This Paranormal Life - #114 If You Read This Cursed Poem You Die

Episode Date: May 28, 2019

What if there was a poem SO EVIL that simply reading it aloud meant you were cursed for life? Sounds like something Rory and Kit need to #INVESTIGATE.Support us on Patreon.com/ThisParanormalLife to get access to weekly bonus episodes!Buy Official TPL Merch! - thisparanormallife.com/storeFollow us on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTubeJoin our Secret Society Facebook CommunityIntro music by www.purple-planet.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If you smash a tombstone, do you free a ghost? If eating carrots helps you see in the dark, how many carrots before you obtain fully operational night vision eyes? All these questions you can find the answer to on This Paranormal Life! Hello everyone! Welcome to the show! Welcome back! It is a fresh week of Paranormal Mysteries and I am your host, Roy Powers, joined by my co-investigator, Kit Greer. How you doing, Kit? Doing great. Glad to be here. Glad to be here. We had a bit of an exciting week last week, I guess it was now, where we were actually nominated for a British Podcast Award for Best Entertainment Podcast.

Who knew? And we won it. Who knew? No, we didn't know that part for sure. We actually managed to win the award, which was super cool. And we got to hang out with a bunch of awesome podcasters, people who are shaping the future of the audio space. You could have joined in there and helped me out, man. You saw me drowning. You saw me drowning in my own words. And you spat at me you threw rocks at me you could have

i retracted the life float but we we also um at the awards we learned a lot we learned a lot about what was popular and there was one podcast on the night that cleaned up and it was a podcast by a guy named george the poet that's right yeah i think he was nominated for six awards one three something insane at least three it was incredible so obviously you know his podcast has a lot of production value it's well researched he's obviously a super intelligent guy himself seems to be but i think it's because people like poems right so what can we do more of on our show is poems and everyone said to us guys just be be happy with your win like don't worry about george like it's cool yeah just stick to you know you guys are great at what you do and we said that exactly

we want what this guy's got we said roses are red violets are blue they're like stop trying to do a poem because that's not even a real poem that's just your own show worse well usually the only kind of poetry that i would find acceptable is slam poetry we've done a bit of that in the podcast before yeah either slam poetry the form or slam poetry when you recite a poem while dunking a basket from half court oh i didn't know that's what you meant slam dunk poetry you didn didn't say that. That's why right? Sorry, that's probably why you didn't think of it. I didn't say it but we're gonna throw slam poetry aside We're gonna throw slam dunk poetry aside and just look at regular old poetry this week Or should I say irregular old poetry? Hmm. That's too obscure cursed poetry. Oh

It's a curse poem. Oh, sorry. Yeah, I shouldn't know. Yeah, let's just let's not beat around the bush here. We're going to be investigating a poem so feared, so cursed that apparently if you even read it aloud, you are going to suffer a terrible fate. Holy shit. This poem is called Tomino's Hell. Now to find holy shit this poem is called tomino's hell now to find out how this poem became so feared we need to look back into its origins so let's go back to 1919 where a japanese poet named saijo yaso was working on his 27th collection of poems okay pretty prolific guy been doing this for a while. Now, Yasso was a very intelligent man.

He was a university professor, lived in France for a while, studying French poets. But despite the fact that his later work was mostly for children, it was often filled with unsettling imagery and wordplay that would nowadays be considered quite disturbing for a child to read.

Back then, there was so few poets. There were so few highly educated men like him. We had to get kids books from somewhere. Exactly. So it was like, Saijo, we love your work. Is there any way for this next children's anthology you could reign it in? My little Timmy, he was a bit disturbed by the last collection to say the least he hasn't come out of his room for a little while he uh doesn't really sleep actually

anymore he's after your last story that you wrote which i think was just not putting your elbows on the table the story of not putting your elbows on the table which you know you could write a little rhyme about but yours i think said a demon would come and chew them off of your body. So we love what you were going for, but I think it just could be a little bit more kid-friendly. Is there any way you can rein that in? You're shaking your head? Okay, no.

No, no. Fair enough. Fair enough. Listen, you're the boss. Write some more f***ed up shit, and I'll see if Timmy does any better this time around. He's like, while you were talking, I drew this demon. Okay, terrifying.

Wow. Also, not a poem. What did you study in France again? Now, when the 27th collection of his poems was released, one poem in particular stood out against the others. This poem was called Tomino's Hell. This poem was called Tommy Knows Hell. This poem was so damn strange that people didn't even like to read it aloud. This is some creepy stuff in a collection of already pretty unsettling

poems. Now we can talk a little bit more about the story later, but essentially it was a poem about a young boy's damnation to hell as punishment for actions that aren't specified in the poem. What has a young boy ever done to go to hell? I don't know, man. This is what, 1919? Young boys were young men at this point. Are you sure? He was probably drinking, smoking, stabbing his way through his teens. I'm not sure that's how any boys lived at least not in like early 20th century japan

oh i was gonna say this isn't that long ago but it's terrifyingly that is it is 100 years ago but also you know what these old-timey books are like you know that they would give to children like look at um who was the original santa claus again krampus sure yeah that was a bit bit of a revelation on this podcast that was a children's book and i'm pretty sure he used to just steal kids in the night yeah and like eat them they were chained up in a little line like we've definitely um softened the edges of children's entertainment these days softening the edges of krampus for sure. We started by completely changing his name. Which was a really good start because Krampus is scary as shit.

