And That's Why We Drink - E219 A Paper Mâché Nose Doll and Mothman's Grandchildren

Episode Date: April 18, 2021

Get ready because episode 219 is a chatty one! What is a paper mâché nose doll? Who are mothman's grandchildren? We've got wild speculation on both this week and two fascinating topics: First Em takes us back into old school medium territory with the story of Helen Duncan aka Hellish Nell aka Scotland's Last Witch. It involves way more cheesecloth than you think. Then Christine covers the mysterious case of the Somerton Man aka the Tamam Shud case, which involves more secret pockets and ear measuring than you might think. We also tackle a question we know you've been anxiously waiting for us to answer: What exactly is British Vampire Condition? ...and that's why we drink! Please consider supporting the companies that support us! Try 5 pairs of glasses at home for free at warbyparker.com/drinkUse coupon code DRINK for $10 off your first box at FabFitFun.comGo to THIRDLOVE.com/DRINK now to find your perfect-fitting bra… and get 20% off your first purchase!Start feeling better with Feals. Become a member today by going to Feals.com/drink and you'll get 50% off your first order with free shipping! Go to ZipRecruiter.com/drink today to try ZipRecruiter for FREE! Go to brightcellars.com/DRINK to take their 30 second quiz to get your wine matches and receive 50% off your first 6 bottle order!

Hi, Christine. Good morning. Good morning. It is morning to me, not to you, but... Not to me, but I'm still tired, so it's okay. Hello and welcome. Good morrow. Good morrow to it.

That's why we drink and also specifically christine since you're the one i am looking at thank you how are you how good how are you we're both very like chatty and like giddy today i well maybe it's just me and i'm projecting but i feel like i'm very like uh frenetic today i don't know i love frenetic christine oh no i i know i i agree with you i think i'm i mean i was gonna say I think I'm a little sleep deprived but honestly it would be weirder if I wasn't at this point so I don't really know I think we're both just uh in the same headspace and matching the waves and therefore we are we are one you know we are one also I wanted to sorry that's not okay it was more than okay to be clear

put that on the record eva write that down m approved of my singing m why do you drink this week i'm just curious that makes me feel like you've got a reason why you drink maybe uh i don't have a specific reason i mean mean, this is a pretty nice week. I mean, compared to the last couple weeks, I feel like it's been, like, really insane. So it was nice to, like, take a breather this week. I do want to say really quickly, this is, like, someone reached out and said, Hey, Bohemian Grove, did you know that there was a, like, a superhero at Bohemian Grove? Which, like, by the way, I researched it, and it's, likeian Grove, which like,

by the way, I researched it and it's like, this guy like wasn't the best, but there was a guy who liked to cosplay as his own created superheroes and like try to like save locals. I don't know. But he, he went to Bohemian Grove one time. His name was Richard.

I just want to bring this up before we get off track. And we will. But there was a guy named Richard McCaslin. And apparently he, in 2002, he like raided the Bohemian Grove as his own made up superhero called the Phantom Patriot. So I guess that's why I drink. But he apparently. That's why I drink too. He saw the

documentary that i mentioned by alex jones and he like freaked out that kids were in danger and so oh i see he went to go he broke in and he planned on like burning down like the the big owl no not me but he didn't realize he didn't realize it was made out of concrete so when he got there he was like well what the fuck and so he ended up trying didn't do a very good research he literally i think did a hot none of it but he ended up uh trying to burn up down a building instead but he got caught and then there was like some like standoff with the cops anyway he also like just learning more about like some of his like interests and stuff it sounds like he would like be in QAnon today. So. Oh dear. I don't want to like give this guy too much credit,

but someone did reach out and say like, oh, like a superhero who looks a lot like Captain America. Oh boy. Also like Phantom Patreon. It's like Captain America and ghosts made a superhero together. It fits. Yeah.

Yeah. But anyway, that's why I drank because apparently there was a superhero I didn't even mention in my research yesterday. Wow. Or super villain. I'm not sure, but he, he's not here anymore. He died. was a superhero I didn't even mention in my research yesterday. Wow. Or super villain. I'm not sure. But he's not here anymore.

He died. So I don't know. I don't feel too nervous he's going to come after me about my opinion. But he seemed like someone who would be in QAnon. So it kind of freaks me out. Anyway. Yikes. Well, that's good to know.

Why do you drink? I had no idea. That's part of it now, I guess. Okay. Because that whole episode was bonkers. But what else? Oh, oh, so this is coming out after, so I feel safe saying it, but Blaze is gone for the next few days.

Not that I, like, don't feel safe when he's not here, but mostly just because I get paranoid when I, you know, you're not supposed to say when people are home, whatever. True crime 101. But Blaze is leaving town for a few days to visit his family because he's bringing a car. He got a new car. you know you're not supposed to say when people are yeah whatever true crime 101 but uh blaze is leaving town for a few days to visit his family because he's bringing a car he got a new car it's a whole thing and uh that is so not interesting but uh so m has to hear it outside of the podcast but um he's gone for a few days and like i've just been feeling really weird and there's uh the footsteps have gotten like super loud to the like on the stairs to the point

that i know to the point that when blaze and i are like both in bed like reading or whatever we'll be i'll be like did you hear that and he's like yes i heard it i don't want to talk about it and we're like what is that and the cats are in our bed and the worst is when they all kind of look up at the stairs and it's happening so much now that i'm like and that i'm not and i've never been here alone for like several days at a time so i'm not looking forward to that christine you need to be recording these sounds and shit how do you know there's not someone that just lives in your house like in those horrible scary stories because i checked because you know how I look under beds. Did you look in the vents? I did because Juniper likes to climb in there. Oh, my God.

But I know I mean, maybe you're right, but they're not very I was going to say they're not very secretive about it. But like, obviously, they are if I haven't found them yet. I will what I do it like a real, real lunatic is I put a bunch of stuff in front of my bedroom door at night. And no, I would and uh no I would too I would do that's how they're gonna not come near me I mean I I really don't think anything's gonna happen but it is like putting me on edge and I haven't been home like here alone for several days in a row so I will update you um so someone also reached out and was like Christine like this is a demonic presence and I honestly don't think it's like i don't feel in danger like they were

like oh the covers thing but even when i got the covers pulled off nothing ever felt like ominous like i'm going and i've lived in places that were like something bad is here but i don't feel like that at all i just feel like some weird energy is going on so i'm not like in fear for my life but i am creeped out let's just put it that way is it is your is your mom's house safer spiritually like do you think probably i was just saying do you think you could just you could just run home like if things get too scary i could but i can't really take all the animals with me because she has cats so um i would have to abandon geoio here. And, you know, he's my firstborn. I don't feel comfortable leaving him with the demons.

They're not demons, to clarify. But I don't feel comfortable leaving him here. So maybe if I get desperate enough, I will probably run away, run home to mom crying. But we'll see. You need to make a friend who can just take Gio and then you can just fend for yourself. That's the one thing that terrifies me about like having another life to have to take care of. It's like when your version of the end of the world is happening, like you got to just be able to take care of you. Like if all of a sudden there was like.

Look out for number one. Yeah. Like if all of a sudden there was a bunch of spirits in my house, then like maybe they were demons and I couldn't flee because I had a dog. I'd be like like you know what fuck that like i was like i just i just want to take care of myself no or i better be able to like hoist the dog over my shoulder and go somewhere else but i also feel like what the dog can you know gee i would he wouldn't protect me but i feel like a lot of dogs would be protective of their owners not mine particularly but you know i feel like it's even

scarier though it's even scarier though like in terms of ghosts like who like what is he gonna protect you from like he's just gonna stare at a corner what's it gonna do to me right like scare me i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i've reported on too many stories at this point of fantastical stories so like i have no idea what the limit is at this point. But you know what the good news is about having pets is that if one of them is not in the room, you can always say, oh, that was just the cat. And it's so, oftentimes it is, but it is so easy to just be like, oh, I'm sure one of the animals just like dropped something or it's going up the stairs.

So I guess so. I wonder if that happens so often often you just get used to noises with animals i mean no i know i'm thinking i wonder if that at all uh like i'm because i don't have any animals when i hear a sound i'm on high alert every time right right like you get so used to it once you have pets that like you don't even notice most of it because you're like oh they're just and juniper stomps so loudly like he literally like slams his feet in the ground that like at this point I can probably just hear a man walking around and be like, oh, June, silly, silly Juniper. But since I'm always on high alert because I don't have any animals to blame things on, I would imagine your anxiety level goes even higher when all of a sudden there is an animal when all your animals are in your bed with you that is when it gets a little bit too much i feel like i would be even more jarring than me

always at the same baseline of terrified that's that's true because you've got another reason to to really be scared now well and like i haven't lived in an apartment for a while because even in la we shared that like we had a bunch of people in a house but like now being in a house by myself it's so much scarier because i mean most of these stories you watch on like these paranormal shows they're in a house you know when these things happen they're not in like an apartment complex you know so it's make sandy come stay with you make sandy and you have like a whole sibling sleepover thing i was about i was gonna say earlier too like it's very easy for me to convince my brother and sister to just spend the night because I have so many snacks.

So that might be just what I do. Perfect. Well, I wish you the best. And if you don't FaceTime me the next time there are loud stomps, I'm going to be furious. You're not going to answer. For the next three days, you're not going to pick up your phone like, nope, I don't want to be a part of it. Or as Christine says, I'll just send her a smiley face emoticon because we go to big

discussion about this christine i don't know apparently i send a lot of smiley faces to a an unnerving level where christine no no you don't send them often which is why they unnerve me when you do like like not emojis i I mean, like the emoticon. Yeah, like colon parentheses, smiley face. And they always seem so like, I don't know. I'm always like, oh, no, M's mad at me every time you send me one of those. I'm sorry that I type like a dad, to be fair. I sometimes they're just easier because it's the colons right there. Then I went on full, but then I went on full, you know, lunatic mode

and I searched that smiley face in our text combos. And every time Em sends it, it's like after I've sent something that I've dropped the ball or I messed something up. And Em always sends a smiley face. And so I think I've just started to associate it with like, I've done something wrong. And then Em's like, it's okay, smiley face. Or sure, smiley face or sure

smiley face i feel like i feel like i'm just trying to go the extra mile to make you not feel nervous i don't know but maybe that's what it is and i'm just uh i don't know anyway i won't i that doesn't matter nobody cares about that but anyway if i find out that there are any more steps in your house i'm just gonna send you a smiley face and be like no wish i heard about it wish i knew then i know i'm about to expire thank you anyway anyway uh good luck i don't envy you i'm happy to not i'm i'm happy that the reason i drink is because of a superhero that's not a superhero yeah yeah all right i've got quite a tale for you i stayed up extra late doing some uh extra research on this oh i've done sort of the same with my story so i'm very excited i think this is going to be a good episode i think it is too um i it's it's a lot so let's crack into it this is the story of Helen Duncan, a.k.a. the wartime witch, a.k.a. the last convicted witch, a.k.a. Scotland's last witch, a.k.a. Hellish Nell.

Oh, I like that one. The last one. We should have stuck with that. Hellish Nell. I know. Ironically, Hellish Nell wasn't even about her being a witch at all. That was a nickname from childhood. Oh, we should have just stuck with that. That's good. I know. Ironically, Hella Chanel wasn't even about her being a witch at all. That was a nickname from childhood. Oh, I should have just stuck with that. That's good.

I know. She should have just started introducing herself like that the second she got into like spiritual stuff. I love it. Okay, so also if that name sounds familiar to you, Helen Duncan, it's because you probably recently played the escape room that I made and she is featured in the escape room. She's featured in it because she is one of Harry Price's main cases that he covered, which shockingly for it being one of his main cases, I feel like he gets featured very minimally in this story. I expected this to be a full out another Another HP. Uh-huh. Yeah. But apparently he only makes a little, a little cameo. So.

Okay. So this is the story of Helen Duncan. Her name was, or her legal name is Victoria Helen McRae McFarlane. Sure. That was her name when she was born. She was born in 1897 in Scotland to Isabel in Archibald. She was the fourth of eight kids.

And apparently she was quite the tomboy and she was very rowdy and fiery and had a temper. And therefore she got the name Hella Chanel. I love her already. Yeah. Do you hear these sounds, by the way, going on behind me? No, you scared me. I'm already on edge. I'm like, is there somebody behind me?

I feel like the neighbors took up hammering the floorboard does a new hobby during the pandemic um i heard that's a new quarantine hobby people are picking up i have literally like every room now we have a different tall item to bang on the ceiling it just gets worse and worse it's like it's like it truly is like your situation except i am in an apartment. At least you know. Yeah, you know who it is. Yeah. Which is like good and bad. I feel like there's pros and cons to both. Oh, it's the they're both bad.

