Endless Thread - Endless Dread: Haunted Hayride

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

In keeping with Endless Thread tradition, Ben and Amory are celebrating spooky season with another installment of "Endless Dread." This time, we're bringing you along on both an actual haunted hayride — thanks to McCray's Farm in South Hadley, MA — and a digital one, through a handful of spooky stories from the internet. Ben introduces Amory to a TikTok commentary on recent ICE raids disguised as a parody of consumerism. Amory tells Ben about an auditory illusion that has risen from the dead (Twitter) to unsettle the living (TikTokers and Redditors), and about a "vampire" from Rhode Island who was exhumed and turned into a tonic to cure tuberculosis. Spoiler alert: it didn't work.

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Amory, she's a witch, Siebertson. Ben, Bogieman Johnson. We are publishing this episode on Halloween of 2025, and once a year we do a thing in commemoration of Halloween. It is different every year. And this year, we wanted to go on a haunted hayride together. And do a haunted house.

Yes. Did we want to do that, Ben? Yeah, I think it was we. No, it wasn't we? No. You know, I lived to tell the tale, so I can't complain. There you go. But we also wanted to bring you a kind of haunted hayride or haunted house from the internet.

So we kind of did both. We went out near where Ben lives and freaked ourselves out. But we also told each other some internet-y, spooky stories. Yeah, rated PG-13, maybe? I think that's fair, yeah. Earmuffs, kids. Maybe instead of listening, just tuck yourself into bed. And make sure you check there's nothing in your closet.

Without further ado, thanks to McCrae's Haunted Hayride in South Hadley, Mass, and the Internet, we bring you this year's special episode of Endless Dread. What's the thing that's going to... What's the thing you would like to avoid? I have come to the, I'm going to the wrong place to avoid the thing I want to avoid, which is people jumping out at me. If you're in the back, that's not a good place today. Well, let's not be in the back.

But you might be in the back. That's the thing. It's just the luck of the draw, wherever your seat on the wagon is. This is it. Look at this. What are you seeing? I'm seeing lots of floodlights. It looks like a...

Lots of cars. Okay. What's that over there? A big skeleton? Big statue of a... That the grim reaper? Yeah, it looks kind of grim. That looks pretty grim to me.

Okay. We're just going on a little hayride. Just going on a little hay ride. Hello. Hey, where are we... Which way is... What's down this way? What's down which way?

You want to go? That way? Which is the most scary way? You got to get on the cart first. Okay. It'll drop you off and it's got not one, but two haunted houses. And you know what? I think I smell poopies already.

Are you scared, little girl? Are you going to go home and leave the lights on? Probably. Well, have a great time then. Thank you. I like that they just assumed that you were pooping instead of me. Yeah, that's fucked up. They're like, she looks incontinent.

He seems fine. Hey, how are you? I think we want, can we buy tickets for the hay ride here? Okay. That's the first scream in the night. Our show is called Endless Thread, but our scary episode is it was called Endless Dread.

We heard this was the place to be for some spooky times. I can show you that. Yeah. So you work here? Yeah. Would you mind sharing your name with us? My name is Ken and that's Carl. Ken and Carl.

And how long have you been working here? Carl's been here too long. A long time. Next week, okay, that line will go around. It'll come up here and they'll go down to that second light down there. You're going to enjoy it. You've probably got 70 workers here. So he's got to have people.

Okay. All right. And you will get scared. No doubt. No doubt. I can already smell the poofies here. It's him. It's him! It's him! We hope you guys enjoy it.

Thank you. Thanks, Kenny. Have a good night. These folks are just like buying corn. There's the beer tent. Right on the back of that wagon and I'll get you on the next ride. Okay, okay? Thank you. Back in the wagon. Back of this ground.

I don't want to be on the back of the wagon. of the way. Yeah. Remember what I told you? The back of the wagon is this scariest spot. That's the, that's good. I hope we get this guy as the driver because he's, his mustache will protect the side field. I really don't.

I'm not into this. I'm already upset. This is the slap-happy trailer. Okay. Because the tractor slap-happy. Okay. Uh-oh. You kind of go forward and backwards.

