June 13, 2025 • 69 mins
What is it that most folks consider to be crazy? Just how odd does a person need to be to be unacceptable? Is a person who hears voices inside their head really nuts, or could they be communicating with unseen beings? I'll go over some historic folks most thought had lost it, as well as a few more resent.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
Are you Are you coming to the truth? Well, Shungam
who says she murdered true.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Jos.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Things have happened that no joner will be a Mamam
holling truth.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Welcome to the show. I'm your host, Chris James. Coffee, Coffee, Coffee, coffee, coffee.
That sounds crazy, but that's kind of how I look
at the world. I like to look at the world
through the bottom of a coffee cup, as opposed to
(00:57):
the bottom of a bottle of booze. No one ever
got in trouble for drinking too much coffee. To get
the best coffee in the universe, you need to go
to Organic Man Coffee Trike four or five zero one McPherson.
That's if you're here in Laredo. If you're not in Laredo,
(01:20):
you can go to Organicmancoffeetrike Dot shop. If you can't
get from there to hear, go online. That's the new
way of doing things. I was listening to Paranormal Rundown.
(01:41):
Vic Hermanson was talking about a patient that he was
treating one day that kept saying there was someone else
in the room, someone Vic couldn't see. This patient may
have been crazy, but Even crazy folks get sick or
injured one once in a while, and a good nurse
(02:02):
will take care of them. Vic told the patient that
he could not see or hear what this other person
was saying, and so they were going to have to
relay everything. When dealing with crazy people, never pretend like
(02:23):
you can hear or see what they can hear and see.
Both will get you unwanted responses. Buying into a crazy
person's delusions is dangerous. Crazy is defined as very foolish,
(02:47):
senseless or strange, extremely excited, enthusiastic, wildly irrational, or incoherent.
Here in Laredo, we have more than our fair share
of crazy people. I probably offended someone with that. Don't
(03:10):
call them crazy, they might be offended. That's mean to
say crazy. In the fifteen hundreds, the word crazy meant
to be sickly or infirm. A century later, crazy was
(03:30):
used to mean insane or demented. To me the word
police are all crazy. Politically correct means oppression from the government.
The First Amendment of the United States Constitution prevents Congress
(03:51):
from making laws respective to the establishment of religion, prohibiting
the free exercise of religion any of y'all remember the
Black Plague of twenty twenty, or abridging the freedom of speech,
the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly, as
(04:15):
long as it's not violent, for the right to petition
the government for redress of grievanceances. I see nothing that
says that you can't call a person crazy. There's nothing
that says you have the right not to be offended.
(04:36):
Common sense is what should guide us on what to
say or not say. If I see some guy eating
roadkill on the side of the road, or maybe even
sitting at a table, that is crazy, it would also
(04:56):
be crazy for me to say so to that person.
Durn cat. Anyone crazy enough to eat things found on
the ground is probably crazy enough to try to kill me.
Common sense is in short supply these days. What is
(05:17):
crazy and what is something else? At what point does
a person's actions step over the line. I've done some
things that others consider to be crazy. I'm fairly certain
I am not crazy, But then crazy people don't know
(05:37):
they're crazy. My wife probably thinks I'm crazy. I know
a few guys at work that figured i'd stepped over
the line. The trick is to be sure to step
back on the bike patrol. We tended to do things
to try to impress each other, while at the same
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time I risking life and limb. There used to be
a staircase that ran next to the bridge. It ran
down to the parking lot with a bend in the middle.
It was about thirty feet down, not long down. The
trick was to slow down just before you hit that
(06:22):
turn so you wouldn't go over the handrail. Yes, I
rode down those stairs. No, I did not kill myself.
Most people watching us must have thought those boys are crazy.
Seth Alvo does things on a bike that I think
(06:43):
are crazy. He has a channel called burm Peak. He's
also twenty seven years younger than me. It's worth watching
him do some of the crazy stunts he does on
a bike. The nice thing is he will also show
(07:03):
you how to fix your bike once you've messed things up.
Is he crazy to me? Not that crazy to my wife.
He needs help. Seth knows he is doing crazy things,
but he enjoys doing them and he is good at it.
He's not crazy, he just does crazy things. I started
(07:30):
to say that here in Laredo we have more than
our fair share of crazy folks. While up visiting San Antonio.
I asked a couple of police officers about this. They
told me to not quote them, but it was policy.
If any one of a less than balanced nature was
(07:52):
found living in the great outdoors, an urban out doorsman,
as it were, the crazy person was escorted to the
bus station given a one way ticket south. The city
that is straight south from San Antonio just happens to
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be Laredo. On the bike patrol, we were right there,
close to everyone. There no vehicle to separate us from them.
In a unit, we have the doors with windows that
kind of isolate you from everyone else. On a bike,
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you are present and easy to talk to. I met
a lot of crazy folks while on the bike patrol.
William thought he was a woman. He dressed the part
using whatever he could find at some of the local
used clothing warehouses. It's amazing how much they throw away.
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Every day. He would go through their trash and pick
out the parts that he liked. If you want to
dress like a woman, at least shave. William usually had
a few days growth on his face. His wig came
from an old mannikin like from the sixties, and it
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was blonde, and he wasn't. He would sit in Jarvis
Plaza and he would play an acoustic guitar that had
a speaker duct taped to it. He couldn't play music
as far as anyone could tell. He didn't have a
singing voice either, but then he didn't really know the
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words to any of the songs or the sounds that
he was making. The thing is, he seemed to be
quite happy being who he was. He told us about
his accomplishments around town and how he was working his
way up. He did sleep on the front steps of
(10:02):
the courthouse, but he was never a problem as far
as us or the police were concerned. He was never
in any fights. He didn't drink or do drugs. It
was just that his elevator didn't reach the top floors.
He never told us about having any family anywhere. There
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must have been someone somewhere out there wondering whatever happened
to their son, or their brother or that member of
the family. Did he wander off one day after forgetting
to take his medication. Was he placed in some facility
somewhere because the family got tired of his antics? And
(10:51):
did he get released because some judge decided he was
not a threat to himself or others we don't know.
You could ask him all kinds of questions and he
would only answer the ones that he wanted to. He
wasn't all that old. He was only about maybe thirty
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at the most. Once I was moved to another detail,
I lost track of most of the interesting people. They
all tended to stay close to the Jarvis Plaza area.
You might could say Jarvis Plaza was a magnet for
interesting folks. Was William really convinced that he had two
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x's and not an x y? Did he look in
the mirror and not see the same image that the
rest of us saw? Was he really convinced that he
was a woman or did he want it so badly
that he was blocking out all of the guy stuff.
(12:00):
He was crazy, but he wasn't a problem. If I
had to live in a world with folks like him around, well,
it wouldn't be that bad. It would just be a
little weird, not like some of the others that we
had to deal with. On the other hand, if I
were surrounded by guys like, oh, say, Elisha Revis, things
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could have been way too interesting. Elisha Marcus Revis was
born in eighteen twenty seven. After graduating from an Illinois
teachers college. He taught school briefly in Illinois. Not finding
his place in life, Revs moved to California, where he
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taught school at Elmonte. He soon lost interest in teaching
and decided to try his hand at gold prospecting. He
spent most of the eighteen fifties looking for gold, and
he joined a group of adventurers and prospectors headed for
the Bradshaw Mountains in the Arizona Territory eighteen sixty three.
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Revs had little success in the Bradshaw's and he returned
to California in sixty six. He married Mary Sexton December thirtieth,
eighteen sixty seven, in San Gabriel. They had two children.
The daughter was named a Luisa Marie. The sun didn't
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last very long. Revas returned to Arizona Territory in the
fall of sixty nine. His uncle Eisham had just been
appointed assistant Chief Justice of the Territorial Supreme Court. Revus
traveled to La Pause with Aisham, but separated and traveled
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on alone to Vulture City. He spent enough time in
Vulture City to appear on the US census report August twentieth,
eighteen seventy. His name then appears in Fort Dowell, OH
Fort McDowell area. It is believed that Revas settled on
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a horse ranch north of town in Verde River, where
he trained horses. He may have ridden with the army
as a civilian between eighteen seventy and seventy two. He
knew the area around the Superstition Mountains quite well from
his time with the military. He was familiar with the
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valleys there, and one of them was eventually named for him,
Revas Valley. Some say that he served as a deputy
marshal in McDowell, having been appointed by his uncle. Just
a little bit of nepotism there. Eighteen seventy five and
eighteen eighty census report showed a lacious State living in
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Fort McDowell. At this time he was living in the
Superstition Mountains, but traveling back and forth. Maybe he only
filed his home as being Fort McDowell, but he had
a cabin in the Superstitions. The Apache considered the Superstition
Mountains as sacred. That's how they got their name. This
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was where the spirits lived. Anyone desecrating the land would
wind up minus one head back. When Peralta first began
mining the gold, many of his men wound up sin
Cabasa headless. How was it that Reeves could live on
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the mountain without becoming a dead guy? To begin with,
he was very good marksman. He carried in eighteen eighty six,
thirty eight forty as well as two cult forty fives.
The Apache did consider him an interloper, and they decided
to do something about it. Armed to the teeth, they
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set out to remove Revs. During the first attempt, three
warriors were killed. The Indians pulled back to regroup wait
for Revs to either run out of ammunition, food, or water.