So so hellish. No. So Helen early on, basically, Helen was showing abilities or showing signs of psychic abilities. Let me say immediately that there are two very strong camps again about whether or not she was a genuine medium okay so i might be going back and forth on different tales basically her grandkids are still alive and campaigning that she was legitimate i was listening to a few of their interviews last night and they're listening to an interview of theirs and reading some of their testimonies and they are like no joke this person is real and then uh and they're basically trying to clear her name because the overwhelming uh

social understanding of it all is that she was a fraud i see but so some of this comes from articles about her from people who didn't know her so some of this comes from articles about her from people who didn't know her and some of this comes from like the actual website that her grandkid runs okay so helen early on uh allegedly showed signs of psychic abilities she apparently saw spirits and had visions of like certain topics before they even came up i think there was like a story on the website that when she was in school she was able to certain things in her head would show up and then all of a sudden they would learn it in class that day or she was able to like manifest answers for her school oh come on i would love that skill yeah it's too late now but it's a swanky power both of her parents allegedly also

had relatives with this gift and so it was like not shocking to them i guess it's a recessive gene a recessive gene that kind of came it's got to be doesn't it always don't they always say that this kind of stuff like skips a generation yes yes i have heard that uh so one day she told this is just another example of her powers one day uh she told her doctor not to go out that night and the doctor didn't listen and died in a car crash oh no apparently this story spread through town and even like the local minister said that she was like in cahoots with the devil or whatever oh good by the time she was 16 she was forced to leave home and i don't know i saw differing

accounts of that so it could have been that she was like pregnant and like unwelcome at home or that she i saw one account saying that it was because of her gifts like the town started getting freaked out and so she had to leave or but anyway so she left at 16 and she went to a town called dundee and worked in factories she worked as a nurse and when she worked as a nurse one of her um co-workers I think it was even her best friend, invited her over one night. And that is when she met the co-worker's family, including the co-worker's brother, who ended up being her future husband. Oh, cute. So she met her husband through her friend at work. And he was a spiritualist and his name was henry and apparently he also had

had visions in the past and he had a vision of her when he was fighting in world war one um i saw a letter of his i'm paraphrasing and i hope i'm not getting it wrong but um i read it really late at night but he wrote a letter about how when he was in the trenches he had a vision of her wow how romantic yeah and also horrible but also romantic well apparently the first thing he ever said to her when he met her that night when she came over for dinner um he said so we meet at last oh i just got goose cam and she had also had visions of him apparently so they both like saw each other from across the room and knew they were the one or whatever oh my gosh okay because i was gonna say that's creepy if you hear that but i guess he probably knew like she would know they would know each other so it wasn't

creepy it was like yeah i mean it must have been like a recognition multi-layered knowing of like oh she'll be cool with this how long ago did he plan that line too by the way if he was like like we're gonna eventually meet up so like i might as well say something real classy he practiced at the mirror for several years before he finally found her i could imagine him like kind of failing and like being like like less confident about it in the mirror for a little bit and like having to build himself back up and practice like so so we so we meet it at last no no no no no no no no hold it save it so we meet at last you know shoulders back shoulders back exude confidence um so yeah so he fought that's how emma and i prepare for our podcast every every that's how that's how i prepared

for texting you if you wanted to go to a farm with me and we weren't friends when you texted me a smiley face i was like that explains a whole lot actually that's what i meant you're right uh so henry had fought in world war one uh he had a vision of her he was later discharged from the war because he had some heart issues or it was rheumatic fever which i guess is the inflammation of your heart and your joints and stuff so helen married him when she was 20 they had six kids their names were bella nan lillian henry peter and gina and apparently they also had two who died as babies henry after he left the war he became a cabinet maker and helen was like a sheet a linen cleaner um and she also

worked in a bleach mill oh that's gotta be not great for your nostrils oh my god can you imagine no i clean my bathroom like every time i clear my bathroom my nose is a mess can you imagine doing that every single day see blaze that's why i don't clean the bathroom that's why alison doesn't clean the bathroom and then i get forced to do it it's not true why I don't clean the bathroom. That's why Allison doesn't clean the bathroom. And then I get forced to do it. It's not true. I just don't clean the bathroom. But I like finding any excuse I can find. Allison and I have an agreement that I have to be the one that cleans the bathroom. And that means my nose is the only one that's ever on fire.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. So they were doing everything they could to support their family. But a cabinetmaker and working in a bleach mill, were you know not super high paying um but when helen was all those kids or did you say that already sorry no no truly they were just trying to support their family because they had six kids and she was like 20 years old he was a war vet and one night while she was working at the factory she had a vision that henry was in danger so she ran home and he was having a heart attack oh no so she was working at the factory she had a vision that henry was in danger so she ran home and he was having a heart attack oh no so she was able to get him help but that vision made henry suggest

like hey we should like use your gifts as a means of like supporting the family uh-huh especially because world war one was ending and all of these people were not coming home. And there was quite a, an overstock of customers who could use her services, right? Especially I think World War One, I think I don't remember. But this was when I was learning about spiritualism a while ago for a different story. But I think World War One, one of the reasons that this wave of spiritualism came about was because during that war, so many people didn't come home. And families were also prohibited from actually going to the location of the bodies to give them proper burials. Oh, oh, my. So there were a lot of families who like never got any closure. Closure. Yeah. So there was this was like a like their version of a burial or a

memorial service was to go find them and talk to them one last time with these mediums. Wow. I think. If that's the case, yeah, World War I is ending and like all these people aren't ever going to see their kid again. So like let's, you know, use your services. Sure, sure. Sorry, I'm cleaning my glasses, which means I can't see my notes. I can't even see you.

You could do anything right now, Christine. And I wouldn't know the best part is nobody else can see it either because uh we have this zoom recording on i actually really didn't see if you did anything so oh good did you do something i did the stupidest thing i could think of which was just give you the double finger oh fine double bird double bird car car okay you mean people were very into my owl sounds and by people i mean two people on twitter said they liked my owl sounds and my whale sounds and said i should make them a ringtone listen you should just become like a like a like a zoo mouth you know zoo mouth you just say just make different animal sounds i'm the next like audubon uh representative i'm i'm actually the audiobook uh bird watcher guide i don't know you're actually the san diego

zoo's audible track i think um so while practicing her trances to be able to then go out and be a medium for the public apparently there was one spirit named Dr. Williams that came through to her and spoke to Henry directly and said that he was going to look after her during all of her medium work and that she was going to be very successful. So he came through her through Helen. So she's going to be one of those people who does seances and spirits speak through her got it and that's how dr what's his face came how dr williams came about

it got it in the middle of one of like her while she was practicing trances early on and that was like one of her like i think first like big successful moments of like conjuring a spirit maybe oh a man is here yeah that would be very frightening but i guess successful so dr williams told henry um some advice and this is a quote from dr williams uh he told henry quote a prayer at the start have a bible on hand and build her a cabinet so those are the three ways you can support her during all this medium stuff build her a cabinet. So those are the three ways you can support her during all this medium stuff. Build her a cabinet. Oh, I guess like one of those spiritual cabinet things.

Yeah, and he was a cabinet maker. That's cute. And I would imagine this was around the time of the Davenport brothers. And I know they had traveled a lot to the UK. So maybe that was like, I'm trying to think of this, that if she was a fraud and if she was just trying to think of things to do i guarantee she'd heard of the davenport brothers right and thought

they have a cabinet so like let's just like make up a voice and tell my husband the cabinet maker to make a cabinet and all of a sudden you know what i mean yeah it's not a bad idea. So Henry made one, and I guess it was to act as like a portal so that spirits that Helen spoke to could come through easier. And Helen's trances were able to get more and more powerful. So she was so powerful that she was one of the infamous mediums who could materialize ectoplasm during her seances. And Harry Price has worked a lot with this. So I think that's where he comes in.

So she could apparently make ectoplasm come out of her nose and mouth during these sittings. And one of the first spirits to use this ectoplasm was the spirit named Albert or Uncle Albert. ectoplasm was the spirit named albert or uncle albert i guess the point of ectoplasm according to these mediums is that when it would come out of your body if you were so deep in trance and so connected to the other side that you could create ectoplasm in this world and it was almost a it was using your life force to create this material that the spirits could use to create forms for them could like make their own physical forms so that you could see you know like if someone you love died and they came through a medium they would be harnessing some of their life energy and then use this ectoplasm to build out their own form so they could walk around the room or you could see them standing in the corner.

And it was just a way to physically be able to build themselves out of this medium. Okay. So the first person to use this ectoplasm was a spirit named Albert who came through. Apparently he had this really thick Australian accent. He allegedly drowned and he regularly showed up at seances. He apparently became a go-to regular of Helen's.

And he literally became like kind of like the MC of her seances and would like show up just like announce what like, like Bonnaroo, like the lineup of other spirits that night. a lineup of other spirits that night um and so one thing that's interesting is people say aha so a really thick australian accent almost as if if she were trying to show that it wasn't her she just picked a different accent that was very different from her kind of like how a lot of mediums would like use a different voice or something yes yes so a lot of people think that oh maybe this was her just using a different accent. So people would think it was a different person. Okay, sure. Another regular spirit was Peggy, who was a little girl and she would like run around the room and sing and stuff.

Oh my God. And those were like her two regulars. People saw Albert and Peggy all the time at her seances. So pretty soon, Helen was very popular and her husband even became her full-time assistant and she was offered to even regularly perform seances with the scottish spiritualist society or the sss um and this is how she would start a seance so if you were lucky enough to see one of these this is how it would start she would apparently get naked oh god i'm in no wonder albert keeps showing up to read the set list i mean geez um and she would let people see that she wasn't

hiding anything so it was a way to like prove the like no tricks on my sleeves because i have no sleeves i love that the i love that the scottish what is it spiritual society was like let's hire her again for the company party let's bring her back talk about entertainment um she would then get completely dressed in black and she would go into a trance and this is when albert and peggy would usually take over um and they would help bring out whatever other spirits were were nearby that wanted to come forward okay so this is when she would begin to have ectoplasm come out of her and physical manifestations or I'm assuming like shadow figures or human forms would appear in the room. So she was getting really big coming up on the 1930s.

And in the late 20s, there was one guy named harvey metcalf who was a photographer and came and took pictures while he was at the sitting i don't know if this was something that helen consented to right um but pictures were taken it was flash photography in what was supposed to be a dimly lit room and uh harvey got pictures of peggy and ectoplasm oh so the pics the pics yikes the photos i'm trying to prove that you're not a grandpa when you text or whatever you said earlier i get it i don't said demodocons i got my pics you know i said pics like my dad with the cloud i um i feel like i do that so often i say pics instead of like pictures on here sorry this is not the first time i've done that also it's just funnier because it's

like old time photography so it's like i took a few pic he snapped a few pics like it's the opposite of how long it probably took to develop take and develop a photograph it wasn't a pic it was a snap a snapshot photograph like a long exposure shot um so these pictures of peggy and the ectoplasm showed that peggy was probably depending on what camp you side with there's one camp that says the photographic evidence of peggy is a very creepy doll made of paper mache and bedsheets oh no um apparently like there may be like like wet cloth wet fabric was thrown over a doll to make it look like the ectoplasm like had started creating a human form um so anyway that comes back later but there is a picture now of like i mean let me see if i can

even just find it and send it to you because it's kind of like out of this world um helen i should have saved it on my end i actually have photos to send you today too weirdly enough which we rarely do oh perfect yeah we never do this okay here's a picture of peggy and then you tell me what you think i'm gonna send you two and you just tell me what you think okay okay okay here's picture one and then here is picture two i'm saying them both at the same time so that's peggy oh my god oh no i mean it's the same picture just one is close up but like it's clearly like it looks like a sheet and a mask, like a human. Yeah, it looks like a very poorly made mask.

I mean, it's definitely not real. Like, it's definitely... It's not human. Although one could argue that that's just how spirits come back, I guess. One could argue, but also the quote-unquote ectoplasm looks like a scarf tied around her head. Yeah, it's like it's supposed to be coming out of her nose and it's clearly coming out of like under her blindfold. Like it's not in her nose. It's not in her nose.

Yeah, that looks a little suspicious. It's as the kids would say, that's us, fam. That's, oh, Em, you're trying too hard today, my friend. Anyway, let me get back to my emoticons um so yeah so that was what did you google so people can like search for it i typed in helen duncan peggy okay yeah i mean it looks sorry to say it looks kind of ridiculous it looks like a scary thing you'd find in like a prop like a theater production it looks like an old vintage like cost like a mask yeah yeah yeah for

a costume party it covered in a bed sheet yes um so then a couple years later the london spiritualist society which by the way uh just call back to previous episodes this is one of the groups that sir arthur conan doyle right um and uh harry price were both part of the lss the lsa the lsa damn it you're thinking the sss the scottish spiritual society lsa i'm shocked that so early on in the world there were so many organizations like this like if they were all thriving today i would be a member of all of them can you imagine so the london spiritualist Alliance had been hearing about Peggy. And also, I don't know if this was at the same time or a separate time, but Harry Price had his own lab that he did his own experiments at. And for both of them, Harry Price investigated Helen.

This was in 1931. So Harry P. is on the scene. Thank God for HP. was in 1931 so harry harry p is on the scene and god for hp yeah after first learning about the ectoplasm i harry price assumed it was like regurgitated items um that were like coming out of her mouth or something and so he wanted to do an x-ray and before getting to actually take the x-ray apparently helen had like a quote nervous breakdown and like tried to pull like tried to punch the doctor oh she was like pulling her clothes off she she does that a lot though that's not weird for her she seems to she seems to be naked twice in this story at least um and she fell down the stairs oh and her husband went to go help her up but

harry price was like i think this is all like a ruse and like she's trying to get out of this she's trying to get out of the x-ray and also she was being so dramatic that her husband would have to go help her so she could hand off evidence to him i see like pull this out of my nose really quickly yeah yank it out of my entire throat scary paper mache doll out of my nose real quick just real subtly and so uh and then harry price said like hey like husband show me your pockets and henry wouldn't do it so wow eventually helen did agree to give them a sample of ectoplasm uh and harry price said that the ectoplasm after testing it was definitely cheesecloth covered in uh or first

people who don't know what cheesecloth is think of like like gauze or something um it was covered in egg whites like raw egg whites so it would look slimy and thick uh-huh she was coming out of your nose it's like snotty almost also the way it got in there she would swallow massive chunks of it no no no thank you a few things really make me want to like hurl but like the thought of like because i feel like i pretty regularly make you know this one makes me physiologically i actually like having a gag reflex right now that i'm trying to like physiologically speaking i'm like i'm really trying to keep it together but like this really makes like the thought of swallowing like raw egg white and well now you're making me ill stacks of gauze okay of all the things we talk about why is that the one but it's something that like well if you're not supposed to put stuff down

there that's not food time it really is making me so so gross grossed out but so so chunks of it would come out and she had taught herself how to regurgitate it either through her mouth or her nose like how much boys did in lunch class where they would like yeah lunch class i'm literally lunch was a class i learned not an american child this is why i had no friends at lunch class nobody would sit with me at lunch class. No. Yeah. Like when they would like be able to spit milk out their nose.

Yeah. Cockaloogie out of their nose and shit. Yeah. They'd like drink milk and it would come out their nose. And I was like, why would you do that? I guess. But. Okay.

But imagine it's now like fabric covered in egg whites. That's what I can't get over. That's horrifying. It really is. So of all things, that one gets me. And I don't like we talk about blood every fucking day. But egg whites, runny. Okay.

So. It's bad. It's bad. Also, like you would choke. I feel like you'd. You would for sure choke. You would. In trouble.

Like you'd. Whatever. This is one of the arguments, by the way, that for all the people who believe that she's genuine, because they're like, nobody could do that. Nobody could swallow massive chunks of fabric. Excuse me. Have you watched Criss Angel? Criss Angel has done a lot of crazier things. Okay.

