Somewhere in the Skies - Halloween Series | Cropsey and Urban Legends (w/ Josh Zeman)

Episode Date: October 29, 2024

Ryan shares another listener ghost story from Angela to ring in the Halloween season. He then speaks with investigative filmmaker, Josh Zeman. Zeman first discusses his film, "Cropsey", a boogeyman-like figure from New York City urban legend, before segueing into the story of one Andre Rand, a convicted child kidnapper from Staten Island. Zeman journies into the underbelly as more information and clues unravel. The reality he uncovers is more terrifying than any urban legend.Zeman then transitions into a television special he created titled, "Killer Legends", in which he investigates four other deeply disturbing urban legends throughout the country and questions which came first, the urban legend or the real events? What power does storytelling have over us when it comes to reality and fantasy? Do we create the monsters in these legends? Or do they create us? It's a fascinating discussion and the perfect way to count the final days until Halloween. Follow Josh Zeman: https://x.com/joshzeman Patreon: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies ByMeACoffee: buymeacoffee.com/UFxzyzHOaQ PayPal: [e-mail] Website: www.somewhereintheskies.com Store: http://tee.pub/lic/ULZAy7IY12U YouTube Channel: CLICK HERE Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/somewhereskies/videos Order Ryan’s new book: https://a.co/d/4KNQnM4 Order Ryan’s older book: https://amzn.to/3PmydYC Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Read Ryan’s Articles by CLICKING HERE Opening Theme Song, "Ephemeral Reign" by Per Kiilstofte Produced by LIONSGATE Copyright © 2024. Ryan Sprague. All rights reserved. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/somewhere-in-the-skies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Today on the show, we talk to investigative filmmaker, Josh Zeman, about the terrifying truth behind urban legends. You know, it's funny, a lot of people get upset about the film because they think it's going to be a dissection of the Cropsy urban legend. And it's not. It's my Cropsey. It's about my urban legend and this urban legend come true in my town. And that really upsets them because they want to know about it. They're urban legend, and that's, but that's the point. And it's very hard, it's, it's hard to put such a fine point on that point. Urban legends are amorphous. They're changing.

They go from community community. Your clown urban legend is different from my clown urban legend. And so it's not even like we can nail down these urban legends. This is somewhere in the skies with Ryan's bread. With Halloween just around the creaky corner, we wrap things up that week with one more listener Ghost Story. Have a listen. My story takes place in

2008, in my hometown near Cleveland, Ohio, and has a few parts to it. I was playing drums in a band with my friends, and we were starting to gain momentum around town. So a local management company scouted us. We signed with them, and the guy who became our point person

or manager was a guy named Bruce. He was 35, 36. He was married, had a three-year-old son, was just a great, easy guy to be around. So we all became really close with him and he sort of became like a fourth member of the band. So Bruce and I hung out a lot outside of music and one day we were sitting around at lunch and I had just gotten a new phone. This was around the time where cell phones were getting fancier and came with these little preloaded animated pictures that you could set as someone's icon when they called you. So he flipped through and decided to make him the rainbow. So he called me

probably 15 times a day sometimes. He was always the first person I talked to in the morning and the last one I talked to at night. So I saw that rainbow a lot. We played a show on Friday night, and we stayed late. We closed down the bar, and then we all went home. A little while later, I got a call from a distraught family member of his saying, was he acting weird? Did he take something that you know of? He was smoking a cigarette in the garage and then just dropped. I called the band. We all met at the hospital where we found out that Bruce had passed very suddenly from a massive heart attack. We were all in shock, so we just went to our bass player's house and sat outside until the sun came up. I went home, went to sleep, and when I woke up, I melted down

super hard. We were all in our early 20s at this time, and this definitely was the first loss of this kind that I had ever dealt with. And I was particularly close with Bruce. I was going through a rough time, and he just helped me out with stuff and was good to talk to and a good listener, and we were just really close. I was close with his family. So I looked down at my phone and had the realization that he was really gone. And I thought, man, I'm never going to see that stupid rainbow again. And just then, my phone rang. And it was the rainbow.

Bruce, cell. And only rang one time and then stopped. I thought it was strange, but I shook it off and figured maybe his wife called me with his cell phone. Then his wife did call me about a half hour later with her phone. So I asked, did you just call me a little bit ago with his phone? She goes, no. if he called you, that makes sense, because listen to what just happened to me. She had gotten home the night before and put his phone, keys, and wallet on the kitchen table.

She also had the coroner's card. She said she put on top of a stack of business cards, dreading the reality that she had to call and deal with all this the next day. Now, there was a table in the doorway that Bruce always said his stuff on when he came home, but she put everything on the kitchen table. So she wakes up, goes in the kitchen, his phone, his keys and his wallet were moved from the kitchen table to the doorway table, and the coroner's card was now under the whole stack of business cards.

Super weird. Part two. I've always had this thing about locking my car. I never remember if I did it or not. I've left events to make sure that I locked my car. Bruce made fun of me for it all the time. So later that day, I was visiting my grandma, and I thought, oh, did I lock my car? I walked out, my driver's side door was wide open.

And all I could say was, okay, good one. So I just laughed. I just knew it was him. After that, and this is all the same day, mind you, the day after he passed. After that, I was taking a walk in the woods with my sister. I got another phone call from Bruce's wife, and she goes, is he's been opening and slamming doors in our house all day? Have you had anything else weird happen?

I thought, well, yes, I have. So I told her about it. Bruce and I always talked about ghosts and the paranormal and spiritual things and just all that stuff. So this was no surprise that he would figure out a way to mess with everyone. Our bass player had something happened to him. I believe he received a text message from Bruce's phone that we all saw. And our singer also had a weird thing happen where we were all sitting there and he all of a sudden just dropped his phone on the ground and backed up, like terrified. We were all just like, what happened? Are you okay?

He goes, no, I just straight up saw my. My phone screen image changed to Bruce's face and then back. And at this time, he was kind of feeling left out that nothing had happened to him yet. So Bruce got him good. So part three, we decided we were going to play our show that night and give our earnings to his family to help with funeral costs and all of that stuff that they had to go through. He would have wanted us to play. He was our biggest fan, our biggest supporter. So we knew he would be there, so to speak.

During our break, I called his wife to see how she was doing. and she said she was okay, she was with his whole family. She said one more weird thing happened though earlier. She proceeded to tell me that they were all sitting around and their three-year-old son was in the middle of the floor just staring up the ceiling and pointing. So they asked him, what do you see? And he just kept repeating, Daddy happy, Daddy happy.

