And That's Why We Drink - E151 The Penultimate Sisyphean Nightmare and Cursed Raisins

Episode Date: December 22, 2019

Christmas time is here! Have you scattered pancakes on your roof yet? We've got some notorious, holiday-themed stories for you today! Em takes us on a wild ride to eastern Europe with the Kallikanzaros, a rowdy gang of holiday goblins who surface and wreak havoc during the 12 days of Christmas. Christine then brings us the tragically fascinating case of the Lawson Family Massacre and the suspicious events surround their deaths. We're also staring a band called "Toppling the Cosmos" ... and that's why we drink!Please consider supporting the companies that support us! Go to thirdlove.com/DRINK now to find your perfect-fitting bra… and get 15% off your first purchase!For 20% off your first purchase, visit nativedeodorant.com and use promo code DRINK during checkout!Join the millions of students already learning on Skillshare and get two months free when you sign up at Skillshare.com/DRINK2Go to Vistaprint.com and enter promo code DRINK for free shipping on all business cards, any style, any quantity.

now we are okay i do realize part of it's green though which is going to be problematic for the green screen oh my bad should i take it off then probably unless my head maybe i'll be a bald man you can block it with that with your head. With my big floppy dot. Problem solved. My big floppy dot. Wait, what if the green screen only picks up the red? Amazing. Oh, that's insane. Now you have a clown nose floating above you.

Oh my goodness. Look, it's sassy magic. Sassy magic. Okay. I'm done. People who are listening are no longer listening, and people who are watching hate me. So. Christmas time is here.

We've had a year. Featuring Chauncey. What's the... Shoot. The song that's like orchestra... What? The Christmas orchestra song that they always put lights to the trans-siberian orchestra

welcome to our christmas special we've had a year to learn the rest of that charlie brown song and we just never did by the way what do you mean i did oh okay i knew all the words had trancey cover for you i see hello everybody it is this comes out if i'm well not mistaken which i probably am comes out the week the sunday before christmas um is my phone ringing someone's phone's ringing it's your mother again it's like she knows i tried to show the people what my mom's picture is when she calls but just think about lucille bluth and you'll you'll get the idea uh merry christmas if things are according to plan if you celebrate christmas merry christmas if you celebrate hanukkah happy

hanukkah if you don't celebrate anything happy day i hope you still are having a good time have a great time despite the cold i'm sure you're chilly and if you're not celebrating holiday that's kind of lame that you have to sit in the cold while other people and if you're in florida and don't celebrate christmas then i guess today is just like a random wednesday it's a beach day well i guess sunday i guess today's sunday for you well that's true because this comes out on a sunday la la la la la okay so hello everyone hello how is your Christmas going? As I say, to whom are you asking this question to you to me? Yeah. Oh, lovely. Thank you. I just won Christmas Tanner. This is me manifesting it. Sure. I just won first place. Got it. I I don't know what I'm doing on Christmas at all. I know I'm in Virginia, but I don't know where I am to start. in virginia but i don't know where i am that's a start uh my parents are still doing the divorce thing of like oh are you with me in the morning and your dad at night are you with your dad in the morning and me at night it's it's so what you gotta do is you gotta marry someone and then go to

their house that's what i'm learning really quickly alison are you listening yeah um oh don't don't do that oh my gosh and now the floodgates open with gossip right we are not even talking about engagement everyone leaves a way to propose with somebody as you say but that wasn't blaze gonna propose on this show yeah but that was before like it was a whole thing and it was just gonna be kind of cute and then like right but in person not like over the episode and then three weeks later are you listening what if she doesn't you down what if you down to wed what if you did do that and then she just didn't listen she told you she listened to the show but she didn't. What if this really was a proposal?

It's not, guys. She would kick my ass. No, that's not how this is going. It would be the worst way to propose to somebody. You'd be like, oh, in three weeks, listen to this episode on your commute. Guys, I'm not proposing to Allison. Allison, I'm not proposing to you. So.

If you do not, I like to think you know me well enough at this point. Allison's already pretty pissed about this. Allison, just. Sorry. No, I had nothing to do with this. Allison, she told me to think you know me well enough. Allison's already pretty pissed about this. Allison, just. Sorry. No, I had nothing to do with this. Allison, she told me to do it. Oh, please. Okay.

Allison knows me better than that. We just celebrated our 10 year anniversary, friendiversary, Al and I. I thought you meant me. And I was like, I'm the worst friend ever to not have that information. You already ruined our friendiversary. Don't worry about it. Okay. 10 years with you and Allison.

That's great. We met 10 years ago. That's pretty adorable. Do you want to tell the story? She was 17 and I was 18. Wow. You guys really you and Allison. That's great. We met 10 years ago. That's pretty adorable. Do you want to tell the story? She was 17 and I was 18. Wow. You guys really have known each other for a long time. I know.

We were little babies. Also, oh, before I forget, today, this, it's not when this comes out, but it is Crohn's and Colitis Awareness Week. And so I'm wearing my Crohn's is Cray t-shirt. And I got it from an Instagram account account account called crones is cray and they just sent it to me for free they said pick something off the website oh that's awesome send it send it to i'll send it to you and so um i just want to give them a little shout out and uh if you know someone with crones or colitis give them a little hug today but not too hard

because their tummy might hurt i'd hug you but your tummy might hurt i'm giving you a metaphysical hug thanks does your soul feel relieved? It actually feels really like uncomfortable. Yeah, mine too. Mine too. Oh boy. Um,

so that's that. I just want to do a, Oh, and I have a patron of the week since we're now making this a weekly thing. I decided. Oh yes. Well, we probably should,

but the problem is if we do it monthly, we're never going to remember. And then three months later, we're going to be like, Oh yeah. But every time you do that then i remember that i forgot to figure out the name of who suggested this story well maybe then you should just do that okay okay so our patron of the week month i don't know what is sydney stevens thank you sydney thank you sydney that's all all right we appreciate your support um oh i remember now okay good and i think that's

all i have it's it's holiday season it is the season oh please go uh get tickets that's right uh we forget to keep saying this but we presumably still have tickets left for our tour um so please go get them yeah the day that this that we're recording this uh tickets actually went live for for sale like for general sale not today for us and uh apparently we already sold out new york so we're pretty proud of that so uh go check if we're coming to a city near you because i think we're selling some moving some uh product if you will moving some products move some prods you know kids say that's what they do say oh i heard a kid last night in target go he was with his friends they were like teenagers and i heard him go whoa an electric truth electric toothbrush

and his friend was like yeah i hear that's the move these days and i was like i was like i'm so old that i didn't know that was a phrase and i'm also so old that i knew the electric toothbrush has been a move for a while but yeah hello quip.com promo code drink what do you apparently his mind was blown he had never seen an electric toothbrush until last well i think that's more a problem with him than anyone else because they're pretty much everywhere well apparently if you didn't know electric toothbrush is are the move we probably said it wrong and sound like such grandparents it's like the time i said though to like a million times and you were just looking at me like okay i was like okay i think i was like i love you as my best friend and that's all that needs to be said uh full stop period um okay

so the reason that i didn't remember this time a person's name is because this actually was not suggested to any different by anyone um I wanted to do a Christmas adjacent story okay so I went amongst myself and Google to find a Christmas you went amongst yourself I went with myself traveling through I made a move like the toothbrush deep dive into your soul all right so this i try okay let's tell the story first about what what i wanted to cover i received a phone call and it was m saying i don't know if i'm in a thin place and i went well i don't want to be involved in this but as your friend i decided i would be so then m says what did you say uh so i remembered so before we even go any further it ended up being episode 47 where i talk about oh yeah yeah don't go googling we figured it out at the end of krampus apparently i also tried to squeeze in another folklore which i should have in hindsight used that as a whole

other story because there was definitely enough information back then we didn't know we would need those stories for later through my material uh but so I remembered vaguely covering the Icelandic Yule elves or Yule lads. And but I couldn't find an episode where I covered it. I looked through all of our episodes. We looked through the episode guide and it wasn't in there. And I was like, I know I've covered this story. I know I have. Well, and that's funny because you called Eva and Eva was like, I have no idea what you're talking about but it was before eva worked with

us so she's like i have no idea so m's like oh my god i'm literally going crazy i was like i know like i haven't even started researching this but i know enough to know that there are at least 13 of them and they like break into your house to eat your food and shit like i know they exist and then you called me without any like you were like did i cover those and i was like oh yeah the ones that like eat your food and eat your cookies. And you were like, yes. So I have covered it. Either that or we're both in the thin place.

You just took me in the thin place with you, which is entirely possible. So we felt really crazy because we, and then I went digging and I was like, I can't find it either. So thank you Twitter for everyone giving us the answer to that, which was, I talked about the Yule Lads in the Krampus episode, which I think was 47. So I would like to go back and do that again eventually. I think that would be a nice retelling because I do remember rushing through it. You know, some people have requested I retell old stories.

And I was thinking about it because obviously I'm like, that seems kind of lame unless you have like new information or you have a better way to tell it. Yeah, it feels like cheating you guys out of a new story but i was thinking about it and i was like if we told a story in 2017 or whatever like presumably soon it'll be three years since then and if people are listening like in order they also haven't heard it for a long time that's true i mean i guess unless you're we have gotten better at researching i remember when i did the Winchester Mystery House and when I did the Whaley House. So the first two episodes, I remember I did all my research in like an hour. Same for Jonestown. And now I'm like, how did I do that?

Yeah, I'm pretty sure there's a lot more to it than what I actually brought up in the story. So I would love to retell it using the tools, quote, the Google I use now. Google page. But I figured out how to use Google. Instead of using one link i use three pages of links so i'm sure there's more than that i was not aware of and i'm sure there's documentaries and stuff i didn't even watch yeah now i've started doing documentaries podcasts and news articles so it's like a nice little rounded combo but back then i definitely was

not doing that so so i don't know let us know what you think we don't want to do it to like appear lazy but we do want to sometimes cover stories that we feel like we have more information now so let us know what you think i fucked this up now my hair is sticking out oh i gave em an elf hat before realizing it had green stripes on it in front of the green screen so i'm pretty sure i'm just gonna have a bunch of red dots on a bald head and now i'm gonna have like a weird patch of hair in the front i think it looks good well good luck green screen however this goes handsome rugged don't you said you only get to say that five times in our life you don't finish the sentence trying to get rid of them don't finish i get three more of those in my life it's like the slaps from how i met your mother just like collecting them i get three more and i do not

want this to be one of them all right you in that hat don't make this the moment don't make this where you call me rugged i take it back i take it back kind of like i i recently just saw book smart so that's why it's coming up such a good movie but you haven't seen it oh my god yes you can only and it like it's like it's your one once a year get out of whatever the situation is or like you get to make the call no matter what um they say malala it's very funny also i meant to say if you haven't seen knives out the movie oh did you see it no but it is so good dude the only thing i know about it is chris evans posted uh clips of him working with the dogs um the whole point oh well not the whole point though one of the things is that he's the only one the dogs hate well so apparently he tweeted out because

he felt bad that like his whole image in the movie was that he like hates these dogs. And he is known to be like a big dog lover. He's like the piece of shit in the movie. He's like the douchebag. The opposite of Captain America. Right. And he tweeted out saying the only reason in the movie, the only way they got the dogs to hate him was he had peanut butter treats in his pocket and all those scenes. So they were always jumping at him.

