And That's Why We Drink - E347 A Lovely Villain Era and a Lasagna Horror

Episode Date: October 1, 2023

It's episode 347 and Christine has seen her own husk! We also determine Em was a blacksmith in a former life even though they don't know what a spaghetti western is. Instead they take us to Georgia for the history and hauntings of Lake Lanier. Then Christine covers Billy the Kid, the most notorious outlaw in the west (who didn't take a great tintype photo). And where are our orange slices and Capri Suns, Eva!? ...and that's why we drink!

hey welcome to episode oh shit 347 welcome to wine and crime oh shit and that's why we drink um finally people can see our real secret yeah we're just a wine and crime knockoff podcast we did start the same week as them which was wild we i remember being like what the heck we have the same setup i do remember for a while we were like are they gonna be our rivals and then i thought like they were gonna despise us yeah um worked out differently very yeah i was prepared for them i was prepared for a villain era or something but it turns out that they're lovely people just like i would love a villain era like somebody be our villain hmm that's a dangerous

thing to ask the world for the universe it depends on who it is i'm down depending on who it is i just love that i said to the universe give me an enemy like why what is wrong with me i don't that's not what i need right now life's too easy yeah the irony is the plot twist at the end of the movie is that you find out you're your own worst enemy oh what a plot twist indeed um so relatable so uh oh sorry before i forget i wrote this in my notes this is barrett my moth um squishmallow that i meant to tell you about um i just wanted to say hello uh him to say hello let me read oh okay well i guess her pronouns are she her according to this tag so um my bad let me see meet barrett this moth loves to dream and interpret dreams for others yesterday she dreamt that she became a snowflake fairy princess and ruled a magical kingdom

she was about to host a snowball when suddenly she woke up do you have any dreams to share with barrett i have a dream that she leaves the screen hey why are you so mean to barrett i i really do feel like five-year-olds come up with the storyline i like in a good way i already have a tattoo of her on my arm do you have a name for your moth on your you know i don't i call him my little moth man so i think that has just stuck you know um oh can i tell you since barrett asked me about my dreams can i tell you something real quick uh-huh yeah what so last night um i decided i was going to try to astral project and so i was listening to a sleep hypnosis session or like a hypnosis session as i was falling asleep uh an astral projection hypnosis man google has everything nowadays and so i was listening to this thing

and i had it in both ears because it was like the binaural beats or whatever and i had a sleep mask on and i was like okay i'm gonna get like really into this so I'm like doing that thing because I always thought maybe I'd be good at astral projecting because I dissociate so well from my own body and like can like leave my physical body mentally and so I was like oh maybe I'll be good at this so it's like you know doing the guidance and I'm like realizing I can't feel any of my body and it's like so trippy and then all of a sudden i'm like oh my god who's that and i like see somebody in my mind's eye in my head and i'm like it's me shut up christine for like a split second i was like who's that like i literally

saw somebody and their face and they had an eye mask on and i'm like who the fuck is that and then i went oh i was like that's me and then i like snapped out of it and i was like oh my god i think it's working i don't know if i was just like hallucinating or what you were you were tearing away from your husk i know i know and i loved this meditation because it kept saying like don't worry you will come back to your body you're not gonna going to like, you know. So I was like, okay, I feel safe in this meditation. But I really saw my own husk. I was like, I think I did. I felt like I did.

But then I'm like, maybe I'm just imagining it all. You know, my logical brain. How many inches away were you from your husk? Were you like kissing close? No, it was like as if they were probably three or four feet in front of me. All right, three or four feet. So now your new goal is what?

Five feet? Ten feet? The ceiling? I don't know. The ceiling. There was a scene. I really thought some ghost had entered my fucking mind. I was like, get out of here, ghost.

I'm trying to see myself. Oh, my God. I think we're going to say some shit about like Harry or something. here, ghost. I'm trying to see myself. Oh, my God. I thought you were going to say some shit about, like, Harry or something. Oh, gosh. Well. What? The other day, Blaze was like, Christine. And I was like, I know he's going to say something about a fucking ghost.

I knew it. I just felt it in my bones. Because I've been feeling like there's more shit going on. You felt it in your husk. I felt it in my husk. And I didn't know if, like, it was were like repairing stuff and like painting and moving things. But I feel like something is afoot. Or it's because I used that fucking ghost app during our after hours.

I don't know what happened. The dumbest thing you could do. So stupid. But Blaze was like, this thing keeps happening. I was like, what? He's like, my glasses keep disappearing and he's like but then they reappear in like a place where i've looked 10 times and i know where they go and like he's not a careless person like i am like if i lose something i'm like i'm sure i

just accidentally threw it out the window or put it in the freezer like i don't know like usually it's i did something stupid i accidentally hammered it to the wall. Yeah. Accidentally. Em told me not to. So I hammered it to the wall. My bad. Now it's broken. But yeah, so he's not like that at all. And it's the last couple of weeks.

He's been like, where the hell are my glasses? Like, they just keep disappearing. And then they will, like, reappear on his pillow or something. And he's like, did you find them? And I'm like, no, I didn't put them there. So I don't know. It's very weird. And he said, maybe there's a ghost. And he said it. And I was like, did you find them? And I'm like, no, I didn't put them there. So I don't know. It's very weird. And he said, maybe there's a ghost.

And he said it. And I was like, ha ha. And then I was like, he's starting to believe it. I feel it. And he's going to listen to this and be like, it's happening. Oh my god, it's happening. This is not a drill. Everybody stay calm.

Anyway, so I'm just saying, I feel like Blaze has noticed it as well. And then the other day he came in and he was like, did you turn my lights on in my office upstairs? And I was like, no, you left them on. He's like, oh, okay. I was like, he's getting scared. He's getting freaked out. I know. He's going to hate this episode.

Anyway, I'm sorry for my, for, for commandeering, but that's my ghosty updates. How are you doing, uh i'm good i have my glasses are on my face no good um which by the way if a if a like i how badly does he need his glasses very he was like like genuinely upset and like he doesn't have like a you know i have like multiple pairs of glass all right i did did. No, I have the one. Exactly. He's like that where he's like, I don't I need to see like I can't drive a car. I can't.

No, I can't either. I can't see further than like five inches from my face. And that's why it's so weird because like he's not he doesn't lose his glasses. Like I always lost my glasses, but he does not lose his glasses because he needs them every second of the day. And so they will just he'll like take a shower and come out and be like, my glasses but he does not lose his gloves because he needs them every second of the day and so they will just he'll like take a shower and come out and be like my glasses are gone it's so weird and it's happened only the last couple weeks multiple times so um yeah i was gonna say like it's a silly little prank until it's like a a necessity i mean like a road hazard. Oh, yeah. Yeah. A crime. His driver's license says he needs lenses. I mean, isn't it wild that before glasses and contacts existed, if you like if you had were here, and if there is a ghost here and you're listening, they're invited to take almost anything else but my fucking glasses. That's how Blaze is.

He was like, this is debilitating. Like, I can't lose these. I mean, also, like, if you're listening, ghost, please don't take my purple riddle. I was going to say, there's a lot of things I would have to lose. Things that my body doesn't need you maybe can have, but nothing else. It freaks me out a little bit more because it's one of those things we've talked about before where it feels like, oh, the ghost wants you to notice. Yeah, exactly. Because if it were Blaze's baseball hat, he's got so many he wouldn't even notice it was gone.

It's a game. Blaze's baseball hat. He's got so many. He wouldn't even notice it was gone. And that disappears all the time because it's like, oh, he has like 10 of them or 20 or 40,000 and they go all over like how I do with all my belongings. But the glasses, man, that's like with you, like they do not leave his face, you know, unless he's in the shower. And if they just poof vanish for like one day, one day it was like two days later and

they just reappeared on his nightstand and we were all like two days later i would have bought a whole new fucking set of glasses so he had like a back he found a backup pair that like fall off his face and stuff but it's happening so often now this is not a joke he's gonna kill me for even talking about this at all but on amazon i checked our amazon orders to like see when something was coming and he had bought like rubber tips for the back of the like backup glasses he's like if i have to keep wearing these they fall off my fucking face because they're like his backup glasses he's like i i clearly this has become such a problem that he needed a solution to keep them

comfortable on his head it's been a very weird couple weeks in this house um i don't know i don't know well i have my glasses good what else is going on i don't know uh hmm i think everything's fine oh good good you know what my stepmom always says no news is good news yeah that's i guess that's what's going i mean i also haven't really left the house all that much so i haven't like given the world a chance to like really do a number on me yeah that's probably for the best i do feel a little stressed in general about like um like allison's still gone and so the place is getting progressively worse um yeah because the only reason i keep it very clean is so allison like feels relaxed here but i like stays your partner yeah yeah i do it fully because i have

because i fully am in a relationship and if i weren't, this place would fall into shambles, which is what's happening. And I'm in the midst of the destruction happening all around me. I feel you. Cackling in the middle of the night. I did not know this about you. And I think I have a misguided understanding of you. you because when we would go to like the apartment to do uh like space camp or you know do like one of these fun like surprise pop-up things and you'd bring all these crafts and i was a fucking like shit show and there's like glitter everywhere and paint and you were like about to rip your

own hair out you were like christine i can't watch you do this like you're making such a mess and i was like man emma's such a fucking clean freak i'm over here like dumping paint i was like look at what i can do and like put it on my hand and like like i became a literal toddler and you were having a fucking i could see your eye twitching and you're so pissed at me and i was like okay em is em and i would not live well together but now that you're saying the place is falling apart i'm like maybe we would maybe we would just be a hovel like we would live in trash piles i don't know like mount trash more or whatever it is about trash more it would i well so i when i'm the messiest person i feel um i feel bad that i'm a mess but then if there are other people who are messier than me, I'm like, I know out of all of us,

I have the responsibility to clean it. So I think that's where the difference is. Yeah, you did become kind of the parent. You were like, I feel like the parent who's now responsible for like all of these messes. And I'm like, you brought me finger paint. I don't know what you expected would happen, but you delivered finger paint to me.

And I really think it's because I knew between the two of us, I'm going to have to clean it. And so I just saw my future as you were throwing glitter on the floor. Okay, well, you know what? I say again, why did you bring me glitter? It's my own fault. You never did it again.

Part of me likes it, I guess. I know, you're like a sucker for it. You're like, you know what? I want to pull my hair out. I was in my, I was still in the routine because Allison was in town at the time. So I think I was in the routine of keeping things clean. This is not how it works. I've been told this is not what we do.

Well, it's not natural for me to be clean. So if I'm in the routine, I have the momentum going of being clean. And then I was threatening. Right now, if you came over and you sneez sneezed glitter everywhere i'd go whatever you know like it's like i'm getting to that point like every room like by the time when allison gets back she'll have no idea like she'll hear this but she'll be like oh i wouldn't have even known because it'll be clean by the time she's here and you'll be like you'll never. But I'm currently living in complete filth. And like, yeah.

And not to be fair, because I don't want people like in the comments being like, well, this is why you have roaches. I'm very clean when it comes to food, but I'm not at all tidy. Like, I'm just like, my shit is just everywhere. Like, you know, my mom always said that. She was like, oh, we're like clean. And they are. My mom's like, they're're right but like just messy like

disorganized like messy whatever by nature i am like not clean like i will literally as you know leave like trash piles and there will be food and like crap like i will my mental illness will take over and i'll be like i don't care that there's mold all over the desk it just doesn't matter to me like there will be like i i just want people who are out there to be seen. Like, I am a dirty, messy person at my worst. Like, if I'm in a bad place. And the irony is that not a goddamn roach in sight with you. But with me, like, I leave my, like, socks out and there's roaches everywhere.

So I don't even know what that's about. Well, you live in an apartment building in Los Angeles, a very urban area. I think that has a lot. And Burbank specifically has a has a roach problem it seems so um yeah so that's gonna happen no matter who lives where i feel like that's just kind of i forgot to tell you i'm sorry i just started laughing what um alice and i went out to get ice cream a couple weeks ago and we were we were walking on the sidewalk and there was like like there was like city roaches like the ones that are like the size of

rats oh cool we walked past one and i also got so scared she pushed me into traffic oh how funny am i mean there wasn't any like cars there but like we both got so scared we didn't know what to do and tried to leave the sidewalk and the only other place was the road and it was just a very anyway it's just burbank things just silly burbank things but it was no they oh my god they were so fast it made ours look like the slowest little like like slow slow cockroaches there ever were this thing, if it had wings, it would have flown right into our eyeballs. It was the scariest.