Revs wasn't into waiting soul. He removed all of his clothes,
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He stripped down his nakedness. He grabbed a butcher knife
in each hand, and he attacked. Picture this Sicily nineteen
thirty two. No Superstition Mountain, eighteen seventy eight. You're camping
with a bunch of fellow warriors. Went out of the
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dark ark comes a naked white guy, screaming at the
top of his lungs and brandishing two knives. He ran
into the camp and the Indians all ran out. The
Apache were convinced that Revs was insane. They decided it
was best to leave him alone. From that night on,
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Revs was known as the White Devil. Any time the
tribe was in the area, they made sure to give
Revus a wide berth. Crazy people were believed to have
supernatural powers. Revus charging into the camp the way he
did convinced the Apache that he was not human more
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than human. Some say this was just a ploy by
Reevus to keep the Apache away. Others believe he was
truly crazy. At night, he was seen running around the
mountain naked, shooting at the sky, trying to shoot out
the moon. Revs was a well read man. He'd been
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a school teacher, after all, he knew a lot about
the world. He also liked to be alone. He grew
his own food, hunted for meat, and once in a
while he would ride into town to visit. Eighteen ninety five,
Revas was almost seventy years old. His health created a
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few concerns among his friends. James Dalibou often checked in
on Revs, and Revs told him that he was fixing
to ride into town for supplies. When Dalibo heard that
Revs hadn't arrived in town. He returned to the mountains
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to check on him. Dalibo found the remains of the
old hermit just off the rogers Case Canyon in what
is now known as Grave Canyon. Was Revas really crazy
or just eccentric? The crazy act did keep the Apache away,
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but was it an act or did Revas have some
issues upstairs? He did like to run around naked that
night in the mountains where there were snakes and coyotes
and mountain lions and other hungry beasts hunting. Does that
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make him crazy or just is he living life to
its fullest? The running around naked, I don't know. It
sounds kind of attractive, but not in Oloredo you get
sunburned all over. Diogenes was born in four hundred and
three BC and Sinope in Paphlagonia on the Black Sea.
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He was the son of Hyssius, who was a money
changer authorized to exchange foreign currency for local cash. As
a child, the Diogenes learned to read, write quote both
epic and tragic verses, while also being trained in athletics
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and horsemanship. His dad had cash, so he didn't have
to learn a trade. Once he was old enough to work,
if that's what you want to call it. Diogenes began
an or He became an epimletus, which is a magistrate who,
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depending on where you were in the world, that was
what you did for a living. You were paid to
do something something in the government. His father was accused
of defacing coins. He would take foreign coins and restamped
them to make them worth more money. This led to
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the old man being thrown into prison and Diogenes was exiled.
Depending on who you listen to, it may have been
Diogenes who had done the dirty deed and his dad
just took the fall for it. Once he said that
he had asked Apollo's oracle and Delphi how he could
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how he could gain renown. The oracle replied, I'd alterate
the currency, which he took to mean that he should
counterfeit coins. The exact date of Diagenes's departure from Sinope
is uncertain. It is also uncertain whether he was banished
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or exiled, or if he simply fled in order to
avoid prison time. Diagenes exile marked a turning point and
the moment of profound spiritual conversion in his time being
separated from one's homeland and thus denied the honor of
being buried with one ancestors, was seen as a tragic fate.
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Diagenes rejected this sentiment, embracing exile as the ultimate detachment
from worldly ties. A Plutarch said the hardship of exile
transformed Diogenes into a philosopher. The noble exiles like Odysseus
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and Heracles, about whom Diogenes wrote, served as models of
exemplary behavior. Diogenes also claimed an encounter with a mouse
revealed to him the value of a simple life, since
the rodent is capable of adopting itself to just about
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any circumstance. Diogenes, now, keep in mind he's a homeless
exile owned a slave named Manus. Since Diagenes was now
living in poverty after fleeing Sinope, Manus must have been
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a part of his earlier life, rather than a slave
bought once he arrived in Athens. When the slave decided
he'd had enough and left, Diogenes dismissed his ill fortune
by saying, if Manus can live without Diogenes, why not
Diogenes without Manus. Through freedom comes from detaching oneself from
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possessions and desires, so even owning a slave could be
seen as a form of a self enslavement. Diogenes spent
his winters in Athens, taking shelter in a jar epithos,
which must have been large enough to at least fit
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his body. Look at the folks pushing shopping carts around
town and picture them living in huge cardboard boxes, a
kind of the same thing, except cardboard hadn't been invented yet.
When the weather got too cold, he would move to
a better climate. Diageeny's life was marked by radical self sufficiency,
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passivity to fate, and an indifference to suffering. He went
barefoot and used his tunic as his betting. He openly
engaged in behavior that defied social norms, such as fondling
himself in public to the extreme, spitting or even urinating
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on people. He supported him self by begging, which he
saw as fair compensation for his role in challenging society's values.
I've seen some homeless guys that act like that. The
Athenians held this man in high regard, even replacing his
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jar whenever it got broken. One day, he discarded his
drinking cup after watching a boy drink water using just
his hands. Diogenes said he had no idea that you
could do it this way until he'd seen someone else
do it. He was also known to wander the marketplace
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by day, holding up a lit lamp. He would tell
people he was looking for a man. In his later years,
he carried a walking stick when he left town, a
symbol of both his itinerant lifestyle and public authority. Ancient
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texts report that he visited various other cities, which helped
shape his reputation as a wandering philosopher. He admired Sparta,
yet he employed his trademark method of teaching through criticism
while there. When a Spartan cited hesidious Hesiods Hesiods verse,
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Nor would the ox die if the neighbor were not evil,
Diogenies retorted, But the Messenians and their oxen have died,
and you are their neighbors. Diogenes Other travels remain mysterious.
He visited various cities in Asia Minor, especially Miletis, known
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for its rich intellectual history. He may have journeyed for
philosophical reasons, though the exact details are lost. Nobody ever
bothered to write down most of that or if they
did write it down, it's lost to time. While on
a voyage to a Gina, he was captured by pirates.
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Diogenes was sold at a slave market. As he stood
there surveying the crowd, he told the auctioneer that he
needed to sell him to a man standing in the crowd,
because that man needs a good master. Zeni Otis bought
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Diogenes and turned him into a teacher and an overseer.
Diogenes did such a good job that he was eventually
set free. Instead of returning to Athens, he stayed on
in the street near a gymnasium that was named the Cranium,
on the outskirts of town, overlooking the harbor to Diogenes.
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According to Dionysius, the Stoic, Diogenes was taken prisoner in
three point thirty eight by Philip the second of Macedonia
during the Battle of Coriona. Amused by the audacity of
the captive, Philip decided to release him. July three point
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thirty six, Diagenes attended the one hundred and eleventh Olympic Games.
When a herald announced that this man has defeated that man,
Diogenes yelled on the contrary. He only defeats slaves, while
I defeat men. When asked if he had come to compete,
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Diogenes replied that he was there to take part in
combat of human ills, anger, mistrust sadness, desire, and fear.
At the Isthmus Games, he crowned himself victor by placing
a pine wreath on his own head. This kind of
pissed off the Corinthians, who removed it. Diagenes met Philip's
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son Alexander the Great in three point thirty six, when
Alexander was proclaimed commander of the expedition against the Persians
at the Isthmus of Corinth. Plutarch said, when Alexander arrived,
Diogenes refused to join the formal greeting, and instead he
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stayed in his usual spot in the cypress grove outside.
Alexander engaged him in conversation that later became quite famous.
At the approach of the king and his staff, Diagones
sat up a little and fixed his eyes on Alexander.
When the king greeted him and asked if there was
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anything he wanted, Diogenes replied, yes, you should stand a
little farther away out of my son. Alexander was so
impressed by this and the arrogance and the grandeur of
a man that could treat him with such disdain, that
he told his followers, I tell you this, If I
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were not Alexander, ah, I would be Diogenes. Would Alexander
the Great have a Southern accent? Well? He was from
southern Greece. Some sources claim that Diagenes died June tenth
or eleventh, three point twenty three BC, the same night
that Alexander the Great died. The exact location of his
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death remains disputed, and kind of like how they lost
Alexander's body. In ancient Greece and Rome, a philosopher's death
was often seen as a final state meant on their teachings.
Diogenes's death, with its imaginative and various accounts, became a
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controversial as his indifference to his own burial. Tell Us said,
in tribute to Diagenes, what difference is there between being
consumed by fire, devoured by dogs, left above ground to
be preyed upon by vultures, or buried below ground to
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be eaten by worms. A bronze statue of Diogenes was
erected in Sinope after his death, with a poem from
Phylliscus of Igenia At the base. The poem says, even
bronze is aged by time, but not all the ages.
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Diogenes will destroy your fame, since you alone show mortal
the rule of self sufficiency and the easiest path through life.
They used to speak really weird back then. Now was
Diageny's crazy or just colorful? I've met some folks who
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lived life to the same way, moving about with little
to nothing, yet garnering the respect of those they met.
I've also run into a few who looked as if
they had everything except brains. They didn't have things, their
things had them. He who dies with the most wins,
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Really who is crazy? The old guy living out in
a field somewhere in a camper or a little cabin
and driving an old youthesed pickup and having all his
bills paid and not owing anyone anything. Or the guy
living in the big mansion who owns so much money
to everyone that he has to work fifty sixty seventy
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hours a week just to pay for all the toys
that he can't even play with because he doesn't have
any time. I still don't speak French, so as I
butcher the language. Just remember those ancestors that I thought
I had from France actually came from Germany. Tarrare was
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born in or born near Lyone, around seventeen seventy two.
His exact date of birth was unrecorded, and it's not
even known if Tarrari was his real name or just
his nickname. As a child, he had a huge appetite,
and by his teens he could eat a quarter of
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a cow that weighed as much as he did in
a single day. Let's just say he weighed about eighty pounds.
Being a teenager in France in the seventeen hundreds, probably
that's a bit much. Folks who were a bit smaller
back then, and the French weren't a diet of cake.
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Well that's what Marie Antoinette told them to eat. This
would mean that he ate about twenty pounds of meat
in a day. Terrari's folks couldn't afford an eating machine.
They could barely feed themselves, so they sent him on
a quest go look for the meaning of life the universe,
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and well, you know, I believe it was more like
get out and stay out. Terrari toured the country with
a roaming band of thieves and prostitutes, stealing or begging food.
At some point he was taken on as a warm
up act to a traveling charlatan. You know, snake oil
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salesman kind of thing. Terrari would draw crowd by eating corks, stones,
live animals, swallowing an entire basket of apples one at
a time. He ate ravenously, and he was particularly fond
of snakes. Seventeen eighty eight, Terrari moved to Paris to
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work as a street performer. He was usually successful, but
on a few occasions the act went wrong and he
would wind up with severe intestinal obstructions. Members of the
crowd had to carry him to the Hotel Dew hospital,
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where he was treated with powerful laxatives. A largehy blows.
I'll bet that was a fun job. Try to imagine
who the poor character was that had to take care
of him. He did make full recovery, and he offered
to demonstrate his act to the surgeon by eating his
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watch and chain. The surgeon said nay nay. Despite his
unusual diet, Terrari was slim and of average height. At
the age of seventeen, he weighed about one hundred pounds.
