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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, this All Hallows Eve, the best day of days, we're going to celebrate by carving a path through the bizarre history of Jack O'Lanterns. And that's not all we've got lined up all of flickering and glowing on the Scared All The Time front porch this evening. In addition to the wild myths and legends that grew into what we know as the modern-day Jack O'Lantern, we've lined up an entire patch of pumpkin-based crimes to talk about. Plus, if you trick-or-treat with us tonight, we're gonna drop the story of some of the strangest, grossest candy ever produced into your pillowcase. So crack your candy and get ready to get scared, because it turns out the history and mystery of Halloween pumpkins is as strange as anything we've ever covered.

What are we scared? When are we? Now it is time for Time for Scared All The Time.

Hey everybody, welcome back. A special welcome, special shout out to anyone who just discovered us listening to Sinister Hood or The Y Files. We're happy to have you hanging out here with the rest of the Scaredy Cats. If you like what you hear, you want to get access to some bonus material, some live stream shows that we do and exclusive merch, head on over to patreon.com/scared all the time to sign up for Scared All The Time premium where it's always a good time. And speaking of which, we'll be announcing a date for our live show this month in a few days. So keep an eye out for that. Those shows have been crazy fun. And I've got a lot of updates and articles that I can't wait to share with you guys this month. So eyes open, you'll get an email. We'll post everywhere. You'll know it's coming. The question will be, will you join us?

Yeah, it'll probably be. If you're with us in real time, then you know this week is insane. Like we're dropping a ton of shit. We're filling up your goody bags. We want this to be a really fun anniversary in Halloween. So the live show might very well just be like keeping that week going.

Yeah, it'll probably be next week because for now we are in the death throes of October, which is the month that we premiered this show almost exactly one year ago on October 19th, 2023, the day before I got married. So I was just having anniversary after anniversary a few weeks ago. And Ed, in the meantime, has been putting the finishing touches on a whole bunch of special episodes that if you didn't see the posts about them yesterday, oh baby, are you going to see them today? You're going to hear about it right now. We dropped our crossover episode of Midnight Library yesterday, and we're dropping this episode, your weekly episode for you today. And then we are dropping three anniversary episodes over the next three days for free, because we love you guys for sticking with us for this long. So enjoy your goody bag, enjoy the candy. It's going to be a very happy Halloween on Scaredy Cat Street. And we can't wait to see what you guys think of what we've got lined up for you. Before we get into five-star reviews, I also just wanted to mention that I know we deviated from our October schedule that we announced.

Yeah, but luckily we only posted that like pretty deep into the weirdest parts of the web. Like I couldn't even find it to fix it. So it's fine, like no one saw that schedule, don't worry.

Well, listen, I just want to say, I feel like we brought up the Snuff Films episode that it's coming, that it's going to be on the calendar and it was on the calendar. And we had some people say they were excited for the Snuff Films episode. So I just want to say, it is still coming, it's going to be worth it. It turns out I actually know a guy who has been researching the world of Snuff Films for years, for a documentary that he's been working on. And so he's not only helping to put the episode together, he's going to come guest on it as well. So he sent me some of the information already. And oh boy, oh boy, it's stuff that you're not going to find on the Internet, folks. So it's going to be a really interesting episode.

It'll likely be our last episode, so it was nice doing the show while it lasted.

Yeah, it's an under research topic in the sense that it is-

Impossible to research.

It's truly impossible to research, but it's also just like an urban legend that is one of those tantalizingly, everybody has heard from a friend of a friend that one of these things exists on the Internet somewhere, or back in the day on tapes. And I don't know, it's a really crazy legend that I think is very genuinely scary.

It's worth doing an episode about, it's pretty fun. It's not fun, you know what I'm saying.

It's not fun, you know what we mean.

You know what is fun? Halloween, and this is a Halloween episode.

Yes it is, and before we get into the fun of Halloween, we're gonna do some five star reviews. You know Five Star Review Corner, you write us a good five star review, we're gonna read it, well, we might read it on the show, and if you find a way to sneak Scared All The Time into that five star review that's not just saying the name of the show, then we will put that review to the top of the list. So the first review we're gonna do today is titled New Found Boogie Man, Five Star Review from Fatboy Lucha, and he says, scared of things I never knew thanks to this podcast, love the dynamic between Ed and Chris, all the episodes have been great, but never felt the need to comment until now. Mentioning the greatest of all boogie men from the real Ghostbusters, which still gives me the creeps, and New Found Glory, one of my all time favorite bands, cemented it. The guys know what's up. Yeah, we do. When you read this, go back and read the first word from every odd sentence from my sneaky plug. Time was due to write the Five Star Review for Five Star Corner. And sure enough, if you go back and read the first word from every odd sentence, it says, I am the Zodiac Killer.

Does it really? No, I didn't hear any of those words in this review.

No, it says Scared All The Time. So thank you, FatboyLucha, for leaving a Five Star Review and sneaking Scared All The Time into it. Great job. We love you. Thanks for leaving the review. Ed, what is your Five Star Review?

I have a Five Star Review here from the original ALHatman. So I don't know how old this username is from a couple of weeks ago. And it says, the subject is from casually interested to fully intrigued. And the body of this review says, great show. Chris brings the energy of a hyperactive 12 year old voracious reader. While Ed's energy is that of Chris' drunk uncle, who's either too intoxicated to stand up and leave or just has nowhere else better to be. Okay? Sounds weird, but it works. Their genuine friendship and combined wit makes listening to a couple of moderately educated dudes talk about flesh-hitting bacteria for an hour and a half an enjoyable experience. Thanks to Chris and Ed for making my Thursdays a bit better. I'm glad it was at least a bit. It's signed the original Astonishing Legends hat man, and then in parentheses it says, go listen to the last two minutes of Astonishing Legends, John Titor and other time travelers episode for context. He finishes it with, this is a joke for no one, close parentheses. If you've listened to our show, then you know that we love jokes for no one. We make them all the time. So thanks so much for the review. And can't wait to go listen to the first, is it the first? The last two minutes. We'll listen to at least the last two minutes of that episode. We'll give it a shot.

Perfect. And I will, I'll just add in there that the secret to the show is that secretly, Ed and I are both the drunk uncle. I do have the energy of a voracious reader, but we like to have fun while we're recording, so.

True.

And then did we have one more?

We usually do three.

All right. This five star review comes to us from Ichi8564, titled Fantastically Gross. As a long time listener of Astonishing Legends, I was stoked to hear about this podcast. I started listening from day one, and I wait with baited breath for each new episode. I've never been one to think or worry about the heinous scary stuff in life, but this episode has changed my life for the good and the bad. I'm grossed out and laughing at the same time. I love every episode and look forward to every future episode. My sister didn't really listen to podcasts and she absolutely loves you guys after I introduced her. You make learning gross and fun, so thanks for that. You're welcome.

All right.

That's what we're here for, man.

I wonder what episode that was. It's got to be Flesh Eating Bacteria, right? Yeah, mid-October, so yeah, probably.

Yeah, we got a lot of five star reviews right around the time of Flesh Eating Bacteria. That episode is the one my buddy, Ellie, shout out Ellie, still can't listen to Flesh Eating Bacteria because it's his greatest fear, so.

Now we know why, now we know why.

Yeah, as we always say, if we do the show right, there will be one episode that every person can't listen to.

That's true.

It'll be different for everyone, but there'll be one that they go, no thanks. And you know what, don't feel bad, that's fine.

Because there's a lot of podcasts out there where you just say no thanks to the whole podcast, so we'll take it if it's just one episode. And before we head into the episode, just wanted to say a few more things. One, for the international button of the month people in Scared All Time Premium, we're doing quarterly shipments, we've decided, so a bunch of you are ready for your buttons. So I'll be reaching out to you guys in the next week or two to solidify the proper way to format international addresses and stuff. So anyone who's been waiting on those, it's happening. It's fucking happening finally. And lastly, speaking of Jack O'Lanterns, the topic of today's episode, Chris, are you gonna be carving any yourself this year? Did you carve any?

My wife and I are carving some pumpkins today, actually. It's gonna be totally traditional style, two triangle eyes, a couple triangle mouths, nothing fancy. I have no artistic skill in that realm. So are you carving anything?

I'm gonna carve pumpkins tomorrow when everything's on sale. And I can get some cheap ass pumpkins because I might try some of those kind of wild, hard to do shading ones. And so if I have a couple of duds, I'm fine with it. But speaking of wild, hard to do pumpkins, send us in your pumpkins. If anyone carves some cool shit, send it over. We'd love to see it.

We'll do Instagram stories. Send us email or whatever, and we'll put a bunch up on Instagram.

Yeah, email us or add us somewhere, and we'll definitely post your, we'd love to see everyone's pumpkin decorations. That'd be awesome.

Yeah. So with that, happy Halloween, everybody. I hope you have a great, high, holy Halloween, and we will see you in the episode. So I guess right off the bat, Ed, first big question to answer, are we afraid of Jack O'Lanterns?

No.

No, not really. Not enough. I'm gonna cross the street to avoid one way.

No, I think unless it's a top, a headless horseman, I don't think it's a problem.

No, I would, if I see a Jack O'Lantern, I actually will probably cross the street to see it more closely, because where there is a grinning pumpkin, there is probably gonna be some Halloween mischief not far behind. And as you know, if you listened to this show last year when we were just getting started, it's Halloween, which means I'm back home at the same place I am every Halloween in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Hershey is not just the chocolate capital of the world. It's one of the best places on earth to go trick or treating. And honestly, I don't even think it's really because of the candy factory. They never did anything special for Halloween. It's more just suburban and cute. And while not every street goes all out, there are a few streets near the center of town where my mom lives that are incredible. They have home haunts, giant homemade monster displays, and hundreds of carved pumpkins set out to crank the Halloween mood to 11. Last year, there was even a silent Michael Meyers guy, like a guy dressed as Michael Meyers and like the new Halloween Michael Meyers, like new version mask stalking around. And he honestly made me want a little too hard cause I took some pictures of him. And as I was taking them, I had a real, this could be the real Michael and no one would know moment.

Well, yeah. I mean, how many schlock movies have you seen where so often there's a costume party?

Yeah.

Like it's either at a school or at a, at their place of work, at a dance, just something where we can put the killer in a mask.

Yeah.

That like, we don't know who the killer is at this party. And yeah, no one's expecting, it's like, it's a terrible witness account.

Yes.

You're like, oh, fucking a pirate stabbed her. There's 30 pirates here.

