Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 134 - (20)22 Alex Mysteries Part 1

Episode Date: January 6, 2022

Happy New Year Chilluminauts! Patreon - http://www.patreon.com/chilluminatipod BUY OUR MERCH - http://www.theyetee.com/collections/chilluminati Special thanks to our sponsors this episode Talkspace - http://www.talkspace.com Promo Code: chill HelloFresh - http://www.hellofresh.com/chill16 Promo Code: chill16 ExpressVPN - http://www.expressvpn.com/chill Jesse Cox - http://www.youtube.com/jessecox Alex Faciane - http://www.youtube.com/user/superbeardbros Art Commissioned by - http://www.mollyheadycarroll.com Theme - Matt Proft End song - POWER FAILURE - https://soundcloud.com/powerfailure Video - http://www.twitter.com/digitalmuppet

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Motorsportsland is a Utah company where family owned and locally operated. We love the outdoors and we know that an RV is the perfect way to blend the comfort and convenience of home with your outdoor adventures. Start your next adventure at Motorsportsland.com. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Chilluminati Podcast, Episode 134.

As always, I am one of your hosts, Mike Martin, joined by the Woody and Buzz Lightyear of California, Jesse Cox, and Alex Possean. Which one of us is Woody and which one of us is Buzz? I would have to say Alex's Woody and your Buzz. OK, it doesn't make sense. I mean, I don't know which one is which. I don't know what my mind is latching on to.

But I always figured that, like... Maybe the other way. No, no, no, I figured of all the toys. I was the T-Rex and Alex was the slinky dog. I was going to say I'm a slinky dog. I already vibe with slinky dog. But then I'm an iconic duo. Well, I don't agree.

I'm going to start some fights. Rex and slinky dog? Have you been watching Between the Lions? No. No, I'm just kidding. That's not like a real thing. What I want to do is with my authority as the sheriff of these parts today,

I would love to rebrand this episode, not as Episode 134. OK, I would like to brand this episode as Episode. Like this is like how like Marvel Comics would do this shit. I want to brand this episode as Episode 2022. What? Yeah, this is an episode from the future. It's the first episode of the year. And I want you guys to know that if you guys thought

that I was long winded and full of shit before. What is happening? I'm trying to follow really hard. I have gone completely off the deep end. I need you all to go to patreon.com slash Shlumanati Pod to get me back on the level. I got to the we have scruples here at Shlumanati Pod. I've lost my mind.

You'll see what I mean in a minute. We're going deep. I don't know how far we're going. I've already chopped this episode into two parts. What is happening? I did not. He's literally going rogue. I don't know.

He gave me carte blanche. He gave me prima nocta to do whatever I want. Prima nocta? Yeah, that's true. And what? Yeah, not, you know, prima nocta with the mysteries. Not like, you know what I'm saying? I mean, I hope I know what you're saying.

Well, me too. I hope I know what I'm saying too. But please go to patreon.com slash Shlumanati Pod, where you can support our fine show for another year of laughs and gasps and sad moments of us existentially lamenting the state of American culture at various times throughout history. All stuff we do on the show that you love.

It's true. And I'll keep doing these commercials forever. Don't you worry. I know you guys love them. So they do. That's the only commercial I don't edit out of the Patreon episodes. Because it's an it's it's edgy advertising.

Edgy advertising. That's what they call it. Say that out loud and like that will be part of our children's futures decades. It's a little bit of learning and all advertising. Yeah, exactly. And you believe that advertising is year four for us. Is that true?

Yeah, that is true. Wow. That's a 20 of 2018. That's like the new Mandela effect is forgetting that two years have passed since the pandemic started. It's yeah. I saw that post from that kid. It was like I was 14 when the pandemic started.

I'll be 18 this year. And I'm like, no. Shut the fuck up, kid. Shut the fuck up. That kid's not allowed on Patreon.com. Slimey. All of you are. We don't want them there to support us.

I don't want to see him. I don't want to hear about what he's got to say. But I'm glad I'm glad you guys are here. I'm I'm I'm just I'm just so this is the year of gratefulness for me. And you guys are also going to be grateful at the end of whenever I finally do reach the end of this gargantuan episode.

I can't tell if this is all set up for a goof or if like this. I don't know what's I can't read that. I like that's my energy. You know what I'm saying? That's what I'm saying. Nobody is so cool that I don't have to explain myself. That's the whole that's the whole thing. That's what we were saying.

Just before the microphone explanation now. All right. Do you guys want to just get into it? We know we're hitting and high. It is it. It is an episode in your hands. Yeah. Today. So here we go.

What he's round up. No, I'm just kidding. What if that's what I did? What if I sang the whole Woody's roundup song right now? Actually, what if I sang the song that Jesse sings? Not Jesse Cox, but Jesse, the cowgirl. You know, that sound that sad song. Remember that one?

I do remember it. Yeah. What if I sang that? What if what if this episode was five minutes long and we just right right now? I just sang the song for when somebody loved me from Toy Story 2, and that was my surprise. Every minute and a half for the story,

or if this is an actual thing you want to do. I can't read you. I can't read you. I'm just trying. I'm I'm I'm floating. I'm floating. I'm floating along the razor's edge right now. We are here.

I'm going to just get right into it. It's been a rough one for all of us, but it's a new year. And like we've been saying, it's been a really shitty couple of years, I think in general for everybody on the globe, whatever, whatever. But traditionally, when things are going better later and we can afford to be hard on ourselves again

in the future, the new year sometimes is the time where we think of it as a fresh start, right? We think of it as a time to clean house, time for new beginnings, right? So today, before I start on my first bit, new, big, singular project for the year, I decided that I was going to give you because it's episode 2000 and 22.

I decided that I would give you 22 little mysteries that have been floating around in my notes for the past year, for all of 2021, that for whatever reason, I'm finally ready to just burn, knock them off my list, even in a smaller and more abbreviated way. Isn't that great? Isn't that a nice idea for an episode?

It's in the spirit of the season, you know what I'm saying? So nice, so great. I'm excited. So nice and great. I'm excited for whatever it is you bring to the table. I call these little things, and you can follow me here. I call them many mysteries, okay? Oh.

And here we, and let's just get going. Because really, I said there are 22 of them. I don't know if you're really thinking about how many that actually is, that's a lot. That's too many. Yeah, definitely. 22, almost like it might need to be two parts. 22 too many.

Yeah, I already split this into two parts. This is not a surprise two-parter, so just be ready for one. And oh yeah, this is the obligatory content warning. I'm not gonna give you any spoilers at the top, other than that there are going to be adult themes. Graphic violence, murder, and sexual abuse in today's episode at different parts,

along with a lot of other fun stuff. The only adult theme is it isn't like sensual love between two consenting adults. Sometimes it is, it was very well received. And one camera. You know what I mean? Why is it never anything good? I did.

Autofocus was filled with good stuff. Yeah, but it wasn't like Alex coming in and being like, I've got 22 stories that are going to titillate your tata. I did, how many did I do? How many 69 stories did I do? 9, 10? 69, that's for sure.

Yeah, well, you know what, maybe next time. Maybe next time we hit episode 69, I'll do 69 stories. All right, I'll hold you to that. But please, proceed at your own risk. At this point, like I said, there's a little bit of adult content here amongst a lot of laughs and fun and general kookiness. So without any further ado, let's just get into it.

Many mystery number one is called e-mail, but it has three e's because it's like a spooky version of e-mail. E-mail. E-mail. Got it, got it. All right, so there was this guy, 32 year old man from Dunmore, Pennsylvania,

who was called Jack Freeze. Frozey? Froze. Jack Frost? It's F-R-O-E-S-E, so you guys can do with that, which you will. He's a super nice guy, super funny guy. He had a bunch of friends and a loving family,

but unfortunately, he died suddenly from a heart arrhythmia in the summer of 2011. You hate to see it, but sometimes that's what happens. But this alone does not a mini mystery make. And five months later, one of Jack's closest friends, a man called Tim Hart, was checking his e-mail at home when he noticed an e-mail from Jack's old e-mail address,

which kind of creeped him out. And Jesse, if you would please be so kind as to read this for me, we're just gonna get right into it here. I'm just gonna drop it right into the Zoom chat for you. Dear Truckin' A, wanna talk torque? The Tundra's forceful twin-turbo V6 will blow your mind. The Tacomas got bite and a taller suspension

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Of course, any heartless hacker type could do something like this, right? Get on to a dead guy's email address and mess with his friends. Oh, I'm a whatever. No, it'll never happen. And it happens all the time, but he's known for swearing, though.

