Between praying for someone or you know, as in the
Bible where Jesus just cast out demon in his name,
with these I don't know how to violent acts that
people are doing and these as you call them home jobs,
where they're suffocating people, they are starting them.

Speaker 1 (46:12):
And so many stories. There's one of a little boy
called Terence Kottrel who was about eight years old and autistic,
and his mother took him to their local church, I'm
not sure what denomination it was, and they basically held
him down and he was kicking and screaming, which was
further evidence that he was possessed to them, and they
suffocated him basically sat on him until he just stopped moving.

(46:35):
Just very tragic reading these stories, and I do treat
a number of them in God Bless America and it's
very upsetting.

Speaker 2 (46:41):
So in the less hazardous but maybe he's still harmful
side of things, we have the real extorcist Bob Larson,
the real excises the Real actressesline.

Speaker 1 (46:51):
In his failed television series for sci Fi.

Speaker 3 (46:54):
That's right. But I have to say that while he
has amused me until I read.

Speaker 2 (46:58):
This chapter in your book, and I don't want to
spoil the ending, but wow, you gave it a lot
more gravity than I would have thought could be squeezed
out of him.

Speaker 3 (47:07):
But there it is.

Speaker 1 (47:08):
Yeah, Well, he's an interesting character, and I've been tracking
him for years, and when I lived in the Bay Area,
he just didn't go anywhere near San Francisco. I think
you've just got a different kind of person there. Certainly
in other parts of the country there are a lot
of He has a lot of followers, and he's often
traveling to other countries and always begging for money, and
if you don't support him, he's going to have to

(47:30):
close his pearly gates. So it's very interesting and I
would recommend to all skeptics that they try to attend
one of his events if he comes through town. That's
an interesting experience and it's kind of a brainwashing session
when you turn up. These go for hours and hours
and he tries to wear you down and keeps begging

(47:51):
for donations. But he'll usually start with some videos of
people being exercised, and what he's really doing it's a
kind of hypnos and he's building these people up for
their role playing, and so he's showing these images and
people are learning through that how they should behave when
he starts to exercise the room, so it's just he

(48:15):
has these intermittent bouts where he tries to sell his
books and DVDs and keeps begging for money, and then
he'll perform these exorcisms on people around the room. And
usually at some point he'll pick a victim out of
the audience and parade them before everyone else. And usually
it's a person who has some very salacious kind of problem,

(48:36):
maybe they sleep around or they're addicted to drugs, and
they'll do a performance basically in front of the room.

Speaker 2 (48:44):
And Joe Nichol described it as being very much like
stage hypnosis, not that they're hypnotized, but that they are
complicit in the performance, right, they have a role they're playing.

Speaker 1 (48:55):
It's a kind of shock induction, really, the way that
he drags someone up on stage and how violent he
and barking orders at them. And he's all the time
giving them cues and telling them what they need to do,
and they're following the instructions, and he asks them what
demon are you possessed by? And because they've seen the videos,
they're going to say Legion or Belile or Jezebel, one

(49:16):
of these famous TV demons, And so then he'll ask
them what kind of thing they're possessed by, whether it's
alcoholism or drugs. So he's really feeding them the answers
and they just have to choose one of those answers.
And usually that person's very distraught and it's a scary
kind of circus to be there. Everyone is in the

(49:38):
audience is playing along too, And the last event that
I went to, there's a woman in front of me
who was growling. And they just know the drill. They
know how to behave and when you're caught up in
that mass hysteria, everyone's participating it was just so surreal.

Speaker 2 (49:53):
If he came here, I would go see him, for sure.
I would like to see at firsthand.

Speaker 1 (49:57):
But I think there's a lot to be said for
armchair skepticism. But to go out there and learn how
these things work, to see it firsthand is very, very different.
And you know, every skeptic is skeptical of exorcism, but
to go and experience it and to see it is
just an important thing to learn. We tried to be exercised,
but no, he wouldn't go for us. I think he

(50:18):
could tell that we were skeptics.

Speaker 3 (50:22):
Oh yeah, you have a dark aura about you, and
exactly that's all that was so from demons. Let us
now turn to Satanic cults. You covered this pretty well.

Speaker 2 (50:35):
There's a big disparity between the sort of self professed
members of the Church of Satan and the kind of
Satanic cults that are described in the famous ritual abuse cases, which.

Speaker 3 (50:46):
By the way, is interesting. One of those was just
in the news again.

Speaker 2 (50:49):
There was one that's just now been settled out of
court just a couple of days ago.

Speaker 3 (50:53):
There's still going on.

Speaker 2 (51:01):
Can you talk about what the differences between the boogeyman
version of Satanic cults and then the real Church of Satan.

