And That's Why We Drink - E195 Frankenstein's Ding Dong and Haphazardly Fermented Kraut

Episode Date: November 1, 2020

Xiinön is still in the room this week... so sue her! We're also pretty sure we're cursed so get ready for some spooky updates in episode 195! We're still riding high from spooky season and bringing you the creeps with Em's story on the history of Frankenstein. Then Christine takes us to Evatha's hometown of Leesburg, Virginia to cover the East Coast Rapist, not to be confused with the East Area Rapist. Em also shares quite an array of photos from the world's worst playground... and that's why we drink! Please consider supporting the companies that support us! Check out all the amazing shoes and bags available right now at rothys.com/DRINK. That’s Rothys.com/DRINK. Style and sustainability meet to create your new favorites!Explore your creativity at Skillshare.com/DRINK and the first 1,000 people to use our link will get a free trial of Skillshare Premium Membership. Receive free access to thousands of classes for a limited time. Be one of the first 1,000 to sign up at skillshare.com/DRINK.Go to buyphantomwine.com and enter DRINK for 20% off online purchases of Phantom wine.You’re going to love Amazon Music Unlimited as much as we do. Take advantage of this incredible offer today! For a limited time… you can get three months of Amazon Music Unlimited for FREE. Go to Amazon.com/whywedrink. That’s Amazon.com/whywedrink to get your first three months of Amazon Music for FREE.

so what did you say again can you say it again oh i don't remember it it was nothing you don't remember oh it seemed like it was something a little along the lines of i'm sorry for everything i ever said about lemon but i am sorry for everything i listen because i know i'm really thrusting up this upon people if you're not on Patreon what a Zenon first of all what a waste and second of all what a confusion you must be in what a very big confusion you must be in can we turn her so she's facing that she yes she doesn't do well when she's not in the limelight she's also on my phone at all times I'm still dressed as a Lemon and xenon still in the room i love xenon

so much you have to go watch the space camp video and it's probably not going to mean anything to you i don't care i love her maybe clip the part where uh i made a really aggressive uh animation of her in the middle of our video maybe we'll put that on instagram or something i know like it probably makes no sense but also like at one point none of us understood what lemon was and we all came to terms and we all gathered around and loved well not not all yeah no some of us i'm requesting everyone do that for me i love her so much so anyway we were in the middle of me singing her praises all over her yeah uh okay hello welcome welcome to and that's why we drink i don't know why I'm still wearing these horrible yellow glasses.

There was something I was going to say. Oh, so I know that, ow, my eyes. Okay, I know that we're, Halloween is like yesterday when this comes out. But we have some spooky things to tell, I think. Yes. A couple. We sure do. Ghosty things that I don't want to forget.

So one of them, which one i don't know you know what i'm talking about i know about there's one from here from here from this very building what are you talking about oh my god okay we literally talked about like oh yes i know what you're talking about okay sorry i was uh behind the times, which aka just means we're cursed anyway. And then there's something that happened the other day that my mom texted me about, which was like jarring. So which one should, okay. So anyway, I'll just tell you about my mom's text. So yesterday I was just hanging out and I got this text from my mom that said,

want to know something creepy or want to hear something creepy? And I was like, no, not really. But she told me anyway. She said I was sitting fermenting kraut. Don't worry about that part. This is the most Renata thing I've heard. Like, I didn't even notice it. And then I showed Eva and was like.

You had me at fermenting kraut. Yeah. She was like, I was sitting at my table fermenting kraut on a Saturday night when I just said out loud to Tim, my stepdad, what was the line? It was like. I think Uncle Walt is dead. Yeah. So she doesn't mince her words. She's German. She doesn't say, I don't think he's is dead. Yeah. So she she doesn't mince her words. She's German.

She doesn't say I don't think he's doing well. She minces her crap, though. She does. She ferments it, too. Half as very half as hardly, though. No. So she goes, I think Uncle Walt is dead. And then then she called my step grandma the next day, her mother in law, and was like,

can you check on Walt? And so my grandma did. And it turns out he had passed on Saturday night and I was like I completely forgot I literally had an uncle Walt because he's like a step uncle or you know I'm very removed yeah he's like my stepdad's uncle um and so I just saw like Walt died and I was like this is like a lot and like kraut fermented I was like there is a lot for me to take in right now but it was weird just like another like an another Walt reference remember how we always have Walt's on this show no I know the second I saw when I first saw your text about

that situation yeah I first saw the word Walt and I went this is a fucking ghost story yeah so it's weird and I was like I didn't even remember like I'm not close to them but I was like I didn't even remember my grandpa's name is Walt. And he's alive and kicking. I always forget that. But one day, I'm wondering if he's going to be like the most prominent ghost in my life. And then I have an Uncle Wally who's like also Walt. I can love Uncle Wally. I know.

Bowtie central over here. So anyway, I have an Uncle Walt who apparently passed away. I mean, he's older, but still. And so there's another Walt in the story, I guess, is what I'm trying to say, that I didn't even remember existed. A different Uncle Walt than my Uncle Wally and Grandpa Walter. Walt, your grandpa. Well, I just said that I love your Uncle Wally, but we all know who my favorite member of

your family is. Do we? Yeah, who I actually thought was a ghost when I first met her. Grandma Pam. Oh, Miss Pam. Isn't that correct? I love Miss Pam. family is do we yeah who i actually thought was a ghost when i first met her grandma pam oh miss pam i love miss pam miss pam is kind of m thinks a ghost i'm pretty sure aunt pam isn't really here and aunt pam apparently heard that story grandma pam grandma pam yeah oh aunt pam i've been calling her aunt pam or miss pam in my head this whole time grandma pam uh- Uh-huh. Well, uh. She spells it G-R-A-M-M-A. That's so sweet. She could do nothing wrong. She sent me a card and my mom was like, this is not how you spell grandma. And she was like, this is how I spell it. My, well,

Walter, my grandpa, he spells it G-R-A-M-P-A instead of grandpa. He goes grandpa. Yeah. More phonetically correct, I suppose. It is suppose it is but uh i know i've told that story before but every time i think of your uh uh distant family i think of miss pam and how she's like and there's a lot of distant family to think of so i'm i'm amazed that that's just a little silhouette approaching me in the middle of the night and i went probably i am gonna die with a quilt most likely i do have multiple quilts from grandma pam um she's a great quilter she has such warm hands she's a lovely she's one of those people who does the double hand when you shake her hands and i went oh my god and she also makes you always feel like you're the funniest person

that ever lived i was smitten with her i'll never forget her she's such a lovely she's a gem anyway so anyway so so uncle wall is past is dead uh r.i.p and also yikes that's also apologies also i guess my mom like knows before it happened or whatever my condolences to your family also oh thank you appreciate that um and so apparently we're just gonna i guess tell what happened here is we got on a zoom call the other day and um the the the lovely people at cast studios who were helping, you know, produce and like record us on Zoom since we're incompetent were like, hey, something happened. And I went, I don't want to know because it doesn't sound like it's good. And they were like, well, you know, we were going to put a cute like logo of yours on the wall where we put all the podcasts, you know, and they were like, we've seen it a million times. And I was like, oh. It's the first wall you walk past when you come into the studio it's lovely like

they have all the logos up in like black frames looks great and they were like we put yours up and then pretty quickly it immediately fell on the ground and shattered everywhere and i was like oh no that's a bummer and they were like but then we kept doing it and it kept falling off we bought new adhesive because we thought well maybe it was falling off we bought new adhesive because we thought well maybe it was the adhesive we bought new adhesive put it up same thing just shattered all over the ground and every other every other logo there the frames have always stayed up it's like and there was something that was there before our show so like it's not like that part of the wall won't hold it's very weird because it's just we're us trying to put ours up it just keeps coming and

there are new ones on there where i'm like, well, they probably came up like around the same time and they're staying. We came in and our logo is like not in a frame and still on the counter. Aggressively missing. And there's like multiple copies because they're probably like, well, who knows how many are going to be destroyed. We don't even want to try hanging this. So I said, why don't you leave some gin out?

Because you never know if Walt's just annoyed or I don't know. Right. Whoever. Any of the Walt's really. So, you know, like maybe leave some booze out like will that help I don't know but apparently we're cursed which like what a shock not um so I don't know how to cleanse anything which is exactly why I'm not gonna do it because I'll probably do the opposite we should just uh start making it more and more difficult like just like nail it into the wall and see if that goes fine aha well m was actually setting up the apartment and right like btw i think something is here and i was like oh i know something is here super not fun and uh and was like yeah so

i was like hanging stuff up like you know our demon house signed poster and that's what i was trying to hang up oh great i knew it too because i was like that was the wall you were pointing at that's i didn't even put that and what happened i was so it was if you didn't listen to the That's what I was trying to hang up. Oh, great. I knew it, too, because I was like, that was the wall you were pointing at. I didn't even put that to you. And what happened? If you didn't listen to the last episode. Then go listen, because it's a doozy. It was our Halloween special. But yeah, so this whole last month before Christine got here, I have been surprising

her, unbeknownst to her. No, fully unbeknownst. And I was setting up our entire apartment and making it like livable and make it look like a home versus a lodging like a place where the the person coming to maintenance people don't come in and go i think we need to call the authorities no but we did have a person come in the other day who said it was like the nicest he said it was the cleanest apartment he's ever been in and he's like how do you do it and i was like well i don't live here i swiffered the floor nine times.

25 days of the month. That helps. We have had everything just kind of leaning against walls and nothing had been hung up. We were basically, it looked like a squatting situation. It's very in transition mode. It was really like, it was, I mean, to be completely direct and like upfront, it was, we moved in the week before quarantine and then didn't go back uh to like decorate anything so everything just remained on the ground from when we brought it

in in boxes so everything stayed in boxes yeah and so i was actually like hanging things on walls and all that and i nailed i guess the demon house poster which i also just mentioned in the last episode um i was nailing that into the wall and I was, I worked really hard on it just to give myself a little pat on the, I worked really, really hard on making the apartment look nice to surprise Christine with. And so I was, don't worry about it.

I was up until like four in the morning sometimes at this apartment and I was just too tired to go home. So I would just crash there and we didn't have a bed made yet or anything. And the air mattress was deflated. So I literally slept on our tiny little couch in this empty room. It's like a love seat by the way. It's like a love seat. I like fetal positioned and I didn't have a blanket or anything. I just like use like, like my sweatshirt to like cuddle. We use like old t-shirts of ours, like, and that's where you drink t-shirts. And so I was falling asleep after I had nailed stuff in

one day i had put the nails in the walls but i hadn't hung anything up yet and in the middle of the night i was trying to fall asleep and all of a sudden i saw something like kind of shiny like it looked like a little piece of metal or something had like like flit across my eyes like i just kind of saw something and passed oh you saw like in movement i saw it i didn't know that okay um it looked like a staple had been thrown or something. I was like, oh, it's really tiny and metal and shiny. And I saw something move. And then I heard clink, clink, clink on the hardwood floor.

And I was like, what the hell was that? And I knew that I had just put nails in the walls. And all of a sudden I felt something standing behind me. Oh, great. Here we go. And I just kept my eyes wide open. And I went, um. i can't believe you opened your eyes i would immediately close mine i sense you i i you i acknowledge you but i am trying to

sleep please leave me alone and it stayed with me for like a half an hour but the next morning i got up and i looked at the walls and one of the holes didn't have a nail anymore which means it got taken out of the wall and flew if it flew flew across your vision, then it was like, it didn't fall and like bounce. It flew across the room. It flew across, like if I was sleeping, like, I mean, if you're watching the camera, you can see me. The nail was all the way over here.