This, I mean, he was known. Well, he's, I mean, if you, I mean, I know the audience can't see it, but the editing of the language was not mine. That is, that is S-I-C, as they say, seek. What does that mean? It means in the manner that it was written, but I don't know what it actually stands for

because I'm not an academic. Oh, interesting. But hey. Interesting. Any hacker could do this, but the reason it freaked out Tim specifically is that Tim and Jack actually did hang out in the attic a lot together. You would have to know them to know

that mentioning the attic would get under Tim's skin. And actually, the last time that he and Jack hung out before Jack passed away, they actually went up there and joked about how dirty it was up there and that Tim really had to get down to cleaning it, right? So that's why it freaked him out because it was so laser specific to stuff that they had talked about just before he passed away.

Very spooky. Yeah, Tim wrote him back with questions, but he never got a reply. But then it happened again with the same email address, this time to Jack's cousin, Jimmy McGraw, who sounds like a real guy for sure. And he was checking his email and the same thing, an email from Jack's old email address came through.

And this time I'll send one through for Mathis to read. A little bit different. So this is the email that came through for Jimmy McGraw, real guy. Hey, Jim, how are you doing? I knew you were going to break your ankle. Tried to warn you. Gotta be careful.

Tell Rock for me. Great song. You're welcome. Couldn't get through to him. His email didn't work. What? So for Jimmy, yeah. So for Jimmy, this is even creepier

because he only broke his ankle like a week prior to getting this email, which again was five months after Jack had died. And he told nobody about the fact that he broke his ankle because he just did it like alone. He was like walking out the door to work and it just happened. And it's, you know, it didn't lay him up

or like ruin the lives of a bunch of people. He just sort of like, oh shit, my ankle's broken. So it wasn't like a big deal. But yet Jack knew about it in his email. And so I don't know who Rock is. I don't know what the song is that they're talking about. I believe that's probably a mutual friend of theirs who doesn't have an email and he just wrote a song,

something like that. But both Tim and Jim decided to just sort of take this communication as a nice sign from their friend. There was enough details in the emails that they felt like, you know, this could really be him and we're fine with that. They don't really care what anybody else thinks about it. They're not trying to convince anybody that it's real.

And since nobody ever really stood to make any money off of this or tried to make any money off of this, even though the story got so big that it made the national news and like not, nobody like swooped in to try and like do a book or anything like that. I kind of tend to believe that these people at the very least aren't lying about what they're saying

and that the emails probably really did come through. But yeah, nobody knows, nobody knows what those emails were and they've never been explained, pretty wild. They never tried to write back to them or anything? No, they tried, they did. Yeah, they tried, no reply. The most of like, take my brain and bounce out. Yeah, yeah.

Little Amuse Bush for you guys, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, that's a tasty morsel, I like that one a lot. I like to call them, this is my new term for them. Many mysteries, because they're mysteries, but they're small and you get the double. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Consonant, you know what, you know what? Consonance is.

Slow down, point X or what? Consonance is. Consonant? Two sounds, two consonant sounds that are the same as each other. Many mysteries, get it? Mama. Oh, right, right, right. Wow, wow, wow.

Yeah. It's nuts. I thought I hired a co-host, not a marketing genius. Dude, it's, I'm a diamond in the rough. Not only am I a sheriff with really bandy legs, but I'm a genius. Many mystery number two, moving right along, is called A858. We are still in 2011 with this one,

same year as the weird Jack. What a year, yeah. We're still on the internet, it's another internet mystery, but this time, instead of emails, we're heading over to Reddit, where a Reddit account with the seemingly gibberish handle of U slash A858DE45F5F56D9BC9,

long, long one, started making posts to a subreddit that was also called A858, et cetera, et cetera. Same subreddit, same username, right? They matched. And at first, the post that he was making just kind of seemed like gibberish as well. Just long strings of letters and numbers.

I would send you a quote of one for you guys to read it, but it would literally just be an encrypted message that you couldn't understand of numbers and letters, so don't worry about it. But yeah, that's all it was for a while. And then almost a year later, out of nowhere, somebody posted an AMA request,

like drawing attention to it, just being like, what the hell is this? I wanna talk to this person. Somebody tell me what you guys are posting here, what do these messages mean? Why are they all here? And so people saw the AMA request and the link to the subreddit and were like,

what the hell is this? And pretty soon after that, another subreddit called Solving A858 was born. And that's the one that the fans of this mystery now, they're all on board, trying to solve this mysterious subreddit. They all got on there. Now, suddenly, next level computer and cryptography nerds

are coming out of the woodwork and get into the mix now. Because that's what always happens when a mystery on the internet goes viral, right? Because people love to go on the source code and look for cipher text or something, right? Sure. And in the beginning, they kept that solving subreddit private so that they could focus

and they would only let people in who actually could help them. But then some headway started to be made and it started to become too big and they still wanted to be the boss of it. They decided they wanted to be the sheriffs of it still. So they ended up opening the Reddit to the public and as people started to swap notes,

they thought that maybe this subreddit was some kind of like number station style thing or some sort of recruiting tool like how Cicada 3301 was, if you guys remember that episode. Yes. Classic. Which is basically why I didn't do this episode

because they're like so similar. But after a while working on this, they all people really could figure out was that the titles of the posts seemed to be timestamps for the posts even though they were also encrypted and that some of them had like, some of the posts had like jokey little Easter egg messages

hidden in them that were like easier to, like much less complex codes than the rest of the codes. And they would say things like happy new year or like no to SOPA, you know, when SOPA was a thing and they were like trying to talk shit on SOPA or just like every once in a while, they'd post like an ASCII picture of Stonehenge, you know, things that kind of felt a little human,

you know what I mean? Things that felt a little bit less like some kind of bot that was just like running nonsense. But most of the stuff on there, like I said, was much more like encrypted, which means that it is meant to be permanently hidden rather than encoded, which means that it's later meant to be deciphered.

So the solution was not like an easy one to figure out and it's really hard to get to the meat of anything. So obviously whoever it was that was making this stuff was actively listening, following the media coverage of themselves. But also interestingly, whenever it potentially got to a point where too many people were getting too hype on it

and like read it was like jamming into it and all this stuff, they would like private their page and like wait it out until it blew over because nobody could access it. And they would just, they would just wait and like it felt like, you know, every time a listicle would mention it,

they would like go low profile mode so that like they could hit their like target for activity or something is what it kind of felt like, right? And so this is just kind of how it was. There was posts. People would like occasionally notice that it went offline and stuff like that. Four years go by, nothing really changed.

And then someone started posting similar hexadecimal chains to the ones in A858 in the solving Reddit, right? So like now people are posting encoded messages in there, except they're a little easier to solve. People slowly began to realize that it was actually the creator of A858 who's trying to do their own like weird version of an AMA in the subreddit.

And the people in the subreddit, the engineers and stuff that were in there were actually able to make a script that would like insta translate the posts so that everybody could read it as it was happening, if you know what I'm saying? Sure. And once they got to talking with this person,

they said that the puzzles were actually paid work that was created by a group in service to a specific company who sometimes requested that they post certain things to raise awareness of the subreddit in the public eye, like the little fun things, little jokes, the stone heads just to get people hype on it again. But neither the identity of the group or the people in the group

or the name of the company were ever made public. And they said that they broke their silence because quote, the audience was getting frustrated and that they quote, cannot disclose the purpose. A858 will end when the purpose is disclosed or discovered. And also they said actually that one of the puzzles, like one of the main puzzles that nobody could solve actually was solved by a woman in the UK,

but that no one really noticed and now her account was deleted and people were kind of speculating that maybe they like absorbed her, you know, somehow, once she solved one of them. But that AMA went on for a while and then they did a post that decoded to all zeros and that was like the end of the AMA.

