It is mentioned in the Talmud… that someone who eats peeled garlic, onions, and eggs kept overnight “forfeits his life, and his blood is upon his own head.”
We’re down here for the SXSW film festival and we’ll be collecting some cool stories and interviews for upcoming podcast episodes. In the meantime, have you been checking our Facebook page? We’ve been going live from some interesting haunted locations on the way down, including the infamous Stull Cemetery in Kansas as well as Oklahoma’s most haunted restaurant!
But we’re still keeping an eye on weirdness in the world and here’s five fascinating stories we saw this week!
A yellowish liquid found in a bronze pot dating back some 2,000 years is not wine, as Chinese archaeologists initially thought. It’s actually an “elixir of immortality” concocted during ancient times.
On October 12, 2017, a 20-meter asteroid passed just 50,000 kilometers (31,000 miles) from Earth. For weeks, dozens of astronomers from labs around the world mobilized, measuring everything they could about the asteroid in preparation for an impact. Once again, we’re entering Rendezvous with Rama territory and Arthur C. Clarke proves prescient!
The residents Sigola’s Ziqaweni Village are living in fear say that they thought they vanquished a gang of invisible goblins last year who were responsible for the murder of some local children. With over 30 cattle dying mysteriously this year so far, some of the villagers think the goblins are back.
Our friend Mike Damante, who we’ve had on the show several times, did a round-up of the times that former Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge (presently from the To The Stars Academy) mentioned aliens or paranormal stuff in his songs. Make sure you check out the blogpost to see how many pop-punk classics you remember! The episode will be late next week because we’ll be at the festival. But please follow us on Facebook so you can keep up with the weirdness we’re finding deep in the heart of Texas! See you on the other side of the weekend!
You might say that Mark O’Connell knows a little bit about Dr. J. Allen Hynek, the astronomer who was in charge of the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book. There, Hynek was charged by the military to investigate UFO reports across America and then summarily disprove them. In fact, Mark O’Connell literally wrote thebook on Dr. Hynek called The Close Encounters Man.
We’ve had Mark on the show several times before and it’s always a treat. He’s written for Star Trek, has a UFO blog, and he even joined us for a remembrance of Bill Paxton, because Mark had written a script that Bill wanted to direct in the late 90s but unfortunately it never came to fruition.
So you think when the “History” Channel decided to create a show called Project Blue Book where J. Allen Hynek is the lead character, they might contact Mark because they were look for true life stories for their show. Well, the answer to that one is a big fat no. They decided to go on a little more fantastical route.
Aiden Gillen as J. Allen Hynek talking to an alien in a water tank. Hynek biographer Mark O’Connell is not amused.
We kicked off the episode by discussing the trip Allison just got back from in Woodstock, Illinois before we started the recording. She was following the trail of a Mothman sighting she read about on The Singular Fortean because it sounded somewhat like the Flatwoods Monster story that actually forms the basis of the second episode of the new show. Allison also attended the Chicago premiere where the producers and Hynek’s son were in attendance.
But Hollywood history be damned, we talk about the real stories behind the man. J. Allen Hynek basically invented how we study UFOs, how you scientifically look at each report and take a look at each piece of evidence from the weather to the planets to the phase of the moon to the position of the stars, and you eliminate all the terrestrial explanations before you move into the extra-terrestrial. We also get into:
The real story of how Dr. Hynek first moved from the desk to the field investigating UFO cases for the Air Force
The cases that converted J. Allen Hynek from a skeptic into much more open minded about the reality of strange lights in the sky
How Hynek became UFOlogy’s Enemy #1 by suggesting some Michigan sightings might be just “swamp gas”
Mark’s favorite case from his own UFO investigations as a MUFON investigator (and what’s going wrong with some of the MUFON politics and investigative methods lately.)
The real guy and Littlefinger…
Hollywood loves to say things are “based on a true story” and then proceed to make them wildly inaccurate. Here, we understand that fiction is fun, but that often the best parts of even fantastical stories (like haunted houses, UFO sightings, etc…) are the parts that keep us grounded to the Earth. By fictionalizing the story to an X-Files extent, you’re doing disrespect to the actual man.