Which is just when your nightmares become reality. In LA, I remember those palmetto bugs and they would just fly around. Anyway. Anyway. Anyway, the place is a mess, so I'm already stressing about the deep, deep clean I'm going to have to do before Allison gets back. So that's why I drink.

And I drink my little Bevragino and LD, Liquid Death. Oh, me too! Love her. I'm going to Rest in Peach, Iced Tea, Liquid Death. You're flavored. Here's my very lively still water. Plain water out of it. I cannot understand it.

All right, that one's done. So let's crack into another. I'm telling you, it feels like you're trying to suddenly go back to a merch idea. You're trying to pitch. Product placement is what it feels like. You're like, well well might as well look at the camera crack into it it's like okay we see what you're doing here if i were hired refuse to lean into it for so many years that now i'm just like i have whiplash like what is going on but okay it's only when i it's because for a long time i wasn't drinking out of cans no but there were times you'd open a liquor and you'd say

let's get into it and i would say m it's there were times you'd open a liquor and you'd say, let's get into it. And I would say, M, it's right there. And you wouldn't say it. And you were just like, eh, it was not your identity at the time. But I guess now it is. I guess I had some exploring to do first. Yeah, it's okay. I understand.

You always come back. Yeah. Product of the day. Okay. So let's crack into it so hey i have a story for you and i've wanted to do for a while we have gotten a million and a half comments about it um which makes me nervous because i feel like i didn't find as much information as people wanted but i think maybe we just have like an audience in this area.

So they were hoping we'd cover it. What is it? This is Lake Lanier in Georgia. Oh, I don't know about this. So I've wanted to cover it for a while, but I wanted to make sure that I did it justice. And if you're from the area, you might know what I'm talking about. us and if you're from the area you might know what i'm talking about um first and foremost lake veneer is a 38 000 acre man-made lake in georgia oh my lord it has almost 700 miles of

shoreline oh i just burped excuse me ever consummate professionals we are from water okay whatever um from not carbonated water what is that how old are we we can't even drink water without just like falling to pieces if you're wondering what 30 looks like it's drinking water and then having like chest pains all day and then your body rejecting it for some reason so uh man-made leaks are extremely common in the u.s uh at my dad's house growing up we lived on a man-made lake yes we love them these this country we love them for some reason and i don't think a lot of people realize that even like massive lakes like maybe their own lake a lot of people have lived on lakes they that they're man-made some people would have no idea um fun fact for you alaska do you know how many natural lakes alaska has i have no idea

over three million whoa i thought it was a trick question i was gonna say zero and then i was like i'm gonna sound like such a fucking idiot so i said i don't know no you're good it's a so natural lakes it has over three million that are bigger than five acres um wow and these make up over 40 of the nation's surface water um jeez and then fun fact how many uh natural lakes does maryland have uh uh 80 000 none damn it i knew zero was gonna be an answer especially i react i was like i should have i threw the alaska in there at first to throw you with the naturals yeah you really got me alaska has uh over three million natural lakes but maryland has none if you've been on a lake in Maryland, it was man-made. I have. Oh. Well, great. So man-made lakes, do you know how they're created? I don't expect you to know, but I just, if you have an answer. I've tried to make a lake before when I was little in the backyard,

and I just dug a hole and put water in it. It didn't work work so i know it's not that it actually kind of is oh okay kind of so uh you you can do it one way or you can do it the opposite way so you can create a dam in a river and then have it fill up a natural basin oh that makes sense or you can dig out a basin a man-made basin and then have a river fill it up. And so probably the only reason it didn't work for you is because you didn't have a dam and the basin was not down to clown. That is exactly why it didn't. That's the only reason it didn't work out when I was six and I tried to make a lake. I get it.

I'm just telling you what's... Short-lived landscaping career. Down the drain. You're welcome. I'm just telling you what's... Short-lived landscaping career. Down the drain. Well, man-made lakes are often created to provide drinking water for people, for agricultural irrigation, for industrial cooling. And in my opinion, one of the most important ones is flood control. But creating man-made lakes, which are also called reservoirs, they are ecologically very controversial.

Flooding a basin destroys hundreds of thousands of acres of habitat that's near water and is very, very important. It's called, I think, riparian habitats. That means habitats that are nearby water. So if you flood a basin, it destroys acres and acres and acres of that, which creates, like, creating the dam itself cuts the water flow. And it harms things from being able to move upstream or downstream where they're supposed to. Oh, it, like, blocks the natural flow of yeah it's another reason why like salmon is becoming endangered because they can't get upstream anymore right right right and also um major rivers have always carried sediment downstream but with a

dam in the way it stops the river flow and sediment can't flow So instead it just sinks to the bottom. And in the grand scheme of things, this means that there's very little new sediment replacing old sediment. So plants aren't rooting properly and it's destroying the wetlands, which is causing more flooding than there should be. So something as small as creating a dam hundreds of miles away can cause the wetlands on the shore to not be able to flood or to prevent flooding well. So that's why a lot of hurricanes these days have more devastating damages. So anyway, just wanted to throw that fun little deep dive in for you. Deep dive. Well, a deep dive, wink. Well, if you had told me that when I was six, maybe I wouldn't have tried to make a lake. I have a feeling your dam was about the size of like a solo cup or something so

who told you about my secret tool I was using I feel like you were just scooping with a rock or something and accidentally just helping the ecosystem i was doing uh so here's where we get into some of the darker history of man-made lakes in general but um this is what leads into lake lanier so reservoirs are also super controversial socially because a lot of these man-made lakes are built on top of towns um and not like the town was already flooded so let's take advantage of it and just make it a lake but like towns were intentionally flooded and destroyed with the purpose of creating a lake on top of it hundreds of of flooded towns out there were flooded to be to create reservoirs oh my god i didn't know that so an example of this is like

lake mead was actually um an ancient indigenous settlement that's now called the lost city um and historically if a town was going to be flooded residents would be told with very little notice so they couldn't really pack everything up um they were also sometimes paid but the compensation was like not enough to like recoup like how much you're losing from your fucking job yeah and a lot of these towns were also like farmland so farmers were already hurting and now you're paying them less than a farmer's wage and they're having to, they don't have enough time. So, I mean, I don't know what the devastation looked like, but I imagine it'd be hard for those people to get to get all their animals out in time and stuff like that. That's so sad.

Or even just their own like livestock, their whatever's in their own home, you know. And one of the most notorious examples of this is lake lanier so it was once home to indigenous people for at least 12 000 years um until thousands were forcibly relocated so white farmers could move in sure and then by the late 1800s uh there were less white people. And this town had actually become Oscarville, which was a thriving community founded by free black Americans. Oh, OK. Oh, I see where this is going. Yeah, it's nowhere good. Nowhere good. So it became Oscarville. It was known as a successful black community.

There were many tradespeople there, farmers there. But by 1912, during 1912, there were, I think, over a thousand black residents living in Oscarville. Many were landowners. It was just known as like a successful black town. And white southerners that live nearby hated. Of course. Of course. Black success, black power, black excellence.

Dear Lord. The tipping point for white people was when an 18-year-old white woman named May Crow, she was attacked. I think she was assaulted and then beaten and ultimately murdered by three black men. That was the story that came out. And I think there was no evidence of who the three black men that was the story that came out um and i think there was like no evidence of who the three black men were but ernest knox oscar daniel and rob edwards were accused charged tried and convicted in one day oh cool great awesome 5 000 white people came out to watch their lynchings yeah i'm sure this is all above board. And then, by the way, they were tried, of course, by all white juries.

Well, sure. So 5,000 people came out to watch their lynchings, and then the white residents attacked the town. They came into this area, which is, by the way, in... I've heard this. Did somebody do a... Sorry, I don't mean to interrupt. Did somebody do, like, a movie about this? I feel like somebody do a sorry i don't mean does somebody do like a movie

about this i feel like i've i've definitely i don't know seen a retelling of this have you heard of forsyth county yes oh wait i know why it's because i cover i think i covered a story in forsyth county isn't that where that murder took or not murder that like mysterious death okay i don't know uh never mind i i do know about this county i think i've covered a story from there and and talked about the history of it yeah okay so lakeland year uh or oscar oscarville is in forsyth county and uh that's where this story is taking place so um the white residents of forsyth uh grew much more violent after this white woman was attacked and the three men were lynched they basically told all the black people in town get the fuck out you're not wanted here

um they burnt down all the black owned homes businesses churches and eventually within the next few years every black resident fled oscarville oh sorry i just remembered tamla horsford uh she was the one who was found dead after spending like the uh doing like an adult sleepover at with all those white women that was in forsyth County it was in Forsyth County and that's why it became such like a hugely sensational case because the woman who died under mysterious circumstances was black she was with all the other football moms at like a slumber party and she was found in the backyard and like nobody really knew what happened and part of it was the context was this story like the the story of the county of the town yes um and how like that was kind of like a a gas like waiting to be ignited by the you know

it was really crazy but i i do remember that yeah so my next bullet is let's deep dive into forsyth county um great well apparently did already, but I don't remember. So you can tell me more. I think you'll remember as soon as I say a couple of certain things, because there's you'll see. So there are parts of Lake Lanier that are in Forsyth County, which is where Oscarville was. And at one point it was said to be incredibly racist. It was openly a sundown town. And I guess, according to your story, there's still it's still a bit of a hotbed of racism. I don't I'm sure there's some lovely people that live there, but this town does have quite a history. I think the history just bubbles up when it's, you know, put in such stark contrast, like with that that death. such stark contrast like with that that death an example that you might remember of forsyth county is that in 1987 oprah winfrey went to forsyth county you remember now to feature yeah

to feature it on her show it's actually a 45 minute segment which i did watch all of it last night and then needed to like detox afterwards oh geez i haven't watched it so yikes there's a much quicker version like a recap on um YouTube if you want to watch it. But Oprah went there because there hadn't been a black resident there in almost 80 years from 1912 to 1987 ever since that that woman was attacked. There hasn't been a single black person that's lived in that town so um i think after watching the 45 minute segment i got some better context on it that there was i think there were talks of like black people wanting to move back i don't or like talk like i don't know how the discussion came up because i don't know if they wanted to or if it was a hypothetical but the townspeople started freaking out and a protest was held in town yes um about white brotherhood yeah and uh 20 000 something

people came out to be part of this march black people counter marched at the same time and you can see them being pelted with rocks literally david duke the grand wizard of the kkk was there um and the feature had clips of people just walking around in their KKK robes and chanting slurs and saying black people aren't welcome here. It was just horrendous. Yeah. Um, so Oprah hold held a panel and I will say a majority of the people she, she held a panel of all the people who actually live in town.

Yeah. Um, and a lot of them were like this is bullshit like we welcome everybody so i appreciate like the loudest get the like exactly stuff yeah which is unfortunate exactly so it's it's not that forsyth county is 100 racist it's just that they have quite a number of loud folks and vocal town. Vocal minority. Yeah, fuck that. So that was just to give you an idea of what this town looked like even in 1987, 80 years later, that they had to have a panel about whether or not they should allow people other than white people to live here. And after this, during the last census census they recorded that forsyth county

wasn't even five percent black so it's still heavily you know prejudice i would guess i would assume that there's quite a few people out there who would think that but i just wanted to give you a recap on forsyth county and going back to to Oscarville after they drove all the black people out of the town the army then took the area and used it as a reservoir project which which it's not like it's entirely the the town or Forsyth County's doing but the government took advantage of the fact that now there was this empty town sure um when they flooded the towns they sunk landmarks stores schools churches cemeteries they all became the bottom of the current lake i mean that like makes my heart sink like that's so dark like how could people be like oh it's not a big deal i mean you're just

drowning an entire town's worth of history and culture in like people's homes also um because white people drove all the black people out of the area out of fear they really abandoned ship it wasn't like they were there to claim and relocate family graves like or graves i didn't even think of graves or important documents or documents i was gonna say sentimental stuff archives of you know history there actually was i think it was also oprah if it wasn't oprah it was it was some news i don't want i don't know which one it was but somebody um actually tried to reach out recently to um descendants of oscarville residents and was able to find people who actually could tell the stories that their grandparents had told them

about oscarville which that was a really interesting segment too but it's just so sad so much history was just destroyed immediately and um without thought or input from the people who actually lived there and not at all fun fact, but there are many communities, like I said earlier, that have been flooded and turned into reservoirs. But of course, a lot of them are Black communities that were run out and then flooded. And this is either through overt or systemic racism.