So that was pretty wild. And then after that, even more people showed up to the puzzle solving party because it just kept getting more high and high profile because that was like a crazy thing that happened was the AMA. And following the footsteps of the happy new year solve and the no to sopa solve,

someone found a partial decryption key for some of the earliest like main posts, but they were only ever able to partially decrypt them. And other than some more ASCII art and some jokes and some possible coordinates to somewhere in North Korea, which was largely unconfirmed, no definitive progress towards the purpose of the site was made.

And suddenly out of nowhere one day, just like it had happened a few times for a short amount of time, the whole thing goes private again, right? Like I said, at first everybody thought, oh, this is normal. Like it's just gonna be one of those things again where it goes away and comes back.

But this time when it came back, there was now a message on the sidebar that read, quote, the A858 project has concluded. You may unsubscribe. And then it went private and then it stayed that way and A858, whatever, whatever, whatever, deleted their account. The subreddit was still there, but the account,

the user was deleted. So then the solving A858 mods were like, well, they know the rules of Reddit. If you don't have mods on your Reddit, you can ask Reddit to make you the mods, right? And there's a process to claim stuff like that, right? But they found out that A858 had already appointed someone as their moderator and that person was like a mysterious

person that they couldn't pin down. So a little while later, another post appeared on the solving subreddit and this one was confirmed legit by a mod because the person contacted them and was like, hey, really quick, I'm gonna make you able to post on A858 to prove to you that I am really this person. And so that was good enough for them

to like briefly be able to post on A858. And they apologized to the audience saying, quote, the information available to the public is not sufficient to solve all outstanding puzzles. Some information was missed and other remains undiscovered slash misunderstood, but because of the misinformation, any further efforts on solving A858 will be in vain.

We will not respond to any questions in the comments nor by direct message. This account will not be monitored after 1300 hours UTC Wednesday. And a few weeks later, through slightly more dubious means, a little more info came out through hearsay. Some of the highest people at Solving said

they have a connect to this person. They said that the company that hired the person had lost interest that the project had lost funding and that it would never come back, even though like almost none of it was solved, which was frustrating for everybody involved, especially the people who made it. And that's basically it.

We'll never know what mysterious company that was, but in 2018, it opened up one more time for about a week with a new moderator with like another number for its username, but nothing happened. And that's the last I've heard of it. And that is the A858 mystery. Hmm. Oh, that's interesting.

Yeah, a little shorter. I can see why you're kind of compared to the Cicada mystery earlier too. Yes. They're very, very similar. Yeah. These mysteries again, shorter than our regular mysteries we cover on the show.

Many sites. If I could just learn of these mysteries while they're happening. I'm smart enough. Yeah, exactly. Next one, left turn. This one is called Silicon Butterfly. It is interesting, I will say that a lot of these

so far have been in that, even though I recall the early days of like the, you know, 2000, 2001 internet, that was, we were still in that weird like everyone kind of trusted everyone phase of the internet. And so you'd go on like YTMND and watch a goof, right? And then you'd be like, but I got a virus. What? Like that can, but the, the 2010, 2011, 2000, like that,

that era is when people started to be like, how can we use the internet to like mess with people? Yeah. And I mean, even on YouTube when they were doing that lonely girl stuff, if you remember, way back when I was like, I was like, the guy who was affected by that. Yeah.

You know what I mean? Yeah. I was all in. Do you remember that, Mathis? Yeah, I, I'm gonna go. It seemed real. It seemed real at first. It was just like a vlog.

It was like a vlog girl. And then like she got caught up in a freaking mystery. And it was like a cult situation and you find out like, oh, she's like in a cult and all that shit. And parents are like really strict and stuff. And then she like went on like, I think it was like Jimmy Kimmel or something. And she was like, I'm an actress.

Yeah. It was like a mind fuck. It was awesome. I still like followed it for years, but it was like awesome. But yeah, it's crazy because I was just about to start doing the job that I eventually, I basically am doing now at that time.

I was just getting started on doing that, right? So same zone, but I think like probably like three or four years later was when, like probably towards the end of the Obama administration, when everybody was kind of like, oh, the internet, we're fucked, aren't we? Like they really, yeah. And yeah, it's like the cigarette moment for the internet.

That was in like 2015 sometime. I don't know what happened. I don't know what that moment was like. And we can talk about, we debate that for a whole episode, but that's my marketing genius's opinion. The sheriff of Andy's room will say that 2015 was the last partially good year of internet culture.

And then we went straight to hell after that. Number three of 22 is called Silicon Butterfly. A really clever title, trust me. The next one shoots back to 1999, the real old internet in Malibu, California, where a couple hikers going through a canyon, about a mile and a half off a PCH, found a 1993 Ford AeroStar van,

which was down at the bottom of a ravine, and which contained human remains inside. The cause of death, once the authorities were involved, was called probably suicide, quote, probably suicide. And surprisingly, when the body was finally identified via dental records, it was discovered that at one point in time, this person had been none other than Philip Taylor Kramer,

who at one point in the early seventies had briefly joined and recorded an album or two with the band Iron Butterfly, though the article was like, it was well after their glory days, which I don't know why there's any need to do Iron Butterfly criticism, but whatever. Criticize Iron Butterfly who I've never fucking heard of.

You probably have, that's how, they're popular enough that you've probably heard their music. But yeah, he was in the band Iron Butterfly in 1974. Shortly thereafter though, in 1975, he changed his name from Philip Taylor Kramer simply to Taylor Kramer. He left the band, he went back to college, he earned a degree in aerospace engineering,

he even spent some time working for the Department of Defense before starting a company called Total Multimedia Inc. in the nineties, which was apparently a cutting edge company that dealt with video compression technology. Like cutting edge video compression, when that was like really starting to become a thing, right, right at the end of the millennium. But even more interestingly,

was that the day Taylor went missing, which was actually four years before the van was found, in February 12th, 1995, when his friend Greg Martini and his wife were waiting for him to pick them up at LAX, that's when he disappeared. So apparently at the time, he'd been working late late hours,

barely finding any time to sleep for the previous two weeks. And earlier that day, Kramer had called his wife and told her that, quote, plans had changed and that he was gonna have a big surprise for her when he got home. Then he called Ron Bushy, who was one of his friends from Iron Butterfly, and he said, quote, Bush, it's Taylor,

I love you more than life itself. And then he called his wife back and told her, quote, whatever happens, I'll always be with you. And then at 1159 AM, which is not midnight, it is in the middle of the day, he made a 911 call where he said, quote, this is Philip Taylor Kramer, I am going to kill myself. And then no one heard or saw him for over four years

before they found his van in that ravine in Malibu. Damn. Authorities literally have no idea what happened. According to them, he just vanished. And just to be clear on where their heads were at, here's a quote from LAPD officer Chuck Carter that Jesse will do us the service of reading out of the chat right now.

You live in LA, you know the LAPD tone. Just that LA confidential. Oh, no, you know what? Because I live in LA. Something happened during that, I'm not gonna say, I'm gonna say nothing, I'm not getting pulled over. Something happened during that time,

either in his head or at the terminal that made him turn away. And I'll tell you, I have an a clue. The guy didn't have an enemy. The guy was a dedicated family man. I checked him out. Whatever happened in his head while at the airport or whatever happened right in the airport,

I've got a feeling we'll learn from Kramer himself. Yeah, so literally just like, they were like, we don't have any fucking idea what happened to this guy. And as with many likely suicides, people who knew Kramer stood by his character, stood by his mental state, saying things like he never would have left his family.

Weirdly, his widow also said that he loved them. He was like, he loved us more than life itself, which is like weird that she said that when he said that in his call to Rambushi. I don't know what that means, but I just noticed that while I was writing this. But more notably, for our purposes, Kramer's father has a totally different interpretation

of what happened, stemming from the fact that at the time of his disappearance, Kramer had apparently been working on some type of technology that could transport information and matter through space faster than the speed of light. And so for Mathis, I actually have a quote from the father to read if you would be so kind to kind of wrap up this mini mystery, if you will.