Sometimes it bumps sometimes. I try and do my best to keep it from doing that. And I'm going to make sure I do it good for you. And I'm freaking waking up. We're fucked. That's translation. We're fucked. You and I are in a giant cart behind a pretty large tractor.

A large tractor. Driven by a man with a majestic mustache. But we're pointing. the way the direction we're going into is very dark. Into the darkness. Yeah. 24, 6, 10, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20. Like, two dozen people.

There's a couple rules of the ride. Please keep your hands inside the cart at all times. Your feet underneath the seat at all times. My characters do come up on the cart. You guys are going to get scared and you guys might jump out of your seats. All I ask is that as soon as you guys compose yourself, you know, make sure you guys, you know, your pants aren't wet or anything like that. But you guys do sit down as soon as possible just for your safety.

All right, other than that, guys, enjoy your ride. They come up onto the cart? You didn't tell me that. That's not okay. You're going to be messed. There's no question. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to McCra's Hot Today, Rock.

Oh boy. What do you think so far? Pretty much fine, right? I don't know if I'm even going to be able to look at anything. I'm trying to look straight ahead. Now we've got some skeletons, the pile of skeletons. Okay. We've got a demon here.

We've landed on a demon. Okay. Oh, no. Oh, no. No. Okay. Now we're being nothing. Now we're surrounded by it.

This is the creepy clone. It's some lasers. Oh no, no, no, no. Amory, Emory. Oh, God. That was... Okay. I don't know it alone.

Oh, gosh. I don't know. I don't like it. That's allowed. That's allowed. Is that the... Big mood. Oh man.

Oh, God. No! Okay. It's going to. Chainsaw. It's a... Chainsaw. Okay.

Chainsaw. Gas mask clown butcher? Yeah, there's a clown. Yes, gas mask clown butcher. When the cart comes to a complete stop, you guys are going to exit the cart and cut up towards the car. the cart and head up towards the haunted house to meet the greet her. Have a great night, guys.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Absolutely. So you and I are on the haunted hay ride in real life, but also we are going to do an internet-based haunted hay ride together right now. We're going to go room by room and try to freak each other out with some spooky little stories.

That's like haunted house, but this is our hunted hay ride. Yeah. We both have to go like this. Like the wagon stopped. Oh, oh, oh. You know what I mean? Okay. The wagon stopped.

All right. What do you got for me? So this is from the subreddit, black magic fuckery. Yep, yeah. I'm ready for some fuckery. You're ready. Okay. So I'm going to play you a little, a little spooky piece of audio.

What do you hear? Don't overthink it. It's weird. I hear like a kind of like lightsaber sound. It's like a whiz. And then I hear, I'm going to say I hear green needle. That's what I hear. Okay, that listen, I also heard green needle.

Okay. So the question is whether you hear green needle or the word brainstorm. Okay. Do you know anything about the origins of this audio before I go any further? No. I don't know anything about it except for, I know this video. Like, I've seen the video. It's this woman. She has like a caption above her head and it says you will only hear the word you are reading.

And then she points and there's two things that appear. One of them is Green Needle and the other is Brainstorm. So this TikTok video, It has 34,000 upvotes at the time that we're recording this. It was posted just a couple of weeks ago. Yep. Which, when I first saw this, my thought was like, oh, it reminds me of another auditory illusion that we actually covered on this show when it blew up back in 2018. And that was...

Yanny, Yanny. Yanny Laurel. Yanny Laurel, that's right. Which is sort of like the dress, right? Like is the dress black and gold or blue and gold or white and gold, right? Blue and black or white and gold. Blue and black or white and gold, that's right, yeah. Okay.

So that particular one broke in 2018. What I was not expecting to find out about this brain needle green, brain needle green storm. Brain needle green storm. All right. About this one, brainstorm versus green needle. Yes. is that this also initially went viral in 2018. No.

What? I mean, that's not, it's not unusual for something to be posted on Reddit that is years and years old. And to go viral because none of us have a memory anymore. We're all goldfish now when it comes to the internet. This was same month, May of 2018, very shortly thereafter. For real? For real. Went super viral on Twitter at the time.