Speaker 1 (51:08):
Oh. Yeah. And we were talking about cemeteries earlier and
people breaking into them, and you might hear of cases
in the news of vandalism of cemeteries and animal sacrifice
taking place in cemeteries. And that's more likely to be
someone who practices can Donbla or Santa Ria than to
be a Satanist. I focus on Lavaine Satanism, the Satanism,

(51:31):
the Church of Satan through Anton Lavay in the book,
and I look at the various different kinds of Satanism,
and there might be a small band of real devil worshipers,
people who do believe in Satan as a real adversary
to God and who worship him through burning candles.

Speaker 3 (51:51):
And proceed like that.

Speaker 1 (51:53):
That's right, right, yes, But you'll find that most Satanists
are atheists or non theists or scape dicks or humanists.
So the theistic Satanists are very rare breed.

Speaker 3 (52:06):
Yeah, it seemed like theatrical atheism, if that could be.

Speaker 1 (52:12):
It really is. And these are people who just they
do practice magical rituals, but it's usually within the context
of they call it psychodrama. So it might be purging
yourself of inhibitions and fears. But it's not necessarily that
they believe that they can affect have affect the external

(52:35):
world through some kind of ritual. Even though Anton Levey
did say at some stage in one of his books
that if you're successful with magic, that you do need
to acknowledge the power of magic. So who knows? He
was full of dish.

Speaker 3 (52:50):
I mean, well, to be blunt, Yeah, absolutely he was.

Speaker 2 (52:53):
I've heard so many interesting first hand anecdotes about the
kind of things he would say.

Speaker 1 (53:00):
Oh, you were a short. Secondhand one and that is
that Matthew's mother used to run this little store just
selling odds and ends, like an early seven to eleven
in a place called Walton in sort of northern Colorado.
And he came in one day and he was a
right asshole to her, really really rude, really mean, picking

(53:21):
a fight with her. And this is this lovely little lady.
And he bought an ice block I think, and just
stood there sucking it while he abused her. And he's
just nasty for no reason.

Speaker 2 (53:31):
What an odd character he used to raise lions. I
watched the documentary about him.

Speaker 3 (53:35):
It was very interesting.

Speaker 1 (53:36):
Well, that's the thing you can't always trust documentaries about him,
and I do go into that. He claimed that he
was a multi millionaire and he owned property in Italy
and throughout California, and he owned boats and Mercedes Benzes,
and that was just crap. He was pretty much died
a pauper, and he had a lot of tall stories.

(53:57):
He claimed he'd had an affair with Jane Mansfield than
Marilyn Monroe, and that he had some nuty picture of her,
of Marilyn Monroe that was autographed to him, and that
was actually signed by his wife at the time. And yeah,
he claims a lot of things. He had a very
grand past if we believe him, but a lot of

(54:18):
that was untrue.

Speaker 2 (54:19):
It seems like it's sort of again like a ritualized
version of just a very selfish, iron Randy and type philosophy.

Speaker 1 (54:30):
Oh. I think there is that element. I think they
profess to be very kind and good people to those
who deserve it, and if not, then they're assholes, and
admittedly they I think it's not really something that's practiced
in any kind of church nowadays. I mean, initially there
was the House Come Church that Anton LeVay lived in

(54:53):
in San Francisco, and now they have their headquarters in
appropriately in Hell's Kitchen in New York. But any Satanism
is really just practiced in the home, and it's just
not the kind of thing that you hear about with
Satanic ritual abuse though.

Speaker 2 (55:08):
But you know, I've never understood the at least the
way that the church, the Christian Church, represents it. And
this is not a big thing a Christian Church in general,
but it certainly sits there in the legendary.

Speaker 3 (55:19):
It's in the folklore but not canonical, right.

Speaker 2 (55:21):
That the faust idea that people make deals with Satan
and are rewarded for it.

Speaker 1 (55:27):
But oh, like Jimmy Page, Yeah right, Well, there's.

Speaker 2 (55:29):
All kinds of people that you know, but be raised
as a Protestant. You know, my understanding was always that
going to hell was the default position. Everybody's going to
go to Hell unless they accept Christ's redemption in order
to get into Heaven. So the idea that people would
be successful by making a deal with Satan for their
soul really made no sense.

Speaker 3 (55:50):
Because by default he gets your soul, right.

Speaker 1 (55:53):
Yes, And of course you can't trust him, so if
you make a pact with him and offer him your
soul for fame and for tune. You can't trust him anyway.

Speaker 3 (56:02):
I think it's metaphysical sour grapes.

Speaker 2 (56:05):
People see successful people and they can't understand why they're
not successful, and so they make this claim, Oh, clearly
they made a deal with the devil, because there's no way, well,
they could be that successful on their own.

