Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 150 - The Ghost Speaking Musician Ft. Pat Contri AKA PatTheNESPunk!

Episode Date: April 26, 2022

Special Guest Pat Contri joins us today for landmark Episode 150! And shares with us his own ghost tales! LIVE SHOW TICKETS:  http://www.chilluminatipod.com WE HAVE A PLUSHIE OF MOTHMAN COMING. GO TO THEYETEE LINK IN THE DECRIPTION Patreon - http://www.patreon.com/chilluminatipod BUY OUR MERCH - http://www.theyetee.com/collections/chilluminati Special thanks to our sponsors this episode Policygenius - http://www.policygenius.com Talkspace - http://www.talkspace.com Promo Code: chill StoryWorth - http://www.storyworth.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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a video game sponsorship. And guess what? And guess what? That changes right now, Alex. Oh, yeah? Right this very minute. Right this very minute. Look, I'm only gonna say yes to this.

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to the season one Blue Flame DLC the very same day. Okay, well I only have two conditions if I buy it on PS5, which I have at PS5. So that's exciting news to me. Number one, I need some kind of support for the DualSense controller. If there's support for the DualSense controller, maybe, and maybe some activity card features.

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it comes with a gas mask, like an ammo box. It's crazy looking. This is the one time that I wish that I wasn't on the show because damn, that's like the exact game that I was looking for. It's real good. It's a great management survival first person shooter with a lot of RPG elements.

Like I said, I put like 20 hours into this game six months ago. Like bits aside, I haven't seen this game. This game looks dope. I would play this game, even if they weren't paying us to talk about it. I think it's pretty cool. Yeah, it's sick.

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We're just going to cut it there yet. Hello everybody and welcome back to the shilluminati podcast episode 150. As always, I am one of your hosts, Mike Martin, joined by the Kirk and Spock of LA, Jesse and Alex. Okay, you can react to that live in a minute because there's somebody more important than you are. Also joining us today for the special episode 150.

None other than Pat Contry, host, writer and director of shows like Pat the NES punk, flea market madness, the video game years, not so common, the completely unnecessary podcast and the writer and publisher of a certain ultimate Nintendo guidebook or two, which you might have in your coffee table right now, depending on how much you love classic Nintendo.

Or I guess in television, Amiko, Pat, welcome to the show. That was arguably the best intro anyone's ever given me. I'm taking full credit for it. Thank you. I do not appreciate that much love. I will not point out you missed out on a few of my accolades. That's okay. I'm not taking credit for it anymore.

I'll adjourn it. I gave him just the hits, Pat. I just gave him the hits. That's all. Oh God, that can all fit on my tombstone, I think, all that if I pass away tomorrow. If you're rich enough. I guess so.

If we had a mausoleum, I'd be good. I give you that Sean Evans treatment. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but we are here today on the Shimonade Pod. Pat, welcome to this zone. Pat, also welcome to the zone. But Pat, also welcome to the zone. How are you doing, man?

I'm fantastic. I did not know this was the heralded 150th. I feel pressure to outperform my low standards. I'll be honest. I had no idea either. I found that out about five minutes ago. That's how much we paid attention. Isn't that amazing when you get to a number like that?

We just passed the 300th CU podcast like about 12 weeks ago or so. And I never would have thought when we started the podcast no less nine years ago that it would still be going. It's strange. It always lands for me like on a weird one when somebody's like, yo, episode 106. And you're like, damn, we're like after 100.

What the hell? How do we do it? Yeah, it's always wild. I can't believe we've made it this far too, but I'm so happy we're here. Yeah, feels good. I mean, Jesse's baffled. That's all.

That's all how he feels about the whole thing. I'm still thinking about who is Spock and who is Kirk. It's worrying to me because I'm not sure which one. I'm a red shirt, then. Does that make me just kill me off? Yeah, you're a red shirt. OK. That's fine.

But even though Mathis is literally wearing a red shirt right now. Yeah. And who are you on the crew, Mathis, in your own brain? I'll be Sulu. OK. All right. All right.

Yeah. I try to navigate us. Maybe you're like the ambassador, Pat. Like maybe you're like that episode, like the guy that rolls in and is like, we are on our planet. On our planet, we eat a flour every time that it's time to decide the new president. And then you have to go.

Yeah, you're like the guest. I'm the Romulan ambassador on Deep Space 9 that gets killed off by Cisco. That's pretty bad. I'm glad you went Deep Space 9 because I was like, which part of the lore are we in right now? Yeah. All right.

That's fine. We're flying all over the planet. It's not a love for Deep Space 9, not enough love for that. I love Deep Space 9. I believe you'll find that the Superbeard bros are currently knee deep into our let's play of Deep Space 9 Super Nintendo. I'm so sorry. Which people literally are having to pay us to play.

Why do you think I brought it up? I knew that was happening. Obviously, it's been being made. That game's terrible. But yeah. So before we get into the topic that I prepared for you this week, something which I chose because I wanted for you to be able to experience this thing for yourself

if you so chose Pat in the future. I want I wanted to before we get into that, I wanted to ask you the question that we always ask our guests, which is where do you stand on the paranormal? Are you a believer like Mathis is? Are you a skeptic like Jesse is? Or are you just along for the ride like me? I think that's that's such a broad question

because the paranormal can encapsulate so many things. It can encapsulate cryptids. You know, the animals like Bigfoot. It can encapsulate ghosts in the afterlife. It can encapsulate psychic powers. It can, you know, aliens and otherworldly creatures. And so I don't think you can just say, oh, paranormal. Yes or no, to be honest, because there was one point in time

that, for example, the panda was considered a monster. It wasn't discovered till the late 1800s, for example. Honestly, they kind of are monsters. They won't even fuck each other. Oh, OK. That's this sort of podcast. OK. But we go we go blue on here. I know. I don't know. But I don't know.

Thanks for being here. Yeah, this is not good for my brand anymore. I don't want to say what it is. Sorry. I'm going to tweet it out right now. I disavow any appearance. I'm too monotonous. No, I grew up in a house. I don't know how much time you got,

but I grew up in a house that that had ghosts. And I don't say that. I don't say that lightly. And we can go through all the stories if you want. But I'm here to hear anything you are willing to tell us. But from consistently from the ages, I will say of four. My age of four until I was twenty four or five and moved out, I experienced things in my house

and everyone else in my family did. Even my father, who was a avowed skeptic of the things that we saw, even eventually admitted seeing and feeling things in the house. Slap a number on it. Like, what are we talking about? How many experiences between all of us in the house? I'd say eight to ten, at least. Wow, OK.

So it wasn't the sort of thing where you can say the argument I was here is like, well, you know, you get gas leaks and maybe you hallucinate and you see things. And I'd be like, yeah, that would make sense if it all happened within like a week or two and there was like a gas week. But these were things that happened over decades every so often. Not they weren't like, oh, and a pattern in like a group. They happen like every year or two and everyone saw them. Who's texting me? Be quiet.

Phone. So and these were all things that happened in one corner of the house, which happened to be, we'll just say, the northwest corner, which happened to be where my room was and the rec room near the furnace right next to it. That's where a lot of the things happened, unfortunately. So in my in my room, it always felt uneasy. Well, what kind of room are we talking about? Yeah, but like, what do we what kind of house?

Yeah, what's the vibe? It's one of those split level houses that were, you know, constructed after, you know, after World War Two. Like these are all built in like probably some history, but not like hundreds of years of history. Oh, no, no, no. And New Jersey is very old, obviously. New Jersey has has the privilege of being obviously one of the 13 colonies. So it's hundreds. It's three to four hundred years old.

So you're going to have a lot of old stuff. So something resembling some actual culture. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So there is, for example, a cemetery 200 yards away that's old. That's at least 200 years old, at least 250 years old, maybe. Where our neighborhoods built on, it used to be farmland 100 years ago, we know that.

So there were people living there over 100 years ago. So you take that onto account. So there is some history. All the elements of the stew. Maybe not necessarily in the house itself, but in the general vicinity, there is enough going on. So about my room, though, as I grew older, it felt more and more uneasy, my room at night.

I couldn't fall asleep and I'm talking when I'm 10, nine years old. This is pre-ex files, by the way. And the older you get, the creepier it feels. Yeah, like the opposite of usually how it goes. Yes, I think there's something to be said for people getting in tune with their their feelings and ESP potentially. There's like some people correlation between, you know, sort of psychic ability and being able to feel ghosts, if that makes sense.

So as I grew older, it became more and more uneasy for me to be in my room, even the rec room, which was adjacent to a south of my room. And as I got to like my early teens, like 12, 13, I didn't I always felt uneasy being alone at night. Even when I'm 14, 15, 16 years old, when I'm home from college, when I'm 18, 19, like rational mind already there, you're still afraid of it. Still has a bad vibe.

Not afraid, but uneasy. It's always literally the feeling I'm not alone. I am not alone here right now. And my sister always had the weird feeling as well. We always had the weird feeling going in tangent. We never explained it to each other, though. So the only the only shower in the house is the room over to me to the west of my house.

If you look at the if you look at the top right corner, that's my room. There's a little hallway. Then there's the bathroom and basically the top center of the house. My sister was upstairs. She come down the stairs and you have one of two directions to go to the toe in order to enter the bathroom, enter past my room or enter past my parents room on the west side. She never, ever, ever would leave the bathroom

and go past my room. Something told her never to walk past my room towards that way. It's an unconscious sort of intuition, a weird feeling. And then when I got older, she told me a story. This is the first sort of ghost story that in the chronology, when I was about three or four, she says, that means my sister's four years older. She's about seven or eight.

We'll just say eight years old about she walked past my room and she saw my mom sort of like telling me like I was having a bad dream, like, oh, you know, like I was waking up and she said, oh, it's OK, it's OK. She walks past my room to the rec room. There's my mom sitting on the couch there. She turned back and whatever woman she thought was my mom was not there anymore. That's that nukes top five right there.

That's that good stuff. And my sister is not the type of person to make these things up. She's not. So that was like the first in the chronology. That story is linked to something that happened to me. It happened. I know that around the day is because it kind of happened when Superman died, which was what, late 92ish around there.

That's exactly right. Yeah, when he comes back with his guns slamming, dude. The guns wasn't until like the next year. Yeah, with the long hair. Yeah. Yeah. So when I was 12, this happened. I remember this being a Sunday morning, because I remember I troubled the next the whole next week. But the next day I had a shovel shovel.

I had a rake leaves in good old Jersey. So it was about, I want to say, five in the morning, something startled me in my sleep. So my mom used to get up around five in the morning to feed to feed the cat or cat cuddles. Cats, the cat would meow. And so my mom would get up and tend to tend to the cat and then usually tuck me back in, even though I'm an older, you know,

mom, mom, baby, their sons. Yeah. So my mom would be typical for my mom to tuck me back in and go, oh, you know, like rearrange the blanket and then go on her way around five, five, 30 in the morning. So I was woken up from a dream or something. I was definitely fast asleep. Now, keep in mind, I had bad vision at this point. I was a short side.

I needed glasses to see. So I'm turned over on my right side. I'll never forget this as long as I live. I feel someone sort of like touching the sheets next to me, the other side and the blanket. And I turned over to my other side, to my left side and go, mom, is that you thinking it was going to be my mom? And in my blurred vision, there was a white image of something.

Oh, just a white. It was a white image, a head and like a body. And I froze and then threw the covers over my head. The first thing I thought was, oh, my God, that's like an alien because I was following alien abduction stuff. Right. And I threw the covers over my head. My man was was terrified, petrified to leave my bed for like three hours

from like five to like eight in the morning. I would not. I would be too. I was I mean, petrified to death. Um, and then looking back years later, I'm like, this is the dumbest thing I'm ever going to say ever. Oh, it made more rational sense that it was a ghost versus an alien to my room. Like, but being sometimes you got to make that call.