He was described as having unusually soft, fair hair and
an abnormally wide mouth. His teeth were heavily stained, and
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his lips were almost nonexistent when he had not eaten.
His skin hung so loosely that he could wrap the
fold of skin from his abdomen around his waist. His
body was hot to the touch, and he was always sweating.
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I worked with a guy like that named Victor, now Victor,
not Victor, but Victor. He was always sweating, even when
it was cool out. Terrari he had a foul aroma
that hung over him, making anybody within twenty paces quite uncomfortable. Yeah,
I worked with a few guys like that. The smell
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became noticeably worse after he ate. His eyes and cheeks
would become bloodshot, and there was a visible vapor rose
from his body. He would become lethargic, after which he
would usually belch a lot, and his jaws would make
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chewing motions, kind of like a dog with distemper. My dog,
George had distemper, and it looks like he's always chewing gum. Now.
They didn't have toilet paper at the time, and Terrari
had chronic diarrhea. Which probably only added to the smell.
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You had to use whatever you had at hand, and
usually it was your hand after going to the bathroom.
Talk about smell, I understand Paris was quite a smelly town.
I understand it still is. Despite his large intake of food,
he did not appear to vomit excessively or to gain weight.
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Aside from his heating habits, his contemporaries saw no apparent
signs of mental illness or unusual behavior. The cause of
Terrari's behavior is still not known. There are other documented
cases of similar behavior. None of the subjects other than
Terrari were autopsied, and there have been no modern documented
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cases resembling him. Hyperthyroidism can induce an extreme appetite, rapid
weight loss, profuse sweating, heat intolerance, and fine hair. A
damaged amygdilla is known to induce polyphasia in animals, but
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not necessarily humans. In seventeen ninety two, at the outbreak
of the War of the First Coalition, Tarri joined the
French army. I'll bet he fit right in with the
rest of the folks. Military rations were insufficient to satisfy
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his appetite. He would carry out tasks for other soldiers
in return for his share of their rations, and when
that didn't give him enough food, he would stavage in
the garbage for scraps. This was still not enough to
satisfy him. He was admitted to the military hospital at
(39:51):
Salts Sasfarets. I know that's not how it's pronounced, but
that's how it's spelled, Salts South Forerets was a case
of extreme exhaustion. He was granted quadruple rations, but remained hungry.
He scavenged for garbage in gutters and in trash containers.
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He ate the scraps of food that were left by
other patients, and he crept into the apathecary's room to
eat the polefases that would be the pharmacists and the
medication military surgeons could not understand his appetite. Terrari was
ordered to remain in the military hospital to take part
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in psychological experiments designed by doctor Carvelle and Pierre Francis Percy,
a surgeon in chief of the hospital. Carveli and Percy
decided to test Terrari's capacity for food. A meal had
been prepared for fifteen men that were working near the hospital. Generally,
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the hospital staff restrained Terrari whenever there was food around,
but this time Carvelli allowed him to reach the table undisturbed.
Terari ate the entire meal of two large meat pies,
plates filled with grease and salt, and four gallons of milk,
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and then he fell asleep. Carvelli noted that Terri's belly
became distended like an inflated balloon. On another occasion, I
need to cover my cat's ears, all eight of them.
I don't have eight cats, I have four cats, but
that means eight ears. Terrari was presented with a live cat.
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He promptly tore the cat's abdomen open with his teeth,
drank its blood, and ate the entire cat aside from
the bones. Then he vomited up fur like a giant
hair ball. I say they should have put a bullet
in the boy's head. No one should treat an animal
like that, especially a cat. Following this, the hospital staff
(42:14):
offered Terrari a variety of other animals, including snakes, lizards,
and puppies. Now the hospital staff needs a bullet in
the head too. Who behaves like that? Well, Terrari ate
everything that was given to him. He also swallowed an
(42:35):
entire eel without chewing. He just crushed his head with
his teeth and then slipped it down his throat. After
several months spent as an experimental case, military authorities began
to press for Terrari to be returned into active duty.
Doctor Carvelli was keen to continue investigations into Terrari's eating
(42:59):
habits and his digestive system, so he told Tilled General
Alexander Baharness that he had an idea that Terrari might
make a good courier. They could send him behind the
enemy lines and have him eat the enemy army. No, no,
(43:22):
he was supposed to be a courier. The idea was
they would give him a message inside a small wooden box,
which he would swallow. If he was captured by the enemy,
they would not find the box because it was inside
his abdomen. A few days later, he would simply pass
(43:44):
the box and then they would have the note. So
they set up a test. Carvalley showed Barhanas that Terrai
could indeed swallow a box with a note in it.
After a few days, he would poop it back out.
Somebody would have the unpleasant duty to clean this little
(44:09):
wooden box off and take out the message, which they
could then read well. His first assignment was to carry
a message to a French colonel that had been imprisoned
by the Prussians near Nostat. Terrari was told that the
documents were of great military significance, but in reality bah
(44:33):
Harness had merely written a note asking the colonel to
confirm that the message had been received successfully, and if so,
that he should return a reply with any potential useful
information about the Prussian troop movements. Terrari crossed Prussian lines
(44:55):
under the cover of darkness, disguised as a German peasant
unable to speak German. He soon attracted the attention of
the locals, who alerted the Prussian authorities and he was captured.
A strip search found nothing suspicious on him, and despite
being whipped by the Prussian soldiers, he refused to portray
(45:19):
his mission. He was brought before the local Prussian commander,
General Zeigli, who again he refused to talk about his
secret mission. Well. They locked him up for twenty four hours,
and finally Tarri relented, probably because he was hungry, and
(45:41):
he explained the scheme to his captors. They chained him
to a latrine, and after thirty hours he passed the
wooden box. Zogli was furious when the docs, which Tarrari
(46:01):
had said contained vital intelligence, turned out to be only
Baharana's dummy message. So Tararri was taken to the gallows
where he was going to be the guest of honor
at a necktie party. The noose was placed around his neck,
but then they decided not to kill him. I don't
(46:24):
know why they just did. I hope this was the
true story, because the other story, which the fake message,
was never seen by the Prussians. Instead, the second story
goes that Tarri did indeed pass the box through his bottom,
(46:46):
but he immediately grabbed it, put it back in his
mouth and swallowed. Now that's just gone from being crazy
to sick. Either way, Serrari was not hung. Instead, they
gave him a thorough head to toe beating, and then
(47:06):
they set him free near the French border, just to
prove that he wasn't indeed crazy. TERRARII was desperate to
avoid any further military service, so he went back to
the hospital, telling Percy that he would attempt any possible
cure for his overabundant appetite. Percy treated him with a laudanum,
(47:32):
a derivative of I believe it's Is it heroin or
is it cocaine laudanum? I can't remember now. Anyway, they
gave him laudnum. It was a liquid with a very
potent drug suspended in it. They used to give it
to kids for teething pain. Not only did it stop
(47:52):
the pain, it stopped the breathing too well. The loudum
didn't work. They gave him wine and vinegar to drink.
They gave him tobacco pills. None of this worked to
turn off his appetite. When everything failed, Percy fed Terrari
large quantities of soft boiled eggs, like in Cool Hand Luke,
(48:17):
but this also failed to suppress his appetite. Lucas Luke
Johnson ate fifty hard boiled eggs so he could win
a bet. If you haven't seen the movie, well it
was cool. Paul Newman played Luke, and he didn't actually
eat fifty hard boiled eggs, but it sure looked like
(48:40):
he did. Efforts to keep Terrari on any kind of
a control diet all failed. He would sneak out of
the hospital to scavenge for guts outside of butcher shops
and to fight straight dogs for rotting meat in the gutters,
alleys and rubbish heaps. He was also caught several times
times in the hospital drinking the blood from patients who
(49:05):
were undergoing blood letting. He would also attempt to eat
bodies in the morgue. What did I say about him
not being crazy? I think he was. Other doctors believed
that Terrari was mentally ill, and they said that he
should be transferred to a lunatic assignment asylum, but Percy
(49:30):
was keen to continue his experiments, and Terrari mained and
remained in the military hospital. A fourteen month old toddler
disappeared from the hospital late one night. Terrari was immediately
suspected of having consumed the child. Due to his eating
(49:54):
anything else, Percy was now unable or unwilling to defend
him when the hospital staff chased Terrari from the hospital,
to which he never returned. In seventeen ninety eight, m
to Sare of the Versailles hospital contacted Percy to notify
(50:15):
him of a patient that wished to see him. Terrari
was now bedridden and weak. He told Percy that he
had swallowed a golden fork two years earlier, and he
believed that it was now lodged inside his intestines, causing
his current weakness. He hoped that Percy could find some
(50:38):
way of removing it. Percy realized that what he actually
had was the white plague, what we call tuberculosis today.
A month later, Terrari began to experience extreme diarrhea, and
then he died shortly after. The corpse immediately began to rot,
(51:04):
which is really weird. The surgeons at the hospital refused
to dissect it to sair wanted to find out how
Terrari's intestines differed from those of normal folks. He was
also curious as to whether that gold fork was in
there somewhere. At the autopsy, Terrari's gut gullet was found
(51:26):
to be abnormally wide the throat, and when his jaws
were opened, surgeons could see all the way down into
his stomach. He had a Class one for intubation scale.
Some of y'all will understand that his body was found
(51:47):
to be filled with pus, which is dead white blood cells.
His liver and gall bladder were abnormally large, and his
stomach was enormous, covered in ulcers, and it filled most
of the abdominal cavity. There was no fork found inside anywhere.
(52:07):
Was he crazy? I would say yes. Anyone willing to
eat anything that had just passed through the exit point
of anyone else for themselves has to be crazy. Anyone
that would try to eat another person has to be crazy.
What caused him to eat everything? Some kind of weird
(52:30):
overdriving force was in control of his mind? Or was
it just he had an overpowering urge to eat? And
how was it he was able to burn off the
calories so well? Way back when I lived in Seabrook,
Texas now, there was a young lady that lived in
(52:52):
League City, but she would walk back and forth several
times a day. You'd see her hitchhiking on twenty ninety four.
