It Could Happen Here - Cryptids and Curses: Spooky Week #1

Episode Date: October 25, 2022

The gang kicks off spooky week with a discussion of Bigfoot, The Chupacabra and the curse the California Parks service accidentally put on itself.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, God is dead. I'm Robert Evans. Welcome to the podcast.

The first episode of Spooky Week podcast. We try to figure out who murdered God and come to the conclusion that it was almost certainly Will Wheaton. I'm pointing my finger at someone else, actually, Robert. I'm fingering Bigfoot. Wow. Okay, now, Danil,

I'm going to need you to just cut that audio line out of the episode so that everyone on the team can play it as a drop whenever we need to. James admitting to fingering Bigfoot. All right, that's going to be an episode. Everybody have a good week. God bless you.

No, this is It Could Happen Here. This is Spooky Week, right? We're recording our first Spooky Week episode. This is the first Spooky Week episode, yes. Praise be to God. All right. What do we have for the ladies? And not the gentlemen.

This one's just for the ladies. I'm going to say that right now. The says, hers, and slurs. It's... That's... Jesus. It's... Yeah, it is we what we got today what we got today robert garrison is some stories about cryptids um so i want to start in the autumn

of 1993 garrison was not alive and robert and i were much younger and i want to start in northern california where one night three men set out to execute a pretty routine weed trade, right? They had to drop some cannabis off, get some money, come home. And it's not exactly a secret that at that time and in that place, there was a lot of illegal grow operations. And it's not exactly a secret. Yeah, Robert, have you heard about this? I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, like,'s number one once you hit about anywhere in like the coastal northern california from like santa cruz on up uh bigfoot is like a topic not even not even really of discussion but there's just bigfoot shit all over the goddamn place um from arcata

to like grant's pass is probably the biggest density of Bigfoot shit, but it's all throughout Oregon, all throughout Washington. You get a decent amount in Idaho, I think, too. Yeah. People make a lot of money off Bigfoot. There's even a Bigfoot highway up there. Yeah. I was listening to a dog shit podcast recently. It's not very good.

It's called Wild Thing, and it's by some former NPR reporter. I've heard it's the Squatches podcast, right podcast right yeah she's doing like a bigfoot thing it's just not very good like there's bits in there where she'll like quote one guy who's like there's a lot there's so much evidence for bigfoot if you type bigfoot into google there's like 11 million results and then an actual scientist will be like, there's no evidence for Bigfoot. And she just is like, what are we to think? How are we to, what can we conclude?

Both sides, both sides, yeah. I did not find it very edifying. I was listening to it while I was alone on the mountain this weekend. There are two sides to the Bigfoot story, Robert. It doesn't matter if one of them is wrong. No, it's very fun but yeah i've been because i also the parts of the west coast that are bigfoot country are

also the parts of the west coast that grow like more pot than anywhere else on planet earth and yeah which is interesting isn't it because these two things may or may not overlap. Yeah, I think they do. But please continue. Yes. So Hulu made a... I will loosely use the word documentary here. Yeah, loose is good for this. So I'm going to use a few words loosely here. So according to David Holthaus,

journalist, which is, again, a word I'm using, maybe loosely, but he does a pretty good job in what I've seen. No, he's fine. Holthaus. So the interesting thing about him and what I do kind of like about him is he's he worked as a trimmer. So the pot industry,

there's the people who move the marijuana around the country, including smuggle it into places where it's still fully illegal. There's the people who sell it either illegally or at dispensaries. There's the people who grow it. And then the largest by number chunk of the weed trade are the trimmers. And those are the people every season, usually in the fall, come down for three or four months.

