And That's Why We Drink - E264 Our Newfound Noodles and Christine's Quantum Thoughts

Episode Date: February 27, 2022

Welcome to episode 264 where we're using our newfound noodles to bring you this week's spooky stories! First Em takes us way out into the woods to cover the terrifying urban legend of staircases in the middle of the woods that lead to nowhere. Then Christine brings us the first in a two-part series on the disturbing Élan School. And if anyone knows where we can find a haunted Barbie dream house, let us know... and that's why we drink!

hello everyone oh you know i forgot that our episode together our first episode hasn't come out yet and so today the list listener episode came out as we record this and people were like oh my gosh christine's here so i feel like we're kicking off now you know i i saw that too that people were very excited to hear your voice for february and we've never we still have not addressed this yet but this is the month that is our five-year anniversary i know i really we really should have planned that better we had five years to figure out what we were going to do. We knew from day three of this podcast that once we hit, well, we didn't know we would ever hit five years.

But I certainly think if we had thought ahead, we knew we weren't going to plan anything. Can you imagine if we hit 10 years? No. That'd be so crazy. That'd be silly. That'd be silly. We'll see. That'd be so crazy. That'd be silly. That'd be silly. We'll see. That'd be silly, Billy.

I don't think any of us are going to hit 10 years, the rate of the planet's going right now. If we do hit 10 years, though, we officially have five years to plan that. And it better be a big slam dunk party, I think. You're right. Let's start over. We didn't plan for this, so we got five years. Okay, it's 2017 again. Nothing bad has happened.

We just get to ride this wave all over again trump literally just became president but okay it was kind of like the beginning of the end you know but um great way to look at it yeah yeah so well that's okay we have five more years we'll do a double celebration then and then when we hit 10 we'll say well 15 you know so we'll just keep this party going. This is definitely like a personality I can maintain for five years of like saying I'll get to it later. We'll get to it. It's a personality we were born with and we've cultivated very carefully over the years. You get it. You get it.

Yeah. Why do you drink this weekend? I drink. Honestly, I do drink because I feel bad that like it's our five year. And I feel like usually I'd really bring something to the table and I feel like I failed you, even though I know that's not how you feel. But my intrusive thoughts are telling me that I have failed us. So that's why I drink. How about you?

Oh, gosh. Well, wow. Yeah. I mean, not to make things so wildly deep, but TMTM. Yeah. Well, actually, I brought with me the inside of my box of wine today. Yeah, we're almost empty on this guy on this bad boy. So I had to pull him out of the little. It's like the old days, you know, I just had to pull them out of the little box boxy box i miss that i miss just seeing like an empty bladder of wine and knowing you'll handle the rest of it my brother does not because he came over to record beach to sandy yesterday and like throughout the recording i just kept sounding like i was peeing on the sofa because i just kept pouring wine me and every and that's why we drink listener is all too uh well uh informed about the sounds of peeing on the show. It's always you pouring

wine. One day when I do pee, I feel like everyone's gonna be like, that's not wine. Something's happening. Honestly, if you peed, you could probably get away with it. I wish I told you that when you were pregnant. I think you did, actually, because I'm pretty sure at one point, I did almost pee my pants while we were recording. And you were like, go for it. You just wanted the chaos to happen. I you know, you're the way that i was like would i judge you no does the camera see anything past your belly no so like you can do whatever you want but will the camera keep recording and will m insist on posting it online yes i i will take a clip of it for sure and let everyone know behind the scenes what was going on oh boy well well i'm glad you're

drinking uh drinking because you're actually drinking because you brought a bladder of wine with you i did and i actually um this is so sad i'm so glad nobody can see the other side of this camera this computer because i brought another box up because this one's obviously empty now and i was like well i gotta bring another one up just in case I need more like what is wrong with me I'm confused what the sad part of that is because it's just like an empty box flipped over like a empty bladder of wine a full one next to it and then like expensive fucking recording equipment all around it it's not sad it's just risky but that's dangerous but that's how i live you know christine lives on the edge every day with her wine exactly i did not get something

to drink i'm supposed to be drinking more water uh and i me too did not bring any water i brought a hydro jug i just haven't been drinking it i brought i just pulled out my hydro jug today and i by the way uh go follow uh bc sandy and do their promo code or something for hydrogen um because that's what i did speech uh i just pulled mine out of the wash and i was like oh i'm gonna use this today nope totally forgot it's so hard to like make yourself drink water it's true i mean everyone can relate i think hey i have an update about adderall though oh excellent tell me so uh I'm officially so they upped my dose so now I'm doing at least 10 milligrams a day but I can go up to 20 if I

need it but it's like take it like two times a day so it'd be 10 and 10 um and I'm officially like cross across the threshold of like any side effects I might experience and I'm officially like cross across the threshold of like any side effects I might experience. And I'm just like fully in it. And one thing I've noticed is that I focus very well, but on the wrong things. So half worked. Step one is half work. I've noticed that like the only way I could explain it is i feel like i'm like if you're driving and you like over correct when you're steering i feel like i'm trying really

hard to focus on the right thing and the focus part isn't the problem anymore but it's like now all of these tasks i've been well you gotta tell us what the wrong thing is that you're focusing on? Oh, I was trying to be a good person. And I posted something about like, what privilege looks like or intersectionality. And someone DM to me and was like, hey, what does this mean? And instead of saying like, Google's free, I was like feeling like really into giving them the answer. And then I ended up reading like five dissertations on like religious privilege. And so it turned into a whole thing where like I was using my newfound powers for good. But I thought you were about to say I was using my noodle. And I was like, you were certainly using your noodle.

I was using my noodle, but I was using it. Your newfound noodle in a new way. A silly noodle moment. Well, hey, next Thanksgiving, you will be prepared when any of your family members extended or otherwise ask you about intersectionality and you can be like, step aside. Really any Sunday. I'm like ready for any evangelical Christian to come at me now because I definitely did a lot of thesis work today. So it sounds like you're focusing on all the right things. I don't know what to tell you. Right things, wrong time. Meanwhile, I downloaded Donkey Kong on my Switch. So like, I think you're winning.

Okay, fine, fine, fine. I know you said you have a long story, so I will get to mine now. Yay. Just to knock it out of the way. And I feel like a lot of people will be pleased with it. I hope they are. I've been trying to hear your cries, and I saw some people saying that I've been doing too many ghost stories in a row,

so they want something new. I don't know. I'm just giving the people what they want. Giving the people what they want, or at least whatever this one person's opinion was. You said something, and it stuck with me, and now I'm trying to do you a service so they said they wanted more urban legends you're getting one and i don't totally know if it's an

urban legend it's pretty much like um over the last couple years it's growing into a well-known lore but uh actually really thanks to like tiktok and uh social media is the reason it's growing but this is the story of a girl story of it's not a story and it's not like a theory i don't know here's the urban legend or the lore of staircases in the woods that lead to Wait, no, you've talked about doorways in the woods. I haven't heard about staircases, I don't think. I talked about the back doors by accident, and then that was supposed to be the back rooms, and now these are the stairs.

Right, but when you talked about that, you mentioned that there was a thing about doorways in the woods, right? Like, I think you mentioned that. Maybe. I did not cover doorways, but this is stairs. Okay, I'm in. Honestly, eventually all these urban legends are just gonna build a whole house with the amount of structural foundations i'm talking about dream house out there like an elevator if anyone has a haunted barbie dream

house and there are back rooms to it and staircases that lead to nowhere and a motorcycle outside your window jesus christ i heard that everyone on earth heard that oh wow he was a problem anyway if you are not a menace to society and you have a barbie dream house that's also haunted let me know i'd love to report about it so okay here are the staircases in the i didn't know what to call it so so I wrote, Staircases in the woods that lead to nowhere. That's catchy. It's at least true. It's at least very descriptive, yes. Yeah. So fun fact about these staircases is that there's a show on Shudder called Channel Zero,

and a whole season is apparently about them. So there's enough staircases to talk about for a whole season is apparently about them. So like there's enough staircases to talk about for a whole season. I didn't actually watch the show, but I did see a lot of promo about it in my ads once I had done enough research on my laptop about this. Because the keywords are literally staircase in the woods lead to nowhere. And you got it. I was like, I know exactly what you need. Instagram was like, this one isn't even hard to pinpoint. I was like, I know exactly what you need.

Instagram was like, this one isn't even hard to pinpoint. So again, it could be an urban legend, but it has become pretty well-known lore over the last few years. And just like a lot of my topics that are urban legends or conspiracies in some way, they all stem from one little website that that maybe rhymes with credit what do you think that could be christine um what are you what stupid thing are you gonna say i waited one millisecond too long here's a AOL.com. Okay, so on Reddit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've heard of it.

So this, I guess, lore really started to become popular. I think around 2019, every single article I looked up for like sources on the history of this urban legend mentioned this Reddit. Now, I don't know if the thread itself is from 2019 or if the last time someone looked at it was 2019 because i looked through a bunch of different subreddits that had the same story on it and i don't know what the original okay thread was anymore i saw some that even said like six years ago which was longer than 2019 so i don't know if everyone was just using different threads for their source but i would say it probably started around 2015, just to give a good guesstimate.

And it was in the NoSleep subreddit, and there was a handle called SearchAndRescueWoods. Oh, I'm already freaked out. Like, I'm already freaked out. How silly is that well it's extra silly because there's a it's wild to me for no reason but it just feels odd whenever a handler username is so easily readable versus like true point true point like i'm always crazy 444 like instead of it like being a bunch of weird hey now back off but like but it's just like clearly like a it feels like a company name or like it's too professional to be cool enough for like social media you know i got you no i totally

get what you're saying yeah yeah yeah so uh there's no numbers like there's no numbers in that right there's not even like a an asterisk or not even a six nine four twenty i'm trying to think search and rescue like the e's are not threes or anything you would think but no i would think but alas don't you can stop thinking so that's right easy done unnecessary so at i don't know at what is what's do reddits have handles or usernames i think they're usernames yep search and rescue woods so this person shared a story about working for search and rescue woods uh where about this mysterious set of staircase uh staircases they've found in the woods over time at their job and they claim that they worked for the national park search and rescue team and they say if you go deep enough into the woods you will sometimes find a lone set of stairs

that lead to nowhere so this person also claimed i don't remember which set which thread i found this in but in a more elaborate version of the stories uh it said that they had seen so many stairs in the middle of the woods that they guesstimated around like one in every five times they've done a search and rescue deep in the woods. They have found stairs in the middle of nowhere. Okay. Regardless of the park. So they aren't leaning against anything. There's no buildings nearby.

