Timesuck with Dan Cummins - Short Suck #20 - Are Tulpas Real? The Spooky Story of Olivia Mabel

Episode Date: October 25, 2024

Today I’ll be sharing the strange and spooky story of Olivia Mabel. It's a story presented as a true story, centered around the unsettling concept of a “tulpa.” A thought form and sentient being willed into existence by, essentially, the power of one's imagination. Is that possible? And if not, aren't characters akin to tulpas created all the time by the power of vivid, immersive, fictional worldbuilding?  Let's get a little bit wackadoodle today as the veil supposedly gets the thinnest between the world of the living and the world of the dead as we approach Halloween. Hail Lucifina! For Merch and everything else Bad Magic related, head to: https://www.badmagicproductions.com

Welcome to another edition of Time Suck Short Sucks. I'm Dan Cummins and today I will be sharing the strange and spooky story of Olivia Mabel. The story presented is a true story, and the story is centered around the unsettling concept of a tulpa, a thought form. A supposed sentient being not born, but created. And not created by a god or by science or by any normal reproductive means, but instead something that can be literally imagined into existence. But is that possible? Or is it just some nonsensical supernatural concept conjured up by nothing more than wishful magical thinking? But even if it's not real, does it at

the very least speak to a larger truth? That sometimes the characters we imagine, or the characters others imagine, who we then become fans of of can end up taking just as much if not more reality real estate up in our lives than our flesh-and-blood friends or families do. And doesn't that make these characters, these tulpas in some sense, alive? Words and ideas can change the world. I hated her, but I wanted to love my mother. I have a dream! I plead not guilty right now. alive. Hello everybody. As this episode releases on October 25th, the last short suck before Halloween, I wanted to do an episode about something that could also be presented in a slightly different way over on my

paranormal podcast, Scared to Death. It's gonna be fairly atypical for what we do here, an outlier of an episode, Short Suck fit for Halloween. And what a strange holiday Halloween is. Holiday-based, most scholars seem to believe on the night before the primary day of celebrating to believe on the night before the primary day of celebrating sawin an over 2000 year old celtic festival primarily celebrated on the first of november marking the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter or the darker half of the year cue spooky sounds but maybe like spookier than those sounds that That sounded like something straight out of Scooby Doo. But you get what I'm trying to make.

The point I'm trying to make. Samhain celebrations began the evening before the first on October 31st as soon as the sun set since a Celtic day both began and ended at sunset. And during the festival of Samhain offerings of food and drink were made to various gods to ensure that both people and their livestock could survive the winter. Also, the souls of dead family members were thought to return on this night and revisit their old homes, seeking connection with and hospitality from the living. A place at the table would even be set for them during a meal. During Samhain, the boundary between this world and the Celtic other world, the world of deities and the dead

was thought to blur. The veil between the two became the thinnest it would be all year. Many think that our modern Halloween costumes were originally not for children to go trick-or-treating or for women to dress up a little more sexually provocative than they might the rest of the year. But originally for children and adults trying to hide from the dead or devils that they thought most easily and frequently walked the earth. Then in the early days of the Catholic Church, the Catholics took this November 1st holiday and adapted it into All Saints Day, aka the Feast of All Saints, aka All Hallows Day, with All Hallows Eve or All Saints Eve the night before November 1st, eventually morphing into the secular holiday of Halloween. And while a lot has changed with how this time of year has been celebrated in the Western world,

a focus on the dead has remained. The belief that the barrier between the living and the spirit world was at its most permeable, allowing spirits their best annual chance to cross over and interact with the living physical realm has continued. And at least some focus on the fall harvest has also continued, which makes sense since it goes hand in hand with the world of the dead. What is a harvest? If not the intersection of life and death. We kill plants, we slaughter animals in order to feed ourselves, to give ourselves life. The shortening of daylight hours, the falling of dead leaves from the trees, the death of so many plants and animals alike as winter arrives, symbolizes the transition

between life and death each and every year. So it makes sense for Halloween to feel a little witchy. So let's get a little witchy with this episode. Maybe even get a little wackadoodle as we play around with an interesting supernatural concept illustrated by a spooky little story. And before I tell that story, let me explain the supernatural concept it is based in by playing a little game with you. Try closing your eyes, and with your mind's eye, try to visualize the following pastoral

meadow scene. Don't just think about this scene in some abstract, casual way, but actually attempt to see it in your mind's eye. Visualize a pleasant green grassy meadow on a warm sunny afternoon in early summer. Can you see all those bright white and bright yellow wildflowers woven into the meadow amongst all the lush tall green grass? Picture yourself sitting in the grass under a big leafy shade tree. Can you feel the soft coolness of the grass beneath you? The warm sun on your skin? Can you smell the scent of soil, grass, flowers, and forest in the breeze?