Northern California, Southern Oregon mostly. three or four months, Northern California, Southern Oregon mostly. And they take raw marijuana that's been like bucked and cut off of the plant and they trim it into the kind of buds that you buy. And this guy was doing that back in the nineties and he ran into these stories about a Bigfoot murdering two or three Mexican guys. Yeah, that's exactly it. Yeah. So I think he actually does a really good job in this documentary. Yeah, I actually didn't think it was bad. No, no, I was ready for it to be bad, but I was quite impressed with... So what happened is, yeah, like Robert says, that there are these probably migrant, probably undocumented workers, right,

who come... Well, a lot of them, there's a good chunk of them probably, I don't know, by my estimates, maybe 20% to 30% are like mostly white kids from various parts of the country a lot of them are folks who are either kind of seasonally unhoused many of them like live and camp basically in places like arcada a big chunk of the year and then will live on farms while they trim um there are a decent chunk who are undocumented a lot are mong um like a lot of are like first like particularly older mong people who like came here after vietnam and started businesses and then

like their kids and grandkids got into the pot trade and were like well my you know grandma or my aunts retired and they like they living in the woods and are good at trimming like we can make a bunch of extra money this way. It's all sorts up there. Yeah, it's kind of fascinating. So these three guys set out to do this deal, right? That they're three of the people who fall into the undocumented labor category and they never come back.

And Holt House is sitting in one of these farm houses or in a trailer or something when a couple of guys come in and say, hey, those dudes never came back. And they've been killed, right? They seem to have been sort of pretty brutally murdered. But the weed that they were carrying was still there. So it wasn't like somebody shook him down and stole the weed, right?

Yeah. By the way, if it was a weed industry thing, you probably wouldn't because everyone's got a lot of fucking weed. I mean, people do steal weed, but if you're out there doing a murder, it's probably because somebody's fucking with your business in a bigger way than whatever they happen to have on the fucking farm. I wouldn't be surprised if a pot murder would not result in whatever shit they had in their trailer actually getting jacked. Okay. Yeah, because the weed's are things that everyone has so uh at the time their deaths are largely if not entirely factually uh attributed to bigfoot right it's it's put out there that these people were murdered by bigfoot now they are not the only people whose deaths have been blamed on bigfoot uh earlier this year july 10th

2022 the seminole county sheriff's office uh reported the murder of mr jimmy knighton deaths have been blamed on Bigfoot. Earlier this year, July 10th, 2022, the Seminole County Sheriff's Office reported the murder of Mr. Jimmy Knighton. In a press release, they said, Larry Sanders has reported killing Mr. Jimmy Knighton by the South Canadian River. Sanders and Knighton had been noodling in the river on July 9th. Okay. Now, yeah. So give it to me, Robert. You're from this part of the world it's just when you stroke a catfish you don't stroke well yes basically it's when you use kind of your fingers as bait and you catch a catfish by the mouth right great yes we call it noodling what a country yes i mean james see robert to the greatest these days catch a catch a catch a catfish by the nose means something very different.

Yeah, so does noodling. Yeah. Or as the Mormons call it, soaking. Sure. Oh, God. There's a great story. This is off topic, but there was just an outbreak in Salt Lake City of armpit crabs because so many Mormon kids are having, having armpit sex and also not using protection.

It's awesome. It's so funny. It's not. That's just, wow. We're still doing this. We're still doing this care. We're going to be doing this the rest of your natural life.

Yep. Never getting past this shit. This is what the future holds for you. Decades of arm fucking. So, Sanders and Knighton, they were old school noodling. They weren't online noodling.

Sure, of course. Yeah, that's the best kind of noodling, in my opinion. That's what I've heard. So, they're out there in the river. At some point, Mr. Sanders becomes convinced that Knighton has summoned Bigfoot to kill him.

Now, that's interesting. You don't hear that a lot. You don't, because I didn't think Bigfoot was summonable. That wasn't on the table of things that I thought one could do to a Bigfoot. I mean, I've always thought Bigfoot was summonable, but not for murder. For sex, sure. Okay. Yeah, that's why his armpits are so crabby.

Well, that's what everyone says about Bigfoot. So you can identify him in a crowd. So at some point, Sanders becomes convinced that Bigfoot is on his way and he's going to kill him. And so he unfortunately strangles his noodling partner to death. Well, that's tragic. Noodling partner.