Wow. And the origin of this, are you familiar with a kid show called Ben 10? Ben 10 or Ben 10 alien force? Oh my God. I feel like I'm living in an alternate universe all of a sudden. No, I don't know. I do a little bit too because I haven't heard of this. I mean, I'm a wrong age demographic for us.

But apparently the audio from this brainstorm green needle clip comes from a 2014 vloggers review of a Ben 10 Alien Force toy. What? So I'm going to send you a link. Ooh, that's a cool looking toy. Yeah, a little light-up toy. The cool technology sound makes more sense because it looks like a, it's like an electrical zap that's happening in the toy.

Yes, yes. And unlike the Yanny Laurel debate of 2018, where it really came down to two words being on top of each other in the audio file, and it was about which frequencies your ears are more inclined to hear up or lower. This debate, Brainstorm versus Green Needle, is absolutely solvable because the toy is saying the name of a character in Ben 10,

which is... Brainstorm. Brainstorm. Yes. This auditory illusion, I would say, is almost more mysterious to me because as the TikTok video that then just went viral on Reddit explains, you can train your brain to hear

what you want it to hear. So if you're looking at the word brainstorm, you hear. If you're looking at the words green needle, you'll hear. That's why is that? Okay, so the telegraph talked to a psycholinguist named Susie Stiles,

great name, back in 2018 when the story broke. And she said, this is a great reminder that everything we think we experience via the senses is just our brain's best guess at reality. What? So nothing's real, nothing's certain, nothing's known. We're just out here, hearing different things and thinking different things and coming to different conclusions and everything is fine. Wow. You know what? I mean, that makes so much sense considering the time that we're living in. Yeah, it's like you're more likely to seek out information that validates what you already believe.

And this is you're more likely to hear what you're thinking. So it's both an explanation and a totally unsettling reality. All right, I got a little spooky number two. When Halloween comes around, you probably dress up, you probably go to a couple parts. parties, right? Maybe 10 years ago. Not so much anymore. Well, let's put it this way.

If you were to go to a party and dress up, what would your vibe be? Like, what genre of costume would you be getting into? This year, I will be handing out candy and I'm going to dress up as Jane Goodall. Oh, that's nice. So I guess usually I go for not so spooky, more just something I admire. Yeah. I mean, I'll do whatever as long as it's hot. Like, I'll be a hot zombie. I'll be like a... I'll be a hot potato. I'll be a hot, I'll be a sexy potato. As long as it's hot, I'll be a flaming hot Cheeto. Well, no, I like that Jane Goodall is your zone because I think there's a genre here of how people dress up that, like, you can go scary, but you can also.

go like political. It's not maybe, I wouldn't call it activism, but it's like this like thing where people are taking this holiday and they're actually reminding you of something that's real that's happening in the world that we should be, that we should be worried about. So I want to play you another video based thing from TikTok. I think it's a really interesting exploration of this kind of thing. Okay. So this is going to take you two minutes, but you should watch it. Okay.

Taylor Swift launches Target exclusive vinyl of her new album, Life of a Showgirl. Imagine an ice, cold, diet Coke and salty fries. Only at McDonald's. Drive to Target. Drop into Home Goods and Save, Save, Save. What's on your kids list this holiday season? Don't raid your closet. Read T.J. Max for your fall fit check.

Drive to Target. Get it now. Get it now. Get it now. How would you describe this? So it's a woman who is like putting on a fake cheesy smile. She's doing like a commercial for Target, a fake commercial for the store Target. And Taylor Swift and.

Taylor Swift's vinyl album, McDonald's fries, ice cold, dyes. Diet Coke. And then she starts doing a sort of mash-up of some of the words in these fake ads. Don't raid your closet. Ice cold, Diet Coke. Ice, ice, ice, drop into home goods, home goods, home goods, home, good home, ice dropped into good homes. Until it's basically just a bunch of these words cut together to call out ice raids taking kids from their homes. Ice dropping into raid your good home, your good kids. Ice dropping into raid your good home, good home, good kids, good kids. And she lands on a place of referencing the allegations of zip ties being used to tie kids' hands together. Which we should say are the sort of official statements about that have been that zip ties were not used.

used and yet there are witness accounts of zip ties being used in this building in Chicago in which U.S. citizens and non-U.S. citizens were pulled out of the building by ICE and arrested and tied up with zip ties according to some reports. And so over the course of the video, this cheery kind of like, get it now at Target becomes a like, do you get it now? Do you get where I'm going with this? Imagine as your kids. You can't save, save, save. Get it now?