Can you hear the birds singing? Picture yourself looking up at a clear blue sky with only a few white billowy clouds in it. As you continue to smell the fresh sweetness of the grass and the flowers, you hear a small brook babbling in the distance. Crystal clear, cold mountain water rolling down, over and around scatterings of mossy stones.

Do you have a real clear image of all of this in your mind? One so clear, it almost feels like you could truly physically enter this space that you've pictured. Does it almost feel like you could step into the meadow, pick some of the flowers, dip your hand into the cool refreshing water of the stream? Does it feel real? Now as vivid as that scene may have been for you, what if I asked you to visualize a person? And not just some abstract person, but a person you know, someone you know well, you could probably see this image much clearer than the last one we just went

over since you don't have to make it up. You don't have to ask questions like, well, what kind of yellow and white flowers are in this meadow? Wild geraniums, blood root, wood aster. Where is this meadow? Way up North in Alaska, Colorado, Georgia? What kind of big leafy shade tree am I sitting under? Is it a maple, a birch, an elm? What kind of maple? What kind of birch?

What kind of elm? How warm is it? How strong is the breeze? And on and on and on and on. With someone you know, especially somebody you know well, you probably know all the important details. Keeping again your eyes closed, you can imagine their height. Relative to yours, maybe the texture of their skin,

the shape of their nose, the way their hair falls on their shoulders. If you concentrate really hard, it's almost like you're truly seeing them. Okay, you've done all this now with your eyes closed. Or at least you were supposed to if you know how to follow instructions, but if you didn't for some lame-ass reason like, oh, I'm driving very fast through traffic and I don't want to die right now. Or, oh, I'm listed while I'm skydiving.

I need to know when to open my parachute. Fine. You can at least imagine what that imagining felt like. Now try imagining it with your eyes open. It's a little harder, right? Reality is intrusive. Now try imagining it with your eyes open. It's a little harder, right? Reality is intrusive, right? So much happening around you, so much to distract you. But maybe if you're in familiar surroundings, say you're imagining your significant other

while at your house, you can see in your mind's eye, even as your eyes remain open, them in the other room, you can almost hear them bustling around, see them bending over to put away a pair of shoes or grab a sock off the floor. Does it almost feel like there's a real presence with you now? If so, congratulations. You've just created a tulpa.

Or you've at least taken the very first step in creating one. There's a decent amount to it. If you didn't feel like you just started to create a tulpa, well you you fucking suck at visualization and you'll never ever be able to conjure a demon companion. Good job! No, but for real, that's how it's supposed to work. In a very very abbreviated way. Tulpas, Sanskrit that roughly translates to or translates as to build but also sometimes as thought form are thought to be manifestations of our absolute

concentration taking the form of particularly potent and ultimately sentient beings akin to an imaginary friend. The concept is an ancient one it comes from Tibetan Buddhism was introduced to the Western world through 19th century spiritualists and some of their texts say that tulpas act like a sort of guardian angel, leading people towards enlightenment. But what if, and this is such a huge if, actually it's two huge ifs, what if A, creating a tulpa is actually possible, that you could truly create some sentient entity that could live separate from yourself by the power of your mind alone, and then B, what if you could truly create some sentient entity that could live separate from yourself by the power of your mind alone.

