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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.

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

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And this is week five in our Summer of Fear series. If you're just catching up, we've so far covered brain-eating amoebas, shark attacks, fireworks, and roller coaster disasters. And the summer is still heating up. This week, we're taking a page out of classic Americana and taking a road trip. Fast cars, empty horizons, windows down, music up, endless freedom, and in true Scared All The Time fashion, the only thing that could go wrong is everything. Because the open road is home to both our wildest dreams and worst nightmares. For every slice of pie at a mom and pop diner, there's a hitchhiker with a sinister grin and a knife in his hand. For each license plate you try to guess the meaning of, there's a body hidden in a trunk. And for every close call when you catch yourself drifting across the yellow line, there's a violent accident that stains the highway red with blood. So to help avoid danger, or maybe up the body count, who's to say? Ed and I decided we couldn't hit the road alone, so we've invited fan favorites Nat and Aly from Let's Get Haunted back to the pod to take this trip down Route 666, yes that's a real road, with us. So buckle up, or don't, we're not going to finish this road trip alive.

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

Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. We have a killer episode for you guys today. Ed, do you want to tee up our special guests for this week?

Yeah, I mean, you know them, you love them. I'm sure we say that in the real episode too. But Let's Get Haunted is here. It's some of our favorite people, really becoming some of our favorite people around, not even in the podcast space. But you know, when they're around, they like us, they bring the goofs, they bring the tangents. It's always a ton of fun. And this one in particular is pretty tangent heavy. It's Tangent Town, USA for like the first half hour.

That's where we took the road trip to, it's Tangent Town.

Yeah, it turns out it takes about a half hour to get to Tangent Town. So because of that, you know, we got personal stories about road trips and car wrecks and shit in the first like half hour. But if that's not something you're into, if that's not a ride you want to take with us, just go down to the chapters in the episode description and you can skip right to, you know, the history of road trips and the stories that Chris has prepared and stuff, because it's not for everybody having an awesome time. Apparently it's not for everybody. So just go down to the chapters, it's there. And the chapters in the commercial free episodes on Patreon, those are spot on, but it might be like up to a few minutes off on the free apps because all that ad shit is completely out of our control.

Yeah. So if you haven't checked out the Patreon yet, patreon.com/scared All The Time. That is where you should head if you want to get the commercial free episodes, if you want to get early release episodes, if you want to get all kinds of incredible bonus material and button of the month club. We've got it going on over there. I feel like we've had a lot of people signing up during the summer of fear. So if you've been enjoying the show, absolutely, please go sign up. Every dollar goes to keeping this show going, getting you guys more episodes, more content. We are content beasts.

Yeah, it turns out.

You gotta feed the content beasts or they die from starvation. So every dollar goes back into the show. So thank you guys who have already signed up. If you haven't, if you're not sure, you can head over to our Facebook group and ask people, what do they think? People will tell you it's one of the best deals in podcasting.

And I'll tell you right now, what's something that maybe they wouldn't mention, the chapters are spot on.

So the chapters are spot on.

You never have to play that little game of like, oh, am I in that section? Am I not? No, you hit that chapter button there, or you go to that time code on Patreon, and it takes you to exactly where I say you're gonna be.

Exactly. So we've got a long episode. So we're gonna skip five star reviews for this week. They'll be back maybe next week or the week after. And with all of that, jump in the car, kids, cause we're going on a road trip. This episode is gonna be a summer classic. But before we dive in, let's introduce this week's guests on the pod. You know them, you love them. It's Nat and Aly from Let's Get Haunted. Welcome back. Thanks for coming on.

Thanks for having us.

We are so happy to be here. Thank you for inviting us back. We weren't sure if we were cool enough to come back on, but thank you so much. It's an honor and privilege to be here. It really is.

Of course. I gotta say, I don't know what feedback you guys get on the crossover episodes, but I feel like we get insanely good feedback on the crossover episodes with you guys. So people love Let's Get Haunted.

Yeah, they do.

Our audience loves you guys, so the feeling is mutual.

Totally.

Fantastic.

Yeah, do you guys incorporate the feedback from your audience? Like if they tell you they don't like something, do you not do it anymore?

I mean, in the beginning, I think we were probably, we bent to their will a bit more, but now it's like, ah, you know who we are, we're not changing.

Okay, yeah, I can't remember the last thing that we responded to that was a suggestion or complaint from a listener.

I'm not gonna say it here because I don't know what the situation is, but we are currently, if you were asking us for personal hauntings on your show, we'd probably be talking about some of these crazy emails we've been getting from a person we mentioned in a previous episode who's reaching out a lot.

Yep.

A lot.

Whoa. Wait, we want the tea. I know you can't give it to us, but maybe in a future episode.

I can't give it to you. I will say I was contacted by this person and he asked to please not make fun of him anymore. And I do want to say as a person who was made fun of a lot growing up, I'm sorry that we made fun of you. I still think some of your ideas are a little bit out there, but maybe we went a little hard on the way that you dress. I apologize.

Oh no.

Oh my God.

I don't even remember what we said.

We've had our fair share of crazy emails. I feel like if you're writing in to a show that talks about weird things and you're being weird, you've got to understand that that's gonna be used on a future episode for content. We had somebody write us a super long email about how they were like sending a blue beam of energy through my window into my brain and that they couldn't understand why I hadn't addressed that they had transported cookie dough into my head through the window via rain shower. I don't know. It was something that made no sense at all and we definitely talked about it. So hope that person's doing well, but it was definitely strange.

We don't use the video component on our show, but you do have, this is not a joke, you do have a blue hue. It's probably just your monitor or something coming back on you.

It's true.

Yeah, in five years, you're going to go to the doctor complaining of a headache, and they're going to sit you down and be like, listen, I don't know if you know this, but your brain is 98% cookie dough. And it will all make sense.

You got beam brain now, dude.

Look, I didn't even know this was a superpower some people had. So mostly I'm just jealous, and that's why I bring it up, because I wish I could do that. But I do have a bone to pick with you guys, because I saw that a couple months ago, you covered meth on your show. And I feel like Nat and I have a large amount of meth-related personal hauntings. And so I can't believe that that is not the episode that you had us on.

That was before we started bringing people on for the Summer of Fear. Meth wasn't Summer of Fear. That's why we weren't thinking crossovers yet.

I am a methamphetamine super fan over here. I owe a lot of my success to the substance. And so yeah, I'm surprised that we weren't at least asked to be expert witnesses.

Is that what you were arrested for?

No, I was arrested for psilocybin for mushrooms.

Okay, that makes a lot more sense.

Yeah, another big fan. I was actually thinking about this. Is Chris like the Aly of Scared All The Time and Ed is like the Nat of Scared All The Time?

I imagine.

Is that what it is? Is that the dynamic?

If you never led an episode, then yeah, I would be the Nat.

But wait, are we talking in terms of who has done the most drugs and been to jail the most often? Because then yeah, probably, I guess.

I've never been to jail.

Me either.

I'm not above it. It could happen. There's still time, I hope. But yeah, as of yet, very much a rule follower.

I think what you said is exactly the pecking order around here.

Okay.

And I think the most intrigue our audience probably has right now is whatever happened to the episodes you were going to do. So I'll put it a chapter when it starts in the chapters.

This is actually a good segue because I was going to say, since this is the summer of fear, I wanted to just check in with everybody to see. And man, it sounds like y'all have stories, but how's the summer been? Has anything frightening happened to anybody? Or was the methamphetamine abuse last winter? Is that more of a winter inside thing?

Well, abuse kind of has like a negative connotation to it, so I don't know that I would use that word.

Sure.

Well, how's the meth celebration been going?

You know, it's been good. I had my birthday in June. Aly's birthday is coming up in July. Whoa. You know, so I got to open up some little blind boxes with little things akin to Funko Pops, if you guys know what those are. Yeah, of course. At 34 years old, that's pretty much like the highlight of the year, you know?

Okay, so I take it though, generally, no one's been bitten by sharks, no one's gotten a brain eating amoeba.

No, summer's been going pretty well so far. I'm trying to think of anything interesting at all that I've done this summer. Very recently, I just got back from a family reunion.

Those are scary.

Oh, you know what? I got bit on the butt by a spider. And that was scary. And I refused to see a doctor because I am not showing a man in a lab coat. My butt.

Could be a lady.

It's not happening.

That's kind of presumptuous.

I'm thinking specifically, very good point, Ed. Wow, you've really called me out. But I am thinking specifically of the urgent care that takes my insurance. And it's one guy, one doctor. And one time, I had double conjunctivitis in both eyes and my eyes were swollen shut. It was viral. It was not pink eyes. So everyone just cut me a break.

Sure.

But, yeah, okay. But both of my eyes were like swollen shut and they forgot I was in there because it's only one guy that sees everybody and they shut all the lights off. I was sitting in the room waiting for them to come back. I had just been diagnosed. I can't see anything. There's pus coming from both my eyes. And I'm just hoping that they're going to come back with my prescription. And then all the lights shut off. And I continued to sit there like an asshole because I couldn't really tell. I knew things had gotten darker, but I couldn't quite see. And then I peeked my head into the hallway. And I was like, is anyone there? And somebody comes up to me and they're like, oh my god, I'm so sorry. He left for lunch. We're on shift change. I just heard you asking if someone's here. We'll be back in an hour. And I just had to sit there.

Wow. You didn't want to race back to this guy with your latest injury. I'm shocked.

They'll leave you in a room with your butt hanging out. I worked with someone who would spend way too much time in the stall, like in the bathroom stall, but the bathroom there had motion sensor lights. And so I would constantly go into the bathroom and then they'd be like, hey, man, what's up? The lights would turn on when I go into the room. And I'd hear someone be like, hey, what's up? And I'm like, you were here so long, the lights turned off. You got to go back to work.

Yeah, it's not good.

Some of us are not blessed with great digestive tracks. So I feel like I can definitely relate to that.

I think they were just doing Wordle or something. I don't know what they were doing.

Well, this episode is a little bit different. I'm glad everyone has had a relatively safe and not scary summer. Spider Bites not included. But this this episode is a little different because the idea of the road trip, while it presents plenty of dangers, many of which we will get into shortly, I know is probably not particularly frightening to most people the way that sharks or roller coaster accidents are. But I would argue that that's just because they aren't paying enough attention or maybe haven't watched enough horror movies. Because where I want to start this discussion is with something that I noticed as I was putting this episode together, which is that my fear of road trips doesn't stem from anything that happened to me so much as it did the subgenre of horror that became really popular for a moment in the early 2000s. Road trip horror, getting lost, falling afoul of bad people in the woods. It's as old as horror movies get. But check this out. I never thought about this until I was researching this episode. But the first half of the aughts, we've got Joyride in 2001, Wrong Turn in 2003, House of Wax remake in 2005, Hills Have Eyes remake in 2006, Vacancy in 2007, and my beloved Jeepers Creepers also in 2001. So I wanted to start by just checking, have you guys seen any of these road trip horror movies? Do you like any of them? Did they scare you growing up? What's your feeling on road trip horror?

