Stuff You Should Know - 10 Medieval Torture Devices

Episode Date: July 9, 2013

Warning: This episode on instruments designed solely to produce extreme human suffering during the Middle Ages in Europe is very graphic in nature. Seriously, if you're squeamish, maybe pass on this one. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And Chuck thinks we should include a warning on this one. I think we probably should. This is gonna be pretty gruesome at times. Warning, kids. Maybe ask your parents if you should play this. Parents, maybe don't play this for your kids. Done.

Pretty good warning. Talk about a COA. And this is history, you know. It's pretty gruesome history, though. Yeah, so. The Middle Ages are the medieval period in Europe. Man. Yeah, they were a very gruesome time.

Starting about the fifth century after the fall of the Roman Empire and lasting until the Renaissance, the 15th century. That's many English years. 1,000 years of nasty, brutish, and short life. Yeah. So the average life expectancy during the medieval period. And historians don't like to call it the Middle Ages

because that implies that it's just basically this little bit of time in between two really important ages. The middle period. Yeah. It's like the jamboready of history. And they're saying like, no, there's some really great things came about during this time. And you can't just call it that.

So they call it the medieval period. I still think it's the Middle Ages. The Dark Ages is another great way to put it. Yeah. Brutish behavior. There was a. What was the life expectancy? You didn't say?

About 40. Somewhere in the 40s. I didn't see specifically, but yeah. So that's old? Yeah. Wow. So that's average age. You could live longer than that.

I mean, if you're a woman, the chances of you dying in childbirth were pretty high. If you were a man, the chances of you being killed by getting kicked by your horse were probably pretty high. If you were a child, making it, I think you had a 33% chance to not make it past five. Wow. It was not good.

It was a violent time. Nutrition was not very good. It was a dirty time. And it was just a bad time to be alive. I think we can agree on that. If you're time traveling, skip the Middle Ages. One of the, I guess hallmarks of the Middle Ages was that after the fall of the Roman Empire,

Rome owned Europe, owned it outright. And under this control also came things like roads, currency, government, justice. Yeah, like to the farthest reaches of the Roman Empire, it was under control generally. And these areas had public service, right? Public services. After the Roman Empire fell, there was a power vacuum.

And for 300 years, the Franks and the Saxons and the Anglo-Saxons all were fighting. And finally in about 800, Charlemagne was crowned the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. And the church took over basically. Which, good news, right? You would think the church, however, had a hatred of women and fondness of torture.

And the Middle Ages was also characterized by a period of really inventive thinking in how to produce human suffering. Yeah, I think this is a great quote from L.A. Perry's 1975 book, A History of Torture in England. The first part of this really hits home. Well, it didn't hit home, but it brings up bad memories. What strikes us most in considering the medieval tortures

is not so much their diabolical barbarity as the extraordinary variety in what may be termed the artistic skill they displayed. So they definitely delighted, and especially reading these torture devices and being very inventive and probably trying to outdo one another. And how awful it was and the different mechanisms,

because mechanics was new. So they were probably like, look, this has five gears that will rip your toes off. How cool. But yeah, so it was a very perversely inventive period. Yeah, Perry says that they basically ruminated and considered how suffering occurs to figure out how to produce it.

That it was basically an art form by the end. Yeah, they would, in court sometimes, they would just do things like, hey, let me put your arm in boiling water, and we're gonna base our verdict on how long it takes it to heal. I know the old thing about, you know, just the witch float, throw it in the lake and let's see.

And if she drowns, hey, she was not a witch, that's sad. But if she lives, then burn her at stake. Exactly. Yeah, so either way, the lady dies, which is very sad. Right. And they even had a thing when they would torture people for confessions, but they wouldn't, they would say basically that confession doesn't count.

So they would say, you know what, within that 24 hour period, we won't torture you. See if you still confess. And if you don't, then we'll just torture you again. Right, that was to corroborate your own confession that was extracted under torture. So even back then, they realized like, yeah, you can't really rely on a confession under torture

because people say anything to get you to stop doing the things that we're about to describe they were doing to them. Right, or they would torture you very publicly. That's a very common thing with most of these to dissuade criminal activity. Yeah, humiliation, shaming, scarlet letters. Yeah, sure.