They are just random ass stairs that lead to nothing. Like just up like it's like there was once a building there and the building disappeared but the stairs remained weird so apparently while on the job this guy said that he realized that these stairs uh would be found in a lot of areas and regardless of how many times he would try to mention it to his co-workers to be like hey this is kind of a weird part of the job that no one trained me on. What are these stairs about? It was an understood rule in his line of work that you just ignore them and don't climb them.

Don't go near them. And whenever he would ask his coworkers directly, they would say very little, which to me seems very suspicious. Very fishy indeed. So he, I'm assuming it's a he i don't know why gross but uh the quote from search and rescue woods is i don't know if this is true in every sar unit but in mine it's sort of an unspoken regular thing we run into on just about every case where we're really far into the wilderness i'm talking 30 or 40 miles at some point we'll see a staircase in the middle of the woods it's almost like if you took the

stairs in your house cut them out and put them in the forest um and i hate that it's like 30 or 40 miles because it means like there was this was never even accidentally supposed to be like a good point a civilized populous area you know like this isn't like the the newest subdivision being formed like and they start with the stairs they said fuck the foundation okay fine valid valid point m okay i'm just trying to throw it out there no but it's true it's true it's like this it's not it clearly wasn't going to be a new neighborhood and like they just had some weird construction tactics. It's not like that clearly failed really quickly.

Or it's not like the construction truck, you know, that was driving toward the new subdivision and dropped a staircase on the way. Exactly. That's actually that's a great that could be a version of it. I somewhere somehow I'm sure stairs have been dropped off somewhere. I lost my staircase by accident. My tracking, my delivery updates are saying it's already arrived. Where are they? Can you imagine Amazon's like, your package has been delivered.

It's literally a staircase in the middle of nowhere. It's like, that's not where I live. So apparently you actually, I didn't know this but you actually they will places will send stairs to you it's like when you have to assemble them yourselves can you imagine getting a box of your own staircase and you have to build them absolutely no absolutely not no no not not even what I want to think about so can you hear the baby crying now that scared me I thought that was like a curse. It's actually me in another world having to assemble my own stairs.

The tears shed instantly. Wow. Yeah. So this Reddit post actually caught on and like not to make like a weird park joke, but caught on like wildfire and a bunch of other redditors started chiming in with their own stories of stumbling onto these weird unexplainable staircases in the woods so again these i am aware that this is coming off of reddit they could all be fake but enough of these stories put together just if they're all real everyone is having some crazy experiences and i didn't even put this in my notes but there are mysterious sets of stairs that were just built so long ago

archaeologists don't even know really what came from them that's cool so even if all these people are faking it they it's inspired from something sure um and uh let me see most of these stories if not all these stories the uh overall theme is that people are very disturbed every time they find these stairs so people claim to have seen them all over the world in multiple conditions made from multiple materials um sometimes they're brick sometimes they're metal sometimes they're stone and sometimes they look like they're abandoned like dirty ruins but other times they look brand new and modern and clean without any like bird poop or dirt on them yuck that's that i would hate like i could understand like some i couldn't really understand but i could better understand like random brick stairs

actually not really because someone had to put grout through all that and shit okay but anyway but if they're modern and clean and like that makes a whole lot of zero sense it does because that means it's like new also like it's just put there also it's not like oh that feels like art installation from 100 years ago or something. It feels like a truck literally backed up and dropped it down. So the ones that creep me out the most from people saying, like, they looked perfectly clean, like brand new, swept and wiped down. No. No thanks. No.

They also are almost always found deep into the woods, away from everything. And when they have been near something in the woods people have often found burial grounds or remains of a cemetery so that's creepy on its own maybe it's just one big tombstone a stair it's just like just bury me in my stairs i spent so much time building these stairs by hand off the amazon package that i'm gonna bury me in them yeah. So in the spots where these stairs can be found, a lot of times, again, you'll see either a cemetery or burial ground, but it's also usually a hotspot

where missing hikers are last seen in the same general area. So that's super creepy, which by the way, now if I ever go missing in the woods, first of all, if I'm ever in the woods, call the police,

but also if I'm ever hiking and then go missing in the woods i would i request that people start looking for the stairs because if there is a correlation to missing person cases and these stairs please go there first if that's like oh there's also a correlation between missing persons in the woods and uh and murderers and cliffs. So we got a lot of options. I don't know if stairs is the number one that I would immediately go to. But I mean, maybe after this episode, you'll change my mind. I promise you, if there are stairs anywhere, I will go missing because I'm not going to

climb them. I'm not. I will escape that whole space. Yeah. So a fun fact. Here's another theory, not not just bears which is funny that you mentioned that but uh there's also there's some other theory which i can look into people are interested in it if not i'm just gonna leave it alone but apparently there's a whole other

theory about missing people in the woods and like k the cave system in the national parks holding like groups of cannibals. What? It's like a whole, I'm sure it's done from Reddit or Creepypasta or something. But apparently there's a whole theory that if you look at a map of the cave system in the United States of all the national parks, like there are people out there who also go missing oddly often next to caves. And somehow that means cannibals. I would think bears, just like how you said bears. I would think, oh, cool, a cave. And then you fall into it or something.

But that's how you and every other person went missing. So I would for sure go missing. Yeah. So anyway, it could be bears, could be cannibals, could be these stairs, could just be that you just go missing. Could be also really bad people hiding in the woods and doing bad things. So some of the stories over time have also mentioned supernatural experiences, including oftentimes where these stairs are seen. So are UFO and Bigfoot sightings. Yes, yes, yes, yes.

So some think that the stairs could have been at some point used for ritual purposes. So if it's not related to aliens, it might be related to sacrificial ceremonies is the real leading theory. The leading theory is that it is a place for sacrificial ceremonies. But some people, I mean, if you look look at these pictures it is very odd and very creepy people have referred to them as stair what stairways to hell and think that they might actually be portals directly to hell how convenient though like so convenient and i like that again they have to start by climbing stairs like hell point hell has begun before you even entered you know point yeah yeah yeah people also think that it could be a spiritual portal and lead to other dimensions because it really

leads to nothing that we can see that's fun a lot of people who've approached these stairs say that they have felt dread nausea fear just total danger and if not all of them at least a vast majority of them have an immediate instinct to run away as fast as they can oh god honestly like i don't know too much about like the uncanny valley stuff but it i think that alone would make me want to run away like why on earth are there these eerie fucking stairs attached to nothing leading to nothing in the middle of nowhere when you're already alone i feel like a lot of it could be psychological but i don't know i've never seen these stairs personally your mind would be like this isn't right yeah at the very least i'd be

like i know this isn't this doesn't track like uh so because of these the instinct to run away or this immediate dread that keeps people from getting near the stairs there are very few reports of people who've actually climbed the stairs sure if you're on the supernatural side of things and think that this is like a portal or a dimension the other argument is well there's very few reports of people climbing the stairs because once they've climbed the stairs they vanish into another world. So, like, that would explain why they're never telling us what happened because they left. Well, it's like Black Eyed Kids where you

don't really hear of anybody who let them in because something bad must have happened. Exactly. So, there's also psychics who have reported that when they're near the stairs, their, it said emotions, but I wonder if that also means their gifts, fade whenever they're next to the stairs. Interesting. So it's like running on some other sort of energy they can't work with.

It like interferes. Wow. And so there are also known to be unexplained noises near these stairs, which, okay, you're in the woods. I get it. Like there's going to be unexplained noises everywhere, but apparently noticeably unexplained noises. And I saw one source that said near these stairs. This is the part that's like a little too far for me. But I saw one source that said that near these stairs have also been instances of spontaneous human combustion in national parks and as much as i want to believe it i feel like if we knew concretely that there was a documented

case of a spontaneous human combustion like wouldn't people have talked about that and also mentioned the creepy fucking stairs that happened next to. And then we would all know about the stairs. Well, also, that's really a perfect way for anybody to blame instead of their gender reveal, blame a wildfire on a human combustion staircase. I feel like we have plenty of instances of like lighting a match, setting off a pink cannon. But like a staircase that's new. Yeah, it's like, well, it's not my fault i was next to a portal sorry i would not believe it but i would respect someone's gusto for the razzle dazzle so such such razzle dazzle so those who have climbed the stairs and lived on this side of

the portal to tell the tale uh they all claim to have felt an eeriness and to a point where once they get up there on the top platform of the stairs, everything goes completely silent and they can't even hear themselves breathing, which is super weird. If down next to the stairs, everyone's hearing these unexplained noises, but you get up there and you can't hear a single thing.

Yuck. People up there have also seen creatures staring at them from the trees but only once they get up there no i wonder if you back down if they disappear yeah like at like at what is it step eight or nine where like they kind of fade away yeah but it is if it's a portal to something it's creepy that once you're at a certain level, you can see things that you couldn't normally see. It's a really, yeah, that's very creepy, but I wonder how that works. Yeah. Yeah.

No scientists were on the spread of thread, by the way. So I don't. You don't say. I totally wish I could give you a better answer. One hiker said that they saw a creature staring at them from the top platform with a dark face and black eyes. And when they went to look back at it, it ran off. Okay, good. Yeah, exactly.

It's like. That's what you want. I didn't want it to get closer. So when they came back down the stairs after seeing this like creepy thing looking at them, they came back down the stairs and realized that several hours had passed. Oh, I don't like the missing time thing. That feels way, way creepy. That was where I got hooked with this because I was like, okay, you can get on the stairs, feel creepy, go down the stairs. Nope. You go down the stairs and time has passed. I always hate that. It gave me shivers. I don't like it. You should cover missing time someday.

That really creeps me out. I would. I feel like it's almost too vague, but also like there's so much potential with that. I would have to really figure out a streamlined. Like an angle because you could do like UFOs in Missing Time or you could do like time slips or you could do like portals. Yeah, I feel like glitches in the Matrix. Yeah, you're actually gone remember that there's that one story i don't know if you've ever read it but oh i'm so scared i know exactly what you're about to tell me it was my favorite i hate it glitch in the matrix one for a long time

where like he literally lived his entire life until he was like in his 30s or 40s and then something happened and he went back to being like he woke up and was like in seventh grade again and he was like i already know all this math i already know who i marry it was so creepy he ended up like looking her up and finding her and falling in love with her again and like uh i think he like yeah because he was when he was in his 30s or 40s he was like he had already gotten all these degrees in engineering so he like flew through school and he was like seventh grade are you kidding me and on a lighter note it sounds like a disney original but in real life it sounds like a nightmare to do high school again you could not pay me you could not pay me millions of dollars to go back to high school you could pay me i think i I, I would do it very differently now, but I, I think I wouldn't give a shit.