Yeah. Well, this, this guy was really, I mean, he was doing nothing, which is also the best way to be Michael Myers, which just walk and don't talk and don't let anyone get too close to you.

And he didn't have a kid or anything. He wasn't accompanying anyone.

He would just stand on a corner for a while and watch people and then he would move.

I kind of feel like that's tough, right? Because it's Halloween and you want everyone to have a good time and let their freak flag fly on the one day a year, you really can. But at the same time, I'm also like, I'm calling the police.

Yeah.

I don't want to be like a Karen about this, but you don't have a kid here. I don't know who you are. You won't talk, you're being fucking weird.

Yeah.

And I know this is the night to do it and you're cosplaying as a silent weirdo, but fucking move it on down the road.

Yeah, you gotta adjust. One of my favorite things about going home is that the street near where my mom lives gets a good amount of trick or treaters. And so one of my favorite things is waiting by the door with a bowl of candy and actually doing the handing out of the candy to kids. And I make sure that depending on what kid I find when I open the door, I kind of adjust my level of spookiness for the kids. So if I open the door and it's like young kids, I just do Happy Halloween. And if they're older kids, I'll try to find something weird to say or, you know.

And if they're over 18, I'm just going to pull out a gun.

Yeah, shoot them dead. Out of the bowl of candy comes like a nine millimeter trick or treat motherfuckers.

And I'll be like, what are you doing here?

You're 31 years old. Anyway, point is, there's no better way to celebrate Halloween on this podcast than to take a tour through the ancient, twisted history of the seemingly harmless Jack O'Lantern. There's something about that grinning face carved out of a pumpkin that is just, I don't know, they can be eerie. I think maybe it's something about giving kids knives and helping them carve the slimy guts of a pumpkin out of it and then giving it a new face and putting it on display. There's something very primal and tribal about it. And while Jack O'Lanterns aren't really particularly scary in real life, they have become a sinister symbol that's been repurposed in pop culture as a catch all for Halloween nightmares. There's the opening shot of John Carpenter's Halloween that's just a slow track in on a flickering pumpkin. There's a sequence in my other favorite Halloween movie, Trick or Treat, that revolves around pumpkin carving. I remember there was a Goosebumps book called Attack of the Jack O'Lanterns. Though I don't really remember anything about it.

It's like Killer Tomatoes, but more festive.

Ed, you might know more about this one. Obviously, there's Green Goblin and his pumpkin bombs.

Yeah, which I have one here, too, actually, from my time working in Hollywood.

That's awesome. Well, this is what I really want to know if you know. There's a whole other Spider-Man villain.

Hobgoblin.

Well, there's one named Jack O'Lantern, right?

Well, Hobgoblin's got more of a Jack O'Lantern vibe, but that's a steep question. I mean, if it is, it's like a fucking not important one.

Okay. All right. For some reason, I feel like when I was a kid, my friend had Spider-Man trading cards, and this is when I was like five years old, so maybe I'm just getting my wires crossed. I could have sworn that there was a trading card. I remember he had Lizard, and I swear there was one named Jack O'Lantern, but maybe not.

No, there is, he's got a Jack O'Lantern on his head. His first appearance is...

Ed's looking this up, and it sounds like this may have been a card of a Z-Level. It's a cool card.

Yeah.

Spider-Man villain.

He's got a cool first appearance cover. It's literally just a Green Goblin rip-off. He's got a glider, everything. He's got a green suit, but he's got a flaming Jack O'Lantern head instead of the Goblin Cowl or Mysterio Bowl or something.

Real creative guys.

Yeah, I'm willing to bet this issue came out around October.

Yeah, they're introducing our new Spider-Man villain, Scavenger Bird.

Jack O'Lantern first appeared in the February 1978 issue of Marvel's Machine Man series, so it wasn't October, and Machine Man was canceled that issue. So I guess Jack O'Lantern wasn't much of a success anyway, but the story did take place during a Halloween party, and Jack O'Lantern would occasionally show back up in other books and on a trading card or two. Just enough to burn into Chris's memory.

Well, and obviously there's the Headless Horseman too, but more on him in a bit. First, I want to go overseas and back in time to investigate the origin of the term Jack O'Lantern itself. So, I didn't really know anything about this other than vaguely I think somewhere in my head I had it categorized as there was an Irish component to the Jack O'Lantern legend. So, I really didn't know where to start.

Now, I don't know. You're going to tell it to me in a second, but there's a lot of Jack O'Lantern imagery in something that Steve and I watch every Halloween, which is Over The Garden Wall, which has a ton of great Jack O'Lantern imagery. And I think a bunch of lore about the like the Inxinguineen, Singwazane, Singwan.

Oh, Sawane.

So, yeah, there's like a whole Sawane thing in that or whatever. And they got like Jack O'Lantern heads and they're making Jack O'Lanterns.

Well, I don't know exactly where Over The Garden Wall intersects with the history of Jack O'Lanterns.

Have you ever seen it?

No, I haven't.

It's fucking amazing. It's like that and Trick or Treat are probably the only two absolutely have to happen at Halloween watches in this house.

Well, it goes on the list then. I'll watch it and we'll update this episode someday with an Over The Garden Wall footnote. But according to an article on Mental Floss, the term Jack O'Lantern first applied to people, not pumpkins. As far back as 1663, the term meant a man with a lantern or a night watchman. And just a decade or so after that, in the 1670s, it began to be used to refer to the mysterious lights sometimes seen at night over bogs, swamps and marshes. These ghost lights, variously called Jack O'Lanterns, hinky punks, hobby lanterns, corpse candles, fairy lights, will-o'-the-wisps and fool's fire are created when gases from decomposing plant matter ignite as they come into contact with electricity or heat when they oxidize. For centuries, before anyone knew any of that, people just saw these glowing lights over swamps in the distance and made up stories about them to explain them.

I like corpse candles, whatever the hell you just said.

Yeah, corpse candles is great. Hinky punks is a weird one.

Yeah, that's a little wacky. That's someone who didn't quite understand what someone said, but felt just threatened enough to not ask them to repeat it. And then went and wrote it down, like whatever census taker of language that was, was like, and it was, you said, Hinky, okay, goodbye.

I'd heard fairy lights. I heard Will of the Wisps, but I had never heard corpse candles. That's a good one.

Or Fool's Fire.

Or Fool's Fire. In Ireland, though, dating back as far as the 1500s, the stories people told to explain these lights often revolved around a guy named Jack. As the story goes, Stingy Jack, who was often a blacksmith in these stories, invited the devil to join him for a drink. Stingy Jack, living up to his name, didn't want to pay for the drinks from his own pocket and convinced the devil to turn himself into a coin that could be used to settle the tab.

Wow.

Now, the devil did this, but Jack skipped out on the bill and kept the devil coin in his pocket along with a silver cross that prevented the devil from shifting back to his original form. So already, this has got to be one of the most complex schemes ever pulled on the devil himself.

I mean, no, he's one of the all-time great Twilight Zone episodes, like The Howling Man or whatever it's called. That's like a good, we caught the devil. Like, the devil's out there getting... Dude, fucking that guy played Fiddle pretty mediocre and like beat him.

Yeah.

Like Charlie.

But I just mean the level of like, first of all, inviting the devil out for a drink in these legends apparently unprompted. So we don't know where Jack met the devil. We don't know how well they knew each other, but he was like, hey man, let's go get a drink. And then deciding that he didn't want to pay for the drinks and that his only recourse for that was to trick the devil into turning himself into a coin with which he could pay for the drinks.

Yeah. It's weird that he's not like, hey, can you get this? And the devil would just say, okay.

Yeah.

It's like, no, how about let me turn into what you can get this with.

Yes. Which considering the devil is well known for the deals one can make with him. It seems like it would be a pretty straightforward trade.

But anyway, yeah, he didn't have to wonder twins his way out of this.

He really didn't. It was it's quite simple. Or even better, if you want to keep your soul, you don't want to make a deal with the devil. You could probably, since you're seemingly buds, just trick another guy into giving you a coin.

Yeah.

How much do these drinks cost?

They were in bulk for it. Yeah. Do you ever do you ever watch Metalocalypse?

I mean, I've seen scattered episodes.

I love it so much, but there's an episode where they do a deal with the devil for their soul, like a crossroads deal with the devil. And the devil thinks he has them on this, give me your soul now. But they're so used to insane contracts that they actually not only get one over on the devil, they don't have to give them their soul. They have to give them a $25 hot topic gift card or something. But the whole idea is just that the devil's like, I got you now. And they're like, actually we had our lawyers take a look at this contract type of thing. So what I'm getting at is in popular culture, the devil's like an idiot.

He's a fool.

He's a fool.

It's his fire.

Fool's fire, which is weird. Cause actually where he is in the thinking hell, it's all ice. There's a fire down there. He's stuck in the ice in the bottom level of hell.

What?

Isn't that where the devil is? In like Dante's Inferno. Oh, oh, oh. He's like up to his waist in ice, just sitting down there with all the traitors.

Well, in this case, he's up to his waist in someone else's waist in his coin purse next to a silver cross.

He just signed a lease to live in a pocket.

Yeah. So Jack here, he's got the devil in his pocket and won't let him turn back into the devil. Now, Jack eventually lets the devil loose, but only after the devil promises that he won't seek revenge on Jack and won't claim his soul when he dies.

Oh my God, he had to sign an NDA?

Basically. So now it gets even a little bit more complicated because after Jack has had this devil in his pocket, he irks the devil again by convincing him to climb a tree to pick some fruit and then carves a cross into the trunk so the devil can't climb back down.

Oh my God, the devil can't, he's having a real problem with crosses.

Well, this is some real Bugs Bunny shit and it's making me think the Irish devil is maybe less cool than the regular devil because-

Do you think every nation has their own devil?

I don't know, I mean, this one, this, the guy in this story seems like a doofus. He's tricked twice by a guy who seems like a stingy drunk.

Yeah, fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice.

I'm the actual devil.

But also, this, I love how Stingy Jack and just like deadbeat people, it's like the fucking amount of work they'll do to like just not get a job or not earn honest money, like the cons they'll pull, the slip and falls, the whatever, everything to just not get a nine to five.

Yeah.

And it was like, bro, you could have bought this drink all the time, climbing trees and doing fruit. Yeah.

Carving crosses.

You could have just fucking did some manual labor for two hours and be fucking wasted for years.

Probably could have worked the bar back. Could have just bought some drinks.

