===TRANSCRIPT START===

Astonishing Legends Network.

Disclaimer, this episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me.

Welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And this week, we're taking a long, hard look at ourselves. And then screaming in terror at what we see. That's right, we're gazing this week into the deep, dark world of mirrors, those simple planes of reflective glass that have been freaking people out since pretty much we had to first confront ourselves in them. From ancient superstitions to modern day urban legends, from magical rituals to psychological terrors, mirrors have been reflecting our deepest fears back at us for millennia. And sometimes those fears can have terrible, terrible consequences. So grab your compact, make sure you don't have any food in your teeth, and maybe throw a sheet over that full length mirror in your bedroom. The Square Boys are about to get reflective.

What are we scared?

When are we?

Now it is time for time for Scared All The Time.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. A little bit of quick housekeeping up top. If you are a subscriber, and we encourage you all to stop by our premium page that you can get to from scaredallthetimepodcast.com. We have our live show this month is going to be next Monday the 30th. It's going to be 6 p.m. West Coast, 9 p.m. East Coast, and they usually go about two hours.

At maximum.

At maximum.

Because you know me, I'm doing a lot better than our last live show physically, but I'm still not 100%. So we'll see if I can get a full two hours.

We wanted to say that up top so you guys know to tune in next week, but also, let's get a, what is our health update?

I'm doing okay. My leg's still pretty messed up. I still have this like huge hematoma or whatever it's called. That it's like having two knees on my left leg. It looks insane. Maybe I'll put it in the show notes. Other than that, physical therapy for other stuff and it's all going great. Like that's moving along, you know, a little better every day, still in the hunt for new car, all that shit. But other than that, like getting a little better every day. Just don't know if I have two hours of live shows in me.

That's all right. We'll do an hour and a half. We'll do whatever we do. It's always fun. It's always a good hang. If you haven't tuned in to one of our live shows before, it's sort of a hangout. We let you behind the scenes a little bit. We kind of, we talk with everybody in the chat. We sometimes have updates on stories from old episodes. We tease new episodes. We read from different weird sources, books and things that I wrote as a kid. And who knows, it's always a grab bag, but it's always fun. And we've got a really solid crew that shows up like every week or every month that we do these.

Yeah, they rule, they rule.

They're great. Shout out to you guys. You know who you are. And we hope more of you join us this month.

Oh, also, I just actually directed the Astonishing Legends live show, The Junk Drawer.

Yes.

And I saw Samantha Cardaman dropped an RIP. God Bless in there and I was happy to see it. Good to see Scared All The Time like in the wild.

Yeah, getting some of our lingo out there for other people to pick up on.

Hell yeah, dude. So thanks for that.

Yeah, thank you, Samantha. All right. Well, before we dive into the show, you guys know it. You guys love it. We want to do Five Star Corner real quick. We got some good reviews. If you've never heard Five Star Corner before, the idea is you leave us a five star review and we might read it. So the first one I want to read that we got is Five Stars, Anxiety in a Nutshell from Glitter Burrito. And the review is simply, If My Intrusive Thoughts Made a Podcast, which warms my heart. It is maybe one of the best reviews you've ever gotten.

That's very good. It's one of the most succinct.

Thank you, Glitter Burrito. We are your intrusive thoughts and we'll be here keeping you up around the clock until Ed's hematoma explodes.

Yeah, it feels like it's going to sometimes where I'm like, yes, like if I like roll on it in bed, I'm like, is this just enough pressure where it pops or whatever? Like that would be so bad.

That would be awful.

I'm pretty sure you'll just die, right?

I imagine it being like it pops and it's just like a GI. Joe's knee socket breaks off and like your leg just falls off at the point where your hematoma exploded.

It might. It might. But also it's not like it's pus or something. It's not like a zit. It's like it's blood. So in my mind, I'm like, you have to go to surgery to have these drained. And so it's like, yeah, does my blood just think this is the new fucking road map? Or it's like, OK, now we go up here and we go back down here. I needed to know that this is not the road we should like. We need to close this fucking route down for my blood.

There's some bonus content we should get. When I was in high school, a friend of mine on the cross-country team had some cysts on his head, and my friend's dad was a doctor, and he brought a scalpel and some anesthetic home from the hospital, and just cut the cyst over the sink, and drained it over the sink in their kitchen, and we were all watched. So maybe we could find a shady doctor who would drain your hematoma during our live show.

I don't think we need to do that. Also, again, it seemed like it was a bit more intrusive than just like having something lanced off, you know? It's still the size of like a fucking half a mandarin orange still. So it's not an insignificant thing. When I say it's like having two knees, it looks like having two knees, it's crazy. Anyway.

All right, well, that was disgusting. Sorry, guys. What, Ed, what's our next five star review?

This person wrote so fucking funny. It's the letter F, letter N. I have listened since day one and Satt is my favorite pod. Very nice of them. The content is engaging, but more importantly, y'all are hilarious and make me laugh with your repartee. Repartee?

Repartee.

Okay, repartee. It's two E's and it's in quotes. So there's a lot going on for me to deal with at that moment in cold week.

Yeah, I feel like we're being mocked with your quote unquote repartee.

Well, it goes on. Let's not reenact every segment though. Okay, so it got mean quickly. Okay, I see. Let's not reenact every segment though. I'd hate for Ed to disappear into a sinkhole. So yeah, I think maybe they're commenting on the fact that we've manifested a sudden death scenario this season. So let's not keep manifesting stuff.

Right, exactly.

We have a couple of things coming up this season though that when you see the title, you're going to be like, oh, I see these guys do want to manifest these ones.

Yes.

So we're working on that same wavelength. So anyway, that's from Tybee Girl. Thank you, Tybee Girl.

Thank you, Tybee Girl. And we'll do one more. Five stars, TikTok challenges, smoke enemas, Satan and much more. Great description of the show, honestly. I found this pod from Astonishing Legends and I've been catching up. My husband and I literally guffaw multiple times through every episode. Ed and Chris are so relatable and their banter is perfect. See, they used banter as perfect and not repartee in scare quotes. So I like this one more.

Repartee is let's not keep doing this.

Yeah. I've loved everything I've heard and I can't wait for more. I love finding new things to be afraid of and hearing the interesting facts behind the fears. And Ed, I'm still waiting to see lubes and tubes in a grocery store near me.

Oh my God. Thank God. This is good that it's reminded me of lubes and tubes. That would make a good pin. I do need a pin number six idea, so maybe I'll use lubes and tubes.

Yeah, if you guys are waiting for your buttons of the month, Ed just shipped them.

They're all out now. They're coming to you.

They're all out now. And if you haven't signed up for Button of the Month Club yet on the premium page, you should definitely take a look at the buttons that we've sent out so far. And I think you'll agree they're very funny and will look great on some sort of a backpack or jacket where you can spread all the Scared All The Time love around the world. So, all right, guys, that's it for housekeeping. Thank you very much for listening. And let's dive in on what I think is our first true sort of spooky season episode this month, Mirrors.

Which is also, I think, just a really good episode. Like, I really liked recording this and I really liked listening to this one back.

I hated recording this.

And you won't listen to it back.

It was miserably hot.

Oh, no, no, yeah, they'll get into it. They'll hear that. They'll hear that.

They'll hear it. You guys will hear it. All right.

Here it is, Mirrors.

Welcome back to Scared All The Time. This is the Fuck It, We'll Do It Live episode. Between Ed's accident and my moving to Pasadena, we have decided that the best way to get this episode recorded is to do it in the same room together. So this will be, we haven't done this since what? Episode two?

Three.

Three?

Since Abandoned Towns. When we looked at each other and we're like, we've made a mistake.

We can't release this episode.

Yeah, yeah.

Good, good. So we've got great precedence set. Well, so anyway, you'll have to excuse, this is gonna be more like what you'd get from a Scared All The Time live episode. So it's good practice for us and hopefully very entertaining for you. All right, Ed, before we dive into the dark history of mirrors, I wanna know, have you ever had a creepy experience with a mirror, maybe caught something out of the corner of your eye that shouldn't have been there, played Bloody Mary, that kind of thing?

I didn't play Bloody Mary or anything. There's just no way knowing me I would ever do that, but I've taken drugs. So of course I've had creepy experiences with mirrors. There's a lot of like, you know, good advice from drug friends. Don't, you know, don't look at the mirror or anything. And then you're like run right to the bathroom and you're like, oh, who is that? That's not me. But no, so I've had that experience. It's not a mirror, but it kind of is. I was doing a Zoom call, like I was watching a movie on Zoom with someone. And so I see myself, a digital reflection of myself, kind of the same as a mirror if you think about it. And I swear to God, I was not on drugs. I swear the shirt on like the back of my chair, like I was like laying on this kind of chair couch thing, like had slipped off and fell to the ground. Like I swear I saw that on the Zoom and it like turned and it was still perfectly on the chair.

Oh shit, that's a good one.

Yeah, so that's kind of the closest and that would have only been, you know, post pandemic.

That reminds me of, there's a video I saw on the internet once and there was debate over whether or not it was faked. And I feel like I'm pretty good at sensing when a video is faked or when it feels like something's not straightforward or someone's being, you know, someone's trying to sell you some shit. But it was these group of guys playing, I think they were playing video games or watching a movie over Zoom, something. And the one guy is sitting there talking and his screen kind of looks like, you know, the way you look on Zoom when you're in the dark and it's really just the computer is illuminating your face. Oh yeah, yeah.

So the back would still be like kind of darkness.

Dark, yeah. And you fully see a person walk behind him. And part of what convinced me that it's real is that there's clearly some lag in the stream. So the friends all react. They're all just talking, talking, talking. And the friends just are like, oh, Jesus Christ. What the fuck is that? Kid has no idea that there was like, he didn't see anything go behind him. And then I forget if they try to get them to watch it back or whatever, but their reactions were just very genuine. And then somebody was like, if it was not fake, it probably was like, you know, sometimes in like low light on a bad computer video, someone can walk behind you and it'll look greasy, like it'll look smeared because you're not sure. You're just getting like an impression of a thing. I don't know, it's a creepy video. I'll see if I can dig it up and put it in the show notes, because I don't remember anything about what it was called or.

Yeah, the playing it back thing is interesting because I remember, because we do these stream yards, you know, when we record the show, not right now, but when we'd normally do it remotely. And it's like, at the end of it, we're going to get a recording of it because I need it for the show. But I remember on that, I was like, fuck, this isn't recording or anything. They can't go back and check. And I don't want to bring it up a lot to the person I'm with and seem crazy.

Right. Yeah. No, I mean, so I've also never played Bloody Mary. I was always way too scared. I remember kids trying to explain it to me. I want to say like on the school bus. And, you know, they tell you like, yeah, you go into a dark bathroom, you chant Bloody Mary three times in the mirror, and then she comes out of the mirror to kill you. And I remember these kids told me that she comes out of the mirror to kill you because I remember being very confused. Maybe I was just too literal as a kid, but I remember being very confused about like, why anyone would do this game? Like, I think, you know, to me, I was like, and maybe this is where I can thank Catholicism for instilling the fear of the supernatural in me so young, but like, there was no, great. It was like, well, I think to them, it was like a fun legend, like, yeah, she'll come out of the mirror and kill you. And to me, it was like, no, you say her name three times and then she'll come kill you. Like, that's why you would do this.