Examples of this are Delta Park, Oregon, that was a Black town once called Vanport in Alabama. Lake Martin, which is still there, was actually two black towns called Coalisia and Susanna or Susanna. And then Central Park, New York City, used to be two black communities called York Hill and Seneca Village. So just some examples for you. and Seneca Village. So just some examples for you. On top of all that history and the bodies that were sank by the government,

these were also, again, once sacred indigenous sites. So just two kicks to the crotch. And for the third, this lake was named after a Southern Confederate. So why not? We'll just put cherry on top. You know what I mean? Yeah.

The racist cherry on top. So today, anyway, I'm sorry to like bum everybody out, but I also like would have definitely been an asshole to not talk about that. No, no. It's really important to the, I mean, it's also fascinating, you know? I mean, as fucked up as it is, it's important to, that we remember it. It is also wild that like some people are just like out there jet skiing and like there's a fucking school underneath you or something like like cemeteries or like there's

cars there's stores oh yeah so today it's a tourist attraction in an affluent very white area uh that it brings in about $5 billion a year. No, that's crazy. With 10 million annual visitors. And some stats, I said this was a very white area, some stats suggest that this town is up to 70% white, or this area. Lake Lanier is also particularly dangerous for a man-made reservoir,

because multiple drownings, boating incidents whatever it is but it's but it's oddly dangerous um from like they don't know why like we think it the story goes it might be the ghosts cursed i see from 1994 into this summer last month um almost 230 people have died in this lake and just for clarification if you're listening to this podcast in four years because that's what i tell myself uh the year is 2023 so from 94 to 23 you said yeah so um not even not even 30 years 230 people have died in this that really seems high um at the time that these notes were done it was eight deaths had already happened this year but as of tiktok last night 12 have already died this year are you shitting me um and since the lake's creation because we don't know

a lot past 1994 but the assumption is since the lake's creation there have been 700 deaths wow one of the most recent deaths uh was 10 days ago uh our researcher googled lake linear deaths and within the hour of researching that there was a new death that's like the worst google alert you want you know you're like oh just finishing up these notes i'll put a pin in this and it's like update yep still updating so um like i said most are drownings boating accidents um a lot of them are also electrocutions because uh shit the electricity in the boats being released into the water or like the power box on the docks um aka this is why you don't swim in marinas um because all the electricity in the water in that one that's

terrifying yeah um but many believe that the lake's history caused a curse on the lake uh which threatens all who enter it so it's just a lot of bad energy there that is radiating still, and there's a lot of eerie phenomenon. So in 1958, this is one of the bigger stories people still talk about, is that a girl named Delia and another girl named Susie, they were on the Jackson Bridge, the Jerry D. Jackson Bridge, right over the lake,

when they lost control of their car in some way and crashed into the lake 18 months later a fisherman found a woman's body floating in the lake missing both of her hands oh and they were like that's odd there's a story there and this woman was just buried in an unmarked grave because no one knew who she was one of the girls they didn't know they just found a woman at 18 months after this car crash um but she was buried in an unmarked grave and soon after she was buried people started regularly seeing a ghost on the bridge of a woman with no hands oh no so now many people think that it could have been i see i see um she has become known as the lady of the lake people still see her today and some say she's either a residual haunting of one of the women or maybe she wants to grab you and pull you off the bridge and down

into the lake which like good luck you don't have hands but you can try uh like if she's known to grab you i'd be it's even creepier because she doesn't have hands it is worse it is so her worse her ghost has ghost ghost hands you know yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i got you i got you uh so yeah she became known as the lady of the lake and 30 years later by the way the bridge was undergoing construction and the crew found the woman's car in the lake and suzy's remains were found in the car underneath the bridge so i don't know if she didn't have hands or not but that could probably be really useful information um but wasn't the woman who has already found the one without hands oh yeah so i guess if they found suzy's remains and delia was the one without hands that may have been delia yeah maybe delia um believers in the lady of the lake hoped that

this would like put her spirit to rest that both people had been discovered but since this there have been even more sightings really yeah so it's interesting because they did like uh whatever they could for a proper burial they found remains and she's still seen maybe there's something to the accident that she wants people to know you know yeah i don't know i't know. Would you board on the bridge? Maybe later. You would say yes. I know. I don't know. Let me think about it.

I'm kidding. There's another spirit, which is extra eerie to me. It is a ghost of a raft that floats on the lake at night and appears from thin air in front of boaters. Just a random raffle just bump into your boat. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Is it trying to lure you into the water? That's creepy.

So a lot of boaters have claimed to also see a shadow figure nearby pushing the raft along with a pole. Like fucking river sticks? That seems like an ancient... Creepy. like fucking river sticks like that seems like uh ancient like an ancient creepy well so even though the water is too deep to tread this person looks like they're gliding through the water pushing this raft with a stick and some believe this is a residual spirit from before the lake was made when people worked the waterways here and so maybe this is a worker who used to push boats and like that floated through shallow streams oh he's like here's the water i know what to do which is also interesting because that implies that ghosts float because wouldn't he be haunting the bottom of the lake where he

could stand at one point where the water would have been at the time good point but now he's floating all the way up here so you'll float too that's what oh no um but yeah so apparently this raft has an old lit lantern that lets you see the figure's shadow oh that's creepy until the shadow and the raft vanish into the dark that does feel like a under underworld like it feels very ominous one story is that um one night the fisherman saw the raft and actually heard someone yelling and so he dove in to help and only when he came back up from diving in the raft was gone so it really does kind of sound like it's luring you into the water yeah um if you there's this is an urban legend which like i'm curious if your town had anything like this but they said if you swam in the lake in your underwear on a sunday like one of those

crazy ones uh you could actually hear the old town below's church bells ringing underwater. Okay. I love that. The underwear part is hilarious, but the rest of it is very spooky. It's also like the church is saying like, you're sinning. Like get more than your underwear on or something. Oh, I see your butt. Ding dong.

It's like sin. Sinful. Sinner. Yeah. Wouldn't it be weird to think, sorry, sorry real quick of like you know how we talk about sometimes time slips or like witnessing kind of a clash in time where you're accidentally like seeing the past or the future wouldn't it be wild if you lived in that town and you got a glimpse of the future and it was just like the whole place is fucking underwater you'd be so confused can

you imagine looking up in the sky and there's someone floating around in their underwear you'd be like i'm so confused what is going on no but it is it is really wild and um i obviously we've talked about this a million times where i think of glitches and in the multiverse or whatever it is i can't imagine getting a glimpse of everything like underwater or like what would that mean for you can you not breathe or like right exactly is that like you're there actually or is it you're just dream like maybe a dream of it i don't know yeah oh i can't imagine like it also really makes me wonder and like it's kind of dystopian in a way but like i think about the room i'm in right now and i'm like in a hundred years what's oh yeah what's right where I'm sitting like is there someone else also sitting here or is this like

has nature taken over and it's just back to woods or like is this the roaches have taken over roaches are now podcasting on your behalf but everywhere like I I walk or sit down if I'm like if I think too long about it I'm like what was here a hundred years ago and what's going to be here in a hundred years I think about that constantly I'm so glad you said that I also think about it my intrusive thoughts are always they're not always bad sometimes they're just like do you think that whoever sat here had to wear a Victorian like corset back in 1880 you know I'm like I don't know because I'm in sweatpants are they mad about it i don't know well also i mean i think about it even with like i think about it sometimes in a very sweet way where i'm like in this room at some point or on this property like if the building went away and i floated down to the ground and you know on this piece of sidewalk like did someone ever have like

their first kiss in this space and like i'm just like in a room where something really special happened ever thought that i've always thought i bet somebody learned that their family member died in this house i'm like i bet something tragic happened during the war in this house i but i should start flipping it i like the positive aspect well i was gonna say i the range is really wide for me because it can go there or it can go like oh with all the like history that's been erased like what happened to indigenous people right where i'm standing well you know that part is always gonna be bad it can be incredibly tender or it can be really fucking horrid depending on my mood but

then you think back then too like probably some really wonderful tender things happened before they got that's true you know so there's also think about this even before indigenous people was a dinosaur fell in love with somebody but did a dinosaur like die from a meteor crash right where i am probably yes but it's also life baby okay hey all right okay this is what i tell myself when the intrusive thoughts start like knocking the door down i'm like it's just a circle of life you're like that's hollywood baby that's how it's hollywood baby so anyway anyway naked underwear people in the sky out of sundays i can't get over that that would be one of those trippy things where you're like i had the weirdest dream and like i know make no sense.

But then we're all underwater and there was a naked teenager floating around and the church bell was going off. It makes you wonder if any dreams are impossible. Yes, like nonsense dreams that don't make any sense. You're like, maybe in the future. Yeah, you don't know. Well, so we were talking about how Lake Lanier can be very dangerous to swim in, and it can also be very dangerous for divers specifically. I don't know how many people are out there diving in a lake. Stop diving in there.

This is because, and this is another kind of trippy thought, is that a lot of underwater debris that we can't see from the town floating up. Of course. Like, why would they not even think of that? Like, bricks are going to get loose, you know? I mean. Think of like someone's cookbook just smacking you in the face. Literally, like a foundation of someone's house just decides to like pop on up. Trees?

Underwater trees? What are you thinking? A fence? A car? A picket fence? Just poke you in the butt. It's just nonsense. We're so lucky. We're so lucky that cars don't float.

Because think of all the cars that would just come flying up, you know? Oh, just like, you know when you put something underwater and then it like shoots back like one of those little boards? Oh my god, yeah. Oh, it would be so dangerous. Oh my god. No one could dive. No one could be in the water. No one could be in the water.

so it's really dangerous from underwater debris from the town but also um currents near the dams that have been created they are also very threatening to divers there's like underwater whirlpools and things like that and a lot of divers have actually said when swimming in open water they will like run into something like head on that they something in their path that they actually they don't know what it is and when they come up or when they start investigating what they ran into that they couldn't see at the time it's a straight up apparition of a human body what and they think it's like they found a drowning victim so they'll hold on to like try to help them to shore and the body will vanish out of their hands okay that's a nightmare that's a new one that's a new one that's terrifying so fine and does that mean like bodies of

the people that used to live down there are floating up and they're go or like that's the ghost of a body from down below or is that the ghost of a drowning victim 300 people who've died there yeah yeah um so just terrible there's also boats that have crashed hitting something in the middle of the lake but when they go looking for what it was there's nothing they could have collided with why is anybody on this lake this sounds terrible and scary drownings are very odd here even strong swimmers will drown in incredibly shallow water which is like kind of a universal warning of like anyone can drown in any level of water but apparently it happens an odd amount here um several people who have nearly drowned have also said that

they weren't drowning but they felt someone yanking them under the water and there was no one that's around that is one of those childhood nightmares that everybody, I think, can relate to. Yeah. This led to rumors that drownings are actually caused by the ghosts of the bodies in the water who have either never been recovered or are one of the more recent bodies, you know, that have also died nearby. Some people have seen the spirit of a boy who drowned here wandering the shoreline

and some people even hear him yelling for help but when they go when they look to him he's yelling for help while standing up in shallow water so he doesn't actually need your help he's just trying to lure you in oh no from the shore like he wants you to walk in oh no yep he just wants to get in the water um this is uh made people wonder if he really needs your help or if he's luring you in other people claim to see ghosts under the water floating near the surface but not being able to get out of the surface as if they're trapped under like a sheet of ice or something it's like they're near the water and can't get they can't break the surface um so who's cam like what does that mean does that mean they're really they floated up and they just couldn't get out or did they drown and they couldn't make their way up and so their ghost trying to like make contact can you imagine a residual haunting of someone who drowned so like

the ghost can never get out of the water. It's just like that loop of like watching them drown. That's horrific. Sometimes people also hear angry voices calling their name in the water. Also trying to lure them in. People hear unexplained sounds. They see lights. They hear music and singing and talking that are all reported on the water.