Yeah. So fun fact. I always wonder about things like that that's very interesting because they looked like friendly dogs like they were just playing they were these big german chevros and they were like playing with all the other people and then with chris emmons they were just like he had jumping on him he had to hide treats or he would put tennis balls in his coat pockets so they were always jumping up and i love that they got to be so playful the puppies so um yeah so anyway if you haven't seen that it's a great movie i really loved it i might i rarely ever watch movies again but i might just to like kind of it's like a murder mystery agatha christie but like modern and like kind of funny it's really

good anyway so go see it i wanted to go see it and then allison saw it with her parents so i guess i'm gonna see it with you okay i'll see it with you so you'll see that with you. I guess I'm going to see it alone. I'll see it with you. Okay. I'll see it with you. I really liked it. So you'll see that with me and then we'll go metal detecting. Whoa, this is the best day of my life. Christmas time is here. Okay. Anyway, my story. I'm ready. I have not once even tried to pronounce this creature yet.

Oh, God damn it, Em. I think it's more fun to do it in front of everyone so we get a bunch of hate comments. So Eva gets the emails. So Eva gets bombarded. You're welcome, Eva. So this, apparently there's a singular, there's a name for it when it's the singular creature and then there's a name for it as a plural creature oh um so this is the you see it keeluk for god's sake what in the world kali kanzaros yeah it looks like kali kanzaros okay and then plural is kali kanzaroy kali kanzaroy yeah okay well we're gonna work

saroy well we're gonna work with the singular is that greek it looks greek yep it is a good for me it is a christmas tradition uh it's a legend it's like their version of krampus but it's not just in greece it's also in bulgaria serbia al albania bosnia and cyprus i almost said albany new york i know i heard it'd be weird if there was just a pocket in upstate New York? Albany. And Pittsburgh. Oh my God. Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania, Bosnia and Cyprus all have a different version of

this legend. Cool. They have different cultural and regional twists on the story, but it's the same creature. So I'm not going to pronounce these but it is all it's known it has a different name in each of those countries apparently and they're all equally confusing for me to pronounce but here just so you can see what this looks like i just see a bunch of red lines underneath all the words it looks like i just like threw my face into the keyboard it's like kali kan it's a lot of scali tangia that's interesting it's a lot

it's a lot of things where i would make a lot of people mad if i tried to pronounce them but just know there's like at least eight names here and they all look somewhat alike like they all have a similar yeah they're all origins on each other yeah so uh they apparently kali con son taros oh dear here we go kali consantaros. Oh, dear. Here we go. Kali-Konsantaros. The Kali's, I'm going to call them. Wait, go back. Kali-Konsantaros.

Kali-Konsantaros. I think it's Kali-Konsaros. Or Kali-Konsaros, yeah. You just added an extra syllable in there. Oh, whoops. Kali-Konsaros. There it is. That sounds right to me.

Sounds right. I'm like, there it is. And everyone's like, no. It sounds more Greek to me than others it's greek to me it's all greek to me okay yikes i'm sorry to every greek person listening to this i went to greece once it's my the favorite country besides well i went to vienna it's my favorite city but greece is my favorite country i've ever visited my mom says that greece is also her favorite country she's ever been amazing it was during the riots so it was a little tough and we

were in a pretty crummy hostel but otherwise it was a great i know a lot of people who say that greece is even if they haven't gone yet it's their dream country to visit i want to go back so bad let's go after we go metal detecting okay but we'll like sing mama mia the whole way like true horrible americans i'm just gonna keep saying colin stardust rose i'm gonna keep singing mama mia and maybe they'll like mesh together okay uh so apparently the kali gonzaros are i'm impressed i said it so quickly and so do you want me to clap every time you do yeah that's fun yeah um so apparently they are goblins elves or gnomes most uh references i worked with said they were goblins okay um and they appear during the 12 days of christmas from the end of december until i'm not religious the epiphany you know what that is okay i did learn

what that was but like i i was very blind to that there's so many though like in catholicism there's so many different freaking days well i had no idea what it was i was like what is the epiphany and i was like i'm sure someone out there is rolling their eyes. And it's actually probably many of you. I doubt it. I feel like we're not like a super strong. I feel like no one expects us to be super religious or, you know, no. But anyway, if you were expecting me to know originally, I did not. So anyway, the epiphany is January 6. And that's when Jesus was baptized, right? That was, I i think so that's what the internet told me okay january 6 i thought that was when the three wise men i thought that okay whatever it doesn't matter i'll you were january 6 is an important date you know better than i do i didn't google it

oh okay anyway it's called the epiphany just don't tell my dad okay okay okay uh so there are goblins who show up during those those 12 days and these 12 days are apparently also if you look back in other cultures um and other communities it's also the winter solstice and in medieval times it was called yuletide so it's depending on what era you're from if you're listening to this podcast in the 1700s it might have been called something different than the 12 days of christmas project pegasus project pegasus are you listening yuletide i like that phrase are you too like why don't we andrew basiago why don't you travel back a couple centuries and let them know we're not changing the name please so they are known during these 12 days to sneak into your house in the

middle of the night sure any way they can so through windows or chimneys through cracks in the wall anything by the way do you know how scary how easily and how scarily mice can get into anything uh do you know they can like literally like get under doors and shit yeah i mean i guess right like freaks me out huh anyway but i i mean i don't know i guess i just don't think about it very often well we had a friend in b Boston who had a mouse in the station. So I learned a lot about mice. I learned a lot about mice that day. So they're known to sneak into your house in the middle of the night, and they'll often even hide in boxes.

Like if you have like a package sent to your door, they'll climb into the box. So you bring them in without knowing. Oh, I'd be screwed. And then in the middle of the night, they will get out of the box and open the door for the rest of them to come oh my god okay how many why do all like oceans 11 why do all have why do all of these freaking christmas tales have like creatures breaking into your home like they're all banding together santa claus does it krampus does it like they all just climb in yeah it is weird to do it in every christmas fable we all just ignore privacy there's just like especially like santa like oh he knows when

you're asleep like he's like breaking in often at least he's actually projecting into your house everything about you it's it's he's watching you all the time oh it's all very disturbing so outside of these 12 days when they by the way outside of these 12 days they are not on earth these creatures you can't just see them are they they are at the center of the earth oh they're not on it they're in it yeah they are uh underneath like underground and they spend every day of their lives for eternity outside of these 12 days trying to saw down the tree that holds up the world so which is also known as the world tree or the tree of life so right i know about the tree of life through my stepmom um that's so that sounded familiar to me i was like oh i can branch onto branch onto

this um so their whole thing is that they just want to saw down this tree that holds up the world so that it will kilter over and then there'll be chaos in the world so that's fun um they do this to mess with i said yeah they want to do this to mess with the balance of everything and topple the cosmos allowing mischief to take over topple the cosmos yeah i like that phrase my new band coming out next spring see us live the toppling cosmos okay so uh we could have a like a signature drink called the toppling cosmos yes it could get or a toppled cosmo it sounds like hmm yeah i'm into it we could figure it out put some nutmeg on there even write that down don't put nutmeg in a cosmo that sounds terrible i don't know what a cosmo tastes like i just know that carrie bradshaw drinks sweet so does alan schieffer

alan boswell oh good for her uh they so they saw all year long and right when the tree is about to collapse so they usually are this close to getting it to actually fall over and then right when it's about to collapse they i guess disappear and reappear on earth and that's the beginning of the 12 days well that's like sisyphus sisyphusian right maybe what the hell is this like sisyphus sorry i'm sorry i'm so clueless i don't know what you're talking about he's like a greek character but he would always roll he had to for eternity roll a boulder up a hill and then every time he got to the top it would roll back and so oh yes it's exactly like that sisyphusian it's the best word but

i've literally i would have i thought you had a list all beside you if i had a list that would have been way hard to say that's true that's true but uh yeah it's basically like it means like futile work that will never get you like you work and work and work but it will never get you yes then you are spot on oh cool um wow that's just a word i never even knew existed i can't wait to ask you to pronounce that again later i love that word i never get to use it so i'm thrilled right now that's like when you learn the word penultimate you said it so many fucking times i still oh i gotta relearn that word penultimate yeah that was that was a penultimate sisyphusian nightmare holy shit Even make that the title of the show.

