===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 week, a chill of terror is in the forecast.

Damn.

It's the time of year when we're all dreaming of a white Christmas. But not every snowstorm is just a pretty seasonal screensaver outside the windows of your cozy home. They can come in all shapes and sizes. And the biggest snowstorms, blizzards, can bury homes, paralyze cities, and turn the world into a deadly white void. They fascinate me because while they can be as lethal as tornadoes or hurricanes or wildfires or landslides, they can also be beautiful, which is not a word we use very often on this show. Blizzards, I think, are sort of like the ninjas of natural disasters. They're silent, deadly, and can be really cool looking. Unfortunately, while you gaze into the sparkling sea of snow covering the streets, extreme cold can send your body into hypothermic shutdown, literally freezing you from the inside out. Blinding whiteout winds can disorient you until you wander in circles and die of exposure. Snowdrifts can entomb you, and heavy ice can collapse roofs and buildings on top of you. Even when the snow has passed, you can still drop dead of a heart attack over exerting yourself while shoveling the driveway. Which is at least one death pretty high on the list, I think, of ways that Ed and I might check out. So, grab a blanket, pour something warm, and get ready. The weather outside is frightful, and we're about to plunge head on into it.

What are we scared?

When are we?

All the time. Now it is time for.

Time for.

Scared All The Time.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. We have just a quick housekeeping for you today. I know our episodes have been sort of weirdly staggered, so we don't have a ton of new five star reviews for you, but as always, if you leave a five star review, we will try to do some for next week. So get your five star reviews in now, and we will read some for our Christmas episode that comes out the week after this.

Which I guess makes this episode our Hanukkah episode.

Yes, exactly.

This has a little bit of Hanukkah theme to it, because some of these storms last more days than you'd think that we're about to talk about. So there you go.

There you go.

These people could have used warmth that lasted eight days.

Couple of candles. We also have an announcement, Ed, I will throw it to you for our holiday merch.

Oh yeah, it's out there. It's still happening. It's super limited. I'm just, the stock I have is what I made them on, but people are buying them. They're excited. It's a direct reference to last year's Christmas episode. And yeah, get your orders in, because I'm shipping them from the East Coast. I've got them all here with me. I'd love to not bring them back on the plane, if possible.

They're really funny shirts, and I think they look really cool for the holidays. Red and green, traditional colors. We keep it simple around here sometimes.

But the messaging is, it's non-denominational.

The messaging is non-denominational for sure. The only denomination it makes you a part of is a listener of this show.

That's 100% correct.

That's what you can share with your friends and family around the holidays this year. But yeah, guys, that's it. This Blizzards episode rocks. If you don't follow us over on Patreon, be sure to do that, patreon.com/scared all the time. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Oh, and Discord, which is becoming more and more active.

Enjoy the weather wherever you are. Enjoy this episode and stay tuned for our last episode of the year coming up next week. All right, guys, we'll see you on the other side. The nice thing about this topic today is that if our pattern holds and we bring a massive blizzard into existence.

It's supposed to snow here tomorrow. So when we're recording this, I'm going to the city tomorrow. It's supposed to snow tomorrow.

I was going to say, it's definitely going to be more of an Ed problem than a Chris problem because-

Oh, because this is not a costume.

No, Ed did not dress this way for this episode. Ed is dressed this way because it's very cold in Connecticut. And I guess, do you not have heat in the room that you're in?

No, first off, it's low. It's low. I have it on low because I already had a jacket on. No, for people watching, this is what he's talking about, what I'm wearing for the watchers. I'm wearing a lot of layers.

A lot of layers, big jacket, warm hat.

Yeah, I stay above the garage and the garage is not connected to the house when I'm over here. So yeah, I have to like do the walk. You know, it's cold out. So I have my jacket on and my other thing on and my Saajan Legends hoodie underneath that.

You look good. You look good. You look dressed for a blizzard. And it's perfect because that's all we're going to be talking about for the next hour and change. If we get a blizzard in LA., there's a much bigger problem afoot than the fact.

You're wearing a t-shirt and a cat right now from what I can see in the video.

Yes, I've got Gertie right here to keep me warm. But if you are anywhere that experiences freezing temperatures, you're in the same boat with Ed because here in the United States, at least, we get rocked by multiple blizzards each winter, especially in the Northern Plains, the Mountain States and the Northeast. With temperate oceans on either side of us, the warm Gulf of Mexico to the south and mountain ranges directing airflow, storm fronts and the jet stream clash and produce monster storms. Nearly every American state has issued at least one blizzard warning since 2005. Most of us wait them out by hunkering down in doors, but if you happen to be caught outside when the whiteout hits, that's when it can turn into a fight for survival. If you've never experienced a blizzard, if you live somewhere warm or where there's not a lot of moisture in the air, I guess, I could paint the picture for you. Well, maybe before I paint the picture, Ed, you and I could talk about blizzards that maybe we have experienced in our lives because I think that you and I have probably experienced one or two.

Oh yeah, blizzard of 93, dude.

Blizzard of 93, that's-

Blizzard of 93, storm of the century, they called it.

Yep.

I broke my head open on a fence post from that storm, yeah. So if you don't know if you remember blizzard 93.

I do, that was on my list of blizzards to talk about.

Yeah, so you would go outside and so normally when you see snow outside, it's a core memory for me, you can walk in it. It's like that's snow, your feet go into it, whatever. But blizzard 93, you had all this snow, tons of snow, but the top was just crazy hard ice across the whole top. You have to smash your feet down super hard just to get into it.

Yeah.

And even then you're going to cut up your leg, get a flesh-eating bacteria. And so I remember that was just my biggest memory of it, is you couldn't, everything was just ice. And so my brothers and I went sledding. You know, we had a big backyard at the time that like, it was a downhill yard. I think there's actually video of the actual event. But I'll put it in the show notes so I can find it. And we went sledding in the backyard and I was on some sort of sled. And I start going and it's going fast, it's going fast. At the bottom of the hill was like a wooden fence, across a big, long wooden fence. And I was like, I can't stop. Because I saw my little tiny mittened hands were trying to beat and punch into the ice, but it couldn't get through. It was just like slap, slap, slap, slap in the top. I'm like, ah, and I couldn't stop. So I rolled off and I just kept going down my normal ice. And I remember, I think there's video of it, where my brother or my dad tried to throw another sled in front of me to hit me off path or like just to hit, I'll hit it and slow down. But it missed, it just fully missed. And then I just like, ah, and then I just like slam. You just see like a bunch of snow shake off a fence at the bottom. And then like, then I just start crying. But yeah, I remember that.

I've definitely had a lot of snow based accidents. I almost, I think, broken knee once sledding down a hill and my legs were extended and they swung around and hit a tree and I couldn't walk up from the bottom of the hill and it was getting dark. That was a scary time.

Oh yeah, walking up the hill. That was another thing, getting back up the hill because you couldn't like punch through the fucking ice.

Yeah.

It was just a nightmare.

Yeah, 93 was crazy.

96 had some big snow too, I think.

96 was crazy too and I can't distinguish my memories between 93 and 96.

Exactly, exactly. I remember I was playing with Ninja Turtles, so I'm thinking more 93.

Yeah, maybe.

From my memory, from my memory.

Yeah, we're about to talk about blizzards as these really horrible, dangerous things, but my blizzard memories are actually quite pleasant from 93 and 96.

Yeah, you didn't have to drive to work.

Well, you didn't have to drive anywhere. All you wanted was to be off of school. We both lived in homes with plenty of heat and we were safe. I mean, I remember there's photos of my sisters and I, I think from the 93 blizzard, where the snow was up to the roof of our garage. There's pictures of us standing on the roof and we just walked up there because the snow had piled high enough to get up there.

Yeah, 93 was like Tennessee to Canada, right? It was just like a giant blizzard.

Yeah, we're actually going to talk about 93 later in the episode. But my other really favorite blizzard memory is from much more recently. It was probably like 2013 or something because there's a picture of it that's the first, I think the first Instagram picture I ever posted.

The Utah?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We were doing Christmas at my grandparents' house in Springfield. And the house was too small for us. My cousins and my aunt and uncle and myself and my sister and her new husband at the time. And there were a lot of us and we couldn't stay in my grandparents' house. So we all stayed at a hotel a couple of miles away. And when we left to go do Christmas dinner, it started snowing really, really hard. And by the time that we'd had dinner and open presents, the roads were like a complete disaster. And it was really, I went outside and I took a picture of the front of their house, like all covered in snow. And it was really like this very warm, pleasant family memory of like, man, we're all going to get snowed in on Christmas and be together. And then my uncle decided like, ah, it's safe enough. I want to go back to the hotel. So we all headed out. We piled into the family minivans and whatever and drove back to the hotel, which was a nightmare. It took us probably an hour to go, you know, five miles. And it was the first time I was actually a little scared of a blizzard because I was very acutely aware that if we got stuck somewhere on the road or if the car flipped over or something, it was fucking cold and people were going to have trouble getting to us. And like I wasn't afraid I was going to die, but it was the first time I was like, oh, I see how this can go south really fast.

Oh my God. Yeah. I mean, I got in a wreck, you know, in high school. Nothing crazy, but road turned right. My car was on ice, kept going straight. And I was like, turn the wheel, didn't do anything. At the break, it didn't do anything. And I'm just like watching, you know, the earth, the unmoving earth ahead of me get closer. And then like, yeah, bonk, I went up on this off the road there and did this like crazy telephone pole.

Bonk is a funny way to describe driving your car headlong into a telephone pole.

Well, it wasn't like I wasn't to go on a thousand miles an hour or anything. But thank God.

Sure.

But then the cops came or a cop came and he also couldn't stop and he hit the back of my car.

Really?

Yeah. Like the police cruiser hit the back of my car.

You should have sued the police station.

It's a different time.