Yeah.

And it didn't make any sense to me.

Yeah. It's like for people like us, if anyone was like, hey, we're gonna do this, like, the initial reaction is like, we have to tackle this person on the ground, right? Like, cover their mouth, like not saying Beetlejuice three times or whatever. Like, because they're, yeah, there are, and that's just crazy. Like, that's the problem I have with like Ouija boards or really any like communicating with the paranormal. It's like, what is the best case scenario? Like, they're all, for me, the cost-benefit analysis is like, the cost is too great. Like, even if you're successful.

Well, here's the thing. I mean, yes, I do think, you know, now is, when I was a kid, it was like, I think, again, because of Catholicism, I did have this belief of like ritual works, like ritual, you know, you, when you're in church and they bring out the body and blood of Christ and they pray over it, it becomes the body and blood of Christ. And then you eat it and then you're eating the body and blood. And so to me, it's like, well, a ritual, whether it's Bloody Mary or whether it's Ouija or something like it must work and it's better to not fuck around with it. But now as an adult, and I'm more of a skeptic, I guess my feeling is if it did work with any kind of consistency, we would have proven the existence of the supernatural by now.

Yeah, probably.

If it truly was more than just a feeling spooky. Ouija and Bloody Mary were horror movies before horror movies. It was a safe way to scare yourself and not actually end up getting hurt or something. But I think in a world where we have less participatory ways of scaring yourself, they almost have this weird, antiquated, weird aura around them that makes them feel more real almost.

Now, did you see Talk To Me? You haven't seen Talk To Me.

I haven't actually seen Talk To Me yet.

Talk To Me.

I know, Harrison, Harrison.

It's fine. I don't watch horror movies, but I rolled over on my controller and it chose it on HBO or something. I was like, oh, okay, whatever. I don't want to like, it was just, it was hot. And I was like, laid up on the couch and I'm like, I'll just watch it. And it was the first 10 minutes scared me. So I turned it off. But that movie had the like the thing in the movie where they have to like grab a hand and then deal with the supernatural that way actually does play as a great community based paranormal thing, because it's like it's fun. People like it, even knowing it's terrifying. I don't mean the audience, I mean the characters, but it's very much like everyone comes to parties to do it and they bring it places. And so that's kind of on that same vein of like a Ouija board or playing and everyone going to the bathroom together.

Yeah, I gotta I gotta check it out because I did. I made a return to the world of Bloody Mary for a TV pilot that I wrote a few years ago, and it's one of my most crushing defeats in the film industry. It was myself and Blumhouse in the CW and we like reimagined Bloody Mary for modern teens. And I probably shouldn't say too much about it because I still want to have it come back in some shape or form someday. And I feel like between Talk to Me and Ouija and Tarot, like there's a space where these horror movies are taking on some of these more, like I call it sleepover horror. Yeah, it's like sleepover horror kind of tropes. But that script, it was born more out of a general interest in the Bloody Mary legend than any specific trauma I encountered while playing Bloody Mary. And I feel like most people listening to this show probably have a pretty good sense of what the Bloody Mary legend entails. And really at the end of the day, it's a very, there's not much to it. It's fairly vague and there's a bunch of different explanations. Usually it's Mary's either like a girl who is killed on prom night somewhere in the town, or some people will say that she's the Elizabeth Bathory, the woman who bathes in the blood of young women. And that she's connected to the Bloody Mary legend. But it's kind of vague. And I feel like we're not really going to get too much juice out of talking about Bloody Mary in this episode. And also that's what everybody expects in this episode. So we're going to throw you a curve ball. Because while I was researching, I came across a number of new Bloody Mary like games that Gen Z and maybe even Gen Alpha have been making up to freak their friends out in a bunch of new insane ways. And I thought since we're pulling up on Spooky Season, that exploring some of these legends and rituals might be a great way to kick off this episode. So listener, if you've heard of any of these, or if you've tried them, write in and let us know about your experiences. Ed, of course, if you know any of these, chime in. Sure. But we don't know what the kids are into. So I definitely don't. These are brand new to me. The first legend is called Lady Spades. This is a Bloody Mary riff that the Internet tells me is popular in Russia, but I think that might just be because a Russian writer named Alexander Pushkin wrote a short supernatural story called The Queen of Spades in the 1800s. In that story, a Russian officer of German ancestry named Herman, with two N's, the great German Herman.

Herman Munster.

Yeah, learns that a fellow officer's grandmother, this old countess, possesses the secret of winning at Pharaoh, which is like, I guess, a high stakes card game. Herman begins a liaison with Lizaveta, the countess's impoverished young ward, to gain access to the old woman, but when the countess refuses to reveal the secret, he threatens her with a pistol and she dies of fright.

Oh, wow.

Which no one does anymore.

No, it seems like they don't. I, if I had watched one more minute of that movie, I might have.

The night of the countess's funeral, Herman dreams that the countess has told him the winning cards for this game of Pharaoh. Three, seven and ace. Herman then places bets on the three and seven and wins. After betting everything on the ace, which wins, Herman is horror stricken to see that he is holding not the ace, but the queen of spades who seems to smile up at him as the countess did from her casket. So he loses the game.

Oh, what an idiot.

Assuming all of his money. And in 1800s Russia, if you lost that much at a high stakes card game, you probably were eating potatoes and ice for the rest of your life or something.

Yeah, you're ruble-less now.

You're ruble-less.

So you got to go live in a mirror. I don't know where this is going.

No, no, no. Well, so that's queen of spades, which is this story that I think is why the Internet says that lady spades is popular in Russia. I don't know that it really is. I think it's just sort of been confused or there's some overlapping whatever there.

Any of our Russian listeners let us know.

Yeah. But I mean, the story is spooky enough on its own. And I'm pretty sure, like I said, it's unrelated to this game. But according to, I found the rules for lady spades on theghostandmymachine.com. So I'm reading from them here. The game breaks down as follows. This is what you'll need to play. You need a candle. You need matches or a lighter. You need lipstick, preferably red, although other colors may also be acceptable. A quiet, dark room. A mirror. The mirror may be a fixture of the room, so a bathroom mirror. And then you need a queen of spades pulled from a deck of cards.

My God.

So once you've got all that-

You're gonna be pretty wealthy to play this game.

That's true. I mean, yeah. Until recently in our lives, I'm not sure either of us had rooms that were quiet. I mean, dark for sure.

Dark for sure. They had a fucking electric company turn our shit off.

Yeah. But so once you've got all that ready to go, the summoning of Lady Spade can begin. You enter the quiet, dark room at the stroke of midnight. You make sure all the lights are off. Place the candle in front of the mirror and light it with your matches or lighter. And this is where it starts to differ from Bloody Mary. Because Bloody Mary, you just say the name. In this case, you use the lipstick and you write Lady Spades on the mirror. So again, you better be rich because if you fuck up your mirror, you got to be able to replace it. You then hold the Queen of Spades in your hand such as that she is facing the mirror. So you want to see the back of the card and the Queen of Spades facing the mirror. Close your eyes, empty your mind. Easier to do if you're rich.

Stress free. Stress free life.

Relax as much as you are able. Then repeat the words, Lady Spades appear seven times. Keep your eyes closed and call up the image of Lady Spades in your mind. Which to me, this part seems tricky because everyone's going to picture a different lady. And the ritual doesn't really specify anyone in particular. So my Lady Spades might look like a random lady I saw on the street.

I think a lot of people will probably think of the queen on the card.

That's true. That's true. I think it might be fun if you picture Academy of War and Ring actress Helen Mirren. Could be a good one.

Sure.

Or whoever. It doesn't matter. You're picturing Lady Spades. All the ritual tells us is that Lady Spades will be dressed in black with eyes to match. And although her smile can melt even the coldest of hearts, her face will be mangled and scarred. Cute. Do not panic if you hear a woman's voice or laughter or the echo of footsteps nearby.

No, I will.

I will definitely.

I'm 100% panicking. Are you kidding me?

Well, for the rich people, it's the butler.

Probably the butler, yeah, or the whip maid or something.

But don't panic because if you hear a woman's voice or laughter or the echo of footsteps, these sounds indicate a successful summoning and you may now open your eyes. Warning though, things can go wrong during this summoning. So if you try it and any of the following occur when you open your eyes, do not proceed. If the candle is out, if the card is facing you, meaning it's turned around by itself.

In your hand.

In your hand, presumably. The card is missing or most concerningly, you see a woman in the mirror with her hands pressed up against it. Oh wow.

Like she's looking into a window.

Yeah. So if you see that, if you see any of those things, immediately enact the appropriate ending for your situation as indicated below. We'll go through those endings in a second. If however, you open your eyes and see a woman in the mirror with her hands by her sides, you may proceed as follows. State your wish to the woman. Hold eye contact with her no matter what happens next. If you break eye contact, immediately enact the appropriate ending for your situation as indicated in a moment. Assuming that you hold eye contact to the lady whose arms are by her sides, and she decides to grant your wish, she will smile at you and say, yes. If the ritual is successful, if you hear yes, say the words, lady spades disappear, then wipe her name from the mirror, which would be super hard to do if it's lipstick. That's not going anywhere.

Yeah, I don't know.

Unless you have alcohol or something.

Yeah, some sort of makeup remover, I would imagine.

Add that to the list of things that you'll need, because otherwise you're just going to smear lipstick all over the mirror. Yeah. But wipe her name from the mirror, blow out the candle, turn the lights on, burn the Queen of Spades card to ash as soon as possible, and your wish should come true.

Oh, good.

Shortly, it takes pain to mention.

We should do that.

We'll do it on Halloween night.

We'll do it tonight. You're here.

That's true. I am. There's no mirror in this room.

Thank God.

And I don't know, Ed, do you have any lipstick?

I don't have any lipstick.

You just ran out.

Does your wife have any lipstick?

She might. My wife's downstairs as we record this episode. So she might have lipstick.

I have a, I've been getting ready for years with the only mirror in my bedroom. It's just the like, are you a Lebowski achiever or whatever? Like Time magazine cover that's a mirror. It's fucking like eight and a half by 11 inches. It's like, I've never seen what outfit I'm wearing in it, you know, before I left for the day. I see my outfit for the day in the reflection of a movie poster frame.

This is what I mean. If we could prove the existence of the supernatural by making Lady Spades appear in the Lebowski Little Achiever Award mirror.

Which we'll have a picture of in the show notes.

Yeah. Someone listening, Photoshop that for us, please. I'm sure you can find those images online. I'd love to see what this would look like.

It would be even crazier if I see a woman with her hands pressed against the glass of my Tron poster frame. That would be so crazy. That's honestly scarier somehow than the mirror thing. Then you're just in your room walking by a piece of artwork.

It should not.

Yeah. Then it's like that fucking, it's that Harry Potter hallway or the staircase.

Portraits.

Yeah, because they can walk between portraits and stuff. They're living in the whole world. So if a ghost followed you in the reflection of each frame in your home, as you're walking downstairs into the kitchen, and now it's in the frames in your living room, I'd be like, get out of here.

Too much. I don't like it.

