Last Podcast On The Left - The United States of Cryptids: A Conversation with J.W. Ocker

Episode Date: December 28, 2022

Ben 'n' Henry sit down with author J.W. Ocker to discuss his new book "The United States of Cryptids", what makes mysterious creatures so interesting, his unique outlook on believing in the unknown, hometown cryptids across the country, Cursed Objects, and MORE!Classy Night Out Tickets Available Here! Fri, December 30, 2022, 8:00 PM – 10:00 PM PST The Pack Theater 6476 Santa Monica Boulevard Los Angeles, CA 90038 

Hey, what's up, everyone? How are you doing? Ben Kissel here hanging out with Henry. Oh, thanks for doing my big foot cry for JW. Very good. Thank you all so much for giving to our Patreon. Without you, we're absolutely nothing today's guest. He is the author of many books, but the most recent book is the United States of Cryptids. JW Walker is with us. JW, thank you so much for being on the show. Oh, thank you for having me on. I am jazzed about this. This is great. I just actually find it kind of interesting that we can even capture you and we can see you usually. Yes. Well, would you say that? All right. Honestly, though, are you a primate?

Am I just going to get here? Are you primate? Are you interdimensional? Oh, primate, definitely primate. Interesting. Indeed. We often talk about how Casey Anthony is a 10 when it comes to murderers, but in real life, she's about a six. But when it comes to cryptozoologists or cryptologists, zoologists, fantastic learning. You, you're about an 11. You're very active, man. You can actually, it seems as if you're clean. And I know what there's a lot of times. I didn't know it was going to podcast. Yes. Within the cryptid contingency, there's some, what do you got underneath the zoom? I can't actually, I can't see below the mouth.

There's some people who resemble the skunk ape or maybe the moth man in more than one way, specifically when it comes to odor, but you're very well kept. Well, I'd cheat though. So those people would actually do the real work of looking out in the forest, in the swamps, in the fields to find these things. I just go to local tavern and see what cryptodeme beers they have behind the bars. I'm not, not that good at cryptozoologists. That's called the power of being the executive. That's your year. You're leading them. Can I ask just straight up, we'll do one of the, you know, it's a hacky question, but like, what brought you to here? Like, what got you to the point where you're a professional cryptozoologist?

Well, that's the thing. So I'm not a professional cryptozoologist. I'm a professional faker. Great. Great. So I basically, I chase oddities. Anything weird. I want to learn about and write books about, and it could be anything. It could be paranormal stuff. It could be art installations. You're like an expert on Edgar Allen Poe as well. Exactly. Yeah. So I spent a year, my life tracking down every site building piece of him that still existed on the planet, everywhere he lived. So yeah, it's just something weird and different and not, you know, me and a cubicle and, you know, whatever for it.

Was it just about that? Was it just about like trying to not be a cubicle warrior or was it, or is it something? A cubicle warrior. Yep. That's cool. I should. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. I mean, a lot of guys become cubicle warriors, but it's bad. Yeah, it really is. Oh yeah. No, for me, it's mostly depression and boredom. Yeah. A lot of that. And when they just left my apartment, which I actually lived from Maryland, I was living in a small little town, the next town over from the Blair witch town, actually, and, and I just got realized I was like in a bad spot. So I just left my apartment one day and started driving

the weird stuff and writing about weird stuff. And then suddenly over the course of a year, it turned into a thing. So that's awesome. Yeah. Were you able to dabble in opium when you were experiencing everything that Edgar Allen Poe experienced? Did you dabble in what he was dabbling in? I did not. I did not try to become an opiate addict, although it was one of my many failings. So honestly, you got to get in the headspace. You really do. So let's talk cryptids. Now, you wrote this book. Now, this is kind of, this book is, it is a little bit of an encyclopedia of sorts, right? Like you do definitely, you have chapter heads, but as you go through

the world of cryptids, I guess that's what it is. You know, last podcast and left, we've been covering various level of cryptids for years. And I think the big question that always seems to come to mind is how materially real do you believe something is and especially like, or like, you know, I suppose it could vary as well between what cryptid is, you know, the Loch Ness versus Sasquatch or New Jersey devil on your spectrum of cryptids, what feels quote unquote materially real and what is more in the realm of what we joked about up top, maybe something interdimensional or is there, is there something to like folklore coming to life? Yeah, which cryptid could you actually have sex with? Save that for

the end if you would. So yeah, well, the thing is, I'll give you some obvious answers. Sorry about that. The obvious answers is anything underwater that you can't see all the time, right? Yes. Truth is, you know, cryptids happen all the time, right? The Kraken, right? Was just a mystery that nobody knew about. And then suddenly now we have giant cephalopods and tanks in the Smithsonian, right? So that's the real one. The gorilla was a cryptid at one time. Like there was rumors of this giant, hairy, dark creature in jungles that nobody believed until something in most the world. Obviously, some people knew about it until somebody went

and found the pelts and found some skulls and brought it back to the rest of the world. The platypus is my favorite one, right? That's another one that was a rumor that nobody believed to suffer some people in this island down the corner of the United, the corner of the world. They found a body, brought the body up to the rest of the world. And the rest of the world was like, this is not real. You made this. You sewed a duck's bill into a beaver's body. So they actually had a live animal for them to believe that creature existed. So those kind of cryptids do exist. Like the actual, like not, because the definition of a cryptid is an animal that mainstream science doesn't accept as real or as real

anymore. And that happens all the time. So they do exist. Now, the more fanciful you get, right? Then you get to the range of like extremely plausible biological entities, right? These are giant primates, right? Because we're, all of us are primates right here. So they exist. We have primates that exist. So you just make them a little bigger, a little hairier and throw them on the forest. And that doesn't stretch your imagination. When you go all the way to like a snagly gaster, then you're kind of like stretching your imagination a bit. So that's a nice little spectrum, which makes a lot of fun. No, what's a snagly gaster? You don't know a snagly gaster?

