Speaker 1: Thinking Sideways. I don't stories of things we simply don't
Speaker 1: know the answer to. Hi. There, Welcome again to another
Speaker 1: episode of Thinking Sideways. I am Joe, joined as always
Speaker 1: by Devon and Steve. So you guys ready to tackle
Speaker 1: a really groovy mystery? Just one? Yeah, actually three? And
Speaker 1: actually these aren't entirely mysteries. One. The theme of this
Speaker 1: week's episode is places you don't want to go, and
Speaker 1: I gotta say, I don't want to go to any
Speaker 1: of these. Yeah, they're scary places. I kind of want
Speaker 1: to go to mine because you're we Well, okay, I
Speaker 1: can see why you'd want to go down, but you're
Speaker 1: still weird, that's true. I am no, Actually I do
Speaker 1: want to go to your place. Oh you do, not
Speaker 1: your house, but yeah, that's there. I don't really want
Speaker 1: to go back, just kidding stuff. Yeah, well, okay, let's
Speaker 1: just start talking about these unpleasant, scary places. My vote
Speaker 1: for the place to stay away from is in a
Speaker 1: Hottie Valley, which is in the Northwest Territories in Canada,
Speaker 1: that is the northern part of Canada. It's just um
Speaker 1: to the east of the Yukon Territories, which are just
Speaker 1: to the east of Alaska. So it's well up there.
Speaker 1: It's way up there. Yeah. Yeah, I've heard estimates as
Speaker 1: many as forty four people have known to either disappear
Speaker 1: or diet under mysterious circumstances in this valley. Yeah that's
Speaker 1: I mean, that's you know, it is way up in Canada. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's bears and some people, so well, I mean, well
Speaker 1: we'll get there. Yeah, Okay, on on with our story.
Speaker 1: When the first European trappers and gold miners began to
Speaker 1: get into the area around the valley, they talked to
Speaker 1: the natives quite a bit and heard a lot of
Speaker 1: legends about it. The Indians said that they avoided traveling
Speaker 1: there because it was inhabited by evil spirits. They also
Speaker 1: thought that it was home to spirit creatures known as
Speaker 1: the Wahila, which is supposed to be kind of half
Speaker 1: wolf half bear and it sounds like a really ugly critter. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know, and that's when I would stay away from.
Speaker 1: They also thought that the natives actually thought the Wahila
Speaker 1: has had mystical powers like the ability to appear and
Speaker 1: disappear it will. Yeah, that would be one scary critter.
Speaker 1: It's a pretty handy handy little power. Yeah, yeah, I know,
Speaker 1: I wish I had it. Uh. The locals also had
Speaker 1: stories about a tribe called the Naha. They were this
Speaker 1: fierce mountain tribe that lived in and around the valley,
Speaker 1: and they would come pouring out of the mountains occasionally
Speaker 1: on slave rating parties on the low landers. And yet somehow,
Speaker 1: right about the time white people arrived here a little before,
Speaker 1: even the entire tribe just disappeared. That's unusual. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe they were wiped out by disease. M Well, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of reasons, and I know we're going to
Speaker 1: get into some of that, but there's a lot of
Speaker 1: reasons why people would disappear. But it's just weird that
Speaker 1: it it precludes the appearance of the white man. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just like Rono colony man, Yeah, a little bit.
Speaker 1: So anyway, it's this is either a huge historical mystery
Speaker 1: or it's just the wilderness version of an urban legend.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure where. So it's possible that they didn't
Speaker 1: never exist. Yeah, I think it's there's really no evidence
Speaker 1: that they did. No artifacts, Okay, got it. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: who knows. But anyway, back to our story, as the
Speaker 1: Europeans began to come into the area. They looking for
Speaker 1: gold and furs and stuff like that. There are stories
Speaker 1: that were spread that there was gold in the Nahanti Valley,
Speaker 1: and so that's when the troubles began. That's always when
Speaker 1: the trouble began. You saw Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Speaker 1: written by B Traven. Yeah, totally saw. Also, we just
Speaker 1: talked about gold being found last week. I did Joe's
Speaker 1: kind of thing about stories that involved gold. If I
Speaker 1: like gold, I'm hinting I want for gold bars for
Speaker 1: my birthday. Not that nice new patio out back is
Speaker 1: hiding something. Okay. It was kind of a rush job though.
Speaker 1: A couple of guys were on the on the lookout
Speaker 1: for gold nineteen o six. The place was the Honey
Speaker 1: Valley was pretty much untouched and unexplored. But a couple
Speaker 1: of brothers, William Frank McLeod decided they wanted to head
Speaker 1: up to the Yukon. Willie and Frank. Yeah, William Frantiska.
Speaker 1: I thought you said Willie Frank as in it was
Speaker 1: first in middle name. I thought, I said William Franco. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So they wanted to go up to the Klondike, I guess,
Speaker 1: and they decided to go through the valley and they
Speaker 1: persuaded another guy named Bobby Weir to go along with them.
Speaker 1: So they had it up the Hone River in spring
Speaker 1: nineteen o six and they were never seen the live again.
Speaker 1: All three all three, uh the Clouds. The Club brothers
Speaker 1: bodies were eventually found about two years later, but their
Speaker 1: heads were gone. Yeah, they had ben decapita. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure exactly what kind of shape their bodies were in,
Speaker 1: and some of some coupts I've heard they were just skeletons,
Speaker 1: and they should think after two years, I don't know
Speaker 1: how much would be left. Well, that depends on when
Speaker 1: they died. If they died as soon as they got there,
Speaker 1: then yes, two years would have gone by. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: if they lived for a year, so there might even
Speaker 1: remains other than small after a year. It's pretty cold, though,
Speaker 1: It's not as if they were in a tropical jungle
Speaker 1: where it's nothing but bugs and other critters. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: you've got scavengers looking for a warm, easy meal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true. Probably a lot of those, a lot of
Speaker 1: that going on. So yeah, I would say they were
Speaker 1: probably skeletons, but whatever. But the key point here is
Speaker 1: their heads were gone. Okay, yeah. And as for as
Speaker 1: to the other guy, Bobby, we're apparently a native hunting
Speaker 1: party found at a decomposed body a year later, about
Speaker 1: half a mile away from that spot where the brothers
Speaker 1: were found. But it's not that it apparently wasn't. I
Speaker 1: don't even know how they really identified the brothers. Maybe
Speaker 1: through their possessions, it's the only thing I can obviously,
Speaker 1: not their fingerprints or their dental records. Dental records weren't
Speaker 1: really Also, they never found their heads, so yeah, that
Speaker 1: makes it quite It's hard to do dental records with
Speaker 1: no dentists dentie, yeah, okay, yeah, And and so that
Speaker 1: was not the end of it. A guy named Martin Jorgensen,
Speaker 1: who was a prospector, was found headless in nineteen seventeen
Speaker 1: outside the burnt remains of his cabin along the Flat
Speaker 1: River and other versions. He was found inside the cabin
Speaker 1: and so and so, I was right about this time
Speaker 1: that the nickname of Headless Valley, or also the Valley
Speaker 1: of the Headless Men both of them began to like
Speaker 1: append itself to the Honey Valley for good reasoning. Yeah,
Speaker 1: thanks so. And then at the time went by, people
Speaker 1: were disappearing, of course at a steady rate. Minor from
Speaker 1: Ontario was found in his sleeping bag in the Valley
Speaker 1: of the Headless Man. What again, his head missing. And all,
Speaker 1: by the way, none of the heads that disappeared whatever found, well,
Speaker 1: they never are in Highlander either, yea, nobody else has
Speaker 1: made that connection. Come on, this valley is obviously where
Speaker 1: the Highlanders are going. It could be quickening the Yukon. Sure, okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: see there were other mysterious desks that didn't involve to
Speaker 1: be heading. In one case, the body of a trapper
Speaker 1: named John O'Brien was found sitting this camp frozen solid,
Speaker 1: next to his campfire, with a box of matches in
Speaker 1: his hand. I also heard in a version that it
Speaker 1: appeared that the fire had been burning amazingly hot at
Speaker 1: one point, and so he must have flashed frozen. Did
Speaker 1: you come across that? I saw that. I saw that
Speaker 1: that out there, and I don't it doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 1: I couldn't find any support for that. I think he
Speaker 1: probably actually fell and fell in the river. Was like,
Speaker 1: you know, I had really bad exposure and was, you know,
Speaker 1: shaking like a leaf and trying to get a fire
Speaker 1: lit and just didn't quite. Yeah, that's that's probably what
Speaker 1: I think. Or somebody murdered him. But he's still at
Speaker 1: his head. He's still had his head, got it, Yeah,
Speaker 1: kept his head about him. Yeah. So here's some theories
Speaker 1: about this place and why it became this evil, this
Speaker 1: place of evil headlessness. Some people thought that there might
Speaker 1: be some sort of mad trapper or murderous hermit running
Speaker 1: around in the Honey Valley. That sounds familiar, Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I remember remember Albert Johnson, Yeah, trapper of Rat River. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a guy named Dick North who wrote a book
Speaker 1: about him. And North speculated that Johnson might have passed
Speaker 1: through the valley in the years prior to his moved
Speaker 1: to Rat River, and he thinks Johnson might be responsible
Speaker 1: for at least some of the murders, but of course
Speaker 1: he has no evidence of that. And of course Johnson
Speaker 1: died in nineteen thirty two, so he obviously couldn't have
Speaker 1: carried out the nad Yeah, and I think he was
Speaker 1: too young to have murdered the McCloud brothers in nineteen
Speaker 1: o six, I would agree, Yeah, because he was in
Speaker 1: his forties when he died. Is that right? But they
Speaker 1: weren't really sure that Johnson. I mean I think they
Speaker 1: were thinking maybe right around forty. Yeah, that would make
Speaker 1: you a child at in when the first murders occurred. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that doesn't work, Okay. Our next theory, uh is some
Speaker 1: people actually believe this, the natives mostly something. I thought
Speaker 1: that it was a remnants of the missing Naha tribe.
Speaker 1: So maybe they didn't actually completely disappear. They're just hiding
Speaker 1: and they're looking at the valley and then so they
Speaker 1: did it. Tell me you read up on how this
Speaker 1: gets tied into the hollow earth theory. Oh, the hollow
Speaker 1: earth theory. You know, I didn't. I've heard of the
Speaker 1: hollow earth theory. I wasn't really going to include this
Speaker 1: whole thing with the hollow earth theory. But yeah, there
Speaker 1: is there is a theory out there among some people
Speaker 1: that you know, the earth is hollow and that the
Speaker 1: entrance is in this valley, which is why if you
Speaker 1: get too close to finding that entrance to the hollow Earth,
Speaker 1: then you know you've got to be off. You know what.