This is right around the time where we would have been starting the show. So that always stuck with me. and that was just really strange. But, you know, kids see things that we don't see. So the last part, after his funeral, I drove to the lake because it was one of our favorite places to hang out and have deep conversations. So I get on the highway, which was kind of a panoramic view of everything.

You get on the ramp and go down. And what's the first thing I see? bright and big in the sky, but a rainbow. So I still feel Bruce around sometimes. A lot of time has passed, obviously. But for the most part, I think he's crossed over to wherever he needed to be. I'm mostly feeling when I'm back home visiting and get to play music with my buddy Nick, who was the front man of that band.

Yeah, so that's my story. Happy Halloween, everyone. I'm off for my tradition of watching Donnie Darko. So, Ryan, when you're in San Diego, Please hit me up. You know where to find me. Happy Halloween, everyone. And now, on to this week's guest. When I was a freshman in college, I remember hearing from an older student that our campus library was slowly sinking into the ground.

Apparently, the architect who designed and helped actually build the library didn't take into account the weight of the books that would fill the shelves. So, I would walk by the library every day on my way to class. and I'd take a look, convincing myself that it has sunk just a tiny bit each day. I went on thinking this my entire collegiate career. A few years later, I mentioned this to a friend at a bar in New York City, and as I told it, he laughed. I figured it was because of how stupid the architect was. But no, he was laughing because he'd been told the same thing

about the library at his college as well. In fact, we asked several others at the bar, including the bartender, and at least three other people claimed that their libraries at their schools were sinking slowly into the ground. And this was the first time I'd ever truly fell victim to an urban legend. But it was a moment I would never forget. That feeling that my college, my connection to this story was special. But it wasn't. and that is the power of the urban legend. For today's guest, an urban legend in his hometown of Staten Island, New York,

haunted his nightmares for many years as a child. If you stayed out too late or snuck into the woods of this New York City borough, Cropsey, a crazed killer, would snatch you up and you'd meet your doom. And while this creepy story sometimes kept children tuck snugly and safely at home, It made others venture out to search for Cropsey. And one of those children was Josh Seaman. And as he grew up, he realized that the urban legend eerily mirrored a tragic string of events that plagued Staten Island.

Someone was actually kidnapping and killing children in the town. As the suspects narrowed, Josh made a terrifying connection and conclusion between the actual murders and the urban legend he'd grew. grown up hearing. This led him to investigate other urban legends throughout the U.S., including the man with a hook for a hand, the stranger in the house, killing children with Halloween candy, and even the creepy clown phenomenon. Where did the legend begin and reality end? Which came first? Is fact more terrifying than fiction? We discuss this and so much more right now, with

investigative filmmaker, Josh Seaman. So I came across your work one day when I tripped upon your first documentary Cropsey on Netflix, and I thought this sounds pretty interesting. I've never really seen someone investigate urban legends before, and right off the bat, I was completely consumed by this story and sort of just manifested into your hometown and then became all too real. So I guess for those who may not be familiar with your work, could you sort of give us a little origin story of how Cropsey came to be? Yeah, I was growing up in Staten Island in the 1980s, there was always

these urban legends about the escaped mental patient who lived in what was called the Willabrook Mental Institution, which was this kind of notorious snake pit mental institution, which was abandoned in the middle of our forgotten borough of Staten Island. And, you know, as teenagers, you always go, keg parties, do whatever, hang out. And, you know, there was this sort of. urban legend about Cropsey, this escape mental patient, and how he would come snatch you if you went and hung out there. And we really didn't think anything about it until a little girl with Down syndrome disappeared from the neighborhood. And after one of the largest civilian man hunts in New York City history, they found her body buried on the grounds at that same mental institution. The police arrested a guy.

He wasn't an escape mental patient. He was a worker who had worked in the mental institution and lived in a state. a campsite on the grounds. And then the police revealed that he had been suspected of taking five other missing kids over the course of 30 years. And so in a lot of ways, the urban legend came true. And then it becomes a chicken or the egg thing. Did the police really know that this guy was doing these, snatching these children? They didn't have enough evidence to catch him. And so they instead told their children an urban legend story to keep them from going in that area to keep to prevent them from being snatched, or is there always urban legends about mental institutions?

And what's very interesting is, you know, it's funny. A lot of people get upset about the film because they think it's going to be a dissection of the Cropsey urban legend. And it's not. It's about my Cropsey. It's about my urban legend and this urban legend come true in my town. And that really upsets them. because they want to know about their urban legend. And that's the point.

And it's very hard. It's hard to put such a fine point on that point. You know what I'm saying? Urban legends are amorphous. They're changing. They go from community community. Your clown urban legend is different from my clown urban legend. And so it's not even like we can nail down these urban legends like we can today.

We almost know exactly where Slender Man came from, creepy pasta. But, you know, Cropsey is so many things to so many different people. To me, he was a campground story. He was, you know, the escape mental patient. For some, that is, you know, Michael Myers, the escape mental patient. For some, it's something else, you know. Every town has these urban legends. And, you know, if you really want to get into it, Cropsey was, he was,

typically a judge or some character of high moral value in a community that gets recently married and a bunch of campers burn down his cabin and end up killing his wife and sometimes his child. He's horribly maimed and then he gets an axe and then comes after the kids. And that's basically the origins of the crops, the urban legend from sleepway camps in upstate New York in the 1950s. And what's so interesting is one of the guys who went to those camps was Harvey Weinstein. Oh, wow.

And so from that, they made the burning about Cropsey, which was basically the urban legend that they had at their sleepway camp in upstate New York. I wrote a little song to remind you, choice hotels, get you more of the experiences you've out. The can be a hotels got it all. A rooftop bar. have a ball. Cocktails up here feel just right. Is Camry your homemasing? All right. Bring a date, your team, or even your mom.

Book direct at choiceotails.com. See you on the roof. Right, right. That's very interesting, the origins of it in how Hollywood can be connected. I know I've heard you talk about another connection within Hollywood with your own work on Cromsey. Is that correct? You're talking about Ryan Murphy.