Whatever happened to that time period in history that movies always show us where it's like, can't afford the bill, hard cut to like them working in the kitchen.

Well, anyway, Jack freed him again on the condition that the devil just eat this shit and not take revenge and not claim Jack's soul. So we've got a real, a cucked devil.

For real, dude. This dude fucking...

But here's what I love about this story. I think this is a great twist and honestly, I'm claiming this. If you're listening, you're not allowed to use this. This is a great origin story, I think for a mystery of the week type character on a TV show. So, when Stingy Jack eventually died, he was so stingy that God wouldn't allow him into heaven. So, he went to hell, but the devil was like, hey man, you made me promise you not to let you in here, so I'm not letting you in. Instead, the devil gave him a single burning coal to light his way and sent him off into the night to quote, find his own hell.

Oh wow.

So, Jack became this immortal light wandering the countryside.

That is an awesome origin story. I bet you Stanley did use it somewhere because it's very well read.

And it's just so, I love the idea of like a guy who's too tricky for hell and too stingy for heaven.

Do you think the stingy for heaven thing was like, you were so fucking tight fisted that there's no way you like did anything good for anyone? I guess, I mean, I think it's just heaven like, yeah, we got pearly gates and they're pearly because it's 25 bucks to get in.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think it's just generally this guy is sort of such a scumbag that he couldn't go anywhere and just ended up being an immortal scumbag.

Yeah.

It's the cool origin story that should get used by me and not you, listener, by me.

Don't try and stingy Jack O'Lanterns listeners.

So anyway, where this all ties into the idea of Pumpkins and Jack O'Lanterns is that Jack took this coal that the devil gave him to roam and find his own hell and he put it into a carved out turnip and has supposedly been roaming the earth with it ever since. In Ireland, the ghost lights seen in the swamps were said to be Jack's improvised lantern moving about as his restless soul wandered the countryside and thus the lights were dubbed Jack of the Lantern or Jack O'Lantern.

Did you watch Bodkin? The like Forte show that was in Ireland? That's like a plot point is like this like a ghost light. Yeah, there's a ghost light like in a swamp or whatever. And it's, you know, part of a crime scene thing. But people like don't take it seriously because he was like it was Jack O'Lantern or whatever. It was maybe I didn't call him Jack Lantern. But what you just described is like what they're like, they were like, oh, he's just some fucking drunk.

Right.

Like talking about that. But yeah, it was at the swamp is all that it was in Ireland. So you got to watch more shit, man.

Dude, as as our listeners know, I've had a bit of a busy couple of months.

So yeah, the things I'm talking about are years old other than Vodkin.

So I also found this awesome secondhand account from the Irish Times that quotes an article from the 1836 edition of the Dublin Penny Journal that describes Jack O'Lantern. I thought this was good. So I'm quoting here, the author, when traveling with his excessively talkative uncle, the worst kind of uncle through a dark night is confronted by the phenomenon of Jack O'Lantern. His uncle tells the tale of Jack O'The Lantern showing his pity for this cursed figure doomed to wander with his lantern. The uncle says, quote, If you knew the sufferings of that forsaken craithor, spelled C-R-A-Y-T-H-U-R, since the time the poor soul was doomed to wander with a lantern in his hand on this cold earth without rest for his foot or a shelter for his head until the day of judgment, oh, it had softened the heart of stone to see him as I once did, the poor old Dunnawan, his feet blistered and bleeding, his ponies or rags all flying about him, and the rains of heaven beating on his old white head.

I just asked you, do you think it's a good time to stop for dinner? You told me this little crazy story, do you talk of uncle?

So that's what Jack O'Lantern looked like, I guess, a real crazy fucking lunatic wandering the country sides. This tradition continued to evolve, the tradition of the idea of Jack O'Lantern, when Irish immigrants began settling in a new world. Making vegetable lanterns was a tradition of the British Isles and carved out turnips, beets and potatoes were stuffed with coal, wood embers or candles as impromptu lanterns to celebrate the fall harvest.

That's interesting considering like Europe does not go hard for fucking Halloween. Well, they brought it with them to the new world.

They don't go hard for modern Halloween, but they do have a whole history of harvest time, legends and myths and rumors and that period of sawing when the veil between the living and the dead grows thin. I think they don't have as commercial of Halloween.

That's because they're from the lineage of Tight-Fisted Joe, whatever his name is.

Stingy Jack.

Stingy Jack, the whole nation of Stingy Jacks. You don't want to put up a fucking decoration or two.

They won't hand out candy. They won't put up decorations.

And they're so close to Cadbury, which is delicious candy.

They will carve these absolutely heinous looking turnip faces, these turnip lanterns. Ed, I want you to take a look at this thing.

Nope, that is, that looks like the cover of Communion.

It does, it does. Maybe I'll Photoshop that or something.

It's kind of like the cover of Communion meets a series of, like, we thought we'd have a bigger budget schlock special effects makeup.

Look at this one. This one looks like a Slipknot mask.

I will say that of the two you've shown me, they're pretty fucking similar. So, like, it really is like they have a plan here, which is like, did you all make a statue of the thing we are for sure saw once? Like, because you know what I mean? They're so similar.

Well, yeah, I don't know how many of these survived. I think both of these photos and the links, of course, are in the show notes. I think both of these photos might be from the same collection at whatever museum they're currently at. But no wonder that we transitioned to pumpkins. I mean, I guess part of it, too, is when you're carving a turnip, you don't have a ton of real estate, so the face becomes...

Very close together.

Very, yeah, like scrunched, and that's part of what makes it look so weird.

Well, there was nothing next to that picture you showed me. I don't know if that was the size of a normal pumpkin or if a turnip's the size of a fist.

No, turnips are pretty small.

That's what I thought.

I think it's like the size of a fist, probably.

Unless it's Super Mario Brothers 2, in which case he holds them over his head. They're fucking huge.

Bloop, bloop. Apparently, as a prank, kids would sometimes wander off the road with one of these glowing vegetables to trick their friends and travelers into thinking that they were Stingy Jack or another lost soul, which it would work on me if I saw one of these fucking things flying out of the dark.

No, forget it.

In America, pumpkins were easier to come by and good for carving, and so they kind of got absorbed in the carved lantern tradition and the associated prank. Over time, kids refined this prank and began carving more complex faces into the pumpkins, which, if you ask me, I think if you ask either of us, may have diluted the prank to some degree, because even if the face was more complex, it wasn't as creepy.

No, those un-complex, simple, monstrous, mutant fucking turnip heads you just showed me. But the thing that's different is I have never looked at a pumpkin, a carved pumpkin, and been like, that kind of looks like Charles or something. Those turnips, they feel like they should have names. Like they look like that could have, like I said, that could have been like before sketch artists. They had turnip carvers who were like, this is the man who stole our cows. And then pumpkins just, what? Maybe are we getting to the just the unbelievable life that pumpkins have?

What do you mean?

I don't know, I just kind of feel like September 1st. Pumpkins are such a like weird flex but okay gourd in the sense that it's like boom, people are lining up at Starbucks for the pumpkin spice latte. Pumpkin pies are going to come around the corner in November for Thanksgiving. Carve our fucking heads. Like if you have a pumpkin patch, you probably have nothing left over at the end of the year. It's got to be an amazing.

Yeah, well it's like Christmas trees or like, and I also think in LA, we see a lot more of it because it's the only thing that makes you feel like the seasons are changing.

Yeah, like we need to lay that out.

Yeah, like we need those pumpkins, we need that pumpkin spice. I mean, I'm even a, I succumb to the pumpkin spice trend because it's the only thing that makes me feel like it's fall now is I'm having all these pumpkin spice, which let's be real, it's all mostly more like a vanilla, cinnamon, there's very little pumpkin flavor in a lot of that pumpkin.

I found a seed in mine, so I don't know. No idea, yeah, it's true, Los Angeles is weird. Like if you're, if that 12 foot Home Depot skeleton wasn't in the yard with you, you'd think it was January. I'm sorry, you'd think it was July.

Yeah, so anyway, kids refined the prank. They started carving more complex faces, which I'll also say one of the reasons I think these less complex faces are scarier is it's sort of, to go back to Michael Myers for a second, it's the simplicity, it's the blankness is part of what makes it so creepy. Once you put the snaggletooth in the smile, it's now a more specific image and thus less mystery can be read into it.

Yeah, do you remember the last thing you carved? What was the last face you chose?

I usually like to do jagged teeth. I do like triangle eyes, triangle nose, and then jagged teeth because I'm not a very good pumpkin carver.

Well, jagged teeth, they're also basically triangles. You took an all triangle approach.

Yeah, all triangle approach.

I did. Do you remember when I did? It might be the last time I did any kind of pumpkin carving on the show. I used to have Everyone's The Worst. We did the Everyone's The Worst. Like I did the Everyone's The Worst logo.

Yes, I do remember that.

And it came out pretty good.

I think if you take the step of getting trace paper and whatever, you can go to the store and buy those too. You lay them over a pumpkin.

Yeah. That was my first time doing a thing where you just shave down parts. So you just create in a loop, which has now gotten completely away. At that point, it's just my canvas. It has nothing to do at all with faces or lore or scariness.

Super complex, super detailed, beautiful pumpkin carvings with that shaving method where they're really intricate and they'll do whole portraits of Boris Karloff or whatever. But yeah, then it's just a canvas. To me, I always go back to the simplicity of, you're stabbing a knife into the pumpkin, you're drawing a couple of lines with it, and then that's it.

Yeah.

I don't know if you know this Ed, but there are a lot of podcasts out there that cover topics that are similar to ours. Things like conspiracies, aliens, time travel, and ancient civilizations.

For some hearing of it, I thought we were the only ones.

No, no, no, no. Trust me. I know that we aren't because I've been listening to one of these shows for a couple of years now. It's called The Y Files, and let me tell you, it's great. If you like our show, The Y Files is going to be right up your alley. I personally love it because some podcasts, I think they take these topics way too seriously. They believe every detail, even if the details don't quite add up, and when that happens, you lost me. Other podcasts tear the stories apart, which, guilty as charged, we've done that before, but The Y Files is different. Each episode starts with an exploration of the mystery at hand, and then host AJ. Gentile tries to separate fact from fiction and see what's left, all with a little bit of help from his pal, Hecklefish, who's sort of like Ed if Ed were a fish. It sounds weird, but it works.

I wouldn't be caught dead being a fish, Chris, but that said, do they ever find any legends that they can't debunk at all, or?