I've seen a lot of those. I definitely have seen Jeepers Creepers cause like that one was, that thing is like so perverted looking. I don't, he like is so gross.

Victor Salva.

Yeah, well there's a whole-

What are you gonna do?

I don't know if you know, do you know what happened to the director of that movie or what he did?

No, what happened?

So Jeepers Creepers is a controversial movie to like because you really have to separate the art from the artist. I saw this movie long before I knew anything about the director other than he directed Powder in 1995 or something.

With Mary Steenburgen.

With Mary Steenburgen. Victor Salva on his first movie, Clown House, with the opening credit starring Tree as Cheezo, one of my favorite opening credits of all time. Victor Salva, I guess there's no way to say it politely, raped a child on camera. He recorded it and then continued to work in the movies well into the 2000s.

What the fuck? Wait, that's the storyline of a movie is that there was a child that was raped on camera?

No, no, no. Well, Clown House is about three clowns who descend on a house and attack these kids. But one of those kids was raped by the director. And he went on to make Jeepers Creepers well after this was public knowledge. I didn't know that.

How old was this kid? See, this person would be dead if I knew about this. That just makes me so mad. Oh my God. Why are these people still working in Hollywood? What the fuck?

There's too many questions about why and how, some of which involve Francis Ford Coppola, which is a really awful thing to even discuss. And the whole thing's awful. But point being, when you say it's a perverted gross creature, if you watch it through the lens of this movie was made by a convicted child molester, the movie gets...

It's a very different film.

It's a very different film.

That's a completely different level of horror.

Yeah, it's fucking disgusting and awful and frightening, but...

It's a perfect film, so that's the biggest problem here.

But it's hard for me to watch now, but I do... I remember that movie scared the shit out of me. The first 20 minutes of that movie to 9th grade Chris was one of the scariest things I'd ever seen in my life.

Well, also because that song that's like, and a tiptoe through the forest, you know what I'm talking about? I feel like that movie would not be as scary without that fuck ass song.

No, I want to see Victor Salva direct Long Legs.

I haven't seen that yet. Long Legs was good.

To answer your original question, yes, I've seen some of those movies that you mentioned. The one that really, I feel like, was a canon event for me was in high school, I watched The Hills Have Eyes, and that movie is so disgusting, and also really made me fear porta-potties. And I work on a farm, and all of the bathrooms are porta-potties, and I will go all day, Nat knows, I'll hold it. I do not want to use a bathroom because there's that one scene where that person is crawling out of the porta-potty that they've been hiding in, and it's, oh, ooh. It was very creepy and gross.

That remake is brutal, especially compared to the original, which is, it's a Wes Craven movie, I don't think it's a great movie, but the remake is fucking tough. I think I've only seen it once because I was like, I think I'm good.

It was a lot.

Is that the one where the woman's breastfeeding, she has a baby and one of those weirdo people comes and nurses on her?

Yes, but I think that's the third one.

I think it might be the second, yeah.

Second.

God, why do these hills keep having eyes? Stop it after the first one.

If the hills had breasts, this guy wouldn't have needed to come suckled.

That's true, I guess. Hills, if anything, topography wise, or some of the closest we get to breasts, honestly. It seems like it's already written for you.

I do feel like anytime I go somewhere where the people are butt ugly, I'm always like, yeah, this place is giving me Hills Have Eyes vibes, and it's just well-understood what it means. I am thankful for that movie for giving me that way to address things.

I mean, Hills Have Eyes, like you mentioned, Hills Have Eyes, all the movies you just mentioned, I drive across the country a lot, and I'm sure it's going to come up in a second, but I mean, all of these movies have touchstones in them that I'm thinking about on the long drive across the country, like you said, like you're like, oh man, Hills Have Eyes, this place is giving Hills Have Eyes.

That's a great segue into what I wanted to touch on next, which is of the four of us, I believe Ed has the most cross-country driving experience, the most, I don't know what road trip experience you guys have, so let's compare real quick. Ed, you've driven across the country what?

15 times?

Five or six times now? Five or six, meaning front and back, so if you're doing it, then it's 12 each way, but yeah.

California to Connecticut?

To West Coast?

Yeah, East Coast to West Coast with different routes. Sometimes I go through Texas, sometimes I go through Kansas, sometimes I'll go up North depending on if it's winter, I obviously don't do the North that often.

Right. I've done it three or four times. What about you guys, Aly and Nat?

Well, Nat and I once did a road trip together. And that was kind of fun. We went from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles because Nat's parents were moving from Oklahoma to Texas and we wanted to take advantage of all of the furniture that was not going to fit into their new place. So we flew down there and then rented a U-Haul or Pinsky truck actually.

Pinsky truck.

Pinsky, the yellow one.

Yeah. And we shoved all that furniture in the back and drove from OKC to LA.

And we literally hit a tornado. Like there was like storm chasers next to us. We had to like pull over and stop.

We had to take shelter under an overpass. Yeah. We thought we were okay because we're driving and we're getting those like amber alerts for tornadoes. And...

We don't know. I guess it's a tornado warning.

Oh yeah. Tornado warning.

Amber alert for tornadoes.

Yeah. Yeah. That's what it was. Unless it's a child tornado. Like there's a child tornado in the vicinity. And yeah. And we were like, oh my God, what do we do? It's starting to rain. It's starting to hail. And we're like, I guess we keep going because we're in a stretch of Texas, I believe it was, that just had nothing. And then as we keep going, we're like, oh no, no, it's okay. There's another car up ahead coming towards us. So we must actually be okay. And then as it got closer, we realized in horror that it was a tornado chaser vehicle. Like storm chaser.

Well, at least it was going the other way. Like the opposite direction, right?

True.

I thought you were going to say that it passed you and like you saw that it had like half the trailer attachment ripped off. There's like cows dragging across the back of it and stuff.

No.

That would be a way better story.

We did that. I've done the trip many times. Actually, when I was arrested for the mushrooms that I was talking about earlier, that was in Arizona. I've driven from California to like Oklahoma a lot of times. I can't even count anymore. I feel like I've been through that one route. There's two. There's one that goes like I-10. It's a little bit more up north, I think. Then there's one a little south that goes by the Texas border. They both have their merits to them. Now, I would prefer to go to the one that does not go through Arizona. You cannot really call yourself a West Coast girl if you haven't been to Arizona and had a warrant out for your arrest because they do not play around over there. You come out of California and you're like raves, crop tops, I've got some weed in my bag to take the edge off and you enter into Arizona and they're like, welcome to jail.

Yeah. I think one of the only times I got pulled over on drives across was in Arizona.

Yeah.

That's why you got to stay a West Coast girl because if you try to go back East, you'll get arrested.

That's true.

Damn. Well, I didn't realize we had so much cross-country experience and I hadn't even considered, honestly, a tornado on a road trip as one of the fears.

So that's a whole new layer. I remember this last most recent drive across, I had to really divert my route because of tornadoes on the last drive last summer.

That's true.

Yeah, because it was like tornado right in front of you. And I was like, didn't say, I got like an alert on my phone or I'm sorry, an Amber alert for tornadoes. And then I had to scoot like way the fuck up into like Kansas, which sucks. There's no major highways there, but I have a grave to visit. So I went and did that. And so it's funny that I found relief, tornado relief in a place that's probably most famous for Wizard of Oz, which is like most people's tornado touchstone.

We're not in Kansas anymore.

Yeah. I think probably the most Hills Have Eyes part of the country, I would assume, would be like West Virginia, like that area you would go towards Connecticut, right? So you guys have probably seen more of that.

Pennsylvania. I mean, I think of the Hills Having Eyes, I think more of like a New Mexico, like weird kind of desert-y hills.

Yeah.

But I guess in terms of like deliverancy stuff, yeah, then maybe.

Yeah, Hills Have Eyes is specifically radioactive fallout in the desert, which is, Ed, what you're speaking to. In terms of people whose property you don't want to end up on.

Well, that could be Northern California.

Well, yeah, that could be Northern California. But I've had, not on road trips, but growing up in Pennsylvania and just bopping around the East Coast. As a kid who grew up in the middle of nowhere, I was always more afraid of the middle of nowhere than cities. Because to me, if you're in a city, if you're walking down the street and someone comes up to you, you can scream for help and there's a good chance someone's gonna come running or might hear you or whatever.

Put you on the Citizen app at the very least.

Yeah. Where I'm from, if you end up on the wrong person's property and scream for help, no one's coming. So, you know, like you're, if you get in trouble, whether it's from a person or even if you just get like bit by a snake or like, you might be, you might be fucked. But anyway, I'm glad we've all had some kind of road trip experience before we dive into the horrors of the road trip. If you have gotten this far into the episode and you're still saying, you know what? Fuck you guys, I'm not afraid of road trips. I'll say what you should be afraid of is driving. We talk about this a lot on the show, but I think this is a good place to start what is scary about road trips because driving, as we've discussed multiple times, is far more dangerous than flying, even though flying is the more common phobia. I think about it all the time, doesn't help, but the reality is this, there are over 6 million car accidents in the United States every single year, resulting in roughly 38,000 deaths annually, which, if you want to talk about flying, that's sort of like a fully loaded jumbo jet falling out of the sky every week. And if you think those stats won't come for you, you're wrong because on average, an American driver will crash three to four times in their lifetime, usually just a few miles from home, in one of the places that they feel the safest. I assume because as soon as you feel comfortable, you're paying less attention to your surroundings, and then oops, you look out your window and there's a tractor trailer coming right for your car, and then you're dead. In any case, whether it's close to home, that's maybe a specific fear I have.

Did my mom tell you to write this episode? Because I feel like this is the speech I get every time I get in my car and leave the house.

No, I mean, Ed can speak to how quickly and suddenly an accident can happen.

Oh yeah, this year, yeah.

He wasn't close to home, but he got in an accident on the highway out here in LA, and it happened in the blink of an eye.

Yeah, last August, man. It was right after we recorded the Sudden Death episode when we first started manifesting shit, and yeah, I was just driving in the far right lane, minding my own business. I'm sure our audience knows this. I was listening to a book on tape and literally just doing nothing but doing that, and a truck drove from the far left lane directly into the side of me on the 10, put me up into the wall, highway speeds, car behind me that was following too close, smashed into me, and it was all started by these two idiots, like a Corvette and another guy racing in the far left lane. They lost it, which drove into the side of the truck, which drove into me, which drove into everybody else.

And they never caught those guys.

No, no, and then the guy who started it, he got away. Like, he just left.

It was a hit and run?

Yeah.

The Corvette guy got away?

The Corvette guy got away. Yeah, the guy who started it all.

Which, I hate to say this, but he must be feeling pretty good about himself, because that car was going nice and fast.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking during that, is I was like, wow, fuck that guy, but also, like, good for him.