Criss Angel is his own form, to be fair. Thank you. He's a one of a kind. He's a rare bird. He's a one of a kind. He's a rare bird. So he also he also realized that a lot of like the human forms that were coming out of this ectoplasm were just pictures cut out for magazines. And like there was once like a hand that manifested during a seance. And he said, like, that was literally a rubber glove like oh so he has his own opinions and he feels like between like ransom letters

cut out of a magazine and egg whites there there's nothing real going on here well i mean because people swallow swords like that's true you're right you know what i mean like you can teach yourself to do some pretty wild things with your body so this isn't i i think raw egg in general freaks me out and so the raw egg white part and just like throwing back a bunch like so much of it that it cakes fabric absolutely foul but i think it it's i i can imagine someone would be able to teach themselves to do that like if someone can swallow a sword or whatever people do crazy things to support their their family of their dreams it's that's just that's a that's mother's intuition right there that's a maternal instinct i could not swallow egg whites i hope not because i feel like then i'm not cut out for any sort of parenting in the future um so so the way that he collected this ectoplasm is it's a funny quote

and then it turns into like a not so funny quote by the end uh but this is a quote from harry price about collecting the ectoplasm harry price says quote the sight of half a dozen men each with a pair of scissors waiting for the word was amusing it came and we all jumped one of the doctors got a hold of the stuff and secured a piece the medium screamed and the rest of the teleplasm went back down her throat oh okay oh oh which means, like, imagine... That's dangerous. Imagine, first of all, you put fabric inside of your body, and then you somehow teach it to, like, kind of come out of your nose,

and then imagine a bunch of people ripping it out of your face. With scissors. And then you're trying to get it back, so you have to, like... And you're... Like, trying to, like, suck it back in. That's the worst thing you've said so far, I think. How did she not vomit? That's what... I don't get it. That's how they... I in that's that's that's the worst thing you've said so far i think how did she not vomit i don't get it that's how they i think that's what they do they like train their gag reflex to go home or something i'm not really that's an avengers fucking gag reflex i

don't they're that that's like a non-existent gag reflex i mean it's the exact opposite of my gag reflex which is prominent right now physiologically prominent i don't know why i said physiologically i'm so stupid no you're not i like it um okay so then he says this time it wasn't cheesecloth so when they got that so the second time he she used something other than cheesecloth it It proved to be paper, which they now also say on some articles was like a toilet paper roll, soaked in egg white again and folded into a flat tube. It's like rolled up. It's like rolled up paper towel roll or toilet paper roll. That's so disgusting.

Which is even more aggressive on your nasal cavity. I was just thinking it would be so scratchy imagine if someone ripped a toilet paper roll out of your fucking nostril like that was going down your throat i mean it's like it's like when they used to mummify people you know and they would go through the nose like it always freaked me out so badly because that's a really sensitive part of your damn body because your brain i literally I can't process anything happening to my nose. It really, really, I mean, obviously after today. But it really fucks me up.

So just to finish out the quote, we learned that Harry Price is fat phobic, to be clear. Uh-oh. Because he finishes out this quote or he while telling this story at some point says quote could anything be more infantile than a group of grown-up men wasting time money and energy on the antics of a fat female crook oh my god what a dick so like chill harry all right like she's going through a lot her nose especially like her nose is hurting yeah give it a rest give it a rest so oh my even so even so despite finding all this information out about her and like essentially exposing her as a fraud she still just like kept getting more and more popular like she like no one

was listening to harry price or if they were they still wanted to see it for themselves. So by 1933, she was exposed another time because apparently someone grabbed at Peggy's physical form after she had manifested out of ectoplasm. And I think it was actually an undercover cop. Oh, again, nothing better to do. I know. Who grabbed at Peggy and then found out it was literally like torn underwear. Oh, wow. It was just like cloth that she grabbed at. So Helen was arrested and charged with really larceny, but it was kind of the fraud charge at the time.

Sure. And was fined 10 pounds. And even though people should have seen them as frauds by now like you would think after so many exposures people would stop world war ii is now ending and so as helen duncan might say business was booming as hellish nell would say do you think do you think it's because there were at least partially because you couldn't just google somebody and like read their read an article about how they were a fraud like do you think it was just the news wasn't necessarily circulating to the right people so people didn't even know she was a fraud it was just like i guess so i guess so and also like i know if they were like if harry price was there

doing a report on like for his lab maybe like people weren't reading like the journals he was putting out like it was only certain circles that were concerned about that or focusing on that yeah i would imagine most like the general population well i don't know because also around this time was like quite a wave of spiritualism so it's not like this was like a hidden thing like sure everyone was going to seances all the time so and she was one of the more famous spiritualists or one of the most famous mediums at the time. So people knew of her and you would think they would hear about scandal. And if it were about someone they knew, they would pay attention to it.

But I don't know. I mean, maybe people were finding out after like because word didn't travel fast. Maybe they'd go to a seance and then hear about it. Or maybe they heard about it but wanted to see it for themselves. Or maybe a lot of people were spiritualists and were like oh those are just doubters and critics sure sure i want my experience also i would imagine a lot of people were really traumatized from losing people they loved that they were like i don't even care if it's real or not i would just want a shot at talking to the person i want to believe that it's real yeah yeah yeah okay so

now we're getting into the real stuff because it's post-world war ii or it's not post-world war ii but world war ii people are now dying um in droves and 1941 the this is may 24th there is an audience member in one of her seances and his name is first of all doesn't sound like a real person but his name is brigadier fire brace and you know what that sounds like one of those name generators like find your firefighter name it's like you put in your what's the what's your first initial on the day you were born but yeah first name of your third grade teacher yeah i mean it sounds ridiculous sorry so say it again brigadier fire brace come on um and he apparently had connections to like the uk version of the cia or something i'm the intelligence services so helen was having the seance brigadier fire brace was in the audience and albert the mc of the night shows up and says oh i don't know how

the conversation gets started i don't know if he knew that this guy was in the navy or anything but said like oh uh you know a spirit is telling me that a british battleship just sank and the brigadier was like i would fucking know about that And he was kind of rattled because he hadn't heard anything. So he talked to his like, like people he trusted and was like, did this happen? And everyone was like, no, like nothing happened. And then the next morning they called them back being like, we just got word that JK, that that battleship sank. How did you know that?

Shit. Oh, so by the way, that's not a good look. If they're like, how did you know this? That's a little shady. Are you an inside like a mole exactly so uh he found out that that was the hms hood and the hood so a couple months later in november of that same year helen was hosting another seance in portsmouth which was uh i guess it was like their navy's like main base so like if you were near which is interesting because uh in Virginia we have a Portsmouth that was also a naval base oh interesting um I guess the word makes sense like port of the port yeah um so he

hosts a seance in uh or I don't know if it was an official base, but I know a lot of Navy people live there. So, but so anyway, that was just a random fun fact. So she hosts a seance in Portsmouth, which is their Navy's like main hub. And one of the spirits who comes forward at the seance is a sailor named Sid who died on another ship, which no one had known about yet. Apparently, this sailor in particular comes forward during the seance because his mother is in the audience. Oh, oh, dear. And so this sailor starts saying, my ship is sunk. ship is sunk and also apparently she like helen was able to materialize through ectoplasm whatever that means was able to provide in the middle of this seance a sailor's hat from the hms barham

which is the ship he was on oh my god and so between literally having a hat and saying and like somehow knowing that this woman who has a son on that ship was there saying my ship is sunk the mother freaked out and was like i haven't heard anything like that oh so the mother didn't like it wasn't there like because her son died it was just like she would happen to be yeah it was kind of like just at a seance had like certain spiritual comfort based on who's in the room this This person allegedly, I mean, going off of the argument that she's legit and that Helen Duncan really just was in a trance and spirits were talking through her. Someone's mom was in the audience. That spirit came forward and said, it's me, Sailor Sid.

And I'm on the HMS Barham. And here's my hat. And also my ship is sunk. But nobody knew. But nobody knew about that yet so the mom freaks out and starts asking around tries to like reach like i don't know navy higher ups and it's like like what's going on where's my son and uh i i saw on a different i saw on a different um on one of the articles that she said something along the lines to the spirit that was talking

to her the mother was like oh no like my my son ship hasn't sunk i would have heard about that and the spirit looked at her and said wait three weeks oh god i don't know if that's true or not but that's what i heard on in one of the articles right but anyway she asks around and eventually it does come out that the hms barham had sank but it was top secret information and that over 880 of the 1100 men had died on board oh no apparently they uh it was top secret because the british wanted the germans to think that the ship was still a threat and hadn't sank and so um one article even stated that the navy allegedly forged christmas cards from dead soldiers to like in case in case there were any like double agents people would

think that the these sailors were totally fine and the ship was still if that's true that's really sad i don't again only one source said that and they even they said allegedly. So it's probably just a rumor. But for the sake of the story, that's pretty intense. Yeah. So rumors spread that Helen predicted a third sinking of a ship, also called the HMS Broadwater. So now that she has talked about three different instances like this, she was now a uk security risk well i was thinking like is she torpedoing these things like what is she doing well so she was uh basically the government was afraid that she knew other information whether she was like literally a mole eavesdropping and

using this for her show or she legitimately had spirits like outing the government like no matter how she was getting this intel no matter what she was ruining secret missions and so oh my god how crazy is that and so the police were now paying attention to her and this again by the way only like grew her audience because now it's like whether or not it's true like baby we'll just like get secret government war intel so uh realistically the way she could have known about at least the big one the hms bar i'm with the sailor on it um she could have known because one local paper had accidentally leaked it and she lived in portsmouth where all of the letters to the families were coming through so there was a bunch of locals who were finding out that their kid had died on the

ship and it just hadn't been released to anybody except families but this was the navy hub where a bunch of families lived so she probably just overheard it 180 people died like that's gonna spread quickly once family members find out yeah 880 families are getting that letter yeah so there's a chance that she just legitimately heard it because she was in the town where all of these families were living wow um but especially because she had that sailor hat that she created realistically she could just made a fucking prop and like brought it in but they considered this like a potential security breach they had no idea how she could have even gotten during wartime like that's no yeah they uh they even started wondering like

is she a medium is she a spy who's just like gone rogue like what is happening here and so side hustle a spy with a side hustle um so in 1944 three years later so basically for those three years the they were like we don't technically have anything on her but like we're gonna keep an eye on her and like be more aware of what she's saying so three years later um operation Neptune aka D-Day was in the works and training had already started and basically the chief of police was like we need to be it's better off to be safe than sorry and if we're about to like pull through with this d-day thing which like could make or break us um she can't accidentally

spread any secret intel like she could ruin our plan yeah and so the cops raided one of her seances and basically higher up authorities demanded she be put in jail even though they technically didn't have anything new on her oh wow um so this is where her grandkids to this day especially one granddaughter named margaret this is like the big issue that they're still trying to address is that she was wrongfully jailed because they just needed a reason because the government was scared of her um so to keep her from spreading more any more intel the cops raided one of her seances and while trying to arrest her the cops also tried to grab at some of the ectoplasm and apparently it went back down her throat um they they didn't find anything on her but her and um three other people at the

seance were arrested because two of them it was their property that they were allowing helen to have her seance on and the other was helen's assistant for the day because her husband was sick or something okay so all four of them get arrested all All right. They were charged with vagrancy, which was kind of a catch-all at the time. And they were also charged with conspiracy. Okay. So, okay. So they were charged with vagrancy and they were charged with conspiracy. And both of them were kind of just catch-alls at the time.

But the government really wanted to hold her and make something stick so the thing that's like that her granddaughter's like this is fucked up is that not only did they change her charge from vagrancy and conspiracy they changed it to um like a 200 year old law that hadn't been used in over 100 years and it was called the witchcraft act of 1735 oh come. Because they needed something that would hold her and like make sure that she was from what her granddaughter is saying, like giving her this charge made her guilty before she ever went to trial. Because they found a law that would specifically hold her like by definition, she had already, you know, fallen into it. So okay. So the Witchcraft act was basically fraud for

spiritual activity and a lot of people think that when you hear the witchcraft act and it's from the 1700s people immediately think oh witch trials sure so this that is its own problem which we'll talk about in a second but um it basically what it legitimately was, was just fraud, but specifically spiritual medium fraud. The actual verbiage of it is, quote, pretending to use human conjuration that through the agency of Helen Duncan, spirits of deceased persons should appear to be present. And then Helen also got charged with larceny, which was another catch all at the time that said that was, quote, falsely pretending that she was in a position to bring about the appearances of the spirits of deceased persons. Right. And like I said, a lot of people think that this witchcraft act was meant to punish and arrest witches. But realistically, it was to punish people pretending to be witches. So it was like we know it's not us saying we think you're a witch

and now you're in trouble it's we know you're pretending to be a witch and so we're gonna catch you on that um yeah that makes sense i mean you know it makes sense makes sense quote unquote but because it sounded like a witch trial the media sensationalized this thing and it was a media craze like i mean helen's name is just getting higher and higher in the ranks in terms of celebrity right um and so there were headlines in this story there were like headlines that were sensationalized about her um one was called the story of a ghost that did not like lipstick and another was women tell of spirit kisses and like it's just all these like crazy storylines that were over the top just because this was such a wild sure they even had all the newspapers were drawing

up cartoons about like witches writing broomsticks and court and shit it was like all over the place so people took it as she was a witch even even though she was just a medium. Right. Or maybe not even a medium. Purporting to be a medium. Right. Yeah, but she was never even a witch. So the BBC actually even interrupted their own war coverage to announce that she had been arrested. It got really crazy.

Oh, my God. Spiritualists were pissed that the court used this outdated law to go after her. First of all, people really, some believe that she was super legit. But also whether or not she was legit, the cops decided for her that she was a fraud when they charged her with fraud, whether or not they had proof of that. Got it. So at her trial, the prosecution had five witnesses, but the defense had up to 50 and these were all just people who were willing to step in and testify that they had seen her powers at work and like try to prove that she wasn't a fraud and therefore they could get her off okay um so people from all walks of life

many with like decent social power showed up to be like she's legit she's a medium i've been in her seances like that this is no joke she's a pillar of the community pillar of the community um many of them had even said that they had seen her conjure up spirits which like spoke different languages or like would just walk up to members in the audience and kiss them because they hadn't seen each other in years which means like if this isn't legitimate then like helen duncan was like making out with people i mean listen she's naked she's kissing she's having a good time or like peggy peggy the like creepy little paper mache doll might have been like running up and kissing people oh my god or maybe i don't know materialized spirits were also kissing people or maybe she had like actors coming out to be you know how some of them had like kids and

teens play these roles that's actually a great point although then having them kiss people is also really questionable yeah well let's hope they weren't minors let's also hope that like none of this like that one bullet was even true maybe that was just like something you know maybe that was just their local cosmo girl coverage maybe yeah but so there's a lot of people who are testifying like wild stuff one of the witnesses said that he saw his wife every time he went to one of her sittings another one said that he saw his high school sweetheart another said that he saw sir arthur conan doyle um one of them said he saw or one saw her father one saw her sister hours before she died, which like means that like Helen Duncan would have no knowledge that she had just died.