It is because it's a small mystery. It's a very small mystery. Gotcha. Taylor told me a long time before there was people given them problems. They wanted what he was doing, and several of them had threatened him. He told me, if I ever say I'm going to kill myself,

don't you believe it? I'm going to be needing help. I don't know why I stumbled the last one. But yeah. I'm going to be needing help. So yeah, that's not true. My dude literally called his dad and was like, somebody's going to make me tell you

that I want to kill myself and then I'm going to kill myself. Don't believe me when I say that. Because he was working on it. I don't know exactly what it was. I've heard that the compression technology, something about the way data was being transferred, he had some hot thing that was about to be popping off

and that he had interest from all these people and he was working his ass off and trying to figure it out. But yeah, he had a really weird day where he was calling a lot of people on the phone. People say maybe he had some sort of break from overworking himself and he just went to a weird place.

But nevertheless, his dad was like, hey, here's exactly what he said was going to happen. So I don't know. Do we know what happened to his work after he died? No, no, we don't. We don't. But yeah, I think I would like to imagine that whoever owned the copyrights

was somebody that he wanted to have the money. But I don't, you know, a lot of things, a lot of people die who do important things and then nobody ever follows them. It's kind of weird. But yeah, you get it. It's Silicon Butterfly because he's a Silicon Valley guy,

but he was in Iron Butterfly. You get fantastic title. Yeah, mini. I mean, now it's like when the title reveals itself in the movie, you're like, oh, now I get why it's called this. The characters look right into the camera. Yeah.

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Number four is called the Atari Labyrinth. What? And I'm going to open this one by asking you guys, if you guys have heard of a place called the Library of Alexandria. Yes. And it no longer exists. Yeah, it's a shame.

God knows what knowledge was lost. Yeah. I've always sort of been fascinated by the idea that there were like discoveries that we've made in science and math or whatever that were lost to history when the library of Alexandria burned. Just to be clear, Alexandria is an ancient city in Egypt.

It had a beautiful library that was like fabled to be like a wonder of the world almost. It had like the sum of man's knowledge. So many romantic stories. Like we used to have magic, but then it burned in the library of Alexandria. Like so many things burned there. I've heard this quote before

and I don't know how factual it is, but I did hear it. Didn't we lose like, didn't it like quote unquote kind of like set humanity back like a hundred or 200 years worth of knowledge, just lost in that fire and like. There's no way to calculate it without knowing exactly what was lost, but that's true. That's very true.

Yeah, that's like the idea and the romance of the idea that like there are things that were lost that have never been discovered since. Right. Is like a really exciting thing to me. But a few months ago, I happened upon a much more recent example of something like this happening,

having to do with a game called Entombed that is for the Atari 2600. The story goes that two video game archaeologists, which are real things now apparently, one from the University of Calgary in Canada called John Acock and another from University of York in the UK called Tara Copplestone.

Could not be a more British name than that. Decided to look into the game Entombed as part of the research and the history of video game software programming because the idea of archaeologists studying a game about archaeologists was intriguing to them because the game Entombed is a game all about finding your way out of a maze like Catacomb of Zombies.

It's called Catacombs of the Zombies. You get stuck in there with the archaeology team. You got to get out of the maze. This is the type of game that does not fly beyond the Atari 2600. It was fine in the 70s, but nowadays people would be like, this is unfinished.

This is not gameplay. This is a maze. I could do this on paper. But the crazy thing is that because the game had so little memory on it, rather than being able to store maze designs on the cartridge, which is what you would do today, they didn't have space to store all these maze designs.

So programmers would literally write code that could generate mazes procedurally on an Atari 2600, which resulted in a situation where you're playing Entombed, but you never play the same maze twice, and the mazes don't take up any space on the cartridge at all. So the question is-

A really, really, really basic roguelike in a way? Yeah, I mean, like, it's a different maze. It's certainly a roguelike mechanic of randomized mazes. Sure, sure. But how was it possible that a console released in the same year as the original Star Wars could be expected to do that perfectly every time without making an ugly, unsolvable maze design

that didn't fit together for time and time? It's a valid question. And yet, that is exactly what it did, right? So through reverse engineering, these video game archeologists sort of discovered the concept behind how it worked, and to get that across to you listeners, I'm gonna have Jesse read a little quote

from them right now. It turned out that the maze is generated in a sequence. The game needs to decide, as it draws each new square of the maze, whether it should draw a wall or a space for the game characters to move around in. Each square should therefore be wall or no wall, one or zero in computer bits. The game's algorithm decides this automatically

by analyzing a section of the maze. It uses a five-square tile that looks like a little like a Tetris piece. This tile determines the nature of the next square in each row. So I know already it's already kind of complicated, but I think you kind of follow along that they're kind of like literally procedurally using it

to generate the maze by like kind of checking it using these pieces, right? Yeah, and it's either a one or a zero. It's like, is it gonna be a wall or no wall? Yeah. How? That's the fascinating part. The fundamental logic that determines the next square is locked in a table of possible values

written into the game's code, depending on the values of the five-square tile, the table tells the game to deposit either wall, no wall, or random choice between the two. Yeah, but beyond that, no one has any idea how that actual table of possible values could have been made. Cople Stone said, quote,

the abnormality of the table was just quite striking and her partner Acox said, quote, the struggle I have as a scientist is, I think that there should be some logical way that this will all make sense and there really doesn't seem to be. Oh. But they would, so these two people were able to interview

one of the five people who worked on Intoomed. It was a guy. It's a weird to find out this guy was like a mass, like this seems like stoner logic. A guy called Steve Sidley was the guy that they interviewed, but he said it was the work of another guy who was unnamed for privacy reasons. He had this to say about the guy,

this is for Mathis to read. It's a quick one. I couldn't unscramble it. He told me it came upon him when he was drunk and whacked out of his brain. Yeah. So he cracked through the collective unconscious and found a beautiful mathematical infinity formula.

And he realized he was numbers and used his own internal code. He's maybe that's why they can't find him. Maybe he's just still there in the game. Is that what that guy was when he messaged us? Like Jack Nicholson. That was the developer. In the picture, in the lobby of the overlook,

Jack Nicholson, they tried to contact this person who was whacked out of his brain for comment. They gave no reply. And so the mystery of how this infinite maze generator was created will stay a mystery probably forever. But that's really interesting, right? I've been really into the idea of like just weird little pockets of scientific phenomenon.

And I just love that there's like an infinity maze generator in a tomb for Atari 26 that nobody knows where it came from. Yeah, that's really like remember the one from the other day, the other day, like months ago about the like Saran wrap factory that like creates like electrical force fields. That's like insane. It's like an X file.

You know what I mean? You know, it's still on my mind is the fucking brain cells playing Paul. And that's what's still on my mind. That's fucking me up to this day. Tune in to the Patreon exclusives. It's a wonderful restaurant. That's a great website.

That's number four of twenty two on episode two thousand and twenty two. Number five. Wow, we this might be like a four part. Number five is called bad. We do have a whole year. We do have a whole year to get through all of twenty. Now, this is the first episode of the year. Bad first day. Is the name of this one. OK, now we're going at first date.

That first day. Day. Yeah. So now we're going to go back in time. We're going to go back across the Atlantic Ocean. We're in Bavaria, Germany, March 31st. 1922, Maria Baumgartner was working her very first day as the maid for the Gruber family, who all lived and worked together at a place called, say it with me, audience, Hinterkai Fek Farm.

OK, you may have we've done this on this show. We may have. You may have. I don't know if you have or not, because I don't remember a lot of what happens in this story. And I looked to see if we did. I have heard details of this story before, for sure. But there was a lot more to it that I did not. And so I felt it was worth doing here as a shorty boy,

AKA a mini mystery course. Apparently, Maria Baumgartner was replacing the previous maid who had quit about six months previously because she believed that the place was haunted. At first, the family did not believe their old maid when she said that she heard footsteps and voices up in the attic. But after she left, the Grubers eventually started hearing the voices too and slowly, but surely more and more things started to seem off.

OK, so the father of the family was Andreas Gruber. He had mentioned that he said of house keys had gone missing recently. He said he found a weird newspaper in his house that he didn't recall purchasing. And then later he found scratches on his tool shed like someone was trying to get into his tool shed. And then like just a few days before Maria came onto the job, he said the famous the famous imagery of this story,

which is the the large footsteps walking out of the woods to the back door of the house with no footsteps leading back out of the house. This does sound familiar, and I'm trying desperately to remember. I know this is definitely an episode that we did. I know that we I know that we've talked about it, but you got to you got to trust me that there's more to this. And I'm trusting Andreas was proud.