So that was an aside. So anyway, we have to learn about. So that was successful. What's the person's name? Bloody Henry. Who's this person?

Lady Spades.

Lady Spades.

Who sounds like Sam Spade's wife.

It might be. I don't know if Sam Spade seemed like someone who would have a wife. I don't know.

Well, that's true, I guess. But Lady Spade doesn't sound like an old Russian countess or anything. Lady Spade sounds like a dame.

Yeah.

Or kick your door in.

Also could be like a carny attraction.

That's true.

But that said, that was a successful Lady Spade summoning and and presumably granting of a wish.

Yes.

So now you said there's things to do if things aren't going so great.

If the ritual is unsuccessful, proceed as directed for each situation. So if you open your eyes and the candle has gone out, relight it as quickly as possible, say the words Lady Spade's disappear, wipe her name from the mirror, blow out the candle and turn the lights on. Burn the Queen of Spades card immediately. Pretty straightforward. If you open your eyes and the card is facing you rather than the mirror, rip the card in half, which I think I would do on instinct. Say the words Lady Spade's disappear, wipe her name from the mirror, blow out the candle and turn the lights on, burn the pieces of the Queen of Spades card immediately. If you open your eyes and the card is missing, break the mirror.

Really? Let's break the mirror.

Break the mirror. Turn on the lights and attempt to locate the card in the room. If you find it, burn it. If you don't, leave it and vacate the premises immediately. So man, if the card is missing, that seems like kind of the almost the worst case scenario so far.

But they do say to look for it.

Look for it.

So it's like you and your friends being like, is it under the fucking garbage can?

Yeah, I guess.

And if you can't find it, you have to bring your whole home down?

Well, no, you break the mirror and you burn the card if you find it. It doesn't say anything about burning your home, but you know, just in case.

But here's the thing. It's like, okay, I started playing this game.

Yeah.

I lost.

Yep.

Both at the outcome I was trying to achieve and I literally lost the card. And the response to that is to get seven years bad luck.

Hey, that's a good point.

Like a fucking mirror, dude.

Well, maybe whoever invented this game, when the card went missing, they got so pissed off at themselves.

They just shattered it.

They broke the mirror.

They threw a Wii remote through it.

If you open your eyes and the woman's hands are pressed against the mirror, break the mirror immediately, vacate the premises and burn the card.

Wouldn't that let her in? She's against the mirror. So now you've...

That's true.

You know what I mean? Wouldn't they be like, oh, thanks. That's what I wanted. Yeah.

I mean, look, I'm just reading the rules as they're stated. It does kind of seem like if you broke the mirror that the woman is just on the other side of, that that might let her through somehow. I guess the idea is it would destroy the portal through which she might be entering your world.

Yeah.

But I would just leave. I don't know about breaking the mirror.

If it's not my home.

Yeah, that's true.

If I would just leave, it was like, oh, but if it was my house, I think I would have to go through the steps to make sure the house is clean.

True.

All right.

Well, there's one, there's only two. Sorry, there's two last ways this can go wrong. If you fail to maintain eye contact, which I'm terrible at, so this would be me.

Yeah, isn't there like a thing that's like, if you want to fall in love with someone, you have to like maintain eye contact and like ask a bunch of like these questions. And then at the end of it, it's like true love or not. Yeah, I would never play that game because of like a fear of intimacy is greater than a fear of ghosts.

Okay, sure. Fear of intimacy higher on the fear tier than ghosts. Great. Good to know. But I thought you were going to say, I didn't know this love questions game. I thought just the advice is that like when you're on dates, to maintain as much eye contact as possible because it shows interest and it's a strength thing. It's like a-

No, I don't go on dates, which is probably why I know about this other thing where it's like-

What's this love game?

I think I don't know. I read it once. It was something, some article that was like, here's 67 questions that if you looked into the eyes of another person and asked these questions by the end of it, you'll be deeply in love or hate each other. I don't know. I didn't get that far into it because I'm like, I'm not doing this.

We should do this.

We should do this in the show. But I'll look it up. If I find that it will be in the show, I'm sure someone listening knows exactly what I'm talking about.

I've never heard of this, but I'm sure it's out there. We covered failing to maintain eye contact, which us and all of our artistic listeners are probably going to fail at. Break the mirror immediately, vacate the premises, burn the card. If Lady Spades declines to grant your wish, break the mirror, blow out the candle, burn the card and hope for the best.

Wow, that's a good thing to teach people how to react to rejection. Oh, she said no? Lose your fucking shit.

Lose your fucking, yeah. Throw a goddamn fit and tell this bitch what's what.

Yeah, smash the mirror and be like, I'm fucking done with people. And it was like, oh man, yeah, just know there's plenty of fish in the mirrors.

It's already getting insanely hot in this room. Not only are we recording this live, we are recording this on the second hottest day of the year in LA, I think.

Yeah.

The second or third hottest, they've all been in a row.

Yeah, my Amazon Alexa just every single day was like, you have an alert and I'm like, what's up? I didn't order anything and it was like the national Weather Service says you're going to die.

I walked into my new place that I moved into and the thermometer on the wall just said zero two, which I think was a hundred and two. Yeah, yeah.

They didn't want to pay for that extra digit on there.

Holy shit.

But it was when I drove to physical therapy last week, the rental car said it was a hundred and twelve.

Oh my God. Yeah. Well, we do this for you, listener, because if we have the AC on, you'll hear the hum and it might drive you crazy. So we definitely drive Ed crazy, drive Ed crazy. So we're doing this. No AC, no fan locked in a very small room.

That's also why we don't do a video component to this show because we would just be fucking flop, sweat and gross.

Yeah.

All right.

So in all of these failed situations, you are not to attempt the ritual again ever. We aren't told why, but I assume if you do try again, you won't live very long or you won't live long. You have to find out.

Everybody gets one.

Everybody gets one.

But you don't know if it's like, hey, I went into a bathroom with Chris and his wife and a couple of friends and we're all going to try it and I'm leading it and I have the matches and I have the candle. Is that me burning my one chance or is everyone involved in that bathroom?

I do have to go in alone. I don't think there is anyone going in with you.

I'm not doing anything.

That's the whole idea. Did you think people play Bloody Mary in groups?

I honestly thought that sleepover parties, it was a bunch of boys or a bunch of girls or mixed group. They all went into the bathroom and tried to make it happen.

No, they send you in by yourself. It's a bullying thing.

Oh no. I thought this was a community that likes horror are going to come together to try and do fun. Because you do light as a feather in a group.

Yeah, but that's different. Bloody Mary is, well, I mean, maybe it's not a bullying thing, but it's scary because you're by yourself. That's the whole.

It's like seven minutes in heaven. This is seven minutes in hell.

Hell, yeah.

Well, at least seven minutes in heaven, you're with somebody.

Yeah. Also, I feel like girls in middle school probably play this game and are like, you know, they take it very seriously and they scare themselves. Boys in middle school, the second in that bathroom, they're looking at porn on their phone and beating off.

Today, not when we were, there was nothing like that when we were.

All right, so if you open your eyes during the summoning and everything is normal, save for the mirror being empty or the absence of voices, laughter or footsteps, the ritual is failed. There are no negative consequences for the ritual failing in this manner. However, it's still a good idea to repeat the words, lady spades disappear, wipe the mirror clean, blow out the candle and turn on the lights. Burn the card at your soonest convenience.

But in that version, it's all those things you do, but just the like, ba-da-da, da-da-da, like fuckin sad Charlie Brown and Chris music plays. You're just like, lady spade disappear. And you're like slowly wiping the lipstick away, like...

And then sadly leaving the house you broke into to try this, because you didn't want to do it.

You didn't want to haunt your own house.

So the man was like, who the fuck was that?

I don't know, he looked like Linus. He had a fucking blue blanket.

Yeah. Do not attempt to end the game between the statement of your wish and the woman's response. She doesn't like being interrupted. Which most women don't. Oh wow. It's rude and it happens all the time. I actually, it's a bad habit I've been trying to break. My writing partner is a woman and she pointed out to me that like, cause I know I interrupt people and I try not to do it, but it is definitely like, I think worse when men interrupt women cause women get interrupted by men all the time.

Our fans say I interrupt you all the time.

Not in the live show because we have to be careful that we don't step over each other.

So far we're doing a great job.

We're doing a great job. I should note finally that Lady Spades, we are told has a habit of sticking around. Even if the ritual is a success, it comes to the price. Again, what the price is, is left to the imagination here. Maybe she just wants to be a friend. Maybe you want a friend. Maybe this is a meat cube. Maybe it's a passion. Maybe there's a passionate murder-suicide in your future. Who knows?

That's awesome. It's good to have plans.

Life can be anything you make it.

It's a box of chocolates.

Yeah.

Poisoned booby trap chocolates.

The next mirror legend is called The Three Kings, which-

Look at a lot of card base.

Yeah, that's true, it's true. For my money, if you're to sleep over, it's probably more entertaining to watch the movie Three Kings.

I've done that at sleepovers.

Great movie. Great fucking movie, even though that's the movie that Clooney fought-

David O'Russell on.

David O'Russell on, yeah.

And also, there's some grizzly scenery in that. There's some grizzly stuff in that, like the bullet in the stomach stuff, the Marky Mark getting the oil in his mouth.

Yeah, it's a great movie, though. I mean, I don't know if you guys haven't heard the story. Three Kings is a 90s, a retro 90s movie. Came out in 99.

First Gulf War.

Well, it's about the first Gulf War. Yeah, and it came out in 99, and David O'Russell directed it. I don't remember. It wasn't his first movie, but he hadn't done- I think it was maybe his biggest movie to that point. And David O'Russell is like a notorious asshole. And there's a story that I think George Clooney himself has told that David O'Russell was screaming at crew members consistently. Like it was a thing that was happening time and time again. And Clooney stepped in and was like, come on man, like you can't-

You can't treat people this way.

Treat people that way. And I forget if Russell swung at him first or pushed him and then Clooney punched him or what, but yeah, they had a fist fight in the middle of the-

Which they say that is the reason why when footage was leaked of him screaming at Lily Tomlin.

Oh my God, yeah. On-

What the fuck is that gonna be called?

Not everything is awesome. Jason Swartzman.

Guy Pearce? No, no, Jude Law, Jude Law.

Guy Pearce, I think is in it. Jude Law, why can't I think of him? I heart Huckabees.

Yes. So I remember he, I believe years later footage was released. I mean, this is way before cancer culture and stuff, like footage was released of him just being monstrous to Lily Tomlin on that movie. And they say, they say Hollywood lore would have you believe that George Clooney is the one who got and like, exposed that footage because he was still pissed from the, from the movie.

Oh, yeah.

So that's, that's, I don't know, Hollywood, that's Hollywood lore.

That footage is crazy though.

It's insanely, it's upsetting.

David O'Russell, you guys should watch that footage. I mean, everyone has a bad day, sure. But he, I mean, he uses, he drops the C word on Lily Tomlin, who seems like the sweetest woman in the world. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, and I'm wrong. I'm looking at the cast list here and Guy Pierce is not in this movie.

No, it's Jude Law.

It's Jude Law, yeah.

Where him and Naomi Watts are like, you take your glasses off, there's glass between us or whatever.

