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Hello, I am Joshua P. Warren, and this is Joshua P. Warren Daly. Well, what a year 2017 has been for me. You know, it's weird uh you hear about time flying, but this year has been so action-packed, it seems like it's been two or three years long. And uh I've had a lot of really cool experiences. I got to meet Mr. T this year. I got to meet a bunch of the guys from Pawn Stars and hang out with them and uh the rapper Coolio, and uh I got to work again in person with uh George Norrie and Tom Danheiser there at Coast to Coast A.M. and Zach Begins and the Ghost Adventures crew. And uh last night, the icing on the cake, perhaps, I got to high five, David Copperfield, after he performed an amazing illusion right in front of me and Lauren. Uh and I mean right in front of us at his um his big show here in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand. And, you know, it was truly a spectacular show. Um David Copperfield, he always does things on a big, huge, grand scale. He he he almost he seemed a little bit more like a filmmaker in a lot of ways. And his show was indeed kind of like a combo between some big stage tricks and then just some massive illusions, the likes of which I have never seen before. And um you really do kind of feel like you're inside of a movie, and he's he's telling this you know long-form story and creating the effects that you might see in a 3D movie, but instead they're actually happening in 3D in the theater. And I really don't know how he does many of the things that he does. Um so I'm not going to tell you about most of the show because I suggest if you ever go see his show, you do no research whatsoever. Don't even read any reviews, have very little idea about what's going to happen, and just go in and uh let him just dazzle you and surprise you. However, the exception being I already told you in my last podcast that I had heard that he produces a huge UFO and an alien. And so, given the the time that we're in right now, where there is all of this um talk of disclosure and uh life being out there and the government revealing things and back engineering stuff, etc., uh, I am going to tell you a little bit more about that part of the show. It is true. Um first off, he produces an animatronic alien. And it is the best animatronic I've ever seen, certainly in person. It's a cute little alien, though. It's not like some big spindly, kind of creepy, close encounters type alien. It's uh it's a cute little alien, and and the alien plays a big part in the show, actually. I mean, it this is a completely independent animatronic. It's not like that, you know, it's sitting there hooked to a power supply and can't move around. Now, this thing, you know, it's mobile. It's it's just like a completely realistic little alien that has great expressions and it it has a big speaking part, and I mean it's I don't know, I he must have gone to Disney or uh or Lucasfilm or somewhere, you know, and I guess it's pretty much the same thing these days, and had them create something like this, or at least work with him on it. But there comes a point in the show when he tells you to look up, and you look up, and all you see is just a big empty ceiling above, and then um, and I mean there's some some rigging and stuff like that, uh, and then the lights, all the lights go out for like maybe three seconds, and then boom, there is this huge flying saucer that is um, and we're not talking about just something that looks like a flying saucer, it's it's a physical prop. I mean, it's a huge saucer-shaped thing where there's there's fog on and smoke all over the place, and there's a lot and the lights are beaming through all of the um the dense air, and this thing it just it flies very slowly and uh methodically over top of everybody's head. I mean, like it came right over Maya and Lauren's head. I mean, so close you almost felt like you could stand up and possibly touch it. And then after it, and of course, everybody is gasping with amazement, and then it flies down and um it flies onto the stage and then backstage where it disappears. And so, look, uh let me just say something. Again, I don't know how he did that, and and that wasn't even his most amazing effect, but if you were outside and you looked up and you saw that, you would you would swear for the rest of your life that you had seen some type of an alien spacecraft. I'm I'm sure of it. I'm sure of it. So David Copperfield has figured out how to make a UFO appear and disappear that would absolutely convince you it's the real physical deal. We're not just not an optical illusion or anything. If it is, then I can't believe it. Uh so kudos to David Copperfield. I even uh sent him a tweet earlier and said, Hey, are you working with the government? So um, but well worth it. And uh that's all I'll tell you about the David Copperfield show. Hopefully you'll get to see it yourself someday. Now, moving on. It is, gosh, it's inching closer and closer to Christmas. And so I guess I better go ahead and get back into some of my Christmas content that I wanted to tell you about. And you know what's funny? I I struggled a little bit about whether or not to tell you the story that I am going to tell you. And I say that because at Christmas time, the the idea is to expose yourself to stories of cheer and warmth and goodness and charity and generosity and you know, all the positive things. And I guess because that I'm always looking into spooky things and I'm thinking a little bit differently than most folks, I also am aware of the dark side of Christmas. And I'm not just talking about some of the spooky things and creepy things, maybe like the crumpass, which I haven't talked about that much this year. I'll talk more about that, I'm sure, maybe tomorrow. But um, but real life incidents that for