Well, I don't know. Strangles a noodling partner to death. We're just going to leave it. We're just going gonna leave it we're just gonna leave it we're just gonna move straight on yeah yeah uh so yeah it does sound rather tragic it does sound rather sad but um it he seems to have reported pretty openly that he believed that bigfoot was on its way and if he didn't stop this ritual, that Bigfoot will kill him. And a lot of, as it turns out, things that people can't really explain. Often the times when people are inhuman to other humans tend to be explained as the actions of monsters, right? And I want to quote from the documentarian,

the director, Joshua Rofe, who made that film. He says, the thing that people should be afraid of is not the boogeyman in the woods. It's our next door neighbors who will usually commit acts of violence that will then terrify everybody on the block or in the neighborhood. Rofe said that working in Northern California was very scary. We did enter a sort of underworld, for lack of a lack of a better term. And, you know, we were really mindful to try and not overstay our welcome there. So I want to get into cryptids a little bit. And I want to get into some of the more famous ones, as well as a curse. I've got a curse here. Oh, good.

Yeah. The curse is great because it's invented by the California Park Service. Oh, good. Yeah. The curse is great because it's invented by the California Park Service. But I want to explain kind of the social functions that they sometimes serve, as well as just having some fun talking about cryptids. So the one that I thought might serve a social function, and probably the most famous cryptid aside from Bigfoot, is our friend the chupacabra, right?

Yeah. Yeah. In English, that translates to goat sucker which is okay yeah we're staying we're staying on this bit I see yeah yeah we're on theme it's not a bit garrison it's culture yeah cheaper you know it's not a costume I'll say this I'm reading a great book right now about the house good sucker no It's called Goat Sucker. No, it's called The Last Emperor of Mexico. And it's about that Hapsburg who tried to become the emperor of Mexico.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And they hung his ass in like three weeks. Yeah. It's very funny. Love to see that. But yeah, good stuff. Huge respect to the people of Mexico. So actually, the Chupacabra doesn't come from Mexico.

It comes from Puerto Rico. Oh, I didn't know that, actually. Yeah, so we're going to learn a little bit about the chupacabra. Perhaps the best source for this, as far as I can find, is this guy, Benjamin Redford, who has written a book about the chupacabra. And he shows that nearly all of the eyewitness accounts can be traced back to this one uh the first account which was this woman called madeline tolentino in the 1990s in uh 1995 in puerto rica right so it's also much more recent than i thought like the chupacabra is 27 years old

it is it's younger than me which is quite remarkable given how much cultural impact it's had yeah i thought i thought it was much older yeah me too i thought it was this uh and like an old-timey border legend and you're what 49 james that's correct yeah yeah okay just make it yeah no yeah i'm just uh i'm just kicking here for a couple more years before i can claim that sweet i heart media pension get that. Get that AARP. Be able to go to the fucking Sizzler and get 5% off. That's it, man. I'm going to be issued my 1911, which you get when you're 60 years old.

You get a 1911 and you get a Luby's gift card. And you get to evoke the Second World War whenever anyone is rude to you, even if you weren't in it. And you're allowed to drive your car into a farmer's market in the state of California up to twice. Yeah, up to twice. After that, you have to move to Oregon. That's right. So yeah, until my retirement, I want to talk a little bit about this stupid car plus.

So they're fascinating because with Bigfoot, there are, as you have mentioned, 11 million Google results, but no actual Bigfoots, right? No one's ever found a Bigfoot. No one can present to you. Big's feet. Big's feet? Is that? Yeah, yeah.

It takes an I, right? It's from the Italian, Bigfeety. That's righty. That's right. Yeah, okay. So there are no Bigfeety, but there are chupacabras um and the reason there are chupacabras is that what people a chupacabra right the name goat sucker this will shock you uh garrison especially that the way that they are sucking goats is perhaps

not the way you would expect interesting yeah they Yeah. They're very innovative in this regard. What is happening is people are finding their goats, their chickens, their livestock with their throat ripped out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So it is the way you would expect them. And most animals need throats, right? It's one of the parts that, yeah, they're not interchangeable.