Oh yeah, and those are really some of my favorite episodes. AJ gets his Worldview challenged on the reg, and it's fun to hear how his thoughts grow and evolve along with the subjects. So if that sounds up your alley, check out The Y Files on YouTube, which is where I watch it along with the rest of their nearly four and a half million subscribers. Or if you just want the audio version, you can find The Y Files on Spotify or anywhere you get your podcasts. The X Files said the truth is out there, but the Y Files says the truth is right here. So I wanna pause here at the point where Jack O'Lanterns became pumpkin based instead of stingy based or turnip based and consider a couple of other elements that I found in my research that play into the Jack O'Lantern story. The first detail I wanna discuss is an alternate explanation for the history of Jack O'Lanterns that I found on a very questionable website called The Western Journal.

Okay.

In an op-ed, author James Wilson fact checks an associated press article on Halloween. The article states that Jack O'Lanterns were first made from turnips and beets, as we've learned, that seems to be the agreed upon history. But not so, says Mr. Wilson. In fact, a Jack O'Lantern was the term for quote, wooden cages suspended from trees where prisoners were set afire and so sacrificed.

Oh wow, that's scarier for sure.

And not true. I don't think, I looked it up.

So this is a guy who wrote an article saying, you're not true, this is true, even though it was, he's the only one, like he's the least true, yet he's claiming that everyone else is wrong.

I mean, I dug around for a while and I couldn't find any corroborating stories or facts to support this claim. I did find elsewhere in the article where Mr. Wilson claims, quote, pagan Halloween is nothing but a variant of the Old Testament ball worship, B-A-A-L, not B-A-L-L.

Yeah.

Practiced by Ahab and Jezebel, now reincarnated in political leaders like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, who make a religious crusade, he says their words, not mine, of the right to sacrifice by aborting babies.

Wait, what year was this written?

Uh, I didn't check the year, but it was-

There's some reason I assumed it was gonna be like the 70s or 80s, but now this language is telling me this was in the last couple years.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Go ahead.

I was just gonna say, I think he has a specific point of view.

Okay, it sounds like it. Yeah, he's revealing like, it's interesting. Thug beats and turnips. This guy's got an onion. He's revealing new layers from with each moment. I do know who Ball is, though, from the Let's Get Haunted episode on Balenciaga, talks about Ball from all the Balenciaga conspiracy theory stuff.

James Wilson is probably a big into the Balenciaga conspiracy theories. He says, quote, As Christians have grown increasingly lax about our call to constant worship of the God who came in flesh, the pagans have simply reclaimed what was once their own. Most of us don't kill anyone, but we certainly find an excuse in Halloween to justify raw lust. French maids, witches and vampiras and lingerie, what that has to do with kids and candy is beyond me. But I do get the metaphysical tie into ballist sacred prostitution, if that's what floats your boat. And you know, I gotta say, I kind of for a different reason agree with Mr. Wilson. I really don't like the adult sexy version of Halloween. No shame to people who choose to celebrate Halloween that way, but to me, the Halloween spirit is a little bit like Christmas where you have to approach it from a little bit of that childlike place where you can let a little weirdness and mystery in. Like drinking and hooking up is all well and good, but I don't know, it's more of a 4th of July thing to me. Or Easter, if you really want to upset people, put on your French made raw lust costume on Easter. But in any case, if there is any truth to this alternate history of Jack O'Lanterns as places where people were burned alive in cages, let me know.

I mean, it's a cool origin story. It's up there with the real origin story. I mean, it's not a bad idea. I mean, burning people alive in cages is a bad idea every time. But I'm saying, like, it's not a bad idea.

Ed and I actually had a third co-host at the beginning of this show and we burned him alive in a cage and we regret it to this day.

I don't regret how much we got for that cage after. We didn't say we hosed it down and we sold it for pretty good. Almost what we bought it for.

But no, genuinely, part of the reason I bring it up is because I couldn't find anything on it, but it feels specific enough that I feel like it must have come from somewhere. So if anyone knows, please let me know.

What's the guy's name? James Wilson?

James Wilson.

So Mr. Wilson, who had a lot to say about Dennis the Menace next door as well. Do you think he's the person that wrote that review of our show that says that we were-

Ballist sympathizers?

Yeah, remember that?

No, there was one guy who was mad that we were too Christian.

Yeah, but all I'm saying is some of the language in this person's op-ed was pretty fucking similar to some of the languages in that unhinged review we were given.

Maybe they read the same newsletters.

I guess so.

Tucked into the windshield wipers of their cars. So the other element to the Jack O'Lantern story I wanted to touch on here, there's another article I read on irishmyths.com that ties the history of Jack O'Lanterns even deeper into Irish history and culture. And here I'm quoting historian Peter Beresford Ellis, the author of a dictionary of Irish mythology and the Celtic Empire. He says, quote, the ancient Irish revered the human head, as indeed did all ancient Celtic societies. It was in the head and not the heart that they seemed to locate the souls of men and women. irishmyths.com tells us that, quote, in Celtic enclaves of Northern Europe, e.g. Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man, and Cornwall, Brittany, the carving of human faces into round fruits and vegetables has been going on for thousands of years. It's a tradition that likely evolved from the Celtic custom of head veneration.

Okay, what?

Where in the severed heads of one enemy's were taken as war trophies. For example.

Okay, like when they put them on spikes and stuff at the end of the street.

Well, get this. For example, there's the story of ulcer hero Cuchillain, the Hound of Cullain, who returned from his first ever battle with three heads hanging from his chariot, as well as nine heads in one hand and ten in the other. So this guy had huge hands.

Yeah, or like the hair. Or maybe each had long hair, and then he can grab the hair.

But think about if you're holding garbage bags by a little bit. Ten is a lot in each hand, even if you're holding just the strings. Yeah.

Well, who's driving the chariot? Like he's got both hands are full of heads.

Well, I assume if he has nine heads in one hand and ten in the other, he also probably has a slave.

Oh yeah, or a couple. And also, fuck, even if I'm not his slave, he's like, grab that for me. I'd be like, well, did those nine people say no? So yeah, I'll do it, whatever you need, pal. Seems like you're in the business of taking heads.

So these nine heads in one, ten in the other, these he brandished at the hosts in token of his valor and prowess. Meanwhile, in a story called The Destruction of Dadarga's Hostel, the warrior, K'nal, pours water into the mouth of the high king of Ireland, Conair Moore's severed head and the head thanks him.

Oh, polite head.

Very polite.

Yeah.

Very polite severed head.

It's like eight heads in a duffel bag.

Especially, I feel like, and not to generalize, I don't feel like the Irish are usually noted for being so polite.

I can't, look, they like to have a laugh, okay? That might come off as gruff, I don't know.

I feel like anyone who had their head cut off, you have to be exceedingly polite. I'm a very polite person, generally, I think, and if someone chopped off my head and poured water in my throat, I don't know that I'd thank them.

Yeah, but you'd probably apologize on, you'd be like, sorry, I'm a heavy head.

Oh my God, I'm so sorry, I'm so thirsty. Can I have a little more? I'm so sorry.

Yeah.

Quote, ancient historians Livy and Deodorus Siculus both recount instances of Celtic warriors hanging the severed heads of their slain foes from the necks of their horses. Siculus further notes that especially distinguished foes were given the royal treatment. Their heads were embalmed in cedar oil and displayed with pride to visitors. This is my favorite fact from this section. This practice is also reflected in the ancient Irish tradition of creating brain balls, wherein the brains of enemies were hardened with lime and used as slingshot projectiles. The most famous brain ball was made by Conal Cairnac from the brain of Leinster King Mesgrégor. This brain ball was stolen by the Connacht warrior Ket Mac Magach.

There's no fucking way.

Used to kill Conchobar MacNessa. All of which sounds fake and like I'm making it up on the spot, but is historical fact.

So dude, we're going to get so many fucking brain balls shot at us from fucking Dennis the Menace style slingshots because Irish people are going to be like, there wasn't one correct pronunciation in that whole John Baguette Susan.

You know what I did pronounce correctly though? Brain balls. And let's not overlook the fact that those are the coolest weapons I've ever heard of.

I just think it's, you know, I mean these are people who gave birth to Stingy Jack. So these are like, use every part of the Buffalo people maybe.

I guess, but how cool to make basically like slingshot ammunition from the brains of your enemies.

I just feel like leave the heads where you found them.

No, take them. I say take them.

I know what, there's projectiles under all of our fucking feet. Any guy who's ever plowed a field and is like, oh, another rock, another rock, another rock. Brain balls are living in the fucking ground. You don't got to go looking for brain balls.

Well, you don't look for brain balls. You make them.

So did you think that's why I'm not an organ donor.

I needed things to do.

That's why I'm not an organ donor.

Why? Because someone's going to make marbles out of your guts?

No, my brain.

Not in your brain? Anyway, all this came to a head during the Celtic Festival of Samhain when it was believed that souls from the other world were able to cross over to the land of the living.

Looking for their brain balls. They're stolen brain balls.

They filled their head with a rattling with brain balls.

You made a ball out of my memories.

Man, they must have been fun to play Hungry Hungry Hippos with. Armed with a plethora of root vegetables from the recent harvest, as Samhain marked the end of one pastoral year and the beginning of the next, ancient peoples carved frightening faces in an effort to ward off restless souls. And since the 1800s, there has been a continued scattered evolution of the Jack O'Lantern term. In 1837, the Limerick Chronicle, which is a real leprechaun ass name for a newspaper, Sure. refers to a local pub holding a carved gourd competition and presenting a prize to the best crown of Jack McLantern. The term McLantern also appears in an 1841 publication of the same paper. So that was a precursor to, or I guess an offshoot of the Jack O'Lantern. They could have been Jack McLanterns if they hadn't caught on. According to the Irish Times, the first definitive reference to a pumpkin Jack O'Lantern carved in celebration of Halloween occurred in 1886 when a Canadian newspaper, The Daily News, which is a much more normal name for a newspaper than the Limerick Chronicle, reported the following, The old-time custom of keeping up Halloween was not forgotten last night by the youngsters of the city. There was a great sacrifice of pumpkins from which to make transparent heads and face, lighted up by the unfailing two inches of tallow candle. However, it should be noted that the first image of a pumpkin Jack O'Lantern appeared nearly two decades prior to this in the November 23, 1867 issue of Harper's Weekly. It was published alongside an article titled A Pumpkin Effigy. But, and this is an important but, the article did not refer to the carved gourd as a Jack O'Lantern or a Jack Micklantern, nor did it reference Halloween. And the image itself is pretty creepy, almost creepier for the fact that it doesn't reference Halloween. Look at this, Ed.

