SEO Transcript

This is not a fully accurate transcript, and was machine generated. It’s here for helping search engines find the episode but not intended to be a faithful transcript of the episode. (But it’s not AWFUL.) Some of the material in this transcript only exists in the Patreon/Premium edition of the show and was excised for the commercial version.

———————

Monster House presents.
This is the ad-supported version of Monster Talk.
We’re dependent upon the revenue from these ads and from the support of our patrons at patreon.com forward slash monster talk to continue making this show.
As a disclaimer, your hosts are unable to control what ads you will hear.
And while we have done what we can to avoid ads that are divisive, the system that injects them sometimes ignores our preferences and always seems to ignore our efforts to not interrupt the conversational flow.
While we understand this can be disruptive, we’re trying our best.
Patreon remains the best way to enjoy commercial-free listening to our content.
Plus, you generally get extended coverage of the subject.
We’re working on other ways to consume our content as well, so please stay tuned.
It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature.
Part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24-mile-long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland, it’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
Hey there, Monster Talkers.
This week, Karen and I are going to discuss a couple of topics.
I’m covering the latest news around Morgan Geyser, the young woman who we discussed back in 2014 when she was involved with an attempted murder conducted in the name of the fictional internet entity Slenderman.
That episode was very informative and an important episode of our show, so I’ll put a link to it in the show notes if you’d like to go back and catch it.
I believe in this episode I mispronounced the victim’s name as Lautner, but I realized during editing that it was probably Peyton Leutner.
I’m not quite sure.
Families do vary the way they say their names.
I just misread in my notes.
Due to the content of my segment, I do need to drop in a warning that we will be discussing murder, attempted murder, and self-harm in this episode.
I know sometimes folks roll their eyes when they hear stuff like that.
Perhaps they’re in a strong mental place and feel like such warnings are silly.
But let me say from personal experience…
When you’re having recurring thoughts of self-harm or have just come through terrible trauma, such warnings are really helpful to avoid nasty surprises.
I know sometimes we have to cover sensational stories as part of this show, but I never want to do it for the sake of being sensationalist.
I just think that this show needs to be about digging deeper, checking premises, getting past the hype, and hopefully finding empathy for our fellow humans.
And that’s not the whole episode.
Karen’s also bringing us a pre-publication review of the new book, How to Build a Haunted House, that she covered for the Society for Psychical Research.
So thankfully, it’s not all doom and gloom in this episode.
But especially this time of year, whether it’s the holidays or the weather or economics, a lot of people do get downspirited.
And if you’re feeling lost or alone and you’re in the United States, you can dial 988 on your telephone.
That’s 988 on your telephone to reach compassionate people who are there to help.
And besides, Karen and I want you to stick around for many more episodes of Monster Talk.
You know, December is a hard time to get guests lined up for recordings because the holidays tend to fill up people’s social calendars, whatever.
Exactly.
Everyone’s dance cards are full and everyone’s traveling.
So, yeah, this is tricky.
But we I mean, we’re always working on something.
So it wasn’t terribly difficult to come up with a topic or two.
No, no, not at all.
And in fact, there’s what I wanted to cover today for my half of this conversation is relevant to a previous episode because we had a little ripped from the headlines sort of true crime story that’s tied into Slender Man.
Sounds interesting.
It is.
It is.
It’s complex, interesting, and, you know, because it’s dealing with Slenderman, not particularly positive, but, you know, that’s how that goes.
But I did want to mention for patrons, James Matthew Neeland, longtime supporter of the show, sent me a cryptid advent calendar.
Which is extraordinarily cool.
I didn’t know there was one.
Not only that, but another listener, this is where I suck as a human being.
Another listener sent me a Godzilla calendar, but I can’t find the packaging and I don’t remember who sent it.
And that sucks.
I feel so bad about that.
But my son is an absolute Godzilla fanatic.
And so he’s going to do a little video series where he introduces the advent calendar for Godzilla, which is very cute.
Yeah, that’ll be fun.
Yeah, yeah, I think so.
And then I’m doing a daily advent calendar for the cryptids, which is cool because when I got it, all the cryptids were like they had slipped out of their packaging and got into a bundle.
So I’m not sure what the order is supposed to be.
Oh, well, that’s a shame.