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Did you already know about the the figure over you? But when you know my sister and not my sister not told me it by that point, but it made it already happened. But you didn't know about it. Yes, it had happened when I was she said like three or four. Right. So piggybacking on stuff that happened around my room, trying to go in order because there's like two or three more things. I was I remember I was playing either Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball or Street Fighter 2 on Super Nintendo in my room. I had my CRT monitor, which I still exists, which was from an IBM XE XT 1985. And I was playing a Super Nintendo game. My door was fully closed. My sister opens up my door and I'm like at this point, like 14 years old. Always my door. Patrick, did you just walk into

your room? And I'm like, no, I've been playing like whatever, Ken Griffey Jr. or silly kappa here. She said, I just saw someone walk into your room like that. Like that's just like that. Shit ever. Yeah. And I'm like, not me, not me. So that was another story. Fast forward. I'm in college now. I'm home from college. I believe it must be a summer. I'm probably about 21. We'll just say. And there's things that happen in between. But these are my highlights, not the stuff the other people saw besides my sister story. I'm 21 years old. I'm at the kitchen table. We have a galley kitchen, which is like a hallway kitchen, basically, to the right where I'm sitting. And past the galley kitchen is we'll just say the northwest corner of the house with

the rec room with the furnace and then my room. And I was eating a sandwich and this wasn't a corner of your eye thing. I remember being turned looking down the galley kitchen and I see this white boot, just the boot, just a white boot, take a full step from in front of the furnace, it towards the rec room out of my vision. It took a full step playing his day. You were staring at it. For some reason, something told me to look in that direction, but it wasn't corner of the eye stuff. It was literally looking that direction. And I saw a natural stepping motion of this white boot and talking to my mom about that. She said, oh, yeah, I've seen that. I've seen that. That's cool, though, that you can have somebody that

it can verify the shit that you've seen. But then my mom said something. I remember the fact to the effect of, oh, yeah, I've seen that, but I've seen like more of it. I've seen the form of like, like a person. She described it as a man who probably could have existed in the early 1900s. But she said, oh, yeah, I've seen the boot attached to something like a dapper gentleman, like an ice cream shop, soda jerk, man. I don't know what sort of short boots were worn in the early 1900s. I was in a ranch. Yeah. Do you? I'm going to ask some questions now. I got more, but you go first. I got another one. Well, you go then. I want to hear more because maybe you'll answer the questions I had. Okay. So that between that and my mom seeing she's seen that thing,

I'm like, okay, that's one of those. We've seen the same thing, but that may not be the person or woman, the woman that my sister saw that was like my guardian angel sort of thing. That's how my sister kind of described it, which not a scary thing. Yeah, which could have been the same thing I saw when I was 12 years old. That could have been the same thing. This boot thing could have been something totally different. The fact of those that you have all these things happening. I went, I bought my, I came back from vacation. This is another good story. I went to the Mayan Riviera and bought one of those Mayan Sun calendars. Okay. God, this was, I have one of those too. I know exactly what you're talking about. The world, the world didn't end. So it's useless, right?

Now it's like, what are those minds? No. Anyway, so I bought that when I was 27 and brought it home. This was after I moved out when I was 26. So I brought it home. My mom put it on the shelf. It has one of those wire, those heavy metal backings where it's like shaped like a half of you, you know what I mean? And it was a nail on there. One day my mom finds it off the nail against the wall, but not flipped down. It's standing against the wall. The nail is still in the wall. So there's just no way it could have like, if it fell, the nail would have felt fallen out. The calendar would have been flipped down. Those are heavy, Jesse. You know, those things weigh like 10, 15 pounds. Yeah. There's stone. So the only way it could have happened

unless my mom's lying, someone lifted it up, pulled it out and then placed it near the ground against the wall. Pretty compelling. That's the only explanation. Yeah, pretty creepy stuff. We had other stuff happen. My mom said where like, glasses fell. It only happened a couple of times where like, you beat in the other room and a glass fell off the counter in the kitchen. I was never around for that. My mom said that and I believe her. Then the last thing that happened, this was literally, it's like, it's like, it's like going away party for the ghost or ghost. So this would be 26. I'm packing up my clothes. I'm moving into my little garden apartment. So I'm in my room, still feel weird in my room, but this is during the day now. This is during the

day, not at night. It's pure light outside. I'm in my closet. My door is open to my room. I'm just like packing things up. Something told me, this is again about looking to the side, something told me to look outside my room and look down the hallway, past where the bathroom is. We're still in the north edge of the house. Just felt like some sort of, yeah. Urge. Hey, Pat, you're folding up a jogging suit your aunt gave you when you were eight that you never wore. Why don't you look outside your room? And I did that and I saw a black form. Like it was as if you were four years old and you drew a person, but didn't know how to draw

like hands and feet, but you know how to draw like a square and a square for a head. That's what it looked like, like a shadow form. And it was about, I want to say Slenderman. It was about seven feet tall. It was about where the hamper is. And I'll never forget this as long as I live. When I saw it, it knew I saw it because it got caught. It did a jerk. It did like a jerk. And then it shot away. Like the form shot away. Like gave it like a little start. I gave it a, I startled this thing. I startled it. Like it didn't expect me to be there at that point in time. Then it shot down the hallway out of my view. The part of the hallway where I couldn't see past my parents room. And then so I walked past it and I was even scared. I'm just like,

Oh, I just saw a ghost. I mean, what are you going to do? He said the shining. And I walked, I walked into the living room and I said, my mom, it was there. I said, Mom, did you just see something there? She said, no, I didn't say anything. So I just saw a ghost. It wasn't a reflection from the car outside. It was a full, it was a form of something. And, and so I jokingly said to my parents when they sold the house about five, six years ago, did you tell the people moving in that it might be haunted? I said, no, we didn't say that. And I was like, well, I would love to like catch up with them somehow. I know that's like creepy now to do that, but like,

it'd be cool for them to be like, yo, we saw this foot go up these steps. And I know this is, and I know this is like a placebo sort of thing or this isn't scientific, but I never have felt the way I felt in my house when I lived in my garden apartment, when I moved out to San Diego and got, got my condo, when I moved to my house, never felt that way again. And even when I was still in Jersey when we visit and come back, or when I, when I came back a couple of times when I was in San Diego for Christmas, you'd feel that weird way again when you were alone in that you just didn't want to be alone. That's all I can say. You just don't want to be alone. And not that something was going to attack you, but you just feel weird.

Yeah, I have a similar thing where like, there was like one infamous dinner where my whole family like admitted to each other where we saw that we saw all the same ghost in the same house. You know, that there's something like my grandmother's house, like my family home, it's like real creepy. It's real. Like sometimes you go down in the basement and there's like you, it makes you look a certain direction. I know exactly what you're talking about. Places that you just feel are like the wrong place to be. Yeah, I know that vibe. Yeah. And I don't think everyone can feel that. I think you have to be in tune to it. I think I think you have to be open to it. I think it's a certain type of either personality or

mind. Because like I said, my father for years and years was like, no, you guys are crazy. And one day he's like, okay, I might have seen something. So like either he was not turned on to it. It was like, he was like tuned out to that wavelength, so to speak. But eventually he just overcame his skepticism and said, okay, I saw something too. Did you ever do like a history look? You know what I mean? No, I think we were the second family to live in that house because they would have moved in like when I was like one or two, like 81, 82. And then they were the second owners from the first people that probably got it when it was constructed or whatever, like let's say mid to

late fifties. That's probably what happened. I'd love to go back like 300 years and see what was cracking on that spot. I would love to see. Well, I don't know. I don't know. Walking up the stairs. You know what I mean? I was going to like one of the questions I was going to ask was like, did it ever react to your presence? But your very last story gave that answer is just like, did it ever seem aware of you? Oh, yeah. Well, definitely, I guess, whatever was hovering over my bed, whatever that woman was, I think was like sentient enough that we interacted, I guess. Now I'm trying to figure out how many more times she might have been hovering over my bed. Here's like an esoteric question. This is like,

you know, you got to follow me on this question a little bit. But like, I know some people talk about like, I always watch like people talking about hauntings, like people who work at like a museum that's old or something like that. And they always like say, like, I get that. I know when it's this person. I know when it's this ghost. Like, do you feel that the stairs or the hallway or the person over you are related in any way? Do they have a similar vibe to them? You know what I mean? Was that a question to me? Yeah. Do I feel like they're related? Like, do you feel like, oh, like these were all the same

type of creature, the same type of encounter? Like, do they give you the same feeling? No, just because, like I said, I think the woman was one thing. Whatever the man with the boot was another thing. And whatever form I saw was something else. Like, would you go so far as to label them as things like for like like ghost angel demon type labels? No, I don't go that far. I don't pretend to know like, like, like I go as far as saying it's some sort of energy that's that's still around, that's hovering around. And I think when you talk to ghost experts, there's like different types. There's like, what's the one type? It's like a video that repeats in a residual haunting.

Yeah, residual haunting. So to me, like the boot thing could have been residual, residual, especially since your mom, like, saw it the same. Yeah. She said, oh, I saw the boot. She said, like, I just saw the I saw the boot. And I'm like, Oh, so you saw the same thing, the boot, because now. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, like an echo. So there's that thing. There's there's the maybe maybe it was a past relative hovering over me. It made my great grandmother. Because I think at the time, my grandmothers were my one grandmother was still alive. And the other one didn't die until 20 years later. And then there's that form I saw that was something else entirely. So maybe so maybe it was like one of those things were like, I don't

know, energy vortex that was around my house in that corner of the house where I happened to try to sleep. Like a human or not human. Oh, I think it had to be human. The the one that saw you. Yes. It felt like like a human presence. What else gets startled like that? Like, I mean, I don't know, like a frickin, you know, like some cultures believe in like some type of spirits or like, you know, little I guess, I guess you anthropomorphize like almost by default things that you have encounter in your life. Right. So it didn't have a creaturely vibe to it. It had the general form of a human. Yeah. The general form. Vibes in like,

yeah, like it's like a tea, like a elementary school drawing of a person. Yeah. Yes. I got you. Yeah. But all but all like a shadow form. So yeah. So it's like, if maybe there's something out there that's like a like a realm guardian that yeah, I don't know. That's that's Matt. This is favorite theory is like being like, what if it's another dimension? You know? Well, yeah, I mean, that's why I go into that. That's more aliens for me. Anything like, but yeah, who's to say that's not an alien encounter in that case is like, you know, is, I mean, scientifically kind of hard to make happen, but maybe they're not ghosts. Maybe it's just a weird slip in the time where you're just interacting with other people that far

back in time. And they're just as scared thinking that maybe they're seeing something really fucking weird. Yeah. Like the time traveling computer messages. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe they literally Yeah. That's a whole topic. That's a whole over time traveling computer messages. It was just this great story about this, this house and they had this computer and they were like communicating with somebody from like the 1600s or something like that through this computer. Jesse, should I should I not bring this up? Is this going on a wormhole again? It's a fascinating story that ends insanely, but like it's just, it's, oh yeah, it is a whole a lot of trouble to find these weird stories. Yeah. Who knows? Who knows? That's kind of my

vibe. Who knows? So let me ask you, Alex, what drew you to wanting to learn about paranormal things? Was it because you experienced the things when you were a child or something else? I think it's cool more than anything. Like I'm like, I'm like a big student of like, I'm like a, you know, I went to school for like seven or eight years as completely as an English major English student. And I love like breaking down cultural mythology and like, I love like anthropology and I just love the idea of like what we're experiencing that's not the norm. It just, it's interesting to me. Anthra was one of my majors. Yeah, there you go. See. And I feel like, I feel like it's, it's a common thing that people have is like this sort of, there's like a

tingly feeling that you get when you think about like aliens and ghosts and all that kind of weird stuff, weird teleportation, Philadelphia experiment type stuff, all the weird forbidden stuff that you want to think about at 2am when you've had a couple joints in a McDonald's burger, you know what I mean? Like just that type of stuff has a feeling to it. That's very exciting, especially if you're an American person, I think there's like a sort of connection to our culture of like paranoia and just like the idea that the government knows about all this stuff that we don't know about. And, and, you know, just that there's more to reality than we, than we are told there is. You think the government knows about ghosts or just talking about it like aliens?

