Creepypasta 2: Disturbing Smiles & Lidless Eyes

You asked for it, you got it. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Christian return to the Creepypasta files and discuss some actual science behind the "Jeff the Killer" tale of mutilation and madness. Why do fake files creep us out? Are people really opting for permanent, surgical smiles? Could fictional Jeff get his eyelids replaced and how does this dark tale mirror reality? Find out.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from housetop works
dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Land and I'm Christian Savior. Yeah
all right, everybody, you ask for it, so you got it. Um,
everyone can really dig our creepy popta episode that we did,

(00:25):
Uh yeah, we expect. We did it back in October,
doing our our slew of Halloween themed science the episode
that's right. Yeah, And so if you haven't listened to
that one yet, I recommend you go back and listen
to it. But the basic premise was, uh if creepy
pastas are short horror stories that are kind of memes
written for the Internet or just based on images for

(00:45):
the Internet, right, and we took I think three of
them that were very science e oriented. It turns out
a couple of these things are are basically like such
and such thing happens in a mad laboratory, Chaos and sues, crazy,
experience gets out of hand, people pull their skin off,
people can't sleep, that sort of thing. And we used
it as a springboard to talk about actual science that

(01:09):
not so much the science behind the creepy pasta, but
the science that can still if you follow the tracks
of the science from the Creepy Pasta, then you can
get to some some really cool studies and whatnot. Yeah,
so we took a look at three of them and
then there was a really positive response to that episode.
So we have been recommended over. You know, actually this
is a good opportunity to plug the ways to contact us.

(01:31):
People have contacted us on Facebook, on Twitter, on tumbler,
and then have emailed us directly asking us, hey do
more creepy pastas. Uh, and specifically they wanted us to
cover something called Jeff the Killer. And I was totally
unfamiliar with this until it was sent to us. Uh
and uh, I gotta I gotta be honest, It's not exactly,

(01:52):
uh my favorite of the creepypostas I've read, but I
can see why it's compelling, especially it's largely based off
of just like a single image that looks like a
photoshop kind of creepy joker thing. Yeah, and the image itself.
I was sort of following the the leads. They're like,
where did it come from? And it's one of these
things where you know, somebody on some message board manipulated

(02:12):
an image someone else manipulated it, and then there's there's
some creepy tales about what the underlying image was. So
some of that is kind of compelling in the sort
of weird, creepy pasta Where did it come from? Let's
touch on that just a little bit further. So Aneline
Knew It's over at I O nine has an article
the uh that is basically like the expose of of
potentially where the image came from. And apparently some folks

(02:35):
over at four chan did some detective work and they
found out that the image that Jeff the Killer is
based on is a photoshopped image of a girl who
was being bullied. Uh. Was she being bullied on the
internet or in real life allegedly anyway, I don't know
to what extent that all, and and killed herself due

(02:56):
to the bullying. This is the again another story. There's
been no evidence to bring this up other than that
that there seems to be some connection and they they
brought up the photo and yet does it looks like
it's the original photo that this was photoshopped off? So
even the origin story of this image, this manipulated images
kind of kind of goes into like the creepier arthor

(03:16):
side of the Internet, which I think adds to its
it's appeal. Yeah, um, yeah, I get it. I mean
I don't know that it's necessarily true or not. I'm
like pretty sure Jeff the Killer itself is not true,
and we are not going to if you want to
read it, you know, stop the podcast, Google Jeff the Killer.

(03:36):
It's on the Creepy Pasta site. But the gist. You
want me to just throw the summary out there right now?
Uh yeah, I will. I do want to mention that
that this is one that, like some of the creepy
pastas out there, it's gotten to the point where authors
will step forward or authors or saying I wrote this
from the very beginning. This is one that does not
seem to have an attributed author. If I'm wrong on that,

(03:57):
let us know and we we'll give you know, proper
credit where it to do. But this one seems to
this is an older one. It seems to just they're
different versions of it. Most of them are not not
not not not the most well crafted bits of fiction. Yeah,
as with most creepy apastas, the the idea I think
is interesting with the prose execution kind of falls apart

(04:21):
a little bit. And I think that's part it, right,
because it's like, this is something it must be true.
It's written so poorly, right, it's like the Wikipedia stories. Yeah. Yeah,
it feels like it was written by five or six
different people who have come in and kind of punched
up certain sections drop And that is kind of the
magic of the true creepypasta. You know, it shouldn't read like, um,

(04:41):
you know, a beginning horror rider is just dumping his
his whole draft on the internet. Yeah, that's true. Um So, okay,
this is the premise of Jeff the Killer. Uh So,
there's this character named Jeff uh and he's a teenager
and he uh is like subject to leeing. He and
his brother. There's there's some implication in the version that

(05:04):
I read that there's like a switch that goes off
in his brain that kind of like unleashes his dark
primal side or something like that during this bullying. Uh
And there are multiple incidents in which, like he confronts
the bullies and basically beats the living hell out of them,
and then they show up at like a party or something.
There's another incident where they hold him at gunpoint in

(05:25):
front of his parents and other people. Uh and and
and basically torture him and it causes his face to
be burned. And so following this he goes insane and
joker style from the dark Knight cuts a smile into
his cheeks so he has a permanent smile, and then
he burns off his own eyelids so that he can

(05:47):
always see this smile. Uh. And then he subsequently you know,
this is the like an origin story myth of a
serial killer who goes from house to house. Uh and
before he kills his victims, he says, go to sleep.
I should also add no relation to killer Mike. Yeah, none,
none that I know of, though Jeff the Killer is
the supporter of Bernie Sanders. It turns out okay, but no. Um.