So how did she came and said, my sister's really sick. I'm worried about her. And I don't know. But that's it could have been. What's funny is the person who testified that they saw Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. They said it must have been him because, quote, he would have been embarrassed to appear at such a shoddy affair as what Duncan was offering. So like.

Oh, ouch. Ouch to Helen Duncan, but also thank you for testifying for me. So despite all the testimonies, the jury didn't fall for it, especially with the evidence against her, because those pictures from the 20s with the ectoplasm and the the peggy uh creation the peggy yeah the peggy questionable uh those those appeared and like everyone was like yeah that's fake harry price apparently uh told of his findings and how she came off as fake. There were several stories about her being exposed in her past, her previous fraud arrests.

Also, Helen's maid, I only saw this in one article, but Helen's maid allegedly purchased a lot of cheesecloth for her. So people were like, okay, that explains it. The prosecutor called Helenen a quote an unmit it an unmitigated humbug who could only be regarded as a pest to a section of society why didn't you list that as one of her nicknames because that is that's because that's what i call you that's my nickname how dare they some people thought the entire trial was a waste of time including winston churchill who's like i'm running a war right now everybody he so first of all he wasn't like a believer in this stuff and

like had gone to sins and but he even wrote about this later and said um he wrote to the home secretary and said let me have a report on why the witchcraft act of 1735 was used in a modern court of justice. What was the cost of this trial to the state observing that witnesses were brought from Portsmouth and maintained here in this crowded London for a fortnight. And the recorder kept busy. And the recorder kept busy with all this obsolete tomfoolery to the detriment

of necessary work in the courts. So he was like, I want to know why you use an outdated law i want to know what the price was to house all of the jury for two weeks and like why the fuck was our recorder busy with this when they're occupied right there's actual shit to pay attention to all this tomfoolery is running rampant so he was like this is not worth our time what are you doing so most records say that it took 25 minutes but i saw one article that said it was an hour and a half but very quickly the jury came back and found that helen was guilty

even though there was like 40 plus people who had testified they just saw like the pictures of cheesecloth and harry price and they were like okay you're probably guilty right um she was sentenced to nine months in Holloway Prison. No bail. And fun fact, the others who were arrested, because the other three who got arrested with her, they got basically fined or put on probation, but she got sent away.

Okay. Again, her granddaughter maintains that this is because the government wanted her locked down during D-Day so she wouldn't spill anything interesting so while inside uh she promised that she would stop doing seances when she got out and she was released only after only six months instead of nine months and uh that promise didn't last long because she allegedly even held seances in her cell with other inmates and the publicity of her being charged under the witchcraft act was like so intense that by 1951 the government repealed the witchcraft act to make sure nobody else could ever get uh charged for that they ended up replacing it with the fraudulent mediums act which is just it's like way more specific it's the same thing it's just

a different name that's true the act is for quote persons who fraudulently act as spiritualistic mediums or fraudulently exercise powers of telepathy clairvoyance or other similar powers i mean to be fair i do find that pretty shitty but like an end crime i mean i can see why that would be a crime to take advantage of people take their money and say, oh, your dead son is here. I mean, I get why that's, you know, frowned upon. The only thing that sucks about it, which Helen Duncan saw specifically, is that if someone already decides you're a fraud without any evidence. That's the thing. How do you decide that?

Then you can just charge them with that whether or not it's true. Yeah. It's, I mean, I guess the cheesecloth is a. It's pretty damning. The pictures. Pretty damning. Yeah, it's, I mean, I guess the cheesecloth is a... It's pretty damning, the pictures. Pretty damning. Yeah, it's not cute. Also, this though, I think Harry Price, or not Harry Price, Harry Houdini had already died.

But for someone who hated mediums, he would have really loved this day in 1951 when the Fraudulent Mediums Act came through. That would probably have been what he considered a success after all of his work trying to expose these people so fun fact harry houdini in the sky was like very stoked about it in the sky um so basically it was it just the whole point of changing it was just so it would sound different than being a literal witch hunt um so right right anyway that act came out um helen duncan was the last person in britain to be jailed for the witchcraft act of 1735 but she was not the last to be

convicted because only eight months later um 72 year old jane rebecca york uh was also charged with the witchcraft act but probably because eight months before the whole helen duncan thing happened they were like we can't let people know we also charge this person so like let's just like she's not gonna we're not even gonna try like we'll just give we they charged her like five bucks and they were like oh go on your merry way like let's not talk about this again so she had she was not the last to be charged, but she was the last to be imprisoned by the Witchcraft Act. I see. Okay. Got it.

There was only one person after her who kind of got a slap on the wrist and that was it. So when she got out, she was released in 1956 and they found out that she was doing seances again, even though she promised she'd stop. So they raided one of her seances. They searched her. They found nothing. But during this raid, the cops tried to arrest her or tried to like grab for the ectoplasm or something. They were, you know, they were being around her.

I don't know what they were trying to do, but they touched her at some point and she was mid trance. Oh, and in the medium world if you're mid-trance and someone touches you that's like a huge no-no okay one theory is that because she had ectoplasm released if you like woke her up from her trance and the ectoplasm hadn't like resurfaced inside of her then you could like kill her or hurt her or whatever so the fact that she got woken up in the middle of having this ectoplasm all over her after the raid they found like second degree burns on her and five and five weeks later she was dead oh my god what so she died at 59 she died december

6 1956 and doctors say it was diabetes and heart failure but uh spiritualists who are still like huge fans of her say that it was because she was interrupted during the sitting and yeah can you get second degree burns from bleach i just wonder if that had if the bleach had anything to do with any interesting i don't know because doesn't it burn your skin oh for sure so i don't know that's just i don't know if they were like old burn your skin? Oh, for sure. So I don't know. That's just. I don't know if they were like old second degree burns or if they were like brand new. I don't know. I don't know. Like maybe she's using bleach as her new egg white technique.

I don't know. Maybe. I have no clue. I don't think snorting bleach through your nose is really a class act. I think she would probably know not to do that. But who knows? knows no we never found out what the second degree burns were that's weird but they there were two of them there was one on her stomach and one on her chest and five weeks later she died and even though doctors have like a

more legitimate medical explanation to that spiritualists say that it's a cover up for the fact that she was interrupted mid trance but anyway so she died in 1956 um in 1954 two years before she died fun fact spiritualism became an officially recognized religion by parliament and as of 2008 the scottish parliament has continued to reject a petition to pardon her because her granddaughter's still trying to pardon her imprisonment oh i see so the scottish parliament has rejected that petition in 2010 the bbc broadcasted a radio show about her called the last witch trial and there's a statue of helen at the sterling smith art gallery and museum i don't know if it's still there or not but it was there at one point and the last thing i'm going to say is um helen was still known in spiritualist helen is still known in

spiritualist circles and there's a campaign for her imprisonment to be pardoned um it's ran by her grandkid maggie at helenduncan.org where it discusses her life and has a petition for you to sign i think as of last night there was almost a thousand signatures and the site also has testimonies for people who knew helen and swear she was the real deal and margaret knows helen was legit and says her grandma was guilty even before the trial because the witchcraft act originally said the conjuration of evil spirits but it had been amended before she got she went to trial as conjuration of spirits just in general uh-huh and so they were like well yeah that's exactly what she even claims to do so no matter what she's in trouble and if the government wants her put away

for a certain amount of time to hold her from totally spreading info that's the perfect scapegoat so anyway the that's how she claims the government guaranteed she would be imprisoned. And this is one of the main quotes on the website. To this day, debate rages as to whether she was fraudulent or genuine. 20 years ago, I decided to find out all I could about my family members and sitters as well as the official records. My research has convinced me that Helen Duncan was a genuine materialization medium the like of which had never seen uh before or since i believe her gift was so accurate that d-day looming the british government felt it necessary to imprison a woman who they feared

might unwittingly betray wartime secrets helen had already done this on two occasions by materializing spirits of sailors from the hms hood and hMS Barham and before the loss of those ships was made public. If having read the accounts of what took place at her sittings, you also believe a miscarriage of justice took place, please sign the online petition to exonerate Helen Duncan, an extraordinary woman and a wonderfully caring mother and grandmother. My family and I thank you, Margaret Hahn. Okay, so that's her granddaughter's statement.

That's the statement. And also she's gone on to do interviews and everything and she is dead set. And also testimonies on her website are like, no, this is legit. I went to a million of her stances. Like I know that this is no hoax. So there are people who really, really, really, really vouch.

I just said Google that photo. I'm sorry. It's ridiculous looking. Like it's clearly phony. And some people will explain that like that's just what spirits look like It's ridiculous looking. Like, it's clearly phony. And some people will explain that, like, that's just what spirits look like when they come back. No, it's not. I know. I know.

I know. Okay. And here's the thing. Here's where I stand. I'm not saying she didn't have any gifts or she wasn't. Maybe she really, truly did. And then just to kind of make the business work, they added kind of frills. Yeah, they exaggerated it it they gave a dramatic

flair yeah like if you were to do a tv show like i mean maybe some ga some bagel bites like sure maybe you have a gift or whatever but then you like totally over you know blow it or play it to to kind of get interest in an audience and if other spirituals are doing this i just ectoplasm is one thing where i'm like i don't know i'm with you i think she probably had some talents that most people did yeah i mean they're the testimonies are um at least parts of the testimony to me are very convincing the some of the testimonies i read and then other parts again with the ectoplasm i'm just like i've never seen it and therefore i don know. But there are people on there who say like, I have been to not only her senses, but I have felt ectoplasm. It feels otherworldly. Like, I'm like, okay, but yeah, sticking your hand through a shitload of egg white feels kind of otherworldly.

So like, In the dark in a dim room, and yeah, it looks like a person. I mean, it's just there were so many people who did that. And there i feel like there's a reason people don't like mediums and stuff today don't really do that anymore and yeah and also like now with the power of like my stance is that the power of like psychology at the time when you're like desperate to yeah you know reconnect with somebody and you're in the dark and there's like so many mind games that could like make you feel like this is a one of a kind experience i don't know i work i'm trying to be very uh down the middle here yeah yeah um i don't think they i mean to be fair i don't think the imprisonment

was necessarily a fair thing i think that was pretty fucked up so i'm not saying they should have put her in jail but you know and that's that's the main part and the one of the interviews i read was or one of the interviews i listened to they were saying like all we really care about is that the fact that she was like entrapped and like this was like a bullshit imprisonment and like under an outdated law like they just didn't fairly try her and they shouldn't have had to try her to begin with so they, that's where they stand versus whether or not you believe. It's just like, this was shitty. And like the government won't say anything about it.

Won't pardon her for that. Yeah. I understand that. I mean. So anyway, I'm, I'm just nervous that that woman might listen to this. I don't think we're like slandering her grandmother. I'm just saying, you know, I have a hard time with the ectoplasm bit, but I understand why you would be upset that your grandmother was, know put away for six months it's pretty

screwed up yeah so her uh her stance is she is just trying to clear the name so there you go that's that's the story of helen duncan wow that's cool i've never heard of her before i only heard about her when i was looking up harry price for the first time and then i thought oh i'll cover it later and i totally forgot until i was doing this escape room and i was like oh i remember that name so but yeah apparently she's considered the last convicted witch i love it that was so cool that's not what i was expecting but it was Yeah. What? What? What? Did you change your name forever ago? Oh, yeah, I changed my name.

I was hoping you'd realize while we were recording. I literally just saw it for the first time. Oh my gosh, Christine. What is it for the audience? It's the smiley faces. How does it make you feel? Not very good, huh? It makes me feel like my name oh no see the frown face i can appreciate that i'm like direct understanding of your feelings it's just it's just the shift of the parenthesis and all of a sudden you're like all the difference

like now i know your entire situation it's true it's like whether smiley face is a nose or not it says a lot about a person oh well anyway there you go christine how anywho how was your pee was it nice oh i walked into a door really hard so i'm gonna have a bruise um later but otherwise great thank you for asking excellent i also changed my name to a bunch of smiley faces to give you a taste of your own medicine yeah um okay let's see i am so excited right now why i gotta know your story i am so excited i've been wanting to cover this since the day we started the podcast i know okay this is the story of the summerton man i don't know that i'm so mad because i want to be like as stoked as you it's just one of those cases that has like haunted my brain forever holy shit okay great in 2016 i started listening to podcasts and i listened

to astonishing legends i think it might have been this might have been the first episode of a podcast I ever listened to because I remember like reading because I used to just sit at home when I was super unemployed and broke and just like read unresolved mysteries and like you know reddit threads and stuff and I remember reading about this and someone said oh there's a great podcast episode about this on a show called Astonishing Legends. And I was like, what's a podcast episode? And I found it and I was like, wow, this is good. So I got super into Astonishing Legends.

But this they did a four part series on this and their episodes are notoriously long. So each episode is like two plus hours. So it is super in depth. Is this a multi-parter for you? No, no. hours so it is super in-depth um is this a multi-parter for you no no mine is not a multi-parter because uh in their episodes they even interviewed one of the researchers i talked to like they it just goes they their episodes go like super in-depth and they tend to talk a lot which is kind of why i like it i feel like it's very calming to me like they just talk it's like

you're listening to two people like talk about something creepy and they just exchange theories and it's just interesting it's my jam it's my jam so shout out to al uh anyway so this is the summerton man and it is an unsolved mystery it is creepy and i'm so curious to hear what you think once we go through it okay so this starts in australia in 1948 it is one of australia's greatest and strangest murder mysteries probably one of the most famous in the world um and yet a lot of people haven't heard of it so i will tell you all about it so we're in 1948 december 1st police head to somerton park beach near glenelg which is about 11 kilometers or 6.8 miles southwest of adelaide south australia okay a body of a man was found lying in the sand by two apprentice jockeys who are taking their horse out horses out for some morning exercise

as you do um so i'm gonna send you a few pictures. I'm going to send you the first picture here. God, that scary Peggy thing just reappeared in my text. This is so exciting because, you know, what are the odds the first podcast you would ever listen to? You didn't even know then, but one day you would have a podcast and you'd be teaching your co-hosts all about it. Yeah. And you know what? eventually we met the guys from astonishing legends and i almost like i was so overwhelmed because i was like i when i was broken sad and lonely i would just listen to this podcast all day long and i finally got to meet them as a fellow podcaster it was just so cool it was really fun to watch christine like fangirl because i i hadn't it's not i knew who astonishing legends was I hadn't listened to the show before

and we went to dinner with them. And so I was just seeing them as two people and I saw Christine just like flustered. I was like, oh my gosh. I was freaking out. For once, I've got my cool about me and Christine is like the antsy one. It was so funny.