Even if you're on a boat alone with nobody nearby despite the hauntings the history and the controversies of this man-made lake and all man-made lakes um people of likely near are unlikely to change anything considering again their five billion dollar annual profit i was gonna say also i feel like this is probably such a popular spot that like half our listeners are like don't tell me not to swim there my family goes every you know what i mean i feel like someone could be like why are you going in there and probably everybody's like because i go there during the summertime weirdo it's my vacation i don't know somebody could be on their boat right now listening to us that's what i'm saying i wonder if they saved

this episode for that and they're gonna be for their big summer trip yeah awkward um there's a historian named lisa russell and i'm just gonna end on a quote from from lisa that says a haunting is something difficult to ignore or forget something poignant and evocative and the real haunting in this story is how history has made it impossible to ignore what was done to the land of north georgia once land of wild rivers, North Georgia is now broken with dams and human-made bodies of water that changed the ecosystem. And once a land that belonged to indigenous people, it is now buried under the water, making recovery of that lost culture impossible. So it's scary on every level. Yeah. Yes.

It's heavy stuff. I mean, and it makes sense why it would have such a dark energy. If I mean, you know, it doesn't sound like it has a dark energy for the most part, if you're just like there on a boat having fun, but you know,

it, it makes sense that people think it's cursed or has a dark energy to it. If it does have such a bleak history, but I can also, I can also see why it makes such a profit because it's a lake for anyone if you're a historian if you are trying to preserve culture if you like ghosts if you just like being on the fucking water like there's a reason to be there for any group of people it seems right like i think if you if i didn't know this story and someone said like i want to go there i'd be like sure yeah i don't know why not or or you can know a lot about

it and still want to go and just yeah and give it like it's it's you know respect or something so there's it's obviously a tourist attraction but i can see why so many different types of tourists probably are learned to drawn to it i wonder listeners out there if you uh i hope you don't mind my kind of flippant remarks about this lake um but i am curious to know if you've had any spooky encounters anybody out there who's been here you know i will say we've had a lot of requests by dms at one point we're filled with people who are interesting likely Lanier. So I wonder if they've had any stories. Send them to our email. I'm curious.

Yeah. Yeah. They're probably like we have already. I know. I'm not looking at it, but. Wow. Good story. That's one of my favorites so far, Em.

That was, I didn't know you could have such a haunted lake. I didn't know that was a thing. I mean, 700 deaths since its creation. That's crazy. lake i didn't know that was a thing i mean 700 deaths and it's since its creation and like crazy and like almost a third of that was in the last 30 years like yeah so last comment guys be careful please out there like go have fun but just please be careful bring a life jacket or something yeah and emma's right you can drown in an inch of water anybody no matter how proficient you aren't swimming so please be careful and if you see a raft at night don't don't look at it don't even think about looking at it just let them go on by

all right um i am so excited for my story today ah why i'm covering a cowboy Oh my god Well here we go folks Everyone you can leave It's Christine's time alone with her cowboy I'm having a moment with Billy the Kid Really? Is it the Billy? Billy the Kid Oh man

Okay so For anyone who for some reason Decided to join listening to the podcast for the first time ever and this is your first episode with us um christine has quite an interest in cowboys what is it like but usually it's cowboy ghosts like it's not even just like cowboys but after after thinking about it for quite a while and like really trying to dig into it, I think it's like also cow, like all cow, like wild West.

Blaze, if you're listening, be a cowboy for Halloween. It's like not that hard, especially in Kentucky. Just figure it out. Just go buy some cowboy boots. Just buy some stirrups and,

uh, you know, something like so endearing and intriguing like i don't know if i like in a past life lived in the old west or something but there's something like so um just like i'm enamored by the wild west stuff i don't know and weirdly it actually occurred to me i was thinking about it a few weeks ago that's how often i think about the Wild West. Entirely abnormally often. But I had this suddenly, this flash where I remember being a kid and we were driving through. You believe a kid?

I'm sorry. I was driving through the desert out by Death Valley with my mom and brother on a trip. And I remember her getting really teary eyed and she cried like the whole time. And she just kept saying, I've been here before. And she grew up in Germany, obsessed with like spaghetti Westerns, all Wild West stuff, obsessed like to a scary degree.

It was everything cowboy, everything Wild wild west all of that old western stuff and uh so when she went she started crying and she was like i've been here before i've i've lived here before like she doesn't say that very often very often i've had that i've had that before but before i move on you were having a tender moment so i could not interrupt but what on god's green earth is a spaghetti western what what do you mean what is a spaghetti western what are you talking about like an italian western are you serious are you serious yes like a western wild west movie spaghetti how would how is that involved this involved? I can't be the only person on earth with this question. I think you might be. Maybe you're not, but I feel like... Spaghetti Western? Where would I have learned that? Everyone's learned that? I mean, I don't know. Maybe not.

Are you not going to tell me what it is? I'm still sitting here. It's a movie. It's a Wild West movie. Oh, it's a movie. Yeah, it's a type of movie. No, no, it's like a genre. I still don't understand. Okay, here, I'll read the Wikipedia. The spaghetti Western is a broad subgenre of Western films. Oh, okay.

Well, they were produced in Europe, I guess. Oh, okay. But they were known, they were directed by Italians typically. So they were called like spaghetti Westerns. Okay. Western films, but made by Europeans. But I mean, it's a very, very calm. I mean, I don't know.

In your house, maybe. Maybe. But like, let me read some. Okay. I'm going to read list of spaghetti Westerns. Did Eva respond? Does she know what it is? Eva, say no. don't make me look like

a fool she's gonna say something very like in between sorry m yeah it is a pretty common term okay good i feel better now i was like am i having if someone if someone else out there didn't know what i was talking about could someone else out there comment or tag me i guess i feel so alone i guess what i'm surprised by is that you've never heard the term like i feel like a lot of people probably have heard it or like i don't really know what that is but you've really never heard it well anyway like also west westerns are not at all like my like they're your cup of tea it's not even like on my shelf like i so i think i've ever watched one like i don't think it's my thing at all.

Like, I don't, I mean, it's my mom's thing, definitely. But like, let me read some. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Oh. I don't know. Just all those famous Westerns. Django. There's a lot.

I had no idea. Okay, so my mind's already blown and we haven't even gotten to your story yet. Okay. Okay, well, in any case, when you were like i don't want to interrupt i was like what could you possibly be interrupting about these spaghetti westerns i was like okay we should probably discuss that if we're gonna continue imagine if i said like oh i love lasagna horrors like you would be like what the fuck is that like that's how crazy it sounded to me i just it's rare that like i know a pop culture term or like a movie term especially i don't watch movies ever i'm like not a i'm i'm very bad at movies cinema film like not my jam at all so i'm it's rare for me to know something that you don't

i feel like very off my footing is off you know i feel you are superior in terms of i'm not the slang today i just genuinely was like taken aback that uh i don't know anyway sorry but yes a spaghetti western is like a one of those classic old like cowboy films i i don't i'm really watch those it's not even my thing to like watch but i think there's something there's a draw there for me where I'm like, I feel at home with the Old West saloon style. There's something. So anyway, my theory, because I'm just going cuckoo off the wall bananas today, is that my mom and I, because I do think she and I have spent a lot of lifetimes together. I have a theory that at some point we were out like in the West somewhere, like out in the trekking across you know interesting different relationship format so that's my theory because it didn't occur to me until recently when i thought about my mom's like

since she was like five her obsession with the old west living in germany and it never really occurred to me and then i was like i'm obsessed with cowboys and then it kind of clicked and i went oh maybe there's like a connection i don't know maybe I had I had a um like a past life regression done and I honestly don't know how you did why didn't you talk about it this was years and years this was before I think we were even friends you've never talked about this because I don't really know how accurate it was it didn't really feel right um I know what you mean where you're like am I just inventing this was it like you're just felt like you were imagining it so maybe I'm using the wrong I went to somebody who was able to tell

me about my past lives is that not what a past oh it wasn't a regression they just did a reading a reading a reading um and i was in sedona and it was like kind of they have a place on every corner so i don't know how you know what i mean i don't know how totally accurate it was um but the first thing they said when they saw me was that i used to be a cowboy and i was like really i've never felt that at all but that was like apparently the most powerful thing they pulled out of it was like oh you were a cowboy i was like you would not get your horse you'd be like no thanks i mean i used to do horseback riding, remember? That's true. But you don't strike me as someone who was like super. Yeah, no, I'm not like, certainly of all the people I've ever been reincarnated from, it was not Billy the Kid.

Let's be clear. I swear, I remember when I did that Akashic record reading for you, but I still don't know if I'm making it all up. But I got that you're a blacksmith in a past that's what i always i've always felt that way anyway so that one makes more sense to me okay good okay that made me feel good because i was that is what i always weirdly envision you as like a whole time blacksmith and like colonial well it also makes a little more sense so like i don't know about any other lives so i can only talk about this one and maybe that one but like wanting to work with my hands and like i've always been really connected to that

like era like it's true that hands-on and like i've always like even i know how like gross this is trust me i wish i could just like not feel this way but like something about like the colonial williamsburg era like there's something there that like, I'm just always like weirdly fascinated by and like, it doesn't happen anywhere else, which that was a big blacksmith era. So I don't know. There's I, that one, I would believe a lot more than a cowboy. I have really no connection to cowboys. That's so weird. Cause yeah. And I also have no connection to cowboys, but for some reason I do. No, I have no spiritual connection. I have no like even cowboys but for some reason i do i'm like no i have no spiritual connection i have no like even interest in it the way you do so yeah yeah i i just um i don't know and i

whatever anyway this is billy well hey i'm so excited i'm so excited i feel like you'll like this story it's it's pretty crazy i really didn't know most of it. I knew some of it, but not the depths of it. It's a wild story. So Billy the Kid. He was actually born Henry McCarty, believe it or not. Oh, okay. Not even Billy, not even William. Crazy.

Yeah, crazy. He was likely born, we think, in late 1859 to a woman named Catherine McCarty. And she was an Irish immigrant living in poverty in New York city. We don't know who his father is, but he and his mother during his childhood, they relocated to Indianapolis. And so they moved out, you know,

West. And in 1873, Catherine married a man who became Henry's stepfather. And his name was William Antrim. And Billy the adult. There you go. You're onto it. And they moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico to start a new life. So Henry moving out here was very adaptable, very smart. He quickly became fluent in Spanish as a way to fit in amongst you know the new peers he had in the west and I don't know that I just find this so fascinating this was a really really difficult difficult region to live in um there were lack of resources lack of medical care

there was so much prolific fighting murder just like mean, what you picture the Wild West to be, you know? And this significantly dropped the average life expectancy in areas like this. So according to some sources, it was so tough to live out West that 80% of the population was under the age of 30. Holy shit. 80% of the population was under the age of 30 that's how so if you really were there in another life you didn't last long is i know but apparently it made quite an impact but what a thrill it must have been what a what a lasagna horror it must have been what a lasagna horror indeed you know what um that's good you really uh came through with that one so in any case it was a very uh tough existence uh to make work especially for a family with a kid

basically cowboys out there had picked up their tools for survival from mexico's vaqueros and these were often called the first real cowboys because they pretty much were. Under Spanish colonial rule, enslaved Black men in Mexico had worked as vaqueros to maintain livestock, and as livestock populations grew and demanded more work, they abolished a law that had been set in place that had forbidden indigenous people from riding horses and they would be executed if they were found riding a horse so they abolished that law because they needed more people to work on these you know sure livestock farms and that law was

repealed so soon black and indigenous people in mexico were mastering techniques as far as horseback riding and they were paving the way for other cowboys who eventually became the face of the wild west like billy the kid so henry was still just a little kid and he settled down with his parents in silver city new mexico where william his stepfather could find work as a miner. Oh, also mining is another weird thing I have like a very strong attachment to for no good reason. Like coal mining. I don't know. I'm just like coal mines. I'm like, I don't get to.