One of the kind of meta aspects of what this woman is doing is she's, you know, she's using words that might not normally be censored on the platform. And so a thing that I've been seeing recently, and I don't know if you've seen this as well, but I've seen creators on TikTok, on Instagram, elsewhere, as they are talking about things that are expressly political and raising the alarm, so to speak, the captions can sometimes be different

from the words that are being said. And what I see in that as a possibility is people are basically anticipating or assuming a level of censorship on these tech platforms or at least algorithmic punishment in terms of whether this stuff might actually get surfaced for viewers. And so they're trying to basically work around that. So I saw one recently where a creator who is basically a political commentator was talking a lot about Nazis.

And every time he said the word Nazi in audio, the caption, which I think he had edited, surfaced a different word than Nazis. It was like funny guys or weirdos or whatever. It was like switching the word Nazi out and swapping in another word. And I think that's an effort to essentially prepare for or avoid some form of algorithmic censorship driven by state powers, whether they are U.S. state powers trying to control TikTok in the United States or state powers outside of the U.S., which I think is really interesting. when you think about this video because she's basically reordering words that might not be expressly caught up by state censorship. But she's clearly in the U.S. So she's like raising the specter of state censorship. And she's also trying to get across a message to you as the viewer that you should be scared about this.

And it is spooky. And the music in the video itself is kind of like spooky music. And so I think it's like a good reminder that sometimes when we think about, you know, what's, what's scary. A lot of it is like, you know, silly and spooky and, you know, not real and bizarre and whatever comes out of horror movies. But often horror movies like science fiction are trying to have a conversation with you about like what's really happening and what are real things that we should be thinking about and worried about. And I thought this was a good example of that. Yeah. These days with that TikTok censorship, you could just claim it's an auditory illusion.

You could be like, you heard Nazi? I said cupcake. There's no Nazis here. It's messed up that you heard that. That's an interesting thing to you. It makes you think about whether or not words on screen are actually easier to censor and and like pick up by the censorship tools. than audio, right? Yeah.

Yeah, easier to censor a caption. Revolution will not be televised, but it might be podcasted, guys. Just think about it. All right, well, I think we should take a little spooky pause. Grab a candy bar. Yeah, it's a candy bar break. And we'll be back in just a minute.

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Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. All right, we're back. You got another little spooky for me on our haunted hay-rise. our digital haunted hayride that we're on while we're on the real haunted hayride. Oh, I do. And this little spooky starts with a capital T. And that stands for tuberculosis. That was a good guess.

My efforts to bring the music man into everything are dashed again. It stands for. 76 trombones? I mean, if you saw 76 trombones coming down the street at you, that might be a little spooky. That's too many trombones. That's TMT. TMT. Too many trombones.

Okay, no, the T stands for tuberculosis. What do you know about tuberculosis? Yeah, I know you cough a lot. It can be terminal. It's not good. Yeah, you cough a lot. There's usually like blood in the coughing in what comes up. So do you know what causes it or no? Nope, no idea. Okay. Well, according to some New Englanders in the 17 and 1800s. It was sin.

Vampires. It was caused by vampires, Ben. What? Yes. Okay. These are not blood-sucking vampires like we think of today with, you know, the pointy eye teeth. These vampires were deceased people sucking. the life out of their living relatives. Whoa. And not in like a, you know, co-worker kind of way where they come over and they want to talk to you for a long time and you got stuff to do.

Like, they weren't doing that. Yeah, not a co-worker vampire, not an energy vampire. The way to stop then in this great New England vampire panic was to exhume the undead but dead person's body from the grave. What does exhum mean? This is a question I've always had. What does exhum the grave? What does that mean? You are ex-huming.

You know when you're ooming? You know when you're ooming? You're ex-ooming. You're ex-ooming. It's to get them out of the grave. Why don't they just say that? Why are they got to say ex-huming? All right.