My lovely wife, Kathleen, she reorganized them into daily slots.
Oh, great.
She pasted it together.
Yeah, she pieces together.
So I’m every day I’m dropping a video for patrons with that day’s cryptid.
And we’re going to do something similar with Godzilla for my son to run that.
But I get another reason to become a patron.
Yeah, I mean, it’s fun.
Golly, it’s nifty.
I’ve got this really lovely reading chair that I put in my bedroom that my grandmother gave me.
Oh, lovely.
I say she gave it to me.
She died and I took it.
That’s not exactly a gift.
Anyway, I’m very happy to have it, and it’s nice to have a reading chair, and I’m trying to get some reading done.
The only book by my bedside right now is Bits, The Journey of a Word.
The only book that you need beside your bed.
Exactly.
That and Gideon’s Bible, and I am good to go.
But I’m trying to get through that because I you and Brian Regal have both asked me to to to put a review out.
And it’s like I I cannot.
There’s something wrong with my character as a friend.
I suck because it’s like I won’t issue a review unless I’ve read the entire book.
And it’s like so hard for me to get through stuff.
Look, we’re only one and a half years into the book being available.
So you’re doing well.
You’re killing me.
You’re killing me.
You’re killing me.
Anyway, it will get done.
But for listeners, I’m enjoying the read.
So I can say, even though I haven’t finished it.
I do want to say that it’s only part of it is on etymology, which is word origins, because I think that was the impression that some people had.
Oh, it’s a book about etymology.
But it’s also about context and how the word has changed meaning over time.
Absolutely.
And gender and insults.
I talk about a lot of different insults and
It’s so topical that you said gender because that’s going to come up in my story.
So, yeah.
Cool.
And in terms of etymology, it’s really only the first chapter.
And it’s a kind of overview of the word origins.
But other than that, it’s a deep dive into the word.
A deep, deep dive.
Yeah, absolutely.
So for my part of this episode, we’re going to be flashing back all the way back.
to 2014, episode 86.
Seems like just yesterday.
It does.
Honestly, I swear my memory is like a flat.
My time is my time since is all screwed up.
But back in episode 86, we had a pretty important episode where we talked about Slenderman and Tulpas.
And we had on Joe Laycock, who will be coming in a new episode soon.
And Natasha Michaels, who is now his spouse.
I believe at the time they were just dating.
But anyway, I think so.
Yeah.
That was about Slender Man and a news story relevant to Slender Man.
But in the episode, which is, again, I’ll put a link in the show notes, well worth going back to listen to.
One of the classic ones, I think.
It really is.
Yeah.
Well, it was a big news story around Slenderman.
But also Natasha kind of dug in.
Her background is in she does religious studies work and she has done a lot of work in Buddhism.
And the concept of tulpas has been sort of hijacked by Westerners.
Thought forms.
Thought forms.
Exactly.
And so it has a very specific meaning within Buddhism.
which she goes into in great detail in that episode.
But what happened is Alexandra Neal…
if I remember correctly, from Theosophy, wrote about tulpas as a non, let’s call it a secular version of a thought form.
Right.
Where you could, if you believed in something enough, you could make something manifest in the physical world.
And so…
Which we see in a lot of different theories too.
I think even through to the law of attraction is based on that as well.
Willing something to happen.
Willing, the human will, and which is all tied into chaos magic and the idea that like your will, exerting your will and manifesting your will, which ties into prosperity gospel, the same idea.
Yeah.
Looking for endorsement from.
Everything old is new again.
Yeah.
Yeah.
For real.
Right.
And this idea of syncretism, the idea of like.
taking pieces you want to have in your religious views from other religions and sort of blending it all together.
Nothing is quite as syncretic as theosophy.
And most people don’t know what theosophy even is, but I would say it is the secret…
binder tying like the ancient world’s religions together with modernity in in a most interesting way well you’re making me even think of uh sylvia brown and she used to to say take what you like and leave the rest behind so very much a kind of new age
of just taking bits and pieces of what you like.
And I think that’s, yeah, very spiritualism today, new age, that those ideas are still around and they just keep evolving.
You may recall, so back in 2014, two 12-year-olds, Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weir, were 12-year-olds in Wisconsin, Waukesha, Wisconsin.
Now, Geiser had been diagnosed with early onset schizophrenia.