I'm Colonial Williamsburg. So like, take it. Please take it. I think coal. I like I just love stories about coal mines. I don't know. Listen, I live in Kentucky now. Maybe I'm just trying to get to my Appalachian roots, but run with it. I just love stories about coal mines. I don't know. Listen, I live in Kentucky now. Maybe I'm just trying to get to my Appalachian roots, but something about it.

I'm like, anyway. So Catherine, unfortunately, was suffering from tuberculosis. And apparently she worked in a laundry meeting. And reading about this, it drives home how hard it was to live in this era anywhere, especially if you had to do labor she worked at a laundry meeting she had these like big huge boiling buckets of water to wash clothes in and then apparently they had like cold buckets where you would have to jam your hands into of like so you don't get burned oh so you'd like be in the spalding water constant shock constant

shock to your system and she had tuberculosis and got a lung infection and like think about how horrible that would be to be in this like enclosed area with all this like dirty boiling water where you're washing people's sweat out and so even if you weren't a cowboy you were not gonna live past 30 it sounds like it was tough no matter what like it didn't even because again like the cowboy stuff aside too there wasn't really hospitals there wasn't really like it was i mean i don't even know a better way to say it it was like the wild west like there's no structure in place for medical care and that kind of thing so you're kind of out of luck.

So she had hoped moving, you know, from like New York City and Indianapolis to a desert climate would heal her symptoms or help her tuberculosis. But unfortunately, she did get a lung infection and she succumbed to her illness only a year later at the young age of 45. And she left 13 year old Henry alone uh he did have a younger brother but at this point he and his stepfather you know his stepfather wasn't really interested in raising a kid that you know wasn't his own yeah exactly and so he was kind of just adrift at age 13. And he moved into a boarding house run by a woman named Mrs. Sarah Brown. And we're not sure if Henry had been a troublemaker, you know, before his mom passed. But at this point, he did start to get into a little bit of trouble. He befriended another boy in the boarding house and they were like partners in crime, I guess you would say, literally. So on September 23rd, 1875, which was a year and one week after his mother's death, Henry was arrested along with his friend from the boarding house,

George Schaefer. The story goes that Henry was on the lookout while George robbed a laundry operator making off with clothes and two guns and they were both arrested for this, charged with larceny and sent to jail. And even though the sentence was pretty light and he was young and he was going to get out pretty soon, he was very impatient and decided he was going to break out immediately. So he shimmied up through the chimney and escaped. I can't even imagine the upper arm strength for that. I can't even imagine fitting my stupid butt in a chimney. But okay, yeah, he's like 15. So I guess he's probably gangly, you know, he he makes his getaway and now at age 15 he's

officially an outlaw already because oh my god he's already escaped from jail yeah so the silver city herald published a story on this escape and this is actually the first story published about the boy who would become the most notorious outlaw of his time. So his Escape Out the Chimney is like the first newspaper article about him, which I kind of love. So Henry made his way through New Mexico, through the desert alone to the mines where his stepfather worked. And William gave him some money, his stepdad, and said, you know what, get out of town before you get in trouble. And Henry said, all right, don't need to tell me twice. And he skipped town. He wandered through the winter until he showed up in the Arizona territory at Camp Grant. And at this point, he was 16 years old. So he started taking up odd jobs on ranches. And this is when he picked up his infamous nickname, The Kid. And this is when he picked up his infamous nickname, The Kid. Now, little quiz, pop quiz for you.

Not really a pop quiz because I haven't taught you this yet, but do you know why Kid was such a, it was actually a very common nickname back then? Oh. Why was, like, you want me to know why? You have a guess, yeah. Why? Is it because so many parents were dying by 30 there were just kids everywhere that actually i think that actually is part of it yeah i think that actually is part of the theory interestingly that like so many people were starting their lives at such a young age because the life expectancy

was so short yeah but so i actually pulled um pulled a line from a website called tv tropes.org uh and they said quite a few gunslingers and outlaws made their reputation before they were even old enough to shave regularly thus they got kid as part of their nickname and people there were so many teenagers and young people like working these ranches and then moving on and then getting replaced that people would just kind of call you like oh the kid the kid it was kids who were kind of either delinquents or were considered like i don't know just on their own uh escaping the law what have you basically kid was what you were called if you were a young person kind of potentially in some trouble. And you think like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. There's like a lot of kids. So kid was mildly derogatory. It was a little bit.

I think it was more just like a hooligan, you know, like a young person getting some trouble. But then a lot of them kind of took that nickname on and it was like an endearing thing so gotcha they reclaimed it yeah yeah there you go yeah exactly so Henry was just one of many kids but eventually he would take that as like his actual you know name so Henry made little money but he wasn't responsible with what he did make again he's 16 and like his he doesn't know his dad and his stepdad doesn't want him and his mom is dead. So I can't imagine you- Tough life. Yeah. I don't blame him for being 16 and gambling away his money. There's worse things you can do,

I guess, but- Especially when you have 14 years left expectancy-wise. Exactly. You're already more than halfway through your life expectancy at this point. Exactly. You're already more than halfway through your life expectancy at this point. So, yeah, he gambled it away. He started spending time with a horse thief and suspected murderer named John R. Mackey, and they became pals. And John had a notorious gang. And so he kind of got in the folds of that.

And a year later, Henry was arrested for the second time in his life for stealing horses from soldiers. And when he was arrested, they listed his name in the paperwork as Henry Antrim, alias Kid. And so Antrim was his stepfather's last name. So he had kind of taken that. And then Kid was the nickname he had gotten. So you can kind of see how we're getting to Billy the Kid, slowly but surely. So fortunately for Henry, a local dance was occurring that night. And the guards were much more interested in going to the local dance at the, I assume, some sort of saloon. It was much more important to the guards to go there than actually guard the prisoners.

So they kind of let them be for a while. And Henry took advantage of that. He was in shackles, but he managed to escape while they were gone. And I watched a documentary yesterday and they showed like the actual handcuffs. It was the director of the Civil War Medicine Museum, which I've always wanted to go to. And he was showing how you could escape those handcuffs back then, because if your hands were either too big or too small,

you could just get out of it. They were so finicky that they only worked on people with very average size wrists. Which is wild because if you knew it was foolproof, if you grew up at a time when that was foolproof, it's not like you can say, ha ha, he's shackled now, off to the dance. Exactly. Like you knew there was a chance he wasn't going to be there. And apparently this was like a fucking epidemic people escaping these handcuffs.

So like, I don't know. I don't know what they were thinking, but i guess it was the dance was worth it you know he's like this it's like i'll just catch him again later i guess yeah i feel like it almost feels like a cartoon sort of where it's like it's not that serious you know it's like yeah yeah oh we'll catch him next time like it always it's like oh man kind of thing oh shucks yeah it feels sometimes they say oh you're gonna're going to be hanged tomorrow. And then he like escapes. And I'm like, what are these people doing?

Like they're saying these like crazy serious things. And then they're like, oh, well, I don't know. It seems like it was a very different time. So he gets out of these shackles. He disappears for a few months and he comes back that August and enters a poker game near Camp Grant. And we know this because during the poker game, he got into an argument with the local blacksmith, Emothy. Oh, no, not Emothy. Sorry.

Not yet. Not yet. Maybe you were Billy the Kid and that's how we found each other. Well, this is going to be rough news for you and because he killed the blacksmith yeah yeah so henry got into you're like i'll see you in another life i'll see you over there also i love in that theory that i are in that version of events that i did an akashic record reading for you and i'm like i see you as a blacksmith and i'm like yeah and i but not as my murder victim i see you covered in blood nope it's it's like you did see me as a murder victim. I see you covered in blood. Nope.

It's like you did see me as a murder victim and you went, let's not go there. Let's not tell you about that. Let's gloss over that. Yeah. Listen, I'm sure there was context. You know, you had to be there. That's so true. Like, I don't know where I came up with that. But anyway, so he got into some sort of argument with a local blacksmith whose name was francis windy nicknamed windy cahill and windy attacked henry so this was provoked

okay um you started it i know what i did windy attacked henry pinned him to the ground and started slapping him like really aggressively and it was sort of at least a vibe I got from one of the documentaries I watched is that it was almost a show of like, ha ha, like overpowering him and like making the other people laugh in the saloon, you know, sort of like to entertain people. And so Henry shot him, got up and ran and Wendy died the next day from this gunshot wound. And Henry skipped town. This time he fled to New Mexico. And he ended up running into a gang called The Boys, who belonged to a larger web of outlaws out in the West. And why are you laughing?

What was, I'm sorry, like, the kid, and then, no, no, The Boys. And then they're part of a bigger group where I'm sorry. Like the kid. And then no, no, the boys. And then they're part of, then they're part of a bigger group where I'm sure there's the girls and like, the men, the fathers. Yeah.

The teens, the preteens. There are a couple more gang names that we'll get to. And some of them I'm like, Ooh, that's badass. And some of them I'm like, you could have brainstormed a little longer, you know, but yeah,

yeah, yeah. But yeah, the boys who belong to a larger web of outlaws whose name i do not know the people unfortunately yeah the people and so uh at this point henry dropped his stepdad's last name because he had already been arrested under that name right and so he took up his first name or his stepfather's first name uh assuming the alias william h bonnie and bonnie was his mother's last name oh what an interesting that's a fun game for all of us to play what would our name be if we said father's name our initial mother's name i think it was her maiden name i want to make i i want to be sure that because her name was mccarty when he was born.

So I don't know where he got the name Bonnie. I'm trying to remember. Might have been her first name or her middle name. Maybe. I think it was either a. Oh, yes. Okay. So it was his mother's maiden name.

All right. Okay. So he took William from his stepfather, Bonnie from his mother's maiden name, and H was his middle initial for Henry. And that is where you get the nickname Billy the Kid. This became the nickname that stuck. Gotcha. And another thing, I'm sorry, I feel like I keep interjecting with like anecdotes and side stories, but I just find this so fascinating.

They talked about on the, I think it was a PBS documentary. so fascinating they talked about on um the i think it was a pbs documentary they talked about uh how back then you wouldn't know what an outlaw looked like right so you see like oh this person's wanted and you know this person is so dangerous but like you wouldn't know if some random guy walks into your town like you wouldn't know that that's billy the kid the notorious outlaw you know he gets like my name's tyler exactly you can just fucking change your name and everyone's like okay you know it's like really an interesting thought because it was so expensive to create of an image and actually that's apparently a misconception of the old the wild west is that there were not that many wanted posters like that wasn't as common as we

kind of see it in the trope of like the wild west and uh there actually was never a wanted poster for billy the kid there was interesting yeah and you'd think like somebody that notorious for sure there would have been but there was only one um piece in a newspaper clipping or like one newspaper clipping that said, you know, $500 reward for Billy the Kid. But it was not, you know, spread around town as posters. And, you know, people wouldn't have known what he looked like. There's only one photo of Billy the Kid in existence, which I will send you. And I will say it's as they said in the documentary it's not the most flattering picture but i still find myself like enamored with him i don't know i

don't know he just has a he has a draw to him maybe maybe in a past life you were like his one secret true love that he just couldn't shake yeah i've already thought about that pretty extensively i'm like maybe i was in your in shower, like next time you take a shower with your like alone thoughts, you're just like, oh, imagine her or Paulita. Daydreaming. I swear to God, I was like, maybe I was Paulita the way I'm like getting so weird about this. Like, I don't know. Or maybe I was like Paulita's like sister and I was jealous. I don't know. I feel like there's a lot of options. Now it's Hamilton. Okay, great. Okay. Of course, I'm going to put my life into the narrative of Hamilton. Okay. So anyway, he takes up this new name. He's now Billy the Kid. Later that year,

he is arrested for the third time in his life. And this time it is for possessing stolen horses. And the horses belong to a 24 year old cattle rancher named john tunstall but this is where there's a little plot twist because apparently john tunstall really liked henry now billy and like took a liking to him and sort of took him under his wing and became his mentor and it's kind of a romanticized part of the story but it's seemingly true that they had a very special, like, fatherly son bond because he had not known his father. His stepfather had kind of brushed him aside. And now he had somebody who was, like, actually taking care of him and mentoring him.