I didn't know.

When I wasn't in the car, I was standing on the side of the road.

Still, what do they call it? Pain and trauma or whatever. You had to watch your beloved car get smashed up, you're cold.

I didn't know you can do that. If it happened to me in 2020, I would have absolutely.

So I think the question that remains for me heading into this episode, as we talk about these blizzards that we remember from our youth, is were any of these storms even technically blizzards? And I would say some of them were, and some of them were not. So to truly understand what a blizzard is and how these storms can be so deadly, the first thing that I think is important to understand is that when we think of a blizzard, we think of just like those piles and piles and piles of snow and it snowed six feet overnight or whatever.

I feel like the most recent, I'm sorry to interrupt there, but the most recent, and I don't even think it was a blizzard or else they would have said it, but when you say giant piles of snow, do you remember like California a few years ago, like out where it would snow, had like pictures of literally homes were below the level of like snow?

Yes.

Do you remember this? It was just a few years ago, I feel like.

Yeah, it was up in the mountains, I think.

But I don't remember any news being like the blizzard of 2020 or 2002, or whatever the year would be.

That may have been because snowfall actually has very little to do with what a blizzard is. The National Weather Service defines a blizzard as a snowstorm with sustained winds or frequent gusts over 35 miles an hour, plus blowing or falling snow that reduces visibility below one quarter of a mile for at least three hours. Unless you're in Antarctica, where the winds have to reach 99 miles an hour to be categorized as a blizzard, which gives you a sense of how shitty the weather in Antarctica is.

I was about to say, thank God Antarctica has no permanent residents. Nobody who comes on vacation being like, you call this a blizzard? Like when they're in our blizzards, you know?

Yeah.

Oh my God. It's crazy. I didn't know it was like a hurricane with snow.

You can even have a blizzard with relatively little new snow if the high winds are picking up everything already on the ground, which is called, not surprisingly, a ground blizzard. And the point of all this is that the danger, the real danger of a blizzard isn't the amount of snowfall. It's that heavy snow combines with fierce winds to create a whiteout, which is a scenario where it becomes nearly impossible to see when you're in the middle of it or to travel anywhere safely or really do anything.

But now, I think a whiteout is just a common occurrence up in Antarctica.

Yes.

Like, snow blindness and whiteouts are both, like, gotta be careful for both.

Well, and snow blindness and whiteouts are two different things, and I think-

Well, no, I understand, but I just mentioned those are two.

Well, yeah, I think I've experienced snow blind, well, I know I've experienced snow blindness, which is just when you're out in the fresh snow and the harsh sun bounces off that expanse of white and you could be looking straight ahead, but you sort of lose a sense of how far something is because it's all just white in your eyes and you can't see. That's snow blindness. Whiteouts, though, I don't know, have you ever experienced a true whiteout? I don't know that I have.

Like a fog of snow in the sense that you can't see five feet in front of you because the snow's whipping by?

Yeah, well, like I wrote out a little description for listeners who might not have any idea what we're talking about.

I mean, for office workers, we're not talking about Bic over here.

Hey-o.

Hey-o, right? Remember the Bic whiteout, smelling that as a kid.

The difference here is Bic whiteout is used if you make a mistake and these whiteouts are a mistake to go into.

Well, both of them are made in Connecticut. That's cool.

Imagine for a second, if you will, travel with me, dear listener, Ed, maybe you can drop some howling wind on the soundtrack here. But imagine you step out into a heavy snow. You're not going to go for a hike. You just need to bring your car inside or walk to the corner store because you want to get a beer or a hot coffee or something. And suddenly a wind picks up, a howling wind that drives snow directly into your face. I think a lot of us have probably experienced that. But the wind blows so hard and there is so much snow that you can actually feel the sun dimming and the air becoming a vortex of ice crystals that scour your face and freezes your eyelashes shut. Within minutes, your fingers are numb through your gloves and that wind chill is so much colder than you prepared for.

My mom is queen of the wind chill. She everything, it's like every time there's any kind of weather on the news, she is just ready to feel like, well, what's it feel like? Yeah, like, what's it? Oh, it's 16 degrees, but it feels like negative five. Like she doesn't care about that first number at all.

Yeah, well, and that's part of the danger here because blizzard conditions can whip up suddenly out of nowhere. So if it can just be normal snow and all of a sudden, it gets much colder and much harder to see. And if you find yourself in this sort of a situation, you might try to turn around and go back to your house. But the danger of the blizzard is that now you can't tell which direction anything is. Landmarks get erased, snow drifts are piling up against walls and doorways. Every direction looks the same. And better yet, no one can hear you yelling for help over the howling, loud sounds of the wind. So that's a blizzard. That's what you don't want to get trapped in.

It's here to swallow you up.

It's here to swallow you up, much like the number of jackets that Ed is currently wearing.

I'll take one off. I can turn the heat on.

They're here to swallow you up.

I have to walk all the way over there and press the button, but I felt like I was feeling warm when I came in with this on.

You look good, man.

I don't leave the heat on up here when I'm not up here. I've been out all day. I'm not trying to waste money.

No, that's smart. So that's what a blizzard is. That's what a whiteout is. And just, you know, you can live through a blizzard without actually experiencing a whiteout. But that's the dangerous part, is getting trapped in a whiteout. So once you've defined what a blizzard is, I think it's also important to know how these storms can form. Meteorologists often sum it up as needing, as a blizzard needing three things, cold air, moisture and lift. So the cold air and the moisture is to make the snow and feed the clouds. And the lift is what gets the warm air rising and forming the precipitation that can come down.

It's like a weirdly similar recipe to tornadoes.

Yeah, I think we've talked about this before in some of our other weather episodes. But as a quick refresher for the audience and for myself and for you, Ed, this is how a major storm basically forms. The moisture in a storm system comes from warm, wet air moving up from lower latitudes, like the Gulf of Mexico. And this air usually gathers water vapor from oceans or large lakes. And as it travels, it picks that moisture up as it travels. So it is that they call that air heavy with potential precipitation.

Okay. Pregnant air.

Pregnant, pregnant air with a with a wet, dangerous baby. Yeah, without warm, wet air is hit with freezing arctic air that's pushing southwards. The warm air is forced up and over the cold air and the moisture that the warm air carries condenses into clouds and then precipitation, rain if it's warm and snow if it's cold. At the same time, a strong low pressure system usually develops at the site where the warm air and the cold air meet and the resulting pressure imbalance causes air to rush from areas of high pressure towards the low pressure center of the storm. Which if you're not following all that, it basically means those colliding wet and warm and cold and dry air creates a lot of wind. That's all it does.

Take your word for it.

It generates really strong winds. And when those elements align, the outcome can be this furious winter storm that can wreak havoc.

And is this something we can see? Like we could have like a Doppler or whatever it can be like, I think these clouds are going to get crazy up there and they're going to fuck. Yeah, I think they're going to drop all these wet babies on us.

They're going to drop all these wet babies. I think if you go back and watch like old weather channel, you know, those maps of the country with like the swirling red and blue lines all over the place.

Yeah, that's the hot air.

That's the hot air. You can't see the wet dangerous babies on those screens.

FCC won't allow it.

No, no, no, no, absolutely not. They'd be fined so much that the weather channel would go out of business if they showed that.

Who's that? Who's that Cold Miser? The like opposite of Heat Miser? In that video? You know what I'm saying? Like those two fucks.

I remember Heat Miser, but I don't remember.

Yeah, but I think there was, well, there was the Blizzard King or Cold, I call him Cold Miser in this scenario, but that's who I pictured for what's up there.

Now I'm picturing those two making a baby, and that's graphic.

According to your description, they might need to get together. You know what I mean? So, maybe it's a better thing that they weren't together. I don't remember the film that much. Comes on every fucking year.

We're gonna get fined by the FCC for putting these pornographic images into us.

I'm gonna put them on the screen. I'm going to Rule 34 right now to find this.

I'm sure it exists. I'm sure it exists. The danger of a blizzard doesn't end with the wind and snow either, because blizzards often usher in a deep freeze. The same cold air that helps create the storm lingers, and in the wake of that blinding snow and howling wind comes an intense cold spell. Temperatures plummet, and with the gale still blowing, wind chill becomes deadly. Your skin can freeze in minutes, and hypothermia is a constant threat to anyone stranded without shelter.

I'm out there right now. I mean, I have renauds, which is like its own problem in the winter.

Yeah, I just learned this the other day. I didn't know that you had renauds.

Yeah, so I don't, you know, I'm like, I like sleeping PJs here with like big ass socks on and stuff.

Yeah.

But yeah, like even if I didn't, it's just crazy how when it's like real cold out, you'll just like go outside and be like, I'm fucking cold. Like this sucks. Like immediately, like my feet are cold, my back is cold. Like if you're not, you know, wearing the right shit, I see these kids out here trying to look cool, wearing sneakers and stuff. I'm like, you gotta throw some boots on, buddy. Like you gotta dress for the weather, kids.

I got really fucked up feet for like a year in Boston. It was, I think it was right after college. I might have told this story in the podcast before, but we were shooting something at Emerson and it was the middle of the winter. It was freezing cold. We'd all bought these like, we went to like an army surplus store and bought like sub zero like body suits because we had to be shooting outside and it was fucking freezing.

Yeah. And I love it. That is, it's where we went to like an army surplus store too. It wasn't like kids today or not even kids, but like people that's like, there's better stuff like there's like Gore-Tex is like there's like that Canada down goot. Where the fucking shit does all the rich kids wear? Like there's like the last thing you should be looking at. It was like, hey, what is the army giving away? They had too much of. Well, I think I mean, it's like World War II era. Can I get a whole body suit that's Peacoat?

Yeah, this stuff was stitched together with thread that was still made by children in a warehouse somewhere.

There were two loose Marlboro cigarettes in one of them.