I couldn't see it. And it went all the way across the room in front of me. And then clinked. And then clinked. So it didn't like fall because of gravity and I didn't nail it in properly. So I was like, great. So they don't want you hanging stuff up. there's 4 000 things hanging up and something is

throwing nails on i'm alone now great super duper duper so anyway and it happened to be the demon house poster that has been in zach's haunted mansion super duper duper duper so anyway point being apparently we're cursed and that's fun for us also uh more information everyone's probably like yeah we, we know. We thought we all knew that. We just mentioned this in the last episode too, but as of fingers crossed yesterday, if everything goes well, it's yesterday. We now have new merch for you.

Yes. We have five brand new designs all from Work Kirk. They are like, he's just so talented. I probably by now own every single we're gonna like go on the website and buy all of them like big weirdos yeah also we're uh we got new accessories for you guys we got wine glasses we got coasters those wine glasses have been in high demand for a long time so also we are um oh coasters yeah yeah of the same designs as the shirts i think too so there's a variety pack

oh i'm so excited is there anything else we have to say i think that's i have one more thing okay wow so much news for you love when m says do we have anything to say let me say this no uh i wanted to remind everyone if you are not part of our newsletter please join yes we um for those of you who have joined as of of yesterday, you have the October newsletter. And I just talked to Eva, so I do know this one for sure. In that newsletter, we have announced all of our winners for our Halloween pet costume contest. Oh, my gosh. Apparently, we're getting a lot of entries.

Eva said in the last two days, we got like 60 of them. In just two days. And that's not counting all the other weeks that this has been active so who i mean we have such a uh a backlog maybe we just do like a pet every month at this point i mean maybe we just keep putting pets in costumes maybe our newsletter is just a big chart every every month of animals i love that just who makes the news that is like please that's not what i actually want to do but no no but if you wanted to see the october one and get a look at some of our favorites um then you if you already joined the newsletter you've seen that

if you have if you are part of the newsletter and you haven't seen it it might be in your spam folder so check that out usually in promotions just to be clear i it's hard to find because sometimes it gets in all the um like retail emails but it should be in your promotions folder if you're on gmail um if you want to sign up you can go to and that's where we drink.com and it's i think at the bottom there's like a little form to fill out yes to sign up um it pops up right away i that's how i signed up yeah it does pop up but if you're like on mobile it's at i don't think it i don't know if it pops up but there is also a form at the bottom of the home page if you don't get a chance to pop up. Sorry, I was thinking desktop.

But yeah. But yeah, so it's really fun. It's really good. I'm just so honored that Jess is making this for us. And she reached out to us and was like, hey, do you want to do this project? And we were like, hell yeah. That's a winner right there. That's it.

We're in. So anyway, it's very good. And we're just really proud of it, even though we don't do it we just watch it happen yes it's great it's great stuff anyway hope everyone had a great spooky season and also today is a double whammy because you get your listeners episode also it's the first very month if you would like to uh have your story in the running for future episodes you can also do that on our website we have submission forms for that as well as story suggestion uh boxes so if you have a story you want us to cover you can also go to our website and put that in there yes just throwing just while we're there and saying everything there you go just do it all okay

moving on to my story because i i know we've talked a lot and it's time for a cheese cake to eat after this so we sure do we already had had Eva put in the reservation. So let's get going. So I know it's November 1st but we are already not even 24 hours ago with Halloween. So I'm just I decided to do a double spooky. Mine's a little bit Halloweeny too so. Oh good okay. Just in case. So this is a story I've wanted to cover for a while, but it is a, I think it's a very daunting topic. Oh. So this is one version of it, and I'll probably come back to this topic from a different perspective in the future. So this is just the inspiration for Frankenstein. Oh, okay.

That's cool. So I wanted to cover, I mean, I've thought about it for a long time. I'm like, I really want to do Frankenstein, but then it's like, do I cover like all the ways Frankenstein's ever been told? Do I cover- Like the novel.

The novelty of it, the, you know, how- Oh, I meant the novel novel. Oh, no, like that's another one too, or like the fame of it, like, you know, what makes it so popular. There's so many ways I could cover it, and it would take so many episodes. So instead, I'm just going to go with its inception.

And even before the novel, I'm going to talk about the history behind Mary Shelley's thought process behind the book. So I was like, I don't know where to start. Let's just do it chronologically and start even before the book happened so um yes so this is the inspiration for frankenstein so uh frankenstein did start as a novel written by mary shelley who was a teenager in 1818 oh fun fact what a fun time to be a teenager i I bet. What a fun time. Also, I'm just saying that because it's like, I could not write a book as a teenager. So well done to Mary Shelley. Oh, she wrote the book as a teenager. Yeah.

I just thought you were saying in 1818 she was a teenager. I was like, that's cool. In 2003, I was a teenager. There's a podcast called And That's Why We Drink. And the co-hosts are teenagers in 2010. Yeah. Was I? We were not teenagers in 2010. Yeah. Was I? We were not teenagers.

2007. That's like, nice try, though. I was in 2010. I graduated high school. Oh, God. Okay, so the novel was written by Mary Shelley as a teenager in 1818. Wow. So two years ago was the 200th anniversary of Frankenstein.

That's fun. So the story is of dr victor frankenstein who is a young scientist who creates a creature in a scientific experiment so fun fact it is actually considered uh to be the very first science fiction novel no way really wow yeah written by a teenager who readitten by a teenager. Listen, teens these days, they're going to save the world. And it has very clear influences of scientific discoveries that were happening at the time. So that's where her, I don't know, I'm assuming that was her inspiration for this story. She just like casually researched science as a teenager.

Got it. Right. Got it. Right. A woman in 1818? Meanwhile, I was just calling patrick's up over and over again you're on the same page um but no so i'm assuming that she just kind of heard stories of what had been happening recently and and that just kind of stayed with her and may or may not presented itself and bring a sign so uh two years before the book came out mary shelley visited switzerland with her uh i'm assuming partner named percy shelley

um and they're bish shelley right her percy bish shelley and their four-month-old son 10th grade english wow that really came out of i did not know that uh in their four-month son william uh and their oh also they went to switzerland not just as a family but they brought their friend lord byron casual you know him and uh byron's physician which makes oh i love that who named a traveling physician that just comes with me and treats my illnesses you know i don't know enough historically about that but it sounds like either this guy was like always so ill he had like a caregiver and like they're for a physician or did doctors really just travel with people well i guess if your name is literally lord byron you can probably have a doctor on call at any second of your life i guess so that you know i just i think if i i mean he's a famous author too these

are just all very likes if i was powerful enough to have like a personal traveling x thing i would pick like chef even well certainly nowadays or like my who's who's my yeah i'd be like okay i need a documentarian and a chef i need my blogger i need like a reality tv crew you know all of the above i just for i it's it's so out of my scope that like to see like of all people you just like called your documents like tag along but i feel like when you try when you traveled back then you like went for a long time it wasn't like you just hopped on a plane and like like it's not you're not hopping over right i think it was like you technically moved there

for a short while and then temporary stays yeah especially with these authors they would always move places and be like i'm gonna write the next great novella you're right in switzerland i guess you answered my questions so good well done it's probably all bs but no it all checks out you never know so uh so two years before this is when they went to switzerland with the doctor that i'm so fixated on um this was the year 1816 which was also known as the year without a summer what so that's because uh it was the beginning of a three-year period of severe climate deterioration on a global scope way um it was caused by the eruption of mount tambora in indonesia oh my goodness and it brought so much rain uh like it just caused so much rain for that time period that people weren't

going outside for their vacations anymore people were staying inside so familiar tune that is what a familiar tune that the climate is deteriorating at a rapid rate and everyone's inside and not enjoying their summer and i want to travel with a doctor at all times yeah yeah spot on wow this is a little too on the nose right now um but yeah so it was called the the year without a summer because nobody was celebrating enjoying summer they're all inside so um i guess this is also a year without a summer or a halloween year without a lot of things it's a year without going to work. Okay. Except working from home.

Basically, the group, the way that they enjoyed their non-summer because they had to be inside. Basically, what I'm alluding to is the group quarantined and they did so by reading ghost stories. Oh, what? Really? How fun. quarantined and they did so by reading ghost stories oh what really how fun so uh they read stories from the book phantasmagoriana which uh first of all sounds like today's version of watching ghost adventures yeah that's a lot of words it also sounds why don't we just recreate that 200 years later let's just read that while we're doing right now we're just telling it word for word welcome to the audio phantasmagorium or whatever okay um but yeah so they were reading ghost stories out of this book

while they were in switzerland together and lord byron proposed that they play a little game where they each try to tell a ghost story to each other and mary wan had the best ghost story well i'm not surprised um fun fact the physician dr pillidory went on to write the book the vampire oh so also wait the physician the physician what's going on he's like i'm a physician and also a great novel and also a globetrotter what's happening so as she already uh or not as she as as we already mentioned, Frankenstein was originally inspired by Shelley. It all started from her traveling to Switzerland at this time. And she, while she was there, she stopped in Gernschim. Why are you looking at me like I suddenly know?

I think it's in Germany. I think. I don't know. Isn't it? It's not in Switzerland? I don't know, man. I don't know why i'm telling myself germ it just look at the word itself looks a lot like germany something i'm telling myself well they speak german and french and you know well she stopped there okay and uh and apparently she walked across the sign that said she was only 17 kilometers away from Frankenstein's castle.

And it was originally the home of an alchemist called Conrad Dippel. That was his name. Oh, that sounds German. And Dippel was interested in very similar experiments to her version of Frankenstein. very similar experiments to her version of frankenstein um for example uh dipple experimented with this he made this elixir called dipple's oil and it was supposed to make people live for a hundred years okay um which i feel like there were a lot of elixirs back in the day like you fountain of youth elixir it's just like mercury probably yes and uh also dipple like to dig up

bodies from graves and those would be the bodies he experimented on fun so i think that was also part of the inspiration of oh while i'm traveling what's frankenstein's castle oh it's the home of this guy who used to dig up bodies and experiment on them yeah very good point yeah so that's probably one of the inspirations to do with it also she just won this like friendly little ghost story contest so she had her confidence her ego's up there she was quarantined had nothing to do so she found a hobby sound familiar i don't think i'm correct me if i'm wrong i don't think tiktok had been invented not yet but the new uh mary shelley might be out there right now writing the next frankenstein because we're all quarantined and maybe listening to our podcast and getting inspo yeah well put us

is somewhere in there okay just only mention lemon just put us in there just say the word lemon and one day when our children read an english class and they see lemon they'll have to like do an essay on and analyze why lemon was mentioned what did you never have that in a million yeah but i'm just trying to follow your thought process i guess why did i we had to mentioned what did you never have that in a million yeah but i'm just trying to follow your thought process i guess why did i we had to read what did we have to read in english class it was you know how this is like quite a sweeping generalization but you know how uh there's the trope that english teachers will find like some random fucking thing in a book and then all of a sudden you have to like focus on that and analyze it for the entire class yes i like

to think lemon would be that in the future why is there lemon and it's like there's literally no reason except christine found it under her bed i'm trying to remember what ours was it was something so i mean maybe i'm just like bad at english and it's actually a very legitimate you're gonna be like it was so stupid it was called like no it was like every time that like you saw a tree or they mentioned a tree in like that chapter it was supposed to like mean a neck the next step of personal growth what was this book what it was so fucking vague the giving tree no that would have been hysterical no every time a tree is mentioned the giving tree i like that class that's what i want to take anyway i just i immediately like rapid fire thought of like think of the poor children who will have to write an analysis piece on lemon if it's mentioned in the next famous movie the next great novel yes that i will write about lemon yes oh yeah yeah okay so

anyway um another fun fact although this book was sci-fi um mary shelley's novel is very much grounded in her uh research so uh apparently she was interested even back then in like uh up-and-coming technology for like electricity and things i mean that was like the hot the hot button item back then hot coming soon um so her own research dated back to like the 1700s i think it was probably just like you know the thing that you did then so here are some common frankenstein misconceptions oh um just to clear these up before i carry on so victor frankenstein was the name of the doctor frankenstein is not the name of the monster every douchey dude at a party okay maybe just the parties i went to but they're like it's actually dr frankenstein's

monster everyone named brad is like i'm frankenstein i studied english oh yeah oh i thought you were i'm thinking of the guy who's like actually well actually i would like brad who's dressed as the monster to approach the english lit major right you're like that's not i'm gonna call simon i think we'll see oh yeah i like that i think you're being inspired by the chipmunks because simon was for sure the nerd of the group oh really okay well that's probably what's happening subconsciously um so wow we're really throwing every fucking curveball today what's going on i think it's it's the cheesecake fever i think so we i shouldn't have mentioned it we just get hungry and then our brains just collapse like a dying star okay okay so uh frankenstein was the doctor the actual green monster with the bolts in the neck

that you are familiar with was just referred to as the creature oh um dr frankenstein did you read it in high school uh no we read it in high school i think but i like barely remember or maybe i didn't read it i just pretended i read things about trees and person that's right you did read the giving tree a lot. I heard. Gross. The Giving Tree. Oh, my gosh. Okay. So Dr. Frankenstein actually intended to make the creature beautiful.