And it just it's kind of nice. He had he had this guy, John Tunstall, as his sort of father figure. kind of nice he had he had this guy john tunstall as his sort of father figure so when billy got out of jail for stealing john's horses john was like oh man i can't stay mad at you come work on my ranch so you're lucky you're cute yeah you're lucky you're cute that's exactly you're lucky you have that doofy grin with your weird looking teeth uh and so he let him start working on the ranch and billy finally got this like stable home life you know and he really liked the other ranchers and he got along with like his compatriots on the ranch and i'm sure they weren't called compatriots uh but whatever you want to call it his co-workers i don't know so he started working for John and his title was a cowboy and gunman to protect the ranch. So he was hired as it reminds me of like Frank Abagnale where it's like you were the criminal, but now you know how to protect. You stole my horses. So now you know how to protect my horses from being stolen by other people.

So he really likes this job. He really likes this ranch. And the only hiccup in this is that John Tunstall, who owns the ranch, was caught up in this big business rivalry with two men named Jimmy Dolan and Lawrence Murphy. Their business, as we're throwing around these names, was called The House. Whatever the heck that means. Man, everything just feels like a child named them. It feels like they looked at an item and said that's that's what that is the name sorry i can't change it if there isn't a horse in this story named the horse i'm gonna lose my mind yeah exactly like it's just very

predictable in a way so their business the house had a monopoly in Lincoln County where they lived and they had this monopoly on dry goods and cattle and so when this guy John Tunstall came in with his ranch and wanted to get involved they were pissed so he was not afraid to stand up to them and try to get his own business and so they had this big feud right but back then things were a little more loosey-goosey, legally speaking, as you can probably already guess. So not only did they basically control all business in the area, they basically controlled the law because the sheriff was, like, in their pocket, like, in cahoots with them. And so this sheriff, this corrupt sheriff, right, is, like, on the side of these original like the house, like these business guys. And so Sheriff Brady would let the house and its men get away with anything, including murder. So the sheriff just turned a blind eye if, you know, his guys did anything shady.

But now that John was a competitor, he feared for his life because it's not like nowadays where you can be sued, you know, it was like you're going to be murdered. So in the legend about Billy the Kid, like I said, his relationship with John Tunstall was very romanticized and like John was a surrogate father to Billy, gave him a home, gave him a job, a purpose. And he did, we do know he did give Billy a Winchester rifle, which became his favorite gun. And he used it his whole life and gave him a horse and was his mentor. So he felt like he had a family now. He had a future. He had a stable place to be. And what happens next was extremely tragic for billy and sent basically his whole life like into another set of turmoil so there are two versions of this story i'm going to tell you uh one of them and then i'll tell you the one that i learned um okay and you know either way the outcome is the same but the first version goes that in early 1878, John Tunstall set out to transport nine horses to Lincoln, New Mexico, and left Billy and the four other men who worked on the ranch in charge while he was gone.

posse who ordered John to surrender his livestock on orders from Sheriff Brady, this corrupt sheriff in Lincoln County who hated him. And so among the posse members were probably Jimmy Dolan, Billy Matthews, Jesse Evans, and Buckshot Roberts. So some notorious outlaws who were part of the house. So John did not immediately surrender and instead began to approach the posse so they shot and killed him on the spot that's version one version two is that billy was actually out on john's ranch riding with him so like billy was with john tunstall and this is a version i've heard more often i don't know if it's just because it's more. Traumatic. Yeah, yeah. Or traumatic or dramatic. But it's the one that I've heard the most is that Billy was out on John's ranch riding with John Tunstall.

Again, his mentor, surrogate father, like the only person he's really like felt this connection with. When a stranger approached on horseback and shot john tunstall right in front of him just like point blank and apparently the story goes that just to be cruel they shot his horse too just for the fun of it then they staged them to look like he was napping with his horse and he propped john's hat under the horse's head and laid them side by side like they were napping oh god fucked up oh my god with that version at least it's clear how traumatized billy would have been from this but either way he was very traumatized from losing this kind of father figure and they later found out that

either way the killer had been sent by sheriff brady so whoever whatever version of events happened uh john was killed under the order of sheriff brady exactly the corrupt sheriff so billy is fucking pissed. And he's going to kill Sheriff Brady for sure. You're fucking on it. You're on it. So I was there. So is you? No, you already died.

No offense. I already killed you. Oops. So either way, he swears vengeance against Sheriff Brady and the house. And he and his other co-ranchers who felt the same way about John, who had given them all a home and a job and a safe place to be. So they decide they're going to get revenge. And they're called the Revengers. Okay, wait.

You're not far off. Avengers? Are they called the Avengers? No, no. That would have been kick-ass. Okay, I'll tell you in a moment. But let me explain first how it happened. So the local Justice of the Peace, this is kind of, the timing was pretty wild.

So the Justice of the Peace appointed one of John's employees. So one of, you know, he had been killed and then the justice of the peace appointed one of Billy, the kids, like other ranch hands to become a special constable. So now one of the guys seeking vengeance for the death of John is a special constable, meaning that they have the power to make arrests like legal arrests. So he's like, oh, my God, I've just been given this great power where I can arrest people. The justice of the peace said I can arrest people now. arrest people now. So he created what was a lawful posse, sort of like a legal gang, like a legal vigilante gang called the Regulators. Oh my God. Okay. You were right. I was pretty on it. Pretty close. And they recruited Billy the Kid because he was in that friend group. So Billy

the Kid is recruited into the posse and each member was paid four dollars a day on their hunt for john's murderers so basically they had one job it was to find john's murderers and they were getting paid uh the equivalent to 122 dollars today uh per day so okay that would be roughly 15 an hour in today's eight hour workday, which like not bad. Not bad. I think. I mean, especially when Billy the Kid would have done it for free. So I was going to say he was already doing it. Exactly. I don't know. I feel like I would have been like, I can't find him. I guess you got to keep paying me a lot you know but but he was determined so pretty immediately they captured three members of the posse that had killed john the house and although although they

were supposedly making their way uh with their three prisoners to jail in lincoln to hand over the outlaws they just so happened to kill all three men on their way back to lincoln so this is considered cowboy justice and the town of lincoln was set into a tizzy uh because people were like wait what the fuck you just arrested three people from this town and killed them instead of bringing them back you know right to jail and so this became an uproar and people started getting divided over like whether they had the right to do that and meanwhile the new mexico governor traveled to lincoln to assess the situation and decided that the justice of the peace who had given the regulators like the legal right to arrest people had fucked up

majorly and so the governor was like, you are no longer justice of the peace, you're fired. So he's out, meaning Dick Brewer, the guy who got the special constable title and role, no longer had that jurisdiction. He could not just legally. Man, short-lived. I know, right? He had that power for such a taste of power.

And speaking of which, he kind of took that and ran with it. He did not want to give it up. So what was once a legal gang now became a very illegal gang. Yes, it became a gang of outlaws who are no longer legally sanctioned to do what they do, but they're doing it anyway. So I love the idea that they started legally and then just like immediately. They had a moment on the right side of history. Yeah, they tried, you know. So in any case, they decided they still needed to get revenge and their task was not over. So they were now outlaws officially,

something that at least was very familiar territory for Billy the Kid, because he had been, like I said, an outlaw since age 15. So April 1878, Billy and five members of the regulators, this is, the legend has it that they sought them out, but in reality,

we're pretty sure they just happened to run into Sheriff Brady. Like they were out having a meal that they sought them out but in reality we're pretty sure they just happened to run into sheriff brady like they were out having a having a meal and one of them stumbled upon him literally someone said is that sheriff brady and they were like now's our chance yeah so they just got up walked outside fucking point blank open fire and a shootout ensued so as a result billy the kid was shot in the thigh but he escaped alive and sheriff brady was killed he killed sheriff brady for his role in john tunstall's murder along with a sheriff's deputy so as you can imagine this did not go well in the town uh he just killed the sheriff and the sheriff's deputy in cold blood in the streets of Lincoln.

Like, this was not good. And he was doing it for vengeance, but also it pissed everybody off. Right, right, right. So three days later, Buckshot Roberts, one of the people who there he is, who had killed John, hunted down the regulators and another shootout ensued. And this time Buckshot Roberts was killed along with Dick Brewer, John's foreman and the honorary leader of the regulators, the guy who had started the regulators. He was killed. So all the surrounding towns were in uproar there was violence uh left and right and it was like taking over the town like people felt like they

couldn't like and i feel like this is one of the tropes that actually is kind of correct about the wild west like this place for a long time there were just people after each other, shootouts, sheriffs, like trying to track down outlaws like this all happened. So I find that kind of cool. But of course, families and people just trying to live a day to day life out here were like, I don't love that this is becoming so out of hand. And there's so many more casualties. And people started taking sides like some people thought oh you know the law is the law we should take the side of the sheriff but then other people were like no the regulators are just getting like revenge on

some corrupt sheriff like i'm on their side so people start splitting and men on both sides were inciting the violence so there wasn't really like one bad guy and both sides were committing murder but only the regulators were being blamed officially for anything so people started to get a little salty about that and soon both posses the outlawed ones and the deputized official ones uh had dozens of men in their respective ranks like they're just creating little mini armies and this violence escalated for three months this went on i know like imagine living there and being like in hiding because you're just like i don't want to be part of this like i'm just trying to be a laundry person

yeah and everyone's shooting each other outside like what the fuck i feel like you just get used to it you just hear the gunshots and you're like oh please don't hit me and just keep on going about your day yeah you're like just cover put the like a you know those copper iron tubs for washing i'd be like okay everybody get under your copper tub there yeah and just like use it as a traffic cone to cross the street yeah yeah you just like hide under it i mean it, it must be so dangerous. Like I imagine there was collateral damage when they're all just shooting each other in the streets. And it was so drastic. It escalated for three months in what would become known as the Lincoln County War. And this climaxed in five days of continuous non-stop fighting in july of 1878 and this is when

60 members of the regulators remember it started off with like five people it's now 60 members of the regulators faced off against sheriff george pappin so the new sheriff uh j Dolan, one of the guys who murdered John Tunstall and roughly 40 of their supporters. Wow. So there's a face off. And on July 19th, cavalry from the army, the United States Army, arrived to intervene. And they had these rapid fire Gatling guns, which were, you know, top of the top at this time. And the idea, sort of like National Guard guard was to keep the peace right and they were supposed to be neutral but of course they turned the gun on the regulators and threatened to open fire and at this point the remaining regulators

were like well now we're totally outnumbered and they fled and only 13 remained and of course one of those was billy the kid he was not going to flee and he stayed up to fight and the 13 who remained hold up in a nearby house so they're basically surrounded in this house and the sheriff sheriff pappin does not know how to get them out. So what he does is pretty fucking cruel. He lights the house on fire. Oh, my God. Yeah. He's like, I'll light it on fire.

That way they'll have to come out and we can kill him. So he tries to flush them out and demand surrender. And Billy the Kid tried to make a dramatic show of his escape because he wanted to, like, create a diversion to let the others get away. But unfortunately unfortunately the plan didn't quite work and billy did get away but most of the regulators were killed in what was later called the big killing so uh really really tragic day and by september 30th of 1878 president rutherford b hayes was fucking over it okay he has had enough i've never heard anything else about him in his entire life and now he's over it in my mind and i don't think you need

to know anymore i think i've given you enough information about him he's like you know what here's the one fun fact about me i'm over it and, let that go down in history because I love that about him. He's like, fucking hell, this is enough. So he appointed, so Rutherford appointed a new governor of New Mexico and said, your job is to restore peace to the state of New Mexico. announced that everyone involved in the lincoln county war would be pardoned for their participation except for those who were currently under indictment for other murders which included billy the kid who had of course murdered uh buckshot roberts and sheriff brady so he was still an outlaw he was not pardoned as part of this in early 1879 billy the kid and four other men rode into Lincoln to meet with

Jimmy Dolan, one of the guys who had the house, you know, who had killed Tunstall and four of his men. And it was the one year anniversary of John Tunstall's murder. So they met and tried to come to an impasse, right? They tried to talk things out so what they did i mean this is the most wild west like visual ever they meet in the middle of the road with their guns like in the dirt road right i'm imagining a swinging saloon door in the background gotta be there gotta be and they shake hands and they set a pact they say that we will stop killing each other and we will stop testifying against each other in court. If anyone violates this agreement, they will be killed on sight. Okay.