Speaker 1: It also makes me think of this this whole the
Speaker 1: rance to where this tribe is living. And I don't
Speaker 1: think Devon's going to know this, but you might remember
Speaker 1: this is there was an old comic called Tar Rock,
Speaker 1: Son of Stone. Do you remember that at all? That
Speaker 1: sounds vaguely familiar. Yeah, I remember seeing that. I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't think I ever read that. Well, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: been on and off for fifty sixty years, but it's
Speaker 1: it was written as two Indian or it was an
Speaker 1: Indian man, an American Indian man, and an American Indian boy.
Speaker 1: Find a cave, go into the system, and come into
Speaker 1: a world where dinosaurs are still about. It's basically kind
Speaker 1: of the same Hollow Earth, find your way in, find
Speaker 1: your way out, travel between the two. But that's exactly
Speaker 1: what it made me think of, is that they're going
Speaker 1: into this paradise and then they're protecting the entrance of
Speaker 1: paradise for all these interlopers who were going to come
Speaker 1: in and destroy it on them. I always like it
Speaker 1: when you're like, Devon's too young to know this totally
Speaker 1: nerdy reference that totally knows about you. Do. Yes, you
Speaker 1: just watched the animated version, didn't you know. Let's keep
Speaker 1: going okay, all right, okay, next theory. The then a tribe.
Speaker 1: They're the ones who, like you, lived outside the valley
Speaker 1: and didn't not to go into the valley. They had
Speaker 1: a theory that it was the New luck, the new Cluck. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: what the heck is the new cluck? Yeah? New Cluck
Speaker 1: is a word that translates as men of the bush.
Speaker 1: All the Arctic tribes knew of the New Cluck, and
Speaker 1: they all were afraid of the New Cluck. Apparently, what
Speaker 1: they are is they're short, sort of Neanderthal like sort
Speaker 1: of human human, but with with more fur, and they
Speaker 1: have they carry stone weapons, like stone clubs and such things,
Speaker 1: and they're very violent. And it's said that they used
Speaker 1: to run the whole the Arctic Circle and that and
Speaker 1: that as at the time of our story, their numbers
Speaker 1: were believed to have been reduced enough that they were
Speaker 1: all maybe had hanging out in the Honey Valley. They're
Speaker 1: like a hairy ogre or something. Is that what that is?
Speaker 1: I know obviously the more locks, right yeah, yeah, from
Speaker 1: the time machine. Yeah yeah, yeah, that would make sense too.
Speaker 1: I could be yeah, yeah, I don't know. These guys
Speaker 1: apparently were some sort of just left behind branch of
Speaker 1: humanity and perhaps this is one of those things. Not
Speaker 1: I don't want to like railroad sidetrack this at all,
Speaker 1: but this is one of those things that makes me
Speaker 1: contemplate how aware we are as humans of our past
Speaker 1: and how much leftover there is and mother civilization and
Speaker 1: going down a rabbit hole. But the fact that you know,
Speaker 1: Native indigenous people very often refer to this thing that
Speaker 1: we know now definitely existed and predated us, and they
Speaker 1: always have that as like a remnant somehow of a memory.
Speaker 1: But they live, they live literally on the ground there
Speaker 1: in the middle of it all the time, and they're
Speaker 1: passing that history, whereas we as a society. The white man,
Speaker 1: from what I can understand, hasn't explored this area other
Speaker 1: than aerial photography. We said, a plane over, we took
Speaker 1: a picture. That's it. Yeah, Like there's tons we don't know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I just mean, like in terms of having this kind
Speaker 1: of mythical thing, Well, you're talking not just this particular
Speaker 1: value in general, the new cluck. Yeah, I'm always I'm
Speaker 1: always astounded it when you hear stories of that. Anyways,
Speaker 1: there there are actually a few European men who who's
Speaker 1: seen these critters. In ninety four, trapper named John Baptist
Speaker 1: was was with some companions and in the valley and
Speaker 1: they came across a strange man like creature about five
Speaker 1: feet tall, had long, bushy hair and beard and hairy
Speaker 1: chested back, and the hair was not quite so thick
Speaker 1: on the arms and legs, and yeah, he took the
Speaker 1: new Cluck took off. Baptist and his friends tracked it
Speaker 1: for a while. Uh, and the entire time they heard
Speaker 1: strange whistling calls in the brush around them. Members of
Speaker 1: the tribe later explained what that whistling meant. That's how
Speaker 1: the new cluck communicated when they were on the hunt.
Speaker 1: So these guys thought they were tracking the new cluck,
Speaker 1: but apparently a group of them, we're tracking these guys.
Speaker 1: The hunter becomes the hunting. Yeah, just like a group
Speaker 1: of velociraptors. Yeah. There There was another new exciting in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty four by a sound kid whose name. His
Speaker 1: name does not has not been passed down to remember. So,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I don't know that these things are
Speaker 1: actually real. It sounds like it might not be beyond
Speaker 1: the realm of possibility. Yeah, Yeah, that's always a hard
Speaker 1: one to say. We don't have anything that says they
Speaker 1: don't exist, that's the hard part. Yeah. Um, so I
Speaker 1: believe in their existence, maybe a little bit more than
Speaker 1: than a hot tribe. So our next theory the Wauhila.
Speaker 1: Remember the Wahila, that wolf bear hybrid. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so it could have been the Wahila, except I don't
Speaker 1: really believe in the Wahila. The Waka. You know, what
Speaker 1: the Wahuila sounds like to me is kind of like
Speaker 1: that hairless bear they saw. Remember that bear, the like
Speaker 1: sun bear or something that was roaming around. Maybe it
Speaker 1: was a grizzly bear that was like really really sick,
Speaker 1: and so it didn't have any hair on it, and
Speaker 1: people were taking pictures of it and they were like,
Speaker 1: what is this creature? This just happened like a few
Speaker 1: months ago. Remember this, No, never mind, our listeners will know. No.
Speaker 1: I was just gonna say, is that. I mean, critters
Speaker 1: that are in states of distress tend to look really
Speaker 1: weird too. I remember the Montauk creature a couple of
Speaker 1: years back. It turned out to be a pig. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it was all it was washed up in the
Speaker 1: ocean and all beat up and it looks like something
Speaker 1: completely different. But I could see how a very sick
Speaker 1: and I'm like, sick mange or something. Yeah, this bear
Speaker 1: looked like a brand new animal that nobody had ever
Speaker 1: seen before. And they finally tranquilized it, and they're like,
Speaker 1: oh crap, it's a really really sick bear. So they
Speaker 1: got it and treated it and released it and it
Speaker 1: looks totally normal. Again. Good for the bear anyways. Yeah, well, okay,
Speaker 1: so so much for the Wahila. There are next areas
Speaker 1: that maybe these incidents were just unrelated. I mean, that's obviously.
Speaker 1: It's in a really rugged environment with bears and wolverines
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. I'm inclined to go with this one,
Speaker 1: just so, you know, is it because it's reasonable? Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: I realized nobody can see me. Not yeah, but boring.
Speaker 1: In the case of the McCloud brothers, Bobby weird body
Speaker 1: was not found with him, so maybe he killed them, uh,
Speaker 1: and then took off himself. And maybe they did yeah,
Speaker 1: and then they got a whole bunch of gold and
Speaker 1: then Bobby killed him and took off. The remains that
Speaker 1: were found a half mile away may or may not
Speaker 1: have been his remains, and maybe the clouds died from
Speaker 1: disease and in the cold, and we're left to get
Speaker 1: help just or just to say it himself, and he
Speaker 1: just died somewhere along the way. And it's just really
Speaker 1: really hard to say. As for their skulls, I mean,
Speaker 1: if you're laying there in the rush for like, you know,
Speaker 1: a couple of years, an animal might actually just come
Speaker 1: and but chew your head off and carry it away.
Speaker 1: We've we've talked about this many, many times about how
Speaker 1: far bones will travel from the initial side of death. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think this is a remote, inhospitable place. And the
Speaker 1: odds of dying from a cold accidents animal tax because
Speaker 1: you can't just call nine one one emergency. You're just
Speaker 1: out of luck. And just if you do something as
Speaker 1: a routine in our society as breaking a leg, well
Speaker 1: that's it for you. There's say, okay, well it's gonna
Speaker 1: be a three month hike to get to the doctor,
Speaker 1: which is a problem. But on the other other hand,
Speaker 1: last there it is interesting that deaths occurred with the
Speaker 1: beheadings and everything within a span of about forty years,
Speaker 1: and in more recent years people have visited the value,
Speaker 1: and nobody's lost their head, so it's possible beheadings and
Speaker 1: the murders were done by one person. That really is possible.
Speaker 1: So I mean forty years, that's not an unnaturally long lifespan. Obviously,
Speaker 1: you're not gonna start killing people till you're at least like,
Speaker 1: you know, fifteen or eighteen whatever the legal ages in Canada. Okay,
Speaker 1: But and and it's it's also possible of this if
Speaker 1: if it was some serial killer, you know, real mad trapper,
Speaker 1: kind of lunatic. It turns out that the value that
Speaker 1: has this mans has a lot of limestone caves in it,
Speaker 1: so a lot of places to high bodies. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So who knows gonna be one of these days somebody
Speaker 1: will be exploring a cave and make a really ghastly
Speaker 1: fine and or something. Uh, that would be really the
Speaker 1: Throne of them In the first Conan movie and the
Speaker 1: Throne of Skulls, I don't remember, it's been so long
Speaker 1: since I've seen that. I know, I swear it was
Speaker 1: a Throne of Skulls. Maybe it was in the comic
Speaker 1: good Man. Yeah, I know. So that's it. So the
Speaker 1: value they had this man don't go their kids yeah, don't. Uh.