She dressed like a teenager, a mini skirt, t shirt
that was way too tight, some kind of tennis shoes.
Her hair would be in braids, and sometimes she would
(53:16):
be seen skipping along the side of the road as
if she were having the time of her life. Other
times you might see an old lady walking with a cane.
She would wear a knee length dress, well actually it
came down just below the knees, and clunky shiny shoes.
(53:36):
She would wear a pill box hat with a veil
on it and white gloves, something out of the sixties.
Every once in a while you'd see her dressed as
if she were heading out on a really hot date somewhere,
with a fancy ball gown or a fancy dress which
(53:57):
kind of looked weird at one o'clock in the afternoon.
We called this young lady Sybil, as in the movie
A Sybil was a case of split personality based on
a true story. Well, it turned out that our Sibyl
had a lot of folks living in her head, but
(54:19):
she didn't know any of them. One or two of
them claimed that they didn't know her. Then there was
the one who knew everything. This personality said that she
was not homicidal, but that one of the others was
(54:39):
a murderer. On occasion, we would see Sybil at the
local steakhouse. She would saunter in and ask for a
table for two. Once seated, she would begin looking at
the menu and carrying on a conversation, which on occasion
would turn into an argument. If if it got really heated,
(55:02):
that Sybil would storm out the door, demanding the other
person pay for everything. The manager never got upset it
could be dangerous to confront this young lady. Instead, the
manager had a phone number to call, which got her
in contact with Sibyls folks. They would drive over and
(55:25):
pay for the food and any damages. Sybil's real name
was not Sybil. I'm not going to say it because
certain laws against that sort of thing. She was actually
thirty five years old at the time, and she had
two kids, both of them were living with her parents
(55:47):
because of a court order. One of the guys I
worked with thought it would be fun to go out
with a girl who was split personality like that. He
said it would be like having a dozen girlfriends all
at once. Well, he turned out to be sorry. She
(56:11):
used the bathroom in the middle of his bed. Number two.
She messed the whole place up. She took food out
of the refrigerator and smeared it all over the walls
and the ceiling, and she wrote on the walls in doodo.
Then she blamed everything on one of the other personalities.
(56:36):
Then there was Bob, not his real name. I'll give
his initials in case anyone from the old Country Seabrook
is listening. His initials were l H. Bob was a
bit off as well. I first met him walking along
(56:59):
Highway one forty six before I had joined the Border Patrol.
He was dressed in a pilot's uniform and I thought,
well he was, you know, like maybe his car had
broken down. So I stopped and I gave him a ride.
You used to do things like that back then. He
said that he was working at Ellington Airfield. I dropped
(57:22):
him off and I thought, well, that was my good
deed for the day. Later I discovered that Bob was
not all there upstairs. He decided he was going to
kill himself by jumping from an overpass. Well, it wouldn't
have killed him. It probably would have just broke his
leg or two. He also tried jumping off of the
(57:45):
local water tower. He tried all kinds of ways of
killing himself, and some of them were actually dangerous. He
became what is known as a frequent flyer in the
ambulance two or three times. He said one time that
he'd been bit by a rattlesnake, but they couldn't find
(58:06):
any fang marks anywhere. Another time he drank an entire
bottle of poison. Well, it turned out to just be
I think it was vinegar. Every couple of days the
phone would ring and it would be Bob, or Bob's
friend or Bob's parents. Well, not only was he not
(58:30):
all that well upstairs, but he was also sometimes violent.
One day he was screaming and throwing bottles at cars
as they went by. Now the police did try to
keep him under control, but it was a small town
and sometimes they would only have one officer working. Bob
(58:51):
throwing bottles around and screaming, wound up stepping on a
broken piece of glass and cut his foot pretty badly.
Having spent so much time in an ambulance, he had
learned a few things about ems. He got some tape
and a splint. Well, the tape was duct tape and
the splint was a two foot long two by four. Wait,
(59:16):
first thing to do is to see if you can
seal the wound. So he took an entire tube of
crazy glue and he smeared it on the bottom of
his foot. He then stepped down on the two by
four and he wrapped his leg from the knee to
the toes in duct tape looked like a red green project.
(59:38):
When the police finally got there, he tried to run,
but that two by four, well, it just held him
in place. The doctor at the hospital left the board
glued and taped in place. Every doctor within a hundred
miles of town knew this guy, and a lot of
(59:59):
them were a a little tired of treating him. If
it wasn't an actual life threatening case, they would refuse
to allow him into the hospitals. One day, Bob swallowed
one hundred and nine pennies, one of those huge rodeo
belt buckles, a handful of double edged razor blades, and
(01:00:24):
a few other items. Then he began to complain that
his stomach hurt, and so he called for an ambulance.
A stomach ache doesn't necessarily get you into the emergency department,
at least not back then. He wound up being shipped
(01:00:45):
out to Odessa for treatment. And the funny thing is
rumor has it that the doctor working at the emergency
room recognized him. When I was a firefighter, I wanted
to be on the hose. That's where the fun, the excitement,
(01:01:07):
and the danger was was I crazy, maybe a bit.
As far as most of my fellow firefighters was concerned,
I was insane. If it was as bad as it
could get, I was in the heart of it. I
used to melt faced shields all the time. Maybe that's
(01:01:29):
why today the parts of me that don't hurt or numb.
One night we had a call. It was a house
fire on Meyer Road. I don't know why I remember
the name. It was four blocks south of where the
fire station used to be. Well. I wound up getting
(01:01:50):
stuck as the driver, which meant I was also going
to be stuck as the pump operator. I hated being
outside when all the on an adventure were on the inside,
where life could be snuffed out in a second. Okay,
maybe I was crazy. As I pulled out of the
(01:02:12):
station and turned onto main Street, I could see flames
up over the top of the trees. I could see
them shooting straight up into the sky. They were blue.
I immediately told the guy on the passenger seat to
call a second, maybe a third alarm. I was thinking,
(01:02:34):
maybe we need mutual aid. And I wasn't even close
to the fire yet. The flames were about thirty five
feet in the air above the trees. As we rounded
the corner onto Meyer Road, I could see that the
building was fully engulfed and fire was going to be
on the driver's side of the truck. Ninety five percent
(01:02:57):
of the time it's on the passenger side. Just one
of those things, so the pump operator never sees the fire.
All he sees is the pump panel. Well today, well tonight,
that night was my not lucky night. As I opened
the door and jumped out of the truck, the heat
(01:03:17):
overwhelmed me. I had to grab my coat, which pump
operators never wore their coats. I also had to put
on my gloves to work the pump panel. Maybe I
shouldn't have parked so close to the fire, but old habits,
you always parked right next to the building that was
on fire. You never had a fire that was so
(01:03:40):
hot it heated up the pump panel. There was no
choice of entering the structure. The flames were coming out
every window, doorway, shooting through the roofs, straight up in
the air. It looked like a rocket was trying to
fly into the ground. The assist stint chief was doing
(01:04:01):
a quick check to see just how bad it was,
and he tripped over a wire that was invisible in
the darkness. All the light was up, not down. Well
he uh, he got up and took a couple of steps,
and he dripped over another wire and tripped over another one.
Every three feet there was a wire coming out of
(01:04:23):
the house at a forty five degree angle, going down
to a ground peg. Once the fire had burned itself out,
there was no putting it out. All we did was
we protected the houses on either side of it. Inside
what was left of the house was a bunch of
(01:04:43):
oxygen bottles, you know, the big ones, the M one
fifties one hundred and fubic one hundred and fifty cubic
feet of oxygen. There were a few in every room.
All along the outside walls were coils of burned copper wire,
big piles that had all the insulation burned off. The
(01:05:06):
coils were lined up with the ground wires that the
assistant chief had been tripping over. We found the owner
of the house and questions were asked, why were there
so many ground wires, what was up with all those
coils of wire and the big ones, and why were
(01:05:26):
there so many two bottles in the house. Well, it
turns out this guy worked at NASA. He was a
genuine rocket scientist. He had built a giant electromagnetic field
to keep the space aliens from talking to him. He
(01:05:49):
didn't mind them talking to him telepathically during the day,
but at night he wanted to relax. As for the oxygen, well,
he would come home and he would flood the interior
of his house with pure oxygen to maintain his mind
and body. He worked at NASA, he must have known
(01:06:14):
about Apollo one, you know Grisom Chaffy White burned up
in a pure oxygen environment because of a spark. This
rocket scientist had torched his home. The thinking it can't
possibly happen to me. Who's the crazy one? Now? Me
or the guy with the oxygen and electricity living in
(01:06:36):
a wood framed home. I see folks walking up and
down the streets that look as if they're communicating with
folks that I can't see. Some are having a full conversation.
They seem to see or hear things that I can't.
(01:06:56):
Are they crazy or are they tuned into some other universe?
You know the multiverse theory? Are these multiverse? Are they
spread out across the universe? Well, it's multi universes. Are
they spread out on a plane or are they stacked
(01:07:17):
up on top of each other. Somebody once described it
as soap bubbles, you know how they form in the sink.
Could these people that we consider to be crazy actually
be seeing something that is there because they're tuned to
a different frequency. Are they really crazy or are they
(01:07:42):
just special? Think about that the next time you see
somebody carrying on a one sided conversation and they don't
have a cell phone. Hope you enjoyed tonight's show. If
you did, tell your friends, Tell your neighbors, Tell the
people you can't even stand to talk to. They should
be listening to Strange Things with Chris James. If you're
(01:08:06):
listening on one of the many platforms that I seem
to be on and you somehow get the impression that
I know what I'm talking about, you'd like to hear
more of the show. You can find all of the
archives at iHeartRadio in the archives in the podcast section.
(01:08:27):
If you don't like what I'm saying, why are you
still listening? Till next Saturday? This is Chris James.
Speaker 1 (01:08:47):
Are you are you coming to the tree?
Speaker 2 (01:08:52):
Well? Shut up?
Speaker 1 (01:08:53):
A man who is says murder, true stands have happened
by no stranger would be a stant at the knight
in a hanging tray,
Are you Are you coming to the truth? Well, Shungam
who says she murdered true.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Jos.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Things have happened that no joner will be a Mamam
holling truth.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Welcome to the show. I'm your host, Chris James. Coffee, Coffee, Coffee, coffee, coffee.
