Lore - Lore 272: Tick Talk

Episode Date: January 27, 2025

We live our lives by the clock and never think twice about it. But history is filled with stories that should make us very, very afraid of time. Narrated and produced by Aaron Mahnke, with writing by GennaRose Nethercott, research by Cassandra de Alba, and music by Chad Lawson. ————————— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  Official Lore Merchandise: lorepodcast.com/shop All the shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com ————————— Sponsors: MeUndies: Get insanely comfy-yet-sexy Undies and Loungewear, and score huge site-wide savings at MeUndies.com/lore, enter promo code LORE. Bubbly Cleaning: Head to BubblyCleaning.com/LORE to get your first 3 hours of cleaning for only $19. Thanks so much to Bubbly Cleaning for sponsoring this episode!  Quince: Premium European clothing and accessories for 50% to 80% less than similar brands, at Quince.com/LORE for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Acorns Earl: Acorns Early is a smart money app and debit card for kids that helps them learn the value of money. Head to AcornsEarly.com/LORE, or download the Acorns Early app to get started today! To report a concern regarding a radio-style, non-Aaron ad in this episode, reach out to [e-mail] with the name of the company or organization so we can look into it.   To advertise on our podcast, please reach out to [e-mail], or visit our listing here. ————————— ©2025 Aaron Mahnke. All rights reserved.

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Learn more at td.com slash low rate card. TD, ready for you. ["The Butterfly Effect"] We've all heard of the butterfly effect, that idea that one tiny insignificant action can ripple out into massive, unpredicted consequences, like how Gavrilo Princip, stopping to eat a sandwich, allowed him to assassinate the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, thus starting World War I. And sure, that's a famous one, but there are countless more examples, like the fact that a simple cup of coffee led to one of the bloodiest moments in history.

There are few routines more sacred than our morning cup of joe, right? In fact, sacred is more on the nose than you might think. You see, the first coffee was imbibed by Muslim mystics known as Sufis, who, during the Ottoman Empire, drank the stuff ceremonially while chanting the name of God. Soon, the beverage began to travel, and so naturally people needed a place to buy it. Some say the world's first coffee shop was called Kiva Han, and it opened in roughly 1475 in Constantinople, Turkey, what is now Istanbul. Other sources say numerous cafes popped up in Cairo, Aleppo, and Constantinople alike.

Whatever the case, early coffee shops serve the same role in society as they do today. They were places to socialize and to share intellectual discourse, to discuss politics and current events, and because coffee was discourse, to discuss politics and current events, and because coffee was cheap, these watering holes allowed people of all classes to mingle and converse about the world around them. Flash forward to pre-revolution France, coffee shops still served as intellectual hubs, and thus provided a space for French revolutionaries to gather, discuss injustice, plot, and ultimately enact one of the most violent revolutions in world history.

In short, some anonymous, caffeinated Sufi was the flap of a butterfly's wing that led to the French Revolution hundreds of years later. Time is funny like that. History is one great big Rube Goldberg machine, each moment a link in an endless chain of cause and effect. And if stories from history teach us anything, it's that time is more entangled than we could ever have imagined. I'm Aaron Manke, and this is lore. Imagine that I were to hand you three photographs. The first depicts a child, the second an adult, and the third an old man. Now place them in order in your mind.

I'm willing to bet that you line them up left to right, starting with the child at the far left, then the adult, followed by the old man. When we think about the movement of time, it may seem pretty straightforward, literally. Except here's the thing, it turns out the way people conceptualize time actually varies from culture to culture, and a lot of it has to do with the language that we speak. As English speakers, most of us conceive of time as a horizontal line, a line that, yes, moves from left to right. Why? Because that's the direction that we read in.

Plop those same three photographs in front of a Hebrew speaker though, and they'll probably arrange them in the opposite direction from right to left, just like the Hebrew language. People who speak Mandarin, which is read vertically from top to bottom, often envision time as a vertical line where the past is up and the future is down. Pretty wild, right? And to spin your head even more, consider that in English we kind of conceive of time in two directions, left to right for sure, but also back to front. The future is ahead of us, the past is behind us, and this is visible in our language too.