And though he told a couple people about what was going on, he wouldn't let anybody help him. He didn't go to the police. And anyway, for the next four days from the outside at least, everything seemed fine at the farm. Cattle were being fed. People were cooking in the kitchen. Smoke was rising from the chimney.

Even the dog was tied up outside when the mailman came by that Saturday. But everything was not adding up. And on April 1st, the and this apparently is a thing that happens in Bavaria, which I wish happened in my life. The coffee merchant came by the house to take an order. But no one answered his knocks. Their daughter, the Gruber daughter, did not show up for school.

And the Grubers did not show up at all on church that Sunday. And that's when people started to get kind of eyeball emoji if there were emojis at that time, but there weren't. So they weren't eyeball emoji. But you get what I'm saying. And on April 4th, a repairman came by early in the morning. And after waiting around for an hour and seeing that no one was on the farm anywhere, seemingly.

But the animals and the dog, he just was like, well, I'm here to do my job. So he like repaired the thing you needed to repair. Left after a couple hours. He told people like, I don't know what's going on over there. There's like no one over there. And so later that day at 3 30 p.m., some neighbors finally worked up the bravery to really start searching the place.

And when they walked into the barn, they were shocked to find the bodies of Andreas, his wife, his daughter and his granddaughter murdered with a pickaxe and stacked on top of each other. Yep, his two year old son, Joseph and Maria, the maid, who was unfortunately was her first day on the job were also both dead in the main house. And no one really knows who did it or why.

OK, at first, it seemed like it was a violent robbery, but a huge amount of money was found still in the safe that was in the house, which is like, you know, for the police enough for them to abandon the idea that it was like a robbery. And other than the fact that whoever did this seemingly stayed in the house living there for days, living out of the pantry, eating their bread, taking care of the farm in a way, no one really seemed to have benefited from the crime in any way

as far as anyone can tell. And the farm was demolished a year later and the case was officially closed in 1955. And the few investigations that have happened since have led to no definitive conclusions, which is crazy. However, there are still a few surprising revelations left when I get into the suspects. So I'm just going to go down the list and do the best I can.

So here we go. The first suspect is Carl Gabriel. He's the husband of Andreas's daughter, Victoria. OK, apparently this guy was meant to have been killed by a shelling in France in World War One, but nobody ever found his body. And once the Gruber family murder was in the news, people started to go like maybe he survived the war and he was like back for revenge or something. But that's weird, right?

That he would be there for revenge. Like, what would he be there for revenge for? But that's one thing that's absolutely crazy about this case is that there's this one detail here that is like never mentioned. You always read the story about they were murdered and like one day after the footsteps led to the house and stuff. But what they never mentioned is that at least until 1915 or 16. And remember, this is 1922, right?

So a couple of years back, but at least on 1915 or 16, it was very well established that the father of the family, Andreas Gruber had regularly been raping his own daughter and once it had been discovered by the town, they were like, dude, like what the fuck is wrong with you? You're fucking travesty. You're fucking pariah. Like we fucking hate you. You're like a mark on this town's history forever.

Like fuck yourself, right? And in fact, there was even some speculation that Victoria's son, Joseph. Was actually like I'm my own. Grandpa, like I'm my I'm my own. And my son is also my grandson. Situation where where he's he's having sex with his daughter to bear himself his own grandson. If you see what I'm saying, yeah, yeah, I see.

Yeah, it's extremely fucked up shit. Yeah. And so that brings us back around to Joseph, the grandson and the fact that Victoria's husband, you know, bearing that in mind as something that was happening while he was away at fucking getting shelled in France, you know, in World War One. Maybe him coming back and wanting revenge kind of makes sense. Though admittedly, I can't imagine why he would murder every single person in the house for that reason.

You know what I mean? Yeah. Why would you kill your son? You're not your son. But like, why would you kill your wife and his entire, I don't know, it just seems like excessive as revenge. And also granted, according to like official documents, the dude was dead. So chances it was him are admittedly very slim. But there were many years later

some German prisoners who were released from Soviet captivity in World War Two, which is, you know, 20 years later, who said that they were let go early from captivity by a German speaking Soviet officer who claimed I have murdered a group of family and. And even though it's pretty sus evidence, people who reported seeing Carl Gabriel around after he was supposedly dead all said that he was planning on running away to Russia.

So it's Lucy Goosey, but there is at least some sort of breadcrum that maybe puts him in Russia and able to be the person who said he killed them there. But, you know, that's a that's a that's a that's a wide one. Anyway, the next suspect is another person believed to have fathered Victoria's child, a local guy to the area named Lorenz Schlittenbauer, who just did one million suspicious things to cast doubt on himself over the years as the as the true murderer. Firstly, he was there when the when when they first found the bodies.

And they had to break a gate to get into the barn, like the group of them had to break a gate to get into the barn. And then later, though, when they get to the farmhouse at the front door, he allegedly unlocks the door with a fucking key. And if you remember, one of the ghost things that happened was that his keys went missing early in the story. And when and so this guy goes in unlocks with a key

and goes to the house alone before anyone else. And when they're like, what the fuck did you just go doing there? He apparently said it was to look for his son, Joseph. And it's confusing because he has one actual son named Joseph for sure already. And then this other kid that's Victoria's kid, who's like two years old, is also called Joseph. So it was unclear which one he was talking about in the piece that I was reading. Though it is well established that he actually did disturb the bodies

during the discovery of the crime. OK, so that's weird. That's suspicious. Why did he have a key? Why would he go in by himself? Why did he mess with the bodies? And he was also known to let slip strangely specific details about the day of the murders and that he probably shouldn't have known like how the ground was too frozen for the killers to bury the bodies the day they were killed or returning to the fucking scene of the crime

from time to time, right, which is like classic I'm the killer type behavior. Oh, yeah, that's like one of the most expected behaviors from people who do that kind of thing. Yeah. And there were rumors that Victoria had just recently began demanding some money to help raise their secret son from this guy. So that's the motive right there, maybe. But years later in 1941, he actually won a few slander cases against people who were referring to him as the murderer of Hinterkäifeck.

So whatever case there was against him was probably not super airtight. And he won those cases hands down. So I don't know what that means. There's also these two brothers, Carl and Andreas S, who were named as the murderers in a letter from a woman called Terese T. In 1971, she said that when she was 12, she witnessed her mom talking to another mom who was saying that her two sons, Carl and Andreas, which apparently there's like five names in Germany.

I don't know why everybody in this case named the same thing as another guy named Andreas, Carl and Andreas were the murderers and that one of them. They were talking. She was talking about, oh, my God, my sons did these crazy murders. Remember those murders? My son did them and he was all I can remember him talking about was that he let me like lost his pen knife while he was there murdering. Right. So that was the letter that showed up in 1971 that said all this, right?

And this would normally just be nonsense from a crazy person. Why would we care what a like a 50 or like a letter 50 years later would say? But they actually did find an erroneous knife on the premises when they demolished the farm in 1923. So that's kind of interesting, though. I mean, yeah, it is like semi kind of it's like, yeah, it's physical evidence, but it could be. And it's like that guy who like was like, oh, I'm on TikTok and no one is on the streets or whatever. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. However, it's also said that Miss Rieger, who was the original maid, the one who left because of the ghosts six months earlier, she said that she thought the knife was already there when she was working. She said she saw that knife outside. So make of that what you will. But speaking of her, Miss Rieger, I'm actually kind of starting to think

it's possible that she kind of half knew something was going on and just came up with the ghost thing to like have plausible deniability because there are accounts of her claiming to have been spoken to from outside her window while she was working in the house by an unknown figure like through her window, like whispering to her from outside, who at separate times she identified as the Thaler brothers and the Bickler brothers or even both. And that maybe she talked to both of them

because both of them seem to have separate knowledge of inside information regarding the comings and goings of the people on the farm and where certain specific people were on the farm and things were located. And it's a weird story, right? I feel like maybe that's her version of a story where she was saying, I gave them this information. You know what I mean? But I don't know.

But unfortunately, that's as far as it's ever gone. No one knows for sure what happened. And there are a lot of convincing evidence for all these different scenarios. So well, except for the one where the husband seems to be alive. But that seems that one seems wild. But other than that, they all seem at least a little bit believable. And also, I was watching BuzzFeed Unsolved the other day and they said that all the body's heads were removed for analysis.