Speaker 1: You guys want to talk about my place, but I
Speaker 1: kind of want to go We're gonna talk about the
Speaker 1: Aokigahara Forest, which is also known as the Japanese suicide
Speaker 1: forest cheerful place. So if that is the sort of
Speaker 1: thing that disturbs you, skip ahead twenty ish minutes. Sorry, everyone,
Speaker 1: We're not going to call it that. We It's often
Speaker 1: referred to as the Sea of Trees, which in Japanese
Speaker 1: can be said as the Jucai, which is how a
Speaker 1: lot of people refer to this forest. So we're going
Speaker 1: to go ahead and just refer to it as that. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's pretend I didn't already tell you that it's a
Speaker 1: suicide forest, because it's a beautiful, lush forest, the kind
Speaker 1: that you would see like in a Miyazaki film. Kind
Speaker 1: of Uh. It's an idyllic fourteen square miles at the
Speaker 1: foot of Mount Fuji, and it is the most the
Speaker 1: second most popular place in the world to commit suicide,
Speaker 1: the first is the Golden Gate Bridge. Numbers vary, but
Speaker 1: reportedly anywhere between ten and a hundred people kill themselves
Speaker 1: in the Juchai every year. In two thousand and ten,
Speaker 1: there were fifty seven confirmed suicides. In two thousand to
Speaker 1: the number of confirmed suicides was seventy eight. And I
Speaker 1: say confirmed because we don't have a way of knowing
Speaker 1: for sure. In two thousands three, after a rumored hundred
Speaker 1: and five confirmed suicide, the government decided maybe telling everybody
Speaker 1: how many people killed themselves in this forest is a
Speaker 1: bad idea, and the reason that was to stop it
Speaker 1: from attracting other people to go to do it. I
Speaker 1: think that was definitely part of it. Part of it
Speaker 1: was to stop this kind of cycle. Another part of
Speaker 1: it was it is a tourist attraction. There's a really
Speaker 1: famous ice cave there. There's a couple really famous other caves.
Speaker 1: There's a wind cave and a bunch of other really
Speaker 1: beautiful stuff. Yeah, go look at the photos of the caves.
Speaker 1: They're fantastic. Yeah, you have to. You have to google
Speaker 1: specific things in regards to this one. If you just
Speaker 1: google the forest, it'll just kind of show you some
Speaker 1: pictures of a really beautiful place. But they were trying
Speaker 1: to nip the whole everybody will kill yourself there thing
Speaker 1: in the bud, but also not scared tourists away. That
Speaker 1: makes sense. It kind of like in Jaws. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: many weird references today. Uh So, in addition to the
Speaker 1: kind of confirmed numbers, I don't know how they necessarily
Speaker 1: can confirm what happened in this past year versus not,
Speaker 1: but they the local government does conduct annual searches for bodies,
Speaker 1: and with the forest being what it is, it's hard
Speaker 1: to know if the bodies are older or younger, or
Speaker 1: maybe they got missed in last year's search. It's always
Speaker 1: it's an incredibly lush forest. It's really easy to get lost.
Speaker 1: It's hard to tell. It's also frozen half of the
Speaker 1: year or more so. It's possible that bodies could freeze
Speaker 1: in a non decomposed state for six, eight, twelve almost months,
Speaker 1: and then they have a warm spell, it decompos, it
Speaker 1: starts to decompose, it freezes again. It's hard. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: frankly I think sometimes they just don't even try, because
Speaker 1: that's a lot of bodies. Yeah, it's a very small
Speaker 1: group that has to deal with it. Yeah, it is
Speaker 1: in the name of prevention. Not only are there large
Speaker 1: signs at every trailhead urging people to seek help, but
Speaker 1: workers also play signs as they search for the bodies
Speaker 1: to remind people that there's something to live for, just
Speaker 1: kind of sporadically around the forest. So at least they're
Speaker 1: just hundreds and hundreds of these signs all around the
Speaker 1: four They are a bunch of them. Yeah. One of
Speaker 1: the big signs is loosely translated to kind of say, quote,
Speaker 1: let's think once more about the life you were given
Speaker 1: your parents, your brothers and sisters and children. Don't suffer alone. First,
Speaker 1: please contact somebody. And then it has a suicide hotline
Speaker 1: number on the bottom of it. It's you know, it's
Speaker 1: funny to me. I mean, I've seen a lot of
Speaker 1: you see those signs on bridges and stuff here about,
Speaker 1: you know, to encourage people to get help and they're
Speaker 1: going to jump, But I do say suicide counseling this
Speaker 1: phone number. Well, no, I've seen some different different signs.
Speaker 1: But what I crack up about this is this kind
Speaker 1: of plays on that that cultural bend of you know,
Speaker 1: your family, which is very important in Japanese society. It's
Speaker 1: actually really smart. I was I read it. I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: whoever wrote that really knew what they were doing when
Speaker 1: they put this together. Yeah, Yeah, it's pretty interesting how
Speaker 1: intelligent they've been about trying to prevent suicide. It's just
Speaker 1: a popular thing to do over there, kill yourself. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and suicide of Japan is a lot higher than it
Speaker 1: is over here, that's true. If you haven't already, you
Speaker 1: should definitely creep yourself out by googling Chucai and uh
Speaker 1: quote forest bodies. Hopefully I don't need to add this disclaimer,
Speaker 1: but some of those images are pretty disturbing, or could
Speaker 1: be disturbing. I don't know why. Maybe it's because we've
Speaker 1: been doing this podcast for so long, but dead bodies
Speaker 1: don't really creep me out. This. This is right up
Speaker 1: there with body farms. And then have you ever looked
Speaker 1: at images from body farms, the ones where they just
Speaker 1: leave them laying out in the brush to figure out
Speaker 1: what happens? This was very much in line with the
Speaker 1: imagery I've seen from that, and I think it's the
Speaker 1: same thing. We've looked at it enough. Yeah, I will
Speaker 1: say I'll show you a picture later on in one
Speaker 1: body that really will creep you out. Okay, The forest
Speaker 1: is really really lush, really, it's really if you don't
Speaker 1: know what's going on in this forest, it's really beautiful
Speaker 1: if you just look at pictures of the Jucai. It's
Speaker 1: it's just kind of breathtaking. It is genuinely if you
Speaker 1: saw Spirited Away or Um Princess Mononoke, it looks like
Speaker 1: the forests from those movies. It really really does. So
Speaker 1: because of the lushness of this forest, bodies are very
Speaker 1: often missed less these days because people have started um.
Speaker 1: People who are hesitant to kill themselves will take trail
Speaker 1: tape with them, you know that, like nylon trail tape
Speaker 1: that you see tied around tree branches. Sometimes they'll take
Speaker 1: that and they'll tie one in around a tree and
Speaker 1: they'll just like flow it behind them in a straight
Speaker 1: line instead of yeah, so they won't get lost. So
Speaker 1: often that leads to something it's it is. I know
Speaker 1: you're gonna tell talk about this, but it's really easy
Speaker 1: to get lost in this Well, it's really easy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's super super easy. The and the most common way
Speaker 1: that people kill themselves is they either the first most
Speaker 1: common is hanging and the second most common is taking
Speaker 1: sleeping pills. But is that is there any do you know,
Speaker 1: is there a male female ratio there? I almost imagine
Speaker 1: that men would be more likely to hang themselves than women. Um,
Speaker 1: from what I've heard, it's not so much a male
Speaker 1: female ratio, it's a determined and not determined ratio. So
Speaker 1: the people who are determined will not mark their trail
Speaker 1: in and they hang themselves. So hanging bodies or nooses
Speaker 1: with skeletons underneath are often found years and years and
Speaker 1: years later because there's no trail mark versus the fresher
Speaker 1: bodies that they find are often marked by a trail,
Speaker 1: and they're not hung. They've taken sleeping pills, and then
Speaker 1: it takes them a while to die from exposure because
Speaker 1: they're too weak from taking the sleeping bills. That doesn't
Speaker 1: kill them, but they're two weeks it can, but it
Speaker 1: turns out that the people often it doesn't. People don't
Speaker 1: take quite enough in this forest. People tend to overestimate.
Speaker 1: It's probably the fault of movies. How many pills it
Speaker 1: takes to actually make that. And they actually have This
Speaker 1: is really really creepy, but they have suicide manuals that
Speaker 1: they come out with in Japan that they'll find on
Speaker 1: a lot of these bodies that tells people how to
Speaker 1: kill themselves in in the Chucai. Yeah, it's really it's
Speaker 1: really creepy. Yeah, and it says either hang yourself or
Speaker 1: take sleeping pills. Yeah. Okay, alright, I was gonna make
Speaker 1: some joke about, you know, killing your leadership, but never mind.
Speaker 1: And some I guess the third most common way to
Speaker 1: die in the forest is just by basic exhaustion, dehydration,
Speaker 1: or malnourishment. This is due to something we're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about in a minute. That's called ubats but it's a
Speaker 1: traditional practice in Japan. Aditional I hesitates called traditional, but
Speaker 1: it is. I have a number of Japanese friends, and
Speaker 1: when I was talking to them about this story, I
Speaker 1: mentioned and they said, oh, does that happen there? Like,
Speaker 1: that's a thing that happens a lot. So you're looking
Speaker 1: at me, you know where we're going, like I do.
Speaker 1: But apparently the people of Japan, at least the people
Speaker 1: that I know from Japan, believe that this is a
Speaker 1: thing that legitimately happens. So alright, we'll leave it at
Speaker 1: that for a minute. Okay, it's not happening anymore though, right, Well,
Speaker 1: maybe it's hard so I'm assuming besides bodies, because the
Speaker 1: story has got enough traction, there's other stuff that's being
Speaker 1: found there's lots of other stuff, and visitors do describe
Speaker 1: the forest as being unnaturally silent, as if all life
Speaker 1: has abandoned the forest intentionally. I've watched some videos of
Speaker 1: people walking through and you can hear birds and things
Speaker 1: like that, but it is really muffled, kind of as
Speaker 1: you know when you have have the first snow, at
Speaker 1: least in Portland. I know places that get a lot
Speaker 1: of snow don't have this as much because the plows
Speaker 1: are out immediately, but it gets really quiet and muffled.
Speaker 1: And that's the truth of this forest as well. And
Speaker 1: a lot of people do leave stuff behind. Like you said,
Speaker 1: there's ice and snow a lot of the time in
Speaker 1: the forest, and I don't know why people would leave
Speaker 1: a lot of this stuff behind, Like shoes of all
Speaker 1: sizes get left behind, including children's shoes, and it's not
Speaker 1: like that kid dropped his shoe, better leave it. Pairs
Speaker 1: of shoes lined up, which is weird. There's people leave
Speaker 1: packs of photos, children's toys. There's a really interesting I
Speaker 1: don't know if you guys got to watch the Vice
Speaker 1: video that I posted for the links. It's really really interesting.
Speaker 1: They follow Japanese geologist who's part of the suicide patrols
Speaker 1: that go out there that I don't think I've mentioned yet,
Speaker 1: but I'm going to mention and he kind of explains things.
