SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, I am Joshua P. Warren, and this is Joshua P. Warren Daily. I told you yesterday was the birthday of investigator Missy Hill. And so we all wish her a happy birthday. But one thing I forgot to mention was that Missy also sent me her ideas on what the scariest costume would be. And she took a note from Mobius, I suppose, because hers also includes this imaginative component that might be holographic. She said, Wouldn't that be interesting if you could basically have someone step out of the room who looks like a person and then all of a sudden they transform into a David Ike styled reptilian? So a person who can appear to shape shift back and forth. That would be amazing, wouldn't it? And of course, uh she said that, you know, a holograph or a hologram would be cool, but there are simpler ways to probably achieve an effect like that. I bet you, and this is just off the top of my head, you could get some kind of a little projector that you would sort of um put on a collar or something like that, so that when you would uh hit a button, it just gradually shines this greenish light up on your face that makes it look like your face transforms. That'd be cool, wouldn't it? If that doesn't exist, maybe I should try to invent something like that for next Halloween. But something that slowly makes the face look like it's shifting back and forth. Or heck for that matter. You could just come out with a human mask and you rip it up, you know, and uh you've got the reptilian mask, it's a little more brute force. Uh but yeah, you know, that's cool. This idea of transformation seems to be really popular from the emails I've gotten with different suggestions. But of course, again, we're getting out there on a limb because ultimately my original question was if I said to you, and of course, and I was uh initially I said this to Lauren, I said, if I say to you, stand right there, I'm going to go into my office and close the door for five minutes. And then when I open the door and come out, as soon as you see me, it's the scariest thing that you can imagine. What would it be? Like what would that shocking thing be that instantly gets you? Where you don't have time to wait around for some transformation or or whatever, you know, it's just like an instant shock. And it and that's very difficult these days because we are all pretty desensitized from having grown up seeing horror movies and um and Halloween masks and all this creepy stuff our whole lives. So um, you know, you you don't have to overthink this one. But I'm gonna tell you in a minute what what mine is. But first, I you know this is one that Lauren herself said. She thought about it for a while, and she said a costume that would make you look like one of those skinless bodies where you're just all you know muscle, kind of like a Hellraiser looking. I know there was a character like that in one of the Hellraiser movies. And also, Lauren and I went to the exhibit called The Body, which they have right now at uh the Luxor here in Las Vegas, where they have real corpses that are skinned and diced into all kinds of interesting pieces and and displayed artistically and whatnot. So she liked that though. That didn't bother her. I I find that kind of stuff uh pretty grotesque. That that was the second time I I'd seen the body exhibit. The first time was in Boston uh several years ago. Uh it kind of grosses me out. I I appreciate the artistic aspect of it. I really do. I mean, and and the the technical skill that it takes to do that, not to mention the stomach, to put that together. Uh not to mention overcoming the moral obstacles of making that your goal to achieve that, you know. It figures it'd have to be a European who spearheaded all that. I don't think you could get that off the ground here in the US of A. But anyhow, uh so that's what she was talking about. Yeah, that that'd be uh that would be shocking, wouldn't it, to see the door open and that's there. But okay, well, here is what I've thought about. Now, this is tough for me because again, I've seen so much. But um when I really thought about it, the first thing that came to mind was something that I actually have seen in person, and that is if the door opened and out came one of these horrific, like seven foot tall crumpass costumes. Now, you ought to know what the crumpass is, he's gotten quite pop popular recently, and this is an interesting topic, I guess, because it transitions us from the Halloween season into the holiday season. But you know, these crumpasses, I'm talking the big tall ones with the long, really ghoulish faces and the contact lenses so the eyes look really wild, and the big long dripping fangs and the horns rolling back, and uh, I mean, uh, if you just jump onto Google and just type in crumpus, K-R-A-M-P-U-S, and you hit the images section, so you just see pictures of people who have done crumpass costumes come up, then you will see just how terrifying some of these costumes look. And I