And That's Why We Drink - E308 Trenchfoot Animation and Ballhootin' Through the Holler

Episode Date: January 1, 2023

Happy episode 308! We mean, New Year! We recorded ahead so we don't have any predictions for the new year yet but we're still bringing the creeps this week. First Em tells the folklore of the Dullahan, from the Irish Otherworld. Then Christine brings us murders along the Appalachian trail. And, for now, we are at peace in the Troll Hole... and that's why we drink!Don't miss out on our brand new, spooky live show: On the Rocks! andthatswhywedrink.com/liveP.S. Here's the link to the video Christine mentions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03iwAY4KlIU&feature=youtu.be

I'll talk I'll talk this time uh hello Christine um you have on a you look a little trashy classy today because you really started strong with trashy classy instead of classy trashy thank you you you have the head for it at least the band for it so i got the headband i'm wearing my um bigfoot sweatshirt what's the what is on your little headband what is what's the pattern i don't know oh i didn't know if there was splotches. From here, it looks like it could have been a thing. So I don't know if there was a thing. No, I'm a little offended you're not impressed by my Bigfoot sweatshirt, but okay. I think I've seen you wear that before.

I haven't seen this headband though. But I like both of them. You look very nice. Thank you so much. This was actually my LA headband that was in the LA apartment for months. And then I missed it. So I stole it back. You stole it from yourself.

From myself. Yes. How are you, Em? I'm good and sleepy. But that's usual. But I just, I'm sleepy because I stayed up late working. So I'm just um you know i did to myself so i really had no room to complain but anyway we do anyway so we never

stopped this before if there's a will there's a way and i will find a way to always complain about being tired when it is fully self-induced um also i you can't really tell totally, but just trust me, this room for a long time was a mess and I cleaned it yesterday and I'm feeling a lot more at peace in the troll hole. Good. Um, RJ texted me. I've always wanted like friends to actually do the, oh, I'm in your neighborhood. I just didn't know if I could pop over.

I've always wanted that. That's my nightmare. I know, but I've've it's my dream would be for that to happen just all the time and um you're literally the strangest person like I feel like that goes against everybody's instinctual nature of like I don't know I'm never wearing clothes I'm all everything's always dirty I always just started a Netflix show and I'm very comfy I don't know I grew up with with the same group of friends and we didn't have boundaries. So I'm just used to.

I also grew up in a neighborhood where all of us knew each other really well and we didn't really care for boundaries. So I'm just used to people always walking into the house. So I miss that and I don't have it here. And RJ called me and he was like hey i'm heading over just wanted to say hi and so that made it forced me to finally clean the troll hole so because it was his bedroom so i was like oh shit i can't make it look like yeah like his room is just the clutter room now so yeah anyway that's fun did he come over yeah he hung out for a little bit um oh yeah we i found out that we have the same dentist which is nice um the two of you i thought you meant you and me i was like i don't

think so unless you still come to la um i certainly don't no but i barely dragged myself to the dentist as is i asked why he was popping over and he said he was going to the dentist and i went oh where's your dentist and i was like oh that's exactly my dentist. And so I told him next time that he's there to ask Olivia for the work gossip because she will give it to you. So great. Anyway, why do you drink, Christine? Oh, thank you for asking. I actually have a very specific reason. I think I think people are going to be interested. I hope. Oh my God. What? Why do you react like that? Why do you react like that? I am interested. I just, look, you don't act like half the time you say something I shouldn't be a little fearful of. So

I'm just bracing myself. Okay, fine. I drink because I'm going to get hypnotherapy on Wednesday for my phone anxiety. Oh man. I'm so excited. I think that's also super good that you're excited because it means it's more likely to work, right? I hope so. I don't know. So the first session, so okay, here's what I did, which I feel like people find this very funny. I didn't find it funny at the time. I do see the irony and I do think it'll be funny someday when I'm hopefully no longer afraid of the phone. But at the time I was like, you really put me through it, Barbara. I forget her name. So I messaged two different hypnotherapists in my area. I like filled out their online form and, you know, explain the phone anxiety and like just the my like fear of getting on the phone and how it's just detrimental to my work and my life and

the next day my phone rings and I'm like you've got to be kidding me that is there is an irony to that I know and like she left a voicemail and I was like, girl, I'm not calling you back. Okay. I'm sorry. Don't you get the hint? Yeah. And so like I had jokingly even said, oh, well, if any, like the true test of who will be the best fit is the one that like doesn't call me.

Right. And so my new hypnotherapist, she emailed me and she said, would you be more comfortable talking via email and never called me and I was like that's so kind and yes please and so yeah we we set up an appointment but she said the first appointment is just to like go over any root causes of why this might be the problem and I don't really know so I'm a little bit nervous about that and then she said if everything goes smoothly and she feels like it's a good fit, then we'll start actual hypnotherapy in the new year.

So I'm very excited. Oh, that's very fun. You've been wanting this for a long time. A long time. And at first it was for my needle thing, but like my needle phobia, but I'm like, you know what? I had to dive right into that one. Yeah. Like I got forced into exposure therapy. I had to dive right into that one. Yeah. Like I got forced into exposure therapy. Exactly. And I feel like as insane as it sounds, I'm almost now more afraid of being on the phone than getting an IV. I think it's just because I get them so freaking often. But yeah. So anyway, I don't know. We'll see if it works. I will keep everybody apprised of my progress. Do you, what was I going to say? say do you know what the like how many sessions it takes there's no way it's just like a one-time thing right i don't think so so she said the

first one is just like a sit down like go over you know all the background stuff and then prepare for the hypnotherapy session and then i think it probably takes a couple at least i feel like i feel like you I don't know anything about it but it sounds like you can't just it sounds too easy for it to work like one time or two times I feel like it's like going to the gym like you have to keep practicing the muscle or something yeah you know I don't know I'm very curious though how like if you need to re-up like do you have to like the following year like like go back or does it just fix it, you know, or does it fix it at all? I don't know. Like we'll find out, but. Well, both of my parents have been

hypno, have had hypnotherapy at different times and it sounded like it was like a, basically a one and done thing. Oh really? I think so. Um, then again, every time my mom went to hypnotherapy or my dad went to hypnotherapy for something, would just like like it was for like to not smoke cigarettes and then they actually wouldn't my mom not my mom my dad would not smoke cigarettes anymore and then i think just for like fucking fun he was like going he was going to because everyone else was even though he didn't want to do it anymore and then all of a sudden it would it's break the break the spell so i every time he went back it was like to correct him being stupid so um and then my mom she had oh my god my mom is still a mess actually if if you need a real hypnotherapist like if this one doesn't work i'll just give you the number two when my mom went to

i remember you telling me about it but i don't remember the details oh she i don't know what her deal was for a while she was like addicted is probably the wrong word but she had like a real unhealthy like very very unhealthy attachment to diet coke and um like she was like drinking like several cans a day like was always had one on her and i think one of her ways of trying to break the diet Coke habit or just to be healthier in general. She realized she wasn't drinking a lot of water. So she went to a hypnotherapist and told them that she wanted to be hypnotized to want to drink more water. And to this day, the anxiety attack that comes out of her if she's not even near water is really it's it's unsettling it's like no

like it's almost like it worked too well and i like how you're like this is the person you should see i'm just saying like it's the anxiety she has without water is definitely it's definitely different than her original behavior so if you want to see a change i can offer you a person get what she asked for technically you know she. I guess the hypnotist might have just probably used the wrong words or something because whatever the hypnotist said made my mom under this trance think, if you don't have a bottle of water in your hand at all moments, you will die immediately. Jesus! Yeah, I would say those are the wrong words.

Definitely the wrong words. But you know what? It certainly worked. And so now if she, everywhere she goes, you will always see her with a bottle of water she'll never drink it which is the irony she'll never drink it but she will hold it and it will always be by her side ready for her to drink if she needs it the question that i think we're all wondering is does she still drink diet coke she does not drink diet coke wow okay i mean you know what it's it was very much the monkey's paw situation where she ended up like having this like really weird anxiety about water but damn it does

she not want to drink diet coke yeah you know what i guess sort of check the box you know i wonder if that means that i will just want to be on the phone all like i will literally be calling you every like jesus christ you've always wanted to just like, pop in or call and all of a sudden, you'll be like, Okay, I didn't mean at like eight in the morning. Don't call me. This isn't the time. That is a good point. I wonder if you getting help is actually going to be bad for me. Yeah, I know. I'm not encouraging this mental health journey you're on. No, I think about like, I do. I do hope that you I know how bad your anxiety is with your phone and i feel like it gets you don't talk about it a lot or you talk about it to a point where we are aware of it

but i don't think people realize how detrimental and debilitating it is debilitate it's so like it's i keep saying it's stupid and people like don't say that because that's not helpful i'm sure it's not but like man i just feel stupid it It feels dumb because I'm like I like I've gone. This is how stupid. OK, this is how silly it feels is that I have driven like an hour to go somewhere to talk to somebody in person instead of just picking up the phone. Like I would rather drive to my dentist's office, walk inside and make an appointment than like call, which is so silly. And I've done that. I mean, this is not, this is

not the same thing, but do you realize how silly my anxiety was that every single time I went on stage, I thought I was going to need to be upside down in front of the masses because my, I mean, like everyone's got a thing that's like, it's very validated, but you feel alone in it. It feels silly because no one else sees it because i'm like i know how nonsensical this is and what a waste of time and i've like messed up business stuff i've messed up money stuff i've messed up definitely lots of medical stuff because i just i cannot pick up like it's just the silliest thing like if people call me i will not i just will not answer i don't know eva has to answer the phone when we order uber eats

or postmates like she's always the one who's like do you want me to call i mean i've i've gotten very used to if i'm calling you i just text you first nothing's wrong just no no no i don't like and that's the other thing is like i don't have a problem talking with like you eva my mom blaze so it's not like necessarily being on i don't know what it is because I don't I genuinely don't have a problem talking to you or Eva or Blaze or my family. I've infiltrated your safety zone. You've infiltrated my like family circle. Yeah. So but but it's just anybody else who I don't know very well.