I even wore, this is so nerdy. I wore a watch that I had bought using a promo code yeah like from those 2016 episodes and um I never bought anything from all right it was like the first time I ever bought anything off a podcast was from there so I wore that watch the dinner anyway it was super dorky but oh my gosh it was very fun they're they're also in case people are wondering they're very wonderful people they're lovely I mean and one time I accidentally butt dialed them, but we'll get into that another day. Oh, okay. But anyway, I've got this picture.

You said there were two jockeys just horsing around. Horsing around. And they've discovered this body. So I just sent you a picture of the body. This is how it was discovered. It's kind of a dude propped up a little bit on some rocks. He's a little bit tilted and he doesn't look he doesn't look dead he looks like he's sleeping yeah he looks like a like a a dude

who ran off from a wedding and is napping on the beach yes that's a great way to put it okay he got a little he got a little drunk at the reception because he's so glad you said that yes he looks fancy schmancy and he's just casually leaning up on the rocks yes he is dressed well he's clean uh and he's just kind of looks like he's sleeping so they see this guy they go over they're like uh-oh this dude is dead and they call the police who show up to see the body uh his so his he's lying face up resting against the seawall his legs are extended his feet one of his feet is kind of up and it was first thought that maybe he died while sleeping so the police observed the man to be well built clean shaven and nicely dressed in a fashionable gray or brown

double-breasted suit a white shirt brown trousers and a sort of red white and blue tie however he did have no hat on which in 1948 was extremely unusual because if you were dressed this way you would be wearing a hat it was just part of your ensemble so it was odd that he was not wearing a hat i mean i guess presumably it could have blown away if he's laying there on the beach i don't know sure but he had no real belongings on him he had no real belongings on him. He had no ID. He didn't have a wallet. He didn't even have any cash, which was unusual as well.

And all the tags of his clothing had been removed. And they hadn't been ripped out. They had been carefully cut out of the clothes. But that's interesting that that was even considered evidence because like i feel like a lot of people cut tags out of their clothes yeah well so i was gonna say this later but i'll say it now because it's relevant but back then a lot of people labeled their clothing like it was just normal to have your name in your clothing oh i see oh so like right he wrote his name on the tag or something so all the tags were taken out of the clothing

and i don't think it was old i don't think it's like modern day tags where it says like haynes and has like medium or whatever on it it was like oh like clothing would be labeled with your name like say inside a jacket pocket or oh like you would like you would stitch like you like a like a piece of fabric with your name on it into the jacket so people knew it was your jacket? I think it would just come that way. I'm not really sure. I don't know if you would – I don't quite know, but I do know it was pretty normal to have your clothes – because people didn't have that many clothes. And so, you know, your set of clothes would just be labeled with your name.

And if you got them dry cleaned, they'd have your name on them. It just was normal. And I don't know – I still think it's odd though to have all your tags taken out like don't you or is that do you do that i don't take my tags off my clothes oh i take all my tags off really oh huh maybe i'm so if i go missing that's like tell the police to ignore that part like i did that that was me i. That was Em. Yeah, so all the tags of his clothes had been removed, and they hadn't just been ripped out. They'd been carefully cut. So a search of his pockets revealed an unused second-class rail ticket from Adelaide to Henley Beach,

a bus ticket from the city, a U.S.-manufactured narrow aluminum comb, or I guess they say aluminum there, a half-empty packet of juicy fruit chewing gum and this was an interesting tidbit because fun fact uh juicy fruit was a an american brand although it was available in australia and b it was widely known as being specifically for children so at the time it was not something you would find on a grown man so just a little odd i guess it's like zebra stripe gum if you found like a businessman with like zebra stripe gum which again tell the cops to ignore that part because like i would i would have glow-in-the-dark bubble tape on me so like yeah yeah yeah your your murder case would be slightly different than if all of a sudden if

they were to show up and like i look like well suited and i have like some altoids on me call the police like and all your shirts say like haynes i'd be like oh something's wrong like that's not their shirt that's not their shirt altoids yeah so uh um so at the time it was just not a thing that you would really find on a grown ass man it just was not uh and so that was odd and he also had an army club cigarette packet and that was a common british brand of cigarettes that like a lot of times army guys would have these army cigarettes they were like pretty cheap but inside were scottish cigarettes called cansitas and they were pretty expensive so he had this like cheap box of cigarettes but then the cigarettes

inside were pricier which is odd because you usually see the opposite of like like if someone were trying to like look impressive they might put cheap cigarettes in like an expensive box see i would do the opposite where i again wow i'm the exact opposite of this maybe you're gonna solve this goddamn case and we're just gonna be blown out of the water here today maybe this guy just has my insane mind but like i would think oh i'm gonna put them in shitty packaging so nobody tries to steal i guess but i think everyone had cigarettes back then i don't think it was really uh i guess so but if they were quality cigarettes and i didn't want to share it's like if you go into a math class and you've got gum put it in like a pencil box because no one's

gonna ask that fair point you know especially if it's glow-in-the-dark especially if it's public safe if it's the sour apple one forget about it in an altoids tin and everyone will leave you alone that's what i'm saying i would put zebra stripes in an altoid tin and then no one's gonna fucking talk to me okay you know what you're you're making a fair point yes so i guess it was odd because typically like a middle class upper middle class dude wouldn't have to be like hiding what cigarettes he uses tearing his labels off his clothes it was just fishy especially because he had no id no cash um it's just off so he also had extensive lividity which is blood pooling at the back of his head suggesting that his body had spent some considerable time after dying with his head in a quite different position so it seemed as

though essentially the body had been put there like his head had been elsewhere and he had been staged right so that's what they gathered from the start so the body was brought in to be examined by a pathologist named john burton i wanted to say cleland uh in a sanctioned legend say cleland but i i'm just gonna say cleland um his observations revealed that the man uh was of british appearance aka fair to ginger colored hair aged 40 to 45 5 foot 11 and in quote top physical condition okay yeah he was super fit so his body they described it as kind of wedge wedge shaped so he had like really broad shoulders a narrow waist and he also had high calf muscles and they thought maybe he was a dancer because his muscles were calf muscles were so

pronounced that they thought maybe he was a dancer and his toes were wedge shaped the way that your feet would become if you were to wear you know know, point shoes or and people say they explain later like long, long distance runners sometimes get that as well when you wear, you know, constraining shoes for a long period of time. So they noticed that. Also, like dancers are like their muscle tone is out of sight. Like very fit. Yeah. And he had the Dorito chip shape. Yes.

He was very small waist, broad shoulders, kind of point like wedge shaped feet. It seemed like an odd and very specific kind of muscle composition. Yeah. So they definitely noticed that. And he also had some interesting genetic physical anomalies. So this definitely comes back later. So this is something, I guess, that happens in 2% of people in the population, in at least the European-American population, that his incisor teeth were missing so that these canine teeth right here are next to your front teeth. Oh, weird.

So it's almost like a lot. Some people have it like we've definitely all seen it, but it's just you almost have just sharper looking teeth in front because your incisors are closer. You look like a vampire. You look like a shark or a vampire. I don't think I mean, I think it's kind of a cool look. I, you know, if I can't, I can't imagine it. I don't think I've seen anybody with that before but that's let me show you i i actually had a picture as well of that to kind

of explain it because it's like you see it and you're like oh okay like it's not a wildly strange thing it's just one of those genetic things some people don't have those incisors or don't have the um genetics are so fucking crazy what are they are so fucking crazy. What are they called? What are they called? What are they called? Yeah, sorry. They don't have incisors, so their canine teeth are closer to the front. Let's see.

No incisors. I don't know the... I don't know the, like, terminology. British vampire condition. It's fine. I mean, I can imagine a vampire, I guess. It's fine. I mean, I can imagine a vampire, I guess. It's not a vampire. It's not a vampire.

Okay, hold on. Here, I'll get you a photo right now. Okay, I'm sending it to you right here. You know what would be really funny? If, like, your canines and your front teeth were reversed, so you had little pointy guys. Oh, see, that would be more vampire. Big, thick guys. Okay, so look at the guy to the right.

And he'll come in to play later. But look at the guy to the right, where his teeth are just kind of more... Oh, yeah. Do you see what I'm saying? I have seen that before. Like, it's not super weird looking or anything. It's like people have it.

I just never even put that together. You would never think about it. But it's one of those things that until you're like counting a corpse's teeth, you like oh odd he has this condition until that guy says i like to uh suck people's blood and i turn into a bat at night then i'd be like oh the teeth oh i get it i get why you have an accent now and you say aluminium it makes so much sense yeah so he had that condition which only two percent of the population has of the again you're white european america not american white european population so it was

just one of those anomalies that they noticed when they were looking at the body and uh he also had a very rare anatomical feature relating to his ears where there was like an inden or the canal there was like an extra fold the canal there was like an extra fold or i don't totally know how it works but he had an anomaly in his teeth and his ears that were both pretty rare so just you know something to note when they're trying to figure out who the hell this guy is so his hands and nails showed no signs of manual labor and cleland also noticed that the man's shoes were squeaky clean so much so that he observed them to have been recently polished which led him to believe that the man

had not been just wandering around the beach the day before his death right so he was found like on the rocks at the beach but his shoes were so clean that they were like that's odd you know it doesn't look like he was just wandering aimlessly right shoes weren't scratched up so the doctor who carried out the post-mortem believed the man had died from heart failure brought on by poisoning at first but there was there was no evidence that he had been poisoned there was no vomiting there were no convulsions uh astonishing legends made sure to mention there was no diarrhea which are very common when you're poisoned i mean that your body has kind of fits or a you know physical reaction sure so none of that had happened so you know they said maybe it was poison but there really

was no evidence to say why they did discover that the man's last meal was a pasty and i'm only learning what this is because oddly enough next week beach to sandy is covering pasties in well get out of town perfect i know and i was like i learned how to say it because i used to say pasty that's what i was that's pasty i had no idea until this moment that that's how you pronounce it that's that's how i learned literally 24 hours ago so fun fact please correct me if i'm wrong but that's what someone in michigan told me so preferably before bichos andiers yes oh god please yes please um so uh so this pasty he had eaten which is basically like a british pastry is what at least i've been told is what it is uh it was eaten three to four hours before his death and further tests didn't pick up any signs or traces of poison in that food or in his body at all finally they took his dental records but they were not able to match them to

any known person that existed okay so that is kind of where they started to hit the first dent and while the autopsy was being completed witnesses began to come forward a few said that on the evening of november 30th which was the night before the body had been found dead they had seen an individual resembling the dead man lying on his back in the same spot and position where the corpse had been found and another couple claimed to have seen him that same night around 7 p.m and noted that they saw him extend his right arm to its fullest extent and then drop it limply almost as if he were like reaching up and then like it fell back down right another couple uh alleged to see him from 7 30 between 7 30 and 8 that same night and they said they did

not see him move during the half hour although they did notice that his position had changed so they said when they saw him he was sitting differently or laying differently which was also kind of odd okay um and pretty much all of these people so they also noticed he wasn't reacting to mosquitoes and they were like you know it was like first day of summer get it together right come on dude it was you know summertime december in australia and so they're like yeah we noticed he wasn't like moving he wasn't reacting to mosquitoes but pretty much everybody just kind of thought he was drunk and just laying on the beach like you saw the photo it looks like he's just kind of lounging yeah so they were like oh he'll sleep it off whatever so one of the witnesses told police she observed

another man looking down at the sleeping man from the top of the steps that led to the beach but again that could just be some guy walking by and like staring at him. I don't think that's necessarily ominous. And it would only be in 1959, which was 11 years later, that another witness would come forward to report that he and three others had seen a well-dressed man

carrying another man on his shoulders along Somerton Park Beach the night before the body was found. And that would align with the polished shoes that Cleland had seen saying he didn't walk in the sand. Which at first I saw he was carrying a man on his shoulders and I thought it meant like piggyback ride, but I think it meant like a carry over the shoulder, you know? Yeah, yeah. Like a fireman carry. A fire person, a firefighter carry but firefighter carry

no no but yeah i think that's more what um what they they meant not like he was on a piggyback ride which is like i was like oh that's cute oh no never mind it's really that would have been precious they were just playing chicken by themselves they were just not in the water right by themselves yeah the best way to play so the investigation into the mystery continued the ticket clerk and bus conductor who issued the tickets that they found in his pocket couldn't remember him they didn't know who he was and according to south australian state records back at the inquest the team was unable to pin down a cause of death but they kind of just went with poisoning because they couldn't figure out what else it could have been and i also want to point out the cigarettes were never tested

for poison and one of the things they mentioned on astonishing legends 2 was like maybe somebody gave him these cigarettes and that's why they were like the wrong cigarettes in a different pack and maybe they were poisoned and no one tested those but, his body also didn't show traces of poison. So who knows? It would have had to been a very like non-detectable poison. So now the deputy government analyst, R.J. Cohen, went on to say he didn't know of poisons which can cause death but decompose in the body so they are not discernible on analysis. So he was like, I don't know what poison would be able to kill him and then we wouldn't be able to find it. Right. He was like, I don't know what poison would be able to kill him and then we wouldn't be able to find it. He said, I feel quite satisfied that if death were caused by any common poison, my examination would have revealed its nature.