And even her mom described her as floridly psychotic.
So she’s definitely mentally ill. Yeah, it is very young.
In fact, schizophrenia often doesn’t emerge until later in life.
Yeah, for my world, the developer of the Macintosh hardware, a guy named Burl Smith, is like one of the most, he really rings, his world looms large in my mental landscape because he was this really important hardware engineer who then slipped into schizophrenia.
I believe he’s being taken care of now, but ultimately, like, you know, his brain is tragically fractured by schizophrenia, even though, like, he was, like, this real genius at developing computer hardware.
Well, I’ll just add, too, that, I mean, it’s, you know, a neurodiverse condition, and not all people who have it actually experience hallucinations.
audio and visual hallucinations uh it’s it’s a i think maybe 20 of people who do so i think that there are a lot of stereotypes associated with it and i do know people who have been diagnosed and have it well maintained uh and they’re finding out a lot more about it too so it’s i i think we just don’t want to you know panic people into thinking that it can’t be treated because it can oh there’s all kinds of interesting treatments in all kinds of meds but um but morgan was uh
fascinated or captivated by the online creation of the Slender Man.
And that was, again, an entirely fictional horror character created for the Something Awful online forum.
So it was an art project, if you will.
But they took it very seriously.
And we talked a little bit about the concept of folia due, the idea of like two people sharing a hallucination.
And we also talked about how in a human relationship it’s possible for.
Two people to sort of slowly push each other forward into acting on things they probably should know better.
And maybe they wouldn’t even do it by themselves.
So that friendship between Morgan and Anissa ultimately ended up with a girl being…
Yeah, so Lautner gets stabbed 19 times with a kitchen knife by Geyser.
Yeah, no, and she’s millimeters away from her heart.
I mean, she literally escaped death by just the tiniest fraction of attack angle, which is terrible.
So the girls, the two girls who perpetrated the crime, fled the scene, ultimately were captured.
And Geyser in particular was institutionalized because clearly something was amiss with her mind.
Now, the reason I’m bringing this up is because.
this year geyser had gotten conditional release i remember she was not even 13 yet when the crime took place and so she had been put into a like a halfway home or juvenile center or something yeah well so she’s now in her early 20s she’s a 23 year old person so um still a youth yeah
Still very young.
I mean, now that I’m older, I’m like, everybody in their 20s, sorry, guys, you seem like kids to me because I’m ancient.
Children, yeah.
It’s a relative thing.
It is a relative thing.
But I mean, also, like, science seems to be suggesting that your brain’s not really even fully formed until you’re in your early 20s, right?
If ever.
If ever.
Right, right.
Well, I mean, one hopes that, or at least the way I look at the world, it’s like you’re constantly seeking new experiences, trying to learn new things.
I know I am.
And so, you know, we have words for this.
Some people would call it wisdom.
I don’t know.
Experience points is how I think about it because I’m a nerd.
But, you know, like if someone could say, would you like to be 19 again?
Well, not if I have to give up all my XP.
No.
Yeah, there’d be some definite pros and cons to that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I would love to go back in other ways.
I love the energy.
I wish my knees worked like they did back then.
You know, you know, but yeah, I would not want to give up the experience points right at all.
But yeah.
So this strange news voice popped out a couple of weeks ago where Geyser was caught.
fleeing her halfway home.
So she left and fled, okay?
With an older person.
She became friends with…
a person who is 43-year-old that they met at church together, a person named Charlie Mecca.
Well, so if you go look at the crime photos or whatever, it’s one of those situations where I think the news is really making a lot out of the fact that Charlie Mecca is a trans woman.
Oh, dear.
It doesn’t sound like that probably has anything to do with it.
It sounds like it’s more…
This is more of a deeply entwined illness, personality thing going on.
And it’s problematic in a lot of ways.
Okay.
So Geyser and Mecca were trying to get to Nashville for some reason.
It’s a little unclear why.
Music.
The music.
They were probably going to start a country band.
That’s exactly.
That’s probably what it is.
Well, you know, it’s one of those situations where someone has moved from the prison system into a halfway home.
And the United States.
does not have a good record for health care, for mental health care, for their rehabilitation in the penitentiary system, the prison industrial complex.
Sure, that’s the best environment to rehabilitate someone who clearly has a psychiatric disorder.