Yeah, the name alone. But yeah, there is a long history of kind of children's, even children's entertainment, if you can call it that, has always had a dark twist to it. The kind of, is it Brothers Grimm and all those kind of fairy tales? Yeah. They always had some kind of dark twist you know it was the hansel and gretel who were yeah eaten by a witch that was terrifying or you know little red riding hood who's terrified of being torn apart by this wolf if anything i

think i think we've gotten too soft i need need, like, the inhabitants of Sesame Street, like, doing gang wars. Kermit should be, like, having, doing blow, showing kids the dangers of these things. Just Kermit trying to teach about, like, gang warfare. What you want to do is to start staying in your own fucking territory. And don't step on Kermit Street. And if you run up on Kermit Street with a blue flag hanging at your backside, you're going to get...

You're going to hear the rat-a-tat-tat. But yeah, that was the point of children's, quote, entertainment back in the day, was it wasn't really to entertain the children. It was to scare them. Scare them straight. Staying inside with their mama and their papa. Absolutely.

And staying safe. Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. Well, obviously, due to the poem's unsettling themes and the fact that no one wanted to f***ing read it, it slipped away into obscurity. Then over 50 years later, in 1983, a director by the name of Teruyama Shuji discovered the strange poem in Yasuo's collection and fell in love with it.

Sick bastard that he was. Despite the horrid themes and the rumors of the poem being cursed, Shuji decided to write and direct an entire movie based on Tomino's Hell. Yeah. wrecked an entire movie based on tamino's hell yeah the poem was called denon ni shisu which in japanese loosely translates to to die in the countryside i watched the trailer for this because you can watch the trailer on youtube it is genuinely creepy as hell really there's a lot of weird demony stuff and naked people getting spanked and a lot of stuff i didn't i didn't quite understand or understand how it's still on youtube the movie was released to critical acclaim but shuji wasn't around for long to enjoy it after the film was released shuji was rushed to hospital suffering

from cirrhosis of the liver he died in hospital soon after. Now this obviously only worsened the rumors surrounding this poem. Was this the wrath of Tomino's hell? I mean, the director must have read it out loud at some point. I guess. I mean, he kind of has to at some point. Cirrhosis of the liver definitely pushes the boundaries of what we would come to expect from a curse. Yeah, yeah.

He didn't like slip and fall or just die of a heart attack. This isn't some Final Destination stuff, guys. This is a long, protracted... This is gradual destination. I mean, very much to romanticize the story, the way I worded it, it was a very accelerated version of how he died. I used a lot of words like shortly after

which is ambiguous enough to not really commit to a certain amount of time okay well because i think it was years okay i think there were years and years after oh so you not just a couple he was fine for a while again i said he wasn't around to enjoy it for long. That's quite, that's delightfully ambiguous. But you said it wasn't long, but it was also years and years. Yeah, it was, it depends on how long you think a year is. How long do you think a year is? Compared to the birth of the universe, it's a millisecond kit. So it's all about perspective.

Compared to an ant, he'll never even see it. So you need to tell me what is my frame of reference here do you even know i prefer to be delightfully ambiguous sir when i can are you even listening to me at this point i do appreciate the kind words okay these are canned responses well afraid that the wrath of the poem had taken a life, public fear increased and the poem once again slipped into obscurity. If there was a song that by listening to it, you became cursed. Yeah, that song's probably not going to be in the iTunes charts. It's not going to be in the Billboard Top 100. Exactly.

It probably is going to slide into obscurity because people can't freaking listen to it. Yeah, and as I said, this is 1983. Word of mouth is their Twitter. So if no one can tweet about it, no one's going to see it. It's just going to die. This film is weird enough. I don't think people are going to see this film. So they're not going to read the poem for sure.

Yeah, presumably this wasn't like being shown in theaters at the same time as like Ghostbusters or something. I don't think so. Okay. I don't think it was like, should we see Back to the Future Part 2 or Dene Nishizu to die in the countryside? Well, I'm personally interested in the sequel to Back to the Future,

but I know the kids would love Dene Nishizu to die on the countryside. How many naked asses get spanked in Back to the Future Part 2? Does Doc slowly descend into the lower depths of hell as punishment for a crime not specified? I mean, time travel's gotta be a pretty big f***ing crime, right? That's gotta be a sin. Yeah, it's funny to think of someone, like, reads a review for one of the movies. It's like, oh, an eccentric doc and his young accomplice

travel through time to save the day. And it's like the pages of the guide were, like, oh, an eccentric doc and his young accomplice travel through time to save the day. And it's like the pages of the guide were like stuck together and walks into Dene Noshisu. Is that the doc's apprentice? Is his little boy falling into a demon's mouth? Where's the DeLorean? It's like, I love the first one, but they went straight out of left field with this sequel. He like marathoned them. The first one ends with them being like, we got to go back to the future.

