Reply All - #184 Alex Goldman, Demon Hunter

Episode Date: March 17, 2022

This week, a listener contacts us about a supernatural occurrence in her Toyota Prius. Alex Goldman investigates. Kim Kelly's new book Fight Like Hell A picture of the photo in question Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, just a quick announcement before we start the show. We are hiring. We're looking for a producer to come help us make stories. So if that producer is you, go to replyall show.com slash jobs. Once again, that's reply all.com slash jobs. From Gimlet, this is Replyall. I'm Emmanuel Joachie. And I'm Alex.

Hello, Alex. Hey, Emmanuel. So, what do you have for me? This week we have a super tech support. Okay. Okay, exciting. So it came from one of our listeners. Mm-hmm.

So yeah, I'm just going to ask you questions about this. I'm very interested in this problem. It's unique to say the least. Yeah. But first I just wanted to ask you a little bit about yourself. Could you just say your name? Marion. Yeah, Marion.

Do you go by something else? No, no, no. I go by Marion, but I don't know if I want my last name on it. Okay. Publicized. Marion wants to stay incognito for reasons that will become very clear in a little bit. And the problem that she came to us for help with, it all began when she recently bought a used car. It's a Toyota Prius, a 2016 Toyota Prius.

It's like seafone green. It's that really pretty like Toyota paint color. I would say a very soft, gentle looking car. And when Marion drives, she almost exclusively listens to podcasts. She actually sent me a list of the podcast that she listens to, and there are dozens of them, at least. Like, she listens to religious podcasts, like pray as you go, the confessional. She listens to public radio podcasts like death, sex, and money, and on point. I also listen to a fair amount of trashy podcasts about, like, reality television, one of which is actually, I would not call it trashy.

He is a, I consider him a dear friend. Everything iconic with Danny Pellegrino is probably my all-time favorite podcast currently. I don't know who Danny Pellegrino is. He is so wonderful. I mean, if you don't watch Bravo. I don't. I'm a Bravo officionado. My dog's name is Bravo.

After the network? Yes, after the network. And Mary's got one of those touchscreen consoles on her Prius. And usually when she plays a podcast, it just shows the name of the podcast itself. Like no cover art, nothing like that. But one day she's listening to a podcast. It must have been probably the second or third time I took the car out.

When I first sort of got more comfortable in the car, connected my phone via Bluetooth, I think first I saw like a generic music note or something in the space where album art should be. And then I saw my car demon. What the hell is your car demon? Can you explain what that is, please? So my car demon is he has like this long wig of like mullet hair.

He's like drooling a long line of drool. He has these scary beady eyes. He's like wearing like blue, gray like ripped up like kind of like tattered. I don't even know if it's clothes or skin. And it's very bizarre. There's no text or anything. It's literally just my demon. Uh, Manuel, I'm going to send you the picture.

of the demon via slack. All right. Okay, let me pull this up. What is that? It's Marion's demon. Yeah, a very demonic-looking creature or person, like, kind of standing, like, kind of crouched over. I mean, it's super mysterious because it is very low-res,

and it's kind of hard to tell whether it's real or, like, a painting. and it looks like they're covered in ash or something. It is a very, very bizarre picture. Yeah. The first time she saw this, what did she say? Like, what was her reaction to that? Well, I mean, her first reaction was like genuine surprise, and she was a little weirded out

because she is the one who described it as a demon and thinks it looks like a demon. Uh-huh. And she also happens to be a devout Catholic and a religion teacher at a Catholic school. Wait, really? Yeah. Being a Catholic religion teacher, like, kind of adds a layer to this.

Right. So I want to preface as a Catholic person. I do believe. I do believe in the devil. I believe in who saying Ignatius would call the enemy. I believe in evil spirit. However, more prominently, I believe that if you're in right relationship with God, then the evil spirit has no power over you. So it's not exactly like Marianne was scared of the demon, but it did start to seem like

had a mind of its own? Because it just started showing up on all these random podcasts. One day it was on two judgy girls. And then another day it was on NPR's Life Kit. And then in the bubble with Andy Slavitt. And even then, like it wouldn't appear on every episode of those podcasts. It would just show up occasionally. Like it just popped up whenever it felt like it. Okay. She wants the demon gone. Yeah. So that's my task. Get rid of the demon. I don't say this to be blasphemous, but could you do like an exorcist style thing where you I cast it out. Oh, well, I have said this before and again.