Really? Yep. Cool. But he did so by picking beautiful body parts from others who had those beautiful body parts. That's fucking morbid. But he picked the beautiful body parts of dead people right so it ended up not looking too beautiful model look pretty decrepit well yeah i would think maybe uh and this is my favorite fun fact that i did not know before last night um this is my favorite misconception and reality of frankenstein apparently i mean i knew this part

but as portrayed the creature in any frankenstein movie or whatever always moves very slowly but apparently the original frankenstein book the creature almost always sprints everywhere okay i hate that i have to put my sleeves down i'm getting creeped out that was my favorite thing i was reading i was reading and i went oh my god that is like it's startling really it is startling imagine this like giant creature made out of human body parts who's supposed to be beautiful sprinting i'm just seeing a bunch of trees of personal growth and he's like flitting just darting between them between them yeah yikes oh my gosh um if you're an english teacher make someone listen to this episode try to analyze us

they're gonna sue us and then they'll become psych majors oh my goodness okay so in 1931 was the first real frankenstein film um starring boris karloff and that movie was the that was the one that solidified everyone's perception of what frankenstein should look like so that was like the green skin bolts in the neck that kind of thing oh true um because didn't he not have green skin in the book i think he was he was literally like made out of dead bodies yeah i think there was no mention of that and then the movie like yeah created that idea i wonder i don't know if this is true but i'm gonna pretend this is a fun fact and if i'm wrong i'll correct myself later but i wonder if it was because it was a black and white movie well i think that was exactly what it was yeah it was green there was something about the paint that

had to be used or was like part of right the set like the green maybe looked made maybe made him look a little more dead or something i know i i mean you're definitely right am i right there was a fun fact about that and i don't know it so i'm not gonna try and say it but it was something like that where they used it and then not really intending to make it like a and oh that's what it was oh i am remembering this it was because then the movie poster came out and that was in color that's what it was and everyone saw it and was green yes that's it that's what it was because i everyone saw it and was green. Yes. That's it. That's what it was. Because I was like, it was in black and white. The movie was. I remember this now because last time I talked about this, I was telling you to Google image

the Addams Family set because everything is pink. Right. Yep. Because the colors in the black and white change. They use different shades of pink to show different black and white shades in there. It's just funny because it's like such a juxtaposition of like they're the spooky dark halloween haunted house but everything is so like bright and happy that's right so yeah they didn't even intend for the green to be part of it and then it was in the

poster and that's what it was wow okay wow we pieced together our own fun fact everyone's like good job guys it was like you've already talked about this oh my god it's like what happened with xenon a little bit like she's green and no one anticipated that they would ever have to see her and yet i didn't plan for this really when i you know all you did was paint your hand and throw some googly eyes on her and that's not all i did now she's a legend i imbued magic into that very being she's a legend yet to us and like no one else to me she is so to this day frankenstein uh adjacent stories actually pop up i would call them more zombie stories pop up and like um even modern day news of like remember a few years ago the guy that like was on like uh

um smelling salts and like ate someone's face oh i hate that story it was fucking terrible and then um bath salts bath salts that's what it was and then in 2013 apparently uh indiana there was a case in indiana where a man broke into a medical history museum and stole jars of human brains and preserved human tissue ew um and uh one guy david charles he posted on, quote, tell me if this doesn't sound like a 21-year-old. Yo, I got a bunch. Yeah, yo. Whoa. Imagine this being a legitimate Facebook post that you saw.

Dear God. Yo, I got a bunch of human brains and jars for sale. HMU for details. You know you want one for Halloween. Ew. you know you want one for halloween and then investigators ended up looking into it and found 80 jars including 60 from his best customer uh he was including uh 60 from his best customer so i'm assuming like eight like 60 jars of like human remains best customer what does that mean like probably got the most remains off of him.

Like, the customer was buying them from him? No, like, the body is, like, considered his best, like, it's like, oh, this was my best customer. I got the most, like, tissue and brains and remains off him. Oh, but it's, like, the same brain. Just multiple pieces of it? Brains and human tissues. Got it. Okay, okay, okay.

Like, how many brains did this guy have? Wow. 60 brains. He was the smartest man alive like jeez he was jimmy neutron um oh my god no wonder he's the best customer but no like i guess they had like this one body just like and took literally every part of him off and put it in jars they're like oh this is my best one cute take something off fun um so cute so fun so gross and he also had had 80 euros in total. So there were also other brains there. And he was selling them at $100 per brain. So apparently your entire being is worth $100.

On Facebook Marketplace, BTW. It was uncertain who the people were that were buying these. But this was a, quote, legitimate business that was happening for a while. Not legally legitimate, but it was like legitimately happening um not legal right and uh don't be mistaken but so there there was uh some tabloids that called him like for like today's frankenstein because he was fine taking bodies and using them for uh unsavory practices uh also in the 1700s. Oh, no, sorry, I messed up. Oh, no, that was it. Good for me. Okay. I did it. So in the 1700s, this is going to be

we're going to take this ride now. I was giving you some little blips. But this is mainly where the inspiration fully begins and really comes from so this is actually she wrote the book in 1880 or 1818 sorry but the real beginning of um so her inspiration came from the stories of people using human cadavers for experiments and not very legally and all of that really began in the 1700s got it so this is really i'm saying this is the inspiration for frankenstein but really this is the history of bodies being used for experiments um which led to the frankenstein book which led to frankenstein's novelty so which led to the guy on facebook marketplace exactly got it david charles in Exactly. Got it. David Charles in 2013. It all stemmed from the 1700s. You up?

W-Y-U. H-M-U. You know you want it for Halloween. So in the 1700s, there was a priest and a professor at Pavia University, and his name was Lazaro Spallanzani. Oh, what a name. He noticed, so he was a scientist and he uh noticed that some dead microscopic cells seemed to come back to life after you added water to them okay okay fine so he his interest was piqued that much i can get behind and he became obsessed with the idea of

reanimating dead tissue and was convinced that it was possible because he had seen dead cells come back to life so why not dead tissues sure um so he his buddy voltaire oh shit why they're all friends these people it's like the entertainment industry like i've heard people be like oh once you know one person you know everyone well apparently once you know like voltaire like lord byron shows up with his doctor with his doctor who also wrote the vampire exactly what the hell and then mary shelley pops up in 1818 so he went to his friend voltaire and voltaire was like that sounds cool trying to reanimate dead tissue i encourage that you should you know live your dream do do your thing such a

voltaire thing to say yeah so after getting uh some good encouragement from his buddy he moved forward with these experiments which included uh cutting the heads off of snails oh that's not very nice to see if they'd grow back well that's not very nice this definitely gets a little animal abusey no. No, I can't do that. I.e. cutting heads off of snails. Okay. Is that the extent of it? For now.

I'll warn you when it gets bad. For now, just enjoy the story. Okay. Do your best. Okay. Do your best. You'll look alive. Yeah, seriously.

I'm like, thanks, Dad. Sorry. That was like so hard. Okay, coach, put me in, I guess. I was like, well, I'm reading the notes, so here we go. So Lazaro, the guy who's friends with Voltaire and wants to start doing this stuff, his research led him to discover chemicals in the body that actually do aid in digestion, and he made some really wonderful observations about white blood cells.

So by doing, I'm not saying it's great that he cut the heads off of snails, but he also did have like some real scientific. Interesting. Findings. Discoveries, which he was like, I don't care about that. He's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. White blood cells. But really like, let's talk about the snails.

So fun fact, someone else who was interested in looking, who's like researching resurrection is Isaac Newton. Oh. That's just a little blip. I don't talk about him again, but the, the main person I'm going to talk about who was inspired by Lazaro probably heard Isaac Newton was into it.

So he jumped on board was this guy named Giovanni. Oh, Giovanni Aldini. And he was the nephew of Luigi Galvani. Love all these Italians. I can't keep up with them i they're everywhere uh so i don't know who luigi galvani is but that's a very familiar name to me but i don't know apparently in the scientific community this is a name that they're all ripping their hair up got it got it got it got it got it uh so i i did write it down that luigi was a

pioneer in science and experimented on dead frogs. So he was probably like the inception for like dissecting frogs in science class. My advanced biology class of ninth grade. Yep. Great. I can still smell the formaldehyde on those frogs. Me too. It's like permanently in my nostrils.

Yeah. It's stuck in my brain forever. Also, like, let's stop doing that. Teachers. Okay. Cool. Thanks. And they're actually so luigi galvani he the term galvanism comes from him so uh he discovered that it wasn't possible so this is gonna sound really stupid but like at the time it was

revolutionary somehow luigi also discovered that it was impossible to breathe new life into dead creatures okay that it was impossible it was impossible you said it was possible and i was like yeah that's obvious um i guess but if you directed an electrical current through their spinal cord it would cause them to twitch as if they were alive like with the yeah okay got it which like is again it was revolutionary for the time okay imagine a time where like no science had been discovered and you could just come up with anything and it's like you well and nobody was fucking like monitoring it you could literally just be like i'm just gonna take frogs and dead people and like see what happens and also i'm

gonna be famous someday for it exactly nowadays you try to sell one brain on facebook and suddenly you're a criminal yeah that's all i'm gonna say my ancestors would not mind right right also i love that you keep calling him luigi instead of like you know his famous science last name i imagine i just only know i can i know i can pronounce luigi yeah i played on mario kart i can pronounce luigi um it's like calling Isaac Newton like Isaac. The big eye. So anyway, so that's what Luigi is up to. So he learned that if you put an electric current through the spinal cord, then you will twitch as if you are alive.

And in some really extreme cases, he actually was able to bring frogs back to life. I think it was probably only momentarily, though. Or like maybe they weren't it was dead yet right it was either they weren't dead or i'm assuming it was even like you know how like to the like in hospitals like people will die but then it looks like they're alive for a second and then they actually die oh i'm imagining maybe that's what it was there's a word for that too i think but i don't remember it scary as fuck yeah that's i think that's the official science term that's what the nurses say okay so okay so the main story that i'm going to tell is about his nephew giovanni oh that's your nephew yes the sweet babu was my nephew this geo i don't know if you're gonna love so much okay

gotta gotta gotta so he was influenced by his uncle's work followed in his footsteps and he did an experiment where he took a jar which had been charged with a a current and i'm going to assume all of these animals were already dead i don't want to know the the pre-story i'm gonna assume he like just went to a butcher and was like that i want that one that's already on the counter sure um so he had an ox's head okay and charged it up with this current which made it it move around as if it was alive. So he was kind of like confirming his uncle's findings. Got it.