And he's like, all right, here we go. The future is a f***ing hell countryside. Demons spanking ass. It's like, all right, he's a bit weird. Doc has not aged well. Doc has not aged well. He's also Asian for some reason. Is that a byproduct of time travel the poem once again slipped into obscurity that is until japanese writer and film

critic inuhiko yomata decided to include it in a book he published in 1998 called the heart is like a rolling stone now knowing the legends that surrounded the poem, the book contained a disclosure written in Japanese that said, If you by chance happen to read this poem out loud, after, you will suffer from a terrible fate which cannot be escaped. Whoa. So now it's becoming like part of the actual print of the poem yeah like he felt he needed to include a disclaimer which is a weird angle i mean if you really believe that it's gonna kill someone

don't print the poem hey man we haven't read the poem yet it could be the most beautiful cursed thing well so it's worth it maybe well because also think about it. You can, if the poem is that great and you really love it, you can put it in the book and just say, hey, read the poem, enjoy the poem, just don't read the poem out loud. Because that's it. You can still read it, but without saying the words, I think that's what it takes to activate the curse. Okay. Okay. So there's, there's rules here. Yeah. Well, eventually as time went on, the poem ended up where all creepy, curse-inflicting things end up.

The internet! A post on an online forum managed to translate the Japanese into English, which is something that I don't think had previously been done before. Right. Because these were all Japanese poetry books who were publishing versions of this poem. don't think had previously been done before right because these were all japanese poetry books who

were publishing versions of this poem but no one had actually translated the poem into english yet or at least no one had successfully done it and survived maybe people had tried and then immediately their liver just crapped out on them on the spot ballooned up to an entire room and then just dropped. Could be. Now, the exact same with the Japanese version of the story. This one came with the warning,

if you read the poem aloud, you'll suffer a terrible fate. So naturally, people started reading this thing. Hashtag, Dene no Shisu Read Challenge. Upload to YouTube, upload to every social media platform.

We're going to do it for charity, guys. I love that, you know, through all the generations we've been through with this poem, it never changes. People want to read this thing. They want to make movies about it. We're obsessed with anything that can kill us. Right. It's like we're dancing the razor's edge.

Juggling with knives. These are all things I like to do. Absolutely. That's my weekend plans. So from that original post online, people obviously start reading it and then start replying underneath. And the replies kind of vary. Some people state they'd read it in full and they felt fine. But others mentioned panic attacks headaches dizziness some people had family members or loved ones pass away shortly after and some people who said that

they were about to read the poem and would reply with whatever happened never even returned to the forum i mean i don't know they straight up died okay we can't infer that just because they didn't post in that forum again that they died if you if they gave their goddamn word yeah saying i'm gonna read the curse poem i'll you know type it away i'll uh i'll let you guys know what happens yeah brb g2g mom's making spaghetti hoops dragon king why they sign off okay that's their username yeah that was their username they've signed off so everyone's waiting on the forms hey where's dragon king you've seen dragon king the days pass that's weird dragon king usually comes online every day at seven after spaghetti hoops weeks are passing now messages are piling up where the hell is

dragon king he's gone he's gone off the forums he's gone offline he's off the grid he's afk that doesn't mean he's dead though where is he gone i know dragon king didn't get a life his name's goddamn dragon king and he spaghetti hoops for dinner every night that is going on forums maybe his mom took away his forum access privileges he sounds pretty young by the sounds of things maybe his mom took away his form privileges when his liver swolled up to a car okay so we might need to park the idea that the people who didn't post again died instantly i just that's what i think okay that's my personal opinion if you if they obviously didn't reply with what happened, they died.

Okay. You don't reply, you die. So what are your thoughts so far, Kit? We got this poem that's been handed down from generation to generation. Even from the start, there was something weird about it, something upsetting. Even though it was meant for children, the director of the movie died. It now has a note that goes along with it saying you can't read it aloud or you're cursed i completely forgot the whole this was written for children thing that's

quite alarming oh yeah well i think i don't know if it was directly written for children but the guy wrote a lot of children's books and stories and poems who is this person this was a this was a bit of a weird twist i feel like he really didn't want to write children's things and that was the only place there was money he was like yeah i guess i'll write another children's book this one's about well i gotta put a child in it uh tamino he's a little seven-year-old kid and uh he's going to hell okay no the last one was about he's doing devil signs the last one was about hell all right sorry okay listen tamino little tamino great the kids love to see other little kids in the book they love reading

about it that they enjoy that but uh can we think of a different situation than hell okay it's about little kid tamino okay yeah he's your average joe kid everyone loves him sure all the guys want to be him all the girls want to date weird to say about a child fine and it's about tamino's journey uh like where's he going is he going like let's think where would kids you know be well i think in this story he's going to the underworld okay okay you ghost any location that ends with you going, we probably don't want to send Tamino for this children's anthology. Okay. What about like a play park or the beach or somewhere like that?

