Somewhere in the Skies - The Power of Urban Legends with Josh Zeman

Episode Date: October 29, 2018

On episode 80 of SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES, Ryan shares one last listener ghost story from Angela to ring in the Halloween season and the end of the Halloween series of the show. 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. Guest Bio: Josh Zeman has been at the forefront of the true crime genre for the past decade. His critically acclaimed horror documentary CROPSEY, a critic’s pick with The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and Roger Ebert, was called “one of the year’s best documentaries” and “one of the scariest films of the year” in 2011. Off the success of CROPSEY, Zeman created KILLER LEGENDS for NBC Universal, an anthology series that examines true crimes that have inspired our scariest urban legends. Premiering as both the #1 downloaded documentary and horror film on iTunes in July of 2014, KILLER LEGENDS has since become one of the most watched true crime documentaries on both Netflix and Hulu. To learn more, visit: www.cropseylegend.com Thank you for creeping your way through October for our Halloween Series. We are back to UFOs next week! ALIENCON lands in Baltimore on Nov. 9th-11th. For discount tickets, use promo code: SKIES at check out. Visit: www.TheAlienCon.com/register Patreon: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies Website: www.somewhereintheskies.com Official Store: CLICK HERE Order Ryan's Book by CLICKING HERE Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Instagram: @SomewhereSkiesPod Opening and Closing Theme Song, "Ephemeral Reign" by Per Kiilstofte SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES is produced by Third Kind Productions, in association with eOne Entertainment SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES is sponsored by HelloFresh. To receive 50% off your first order, use promo code: SOMEWHERE50 at checkout by visiting www.HelloFresh.ca 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

Greetings, Skywatchers. This is Ryan Sprague, the host of the Summer in the Sky's podcast, and I want you to join me at AlienCon. AlienCon lands in Baltimore, Maryland on November 9th, 10th, and 11th. Explore the Unexplained with your favorite ancient aliens contributors, UFO researchers, and stars from hit sci-fi and sci-fact television shows and films. I'll personally be giving my solo presentation, and I'll also be joining my good friend and colleague, Jason McClellan of Roke Planet to moderate and take part in panel discussions throughout the weekend. It's going to be a fun and informative weekend for families, serious researchers, and all curious minds alike. And right now, you can get an exclusive somewhere in the sky's discount on all tickets by visiting the aliencon.com

and using the code skies at checkout. We hope to see you at the Baltimore Confirm. Fetchettian Center in November, and now on to the show. 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 Cropsey 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 their urban legend. And 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 Sprague. Welcome to the final installment of the Halloween series of Somewhere in the Skies. I'm your host, Ryan Sprague. With Halloween just around the creaky corner, we wrap things up this 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 scatted 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, easygoing 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 fancy. 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 one 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, sell, 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 call. deal with all this the next day. Now there was a table in the doorway that Bruce always set 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 a very very

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 been opening, and 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 phone screen image change 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, 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 Zeman. 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 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? came first, is fact more terrifying than fiction? We discuss this and so much more

right now with investigative filmmaker Josh Zeman. 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 manifest 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 Willowbrook 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 urban legend about Cropsey, this escape mental patient, and how he would come and 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 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 Cropsy urban legend. And it's not. It's about my cropsy.

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. clown urban legend, you know, 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, 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. 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 of the Cropsey 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. Right, right. That's very interesting, the origins of it in Holly. Hollywood can be connected. I know I've heard you talk about another connection within Hollywood with your own work on Cropsey. 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 cropsy and i'm like hey dude pay me yeah yeah 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 um but you know had anybody ever taken that haroldo footage before and cast that story reframed what was a social justice story for harold 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 um could you tell us a little what you were trying to sort of convey with staten 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 you know what i'm saying and so immediately you're going to write you're going to there's so many stories and so many first-time filmmaker stories are about their hometown right and so um that was important and I 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 and 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 like, well, one interesting thing we found out was a lot of people, when the Arizona Bridge was built in the 1970s, a lot of people came over from Brooklyn, right? They suddenly had a house, they 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 a band in place, that was like a lot, you know, that was like a lot that nobody went to. And only bad things happen 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 patches 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 were 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, they went, and it wasn't just that. It was an abandoned. It was C-view, 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 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?

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 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 Burlinger. And to me, that was the moment I saw that opening sequence with Metallica Sanitarium, I was in, a hook, line, sinker. 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 that went down, a real whodunit. 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, 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. And what 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 they said he did, but 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. 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 I, 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, at least in Jennifer's case, he killed a child with Down syndrome. Because Down syndrome children, supposedly, the legend goes, is 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. 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 again, the set pieces are all there. Like, 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, you know, and that's exactly what happened. And so, and then so juxtaposing that versus 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. People who testified against him. Oh, he looked crazy. He sounded crazy. And then the other question is another reason why people create narratives is through guilt. And I think that there was some guilt about what happened at Willowbrook. 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 Rand'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, you know,

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 picture 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 in to the world as drifter.

living in the woods. You know what I'm saying? So, and I think that that's the, that's the narrative that everybody else got. 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 Willowbrook. You know, it was comfortable for him. Maybe it was a way for him, 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 boogeyman 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. 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 Rand 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 have know about Cropsey. Like, 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. 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, institutions, 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 become so provisional. base of 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, it's 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, they said, oh, 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. something. 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. 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, what 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 and everybody was like oh I have an urban legend that I want to discuss and so I really liked showing everybody like hey 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 Lover

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. and 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.