It's just a general, just a general sense, you know what I mean? It's just a general sense. Alien for me. So the ex files must be your favorite show of all time then. I think it's one of the best TV shows ever made. I think it's like super good. But I, yeah, I mean, I don't know, like I just love like, I think really what it was, if I'm, if I'm going to try and like pin it to like one experience, it was that my grandma was like a big reader's digest buyer. And she'd buy these like books that were like the kooky experiences of the insane and twisted. And it would have like 1000 like little like encyclopedia sized articles about stuff. And I would just read it cover to cover. Like I used to live with my grandma. I read that shit cover

to cover. I'd read Tom Clancy's net force and then like a fucking paranormal book from the 70s. So did you subscribe to Time Life's mysteries of the unknown, that famous series of books? I never, I never subscribed, but like I used to go shopping at the Goodwill all the time. And anytime I could get anything like that, I would grab it or like some one of those like travel books, like from the that you buy, like the train station that's like all got the same design for like every city in America. That's like ghosts of Houston, you know, like all those. I love those. I buy them everywhere that I go. Well, you can buy the entire Time Life mysteries of the unknown on eBay. It looks like for $100. Dude, that's not bad. That's not bad.

All 14 hardcover books. Yeah. That includes or excuse me, just 24 of them. Do you want me to run down the topics? There's there's a lot in here. I just love stuff that feels a little bit like a relic. I love stuff that feels like primary sourcey. I just love that. Like, my brother got me a bunch of those like 60s UFO magazines that they like were like independently printed in like very small newsletters. You mean like local ones like staples. Yeah. And I they're like in perfect condition from like 1968. And they're just so fun to just like flip through. And I just read like a big long article that's like real chunky every once in a while. I should do an episode on them, actually. Do you know, do you know there used

to be, you know, the guy from H and Aliens, Giorgio Petalucos, whatever his name is with the big hair. He used to run in California. Not a good name. UFO Con. That was the name. Con. The big UFO Con in California. Every year. They used to have that. I guess before the pandemic. So I was wondering if you would go to that or would you be interested in going to something like that? Listen to like speakers and panelists. I got to admit that I would be not one hundred percent earnest in my attendance, but you better believe that I would go. Oh, like I want to be a lot better one to go to is Dragon Con because Dragon Con has multiple tracks. So like there's the cosplay and the video games and the nerdy stuff. But then there is also one

track that is paranormal. Oh, and I may tell you, it is one of the best things I've ever done. I went and did that and we saw a panel about ghosts and what ghosts really are. And then a person stood up when asking questions and said that they used to have a ghost that would fold their laundry and that their aunt had their head cut off and heart eaten. And everyone was like, what? And they never, the host was like, all right, well, that's it for the panel. Thanks, everybody. And we were like, is no one going to talk about that? No one did. And I'll never know. There's something amazing. Like, dude, OK, that's our mineral ad right there for Dragon Con September 1st to December 5th. It's a one convention in Atlanta, Georgia. Yeah, right there.

But yeah, I mean, I don't know. Like last time we did a live show, which was like in October, we like kind of like had time at the end to have people come up and talk to us for a little bit. And this one dude showed me this amazing like ghost photographs that like blew my mind. And like that to me is worth it. I don't care if it's real that much. I just am attracted to the fact that somebody has that on their phone. I just want to see it. I don't need an explanation. I'm like Mulder, but like then he did like ayahuasca and then he realized that he just can believe if he wants to, you know, doesn't matter. Yeah, I don't know. Are we disappointed that we're about, what, 13 years into the existence of smartphones and having awesome cell phone cameras that we

don't only have good UFO photos and videos. That's why I'm convinced that that's why I'm the skeptic. That's why I think it's all BS. It's all of it. Even though now the Pentagon is coming out and saying we don't know what the hell this stuff is the past few years. Here's the thing. I'm waiting. I, for one, would be very excited. I welcome our alien overlords. Still don't see any evidence that we're going to get them anytime soon. I don't see it. Well, this is what Frank says. Alex knows Frank. Frank is a Jersey hippie. He's a fan favorite. Yeah. He's a fan favorite. He's a cult influencer. Frank has very sage advice when it comes to aliens. And he says this, you got to listen to the military guys. Because those are guys that are straight laced,

narrow ass, and they got no, no reason to lie about it because it can ruin their careers. And he's 100% right. Yeah. So when you have astronauts saying they've seen things, military pilots seeing they've seen things, that's what you believe. And even, and the airline pilots have seen stuff like the Japanese flight was going towards Alaska, but they saw something like outside their airplane for like half the trip or whatever. That's like following them. Yeah. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, I do. Those are the stories you focus on. Not some jerk off down in the sticks that sees swamp gas. You focus on the professionals that train their whole lives. And if they lie about something, their careers are gone. Those are the people you believe, the people that have no

incentive to lie about or to make up stories. Yeah. And it can't be wrong, but you go with the odds. My pushback to that would be a military person would equally say that we don't know what that is. If it is something that's like, I don't know, a foreign adversary in our airspace and they can, we can't stop them, like that kind of thing. They would equally say we don't know what that is, just because it would be very unnerving to be like an enemy of ours flies around above us whenever the hell they want. You know what I mean? Like that could equally be the same. It could be. But this is what I'm going to say to that. Most governments in the world say, yeah, there's stuff out there. We don't know what it is. For some reason, the U.S. is one of

the ones, because obviously we're like so far ahead in terms of military tech, estimates are between 10 and 15 years ahead, maybe 20 years ahead of the second place, which could probably be China, that it's not in our interest to say we don't know what this is because we're supposed to know what everything is, if that makes sense. I agree. Completely agree. That's something that's right. But like, you know, I would be thrilled. I'm one of those people like if I was proved tomorrow, like if an alien showed up, I'd be like, got me. So when you see the military videos showing these things descending into the ocean, literally 20 miles off the coast of San Diego out here, this stuff happened multiple times. You're just like, they're lying or it could be

something else? No, I mean, I don't think they're lying. I just think it's fascinating footage and I think it's super interesting. I'm not going to jump on the immediate train of Alex and Mathis, which is like, it's aliens. I'm like, it's aliens. I just think it's something. It's something we don't know what it is that's acting with intelligence. You want to call that aliens or whatever else? I'm even more I'm even more open to the idea that then this is not necessarily from outer space, but are under the fucking water. I'm open to that because so much of the ocean floor, we don't know what the hell is down there and you're right. I like, but I'm always trying to look for the scientific explanation for everything. And that's like,

so when, you know, when, when we talk about ghosts or whatever, I'm always thinking like, all right, well, what else could that have been like that kind of stuff? But if a ghost showed up, it was like, just what up, bro? I'd be like, my man, I will, you know, I'll be fine with it. You want to go towards it to be proven wrong. Yeah. Okay. So Jesse, so, so you, you have never experienced anything close to what I talked about in terms of any feelings of ghosts or? I 100%. I'm sure my life have seen something or like something I caught in my eye. I'm almost positive. I would be lying if I said I didn't think that. But I don't, to me, I, it's immediately written off as not being like, oh, that wasn't

a ghost. That was like a trick of the light or that was like, oh, I am tired. That was something, you know, like a great example is, let me see if we can, I'll tell you about it. Let me see if we can find it while I tell you. There was a, uh, TikTok that I saw. Oh boy, TikTok. There was a TikTok that I saw, which was about a guy who was saying, Hey, it was just like him in the bottom third. And he was like, Hey, uh, up above their celebrities on either side of the screen. And they're just going to cycle through the celebrities, but in the middle of the screen is a plus sign. Stare at the plus sign. Don't look at the celebrities. You know what these people look like. Just stare at the plus sign. And as you stare at the plus sign, because the celebrities

in your periphery, they slowly start to warp and they look like monsters, but like they look creepy as hell. And it's that kind of thing. We're like, well, you know, you caught something and looked weird. And so I've definitely probably have seen things. I know people who are like, yeah, no, I saw a ghost. I'm like, I'm not going to tell you didn't like maybe you did. And maybe that's the time where I get proven wrong. But like me personally, I got nothing. We're going to get into some psychological territory here. And I apologize, Jesse. I don't know much about, I don't know much about you personally, but this is something when I was in college, I was talking about to my anthropology professors about cryptids, about the possibility

that there's still stuff out there, which every year we still find stuff. I mean, they just found a new version of a fucking a small chimpanzee like between the last in the last five years. Like another like offshoot in a day somewhere in Africa. I mean, if they didn't or not, that kind of thing happens like literally like every couple of days. They're still discovering insects every single day. So we're still discovering mammals though. That's the thing. Like larger mammals, that's what's fascinating to me. Besides reptiles and amphibians, whatever else on this field. So the point is this, so I'll bring up a conversation about, you know, Bigfoot, you know, it's a large swath of area. A lot of it's unexplored. There's not a lot of people in the

Northwest, you know, talking from Northern California up to Alaska, this whole path, right? And I brought that up and not to be insulting, but one of my professors said, does it make you feel more interesting that these things could exist? Like your life is more interesting. And I'm like, well, yeah, obviously, but that may not be a main motivation for me. But in this respect, so in that respect, the opposite to some people that are skeptics, are they afraid that there's things out there that they don't know everything about? They have less control over their lives because there are things that exist that they don't have a handle on. That's that's the other sort of side of that coin. I'm not saying Jesse falls under that,

but I think there's definitely skeptics that they want to feel that they know everything that exists or have a feel of it. Because if they don't, now the world's a little less organized. Maybe it's a little more scary. That's more. It falls into a similar category of the people who believe in like some of the conspiracy theory nuts, because they also need that control. And so I would say the idea of its aliens or its ghosts or whatever is the necessity that we all as people have that to put things in in like everything has a purpose. So like this weird thing that happened, it was caused by this or this. So like, yeah, I mean, personally, I am a like willing participant in the idea of like there could be a million things we don't know. And because I love just

science in general, I understand that one of the key tenants of philosophy is like understanding you don't know nothing, right? The whole idea like the more you know, the less you know. So I'm totally open to it. I just think that like the thing that is to me is the more we look and the more we deep dive into like, I don't know, Chupacabra, any cryptid, whatever is a lot of the time it ends up just seeming like a modern day mythology that a group of people have decided is what happened based on micro accounts of things and then created a story and that story becomes the legend and then it just grows. And a lot of the time when you look at like the origins of things, it really is just like keeping your kids scared. So they don't go after dark.