Being sent to the play park for what he did? That little sinning bastard. What did Tamino do? What did Tamino do? Well, that's delightfully ambiguous. I'm not sure exactly who the audience is for this, but hey, maybe this is just where he was coming from. I mean, it could be that where did this curse originate?

Maybe this author was possessed to write this stuff, was basically cursed to write these things. He didn't want to create these hellish children's books to curse generations of people with livers that are going to crap out on them that could be it because he seems like a perfectly normal dude up until this very cursed poem so yeah maybe it was just channeling through him look we can dance around it all day but if we want to come to any sort of conclusion with this thing i think there's only one thing we can do. We got to read this poem.

Kit, I have in front of me Tomino's Curse. I have the translated English version, and I am prepared to read it out now on the podcast. You're prepared to read it? I'm going to read it. I'm going to read it out loud. Read it a la Curse? I don't know if this is going to affect me.

I don't know if it's going to affect I don't know if it's gonna affect you. I hope not it can affect anyone I think that's why you're willing to do it I'm ready to put your life on the line and see if this thing really is cursed. I'm like, alright, let's uh, Let's see if this thing is really cursed. I like put on my crucifix my priest robe. I've got a shield bro Do I get any of those things? Sorry, man. You should have brought your own. I've got a shield. Hey bro, do I get any of those things? Sorry, man. You should have brought your own. I really got a double down. You didn't tell me anything about this episode.

I've got a holy blade. Okay, can we put a pause on this thing? You lock the door. Sorry, man. You're in it now. I'm like, I'm holding, hugging the Ark of the Covenant. Where did you find that? I'm ready to read it out loud.

So the symptoms that we're looking for that are pretty common in people who have read the story okay the mild ones headaches regular aches pains in your body okay general malaise yeah you know kind of like a panic attacks uh you know irregular heartbeats that sort of stuff okay anything like that and then the extreme version i guess if one of us dies that's a pretty sure sign yeah uh if our family die anything like that. And then the extreme version, I guess if one of us dies, that's a pretty sure sign. Yeah. If our family die, anything like that. Again, I'm pretty well protected because I brought on my shit. I am.

I think it's only fair if we... I'm not. Well, yeah, but it's only... It doesn't make any sense if we're both protected. Why? Because then how do we know if it works or not? Someone's got to be exposed. Someone's got to be protected.

How about we just get in a little guinea piginea pig or something well you know you're here there was something earlier about loved ones and like i love you you're your loved one so i figure you know you can go it'll get you that's your attitude towards loved ones is they can go right well just if we want to see if it works or not if that's the case i'd rather not be a loved one thanks very much i just i don't want to you you know you know that if i could i would give you any of this this sword yeah i would i would give you this holy blade if i could man give it to me right now you've got so many other protective if if i just give it to you you can i'm right here i'm holding it but you're you're very tightly gripping it in fact it's killing me i can't give it to you so just yeah just give that back because okay look if i die look if it gets me is the only thing then no one finishes the the poem i gotta finish the poem

why do you have to finish the poem you saw in curse no you saw him possess. Just let this happen, Tamino. This sword is glowing. Now, I will say, if it doesn't work, another explanation could be that we are reading the translated English and not the original Japanese, which some people say you need to do to activate the curse. But you know what? Let's just let's get in this thing. Let's let's read this bad boy. Ladies and gentlemen listening, you have been warned. This is your last chance to turn off the podcast before you are exposed to tomino's curse you should be safe because you are not reading it however there may be some sort of side effects

that you may experience but it is primarily the host of this podcast myself and roy that are in immediate danger and if i could as i And if I could, as I said, if I could give you, the audience, or Kit, just any piece of this protective gear that I have loaded out. Just please, just anything. One of those rosary beads. You have seven.

It looks like seven rosary beads. It kills me that I have to carry all of this on me. It's actually pretty heavy as shit, but I know my... Lighten the load, buddy. I know my... Can I just at least,

can I at least hold one of the necklaces while while you're wearing it i really think your luck will uh neutralize the holiness of it so i just rather i'd rather actually what does that even mean i'd actually rather you backed the f**k up just a couple steps because you're getting close to my sword and i don't know if i'm going to start swinging this thing when the poem is read i don't know if the holy spirit's going to come through me so if it doesn't sound very holy i don't think the holy spirit would want you to do that who knows with these things it might it might be aggravated i got a lot i'm dealing with a lot of shit here i don't think the holy spirit has ever been aggravated this helmet

is from the knights of templar i bought it on ebay for two grand i don't know i can't i can barely see in this thing i don't know who's near me i don't know. I can't, I can barely see in this thing. I don't know who's near me. I don't know what I'm going to do. So just, you need to be careful. All right. Because the tablets are heavy. I've got the holy hand grenades somewhere. I think it's in my back pocket or my other chinos. Why a two grand helmet and then chinos? Because there's no holy chinos. There's no holy pants. I got to wear my regular shit. We're getting sidetracked here, all right? Let me adjust the helmet. There you go, I can see again. Ladies and gentlemen, let's do this.