He took Cropsey and made it the end of American Horror Story 2. Okay, gotcha, gotcha. And, you know, it's interesting because he, like, he's very, I guess, imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, but he ended up being very public, like, oh, yeah, we took it from this documentary Cropsey, and I'm like, hey, dude pay me but the interesting thing is is that you know it's a documentary

so technically you can't there's no copyright infringement on a documentary but you know had anybody ever taken that Geraldo footage before and cast that story reframed what was a social justice

story for Geraldo Rivera back in the 1970s and reframed it as a horror story and that's what I brought to the table and that's what I took umbrage with in terms of what he then used. And I mean, you do touch very closely on societal issues within Cropsey and your follow-up to Cropsey as well. I kind of want to tap into that, Josh, about Staten Island itself.

Like you said earlier, it's sort of the forgotten borough of New York City, a dumping ground of sorts in that it's an underbelly of where you grew up and it played such a big role throughout the film. Could you tell us a little what you were trying to sort of convey with Stats? Latin Island being almost like its own character in the narrative. First of all, as I like, when I used to teach and tell kids, like, write what you know, what I'm saying? And so immediately you're going to write, there's so many stories and so many first-time filmmaker stories are about their hometown. Right.

And so that was important. And I guess, you know, it was just this fascinating history to this forgotten borough. And, you know, one with an obvious chip on its shoulder. more and more I dug into this story, the more and more I realized it played into the people. Because, you know, it starts first with the people. Why would people believe the story? Why would people bite so hard into the satanic narrative, you know? And it was like, well, one interesting thing we found out was a lot of people, when the

Verrazana Bridge was built in the 1970s, a lot of people came over from Brooklyn, right? They suddenly had a yard. They had this great place because before, when you grew up in the city and there was like a piece of woods or abandoned place, that was like a lot. You know, that was like a lot that nobody went to. And only bad things happened in those lots. You got beat up if you used it as a walkway to school. People got dragged and raped there. Maybe you would find a body there.

Maybe there would be abandoned cars. People would go shoot up there. So when you live in an urban community, abandoned areas or pieces of patchwork. of greenery and stuff, only bad things happen there. And then all these people moved to Staten Island and then they were like, oh, look, there's this whole, it's called the Greenbelt. There's this whole like forests, you know.

And people were, they were apprehentious about these big, large forests, you know, especially when you're in the city. City folk, you know, the city folk are always nervous about the forest, you know? And so they were always nervous about it. And then suddenly, when they peered

through the branches, they found in the middle of this abandoned mental institution. In fact, and it wasn't just that. It was an abandoned. It was Cview, an abandoned sanitarium. There were all these abandoned buildings. And, you know, that's scary. But then, oh my God, you know, they're finding dead bodies in this abandoned thing. So it was very much, you know, about how people reacted. And it's very much about urban politics. But, you know, it was very much about Staten Island as this forgotten borough and this dumping ground. I mean, how could you not when your hometown is,

known for having the largest garbage dump in the world. You know, and I'm saying, like, everything you do is going to be tainted by the fact that you live in the largest garbage dump in the world. Right, right. And it's all about, like you said, it's all about perception. And, I mean, in terms of Willowbrook and the disappearances, like you mentioned, sort of in the synopsis of Cropsey, you decided to focus on this guy, Andre Rand. Could you tell us a little about how that came to be?

be and sort of what the dichotomy was between what the community considered true and what the actual trial of this Andre Rand guy, what it brought forth. That's a great question. Originally, I was my, I wanted to make Paradise Lost, you know, the documentary by Joe Berlinger. And to me, that was the moment I saw that opening sequence with Metallica Sanitarium, I was, I was in, a hook, line, sinker. This was, this was the teenage angst that I was feeling. this was the

journalistic integrity of a documentary filmmaker but this also had the mystery of you know Damien Eccles and the story and everything and that went down a real who done it and so I was trying to make that movie basically emulate that film as a young filmmaker

but interestingly enough you know in New York you can't have cameras in the courtroom so I was screwed I was like what am I going to how am I going to tell this story I can't have a camera in the courtroom how am I going to tell this courtroom drama? And so we decided to, and this was a trial that came about in the 90s for a crime that happened 20 years earlier, right?

So that brings something up. You know, there's a lot of like false memory and there's a lot of like I remember when and what that means, you know? And so we decided because we couldn't get in there, we decided to go out into the community and basically talk to the people and hear their stories. we realized was the fiction of the case was so much more interesting than the facts. The facts can be manipulated. The facts can be argued. The facts can be construed. But the fiction is created. And so all these stories about this supposed guy, Andre Rand, the facts about him weren't as interesting. What was interesting is how the community created their monster in him, how they scapegoated him. He may or may not have done it. I think he did some things. I don't know if he did everything that

that they said he did. But, you know, he became their boogeyman. And the question is why do communities create monsters? Why did they create scapegoats? And especially crimes against children. Crimes against children are the worst crime because they're so incomprehensible to you and I. You know, I think we can all, at some point in our lives, get behind killing the guy because he stole our parking space. Like, you've been that angry, you know what I'm saying? Or the person that insulted you or, you know, belittled you or something like that. We can all get behind that. But for somebody who murders a child, there is no logical conclusion. And that's one of our biggest fears, you know? And so we have to say that that's not human. We have to assign a different

motivation. And typically, the only way we can contextualize and understand that is to say that it's good versus evil. And even more so, in this case, that was only heightened when in at least in Jennifer's case, he killed a child with Down syndrome. Because Down syndrome children, supposedly, the legend goes, they have no ill will thought at all. And so you're killing pure innocence. And so that's almost even more cinematic, per se. And so the community just created all these legends about what happened.

I mean, you can imagine a community going in and searching for a missing child and, again, finding Willowbrook, finding tunnels underneath Willowbrook. in the midst of Herald Rivera doing his whole satanic panic thing. Yeah. You know, it was just like the perfect storm of how to freak out a community. Well, yeah, like you said, it's almost a way of piecing things together that may not be connected to begin with. Right. But that's how you create the legend.

That's how you create the story. Right, because there has to be some reason, right? Yeah, we have to give it reason. Yeah, there can't be like so like, oh, well, you know, and then again, the set pieces are, all there. The movie was there for these. These people were living a movie. And that was all there. You have the abandoned mental institution. You have satanic panic. You have missing children. You have drooling guys like Andre Rand. You have mental patients who are still returning to the community and kind of hanging out there. You've got tunnels. You've got cops.