No. No, yeah, educate him. Oh, snagly gaster. This is a good one. This is one from Western Maryland. So, snagly gaster looks like a chicken and a dragon mated and is choking on an octopus. So it's got a beak. It's got tentacles coming out of the beak. It's got wings, other three wings. And it's just rumored to fly around, you know, Western Maryland. And I think the biggest story about it is the most known one died in a giant vat of moonshine. It just got kind of the smells good went down there, got boiled. And then the moonshine police or whatever they're

called came in and blew up the entire place. Whoa. That's fun to sell. Yeah, that's because that's the idea. They're like, well, you know, well, you would have seen one. You would have seen one of a wasn't for that explosion. I can't believe what happened. Moonshine's a great preservative. We had a body and everything. What a way to go for the snagly gaster. I remember they have those things. You ever see those at bars where they have like the

toe in the thing of liquor and then you have to take the shot and you have to let the toe hit your lips. Yes. But this actually maybe brings me to like you. So you write articles for Atlas Obscura, which I do love. And there was one recently that you wrote, like, I feel like that fits perfectly into this, this idea of like, could be materially real because they thought it was one thing, but then it became a cryptid. The Shunkow O'Rocken, right? The Rocky Mountain Hyena.

So the Shunkow O'Rocken is interesting because it's based on a real event. Something actually all cryptids, this is the beauty of cryptids, even if you don't believe in a snagly gaster or a puck wudgy or some of the more random ones, they, the, the event happened. Whatever they saw kicked off a giant mania that that's sometimes a summer, sometimes a year, sometimes years. And the newspapers followed them. Local newspapers followed the story for the entire time. So something happened and it's documented its history. Even if you don't believe the source of the history, it's a real thing. So we just saw this happen with the new wave of the Mothman sightings in Chicago and outside

of that area. Exactly. And that's in the newspapers now. Like somebody saw something, whatever it was, saw it. And now history, some, some of the history happened, not the old kind of history in the fifties and seventies and sixties where you jump, I call it hunting parties and parties where either you jump together and go chase it, or you just party, take the party around it. Yeah, exactly. Shotguns and moonshine in the back of the car. So yeah, so the Shunkow O'Rocken is a great example. It was a real creature that a farmer had a problem with, ended up shooting it and couldn't really, didn't really fit any creatures he'd seen.

It was vaguely canine, maybe hyena, kind of dog-ish. It was one of those like really vague canine creatures. Yeah. And then the story, the story got passed out. It got connected to Native American lures. They always do. They always get connected to Native American lore. And then eventually there's a body. They had a body somewhere in the museum, I think somewhere in Montana these days. Well, if you look at here, I got, I got the picture. I could show Kissel, right? So they have a, because they ended up calling it the ring docus, right?

It's another word for, yeah. It says seven different names, I think. Gaiuscus is another one. It's like Cullum names. But they, so they, it wasn't a museum for a hot minute, right? And they said, I guess they got rid of it. And there was this one picture of it. And so you look at it and like what we, because we cover on, you know, we talk about the chupacabra kind of off it, but it was, most of the time when we talk about chupacabra, we're talking about a dog with mange. Sad-ass dog.

Yeah, dogs all fucked up. And it does just kind of look like if I'm, and I'm not a scientist, but I look at it. You're not? No. No, no, no. And the first time I look at it, the first thing I say is that's a jacked up wolf. Like he's, oh, he's jacked up. That's all I got. No, that's, that's the other thing. If we do a body, it's usually taxidermy. And often taxidermy, not very well, because you can definitely make any animal pelt look like a mutated creature and with whatever, just yeah, level of skill, you know?

Yeah, just being bad at it. Exactly. You can create whole realms of mystery. Do you think that like that's why this is my question, because I get, I love cryptids and like you, you must be passive because like on one level, do you make judgment calls about where, whether things are real or you're just like, I just collect stories? No, I don't usually make that. Well, I'm a skeptic at heart, a sad skeptic. I'm a sad skeptic at heart. Like I'm really sad that I never had a ghost experience, even though

I spent a big period of my life and abandoned asylums and abandoned prisons and great yards and ghosts. I feel like I'm like, I'm six cents blind or something like that. So I'm really sad about it. I've been told that I'm too horny for the phenomena. Yeah. He's too. Aliens, ghosts. I want to see it. And I can never, I same thing. I can never see it. I saw an orb. He says he saw an orb, but we, he's, we've seen the picture and that's up for debate. It was hard.

No, it wasn't. I saw it besides the picture. I took, I saw a ghost train. I saw a ghost train. I saw an orb. I'll describe it to you. I was driving outside of, it was in Atlanta and there was a train. It was train, literal train tracks. And I saw a thing that looked like a wobbling beach ball that went up and down and sort of a weird like hovering pattern down the railroad track. And when I brought it up in the show, I had several people being like, that's called a ghost train. It's a ghost train. So as we just heard, it makes people sound insane, right? When they talk about cryptids or orbs, how do you maintain sanity in this world of madness?