We're running behind if we're late, and we're looking forward to something in the future. Heck, in Swedish, the word for future, Framtid, literally translates as front time. But get ready for a real-time warp because, surprise, surprise, not all cultures see it that way. Speakers of Aymara, an Andean language, use a word for the future that means behind time.

After all, we can't see the future, so it must be at our backs, while we can see the past, as so it must be at our backs, while we can see the past as if it were right in front of us. And honestly, that makes a lot of sense. Now, as someone who studies folklore and oral tradition, I have to wonder, what about cultures without a written language? How do spoken cultures order time if they can't link it with the direction in which

they read? Well, ask the speakers of Cooke-Tire, an Aboriginal Australian language. When handed those same three photographs, they won't orient them from left to right, right to left, or even up and down. No, they'll arrange those cards differently, depending on which cardinal direction

they are currently facing, moving from east to west. It's best understood by this quote from Lyra Boroditsky, author of a seriously fascinating paper called How Language Shapes Thought. Here's what it says, When they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north,

the cards went right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body, and so on. We never told anyone which direction they were facing. The Cook Tire knew that already. Meanwhile, speakers of Yupno, an indigenous language from Papua New Guinea, conceive of time in topographical terms, uphill and downhill, representing the valley in which the Yupno

people live. Oh, and don't forget, this is all just how we perceive and experience time, which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with how time actually works. In fact, and don't forget, this is all just how we perceive and experience time, which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with how time actually works. In fact, physicists aren't so sure that distinct categories of past, present, and future even exist at all. And hey, if you aren't ready to take my word for it, how about Albert Einstein? He said, and I quote, the past, present, and future are only illusions, even if stubborn ones. So time isn't linear.

Well then what the heck does it look like? Well many physicists believe in a concept called block time, in which time functions like a landscape, where all past, present, and future events are hanging out together. It's a weird concept to try to wrap your brain around, so if it's not making sense to you, don't feel bad. I was in the same boat until I heard this particular analogy. Imagine an old movie shot on film. The whole story is there, developed on that strip of film, all existing at once coiled up on the reel. But the projector can only see one frame at a time time moving along in a straight line According to some theorists time works a little like that. It's all happening at once

It's all developed, but we can only see one frame at a time Now I know what you're thinking if time is a film strip shouldn't it be possible to rewind and fast-forward? Well if a handful of former Vatican priests are to be believed, all you need is the right VCR, which not only exists, but happens to be sitting snug in the Vatican archives. It's called the Chronovisor, and it was supposedly created by a Benedictine monk named Father Pellegrino Ernetti. Allegedly, he worked with a scientific team that included the architect of the atom bomb, Enrico Fermi, and former Nazi scientist Werner von Braun. Although there's not even the slightest bit

of evidence to support this. We'll just have to take the priest's word for it. Using antennae, metal, and cathode rays, the chronovisor was designed to pick up echoes from the past the way that a TV can pick up channels and display them on a screen. And according to these Vatican priests, the thing worked. Ernetti claimed to have watched Cicero speaking to the Roman Senate. He saw the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. But Ernetti's boldest chronovisor claimed that he had watched the crucifixion of Christ, which he even snapped a photo of and then published in an Italian magazine in 1972.

Granted, the photo looks suspiciously identical to a cheap Jesus statue hanging in an Umbrian church, but, you know, who am I to judge? Years later, in 1994, as Renetti lay on his deathbed, his conscience seemed to get the best of him and he admitted that it was all a hoax. Well, sort of. You see, in some accounts he conceded that there was never a chronoviser and that he had made the whole thing up to draw more people to the Catholic Church. But other accounts claimed that he only admitted to faking the photo as well as a transcription of an ancient speech, but swore that the chronoviser itself was real. And they claim any confessions Ernetti may have made

were only done under pressure from the Church. Why would they want to keep it hidden? Well, you'll have to ask Pope Pius XII. After all, he's the one who supposedly hid the chronoviser deep within the Vatican archives, desperate to keep such a powerful weapon from falling into the wrong hands. The concept is seductive, the ability to travel through time. Countless sci-fi stories have explored the idea, but that's unfortunately all they are.