Hynek’s investigative techniques and open mind are what made him a legend in UFOlogy. He was dealing with a lot of things that couldn’t be proven and his mission to discredit UFO sightings is what made it all the more impactiful when he found cases where he could not find an answer. It was his rigorous scientific method of investigation that made the difference, not secret government informants or Werner von Braun.
For the song this week, we were taken by the fact that sometimes the media thinks we’re too dumb to think for ourselves. There is a language and shorthand to cinema that is meant to trigger our emotions quickly and too often producers think that they can exploit our beliefs with special effects and “dramatizations”, sacrificing quality for spectacle. Well, we’d rather hear the truth about Hynek and here is Sunspot with “Disinformation Nation”.
Don’t trust your eyes and question what you see They’ll tell you lies the don’t care about history A story to bewitch that is designed to find your switch you’ll never see it coming when they activate your programming
Believe
Disinformation nation
Deceive
Disinformation nation
How loud can you shout with a
a mouth inside a mouth
we’re just hardwired for manipulation
Disinformation nation.
You’ll see all things new
with a mind that’s clean
A brain tattoo
imprints and memes
A tale to push your trigger point
Finding the weakness at the joints
Looking for a crowd to whip
and you’ll jump when your sequence is tripped
Believe
Disinformation nation
Deceive
Disinformation nation
How loud can you shout with a
a mouth inside a mouth
we’re just hardwired for manipulation
Disinformation nation.
Speaking of Metal Gods, here’s a Judas Priest classic when they were at the top of their game. Let’s get Hellbent for Pleather! This week we talked about curses and cursed objects, take a listen right here.
See you on the other side of the weekend! Mike and your weird SYOTOS podcast crew
But celebrities are just one of the many things that people are superstitious about and we all do it to some extent. Have you ever called some piece of clothing like your tie or your hat or even your socks, “lucky”?
Do you ever perform a little ritual before doing something important? Maybe shave a certain way because the last time you did it that way, you had an amazing date? Or listen to a certain song because it gets you pumped up and you feel you need that confidence? That’s just basic human nature. We do things to try and convince our mind that success is on the way, it’s just a little bit of magical thinking in our lives, but sometimes it seems to help.
But what happens when something horrible happens to you while you’re wearing a certain t-shirt or a pair of shoes or while a song is playing in the background? Do those things become “unlucky”? Well, that’s the question we tackle today as we discuss curses!
In this episode, Wendy and I are joined by Scott Markus from WhatsYourGhostStory.com, Allison Jornlin from HawaiiParacon.com, and paranormal author C.E. Martin (check out his Stranger Than Fiction book!) to talk about strange cases of cursed objects, people, and even bulidings!
You can give someone the Evil Eye and not even know it…
Allison has done some research into the Italian Evil Eye called Il Malocchio and it can curse you without the person even knowing it. Often the eye is caused when someone looks at you with envy or extreme jealousy.
Some families have special rituals to combat Il Malocchio but they are kept very secret and can only be passed on one night of the year. In Ronnie James Dio’s family, he was taught that throwing up your rock fist was actually a defense against the Evil Eye and that’s one of the reasons he chose it as his onstage symbol and it’s now been assimilated into the rest of heavy metal culture.
C.E. Martin (here’s his author page on Amazon) has had his own experiences with three curses in his life and he describes them here in his own words:
1. I was cursed at birth. My paternal grandmother, a member of the cultish “Eastern Star” organization, actually showed up at the hospital after I was born and proclaimed to everyone that she wished I’d been still-born. She hated my parents eloping, and took it out on my my entire life–until I was an adult and I realized I didn’t have to take her $%^T anymore.
2. I’m fairly certain my ghost stories book is cursed (Mike’s note: he’s talking about Stranger Than Fiction, but don’t be scared, it’s a great book!) Writing it took more than two years, filled with bad luck: my daughter’s scoliosis diagnosis, the ensuing therapy and surgery, my wife being in a car wreck, my fall down the stairs at home, my dog unexpectedly dying, my title being stolen, and my recent banning online for mentioning it on paranormal forums (to name a few of the calamities in that period). Best of all, the other day, as I was leaving work, I was thinking about the book as I walked toward the exit from the law office. I was wondering how I could promote the book’s 2 free days online. My thoughts were interrupted when not one, but two large pigeons flew into/rammed the glass of a large picture window I was walking toward, one right after the other. (they bounced off, recovered and landed safely on some nearby power lines). Definitely an omen of the banning that was coming the next morning.