I don't want to trivialize. But again, I have said that it's fine. You just have to renounce Satan before you get in my car. So, I mean, basically, I do every day that I get in the car. I drove to work with my demon this morning. Let's go, man. Good, how are you? For service?

Yes. A little while after talking to Marion, I did what I thought was the most obvious first step. I went to the Toyota dealership. Can I ask you a weird Toyota question? Because I wanted to know if they'd ever heard of a problem like this and if they had any clue how to fix it. What did they say? Nice.

Nice. And so they were like, can you tell me what's going on here? And I was like, I don't. You need a young priest and an old priest. And you have to say the power of Christ's compelior. After the sort of requisite exorcist joke that he had to make, he told me that he'd never experienced anything specifically like this. but he did have an idea of who I might need to talk to.

That would be with Grace Note, with any images. What's Grace Note? Grace Note is this company that has like a massive database of music images. So like album art and pictures of artists. So when you are playing something on your car stereo and an image pops up for the artist, that's likely Grace Note sending it to your car stereo. Oh, so Grace Note is, its function is just to like figure out, okay, this song is playing, the screen should be showing this art from this artist.

Right. So I went to Gray's note and they declined to do an interview. And so I was like, okay, well, maybe someone on the other side of this will know what's happening. So I went to this guy named Russell who works at Pocketcasts, which is the app that Marion uses to play her podcasts. And I was like, do you have any idea what's going on? So can I just send you this picture real quick? Yeah, please do it. I mean, if I'm going to end up cursed after this, I'm a little bit worried.

Just so you can understand what we're working with here. He thought that there was maybe something going on with the car stereo and how it was trying to find the podcast art. But he wasn't super sure. And what he said to me was like, you know, you should really go to Grace Note and ask them, which, you know, I'd already tried. Yeah. And it just sort of felt like, do you know that thing where you call a customer service line and they keep bouncing you back and forth between like the same two departments who are like, oh, you need that other department? Oh, you need that other department. Oh, yeah.

I'm actually there right now with some airline crew. I have. It just felt like I was caught in that loop. And without knowing who the demon was, like who this was a picture of, none of these people could really help me. And so I figured, like, if I'm going to figure out what this problem is,

I have to know who the demon is. And so I got into the studio with producer Anna Foley to see if we could figure it out. Here, it says, Google, let's see images, visually similar images. Okay, let's click through these babies. by doing a Google reverse image search. Taffa the Darlings, which is a band, Woodstock Performers,

dark aesthetic art replay. It's really having a hard time with this. What is the name of that Russian search engine? Then I tried this Russian search engine, which a security researcher told me in the past is better at reverse image search. It's called YonDex. I tried that and nothing matched at.

I mostly got horror movie posters. I got a man or a man called raw, Rob Zombie? You don't know who Rob Zombie is? Why would I know who Rob Zombie is? Because he's incredibly famous. He directs movies. He was in a band called White Zombie for many years.

And in every one of his songs, he like ends every stanza by going, Yeah. Ah, yeah, Manespro Creep. Soba-dabat-da-da-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. Yeah. Some of the people working on the story, Anna Damiano and I, we spent like the better part of a day arguing about what this picture might be. Well, Anna was like, I don't think it's someone on a stage.

I think it's CGI. No, no, that's not what I thought. Alice is a mister person. Anna seemed to think that the picture wasn't even real. Okay, the one thing that I was like, it really doesn't look real is if you look at the picture, the drooling, it doesn't look like. It's like white drool. It's like gross, weird, like an actual human would never like look.

like this. Oh. I see what Anna's saying. Damiano was hyper focused on the hair. The hair is surprisingly like healthy. Because he was convinced

that it proved this had to be a stage act of some kind. It's like, it's got volume, it's got gene, it's got body, like. But after a good amount

to back and forth, I said that it looks like something from the walking dad and Alex said like walking dead people don't like they've deteriorated. I had started to form a theory. There is a musical

genre where everybody wears corpse makeup called black metal. I don't know if you're familiar with that. No. I couldn't stop looking at this person's face and like the way it was made up. I mean, I'm kind of a metal fan.