OK, so, yeah, all year long, they are experiencing a Sisyphus. There it is. And so they're right about to chop down the tree. And then right before that, it's like signals that the 12 days of Christmas are about to begin. And then they show up in Earth. And when they return to the center of the Earth after the epiphany um that's also when the priests in the town like purify everything um it's like they'll go around i guess this is not an american thing but the priest will go around and bless all the houses in the in the neighborhood okay um and it's like a purification of the whole town

after the epiphany so on that day when the priests are going to bless the entire town that's when all of these creatures go back to the center of the earth and they see that the tree has healed itself and is fully so close so maybe next year maybe next year starts on so while on earth they try to cause as much mischief as possible so they'll do anything from like making people sick to like curdling the milk or you'll lose your items or they'll knock things over. It's kind of one of those kind of like the hoedag story where just if anything happens, you just it's kind of cultural to just blame it on the hoedag. Oh, I would use that excuse every five seconds. So during the 12 days of Christmas, every single time anything happens to you, you can just kind of blame it on the cali consaros i love it i'm gonna start doing it i think we do it with mercury and that's true

that's our modern day yeah you're right so imagine the 12 days are just like mercury and retrograde but with demons um so they will oh yeah where was i lost. Demons with little saws, too. This is, they sound dangerous. So their behavior actually is, even though it sounds pretty demonic to me that their whole plan in life is to try to topple over the cosmos and cause mischief, they aren't actually evil. They're known to be more. They sound like mischievous. Yeah, like elves. I think that's how they end up being compared to us. Like little goblins or whatever a lot of their behavior has been compared to drunk people at a

pub this is why i need the excuse so they're very they a lot of the stuff that they do it just ends up being pranks and um like just just inconveniencing you right um there have been based on where you live some stories do say that they are more nefarious and they do actually murder people sometimes oh okay but for the most part it seems that they're just like mischievous creatures okay um here is a quote i forget where i got this from beyond google super um google said google said someone who was in an article on google said uh they cause mischief they intimidate people urinate in flower beds that sounds like a drunk person that is one million

percent spoil food tip things over and break furniture they devour the christmas pork be foul all the water and wine and food and leave the occupants half dead with fright oh so just scary okay um so there is no set appearance on what these creatures look like um again that also changes regionally but basically like what you would imagine a demon to look like really um they're small black fur red eyes somehow they're mostly blind i don't know what that means like i know what it means maybe they're just clumsy and everyone just thinks they're doing it on purpose mate wait a minute maybe they just aren't trying to like live 12 days on earth and just keep knocking into shit and they're like i want to try pork oops right i curdled the milk

again i don't know i like how those two things must go hand in hand i pissed in a flower bed and the pork went bad uh they have long black tails and they actually do speak with a lisp, which is funny that we brought that up earlier. Ask them to say Sisyphus. Maybe that's part of their curse. Maybe they're just trying to, maybe they no longer have to be at the center of the earth if they can just say that Greek god that their story resembles. This is a Sisyphusian nightmare we live in. And then they're like freed from their right captivity that's their chain but we should write a children's book i know we say it a lot

but this time we really should write a children's book i have ideas already written down for that one so don't worry great i'll i'll get you thrown into the into the mix i have a lot of cautionary tales to contribute don't worry i'm on it so uh they apparently wherever you live and wherever the story is told there is a version of uh it being a hairy bodied creature sometimes having horse legs sometimes having boar tusks sometimes the tail is a rat tail but it's like proportionally long enough for a human so oh wait so they're big yeah so some sometimes they're small sometimes they're big but they have a proportionally long rat tail that's foul truly speaking of foul they are known to smell horrible good and they have protruding enlarged male sex characteristics

whoa protruding protruding yikes that scared that's enough to scare me yeah me too so they are uh drawn to larger more elaborate christmas decorations the more invested you are in the holiday the more likely they are terrible so the happier you are the more likely they want to ruin it they're like the grinch they are yeah they're like little grinches oh my god but like so much creepier and like also the grinch is also naked but he is not protruding like he's yeah he's modest thank god he's at least modest my childhood would have been a lot worse if that were the case uh so they have an enormous sweet tooth apparently and when they break into your fridge they are more likely to go for the desserts

but when they are on their own they eat small animals like mice worms snails and frogs okay all right interesting but when they can get into like the pumpkin pie, they're going to do it, you know? Sure. I mean, who isn't? So they are afraid of light and fire, kind of like a vampire, and they only come out at night, kind of like a vampire. Anyone born during these 12 days. So let's say like the 12 days where they're out.

If you have a baby. That's Blaze. Blaze the January 2nd. Okay. So this is about Blaze. Okay. Blaze, are you listening? No.

No. Like how quickly. Nah. So you might want to warn him that he is in danger of transforming into one each Christmas for only one day. You might want to warn me is what you're saying. Well, if all of a sudden like all of your like pumpkin pie is gone. I finally have an excuse.

If there's pee in your flower bed. Again. I finally. Both of those things are definitely true and let me guess he's been telling you it was geo this whole time no it was me but i have an excuse is what i'm saying i finally have somebody to blame it on um oh my god that was good christine what listen i'm just on board for that one tickled me for someone to blame okay so anyway if you were born in those 12 days you now have a permanent excuse every christmas day of why things are just going ballistic that's kind of nice um to prevent this transformation so if you want to keep blaze from being in your flower bed yeah you have to bind him in garlic or straw or burn off his toenails here's the thing you have to do this when they're a child so you're already late to the game once they once they've hit adulthood it's too late you have to do this when they're a baby

bind them in garlic and straw your children's feet well you can clip them off and throw them in a fire you don't have to burn their toenails you don't have to like dip their toes in gasoline or anything well you said i thought you meant like you have to burn all the toenail i know just the clippings i'm correcting it yeah just the clippings oh my god i was like don't do this thing that emma's telling you to do i'm not condoning anything i'm just giving information but also don't do that other thing because that's just gross uh so interesting though it is again some vampiric inspiration because to bind a baby and garlic to keep them from this monster also don't do that that sounds kind of tasty to me do that if you

want to wrap me in garlic let's do it oh oh um oh no anyone born on a saturday so this is year around if you're born on a saturday apparently you can see and talk to them like their spirits so wait if who's born on us oh if anyone is born on a saturday then during those 12 days you can see them walking around i wonder what day of the week i was born i was born on a wednesday i think i was no wait yeah because our birthdays are a year apart yeah right well then that would be i think you may have been born on tuesday oh could be well i was a day after you though oh right oh yeah i think i was born on a wednesday look at us we're hump day babies amazing yay we're little humps okay so we're little humpies but we can't see those little demons that's exactly right sad so uh well also probably good for us i'm i'm

excited to not be able to see them those rat tails sound awful if you know someone who's born on a saturday and also a saturday like during these 12 days you're in trouble because they can see them and become one oh they can become one too well if you're born in those 12 days i see i see i see if you've got the combo package yeah what day was blaze born that's a really good question i don't know should i check yeah okay january 2nd 1990 was a Tuesday. We were, oh no, we were Wednesday. Wow, crazy. Could have been a triple hump.

One day apart. So, okay, so congratulations, Blaze. Oh, well. So here's an interesting thing about these Cali-Consant, Cali-Contaros, Cali-Contaros, Cali-Cont-zaros, Jesus. Contaroy. Is that the plural? That's the plural. Yeah. Kali Kantaros. Kali Kantzaros. Jesus. Kantaroi. Is that the plural? That's the plural.

Yeah. Good. Thank you. None of this is probably right. Oh my God. Okay. So, uh, interesting about them. They're wives.

I didn't know they could get married. I did not know that they had partners. I thought they all had male protruding. I mean, not that I'm saying you can't be a wife, but I'm saying... You're like, they could be straight or gay. Traditionally speaking. But if they have wives, you know. Apparently they have wives only.

So this is, I would say, an older folklore. I don't know. But they don't all have... So they don't all have protruding male genitalia. I think they are all straight male calicansaros right but so there's no female ones right so wait so oh sorry so i think i stepped in too early here their wives first of all one they have wives surprise one surprise two they are all human females okay never mind i get it now i was like how do they marry each other and have wives if traditionally probably yeah yeah i hear what

you're saying i i'm picking up what you're throwing down nowadays sure go for it i think back then their wives are all human this is starting to disturb me well i mean blaze's wife is also a human female so it's starting to make a lot of sense wait a minute shit oh boy oh shit oh boy we're piecing it together damn it one by one here i am it's too late throw some garlic at him next time um so their wives are human females whom they manage to seduce and they own like they seduce them away from the family apparently oh no um and they only like to have male children so oh if they nothing bad happens like nothing awful happens if they have daughters but if they have sons their midwife apparently there's midwives down here jesus okay who could be human or not i'm not sure anymore

uh if they have a son they give the midwife a basket of gold coins as a thank you because she fucking gave birth to the son uh but if you if they a daughter, then the midwife gets a basket of ashes. I just, I don't even want that basket. Strange. Give me nothing. Give me nothing. So one belief is that the Cali Gonzales, um, or Cali Consanto Roy, uh, they apparently were ill-fated quote, ill-fated individuals that were changed into demons. Oh, so they were people.

Interesting. So that's one theory is that they started they started as people and then were karmically they did so much wrongdoing that they became these creatures and then these poor wives from earth just get like fucking plucked from their houses yeah right they did nothing wrong got it makes sense yeah uh-huh that's exactly right um they may be uh actually a another theory is that they might be a cautionary tale about like night terrors. Oh, that if you see something running around your house or fucking things up and you can't control it, maybe it's actually a night terror. Or maybe people had night terrors and these are an inspiration for and now a cautionary tale because someone witnessed

something so they don't know it's just a couple thoughts um some of their traits do match traditional lore like i said with vampires especially um the garlic and not being able to go out in the sun and only showing up at night um and there's a couple other things that are kind of vampiric about them which i'll get to in a little bit. But so a big theory is that these were inspired by like basically if a vampire and a demon had a baby. What a fun game that is to play at the holiday table. If they took like a 23 and me, like I'm 65% demon. Oh, my God. I'm.001%.

Yeah. That's like a really weird would you rather game many people have resorted to another way that's kind of vampiric a lot of ways that people one of the ways that people have tried to prevent these creatures from coming into their house during those 12 days is they will start nailing crosses to their front doors or they will draw crosses out of like ash okay or they'll like burn frankincense like ash wednesday yeah so there's a lot there's a few ways to try to keep demons and vampires away but apparently like even though this is a folklore apparently a few centuries ago like people took this seriously and really were

nailing crosses to the door and were actually kind of worried about this creature and now i think it's slowly becoming an urban legend sure um but so here are some of the differences between them is it raining i'm sorry i'm like really thrown is it raining yeah i think so like do you hear that i just thought the house was breaking i did too for a minute because like it i just thought for sure the ceiling was gonna give it makes more sense that the house would crumble than it would rain in la so i was like oh we're in trouble dead serious i thought that the foundation was crumbling before us and i my first thought was at least we'll get it on camera yeah oh yeah i was like just keep going i said i thought at least i have this nice

cushion on my head this stupid santa hat no it's raining wow what a christmas miracle christmas time is here wow it's like this really is a christmas a gift not it's not a white christmas time is here wow it's like this really is a christmas a gift not it's not a white christmas it's a wet christmas wait i got so excited beatboxing that's what i meant oh i see i thought we were starting like a rap wet christmas oh my a wet wet christmas wow a wet hot it's beginning to look a lot like rain so and here's a couple differences between these creatures based on the country so in bulgaria these are called uh caracond jewel okay i'm sure that's not how it's said but that's what i'm sure it's exactly how it's said and they are sometimes seen as a one-eyed creature standing on one leg and they have a horse head but on but on a man body do they just hop i guess so do you gallop with

one leg maybe i don't know i don't know uh someone who rides horses tell me um also they shapeshift into a dog a man a sheep or a, or a calf. Okay. And so apparently in Bulgaria, when they leave by the epiphany, ashes from a yule log will be sprinkled over everyone's crops to make sure that they still have good energy around them and they weren't damaged during the time these creatures were around. That's kind of cool. And it promotes good produce. And so it's kind of a sign that when the produce rises and it's all good it means that the creatures have definitely left okay cool okay in albania uh

they're called cacuth and they are they kind of are more like zombies they're undead corpses and they go around in january and they have chains around them and deadly breath just like you just like me uh i really do have deadly breath in the morning it is bananas i there's something wrong with me i like i there if there's one thing i hate about myself it's my i really have awful morning breath so that's all you hate about yourself here to live in a good life. Don't worry about it. I am, but I think there's something wrong with me. I really just have, it's like I ate a dead animal. Halitosis?