But that pretty soon after that, they lost all the heads. So all the bodies that were buried from the family were just all buried headless. And nobody knows where the heads are to this day. But I looked to try and find like where that was from, like the official source from that couldn't find it. But it was on BuzzFeed Unsolved. And I feel like maybe they would have checked it. I don't know.

I don't want to say it's definitive, but that's that. And also, just as a last word on this case, there were some students at the German Police Academy who did like a like a soft reopening of the case as like a training exercise. And they concluded that it was extremely unlikely that the evidence to definitively solve the case would ever be found. That was like their main findings. But it is worth mentioning that also they all did unanimously decide together

who they thought the most likely suspect was. And for legal reasons, they can't say. Because they would be like, look at them implicating somebody based on like fake police work, right? Yeah. But yeah, that's got to be the worst ever first day of a new job that I can think of. Yeah, no, that would be bad.

How about that? I mean, yeah, I am obsessed now with the fact that you mentioned the TikTok Time Traveller. Yeah. Yeah, there's so many of them. I went to go look that guy up because they don't remember the dude like he was showing videos and it was great video. It seemed fake, but like it was very good. I discovered I want to go look for a follow up on that guy.

And I realized that like there's so many of them. Yes, there's tons of them. Like different people doing it. A lot. And my favorite one is a guy who says he's from 2714. Come on. And he's a Time Traveller who came back. And my favorite one is yes, two, two that are so good.

And they're recent. This is why I'm only bringing up these two. Yeah, yeah, yeah. December 2021, a T-Rex dinosaur egg will be found that can open a portal to an alternate universe and three teams are going to open the portal. Dude, are you sure you weren't talking about an N64 game? But wait, February 2022, the mythical city of Atlantis

will be found housing a new hybrid fish human species in the Atlantic Ocean. Part of the lore. Abe Sapien. What is it? Easy comics. I guess I think to be less fantastical. I think we talked about it on a mini show, but there was one that I saw filming the empty streets type.

Yeah. And they turned to the camera and one of the buildings like rendered a little late and it popped in and you're like, OK, that makes sense. And they're just like that's the thing that just fucked up. Have you guys played the Matrix? Yeah, like look at like people like engines look photoreal now talking about the Matrix. Buildings.

No, we haven't really talked about it. Maybe we'll do a little bit of talk in the mini so about the Unreal 5 Matrix thing. OK, yeah, you guys, you guys, did you guys play it? Yes. Oh, OK. Oh, yeah, you got to do that. You got to PS5 or something, right? You got to do it. You got to do it.

Um, OK. Yeah, OK. Number six of 22, mind you, is called cursed or clear. OK. OK. In America, it's estimated that four percent of people in prison are actually innocent. When I saw them for the very first time, like I knew who my jury will be doing trial.

To be honest, I knew I lost them. In 2002, the state of Georgia found Kerry guilty for his alleged involvement in a vicious rape. Only a small percentage of those people have their convictions overturned. You know, as one great justice said many years ago, we don't find our witnesses from church pews. What series of events led to Kerry's wrongful conviction?

Could this happen to anyone? What finally convinced the courts to overturn his conviction? From Zappier, in partnership with the Georgia Innocence Project, this is the 4%. Listen anywhere you get your podcasts or visit zapier.com forward slash resources forward slash podcasts to learn more. Summer is back and so are the deals

at Larry H. Miller Chrysler Jeep Dodge Ram Sandy. Right now, get up to $11,250 off the 2022 Ram 1500 Big Horn. Make it happen during the Memorial Day sales event at Larry H. Miller Chrysler Jeep Dodge Ram Sandy. $4,500 dealer discount, $1,000 engine retail bonus cash, $2,000 select inventory bonus cash, $2,000 national bonus cash, $1,000 CCAP bonus cash, $750 CCAP non-prime finance through Chrysler Capital

on approved credit. All prices are plus tax, title license fees, and a $299 dealer dock fee expires $531.23. Up next, to lighten things up, I've got a nice little pop culture mystery for you guys to chew on in the form of a short list of scary movies, a mini list, if you will, which all happen to be about humans communing with the powers

beyond their understanding, by the way, and the various ways that meddling with said powers are said to have cursed the people who made them. Kind of like Richard Gere in The Mothman. Exactly. You're right. Which you can go to patreon.com.shuleimanada.pod, sign up for the $20 tier, and get the chill tracks

and listen along. Beautiful, beautiful bastons. It's possible that all these movies will eventually be on chill tracks. Who knows? That's very true. Maybe you've heard of some of these before. Maybe you haven't.

But after I tell you what happened in each movie, this is why it's called this, you guys are going to decide whether you think each movie is cursed or clear. So you know what I'm saying? You know what I'm saying earlier about consonants? You know what I'm saying? The sound of two consonants that alliterates.

Alliteration? Yeah. Alliteration is a blanket term. It's like a, you get what I'm saying. All right. Number one, the first movie, it's Poltergeist. The 1982 movie, Poltergeist, is a movie about ghosts haunting a family home, which was secretly built

on a Native American burial ground and was rumored to have been ghost directed by Steven Spielberg himself. But the question is, were any of the ghosts real? And what about Poltergeist 2? Because apparently Poltergeist 2 is just as haunted as Poltergeist 1. And Poltergeist 3 is possibly somewhat haunted as well.

So let's get into how these curses maybe happened. And then we'll get into what the curses did. So for the first movie, Poltergeist 1, according to some unconfirmed information attributed to actress Jo Beth Williams, who plays the mother character in the movie, some of the skeletons that Spielberg used in the film's big climactic scene were real.

Because apparently real skeletons were at the time way cheaper than like good looking plastic one somehow. Maybe that's true. I have no idea. I believe that because weren't the skeletons than Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean for a couple of them were real for a little while until they ended up replacing.

I was just watching a thing on Disney Plus about that maybe. And I think I picked up that piece of information as well. One of them's still there. They still have a human skull on the right. Yeah, that wouldn't surprise me if we're using them for movies too. So it sounds wacky.

I think it would be weird to like play with somebody's bones. Like maybe for set dressing I would be convinced, but like you couldn't convince me to like. Would you guys buy a like actual human skull for your display? I don't know. I don't know what tone I would set for a real human skull.

Cause like I went to like an occult like, what do you like almost like a merchants corner you would find in like a con. Sure. And they were selling human skulls for like 250 bucks. Did you buy one? No. Were you tempted?

I was. I was tempted. They also were selling dirt from the sites of serial killers. Oh, that's a really provable and good way to spend some money. Yeah, that's why I didn't buy any of it. It's like a real life NFT. All right. So that's Poltergeist one's curse.

Poltergeist two, on the other hand, the curse was pinned on a man called Will Samson, who is a muskogee actor, painter, and like legendary rodeo performer who plays this sort of like Shaman type character. I think his name is Taylor in Poltergeist two. I've only seen Poltergeist two and three like once a piece. They're not the same movie as Poltergeist one.

And after hearing about the curse on Poltergeist one, whether true fact or weird racist idea about magical Native American people, it is said that Will Samson then performed an exorcism on the set of Poltergeist two, which according to the lore is the source of the curse, angered the spirits, et cetera, et cetera. And that's where we're at.

And then according to the theory, we're off to the races with the curse stuff. First thing that happens, few months after Poltergeist one comes out, 22 year old actress Dominique Dunn, who plays the older daughter Dana in the movie, had to be removed from life support five days after being jumped and brutally strangled by her ex

in her own fucking driveway. What a real fucking piece of shit that guy was. Yeah, that's yikes. Guy I think totally went down for it and everything, but yeah, she fucking died for a stupid shitty ass reason and that sucks. But that was like the big first thing that made everybody go like, oh shit,

that's how there was like a rumor about a curse so early because it was just a few months later. And then Julian Beck, who plays the character of Kane in Poltergeist two, died of stomach cancer at age 60. He already had cancer going into production and he knew that he had cancer, but he passed away in September of 1985,

which was like so soon after he got on the movie that he didn't even get to watch the movie come out. Damn. So people link the two things together, his death and the curse. And then two years later, Will Samson, the guy who allegedly exercised the set, died himself after a lengthy illness

during a risky Hail Mary surgery, which required multiple organ transplants due to a chronic degenerative condition called scleroderma. What is that? Do you know? It's degenerative, it happens over time. All his organs started like dying.