If he did die from poison, I think it would be a very rare poison. So it's possible, but they're kind of leaning or he's kind of leaning away from it being poison. So at this point, the case went cold for a few months months they didn't have much to kind of go on everything kind of seemed to lead to a dead end until january 1949 when an abandoned suitcase was found at the adelaide railway station january 19th 1949 i think that's the same day as the helen duncan raid oh well it wasn't the night it was just january of 1949 yeah january you mean the same month oh oh i see what you're saying sorry yes it was it was the same month and year but anyway and year yeah oh that's weird i'm pretty sure anyway i just heard that and i was like why did that just trigger me what a mysterious time what

in the world that day crazy 30 days what on earth yeah that month must have been something else maybe something some planets weren't aligned i'm not sure anyway sorry about that no no you're that's kind of creepy but yeah january of 1949 an abandoned suitcase was found at the Adelaide Railway Station, and it was believed to have belonged to the Somerton Man, aka they call him that because he was found on Somerton Beach. Got it. So this suitcase had been checked into the station at 11 a.m. the day before the Somerton Man had been discovered on the beach,

and it contained the following items. So I'm going to read you what they found in the suitcase. This is a list from Wikipedia, and I've kind of added some notes to some of it but they found a dressing gown and cord a laundry bag with the name keen written on it k-e-a-n-e a pair of scissors in a sheath that had been sharpened to a point a knife in a sheath that was sort of a table knife but it also been sharpened into a really sharp point one stencil brush two singlets which are like men's undershirts at the time two pairs of underpants a pair of trousers with uh like dry cleaning tags on them and a six pence coin in the pocket a sports coat a coat shirt a pair, a yellow coat shirt, a singlet with the name cut out of it, a shirt without.

So like, you know, it'd be like part of the shirt. So it was sort of like someone was cutting out the fabric of the clothing. You know what I mean? Yeah. So six handkerchiefs, eight large envelopes, one small envelope, two coat hangers, one razor strap, one cigarette lighter, one razor, one cigarette lighter one razor one shaving brush a small screwdriver and the researcher abbott that i'll mention later that was interviewed on astonishing legends said it was an electrician's screwdriver specifically one toothbrush toothpaste one glass dish one soap dish containing a hairpin which was kind of notable because it was typically an item used by women back then to have a hairpin uh so that was odd three safety pins one front and back collar stud

one brown button one teaspoon one broken pair of scissors this is starting to sound like uh ariel's ariel's i was gonna say this sounds like just the this like i guess not the weirdest assortment but quite a lengthy list. Quite a bizarre, like, collection. Yeah, it's like she's brushing her hair with a fork or whatever. He has a random hairpin and some broken scissors. They found a card, like a packer card of tan thread. And this linen thread that was in the suitcase was microscopically later matched with a thread

that used to sew the buttons on his clothes that he was wearing when he died. So that's kind of how they were like, that's, this is his suitcase. Because they weren't positive at first, but the thread was pretty unusual. And so they were like, this, we're pretty sure this is his suitcase because it matches. Okay. They also found a tin of tan boot polish two airmail stickers which suggests he was sending international mail a scarf a towel and an unspecified number of pencils so how big was this fucking suitcase and this was this was a time when like suitcases didn't have wheels right

no wonder he was so fucking fit he just had to carry this goddamn suitcase everywhere okay but so i thought the same thing but then i was like half of these were like a button two buttons okay you're right a teaspoon because the list just goes on and on but like you know stickers uh a teaspoon a button but it does sound like a shit ton of stuff it sounds like my purse honestly yeah if i were to dump my purse out there to stay like that was not like a weekend trip like he had a towel you know so he did have a towel but they did actually say since he only had like two or three shirts they were saying it it looked like it was a short short weekend getaway is what he's just an over-prepared pecker i guess but not even with like the normal things like clothes and shoes because there weren't even shoes in there there weren't even clothes it was like scissors this is broken scissors and

i guess he had a shaving brush but a scarf i mean yeah it was all kind of random stuff but i don't think it was like a lot of like he only had two pairs of underpants two pairs of pants okay it looked like he only had a couple outfits prepared so two pairs of pants okay it looked like he only had a couple outfits prepared so they were like it didn't seem like a long journey like he didn't have a whole slew of suitcases like i don't know i guess he just had like probably only a couple clothes and then realistically most of that stuff you named was in like one toiletry bag it could have just been like scattered throughout the bottom. But everything's a clue all of a sudden. It feels like it would be like if Christine's bag was found.

It'd be like broken scissors. I was about to say that. Half of her social security card. If I get murdered and they say, wow, we found the strangest items in her bag. There's like a can of paint and like be like, no, no, that's just her normal. I would literally have to like walk into the precinct to be like let me see the bag i'll be like nope nope nope nope nope nope that's clean and organized be like something terribly wrong has happened here uh i used to do a game with my friends they'd be like we're bored play what's in christine's purse and i would pull out

like the most random item i could find and it would i mean truly you would be perfect for um let's make a deal then because don't they do that thing in between the breaks where like i was too scared because i was like there's so much weird shit in here that like i don't want anyone to on tv to see what's in here like it was so weird i remember you having the confidence that you could have played it though because oh i was like fucking i could blow all these people out of the water for those who don't know at the in like during the commercial breaks of let's make a deal they have like these games to keep the actual people in the audience entertained and one of them is like you have to like wayne brady will guess three random fucking things and like

whoever has all of them in their purse wins yeah and sounds like you would have had like with us it was like a like a dice and a hairbrush a hairbrush and then like a baseball card or something. And someone actually had all of those things. And it was basically you, I guess. It must have been me because I mean, the other day I found like a miniature rubber duck and I was like, I don't know why this isn't here. But I mean, really like the strangest items. It's I never know what's in there. I literally I literally just mailed you a bunch of shit from one of your old purses.

Oh, is that what that was? Did you wonder what all that was? I was like, what is this weird? I mean, I knew it was from my old house, but I was like, where did all this stuff come from? I was at the NSW Drink apartment. There was a bunch of random stuff at the bottom of a box. And I was like, I know this is Christine's purse was upside down and contents filled out. Oopsies.

And so I was like, I'm just going to mail all this to her at one point. So I sent Christine like a package of like keys and like gift cards. There was weird gift cards and pins. And like there was a remote for a fan that I never owned. I was like, why do I have a remote for a fan that I don't own? I don't own a fan, whatever. I didn't know what you need. There was literally a locked padlock without the key. Oh yeah, there's a locked padlock.

I don't know where that's from. It's just suck. It's just not usable anymore. But I was like, I don't know what of this Christine is missing. So just take all of it. This is why, anyway, this is why Blaze drinks. Cause I'm like, oh have a pen and he's like no no no no no please a working pen christine yeah i'd rather go buy a pen than wait for the next half hour while you like dig through your bag for a pen okay so sorry so this is what's happening in his bag that's probably why i got defensive when you were like wow that's a lot of stuff i was like no it's not it's all very normal amount of stuff um his friends also mail him back his locked padlocks too maybe that's what it was all those airmail stickers so like i said they had found a laundry

bag with the name keen written on it they also found a tie marked with the letter t as in like an initial t period keen spelled the same way and then they found one of the undershirts had the name keen without an e on the end of it so So they were like, well, maybe that's his name. But also, you know, one of the theories is, well, why would that be? Why would he have left all those in and cut out every other name tag? So the thought was either so some of the theories are either that he had cut out all the his own name from all the shirts and that wasn't his name and he had got it from like a secondhand store or a thrift store and didn't bother cutting the names out because it wasn't his real name or that somebody else had cut the tags out to cover up

his identity after he was murdered and also didn't feel like cutting out the extra three items that sure didn't have his name on it so got it those are the theories they also searched for the name keen in the database and there was not anybody missing with that name so they kind of quickly determined that's not they don't think that's his name okay so they have a suitcase now and they think they're kind of like they found everything they could but no months later police discover a secret pocket in the man's pants oh my gosh now it wasn't really a secret pocket it was like a pocket watch pocket which is kind of what in your jeans where you have that little mini pocket the tiny one yeah the teeny one so it wasn't necessarily a secret pocket but it was real like what was in it was

so well hidden that they hadn't seen it right away wow and it was a piece of paper and it was rolled up really tightly and then stuffed all the way into the bottom of this little tiny pocket i just love this part because it's like oh my my gosh, what does it say? Okay, so they pull it out and they unfold it to find the words Tamam Shud. Now, let me spell that for you. What? You're not satisfied with that? Are you here? Hang on.

So it's spelled T-A-M-A-M space S-H-U-D and it's Persian. Okay. And it's Tamam Shud and that's actually the name of, that's the alternate name of the case. Sometimes it's called Somerton Man most often, but sometimes it's also called the Tamam Shud case. Got it. So they find this printed on it, and with further investigation, the police discover that Tamam Shud is a Persian phrase where tamam is a noun that means the end and should, S-H-U-D, indicates past tense. So tamam, should, means ended or finished. Okay. So notably, this phrase appears at the end of the 11th century book of Persian poems by Omar Khayyam called the Rubayat.

So there's this book of poems called the Rubaiyat and it was written by omar and the last page features that phrase tell mom should sort of like the end sure so in the following weeks police were like hey anybody have this book we're trying to figure out what the hell this ripped out you know piece of paper comes from yeah and amazingly they couldn't believe their luck when a local businessman came forward and said uh i think i have the book you're talking about and i don't know why and they're like what do you mean and he said i've been driving my truck around i've been driving my car around and one day i noticed this book in the back seat i thought it was my brother's my brother thought it was mine so he didn't think much about it and then when he

saw that they were making a call for this copy of this book he was like oh god that's the book in the backseat of my car and it was the copy of the rubaiyat and it had a missing last page it was had been torn out where the phrase tom should would have been. Goose cam! I know, it's so creepy! And so they determined... So wait, how were... So, sorry, how were these brothers related to him? Like, how would that guy's book have gotten in this guy's car? So what they determined is that since nobody really locked their doors,

or they would just have their windows rolled down, that someone just tossed it in the backseat. There was, like, no connection. Just getting rid of evidence. He was like, none of us have ever seen this book before. We just assumed it was like somebody else's in the family and nobody even noticed it for like months or weeks or whatever until we were like, uh-oh, this is what they're looking for. So there was not even a real connection. It just happened to be that they uh were driving around

with this book in the back seat someone had just tossed it in so just another odd i mean thank god this guy found it i guess uh so he tells him he has this copy um and when police look at the back of the book they find this final page and where the words tom-om should should have been they had been ripped out and at first they were like they weren't sure if it could match up, but they had it forensically examined and it was a perfect match. So it had been torn from that page. Even more creepily, spookily, scribbled on the back cover of the book, they find a coded message.

Oh, my God. I'm going to send you the message because it is just something i can't even begin to explain to you i mean i'll read it out loud for the audience but i'm gonna text it to you anyway okay it's just so weird looking oh okay it kind of oh good night i i get it i i get it it changed the formatting but all those mixed up letters are kind of what the lines were. So like, for example, the first line says W-R-G-O-A-B-A-B-D. And then the second line is M-L-I-A-O-I. And then there's like a line through it. So just picture that for five lines.

And it's just odd. Oh, weird. Yeah, it's just a random assortment of letters. Yes. So it looks like some sort of code or cryptic or whatever you want to call it and uh they find this in the back of the book so this is like another clue to this mystery as to who this person could be and alongside the uh clue or the message was a phone number was a local phone number and so they look at the line so i'm gonna tell you a little bit about the lines that they

find there there's a debate as to whether oh you know what actually why did i send you that i have the actual picture of the code which is way creepier that had been useful silly me here it is silly goose christine this is way creepier so this is it written now oh good night it really is so much scarier all of a sudden right when it's not an apple text font it is a lot creepier when it's not in a blue bowl with a smiley face at the end of it yeah it's just a picture it's like when there's not like 10 eggplant emojis underneath it christine can't read it if there's not 10 egg emojis uh we could probably put this in like a instagram series of photos because they are so creepy just to have them all in one place.

But yeah, so it's this creepy code and like I'll tell you a little bit about them. So there's a debate as to whether the first letter is a W or an M because you could kind of see it could be either one. Yeah. There's also a struck out line after the first one and it's considered significant because it's the same, pretty much the same line as the fourth line or at least starts the same and so they think that someone made a mistake crossed it out and wrote it further down i see and uh so in the third line there's a dot in the a and a dot under the t in the fourth line there's a dot near the first a and in the fifth line there's a dot above the s a line through the m and a line through the s so just like strange puzzling assortment of letters yeah and nobody has ever been able to crack this or figure out this ever computers software has tried you know code cracking

software has tried police have tried investigators have tried armchair detectives have tried. Armchair detectives have tried. It is as mysterious as it was the day they found it. However, there are a few people who believe they have an idea as to what it says. Okay. So some people, including the folks at cyphermysteries.com, believe it's more likely to be an acrostic rather than a secret code. acrostic uh rather than a secret code so if you can remember from like elementary school where you would write like your name and then you would write like like you'd write it vertically and then you write c is for corny or i was gonna say cool but that was wrong so c for uh clueless what c for christine no that's what the, my name would be Christine. Okay, sorry. So.

Oh, I know what you're saying. It would be like different, it would be like different adjectives that have to go with your name. Uh-huh. Exactly. Or like, you know, you could do Christine, uh, crossing every line, H, uh, whatever, you know, you can play this game. Like different, different attributes per letter or something

yes or like a poem or like some sort of whatever and so yeah they believe that's more what it was like he's trying to remember something like maybe a mnemonic device to to memorize something uh so that's what a lot of people believe because i guess the way that the i mean code stuff is its own whole field obviously but uh apparently the letter frequencies are more similar to the letter frequencies of the first letters of english words and so they looked at and they're like this looks more like the first a bunch of first letters of a bunch of different words that he was trying to remember yeah like roy g biv you know right right right so they thought maybe that's what it is.

A few people have tried to, you know, on Reddit, say they think they know what it is. So I'll take that with a grain of salt. But here's some suggestions. So a user named X Friday said they think the final line is, quote, I think they might think something about me. Send the guys. So that's one option. Very creepy. Send the guys. So that's one option.