Let me step back and say, hey…
morgan committed a terrible crime and nearly killed someone right so i don’t want to i don’t want to forgive that but clearly also mentally ill and this system that we have yeah and a minor the system that we have is not really set up for that so but but the way the news is covering this story is uh
That a trans woman and this this person who is trying to work their way out of the penitentiary and the system blew off the halfway house and tried to escape.
Right.
So it’s a.
I guess it sounds like what was happening was at the halfway house, they were going to deny Mecca access to Geyser.
Which would make things worse, I think, to do that.
Geyser is messaging Mecca that she’s suicidal.
She wants to drink bleach.
The idea of not being able to spend time with Mecca is killing her, right?
And she’s going to…
do something terrible to herself so so she basically convinces charlie mecca to help her escape so they’re going to grab a bus and they’re heading to nashville well on the journey they get caught um and now um
They’re both in trouble.
So Geiser’s going to be going back into the prison system, most likely.
And Nelmeca, who, again, is a trans woman, is in the media spotlight at a time when we have what I would describe as a…
Very hostile society.
A trans-moral panic, right?
The whole question of…
Being trans is now a political hot potato.
And in the United States and in other parts of the world, it’s being used as a cudgel.
These people are having their rights taken away.
And it’s definitely a moral panic, right?
And so this has been going on since the satanic panic.
Yeah, it’s always a new shifting topics.
You know, and it bugs me.
OK, so, you know, every now and then we’ll cover a topic that ties into politics.
Right.
And we’ll get some of our listeners are bothered by this because they don’t want us to have a political view or they don’t want to hear our side or whatever.
That’s, you know, but I.
This is so clearly a situation where a moral panic has made it OK to abuse a segment of the population.
It just really bothers me.
And we don’t have to name parties.
I mean, I can, but it’s not just the United States and other parts of the world.
It’s become OK to attack trans people.
And we’ve had.
friends of the show, fans of the show, contributors to the show who are trans.
I have friends in real life who are trans.
I have family members in real life who are trans.
And to see them scapegoated and victimized through the same nonsense that was used in the height of the satanic panic in the 80s and 90s is killing me.
It’s like it just breaks my heart.
Yeah, portion of society.
And it really is a biological matter and it’s a social matter and just should not be brought into politics.
But they’re being scapegoated now.
Yeah, they absolutely are.
And, you know.
Again, I read my kids the Harry Potter books.
So having J.K. Rowling coming out so hard against trans people after writing these beautiful books where inclusion and support for the underling is so important just freaks me out, you know?
Oh, what a massive blind spot and just not something she should be talking about, especially when she has such a platform and can influence people so negatively and so dangerously.
You don’t know how dangerous it is to go to the bathroom when you’re a billionaire.
You know, you never know.
You never know, Karen.
Anyway.
I see what you’re saying.
And this is really turning this into a separate matter.
And this is really a difficult issue, very complicated and difficult to tease apart the different issues.
And it’s just a shame that this is becoming such a media circus and that it’s so ongoing too.
It bugs me.
I mean, again, going back to the Slenderman angle, I don’t even know if this story would be in the news, relatively speaking.
Like, I don’t know, like, if it weren’t for the Slenderman piece of the story, right?
then this would probably be a different kind of story.
I don’t know the facts around Charlie Mecca, right?
Charlie is in all of the news coverage, all across the board, the news coverage.
They’re using Charlie’s dead name, okay?
And referring to her as a he, right?
Okay.
It doesn’t help things.
It doesn’t help things.
It makes it more about the trans angle.
I don’t even know who the victim is here exactly.
Because we know Geyser has already used…
her mental illness to lure other people to complicity and in bad situations, you know, she may legitimately be trying to keep a friendship.
I don’t know.
Or she may be manipulating Mecca or maybe Mecca’s manipulating her.
I don’t know.
I just read an article for psychology today about favorite people.
And it’s a concept from personality disorders where often, and there are lots of different,
personality disorders from antisocial through to borderline and narcissistic and a lot of kind of pop culture understanding of these things and a lot of it’s wrong too but this does sound like one of these kind of relationships where you have two people and they’re very or one person’s very attached to another person and emotionally dependent upon them and I think that this is probably underpinning a lot of relationships like this so I think that there’s so much going on but
I’m sure the media is just turning it into something above and beyond that.