Tomino's Curse. Here we go. Elder sister vomits blood. Younger sister's breathing fire. While sweet little Tomino just spits up the jewels. All alone does Tomino go falling into that hell. A hell of utter darkness. Without even flowers.

Is Tomino's big sister the one who whips him? The per- Hearing a bit of laughter. So that's rude to Tomino. Now you're interrupting. Yeah, but because you're laughing at me and i'm trying to i'm trying to curse you here and you won't let me do you're trying to curse me all right yeah the truth comes out i'm trying to curse you i've wanted to host this

podcast solo from day one you must have known that by now remember last week week when we investigated that knife and i just threw it at you at the conclusion you didn't catch a drift then you've been investigating curse after curse and none of them have worked and now it's come to this yeah it's a bit weird for a children's poem but it's 1919 all right this is basically dora the explorer the war was just over there wasn't a lot of sunshine and rainbows going around is chomino's big sister the one who whips? The purpose of the scourging hangs dark in his mind. Lashing and thrashing him. Ah!

But never quite shattering. One sure path to Avicii. The eternal hell. How much did he put in that leather pouch to prepare for his trek to the eternal hell? The nightingale in her cage, the sheep aboard the wagon, and tears well up in the eyes of sweet little Tomino. Sing, oh nightingale, in the vast misty forest. He screams, he only misses his little sister.

forest, he screams he only misses his little sister. Down past the seven mountains and seven rivers of hell, the solitary journey of sweet little Tomino. If in this hell they'd be found, may they then come to me, please, those sharp spikes of punishment from Needle Mountain. Not just on some empty whim is flesh pierced with blood red pins. They serve as hellish signposts for sweet little Tomino. So long. It's pretty long. I don't know. What do you think? Is that what you expected it was it's almost weirder it's a lot more hellish than i expected i thought it would be creepy i didn't think it

would be about literally i think so we had vomiting blood tomino getting lashed with a whip by his older sister yeah i think you use the term needle mountain uh towards the end in any context is gonna be a pretty bad place to visit yeah like even if you're a freaking junkie needle mountain is not gonna be somewhere you want to visit it's not gonna be a cozy place to take a nap and lie down needle mountain no absolutely not the the nice thing about this poem is there's actual uh people who have like i don't know studied poetry at university who consider themselves to be experts who have broken this down like you would analyze any other poem and like um thought about what the original writer meant by certain things uh so there's a lot of different

interpretations of the story some are a little more literal and some are a little more i don't know they could be about representing different parts of life or war or death but i don't know it seems pretty much about sweet little tamino going to hell some people think he killed his mom and dad some people think he was like having bad thoughts about his sister or something some really weird dark stuff that i really don't think a child should be reading i can't comprehend how this is has anything to do with children why any child should be reading this but i guess maybe it's like we said before it's like this is the warning if you if you

act like little to me sweet little tamino yeah you're gonna get go to needle mountain you're going to needle mountain you little bastard that's what the parents are saying to their kids i was 1919 parenting because that's i mean you could see how this would work you know um you know your kid is uh gets chucked out of school for throwing rocks or something and you know you're in you're walking home from school and you're talking to your kid and you're like you know what happened today what you did reminds me of sweet little tamino oh you know you can kind of work that into it and then oh who's who is sweet little tamino papa he was a naughty boy just like you

and so oh like me what happened to sweet little tamino and the little kid's licking a big old lollipop at this point like well he's having a nice time he was punished for his wrongdoings and so like like i'll be punished and it's like no no not not quite as uh as bad as what happened to tamino tamino went to needle mountain tamino was spanked by his sister Tamino drowned in the rivers of hell and it's like oh that sounds awful and then it's like oh so if you don't change your ways you're getting a one-way ticket to needle mountain you little son of a bitch that's sorry kind of lost your temper there in the in the You kind of, yeah, I made the story redundant because I just yelled at the child.

I feel like this line of parenting is almost counterintuitive though because all the poetic techniques and literary devices here are too complex for young children to understand. And the kids would probably be far better punished by saying if you act like little tamino you won't get any sweets yeah that's hell for children

it doesn't get a mountain for kids needle mountain for freaking toddlers they don't understand getting whipped and all the rest of it but again i guess it's like a it's a frame of reference isn't it so 1919 maybe this was it it was a bit more like even the way kids spoke back then was a bit more romantic and old englishy so maybe it was more like he hath gone down thon path you know a bit more played up not just tomino don't get no chocolate milk after dindins it had to be like written in a very romantic way. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how much has changed since then. I guess a lot.