I mean, it's, again, it was all there for the connecting. And that's exactly what happened. And so, and then so juxtaposing that verse, the reality of the trial was just so interesting. And none of it mattered. You know, if you watch the film and you listen, they were all, the people were all coached in the same way, too. They all say, oh, I had to do what I had to do, you know. Yeah. Some people who testified against him. Oh, he looked crazy.

He sounded crazy. And then the other question is, is another reason why people create narratives is through guilt. And I think that there was some guilt about what happened at Willabrook. Absolutely, throughout the entire town, I would assume. You know, and it's like, oh, how could we let all this happen here? So what I learned from the urban legends experts is, like, people like to create scapegoats to cathartically exercise their own guilt. And in Staten Island, it was status anxiety, moving from Brooklyn, you know, lower middle class to now middle class. It was all these interesting things.

Yeah, and I mean, you've mentioned on occasion that we, sometimes these acts of violence and murder, they occur and they're so unbelievable, so incomprehensible that we have to create a story around it. We have to create some sort of reality to propel that unbelievable act of aggression. And I find that very interesting. I mean, one of the most, I'd say chilling moments in the film came when you interviewed one of Rann's past acquaintances, and he said, you could hold up a photo of this guy, and he could either be, quote, unquote, a murderer, or, quote, unquote, he could have saved children from a burning building. And it's really a huge game of perception, stories, opinions. And I guess my next question would be, in terms of crops, how did you try to differentiate and paint a true picture? of Rand. I guess to do that is to try and understand his history. The best way to paint the truest pictures is to understand the motivations, right? Yeah. And so speaking to his family, trying to understand his family, and that was what opened up a lot of doors of understanding. Like when we went back and we said, you know, well, who is this guy? Because, you know,

people don't just, you know, pop into the world as drifters living in the woods. You know what I'm saying? And I think that that's the narrative that everybody else got, Drifter, Drifter, Drifter, Drifter, Drifter, you know. And so we're like, okay, so who is this guy? And then when you realize, well, his mother was in a mental institution at Pilgrim State, which is very much the same type of mental institution, the same physical layout, especially in his formative years, that he would go visit her in Pilgrim State, you start to understand the motivations, like why he would want to be at Willabrook, you know, it was comfortable for him. Maybe it was a way for him to reconcile his own family's issues. And then it starts to create a much more complex picture, one that I find so much more interesting, but one that breaks out of the simple narrative that the community is created. Then he's no longer just an evil boogey man or he's not a devil worshipper.

Then he's a guy with mental disabilities or some kind of, you know, his own mental schizophrenia or what have you. you know, it becomes a much more complex picture, one in which, by the way, how we deal with the mentally ill becomes even more important. And people don't like, you know, they don't like really, really complex puzzles because it's too hard to figure out. And there's, it's not a clear enough end. Yeah. We have to put a face to it always. Yeah. I guess, you know, sort of closing in on Cropsey, Josh, have there been any updates on the Rand case or have you noticed? I don't want to focus too much on him because that's not necessarily. what the film is about. But have you noticed the urban legend changing it all since he's been imprisoned? The interesting thing was is that nobody had talked about, when we were young, we all talked about this guy ran

and did he ever take those kids. We all talked about Cropsey, the urban legend. We had never kind of tied it together in the way that we had and never then represented that. So I think what happened was we took two different

chapters and we tied them into one. and so we created the next chapter. And what's so interesting is I've been back to Willowbrook or the area and talked to the kids. And now the new kids know about Cropsey. It's just amazing to me that Cropsey has now become such a pervasive urban legend in Staten Island and New York. It's everywhere, you know. And so much so that like last year there was a haunted house about urban legends of New York. city and Cropsey was one of the characters.

Oh, wow. And it makes me laugh only because like this was never you know, it's just it's almost like slander man. Yeah. You know, if you hit it at the right time, you know, with the right story and the right amount of truth, you know, it's going to take.

You know, and that's what makes urban legends go. Just the right amount of truth, the right amount of realness, the right, you know, mental, you know, institution. you know, all those little factors that totally work and it'll go. And so it's just amazing to me how that urban legend has evolved

and then becomes so pervasive in Staten Island. And you now see how they happen. And I wonder what the next iteration is going to be, you know? It's so cyclical, you're right. Yeah. And then it keeps growing, festering it away. Well, Josh, it seemed that Cropsey was kind of a precursor to really getting your thematic point across

in your next project, where the idea of urban legends spread from your hometown to all across the country. And this came in the form of killer legends. How did this project come about? How did you get hooked up with Chiller TV on that? It's funny. You know, a lot of people are like, we put it out as like a movie on Netflix, but a lot of people are like, this doesn't feel like a movie, you know, because it's not.

It was a TV show. Right. That's a pilot that never went. And, you know, Chiller, Chiller, they said, oh, yeah. yeah, we'll make it into a show. And then it was funny. We pitched all these reality TV executives around the time of the ghost hunting shows. And we said, listen, this is not ghost hunting.

Okay. And we're looking at urban legends. And everybody was like, wait a second. If you're not looking for ghosts, what are you looking for? They couldn't get that people were interested in mythology and urban legends and the connections. They just couldn't wrap their heads around what. that looked like and why people were interested. And now with your podcast, with lore, with all these things, it's so obvious.

You know what I'm saying? It's like we love to understand how these stories take a life of its own, how they're so active in the idea of storytelling. Like to me, that's so amazing. You know, very much like, you know, it's like I've never seen something like spread like wildfire and take on this game of telephone. Like I love understanding how we communicate. And so Chiller was one of the only channels that they just wanted some content on there.

So they're like, sure, go ahead, do whatever you want to do. And so we did these four urban legends that, you know, everybody had talked about and everybody knew. And we put it together. And I wish it could have been much more interesting. But, you know, we only had like 20 minutes per. And but it was still fun to do, you know, only because when we talked about crops, everybody was like, oh, I have an urban legend that I want to discuss. And so I really liked showing everybody like, hey, Holly,

Hollywood keeps regurgitating these same old urban legends and let's see where they really come from, you know. Well, let's sort of go into those if you're cool with that. The first one you cover is Lovers Lane in the Hook. And could you give us a little backstory on the urban legend of what brought you to Texarkana, Texas? Sure. It is really interesting. You know, it is the most famous urban legend of the 1950s and 60s. You know, a couple making out on a car in Lovers Lane.