Speaker 1 (56:17):
Then you have urban legends surrounding led Zeppelin, and as
I said, Jimmy Page and he goes and buys Aleister
Crowley's all place in Scotland and purchased a lot of
Crowley memorabilia, and so people just I guess, made a
natural assumption that he'd made a fausty impact. Yeah, the devil,
as you do.

Speaker 3 (56:35):
Either either the devil or perhaps sore on.

Speaker 1 (56:42):
Oh Dear.

Speaker 3 (56:45):
The Misty Mountain harp comes to mind. But the love
that song. It's a good song.

Speaker 2 (56:51):
Yeah, And even as you point it out, even Ozzy
Osbourne says, you know, that's just shell, it's not real.

Speaker 1 (56:58):
Yeah, he said, Oh, I'm just a night sky and
I'm not a Satanist. And it's I think it's good
pr for musicians, or it's often been, but not so
much for some companies. That have been attacked by those
out there who claim that these companies are affiliated with
the Church of Satan order exactly demons somehow Liz Claiborne

(57:21):
and McDonald's and.

Speaker 3 (57:23):
Example Proctor and Gambles.

Speaker 2 (57:25):
And this dates me, but uh so when I was
a kid, way before the Internet existed, people still had
something like spam offices across the country would get on
these facts links, people sitting fact spam and your facts
actually would just dump out stuff that people has shared

(57:45):
and people would share these, uh these urban legends on
fact paper and we got some and it all explained
about how that Procter and Gambles logo the stars could
be shaped to say sick six six.

Speaker 3 (58:00):
I totally yes.

Speaker 1 (58:01):
And the girls in the guy's beard, I remember that too.
I was just a kid, but I remember looking at
a picture on some Procter and Gamble product in Australia,
a detergent maybe, and seeing that symbol and thinking that
there was something evil about it, but really not understanding
what was behind it. And I don't know if you know,
but it was actually that whole scam was traced back

(58:23):
to Mway.

Speaker 2 (58:25):
Yeah, but if you would like to learn more about Amway.

Speaker 3 (58:29):
You can give me a call. Now, my parents went.

Speaker 2 (58:35):
Through the Mway thing. We had the drawing the circles,
and it was you know, I was just a kid.
I said, this sounds wrong.

Speaker 1 (58:43):
Yeah, Well, Procter and Gamble had to retire that symbol
and they'd been using various forms of that for about
one hundred years. So I thought that was a shame.
From a historical perspective, it's.

Speaker 2 (58:53):
Really difficult to convince people that you're not actually secretly
powered by Satan. I mean, if people are willing to
believe that Satan is actually, you know, working with corporations,
it's going to be If they're willing to believe that,
it's going to be hard to talk them out of it.

Speaker 3 (59:12):
Right.

Speaker 1 (59:13):
Oh yeah, And I think these urban legends always survive
the truth and exposure.

Speaker 2 (59:18):
But there's this persistent story about the Satanic cults that
are lurking around the country killing baby sacrificing babies. But
you didn't find any others that that's true.

Speaker 1 (59:29):
No, you'll normally find with the Richard Ramirez and other
characters like that they are pseudo Satanists, Satanists people who
are members of the Church of Satan, don't see those
people as being Satanists. They're really pretenders. They're people who
have psychological issues, mental illnesses. And yet it's just I

(59:53):
think Satanism has always been a good outlet for them,
something for them to align themselves to, but certainly not
the same thing as the Church of Satan. And again
cases of vandalism and animal sacrifice. Animal abuse might be
related to drugs, but animal sacrifice is probably going to
be Santa Ria.

Speaker 2 (01:00:11):
The idea that they are out there, you know, farming
babies to power their dark cults doesn't seem to be true.

Speaker 3 (01:00:21):
They still sound a little bit like a hole's and
I should.

Speaker 2 (01:00:26):
I don't want to like people all with a dark brush,
but you know, yeah that.

Speaker 1 (01:00:32):
Really they got swept up into the whole Satanic ritual
abuse thing. They were an easy target and the book
Michelle remembers that's what kickstarted a lot of the Satanic
ritual abuse claims and the Satanic panic And in that book,
the author, I think it's Michelle Smith. She underwent maybe
six hundred hours of sessions with her psychotherapist's later husband,

(01:00:55):
and she made all of these claims under hypnosis. These
were false memories that were implanted into her mind. She
claimed that her mother had been involved with the Church
of Satan back in nineteen fifty six, and of course
the Church of Satan wasn't around for maybe about another
twelve or thirteen years, so they just couldn't have been
a part of that. So it was just dumb luck

(01:01:18):
really that that should coincide.