I don't know. Cause I'm more, I'm still terrified of confrontation, but I think in my mind, if I were going back in time with my 29 year old brain, right. I guess I would be like, these are like 16 year old shitheads. Like I can't wait to like tell my bully to go fuck off instead of be worried about what she's thinking. You know, that's a good point. Like, I feel like i i'd like to pop in every now and then but i would not want to do the drag of like wake up at 5 30 or 6 every day do homework write a

paper apply to college what a nightmare i just trying to live as a girl forget it like yeah Like, yeah. Such a fucking drag. Oh, my God. No, I try to escape that every day. I would definitely have come out a lot earlier. What else would I have done? You know what? I'm sorry. I mean, the horrible stuff of high school, obviously, like, I would hate to do that again. But I really think I would actually thrive if I could go back and do it all gym class I mean hello gym class I would be now that I'm like I know that I have friends who are gym teachers I feel like I could be like you know what I know

the ins and outs of this like I'm just not gonna do it you can give me the f if you want whatever I think I think it would have been like I know you don't want to be here too. Valid. Where were we? I don't know. I really decided to drag us down to the pits of hell. Or I guess up the staircase. Up the staircase and into high school. Yikes. Oh, time.

That time. Time loss. That's where we were. So this is actually, so I told you that one story where she goes down and all of a sudden time, several hours have passed. Well, this was actually a common experience with the staircases where if someone were to go up the stairs, a lot of people report later having lost huge chunks of time. This one person in particular, extra creepy for some reason, said that they saw a staircase in the middle of the woods with shining carpet like glowing carpet on the steps and everything went silent when they got up there uh they also lost hours of time

and another person said that they actually felt like they were hypnotized and drawn into uh into the stairs i guess they the quote that they said was that they, quote, couldn't see anything but the stairs as if they had like tunnel vision and were just tranced into going. Oh, no. Oh, and I guess he also when he got up there, he got scratched by something and then came back down. Ugh. Even weirder, multiple people have reported going back to try to show their friends the stairs and the stairs are fucking gone. Yuck. Is that like not the worst thing you've ever heard it is except me knowing myself would be like it's right over here

and walk 16 miles in the other direction be like i swear it was right here and they're like that's the subway like what are you doing that's not anything see again in high school if i could go back i i would miss the fearlessness of going into abandoned houses because now I'd be like, oh, I'm going to jail. But I feel like Deirdre would be the first person to be like, oh, there's a haunted set of stairs 30 miles into the woods. Let's go. And somehow I would have been convinced. You would have gone. I know you would have.

A hundred percent. Nowadays, I'd be like nice try you can i'll check google earth and see if it's still there before i go in woods stairs like there's nothing for me tell me the benefit like best case scenario there are stairs and then we climb them no no no no shiny carpet i guess you're onto something maybe so those who claim that it's has to do with aliens and that there are ufo sightings that happen next to these locations they think that the stairs might actually be aliens luring abductees onto the ships well they're too lazy now to come use their fucking

beam they're like you walk to me now are you kidding me me as an alien i feel like it makes sense for real i feel like it would make sense like with like glowing carpet or something. Maybe it was like a beam of light that was shining and they were like, we're just gonna make it look like a staircase. This will really draw them in something shiny and glitzy. It would also make sense though, why a lot of people say that they feel tranced and hypnotized towards it. And then all of a sudden, there's a massive chunk of time missing when they come back down so like it really could be a portal to a ufo or a spacecraft or something like when you're coming back yeah and then when you come back down you have no idea you've been abducted that whole time yeah and i guess with the like traditional i don't know illustration

of a ufo like they have sometimes stairs that come out of the ufo yeah right come like take me to your leader they walk down the stairs i don't know i wonder i wonder if that exact thing is happening but they have some weird energy device where like they like the cloak wasn't long enough and so only the stairs are shown the tablecloth got pulled a little bit in the corner showing it's like oh shit so some people say that they have seen the stairs in even more unsettling spaces than just in the middle of the woods what is possibly tell me what's possibly more one person who was out with their family i guess on a summer camping trip they found stairs jutting out of the middle of the lake i was afraid you would say like yeah that's not good for me uh another person i think this was actually the original reddit user guy

some what was it 69 420 something rather yeah you get it uh he said that another co-worker of his had seen stairs in the middle of the woods flipped upside down. Ew. Which feels now like a poltergeist situation where like the chairs are upside down or jutting out or on their side. I don't like that at all. Because also stairs, first of all, shouldn't be there. And second of all, if they're going to be there, they better be upright. So like what is going on? It's like God had like a Lego piece of staircase and went, ugh, and like just threw it down to earth and just kind of fell on its side.

You know, it always also reminds me of, again, the black, I don't know why I keep thinking black eyed kids, but the black eyed kids thing of like, it's close, but off. Like they're trying, but like, oops, they didn't understand that it goes the other way around. That feels like an alien abduction, but it was ran by the intern on the UFO. And he was like, is this right? And they were were like he pulls the fitted sheet off the stairs by accident then he puts the staircase down upside down i mean he's and then they're like then they're like pick it up with your little ufo crane and drop it perfectly and he put it in the fucking lake by accident he dropped in the lake oh this guy is fired three strikes he's not coming back to earth that's for sure so these staircases have been like i said reported by people all over the world including at least

the u.s france portugal brazil germany sweden norway and the philippines um so here are just some of the more popular stories i think i have five little quips of um like the most well-known staircase stories that people have reached out and discussed so there was a guy in the 1940s who was working for the government and i okay here's my first like hmm i don't know about that a guy from the 40s is on reddit okay i was about to ask where did this come from like couldn't be reddit right was the redditor talking about like his grandpa you know like or was it just like another no sleep like fictional thing or was it like a really tech savvy hundred year olds you know like who knows it could be um So this guy was working for the government in the 1940s, which was right after the Roswell incident.

So first big, like, UFO experience on the scene. And he was doing research in the area because in that chunk of the woods, there were a bunch of cases of mutilated animals. Excuse me. Mutilated animals. Why would I choke on that part of all of everything why would you have to say that twice thank you um wait where where was this i think it was in in new mexico i think oh oh okay um i did not write that down but it would make sense if this were right after the roswell incident he and he had to go into the area to do research on that

yeah she feels like roswell and because there are a bunch of cases of animals and so that could have been a ufo thing because there's a lot of like alien stories of like crop circles and cows and you know things like that but there it could also be like ceremonies like sacrificial ceremonies something going up um so they didn't really know what was going on they were supposed to only investigate for two weeks and they ended up being there for six months. Oh, because there were so many cases coming in. So they at different times during their investigation would camp out for the set of these creepy stairs that were out in the middle of nowhere. When they would wake up every every morning, the stairs seemed to move around by themselves at night. No. Because when they would wake up, they would find the stairs at different distances than they had camped or put up put up camp for the night.

Yeah. then they had camped or put up put up camp for the night yeah i think one of the stories or one part of the story was that they had they were like 30 meters away from the stairs when they set up camp and then they woke up and they were like almost double that distance all of a sudden from the stairs i mean at least going farther exactly yeah okay fair i appreciate that instead of like it's sitting on you suddenly yeah you open the tent and it's like, come on up. No, thank you. So I guess the first argument could be, like, oh, maybe, like, you happen to sleep through, like, a hurricane and get blown away from the stairs.

But they know the stairs moved instead of them because in the spots where the stairs were the night before, the ground had intense scorch marks oh so like it was clearly leaving an imprint and moving while they were not paying attention to it which i hate yes the researchers ended up looking at the stairs and investigating those while they were there because they were like here's a whole other mystery we've got to look into and they said that the staircases uh had a bunch of weird frequencies compared to the rest of the environment oh no they ended up trying to do a sample off of a piece of the staircase um but

even though it was a wooden structure it looked like a wooden staircase apparently the stairs themselves they couldn't pick off or cut off a sample of it because the wood was quote harder than steel and none of it could be none of it could be chipped off for sampling no after this whole debacle with the stairs a week later the stairs disappeared for good never seen again again. What the fuck? The second story is in the Philippines. And I guess this is sometimes called the vanishing stairs and sometimes called the ladder of lost time. Oh,

a ranger who was on patrol for search and rescue. He was looking for missing hikers and he found these stairs, just stumbled upon them. So he climbs up to see if he can get like an aerial view of the woods yeah i like to think of it as like michael scott on that rooftop looking for dunder mifflin when he got turned around you know yes 100 which also by the way could be an argument of like maybe the lost hikers are climbing up the stairs to get a better view of how to get out of the woods and then they're like i don't know abducted by aliens or fall into a portal yeah it sounds like a hunter's blind like where you like

elevate yourself to be able to see you know yeah and go uh so yeah so this search and rescue patrolman he was he's thought if i go to the top platform i can see an aerial view better and uh as he was on his way up the stairs all all of a sudden, this really scary dog shows up out of nowhere in the woods. First of all, whose dog is this? Second of all, it's like scary enough or like, I guess, snarling or doing something to make him feel threatened. And so since he's kind of cornered, he ends up running up to the top of the stairs. No. And he's just standing there long enough waiting for the dog to get

tired and run off so after a while the dog runs off and he decides he's like fuck this i'm just gonna go back to the office um or i don't know where park rangers go the cabin and so when he he gets back down the stairs he goes to the cabin and he finds out that he is fired because his boss thought that he just stopped coming to work one day because he stopped coming to work five years ago oh no so five years had passed oh my god i i don't know what to i'd'd be like, no, as far as I'm concerned, I was on the job for five years. So please pay me five years worth of my money and then I'll leave. Yeah. You pay, you hand that over in this cabin we're in, hand me all that cash. I feel like I would like to know more about where this man ended up and like how he did not make front page news uh at least in his local town at least in the town of those woods the town of those woods you'd think that at least the local woods

people would have written about it you should be warned that like there's a staircase like only a couple miles from you and like you might time travel i feel like if that happened to me or to a lot of people it would probably lead to a psychotic break like i think i would be so like separated from reality for a minute like i don't think i could handle that mentally i think i would be totally beside myself i don't know not to make everything about marvel but uh so i don't know how much you know but you know i feel like i say this every time i'm about to talk but you know when thanos the purple guy snapped his fingers that's like a big thing okay so like it erased people from existence for five years and then all of a sudden what we're

what we're seeing in all of the new shows is like people disappeared at random only half the population experienced this so now five years later, half of them are coming back and like have no idea they've been gone. Like, Oh shit. Like one of them, like black widow's sister, she was washing her hands and then she just disappeared when Thanos snapped

his fingers. And then she came back and finished washing her hands and had no idea five years passed. So like, that's how I'm feeling. Like this guy probably was on the stairs when he came back and everyone was just older or had children or like i mean his poor partner probably left you know his parents his siblings his friends terrible

his dog i mean it's just very sad it's super like it's trippy fun trippy for a second and then you're like oh shit the gravity of what that would actually do terrible terrible so uh also i'm wondering if he was gone for five years let's say he climbed up to do in like year 2000 just to use a base an easier number year 2000 he goes up the stairs to do like so for five years is the staircase gone and then he comes back and like nobody else could have been taken during that time question or could there have been like 30 different people just and they'll they'll all come back at exactly five years from when they left well so this is also my quantum thought you know how i have finally

i've been waiting for christ Christine's quantum thought du jour. Please tell me. Christine's quantum thoughts. I'm working on a jingle. If someone can help me with that, that'd be great. So, and a logo. I'm building this out in my mind. But what if, quantumly speaking, you went up the stairs and time, you know, time's not really linear.