I don't remember whose idea it was to get them from the Army Surplus store, but they had a bunch of them and they were cheap, which is what mattered. But anyway, the point is it had warmed up a little bit and we were out drinking one night after the shoot and not wearing these body suits. I just bring up the body suits to give an example of how fucking cold it had been. And I decided to walk back to the hotel from wherever we were, but I was pretty drunk and got lost and ended up walking through icy puddles.

Oh, the ones that you think it's the road, it ends up being a four inch deep fucking puddle of water.

And I don't know how far I walked. I don't think I was in danger of actually getting frostbite and losing toes, but it felt like I was in danger of getting frostbite and losing toes.

I think it doesn't take as much as you think.

Probably not. And I didn't lose any toes for anybody who is keeping track of how many toes Ed and I have. We both have 10, so I didn't lose any. But the wet and the cold, I don't know if it was like a fungal infection or what, but my feet were fucked up for like a year. And then it went away.

One year. When you say fucked up, you mean it was pain or they were a weird color?

They were like red and peeling and like itchy, and it just took forever for it to go. I mean, it probably was like something I should have gone to the doctor for, but I didn't have health insurance. So I just was like, well, as long as nothing turns purple or black, it's probably fine.

It's where we are. Yep.

Yeah. So that was, I'm sure if you're actually trapped in a real blizzard in real blizzard conditions, I can only imagine how fucked you would be.

I want no part of it.

Your feet and everything.

I want no part of it. I was up in Alaska a couple of years ago in February. It was cold as shit. And but luckily no blizzards descended upon us. So it was like doable.

Yeah.

But yeah, I can't even imagine blizzards. Like I don't even like going for a hike and realizing it's a little too late in the day. And now you're now you're like, oh, it went from kind of sunny to pitch black in 45 minutes. And I'm like in the woods.

Yeah, that's yeah, that's terrible. You never want to be in that position.

Even if you're warm, I'm like, fuck, this is what's going to happen.

Yeah, you start thinking about the Blair Witch. Yeah, she can be anywhere.

Or that movie, The Grey.

Oh, yeah.

Where the Wolves movie, where they have that ridiculous line of dialogue about how Wolves are the only animals that seek revenge, which I don't even know how, like that's a crazy thing someone says in that movie.

We should look up, maybe we'll do Eatin Alive Part 2. We can look up and see if that's true. That reminds me of Adam Green's movie Frozen, which I think is maybe his best movie about the guys that get stuck on a ski lift chair.

A ski lift? Yeah.

There's a really, as a person who is terrified of being eaten alive, there's a really effective death where this guy, at one point, they're sitting in a chair and I forget how it comes up, but early in the movie, this one guy confesses that his greatest fear is being eaten alive. And at one point, as they're freezing to death in the trapped ski lift chair, he decides he's gonna jump and he's like, it's not that far, I'll be fine. And he jumps and breaks both of his legs and he's trapped in the snow. And over the course of the movie, these wolves gather and they eventually eat him alive. And he sees it coming. And the sequence where he-

It's a spoiler alert. It's like early jumps off.

The sequence where he sees it coming and realizes he's about to face his worst fear of being eaten alive and he can't go anywhere because his legs are broken is like really upsetting, especially to a person who's afraid of something like that happening.

Yeah. Yeah. Never say anything in a movie. Never make plans. Never say what your fears are. All that shit happens. It seems to come to pass. I am not afraid of being eaten alive or being frozen in that scenario, but I am afraid of ski lifts. Because when I was a kid and went skiing, and I think I was with my brother or my dad, one of them on the ski lift. And when we got off, I was a little too slow to keep going or whatever. And the ski lift whipped around and bonked me, like slammed me right in the head. My little body fell forward and slid down that little hill when you get off the ski lift.

That's two bonked accidents in one episode so far.

Yeah, so that's why I'm the idiot on the show.

Your car went bonked into a telephone pole.

I'm not good on snow, man.

The ski lift went bonked into your head. So yeah, there's a lot of things about blizzards that are or can be extremely dangerous. And for as deadly and uncomfortable as they can be in the present day, you know I love historical reference. And so I was like, God damn, it must have been really shitty to live through a blizzard. I mean, they've always been around. So like, could you imagine how deadly and scary they must have been before the modern conveniences of indoor heating and warm clothes?

I'm from New England, Chris. Yes, this is like, you learn about this in school. Like a bunch of those colonies were different groups each fucking winter. Yeah, like by the by the thaw of spring, it was like, who's not here?

Yeah, I mean, they had furs, I guess, and you could build fires.

But only if it dealt with those French Canadian Catholics. Yeah, to see if they can get some furs.

It must have been brutal. Like I can't imagine that, you know, three layers of raccoon skin wrapped around your arms really did much to fight off the cold on day three with no fire.

I think they probably had fire.

Well, no, I know they could make fires, but if it's blizzarding and whatever, like, I don't know how easy it is to keep those lit in those conditions.

Oh, yeah, I guess you're right. There's no way. If it's like blowing crazy winds and you're outside.

Even if you're inside, those walls were not, in a lot of homes, I imagine the walls were not super sturdy.

No, I think they were because that was before we like stopped cutting down like old growth trees. And so I think like old growth of those tight, tight, tight, tight, tight, tight rings. Like if you buy a house from like the 1700s, an old colonial home and you have to like restore it, we know within the guidelines of whatever historic homes they make you do, but like try and nail a fucking something into the wall on there. It's like crazy hard.

Interesting.

I think like old growth, I think old growth wood is, and I might be talking bullshit, I don't know, but I think like that old growth wood back then is like super, super sturdy. People were making log fucking cabins.

No, I know, I know. I just wonder during like a howling blizzard, how much, not that the logs are moving, but like how much wind is still coming in between the logs.

I guess I didn't think about that. Yeah. I can't imagine. I don't even know what they're using for installation back then. People? People who didn't survive the winter? Just squeezing them between the logs?

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Go to shopify.com/scared. Again, that's shopify.com/scared. So I took a look back through history to see what I could find in terms of historical blizzards. And the first thing I learned is a little bit of wordplay that I also love. The word blizzard in the context of a snowstorm, wasn't really a thing until the late 19th century. Before that, blizzard meant something like a violent blow or blast, a punch, or evil, even a verbal dressing down.

So I had a totally different definition. It had nothing to do with weather?

No, nothing to do with weather.

That's insane. That's like if it gets real hot out, and I'm trying to think of a good, yeah, it's like if it gets, oh my god, I was trying to make a joke, and I think I landed on a real thing.

Tell me.

I was trying to, so you said that a blizzard could have been like a verbal.

Dressing down.

Dressing down?

Yes.

Well, what's a fucking synonym for a dressing down? A scolding, and it's scolding heat when it's super hot out.

Well.

That's what I'm saying. So I think that's apparently what we were doing.

Ed, it's scolding heat. It's scolding heat, not scolding heat.

I'm deleting it. I'm deleting all that. The world will never know about this moment.

Ed decided to leave it in because Ed is the people's podcaster, the one who shows you you're not alone when confidently saying something completely wrong in front of your friends, family, or thousands of strangers.

According to Grammaphobia, the word blizzard was included in a list of Americanisms published in 1829 as blizzard, a violent blow, perhaps from blitz, which is German for lightning. Davy Crockett used the term blizzard in his really excitingly titled 1834 memoir, An Account of Colonel Crockett's Tour to the North and Down East, where he used the term figuratively to mean a burst of speech, saying, A gentleman at dinner asked me for a toast, and supposing he meant to have some fun at my expense, I concluded to go ahead and give him and his likes a blizzard. So Davy Crockett yelled at a guy basically.

I mean, he had a real interesting life. I mean, he really did until the end.

Well, why was his end not interesting? How did he end in a boring way?

He didn't die in a boring way. He just died at the Alamo.

Oh, right. Duh.

I'm saying it was like an interesting life all the way till the end.

I see what you're saying.

Like he was like a congressperson, like he was a trapper. He lived like a hundred lives.

He had a cool song written about him like way after he was dead. Remember the song?

The one was the guy named Davy?

Davy, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier.

I think that was for like a TV movie or something.

I think it was Disney. Yeah, I think Disney.

Yeah, it was like a movie. There were actually, was it like Henry Fonda or somebody? Like Davy Crockett movies, there's like two or three. I think Steve and I watched at least one of them and it was great. It was fucking great.

Yeah, he was a folk hero. The best blizzard I can think of is a Dairy Queen.

Exactly right. DQ Blizzard is unbelievable.

Oh, that's really what you were going to say?

Yeah. Oh, and then I stopped talking because I was just thinking about a DQ Blizzard.

They're good.

I think neither of us can eat.

Not anymore, but I remember. I remember.

Yeah.

Anyway, it's not until the 1870s that US newspapers in places like Iowa start using the word Blizzard to describe a savage snowstorm.

Shout out to whoever just bought a Christmas shirt from us in Ames, Iowa. It just got put in the mail today.

We're going to send you a Blizzard of gifts, but really just the one that you ordered.

Yes, I didn't know about this until right now.

Again, according to Grammaphobia, the term Blizzard was first used to describe a snowstorm in the April 23rd, 1870 issue of The Northern Vindicator, a newspaper in Esterville serving Emmett County in Northwest Iowa. That issue of The Vindicator debunked a glowing account in another newspaper that an Emmett County resident was endangered by a severe storm that had struck the Midwest on March 14th through 16th, 1870. So saying, quote, Campbell, this county resident, Campbell has had too much experience with Northwestern blizzards to be caught in such a trap in order to make sensational paragraphs for the Upper Des Moines.

Huh. So they were like, this guy knows, this guy would never.

Yeah.

Why is he saying this?

Exactly. And they spelled blizzards with one z.

Different time.

Blizzard.

Blizzard.