3. A friend in the USAF removed a Nazi SS ceremonial dagger from a bunker in Italy that US forces opened up after the Italians had sealed it following WWII. The bunker had sat, sealed up for decades. US Forces were examining using it, and my pal was doing security on the site. He decided to stroll around inside and found it abandoned–as in, everything was there as if the Nazi’s had just teleported away or something. So he took a souveneir. Over the next few years, he had a whole string of terrible luck, including his child getting some kind of strange fever that resulted in brain damage (the little boy was borderline mentally retarded after that and had lots of developmental problems). Eventually, my friend buried the dagger in the backyard of his base-housing quarters right before he and his family moved to their next base. The bad luck did not follow them.
https://amzn.to/2SqX4Mf
In Scott’s book, Voices From The Chicago Grave, he talks about the curse of ‘Cap’ Streeter. George Wellington Streeter was a boat captain who was ferrying passengers from Milwaukee to Chicago on Lake Michigan when a storm capsized his boat near where Superior Drive is in modern Chicago. At the time, however, it was just a sandbar on the edge of the lake. Cap decided to stay there, claim it as his own (even independent from the United States) and made a living by creating a shantytown and garbage heap there. Following scuffles with local law enforcement and some time in jail, Cap cursed the area and some very weird and sad things have happened in the locality since.
Elma Lockwood, George Cap Streeter, and Spot
We also discuss my trip to the Zak Bagans’ Haunted Museum in Las Vegas, where you can see a variety of “cursed” objects from Ed Gein’s Cauldron to Jerry Lewis’ clown costume from a movie he thought was so bad that he never released it (and indeed said that he would not let it be shown until years after his death) The Day The Clown Cried.
Here’s the waiver that you sign at Zak Bagans’ Haunted Museum
While we were waiting in line, my wife saw a girl with waist length brown hair and a blue/grey dress running across the parking lot, and then <poof> there was no little girl there. She said the girl looked 5 or 6 years old. I missed the entire thing because I was working on the waiver that you see above, but it was interesting because it was outside and not anywhere near the cursed objects.
Bagans does claim that the mansion is haunted, so maybe it was some kind of residual energy from the family that lived there for decades before it was turned into the museum. We looked for pictures (they talk about the family and the original house’s owner, Cyril S. Wengert, on the tour) and did find several photographs but none seemed to match up to the girl.
Either way, I was jealous! The weirdest thing I saw was a marionette that semed to move on its own and I had guides tell me conflicting stories about whether it was animatronic, or it had moved when the guide bumped the stage, or it was a ghost(!) So, that experience could be chalked up to whatever I choose to believe.
And it seems that’s how curses live and die, by what we choose to believe. That seemed like a good message for a song, that we’re always struggling against our own heads. They say there are only seven different kinds of conflict in storytelling and while one of them might be “Man vs. Supernatural”, it seems like the battle that is most applicable when you’re fighting a curse is “Man Vs. Self”. Conquering your own fears and superstitions is what this week’s song is all about.
this is our jihad
our fight is a spiritual war
battling our basest instinct
it’s so hard to ignore
and we’ll take that to the morgue
The fortune tellers will predict
but your conviction is the trick
superstitious fiction
don’t let yourself be deceived
a curse as good as you believe
Devour the cowards
drunk on the will to power
Man vs. Self we go down mean
The toughest fight you’ll ever face
is taking on the whims of fate
be more than the dice roll of your genes
Don’t believe everything you read
you don’t need everything you see
you’re more than your credit score
don’t buy in when you should drop out
don’t forget what it’s all about
These are the moments that define
these are the times that will go down
history to the victor
don’t you mess around
you better make your seconds count
Devour the cowards
drunk on the will to power
Man vs. Self we go down mean
The toughest fight you’ll ever face
is taking on the whims of fate
you’re more than the dice roll of your genes
If you missed our discussion on music and the paranormal this week, then make sure to take a listen. Wendy, Allison, Scott, and I talk about how dancing and singing can bring about paranormal experiences and some of the traditions that have been using these ideas for millennia. Then we bring on industrial music pioneer Praga Khan from Lords of Acid to discuss his experiences with the supernatural (and in particular, what happenened to him while he was working on the Necrofusion with Ghost Adventures’ Zak Bagans!)