It's very bad. Halitosis? I don't know. I like, I brush my teeth and shit. Okay. Um, fun fact, another version in Albania. Oh, get you, get you a, um, electric toothbrush. Oh, I hear they're the moves these days.

Throwback. I feel like this is step one into becoming our parents where we're trying to unironically use phrases that are cool now. Do you know what I learned? This could be totally wrong. Maybe my cousin was fucking trolling me. I think my cousin was fucking with me

because I have not heard of this, but I also don't surround myself with teenagers. Apparently, you know how they were saying like this is lit? Yeah. Apparently now it has gone from this is lit. Or I think it either started or switched into this is fire. You remember? Yeah, that's fire.

Yeah. Then it became this is lit. Apparently it's turned into another thing since then and then since that phrase it's now uh this is scorched instead of saying this is lit people say that's scorched for real guys i don't know i make it sounds like so as it gets increasing and fire progress i'm worried about where we're going with this well my uncle was like so is the next thing ashes like this is ashes i was gonna say that then i was like don't say that but then my but then he was like but then so next thing will be this is ashes and then after that the thing will be this is phoenix oh for god's sake so that's what my 40 something year old uncle has

to say about the matter i think i agree with him i trust him more than the teens so if it is that scorched let me know let us know if a toothbrush sounds believable electric toothbrushes are scorched that's what i always say that's truly what i always say as of two minutes ago until like in two days when it's not what you say anymore and i have to learn a new phrase anyway maybe i should try some scorched moves on the electric toothbrush my sister taught me a lot of things like e-girl do you know that the fuck is an e-girl i'm telling you everybody apparently like a girl that is on the internet sort of but it's sort of like um it reminds me of like the my spacers today like from our generation but there's also all these other things like they wear baggy shirts

and there's a whole look what's the difference between that and a visco girl a visco is a preppy girl okay a visco like a e-girl is like an emo like myspace girl oh i see okay but i mean not really you would be an e-girl not a visco girl but i thought visco girl just meant like basic bitch who has like reusable straws and shit specific you have they want to save the turtles i learned all this they uh they they also i think wear oversized t-shirts they have hydroflask but you have to have the right size my sister got one one for her birthday and was like, this is the wrong size. And I'm like, for God's sakes. They use metal straws.

And they say, and they say, oops, I did it. Nope. What is it? Oh, my God. Okay. I know what you're saying. And I, and by the way, oops, I did it again. And I came from a gay man accidentally sitting on his balls.

Let's be clear. Seriously? Yes. My sister didn't know. No wonder she didn't know. Okay. So it's a, I don't know if it was a vine. I think it came after vine, but it was a TikTok.

I don't fucking know anymore. And then my friend Celine was with us. She's like a TikTok. I was like, don't even start with this. This is like, there's so much loaded stuff here. Okay. No, it's a video of it's either, pardon me. It may not be a gay man it

it was someone in drag it was male presenting in drag so i don't know if there was i don't i don't know how they identify but it's came across as someone in drag who was in the middle of having like an argument or like making a point to the to the internet and like like videotaping themselves and he's like adjusting himself in his chair and he goes and uh oop and like like videotaping themselves and he's like adjusting himself in his chair and he goes and uh oop and like accidentally sits on his balls and it hurts i imagine it does hurt i would not know but that's where it came from and a lot of people don't know because the video cuts off after and i oop but if you watch the extended version he goes he just he like explains what happens now all the visco girls say and i oop when they drop something yes and then i say which i don't like that it sounds like parcel tongue to me it sounds

like you're trying to call over a cat that's what i'm saying and um then there's also the opposite of e-girl or e-boy is which e-person come on it's 2019 i know if you're gonna change it up like they've gotten on binaries listening like in my space time we weren't that woke do we say woke anymore i don't think they do maybe they've changed it from woke to like up and ready to like coked out nope don't say that sorry don't listen don't stop listening i get where you were going like i'm trying to think of like the instead of it being lit it's scored so if it's not woke it's like one of those like oh yeah yeah the a b a b if a it's like one of those and like things that they made us do with standardized testing of like if this means this then this means that if a equals b and

b equals c then yeah all that bullshit yeah if tired means anyway yes do you do those do you know what a standardized test is oh the other thing so sorry the opposite of e person e girl or e boy is soft girl or soft boy and they wear a lot of blush and they're very like like feminine and wear like um so like the opposite of it does e come from emo no it comes from e like internet i think like like email email they're like what's an email god damn it they're like isn't it called gmail i'm telling you guys people must think that we're talking about the wrong letter i'm a child right now must be like why do you say email when it's gmail oh yeah i i remember like i i it's not even a surprise anymore they don't know what a floppy disk is we've literally talked about on this show but there's some things where i'm like a cd-rom and my sister's like i don't understand and i'm like this hurts me deeply deeply hurts

i okay apparently instagrams have themes now did you notice my sister's like my sister looks at selene goes what's your theme and my selene goes my theme of what and my sister's like your instagram theme and we were like i don't know what that means she's like you know every instagram has a theme and i'm like mine is yellow i don't know she's like that's not a theme i was like well what what is i think it means like the filter you use so like you know how some influencers have like all the same color scheme oh it's like if you use a certain my do you know what visco comes from i learned so much visco is a photo editing app on your phone right that i know okay i learned that i i knew VSCO was, but that was like the, that was like, if I were to graduate in the school of like pop culture, internet stuff, VSCO was like my last class I took.

I don't know anything past VSCO. Sure. Yeah. Since that became a word, I don't know anything that's new. Scorched. Like the last cool thing I ever learned now, I guess was scorched, but that could literally be a fucking joke. The jury's joke on that one

we'll see we'll see if that's actually real i don't know anything beyond visco girl if anything new has come up since then i don't understand it if it's not on twitter i don't know what's going on e e girl e boy but somebody on at a halloween party this year was like i was like oh who are you just said she's like an e girl and i was like i love her and she was like what the fuck are you talking about and i was like i'm not cool i don't understand i thought it was a character from like a comic book now i know how my parents felt though when i'd be like wow you're so lame how do you not know what this is and my parents were like you have no idea how cool i was back when it was my fucking time to shine you look like an idiot now it's like i i could rule the roost back in the day i was like i learned coding to put skulls on my myspace

page so like fuck off yeah i bet you can't fucking do it on your themed Instagram. Yeah. Yeah. You put a theme. Pink skulls. Anyway. We had, you know what? Selina talked about this.

We're like, we had MySpaces where you had one song that was like your profile song. Yeah. And it would be like My Chemical Romance. And since we didn't have Spotify, we would just refresh the page and listen to our own MySpace to hear the song. That's the truth. That's how sad it was back then. I, well, I, the thing that, not to like go off on this tangent but here we are oh yeah i found my

old ipod like my very first ipod i ever got oh yeah and it had the click wheel where it wasn't even the touch one where you could go in a circle oh it was just buttons it was literally you had to if you had 500 songs you had to click wait was it a shuffle is that why no it was like the old like like this thick of an ipod and it wasn't a it was like literally it looked like the eye like the mini ipods right it was like that but the the version before that where before it was a touch wheel right you literally had to click next 500 times if you wanted to get to the 500 yes yes exactly so i remember being like oh i this song. I have it on my iPod. Here, give me a second.

Click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click. And then you would have to wait, like, forever to get there. Anyway, back to Bulgaria. Our parents are like, listen, fuck off. We had to go to a record store, so shut up. Yeah, exactly. And now records are back, so eat your words, Mom. Teens.

Can't live with them? Can't live with that? One day, the original click ipod will be in again i promise i will accept the original ipod is not first of all if anyone out there thinks that they're cool and retro and they're getting the original ipod from stores that's actually the ipod video yeah and apparently they've been remarketed and they're called the original ipod that was like the eighth generation there were so many ipods before that one but apparently they're with no color no video they're apparently calling it the original ipod so and it's posers anyway that is not scorched i remember i had mean girls

on my video ipod and i remember it would once you got through half the movie the battery would die yeah you couldn't watch very much of it uh okay uh bulgaria yes it's a one-eyed one-legged horse man who apparently also shapeshifts into dogs and sheep sure um oh yeah and then the ashes that's where we that's where we got lost well it was raining i got distracted in the ashes yeah so albania right there's kind of kind of like zombies they go around with chains they have bad breath like me and fun fact about albania there's another version of them uh of this creature called the karkankual karkankual or something and they were known in their description to wear iron clothing which is why now in albania their version of armor is called chemish karkankual no way i'm saying it totally wrong

but apparently your armor is named after that's so cool the clothes that this creature would wear that's very interesting fun fact fun fact um in greece which is i think the most common version of this story they would steal your food from anywhere they could hence breaking into your house but they were also known to steal it from your fireplace and so people would leave fried honey cakes for them to eat either in the fireplace uh after the fact is like a thank you. Now, please leave. Or they would literally throw them on the roof. So that way, as they were leaving, like to leaving Earth, they could eat honey cakes off your roof without breaking into your house.