And then B, what if you could think of a dark tulpa into existence? A monster. What if you created a tulpa out of some strong negative emotion, say grief? What if you tried to resuscitate some long lost loved one to bring them back as a thought form? And you succeeded, kind of. You did create a tulpa, but it was not your departed loved one. It was something dark, posing as your loved one,

and it was intent on your destruction. According to some, you know, this wild, far-fetched, wackadoodle-I-know-whore movie scenario is exactly what happened in the small Texas town of Salina back in 1994. And now that I've somewhat explained what a tulpa is and how some think that not all tulpas play nice, let me tell the story of a dark tulpa down in Texas in the 90s that has spooked a lot of people and a lot of these people do seem to think that this crazy story is true. Salina is a small city in Texas on the very outer northern edge of

the sprawling and massive Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. In recent years, Salina has seen a lot of growth. Four years ago, the Dallas Business Journal ranked Salina as the fastest growing city in the Dallas-Fort Worth area with a population growth rate of about 50% each year from 2015 to 2019. I'm sorry, not each year. In that period, 50%. That would be even more explosive. It was every year doing 50%. It's thought to have grown even faster though since 2019,

becoming the fastest growing city in the entire nation. In the 2020 census, population was recorded at 16,739. Just three years later, population well over doubled that, more than 43,000. Salina has been popping, in part because in 2017 it became the first gigabit city in Texas, meaning that it has a citywide fiber optic network that provides super

high-speed internet to all homes. A great place to be an out-of-office tech worker. Another big reason behind this massive population growth has been tulpas. Over 10,000 thought forms have been said to have been created since 2020 alone, and they have become so real that the U.S. Census Bureau has chosen to count them as full-fledged citizens. They even get to vote. This presidential election might be the first one ever to be decided in the end by tulpas. Whose base can create the most tulpas the fastest Trump's or Harris's who can harness the power of the dark arts most effectively and of course I'm being ridiculous Salina is associated strongly with the tulpa though, but not with over 10,000 tulpas just with one one really creepy one

Salina has not always been a bustling city The first European American settlers arrived sometime around 1846, eager to use the black fertile prairie soil of northern Texas to grow their cotton. After the establishment of the town, just over three decades later in 1879, a Methodist church was built in 1880 and it doubled as the town's first schoolhouse. By 1884, Salina had a gristmill, cotton gin, a school, several general stores, a drugstore, and over a hundred people. And then almost 20 years later in 1902, the whole town would move. Pretty damn rare thing for a

whole town to do. In 1902, a news reached Salina that the St. Louis, San Francisco, and Texas railway would be constructed and extended to reach the area but not run exactly directly into town. The town's merchants decided to move the entire town so it could be right next to the railway. Dozens of residential houses and businesses were loaded onto big rollers and moved a full mile north to rest beside the train tracks. Whole town just up and moved. Then in 1907 the new location of Salina would be officially incorporated. I love this bit of history. What a badass and smart thing to do. Well I stood around

whining about how the new railway has bypassed your town when you can just move the whole town to the railway. Over a century later downtown Salina, still defined by some old relocated structures and brick storefronts, popped up on Main Street in the early 1900s. Texas power would begin supplying electricity to the area in the early 1920s, but despite these technological advancements, Salina remained a small agricultural town and the population will remain pretty steady from 1920 when there were just over a thousand people living there to the 1990s when the population registered a thousand seven hundred and thirty seven people. And like many small towns in northern Texas, Salina would be defined by its hard-working

industrious people the down-home values of these people the churches they belong to the land they made their livings from But then in 2016 Salina abruptly became known for something very very different for a dark and tragic story centering around a tulpa and for a dark and tragic story centering around a tulpa. And before I get into the meat of this tulpa tale, time for today's mid-show sponsor break. If you don't want to hear these ads, you can sign up on Patreon, become a space lizard for $5 a month, and get the entire catalog ad free and more.

And now let me tell you the tulpa-centric tale of Olivia Mabel. According to this story, Travis and Olivia Mabel lived on a 13 acre property called Footlights Ranch and the young couple were ecstatic when they learned that Olivia was pregnant. She would give birth to a son they named Aidan in 1983. For a while the small family was like most others in Salina. Travis worked hard to support his family. Olivia stayed home to work hard raising the baby and the baby Aiden grew into a happy and

hearty young child. But then tragedy struck. On March 13th 1990 Aiden went outside to play like he always did. Olivia thought nothing of it but when she realized that several hours had passed and the boy hadn't come home she began to get worried. Soon she would discover a parent's worst nightmare. Aidan had fallen into a pond on the property and drowned at just seven years old. This had unsurprisingly a catastrophic effect on Olivia and Travis's marriage and the two divorced the very next year in 1991. Eager to move on, Travis moved to New England and eventually remarried, but Olivia would do no such thing. Instead, she seemed to also drown in a sense, in her guilt.