Can't do it. I am not that this I'm not trying to compare. I'm trying to do the thing where I I explain how I feel like I can relate on a different level. Yeah. I'm not trying to I'm not trying to do the thing where i i explain how i feel like i can relate on a different level yeah i'm not trying to i'm not trying to make it about me i feel like it comes off that way when i do it but uh but i know with my adhd i mean you know how bad i am with my phone like you know how bad i am at responding to things it's in a way that nobody else sees unless they have access to my phone number like i mean i that's an adhd thing i and i know what it's like to know that i need to call doctors i know what it's like to i need

to call the bank i need to call my mom back because she's called a million times and your brain and you're like it's just like a constant underlying anxiety of yeah because it's like oh i need to do that thing but then oh i've waited so long is it even worth it now oh but now i've waited too long and now it's awkward and now I need to explain myself and why I haven't responded I mean yeah and there there have been times where I've finally called my mom back like two months later after she's called me 15,000 times and she's an overprotective helicopter Jewish woman she thinks I'm dead dead and I have to just be like no I'm mentally ill i'm sorry there's i have no i have no excuse or like even whenever we i have to respond to something in our like our own group chat and

like it takes forever i just like i've seen the message and there there's it feels like someone explained it really well well now it's really derailing away from you so um it's fine go for it there is a tick there's a t tock where someone did a really good explanation of like how it feels to like have like executive dysfunction of like, you know, you could put your hand on the hot stove. It's like, yeah, like your brain tells you absolutely do not do that. Do not do that. Even if you have to for a million dollars, don't put your hand on the stove. That's how every task feels.

And so the second that I've waited too long to respond to something, all of a sudden my brain will not allow me to just fucking fix the problem and so i i have phone anxiety not phone anxiety well i have anxiety about using my phone after i've already fucked my own problem up like i'm the cause yeah but so i i know what it's like to i don't know what it's like to be scared of talking on the phone like you do or to have the anxiety of talking on the phone. But I do know what it's like to feel the complete guilt after the fact of feeling like I ruined my own life. Like man I fucked up. Yeah. Or I made more I made more difficulties for myself because now I have to over correct when I could have just picked up the phone the first time.

Exactly. I mean I'm the same way with text. I'll get a text in my even if it's just like hey thinking of you'm like, it's too much. I can't respond to that right now. And then it takes like weeks to respond. And then it's like, sorry for the delay. And then, then they're like, Oh, it's fine. And then I still don't respond. And then like two weeks later, and I've lost friendships over this. Like I've genuinely had people be like, I can't. And I understand. I'm like, I understand that like not receiving a message from somebody right away probably gives you anxiety and I just wish I could solve that but

I can't solve it I really like all my friends now are like very aware that like you know what we're just we're gonna be ships in the night sometimes and that's okay and then we'll go on a frenzy of texting like for an hour straight back and forth about something because you're like we're hyper fixating this this is the only time my brain will allow me to communicate with you i better fucking hand now that we're now now that we're talking about like i don't know that our eighth grade religion teacher now let's talk for an hour straight yeah yeah no but i i can at least empathize i can sympathize with the anxiety part because I don't understand that. But I can absolutely empathize with the aftermath of having to fix everything, all the destruction you caused in your own path. Yeah. Isn't that fun?

It's terrible. And I really, I don't know how to get myself out of it. But if there's a light at the end of the tunnel for you. Hey, let's try hypnotherapy. If it works for you, I would love to know if there's a way that that is even possible as i mean to break an adhd somebody can make you drink water and stop drinking diet coke which i think is a physiological addiction in a lot of people then i feel like this is solvable i would love to to try to figure it out new year new us wait a minute i'm not gonna say anything because i jinx it all. So I'm just going to

let you say it. Everyone listening is like, you guys are, no, a year from now you'll be complaining about the same fucking thing. No, a year from now we'll have tried hypnotherapy and then we're going to like be even more scattered than before or something. I don't know. We're going to like create umbrella problem, like more problems branching off of all our existing problems no if you if it's able to help you i'm very happy for you because i know what the rut feels like so um if maybe maybe in your after your session could you ask for like for me if it's possible no absolutely and i'm i mean i have a similar thing with the texting. So I want to know if that's a possibility. So yeah, I would definitely keep you updated.

Just so anyone knows what I'm drinking, by the way, I'm drinking sparkling pineapple juice beverage from Trader Joe's. It's not one of my vinegary kombucha things like last time. Interesting. I was supposed to be drinking water, but I forgot where I left my cup. Now you're going to die. Oh, my God. If I were my mother, I would be feeling like a real dry mouth problem right now.

And I would start sweating and palpitating. I can't believe it's like she has to have it on her, but she doesn't have to drink the water. It used to be. Also, when I wasn't, I was like a shitty little kid who didn't understand mental health at all. But I think all of us were that. So don't worry. I think I, I used to think it was funny when I was a kid to like hide water from her and

she would just freak the fuck out. But at the time I was like, what is your deal? It's just fucking, it's a water bottle. You could get it anywhere. And she would obviously was losing her mind and probably wishing she never had me.

But I, um, I, I, I do feel bad for her. And as I'm getting older, I see the panic in her eyes. If she's like not, if she can't see a water bottle near her, it's wow. Yeah. It's wild. It's very weird. And she's that person that has like 20,000 undrinked, undrinked water bottles in her car because she always thinks she needs a new one

every time she gets in the car, but then she won't bring the other ones inside. She doesn't even use like a reusable one. She just uses like regular plastic water bottles. I have kind of, this is not an excuse for the anti-environmentalism that's happening here, but I think I pick up on a lot of my own scatterbrained slash ADHD tendencies from her

and I'm starting to notice them the more I go home. And if she ever, one of my own scatterbrained slash ADHD tendencies from her. And I'm starting to notice them the more I go home. And if she ever, one of my problems with having a, like a go-to water cup, I'll never find it again after five minutes. I just never will. And so I've done the thing where I've tried to buy multiple cups and have a designated cup for each room. So if I was got a cup nearby and then I will lose that or I'll drink it or i'll put it somewhere so i've also had to do water bottles i think that's why because i mean i think that's why there's that running joke about like our generation having like 4 000 reusable water bottles because like i'll always think i need a new one this one will fix my problem and this one will help me drink more water and then i buy it and then i leave it it upstairs. And then I'm like, well, now it's funky. I don't want to reuse

it. And so I'm like, I'll just leave it there. Okay. Now I'm at the store and they have a cute water bottle. I'm going to buy it, which is like, isn't helpful for the environment either. To be fair. I have five personal water tumblers. I just, I just decluttered all my cup cabinets. That's how I have a number to everything. But, um, I, I have five big, like, like the Turvis tumblers or whatever the new thing is. People don't use Turvis tumblers anymore. I don't think I've used. I do, but okay.

Well, I have five and I keep thinking, oh, I can have one in each room. But then like, I'm, that would, the way that my brain works is every task is actually like 15 tasks. And so if that, if those 15 tasks in sequence feel exhausting i'm not going to do the one simple task of getting myself water okay that explains a lot because i always beat myself up for that but then i'm like well then i have to take it down i have to go go get it from the third floor then i have to clean it because it's been sitting there babe that's that's adhd girl i know you i know you keep we've been having our own private conversations on whether or not i'm not trying to know you i know you keep we've been having our own private conversations

on whether or not i'm not trying to put you on blast here but we've been having our own personal conversations behind podcast doors where christine's been like you've been talking about adhd a lot and it's starting to make me wonder if i have it and every time you give me an example i'm like girl that's literally one of the fucking main problems you give me examples and i'm like you're like oh shit stop watching what I do. No. So every task, I know exactly what you're going to say. Every task feels like a million tasks.

It's just like a fucking mountain. And I'm like, why do that? I have other shit to do. Yeah. Yeah. And then I don't drink water. So you know what? So the water thing is like, if I leave it in this room, then it collects dust.

Then I feel like I have to wash it. And then, or if it's already funky from the last time I drank it two weeks ago and keep forgetting to bring it back to the kitchen. Now I have to wash it again. But it just becomes so many little obstacles. And it's like, well, why the fuck would I do that when I can just grab a water bottle? And now I have 45 fucking water bottles and four of them are in my car. And I probably won't use them for another year when I like somehow sanitize them. Well, I have done this. and this will be the last.

We've been talking for 20 minutes about mental illness. What's new? But our mental illness is that we talk about mental illness on top. But I will say one of the and this is going to be like a weird platform because it is kind of controversial. But I still stand by it that like I want to be good to the environment. I want to do the right thing. And I want to have like a recyclable reusable water cup that I use all the time. But sometimes I know this sounds stupid, but that's not accessible to me.

Like if I'm going to drink water, some people just need water bottles because the, the laundry lists that becomes me, it sounds lazy to people who are uneducated about attention disorders but to just grab my cup from a table and go clean it and fill it with water that is actually a very exhausting obstacle for me and in the world of the spoon theory and all that i don't have enough spoons to do that shit i don't and sometimes the way that my brain works is i only have goldfish memory and if in the next three seconds if i can't get fucking water i'm not gonna drink it no so And sometimes the way that my brain works is I only have goldfish memory. And if in the next three seconds, if I can't get fucking water, I'm not going to drink it. So in terms of wanting to be good to the world, I am often trying to balance that with still making my own home accessible to my needs. And if having water bottles that are plastic and that sucks, but like if that's the only way i'm going

to get water on my body sometimes you just got to go with the water bottle and you shouldn't feel bad about it i'll be honest like there there's always i feel like given give and take and if you know say you're using plastic water bottles well then maybe you make sure to exactly you know recycle or next time you go to you don't get uh utensils you have to throw away you can use your own or whatever i feel like there's always give and take and you can't get utensils you have to throw away. You can use your own or whatever. I feel like there's always give and take and you can't just like sum everything up with one action. And like the bigger thing is that yes, we should all try our best and everyone has different needs.

And what I was going to say is like, yeah, we all, you know, should try our best to do what's right. But like for the environment, but ultimately like for the environment but ultimately like if the bigger issues aren't fixed like uh jeff bezos you know like if if these if the you know bigger corporations aren't doing their part either then like you know it's sort of frustrating because i feel like it all falls back on the individual at a certain point and yes we all should try our best.

But like, you know what? Everyone should be fucking trying and we should be calling on people to work harder. Anyway, this is just another rant. No, but you're very right. We, the very, the small people, the individuals are being 100% shamed. Like guilted. It's like so gaslighting. For the very small fraction of damage that we're doing compared to the corporations that will refuse to do nothing.