Time, you know, time's not really linear. Time just like either speeds up or slows down to such an extreme that by the time you like are able to turn and walk back down the stairs, like your concept of time has shifted and five years on Earth suddenly have passed. Like maybe you just enter a different dimension in a way, like a parallel dimension or something. dimension in a way like a parallel dimension or something in the time that it takes you to come back somehow that earth time has elapsed i don't know no i took i also like what if you came down the stairs and you didn't notice but you've aged five years and like he's and he has hadn't looked at a mirror yet for them to be like where the fuck have you been for five years and he's like what are you talking about like what if he now looks five years has done a real number on my body like imagine if he started coming down the stairs and now he's just like making all these weird sounds yeah that's what all the sounds were it's like grunting i feel like you'd have to go down on your butt you know i'm sorry but if the unexplained mysterious noises are just people aging overnight, like now having to like deal with their cracking knees.

Like, anyway, it's a bad noise. It is a bad noise. What a bad time. So another story is a lot quicker is that in Sweden, there were two guys hiking and they found the stairs. They climbed up and heard a blood curdling scream. hiking and they found the stairs they climbed up and heard a blood curdling scream so they ran immediately but on their way down the stairs they felt some icy cold hands grab them which feels a little more supernatural uh another story is that a park ranger and one of his other co-workers they found a set of stairs and he climbed uh his friend climbed the stairs while the original park ranger

stood down was like i'm not doing that that's us at the bottom like you do whatever you want to do i'll just film it exactly so uh the park ranger that went up the stairs though i guess these stairs happen to be next to some trees and so he went to go grab a nearby branch and according to this park ranger that watched it all happen from the ground the park ranger who grabbed the branch his hand got cut clean off by something unexplained oh like he reached out of maybe that he reached oh reached out of like the bubble whatever that stairs energy is yet he's entered and it like sliced it off. Oh, no.

Yeah, like maybe he like was leaving one portal and going into another. Exactly. Ooh. And just. You can't even see it. Just. Couldn't even see it coming. Or maybe you're not supposed to like have one part of you straddling portals.

Right. You just got sliced. Oof. Anyway, that's another story another is that one park ranger remembered a woman climbing up the stairs and she said that something was wrong and then collapsed and died oh my god so that could be like if that's real that could just be like a coincidence that like she felt something was wrong in her body as she was climbing yeah yeah yeah who knows but that's another bad it's another popular one so just to try to debunk these stares the uh main argument is that all these stories are from like reddit's no sleep forum so like take a hint um but i mean a lot of these people could just be excellent writers, although they are very convincing that they believe this. So yeah, you know, whatever. Uh, the other thing that people use a lot to debunk this is like, if all of these staircases are in the middle of the woods, and all these people are experiencing it, where the fuck are all the photos because if you google staircases that lead to nowhere in the woods you really won't find too many you'll find a lot but like certainly not as many as there are stories right and so people are have said like if you're a hiker

in today's world like you go with a fucking phone absolutely and so why aren't people immediately taking a picture of one of these stairs since they've happened since 2005 or 2015 sorry 2015 like we all have phones everyone has a camera on them yeah and so one of the arguments is like there should definitely be more pictures but then like the supernatural argument is like well if they're in a trance maybe they aren't thinking about ghosts and things so yeah that's true i can tell you from the time that i granted cell phones with cameras didn't exist and but even then when i was a little kid and i saw my grandpa i'm using that as my frame of reference because i haven't seen anything since

yeah i remember the feeling and the headspace of seeing him and it was almost like he took out every other one of my senses every other bit bit of awareness. It was just we were transfixed. And there was even if I had a form of technology next to me that I could turn on to get evidence, it was not going to happen. So if there is some sort of trance situation happening, I could understand the, oh, I didn't take a picture. I wasn't even thinking about it. So for the stairs that do exist out there, because I don't doubt that there are stairs out there. They just make no sense for existing there.

I don't really know about the whole supernatural element to it. Right, right. But they are creepy and make no sound sense. It is very creepy either way. So for the stairs that do exist out in the woods that lead to nowhere, what could that be from? The main theory is that these stairs are just foundations left behind because the stairs are often made of material that isn't wood,

which means that they would have withstood erosion and rot. So maybe someone forever ago was planning on building up like a secluded home out in the woods. But then I feel like wouldn't there be like blueprints or like architect documents somewhere that this was in the works? Well, not necessarily. I mean, in the United States, perhaps, but in other places. I mean, thousands of years of, you know, homes and building materials. And, you know, it could have been from hundreds of years ago that just, you wouldn't have been on any sort of registry. That's true. But I also wonder too, like if, I mean, I don't know enough about the history of

construction, but I feel like if the stairs are lasting the foundations of the house should have lasted and weren't those at least made of rock or something like what happened there yeah i don't i don't totally i don't understand but the main theory is that they're just they happen to withstand weather better than the rest of the house materials that were once being put there tell one creepy like small story which is from from Jim Harreld's Campfire? Somebody called in once and it's pretty recent. It's one of my favorite stories ever on the show. And she called in and said when she was younger, she and her friend were like, I don't know, they had like a summer home or they went to some town for the summer. And they used to play outside in the woods all the time. And one day, they were

playing in the woods. And they stumbled upon this like really beautiful Victorian house and it was kind of like old school and creepy looking but it was this beautiful house and there was this little boy out front staring at them and he was kind of dressed in this like old-timey garb or whatever I'm probably butchering the story but they saw this little boy and they were kind of like whoa what's that about and he stared at them and they stared at him and uh his mom called him back inside uh and she had this like old dress on and they were kind of weirded out but they were like 10 so they just went home and then the next day they were like to their brother you know come i want to show you this cool house we found and they went exactly to where it

was and all that they saw was an old staircase like a like a stone steps leading up to where this house would have been and the house had been like completely gone and the theory is that it's like a time slip like they saw something that had existed like like they fell into that time's residual blueprint or something something like that and And the fact she said like the boy definitely saw us and stared at us like what are you wearing? What are those kids doing? You know. Like a total glitch in the matrix or whatever. Yeah, like crossover.

And he was transfixed like what is wrong with those kids? Like something really weird is wrong with those kids. And they were looking at him like what's wrong with that kid? really weird is wrong with those kids and they were looking at him like what's wrong with that kid um and then they went back and it was all that was left was like a stone staircase like a short stone staircase so i don't know just kind of reminded me of that isn't it wild that like one theory it could be that like we are living in this space right now as is someone else and we just aren't overlapping because of some weird veil yeah so like whatever was going on a hundred years ago where you're sitting right now is happening right now the

only thing that's keeping us from seeing each other is some weird energy veil i don't know what else to call it the matrix but like like who lived here last but like did they live there last or are they living there right at the same are we all over like are they bumping into me and i don't even notice it right now yeah because like time is not fully linear like we think it is it just feels that way so yikes creepy christine's quantum thoughts thank you for joining bring those uh make those a thing that you always do by the way i think i said i think i said quantum your quantum thought du jour and i only said du jour because literally yesterday i had the dumbest conversation i've ever had with somebody because i was at a restaurant and they had it was like it's like a tea shop coffee shop and on their menu it said like their only options for tea were

tea du jour. And so I was like, okay. So they just like switch it out every day. So I was like, oh, what's your like tea du jour? And they were like, oh, that's, it was literally like the movie Dumb and Dumber. I was about to say, this is what I'm thinking of. But he was, at first I think he was like too young to like know like the social significance

or the impact of like, he really just said it like straight out of diamond number and like totally meant it. And I was like, Oh, what's your like tea to shore? And he was like, Oh,

that's our tea of the day. And I was like, right. But what is, but what is that? Like, I want to know if I should, can I order?

It's actually French. It's like, yeah, yeah. That's not the question. I was like, Oh, like,

but what is it though? And he was like, Oh, it's our like tea of the day. And I was like, the daily one. Yes. And then I was like, oh, like, but what is it, though? And he was like, oh, it's our, like, tea of the day. It's like the daily one. Yes. And then I was like, okay, well, what is it? Like, I want to know if I can order it.

And he went, oh, you can order it. It's on the menu. And I went. Dear Lord. Dear Lord. What is the flavor of the tea du jour? And he was like, it's just like you're like a normal tea. And I was like, I don't know what that means.

Oh, my goodness. Bottom line, I got water. But anyway And I was like, I don't know what that means. Oh, my goodness. Bottom line, I got water. But anyway, I was like. Was that the tea du jour? It was just water all along. It was actually tea without the leaves. It was just. The base notes.

Yeah. It was. So all like for the last 24 hours, I've been hearing du jour in my head because I like want to. I don't even know how to correct this like weird thing that's stuck in my head now okay before we before we stop on mine i do want to say that the theory is that these were original foundations but in the meantime while they were just sitting in the middle of the woods the other theory of them being used for ceremonies and rituals could have also happened because they were just random remains. So people could have gone out into the woods, seen these and incorporated them into their own personal rituals, which maybe conjured some sort of eerie energy.

Yeah, interesting. And it would make sense why some groups would see those stairs and incorporate them into their ceremonies, because in spiritual practices, stairs or ladders usually represent ascension or a journey or the connection between one world and another like heaven and hell like sure and so it would make sense why they'd be like oh damn like that was the last thing we needed on like our ingredient list before we do this ritual hey literally we just found some stairs like eye of newt and then like a staircase and they're like well we're not gonna find that in the woods so let's just like wing it and then they found staircase and mix it together. Well, we're not going to find that in the woods. So let's just like wing it. And then they found stairs.

