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Hello, I am Joshua P. Warren, and this is Joshua P. Warren Daily. I have a fascinating subject for you today, inspired by the television shoot that I did yesterday. And before I get into that, I want to give you an announcement. This coming Saturday will be the last edition ever of Speaking of Strange. Now, for those of you who may only listen to this podcast, Speaking of Strange is a three-hour radio show that I created about 15 years ago that airs from flagship station News Radio 570 WWNC in Asheville, North Carolina. And I hosted the show. Again, I created it. I hosted it all the way up until oh maybe a year and a half or two years ago. And then I just didn't have time to host anymore. But I still retain ownership of the show, and I still continued to executive produce the show. And I handed over the hosting first to Vance Pollack. And then Vance didn't have the time to host anymore. And so the current and uh final host of the show is Sam the Animal Steel. And so it's been a long, long run, and uh there are a lot of people sad because that this Saturday is going to be the last one. And I want to let you know that this is completely my decision. And this there's no bad vibe at all in this. The station was very happy with the show. The show could have run for many, many, many more years, I have no doubt. Um this was my decision, and I'm gonna come on the show to explain more about that decision on Saturday. But what it really boils down to is that um I just don't have the time to oversee so many things. Um I mean, I'm in a position right now where I mean you've got to realize, I mean, I I'm working on two television shows. One of them is a major TV series. Actually, both of them are big TV series, but one of them is even more major for me because I'm both producer and talent on one of them. Um I'm producing this huge event in Las Vegas. I am the uh owner uh and I do a lot of the management for the Haunted Asheville Ghost Tours and the Asheville Mystery Museum. I'm running the Bermuda Triangle Research Center here in Puerto Rico. Um I mean I've just got a lot, a lot of stuff going on. And it's very important for me to ensure quality control, which means that you know, if if I can't personally pay attention to something, then I feel like I'm being unfair to everybody involved. And so uh so that's the gist of it. I'm just having to pare down some things that I'm involved with, and um and and look, you know, yeah, there are certain things in your life that you can just hire somebody to do for you. But when you're dealing with creative subject matter, sometimes you can't hire somebody to do something for you. It's like the old saying, you you can't have someone do your push-ups for you. You're right, no matter how how rich or powerful you may be, nobody can do your push-ups for you. And so um there comes times when you know you just have to say, look, uh, I can't pay attention to this or this or this or this anymore, and it sucks. Um but that's the gist of it. So when you uh if you if you're a speaking of strange listener, you can listen to the show this Saturday night. It airs 9 p.m. till midnight East Coast time, and uh and you'll get to hear more about that. But uh also I believe that Sam's putting together sort of a retrospective, uh, which is another thing I I can't stand, you know, these like sad, gooey, boo hoo kind of I I don't know what it's gonna be. I really have no idea. I don't want to know. I'm just because it's hard for me to be objective about the show uh after having done it for so long. So anyway, if you want to listen to the last Speaking of Strange, that will be um this coming Saturday night. You can listen through speakingofstrange.com. And also, now we have years and years of podcasts from previous shows that will remain on online for a while as well. So that's what's happening there, and I really appreciate it if uh you do not email or or contact me in any way to ask me more about it, because I'm saying uh everything on the air Saturday, and um I know whenever a show goes off the air, there are a lot of questions, uh, but I just want to uh reassure you that this is my decision and everything is good, and uh I am especially happy with all the uh freedom and flexibility the radio station has given me over all these years to talk about some pretty crazy stuff. So uh this is certainly not a forced decision. This is just a matter of me being too darn busy to um to oversee all the things that are that are out there. So that said, um, and and and by the way, I I I want to emphasize something to you. I know I've been saying this a lot, but I may as well emphasize this one more time. 100, well, well, not a hundred, let's say, uh well, up until last night it was like ninety-eight percent because I had to do this TV shoot, which I'm gonna tell you a little bit more about in a second. But now I am one hundred and ten percent devoted to this event in Las Vegas. And I know that you know you you may be tired of hearing me talk about this event, but I want to tell you something about this event that I have not revealed before. And those of you who have your ticket, God bless you, because you might just think this is an event where I'm gonna come uh out and share something with you. But this is actually not the only case. The reality is if you have a ticket to this event, you don't know this, but here you go, you by coming to this event, are actually going to be prepared to become a potential staff member for me on some amazing opportunities and adventures that I have coming up. So what I'm doing with this event is I am using this as an opportunity to select people and and and they select themselves really by coming to the event. Because I know it's a big deal to uproot and come to an event like this. But because you're doing this, then you and and you are going to be given an opportunity that you don't even um know anything about. It reminds me a little bit of Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory, and that's fine. That's how I that's how I want it to be. So those of you