some reason occur or have occurred around Christmas that are um are troubling. And I'm gonna tell you a true Christmas story right now that is very disturbing. Uh, I think that you'll understand why I'm telling you this after I tell it, given my love of history and the macabre and paranormal stuff and hauntings and all that. But I want to warn you this is not a nice, fuzzy, warm Christmas story that's kind of comfortable to listen to. It's about a horrible, horrible incident that happened eighty-eight years ago this Christmas day. It happened on Christmas Day, December 25th, 1929, in a little town in North Carolina called Germanton. Now, Germonton is north of Winston-Salem. To be honest with you, I don't think I've ever been there, even though I am from North Carolina. And of course, it's called Germanton, but it was originally Germantown. And just to give you a little backstory, just because again, I find that sort of thing interesting, during the American Revolution, there were a lot of people who came over here and volunteered to fight for the um Americans who were of Germanic descendant, uh descendants. And um when we won, they were given land grants as awards for their service. And a lot of the people of Germanic descent uh were given land grants around this spot that we now call North Carolina, north of Winston-Salem, and it was Germantown, and now it's Germanton. So that's where this story takes place. 1929, of course, boom, we've just gotten into the Great Depression, and so um not only were very, very difficult times ahead, but um a lot of people were already having a lot of trouble. And one of those men who was having trouble was named Charlie Lawson. He lived there in Germonton with his family. He was a sharecropper, forty-three years old. And I'm gonna tell you about his family real quick. Um, he had a big one. Let's see, uh he had a wife and seven kids. So again, he was forty-three, his wife, uh Fanny, um, was thirty-seven at the time of this incident. And their seven children were Marie, who was seventeen, Arthur who was sixteen, Carrie, who was twelve, Mabel, who was seven, James, who was four, Raymond, who was two, and then a little four-month-old baby named Mary Lou. And shortly before Christmas, there in 1929, Charlie Lawson took his rather poor family into town to do something that was unexpected. He bought everybody new clothes and then had a family portrait taken. So I think you can tell where this is going. Um he was he was recording his family one last time. So on the afternoon of December twenty-fifth, he did something else unusual. Uh his wife and daughters were in the house fixing Christmas dinner, and he told his oldest son, sixteen-year-old Arthur, to run into town to run an errand. To go to some shop and pick up something. And Arthur thought, well, that didn't make any sense. He says, Look, it's Christmas, everything's going to be closed. But his dad, Charlie, said, Don't argue with me. He just insisted. He says, Go into town and run the errand, okay, and made him go, made him do it, no matter how nonsensical it seemed. So Arthur shrugged and went off to run the errand. He would be the only one of the family alive by the end of that day. Because after Arthur left, uh Charlie Lawson got a shotgun, and first he shot his daughters, Carrie and Mabel, as they were setting out to their uncle and aunt's house. He waited for them by the tobacco barn, and when they were in range, he shot them with a 12-gauge shotgun. Then he ensured that they were dead by bludgeoning them, and he placed their bodies in the tobacco barn. Afterward, he went to the house and he found Fanny on the porch there, that's his wife. He shot her on the porch. And as soon as the gun was fired, Marie, his oldest, the 17-year-old daughter, she was inside and she screamed while the two small boys, James and Raymond, tried to find a hiding place. Well then Lawson came inside, he shot Marie, then he found that he shot the two boys, and then last he killed the baby Mary Lou. It's thought that she was bludgeoned to death. Now, of course, everybody in the community hears this commotion. And a lot of the neighbors and family members come over. And by the time they get there onto the property, obviously they're absolutely horrified to find the whole family dead. And in fact, he has laid the family members out with their arms crossed on their backs with rocks under their heads. But Charlie Lawson himself is nowhere to be uh seen. So here we have um seven people dead here. Okay, because you have six kids and the wife, seven people. And as everybody is trying to figure out what the hell has happened on this property, they hear boom, another blast, another gunshot out in the nearby woods. And so they go out to the woods, and there they find Charlie Lawson, who has committed suicide, shot himself in the head, and he was he was laying there next to a tree, and there was a bloody circle of footprints worn all into the snow around the tree, and so it uh appeared that he had been pacing around the tree for a while before taking his life. So on Christmas Day, Charlie Lawson killed his wife and six of their seven children, and then himself. So that's what, eight people there and this little cabin. Uh there was a book written about this. I think it was called White Christmas, Bloody Christmas. Can you imagine what this did to Arthur, aged sixteen, when he uh when he came back and found that? Of course, everybody wondered why, why, why did he do this? Some people said that Charlie Lawson had gotten a head injury shortly before this, but afterward his body was sent for analysis at John Hopkins, and they found no abnormalities in his brain, so that didn't seem like a good one. Some people said maybe uh he'd witnessed some kind of mob activity and that um they were going to come and kill him and his whole family, and