And the way that this demon's face was made up looked to me like corpse paint, which is this style of face makeup where you like paint your face very white and then you put like black around your eyes and mouth to make you look kind of like a skull. And there is a sort of subgenre of heavy metal called black metal where a lot of acts use corpse pain.

It's like super fast, very symphonic. They use like lots of synthesizers and they use like operatic singing with growling. They're kind of most famous for being weird anti-Christian racists. Like, no, they're terrible. Like the first wave of Swedish black metal was like all these guys who, you know, got arrested for burning down churches and murdering each other. Like, they're all truly unhinged. So, Emmanuel, I was like this could very easily be a member of a black metal band. But my concern is, if this is, in fact, a black metal musician, I am worried that it might make Marion even more upset

because it's not just a picture of some creepy guy. It's like a picture of an anti-Christian church burner that's like she's riding around within her car. It seemed like if I was going to figure out who this was, I was going to have to dive into the world of black metal. That's after the break. Welcome back to the show. So, Emmanuel, I wanted to figure out who this demon was in Marion's car. And I had a theory that it was someone from like the world of black metal.

But I couldn't figure it out on my own. So I reached out to this woman named Kim Kelly. She's a reporter who mostly does labor. reporting, but she wrote about metal for years. And she knows way more about black metal than I do. Much more of my life has been spent as a metal head than it has not. How did you discover it? So I grew up in kind of the beginning of the Napster and like Malgoth, new metal era. And of course, it's like kind of a weird, angry kid. I threw myself head first into the slip knots and pop roaches of the world. Where'd you grow up? I'm from the South Jersey Pine Barrens. Oh, okay. It's really

cool and weird in the Pine Barrens. I love it. Yes. The soil's all sandy and strange, and, like, the only thing that can grow are all these pine trees. Yeah, sugar sand and pitch pines. We have our own demon, too. Jersey Devil. What up? Are you saying hello to the Jersey Devil? Just in case he's out there, because you never know. So I really wanted to show Kim the picture.

But first she told me this very interesting thing about my conception of black metal artists as, like, anti-Christian church burners. What she said was, like, yes, there certainly was some. awful stuff in the origins of black metal. But I have a terrible misunderstanding of what black metal's become today. And she said like, look, black metal came into existence as this

weird misunderstanding in the first place. So there's this British band called Venom. Venom. And they put out an album called Black Metal. They kind of helped develop this aesthetic of like leather and the devil and like, we're going to set your children on fire. Like this very, in retrospect, very

kind of campy approach. I don't want to compare them to Spinal Tap because that's insulting, but like they were on that spectrum. Okay. Like when I was in high school, people used to pass around this cassette that was just like a live performance of theirs, but only the in-between song banter because everybody found it very funny. It's actually on YouTube now.

Let me send you the video. Your souls do the gods rock and roll. I mean, it's goofy, but I'm into it. Right, but what happened is Venom fans, you know, they started sharing the music with each other. They, you know, traded tapes with other little metal maniacs in other places, and a bunch of nerdy white kids in Scandinavia got a hold of their tapes. And without the context of realizing, oh, this is a bunch of drunk English students.

who were having some fun, they thought it was like real. And we're like, oh, yeah, Satan and hatred and death and anti-life. Like, this is going to be our whole deal. We're going to make some bans about it. And these guys happened to be pretty anti-Christian because they felt like there was this big colonization aspect of Christian missionaries coming into Scandinavia in the past

and diluting the actual religions of the area. That makes sense. But Kim says that, like, Black Metal has evolved way beyond, the weirdos that started the genre to be like a completely global phenomenon that is way more inclusive than it used to be. So whoever's in this picture is probably not an anti-Christian church burner, but I was still curious if Kim knew who it was. So I told her about Marion's situation. Haunted car, obviously. Yeah, obviously. So she sent it to me. She sent me a picture. I sent her the picture. Oh, man. So that's the picture that this, and just so you know,

this woman is a very Christian and and it's like a little weirded out. Interesting. It looks like they're spitting maybe. Yeah, it looks like they're sort of like this this like white drool coming out. Yeah. I mean, they're wearing a black leather vest and they've got, well, that's not corpse paint. That's just all cover. Like horse paint is a very specific like black and white design.