Here’s some of the coolest paranormal news this week…
Scientists think they’ve identified a previously unknown form of neural communication that self-propagates across brain tissue, and can leap wirelessly from neurons in one section of brain tissue to another – even if they’ve been surgically severed.
NASA is starting to take the search of extraterrestrial intelligence more serously and is creating a new division for that purpose. Think you’ve got “the right stuff” to join?
Occult terms are bandied about all the time by both sides of the Brexit divide and while this article looks more at the artistic and symbolic side of it, author Gary Lachman might argue that magick actually is behind these cultural movements.Click here to read the full article.
In 1974, we broadcast a signal into space called “The Arecibo Message”. It contained information about humanity in order to lead (hopefully friendly) intelligent alien life to our world. 45 years later, they’re working on an updated version.
What does it mean to be psychic and Jewish? It’s not something you read about all the time, which makes for some interesting reading with this article.
Speaking of Jewish mysticism, Matisyahu takes reggae and hip hop and infuses it with a Hasidic sensibility. Here he is singing Bob Marley’s “Rastaman Chant”, a song that itself is inspired by Rastafari recitations of the Old Testament Psalms, bringing the whole cultural mash-up thing to a different level.
New episodes come out every Monday night, we’ll see you on the other side of the weekend!
Stay Weird!
Mike
P.S. – If you’re having fun listening to the podcasts, reading the newsletter, and checking out our songs every week, why not join our Patreon community? Click here to learn more.
Music is universal across human culture. Doesn’t matter what language you speak or where you from, singing and dancing is an essential part of the human experience, just ask Kevin Bacon…
If anyone ever asks you about cocaine consumption in the 1980s, just point them here…
There was a video that made the rounds a few years ago that showed normally unresponsive Alzheimer’s Patients reacting to the music of their youth. And it underlines the point that songs can activate a part of our brain that conscious interaction cannot get to. Frank Zappa famously called “writing about music” like “dancing about architecture”, because you’re trying to describe something through reading and writing that can only be experienced through listening. We’ve talked about binaural beats before (and even created a Star Trek-inspired binaural beats song!), which are two frequencies played in each ear that are a different pitch by a certain number of Hertz, your mind processes that difference and according to an automatic process in our brains called “Frequency Following Response” will start producing brainwaves at that Hertz.
And these brainwaves are associated with different states of consciousness, such as meditation and deep sleep. So, science has shown that music provides a natural and automatic way to alter your consciousness. But we knew how to do this long before we had the technology to measure Hertz, we did it through rituals and dance.
When we talked with Dean Radin about his book, Real Magic, the real lesson that stuck is that magic actually can work, but that the ceremony is the most important part of it. Somehow, it’s the going through the motions that puts your mind into gnosis (A Greek word that means to literally “knowledge”), which is an altered state of consciousness that seems to be key in creating real changes in the brain, where psychic phenomena (“magic”) can happen.
We also talk about the tradition of the sweat lodges, a ritual meant to promote healing, where participants sit in a small hut that gets hotter and hotter while being led in sacred prayer and songs by tribal elders. There is also the jingle dress dance which is a sacred dance of healing that was popularized in the Twentieth Century by a girl who performed the dance to save her own life from the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918… and it worked!
And when it comes to extreme rituals and altered states and dancing, the first thing we think about in the modern world is a rave. Hours of non-stop dancing, drugs, and crazy costumes, all add up to a recipe where people can enter this particular state.
Belgian electronic musician Praga Khan is probably best known for his outrageous techno and industrial act, Lords of Acid. With hits like “Pussy” and “I Must Increase My Bust”, them, they’re known for tongue-in-cheek sexually charged dance anthems.