Yeah.

There's a lot of great lines in that, like when Marky Mark and Jason Schwartzman are like running out of the building and they have to like sign in at the beginning, he's like, I'll sign you out. It's just like, I don't know, there's like really great moments like that. But anyway, we're not here to talk about David O'Russell.

No, we're here to talk about the Mirror Legend called Three Kings. Now this one-

We Three Kings be stealing the gold.

This one is a little bit more complicated than Bloody Mary and Lady Spades. It also doesn't promise that any particular demon or spirit will be conjured. And it's honestly, I think it's creepier than that because, well, you'll see.

Cause you don't get a wish.

You'll see. Well, you don't get a wish, but it just feels much more, I would say this is more the Ari Aster vibe mural legend to the Wes Craven, John Carpenter, Bloody Mary. You know, it's a little bit more in your mind. It's a little bit more, it feels a little more sophisticated. So here we go.

I love that.

I'm reading here from the Reddit post.

From the Necronomicon.

Yeah, I just started speaking in tongues. I'm reading here directly from the Reddit post that started it all. And the post, of course, is linked in the show notes. Here's what you're gonna need to pull this ritual off. A very large, empty and quiet room, preferably without windows. If windows exist, you need to be able to cover them and ensure total darkness. Basements usually work well if they're roomy enough. You'll need a pack of candles, though you'll only use one if all goes well, and a lighter. Get a bucket of water and a mug, a fan, three chairs, an alarm clock, an active cell phone, a small toy or deer object from your childhood, and last but not least, two large mirrors and a loved one who's good at following rules and loves you enough to go along with all of this.

Oh my God, it does need to be a roomy basement. They're not wrong.

It does need to be a roomy basement, yeah. I mean, you need some space for all that stuff.

I wish at this moment that I would never actually want to work at Amazon, but if I worked at Amazon in a way that I can see people's orders, and if you just saw two mirrors, a box of candles all in someone's cart and they bought it, I know what they're doing.

Yeah. Then you have their address, so you can probably go fuck with them.

Or do I got, yeah.

You start set up for Three Kings around 11 PM at night. Place one chair in the center of the room facing north. It's important that that chair in the center of the room is facing north.

I'm directionally inept. There's no way I get this right right away.

Get a compass. It's not that hard.

Oh, can I add that to the Amazon cart?

Yeah. Jesus. One magnetic compass, please. Place one chair facing north. Place the other two chairs exactly to the left and right facing your throne. The throne is the chair you put in the center of the room. The other two chairs are to the left and to the right of it facing your throne. The distance between your throne and that of your queen and fool, which is the other two chairs, should be about the length of your arm to each side more or less. Place the two large mirrors on the queen and fool chairs to the left and right of you facing you and each other. Try your best to have them stand at a 90 degree angle or else you may get more or less than three kings. If you sit on your throne facing straight ahead north, you should be able to perceive your own reflection in each of the two mirrors without actually having to turn your head nor your eyes to do so. If you see your own reflection in the corner of your eye just barely there, then you've done it right.

I love it. It's the same kind of wording like when you set up a video game where it's like, okay, lower the brightness until you can barely read the text. Yeah. Then you know this is how you play Call of Duty.

Yeah. That's pretty much what you're doing here just with mirrors in your basement and it's totally cool and normal. Don't worry about it.

Hey, have any family members who love me enough to listen to me, who are interested in calibrating shit in the basement?

Place the bucket of water and the mug in front of you, just barely out of reach. Place the fan behind you and turn it on. Don't set it to maximum power, medium or low is usually enough. Leave it on, turn off the lights, leave the door open and go to your bedroom. Set the candles by the side of the bed next to a lighter, your alarm clock and your cell phone, which you should leave charging. Set your alarm clock for 3:30 a.m., no thank you, immediately I'm out. Turn off the lights and sleep while holding your power object and get some rest. When that alarm goes off at 3:30 a.m., turn it off but do not turn on the light. You have exactly three minutes to light your candle, grab your cell phone and make your way to the dark room to sit in your throne. You should be seated by 3:33 a.m. And don't forget your power object.

So I'm sleeping in the basement at this point. There's no way I'm going down two flights of stairs at 3.30 in the morning.

No lights on. Well, you want to, I don't know if you can sleep in the bay. You probably shouldn't sleep in the room where this is happening, but it would be great if you could sleep adjacent to it somehow.

Yeah.

Check for potential red flags. So for instance, if your cell phone didn't charge for whatever reason, abort the mission. If the alarm didn't go off exactly at 3:30 a.m., abort the mission. If you find the dark room door closed, remember you left it open. Abort the mission. So if you're the loved one involved in this, just close the door and everybody's going to get more sleep. If the fan is turned off, remember you left it on. Abort the mission. Side note, if you have to abort the mission due to any of the above. Also, I don't know why they're calling it a mission.

Yeah, mission's weird. Yeah, we're not gonna go take out the head of ISIS.

Yeah. This is a SEAL Team Six experiment. If you have to abort the mission due to any of the above, leave the house of your loved one, go to a hotel or something, it says.

God, the money to play these games.

I know. There's no need to run. You have time to grab a jacket and your keys and whatnot, but leave. After 6 a.m., the coast should be clear. If all is going as planned, you can proceed and take your throne. So if the door is still open, the fan is still on, your alarm went off at the right time, go ahead. You sit on your throne. Do not look directly at either of the two mirrors beside you. Do not let the candle go out. The fan is behind you. You must protect the candle with your body, which is standing in between. There's a reason for this, as you will soon see. So you sit in your throne, you look straight ahead at the darkness, not at the candle, not at the mirrors, just straight ahead. Then this is, again, because I'm quoting here, eagle-eyed readers surely noticed, I didn't say during setup which chair was queen and which chair was fool. That's because it's your job to find out. And from their point of view, you are either their queen or their fool.

Oh, wow.

Hence, three kings.

Whoa, I don't, well.

So each mirror you is its own king with each other reflection serving as the queen or the fool.

But there's only two mirrors down there.

Right, but so there's three of you total.

Sure.

And each one of you, theoretically, is looking at the other two.

And each one thinks they're the king.

Yes. I won't spoil what happens next.

Oh, okay.

Thanks. Suffice to say, you won't be alone. And if you have questions, you'll get answers. Sometimes in the form of new questions. But hey, that's the story of humanity, eh? Just stay put and try not to move. Again, do not look directly at the mirrors nor the candle. Just straight ahead. Trust me. Don't chicken out either. You need to wait until 434. By 434, it's all-

That's an hour.

It's an hour.

That's an hour from when this started.

Yeah.

That's an unbelievable amount of time.

Stay awake.

And nothing presumably has happened. I'm just sitting here as a wall, stopping wind from hitting a candle. How long has this candle got to burn for a fucking hour?

Well, I think you get the tall ones.

It's at six feet tall, so crazy.

It's okay to tremble a little bit. Just try not to.

Don't fart, don't burp.

Not because it affects the ritual or anything. It's just a pussy thing to do while in polite company.

It says that?

It says that. Oh my God.

Redhead, get out of here.

Yeah, Jesus. Did I mention not to let the candle go out? That's what the fan's for. You're protecting the candle with your body, but if your body were to be suddenly moved, then the fan would turn off the candle. That's backup number one. Your loved one is backup number two. At 434, he or she has to come in the room and call your name. If that won't work, she has to call your cell phone. If that won't work, she has the glass of water and the bucket. She can't touch you though. That's a newbie mistake. Backup number three is your item of power, the toy or locket or whatever object of strength you brought along for the ride. It'll show you the way if shit hits the fan.

I have a question.

Yes.

So when it says if that won't work, it means that the person opens the door upstairs and is like, hey Chris, and if you don't respond, they then call your cell phone? And if you don't answer your cell phone, they then go downstairs with a bucket of hot piss and shit and pour it on your head.

Yeah.

Okay.

This is a great way to shoot right to the top of the fear tier very quickly.

Oh my God. You were my loved one. I trusted you. Why do you even have this hot bucket of piss and shit?

I've been making it for weeks. So multiple backups. They say you gotta be like a boy scout if you do these things. If you half ass it, half ass it all the way so that it won't work. Worst you can do is take it seriously enough for it to work and not seriously enough to be prepared for the consequences.

Okay, I guess earlier it said I'm not gonna spoil this for you. Do they never tell you what happens at the end?

No, you sit there for an hour. And I guess the implication is that there will be some kind of conversation over the course of that hour between yourself, the fool and the queen.

But at 430, no matter what's going on.

434.

Excuse me. Yeah, I'm already out. I can't use me as your guy. I'm fucked up.

Don't have Ed be your loved one. You're gonna get dragged through the mirror and he's gonna be like, fuck, it's six in the morning.

I fucking fell asleep. I was drunk. So that's kind of bullshit though. It's kind of like, I won't spoil it for you. I want to know exactly what I'm in for.

Well, yeah, I mean, I guess that's where. Also, I would say, bravo. This does feel like a Gen Z legend to do this.

Well, like the quiet quit on the story. They just gave up before it had an ending.

Well, I mean, it's just, it feels, I mean, I don't know. Millennials came up on Bloody Mary. It was very straightforward. It was very simple. This is like a whole complicated, it's like a TikTok dance in horror form or something.

Yeah, or like for Gen Xers and Millennials, I think the only way to see that level of complication is to build the board game mousetrap prior to this.

And we were like, holy shit, can you believe this thing?

No, let's just try and get the guy to flip into that thing. That's all we can do.

This is like these kids are so over stimulated and bored. They're moving mirrors into the basement and they gotta have multiple people involved and fans.

You will have a conversation with Skibbity Toilet or whatever if you do this.

Skibbity, skibbity, skibbity, skibbity. Yeah, man, I don't know. I mean, I think it would be kind of fun to do this. I wonder if we could do like, if we could do it at the same time and have like six kings or something.

I'm not doing this.

With the right arrangement of mirrors, you could have infinite kings. You could have infinity kings.

I don't...

Which sounds like a bad... I mean, if this does conjure anything strange, infinity kings is probably...

The last thing you want.

Yeah, it's the last thing you want.

There's not enough candles in the world.

No. But yeah, I mean, I don't know. But the reason I said this is kind of like the Ari Aster one is it does seem much more, it's much more complex. It's kind of nuanced, the whole like, you must be facing north and like the idea that you're gonna stare into the darkness and something's gonna happen, but you're not sure what. I don't know, it does seem, it seems like you could experience it in a way that feels very, like Bloody Mary is very black and white. When we were growing up, if you played Bloody Mary, she either showed up or she didn't. It was pretty, you might freak yourself out, but she either showed up or she didn't. With this, the whole idea is like, who knows what might happen? And as we will get to in a little bit, if you're sitting in the dark looking at two mirrors out of the corner of your eyes, something freaky is gonna happen.

Your brain's not good. The same brains that we've established in Hapman just have snakes in there. Everyone's giving the best, in the worst of opportunities slash best of opportunities, so much of society, a percentage of society will just see snakes. Yeah, there's no version which your brain's not gonna be like, I mean, if we're down here, I might as well fucking mess with you.

So I think that could be a fun one, but let's do one more. This one's called The Devil Game. Oh, good. A little bit more straightforward than these last two. This one was on the Creepypasta Wiki.