I mean, we just read the poem in full. How do you feel? I feel all right, I think. I didn't notice anything immediately. I got a little short of breath, I guess, at the end, but I was on a tear. I was really getting into that by the end of the story. I don't feel i'm

not sore i don't have any headaches i feel pretty untouched now that doesn't mean that i'm immune to any of the longer uh the longer form effects of this curse yes granted i am in a priest's robes with a magical uh shield a holy sword and tablets you are the one that's fully exposed do you feel any effects at all of tomino's hell i feel cold okay i feel that's actually pretty weird because it's usually pretty damn hot in this room i feel cold i think i think i feel my lips going blue okay that's really so really cold could be yeah actually i'm i'm freezing wow at the start i just i thought you meant like a chill no i can't feel anything at this point actually anymore is it getting it sounds like it's getting worse as

you're talking to me because pretty much you said a little cold pretty now you're saying you're completely numb i think all my digits need to be amputated so this is i can move anything anymore a lot quick you're freezing over as you're looking at me. I can't. Okay. I can't. I can't. Ladies and gentlemen.

Let it be known that while I remain perfectly safe, Kit has frozen solid. The sword. Let me use this. Let me touch the holy sword. I'm sorry. I wish I could give you the sword, man. Just one touch touch the holy sword i'm sorry i wish i could give you the sword man one touch the what i can't hear you sword you're bored i'm wrapping up i'm wrapping up i wish i could give you any of this shit but i can't enjoy needle mountain asshole um so it's safe to say that for us not much of an an effect. Not much of an immediate effect.

We don't have any immediate evidence on that one. But I had a little hunt online for some recent replies and comments about reading this story, just to see if this thing is still kicking about, if it's still cursed. I went on a couple different websites and found a couple different comments from people who read the curse out loud. I should warn you, some of them are weird. Some of them are not so weird. You know, you got to pick from everywhere when you're investigating the paranormal. Of course. Hero Brian Winter said,

If you are a Christian, I suggest don't read this at all. Reading this both ways will summon demons out to hunt you. What does he mean reading it both ways? I think in English and in Japanese. Okay, so either way. Either way will apparently summon demons to hunt you. What does he mean reading it both ways? I think in English and in Japanese. Okay, so either way. Either way will apparently summon demons to hunt you. Wow. They never mentioned that before.

Yeah. They mentioned like a bit of a headache, pains, not a like a demon assassination squad. It seems to be applying some kind of like religious paranormal science to this which will always come in when we're talking about curses i think to a certain degree yeah so like what's causing the health problems what's causing the headaches what's causing the deaths uh is it a legion of demons very possibly we can't see them we don't know we don't know jessica said i read it and my mother now has an allergy to peanuts her loved ones and family being affected

by the curse once again need to know the time scale on that I uh uh moving on Kai said Kai said I read it in both English and Japanese and nothing happened to me it's all good fam we won't die shit won't happen so Kai read it in. He seems pretty confident in his pronunciation of Japanese. Yeah, pretty ballsy. And he says he's fine. But Allopixel100 said, My boyfriend read this aloud in a different building entirely, and I ended up throwing up.

I told them about it, and they admitted that they had read it. It might just be a coincidence, but it's still scary. I'm suddenly crying, and I've seen that this is happening to other people too. Weird. Yeah, I guess maybe her and her boyfriend promised they wouldn't read it. And then she was just in class and went, Yeah. And then called her boyfriend was like, did you read it?

Like, yeah, why? What did something happen? So I threw up everywhere. Your loved ones being affected. I like to think that kai it's like he seems to be really palsy about it and he seems to be unaffected but oh uh it looks like he hasn't logged in in six months so uh i guess he died immediately after writing that i didn't see a reply comment from any of these people so i assume they're all gone they're all dead probably

this girl i think just sicked up her own heart and died right on the right while she was writing this probably probably so we've got a little we got a variety of people you know kai's going strong but a couple of these other people are crying vomiting having allergies pop out of nowhere for peanuts i mean you potentially getting a curse and then your mom developing a peanut allergy yeah it's pretty low stakes in the curse game i don't know man if you threw a peanut at me right now i might drop dead i don't know how it's affected me that's pretty true imagine if that was the only effect of this curse we just developed mysterious allergies and we had no idea what they were yeah that's the shittiest curse of all time i realized tomorrow i'm now

lactose intolerant it's like god damn it i can't even really say that was a curse this is a minor inconvenience for the rest of my life to me no all right look let's start wrapping this bad boy up because we've read the poem we've read the testimonies of people that have read the poem and we know all about the history of this bad boy okay what are your thoughts where are you at this is pretty badass we haven't got the chance to talk about something so specific as a cursed piece of literature i love that idea the idea that this guy wrote so many different pieces of work in his lifetime but there was just something in his entire bibliography that just jumped out of the page

maybe it was written in goddamn blood but just whoever read it just said this is satanic as shit that's pretty impressive and we need to reproduce it and show people. And it also speaks to kind of this morbid fascination that people have. It's also kind of interesting, like Japan is famous for creations of horror in cinema, in manga, in literature, that there's like Japanese masters of the horror genre. So it's kind of interesting that they would have someone in the world of poetry being able to... Children's poetry, nonetheless. Children's poetry. To be able to create something so creepy.