Stories. Not to be a killjoy here, but physicists tend to agree that time travel isn't actually possible. There are a bunch of reasons why, a big one being that the amount of energy needed to build a time machine would be more energy than there exists in the entire universe. Bummer. And yet, that leaves us with a pretty big mystery. How do we explain something that numerous regular everyday people have claimed to experience? The concept of

a time slip. Now, we aren't talking about Marty McFly and the DeLorean here. Time slips aren't facilitated by a machine. In fact, they aren't actually on purpose. Instead, this is the kind of time traveling that happens randomly and without warning, totally bewildering an unwitting victim. Take the experience of a middle-aged woman named Miss E.F. Smith from rural Scotland. On January 2nd of 1950, Miss Smith was walking home from a friend's cocktail party, her little dog in tow. She hadn't intended to walk, mind you. After all, she lived 10 miles away in the town of Letham, and it was late at night. But when icy rain caused her car to slide into a ditch, she was forced to abandon it and start trudging along on foot.

Shivering against the cold, Miss Smith marched down country roads. She passed acres of farmland and silent hills. And finally, almost eight miles later at two o'clock in the morning, she reached the outskirts of Letham. And there she saw them. It was a group of people, and they were carrying flaming red torches. They wore strange garments, tunics with tight pants underneath, and antiquated rolled headgear. But the most jarring part would have to be the bodies. The ground was strewn with corpses, corpses that the torch-bearing people were sorting

through one by one. They were obviously looking for their own dead, Miss Smith would later report. The one I was watching would bend down and turn a body over and if he didn't like the look of it, he just turned it back on its face and went on to the next one. Smith's little dog began to growl, but just as she arrived at the town, the figures disappeared. And that was that. They were simply gone. So, who exactly were those people?

And more importantly, who were the dead? Well, both Smith herself and investigators from the Society for Psychical Research came to the same conclusion. Miss E.F. Smith must have witnessed the aftermath of an event known as the Battle of Nectensmere, a battle, I might add, that took place in the year 685. That's right, it seems that Miss Smith had slipped nearly 1300 years back in time. The garments she'd seen, along with the red-handled torches,

roughly matched how ancient Pictish warriors would have looked during Nectensmere. The battle was an absolute slaughter, which would explain the bodies. Plus, many have long believed it had indeed taken place on the outskirts of Letham. In short, all signs pointed to time travel. At least it did, until 2006, when new research revealed that the battle had likely taken place in an entirely different location. Which leaves a chilling question. If it wasn't the Battle of Nectensmere that Miss Smith had witnessed, what on earth was it?

Yes, it's true that she was alone and exhausted, and she would have seen this all through dark rain, and she was probably a little drunk too. Maybe Miss Smith had only thought that she had spotted those figures, but it's a lot harder to dismiss what happened just seven years later to three fifteen-year-old Royal Navy cadets in Suffolk, England. One Sunday morning in October of 1957, William Lang, Michael Crowley, and Ray Barker were sent out on a map-reading exercise. They were tasked with navigating across four or five miles of countryside to reach a small town called Kersey, a picturesque little village regularly drawing a bustle of tourists to its quaint, postcard-perfect streets.

As they approached, the cadets could hear the church bells ringing and glimpse the steeple through the trees. And yet when they finally entered the town, something was off. The village was utterly deserted. No tourists, no residents in the streets, no open businesses. The only store they found was a filthy cobweb-ridden butcher shop in which rotting carcasses of oxen had been hung, now green with age, as if abandoned weeks before. Not only that, but there was no sound anywhere in the town. No birds or engines, and most notably, no church bells.