actually uh went to a crumpass knocked one time. Now, this is a uh a party where you get together and you celebrate the crumpass. It's kind of like an anti-holiday party, because it's it's a holiday party, but everything's all dark and ghoulish and spooky. And uh there was a uh there you know, there were a few guys there, but you know, you'd have a guy dressed up like crumpus, big dude, you know, again, seven foot tall guy, not to mention the horns, uh, looking so creepy, you know, that you're standing right next to this guy at the party, and you know that there's just like you know, a geek inside this thing, but it's still scary, it's still spooky. You you you feel a little intimidated to say something. And I think that's what a really good costume does. It is you know it's a costume, but it's effective enough that it still makes you hesitant to want to engage with the person inside because it's uh it's so believable. You know, there might be some kind of a uh um a danger there. And I guess that is really what makes a costume a good costume in general, isn't it? So anyway, um I think some of these crumpus costumes would be particularly effective. And uh the crumpus is uh you know, it is a demonic kind of figure, and of course I love talking about the crumpus, and we'll talk about crumpus again uh more this Christmas season, but you know, the idea is if you're a good little boy or girl, well then Santa Claus will bring you presents. But if you're bad, the crumpass will come and he will drag you off and do terrible things. So I think opening the door and having one of these big, impressive, grim faced, glowing eyed drip fangs dripping crumpus costumes would uh give me that initial shock factor. Maybe I'm forgetting about things, but these have been all great suggestions that have come in. And I know that there are some people who are still sort of waiting, waiting till now, waiting till the last minute to figure out what their costume is going to be. And you know, Asheville, North Carolina, of course, is, as I've mentioned, such a Halloweeny place that the streets just fill with people wearing every kind of costume you can imagine. And so it's a very appropriate time for a new book to be out, and uh it's a book that came out, well, just recently by my good friend, author Marla Hardy Milling. Now she has written some of the coolest books about Asheville. Um in fact, she wrote a book in 2015 called Only in Asheville: An Eclectic History. And then one came out in 2017 called Legends, Secrets, and Mysteries of Asheville. And her new book is called, simply enough, Wicked Asheville. And I feel very honored because not only have I been included in all of her books, and uh not only are we uh always exchanging information back and forth, and she's come to my events, and uh she's always wonderful at interviewing me for articles and stuff like that. But this time around, she asked me if I would write the foreword for this book, Wicked Asheville. And it was my pleasure to do so. And this book is now available on Amazon, and so what I figure is it's perfect time, uh perfect timing for me to read you the foreword that I wrote to the book Wicked Asheville. And uh it's not very long, so what do we have? About three and a half pages. So uh you can actually read this for yourself if you just go to Amazon.com and then you uh you know they let you pre pre uh preview certain pages of the book. What do they call that feature? It's uh let's see, you click on something and they say uh look inside. Yeah, okay. There's a little feature called look inside. You hit look inside, you can read this for yourself. But I will now read it to you. My foreword to Marla Hardy Millings Wicked Asheville. Many do not want you to read this book. Asheville's majestic blue and purple mountains glow with a halo of silvery clouds in glossy ads and slick TV commercials all over the world. The cozy streets explode with tourists who pour in for a fun experience rambling on foot. The idea is to focus on a good time, and yet Marla Hardy Milling has decided to write this book about the dark side, the seedy things, the things we usually brush under the rug called wicked Asheville. Why? How much can we pay you, Marla to just forget about all this, cram it in a manila folder and let the city ride its wave of positive income with a naive smile? Why do you need to point out the embarrassing, awkward, and often shameful things in the past of this grand southern gym? What in the heck are you thinking? Okay. I suppose these are rhetorical questions. Now why do I say this? Well, Marla is a native of these mountains just like me. And I know she doesn't want to hurt us. So here's what I'm thinking about her decision to write this controversial book. Some of the world's smartest people, cosmologists and astrophysicists tell us that all time is occurring at once. What you consider the past, present, and future are all happening simultaneously. However, the human brain is so diminutive it can only process this little by