Very creepy. But then you kind of hear the next one. You're like, wait, how are they even getting to this? Because user Scout483 says, my rose grows old and by and by decays. Most threadbare in my penitence and ne'er enough to pay. My life is all but over and I am quite content. I'll take the moon, the stars, and my soul to grovel and repent. So these are two options of what i could say whoa it's really running running the gamut on running the gamut i'm really in just

put any word anywhere and it could fit i think it says christine is cool and hot and and really really into some tasty igloos uh not m not i was like you're stuck oh no you're not stuck okay that was pretty good m that was pretty excellent i'm actually quite impressed i mean i'm pretty good at my alphabet so but like no no you brag about it man own it um so it's interesting though because if it is some sort of like cipher like that or like his own personal thing no one's ever going to be able to crack it because it was just something he had in his head that he wrote down that isn't actually a code you know what i mean so it could very well just be like a grocery list some people thought maybe he just wanted to write

down a list it's like his own shorthand and he wanted to write a list of what he needed to pick up this person could also be wildly unstable and like whatever is written down here like whatever the list is like i used to make lists for fun that made no fucking sense like it might just be a list of like his favorite cereal mascots in order you know it could be literally be something so non-pertinent right to the case and could just be his own shorthand they did say it's they don't believe code like professional code crackers have said they don't believe it's gibberish like they do believe it does stand for something because the way it's structured has like some sort of

relevance to the english language i don't know how they do it but apparently they have kind of said they don't think it's gibberish but it could very well be a list of his favorite cereal mascots like it could be something that only mattered to him and that we wouldn't even be able to read you know right so it's kind of a mystery but it's very creepy because it's written in the back of this book um on astonishing legends they also had a code breaker lady that they interviewed and she was super cool and fascinating and she explained that there was this thing around this time where like Soviet spies would use one time. What were they called? Like basically one time sheets where you could only use this code once and then you had to destroy it so that nobody could ever pick up on a pattern.

So she said maybe, you know, the book was the code and you were supposed to go to a certain line of the book and of the tamam should and and relate the you know and then never use it again so that was one thing she kind of threw out there that i thought was interesting especially because that was commonly done back then uh so that's possible also this was right around the this was at the end of the 40s this was only a few years after like world war ii right so like maybe this was at the end of the 40s this was only a few years after like world war ii right so like maybe this was someone who was like in coding or yeah knew some sort of that's where that's exactly where i was about to go which is that we are in post-world war ii cold war is ramping up we are getting into all sorts of spy territory all sorts of wild stuff going on that was real that wasn't just fictional spy stuff like it actually happened and some of it's crazier than we could

ever believe so that definitely becomes part of it especially when they're looking at it going like okay he has all his clothes labels torn out he has a secret code in his pocket he's dead mysteriously on the beach like i mean it really sounds like a some sort of novel like spy novel yeah yeah for sure so it's just very odd um let's see so in a 2004 sunday mail article a retired detective named jerry feltis who had become obsessed with the case himself took the letters in it i-t-t-m-t-s-a-m-s-t-g-a-b and they believe or he believed that it could stand for the following it's time to move to south australia mosley street so remember that so that's what he kind of for whatever reason you know retired detective went way deep in this case

and he believes that's what it stands for so they didn't have many leads with this code obviously but they did have a lead with the telephone number so there was a phone number written a local number and in fact it directed police to the doorstep of a young nurse named joe thompson who lived 400 meters away from the crime scene on a street called mosley street uh-huh okay so by this point uh they had already buried the somerton man they had done every test they could think of and also i just want to point out to you i'm going to send you a picture of the uh if you are okay with it i'm going to send you a picture of the photo of him after being embalmed like in his oh good night sure okay it's just a photo of thank you for the preparation i wanted to warn you but it's just a photo of like him dead yeah

okay i was expecting like something much more drastic no no no it's nothing horrible but um i send that to you because and then i want to send you a picture of what he actually looked of what they think he actually looked like. Because so this photo I just sent you is is a photo of him months after he had died and had already been embalmed and had been frozen. So essentially, I'm saying that because that's that photo that I just sent you is the most commonly associated, like the most famous associated. But it looks nothing like him so if you know if you were to know him in real life you wouldn't maybe even recognize this guy uh if you saw him in this state so here's a picture of what they believe he actually looked like um in his tie and everything okay on the left there uh-huh oh he's a

sharp looking dude right so yeah he looks completely different i think in the rendering of him alive uh based on what how they found him on the beach versus after months of being in a freezer and decomposing essentially i guess he it's weird because it's it looks if i'm looking for the similarities he looks very similar to that guy but if i'm looking for the differences he looks so different yes that guy but if I'm looking for the differences he looks so different yes I think it's more like if you knew him like in your life you probably would be like oh I know that guy but I think if you saw him in passing or like he was a customer of yours a cafe or something and you saw him briefly you might not recognize the

right decomp photo but you might be like oh that's the guy the sharp looking dude i saw at the hotel or whatever it may be so um you know it's kind of they just look different i mean i'm sure like you if you knew him i'm also totally like projecting my own like like hopes and desires on this but he looks like a spy from the 40s like he looks he looks i mean i'm he just looks like a normal dude but like now that i'm primed to think of him as that he looks like a fucking spy from the 40s it's kind of weird i mean he had a code in his like hidden in his pocket he had all of his name tags ripped out no id like it's sketchy yeah and he's pretty good looking he could like get himself into really any scenario he needed yeah yeah yeah he's he's a good looking fella and so you know i don't know it just adds to the

mystere i suppose uh but also they mentioned on astonishing legends which i googled later which is marilyn monroe's autopsy photo and you like really can't i mean it looks like a completely different person it's fascinating how? It's fascinating how. And it's not just because she's not like made up and glamorous. It's just like after your body has been completely, you know, in a different state and decaying and, you know, embalmed, you look different. So essentially that's the only point I wanted to make here is that. Sure. Even then they were like sharing this other photo and people may have been like, I don't recognize him, but they didn't know what he looked like in real life. So anyway, they find this woman named Jo, J.O. Thompson.

She's a nurse and she only lives 400 meters away from the crime scene. On Moseley Street. On Moseley Street. Exactly. and so they had buried the somerton man but they had hired a i guess taxidermist to make a plaster cast of him to kind of keep his form for after he's buried so that they had like a rendering of what he looked like sure yeah like a physical rendering of what he looked like and when police roll up at the nurse's house they show her a picture of the body and ask her to identify it. She denies knowing the man. But when they show her the plaster cast, she apparently looked so completely taken aback to the point of giving the appearance that she was about to faint.

And a detective had to stand behind her because they really thought she was going to pass out. But she continued to deny knowing this guy. But she started, like, fully freaking out. And they were like, mm, fishy, fishy. She knows something. So they definitely got the impression she knew more. So they kind of, like, kept on her. And eventually she admitted to once owning a copy of the Tamam Shud, the Rubaiyat, where the Tamam Shud phrase came from.

But she said she had given her copy away to a guy named Alfred Boxall in 1944. And they were like, well, maybe Alfred Boxall is the guy. And so they tried to track him down. No such luck. He's alive and well, living in Sydney. He is not the Somerton man. So another strange dead end. But also they're like, okay, so she owned a copy of this book

she clearly almost passed out when she saw his physical likeness and uh she lives 400 meters away from the crime scene something fishy is going on here so with little evidence no suspects no clear motive the police kind of let the case go cold and ultimately they call it a suicide they're like well we don't really have anything to go on so we're gonna call it a suicide and so something odd was that joe thompson at this point asks for her name to be removed from the case file uh she said she doesn't want her name in it she doesn't want to be associated and they take her name out so that's another also fishy right that's not something that investigators should condone that's what i'm thinking i'm like is she allowed to just say

i don't want to put my name in here i don't know yeah like can you imagine like stumbling upon like a murder and then being like can you like just jot out that i was ever here like actually no can you tell them i was somewhere else like yeah it just seems to white out just clear my name yeah literally clear it because it seems anti what they should be doing but they took her wishes to heart and they took her name out okay but she doesn't disappear from this story so don't worry so now we fast forward to 2007 so we are whoa okay we made a big leap and this has just been an unsolved mystery for decades and we are now with a scientist uh who works at the university of adelaide called derrick abbott and he's the one who was interviewed on astonishing legends i did like an hour and a

half interview um it was part three of their series and according to a long article about abbott on california sunday.com he had always been kind of an investigative kid uh having grown up in the uk at 15 he started traveling all over london and researching the history of old lamp posts and mailboxes which i thought was precious so pure isn't it you've got nothing else you want to look at okay that's it's sweet it's like oh mom i found the coolest like uh retro lamppost today from the steel company i don't know i just thought it was so bizarre i mean someone's gotta care to be able to pass on that information so and you know what some steel maker maybe my dad maybe not somewhere going, wow, a little kid is proud of my work and it makes me feel good. I'm a hero to someone.

Yeah. I'm a hero. It's not my daughter who's a podcaster, but it's some child in London and I'll take it. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. So he was kind of always super into just investigating things around him. He was actually involved in the case of the Snowtown murders, which was episode 212. And so he was already kind of renowned as a, I don't know, a smart dude.

Let's just put it that way. He has. So I put this later, but I'm just going to tell you now. Hold on. So he isn't just some random dude. I'm saying all this because to give him some credit, he's a physicist with a PhD in electrical and electronic engineering. So he's a smart dude. He's spent a lot of time like helping in unsolved cases and that kind of thing.

He spent a lot of time looking at mailboxes. I don't know, but he's a smart guy. So just to give you some context so abbott in 2007 he becomes obsessed with the case of the somerton man and he goes on facebook to try and crack the code with other people who are interested in cracking the code so thank you zuckerberg i guess because now there are facebook groups to crack the codes. And so they're trying to figure out what this code means. And eventually he comes to the conclusion that a lot of other people did, which is that the list is most likely the first letters

of words, like a memory aid or a shopping list. So kind of a red herring, I guess, is one way to put it. Like, it doesn't really necessarily apply. But he had already gotten so deep in on this case that he's kept researching it. So he reached out to former Adelaide detective Jerry Feltus, who I mentioned earlier, who had tried to solve the riddle or whatever and said it meant, like, go to, what was the name of the street? Right, Moseley Street. Moseley Street, thank you. South Australia, Moseley Street orley Street. Mosley Street, thank you. South Australia Mosley Street or something. Mosley Street, exactly. So he reaches out to that guy

who's also obsessed with the case. And he felt his way. And lampposts. I mean, they just are meant to be. They were like in a Facebook group with two members and it was just them.

Oh, Jerry and Derek are PFFs. oh jerry and derrick are together they're jerick okay that's sweet i mean it's terrible but it's sweet they should go into business as like the jerick lamppost company the appreciation society well uh spoiler alert they are no longer friends uh and we'll get to that but it's kind of their frenemy name i guess yeah derrick you know derrick already has that kind of like derrick name to it so jerrick is even worse uh so he reached out to jerry feltus and jerry was a detective with over 40 years of experience in the police and in the last decade had also been delving into the Somerton Man case himself. He was actually writing a book at this point, which would later be published in 2010, called The Unknown Man, A Suspicious Death at Somerton Beach. So when Abbott got in contact with Feltus, Feltus had already had the actual original piece of paper that was found in the Somerton man's pocket wow so this guy's like been on it for 10 years now and now Abbott enters the scene and is like okay I'm in I want to do this too so in 2009 they arrange a meeting where three key pieces of

information emerged for one Feltus told Abbott about the name of the nurse who had tried to take her name out of the case. Okay. So luckily- She's back in action here because Feltus had interviewed her for his book, and it was fortunate he had done that because by the time Feltus and Abbott met, she had died. So he had information on her that could help Abbott kind of unravel the mystery of who she was. And it was also revealed that this nurse, Jo Thompson, was frequently referred to by she had a lot of nicknames. Nothing as cool as Hellish Nell, but she had one that she called Justin that she kind of made herself J-E-S-T-Y-N.

I love when people make their own nicknames for themselves. Don't you? Don't you? Always so entertaining. I'm like, you you gotta really have a particular level of confidence i mean that's what i did with chrissy kiwi and it was really some misplaced confidence because it certainly didn't catch on uh but i tried really hard um it's okay chrissy kiwi you're doing good man someday someday so the name justin is another name she went by of her own accord.

And so after this meeting, Abbott is like, okay, now I know kind of the identity of this person who had been kind of removed from the case records. So he tracks all of Joe's friends, family, acquaintances. And because of these interviews, he begins to get to know Joe Thompson really well and would later go on to provide california sunday her life story so a little bit about joe she was born jessica harkness in 1921 outside sydney she had cut ties with her parents rarely spoke of them and she had started dating a car salesman called prosper thompson and had a child named robin thompson in 1947 okay she and prosper hadn't yet married because he had recently divorced his first wife and australian law had like a cooling off period basically where you had to wait a certain amount of time to remarry somebody so he uh had to wait so they weren't

married yet when she had their child but they did get married in 1948 and she worked as a stay-at-home mom for their two children through the 50s and then began work as a nurse okay now her association with the somerton man has led some to hypothesize her potentially being a communist spy master posing as a housewife this is where shit gets wild okay so some people think she was a communist spy and was just the average little housewife and you know the perfect cover i suppose oh yeah and interestingly enough her own i believe was her daughter in an interview on australian tv said her mom had once offhandedly said oh i'm surprised i still remember so much russian and her daughter was like russian like it came out of nowhere excuse me how do you say excuse me in russian excuse me may excuse me i don't know oh my gosh and uh so that was just like a side comment her daughter

had heard and her daughter believes she was a spy her family does believe that so oh my gosh believes she was a spy her family does believe that so oh my gosh interestingly enough but again that's you know more kind of hearsay like who knows if that's true or has been embellished at all um but so just to give it kind of a little context oh god i already lost my place hang on we were speaking russian actually so oh that's right i'm in the russian portion of my story go back to like the borscht and like random things like that oh love a good borscht okay so some people think she was a communist spy uh and her daughter kind of adds to that a little bit so next abbott is like okay she had children so i'm gonna try to get in touch with her son, Robin Thompson. But unfortunately, Abbott was too late because Robin had passed away of cancer on March 19th, 2009.