And I just don’t think these people will get the help that they need.
No, exactly.
And they’re focusing on the weirdness of the whole thing, right?
And so, yeah, it is weird, but only because society has not made a place for people who are mentally ill. Society has not made a place for people who don’t fit into binary categories.
Oh, yeah, it’s one of those kind of final frontiers, I think, when it comes to discrimination and prejudice dealing with disability and mental health.
But, yeah, well, they should have gone to Nashville and started that blues band or…
They like both kinds of music, country and Western.
But I, you know, I don’t know what will happen with them.
The the Slenderman angle is actually being underplayed compared to the trans angle, which is, you know, a sign of the times.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Very sad.
It’s a bummer.
It’s a bummer.
I wish that the United States had a system where they actually not to reward the criminal.
But a lot of these people are criminals because they’ve had bad circumstances because the system is against them.
And it’s like it’s so easy to be a person who, you know, follows the rules and has advantages.
And to look at these people who are trying to get by out on the outskirts of the society and just marginalize groups and crush them, marginalize them, crush them, never excuse them, utilize them in the prison industrial complex, et cetera.
So I don’t know what will happen here.
Yeah, it doesn’t sound like they stand a chance, really.
They really don’t seem to.
And again.
Geyser committed a crime, almost committed a murder.
So I don’t want to excuse that.
But, you know, it clearly had mental illness at the root of this.
Absolutely.
But it did give us a chance to talk about the fact that Slender Man is simultaneously not a real thing, yet exemplifies this concept of the…
the monster that comes forth from our minds and becomes real.
And even though as a skeptical person, I know that’s practically not true.
Like how much of our world or how much of our lives are controlled by
complying with or are participating in structures that are all social constructs like you know like how much we do during the day how much that we live under or abide by are are things that we might not be behaving the same way if we didn’t live in these
you know, large communities where we have to find some way to work within a shared mental framework, which is really interesting.
It’s deep and not the sort of thing that a news article would cover.
But I find it fascinating because these shared mythologies of monsters.
So anyway, that’s our Slenderman update.
It looks like presently Geyser is rolled back into the American penitentiary system.
I’m sure there will be hearings and other things.
I don’t know that she posed a threat.
I don’t know that Charlie Mecca posed a threat, but she definitely broke her probation.
And that’s what it’s become about.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So maybe this is.
Right.
And I just, you know, again, I don’t know enough about Charlie Mecca.
People are like trying to dig up dirt.
And there are stories that like maybe maybe Mecca had, you know, tried to do something negative with a previous.
There are stories that are just allegations that are coming out in this media coverage.
And it’s like you would be able to sue somebody in a normal world just for the allegations being out there.
But the truth is that.
People in the trans community right now are at the heart of a moral panic.
And, you know, I don’t know that I trust anything that’s being said in the media about trans people because I just everything is right now.
It’s like there’s a permissive ecosystem to criticize the trans community.
It sucks.
No, I absolutely agree.
And just as for regarding legal matters, it’s a.
It’s a legal system, not a justice system.
I’ve heard that said before.
That’s true.
So really complicated.
And I guess we’ll just try to keep up with the news and find out what happens.
But it’s all around a very sad story.
And no one’s getting it.
Well, it is appropriate.
It is.
But remember, the forum that gave birth to Slender Man was called Something Awful.
yes it’s all come full circle living up to that living up to that all right well bring the room up a little bit because i’ve brought it down i apologize so so oh i think i’m gonna probably keep the mood down a little bit
So, yeah, it’s been an interesting couple of weeks for me.
I’ve got a lot going on.
But one thing that happened was I received an email that came through to my website and it was just from Nemo.
And I’m just thinking, I don’t know.
Who this is.
The fish or the captain?
Well, that’s what I was thinking, finding Nemo.
And the email said, dear Dr. Karen Stolzner, I’m the content manager for the website maintained by the SPR.
And so I just thought, oh, this is a joke email or something like that.
And I investigated things a little bit further in the email address that was supplied and found out, no, this is real.
This person does exist.
And they were wanting me to do a review for the SPR website on a very interesting book.
It’s a new book, but it’s not actually out yet.
It’s coming out, I believe, April of next year, so 2026.
Oh, this is a pre-publication review.