who are there are not just going to go to the event and have a wonderful time and then go home, but you are also going to enter into a new realm, um, a new echelon when it comes to some of the bigger things down the road that I have planned that I will be needing you for. So I'm training you for something bigger and more important. Um I guess that's all I should say about that right now. But all the details about the big Las Vegas event are at youwillmanifest.com. You willmanifest.com. Um As I told you, we're almost sold out because I can only take 100 people for this, but if you go there and uh the shopping cart button is still there, then we still have tickets. When it's sold out, I will have a big I'll have big red letters at the top that will say sold out, and the shopping cart buttons will be removed. So um you will manifest.com. That's where 110% of my attention is, especially now that I have this shoot over with. Now the TV shoot that I did yesterday was was really interesting because I've done a lot of TV over the years, and this is the first time that I've been able to convince a major production to do a remote with me, and that's because they always want you to go in person. And they this this production company, they are doing a reboot of a big, big paranormal TV show. Uh, that's all I'm gonna say about that, because I don't have permission to give you any more info. And they were doing everything they could in their power to get me to fly from here in Puerto Rico to Los Angeles to sit down and shoot this with them. And I told them there's no way. There is no way. I mean, for one thing, Puerto Rico is a long way from Los Angeles, it's kind of a long way from everything, and that I am in the middle right now of this crucial time when I am moving all of this valuable and sensitive instrumentation out of Puerto Rico. I'm packing a lot of things up and sending them back to the states for various reasons, and I just can't leave right now. I'm going to be uh heading out of here sometime in April, and then I'll be hitting up North Carolina for a while to get some things prepared before I head out to Nevada. But uh should you catch that? I said Nevada. Yeah, I'm getting there. Not supposed to say Nevada, Nevada. And so um I said, there's no way I can do it. I and I would love to be a part of this show, love to be a part of this show, but I just can't leave. And they were like, Well, can you go to New York? Can you go to Phoenix? You know, like, nope, I can't go anywhere. You can bring somebody here, and they're like, Well, we can't send anybody there. I'm like, well, I guess it's not going to happen. But fortunately, they were so um insistent upon having me as a part of this that we worked this out technically to do a remote. So I created the closest thing to a set here on my end at the Bermuda Triangle Research Base here in Puerto Rico, and uh had high definition cameras and uh did high-quality audio recordings, etc., etc. And let me tell you, it worked out great. Everybody was happy, and uh I was able to do uh hours of interview time, and it was it was uh you never know, okay? You never know until a show airs if you're gonna make the cut. But uh whether or not I make the cut, what I can tell you is that at least we were able to get the job done with me sitting here thousands of miles away, and that's pretty cool. So, even though I can't tell you what the show was about, I did a lot of research for the show because we were talking about a lot of really just interesting, fascinating topics. And there was one topic that I was looking into that I thought, you know what? Since I'm already doing some research on this, I may as well talk to you, the Joshua P. Warren Daily Listener about this subject matter. And it is cursed and forbidden explorations. They refer to it as cautionary tales, that there are times when people go gung ho into some environment that they want to explore, like Indiana Jones, and then they ignore all the warning signs and red flags and and threats of curse and all that, and then bad things happen to them. And you know, and like what is the reality of this, and how often does it happen? Excuse me. So, what I want to do here is I want to give you some examples of this. And some of these will be examples that you know, and some may be just things that you've heard about. Here is one that's really interesting that you may not know about. In 2015, a uh a group of explorers, hang on a second. Sorry about that. You know I don't edit these things. In 2015, a group of explorers went to Honduras in Central America, and they were exploring or excavating the site of this ancient lost city called the City of the Monkey God. Now that sounds interesting, doesn't it? Who's gonna worship a monkey? City of the monkey god, city actually called Ciadad Blanca, the white city. So this has been lost for thousands of years. They get down there, these explorers are trudging around knee deep in all this vegetation, they're excited by all the things they're finding, and next thing you know, lo and behold, they start getting sick and find out they have all been infested by a flesh-eating parasite. Now everybody told them this was a forbidden place, don't mess with it, leave it alone and they kind of blew it off as some kind of intangible poo-poo. But it turns out oh, there is something there. It's called leash meniasis. Leish meniasis, flesh eating parasite, makes your flesh start dripping off the bones, opens these big gaping, horrific sores all over your body. Now we can't be certain here of the cause and effect relationship. What I mean is is it possible that this place was considered forbidden and cursed because that parasite existed there? Or was it considered forbidden and cursed and this negative energy field was placed around it, and then that attracted some kind of physical manifestation, which in this case was a flesh-eating parasite. Um here's something that you have to understand about curses and hexes and forbidden places, all that. If you have ever said a prayer, if you've ever said a blessing, and you believe that makes some impact, then