They're not, yeah, they're really- That's good to know. This is all really important information. Yeah. Yeah. So throat-free goats, cattle, sheep, chickens tend not to survive very long. know this is all really important information yeah yeah so throat free goats cattle sheep chickens tend not to survive very long so a lot of times people come out in the morning find their animals throatless and dead deep-throated sure yeah you could you could

call it a deep throating that's where they get it right deep in the throat um so they uh these animals are dead and the people claim that they're drained of blood, which isn't quite true. Of course. There's only two possible explanations. Do you want to go through them? One obviously being vampires. The other being this, being this Crippid creature. Well, of course.

That's the only possible things it could be. The Chupacabra is a vampire. Okay. All right. So yeah, that's where the Venn diagram overlaps. the only possible things it could be. The chupacabra is a vampire. Okay, alright, sweet. That's where the Venn diagram overlaps. It's got goat-like legs, actually, but then it's bipedal. It has kind of a human torso and a sort of lizard-meets-wolf

face. We're verging in Jersey devil vampire territory. Yeah, but it prefers warmer climates climate it doesn't like jersey and frankly i mean me neither so yeah who does i think yeah i look i don't go east to new mexico and i don't think anyone else should either no it doesn't care for bruce springsteen and it doesn't want to live in new jersey so it uh it it stays out west uh but it's been reported all over

the world actually now the there are a couple of interesting things about these chupacabras. One is that people have found them, especially in Texas, right? Are you familiar, Robert, with Texas blue dogs? No. Okay. I've got to tell Robert something about Texas. So this lady, I don't have her name written down here. She was a Texas nutritionist.

By the way, I will say, when it comes to cryptids people taught me about in Texas, it was the chupacabra. Oh, wow. Yeah, we're basically Mexico. Yeah, not Ted Cruz, who is the other famous Texas cryptid. Yeah. But unlike Ted Cruz, this chupacabra had actually been to a farm and it had been ripping out the throats of these animals, right?

And this lady had a problem with the animal's throats being ripped out. And then one day she finds a corpse of what she presumes to be a chupacabra. It is hairless. It looks kind of like a dog, but it has pronounced glands on its bumps on its back, I guess. And it has thick blue skin. So what would you do, Robert, if you were living in Texas, you come across a dead chupacabra?

I mean, fry it up. A little bit of adobo sauce, you know. Maybe even some green chili, throw that shit on there and just kind of fry her. I hadn't even. Yeah, that makes sense. That one didn't even hit me. But yeah, I know there was a couple of taco spots we went to in Texas, which that might have been what was going on.

Yeah, you just get whatever kind of meat. It doesn't matter. Meat's meat. Yep. So that's not what this lady did. She was a nutritionist, perhaps. So she was a little worried about the nutritional content of chupacabra. She had it stuffed and it's in her living room today. Okay.

That sounds science-y. Is it just like a coyote? Like, what is it? Well, that's an interesting question, isn't it, Garrison? That is an interesting question, Garrison. Yes. What the blue dog seems to be is some kind of hybrid of a Mexican wolf and a coyote that has some kind of mange, which has made all its hair fall off. Nearly all of the chupacabras are some some sort of canine with mange because mange makes it

look like a fucking monster yeah yeah so what yeah i mean like if you saw a giant sphinx cat you would also think that's a cryptid yes yeah and especially if they've been ripping the throats out of your animals right because these poor coyotes and feral dogs and such are so weakened by the mange that they can't prey on wild animals. And so they tend to come... Okay. Right, it's pretty easy to catch chickens if you can get them to the coop, right?

Because they've got nowhere to go or to catch goats. And so unfortunately... Poor little guys. What's happening is that these dogs, these various canids are getting mange. And they are unfortunately too weak to hunt. And so they're killing things like captive goats and chickens. And that is where the chupacabra myth comes from.