Because the two, two reasons. I'll get a little sentimental at first and I'll get, get back to like what we should be. But one is that when somebody tells me that they believe in Bigfoot, I don't hear like, you know, tin foil hat. What I hear is somebody saying, I want cooler stuff in the world. I want the world to not be like kind of ripped apart of all its wonder. Like I want more mysteries to be uncovered. I don't want, I don't, everything is owned for McDonald's franchise. I want more stuff out there. So to me, like the pursuit of cryptids is like wonder, which is one of the most amazing parts of being a human. So I feel like kinship with them. Like I also don't want there to be every single animal

already cataloged. I don't want that to happen ever in my lifetime, right? So there's that part. And the other part about it is whether the stories are true or not, the outcomes are real. Like for instance, a big part of the book is like you guys said, this is basically, in some ways, my book is a cryptid encyclopedia, which one cryptid encyclopedia comes out every year, right? Every year, somebody makes one. The difference with mine was I only do if I could travel and see things. Their entire towns, entire groups of people that celebrate their cryptids so hard that they have statues dedicated to them and festivals every year and plaques and just it's a real

phenomenon. So right now in Indiana, I try to go Indiana, every year they celebrate this giant turtle that was supposedly found in a pond outside of town in the late 1950s. So for the past 40, 60 years, they've been celebrating a gigantic turtle. And you can go there any time of year to sure of us go. And there's like turtles everywhere because of this. So that is real. That celebration is real. The turtle statues outside the dentist's office is real. And it kind of makes it real. It kind of like you make it real. There's something about, because we talk about in Tulpa, that that comes up like in some

way, it's almost like you are creating a living thought form that that is real. And then it's also, it's much needed tourism for a lot of these places where people come and show up. And that's why I got no problems with it. We talk about the Boggy Creek monster. That was like another kind of an example that it's like, they have a big foot economy. Yeah. Yeah. I went down to the folk monster mart as part of this. And it was just fantastic and glad that thing exists. Well, so I believe here's like, I remember I'll throw this at you. All right. Let's say Tantamout. Tantamout. I'm using the word Tantamout.

Tantamout. Tantamout. Right. In what foot, in what, I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. Bigfoot, let's say it's real. Let's say it is real or the idea of giant apes are real that are hidden. How do they stay hidden? Like what is like, is there a thing where like, do you really sit in like, is that your goal to like hammer out like whether or not something's like real or not? Like what do you want? I know you're saying you want to keep the mystery alive, but is there that in the pursuit of making it real? How did this start with Tantamout? I don't know.

But it's like, how did you like, like, where do you sit with that? Like, because I think a big foot, like of all of the cryptids, it's like, well, that sounds most like, you said it's plausible. Like it sounds like a thing. It could be real. So the question is how they hide, how they hide it, how they hide. I hope it's because the world is bigger than I think it is. As far as me thinking, there's no way they're hiding, right? But I'm hoping that it's just a bigger world that I really think it is. Like a forest is massive. I don't really understand how big like whatever the forest on the Pacific Northwest is. But the weird thing about that is there's been a big

foot siding in all 50 states, right? At least one that includes tiny Delaware and tiny Rhode Island and Hawaii on the middle ocean. So those kind of places I'm like, I don't know if you can hide a big foot in Delaware. Maybe you can. I don't know. But like, hopefully you can hide one in Appalachia, right? That's an undiscovered country, I hope. I hope we haven't like explored all of that. But I assume the world's gigantic. I hope it is. It might not be, but that's how I would say it. It's just big. What do you think what, what does the cryptid tell us about the region? Obviously Pacific Northwest, you got a lot of trees. That's good. That's good for your big, that's good

for your big foot. Definitely big foot country. And then maybe you got some, a lot of lakes. You got lake creatures. What does it tell you about the region and how the cryptids relate to it? Yeah, it's where you can hide them, right? Because like you said, how do you hide these cryptids? So generally most cryptids started at the golden age of cryptids is the 1950s to 1970s. That's when most everything was seen, right? And then where they were usually seen was rural towns, with some exception, but mostly it was rural towns. It was every single story of a cryptid, no matter what it is, starts with some teenagers in the back of a car, on a back road, at night, you know, outside

of town, that every single one starts that way. And the reason is you need, you need a few things. You need some kind of natural landscape, I think, to hide it, right? So rural towns have that. They have forests, they have mountains, they have fields, they have places to hide it. And then you need the boredom to make it a story, right? And rural towns have that as well. But right now, right? Today, I found out there's a cryptid running around my town. I'm in, I'm in Nashville, New Hampshire, which is about 40 miles north of Boston. If I heard there's a cryptid running around my town, I might get off my phone and go find it or jump in my car or I might, but I probably won't. I'll probably just follow

it on Twitter and see what happens, you know? But back then, you can all get in your car, it's be a party, the town center will be filled with people talking about it and the local newspapers writing about it. So it's like real life, it's like real life Pokemon Go. No, it's exactly what it is. Exactly. And that's actually why we have, I think we have so many different kinds of creatures. It's not just Bigfoot. There's like, in the book I found like more than 70 and most of them are very different because we want to collect them all, right? We don't want it just to be the United States of Bigfoot. We want Chico Rockin and Snally Gasters and Puck Wedges and every kind of creature we can find.