Yeah, he went GTA mode and got five stars and escaped, so.

I don't know, I will continue to let the air out of every white Corvette's tires I see, though. Until someone's caught.

A white Corvette? Yeah, that explains it.

Gross.

Maybe it was a black Corvette covered in cocaine. Yeah.

So anyway, yeah, we're driving, people driving, they can get in wrecks. Mine was bad and I had some PT for a while and stuff, but I didn't die like Chris's initial statements, which is you will get hit by a car and die.

Nat and Aly, have you guys ever been in an accident, like a notable one? I'm sure we've all been in a fender bender or something.

I've been in quite a few fender benders over the years, but yeah, very fortunate that I've never been in a major accident. However, I was, as you were talking, I was trying to think through like, have I even ever been close to being in a car accident? And the thing that came to mind is many years ago, I was dating someone who had a very fast car.

Wasn't a white Corvette, was it?

I know.

Not a white Corvette. It was, I don't even know what it was. It was a Jaguar. I don't know what kind or what, he shouldn't have had it is the point. I'm not clearly not dating this person anymore. Or else I would not be telling this story. But yeah, got in a super bad accident. It was horrifying. Like the whole car was crunched. Like it's a miracle he lived, but I almost got in the car with him right before it happened. And the passenger side was completely smashed in. The only reason why the driver's side, he flipped, like hit, it was just racing super fast. In kind of a rural area, there was a roundabout that I guess he just didn't see coming over, kind of an incline, sailed through the roundabout, did a bunch of property damage, rolled a bunch of times, ambulance had to be called. It was gnarly. He was fine, thankfully, at least physically. And then I was the one in the relationship that was responsible, which maybe Chris is why you and I are on the same wavelength. And I had triple A.

You were responsible in the sense that you cut his brakes?

Because I was trying to teach him a lesson and it worked. No. But yeah, so he had let his car insurance lapse.

Oh my god.

And the car was completely totaled on a leased Jaguar, so you can imagine. And I had to call triple A and get it towed back to the house that we lived in, that we were leasing. And then he just went inside and went to sleep. And I was helping this guy take pieces of his car off of this flatbed, triple A tow truck and placing them into an open air garage, like carport, as all of our neighbors are gathering around, like, oh my God, did he die? Where is he? And I'm like, no, he's asleep. This is normal. This is fine. And then we took a pool cover. We had to grab a pool cover out of me and, to clarify, me and the tow truck guy had to go grab the pool cover out of the backyard and then lay it over all these chunks of car.

Of Jaguar, yeah. And then it was in your driveway for months.

A year.

Yeah, because he just could not, yeah, deal with it.

The way you describe it sounds like the Roswell crash. Just like, he's got his pieces of metal out on the floor.

I was so embarrassed too that neighbors were coming up being like, what happened? And I didn't want to say that we had gotten into an argument and he had sped away and crashed. And so I was like, oh yeah, he got hit by a semi, but he's fine. And it's actually someone else's fault, not his. And it's actually, it's not our fault at all. And for whatever reason, we're bringing it back here.

It's not your fault. Even if he stormed off, except from your argument, that's still a decision he made and an action he took.

Thank you. I appreciate the reassurance.

You got it.

Nat, were you going to jump in with something?

You know, I actually do kind of have a crazy car wreck story. It's not mine, so I feel good telling it. I'll just take like two minutes. OK, so I was back home recently for like a family gathering. And there was a lot of people I hadn't seen in like such a long time. And there was one of my brother's really old friends from high school there. And everyone was like, you know, having a good time, kind of drinking. Things got sort of loose. And he starts telling this story. And he was like, man, the luckiest thing that ever happened to me is that when me and your brother got in this wreck, we didn't kill these two kids. And I was like, what? And they were like, yeah, listen to this story. They were like, we were driving his truck. This this kid at the time had this huge pickup truck that was like super lifted. We're talking about Oklahoma Corps guys. OK, it was like super lifted, super loud diesel truck. He's like, we were on a back road. We were going like 90 something. And no seat belts on, like just sending it. And up ahead, it's a two lane road. Up ahead, I see an SUV kind of coming out of like, you know, one of the side streets. And they just go into the middle of the road and sort of like swerve and just stop there. And I'm kind of like, what the fuck are these people doing? Why are they just stopped in the middle of the two lane road? And then another car starts coming from the opposite direction. And so the car that's in the middle of the road turns into the truck that's going 100 miles an hour. And then all of a sudden the guy who's driving it is just like, oh shit, like we're gonna fucking hit these people. But he is an idiot teenager and he knows he's going like 100 miles an hour. So he doesn't want to use the brake because he doesn't want there to be skid marks on the ground because he doesn't want the police when they come to say that he was at fault. So we're talking about a huge football player too.

That's fucking, that's four dimensional chess level. I know, I know.

Honestly, when he was telling me this story, I was like, wow, you're just a stupid beat head. But then I was like, oh my God, he's like spinning the jets. Like he knows what's going on.

You're living your life through the eyes of like a criminal though. So this isn't their first time like looking for security cameras in the open.

Right, right. I know he knew what he was doing. So then he sticks out his arm, his big ass football player, you know, 200 pound, whatever person arm to prevent my brother from flying through the windshield because he's got-

Wait, he did the mom arm?

Yeah.

He did the mom arm, but he was like strong enough that it worked?

Yes, and they fucking hit the car in the corner, like the SUV in the corner, the SUV spins out and goes into a ditch or whatever, right? And then they slow down, turn back around, come over. And the SUV in the car, there was a kid in every single seat except for the corner that they hit. And if someone would have been in that seat, they would have been dead. But here's where it goes even crazier. The kids come out of the car and they're drunk. They're wasted. And so they're like, get rid of all the beer. And then someone else comes. It's like the older brothers come and are like helping them get out. So my brother and his friend just like walk. Nothing happened to them. And the other kids all get like DUI, MIP, whatever. But the lucky thing is that no one died. But I just remember hearing the story and being like, this story is fucking insane. Like this should be a Black Mirror episode, you know?

That's lunacy. I mean, that is the most extreme car crash story I've heard in a long time. In terms of speeds and risk of death, I'm shocked that no one got killed.

Wow. I know. I'm glad I didn't know about this until after the fact. Because I was listening to this and I was like, oh my God, this is really, this is not good.

I think what we've all learned here is that the four of us are the lucky ones. We've survived our open highway stories, our cross-country trips, our road trips with stories to tell. But the open road can harbor far darker dangers than a bunch of gnarly car accidents and drunk drivers. From interstate serial killers prowling lonely highways to ghostly hitchhikers lurking at midnight, the great American road trip can quickly become an American nightmare. But before we get to the gory details, you know this show, you know we gotta dive into the history of road trips, which to be honest is a little tricky because I found myself asking, what counts as a road trip? Humans have been taking the long way for centuries. Our ancient ancestors crossing the Bering Strait? That was a pretty long road trip. What about Moses leading the Jews through the desert? That's 40 days and 40 nights on the road. Even the Odyssey is kind of a road trip with a lot of monsters along the way. But we're gonna start closer to the present with the dawn of the automobile and the promise of freedom that came with it. And I should preface all this by saying that I'm tackling the road trip as maybe not uniquely American, but mostly American because of the impact cars have had on our culture. Unlike other first world countries, we never invested much in public transportation. We fell sway to the idea of private individualized freedoms to travel and invest it in roads and highways instead. See the history of Los Angeles if you're interested in that to go a little further. And it's not like other countries don't have roads and road trips. The Motorcycle Diaries, for instance, is a very famous road trip through Latin America. But we generally think of backpacking across Europe more than we do hitting the road, which is a whole other episode. So for decades before road trips were a fun activity for families during summer vacations, I do think Americans were hitting the road, traveling this country end to end. Manifest Destiny is sort of one long violent road trip that wiped out societies. And the rest of this episode is about horrors that await the travelers participating in a road trip. But that period of American history was unique because it was the road trippers who were doling out the pain.

Oh yeah, shit, you're right.

There were horrors visited upon them too though. Lots of cannibalism and murder. If you want to dive deeper on that, you can listen to our episodes on cannibalism for a deep dive into the Donner Party and what they faced out on the open road. But I found an article in Time Magazine that details the transition of America from a nation of horses and buggies to a nation of roads and cars. It says, quote, In 1900, Americans were hampered by wretched roads and limited by the speed and endurance of the horses that powered buckboards, coaches and wagons. If they had an urge to travel far distances, they had to rely upon the steam locomotive. As fantastic as it might have seen at the turn of the 20th century, the idea of supplanting the iron horse with the horseless carriage did catch the fancy of some intrepid men and women, eager to test the technological limits of their new contraptions. A few hardy souls set off upon far reaching expeditions between 1900 and 1910. I thought this next little tidbit was really interesting. There was a Colorado attorney named Philip Delaney, who recounted his 1903 excursion from Colorado Springs to Santa Fe, and he observed, quote, and so the machine is conquering the old frontier, carrying the thudding of modern mechanics into the land of romance, which is a really, I don't know why we don't write this way anymore. I feel like everything now is way less exciting sounding than the way this guy wrote about driving like three states. But such travel meant seeing, quote, the wildest and most natural places on the continent, encountering more than a few hints of danger on steep and rocky mountain roads and reliving the exploits of American pioneers. So when we leave our homes now, what do we take with us? Our phones, maybe a bottle of water. But basically we get in the car, we just go, we don't really think about it. Aspiring long distance auto tourists back then were counseled by self-proclaimed experts to carry abundant quantities of supplies. Those who made the first transcontinental drives between 1901 and 1908 hauled along ropes, blocks and tackle, axes, sleeping bags, water bags, spades, camp stoves, compasses, barometers, thermometers, cyclometers, first aid kits, rubber ponchos, tire chains, pith helmets, assorted spare parts, and sufficient firearms to launch a small insurrection.

Jesus crap, part of that, I thought you're going to break into a song from The Music Man or something. No.

Can you guys imagine leaving the house with that much stuff to go on a road trip?

No. No. But my car does have stuff in it. I am shocked when I meet people who don't have jumper cables or anything else in their car, which based on some of your faces, maybe is all of you, I don't know.

Ed, you're particularly concerned about your car breaking down.

My current car is a piece of shit. Yeah, it wouldn't get to Long Beach, let alone find romance over how this man said.

You know what I like about this compilation, Chris, is that you're really making me think, like you said, about what constitutes a road trip. How long does it have to be? Do you have to cross state lines? Can you be on a road trip between different cities? What about within the same city? This is just making my mind spin because I drive a lot for work, but I would have never considered that a road trip.

Yeah, I think for the purposes of this episode, I think what captured my imagination was the wrong turn road trip. The idea that you and some friends or some family members are going on a journey that's going to probably take a day or more, and something bad could happen along the way. But we spend so much time on the road that it does become a question of, what does constitute a road trip and pretty much anytime you get on the highway, especially in Southern California, something bad could happen. So I think it's a pretty relevant fear for a lot of people.