So he had basically just missed him. Yeah. And it still is relevant, though, because he continues to research Robin Thompson. And what he discovers, now this is where oh this is where goose cam comes in for me what he discovers is that from a young age robin's mother had taken him to dance classes he stuck with it and would become a professional ballet dancer in his adulthood weird right so this guy could be robin thompson uh well he is robin thompson but he could be well the the the guy on the on the sand like the guy the main somerset guy could be robin thompson uh well he is robin thompson but he could be well the the the

guy on the on the sand like the guy the main somerset guy could be robin thompson no robin thompson died in 2009 oh right duh sorry sorry i heard dancer and i got really stoked i was like oh it's the guy with the great physique no his son okay okay are you following now i'm following now sorry so okay sorry my own brain was on its own trail no no i don't mean to take you off your fun trail i'm so no this one's more juicier so i this one gets juicy i gotta say yeah yeah yeah so essentially he finds this joe thompson who's like nope never heard of the guy even though she's fainting when she sees his face and she has the son named robin thompson who's the guy she married but when they look year decades later when this abbott looks into robin thompson is like huh he has this uh noted ballet career uh he also there's more information here um so he starts thinking of the 1948 coroner notes

and uh like i said the uh the somerton man had trained or he had pronounced calf muscles that uh they were much higher up than a runner or a cycler right and because of thompson's acclaim robin's acclaim of being a ballet dancer abbott was able to find a close-up photo of him in a newspaper and he would later go on to say to abc news lo and behold i found he has the same strange ear feature as the somerton man uh-huh uh which was a little crease on his earlobes and that's uh that's what the somerton man had so they had the same strange ear thing then he went down a rabbit hole of pictures and found that Robin's smile also shared a genetically inherited trait of the incisor teeth being missing. And now that photo I showed you that was an example is a picture of Robin.

That's a picture of the son. Wow. Oh, well, now let me go back and look again. That Abbott believes is the son of joe and the summerton man i wanted to see if they looked similar at all it's so hard to tell also because they both have curly light brown hair and the ears look at the ears yeah their ears are really similar so the teeth i mean again the teeth are a two percent genetic rarity of two percent yeah then plus the ears plus the genetic tendency to be dancer yeah so very odd

so at this point abby is like down a rabbit hole but like a cool one and he is a cool one sometimes i feel like you can get lost in a rabbit hole that doesn't really yield much i mean i do that all the time but he's down a rabbit hole that's like oh shit like i am uncovering something major here and uh on top of that the fact that joe thompson hadn't been married in 1947 when this child was born and that the Somerton man had her phone number and had written it on this piece of paper in his pocket. And I mean, this is just conjecture, but the potential, you know, saying it's on Moseley Street where she lived, you know, also. And the fact that she had a copy of this book that she had lost or given away. Also, just very suspicious. A a very sus i'm so sorry

very sus yeah for sure so when astonishing legends folks talked to abbott he said he believed 99.9 that robin was the somerton man's son i mean that's some incredible investigate investigative skills right there yeah wow to be able to find i mean and the similarities are like striking just the genetic anomalies the fact that like you can yeah it's pretty wild i mean statistically speaking it's pretty wild wow so obviously yeah he did great uh so good job abbott of course, now Abbott begins to research into whether Robin had any children because he's trying to find anybody who can kind of he can talk to. Yeah. So this is where it becomes sort of like a soap opera. Okay. So he finds a woman named Rachel Egan. Now,

Rachel had been put up for adoption by her parents, Robin and Roma when she was a baby. And she later said to ABC News news i grew up not knowing i was adopted however there were many aspects of me and my adoptive family that were very different i always had a passion for ballet and dance and theater and i always wondered where that came from what by the way i didn't know being a ballerina or a ballerina was so genetic because now i'm just gonna say that's why i'm not really coordinated or good at anything because my genes aren't you know right why do i have such a genetic predisposition to ice cream and thanks a lot mom and dad that you did this to me and i have no choice in the matter at all

couldn't i care about like triathlons jesus i almost said asparagus asper asparagus i can't even say vegetables right oh my god oh it's so sad so uh she said uh in her early 20s rachel's birth mother roma who was robin's partner got in contact with her and revealed that she had been dancing with the australian ballet in new zealand when she when she met robin and fell pregnant with rachel they had put her up for adoption seemingly to focus on their dance careers and after being reconnected rachel moved to brisbane to be closer to her biological mother so in 2009 abbott contacts rachel and is like i'd love to meet up and discuss the somerton man who's potentially your bio granddad that you know this mystery is kind of coming together so abbott flew to brisbane, according to Rachel, she collected him from the airport and they spent a few days together looking at photos and sharing information.

However, it wasn't just information they shared. Because as Rachel would go on to say in a 60 Minutes documentary, it turned out that we'd had a lot of similarities with our upbringings. Like me, he wasn't planned. His parents were quite young and they were students. And by the end of the weekend derrick had proposed to her holy shit okay wow okay so now it's derrick abbott and the somerton man's potential granddaughter who he's been researching for all these years so just a wild turn of events and everyone was a bit weirded out by this because

it's like wait you were researching this woman and now you're like marrying her after a weekend like it was just a pretty weird turn of events so that worked real quick maybe there was like some quick agreement of like i can only tell you if we're married and he was like i'll marry the shit out of you what's that thing where you can't testify against your spouse yeah exactly it's like maybe he was like i have been hunting this story for far too long to end now like that's not gonna be what stops me i'm gonna like legally bind myself to you i guess so everyone was weirded out especially jerry feltis you know of jarek fame because he said i just couldn't believe it and i

thought what the hell is going on here has this guy married this girl to just try and pursue his dna subject truly i that's right it's like it's not that far-fetched with everything else i'm hearing so all of the yeah exactly so side note according to california sunday.com it seems feltus and abbott have just developed a lot of beef with one another so to quote abbott he hates my guts about jerry and they both spend vast amounts of time tracking the same clues collecting the same rubaiyat copies to try and you know find the one i guess that was missing and scrutinizing the same photos but they do not speak to each other and uh feltis regards abbott as a grade a pest and a bane of serious investigators wow so they are frenemies except

without the fr part they're enemies um sorry for jerek lovers sorry for all the jerek stans who just are not happy right now all the jerek fan fiction out there needs to be put to an end oh it's really sad i know so this is where i was gonna say just to clarify ab it's not just some random dude like he literally has a phd all this business so you know he he has some cred okay where where credit is due i want to give it to him so now uh abbott and rachel are still together they have three children and they're happily married. And Abbott says, the fact that my family is now entwined with a Somerton man makes things perhaps a bit more complicated. But as a scientist, when I do my work and my scientific research, I have to be neutral about things.

I have to be dispassionate. Whereas Rachel has said, quote, he wanted to look at my ears and my teeth. And then he said, I do. And then I said, I do for some unexplained reason. She said he wanted to look at my ears and my teeth. He was also after my DNA. It's probably the first request I've had from a man to do that. Anyway, now we're happily married with three children.

So how odd to be like, I must your dna and also mix it with mine so now we just carry on this creepy legacy biologically related to the summertime man sort of or at least my children are so pretty wild stuff um pretty fascinating listen love is blind love is mysterious nobody knows uh i don't judge so this is pretty wild so the relationship flourished but the case unfortunately hasn't really made much headway uh derek abbott's last step has been to seek i don't judge so this is pretty wild so the relationship flourished but the case unfortunately hasn't really made much headway uh derek abbott's last step has been to seek opportunities to prove that his wife is the somerton man's granddaughter through dna testing and fortunately so he's wanted to have the body exhumed but the australian government keeps denying it just because they're

like that's kind of we tried not we try to avoid that right like unless there's some serious reason um however he actually was able to find he is sort of a breakthrough he found the you know the plaster bust that the taxidermist made yeah they used the actual body to do that so he found three hairs of the actual somerton man on the bust why doesn't he just trace why isn't just he did oh he did so that happened in 2018, I think, or 2017. And so, you know, obviously that takes a while. They did eventually obtain a high-definition analysis of the mitochondrial DNA, you know, as you do, from the hair sample. And they found that he and his mother, so summertime man and his mother, belonged to haplogroup H4A1A1A, which is possessed by only one percent of europeans but i don't know what that means for the case really i mean maybe it's still going somewhere i'm not sure but he was able

to find and test those hairs which i thought was really cool can you imagine if you die and then you like a random person is so obsessed with your mysterious death that they marry your granddaughter and like it's true though it's so weird he's probably like what the fuck is going on down there he's probably like i was just smoking a cigarette and i accidentally got too drunk and fell asleep on the beach and now everyone's like people are freaking out yeah so really odd turn of events um so in kind of a sweet ending he said he owes a lot to the somerton man and in their household on the walls you'll find portraits of joe and the somerton man next to one another

because he believes they were had a thing whether it was a an affair or like a quick affair a long affair one night stand whatever um it's pretty clear that she was probably impregnated by him because the statistics of this are just too kind of wild to suggest otherwise. So he says, a Somerton man has brought me to the place I am today. I have the children I love and might not have existed if it wasn't for him, which technically is true. Wow. So one day you'll get to say that about like Mothman's grandchild. one day you'll get to say that about like mothman's grandchild the fact that my children have wings is all due to my love for my queer icon mothman himself if it weren't for my love of mothman i wouldn't be where i am today i wouldn't have the beautiful and fucked up life

that i have and also no friends left because i got really weird in the last couple years um yes um thank you i'm so glad you finally are just fully understanding my lifestyle so to this day the identity of a summer tin man is a mystery as is the reason he was on the beach as is the reason he wound up dead or even how he wound up dead there are so many theories that like you have to listen to this podcast if you want to find out all the rabbit holes because they go down every rabbit hole in astonishing legends like they will take every little piece i mean they interview these guys like they're so in-depth with their research that it's four you know two hour episodes on this just this so really well done a lot of rabbit holes i will tell

you the most common theories are a that he was a spy again we're post-world war ii tensions with soviet union and soon after the somerton man's body was found there would be a crackdown on soviet espionage espionage in australia so this was a thing that was kind of happening in the area there were also the odd details like the expensive cigarettes hidden in a cheap box uh the tags removed from his clothing the code on the paper right so some people believe he was a spy another theory is that the Somerton man had returned to town either he knew Joe he and Joe had had a child or he heard that Joe had fallen pregnant after they had hooked up and he knew

maybe this Robin was his potential son and he went to town to meet the child or confront her or something like that. I mean, he had his suitcase. He had his train tickets. Maybe he was in town to kind of, I don't know, reunite with her or meet his son. And he may have been either killed or died by suicide. And there is some eyewitness testimony that supports this saying that a neighbor had seen a strange man banging on Joe's door. And when she didn't answer, he went to a couple neighbors to ask like where she was. So I nobody recognized on Moseley Street.

So it's potential that he traveled there and was like, I want to figure out what's going on. I heard she has a child and it could be mine or, you know, who knows? That's conjecture, but could be. and it could be mine or you know who knows that's conjecture but could be now one of the more interesting ones i heard was that it could have had to do with the black market because you know during wartime things were so like supplies were so hard to get a hold of it turns out they so there were taxis so taxis were used a lot of times in these black market sales and joe's husband prosper the father of robin on paper at least was a taxi driver and was known as the man who could get you anything and some people believe he was a black

marketeer which is what they called a black market racketeer um and this wasn't necessarily like really sinister it was just like oh he would help you get eggs and yeah he's your egg guy he's your bucket guy or like you know extra sanitary napkin whatever you need like you know it doesn't necessarily mean sinister it's just like it was really hard to get supplies back then rations and that kind of thing and there was some evidence that the Somerton man worked at sea and could have been a black marketeer himself so some people believe this was a love triangle like Prosper somerton man and joe all knew each other and maybe joe slept with this guy that like was prosper's friend or or like business or something maybe they knew each other and maybe she slept with him and then prosper had him killed when he came back to town i mean

not to cast aspersions on prosper as they said on the other podcast but you know there are a lot of rabbit holes and theories you could go down as to like how he got involved with these people maybe they met maybe she was a spy and she had him killed maybe he was a spy and he got too close to somebody who knows there's a lot of mysterious um theories in most recent news a pandemic has actually brought some traction to the case which is cool so a virtual reality specialist named daniel vosshart whose credits include star trek discovery recently joined forces with derrick abbott and genealogist colleen fitzpatrick and they've been working to construct the

somerton man virtually and yeah and so he explains one of the things i've been doing uh while i had this time off during this layoff was to test the software and i was testing it for forensic uses so this is like super cool i mean i hope they are able to kind of crack down some cases here or crack some cases with this technology because it sounds really neat um he said he used all the collected info from the case the body cast of the, and made an eerily similar copy of the famous photograph. And he says, where I come in and my interpretation comes in is using my intuition on how features might look from a different angle, what might happen when sunken eyes are opened. And he continues, a large part of it was curiosity on my own, and just to figure out what this man did look like. Another part of it was, can it jog someone's memory?

So that's where we stand. Hopefully somebody's like, oh, that looks like my grandpa or my great grandpa or who knows. Or maybe some war, that Code Cracker woman said something like maybe a country will, after 100 years, a country will, in 1948, will release some records that identify him. You know, who knows? But hopefully we solve this case eventually. Wow, that's a great story. Oh, sorry. That was, I mean, really long. I'm so sorry. That's okay. Mine was long too. Wow. We've been on a good role of keeping them concise. Not anymore. Uh-oh. Well, we both also showed up real chatty today. We did. We did. So, yeah, that's the case.

I've been so amped about doing this for a long time. And, man, that's what got me into podcasts, this story. Wow. Well, maybe this is going to be the one that gets someone else into a podcast. Oh, that's fun. That'd be a fun little pass it along. Maybe we'll have sushi and beer with them someday and it'll be all a cycle maybe they'll wear like a third love bra because they'll show me at the sushi bar look i bought this with your code as terry carnation says they'll show all three of their boobs like that

one how sweet what a full whole heart what a what a um heartwarming circle that would be well thank you everyone for uh tuning in and uh you can see find all of our socials at atww podcast follow us on patreon uh our website is and that's why i drink.com where you can submit uh topic suggestions and your personal stories for our listeners episodes and yeah i think that's it uh my throat hurts from talking and that hasn't happened in a while so wow my postmates is going to be here in 10 minutes. Oh, amazing. You were ordering Postmates while I was talking?

Rude. I already had picked out all of my options before we started recording. I'm not kidding. Everybody go back and see if you can find the point where Em was ordering Postmates. My phone's been down here the whole time. But I picked it out when we were just talking before we recorded. And then at the halfway- That's smart.

At my guesstimate of your halfway point, I like only pressed like order and that was it. That's smart. The guesstimate. I hope you weren't totally off because this is a long story. Apparently not. It's going to be here in 10 minutes. That's actually perfect.

Well, I'm going to go get my dog and then maybe order Postmates too. So. Okay. Yay. That's why we drink.