Hey, you know, go out like, go near the water at night or else the lady will get you like that kind of thing. And you know, I'm totally cool with the idea that like, could there be a lady who grabs you at night in the lake? Maybe. But also, it's probably more likely that at night, they don't want their kids going down by the lake to get to drown. And both are fine because they're both neat stories. Well, you brought up actually a lot of things came to my head at once because my mind kind of sort of ping-pongs. You'll find that out if you haven't already. You talked about like small accounts building up to mythology and a legend. What was one of the greatest or one of first, we'll say modern conspiracies was the JFK assassination, which is like 60 years ago

next year. And that sort of probably started the whole modern conspiracy push. And it comes down to the fact that a lot of people don't want to believe that a lone gunman just happened to kill the most powerful person on the planet, right? Like that's part of it. And you can build around, well, Magic Bullet or this and that, but they still came around their minds around this guy just went out and fired off three shots and killed the president. Like that's basically what it comes down to. And even Frank, someone intelligent, you know, he, I taught them about, as I listened, Frank, this guy was a Marine. He was a sharp shooter. All Marines are trained to be marksmen. You have to have a degree of marksmanship to be a Marine. He made the shot, Frank. He may not

want to admit it, but he made the shot. I talked to my friend's Marine. He's like, oh, yeah, that's a doable shot. That's not an easy shot, but it's a doable shot to do that. And that's what it comes down to is like, you don't want to maybe admit the world is the way it is. And then you get that, you know, those loose change documentary documentary. You're going to call it that. Those pieces of trash don't want to don't want to don't want to admit that. Yeah. A bunch of Saudis just conspired to bring down the towers. Yeah. But also like, you know, aside from the like fear motivation, right? Like there is a difference between like facts and like perception to like, for example, like you had the experiences that you had in the northwest corner of your house by the, you know,

the little rooms and like you saw all these things that you saw northeast. I got my east and west. Well, I'm just going off, you know, what I what I got. I'm just a journalist. I'm just a journalist, man. I just go with the facts, man. Your west. Yeah. Dude. Yeah. Well, yeah. So we're on the west coast. So it's opposite. So that makes sense. And like, you know, like, I don't know, like you saw those things, they affected your perception of reality in some way. Like you definitely like know that you saw them and it's like you're comfortable with the fact that you saw them. But you probably also don't live with the implications of that hanging over your head. 24 7365 as you exist in the physical world as we know it based on thousands of years of

science research, right? So it's this sort of like there's this spiritual world, right? Like, I mean, back in the day, people think about it a lot easier as something that people were willing to do because they sort of have a romanticized version of like these people that are like under civilized people from a time before we have all the systems and information that we have now, you know, people from thousands of years ago and how easy it is for them to cross over into the idea of like the spirit realm and things that happen that don't happen. You know what I mean? It's like a wild thing that we all just kind of like take for granted is that there's this other world where stuff doesn't that happens that doesn't happen. And we're still just in that and we're

still wrestling with that in the same way that created religion in the first place, I think, in the modern world, like we're not getting like remarkably smarter than people, you know, a thousand years ago, there's not like a huge amount of brain evolution in terms of our capacity for reasoning in that time. And so despite everything that we do to explain the world around us, sometimes our stupid monkey brains still just have to make a little story picture myth for ourselves to explain things that happen just so that we don't lose our minds or like go into like fight or flight mode, too. You know, so fear is one thing, but also just like your brain kind of like does it without you thinking about it anyway, makes up little,

you know, conspiracy theories about everything. Everything is like a little story in reality. Just the fact that like I can sit here and be like, well, obviously, because the scientists said there are multiple dimensions theoretically that there could be other Jesse's out there like that's as plausible as the ghost realm. You know what I mean? Like that is like literally just a comic book concept from 50 years ago that might be real. It's plausible. I would love to visit a ghost town and or alternate react. I would be fine with either. I'd be happy to be there. I look at it. I look at a lot of these things as just things we don't have the tools to measure yet. If we don't understand. Yeah, we don't have the tools to

measure. At one point in time, we had no idea that magnetism existed as humans. We had no idea that there was a literally an invisible force that pulled and pushed things. Yeah. But now we know about it. So maybe we get to the point where you want to call it extra dimensional. You want to call it interdimensional, but maybe it comes to a point where, oh, yeah, there's a weird wavelength that we're on in the universe and there's another one that's slightly off and that's something else. Yeah. And it just is what it is, you know, and that's it. And at some point in time, maybe a thousand years from now, that'll be accepted. Maybe we'll be able to be able to tune into it and like peer into it like through a peephole. But now we can't do that and the

energy slips in. And I think that's not crazy. Yeah, I don't think it is with you. I don't think it is either. Yeah. That's that alone, obviously for ghosts, too, but that's a huge realm in the alien world as well is that, you know, if they're not just physical beings from another world, they may be from this, like you said, slightly off other dimension and they need to use us to like get pulled into our world for whatever reason. And that's why people's abduction scenarios are always really the same in very particular ways. Now you're stretching. I'm actually in Jesse's idea. I think you're stretching this sort of. This is the alien world. You were like, come over, come with me.

The psychic side of the alien world. They had to drag you along through the open portal. I'm more in the fact that they're moment they're living underwater in the earth like that to me. I think they're definitely on a fantastic ball that they're from our planet and they are from somewhere else. The best evidence we have militarily these videos from fighter jets showing these things going into the water. I just wish we had like again, better anything, the world we live in with our smart cameras and phones. Like even that video footage of it, you know, it's always the like the crosshairs and the grainy screen and then like zip. And the thing happens and it looks compelling. You're like, what was that? The question is, we're always saying what was that?

And no one's like, well, we figured it out. And that sucks. I want to know the answer. Yeah. The alien ship's going to let the the F 16 get that close to it. What are you hiding aliens? What do you got to hide? Do you think they're mad? They could just be probes of some sort, just controlled elsewhere. There is nothing living in there at all. I just think it just be something machine. I just think it first of all, they got leaked originally. And then the Pentagon then was the next year. It's like, oh, yeah, these things are real. Like these are video from our crafts from our from our from our pilots. You can't deny it anymore. It is what it is. Yeah. It's whatever it is. It's real. It's like it's on there. It's getting trapped by multiple pieces of radar.

It's on video. It's there. We're not saying what it is, but it's there and we don't know what it is. And that's really footage from a military vehicle. That's what I'm saying. Showing something. Showing something. We don't know what it is, but it's on a bird. Yes, you know, it's moving too quickly. Yeah, I mean, it could be a bird. If you account for like parallax, you know what, I don't want to get into that point is point is rolling. What? Yeah, actually, like if you think about, okay, if you want to take the big bong with though, if you want to think about what's real and what's one thing what's real, what's fake and you want to talk about infinite universes being like on the on the on the menu, like as something that's possibly true, right? Then if any reality is

possible, then there really isn't a difference. Like, like, like when you read a conspiracy theory, or you read something that's written, you know, theoretically, there's a reality where it's true and there's a reality where it isn't anyway, even for like, Star Wars, you know what I mean? Like, every telling me that there is a galaxy far, far away. If infinite realities are possible, there is no line between reality and fiction, which is like a weird realities are all restricted by the same physics. It just breaks down the fact that like, there's no way for us to tell what's one joint away from a good time. Is this all part of your outline for the episode? That's where I'm getting to. But if you're speaking of my outline for this episode,

the next thing that it tells me to do is to promote patreon.com slash now we're going from the intro to the main episode. So, you know, it's, you know, this is the time when we do the patreon job. Alex, Alex, what can I get a patreon.com slash not only can you get these episodes without any ads except for this one. You can also get the minisodes, which come out every time we put on an episode, you get 15 more minutes episode and it's, and it's great. It's great. I'll tell you right now, Jesse sent us the link to that TikTok. I'm going to do it on the minisode. I'm going to do the tiktok. I'm going to look at the celebrity. I'm going to look at the plus sign. I'm going to let

you know we should do that on the minisode because it'll blow your mind. I want all three of you to be like, yeah, we're going to do it. And everybody's going to read the news. It's going to be great. And there's like 40 of those or 30 of those. I don't even know how many there are. There's a lot. You get art. You get pre-sale stuff. You get merch. You get all kinds of incredible stuff. Mel, she's a fucking peach. She draws the best stuff. Go get it on the patreon.com slash shilluminati pod. The finest website that sentence did not make grammatical sense. Anyway, I'm sold. Oh shilluminati pod. I'm sorry. You got it. You have one more thing to shill still, Alex. It's very important. I do. And that is because in one month's time, a little

bit over one month's time, we're going to be in in Austin, Texas. It's a great place that I like to visit. And I'm excited to go there. And we're going to be doing a show on May 26th. And it's going to be a great time. And there's tickets still available. There's only two VIP tickets available. So you better grab one if you're thinking about doing it for you. Someone you love. And if you're on the fence, come have a beer with us. Go get a ticket. Come watch the show. It'll be a good time. There's a bar in the venue. I'm going to drink. You're going to drink. It's going to be a great time. It's going to be funny. Mathis will get up and move around more than you expect him to. He gets the energy of like, I'll get fed up with the two of them. And like, that's

my goal. My goal of this show is to achieve what I did last show is make walk. Jesse so frustrated he walks off stage. What is happening today? Make walk, Jesse. Well, make walk. Jesse make walk off stage just from being so frustrated. And where can I get those tickets, Alex? ShilluminatiPod.com. And like Alex said, free beers on him if you're on the fence. I don't know what you're going on. That's what I'm saying. I'm on the fence. I'll pay for your airfare. No, you pay for my beer and then we'll talk about it. That's what I'm saying. Oh, okay. I'll give you a place to stay. You said to travel across the US. Was it a good decision?

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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 $5,3123. No, that's not true. That's false advertising. You guys are doing live dates with this. That's fantastic. Yeah, I did spray lemon and throw salt into my eyeball one time during a live show. Anything's possible, so come down and check it out. Anything is possible with so many realities. Anything's possible. Alex could slip in human piss one more time. It's happened before.

At any moment during this episode, Darth Vader could arrive at my home and slice me up. It's true. Anything is possible. At any moment. I'm universe. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Why do you think Darth Vader comes to your house though? Like just a quick question. Maybe I'm special. Maybe I'm special. He needs a better wardrobe. I mean, I love Alex's shirts. I've always loved it. In the Star Wars universe, Darth Vader, but with an Alex shirt on. Where did you get that? I'm like, target, bro. And he's like, what? Are you serious? Target? It's like, you got to buy the one they got a lot of because nobody wants it. Oh, wow. That makes sense. If you think about it, we got the credit card. Yeah, okay.

It's the black card. All right. Terrible. It's the dark slide. Bam! Dark slide. There's so many different varying uses for that term actually. We'll cut this because that deserved it. That should have been cut right now. Cut on the roof floor. Let's get to the show. Let's get to the show. Let's get to the main program. Anywhere. Power in, baby. One hour ago. Originally, since we all have the hashtag gamer, hashtag gaming, career in common, I wanted to try and find us some good video game related mysteries to diving together, you know, since we're all certified experts at video games. But let me tell you, other than Polybius, that is a long walk of a short peer into like literal made up creepypasta

town. And honestly, Polybius mostly made up as well. So instead, I turned my attention to New Jersey, Pat's homeland, hoping to find something juicy to dive into. But we've already done the Jersey Devil. And I didn't want to do a murder, which there are a lot of in New Jersey, especially since I am still only barely recovered from the fucking Gacy episode, Mathis did last month. I've been saying there's a lot of there's a lot of murder. I just watched that. I just watched that one in the morning and I couldn't get to sleep. That's not a good idea. A new documentary. I haven't seen it yet. We just did an episode on the show, but I got to ask as somebody who's watched it, is there like a large amount of like fried chicken, like bribing going on in the dock?

Do they talk about that? What the hell is that term fried chicken bribing? Okay, so check this out. Whoa. So he didn't focus on his life prior to the murders. Oh my God. Yeah. He Oh, because you're saying because he had all the, you know, he was the community leader and was having cookouts. His nickname was the kernel. He'd grease the wheel with the KFC every single time that like stuff went down. He would show up with like chicken and people were like, you're good, my man. He brought people with it. It's crazy. Well, that wasn't in the documentary. I mean, there's no fried chicken. When he owned a first marriage, his father-in-law gave him three KFCs as part of a franchise. He ran them, making the equivalent of like 200 grand nowadays

in money, free house. He was coasting before he was like, yeah, because because the town was so small, he would often end up hanging out in the same areas. Cops would hang out when they were off duty and he would bring them chicken. He'd be like, who wants chicken? The murders started happening. He was not even remotely suspected. Was that in the boat or in the club? I missed that. I missed it. It probably wasn't in the documentary. I missed the fried chicken trilogy. We did a really deep dive on him. He had like a KFC sex club thing going on. I'm telling you. Yeah, he literally had a club under one of the KFCs where he would try. There's a whole other story that is fascinating. Not to be a downer, but the reality is, is that like a lot of serial killers,

they focus, they prey upon those that when they go missing, no one cares. Right. Oh, you are. The less dead, good sir. The less dead. So much of that. That's why Alex was saying how messed up he was because like it got dark. We talked about the KFC because it's the one funny bit from the entire dude series, which was just dark. Okay. And John Wayne Gacy in jail being a whiny bitch and faking heart attacks to get out of being that guy. No, I don't know. This wasn't in my Netflix. I'm already about faking heart attacks. I want to watch this documentary. I want to watch the chicken bribing documentary. It's a three part series on the on the checks out. Man, but yeah, it's good work. So we didn't do video games. I didn't do New Jersey, but I.