And they're like, whoa, that worked out. They Amazon primed them and built them themselves. That's when they dropped them off for the ceremony. Okay. So I was like, that's weird. I didn't even think about like the significance of what staircases could mean and rituals. So I tried googling that and they're actually in a full circle of events there's a creepypasta called the staircase ritual oh boy and i won't go through all

of it because it was just so so long this was the thing i made us hold for 15 minutes because i was like maybe i can i can condense this in 15 minutes and there's just no way. But basically the staircase ritual on creepypasta, which, by the way, I do not condone. And also, like, I don't even know if it's real. It's just a creepypasta. Reminds me of the elevator game from Cecil Hotel. It's very much like the elevator game, but like the version that doesn't move. It's just like a stagnant elevator. Just sit still.

It's just like a stagnant elevator. Just sit still. So the staircase ritual is for issues in your home with the supernatural and trying to correct or evacuate these energies from you. Oh, dear. That seems like something no amateur should try at home. Bingo. So the first quote on there is, if you're reading this, it's likely that you are at your wits end. You want to know, is there something in your house?

This ritual is designed to detect the activity of the supernatural, demonic and or worse. I'm sorry. What? And or worse? What is worse than demonic? I don't know. Don't even know. There was like when I was going to try to condense and do a whole thing about the spiritual or the staircase ritual.

Basically, there's like 20 different items you need, including part of your body. You have to take like a tooth or a nail or a piece of hair. A tooth? I don't know how desperate you are, but you have to take this whole list of items. And on each step of your staircase, you have to do a certain part of the ritual then you you leave an item from the list on each step and then you wait to stay overnight or you let the object stay there overnight and then you do i think you do all the steps in reverse so you like close out the ritual um and it just was like a very long thing for me i have to go through if you want to look it up it's called the staircase ritual on creepypasta and it ends here's the weird part so you do this whole

like overnight ritual blah blah blah blah and the way that it ends is it the quote is once you've done all those things make sure you have a weapon in your hand turn around brace yourself good luck and that's the end of it so like bye it's like now that you've done all that get ready to fight to the death fight demons and or worse anyway that is the staircases in the woods that lead to nowhere wow you know that's kind of rude they're like here's a plan to help you and also at the end i'm gonna say psych it's like yeah i'm just gonna like hopefully you haven't read the last part. So that way you do all the other things.

And then we trick you into exacerbating the problem. Oh, my God. That's really nuts. That'll teach you to read the instructions, I guess. Good job, Em. Thank you so much. And I hope that was interesting. I hope if you're if you're listening to this on the way to like a campsite, the book, you know.

Oh, gosh. I hope you don't listen to anything creepy on the way to a campsite i feel like that's the worst possible plan i hope you're listening to this after you just had like a whole week in at a campsite and like you maybe saw some stairs in the distance but you're like that's not really interesting to me and now you're in the car and you just hit the highway and now i hope you're listening and now you go back and they're gone just hit the highway. And now I hope you're listening. And now you go back. And they're gone. Yeah. Actually, do a quick, Yui. Take a picture if you can.

Please. Let us know that one exists. And then happy trails. Good luck with that. All right. I got to open this wine real quick. Hold on. What are we drinking today?

What are we ripping apart with our bare hands, Christine? Oh, thank you for asking. This is actually a wine enthusiast best buy with over 50 gold medals. It's a Boda Box Cabernet, eco-friendly, portable. I would love that. Yeah. Just trying to save the earth, you know. 50 awards. What do wine awards what is what do you what do wine awards look like do you think you know is it a taste situation or is it like you have to be like a sommelier or however you know i don't know i wonder if just saying 50 medals like i feel like

that's pretty vague i feel like you could really just kind of yeah make that your own i feel like one of the 50 medals is probably like not really that intensive an award. It's like prettiest color, you know, or like. Yeah, yeah. Maybe some of them are really important, but I feel like 50 is like you counted every possible award you got. That's like what we would do if somebody gave us a medal. We'd be like, that counts. I don't know what it is, but it counts.

Like award winning and that's all. You gave me like a yogurt lid like oh i guess i've hit gold then all right let me pour this this is a dangerous game all right we're good all right um i have a doozy is what i'm gonna call it today christine i gotta be honest i love when you use the word doozy i love when you offer me doozy. I love when you put a lot of work into said doozy, which I think is what's already happened since you've done the research. So I thank you in advance for this doozy. Oh, you know what? That's so kind. You are so welcome. Thank you for putting your trust in me. I'm just gonna go right into it because it is, like I said said a doozy and it is a lot so um let's just go so

february 2016 wow we're not even we're like you're just like fuck a title fuck the like we're just going straight into the nitty-gritty i should tell you what it is huh you're just like you're like here we go it was a crisp dark night february 2016 this is the story of phil williams and the elon school elon school like in north carolina not elon but like elon e-l-a-n e oh okay and now there is an accent an accent de goût as my mother would say. You just got chills. Over the E, but they, so I would imagine the emphasis would be on the E, but. Girl, I know you didn't just say emphasis. What is happening?

Is that a word that you really pronounce that way? No, like, you know how they say the emphasis is on the wrong syllable get off of this fucking podcast give me your notes i'll read it i'll do it no that's just me okay wow that wine hit you and it hits you good. I'm very. Elon. Elon. Okay. My thought is with the accent should be like Elon or something, but they pronounce it Elon in the documentary.

So I'm just going to go with what they call it. Cool. Okay. So we're going to call it Elon. Not Elon. Again, no slander to Elon. No. So there's a 45-year-old woman in 2016.

Her name is Pam Newell, and she receives a call from a man called Mark Babbitts. And this man, Mark, is a 56-year-old construction company owner who says he has been working as a bounty hunter for 30 years, and he has tracked Pam down to give her some information that will change her world forever oh god okay done done done is it gonna be good news we'll find out that's a no so pam newell was six years old when her father phil williams was sent to prison for conspiracy to commit murder um and again she was 45 in 2016 so you know this is 39 years earlier um so when she was six her father philly williams was sent to prison for conspiracy to commit murder so pam and her nine-year-old brother phil jr their mother alberta williams uh that was actually the intended victim of the attempted murder. So basically their father attempted to kill their mother.

Fortunately, she did survive. And it was described as a savage pipe attack. That's how he attempted to kill her. Oh, no. And she ended up being put in a nursing home for the next 28 years of her life because she was unresponsive after the attack. Oh, my God. So for obvious reasons, Phil Williams Sr. went to jail. And so now, you know, just total tragedy, these kids,

Pam and her brother Phil Jr., you know, lost their father to prison and their mother to this attack that put her kind of in a comatose state or vegetative state. So Pam and Phil ended up growing up in various foster homes. And yeah, it's a rough story. So Pam remembers her brother as being a beautiful kid and all the girls liked him. She said, I used to get mad because that was my brother and I didn't want any girls around him. We were really, really close. I didn't want any girls around him. We were really, really close. So the Sun Journal reports that by this point, which was now 1982, Phil had grown into a slim teenager. He had wild curly hair. He was very likable, an affable person. And even though on the outside he was very well liked, especially by the girls, he was internally, let's just say, full of rage.

Oh, shit. Well, first of all, so far, can you blame him? Understandable. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I don't know what's going to happen in the future of this story.

I know, it's hard to say. So I was like, okay. No, but I agree with you. I mean, he's still a kid. Like, you would be full of rage. It's just a terrible terrible terrible scenario you found yourself in um so there's an article written by katherine skelton and lindsey tice in 2016 and they explained that phil would quote launch into fits of rage banging his head on the walls once

swinging his foster brother by the ankles into a couch he was often triggered by intense migraines and because of his violent behavior phil was sent to a youth center in Maine before being sent to an expensive correction school in Poland, Maine called the Elon School. Okay, I see what's happening now. So this is the final step in how we got from Phil Williams to the Elon School. So now he is there.

And the Elon School is this sort of, for troubled kids, let's put it that way it's sort of like a private school private boarding school uh that purports to correct troubled behavior in children so i don't like how that sounds. Me neither. So it was a pretty abusive area, a pretty abusive school, I feel? It certainly was. It certainly was. Times a thousand. Yeah. Oh, shit.

Okay. It gets rough. So Pam remembers, we were told Elon was a step up from the youth center because he got transferred and that he was doing well and that everything was going good and he was going to come home. However, ultimately, Pam was horrified, ultimately, when her brother did return home, but in a box, and she only ever saw him at his own funeral. So God, okay, he did not survive his time at the Elon school. Unfortunately, Phil Jr. had suffered what they called an aneurysm and was rushed to St. Mary's General Hospital in Lewiston. Uh-huh. And Pam and her father, Phil Sr., were accompanied by one of Phil Sr.'s prison chaplains in the hospital.

Or, sorry, to the hospital where the doctor confirmed that Phil Jr. was indeed brain dead. His dad remembers just looking at him and holding his hand. I could tell there was no hope. And so they took him off life support, saying it was the hardest decision they'd ever have to make. And he was taken off life support and obviously did not survive. So now poor Pam is like, you know, lost all three of these people in her life. So now poor Pam is like, you know, lost all three of these people in her life.

And so reflecting on what happened to Phil Jr., Phil Sr. and Pam had always kind of had this like nagging feeling in the back of their mind of, you know, an aneurysm. Like, seems really vague. He was so little. Like, strange. It was like fully going to, it's you're're fully gonna tell me it was abuse from this let's just let's just skip let's just get there i hate it sorry it's let's actually just skip it let's i know i know i can't do that but like wow what a relief i felt when you said let's skip it and i was like yeah thank god okay no we can't I know we gotta tell his story we have to honor it but I already am not looking forward to having to hear this yeah so it's it's rough um so for people who don't know an aneurysm is basically a bulge in

your blood vessel usually caused by high blood pressure the majority of aneurysm cases are diagnosed in people over 40 so again Paulul jr he was only 15 at this point and he was very healthy very strong um and there was no family history of aneurysms so it just seemed strange but there was nothing really they could do um strangely lewiston neurosurgeon bruce chaffee filled in phil jr's cause of death as a brain stem compression due to massive cerebral hemorrhage uh it's just very vague um it sounds like it sounds like a very brutal you know cerebral hemorrhage sounds bad uh very bad but there's no detail it's not like from a blunt force object like you hear sometimes in a homicide or anything like that it's just

very vague there was a hemorrhage and he died so pam unfortunately like her whole world fell apart and she was so distraught this is very disturbing and sad but at her own at her brother's funeral she tried to climb into the coffin because she was so upset about losing her brother. That kind of makes me ill. I'm sorry to even say it. So 33 years later, now fast forward to the beginning of the story where she gets a call from this Mark Babbitt's guy, who's the bounty hunter. And he says, buckle up. I have some information for you. I also went to the Elon School in 1975. Oh, my gosh. Okay. I just got chills for my own story. Wow. Yeah. It's like a, we're going to get a tell all of a sudden. It's like a comeuppance, you know? Yeah. Expose. So he says, I also went to the Elon school in 1975 and I have been trying

to track you down because I would like to put you, Pam, in contact with someone who has more information about how your brother died because it was not just a brain aneurysm. So do we know if this guy knew her brother? Yeah, so he was there when her brother passed away. That's what I was wondering. I just didn't know if it was like a big school and they didn't cross paths or something. Oh, yeah, no. He definitely knew.