Okay, I'm clicking, I'm opening.

Now, if a group of children is doing this on Halloween, I'd say, okay, that's cute, but it makes sense.

I still don't have my glasses from the accident and they're getting made. Everything takes forever, I guess. Is one kid holding a head? No, that's a hat. Okay, now that it's close to my face. So are they, is it just a Jack, this is a traditional Jack O'Lantern, like triangle eyes, triangle nose, triangle everything. But I just don't know if it's like on a stump or on a kid. Like just tell me what the fuck they're doing here. I just, I can't. Well, it's so iconically Halloween. Like if someone just showed me this with my glasses on and they said, what do you think the title of this etching is? I would say Halloween.

Well, yeah, it's, we're looking at three kids surrounding a stump with a very evil looking Halloween pumpkin on it and another kid clutching his sister or mother and looking on at the pumpkin in fear.

Yeah, it's a gorgeous, actually gorgeous.

It is, but my point is it's very frightening to have nothing to do with Halloween.

Well, is it titled The War Is Over?

The Great Pumpkin War?

No, Civil War would have ended what, a year earlier, two years earlier. It's an effigy. Maybe that's supposed to be Jefferson Davis or something.

I don't know what the fuck these kids are doing carving that nightmarish face for fun right around Thanksgiving.

But it could not be a more traditional Jack O'Lantern though, which is what's so shocking to me.

Yeah, crazy. I encourage you to go look at the image again in our show notes. Everything we just said will make a lot more sense if you're looking at it. And then finally and interestingly, I always thought that the legend of Sleepy Hollow and the Headless Horseman must have had something to do with why Jack O'Lanterns got so popular in the United States in Halloween. But when I went back to check the original story, which was published in 1820, it only mentions a shattered pumpkin discovered next to Ichabod Crane's hat the morning after his encounter with the horsemen. The story never actually references Jack O'Lanterns or Halloween.

Creative license.

Well, I assume that must be an invention of Disney with the famous cartoon. And maybe that's the first time that he had a pumpkin head.

Yeah. I mean, Disney is responsible for a lot of things that we now think is the thing. So, yeah. Maybe.

It's a creepy. I always assumed that there was more of a Halloween legend element to that, and there really wasn't. There was a fall time gourd pumpkin piece, but not really inherent to the story in any way. So, I guess you're right. Yeah. Thanks, Disney or whoever.

I don't have it in front of me, but the whole thing about how lemmings follow each other off a cliff.

Oh, yeah. Disney invented that for the wild world of nature.

For the documentary thing. Yeah. They had lemmings on a lazy Susan that was hidden on a lazy Susan. I don't know if they really just threw those fucking things off a cliff, but that was an invention of that documentary, which by, it shouldn't be called a fucking documentary then, if you've manipulated it that much.

Well, that's every documentary though. I mean, almost every documentary, well, that's true. That is manipulated to almost the, to a Herzogian extreme.

Yeah, because they're telling you like, look at this thing we caught in Nature. I'm like, you really fucking did it.

Yeah. I bet whatever just like cigarette smoking PA was chucking those lemmings off the cliff probably got promoted.

Yeah, that was, that was Jeffrey Katzenberg.

That was that Jeffrey Katzenberg. Which exec or got his start in the industry as the guy who threw the lemmings off the cliff in that Disney documentary?

God, that would, with my luck, well, no, with my luck, that would be like the million dollar question on who wants to be a millionaire.

Yeah.

And that's like phone a friend, you'll be like, I don't fucking know. And give me like some asshole answer. And I'll be like, I don't know. Yeah, D, Jeffrey Katzenberg. And then Regis Philman, is he still with us?

Regis Philman? Yeah. No.

RIP God bless then.

RIP God bless. I think Regis has passed.

Regis would say, I'm sorry.

Yeah.

Did you know the first guy to win a million dollars on the American who wants to be a millionaire is from Connecticut?

I did not, but I think I watched it.

Yeah, he called his dad, remember? Because he still had like two lifelines left. And he was like, I want to phone a friend. And Regis was like, all right, who do you want to call? And he's like, I want to call my dad. He's like, call your dad. And then he did. And he's like, hey, dad, I don't need any help. I just want to tell you I'm going to win a million dollars.

Oh, right.

Yeah. It was like such a baller move.

Yeah. Fun times, man. What happened to the early 2000s?

They're gone.

They died along with Regis.

Yeah. They went into a quagmire of a war in the Middle East.

Well, unfortunately for this show, unlike the quagmire in the Middle East, Jack O'Lanterns don't really cause much death and destruction in real life. If anything, they've become symbols of welcome on Halloween night. If the Jack O'Lantern is out and lit, it usually means the house is open for business and you can get that candy. They're actually more dangerous in their original form, the pumpkin, the faceless, boring, bland pumpkin. And why do I say that? Because in all of my Jack O'Lantern research, the most dangerous tales came from pumpkin patches, pre-carving.

That's crazy. In my mind, a pumpkin patch is where you go to like meet a wholesome partner.

Well, you can meet a wholesome partner at a pumpkin patch, but you can also almost die a lot of different ways.

That's also dating. You're just describing dating. So we're both describing dating.

It's true. Ed, have you ever heard of pumpkin chunking?

Pumpkin chunking.

Usually spelled in this case as P-U-N-K-I-N.

So pumpkin chunking.

Pumpkin chunking.

What is that, a position?

Yeah, it's something that happens after the end of a good date. You go pumpkin chunking. No, it's an event that takes place, I think, all over the country, but is most famous for an event in Delaware where people, and I'm taking this from an official description, quote, launch pumpkins as far as they can using enormous hand-built machines, catapults, air cannons, trebuchets and more.

I don't think you need that N in chunking then. It could just be pumpkin chucking or pumpkin chucking.

I don't know how it became stylized this way.

It's a fucking nightmare.

Well, the event combines strength, engineering skills and pure lunacy and has the kind of dedicated following usually reserved for more moneyed sports. The event, and supposedly it started this way, there's a lot of local legends about this, but the event supposedly started with four Delaware guys trying to one-up each other in a blacksmith shop 29 years ago.

I love it. That's how so many things like 24 Hours of Lemons or this, or the movie Baseball.

What's 24 Hours of Lemons?

You've heard of 24 Hours of Lemons, the race?

Yeah.

It's like that, but you have to do it with cars that are under $1,000. Oh. And it was just like-

That's fun.

Some regular dude started it, but now there's national chapters and it's all over the country.

Yeah.

It's a pretty big deal and it's got crazy rules.

Right.

But I'm saying like that, this thing you're talking about, the movie Baseball.

The Red Bull thing.

The Red Bull Wagon thing. Yeah, anything that just kind of started as something stupid and then turns into this like, oh my god.

Like this podcast.

Yes, exactly. I really want to go to it. It can't be good for the environment. In Alaska, there's like this car tossing event where like, you wait at the bottom of what is like a mountain basically, and at the top, they just attach cars to, I don't know, some sort of winch system that just launched the car off a cliff.

Well, that's a trebuchet, right? The winch system that like.

Yeah, but it's not, they don't put it into a like medieval trebuchet. I'm just saying it's more, they just, honestly though, I think they actually just fucking hold the gas pedal down and they just put a fucking rope keeping the steering wheel straight, but it's just people sit at the bottom like a mountain and it's like, whoa, look at the way that one's smashed. Amazing, but they do that all day and I don't know who cleans it up and I don't know if it ever like hits people, but we gotta go.

We gotta go.

That seems like a super fun, very American thing to do.

If you run the car chucking event in Alaska, we'll help clean up if you get us tickets to go.

I don't think it costs anything.

Oh, okay. Well, then we won't help clean up anything. So apparently these guys were trying to one up each other. And after anvil tossing proved too hard on their backs.

Oh my God. That's something you do once, right?

No, it could not have taken very long to have proved too hard on their backs. They turned to a lighter type of ammunition, pumpkins. Riffing on their surroundings, they challenged each other to build medieval style pumpkin tossing machines and to meet at a local field the weekend after Halloween when pumpkins are free and plentiful. When the day arrived, three machines rolled up to the firing line. They were built out of spare parts, garage door springs, twisted ropes, whatever they felt would propel the pumpkin the farthest. The longest throw that year was about 114 feet. They vowed to do it again the next year and then the next and thus was born the annual world champion pumpkin chunking or WCPC for short. Most of the years of the pumpkin chunking event went off without a hitch. But after a few accidents in the 2010s, the future of the event was already on shaky ground before disaster finally really truly struck in 2016.

Oh, so we can't go.

No.

This event is no longer with us.

No, this event is no longer with us because a person is almost no longer with us. I'm reading here from an article posted on delawareonline.com, Delaware's world famous pumpkin chunking, back after a two-year hiatus prompted by an accident in lawsuit, turned dangerous Sunday afternoon when an air cannon firing a pumpkin broke apart, injuring a man and woman, according to Delaware State Police. The 39-year-old woman whose state police initially reported had died. So you know it was bad.

Oh my God. No one could have survived what we just saw. So send over a couple of bags. Take your time, boys.

Is listed in critical condition at Christiana Hospital in Stanton. Judges to already seen about 10 air cannons fire pumpkins more than 3,000 feet using compressed air when the trapdoor of the air cannon named Pumpkin Reaper, tough name, all things considered, flew off when it fired shortly before 2:40 PM on Sunday. As people were running away from the cannon, which sent large pieces of material into the air in all directions, a person was struck in the head and face at the event site. The woman lay motionless as paramedics and emergency responders rushed to her side. Paramedics were called to the scene where many spectators and participants stood in shock to offer the woman further treatment. And she ended up being treated at the event grounds before she was taken to Nanticoke Memorial Hospital. Carrie Collius, who had just gotten to Punkin Chunkin when the incident occurred, saw the air cannon malfunction and the aftermath up close. The cannon, Punkin Reaper, again, you're asking for trouble here, was registered to 21 year old Will Shell, the grandson of Dominic Daffner, who said Saturday he and his grandsons were competing against each other in the event. Crazy enough, I dug a little deeper on the victim here and she is actually a television producer.

Oh, wow.

Named Suzanne DeKessian, who is chronicling the 2016 world champion, Punkin Chunkin for the Science Channel. According to CNN, her memory of the explosion is hazy. She ran as a large metal plate flew toward where she and other TV crew members were standing. For a split second, she turned to see where the debris might land and that's when the plate struck her head.