In fact, the church they had seen from afar was no longer there. But the strangest part of all, there was not a single sign of modernity. No cars, no telephone wires, no TV aerials. The architecture of the houses looked almost medieval, and when the boys peered through windows, they found the rooms barren and empty, devoid of people and furniture. And while it had been autumn when the cadets set out that morning, the leaves on the trees in town were a bright spring green.

The boys, as you can expect, were freaked out. One later recalled, and I quote, the place felt quite evil and hostile to us. Oh, and as if it weren't already creepy enough, the young cadets were also struck with a terrifying certain sensation that they were being watched. After about half an hour of exploring, these three cadets fled, returning to base to report their experience to their superiors, who, of course, dismissed them and laughed it off. But paranormal investigators have a different opinion. It's believed that the three teenagers had slipped back in time to the mid-15th century.

And there's compelling evidence for it, too. For one, the large church tower in town would not be completed until the late 1400s, and the butcher shop they saw, that same spot in modern Kersey while currently a private residence, had been a butcher shop in the past. Then there was the lack of furniture, which would have been common in the 15th century as the average country cottage-dweller couldn't afford much with residents keeping their belongings in baskets or boxes instead.

But of course, there's one final detail in need of explanation. Who was it that the boys felt watching them? Well, according to some theories, the answer is simple. The eerie watchers were none other than the people of bustling modern-day cursey. Factor fiction, one thing is clear. Time slips into the past are a perplexing situation, and honestly, it's difficult to know exactly what to make of it all. But history tells us that there's something even more terrifying than tumbling into the past,

the glimpse of a future that you're powerless to change. Leslie had decided that a quiet Saturday morning was in order. As a housewife in 1974, she would have been on her feet much of the week, cleaning and cooking and keeping up the home. But finally, it was time to relax, and so that morning she settled in to watch a movie being shown on TV. Just as she got comfortable, though, the screen went blank and the broadcast was interrupted by an emergency bulletin. It was horrible news, too.

The anchor reported that a massive explosion had just taken place at the Nipro chemical plant in Flicksboro, England, just 25 miles away from the town of Grimsby where Leslie lived. According to the newsflash, a pipe at the plant had failed, causing a chemical leak and igniting a massive cloud of vapor. The explosion was like a bomb going off. It shattered the plant's windows and cracked the foundations of nearby buildings. Out of the 72 employees on shift at the chemical plant that day, 28 had been killed, with another

36 badly injured. Off-site, 53 more people had been wounded due to their proximity to the building, and Leslie watched in horror as the dead were numbered and the culpable chemicals named, and then the news flash ended and her movie resumed as normal. Later that day, two friends joined Leslie for lunch, and as they chatted and caught up, she realized that neither of her guests had heard about the explosion yet. She told them the tragic story, just as the news flash had reported it. Come nightfall, Leslie and her husband sat down to watch the evening news. Naturally, the anchors discussed the Flixborough disaster, but there was something odd about

the reports. You see, the evening news gave the time of the disaster as just before 5 p.m. Leslie was confused. After all, hadn't she seen the bulletin that morning? Her husband teased her about getting the time wrong, while Leslie assumed that it had been the evening news anchors who were mistaken. But either way, the couple went to bed and nearly forgot about the whole discrepancy. And they might have, if not for the next morning's papers. There, the reporters also asserted that the explosion had taken place at 4.53 in the afternoon. Frantically, Leslie called her friends who

had been over for lunch long before 4.53 p.m. Had they remembered her telling them about the explosion, or was she losing her mind? Much to her relief, both friends affirmed that yes, Leslie had absolutely told them about the disaster at lunchtime, numbers and details included. In fact, they were so adamant about this that both would later sign official statements insisting as much. Leslie was not going mad, but what she had experienced was much, much worse. She had known about a horrifying event hours before it had taken place. When I realized what had happened, she later told the Grimsby Evening Telegraph, I felt

cold and started shaking. I kept thinking, if only I'd known I could have warned the factory that something was going to happen, I might have been able to save the 28 people who lost their lives. The story of Leslie Brennan, or Leslie Castleton in some reports, is certainly a strange one. Was it a time slip, second sight, or something else? I imagine conspiracy theorists might interpret the story as sinister evidence that the explosion was planned and that the broadcast was pre-recorded. But if that's the case, why would Leslie have been the only one to see it?