I didn't even specify that. But yeah, he was there the same year. And he definitely witnessed what happened and knew or he at least knew somebody that he wanted to connect her with who had like much more information about how he had passed away. like we said it was a behavior modification uh program based in poland maine and the word elan is a word meaning energy style and enthusiasm which doesn't quite fit the bill here but i guess they were trying i feel like someone was like i know one french word let's make this place sound really classy put an accent on it we're Yeah. So the guy who founded the school, his name is Joe Ricci. And he was this kind of he was described. I'm going to tell you a little bit about the documentary I watched, but he was described as sort of this like Italian, like this really larger than life persona that was very intimidating. he had suffered from a heroin addiction he was described in details magazine to be one of the few direct descendants of synanon do you know what synanon is

i know synabon he was a descendant of the famed synabon clan. I'm very jealous, by the way. No, I don't know what Cinnabon is. So S-Y-N-A-N-O-N, like anonymous Cinnabon. And essentially, it was a defunct cult, sort of, that pioneered the use of North Korean brainwashing techniques to control its members. So I was gonna make a joke about q anon and if it was a cult and you like kind of beat me to the punch well there you go yeah and it's it was sort of trying to be like a new narcotics anonymous or a new aa oh oh that makes me feel bad that i said cult sorry no but yeah i mean it was like more it was a cult it was more they it's like they tried to take the concept of aa or na and turn it into like a tougher got it program that would like

you know kick the addiction out of you through you know it just okay pretty fucked up and it already sounds like they missed the mark because they're not defunct because they're defunct defunct but also it sounds like they already lack serious communication skills which is necessary for any therapy so oh valid point yes sounds like it was not going to work from the beginning yeah they kind of missed the mark step one exactly uh yeah so joe this joe ricci guy this like italian mafioso character, he had attended a rehab center called Daytop Village. And he was commended as one of Daytop's greatest success story by Corrections magazine because he responded so well, quote unquote, to the Synanon brainwashing methods, basically. Yikes. synanon brainwashing methods basically yikes so he was like the poster child of this kind of synanon

uh rehab program uh question what did the so i understand where anon came from but where did sin come from or is it like sinning it's s-y-n um that's a great question. Okay. I don't know if there is. I don't know. I don't think I actually know what that would stand for. Sin. Like we're all in sync? Synchronized? I don't know. I feel like sin would have been a more cute play on words.

Cute being a person. So, you know, that's what they were going for was cute. Cute-sy and a play on words no it's i don't know i don't know i'm annoyed now that i can't think of it sin i mean sin would make sense if they're trying to like get like what they think is sinful out of you or something yeah but it's syn which doesn't really i know that's why i'm saying it should have been spelled it would have made more sense syn i don't know i keep interrupting you like i'm so sorry just keep no you don't no no i mean it's interesting because like i'm reading this entire there's this

la magazine article that i read and it does not even say like it they don't mention it so all right well hey i wonder if it just had some meaning that didn't end up having anything to do with oh there is a video here um a youtube video uh that the the preview says synanon where only the damned want in um so a 1965 uh trailer a 1965 documentary about it so it's just a rough place and um i'm sure somebody will tweet at us like hello obviously it means cinnabon or whatever the hell it actually means. I'm not sure. No worries. But so maybe if Eva's still watching this, she can find out while we record and do a little Googling.

Do a little Goog. No worries either way. This is pretty interesting. So Cinnabon was, like I said, a drug rehab program founded by a guy named Charles E. Chuck. Now, are we both thinking Chuck E. Cheese? Because that's where my mind went. Except I know that Chuck E. Cheese's middle name is E stands for entertainment. So I don't know about this guy.

Right, Charles Entertainment Cheese. This guy is Charles Entertainment Chuck. Okay. I'm losing my mind. I'm losing my mind. You're stupid. Charles E. Chuck. And his last name is dead rich uh eva says i just got back from the potty i missed what you want from me basically that's not what you said we're talking about synanon s-y-n-a-o-n it's like a drug rehab

program from the 60s and we're trying to figure out what the S-Y-N means. Synanon. We couldn't figure it out. We know anon means anonymous, but we don't know what syn means. Yeah. So this guy, Charles E. Chuck Dedrich Sr., he promoted a form of therapy. And this might give you a little more clarity on their approach. He called it attack therapy. Fucking ya okay never mind i can barely say that with a straight

face like what are you doing by the way it sounds like something q anon would come up with it does it sounds like i was gonna say it sounds like a wartime brain that's literally what it's from north korean brainwashing technique they are both well never mind we don't need to talk about q anon today but i i sense some similarities pretty immediately i feel like i just keep opening doorways for you to talk about q anon and you're having to like be like stop don't try my adhd is really trying to over correct me into that focus and i'm really trying to talk about so sorry so so basically they called it attack therapy uh basically exactly what it sounds like intense emotional and physical confrontation and abuse in an attempt to kind of get your feelings out and address your problems um so in attack therapy

uh individuals are torn down harassed and ridiculed. And this is all part of the process, the healing process. Gross. It's like, it feels like they're trying to like break you and start you from the beginning. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So that's actually what they described in the documentary. Someone said like, I never understood why they wanted to break you down just to try and fix you. Like, why do you even need to break somebody before you fix them? It's a whole interesting thought process. But so along with psychiatrist Gerald Davidson, this guy, oh, Eva found out. He literally made it up.

It's okay. I feel so much better. I felt really stupid there for a minute. It says, Sinanon, this is, thank you, Eva, our genius. Sinanon is a word of his own invention integrating togetherness sin with the unknown anon so it's literally like you said in sync yeah which by the way like thank you eva first of all thank you eva but second of all i feel like if you gave me like two more sentences about the type of person this guy was i would have been able to guess that he just made

this he invented it right weird narcissistic ass was like this is the smartest word that's ever been invented he probably called it he probably originally registered the llc as like attack therapy inc and they were like you can't do that you need to come up with something a little less dramatic so yeah along with this uh psychiatrist gerald davidson this guy joe ricci who um founded the elon school uh they found an area of land in what seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. Oh, maybe a staircase ensued. I'm not sure.

Uh-oh. It started with a staircase, became a whole building. It became a staircase to hell, as you mentioned earlier. So they found this land in the middle of nowhere in Maine. They cobbled together some buildings and run down trailers and they called it the Elon School and they opened it in 1974 because I guess in the 70s you could just kind of have a trailer and be like this is my school now and that's what they did so it was a facility for joe to give uh to kind of pass on the knowledge he had learned at synanon uh to help other people uh you know fix their own problems he wanted to pass on he wanted to uh what do you call it um

what he wanted to what's the phrase you know me in english um i don't know tell me give me like a couple more syllabalays or whatever you said earlier he wanted to like pass it on like what he learned like he wanted to pass on the torch maybe not really i don't know it's fine i'm just having a brain we'll figure it out in 10 minutes but it's not necessary anymore eva will probably figure it out uh so it was this facility he decided uh this is where i'm going to teach the youths what I learned. And around 150 students attended. Pay it forward? Pay it forward.

Thank you. That's it. Yes, that's exactly it. He's like, I benefited so much from this synonym that I want to do the right thing and charge people a shit ton of money in cash. That is the right thing to do. Exactly. That's what I always say. Yeah.

that's what i always say yeah um so he uh basically had convinced families to send their problematic quote-unquote children ages 12 to 18 uh who were like a lost cause like if they had tried everything else he'd be like send them to me i'll figure it out god yeah so you want to know how much this is 1974. Do you want to know how much tuition was a year? I feel like at the time it was like $15,000. So it ranged between $44,000 and $55,000. Yeah. For then, did you do the calculations? Is that not bananagrams? I did not even do the calculations is that not bananagrams i did not even do the calculations i just went wow that's a really fancy car and just moved on um oh my god okay hang on i have to i have to look up what that what that is okay it's 1974 yeah geez okay and it was

44 grand to what what was the range so the upper range was 55 but i think that was probably later like as the years went on i don't think it was 55 the first year oh my god it's 235 000 dear lord basically a quarter million dollars wow holy shit and you know that range is kind of an estimate that has been reported. There was never an official number given. So I don't know if that was like the price in the 90s or, you know, I don't know exactly that it was 1974 that that was the price range. But at a certain point, I mean, a couple of decades, it was open. People were paying that much.

And it was much more nowadays. This is going to be like the most ignorant thing I've ever said. But I didn't even know that much money existed back then. It just sounds like. I'm like, wow, someone back then had a quarter million dollars. You know, what was seemingly the equivalent. Yeah. Someone just had that to just throw at a kid that was like, quote, not worth it.

Like what? I know. Bananas. It's kind of a dark and weird. You're right. It's like a weird paradox because it's like. I guess you could also pitch like, but I'm saving your child's potential. Well, that's and that's exactly how he pitched it is like, you know, he would say you your child would be dead.

Otherwise, your child would be overdosing or in jail. And like, isn't it worth like they did the documentary and they interviewed this woman in the 70s and they said, like, you're paying so much money. Is it worth it? And she said, yes. And they said, you know, how is that worth it? And she said, well, how much is a life worth? Like that was literally how they looked worth it? And she said, well, how much is a life worth? Like that was literally how they looked at it. And, you know, people sending their kids there didn't necessarily know how brutal, they didn't necessarily know what they were signing up for. They just thought,

oh, this is some cool new program that's guaranteed to work, a fancy boarding school. And that's not quite what they got so um the word got out via newspaper ads a lot of parents started signing up their children um some parents would drop their children off themselves but more often than not two quote big strong and insistent men known as the, this is a problematic name, the Teen Escort Company. Whoa. Okay. Would subdue the teen, often in bed, like they'd come into their bedroom in the middle of the night to kidnap them, handcuff them, throw them into a van, and then drive you into this rural area in Maine. So, so far this sounds a lot, I mean, I know that it's the,

there's about to be like some serious abuse. So like, I'm not trying to, you know, compare apples and oranges here, but so far the beginning of this still happens at a lot of those programs. Like if you've ever seen like Steve Wilkos or Jerry Springer or whatever, and they like send the kids to like a farm like it starts with like i was gonna ask you if you like follow any of that youtube drama where the family vloggers had their kid sent to one of these programs um in the southwest i don't want to like name the name of the program but they basically signed up to have their kid taken down there and um now this

place is very i mean they've been under scrutiny for neglecting their children all sorts of stuff but oh they were sorry you said a vlog family and i was like oh my god did they like force their kid to vlog undercover okay so that's oh no sorry this was like they were punishing their child oh holy shit sorry so they signed him up for this program and he was like abducted from his room. That was like, yeah, like you said, part of the thing. And then it came out that there's a documentary on this program. And yeah, a kid died as part of this program. Wait, I feel like i did hear about that it was pretty you know there's like abuse allegations surrounding this wilderness therapy program um yeah it it gets messy and that's like you said it's still happening like that's a current issue i don't know i don't know the the going on now right with that kind of stuff but i do know that like they would show that stuff filmed, like which like, I don't know if it's scripted or not.