It's like the old timey like Christmas with the cranks. They're trying to like put up the Christmas lights. But instead, they're all just like, hey like hey neighbor like throwing food under the roof apparently um if you ever left an opening available for them to get in they would uh take that opportunity to try to steal food so they were leaving it outside of the property i see that way you could eat there i see also apparently storage rooms if they were dirty it was an invitation for them to continue dirtying it because apparently you already didn't respect that space anyway so they could be as mischievous as they wanted started it and if it was clean they would take that as a sign of like oh you care

about this room i don't want to dirty it up too much for you and then they would very nice of them they would apparently leave wishing the room a thousand goods like wishing you that's just what your mother would say to be like that's what i thought i was like your damn room i was like this is literally just a step off into like a parent being like, ah, the monsters are going to get your room if you don't keep it clean. But if the milk goes bad, it's not my fault.

Right. I mean, really, really mom in Serbia, the 12 days of Christmas. So there are the unbaptized days quotes, AKA when demonic forces are most active bid. So,

uh, people in, at least in the Serbia story, they don't go out late at night during these 12 days, because if you do, one of them will jump on your back and force you to carry them until sunrise. Fantastic.

So what a fun, again, another cautionary tale from my mother, probably like don't go out when I'm already in bed. I don't want to worry about you and the monsters jumping on your back and your poor poor back also in serbia it's especially worse if you try to commit adultery during these 12 days if you sneak out to meet someone late at night apparently one of these monsters is assigned to

always sit on your door frame on the front door of your house and they will jump from the door frame if they see someone leave and know that you're about to commit adultery and they will jump onto your back hit you with a stick dig their sharp nails into your neck and force you to run throughout the nearby forests all night until sunrise do you think they're just a bunch of people running through the forest like committing adult you know these are mischievous but they seem also very protective of loyalty so yeah they seem to be very moral creatures like ethical creatures i'm not gonna mess up your clean room also don't cheat on your but they seem also very protective of loyalty. So they seem to be very moral creatures, like ethical creatures. I'm not going to mess up your clean room.

Also don't cheat on your wife. Like if you're virtuous, you're fine. Right. But also please leave honey cakes on the roof. Yeah. We're hungry. Um,

so in Turkey, uh, if you were to, one of the stories is that one of them will actually lead you astray in the middle of the night, imitating voices of your loved ones so that you'll walk out into the woods i think turkey is where people die because of these creatures right so they'll imitate voices so you'll go walking in the woods to go find your loved ones and then you get lost and freeze to death well that's dark

their word for this creature is a cara con jalos, which apparently translates into some version of werewolf, vampire. And Cara in the beginning comes from black. So black werewolf or black vampire. And there's also another word that they go by called Concalos, which apparently means bloodsucker or werewolf. Cute. So that's where that name comes from. But most people say that the name is derived from the Greek phrase, which means beautiful centaur. Oh, that's where that name comes from. But most people say that the name is derived from the Greek phrase, which means beautiful centaur.

Oh, um, that's nice. It's kind. Yeah. They apparently look like small Sasquatch and they hide in dark corners. Um, this is a general fear that people have with these creatures.

Apparently this is across the board. I'm not too sure, but as far as I know, it's across the board. Um, they look like small sasquatch sometimes that will hide in dark corners or under street lights that went out and they will ask passerbys if you're walking home late at night and you're not supposed to they will call you over and ask

you a question and no matter what the question is if you get it wrong you die what so if they ask you like what's your name if you get it wrong you die if they ask you like a math problem what's this officiant mean oh i'd be dead uh what's this what's harambus uh well we're both listen you and i so apparently there's a little cheat code here if they ever ask you a question no matter what the question is if you say cara which in turkey means black if you say cara to all of their responses then apparently you survive and they leave you alone or they run away okay that's easy enough um so like i said they will lure you into the forest uh if you can't shake yourself out of the trance so you do have if they are calling you over as long as you can kind of break your your focus on them

then you can be safe um if you are outside and see one at night if you say the phrase apparently you're supposed to say this like in other languages but in english i'm going to translate it to woods logs torches burning they will leave you alone scorched it's scorched every you're about to be scorched if you come near me woods logs torches burning that seems because they're scared of fire oh i see okay so if you say those things it's like okay everything's on fire over here don't come over sorry so here are some actual tips across the board to save yourself from the cali consaros um if you hang the lower jog of a the lower jaw of a pig behind the front door or inside

of the chimney thank god i already have that set up good uh if you hang a tangled strand of flax on the front door okay um apparently uh so i'll explain that in a second when i get to another part but remember a tangled strand of flax also uh if you scatter pancakes on the roof like i said that will keep them busy that's my favorite it's so stupid um when the village priest blesses all the water on the epiphany then the entire town is safe and the main one which beyond marking your door with a with a cross the main one is to leave a colander on your doorsteps which this is the same as the tangled strand of flax, because apparently one of the things that is interesting about the Cali

consaros is that they can't count higher than three. They won't say the number three because it's a holy number for them. Well, it's a holy number in the Trinity. Maybe that's why. So they won't say the number three. It's probably like they can't say it. They can't do it or something. So if you leave something like a strand of frayed flax or a colander or something with a lot of holes or wisps, they will stand there all night trying to count it.

One, two, one, two. They'll just keep going one, two, one, two, and they'll have to keep starting over. two one two they'll just keep going one two one two and they'll have to keep starting over so if you leave something with a lot of holes or strands or something if you leave that on your front door begs to be counted then they will not be able to enter because they'll be too busy counting intriguing um also if you hang sweets or food off of your chimney although a lot of people will actually say that you should literally leave uh like fire in your chimney so they don't come down your chimney. I don't know why you would entice them with food. That's a valid point.

If the household owns a black rooster, for some reason, they won't approach in the first place. I think because if I don't know why it has to be a black rooster, but if a rooster is like making their noises in the morning, then that lets them know that the sun is rising and they're afraid of being outside during the sun. You think that'd be a nice alarm clock for them, though? Yeah, I don't. I don't understand. Also, if you spring holy water around each room once a day with a basil wrapped cross. Sure. You should be fine.

Another one is if you burn a smelly shoe over the fire. No, don't do that. The foul smell will go through the house and keep them away because it smells it'll also keep me away i was gonna say the first part's true the house will smell really bad i don't know about the second part so to stop them from coming down the chimney this is my favorite fun fact of all this is to burn a very large log and burn it for 12 days straight and this actually ties in with the tradition of the yule log. Oh.

So since it's happening during Yule tide, put a log down. I guess it's called the Yule log then. And since it's burning, it keeps all of the creatures away. Oh, that's kind of nice. So here are some fun facts real quick that have nothing to do with information about them. Fantastic. Just random fun facts. The Gringotts goblins in Harry Potter are referred to as these in the Greek translations.

No way. So if you read the Greek version of Harry Potter. Hey, but those things can count money like nobody, but nobody's business. They are useful. Yes. So I don't know about this counting thing. Okay. Wait a minute. That's the truth.

Telling you. Apparently a reference to the Kali Kanzari of modern Greece is made in HP Lovecraft story, The Whisperer in Darkness. That's fun also very fun i look i found it also hp lovecraft i always think is a literal harry potter character which i know is not right it just sounds like some my first thought is always that sounds like something jk rowling would say also hp like harry potter also lovecraft sounds like the luna lovegood hp harry potter yeah i mean i get it i know it's not just so we're clear i know it's not but my first thought is always that's a jk rowling character makes sense um potential descendants

of these creatures are called the koboloi and they were companions of dionysus oh okay that's fun speaking of greek very fun um and once here's speaking of greek stories again once they apparently annoyed heracles so badly that he tried to capture them, but then they shapeshifted into looking so cute that he let them go. That would work on me every time. And the Cali Consaros were on or the Cali Constantin Roy were on NBC show Grimm for their Christmas episode in 2014. OK, I didn't see that, but I bet it was good. I had to watch it at my old work when I would... Oh, right.

When I had to watch TV for a living, which was fun. And we complained to you guys every day about our work jobs. But I used to... I wrote TV, you watched TV. What was the problem? But interesting, I did have to watch that episode. So, full circle. And that is some information about the Cali Consaros.

Yay! Okay. I like it very good thank you sorry for our weird rant about technology guys keep this in mind for next year when we all tweet out did we ever cover those weird greek demons and you guys need to like tell us what did we ever complain about technology can you tell us exactly where that was we don't remember and then they're like yeah every fucking episode that sounds we're so over it that checks out okay guys so i have a holiday tale for you it's very fucked up and i'm so sorry a hell of a day a hell of a tale yeah i'm just trying to make that happen we'll see if it works i'll keep saying it until people hate it

and then it's still a thing so here's what i have to say so i like i explained did the instagram close friends to all our patrons. I asked them to please send in holiday topics for me to cover for this episode. So I'm going to read some of my favorites that I got that I did not use because they made me laugh or they were interesting. So here's some favorites. Liv Tompkins suggested mall Santas. The Well Witch suggested a channel that i'm so thrilled i know about called homicide for the holidays on oxygen oxygen has the sounds about right yep they have the punniest

shows uh my name is crystal suggested uh oh wait what did i do did it go way back sent did you delete it my name name is Crystal. I put the lineup dot com slash Christmas murder. So maybe they just suggest just a link. Yeah. Megan Mixon says the frosted tips epidemic. Oh, that is something. It is an epidemic. Pretty horrific.

Yeah. Hell of days. Dixie Baby 89 and Mrs. Joe Cap said bad Santas. Bell Not Bella said how the Grinch stole Christmas. Also quite a harrowing tale. That actually would have been a true crime of him when he went to the post office and stole everyone's gifts. I mean, and when the icebox.

You really should have told the story but changed the name so I didn't know what was going on. That would have been funny. I would have been like, what? I can't believe that happened. He had this really cute dog. His heart had some serious problems. I would have figured it out by the time his heart grew three times the size. No, I would have said he had like an enlarged heart.

Oh, yeah. Oh. Yeah. Do it again anyway. I'll do it in a couple years. Somebody remind me. I'm not going to remember it next Christmas. Do it next Christmas.