The radio is on. They're getting really hot and heavy. and all of a sudden, you know, newscast comes over the radio that there's an escape mental patient roaming the countryside. He has a hook for a hand. The girl, Quiddis interruptus, wants to go home. The guy's all pissed because he's not going to get laid. He jams on the gas, pulls the car out of Lovers Lane,

gets home, opens up the car door for the girl, you know, to let her out to go inside her home, and suddenly he sees the hook is on the car door, you know, is attached to the car door. And basically, if she hadn't, like, stopped having sex and wanted to go home, they would have been killed by the one arm, the hook for a hand guy, you know? And it's so funny because the urban legend is completely about sex, basically. It's like a teenage anti-teenage sex thing. And it's amazing to me how graphic it gets in terms of, like, some, there's like penetration.

like the hook would have penetrated the car if they had gone further in their own sexual act and stuff like. But, you know, we all know that for urban legends to really grow, there has to be some truth. Basically, if you want to put forth a cautionary tale about teenage sex, you can't just make up some story. What you have to do is you have to find a real story that exists that there's no quite answer to, and then attach your cautionary tale to that. So that's what the parents would do. So the parents would find some other, you know, unexplained, solved, mystery, crime, and say, hey, you know what happened to Billy Joe, you know, Sarah Joe down the street.

That's going to happen to you just like, you know, the Moonlight Murderers, if you guys go out there and have premarital sex. And so, you know, in the 1950s, there was these crimes, you know, the Moonlight Murderers in Texarkana, Texas, where some guy would happen upon, you know, couples making out in their cars, and he would shoot them. Now, the interesting thing is, it's like, yeah, you know, no shit. That is exactly what's going to happen. Like, where do you think most killers are going to find their unsuspecting victims, especially victims who are so in states of undress and therefore easily controlled? You know what I'm saying?

So, of course, it makes sense that killers are going to go to lover's lanes areas. There's typically some sexual component to it, you know, so they're going to love to, they love that part about it. And the guy's got his pants around his ankle, so, of course, he's going to be listening. You know, he's not going to be hyper aware. And so it just makes complete sense that that would happen. But there's numerous people who say it could have been, the hook for a hand came from the Texarkana, Texas murders. They say it could have come from also the Carol Chessman murders.

the red light murders that we don't really get into that happened in California. So there's a lot of different iterations of that urban legend and where it came from. But for me, it was, you know, the unsolved Texarkana, Texas murders was interesting. And then on top of it, as we're filming it, we find out that Ryan Murphy is doing the remake of the film, the town that dreaded sundown. So it was like, okay, this is just hysterical. Yeah, well, let's definitely touch on that. I mean, that was probably the biggest twist.

I mean, you left the, what was it, the Parks and Rec director in Texarkana, like, speechless. Like you said, yeah, you discovered. It's an idea. I love the idea that, so basically the idea is that they show this 1970s movie, the town that dreaded sundown, which by the way, was one of the first Blair Witch. style movies. A movie, which was a docu drama, which was basically fictionally filmed,

but there was voiceover to make it seem like it was real and happening. And that director did the same thing with The Legend of Boggy Creek, which is a totally scary movie. So that was one of the first like, again, this kind of almost docu drama horror film.

And the Legend of Bogi Creek was a huge, huge moneymaker. That was the Blair Witch of it. time. And so while we're, so they show this movie about the murders in the actual park where the murders happened every October as part of some, you know, film series. So basically, that is legend tripping. Basically what they're doing is they're bringing everybody to the scene of the crime and then through the movie telling them about what happened here. and that is that is what

folklore is called legend tripping where you like go to the haunted house in your neighborhood and some guys like yeah you know what happened right here right here five people were killed you know so you go there as teenagers and you kind of test your own strength that you know you test your own courage or you go there with a girl and you know

you try and quote unquote scare the pants off her you know so it's all part of this kind of thing that we do yeah well I mean that's a good point too is that like a lot of these times you go on ghost tours, and it's, it's, it's, it's, it's legend tripping. But I guess, you know, bringing, bringing to light when this happened, the Texarkana case, you know, in car culture was a big thing.

Totally, right? Exactly. Um, so it is, like you said, it's almost a lesson, like what not to do to, you know, for kids to remain celibate and conservative. Um, so I found that very interesting. I think you put it best with this case, Josh, that it's a lack of answers on who killed the people in the town that makes the legend stronger. And, yeah, it just sort of grew from there.

The lack of answers as well is like the main ingredient, which you can then take that story and repurpose it for anything that you want, because there is no answer. So, like, that's the only way an urban legend can actually form is from a story that has no definitive end. Yeah. And so, like, that's the main ingredient. So you want to make an urban legend? First, first get a story that typically has no right answer and then apply your own cautionary tale to it and then, you know, take it from there, you know. And, you know, so for Cropsey, it was don't go to this abandoned mental institution because there's a pedophile there who may kill you. And here it's don't have premarital sex, you know, in your, in your car. And, and, you know, and, you. you know, we'll create, you know, we'll add an unsolved mystery to go, to go make it seem real to you. The next urban legend you investigated, Josh, is the one that hit home for me, and that's the candy man.

Cannot tell you how many times my parents reminded me to check my goddamn Halloween candy before I ate it. And this came from the idea that at some point children were being poisoned or finding sharp objects in their candy, which would, you know, certainly cause death. So could you tell us where you're, work began on this urban legend, how the idea of poisoned candy came about? I mean, you said, like, we all have that. The most interesting thing about this urban legend is it's not even like it's an urban legend.

Right. You know, it's so pervasive in culture that everybody believes it to be real. And in fact, it is an urban legend. It's a, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a panic. You know, it's what they call a panic, you know. And so, and there's this guy, Joel Best, who we interview, and he's hysterical.

He writes every year. He writes the same article that it never happens, but people still do it anyway. So it's almost that it's gone the other way. He can't convince people that it's an urban legend. But the amazing thing about it is what's called ostension, which is enacting something and it actually happening. So, for example, in this case,

and I guess we could give it away or we cannot, but in this case, there was never any true stories of anybody actually dying from taking. candy except in this one case in Houston, Texas, where this kid did die from a cyanide-laced pixie stick. And the only reason he died is because his dad poisoned him for insurance money. And what was so interesting was when, you know, they brought the dad in for questioning, he goes, well, you know, someone must have murdered him.