(06:11):
The funny thing is is that so the story sort
of starts off as like a from the perspective of
somebody who's about to be killed by Jeff the Killer,
and then it kind of flings backwards and reveals the
origin of Jeff the Killer. Um. And it so you're
probably listening to this and going, where's the science? What

(06:32):
would possibly be about those of you out there who
are like these guys have gone a little bit over
the deep end with the monster horror stuff. We we
actually did a little bit of digging, and it turns
out uh not Jeff the Killer wise. But there's three
topics that we want to touch on here. Uh. One,
people giving themselves permanent smiles and the science of fake

(06:53):
smiling and how our minds react to it. To the
idea of eyelid replacement surgery, which is apparently much bigger
of a thing than I thought it would be. Yeah,
I mean it's a it's a rather complex procedure and
an important one in terms of reconstructive of plastic surgery.
And then the third one is that there's there is
a strong reality of acid attacks out there. Uh. And

(07:17):
it's it's largely common in countries uh in like Afghanistan, Cambodia,
I believe, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. All of these countries have
like pretty high incidents and I was shocked to find
out how often this happens. So well, we'll touch on
that briefly. Yeah, and that is that's going to be
you know, some dark, real life stuff there at the end,

(07:39):
but I encourage you to stick with it. We actually
had a discussion about whether we should actually discuss that, Like,
is it is it right to start a podcast off
with something kind of light and stupid and end up
in a dark and serious place. But I think so.
I think it's It's a topic that's worth if you're
not familiar with it, it's worth becoming familiar with this topic.
And this is probably one of the better opportunities for

(08:01):
us to discuss it, because it's not the kind of
thing we would do an entire episode on for this show. Yeah,
I agree. I mean I wasn't. Um. I was familiar
that this was a thing that happened occasionally, like that
I would hear about in the news, But when we
did the research for this episode, I was shocked to
find out how frequent it is. And uh, yeah, I
think it deserves, you know, some time on this episode

(08:23):
and for people to learn a little bit more about it.
I'm glad that I learned a little bit more about
it doing the research. So let's uh, let's let's start
off with the smiling thing. Okay, So this is a
recurring motive in our fiction, the idea of a sort
of creepy smile, right, um uh, it comes up over
and over again. Obviously, The thing most people think about

(08:45):
is the Joker for the Batman Villa and the Joker,
which varying depictions either like the dark nightyas the Glassgow
smile yeah, the Glassgow grind where it's been cut in
other times as a frozen grin ye, and what he's
wearing a like a face. Recently, I haven't really been
keeping up. Yeah, I think I haven't read that storyline either,
but my understanding is, yeah, he had his own face

(09:09):
cut off and then sewed it back on in a
smile it. But then I think they've already read contact,
so he's like that was just like for a year
or two or something, they but they basically wanted to
like up the gross out horror factor with a Joker,
and I think they've scaled back from that, probably because
they have that Suicide Squad movie coming out later this
summer with Jared Leto as the like punk rock uh

(09:33):
kid rock version version of the Joker. Yeah, and the
creepy fake smile. We you know, we encounter that throughout
our myth cycles. One of the one of the ones
that I really have been impressed with. And this is
a recent phenomenon dating back to around nineteen seventy nine
and Japan's uh Nagasaki prefecture. Uh. This is uh the

(09:55):
the urban legend of the slit mouthed woman or Kuchasaki
Ona and uh basically the urban legend is that this
this woman was mutilated by her husband. Um. She he
like slits her the corners of her mouth. So she
has this slit uh slit face and her ghost wanders around,

(10:17):
comes up with people and ask do you think I'm beautiful?
And it's apparently like a whole program of how you respond, uh,
like if you say yes, she'll kill you one way,
if you say no, she'll kill you another. Um. But
you know, it's very well versed in this sort of
grotesque fake smile. Yeah. Yeah, so this seems to have
particular resonance in Asian cultures. Um. So there's that myth

(10:40):
I think of Ichi the Killer that MK a movie, UM,
which I guess is probably part of the inspiration for
where that Christopher Nolan Joker came from the idea of
the Glasgow We should probably explain what a Glasgow smile is.
Obviously the idea of the street gangs in Glasgow would
slice your face, uh, but give you a fake it
was sort of like their way to mark you. Uh,

(11:03):
and I was surprised. I think the actor, I think
his name is Tommy Flanaganda from Sons of Anarchy. Yeah, yeah,
he actually has like somebody did that to him. Yeah,
I had no idea he was I think a DJ
back in the day because assaulted leaving the club. Wow. Yeah,
well yeah, so that's a real thing. Um yeah, each
of the killer And then we're gonna find as we're

(11:25):
talking about it, like there's a big plastic surgery movement
in South Korea that's connected to this sort of enhanced
fake smile as well. Yeah, And of course if you
want to see a fake smile, you don't have to
turn to ghost stories and other cultures because they're everywhere,
right the politician, the car salesman, um me. Yeah. So

(11:46):
like you know, I try my best and I guess
our stuff to believe in my promotion with those, but
I'm terrible. I'm one of those people that's just terrible
at smiling and photographs. And my wife teases me about
it all the time that I'm like that I look
even creepier when I'm trying to smile, and it's that
it's that thing where I'm smiling with my mouth but

(12:07):
not with my eyes. Yeah, it's because the smile, as
it turns out, is far more complex than just that
fake smile, and we can tell when somebody's fake smiling.
And I mean, it gets complicated, but it basically comes
down the way I always think about facial expressions is
your face is a communication array. You know, it's not

(12:27):
just about voice, it's not just about body and movements.
It it's it's about you know, where your eyes are looking,
what you'r what, all the expressions and micro spressions, how
they're coming together to communicate with another. Uh, facial communication array. Yeah.
In nonverbal communications studies, Uh, outside of just body language,

(12:47):
like the broad study of body language, facial communication is huge,
and it adds a ton to how we communicate with
one another outside of you know, our our verbal communications. Right, Like,
think about when you're talking on the phone, It's it's
much more limited compared to when you're talking to someone
face to face and you can actually see the different
ways they're communicating. I'm like waving in my face right now. Yea.

(13:10):
And of course these are the problems inherent in both
podcasting and email communication, especially So essentially though, there are
two types of smiles then you can think of as
the fake and the genuine smile. So first you have
the doucheen smile. And this is named for French physician
Gillama Duchen, who in eighteen sixty two conducted a slew

(13:31):
of experiments essentially electrocuting people's facial muscles into outrageous grins.
See like, we didn't really have to go too far
from Jeff the Killer through science to get to something
just as creepy electrocuting people's faces into smiles. Yeah, science
is inherently weird. So in these cases, the electrical current
activates contractions in two muscles, the voluntary zygomatic major, which

(13:55):
raises the corners of the mouth, and the involuntary orbicularious oculi,
which raises the cheeks and spreads crowth's feet across around
the eyes. And that's really that's the that's the part
that jin generates the idea of the real smile, right
at the crow's feet and the cheeks raising up um.
There's have also been research There has also been research

(14:17):
done that patients with damage to their motor cortex and
their brains left hemisphere. They can only smile asymmetrically, with
the right side not moving the way it should uh.
And here's the trick, though, if they laugh spontaneously they
smile normally, they they'll do one of the douchen uh
smiles without asymmetry. So likewise, when a patient with damage