Speaker 1: But they find this stuffed animal that's kind of a
Speaker 1: humanoid figure that's been nailed upside down to a tree
Speaker 1: and kind of like cut open, and then there was
Speaker 1: a curse that was nailed into the inside of him.
Speaker 1: They find that while they're wandering around, so you kind
Speaker 1: of have the sense that that's the sort of thing
Speaker 1: that's around a lot. This is kind of like getting
Speaker 1: into Blair which territory a little. Yeah, there are a
Speaker 1: couple of theories about why people go here to kill themselves,
Speaker 1: why it's so popular, and ubats plays a role in it.
Speaker 1: Ubot s is it literally translates to the leaving of
Speaker 1: an old woman, and it's this rumored Japanese tradition, although
Speaker 1: tradition I don't think it's the right word. Practice, I
Speaker 1: guess of leaving a family member who's very old or
Speaker 1: ill in a place to die. Basically, it's it's somebody
Speaker 1: is a burden on the family. You take them out
Speaker 1: into a forest or some other deserted area and leave
Speaker 1: them to die. So that they are no longer burdened
Speaker 1: to you nice as I said, there's there's not a
Speaker 1: whole as far as I can tell, this is not
Speaker 1: a thing that actually ever happened. You know, in Japanese culture.
Speaker 1: Isn't the only place that I've heard of this kind
Speaker 1: of thing. Other cultures talk about taking the old out
Speaker 1: or the old wandering away when they decide that they
Speaker 1: become a bird. Yeah, that's that's kind of back in
Speaker 1: the way back days, like when you're we were living
Speaker 1: in the Stone Age and the way back in the
Speaker 1: way back. Yeah. There, And there's a larger conversation to
Speaker 1: be had here about the traditional treatment of seniors in
Speaker 1: Japan and the fact that Japanese seniors have the higher
Speaker 1: much higher rate of suicide than seniors in the rest
Speaker 1: of the world or the average rate of suicide in
Speaker 1: the rest of the world. But we're not going to
Speaker 1: dive into that so much. Yeah, they haven't kept stats
Speaker 1: on the age of the people what they find having
Speaker 1: their bodies out here, right, No, they ever really kept
Speaker 1: stats other than numbers for the most part, it sounds
Speaker 1: like but even though I'm not totally willing to say
Speaker 1: that you bots is a real thing. Let's assume it is,
Speaker 1: and we can say that because it is vengeful spirits
Speaker 1: from the family members who have been left behind haunt
Speaker 1: the Jucai and call people in. That's a good theory, right. Alternately,
Speaker 1: vengeful spirits from samurai who killed themselves in feudal times.
Speaker 1: Did they all go to the forest to kill themselves?
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't think so, but that's a theory.
Speaker 1: It's smacks of so many bad Hollywood movies where there's
Speaker 1: the house or the woods that are filled with evil
Speaker 1: spirits that draw people in. I mean, it makes me
Speaker 1: think of The Evil Dead with Bruce Campbell. Yeah, the houses,
Speaker 1: it draws them in. It does crazy stuff that's completely believable.
Speaker 1: Next theory that has the exact same smack to it
Speaker 1: is the urry, which are demon ghosts. Also maybe the
Speaker 1: Buddhist monk, which is a demon ghost. Will There have
Speaker 1: been reports of people seeing a Buddhist monk wandering the
Speaker 1: forest uh and some people claimed to have even spoken
Speaker 1: with him. He asks people wandering the forest why they're there,
Speaker 1: and he tells them how to get out of the forest.
Speaker 1: He gives them, you know, there's the trail around Basically yeah.
Speaker 1: If they say, oh, my gosh, you're right, I don't
Speaker 1: want to kill myself, I don't think oh yeah, actually
Speaker 1: I guess I did mention that there's a core of
Speaker 1: volunteers that goes out to try and find people who
Speaker 1: haven't yet committed suicide. Know you talk about the people
Speaker 1: who go out and look for the bodies. Oh, they
Speaker 1: are also trying to find people who are out there
Speaker 1: who might be about to commit suicide and try to
Speaker 1: talk them out of it, not in like, oh you
Speaker 1: have so much to live for blah blah blah. This
Speaker 1: is another thing you get to see in that Vice
Speaker 1: video because the gentleman that they're following is part of
Speaker 1: this core, and they do find somebody and he just
Speaker 1: kind of sits there and talks to him for a
Speaker 1: couple of minutes. He says, what are you doing out here?
Speaker 1: You know you can't you're not allowed to camp out here. Okay,
Speaker 1: Well do you have food and water? Okay? Well I
Speaker 1: just want you to think really hard about what's going on.
Speaker 1: It was really nice to meet you, okay, you know
Speaker 1: by basically, uh, you know, it's not like you have
Speaker 1: so much to live for and don't kill yourself. And
Speaker 1: blah blah blah blah blah. It's more of a let's
Speaker 1: have an honest human interaction with each other and hopefully
Speaker 1: that will discourage you from doing whatever you were thinking
Speaker 1: about doing, the cluttering up our forests with corpses. Anyways,
Speaker 1: the reason that I bring this up is it turns
Speaker 1: out one of the people that's very active in this
Speaker 1: is a man by the name of Chaozin Yamashita, who
Speaker 1: is a Jodo Shinshoo priest. It's a sect of Buddhism,
Speaker 1: and Yamashita juice Shaku, is one of those monks, and
Speaker 1: he does dress in the traditional robes, not the it's
Speaker 1: not the bright orange robes familiar. Yeah, they're dark robes,
Speaker 1: but they are traditional. You can kind of you could
Speaker 1: go out and google it if you want. They are
Speaker 1: they're kind of big, dark, flowing robes. So I think
Speaker 1: it's pretty possible that people are freaked out in the
Speaker 1: middle of the forest and have a real encounter and
Speaker 1: go back and talk to their friends and they say, yeah,
Speaker 1: I talked to a monk in the middle of the forest,
Speaker 1: and people are like, you're crazy, that's not a real thing.
Speaker 1: You probably saw a go I can very easily see
Speaker 1: that in a forest where it's super weird and creepy
Speaker 1: and you're on your own or such, the two of you,
Speaker 1: and suddenly a monk, which is not something I think
Speaker 1: you would normally expect to run across in the forest,
Speaker 1: suddenly shows up. Yeah. Yeah, strange. Yes. Next up is
Speaker 1: the q Roi Jucai book, which is by s Cho
Speaker 1: Matsu Moto, who's a very famous Japanese novelist. He's written
Speaker 1: just an absurd amount of novels and books and poems
Speaker 1: and things like that. He's very, very famous. But he
Speaker 1: wrote this book. I came out in I think it
Speaker 1: was nineteen sixties. Some things I read said nineteen sixty two.
Speaker 1: It's not in print and English, and despite my clearly
Speaker 1: flawless Japanese product pronunciation, I do not actually read kanji
Speaker 1: or katakana, and that's the only way that you can
Speaker 1: get information about this book. I did find a Wikipedia
Speaker 1: page on this book, and it was in Japanese, and
Speaker 1: I said, hey, Chrome, translate this page into English, and
Speaker 1: I literally could not make the English words that appeared
Speaker 1: on the page makes sense to my American brain. There
Speaker 1: were some very very interesting things that happened, and I
Speaker 1: was I know I mentioned to you guys. I was
Speaker 1: talking to one of my Japanese friends, and I said,
Speaker 1: can you just read the synopsis and tell me what
Speaker 1: this book is about? And she kind of looked at
Speaker 1: it for a minute and said, uh no, so Ese.
Speaker 1: She read in Japanese and I there are two different
Speaker 1: ways that it could that this book could be. And
Speaker 1: it's also possible that it's like just a there are
Speaker 1: a lot of Japanese concepts that don't translate very well
Speaker 1: into English, so it's possible that she just was like,
Speaker 1: I'm tired of you asking me things about Japan, so
Speaker 1: stop and uh, I don't really want to try and
Speaker 1: explain this to you. But as far as I can tell,
Speaker 1: this book is either about a woman who kills herself
Speaker 1: in the forest because of kind of a star cross
Speaker 1: to lover forbidden love situation, or about a woman whose
Speaker 1: sister dies in a bus accident and she like won't
Speaker 1: leave her sister and then she tries to take over
Speaker 1: her sister's job. Or maybe there's like an evil spirit
Speaker 1: that possesses the sister. It's hard to tell. If you
Speaker 1: want to run this experiment, please be my guests, go
Speaker 1: out in your English speaking brain and find the Wikipedia
Speaker 1: page and try and Google translate it and and then
Speaker 1: if you can figure out what it means, tell me please.
Speaker 1: But apparently it was a very very popular book in Japan.
Speaker 1: Many people read it and thought, hey, that's a cool
Speaker 1: place to kill myself. Yea, at some point at the end,
Speaker 1: she commits suicide and in the forest, yeah, as far
Speaker 1: as I can tell, in that particular forest, in the Jucaia,
Speaker 1: as far as I can. And then my final theory
Speaker 1: is that it could just be a really pretty place.
Speaker 1: And I died Sena to go kill yourself. It's really beautiful,
Speaker 1: it's really quiet. There's a lot of really secluded spaces.
Speaker 1: You don't have to look at anybody. Somebody's not going
Speaker 1: to stumble upon you and a campsite or something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it also, you know, not to be macab or anything.
Speaker 1: But it saves your family and friends from having to
Speaker 1: find you. It's a pretty much guaranteed that your family
Speaker 1: and friends aren't going to be the ones who stumble
Speaker 1: upon your body in the middle of this forest. Somebody
Speaker 1: else is going to, and they're going to if you're
Speaker 1: still recognizable, they will tell your family, what happened to you,
Speaker 1: and where it happened. I I have never really contemplated suicide,
Speaker 1: but I can see where the draw could come from that. Well,
Speaker 1: but of course you know that, and I think that
Speaker 1: the people who are in that situation don't think of
Speaker 1: his exact opposite side of that, which is your unrecognizable,
Speaker 1: you cannot be identified, which means your loved ones then
Speaker 1: live on forever wondering what happened to you. It's always
Speaker 1: the other side of the coin. Yeah, they I'm sure
Speaker 1: they leave a note behind, say I'm going to go
Speaker 1: off myself. Oh maybe for their family before they had
Speaker 1: that strike out for the forest. Well, I have another
Speaker 1: theory is that these are suicidal people and they go
Speaker 1: out to the forest to do it because they're animal evers.