So both sides said, great. Truce. We won't kill you. We won't testify against you. We're done. We're safe from each other. So in March, the governor received a letter from Billy the Kid. And Billy the Kid, so sweet, wrote,

I have no wish to fight anymore. Indeed, I have not raised an arm since your proclamation. As to my character, I refer to any of the citizens, for the majority of them are my friends and have been helping me all they could i am called kid antrim but antrim is my stepfather's name waiting for an answer i remain your obedient servant so he really wants out like he wants out he doesn't want to be an outlaw he doesn't want to live i have a checkered past but like all can we just do a redo redo yes like checker pass but i can explain also i swear i'm a great guy yeah ask any of my buddies ask palita she loves me her sister does too even though she's a little clingy and like lives in 2023 and she's actually married with a baby someone else murdered a lumberjack but that's a whole different thing yeah it's a little messy but anyway they all

love me and so the governor said all right fine uh i'll look into it you can come testify you can come and testify against several of the other men in exchange for amnesty i will grant you amnesty you will no longer be an outlaw if you testify against jimmy dolan and he says sure thing i'll do it he has broken the truce already right so the governor was surprised when the kid came and interacted with the public while he was in town and he could see that jim uh jimmy billy the kid's letter was not an exaggeration because people were really, really drawn to him. He had like a very magnetic personality, very open, friendly guy from what sources say. Just people were drawn to this guy.

He lit up a room, you know. Sure, yeah. I'm sorry. He lit up a saloon. Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes with a gun, sometimes with his beautiful personality. I would say that the flash of the gun sometimes is what lit up the room. But yeah, unfortunately, sometimes lit up in a bad way.

So he really noticed people seem to like Billy the Kid. And after the kid's testimony, the governor declared, I will let you go scotfree with a pardon in your pockets for all of your misdeeds so billy's like phew no longer wanted by the governor no honor no longer wanted you know by the law but ultimately in this case that he had testified you know as part of the case he had testified in ultimately 50 men were charged with roughly 200 indictments but almost none of them even went to trial and despite testimonies like the one from billy the kid about jimmy dolan's and the sheriff's involvement in these crime networks almost all the charges were dropped and most of the men were acquitted or skipped town so now billy knew he was in big fucking trouble because he testified against them and now they're free so he had basically uh betrayed their trust right and

now he's in hot water so he realizes justice is not being served and now i'm a target uh so i he has to skip town again and for the next few years he gets up to his usual, you know, no good gambling, drinking shootouts with other outlaws. In one shootout, a well-liked blacksmith was killed while trying to negotiate a ceasefire. May I rest in peace? Different blacksmith, unfortunately. And both sides blamed each other for his death. Billy outright denied having anything to do with killing this man, but nobody could come to an agreement on it.

And so on December 3rd of 1880, the Las Vegas Gazette published an editorial that referred to the kid as Billy the kid officially for the first time in writing the paper frequently published tales of billy the kid's notorious exploits often inflating the details that you know how back then the newspaper articles sometimes were so verbose and flowery and you were kind of like it felt like they were kind of embellishing a little bit you know so whether they were embellished or not his uh his exploits were splashed across the pages of the papers people were reading along and billy's infamy as an outlaw exploded um and this is where i had another one of those like what you and i were literally just talking about one of those moments where i was just going over these notes before we recorded and I was reading that,

rereading that bullet. And I thought, oh my God, the year was 1880. People in this house that I'm sitting in right now, we're reading about this as it was happening. So that what a full circle from what we were talking about earlier of what was happening a hundred years ago, right where you're sitting. I mean, and it's so weird you brought that up because today, like a couple hours before we recorded, I was sitting here thinking, man, I wonder if a ghost could see right now what I'm reading. Yeah. If they'd be like, oh, I know that guy. It's just so wild to me that like back then or to think about like, whatever, you know, I could go on a tangent. But basically I'm saying it is so cool to think about like living history like, oh, this story back then in this household specifically would have been like the talk of the family.

Like, oh, have you heard about this? Billy, the kid, he's causing a lot of trouble, you know. It's wild how like a lot of trouble you know it's wild how like followed along a lot of people say they're like when they listen to podcasts they're like screaming the answer even though like we can't hear them i wonder if on the other side harry is in your on your couch right now screaming at you more details that you're butchering as like i was there i know he's like first of all stop wearing pants well first of all he's probably like start wearing pants because i'm over the not wearing pants second of all

put on a corset like a respectable lady uh sorry harry not gonna happen not gonna happen um but yeah isn't that weird to think like maybe they how funky my notes and be like wait i know this headline or like a picture of the old newspaper anyway i just love shit like that wild just trips me out you know okay anyway so on december 3rd of 1880 uh like i said the las vegas gazette published an editorial referring to him as billy the kid for the first time is, again, when I started thinking about people in my house, you know, when they built it in the 1870s, like reading about this as it was happening. I just think that's so cool. So anyway, he at this point knew he was in hot water because the spotlight was on him. The whole nation is like following along. And he's like, I don't think that's good because everyone's making me out to be this like violent outlaw, you know.

because everyone's making me out to be this like violent outlaw you know so he wrote the governor a letter again and he said i was not involved in killing that blacksmith but the governor did not believe him and instead a bounty was put on his head and this is that newspaper clipping i mentioned that read 500 reward notices hereby given that 500 reward will be paid for the delivery of bonnie alias the kid to the sheriff of lincoln county so 500 back then is just about 15 000 today so that's that's a big chunk of change i also i feel can you imagine writing a letter to the governor for help and then the response is oh actually there's a public bounty for you he's like actually run actually fucking run because we're coming for you it just feels so targeted he's like hey listen man i didn't do this he's like

sure okay yeah and then his eyes change you know and he's like we're coming yeah yeah what the fuck it's like so do you think at like i don't know what was going on the 1880s obviously i wasn't there because you killed me but like i wonder i'm so sorry by the way that i didn't get to let you experience the last part of the decade i'm sorry well my thought is like i don't know how possible it is to like just get on a train and just like fucking get to like new york and just like work a factory job or something and like be totally hidden and like there's no there's no picture of you like can't you just go somewhere where there's not shootouts in a life expectancy of 30 and like just kind of hold out question i think you probably could but i wonder if at this point like he's been living there since he was

13 and i wonder if like this is just what he knows and the life he had he he can't imagine like i guess i don't know i feel like if someone if the governor if fucking like gavin newsom had a $15,000 bounty on my head, I would leave California. I would start a GoFundMe to try and protect you. So don't worry. Thank you. So I have a couple of theories about that. And I have a couple of theories. People have theories that I've now learned. and one of them is that he was in love

aha with you with your sister not with me unfortunately with paulita and uh some speculate he did not want to leave town because he was head over heels and he just couldn't imagine leaving her behind. Some people speculate that this was just the life he knew and he had his friends. And another part of it is he was so young still that there's that element of like notoriety, naivete. You feel invincible, you know know like you've already escaped death so many times you've already escaped jail so many times it's sort of like you i imagine at this point you sort of feel invincible like well might as well keep on keeping on you know yeah that's true um so i'm not really sure but uh yeah it would have probably been so hard to just peace

out but i guess then he wouldn't have become you know that famous outlaw we all know so there's this award out for reward out for his arrest and on december 23rd sheriff garrett and his men hunted down billy the kid's hideout and surrounded them instead of of a shootout, though, they just spoke back and forth throughout the day. And they finally got Billy to surrender. And the way they got him to surrender is, which genius, and would work on you and me both, Em. They started cooking beans and bacon outside. And they were so hungry that they gave in.

They said, fine, arrest us. We'll go to jail. But they were so hungry that they gave it. They said, fine, arrest us. We'll go to jail, but I'm so hungry. So, you know, they used human need to their advantage and,

uh, got them out and they surrendered peacefully. So Billy had to say goodbye to his love, Paulita Maxwell, and went to the sheriff to Las Vegas to be imprisoned. He said in an interview with the Las Vegas Gazette, what's the use of looking on the gloomy side of everything? The laugh's on me this time. Okay. Hey, he owned it.

All right. He really is. He's like very self-aware. Very, I don't know. He just has a charm about him. In April 1881, Billy the Kid was ultimately charged with the murder of Sheriff Brady. He was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. So, of course, the fairness of this trial was questionable, considering that the governor had previously officially pardoned Billy

for that crime. So it's like, he's been pardoned, but now they really want to punish him for it. Right. And the other shady part is that the court appointed Billy a lawyer who was well known for publishing negative pieces about Billy.

Hmm. Like in the newspaper. So even his lawyer was not on his side so a fishy trial if it can even be called that but he was sentenced to death by hanging so while awaiting his execution in jail billy was bored he decided to concoct a plan to escape of course of course so there are several versions of this uh and they're they all are relatively similar with a couple differences one of them is that uh they well they all kind of start with him asking to use the outhouse and he needed to be escorted to the outhouse right and he needed to be escorted to the outhouse right as being being a prisoner and so getting to use the outhouse was the only time he wouldn't be shackled to the floor

he would only have those flimsy handcuffs right so he asked a guide i'm sorry a guard to escort him to the bathroom and there are multiple versions of what happened here. Either he ran ahead, grabbed a gun out of the office from upstairs, turned and shot the guard as he was following up the stairs behind him. Another version is that he wrestled the guard's gun from him and attacked. guard's gun from him and attacked and yet another version is that uh one of his one of billy the kids compatriots had left a uh or fellow outlaws had left a gun in the outhouse hidden and so when he left the outhouse he had a pistol and he could gotcha kill kill in some way he had a gun yes so he acquired a gun one way or another and he was able to escape but the problem was there was another guard who was across the street watching five prisoners on the other side of the street so the second jailer heard the commotion and came

running outside to see what was going on he then saw billy lean out of the office second story window he shouted hello old boy and then shot him in the chest oh eerie eerie uh some of these sources say they that he used his name i think it was i don't know hello bob something like that but i saw hello old boy in in most of the research so i went with that he lived up to his reputation as the best marksman in the west uh he was known for using the winchester uh repeating rifle it was like the i mean you've talked about it it's like the it was the most popular gun back then it was like revolutionary for the time because you could keep the gun facing your enemy when you reloaded it instead of having to like

take it and reload it from the top you could reload it from the back so you could you know more efficiently kill people so he was also known as an extremely talented marksman so he could shoot people just point blank so after shooting this guy this other guard uh he then used a pickaxe to break free of his shackles and then he stole a horse and made his getaway so three months later sheriff garrett and his men followed a room who are now like on the hunt and double pissed because they've already captured him. And then he escaped and killed both of their guards. So now they're extra pissed and they decide to hunt him down. And the way they do this is they follow a rumor that Paulita Maxwell maxwell was pregnant with billy's child oh shit

okay so guess where they go hang out for a little while his house at the maxwell's house uh at paulita's house so on july 14th 1881 billy the kid as he always did, went to Paulita's house to visit her in secret. Now, Billy was often sheltered while on the run by Hispanic households. And this was actually a huge advantage to him. And one of the reasons people believe, historians believe that he was so successful is because unlike other, you know, white Anglo people who had come in and treated the hispanic population with derision uh he came he learned fluent spanish and befriended all the people in the area so he was considered one of them you know they took him in uh families took him in and people really cared for him and so he was often sheltered byed by Hispanic households when he was on the run.

And there was a lot of cultural animosity in this part of the country during this time. It was said that Billy the Kid humbly learned most of his skills from vaqueros. And he always said, you know, that is where he learned everything from spurs, the best spurs to wear to horse riding technique, gunmanship. And he embraced the Spanish language, which was something that white Americans did not do. Unheard of at the time, yeah. Yes, it was. It totally was. And so he never spoke as if he were better for being a white American.