As Praga says in the interview, when Lords of Acid come to a city it’s a chance for that town to let their freak flag fly. People get dressed up in fetish gear and come out to celebrate . We talked to him to preview his show in Milwaukee at the Miramar Theatre on March 7th, but we also wanted to discuss the album he made with Zak Bagans called NecroFusion, where Zak sent Praga EVPs and then the musician put beats behind them (even Bobby Mackey makes a guest vocal appearance!)
For this episode’s song, we wanted to make sure to capture some of the ridiculous oversexed raver energy that made the Lords of Acid so much fun in the first place. We thought we’d leave subtlety far far behind and just go ahead and say what they didn’t on the NecroFusion album, I want some “Ghost Sex”!
I’m gonna haunt ya scare the pants off ya I think tonight you’ll believe A spooky surprise you might not believe your eyes when you see what’s under Casper’s sheet
Ghost sex
I want some ghost sex
Ghost sex
I want some ghost sex
Get down with a phantasm
A face full of ectoplasm
Yeah I’m gonna do it with a specter tonight.
This apparition is a freakin
And you’ve got my K2 peakin’
A paranormal lover from the other side
you might be a little scared if you’re unprepared I’m gonna capture you on EVP But don’t get creeped out tonight I’m gonna find out just why they call her “The Brown Lady”
Ghost sex
I want some ghost sex
Ghost sex
I want some ghost sex
Get down with a phantasm
A face full of ectoplasm
Yeah I’m gonna do it with a specter tonight.
This apparition is a freakin
And you’ve got my K2 peakin’
A paranormal lover from the other side
Happy Friday !It’s your weird friend Mike again and I hope everyone had as good a Valentine’s Day as Dan Aykroyd did in Ghostbusters…
Hey now! But just because love was in the air doesn’t mean that there also weren’t spirits as well. Here are the most interesting paranormal stories this week…
Cryptocurrency has been all the rage for speculative investors for the past couple of years. Feeling lucky? A Texas psychic says that she can predict Bitcoin prices, maybe it’s time for me to invest!
Former Major Leaguer Jose Canseco is following up his tweets last week about aliens and time travel with an offer to accompany him on a search for the sasquatch! It only costs $5,000 and the spots are limited to 5 people. There’s even a phone number to sign up. Call 702-374-3735 for details (and then tell us if you go!)
Al Ula is a remote corner of Saudi Arabia home to a pre-Arab people long since disappeared and proclaimed by the Prophet Mohammed to be been haunted by the evil djinn. In fact, in 2012 the Saudi Arabian government ordered the area open, only to re-close it after students started reported djinn sightings. But even the djinn can’t stop capitalism and they’re going to try and turn it into a tourism destination. Is it just me, or does that sound like the beginning of a horror movie?
Probably because hauntings are never too far from my mind, my 2-year old often asks about ghosts. She hasn’t seen one yet (even though I’ve looked in the closet a few times) but lots of kids say they see them. Some might actually see them, but it looks like there’s also an answer in developmental psychology.
Speaking of kids seeing ghosts, Mos Def, Kid Cudi, and Yeezus himself combine forces on this track. Kanye and Cudi named their partnership after this song and it’s a perfect one to listen to while you read this week’s newsletter. Click here to listen to the song.
If you haven’t heard this last episode with author Louis Proud, you shouldn’t miss it. (Click here to listen.) It will make you think in new ways about poltergeists and Spontaneous Human Combustion (What?! You don’t think about those things all the time?)
The whole team will be be back the saddle for the next episode and we’ll see YOU on the other side of the weekend!
Spontaneous Human Combustion just doesn’t seem to get the recognition in the paranormal world that it used to. I remember when I was a kid checking out books on weirdness from the library, they almost never failed to include this picture…
All that was left of Mary Reeser
Now I know that people randomly starting on fire might not be as sexy as demons or aliens, it’s one of the only strange phenomena where we get real physical evidence. This is more than witness testimony and above you can see poor Mary Hardy Reeser, 67 years old. Her body burned alive for no apparent reason whatsoever.
Mary moved to St. Petersburg, Florida in 1950 so that she could be closer to her son after her husband died. One day she gets ready for bed, sits down in her armchair, and in the morning they find her body reduced to ash. Her shrunken skull and her leg below the knee (still in its slipper) are all that is left. The surroundings are singed but the fire was mostly confined to her. What could have started her on fire?