A char blizzard.

Yeah.

A week later, on April 30th, 1870, the Vindicator got up to speed with the times and spelled blizzard with a double z under the headline Man Frozen at Okoboji, Iowa. The article says, quote, Dr. Ballard, who has just returned from a visit to the unfortunate victim of the March blizzard, reports that his patient is rapidly improving.

But he's never had a patient live, so I'm trying to find a way where they can also call bullshit on him.

No, I think-

You know what I mean? All the Vindicator does is not vindicate people.

Yeah, undercut them and-

They undercut everyone. Yeah.

But what's interesting, I guess, is that if you went back in time and asked somebody who would have lived through a terrible snowstorm, hey, what's the worst blizzard you ever lived through? They would have no idea what you were talking about, unless they were the guy that Davy Crockett yelled at, then maybe he'd be like, I survived a Davy Crockett blizzard.

Yeah. Comedy Central is the roast of Davy Crockett.

That might be a button of the month.

Hosted by Kevin Hart.

They would know about the great snow or the cruel winter, or maybe the year all the cattle died in a snow drift. They just wouldn't know the word blizzard.

They wouldn't know blizzard.

Some of the earliest written clues about history's blizzards come from medieval Europe where monks and chroniclers wrote down anything unusual that the sky did. One of the best sources is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. In an entry from the year 1046, it tells us quote, after Candlemas, which is early February, came the severe winter with frost and with snow and with all kinds of tempestuous weather so that there was no man then alive who could remember so severe a winter as this was. As well as through mortality of men as moraine of cattle, even birds and fishes perished through the great cold and famine.

Just like a frozen bird falling is an insane thing to see and hear. What was that? What was that? Hugely loud noise outside. It was like a frozen bird fell a thousand feet.

I say this every once in a while, but humans used to be such better writers. Can you imagine anyone describing a snowstorm this way now?

No. No, I can't.

I mean, it's beautiful.

I think what the problem was is that there was 13 people who knew how to write. Like actually know how to write words. Yeah, they flowered it up, which is nice. It's just nice of them. Then I think as it became more ubiquitous being able to write, people just wrote down lists and stuff. Yeah, their whole thing wasn't like someone's going to read this. I don't know. All I know is that the colonies, these here colonies, where everybody fucking died from snow, I think the literacy rate here was higher than like anywhere else, any other English colony, and that's probably why they were overthrown.

We'll get to American blizzards in a moment. For right now, I can say we obviously don't have wind speeds or visibility measurements for this storm that was written about in 1046. So we can't-

Is it a monk writing it?

I don't know if this-

The only people who know how to fucking read were like clergy people.

We do have a clergyman coming up. I don't know exactly who wrote this bit. I assume probably a priest.

Well, I just didn't know if it was, it's always the church. Because they need to swindle people and write things down and tell people things. And I only bring it up because one way they could have seen wind speed is whatever made those like fryer tuck haircuts. I mean like the center of the hair blew off. And that's where it's like, oh my god, that's how windy it is.

It's a hairless winter for everyone. Our hairs have been ripped from our heads. My point is that we can't certify this earliest reference that I could find as a blizzard in the scientific modern sense, but I do think it clearly describes a snow that puts it firmly in the like, this winter tried to kill everyone territory, which for this episode is I think good enough.

I can't imagine living in giant stone fortresses. Like was that warm? I don't know, but.

No, I mean, I guess that's true. I don't know if maybe they had like, if stone had like a weird insulation effect where when it got warm, did it take longer for that warm air to dissipate? I don't know, but it was probably pretty miserable. It wasn't until 300 years after this first mention of what I would categorize probably as a blizzard that Europe and parts of North America entered what's known as the Little Ice Age, which was roughly the 1300s to the mid 1800s, when winters were generally colder and longer than they are now.

That's a ton of time. Yeah, it was like 1300s to 1800s?

It was like a 500 year period where winters were more severe than they are now.

I gotta say, Christopher Columbus and the settlers who came to a bit, like the worst possible window to pick. So like fucking take your boats and show up here.

Christopher Columbus showed up in some pretty warm climates at first.

Yeah, he didn't know where he was. He was always in a whiteout. That guy.

Yeah. There have been a number of people who have studied this from every angle, from historical documents to tree rings to glacial evidence, but all these scientists note that many years during this period, snowfall was heavier than before or since, and snow tended to stay on the ground for months longer than it does today. In some places, snowstorms hit areas that today really only see rain. I found one example in Lisbon, Portugal, where historical reconstructions note that snowstorms were much more frequent, and one 17th century winter they think may have had up to eight separate snowstorms in Lisbon, in Portugal.

Wow.

Which I think of as a pretty warm place now.

Yeah, I don't really know the climate there, but I think you're right for it. I think it's probably warm.

If you're a listener in Portugal, let us know how often you see snow.

Yeah.

But eight sounds like a lot.

In one year.

Eight snowstorms sounds like a lot in one year.

So not eight blizzards, just eight confirmed snowfalls.

Yes, yes, yes. We also have a very specific, almost diary-like entry from Switzerland around this same time.

Oh, they're a snow all year, aren't they?

Yes, well, they're a very snowy country. This project called the Euroclimist has digitized the chronicles of one Gaspar Berrodi, a cannon in Valais, a cannon here meaning a cleric or a priest.

Always.

In July 1621, July, he notes in his records that a deep snow fell on the high pastures, killing many cattle or forcing them to be driven down to lower altitudes and fed with hay. A special procession was held on August 15th to beg for warmth and sun.

Okay. Beg who? Just God?

I guess just God. I don't know who else they would have been begging.

That's true, yeah.

I think at that point they would have known enough that the king would have been a useless figure in warming things up.

What is that movie with Griswold and Dan Aykroyd? Spies Like Us?

That is a Chevy Chase Dan Aykroyd movie, yes.

Yeah, there's like a moment in that where they like get caught in the woods. I want to say I'm not misremembering it, but it's like snowy or whatever. And they get caught in the woods by the Russians or whomever. And they're just like, if you let us go, we will bring back the sun.

Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. That's basically what was going on here, I think.

Yeah.

Another diarist, Father Josef Dietrich of Ainseldein Abbey describes November 1676 as a winter so brutal that wells froze, mills stopped grinding, water ran short and Lake Zurich froze over. Father Josef Dietrich noted that this cold was so cold that it had never been experienced in man's memory.

And I asked the three guys I could reach in this town. Yeah.

I asked the three guys who were 25 years old, the oldest men in our frozen ass town, and they said they had no idea what I was talking about.

They said, Dietrich, get out of here.

Yeah. 99% of our population dies every time it is this cold, so of course, no one remembers. The first American blizzard recorded in enough detail to clearly fit the truest definition of a blizzard happened over roughly 10 days in late February and early March, 1717, when a series of at least three or four major snowstorms buried what's now New England, where Ed is sitting, and parts of the Mid-Atlantic. Historical reconstructions and diaries say that storm after storm piled up four, five, even six feet of snow, with drifts reported up to 20 to 30 feet high in places like Cambridge, Massachusetts. According to the New England Historical Society, many one-story houses were completely buried.

See you later. You live in an igloo now.

Some accounts describe homes, this goes to our fire question, some accounts describe homes only detectable by the small curl of smoke from a hole in the snowpack where the chimney would vent.

Wow.

So can you imagine looking out over like Boston and you just see nothing except a bunch of like puffs of smoke that's coming up out of what appears to be the ground?

That is wild. I don't know. Yeah, I guess I haven't imagined that.

Now, once again, being as dramatic as Joseph Fritzl.

I think it was Diertrich Pretzel.

Diertrich, Joseph Diertrich, Puritan minister Cotton Mather wrote that there had never been such a snow in the memory of man. They loved that one, huh? Yeah. Later writers like Henry David Thoreau quoted Native Americans saying that even their ancestors had never told them of anything this bad. In New London, Connecticut, farmer Joshua Hempstead noted in his diary that it snowed smartly and then recorded that there was no church meeting, which I think back then was a real big deal.

Yeah. I mean, when you drive around here in New London anywhere, I mean, you drive by like a million white picket, not picket fences, like white steeple churches that when you look, yeah, they are from that time period. I bet you that church is where they went when shit got too cold to all huddle up together. It was like a big structure. They could fit a lot of people.

Yeah. But I mean, that was the center of the social and communal life at the time was the church. So if you canceled your services, that was a bigger deal than like school. It was like the government being shut down basically.

Yeah. The one guy who knows how to read. I guess you had to just play telephone with everybody else. Well, that's not true because this is the colonies and everyone knew how to fucking read here. It's like a big deal.

No one had telephones. So you weren't playing telephone. You were playing tin, they didn't have tin cans either. They were just shouting.

They were playing Missing Monk, or whatever the hell would be called back then. Quiet clergyman.

Yeah. What really sells these storms as a capital B blizzard though, are the stories of chaos and despair that set in throughout New England. Snow choked rural roads so completely that all communication between houses and farms stopped. Towns organized search parties to check on widows, the elderly and isolated families. Some rescuers lost their bearings in the snow drifts and couldn't even find the houses that they were trying to reach. In other cases, they arrived to find people birding their own furniture because there was no way to haul firewood through the chest deep snow. Unfortunately, if you're an animal lover, you might want to put on some earmuffs for this next part because animals really got at the worst. Contemporary and later accounts compiled by Sydney Purley in the book Historic Storms of New England describe what I can only describe as a frozen hell.

Oh my god.

Many cattle were buried in the snow where they were smothered or starved to death. Some were found dead weeks after the snow had melted, yet standing and with all the appearance of life. The eyes of many were so glazed with ice that being near the sea, they wandered into the water and drowned.

Do you think this is our fault though? Because I was going to say at first I'd be like, oh, well, they're like in a pen, they can't get out. But I guess if you're just an animal and you're outside all the time, I guess throughout history, this must happen to you every once in a while.