And I also feel that maybe this will come up later, but in terms of things that person was like, all right, boys, and probably just boys at this point, all right, boys, we're getting in the car, and we got our pre-flight checklist of shit. And I think about it, someone just, I was, maybe we were going to Idlewild or something, Chris, and you get to that point when you're going to the mountains where your cell phone stops having service, and now you're like, how much does it remember or know of my Google Maps? Because now I'm in the fucking, I don't know where the turns are. And I was just thinking about that, and should we all be having a paper map in our car of where we're headed, just in case, for whatever reason, your phone dies? Like, whatever?

Two things about that. One is, I did find more than one article talking about the history of road trips and mentioning about how, in the old days, maps were on paper. They were not on the internet. So you had to have a paper map. No, no, no, I know, but it's something I-

How young do you think our audience is?

I don't know. I mean, to me, it's shocking.

I remember MapQuest, which was sort of like a hybrid, right? Like if you were going on a road trip, you would Google essentially or go on to MapQuest and search the route and then MapQuest would like print you out a map, the directions turn by turn, but also like a map. And that would be, I mean, that was like the thing that you did. And that was not that far. That was not that long ago. Like I feel like I did that probably in 2011, 12 or something.

When I first moved to LA, I had a Thomas guide. Did anyone else have a Thomas guide?

I had something, I don't know if it was a Thomas guide or what it was, but it was like this giant external GPS thing that my dad put in my truck. It plugged into the ashtray because I got lost when I first started going to school in LA. Got lost, went too far, missed my exit via my MapQuest directions. That's the thing about MapQuest, the era of MapQuest, is once you passed a turn, you were completely lost because now your directions. Yeah. I had to call my dad and be like, I'm at a gas station somewhere in LA. I don't know where I am. He's like, okay, ask around. Do you see anyone you can ask? It was nighttime. After that, he had got this giant external GPS thing and just plugged it into my ashtray and was like, here you go.

I had one of those. It was called a Garmin.

Oh, yeah. I think it was a Garmin.

I couldn't afford a Garmin, so I got a Thomas Guide, which was like a giant yellow spiral bound notebook of maps that was like all of Los Angeles County. And then you would, it had like a grid system on the map. And so you'd be like, oh, I'm going to like Silver Lake. So that's G13 on the maps. Then you'd go to the page for G13, which is like a pushed in more zoomed in that square of the map. And then if I needed to like now find whatever off of Sunset, I'm like, okay, well, that's there. So that's, you know, A, whatever. And you would get this, you'd physically turn to like enhance the size of the map. And it was a nightmare and immediately put a garment on a credit card.

When I had my garment, I drove out with it in 2008. And then I was waiting for a mattress to be delivered at my apartment and I got really hungry. And so in 2008, I couldn't conceive of the idea that you would ask your phone where to go get food. So I typed lunch into this garment thing and walked around with it. I downloaded the maps and I was walking around holding it being like, where are burritos? I need burritos. Found a burrito place down the street for me. But yeah, I mean, I think whoever said was, Nat, did you say you were using MapQuest in like 2012 or printing out directions?

Yeah, because I remember it would have been when I very first moved to LA, I had a friend and we were into like running and we did some like marathons together and we did some like half marathons that were like in weird parts of California. And I remember her printing out directions on MapQuest to get to one of them and us like taking the MapQuest directions and just going out and being like, you know, 20, you know, and having a car and being like, I'm an adult, I've got the MapQuest and you know, I'm in California. And like, no one could tell me what to do. And it was just like real sense of freedom.

Have you guys all seen the movie Swingers?

Yes.

Where they all go to the party in the hills and all their cars are like three inches behind each other. They're like following each other to each next location because only one person really knows how to get to any of these.

Yeah.

All right.

So, Ed, the other thing I was going to say quickly, Ed, is that you said mostly men, but I found in my research, Mary C. Bedell listed an impressive list of gear in her entertaining 1924 account of auto touring modern gypsies, which is probably a term we don't use anymore.

What the hell are you doing in my family?

She said that most dedicated motor campers carry, quote, tent, duffel bags, gasoline stove, Adirondack grate and a kit of aluminum kettles with coffee pot and enamel cups and saucers inside, an array of equipment that added 400 or 500 pounds to the weight of an automobile. So, women be traveling even in the 1920s.

Or she was just packing it. We don't know. She was like, and take this shit with you, too. Now that you got a car, drive out of my fucking life.

But American road culture, as we think of it today, didn't really pop off until Route 66 opened in 1926. According to a blog I found about the haunted history of Route 66, also known as the Mother Road, because it was the first really long interstate highway, it stretches over 2,400 miles from Chicago to Santa Monica. Some of it cuts through Pasadena, where I live and I drive on it almost every day. I don't know if you guys have also been out to where it ends at the Santa Monica Pier ever. But it's weird out there. Weird is maybe the wrong word, but like.

Yeah, here come the letters.

Well, Santa Monica Pier is very, it's chaotic. There's tourists and buskers and crazy people, but I've been out there a few times at night when the sun's setting on the pier. If you just take a breath, you can imagine yourself at the end of a cross-country road trip there in the 1930s or 40s. You can still feel that like, man, I'm at the far end of the country. I'm looking at the ocean and the road just ends here.

Yeah, it is surreal. The whole Santa Monica, so much of it is kind of like that like kitschy vintage like 1950s. A lot of LA is like that. Like I know like Dodger Stadium is very like time portal to 1950, whatever. It is weird. I've heard that the Santa Monica Pier too is like the original pier, like the first, the woods like the same. Is that true, Aly?

I don't know, but I know who does, and that would be Google. Let's see.

It's probably super haunted. Sorry to go on tangents.

No, I mean, it would seem tough to be the original wood if it's all the salt water and everything. They'd have to probably put some. Maybe they made wood different then. Maybe it was that old growth they cut down.

Yeah. No, the trees used to be like stronger back then. Yeah. That's actually a thing.

This is what it says. It says the current, I don't know if this is accurate or not, Google says the current Santa Monica Pier is actually made up of pieces from two different piers. One built in 1909, which was made of concrete, and the other which was built in 1916, which features a wooden section. The pier has undergone various modifications and repairs over time, including replacing some wooden sections with concrete. But it sounds like there's still remnants of two different piers.

Yeah, still pretty good. It's like over 100 years no matter what date you gave. Way to go, pier.

They don't make trees like they used to.

No. Well, that's where Route 66 ends. I don't know, Nat, did you ever-

Where do the horrors begin?

I was just going to say, Nat, since you were driving back and forth to the middle of the country, did you ever end up taking Route 66 for a long period of time?

Yeah, I had a few times. I know when we would take road trips with my family, when we were little kids, my dad would be like, let's drive on the old Route 66 because there's the main highway, and then right next to the highway, it's the feeder road is actually the old Route 66 for a lot of the path. So we would get off the highway and drive on it. There are still these little towns, the one in fucking cars where Lightning McQueen goes, where they're like Radiator Springs, right? Where it's a town that came up off of Route 66, and then the highway moved away from it, and now it's a dead weird city, Hills Have Eyes vibes, and everything's kind of 1950s, but it's like 1950s because they didn't update it, so you feel weird. You feel like I'm in this place that's frozen. It's not kitschy and cool, like Instagrammable. It's like I might get murdered here.

Yeah, there's not Instagrammable.

I don't have it in the show notes. Maybe I'll add it, but there's a Vice documentary about the towns off of Route 66 that are trying to survive still, and it's pretty pressing. It's very sad. Time has literally passed them by. The reason, though, that it feels like the 50s in a lot of these places is because even though... So, Route 66 wasn't fully paved until 1938, at which point Depression-era families had already been piling everything into their jalopies and heading west on it for years, but most Americans wouldn't travel much beyond their immediate town, city or region until after the economic boom years post-World War II, at which point the popularity and affordability of cars made them an instrumental part of a cultural shift. From 1945 to 1965, the number of private motor vehicle registrations almost tripled from about 26 million to 75 million. The Atlantic, in an interview with Richard Ratte, author of Don't Make Me Pull Over, which sounds like a real dad book, noted that World War II had a psychological effect on a generation of dads who came home from war overseas and were anxious to be on the move and see new places, which sounds like they all had shell shock from being in a war.

We got to be on the move, family. We learned that over there.

I'm having flashbacks. The road trip became almost a rite of passage, especially for families with kids looking for something to do in the summer time. But with the rise of road trips came the rise of grisly road trip deaths. And wouldn't you know it, hitchhikers were to blame. Hitchhiking was once downright normal. In the 1940s and 50s, it wasn't unusual to see a serviceman or a college kid thumbing a ride on the highway, and plenty of drivers would stop to pick them up. Part of the reason this was more normal, which I had never really thought about before, until I was researching this, but it makes a lot of sense, is that not as many people had cars, and we didn't have great public transportation in the United States, so people who wanted to go somewhere would just go hitch a ride. It wasn't considered a weird thing before 75 million people had cars. In fact, according to an article in Vox, dating back to the Depression in World War II, it was normal to see someone stick their thumb out and pick them up. We lost that somewhere along the way.

Probably all the murders are going to tell us about.

Yeah. Well, there's a piece of art in this Vox article that if you head over to our show notes, you can go check out. It's a piece of art produced by the FBI and signed by J. Edgar Hoover that shows a road tripping family stopped near a hitchhiker. And the text says this, quote, To the American motorist, don't pick up trouble. Is he a happy vacationer or an escaping criminal? A pleasant companion or a sex maniac? A friendly traveler?

That sounds like a positive. Why are we in the category of a murderer?

Don't threaten me with a good sign.

A friendly traveler or a vicious murderer? In the gamble with hitchhikers, your safety and the lives of your loved ones are at stake. Don't take the risk. But why the change in attitude? That all pivots on one man, William Cockeyed Cook, a notorious spree killer whose name and crimes have almost been lost to time, but whose actions shaped decades of hitchhiking laws. I take it none of you guys have heard of Cockeyed Cook?

No.

If I become a maniac, can you help me not have a name like Cockeyed? That is insane. Just something neutral would even be fine. Like, Aly Normalize? No name.

Aly, we thought she was normal.

Yeah, we won't give you a nickname. You'll just have the first, middle, last name of a serial killer. The way that they always give all three names. Cockeyed Cook, there was a reason. I found an article from Life Magazine that breaks this guy's life and crimes down. And it tells us this, quote, Cook's early life in his native Missouri was brutal. His mother died when he was five years old. His father abandoned him and his seven siblings in an old mine. He became a ward of the state.

I'm sorry, were they living in the mine or was he?

He just left.

Did he bring them to a mine being like, hey, look, I dropped my keys in there. Could you, the whole family go in there for a minute? And then he just ran to the car and drove off.

Eight children.

It sounds like that. It sounds like he left eight children in a mine.