How do you think we get, like, I guess that's where it is. In my mind, like I'm trying to kind of, I think about cryptids and how they are so different. And I wonder like, like, where does that come from? Like, I guess it's like, is it really just a response to the natural environment? Is it, is it something that people have inside that they project out? Because I do believe that the phenomena on some level is quote unquote real, but I do, I think that it has something to do with kind of some interdimensionality, which is if you listen to John Keel, like we kind of participate in it, right? Like we're help, we help bring it out. Like, how do we get such variety encrypted? And then like, what,

what do we do about the really crazy ones? Like, you know, you said about the Snallywag, like that's a, that's a crazy one. Like, but is that because like they do see something like that? Can something exist like that for a moment in time and then not exist ever again? Or is it a bunch of people just like, again, just trying to create some of that cryptid flow? That's tantamount. Tantamount. Tantamount.

I would say it's mostly Hollywood. There actually is a lot of theories of different kinds of creatures that came out that looked from Mark. We like a movie creature that came out a year before, Tupacabra is actually that one, not the dog version, but the Puerto Rican Tupacabra. Yeah, Puerto Rican version one. The Wolf Woman of Alabama came out like right when the commercials for Mephisto Waltz came out, which is this trippy 70s movie that, and one scene, the trailer had this dog with a human head on it walking around. But so, but I think the variety just

comes from, that's a good question. I've never been asked that question. Why do we have the variety of creatures we do have? That has to be in, so obviously we have some, some very similar carryover, right? Harry Primates, leg monsters almost always boiled down to Pliosaurs. Yeah. And I think it comes from fantasy for, I don't know, it's a good question. I want to say, the evolution is fantasy until you find something in science to hang it on, right? So,

Because they don't know, because like when someone's in a rural town, like, because those of before the internet connected everybody, I think it's interesting is that they, it's not like they were looking for a gap. Like we haven't had a big turtle one yet. All right, let's make it up. Right. It seems that like they do kind of spontaneously come up with all of these different forms. Yeah, it could be. And I know there's a, there's a subsection of cryptids called, from called lumberjack tales, right? And these, these creatures came out of tales that lumberjackers

were going to forest in the 19th century, right? Dark forest, middle of nowhere, no electricity, no internet, nothing, right? They're just out there. It here sounds, things would happen. And they would spend their time around the campfire making up personalities and creatures for what would make that sound or what would do this thing. And you get stuff like hodags out of that. And you get, you know, you get stuff like walker's cats out of that. Yeah. And hodags, like Rhinelander, Wisconsin celebrates the hodag, like it's a, whatever, a military veteran, they have statues of it and they have Christmas merchandise and they have festivals every year.

So sometimes it's that, sometimes it's just human imagination. And sometimes it's the ability, the human mind to make patterns. So if you see something rustle in the bushes, you know, what does it look like? Like the infield horror looks like a beat up kangaroo like that. And I came from one person, one person's description of it, right? So the human mind is great at creating variety, I think. Yeah. And of course, around the lumberjack, or it's a great day to be a tree, if you know what I'm talking about. When it comes to, I don't do this to the man, this man's worked so hard on his book.

I have a serious question. We're killing all of our animals. We're killing all the bugs. The human race is destroying a lot of shit. Do you feel like because we have destruction of so much wildlife that cryptids are almost filling a void where it's like, no, we're not destroying everything. There's still these cryptids out there that they exist because I was just reading an article, 75% of all the shit that was in like 1800s is dead. That's why cryptids are our apology to the planet. I think it is. I think that they are because they're like, yeah, we're killed so much stuff, but we're making up new ones with our brain. New ones with our mind.

I like it. We're all going virtual reality, right? We're all metaverse, so like all of our creatures should be metaverse too. I do, but I do sort of believe that that's kind of there. That is a kind of explanation for some of this stuff. Like who we talking about the sand and clown. There's a couple of these like super weird shit, right? Like when it's super weird and you have like several people say like the flatwoods monster, you know, like something like that where you're like, what in the living fuck did these people see? Cause it's like they're all freaked out and weird. And yeah, they can make it up, but it's also like, I also sort of believe in the idea of screen memories. I know that's

true. Like people say they experience something because it's to cover up something traumatic. So they'll make, they, they, they project to something else onto it, but it's so crazy. Just like how easy it is for people to project stuff onto like their reality and have it show up. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good example too. Cause the skeptics always, I think Joe Neco mostly the skeptics called the flatwood monster a owl and a tree, right? Whatever to go from, to go from an owl and a tree to a red domed alien in a skirt, robot alien in a skirt. That's a big job. So either like there's a totally wrong explanation or the human mind, like you said, can build whatever, whatever it needs to out of the materials

at hand. But yeah, some are super weird though, for sure. You did write a book, you wrote a book called the 12 nights of router house where you stayed in a place, right? Like you just decided to be like, Hey, I'm gonna see, I'm gonna see a ghost, right? Is that the kind of, was that the idea? So that was a novelist, but in that case it started out as a nonfiction project where I was like, you know what? I'm going to stay 12 nights or 13 nights inside of a, inside of a haunted place and just document my experiences. I'm a nonfiction writer mostly. I'm going to do this and I sat down and found a place. I wanted to do it and started planning it. And then I realized this is going to be