She withdrew completely from society, retreating to the ranch house that had until recently housed her happy and intact family. And she was last seen in person in September of 1991. But then over three years later, something very, very strange would happen in her house. Around 9.30 PM on February 27th, 1994, police got several 911 calls, each lasting just a few seconds long. They traced the calls to Footlights Ranch, and they had to trace them because the calls were silent.

No words. Not even the sound of breathing. Complete silence. Arriving at Footlights Ranch that evening, police crept through an empty and dusty house, realizing that the vast majority of it had been boarded off and allowed to fall into disrepair. There was only one room that was in a seemingly livable condition, and that was Aidan's old room. And unlike the rest of the house, Aidan's room was clean, but a horrifying discovery was made in this clean room.

Olivia Mabel's body remains perhaps more aptly described as her skeleton, laying a rocking chair, sitting upright, holding a handcrafted stick doll in her very, very decomposed hand. From the looks of it, she had to have been dead for many months if not years. So who made the 911 calls? Creeping further into the room, police saw that behind Olivia's body was a crudely constructed and decorated altar surrounded by hand-drawn images and letters from Olivia to her son Aiden. On the front of the altar were some words written in Sanskrit that translated to words such as construct, as in constructing a tulpa. One of the letters found in the altar

was particularly disturbing. It read, My Aidan, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I should have never let it get like this. I'm leaving. I will not let you keep me, you vile, evil creature. Mommy's coming for you, Aidan. My sweet Aidan. Mommy loves you.

Curiously, this letter was dated February 27, 1994, the same day officers arrived to find Olivia to be long dead. Crime scene photos displayed several more letters along with what looks like a silver urn, a pair of shoes, a baseball glove, drawings, flowers, numerous candles. Police didn't know what to make of it all, especially police born and raised in a small conservative southern town. Sergeant Terry Goulcher, the lead investigator, said, Nobody had seen her in years.

Almost three, I think. She clearly passed her time in some pretty unhealthy ways. The negligent damage to the house, the obsession with her deceased son, and the clearly pagan symbols and altar were all signs of something seriously wrong with her mental health, which is understandable after the death of a child like that,

but she just balled up. Ran her husband out, never went back to church. See if she had reached out, her brothers and sisters in Christ would have supported her, but she left the flock and became the devil's prey, plain and simple. Another officer, Francesca Santiago, was more sympathetic, saying, I spent a lot of time in El Paso and had an uncle that was into some really dark occult stuff. I recognized it immediately. When I walked into that room and saw the symbols and the photos on the altar, I felt a strong angry presence looming over me. It was honestly the last thing I expected to see in this town. One of the oddest parts for me is the date on the last letter we found.

Dated the very day we kicked that swollen door down the city concluded that she post dated everything But I don't believe she was alone in that house And I don't believe her spirit wasn't still in the room with us that night, but then that makes me the crazy one, right? Both of these quotes will be featured on the blog Olivia Mabel comm Dedicated to finding Olivia Mabel's killer the blog shared its first post in 2007 Included an active tip line for anyone with any information about what happened at the Footlights Ranch. The blog has posted occasional interview clips and photos from the crime scene over the years and images of the police

report. Coincidentally and ominously, numbered 93050666. Others, however, don't believe that Olivia Mabel was murdered, at least not by a living human being. Rumors that evil spirits inhabited the house grew so persistent that the owner of the property at the time, Christopher Hagen, couldn't sell the property. In 2005, in an attempt to debunk the supernatural stories, Hagen hired an Austin-based paranormal investigator, Drew Navarro, to visit. But Drew would not succeed in debunking this supernatural infestation. In fact, what happened was quite the opposite of that. After his experience at the residence, Drew said, I'm not even sure this was ever on our physical plane.

In the hundreds of locations I've studied, I've never felt such an imposing force. I couldn't breathe. My heart was constantly racing. Its energy kept changing, but none of it felt inviting. Whatever is in there, it's extremely possessive and behaves so erratically like a jealous child throwing a tantrum. As far as I'm concerned, that house and that entire property should be avoided. It needs a serious intervention because I'm not sure what we're dealing with. be avoided. It needs a serious intervention because I'm not sure what we're dealing with. So what was this evil spirit? Again, cue the spooky sounds.