Oh, I thought you were gonna say Creepypasta Weekly, like it's like a time magazine.

This is on Creepypasta Wiki. It's short, it's to the point, and I think it might end up being the most potent of the three. So I'm reading from the Wiki here. At 12, 17 a.m. Oh, good. So again, staying up well after Ed and I have fallen asleep. At 12, 17 a.m. on any given night, arises the opportunity to awaken an alternate soul. The most common way of viewing them, through a mirror. It is through said medium that the process must take place. Okay, it's already contradicting itself here. It says, begin exactly at midnight.

So it's 12, 17.

It just said 12, 17. So I'm not sure what's going on here, but oh wait, I see. Okay, hold on. I forgot.

Oh, so it's you. And you want to be my trusted game player?

No, no, no, no, no. Listen, you'll see in a second. So it is at 12, 17 a.m. This can happen, but you have to start the process exactly at midnight. The whole thing takes time.

17 minutes.

Yeah. So begin exactly at midnight. By no light but that of a single candle, stand before the selected mirror. For 10 minutes, you must concentrate in silence, focused entirely on your reflection. Do not look away from the eyes, for it will be interpreted as weakness, and you will be overcome. After 10 minutes have passed, you must draw blood to smear in a line across the eyes of your reflection.

We had fucking Maybelline products or whatever, and now we gotta use blood?

Yeah, you gotta use blood. You have to draw a line across your reflection's eyes to blind it, and you will watch as your own features begin to warp in the mirror. Slowly, gradually, they will mutate into a frightening creature beyond the comprehension of those who have not experienced it. You must not look away through the entirety of the change. Soon, the writhing movements of the image will cease. By now, an echoing, inhuman sound will resound all around you. The creature will begin to ease toward the mirror's glass. You must keep watching as it approaches. If you do not extinguish the candle at exactly 1217, the creature will escape. Be warned, should you succeed through any polished surface, be it mirror, wood, window or Tron poster, that's what I was saying, yeah. your reflection will always be watching. So best case scenario, the Devil's Game just awakens an aggressive soul that watches you always.

I don't love that. But it's also, they say that like my grandpa's dead, but you know, he watched me score that touchdown. So we're always being, there's always the threat of someone watching you from the afterlife.

I guess.

I just watched Albert Brooks' documentary where he talks about mortality and stuff. It's weird he didn't bring his brother dying up at all, but that just happened recently. But he brought up a good point because they were talking about defending your life and stuff. And he was like, I don't know what's after we die, but I do hope I don't get to look back. Like he was being interviewed by, who's Carl Reiner's son? Rob Reiner.

Yeah.

He was being interviewed by Rob Reiner. He's like, I just know I don't want to be wherever I'm going and have the ability to be like, Rob's doing well still.

So he doesn't mind looking back on his own life. He just doesn't want to be able to look.

He doesn't want to be able to see the living anymore.

I see.

It would be too hard for him.

I was going to say, I'm pretty sure. I mean, it does seem like if there is one biological thing that happens when we die, it does seem like looking back on your own life is pretty baked in.

Yeah. I don't need to see that either, but I very much am in agreement with him of just like, God, how jealous you would be if you're stuck in wherever you're going.

Right. Although, if wherever you're going is cool.

No. Wherever we're going, we're going to be on the other side of mirrors, it sounds like.

Yeah. Waiting for someone to wake up at 12, 17 in the morning and knock on the window or whatever.

Which must have been a more interesting game in an age of having to plug in an alarm clock or we're having a watch or a pocket watch where now it's like, yeah, your iPhone is going to tell you the right fucking time. Like it's set to atomic time.

Yeah. Well, I wonder if maybe that's why some of these have grown more complicated as the gen, you know, for newer generations, because all of the, all of the mechanical, mysterious, tangible elements that used to be fallible or part of the experience are no longer.

Yeah, the gears stopped in the clock.

Yeah, like the details, the things that you need are all always going to function perfectly. So you need a more complicated legend to squeeze any creepiness out of it.

Do you remember, you can like call the bank and it would tell you the time and weather?

No.

Yeah, a lot of places. Yeah, it was like you would call and it would get, you would call this number and it would be, it would be like, the time at the tone is 1 14 p.m. And it was like beep. And so, you know, like at that moment, it's 1 14 or whatever. And the weather is, don't go outside. But, but like, yeah, that's, that's just interesting if like, that's the level of shit. Like in these games, it was like, and then you have to call the bank and you have to find out at like 1 14 p.m. And then you gotta open a safety deposit box and you gotta like bleed into it.

Yeah. We should start a game like this and it starts with wake up at exactly 4 a.m. Venmo Chris and Ed $100.

We should also.

Summon them into your mirror for a private podcast.

We should. God, just that we're on cameo, but exclusively in mirror form. I think it would be great if someone did write one of these things for, you know, people to do to play. And then like halfway through you realize that it's just making you a better person. It's like, okay, wake up at 6, make your bed, brush your teeth, check on the job application, you put in, blah, blah, blah. And it's like at the end, you maybe get a wish or something, but it's like, but if you don't get a wish, isn't it feel great to get home and go do a made bed or whatever?

Jordan Peterson's bedtime stories.

Oh, I would never. Don't bring him up. Don't summon him in a mirror.

So I haven't tried any of these games, especially The Devil Game. I'm not super psyched on the idea of awakening my alternate soul. It's not something I need in my life.

Two of those games had alternate souls, like The Three Kings or other versions of you.

Sure.

And The Devil Game was like a zombified Ash version of you.

But the zombified Ash in The Devil's Game, I actually have reason to believe will almost certainly work for everyone, at least in a way, because according to a 2010 study by Italian neuroscientist, giovanni Caputo.

Sure.

Love another grease ball in the mix here. If you stare at your own reflection in a dimly lit room.

Your eyes will become meatballs. Yummy fucking dance party.

If you stare at your own reflection in a dimly lit room for about 10 minutes, you'll start to hallucinate. Caputo's research published in the journal perception found that participants reported 66% of the time, they reported huge deformations of their own face. 28% saw an unknown person, and 48% saw fantastical and monstrous beings.

I'm not at all surprised by these numbers because when I was a kid, I would get scared. To this day, I hate thunder and lightning. And that's why I like living here, man. It doesn't happen. But I would get scared and I was like, well, can I sleep with you, Mom and Dad? And I would go in their bed and then I would always regret it because I would still be kind of up. They're adults. They're like, it's not scary. I'm going back to bed. And I always like fixate on either my mom or my dad's face, but it was in like a dark room. And without fail, that face would turn into like a Frankenstein or a demon. It would always just like morph into something that scared me more.

Yeah, it's bizarre. And I mean, I don't know if we can tell people to try this. Can we tell people to try this?

No, I think Sonic and Legends would say we shouldn't.

Okay, don't try this.

Our overlords, our fear of litigation overlords say that we aren't, whatever you guys are going to do, you guys, you do you, but we didn't say to do it.

The top of the fear tier for Scott and Forrest is getting a phone call from someone whose name ends in Esquire. So don't try this. Instead, just think about what it must be like. Pretty weird, huh? And it raises the question, though, why? Why if you stare into a mirror at your own face or if you stare at your parents' face or anyone's face in the dark, why do you see monsters? Psychology Today notes, quote, The answer lies in our brains penchant for selective processing. In simple terms, our brains can only handle so much information at one time. Right now, as you're reading this article or listening to this podcast, you probably aren't noticing the feeling of your clothes against your skin, the pattern of your breath, or any of the delicate sounds around you. Your brain simply turns a blind eye to these various stimuli to better focus on what it deems most important, right now, these words. Our sense of sight works no differently. When faced with an abundance of visual stimulation, only some of which are considered relevant, our brains will tune out the non-relevant parts.

Like our nose.

Like your nose, possibly your own eyes, your ears, whatever it says we don't need right now. This phenomenon is termed the Troxler Effect, discovered in 1804 by a physician and philosopher with a wild name, Ichnatz Troxler.

Oh my God. He was also just, is this a raptor in a lab coat?

He sounds like a guy who did most of his work out of an opium den, but he knew his shit. The effect named after him underlies many of the optical illusions you find on the internet. Staring at a red dot in the middle of a circle for long enough, suddenly the outside of the circle fades away and disappears and you just see the dot. It's because your brain has deemed the outer edges irrelevant and has lessened its processing burden by simply fading it out of our perceptual domain. The article continues, should one elect to gaze at a mirror into their own eyes for a significant period of time, it's possible that other areas of the face might begin to dissipate and blend into the mirror. Your face can suddenly look terrifying when, for example, your forehead starts to fade away or your cheeks morph into one large brooding mouth. In time, your entire face can become distorted and transformed into this terrifyingly mangled monstrosity. Worse, our brains like to fill in things they cannot recognize with things they can recognize, never mind if those things are scary. So your incomprehensibly distorted face might morph into a monster you once saw on television locked deep within the synaptic catacombs of memory. So there you go. Some people theorize the Troxler Effect is one of the explanations for why so many cultures have myths and legends about monsters lurking in mirrors and reflections and maybe in their parents.

Wow.

Wow.

I mean, Ingludius Troxler or whatever his name is. What a great guy.

Ignaz Troxler.

God, I mean, he must have been exhausting to be at a party with, but...

No, he's like, all right, come here, stare at this thing, let it fade out. Look, it's some scary monster.

It's a scary monster. But if you ask these 66 questions, you'll be in love or whatever.

Who invited Troxler?

It's fine, because we also invited the love guy. So don't talk all night about this.

The first man-made mirrors were pieces of polished obsidian, a naturally occurring volcanic glass. The oldest known manufactured mirror was found in Anatolia, which is modern day Turkey, and it dates to around 6000 BC.

Wow. Before that, it was just obsidian. And I guess like your reflection in a pond.

Yeah, pretty much. I mean, it must have been... This is where you start to understand where some of these legends would come from. Cause can you imagine? It's scary enough. Cause I've done the mirror thing, where you look at yourself in the mirror for a long time. And it is, it's bizarre. I mean, I've never like run away screaming or anything, but it's uncomfortable. I can only imagine 6000 BC staring into something and seeing your face mutate. Before there was anything else to do really, you know? Like you're hunting, you're looking at the sky, you're hoping that you don't freeze to death, and you look into a, you know, you get fascinated by a reflection because it's like a screen almost projecting stuff back at you, and you're looking into it for too long, and you turn into a monster.

Also, a majority of your day is candlelight.

Yeah, that's right.

You only have sunlight for however long, and then the rest of it's like, hey, can you give me a light that is wildly, it's organic, so it's wildly like imperfect and it's sustained, how much it throws light. So it's like you're looking at yourself, as it like whips around the light and like there's dark and shadow and it moves quite literally. And so you have to just be so crazy to, I don't know.

I'm sure it happened a lot.

Is it like the first TV set? Like, oh, you know, everybody, the Johnsons got a TV set. Like they're the first people in town. We should go over there and watch television. Do you think someone was like, we gotta get to whomever's castle to see their, yeah, go to the Urg's house and see Urg's castle, Eureka's castle.

It's starting to sound like a far side comic.