Oh, well, you would be cockeyed because you probably wouldn't be used to the sunshine if you were just growing up in a mine shaft.

Oh, yeah, I guess I should have asked, was he one of the kids left in the mine or is he the mine deliverer of children to mines?

No, his father abandoned him and his seven siblings in an old mine.

So he's part of the Missouri Ocho, whatever they must have been called in the papers.

He became a ward of the state before his 10th birthday, had a nasty temper, exacerbated by the teasing and bullying he endured due to his deformed eye, and eventually ended up in Missouri State Penitentiary. When he was released from prison in 1950, the 21-year-old told his father, with whom he briefly reunited after more than a decade of estrangement, that his ambition was now to quote, live by the gun and roam. Which kind of sounds broadly American.

Yeah, that sounds kind of cool. I don't know. Feels like he really came out on top there at the end.

Yeah, I don't know how to break this to you, but Deadwood's not a place anymore by 1950. You can't just go be a cowboy.

The fact that he decided to try to reunite with the dad who left him in a mine with seven of his siblings, I feel like tells you he was already a little unhinged by that point.

Or it's where the only gun he knew was. He had to go get it from his dad.

He headed west from Missouri, drifting to California, and then eastward again down into Texas. There, in late December 1950, his crime and killing spree began. He kidnapped an auto mechanic who picked him up hitchhiking and forced the man into the trunk of the car. The man escaped shortly afterwards.

Yeah, mechanics probably know their way in and out of cars.

Yeah, not the guy you want to shove in a trunk. The family of an Illinois farmer named Carl Mosser, en route to New Mexico, would not be so lucky. In Oklahoma, the Mosser clan, Carl 33, Thelma 29, Ronald 7, Gary 5, and Pamela Sue 3, all of whom have names that sound like they're 40 plus. I guess that's just what you named kids back then. Picked up Cock-Eyed Cook, who was once again hitchhiking. Cook pulled out the 32 caliber snub-nosed pistol he bought in El Paso and told Carl to drive. Over the next three days, Cook and the Mossers wove their way back towards Cook hometown of Joplin, Missouri, and on the third day, Cook shot them all, including the family dog, and dumped the bodies down a well not far from Joplin.

The dog?

That's all his bullets.

Yeah, that is all his bullets.

He dropped them down a well? That's like the wet equivalent of a mine shaft.

Yeah.

Why would he do that to someone else?

He's in a cycle of abuse.

Shafts.

Maybe there was just a lot more holes in the ground back then, like mines and wells and stuff.

Yeah, the holes in the ground that did exist were probably much less scrutinized than they are today. If you found one, you were pretty safe dumping things and people and dogs.

But also, he could just be like, you know this guy might have gotten in the car and was like, work smarter, not harder, you know what I'm saying? I could have dug eight graves, but I didn't today. Now I leave here not sweating.

Cook killed once more during his spree, shooting to death a salesman from Seattle named Robert Dewey and dumping his body in a ditch.

This guy full of any hole in a storm, I love it. He really does not put the work in at all after.

Cook then kidnapped two hunters and forced them to drive him across the border into Mexico. There in a town called Santa Rosalie, the local police chief Luis Parra recognized Cook, plucked the 32 from his belt and arrested him.

Hell yeah, this guy's a wild man.

He is. Now the article ends, this is amazing to me. The article ends by noting that a short time later, Cockeyed Cook was handed over to the FBI. But that's not the whole story. Wikipedia adds this incredible detail. Mexico did not have an extradition policy with the United States at the time. So a group of police officers decided to physically push Cook across the border. So they said, you're not sending your best, we're sending this guy fucking back to the United States. We don't want Cockeyed Cook. They physically pushed him and that was where the FBI arrested him.

Do you know what's blowing my mind right now is his eyeball must have been so goddamn distinctive that a fucking Mexican sheriff or whatever is like, I've seen that eye in definitely a drawing, maybe, or I don't know how many photos are being mass produced and sent across the border. I've seen you in a fucking wanted ad. Give me that gun, idiot. Yeah, he plucked it from his, you must have been so distinctive looking.

I just love the idea of pushing somebody into jail, essentially.

Yeah. There are photos of this guy's arrest. His eye is not as crazy looking as you might imagine, unfortunately. I was imagining an X-Man style, like one giant eye or something.

Or whatever that teacher in Harry Potter.

Mad Eye Moody.

Kind of just looks like he's squinting out of one eye a little bit. But once he got back to the States and was arrested by the FBI, he was sentenced to 300 years in prison after being tried and convicted of the monster killings. And it was then tried, convicted and sentenced to death in California for the murder of Robert Dewey. And on December 12th, 1952 at San Quentin, Cook was executed in the prison's gas chamber at 23 years old.

Good riddance. RIP not God bless you, piece of shit.

Get out of here.

Interesting that he had a... Do you think he was pushed over the border in California or in Texas or Arizona?

Oh, that's a good question.

Because it's interesting that he wouldn't get killed till he went to California. These other places that I thought would have killed him faster were like, oh, those well babies are valued there? Don't worry about that. That salesman you killed, you gotta hang for this.

I'm not sure why. So Oklahoma convicted him of killing the whole family and gave him 300 years in prison.

Okay.

I don't know why California gave him the death penalty for the one guy.

Because he got in the way of business, it sounded like.

But the important thing for the history of road trip horror is that less than a year after he was put to death, a movie based on his killing spree and helmed by the actress turned director, Ida Lupino, called The Hitchhiker, was released by Lupino's production company, The Filmmakers. And the movie is, I don't know if you guys have ever seen it. I haven't. I know it's considered to be like one of the kind of classic film noirs, but it was also one of the first films ever made in Hollywood that was clearly based on a killer who had just committed these crimes.

Like pre-In Cold Blood and Capote and all that stuff.

Yeah.

What was the name of the film called?

The Hitchhiker.

The Hitchhiker. I guess it would be post-Capote. I don't know, but anyway.

It was post-Capote, but I don't know the time between In Cold Blood being written as a book and being made into a movie.

Post-Capote does sound like Post Malone's less talented cousin.

I have not seen that movie, but now I want to. I don't know if this is a good time to bring it up or not, but I have hitchhiked before.

Aly, I was just about to ask all of you guys, yeah.

I have to.

Okay, let's hear it.

Okay, I have hitchhiked exactly once in my life. I was in college and I was driving in the car with a guy and I wanted to get out of the car. He didn't, he did nothing wrong. I was in like a weird, angsty, I went through like my angsty phase way too late in life. It's very embarrassing.

This is last year. No, you said college.

Yeah, I was in like my manic pixie, like, you don't know me, like whatever phase that a lot of women go through. It's very regrettable. And we were arguing and I just opened up the passenger door while we were driving and I undid my seatbelt and I just jumped out. And so he slams on his brakes and he's like, what the fuck? And he's like, get back in the car, get back in the car. And I'm like running away and I'm like, no, I'm going back to campus. And then I just, I don't know. And then he drove away because he was like, well, fuck it. I'm not going to be like chasing after some lady in the street that's saying no.

Honestly fucking fair dude.

Absolutely, no. He's the hero of the story for sure. I was the villain. And then, yeah, I just started trying to walk back to Loyola Marymount University, which if you guys know anything about LMU's location, it's up a hill. And so I'm trying to like walk towards, I think it was Lincoln Boulevard and it's just, it's way too far. So I start trying to hitchhike and it's kind of late at night. It was probably like one in the morning. And so there aren't that many cars going by. And I'm like, why is no one stopping for me? Like this is bullshit. And so I stand in the middle of the street with my thumb up like this and I see headlights and I'm like, perfect. They're going to have to stop because I'm literally blocking the lane. I'm standing in the middle of the street. And as it gets closer, the siren goes off and I realize it's a cop. Whoa. So then I start running, sprinting away from the cop. I run into a nearby like apartment complex and I'm like ducking in different areas and I'm just sitting there waiting. The cop car eventually goes away. I go back to the sidewalk and I stick out my thumb again and a guy picks me up. There were a bunch of guys in a car and they were like, what are you doing? But they were really cool.

No, I mean, honestly, more times than not, that's how the story ends. But I'm still just like, you got to. You gotta fucking gauge some shit.

Yeah, I'm very calm now for anyone listening to this who's like, you sound like a nightmare. I agree. I'm very calm now. I would not do this now. And I was just like, hey, can you take me back to where I'm living, please? And the guy was like, where are you from? And I was like, I'm living on campus at Loyola Marymount University. Do you know where that is? And he's like, I have no idea what you're talking about. And so I was like, I'll guide you. It's okay. I'm drunk. And so he and some guys, I could not pick them out of a lineup. That's how drunk I was.

And that's never what you want to say.

No. And then they drive me.

Oh, you four? I would never pick you guys out of a lineup.

I'm sure I told them that. Honestly, they were so cool. And then they were just like, why are you doing this? Like, you should not be doing this. This is very dangerous. Like, we will definitely drop you off. And yeah, they just went and dropped me off at the front entrance to school.

At the closest mine shaft.

Yeah, they dropped me down at the closest mine shaft and I slept it off. Yep, and that is the story of the one time I ever hitchhiked.

No, that's the story of the one time you met four guardian angels. Like, literal spectral beings picked you up.

I wish I remembered who they were.

I think we found the difference between myself and Aly. Because I would not have tried this.

I'm a person who makes tons of bad decisions, especially when I'm alone and like, well, no, it fucking cares. You just say yes and see what happens. And I still, every time I see someone hitchhiking on every one of the times I drive across this country, I'm like, I'm so sorry. Like, I mow that as I drive by, like, I can't help you. Like, I just can't trust you. I'm sorry, I just don't know you.

But if it were me at one in the morning holding up a thumb, you wouldn't stop?

I just have that, it's funny, I have a lot of faith that people are good, but I have just no faith that if you're in here with me, what's gonna happen?

It's funny, I feel like if I saw a scary looking guy hitchhiking at one in the morning, I would be like, I can't pick that guy up, he's too scary looking. If I saw you hitchhiking at one in the morning, I would be like, I can't pick this girl up, there's a trick happening. That's what I'm saying!

Like, you're giving track.

She has a gun or something.

Oh, entrapment, I understand.

There's no good option. But Nat, you said you also have hitchhiked?