So what did I do instead in the interest of making sure this retains the feel of a quote, unquote, Alex episode, I've decided instead to opt for my new favorite thing, which is keeping everybody guessing during the episode for as long as I possibly can. And so I ask you, do any of you have the one writer that you like to read who you think is like just as good as like the greats, but never got the recognition? Do you know that vibe? Yeah, one writer that I like to read that's just because the greats like Dan Brown. Come Clancy. Yeah. No, I think they're doing it. Okay. So it's fine. It's all right. Well, when it's Clancy, it's all right. You know, but when it's like whoever the hell else it is. And it just says, I would say like Brandon Sanderson, but he's

hit it big now. Like he's really done really well for himself. Yeah. And for a while, I think I would have said Pat Rothfuss, but that man just gave up on really working. So it's just weird to think about like that there's so many of them out there that like do pretty good and like lots of people read their work and they're very well read and they just kind of disappear. But like that's about to happen here. Robert W. Chambers, for example, right? Right. He's like this up. I'm not as I'm not as a rude, right? Well, he's he's the guy he's the dude who wrote King and Yellow. This, you know, not you do not need to look this up, which is about those like weird, like demonic fantasy characters. It's like a play that people read it and they go crazy. It's like part of

Cthulhu. It's been like the book is multiple, multiple stories. And the first couple are about this weird play that features the King and Yellow. And it if you interact with the play, you literally terrible things happen. We just did. Isn't the King and Yellow in that in that smoochy dating game? We just did about it on a scary game squad. Did you? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Isn't that Cthulhu blow Cthulhu? Yeah. But a warning if you get the book King and Yellow, it's only the first couple of stories are about the King and Yellow. The rest of it has absolutely nothing to do with it. But actually, no. Oh, okay. But those other stories are like romance stories that were like the bestselling books in the country at one point. So you are Kay Fabe supposed to go crazy

reading it? Yeah. Like like fake like it's a store. It's a story about a play that drives you crazy. Gotcha. It's like several short stories about the people's. It's very in the Cthulhu world where it's like you see the aftermath of what happened to the person like that kind of thing. True Detective season one was kind of like a heavy reference to this character, but it doesn't matter. This is like this is just my example of this is just my example of somebody like this. Nobody knows who the fuck it is. He's heavily referenced. We're not even talking about Robert W. Chambers today, but we are talking about somebody whose life went in the exact same direction despite all the wonderful and weird things they've done and built and the name they made for themselves.

And eventually everyone out there listening to this will know that name well by the end of this episode. But for now, where this story starts in the town of Birkenhead, England in 1848, just across the Mercy River from Liverpool on September 13th, he was born to his parents, Joseph and Emily as a little boy, which I love that he was called Jesse. The main character of this episode is called Jesse, which is just great. However, this attractive sex God do in this story. Well, this gentleman and scholar. You're joking, but you're joking, but he did literally everything. However, his parents were very poor due to an economic depression in England at the time in the 1840s and became a part of a mass exodus of the hardest hit to other countries

that seemed a little bit more promising at the time, which eventually landed his family almost 20 and 20,000 other English families in Illinois at that time. And Jesse little when I think getting away from it all, I think I guess just it seemed like a good prospect at the time. And little Jesse spent his first 10 years there on a farm in Sangamon County. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right. Everything in the Midwest has a weird pronunciation, but he was on a farm there. However, his daddy, Joseph, just wasn't cut out for the country life. He had no knowledge of agriculture and no idea what he was doing. He couldn't get started selling horses, which he tried to do for a while. Then he had some weird problem where his eyes kept hurting when he was

outside in nature that they don't really get into. So eventually he swapped it all for a government job in St. Louis, grabbed his whole family, became city folk pretty cleanly, and then finally had like a happy life for him and his wife by 1865 when they made it to Chicago, the big time. And apparently they have some letters that his mom sent to her cousin fighting in the civil war at the time. And while they were out sucking it up in the country, just like not doing a good job, she was saying that she could get back to, she wanted to get back to quote unquote, civilized life in England someday. And that she had this incredible quote, and I'm going to have Jesse read this quote in his best Mon Mothman impression, who is a real person now. I dropped

it in the in the DMs. Ah, all right, I got to go open that up then. I know. Open the tweets. I got some long quotes later. So we got to do it in the DMs. I'm so sorry. That's all right. Okay. For my part, I lost so many precious years of my life wandering in the wilderness. There you go. Bam. Lil Jesse probably missed those days, though, because it sounded like he had a pretty exciting life out there until he got to St. Louis. He did not go to school. He just got to go out and run around and explore nature all day instead. And for a little while, his house was even a station on the underground railroad bravely in the face of their staunchly pro-slavery southern neighbors. But yeah, by the time he was a teenager, he was a city boy in Chicago

and he's probably kind of yearning for that excitement that he had when he was young. So when he was 21 years old, after patiently taking the time to learn and become excellent at improvised piano playing, he left home by himself in 1869 and headed to France and he put the pedal to the metal, hustled a little bit. Eventually, stars aligned, he runs into Francois Aubert, who was a famous composer at that time. And amazingly, it sort of put him on the fast track to regular gigs in the courts of various royal families. And for 20 years after that, based purely on his own skill and reputation, taking him back and forth across Europe and America multiple times, even once to Australia, which again, this is the 1870s. I was going to

say, man, traveling and that must be just to give you an idea of how popular he was. You know what I mean? He was able to do this multiple times, went to Australia. World tour in the 1800s. By then, Lil Jesse had grown up and evolved the Pokemon style into Jesse Shepard, a big guy, tall and thin, with notably large hands and feet, if you know what I mean. Good looks, charming ways, and he had so much self-confidence and so much determination. He was basically just whipping ass everywhere he went, everything he did. He was like Lizzo. Everybody was just like hype to see him when he popped up. And everybody who saw him loved him. Here's a quote for Mathis to read from the French novelist, Alexander Dumas, that he said, he literally said this

to the guy. Dumas said, this is being said to Lil Jesse. Yeah, to Jesse Shepard. With your gifts, you will find all doors open before you. Yeah, imagine that kind of got Spanish at the end there. Imagine Dumas. It was a little counter-musk crystal there. And then just after that, he also took up writing and was writing in the same magazine as Mark Twain, and he was publishing well-reviewed collections of his own essays in Paris, where they really care about books in France. And then they publish his memoirs, The Valley of Shadows, which is kind of like how I know about all this stuff. But the book is also kind of about how the 1858 appearance of Donates Comet prophesied the rise of Abraham Lincoln as a chosen leader of men, which was kind

of like a weird tangent for the book to go on. But it's not really out of character for the guy at this point. Since A, he was actually present for the last Lincoln-Douglas debate in 1858, which is pretty crazy to think about. And also B, because he had become something of a like eccentric genius at this point by reputation. People get excited about him the way they got excited about Liberace. He was a very colorful character. So what you're saying is Jesse just gets reincarnated as the same person every single time. Something like that. But literally, this guy's like a piano master. He's traveling the world. It's my personal Liberace, Jesse. It's writing books. I mean, that's true. Yeah. Apparently, he was just like this really romantically-remotivated

dude. He had like that very classical style of like artists going for him. He would have a concert of like extremely powerful European aristocrats fawning over him and would just like pour out these emotions, get everyone going. Like one time in England when he was playing piano at this party and he was just improvising music live on the spot, like based on the sinking of the Titanic. And all these rich ass people and royalty were like crying, listening to it. And he was so moved by the power of his own genius that he actually decided to take like a few days to recover before he went back to America. He delayed his ship because he was so tired from expressing the Titanic. Where is this madness going? Is this a typical episode? It's a typical Alex episode.

Usually, we have like this is what this is. You just gotta jump aboard. You'll know what this is 45 minutes. And this is non-fiction. Alex is just making up this story. This is a guy that exists. No, this is a real guy. This is a real thing. And this is a category. This is a subject that I picked specifically for you, Pat Contry. Oh, I gotta pay attention. Okay. How are we getting to there? I'll be taking notes. No, it'll be, it'll just be, it's just, I customized it to you. You'll have- Pat, I need you to know. I need you to know. I need everyone listening right now to know. Alex will tell you, all right, so today's episode is going to be about New Jersey. And then he'll spend an hour nowhere near New Jersey. Is Porcro gonna come up in this or a diner or something Jersey

related? You said this was New Jersey related. Porcro is the best thing to put on a breakfast sandwich, but it is not present in this episode. New Jersey itself is not present in this episode. We already touched on- You said New Jersey! I said, I wanted to do New Jersey, but we already did the Jersey Devil, and I didn't want to do a murder. So we're doing this instead. And I thought you were still renewed. I thought we were still New Jersey. I truly, I truly also thought that- I thought you were taking us, you were like, and then Jesse went to England and then he came back via New Jersey and- And he's not, he didn't, he didn't come back to New Jersey. So now you know what kind of guy he was though. It's probably not too surprising to hear that was also super into like

weird New Agey spiritualism at the time. He's one of those types of guys too. And in 1871, when he was playing for the Tsar of Russia in St. Petersburg, yeah, General Zhuravsky heard that he was into that dark magic shit and taught him how to do some neat like occult stuff. And sometimes while touring around- As part of his show? Sometimes while touring around and playing these crazy shows, he'd even like dead ass start like, like playing piano like as soundtracks for his own seances that he was conducting. And then- That is, that would, that would 100% track Jesse, because at this time, seancing in that shit was a huge seller. New Age spiritualism was a huge thing and people, this is like what they, the rich folk would hire people to have seances at their home

so all their friends could come and they could talk to the, so like that doesn't surprise me that this man was doing like the piano man version of seancing. What was this guy born again? Because you just said Titanic, which would be 40 years after this. So when was this guy born? This was, this was, this, the Titanic thing is just an account of him doing this one time. This was like the, the, the Titanic time was later in his career, but that's just an example of the time. Later, he'd be dead. That's all, that was 40 years later than this. He was born in 1848. So the Titanic sank in 1912. So he was alive for it. He just- Okay, so, okay. He died in 1927. So he was-

Okay, yeah. So he was like 70 in his 70s for the Titanic story. Gotcha. He was still doing this, like even at that time. He was like, it wasn't 70. He was like, like, like 65. Okay. Yeah. Still though. Yeah. Still though. I know. I know. And so, yeah, he learned it from this Russian czar, like general sorcerer guy that was his friend. And then- General sorcerer guy. Dude, dude, just thought of him like how to do seances. And then- He's a general, he's a sorcerer. He didn't call him a general sorcerer guy. A senior, a senior com artist. He used to be totally normal. Every army had that for like 200 years. Anyway, alchemist. Yeah. Dude, it was all real at one point.