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, there was this, these crimes, you know, the Moonlight Murders in Texarkana, Texas, where some guy would go 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. 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 discover it. I love the idea. 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, you know, 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 Bockey Creek was a huge, huge moneymaker. That was the Blair Witch of its 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 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, 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 not. 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. 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. 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 is what 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, 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 Candyman. I 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 certainly cause death. So could you tell us where your 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 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 Tainted Candy, except in this one case in Houston, Texas, where this kid did die from a sign.

and I'd lace 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. And you bought into 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 is 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 yeah it's a sneak eating the tail exactly and I mean in that tragic extremely disturbing killing he was ostensibly the man who killed Halloween like he was the man who killed Halloween yeah he was the candy Yeah. They called him candyman. And so the most interesting to me is what people talk about is he wasn't even the only candy man in Houston.

Mm-hmm. There was a serial killer named Dean Coral, who was also the candy man. So there's two candy man's in Houston. It just goes to show, Josh, like that the actual crime, again, can be so much more horrific than the actual urban legend. Right. Yeah. A guy killing his own kid. I mean, how do you even talk about this?

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 in 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 status 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 church-going man who professed, you know, who very church-going, by the way,

who killed his own kid. And was not a stranger, obviously, which we'll touch on in one of your 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 in horror ways. 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. I was just somebody just asked me about this earlier today. Like, 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. 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, 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 babysitter's like, oh, yeah, everything's fine. The turkey's in the oven. And it's like, she looks at her husband.

like what turkey you know and obviously they run home and and and the the babysitter has put the child in the oven um that that used to be a big LSD urban legend that was one of the urban legends that came out of the LSD culture yeah um 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 um yeah like we 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 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, there was always this tinge of, It was a very racially divided town.

You know, we had found out. And then I don't know if you heard last year, it was much more recently that there was a huge firing of the dean of Mizzou, 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. 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 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. And of course, when we think of killer clowns, we always go back to two major points of interest, one being John Wayne Gacy, 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 so sugar-coded. And then they became creepy again. And so, you know, look, a lot of people say clowns, became Creek B when John Wayne Gacy 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 that 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. There was 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 ghetto. 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. Yeah. I mean, again, it could be the parasitic nature of Hollywood, but that only feeds the idea of the legend and permeates it. And like you said, like how were these phantom clowns supposedly being cited all over the world at the same time?

And all these different communities of people who don't talk to each other. 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. We're like, oh, you know, 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 it 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

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 a 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 gasey 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, 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 Gacy 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 artypes 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 art type. 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 filtered versions. No, no, that you're 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 1. 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 of. 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 to be noticed? Like, what do you think is 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, look, I don't consider myself like a mythbuster per se. 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 also plays in kind of a Salem witch trial itself. You know, how much was the Salem 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 Corby, he was molested by his baseball coach,

but 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 you 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. 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 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 Ekelton, yeah. 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 but maybe, you know, something else happened. But, you know, what I love about Betty and Barney, it was these were two extremely upstanding individuals. You know, they would have no reason to lie, you know what I'm saying? You know, especially as an interracial couple at the time so much. Totally, like, the last thing you would 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. So, again, right there, if the military was somehow involved in this quote-unquote abduction, if the pills are going out and saying it was aliens, done. Your disinformation has been planted immediately. 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, hate us promoting this film Miragemen, but it is. It's absolutely eye open.

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 ill ability 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 Roswell 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. Moll 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 were doing a a show, we're doing a show actually for, 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 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? Yeah. And I know you're working on another documentary as well, is that correct?

Yeah, yeah, one about an, a different, kind of urban legend, a whale. A whale, okay. Yeah, that's my lovable. Can't do too much darkness, but actually I've been working on it for about four years, a documentary about a whale that calls out of a frequency that theoretically

no other whale can understand. And he's been swimming through the oceans kind of for, you know, a couple decades now. And it's this kind of a Habian quest to find this whale. And just why we believe, why we have all these emotions tied to whale.

else. 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. Wow. 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, Josh, 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, uh, Cropsy, you can see it. Netflix, you know, it's pretty much everywhere digitally. And you could 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, iTunes, Hulu, Netflix. And then, you know, some of our other stuff is going to be coming out. Twitter, Josh Zeman.

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, hard truth that we, 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 love you. I love. 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, Shutter, 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. Thank you in advance. If you'd like to support the show and receive many rewards in return, please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber today. To learn more and to contribute monthly, visit patreon.com slash somewhere skies.

We're on Twitter at SomewhereSkies and Instagram at SomewhereSkies pod. For past episodes, news, articles, and contact information, visit the official website. the skies.com. Thank you so much for sticking with us through October for this very special Halloween series. We are back in euphological fashion next week as we count down to AlienCon. 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.

Somewhere in the skies is produced by third kind productions in association with the Entertainment One Podcast Network. To learn more, visit Entertainment One Podcast.com. It's human nature to be fascinated by mystery, drawn to the unknown, desperately seeking answers for something that is impossible to understand or explain. Well, that's our specialty. I'm Paula Schleis.

And I'm Steve Yoder, and we're the hosts of all. Ohio Mysteries, and we've got a head scratcher for you. Join us the evening of October 28th for a very, very special podcast we're calling The Great UFO Chase. Because if you're a skeptic, this just might be the story that makes a believer out of you. After all, who can argue with eyewitness accounts and even a photo from trained law enforcement officials in two states?

Project Blue Book, that's who. Oh yeah, those guys. Well, give us a listen and decide for yourself. Search for Ohio Mysteries on your favorite podcast app. Or visit us at ohiomystries.com.