Speaker 1: They figure, I'll not only kill myself, but I'll leave
Speaker 1: a nice, a little tasty meal for all the animals.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like an air funeral. Yeah, you know
Speaker 1: in that Vice video, not to like refer too much
Speaker 1: to it. This is the third time. Now, sorry, Hey
Speaker 1: what about the Vice video? Yeah? No, but the the
Speaker 1: guy that they're following, you know, he says they find
Speaker 1: this little area where there's a bunch of flowers in
Speaker 1: a box of chocolates, and he says, oh, it must
Speaker 1: have been the family and friends of this person who died.
Speaker 1: And he said, you know, I think it's a really
Speaker 1: beautiful re minder that you're never alone. Even if you
Speaker 1: think you're alone, you're not. So there's that. That's the
Speaker 1: up note to remind our thoughts of this story. I
Speaker 1: really don't know how I'm going to follow that act
Speaker 1: because wow, it's going to be an upper you have
Speaker 1: something I read it before you're started. Read a little
Speaker 1: fun little piece of trivia regarding this, which is that
Speaker 1: the work cruise that have to go out and get
Speaker 1: the bodies and bring them in. They take him down
Speaker 1: to the police station and I think there's they have
Speaker 1: a special room just for the suicide. They put him
Speaker 1: in there and put the body in there, and then
Speaker 1: they have to roche embo to see who gets to
Speaker 1: spend the night in the room with the body, because apparently, um,
Speaker 1: it's bad mojo that to just leave the body alone,
Speaker 1: so somebody has to stay with the body all night. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that one. You know, it was a pile of
Speaker 1: bones and it's okay if it's anything otherwise rotting corpses
Speaker 1: you to I don't know. I like from the living perspective,
Speaker 1: it's kind of an early job, but from the the
Speaker 1: ideology of it, it's kind of sweet. You don't want
Speaker 1: to leave this spirit alone? Yeah? I would. It's a
Speaker 1: nice sentiment. Yeah, the sentiment is that it's good way
Speaker 1: to put it. Can we stop talking about suicide? Please? Hey, everybody,
Speaker 1: we're done. Let's talk about something else. I think we
Speaker 1: lie to people. It's been a little more. It might
Speaker 1: have been a little more. In twenty minutes, we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about a new one. Yeah. So, Steve, do
Speaker 1: you have an exciting terrible place for us? I I
Speaker 1: do have a what is a beautiful but terrible place?
Speaker 1: I know it's just like me. Yeah yeah, but for
Speaker 1: completely different reason. Is it a terrible place? Okay, okay,
Speaker 1: not so much A terrible place? Has a scary place? Yeah? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's there's a lot of fear involved here. Let's let's
Speaker 1: go ahead. Um, the place that I don't think that
Speaker 1: these people, that any of our listeners should be going.
Speaker 1: It's one that randomly catches on fire. Yeah, things like
Speaker 1: a bad thing. It's kind of a bad thing. Not
Speaker 1: the whole place doesn't catch on. No, it's not Pumpey
Speaker 1: or anything like that. We're talking about the village of Coronia.
Speaker 1: It's on it's on the island of Sicily, which it's
Speaker 1: east of if you know the island at all, it's
Speaker 1: east of Plamo and Sicily is Italy Sicily. In case
Speaker 1: somebody didn't know that, I thought I said Italian village.
Speaker 1: If I didn't, an Italian village. Um, it's it's a
Speaker 1: pretty little coastal town. You know from the photos and
Speaker 1: and everything. It's exactly what you'd picture a coastal town
Speaker 1: on the island of Sicily. Look like it's built up
Speaker 1: into the hills a little bit. It's really nice. I'm
Speaker 1: showing you pictures of Griano. Yeah right, yeah, it's very picturesque.
Speaker 1: Oh it is. I did my usual thing. I did
Speaker 1: a little street tour on Google. Beautiful neat little town.
Speaker 1: It was actually really hard to drive around into Google
Speaker 1: street View though, because it's one of those weird little
Speaker 1: towns where it looks like the street keeps going but
Speaker 1: the road doesn't. The street does because you can walk
Speaker 1: on it. Yeah. I was like, why won't you go there?
Speaker 1: And by the way, there's the streets in this village
Speaker 1: are not like what you're thinking used to thinking of
Speaker 1: the streets. They're more kind of like alleys. They're very small,
Speaker 1: very scared. It's a traditional village. Yeah, and lots of
Speaker 1: like a little weird underpass and yes, all of that
Speaker 1: good stuff. But enough talking about this beautiful little place.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about the story. Okay, talk about why you
Speaker 1: should be scared to go. Yeah, you really undersold this
Speaker 1: so far. The story begins somewhere in the beginning of
Speaker 1: January of two thousand four, when randomly things literally started
Speaker 1: catching on fire. Lots of things, like physical things. Okay,
Speaker 1: here's a list of things according to the media reports.
Speaker 1: Because this is the difficulty with this one is most
Speaker 1: of his media reports. And I did the same thing.
Speaker 1: I was putting stuff into chrome and getting it translated,
Speaker 1: and it makes a little rough. Here's the things that
Speaker 1: catch on fire. There's furniture, there's electronics like TVs or
Speaker 1: microwave stuff like that. Um or computers would have their
Speaker 1: memories randomly wiped. That's a kind of an odd twist
Speaker 1: on the whole electronics bit part. Cars would either can't
Speaker 1: just be on fire or there. The glass would implode
Speaker 1: into the car from some kind of weird heat source. Uh.
Speaker 1: The doors, electric doors on cars, the law box, they
Speaker 1: would go on and off, opening, closer, locking, unlocked, constantly weird.
Speaker 1: And there's there was there's electronic gates that would randomly
Speaker 1: open and close on their own. So you'd just be
Speaker 1: walking up the street and then the gates of the
Speaker 1: head would open and then closed, and then open and
Speaker 1: then closing. He sounds like the whole town got hacked it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've even seen a photo of what it looks like.
Speaker 1: It was a water tank on a wall. So if
Speaker 1: you imagine in the if you're from the States, you've
Speaker 1: got your toilet tank. It's almost like that shape, that
Speaker 1: square shape of but as a water tank with a
Speaker 1: pipe coming down, and it looks like the whole thing
Speaker 1: had caught fire at a water pipe looked like they
Speaker 1: had caught on fire. It wasn't a toilet tank a
Speaker 1: toilet No, No, it wasn't, because there were pipes running
Speaker 1: away from it and it was kind of cropped, but
Speaker 1: the pipe took an angle in in what I saw,
Speaker 1: so I'm pretty sure it wasn't. Somebody was smoking on
Speaker 1: the John now. Of course, at first when things are
Speaker 1: going up, especially the electronics are catching on fire, people
Speaker 1: started unplugging things. There are other things like appliances like
Speaker 1: toasters and yeah, appliances that things in general that plugged in,
Speaker 1: we're catching on fire. So people were unplugging them and
Speaker 1: the power company would eventually cut off the electricity. That, however,
Speaker 1: didn't stop the problem. One of the famous pictures you
Speaker 1: see is a hair dryer hanging on the wall, the
Speaker 1: core looped up next to it, not plugged into anything,
Speaker 1: and the dryer on fire, which is really weird that
Speaker 1: what did the owner of the of the hair dryer
Speaker 1: like take a picture of it or something that somebody
Speaker 1: had a picture of it as it was catching As
Speaker 1: it was flames were coming out of it. Yes, it was.
Speaker 1: It almost looked like it was they had stuck it
Speaker 1: in the towel rack. There was no towel, but they'd
Speaker 1: stuck it in the towel rack itself. And so you
Speaker 1: can see the wires, you know, looped up around and
Speaker 1: and the head of it was had flames coming out
Speaker 1: of it. Bizarre. Yeah, that's a hell of a hair dryer.
Speaker 1: Let's see there's oh, and there's there's other weird things
Speaker 1: that were going on in this village. At the same time,
Speaker 1: people were reporting seeing glowing orbs over the ocean, because
Speaker 1: as we said, it's right on the ocean. And they
Speaker 1: also reported that there were UFOs flying just off the coastline.
Speaker 1: So this is a nice little addition to the Oh,
Speaker 1: by the way, everything I own is catching on fire?
Speaker 1: How many? How many different people reported things catching on fire.
Speaker 1: I don't have a clear sense. I'll say this now.
Speaker 1: I don't have a clear sense of how much stuff
Speaker 1: caught on fire. I don't have a clear sense of
Speaker 1: how long things caught on fire. Four. We're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about this in a sec. But there's the time frames
Speaker 1: in the descriptions lead me to either believe that it
Speaker 1: was a short time frame, say like a month or years,
Speaker 1: that this stuff kept happening. But let me, I don't
Speaker 1: know that for sure. I believe that it's stopped, but
Speaker 1: I don't know that for sure because the reporting is
Speaker 1: so like even the English versions of things not to translated,
Speaker 1: but the English versions are vague, So I'm not positive
Speaker 1: if it's stopped. I have to imagine that for the
Speaker 1: most part it's stopped. But well, and some of this
Speaker 1: will be covered in theories. For the time frame thing.
Speaker 1: The time frame about a week after of fires had happened,
Speaker 1: they evacuated the town. And did they evacuated after about
Speaker 1: a week or so? Yeah, it was after about a
Speaker 1: week the well, again this depends on the accounting. Some
Speaker 1: say it was after two or four weeks they have
Speaker 1: they evacuated, Some say after seventeen fires. Like again, it's
Speaker 1: never an exact number, but they evacuated the town. Government
Speaker 1: brings in every expert that they can think of, They
Speaker 1: run tests on things that have been burned. They start
Speaker 1: they put up cameras all over the town to try
Speaker 1: and figure out what's going on. The odd bit to
Speaker 1: me is that as soon as the as as big
Speaker 1: as the government swoops in and starts doing all of this,
Speaker 1: the fire stopped. That's nothing caught according to the government reports,
Speaker 1: nothing caught on fire while they were there, and they
Speaker 1: couldn't figure out what was going on. So eventually they
Speaker 1: know the people are like, hey, I'd like to go
Speaker 1: home please. So eventually they say, okay, well we can't
Speaker 1: figure it out, go ahead and go home, and the fires.
Speaker 1: At that point, this is what I got to earlier
Speaker 1: sporadically seemed to start happening again. Weird. Here's some other
Speaker 1: weird things that then happened after that, is water pipes
Speaker 1: begin to leak and burst, the pipes under your sinker whatever. Um.