Someone who's binging this a year from now. Right. Just email me right now. If this happens to be December 2020 november 2020 and you're hearing this i don't remember anymore i don't need to tell christine i don't either so message me please great idea okay cool okay megan haley 89 says a real grinch that stole christmas okay uh call me britney says killer santas andrew olsen says death by a lemon uh and finally hannah conda says make one up about elves stealing which i guess you kind of did so i done not that you made it up but you know

the greeks made it up it seems no it's it's very true i don't want them coming after me okay no we don't want the greeks after us so the topic that i did pick was one that a lot of people suggested and that i had never heard of so i looked, obviously. And it was sent to me by quite Frankie Lee, Robo 816, Becky and 1204 and somewhere over the bamboo. And this topic is the Lawson family Christmas Day massacre. I okay, dun dun dun. I've never heard of it. Hang on. I need a swig of my deep happy. Yeah. Yeah, you take that swig d peppy is a is a thing i learned by the way oh okay actually i'm not you learned or made up learned because i actually i changed my mind i have learned things since bisco girl which is baby yoda and well sure we all

learned that we all learned we all learned something about ourselves and learned that yeah uh d peppy is from one of the baby yoda memes so when he's it's when the one where he's drinking and he's holding a dr pepper if you're not watching this so it was baby yoda and the meme and he called it a d peppy and i'm just obsessed so okay great i love it um okay okay as you were this is the lawson family christmas day massacre okay um i i'm just gonna tell you where i researched this because there was a lot of information. I used a few podcasts, Morbid, Criminal, and Once Upon a Crime. So thank you. Those were extremely, extremely helpful.

Those were like where I got most of my information. And then I also went on Medium's website, news.com.au, Wiki, obviously the lineup and murderpedia.org. So there's that. I'm just going to tell you now, cause this is a wild tale. All right. You're not going to know what hit you. All right. 1920s in Germantown, North Carolina. Oh, also since North Carolina is mad at us, I'm going to do a North Carolina story for you. Are you mad at us, North Carolina? Well, since we didn't go to Charlotte on this tour.

Fair. Okay. So I apologize about that. It's not you. It's me. It's not you. It's definitely am. So we're in Germantown, North Carolina. Charles Lawson and his family, they worked as tenant tobacco farmers. They weren't really wealthy. They were kind of lower working class. But by 1927, they had saved enough money to buy their own farm. It was kind of run down, but it was kind of the their life goal to have their own farm. So moved onto this farm the dad's name is charles or charlie lawson and he had been born in 1886 there's not much known about him but in 1911 he married a woman named fanny but what is fanny short for you don't wait for me to ask the question all right okay edit edit okay you do you do it fanny oh what's what's fanny short for but oh yeah i forgot okay i like that we were gonna we want to make merch about that someday that would be really we would like a fanny pack that

says that ideally i'm telling you that would be like epic i think um we'll work on it okay but so we know that fanny also means other a front butt in other countries yes to be clear somebody dm me recently was like fanny is short for the name francis i was like it's like i mean i know but that's not what we meant the fanny oh it was what is fanny short for that's what it was what is fanny short for but yeah okay sorry charles and fanny had eight children but william uh one of their children died of pneumonia at the age of six. So they had seven remaining children. Marie was 17. Arthur, 16.

Carrie, 12. Maybel, 7. James, 4. Raymond, 2. And Mary Lou, four months old. Wow. Once you list them all out, it's like, holy smokes, that's a lot. Fun fact about Mary Lou.

Uh-huh. So Mary Lou was the secret codename for the Avengers movies. What do you mean the secret codename? So every movie has a fake name you knew about this no no oh okay most movies have a code name that they go by so that way if you're actually filming on location it'll be like a more boring name of a movie that way people don't crowd around and want to watch you film it oh but where do you put the code name like if you're put like on a chair back or something or like all the production stuff so any public facing stuff it has like a or like like let's say in a i know we have this a lot in la a lot in new york also like in atlanta if you're a big town where people will shoot on location or shoot at actual physical sites that

a lot of people are usually at like a park or something instead of being on set that's being on location when you're not on set you're on location um a lot of times there'll be like drivers have to know where base camp is so they'll have signs in public without drawing attention saying like we're shooting the avengers movie over here in this gas station the avengers base camp is this way they'll have so they had like mary lou base camp ours should be fanny fanny's performing over here got it well now if you see fan also all the captain america ones each captain america one was a different winter themed one okay so like in the one because he in the first movie he was frozen to death so don't tell me they called it frozen because that's gonna get a lot of people no they called it frostbite oh okay but like things like

that i think the second one was actually called frostbite but they had like frost icicle yeah like things that like so i think i showed you the one i still have a chair back from when i worked on spider-man and they had it was called summer of george um what and it's supposed to it's supposed to be a name that's kind of ambiguous and like it sounds like a lame like indie movie yeah the idea is that like so people don't crowd around because if you're also shooting at a park and you need it to look like it's open and there aren't really people at the park if people start crowding around right it's not going to look very good not only do the camera people have a harder time shooting but also

there's enough people there that now audio gets messed up because people are talking and nobody's going to just totally shut up and be silent and there's security it's a whole thing it becomes a whole thing so just to like keep things quiet they usually have a boring name for an exciting movie interesting so anyway mary lou mary lou is the nickname for infinity war i think interesting it's also a four month old okay i'm trying to do all the fun stuff now before it gets to murder sure sure family uh so the family was pretty well respected they were seemingly normal um and in 1929 two weeks before christmas charles took his entire family into town to winston-salem which was about 13 miles from where they lived he planned to get a studio portrait taken of the whole family so beforehand he bought everyone fancy new outfits he told them they could buy whatever they wanted the kids got new toys um and they all

got dressed up for this picture now pause that was so abnormal like because they were lower working class in the rural area this just was not a thing you did in the 1920s especially with seven children getting them all into town paying for all brand new clothes for all of them these people were not rich like you know they worked really hard to feed their own family um just very the whole thing was and then the portrait like they're just very strange um a lot of people at that time in their class had never like would never in their entire lives have any picture taken of them so the fact that he paid for this whole studio portrait was very bizarre. Yeah, very bizarre. So it just it was extremely expensive. It was just way out of the way.

It didn't it didn't it just threw everybody off. They're like, we don't know what's going on. But his family just went with it. So, yeah, like I said, according to Morbid, the podcast, most people, their societal rank had never even had a photo taken. So this is very odd. This wasn't like, jc penny's christmas studio portrait session it was like i don't know what it was like but it was not that it was not that i see um so i okay so i found a photo that was labeled for use so i'm gonna put it on the green screen so that everybody because it's like a really important part of the story wow it looks great i'm gonna show it to you right

here oh i can't see it i'm about to show it to you right here oh i see i'm like hold on let me scroll i was trying to make a joke for the future like i don't know what's here but okay i'll show you in a moment uh but i i wanted to also add that um when they when his family asked uh like why are you doing that his wife was like okay i'm getting nervous like we don't have much money why are you doing this he said it's a christmas surprise so just very strange so this is a photo so you get like a little look so i'm gonna explain to you here so everyone looks kind of uncomfortable right and like i know that back then people in photos didn't necessarily smile that wasn't like how photos worked back then still blows my mind though i understand why you

wouldn't smile because like you wanted to you only get one shot and you want it to be like a serious picture of you well but yeah but like people it wasn't like even a concept that you would smile like why would you smile yeah like here's what i look like yeah so okay here this is marie she's 17 that's the daughter and that's the father and then over here this really angry lady is Fanny. There's Mary Lou. And then these are the other kids. This is Arthur over here. So the whole family is set up where... Oh, look, there's Infinity War. There she is.

It's set up strangely because the mom and dad, not strangely, but kind of different than what you would expect. The mom and dad are not in the center of the photo. Yeah, interesting. They almost look like a couple, the father and daughter. It looks like two couples are showing off their children together. It looks like two couples. Oh, I see. And they're younger kids.

Right. So it's a little bit odd. Like, it's just kind of like, you know, you'd normally think in a traditional family setting back then, like mom and dad in the center, holding a baby and then everyone's around. So it just it was a little bit odd. But as you can tell, everyone's kind of cranky looking yeah um this also like for a professional portrait there's no real backdrop there like it's like it looks like they're standing kind of off to the side of the screen yeah yeah that's true it looks like our our attempt at a green screen just they like

just went up to like a corner of a wall and they were like let's all smush together yeah and it was probably way expensive anyway um and then here so you can see he's the only one the dad charlie is kind of smiling and like he's looking off into the distance that actually makes it so much creepier now that i know something dark's about to happen because it looks like he it looked the others are clearly clueless to whatever is in the future they look pretty uncomfortable and unhappy just saying okay duly noted not to prep prime anyone but we'll see duly no they do look pissed and or at least fanny she does look she does look the most mad the rest look like like resting bitch face yeah yeah yeah so uh as they mentioned on morbid they all look kind of uncomfortable. Um, but the photo is taken. They move on. And two weeks later on Christmas day of 1929,

uh, 17 year old Marie, she wakes up early. She's going to bake the Christmas cake. It's a family tradition. Um, and the oldest son, Arthur,

who's 16, he's younger, a little bit younger than Marie. He and his dad want to go. He wants to go hunting for rabbits with his dad. And this is a local Christmas tradition. Um, or it was a local Christmas tradition that you would go rabbit hunting in the morning

on Christmas day. But he realizes he doesn't have any shotgun shells. So he asked his dad if he has any shotgun shells. And his dad says, No, I have none to spare. And he says, Why don't you go into town and buy some shells and come back? So we can go hunting so arthur heads out back to town um to get some shotgun shells to go hunting so arthur is at the store he's buying these shells when he is pulled aside by someone who tells him something terrible has happened you need to get back to the farm so charles uh his brother so charles's dad his brother elijah and his sons had stopped by the lawson farm on the way home from a hunt to wish them a Merry Christmas when they arrived they found the middle

girls 12 year old Carrie and seven year old Maybel in the tobacco barn shot and bludgeoned to death Fanny the mom was on the porch she had been shot in the chest with a shotgun inside they found 17 year old marie's body sprawled next to the fireplace then the little boys four-year-old james and two-year-old raymond were found inside beaten to death shit they had seemingly run and hidden before being found and killed by the attacker then they found four-month-old mary lou inside her crib bludgeoned to death oh my god the bodies had all been found with their arms crossed and rocks under their heads oh and charles was nowhere to be found of course police and neighbors descend on the farm arthur's called back and people begin

searching for charles uh and that's when they hear one single shotgun blast from the woods so arthur and a police officer follow the family's two beagles into the woods who know where to lead them. And the dogs lead them to Charles. He's dead. He's dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. There were footprints encircling a tree nearby where he had essentially been walking for hours. Wow. He had trodden down so much that he had been walking

for several hours around this like pacing essentially before taking his own life next to charles's body were two letters both seemingly unfinished they were on the back of two receipts one said troubles can cause and the other said no one to blame but. And that's all they said. Huh. Mysterious. Yeah. So once they had found Charles's body, they were able to piece together what had happened, knowing who had done this. Now, they determined that Carrie and Maybel, the 12 and seven, 12 and seven year olds, had decided to head out to their uncle and aunt's house. Their father was waiting behind the tobacco barn with a shotgun. was waiting behind the tobacco barn with a shotgun and once they were in range he shot them with his 12-gauge shotgun and to ensure they were dead he bludgeoned them before placing their bodies in the

tobacco barn folding their arms and putting rocks under their heads he then returned to the porch where he shot fanny directly in the chest just walked right up to her marie and the two boys heard the blast presumably and the boys went running to find a hiding place. Charles entered the house, shot Marie in front of the fireplace before seeking out the boys, going to look for them, and then shooting them and bludgeoning them as well.