(14:42):
to their anterior singulate, which is part of the limbic
system UH in your brain, when they try to smile,
there's no asymmetry. It's symmetrical. Uh. This whole thing leads
to the hypothesis that the fake smile, what is sometimes
referred to as the say, cheese smile, is controlled by
the mos or cortex, where the duchene smile is actually

(15:03):
controlled by the limbic system, which is the actual emotional
center of the brain. So it's two different parts of
the brain interacting. And not only does our brain generate
the smiles differently, but it responds to other people's versions
of these smiles differently. But of course this is because
so essentially we've we've outlined here that there is the
genuine smile, there's the fake smile. But of course can

(15:25):
we tell the difference are creepy smiles creepy because we
can see through the con well. A two thousand thirteen
study from the University of La Laguna, Spain investigated and
they found it on first glance test, subjects had a
very hard time recognizing that fake smile, which surprised me
because there are fake smiles out there that you you

(15:47):
look at it, and maybe it's more a matter of
projecting on that person, like this politician is smiling, it
must be fake. That's funny than you said, politician, because
that's where I immediately go to as well. Yeah, the
dead smile of certain politicians. But yeah, there's another study
that was done out of North Eastern University in Boston
that found that two thirds of individuals can fake a

(16:08):
deucene smile well in a way that people can't distinguished,
They can't tell whether they're fake smiling or real smiling.
I'm not one of those two. I'm know I'm the
one third that can't do it because whenever I do it,
it looks like, you know, I'm dead inside, like I
look like Jeff the Killer. Well, then there's also this
I feel like there's this feeling daily interactions. Um, not me,

(16:32):
any of it, just everyone is that fake smiles are
kind of uh expected fake smiles, fake laughter. So sometimes
you're you're chatting with somebody and there ha ha, they're laughing,
they're smiling, and on some level I know that this
interaction is either maybe not completely fake but at least
punched up. Uh, And it feels okay because I expect that. Yeah,

(16:55):
it is sort of the motions of every day like
human beings just trying to get it along, right. And
then there's sometimes maybe this says something more about me,
Like every the audience is gonna learn today that I
can't actually fake a smile and that I get irritated
by people who do fake smiles. But like I'll be
sitting there and overhearing kind of those you know, those
conversations where I know one person is angry at the

(17:16):
other person, but they're they're faking their way through it.
They're smiling, they're doing the kind of fake laughter that
to just kind of make their way through the conversation
and get get away from conflict, right, avoid conflict. That
drives me crazy. I'm conflict oriented, I guess, But yeah,
it is it's it's it's every day. It's every day
for human beings. Um, and it's there's tons of studies

(17:38):
into this. Like when we dove into this, I thought, oh,
well that you know the Jeff the killer smile things.
Sure there's gonna be a little bit of research into
the fake smiles. But it was like a sea of research.
I think we only script the top of it here. Yeah,
now to to return to that that Spanish when study
I was mentioning just a second ago, they found that
the longer they looked at the individual, the longer the
longer one person looked at the other person, uh, taking

(18:01):
in all the details of the expression, the more they
saw through uh the ruse. However, in the cases, test
subjects ultimately classified ambiguous smiles as happy, since their eyes
were drawn more to the smile than to the eyes.
And that probably has something to do, I would imagine.
With these were both done in Western societies. There's an

(18:22):
aversion to looking at people's eyes too long in Western culture.
In facial communication as well. I used to talk about
this with my students when I would I was teaching
communication classes that like, if you you know, obviously you're
expected to maintain eye contact for a certain amount of
times so that you can convey your interests, right, But
if you just stare directly into a person's eyes while

(18:44):
you're communicating and don't unlock. It becomes very uncomfortable pretty quickly,
right Uh, And so I wonder if that has something
to do with it as well. But also like the
crow's feet thing, right, Like that's a detail that becomes
more obvious the longer that you're staring at somebody too. Yeah,
maybe I didn't stop staring at you this whole time.
Yeah he didn't. He held he kept committed to the bit,
and I was the only one who got to stick

(19:06):
to it. I find myself in certain situations, Uh feel
I feel like I'm playing a game of like staring
chicken with someone, and I'll become super conscious, am I
staring too long? It? Should I be breaking my eyes away?
How uncomfortable am I? And then sometimes I think, should
I just keep staring to maintain to like wine? And well,
that's there's something to that as well, and we'll talk

(19:28):
about in a second. Uh. But the whole thing is
super confusing to our brains too, right, Like, think about
our poor brains, Like it's trying to process generating these smells,
but then it's trying to also process like interpreting whether
these smells are genuine or not? Right, Uh, and U
c l a scientist named Marco I A. Caboni, I
believe it's how it's pronounced. Uh. He noted that our

(19:49):
brains are actually, you know, wired for sociability. That makes sense.
We're social animals, and if we observe another person smile,
it mirrors the neurons in that person's brain. They will
light up in our own brains as if we are
smiling ourselves. Right, So there's that idea too, that like
the smile is contagious, and then which we're we're going

(20:10):
to talk about as well today, that the smile itself,
whether it's genuine or not, generates happiness. Yeah. So yeah,
the the issue is is not as cut and dry.
Now that being said, if the smile fake smile is
cut into the person's face, yeah, you're probably gonna catch up. Yeah,
your brain will probably figure that one out. For the
rest of us though, dealing with just normal fake smiles, Um,

(20:32):
you're probably wondering, how can you consciously detect one? Well,
we already mentioned that it's a little problematic, but according
to body language expert Nicholas Freed, it you look at
the crow's feet. Okay, look to look for their bottom teeth.
If you can't see them, might be a fake smile. Yeah,
what that makes sense? Like, I guess when I think
of like really emphasizing the fake smile to the point

(20:53):
of like making it creepy on purpose, that's when you
like you really like bite down on the teeth and uh,
demonstrate your your your lower teeth. Yeah, I could see that,
but then like you've got to keep those those eyes dead.
No crow's feet. I wonder if people who know who
you know, naturally through aging or whatever, just have more

(21:13):
crow's feet are better at the faking thing. I don't
know that. I'm sure there's somewhere that we missed on that. Yeah.
So yeah, basically, the the involuntary movements of the orbicularious
oculi or key here. This can cause the eyes to close,
while fake smilers often keep their their upper face very still,
and that doesn't work. It might He's a media lab