Going back to the bipedal chupacabra, though, it's very interesting. That sounds a little bit more fun. Yeah, so in the year before the chupacabra was seen, there was a film made in Puerto Rico and it was called species god oh man yeah okay okay so unfortunately the uh the original eyewitness reports which began the year after that film was released uh-huh yeah this i've heard they all perfectly describe the

creature uh it's got the spines on its back uh radford radford is the person doing writing the book radford said the uh the resemblance between the creature which is called sill in the film and the chupacabra is really impressive so yeah the uh the old quadrupedal chupacabra it's a dog with mange the bipedal chupacabra seems to be exclusively explained by this this movie and people's feelings about united states colonialism in puerto rico specifically the number of defense facilities and labs in the yunque rainforest and their feelings that maybe something like this shit could come out of one of these u.s labs because if the u.s was developing a terrible creature that sucked the blood of people it would absolutely do it in one of its colonial properties, right? Yes. That entirely makes sense.

So this, in a sense, the Chupacabra, according to Radford's theory, gives a physical manifestation of this feeling of disgust with the United States. I've got a couple of other cryptids. I was going to talk very briefly about the Beast of Proctor Valley, and then I want to talk about the Curse of Bodhi, which is a curse, not a cryptid. But first, Robert, do you know what will not ambush your livestock and rip its throat out? I mean, like a good sheepdog wouldn't do that.

That's right, and that's why this episode is presented by Border Collies. Wow. Let's hear from some Border Collies. We finally got the big deal with the Border Collie industrial complex. That's good. Yep. Just use promo code Robert Evans when you're buying your Border Collie for 10% off. Just walk up to a Border Collie and shout my name in its face.

Try to grab its food away from it rapidly, too. That's a good way to get their attention. And see what happens. Yep. Refuse to be herded. Yeah. See if it likes that. Welcome.

I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal tales from the shadows as part of my cultura podcast network available on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast all right we're back i hope you've all got your border collies because this next cryptid is a local one. Okay, so they're a cryptid a bit like the Chupacabra all across the country. But the one that we have closest to San Diego is called the Proctor Valley Beast.

Now, to understand the Proctor Valley Beast, I think you've got to understand Proctor Valley. Proctor Valley is exactly the sort of dirt road that you go down when you're 16 years old, when you want to go somewhere with your date, pound a few beers and get away from your parents, right? These kind of exist all over the country, all over the world, probably. And they're a little closer, they're close enough to know about, but far enough away to seem weird and distant right and proctor valley is a gravel road and you can drive down it a regular car but it's pretty washboarded there's no lights

there's no street lights nothing like that right these days your greatest danger when you're driving uh riding a bike or walking or driving down proctor valley road is the border patrol absolutely hauling ass in in one of their um for Raptors, which they seem to have obtained. I will never understand their love for the Ford Raptor. It is. I don't know how much those cost, but that is an obscene amount of money to spend on a pickup truck.

Well, it's also like, look, if I'm going to be out in the middle of nowhere and trusting an off-roading vehicle, my first pick is not going to be the Ford goddamn Raptor. Well, you've got to buy American, Robert. Yeah, but they're Border Patrol. Of course they're driving Fords. Unbelievable.

Yeah. Well, they always have a predator drone hanging out. It can come rescue them. Yeah. Yeah. The Border Patrol and steroid abusers

in my old neighborhood in West LA shaking hands over the Ford Raptor. Yeah, Ford Raptors with illegal tunes. Yeah. Ford Raptors, the car you can only drive if you have adult onset acne caused as a result of injecting hormones into your fucking thigh every night yeah they sell a lot of them in la coincidentally yeah well you really need one for you know getting down beverly hills not the good hormones like the ones you you steal from

a horse's blood yeah yeah the uh the hormones you take when you're wanting to be more macho, but maybe not quite achieving your gender insecurities. Okay, so legend has it that a young couple headed off down Proctor Valley Road one night, and their car broke down. So the young man gets out. This is a male-female couple, and he's going to fix the car, right? And he says to the lady in a very chivalrous way that she should lock the door so she's safe right that's the last she hears of him so she assumes he's gone off to get some help and she nods off

right she's got the doors locked she's very safe she nods off and she's awoken by a kind of scratching sound and the wind's howling every Every time the wind blows, there's a little scratch on the roof. Scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch. Wind noise. I'm not going to do the wind noise. And she starts shitting herself. She's very scared now. Scratch, scratch, scratch.