Finally, he went to the baby, bludgeoned her to death, and put her back in her crib. And her cause of death was a fractured skull. Wow. Then he posed the rest of the bodies with their arms crossed and rocks under their heads some accounts say stones were placed over their eyes also but that's not confirmed but it's a very like funereal like right uh setup kind of

sure after posing the bodies he went to the woods where he like i said paced for several hours before shooting himself and he was eventually found by his son and a police officer now obviously this is like suddenly a massive you know sensation in the town um and across the state 5 000 people attended the family's funeral a lot of them you know most of them not knowing the family but just curious what happened and according to morbid the bodies were buried together in one plot with charles also in the like in the same plot which is that's kind of gross questionable right i get it but i also hate it also it said like charles father and i'm like don't do that he just murdered all of his children and his wife not very fatherly yep um also they were this is really an odd fact they put them they buried them in the clothes that he had bought for their studio portrait because they were the nicest clothes they owned you know i get

it but that's just icky it's so icky it's it makes it just like an extra layer of disturbing so the farm was a crime scene but back then as you can probably imagine they didn't cordon off crime scenes they didn't disinfect them in any way so thousands of people began swarming the family farm to gawk at the scene of the crime there was still blood everywhere shit uh basically left exactly as it was found the day of the murders and at this point charles brother marion uh took advantage of this and started charging people 25 cents to tour the house okay yep uh which actually you know i've thought about this a lot and i was listening to once upon a crime and at first it's very like ew why would you do that but it's kind of like nowadays we have tv shows and podcasts and things where literally

all we do is hear about murders also i i think it what grosses me out about it or makes me feel a little uneasy is that like it was so fresh to the death i feel like maybe after enough time has passed and maybe it's not as exploitive like but i think that's kind of that's me with like going to like the lizzie borden house you know it's like i feel like enough times passed i but i think that's kind of that's me with like going to like the lizzie borden house you know it's like i feel like enough time's passed i mean i think that's like a human feeling but i think if you really think about it it doesn't really make a difference like it's just as it's murder is murder you know what i mean yeah like i feel like nowadays if something horrible happened everyone's going to watch tv about it like if somebody i don't know like a recent case that's like even like the menendez brothers like everyone tuned

into the trial everyone wanted to know what happened people saw the crime scene photos like it's just yeah that's true people like people are just drawn to act like gypsy rose everyone right exactly gotcha and so it's like it it sounds fucked up but nowadays like you don't have to go visit the crime scene to see what people can do right to see what the results of a murder like that can be you can literally just turn on the tv or google it so it makes sense to me a little bit that like people were fascinated and wanted to just like see what was happening it's fucked up like i think maybe don't bring your kids there right but who knows um so this is disturbing marie's Christmas cake was still on display from that morning, the one that she had baked. But it ended up having to be put under glass because people kept stealing the raisins off of it.

Wow. Wow. Hold on. Oh, I thought you wanted me to elaborate more, which I could easily do. You can. You don't have to. It's just my first thought was like i can't imagine like making a cake thinking i'm gonna eat it but it's actually everyone that's gonna

eat parts of it are actually people viewing my murder in a few hours like one of the more disturbing elements and it it's like it's only because like oh look she made this for the family to celebrate yeah the only reason it exists is because she had other plans only a few hours ago and so people were stealing people apparently people came with buckets and collected the blood so this is too far i'm like don't steal shit from a crime scene don't like you know collect blood from the victim like okay now you're going too far like i understand wanting to like see it and be curious but like this is how i end up having stories like it sounds like you're just trying to haunt your own house right

like what a curse to bring like a victim's blood into your home. Bring a victim's raisins back to your house. Right. Right, right, right. Those are cursed raisins. Mm-hmm. All raisins are cursed raisins, to be clear. Unless they're on sticks of peanut butter celery.

Correct. And little aunties on a log. Just don't put them in my cookies. Okay. So supposedly John Dillinger also came to the scene to view it, right? Oh, interesting. Isn't that cool? It's just like one of those random fun facts where like thousands of people came, including John Dillinger.

He was curious too, I guess. Well, him amongst many. I know. Of all people, I'm less surprised about him being there. Because, I mean, you're right about like Lizzie Borden. Think about it. Nowadays, if we were there and they still had like a setup of it, we'd be like, oh, I want to see that. Yeah.

So it's like, sure, it's like 100 years later but it's still the fucked up thing still happened to these very real people so it's just yeah you're right it seems very fresh and like fucked up and it is there's an element of how new it is that like yeah i don't know why i don't know why it makes it less fucked up immediately we do do talk about that. Like older stories just have the element of time. Like they don't feel this. I think also we're maybe we're more open to talk about our feelings about them because we know nobody alive right now is suffering through the aftermath of it. Like, like direct like this.

Right. Like nobody is like a current victim of the situation. Like nobody, nobody that's alive right now was best friends with Lizzie Borden's dad or something like that. Like, not that that like, oh, now we friends with lizzie borden's right or something like that like not that that made like oh now we can laugh about it that's not what i mean but it just feels less it feels uh it's farther away like distance almost yeah yeah no i agree like so like the cake is still warm from her making it and there's her fresh blood outside from only an hour later yeah and then people are just like bringing buckets it's like well that part's like

beyond me yeah it just seems i don't know i don't know how to describe it but yeah it just seems like there's not enough time has passed for us to somehow kind of at least form a scab over it completely especially being like in the family and charging 25 cents for people to come see it it's it's it just listen i don't know this guy i know i did read he had like severe money problems and listen i'm not judging i'm just saying like i understand why our innate reaction is to go what the fuck and then our secondary reaction is to be like well actually yeah it's like i was listening to once upon a crime and she said that she's like i mean to be honest like we all probably would have gone if you're listening to this podcast and you binge true crime podcast that's true and you

had no other access to any of this kind of information it's fascinating to you and you're like what is everyone looking at what is everyone you know how could this happen it doesn't mean you don't have empathy i guess it just means like you're sickly fascinated like i mean who are we to talk we literally know it's a true crime podcast that's exactly what i'm saying yeah and like you know so i i'm like we were probably in the same boat so i don't feel like i can judge that at all. Got it. Taking the blood. Don't do that.

That I might not have done. That's a different story. That's like, what are you going to do with that? What is wrong with you? Yeah. Either you're going to do nothing or something. Right. And anything in the something category is bad.

You're going to do nothing or something. And we don't like either. Right. Okay. So now I'm going to tell you the theories as to what the fuck happened on christmas day of 1929 got it so arthur had actually injured himself a few weeks prior to the murder he was uh chopping some weeds down with a uh with kind of an axe a pickaxe type thing i don't know if it's a pickaxe it's a type of axe and uh it got caught on like a wire

and it swung back and hit him hit him in the head oh the sharp point or the dull point i have no idea okay i imagine those are two different stories either you got hit by the wooden handle or the sharp metal i don't think he got hit by a handle if he was swinging it right oh i see i thought you meant like it left his hands and it's no no like he was swinging it and like it got stuck and when he pulled it back it gave way and hit him got it it's bad got it yeah so he uh it was a really really bad injury um and people said his temperament changed after the injury uh his temper became even worse than usual but so at first it's like oh head injury you know we know how that can change someone's

uh behavior and attitude and outlook on life and that seems to have happened but this is also debunked pretty much in my opinion as a plausible theory because after their deaths charles's brain was actually removed and brought to johns hopkins in baltimore and they analyzed it to see if anything was wrong if he had received brain injury from any from the the hit nothing he didn't have any brain injury nothing was seemingly like off from his normal self from the way his brain would have looked before the injury um so that kind of was debunked as a theory as to why why he did this um another theory now this is the one that's probably the most shocking uh this one didn't actually surface until 60 years after the crime so in 1990 a book

called white christmas bloody christmas was published about the lawson family murders the book was written by trudy j smith and her father m bruce jones who was actually a boy in the neighborhood when the murders occurred. So as he grew up, he said all his sisters were able to go see the crime scene and his mom said he was too young. So he was left at home. I feel like that would cause you to in the future write a book on it. Be obsessed with it, right?

It's like, well, everyone else got to see it. You kept me from it. Exactly. So he did. He became kind of obsessed with solving the crime and his daughter joined him and they wrote a book about it. The day before the book was to be published, they received a phone call and the phone call was from one of the Lawson's cousins. Her name was Stella and she was a cousin of the kids at the time and she had already been interviewed for the book.

But she called and said, look, I know you're about to publish it, but there's something you need to know before you publish your book. It emerged that weeks before Christmas, Marie, who's the oldest, the one in the middle, 17 year old. She was at a sleepover with her best friend, Ella Mae Johnson. And she seemed like off. She seemed upset. And Ella Mae asked what was wrong. And and she said nothing. And she tried to kind of prodded her and asked her what was going on.

Finally, Marie broke down and told her best friend that she was pregnant. When Ella Mae asked who the father was marie said my papa and that's why they were standing in the middle together in the christmas picture i don't know it just adds to it you know so marie told lma that her dad knew he had impregnated her and so did her mother okay but it's different a neighbor said uh he knew he had heard about this the pregnancy and he he uh charlie had told him if you ever tell fanny if anyone if fanny ever found out if anyone would ever tell fanny quote there would be some killing done so yikes and marie outwardly told her friend my mother knows as well so and she looked pissed in that picture she did look pretty fucking pissed and they all look pretty uncomfortable so then the authors were like well back to the drawing board i guess our book was supposed to

be published tomorrow but let's uh oh my god go back so they started to gather more information about this story and it seems pretty true like it there's you know a lot of people had have they ever exhumed her body to see if there was a baby there or is it i don't know how bodies work it could uh i don't know like would there still be a fetus there after all this time is what i'm i guess it would imagine or i guess it would depend on how far along she was um so a few loss and women and she wasn't showing in the photo they know they've said she wasn't showing so I don't know how far along she would have been so a few Lawson women had been overheard talking at the funeral about how Fanny had confided in them that she had discovered incest in her family

before Christmas and she had agonized about the situation for weeks and that family portrait just becomes creepier and creepier the more you think about uh this whole situation going down and like that at the time of this photo marie and her dad and mom knew about this pregnancy and he had assaulted her and it just makes it all much more twisted right um especially him with that weird smug face it's just not good yeah you guys if you're not watching the youtube go google a picture it's of the Lawson family murders. It's or the portrait. He does look very proud of himself.