Speaker 1: There's some theories on that that we can talk about
Speaker 1: in a bit. Let's see what else we've got. There is,
Speaker 1: Oh this Devon's I know you love. There's there's farmers
Speaker 1: in the area who grow eggplants, and according to their reports,
Speaker 1: all of their eggplants change colors, not the you know,
Speaker 1: as egg plants will do. They change one color to
Speaker 1: to another color when they're right, they all changed to
Speaker 1: different colors. That Yeah, I was reading through the script
Speaker 1: and I was kind of skimming. I missed this part,
Speaker 1: and I was reading through the theories and it says
Speaker 1: the egg plants, and I was like, what, the eggplants
Speaker 1: are responsible for everything? Apparently Steve has lost it. But
Speaker 1: but these eggs plants, the eggplants didn't just change to
Speaker 1: one odd color. That changed to multiple different colors. That
Speaker 1: is what the reporting that I've seen set. And I'm
Speaker 1: going to put that in doubt because that seems a
Speaker 1: bit fantastical. We'll talk about that a little bit in
Speaker 1: the theory section. But I actually did some research on eggplants,
Speaker 1: just trying to figure out in the eggs action of
Speaker 1: the grocery store aisle. Yes, let's see, we also have
Speaker 1: there's some other weird stuff. And this again, this is
Speaker 1: another vegetation thing. There's a local grass called the Mauritanian
Speaker 1: grass Martinian. Yeah, and it's it's a big grass, so
Speaker 1: not like your lawn. This is a grass that grows
Speaker 1: eight feet high in a big Your lawn is brown
Speaker 1: and scorched, is not tall, unlike these plants, which are
Speaker 1: super tall. What this plant has in common with your
Speaker 1: lawn is that it was scorched. It was the plant
Speaker 1: at ground level showed signs of burning, but it wasn't
Speaker 1: as if it had ever cast caught on fire. Was
Speaker 1: more of a smoldering heat kind of look. And I
Speaker 1: don't know how they figured this out, but I guess
Speaker 1: somebody would start digging them up. Is the roots were
Speaker 1: blackened as if they had been burned. That's odd, it is.
Speaker 1: And the last thing that I'll put in here is
Speaker 1: people have said that from that time or during that time,
Speaker 1: that compasses weren't working correctly, that they were deviating from
Speaker 1: magnetic north. You're pointing somewhere else UFO influence here, then
Speaker 1: we are. We are laying a ton of hints for
Speaker 1: the possible UFO theory right there. I will totally admit it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And another theory you're going to talk about too, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and we we should go ahead and just jump right
Speaker 1: into the theories. Yeah, I think so, because really that's
Speaker 1: about all of the description that we've got for this
Speaker 1: particular story. Theory number one, the devil did it well, Satan.
Speaker 1: You know what we should have named this this episode
Speaker 1: is things that nefarious spirits do. Yeah, because that just
Speaker 1: rolls off the tongue places you don't want to go
Speaker 1: things nefarious spirits, Okay, nefarious alright, fine, but that's been
Speaker 1: a common thread throughout everything, and it kind of is
Speaker 1: that bad spirits are doing this thing. Yeah. Well, okay,
Speaker 1: this is kind of a commo. It's either the devil
Speaker 1: or evil spirits, which is much like what we talked
Speaker 1: about in the forest that you had. I've got to say,
Speaker 1: the more superstitious villagers seem to fall in line with
Speaker 1: this right away. And you know that the devil makes
Speaker 1: tunnel sense. It comes from a really hot place. Of course,
Speaker 1: he would catch on stuff on fire. It's his fault.
Speaker 1: I get. I get why people would see that. Italian
Speaker 1: villages are also very religious usually. I think that you know,
Speaker 1: if the devil was up to this kind of stuff,
Speaker 1: he'd be spreading the he'd be spreading the love a
Speaker 1: little bit. You would think, you would think it was
Speaker 1: a very big concentration of centers in the city. Devil.
Speaker 1: The devil is pro center. He would go, he would
Speaker 1: go to the most pious village and starts. That's true. Yeah, oops, okay,
Speaker 1: let's move away from the devil did it to the
Speaker 1: evil spirit side of this theory, because there's actually some
Speaker 1: very simple logic in this one. According to villagers, this
Speaker 1: is the way things played out is somebody's stuff or
Speaker 1: house would start to try to catch on fire, and
Speaker 1: an attempt to save their stuff, if they had somebody
Speaker 1: who would let them, they would take their belongings to
Speaker 1: that other person's house, so that if the house went up,
Speaker 1: at least they're they're precious things didn't go as well,
Speaker 1: except that according to this the evil spirit was actually
Speaker 1: in the possessions. The evil spirit was causing the fire,
Speaker 1: was in a possession. That possession is brought into the
Speaker 1: new house. The spirit then jumps from the newly transported
Speaker 1: item to an item that had resided their previous to
Speaker 1: its rivals. So it's jumped into the new home. It's
Speaker 1: gonna catch things in that house on fire. That person
Speaker 1: is going to do the same thing. Oh, I gotta
Speaker 1: get my stuff out of here, moves it to the
Speaker 1: next person's house, inadvertently passing the infection. Yeah, passing the
Speaker 1: infection along it. From a very simple perspective, it makes
Speaker 1: a lot of sense. I suppose I would think that
Speaker 1: a spirit really wouldn't need a ride over to his
Speaker 1: next place. He's gonna go to. You know, there's lazy spirits.
Speaker 1: You do sit around, eat cheetahs, catch something on fire
Speaker 1: and wait for a ride, play Xbox until that happens,
Speaker 1: or short the Xbox out. One of the two it happens. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm totally buying into this spirit thing. But what are
Speaker 1: the theories do we have? Well, I got one that
Speaker 1: you'll totally buy into. Yeah, yeah, okay, I said they
Speaker 1: were flying objects seen in the area, glowing orbs over
Speaker 1: the ocean, and UFOs flying in the distance. Their stories
Speaker 1: of helicopter chasing something but never quite being able to
Speaker 1: catch it. Those sightings supposedly became a regular occurrence right
Speaker 1: about the same time that all of the fires started,
Speaker 1: so that has led people to posit that it's aliens
Speaker 1: that are causing the fires. Of the aliens did it right?
Speaker 1: Why though this I love this, this is hol hilarious
Speaker 1: to me, is that one article I read said they
Speaker 1: were doing it as a way to test how we
Speaker 1: as a society or a group would react and how
Speaker 1: good our response would be to a crisis like a fire.
Speaker 1: So once these pyromaniac aliens figure out how our response
Speaker 1: patterns are, they'll be able to just in vain because
Speaker 1: they'll know how to outwit us because they'll already know
Speaker 1: what we do is a predictable pattern. Because a small
Speaker 1: Italian village on an island is probably the best way
Speaker 1: to test that small sample size. Baby, it's all about
Speaker 1: the small sample size. I don't know, man, that just
Speaker 1: it just seems like, yeah, you'd want to like, if
Speaker 1: you're going to a place for you as an alien.
Speaker 1: You don't really know that these guys are representative in
Speaker 1: terms of the way they would respond to anything. Right, true,
Speaker 1: in the size witch. You know, if they're powerful enough
Speaker 1: to set things remotely on fire, wouldn't they send any
Speaker 1: people on fire? Well, I can just imagine that it's
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's some drone alien worker in the
Speaker 1: drone alien worker reconnaissance office saying where am I gonna
Speaker 1: put this? I don't know. All those humans sound alike,
Speaker 1: these ones sound fine. This looks like a big enough
Speaker 1: settlement will use it. I mean, it could be that,
Speaker 1: or it could be that it's total OUI or the
Speaker 1: aliens were like, this place has been around for a
Speaker 1: long time. It's probably the pinnacle of what We've been watching.
Speaker 1: This place for a thousand years. It hasn't changed. Therefore
Speaker 1: it's perfect. Yeah exactly, or maybe not. Yeah, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: move on. Yeah, the next one I actually will. The
Speaker 1: next theory is actually the possible one in my mind.
Speaker 1: I know, because you were bragging about it last week.
Speaker 1: You were like, the theory that I came up with
Speaker 1: is actually supported. I would try to deport it with
Speaker 1: this seventeen page document that I found on the internet. Yes, exactly, Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: our our next theory is volcanic gases. What are volcanic gases? Well,
Speaker 1: you know when you eat a lot of beans. No, no,
Speaker 1: let me. Let me explain a little bit of the
Speaker 1: geography of the area. I think the geology is pretty
Speaker 1: easy in terms of we know that there's a ton
Speaker 1: of freaking volcanoes in that area. But the geography of
Speaker 1: the area is this village is right on the coastline,
Speaker 1: so it's at sea level for the most part, and
Speaker 1: as you move inland, the land rises up and there's
Speaker 1: little valleys. So if you keep that in mind, we're
Speaker 1: going to keep going through some of this description, but
Speaker 1: that that geography is what is important. Right above of
Speaker 1: the village, just a couple of miles up is what
Speaker 1: is called the Auto Strata A twenty and it's a
Speaker 1: four lane motorway. It runs around the coast to Sicily,
Speaker 1: and at the time two thousand and four it was
Speaker 1: brand new. They finished construction in two thousand and four.
Speaker 1: The train in the area, like we're talking about, there's
Speaker 1: the valleys, it's kind of hilly. The engineers civil engineers
Speaker 1: love this, well, I don't want to go over, I'll
Speaker 1: just dig a tunnel. So they dug a tunnel. They
Speaker 1: dug a bunch of tunnels, and what they did is
Speaker 1: they would tunnel through the mountain. They would come to
Speaker 1: a valley, they would build a bridge to the next mountain.
Speaker 1: They bore a hole in that hill, come out. If
Speaker 1: it was decent flat land, they put the road on
Speaker 1: the ground, and then they do it again wherever they
Speaker 1: had to drive around sicily on that road. The twenty
Speaker 1: looks really cool. If you look at it in the
Speaker 1: satellite views, you can actually see the shadow of the
Speaker 1: bridge thrown across onto the shape of the valley. It's
Speaker 1: really they're they're there. They're kind of that that span
Speaker 1: arch bridge, the lower arch underneath, not on top. The
Speaker 1: really neat looking. But this is what they did well.
Speaker 1: The idea is that what happened is as they were
Speaker 1: digging those tunnels, they accidentally popped open a fissure or
Speaker 1: some kind of vein that was connected to a magma
Speaker 1: system or a volcanic system. Nothing major, because if they'd
Speaker 1: hit something major, we'd have known about it. Stuff had
Speaker 1: blowed up, and I say that my best American accents.
Speaker 1: Stuff blowed up, it would have been obvious. But instead
Speaker 1: nothing happened, which means that they hit a crack or
Speaker 1: they hit a small leak so this theory runs that
Speaker 1: there's a fissure in a tunnel and it's not obvious
Speaker 1: and it's leaking gas or we're talking explosive gas. So
Speaker 1: not just carbon monoxide, but methane and things like that.