Yeah, no, I wouldn't blame the colonists or the people involved in this necessarily. This is something, actually, there's a long, long, long paragraph about what happened to wild animals, and that was even worse really. But it was just very long, so I cut it and just focused on the farm animals here. But the most grotesque thing here to me is that the cow's eyes froze shut, and they ran and drowned in the freezing water because they didn't know where else to go.

That's really messed up. Yeah.

That's really horrible. On the farm of one gentleman, upwards of 1,100 sheep were lost in the snow.

And they're the only ones wearing anything out there. They should fare better than anybody.

We're actually going to get a little bit more to... Oh no, I might have trimmed that too. There's...

Just like a sheep, we do it every year.

Here we go, here we go. 28 days after the storm, while the search for the sheep was still in progress, more than 100 were found huddled together, apparently having found a sheltered place on the lee side of a drift, where they were slowly buried as the storm raged on, being covered with snow, until they lay 16 feet beneath the surface. Two of the sheep were found alive, having subsisted during the four weeks of their entombment by feeding on the wool of their companions.

Eatin hair?

They're eatin hair, bro. That's how desperate they were. When rescued, they shed their fleeces, but the wool grew again, and they were brought back to a good degree of flesh.

Okay.

So, I would have made the two surviving sheep like king and queen of the farm or something. I feel like that's like a holy bestowment upon them, that they survived 16 feet below the surface of the snow for four weeks.

But did they only survive because there were so many other sheep that they were like on the inside of, so they were like in a womb?

I suspect that probably, yes, they were probably at the very center of the pack or something.

There's probably a lot of glazed over fucked up ones on the outside. They had to like pull them out of like the rubble at 9-11.

Yeah, exactly. Other animals also lived during several weeks imprisonment under the snow. A couple of hogs were lost and all hope of finding them alive was gone when on the 27th day after the storm, they worked their way out of the snow bank in which they had been buried, having subsisted on a little tansy which they had found beneath the snow.

What's tansy?

I had to look it up. I didn't know. It is apparently, quote, a strong smelling aromatic perennial plant in the daisy family known for its clusters of bright yellow button-like flowers and feathery fern-like leaves, historically used as a medicinal herb, insect repellent and dye. So there were no bugs down there, at least.

I thought you were going to say it was cotton candy.

No.

And then could you imagine being like, nobody get this wet. It's only good when it's dry. If even a little bit of this gets wet, we're fucked.

But I like, I can't even imagine if you're a hog buried beneath the snow, you're not going anywhere. So you're just basically like flat on your belly snorting around, trying to find tansy and probably like a dragon with your teeth forward or something. Like it sounds like it probably was really miserable down there.

I mean, somebody took porky pig's pants under the crush. Never found those.

In addition, poultry also survives several days burial, hens being found alive after seven days and turkeys from five to 20.

I don't think we should be eating, I think things should be ruling us. Yes. It seems like they're faring way better than a human being who would be under snow for five days, six days a week.

If we truly built a society around the survival of the fittest, these animals would be our overlords.

Yeah, 100 percent. They'd be pardoning us once a year.

Yeah. The sea was greatly disturbed and the marine animal life was in a state of considerable excitement. They were dying. I think they were frigid and dying.

I don't know. I guess it gets cold, right?

Have you ever seen a fish on land? That's also a state of considerable excitement.

Yeah, he's jumping around and flipping, and he didn't just win the lottery.

No, no.

Something else is happening.

After the storm ceased, vast quantities of small seashells were washed on shore in places where they had never been found before. And in the harbors, great numbers of porpoises were seen playing together in the water.

Okay, that's just rubbing it in.

Yeah, the porpoises were like, we're fine, we're fine.

Yeah, thanks for all the fish.

Here's, yeah, there you go. There's a little, I kept a little bit on wildlife. Summaries of this storm estimated that 90 to 95% of the deer population died from starvation or predators using the crusted snow to run them down. And in response, towns appointed officials called deer reaves to protect the surviving animals and rebuild the herds.

Wow, that's the first time in American history we've protected deer.

I know, now they're considered like pests.

Yeah, I usually put a group together to cull them.

Yeah. According to the New England Historical Society, New Englanders dated events as happening before the Great Snow or after the Great Snow for decades after this storm.

I love to hear it.

Yeah, that's how much it impacted. They treated it like a historical shift.

Can't believe 9-11 is gonna come up twice in this episode.

Modern weather historians often treat 1717 as one of the first clearly documented benchmark blizzards in American history. Huge snow totals, massive drifts, week-long disruptions, and a detailed firsthand description of every bullet point of what we now call a blizzard. I also wanted to cover briefly the strange storm that slammed into New England in October 1804, sometimes called the Snow Hurricane, which jumped out at me because we covered fire tornadoes and twisters.

Yeah, and I just referred earlier. So it's like a hurricane with snow when you were explaining it to me.

Yes, there was a very literal snow hurricane in 1804 when a late season tropical cyclone moved up the East Coast and collided with the unsurprisingly very cold air over New England. The result was a storm that dropped up to four feet of snow in parts of Vermont, ruined crops, killed livestock, snapped trees and orchard branches under the weight of all the wet snow. Weather historian David Ludlum in later analyses described it as the most severe storm since the great colonial hurricane of 1635 and emphasized how bizarre it must have been to see hurricane force winds combined with full-on blizzard snowfalls.

Yeah, bizarre. That was the word they used too probably.

Yeah, and not at the funerals. They called it bizarre and weird. According to Wikipedia, this was the first known tropical cyclone to feature frozen precipitation and remained the only instance until a later disturbance in 1841 and Hurricane Ginny in 1963, which triggered 13 inches of snow in regions of northern and central Maine. The unusually widespread and severe October snow was seen a few times, if ever, between then and the 2011 Halloween nor'easter, which dropped several feet of snow on New England.

I wasn't here for it.

No, we were out here. I don't even remember news stories about that.

But it must suck, though. Halloween, you want to go out, you want to trick or treat and stuff.

It's snow and it kind of puts a damper on things.

Yeah.

You know what else puts a damper on things? This next storm.

I can guess it, maybe. What century is it in?

The 1800s.

Yeah, I don't know any of those really well.

Well, much like some of our best episodes, this involves terrible things happening to children.

Oh, good.

Between the Boy Scouts in the summer camp Flash Flood, the school children in the exploding school in the back to school episode.

All those kids working in the fireworks factories.

Yeah. One of the first deadly American blizzards post the great storm of New England is known as the Children's Blizzard. Ed, would you like to guess why?

I have a theory that I'm hoping it isn't.

Lay it on me.

Because so many kids died?

Hey, you nailed it.

Oh no, why would you call it that? I don't know. I would say I would call it the bad blizzard.

The no good, terrible, very bad blizzard.

Yeah. You don't have to be like... I can't think of one other thing off the top of my head that we've named after the most deadly aspect of it.

It's true. It would be like calling 9-11 Accountants Day or something.

Why? I'm erasing that. That's so weird.

Ed decided to leave it in because again, Ed is the people's podcaster and also, he didn't want to record any additional material to make a new transition out of.

It was named this because so many of its victims were children caught in one room schoolhouses on the prairie.

Oh my God. Yeah. Slate does nothing to keep you warm.

No, it does not. This blizzard struck on January 12th, 1888 and swept across the Great Plains without warning. Part of what made this storm so deadly is a little bit what we were talking about earlier. Temperatures that morning were actually unusually warm from mid-January. Now, granted, in the Great Plains in mid-January, we're still talking like just below freezing, but in that part of the world, it's still pretty balmy for that time of year. And unfortunately though, that means that no one was prepared for what was coming. Kids walked to school that day with light coats. A lot of them didn't even wear gloves. No one knew that a massive Arctic front was barreling down on them until it hit around midday. And when it did, shit hit the fan. In a matter of hours, temperatures dropped 40 degrees from right around freezing to well below zero. Gale force winds and fine powdery snow followed, blasting across the open plains. The blizzard struck so fast and so early in the day that it trapped thousands of people away from their homes, from farmers in their fields to travelers on the road to, you guessed it, children and teachers in their rural schoolhouses.

This is a rapture. Like this is crazy. I mean, if you were there and you're thinking like, all of a sudden, it drops 40 degrees and-

And gets dark?

Yeah, it gets dark in the fucking schoolhouse, like wooden slats of the schoolhouse are like slapping and going crazy from wind.

Yeah, dude. It was really no good. Carl Salty, old Carl. Old Carl Salty, a teenage Norwegian immigrant in Fortier, Minnesota.

Going on 40 with that name.

Somebody who you think probably was no stranger to ice and snow being from Norway. He remembered that, quote, on the 12th of January, 1888, around noontime, it was so warm it melted snow and ice from the window until after 1 p.m. This changed rapidly. By 3:30 p.m., he says, a dark and heavy wall built up around the northwest, coming fast, coming like those heavy thunderstorms, like a shot. In a few moments, we had the severest snowstorm I ever saw in my life, with a terrible hard wind like a hurricane. Snow so thick we could not see more than three steps from the door at times. So this is 1888, no phones, no radio, no indoor heat, or maybe a fire that probably went out immediately. Many schools at this point were just wooden shacks out on the prairie. They weren't really stocked with food.

No, nor would there be, yeah. There's no reason to. I don't think you're living there.

So here's the real problem, Ed. When the blizzard hit, each teacher had to make a choice. Do you hunker down and wait this out in the schoolhouse, or do you try to lead the children to better shelter?

You gotta wonder how far the schoolhouse is from society.

Better shelter?

Yeah, is this our best bet? If anything else, you can all huddle together and use our bodies warmth. I really hope the teacher waited till it was necessary to make that suggestion. But there's a reason why they put them so far away. But yeah, if your families are a one minute walk away, I imagine everyone would just be like, oh my God, go home, it's crazy out. But something tells me they put these school houses just like way up on the hill or something.