Okay, cool.
It is.
So a good publisher who’s actually, I guess, ahead of the curve and promoting a book months before it comes out, which is not what academic publishers do.
This is novel.
A trade publisher.
So anyway, the book is absolutely up my alley, and it’s called How to Build a Haunted House, The History of a Cultural Obsession.
And the author is Caitlin Blackwell Baines, and I believe she has a PhD.
She’s an art historian, and she specialises in Gothic art and architecture.
So I thought this is a really interesting background and expertise to have to be writing about this topic.
And I thought I wonder how that could contribute to the conversation and the discussion about
hauntings and haunted houses.
And so anyway, I read this book and I did this review and I just thought, oh, we should talk about this a little bit.
Now the review is available now.
So you can go to the SPR website.
It’s a strange URL.
It’s spr.ac.uk.
And they have a whole section where you can go and look at reviews in general.
And there are lots of reviews there on topics that our listeners would be interested in.
But it’s a really interesting book.
And I think a lot of our listeners would be interested in this topic.
But it wasn’t quite what I expected.
So initially, I thought that this was going to be a kind of blueprint for a haunting.
So a book of this nature with the author having this background, I thought it’s going to be a kind of breakdown of the ingredients that make a house feel haunted.
And I have spoken about this kind of thing myself in the past, going back to
talks that I’ve done at the amazing meeting, Tam and Skepta Camp.
I’ve talked about haunted history and the role that particular houses will play in
hauntings and claims of hauntings.
And so I thought that’s what the book was going to be about.
It’s going to be looking at kind of architectural details of houses and certain atmospheres and tropes as well that we see appear in hauntings across time and across culture.
So I was really excited about that and I thought this is going to be at the intersection of folklore and history and psychology and architecture.
But the book is, I don’t mean to blow my own trumpet, but a bit more like my book, Haunting America.
So it is a kind of guided tour of haunted places.
And so I can see why Nemo got in contact with me and wanted me to review this book because the author does look at a number of places that I’ve researched before.
So in particular, the Myrtles Plantation and the Winchester Mystery House.
And so she looks at these haunted locations and looks at the, explores the legends of each site.
And so it’s not really a book that debunks these stories.
And it’s even more than just telling the folklore too.
It’s really digging into the cultural anxieties that are woven into the folklore.
So she’s looking at not so much did this really happen, but why do we tell these stories?
Why do we tell these stories in these places?
So it’s a lot of familiar stories that our listeners are going to have heard about or that we’ve talked about on this show, predominantly in the United States and the UK, although there is one chapter on…
Japanese hauntings and I thought it was going to be a bit more global and maybe look at other cultures and it kind of dips its toe into other cultures but doesn’t really explore that very much but it is interesting.
So for example we’ll look at the Myrtles Plantation.
And, again, I think another reason they reached out to me is because of that Netflix show that I did a couple of years ago, three years ago.
And when we did that interview, what was interesting to me is that they really wanted to delve into the history.
of the place because it was a plantation.
And to look at the legacy of enslavement that is just not talked about when you go on tours.
I mean, they do talk about enslavement, but they don’t talk about the history of the place with regards to that.
I mean, that’s just left out because I went on one tour, I think the first tour I ever went on, and they talked about the enslaved people as being servants.
didn’t sit too well with me and some of the other people on the tour.
But that is the kind of whitewashed perspective that you get on these kinds of tours.
Yeah.
And so when I did this interview for Netflix, we really kind of delved into that, and I thought this is a really important angle.
And I think that this book does look at that angle and similar angles for other places as well.
So, like, there’s a chapter on the Borley Rectory.
And we’ve talked about that before and we’ll be talking about the place again soon.
Yet again.
Yet again.
I mean, it’s just one of those classic stories, but they…
It’s a really important story.
I don’t know.
I was looking for the right word.
It was not coming to me, but it’s…
I don’t want to say foundational because it’s too new, but it’s just one of those go-to stories that has been really… Its relevance has been elevated by…
by the amount of work that was done on it by serious researchers and maybe people who weren’t quite as serious.
Well, I really do think it’s a seminal story.