Speaker 2 (01:01:20):
Well, I want to visit that a little deeper in
a future episode because the idea of the Satanic ritual
abuse ties in very closely with the ideas of alien abduction,
and not that they're the same phenomena what the experiences
are recounted as, but that there are a similar phenomena
in how the experiences are put into the brain.

Speaker 1 (01:01:41):
So yeah, that would be a fascinating episode. There's a
lot of information there with the McMartin primary school trial
that took place in California and all the amazing stories
that came out about that, and children being abused by
giraffes and just crazy stories rights.

Speaker 3 (01:02:01):
But when the people are not following up on whether the.

Speaker 2 (01:02:05):
Things really happen, it seems like the more outrageous the claim,
the quicker they are to accept it is true.

Speaker 3 (01:02:10):
It's very odd oh yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:02:12):
It was a lot of abuse taking place there with
leading questions bad therapists.

Speaker 3 (01:02:15):
Legal abuse versus actual real.

Speaker 1 (01:02:18):
Abuse, right, oh yeah, with some very real world.

Speaker 3 (01:02:21):
Yes, really bad consequences for.

Speaker 1 (01:02:24):
The people going to use jail for years and losing family,
losing their careers.

Speaker 2 (01:02:32):
Yeah, And a lot of this just comes down to
people don't understand how memory works, which is we just
I did a special called She's Believing, which a couple
episodes ago. It was just a special thing I did
with Elizabeth Loftus and Richard Wiseman, and just you can't
trust your memory. I mean, it's it's good for everyday stuff,

(01:02:53):
but if something's fantastic, something's.

Speaker 3 (01:02:55):
Weird or unusual, you can't trust your memory. You just
oh yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:02:59):
And I think a lot of skeptics so skeptical about
things like hypnosis and false memory, but those are very
real things.

Speaker 3 (01:03:07):
Yes, yes they are.

Speaker 2 (01:03:09):
I would say this is a fantastic book, and there's
lots more. We've only covered three topics, but there's many
more chapters and I think you'll really enjoy it if
you pick this book up.

Speaker 3 (01:03:19):
Linked is in the show notes.

Speaker 1 (01:03:21):
And there are plenty of monsters still in the book. Too. Sure,
there are religion and skepticism. I'm sorry, lots of puns,
but yeah, I think the main monsters that I focus
on that the worst monsters being.

Speaker 2 (01:03:35):
People people, the real monsters, exactly real monsters. Well, speaking
of monsters, I don't think I've gotten to ask you
this before.

Speaker 3 (01:03:43):
What's your favorite monster? Karen?

Speaker 1 (01:03:45):
I think I answered this on an interview that we
did years ago for Skepticality, and that's.

Speaker 3 (01:03:51):
Just, oh, okay, nothing.

Speaker 1 (01:03:55):
In all of these years, it's still Jeff, that's so great.

Speaker 3 (01:03:58):
I'm so glad we got to do that interview. Wasn't
that good?

Speaker 2 (01:04:00):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (01:04:00):
That was my favorite. I really love that story and
talking with Christopher. He was so knowledgeable and I can't
wait for his book to come out.

Speaker 3 (01:04:09):
Yeah, I really hope he finishes that up.

Speaker 1 (01:04:11):
He will. I'm keeping an eye on him on Facebook.

Speaker 3 (01:04:15):
Excellent. Thank you so much for coming back here, and
I really oh, thank.

Speaker 1 (01:04:18):
You for having me. This was a lot of fun.

Speaker 2 (01:04:21):
Monstertle, you've been listening to Monster Talk, the science show
about monsters. I'm Blake Smith and.

Speaker 1 (01:04:29):
I'm Karen Stoltner.

Speaker 2 (01:04:30):
You just heard a flashback to December twenty thirteen when
we heard Karen talk about her research into religions for
the book God Bless America. If you're listening on Patreon,
you got this flashback without all those pesky commercials. If
you're not listening on Patreon, then please support our beloved
sponsors Irony. My secret name is Commerce. Monster Talk theme

(01:04:52):
music is by Pete Stealing Monkeys. Thanks for joining us
on this flashback. If you stick around, there's some amusing
outtakes after the credits that I totally forgot I had.

Speaker 3 (01:05:01):
Saved h.

Speaker 1 (01:05:48):
This has been a Monster House presentation.

Speaker 2 (01:05:51):
But the the.

Speaker 1 (01:05:57):
Satan of spawn uh uh and.

Speaker 3 (01:06:03):
Uh uh.

Speaker 1 (01:06:07):
Uh a tone for all of the sills.

Speaker 3 (01:06:18):
I don't know what you would call that in the
uh yeah and I don't uh yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:06:31):
It's also you know, the fault that people the sort.

Speaker 3 (01:06:36):
Of the said now, yeah, I have to say that
while uh well,