And like I'm like really nutty about like composting, recycling. Like I take it very, very, very seriously. And so don't get me wrong. Like I'm not saying it doesn't matter and it's not important. I'm just saying at a certain point we need to stop just like shaming everybody for like the littler things. And, you know, recognize that there are other people that should be pitching in too yeah yeah who are making us think it's our fault anyway we've really taken on a lot of um soapboxes today i don't know i'm so sorry everybody i don't know what happened to

either of us but we both came ready to just like really scream about things look all of those reasons are that's why we drink or why we drink this week so um anyway in a very large uh shift to a completely different theme of the show let's talk about spooky things thank you although there's nothing spookier than big corporations ruining the world and blaming it on us but anyway mental illness those are the two spookiest of all so um sorry to everyone who's listened for 25 minutes waiting for a ghost story here it is sorry everyone who's had to fast forward and hit 15 seconds 80 000 times they're the people i feel most sorry for i feel like those people that try to skip through it

know that 15, 20 minutes is the sweet spot usually. That's fair. Okay, so this is a folklore-y kind of character today. By the way, we're doing this out of order, but we should remember that this is the episode that comes out after Christmas. So I hope everyone had a very lovely Christmasmas um and i hope you got all the presents and saw all the people that you like and didn't see all the people you don't like and um i hope the

table talk conversations probably about pronouns and biden were not that terrible to putter through so and if they were which inevitably some of them I'm sure have been, I hope you had a drink in hand or a brownie in the other. Oh, what a, what a flower. I know not everybody drinks and for good reason. And I know it must be very difficult for those,

especially who are sober to avoid alcohol in stressful family environments. So I hope you at least had a piece of pie on you. And if you didn't get that present you wanted really, really badly, and it didn't even cost that much money, but you were just hoping someone would remember that you... Yeah, I hate when that happens. If that happened to you and you're like, man, I just really wanted that one thing.

I don't know why anyone didn't get it for me. This is my call to you. This is your sign. You deserve it after a very stressful holiday. And I want you to go treat yourself and buy yourself that thing. Hell yes. And just give yourself a pat on the back because you got through 2022

and you deserve that little thing that you wanted so badly. You're taking care of yourself. Treat yourself. The Merry Christmas this weekend, you go buy yourself a present after all the presents you had to get everyone else. Yeah.

It's not about them. Never was. Never will be. Okay. Here's a little folklore story for you. This is the story of the Dullahan. Oh, never heard of that. I hadn't either.

And I thought it was Dullahan found out it's Han, like Han Solo. Oh. So this is a figure in Irish folklore that is usually considered a fairy, but it's said to sometimes manifest instead as a ghost. So got a little hybrid situation going on i do want to say um just to give a shout out to being as respectful as possible to uh irish communities and their um folklore history um the word fairy or fae is sometimes seen as disrespectful to people in Ireland. It's like disrespectful to the fairy slash fae themselves. Another phrase you can call them is the Irish other world, which I think is so badass.

I love that. I don't know if that goes for everybody, but I think it's kind of like how Appalachia has a lot of its superstitions. I think in Ireland Ireland it's probably also superstitious of hey don't say those words it's not not the best um they might come get you or find you or something so you're disrespecting the kind of the rules of the of the so today many people use the catch-all term she which we talked uh two weeks ago about the irish language and how they the letters make no sense together in my american brain so um she is actually spelled s-i-d-h-e said hey but it's oh you know i thought you meant like pronoun she and i was like okay so we're just umbrella pronouning

them all sure uh somewhere in there is a very hysterical response to you, but I don't have it. I'm not smart enough for it. But you're right. She. It sounds like a pronoun thing. So today people, instead of using fairy or fae, a lot of people use she, which means mounds. M-O-N-D-S. Maybe I think it means like for burial mounds or ceremonial sites. Sometimes it just

means hills and that is said to be the entrance to the other world. Oh. But people, some still at least believe that using any variation of fairy or even using the word she brings terrible luck. So they have opted for other

names like the other crowd, the good people people the good neighbors or the gentry oh the other crowd they sound so much more badass to me i feel like i don't know why we ever didn't just start with that that sounds so cool like oh the other world it's like oh my god okay gotta you know who well according to one of the co-founders of the Irish pagan school, Laura O'Brien, these names that they've come up with in lieu of using the other words, it's almost like a plea. It's to call them the good people or the good neighbors is almost to like imply to them,

like, I think of you as good people. I was wondering that because you said like oh the good people the good neighbors i'm like oh so we're just making sure they know yeah we have no problem exactly it's kind of a sign of respect or asking them to to live up to the name of like please be good people and please don't hurt us yeah you're good remember yeah um it's also apparently even in appalachia a lot of people have um take issue with using the word fairy I know I'm currently using it and maybe that's twisted in this case but I know a lot of people in Appalachia also have problems with using that word and I guess they've literally called it

the f word oh wow and so uh some people in Appalachia have grown up calling them the fair folk instead of oh I've heard that definitely yeah so most people know Dullahan as more so a headless horseman um which is interesting because it has roots in I'll say the other world but the most of the stories seem to be ghost stories in some way so um it's an interesting tag teaming of different lore i guess um some believe that the she are divided into two noble courts so there's the seelie which are the at at the apparently it's more complicated than this but just to keep things super basic the seel are the good guys and the unsealy are the not so good guys okay um and also there's more complications to this too because i guess when you overlap irish lore and like scottish origins there's debate on who how on like the historical crossover of the two. So, but anyway,

what we're going to go with today is that there are two noble courts in the she, the Seelie, which are good, the Unseelie, which are not so good. And what's important to know is that the she are not, it's not just good versus evil.

It's more that they don't ascribe to human morality. So they're just kind of, maybe we see them as good or evil, but they're just kind of living on their own. And either way, the Dullahan is seen as a member of the unseelie court. So he's technically not one of the good ones, or maybe he's just more often malevolent than others, if that makes sense. Yeah. The Dullahan is usually well-dressed in noble man's writing clothes, in nice shoes, and a cloak or cape for that dramatic flair,

obviously. Yeah. And the Dullahan is sometimes said to be as tall as eight feet tall. And its horse is said to be 18 and a half hands. And, uh, which horses are measured in hands about 18 hands is the equivalent to like six feet and a horse when it gets measured it's not to the top of its head it's just like

basically its shoulder or its neck right yeah oh okay so it not including its big ass head this horse was about six feet tall and if the guy's eight feet tall and he doesn't have a head right or neither of their heads are being counted in this situation right yeah okay so both of six feet tall. And if the guy's eight feet tall and he doesn't have a head, right? Or is it only sometimes? Neither of their heads are being counted in this situation. Yeah, right? Yeah. Okay. So both of them from neck to toe are six feet or eight feet tall.

That's too tall. Their height is almost scarier than the fact that neither of them are, their heads are being included. So anyway, yeah, that's at least 14 feet of ghost. So yikes um and uh so when the dollahan rides it's creepily silent so even though you would usually hear a horse go like

yeah um can't hear a single thing there's no uh buckles on the saddle there's no there's nothing on his outfit you're hearing it's just weirdly eerie silent um and sometimes it even they think because it's so silent he must be floating by you instead of actually riding by you but then there are other times where he's riding so fast near you that it's known to shake the ground like thunder whoa so wide range and he picks all of the options. Okay. It said that no one can outride the Dullahan, but you can outsmart it, Christine,

with your big, big brain. I don't know about that, but I'll try. Well, there's one story of a man fleeing. This was kind of an accidental outsmarting him. I love that. But a man fleeing the dollahan once he dropped a gold coin in the road and after a thunderous roar the dollahan vanished so i guess the story goes that he's either afraid of gold or got paid off to go away yeah or he got too disturbed maybe he has adhd and he was like oh shiny, he might've just been like, Oh, I,

that reminds me, I have to go do something at the bank. And they just turned around before I forget. That's what I do for Leona. If she's getting upset, I'm like, look over here at this thing. So I feel like I could outsmart him in an indirect way. You could certainly outsmart me because really you could throw anything my way. And i may not be distracted at how glistening it is i mean it will but also it will remind me of another task i had i was supposed to do five seconds ago yeah so sure let's go with that maybe all of a sudden he was like oh my god thank you for reminding me and he like ran off to do a task before yeah and by the way you're so welcome thank you in advance i appreciate that so uh some think that the dollahan is either a death omen for the near future like you're about you're gonna die soon or he's more of a grim reaper coming to

collect you in that moment no wonder people don't like to talk about it especially yeah and to say any word other than the good people like desperately begging like please be good please don't hurt me some stories um is that some stories say that the dollahan is not actually a she or from the fair folk but is just truly a ghost and gets mixed in with a lot of stories of headless spirits okay so um headless spirits uh they're called uh gonkown. That's the phrase. So Gonkown is spelled G-A-N-C-E-A-N-N. So if I'm mispronouncing anything, please let me know, everybody. So Gonkown is the word for headless spirits. So they think that Dullahan might not be Fae or She, but may be Gonkown.

the dollahan might not be fey or she but maybe a gonkown and depending on the story dollahans uh can harmlessly walk past you and you are totally like free from any danger or it could torment and kill you so oh cool cool cool but it's fun to just to just hope for the best and not know so i think a lot of the stories over time have kind of implied that like based on if you're a good human or not the dollahan's coming for you super so kind of it's in my mind it's like a weird twisted santa claus story of like if you're good he won't kill you like yeah it sounds like very crampusy like he wants to harm the bad children. Right, right, right. It also sounds a lot like Christianity, like be good or you're going to go to hell. You're going to burn forever. Yeah.

Yeah. So when he's harmless, some versions have suggested that it's because it's just a test of your humanity or a test of your moral code or some personality test. Okay. And if you pass it, this headless being will reward you or at least let you live which in itself is a reward um thanks if you thank you i guess i was doing nothing before you got here what the hell but if for some reason you don't pass the test or the headless horseman doesn't like you he will punish you and in other versions of the dollahan it's uh just this is my favorite theory

is that instead of it being a ghost or of the the other world um it could literally just be the ghost of like or instead of it being a ghost with some sort of like really spooky background and like there's a whole storyline to it some versions are that it's the ghost of a dude without his head and he's just riding around enjoying freaking people out for giggles like i mean i could get behind that if i were headless and then i and then i died obviously those two things go hand in hand i would hope so oh god if i ever do lose my head and i'm still alive please just not make sure i'm not anymore i don't want it don't i don't want to live that life i'll fix it um but if i if that were to happen to me and then i become a ghost i like to

think once you're a ghost whatever you know ailments you had are healed in the afterlife right at least one full functioning body if i'm still fucking headless i've got nothing else to do for eternity i might as well freak people out I agree. And like the kind of fun part about that too, is that, um, I say fun in big quotations, but the kind of fun part about all this too, is like, if you do know some shitty people from real life, like from who are alive, you really could fuck with them. Like you're like, you know what? I'm going to scare the shit out of Don so-and-so. Cause he really, uh, he really pissed me off when i was alive that actually makes sense i feel like that would um add to the that would make sense alongside the lore of like

maybe he just started out with people he didn't like and decided to punish them and then reward the good ones and now just he ran out of people all those people died so now he's just spying on everyone just figuring out who's who's who without his head he was able to still see if you were not even nice great point great point so we're gonna get into some of the stories but before uh i do i just want to say that piecing together uh irish folklore is very complicated um after the christianization of ireland many traditions were either lost completely or retold through a Christian lens. And centuries later, English colonization also destroyed a lot of folklore traditions. So interestingly, in the 18th and 19th centuries, scholars and folk enthusiasts tried to record

and preserve whatever lore was still out there. enthusiasts um tried to record and preserve whatever lore was still out there but they ran into a lot of people that i mean when you're going through and just trying to collect stories that for centuries have been passed on through a game of telephone um they ran to a lot of people that were either just making stuff up or had distorted details or they were combining multiple stories pieces into one story so the best we've got is still debatable um there are a lot of stories with origins that are unknown or even if we think they're known that could not be the case and they're still being told as if they're authentic ancient irish tradition and um this is just a psa that we are here to enjoy the best that we could, that we can know. But other than that, we'll never truly know the beginning of it all. That's just so tragic, you know, that it just got wiped out like that.