No, but I'm saying, for real though, like you'd have to go to like Eureka's castle and be like, you gotta come check out this mirror I got. I was like, how'd you get a mirror? It must cost you 10 billion shillings or whatever. And it was like, yeah, it's pretty wild. I'm gonna light this candle and we're gonna, you know, just look at each other all night.

You know where I bet it happened a lot probably is like, as the day was ending, if anyone ever was relaxing by a lake or a pond or something and kind of contemplating their own reflection as the ambient light goes down and you're looking at yourself for a while, I bet you had some people see some shit.

I bet.

You know?

Cause the water ripples.

Yeah.

And also like unlike a mirror, a fish can jump out and scare you. And I do like, I don't know. Also, it's gotta be a bummer. People just lying to you all the time being like, no, you're super handsome prince. You're the most handsome prince in town. And then he's like, oh yeah, everyone likes me cause I'm so handsome. And then, then you get a mirror and you're like, oh, I'm fucking ugly dude, this sucks.

Yeah, this is, I mean, and based on paintings, I mean, I guess we don't have any real sense of what people look like 6000 BC, but a lot of guys and girls in paintings from even like the middle ages, it's like, oh, that was the like Prince Charming?

Yeah, who was that?

Who was that?

The Habsburgs?

The Habsburgs are their own special case, but yeah, they have the Habsburg jaw, the inbred.

Yeah, what the hell are the kids today? They're doing all the maxing, something maxing.

Oh, the looks maxing.

Looks maxing. Like there were some people in dire need of looks maxing back then.

There was people in dire need of fucking people not in their bloodline.

Yeah, yeah, we have that to this today.

So yeah, I mean, I suspect for all of these reasons is why mirrors have played such a significant role in magical and occult practices across cultures and throughout history. According to one of the websites that we return to time and time again on this show, ancientorigins.net, quote, the priests of ancient Egypt used to practice spiritual purification rituals with the help of mirrors. Since it was believed that the mirror reflected the spirit of the individual through special techniques, an initiate could end up seeing his degree of spiritual evolution or decadence. In this way, a sinner would see in the mirror a distorted personal image, and he would then move on to the spiritual cleansing phase until he would only see himself reflected in the mirror.

Oh, interesting. It's like your problems are a self-correcting issue if you just use this mirror because it'll reveal to you what needs to be done. It's also very Harry Potter, right? They went in there and everyone saw what they wanted to see in that reflection of either that water or that mirror or what have you.

Well, I think it's super interesting because it speaks to the psychological implications of reflections as much as it does the supernatural. Because even if you don't believe that the mirror is showing you an independently sentient spirit version of yourself, it's certainly a surface in which we can ponder ourselves and our successes and failures and sins.

I don't see successes. I mean, knowing, not even for me, I'm saying, but knowing just humanity. No one's ever looked in a mirror and been like, this rules. I think every you know what I mean? Like I think most people look in a mirror and they're like, fuck, I hate under my eyes. I wish I where did my youth go? Like just so much stuff. I feel like you do find the worst in yourself. People I think are naturally defeatist. Yeah, they are not. So I don't think you're going to a mirror and finding like I remember the way out of this feeling.

I don't remember why I started doing this, but I would say in like, I was probably about 13 or 14. There was a-

Fever, she masturbating in the mirror.

No, thank God, no. No, when I was like 13 or 14, I started doing this thing where I would wake up in the morning and like, I, you know, I was bullied a lot and I was very uncomfortable with myself. And I started doing this thing where I would wake up in the morning and I would look in the mirror before I went to school because I had like a bureau mirror or a dresser mirror in my room and I would look at myself and I would just like put myself down so hard.

Oh, wow.

Like pick myself apart, be like, your ears are too big. You're like lip hair looks gross because I was growing in a mustache, but terribly. Like you're just like so weird and gross and awkward and I hated myself. And then I would come home at the end of the day and before I went to bed, I would look in the mirror again and I would like talk myself up. And I would be like, dude, you're great. Like, don't worry about it. You're cool. You can do this. And then I would do that. I mean, I don't know if I did it like every day, but I remember doing it a lot and I don't know if it was healthy. I'm not saying it's 100 percent.

I'm not a psychiatrist. I can tell you right now, it doesn't sound great. But well, it was better than maybe the positive reinforcement at the end helped.

Yeah, it was better than hating myself all day. You know, like there was always a period of time where I would give myself like a pep talk and then I would talk myself back down. And I don't really know where I'm going with this other than to say, I kind of feel like that's what the priests of ancient Egypt were doing. Like, yeah, looking at themselves and being like, these are all the things you need to fix about yourself.

And then I will say when I was younger, not that young. I mean, I did it pretty late. But I remember I would like redo interactions I had during that day in the mirror.

Yeah.

To be like, how did I come across these people earlier? And again, there's going to be so many people writing in in this episode being like, you both need professional help. No one else does this shit. But I remember, yeah, like in like probably high school age, you know, I would always do like a quick snippet to myself. Like, how did that come across when I went into that and talk to those people?

Yeah.

So yeah, as I'm saying, the mirror is not a great place. It sounds like we both used mirrors in the way that other people use journals. Where like you could just fill in your journal. Boy, today everyone was mean.

Yeah.

Probably my big ears.

Yeah. I mean, I think in the context of the, you know, scary stories built around mirrors, I think the thing that's really interesting about them is that it almost doesn't matter what you believe that you're looking at when you gaze at yourself, it's going to provoke a certain amount of self-reflection whether you think you're...

I mean, literally.

Yeah, literally. But it's, you know, whether you think you're looking at an alternate world version of yourself, or if you know that it's just the light bouncing back in your eyes.

But it is also bullshit because I feel like the mirror people have not gotten in a room with the camera people because I never look the same in the mirror as I do when I see a picture of myself at a party. And I'm like, Jesus, what a... God, I thought I was mean to the guy in the mirror. The camera people are going like, doing me extra dirty.

Yeah, well, you look when you look at yourself in a mirror, you're looking at yourself at eye level. Once you start moving that camera, especially a little bit lower, it's no good.

But it's like that with you hate your voice in the podcast. But I'm sure when you talk, you're like, wait, how does that... That's what I sound like. So the camera and the microphone are potentially revealing how other people see you in the mirror. It's just how you see yourself, which is, I guess, also positive because you're like, fuck, even if I'm mean to myself in the mirror, like, I always feel like I look in that mirror before I go out and you're like, this is the best you can do, Ed. That's fine, but I'm going out, aren't I? I've looked in the mirror and I've said, this will do, and then later in the evening, the next day you get the pictures, like, I should never have left. That did not do. The only thing I'm saying is that like, yeah, like mirrors and microphone, it's just weird if you just take two seconds to think about perception and no one's ever been like, hey, come take a look at this mirror with me. How do I look? You're just like, hey, how do I look? And the person says, that tie is great. You would never be like, hey, bounce us off a reflection of me to get, what do you think of the guy in the mirror? But you only have the guy in the mirror because you can't fucking see yourself. And so, listen, we're not on drugs. This is just-

This is the heat.

Literally the heat is killing us and I'm thinking out loud.

But there's a lot of interesting things there. I mean, I think that's, I think part of where I'm going with this too, is that I think all of this explains why so many mirror rituals are designed to ask for things or wish for things or receive divine information because I swear we're not on drugs. We're ultimately asking ourselves for these things. That's true.

Yeah, yeah, it does become psychological in that way. Like, fuck, save money on therapy. God knows we have. Just ask the mirror. I mean, even in, what is it? Fuck, it's Snow White or whatever. Whichever one is like mirror, mirror on the wall. Who's the fairest of them all. Like, again, we don't, there could be no witch there.

Right.

And you know what I mean? Like, you'd still maybe get the same error. And so, if you didn't think you were the fairest, you'd still be like, God, Jess, that bitch across town is the fairest, right?

Yeah.

Or if you're a narcissist, you'd be like, I'm the fairest.

Yeah. A lot of this ties into, I think, the practice of catropomancy, which is divination using a mirror. There is a whole Astonishing Legends episode on this.

Oh, wow.

You know it's the good shit. If you want the master's class, go listen to Scott and Forrest. They also probably pronounce it correctly.

Although they've probably done many episodes on things that end with mancy. Like necromancy, canop to Papatropolis, whatever Greek word we're trying to say.

The catoptromancy 101 explanation is that it was a popular form of fortune telling in ancient Greece and Rome. The idea was that by gazing into a mirror under certain conditions, I bet low light conditions, you can see visions of the future or communicate with spirits. According to Wikipedia, Pausanias, an ancient Greek traveler, described the practice as follows. Before the temple of Ceres at Patras, there was a fountain separated from the temple by a wall, and there was an oracle, very truthful, not for all events, but for the sick only. The sick person let down a mirror suspended by a thread, till its base touched the surface of the water, having first prayed to the goddess and offered incense. Then, looking into the mirror, he saw the presage of death or recovery, according as the face appeared fresh and healthy, or of a ghastly aspect. So, the idea was you'd offer the goddesses everything, dip this mirror into the water, and then you'd be able to see if you're gonna live or die or survive the sickness.

Which has come up several times, which is water is so often a conduit to the other side through the veil. And so, it's like, I've come to this shrine to this goddess, I need to speak to you, I gotta get this in water so that the goddess can like travel through that into the mirror. Just water is so present in so many of these things we talk about. But also, I would like to do mine at fucking noon. Like, I want it to be bright, beautiful light, as you've established, like dark, light, you know, it's easier to play tricks.

I feel like more people probably saw the ghastly pallor.

At noon?

No, in the dark cave or whatever in the Temple of Ceres.

In my mind, it was outside this fountain, but you're saying it's inside. You said it's separated by a wall.

There was a fountain separated from the temple by a wall.

That could be outside.

That's true. I guess it could be outside. But it was basically this whole practice is a precursor to what we call scrying in modern witchcraft, which is using a reflective surface like a crystal ball or a mirror to observe future events. And I wanted to touch on one of the most famous practitioners of scrying, a man named John Dee, who you might remember, last we heard from him, he was creating Super Spy Homunculi in our episode on Homunculi.

So he was from a long time ago.

Yeah, he lived a long time ago.

Okay, so it's not Miss Cleo.

No, no, no. John Dee was one of, I think, Queen Elizabeth's sorcerers. And he was, we talk about him in the Homunculi episode.

I'm sure I called him a charlatan then.

I don't, his name rang a bell and I went back and looked through the episodes and he was the guy who had created Homunculi to go spy on the queen.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so he's back because Dee's creation of Homunculi.

Dee's nuts?

Dee's nuts.

His creation of Homunculi got him another job?

No, his creation of Homunculi is but a footnote in a much wilder history. I want to read a part of an article about John Dee from Thought Company because this is he's one of those people that could be nominated for most interesting man in the world. John Dee entered Cambridge's St. John's College at age 15. He went on to become one of the first fellows at the newly formed Trinity College, where his skills in stage effects.

I've been to the library at Trinity College. It's amazing.

Have you been to the stage shows because John Dee invented them?

No, I'm sorry to interrupt. I treat you like a woman. But no, I have been to Trinity College and it's got a magnificent library.

What did you go for?