Even when a body is cremated and the corpse is burnt for two hours at 1400 to 1800 degrees Fahrenheit, there are still bone fragments left at the end, not just ash. A regular house fire burns at around 1100 degrees Fahrenheit and that’s when the whole house is on fire! It would have to be much hotter than that to burn a body that completely. Just what could do that to her body?
Louis is our first guest from Tasmania(!) and became interested in what he calls “Borderland Phenomena” when he was in his late teens and started experiencing extremely intense episodes of sleep paralysis. After hearing about an unusual history of paranormal experiences in his own family, he decided to start exploring the “Borderland” for himself. That’s where he discovered the link between classic poltergeist cases, anomalous lights like ball lightning, and Spontaneous Human Combustion.
The Women’s Suffrage Movement that evolved in the late 19th Century to expand the right to vote also carried along with it many elements of Spirituality and of course, Temperance, or abstaining from alcohol. Saying that Spontaneous Human Combustion could result from alcoholism was a perfect paranormal way of trying to convince people that alcohol should be illegal. And by the early 20th Century, they succeeded (in the United States, at least.)
So, we took that idea and ran with it. When you’re drinking, sometimes you feel unstoppable, just like you’re on fire. As Axl Rose once sang, “When you’re high you never, ever wanna come down”. But you know that when you’re drinking, the hangover eventually comes and that fire burns out. Hopefully it won’t take you with it. Here’s Sunspot with this week’s paranormal song, “I’m On Fire”!
Against the wall, I’m not ready to show my face Another shot, I’m running hot with every taste
Runs through my fingers (and the burning grows) Across my chest (and the burning grows) Every extremity (and the burning grows) is possessed (and the burning grows)
I’m on fire,
Indestrucible.
I’m on fire,
Untouchable.
A human volcano, a flesh inferno with a burning crown.
I’m on fire,
and then the fire burns out.
I close my eyes as I get ready to unload,
Just another sip, I’ll lose my shit, and I explode.
Runs through my fingers (and the burning grows) Across my chest (and the burning grows) Every extremity (and the burning grows) is possessed (and the burning grows)
I’m on fire,
Indestrucible.
I’m on fire,
Untouchable.
A human volcano, a flesh inferno with a burning crown.
I’m on fire,
and then the fire burns out.
While the witches in the United States are casting hexes on President Trump, they’re doing the opposite in Russia. Is Putin harnessing the supernatural power of Baba Yaga and is that scarier than everyone abandoning the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty?
Hey, it’s the weekly Avi Loeb report! Currently the nation’s most vocal academic to be carrying the flag for the real possibility of alien life being closer than we think, he’s been profiled by The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and now Chicago gets in on the fun.
When I was in college, I sometimes thought my dorm room was haunted. Things would never be where I thought they would be and then they would mysteriously reappear in the exact same location. Sometimes within minutes. I thought that was weird but I chalked it up to my college lifestyle, which made David Lee Roth look like a monk. Now this girl discovered an actual nightmare, her closet had a real bogeyman.
James Brown has been dead over a decade and it’s taken us this long to get a good conspiracy theory going over it. Is it believable? Well, you’ll have to read it and see. But if the only thing it does is get you to pull up some of his old performances on YouTube, then it’s worth the investigation.
This isn’t just a hit job article written by skeptics, it’s co-written by someone studying parapsychology, so there’s something worth reading here. It details all the reasons that if we’re going to prove the existence of psychic phenomena, it’s not going to be with your gut, it’s gotta be in the lab. We’re too eager to believe, especially when we want to talk to our relatives who’ve gone over to the other side.
Thinking about the last article also made me think about this deep cut from the early 90s. It’s a quintessential slice of MTV Alternative Rock and while it’s a little bit “Grunge By The Numbers” there’s a simple message that’s always resonated a little bit the me. “Why don’t you believe in your own god?” Does that make the members of Dig secretly Gospel of Thomas-style Gnostics? Nah, it’s probably just some stoner poetry.
New episodes come out Monday nights. Our Patreons are currently helping us out with the questions for the next episode’s guest, click here if you’d like to ask some too!