that he just decided to do it himself. But actually, the one rumor that has been like a little ugly rumor that has popped up here and there over the years that is sort of whispered about, apparently by family members, is that uh Charlie Lawson was having some kind of an incestuous relationship with his with his daughter Marie, and um that she had gotten pregnant, and that it was about to become apparent what was going on, and rather than put himself and the whole family at shame for this an unspeakable relationship that he just decided to kill everybody but wanted Arthur to go on and uh and continue the family legacy in some way. We really don't know why he killed himself, but I'll tell you a couple of troubling things, or why he killed his family and then himself, but I'll tell you some troubling things about um what happened even afterward. Charlie Lawson's brother decided to open the house there as a tourist attraction, as a roadside tourist attraction. And for years people would stop and they would pay a couple bucks to come and walk through this house where this horrible stuff had happened. And what makes it even more sort of eerie in a way, is that um right before this happened, this incident, Marie had just finished baking a Christmas cake that had vanilla icing on it with raisins. And so many people, so many tourists, as they were passing through the house, would sort of ease over and uh secretly snatch a little raisin off that cake as a souvenir, that they finally put a glass covering over it, and it was preserved under that glass for many, many years. So what a ghoulish roadside attraction. So this, again, was a tourist attraction for years until I don't know the the specifics of how things finally unraveled, but uh the house then ended up sitting there for many years abandoned, and then my understanding is that it was finally torn down in the 1980s. This kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier, doesn't it? About um sensitivity issues related to paranormal tourism, if you want to call it that, and when is it appropriate to to tell a story and how to tell it and and make money off of it and all that kind of thing? It's it's a tricky business and there are ethics involved. Um What happened on that day is just one big horrible mystery that you might wonder. You might wonder, well, what happened to Arthur Lawson, that sixteen year old son who was allowed to live. Well, it seems like there was some kind of a curse upon that family because when he was thirty-two, he was killed in a car accident, leaving behind his wife and four children. A tragedy all around. I told you this was not going to be a warm and fuzzy Christmas story, but every Christmas since this incident happened, not too far from where I live in North Carolina, I think about it, and I take a moment to I guess send out some kind of a prayer to the victims of that horrible tragedy, and uh it reminds us in a way that no matter how great and positive and warm the world tries to be, there are always going to be twisted people in the middle of it somewhere who are going to do something messed up. But now I know that a lot of you who listen to this podcast, you listen in North Carolina, and I've never been to that site where the Lawson House stood. But if any of you have, or if you're near there and it and it's not off limits, um, I'd love to hear about any kind of paranormal experiences that you may have had near that property, especially right around Christmas time, because this would be a perfect example of an anniversary haunting, something massive that replays itself on a certain date every year. And yes, this December 25th, it will be 88 years ago, but sometimes these these things go on forever and ever. So, if you do want to share some info with me about that or anything else, my website is joshuapwarren.com. And you can just scroll to the bottom to find my email address. I also want to repeat something that I mentioned yesterday, and that is that one of the things I've been doing here in Las Vegas is working on producing my own amazing mind-boggling event here. And uh we're putting the finishing touches on it. Everything looks like it's going to be a go, and it will be sometime, it looks like, around mid to late May of next year, 2018. That's all I can tell you for now because this is such a big event. There are still some contracts that need to be finished up. But if you are planning some kind of a big event for 2018, like a trip your your family is going to take, uh, I hope that you will consider setting aside this. It's like a save the date kind of thing. Save mid to late May of 2018 to come here to Las Vegas and experience something with me that you will find, I believe, truly life and I will even say reality altering. So I'll just plant that little seed for now and I'll give you more details as soon as I can. So I hope that whether you are digging into the paranormal or good old-fashioned traditional Christmas fun, that you are having one way or another an enjoyable holiday season, and uh you've got yourself in the proper mindset as you shift into the upcoming year. Uh again, this daily is called Joshua P. Warren Daily. I do this podcast about every day. It's always short, it's always free. If you go to my website, joshuapeewarren.com, there is no period after the pee there. If you go to joshuap.com, you will find all kinds of interesting content to dig into. Uh I hope you will do that. I hope you'll email me if you have any feedback. And uh I have a lot of stuff that I'm going to be talking to you about. I think tomorrow we're going to dig into Corumpus. You know what that is? Yeah. If not, you need to. He's kind of like the evil version of Santa Claus. That's putting it lightly. All right. Thank you for listening. Uh, thank you for staying curious, and I will talk to you again soon.