(21:35):
has developed an algorithm that allows machines to pinpoint fake
happiness and frustration as well, which leads to a whole
bunch of uh, you know, potential applications in our our
cybernetic future. Right, you can have some sort of app
in your your eyeball or your glasses that can cue
you into fake. Yeah. It's it shows like the RoboCup display,

(21:57):
Like it shows the basis face and then like a
little thing comes up in It's like this person is faking. Uh. Well,
let's get into the faking part. Uh. There's some actual
science to the fake it till you make it. Uh,
you know idea of making yourself happy. Yeah. A two
thousand twelve study from the University of Kansas studied how
smiling influences are recovery from stressful activities, and they found

(22:20):
that a genuine smile resulted in faster recovery time and
a more relaxed state. But even a fake smile can
force your emotional state to follow suit. Yeah. I think
this is the same study. I read a couple of
different studies, but I think this this is the one
you're talking about. The title has Grin and Barrett the
influence of manipulated positive facial expression on the Stress Response,

(22:41):
which is a pretty hilarious title of a Tara Craft
and Sarah Pressman. Uh and they is this the one
where they use chopsticks? Yeah? Okay, so they use chopsticks
to manipulate the facial muscles of a hundred and sixty
nine different participants, and from my understanding, they did it
in a couple of different ways. I'd I didn't get
to see any like images, and I'm assuming they must

(23:02):
have taken pictures of video or something that went along
with this. But some of them they bit down on
the chopsticks. Others they like put the chopsticks in their
mouths horizontally, so it was pushing uh, their their cheeks up,
I think, um. But the general idea here was that
they had three different positions that they put their faces in.
There's the neutral expression, a standard smile, and the Duchen

(23:26):
smile uh. And then they subjected them when they've got
these chopsticks in their face, they subjected them to stress
inducing multitasking activities uh. And obviously this is more difficult
when you've got chopsticks shoved in your mouth. Uh. And
the results were basically that those who were instructed to
smile recovered from the stressful activity with a lower heart

(23:48):
rate than those with the neutral expressions. So the Deuchen
smile is the one that makes you the most relaxed.
That's kind of weird. Um, regardless of how you're actually feeling,
it will generate that relaxing feeling in you. And so
there's lots of other studies that seem to indicate that
the just smiling thing can produce a happy feeling. Uh.

(24:09):
And from our own home based site how stuff works
dot com, there's a article about the smiling happiness thing. UH.
It says that in nine nine Robert Zajenck I believe
I don't know how to pronounce that name z A
j O n c q uh sounds Eastern European to me. Um,

(24:29):
So sorry Robert. Uh. But he published a study where
he had his subjects repeat vowel sounds over and over again,
forcing their faces into various expressions. This is kind of
like I guess like isometric exercises, um, and so to
mimic a smile, they made an E sound to stretch
the corners of their mouth outward. Then they also tested

(24:51):
a long you sound, which is kind of like I
guess you, which forced the mouth into about And then
they reported their feelings after this, and of course, after
doing the E for a long time, they felt good,
and after doing the U sound for a long time
they felt bad. Now, his research proposes that there's a

(25:12):
physiological connection going on here between the facial changes and
the brain activities that are associated with happiness. And he
goes deep here. He says, Uh, the internal carotid artery.
This is the pipe that's kind of like above your mouth.
It delivers the majority of blood to the human brain.
It flows through an opening in our heads called the

(25:32):
cavernous sinus. And this contains a lot of our facial veins, right.
So the idea is that when we're smiling, those veins
are constricted and that cuts down on the flow of
blood to our brain. Uh. And this makes the temperature
in our brain drop, the blood of or at least
the blood drop. The idea here is that the cooler

(25:53):
your brain is, the better your emotions are going to be.
They're going to be good emotions, according to research, whereas
a war mer brain produces negative emotions. Interest. That's pretty wild. Yeah,
so um. His theory was basically that the reverse is
also true, that that when your muscles are frowning, that
increases the blood flow, which makes your brain warmer, which

(26:15):
makes it more difficult to be happy, which is interesting.
You know, I guess I think about like the temperature
uh differences of various areas of the world where people live.
There must be some kind of studies on like whether
people who live in the Arctic, for instance, are uh,
you know, more likely to be happy than I guess
like people who live near the equator. Yeah, but yeah,

(26:37):
I don't know to what extent they look to this
area that we're discussing here, which is essentially the like
the temperature constraints on the physical mechanisms of of facial happiness.
I believe that that's the same mechanism that causes brain
freeze to like when you're having like ice cream or

(26:57):
popsicle or something like that. I think it. Uh. We've
done research on this for an episode of brain Stuff,
the video show that Joe and I write on uh,
And I believe that that artery is what causes brain
freeze that like the at least I think that is.
You know, when you say that you and Joe have
done research on this, I'm imagining you guys going out front,
the two of us just eating ice cream until it

(27:19):
hurts so much and then like putting our heads in
m r I machines. Uh, if only, if only, but
so it gets even crazier. Okay, so we've got chopsticks
shoved in the face. We're talking about ice cream, right.
What about botox injections? Oh yeah, So if you inject
botox into your face, there's been research that shows that

(27:39):
it dampens your emotional responses, specifically the ones that paralyze
the small wrinkle causing muscles around the eyes, the crows feet. Yeah,
because you are interfering with the physical communication of emotion,
but in this week weird sense, it's also affecting how
you feel. Like we tend to think like here's the

(28:00):
puppet master and here's the puppet and we think that
everything's going on with the puppet Master is authentic and
everything on the outside is just it's shadow, it's expression.
But it's like the mind body connection. If everything is
is is hooked together, everything is connected here. Yeah, definitely,
to the point that it not only reduces your happiness,
it also reduces your depression as well. Um. So basically

(28:22):
what they did was they showed people who had had
botox injects and injections quote happy videos. So I'm imagining
this is like cats or something like yeah, uh, and
they recorded their emotional response to these things, and they
found that, yeah, both their depression rate and their happiness
rate were lowered. The effects were minder though, So I

(28:42):
don't want to like paint the idea here that people
turn into like emotionless robots when they get botox injections.
But they also did a study on the botox thing
at the University of Cardiff, and they found that the
people would smile injections, so that this is different from
the crow's feed injections. Uh, they're happier on average than
people who can frown with a botox uh. Scientists at

(29:05):
the Technical University of Munich also found that when they
scanned botox recipients with f m ri I machines while
those people were mimicking angry faces, they found that they
had much lower activity in their brain circuits involved with
emotional processing than those people who had not received botox treatment.
So it is possible that maybe we would feel less