He needed multiple organs transplanted at once. And it was like one of those surgeries where it's like, well, we're gonna try, but you might die and he died. Yeah, it is a group of rare diseases that involve the hardening and tightening of the skin and connective tissue. Yo, yeah, I'm looking at it right. That looks terrible.

I don't wanna look that up, it's brutal. I was in that zone earlier today and it's not for everyone, I'll tell you that much. And then, not even a year later, comes the big one that everybody talks about today, where Heather O'Rourke, who is Carol Ann in all three movies, the little girl who says, what does she say?

They're here, you remember that scene? I may not have seen the movie, but I do know that quote. It's a famous fucking scene. It's like a Here's Johnny level scene. Yes, very much so. She suddenly passes away at the age of 12 before Poltergeist 3 comes out in theaters

due to a misdiagnosed congenital intestinal abnormality, which she initially believed just to be a flu. So she was being treated for something totally different than what she had. She had this horrible blockage in her intestine. She went in for a bowel obstruction surgery and just like, there was something wrong in there that was not the type of shit they were expecting

and it just went south and she just died out of nowhere at age 12. And then in March of 1992, Richard Lawson, who I believe is like Beyonce's stepfather or something like that or father-in-law, I can't remember. Richard Lawson, he plays Dr. Mitchell in Poltergeist 1. He survived a plane crash in 1992

where 27 people out of the 51 people on the plane were killed, which is insane. And then finally, and maybe wildest of all, in 2009, Lou Perryman, who was also in the first movie as the character Pugsley, was ax murdered in his home by a recently released ex-convict who, according to Wikipedia, was, quote, off his medications and had been drinking.

Okay? So those were the curses. That's all the bad shit that happened to the people. That's Poltergeist. What do you guys say? Is it cursed or clear? I mean, that one seems cursed as hell. I feel like it's also a lot of coincidences, but...

That's what I felt. But like, just rattling them off, it seems like you can buy how people would be like, oh, that's a cursed thing. The reason it's rough is because it's such a long, such a long span of time. You know what I mean? Like, people be dying.

You know what I mean? Like, if you just, if you just like take a slice of like 2,000 people and you track them for 15 years, some of them are gonna die. There's just no question. But okay, final answer, cursed or clear? I mean, I think, look. Poltergeist, this is really...

Definitely clear, but like, I like the cursed aspect of it. I think it's like fun to be like, no, no, that was cursed. Yeah. I have to go the same. I have to say like, everything you described that happened, it's like they came into the movie with these problems already.

It's just, it's a simple, tragic, coincidental timing. Fair enough. Fair enough. Up next, we have The Exorcist. This is a classic 1973 movie, a horror film about a priest exercising a demon from a young girl. And apparently this curse traces back to a story that Jason Miller, who plays Father Karris in the movie,

the staircase guy, if you know the movie, he told the story where during filming an actual priest came up to him while he was standing out on the street for like a smoke break or something. And unbidden came up to him and with no knowledge of the film, handed him a medallion, an ancient sacred medallion.

And here is a quote from that priest for Jesse to read. Okay. Reveal the devil. Wait, hold on, I got this, I'm not gonna do better. Reveal the devil for a trickster like he is. He will seek retribution against you or he will even try to stop what you are trying to do to unmask him.

Yeah, so. I love it. I love it. That's fantastically done. So you can kind of interpret that as him being like, listen, you're making a movie where you're trying to show Satan off and how he's bad. You're gonna get fucked for it.

So that's the story that Jason Miller told. And now we're off to the races for the curse evidence. Ready, here we go. First, the set for the house, the main place that the movie takes place was completely destroyed by a fire right in the middle of production, which delayed literally everything for six entire weeks

where they just rebuilt their burnt down set. And the official reason, as far as anyone could tell, was that a pigeon flew into some kind of electrical box and messed everything up, AKA an act of God or perhaps an act of the devil. Then during the scene where Regan throws her mom from the bed, Ellen Burston, who is the actress who plays her mom,

was really screaming in pain in the shot because the stunt that they were doing went wrong and she actually in that shot received, you're watching her receive a permanent spinal injury during that scene. And then this one is crazy. During the movie's premiere, which was in Rome, while the film was playing in a movie theater

that was between two churches, a 400 year old cross on top of one of the churches was struck by a bolt of lightning and fell to the ground. Then people connected to the film started dying from actor Jack McGoran who died from the flu a week after he filmed his character's death scene in the movie because it was an epidemic of the flu in London at the time to a night watchman, to a special effects expert,

all these people, like nine of them all died leading up to the movie. And then finally, Paul Bateson, who was technically in the movie as a radiology technician, bit part, he was arrested in 1977 for the murder of a Variety reporter. And at one point was thought maybe

to have been a serial killer with five or six victims, though if he was, he was a pretty good one because there wasn't enough evidence to go on about it. And so they never got a definitive answer. And that's the Exorcist curse. So do we call it cursed or clear? That one's much closer to cursed in my book. The cross is pretty crazy.

It all happened mostly during the movie. Lots of deaths too. I would stick around for our bonus episode today. Okay. Because I have something related to the Exorcist. And so, all right, all right, all right. I will say that I withhold my answer for the bonus show. Oh my God, okay.

Also, I forgot to mention this in here, but another thing that happened was Max Fonsito. He's the other priest in the movie. He father, what's his name? Father Magus, I forget, Maron, Father Maron. He, the moment that he like landed in America to shoot the movie, his brother died. Or his brother got stricken with an illness and died.

I can't remember exactly what happened, but it was like, so much misfortune around the Exorcist. So wait, are we cursed or are we clear? What's the deal? Jesse's abstaining. Jesse's withholding. I'm saying cursed, I'm gonna go with cursed on that one. That one seems pretty cursed.

Do you think Satan, cursing this movie gave like little Nikki his blessings? Like, is it like a curse? Like I was saying there's like little Nikki. No, have you seen little Nikki? No, no. No, I haven't, I have not. Let's never watch that one, what you said.

No blessings were involved. Let's watch that one next. Let's watch little Nikki. You wanna watch it this month? It's not a, there's no justification for watching that on the Chilluminati podcast. There's no way that I could convince you that little Nikki is gonna somehow reveal

some mystery about the world to us. No way on earth. Mothman prophecies only revealed like the mystery of how horny Richard Gere was. John Lovitz plays a horny bird in a tree who jacks off in the tree in that movie. That sounds awful. It is.

Sounds so bad. I would rather watch Little Vampire than Little Nikki. Anyway, up next we have another movie. I bet you can guess what it is. It's Rosemary's Baby. It's Ira Levin's novel, Rosemary's Baby, about a husband and wife confronted with the possibility that their unborn child may be the target

of a secret satanic cult, what's considered by some to be one of the most perfect horror thrillers ever written, while others considered it a literal affront to God. So much so in fact, that religious and societal guilt and shame about the book and anyone it may have offended or inspired in a negative way, followed Ira Levin, the author, all through his life.

Though to be fair, from the beginning he must have known what he was doing in some respects, sort of poking a hornet's nest. Since the idea was conceived of by Levin while his wife was pregnant in real life, as a story where the birth of Jesus was turned upside down, where God was dead and where the devil was alive. That was like what he was trying to write,

so he had to know that somebody was gonna get mad at him, right? But anyway, none of this stopped it from becoming a huge hit. It was a great selling book and pretty soon after, I think like within a year, there was a absolutely fantastic, incredible movie version made by Roman Polanski, which was condemned by the Catholic Church

and possibly, depending on what you guys think about what I say next, cursed. First, in the fall of 1968, the composer Kristof Komeda had a bad fall during a party, fell down some rocky outcropping or something, went into a four-month coma, which I don't know if you have seen the movie, Rosemary's Baby, but if you remember what happens

to Hutch in that movie, it's a similar situation what happens to Hutch in that movie, except Komeda never came back out of the coma and after four months, he fully passed away. The composer of the film. Then in April, 1969, haunted by constant hate mail from angry Catholics, producer William Castle was hospitalized with severe kidney stones

and even yelled out, Rosemary, for God's sakes, drop the knife while in his room, like losing his mind at the hospital. And then, of course, as the last element of the curse of Rosemary's Baby, we are all very aware of what happened to Roman Polanski's wife Sharon Tate. Just a few months later in August, 1969,

when she was brutally murdered by the Manson family along with her unborn child, four of her friends and two neighbors up the street, all while Rosemary's Baby was still playing in theaters and Roman Polanski himself was out of the country. So, was it cursed or clear? And still seems like coincidences. Yeah?