Well, for the most part, the teachers who stayed put fared a little better. The storm was so bad that even a short walk could prove to be lethal. One teacher, Miss Lois Royce in Plainview, Nebraska, found this out the hard way. As the blizzard raged and her classroom stove ran out of fuel by mid afternoon, she decided-

Oh, so there was some heat in there?

There was some heat in here, but it was out of fuel, so that didn't help.

You gotta start throwing the fucking books in, and then the kids will get all Fs.

Yeah, they're throwing in the spindliest kids. They're like, you most resemble a dry stick in the fucking stove.

I don't want to get in the stove. Oh yeah? Just yesterday, you were over the moon about how the yearbook named you most likely to grow up to be a dry stick. But I wanted to grow up in that version.

It's a blessing and a curse, kid. She decided that they had to try to reach her boarding house, which was only 82 yards away, which I'm pretty sure that's less than a football field, right? A football field is 100 yards.

It definitely is. It's 100 yards.

She tied three children together again, only because she had to as far as we know.

Yeah, but with what?

I don't know.

You're saying there was no food in the schoolhouse, but there was like rope? It was rope?

It was enough. I think she just wanted to keep them together so that they wouldn't get separated in the whiteout.

No, I think you're, I know you're right, but I was just wondering like, they're like, I don't know. I don't know, teach. Maybe if we keep our clothes on, we'll fare better than taking them off to tie us together with.

That's actually a extremely funny mental image of a teacher being like, okay, we gotta head out in the snow and we gotta stay together and making the kids strip down to tie their clothes to each other. They're like, I don't know, teach.

It seems like these shirts are doing a lot. They're not doing much, but they're doing more than bare skin. It was like, well, since this afternoon was bring rope to school day or whatever. I don't know. It's late here.

It didn't really matter because they immediately became lost in the wind and blowing snow. In the end, all three of her students froze to death in the blizzard just yards from the boarding house.

Only because all those tied together shirts became a sail.

I know.

They all blew away up into the sky.

No.

Oh my god.

Miss Royce survived, but her feet were so severely frostbitten that she required them both to be amputated.

Oh, it's a bad time to have that happen.

Mm-hmm. We too, if you haven't listened to our episode on surgery while you're awake, we did an episode on that and turns out until very recently, that was just all surgery.

Yeah, yeah, so she'd be awake.

On the other hand, on the flip side of this tragic coin, the thrilling website Explore Nebraska History tells the story of Minnie Freeman, a 19-year-old school teacher in Mira Valley, Nebraska. When the blizzard blew the roof clean off her sod schoolhouse, Miss Freeman realized they couldn't stay put. She gathered her-

She was. What made you think that? The top of the class tell you?

The monk's hair was just-

Yeah. We're looking at a sky. Who thinks those are bats up there? That's monk hair.

That's all. Yeah. She gathered her 13 pupils and led them out into the howling storm to find better shelter. According to later retelling, she used a rope to tie the children together so no one would get lost.

I'm sorry to think that maybe ropes are just in schoolhouses.

They might have been. Well, you could easily tie things to them to whip the kids with.

Yeah, it must have been some dunce cap type thing. Couldn't figure out curse. Or if you're a left-handed kid that wasn't getting writing with your right hand fast enough, then yeah, they would tie you to the corner or something.

At least one of the children later said that the rope part may have been a myth that she didn't actually tie them all together.

We're getting some shades of satanic panic here. I don't think one of these kids beat a draft to death with an icicle.

The upside of this, rope or no rope, is that this school teacher, Ms. Freeman, managed to navigate all the kids to a farmhouse about a mile and a half away.

That's way more than 80 yards.

Way more than 80 yards. All 13 children survived unscathed and Minnie became a celebrated hero. Newspapers dubbed her Nebraska's Fearless Maid and there were even songs written in her honor, including the popular ballad, 13 Were Saved.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's fucking tight. She was a superstar. Yeah. Until that one kid came out and was like, it's all bullshit.

I actually led her to the farmhouse and saved all the children, but she saw her opportunity, so good for her.

Isn't frozen rope a thing?

What do you mean?

Like in baseball? Isn't that what they call a hard line, like a hard hit straight line, like when the ball just goes like...

You're asking the wrong guy. I don't know any baseball terms.

Maybe she came up with it, so maybe she did.

According to Wikipedia, by the time the schoolhouse blizzard blew itself out, an estimated 235 people were dead, at least 213 of them in the Dakota and Nebraska region. Some sources later speculated that the death toll may have been even higher, up to 1,000 dead. The victims included many children who either never made it home from school or tried to go home, got lost and collapsed in the snow. So the lesson learned from this particular snowstorm, I think, is that if you are sheltered during a blizzard, even if it's questionable shelter, it's often safer to stay put and wait for rescue than to go out into a whiteout.

Good advice. I might use that this weekend.

You should, yeah. Don't go anywhere. I also should note that 1888 was just a bad year for blizzards. Just two months after the schoolhouse blizzard in March, the East Coast got blasted by its own historic snowstorm, the Great Blizzard of 1888, also called the Great White Hurricane. This storm dumped 40 to 50 inches of snow on parts of New York, New Jersey, New England, and killed over 400 people in the days that followed. It paralyzed New York City, stranding thousands, and there are still stories that you could find of people tunneling out of their houses or city dwellers who trekked between what they called snow canyons as tall as people. I bring this particular storm up though because it had two lasting impacts on New York City. It spurred the city to place the city's power lines underground, which is why you see very few telephone poles and wires in New York City. It also inspired the creation of New York's subway system. Because the above ground street cars were shut down, and they decided we don't want that to happen again.

We talk about this in other episodes too. I love anytime an episode we cover has a lasting effect.

Yeah.

Where it's like, we found out that day we're going to change things, which unfortunately with the topics we cover, it comes up fairly frequently or not as frequently as I would like, but we usually cover things that are like bad shit happened. So hopefully something good comes out of it. But you were about to say something.

I'll try to include more details like this in future episodes. Yeah, because it makes me feel good. But I'd like to say RIP, God bless to those 400 souls that perished during the storm. Your deaths were not in vain because New Yorkers can now watch rats eat pizza on their way to work. So good job.

It's true.

Worth it. We built the subways.

They kept them. It's not like here. We're not here. I'm in New England at the moment, but in Los Angeles where they had the red car trolley system, that was the best and most elaborate public transportation in the country. Some would say the world maybe, and they got rid of it. They just fucking straight up got rid of it.

But blizzards didn't just impact people of the past. Every year, they barrel down on cities all over the world, dealing damage and taking lives, despite modernity's best efforts to keep us safe. The storm that you and I discussed earlier that we remember from our childhood is also one of the most brutal blizzards of all time. Like you said, it was known as the storm of the century, also sometimes the costliest blizzard in history.

Yeah, I saw that. I saw some numbers on that.

Yeah, it caused $5.5 billion of damage in 1993 and nearly $12 billion in damage in 2025. It also killed more than 270 people across 13 states.

Wow, wow, wow. We were sledding.

We were throwing snowballs.

We were having a winter wonderland.

Woo, woo. While people were freezing to death and saying their last words.

Wow, wow, wow. Any info, when I asked my parents, when I said I had to go do an episode on blizzards, the way we talk about the blizzard of 93, which obviously they live through, they talk about the blizzard of 78, which might have been in your research, but they both, when I was like, are we doing blizzards? They both were like, oh, 78. We remember. I'm like, no, 93.

Yeah, 93 I focus on because it's the costliest blizzard in history.

I don't know.

We do have one from the 70s, but it's surprising. So we'll get to that in a minute. But this fucking monster, the costliest blizzard in history, the storm of the century, the most fun Ed and I ever had, came barreling out of the Gulf of Mexico, traveled through the deep south in Cuba and up the entirety of America's East Coast and finished in Eastern Canada. It raged from March 11th to March 14th, 1993 and spanned more than two thirds of the country. I found a quote that, With a central pressure usually found in category three hurricanes, the storm eventually spawned tornadoes and left coastal flooding, crippling snow and bone chilling cold in its wake. Of the more than 341 weather and climate events with damages exceeding $1 billion since 1980, this storm is the country's second most costly winter storm to date.

Wow.

During the height of the storm, snowfall rates of two to three inches per hour occurred. In the Catskills, along with most of the central and southern Appalachians, received at least two feet of snow. Wind driven sleet fell on parts of the east coast, with central New Jersey reporting two and a half inches of sleet on top of 12 inches of snow, creating what they called an ice cream sandwich. Which is, Ed, what you were describing, that it was crunchy, that you couldn't put your foot, you had to stomp really hard.

My little hand couldn't punch through the ice layer on top of this regular puffy snow below it.

It sounds like you should have tried tasting it.

I would taste many things later on in life. That was the last time I was thin. It's winter 93, dude.

The storm ranked as extreme or a category five, which in this case is different from the twister categories on the regional snowfall index for the Northeast, Southeast and Ohio Valley regions. The storm covered more than 550,000 square miles and impacted nearly 120 million people. In addition to the snow, an estimated 15 tornadoes struck Florida. What? With 44 deaths attributed to either the tornadoes or other severe weather in the state. A 12-foot storm surge also occurred in Taylor County, Florida, resulting in at least seven deaths.

So this is some SimCity shit was happening.

This was, yeah, someone clicked the disasters button. The storm's high winds were devastating with at least 15 stations along the east coast reporting wind gusts of 70 miles an hour or stronger. The dry Tortugas west of Key West, Florida recorded a wind gust of 109 miles an hour.

Wonder if Jack Sparrow was there.

He may have been.

Isn't he the Jester of Tortuga?

He used down around that area. Is that really one of his nicknames, the Jester of Tortuga?