I was just there with Forte when we were in Ireland. This is Ireland, right? Yeah, so we were just there and just had time. Trinity College was there and I heard that they have this cool library with a bunch of like bus of famous thinkers throughout history or whatever and I was like, I'll check it out.

John Dee was probably in there.

Yeah, he probably had a bus. I didn't know him then. I didn't know his work with the Monoculai. But it also has a bunch of really like incredibly old manuscripts in there, where you can look at a book that was written in like gilded and gold and stuff from like, fucking, I didn't give you that. The second century, I don't know.

Yeah. Well, this is one of the reasons he gets to St. John's College at 15. He becomes one of the first fellows at Trinity, where his skills in stage effects of all things, earned him notoriety as a theatrical conjurer. So he was basically like an effects man.

Wow. He's fucking...

He's Tom Savini.

No, I was going to say he's mysterio from Spider-Man. He's got these homunculi working on all these levers behind the stage.

There is probably some John Dee in mysterio. In particular, John Dee's work on a Greek drama, a production of Aristophanes, who we also talk about.

Who wrote that ridiculous play that we had to read from? Yeah. Fuck that.

Actually, I don't know if this was the same play or not, but a production of Peace written by Aristophanes left audience members marveling at his abilities when they saw the giant beetle he'd created. The beetle descended from an upper level down to the stage, seemingly lowering itself from the sky. After leaving Trinity, Dee traveled around Europe studying with renowned mathematicians and cartographers. By the time he returned to England, he'd amassed an impressive personal collection of astronomy tools, map making devices and mathematical instruments. He also began studying metaphysics, astrology and alchemy. In 1553, he was arrested and charged with casting the horoscope of Queen Mary Tudor, which was considered treason. So like reading someone's horoscope or trying to predict the future of the Queen, I guess, was considered.

Yeah, because he might see an assassination in her future.

Yeah. Well, I guess whatever he read must not have come out well or she didn't like it. Because if it was great, I doubt he would have been arrested.

It'd be great if they're like, we're here. We have a warrant. I don't think I was like that back then. Yeah. But it was like, we have a warrant for your arrest. And then he just like throws a smoke bomb and like a beetle lowers from the ceiling. And he like goes out a window.

Dee was arrested and accused of attempting to kill Queen Mary with sorcery. He was imprisoned in Hampton Court in 1553. The reason behind his imprisonment may have been a horoscope that he cast for Elizabeth, Mary's sister and heiress to the throne. Here we go. The horoscope was to ascertain when Mary would die. The answer I imagine was soon, and which is why he was arrested for trying to kill her. He was released in 1555 after being set free and re-arrested on charges of heresy. And then in 1556, Queen Mary gave him a full pardon. When Elizabeth ascended to the throne three years later, Dee was responsible for selecting the most auspicious time and date for her coronation and became her trusted advisor.

Wow, could you imagine just like, do convicted criminals have as good a life anymore? Where it's like, oh yeah, I was in jail for, there's a lot of gaps in your resume, John. What was that about?

Again, this would be like if Tom Savini at some point, like convinced George Bush to like put him in his cabinet or something and then got arrested for making too spooky of a makeup effect or something and scaring him. And then thinking that Dick Cheney would be president and he would just send even higher or something. Or actually, you know what? No, the better way to say that is imagine if Dick Cheney had started as a makeup artist. I think that's maybe more of it. Okay, sure. Anyway, during the years that John Dee advised Queen Elizabeth, he served in a number of roles. He spent many years studying alchemy, which is the practice of turning base metals into gold. In particular, he was intrigued by the legend of the philosopher's stone, the magic bullet of the golden age of alchemy and a secret component that could convert lead or mercury into gold. Once discovered, it was believed it could be used to bring about long life and perhaps even immortality. And then there's this from livescience.com. Though Dee was a scientist and mathematician, his interests also swung toward the magical and mystical. He owned many objects related to astrology, divination, alchemy, and the exploration of demonic magic. Dee claimed that one of these objects, a purple crystal on a chain, was given to him by the archangel Uriel, along with instructions for making a philosopher's stone, which is the mythical alchemical marble that promised the gift of eternal life and the ability to turn base metals into gold. Dee also possessed a clawed glass, C-L-U-D-E, clawed glass, a black glass mirror kept in a sharkskin case, which is fucking badass.

Yeah, also, man.

Sounds like something if he lived in the present day, he would have done a lot of cocaine off of it.

Oh my God, dude. Yeah.

All his friends are like, you got that sharkskin around, man, that case?

Yeah, John, you have a really long pinky nail.

He used the clawed glass for, quote, peering into the future. And according to others, he used it for communicating with ghosts, angels and demons. What's really cool is that you can see this mirror on display at the British Museum in London or if you Google a photo of it. We still have it. It still exists. It's polished on both sides, almost perfectly circular. It measures about 7.2 inches in diameter and a half inch thick and weighs about 30 ounces.

Do you think he's the first guy to be like, we should cut up cocaine on mirrors? Maybe. I mean, probably was this like coke mirror.

This guy was into everything. A perforated square tab at the top of the mirror measures about one point three inches long and may have served as a handle. It is also strikingly deep, deep black. It's like staring into a void more than it is staring into a mirror. It's impressive and strange looking. And for a long time, the big question was where the hell John Dee get this thing? Because it seems like the sort of object he would have claimed Uriel gave him or the devil forged for him in the bowels of hell. But there's actually no record of Dee making any claims of where this thing came from. That didn't stop people from wondering. And in 2022, we got some answers. A geochemical analysis done using a portable X-ray fluorescence scanner enabled researchers to link the mirror's particular obsidian to Pachuca, Mexico, which was a popular source of obsidian for the Aztec people.

That's so far from ancient Greece.

Well, no, this guy wasn't in ancient Greece. This guy was medieval London.

That's still far from Mexico.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But not so far that you couldn't go over and enslave some people and bring their mirrors back. Copy that. The Aztecs used obsidian for medicinal purposes and viewed its reflective surface as a shield against bad spirits. The volcanic glass obsidian was also associated with death, the underworld and capturing the image and soul of a person. The Aztec god Tzcatlipoca, or smoking mirror, is frequently depicted wearing mirrors that allow him to see humans' thoughts and actions. In any case, this finding that they were able to detect through this high-tech reading that they did, indicated that the artifact was, in fact, Aztec, and not a copy made from European obsidian and indeed likely acquired the mirror after it was brought to Europe from Mexico, which is not surprising at all. I don't know, you know, I feel like the Brits have a long history of taking things for granted.

They have a real give-me-that attitude.

Yeah, they really do.

I mean, Brits did it here and then they became Americans. But yeah, like they're all about that give-me-that.

That's mine now. Yeah. Anyway, I wanted to end this episode on real life mirror phobias, because after hearing all of these stories, myths and legends, it's no wonder that some people have a fear of mirrors. But there is a much more human side to that fear as well. One that's got nothing to do with contacting the dead or stealing treasured artifacts from cultures that you see yourself as more advanced, even though you use mirrors to do basically the exact same non-scientific things that they do. Some people have an actual phobia of mirrors. It's called spectrophobia, which is a type of anxiety disorder classified as a specific phobia pertaining to mirrors and or the fear of what may be reflected in them. Individuals with spectrophobia may be extremely fearful of their own reflection, of the mirror itself, or of ghosts appearing in mirrors. What's interesting too is that this is one of two specific phobias associated with mirrors, and it does seem to be that there's some overlap, but while people with spectrophobia are afraid of what they might see in the mirror, their condition is considered different than isopterophobia, which is the fear of one's reflection. In the case of spectrophobia, some definitions include the fear of one's own reflection, other definitions exclude that.

Because that's probably a totally different phobia.

Well, that's what it is.

That's a who me phobia?

Yeah. In any case, according to an article on ecounseling.com, people with spectrophobia will avoid mirrors in other reflective objects at all costs. This condition may, unsurprisingly, negatively impact their social lives. One can avoid seeing mirrors in their own home, but once you're out, you have to go through extreme tactics to avoid seeing one. These people may experience symptoms simply upon the mention of a mirror.

Oh, wow.

Some will not use any items made of glass out of fear they might see something reflected off that item. When they find themselves in a room with a mirror or they see what appears like a reflection from a mirror, they will experience symptoms of anxiety like sweating, shortness of breath, dizziness, increased heart rate, upset stomach, irritability, and fatigue.

That's a tough lot in life.

All of which are things I think we're feeling in this room right now.

No, yeah, we're dying. We're fucking dying. But at least there are no mirrors in here.

There's no reflections.

So we can't see just how wet we are. I mean, I can see how wet you are. You can see how wet I am.

We are drenched.

Drenched.

But we're getting to the end of this episode because I didn't want to... So, Spectrophobia and I...

The end of the episode is gonna be the sound of our two bodies slumping over and then like Anna dragging our bodies out of the room.

I wanted to try to find a first-person account of Spectrophobia or Aesoprophobia because it is very rare and it seems almost like... Not made up, but there's not a lot... Like I wanted to read a first-person interview with somebody who's like, I experienced this.

And the quiz is a real question. This is not a joke. This is a person we realistically couldn't even interview over Zoom because they would see their own reflection through the... Yeah. I mean, it's not, again, their reflection, but it's a digital version of a mirror, basically.

So I did find an article about a man living with this phobia, and it's basically as terrible as it sounds. I'm reading here from Metro UK, headline, Man Who Hasn't Looked at His reflection in Months Opens Up About a Phobia of Mirrors. Steven Gillatt, 40, lives with a phobia of using mirrors. The debilitating fear started four years ago, around the same time he had a mental breakdown.

Oh, wow, late stage mirror fear.

Yeah, possibly connected to him having a mental breakdown. It doesn't go into detail about why he had a mental breakdown, but the article says it's not essentially the mirror he's afraid of, it's his own reflection. So this would be categorized by some as isopterophobia and not spectrophobia.

Isopterophobia sounds like it really could be born of some of these games we talked about earlier. We're like, depending on how those went, you might now think like, my reflection, these other two kings are out to kill me. Like, it's crazy that no one else here knows that. Don't you look at the fucking mirror, dude, because they are kings, there are kings and they're coming. And it's like, yeah, because that could have been the result. Like the breakdown could have been a result of like, I didn't blow the candle out fast enough. And now he's like just avoiding his reflection. And so because it's pretty late in life to all of a sudden have a phobia.

Well, this says, Stephen will go months without peering in a mirror because he cannot bear to look at his face.

Dude, fucking preaching the choir, bro.

This doesn't just affect him when he's getting ready in the morning. If Stephen goes to get his haircut, he will keep his eyes shut throughout. And I will say there's photos of Stephen in the article. One taken of him looking into a rearview mirror, which makes me question how afraid of mirrors he is and how much he wanted to get paid to rewritten about.

Yeah, you're doing this to be a star. Don't worry about it.

But I will say, Stephen, if you're hearing this, you're a totally good looking guy. Your hair looks fine. Open your eyes, man. It's all good. He's shockingly well put together for a guy who doesn't... I thought the pictures were going to be of a wild man. Hair down to his ass and long yellow teeth. He looks like a regular guy.

Shit, dude.