little, second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, week by week, month by month, and year by year, plus only from a limited perspective or point of view. Thus, in other words, as you stand in Asheville today, you are knee deep in what happened in Asheville twenty years ago, or one hundred years ago, or even two hundred years ago. Why is this important? Because you can only grasp the identity of a place if you know its history, for better or for worse. And this very day, when you stand in the middle of downtown Asheville with the Battery Park Hotel gleaming before a full moon as if you were on some movie set or in the middle of a miniature shadow box, you are immersed within the entired multi layered history of that site. Many roaring and wonderful times were had in that grand building, but it was also the site of numerous suicides, depressed people jumping from the top. Let us be honest about our view of the place. The tragedies were rare, but they did occur. Some prefer to turn a blind eye, like an ostrich hiding its head in the sand to the unpleasant elements of history. And yet these elements give us the contrast by which we see the peaks and valleys more sharply. So in this book, Marla has firmly embraced the darkest sides of our community so that we can both have a fuller and more realistic sense of our complex identity, and to form that precious contrast so the good parts of our region pop forth even more vividly. And even the darkest clouds do have a surprisingly silver lining. For example, Asheville was founded in the seventeen nineties, and yet in all these years our largest mass murder, the Will Harris incident, which occurred in nineteen oh six, culminated in six dead bodies, including that of the madman himself. Six is not a huge number, especially when compared to other towns of similar popularity. Let us keep it that way. It is true that all the soil of the world is drenched in blood. These mountains have certainly absorbed their share. And being positioned at such a sweet spot between the north and south and near the coast, every type of swindler and weirdo has drifted through here at one time or another. It is therefore inevitable that twisted things will occasionally occur and troubled genes get passed down through the generations. It is at very least interesting to reflect on the kinds of stories Marla has collected here, and really the tone of these tales is not so different from the kinds of disturbing headlines blazing across the news today. We have a natural fascination with those things that go wrong. It all goes back to survival of the fittest. We evolve to be aware of danger so we can avoid it ourselves. Fortunately, these stories are newsworthy because they are in fact so rare. They are the gross exception to the friendly people and beautiful scenes. The morbid joy in reading a book like this one may be similar to watching a horror movie. I wouldn't want to watch a horror movie every day, but once in a while it's fun to let your mind drift into ghoulish territory. One thing is for certain about these scenic lands, during the day when the sun shines, and the air is crisp and clean, and streams rush through the lush leaves and mossy rocks, Asheville can feel like a version of heaven. But late in the evening, when the sun slips away and darkness quietly creeps across the ranges, everything changes. The mountains are spooky, the curved winding roads hiding whatever you can imagine, bandits or spirits, or wild beasts of campfire tales. To this day there are strange lights in the woods that no one can explain. There are shady characters holed up doing secret things. There is an entire underground of activity just beyond the street lights tucked in the alleyways and perched on the cliffs above. So let this book be a fascinating freak show but also a warning. Since Marla grew up here, she has a sixth sense for a juicy local story and uses her fine skill as a writer to beautifully capture the mysterious and macabre all around us. Never forget that dark and twisted things happen everywhere, even here, in the jewel of the crown of the Blue Ridge Mountains. A tourist's dream. My grandfather recently passed away at age ninety-four. He used to say that when he was a young man growing up in the nearby mountains, he woke up every day for work before the sun rose. In the cold pre-dawn he would walk miles to a sawmill. It was still and quiet in the morning. Except frequently, as he would pass below one spot, up on a mountainside above, he would see a raging bonfire and hear the chanting of witches. Their silhouettes would break up the flames as they danced around the fire. His heart would always race and he would speed up to pass the spot. It would make his blood run cold. My grandfather was a very religious man. Who knows what was really happening up on that mountain on those mornings? He never ventured there to investigate further. But all throughout history I've heard stories about an obscure level of our town that is usually