Oh, I don't like that. So I, because there's one thing if it's a sudden death, where it's like, oh, that's an interesting canon.

Oh, yeah.

And it's another thing, apparently, we're like, how? I don't, it's just so crazy to me.

I think people were probably, you know, there's probably a safety perimeter around these things. So there are, you know, a hundred feet away. It blows up and you get enough of a chance to go, oh, fuck, like you see it.

Or maybe more realistically, yeah, I don't know. I got nothing.

In the aftermath of the incident, Dekeesian had to have part of her skull removed because her brain was swelling. The show was ultimately scrapped, although she says she would have preferred it came to fruition. It's heartbreaking, she says. I was really looking forward to seeing what came from all the hard work I put in. The day of the chunk, I was working 15 hour days and to not see the product, after all that blood, sweat and tears, which very literal here, I'm really bummed out about it, but I understand this is a big world. It's much bigger than me and I don't have any kind of right to say what people should or shouldn't do.

And this is a good point to bring out, Pierre. Even if you're making faux documentary.

This is for the science channel.

I'm saying faux documentary television. It's fucking 15 hour days. Media is hard and people don't realize that and they're always like, oh, these people are striking, fucking these millionaire babies. It was like, no, this lady was probably making $7, got killed by a stupid cannon for a thing that'll never rerun. It's so depressing. But no matter where you are, whether you're in Pennsylvania or LA or whatever, it's like 15 hour days is just too fucking common.

It's a lot of hours. And actually, I think Suzanne sounds awesome. In this CNN article, she talks about on another set where she mangled her hand.

Dude, you guys are gonna start working some union jobs here.

And dealing with her type one diabetes during production on a different set. This is the quote that made me think she's really one of us, Ed. She said, quote, I like covering stories that show the spectrum of America's quirks, and there's a lot to learn from each one. I've enjoyed the adventure, and, you know, life is dangerous. You can't let those concerns stop you from living it, from living it well and fully. It's a big, big world, and it's an interesting world, and I want to see as much of it as I can. I don't think anything is going to change that.

That is awesome.

So, hell yeah.

She's great, but she needs to realize, maybe do a couple stories where you're not ten minutes away from becoming brain balls.

Yeah. I'm glad she survived. We didn't have to add her to Sudden Death Part 2. I'll also say if we ever do a television show of this podcast, she's now on my list of producers. She's still working. But this event is far from the weirdest accident or crime that's taken place in a pumpkin patch. For that, we turn our frightened gaze to a list I discovered on listverse.com, titled Ten Crimes Committed in a Pumpkin Patch.

Weird.

Weird that this list exists. I did not write this list. This was just floating out there on the internet. I will say most of these are crimes. Some of them were stretching the definition a little bit. But number 10 is called Police Chase in a Corn Maze. The article says, quote, one man from California tried thinking outside the box while on the run from police and his plan, surprisingly, involved the local Petaluma Pumpkin Patch. The man was accused of stalking an ex-girlfriend and fled the scene when officers arrived to arrest him. He managed to flee into the corn maze at a nearby pumpkin patch. The maze was so intricate and well-designed that he avoided the police and a helicopter for two hours.

Yeah, as he was fucking lost, he couldn't get out.

But apparently neither could the police or the helicopter.

You'd think they'd be able to look straight down into the maze and be like, there he is. But he's Homer Simpsoning into the bushes.

This must have been a 4D corn maze. He could slip into the space between spaces. I hope whoever designed this maze won some sort of award for complexity.

They went back to hell or whatever. Whatever that HP Lovecraft invention.

Yeah, it's a non-Euclidean corn maze. One officer who had been to the maze before while off duty even acknowledged how easy it would be to hide in the maze. This guy knew. Eventually, the man was discovered hiding in a chicken coop and arrested by authorities restoring peace to the pumpkin patch. Number nine, 200 pumpkins stolen. This one I think is pretty self-explanatory. Farms View Roadstand in New Jersey was robbed of 200 pumpkins and the thieves were caught in the act by security cameras. At first, it might not seem like this would be a very profitable crime, but according to the owner of the pumpkin stand, they would have ended up selling for close to $3,000.

Oh, wow.

So if you're looking for a fairly safe heist to pull off, not that I want anyone to prey upon the owners of pumpkin patches, but holy shit.

It can't. Well, first off, what a steal. No pun intended. A, it's not that safe. They got caught. And B, that's a fucking lot of mass. That's a lot of surface area. 300 pumpkins.

200 pumpkins.

200 pumpkins. You can have to rent a box truck or something.

Yeah.

You're going to have to make that weird, like, assembly line of, like, one person to the next, putting them in.

You can't hide it in your code.

You can't do it with two people.

Yeah. Well, get this. The owners of the pumpkin stand were so distraught over the loss of the pumpkins, they offered a cash reward to anyone who had information on the suspects. The robbery itself happened in three stages. So, this was organized pumpkin crime.

Sure.

The security camera showed a vehicle approaching the pumpkin farm three different times during one night, and a team of individuals jumped out to load up the pumpkins. It was a calculated plan for stealing pumpkins, and we may never know the motive. Fortunately, if the thieves' intent was to try and shut down the family-owned pumpkin stand, they were unsuccessful, which I doubt it was. I feel like their intent was to try to steal pumpkins and sell them.

This will ruin them. If we take these pumpkins.

Just burn it down if you're trying to ruin it.

So they came, took a load, left. Came, took a load, left. Came, took a load, left.

They came and took a lot of loads.

I think you can maybe do that with a fucking Nissan Sentra though. I don't know if you're doing like, that's maybe.

When I moved in my Honda Fit, even with a truck for one big moving load, I still had to take multiple loads in my Honda Fit. We need to stop about taking loads. We need to stop talking about it.

All right.

So it seems like even though they were caught on camera, these guys were never prosecuted. So if you or someone you know has over 200 pumpkins, do the Farms View Roadside in New Jersey a favor and turn yourself in.

But I thought they were caught on camera.

They were, but it didn't say anything about them ever being prosecuted or anything. So I don't know.

Wow. Wow.

Number eight, drunk driver. On October or in October 2018, while turning into the entrance of Jerry's Fall Harvest and Sunray Produce in Wisconsin, a local man was hit by a drunk driver. The man did not survive the incident. Oh, and the passenger had to be life flighted to a nearby hospital. The owner of the pumpkin farm expressed that he was shaken up by the tragedy. The drunk driver was arrested and ordered not to drive any vehicles in case he posted bail. Okay, well, how fast was this guy turning in to the pumpkin farm?

Yeah, like two people are like...

You were recently hit by a car in another car. Yeah. This guy must have been turning in to the pumpkin patch at 200 miles an hour.

Yeah, or his car was so weighed down by stolen pumpkins that it just barreled through people like a tank.

I guess.

I do hate, I genuinely hate this. I do hate how often, and I get why, because they're not, you know, they're not tense, they're not whatever, but drunk drivers like always end up living.

Yeah.

Because they don't even know they're in a fucking accident. And then people just so often die.

Yeah. Well, this guy.

From drunk drivers.

This guy.

Because they're going 6,000 miles an hour in a fucking pumpkin cart.

This guy, Nicholas Hanley, 46, was formally charged with vehicular homicide. Driving under the influence with a prior DWI, a second count of homicide, driving above the legal intoxication limit, two felony counts of causing injury by intoxicated use of a vehicle, and two other DWI related offenses, with three prior convictions for DWI. Hanley also had a blood alcohol level of 0.087. His last conviction was in 2006. His license was restored in 2007. After all of this, in August 2022, he was sentenced to five years in prison.

Yeah, but this is America, so he got off in 16 days. 16 days later, he was back to drive over people again.

Yeah, I mean, I hope Nicholas Hanley.

But also five years.

Five years for vehicular homicide. That isn't enough time. Other multiple counts of homicide, so yeah.

That's not enough time. So my joke about it being 16 days, which realistically it wasn't, he didn't even do five fucking years, but yeah, you fucking killed somebody, and then potentially another person, and you have a history of almost killing or killing people. Fuck man, it makes no sense. You got people who were in prison for like having a joint in 1978 for 30 years.

It seems like at the very least this would, and I don't know, like I totally, I believe in restorative justice. I don't think people should go to jail for the rest of their lives, except for the most heinous crimes, but.

But when it's your fifth time doing it.

Well, it's your fifth time doing it. I feel like if you're going to be let out, you should also never be allowed to get a driver's license again.

Yeah, you also aren't allowed to be on the road without insurance. And three of the five vehicles involved in this pileup I was in didn't have insurance.

True.

So this guy is just going to be like, yeah, I'll get in a car. Fuck it.

Number seven, I'm calling crime and pumpkin schmint.

They should hire you at that other badly named event at the Pumpkin Chumkin Zunkin.

According to one woman, while on a date, Ed, we're back to talking about dates here. While on a date at McCall's Pumpkin Patch in New Mexico, she absentmindedly picked up a $2 pumpkin from a display stand. She says she then wandered off neglecting to pay for it.

This is Winona Ryder?

After being in fronted, Ms. Ryder reported that she offered to pay for the pumpkin, but her request was denied and she was escorted from the property in handcuffs. This is where it turns into a real nightmare for this woman.

She got 24 years. She got a 24 year sentence. Because it was her first offense.

The situation escalated even further when the couple, I guess the guy got roped into this, appeared in court. The presiding judge decided to rule based on the intention to steal and not the dollar amount of the item, which again was $2. Since that was the case, the couple was found guilty of shoplifting an item of $250 or less in value and were each sentenced to 40 hours of community service and had to pay $73 in court fees all for a pumpkin worth less than $5.

I mean, I kind of, it's interesting. Let's say a pumpkin's worth $2. This other pumpkin crime where it was like, you're moving $3,000 with the pumpkins, feels a little bit like how the cops are like, we took this cocaine off the street with a street value of $2 million and it was like, what are you talking about? Like, that's just cop lingo of how expensive things are.

Maybe that's what the guys are stealing the pumpkins for was to fill them with cocaine and then move them.

Maybe, but it just seems like, yeah, this is $3,000 worth of pumpkins. It was like, well, here's the next story where a pumpkin cost $2.

Yeah, I mean, look, maybe it was a small pumpkin.

I don't know why this lady had the book thrown at her when they're really lenient with a man who drove 64,000 miles an hour into a pumpkin patch and killed a bunch of people. They need to be airlifted out. And then this lady was like, hey, what are you, where are you going with that?