Just another way that religion and colonization have absolutely decimated history. Yeah, it's too bad. It really is too bad. estimated um history so yeah it's too bad it really is too bad so one of the stories is a guy named larry and he is known as hard-working and sometimes hard drinking which i would also describe christine like that i get it uh so larry was out riding at twilight and he was just kind of on his own doing his own thing and suddenly a woman appears beside his horse oh which that alone maybe it's because i'm i'm currently watching wednesday and i'm very primed about this but it feels like a wednesday adams move to just appear appear in silence yeah yeah yeah speaking of which are you watching wednesday i haven't watched it yet

no you'll really like it you'll really like saved it on Netflix. Like got to my list or whatever. Did you ever watch the original Addams Family? You know, a little bit, but like not, not as much as you. You watched it, right? Like through. Yeah. I never watched it through. Have you ever watched, or you know who like Thing is?

Yeah. Like the hand? Yeah. So apparently Lego just came out with a set for Wednesday and Thing is literally just one of the random people hands. No, that's cute. The line with the little like the cup, like the Lego. Yeah. What do you call this?

A hook or like a. Yeah, I know what you mean. Like the Lego human hand. That's so funny. They literally, they clearly just threw one in the bag and they were like, I don't know, that's Thing. Here you go. That's the best we can do. i actually find that kind of hilarious i i feel like when your whole character is a hand lego should have at least tried to like give you a better hand every other hand

but i feel like that's very funny though like i hope they knew what they were doing like i hope they knew too because i mean that is very silly that is hysterical that's like really you could just go grab any lego character you have pull off its hand and pretend that was like now this is uh yeah on brand anyway uh i would just i thought of wednesday i thought of thing and i thought of that fun fact i like that a lot anyway so uh all of a sudden this girl just like pulls a wednesday and just shows up silently next to his house next to his horse super larry says i guess he sees her out in the woods by by herself and he's like okay he says my little girl just jump up and behind me and i'll take you safe and sound through the lonesome bit of road that is before us so she gets on the horse behind him and soon

after larry notices that his horse has a loose shoe. So he pulls over. I don't know if that's the right phrasing when you have a horse. He turns on his blinker and he gets on the shoulder. Well, he got off the shoulder, technically. He got off the shoulder. So he pulled over with his horse and he gets off to look at his horseshoe. And this is right around the spot where the road is starting to get the darkest and spookiest for the night and the woman also hops

off the horse again landing a little too silently and starts not just walking but gliding up the hill toward a church oh um larry if we thought we were friends with him up until this point we are no longer because he tried to chase after her wanting quote payment for helping her um and he said sure he said sure i've earned a kiss from your pretty lips and i'll have it too yeah and also fucker we're now in the darkest spookiest part of the woods so she this girl kept moving uh she looked as if she was gliding even through the thick the rough thicket where larry was getting like caught with thorns and in the bushes and everything and she just seemed to be moving right through all that stuff good he kept tripping over himself and for

some reason i don't in the story he's also tripping over headstones and coffins i don't know what part of the woods he's in but okay um and he sounds like he just made a pit stop at your house and he decided that he was like you know what i'm gonna stop trying to get through all this rough you know bushy all these bushes and stuff i'm just gonna wait for her to turn around and come back to me and when when she like turns the corner because we'll have met we'll have met up by then oh i see um she ends up showing up again and when she does he grabs her and tries to kiss her but when he but when he grabs her he realized uh earlier when she was walking by the horse he couldn't see her face and she had her hood up and so when she when he grabs her, he realized earlier when she was walking by the horse, he couldn't see her face and she had her hood up. And so when he grabbed her this time, she had no head. Yes.

Honestly, all of us wish that we could have no head when a dude's being an asshole. So fucking literally, if we could scare the shit out of anybody who's, I mean, it's a dream. Honestly, now let's go back to that uh hypothetical where i'm somehow alive and also don't have a head if it means being like an activist and protecting all women from creepy men to just appear when they're being targeted yeah i would like to stay alive for that or honestly either way i will do it for sure i love that now i somehow have to figure out whether you want me to kill you if you lose your head or whether you need a new purpose you want me to help you with your new purpose in life maybe we just have like a like a debriefing first i won't be able to speak or hear

you but oh okay i'll just like read the room and figure it out i'll just give me like a pen and i'll use my hand to like write out what's going on easy without my brain stem i'll still be able to do everything like thank you and have motor functions yeah yeah yeah um i think i would like to still not be here on earth but i can't promise in the afterlife i will defend you will have a mission yeah okay well thank you for that you're welcome i it's all it's the least i can do so anyway she has no head and now he freaks out and he says well that accounts for her not speaking and it's like okay guy like thank oh my god this guy is too much so he's not even apologetic he's just like practically realizing why he wasn't interested and or why she seemed uninterested yeah and he's like i didn't want a kiss from you anyway it's like you exactly motherfucker

i like that he was thinking like oh the only reason she wouldn't have wanted me is because she doesn't yeah that's the only reason explains it that's the only reason she didn't seem interested in all of this motherfucker uh so if you would if you thought that was a lot for larry to witness doesn't seem like he was really too phased by it um but shortly after he saw a whole group of dollahan gather around and in this gathering he saw uh i guess he got close and personal to like the area where they live or something or where they gather and he saw a spinning wheel with heads mounted on top of it whoa the decapitated heads were all singing together and the and the dollahans were

dancing to it so now i'm wondering are the heads victims that they've harmed or is it their literal heads their heads since they're headless oh my god can you imagine though like if dollahans actually still have access to their heads they're just actively not wearing them they're just like choosing they're just sticking them on spikes so they can all be in a barbershop quartet together i mean and then they just dance around in a party that sounds so cool it's it's like the the theatrics of it are too fun to to put aside again like that feels very that's giving like beetlejuice vibes for the afterlife of like, oh, well, if I'm not if I can just take my head off at any moment, why wouldn't we have a secret society where we just take them all off and take advantage of that, you know? So anyway, the Dullahan, I guess, let let Larry feel welcomed into this gathering.

They offer him a drink. But when he drinks whatever they gave him, it must have been spiked in some way because his own head comes off spiked with what spikes also like how did it did it just roll off like billy the zombie or like i don't understand did it did he just start feeling kind of like looser and he just kind of picked it up? Or like, did it, oops. I don't know. Did it tumble away?

Was it like acidic and it burned through his neck and his head fell off? I don't know. Did they grab him by the hair and just kind of do a yank for him? I don't know. Also, does that mean now he's a victim of theirs or part of the Dullahan or are Dullahan in this story? Great point. Previous victims. Yeah, great point.

And now they've joined this little club of like we were victims and now we don't have yeah i don't know i don't know there's so many questions a lot of questions that people are relying on me to answer and i just don't have that's the worst feeling i feel very pressured to to i to be fair up until 24 hours ago I was not aware of this lore. So anyway, apparently he blacks out and wakes up in the morning and lying on the churchyard ground with his head still intact. So this feels like one of those English papers where like, it's a crazy adventure. And then the last sentence is like, he woke up and it was a great dream. It was all a dream. And yeah, everybody gets mad.

Yeah, exactly. So that's one story there's larry another story is from cork county and it's a man named charlie colnane um he was a horseback rider and a racer and he stayed out late drinking one night seems to be a theme in these stories also like the stereotype of the irish is like oh i'm sure every story starts with i was drunk i was having a pint yeah yeah and so uh charlie is writing home on one of the darkest nights he claims to have ever seen and while it was raining he came upon an old stone ruins of a castle oh he realized that something and by the way again it's ireland So I'm imagining like castles are just kind of on every block.

So I don't know if that's as eerie as it is to us. I don't think they're on every block. I think that the people who own. Don't ruin it. I don't want people to be like, you're so ignorant, you know. I'm not smart. But I don't want to intentionally be ignorant. Well, I will say I have a feeling Ireland still has more castles than oh sure i yes sure i mean i do find this very creepy i think it's probably creepy whether or not you know well either way he finds a castle ruins and he realizes

that something was following him the whole time and i like that he was like hmm something this was like his gift of fear where he was like something i'm on to something what could it be and apparently it was the disembodied head of a white horse oh no uh which like what please you and gavin de becker please tell me what is the gift of fear telling you here when you can sense a head is floating by itself behind you oh my god but it just kind of bumps into a tree behind you or something oh my god i don't know i guess i have to listen to his his forward he needs to yeah he needs to write another edition so uh the distant body had of a white horse so it had cropped ears flared nostrils and huge eyes and charlie's horse sped up um because obviously it was afraid of do you mention the horse seeing a floating me feel bad i'm like this poor horse is just like

i don't know what else to do like this poor they're just in the wrong place the wrong time so the horse starts speeding up obviously but this head flies past them so it's definitely faster than than they could go and charlie then sees a very huge apparition of the dollahan up here charlie looks him up and down and exclaims it is no head at all he has which like why is that shocking when you just saw a floating fucking head you just saw the head and now you're seeing the headless body and you're like wait a minute also i love in stories when people say things out loud when like in reality does anyone actually sit there and go oh my his head has been removeth from his body

i don't know i feel like wouldn't you just think it in your head and thou dost think the head should be connected to that headless body but yeah i like i love stories where it makes no sense why you're freaked out by one but not the the other. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So somehow, seemingly without a head, the figure says to Charlie, because he said, oh my god, it has no head. The figure says, look again, Charlie Culnane. And that's when Charlie sees that the Dullahan had been holding his own head under his arm the whole time. the Dullahan had been holding his own head under his arm the whole time. But the horse head was not being held by any horse.

I'll tell you that. Yeah. What's that about? I don't even know where the horse head figure went. That just kind of kept floating through the woods. What was the point of that? Was he like trying to frighten him? And then when the horse head didn't work, he's like, fine, I'll do it. Yeah, I think so.