Some researchers believe that Leslie experienced a premonition, one that manifested itself in the form of a news announcement to make it easier for her to accept and comprehend. You know, cosmic powers dumbing down a message into a format that a 70s housewife might understand – TV. Which feels a little patronizing, if you ask me. Others claim that the Flicksboro case is evidence of something called time television, and yes, it's exactly what it sounds like. It's the idea that electromagnetic pictures from the future may have the ability to manifest on certain television sets in the present. Honestly, it sounds a bit like the Chronovisor, which might be good news for all you time

travel nerds hoping to stumble into a time slip of your own. After all, it means you won't have to break into the Vatican for a glimpse at the past or the future. Just kick back, relax, and turn on those Saturday morning cartoons. Time is a strange creature. Some moments seem to slip through our fingers before we're ready to let go, like our wedding day or a particularly joyful vacation. Other moments, though, seem to drag their feet, ready to let go, like our wedding day or a particularly joyful vacation. Other moments, though, seem to drag their feet, teasing out our most awkward or miserable

experiences. And if the stories we've heard today are true, sometimes time can stop altogether. It's called the Stone Tape Theory, which claims that certain events, especially intense or traumatic ones, can leave such a strong impression on the environment that they are essentially recorded into the place where they happened. Events like, say, the Battle of Anaktansmir, or the Flicksboro Explosion. This theory is used to explain certain hauntings, too. Ghosts who appeared in places where awful violence has occurred. And in that vein, time slips can also fall under the stone tape umbrella.

It's called that, by the way, because according to the theory, rocks are especially good at recording past events. The past, literally written in stone. Now, you might be wondering why, if this is a thing, we aren't all stumbling through creepy hologram apparitions of the past every time we visit places like, say, Gettysburg or Wounded Knee. Well, according to the Randalls and Huff Encyclopedia of the Unexplained, for most of the time nothing is there. Then certain conditions such as electromagnetic energies in the atmosphere or the arrival of someone with developed psychic powers could act as the trigger which sets

the recording off. And they might be on to something there, especially that last bit about certain people having a knack for picking up these recordings. You see, the Flicksboro explosion wasn't the last premonition Leslie from Grimsby would experience. In fact, it wasn't even the last explosion she would predict. One morning in June of 1980, she was walking to a friend's house when she suddenly had an invasive thought about how awful it would be if there was a gas explosion.

She was shaken, but she didn't mention it to her friend. Several hours later, though, a house on that very street was destroyed by, you guessed it, a gas explosion. Now that's what I would call a blast from the past. Time is tricky in more ways than one. I hope today's tour through these bits of folklore and real-world events has left you thinking about time in a very different way. Be it factory disasters or ancient battles, some moments in time simply feel more cursed than others.

But if the legends are to be believed, it isn't just dark events that come with a curse. Sometimes the evil hides in the very hour of the day, and we've put together one last story to show you what I mean. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it. This episode of Lore was sponsored by MeUndies. Love is anything. Whether you're married, single, focusing on friendships, or stuck in a never-ending spiral of situationships, everyone deserves to celebrate love. While me undies can't

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reputation? Well, some claim that the answer lies in the Bible. According to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus died during, quote, the ninth hour, which, in modern timekeeping terms, is 3 p.m. According to legend, because of this, Satan decided to seize the opposite hour for himself, that is, 3 a.m. And because of that, there is a veritable bounty of superstitions surrounding this so-called Devil's hour.

It's said to be when the Devil is most powerful, as well as a time when witches rule the night. Some believe that if you wake up suddenly at 3 a.m., it means the devil has paid you a visit. And honestly, there might be something to that. In terms of sleep science, most people are in their deepest part of their REM cycle at 3 a.m. And being woken up by a noise at that point

can be especially jarring and disorienting Leading to the terrifying phenomenon known as sleep paralysis It makes sense that such an experience might lead people to believe that they were being beset upon by the devil in 2017 a YouTube trend called the 3 a.m. Challenge encouraged people to perform specific actions at that hour, claiming that they would encounter paranormal activity if they did. The actions themselves were simple, things like playing with a fidget spinner or talking to their phone's virtual assistant, interactions that the Devil's Hour would allegedly transform into something haunted and sinister.