Yeah.

You're going to prison with that.

They threw the book at her.

Yeah, dude, the Necronomicon at her.

Number six, another chase through another maze. Two brothers ended up in a dangerous situation while playing in a corn maze on a California pumpkin farm. The boys had been having fun in the maze and became separated from their family. After a while, the younger brother noticed two suspicious men following them. Before the kids could lose them in the maze, the boys said one of the men grabbed the younger brother by the arm and tried to drag him away.

Fuck that.

To defend his sibling, the elder boy kicked the man in the crotch. The boys managed to flee from the maze into the pumpkin patch to find their family and call the police. That's all that it says. And I think this one's maybe the actual scariest one on here. Can you imagine being a kid in a corn maze and a guy starts trying to drag you away? You're already lost in the maze, presumably, cause it's a maze. And there's just a fucking psycho.

I don't know these kids though. You know what I mean? They could have just stolen a display pumpkin.

Oh, I see.

And it's actually a security guard saying get over here. That's worth two dollars and the rest of your life in prison. But they got away. They kicked him in the dick.

This doesn't sound like that. This sounds more like-

No, Predator. This is Predator.

This is Predator.

This is 100% a fucking pumpkin maze Predator, state of California, some shambles.

So that's all we know about this case, but that one's really frightening to me. And actually, I'm kind of surprised you've never seen something like that done well, at least, in a movie. I'm sure there's something like it in a Schlock movie, but like getting lost in a corn maze and getting stalked by a guy is a pretty creepy thing.

Pumpkin patches. Look at what we got. You try and drive into them, you're going to die. You try and walk through them, you're going to fucking get snatched. You try and go there just to enjoy it. There's going to be like another stalker, like the other person was a creep ass stalker peering around. I think, you know what? Pumpkin patches during the day only and on the perimeter. Only the perimeter.

Number five, this one gets political. Burt's Pumpkin Farm in Georgia found itself front and center of a high profile court case where a journalist was arrested for filming at a political rally, which I guess the rally was taking place at Burt's Pumpkin Farm.

Okay.

Tensions grew during the rally at the pumpkin patch as one of the political candidates asked the journalist why she was filming.

Well, it's a fucking political rally. It doesn't seem, there seems like a lot of people should be filming.

Yeah, growing uncomfortable with the confrontations, the property owners decided to have local law enforcement step in. The journalist reported having permission to film and did not stop, resulting in her being forcefully removed. Chaos began to unfold as the officer did not respond to the woman's calls for him to identify himself as a member of law enforcement. This caused a scuffle that resulted in her, the journalist, being taken into custody, which all sounds kind of like a, I mean, I guess she's on private property, so maybe it's not impinging on her freedom of speech, but still, yeah, what kind of political rally are you holding?

I mean, the political rallies are held for publicity. I need to speak to the people. I need to get my message out about what my plan is, what my-

One would assume.

And so, yeah, it's weird that they have like a blackout on that. And then officers who won't identify themselves. I think you just stumbled into like an Illuminati meeting.

Yeah, was this pumpkin patch at Bohemian Grove?

Yeah, for real, dude. But also I do hate, I mean, I hate anyone, I'm not saying this was a person who was doing, but you ever just watch those videos online of like the most obnoxious people in the world, people who were like filming.

Yeah.

And it's like, it's my right, I'm on a public road and I'm allowed to do this. I'm like, if you get fucking pushed off that sidewalk, I'm not really empathizing with you.

Yeah, there aren't any details in this story about how this person was behaving and to what degree she was a journalist or just an annoying person with a camera being annoying.

I think what I'm talking about is usually like on a sidewalk, someone's walking out of a hairdresser or like they walk on to like police property and they try and be obnoxious because it's like, it's my right, I'm a taxpayer. This, they said a political rally was going on. So it really seems unusual that they would have this. But again, I guess it's a crime in a pumpkin patch. So it's on the list.

Well, and get this, the case was monitored for several years by the media, a ruling was reached and the journalists did not have to serve jail time, but she did get charged to pay a $1,000 fine and complete community service to have a misdemeanor charge completely removed from her record.

Wow.

So once again, Railroaded. Getting in kind of more trouble than the drunk driver guy.

No, the drunk driver who, I mean like, Crime to punishment.

Crime to punishment ratio, yeah.

Fuck, pumpkin patches, I never thought I'd say this.

Please make news, Ed.

We need to not go to them.

No, I don't know if we should be on the record saying that. We should absolutely go to pumpkin patches.

But I feel like there's a greater chance of insanity happening versus like the news is like, if you go into the subway in New York and you get pushed in front of a subway train, like you have a greater chance of getting abducted, stalked, hit or put in prison by going to a pumpkin pumpkin patch.

Well, number four, pumpkin ATM theft. Most pumpkin farms have treats available for purchase or at least charge an entrance fee for their corn maze, but not everyone carries cash on them all the time.

Yeah, these pumpkin batches don't want to pay taxes. So they're going to report a totally different number. So we need you to pay in cash.

Live Oak Canyon Pumpkin Farm in Redlands believe they had managed to avoid the problem of their visitors not having cash because they had an ATM available for customers. They did not realize that the machine would cause them a different type of problem. One night, two men in a van drove up to the Pumpkin Patch and stole the entire ATM. They managed this by cutting the security card and loading the machine into their rental van. However, the team was caught on surveillance discarding the machine after breaking into it. The authorities recovered the ATM and calculated the thieves had gotten $19,000 out of it.

Oh my god, that's a lot of pumpkins.

Both men were eventually arrested and sentenced to jail time and the police were able to recover $2,000 of the money from the pumpkin farm's ATM.

Okay, it sounds like there's like $17,000 in those cops pockets.

Yeah, they were like, wow, hail us, the conquering hero police, we've retrieved $2,000.

By the way, it seems like they had this a night, so what the fuck did they, some people took that money, dude.

Yeah, it's floating. Number three, we make a return to a highly criminal pumpkin patch. At the same pumpkin patch where the woman was arrested for stealing the small pumpkin.

Oh my God, yeah.

10 years later, another dramatic situation unfolded. Perhaps to make the maze at McCall's pumpkin patch extra challenging, a man from New Mexico entered while intoxicated. Law enforcement interrupted the man in the middle of harassing and headbutting the actors performing in the court. Oh my God.

That's just inappropriate behavior.

Yeah. Deputies reported they could smell alcohol on his breath as he got in their faces and refused to exit the pumpkin patch peacefully. The man was handcuffed when he spit in the deputy's face.

Oh wow.

But that did not stop him from causing a scene, much to the embarrassment of his friends. According to the authorities, the man kept up his performance all the way to jail.

Where they were like, if only he had stolen a pumpkin, we could have put him away for life.

But since you only spit in our faces and headbutted everyone, that's going to be two months community service.

Yeah. Number two, pumpkin assault. A video on social media challenging viewers to wreck mayhem was taken seriously by a group of teenagers at Roca Berry Farm in Nebraska. As a result of the incident at the pumpkin farm, two girls 13 and 14 years old were injured. It doesn't say how exactly anyone was causing havoc or wrecking mayhem at this pumpkin farm, but apparently it was enough to injure these girls. They had to be treated at the hospital. The injuries were not serious. Police used Snapchat to identify the suspects. The pumpkin patch increased its security presence as a response to the event and no longer allows children under the age of 15 to enter without an adult.

Wow.

And number one, this one, I'm sorry, this should not be on the list as a crime. This is a children's book story at best.

Yet it tops the list.

But it's on the list, so I'm going to read it. Quote, anyone driving down the highway near Gebert's pumpkin patch in Apple Orchard in Chicago one afternoon would be in for a huge surprise. A police chase was in progress, but not of people. Two zebras had escaped from the petting zoo in the local pumpkin patch. What? The Illinois State Police had to work together with the zoo to contain the wild, wink, wink situation. The zebras managed to hang on to their freedom for two hours before they were safely captured. In their defense, the article states, zebras probably did not know that running from police was a crime.

It would be better if it was like around Halloween. It was actually just four kids in two zebra costumes.

Yeah, pretty, pretty not criminal. But I guess this is how hard it is to come up with other bad things that happen in and around pumpkins that they had to turn to freedom zebras.

Yeah, I don't know. I will say that list did turn me off from pumpkin banters though.

There's one more thing I want people to learn, because we're not giving up on this episode yet. In my research, I found something not pumpkin related, but Halloween adjacent enough that I thought it was well worth closing out this episode with. You may remember our episode on booby trap candy last year, and I didn't want to repeat myself, so I stayed away from booby trap candy, but I found something candy related that still made my stomach turn. They're called morgue chocolates. And they're pretty fucked up. Now, to me, morgue chocolates sounds like something that gets like put like the way that a hotel will leave a chocolate on your pillow or something.

Yeah.

Like it sound, I thought this was gonna be a legend about somebody who like leaves little candies in the morgue trays or something.

I don't know why that job would exist, but right now we can use jobs, so hopefully they get created.

I think of it less as a job and probably more of a hobby for somebody.

Well, speaking of real fast, I was at Dairy Queen today and the people who had gotten Dairy Queen before me at, I don't know, fucking 11 in the morning or something, maybe even earlier because I was waiting for a friend, so I was just sitting there working and I look up and it's these four people dressed in like kind of militarized uniforms, which is weird. I wouldn't expect the forensic department to dress like they're the Capitol Police. But I'm saying four people with the forensic badge across the back are all just eating blizzards in full forensic uniforms. And I was like, did a crime? Like, did you just finish chalk outlining someone and now you're going to have a blizzard break?

Hey, you know what? It's a stressful job, man. It is.

Yeah. But it's just made me laugh to look up and just see a bunch of fully uniformed on the job forensic people eating blizzards.

Yeah, that's a great image. Speaking of images, you sort of need to hit Google Image Search to get how creepy this morgue chocolate situation really is. So I encourage you to hit that search bar or go to the show notes and search morgue chocolate.

Is it safe for work?

Yeah.

Oh, good.

Yeah, kind of. What you'll see are not chocolates served at a morgue. No, what you'll see are chocolates displayed in a candy box like any kind of Russell Stover spread. But look closely at those candies. Look at what shapes they are. Here's a hint if you can't tell. They're all wounds.

What?

They're all wounds and twists. They're all real wounds made from molds made from real corpses.

Oh, what? Who the fuck are they doing over there, Russell Stover?