It is in that Lonely Island song.

Oh, well, I don't know if that was an official moniker. Yeah, and the record for this storm was 144 mile an hour gusts of wind recorded on Mount Washington in New Hampshire, which I've actually been to the top of Mount Washington and it is extremely windy up there almost all the time.

Did you get a bumper sticker?

I didn't, but you go up on a little cog railway. So I think we might have talked about this on the show before, but it's a car, like a train car, an old timey train car, and it goes up the side of this mountain, but it's not on regular wheels. In the middle of it are like two cogs that click in gears and kind of drag you the whole way up the mountain. And then you get off in the weather station at the top is like insanely windy. Like if you jump, when I was there, the day I was there, if you jumped, you could feel it. It wasn't really pushing you back, but you could feel like, whoa, that's taken me somewhere.

Wow.

The storm snowfall isolated thousands of people, especially in Georgia, North Carolina and mountains in Virginia. Workers rescued over 200 hikers from the North Carolina and Tennessee mountains.

What were they doing up there? Is it just that we didn't know the storm was coming? Is it like, oh, no one anticipated Georgia to have snow, so people were out just living their Georgia lives, and hiking and enjoying?

I assume. It is March when this hit, so it's not like the middle of January. The National Guard deployed in several counties and cities to enforce curfews and declared states of emergency. The storm impacted travel like crazy. It closed nearly all interstate highways from Atlanta north eastward. It also closed every major airport on the east coast at one time or another, representing the most weather-related flight cancellations in US history up to that point. Once again, I think we know what caused the most flight cancellations in history.

Oh, we're not talking. This episode cannot have three. This episode cannot have three references.

From Florida to Maine, nearly 10 people and businesses lost electricity.

So from one Stephen King residence to the other.

Yeah, exactly. From Florida northward, the storm battered the entire eastern coastline and at least 18 homes fell into the sea on Long Island due to the pounding surf. The storm also damaged about 200 homes in the outer banks and the US Coast Guard rescued more than 160 people at sea in the Atlantic and in the Gulf of Mexico. One freighter sank and another 48 people were reported missing at sea.

Whoa, some perfect storm shit was happening out there. We had twisters, we had perfect storm shit, we had blizzards.

Yeah, I mean, this storm rocked everyone's world in one way or another.

Best lived in California, I guess.

Yeah, and then you didn't, you were just like, whoa, that seems-

Didn't even know what happened.

That seemed pretty bad over there, man. There was another, like we talked about, there was another big blizzard in 1996, although, or it was another big storm, it was technically not a blizzard. According to the History Channel, that 1996 storm paralyzed an immense swath of the East Coast with three days of heavy, wet snow. It started on the evening of January 6th, when snow and sleet began hammering DC, Baltimore and the surrounding areas. Over the next few days, the storm made its way northeast, breaking record after record along the way. By the time it had subsided, it deposited between 17 and 30 inches of wind-driven snow on every city along the eastern seaboard. The real problem then was that-

Was the guy who kept screaming, It's happening again! And then just let go and it was like, Sir, we need to do work.

One of the biggest problems was that temperatures rose quickly in the wake of this storm and rivers and streams surged with a sudden meltdown.

Yeah, sure.

So the 1996 storm at the end of the day claimed 154 lives, many of whom died in car accidents.

Yeah, I bet you when it got hot, then it became water and then it got cool again that night, that all turned to ice.

Yeah, and people went slipping and sliding all over. The ensuing floods killed 33 more people, so just-

And again, this is modern era. Like if you really had to, you can get in your car and turn the heat on, like just sit there, you can't drive anywhere. If this same storm was coming through colonial fucking Williamsburg, like that's just Civil War level bodies on the ground.

Yeah, just fields of death.

Yeah.

And it's funny though, I was thinking about it, with these two storms so close together growing up, I think I assumed heavy snowfall, like really heavy snowfall, was a much more common thing than it even is on the East Coast. Because those two felt back to back as a kid, so it was like, well, I mean, every winter we're gonna get five feet of snow. And then when you only get one foot of snow, it was like, well, that sucks, but that's a much more normal-

Yeah, the last couple of years I've come home, if you're a snowplow man, I guess you're out of money.

Yeah.

But I haven't looked at the farmer's almanac yet this year. Is it like, is this supposed to be a heavy snow year?

I don't know.

It's a good question. I can tell you right now, it is fucking crisp. Yeah. It is for real, like, very cold. And I think, I'm not, I don't know anything about weather, but I feel like if it's cold now, it's gonna get colder. And so I saw, like, Buffalo Games watching football the other day, the Buffalo Game was like, they're playing in fucking tons of snow. Yeah. So it's already started in upstate New York, like, in a big, bad way.

Yeah.

So I think this year might not be dry like the last few.

We'll see. We'll see. It probably won't be dry after this episode because we'll have triggered the worst blizzard of all time because we spoke about it.

It's true. It's true. Damn it. Also, Farmer's Almanac, that's not all from that time period, right? They're updating that, right?

I think so. I think they're...

Yeah. There's no way that Ben Franklin or whatever it was like. In the year 2026, it's going to be fucking wild.

No, he wasn't Ben Franklin.

How does he keep getting it right?

Ben Franklin is not the Mayan calendar. He wasn't guessing that many years out. But maybe it's for the best, well, I guess I should say, if we do trigger a massive snowstorm by talking about it because our show is cursed and those things tend to happen, it will be hard for us to top the worst snowstorm of all time. Ed, would you like to guess where this snowstorm hit?

But what's that, repeat the question?

Would you like to guess where the worst blizzard of all time hit?

Worst meaning Moth's Deaths, highest snow, what makes it worse? Most deaths. All right, we're talking Moth's Deaths. We're talking, okay, we're looking for people with not a lot of shelter and get snow. Russia?

No.

Serb? Is it in America?

No.

Okay, so we're talking snow. So Antarctica, no one lives up there.

Correct.

Alaska is America.

Yep.

You said no to Russia.

Correct.

I don't know if it snows in China.

There are parts of China where it snows.

So yeah, I don't know, I guess. Those are all the guesses I have. Mongolia? No, I don't know.

Iran.

Stop it.

Iran, yeah. If there's any evidence to the idea that the US has developed a weather machine to punish their enemies, this storm might be it. Although, I'm pretty sure the storm hit in 1972, and I'm pretty sure Iran was actually our close ally until like 78 or 79. So, scratch that, but it doesn't matter.

I don't know enough about like the Iranian geography to know, you know, gone to my head. I think it's a desert, but maybe deserts get cold?

Well, that's part of what's crazy. So get this, according to Wikipedia, the Iran blizzard of February 1972 was the deadliest blizzard in history as recorded by the Guinness Book of Records. A week-long period of low temperatures and severe winter storms lasting 3-9 days in February 1972 resulted in the deaths of more than 4,000 people. According to contemporary reports by the newspaper Etelat, the city of Ardakan and outlying villages were hardest hit, with no survivors in Kakan or Kumar. In the northwest, near the border with Turkey, the village of Shekalabad and its 100 inhabitants were buried. According to some experts, about 200 villages were completely erased from the map.

So this snowstorm was like Mount Vesuvius to them.

Yeah, pretty much.

Or Pompeii or something. One of those things where the archeologists are gonna find people under the snow a thousand years from now.

Well, because I did a little bit more digging, and the 4,000 dead is just the death toll for the city of Ardakan and the surrounding villages. According to- Whoa, whoa!

Normally, normally, FIFA has to try and build a fucking stadium for that to happen.

According to Mental Floss, another 2,000 people are thought to have died in some of the farther flung regions. So that's 6,000 dead if you're keeping track. And I'm pretty sure that's a low ball figure because I would imagine some of these villages probably weren't keeping exact population records. And whatever the real number is, 6,000 is already up there with some of the deadliest natural disasters we've ever covered on this show. One of the reasons the death toll was so high is because, Ed, as you sort of suggested, with Iran being very dry and deserty, no one was prepared for a storm of this magnitude.

No way.

Or any magnitude really because Iran at the time had been suffering through a drought for 4 years. So any kind of precipitation was like a distant dream.

This is a careful-what-you-wish-for situation.

Really, somebody had a monkey's paw somewhere in the city of Ardakhan. Because the other reason nobody was prepared here is because that city sits in the heart of the Iranian desert and is considered one of the most arid areas in the country. They almost never receive snow, never mind the 8 feet of snow that fell on the capital of Tehran, the more than 10 feet of snow that fell across northern and central regions, nor the 26 feet of snow that buried the Ardakhan region in southern Iran.

Oh my, I don't even know, do you know if it's happened before or since? I mean, like, because you just said, like, they rarely ever get snow, but was there any example?

Not to this degree, not to this degree.

Because this is the one time I think it's okay for somebody in the story to say, never has a man alive remembered such a snow beating.

This is full on, like, day after tomorrow, the city is gone. Ice age. And I know earlier in this episode, we were talking about the 13 who were saved and the woman who failed to save the children before that. I know I suggested that staying put during a blizzard instead of heading out into the wind and snow looking for shelter was maybe the proper move, but that did not work out so well for the Iranians trapped in this snowstorm.

Here's the thing I'm going to say about a culture I know nothing about and an architecture I know nothing about, but I feel like when I was in Ghana, which is not the same at all, but also a place that you're not anticipating snow, I feel like I saw a lot of flat roofs there, a lot of like the roof is just a flat. And if you drive through the Northeast, you don't see a lot of flat roofs. You see like curved A-frame so like snow can melt and come down into whatever. And so I imagine if you are staying put in a place where 26 feet of snow is gonna land and you got like a flat ass roof, that shit might cave in on you.

Well, it's funny. I didn't find any stories specifically of homes that caved in possibly because by the time they thawed any of these houses out, there was nothing left. They just fell into, they just turned into dirt by the time the snow was gone.