Maybe he's like, I'll just manifest into something else, I guess. So anyway, Charlie finds out the Dullahan had his head under his arm the whole time. Giving very Headless Horseman vibes. I mean, literally. Literally. The head had no color to it. The skin was stretched over. Gross.

It had huge glowing eyes, dull black hair, and its mouth was stretched from ear to ear. Ew! So now this feels like a horror movie it's grotesque the headless person was not a horror movie to me but the mouth from ear to ear really did it that part is not good the skin stretched over it and like it sounds like a horror movie well for some reason charlie didn't um take off at this he did not freak out he just went he seems to not be freaked out by the disembodied heads of anything. He was fine with the horse flying through the woods. Then he sees

this head that is smiling at him with glowing eyes. And he's like, I, whatever. And he continues to ride alongside the Dullahan through the woods, just buddy, buddy. I mean, this fucking guy. This is the most relevant part of this entire story, is that Charlie apparently said they were riding in silence and he didn't know what to do or what to say. And he tried to make small talk, but it wasn't working. Oh my gosh, this guy. He complimented the Dullahan's riding, the Dullahan's clothes,

and the Dullahan's horse's bravery. And none of that was interesting to the Dullahan. This is and me like trying to talk down a ghost that's haunting us like oh yeah oh well uh i love that collar you've got on yeah and their head should be i really love that little green lace ribbon please don't untie it though please don't tie it so not interested the dollahan tells charlie that he has an ugly mouth hey if i were charlie i'd be like i'm literally trying to keep it together so seriously like that really and also like that's the best you can do you have an ugly mouth that's the best you can do i know it's like well at least i have a mouth yeah exactly exactly you're one to talk it's a creepy smile so charlie tried again and i guess just to like throwing a shot in the dark there said okay delahan would you like to challenge me

to a race just for the fun of it and all of a sudden uh charlie vinn said his only first of all charlie vinn said his only fear in challenging theullahan was that his horse would get hurt on such a dark night. And that's when the Dullahan seemed very interested. No! And the Dullahan, well, somehow I thought the same thing that you did. I was like, that feels sinister. But the Dullahan says, will you take my word for the safety of your mare? And Charlie said yes, and they start start racing after a few moments of racing um the dollahan shouts out he goes charlie colnane charlie stop for your life stop and so when charlie stops the horseman declared him the winner and here's why because the dollahan tells him that a hundred

years ago in that exact same spot he had charlie stop he and his horse did not stop and they broke their necks at the bottom of the hill that they had been racing on oh my the dollahan said that ever since that night this feels like a children's book all of a sudden the dollahan says that ever since that night they've been looking for a friend that dared ride with them and the dollahan promised that if char Charlie always remained bold, then the headless horseman would never leave his side, nor his horse's side. And from then on,

Charlie won every race and always credited the headless horseman. The end. Friendship, friendship, just the perfect blanship. I love that song. So some stories of a headless spirit they actually come from this um collection of stories called the school's collection so do you know about the

school's collection no okay so in the 1930s the irish folklore commission headed a project where they enlisted this This is where, okay. I immediately liked how it sounded with the Irish Folklore Commission headed a project. And I was like, oh man, they must've been taking this really seriously. And I think they were trying to take it seriously, but I think you can see pretty quickly where the convolution in their, in their research went.

They enlisted 50,000 school children throughout ireland to collect local folklore stories uh and histories and their hometowns and kids from 5 000 schools it is impressive the numbers kids from 5 000 schools went around their towns and collected stories from grandparents neighbors etc and some of the almost three quarters of a million pages of Irish folklore and local tradition that they were able to get are digitized online. Some of it's in Irish and some of it's in English. So that is impressive, but I do have to say the fact that their sources are 50,000 children. I just, I feel like I don't know how they trusted them to relay the stories back to the organization. So, um, but at least they collected them at all. So that's cool. I mean, I feel like, you know,

they're getting them from their elders, so to speak. That's true. That's true. No, I do. I think the idea is very sweet. I just hope the kids took it seriously. Or maybe, honestly, I bet a lot of the parents and grandparents and locals were like, let me write it down and you hand it to them you write it then i'll edit it yeah exactly so uh anyway i think that's really cool also as one of the kids i'd like to feel like really important after the fact of like oh i helped you're published in this cool book i mean that's really neat yeah so that was one way that in the 30s they were able to collect a lot of local lore all over again. So, yeah, it's very sweet. And one of the stories they got was a story from Wexford County where a woman stayed up late waiting for her husband to come home. He was usually drunk.

So I think she was used to having to wait for him to get back. And one night she heard a sound outside and saw a hearse driven by a headless man. And it scared her so badly that she got sick and died. What? Got sick and died? got sick and died that's the story okay but i think it's not meant to be like a oh the the creature literally scared her to death but it's to show how magically powerful oh and these beings are maybe it's not that she got sick because she saw it. Maybe he was just an omen and she was going to get sick and die. And she saw him and he was like the bringer of death. Maybe, yeah.

The Grim Reaper. So that's one of the stories the kids collected. Another one is a story from Limerick County. Is it a Limerick? No, but can you imagine? Oh, come on. Boo. If I knew how to just construct a Limerick freestyle, I would right now.

Okay, I i do it oh tell me the story and then i'll make one okay um okay so there's something called so the the entity is called the koshta boer oh gosh okay and it's a it's a like the spirit or the um it's a hearse or a coach that it comes down one road and turns up the other and it's always in the middle of the night and alongside it are four headless horses and a headless coachman driving it and anyone who sees it uh never does an hour's good which makes me think like within the hour you'll be done oh which is why the hearse is bringing itself to you like you see the hearse with four headless horsemen and a headless coachman and or three four headless horses and a headless coachman and within the hour you might not be here anymore okay i'll try

oh okay there once was a man on a coat no hold on there once was a man with no head if you see him you should go to bed but if it's too late then you better not wait because in the hour you'll be dead you will be dead in the hour you will be i have to work on the um syllables i thought you were gonna say um if it's too late expect your fate oh yeah if it's too late expect your fate oh yeah if it's too late you have you've now sealed your fate because because in the because within the

no I gotta within one single hour you'll be dead there you go that deserves two rounds that's just my English teacher would be so proud of you oh my god well um i have a weird i love limericks i know that probably wasn't even a proper limerick but i do love like the the idea of limericks i just think they're a cool concept i don't know if that ends up on a shirt somewhere in limerick county i need we need to write a season to assist

offended the entirety of limerick county with that so sorry i like how you just you're like fucking eminem you just work that together it's so crazy not to date myself but oh my god like i'm like hanging out with eminem that's crazy oh what a compliment so another story this does not involve a uherick, just so you know, you're safe now. Thank you. But this is from Clare County. One story there is that if you see the Dullahan pulling its hearse at night, it might make you walk behind it and carry the coffin yourself. I guess as a test, the only way you are safe from this, it's so funny.

the only way you are safe from this it's so funny basically the only way that you're safe from this happening to you if you come across the dollahan is if you are literally just so clueless to the situation that you don't know what's going on um that's me and you it's if you actually see the dollahan and it's hearse if you think oh that's actually just like a normal funeral procession like i should get out of their way or something then you will not be touched but if you see it coming and you think is that the delahan you're fucked oh shit so stay clueless folks well you just told us all so now it's too late shit damn good luck everybody especially especially in clare county but if you realize you are walking among the delahan and uh you know they might try to give you a coffin to carry behind the fear alone might kill you so you really should just keep your head keep your nose

to the ground put your air pods in and just ignore everybody just ignore everybody okay another story is also from wexford county that a man heard a coach and looked out the window and saw a headless driver and two headless horses next to him oh gosh it freaked him out and he tried to close his window so they could get him which like i wouldn't know what to do either but i'm imagining an old 90s window like he's rolling cranking yeah yeah yeah yeah but the coach the headless coach driver caught up to him and hit him in the eyes blinding him what oh no well apparently that's a common theme that people who witness uh these beings will get blinded as punishment as like you shouldn't

be able to see me or don't look at this is the last thing you ever saw um so there's another story here from northwest ireland and donegal county um i think this is the most accurate story i think this is we tried we tried on on accuracy here but we're unsure of if there if someone actually has heard of the story and has a correction please let me know but we're trying our best over here so this is the story of colin goncown and basically a rich king which I feel like any king is rich so okay a king uh he built a castle but immediately realized that the castle was haunted and had to move out yeah he built it though he like he had a castle built and somehow it's so haunted already I guess the land was really powerful bad luck um but yeah I thought that too i was like damn like it can be built haunted that's

awful that's a scary thought yeah it makes me think like oh well actually you know what i mean my parents built my house was haunted i was gonna say we've definitely heard stories like this even from you or like it's the land or there was a property there before or the house did used to be battlegrounds so yeah exactly i feel like that it does make some sense yeah um so anyway so the king moves out of this haunted house with his family and one day this really poor boy comes up to him and asks if he had if the king has any shelter for the night because he really needs somewhere to sleep the king says that he could it's this is a very shortened version of it but basically the king says he could stay at the castle oh wow very nice well the boy asked to stay in the castle and the king was like i don't know about that okay good i thought he was like well i have just the thing go plebe as we say

um he said i don't know about that it's really haunted and honestly like it's so haunted that me and my family think that you will be dead by morning if you stayed there. So please don't. Oh, my God. And the boy was like, I really need somewhere to say I'm going to stay there. And the king was like, all right. I like how the king was like, I will quickly offer. I will more quickly offer that to you than just letting you stay in our guest bed because I'm a king and definitely own a guest room.

Yeah. Yeah. It's sad. So he's like, OK, I guess you can stay in the castle yourself so the boy stayed there and that night he saw the ghost of colin gone cow and it's also known as the body without a head the uh the spirit this is something that i feel like we should try next time we're in the room with a spirit um the spirit appears and just started throwing things around the room so very poltergeisty and the boy didn't know what to do so he just got up and

started also throwing things around that is so beautiful he was like i'm just gonna match your energy and see what happens okay cool two can play this game yeah so he just got up and started doing the exact same thing and uh then the the colon vanished and in the morning the family found the boy alive thank god the boy asked to stay a second night and the king was like dude like you i don't even know how you made it through the first night like i don't want you here a second night and after enough convincing the king was like okay i guess if you survived one night, maybe you can convince, maybe you can be here another night and you'll be fine. Well, so that night, the Colin appears again and started causing ghostly mischief. I'm not sure exactly the details on this, but all I could see was that the boy again joins in on the fun and it basically pleased the Colin.