I'm gonna make mine really short, okay. So, this was, you know, a few years ago, I had written a TV pilot and we had submitted it to this Vermont film festival called ITVFest. And the keynote speaker for ITVFest was the CEO of Viacom. His name is Bobbert Bakish or something like that. I'm not sure if it's the same dude now, but this was the guy at the time. So, it's the day I had just listened to his speech, whatever. I went back to, like, our shitty hotel room because I was just going to, like, take a nap or something. I was, like, had been living in an LA., like, all of my adult life. So, like, I didn't understand that there were places in the country where you couldn't just, like, call an Uber. And so, I was, like, back in the hotel room. I was, like, well, I'm just going to, like, chill until it's time for the, you know, the showing of our, whatever, the premiere. And then it was, like, an hour before, and I called an Uber, or I tried to call Uber, and it was, like, Uber's not available in your area. And I'm, like, a 30-minute drive away from the festival because we were staying in this, like, secluded, out-of-season ski lodge thing because it was the summer, and that was, like, the cheapest place to stay because it was, like, out-of-season ski lodge. And so I'm just, like, panicked, like, oh, shit, I'm about to miss my fucking premiere at this film festival. This is, like, a big deal to me. Like, I wrote this thing, like, I starred in it. This is, like, a big deal to me, right? And so I just panic, run out of the hotel room, and I just run to the nearest gas station. I'm like, can anybody give me a ride into town? Like, I'm going to here. Can anyone help me? And everyone is just, like, silence. And then I'm just like, ah! And I see, like, a semi-truck guy, and I'm like, please, can you, sir, can you just, like, are you going this way? Can you give me a ride? And he's like, sorry, I'm going the other way. I'm like, okay, shit. And I just, like, start running down this road. And every car that goes by, I'm, like, sticking my thumb out. Everyone's passing me, passing me. And I'm sweating. I'm in fucking leather pants, because I was like, I'm going to be, like, so cool at the premiere. I'm wearing these leather pants.

You're going to be so chafed.

I see, like, three or four all blacked out escalates just, like, speed past me. And I'm just like, fuck, ah!

Even the men in black won't stop.

Yeah, you just keep getting down this road. And then all of a sudden, like, all of those escalates, like, turn around.

Oh, wait, I take it back. I take it back.

And then I'm like, oh, I'm about to die right now. This is like cartel. I don't know what this is, but this is bad. Like, just the fact that it's, like, a whole group of them turning around, like, this is not good. And then they come around, and it's like a guy in sunglasses, and he's, like, there with his wife, and he has two kids in the car. And he's like, hey, you say you're going to this festival? That's where we're going to. Like, we heard you at the gas station. What you're doing is not safe. We're happy to give you a ride.

Oh, you said your names were Jeff and Ghislaine?

And I was like, OK, cool. And then I get in the car. I'm all huffing and puffing, trying to be normal, let them know that I'm not a weirdo with their kids. So I'm like, hi, thank you so much for picking me up. Are you guys from around here? This is a lovely area. I've been skiing. You can trust me, white people. I'm cool. And the guy turns around. He takes his glasses off, and he's like, hey, I'm Bob. Nice to meet you. It's the fucking CEO of Viacom. Gave me a ride to the film festival. Yeah. And he goes, so, you know, when I, we had like a whole conversation, whatever. I told him about how many times I've been skiing so they could really trust me. And then I get out of the car and he gives me his card and he gives me his email on it. And he's like, you know, send me an email, send me your pilot and I'll see what I can do. I'll get you to the right people. And so I was just like, of course it didn't go anywhere cause this fucking sucked and I'm not good at that. So but it was a good story, you know, it's a good story.

That's amazing.

I do love that the head of Viacom is like, here's my card by the way, in case you forget what I do or what my name is.

Well, it's just important to have a card.

So humble.

Yeah.

But you said it was multiple SUVs or just that one?

It was three. It was three. I'm assuming the people are in front.

Why is he rolling so deep?

He was a billionaire at the time.

You had every opportunity to ruin his life and take his kids and hold them in a well until he gave you some of that money. You fucked up, honestly.

They were like, so where are you staying? I told them this dilapidated hotel thing that I was staying at. They're like, oh yeah, one of our houses is over there and this has some of the best skiing in the country. You should come back and see the leaves change in the fall and all this stuff. I was like, wow, what a life.

I think they were probably trying to take your blood or whatever that stuff in your blood is. I think they were like-

Reprove you into a sex cult, that's my guess.

I think that you're saving Grace is that your name was on where he was going to be.

It was a guy in his family, you guys. It was like a dad, a mom and two teenage kids. They were in high school and I was talking to them about their plans.

Yeah, who are now old enough to take Hitchhiker's Bloods themselves now.

Yeah.

They were in training.

The kids are like, she smells great dad, can we cook her?

Yeah. You're like, oh no.

Oh fuck, what have I got myself into? No. Well, listen, I'm shocked that you two are the Hitchhikers of the group and Ed and I have never dared.

No, I don't dare because this is not why you guys did it, but I don't have a great self-esteem thing. I'd feel like who would want to pick me up. It's like where I'm at. So it's not that I'm afraid, I'm just like, and not even that I think I would be in position because I'm also polite, but I just feel like, ah, who would give me the time of day?

You just didn't want to be rejected?

Yeah, exactly right. I'll walk until my legs fall off to not have somebody put my thumb out and then have someone drive through a puddle and splash it up on me.

They do say to become a successful hitchhiker, you got to get through a lot of nose. There's a lot of rejections.

I've seen this, how many films where it's an Ed Voccola type and he was like, oh, I can't get a ride. And then the lady he's with raises her pant leg or whatever. I feel like that's a trope for a reason. I'm holding both bindles at this point. You know what I mean? I don't need that.

Raises her pant leg.

I don't know why, but that's so funny to just think of someone who's like too insecure to try to hitchhike.

Yeah, that's not think of someone. You're looking at them on camera right now. This is not a made up character.

Well, I'll tell you what. There's a lot of weird guys out there who were very secure enough to hitchhike. And after Cockeyed Cook, the image of the scruffy hitchhiker with a gun in his pocket stalking Route 66, entered legend and put a damper on hitchhiking for quite a while. And then in the 1960s and 70s, the presence of Cook in the American psyche sort of released its grip and the practice of hitchhiking saw a resurgence. It was the era of free love and easy rider wanderlust and the open road once again called to adventurous spirits, even those without cars. But things would take a turn for the worst before long because in the 1970s, a trio of California killers all nicknamed the Freeway Killers, even though their crimes were unrelated, sprang up. And unlike Cockeyed Cook, who is classified as a spree killer due to the compressed timeline of his crimes, these three men were in fact fully serial killers and they struck terror into the heart of a country just beginning to understand the idea that hunters lived among us. Also, unlike Cockeyed, these guys weren't hitchhikers themselves. They preyed on the young free men and women who jutted their thumbs out and tried to catch rides around the country. One of them, Patrick Kearney, took a liking to young men along California's highways in the early 70s, often picking up hitchhikers or men from bars. He confessed to 21 murders and is suspected in up to 43, dismembering some victims and dumping their bagged remains off the freeway. Another, William Bonin, a former trucker, trolled the freeways in a van and tortured and killed at least 14 boys and teenagers, sometimes with accomplices, before he was caught in 1980. And a third, Randy Kraft, was arrested in 1983 with a body in his car. He's tied to 16 murders, likely more, of young men that he picked up on the highways and he infamously kept a coded scorecard of his kills. So, if you were a hitchhiker or a teen guy run away in the 1970s in LA, the odds of encountering one of these three guys was non-zero. You had a good chance of running into three overlapping serial killers.

I mean, this is prolific. Those are huge numbers they were putting up. And I have to imagine a lot of hitchhikers are not simply your Aly and Nat types, drunk people who don't research. I'm talking about these people were probably like a lot of them are runaways coming to the West Coast, trying to work in the biz, whatever. No one's calling to be like, hey, where's Brian? Where's Susan?

Yeah.

For a couple days, for a week, what have you.

Yeah. And there's another place in Texas. I don't know if you guys have ever heard of the Texas Killing Fields.

Yes.

But this is another place, yes, where a lot of lives on the open road came to an end.

Is that where it got its name?

What do you mean?

Like it was, well, I'm sure you'll tell me, but I've heard of it, but I don't know what it's in reference to, the Texas Killing Fields. Yeah.

It's the I-45 corridor between Houston and Galveston. And since the 1970s, more than 42 bodies, mostly women and girls in this case, have been found in the same 50-mile span. Wow. Police suspect that multiple serial killers took advantage of how isolated the area was, and many of the cases remain unsolved, no leads. And whether these crimes were perpetrated by hitchhikers or on hitchhikers may never be entirely clear.

I feel like the age of by hitchhikers that went away pretty quick, I feel like on hitchhikers seems real fucking easy.

Yeah.

Like on hitchhikers, you're in the middle of nowhere, you pick somebody up, hey, what are you up to? Dead. You're up to nothing now. And then fucking, you just dump them in the killing field, and you keep going at 60 miles an hour, and it's just easy peasy. Okay, I almost finished that in a way that's cancelable. Um, it's just easy peasy.

I thought when you said by hitchhikers, I thought you were talking about bisexual hitchhikers. Like, you never see a bisexual hitchhiker anymore. They're all just trying to murder.

Depending on how desperate you were to get somewhere, I feel like many hitchhikers may have been bisexual hitchhikers at a certain point.

Out of necessity, though. Not out of preference.

Correll, yeah, you're right.

At the end of the day, taken together, these crimes, along with hundreds of others connected to hitchhiking, resulted in most states passing laws that at the very least restricted walking and standing alongside highways, which effectively outlaws hitchhiking.

Oh.

And it is now illegal in Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Utah and Wyoming to hitchhike at all.

I did not know that.

I mean, a bunch of those places are desolate ass. They have desolate ass parts of their state. Yeah. So it makes sense.

Yeah. And I don't think we could truly move on from a discussion of scary road trip hitchhikers without touching on one of the most common urban legends in the world, the legend of the phantom hitchhiker. I'm sure you guys have heard phantom hitchhiker stories. You may-

You mean like Large Marge?

Kind of like Large Marge.

Like people get in the car.

Large Marge with the driver.

And then they disappear.

Oh, the person you picked up was not real.

Yes.

Yes. Correct.

That's the opposite of Peewee. Okay. Got it.

Yes.

I'm on board now.

The way that these stories usually go, you guys may have even covered some of these stories on Let's Get Haunted. But generations of travelers and road trippers alike have reported picking up a lone hitchhiker, oftentimes a young woman in a white dress who gets in the car, says very little except to maybe give an address of where she's going, and then vanishes from the car without a trace. And the story usually ends with the driver rolling up to the address requested only to be told by a mourning father or mother or significant other that the person they're describing, who got in their car, died on that lonely stretch of road some time ago.

I don't know how to tell you this. I lent her $500 and you, grieving family, I'm not leaving until I get it.

We have talked about that trope before of the phantom hitchhiker. I know we once did a story in Hawaii. We had on a guest that was telling us all about Hawaiian folklore, and there's quite a few hitchhiking ghosts in Hawaii, if I remember correctly. And then we also have a segment called Paranormal Games to play in the dark.

Yeah, which we keep wanting to be on.

I know. I need to have you guys on. We've covered all the good ones, so I'm like really scrounging around trying to find-

You heard my story about why I don't hitchhike, right? I'll take garbage. I feel that I deserve the garbage games.

We'll play Uno in the dark and it'll count.

It's fine.

Perfect.

There's also the Japanese people that hitchhiker ones, right? The cab driver drives around the area where the tsunami came and he picks up these people.

Oh, shit. Yeah. That's a good one.

Yeah. Then they are not real and it's a problem because the taxi drivers aren't getting their fare paid.

That's what I'm saying, dude. What the fuck? Can't get that bag if they're fucking not real, dude. Yeah.

But there's a paranormal game called the 11-mile road ritual where during these different stages of this 11-mile period on a phantom road that you magically find yourself on, a woman appears in the back seat during one of the mile markers. I forget which one. If you look in the rear view mirror at her, her jaw unhinges and she just swallows you whole in a non-positive way.

I was going to say that's not where I thought that was going for a split second there, but God damn, let's hit mile 11, baby.

That's like, did you get to home base last night? Did you get to mile 11 with her last night?

Yeah.

Oh my God, dude.

Bro, her jaw comes right off. If my mother-in-law is listening to this, I'm sorry.

Oh my God, Chris.

You guys are fucking gross, dude.

I'm not used to hearing Chris talk like that. I'm kind of shocked and I expect that from Chris.

I'm sorry. I pulled a Nat. One of the most famous of these stories is Resurrection Mary in the Chicago area. Since the 1930s, dozens of drivers on Archer Avenue have picked up a beautiful blonde woman in a white party dress who asked for a ride towards Resurrection Cemetery. As they approached the cemetery gate, she disappears from the car seat, leaving the driver understandably freaked out. I feel like if a person stopped Ed and asked him to drive into a cemetery, he would have questions.

No, I think she just said in the direction of Resurrection. She might be asking to go to a bar that's right next door.

True.

I'm sure it's called House of Spirits. Then he thought they were asking to go to a bar called House of Spirits, but what is a graveyard if not a House of Spirits? So it's like, oh shit.

Pretty good.

Yeah, dudes.

It's a meet cute.

It is a meet cute.

As far as strange mysteries out on the open road go, though, Mary is not even near the top of the list, because sometimes the road trip itself becomes the mystery, whether due to harsh environments, vehicle failures, or strange disappearances and deaths that to this day defy explanation. And it's at that particular intersection of the Twilight Zone that we encounter the bizarre disappearance of the Yuba County Five. I don't know if you guys ever heard of these five men who disappeared.

I sure have.

It is a wild story. On February 24th, 1978, five young men from Yuba City, California, friends who, we'll discuss this delicately, all either had mild intellectual disabilities or psychiatric conditions, which honestly sounds like most of my friends, so this is relatable, all piled into a car together to go on a road trip to see a college basketball game at USC Chico and never made it home. According to an article about the case on All That's Interesting, quote, there was no sign of the men between Chico and Yuba City. By pure luck, a US Forest Service rager happened upon Madruga's car stuck in a snowbank in the Plumas National Forest on February 27th. The remote road was nearly 50 miles in the opposite direction of the route the men should have been traveling. But here's the thing, when they found the car, it still worked. And it wasn't stuck in a way that you might imagine. It looked like it had basically just been left behind and it was a little bit stuck in a bit of snow. Per the Washington Post, the car still had a quarter tank of gas and there were several maps in the glove compartment and the keys were gone. A massive search ensued. And then this is where it gets really weird. Because a man named Joseph Shands came forward with a story about the night these men disappeared, the night of February 24th. According to the crime wire, Shands had been driving on the same remote road to check on his cabin that he owned in the forest when he also got stuck in a snowbank. He said he then suffered a heart attack while trying to free his vehicle and collapsed in pain, unable to move. Around 11:30 p.m. that night, he noticed headlights on the road and claimed that several men got out of a car, along with a woman who was holding a baby. He called for help and the group stopped talking and disappeared. Shands said he saw flashlight beams again about two hours later, but no one ever came to help him. When he recovered enough to attempt to walk down the mountain for help, the car of one of the missing Yuba 5 was in the spot where he'd seen this group of men the night before. It's unclear if Shands actually saw the Yuba County 5, if they really had a woman and a baby with them, or if he'd simply imagined the entire thing in a pain and heart attack induced days. However, it was all that investigators had to work with until the snow melted in the spring. And that is when searchers made a very grim series of discoveries. The bodies of four of the men were found in scattered locations miles from the car. One of them, Ted Weir, had died slowly in a forest service trailer 20 miles from the car. So get this, he had somehow traveled 20 miles on foot, found the service trailer, broke a window, took shelter there, but the length of his beard on his dead body suggested that he'd been alive and growing this beard for two to three months after-

Nope.

Disappearing.

Fuck that, dude.

His body was discovered emaciated, stretched out on a bed in the trailer, wrapped in sheets and his feet were severely frostbitten. Now, the crazy thing about a guy who starved to death in a cabin 20 miles from the car that he abandoned and after he'd spent three months there is that he hadn't opened a locker in the shed that contained enough food to have fed all five of these guys for more than a year. Nor had he used the matches, fuel or propane tank located in another shed to keep the trailer warm. It seemed that he'd simply found the trailer and then spent months waiting to die. The other three guys had apparently tried to trek back towards civilization and succumb to hypothermia in the woods where their remains were scavenged and spread about by animals. The fifth man, Gary Mathias, was never found. To this day, no one knows what happened to these guys. They don't know why they ended up on the mountain road. They don't know what happened in the woods. They don't know if someone chased them.

Interdimensional.

Aly, have you, as the one other person here familiar with this case, have you ever heard a good theory about what happened to these guys?

No, not really. I know that the first time I heard this story and I don't remember the particulars, so if I'm wrong, sorry in advance, but I think I remember the individual that was found inside the trailer where like why didn't he open the locker and eat the food? Why didn't he light the fire? I think he was described as having the cognitive capacity of a child, if I'm recalling correctly, and when I remember myself as a rule-following, very anxious child with undiagnosed anxiety, just like not having a good time if I lost something or if something didn't go according to plan, I could imagine myself starving to death, surrounded by food that I didn't know if I was allowed to eat or not. You know what I mean? And so that one to me is like, okay, I could definitely see that happening depending on the person's personality and ability to think clearly.

Yes. Ed, you can cut this if we feel like we want to, but the Sacramento Bee ran a headline, Rick Van may have survived one month. So he was definitely not fully at his full mental capacities.

Yeah, but just the 20 miles of it all is what gets me.

Yeah, he got there.

20 miles in the snow.

He hiked 20 miles in the snow and found a trailer. So he was like good enough to do that.

He might have just not had the experience enough like survival experience enough to know that you could spend three months in a cabin without rescue. And so I feel like he probably thought, oh, I made it to shelter. I'm good. People are gonna show up at any time and save me. That's true. And didn't really think about, you know, it's like that thing when you're in the car and you really have to pee and you're like, as soon as I get home, I'm just gonna pee. I'm gonna pee. And then you get in the driveway and you just like piss your pants because you hiked yourself up and you should have been like, you know, actually, I can't pee for like another two hours to hold it, right? Like, I feel like he just...

Yeah, and I feel like it's definitely one of those things where he probably wasn't in great shape by the time he made it 20 miles to this cabin. And so all it takes is like, I could definitely see getting to a point where you get there, you're like, oh, they're gonna rescue me. Like three days go by, you're starving already. And then the next two months are just like, you've lost your mind already. You're just like waiting and not even realizing that time is passing and...

Totally.

Yeah.

Yeah, that one is more understandable to me, but why they stopped in the first place. And then beyond that, why they decided to walk into the woods instead of wait by the car, that for me is a little fuzzier because again, trying to put myself into the mind of like me as a child, I feel like that would make sense to my brain. Like I'll wait here if I think there's something wrong. Like I wouldn't move, I wouldn't risk it. That's not to say that everyone would make that same decision. But yeah, and it's interesting that one of the guys has just never been found. I mean, you hear stories about people going missing in the woods all the time and they're not found until years later, but you would think there would be some trace of that guy.

It's crazy. People call it the American Didilov Pass incident, which is a Russian hiking story that if we ever do hiking on this show, I'm sure we'll cover Didilov Pass. But it's one of the weirder woodsy disappearance death stories that I've ever heard. And we're all these years later and no one's come forward. No one has any other stories. There's just this one guy who maybe saw them, but also-

Was fully dying of a heart attack at the top of a mountain, it sounds like.

Yeah.

That is my nightmare. I think you guys have already covered heart attacks.

No, no.

Maybe I'm wrong.

No, no.

Okay. All right. Well, anyway.

We know the next one will have you on.

Yeah. I'm terrified of anything heart related just freaks me out. I don't know why.

Do you ever feel anything? Do you ever get weird missed beats on your own heart?

I went through a period of time where I constantly thought I was having a heart attack, where I was like, oh my God, every small pain in my arm, it's definitely a heart attack. Every stomach ache, because they say women, it manifests differently. And if you have a lot of stomach pains, it's like the equivalent of the arm pain for a man is stomach pain for woman in relation to a heart attack.

I didn't know arm pain. I didn't know that was just men. I didn't know arm was just man.

I know.

Yeah, I know. This is why.

It's Reddit, though. It might be misinfo.

I don't know.

Oh my God. It's ChatGPT told you you had a heart attack.

When you have anxiety, you just like over Google. And so then you know too much. Like, what is that saying? A little bit of information in the hands of an idiot is like a really bad thing. Something like that.

That's why I've long since stopped Googling any medical problems because I know the answers are just going to be like, you're dying. So I go, okay, let's assume I'm dying. Is this immediate enough to go to the doctor or should I like just go, maybe I'm not dying? Like removing the ability to Google it for myself has actually made, I think, my anxiety better because I'm just like, all right, let's deal with what I know, not what I'm worried it could be. Then who knows, they'll find me on the floor in six months.

This is what the best part about doing a Summer of Fear episode with Let's Get Haunted that Chris runs, is that as a person who's genuinely the most like, I'm just in a sidecar of this podcast for the most part, is like, I thought we were going to have guys in Hawaiian shirts taking their family on road trips. So far, I'm like Googling, if I have a stomach ache, does it mean I'm going to fucking have a heart attack? We're talking about like fucking people freezing in the ice? Like, what's going on here, Chris? This is wild.

Well, I have a story about a German family called the Death Valley Germans, which is a great punk band name.

I was about to bring them up when you started talking about the Yuba County Five. Go ahead.

Well, let's wrap this episode up then on the Death Valley Germans on tour near you, playing incredible punk rock in the basement of a bar somewhere. But this happened in Death Valley, obviously. The one place that my dad ever was... My dad has never expressed an interest in where I am, if I'm in danger, anything, except one time I drove to visit him in a place he was living on the edge of Death Valley. And he called me three times to make sure I had enough gas. And I was like, what the fuck is going on? Like, I've never had him express this much concern about anything. Then I read this story, and now I sort of understand what he was so worried about. In the summer of 1996, a family of four from Germany flew to California for a vacation where they rented a Plymouth Voyager minivan and set off to explore Death Valley National Park in July.

No.

The hottest time of year.

Fucking mistake. I do like, I think Death Valley is really pretty, but I would never go in July.

No, that's, I guess I visited my dad in, oh yeah, I visited him in July. I, you fool. Because we did the fourth with him. So it is very hot out there. Temperatures routinely soar above 120 degrees Fahrenheit or 49 degrees Celsius. This family was last seen on July 22nd, 1996, buying a guidebook at the Furnace Creek Visitor Center. Right there kind of tells you what the vibe of this place is like. And they even signed a guest book at a remote ghost town site, cheerfully noting their next plan stop. It wasn't until they failed to catch their return flight home and the rental car company reported the van stolen that an investigation began. In October of 1996, Park Rangers found their stranded van in an extremely remote part of the park called Anvil Springs Canyon. The van had gotten hopelessly stuck in soft sand on a little used dead end road, and inside were empty water bottles and a couple of personal effects. Ominously, it looked like the family had tried to camp for a short time and then left on foot, which was a big mistake. It wasn't until 13 years later that hikers stumbled on the skeletal remains in a remote wash over two miles from the van's location.

Oh my God.

And they-

Just skeletons and leader hosens?

You know, that detail was not covered. We can only assume, Ed. We can only assume. They did find one of- They found the wife's passport and bank ID near the remains. Other belongings such as a journal with German writing and a wine bottle were found and attributed to the missing family. They only found DNA from one set of bones, and they were fairly certain that those bones belonged to the missing tourists. The remains of the children were never officially discovered, although the sole of a shoe, possibly from one of the children, was found. And a bunch of people have speculated about what exactly happened, you know, if they set off on foot. One interesting theory is that the family may have seen on the map that there was a naval air weapon station in China Lake nearby, and that they may have expected to find a well-patrolled fenced perimeter, but the military bases in these desert areas of the southwest, unless it's Area 51, actually don't have those. So, they may have become even more disoriented upon not finding anything that would indicate a base approaching.

Okay, well, this is a question for Chris and Nat. You guys are in families. You have families. You've created offspring.

Yeah.

Now, am I crazy? I feel like my dad, he would be like, I'm going to go check it out. You guys hang here. But it's weird that, how about for you, if you had a kid and a partner, would you choose you or your partner to be like, all right, you stay with the kids. I'm going to go check it out because we know it's hot, but it's safe-ish, you're not exposed to animals, and you can make a lean-to and stay some under the shade. I'll be back. I'm going to check on the China Lake situation. Yeah. It's just weird that the whole family was like, let's go all together.

It would literally be like, Cody, go figure this out. I'm going to stay here with the kids. That's how that works. Yeah.

Yeah. The whole family thing is weird. Both these stories, the fact that the whole car has left is weird to me.

I assume that the temperatures and the lack of water probably was playing a part in the decision-making at this point. It is a little weird, I do think, that they all left the car, but I don't think that anything beyond just confusion probably accounts for that.

What year was this?

96.

96. They probably just didn't know how dangerous a desert was. They probably didn't realize how fast you can lose water. Maybe this was their first time to a place that has that kind of climate, and especially in California, you kind of forget that, I didn't want to have to bring this up, but this is America, free to make free, guys, okay? Sometimes you're gonna leave your minivan and your family is going to get dehydrated and starve to death in the middle of the desert, but that's the American dream.

Yeah, listen, all right?

The chance to die of starvation as your brain overheats. That's what our boys in blue are fighting for.

Boys in blue? The Union Army?

God bless America.

What is happening? I don't like this. I don't like what's happening.

Yeah. The flag is flying.

Look, two children, or at least are missing, they're living in a vulture's house. And this is what you're doing? You're making jokes?

Well, I'll also say if for whatever reason, someone from CPS is listening to this, Nat is just kidding about this being the American dream of her whole family dying in the desert.

I don't even know how you got this.

They'll clip this in the future when Nat loses it. They'll be like, there were signs along the way. And it's just a supercut of all of our worst jokes of LGH lore.

I'm just saying it's kind of cool that you can just get a minivan and drive out into the middle of the desert here.

Yeah, but you got to be smart about it.

Yeah, you got to be prepared. But you also don't. It's not illegal to not be prepared.

It's not illegal to be a fucking idiot.

Once again, freedom isn't free, guys.

True, but I would also say, I have not been to Europe many times. I went once in sixth grade and once in sophomore year of college. Both times I was struck by how many tourist sites or whatever have very little signage or warnings or anything compared to a lot of America, where if you go to anything that's got a cliff or a sudden steep drop or deep water, there's signs everywhere that are like, don't go here, don't do that, stay here.

We're a litigious country.

From my limited experience in Death Valley, there's not a lot of that. It really is just sort of a wide open desert. If you want to go drive your car off the road, there's really nothing stopping you. So yeah, it is kind of a like at your own risk location for sure.

Yeah, the reason why the Death Valley Germans came to mind when you were talking about the Yuba County Five is because in that case, it took years, 13 years to find the skeletal remains of this family. So when I hear the story of the Yuba County Five, I'm like, okay, well, sometimes it takes decades to find someone's remains. But I still think it's weird. I don't know.

Well, they still never have. I mean, the Death Valley Germans, they did find 15 years later or whatever, the Yuba County Five, that one guy's been missing, what, 45 or 50 years or something at this point.

So he could still be alive.

He could be. He could have orchestrated it. They had half a tank of gas. He took the keys. That's a better question. Did they find the keys on any of these fucking bodies?

I don't think they did.

So then the fifth guy has the keys.

Ed, you should have been a cop.

I literally, they wouldn't hire me.

Ed Voccola's a great name for a cop.

It is.

But with that, our road trip with Let's Get Haunted comes to an end. Nat, Aly, this has been an amazing episode. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having us. I'm sure we will do this again soon. Here or on your show, we'll play a game. What's it? Haunted Games in the Dark?

Paranormal Games to Play in the Dark.

Paranormal, yeah.

Ed remembers.

We'll do one of those. We'll figure something out. We survived the road trip. I hope you guys enjoy listening to this episode. Before we go, we do need to place road trips on the Fjord here. Let's start with our guests, Aly and Nat. Where would we place road trips on a scale of one to ten on the Fjord tier?

What's one in ten?

Well, one is not afraid and ten, according to Ed, is having a bucket of hot piss and shit dumped on your head. Oh, God.

That woman in Hollywood on Hollywood Boulevard. Yeah. Road trips, I'm going to say compared to having someone dump a hot bucket of diarrhea on me, probably a two.

Fair enough. Fair enough. A solid two from Nat. Aly, what are we looking at?

I think it's a little scarier than a two, but I have to agree that I can think of many things that would be much more frightening. But I would say I'm going to rank it a five, because there is a lot of possibility for things to go wrong. I know when I'm on a long road trip, I drive 100 percent of the time. I do not trust anyone else driving as Nat knows. I feel like if someone else were driving, that might even get above a five. I might be very scared.

Okay, Ed, what about you? You've had a lot of experience.

Yeah, and I'm also a wheel man. It's like Aly, it's like I'm the-

Okay, cool guy, the wheel man.

I'll do 12 hours behind the wheel. I don't give a shit. I'll do 15 hours. I don't care. It's like I'm the driver, almost exclusively. I took you eight hours, Chris, I drove. Yeah, I would say five is definitely a good starting point because I don't want to go too high because I do feel that much of the road trip I'm in control, like I'm setting the route, I'm driving, but I've had tires blow, I've had fucking amber alerts for tornadoes make me lose a whole day and have to now go to some place where I wasn't prepared for it, I don't know where to eat, I don't know if everyone's going to try and kill me or whatever. I have to say five because freedom ain't free, as Nat said, so yeah, you're giving something up on this trip.

Okay.

Yeah, I'm going to go five.

What do you think, Chris? How would you rank it?

I think I'm going to go four because I'm more comfortable letting trusted people drive at least, as evidenced by Ed driving me eight hours. I didn't feel the need to grab the wheel and take over the situation, so that never really changes things for me. My general anxiety about dying while traveling is always going to be lingering there somewhere just below the surface, but it freaks me out way less than flying, so I think road trips is definitely a solid four for me.

Before we wrap the episode up, there are some things that maybe we'll do on New Fear Unlocked or one of the Patreon shows, but there's a lot I feel like I left on the cutting room floor that was never recorded here. There's like, I've let people stay with me in hotel rooms, I don't know, on drives across the country. I've had a tire blowout in a place that had zero cell phone service.

Yeah, I know that story.

Yeah, the two weird cowboys, not weird, guardian angels, the two cowboys who stopped and it was the only car we saw for literally more than two hours, stuff like that. So I feel like there's a lot of bonus material that can come out of this episode. So I'll say that there's more stories in us.

Absolutely.

Yeah, one time I took a wrong turn and drove through a wedding. And that's all I'll say about that. Drove through a wedding between the arch and the bride.

Oh my God.

And she saw me. I saw the whites of her eyes.

You have to come back on the show, guys. You should come on one of the bonus episodes.

That is like a naked gun level wrong turn.

Yeah.

That you would comically just cruise through a literal wedding.

Yeah, it's like-

It got worse, if you can imagine it. It gets even worse.

She drove through twice.

Oh my God, came back.

You turned around?

Well, she had to get a piece of that cake, dude.

She's holding her hand.

She saw four guys in another car and was like, Hey guys, I gotta jump in here.

Oh my God. That is, yeah, you guys have to come back and tell those stories, even if it's on New Fear Unlocked.

Yeah, we'd love to.

We would love to.

Anytime.

All right. Well, thanks so much, guys. Thanks so much for listening. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Go check out Let's Get Haunted anywhere that you get your podcasts. Do you guys have anything else you want to plug?

Nope.

Nope.

I mean, you could plug road tripping because I will say I've gone through like an Oreo sleeve level of of listens of Let's Get Haunted on my drives across the country. Just one episode after another, after another, after another, just like in a long stretch, like crossing state lines on like.

I feel so bad for you.

No, it was good, guys. That's how I that's how I got to hear about all my heroes, like Epstein and Balenciaga and.

Oh, so you're a Nat episode man.

Oh, shit, I guess maybe.

OK, I'm telling you guys in another dimension, Aly is Chris and I am Ed. And the fact that Chris even said he doesn't like flying, that is like a major Aly thing. She's terrified of flying. It's like a whole thing. It's weird. It's very scary.

I do like it.

Wild scene. All right.

We'll do just a fears, a four person fears episode sometime. We'll cover everything. But until then, thank you very much for listening. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Until next time, I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

The show is Scared All The Time and we will see you next time. Bye bye.

Bye bye.

Bye bye. Woo.

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 is Astonishing Legends Production.

Night.

We are in this together.

Together.

Together.

That was really fun.

===TRANSCRIPT END===