Right. He's like between the two of them and like looking off into the distance. It's a little creepy. So that one, I think that theory makes a lot of sense to me because pretty much everyone from around that time, there were rumors going around. But also people in the family were like, oh, no, she told us this. Like we knew this was the truth. Fanny knew. Marie knew.

It's not just a rumor. Like, they actually have a lot of people who were there who said it was true. Now, another question that was brought up in that Morbid episode that I thought was interesting is why didn't he kill Arthur? Why did he send Arthur away before the murders? One theory that i think makes a whole lot of sense is that arthur he believed arthur would have stopped him so he's like he's the oldest he's 16 like he would have gotten in the way if i were trying to kill everyone in the family right um he would have gotten in the way so that's one theory uh another theory that i think

is interesting um is that arthur didn't believe the incest he didn't know about the incest thing and so after the deaths maybe he would have been able to be like no that would never happen and like protect the family name or reputation which is a little bit it's a lot of thought i don't know that doesn't totally a lot of assuming about someone's character after you're not there yeah and a lot of caring about that. Right. After you just murdered everyone, you want your reputation to be saved. Right. Exactly. It's like, um, questionable.

Kind of backwards. Now, another theory that was thrown out by the people on Morbid, which I thought was interesting, is that considering he was the oldest son, he could carry on the family name. And I personally think that makes a lot of sense, just because that's how a lot of people think and thought. And, you know, he was the oldest son. I'm sure apparently he and his dad were very close and maybe he just was like, okay, you're carrying on our name and, uh, everyone else has to go with me. Um, Arthur had obviously a hard

life after the murders, his entire, I mean, his six siblings and his mother and father were all dead in a matter of one afternoon on christmas day he began drinking heavily at a young age and he refused to discuss the crimes with anyone for the rest of his life he married and had four kids but tragically in 1945 he died in a car accident at the young age of 31 so he didn't even live too much longer 15 years after the murders so this is uh this was brought up in every podcast episode i listened to about this uh story is that back then there were these things called murder ballads and they would basically sing songs like bluegrass bands would like make songs about murderers or crimes oh okay it's like in game of thrones where like they'd play you know like

old-timey tunes about like the wife so fair blah blah right right you know that one uh and so they would make up these songs about like these crimes and then they would sing them and people would kind of i've heard a few yeah yeah um and so they actually played the songs in criminal and once upon a crime um and that's very weird to hear uh they were very popular apparently they were often used as lullabies to warn children like cautionary tales which stick to the demons if you're gonna do a cautionary tale the thing about a cautionary tale is like realistically it can't happen and also by the time you're older you realize oh that

was made up right this is like a little too it's literally real what are you saying like daddy's gonna hack you up with it's like you're not telling a like a fable you're telling a biography yeah yeah yeah real story so that i thought was weird it's like but like but real but real um so actually here are the some of the lyrics i'm gonna read to you i'm not gonna sing them okay don't worry you're not gonna look in my eyes and hold my hand and then write it in a card later for me to read out loud to everyone else okay oh I'll do that just after we stop recording don't worry uh here's some lyrics and uh I heard this on all three episodes they say he killed his wife at first while the little ones did cry please papa won't you spare our lives it is so hard to die and i'm like that's fucked up dude oh that's heavy heavy and like they said it in uh the morbid episode too they were like

also like you don't know what the fuck they said like right it is so hard to bring your own spin on things correct you're like creating your own little like story behind it to sing to your because it rhymes right i mean really so anyway the family is still buried in the same plot in germantown north carolina the headstone bears the inscription quote not now but in the coming years it will be in a better land we'll read the meaning of our tears and then sometime we'll understand it's just all very dark and heavy stuff uh pretty much everyone in town knows the story um i can imagine you would if you lived in a small town like that uh if you want to read a copy of white christmas bloody christmas it's very hard to find a copy so you can check it out at the local library but you have to stay in the building to read it so that you don't steal it oh interesting

um you can't really check it out uh the story is still shared to this day it has kind of developed this like air of mystery over time as like you said this is ripe for a kind of a ghost story a creepy paranormal story yeah um it is said that when the leaves fall they fall on every plot except charles's oh and when it snows the snow doesn't stick to his grave interesting so there are even mother nature has denied him yeah exactly as she should uh there are also rumored to be some ghosts that haunt the property well duh i'm gonna tell you these because there's not there's definitely not enough for you to do a story there's only like now you know what it's like to try to find a ghost i know i know so i'm just gonna i decided to just do it because i'm like you're never gonna have enough to cover this on your own but so there are rumored to be ghosts

duh as you said so eloquently uh also gone i could have gone with doy doy is a good one is that cool now though that's probably we literally said this is heavy as if we're still in the 80s so i think i think cool has passed mom if you're listening i'm no longer cool so this is not hope you enjoyed that phase of my life i sure did i'm sure she loved it by the way when you were super cool yeah this is not radical all right not tubular not tubular okay according to paranormalstories.blogspot.com which i imagine is one of your bookmarks a house that is now the Squire's Inn Bed and Breakfast is said to be haunted by members of the Lawson family.

The owners claim they have seen seven-year-old Maybel and two-year-old Raymond Lawson peering into windows of the front door, and they have been heard talking, laughing, and playing inside and outside the house. According to paranormal author Dale J. Young, it is said that Charlie Lawson's crimes are so horrible that his soul is not even welcome in hell wow as a result some local residents say his ghost still wanders

the road in stokes county near the place where his farm once stood and if you go you can see him walk down the road toward his where his farm once was and finally the author of strange carolinas dot com interviewed richard miller the owner of tb nightinas.com interviewed Richard Miller, the owner of TB Night Funeral Home. So there's a museum on the first floor and then there's like the funeral home above it. Oh, wow. Where the eight members of the Lawson family were embalmed. When asked if there were any ghosts, Miller, the owner, replied, yes, a little girl. I've never seen her, but four people have.

One was a man. I was in here, which i'm like okay thank you what were the other three yeah i don't know who's to say a dog uh a is that to believe does that mean the other what is it called does that mean the other three are women i think that's what he's saying which i'm like catsop okay men can Men can be even ghosts too. One was an uncle Jesse. Uh, one was a man. Okay. I was in here years ago and apparently she was looking out the window because the man wanted to know if my daughter was in here working with me. So the guy came in and asked, Oh, is your daughter working the office with you? And he's like, no, I don't have a, or no, I don't have a daughter or no,

she's, I, you know, no, my daughter's not here. And he and he's like oh who's that little girl in the window goodbye goodbye goodbye uh then he says there's been three kids oh okay maybe it was three kids okay all right i'll give you i'll give you a pass on this richard he says there's been three kids who saw her one kids about one kid about three years ago grabbed his dad's arm and said i'm not going up there there's a little girl standing there i like how he didn't know if it was a dead girl not just a girl and he was like i'm not going up yeah fuck that there's a girl absolutely there's a girl i refuse that's such a good point uh he also says richard also says i've had a couple kids who refuse to go down the hallway so they are scared of her which is interesting because a lot of times you hear of kids say like oh no that's my friend but apparently they don't like this one is not trying to

like moosh off your vulnerable this one's been murdered violently i don't know and anyway that is the tragic tale of the lawson family christmas day massacre all right terrible huh terrible so i researched that and that's why when we were doing an episode yesterday too i was like i don't want to do another christmas one i just want to kind of do one and then move on it's too much it's a lot the takeaway is mary lou is also the avengers that's that's where i'm just gonna leave it i don't know i thought for sure you would have known about that as working in tv that there were code names for things no but i never worked on set like i worked on set at set like uh at disney like in the building oh like on a lot got it got it got it

but i never worked on location because i was always an office pa got it well even then it's like it's i guess and also i worked at disney xd we didn't have we didn't need code names that's true any of the any of the nickelodeon or disney shows we'd had they had just normal and also they're all filmed like or they're either animated or they're all filmed um on set at nickelodeon so like there weren't any uh yeah so there was well there was mainly codings for people like me because it the whole point is that there's so many movie parts to a production that you know you don't know the names of every person who's gonna work on your show so like if i ran home and said i'm working on spider-man you know things would get out of hand very quickly yeah so they would they wouldn't even tell us like we found out afterwards because who knows

who's accidentally gonna say it who's accidentally gonna say it yeah you kind of figure it out after you're making enough of the the props but like yeah but like so making like a spider-man mask you're like i wonder what this movie about summer of george is well yeah so like they don't tell us either the whole point is that like only the direct people who work on on the actual movie, like are on the lot, know what the movie is. And then when they whenever they would give us a work order or come pick something up, they'd be like, oh, I'm here for Summer of George. It does make sense. And that way, like all the moving parts underneath you, you can trust that they're not going home or like

stealing product. Like if I knew that I was working on a Spider-Man movie, fuck, yeah, I would take everything. I would have made made doubles of everything so i'd have my own like little hold on i'm calling the police well well so then you end up finding out like after you work there long enough you just become friends with the people who are making the work order so they know what the actual movie is and and they could probably trust you at that point not to run around screaming what you're doing or tweet it yeah so at some point you're working on enough things you're like oh what it is this movie actually your job would be at stake if you tweeted i'm working on this like they fucking would probably fire you yeah the rule usually

was once the movie's out you can you can tell right so there were times where you would kind of look at me and be like you may not share this oh yeah we would be in the middle of the podcast and i'd be like delete this i mean delete lot. You cannot tell anyone. I know. Anyway. You used to be the bearer of all my secrets. I still am. You just don't know it. Hee hee hee hee hee. All right. Well, thank you for listening to our holiday special full of fun facts and lots of gruesome death.

Christmas time has passed. Yes. Can't wait to sing that again next year. Can you wait? No. We can't. I'm going to tell the real story about the Grinch, so email me. Okay.

And that's why we drink. Yay.