Small town Texas police in the 90s may have had no idea, nor did Drew Navarro, but internet sleuths in 2016 thought they knew. Based on the Sanskrit words found on the altar and the small figure found in Olivia's hands, they would arrive at the idea of a tulpa. And again, a tulpa, frequently loosely translated as a thought form, is a concept originally from Tibetan Buddhism of materialized sentient being, typically in human form, even if it doesn't have a physical body,

that is created through spiritual practice and intense concentration. In Buddhist thought, topas are entities that a Buddha, an enlightened being that anyone can become, manifests in order to teach those who have not attained nirvana. But other things that topas may not always be so helpful. British social activist, social reformer, and theosophist,

Annie Bassant, in her 1905 book, Thought Forms, so helpful. British social activist, social reformer and theosophist Annie Besant in her 1905 book Thought Forms divides them into three classes. Forms in the shape of the person who created them. Forms that resemble objects or people and may become ensouled by nature, spirits or by the dead. And forms that represent inherent qualities from the astral or mental planes such as emotions. I said this ride would be a little wackadoodle. Just goes it a little bit longer. It seemed most often that these emotions were deep, dark, and heavy. Emotions like hatred and perhaps grief. And if the Tulpa is in the form of a dead person and imbibed with dark and malevolent

energy, what might happen then? Belgian Buddhist, spiritualist, explorer, and anarchist Alexandra David Neel, who gained fame for writing about her travels to Tibet in 1924, believed that some tulpas could be practically autonomous, as in truly independent sentient and spiritual entities, not dependent on their creator any longer in any way, free to explore the world and interact with we meat sacks living in the physical plane. She wrote once the tulpa is endowed with enough vitality to be capable of playing the part of a real being, it tends to free itself from its maker's control.

According to David Neal, this happens nearly mechanically. Quote, just as the child when her body is completed and able to live apart leaves its mother's womb. Years later here in the US, Topaz would become widely known and connected, possibly, to aliens in 1975 when UFO enthusiast John Keele mentioned them in his book, The Mothman Prophecies. He wrote that novelist Walter Gibson's house had been haunted by a figure greatly resembling Gibson's famed literary character, the Shadow, explaining that quote, the Tibetans believe that advanced human minds can manipulate these invisible

energies into visible forms called topas or thought projections. What Keele was saying there is that Walter Gibson's fictional or Walter Gibson's real, not fictional house, his real house became haunted by a fictional character that he created originally as the mysterious narrator of the radio program detective story hour 1930 And that is like if my house suddenly became haunted by Lucifina Which would be pretty sweet or to use a much much more famous, you know much more popular and flushed out creation. If Stephen King's house became haunted by an entity that looked and behaved a lot like Pennywise the evil clown from It. Keele speculated that many reports of

ghosts or aliens that resembled pop cultural depictions might actually be topless. Actual beings born in the minds of science fiction authors and screenwriters whose creators and fans felt they were so real that they did actually become real. What a truly fascinating concept. Based on Kiel's 1975 book, tulpas would become a sort of underground horror element featured in mass market paperbacks like The Tulpa, a 1998 novel written by J.N. Williamson. The description is as follows, he was an old man burdened by the weight of years

and approaching senility, struggling to control the workings of his confused and wandering mind. He had spells. I think this needs some music. I'm not quite so loud. Strange dreams and visions which he could not comprehend, but which he knew were generating an evil force.

It rose from within, assuming bodily form, shuffling through the shadows, learning of violence, stalking its prey with a special hunger. And then it struck again and again, never quenching its thirst for blood and terror. It seemed no power on earth could destroy. In the story, an elderly man begins to develop psychic powers, including visions of approaching disasters, as his mind also starts to rot away from dementia. His son-in-law investigates a strange phenomenon and encourages the old man to try and create a stronger grip on these powers as they might save lives, but in fact the old man's concentration leads to the creation of a tulpa an independent and terrible entity in this case that goes on a rampage and then with the birth of the internet which

itself straddles the line between reality and unreality tulpas became associated with all kinds of things that stretch the border between the real and the not real like Slender Man which came about August of 2009 on the something awful forums. While fictional Slender Man then became the basis of the Slender Man's stabbing, very real stabbing, in which two 12 year old girls Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser lured their friend Peyton Lautner into a wooded area of a local park and stabbed her 19 times in an effort to appease the fictional character of Slender Man. We covered that in an early episode of Time Sick, actually, episode 48.