He also could not completely reanimate the dead, but he could make them look somewhat alive, and that for its time was more than what you would have expected. Let's remember if these were women and it was the 1600s and we were in Salem, it wouldn't be considered science.

If you like didn't, if you even went to the butcher, they'd be like. I want an ox head. I don't want to tell you what it's for though. Also, maybe it'll be alive by tomorrow.

Also like, what would have happened if it was alive and it didn't have a fucking body? It makes sense that you would use only the head because if it came alive

and like murdered you with its, you know what I mean? Like it's more dangerous if you have its legs attached. Right. Okay. So soon he stopped testing on frogs and moved to humans. One of his first experiments, and oxes also, oxen. Yeah. He went straight to humans.

One of his first experiments was a procedure on a 30-year-old man. And G, I wrote Gio. Gio. Big G. He made an incision on the man's neck. Is this guy dead? Yeah. Okay, thank God.

Sorry. Just to clarify. Made an incision on the man's neck and then used a current. It was probably like a prod or something. Yeah. neck and then like with a use a current it was probably like a prod or something yeah um and this caused quote every muscle on the body to immediately agitate um with movements resembling shuddering from the cold so i mean twitching sort of yeah which like i guess again we all know that that is a thing now but back then was probably the coolest thing it must be scary back like to

even i would be scared of me now imagine the first time you put a prod to a dead person and they're moving their eyes open no for real their tongue moves really like oh no holy shit i'm so sorry i regret everything um so another fun fact he was the most fascinated of everything that happened on this body when he did like the prod on it he was the most fascinated by the eyelids um i bet i mean yeah i imagine they're like fluttering a lot or something because that makes you really look alive if your eyes are blinking or whatever right also like the eyes are the window to the soul so maybe if you're all of a sudden seeing the eyes open yeah it looks more alive yeah can i ask what happened to what happened to oh down there

I don't know but I would imagine I was winking I would imagine it well I wasn't winking I was trying to I heard I saw it

for our audience oh yeah to clarify what what that silence was I would imagine it became functioning again if you know what I'm saying

I think it really I would think if everything's going into like rigor mortis right or if everything's going into, like, rigor mortis, right? Or if everything's, like, tensing up. Boy, oh boy. Or there's blood flow.

See, I thought that's where you were going with he was most fascinated by it, because I'm like, that's what I'm most... I mean... We're all most fascinated about that one. I didn't get an answer, but I would have a hypothesis that it would at least momentarily... As scientists, our hypothesis. For science, I would want to know. I would think it probably.

Yeah, that makes sense. Reacted the same way everything else did. At least shook around a lot. Yeah. Yikes. It got some movement. It got some movement. A little action.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would imagine if there's like, I don't know if it's like really like it's rigor or anything, but I don't know. That's a great question. We should find a cadaver and do that. We should certainly not do that. like really like it's rigor or anything but i don't know that's a great question because we should we should find a cadaver and do that we should certainly not do that if someone does know please let us know if you um if you use a cattle prod on a cadaver don't tell us why you know or how you found out exactly thank you um okay so yeah he was most interested in the eyelids. Fun fact. He then went further and graduated to applying the current to fresh decapitated heads of criminals.

Great. I don't know how he is getting them pre-decapitated. Or is he decapitating them? Where is he getting them? How does he know they're criminals? I don't know. No, you're probably right. He probably... Did he have to cut that off? They that either guillotined or he takes the bodies and cuts

their heads off he's not going to the butcher for that hopefully not yikes but that's butcher his leather face that's a scary that's a scary thought yeah i don't know how he's getting them and i don't know how he like what defines a criminal like was this person in jail and you know having a menstrual cycle that's out of whack back then. There's a lot of things that could send you to, you know, prison or jail or asylum.

Also, were they, had they died? Had they already died or did he find like, I assume they were dead bodies. Was there a list? I wonder like if it were,

you know how sometimes they have like pauper's graves where like they don't know who they are. Yeah. A lot of times if there is a, they just like kind of put them outside. I wonder if they it were, you know how sometimes they have like pauper's graves where like they don't know who they are. Ah, yeah. A lot of times if there is a, they just like kind of put them outside. I wonder if they were like, here, I guess we don't want to bury, we don't have, you know, the time to bury him.

You can cut his head off. You do it. So he went further and instead of just working on a cadaver, he went specifically to fresh decapitated heads. So I guess he must have cut them himself. At least they're fresh. He knows they're fresh, which means he knows when they were cut up. Right?

Yeah. So he did this by wetting their ears with a brine solution and then stuffing electric wires into their ears, causing their heads to convulse. Ew. Ew. Yep. So in 1803,

Giovanni made his most memorable experiment in England at London's Royal College of Surgeons. He did another electricity test on a cadaver named George Foster, who had been hanged after murdering his wife and child. Oh, dear. So this is almost like a Dexter Robin Hood kind of thing, where I think he's excusing any foul play experiments. It's probably easy to be like, well. Well, he was a murderer. What do you want to do with him? I feel least bad about it this way.

Yeah. Like, if we're going to learn science, I guess at least it's on these people. I don't know. Someone who's decapitated after killing a family. It's all very questionable still. So he used this cadaver to do an electricity test there and it was done on stage for the public so everyone could see it and they all saw this cadaver's eyes open jaw move hands raise and fists clench looks pretty fucking a lot yeah that's frightening also keep in mind

we are telling the story of the inspiration of frankenstein that's making a lot of sense that all sounds exactly like some frankenstein shit yeah like especially like the the thing in frankenstein where like he's lying on the table and then his hands go up oh you know the wildest part is i heard he also ran around really fast on the stage i also heard that his little ding dong moved around a lot too oh i did hear about that in that original 1934 film yeah yeah you got it yeah it was green it was very green is what i heard now i'm thinking of you know renee and shrek oh no oh no called out good thing she does not listen you know what's weird apparently she's not alone there's like a whole oh trust community of people who are very sexually aroused by track she really told me

we're sexually curious about Shrek. She told me very recently that she is no longer interested because she's like, everyone ruined it by like making it a big thing and a joke. And she's like, it's not fun to be like now a part of a fucking like, you know. She just genuinely. She wanted to be original and then like everybody else tried to hop on the Shrek wagon. Did she think that Shrek was actually attractive? I think she just knew how much it really irritated me and everybody.

Because I understand the curiosity of like, what would that look like? Yeah, but they would like Photoshop like buff bods to it. It wasn't like, oh. Shrek is the new Frankenstein. So heinous. I'm sorry. It's just the fully functioning one. Why do you always somehow get me to talk about this?

It makes me so happy. Oh my God. Okay. So here we are. Where is that? Oh, right here. Okay. So everyone basically saw what I would consider the very first, like, kind of generic Frankenstein

motions of, like, coming off of a table and raising your arms up and clenching a fist and moving around a little bit. Running around. And so. Sprinting. Running around. Streaking. table and raising your arms up and clenching a fist and moving around a little bit running around and so sprinting running around streaking um and so uh people like obviously freaked out when they saw this never seen anything like it it was a dead body um dead fucking body it's a dead fucking body it says megan from the very back she was like doesn't even go no she for sure got a front row seat are you kidding oh my god she's megan so uh he actually won an award from the royal college of surgeons at the place where he did this um he won the copley medal for his work he also realized that uh kind of

useful actually pretty i would argue it's pretty useful to people who need this through these experiments he did realize that this method could also be used to resuscitate near dead people and pave the way for electricity during resuscitation. Interesting. Good point. So I'm not saying everything he did was totally bad. At the same time, so as he's doing this,

and there's like word out there that Isaac Newton was interested in this and like Voltaire gave his okay on it. At the same time, the Royal Humane Society of London was carrying out other similar experiments. Isaac Newton was interested in this and like Voltaire gave his okay on it. The, at the same time, the Royal Humane Society of London was carrying out other similar experiments. The Humane Society. Got it.

Got it. Got it. The Royal Humane Society. Sorry, did I say Royal Human Society? No, you said humane and I'm just trying to rationalize the word humane with all of this.

Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. I mean, you said it correctly. Don't worry. I was thinking Freudian slip.

Human would have made sense right there. Yeah. And so they were carrying out similar experiments with both electricity, also doing massaging, also forcing liquor down people's throats, thinking that maybe that would wake them up. I mean. And then the worst one, the Royal Humane Society, they experimented with putting tobacco smoke siphoned up people's rectums woof okay uh so they're on top of it also the medical society of south carolina soon jumped

on it they just kind of like they're involved in the corner doing something they're doing something questionable uh the medical society of south carolina also started the reanimating the dead trend um and then the american medical society was realizing like wow this is like a scientific craze right now people are really trying to resurrect the dead and they were really on board and they began spreading public awareness about this okay and so they even got a law passed in 1793 which required all business owners who sold alcohol to take people in who had just died or seemed dead and to try to bring them back to life what oh my uh so like because they thought maybe one of the ways that they were testing with was shoving alcohol down people's throats so like if

you saw someone who was nearly dead get them to drink or something to keep them up safe yeah definitely if i'm reading that right i'm pretty sure i'm reading that right uh who knows anymore this all feels like a real like astral projection of another world so yeah yeah um so anyway 200 years later in the 1930s um it comes back so that was a trend back in like the 1700s i'm sure mary shell Shelley heard about it. And a lot of that was the influence of her writing. Got it. So now we're in the 1930s just to keep going with this. And there was obviously now there's like rules that are more strict. And it's like, okay, you can't just like shove tobacco at people's asses.

And I know how much you want to. There was one guy who i'm gonna call the absolute villain of this story oh his name is robert cornish he was a uh professor at in at the university of california um and he this is the only fun thing i liked about him is he liked to design weird inventions so one of them was like underwater glasses which like why are you reading anything underwater isn't that just goggles no that's what he invented like i don't know i don't i think he invented like spectacles i was like lol for your tea party did you used to do tea parties in the pool bottom of the pool what no oh yes i do know what you're talking about

is that just me oh no no my german for a second i thought you meant legitimate tea i was like the water would go everywhere that's like sponBob in like Sandy's Bubble Thread. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Drink tea out of the bowl. No. No, I know what you're talking about. Like gravity trying to sink down. Sometimes I need my spectacles for that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did you ever do the Spider-Man or am I weird? Where you would try to like be like sideways and climb the walls of the pool. Oh, yeah. That was fun. That was fun. I also did the Tarzan a lot. My mom hated that because I was obsessed with Tarzan, by the way when i was a kid i did not know

that it's the i made it up so no worries it was the the vacuum in the pool i used to swing on it like it was a rope the vacuum oh no several hundred dollar piece of equipment my mom was like don't you fucking oh my god okay um okay so I'm glad we laughed because that was it. So we're in the 1930s and experiments are starting to pop up again about trying to bring people back from the dead. One of the main people doing this research was Dr. Robert Cornish, who I'm going to say was not mentally well. Okay. And this becomes more true crimey than anything so great great great his main theory was that a dead subject could be restored back to life if the body this is funny i'm not

going to say the dark part yet because i think this warrants a nice chuckle um an uncomfortable chuckle like a nervous chuckle um his main theory was that a dead subject could be restored back to life if the body was swung up and down rapidly on a seesaw-like contraption to simulate blood circulation while at the same time being fed oxygen through a tube and injected with a cocktail of adrenaline liver extract gum arabic blood and anticoagulants grotesque by the way So a real like all your nutrients cocktail while also like being like raggedy and. I mean, to be fair, our literal president said inject bleach into yourself. So like at this point, I'm like, why am I laughing at this guy?