Wind, wind, wind. Scratch, scratch, scratch. And she stays there till sunshine when she's sun up, when she's woken up by the good people of the san diego sheriff's department san diego sheriff's department are shouting they're pointing guns they're doing their thing why are they doing that because her boyfriend is hanging upside down dismembered from the tree above her and his nails are catching the top of the car every time the wind blows him right he's been killed by the proctor valley beast now the proctor valley beast is an

animal of kind of nondescript shape and size uh the in the 1970s a local radio dj organized a search for the proctor valley beast right people went out at night previously the proctor valley beast most of the stories it kind of looked uh like a kind of winged bipedal half human goblin creature it changed its form in the 1970s when people uh conducting like it's kind of a teen radio thing in the 1970s right people conducting this search reported finding a deranged cow okay the cow was probably not deranged the The cow was just sleeping. Yeah. I've known more cows than most people. I grew up on a cow farm.

I've seen them behave in a variety of ways. I've never seen one appear deranged. Sometimes they're moving very quickly. Sometimes they're scared. Sometimes they're sick. Deranged is an interest because cows don't really have enough going on up there to be deranged. You didn't grow up in the United Kingdom in a certain period of time, Robert, when our cows became mad.

Well, but that's still, I've seen cows that have mad cow disease and they're like, they're ill, but they're, I don't know. Yeah, they're not like, ooh. Yeah, that's a crazy cow, wouldn't it? They're not like forgetting the name of their eldest daughter as they lose their way home. Going on violent rampages. They're not asking where their husband,

who died 23 years ago, is when they wake up in the middle of the night. Anyway. A senile cow. They have to go and live on... They go and live on a farm when they get old. That's why you haven't seen him, Robert. I sure do like that young Ronald Reagan.

That's my cow voice. Yeah, yeah. They get old. They forget things. They vote for Donald Trump. They do a fascism. That's what happens to cows. It's the only way cows can die.

Otherwise, they live very happy and fulfilled lives in the countryside. So why do we have this Proctor Valley beast, right? Why is there a mad cow that murdered a young man who was out late murdered a young man who was uh it was out late nights with a young woman no one no one knows who this young man is right i did to try my best to find reports of any murders in proctor valley uh and of course it won't surprise you to learn that we have in fact discovered dead bodies in proctor valley because unfortunately

proctor valley is just a few miles from the border and ah yes well and uh I've spent quite a lot of time out in that area and unfortunately the people that we are finding down in Proctor Valley haven't been killed by a deranged cow or a bipedal beast but in fact by the elements right so people trying to cross the border and find a better life for themselves and not making it as far as the dirt road, which leads to a small town, which leads to a big road, which leads to a big town that is close to there. And so what the Proctor Valley Beast is a myth that serves to tell kids to not drive down dirt roads late at night on their own. Right?

Do it, kids. Fuck your parents. Yeah, absolutely. Fucking send it. Your Miata can handle it. Get off road. Yeah. Do some drifting drifting what's the worst that could happen uh maybe if you're out there take a gallon of water uh and uh maybe maybe i'm not gonna say that because there might be a crime uh yeah we can cut that but i was gonna say a handgun with a single bullet in case you get stuck off road

a silver bullet and uh yeah and stuck off road. A silver bullet. Yeah. And a nail to hit it with. So the last curse I want to get to is the curse of Bodie State Historic Park. Do you know where that is, Robert? No. When you said Bodie, I thought immediately about the movie Point Break. Okay. Haven't seen it.