(29:27):
pain if we weren't physically able to express it. So
that's kind of an interesting turn of events on the
whole botox Yeah. Yeah, you think it goes one way
and then it flips the other here and then we
should of course mentioned that all of this goes back
to like the The granddaddy who who postulated a lot
of this was Charles Darwin, and he proposed way back

(29:47):
in eighteen seventy two that facial expressions don't just reflect emotions,
but they caused them as well. Uh And he actually
is quoted as saying the free expression by outward signs
of an emotion intensive is it? And he observed this
in babies, and he said that babies that are born
blind smile the same as babies that are cited. And

(30:08):
the reason why, he thought was because at five weeks old,
babies start learning to smile. And the reason why is
that we learned that crying gets the attention of an adult,
but smiling keeps them there. So whether you can see
or not, you're able to um realize that that that
has some kind of a cause and effect. Alright, one

(30:29):
more thing I briefly mentioned this. So there's a connection
between people who fight, uh and sort of like dominance
in men specifically, and smiling as well. Research has been
done that shows that fighters who smile authentically at another
fighter before match are more likely to lose that match.

(30:49):
Uh And and it's somehow linked smiling is somehow linked
to testosterone, Like our thought of how much testosterone you
have is linked to how authentic you're smiling. Uh. And
so I gotta wonder, like what does that do to
the whole fake smile system? Right? Does it indicate strengthen
or not? Uh? And smiling also can sometimes indicate dominance, right, Like,

(31:11):
if you're in a position of power, you may be
smiling authentically the other person because you can, right. Yeah,
Like I'm thinking, I'm instantly thinking of say brock Lesner smiling,
and if it's a fake smile or a real smile,
either one is terrifying if I'm in the wrong scenario
with brock les Yeah. They even found that the chimps

(31:32):
have two different kinds of smiles. They have a submission face,
So this is maybe a more interesting way for us
to think about our smiles. The submission face where their
lips are retracted and their lips are exposed. So this
is sort of like the equivalent of a dog like
laying down on its back right exposing it's it's belly. Uh.
And they have a playface where their lower jaws dropped
in the corners of their mouth are pulled back. But

(31:54):
so they have a whole dominance thing going on as
well with their smiles. So it's yeah, it's interesting you
bring this all back to Jeff the Killer. Uh. If
Jeff the Killer's smile is fake because he's cut it
into his own face, then the fake smile won't necessary.
I guess that does necessarily indicate that he's more dominant, right,

(32:15):
because the real smile would be submissive, and maybe he's happier.
I don't know, he might be. Yeah, yeah, all right,
we're gonna take a quick breaking when we come back,
we're going to discuss some more smile science. We're gonna
discuss some some reconstructive surgery, and uh, eventually get to
this episode's more dark real world world conclusion. Hey, everybody,

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to get ten percent off your first purchase and a
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website with square Space. All right, we're back. We're talking
about killer Jeff. I mean, we're sort of talking about Jeff.
We're talking about scientific topics that that stem from contemplation

(33:45):
of this particular creepy pasta. Yeah, and we've hit a
lot of the smile science. But of course, you know,
some of you out there are wondering, is there any
science behind carving a smile into your own face? Is
there joker science? Because most depictions of it are it's
pretty crude, right, it's and it's the horror of like, oh,
facial mutilation. And this isn't a real smile at all.
This is like the worst, right I even think, like

(34:07):
I read like there's like one rumor that the photoshopped
image of Jeff the Killer like uses like parts of
a wolf's mouth. Maybe it's just a dog, but in
order to make the rictus look a little bit creepier.
But hey, it turns out that lots of people are
doing this, not like in their own bathroom with like
a carving knife or anything, but there is a whole

(34:29):
culture surrounding the plastic surgery of giving yourself a permanent smile. Yeah,
it just sounds familiar. It is because in August The
Atlantic reported on a growing surgical trend in South Korea.
Valentine angulo plastic also known as valentine mouth rejuvenation or
a corner of the mouth lift. And so it's apparently

(34:52):
called this because of the heart shape that it makes
when the muscle tissues are removed at your lips edges um.
If those of you out there, you know, like the
cupid's bow part of the mouth that I I know
this just from like drawing classes and like learning anatomy
and how to draw mouth and stuff. Cupid's bow is
sort of like the middle of your mouth, I guess,

(35:12):
like that area is sort of highlighted because of the
removal of the areas at the edges of the lips.
Each one of these procedures costs two thousand dollars, which
I don't know anything about plastic surgery, but to me,
I was like, that's cheap. That's I don't know. Yeah,
is it cheap? I don't I don't know. Maybe maybe
plastic surgery is less than I thought it was. I
don't think I would I would be able to really know.

(35:34):
Is that is that Korean? Or I think that's the
Korean procedure? Yeah, see, I see, I don't know. I
can't really frame that in the reference of of Korean
surgical costs, but over there I feel like that would
be cheap. It seems like it. Yeah, um, okay, So
this brings us back to that Glasgow grin Glasgow's smile
we were talking about earlier. Yeah, it's a it's a
little reminiscent of that, except you know, go ahead and

(35:55):
cast away any of the more grotesque ideas here, because yeah,
we are talking very slow light augmentation. Yeah, this isn't
This isn't Heath Ledger's joker like, like, how do you
think I got these scars? Kind of thing, like you
can barely tell from the photos that I saw. Yeah. Now,
of course, one of the things that that comes to
came to mind when I was reading about it is
that it's easy for these when you have a report

(36:19):
coming out of something that is supposedly a trend in
a foreign country, sometimes things get a little blown out
of proportion. For instance, I always always come back to
the bagel head thing. This was where which we have
an awesome post about on stuff about dot Com. Yeah,
it's a it's a fun one. But this was in
Japan where a few individuals, like a handful of people

(36:40):
have had silicone and injected into their head and to
make a forehead forehead to make a bowl. Yeah, just
under the skin and then they pressed their finger in
it and it kind of makes a bagel. Um. And
very few people have done this, but some of the
initial reporting, granted not The Atlantic but other other places reported,
oh says everyone is doing this, as if all the

(37:01):
teens in Japan are going out and having so any
time I read about a surgical procedure in another country
that if they trend, uh, you know, I always sort
of put my warning lights on a yeah, And I
do have to note, like none of the pieces I
read for this I don't think they gave numbers on
how many people were getting this done, but they did
say that it's very popular with people who work in