They're digging them up out of the graves. All right. And in some cases, they were just flip. them over and be like that'll do the trick. What? Just give them a flip. The coffin or the person? The person.

Oh, they have them like face down and then they rebary them. Oh, that's creepy to me. Or you could cut out some of their organs and burn them. Oh, I mean, as everyone knows. Which brings us to a Today I Learned post on Reddit from several years ago by a sense deleted user that reads, Tee. B. I.L. After her death, Mercy Brown's heart and liver were burned and the ashes mixed into a tonic that was given to her sick brother to drink. Her father believed that she was a vampire and that the tonic would cure the brother of tuberculosis. Yeah.

It didn't. He died two months later. Narrator voice. It didn't. Yes. Brutal. So this was Mercy Lena Brown. of Exeter, Rhode Island, or just Lena Brown, as her family called her. Okay. She dies of tuberculosis in 1892 at the age of 19. Tuberculosis was widespread at this time. It's devastating.

It's the leading cause of death in the Northeast. And how do you actually get it now that we have science? Oh, a bacteria. It's a bacteria. Yeah, it's an infectious disease caused by, I think it's called bacillus. Yeah, yeah, sure. It's one of the bacillus ones. Yeah, yeah.

Everyone knows Bicillus. So her mom dies of tuberculosis nine years before she does. One of her older sister dies of it. So tuberculosis is running through this family. It's not well understood, and people are filling in the gaps of what causes tuberculosis with folklore, you know, that it's the work of the undead or a vampire that's causing it. Man, oh, man. So Mercy dies. Meanwhile, her brother, who's the only son out of seven children, is dying.

of tuberculosis, and her widower father wants to save her brother. So about two months after Mercy dies, he agrees to have the bodies of Mercy, one of his other daughters, Mercy's older sister, and his late wife exhumed, exhumed. Yes. He's like, we already oomed him. Let's exhumed him. That's right. To try to find out which of these three dead relatives is sucking the life out of his son, Edwin.

Okay. So they dig up Mercy's mother and sister. They are both decomposing normally. They're mostly bones because they died almost a decade before that. But Mercy's body shows almost no signs of decomposition, and she still has blood in her lungs, which some thought to be the sign of a currently feasting vampire. Oh, boy.

So the villagers remove Mercy's heart and liver, and they burn them on a rock nearby. As you do. Right. It's like the 1890s equivalent of driving a steak through her heart, I guess. They're like, hey, Freddie, you got that hot rock? You got that rock hot. We're going to cook the stuff on the rock.

They cooked them up. The ashes are then mixed with water and turned into a tonic that is given to the brother Edwin to drink, thinking that it would cure him. As we know, it didn't. He dies a couple months later. But a couple important things to note. Mercy dies in January of 1892 in Rhode Island, which means it's cold. And as one Reddeter put it, she was a mercicle. Or I'm like, just call her a merciful.

She was a merciful. No wonder she hadn't decomposed. Her body was so well preserved because it was winter and it had only been a couple of months. Yeah, that'll do it. That'll do it. But some other fun facts, Smithsonian Magazine notes that Mercy's, your favorite word, exhumation, is referenced in HP Lovecraft's The Shunned House, which is a short story about a man being haunted by dead relatives that includes a character named Mercy. And furthermore, that the character of Lucy in Dracula, like the original Brom Stoker's Dracula.

Lucy, who's Lucy? She's a teenage girl who might have also had tuberculosis and gets turned into a. a vampire and is exhumed in the book. Wow. So she was potentially inspired by Mercy, and some say the character name Lucy is a combination of Lena, what she was called, and Mercy, her first name. Huh. But also, like, there are a bunch of comments in this very popular Reddit post about

Mercy Brown saying things like, don't tell anti-vaxxers about this and, like, you're giving anti-vaxxers new ideas. But as someone who, you know, made a series with me about the history of vaccines and anti-vaxxers. Yes, yes. The interesting thing is like this idea of grinding up the ashes of the heart and the liver and serving it to your son, to me sounds a lot more like the history of early variolation and inoculation. Absolutely. Well, that's the thing that's so interesting about this stuff, right?