Thank God no one was in here when this fell down.

Many of the people who chose to stay safely indoors as the storm raged outside froze within their home as the cold seeped in. But even more crazy to me is that they think some people asphyxiated in their sleep because the snow was so tightly packed into their chimneys and doors that they just suffocated in their sleep inside because all the ability for air to enter or leave the house was cut off.

That is kind of a great way to murder someone.

But fill their, dump their 26 feet of snow.

Just like close all the holes to the, yeah, like, but holy shit. Holy shit, that sucks. I mean, not a bad way to go, maybe if you just stay in your sleep. I don't know if you wake up trying like grasping for breath.

I mean, yeah, I don't really want to think about it.

I mean, that to me, that's up there with the tsunami thing, where like you're asleep, it's 3.30 in the morning, tsunami comes, now you're underwater.

Yeah.

Like you just weren't anticipating that, you were asleep.

Yeah, no, it's terrible.

I was way off maybe on my flat roof theory, but this is way worse. This is way more insidious, like nature, like holding you down.

Yeah.

Like if you can see the video right now, you know what I mean? Like the nature of it, this is a real go to sleep from nature.

It's a sleeper hold from nature. Yeah, yeah.

Some sort of like sleep, that's probably what it's term.

You can't tap out.

You can tap out once.

You can double tap to the forehead. Well, I guess only once if that gun do be loaded. It took nearly a week of continuous snowfall before the skies finally began to clear and rescue teams could mobilize. The Iranian military and the Red Crescent loaded helicopters with supplies and medical crews flying out over what looked like an alien landscape where previously there had been cities and villages and homes was now just a straight white sheet as far as the eye could see. They had to use coordinates and their memory to land where they hoped the villages were because they couldn't see any. And when the first responders...

I mean, I will say this about a flat roof, easier to land a helicopter on a fucking pointy one.

As the first responders jumped out onto the snowpack, their boots, the snow was so deep that their boots never hit solid ground. They just snow, snow, snow.

Can you imagine if every rescue person just like, whoop, like went into the snow and they were gone?

Yeah, just...

Like every person who jumped out of the helicopter just like, just like, eh, fell in the bomb.

Well, yeah, because from a helicopter, you wouldn't really be able to tell that it was 26 feet of snow. You just would be like, oh, there's a lot of snow on the ground, but just put those little holes all over the...

Yeah, now we have like people, different helicopters come in to rescue those people. It's like a real spider crawled in, whatever that story was from our childhood.

Well, unfortunately, there were no signs of life, but helicopters dropped two tons of bread and dates as a last ditch effort to feed anyone who might, quote, claw their way to the surface.

Oh my God, just in case you're down there, there's dates now.

Yeah, as far as anyone knows, that food was never touched by human hands. So that is the Iranian Blizzard of 1972, the deadliest Blizzard of all time, with apparently nearly 6,000 people killed over the span of a week.

I cannot believe this story. I cannot believe that that happened, that for one week, it snowed 26 feet or whatever, and snow just never went back there.

What deal with the devil has made? I'm sure snow has... When you asked me if it had ever happened again, I'm sure there has been other snowfall, just not nearly at this scale. I mean, that would be...

I mean, you must be Iranian guys, must be talking to this day.

What was that? Yeah.

You know what I mean? From every year... Well, the next year, they're not having a discussion. The next year, they're terrified. They're like, is this coming back? Is this our life now? But then after a few years, five, six years, there's gotta be people being like, what do you think that was? What happened here?

That's what I mean. Maybe it was us testing out the weather machine or something, because...

If it's that successful, I don't think we need F-35s.

That's true.

I don't think we need to spend a trillion dollars every year in the military if we have something that can create 26 feet of snow in the desert. That's just crazy to me. The whole dates thing is really bothering me.

Why?

The idea that someone flew home in a helicopter, and they were like, how did it go? Then they have to tell somebody, we threw down some bread and dates.

We made a really nice...

Best we could do.

We left behind a really nice charcuterie board for whoever might be.

Not even that. It's just the idea that there was so little we can do.

Yeah.

That we threw some stuff down. In the event that somebody was alive, we didn't do anything more. I think they did a lot, but I'm saying, it's just wild that they brought all these dates and just to not see anyone who can eat a date.

I think in a lot of these places, they didn't even know where to look. They didn't know where the homes were.

I don't know. Just something wild about that. Just something wild about it. Imagine if Hurricane Katrina, if we saw on the news, like, oh, we didn't find anyone in the water, so we left rafts with cheese on it or something.

We flew over New Orleans and dropped 800,000 packages of Milano cookies.

Yeah, it's like, in the event that, well, first off, you ever dip Milano in coffee? It disintegrates immediately, so you probably shouldn't throw that in the water. But yeah, I don't know, it's also the 70s, so it's like, there's genuinely no one checking back up on this. It's not like Twitter or like we have 24-hour news networks. It's literally the day the earth stood still.

The day after tomorrow, yeah.

It's the dates after tomorrow.

The dates after tomorrow.

I have to cut all of this. We seem callous as hell.

No.

Ed decided to leave it in because as everyone is fully aware, Ed is the People's Podcaster and because Chris said no in that elongated way.

What's more effective, dropping dates or like just putting space heaters below the helicopter and just like flying them low?

I don't know, I don't know. I guess they ran the numbers on that and figured the dates and bread program was the better option.

Okay.

Ed, with all of this said, we've reached the fear tier. So now that you know a lot about how nasty a blizzard can be, much nastier than we remember from 1993, where do you place blizzards on your fear tier?

I don't like driving in them. I don't like being cold. So I'm going to put up seven, seven, eight, because I know I got to come back to LA soon, and weather always makes it a problem in fucking January, February, like this time period is just such a crap shoot. Whether it's snowing here or it's snowing over camp, whatever it might be, you're always kind of fucked. So as someone who is staring down the barrel at a potential blizzard in the next couple of weeks, yeah, I'm going to put like a seven.

Nice, all right. I was thinking like a five or a six for me because I don't think I'm the kind of person who is going to end up ever being in a blizzard strong enough that I don't know what to do with myself or find myself under 26 feet of snow. But if I did...

I think if you find yourself to under 26 feet of snow, it's seven goes to a 10. I mean, it's not...

That's true.

Like, I don't think your house is helping you maybe at 26 feet of snow.

It's just collapsing on you at that point. Yeah. The danger there is the rubble more than the snow.

Yeah.

How much... I mean, if you were under 26, how many pounds... Like, how much pressure per square inch is that? If you're under 26 feet of water, that's a lot of pressure, but you're only down there for, you know, 20, 30 minutes or whatever. If you're under 26 pounds of pressure or 26 feet of liquid... I mean, it's not liquid. I guess it's a frozen, but whatever.

It can become liquid.

Yeah, that's a lot of...

You get, if you're under there for a while, if you are under there until someone finds you like a week later, I bet you're pretty pruney, pretty wrinkly.

Yeah.

Even though it's like a solid, I think there's like a lot of moisture in there. I mean, I'm sure we'll do avalanches at some point, but like, yeah, the buried under snow thing, because it seems so heavy.

Yeah.

Like you're fucked, like you're just fucked.

Yeah.

Like you can't, because in my mind, until you told me that Iranians could be suffocated by snow, everyone, by the way, I'm not saying just them, like, oh, what a horrible place for it to happen. The one people who couldn't-

Breathe snow.

Who couldn't breathe snow. But in my mind, I'm like, oh, I don't know, maybe if you can kind of get ahead of it, if you're outside, you can kind of whip your hands around a lot, and so that the snow falls around you, and then you have like a little bubble you live in. I don't think that's possible.

No, no.

You don't think you can slap the flakes, like kind of as they come, I'm saying.

In a blizzard or an avalanche?

Probably neither. I was thinking just heavy snowfall.

Right.

With no wind.

Yeah, no wind. No, you can't slap enough snowflakes.

I'm not saying you slap them to like, I'm just saying you slap them in your area so that it falls around you, so that you live inside like a hollow shell.

I think, I think what you're describing is a snow globe. I don't know.

Well, you know how it's like if you're on fire, stop, drop and roll. If you're in an elevator, lay on the floor.

Yeah.

Maybe you got a snow globe. You got to slap a snow globe to survive.

Slap your area. Yeah. Well, folks, I hope you are not trapped in a blizzard because if you're listening to this show, you're doomed. And we have no useful advice for you other than blizzards are much more dangerous than we knew when we were playing in them as children. But we've got one more episode for you coming up next week before the end of the year. So I hope you've enjoyed this one. I'm pretty sure you're going to enjoy next week's because it's pretty crazy. Follow us on Instagram. Follow us on Facebook. Check out our Patreon at patreon.com/scared All The Time.

If you guys are still available, they're very limited. Grab yourself a Scared All Time holiday shirt. Support either that goose-footed witch or that sneaky Yule-led spoon licker.

And I would just like to reiterate that goose-footed witch, not that goose-stepping witch. Those are two very different things.

So I wish it wasn't a goose foot. I mean, I had to change the designs. I didn't want a lot of goose stuff flipping around there. But we're good.

We're good. We're good.

Although she is, she's like Austrian, right?

Frau Pecta, yeah.

So I think she is from that part of the world.

She's a nasty lady. And if you don't know Frau Pecta or the Yule boys, the Yule lads, go listen to our first Christmas episode, Christmas Horrors with Pat and Josh from Sonic and Violent Night.

Yeah, it's a great episode. Really fun.

It's a great episode. So until next week and our last proper episode of the year, I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And the show is Scared All The Time. And we will see you next week. 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 Vifel.

Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew.

And Mr. Disclaimer is ****.

And just a reminder, you can now support the podcast on Patreon. You 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.

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Good night.

We are in this together. Together. Together.

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