(37:23):
customer service. Yeah, like you know, flight attendants, secretary. I mean,
you can imagine any situation where that that facial communication
array interface with a client or a customer is vital.
And these are largely people in their twenties and thirties too.
I thought, probably because they're in that customer service sector,
they're being told like, you're not happy enough for for

(37:46):
the for the job or whatever, and so they get
this procedure done so they can make a career out
of it. Of course, there's a horrible thing to be
told I'm sorry, not happy enough for this job, but
the worst Like I kept thinking about that too, because
that's I don't know about you, but like as a kid,
I always got that like you don't smile enough kind
of thing, like why don't you smile more? That sort
of thing from teachers and stuff. And I know that

(38:07):
that's uh even worse for women, Like it's such a
gendered thing like, oh, you should smile more, you know. Um,
So I imagine that this probably plays into the angle
of plastic Yeah, so, um would definitely with the twenty
and thirty year olds. You're talking about people with with
naturally downturned mouth corners, and they're essentially just getting things

(38:27):
perked up a little bit. But also this surgery has
applications for aging people where you have downtrent turned corners
of the mouth and sort of downturned up lines in
general due to just facial aging. And so one of
the things that I read, I think it was a
Wall Street Journal blog post about this kind of surgery.
They stated that this has actually been around for over

(38:50):
fifty years in medical circles, and it was done here
in the West, but apparently very few plastic surgeons over
here performaive anymore. So that's curious to me. I wonder, um,
why not? I wonder. I wonder what it is about
Korean culture versus you know, Western culture that makes it
acceptable or not acceptable. I'm sure we have listeners who

(39:12):
are coming in or of a Korean descent who might
be able to give their own two Yeah, I would
love to hear more about it. And you know, um,
maybe somebody out there's got one of these. I don't know,
but I'm just curious about the whole thing it. I
have to say, like, I'm overall usually kind of dismissive
of the idea of plastic surgery, but in this case,
I can see, like I sort of well, I mean

(39:32):
plastic surgery and the cosmetic this is an easy This
is an easy thing to to to to fall in
that line on because because I feel like in our culture,
plastic surgery is often just the go to word for
unnecessarily plastics. But as we're as we're discussing this episode,
there's of course a larger plastic surgery that deals with
with with either you know, either correcting birth defects of

(39:54):
varying degrees or are dealing with injuries of varying degrees.
But again, pla surgery in the headline sense, it seems
like it always ends up referring to something that is
purely um, you know, purely cosmetic. But the but anyway,
the the idea of this particular surgery, Uh, it's really
interesting because on one hand, it's easy to look at

(40:15):
it and say, well, hey, you're getting a fake smile,
you're manipulating the natural facial expression of emotion. But the
counter argument is that, especially with age related negative lines
like those are warping your natural facial expressions. Those are
messing with your ability to convey your emotions through and
and communicate through your facial communication array. Yeah, and and

(40:38):
also how it's received to right, Like, So, like we
were talking earlier before the break about how people see
smiles and perceive them in uh, the kind of happiness
that that generates, or even like the kind of happiness
that just smiling on its own generates. So I'd be
curious to see a study on Valentine angled plasty and

(40:59):
the level of happiness amongst the people who have received
it versus I guess you know, they would have to
use like a h control group of people who don't
have it. All right, so we we've talked about smiles already,
But of course that's not the only, um, the only
aspect of Jeff the Killer here, right, So raises aren't

(41:21):
The story goes that in order to I guess see
how lovely his face is all the time, Uh, he
burns off or cuts off his eyelids. Um, And that's
not something that you normally see uh people do to themselves. However,
there are lots of occasions in which eyelids either need
to be replaced or fixed through surgery. This is a

(41:44):
good example of what we're just talking about with corrective surgery,
or people have been in like really horrible accidents and
need to have grafts put on because eyelids are an
important thing. Yeah, I have to admit that this is
an area that's it's fascinated fascinated me since I read
Larry McMurtry's novel Comanche Moon. So this isn't I'm not
familiar with this, all right, Well, it's it's ano same series,

(42:06):
the Lonesome Dove series, So there with those characters like
they they are in this book. It's like it I
think it comes before. It definitely comes before. But if
you if you haven't read it, you've probably maybe you've
seen it a bookstore and it just looks like a
big dick Western novel, right, But I have to tell
you it is. This is a weird book in respects

(42:27):
if he's just a lot of Comanche horse mysticism, and
there's a whole lot of torture and flaying, and in
particular there's a an already weird Texas Ranger character named
Captain Innish Skull. He winds up captured by a band
at warlord and then his tortures. Um there, you know,
they busied himself deciding just how much skin they're going

(42:48):
to remove from their various captives, and they finally decide, well,
we're just gonna take his eyelids. So they cut off
his eyelids so he can't turn his head away from
the horrors of the sun. But he eventually escapes in
the book, and he crafts a special set of glasses
with a system of varying shades to click through in
order to regulate the amount of light entering his eyes.
So it's it's really almost a kind of crazy, almost

(43:11):
steampunk notion. That is not what I would expect from
a lonesome dove book. Yeah it is, though it is
a weird, great a great book. I've tremendously enjoyed it. Well,
So eyelids themselves, though, you know, they do more than
filter light, right, So, I mean that is one of
the important features. Though, I mean you can't squint, you

(43:31):
can't you can't adjust to the lighting. It's always just
wide open all the time. Huh. So I'm guessing, I
guess what I'm trying to wrap my head around in
both of these fictional examples, is what what that would
do to the eyeball, Well, you would It definitely plays
into some of the other key reasons to have eyelids,
to begin with, moistening the eyeball via blinking, spreading to

(43:54):
your across the surface of the eyes, especially the moist cornea.
So like maybe as goggles need to like have a
little bit of i don't know, like a moisture trapped
inside of them. Yeah, yeah, like some sort of like
little clockwork orange squeezies on the side. So you know
that this is what Jeff would need in order to
turn his life around. Also, your eyelids protect your protected

(44:14):
just stuff from getting in there, all sense of debris
that's gonna blow around in the wind and help they
help keep perspiration out of the eyes as well. So
the key risk here is exposure care atopathy, which is
excessive dryness due to revealed eye especially during sleep. So
and and this is interesting as well, we'll discuss there

(44:35):
are surgical methods to either replace eyelids or to correct
eyelids that have either there's a birth effect or it's
an agent related to symptom. But without going into those surgeries,
the best you could do is to apply at nightly
dressing to the eyes, like with using bubble patches or
swim goggles, even to ensure that the eyes stay moist. Right, Yeah,