It happens all the time. And the police are like, actually, it doesn't. It's an urban legend. to the urban legend and you're busted. You know, so basically the urban legend became real, ostension, because some guy believed it and therefore did it. And then when people say, well, does anybody ever been killed, it's like, yes, actually, somebody has now been killed by Tainted Candy, but he only believed it because it was

an urban legend. You know what I'm saying? Steakening the tail. Exactly. And I mean, in that tragic, extremely distinctions. Serbian killing. He was ostensibly the man who killed Halloween. He was the man who killed Halloween.

Yeah. He was the candy man. Yeah. They called him candy man. And so the most interesting to me is what people talk about is he wasn't even the only candy man in Houston. There was a serial killer named Dean Coral who was also the candy man. So there's two candy men in Houston.

It just goes to show, Josh, like that the actual crime again can be so much more horrific. than the urban legend. Right. Yeah. A guy killing his own kid. I mean, how do you even talk about that?

You don't. Like, you know, that's horrific. And so maybe, like, maybe people did believe in the urban legend of, by the way, that this person is called the Halloween sadist. That's the person who theoretically puts pins and candy. And there's like, you know, when we did that, we did a chick, you know, chick tracks. Yeah. You know, the guy who creates all those, like, he's like one of the main, main guys who talks about these Halloween sadists, like these devil worshippers who put stuff in people's candy. It's amazing, like, how they regurgitate these old kind of like urban legends, you know, to kind of use them.

And that's the Halloween sadist. But, of course, the only real case where it ever happened was a very churchgoing man who professed to, you know, who very churchgoing, by the way. who killed his own kid. And was not a stranger, obviously, which we'll touch on in one year later urban legends. The next one, Josh, comes in the form of the babysitter and the man upstairs. We've seen this so many times. So many times. Yeah.

But it's a trope, and it works. It increases suspense. And one would think it would be easy to find actual cases of this since we've seen it so many goddamn times. But it was actually pretty difficult for you to find anything. And you had to go all the way back. to the 1950s to actually find something on this. Could you tell us a little about that? Yeah, Columbia, Missouri.

Somebody just asked me about this earlier today. Like, you would think with the amount of movies that use that character, you know, the innocent, quote, character of the babysitter that there would be all these cases. But no, like, there's so few cases of babysitters actually being murdered. What there is is way more cases of babysitters. murdering children. And that has its own urban legend, which is the turkey in the oven. You know that one?

Yeah. Could you tell us briefly about that? This is very disturbing. This is the family's going out for the first time. You know, their baby's born. They haven't had like their first date and they go out to a movie. They get a babysitter. You know, they get a babysitter.

You know, she's usually an old woman or like a young teenager. And they're all nervous about it. And they go to a movie. And, you know, the woman has a bad feeling. and she calls the babysitter just checking in. The babysitters is like, oh, yeah, everything's fine. The turkey's in the oven. And it's like, she looks at her husband.

She's like, what turkey? You know, and obviously they run home. And the babysitter has put the child in the oven. That used to be a big LSD urban legend. That was one of the urban legends that came out of the LSD culture. Where, like, be careful, don't hire hippies to take care of your children or cook your children. But, you know, it's very, interesting yeah like we found so few cases of it and of course it was in columbia missouri

and the tragedy there is that you know these two white babysitters were getting killed it was obviously the same guy and the town wickedly racist was just like literally putting black guys to death you know rounding up the black guy putting him to death for killing him for killing these white girls and it was obviously so much so so politically and race charged murders. It was horrific what was really going on there. Yeah, you said it was being pinned on these black men. And even though a lot of the evidence was stacked up against this one guy,

Robert Mueller. Yeah, it seems just so ridiculous that he was never indicted for these crimes. These discoveries were much more interesting than the urban legend itself, it would seem. Yeah, we couldn't believe it. you know, and then it was like, wait a second, you know, and then, you know, we were, there was always this tinge of, of, it was a very racially divided town, you know, we had found out. And, and then I don't know if you, you heard last year or what, it was much more recently that there was a huge firing of the dean of Missou where they had all those race issues. So I was just like, oh my God, like, we had just discussed all that, you know, in this urban legend. and here it is coming out to play, you know, in the whole culture of this college campus.

And this happened like all literally within blocks of the college campus. So it's just very interesting. It seems like there's little, I guess social fear of strangers actually killing the babysitters. But this small town created the fear by formulating a racial issue around it. Right. That's just another thing, right? You know, the fear of the black man, you know. Exactly.

But the interesting thing was it was also like. The whole thing about like, did you check the children? Did you check the children? First of all, when a stranger calls was the first time a film used an actual, like, urban legend from almost beginning to end, you know? And so that was very interesting. But by the way, the cautionary tale here is that women shouldn't seek employment outside of their womenly duties, raising children. So the moment that you do that, you leave your home and go like get employment other place else, look what happens. The children die. So it's really about the subjugation. The urban legend itself is about the subjugation of women.

Yeah, exactly. And we see that so many times in horror movies, you know, in terms of celibacy or purity, as it were. And it does. It touches on many gender issues. Which brings us back to Scream. which basically in a lot of ways is a very irreverent self-referential horror film that knows the tropes of these urban legends and then talks about them, you know, where the character talks about, you know, oh, look, it's the celibate, you know, babysitter. You know, she's obviously not going to get killed where the slut babysitter is going to get killed. It's referential. Like, they know that that's happening.

But I think, you know, they kind of just make fun of it. But I think it's the history. and the cautionary tales and the lessons to be learned behind these horror stories, there's so much you can learn about them. You know, there's so much that's being said, and there's so much manipulation that's going on, which I find to be the most interesting thing. Absolutely, and that manipulation only continues in the last urban legend that you covered,

Killer Clowns. Yeah. And, of course, when we think of killer clowns, we always go back to two major points of interest, one being John Wayne Gasey, obviously. And for me, Pennywise, from Stephen King's It, the legend behind evil clowns stretches much further back than these two cases. Tell us a little about your dive into the history of the clown archetype. It's so interesting because this wasn't really like an urban legend per se, and that got some people angry, but I had to do it because it was just like, when did clowns become creepy?

And when you find out is clowns actually were always creepier. They were creepy first before they became, you know, so sugar. coded and then they were then they became creepy again and and so you know look a lot of people say clowns became creepy when john waying casey his dastardly deeds were brought to light what was interesting to me however was you know that that's low-hanging fruit what's interesting to me is the phantom clown scares of the 1980s yeah which was all over the world you know from from Pittsburgh to Glasgow. So this phantom clown scares were happening all over the world. Kids in different communities were seeing white bands with clowns and they were snatching children.