there's no reason you should not believe in the power of curses, because it's the same thing. It's just for a different purpose with a different intention. And so a curse that's placed upon something is actually a tangible thing. I mean, thoughts have physical power. I mean, if thoughts did not have physical power, then there's no way you could think right now, I want to raise my arm, and boom, what happens? You can raise your arm. Right? All you did was think that, and that thought sent electrical impulses through your body that made this physical action happen. So thoughts do have physical power, and we're just not sure the extent to which these thoughts can transcend the physical body and the physical limitations. So, again, cause and effect is up in the air, but however we explain this, there are places that can become absolutely saturated with this kind of energy, this negative energy. Everybody has heard of the curse of the pharaohs. I mean, the whole valley of the pharaohs in Egypt is riddled with various curses that are etched around tombs. There's one in particular that says cursed be those who disturb the rest of a pharaoh. They shall break the seal of this tomb, and shall meet death by a disease that no doctor can diagnose. No doctor can diagnose. That's interesting, isn't it? It reminds you of the Leish Maniasis. And then here is the tomb of Kentika Icleki. Has an inscription that says, As for all men who shall enter this tomb, there will be judgment. An end shall be made for him. I shall seize his neck like a bird, I shall cast the fear of myself into him. There were uh there were other there's another one that's pretty good I remember saying uh He who enters the Pharaoh's tomb will be attacked in the water by crocodiles and hippopotamus, and on the land by snakes and scorpions until death. When Howard Carter, the great British Egyptologist, entered King Tut's tomb in nineteen twenty-two, everyone told him that that was a cursed tomb, and of course he ignored it, and it gave rise to perhaps the most famous series of events attached to an Egyptian mummy curse. The very night that Howard Carter went in there. And by the way, before I get into that, you know, I one of my favorite stories, Howard Carter, he searched for years for King Tut's tomb, and uh everybody thought it was going to be impossible to find. And when he finally broke through the seal of the tomb, he peeked through the hole, and his benefactor, Lord Carnarvon, was standing there next to him and said, What do you see? And everybody's holding their breath because the in the past they'd opened these tombs and found them to be empty. It was like the uh Heraldo opening of um Al Capone's vault, right? So Carter breaks this little hole and he looks in there, and Carnarvon says, What do you see? And then Howard Carter says, Things. Wonderful things. And then they go in there, and oh my gosh, it's the most well-preserved treasure trove of an Egyptian pharaoh ever discovered. Well, that night, a cobra slithered into Howard Carter's house and slithered into his canary cage and ate his canary. And people said, Oh boy, yep, you've done it now. Because the royal cobra, that is the the main emblem of these old pharaohs. You've seen the uh hieroglyphs, you've seen the various depictions of these pharaohs with the cobra coming right off of the forehead on their their headgear, their headdress. So after that, yep, his crew members started dropping left and right via various means over the years. In fact, just four months later, his benefactor, Lord Carnarvon, who was standing right at his side when he opened the tomb. Lord Carnarvon was in his hotel room in Cairo shaving. And he cut himself. They think he might have had a mosquito bite on his face and nicked it. But after he cut himself, that Became infected and very soon it turned to blood poisoning and Lord Carnarvon died right there in Cairo. The list goes on and on regarding people who died from King Tut's curse. There's something real about that. Maybe you've seen the program on the History Channel, the series that's been running for quite a while called The Curse of Oak Island. Of course, Oak Island up there in Canada. This is a place where countless men have been searching for treasure going back hundreds of years. Since the eighteen hundreds, at least six men have died trying to find that treasure. I think it's more than that, but at least six. We have the Lost Dutchman mine in Arizona. This is a mine that was supposedly discovered by a German prospector, and uh which you know, actually the Germans don't call themselves German, they call themselves Deutsch. And so when the Deutsch first started coming over here to America, a lot of people confused their name with Dutch, and they would call them Dutch, even though it was actually Deutsch. And so since the lost Dutchman found his treasure, his treasured mine, and kept it a secret, people have been searching for that. Several men that we know of have died over the years searching for that. One man was found decapitated in the 1940s. His name was James Cravey. Nobody knows what happened to him, but the guy was out looking for this mine, and the next thing you know, they found him in the desert, and somebody had clearly cut his head off. You know, it's said that hundreds of years ago, a Frenchman in India plucked the diamond from the eye of an Indian idol. And that diamond was cut and is now what we call the Hope Diamond, another one of the most famous cursed objects. The Hope Diamond actually has a very interesting relationship to Asheville, North Carolina. The last private owner of the Hope Diamond was a woman named Evelyn Walsh McLean. And for a while she lived at the Reynolds Mansion there near Asheville. This woman would actually wear the Hope Diamond around her neck. Can you believe that? I mean, this diamond was something like forty-five carats, I think. And uh she would wear this to parties and social gatherings. But once she started wearing the Hope Diamond, and mind you, she got it when it already had this vast history of curses. I think Louis XIV and all these different people