And with Harry Price interwoven into it, and I really do think that’s kind of set the foundation for our expectations for…
hauntings nowadays not only with what a place should look like but what kind of history should be behind it but instead of going into the usual stories and and that was an interesting thing with the book too it didn’t really tell all of the folklore and it didn’t even really tell all of the history and i found some inaccuracies unfortunately uh there was some some of the retellings were uh wrong and some of the descriptions of of various things were inaccurate and so
Again, the copy that I received, it was a proof.
So it’s a possibility that they’ll go back and fix some of these things.
So you admit it, the proof of hauntings exists.
Yeah.
Not in that sense.
But there were some inaccuracies there in some of the retellings, and I think some of them were fictionalized a little bit too.
So that was a bit disappointing.
But instead of just telling the usual story of Borley Rectory, and if that’s all it was doing, it really missed the mark in quite a few ways, but instead was talking about the real drama being the lives of the Rectors and the families, the people who lived there from the Bulls through to the Smith family.
No relation, I take it?
No relation, exactly, right.
The Foysters as well.
And so talking about the showmanship of Harry Price and it is the stories behind the story.
And even though the place is long since gone, it really delves into the aspects and ancient history too that is underpinning a lot of these stories.
And when she talks about the Winchester Mystery House, she…
talks about Indigenous people as like an embodiment of past atrocities.
And I thought that was interesting, but I’m just not sure how related that is.
I really wish because her background is in architecture that she would have talked more about the…
are the influence that the current owners have on the building, on the architecture and all of the things that they’ve done.
She didn’t really go into a lot of the kind of oddities of the house being a result of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
And she didn’t talk about the Brown family coming in and adding really strange features to the house.
And I thought, well, that should really have been dealt with since that’s her expertise.
Right.
Exactly.
With an architectural background, you would think that these angles and that sort of facade would be like critical to the support.
Right.
So, yeah.
And I think it explains a lot, too.
And so she states that she’s not wanting to.
debunk these stories um and that’s fair enough but i think that if you do delve into the history and you find that people didn’t exist or that things didn’t take place then you really don’t have that foundation there for the haunting of course you can still explore the the folklore but the very reason for its existence falls apart
Well, and you can you can always include those details and then include also that those are not actually supported by any evidence.
Right.
So, yes, this is a story.
Yeah, I think so, too.
Right.
I think that’s part of honest reporting.
You tell the story, but also, hey, it turns out there’s nothing to support.
This doesn’t stop the story from being interesting or continuing because that’s what stories do.
The further we get away from evidence-based reporting, the more we slide into mythology and folklore, right?
Oh, yes.
It all folds in on itself.
Absolutely.
So she does tend to be skeptical at times, but then finishes the book with a personal encounter that she had at the Myrtles plantation.
So as I read this personal experience, I immediately thought this is an episode of sleep paralysis.
And she does name drop that as well.
So I was pleased about that.
But then she and she talks about some of the underlying reasons why she could have had that.
She had a bout of gastroenteritis and she’d been eating very rich Cajun and Creole food and she’d been drinking a lot of alcohol and she was traveling.
So she was jet lagged.
So, of course, we’ve spoken with.
Brian Sharpless, Dr. Sharpless before about these kinds of factors underlying sleep paralysis.
Probably a lot of haunted people in New Orleans because you go for carnival or whatever, and then you’re traveling, you’re in a different time zone, you’re eating super rich food, you’re drinking, you’re sleeping, you’re constantly being bombarded with stories about the spiritual ghostly history of the city.
And then you go to sleep in a strange place.
Yeah.
And you have an experience.
Yeah, you have an experience.
So I was pleased that she was skeptical in that regard.
But then she kind of ruined things by consulting Frances Kameen.
So I’m not sure if you’ve heard of her before, but she was one of the earlier owners of the Myrtles Plantation.
And she wrote a book in the early 1990s, and it’s called The Myrtles Plantation, The True Story of America’s Most Haunted House.
So as we know, based on a true story series,
something purports to be the true story, then it’s suspicious.
And so this book is, I think, really set up to look rather like Harry Price’s book to kind of set this precedent, you know, for this place is haunted and to lead everyone to believe that it is and to make some money.
And so anyway, the author consults Miss Frances Kameen and she says, oh, yes, of course, this really happened to you and this would have been a paranormal experience.
And I’ve had similar experiences and so many of my guests have had these experiences.