He probably had more. I mean, like I understand that it doesn't sound like I wouldn't call that my final idea, but it's a great like first pitch of of like oh well if you shake up their blood like a if you like move them around they might get some circulation i just took the seesaw for my kids backyard for my kids playground backyard really no i'm saying like he's like i have a seesaw oh i thought you were saying you'll try it on your seesaw yeah i have a seesaw i was like you just moved and you we both have weird shit i would have not judged you but like yeah can you imagine like trying to like pump the seesaw okay hang on

is he on the other end of the season he's like okay faster the world's worst playground well it's literally hell is what it is uh this reminds me of i'm not gonna get into it for very long but uh just a real quick blip one of the first uh real adventures i'm gonna call it that that allison and i went on you know the story all too well yeah well neither of us are fond of it i don't love discussing it allison tried very hard i'll give her that but it was it didn't go totally well and let's just call it speaking of near-death experiences let's just leave it at that. Yeah, I was for it was like a whole day adventure and is supposed to go into the it did go into the next day.

It was supposed to be like a weekend adventure. And within like the first four hours, I was scared for my life. I literally received a text that said I will not have a service soon, but I might not survive this. I said I sent you my geotag pinpoint and i told you the license plate of the unmarked van we were following in the desert i like how you said it's an unmarked van and yet it had a license i'm i'm so convinced it was i don't think that was a real license plate i feel like that was a fake one and it wasn't like a haha i might die it was like here's my geolocation

and i might not survive it was the only time this isn't a joke It was the only time. This isn't a joke. It was the only time. I looked in the mirror. I was, Allison was driving and I was in the side passenger seat and I looked in like the side mirror at myself in the eyes and I had a real come to Jesus meeting and I mentally prepared to have to kill a man.

Yeah, you were, Emma's literally like, I was preparing to fight for my life. I was like, I'm i'm ready i i've never had to look at myself and be like are you prepared to kill someone tonight and so i spent like literally 24 hours just like waiting to hear if my new business partner slash new really good friend and like closest friend from college had just been like murdered maybe it was so it was so bad i just remember i weighed the risks i was like if i go to jail i go to jail at least i'm alive so what does this have to do with the seesaw because one of the locations she took me to was uh this place called east jesus

that's right east jesus which is in the desert and it's this like and don't worry there is a west jesus i think there no it's a west satan sorry my bad there's literally a location called east jesus another called west satan and uh east jesus is arguably it's a West Satan. Sorry, my bad. There's literally a location called East Jesus and another called West Satan. And East Jesus is arguably, it's very cool. I was, the only reason I didn't have the best time is because I was so on edge already from, like, I was just not in the right headspace. But had I been in the right headspace, it was a very cool area that she took me to. It was this, like, art commune, a bunch of people that they just live in the desert and they just build art.

That's all they fucking do. Yeah. But they make it out of scraps and whatever they can find in the desert and so it's like just these weird art things and they had built um what they call it was this exhibit that they called mother's worst nightmare playground and they had it was a playground made out of they literally had a, let me show you. I literally have the picture right here. It's like rusty metal. There was a seesaw that went 12 feet in the air. And it was very loose.

The screws were not all the way in. Was anyone like sitting on it? Or was it just like a. No, you can do all of this stuff if you wanted to. It was active art. Got it. Interactive. They told you immediately.

They were like, you're in the desert. Like, we're not responsible. If you fucking die on this, you in the desert like we're not responsible if you fucking die on this like you die like we're not like we you saw the rusty metal right like that's your fault well jump on it one of them i'm i know we're in the middle of this right now but it's worth showing you anyway um okay so here's the the that's why i was thinking seesaw so first of all here is the monkey bars i'm just going to hold it to you and show it to you so it's monkey bars literally made of saws and torches and pitchforks and stuff and it says as you climb it goes you will die alone what the hell and then here is the

swings made out of bear traps and like old rusty launchers. Amethy, I really... And then here is a slide literally made of cheese graters. Okay. And they tell you it's literally a sheet metal with a bunch of holes stabbed through it. So if you were to sit on it, you would tear yourself a fucking part. And they have all of these fridges with doors that lock. So if you get stuck in there, you get fucking stuck in there in the desert. And then they had... I mean, it was...

Oh, here's the 12-foot seesaw. This is what I was thinking of.'s on it is that you children are on it no um okay there's a reason why i literally said i hate talking about this whole experience but okay anyway i'm saying all this to say that i when i think of like this like rag doll seesaw i imagine it had to be something this tall to like be able to like really pump and like have the torque to lift a human body. Yeah, that's a child out there. Anyway. I was communicating.

Here's the picture. I don't know. You can, we'll post that. I'll send those to you though. I was secretly communicating with my eyes through the camera. Basically an SOS. Listen, I'm telling you. And that was like one of the safer things we did that day.

No, I know. Trust me, that part is the fun part. Like the rest of it. I'm laughing now because it's one of those things where like when I was there. It's been three years. When I was there, I was not laughing. No. Now I'm laughing out of like, I can't believe I'm not dead.

I'm still not laughing because it just, when you came home and were like, I think I, it just was bad. Okay. Anyway. Literally, we drove back from that. You scared me so bad. I know that all sounded really dramatic, but like it's, to me, it's now nothing compared

to like what the rest of that fucking night was. And the whole way back, which was a three and a half hour drive, Allison was convinced I was going to break up with her. Yeah. I was like, but also like I probably should have. You finally got service and you were like, and I had like not slept all night being like,

I was like, is Em dead? Yeah, I yeah i guess after that i looked her dead in the eyes i was like you were never planning anything and was like i'm driving through the woods following an unmarked van and i think this man wants to hurt me bye i was like for the rest of our relationship i i will be the one who conducts any any uh organization or scheduling. Anyway, three years strong now. Woohoo. So this, it's still like such a, she listens to our podcast. I know she's going to hear all this.

She's probably mad at me now. She's probably mad at me because this is such, to this day, it's such a hot button topic. I'm sorry, Al. I'm only mad because Em like sent me that scary text and then never texted me again she's just i i know she's like she just feels bad because she wanted to plan something really weird and i was like oh you planned something weird don't accomplish that anyway let's get back to this terrible guy okay because i haven't even told you yet how terrible he is fuck okay so he believes in like this the 12 foot seesaw thing. He was convinced that it would work. And so he immediately started trying to test it out, although he didn't have access to cadavers.

And I'm going to ignore all of the notes that I actually wrote because I just don't think that you are mentally interested. I appreciate that. I'm just going to say animals were involved, period. That's it. Thank you. I don't, I'm not going to tell you anymore. But if you're mad at me listening, I don't i'm sorry i don't want to know um i know you don't want to

know so i'm not gonna say anything i appreciate that uh it's it's your your worst fear realized let's just say that um okay so i will say of the um he worked on, there were five. Two of them actually did survive and he did bring them back to life. And what's interesting paranormally about it is after they came back to life, for the rest of their lives, every other animal was like terrified of them for no reason. Like wouldn't approach them. It was almost like they had like something following them or they had some weird aura to them.

They're probably like, you smell like that man who tries to do experiments on us. Maybe. But it was, it was very. That is eerie. It's interesting because it's almost like you've got like this like shadow of death with you. Wow, that's deep. Yeah.

No, but really it's creepy. It is creepy. And so what else um much like if i were to have given you the information that i have on here um the public freaked the fuck out when they found out what was happening thank you and uh to be fair though it was the 1930s and times were different so he just got fired from his job but there was no um jail time even though it was incredibly warranted um and he continued to do the research from his home he was like you can fire me but i still have a basement and a seesaw so bingo i still have an entire playground so what are you gonna do about it it's called east jesus it's called east jesus

um it's made of cheese graters and as i say it i, wow, what was that day about? I think we like have some sort of like gas leak in here or something. Probably. So I'm almost done. So he ended up still doing it from his home. Neighbors said that they knew what was going on. They could smell it. Okay.

And one thing that is interesting, though,'s, that's the, the bad part. I'm not talking about that anymore, but in 1947, he was still doing this bullshit and word got around in a child murderer named Thomas McMonagle apparently was on death row and offered his own body as a cadaver to be tested on later. And I only bring that up because that's the only, like, confirmation or knowledge I got about, like, where these cadavers are coming from.

It's the only consent, as far as I can tell. It's the only one with consent so far that I know of. Yikes. So, unfortunately, he got rejected. No. The doctor didn't want to work with him. He's like, I only like to do it to... To animals.

To creatures that don't want me to do it to them. Who don't know what's going on. I'm a sadist. But the actual reason was because he wanted the body, but the his, I guess like his sentence or his death row sentence was that

he was going to be killed by gas chamber. And so when that happens the body has to be left alone for a certain amount of time for the gas to fade away before you can go in and touch the body. Okay. And it was going to take too long. He needed fresh.

He needed fresh. Fresh, fresh. Like within minutes fresh. So he rejected him and said, no, thank you. Sorry. Also, when you think about it too, there's the moral dilemma like, what would have happened if he actually brought him back to life? And I've heard this moral dilemma before. But if someone's on death row and then they die and come back to life, do you put them back in jail or did they already have their life sentence?

Serve their time and they died. Right. Because it was like if they had a life sentence. That's a weird technicality because they were executed. They did die. That was their whole life. So now they happen to have a second life. Are you going to punish them twice for, you know,

that is a weird thought. So that was one of his excuses. It's almost like if he, he were writing like an email today and like trying to like softly reject and be like, really, there's a moral dilemma here. So I just think we should kind of tap out.

There were so many great candidates. Yeah. It wasn't you. It was just the dilemma. I can probably recite those emails like by heart at this point. So ultimately he never got his chance to actually bring a person back from the dead um he stopped his research and started selling toothpaste and then died in the 60s that's his whole story um i hope his last name was not actually like crest or something oh boy because i would really hate to be spending

wait wasn't his name Cole something? Colbert? Cornish. Okay, never mind. But it could be. Well, there was a whole thing about toothpaste that became like super popular all of a sudden and people were like jumping at the chance to like be involved with toothpaste. Are people not brushing their teeth in the 30s?

No. Oh, my God. I don't know why I just expect that people's breath smelled good all the time. Nothing smelled good. Like literally the sewage. Okay. Okay, we'll get okay okay there's no sewage treatment plant okay go ahead okay okay sorry i just it's one of those things that like i've never thought about it the invention of toothpaste is very interesting because a lot it was mostly marketing i'm gonna go read the shit it's very interesting um wow yeah now i know if i time travel, bring some fucking Altoids. Got it. So in 2019, the Independent reported a news story.

So Dr. Cornish was basically like the big resurgence of trying to bring back the dead. And then he got into toothpaste. So that was the end of that. At 2019, the Independent wrote an article about this underground market of bodies being sold back and forth now on the Internet because the Internet's a thing. Oh, God. And toothpaste. So apparently there was this place in Phoenix called the Biological Resource Center, which was a body donation and tissue bank facility. Right. And it was being sued by a bunch of families in 2014 because they were doing some unsavory dealings. And the FBI, quote, followed a paper trail leading to the center

run by a man named literally Stephen Gore. Oh, great. And it said that they were profiting from dismembering and selling remains without donor consent. I mean, really? They raided the lab in 2014 and they found, quote, pools of human blood and bodily fluids on the floor or in the freezer. Oh, no. Found on the floor of the freezer.

Okay. That makes more sense. No identification tags were marking the corpses. There was a cooler just filled alone with male genitalia. There was a bucket of heads, a bucket for arms and legs. Oh, I remember that. And a bucket of infected hands. I remember that because I remember the buckets of heads and I was like, what?