That sounds crazy, but that's kind of how I look
at the world. I like to look at the world
through the bottom of a coffee cup, as opposed to
(00:57):
the bottom of a bottle of booze. No one ever
got in trouble for drinking too much coffee. To get
the best coffee in the universe, you need to go
to Organic Man Coffee Trike four or five zero one McPherson.
That's if you're here in Laredo. If you're not in Laredo,
(01:20):
you can go to Organicmancoffeetrike Dot shop. If you can't
get from there to hear, go online. That's the new
way of doing things. I was listening to Paranormal Rundown.
(01:41):
Vic Hermanson was talking about a patient that he was
treating one day that kept saying there was someone else
in the room, someone Vic couldn't see. This patient may
have been crazy, but Even crazy folks get sick or
injured one once in a while, and a good nurse
(02:02):
will take care of them. Vic told the patient that
he could not see or hear what this other person
was saying, and so they were going to have to
relay everything. When dealing with crazy people, never pretend like
(02:23):
you can hear or see what they can hear and see.
Both will get you unwanted responses. Buying into a crazy
person's delusions is dangerous. Crazy is defined as very foolish,
(02:47):
senseless or strange, extremely excited, enthusiastic, wildly irrational, or incoherent.
Here in Laredo, we have more than our fair share
of crazy people. I probably offended someone with that. Don't
(03:10):
call them crazy, they might be offended. That's mean to
say crazy. In the fifteen hundreds, the word crazy meant
to be sickly or infirm. A century later, crazy was
(03:30):
used to mean insane or demented. To me the word
police are all crazy. Politically correct means oppression from the government.
The First Amendment of the United States Constitution prevents Congress
(03:51):
from making laws respective to the establishment of religion, prohibiting
the free exercise of religion any of y'all remember the
Black Plague of twenty twenty, or abridging the freedom of speech,
the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly, as
(04:15):
long as it's not violent, for the right to petition
the government for redress of grievanceances. I see nothing that
says that you can't call a person crazy. There's nothing
that says you have the right not to be offended.
(04:36):
Common sense is what should guide us on what to
say or not say. If I see some guy eating
roadkill on the side of the road, or maybe even
sitting at a table, that is crazy, it would also
(04:56):
be crazy for me to say so to that person.
Durn cat. Anyone crazy enough to eat things found on
the ground is probably crazy enough to try to kill me.
Common sense is in short supply these days. What is
(05:17):
crazy and what is something else? At what point does
a person's actions step over the line. I've done some
things that others consider to be crazy. I'm fairly certain
I am not crazy, But then crazy people don't know
(05:37):
they're crazy. My wife probably thinks I'm crazy. I know
a few guys at work that figured i'd stepped over
the line. The trick is to be sure to step
back on the bike patrol. We tended to do things
to try to impress each other, while at the same
(05:59):
time I risking life and limb. There used to be
a staircase that ran next to the bridge. It ran
down to the parking lot with a bend in the middle.
It was about thirty feet down, not long down. The
trick was to slow down just before you hit that
(06:22):
turn so you wouldn't go over the handrail. Yes, I
rode down those stairs. No, I did not kill myself.
Most people watching us must have thought those boys are crazy.
Seth Alvo does things on a bike that I think
(06:43):
are crazy. He has a channel called burm Peak. He's
also twenty seven years younger than me. It's worth watching
him do some of the crazy stunts he does on
a bike. The nice thing is he will also show
(07:03):
you how to fix your bike once you've messed things up.
Is he crazy to me? Not that crazy to my wife.
He needs help. Seth knows he is doing crazy things,
but he enjoys doing them and he is good at it.
He's not crazy, he just does crazy things. I started
(07:30):
to say that here in Laredo we have more than
our fair share of crazy folks. While up visiting San Antonio.
I asked a couple of police officers about this. They
told me to not quote them, but it was policy.
If any one of a less than balanced nature was
(07:52):
found living in the great outdoors, an urban out doorsman,
as it were, the crazy person was escorted to the
bus station given a one way ticket south. The city
that is straight south from San Antonio just happens to
(08:12):
be Laredo. On the bike patrol, we were right there,
close to everyone. There no vehicle to separate us from them.
In a unit, we have the doors with windows that
kind of isolate you from everyone else. On a bike,
(08:33):
you are present and easy to talk to. I met
a lot of crazy folks while on the bike patrol.
William thought he was a woman. He dressed the part
using whatever he could find at some of the local
used clothing warehouses. It's amazing how much they throw away.
(08:56):
Every day. He would go through their trash and pick
out the parts that he liked. If you want to
dress like a woman, at least shave. William usually had
a few days growth on his face. His wig came
from an old mannikin like from the sixties, and it
(09:20):
was blonde, and he wasn't. He would sit in Jarvis
Plaza and he would play an acoustic guitar that had
a speaker duct taped to it. He couldn't play music
as far as anyone could tell. He didn't have a
singing voice either, but then he didn't really know the
(09:41):
words to any of the songs or the sounds that
he was making. The thing is, he seemed to be
quite happy being who he was. He told us about
his accomplishments around town and how he was working his
way up. He did sleep on the front steps of
(10:02):
the courthouse, but he was never a problem as far
as us or the police were concerned. He was never
in any fights. He didn't drink or do drugs. It
was just that his elevator didn't reach the top floors.
He never told us about having any family anywhere. There
(10:25):
must have been someone somewhere out there wondering whatever happened
to their son, or their brother or that member of
the family. Did he wander off one day after forgetting
to take his medication. Was he placed in some facility
somewhere because the family got tired of his antics? And
(10:51):
did he get released because some judge decided he was
not a threat to himself or others we don't know.
You could ask him all kinds of questions and he
would only answer the ones that he wanted to. He
wasn't all that old. He was only about maybe thirty
(11:13):
at the most. Once I was moved to another detail,
I lost track of most of the interesting people. They
all tended to stay close to the Jarvis Plaza area.
You might could say Jarvis Plaza was a magnet for
interesting folks. Was William really convinced that he had two
(11:39):
x's and not an x y? Did he look in
the mirror and not see the same image that the
rest of us saw? Was he really convinced that he
was a woman or did he want it so badly
that he was blocking out all of the guy stuff.
(12:00):
He was crazy, but he wasn't a problem. If I
had to live in a world with folks like him around, well,
it wouldn't be that bad. It would just be a
little weird, not like some of the others that we
had to deal with. On the other hand, if I
were surrounded by guys like, oh, say, Elisha Revis, things
(12:26):
could have been way too interesting. Elisha Marcus Revis was
born in eighteen twenty seven. After graduating from an Illinois
teachers college. He taught school briefly in Illinois. Not finding
his place in life, Revs moved to California, where he
(12:47):
taught school at Elmonte. He soon lost interest in teaching
and decided to try his hand at gold prospecting. He
spent most of the eighteen fifties looking for gold, and
he joined a group of adventurers and prospectors headed for
the Bradshaw Mountains in the Arizona Territory eighteen sixty three.
(13:12):
Revs had little success in the Bradshaw's and he returned
to California in sixty six. He married Mary Sexton December thirtieth,
eighteen sixty seven, in San Gabriel. They had two children.
The daughter was named a Luisa Marie. The sun didn't
(13:33):
last very long. Revas returned to Arizona Territory in the
fall of sixty nine. His uncle Eisham had just been
appointed assistant Chief Justice of the Territorial Supreme Court. Revus
traveled to La Pause with Aisham, but separated and traveled
(13:54):
on alone to Vulture City. He spent enough time in
Vulture City to appear on the US census report August twentieth,
eighteen seventy. His name then appears in Fort Dowell, OH
Fort McDowell area. It is believed that Revas settled on
(14:15):
a horse ranch north of town in Verde River, where
he trained horses. He may have ridden with the army
as a civilian between eighteen seventy and seventy two. He
knew the area around the Superstition Mountains quite well from
his time with the military. He was familiar with the
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valleys there, and one of them was eventually named for him,
Revas Valley. Some say that he served as a deputy
marshal in McDowell, having been appointed by his uncle. Just
a little bit of nepotism there. Eighteen seventy five and
eighteen eighty census report showed a lacious State living in
(15:00):
Fort McDowell. At this time he was living in the
Superstition Mountains, but traveling back and forth. Maybe he only
filed his home as being Fort McDowell, but he had
a cabin in the Superstitions. The Apache considered the Superstition
Mountains as sacred. That's how they got their name. This
(15:26):
was where the spirits lived. Anyone desecrating the land would
wind up minus one head back. When Peralta first began
mining the gold, many of his men wound up sin
Cabasa headless. How was it that Reeves could live on
(15:49):
the mountain without becoming a dead guy? To begin with,
he was very good marksman. He carried in eighteen eighty six,
thirty eight forty as well as two cult forty fives.
The Apache did consider him an interloper, and they decided
to do something about it. Armed to the teeth, they
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set out to remove Revs. During the first attempt, three
warriors were killed. The Indians pulled back to regroup wait
for Revs to either run out of ammunition, food, or water.
Revs wasn't into waiting soul. He removed all of his clothes,
(16:39):
He stripped down his nakedness. He grabbed a butcher knife
in each hand, and he attacked. Picture this Sicily nineteen
thirty two. No Superstition Mountain, eighteen seventy eight. You're camping
with a bunch of fellow warriors. Went out of the
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dark ark comes a naked white guy, screaming at the
top of his lungs and brandishing two knives. He ran
into the camp and the Indians all ran out. The
Apache were convinced that Revs was insane. They decided it
was best to leave him alone. From that night on,
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Revs was known as the White Devil. Any time the
tribe was in the area, they made sure to give
Revus a wide berth. Crazy people were believed to have
supernatural powers. Revus charging into the camp the way he
did convinced the Apache that he was not human more
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than human. Some say this was just a ploy by
Reevus to keep the Apache away. Others believe he was
truly crazy. At night, he was seen running around the
mountain naked, shooting at the sky, trying to shoot out
the moon. Revs was a well read man. He'd been
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a school teacher, after all, he knew a lot about
the world. He also liked to be alone. He grew
his own food, hunted for meat, and once in a
while he would ride into town to visit. Eighteen ninety five,
Revas was almost seventy years old. His health created a
(18:32):
few concerns among his friends. James Dalibou often checked in
on Revs, and Revs told him that he was fixing
to ride into town for supplies. When Dalibo heard that
Revs hadn't arrived in town. He returned to the mountains
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to check on him. Dalibo found the remains of the
old hermit just off the rogers Case Canyon in what
is now known as Grave Canyon. Was Revas really crazy
or just eccentric? The crazy act did keep the Apache away,
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but was it an act or did Revas have some
issues upstairs? He did like to run around naked that
night in the mountains where there were snakes and coyotes
and mountain lions and other hungry beasts hunting. Does that
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make him crazy or just is he living life to
its fullest? The running around naked, I don't know. It
sounds kind of attractive, but not in Oloredo you get
sunburned all over. Diogenes was born in four hundred and
three BC and Sinope in Paphlagonia on the Black Sea.