the most boring book that anybody's ever read. If you mean just walking around dark hallways, like just jumping at sounds. So then I just turned into a novel and made it more interesting. But have you tried the investigation? Like when you were there though, like I'm saying the same thing, like kind of like, it's weird how you'd think that you're an expert on all this phenomena. Your brain would provide something for you and really give it to me. I don't know. I think I just broke into the belief factor and not just with like paranormal with like belief and like the goodness of humans and like whatever positive. I don't believe in anything really. So like, I'm like a universal cynic, but yeah, I feel like I

should have even one story that I could exaggerate into like this amazing paranormal experience. And I don't even have that level of a man. Henry's, Henry's requesting you to lie is what that request is. I am hoping, which is just fine. But don't you think show business show business. That's right. You and every producer are making a reality show, right? There's so much real JW. You don't mean I'm going to react. I would react. I would react if you were reported, by the way, lie. What if we did it? So the thing is, we do live in a world of mystery and these animals, like you were just discussing a fricking trippy dude. I got, I watch a lot of my Instagram. I watch a lot of bug footage and animal footage.

Do you think if we, isn't that something, but do you think if we actually saw the moth man, how long would it take before we're like, yeah, that's the moth man. Let's move on. It's boring. Oh, seconds. That's, I call that the curse of cryptozoology or the curse of cryptozoologists where you study this thing your entire life indirectly, right? Through footprints and first in tails and eyewitnesses and those kinds of things, never getting your hands on a body. You finally find it. Look, I found the moth man and then zoologists and anthropologists come and say, thank you. That's ours now. And suddenly it exists and it's not yours anymore. It's not, it's not a cryptid. Once you discovered, it's not a cryptid. So

like it just, it just stinks. So you really can't, you can't discover it. You can't get the cryptid. You can't literally know. And I think here's okay. Here's a policy question. You know what I see a lot, right? Here's a tantamount. This is a policy question. Right? What, what, what, what institution does he have policy on? A BFRO. Okay. Right. You might even talk to my lawyers on this one. This is policy JW. So, do you know, do you know BFRO? I'd like all those groups. Like it's like another, it's a big foot hunting

organization. Oh, so I never spoke, I never spoken. It's a BFRO thing. Yeah. I'm sorry. You're not cool. Like I am in the circles I run and we, you know, the, you know, the lads out of BFRO. Um, so, so sad, but BFRO just sounds like a place in Wisconsin where a bunch of fat dudes hang out. It is, it is. Um, but think, so they talked about, they, they had a reaction to a Oklahoma came out and they said that it's okay to hunt big foot. Right? That was the thing. They get this set up as big foot. Like this is my thing. If we're seeing, that really mean it's like, how do you feel about shooting big foot? That's not nice. It's not nice,

but I do want a body. I want a body really bad. Yeah. So I might, if I had morals, I might bend them a little bit for this one because I want to see you. You're going to end up like that doctor in Minneapolis who shot that fucking lion, dude. And then everyone's going to protest you and they're all going to be like, why'd you shoot big foot? That was the only one left. That's the thing. I'm okay with shooting the first big foot. We can't shoot the second big foot though. Just the first. Second big foot needs to be on television. Well, this is why it's hiding. This is why they don't want to be found. They're horrified of us. No, I want to ask them what they think

about the Ukraine conflict and then I want to get them canceled. Oh, that's what we'll do is we'll get big foot canceled and then he'll be on the show. Oh, that'll be great. Do you think the sea or the center of the earth holds more cryptid life? Oh, the sea has to, right? For some reason, the sea won't, the sea won't stop making creatures and won't stop making the most terrifying creatures on the planet. It just won't stop. Like every time they find something new down in the Marianas trench, the thing looks like a nightmare where there's a vampire squid or things you'd never even heard of. It's terrifying down there. So I'm pretty sure they're making it down there in the ocean. All the elements of life

are down there, right? The first person to see an octopus must have been scared. Absolutely. I would have been unless you'd been like, that's a lot of arms to eat. That's right. The first person to eat one. That's for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I ate in a whole octopus once I went to this restaurant. I've heard this a thousand times. I hate this fucking thing. He ate an octopus brain and he got sick. He was really, really nauseous. He was very big. He was big, but floppy thing. I can see why people taste good though. No, no. I like octopus arms, but then it turned me off of octopus altogether. And then my wife said I can't eat octopus anymore because they're too smart. And I said, if they were so smart,

why are they in the fucking tank? Yeah, that documentary filled a lot of our orders. Unfortunately. Yeah. A lot of pulpo went down because of that. Now you've searched for a lot of cryptids in, but if you found the most elusive crypto of all, it's called love. Yeah. That's a good question, but I don't get my cynic. So I don't know if that one exists. I'd probably find Bigfoot before I found love. Yeah. I say that's a joke because my wife is somewhere in this house. So I just heard her scream. I just heard her yell. Just because you're married. It doesn't mean there's love there. That's sad. Super It's true. Look at the queen. Dead. That's also a cryptid. Dead. Well, that plays into

it. When it comes to community, I was watching this documentary on flat earthers where ironically they've proved the world is round. But one thing that stuck out to me was that these people are exceptionally lonely and they all got together in the back yard, but really it was more about like these orders are good. Do you feel like the cryptid community? It's a, I mean, that's like, how big of a component is just that? The human connection. Yeah. When it comes to Bigfoot Zoology, I look for a Bigfoot with the most important thing with the friends I found along the way. Exactly. It's true. Right. So like this, like most French things is full of outsiders and misfits, right? Looking for connection, including myself.