I suppose the difficulty in this is we have something that is bona fide, very, very creepy, bona fide, curse-like writing. And I don't even want to know what it's like in the original Japanese. This translation was really good, it seemed like but the difficulty is how can we prove that this is has some kind of paranormal effect and it isn't just some kind of psychological placebo

that enough people have told each other that it's gonna have an effect on you that they kind of just believe it into happening yeah especially a lot of those ones where it's like oh i read it and like my heart was racing like that's not really an effective so you got a bit excited yeah you're you're scared because you're reading a poem you think is going to curse you like a lot of those i think can be explained so that does make sense that's definitely a risk that you run in this instance and we've touched upon it with other curse stories in the past it does even when you've got like we have with the curse of tutankhamun the curse of the hope diamond and others even when you've got a number of deaths attached to one

curse object geez it's really hard to pin down why someone died. It is, yeah. I mean, we've investigated curses that have claimed a lot more lives than this one, which is pretty much only one that can be confirmed, the director. And he died quite a while after the movie was released. Well, you never told us, but we sort of assumed that was the case. It was years. It was years and years and years afterwards. Okay, so now it's years and years and years afterwards okay so now it's years and years to the birth of the universe right the birth of the year is a is a microsecond is tiny

you couldn't even see it what about compared to us our lifetime it's pretty long it's about it's it's over 300 days for sure which i consider to be pretty damn long like if you were 10 years old yeah it would be like six tenths of your life so it i don't want to say how many years it was so it was six years it was around six years yeah it was quite a long time i suppose a huge number but compared to when the dinosaurs roamed the earth to now yeah that's barely even a scratch on the time spectrum. It's exactly 10 million times less than that. But it is thousands and thousands of days, more than thousands of days. So it's quite a while if you look at it, if you break it down into like the day to day,

like hours, it's, I don't even know, man, like hundreds of thousands. It's crazy. It's super long. Point being, it's very difficult to connect that death with that poem. Yes. If he died the day after or during production, sure, that's pretty convincing. Pretty convincing. But alas, he did not.

It is. There's something pretty creepy, though, about the fact that the poem itself, people attached warnings to it down the line. There's something kind of cool that the original author never said don't read it out loud he just wrote it and it was evil and then people discovered that it was there was something crazy wrong with it it wasn't like toon and cammon where they had up the seal that said if you enter here you'll die yeah there's no warning on this thing we don't know if it's going to give us a peanut allergy we don't know if it's going to send our souls to purgatory forever or god forbid needle mountain needle mountain hang out with little tamino yeah who by the way is

gonna be he's the one flogging you with the whip which which is kind of cool because if he had written it and had been like by the way this is super cursed we could have been like okay he wrote it as like a ghost story or to get some more publicity like that was the gimmick behind it but as you said he just wrote it he just wrote it and it was scary as shit and other people said this is cursed it's a it's a very scary little poem like it is quite unsettling to read because there's nothing directly horrible in it but a lot of the imagery and stuff that it mentions is yeah it's not very nice it does make you feel a little uneasy. It definitely does.

And I think a lot of people are, I don't know, instead of realizing that they're just visualizing a lot of horrible things, they think it's some sort of curse taking effect in their brain and affecting their body. I don't know about you, but if we had read this and something had happened to me pretty soon afterwards, maybe I would be swaying over to the yes side. But i think it's going to be a no for me this week you'd be on your deathbed with a thumbs up like it's a double yes this week uh yeah i completely agree um as always we need more evidence on this show. Fascinating poem, fascinating curse, but we just don't have enough to say that this has had some paranormal effect. It's a no. It's a double no. But hey, everyone listening to this podcast, I absolutely encourage you to

check out this poem online. If you're feeling courageous enough, read it out yourself. If you're confident in your Japanese, read out the Japanese. I think that's the one that really gets things going. And let us know if you are cursed or your liver swells up like a hot air balloon. Just let us know what's going on and maybe we'll change our minds. But regardless, I hope you enjoyed this week's episode of This Paranormal Life. You know, we do a lot of different things on this podcast. We investigate the paranormal. Sometimes we investigate poems.

Maybe we're not the smartest podcast out there but do you think george the poet is reading cursed poems risking his life on his podcast oh actually i'm just on itunes it looks like he's got several episodes actually about he's actually got a two-part series in this poem on on tomino yeah on tomino yeah it looks like he has some pretty illuminating thoughts on it so he read it yeah it seems like it before and actually his career seems to be going pretty well since the poem shit because our numbers are down yeah like since the award i don't know how that works there i'm watching them right now they are just plummeting the tpl stock is just dipping massively when they said i was going to needle mountain i

thought they meant there was going to be a spike in numbers like we were going up up up baby but it turns out hell is down and we have been plummeting since episode one so yeah let me know uh let me know if you are affected by the curse poem and thank you so much for listening to this episode of this paranormal life if you want to get in touch with us whether you want to let us know what happened when you read the poem or you have a case you want us to investigate just pop us an email at this paranormal life podcast at gmail.com we're on twitter we're on facebook you guys know where to find us it's not too hard and as always if you want a little bit extra a little bit on the side maybe you're a naughty little boy like tamino you haven't had enough paranormal sweets you want to