That kind of thing. Permanent scarlet letters. Right. Even. So we were talking about the torture devices, some of the more famous, more diabolical ones that came out of the middle ages. Yeah, and this is a surprise for you.

I told you I had a little game we were gonna play. Okay. We're gonna, as we go, we will also find out, because I've done this research, which of these torture devices are also the names of heavy metal bands. Oh yeah, that's a great one. Because very first one I saw the Brazen Bull,

I was like, surely that's a band. Yeah, when I was researching this I was thinking like, I wonder how many times Chuck's gonna be like, that's a great band name. Well, the Brazen Bull is in fact a band in Chicago. Yeah. Three piece grind to core metal band. Nice.

Give me another example of grind core, so I know. I don't even know. I think it's just the stuff that's so fast and heavy and like. Gotcha. I like that. Yeah. So I tweeted out this picture of the different characters

from Lloyd of the Rings. And then based on their looks, what kind of metal they were into. Really? Yeah, like Gollum was into new metal. New metal? Yeah. And then I can't remember, I think Vigo Mortensen

was into like, I can't remember. It's worth checking out. Go on to our Twitter feed, look like three weeks, four weeks back. Yeah, I'll find it, you'll love it. I'm sure I didn't describe grind core correctly. That's cool. I'm not hip on the metal scene.

Chuck. The Brazen Bull. The Brazen Bull is old indeed. They think that an ancient Greek named Perilis invented it. Yeah, for a tyrant named Phalaris of Agrincentum. And so basically like, hey, let me build you this torture device. You're gonna love it.

And the guy was like, I love it. Get in it. Yeah, let's see how it works. And the guy was like, what? And apparently that's how it went down. Right. The Brazen Bull. Well, it's a brass bowl,

which is why it's brazen and a bowl. Yeah. It's a large one, big enough for a human to fit in. Ah. And there is a locking mechanism on the outside once the human is in, because the fires around the Brazen Bull lit them and then waited for the Brazen Bull to heat up

with the person inside who would then scream and move around and the muted sounds because it was brass. Yeah, and because their tongue was often cut off. Right. Yeah. Made it look and sound like the bull was alive and making noise.

Yeah. And we found through all of these, Grabster wrote this, of course, at Grabinowski. It was usually followed with to the delight and entertainment of the crowd. Right. So apparently, you know, if the bull started rocking and making noises,

people were just like, ooh, I love it. Right. It's great. It's getting seared alive inside that hollow bull. Yeah, because this thing, you're not being, you're not being like charred, you're being seared to death. That ultimately, I imagine you would pass out

and die from the heat. Yeah, probably. Hopefully, but I mean, being seared to death, that's pretty bad. Or even being seared in the meantime before you pass out from the heat. Yeah, I think with most of these, your best hope is to pass out as soon as possible from pain.

Yeah. You know? Thumb screws is one that are, they're interesting in that they aren't designed to kill you. Right. Like a lot of these tortures are designed like to either kill you or you could die from them. And if you do, well, whatever.

With thumb screws, it's like, nope, this is just for inflicting pain on you. Yeah, band or not a band? A band. Band. Awesome. Thumb screw out of Austin, Texas. Awesome.

Metal band. So yeah, like you said, you're not gonna die. It's basically a, these upright metal bars, three upright metal bars that you put your thumbs in and then a wooden bar slides down and presses your thumbs down and then it has screws and they just crank it down.

Like squeezing your thumbs until they're crushed and broken, I would imagine. Yeah, if you want to just start to get even the slightest bit of idea of it, just press down on your thumb a little bit, about within the top third of your thumb, above the quick. Jerry's not doing it.

She's just watching us. And it just, it starts as like a little throbbing pain. Yeah. Now imagine like somebody's screwing a vice down on top of that while you're screaming. That's what a thumb screw is meant for. Apparently there was a 10 finger version called a Pilly Wink.