I clean myself in that group. And it's so funny when you go to a cryptid festival or cryptic convention, these people mostly aren't giving scientific paper rows on whether Bigfoot exists or not. There's some of that there, but most people are there to party. They're there to party. If you, if you know the word hodag, you're a friend of theirs. They'll party with you. They don't care if you believe it or not. They want to draw it. They want to wear a shirt with it on it. And they just want to like party with people who aren't, you know, sitting on the sofa watching football on Sundays or going to the golf course on Saturdays. They want it. They want something else. And that's why they're awesome people.

Like again, they're just different. I'm always looking for different people. And so that's why I try to like hide, hide out in these circles. Hodag is a great name for a football team. It really is. Washington Hodag. That's what they should have done as the freaking commanders. When you hang out with a lot of these other cryptid hunters, cause like, so you're, you're a journalist and a researcher and like, that's kind of what you are going to, but when you meet the hunters, like what's the difference between you and them? Like do you view them like, like as you said, like they're doing the dirty work and you kind of like collect

the data afterwards or like, do you were like, well, that's a step too far. Or do you see yourself in a couple of waiters at Loch Ness like anytime soon? Have you ever joined them on their journeys? I have not. Um, I, I have an aversion to dirt under my fingernails. It's really bothers me. And I would do it. I didn't get a chance. So a lot of that, a lot of the book has written like some of the pandemic post pandemic, when everything, like everybody was like, you never do what you could do. Honestly, you're allowed to or not do. So I didn't get to go. A lot of the festivals were canceled and it was like a massive time, but I would do it. I would

go out. Um, it's just, it's just, I, I, so I wreck, I compare cryptid hunting, like literal cryptid hunting, people that go out in the wilds to fishing. It's really boring. Uh, you get some, it's peaceful. You're out in the woods. That's nice. But the end of the day, you're kind of standing in a spot and, you know, standing in a spot most of the time. So, which is again, that's real research. You sit there for, that's why in the paranormal, some of the shows are funny because they go for like six hours and then they find everything. Oh, really? Real paranormal investigations would last years at one place, right? So it's just, um, they

sound exciting. Let's go hunt bigfoot. But in the end, you're just camping. Yeah. You're just drinking. It sounds fun. Honestly, I actually would rather do that than fishing. Yeah. Absolutely. Because I would sit and watch them go past. I mean, like, it's just some guy went, yeah, we saw him up there. 1979 was doing right over there. And it's like, I listen to him talk. I won't ask him about COVID, but like, I'll ask, but the rest of it's up for games. You know what I mean? We'll talk about everything. I think cryptid wise, it'll be really safe. Well, you don't want you, you're, you're adverse to the truth. What do you think is the most

likely to be real UFOs, alien? Well, UFOs are aliens, UFOs or ghosts or cryptids? I'm going to go with, um, uh, aliens. I'm going to go with aliens. Well, do you ever, have you ever done any of the research about them all being connected like aliens and UFOs and UFOs and cryptids being sort of together like in the same basket? Um, what do they call that? Oh, look at that. We're right at the same time. That's great. Yeah. And what that is, is so Occam's razor is something like, um, if you kind of rule out everything that doesn't make sense until you all you have left is the only thing that makes sense. What a lot of people in the fringe, these French communities do, they go the opposite

way. If something makes sense, it does something that doesn't make sense. They start adding stuff to it. So once you can't find Bigfoot, it's because he's a ghost or because he's an interventional being. And then once you can't find proof, you can't find the Roswell crash pieces. You're like, Oh, maybe UFOs are part of that phenomenon too. And to you, it's a John Cube land. And you're just like, everything is hard to understand because everything is part of this weird phenomenon. Um, and just, you kind of live there because there's no proof there. It's a fun place though. I like that place a lot. It's very fun. Yeah. Yeah. You just see it to weed. Tincture really helps. I'll tell you that. Yes. So that, that's

kind of that, that connection that I think is a last gasp at, um, um, asserting everything exists that exists. Well, it's because they want an empirical version of the story. Like they want it to be like solved, which I think it's very difficult because I think what you're saying is true is that the problem is that if you do solve, you've just solved yourself out of a job. Yeah. Cause now it's gone. Like what else are you going to do? You can go on, you, you no longer allowed an ancient aliens. It has been founded. You now have to go on the news and they're asking you a bunch of other programming. Yeah. Yeah. You're going to miss all of that. You don't get to let Giorgio Succolis sleep on your couch.

Oh, I love that man. Great hair. Great. Have you heard those stories? Yeah. He's, he's a good point though. Success in those industries means not to usually get promotion when you're successful in your field, but like you get demoted right away. How much do you think that's true with, with the ancient alien theory? I would sort of like replaced religion for some people. Do you feel like cryptids kind of fill that void also is, I don't know, we're in a strange religion kind of kickback now too. I don't know this next generation is our losing religion for some reason. We have a giant and I'm not, I used to be religious, but anymore, but like it's a giant void in people's souls. You have to fill with something

and if that's aliens, if that's Harry hominids, if it's something beyond the norm, we need it, you know? Yeah. And isn't Jesus a cryptid in his own right? I believe he was, if he was around, he was a cryptid. He's right here in my heart guys. He's knocking on your door. So you also wrote a book about cursed objects. This is a, there's a question, right? Cause we have friends that are, I have, I'm friends with like people that are attached Zach Baggins, right? And then are my, my friends, the new Kirks also sort of like, yeah, they're great, right? And they're kind of in the world now. They're, they talk a lot about cursed objects. When you were working with cursed objects, like, did you bring any into your