And that was kind of the end of it. The Colin was able to say, you had passed the test. I just wanted someone to like vibe with, I guess. And this is another common theme in Irish stories is that the main character meets an otherworldly being and somehow passes an unspoken test, which is exactly what happened here. Compliment the person's outfit and the boldness of their horse, and then they insult your mouth, and then all of a sudden you're best friends. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

It's like, oh, I thought I would have passed that test, but I guess I really had to say I want to challenge you and risk my horse. That didn't even do it. It was the challenge. Yeah, true. I think that was the test before the test. Yeah, it must have been like the precursor to the test that dollahan had like layers to his test this is like a lot of he has a lot of time on his hands so uh the boy somehow survived a second night there and when

the colin realized like oh this guy's pretty chill uh the con basically said well done and then told him that he actually the spirit used to be the a previous king here but he was very cruel to his people and was now trapped here after death until he rectified his wrongs so instead he just threw shit around and made a mess yeah you know that's interesting i that's a great point like okay so you're supposed to be a better person and that's the only way or maybe you he wanted to stay in the, that's interesting. That's a great point. Like, okay, so you're supposed to be a better person, and that's the only way you're... Maybe he wanted to stay in the afterlife. That's what it sounds like to me.

Yeah, yeah. If you're going to just trash people's houses and threaten them and scare them out of living near you, you're not rectifying your wrongs the way you think you are. Yeah, it doesn't seem like it. So he told the boys that um you know i'm trapped here but there is one of the things that i did as a king that wasn't very good is i hid money from people and there is money and notes hidden beneath this castle yes after that

conversation the colon disappears and in the morning the boy told the king hey one i'm still alive and two this is what happened last night uh he tells the king about the boy told the king hey one i'm still alive and two this is what happened last night uh he tells the king about the money and the notes hidden beneath the castle the king finds the money where the ghost said it would be and the king i guess learning a lesson from the previous king who ended up being damned to eternal purgatory the king distributes the money justly and rewards the boy. And after that, and after that, the castle was no longer haunted. So I guess it was, he rectified his wrongs by at least copping up to-

By giving the next king a lot of money. Yeah. At least by like paying everyone back that he owed or something. Okay. Yeah. I guess I could see that. So the story's basically, that story on its own probably varies in a lot of ways. But all of this to say that the Dullahan stories, they vary from people to people, from county to county, could be part of the fair folk. It could be a ghost. It could be. And then all those stories in between are so different.

stories in between are so are so different but the main theme is that it is to you must impress the doll dollahan in some way and thus you will be rewarded after the fact their test wow or punished oh and that's the dollahan i like how that one guy was just closing his window and then he was punished for that you know i'm like well i guess i wonder if it's like every single dollahan has their own tests and it could make total sense or no sense or they could be like maybe they just decide without even they're just in a mood like the dollahan was like you looked at me bam you looked at me funny you're closing your window on me you know there's like some there's just shitty people out there but there's also lovely people maybe there's a shitty dollahan and lovely dollahan i don't know i i didn't say it m did oh

right because you're not supposed to think they're all lovely they're all good people good neighbors the gentry yes you know it's funny remember on the last after chat we had talked about um what i would get uh the it was actually two after chats ago i guess but i talked about what i was going to get my friend's daughter uh they celebrate Hanukkah and we're going to their house tomorrow. And so we went to the toy store this morning to buy her a toy. And apparently my friend told me that recently her daughter started saying she's like three or four. And she started saying she wants to be called Baby Butterfly now. That's precious.

And I was like, that's so cute. baby butterfly now that's precious and i was like that's so cute and so uh we got blaze found this like it's like a fairy door because in our neighborhood people love fairy doors that you just like put on you know parts of your house and so we found like a decorate paint your own and decorate your own fairy butterfly fairy door like it has like butterflies on it and that's the perfect gift i was like this is so cute it's like you paint it you can attach different designs to it and then you can put it on your house outside as a fairy door that's precious but now you realize you have opened a door and she's going to demand paint a new door every day every eventually their whole house is just going to be like the baseboards are just going to be caked in little houses oh my god we have like six of them on our house from

the people who used to live here and uh i have not removed any of them I feel like that would be bad luck or something. Yeah it's weird that it almost becomes part of the architectural history like in a hundred years I hope no one's touched them but that means a hundred years in a hundred years there'll be a hundred year old fairy door on your house. Yeah that's true I gotta say one of them definitely was done by like an a toddler because like a very little toddler with no artistic ability because it's just like a white ceramic thing and then just like splotches of brown paint on it and i was like brown yeah i was like this is what you put on my house okay fine i guess i can't touch it that one i would take away i know i was like how do i take it away by accident? Maybe I'll drop something on it.

Or maybe, you know, you could add to it. Maybe you could do like keep this. Oh, yeah, maybe I can paint it. Keep the splotches a brown and then add, let Leona spat a new splotch. Wait, that's cute, Em. And then the next baby and the next family that lives there can add a new splotch. I love that. I'm pretty.

I feel like the kids are going to come back. Sometimes they walk by the house and they're going to be like, what did you do to my fairy door? I worked really hard on it. I don't know what to say. Sorry. Okay, here we go. Back on track. I feel like this is a synchronicity because today I'm telling you a story about the Appalachian

Trail. Oh, shut up. Okay. Well, hey, I'm so glad that we obviously talked about this before and strategized. That's what we do every episode. Yes, I'm so glad we did that thing that we do where we really carefully plan ahead. We debrief with our heads. We make sure that we are doing topics that really work well together. They speak well to each other. Yes, they pair nicely. I understand. I have my gargoyles ready.

So I am prepared for whatever characters you're going to throw my way to this week. Oh, good. So I know you have an interest in Appalachian history and i do too i like especially now living in kentucky i feel like very close to it my stepdad's whole side of the family is from appalachia and still a lot of them still live there um so i've spent time with some of them it's just a really cool part of the country and has quite a history and when we were up, we had to learn a lot about because we were so close to it. We had to learn a lot about it. And my brother still uses some of the lingo. There's a really, what does he call a poke is, uh, I think what they call a bag,

like a shopping bag. Um, there's one thing he always says it, it drives me absolutely crazy, but there's certain things. Let me see if I can find it. I should have looked this up before. Um, do you know any Appalachian slang? If I do, I don't even think I'm aware that it's Appalachian slang. I don't know if you do. They're very wild. Okay. There's okay. So the poke, I'm trying to think of what there's a word for drinking Coca-Cola or something. Drinking Coke specifically? Yeah. The one I always remember is

poke. Yeah. And that's, I've, I have a friend who actually went to school in Appalachia and she also uses poke. Seriously? Whoa. Appalachia drinking coke I'm just gonna see if no no that's not it I already tried that oh I do know isn't Mountain Dew from Appalachia speaking of sodas and um I don't know if it's yeah I think it's from West Virginia I don't know but it's definitely very big there I know that's been a really big problem that's actually one of the documentaries was about was about the like health problems from Mountain Dew. Isn't Coke or soda in general, isn't, I think in Appalachia it's called dope.

That's what it was. Got my dope in my poke. Hold on. Is that right? Is that what you were thinking of? I think so. I'm going to wait for my brother to respond. But yes, the Mountain Dew thing was, is like a big problem there.

I know that. Or at least was. Gotcha. No, I remember, I remember dope as soda because I thought they were talking about weed and it didn't click for a long time because my friend be like oh yeah well I'm just gonna grab some dope and I was like you're gonna just bring that out interesting okay I'm just curious yeah so I there were I don't know that much about it about the whole area but but I definitely have always had an interest. And I just love the mountains and I just love, I don't know, I just love driving through the area. As someone who doesn't even like to hike, I will say Appalachia is probably one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen.

Gorgeous. But man, that is a town of hikers. People love hiking there and I don't get it. I mean, I get that it's beautiful, but I could not live there is what I'm saying. Yeah. Well, I will say people like to visit to hike for sure. Like it's definitely known for the Appalachian Trail, which is what we will be discussing. Okay. Got it. So the Appalachian Trail was actually the idea of one man in 1900. And over decades, the idea was adopted by government's national park sephora service

until in 1937 when the trail finally connected all the way from georgia to maine the first through hike which is started hiking from start to finish without breaks was completed in 1948 by earl schaefer and the first woman to through hike the trail completed it in 1952. And her name was Mildred Norman Ryder. In 1987, Lori Tenderfoot Pierce became the first black through hiker to complete the trek. Oh, wow. And over the decades, the trail has like grown and changed a lot as far as being affected by government policies, construction and natural disasters, hurricanes, landslides, all that good stuff. They have all affected the trail. Today, the trail is over 2,100 miles long.

It takes about five to seven months to complete on average. And there is one quick footnote here. There was one wildly competitive hiker who set the record in 2018 and completed the hike in 41 days remember that holy shit typically five to seven months is the average completion time that happens he the flash like i'll tell you he had a crew following him with supplies whereas the previous record holder hiked alone without support so he had like an entire like pit pit crew basically to replenish him give give him water, help him get through it, basically. Do you know his name, perchance?

I don't. Okay. Do you want me to look it up? No, it doesn't matter. It's fine. Why do you know him? Well, I know someone who has been hiking for, like has never stopped hiking, basically. Like hikes one trail trail then just walks the other

trail then hikes the other trail and like doesn't have a home like he lives he had for a long time he had a literally a like a mule like in a cart and he just walked he was he wanted to walk across the country was named buddy carl say beat carl say he's like up i think like a professional like i mean this was like unheard of to do this in 41 days gotcha well the the guy that i'm thinking of he dated one of my mom's friends like years ago and but he broke up with her because he wanted to walk across the world or something walk or something like crazy and he actually did it and they did a news segment on him my brother-in-law's uh partner just walked uh across the united states yeah it took her months she just finished and like we saw her at thanksgiving and

she was telling us the stories and how it works and it was just i mean she trained for months to do it yeah it's not something you can just you can't just walk out the door at all i'm on somehow i ended up on hiking tiktok which is the absolute opposite of what i have because i was following this couple where they're like their big thing is they're known to travel to hike massive amounts and then they like documented on tiktok for the however many months they're gone and then I fell into hiking TikTok but I I know enough about the the prep work to know that I never want to do it that sounds crazy that sounds so so tough it's a lot of work uh so that was the the record holder um and you know some people probably say well he didn't really do it the

right way I don't think we have, at least I have the room to criticize how anybody completes the trail. It's not my place. Nope. But if you were to, you know, hike the trail, it crosses 14 states, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia, as well as 22 Native Nations traditional territories. Wow. So Trey Adcock of the Cherokee Nation writes about the relationship between the Appalachian Trail and Native land. And he believes there is a lot of work to be done still between the ATC or the Appalachian Trail Conservancy and indigenous communities. And this

is a quote from him. What current issues are impacting specific indigenous communities with historic connections to Appalachian trail land and how can the ATC be a viable partner? These might lead to uneasy and uncomfortable conversations and that can be a good necessary point of reflection for future generations. Wow. So as much as this hiking trail is very popular

and an important landmark and park and so on, it's just important to remember that it was, you know, made right through a lot of traditional territory. If you are going to do this trail, good luck because hikers face enormous elevation changes. You climb as high as 6,643 feet, which is at Clingman's Dome in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. Along the trail, you can encounter potentially dangerous wildlife like black bears, snakes, and moose. But the Appalachian Trail Conservancy warns that hikers should be most worried. And the most dangerous thing there are ticks that carry Lyme disease. Interesting. I like how that is not something I would have even thought about were the ticks. I would have thought about the fucking bears.