And that's a cute name. Is that a metal band name? No, I looked that up though. And it supposedly originated in the Russian army as punishment for bad soldiers. And then a Scotsman said, this is great. Let's bring it back home to the UK. Yeah, a guy named, quote,

bloody Tam Delio, who was a 17th century minister of parliament who liked to use them himself. Not on himself. No, but he liked to use them on people. Okay, number eight, the rack. Band, not a band. Band. No, I couldn't find it.

It's gotta be. I think it's just a little too vague. That was my explanation. But it is a workout device. Someone's actually named their little workout machine, the rack. No way. Yeah, it looks like a walker.

If you can't walk so great, but you can do dips and push ups and sit ups and stuff with it. So do you think they were making a joke? I have no idea. I hope so. So the rack is pretty self-explanatory and you've all seen this before. Has many different forms, but generally it is a person

tied to a table with each limb tied to a corner. And then it is cranked and you are pulled apart or at least dislocated. Right, like the wheel is cranked or like an axle is cranked or something that winds, that coils the rope that your limbs are tied to up. And yeah, it's either dislocated or if you really wanna get down,

you can just keep going and pull the limbs right off of the body. Yeah, I imagine there was about a four second period where it was great, where your back just cracked just right and they're like, oh, that's fantastic. And then it was like, no, no, no, no, no. Can we stop there? Oh no.

Oh no. Yeah. I don't like this anymore. And they called you, you know, would be called broken on the rack or racked or stretched on the rack. Right. And there was one type that apparently looked like a horse

even. I get the impression that it was a little bit like a saw horse looking kind of. Yeah. It's just a beam with legs. And Torquemada, who was the head of the Spanish Inquisition, he preferred one called the Portoro.

Right, but again, the inventiveness, like they would make one look like a horse or, you know. Right. They would apply a little artistry to it, which is even more perverse, I think. And there's another one that's kind of related to the rack, it's called the wheel. It's no band name.

Virtually the same principle. No band? Yeah, too generic again. It's basically the same principle as the rack. Your limbs are tied to the wheel or they're broken ahead of time in two places with an iron bar and then threaded through the spokes in the wheel.

Yeah. And then once you're secured this wheel, they can do all sorts of stuff. They can swing it like a pendulum and put spikes that you're grazed over. Right. Or a fire. A fire below you and just swing you slowly over that.

Or they can use the wheel as it was meant to be used and tie you to it and send you down a rocky hillside. Yeah, tie you on the outside of it. Yeah. It's not to make you dizzy. Yeah, I just had to catch myself, almost said that was my favorite. The wheel's your favorite?

Well, tying them on the outside and rolling them down the hill. When I read that I was like, very inventive. Yeah. Hats off to you. What else are you gonna do with the wheel? Using it as a pendulum, that's stupid. Yeah, the one where they would break your arms

was akin to crucifixion because like you said, basically they would thread you through it and then put it high on a stake and just let you bake out in the sun until you died with four broken limbs. Yep. All right. The rack and the wheel.

The stake, burning at the stake, not a band name. No, and it was usually a form of execution, but it was so painful that it's also considered a form of torture. How long would it take, Josh? So it's just a pole that somebody's tied to with some dry kindling around it. You like the kindling.

Lots of kindling. And depending on the conditions, it could take 30 minutes for you to finally go unconscious from the pain of the fire. 30 minutes of being burned before you finally fainted. Now, if it was windy out and the fire is blowing away from you a little bit, you could be enduring that for up to two hours.

Unbelievable. Of being burned to death, 30 minutes, two hours of being burned to death at the stake. Yeah, and the Netherlands, they got a little more creative with it. They would, a lot of times, they would remove the tongue or do something to the tongue,

I think, to just muffle the screams and make it a little more palatable. And in the Netherlands, they would apparently sandwich your tongue between two hot iron plates. And, of course, you couldn't do a lot with that, except make weird muffled screaming noises. Right, I don't know if it was to make it more palatable

or people during the dark ages thought it was hilarious when people couldn't talk. Yeah, maybe so. You know? You're right. Like, that was like the Jerry Lewis of periods. The Jam Brady and the Jerry Lewis of periods. Wow, that's pretty exciting time.