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He was the son of Hyssius, who was a money
changer authorized to exchange foreign currency for local cash. As
a child, the Diogenes learned to read, write quote both
epic and tragic verses, while also being trained in athletics
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and horsemanship. His dad had cash, so he didn't have
to learn a trade. Once he was old enough to work,
if that's what you want to call it. Diogenes began
an or He became an epimletus, which is a magistrate who,
(20:42):
depending on where you were in the world, that was
what you did for a living. You were paid to
do something something in the government. His father was accused
of defacing coins. He would take foreign coins and restamped
them to make them worth more money. This led to
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the old man being thrown into prison and Diogenes was exiled.
Depending on who you listen to, it may have been
Diogenes who had done the dirty deed and his dad
just took the fall for it. Once he said that
he had asked Apollo's oracle and Delphi how he could
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how he could gain renown. The oracle replied, I'd alterate
the currency, which he took to mean that he should
counterfeit coins. The exact date of Diagenes's departure from Sinope
is uncertain. It is also uncertain whether he was banished
(21:49):
or exiled, or if he simply fled in order to
avoid prison time. Diagenes exile marked a turning point and
the moment of profound spiritual conversion in his time being
separated from one's homeland and thus denied the honor of
being buried with one ancestors, was seen as a tragic fate.
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Diagenes rejected this sentiment, embracing exile as the ultimate detachment
from worldly ties. A Plutarch said the hardship of exile
transformed Diogenes into a philosopher. The noble exiles like Odysseus
(22:37):
and Heracles, about whom Diogenes wrote, served as models of
exemplary behavior. Diogenes also claimed an encounter with a mouse
revealed to him the value of a simple life, since
the rodent is capable of adopting itself to just about
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any circumstance. Diogenes, now, keep in mind he's a homeless
exile owned a slave named Manus. Since Diagenes was now
living in poverty after fleeing Sinope, Manus must have been
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a part of his earlier life, rather than a slave
bought once he arrived in Athens. When the slave decided
he'd had enough and left, Diogenes dismissed his ill fortune
by saying, if Manus can live without Diogenes, why not
Diogenes without Manus. Through freedom comes from detaching oneself from
(23:46):
possessions and desires, so even owning a slave could be
seen as a form of a self enslavement. Diogenes spent
his winters in Athens, taking shelter in a jar epithos,
which must have been large enough to at least fit
(24:07):
his body. Look at the folks pushing shopping carts around
town and picture them living in huge cardboard boxes, a
kind of the same thing, except cardboard hadn't been invented yet.
When the weather got too cold, he would move to
a better climate. Diageeny's life was marked by radical self sufficiency,
(24:32):
passivity to fate, and an indifference to suffering. He went
barefoot and used his tunic as his betting. He openly
engaged in behavior that defied social norms, such as fondling
himself in public to the extreme, spitting or even urinating
(24:56):
on people. He supported him self by begging, which he
saw as fair compensation for his role in challenging society's values.
I've seen some homeless guys that act like that. The
Athenians held this man in high regard, even replacing his
(25:19):
jar whenever it got broken. One day, he discarded his
drinking cup after watching a boy drink water using just
his hands. Diogenes said he had no idea that you
could do it this way until he'd seen someone else
do it. He was also known to wander the marketplace
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by day, holding up a lit lamp. He would tell
people he was looking for a man. In his later years,
he carried a walking stick when he left town, a
symbol of both his itinerant lifestyle and public authority. Ancient
(26:02):
texts report that he visited various other cities, which helped
shape his reputation as a wandering philosopher. He admired Sparta,
yet he employed his trademark method of teaching through criticism
while there. When a Spartan cited hesidious Hesiods Hesiods verse,
(26:27):
Nor would the ox die if the neighbor were not evil,
Diogenies retorted, But the Messenians and their oxen have died,
and you are their neighbors. Diogenes Other travels remain mysterious.
He visited various cities in Asia Minor, especially Miletis, known
(26:50):
for its rich intellectual history. He may have journeyed for
philosophical reasons, though the exact details are lost. Nobody ever
bothered to write down most of that or if they
did write it down, it's lost to time. While on
a voyage to a Gina, he was captured by pirates.
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Diogenes was sold at a slave market. As he stood
there surveying the crowd, he told the auctioneer that he
needed to sell him to a man standing in the crowd,
because that man needs a good master. Zeni Otis bought
(27:35):
Diogenes and turned him into a teacher and an overseer.
Diogenes did such a good job that he was eventually
set free. Instead of returning to Athens, he stayed on
in the street near a gymnasium that was named the Cranium,
on the outskirts of town, overlooking the harbor to Diogenes.
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According to Dionysius, the Stoic, Diogenes was taken prisoner in
three point thirty eight by Philip the second of Macedonia
during the Battle of Coriona. Amused by the audacity of
the captive, Philip decided to release him. July three point
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thirty six, Diagenes attended the one hundred and eleventh Olympic Games.
When a herald announced that this man has defeated that man,
Diogenes yelled on the contrary. He only defeats slaves, while
I defeat men. When asked if he had come to compete,
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Diogenes replied that he was there to take part in
combat of human ills, anger, mistrust sadness, desire, and fear.
At the Isthmus Games, he crowned himself victor by placing
a pine wreath on his own head. This kind of
pissed off the Corinthians, who removed it. Diagenes met Philip's
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son Alexander the Great in three point thirty six, when
Alexander was proclaimed commander of the expedition against the Persians
at the Isthmus of Corinth. Plutarch said, when Alexander arrived,
Diogenes refused to join the formal greeting, and instead he
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stayed in his usual spot in the cypress grove outside.
Alexander engaged him in conversation that later became quite famous.
At the approach of the king and his staff, Diagones
sat up a little and fixed his eyes on Alexander.
When the king greeted him and asked if there was
(29:58):
anything he wanted, Diogenes replied, yes, you should stand a
little farther away out of my son. Alexander was so
impressed by this and the arrogance and the grandeur of
a man that could treat him with such disdain, that
he told his followers, I tell you this, If I
(30:23):
were not Alexander, ah, I would be Diogenes. Would Alexander
the Great have a Southern accent? Well? He was from
southern Greece. Some sources claim that Diagenes died June tenth
or eleventh, three point twenty three BC, the same night
that Alexander the Great died. The exact location of his
(30:47):
death remains disputed, and kind of like how they lost
Alexander's body. In ancient Greece and Rome, a philosopher's death
was often seen as a final state meant on their teachings.
Diogenes's death, with its imaginative and various accounts, became a
(31:08):
controversial as his indifference to his own burial. Tell Us said,
in tribute to Diagenes, what difference is there between being
consumed by fire, devoured by dogs, left above ground to
be preyed upon by vultures, or buried below ground to
(31:32):
be eaten by worms. A bronze statue of Diogenes was
erected in Sinope after his death, with a poem from
Phylliscus of Igenia At the base. The poem says, even
bronze is aged by time, but not all the ages.
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Diogenes will destroy your fame, since you alone show mortal
the rule of self sufficiency and the easiest path through life.
They used to speak really weird back then. Now was
Diageny's crazy or just colorful? I've met some folks who
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lived life to the same way, moving about with little
to nothing, yet garnering the respect of those they met.
I've also run into a few who looked as if
they had everything except brains. They didn't have things, their
things had them. He who dies with the most wins,
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Really who is crazy? The old guy living out in
a field somewhere in a camper or a little cabin
and driving an old youthesed pickup and having all his
bills paid and not owing anyone anything. Or the guy
living in the big mansion who owns so much money
to everyone that he has to work fifty sixty seventy
(33:05):
hours a week just to pay for all the toys
that he can't even play with because he doesn't have
any time. I still don't speak French, so as I
butcher the language. Just remember those ancestors that I thought
I had from France actually came from Germany. Tarrare was
(33:30):
born in or born near Lyone, around seventeen seventy two.
His exact date of birth was unrecorded, and it's not
even known if Tarrari was his real name or just
his nickname. As a child, he had a huge appetite,
and by his teens he could eat a quarter of
(33:53):
a cow that weighed as much as he did in
a single day. Let's just say he weighed about eighty pounds.
Being a teenager in France in the seventeen hundreds, probably
that's a bit much. Folks who were a bit smaller
back then, and the French weren't a diet of cake.
(34:14):
Well that's what Marie Antoinette told them to eat. This
would mean that he ate about twenty pounds of meat
in a day. Terrari's folks couldn't afford an eating machine.
They could barely feed themselves, so they sent him on
a quest go look for the meaning of life the universe,
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and well, you know, I believe it was more like
get out and stay out. Terrari toured the country with
a roaming band of thieves and prostitutes, stealing or begging food.
At some point he was taken on as a warm
up act to a traveling charlatan. You know, snake oil
(35:00):
salesman kind of thing. Terrari would draw crowd by eating corks, stones,
live animals, swallowing an entire basket of apples one at
a time. He ate ravenously, and he was particularly fond
of snakes. Seventeen eighty eight, Terrari moved to Paris to
(35:24):
work as a street performer. He was usually successful, but
on a few occasions the act went wrong and he
would wind up with severe intestinal obstructions. Members of the
crowd had to carry him to the Hotel Dew hospital,
(35:44):
where he was treated with powerful laxatives. A largehy blows.