Steve Wilkos. But I mean, they would show like, you know, waking a kid up in the middle of the night to like throw them off or like when they're unsuspecting it so they can't run away. Can't run away. And then just like nothing about the clothes in their back and just throw them in a van and they like get permission on camera of like, do you mom and dad like get permission on camera of like do you

mom and dad yeah give us permission to do whatever and i think that's kind of the iffy part is like you know if the parents say yes and the kid has no independence in you know in the say it's like oh that's ethically very iffy also it's like how much are the parents being told before they give the permission because if your whole job as a guardian of a minor is to keep them safe then like are you really properly giving are you at point are you even ethically able to give permission to that and that's what like a lot of these legal issues are now with this these wilderness programs because one of the uh the contracts or the waivers was leaked and one of the things the parents had to sign was

like a promise to never sue and it's like what a wild thing to have to sign that you'll never sue red flag massive red flag right and it's really sketchy i wonder if the elon or elon school had something like that of like i don't even know if it mattered back in the day of like, oh, you can't sue us. Because back then, what year was this again? This was the 70s? Yeah. I mean, like, what, not saying this like to be like off the cuff, but like, what was child abuse considered back then? Right, exactly.

I feel like people weren't as scared of like getting caught or something. I'm sure it was 50 years ago, you know, like it's such a different and it's almost 50 years ago you know like it's such a different it's half a century ago like it was such a different time to begin with so right now what's really shocking might have been different than what it was back then yeah um so right i'm not saying you know any of these wilderness programs are like doing the most wild brutal shit but they're definitely under attack for you know various maybe not so ethical uh issues but yeah so basically they would quote unquote kidnap i'm saying that i don't think they called it kidnapping but like the teen abduction force or whatever the fuck they were called would

show up in the bedroom and like take these children um subdue them take them to rural Maine and uh it was not exactly the most welcoming place as you can probably imagine the first thing that you learned according to Joe Ricci who founded the place is that you're not going to get out of here no matter how many times you run away we will go and get you oh my god they had guards in the woods who would like wait for teenagers to like try and escape and then they would subdue them. And then, of course, they would get punished, which we'll get into. But like people would. One guy said he escaped all the way to California and he was then. And he got found and caught? And somebody came up behind him and just like gagged him and they took him all the way back to Maine. Holy shit. They did not fuck around.

Wow. So it's not even like if you're off the premises like or out of state lines. Right. Oh my gosh. Like that can't be legal. I mean it's. You don't think so. Like I wouldn't think so.

But I guess if they're trying to claim like we're the guardians now they signed over guardian rights and we're just trying to i guess protect you know very quotes air quotes um so now what could label you as problematic is the big question here um this is another giant yuck moment because children were sent there for everything from like needing legitimate medical and psychological help. There's one woman who was interviewed in the documentary who said she didn't even know, but while she was at the Elon School, one of the teachers announced to the rest of the class, did you guys know that Mary was diagnosed with autism before she got here um and she's like I didn't even know that until I got there and they announced it to everybody so it was like part of her records or whatever what so it you know anything from being you know having a learning

disability um to drug addictions to heroin addiction um a lot of them were sexually abused. I think they said a very high portion of these kids were sexually abused by their own family or people close to them. Some kids like Phil Williams Jr. were violent, but oftentimes just in reaction to being, you know, in the system or, you know, being provoked by. Or watching his, like, dad kill his mom or knowing about it. God. Exactly. So it's like. I'd be reactive too.

Reactive, exactly. And so very broad range of what could get you sent here. It reminds me a lot of the women being. Asylum. Asylum, right. It's like, oh, because you, like, had an attitude one time. She's menstruating, send her to the asylum. I am interested in another woman.

Oh, another woman, and therefore she should be gone for the rest of time until she's dead. She needs to go. Yeah, exactly. So very wild, wide range. And there's a really in-depth blog post called Suzuki's Thoughts that kind of talks about all facets of this place. And it quotes, some were orphans sent by guardians who couldn't take care of them. Others were juvenile offenders ordered to enroll in a lawn as part of a criminal sentence. Some were the heirs of multimillionaires who were enticed by the idea of a boarding school

in the middle of the woods. And some were kids who had been having academic trouble. And then there were those who were neither troubled kids, nor outlaws, nor school dropouts. They were depressed, suicidal, or worse, simply misunderstood. These kids suffered from mental illness, chronic depression, or autism spectrum disorder. They were sent to Elan solely because they were different, because they couldn't fit in with others,

and because their parents and guardians believed that their condition was merely a behavioral phase that could be cured with rigid discipline yeah this was the most disturbing aspect of elon's enrollment these autistic or mentally ill children needed support and treatment and instead they showed up here and i'll tell you what happened instead yeah i know i mean i i like i know that we quote knew less in the 70s but like at the same time like if your whole system or your whole concept is like we're a school that's going to be like hyper aware of what people's needs are and then like you're going to do attack therapy on like simply neurodivergent people. Like what the fuck is going on?

Like like 14 year old like you're a divergent kid. Your main premise should be being able to understand people and their backgrounds. And you're like, oh, everyone is exactly the same. Let's use attack therapy and break them. Exactly. And to your point, they they made it very clear in the documentary as well that none of the people running this place had any medical background, any psych background. I'm glad you mentioned that because I was like, who, what doctor signed off on this method? Nobody. It was this Joe Ricci guy who was like, hey, this worked on me. Let's do it to a bunch of children who are misunderstood and neurodivergent. So that's really the end all be all is like there was not even any psych influence, like medical background to any of this.

I feel like there wasn't even someone who signed off that was like legally, this is fine. Yeah, not at least not back in the 70s. Yeah, not that I could tell. So, oh, so the documentary I watched, which is, I really recommend it just even just to hear people tell their first person stories. It's called The Last Stop. It's on Amazon Prime. If you Google it, you should be able to find it somewhere for cheap, but it's called The Last Stop. And it talks to a bunch of survivors about their experiences from different decades, which is cool. So like the 70s, 80s, 90s and 2000s. That's how long this place fucking ran.

Sorry, what? When did it close? 2011. And they were using the same tactics this whole time? Yeah, pretty much. Maybe not exactly the same same but it was still was shut down for you know scandalous reasons honestly i kind of wonder if like there was a crossover then between this and like oh it could very well be where the jerry springer

see will go wait a second i don't know what i think they were on a farm i don't really remember but i like i for all we know that's where they got fucking sent who knows well you know they had jobs they had chores or like jobs they had it was like sort of a self-sufficient quote-unquote like make the prisoners do the work kind of thing um and it was out in like very rural area i mean who knows or it was something similar which also sucks because that means there were more than one. But I guess that's not surprising. So The Last Stop is really good. And so a lot of this is from that documentary and people's like firsthand accounts, which is cool. So once you arrived at Elan, one of the first things to happen was that you were assigned a

big brother who was an older student. And this was a co-ed place. So I don't know why they were just called a big brother, but they were. Who was an older student and this was a co-ed place so i don't know why they were just called a big brother but they were um who was an older student that would be both your guide and your jailer uh to make sure you stayed in line basically um and big brothers would play tricks on their little brother by speaking to them about running away trying to like you know bait them into admitting that play tricks on them, aka like, I don't even know if I just plain old manipulating them into like, leaving just to catch them. Yeah, exactly. Admitting that they were going to run away, and then they would report them to get them punished. And so you were also told you were called non strength. And so all new

students were called non strength, there was And so all new students were called non-strength. There was non-strength and there was strength. And so there was a class divide where the strength students, you had to like graduate to that point. And non-strengths were not permitted under any circumstances to talk to other non-strengths. Only strengths could talk to non-strengths. So confusing. strengths could talk to non-strengths okay so confusing so uh the elon cast system uh was very effective mostly because like everything in elon this is from uh the website elon.school which originally was a school's website but has since been taken over by the people who have like you

know shut it down and like are spreading that which is great. It's like a full takeover. So according to their website, the Elan cast system was very effective, mostly because like everything in Elan, they took it completely to the extreme. So when you were a non, you couldn't so much as look in the direction of another non, you couldn't so much as pass them a broom. You couldn't say bless you if they sneezed, you had to look away in an exaggerated manner if one was looking at you. You definitely didn't want to whisper anything to yourself or make any weird hand gestures while another non was around because you would be immediately accused of sending them a message. And remember, strengths were everywhere and it was literally their job to catch you doing any of these things. Wow. And a lot of the problem too is that they would have the kids enforcing the rules so it was

like it's very lord of the flies yeah it's very lord of the flies that it's it's kind of rough because you're like you want to blame the people enacting these punishments but then you're like they're just other kids being forced to do it so it's it really fucked up. And it really is like a survival of the fittest environment where it's like, even if you don't want to be mean, it's like, if you don't be mean, then someone else is going to do something to you. Exactly. Then you're just going to be stuck there. Yeah. And it's like, you have to fight, kill or be killed, basically. And so you'd often spend six months trying to earn a strength title, although some kids just never made it to strength. And once you'd arrive, you'd also have to start writing your guilt letter.

I'm sorry. Are we not noticing all of the parallels to this in Scientology? Oh, M. Because like the fact that like you, they all rat each other out or try to like coax they're all spying on each other to then like put them in i don't know like scientology jail whatever it is where they have to like go through those like cup interviews and then like like they have to good point they have to write those letters that way like they have all their admissions written down that can be used against them. Oh, right. They have like blackmail on you.

Yeah. Good point. Oh, my God. And the 70s. Wasn't that like right in the beginning of Scientology? Maybe he was reading some like Dianetics bullshit while he was doing this. He was like, listen, we got some Synanon, all this made up shit. Synanon, Scientology, Xenu.