Yeah, this is more like gray and chalky sort of. all over them. I don't know, man. It seems like I bet it's, hmm, it doesn't look at any blackmail band I've seen. I've seen a whole lot of black metal bands. Okay. I was so hoping I could just be like, oh, it's this band. That would have been so cool. That would be cool. I wish that you could have too, because now we're back to the drawing board. But I think, I don't know. I feel like we're on the right track because it does have a, it does really have a metal vibe to me. Like the vest feels medley. I don't know, man. This is a miss is going to eat at me until the, this is going to eat at me until the day I die now, I think.

Well, if you want to download that picture... Oh, I already saved that shit. I'm like, this is my snoo-side project. I got to send it around to some of the group chats and be like, yo, who is this? And so we're just like, fuck. Even the metal expert doesn't know those. But I was talking to Tim Howard, one of the editors of the show. Oh, and Tim probably helps you because he knows a ton about music.

Yes. And Tim basically was like, look, just because Kim Kelly doesn't know who this is, doesn't mean it's not someone in like the metal community. We just need to dramatically expand our search. And so me and Gimlet producer Bethel-Hobte and Tim reached out to like tons of people. Like I reached out to Sebastian Bach, who you may not know, but he is the lead singer of Skid Row. And he wrote back and said, I think this is Alice Cooper's daughter, Calico Cooper. Oh, wow.

But we looked at pictures of Calico Cooper and we were not convinced. And Tim reached out to a bunch of record labels in stores, including this label called Metal Blade Records, which has been around forever. They put out, like, Metallica's first release. And the person at Metal Blade was like, I think this is an artist named Lizzie Borden. Lizzie Borden. And we spent, I would say, an hour looking at pictures of Lizzie Borden being like, this could really be him. Like they have the same broad nose, they have the same sort of high cheekbones. Like, this really feels like it could be Lizzie Borden.

The owner of Metal Blade Records then reached out to Lizzie Borden, who was like, that's not me. I don't know who that is. Really? Yeah, so we're banging our fucking heads against the wall. But then Tim heard back from someone else who thought they had an answer. And he sent Bethel and I a voicemail. Over the weekend, I got an email from this guy named Charlie who runs a record store in London

called Crypt of the Wizard. And he had taken the picture and posted it on a forum, like an underground metal forum. And they, within an hour, tracked it down. And they identified it. It is the singer of a band called Murder Dolls. They're like a glamy metal band out of L.A. And the singer's name is Wednesday 13. Wednesday 13.

They are very, I don't want to say silly. It's kind of hard to take super seriously. Like, let me read you, let me read you the song titles of his 2019 album, Necrophase. Necrophase? Yeah. All right, here we go. Necrophase, bring your own blood.

Zodiac, which is about the Zodiac killer. Monster, decompose, be warned, the hearse. Tie me a noose. Life will kill us all. bury the hatchet. Like all of the, like, it's like, all the songs are like, You're going to die in a terrible way. Here's some heavy metal and I'm going to kill somebody.

Like, it's way more on the venom side of heavy metal than it is on like the anti-Christian church burner side. It's a bit. It's not necessarily a full-on like, yes, I love the devil kind of music. Yes. And if you Google Wednesday 13 and OzFest 2010, Oh, whoa. That's the photo?

Yeah. That's the person. Yeah, that's the person. And because this picture is way more high-res than the one that was on Marion's car stereo, there were all of these little details that I didn't notice before, like the spit. Ew. That's such a long luga. It is super gross.

There's like a bulge in the middle. God, now you're grossing me out. Okay. So, I mean, at this point, I was stoked. Like, I had a name, Wednesday 13. And I was like, I wonder if any of the people that I talked to for this story might be able to help me figure out why this is happening now. So I went back to Russell, who works at PocketCast, which is the podcast app that Marion uses. And I go to him and I'm like, hey, look, we're having this issue.

We've spent ages and ages trying to figure out who this person is. The picture is from OzFest 2010. Is it Oz's in Australia? No, OzFest is in Ozzy Osbourne. Ah, of course, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And the artist is someone named Wednesday 13. Okay.