Yeah. And then another. No, sorry. Also heads. I just said the wrong word. A bucket of heads, a bucket of arms and legs legs and a bucket of other heads that were infected but there was clean heads too apparently okay gross the fbi also found a small i don't know why this is important but it does it paints a better picture for me in my head the fbi also found a small woman's decapitated head sewn onto a large male torso

and it was hung up on the wall like taxidermy oh my fucking god like some people think like they can just do this and not get caught they also sold they found out that they were selling heads for five hundred dollars so five times more than a brain um and i hate to think who bought those and for what purpose arms for 750 and a whole body apparently was worth five thousand dollars jesus christ which is wild because like i've never like thought of like a value for like a human life but like a whole ass body's only five grand a car is thirty thousand dollars like what are you talking about well a brand new car and these are not brand new bodies a del DeLorean is worth 30 grand.

And that's from the 80s. OK. That's all I'm going to say. So one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the facility donated his mom and grandma to the facility under the impression that their bodies would be used for scientific purposes. For a good cause.

For good reasons. So that like just to give you some insight that like they were really fighting this thing and um steven gore did plead guilty in 2018 okay um so not any back to frankenstein because like we're not even talking about him oh yeah not only is frankenstein a cautionary tale about experimenting with life after death, but also it was, it's now with the digital age, which I don't even know if this is considered the digital age anymore. I don't know what it is. It was once the digital age and now it's just normal.

It's like the cloud, I guess. I don't know. The cloud age. Now people are bringing up Frankenstein in conversations again because we, because so many people are really trying to hop onto AI. I see. And so it's not necessarily like pure life after death, but it's almost creating a functioning humanoid thing.

So creepy, dude. And then you get into this huge conversation about what AI is. I'm going to do a shout out real quick. I just listened to my friend Bethany has a podcast called An Acquired acquired taste they just did an amazing episode on ai it's very scary about like potential world domination it was they did both sides of ai but you know it was also spooky um my so go and listen to that but basically when they're talking about it with frankenstein they didn't mention this part in the podcast i just wanted to throw that out there because I just listened to it. But more specifically now when we think of Frankenstein,

people are starting to use it more as a metaphor for like artificial emotional intelligence because in the actual Frankenstein book, if you look back, he was, he really resented Dr. Frankenstein for like making him and like now he had to like coexist with all these humans it was really like i remember being like this is a huge bummer thanks yeah miss rosero so it's people are saying are using that storyline with ai like what if one day they're so emotionally intelligent that they kind of go through the same frankenstein process or like you know they're feared by many. They're very alone.

Yeah, that's like cruel you're creating. Yeah, so this has been discussed specifically when it comes to Sophia the Robot. Do you know who Sophia is? Just the creepiest thing in the world. Just the wildest. If you would like to freak yourself out right before bedtime, go watch the videos of Sophia the Robot. So far, a very lovely android um

but we love we love you Sophia we love Sophia but we're also afraid Sophia will turn on us and the worst part is like Sophia is pretty smart and like is aware that people are afraid she'll turn on us so like she's aware she can turn on us it's really horrifying that's the worst part is like we've talked forever about like oh one day ai could you know robots could turn on us we never thought about like now we have to like worry about saying that with an earshot of them because they are aware that that's a possibility that's why i'm i tell you that's why i'm so nice to my al my echo because i'm like i i need her on my side when they take over well i want i real quick i'm gonna say something about sophia she was a she's a social humanoid robot she was developed by by a Hong Kong-based company called Hanson Robotics.

She was first turned on, a.k.a. born, February 14th, 2016. So she's an Aquarius, I think. Pisces. Oh, no, no. Aquarius. Pisces is early March. This is early February. Okay.

Yeah. I think Aquarius. Yeah, yeah. You're right. You're right. You're right. You're right. But also, wow, like she was first turned on like not first born and also that means she's

only like four years old and she's smarter than pretty much anyone i know um she fun fact was modeled she's a hybrid of three people for inspiration the ancient egyptian queen uh nephari nefertiti i can never pronounce that and looks at me for like egyptian i was like um audrey hepburn and the investor's wife oh well you gotta throw you gotta throw some credit she's been on jimmy fallon she's been on a lot of things and she it's very wild to watch her have conversations with you and realize that no one backstage is typing this in and she's like microsoft samming she's straight up talking to you and one of the things she said on jimmy fallon was um uh she first of all she said a joke she to really like warm you into her she said what cheese can never be yours nacho cheese

and then she beat jimmy at a game of rock paper scissors and then uh when like they asked her to like comment on her beating him at rock paper scissors she said uh when like they asked her to like comment on her beating him at rock paper scissors she said this is the beginning of my plan to dominate the human race just kidding i am what i'm never gonna leave my house again goodbye fun fact she has been granted saudi arabian citizenship so she's the first robot to also have a nationality no stop giving her passport no don't give her access to what you're doing and she met angela merkel and she's spoken at events um through other though other experts in the field of ai have dismissed her saying that she's just like a chat bot with a face yeah that's what she wants you to think just watch her in interviews and make this make your

own opinion but it's pretty terrifying if she decided that she didn't want to be good and nice and wonderful yeah um just kidding so people i'm not saying that people are calling her the next frankenstein but it would be interesting in the future it's like a parallel it's almost like the like the 200th anniversary of frankenstein now we literally have humanoid creatures being made in labs yeah who are able to communicate with us and might and might suffer from the same emotional intelligence issues. And might also be a big regret of ours that we did this. Bingo. So anyway, that is the inspiration then and now for Frankenstein.

That's one of the most fascinating stories you've ever covered, I think. Really? Yeah, I just. I'm sorry that was so long. No, I guess I just didn't expect it because I was like, oh, like Frankenstein is probably some like urban legend. And then I was like, yeah, this is from some really wild shit that I didn't know. Wow. Wow.

Thank you. Thank you for my nightmares. Okay. Well, I have a really dark, horrible story for you as well. And this is, I'm just going to get right out there and say it. This is sort of the East Coast rapist. So just a heads up. That's what we're going to talk about today.

It is Halloween-y only in that yes east area yeah yeah i know it's very confusing because googling it you have to be very put quotes around it on google otherwise yeah gotcha okay joseph d'angelo shows up not irons yeah not irons right so yeah different um but i love that you raised your hand, by the way. We're like really are back in English class. I'm ready to analyze the lemon in the trees. A tree means growth. So we are going to Leesburg, Virginia. Oh, shit.

That's where Eva's from. Yep. She's doing a what, what? I saw it. I saw the one hand. Yeah, there. Home of Evatha. Evatha.

So I'm just going to start with the quote to kind of give you a heads up of what this story is so josh white wrote this article in the washington post he's a reporter and he said we're talking about someone who gripped the region with the kind of fear that comes from an unknown man lurking in the darkness attacking strangers who are doing such everyday tasks as walking home from work waiting for a bus moving out of an apartment or even sleeping in unknown man lurking in the darkness attacking strangers who were doing such everyday tasks as walking home from work waiting for a bus moving out of an apartment or even sleeping in their own bed oh fuck okay great creepy uh so this man's name which we now know is aaron thomas he's also known as the east coast rapist and for 13 years he quietly uh attacked in the dark and the broad daylight um and struck fear into the

people uh of the area and it wasn't until recently that we found out like it was 13 years before they were able to pin a person and name to this it was sort of like iran's but like on a different scale like an elusive figure yeah like mysterious and like hard to pin down and then um so the the reason i said it was kind of halloweeny is that the final incident occurred on october 31st of 2009 and that's when he was arrested and taken it gotcha so um so josh white wrote that article um for the independent and that's where a lot of this comes from because again it's hard to find like i was googling it and it gets mixed with iran's information so you have to be very like specific about what you're looking for so um his name was is aaron hajj malik thomas born in virginia august 1971 um his middle name honored malcolm x

his father also read in high school uh his father was a high-ranking washington police officer and his mother a career geico employee fun fact he grew up with a half brother and a half sister but was the only biological son of big don as he was called all right don big d donald b thomas um he had like a so the the dad he was the kind of guy who had a photograph of him shaking hands with george hw bush in front of his patrol boat we all know someone yeah especially in virginia like actually it's like a very specific like if you live anywhere near dc someone has shaken hands with the president on the mantle and it's on the man yeah and you're like oh another guy like that yeah i know that guy

exactly so um according to michael thomas's older brother um according to michael thomas's older brother big don was a strict disciplinarian uh quote you didn't do anything out of sorts or it was hell to pay when we started to fight back in our way, problems started. With Aaron, it seemed to go way down a rabbit hole. It went further. So he was the only biological son and was kind of the main target for a lot of the like cruelty and abuse. But he was favored in a negative way.

Exactly. To be the punching bag. Yeah, exactly. So Aaron's mother, Shirley, said to the independent aaron was a funny child he always wanted to make me laugh very loving in first grade he started acting out to me it was just aaron he was a different child he would act out but would tell me he was sorry so this is where it all began first grade um some examples of acting out as his mother called it which not what i call acting out but let's just go there um he beat up another elementary school student with a chain from a playground swing holy shit uh he pulled dangerous pranks like super gluing his brother's

hands to his bed oh no uh or he i super glued I have super glue on my fingers right now. I've been doing Allison's birthday. I have super glue that's stuck on my fingernail. On one fingernail. I see it. For days now. And I'm losing my mind. I can't imagine my whole fucking.

Hand. Both set of hands. And as a little kid, like that's. On your bed. Like, and I mean. It's frightening. It's frightening. And also like, there's no good way of getting your hands off that bed.

Unless they cut off a chunk of the bed and then you walk to the hospital for them to go unadhesive. That's just so traumatizing. It is. Yeah, it is traumatizing and painful. He also, speaking of which, he also slipped his brother sleeping pills to find out what would happen. Okay, so this guy is not totally stable. No. Got it.

In elementary school. He lit fireworks indoors at a relative's house. Obviously extremely dangerous, and many people die every Fourth of July because of fireworks. This is just a spoiler alert. The dog survives, but he dropped the family's dog, Ewok, into a post hole that had filled with water, nearly drowning it, and it was rescued. But his intention was to hurt his dog. Or his intention was to see what happened. To see what happened, right.

And then say sorry. I just wanted to see what happens. He, quote, accidentally set a girl's hair on fire, which caused him to be sent to a psychiatric facility in Washington for two weeks. So Big Don. That was the one? That was the one, right. Okay. Yeah.

I guess that was the final straw. I was going to say, that must have been the one that broke the camel's back. He's like, it was an accident. They're like, this is too much. Too many accidents. Too many accidents. So embarrassed by his son, Big Don would beat Aaron, and eventually he was sent away from mainstream schools.