Speaker 1: Are these things found in volcanoes? I know two of
Speaker 1: the gases that would be flammable in a volcanic mixture
Speaker 1: would be methane and hydrogen sulfide. Yeah, I know those ones.
Speaker 1: What else is going to be in there? It's it's
Speaker 1: a mixed bag. Were not yet? But those uh don't
Speaker 1: those kind of odoriferous? No, they're not, they're not, they're not.
Speaker 1: You gotta remember, is a lot of the gases that
Speaker 1: we use that could I mean, like, methane does put
Speaker 1: off kind of that sewer smell, Hydrogen sulfide does not.
Speaker 1: So we're used to have a lot of gases having
Speaker 1: like this is a common misnumbers. People like I would
Speaker 1: know if I had a gas leak, you know, because
Speaker 1: it smells like rotten eggs. Well, when you're out in
Speaker 1: the woods, nobody's artificially put that rotten egg smell in it. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that, that is true, because they do they do
Speaker 1: put that in methane yeah, natural gas yeah yeah, so no,
Speaker 1: those are the flammable. So though, as I we were
Speaker 1: talking about again, and I'm going back to the geography,
Speaker 1: if this crack is coming out of a tunnel, which
Speaker 1: is uphill, it's gonna run down the valley, which this town,
Speaker 1: this village sits in kind of the basin of a valley,
Speaker 1: so it would all run down hit low spots create
Speaker 1: little pockets of potentially explosive gas that if there's a spark,
Speaker 1: which Okay, my TVs on, it's got little sparks running
Speaker 1: around in it, or my computers running, or my car
Speaker 1: ignition is on, but the cars not on. I can
Speaker 1: see how that could cause a fire. What it doesn't
Speaker 1: appropriately answer is the fires that are caught in things
Speaker 1: like furniture or electronics that aren't turned on, or hair
Speaker 1: dryer that's not plugged in. It also does in the
Speaker 1: caf its for like you know, hard drives being wiped
Speaker 1: and gates opening and closing on by themselves. It does not.
Speaker 1: It does, and it really doesn't. Uh, there is there
Speaker 1: is some discussion. At least one article that I came
Speaker 1: across was talking about the fact that if it is
Speaker 1: some kind of volcanic fisher that is leaking gas, It's
Speaker 1: probably gonna be leaking volcanic ash at the same time
Speaker 1: in very small quantities. But that's going to drift down.
Speaker 1: And I've got to I've got to read this because
Speaker 1: I didn't exactly get it. But this is what I'm understanding,
Speaker 1: is that there is a bit of friction that has
Speaker 1: caused between the ash when two pieces of ash rub
Speaker 1: together or go across each other, which would create a
Speaker 1: static charge. So if enough of that builds up, it's
Speaker 1: going to create enough static charge that could potentially start
Speaker 1: a fire. Then you would be dealing with like random
Speaker 1: fireballs as well. You know, it wouldn't necessarily always be things.
Speaker 1: I'm plus, I think people in the village would be
Speaker 1: noticing that there's ash all over everything, you would think,
Speaker 1: But if it's in small amounts or it's ground into stuff,
Speaker 1: I can see how it's not noticeable. But Devin brings
Speaker 1: up a good point because that ties back into remember
Speaker 1: the UFOs, the the glowing balls over the ocean. I
Speaker 1: guess that's true. I forgot about that. It could be
Speaker 1: the old men in Black explanation of swamp gas or
Speaker 1: a burning ball of gas floating over the horizon potentially,
Speaker 1: So that's a bunch of their gas. It's just gone
Speaker 1: out and got caught on fire somehow caught on fire
Speaker 1: a cigarette and flickted straight up a hundred feet. And yeah.
Speaker 1: The other thing about the thing about this theory that
Speaker 1: I'm not so sure about is that, like, besides that
Speaker 1: the flammable ones psychhydrogen, sulfide, and methane, there are a
Speaker 1: lot of other gases that are associated with volcanic leaks,
Speaker 1: and some of them are pretty caustic and and you
Speaker 1: would be smelling them. Yeah, um, well, you know. And
Speaker 1: one thing that we haven't talked about a little bit,
Speaker 1: if we're gonna go into the series just a tad
Speaker 1: bit more, is there have in reports of people saying
Speaker 1: that as they were going through the tunnels around the
Speaker 1: village on the twenty and I want to say that
Speaker 1: the other road is the it's like the eighteen or
Speaker 1: it's an eighteen. I remember that it's it's in the teens.
Speaker 1: Is that there are random events where a car will
Speaker 1: shut off the electronics with car die car coose to
Speaker 1: a stop, they started back up, it starts, ignition fires,
Speaker 1: and then they drive away. And they don't know how
Speaker 1: much that happens when people have reported that in that area,
Speaker 1: And I don't know if it's in the tunnels, or
Speaker 1: if it's on the other road, or if it's on
Speaker 1: the bridge. Like the reporting on it was very scant,
Speaker 1: But it could be that it's some of those more
Speaker 1: caustic other gases which when the car sucks it in
Speaker 1: instead of oxygen, is going to kill the ignition, you
Speaker 1: know in the in the cylinder gas can on ignite.
Speaker 1: If there is not oxygen and it's some non gas
Speaker 1: that doesn't burn right with it, then the car dies.
Speaker 1: But it it rolls far enough forward to get out
Speaker 1: of that pocket of gas, so then when they go
Speaker 1: to turn it over, it sucks in air again. So
Speaker 1: that's that's why the pocketpants of the car don't get assixiated.
Speaker 1: Then they're moving too quickly. Yeah, it's not perfect, but
Speaker 1: it's one of those things that I've heard or of read,
Speaker 1: so I think I think the explanation for that is
Speaker 1: these people just need to get their car worked on.
Speaker 1: It's some auto body shop in the village or car
Speaker 1: repair shop in the village that's doing it. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: probably what it is. So it could very well be. Um.
Speaker 1: I know Devon likes this because we we've used nefarious
Speaker 1: a number of times and this this plays a little
Speaker 1: bit here. Well we've got our next theory and it
Speaker 1: plays a little bit into the volcanic bid and then
Speaker 1: it goes on to the much more defarious aspect. So
Speaker 1: this kind of ties the two together. Is that when
Speaker 1: there are vachanic eruptions, there tend to be some electro
Speaker 1: magnetic issues that go on. Because I don't understand why,
Speaker 1: because I'm not a volcanologist, as we've said, but it happens. Well,
Speaker 1: that is one reason people say that there's these electro
Speaker 1: magnetic issues. The other one is that some bad organization
Speaker 1: is targeting the town. And what they're doing is they're
Speaker 1: they're using a high powered electro magnetic beam shooting it
Speaker 1: at the village from somewhere most likely out to see,
Speaker 1: which I gotta say sounds like a total evil supervillain move. Um,
Speaker 1: and they're frying stuff in the town. Yeah, that sounds legit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is actually Yeah, Ano this works because I would
Speaker 1: I would not be at all surprised if some of
Speaker 1: the some some super villain wasn't working on some sort
Speaker 1: of volcano lancing super laser. They could the blackmail of
Speaker 1: the world. You're laughing, but this is like a serious
Speaker 1: vocal Yes, a volcano that says super laser that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And you could just say, hey, guys, if you know
Speaker 1: what a hot lava boiling down to your town, you've
Speaker 1: been giving a cough up like a million bucks man, Yeah,
Speaker 1: right now, one million, one billion dollars. Yeah. And so
Speaker 1: it might be that these are kind of beta versions,
Speaker 1: they're weaker beta versions. He still hasn't gotten all the
Speaker 1: way up to the superpowered one end or she possibly
Speaker 1: she or it as in a organization, because it's there's
Speaker 1: there's a there's a US Air Force base right in
Speaker 1: that area. So of course the finger gets pointed them.
Speaker 1: The finger gets pointed at the government, at aliens, or
Speaker 1: at a super villain. The quote that I've got here
Speaker 1: talks about the fact that it would have to be
Speaker 1: all ultra high frequency beam and it would have to
Speaker 1: be transmitted somewhere between three hundred banker hurts and three
Speaker 1: giga hurts. Makes sense. I mean they have been they
Speaker 1: have been mucking around with the mp AMP weapons and
Speaker 1: so well, we've talked about that mazers and every other
Speaker 1: kind of silly laser item like that. Yeah, yeap, device
Speaker 1: wouldn't set things on fire. Yeah, I'm gonna say no. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was not meant to do that. Yeah. Our next,
Speaker 1: sadly theory, our next theory, sadly could be one of
Speaker 1: the more plausible, and that it was it was a
Speaker 1: local boy slash man. Yeah, that makes sense to me.
Speaker 1: And by a boy slash man, I mean a boy
Speaker 1: in two thousand and four, isn't a teenage boy who
Speaker 1: is now a man, Because one of the Italian reports
Speaker 1: that I found was talking about the fact that they
Speaker 1: had found they believed, they authorities believe they finally figured
Speaker 1: out what the problem was, and it was just sepi Posino.
Speaker 1: He's twenty six and he had been so that means
Speaker 1: he's been fifteen sixteen years old at the time. And
Speaker 1: they're saying he's one who starts all the fires. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was running around starting fires. Kind of a pyromaniac situation.
Speaker 1: Burning thing. That's not unheard of. It's not unheard of, though.
Speaker 1: More unheard of is like breaking into a house to
Speaker 1: set a hair dryer on fire and then escaping before
Speaker 1: anybody noticed that you're in the house. Well, the hair dryer,
Speaker 1: in my mind is kind of suspect because whenever I
Speaker 1: walk into a room in my house and I find
Speaker 1: something on fire, I don't stop to take pictures of it.
Speaker 1: I grabbed I haven't seen the picture kind of just
Speaker 1: looks like there's a flashlight. It just looks like there's
Speaker 1: like a bright light, and I am I am taking
Speaker 1: the photo and face value according to what it's written
Speaker 1: about it. That's so, you're right, it does look a
Speaker 1: little suspect. But here's here's what we're saying. Is that,
Speaker 1: remember I told her. What I'm saying is I told
Speaker 1: you that when the Feds came in they had put
Speaker 1: up all these cameras, or when the government had come
Speaker 1: in and then the fire stopped. Yeah, well, there evidently
Speaker 1: is some footage just at the beginning of that time,
Speaker 1: and one of this one of those pieces of footage
Speaker 1: shows him by a car and doing something almost the
Speaker 1: strike a match movement, if you were going to strike
Speaker 1: a match, a wooden match away from yourself, and he's
Speaker 1: in front of a car, and then it's obvious it's
Speaker 1: one of those cameras that does every five or ten
Speaker 1: seconds and then suddenly the car is smoky and billowing.