You gotta have your Rasputin. Everyone needs a Rasputin. He builds up this- Rasputin is so fun to talk to. He builds up this crazy show. He has this reputation. He goes back to Chicago and starts running seances out of the house of a medium by the name of H. H. Crocker in 1880. Crocker. H. H. Crocker in 1880. He starts running seances out of our house. During these half-performance, half-ritual shows that he sort of landed on after over the years, he'd say he was contacting Egyptian spirits and he'd have conversations with them and he would quote,

sing in two voices. Don't know what that means, but he would do it. I think it has something to do with how people like throat sing or something like that. I don't know. They reference his range when they talk about this. In fact, going back to his later career, his last published book that he ever did was called Psycho Phone Messages from 1921, which was a couple years before he died. He literally sold it to people as spirit messages that he'd actually received, like that he channeled from famous Julius Caesar or some shit like that. And eventually, he even started lecturing around as a well-respected and serious quote-unquote

world-famous mystic and would talk about time and space and dimension and consciousness and and just like blow people's minds by like telling them about like basically what we were talking about earlier. Okay, I'm looking up on Amazon Psycho Phone Messages. It's free on Kindle. Yeah. $12 on paperback. Yeah. It's real. I read the description. Yeah, go for it. Psycho Phone Messages was originally published in 1921 by Francis Greerson, a mystic musician, poet, prophet, overall man of many talents. Greerson was born as Benjamin Henry Jesse. Francis Shepard in 1848 in England, but grew up in Illinois, not Jersey.

He says that on Amazon, not Jersey. He later took his mother's maiden name when publishing Modern Mysticism in 1899. By 1915, the Washington Herald Herald hailed Greerson as the strangest man in the world. Yeah. So great and varied and unearthly are Greerson's gifts that it is difficult to consider him as a human being. The paper wrote, if he had lived in ancient times, his contemporaries would have made an oracle, prophet or saint out of him. His most particular talent was to play at the piano, where he completely improvised with an ever learning to read a note of music. Greerson's abilities led him to travels throughout Europe, playing before crowned heads

and causing Alexander Dumas to say, I predict for you a marvelous future. Yeah. Can you can you believe that you don't know who this person is before this? Doesn't that seem crazy? There's no Instagram. So I mean, I guess he wrote it himself, too. That's his own book, but still. But yeah, yeah. I was going to ask you, what is your primary source for all this information? So I'll I kind of shout it out. I've grabbed like I kind of pulled it together from a bunch of sources. A couple of them are from like newspaper clippings from back in the time. So I got some of the details from there. And there was like a really good article that was

done by the San Diego Historical Society that gave me a lot of like real hard facts and numbers about stuff. And then somebody did a like crazy like sort of like, you know, it's like a scan from a book from archives.org. That's like from the 60s while stuff was still happening. But we haven't really gotten to the meat of this yet. So we'll get it. It'll start to make sense why I picked this for you very soon. But yeah, he did these he did these weird stay on shows for a good long time until January of 1887, when suddenly during a great real estate boom, he found himself down in good old San Diego, California, having a custom mansion built for himself at 1925 K Street, like Sherman Hill, I think it's called. It's not the greatest neighborhood,

but it's a pretty beautiful house. However, according to L. W. Tonner, who was Shepherd's beloved like clerk, ward and companion of 40 years, I'm pretty sure this is like a gay relationship that's just like six blocks east of Petco Park or the podgers by the way, they were just best friends. Yeah, I think I think I think it's like his like partner in life. But they don't go right up and say it, but I'm just kind of reading between the lines. Beautiful house. 15 years younger than him. Yeah. The circumstances surrounding the house's construction were pretty unconventional. I have a short quote here for Pat to read, which I'm going to drop in your Twitter right now. Bango.

Who am I quoting? Who are you saying this? You are L. W. Tonner, Shepherd's possible boyfriend and live in war to 15 years is younger. Live it. What's a live in war's voice like Robin certain rich towns people gave the land and some of the money to build the via the idea of being to attract attention to the town, which is certainly did. Yeah. And these rich towns people were none other than William H. High and his brother, John, aka the High Brothers, two rich fans of his who thought it might be a good investment to sort of give him a home base slash party parlor in their town to like get people coming to San Diego. And on February 19. All right. Yeah. Listen, hold on. Hold on. Hold on. If we ever buy a chaluminati mansion,

can we please have a seance parlor par as part of that mansion? It's called a party parlor party party parlor party. Sorry. I'll use appropriate terminology, parlor. Multiple use record multiple use rectum. And on February 19, 1887, there was an announcement that went out in the San Diego Sun, which I have here for Jesse to read, which I will drop in to the DM slot right now. Where did Did I get, oh, I got the DM from Jesse about doing a Rasputin episode. You're not supposed to spoil it. I mean, I really want to do a Rasputin.

That rat poop, that rat poop. I really want to do an episode on that. You want to do an episode about that rat poop. That's what I said. And you can do like multiple episodes on that, man. All right, anyway, yeah, there's the quote for you there in the DMs. Jesse, who said this?

This is the San Diego Sun. I don't know, what's the San Diego Sun? It's a newspaper. I don't know, it's hot like this. Yeah, they sound like skaters. Jesse Shepherd, formerly of Paris, France, and will build a $10,000 cottage on the corner of 19th and K streets.

Messers, Comstock, and Trosh architects are preparing plans. Yeah, and this beautiful, mystical, and mysterious Queen Anne style mansion. It's like a Victorian style mansion would eventually become known far and wide as Via Montezuma, that would actually ended up costing more like... I'm googling this.

Costs more like 25K, all told, which if you think about the fact that this was... What year was that? I want to look up how much that is. What did I say, 1887? That's like $4 million now. It's so expensive, yeah. Or something.

Insane amount of money. Today's inflation? Yeah, it's like $400,000 just about a little bit more. That's it? Only eight times for $8,248? Stuff probably had more value. Sorry, it was $700,000, that's what it's worth. 700K, gotcha.

If you look at this thing, it looks like the house from Casper. Like if you checked like from the movie... I had no idea this existed, like 20 minutes away from me, that I can go visit this place. That's why I picked it, because now you can go see now that you know,

you can go see. I know about the Whaley House, which is like 15 minutes away. Yeah, dude. But I love that. Okay, all right, anyway, anyway. Thank you, Alex, I love you. I know this is going somewhere,

it took 14 hours over here. We got that, yeah, that's how Alex does it. If you are looking this up, the best photo is the full street corner view of this house, because nothing around it looks even remotely similar. It's like a pretty sketch zone, actually. Like, it's not... Well, maybe it's gotten a little better,

but when I was there seven or eight years ago, it was like, there was like a guy who was like lurking near us when we got out to look at the house. And I was like, who is that guy? And he kind of like shuffled behind a pole. It was not a good zone. He shuffled behind a pole, like a cartoon character. Yeah, like a big foot-side or...

Like a cryptid. I was saying they were cryptid. You tried to take a photo and it was blurry. It was weird. The zoo man. It was a shadow figure. It was just Pat Contrary. But yeah, so it happened.

He gave his first performances in town and around town. There's like a... Here's a short review from one time that he did a performance somewhere in town, just to show you guys how good this guy was doing. This is for Mathis to read. Just to see what the zone was with this dude. The zone with this man.

He has a loading. There we go. And all right. This voice was indeed a fragment of celestial harmony. It has been my good fortune to hear Mr. Shepherd in other cities in Europe and America. It is indeed magnanimous of him to forget all the honors and distinction of the world.

And from the organ loft of this unpretentious church, pour forth an invocation in song and humanity. Think about that. That's like something he did not write about himself. So that's pretty crazy. This was also around the time that he began writing essays and reading a lot of spiritualism and philosophy. And he landed on the idea that his talent came to him

via a higher power, which granted him a natural intuition. Like God wanted him or like a higher spirit wanted him to like do these things for some reason. And so it comes naturally to him for that reason. And in one of the articles I read about him from the San Diego History Center, they included a quote of his

from the first published essay that he ever did, which was about a Catholic priest in France as something that he probably thought about himself as well. And I will have Pat Contry read that for us. This is about, this is like, this is an excerpt from an essay by Jesse Shepard. I'm a priest.

You're, he's, it's about a priest. Oh, it's about a priest. Okay. Joseph Ru is before everything a man of meditation and thought, whose whole life may be likened to an alien harp fixed in the turret of a deserted castle. So finally, strong that the faintest breeze awakens a pensive and responsive tone.

Yeah. So that's, that's kind of the idea he had of himself, maybe is something like that. So I guess after almost a decade of like weird, crazy ghost parties and performances and stuff, he got bored of the life. He changed his name to Francis Greerson or Gryerson, not sure which he's British.

So I'm guessing Greerson, I don't know, from his mother's maiden name, moved to Europe again to live this entire second life as like a slightly more like Christian-ish spiritualist writer. What age would this have been? This was in- Is this post-Titanic thing along?

This isn't, no, this is in 1889. So he never stopped doing music either. Wait, wait, so his, his, so he has this like, I am in the 1800s, a dude who does mysticism is like enough of this racket. I'm gonna move overseas and become a song and dance man. I'm gonna move overseas and become a famous author, spiritualist essayist and also continue to be

one of the most premier like touring musicians who plays piano in the entire world. Now, do people understand it was him? Like they just, they were always changing his name. Probably not, like probably not in the way that we do now. It's like changing your name back then. Like there probably wasn't even a lot of pictures of you. You know what I mean?

So- Yeah, you could probably just disappear super easy. So, you know, he changed his name and that's like, if you look him up today, that's what he's known as Francis Greerson. Like- Do you, I mean, like just speculative. Do you think he like, you know, seance the wrong person?

Like he- Gotta possess? I'm like, no, not possessed. I'm more thinking of like, when I think seance, I think like, oh yeah, I'm gonna say whatever you want me to say in order to get your money. And I'm thinking that this dude like- Well actually-

People are buying him homes and like, you know, the wealthy, the wealthy also have power and they don't mess around. So I know like, if you piss off the wrong person, you changing your name and you're fleeing to Europe. I'm really glad you asked me that because that's like literally exactly what I'm gonna get into right now.

Cause, okay, so his farewell show was in December 17th, 1889. Same day via Montezuma and everything inside, all the furnishings was sold to David D. Dare, vice president of the California National Bank, done deal just like that, nice and clean. Same day they left town. Almost 15 years later in 1913, one of the nephews of the High Brothers, Sam High,

was interviewed in an article called Weird House of Ghosts, this, built by spiritualist as Home for Spooks, where he was the first person to really call Jesse Shepard's good intentions into question. It described the house as a quote, temple of art and occultism,

which for years brought ill luck to all who bought it, which was like the big rumor about it is like it ruined your life if you owned it. And the captions under the photograph said things like, via Montezuma, built as temple of occultism by slick trickster, and it painted the High Brothers as simple fruit sellers who got hoodwinked into spending their life savings

on the place and dying poor. Here is a quote from Sam High for Jesse to read, a little bit chunkier quote for you here, so this one. There it is. I'm so thrilled, cause I was like, no way this dude just straight up, up in leaves. Well.

He had a life, so now it makes sense. Read this quote here, this is for Jesse. All right. Yes, I remember Jesse Shepard. I remember him well, and a fine fraud he was. If my old uncles had never met Jesse Shepard, they would have died about half a million dollars richer than they did, and I'd have been a bit better off

for myself today. Did someone's a little bit bitter about what happened? Sad as it was in one way, I can't help laughing, to think of Shepard with his secretary and his servants rolling in luxury, and the two poor uncles, poor old uncles, who were putting up for it, driving by in their little wagon, peddling their vegetables from door to door.

In 1889, when Shepard saw that the game could not last much longer, he sold the house, or rather traded it, for one in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and then disappeared. I remember some time afterward, Shepard sent a deed to Cheyenne property to my uncle John, that the old man was mighty pleased for a while, particularly when he found out

it was worth about $10,000, but all his pleasure disappeared when he learned that Shepard had already mortgaged it for $12,000. Yeah, this is a car man racket, it all checks out. Wait a minute, he traded the deed to the Montezuma for a place in Wyoming? Yeah, so that's what this dude said in the newspaper, but here is the real facts.