home? Did you bring anything around? Or like, it's like, how do you feel like about like, cause like the hell that you're like, the new Kirks are firmly against any sort of transportation or purchasing of cursed objects. Sure. Cause I was scared to do the fuck shit up, but did you have any, they also would make a competitor to them. So that's, that's a problem as well. Yes. So what do you do with it? Yeah. We're like, well, how did you go about those processes? Did you just listen to people's stories or did you handle any objects? So I did. So as part of it, I, there's a whole section that I book called the business of

cursed objects. The new Kirks are in there and a Zaphis is, um, Baggins is in there. I went to his amazing haunted museum, by the way, which I was, I went in there, not, not thinking I was going to like it at all. I'm coming out just completely disturbed and loving it. And then I bought one. So it's also the eBay trade. If you go to eBay and type in cursed object right now, there's going to be scores of things for sale and they're going to be for sale. Pretty high prices. So I went in there and finally it was funny. I went in there to like buy one and didn't buy one right away. And I got retargeted retargeted ads all over my internet experience saying, we have cursed objects. Yeah. So I ended up

buying one. I bought one and brought it to my house. Didn't tell my family. What was it? Huh? What was it? It was, cause I have a little haunted box. I had people brought me nails from Baleskin house. Like I have all that type of shit and, but I kind of waved shade. We got a little cursed object here. It's a little pug. It's a little, it's a little brass bulldog. And the person who sold it to me was so good. They were like, my father bought this from Asia somewhere, brought us all nothing but misfortune, harm whatever. If you want this, be careful what you wish for and really played it up. Right? I bought it. I won the auction. I guess I think it was the only bidding. And when she

sent it to me, she sent me with like warnings all over the box saying, be careful what you wish for, be careful with this thing. And when I realized, and I got, I got a little trepidation, honestly, again, I'm a skeptic, but there's some scientific proof that cursed objects can work. But even then I was like, what if I'm wrong? It doesn't matter if I, what I believe if I'm wrong. So if I bring this cursed object to my house and I say, it could hurt my family. I also took with us on vacation. But I, it was a, there's all this kind of stuff. She wrote stuff in the box and be careful what you wish for. Here it is. And I, what I realized what I was doing was not buying a cursed object, but buying

the experience of buying a cursed object. Right? So usually cursed objects are, you go to China town, you find that one shop with everything's piled around, you try to buy something and the owner says, I'm not selling you that. I'm not, it's the beginning of gremlins basically. I'm not, I won't sell you that. I know, I know it has a price tag, but I'm not selling you that. It's not for sale, it's in the store, it's not for sale. And then you finally convince them to let you have it and you take it home and then whatever, all hell breaks loose. And you can't get that anymore these days, right? The world's too connected. And right now, yeah. And just buying by now at eBay is a very sad experience,

very convenient, very sad experience. So she did this entire thing with her emails to me and her box scrolls to make me think, or maybe it was a legit, sincere warning, but the very least gave me the ambiance that I was bringing something forbidden into my house. So it was, it was a lot of fun. And then nothing bad happened that year, unfortunately. But I just sat there right in there, I wrote the entire book that thing looking at me. What makes a cursed object cursed? Is it like an experience that happened around it or did someone cough on it all weird? Yeah, there's multiple ways. There's purposeful, so somebody with the power can imbue it with

the ability to hurt people, right? That can just be somebody like a shaman or it could be even a person just using their mental will to say, this is going to bring cursed. It could be like it was around the scene of a tragedy. So it's kind of sucked up all that negative energy, like a battery or like Shirley Jackson seal house, right? It could have just been born bad, right? All the way down to what's made in China sticker. It was just born bad. So those are kind of the three ways I found discovered that the cursed object is cursed. So, and then of course there's like the scientific version of a cursed object, the no sebo is basically if you think somebody's going to harm you, it'll harm you. We're able to trick

our bodies into being harmed just like a placebo. We can trick our bodies into being healed. The exact opposite is also possibly true. Yeah. That's very interesting. But so did you find in your searches, they were like, well, this sounds cursed as hell. Like this was like, was there one of them or any of them that you were like, well, there's something here. They obviously believe it. Well, my favorite example, and this is also going to be a very boring example, because I know you guys probably know it, is the Hope Diver. I grew up in DC area and that was like my local museum and I was always like going there. But this thing has an actual provenance of hundreds of years old. We know exactly where

it was at a given time. And it was surrounded by tragedy the entire time. Like documented tragedies, not just like kind of legends that nobody has documents for documented tragedies. So and it's the perfect cursed object, right? It's small. You can lose it. You can actually slip it into somebody's pocket. It's expensive. So it's beautiful too. It's got like a lure to it. Yeah. And it's crossed the world. It's been in the hands of monarchs. That one has the most legit story in the world. And now that it's in the Smithsonian or it has been for decades, you know, you can blame all the all the ills of the country on it for sure. Excellent. You know what? I'm really catching a theme that I really appreciate, which is