I now have a theory about how that podcast artwork gets there. So one of our users, our beta users, reached out. So I talked to Russell for a while, and we figured out what was causing the demon in Marion's car. And not long after that, Grace Noe got back in touch with me and completely confirmed my findings. So I'm like super excited. And I got in touch with Marion with producer Bethel Hoppe to tell her the answer. I know it's not a happy Ash Wednesday, but like dust to dust, just want to see you. We happen to talk to Marion on Ash Wednesday.

And so she had like an Ash cross on her forehead. This seems actually completely liturgically appropriate. Excellent. And this has been another episode of Catholic bros. All right, Marion. Buckle up. I'm ready. So I told her about the whole journey, about the metal stuff, about the potentially black metal stuff.

Your demon is actually an artist who goes by the name Wednesday 13. Okay. I reassured her that her demon is just a guy doing theatrical metal stuff. It may read as menacing to you, but as a metal fan does not read as menacing to me. I appreciate you making that judgment because, yeah, I mean, heavy metal. Demon obviously doesn't relate to me. Heavy metal is maybe 5% more relatable to me than a demon in my car. And I explained to her that when I told Russell about Wednesday 13, like the moment he heard the name Wednesday 13, he was like, I know why this demon's showing up in her car.

A pocketcast user got in touch with Russell and was like, hey, you know, I've been looking at the data that you keep in the files. And I noticed that in like the artist field in the file, you guys always put the name of the podcast. But I already know what the podcast is because I'm the one who's putting it on. So like I don't need to see who the artist is in the artist name. You could use that field for anything else, like say the day of the week. Wow. So. He started using the artist section of the files to automatically put the day of the week that the episode came out.

Oh, my God. And Grace Note, trying to figure out what was going on with episodes that came out on Wednesday, started spitting out Wednesday 13's photo. Stop. Wow. Wow. Wow. all of this was because poor russell over at pocket cars took like some extremely nerdy pocket cast fans email too seriously and tried to fix something that wasn't broken and thus created a whole new problem it's like a butterfly flapped its wings and a demon appeared on marion's car it's like this weird chain of cause and effect that created this insane thing that happened on this poor religious teacher's car

Stereo. This is beyond my wildest dreams, literally. I never thought that there would be a story wrap up like this. That's pretty amazing. I'm glad that we could provide this closure for you on this very religious day. Same. Well, you know what's funny is another thing that is said liturgically around Lent, especially is Memento Mori, which means remember that you will die, which is pretty heavy metal if you think about it. That's super. heavy metal, and I will say, hold on just a moment. Does he have a song called Ashes to Ashes? It's called Life Will Kill Us All, which is a very memento-mory kind of vibe. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Yeah. Maybe I should play that in the car today. I mean, that's up to you, but I don't know if it's exactly your vibe. If you update your radio software, you can probably get rid of the demon if you want to. Okay. Maybe I'll reset my software one day when there's a small child in the car, but I don't, I don't know, I don't feel totally compelled at this moment to do that.

Reply All is hosted by Emmanuel Jochi and me, Alice Goldman. This episode was produced by Jessica Young, Anna Foley, and Bethel Hobte. It was edited by Damiano Marquetti with additional help from Tim Howard. This also happens to be Jessica Young's last story as a producer. Jessica's been on the show for four years, and in that time, she has worked on and informed some of my favorite stories that Reply All has ever made. Her telling me not to freak out when I was about to go into a head shop in episode 151 is maybe one of my favorite moments in Reply All history.

I'm going to miss her a lot, and the rest of the team is too. Thank you so much, Jessica. The rest of the Reply All production team is Fia Benin, Lisa Wang, Sonia Dosani, and Kim Netterfane Peterson. Our intern is Sam Gabauer. The executive producer of Reply All is Tim Howard. We were mixed by Rick Kwan with fact-checking by Isabel Christo. Music and sound design by Luke Williams. Our theme song is by the Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Special thanks this week to Carrie Jones, Tyler Cordaro, Jonathan Selzer, Charlie Wizard, Albert Mudrian, and all the metalheads that helped us identify Wednesday 13. Thanks so much for listening.