The actual high brothers were much more like rich socialites and landowners, who happened to be in the fruit farm owning business, and nobody knows exactly how much if any of the house Shepard paid for himself, but even if he was absolutely destitute and had no money to pay for the house at the time, purely off the success of his writing at the time,

and the fact that he was like slaying it at shows, he probably could have if he needed to, but also he did borrow 4K to get back to Europe when he left town, so who the heck knows? A lot of versions of this story still say that the high brothers really did die poor, but that's not true. They each had sizable amounts of land to their name,

got married, settled down, were selling parcels of that land for much higher than they paid right till the end of their lives, and were living quite comfortably off of that, though the villa probably did lose them a little bit of money, because as it turns out, the property in Wyoming, which was called Castle Dare owned by David D. Dare, did-a-dare, was actually more of a clean trade deed for deed,

but with a mortgage offset 10K in cash, which Shepard needed at that time, so he was like, yeah, you can have my house in like beautiful San Diego in exchange for your house in Wyoming, but you need to take a mortgage out on it and give me $10,000 to sweeten the deal so I can pay off some debts right now.

And so basically- So then when he gave them, so basically what you're saying is, just so I can math this out, he said, okay, you can have the San Diego house, if you give me this house in Wyoming, fair trade, however, I need an extra 10K on top of that. And so the dude mortgaged the house to get the 10K?

Shepard did not mortgage the house. The guy who- The other guy did to get the money. So that was different than what this dude said in the paper. And also- I think the guy in the paper might be mistaken because what ends up happening is that then, he sends the deed to the house to them,

but like without having paid any of the mortgage off? Well, but he knew he was the one who put the mortgage on the house. It wasn't, the guy who sold the house in Wyoming was the one who put the mortgage on the house in Wyoming. Right, right, but I'm saying that like, he took the 10K and then- Yeah, but-

It's like flipped a thing. Like he's- What was the other part of the deal? Almost money laundering? But here's the thing, both of the houses were actually worth the same amount. It was valued at the same. So though the brothers did lose some money in the trade,

he was not culpable in any way for any money to the brothers. He gave them this other property for nothing. But the property had a mortgage on it is what I'm saying. The property had a mortgage on it, but they still got like $15,000 worth of property. I'm just saying that like the rich cousin son, whatever, the dude from the article,

he is just talking about the negative parts because like that's all he's focused on because he's like, they screwed me out of my money. Yeah, but he also- But he also lied. Like he did, because they didn't screw him out of money because there was no agreement. Like he just went in and was like, these guys are dicks.

And actually, David D. Dare and his partner, John W. Collins, had quote, systematically looted the California National Bank so badly that not only did it literally cause the bank to fail in 1891, but his partner Collins shot himself in the face rather than face the bank examiners, which made it very likely that Dada Dare was probably doing the back dealings, if anyone.

So you're telling me that everyone involved, crazy. I know, I know, let's get some crazy. But all these people involved with the scammer, dude, we're all so bad people. Yeah, but- I refuse to believe such a thing. We're also, as I kind of hinted at about the French Catholic Priest essay,

the alternate theory about what happened was simply that Shepard just kind of like found religion in San Diego, took another name and was like, I'm not gonna be this guy who's in this party parlor anymore. I'm gonna- He got led to Europe. No, he first, he went to Los Angeles, briefly, in 1888 while he was still living at the house

the year before he decided to leave. And he got baptized as a Roman Catholic in Los Angeles at like a church. So he kind of was having like a change of faith. So either way, after an initial sale to Dare, Via Montezuma passes from rich people to rich people, some of whom do in fact experience varying degrees of financial hardship over the time that they owned the house,

including Dr. George Kalmas, who bought the house in 1900. And then pretty soon after that, six years later, skipped out on his wife and two mortgages, including that house. And then after Dr. Kalmas pieces out, it's sold to Mr. George Sinclair at an auction who rents it out to Mr. and Mrs. George W. Montgomery and Mrs. Montgomery again starts doing seances in the house

because she picks up such a vibe off the house. And then it's sold for 33 years, it stays with the president of the Benson Lumber Company and his wife, who then sell it to James and for a Craig, who turned it into a rooming house for defense workers in like 1942 when they bought it for World War II. It becomes a rooming house. And then they move another house onto the land in the garden

and divide it into two properties and sell them off separately at the end of the war. And Edward Campbell buys the house because he heard that Shepard had a hidden treasure sealed in his basement of like relics from the East. So he purchases the house for like a couple months. He goes in there and looks around, can't find anything, sells it to quote Hanson and McPhail, who buy the house.

And then they sell it to a retired engineer and an ex silent movie actress, Carl and Amelia Yeager. And then Carl Yeager dies and by some accounts, Amelia like loses her grip a little bit. And she's often a fixture out on the street asking people where her dead husband is. And when they don't know, she pulls a gun on him. So it's like, it's starting to get.

She's probably like 79 years old at this point. Yeah, but it's, you know. It's like silent film star. It's like, wait, by this point, were we in the 60s? By this point or 70s? 60s. I picture in a silent film when it's like, Kramer.

But, you know, I'm just, it's like, it's this crazy thing. So the parties representing Amelia's interests, quote unquote, probably like some lawyers who are like, wow, she's really old. They try to sell the house in 1968 for half its value. But Amelia's family is like, what? Why? No, they contest the sale. It's voided by the superior court.

And it's left open for the San Diego Historical Society to actually swoop in and grab it, purchase it, convert it into a museum, get it designated as a historical site with the city of San Diego and listed on the National Register of Historic Places by 1971 with a full restoration of the building completed by November the following year.

Over the years, more and more efforts have been made, especially after surviving a fire in 1986 to restore Via Montezuma closer and closer to its original appearance funded by tours and donations. And in 2007, the friends of Via Montezuma goes from being an auxiliary arm of the San Diego Historical Society to a full-blown nonprofit.

The museum is still open today. It was closed for a while because of the pandemic and it's opened and closed a lot over the years because sometimes it has to be closed. But the house is designed based off concepts put forth by Jesse Shepard himself and the prestigious Comstock and Trotsky architecture firm. All the interior decorating

was selected by Jesse Shepard himself. It was built on a slight hill. It's two stories high with a basement containing a kitchen and a little storage space. And on the almost third floor, there is one more room. I say it's a third floor because it's alone in a tower by itself. That was Shepard's study.

I encourage you to look at some pics of this house because it looks weirder than you think. Listeners at home, I bet. Inside the house, the walls are polished redwood. The ceilings are silver Linkrusta Walton, which is like an old-timey fancy linoleum. It has like colorful windows on both its inside and outside walls with panes of art glass set in them,

which is kind of like baby's first mosaic. It looks really nice in glass, but it's like a very simple mosaic style. On the first floor is the pink room, a reception room with art glass of grapes and flowers. It was painted fully pink and all everything was pink in the room, down to the candles.

All the beautiful hardwood floors were covered by Persian and Turkish rugs. Shepard chose every fabric piece of upholstery, every rug in the house, everything arranged it all himself. On the other side of the house was a giant music room. On one side had an octagonal conservatory salon with a tile floor that had exotic plants. Four art glass windows depicting the seasons,

another giant one of the Greek poet Sappho and two cupids and Milton's ill-penceroa and l'legre. And on the other side of the room is a room with art glass portraits of Beethoven and Mozart and Rubens and Raphael and portraits depicting the Orient and the Occident. And the portrait of the Orient is like a person who is not a real person, who's just an allegory portrait,

but it's actually a portrait. The Oriental man, quote unquote, is Shepard himself. It's his face. And it's because he's obsessed with the mystic, mystical, Eastern, racist, sort of old school, Asian fascination that people used to have. Here's a quote about that room for Mathis to read right now just to give you an idea of how absolutely insane

this room was. There it is. Reluctantly, the eye leaves the marvelous figures constituting the art glass windows and looks about to observe the next surprise. Art, pure and simple, is found in everything. There are no pictures in the music room, save those in the art windows,

but the hard finished redwood walls are relieved by eight ebony panels inlaid with boss relief figures of ivory and mother of pearl that are hung at intervals. In addition to the six heavy Persian rugs that cover the wax floor, an immense polar bear skin is in its center. Apitzitzapho's portrait on the end of the mantle. It is of medieval design.

It is built of important English tiles, heavily glazed in porcelain bricks. The design of the mantle is purely original. It represents the roof of a tower of one of the old German castles like those found along the Rhine and extends halfway up to the ceiling. Small black walnut shingles of odd shapes

cover it from top to bottom, save at one place, where a portico platform, also of walnut, is placed. This bears a bronze bust of Diana, who seems to look down from the height as if charmed by the beautiful surroundings. Is that not insane? That sounds bananas. On the south side, along with a fireplace

that has a secret passage behind it, and an 18-foot bay window framed by life-size art glass portraits of Shakespeare, Goethe, and Cornet, was the red room in which Shepard slept, and which had reddish Lincrusta Walton walls with matching bed linens, and the gold room, which was a library decorated

with windows framed with cathedral glass. All his art, books, writing, and memorabilia, and his study, a.k.a. his quote, sanctum sanctorum, had windows in all four directions and a revolving chair to help him look out of them with. Pretty grand stuff. But I did not find out about the Via Montezuma because of the museum.

I actually looked that up later. The way Via Montezuma was first introduced to me was when I went down there about seven years ago or so with my family, and we stopped there on a ghost tour bus that we took out of Old Town right next to the Whaley House. And it was the grand finale of the tour because apparently there's plenty of stories of strange occurrences going down on the premises.

So there's actually two main ghosts said to be present at the villa. One is supposed to be Jesse Shepard himself, who's both been seen as a tall pale figure in a dark gray suit, and heard playing piano in various parts of the house, especially at night when things are very quiet. I believe that the current bathroom

is like near the red room, which was his bedroom, and people say they hear piano music come out of there a lot. Also, it's not really clear how the rumor got started of a butler hanging himself from the raptors inside the sanctum sanctorum, but because there's nothing like that on historical record, but a hanging figure has been seen and reported many times to the window of that room,

and also peering out through many of the various other windows on this copiously windowed building. Seriously, like look at this building. There are a shitload of windows on this building. Also, people on tours have reported weird feelings and strange phenomena in the house. Like I mentioned how there's an art glass portrait of Peter Paul Rubin.

Peter Paul Rubin, it's not Paul Rubin. Paul Rubin, Peter Paul Rubins, who is, he has a beard in the portrait, and the beard apparently over time has aged in the way that a man's natural beard would age into like salt and pepper gray, which is pretty funny. And one corner of the grounds of the house, plants will never grow there,

no matter what any gardeners do. And there's also a silver Abyssinian cat with blue eyes. You should Google what those are. Blue eyes and extra toes, it had the name Psyche. Didn't, it not only survived the fire, but was said to have lived far beyond the normal lifespan of a cat. And that,

That's a little suspicious. And that is the story of Lil Jesse, AKA Jesse Shepherd, AKA Francis Greerson, and that haunted temple of occultism, the Via Montezuma. But don't take my word for it, because I also grabbed a couple of testimonials from Weird California, which is like, in tribute to Pat, sort of like the bootleg

California version of Weird New Jersey. Well, Weird New Jersey was like the first one that all the other states started doing their own weird versions of weird stuff. Weird New Jersey is like a journalistic institution compared to this. But I grabbed some quotes from the comment section of the page on Via Montezuma for people to read.

They're all like first hand accounts, a paranormal activity. So here's one for Pat to read. And these are, oh, I think I dropped in the wrong chat. Here, hold on. This one's for Pat to read. They are presented as written, so do your best. Is this on Twitter?

Yeah, not everyone is as erudite as me, as you would say. So the typing is not so hot. This is from the comment section of what's this, Weird California? Yeah. Gen of San Diego, California on June 8th, 2014 said, me and my dad went to the villa Montezuma several years back when the ghost and gravestone tour

still took you inside haunted buildings. We were standing in one of the rooms, just three of us. And one of the rocking chairs slowly started rocking back and forth. Once we all started looking at it, and it abruptly came to a stop as if the person sitting in it just got up and walked away, odd as experience I've had.