It was a pedophile scare. It was a lot of other things. But what was so interesting, and that's why Chicago was just the epicenter because there was so much going on in Chicago related to clowns. It was the home of John Wayne Gacy. You know, there was a, you know, some of the Batman stuff going on there as well. But the most interesting thing about phantom clown scares to me, this was pre-internet. You have African American ghetto communities. You have Hasidic communities. You have white, black, rich, poor, all these different kids in all these different communities seeing these same evil characters in their community yet how is this

it's not like the kids in glasgow and the ghettos of of chicago are talking to each other in the pre-internet age how is this happening this is happening before poltergeist before stephen king's it you know what i'm saying and so to me there is some undercurrent This is where I start to get the chills because to me that's when you're really seeing like a massive game of hysteria and panic going on pre-internet. And that's what's interesting to me. And to know that Pennywise came out of that. You're great at protecting your data, but lots of places could still expose you to identity theft. I thought it was safe.

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Hasidic kids were not talking in Chicago. We're not talking to inner city, you know, kids from the ghetto just wasn't happening, you know, but they were all seeing it, you know. And it's just so strange and bizarre. And then when we started to our research and we found out at the same time, that, you know, there was Gacy, of course, and there was all this stuff. We found out in Chicago that there was this train wreck where

a whole bunch of clowns had burned to death in a massive train fire. And there's a cemetery dedicated to it. We're like, okay, well, that's, you know, then it's Stephen King. You know, what I love about Stephen King is he takes the modern day, there's the monster that's

happening now, right? Like the Shining or the Pet Cemetery. And then there's always some historical element to it, typically Indian, American Indian. He likes to go for on the native side, you know, that that allows it to kind of set itself in history a lot further back that makes that really like, it's almost like the glue that sets the horror, the narrative, you know, for it. You have the idea of the mischievous clown blending into modern day where children were said to be abducted. And like you said, you focused on. lot on the area in Chicago. And I do want to bring up Gacy just briefly if we could, Josh. Sort of the misconception of Gacy. It was that he was a murderous clown, but I mean, you say in the film, or excuse me, in the pilot, sorry, that this isn't the case. I mean, the clown aspect of his life was in some ways completely disconnected from the murderer.

Can you tell us a little about that and like what the clown side of Gacy might represent? It's very interesting, right? Because all the films now show, like, if you're going to do like a Gacy film or like 10 years ago, they're always like Gacy dressed in a clown outfit holding a knife, you know? Yeah. And that's not really what it was. You know, he was a guy who wore a lot of different masks. You know, what I like when we're making the film, this is what's great about going, making these movies.

Like, we didn't just go to Gacy's house. We didn't just do that. We went to the park where Gacy would dress up as a police officer and arrest, you know, you know, kids who are, you know, prostituting themselves for chicken hawks, you know. So, like, as much as he was a clown, he was also a cop with a pair of handcuffs that would go around busting kids, you know, who are trying to, you know, prostitute themselves. So we don't talk about that side of the gasey mask, but we should because he used that as well. But it's just about the idea that, you know, we have a lot of internal masks that we wear.

And that's what I love about Bill Ellis, because then he takes it and brings it to the present day, which is the idea of chaos and the clown. The clown is the jing to our yang. He is the chaos character that exists in all of us. The character, I think that Heath Ledger encapsulates so much, or, you know, Chris Nolan does in Batman and a lot of the things that he says, you know, I'm chaos really ring true when you get into the arpt types of the evil clown character. And then when you have James Holmes, you know, in the Aurora shootings, kind of enacting that chaos, you really start to see the chickens coming home to roost, and you really start to see how people buy into the archetype.

And, you know, he wanted to enact the same chaos that was being talked about in that film, you know, and the clown is always there. You know, it's sometimes mental illness brings the clown up a lot more, you know what I'm saying? you don't have the it or the ego or whatever it is to kind of keep the devil on the shoulder, but he's there all the time. He exists. We struggle with those masks at a constant rate, especially in a digital age where we're represented, you know, in avatar form on all these social networks. You know what I mean? I mean, we have these filters. No, no, no, that's absolutely correct.

Of our own lives. Yeah, please elaborate. No, I mean, you're absolutely correct. We're way more in a cosplay than we've ever been. You know, we allow ourselves the freedom to put on those masks more than we ever have. It's accepted, ready player one, you know, whatever it is, these avatars that we have. And so it's a lot easier to slip into worlds and do things that we wouldn't do. I mean, there's a reason why, you know, eyes wide shut, you know, they have all those sexual escapades wearing masks. You know what I'm saying?

Once you put on the mask, you can be a lot more, dude, this goes back to superhero culture, this goes back to erotica, this goes back to all these things. You know, if you could put on the mask, you can be that other person a lot easier. It's absolutely captivating, Josh. In terms of like what we do, we cover some pretty fringe topics. I deal a lot with people who claim to have encountered possible. non-human entities. I mean, let's be honest, aliens. Every story seems to have the same

prototypical timeline of events, you know? And I constantly find myself miffed about if this all stems from a cultural narrative, or if it actually happened, or if it's both, I don't pretend to have any answers. I mean, no place to do that. But do you think people like to

adopt these sort of stories, these prototypes as something of their own, like, is it a pride thing? Do they want be noticed, like, what do you think's going on there in terms of possibly the paranormal, but if we don't want to go that far, like... We can. I mean, you know, like, look, I don't consider myself like a mythbuster per se, but, but, you know,

ego, like, I was the one to see the ghost. The ghost showed himself to me, you know, is that there? Absolutely, you know, and that, that also plays in kind of a Salem witch trial itself. How much was the sale in witch trials like Heather's? How much was it a popularity contest? I saw the devil, you know? But then, you know, I did a movie as a producer called Mysterious Skin. And one of the things in Mysterious Skin is his character, Brady Corbe.

He was molested by his baseball coach. But, you know, he thinks he was abducted by aliens. And so, you know, there's one reason why so many of the alien abduction stories have a sexual penetration thing going on as well. Again, we create stories to deal with events that we can't understand or don't want to understand because they make no sense. Why would a baseball coach, some guy I trust, molest me? So instead, I was abducted by aliens because we don't know the motives of an alien.