Some people point to the Amityville Horror murders taking place at 3am as proof of its evil nature. Movies like The Conjuring and The Exorcism of Emily Rose also rely on this trope as an extra boost of horror. But if witches, the devil, sleep paralysis, and terrible murders aren't enough for you, if you live in certain parts of New Mexico, The Devil's Hour comes with yet another threat to worry about. Her name is La Malaura, which means the Bad Hour. She usually takes the form of an elderly woman with a demonic face and appears to humans

at, you guessed it, 3 a.m. She's said to wander lonely areas of the countryside and manifest at crossroads, attacking late night travelers. And trust me, you don't want to catch a glimpse of this lady, because if you do, it means one of your loved ones will soon die. The most common story told about La Malaurah concerns a woman who goes to visit her friend late at night while her husband is away on a business trip. She drives down the black starless highway and eventually reaches a crossroads. There, to the woman's terror, a figure appears right in the center of the

road, a figure that looks a lot like an old woman. The driver slams on her brakes, and the crone vanishes, only to reappear next to the car window, complete with demonic red eyes and razor sharp teeth. With her heartbeat thudding, the driver speeds away, but the figure keeps up with her, scratching her clawed hands against the glass of the window. Eventually, the woman begins to outpace the demon, but in her rearview mirror she sees it growing larger and larger, until the creature is the size of a tree. At last the figure disappears in the distance and the woman arrives at her friend's house, terrified and panting.

She tells her friend what she had seen, but rather than ease her nerves, her fear only grows when her friend relays the legend of La Mala Ora and what such an encounter means. The next day the still shaken woman and her friend drive back to the woman's house and are greeted by the police who deliver tragic news. Her husband, they say, was shot and killed on his business trip. At the exact same hour, the woman had seen Lamala Ora. Lamala Ora doesn't always appear in human shape, though. Sometimes she arrives in the form of a large sheep's fleece, which you would think would

be the preferable option, if not for one small detail. It's said that whoever sees this particular version of La Malaurah will permanently go insane. But perhaps no one describes the malevolent power of the dreadful Devil's Hour better than the master of the marvelous macabre himself, author Ray Bradbury. In his classic novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, Bradbury has the following to say, Oh, God, he writes, Midnight's not bad. You wake and go back to sleep. One or two's not bad. You toss but sleep again.

Five or six in the morning, there's hope, for dawn's just under the horizon. But three now. Christ, 3 a.m.? Doctors say the body's at low tide then. The soul is out. The blood moves slow. You're the nearest to dead you'll ever be save dying. Sleep is a patch of death.

But three in the morn, full wide-eyed staring, is living death. This episode of Lore was produced by me, Aaron Manke, and was written by Jenner Rose Nethercott with research by Cassandra De Alba, and music by Chad Lawson. Just like you, I'm not a fan of ads, but I'm grateful they keep the lights on here at Lore HQ. That said, if you want to avoid them, I've got a solution for you. I make a paid version of Lore that is 100% ad-free.

It's available on Patreon and Apple Podcast subscriptions, and gives you a much better experience. Plus, subscribers there also get weekly mini episodes called Lore Bites. It's a bargain for all of that ad-free storytelling and a great way to support this show and the team behind it. Of course, Lore is much more than just a podcast.

There's the book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the Lore television show on Amazon Prime. Learn more over at lorepodcast.com. And you can also follow this show on YouTube, Facebook, threads, and Instagram. Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. And when you do, say hi.

I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening. low interest rates on balance transfers and purchases to give your finances a lift. Find the credit card that's right for you. Visit mbna.ca slash trulinecarts. Give your finances a lift.