Speaker 1: He's moved away, and then the fire department comes running
Speaker 1: around to it. It almost, uh, it's really it's kind
Speaker 1: of comical to watch. It's almost like a Benny Hills skit,
Speaker 1: the way everybody runs around but they run over and
Speaker 1: you can see him standing there, almost as if he's,
Speaker 1: you know, on his phone, go. I don't know what's
Speaker 1: going on or what happened over there. I do. I
Speaker 1: question it because there was so many things, and I
Speaker 1: really don't know how one guy could have got into
Speaker 1: so many places unless nobody in that village ever locked
Speaker 1: their freaking doors. You can't entirely rule out the possibility
Speaker 1: of copycats too well. But the thing is what I
Speaker 1: don't understand, and maybe this is tacked on, is all
Speaker 1: the other weird the computer drives wiped. Okay, I could
Speaker 1: see somebody goes in with the magnet just wipes the drives,
Speaker 1: But what about car doors and weird electronics stuff, you know, locks,
Speaker 1: opening and closing, things like that, those things happen. I'm
Speaker 1: saying is that I don't know that those aren't tacked
Speaker 1: onto the story. I can't say they're not. It just
Speaker 1: it seems like a lot, and it seems like there's
Speaker 1: According to the article I was reading, he might not
Speaker 1: have done it all on his own because his dad,
Speaker 1: at the time that he got in trouble, was head
Speaker 1: of the fund to compensate people for things that had
Speaker 1: caught on fire. Maybe his dad was helping him a
Speaker 1: little bit once he figured out he was doing it,
Speaker 1: and hey, help me keep my job. Kind the thing.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Yeah, I mean, maybe Giuseppia is totally
Speaker 1: totally the one who did it all. He probably is
Speaker 1: Devin Judge jury right there. I think. I think it's
Speaker 1: entirely possible to that at least some of these things
Speaker 1: that caught fire, people just thought, hey, I want to
Speaker 1: get on the act. I want the guy from the
Speaker 1: National Enquiry to come by an interview me. So I'm
Speaker 1: gonna let my toaster on fire, or yea, this hair
Speaker 1: dryer doesn't work anymore, I'm gonna light it on fire
Speaker 1: and then the fund will replace it. Yeah there's that. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that could be could do that. You could intentionally
Speaker 1: overload something. I would do that and then plug it
Speaker 1: back into the sock and say, look at caught on
Speaker 1: fire right there. Oh my gosh, I need a new one.
Speaker 1: I know this is the crappy one, but I'd love
Speaker 1: the fancy super chrome queas and art version please. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's the version I bought. When I bought it, you
Speaker 1: just can't tell because it's so melted. Yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of evidence of people pulling that kind of fraud
Speaker 1: off in the past to say that it's entirely pousible.
Speaker 1: And as far as wiping your drive, your hard drive,
Speaker 1: I guess I don't see what the hell you'd get
Speaker 1: out of wipe in your computer, because every time my
Speaker 1: computer dies, I am so angry, even if I have
Speaker 1: it backed up. Yeah, I know, but no, I mean
Speaker 1: I I would put a compensation for a claim for compensation,
Speaker 1: Like you know that drive had that was filled with
Speaker 1: cat videos. Spent a whole lot of time. It took
Speaker 1: me five years at working, you know, twenty hours a
Speaker 1: week to build up my collection of cat videos. They're
Speaker 1: all gone. I would like to be compensated for my time.
Speaker 1: I have a feeling that might actually get thrown out.
Speaker 1: That surprises me. I got I've got to back up
Speaker 1: my cat videos. I do have a couple of bits
Speaker 1: that I want to throw out. These are not specifically
Speaker 1: related to any theory, but they are explanations of some
Speaker 1: of the things that were going on. Do you remember
Speaker 1: I talked about the water pipes that suddenly, after all
Speaker 1: the fires, suddenly water ironically, water pipes are bursting. There
Speaker 1: is a theory on how that might be happening, and
Speaker 1: that is through what is it's called a probably mispronouncing
Speaker 1: cathodic or cathodic process. I think it's cathodic because it's
Speaker 1: the cathode. I think that's right. But basically, what it
Speaker 1: is is that you've got a water pipe and it's
Speaker 1: welded together with some material, and somehow electronic charge is
Speaker 1: getting to the pipe and that's going to corrode and
Speaker 1: weaken that seem so that's what's causing us. So it's
Speaker 1: almost like there's an electrical leak in the ground that
Speaker 1: is weakening everybody's water pipes, because then it gets in
Speaker 1: the system screws the whole thing up. Um. I must
Speaker 1: say that this this village looks pretty old, it does.
Speaker 1: It looks like it's been around a long time. I'm
Speaker 1: going to give you that. The last thing I want
Speaker 1: to talk about, though, is Devon's favorite part. The egg plants. Yes,
Speaker 1: the evil, evil egg plants. Did a little bit of
Speaker 1: research on this, and I, okay, I admit my ignorance
Speaker 1: right off the bat. I thought all egg plants were
Speaker 1: that weird dark purple. They are absolutely not. They are
Speaker 1: as varied as the rainbow. They come in a million colors,
Speaker 1: and most of them start out one color and then
Speaker 1: turn another. I also want to point out the fact
Speaker 1: that if this is a local farmer who is trying
Speaker 1: to save money, he may have gotten eggplant seeds from
Speaker 1: someone saying that they had a specific kind and did
Speaker 1: quite the sloppy job and gave him a variety of
Speaker 1: egg plants. Because I've had this at our house, is
Speaker 1: that we'll say, oh, we're gonna plant this, and you
Speaker 1: plant a bunch of seeds and then the one oddball,
Speaker 1: like what is what is that weird carrot? And it
Speaker 1: turns out not to be a carrot, but you know,
Speaker 1: something utterly different. Yeah, an eggplant which I'll never grow. Well,
Speaker 1: it could have been actually also a little farmer playing
Speaker 1: a little prank on the press. You know, I know this,
Speaker 1: I know that they're gonna come out all colors, but
Speaker 1: these guys probably have as ever seen purple ones, you know,
Speaker 1: So I'll ring them out to my farm and I'll
Speaker 1: wind up my multi colored egg plants, and you know,
Speaker 1: I make and just you know, kind of make make
Speaker 1: a fool out of the one thing that I've always
Speaker 1: seen In the articles those they said the entire crop
Speaker 1: had to be destroyed because they couldn't sell it well,
Speaker 1: which sounds kind of punkish to me. Cross Pollination is
Speaker 1: also a thing, like you know, when you go out
Speaker 1: in the summer and there's like this one bush that's
Speaker 1: got flowers on it that's like half one color and
Speaker 1: half another color. That's a thing. Yeah, I don't I
Speaker 1: don't know if that's as prevalent in eggplant because it
Speaker 1: seemed like they were very very linear in their their process.
Speaker 1: But it completely could be, if possible, if he had,
Speaker 1: you know, one plant that was a different color that
Speaker 1: got cross pollinated with a bunch of them. I don't know. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I personally think it was a seed mix up, That's
Speaker 1: what I'm thinking to or I really think the guy
Speaker 1: was drown asparagus and didn't know what it was. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And the guy probably might he might very well deliberately
Speaker 1: mixed up the seas produced different colors, you know, because
Speaker 1: that would make your fields look a lot prettier if
Speaker 1: they're all multi rainbow colored and everything. That's that's really
Speaker 1: all we've got on this, this little village. So I'm
Speaker 1: gonna vote for human agency. I'm I'm inclined to go
Speaker 1: with the volcanic gas online. But you know, we never
Speaker 1: talked about did we ever vote on the other's all?
Speaker 1: Who cares? Not? No? No, I think I think I
Speaker 1: think with mine the value of the headless Man. I
Speaker 1: think it was probably just unrelated. I think it was Turrock,
Speaker 1: son of Stone. Yeah, it could have been that. I
Speaker 1: don't want to think about. We're just glossing over mine. Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm totally okay with that. Okay, Well, so it concludes
Speaker 1: another episode of Thinking Sideways the podcast. Hey, you probably
Speaker 1: don't know where our website is, so we're gonna tell
Speaker 1: you this Thinking Sideways podcast dot com. Actually I'm sure
Speaker 1: you do know, but just in case you don't, you
Speaker 1: can leave comments. We'll have links out there for you.
Speaker 1: You can listen to the episodes. More likely you're finding
Speaker 1: us on iTunes, so if you are getting us off
Speaker 1: of iTunes, Please subscribe and leave us a review, preferably
Speaker 1: a five star review or a sixth star review that
Speaker 1: is the new coveted ranking star. Yeah, exactly. You can
Speaker 1: also stream us and there's tons of places to do that, literally,
Speaker 1: billions and billions of places. So, uh, yeah, we're on Facebook,
Speaker 1: just Thinking Sideways Facebook. Uh, definitely, you can friend us
Speaker 1: and like us and leave comments. So we also have
Speaker 1: a group. Yeah. Yeah, we're also on Twitter Thinking Sideways.
Speaker 1: We dropped the G for that because we're so cool.
Speaker 1: And last of all, email, We get lots of emails,
Speaker 1: so if you'd like to send us an email with
Speaker 1: a suggestion or just tell us how much you love us,
Speaker 1: then you can find us. Our email is Thinking Sideways
Speaker 1: podcast at gmail dot com. And last of all, we
Speaker 1: are on Patreon. Now, if you haven't heard of Patreon,
Speaker 1: it is spelled p A t R e o n,
Speaker 1: so it would be Patreon slash Thinking Sideways patreon dot
Speaker 1: com slash Thinking Sideways. Yeah, so if you don't know
Speaker 1: what patreon as well, you'll find out. We've got stuff
Speaker 1: on there to explain it. Yeah, we do, um, and
Speaker 1: that's pretty much it. Hopefully you're gonna take our advice
Speaker 1: and stay the hell away from these places. Vacation somewhere normal,
Speaker 1: much nicer now. Actually, I think if I ever get
Speaker 1: the chance, I think I'm going to go to Sicily
Speaker 1: and go to this little village. It looks pretty cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, I would. I just wouldn't stay there. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The Valley of the Headless Man not so much. No, no,
Speaker 1: yeah yeah. Okay, Well that's it. Then, see you all
Speaker 1: next week. Later everyone,