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the official RuPaul's Drag Race podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Are we onto the pillory? Oh, well, we should say probably that there was a modicum of mercy. Oh, sure. With the stake where the church would strangle you

if you confessed to being a heretic. They would strangle you to death first before burning you at the stake. And then it was just a symbolic burning. Yeah, right. You were being consumed by fire. That's a very nice thing to do. Sure.

So pillory, band or not a band? I would say band. They are a band out of Boston. And they're a hardcore band. And actually listen to one of their songs. You want to know the name of it is? What? Hangnail in a f***ing s***.

Jeez. That's a metal band song title. It sure is. Wow. The pillory you've all seen, it's basically the two parallel wooden boards that are clasped together around your neck and arms and you're bent over hanging through them.

Your hands and your head stick through these things. Yeah. I always thought that was the stocks. Stocks are just like, yeah, it's just like to restrain your ankles. Yeah. But the point is you're immobile and you're put on a platform in a very public area

to be shamed and humiliated and have rotten fruit thrown at you. And more than that, there's a lot of feces and I imagine the worst case scenario for this would be a group of like 12 year old boys in the middle ages when you're in the pillory. Yeah, 12 year old boys have families and kids by that.

That's true. But I bet they were the meanest of all. Like some people would die in the pillory because they would be beaten to death. Some people would be lauded though if they were thumbing their nose at the government and saying I didn't pay my taxes. Some people would bring them flowers and food and stuff.

Yeah, basically the pillory was meant to just be left up to the crowd what was to be done with you. At the very least you were shamed publicly just for being up there for an hour or two. But if the crowd decided that you needed more justice, like there was a four Englishmen who had wrongfully accused some people and sent them to the gallows

in order to get the reward money, those guys were beaten to death when they were put into the pillory. That's no good. That's what they call English justice. Yeah, and can you imagine not being able to move and just have someone like beating you about the head? That brings up a-

If you're not able to bring your hands up and at least guard your face. That still goes on today. What? As public execution, there are some countries out there that use stoning, Iran's a very prominent one. Where you are sentenced to death by stoning. They still do that?

Yeah, they bury you up to your neck and your heads just exposed. So you can't move and people throw rocks at you until you die. Usually they cover you with the sheets so they can't see you, but they judge that you're done when you stop moaning

and you're bleeding through the sheet. But there's a really interesting article that I think you should read. I wrote this blog post, Chuck. It's called Five Most Entertaining Academic Papers of All Time. And one of them, and entertaining, I use this in a strange way,

but one of them is called The Possible Pain Experience during Execution by Different Methods. It was by Harold Hillman. It was written in the, I think the early 90s. And one of the ones he covers is stoning. But he goes through and takes all of this. He's like, there's no body of work

on how much pain stoning causes. So he compares it to pain reported from a car crash or something like that. And then makes assumptions that are pretty good educated guesses of what pain a person experiences and basically rates methods of execution from hanging to stoning to the gas chamber in so far as how much pain and suffering they produce.

Entertaining? I think fascinating might be the word. Yes, okay. The other ones are much more entertaining. That one had to be in there. Originally I call them the five greatest academic papers of all time. But you know, SEO.

Yeah. Okay, so we're done with the pillory and the stocks, correct? Were the stocks a band name? No. Next we have the Iron Maiden band or not a band. Uh, you know, they have their own beer. Iron Maiden beer.

Trooper Ale. Really? Yeah, it's got Eddie on the cover and everything. Oh wow. It's pretty neat. I'd try that. Around the label, I should say. Can you get it like here in the States?

No, you can only get it in the EU. I tried. Yeah, it's probably 16 ounces too. It looks good. Like it's well made. It's not just like I'll put our name on this crap. Like it's clearly like a kind of craft beer. That's awesome.

You know Bruce Dickinson's like a full on pilot, like 747 pilot. I didn't know that. Like he flies their big jumbo jet that the band travels on. That's cool. Wow. So the Iron Maiden, at one point they didn't even believe this was real because it sounded so diabolical.