He just felt at home with them. if he were better for being a white American, he just felt at home with them. But Paulita's family did object to her romance with Billy because he was an outlaw, which is fair. That's a good reason. That's a different thing. Yeah, there was like some concern there. But Paulita was apparently head over heels

and people had it on good authority that they were romancing one another so unfortunately paulita's brother was not on board with his sister being emotion romantically involved uh with billy the kid so guess what he invited sheriff garrett into their home that night to wait and see if billy would come around to see his sister great so fucked up so fucked up really messed up and of course he did he was in love he wanted to see his girlfriend and so he approached the house and he saw a kind of silhouetted figure in the dark that he did not recognize and he called this has become

a famous line uh in the story of billy the kid he called out kianess kianess because he didn't know who it was and kianess is directly translated as who is that who is it who's there right and he was essentially asking kalita's brother like who's in there with you yeah so he says kianess kianess and uh sheriff garrett stood up took his chance shot twice and killed billy the kid and that was the end of billy the kid he was only 21 years old and just like that it wasn't in a shootout it wasn't after he'd been his building had been set on fire and he was trying to escape it was just he went to see his girlfriend and uh he was ambushed he was killed on the spot man so this news erupted internationally papers around the world published billy the kid's obituary and at the time sheriff garrett received accolades for taking down this notorious outlaw but the truth was that billy the kid was far more popular and

more of a folk hero than this sheriff garrett ever became you know right yeah like everyone was like yeah petty small claps for you i guess yeah like you did it i guess but thanks a lot you know we were really into this whole story and yeah so only a year later than i mean i will say too to like a lot of Billy the Kid's storyline is like vigilante justice, you know, like sticking up for or getting revenge for the murder of his father figure. You know, a lot of it was very it felt Robin Hood-esque, you know, like people felt like a folk hero almost to people. felt like a folk hero almost to people so only a year later after he died a novel came out about billy's life and when i say novel i mean like a novel because it was pretty much embellished stories and myths about billy the kid's life it was called the authentic life of billy the kid and i feel like if any title says it's authentic, you kind of got to question it. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Why are you insisting? You know, so this book immortalized Billy the Kid

and his exploits as more of a grand myth than actual true facts in the American West. But just to clarify, everything I've covered so far, as far as I can tell, is whatever I presented as fact is like seems to be authentic fact yes so more books came out followed by tv shows comics and movies and as of 2012 billy the kid held the record as the individual with the most films made about him in history wow i had no idea about that before i learned that uh and i would say a number of them are probably spaghetti Westerns, just saying. Not lasagna horrors. No, probably not.

If one is, someone should let me know. But I would like to know. You could be the first. I know. Wow. Yeah, it's crazy. He was really a legend. Is still a legend.

And so today, many stories about Billy the Kid are, you know, more legend than fact. And it's hard to know what's true. Historians don't know as much about his personal life as they wish. Like I said, there's only one single tin type photo of him in existence. And this photo, it's pretty famous, but I don't think I would have known what it was. Like, I recognized it. this photo it's pretty famous but i don't think i would have known what it was like i i recognized it i'm gonna get it for you because i don't think i would have known what it was uh if you had just said who's that but when i saw it i was like i've seen this photo before so he's kind of here i'm

gonna send you a photo let me know what you think of my boyfriend i'm sorry i just heard you say my boyfriend okay oh my god he's so cute you are a lucky girl lucky lucky you here's the thing we're gonna put this on the instagram and i know listen i know he's not traditionally the cutest guy but everyone has a bad photo you know and if you only have one photo ever that can you imagine if you only have one photo and it's a bad photo of you that's like just kind of linked in it and it looks a little bit awkward and his he looks like he doesn't know he's supposed to be posing yet he's like waiting for his cue and so the type of photo this is it's called a tin type uh-huh uh and it's kind of those cheap uh it's like when photography was finally starting to pick up and it's like a cheap metal uh piece of tin that the photo is put onto and they cost 25 cents do you think so he's seen this

picture of himself you think yes he yeah he had that I know. So you didn't want to fork out another quarter and get a redo. If Paulita were in the room, I hope she would have been like, let's try that again. Yeah. Like I'm not putting this on our wedding, on our Zola website. Okay. I'm not adding that on the Zola website. You need a better photo if we're going to get married. You know, what's interesting is like, it looks like he's actually wearing a very lovely cardigan oh like his like that's like a that's a ribbed a ribbed sweater he's wearing that's a cool it's a fisherman's sweater yeah yeah i love the hat that looks like uh a dented it's like very funky looking i I don't know. Interesting. But so yeah, that was printed on a tin type and it was 25 cents, which today is about $5. So you'd think he could have maybe shelled out five bucks

for a new copy, but maybe he liked it. Maybe he wasn't shallow, you know? So it's interesting. And like, honestly, it's not the outfit i would have picked for an actual wild west cowboy like isn't that interesting a top hat instead of a cowboy hat oh by the way cowboy hats i've learned i think i learned this on lore were like not really worn the way that we think they were uh most people did wear like bowler hats and uh kind of these sort of top hat i mean not top hat but you know that that style like a bowler hats and these sort of top hat.

I mean, not top hat, but, you know, that that style like a bowler hat kind of thing. Oh, interesting. Yeah. So that's what we got on him. And this photo on tintype sold for two point three million dollars in 2011 at a colorado auction like his actual one that he had wow which is pretty badass sometimes i'm like why would someone pay that for an object but this is pretty cool like the actual photo he had taken i think that's pretty cool yeah also like how do you preserve something like that to make sure it stays you know okay i haven't talked about this on the podcast and I've been meaning to, but I'm so overwhelmed and I will bring it up next time.

But somebody mailed me. Maybe I did bring it up. Somebody mailed me like hundreds of old timey original tin types and photographs from like the 1800s. What? I'm talking like a pile like this big to my to my po box with no wonder you have fucking ghosts in your house dude what are you talking about that's not babies in those weird dresses and i'm like they're the ones taking blaze's glasses this isn't some harry shit anymore i don't think why am i blaming harry that's probably why he's pissed he's like i didn't fucking do that who are these people in my house he's like yeah this house i thought was

like empty why are these all these guests in here house? He's like, yeah, this house I thought was like empty. Why are these all these guests in here all of a sudden? There's all these like random farmers here now. Yeah, I don't know. So their name started with an L and the only information was a return address on the package. No note. Nothing. Isn't that always the eeriest when people send you things with no context?

It's just like, here you go. It was crazy. Isn't that always the eeriest when people send you things with no context? It was crazy. And a lot of them had these weird stamps on the back. They all seem to be from Ohio, Indiana area. I have to show those to you, Em, when you visit. There are several tin types in there. And it's really creepy, honestly. Interesting.

Yeesh. So anyway, that sold. And Billy the kids lover paulita once said oh my god here you go that she never liked the photo of him good girl okay that's what's up she said it did not do billy justice so she knew she knew she was like she probably saw that went oh this is the only and this is the only copy huh this is the only option i have yeah i feel like this is such a guy thing like so what what's wrong with it totally people to see what you look like who cares like yeah apparently millions of people will care one day believe it or not also though like maybe that was his like fucking strategy of like if there's a bad picture may no one will know what i really look like you know it was probably

dangerous to get a bunch of photos out there like yeah because he was probably like girl please don't show people what i look like the wanted posters are gonna be up before you know it yeah yeah so the photo now this is is kind of a fun twist. So he was known as charismatic, handsome, charming. And despite his notorious reputation, he was actually very well liked by most people who knew him and known as like a very loving and caring person and friend. And this photo of him that has become so famous, it shows Bill's gun on his left side. And this led to the belief that Billy the Kid was left-handed.

And this misconception became so famous that entire films were made about it. Like the left-handed gun. And they referred to Billy the Kid as like the left-handed outlaw. Turns out the photo was just reversed. So he was actually right-handed the whole time uh so fun fact for you there if you've heard that rumor and although billy the kid was a notorious

outlaw who according to legends killed 21 men in his 21 years of life uh history often remembers him favorably and many people still defend his actions, claiming he was only guilty of seeking justice in a corrupt system. Ergo, the kind of Robin Hood vibe he gives. So the stories of Billy the Kid's escapades, many embellished, presented him as an easygoing guy who never killed unprovoked. And I feel like that's important. Today, he's become one of the most famous antiheroes in history,

with many still petitioning for an official governmental posthumous pardon for his crimes after the pardon he received was revoked during his lifetime. So in 2010, the governor of New Mexico was considering an official pardon, but he ultimately decided against it, citing historical ambiguity. Thus, to this day, Billy the Kid remains the West's most infamous outlaw. And in my head, I'm playing a Taylor Swift's anti-hero song now. Yeah, I love it.

It's me. Hi. Yeah. It's me. Hi, I'm Billy the Kid. And also Billy Joel's Billy the Kid the kid song so oh yeah that too yes yes uh yeah so that's his story i just i really i just always i feel like there's a trope about outlaws just like shooting people willy-nilly no care respect for life but it doesn't seem like that's this case at all and

it seems like he didn't even really set out to be yeah a notorious outlaw you know he just wanted to be to get revenge for an unjust killing it even sounded like he was like trying to step away from that world and then every time it would like something would happen he'd go oh not again and then just have to get back into it yeah yeah and you know he lost his mother so young and had such a a really impoverished and rough upbringing um and he really made a name for himself so cool story wow and that is the story of christine's first lover so um i mean i don't know you know i was in egypt before that so i'm sure i had a few more lovers but don't uh you don't need to tell billy about that you certainly wouldn't have swiped right on him today if you saw that picture on tinder but you know you know me i might have been like you'd be like i can i can change him

we have a lot to talk about there's something called invisalign you'd be like i just have to zhuzh up his style he'll get it it's fine and also like who cares yeah if he's a bad boy at heart but that's okay that's okay if he's funny all bets are off i do know that about you yeah i. I am a sucker. I like the second someone makes me laugh. I'm like, okay, I'm in love. And they're like, I did not want you to fall.

And it's like, well, too late. We didn't ask for this. Yeah. We did not ask for this, but too late. Wow.

Talk about a good episode. Christine. This was a fun ride. A fun ride. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm proud of us. Good job.

Good job. Em. Thank you. Good job. Christine. Good game. Good game. Good game. Good game. Good game. Good game. Where's my orange slices, Eva? fun ride a fun ride yeah yeah i'm proud of us good job m thank you good job christine good game good game good game good game good game good game where's my orange slices eva i want a capri sun now we have um our after hours to uh get back to oh my god do you remember what we're doing today no do you so in our after hours today, I'm going to be going over the current active serial killers in the U.S. today. Because I want to cover the currently active serial killers to look out for. Aha.

Yes. Good, good, good. Pop on into Patreon if you want to hear that conversation because I already have a bunch of bookmarks ready to go. Okay. Yeah. to hear that conversation because I already have a bunch of bookmarks ready to go. Okay. Yeah. If you want to hear Christine's real wacky deep dives, but very topical deep dives that are also life-saving. Yeah. I feel like they're wacky, but they're also very scary and important. I think that's how most of our thoughts are. It's like, well, it's a little nutty until you need the

information. It's like that uh saying everyone said for a while like i'm just in a silly goofy mood when i do something like totally deranged it's like oh i'm just being a little silly today and talking about all the active serial killers to avoid yeah exactly i'm also sending a picture of paulita to the group chat so we can add her uh next to her love uh all right well as, as the resident bi of this show, what do you feel about Paulita? Are you in love with both of them? I think she's a beauty.

Look at, she's such a cutie pie. She is such a cutie pie. I was like, these two would have made the most beautiful love story. And I wish that they had that chance. It makes me very sad. Oh,

they loved each other. That it was cut short, you know? And the fact that she was that chance. It makes me very sad. Oh, they loved each other. That it was cut short, you know? And the fact that she was from a Hispanic family and like he just loved her despite that. And I say despite that because there was such, you know, it wasn't unusual for marriages to happen between the different communities. But it was still frowned upon by a lot of people on both sides and so i thought it was just a really cool story because uh you know her family didn't approve of course story ages old as time but um which christine continues to perpetuate yeah i sure do uh but yeah i think uh i think they had you know something really nice and nice. And it's too bad it got cut short.

Well, if you want to hear us talk about more killers, you can do that over at Patreon. And I'm sure Christine's got quite a lot to say. She might be attracted to some of them. So let's be, like, very careful about that. You never know. And that's why we drink.