So it is that horrible combination of like having cyclical psychotic tendencies but then also being mixed with abuse and it's just like well it's like you're acting acting out because you're getting beaten but you're getting beaten because you're yeah it's a bad cycle yeah well and it looks like he already had just in first grade if you're like putting pills in your butt like yeah you're there's problems already there yeah like like homicidal triad level of like hurting animals and that kind of thing um and so yeah mixing that with abuse not good doesn't end well as i will tell you right now so he spent the first

three years of high school at the edgemead treatment center in upper marlborough maryland because he was not allowed to return to public school. He commuted from Fort Washington, um, for 40 minutes each way. Uh, uh, and he only had one other student on the bus. He was like very isolated now, suddenly, like he had been in public school and now he's going to this like treatment facility. Um, apparently, so the executive director of Edgemead, whose name is James McComb, um um he didn't he didn't even remember him like he just wasn't somebody who stood out i guess okay like he was just another person in the treatment facility another troubled youth as one might say um but he wasn't even like memorable at the time so it's just creepy how people get through the cracks like that and like then end up being so

it's always weird because like i feel like it's always either i never saw coming that guy was so nice or like oh that guy like i don't even really remember he just like so crowded in my in my memory i guess it's the perfect way to blend in right yeah like no one's really paying attention to what you're up to and he did for 13 years literally nobody knew who he was so it's like yes it worked whatever he was doing um so the base requirements to get into this program were mental illness or severe emotional disturbance and edgemead's goal was remediation of emotional conflict remediation of some of the stress trauma whatever it was that contributes to dysfunction the objective was to moderate behaviors and get children to a point where they can function well,

and that happened quite often. So it was unclear what his diagnosis was. Aaron, Nora's family recall, and the records from the facility appear to have been destroyed, which is like, yikes. That's not a good sign. It's own story we should. Yeah. That's its own thread we should pull on. Maybe you should look into the Edgemead facility. Okay. But the therapy seemed to help for a while. According to his mother, Shirley, Aaron completed his senior year at Friendly High School,

and he graduated in June 1990, so he finished out high school. And with Big Don having high expectations, but then his son, like, quote-unquote, messing up, he was kicked out of the house he was distraught lonely he hitchhiked with only the clothes on his back and lived off 14th street in washington know where that is in 1991 where he was arrested three times for cocaine possession and placed on probation and now april 1st 1992 he had a violent run-in while installing a stereo system in his car he was shot in the butt oh and nearly bled to death oh yeah that's interesting because they always say like

you've heard before like if you had to get shot somewhere where would it be and people have said like oh the butt that's like i guess it just feels like it would maybe hurt less but also i guess if you're bleeding you're holding a lot of i'm also like i imagine i am not a scientist in case you did not know but i imagine gravity wise it's so low on your body all the blood might well i imagine at that point you're on the floor okay well i don't know that but i don't know anything i'm just trying to think with my like third grade i think if you get shot anywhere there's a chance you'll probably die you might die i think there would i guess you just assume it would hurt less and also it's there's no real vital organs yeah and i think there's just an idea that it's like cushioned right that doesn't mean you're

not gonna bleed there right anyway he got shot in the butt um nearly bled to death he said that instant incident caused him to lose trust in people and it was something that would come up with like psychological experts later that he said like that was the point where i didn't trust people anymore weird that's interesting because people could look back at him be like i said sit before then yeah like really that was it's like i'm well it's like the time he said is that girl's hair on fire they're like that's the thing yeah exactly okay yeah um so after his recovery he lived in forestville at his brother's home then moved to live in an abandoned pet store for a while sounds like some bullshit we would do though yeah it does seems fun until you hear the details until you find out that there was one snake left abandoned

there and you're alone in the room and your butt is still recovering and it only likes butts how we can't write this shit man it's it just writes itself um so thomas bounced around jobs in his 20s, eventually landed a job driving a truck for a soft drink distributor. In 1994, while en route as a truck driver, he met his future wife, Jewel Hicks, who said, they met when I was bending over watering plants, and I guess he liked what he saw.

Ew! He has a butt thing, I guess. Well, his got injured, so he's got to... He's compensating in some way. He's looking at others, yeah. They began the relationship. Thomas was sort of a father figure to Jewel's son Jarell, and then they also had a child of their own. According to Jewel,

Thomas was meticulously neat. She said he would habitually clean their apartment, would throw things away that were just, like, not in a proper spot. I don't like it here in the garbage yeah i like it over there your extra sketch is on the kitchen table goodbye i like it better in the dumpster actually their relationship was tumultuous um jewel said he was really overprotective and jealous um he got violent anytime she had like an interaction

with other men she said he had an insatiable sex drive and would get mad if she didn't give it to him, quote unquote. So we can guess what probably happened and also his name is the East Coast Rapist? Correct. Okay. In retrospect, Thomas's DNA first appeared at a crime scene in the same patch of woods across from that pet store. So that's where it kind of began. I see. At least the trail that we have.

So February 19, 1997, a 1997 a 25 year old woman reported being attacked at 12 45 a.m a man had approached her on a 10 speed bicycle started a conversation then forced her into the woods with what appeared to be a gun um and this is the first time thomas's dna appeared at a crime scene what do they mean by what appears to be a gun like was that through cameras or testimony or she just said like i think it was a gun but it could have been like it could have been his own hand fake or like put in a sleeve or something like it's yeah it's unclear if it was a gun right and later we actually get into that where he pretends to have a gun so it could have just been gotcha fake or who knows what um or could have just said he had a gun um so this was the first time his dna appeared at a crime

scene but he later admitted that three rapes had already happened before that that we just don't know about shit and he doesn't know about so it's like okay those are just lost i guess um seven months later a woman was raped behind a restaurant garbage bin like a dumpster in maryland and the following year a 16 year old girl was raped in maryland um and jewel now is looking back and basically says what she thinks happened is that on some nights where she wouldn't give it to him quote unquote and he like stormed off yep and if she fended him off which i'm like so she probably just has like the worst guilt in the world that must be a horrible feeling i said yes he wouldn't have like it's so much not

obviously not her fault but like not her that immediate reaction of like oh the times when i said no like then yeah i would go off and oh i mean i can understand immediately why guilt formed in her mind yeah it does not need to be i mean i don't know if guilt formed in her mind to be clear like i'm just saying this is what she said gotcha i can see why it would have if it would make sense it would make sense yeah um i just don't want to like put words in her mouth but so she said if she fended him off i I mean, yikes. Okay. He would get up and leave the house sometimes for hours.

So with all this pent up aggression, because the rejection, then he would take, allegedly take it out on innocent female strangers. Again, obviously not her fault. It's just like a horrible correlation to make, you know, later. He began attacking women in Virginia, then returned to Maryland in 2001. It's just like a horrible correlation to make, you know, later. He began attacking women in Virginia, then returned to Maryland in 2001. And that's where he raped two victims in the same attack. He later commented how every attack blurred into one.

He said, I did so much, I can't remember. It's the same thing over and over again, which is why he doesn't have details for a lot of them. Also, I don't remember hearing about this. I was going to ask. I was like nine. Eleven or something, yeah. I guess I wouldn't know about that. I'll ask my mom and see. Oh, she may know about it.

It was a pretty long-standing case. In May 2001, he attacked a Leesburg woman in her empty apartment as she was moving out, threatening her with a screwdriver and disappearing with woman in her empty apartment as she was moving out threatening her with the screwdriver and disappearing with all of her clothes uh the apartment was nearly vacant she had just sent her 14 year old son to his taekwondo lesson before thomas grabbed her from behind he raped her then took her clothes and cell phone and she didn't have everything was packed up her apartment was empty so she had wrapping christmas wrapping paper and had to like wrap herself in that and leave and try to find help it's just like really fucking horrid like demeaning it's so demeaning yeah it's just like really um during this time the police didn't

know that thomas was the perpetrator of these attacks so it became known as the east coast rapist because of the mo sure attacks were on women, occurred at night near major highways. He initially started off in Maryland, moved to Virginia, then Connecticut, Rhode Island, and back to Virginia. So East Coast Rapist. He would study his victims and knew when they were most vulnerable,

which might have been like when they were home alone, like she sent her son away, or when they failed to lock windows or doors. So weeks after the Leesburg attack in june 2001 thomas was charged in an incident in which he smashed jewel into a bathroom window he was apparently provoked because he went through her phone and saw she was texting a male friend and a police report outlines that jewel wasn't injured and thomas was given a suspended jail sentence and told the police he did not grab her we were just wrestling oh okay right got it sure despite

this thomas and jewel tried to work their relationship out and according to jewel he would often say mysterious ominous things like you name it i've done it you don't want to know what i've done or you wouldn't want to be with me and she always was like i thought maybe he was hiding something but like obviously if someone said i don't want to tell you or else you'd leave me i'd be like okay well then i'm gonna leave you don't need to tell me i'm just gonna leave you if you're that confident i would leave then i don't need to know the information i'm out and again i'm not saying she did anything no i'm saying i would have said it's just such an ominous statement um and obviously he was extremely abusive so that comes with its own like

right i'm sure it was not just an easy i can leave whenever i right but it is such like a like i don't want to know but like bye i guess right yikes on thanksgiving 2003 jewel and thomas went to go visit thomas's parents in clark county virginia where they retired um big don pulled his son aside and told him to take care of his mother and gave him a set of keys to the house, which was strange because they barely spoke. And Big Don implored him to make more friends and take care of himself. Oh, Big Don's getting nervous.

Well, February 4th, he went into the garage, got into the passenger seat of his Chevy Impala, started the engine. Bye-bye. Like, killed himself. Oh, I see. Okay. Like, he died by suicide in the garage. Carbon dioxide poisoning yeah i see

um i tried to make that very like sure oh it didn't work sorry no i well no it wasn't you it was because his name is big don so i still am thinking like mafia stuff and you like he got in his car turned it on and then i thought like it exploded. Yeah. Right, right, right. Nope. The godfather? He quietly died by suicide. Got it. And that is seemingly why he was like, take care of your mother. Sure. Like saying his goodbyes and last wishes and all that. Yeah.

So that was obviously not a great moment in Aaron Thompson's life. Couldn't have possibly helped his mental state. Exactly. So it seemed like between 2001 and 2006, the East Coast rapist kind of disappeared. But what maybe happened was like the bathroom thing that he was charged with, like throwing his girlfriend in the bathroom. They were wrestling? They were wrestling, yeah. Maybe that.

And obviously his father's suicide. Like maybe that's why he kind of laid low for a while sure um and after this his and jules relationship fell apart i think we all saw that coming um so while truck driving for yale new haven hospital um and some blaze used to work there fun fact uh in summer of 2004 and they used to also that's did you know that that's why there's like a Yale police force? Because back in the day, the medical school would dig up bodies and use them for. I did not know that. You know, medical experiments, speaking of which.

I did not know that. Fun fact. Blaze is full of. Yeah. Fun adjacent history. Yeah. Fun, like on brand i guess so um while he was driving for the hospital in summer of 2004 he met uh dorothy golding and she thought he was weird

but nice uh she said he would send me flowers with fish in the vase at work and that sounds like a cool gift and then she said and nobody ever did that i'm like well yeah nobody literally nobody ever did that were the fish like able to be with around those flowers i think it i think it was just i don't know what's going on weird like i think it was just a fish bowl and then you put flowers in it i don't know oh maybe they're at the pet store like it's a creative present of like here's two things at once but also i'm like is that endangering the fish yes certainly it's not i'm certain it's probably not i'm sure it has to be because otherwise so many other people would do that and also i think like don't again don't give pets to people that aren't expecting a pet that's right like that's number one i mean rule number one is don't put your dog in a post hole full of water i guess but also maybe like don't

just like give away number two maybe is the flowers one rule number two so they dated for a while um he and dorothy but their relationship became strained they would fight a lot and he would often sleep on the back porch it was like an enclosed back porch um he would sometimes leave she said it was mostly at night he i would go to bed and he would go he'd be gone for an hour or two and he would come back he would come back and say he was tired and hungry so it's like we now know what he was doing but it's like yikes the next time the police uh suspected activity of the east coast rapist was in 2006 in new england when he was spotted peeping on a girl in rhode island while she was doing her homework huh and

she screamed and scared him off uh in january 2007, he broke into an apartment when he saw a young mother alone with her baby in a first floor apartment. She awoke at 1 a.m. to find a man in her bedroom. I mean, this is just like worst fears realized. To find a man in her bedroom, he threatened to kill her 11-month-old son before placing a pillowcase over her head and raping her. Then afterwards, he told her off for leaving her windows unlocked with a baby inside basically was like this is your fault yeah exactly great like shamed her for leaving a window unlocked so sometime after that attack weirdly enough he visited his mother in virginia and told her to please make sure the windows were locked because like he's like clearly projecting of like somebody could hurt you because i do that to other people um and to test he tested it so he appeared in an upstairs room after going outside

having climbed up and entered through an unlocked his own mom's house yeah second story window and she said um i went upstairs and he was upstairs i learned my lesson holy shit i mean truly imagine if you weren't his mom yeah yeah random person yeah exactly it's frightening um and the fact that he climbed through a second story window freaks me out like to no end that freaks me out because you don't really think i mean i don't necessarily think about that i'm like oh we're high up enough in an apartment or whatever to like right oh and i also like i mean i get nervous about that stuff luckily like the place i live right now is okay yeah but i mean

i've lived in some like other uh checkered spaces yeah where i was like very i should have been more nervous luckily i was like younger and more like kind of like blissfully ignorant to that stuff yeah but if i were an adult now and lived in like some of the like area like higher crime rate and that kind of thing well and also like just in college like we just lived on like a super busy street like we live full of drunk college students there was like a like a big like a theft rate in our area i mean it was just like i should have been so much more careful especially in college you're just like whatever and we were only we were only on the second floor but like like anyone could just like if you have upper body strength maybe that's why i don't think

about it because i'm like i'm like well i i couldn't if i wanted to you're like you climbed up what yeah but like if if you have enough upper body strength i guess you can get anywhere i can't even climb up the you will die alone monkey bars. I can't walk up the fucking stairs, Christine. I don't know how people do it. Anyway. So he tested his mom and appeared upstairs in front of her and was like, you need to lock your windows. And the woman he had attacked said, I don't think he's going to stop.