But then they found one in Nuremberg, Germany. And sometimes it's called the Iron Maiden of Nuremberg for that reason. But it's a sarcophagus. You've seen it before like King Tut was buried in, but it's got little double doors and very strategically placed spikes on the inside. Yeah.

Done. Well, when you shut these double doors, including one over the face. Oh, you shut the door. Right. Gotcha. Including one over the face that has two spikes that are designed to take your eyes out.

Yeah. These spikes go into your vital organs. They're arranged in such a way so that your heart gets it, your kidneys, your liver, all this stuff. But just a bit though, right? Yeah, the spikes aren't so long that they just go right through you and kill you.

They're short enough that they're gonna puncture these organs and you're gonna die. But it's gonna take many hours. And the Lord of the Castle in Nuremberg gets to sit there and listen to you moan and die. Wow. And they had one apparently that was even shaped like the Virgin Mary in her arms.

So when he got in, she would hug you. Yeah, when you like turn to crank, the arms would draw you closer into the spikes. Again, very peendish. Scavenger's Daughter, band or not a band? I know that as a band. I ran across it during my research too. Four bands from what I saw.

Is that right? There's one in the UK, one in St. Louis, one in Shanghai and one in Poland. Cool. So they're really spread out. Maybe it's all the affiliates of the same band. They're all subsidiaries of Scavenger's Daughter Co. Well, I will see.

The original name for the Scavenger's Daughter, Scavengington's Gives or Gives. I don't know how you would pronounce that, G-Y-V-E-S. That's a band too. Is it? From Tallahassee. I can believe that. So it was named after the inventor, Scavengington.

And... Todd Scavengington. This, the best way I'm gonna describe this is, it looks sort of like an arch. Imagine the St. Louis arch shrunk down to about two feet and attached to a base plate. And you would get down in like the tornado crouch position and get inside of this thing.

And then they would crank it down on the back of your neck and back. At the top of the arch, the top of the center of the arch is like a screw that they can crank to crank the whole arch down on top of you. Yeah. So you're in like a crouch position

and they just further crouch you until your spine cracks and your breastbone breaks. And like, it's the opposite of the wreck where the wreck tears you apart. The Scavengington's gyre jives is meant to compress you. And like you will bleed out of your fingertips and your eyes and your ears

because your body's being compressed into this tiny ball. It's like a car crusher. And yeah, and you're exactly. And there's actually one on display at the Tower of London. Yeah, it's all on the internet. It was pretty cool looking. And again, I'm not delighting in this, but...

That's just insane. Like I was looking at it on the internet today too. And I was thinking like human beings used to be placed in that a few hundred years ago. Like the suffering that this machine, this contraption produced at the hands of other people. Like if you just sit there and like force perspective on yourself,

it's really unnerving. Yeah, well, some people might say that putting someone in a chair and sending electricity through their body until they die is the same thing. Oh yeah, for sure. Have you ever seen that, the Errol Morris documentary on the inventor

of the electric chair? No, what's it called? Mr. Sparky? No, I think it's called Doctor Death. Okay. And then Colin, what his name is? Lutcher maybe or something? I don't know.

Really fascinating though. Because he, yeah, just, just rent it. And it's Errol Morris, that's all you need to know. Okay. These last two are really pretty brutal and brutal against women. Yeah. And it's pretty gross.

So if you're not into hearing about that, maybe you should turn off the podcast. Yeah, this to me is like, this is the worst. The other ones were gender neutral. Yeah. And I guess the last one we're gonna talk about is technically gender neutral. But like the idea of it being inflicted on women

to kind of as Grabbunowski points out to destroy aspects of femininity. Yeah. It makes everything even more disturbing, you know? Yeah, agreed. And this is called The Breast Ripper, not a band. And not to make light of this, but there was a Yahoo answer where a guy said,

quote, I need a brutal band name, something like diseases or disorders or something to do with babies being eaten. It needs to be killer. And one of the people said, you should call yourself The Breast Ripper. Did he say awesome? No, I didn't like follow up and like look to see

if that's what he chose. But the guy had listed it like a bunch of names. Yeah. You know, that were mainly torture devices. I mean, if you're a metal band searching torture devices or a medieval torture device, it's gonna yield a 90 or two. Exactly.