That's just how it happens. It happens for so many reasons. one of the urban legends actually we do plan on trying to do another round of killer legends by the way that was going to be my next question do plan on doing that we've been going back and pitching that you know to do it on a better channel and to find you know the right place whether that's netflix and uh so guys if you're out there and you want more please let us know and one of the ones we want to talk about is the is the betty and barney hill oh awesome you know because listen there's a lot of people who have a lot of different reasons why they might say that they were abducted by aliens, right? And, you know, there's some people who, have you seen, by the way, Mirage Men? Absolutely.

Great movie, right? Mark Eichleton, yeah. One of my, I just watched it the other day. It's funny you mentioned that. So good. Amazing, yeah. So good. Creating a myth around so many years of storytelling.

Creating a myth out of disinformation and enough to feed more disinformation. It's brilliant, you know what I'm saying? Like that, so that is like, who knows why some of these things happen? Like, who knows why? people, there's so many different reasons to feed the mythology that it's so hard to, you know, get an answer for all of them. Like, you know, maybe Whitley Stryber was abducted, you know,

maybe, you know, maybe something did happen or, or, but maybe, you know, something else happened. But, you know, what I love about Betty and Barney, it was these are two extremely upstanding individuals. You know, they would have no reason a lie, you know what I'm saying. You know, especially as an interracial couple at the time so much. The last thing you want to do is draw attention to yourself. However, but let's really get into it. Really, what was, you know what I'm saying? Like, do you have any ideas?

It's, you know, it's such a, it's such a pivotal case in terms of, quote, unquote, the UFO field. And there's been so much contention with it. In terms of my personal beliefs, I don't know. I honestly don't know. And I'm not afraid to say that. I firmly believe something happened to them. A lot of people think it may have been the military. military. So again, right there, if the military was somehow involved in this quote-unquote abduction,

if the hills are going out and saying it was aliens, done. Your disinformation has been planted immediately. Yeah, I have to say Miragemen really opened my eyes to how these can, how journalists could be manipulated into, you know, retelling and regurgitating those stories over and over again. And I know a lot of our more believers will hate us promoting this film Miragemen, but it is. It's absolutely eye-oply. You have a guy who works for the CIA

saying that that is what we did. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Richard Doty, you know, and for all his You know, that he says, we really spread misinformation because we didn't want people to know about things like stealth bombers. So if somebody said something, we told them it was an alien ship. Right.

That's what you do. So the other part of an urban legend is that you can never prove or disprove it, right? Because if you could, then the urban legend has no power. And so the illability to, you know, the fact that you can't do it is what makes it work. And the same thing with, you know, aliens. Once you throw in the disinformation, there's always an answer, you know what I'm saying? And there's never a right answer. And that seed was sort of planted early on with the first case of rob.

Oswell in 1947, which started immediately with possibly a lie, but we don't know. And it just, it goes from there. So you mentioned, Josh, that you want to do more of killer legends. What would you want to cover if you had the opportunity? Oh, there's so many great ones. When to go psychosis, you know, the idea of like eating people somehow makes you crazy, which is true, you know what I'm saying? Everything.

Mole people, love that. You know, we were just talking about it this morning, literally we were just talking to a company this morning about it. You know, mole people, Betty and Barney Hill, vampire cults, you know, like all those very interesting things. We're doing a show, we're doing a show actually for A&E about serial killers. Oh, okay. And kind of dispelling some of the mythology about that. And, you know, a lot of people think that vampires, were just, were just, were just, serial killers. They were just serial killers that were killing people and people didn't know how to

contextualize that so they kind of created, you know, the vampire mythology. Yeah, it makes complete sense, you know. And I know you're working on another documentary as well, is that correct? Yeah, yeah, one about a different kind of urban legend, a whale. A whale, okay. That's my lovable. Can't do too much darkness, but actually been working on it for about four years, documentary about a whale that calls out of her frequency that theoretically no other whale can understand and he's been swimming through the oceans kind of for um you know a couple decades now and uh it's this kind of ahabian quest to find this whale and just why we believe why we have all these uh emotions tied to whales everybody loves whales but why especially one that can't communicate with anything else on the planet

of course it's man's existential crisis you know it's the best thing and so like just to watch people like freak out when they hear this story. They're like, oh, my God, it's so sad. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's where the empathy comes in for sure. Totally. Totally. So, Jeff, where can we find out more about what you're up to and where to find Cropsey, Killer Legends, and how we can get this thing back on the air? Sure. Well, you know, the interesting thing is that Cropsie can see it, Netflix, you know, it's pretty much everywhere digitally. And you can also, if you just search for it, a lot of people don't know that there's a ton of great extra footage on Cropsy on the DVDs that you can

VHX, you can, a company called VHX, you can find it. But, you know, if you do some searching, you can find how to get all that additional content. Same thing with Killer Legends, iTunes, Hulu, Netflix, and then, you know, some of our other stuff is going to be coming out. Twitter, Josh Seaman, you know, I'm around. It's interesting. I don't use that much social media, as you might think.

but that's because I'm always working. Yeah, that's a good thing, man, for sure. I wish more people would take after you. I'd rather make content than make posts. Yeah, you know. Good point. Well, I mean, and you have, and you've tapped into sides of humanity that most of us just aren't willing to face,

and that is the cold-heart truth that we are, like you say, the monsters we create, and inevitably the legends we fear. And it takes someone like yourself to shine a light, in those dark corners of society and to try to find some sort of answers and perhaps even give some closure to the people that you've interviewed and documented on these actual cases. So I want to thank you for not only coming on the show today, but for doing that for people. So yeah, totally dig your work, man. I look forward to what you have coming up next.

And again, thank you so much for coming on today. Thanks for having you. That's it for this week's episode. Be sure to check out Cropsey and Killer. Legends available on Hulu, Netflix, Shudder, and many other streaming platforms. Please take a few moments to subscribe, rate, and review somewhere in the skies on iTunes and Apple Podcasts. These are the largest podcast platforms out there. In every subscription and rating moves us closer to being featured and helps us gain new listeners.

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For past episodes, news, articles, and contact information, visit the official website, Somewherein the skies.com. Thank you so much for sticking with us through October for this very special Halloween series. We've got some very special guests

coming your way throughout November, so stay tuned for that. Have a very happy Halloween. And remember, keep your eyes to the skies, but never stop searching somewhere on the ground. The Somewhere in the Skies podcast is part of the Lionsgate Sound Network. Please take a moment to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever possible. Thank you for listening.