had had it throughout history when tragedy befell them. Um she started wearing this, and right after that, her son died in a car accident. Her daughter died of a drug overdose. Her husband left her for another woman, and then he went insane and ended up in a sanatorium. And the family business went bankrupt. All this happened within a short period of time, just a few years. So when she finally got rid of the Hope Diamond, uh it ended up in the hands of Harry Winston, the great jeweler in New York, and he said, Oh, this thing's bad. He had a bad feeling about it. So he decided to donate it to the Smithsonian. And uh he gave it to the Postal Service and just sent it through the post office, registered mail, insured for a million dollars. The mailman who brought it to the Smithsonian, where it remains to this day, was named James Todd. And uh right after he delivered the Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian, uh he was in a terrible car accident, crushed his legs, some of his family died, and then later on his house burned down. So you have, you know, even the connection between a location and objects from the location. I'll give you one last example of this. In sixteen twenty two, a Spanish tre uh a Spanish ship laden with all kinds of treasure, especially silver and gold called the Atosha, sank near the Florida Keys. Three hundred and sixty-five people, many of them dignitaries and high class folks, priests and whatnot. Three hundred and sixty-five people died. They went down with that ship. And it sat there on the bottom of the ocean about fifteen, let's see, I can't remember how deep it was, but it sat there on the bottom of the ocean for three hundred and sixty-three years until nineteen eighty-five, when an obsessive shipwreck hunter named Mel Fisher finally discovered the shipwreck and the treasure. It's all housed in a museum right now in Key West, Florida. He searched for years, and he just wouldn't quit. And in the course, there were plenty of deaths associated with his mission, but most prominently, he lost three members of his crew looking for this shipwreck, including his son Dirk, and his daughter-in-law Angel. I mean, these are close family members who died searching for this treasure. So you ask yourself, how much is this treasure worth? I, as it turns out, actually have a ring given to me by a dear friend that uh has an authentic coin from the Atosha built into the ring, and uh it's uh it's the centerpiece, of course. And when I first received this, I was thrilled to have such a piece of history, and it gave me a chill to think that this coin had been down there, well, for one thing, had gone down with 365 people over 300 years ago and sat on the bottom of the ocean for over 300 years. I mean, that is chilling to think of the history of this coin. But then I began to wonder also, is this a cursed object? Is this a cursed item? And I struggled with that. Like, is this good for me to have this? And then I realized that you know what? This came to me. I didn't ask for it. I uh it was just a gift that appeared and was given to me. And so that I think that's fine if these things appear that way. But it's when you go out with some kind of money lust, some sense of greed and obsession that you fixate upon these things when I believe that uh it can turn bad for you. But I will tell you this I could keep you know giving you examples and going down a list like this, but I really do believe that there are cursed and forbidden places. And it may be that some places are sort of going or have gone the way of the dinosaur, meaning they are extinct and out of touch and buried and gone for a reason. I believe that humans have a spirit, I believe that objects have a spirit, and I believe that places have a spirit. Now you might wonder what is the logic behind that. Well, what is a human? A human is made up of iron and magnesium and sulfur and tin and all these components that we would ordinarily think of as being inanimate. So really, what is it there to separate us from objects and places that are made of the same stuff in many cases? I think all things can have a spirit, and some things can retain the conscious, you know, sort of spiritual energy that's put into them, and some things, if you want to make it simple, just want to stay hidden. Some places don't want to be found, and you never know how that's going to manifest. It's going to manifest in some way that you do not expect, however. But I would caution any of you who are interested in going out and snooping around and poking in places where there is a curse. I know that discovering things, finding treasure, making new profound headway is exciting. But you better weigh your decisions very carefully because if you tread into some of these places that are called cursed or forbidden, then you may pay a heavy price. You might find yourself maimed, disfigured, sickened, you may even die and have to watch your friends and loved ones die as well. So be very, very careful and think about the price that you want to pay, because it can be very real and horrific. So I don't mean to deter exploration, I'm just telling you, there is a reality there to think about and to contend with. Um I have so much stuff to uh get done here. I think I'm gonna call it a day, but um at least on this podcast, I want to reiterate to you if you go to joshua pwarren.com, you can find all kinds of cool links, including a link there to my big event coming up in Las Vegas. You'll find a curiosity shop. I hope that you will subscribe to my e newsletter because very shortly those of you who are subscribers are going to experience some cool opportunities. Some of you know what I mean already. This podcast is uh it's always short, it's always free. It's called Joshua P. Warren Daily, and you'll find there at joshua parren.com where you can click the link to sign up for the podcast, or just follow me on Twitter at Joshua P. Warren, and I will tweet when a new one is available. So that's it. Thank you for your interest, thank you for your support, thank you for staying curious, and I will talk to you again soon.