I'll bet that was a fun job. Try to imagine
who the poor character was that had to take care
of him. He did make full recovery, and he offered
to demonstrate his act to the surgeon by eating his
(36:07):
watch and chain. The surgeon said nay nay. Despite his
unusual diet, Terrari was slim and of average height. At
the age of seventeen, he weighed about one hundred pounds.
He was described as having unusually soft, fair hair and
an abnormally wide mouth. His teeth were heavily stained, and
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his lips were almost nonexistent when he had not eaten.
His skin hung so loosely that he could wrap the
fold of skin from his abdomen around his waist. His
body was hot to the touch, and he was always sweating.
(36:54):
I worked with a guy like that named Victor, now Victor,
not Victor, but Victor. He was always sweating, even when
it was cool out. Terrari he had a foul aroma
that hung over him, making anybody within twenty paces quite uncomfortable. Yeah,
I worked with a few guys like that. The smell
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became noticeably worse after he ate. His eyes and cheeks
would become bloodshot, and there was a visible vapor rose
from his body. He would become lethargic, after which he
would usually belch a lot, and his jaws would make
(37:37):
chewing motions, kind of like a dog with distemper. My dog,
George had distemper, and it looks like he's always chewing gum. Now.
They didn't have toilet paper at the time, and Terrari
had chronic diarrhea. Which probably only added to the smell.
(37:59):
You had to use whatever you had at hand, and
usually it was your hand after going to the bathroom.
Talk about smell, I understand Paris was quite a smelly town.
I understand it still is. Despite his large intake of food,
he did not appear to vomit excessively or to gain weight.
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Aside from his heating habits, his contemporaries saw no apparent
signs of mental illness or unusual behavior. The cause of
Terrari's behavior is still not known. There are other documented
cases of similar behavior. None of the subjects other than
Terrari were autopsied, and there have been no modern documented
(38:45):
cases resembling him. Hyperthyroidism can induce an extreme appetite, rapid
weight loss, profuse sweating, heat intolerance, and fine hair. A
damaged amygdilla is known to induce polyphasia in animals, but
(39:09):
not necessarily humans. In seventeen ninety two, at the outbreak
of the War of the First Coalition, Tarri joined the
French army. I'll bet he fit right in with the
rest of the folks. Military rations were insufficient to satisfy
(39:30):
his appetite. He would carry out tasks for other soldiers
in return for his share of their rations, and when
that didn't give him enough food, he would stavage in
the garbage for scraps. This was still not enough to
satisfy him. He was admitted to the military hospital at
(39:51):
Salts Sasfarets. I know that's not how it's pronounced, but
that's how it's spelled, Salts South Forerets was a case
of extreme exhaustion. He was granted quadruple rations, but remained hungry.
He scavenged for garbage in gutters and in trash containers.
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He ate the scraps of food that were left by
other patients, and he crept into the apathecary's room to
eat the polefases that would be the pharmacists and the
medication military surgeons could not understand his appetite. Terrari was
ordered to remain in the military hospital to take part
(40:35):
in psychological experiments designed by doctor Carvelle and Pierre Francis Percy,
a surgeon in chief of the hospital. Carveli and Percy
decided to test Terrari's capacity for food. A meal had
been prepared for fifteen men that were working near the hospital. Generally,
(41:00):
the hospital staff restrained Terrari whenever there was food around,
but this time Carvelli allowed him to reach the table undisturbed.
Terari ate the entire meal of two large meat pies,
plates filled with grease and salt, and four gallons of milk,
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and then he fell asleep. Carvelli noted that Terri's belly
became distended like an inflated balloon. On another occasion, I
need to cover my cat's ears, all eight of them.
I don't have eight cats, I have four cats, but
that means eight ears. Terrari was presented with a live cat.
(41:49):
He promptly tore the cat's abdomen open with his teeth,
drank its blood, and ate the entire cat aside from
the bones. Then he vomited up fur like a giant
hair ball. I say they should have put a bullet
in the boy's head. No one should treat an animal
like that, especially a cat. Following this, the hospital staff
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offered Terrari a variety of other animals, including snakes, lizards,
and puppies. Now the hospital staff needs a bullet in
the head too. Who behaves like that? Well, Terrari ate
everything that was given to him. He also swallowed an
(42:35):
entire eel without chewing. He just crushed his head with
his teeth and then slipped it down his throat. After
several months spent as an experimental case, military authorities began
to press for Terrari to be returned into active duty.
Doctor Carvelli was keen to continue investigations into Terrari's eating
(42:59):
habits and his digestive system, so he told Tilled General
Alexander Baharness that he had an idea that Terrari might
make a good courier. They could send him behind the
enemy lines and have him eat the enemy army. No, no,
(43:22):
he was supposed to be a courier. The idea was
they would give him a message inside a small wooden box,
which he would swallow. If he was captured by the enemy,
they would not find the box because it was inside
his abdomen. A few days later, he would simply pass
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the box and then they would have the note. So
they set up a test. Carvalley showed Barhanas that Terrai
could indeed swallow a box with a note in it.
After a few days, he would poop it back out.
Somebody would have the unpleasant duty to clean this little
(44:09):
wooden box off and take out the message, which they
could then read well. His first assignment was to carry
a message to a French colonel that had been imprisoned
by the Prussians near Nostat. Terrari was told that the
documents were of great military significance, but in reality bah
(44:33):
Harness had merely written a note asking the colonel to
confirm that the message had been received successfully, and if so,
that he should return a reply with any potential useful
information about the Prussian troop movements. Terrari crossed Prussian lines
(44:55):
under the cover of darkness, disguised as a German peasant
unable to speak German. He soon attracted the attention of
the locals, who alerted the Prussian authorities and he was captured.
A strip search found nothing suspicious on him, and despite
being whipped by the Prussian soldiers, he refused to portray
(45:19):
his mission. He was brought before the local Prussian commander,
General Zeigli, who again he refused to talk about his
secret mission. Well. They locked him up for twenty four hours,
and finally Tarri relented, probably because he was hungry, and
(45:41):
he explained the scheme to his captors. They chained him
to a latrine, and after thirty hours he passed the
wooden box. Zogli was furious when the docs, which Tarrari
(46:01):
had said contained vital intelligence, turned out to be only
Baharana's dummy message. So Tararri was taken to the gallows
where he was going to be the guest of honor
at a necktie party. The noose was placed around his neck,
but then they decided not to kill him. I don't
(46:24):
know why they just did. I hope this was the
true story, because the other story, which the fake message,
was never seen by the Prussians. Instead, the second story
goes that Tarri did indeed pass the box through his bottom,
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but he immediately grabbed it, put it back in his
mouth and swallowed. Now that's just gone from being crazy
to sick. Either way, Serrari was not hung. Instead, they
gave him a thorough head to toe beating, and then
(47:06):
they set him free near the French border, just to
prove that he wasn't indeed crazy. TERRARII was desperate to
avoid any further military service, so he went back to
the hospital, telling Percy that he would attempt any possible
cure for his overabundant appetite. Percy treated him with a laudanum,
(47:32):
a derivative of I believe it's Is it heroin or
is it cocaine laudanum? I can't remember now. Anyway, they
gave him laudnum. It was a liquid with a very
potent drug suspended in it. They used to give it
to kids for teething pain. Not only did it stop
(47:52):
the pain, it stopped the breathing too well. The loudum
didn't work. They gave him wine and vinegar to drink.
They gave him tobacco pills. None of this worked to
turn off his appetite. When everything failed, Percy fed Terrari
large quantities of soft boiled eggs, like in Cool Hand Luke,
(48:17):
but this also failed to suppress his appetite. Lucas Luke
Johnson ate fifty hard boiled eggs so he could win
a bet. If you haven't seen the movie, well it
was cool. Paul Newman played Luke, and he didn't actually
eat fifty hard boiled eggs, but it sure looked like
(48:40):
he did. Efforts to keep Terrari on any kind of
a control diet all failed. He would sneak out of
the hospital to scavenge for guts outside of butcher shops
and to fight straight dogs for rotting meat in the gutters,
alleys and rubbish heaps. He was also caught several times
times in the hospital drinking the blood from patients who
(49:05):
were undergoing blood letting. He would also attempt to eat
bodies in the morgue. What did I say about him
not being crazy? I think he was. Other doctors believed
that Terrari was mentally ill, and they said that he
should be transferred to a lunatic assignment asylum, but Percy
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was keen to continue his experiments, and Terrari mained and
remained in the military hospital. A fourteen month old toddler
disappeared from the hospital late one night. Terrari was immediately
suspected of having consumed the child. Due to his eating
(49:54):
anything else, Percy was now unable or unwilling to defend
him when the hospital staff chased Terrari from the hospital,
to which he never returned. In seventeen ninety eight, m
to Sare of the Versailles hospital contacted Percy to notify
(50:15):
him of a patient that wished to see him. Terrari
was now bedridden and weak. He told Percy that he
had swallowed a golden fork two years earlier, and he
believed that it was now lodged inside his intestines, causing
his current weakness. He hoped that Percy could find some
(50:38):
way of removing it. Percy realized that what he actually
had was the white plague, what we call tuberculosis today.
A month later, Terrari began to experience extreme diarrhea, and
then he died shortly after. The corpse immediately began to rot,
(51:04):
which is really weird. The surgeons at the hospital refused
to dissect it to sair wanted to find out how
Terrari's intestines differed from those of normal folks. He was
also curious as to whether that gold fork was in
there somewhere. At the autopsy, Terrari's gut gullet was found
(51:26):
to be abnormally wide the throat, and when his jaws
were opened, surgeons could see all the way down into
his stomach. He had a Class one for intubation scale.
Some of y'all will understand that his body was found
(51:47):
to be filled with pus, which is dead white blood cells.
His liver and gall bladder were abnormally large, and his
stomach was enormous, covered in ulcers, and it filled most
of the abdominal cavity. There was no fork found inside anywhere.
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Was he crazy? I would say yes. Anyone willing to
eat anything that had just passed through the exit point
of anyone else for themselves has to be crazy. Anyone
that would try to eat another person has to be crazy.