Walking past large windows when shopping is a nightmare, as all large reflective surfaces make him feel uncomfortable. Steven tells metro.co.uk, Quote, I rarely use a mirror to do my hair. It's short, so I just leave it how it is or put some wax on my hands and just rub them all over my head.

No, I think they call like hair gel wax there. I think they call like pomade wax.

No, I'm having the idea of him just not looking in a mirror, just like rubbing wax and gel all over his head.

Or it's the wax he used from the fucking candles to look into the mirror games.

He says, I rarely know what I look like when I go out. I just get dressed and ask my wife or my eldest daughter, they're both honest with me.

People are, they have a fucking, he's got a whole life.

He's married and he has a kid and he never looks at himself.

I mean, I guess maybe the kid and the marriage were prior to a mental breakdown and in a late onset mirror show.

So this is his quote about mirrors, not using them doesn't directly affect me, but using them does. It's actually easier when I don't use them. So unless I absolutely have to, I won't.

Like for the photo for this article.

Yeah, yeah. I envy there's a gun just out of frame. Look at the fucking mirror, Stephen. I envy people who can just use mirrors for aesthetic purposes to just see how they look and if they like it or want to change it. When I look in a mirror, I see an unsuccessful, emotionally ugly person. I don't see my physical features. I just look straight through them to which I see. Well, here, let me finish the quote. I see my failures as a son, husband, father, brother and friend, my inadequacies, how I've hurt people, how I've let them down and how much I loathe and hate myself for doing all of this.

Sounds like Little Chris.

Yeah, sounds like Little Chris. Also sounds like those Egyptian priests we talked about. Yeah, like this is a long line of people who have done this sort of self loathing and and flagellating in mirrors. He also says it has links to death anxiety too.

Oh, it's the, well, this is the time-honored dance of the self-deprecating.

Yeah, Stephen says that looking in mirrors makes him panic about his mortality. It's a reminder that he won't always be able to look into a mirror and see himself, that he'll eventually be gone. Eventually, it'll be just darkness and oblivion, he said. It triggers lots of things in my head. I have a lot of invasive, uncontrollable thoughts, and when I look into a mirror, they are triggered. I mean, honestly, Stephen, if the other thing you could do here is just start a metal band. I think like everything you're saying sounds like a deathcore lyric, just like a guttural, eventually, it will be darkness and oblivion.

Yeah, and you can grow your hair out long to cover your face. You don't see your reflection and wear like kiss makeup.

Yeah. Stephen also hates having his photos taken as he hates seeing himself on camera. So, extra fuck you to the photographer who put him in this article.

Double whammy.

Yeah.

I gotta get a picture of you looking into a mirror. Excuse me? Excuse me? You want me to go fall into the deepest depths of despair?

He adds, I wish I could just look in a mirror and think, my hair looks ridiculous, I'll change it. Your hair looks great, Stephen. Stephen is currently not receiving any help for his phobia. He was in therapy for a couple of years and talked about it during some sessions, but he still lives with his phobia intensely. And this is a man who has access to free health care.

Yeah, that's true. That's true.

Get to it, Stephen.

Unfortunately, also has access to a family, who most days must be like, fucking Christ, just let's just go without talking about mirrors for one day.

Stephen says, quote, the problem comes from deeply embedded feelings of low self worth and self esteem and to an extent, self loathing.

The student needs a glow up. He does need a glow up, but he has to look in the mirror to acknowledge it.

If the Fab Five from Queer Eye or let's do this, get over there. Let's do Queer Eye UK. Number one, Stephen. Yeah, absolutely, dude.

Don't put him on British Bake Off. It'll only become crippling problem for him. We got to get Queer Eye over there. And we got to save a life today.

I think we can. He says, I've formed these feelings and views of myself over decades. So it might take that long for me to truly displace them. And to be honest, living without mirrors isn't that bad once you get used to it. I've had so many challenges, self harm and suicide, addictions, problems with sleep, eating and body image to mention a few. So I've not really talked about it. I've written a memoir about fatherhood and mental health called Mad Sad dysfunctional Dad.

That's really good.

Which will be published, I hope at the end of April or early May, and I talk about it a lot in there. It shows in more detail how my daily routine and emotions can be affected by both using and not using mirrors and how debilitating it can be. I've not met anyone who lives with this phobia and could not find anything on the internet in terms of a number of people in the UK living with it. I feel it's met with maybe not disbelief, but a difficulty to empathize. It's very complex and I can see why people might find it difficult to get their head around, so to speak. The more concerning aspect is the stigma that still exists around mental health and mental illness. I think people are still scared of it and a lot of this is down to a lack of understanding, misinformation and the way it's portrayed and sensationalized in the media, especially films and news coverage. I think there he's speaking about mental health and mental illness and not fear of mirrors, but you could argue that both are sensationalized in films.

Yeah, it's 100%. Keepers Sutherland's Mirrors.

Yeah, that will be on the Scared All The Time watch list when we finally start our live watches.

Or any of the Schlock Mirror Mirror movies. There's like, I think, three or four of them.

Steven sees a way of battling his phobia, especially because he's become so used to never using mirrors. He says, I'm not sure I'll ever use mirrors on a daily basis again, but it's like anything. You learn to live without something and the more you do, the easier things become.

Well, I can't wait to see you at the- I have nothing to say to Steven. I don't know, because now I feel like, he was like, no, people don't take me seriously. I'm like, we did laugh a little bit during his story. It's not that we don't take him seriously and that not empathetic to his plight, but it really seems like a person who is incredibly well aware and attuned to what they believe to be inadequacies in their life, and they're kind of blaming a mirror for it. Because like you said earlier, mirrors can be psychologically, like they're just reflecting back on us, and it's both a physical manifestation or representation, but also from that, you can pierce that physical thing and see, like I said, using it as a fucking journal. It seems like he's using it as a journal, and then literally journal into a book he's publishing.

Yeah. So, I mean, I'm-

Is there anything like good on Stephen for discovering himself through his hatred of mirrors?

I mean, yes, we joke about it. I feel like I doubt Stephen will hear this, but if he does, I should say that, I mean, this is clearly a very difficult thing, and we're not, we don't mean to cut you down. We all live with shame and stuff, but to me, this sounds like a pretty much a, he uses a lot of words to say it, but it's a man who is filled with shame over something, and it's just easier to literally never look yourself in the eye.

Or, yeah, yeah. Did they say, how do you look yourself, how do you look at yourself in the mirror? People say when they wanna cut deep, but they're just like, you profited off the kids getting sick, and you're making all this pollution from your factory, Mr. Bigwig, how do you look at yourself in the mirror? How do you sleep with yourself at night? And so, yeah, you're probably right. He's probably got, he might own a giant corporation, who's been dumping toxic waste in kids' backyards.

If Stephen hadn't run the AIDS factory for 30 years.

Oh my god, I mean, if Stephen didn't lose all those kids on his chocolate factory tour.

He'd be a little bit more capable of looking himself in the mirror.

All these oompa loompas got fucking sucked into a ceiling fan.

So Ed, after all this talk about ghosts, demons, scrying, communication with the dead and intense self-loathing, where would you place the fear of mirrors on our fear tier?

Oh, on or off of drugs?

Let's just go with off.

Off of drugs? I have a lot of Stephen issues, like we all do. I don't think we see our best selves when we look in the mirror, and that is, I think, a universal issue. But I'm not afraid of mirrors, but I am afraid of things in my peripheral. And so if I'm, you know, I don't want to get graphic, but if I'm murdering someone, I'm just kidding. If I'm like taking a piss or something, the way my bathroom is set up, that the toilets in front of me and the mirrors to my left, it would not be uncommon for me to like whip my head to the left and think I saw a movement, but it was just out of the corner of my eye, my own peripheral. Like I would see it probably just me. And you know, I have, and this is more movies did it to me, but if I'm getting something out of my medicine cabinet and I go to close the medicine cabinet again, there's always that split moment where I'm like, is something gonna be behind me? So yeah, it is, it's a trickster. It's a trickster material.

It's somewhere in the middle of the fear tier for me. I mean-

Oh, I forgot to give it a number. Yeah. I would say middle, middle, little less than middle.

Yeah. It's not as a-

Hall of Mirrors would be higher.

Okay.

Like if I'm in a place, it's all mirrors.

Yeah.

And I'm now lost because of what mirrors have done to me, then it's higher. But I think just a mirror.

A mirror is middle of the road for me unless I'm having to shower in one of those hotels where it's just like the giant mirror across from you.

Oh yeah, yeah. That's not a pretty sight.

That's a much higher amount of fear, dear. When you turn around and you're tired and you get a- it's like accidentally turning the front-facing camera on when you're not expecting it.

Oh my god.

And you see yourself just like haggard looking and not great.

80% crone at that point.

Yeah, it's a middle of the road fear for me. It's definitely creepier that I gave it credit for before researching the episode. But yeah, I mean, we should- I'd be curious. We'll maybe dig around, do some research on this. Closing medicine cabinet mirrors spooks me a little bit because of movies.

Yeah.

I wonder what the first medicine cabinet scare was.

In a movie.

In a movie.

I'm sure it's findable.

I'm sure it's findable. We'll have to look it up. medicinecabinet.com But here's a positive fun fact to leave you with. In some cultures, mirrors are actually considered protective. In Feng Shui, for example, mirrors are used to deflect negative energy and to expand spaces. So that mirror in your bedroom that you didn't break when you failed at Lady Spades may not be a portal for ghosts at all, but it could be a shield to keep the rest of the restless spirits at bay.

Or to suck things into like a fucking Superman, where they put him into that shard of glass. Not the negative zone in Superman. It's called something else. The Phantom Zone. It's called the Phantom Zone. But like, yeah, it'd be good if you can suck people into a mirror.

Yeah, that would be a fun power to have. I'd take that power.

Yeah, toss motherfuckers in mirrors.

We didn't even touch on Candyman. There's so much more mirror stuff we could...

We are very unlikely that we'll do a part two on mirrors, but we'll happily talk to people more about mirrors.

About mirrors, that's true.

And we didn't... Well, we didn't... I was going to say we didn't touch on like Sitting Shiva or anything where they cover the mirrors, but that has nothing to do with... That, I believe, is about keeping your focus on your grief and on the day and not having it be about you or a distraction. And so it's about the person who has passed and staying with your grief.

Right.

So I don't believe it has anything to do with like scary stuff. But I'm sure someone might mention it, so I'm just bringing it up.

Yeah. Well, until next time, from a very hot room in Los Angeles...

Oh my god, so hot.

I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm melted.

And this has been Scared All The Time. And we'll see you next week.

See you guys.

Bye.

Scared All The Time is co-produced by Chris Cullari and Ed Voccola.

Written by Chris Cullari.

Edited by Ed Voccola.

additional support and keeper of sanity is Tess Fiefel.

Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew.

And Mr. Disclaimer is ****.

And just a reminder, you can now support the podcast with Satt Premium and get all kinds of cool shit in return. Depending on the tier you choose, we'll be offering everything from ad free episodes, producer credits, exclusive access and exclusive merch.

So go and sign up at scaredallthetimepodcast.com.

Don't worry, full Scaredy Caps welcome. No part of this show can be reproduced anywhere without permission. Copyright and Astonishing Legends production.

Good night.

We are in this together.

Together. Together.

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