So she just really doubled down on this being.
paranormal experience and so she kind of ends on that note very much that that kind of vein of well i’ll leave it up to you to decide and it’s not a matter of whether it’s true or not it’s just personal experience so i had mixed feelings about the book and uh a saying or a quote kept coming to mind as i was reading the book and that is one that joe nickel used to talk about a lot that’s a quote from the psychologist robert a baker where he talks about there are no haunted
places only haunted people and i think that yeah had she invoked that quote i really think to start with that quote would have been a very strong beginning uh but they’re just i don’t know big gaps in the history of these places and oversights and errors and the references were so thin too now i think she did a lot of good historical research and a lot of good architectural
research too and again that’s her background but if you go and look at the references she’s referenced two or three books for each chapter and I thought that’s just very thin and with all the information that’s out there I think that
had there been more of a leaning into those aspects, I think the book would have been stronger.
But it’s still a very good read.
And it’s a topic that we’re interested in, our listeners are interested in.
So it’s right up our alley, up our collective alleys.
But it’s just a little bit disappointing in some regards.
Yeah, well, that’s a bummer because although…
how many people are going to approach such a sensational topic with this sort of journalistic rigor or skeptical detachment?
I guess the path to a sensational book is an easier walk, right?
And since this is a trade book as well, I think if it had been academic trade or an academic book, I think it…
probably would have lent itself better to the theme of the book.
But I think under the circumstances, it’s still a good read, but I think you’d really want to supplement your reading and your research with other books about these subjects because it doesn’t quite have that sceptical punch that we like.
Right.
And I think our listeners will be probably a little bit more excited about an upcoming interview we have in January with the author of a book called Ghosted.
So we’ll talk about that soon and that’ll get us back to Borley Rectory again.
Oh, yeah.
I think it’s so interesting, too.
We’re going to be talking with another author.
this week as well and probably touch upon all the directory.
So it’s just showing how our interest in these places is maintained and it just endures to this day and it’s just very entertaining.
Well, and again, I still love this stuff.
You know, the sort of my need to have it like to know what’s supported by evidence and what isn’t.
I know that’s not a universal, but I appreciate that our audience likes that, too.
And I’m really glad that there are people out there doing fact checking, that sort of thing.
But I do love a good story, too.
And I really find often, even though, like, for example, I think I’ve mentioned before that I don’t literally believe in Bigfoot, but I enjoy Bigfoot.
I enjoy talking to people who’ve had interesting experiences and they think they’ve seen a Bigfoot and all that sort of thing.
I go to Bigfoot conferences.
I like that.
And my goal there is not to tell everybody they’re wrong.
is to try to understand the human experience of cryptids and the supernatural and the paranormal.
I just, I want to know, I want to understand.
I feel exactly the same way and the same way about, you know, paranormal claims and hauntings.
I mean, how many times have we discussed these topics and just how we, we love the stories.
We love the folklore.
I think I love the history just a little bit more.
I think it gives us an additional layer of understanding when we try to contextualize it in
Is this supported by, you know, a materialist view, a rational view?
Does the evidence make sense?
That sort of stuff.
So, you know, it’s another lens to examine the stories, but I can still enjoy the stories, you know.
So, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
And it’s a great book, too, for, you know, legend trippers and people because she does go to these places and does more than armchair research.
All right.
Well, that’s this week’s episode in a nutshell.
Yeah, all over the place.
Thank you.
Yeah, a little bit all over the place.
And, you know, sorry for the negative content.
But, you know, this is stuff I thought it was necessary to do a follow-up because I saw several news stories that were tied into Slender Man.
And it’s like, hmm.
Oh, yeah.
The story’s not over yet.
Hmm.
Yeah.
And I hope that ultimately ends up with a positive outcome for, you know, the people involved.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
What in the world is our culture doing?
Something crazy.
Strange times.
Indeed.
All right.
Well, thanks, Karen, for your time.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Still good to talk about these things.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard a discussion with me and Karen about the latest news around the Waukesha Slenderman attacker, Morgan Geyser.
Plus, a pre-publication review of How to Build a Haunted House by Caitlin Blackwell-Baines.
Check the show notes for a link to Karen’s review.
Did you know that our theme music is by Pete Stealing Monkeys?
Every now and then, I think about changing the music, but darn it, I still like it after all these years.
This has been a Monster House presentation