Though Slender Man is undoubtedly fictional, some would speculate that the dark energy created by the intense focus of the internet and particularly the two girls upon it created a sort of Slender Man tulpa that then did play real role, that then did play a real role in stabbing. As in, an initially fictional monster became a real one and influenced two real girls to stab a real victim. And while that seems pretty damn unlikely, many people online have claimed to believe it. But many others of course think it's a bunch of bullshit. Still many internet sleuths and lovers of the paranormal who did not buy the Slender Man Tulpa but did not abandon all hope in the concept of a Tulpa being real began to focus on finding a better evidence for the

existence of Tulpas and their propensity for killing. And this brought many of them to the Olivia Mabel case. To paranormal enthusiasts the Olivia Mabel case seemed to be the best proof that not only Tulpas could exist but they brought many of them to the Olivia Mabel case. To paranormal enthusiasts, the Olivia Mabel case seemed to be the best proof that not only tulpas could exist, but they could also kill. And in the absence of a good theory about how Olivia Mabel died, this seemed like the overall leading theory

in this strange case of tulpas. Did the madness of Olivia's grief conjure the tulpa? Or did she intentionally conjure the tulpa herself with at least a somewhat clear mind, unaware of the possible ramifications, to give her companionship or a reunion with her son Aiden? Evidence on the website oliviamabel.com would seem to point to this latter theory, given the apparent emphasis on the paranormal in every photograph and comment from law enforcement, from Terry Goltzscher and Francesca Santiago's theorizing to the eerie photograph of the stick figure that was found clutched in Olivia Mabel's hand.

So, is this case evidence that tulpas exist? Maybe not. Looking closer at the oliviamabel.com website, you can find some strange discrepancies. First of all, the case number was apparently 93050666. Ignoring the 666, we can actually point to the 93 as being the most problematic numerical sequence here. Typically, police case numbers start with the year the case is opened. In this case, since police arrived at the house in February of 94, the number here should have probably began with 94, but it begins with 93. Also, no record can be found online of a Celina police officer named Francesca Santiago, the first person on the scene. And that's not the only person who fails to show up online outside of this story. There are no birth, marriage, divorce, or death records which can be traced

to Travis Mabel, Olivia Mabel, or Aidan Mabel. There's also no genealogical verification of family relatives, alive or dead, no paper trail of bills, insurance, or pension documents, no driver's licenses or bank statements or anything else that points to the Mabel family having ever existed in Salina. So was this staged, and if so, why? Some people would notice that a Kickstarter aiming to collect 10 grand went live around the same time that the story began to go viral for a movie called Thoughtform about the Mabel family made by the company Elf Tree Media.

A three-minute video published on Vimeo would introduce the project's director and writer Martin Eden, its producer and editor Ian McNenney, and its sound and music designer Joe Morales. Both Joe and Ian are from Texas. Ian from Northern Texas near Dallas. Joe from Central Texas near Austin. Ian McNenney worked on the series Dallas for TNT, wrote his own pilot called The Atrium. And Ian explained in an interview, this thing kind of got started.

We came across this unexplained mystery of this woman named Olivia Mabel, who was found dead in her house. We shared the story with our friend Martin. He put together a really awesome script. So with the screenplay, Martin Eden goes on to explain, what I did was took parts of the story that I found online, mixed it with elements of mysticism and ancient Tibetan Buddhism just to flesh out the parts that we didn't know and add the supernatural cinematic element. The way

they've presented it here, you know, it seems it comes across like the story itself might be real but just exaggerated. In the written section on Kickstarter, they added that the team took a trip to scout locations, quote, in close approximation to the original Mabel house, which further increases the story's seeming credibility. So with all that said, it still could be real, right? Maybe they were just using real events the way the real Amityville murders would go on to inform the Amityville Horror, one of the most iconic horror movies of all time. Well, let's take another look at the website. Though

there seemed at quick glance to be posts going back a decade, upon further investigation the domain name was not purchased until September of 2015 2015 just a few months before the story started up popping up online and before the Kickstarter for thought form was uh you know built and once you know that well the photos on the old looking website start to look staged in one photo you can see a drawing of a creature who surely did not exist in 1994 and that's Slender Obviously, this all paints a picture of how the Olivia Mabel case was actually elaborately conceptualized and staged by a media company to drive up donations for a film. A film that would never end up even being made, by the way.