This is all part of an art project, ongoing art project that has been undertaken by artist Steven Shanabrook, the son of an obstetrician in a coroner who started making these candies, which at first seemed like they weren't available for purchase, like for private purchase. But then I saw somebody, I think, on Reddit say that they are. So you may be able to buy these candies for yourself. He started making them as an art project in Russia.

I mean, maybe like access to your dad's corpses are a little easier in Russia.

Well, in an interview with Vice in 2009, he said, quote, I was living in Holland at the time, and a curator asked me to go to Russia with a group of Dutch artists. And I had just made an edition of chocolate teeth.

Oh my God, sir.

I had just made an edition of chocolate teeth called I Eat People They Eat Me with teeth I collected from dentists in Holland. We were talking about Moscow, and they said there was a huge chocolate factory in the center of Moscow, a very famous old factory. So I got to thinking, ellipses, end quote. And I guess what he was thinking was that he could go to morgues in Russia and make molds from the fatal wounds of anonymous victims, including gunshot wounds, stitch skin, protruding eyeballs, and then create chocolates from those molds.

I mean, what is that, like, port of entry conversation? When it was like, oh, your purpose for entering our country?

Yeah.

What is it? Is it business or pleasure?

Well, it's sort of a long story, a little bit of both. You see, what I'd like is access to your corpses.

Sir, you can't come in here. Well, can a bribe of chocolate teeth change your mind?

Yeah. The craziest one that he's done is actually an entire sculpture, and I have a link to a video showing this sculpture in show notes, an entire sculpture titled On The Road To Heaven, The Highway To Hell.

This guy, by the way, two times in a row could have shortened these titles. The first one's like, I eat, you eat, everybody eats teeth. And the second one is equally stupidly long.

They sound like mid 2000s emo songs.

Oh my God.

But this sculpture of his, On The Road To Heaven, The Highway To Hell, is a full mold of the remnants of a suicide bomber. So it's the upper half of a man with his entrails splayed everywhere, but the entire sculpture is made out of chocolate.

And this was a mold presumably made on scene? They're not gonna wait. I mean, maybe that's what the forensic guys I saw were. They had to like wait till the chocolate sculptor came. And so they had to just sit there and eat fucking sweet treats until they were done at the crime scene making a mold of somebody.

Well, here, here, Ed, I'll show you, I'll show you this video. And I kind of think people should look it up. It's a little graphic. I don't know that I'd say it's safe for work.

The last time you showed me a video in an episode, I saw someone die.

So it is just chocolate. This is it's only like a 15 second long video. It's not very long.

OK, I'm watching. This is, in fact, a dead person made of chocolate. I see their entrails. It looks like they have a hood on. It's actually beautifully. It's not beautiful in any way, but there's definitely this person's good at their job. This is well well done.

Yeah, I don't know how he took the mold of this guy, especially how he took the mold of the entrails.

Yeah, that's why I'm thinking maybe it's sculpted.

Was he a Russian suicide bomber? I don't know where the guy came from.

Yeah, I mean, I'm sure a couple Google searches away from getting that answer, but who has the time?

So why do any of this?

I didn't ask that, but I'm sure society did every time they saw one of his new art projects.

Every time that he had to go in or out of a country. Stephen explains himself in an interview I found on this kind of random blog. I think the original interview might have been in Russian, and what I'm reading here is a bit of an odd translation, but you'll get the idea.

He's a Dutch guy who went to Russia.

I think he was an American. He's an American who was with a group of Dutch artists in Holland, and they brought up this idea of going to Moscow.

OK. So anyway, you are who you hang out with.

Stephen says, it is exactly the banality of chocolate that makes the image so powerful, because the viewer is caught off guard, I'd say.

Yeah.

The familiarity, smell and the hidden psychological effect of chocolate are the most influential aspect of the Morgue Chocolate series. By exhibiting wounds in a chocolate box motif, the mold of a shotgun wound to the face becomes desirable to the viewer.

No, it doesn't. That is, you're wrong, sir. You can put whatever you want in your paragraph on that plaque next to it. Also, where is this taking place? You turn the heat up in that room. It's just a box of goop.

Well, just like the person whose mold this was taken from.

Yeah.

Even though one would not admit it, the desire is there and so begins the conflict for the viewer.

You're talking to me wrong. I'd eat it.

This smell is overpowering to the point where you cannot come to grips with what one is seeing, so much so that you begin to wonder what you were really looking at. So yeah, I guess it's true. There is a different dimension to viewing these morgue chocolates in person because you are experiencing them as candy much more than when you just see them visually.

I mean, I would split a box of fucking face wounds with someone. It's just because chocolate is chocolate. We eat fucking chocolate bunnies.

The big question here is, why did he not fill them all with different fillings?

Oh my God, who has the time to make the map?

A popped eyeball filled with marshmallow or a shotgun blast to the face filled with raspberry jam?

I think because there's no intention to eat these, maybe.

I guess. How is it, he says, that we should desire to eat the representation of an, hold on, I should try to do this without laughing. This is such an artist thing to say.

But also, again, remember, he's saying it. So this is, he's projecting his desires. Most people probably saw this shrugged and went, oh, okay.

Right, but he couldn't call the collection whatever. Quote, how is it that we should desire to eat the representation of another's pain? The chocolates are made, in a sense, to be digested mentally or physically, removed for the living to process again, but not to acquaint us with death per se, but to nourish life. Consumption alone has become the manner in which life is sustained. In this state, life's processes cannot come full circle. Upended in a single direction, movements, both physical and psychological, become stilted and reactionary. Furthermore, chocolate and blood function at similar temperatures, and as fluids, they both have come down through history as offerings to the gods, or at least as remedies for curing some inner melancholy.

Okay, the blood makes sense, but who the fuck's like, I made this chocolate fountain for Zeus? Like, nobody's fucking doing chocolate?

The Aztecs had their, they would drink like, hot chocolate, or their version of hot chocolate, which was a much thicker denser pitcher.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was, hot chocolate and the consuming of chocolate, at least in Aztec cultures, was like a communion with the gods kind of thing, but.

Is cocaine made from cacao beans?

Yes.

I mean, that's out there, fucking dude.

There you go.

It's like, chocolate's a hell of a drug, dude.

Chocolate's a hell of a drug. Put that down for button of the month. Here it is. Chocolate's a hell of a drug, like curved font over just a pile of white powder.

Oh shit. Shit. That's actually, it's going to be hard to do that actually. I was instead maybe just going to make a mold of it.

Yeah, over that. So Steven Shannebrook also has one other piece in the candy space I want to mention because the title makes me crack up. It's a piece of performance art called slapped in the face until your shit turns red.

He needs to shorten these fucking titles, buddy.

That's a great title though. Here, standing against a white wall, Shannebrook places a cotton candy machine modified with fans in front of his face that slaps him with the red and fluffy substance. According to the artist, the cotton candy performance for me is a simple gesture to conjure up feelings of forcing one's beliefs on others, even beliefs that seem sweetly correct. This action is the interpretation of a mental torture for the unwilling recipient. So it kind of sounds like, who is that girl that did the I make shitty robots or whatever on YouTube?

Oh my gosh, she's great. She is? Simone Gertz?

Yeah, she is great. But slapped in the face until your shit turns red sounds like a machine she would make.

Or would tell you later that the intention was to comb my hair and it ended up slapping me in the face until my shit turned red.

Yeah, well instead-

This guy set out to do this. This is somebody's kid that they have to then explain to people.

I also did leave out, I must have accidentally just, I didn't type this in here, and this, I guess, is sort of an important fact when it comes to this artist. He did spend some time in his youth working at a chocolate factory. So he did have some connection to the idea of a chocolate factory and chocolate making, and it wasn't completely out of left field.

I kind of feel like if we dug a little deeper, it's like, oh, his parents owned the chocolate factory.

No, his dad was an, or one of them was an obstetrician and one was a morgue technician.

Oh yeah, so those are making money. They got a little cash at the house.

It's speaking to his, you know, the morgue technician, chocolate factory work.

I guess all I was saying is you seem kind of like artistic endeavors where you have a safety net in your life in order to pursue them.

Yeah, yeah, true.

Don't know how much money is going to be in 73 word title chocolate and cotton candy rile people up art.

To be fair, I would love to live in a world where there is a lot of money in that, so.

Or just a universal basic income so we can go off and. Or just, yeah, live in a world where you're born into privilege.

Suffice it to say, Stephen Shannonbrook, if you're listening to this, I would love to know what you would do with gummy bears. So hit us up when you get to them because I'm sure it's going to be a masterpiece.

I don't know, gummy is actually very difficult to manipulate and deal with, I think. So I think like gelatin and stuff.

He's not prepared for the level of difficulty.

I don't think he's at that fucking level.

He's not at that fucking level. Who do you think you are? Jeff Koons? No.

It would be cool if he had Collabs. Where it was like him, you know.

Jeff Koons, ex Stephen Shannibrooke. A giant latex inflatable exploded guy. Well, Ed, that brings us to the Fear tier for this episode. Where are we putting Jack O'Lanterns on the Fear tier?

One.

One. Very low. And listen, folks, the longer this show goes, the more ones there's gonna be.

Especially when it comes to like themed stuff, like we're in October.

Yeah, buckle up. They're not all gonna be tens, but...

It was a fun conversation.

There is a lot to learn about Jack O'Lanterns and possibly even more if you have secret, obscure Christian knowledge about the burning of people in cages.

Still give us a five-star review. You can write all that crazy shit you want on there. Just make it five stars.

Five-star reviews all around for all of us. From us to you, we wish you a very happy Halloween. We hope you watch some scary movies. We hope you eat a bunch of candy. We hope you have fun. Give yourself one good scare.

Check your candy.

Check your candy for razor blades and stay out of those pumpkin patches. I'm actually gonna put pumpkin patch at a two.

Yeah, pumpkin patch is moved to a two. Yeah, we'll move pumpkin patch up to a two because pumpkin patches are apparently like New York in the 70s.

Yeah, you're gonna get machine gunned to death by a gang with bottles on their fingers. Yeah. All right, happy Halloween everybody. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

The show is Scared All The Time and we will see you next week.

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 Feifel.

Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew.

And Mr. Disclaimer is...

And just a reminder, you can now support the podcast on Patreon. You can 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 sign up for our Patreon at scaredallthetimepodcast.com.

Don't worry, all scaredy-cats welcome.

No part of this show can be reproduced anywhere without permission. Copyright's Astonishing Legends Production.

We are in this together. Together. Together.

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