Like, you know, the 17 and 1800s, there's all of this, like, pretty weird experimentation that is, you know, connected to what ends up being, like, scientific shared truth, right? Like, you start to figure out, like, oh, like, this thing seems to work. Let's start playing with this. And maybe it'll be an actual thing. And sometimes it is a thing. And sometimes it's like, no, whoops, we killed somebody. Yeah, and Edwin already had tuberculosis. He was deathly ill to begin with.

So you can kind of, I mean, it's hard to imagine, and yet you can almost understand how desperate the father is. Absolutely. And tuberculosis, it killed more than a million people as recently as 2023. So this is not gone. Totally eradicated. Well, I don't recommend grinding up your eggs, whomed loved ones, organs.

Yeah. Don't put it on a hot rock. Don't put it on a hot rock. Yeah, we do interesting things when we're desperate. That's true. We're pouring one out for Mercy Brown, but no organs involved. Mercy deserved mercy. That's for sure. Well, she was dead. She didn't know. Or was she?

All right. Our haunted hayride of the Internet is wrapped up, but we're about to go into the haunted house in real life. Listen on, if you dare. Okay, you're going to go first, right? No. Yeah, no, you're good. No, no.

You're fine, you're fine. No, we fit side by side. We fit side by side. That's true. It's just a bloody maze and bloody walls so far? You really didn't like going around that corner. You did not like going. I don't like this.

I don't like this. There's so many corners. There's just a woman with a cleaver next to a fireplace. Keep moving. Why are you stopping? I don't know. I knew that thing was going to do that as soon as we started walking away. It was going to do something crazy.

It's cool. We're just going to go this. Ah! Okay. And then this guy in the corner just started jumping around. Oh god Oh god's crazy spider Crazy spider deadly clown guy

He's ripped the arm off of a toddler Oh yeah perfect Perfect Oh my god Oh my god Oh my god This is not good. Oh!

Okay. The spider walk was good. What do you think? How are you feeling? How are you doing? Okay. The jump scares, yes, that's terrible. Yeah, yeah.

But, like, the world is so scary right now. Yes. Like, as it is. Yes. I mean, it's very well done, but I think, like, the things that really keep me up at night, unfortunately, are, like... have nothing to do with... Oh, surreal.

I feel like horror movies and like horror stuff, I feel like it's like trying to like wake you up a little bit. I feel like when it's done right, it sort of takes, takes down a notch some of the stuff that's actually scary in the world. Somehow. It lets you laugh at death or something in a way that like makes you feel like,

it's good to be, it's good to like face death before you have to face death. Yeah. Does that make sense? Yes. Well, I think, yes, because death is like for so many people, their greatest fear before they feel ready for it. Yeah. If you can't laugh about it, even if the laughing is like, I was just so scared that now I'm going to laugh about it and talk about it and experience it with other people, then you just like lose your mind over it. And so it's, it almost feels like we don't know what else to do with those, those feelings and fears.

Yeah. All right. So? Another year. Another year. Another year. Another year. Facing our mortality.

It's good. It's important. On a hay ride. With a chainsaw. Endless thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was produced by Amory Shizewicz, Siebertson. Ha-ha. And Ben, Bougie.

Man Johnson, sound design terrors by our production manager, Paul Vycus. Editing by Meg Kramer. Our managing producer is Summata Joshi. The rest of our team is Dean Russell, Grace Tatter, Franny Monaghan, and Emily Jankowski. Big thanks to McCrae's Farm in South Hadley, Massachusetts. If you have an unsolved mystery, an untold history, or another wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up. Endless Thread at WBUR. dot org.

Mua. Happy Halloween. Happy spooky Halloween. I was so freaked out the first one that came on there for like, not like creepy guy with a chainsaw but I was like, safety first.

Yes, I knew you were going to feel that way. I knew you were going to feel that way. You're twirling that a little too is a little too much. Is this guy certified? Is this clown? Is this chainsaw clown? certified. Did he run his choreography before now tonight just to brush up and make sure that we

weren't going to actually get our hair shaved off? Yep, yep. That was good.