dip your hand in the bowl we're not going to punish you for we're not going to curse you for it absolutely not we're not going to spank you because we have a whole bowl of bonus episodes ready for you to gobble up little tamino. That's right on our Patreon for just five bucks a month. You can get access to a whole bunch of bonus episodes that we've been making for hell a year now. So that's quite a few episodes. And even below that for $2, what you can do is get yourself a very special shout out on the podcast, which we're going to do right now for a bunch of our patrons who've supported us in the past that's right special thank you to norm nelson nelson is anything but

the norm he's actually pretty abnormal he's a unique guy he's the kind of nelson that you want on your team he's like a vintage coin the full nelson if you will the full nelson we're glad to have you on board mr nelson and thank you for your support thank you also to joe stevenson don't stop the steven wow it's joe he's here he is steven he's got me believing that his support is never ending joe i don't know where you came from. And I don't know how you got your dirty money. But I'm going to take it and I'm going to spend it on paranormal gear to hunt beasts.

Whether they're cryptids or buffalo. Whatever it takes, buddy, to make an episode of this podcast. So thank you. Thanks also to Sean Hannan. Sean Hannan's always hanging around the alleys you know hanging around the street corners rolling dice playing cards he's got one of those butterfly knives but he's not very good with it he's like cutting up his fingers he's had to go to hospital a couple times because he tried to do some of those cool tricks and just just jabbed himself with it weird life choices cards butterfly knives yeah he's because he's not quite gambling because it's no one's playing with him he's more of like a magician

with a knife go back to school sean sean i don't know how you're hustling people for this money, but we appreciate the support. Thank you. Thanks also to Matthias Jensen. Matthias Jensen with the paranormal pension. That's right. When his company came around and said, do you want us to, you know, invest some of your paycheck into a pension for further? He said, hell no. I'm going to invest in one thing, the paranormal.

And he just picked up his pay pay slip and threw it out the window whoa which was weird because that's not investigating the paranormal i think it was more of a statement but uh it looked cool at the time it did but that was like two grand down that he did a lot he almost lost the house that month because he couldn't pay the rent because he was investigating the paranormal i think investing in the paranormal is like the closest thing to that is like the ancient Egyptians building those big ass tombs full of just like shit for the afterlife. Yeah, pointless and expensive. But thank you for your support. Thanks also to Jim's band.

This is actually the name of agent double-oh-eight James band he never actually passed the the tests required to become a secret agent but they all kind of felt bad for him so they gave him a gun with no bullets in it and sent him an omission which was just to go have as much fun as possible so he's just been kind of roaming around telling people he's a spy because he's not very good at keeping it a secret either he's like he just walks into a room and they're like oh sir nice to meet 008 james band secret agent and they're like i just wanted to know if i could take your coat sir i'm on a mission to have fun okay thank you good good to yes thank you sir

is he always like that he's always been like that He's always been like that. He's always been like this. But hey, if some of that mission money ends up in our pockets, James, then you've got the license to thrill my heart. Thank you also. To Julia Pudicombe. Julia Pudicombe lives in a honeycomb. She evicted a whole bunch of bees. Apparently, you just blow smoke in there they can't really handle smoke yeah that's not evicting bees i think that kills them in the instant those suckers

left the hive she moved right in uh really upscaled the place painted the place white you know got some real minimal uh yeah minimal furniture in there made the place really sing because she tried to legally evict a bunch of bees before this um she tried to put up the eviction notice on the beehive and just hammered that thing it exploded it cracked open bees came out everywhere and the property itself was ruined. It was. And the bees unleashed their stingy wrath. So now she's like, I'm going to evict via gas. That'll do it. Cruel but effective.

I think you'd make a shrewd business person. So thank you, Julia, for your support. Thank you, lastly but not leastly, to Ethan and Patrice. Ethan and Patrice were actually two of the paranormal investigators I first went hunting with. Yeah, we were out in the woods camping one night looking for the chupacabra. And I think it was like 3 a.m.

We heard like rustling noises and roaring. That'll be him. I freaked out, man. I just still in my freaking sleeping bag just jumped out of the tent and i'm in a panic i'm zipping that thing up again they're clawing at the fabric they're trying to undo the zip yeah i'm like boys i'm sorry only one of us is getting out of here so i take a couple steps forward then i see they're starting to get the zip i'm done i go back i zip it up i padlock that

thing you know boys and you've got all the supplies all the weapons everything you need to keep the chupacabra bay all in the tent yeah everything to to capture and tame the beast i'm taking with me because i need it bait doesn't need equipment all right so i'm i'm running for the hills here. I didn't realize that we're literally like 10 feet from a school football field. What I saw was the school mascot taking a whiz three feet from the goal line. But it's a funny story now, and I'm glad to see they've forgiven me, which is quite nice. I guess they have. Well, at least they got out of the tent.

That's pretty good. That's a good start. That's a great start. So thanks, guys guys and thank you to everyone that we read out today who has supported us on Patreon. Now, if you're waiting for your shout out, don't worry. We got a bit of a chunk to get through, but we're getting through them

every episode. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode on Tomino's Hell and we will be back next week with a brand new terrifying paranormal tale.