So was it all a hoax? Should we be mad that these creators tried to pull a fast one over on hundreds, if not thousands, if not millions of people on the internet? Hoax maybe isn't the right word. Horror movies or at least if it was a hoax it was a common hoax in the world of the paranormal horror. Horror movies have long used immersive viral marketing to make their movie seem real. Alfred Hitchcock's psycho would lay the blueprint for this. Being the avant-garde director and businessman that he was, Hitchcock invested $800,000 of his own money in the film which gave him much more control over

how it would be marketed. Hitchcock cast household names such as Janet Lee to increase viewership and he promoted the film as a real story, taking audiences on a tour of the supposedly real Bates Motel and Norman Bates' mother's house in the trailer. Since Psycho was based on a book by Robert Block, Hitchcock bought all available copies of this book, effectively keeping a surprise twist from everybody that Norman Bates was keeping his dead mom inside the house all along a secret. He kept the ending a secret from the cast, crew, critics, and studio executives, even warning the audience of possible health issues while viewing the film and hiring nurses to stay outside the theater to build more drama. He also enforced rules to prevent spoilers, such as not allowing people to leave the theater

and then being able to enter the theater again, and not allowing latecomers to enter the movie. The film became an instant horror success and is now considered iconic. Still frightens audiences. This strategy, combined with Hitchcock's mastery of suspense, made Psycho a pioneer in the world of horror films and a financial success earning 61 times its budget at the box office. Other films would build on the strategies Hitchcock developed, especially when these movies needed an air of mystery to generate hype in the absence of a large budget one of the most financially successful horror movies of all time the Blair Witch project was produced on a shoestring budget of just

$25,000 and it went on to earn nearly 250 million dollars in the box office and Undoubtedly their immersive advertising played a role in the movie success The Blair Witch team created missing person leaflets, a website, message boards, and chat rooms to make it seem like the characters in the movie were so real and actually missing. I'll never forget the hype around this movie. Well, my girlfriend at the time and I saw it in the theater in the summer of 1999. We both thought it was real. I had just graduated college, I was working as a counselor at a residential crisis treatment center, and I remember the

other counselors thinking it was real. There was just so much buzz around this movie. And most of the buzz centered around it, you know, being found footage involving real disappearances, possibly a real monster. And because of that buzz, when you watched it in the theater before everyone knew it was pure fiction, you know, it was genuinely terrifying. Actually after getting home, following watching it in theater, when my girlfriend went to the bathroom, I went in and stood in a dark

corner of her room, just facing the wall, silently rocking back and forth, mirroring a certain very creepy scene. And she was still so worked up from the movie, and she wasn't normally easily scared, but she got genuinely pissed off. I scared her so bad. 2022 Smile, another horror film that used a unique marketing campaign to generate a lot of buzz. Films marketing team set up hidden cameras at baseball games, film people with creepy ass smiles.

Footage then used as a trailer for the film, planting the seeds that the creepy smile passed from person to person. The movie might extend somehow into the real world. They just did the same thing for Smile 2. I saw a couple of creepy people sitting behind home plate one of the Dodgers Mets playoff games. Very smart use of marketing money. In an age when we're bombarded with advertisements literally every day some horror creators go above and beyond to

give their stories that extra push. Something that makes the advertising itself feel immersive and interactive. So well well yes, the Olivia Mabel story was a hoax. It wasn't any more unethical in its hoaxness, if you will, than the marketing of many many other horror films. But what a bummer. No tulpa. So is the whole concept of a tulpa just a bunch of bullshit? Well, in the case of Olivia Mabel, it certainly is. Actually, when you do some digging, So in the case of Olivia Mabel it certainly is. Actually when you do some digging, none of the cases of a supposed tulpa that I am aware of really hold up under very, if you just apply a little scrutiny. There's no evidence to suggest that the concept of a thought form manifestation being able

to interact in any way with the physical realm exists with certainty. The closest definitively, definitely real in some sense, tulpao like entity that we know of is an imaginary friend and that's the concept of the tulpa that seems to have had the most staying power so called tulpa mansers which is a real thing now on online forums have been creating a version of fictional characters they love most notably and randomly many are adult fans of the animated show my little pony and sometimes they've attempted to integrate these tulpas into their everyday lives leading to some psychological studies done on these people. Surveys by a French anthropologist named Samuel Vissier

explored this community's demographic social and psychological profiles few years ago and he found that they belong to primarily urban middle-class Euro-American adolescent and young adult demographics and they cite loneliness and social anxiety as an incentive to pick up the practice of creating tulpas. 93.7 percent of respondents express that their involvement with the creation of tulpas had made their condition better as far as their social anxiety and loneliness and only 8 supported a metaphysical explanation for tulpas, while the majority supported a neurological or psychological explanation.