you're trying to examine and live in a world that like as you said before, with your cryptid kind of like your theme, it's like you let mystery in. Let's let's look for the mystery and not necessarily like dig it up, but kind of like be in it, experience it. Does it make the world better at the end of the day? And honestly, a lot of this stuff does. It makes the world more interesting. It gets people stuff to do. It's like it's again, very few of us are happy with just making our lawn nice every single day. You know, there's something more interesting out there. Absolutely. That's another than the lawn gnome. The lawn gnome and the more famous cryptids out there. Yes. There's an entire town dedicated to gnomes

in Minnesota. They had it just all all over there, like the park in the little town. They add to it every year. It's like, it's like their cryptid. That's scary though. That's kind of fun though. I like that. Do you think that Edgar Allen, but then you wrote that whole thing about Edgar Allen Poe. What was the mystery there? Was there anything that or was it kind of just a sad truth of what it takes to be a lonely, weird author? No, the mystery there for me was how does a random, not random, but like a poor, robusted poet become an international phenomenon even today, right? We have a football team named after Edgar. We have shows about him every single second. There's a Christian Bale movie coming

out here in a second about everybody recognizes. Yeah, Jillian Hansen's in it too. But every single person recognizes Poe. Why? He was a broke poet who wrote spooky stuff and also comedy. He wrote mostly comedy, honestly. But there's no reason why he should be as famous as he is. And for some reason he is or something about him, he's more famous than most most things. And like, I don't know that he's been on The Simpsons. He's been everywhere. Oh yeah. That was the big mystery for me. How does this guy go from random 19th century broke poet who is unknown in his day mostly to one of the most biggest phenomenon in culture continually, continually big phenomenon. He's probably kind of upset that like he was treated

like dog shit in real life and then he died and everyone's like, we love this guy. We liked him because he was he was a supreme weirdo, right? And then he did die a mysterious death that always kind of helps. And then he looks the part. I think there's something too, especially in a like, we really like somebody who fits the idea of what it is that they do. Like we like that. I think like, you know, what Stephen King does, like he helps like, he made a big scary house, you know, and he lives up and there's something to it. Like, you know, he's getting, he's walking the walk and we love that. Well not anymore. I did follow Stephen King on Twitter and he said about the about the

World Cup in Qatar. He said, if you, if you need alcohol to enjoy a game, you have a problem. I said, you're Stephen King. You're a drug addict. You're an alcoholic. Please tell me, do you feel that your mystery now, do you think that like, how's mystery affected your life? Like, is it one of the things that now with like you as a person, like do you like, like, I don't know, like, do you feel like it makes you like experiencing all of these things? Well, it sounds like you're a good guy to hang out at the bar with. That's for sure. Oh yeah, until I get too much drink for sure. But yeah, no, I love it. It makes me go to

places like that's a big part of all my books, even though they're research topics. They're all also travel logs at the end of the day. So if I'm writing a book about a girl, I'm in every state he's been to, I'm in London, visiting his stuff, cryptids, I'm going across a, across a country looking at towns. It was my book about Salem mass. I lived in Salem for a month. Like it's, I just, I go places. It literally adds to my life to go like, I make friends as well. These book projects. So it's made my life better. And I, I assume it makes a lot of other people's lives better. Or we would say, well, it's definitely better to do a cryptid zoology than storm the Capitol. I'm really proud. That's what I always say.

W walker. Thank you so much. And also you didn't answer sex, which cryptid. Oh man, hold on. I've got my, hold on. This is your, your wife will let you get out of jail free with this. Yeah, because you, it doesn't exist, honey. I'm going to have to say, I'm going to go back to, I'll take the Wolfram in a mobile. I'll take a female werewolf. Yeah. Cause it's got the good parts and you have to worry about the barbed penises. You don't gotta be, you gotta worry about like a snap and weird like cloaca or anything. Never bothered me. You know, it's fine. See, excellent. The United States of cryptids, a tour of American myths and monsters. J. W.

Walker. Check out this book. If it's just around the holiday season, is it not? Maybe it's a gift. Perhaps. Maybe it would be a good idea. J. W. Thank you so much for being on the show, man. You're wonderful. Thanks man. I appreciated everything. Yes. It was fun for sure. All right, everyone. There it was, our conversation with J. W. Walker. He was very funny. Again, handsome, lovely man, very handsome for a cryptid attached person. He's married. I mean, we'll out of them have wives, but it's what's because it allows them to go have more free liberal fun with their buddies when they're out on the trail. Right? We're in gay. We were just out here. We're just seeking warmth. Absolutely. We ain't trying

to be like, I'm married. I married to a full-blooded woman, very big woman. There's a lot of fun. There's no rules when you're hunting cryptids. Nope. The United States of cryptids, a doer of American myths and monsters. Check out that book, y'all. And if you're in the Los Angeles area, come and check out me. No big old Hammy Ham's Ed Larson himself. We're going to be hosting a classy night out pre New Year's Eve celebration. It's December 30th at the pack, 8pm. It's December 30th, 8pm at the pack. Tickets are still available on the website. Uh, it's all going to be cavalcade of a bunch of hooved us, uh, yelling at you and, uh, just don't wear anything. You're afraid to get wet. That's, that's not, that's

not true. That's not true. Honestly, I hate to be wet. Why would I do that to you? Ham, Ham, thank you all so much for supporting us, J W Walker. Thank you for being on the show. And yeah, we'll just be back with you a little bit later on. Thanks for supporting our Patreon. Thanks for your money. We'll talk to you soon. Hail yourselves. I'm dating. I'm in your home. Congratulations, everybody. I'm cold.