Yeah. I'm gonna go the other way. I'm gonna say this movie's cursed as fuck. Have you seen this movie? Have you seen this one? No. This one feels like one of those things where people are like, you shouldn't read this, but you should.

And now it's so tame. Like if you go back and watch Rosemary's Baby in 2021, like the depravity that movies have gained since then is immeasurable. It makes it just look like a PG movie. Yeah, but it's still a fucking great movie and it is like what the plot of the movie is, it's fucking wild.

I think you may, I now know what movie I wanna watch this month. Is it Rosemary's Baby? No, it's not Rosemary's Baby. It's a terrible B movie. Oh, you know what movie we should watch? Speaking of Roman Polanski is The Ninth Gate. Oh my God. I've never seen that.

Really? I love The Ninth Gate. The Ninth Gate is a great double feature with Chinatown. If you guys are like looking for a great double feature, watch Chinatown and then watch The Ninth Gate. It's great. I wanna watch Maze's and Monsters with you guys. You don't wanna watch? With Tom Hanks?

Yes, with Tom Hanks. And it's on fucking Amazon Prime. We can watch it. You don't wanna watch the Arnold Schwarzenegger End of Days? No? I forgot. Is that the one with the, is that the one?

No, I think I'm thinking of Eraser. That's Arnold Schwarzenegger versus the Armageddon. It is What's the one with Vivica Fox? Pete Schwarzenegger. Is that Eraser? Is it Vivica Fox? Am I just like a piece of shit?

I just don't know. All right, hold on. We're gonna get to the bottom of this right now. We are gonna watch Maze's and Monsters. You guys are all, Maze's and Monsters. Dude, have you ever seen Monster Squad? No. Oh, it's Vanessa Williams.

I am a piece of shit. Okay. It starts with a V though. You got me there. You know, I worked at a video store. You gotta give me some slack on that one. And finally, we have a movie that messed with the most powerful power of all.

That's right. The Passion of the Christ. It was released on Ash Wednesday, 2004, made a shitload of money and then made like pretty much everyone who existed uncomfortable in some way. And if you don't know what I mean, just fucking watch this movie.

It is a nuts movie. It is like that movie with Jennifer Lopez, the cell, except into the brain of Mel Gibson. It is a fucked up, surreal, upsetting, like torture porn Jesus movie. It's quiet. It's quiet? You're supposed to understand his pain

and what it was like when he went and got crucified. I'm not gonna say that it, I'm not trying to be sacrilegious. It's a movie, you know what I mean? It's not the Bible. It's just a movie. It's a fucking wild movie. Like I've read the Bible.

That's not what I pictured. But is it chill to make a super brutal, super gory, artistically reinterpreted blockbuster about such holy stuff? That also makes you mega rich, let's see if it's chill after I tell you this crazy stuff that happened. First, let's talk about the one

that probably everybody knows about. It is true. The dude that plays Jesus in the movie, a man called Jim Caviesel, was struck by lightning during filming of this movie. Yep. But did you know? Wild.

That he was actually struck by lightning three separate times. And that one of those times, five minutes later, the assistant director, John Mikolani, was also struck by lightning. And that that was not the first time that John Mikolani had been struck by lightning during the production of the film.

I like to imagine that they, you know, God's just like, how are they not getting the fucking heat? Just like. That's like one in 11 million. It's like, it is crazy. It's so funny. That's the most evidence of God that we have so far. Continue.

And did you know that Jim Caviesel was also accidentally whipped on set for real? Because here is a quote for Mathis to read. From Jim Caviesel. I almost said Jesus. Listen, after what's his name, accidentally shot somebody recently, I'm not surprised.

Alec Baldwin, oh my God. Yes, Alec Baldwin. All right. His lash just extended over the board and hit me with such a velocity that I couldn't breathe. It's like getting the wind knocked out of you. The stinging is so horrific that you can't get air. I turned around and looked at the guy

and I tell you I may be playing Jesus, but I felt like Satan at that moment. A couple of expletives came out of my mouth. What a wild. What a wild. I would too if I got accidentally whipped on set and was just in searing pain. Imagine how weird it would be

to see like a super realistic Jesus be like, what the fuck, man? Get your shit under control, brother. Anyway, can you guess what the very next thing that happened to Jim Caviesel was? Cause what happened was he got whipped again. And then at other separate times while playing Jesus Christ,

he also dislocated his shoulder while bearing his giant 150 pound wooden cross. He got pneumonia. He got a lung infection. He regularly suffered migraines because he had to have this fake swollen eye for like half the movie. And it was like pushing his eye in a weird way

and it was giving him migraines. And then after this movie came out, his career basically fucking ended because he played Jesus in a movie, which is like the ultimate way to blackball yourself, which could be a sign of the curse. Or according to Caviesel, he was just blackballed by Hollywood

because it's like a wild move to play Jesus. But then if you think about it, isn't that just a curse by a different name? Actually, I will leave it to you. You tell me, is it cursed or is it clean? Think about that lightning one before you answer this question. Yeah, so like the lightning shit is wild,

but everything else just sounds like the movie set was just rigorous and difficult and hard to get through. Yeah, the lightning stuff is crazy, but you did say he was struck multiple other times. So like that negates the craziness of like, God was mad. That's the thing that's so crazy about.

Have you been hit by lightning? I think I was on a bike as a kid, it struck near me because I was like visibly shaken. Now imagine it happens three more times. Yeah, no, look, agreed, crazy, but I don't think that's specific to the movie. And so I have to agree with Mathis. Clean.

Yeah, I'm going knock. Passion of the Christ is clean. Clean. That's what we're saying. I mean, if we're to believe that God was super mad, then he's more like the Old Testament God and the New Testament God, if he's violently punishing all the actors.

And it really, it's just Mel Gibson, if you think about it. That's true. And with that thought, folks, we have reached the surprise and that's right. Part one of the plans to parter has become a surprise to parter in itself. 20.

We are going to be, it's going to be a three or four parter. Do you guys know how genius I am? Do you know what 22 is? It's two twos, guys. Two shoes. I'm a genius. This is going to be good. Cause I'm going to, after this, whatever,

however many parts this is, I got to bring you all to misery land again. So. Oh, we're going back and forth for misery land. I don't, I'm not even going to tell you what the next one is. It's quite miserable. Yeah, don't, don't, I'm excited. I'm excited for what you got.

Cause those were all very delectable. What they call mini, mini, mini mysteries. So if you guys could start saying that online and like passing that around, I think we really have something there with that. So send that around, head on over, let us know what you think about it at patreon.com slash shillimanati pod, sign up,

sign up for whatever one, sign up for the highest one. Probably is the good one to sign up for. And, or get a t-shirt for everyone. And yeah, well, I'll be back with more mysteries. And as a, as a, as a trailer for the mini-sode, I have predictions from famous clairvoyant, a famous psychic from across history about what's going to happen in 2022.

So come find out the truth. Oh, special thanks to the ghostandthemachine.com, the kernel, ultimateclassicrock.com, parade.com, biography.com and grunge.com for, for, for helping me with these so far. And yeah, I'll be back with the rest of these 22 mini-mysteries soon. Excellent.

Thank you guys so much for listening. We'll see you guys next week. Goodbye. Bye. Anyway, me and my wife were sitting outside indulging on our porch one night enjoying ourselves. I needed to go to the bathroom, so I stepped back inside and after a few moments,

I hear my wife go, holy shit, get out here. So I quickly dash back outside. She's looking up in the sky in the hall. I look up too, and there's a perfect line of dozen lights traveling across the sky. So, yeah. What's up everybody? I'm Mike Wilson with Any Hour Services,

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