Always check for ticks. It's recommended to use backwards off. Backwards type of off for bug spray and bear spray as well. And not to be confused with the other, the instructions for the other product. So bear spray is not meant to be sprayed onto your body to repel bears. It is meant sort of like mace to repel a bear if it comes toward you. And the bug spray does not repel a bug when it comes toward you. It's meant to be on your body to repel the bugs.

You know, maybe we need new words for them. Maybe not. I don't know. But just to be clear, if you spray bear spray on yourself, you're essentially macing yourself. So please be careful. And actually just don't do that at all, please. So every year, about 3,000 people attempt a through hike, and only about a quarter of those people actually complete it, which is interesting. Yeah.

I wonder at what point they give up. So there are a couple things that people face that end up kind of stopping them in their tracks, so to speak. Bad weather, injury, illness, dehydration, and chronic wet socks, which doesn't seem like a big deal. And then if you really think about it or experience it would be a true nightmare well it's called is it called trench foot or trench boot trench foot i think it's like it is definitely a thing um it's it started in world war one like in the trenches yeah but it's from your boots getting wet and then your socks

getting wet and then your socks can't dry wet And your feet are just wet all the time. It's not good. If you look up images of trench foot, it is out of sight. It's crazy. I'd rather not. Ooh, it's bad. So definitely something to consider. Get the right gear if you're going to go out. You know, I was talking to my brother-in-law's partner and she was saying, oh, like, she

was describing like when she would have to get new shoes during the walk and she was saying oh like she was describing like when she would have to get new shoes during the during the walk and she would go to rei i guess has these like used items where people you could wear a pair of shoes like around the parking lot and walk back in and now they have to sell it at like a discounted rate because it's been used otherwise they have to toss it and so they have like varying levels of um like reusable products and so she would go there and get like her shoes it's just really cool um but yeah people are you need to be genuinely prepared for this kind of a hike oh by the way i haven't even told you what we're covering we're covering murders on the appalachian trail today you know i picked

that up i think i picked that up. Okay. We did never clarify at all. I just like let's talk about the Appalachian Trail. You just did like a third grade PowerPoint presentation on the trail. This man walked it in this many days. Yeah. So I here's my I'm going to custom animation a picture of Trenchfoot. It's going to like spin around until it gets onto the screen. All of a sudden sudden the trench but and there's like a sound effect of it like kicking you in the face all right so focused on bears and thunderstorms plenty of hikers might not consider that other hikers seemingly just like them might also be risk factors since 1974 there have been at least 13 documented murders on the Appalachian Trail

now if you're really thinking about it the statistics make it pretty clear that it's much more likely that you would be harmed by some other ailment than a murderer on the trail but it has happened violent crime is not common on the Appalachian Trail. In fact, you're about 10 times more likely to be murdered in Chicago than on the Appalachian Trail. That is 10 times more likely. So instead, there is this element of fear of being in the isolated woods, being alone, being in the dark, being in some force majeure. Yeah, like you never know. I mean, there definitely are added elements of being in the woods that are scarier in some ways than being in a big city. But typically the violence is more likely to happen in an urban environment. So the first story we're going to I'm going to talk about two murders.

This first one happened in 1974 and it was the first Appalachian Trail killing. Okay. So 26-year-old Joel Eugene Polson and 18-year-old Margaret McFadden Herrett had only recently met in 1974 when Margaret introduced Joel to her parents and told them a bit of a white lie. Uh-oh. She hadn't known him long, but she really trusted Joel and admired admired his adventurous spirit but she knew her parents would never let her take off into the woods with some guy she just met especially considering he was like eight years older than her she was only 18 so instead margaret told her parents that joel was actually leading a group of 15 college students along the appalachian

trail and she was one of those 15 college students. She lied because it was just the two of them going on this trip together. Oh, okay. Yeah. No, it is. So Margaret's childhood best friend remembers, I can remember sitting in her front yard and her telling me about the trip. I'm sure I knew about the trail, but I'd never known anyone who did that kind of stuff.

So May 9th, 1974, Joel and Margaret set off, just the two of them, from Springer Mountain in Georgia, which is the southern terminus of the trail. And Margaret was a new hiker. Joel actually wasn't really a veteran hiker himself. And after six miles of intense incline, they decided to stop at the low gap shelter for the night. Now, when you're on these kind of trails, and this is something I heard from, I'm going to, her name's Emily. I'm just going to call her Emily, who did this, who did her long cross country walk, is that you encounter other hikers and that's kind of how you have social interaction, how you get information about other hikers.

You just like connect with people as you're walking the trail, you see them and then you lose them and you see them again. It's just how it works. So it's not uncommon to share shelters with other hikers on any trail. So Joel and Margaret were unsurprised to run into 31 year old Ralph Fox Howard at the Lower Gap shelter that evening. The weird thing, and this is where Gift of Fear comes in handy, they noticed he didn't look like a hiker. Ew, immediately. Yeah, big red flag. He was in everyday shoes. He didn't have any supplies. He wasn't really dressed for cold or rain, and he only had a single canvas backpack. Okay, yeah, note that he's out of place for sure. Yes. Out of place. He introduced himself to the couple casually enough, but Joel told Margaret that Ralph made him uneasy. He said they should get an early start in the morning and eat breakfast

further up the trail. And Margaret totally agreed. So that night went pretty smoothly. They passed the night quietly together, all three of them. But early in the morning, Joel woke Margaret up and said, come on, let's go. I'll be outside getting ready. So Margaret was lacing up her boots in the shelter when she heard what she called a sharp noise. It was a gunshot. Ralph had shot Joel outside the shelter just in cold blood. Oh my God. So Margaret at first didn't quite understand what had happened. I imagine that would be a very turbulent and confusing moment. And so she didn't realize that Joel was dead. As Ralph led her into the woods at gunpoint, she asked him to move Joel away from the fire ring so that he wouldn't get burned.

Because he had been shot right by the fire ring. Jeez. So Ralph blindfolded Margaret and tied her up to a tree. And then he left for a few minutes. And when he came back, he told Margaret he, quote, took care of Joel. Jeez. He ransacked Joel's bag, stealing his traveler's checks. And then Ralph told Margaret he was leaving her there.

He gave her some water, a bag of granola, and a wristwatch, and he told her he'd leave a note in the shelter telling people where to find her, and then he just vanished into the trees. Wow. Okay. Yikes. But apparently, Ralph realized nobody may ever find Margaret, and then she would die horribly of exposure or dehydration. So he came back. And he said, let's hike together to the nearest road and then we'll part ways. Let's not. And he said if Margaret tried to signal to anyone for help along the way, he would kill everyone involved. So they take this trek and Ralph and Margaret did pass other hikers and even spoke to them,

but she couldn't do anything to risk her own life, to risk their lives. So she just kept quiet. Ralph ended up going back on his promise and he forced Margaret to hitchhike with him into a town where they got dinner and stayed together in a motel. Ew. I know. It's so unhinged. While Margaret showered in the motel, Ralph lurked in the bathroom to make sure she didn't climb out the fucking window.

Oh, my God. I can't imagine the fear. I can't imagine the fear. Then they hitched a ride to a Greyhound station where Ralph bought himself a ticket to Atlanta and bought Margaret a ticket to Columbia, South Carolina. Ralph's bus left first. And once he got on the bus and left, Margaret got on her bus. When she got to Columbia, she finally was able to call the police who connected her to Georgia police. And eventually she was able to return home.

May 11th, investigators recovered Joel's body from the trail. On May 16th, investigators received a phone tip about a man who matched Ralph's description in the media. They got a search warrant to his apartment, and inside they found Joel's stolen traveler's checks, so they knew this was the guy. His name, like I said, was Ralph Fox Howard. He was 31 at the time of the murder.

He had a history with the law. Some of his other previous crimes included car theft, breaking and entering, statutory rape, then marrying the pregnant teenager that he had raped, then attempted murder of that same teenager slash his wife now, and then prison break. My God. Yeah. So this guy's trouble. In 1975, he was sentenced to life in prison for Joel's murder. But in 1991, he got leave to attend his brother's funeral and was then paroled. But he didn't show up for his parole hearing.

And pretty shortly after that, he murdered 29-year-old Diane Good by strangling her in cold blood. Oh, my God. And so... Do we ever find out a reason for, like, why he, like, let this one go, but not before making her go all the way to, like, fucking South Carolina and... It's just so creepy. It's just, like, deranged. Okay. I guess I just gotta be okay with that.

Yeah. creepy yeah so police caught him two days after he strangled diane good all the way in washington state and he was convicted of diane's murder and sentenced again he died in 2003 at a state prison hospital of lung cancer and joel who was killed uh by ralph his friends remember him as shy nerdy and kind it surprised some of them that he was setting out on an adventure with a woman he had just met because he usually was pretty awkward and unsure around girls but he was always really kind and it won people over one friend said he was just a friend to everybody he was happy to be by himself and he was really happy to make other people happy so pretty traumatic pretty tragic uh and for mark because i mean you hear the

start of the story and you think oh he's gonna murder her because yeah she lies to her parents she says oh i trust him i just met him you know that it seems like he's the bad guy but no so for margaret weirdly enough or like amazingly, the experience did not keep her out of the woods. She went on to spend several years studying in Brazil's tropical forests and earned her doctorate there. Oh, wow. Yeah. Okay. Well, good. That's nice. I know. I mean, talk about a comeback story.

She actually shared her story in 2018. And as of then, she was married with several children several grandchildren and living in southern europe she told earl swift of outside online.com that the memory of the incident feels like something that happened to someone else a long time ago but she knows it very much shaped who she is now and here's a quote from her i wouldn't say i've done anything all that extraordinary but i have very much taken it to heart that i was spared for something maybe this experience helped me see that life is a fleeting moment so grab it and go wow yeah what oh my god freaking story to survive i can't i just also like to know that you were so close to death and probably in so many ways just because of the sheer time you were next to this person. Yes.