So extending back to the Roman times and probably before females have had a rough time of things when it comes to torture being marched through the streets naked, public humiliation, forced rape, sexual mutilation, all like just terrible, terrible things specifically geared toward women. Right.

The Breast Ripper was probably the worst thing I've ever heard. Yeah. So basically- I mean, the one who wants to describe it. I thought it was very bad too. Back to you. Go ahead.

After you. A woman would be tied to a wall or basically forced to be immobile. And then this, The Breast Ripper, which was basically a claw of spikes. It could be open and then placed on the breast and then shut, clamped down onto the breast. But then we pull the way.

Basically just mangling the breast. Yeah. And like the thumb screws, it was not intended to kill. Right. As a matter of fact, I get the impression from this article that it was used very frequently to basically say, hey, everybody, look at this person.

Right, like the scarlet letter. Right, exactly. It was meant to label somebody. Yeah, in England, I know they were fond of branding women on the face to shame them. Yeah, and apparently, if you're in the pillory, one of the things that may also accompany that was to be branded by having your nose slit.

Right, or an ear cut off maybe. Yeah. Jeez, what was wrong with people back then? I don't know. And what changed, I wonder? That's like the most peaceful period in history. What, right after the Middle Ages? Well, that's what we were talking about.

Remember, Steven Pinker was like, the Middle Ages were particularly bad. I don't know what it was that changed, but I think the idea that government came in and created a monopoly on violence, that's fairly, that's what we're talking about here. That doesn't really account for it because the government had,

not necessarily a monopoly it was supposed to, but it was pretty violent itself. Yeah, and it's not like things got great. Like you said, they're still stoning people and they used the electric chair in this very country. But it definitely wasn't the Middle Ages. No, and also, I mean, you could get, you could be tortured for all sorts of things.

Like your neighbor could be like, you're a witch. And all of a sudden you're tortured. Right. So I would be very curious to know exactly what accounts for that changed, because something changed. Yeah, and they also point out in the article I did that a lot of times these were used to also get you

to sing about your accomplices. Yeah. And that was basically like you to say whatever you want. Sure. Yeah, it was my neighbor there. And the neighbor was like, huh? And then all of a sudden he's in the pillory too. Right.

You know. All right, our final one is the pair of anguish. Oh man. Band or not a band? It's gotta be a band. It's a band, four piece metal band. Wow. From Roanoke, Virginia.

Man. Not Roanoke, North Carolina. No. So the pair of anguish was, I guess I'll do this one since you had to do the breast ripper. It is a pear shaped device and the pair is actually four metal leaves joined at the top by hinge

with like a key crank. So just imagine a pair that if you crank like where the stem would be, the four leaves would open up. And they would use this on women in like the worst places and on homosexual men in the worst places. An orifice basically. Yeah.

And open it up. And I showed Emily this morning, she was like, so that looks like an early speculum to me. And that's, you know, kind of this along those same lines. And that's the pair of anguish. Yeah. And you can get pictures of all these and look at them. Not in use obviously, but actually some of them

are like they have drawings of like the rack and things like that. Yeah. But luckily not of the pair of anguish. There's a spoon from I think the Nuremberg Castle that has a mini iron maiden on the top of it. Oh really? Yeah, proudly displayed.

Wow. Yeah, you can, I mean, there's photos of these and some of them are relics in museums around the world, like the Skevington's jeeps in the Tower of London. There's probably a torture museum, I bet, somewhere. There is. There's the London Dungeon. Oh really?

That one's awesome. I went with my dad and my sister years and years ago. How old were you? I was like 17 maybe. Oh, that's good. I was like 13 maybe perfect though. Yeah, well yeah, anywhere from there. But it's like they really did it up

because they used like wax dummies and it's like there's like a head in the basket on the guillotine exhibit. Right. Plus there's a great misfit song named that too. Name what? London Dungeon. Oh yeah?

Yeah, nice. One more thing I wanted to say. In 2003, after the US invaded Iraq, they found, you know, Uday Hussein had Saddam's oldest son. Yeah. He's the minister of sports and he was very famous for like torturing athletes that he didn't think were performing well enough.