Pretty soft and spooky. What a shadow figure though. Yeah, it weirdly has like the vibe of a Yelp review for some reason. Here's one, three out of five. Yeah, three out of five stars on ultimaterollicoster.com. Here is... Oh man, a lot of the viewers went there

and apparently they tried to leave their own reviews and it did nothing. I know, I saw that. There's like a weird mystery about the reviews on ultimaterollicoster.com. Here's another quote for Jesse to read, bam. The one from Joe. Joe Gutierrez of Belleflower, California

on the 16th of February, 2009 said, in October, 2004, my wife and I went, where's the scroll down? My wife and I went on a Halloween tour of Old Town San Diego. We went to the Whaley House in Villa Montezuma. When we were walking through the music room, I fell behind a bit and on the way out,

I could hear piano music. Two days later, we were talking to our friends about the trip. I told them about the piano music and they, they play on the tour, my wife told me that they don't play music. So we called that day and asked if they did and they said no.

So I got to hear Mr. Shepherd play for me. It sound great. It sound great. It sound great. It do sound great. It sound great, Joe. And then here's one for Mathis Tureed. Dropping that in there, a bam.

Kristen of Las Vegas, Nevada on the December 14th, 2008. I went on a private tour of the house in June, 2004. Upon entering the house, it was beautiful and old but it didn't really seem haunted. As we were leaving, I got a notion to snap a picture of the tower and sure enough, when I had the film developed,

there was a face looking back at me. Is that creepy or what? You get the one that like doesn't end in, like it sound great. Yeah. Maybe they have the same shining the pat had when you needed to go check the hallway. You know what I mean?

Sometimes you just gotta go check. I don't know. Sometimes you gotta look. Yeah. Finally, here's one for me. John of San Diego, California on April 18th, 2012 said, I live right next to the via. Weird stuff does happen.

My window faces the house too. So I prefer to keep it closed. What? He's the Squidward of the neighborhood. Don't worry about him. Also, just before we started recording, I found out that Buzzfeed Unsolved did an episode on the Via Montezuma and the best piece of new information

that I got was that Jesse Shepherd, AKA Francis Greerson actually died in Los Angeles immediately after his final performance in 1927. Like literally sitting still at the piano bench with his hands on the keys after hitting the final chord of his final song during the final performance of the evening. And he actually was living in poverty when he died. And that's that.

Thank you for coming, Pat. I really appreciate you coming to this. I don't believe that story. I think that was made up, but okay. Dude, it's 100% true. 100% true. What's the sourcing for that last story? Oh, Wikipedia.

So looking at Wikipedia quick, he died, looks like he died penniless this guy. Yeah. So my encapsulation is he's a grifter. He was the John Edward of his day, it sounds like. Except he could fucking slay on the keyboards. It sounds like he sweet talked those brothers for the real estate moguls,

they got a free fucking house and then 10 grand out of it. And he sounded like he was a sweet talker. That's what it sounds like. And that's how he made his money and lived. Yeah, and again, 10 grand is like a more like 200 grand actually, right? Yeah, that's a ton. And I don't know about his writings.

I don't know what this man does. I don't know his business. But he had a good thing going. It sounds like he was half a guy that was famous for being famous. It sounds like he was talented, but he just knew how to, how do you meet all these people all over the world

back then? As no one, no one ever heard of. So it must have been word of mouth and friends introducing him to other people. And then that's what it was. Good for him. Isn't it insane that you just have never heard his name anywhere ever?

He lived 20 minutes from me. I know. It's six blocks from Petco Park. And I had no idea it was there. It's a national historical monument, basically. You're going to go check it out? Yeah, I'll check it out. If you want to go check it out, be advertising.

They're open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. There you go. A mission is adults $15. There's two tours a day. Some of the tours are separate. The tours are $20 at 1 and 4 p.m. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Worth.

What's super interesting about this story that I would love to see if it's covered in any kind of way is the idea that the wealthy of this time period had so little to do and so much money that they elevated a man from nothing to entertain them. And his whole existence was to be a jester for these people. And there's a whole other angle to this story. This man lived to entertain the wealthy and elite.

And then got out. And he was like, I don't want to do this anymore. But then like. Today, people buy like monkey pictures. You know, like it's all the same game over and over again. They buy monkey pictures. Stupid fucking, like a monkey smoking a fucking cigarette. That's what I was having a conversation

with a friend the other day. We were talking about, like, we went out to eat hamburgers. And the burger we got was one that had like bacon, dates, and goat cheese on the burger. And we were like, you know what, all these things 100 years ago would have been like, only the wealthy could make this burger happen. And we were talking about how people would buy and rent

pineapples. Like the wealthy would rent pineapples to have them as a display thing in their home, because it was so hard to get a pineapple that people would be like, you must be rich. Because, and then they would rent the like rotting pineapple to their friends so everyone could show it off. Because there was so little access to pineapples.

It's a $1,000 iPhone app. That's a picture of a diamond. Yeah. And it's that kind of thing. It's just like. It was when the iPhone first dropped, yeah. Yeah, it was just to show how wealthy you were. We're talking about the latter half of 1800s, right?

So you can go to plays if you have like a theater in your town, there's probably plays. You know, there's going to be some musical performances in some larger towns and cities, not everywhere. Around the sticks, you don't have that. You have to entertain yourself with music. Like people playing the harpsichord back then or a piano. Like that's how you entertain.

That's why you go to every Victorian house. There's like a party room, basically. 100%. Like the conservatory. Yeah. Or you had a hangout room, basically. There are not any more in houses you don't only have. You have like a dinner record.

But you needed a space where groups of people hung out regularly because that's all you do to have fun. Besides, I guess, read. That's all you can do regularly. Drugs and alcohol. Huge part of the 1800s. I want a conversation pit in my next house when I buy a house. So a guy like this, there's probably hundreds

of people like this guy throughout history back then are just like, oh, it's just a guy you hire. He does some bullshit magic say on stuff. He can play the piano. He probably told the joke or two. He entertained with stories. And that's what you do. He said he was a jester.

Yeah, he's David Blaine. Yeah. But that was your movie for the night. You hired this guy. You gave him 20 bucks or whatever coming out. Hang out. And that was it. That was your entertainment.

You probably told all your friends, hey, I got that guy. You heard about this guy? I got him. Come on over. We're going to have a barbecue. If they had a barbecue back then, we're going to have drinks. We're going to get sloshed and watch this guy pretend to talk to your dead aunt.

Yeah. That's what you did. It was like a little salacious. It wasn't like we're going to the opera. We're going to a play. It was, you know, there was a little bit of like what every human kind of loves that little salacious. They kind of know it's a grift.

Yeah, they kind of know it's a grift a little bit. Like that, do you see that movie with Bradley Cooper recently? Which one is this? Nightmare Alley or whatever it's called. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a remake of a noir that Frank liked. And Frank actually liked this remake. It was great.

Yeah, it really did good. I think it's a book, too. But yeah, same deal. It's like he's a mentalist or something. It's like the same kind of grift. There's something to be said for that, that like if this guy was showing up at your house, like you probably like you scored something big. Like you're like your stature went up because think about it today.

Like today when you have like, oh, we're going to have board game night or we're going to have, I don't know, bring wine and cheese. There's no longer I'm going to hire this weirdo guy that can do all these different things. Come on over. We're going to have a whole night. And a kid's birthday party is the last place that ever happens. Like not some guy that is known for like keeping court overseas. No, but some people do like they're like,

yo, the Red Hot Chili Peppers are playing at my fucking house like a first spring break. Like come on down. But that's kind of like that's not this guy. Come on. That's fine as well. But like if you could, if in the 1800s, you had a way of contacting anyone you wanted, you could get fucking Abraham Lincoln

to come fucking do a cake stand at your party for the right purpose. So we do a 20 minute speech and just get paid. He just doesn't get his burger dressed. He does a cake stand. He's out. He kills a vampire. You brought up, you brought up the someone brought up the Frederick Douglass Debates or the Douglas Debates.

The Lincoln Douglass Debates. Yeah, Lincoln Douglass Debates. Sorry, it was confusing. Douglass Debates. Those were huge. They toured the U.S. Yeah. Doing those because that's like, oh, we're going to.

This is like a two and a half hour debate. This is like, yeah, you want to go see that man in real life. Like this is the best thing over. Yeah. I mean, God, you want to you got to see a debate. That's your entertainment. This is before, you know, like you have like a whole, you know, there's no local sports teams that go watching every city.

Go get murdered in the fucking prison yard. Like he got his neck it broke. That's crazy. What do you do? I guess so. Yeah. That makes sense. I got one musical John Edwards, though.

I'd be down. I'd go watch a guitar. That'd be a different show. I'd still be upset. I'd still be like, y'all are just believe in this. Like a fucking guitar. I would be that'd be another show entirely. I would watch.

I wouldn't care. Actually, God, if there's any rich board people out there that want a group of clowns to call their own, Patreon.com slash Luminati. You can go ahead and sign up by us. Is that what you're saying? You know what? I'm here for it.

Listen, everything has a price tag. All right. I want to shout out to weird California. I want to shout out San Diego ghosts. I want to shout out friends of the Via Montezuma, Inc. And the biographical sketch and bibliography of Francis Greerson by Harold P. Simonson from 1961. Pat, what what can the people what where should the people go

if they want more Pat Contrary in their lives? What should they do? There's there's I mean, do you want the podcast? It's it's hashtag. See you podcast. I'm you'd go go through the do the whole spiel. I mean, I mean, Alex, you gave me this spiel via Michael before, but you can go to Pat the NES punk on on YouTube.

I got the flea market man this videos. I got a couple of game books soon to be a third book. What's going on with the Miko now? What's happening? The Miko, we are now in these like very slow fade away period of the Miko where he's just called it quits already. But the company's dead. They're laying off people.

They can't get a new person to keep this grift afloat. And so it's the slow fade away now where they took. They took was up to 17 million dollars. People are saying between per years and investments where there's no accountability. People that put in their hundred dollar deposits can't get paid back via the company. And it's the worst nightmare.

It's the Kaleco chameleon on steroids that we try to prevent people from getting it to back then that somehow succeeded this time out. And now it's a slow fade away where. Yeah, it's going to be a slow death. One day it's going to be like, yeah, we declare bankruptcy in television entertainment. That's it. Is Jesse Shepard in the V.M. Montezuma, the Tommy and then television Amiko of Old Town, San Diego?

No, because Shepard had talent and actually produced. Produced by Tommy Tallarico. Superfluously does play guitar very well and write a lot of. I caught a game. That's true. Not not this to turn us to a best session, but word is on the street is that he air guitars at all the video games live performances. OK, two overnight hot takes. Here we go. Check out.

Check out. Aliens are like that's my. Pat Neane, it's a good fucking show. Go go watch it if you want that exact vibe right there. And also like a weird amount of talk about like very bad Mayonnaise. Last time I checked in with them. What was bad Mayonnaise? What heavy duty? We were at we were at it was at the Mayonnaise from college. We were at the we were at the the con at what's called retro.

So Cal, so Cal retro. Yeah. Hilarious, very good time. Pat, it was an honor to have you on the show. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you so much for coming. Yeah, thank you. Well, I thought it'd be great. Yeah, please, please.

We try to make it less painful by the rest of our tickets in Austin, Texas. I will be filled with barbecue and stories to tell at the bar after the show. I love you guys, Mike. Get get us out of here. Yeah, we're out of here off to do a mini soda over a patreon.com slash shilluminati pot as we do every single week. We hope to see you guys over there until next week, everybody. Goodbye. Bye. 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 at the sky and I look up to there's a perfect line of dozen lights traveling across the sky. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh