===TRANSCRIPT START===

Astonishing Legends Network.

Disclaimer.

This episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here.

But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me.

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

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And this is week seven, our final week in the Summer of Fear series. After a season's worth of brain-eating amoebas, shark attacks, fireworks, and roller coaster disasters, road trips and summer camps, we're finally rounding the corner, sharpening our pencils, packing our lunch boxes, and bracing ourselves for everyone's favorite seasonal dread, going back to school. Of course, teachers would want you to think of back to school as a fresh start. You've got new classes ahead of you, new experiences, maybe new friends. But here at Scared All The Time, we're experts at finding the dark underbelly of even the cheeriest things. And school has a very dark underbelly indeed. Truth be told, it's been almost 20 years since I've had to go back to school, and I still have dreams or nightmares sometimes about the teacher trying to kill me or a bully trying to kill me, or maybe something as simple as just forgetting my homework and showed up at school with my pants off. In any case, when I graduated college for the last time, I swore I'd never go back to school again, but here we are. And hey, Ed, I'm looking at our school schedule and it looks like this week we have class with fellow talker Amber of the It's Murder Ya'll podcast. So at least we'll have someone to pass notes to as we learn about all the reasons school can be so much scarier than pop quizzes and getting an F in your worst class. And listener, do pay attention, there'll be a quiz at the end of the episode.

Will there really be?

No.

If it weren't for work for me, I'd be so pissed. What are we?

Now it is time for.

Time for.

Scared All The Time.

Hey everybody, welcome back to Scared All The Time. We've got an awesome end to the Summer of Fear lined up for you this week. Just a couple of things off the top. One very big, big, big announcement flashing neon. Imagine this is like a 1990s Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. This is an important announcement for everybody. As you know, October is spooky season. The Astonishing Legends Network is going to be going all out for spooky season, including us. Although I don't know if we're going to do three.

No, we're probably not going to do a week of treats again, no.

Because that almost killed Ed last time. But we are going to go all out. We're going to find some cool stuff to do for October. But in order to prepare for that, we are going to take September off.

Yeah, but don't freak out. Don't freak out.

Don't freak out. You might say, what am I going to do without Scared All The Time for a month? Well, listener.

Probably something productive.

Probably something productive. Maybe read your kids a bedtime story instead of telling them to listen to us while they fall asleep. But what you can do if you can't bring yourself to read a book to your children or talk to your significant other, you can go sign up for Patreon for $5 a month. We are going to be releasing a new Fear Unlocked each and every week, every week, people, in the month of September to make up for the fact that we are going to have the regular show in the kitchen, getting cooking up, cooking up spooky season stuff. So you head over to patreon.com/scared all the time. Sign up for $5 a month. We'll keep you covered for the month of September while we get ready for October, where we're going to be back with a bunch of great stuff all across the Astonishing Legends Network. And I believe we're going to be doing a collab with Perplexity. We've got a bunch of stuff going on. So stay tuned for that.

Speaking of collabs.

Speaking of collabs, we want to let you guys know, we hear you about guests. Some of you love guests. We love guests.

Hell yeah.

We love everyone we've had on the show. I think our guest episodes are great, mostly because I get tired of just talking to Ed.

That's true.

It's nice to have other people on to have fun. But we've seen some comments that you guys don't love the guests. We hear you. All I will say is, please don't leave mean comments about the guest. If you don't like the guests, you could absolutely leave comments saying, we don't want episodes with guests. But you don't need to be mean to the actual guests. They're our friends. We have fun on the show. We don't want people to feel bad about coming on the show. So we don't want people to feel bad in general. So you can let us know, but lay off the guests themselves.

And now for the opposite. Let's go to five star reviews.

Five star reviews. What we do want you guys to tell us in great detail.

How much you love us and our guests.

Yeah. So as you know, if you listen to the show, if you leave a five star review, there's a chance we will read it. We are actually digging deep into the five star review archives to kick off five star review this month. Ed, would you like to let the listeners hear one from nearly a year ago that we did not get to?

Nearly a year ago, never read on this show. So just don't, if you don't hear your thing read, it might just be coming down the road. All right. So this is from littlebit9979 and subject weekly must listen exclamation point. Love this show. Not only saying it because Stevie would hurt me if I didn't, happy face, but I look forward to new episodes weekly. It feels like hanging out with family, having some laughs and learning a thing or two along the way. Ed's take on the Tornado EF scale is definitely something I reference way too often, but it's too funny not to. I hope you guys never stop creating exclamation point. Well, I hope Stevie doesn't beat you up.

Who's Stevie? Who's going to beat this guy?

I have a theory. Maybe Comic Steve? Maybe it's someone Comic Steve knows.

Oh, okay. I've never heard Comic Steve called Stevie. Whoever Stevie is, keep your fists at your hands to yourself. Leave our listeners alone. See, I defend the listeners as much as I defend the guests.

Yeah, Stevie, stop the violence.

Yeah, quit it. All right, so we've got some newer five star reviews as well. We've got one from Guilty and The Ghostly from August 8th, 2025, five stars laughing while diving into big fears. Scared All The Time is my emotional support podcast. Equal parts scary and hilarious, like if a haunted house had a stand up comedy night. Hey, that's a great idea. Damn, that's a great idea.

It's a great idea.

I laugh, get freaked out. I question my life choices in the best way possible. I even talk you, talk, bleh, I even talk about you on my own show, The Guilty and The Ghostly, the best mix of funny and freaky. All right, so we've got a podcast we've got to check out there, Guilty and The Ghostly.

Sure.

Glad you listen.

Yeah, and also that you know how to leave a beautiful review.

And also, because you left the review on our website, we actually own the idea about the stand up in a haunted house. So don't try it.

That's on you.

We already have our lawyers looking into it. And then last five star review, five stars headline worth listening to. This podcast has quickly become one of my favorites. Interesting topics, good flow and conversation, and sound, Ed, can't be beat.

Oh, hell yeah.

Keep the shows coming. And that's from Carly OK.

We work hard on it. This episode has some issues with sound, but most people won't notice.

Carly OK feels the same way about her name as she does about the headline worth listening to.

Yeah, yeah.

But the review is five stars, so amazing. Thank you very much for the five star review. With that, onto the show. This is a good one. We have a guest. We won't have as many guests in October.

Because of the meanies. I'm just kidding. We were doing a summary of your thing with guests. But also before we get into it, I want to say, you know, had a great time at Midsommar Scream over the weekend. And it was a blast to meet a bunch of other pod people and YouTubers and just people in our space. And also a huge shout out to Sean and Michelle for rocking Scared All The Time shit. Thanks for coming to hang. Thanks for the gifts.

All right. Yeah, hell yeah. Midsommar Scream. We'll find some more opportunities to do some fan meet up type stuff in the very near future. So until then, plug in your headphones, hook up your Bluetooth.

Put on the Scared All The Time vinyl.

Yeah, we shouldn't release a best of vinyl collection.

It's all the stuff I cut out. It's however long a record can hold ahs and ums.

That would be a great way to lose money.

We could put coughs on one track.

Side B, coughing.

All right.

Enjoy the episode.

Hey everybody.

Welcome back to the show. We've got a killer episode lined up for you. But before we dive in, I want to introduce our guest this week. We have with us Amber, the host of It's The Murder, Ya'll podcast.

It's The? It's Murder, Ya'll.

Did I say it's the? It's Murder, Ya'll podcast.

If it was one episode long, that would be the name of the show. Just one. And there it was. That was the murder.

400 episodes on a single murder.

Oh my God.

We have Amber, our fellow podcaster and host of the It's Murder, Ya'll podcast that you can listen to wherever you're listening to this podcast. So Amber, welcome.

Thank you so much. Also, it's hilarious to me when people that aren't southern say ya'll because ya'll don't put the stank on it that we do, but I appreciate your effort.

No, especially not Ed and I from the Northeast.

Yeah. In New England, they call those apostrophes.

I don't think they're called stanks down South. That's just more of a colloquial phrase, but.

I don't know. I've never seen their textbook.

From being in the Northeast, It's Murder, Ya'll is the best you're gonna get from us.

I love it.

I also call, I also say crayon instead of crayon.

Oh God, no. It's a crayon.

Yeah, well.

Oh, and I say, this is mispronounced anywhere you are on the planet, but apparently I say the ninja in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles wrong.

Yeah, there's no A except for the end.

Ninja.

Ninja.

Teenage Mutant Ninja.

Yeah, I think I don't say ninja. I say ninja. So anyway.

That's right there with like robots.

This is why I don't listen to my own podcast, because I would walk off of a bridge. But Amber, please, the floor is yours. Introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about the It's Murder, Ya'll podcast.

Well, thank you so much. So I host It's Murder, Ya'll podcast. I do have a co-host, my husband. He doesn't really, he humors me. That's why he's on my podcast. He doesn't want to do podcast stuff, because he doesn't care about true crime. He just, again, humors me. But I cover true crime cases, typically murders, in primarily the deep south. So like Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, all places I've lived. I try to cover cases that not everybody and their mama have covered. And sometimes I throw out a good disaster, like the Benton Fireworks disaster.

Yeah, yeah, which we've referenced on this show.

Yes, thank you. And I have some mystery episodes coming up. I used to post regularly, but I'm in school. And so my posting schedule is a disaster, but I will start posting again soon.

Yeah, that's why I hit you up. You came, you were top of mind, because you're always like, oh, I can't do podcasts because I'm trying to get a degree or whatever. And I was like, yo, fuck that up and come on our show for two hours and fail that test.

Well, we should back up a minute before we get into how Ed so closely knew Amber's schooling schedule. So we've been online friends through the podcast with Amber and her podcast for a little while. And we were just before the podcast started trying to remember how we became internet friends. And Amber, I believe you have the most accurate recollection of how this happened.

I do. I have the podcast canon. So I have ADHD. And so I get like hyper fixations of certain things. So I was going through this hyper fixation on Astonishing Legends. And I was just like all day listening. And it happened to be when y'all dropped into their feed and I listened. I was like, OK, first of all, they're hilarious. Also, Chris, I love like you and I as children, kindred spirits, nerdy, scared of everything, but loved all the spooky stuff. So I was like, that's great. And then in an episode, y'all mentioned Our Lady Peace and something else. And I was like, I'm going to reach out and say, hey, because they seem awesome. And Ed responded. And then I think Ed listened to an episode of my podcast and my husband's funny. And he said something about pepperoni.

Yeah, I don't remember exactly what it was, but I did make it. I did send you a comment and I'm laughing out loud at something in your show. Yeah.

And then I started like sending reactions as I listened to y'all's episodes. And that's how it started.

Here we are. And so I knew she was in school. So when we were trying to find a guest for back to school, I'm like, this person has, as far as I know, at least one child that that's, yeah, children. She herself is in school. She has a pod. So I'm like, you know, this person might be perfect for having on as a guest for this.

Yeah. So there's school coming from every which way. So you have kids in school, which is kids in school is really one of the main focuses of this episode. So there's there's been and we will avoid for the record. I made this decision early on. We will be avoiding school shootings.

Oh, yeah.

Obviously, that's the number one school fear on everyone's mind. Makes for really shitty podcasting. So we're just putting those to the side. But even still, there's lots of bad things that happen to kids at schools.

So many people just turn the pod off being like, I was here for the school shooting. So this is I'll see you later.

We need more trench coat mafia content.

But what makes them tick? I'm sorry.

Tell us, Amber, a little bit about what you are in school for.

Great question. So I actually really am the perfect guess because I do have a child who just started middle school, which is a very scary thing in and of itself. Who likes middle school? Nobody.

I liked it.

I actually work in higher education. Like I work at a college, I teach and I do some other things. I've worked at a college my whole career. Almost 17 years. I worked at the University of Alabama, Roll Tide, where I went to school. I worked for the University of Georgia.

Wow. Okay. I about to say, there goes our Georgia fans, but then you got them covered.

Then I worked at another unnamed school that I won't mention. But I'm currently in school for my doctorate. Y'all aren't going to know what it is. I'm going to tell you anyway. So it is a doctorate of education in learning, assessment and student success.

Oh, that sounds cool. So what is that sort of like, yeah, what is that? I was going to try to guess, but I can't even, I can't synthesize it.

I only, my brain immediately went to that it's assessing why they weren't successful. And then that would be like, I would be a case study, you might be Chris be a case study for her in class.

See, it's the opposite. It is basically the assessment of what do we do to help students be successful.

Oh, okay. That's awesome.

So for me, fun fact, I was the first person in my immediate family to graduate from high school.

Wow.

And so made it from the bottom. Now we here. And I was always a nerd and I always left school, which is weird because I'm very shy and introverted. I'm actually doing my dissertation on shy, on introverted academic advisors. Oh my God. Yay, I just finished this past Sunday, I finished all my classes. Done with classes. I just have to write a dissertation and I will be done. So I'll graduate next summer.

Whoa.

Round of applause.

I'm so glad we caught you. Round of applause.

For those of you who come to our live shows, you know round of applause.

Round of applause is a big thing for us.

If you don't know round of applause, come to the live show, get a round of applause.

Oh, that's huge. Yeah.

That's huge, yeah.

And it's fucking wild. 17 years in academia is-

But also, an introvert in this position, that really does make everything about school kind of a nightmare.

It does. Rob asked me all the time, now why did you choose a career where you talk to people literally all day? I'm like, I don't know.

Oh my God.

Well, whatever calls to you, right? I mean, I remember when Ed and I, I think I found out before Ed, but Ed and I as screenwriters found out that a large part of the job of screenwriting is pitching, which is going into a room with powerful people and trying to convince them that they should spend money on your idea. And I remember when I first found out, I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm a writer because I don't like talking to people. And now my career relies on my ability to talk to people. That seems really backwards. But hey, that's how it goes.

So I actually have a school question for you all. Yes. Also, I'm getting over a cold. So if I say I'm crazy, that's why.

Are you still you still have the lozenge in?

Yeah, I got rid of it.

OK, but say she's minoring and making all sorts of noises on mic.

Oh, I'm sorry. I say like and um so much. That's why I couldn't be on loop here or not.

Oh, we only cut it out of the. That's true. I am to be cutting these out. Fuck. I do help the guests out with them every once in a while. But since you just exposed that, we're going to leave them all in. So hope everybody enjoys this guest sick and umming and umming.

Lack is the issue. I'm a sorority girl. I say lack like like every other way.

I do it too. I didn't have to join a sorority for that.

Wait, introverted sorority girl.

This is like how I hate fish, but I love sushi.

So I was going to talk about this at some point, so I'll mention it now. So I was in a sorority at the University of Alabama. So I don't know if y'all know this, but the Greek system of Alabama, huge. Like it and Ole Miss, probably the two biggest.

Take your word for it.

I was an 85 first bonus forever. If you want to, we were the first sorority and that's our motto. So if you want to see something truly scary, at some point you need to go on YouTube and you need to Google University of Alabama sorority door song. You'll have not mayor. So basically during sorority recruitment, at least at Alabama, all of the girls get in the door and they do like these songs and there's clapping and so you just have all these sorority girls just yelling songs at you.

Wait, when you say get in the door, what does that mean?

What does that mean? Like in the door jam? Like write all as many as they can fit into a door jam?

So you have like layers of girls up as high as they go. And then you have like a trail of girls behind them. And like I graduated college in 2008, so that was a long time ago. I still remember the door songs. But the first house I went to when I went through Rush, one of the girls got too excited and she was banging on the glass and her hand went through the glass.

Oh, oh, my God. Didn't you do an episode on these fucking sorority girls who like were walking on the street and then a crazy accident happened?

Yeah, the Cow Omega Walkathon.

Yeah, that was a wild episode you did.

I know.

And it's synapses are firing for me to remember it, but I don't remember any broads falling through windows in that. I mean, young women. But yeah, we should look at will Google it. I don't the whole sorority life stuff is so I'm from Connecticut, so everyone's like skull and bones. But I just think any kind of group activity in college is weird. Yeah, our has has the ability to be weird with rules and stuff.

Ed and I went to Emerson, which is a communication school in Boston, and they had frats slash sororities. I think they were mostly co-ed. I don't really remember.

Emerson, it would be. Emerson, everything's so, everyone's everyone.

Yeah, it was weird because Emerson itself was more or less like a frat. If you went to Emerson, you had that leg up of getting hired by people who went to Emerson. It didn't really matter if you were in a frat or not. Yeah, so we never joined.

But yeah, but I'm pretty sure the frat stuff and the sorority stuff at Emerson was like, you know, hey, we have always rituals for hazing and stuff. And it was like, well, we actually can't do any of that. So and so everybody was like, I don't know. Just tell us your deepest secret. That's the haze. Yeah, now we're all that was like it like paddles on the wall. No one's doing shit here.

So if you wait way too litigious, if you pulled an I know what you did last summer, don't go to Emerson. They'll make you spill your deepest secret to join a fraternity.

So Emerson, that's what my question was going to go to.

Oh shit.

I've only I worked at community colleges and I've worked at big SEC schools for our listeners.

That's a sports thing.

Yes. Did y'all have advisors like academic advisors or was it just like, here are the classes you take? Have fun.

No, we had academic advisors. I don't know and they had office hours and stuff. I don't remember ever utilizing it other than needing to, if I couldn't reach out to the teacher to be like, I'm going to be so late with this paper, I would reach out to the advisor.

Yeah. Amber, I'm going to be real honest with you. Emerson's not a real school. I mean, it's lovely. We had a great time there, but most of our academic focus went into figuring out how to put our classes on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, so that we could go pick up film equipment on Thursday, shoot Friday, Saturday, Sunday, return the equipment on Sunday or Monday, and then go back to class Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. I'm sure there's lots of lovely advisors there, but we were mostly just trying to figure out how to avoid class and go make movies.

Yeah, that makes sense.

You ask because that's your position, you're an academic advisor?

Well, I used to be. I was an academic advisor for 15 years, but now I'm like the boss of the academic advisors because these kids, ya'll, I couldn't do the face to face anymore. It was a lot.

Their breath is getting worse?

All of them. COVID did something to their brains.

Oh, COVID, AI, just the Internet in general. These kids are cooked.

They can't talk to people.

No, we're going to have to have you on for a bonus episode if you're done with that. At some point, we're going to dive a little deeper into, I think, stuff that will touch on. When we do the AI stuff for that, it will be tons of knock-on effects to what students are like or the COVID of it all. We're like, oh, I graduated high school over Zoom. You know what I mean? And what that did to people.

Yeah. So I teach freshmen and then I do my over-advising duties. I also talk with my hands a lot. I don't know if y'all have noticed.

It's fine. We don't use a video component, but if anyone's seeing this, it meant that I lost a bet with whoever our marketing person is to be like, you need more video content out there. So hope everyone likes my old t-shirt. All our old t-shirts were old t-shirts.

We just found out Ed's lawyer has a podcast and it has video content and it's doing great because it has video content.

He's crushing it. He might be a bigger podcast than us, so I won't shout it out right now. He doesn't need the numbers.

Well, that's a great place as we start talking about lawyers and their podcasts to just segue into the history of back to school. After all, that is what this episode is technically about. So how did we find ourselves in a world where part of the year equals freedom, and the return of school never fails to become a torturous and terrifying experience for anybody who's ever been a student? Well, I found a great series of blogs on acereader.com about the history of schooling. You guys, you know we love a website here, and I'll tell you what, acereader.com is a hell of a website. They've got lots of educational texts that I'm assuming are mostly correct, and their blog about the history of schooling is what I'll be pulling from here. So they have, quote, In terms of biological history, schools are a very recent human invention. For hundreds of thousands of years, people lived in hunter-gatherer societies, and children learned what was important to know from playing together. Adults in these societies allowed children almost unlimited freedom to play and explore, recognizing that these are children's natural ways of learning. This way of life was skill and knowledge intensive, but not labor intensive. To sustain a hunter-gatherer type of living, everyone in the community had to acquire vast knowledge about plants and animals, great skill in fashioning and using the tools needed for their way of life, and they had to be creative in finding edible or medicinal plants, or lucky, I'm not sure creativity has it. I think that's more only the strong survive.

Yeah, this was a real you try it first society.

Yeah, exactly. Also living in houses, the first guy who built a house probably was like, hey, you know what, you guys want to live in this thing and see how it holds up at all?

No, we're going to keep using the lean to, but you do you.

However, aceblog.com, acereader.com says, they didn't have to work long hours, and the work that these people did was an exciting and expected part of their life. So I found this really interesting. Basically, anthropologists studying current hunter-gatherer groups have come to the understanding that early human groups didn't distinguish between work and play and learning. All of life was understood as play. According to historycooperative.org, a much more formal source of learning. The roots of formal education can be traced back to ancient civilizations such as Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Indus Valley, where centers of learning known as scribal schools or tablet houses emerged. These early institutions focused on teaching reading, writing, mathematics and religious texts to young learners. Education was often limited to the elite classes and those training for specific roles such as scribes and priests. Now, we can imagine what schools would have been like a couple thousand years ago. I didn't realize this until I was researching, but we actually have evidence of education systems as far back as the Sumerians. The Sumerian education system, which is one of the earliest cultures that we have any record of. The Sumerian education system required its students, mostly boys, although the daughters of royalty and those training to become priestesses also were allowed to attend school. But the education system there required these kids to learn thousands of cuneiform symbols so that they could learn a number of subjects, such as reading, writing, math, and history. Depending on their future employment, they had to be familiar with a variety of other subjects including zoology, botany, astronomy, geography, engineering, medicine, and architecture.

Fuck, that's how you get pyramids dude. Just everybody knows everything.

They taught everybody everything. Amber, out of this group of students, Sumerian students, of zoologists, botanists, astronomers, geographers, who would you most want to be an advisor to? Who do you think would be the most interesting?

That's a good question. So most of my advising experience has been for students who want to go to like vet school, medical school, something like that. Bless their hearts. A lot of them can't go. They want to. They can't go. So I like animals, maybe zoology. Also, I've never heard of these people. I do have an Alabama public school education, so maybe that's why I don't know these people.

I only know anything Sumerian because of Ghostbusters and Indiana Jones.

Ghosts are the Ghostarians.

Ghosts are the Ghostarians and Indiana Jones is always like, these are cuneiform markings. And so as a little kid, I would have to look it up.

But my archaeological knowledge pretty much stems from the exact same sources. I mean, I do, Sumerians were, and there are actually very smart people who listen to this podcast, and we get incredible emails from people offering their assistance, offering connections to people who know things, and we've never taken anyone up on it. So I'm sure somebody out there knows this much more finely than I do, and is screaming at the podcast. But Sumerians were basically kind of back in the day with the Mesopotamians. They may have actually been a Mesopotamian society, but they are some of the earliest, like the old gods kind of culture, like pre-Christianity. There's lots of, I think Ed and I have run into the Sumerians because they are often featured in like horror and genre stuff.

Occult stuff, stuff where it's like, no one's gonna know how to read that hieroglyph. Art department can do whatever the fuck they want, and so no one's gonna be able to say anything. But yeah, it's interesting that you say it's a pre-God's, well, Christianity society, because it's like, Christians like to use like, oh, idle hands of the devil's workshop. And it was like, well, they didn't need the devil back then to get them doing 50 fucking jobs. So.

Yeah, I mean, it seems like the higher class folks in the Sumerian society really learned quite a bit, and they had a very advanced society. I also find this very funny though, that the ACE blog mentions that we know Sumerian students learned cuneiform through constant practice on clay tablets. Basically, just like they do today, a teacher would write a sentence on the tablet, and then the student had to copy it until he wrote it with no errors. We know these methods to be accurate, because archaeologists have found numerous clay tablets covered with the student's efforts with corrections made by a teacher. Oh, that's funny. Can you imagine if you're like-

Having to chisel an F into someone's tablet?

Well, I was going to say if your worst homework assignment, because we can all think back to that time that we either just didn't do the homework or we did it in five minutes before class. If your worst homework assignment was preserved thousands of years into the future, so people could be like, look at this fucking idiot. We know everything about this science because of what he couldn't remember.

Also, you'd think we would have gotten remote work so much faster if going to school was carrying stone tablets. I'd be like, I'm not walking these to fucking school.

Yeah, absolutely not.

It was a nightmare.

I'll be a-

Now I don't think they even use paper anymore.

No. When I spoke at my high school a bunch of years ago now, not even during COVID or whatever, all the lockers were useless as all the textbooks were on a Chromebook or something.

Yeah.

Kids were walking around with little laptop ass fucking iPad looking things, and I'm like, I got in trouble if I didn't cover the fucking book.

Right.

Yeah. We're writers and I haven't had a printer in eight years. I just got one because I had to print like two things in a row and I was like, oh, God damn it, like whatever, fine, I'm getting a printer. But yeah, it's come a long way.

Anyone who's received the merch from us knows that I have to print a lot.

Yeah, Ed prints a lot.

I got mine at Goodwill, the Goodwill on eighth, but it's not a great printer, but it gets the job done.

It's steam powered. So, you know, back in the day, the idea that the average person needed to know anything besides how to plow a field and like a vague sense of which plants were edible and which ones were not.

That's important.

That is very important. But outside of those things, the idea that they needed any kind of knowledge was ridiculous to people in the upper class. Something that I guess I knew, but I never really thought about until researching this episode is that in a lot of these early cultures, knowledge wasn't something to be shared.

That's why it says knowledge is power, not knowledge is level ground.

Yeah.

It was something to be hoarded and closely guarded as a way to make sure that there was a continued hierarchy in society. The idea that some people could handle knowledge and were responsible with it and others couldn't. So haves and have nots until really recently weren't just divided financially, but through a literal awareness, they had and had not knowledge of how the world worked, which is kind of wild. If we lived in just a completely different world than people smarter than us, which I guess we kind of do.

We definitely do. Are you kidding me? That's how we ended up in this shit. That's why no one's ever going to buy a house again. Like these people read the same ace.com article, whatever you read, to be like, we should do this. We should absolutely separate ourselves from the lower classes.

Yeah. And they did it in numbers because I found a statistic that claims literacy rates were estimated to be only around 5% in classical Greek society. And in the Roman empire, they were maybe, maybe up to 10%. So the people who knew how the world worked, they kept it close to the chest.

And Rome, Rome is inarguably, we're obsessed with ancient Greece.

Yes.

And of course, they probably mimicked as much as they could.

So Sparta earns a special mention as having a particularly horrifying educational system, if you can even call it that. The ancient Greek writer Plutarch tells us of training designed to create warriors who embodied complete obedience, courage, and physical perfection. I believe director Zack Snyder tells us this as well.

Yeah, I took an antiquities class, whatever. I think they were gay as well, like a lot of them. As part of that training, which is like their idea was that if you loved the person, you're fighting alongside, you would fight like twice as hard.

Like carnally.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. It's like get in there and fuck and get some, you know what I mean? Like survive some love triangles. I'm sure we'll get some letters on this, but I feel like Mr. P said some stuff about it. Who was a real person? I'm protecting his name.

When these kids turned seven years old, boys were removed from their homes.

I didn't say they did the thing I said then. It's not the book, It. It's talking about when they're in the movie, the movie stage. It's okay.

I was letting you finish out that whole thought before I continued.

You piece of shit, you.

I laid in wait. When they turned seven, these boys were removed from their homes to get into love triangles and live in school dormitories or military barracks. There, they were taught sports, endurance, fighting, and little else except how to love. Discipline was harsh and this was to make the warriors strong. And then when the boys turned 16 years old, they entered a military police force called the Clutea and they were made to live in a jungle in Messenia where they were expected to fend for themselves. So these kids had it rough.

That's a shit life. That's a shit life, but that's how you push back Xertes for five minutes.

Exactly, but that is part of why, can you imagine anybody who is in school and is not looking forward to going back to school? Can you imagine if that's what you had to go back to?

Yeah, thank you.

Yeah, constant abuse and being left in the jungle.

Yeah.

Where I'm sure everyone hates you because I'm not sure any part of Greece is naturally jungle, but maybe there's tons. But I imagine it's some place that like their expanding empire took over. So everyone's like, oh, he's got, it used to be a fucking place where you could just hang out, but now there's a bunch of little boys running around punching fucking monkeys and snakes and stuff. I fucking hate the Greeks. I wish they never came here.

Students like these were pushed to their limits. And I kind of assumed that many of the early back to school tragedies that I would find would involve them turning on each other in horrible ways or clashes between warring families forced together by education. But instead it turns out that many of the earliest school tragedies are centered around attacks on the schools themselves, not the students. As the centers of the societies that built them, places of learning were targets of invaders seeking to lay waste to their neighbors. The most famous of these disasters was actually an accident, the burning of the Library of Alexandria which occurred during Julius Caesar's civil war in Egypt. Once again, according to the great writer Plutarch, Caesar set fire to enemy ships in Alexandria's harbor and the flames spread to the city where the great Library of Alexandria, which was attached to a larger scholarly academy and research institution known as the Museum or Muisson or Mouse Ion, if you pronounce it how it's spelled. It ended up being a calamity for education and research.

Well, they didn't use use, right?

What's that?

They didn't use use, right? That's why when you look at Colosseum written, it was always a V where the U would go.

Oh, yeah.

Maybe that's why they, maybe it's why museums got like a thousand U's in it.

It does.

So maybe they're like, we should get a better word we can write.

Well, it was considered a temple to the Muses, essentially. That's where the word comes from. So they had a U in Muse, I guess.

Well, unfortunately, they burned this shit down to the ground. You know, I think Alexander was naming like every town Alexandria. Sucks that the one that was had a big library went.

Yeah.

It's funny is my hometown is Alexandria.

There you go.

And also, I just thought of this.

No library.

Sorry, ADHD. No, we don't have those in Alabama. So it made me think of very similar thing happened at the University of Alabama during the Civil War. Sherman burnt most of the campus down because it was the Civil War. And now the campus is haunted by Confederate soldiers.

Oh, shit.

The more you know.

Knowledge truly is power.

Yep.

The more you know.

Fuck, man. People be burning down. Like, generals be burning shit down.

They do. Is Chris frozen again?

I don't know. I think he just has a face.

I know. I'm back.

Always be moving your hands or something. We don't know what's happening.

Jazz hands all the time.

Yeah.

Oh, great.

That did it. That broke them.

Please hold for technical difficulties.

The destruction of Alexandria resulted in the loss of untold number of scrolls, and it was a calamity for education and research. Ancient knowledge about science, healthcare, arts, and philosophy, along with texts from Babylonian, Persian, Assyrian, Indian, Jewish, Zoroastrian, and Buddhist cultures were all lost. And the amount of information there still sparks the collective imagination. Sort of like the Sumerians that we mentioned earlier in the episode, I feel like the library of Alexandria comes up a lot in movies and TV shows for where the hidden knowledge was.

It might have even been in one of the ancient wonders of the world. It might have been on the list of the seven. I don't know if it was. I know the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Classes of Rhodes. I don't know, but it seems like something they would toss on that list.

Yeah, maybe. Could have been up there, but I don't know either. I don't think it was because I'm pretty sure the seven wonders of the world are all modern discoveries and they're all still standing.

We're talking about the modern one. We've had this discussion on the show before. There was the ancient wonders of the world and the modern wonders in the world. Interestingly enough, the lighthouse of Alexandria is on the seven wonders, but no museum. Great Pyramid of Giza, Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Statue of Zeus at Olympia, Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, Ephesus, Mausoleum, they're all getting harder the names, but you get it.

Well, well, well, Mr. Skull and Bones.

I'm reading it.

It seems that you know.

Objectively reading it. It's not from memory. Although the ones I mentioned earlier were from memory, from that same class where that teacher was like, I think they were gay.

Well, here's something else I'm gonna read, but don't actually know. The Library of Alexandria was not the only ancient great library lost to battle and time. There were actually a couple of other great temples of education and libraries that were lost from other cultures that you never hear about as much.

What was that one during Afghanistan or Iraq that was all, they fucking tore that one down, unfortunately. I remember during the early days of the fucking war in the Middle East, our war in the Middle East, I feel like there was some big house of learning, temple ass shit was like, ugh, that's no longer there.

They ruined a lot of art and sculpture during the beginning of that war, but these I'm talking about whole cultures, libraries that were wiped out in ancient times. For instance, the city of Tekzila in present day Pakistan was historically a great center of learning, home to renowned universities where students came from across Asia to study Buddhism, the arts and sciences. Its demise came in the 5th century CEU and it was sacked and largely destroyed by the Huns during their invasion of India. And this invasion effectively wiped out the monastic academies and schools in the city ending centuries of scholarly activity in the area.

Ugh, hate to hear it.

What did the Huns not fuck up?

Damn, dude. Fucking gauntlet throw and take that, Huns.

Also, I, again, almost have a doctorate. I have no idea what the fuck you're talking about. Does Alabama just not teach history? I don't know any of these people.

The Huns were the great eastern civilization, I guess you'd say.

Like Attila the Hun you've probably heard of? Yeah, that was his people.

They spread far and wide and took over. They were sort of like the Roman Empire of the East. Of the East. The most, is that racist to say now? I don't know, can I say of the East?

Yeah, no, I mean, we're probably gonna be like, you mean the Romans were the whatever of the, you know what I mean? So, I don't know. They're all people who had a moment in the sun and we're having that now. And some podcasts in 50 years, remember the American Empire?

Here's another library that was wiped off the map. Lindisfarne was a monastery on an island off of Northumbria. And like many early schools, the education at Lindisfarne was part and parcel of the religious training of the monks who lived there and produced works such as the Lindisfarne Gospels. But on June 8th, 793, the Viking Age began when the Vikings launched a devastating raid on this school, plundering the monastery's treasures, killing or enslaving many of the monks and desecrating sacred items. Contemporary Chronicles report that some monks were even thrown into the sea to drown.

I mean, Northumbria, that's got a pretty long coastline.

Lots of places to drown. Lots of places to get thrown off the ship.

Lots of places to throw monks, dude. So yeah, so you're saying the Vikings showed up and they were just like, yo, nice library, nerds and destroyed it all?

I think so.

And then it was like, anyone who has a problem with this, I hope you love, you're about to meet the sea.

Yeah, now 10% of the sand off Northumbria is made up of monks.

Shit, dude. Stepped in a monk tooth when I was there.

This early medieval attack on a monastic school sent shockwaves through Christian Europe, which interpreted the attack itself as divine punishment and marks one of the earliest recorded tragedies at an educational institution in medieval Europe. Elsewhere, in the 1190s or early 1200 CE, an ancient Buddhist monastic university known as Nalanda Mahaviyara was attacked by the Turkic general Bakshar Khalji. He and his men ransacked and burned the vast university complex, slaughtering monks who were both the teachers there and the students, and torching the libraries. So many manuscripts went up in flames that according to legends, the fire in Nalanda's great library burned for months. Afterwards, makeshift attempts to continue education at the site occurred for a few years, but it was soon abandoned and then forgotten completely until it was rediscovered in the 19th century.

So, you're saying people didn't want to come and work on top of rubble? Yeah.

It was a little uncomfortable working atop the corpses of your previous students at the school.

Shit, dude.

But if you're a writer who is in need of a source of secret lost knowledge, I don't know, maybe forget the Library of Alexandria and throw some love Taksila's way, throw some love Lindisfarne way, and throw some love Nalanda Mahavihara's way.

I think you're just making these things up. I swear.

No, that's how I feel every episode.

These are real places. These are real tragedies that occurred. And honestly.

And for as little as a cup of coffee a day, you can rebuild these establishments by donating at the link we've included in the episode notes.

What I was going to say is the next back to school horrific thing that I have researched is, I think, sounds even more made up than these places, but this is real. So the causes of the attacks on those previous educational institutions, vary, but it always revolved around a group of outsiders who were barging into a new culture to pillage and destroy a culture that was not their own. But that's not the only reason schools found themselves under attack in ancient times. One of the craziest stories I found is actually about a town that turned on itself. And that's because schools were not always seen as a public good. Back in ancient times, many areas with schools were split along lines of locals and students who were seen as arrogant, lawless outsiders.

Oh, like going to school in Boston.

Yeah, pretty much. We could do anything we wanted.

But also, like, if you stuck around in the summers like I did, because I tried to finish school quick, same town was empty. They just showed how much of the town are students who come for the school year and then just disappear for the summer.

Yeah. Does that happen where you are too, Amber? Are they college towns or are they more?

Yes, very much a college town. It's great because then traffic is not as bad. So I enjoy the summer.

But are there like townies or locals who are like fucking college kids, they come in, they do whatever?

No, because it's the south. And SEC schools are such a big part of the culture that there's not really that negative. And I will say this about the place that I live. Me being a Bama fan, they're actually really nice. When I lived in Athens, when I worked at the University of Georgia, they were so hateful.

That's what I was saying.

I'm like, we don't even care. Like, well, they were hateful to me because I was a Bama fan. I was like, I don't give a shit about UGA, but the place that I-

Stop wearing all Bama outfits every day. It seems like you gave a shit seven days a week wearing track suits.

I would try to be sneaky with it and just wear halons too because some people don't realize that that's like our thing. But the people in this town- I didn't know. The people in this town, they're really cool.

Good.

I think because of the South, it's how the town gets its money. Okay.

Yeah.

Well, back in the day, the haves and have nots of the world, the have nots viewed the students as pricks who got to know everything and rule the world. All of this boiled over in the Middle Ages in Oxford, where students could literally get away with murder while a townsperson would be severely punished for harming a student. And that's not an exaggeration. According to Wikipedia, quote, violent disagreements between townspeople and students had arisen several times previously. And 12 of the 29 coroner's courts had held in Oxford between 1297 and 1322 concerned murder by students. So, students used to be cool, is what I'm learning.

No. You're just like, every argument ends with a murder, because they were like, fuck it, we go to Oxford University or whatever, so what are you going to do about it?

Yeah, if you think Ivy League kids are snotty now, you can only imagine when they could just kill you in the town square and nobody would do anything about it.

But for our fans, Ivy League is also a sports reference.

And so I have two tangential thoughts if I don't forget them. So the first one, Oxford, so I'm from Alexandria, Alabama. Rob, my husband, is from Oxford, Alabama. I know those words kind of.

Well, I'm from Oxford, Connecticut, it's real close to me too. I think whoever those families are, they got some land from King George or whatever.

Yep. So the second thing, at the place that I work, you know, it doesn't snow a lot in the south, but we freak out when it snows. But the place that I work typically doesn't close, even if it has snowed, which has caused students to like slip and break their legs or whatever. And it's because of something that happened in like the 50s. So apparently there was a snow day and some students were like dicking around downtown, throwing snowballs. The purge, great. One thing led to another and somebody pulled out a gun and like a town person got shot and they died. And so because of that.

This is a twist I did not see coming.

Right? So because of that, the school since the 50s hasn't closed for a snow day because the snow day led to snowballs, which led to somebody being shot and dying. And then to now people breaking their legs on the ice because also it's a very hilly campus.

Oh my God. It's so crazy that 70 plus years of people being like, one guy had a revolver and we can.

Yeah, I'm imagining like a naked gun style, like slow motion, student jumping right, throwing snowballs in slow motion, student jumping left, throwing snowballs in slow motion, man diving through screen with two revolvers, just plugging the kids in slow motion.

Who did not attend the school.

Yeah, holy shit. Well, this is a whole different story back then. And the tensions really boiled over in the most extreme way imaginable during the St. Scholastica Day riot on February 10th, 1355. Is that who the book fair is named after?

Oh my God, I love the Scholastica Book Fair. I live my curiously through my kid now. I'm like, here's like $50, bring us back some good shit.

Oh yeah.

$50 would get you a million books when we were kids. Now it might get you like half a book.

Yeah.

So many scary stories to read in the dark would have come back with $50.

I have the whole collection of the scary stories books.

Cost you six pence.

I love those. I love those. Yes, the Scholastica Book Fair, which also ends in riots on a regular basis, is named after St. Scholastica Day. Now this riot started in a pub because of course it did. Two students at the Swindle Stock Tavern, which is a name that I am not making up, in the Swindle Stock Tavern complained to the landlord, who also happened to be the mayor, which now is starting to sound, I feel like Amber, like a small town, a southern small town thing. So these students-

Yeah, I've seen Roadhouse. I know where this story goes.

These students complained to the landlord that his wine was terrible. An argument- Well. So this guy was also the winemaker in town. He was the mayor of the pub over and he made the wine. That's vertical integration.

The only thing worse than this pub in this town is the wine you serve here, dude. Everything about you sucks.

So an argument broke out. A student threw his drink in the mayor's face and then a fight broke out. The fight spilled into the street-

I thought you were going to say the mayor agreed. He's like, you know what? Now that it's on my face, not my lips, I agree with you. It's not very good wine. This actually went bad, I think.

The fight spilled into the street. The townspeople rang the bell of their church. St. Martin's is a call to arms. The students rang the bell of the University Church of St. Mary in response, and the fight turned into a riot. The next day, the town bailiffs actively encouraged the violence, allegedly paying people from the countryside to come join the fight.

Whoa!

A mob of nearly 2,000 people carrying a black banner, descended on Oxford crying, Havoc! Havoc! Smite fast! Give good knocks!

Whoa! This is like Gangs of New York level shit.

Yeah. 2,000 people. And I mean, like, Jesus, most colleges get on the news if they flip a car after a football game. This is a whole other... They ransacked student housing, murdering any student they could find.

Oh my God. This was a long time coming. These were people who were like, man, I swear to God, I am one wine insult away from just fucking killing all these kids. And then as soon as it happened, it was like, get the malicious down here. We finally have a reason to get rid of these assholes.

So yeah, 2,000 people started murdering any student they could find. There are reports of chaplains being scalped.

That's rude.

And by the time Royal forces arrived to quell the violence three days later, so no rush, they let this drag out.

What year was this?

This was 1355.

Yeah, they had to walk there. It wasn't like...

That's true. But still, I don't know. I feel like if somebody attacked the king, it wouldn't take them three days to get there.

Because they live with them.

Well, that's true.

If these people had to leave the king's royal guard, then like, I don't know where Oxford is, but you know what I mean? But I mean, they probably went as fast as they could because these are well-to-do college students and fucking men of the cloth being scalped. So they probably had a little bit of a fucking, they moved a bit quick.

They put a little, yeah, they put a little pep in their step. By the time they got there though, pepped out, about 60-

The townspeople were wearing the students' skins. And being like, we're fine, where did you hear? There was never anyone here.

63 students and about 30 townspeople were dead. And in the end, King Edward III ruled in favor of the university. Of course he did.

Of course. That's the opposite of what we're dealing with now, but yeah.

The mayor and bailiffs were sent to prison. So take that wine making mayor.

Now he's making Sterno, whatever the hell you make in prison.

Yeah, he's making toilet wine now. And as penance, every year on St. Scholastica Day, the new mayor and 60 leading citizens had to march barefoot through the town to the university church and pay a fine of one penny for every student killed.

Wait, so to this day?

This tradition, not quite to this day, this tradition continued for 470 years until the year 1825.

That's still pretty late, I guess?

It's pretty late for something where you're paying a pence per student killed for something that happened, I mean, 400, almost 500 years ago. It's a long fucking time. That would be like if we were still paying penance for...

Don't you? There's no easy or good way out of this sentence. Let's not try and make any comparisons here.

What was happening in the 1600s is what I'm saying. It was a long time. In any case, the university came out on top of this particular school tragedy, even if the scorecard was 63 students and 30 townspeople dead on each side there. I think the university was the one being apologized to for 500 years, so I think they turned out all right.

It's the first endowment was the end of all those pennies.

Yeah, exactly. They collected them all in a wishing well.

I just had another thought. When you were talking about the mayor, it just hit me. Do y'all know much about wrestling?

Oh, boy, Chris sure does.

Yeah. The governor of Knox County is Kane.

Oh, yeah, Glenn Jacobs. Glenn Jacobs, yeah.

A lot of wrestlers are governors. Wasn't Jesse Ventura a wrestler?

Yeah, Jesse Ventura was a wrestler.

He became a governor.

He's now back on commentary on Saturday night's main event on NBC, looking like the Crypt Keeper.

Oh, wow. I'm talking about what makes him into a sexual tyrannosaur now.

My man is not held up. Nothing makes him into a sexual tyrannosaur now. His days of that are over, I think. Anyway, as access to education expanded to more people, it was often with a single purpose, which was to teach more people about God. Textbooks like the New England Primer were used to teach kids their ABCs alongside grave rhymes about sin and death. The very first rhyme in the New England Primer was for the letter A, and it reads, in Adam's fall, we sinned all.

Oh.

For F it was, the idle fool is whipped at school. And for T, a picture of the grim reaper with his scythe was paired with the line, time cuts down all, both great and small.

How old were these kids?

What was it told to you?

These were children. These were elementary school kids.

Oh my God.

One 1813 edition showed a woodcut of a child's grave with the line, young children too may die.

Oh God.

This is a school. This is what you were handed by the teacher.

Wow.

I guess it makes me feel better about my parenting. So when my daughter was like-

Show us the wood etchings you showed your daughter.

So when my daughter was like three, we were working on matching letters with words. So we were like, what's something that starts with A, whatever. So we get to F and she thinks for a second, she's like, F, F, fucking damn it. I was like, you're not wrong, but maybe don't say that at school, please. And I was like, that's Rob, that's Rob, it's his fault.

We'll use frog at school, that'll be F for me. By the 19th century, the frightening culture of school hadn't improved much, especially when it came to discipline. They were rough on these kids. Disobedient kids were faced with a litany of physical and psychological torments designed to encourage them to behave. The most common torture tool was the ferrule, a long flat piece of wood for striking a student's hands. Canes made of birch wood were also popular. Boys were typically caned on their butts, while girls were caned on their legs or hands.

So did y'all not have those in the school?

I was about to ask, New England got rid of corporal punishment pretty fucking early compared to the South. So when I was in... I know a friend who was working in Louisiana, like our ages, guys, like I graduated OAU at O8 and then Chris is O9. Like our ages, who was like, I have parents call to be like, so and so was a fucking piece of shit at home this week. Could you like do schooling, corporal punishment? Cause like child protective services ain't gonna be called on you cause you guys were allowed to hit the kids.

Oh my gosh.

And this was like in our era of existing guys, like our era of being professional age, like working in schools.

That is insane. So I graduated high school in 2004 and they definitely paddled. There was one teacher, so they didn't paddle girls. They only paddled boys, but there was one football coach who he had a paddle and he drilled holes in it because apparently it hurt worse. And he would also like check that they weren't wearing layers.

Oh my God.

How do you check that? You just like show me your bare ass.

It was Alabama in the early 2000s. Not that it's probably changed any sense, but yeah, it was a lot.

We had a math teacher who would come around and like give kids massages. Oh, thank you. And it was in hindsight really creepy. Everybody just was like, oh, that's Mr. Beep. Let's bleep the name. But everyone was like, oh, that's Mr. That's just how he is.

Our biology teacher, he was so creepy and he was friends with my mother, which is even weirder. But I remember one time in biology, he was telling us about how like him and his wife wanted kids, they couldn't have kids. And then it turns out it's because he wore like tighty wotties. And then when he switched to boxers, they had a kid because apparently your balls are up too close to your body. It like messes with your sperm or whatever. And I was like, you're telling ninth graders about your balls.

Like, I mean, that's when you're supposed to talk about sex ed, but maybe not in his class.

Not in Alabama. We don't talk about that.

Do you guys have like a moratorium on it? Like it has to be taught about like abstinence or something.

I don't think it was, I don't even think that it was discussed. I mean, my school, like they did prayers over the announcements every day. Like it's small town Alabama. They were very behind.

Everybody prayed for this guy's balls, man. He can't have a kid because of Haynes. Haynes fucked him up.

Here's a question for you, Amber. You say they were far behind, but were they so far behind that they had punishment baskets?

No.

It's a good transition back. I'll see how much I cut out of that previous thing.

What is a punishment basket?

I never knew about these. This is another thing where I was like, there's no way this is real, but it is real. There are woodcuts of it. Obviously, there was the dunce cap was another way to punish kids.

I was going to guess it's something you put over the head entirely.

But there was no concept back then of learning disabilities. If you couldn't keep up, you were essentially considered lazy and deserve to be shamed. In some schools, they used punishment baskets, which were wicker baskets that the lazy student was made to sit in. Then the basket was hoisted to the ceiling with ropes and pulleys for everyone to gawk at.

Oh my God.

So you basically had to be in a hot air balloon of shame up at the top of the room.

And I did always really like days that had like labs, like where they were going to show you something in lab, where you're like, oh, when you put these two things together, it makes like fucking green flame or whatever. So at least these kids got to see like how pulleys work.

Yeah. They learned, they learned about the basic machines.

Yeah. Give me enough pulleys and I can lift the world of dunces.

So eventually education system softened and we created that sacred American institution, although it's not a worldwide institution, Summer Break.

Yeah, because the rest of the world gets like vacation time.

Yeah.

That's true. Initially, Summer Break had nothing to do with fun and vacations. You guys, you might know, have you heard of why Summer Break was invented?

I actually don't know.

I think I know. Was it so that kids could farm?

That makes sense.

That's what I thought too. But apparently, what I learned in the research here is that summer vacation wasn't about freeing kids to work on farms. In reality, rural schools often operated year round, while urban schools shut down in the summer because the heat and disease made classrooms unbearable, if not physically dangerous to be in.

Oh, it's like recording our podcast.

Yeah, exactly.

In the chemical tent.

Yeah. So, what would happen is during the summers, the wealthy families would flee to the countryside to escape the city heat and disease, and the schools eventually just gave in and institutionalized the summer breaks that gave rise to the annual ritual of going back to school.

There it is. Without the summer break, you would never have a dread of going back.

Exactly. You would just always be there.

I always bring up Simpsons episodes, and one of my favorite lines from, I think about it all the time, in the episode where Bart breaks his leg, and so he can't enjoy the summer, his summer break, because he's going to have to cast. And he's all complaining to Homer about it. And he's like, don't worry, boy. When you get a job like me, you'll miss every summer. And so I think about that like just a perspective thing, yeah.

So according to PBS, by the late 19th century, school reformers started pushing for a standardization of the school calendar across urban and rural areas, and a compromise was struck that created the modern school calendar. So every August or September, like clockwork, students return to the classroom, and it is meant to be normal. But when you take as close of a look at schools as Scared All The Time does, it turns out that some very abnormal things have happened in American schools. It probably won't surprise you to know that some of the earliest school tragedies I could find were fire-based.

Yeah. Yeah.

One of the first, but not the worst, happened February 20th, 1883, when around 900 children were attending classes in a four-story brick building in Manhattan's Little Germany, or Kleindurchland. A minor fire started in the basement or on the first floor of the school, and smoke began seeping upward. The students and teachers panicked, and hundreds of children bolted for the narrow wooden staircase, which was only about three feet wide that led down to the exit. In the chaos, the crush of children ripped the rickety railing from the wall, and kids began tumbling off the side of the staircase. Those in front fell to the floor below, and others fell on top of them, piling reportedly four deep in a tangle of bodies.

That's like a doorway at a sorority.

Exactly.

Yeah, that's what could go wrong when they fill the door or whatever the phrase is.

I'm sorry, whoever those kids survived were like, I got an idea when we get to higher education.

Yep.

We're going to greet new chicks this way.

By the time order was restored, 16 children had been trampled or smothered to death, and at least eight more were seriously injured, which 16 out of 900, that ain't bad. I feel like that's not bad. Those are actually pretty good numbers.

And I always threaten doing a whole episode on crushing, because I do think it's, to me, it's a big fear of a crowd reacting to something and you're caught in the mix.

Yeah, that's a big fear of mine too. I did an episode about the Shallow Baptist Church crush in Alabama that happened in the 1800s maybe. I should probably know my own episodes.

Yeah, this is the peak of crushing maybe in society.

Yeah, we've talked about them on the elevators episode, on the fireworks accidents episode. They happen quite often. In this case, the fire itself was actually very small and it had been extinguished. So it was really only the panic and the inadequate escape routes that proved to be as lethal as they were.

I mean, I feel if anybody's gonna panic, it's gonna be children just freaking the fuck out.

Well, and that's what we learned from this particular fire. A jury in the case found no one legally negligent, but the public outcry prompted people to enact new safety measures. And so we came up with the fire drill because of this school fire.

Amazing, as a person who grew up a stone's throw from Sandy Hook, and we're not getting into those in this episode, one notifier entered into a world of fucking safety regulations.

Yeah.

Weird that 20 fucking kids gunned in a closet did nothing, but whatever.

Did not, yeah. No, it's crazy. I mean, it's funny. Sometimes we've gone over some of this stuff in the past, and there's another one coming up of stories where a tragedy leads to pretty quick measures enacted by local or federal governments. And it's crazy that it does kind of feel like we're that, we don't live in that world anymore. We just live in the world of the tragedies keep happening, and we just don't do anything about it.

There's simply nothing we can do about it.

There's simply nothing we can do. There's simply nothing.

My daughter has to do like-

The gun drill things.

The gun drills.

Yeah.

And it's so scary. Action shooter drills. I asked her, I was like, my niece and nephew do too. It's so scary.

Well, in this case, we did learn a lot about fire drills and fire drills were not only designed and taught, but became, I think, law in some places now that you have to run fire drills with.

We had them as kids. Yeah.

Did y'all do any other drills?

Just fire drills.

I think we did one, I grew up near Three Mile Island and I'm pretty sure we did, maybe it was the year that we visited.

Nuclear meltdown drills?

Well, something like that. I remember a drill that we did around learning about Three Mile Island because it wasn't about even just getting out of the school, it was about knowing where to go to leave the county.

So for listeners who might not know, Three Mile Island was a nuclear meltdown, like a nuclear power plant meltdown.

In the 1970s.

Or like not even a full meltdown, but.

Yeah, they lost one tower. And in hindsight, it was one of those, it happened right after the movie, not the Andromeda Strain, that's the virus one, China Syndrome.

Oh yeah, a movie that I know the title, but I've never actually watched.

Yeah, well the titular China Syndrome is that the reactor would melt down and it would be so hot that it would fall through the earth. Theoretically, it would fall all the way to China, but unfortunately, what it would hit first would be subterranean water, which it would immediately...

Instantly turn into steam.

Instantly turn into radioactive steam and shoot it up through the ground.

Yeah, my dad did plumbing on, I think more than one nuclear facility. It's crazy, by the way, the work they do at those. They're so crazy. They get paid really well, too, because you get to x-ray the welds and stuff, because you really can't have fuck-ups. Yeah, but it's so fucking hot. All the shit has to be designed for like the craziest heat, steam.

Well, yeah, and they're always by water because they're so hot that you need a literal fucking river, ocean to cool them down, but yeah.

Anyway, yeah, crazy. So you did like a fucking meltdown drill.

There was there was something we did. I don't remember if it was like a I remember we were learning about Three Mile Island and we did some sort of emergency evacuation thing, but yeah.

But so you'll never had to do tornado drills.

Oh, no, no, not New England.

No, they were the worst. So like where I'm from in Alabama, like I heard one podcaster call it Waffle House Alley. It's like literally like another tornado alley.

Sounds like an alley that Ed and I would hang out in.

It's like, you know, do you have Waffle House?

No, ma'am.

Oh, have you ever been to a Waffle House?

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

So the Waffle House, like they're literally used by, like, the the weather service or whatever. As long as the Waffle House is open, things are OK. If Waffle House is start closing, things are really bad.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's funny. It's a funny metric.

Right. So where I'm from in Alabama, like tornadoes come through Mississippi, through Tuscaloosa, through Birmingham and then hit where I'm from. So every spring, it's not like if a tornado, when is the tornado going to hit? So every spring, well, all the time we did tornado drills. So what would happen is you'd go out in the hallway, you'd kneel, and then you would basically sit with your butt on the back of your legs. I don't know if that's the best way to explain that.

You're outside?

No, you're inside, in a hallway.

I'm like, what are you guys offering yourselves up to the tornado? It's like, if you give you these two classes, will you leave?

That's it. And you had to take a textbook and put it over your head.

Chromebook now.

Yeah, no, squish into this little ball. And we would also actually get tornadoes. And so they would put us in the hallway and we'd all just be sitting there with our book. What is this math book gonna do to... Yeah, they were awful. Oh, I hate it.

That is so crazy. Were you scared as a kid?

I'm so scared of tornadoes. What's funny is when I was in college, my mom would get freaked out. She'd be like, oh, there's a tornado coming towards Tuscaloosa. And I was like, mother, a tornado has never hit the University of Alabama. It's fine. Three years after I graduated, huge tornadoes came through and killed several students at the University of Alabama. My mother was like, I told you. And I was like, it had never happened to that point. So we had to do the, I remember one time we had a tornado and our house mom, Mimi, got all my sorority sisters and we had to cram in this little tiny bathroom. And like Mimi wouldn't let any of us leave. Tornadoes suck so hard.

It's good that you had all that practice squeezing in the door.

Yeah, it's true.

I didn't have my textbook though, so I was vulnerable.

That's true. Wow. Wow, wow, wow. Yeah, I just think about that, like the psychology of a student. I don't think it would change you as a person, but the idea that like my niece and nephew and your daughter have to do gun drills, or my parents had to do fucking air raid drills, like under the desk in their thing. It's just like, it's interesting that air raid drills were, what if the Russians fucking come? Tornado drills are like, what if a tornado comes? Those are all external forces. Only like active gunman drills or one of the other students turned into a tornado.

Right.

And it's like kind of crazy, where like, because I remember in fire drills, there'd always be kids being like, ugh, so fired, this is a fucking drill, I got to like whatever.

I never once stopped to think that I would actually die in a fire during a fire drill. Like they were always just like, you just did them because they said you had to do them, but you never really were like, hmm, what would it be like if this building were on fire?

But no, I never did.

It's like, oh my God.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Fucking I, in terms of back to school, every time there was a fire drill, I would always like pray for fire drills. I never had assignments done. And so I'd be like, oh man, I'm next. On this book report, I didn't write, I hope a fire drill happens. Then we had to go outside and I don't have to do it. But it never happened.

And that's how Ed became known as his high school's arsonist.

No, I would never. I have a couple of high school problems, but not that.

I hated the fire drills in college. Like, I don't know if y'all lived in dorms.

No, that's crazy to me that you were doing. Like high school, they got you by the balls. Like you're a child, everything's like, it's going on your permanent record. Like, you are terrified, cause there are people in control of your life that we can ruin your life. Ruin it. If you fucking get out of line. Where college is independent. Like, that's why I was successful in college. I did well. I no longer had this tyranny. So the fact that you guys had like tyranny reign, like, but into your college years is crazy to me that you were, that anyone could make you do a drill.

Yeah, like they would come knock on all the doors. And it always happened like three o'clock in the morning. Like, what are y'all doing?

The drilling hour.

That is the drilling hour.

Yeah, you got to be prepared. You got to be prepared. Well, even fire drills couldn't stop a worse fire from tearing through an elementary school in Collinwood, Ohio, a couple of decades later. On March 4th, 1908, just as the morning was getting underway at the Lakeview Elementary School, a fire broke out and within an hour, the entire three story school was engulfed in flames and collapsing. The death toll here makes the East Village fire look like nothing. This one claimed 172 children, two teachers, and one rescuer. According to Wikipedia, quote, newspapers circulated many possibilities for what caused this fire, sometimes blaming the building's janitor, Fritz Herter, for inattentiveness.

I mean, well, if he was inattentive, I'm not trying to blame the janitor as well, but if he was inattentive to the boiler, it's fucking his fault, and that is, I'm sorry, that's the truth.

They blamed the building's janitor for running the boiler too hot, and another theory, though, held that the fire was caused by girls smoking in a basement closet near flammable materials.

You know the janitor started that rumor.

For sure.

I saw these girls, they were down there, and they were kissing, and then they were smoking.

They were kissing and smoking, and that's right where I keep my oily rags.

No.

It's certainly not boiler based. Don't look over here.

The coroner's inquest concluded that heating pipes running next to exposed wooden joists. What are joists? Did I spell that wrong? Maybe that's joints. Maybe it's joints.

I don't know. We didn't go to trade school. If we did, we'd be doing this podcast from our house we own.

The coroner's inquest concluded that heating pipes running next to exposed wooden joints ignited the building. The coroner blamed the fire on quote, conditions and held no one legally accountable for it.

Oh yeah. That's what happened there.

Conditions.

It was conditions.

You know, it was conditions.

That's the like bless their heart of like coroner results. Oh, it just, you know, conditions there.

Yeah. Things happen. It's an, it's an act of God. Also, Ed, it's funny when you said the thing about like, if we worked in trades, we'd be in a house. So I'm in a house because I married a man that works in a trade.

Yeah. All my, all my siblings or family who went into the trades instead of definitely didn't go as far as deep as the arts like us. But I'm saying like, yeah, my brother, my brother's house paid off, man. Plumbers paid their fucking house off at fucking 40.

What did I get all these degrees for?

Did you fucked up? We fucked up. The only degrees you need to worry about is how hot it is in the boiler. And you will, you'd be doing a lot better off.

I don't even know what a boiler is. Is that like a hot water heater?

I think it's got a lot more to do with it. I don't know. I know my dad's put a lot in. And I know that like the old ones needed to be like addressed, like someone needed to like relieve them in some way or like let out steam or something.

Yeah. On a level that you wouldn't want to just trust the janitor to do it either.

No, I think it is. I think it is. Yeah, I think you do trust it's like a dummy. Not a dummy. I'm not saying he was dumb. I'm just saying like it's just someone to do a task once. I don't think you need to like get in there.

Freddy Krueger infamously had his boiler room because he was the janitor. I guess janitors were responsible for keeping the boilers jerked off or whatever they had to do.

I think it's also something in The Shining, right? Like even when the staff left, you still had to deal with the boiler and make sure that that was at the level it needed to be.

Yeah. We're thinking that boilers have to do with heating, but for all we know, it was just a crab boil that was culturally a popular thing that all these places had one going and you couldn't turn it off.

Before I gained too much weight to zip it up, years and years, I wore a Utica boilers jacket. That's one of my dad's jackets.

Yeah.

And yeah, it's like stolen valor. I couldn't tell you what a boiler is.

Yeah. So I thought of a couple of things. One, Freddy Krueger was a janitor.

Yeah. That's how you got to know those kids.

See? Okay. So I have this thing about, I have this thing about like academic integrity and honesty and I never cheated. There was one time that I cheated a little bit. So it involves Freddy Krueger a little bit. So for my honors-

She'd cheat on your husband in a dream.

For my honors, eighth grade English class, we had to write some kind of story. So I kind of borrowed, there's an episode, it was one of the Treehouse of Horror episodes of The Simpsons.

Yeah.

And it was when groundskeeper Willie was Freddy Krueger. And so I basically stole that whole story and pretended like it was mine. And I'm sorry, Ms. Bradley. And okay, the other thing, this is gonna sound made up and I swear it is not made up. So in the building that I work at on campus, it's one of the oldest buildings. And there's a basement and it is weird and scary. We had to pay a person to sit in the basement, eight hours a day, just sit there to make sure nothing caught on fire.

Oh my God, what a job.

I think they stopped like a year or two ago, but like the fire marshal made sure that they were down there in the basement, make sure just nothing's on fire.

What was your kerosene reserves? What was in the basement?

Literally, it's just like our old random shit.

Yeah, that sounds like-

We don't have oily rags, like what is going on down here?

It sounds like a job that one of the C-list characters on Lost would have had for a season.

Yeah, for the Dharma initiative.

I think the person was like somebody's kid, and I'd go down there and they'd be sitting there on their phone wearing a snuggie. I'm like, what are you doing?

That's a cuss job.

That's a mobbed up job.

Yeah, not all Nepo babies are smart. You still got to give their kid a job.

Hopefully, they were fireproof though, because it sounds like they would have been the first in line to get burned up.

Literally.

Fuck man. I want to see that guy on Shark Tank too, being like, I got an idea. It's like a Snuggie, but it's fireproof.

Fireproof.

What made this particular fire so lethal wasn't the lack of preparation. They did prepare with fire drills, but the architecture of the building itself was the problem. On the outside, the school was a gorgeous brick building, but its interior was all wood. So it was essentially a giant brick oven waiting to happen. And so, whether caused by wayward girls or conditions, when the blaze here started, the brick exterior acted like a chimney, drawing flames upward through the open stairwells. And then, to make things worse, the building only had two exits. And as the fire spread, one exit quickly became blocked by fire. Unfortunately, that exit was the front door. So that was where most people were trying to go. And then they tried to lead kids to the back exit, but design flaws turned that escape into a death trap because the vestibule that led to the back door was too narrow.

It was famously a hedge maze.

Yeah, very, very hard to navigate. Should never have put it in there.

It's crazy that they did it, but it was an alumnus donated it. We had to.

Yeah. By the time the Collins Woods Tiny Volunteer Fire Brigade arrived with their horse-drawn fire engines, it was too late. In less than an hour, floors began collapsing and nearly half of the 350 children inside were dead. That sucks.

It's such a fucking nightmare.

Yeah. They didn't learn anything, I guess, as interesting as we should have fire drills, but they did change building codes because of it.

I do wonder if the cinder block of it all has anything to do it because so many schools have that ugly-ass cinder block, like painted cinder block. I wonder if that is born of too many kids are burning up in these places. We got to get something that's fire retardant or- Maybe. Asbestos is incredibly fire retardant. It's just not safe.

Ed. Yeah? Do you know what's worse than a fire at a school?

Does that not count?

I think I do.

Amber, go ahead. She beat me to it.

Is it an explosion?

Yes, it is.

What the fuck?

Why would you guys, why are you guys linked on that?

I found an example, I found two examples of explosions at schools, both I think fascinating for their own horrible reasons. The first dates back to May 18th, 1927 in Bath, Michigan. I'd never heard of this. This is a wild, basically domestic terror story. It was the last day of school at the Bath Consolidated School, and at 8.45 in the morning, just as 314 students settled in for their end of year exams, an explosion ripped through the north wing of the school. The blast was so powerful, it could be heard miles away, walls crumbled and the roof came crashing down on classrooms full of children. Local author Monte J. Ellsworth wrote in his 1927 account, The Bath School Disaster, quote, there was a pile of children, about five or six under the roof, and some of them had arms sticking out, some had legs, and some just their heads sticking out. They were unrecognizable because they were covered with dust, plaster, and blood. Now get this. According to a Smithsonian Magazine article, quote, as community members rushed to help after the explosion, and getting a rope to lift up the collapsed roof and pull the students and teachers from the rubble, a member of the school board named Andrew Kehoe drove up to the site. Kehoe stepped out of his truck filled with dynamite and shrapnel, aimed his rifle at it, and fired. The ensuing explosion killed the school superintendent, several other bystanders, and Kehoe himself.

Wait.

That motherfucker.

So the thing you said about the kids and the arms and all the stuff, that was post this insane truck?

No, that was pre.

And then as now to add insult to injury or a lot more injury to injury, this guy made his vehicle into like an IED or whatever?

Yep. And drove up, got out, aimed his rifle at the truck he had just been driving, fired at it and blew up more people. In addition to the hundreds of pounds of explosives that had set off the blast at the school, fire department personnel and police officers found another 500 pounds of unexploded pyrotal dynamite rigged up around the school's basement, along with a container of gasoline that may have been placed there to cause a fire if the dynamite failed. They then discovered that Andrew Kehoe, the man who had driven up and blown himself up, had also burned his farmhouse, killed his wife and two horses. Their bodies were discovered at the farm, along with the sign attached to the property fence that read, criminals are made, not born.

Oh, so he got passed over for a promotion.

Yeah.

Andrew Kehoe, and what's crazy is there's not really too much about him. We'll get to what maybe made him do this a little bit in just a second, but this guy clearly had an issue with the school and lost his mind. Now, there were some signs, unusual incidents they were described as prior to the bombing that might have tipped people off that Kehoe was losing his mind. He killed his neighbor's dog, and then he beat one of his horses to death with his bare hands. My God.

Wow, safe place for animals.

No. Trigger warning.

Then he argued, and this isn't nearly as bad, but this was much more public, he argued with members of the school board over the cost of ongoing taxes for the consolidated school. His access to explosives was actually granted by the government who sold him surplus World War I explosives that he bought with the cover that he was helping local farmers remove tree trunks with them.

Oh, boy. What year was this?

This was 1926, I believe.

Okay. So they, yeah, I guess we had a large mining operation and they had a lot of surplus World War I shit. Yeah, I guess the timing adds up, but it's just that thing where we talk about it in the show a lot where it's like, you could change your identity with an X-Acto knife and tape.

Yeah.

Like there was just a crazy time. We talked about it in the Halloween candy episode where the guy was like, hey, we're going to get a ton of this thing that should be illegal.

Right.

Yeah. They were like, oh, at the soda fountain. Like, it's so crazy.

Well, this guy, I think he was, it sounds like he was going downhill for a long time, but I think, Ed, you're on to something that at the time, maybe you could just act up because I found a quote from a guy, Arnie Bernstein, who wrote a book called Bath Massacre, America's First School Bombing. You'll notice the unfortunate first school bombing in that. I'm sure we've had many since, but Arnie Bernstein says in his book, quote, a lot of the stupid things he, being Kehoe, did were just stupid things people did. So I guess killing your dog, beating a horse to death with your bare hands, and buying surplus World War I explosives under cover of helping people remove stumps was just kind of what you got up to.

Stumps are pretty hard to get rid of, but I don't even know if he needed the explosive. If you're punching full grown horses to death, you might just be able to come through the wall of the school like the Kool-Aid guy. You don't even need all this shit.

Punching kids, pull the school down around you.

They're like, oh, where's my son? He's on the moon because this guy punched him to the moon. The strongest man I've ever seen. He had a successful stump removal business before acquiring dynamite. Bare hand stump removal.

If only he'd never gotten so lazy. The Smithsonian Magazine article says that newspapers rushed to make sense of the tragedy. They called Kehoe insane, demented, a madman. All, I would say, pretty accurate. There was little understanding of mental illness at that point, and the media still tried to find reasons for the bombing. He was notified last June that the mortgage on his farm would be foreclosed, and that may have been the circumstance that started the clockwork of anarchy and madness in his brain.

Well, then blow up the bank. Don't blow up a bunch of kids.

Right.

I know. That was the New York Times' claim. The Boston Daily Globe suggested that he may have suffered two head injuries that may have continued to disrupt his thinking. I would wager to bet he got those head injuries when he was beating his horse to death with his bare hands. I think he might have gotten kicked in the head by that horse.

Wow. I mean, football did exist at the time, though, so.

And I don't think they had very good helmets.

No, they were leatherheads at that point, probably still.

The case came to the conclusion that Kehoe was of rational mind the whole time, according to Arnie Bernstein, who says, it does take a rational mind to plan all that out. The reality is, there's no why.

Oh, no why that didn't burn up. The problem is when the guy deals exclusively in flames, you're going to lose a lot. We saw that with all the libraries.

Rest in hell, Andrew Kehoe.

Yeah, RIP not, God bless.

For sure.

Well, I guess rest without peace. I don't know. It's hard to do what we say, but in a way that's like go fuck yourself.

Rest in anxiety, mother fucker.

Perpetually.

Yes. So there's one other school explosion that has actually resulted in more changes to the way we live than this bombing, but this happened in a place called New London, which was a 1930s oil boom town and-

New London where?

Texas, I think.

Yes, yes. New London, Texas.

There's a New London, Connecticut as well. Every state just got like eight names for towns and they keep recycling them.

Well, look man, a good name's a good name and New London-

Right. Adding new to something.

Simple to the point, makes us sound better than London. So take that Britain. But the school in New London was actually one of the wealthiest rural schools in America because of the oil boom town in Rust County where New London, Texas was. The school was a modern two-story brick and concrete building heated by natural gas heaters. And of course, you may have clocked the words natural gas heaters, which sure sound like something that might cause an explosion and you would be correct. In early 1937, the school board was looking to save a buck and decided to cancel the school's gas contract. And instead, great idea alert, had workers illegally tap into a residue natural gas line from a local oil company. So we're getting-

First off, if you're living on the back of an oil boom town, why are you not just getting it from the company anyway? Why wouldn't you be like, oh, we're going to give it for free to the fucking school? This whole town is built on oil derricks. I guess it's asking too much of the wealthy to fucking help. But I'm just saying, you'd think, I guess, I don't know, I've done zero research into how many coal towns provided any kind of service either. So I don't know.

Probably not many.

They always say the people who have the most money have it because they don't spend it. So I guess the school board was just looking to save up some of those oil bucks and-

Yeah, they had company town money.

Yeah, they wanted to get an extra Snickers bar at the company store that weekend. So they rerouted the gas to a super dangerous line. But also just the number of times that we've had to cover a tragedy on this show that starts with some version of they were looking to save some money and-

Or make more money than.

Yes.

Like I watched Dark Waters or whatever with Lou Ferrigno, not Lou Ferrigno, but he also played the Hulk. Eric, what's his name?

Eric Bana.

Eric Bana also played a Hulk. But the guy I'm thinking of is Current Hulk.

Oh, Mark Ruffalo, not Eric at all.

Mark Ruffalo. I had to go through three Hulks to get here. He's in a movie called Dark Waters that is one of the most upsetting watches. It's just about Teflon and how it's so fucking dangerous. And they're making a billion bucks a year and didn't give a shit.

But yeah, gave a whole town cancer because they pulled the water.

Whole town gave a world cancer basically, but that town was fucking patient zero for that. But they knew that in the 50s, man. It's crazy how this shit that they went through to just keep making that fucking Teflon money. But anyway, continue with them, how Greed's going to kill a bunch of kids here.

Yeah, so raw gas has no odor.

Yeah, they add the smell to fucking, what's it called, propane. They add that smell after this accident.

Literally, yes. Yes, that's why I'm telling this story because this accident.

I wanted to come out ahead of you seeming smart as hell, having seen an episode of fucking King of the Hill.

This explosion is the reason that gas has a smell because no one could smell that the entire school was filling up with gas.

Now, yeah, this school doesn't have canary budgets.

Kids were complaining of headaches for weeks.

Oh, no.

But nobody put two and two together that the illegal gas line was leaking into the school until March 18th, 1937 at 317 p.m., just minutes before school would have gotten out when a shop teacher in the basement switched on an electric sander and a spark ignited the gas air mixture that had built up under the building. Eyewitnesses said, and I'm sorry I'm laughing, this just sounds so... You shouldn't be laughing.

This is about to get horrible.

Eyewitnesses said the school blew apart, the walls bulged outward, and the roof lifted off and crashed down, which is the most...

It's the cartoony way to describe it.

Yeah, it's very cartoony.

Yeah, it's like when a character gets so upset, all of those same things happen in a cartoon.

Yeah, to their head.

Like steam came out of the ears of the school. Like, yeah, I get why you laughed, but I don't think there's a lot of survivors then.

No, the entire main wing of the school collapsed, trapping hundreds of children and teachers in a heap of debris. Rescuers, including roughnecks from the oil fields, parents and highway patrol raced to the sea to pull out victims and survivors. Didn't take them three days to arrive, King George. Over 295 people were killed, most of them kids from fifth through 11th grade. According to the locals, nearly every family in the area lost at least one kid.

That's the problem with these rural explosions. We saw that with the Benton fireworks fire too, where it was like everybody saw a neighbor's body part like in their yard.

And with the new, and you may get to this Chris, but with a new London, also how sad is it that I know more about an explosion in Texas than any of the like historical shit I should have learned in school. But they think that it was like, basically, they don't have a good count of how many kids actually died because a lot of the parents were like migrant, or like they're temporarily because of the oil, and they just like pack up their shit and left and like didn't claim their kids, or just took their kids and left.

Yeah. And what year was it? 30 something. So it's still like, it's only a few years after selling kids, like the depression had just ended. They just moved, they'll go anywhere to find work, so they're moving into these oil derrick places.

Yeah. Yeah. This explosion was so catastrophic that it actually ranks as the third deadliest disaster in Texas history, only behind the 1900 Galveston hurricane and the Texas city ship explosion, which occurred on April 16th, 1947, and is widely considered one of the deadliest industrial accidents in US history. In any case, investigators-

Everything's bigger in Texas.

Investigators pretty quickly figured out the cause of the explosion was the scentless natural gas. Within weeks, the Texas legislator passed a law requiring that sulfur compounds be added to natural gas to give it that distinct gas odor.

Fucking smart. Smart solution.

Yes. You think they would do it for carbon monoxide, but maybe carbon monoxide detectors have too big of a grip on them. A lobby.

Yeah, they have too big a lobby, the monoxide people.

So if you ever smell that smell, you can give a RIP, God bless to the people lost in the New London School Explosion.

Who have saved countless lives since this event by doing that.

Yes. Now, I wanted to end on a slightly lighter note because some of these stories have been kind of heavy.

None of them have been about going back to school. They're just like, here's what happens if you go to school.

Yeah, you might explode.

Because there's not one didn't want to go back to school where I was like mom, dad, well, when they were together. So it could be just one or the other. But I would say I've never once been like, I don't want to go to school because it might blow up. Like I always had a lot of anxieties about just going, just sucked. I didn't do any of my summer reading.

Yeah.

But I guess it's a harder episode to make about kids not doing the summer reading.

Well, I guess you would have had plenty of summer reading that you didn't do, that you could have told us all about not doing. But instead, we're talking.

I hear Check My Privilege in your fucking tone and I don't like it.

Without those stories, I felt like we could end on a note that's a little bit lighter, a little bit more supernatural because not all terror at school is violent. Some of it is weird, ghostly, manifests in strange ways. Well, it's not tough to say what caused some of these, but there are a lot of weird things that have happened at school. So one of the weirdest things that I found in my research is the Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic of 1962. One more thing in this episode that feels made up, but I swear.

100%. It was like, hey, what if something the Joker would cause also had an inpronounceable name? How mad would you be at me right now if I had to take a pee?

You can go pee.

On a scale of one to never stop laughing?

Just go pee.

BRB, BRB, BRB. You guys speak amongst yourselves.

Please hold for peeing.

Oh, Ed's back from peeing. Thank you, Ed, for returning from peeing.

Yeah, you got it, bud. I drank all these fucking whatevers, but not like last time, not Michelob-based, but.

In January 1962, at a mission-run boarding school for girls in Kashasha Tanganyika, now Tanzania, a few students started laughing uncontrollably and couldn't stop. Witnesses described it as laughter mixed with fear and an inability to control one's body. The weird laughter spread from girl to girl and soon dozens were affected. The school had to shut down because teaching became impossible.

These kids are too risible.

I mean, like that's several slumber parties that I went to. I peed my pants at many a slumber party from laughing so hard, and I was not the only one. You get girls together and we start laughing, you can't stop it.

Well, this laughing episode lasted.

That's why I went to the bathroom, so that didn't happen.

Exactly.

This laughing episode lasted days in those afflicted.

Did they sleep?

It doesn't sound like it. It sounds like they basically were awake laughing for multiple days in a row.

They got smilexed.

When the school tried to reopen, the epidemic flared again. Ultimately, the condition, which also included crying spells, I know I said there was no crying in the story, but there is. There were crying spells, random-

There's only no crying in baseball.

Random shouting and occasionally running or violence spread to other villages and schools in the region, in the risen.

I don't like that it fucking escalated, where it's like you got one person, like you're on the phone being like, hey, your kids laughing a lot? It was like they were, but now they're punching each other. What about going on in your town? It was like, yeah, kids just keep stabbing each other in the neck.

By the time this stopped, 14 schools had been closed and an estimated 1,000 people had experienced the laughing fits.

Wow, they learned nothing that year. Jokes on them. Am I right?

Hey.

Bunch of dummies.

No physical cause is ever found and doctors concluded it was a case of mass psychogenic illness, essentially a mass hysteria triggered by stress. The theory is in this case that Tanganyika had just become independent and the students were under extreme pressure at a strict school with this cultural upheaval all around them and their stress took the form of laughter and began this contagious reaction in a high anxiety environment.

Huh.

This is why Christian Hempelman of Texas A&M, who has done research on the incident, says he hates when humor researchers use the Tanganyika case as evidence of laughter being contagious because for those afflicted, it wasn't really funny.

But what's his thoughts on yawns being contagious?

I don't know. We'd have to ask.

I think there's evidence of that.

Some of the people who experienced this laughing fit said that they were laughing, but they were feeling pain or even anguish as they laughed.

Man, welcome to being a comedian.

He explains that this psychogenic illness has all kinds of nerve symptoms or nervous symptoms and laughter is just one of them. Other cases of mass psychogenic illness occur among groups of people unable to extract themselves from a stressful situation. In this type of situation, the person has no power over their stress. It can come up with no other response, which kind of makes sense to me.

Nervous laughter is a thing, right? People say it. We write it in scripts.

Yeah. I've laughed nervously before in inappropriate situations where it doesn't seem like something you should laugh about, but that's just the only reaction that your body physically has. I remember I found out, this is horrible to say, I won't name names, but this is probably 10 years ago, somebody called me to tell me that a person that we'd gone to college with had committed suicide. When I hung up, I started laughing and I was like, what the fuck is wrong with you? I had no emotional feeling of this is funny. I was just laughing and that was the first time I really understood the idea of nervous laughter because I was just like, it comes over you in a way that you can't control.

It seems like an exhaust pipe a little bit where it's like you want to physically react, but you also you're a polite member of society. Maybe you hold that in and then it just rises itself up until it farts out as a laugh a little bit. I guess nervous farts are probably a thing too. Nervous shits are for sure a thing.

Yeah, they are.

For fucking sure as a person who's had to go on stage a bunch of times.

Yeah. They tend to take a little longer, I feel like to express themselves.

Yeah. What I'm just saying is it seems like there is maybe some correlation between a bundle of nerves and getting something out of some end.

Yeah. I guess that's a question of what's really going on on this show though. Are we laughing because we're making each other laugh or is just so stressed making this fucking thing that we have no other response?

Six of one, half doesn't have another, man.

Column A, Column B.

Yeah. A similar but more ghostly case of something like this happened in Malaysia in 2016 at a secondary school in Kota Baru, Malaysia. It was from there that reports emerged in April of 2016 that students and teachers were seeing a black figure, like a jet shadow figure, like a jet black shadow figure, lurking around campus, described as a sinister ghost or spirit. Eventually, one of the teachers screamed and fainted after claiming this figure tried to enter her body. She said she tried to recite verses from the Quran when she realized that she was losing control of herself. She said, quote, I saw a black figure like it was trying to enter my body, but my colleagues were surrounding me reciting verses from the Quran. I felt like my head was bloated. I felt numb and tears kept pouring down my face. I silently recited the Ayatollah Kursi, which is a verse from the Quran over and over again. Then my head began to feel lighter after about an hour. And this attack by this spirit set off a chain reaction of mass hysteria with about 50 students and 11 teachers having episodes of screaming, crying and fainting over the next couple of days. And it got so bad, the school had to shut down for an entire week. And in that time, they brought in Islamic faith healers, scholars, and even witch doctors to perform prayers and rituals to expel the evil spirit. And apparently after the interventions, the school reopened and there were no more sightings reported.

Whoa, mass hysteria.

Yeah, medical experts once again chalked it up to stress. It was a very strict school. It was exam season. And they noted that belief in spirits in Malaysia is like a culturally present. It's a strong belief. So it's a kind of perfect recipe for a collective psychosomatic event. And this has taken on different flavors over the years too. In the Philippines in 2013, there was a group of kids that started acting like they were possessed by evil spirits. But a year prior in Afghanistan in 2012, there were multiple scares in girls' schools where the students fell ill and many suspected the Taliban had been poisoning girls. But the World Health Organization investigated and found no toxins and concluded that it was likely a mass hysteria born of fear. It's just in this case, there was a concern about terrorism and not demons. So it took on a different form of blame.

Wasn't there a thing, mass hysteria wise, wasn't there like a thing?

What is it?

Tongues, you know, like in like evangelical Christian-

Speaking in tongues.

Shit, where like some kids were speaking in tongues and then some other kids start speaking in tongues. And I think more people were just like, you can get out of class from fucking acting like this. We'll do it.

That's what I think. I think it's like, oh, they're doing it. And like, so I'm going to do it too.

Yeah, kids just being kids, you know?

Yeah, and it spreads.

And we saw that with the Pokemon thing, right? There was like a there's like a Pokemon episode, Pokemon Go in Japan where like, yeah, a couple of kids got seizures and like every kid was like, I also got fucking seizures.

Oh, yes, yes, yes. Yeah. I thought you meant lots of kids started playing Pokemon Go.

That was you as a full grown adult.

I have a Jurassic Park game that's very much like Pokemon Go. So that brings us to the end of all of these horrifying school back to school stories, which leaves us with only one thing to do, which is place going back to school on our Fear Tier. And Amber, as our guest and as our resident school attender, where do you place going back to school on your Fear Tier?

Well, I'm a giant nerd. I love school. So also, so are we still using the bucket of hot piss and shit as like our?

Unfortunately, yes. And by the time this episode comes out, I might have posted it, but someone just, are you guys familiar with the Citizen App?

Yes.

So in the cities, you would know like, so the Citizen App, I don't use it, but it's like an app that's, you know, like crime is six feet away from you. Like people post what's happening. A lot of times it would be like, there's a car on fire and you can go on there and click on it. And then you can see like from someone's self footage in real time, like here I am, this car's for sure on fire. Oh no, all these kids burn up. And someone just sent me a screenshot of their Citizen App. That says that it was in the Los Angeles area. That said that a person was throwing like a bucket of feces on somebody. And so it's back and I was real ready to retire at Amber, but seems like it's alive and well. So we got to keep it.

You got to keep it. Also, it makes me, did y'all ever watch In Living Color?

Of course.

So it makes me think of.

Turns out Homie does play it here with throwing shit around.

It makes me think of the character that Damon Wayans played, that he had the pickle jar. Do you remember?

It's something, it's synopsis or firing, but please tell me.

So he was a homeless guy, and so it was a pickle jar with a pickle in it, but the joke was that it was his jar of piss and shit.

Oh, I don't remember that part, but I was also, we were all pretty young for In Living Color.

Yeah, I wasn't supposed to be watching it, but I did, and it was funny.

I just remember my mom wanted to be a fly girl. I remember she would always say it.

Yeah, you know, that's how JLo got started.

Yeah, exactly. My mom didn't know that then, though.

That's funny. But so, yeah, okay, so actually going back to school, like zero, getting exploded, being in a fire, that's definitely gonna be hot. Like, that's gonna have to go higher than the bucket of hot piss and shit.

Okay, but when you went, when you're in the school, are you ever thinking, today's the day it blows, or are you, like, I think that would help you where you're gonna put it.

Well, no, I do think about school shootings, but.

Yeah, but we can't do that this episode, it's too depressing. It gets me too fucking crazy mad.

I don't. I mean, I'm always thinking about stuff like being anxious, like this could catch a fire. But I will say I learned that I'm not good in that situation. I was actually in my office. I had a student in there. We were talking and the fire alarm started going off and like we don't do fire drills. And so I was like, we we probably need to like get out. And so like the doors have like shut and we're going. And I realized I forgot my purse. And I was like, OK, you go, I'm gonna get my purse. And I started walking. I was like, I forgot my iPad. I don't believe that. So I went back and I finally went outside. Somebody just burnt toast. But I told Rob, he's like, you would have died getting your stupid purse. I'm like, yeah, yeah.

You went back a bunch of times for something that's not a baby.

I know.

Yeah. You need to you need to remember the East Village fire. And you need to tell the people at your school, hey, we got to practice fire drills because I'm not getting stuck in this doorframe.

Yeah.

With everybody else.

I need to be second nature to scoop up my iPad.

Yeah. All the drills I've done turns out I'm not good in a crisis. So I need the preparation and the practice.

OK, so you're so as a crisis handler, you're a zero.

Although she handled the crisis of the beginning of this episode pretty much, which hopefully if I edit this, the world will never know.

That's true. I'll leave this part here so that they know that I did the Lord's work.

But you did do the Lord's work.

Many Chris did it when I did the work, but he did the crisis. He's created the crisis. You're the tornado.

So Amber has actually going back to school as a zero, perhaps dying in a school higher, depending on the death. Ed, where would you put going back to school?

I'm never going to go in those hallowed halls again, bro. Especially now that I'm not as successful as I used to be, nobody's asking me back. I know I'm changing the rules here, but if I put myself in little kid age or my niece and nephew and stuff, I don't know. They seem to be into going back to school. They don't seem too scared about it, but they do. The active shooter stuff is more like a shrug for them. They're just so many years of doing it. I would say I would still keep it at a five because we do live in a society that is making no more changes. I would say you have to always be at a five, like one foot in a running stance.

I'm going to put it at a six or maybe even a seven because there were some years that I really didn't want to go back to school.

Well, we've heard you've talked about being a student at that time and you seemed infinitely bullyable.

I got bullied so hard.

We all got bullied. I definitely got bullied the least, it sounds like, from this group.

I hate my high school. I wish it would burn to the ground.

Oh, shit. Oh my God.

Shit.

Well, call Andrew Kehoe and he can maybe help you out from beyond the grave.

I think we're on a call with Andrew Kehoe.

Yeah.

So you're going zero to something. I'm going five, you're going six.

If we think about the reality of things that could happen at a school, I'm at a seven because there is a lot of shit that could happen. You could absolutely die in a school. But just like the going back again, school supplies. I love a school supply. So that's fine.

That helps.

Well, you're in college now, like higher education. I don't even know if kids have notebooks or anything anymore.

I require my students because I'm old school.

Five stars.

Really?

You just nodded. You really have to have a five star spiral notebook.

I'm not that picky. Well, I did have one class where they made me be that picky. I had to tell them exactly what folder to get. That's stupid. But I also keep folders in case students, like college is expensive. If you need a folder, I'll give you a folder for a notebook or whatever.

Well, yeah. I mean, I would think that, yeah, going back to school for me, if you're looking at it, not even from the boiler explosion aspect, just from the anxiety about going back, the depression of the summer ending. You know what I mean? There's just, yeah, I guess it's got to be minimum five because you're getting beat up from all angles. And if you add shrapnel to that, then it's worse. But like, I think going back to school, and it wasn't until I got older that I realized that, like, high school, guys, it fucking started so fucking early in the morning.

Yeah.

Like the idea that I would wake, like I'm out the door by like six something in the morning to go to high school. And I'm not doing that now. And it's just so crazy to think about. And you in the South, you didn't even have to deal with school days.

AKA snow days.

So you had to like live there even like an extra 20 days that you burned on school days.

Oh, like your summer.

Yeah. Your summer starts even later.

Well, so you would think that. But when it gets real cold down here, they cancel school.

Not your school where you went where they were like, well, no. But like one guy brought a revolver.

Literally. But they will like the elementary and high schools. They will close for it being too cold. A weird thing that happens here. And I don't know if it's like a Knoxville thing or a Tennessee thing. We did it in Alabama. But like the elementary schools start earlier than the middle schools because apparently we don't have enough school buses. So like they have to. And so my kid just switched from elementary school to middle school. So I've had to like rearrange my whole fricking work schedule because you can't get your kid there earlier than 730. Apparently they'll call CPS on you if you get your kid there before 730, too many days in a row. Like, cool, thanks.

Yeah. You want your kid to go to school too badly. Like we can't have this.

Yeah.

I've never had a demerit from being early. But yeah, I guess the parents get the demerits from being early and the children get the demerits from being late.

So you really got to thread that needle.

Jesus. I had to I fucking and this is this all fits in the in the fear tier. I feel comfortable talking about it. I went to Catholic school in high school and they like they gave you this fucking piece of paper that if you were late, they like stamped it with like a check it into the to the factory level, like time card clicker thing that was like here's here's carbon copied proof, like three carbon copy proofs of you being two minutes late. And like if you get X number of these, you have to like wash fucking chalkboards and shit or like run around the track. And then also if you showed up with stubble on your face, you had to shave at the nurse's office, but they never had fucking shaving creams. He's just using a hand soap, like a bar of hand soap, crusty like Bic razor. Sucked, but whatever I'm cool now. So thanks for that.

Y'all are both Catholic, right? Okay, so you can keep this, you can cut it. I swear I'm not a stupid Southern stereotype, but I'm from a very, very small town and there wasn't anybody Catholic in our town. And so when I went to college-

Wasn't a Catholic president until JFK.

Yeah, when I went to college, I remember it was Ash Wednesday and one of my best friends who was like my big sister in the store, she comes in and she has like, what I think is like a random dirt smudge on her forehead. I'm like, hey, what do you have on your forehead? And so she had to explain to me Ash Wednesday, cause I was Southern Baptist, we don't do that. And I was like, I'm really dumb.

No, it's fine. If I didn't know, I would also be like, why is there always pig pens walking around, fucking dirt all over them stink lines.

There's some strange rituals in the Catholic Church.

Including confession.

Yeah, confession. Ya'll, is it, ya'll can't eat meat on Fridays? Is that a thing?

Only during Lent.

Only during Lent, yeah.

So during, we had a lot of Catholic girls in our sorority apparently. So our house would serve tilapia on Fridays to accommodate.

Sure, we should get fish filets. That's what we did up north. Go to McDonald's, get fish filet.

My nonna always made seven fish pasta.

Not us, for Christmas?

No, during Lent, when we couldn't eat meat on Fridays. Cause we always went to her house on Friday nights for pizza night.

Oh, that's cute.

Fuck man. Well, anyway, we got off track, but so it's all scary and being Catholic is weird. At least it can be weird to outsiders. And being an insider in a school is dangerous. So there you go.

There you go. Well, guys, thank you very much for joining us for this back to school episode. If you are headed back to school, I hope your school doesn't explode or catch fire or become possessed by a thousand demons.

And if you're going back to school at a Catholic school, I congratulate you on not having to do back to school shopping for clothes. Just get right back in that uniform, baby. It is the best feeling in the world. If you, when you're older, you'll appreciate it.

So Amber, anything else you'd like to plug before we sign off here?

Yeah, plug your show.

Please come listen to It's Murder, Ya'll, but only if you're okay with like ADHD, induced tangents and cussing. Also, I've not released an episode in a while, but I'm gonna soon, I promise. And if you want to listen, if you have anything you want to hear in particular, that happens in the South, send me a DM. Oh yeah, you can come follow me on Instagram. It's Murder, Ya'll is my thingy. I used to have a website, but then I just lit up.

I never used it.

You barely have time to podcast, you don't have to.

Literally.

I found your show from you and then listened to a bunch of episodes on drives. I've posted audio of me listening to it in the car. It's really good, I really enjoy it.

Thanks, I appreciate you.

So yeah, everybody, check out It's Murder, Ya'll. You're already checking out Scared All The Time. Head over to patreon.com/scared All The Time if you want to join our Patreon. But until next time, the show is Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola, and that was Amber.

And that was Amber, and we will talk to you next time. Bye-bye.

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

Written by Chris Cullari.

Edited by Ed Voccola.

Additional support and keeper of sanity is Tess Fifle.

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 and get all kinds of cool shit in return. Depending on the tier you choose, we'll be offering everything from ad-free episodes, producer credits, exclusive access and exclusive merch.

So go 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.

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