Oh, well, that's okay. Garrison, you seen it? No. You haven't seen Point Break? Oh, sorry i forgot this is you've seen point break this is an audio medium yeah that's right yeah i can't shake my head no no i have not seen point break you haven't seen point break no oh my god oh my god i only watched the filmmakers previous far superior film that will not be named uh-huh this is a joke that like one person will get who's listening well we're gonna have to watch point break but there's a guy named bode on it and he is kind of a cryptid oh interesting so there bode has a bit of a problem right bode is an abandoned he was robbing all those those banks anyway yep this story does involve some robbing

oh good yeah but i have a bit of theft on the podcast. So what happened to Bodhi is Bodhi's got a problem, right? Bodhi has a problem specifically with mail because almost every week when the rangers from Bodhi travel into town to get the mail, they have to collect half a dozen or so little packages containing little things like rocks, pieces of wood, fragments of pottery pottery or coins. And all of those little packages have letters attached to them. And I'm going to read from some of those letters. Please find enclosed one weather-beaten

old shoe. The shoe was removed from Bodie during the month of August 1978. My trail of misfortune is so long and depressing it can't be listed here another one you can have these godforsaken rocks back i've never had so much rotten luck in my life please forgive me for ever testing the curse of bodhi okay so what we got here what we got here is a curse right just good old-fashioned if you steal something from the town, the town will come back and hurt you, right? Yeah, yeah. So Bodie popped up in the late 19th century gold rush, right? It's in between Mono Lake and Lake Tahoe.

It's named after a gold prospector. There was some gold found there. In fact, at its height, Bodie hosted around 10,000 people, right? And for those 10,000 people, there were 60 saloons, which is a pretty good ratio. There's multiple documented gunfights on the main street in Bodie. It seems like your stereotypical Wild West town, but after the gold rush was over, it wasn't such a great place to live. So people abandoned it. And it's now managed by the California Park Service, right? And the

California Park Service curates this ghost town in arrested decay so that people can come it and it's now managed by the california park service right and the california park service curates this ghost town in arrested decay so that people can come and see this little slice of history and there's a lot we can learn from these like these places that have been abandoned right we can learn a lot about the history of everyday life like oh what things do people have in their kitchen why with this next to that why Why is there a knife here? Why are the beer bottles kept here? There's a lot that historians could learn over time that they might not find initially. So it's important to keep these things in a really pristine condition. The problem that they had was once they opened the park, you could just walk around town. It's

not like a museum. There aren't little ropes. There aren't plexiglass dividers keeping you away from stuff and people took that as an invitation to steal shit and steal shit they did so uh the a park ranger who i cannot find the name of anywhere uh but at some point a park ranger giving the walking tours around Bodie started telling people about this legendary curse. And this curse, he said, made it so that anyone who took anything from Bodie would be pursued by bad luck for the rest of their life. Didn't really think anything of it, just didn't want people to steal shit. And as a result, hundreds of people who had stolen things from bodhi started returning them in the mail right they're blaming everything from cellulitis cancer failed relationships on on the thing that they stole from bodhi uh now this would just be funny if it wasn't for the fact that every single one

of these items has been stolen from a protected site right so yes the park service has now set itself up with this huge administrative burden which is reporting a theft for every single shoe or piece of glass or button that's stolen from bode so it's taking up a huge and inordinate amount of their time and they no longer will speak uh i've tried to reach out i didn't get a response i did i did drop them a facebook message on their page uh trying to trying to talk to someone about this but they no longer talk about the curse because it's created such a burden for them

filing police reports on all these broken buttons this is the actual curse that they did themselves this is how most curses actually work you just actually the effect is what you turn the thing into and now you're forced to do all these police reports and that's the actual effect of the

curse yeah i think it's wonderful i think it's great that they made this this rod for their own back uh you know you know what won't curse you with cancer or cellulitis garrison i cannot i yeah there's there's a lot of weird stuff that exxon mobil will give you cancer so yeah well the gold that we're about to plug uh that's totally totally safe you can huff that gold you can melt it down dip your hand in get a gold-plated hand totally fine so yeah lick it lick it bop it you missed that too garrison sure it's a shame no bop it was incredibly popular when i was a kid okay it was like everywhere welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, we're back. And having all received our little bags of gold for that plug we did yep i have mine right here i like to uh keep it with me in case the shit hits the fan i've buried i've buried mine in the middle of the oregon desert smart i've buried a couple of things in the middle of the oregon desert none of them gold well that, that was that Bigfoot. It depends on your definition of gold. Yeah. Bigfoot's armpit is what you buried out there. And your definition of that guy, I started a barbershop. Anyway, whatever, continue.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah. We don't need to talk about that on the podcast. Thanks for raising that out, Daniel. We don't want any more of Robert's felonies on Maine. It's only a felony if the police find the body that's true but maybe you could uh put put some shit out there about a curse related to the body yeah for sure i'll give it some mange yeah and then struff it so why why do we have curses encrypted uh obviously partly because it's just fucking fun uh and partly because uh some of our beliefs right like if we if we look at dirkheim or what dirkheim thought religion was religion is kind of an an outgrowth of society that unites people based on a moral code right