(44:59):
So you gotta wonder about this Jeff the killer myth
then that like, uh, you know, he's already kind of
a crazy serial killer who has done all this terrible
stuff to his face. But like, uh, he'd have like
some real eye problems unless he'd like put some swim
goggles on and dressed his eyes every night, I guess
every day, because he's probably a serial killer at night

(45:20):
when h and of course, and I don't know if
he would be more or less terrifying with swim goggles on. UM.
In his case though, if he wanted surgery, he's going
to happen because there are there are surgical techniques that
can be used to just correct minor. You're not getting
full coverage lots of academic articles about UM, different procedures

(45:43):
and methodologies for that kind of reconstructive surgery. And then
I think there's also like grafting that can be done
from other parts of your body, right right, yeah, now
with but with Jeff or with Captain Skull here, nothing
short of total upper and lower eyelid replacement. It's gonna
actually take care of thing. And this is the complex
surgical procedure in a series of procedures. Even a two

(46:04):
thousand two paper on this titled Treatment of bilateral severe
eyelid Burns with skin Graphs colon an Odyssey, which should
give you some idea if what we're dealing with here
in this case five operations over the course of five
years the individual. And then there's a two thousand eight
paper total and upper eyelid replacement following thermal burn using
an A L T flap. Case of report this chronicle

(46:27):
is the use of of free anterior lateral high that
thigh that's a LT thigh flaps uh. In the skin
graph procedure, cutting uh bits off of your own thigh
and then using those to graft in new eyelids. Yeah,
we're talking about a skin graphed here, and a rather
rather detailed uh one as well. Uh So, Yeah, it's

(46:50):
it's not it's not just as simple as just throwing
some some tissue back up over the eye. You have
to hook it into the the the existing muscles. Uh.
It's a complex procedure. But uh. In the case of
total eyelid loss, you know, a necessity. So as far
as our Jeff the Killer loose thread that we're following here,

(47:13):
the fake smile thing, yeah, there's some plausibility to that,
but it would be more like a Glasgow grin, I think,
than like the Valentine angle of plasty that we were
just talking about, unless he's really skilled with whatever whatever
blady he was using in his parents bathroom. Uh. And
then as far as this eyelid thing goes, I mean,
it sounds to me like you wouldn't get very far,

(47:36):
very long without eyelids unless like you had. Yeah, you're
constantly treating it yourself. I don't even know if the
goggles would cut it. Now at this point we're gonna
get into a little darker realistic territory. But I think
it's important because with with Jeff the Killer, we're essentially
talking about, Oh, this an individual discarred by fire or

(47:59):
or ask did and this and this makes them horrible somehow,
this makes them a monster, which of course is it's
a ridiculous notion, um. But but we have this idea
just throughout our horror culture, especially like you have just
all of these burnt creatures, you know, they're and then
they're they're awful and they're less human because of it,

(48:20):
which is which is completely ridiculous. So it's it's really
essential to I think, to to take that that that
cultural trope and then actually discuss uh, some some rather
depressing um facts about real life mutilation attacks that continue
to take place around the world. Yeah, I have to say,

(48:42):
like we talked about this a little at the top,
but I was just I was shocked at how prevalent
this is, UM. But I'm glad that there's a lot
of research being done on it. UM. In particular, there
were two sources that we we looked to here. One
was a really great BBC magazine article that was just
sort of about the general cultural problem of what are

(49:04):
called acid attacks, uh, And then we we also looked
at a thesis paper out of the University of North
Carolina by a woman named Jane Welsh, and it's called
it was Like Burning in Hell, a Comparative Exploration of
Acid Attack Violence, and she looks at the whole gamut
of acid attacks and like the last I think it's

(49:24):
like thirty years that this has become fairly prevalent UM
and really kind of breaks down the statistics and what
what can be done and what should be done about them.
So let's start with how jeez, how prevalent they actually are. Okay,
acid attacks skew heavily, as you would imagine, toward women
and girls. Eighty percent of them are done to women. Uh.

(49:48):
Thirty percent of those women are under the age of eighteen. Uh.
You may have heard about it recently happened in Zanzibar
to two women who are tourists. There has been a
couple of incidents in which there have been Western tourists
in other countries where this is more acceptable, and you know,
some somehow or another, it's they've offended someone and therefore

(50:11):
like an acid attack is perpetrated against them, and these
poor people, you know, have have to go back and
uh have surgeries to correct this. There's there's a lot
of literature on the surgeries themselves for this as well.
So this is some of the numbers that I was
able to accumulate for this. Just in England alone, which

(50:32):
is not one of the major countries that you read
about when you hear about these ascid attacks. In the
between eleven and twelve, there are a hundred and five
hospital admissions for what we're referred to there as assault
by corrosive substances. UH, so that covers more than acid,
but it's the same premise essentially. UH. Every year there

(50:55):
are more than fifteen hundred cases recorded. So those are
recorded ones. Other are the ones that are reported. UH.
There's an uh an organization that tracks this called Asset
Survivors Trust International. India has an increasing problem with this.
UH that the group that tracks that says that a
thousand of the incidents take place in India every year. UH.

(51:18):
They're they're disproportionately common in South Asia India, as they
just mentioned, they are also suspected to have very high
numbers in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan and UH Cambodia. Yeah, and
so like many of the you know, every case is
a little different. But then a lot of the ones
that i've I've heard it entails, uh, you know, a

(51:39):
male proposition as a woman or tries to initiate some
sort of u uh sexual or romanic um relationship with them.
They are rejected and then their response is I am
going to deface you. I'm going to try to ruin
you by assaulting you with acid yeah, and so I

(52:00):
don't know the details specifically on those Western tourists, but
I suspect that that was probably the case. It's worth
deeper diving. Um And like we said at the top,
we didn't want to do a full episode on this,
but we do think that it bears covering. Um. Yeah,
it's it's about destroying someone's identity at the end of it, right,
Like that is the real aggression here. Uh And and strangely,

(52:25):
I guess that's kind of what Jeff the Killer is
a about. You know, if you can like do some
sort of thematic analysis of a creepy pasta like that,
if you do a far more serious reheat of the
pasta than it, yeah deserves the character Jeff starts off
as just kind of a junior high kid, like everyday
American kid who deals with like incessant bullying and his

(52:47):
brother getting thrown in jail, and then he's assaulted terribly
and literally changes his identity, right it makes him go crazy. Well,
I mean really, there are two main optacles here. I mean,
one is just the cultural challenge of keeping this from happening,
to to just you know, push this back into the past.
But on the other hand too. It's it's about the
victims as well. How the various programs and and uh