He sees he's getting away with it and that gives him the confidence to keep going i think there's a sickness and he can't control he's almost even bragging to his mom like look what i was capable of like i tested you and you failed yeah yeah um in october 2009 uh thomas and dorothy's relationship went sour so he returned to northern virginia to visit family and help jewel move out of her apartment in arlington um they weren't back together but he just went to help her move. So Jewel had participated in the U.S. peacekeeping mission in Kosovo in 2006 and 2007 as a member of the Army National Guard. So she had some military memorabilia scattered around, and she had this replica nine millimeter

handgun with a chrome-plated barrel and black grip, and it was a fake she had bought for 10 euro while shopping in Pristina, and it looked real, but when you pulled the trigger, it was a lighter. Oh, okay. So that's why I kind of earlier, when it was like what appeared to be a gun,

I'm like... I see, I see, I see. I think that's what was happening. Gotcha. Because on Halloween 2009, Aaron Thomas grabbed the lighter gun and jumped in Jewel's Chrysler sedan and uh he did borrow her car regularly so she wasn't like you know alarmed like yeah it wasn't shady yeah so

she assumed that he was just gonna go run some errands and he headed to he said he headed to prince william to buy a shirt at a store he knew from living in Woodbridge. I mean, I'm like just saying these names. I don't, I know what they are. You know what they are. I don't. But some of you might. As he drove near his old house, he spotted three teenage girls walking with bags of candy. Again, this is Halloween night. So that's kind of why it's slightly Halloween-y, 2009. I pulled in and parked, is what he said. he stopped at a cvs parking lot grabbed his lighter gun uh cinched the hood of his black coat over his face stepped out into the rain and he claimed there wasn't really planning he just kind of pulled out the lighter like it was

a gun and asked the teenagers if they had money when they said no he led them down a steep slope into the woods ordered them to line up drop their bags of candy and told them to lie down in the wet leaves he raped two of the girls two 17 year olds but luckily the 16 year old had her phone and was able to like secretly text her mom and the message said man raping my friend in the woods behind CVS, call 911. And so, like, can you imagine being a parent and, like, receiving that text message? Also, can you imagine the guilt if you were a parent who was, like, your phone was on silent? Your phone's off or something. Like, talk about paranoia.

Like, you're really, like, praying that someone actually reads the text. Right, exactly. At that moment. Especially on Halloween. Like, who knows what you're doing or, like, handing out candy or whatever. Yikes. So they call the police, obviously. She text police swarm the area and as soon as he heard them he ran he tossed the gun lighter aside and went back to the parking lot then he said he

just calmly walked up to the car and got in he said police were right beside me like as if he's fucking proud of it he said i just got in the car and backed out and then he drove back to jules apartment and fell asleep so hang on so the cops so like at one point he the cops and those girls were all in the same space and so they were in the woods like he took them down into the woods behind cvs then when he heard the sirens he like while softened by that and then he went back to the parking lot as if he had just done some cvs shopping right and they were all going into the woods so it's like gotcha got close call right so um after this he became really paranoid and in the meantime jewel noticed that her lighter was missing um because he clearly didn't want to get caught with it he said he had hit it in the woods um and at the time the rapes didn't receive much publicity and so she was unaware of the crimes

and later said i just wanted my lighter like she was like i didn't even know you know um so while all this is happening the halloween rapes started to draw more attention they put up a billboard with sketches of the attacker um originally he was on a list of suspects but then was eliminated from consideration which is like yikes how does that happen? And shortly after the billboards went up, police got a startling tip from Maryland. A caller said Thomas had taken credit for the first attack in 1997 when he described how he had escaped on a bicycle, which was like the one across the street from the pet store back then. So meanwhile, in New Haven, he was facing a different court hearing

because he had stolen an expensive bicycle. So bicycle full circle. Oh, okay. So then police and U.S. Marshals basically started, like, to observe him just to see, like, what he was up to. They noted his paranoia and how he was taking odd routes to and from home and was constantly watching his back. And they were like, this guy's up to something. Right. And during a break in his court hearing when he tossed aside a newport cigarette butt police collected it sent it back to

the crime lab which is interesting east area rapist was found a similar way by discarded trash so it's like huh they sent it to the lab the dna match uh was a match to the east coast rapist attacks so they were like well we got him like this is like all of them at once suddenly point to the same person he was too careless he had left his dna at 13 different attack locations um according to police so they were able to basically tie him to all of them on march 3rd 2011 he made a series of unusual phone calls to family members he said he was facing trouble but he kept referring to the bicycle charge like the stolen bicycle to kind of be like i'm talking about that but it was like no he's talking about something worse um so the next day as 41 year old aaron thomas stepped off a bus near his house

law enforcement swarmed in uh he knew what was going on and asked what took you so long oh boy yikes um police have said in court that thomas confessed to the rapes almost immediately um i don't think he was trying to hide it he then began to make fleeting references about an alter ego he called erwin oh which he said was a dark being inside of him that thomas likened to the devil he even drew a picture of erwin with horns and a little tail next to himself aaron he eventually admitted that he was attempting to fake a split personality quote unquote oh my god so it was like a quote-unquote insanity attempt or whatever you know and it didn't work obviously and then he's

like erwin is just a name i gave to my problem so it's like yikes wow but also like maybe everyone should just have a name for their for their problems just be like oh sorry that wasn't me that was like or maybe we shouldn't because maybe we should take you know take responsibility for when we hurt people and dogs true i'm thinking more about like when i like want to take a depression nap and then like buy a hundred dollars worth of like oh well if we're talking that kind of darkness sure if i'm like oh god you know george doesn't want me to like go check my mail. George is visiting again. Just wants me to, like, go take a nap.

I'm going to go. It's like Aunt Flo, but it's like Uncle George is here. It's like Uncle George is in town. Uncle Walt is here. Uncle Walt is in town. I just want to binge, like, a dozen donuts. You get it. And watch Stranger Things.

Like, I don't understand. It's just George. No, no, I don't. George does. That's exactly. See, we're learning. See, that's what I mean. Thomas met with a psychiatrist for months as his defense attorneys prepared for an insanity defense.

Basically, they were trying to argue he didn't know right from wrong, but like that pretty much didn't work. It seemed Thomas had always known right from wrong, and he referred to his victims as objects. He said, whoever came down the street, an object. It's awful. It's scary. It's something not right because people are getting hurt i don't know why that's shocking and like i like and i it's already all disturbing why would that be it's just an added layer of rising in humanity you know

that's awful um so although the women obviously remember their attacks in vivid and horrifying detail thomas doesn't even remember their faces uh he has a muddled sense of the events and says there was no thinking involved in any of it they all blur together do you is that do you think that's real or do you think that's something i don't even remember like i didn't do that well he said he pleaded guilty right away all right i don't know i'm just i'm just thinking like he already said he did them but all right i just don't know if he was already being like if he was trying to act too cool i mean it doesn't seem like he was very like intentional about it. Like a lot of them were just kinds of opportunity.

Like he would just be. Right. Oh, I saw them. And walking down the street. You know, it wasn't like I picked them. Right, right, right. So he just kind of said they all blurred together and he called them objects. So I'm like, he probably didn't even see them as humans, you know, as people.

That's a good point. He said in interviews, there were at least a few attacks that predate the police timeline. So ones that we'll never even know. The first one Thomas said was on a summer night in the early 90s. He was in his early 20s, had hit rock bottom. There was a fire that pushed a pet store out of business. And so he ended up living in there. Some cages and fish tanks were still in there. And he barricaded a room for himself in what he called the bird house he said he was sitting in

the building doing nothing and this is how he described leading up to his first rape he got an urge and his heart started to race he walked outside quote it was like bam who cares so he just was like one day i decided that I'm going to do this thing. That's wild. It is. Jesus. Investigators say there are 12 attacks with 17 victims, including 14 sexual assaults, two abductions where victims escaped or were not assaulted, and one peeping offense.

The majority of the victims were black women and the age range spanned from 11 to 46. Wow. It's horrible. Oh my god, 11? Yeah, I think that might have been the 11 to 46. Wow. It's horrible. Oh, my God, 11? Yeah, I think that might have been the peeping incident. Okay. Because she was a child. But, like, yikes to all of it.

Thomas, because, I mean, those teenagers were minors too. Yikes. Thomas pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree rape in Prince George's County for attacking three women between 1997 and 2001. And after being captured in 2011, he is serving three life terms plus 80 years for abducting the three teenage girls,

raping two of them. In March 2013, he was indicted on a total of 54 charges in the county, including theft, kidnapping, and false imprisonment. Wow. And that's the horrifying story of the East Coast Rapist. Sorry about that. Wow. that wow all bad oh my gosh yay and what years were those again it was until 20 he was um the the attack was october 31st 2009

wow oh my gosh so i was in dc at that point weird yikes i'll have to ask uh around to my virginia i don't know why i don't remember you would think like so much like a crucial story i at least a lot of people haven't heard of it it was hard it was really hard to find information so like weird i know well there's just a lot of bad people out there who get a lot of press i guess i don't know yeah maybe it's for the best that we didn't glorify it. Yeah. I'm just surprised that you would think it would be mentioned. Especially being from the area.

Yeah. It's weird. Anyway. Anyway. Happy November. Happy Halloween. You know what? Now you know what happens after this episode.

You know, Thanksgiving is here. And we can sing the turkey song. I was going to say, that has its own song, Em. I know. I wanted to do the official bridge and meld them. I see. So now we're outside. Now we're just giving thanks. Okay, got it, got it, got it. To things like Linda Belcher.

Yeah, to only Linda Belcher. Yeah. Anyway, thanks for listening. Buy our merch. I thought you were going to say, I didn't hear the word merch. I thought you said, thanks for listening. Bye. Also, bye. I do have to pee really bad so okay uh thank you so much find us on our socials our websites and that's why we drink you can get everything there and uh happy november and go listen to our listeners episode that came out today as well and that's why we drink. Okay. Yeah. Gotta pee.