and uh functionalists more broadly in sociology believe that these beliefs serve a function in society and i think a lot of these things help us explain things that we can't otherwise explain or give a more palatable explanation for things that we don't care to explain right or things um and like in in nearly all of these cases there are things that rip children away from their mothers, right? There's another Mexican like shape-shifting witch that rips children away from their mothers, right? Unfortunately, there are things that rip children away from their mothers and your taxpayer dollars pay for them, right?

But it works a little better to explain things that don't fit with our other systems of belief. If we fundamentally believe that the world is good and capitalism is wonderful and that gradually things will trickle down so that everyone gets richer if the rich get richer first, it can become very hard to explain the state of the world unless you are a member of the Conservative and Unionist party of great britain and northern island of course and so instead we create these external things right um these things that go bump in the night so sometimes they can be a proxy for external forces right uh the chupacabra in a way kind of explains as we get closer to nature and nature pushes back on us a little bit that

why that happens, rather than just saying, oh fuck, we've given all these coyotes mange. How on earth are we in a state where there's a blue dog walking around? The chupacabra also serves as a way to personify for people in Puerto Rico, either consciously or unconsciously, the terrible impact of United States colonialism there, which it's not very hard to see. Even the Proctor Valley Beast, right? That says, stay away from this dark road near the border late at night.

There are reasons to stay away from there, but unfortunately there are also reasons to go there and try and help people who are genuinely suffering. And lots of people I know go and leave water out there. So these curses, they're kind of like credit scores right they're not real but they can sometimes ruin your life um and so sometimes it's just easier to pretend that that it's magic doing that rather than this overarching global system which is not very nice and that's kind of where i want to finish up i guess is this...

These are ways to explain things that we can't always explain, and that's sometimes okay, because sometimes it can be hard to confront these things. You got anything else you want to say about cryptid, Robert? I don't know. I think if you're in

an industry that's adjacent to illegal drugs and you murder someone in the woods, it's probably a good idea to blame it on Bigfoot. So that would be my advice for our listeners is to blame your crimes on Bigfoot. Mm hmm. I don't know. Do you guys believe in Bigfoot? Let's let's end by talking about that. Like, like, actually, like, believe in the physical.

Yes. Like thing that's been thusly undiscovered that roams in forests. Some people say ape-like garrison. Primate, I think, doesn't necessarily mean ape-like. Sure, primate. Maybe Australopithecus.

I do not think that there's a physical one exists. Now, I think like we've mentioned before like the words you know you can say like a curse isn't real but it can still have effects based on how we talk about it and how like we can kind of make it real by our own actions and same thing like i don't think bigfoot the primate exists but as a cultural symbol that has impact. It is real in some way, but it's not like, it's not like a physically manifesting.

Yeah, I would agree with you, except for I would say it is real in a physical way. And- Have you seen a Bigfoot, Robert? Are you gonna, is this where you drop in your Bigfoot sighting? Yeah, I actually have. I've seen a couple of large animals out in the woods.

I have seen weird stuff in the woods. I don't think, I'm not comfortable calling it Bigfoot. Well, I am. Weird things in the woods, certainly. Yeah, I've seen a lot of weird things in the woods, and all of them were Bigfoot, as far as anyone has ever been able to convince me. And you know, when you get right down to it,

isn't that what Christmas is all about? Yes. Happy Halloween. Happy Halloween, everybody. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources.

Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.