(53:10):
an outreach programs that are aimed at at helping these
women reclaim their lives, you know, and and help them
feel like like in a way, keeping their their attackers
from winning, keeping their attackers from achieving this warped sense
of victory they that they set out to accomplish. Yeah, absolutely,

(53:30):
because it's more than just about like the physical surgeries
involved to right, It's about the like psychological consequences of
losing your identity as such as it is. I don't
think that a lot of these attackers articulated that way,
but that's essentially what's going on. Yeah. The BBC piece
that I was listening to, which dealt with a cafe
that allows the place for these women to work and

(53:51):
also has support network for them. Like they mentioned that
in some of these cases, UH, the victim is is
it can no longer turn to their emily because there's
like this level of of shame that is a that
is applied to to their plight that they no longer
have a home because this this person assaulted them. Yeah,

(54:12):
and I think that that is largely UH cultural from
from the areas that these are committed into. Right, Like,
I'd like to think, I don't know, maybe it's not
the case, but I'd like to think in in our culture,
at least here in America, Uh, in the house, stuff, work, studio,
that that that you know, like that wouldn't happen. Well,

(54:32):
And that's the I mean, that's one of the things,
right is so much of us live with the privilege
of not having to know. You know, we can, we can,
we we can think, we can't help, but think what
would happen if this happened in my community, if this
happened in my family? Uh, how would one respond? How
does one react? And you know, luckily most of us

(54:52):
don't have to know. Well. Jane Welsh's thesis, she really
does a great job of breaking it down, and it's
it's much longer. I mean, I'm I'm just going to
summarize a few facts here. But she found that this
started somewhere around the nineteen sixties. So I was off
when I said thirty years. But it's it's thought to
have started in Cambodia as the earliest case of this

(55:14):
kind of violence. Uh, And since that time, it's become
an epidemic there. Uh. And in the late nineties through
two thousand five, acid was a favored weapon of choice
for women and men looking to disfigure their rivals and
settle scores. Uh and so uh some of the activists

(55:34):
that are involved in this, they say that at least
sixty people were attacked in one year alone. Well that's
in the nineties. You know, we just read the stats
for now and it's in thousand, um and and that
it's both men and women who are doing the attacking,
but you know more women are being attacked. Uh. And

(55:55):
the reasons are listed as sexual jealousy, extramarital airs, land
or business disputes, domestic violence, personal or family disputes, robbery
or hate and revenge. And then it's usually a premeditated
act that involves sulfuric, nitric or hydrochloric acid thrown at

(56:16):
another person. So uh, you know, I don't know that
there's like much deeper that we can go than that,
other than you know, if I guess if those of
you out there want to hear more on this, we
can maybe do a future episode where we dig deep
into the science of the surgeries involved. But honestly, like
I read a few of those getting ready for this episode,
and it was pretty deep diving. Like I think it

(56:36):
was a dense medical material that I didn't necessarily understand. Yeah,
I think probably the best we can do is will
make sure that the landing page for this episode will
include links out to UM to some of the sources
here as well as some organizations that have involved as
somatomacity organizations. UM. A positive BBC story that here that
alluded to already about the cafe. The title of that
is the cafe helping to support acid attack victims in India.

(56:59):
Believe it the dioplete peace Uh that I think I
heard it on the radio initially. UM, that's worth checking
out because it highlights not only the problem but also, uh,
what's some of the efforts that are that are underway
to to help the victims. So all right, let's like
wrap this up and and try not to end it
on like a super bummer note with the acid attacks thing,

(57:21):
but as such as like let's go back and look
at the Jeff the killer, I guess myth and in
the realities involved. Right, So acid attacks, Yes, that's a thing,
unfortunately more of a thing than we'd like it to
be so sure, a kid named Jeff could have been
attacked in such a way his face would have been
burned away and he would be able to go back

(57:42):
to his home. From when I was reading, there are
no asset attack victims though, that go crazy and cut
their mouths and cut their eyelids. That is that is
purely a a fictional thing. Yeah. Um, the eyelid reconstructive surgery. Yes,
that you can reconstruct lids. I suppose you could cut
your own eyelid off, but I don't know necessarily that

(58:05):
you would be a very functional serial killer without eyelids.
And then when it comes down to the smile. Wow,
is there a lot of research on that. Uh. But
you know, in the Jeff the Killer situation, I don't
think he's doing like a cosmetic Valentine angle of plasty
as much as like, you know, it's just kind of
the Glasgow grin joker kind of thing, Eachi the killer type,

(58:27):
you know, the generic I guess it's become a generic
trope now, jeez of like a sort of homicidal maniac
who cuts themselves. All right, Well, there you have it.
We stood up to the challenge. We took you asked
for Jeff the killer. We gave got for him, We
gave it to you. We explored some very fascinating science
and cultural information. Uh. That, like I said, doesn't necessarily

(58:51):
underlie that it's not like the the author and authors
of that original Creepypops and inspired by these things. But
in a sense, Jeff is composed is of all of
these things. He's kind of like the cultural um, the
cultural sludge kind of comes together and forms a figure
like this, uh in our myth making. Yeah, well, it's certainly.

(59:11):
I mean, I think that the science and psychology behind
fake smiles certainly play into at least the sort of
general trope of of this type of creepy pasta. Alright,
so hey, if we were to do a third Creepy
Pasta episode, which one would you like for us to tackle?
Which one would you like to us to try and

(59:32):
just dissect and and dig some slivers of science out. Yeah,
you know, you can tell us about you first of all,
tell us about other creepy pastas, even if they're not
ones that you think we should cover, but you know,
ideally we'd like to do them on the podcast. I
was surprised at how many listeners popped up and we're like, yeah,
check this one out and this one and this one.

(59:53):
Like I think you know, even though you and I
are big horror fans, uh, that like this is just
an area of the medium or the genre. I suppose
that we're not highly familiar with. UM. So yeah, if
there's stuff out there that we're missing, let us know
about it. You can always get in touch with us
on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler will blow the mind on

(01:00:13):
all of those. Uh. We do periscope or Facebook live
on Friday's Eastern Standard time around noon. Uh, And lately
we've been kind of switching back and forth between those
two things. But you know, we'll let our audience know
beforehand on on those platforms. Hey, this is what we're
doing today before we we jump on one or the other.

(01:00:36):
All right, if you want to get in touch with
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