Right. Combine them. We got this covered. We're going to put a bunch of children in in in the mix and see what happens what a mess such a mess um so you would write this guilt letter which was a letter you'd send home to your family explaining why you deserve to be there so god they like forced you to write it uh however any contact home that you usually you didn't get any contact home but if you did if you were able to write a letter or make a phone call of course it would all be screened it would all be listened to they had other kids screening all the phone

calls and taking extensive notes on everybody's conversations um and then for the everyday activities of Elon, as an Elon resident, more like, I don't know, captive. Yeah, I was going to say prisoner. Prisoner. Or something, yeah. Exactly. You would participate in a daily activity called encounter groups. So in encounter groups, you were asked to fill in a little slip of paper. And in the example, in the documentary, they had a copy of one and it was written in Comic Sans. I was like, how fun that they tried to make it whimsical for everybody. This is just like every other child's experience. They were like attack therapy in like alternating cases.

Curls MT. Curls MT. Exactly. So they had this little slip of paper and it read to blank and you would write the person's name. Then you would write from your own name. And it was then followed by a list of five emotions and you would circle at least one of the emotions that applied. So if I were writing a letter to you, I'd be like, 2M from Christine. And the emotion I would circle is like infatuation. Not really.

In real life, I would. Circle yes or no. Circle the butterfly or cross it out. Let me know which one you are. No, I got you. If that were an option, sure. Let me know which one you are. No, I got you.

If that were an option, sure. But yeah, so the list of the actual list of emotions were less fun. There was anger, hurt, jealousy, intimidation and concern. Oh, God. None of those are good. Bad. Concern sounds a if somebody said I'm concerned about you, I'd be like, that's so fucking demeaning. And like, yeah, you know how I get very defensive. a if somebody said i'm concerned about you i'd be like that's so fucking demeaning and like yeah you know how i get very defensive again very vague because it's like concerned about what

concerned about yourself concerned about me concerned like anyone could take you're concerned and very quickly like i don't know gaslight you into like oh you're concerned about how we're handling things oh you're don't worry you worry. You're about to find out every detail about why someone is concerned with you. Because you circle it. You put it in a box at the front of the room. Then everyone sits in a circle and the director reads out all the notes, followed by, okay, M, you are concerned about Christine. They would say, get your feelings off. And that was basically the ready, set, go for you to just start screaming at me. You just started, you, it was like attack

therapy. You yelled, you got your emotions out. And like, I have a hard time with this because I don't know. I don't know how else to say it except that yelling is something I really struggle with from life experience. And I can't listen to yelling. Like it makes me, I'm literally sweating thinking about it. So in the documentary when they had an actual recording of one of these sessions of these kids just screaming at each other, I had to fast forward it i it was just so overwhelming but um yeah you would it's called primal scream therapy and like you would just scream at the other person and be like i mean some of the examples were literally like you fucking whore i saw you talking to so and so and well i mean just oh yeah because this is also co-ed right yes yeah which like makes it twice as bad to me because like it's i mean not saying that like there weren't like potentially closeted gay boys in my head this was like an all boys school but now that you're adding in the fact that there's like romantic or sexual expectations that could be going on in some way like there could be like

assault going on and like i'm already thinking about just like in terms of in just that one instance of like if someone got assaulted was that girl then allowed to scream at the person later or would that like just get her in more trouble like i feel like yeah because then i feel like you're in your own like, like your own, like, not only are you sitting inside this like abusive hellhole of a building, but every person around you is a potential threat. But they're also saying the only way to heal is to scream your true emotions at them, which could set other people off and hurt you. Exactly. It's like get that all out. But then the aftermath of that. Yeah, the consequences are also something you have to consider. And again, these are kids like they're all kids. So it's like how can you expect them to. Like teach them to scream and but not process or teach them to like get all their feelings up and not actually teach people how to regulate.

feelings up and not actually teach people how to regulate, cope or or regulate or communicate. And one of the one of the women in the documentary, too, said like sometimes to this day, and she was probably in her, I would guess, 60s. And she said, to this day, if I'm having a hard day, I don't give myself a pep talk. Like I hear screaming, like I hear people screaming at me. And it it makes like it made me cry. I was like, that's nightmarish. You're in your 60s. This has had such a lasting impact. You were there for what, a year?

And like it has traumatized you to such an extent that you still to this day, like that's how you deal with, you know, feeling less than. So it's really they had an example in the documentary. So if you're, you know, sensitive to that, like me, be forewarned. But basically, you would get a certain timer of a time limit of screaming at the person until you got it all off out of your system. It's terrifying to listen to. and this is just how they had you deal with your emotions so uh they'd also facilitate this thing called primal scream therapy which was just like just guttural screaming to like try and get your emotions out which like i'm sorry but like this is the i i'm i'm very aware of how much I'm interrupting you in this story. No, no, no.

It's just like. How could you not? I mean, like what a perfect example of like toxic masculinity, too, by the way, of like this guy is like running this built this school full of children. And he is like, well, the way I learned is just to scream instead of express or like yeah i feel like at some point violence is going to get involved in which case i'm gonna be like oh interesting how you also thought that was the way to heal like i'm not saying that that's how all men or all people handle things but it's very interesting that like this one guy tried this really shitty version of therapy and like was like now all of a sudden like I'm good enough at this that I can make children.

And to force it upon children. It wasn't like, oh, you can volunteer for this. It was like, not that that's any better as a child. You don't really have that that consent, but just to even be forcing them. And then if they don't participate to punish them them it just adds such a fucked up level to this just for the just for the the version of therapy that he thinks works is the one that involves zero communication zero self-growth zero looking within zero yeah talking to others introspection no communication no just like be primal and scream guttural sounds and probably be violent

until you just don't feel anything. Until you just. Exhaust yourself. Or end up with a brain aneurysm. Amen. Spoiler alert. Yeah. So that's basically how it went day to day.

And they had these they had this list of rules, of course, which you had to adhere to. And they were called guilt. And if you went against guilt, and guilt was obviously a huge part of how they enacted like control over you. And if you went against guilt, there would be severe repercussions. So the Suzuki thoughts blog I mentioned earlier did a list of what guilt included. I'm going to list some of them here. Talking too quietly, talking too loudly, talking to someone without authorization, talking to a non-strength while being a non-strength, talking too much, not talking enough,

talking about non-Elon related subjects, having sex, but that not only having sex, but also looking at someone the opposite gender, very heteronormative place, the 70s, 80s, talking to someone of the opposite sex, you could immediately be blamed for being sexually interested in somebody, even if you had a crush, not good. Deliberately avoiding looking at someone of the opposite sex. So even if you were looking at them and you got in trouble because now you were sexually interested in them, but if you avoided looking at them, then that was like also shady. And now you got in trouble because now you were sexually interested in them but if you avoided looking at them then that was like also shady and now you were in trouble for

intentionally avoiding looking at them i mean it was like anything you possibly did was going to get you i mean it sounds like just any good old classic domestic abuser fully you can't win there's absolutely nothing you can do and i will find a way to be upset i will find a way you will do something wrong in my eyes literally you are trying to avoid looking at someone avoid doing the thing in either direction and you're so wrong and you're and how dare you yeah um so uh let's see what else do we have being attracted to someone looking outside looking at the floor having body language, reacting to insults, slouching or yawning, being sideways, reading or writing. Okay.

Educating yourself. So also like. Yep. one was old enough strong enough or even should have to do this but i would love from a third party perspective to just sit across from a bar with this guy and be like so what are they supposed to do like yeah like what like what is your expectation what's the ideal student then like don't look don't look outside don't look at people do look at people but not for the same amount of time don't look at the floor where are they where do they look what do they look at sit up straight but don't look like you're smug uh yeah don't read but talk but not a lot but also not too often but also not often enough but also

too loud but too soft pretty quietly but not too quiet it's that shit crazy. Drawing, not falling asleep, sleeping for too long, laughing at a joke made by someone of a higher rank, doing poorly on academics even though there really wasn't any school, feeling tired, speaking without permission, eating after designated mealtimes, not eating, going outside, rolling your eyes, attempting to run away, swearing without permission, smiling without permission, not smiling enough, making any sort of physical contact, even shaking hands was forbidden, wearing clothes with image, which I assume is like trying to be trendy, having bad thoughts, showing or voicing any dissent. So you're fucked, basically. That's the list of examples. I would love to know the statistics of what happened to kids after they either graduated, whatever that means, or left this program. Because there's no offense to those people. And I'm sure they went through hell and back. But I can't imagine the vast majority are 1,000% stable or feeling mentally safe and healthy. No.

And they do actually. i don't know the right word i don't mean to offend anybody but like like after going through that kind of trauma like i'd love to know where you ended up this doesn't set you up for success you know at the very least and i there in that documentary they do have statistics of the percentage of people who ended up um river there's a whole list of statistics but it's like the people the percentage of people who left ilan and ended up um becoming addicted to drugs the percentage of people who ended up in jail so they do have all the statistics actually and they are not good yeah really not good i think yeah yeah really bad i mean there's just a whole bunch of traumatized children that

you just send back out into the world um so actually i'm gonna stop there because i have like literally four more pages and i feel like we're at two hours so we did a halfway point but that's fine i i you never get to do two-parters but like i know i don't want to rush it you probably could have gotten through it if i wasn't interrupting so many times but But like... You needed to, though. Like, I couldn't just spell off... In the darkest way possible, this is fascinating. It's so sad, but it's like... I feel like I don't want to overlook

what these poor kids had to go through either. It's definitely a discussion-based topic, discussion-based story. And there's just so much more. I mean, usually my stories are like four pages and I just went through four pages. So that's about the length of a normal story anyway, but I don't want to rush it. So that's so, I mean, wow, it's crazier. So I guess we'll, I can't, we haven't even gotten to violence yet. It's just been like, I know true.

Like just feels like a complete dictatorship over innocent kids who don't even want to be there or need to be there. And the fact that it went on until 2011, yikes. And the fact that he was making a cool, like, maybe quarter million dollars per child. Per person. My God. Well, okay. I don't really want to say I can't wait to find out what happens, but I do look forward to hearing the rest of this. Yeah.

Sorry in advance if I interrupt you next week because I got to. No, I'm glad. I have a lot of opinions apparently. Well, it's worth discussing, I think. So thank you for sitting through that. You're welcome i will uh good call on making it a two-parter and i'll try to come up with uh some new fascinating story next week that maybe involves less stares this time i feel like i'm pretty exhausted from that so i'd rather not i'll try to find like a haunted couch next time

you know so foot will lay on something something more well maybe someone will write in with that barbie dream house and we can finally go over that honestly if i if i could find a story in the next week of a haunted barbie dream house can you imagine that would really i'll figure out what happens we'll figure out the deal all right well we'll see y'all then fingers crossed for that dream house like i was when i was a child and i never got it so uh me neither and that's why we drink