In 2021, a group of Canadian researchers described the internet's tulpamancer subculture as being used to overcome loneliness and mental suffering and noted the close association with reality shifting, a way of deliberately inducing a form of self-hypnosis in order to escape from current reality into a pre-planned desired reality or quote-unquote wonderland of chosen fantasy characters. Essentially a lot of these tulip answers are just really really good at escapist daydreaming. Interestingly enough, the same desire to have an incredibly immersive experience, to have something that extends from the boundary of your own mind into the physical world in some

way, is shared between the ongoing tulpa community and the viral marketing of horror movies. And in that way, maybe the story of Olivia Mabel wasn't entirely fake after all. It just speaks to a different truth. Well, I am very skeptical regarding the possibility that you can truly just think some sort of metaphysical sentient independent entity into existence, especially the one, especially one that could, you know, kill its creator or kill or otherwise interact with other people, especially people not even familiar with the supposed creation of said topo. I also think the creative process of world building is something very very close to creating a true tulpa. I mean don't some

definitely fictional characters feel so incredibly real? Take Harry Potter for example. I'm sure Harry and his friends, for many of you when you first read those books, especially if you first read them when you were a kid, teenager, whatever, felt in many ways just as real as any of your real life friends. If you were an introverted kid, the characters you read about in those books and or others, for me it was the characters in some Stephen King books, felt absolutely as real, if not more real than many of the people in my real life. Reading about them felt like getting to know real people living in a real world similar

to ours but also so very different. Thanks to the details some authors are able to put into their works, you know these characters, their hopes and desires, their thoughts, their deepest secrets, more than you know anybody in real life, chances are. Immersive world building, when done by the best to have ever done it, it starts to feel truly magical, doesn't it? My dad was a kid, the fictional world that felt the most real to him was Star Trek. He really wanted to go join Captain Kirk and his crew and explore the universe, encountering people from other worlds.

For me, in the film and TV world it was X Files I think. A show that actually had two episodes featuring Tulpas. Sure I knew on some level that agents Mulder and Scully were not real special agents they were just characters played by actors David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson but they felt so fucking real to the point that if 17 year old me would have ran into David Duchovny I wouldn't have felt like I was meeting an actor fromny, I wouldn't have felt like I was meeting an actor from California. I wouldn't have felt like I was meeting David Duchovny. I would have felt like I was meeting special agent Fox Mulder. And I would want him to tell me what he knows about the smoking man.

So maybe in a way, tulpas are real. At least in the sense that sometimes a character born entirely out of some writer's mind can become so fully fleshed out and we can consume so much media or such powerful media featuring said character that fiction becomes a version of real and It this is why I love the world of storytelling so much. There's real magic in it It allows many of us to leave this world behind in moments to escape our troubles and travel to and get lost in some version of that meadow I mentioned visualizing at the top of the show. Where we can live with whoever we choose to access or invent and that while again not exactly proof in the reality of a tulpa is still pretty fucking cool. The fact that we have the ability to even imagine things like tulpas.

That is so cool. Our minds are so cool. The creative ability of our minds is immense. So powerful. So powerful that who knows? Maybe as we learn more about the mind and our imagination and how it all works, someday we will really be able to create something as crazy as a tulpa if some of us haven't already figured out how to do it. And that's it for this supernatural, maybe spooky, definitely a bit wackadoodle, but hopefully fun wackadoodle edition

of Time Suck Short Sucks. If you enjoyed this story, check out the rest of the Bad Magic catalog, beefier episodes of Time Suck every Monday at noon Pacific time, and new episodes of the now long running paranormal podcast, Scared to Death, every Tuesday at midnight, with two episodes of the now long running paranormal podcast scared to death every Tuesday at midnight with two episodes of nightmare fuel fictional horror thrown into the mix each month. Thank you to Sophie Evans for her

initial research on this one. Thank you to Logan Keith polishing up the sound of today's episode before release. Please go to badmagicproductions.com for all your bad magic needs. Have a great weekend and have a happy Halloween!