What a guy. He found an Iron Maiden at the Ministry of Sports, his Iron Maiden that he used on people. Wow. Yeah. That certainly doesn't encourage athleticism, you know? No, it encourages defection and running away whenever you go somewhere to play somebody in another country.

Wow. That's very sad. So that's it for 10 medieval torture devices. Yeah, very bizarre time in this world's history for sure. Yeah. If you want to see pictures of these things or read more about them, you can type that in medieval, M-E-D-I-E-V-A-L torture devices in the search bar

at House Stuff Works. And I said search bar, so it's time for message break. Stuff is should go. For food lovers, there's no place on earth like Mississippi where sweet, spicy, and smoky flavors satisfy your spirits. Wherever you wander. Plan today at visitmississippi.org slash dining. Mississippi, wanderers welcome.

Ready, set, slay. Squirrel Friends, the official RuPaul's Drag Race podcast is taking you behind the scenes of RuPaul's Drag Race season 15 on MTV. With me, Alec Moppa, and my co-host, Lonnie Love. Alec and I will recap the latest episode, the best and worst looks, and we'll even be joined by some of your favorite queens along the way.

One thing's for sure, there is no shortage of queens this season, because we are witnessing the biggest cast in RuPaul's Drag Race Herstory. And the stakes are higher than ever with the largest cast prize in Drag Race Herstory. So make no mistake, the competition is going to rev up. Watch season 15 of RuPaul's Drag Race every Friday on MTV.

Then join us on the podcast right after the show to recap the episode. Deep brief on all the looks and more. Listen to Squirrel Friends, the official RuPaul's Drag Race podcast on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And now I'll listen to her mail.

Yes. All right, thank you. So this is from Matthew N. Cook. Listened to the Living Off the Grid podcast and it reminded him of his friend Michael's aunt. He and his friend are very technically oriented. They've been wiring little doodads and things for years. His aunt bought a house some years back,

which turned out to be a long-term witness protection house for local authorities. She called us in because there were about 1,000 little switches and project boxes all over the house tucked in the nooks and crannies that automated everything from the window blinds to the lights to the door and window locks. It's very reminiscent of something we'd seen

in an old James Bond movie. So this is not like a new thing, which is why it was weird. She had no idea how to operate any of them or even what half of them did. So we got to come and play in the house basically for a while and figured out what we could. We found the house had many defense measures, including motion sensor alarms in the surrounding woods

and driveway and backup power and water supplies, which included rainwater collection solar panels, a huge backup generator and a wind turbine on a telephone pole type thing that could be raised or lowered and adjusted using a hand winch. Well, what made the house really cool was while many of the home automation

and power water conservation measures implemented are now things that can be purchased and installed professionally. This was all done well before this as evidenced by all the project boxes and very retro toggle switches and such. For us, it was like seeing history as some clever guy or girl actually

had to think up these pieces and then design and build them from scratch. I feel like I'm really not doing this house justice and the engineer's justice, but that could be the over-excited geek in me recalling this find. Matthew in Cook, sounds pretty cool. That was very cool, thanks Matthew.

Apparently the aunt wasn't too into it. Yeah, she's like, I got a good deal on this house. Yeah, like once they figured out how to do like the lights and stuff, he was like, all right, get out. I would be very curious to see photos of this house. Yeah, me too. Send them along, maybe.

We love cool photos of very cool places, whether they're abandoned or unusual or whatever. So if you have like a photo spread of a cool house or a cool old asylum or whatever, send us a link because we want to see it. You can tweet to us at SYSK podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcastsdiscovery.com

and you can join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Hey, Netflix streams, TV shows and movies directly to your TV, computer, wireless device or game console. You can get a 30 day free trial membership.

Go to www.netflix.com slash stuff and sign up now. For food lovers, there's no place on earth like Mississippi where sweet, spicy and smoky flavors satisfy your spirits. Wherever you wander. Plan today at visitmississippi.org slash dining. Mississippi, wanderers welcome. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff.

Stuff that'll piss you off. Cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast

or wherever you get your podcast.