Like the amount of spending the night in the same room. I mean, Oh my God. Like, I mean, even Joel, like he was there for a hot minute and died. And,

but this woman, like maybe he just like desperately wanted to be near a woman or something. I don't know. Maybe he had no idea. It doesn't, you know, maybe there's just no logic that we can understand yeah also her like

probably having to like do her best to keep it together like for like in that time period of being abducted and like yeah you're in survival mode but you're also trying not to freak him out because he threatened to kill everybody if you made a signal or anything i mean god there's the pressure alone um very very. Do you have another story? Yep. How many do we get? Two. Okay. Okay. Okay. So this is the second one. This occurred in 2001. And I want to warn you right now, it's unsolved. So we don't get many answers and it's a little frustrating. Okay. So this is the unsolved case of Louise Chaput. I hope I'm saying her name right.

I listened to a podcast that said it, Chaput. So I'm going to go with that. Louise Chaput was 52 years old and was a self-employed psychologist from Sherbrooke, Quebec. She owned her own practice where she offered affordable care to low-income families struggling with mental health, which I think is so cool. Oh, yeah. She specialized in family and marriage therapy, and she sometimes testified as an expert witness in youth criminal cases. Outside of work, she was known as a kind woman with a sense of humor. She had two daughters, 18-year-old Corinne and 10-year-old Constance, And her family said there was no one who liked life

as much as Louise. When Louise went hiking, she always took water with her, much like Linda, always have water on hand. But also probably much like Linda, she also always brought along chocolate on all her hikes. Wow. Okay, got it. So it just tells you about her like she's responsible, but she's like, but I still want to have a good time. You know, she's going to she's going to have a zesty moment at some point. Yeah. She's going to treat herself at some point. Yeah. So she was the kind of person who just enjoyed the simple pleasures in life.

And she especially loved the mountain Washington Valley in New Hampshire, roughly three hours from her Quebec home. And she hiked there when she could, because pre-2007, you actually didn't need a passport to go between Canada and the U.S. So it was kind of an easier hike. Fun fact. So Mount Washington is the highest peak in the Northeast. It's about, it's not about, it's exactly 6,288 feet at the summit. The mountain, which is considered the most dangerous small mountain in the world, interestingly enough, is notorious for its violent weather conditions. And it holds the record for the fastest wind speeds ever recorded that were not related to a hurricane or tornado, which I think is pretty incredible.

Okay, wow. And that was 231 miles per hour. Jeez. Yeah. Thank God. So Louise loved the White Mountain Range. It was a challenge. It was a little bit dangerous, but it was also absolutely beautiful.

And so on November 15, 2001, Louise decided to head to Pinkham's Grant in White Mountain National Forest and stay at Joe Dodge Lodge. It was November, like I said, and it's considered unwise to climb mount washington in november so louise asked an employee at the appalachian mountain club for short hike suggestions so just like a sure quick one and done be back that's what i would like if i gotta go again that's what i want just circle right back home and have my hot cocoa waiting for me oh yeah oh wait no i bring it on the trail with me. No, no, no, I need it as I need to know that I have a reward. A reward. Yes. Okay, okay, okay. It was around 3pm and she wanted to go out and get back before dark, understandably. And so they sent her to

what they, you know, considered a shore hike called Lost Pond Trail. Lost Pond connects to the Appalachian Trail, but most hikers hike in and straight back out. It's relatively gentle. It's 1.6 miles. Most people can do it in under an hour. So it's just a short, easy trek that she had requested. Sure. According to all trails, this is a very popular area for birding, hiking, and running, so you'll likely encounter other people while exploring. hiking and running so you'll likely encounter other people while exploring but by mid-november peak season is long past in the white mountains snow is not unusual and fewer people are eager to set out in the cold uh i remember those wind speeds this is a tough place to be in the winter

time okay so it's likely louise was alone on the trail when she left on what should have been a short trek but she never came back to her room at the lodge oh okay she was in a national forest where service is limited so her family at first spent a few days thinking well we don't need to panic you know she probably doesn't have service sure but when she never came home her boyfriend reported her missing on november 19th and after that a major search effort was launched the forest service the appalachian mountain club park rangers and police all set out to find her and at first days went by with no news until tragically her body was discovered on november 22nd near glenn boulder trail which was a week after Louise had first set out. She had suffered multiple stab wounds and her throat

had been cut. Oh my god. Wow. Yeah. But that wasn't like an accidental fall. That was an intentional very, very brutal murder. So the Glen Boulder Trail connects to Lost Pond and searchers found Louise only about a quarter mile from her car. So in other words, it seemed like she had been killed that day on her hike on the 15th. And in fact, strangely enough, her hiking boots were still in her car. So it wasn't like she was being, oh, she hadn't even started hiking then yet. Yeah, but she was found a quarter mile into the hike. so people wondered maybe she was targeted as soon as she parked and was dragged into the woods um perhaps it wasn't clear what had happened maybe she met somebody and yeah but her hiking boots were still in the car so it was um that was a confusing element to this yeah it sounds like

right away she was pulled away so yeah doesn't it so there was confusion in the days following a canadian news outlet reported that police weren't sure if louise was hiking alone if she had been attacked at random or if someone with her were responsible louise's backpack sleeping bag and car keys were missing but investigators thought you know maybe the killer took them off her or maybe the car sat unattended for a week and someone stole it oh so it could be that the murderer had taken them or it could be that she had been killed and then somebody just saw like just stuff sitting out in the car and took it took her stuff you know what i mean sure either were possibilities um her keys were gone weirdly but the car was still there so that was odd um and people thought well what the hell is the motive here who would

kill somebody for a sleeping bag and a backpack like there wasn't also if you're gonna take the keys like why wouldn't you want the car or like even if it was you took the keys so you could hide the evidence of the car would You still didn't drive it anywhere. Yeah, it's just weird. Hmm. Maybe, honestly, I wonder if, like, she was, I don't know, getting something out of her trunk. Someone ran up and, like, grabbed the keys from her car so she couldn't run away from them. And then she, and then dragged her away.

Definitely could be. from her car so she couldn't run away from them and then she and then dragged her away because that would make sense why the car was still there but they didn't need the car they just wanted to drag her but why wouldn't you then just like tell her to get in her own car and drive her somewhere why would you need well i guess if you're already in the middle of nowhere that's pretty good place to kill somebody oh yeah it's so confusing and we weren't the only ones because investigators were also at a loss. They did confirm Louise was traveling alone. So now they had no known suspect. And authorities just had to conclude it was random, senseless act of violence, which is so scary. Yeah.

You just want to be in nature for a few hours. That's what it sounds like to me. It sounds like there was just someone maybe living in the woods or someone hiking nearby that just kind of lost it. Advantage? I don't know. And I mean, one theory they had is perhaps somebody she once testified against had targeted her and stalked her all the way to the mountains to seek revenge. But it seemed like far fetched that she had been followed all the way into a different country and like didn't even notice somebody following her but i guess it's possible um also louise's family couldn't even think of any enemy who might want to hurt her nobody they could think of had ever harassed her in the past or bothered her or even threatened her in the past so it didn't really make sense to them and

despite the more relaxed 2001 border where you didn't need a passport a criminal would have still had trouble crossing it wasn't like you could just do it without any paperwork it was just you know you still needed like an id or something yeah um there were no witnesses no footprints her body had been out in the elements for days um this was like pre the popularization of DNA evidence. You know, it existed, but it wasn't that well known. And also, you know, her body had been out in the elements for so long. Okay.

A chief of the homicide unit said the killer or killers essentially had a week's head start on us. That meant we lost some potential evidence out there as well. Now, obviously, the news rocked the hiking community in the National Forest and along the Appalachian Trail. Canadian and U.S. media advised people to hike in groups or avoid the area completely until police found answers. Spoiler alert, they never found answers. It's now been 21 years. The case remains cold. There is no known motive, no suspect, and the killer is presumably still at large. The New Hampshire Department of Justice is still encouraging anyone with any new information to please use their online tip form. But it just seems like a cold case at this point. It seems like a dead end.

That's so weird. According to WMUR.com, Louise's loved ones returned to the place where she died once a year which I think is really beautiful because she loved being there was one of her favorite places in the world it's still just so eerie to have to go there I know that it was where she her loss was yeah one friend expressed the deep need for answers saying I think in English the term closure which we don't have in French is very appropriate it's you know you never get your friend back but at least you know what happened and unfortunately they have not gotten that closure so i don't know i don't know if they will i don't know if they will either it's one of

those things where we can only hope and wait which yeah is one of the hardest things to do i imagine um and yeah that's that's the those are some deaths on the Appalachian Trail um I'm surprised I feel like I mean you said there's 13 known deaths on the trail I don't think 13 deaths 13 murders I think hold on 13 documented murders yes I don't know why you haven't done an episode where you just do all 13 yet man well. Well, I think starting off with two was one of the most well-documented ones. Yeah. Eventually, it would be nice to cover all of them. Yeah.

Just to make it a little series. Oh, my brother texted me back. He linked me to Appalachian English, which is like a YouTube video we love. Okay. And he said, yeah, it's something about putting your dope in a poke and ball hooting through the holler. I don't know. Ball hooting.

I don't know what ball hooting is. That's the one that I couldn't think of. Ball hooting through the holler. Yeah. So that's the sentence. Sorry that in the beginning, I was just trying to figure out what the hell he was saying. But yeah. oh my gosh well thank you Xandy for the last minute uh shout out I suppose or the last minute comments can we put let me put I want to put this link in the show notes

because it's a great YouTube video uh it's a guy explaining Appalachian slang and it's like an old it's like I think it's from the 90s or something i don't know it's just a beautiful thing i'm looking up ball hooten in this exact moment hang on all hooten to lose control does that mean anything maybe it means to lose control that's what it says oh my god you guys have to watch this video i can't. That will be what I do later when we're done recording. You gotta watch it. You and Zandy would have a great time chatting about this video. Well, I was going to say I have no... Oh, side-goggling?

Sorry. Side-goggling? I think side-goggling. Yeah, that's another one. Oh, like cattywampus or something? I think so. I don't know. I'm just watching them talk and they're just like saying things that are, yeah, like

cattywampus, like crooked. Well, my, usually after we record, I already have something in mind I want to eat and I have something in mind I want to watch and I don't have either yet. So now I've got my thing that I need to watch. Now I just got to figure out what I'm going to eat. Some dope. I'll drink some dope. That's for sure.

Yeah. And maybe you'll smoke some dope. I don't know. We'll figure it out. We'll see. All right. dope that's for sure yeah and maybe you'll smoke some dope i don't know we'll figure it out we'll see all right well if you um are for some reason not sick of listening to us talk after two hours uh and you are a member of patreon you can go hop over to our after chat that we're about to have and we'll probably still be talking about appalachia over there yeah who knows um and i'm sorry in advance and that's why we drink go ball hooten