What caused him to eat everything? Some kind of weird
(52:30):
overdriving force was in control of his mind? Or was
it just he had an overpowering urge to eat? And
how was it he was able to burn off the
calories so well? Way back when I lived in Seabrook,
Texas now, there was a young lady that lived in
(52:52):
League City, but she would walk back and forth several
times a day. You'd see her hitchhiking on twenty ninety four.
She dressed like a teenager, a mini skirt, t shirt
that was way too tight, some kind of tennis shoes.
Her hair would be in braids, and sometimes she would
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be seen skipping along the side of the road as
if she were having the time of her life. Other
times you might see an old lady walking with a cane.
She would wear a knee length dress, well actually it
came down just below the knees, and clunky shiny shoes.
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She would wear a pill box hat with a veil
on it and white gloves, something out of the sixties.
Every once in a while you'd see her dressed as
if she were heading out on a really hot date somewhere,
with a fancy ball gown or a fancy dress which
(53:57):
kind of looked weird at one o'clock in the afternoon.
We called this young lady Sybil, as in the movie
A Sybil was a case of split personality based on
a true story. Well, it turned out that our Sibyl
had a lot of folks living in her head, but
(54:19):
she didn't know any of them. One or two of
them claimed that they didn't know her. Then there was
the one who knew everything. This personality said that she
was not homicidal, but that one of the others was
(54:39):
a murderer. On occasion, we would see Sybil at the
local steakhouse. She would saunter in and ask for a
table for two. Once seated, she would begin looking at
the menu and carrying on a conversation, which on occasion
would turn into an argument. If if it got really heated,
(55:02):
that Sybil would storm out the door, demanding the other
person pay for everything. The manager never got upset it
could be dangerous to confront this young lady. Instead, the
manager had a phone number to call, which got her
in contact with Sibyls folks. They would drive over and
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pay for the food and any damages. Sybil's real name
was not Sybil. I'm not going to say it because
certain laws against that sort of thing. She was actually
thirty five years old at the time, and she had
two kids, both of them were living with her parents
(55:47):
because of a court order. One of the guys I
worked with thought it would be fun to go out
with a girl who was split personality like that. He
said it would be like having a dozen girlfriends all
at once. Well, he turned out to be sorry. She
(56:11):
used the bathroom in the middle of his bed. Number two.
She messed the whole place up. She took food out
of the refrigerator and smeared it all over the walls
and the ceiling, and she wrote on the walls in doodo.
Then she blamed everything on one of the other personalities.
(56:36):
Then there was Bob, not his real name. I'll give
his initials in case anyone from the old Country Seabrook
is listening. His initials were l H. Bob was a
bit off as well. I first met him walking along
(56:59):
Highway one forty six before I had joined the Border Patrol.
He was dressed in a pilot's uniform and I thought,
well he was, you know, like maybe his car had
broken down. So I stopped and I gave him a ride.
You used to do things like that back then. He
said that he was working at Ellington Airfield. I dropped
(57:22):
him off and I thought, well, that was my good
deed for the day. Later I discovered that Bob was
not all there upstairs. He decided he was going to
kill himself by jumping from an overpass. Well, it wouldn't
have killed him. It probably would have just broke his
leg or two. He also tried jumping off of the
(57:45):
local water tower. He tried all kinds of ways of
killing himself, and some of them were actually dangerous. He
became what is known as a frequent flyer in the
ambulance two or three times. He said one time that
he'd been bit by a rattlesnake, but they couldn't find
(58:06):
any fang marks anywhere. Another time he drank an entire
bottle of poison. Well, it turned out to just be
I think it was vinegar. Every couple of days the
phone would ring and it would be Bob, or Bob's
friend or Bob's parents. Well, not only was he not
(58:30):
all that well upstairs, but he was also sometimes violent.
One day he was screaming and throwing bottles at cars
as they went by. Now the police did try to
keep him under control, but it was a small town
and sometimes they would only have one officer working. Bob
(58:51):
throwing bottles around and screaming, wound up stepping on a
broken piece of glass and cut his foot pretty badly.
Having spent so much time in an ambulance, he had
learned a few things about ems. He got some tape
and a splint. Well, the tape was duct tape and
the splint was a two foot long two by four. Wait,
(59:16):
first thing to do is to see if you can
seal the wound. So he took an entire tube of
crazy glue and he smeared it on the bottom of
his foot. He then stepped down on the two by
four and he wrapped his leg from the knee to
the toes in duct tape looked like a red green project.
(59:38):
When the police finally got there, he tried to run,
but that two by four, well, it just held him
in place. The doctor at the hospital left the board
glued and taped in place. Every doctor within a hundred
miles of town knew this guy, and a lot of
(59:59):
them were a a little tired of treating him. If
it wasn't an actual life threatening case, they would refuse
to allow him into the hospitals. One day, Bob swallowed
one hundred and nine pennies, one of those huge rodeo
belt buckles, a handful of double edged razor blades, and
(01:00:24):
a few other items. Then he began to complain that
his stomach hurt, and so he called for an ambulance.
A stomach ache doesn't necessarily get you into the emergency department,
at least not back then. He wound up being shipped
(01:00:45):
out to Odessa for treatment. And the funny thing is
rumor has it that the doctor working at the emergency
room recognized him. When I was a firefighter, I wanted
to be on the hose. That's where the fun, the excitement,
(01:01:07):
and the danger was was I crazy, maybe a bit.
As far as most of my fellow firefighters was concerned,
I was insane. If it was as bad as it
could get, I was in the heart of it. I
used to melt faced shields all the time. Maybe that's
(01:01:29):
why today the parts of me that don't hurt or numb.
One night we had a call. It was a house
fire on Meyer Road. I don't know why I remember
the name. It was four blocks south of where the
fire station used to be. Well. I wound up getting
(01:01:50):
stuck as the driver, which meant I was also going
to be stuck as the pump operator. I hated being
outside when all the on an adventure were on the inside,
where life could be snuffed out in a second. Okay,
maybe I was crazy. As I pulled out of the
(01:02:12):
station and turned onto main Street, I could see flames
up over the top of the trees. I could see
them shooting straight up into the sky. They were blue.
I immediately told the guy on the passenger seat to
call a second, maybe a third alarm. I was thinking,
(01:02:34):
maybe we need mutual aid. And I wasn't even close
to the fire yet. The flames were about thirty five
feet in the air above the trees. As we rounded
the corner onto Meyer Road, I could see that the
building was fully engulfed and fire was going to be
on the driver's side of the truck. Ninety five percent
(01:02:57):
of the time it's on the passenger side. Just one
of those things, so the pump operator never sees the fire.
All he sees is the pump panel. Well today, well tonight,
that night was my not lucky night. As I opened
the door and jumped out of the truck, the heat
(01:03:17):
overwhelmed me. I had to grab my coat, which pump
operators never wore their coats. I also had to put
on my gloves to work the pump panel. Maybe I
shouldn't have parked so close to the fire, but old habits,
you always parked right next to the building that was
on fire. You never had a fire that was so
(01:03:40):
hot it heated up the pump panel. There was no
choice of entering the structure. The flames were coming out
every window, doorway, shooting through the roofs, straight up in
the air. It looked like a rocket was trying to
fly into the ground. The assist stint chief was doing
(01:04:01):
a quick check to see just how bad it was,
and he tripped over a wire that was invisible in
the darkness. All the light was up, not down. Well
he uh, he got up and took a couple of steps,
and he dripped over another wire and tripped over another one.
Every three feet there was a wire coming out of
(01:04:23):
the house at a forty five degree angle, going down
to a ground peg. Once the fire had burned itself out,
there was no putting it out. All we did was
we protected the houses on either side of it. Inside
what was left of the house was a bunch of
(01:04:43):
oxygen bottles, you know, the big ones, the M one
fifties one hundred and fubic one hundred and fifty cubic
feet of oxygen. There were a few in every room.
All along the outside walls were coils of burned copper wire,
big piles that had all the insulation burned off. The
(01:05:06):
coils were lined up with the ground wires that the
assistant chief had been tripping over. We found the owner
of the house and questions were asked, why were there
so many ground wires, what was up with all those
coils of wire and the big ones, and why were
(01:05:26):
there so many two bottles in the house. Well, it
turns out this guy worked at NASA. He was a
genuine rocket scientist. He had built a giant electromagnetic field
to keep the space aliens from talking to him. He
(01:05:49):
didn't mind them talking to him telepathically during the day,
but at night he wanted to relax. As for the oxygen, well,
he would come home and he would flood the interior
of his house with pure oxygen to maintain his mind
and body. He worked at NASA, he must have known
(01:06:14):
about Apollo one, you know Grisom Chaffy White burned up
in a pure oxygen environment because of a spark. This
rocket scientist had torched his home. The thinking it can't
possibly happen to me. Who's the crazy one? Now? Me
or the guy with the oxygen and electricity living in
(01:06:36):
a wood framed home. I see folks walking up and
down the streets that look as if they're communicating with
folks that I can't see. Some are having a full conversation.
They seem to see or hear things that I can't.
(01:06:56):
Are they crazy or are they tuned into some other universe?
You know the multiverse theory? Are these multiverse? Are they
spread out across the universe? Well, it's multi universes. Are
they spread out on a plane or are they stacked
(01:07:17):
up on top of each other. Somebody once described it
as soap bubbles, you know how they form in the sink.
Could these people that we consider to be crazy actually
be seeing something that is there because they're tuned to
a different frequency. Are they really crazy or are they
(01:07:42):
just special? Think about that the next time you see
somebody carrying on a one sided conversation and they don't
have a cell phone. Hope you enjoyed tonight's show. If
you did, tell your friends, Tell your neighbors, Tell the
people you can't even stand to talk to. They should
be listening to Strange Things with Chris James. If you're
(01:08:06):
listening on one of the many platforms that I seem
to be on and you somehow get the impression that
I know what I'm talking about, you'd like to hear
more of the show. You can find all of the
archives at iHeartRadio in the archives in the podcast section.
(01:08:27):
If you don't like what I'm saying, why are you
still listening? Till next Saturday? This is Chris James.
Speaker 1 (01:08:47):
Are you are you coming to the tree?
Speaker 2 (01:08:52):
Well? Shut up?
Speaker 1 (01:08:53):
A man who is says murder, true stands have happened
by no stranger would be a stant at the knight
in a hanging tray,
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