unseen, just behind the ridge or around the bend. Some believe there is a reason that Asheville has the word evil right in the middle. We may never know all the strange and unsettling things that are hidden just out of sight in these dense enchanted lands, but here Marla is giving us all a rare and sometimes chilling glimpse. Prepare yourself for what lies ahead. And then I signed off as Joshua P. Warren, author of Haunted Asheville and The Evil in Asheville and owner of the Haunted Asheville Ghost Tours. HauntedA.com. If you want to read that book, Wicked Asheville, just go to Amazon.com and just do a search for Wicked Asheville. It'll pop right up there. You can get it instantly on Kindle for $14.99. Paperback $18.4. It's even available in hardcover. How about that? $27.25 Prime. Says by the way, there's only nine left in stock, but more on the way, so this thing is selling. Wicked Asheville by Marla Hardy Milling, and it also gives me a credit there in the listing, Joshua P. Warren with the foreword. Um it's A really good book, I can tell you that. I had a lot of fun reading the book before I wrote the foreword, and uh so I was pleased to get uh the advanced opportunity to do that. And let me tell you how much that I think of Marla. You know, earlier this year I uh self-published a book called Finding Your Magic, How to Hack Reality Through Lucid Living, and that became the guidebook and the workbook for my big event that I did here in Las Vegas. And uh I sent that to Marla to do the proofreading, and uh I could have sent that to a lot of people, but I I knew that she would really get the material and she loved it. So she's a just a fantastic author, and if you have any interest in uh not only Asheville and the dark side of Asheville's history, but also just fascinating, quirky, weird stories in general about you know small towns, uh you will enjoy Wicked Asheville. So I'm not in Asheville this year, you know. I'm here in Las Vegas for a number of reasons, and one of them is because, as you know, on October 31st I will be on Zach Begin's live Ghost Adventures special on the Travel Channel. A four-hour event from 5 to 9 p.m. Pacific time from 8 p.m. to midnight East Coast time. He's going to be doing some uh controversial stuff. Opening some things that have dark energy inside of them. As a matter of fact, uh one of my really great friends sent me a protective stone to wear. Uh I don't want to talk about it yet until I ask if it's okay for me to talk about it. And even then I might wait until after the show to talk about it. Because I don't want to give the evil spirits any heads up as to what I'm using to protect myself, but this is a serious situation. Um when you when you open things that are not supposed to be opened, when you call forth dark spirits, and especially when you have a lot of people who are there all contributing their energy to this. And in fact, there was an article in the uh Vegas paper here that said that this is going to be such an extravaganza that Zach is inviting the public to come and gather outside the fence of the haunted museum, which is of course inside of a big rambling haunted mansion, to gather there from three to six PM local time in Las Vegas to cheer everybody on as we are about to do this. Can you imagine how chaotic that scene is going to be? Do you know how many people are going to be crushing upon that fence on Halloween on October 31st, contributing their enthusiasm to what is going to happen that night? This is going to be like nothing else that has ever been produced. I mean, for a number of reasons, but because you know this is a live show where some very extreme things are going to happen on October 31st. And uh it's a wild thing to be a part of. I know I have no doubt this will be a historic program. I have no doubt of that. So I'm pleased, very pleased and proud to be a part of it, but I also am uh humbled by the weight, the gravity of what we might be doing. And again, I don't want to talk too much about that. You can see what's been written on the internet yourself, but there are some things that will be happening that night which uh we have been warned should not be done. And my role is to um well use some dynamic equipment to create an environment that is conducive to enhancing whatever is going to happen. So I guess it's a darn good thing that I will have some kind of protection around me, and I want to to ask all of you right now to also mentally project a field, a force field of white light and protection around me, but also everyone. But especially me, but also everyone. Um as we do this on October thirty first. Okay, so seriously, I'm asking for you to do that. Just take a moment, close your eyes, envision a bubble of protective white light around me that will not allow any of these things that are are very destructive and negative to uh to enter my life. So, anyway, you know I'll keep you updated. Um it's already happening. Uh I'm already getting involved with the setup. I mean, tomorrow I'm gonna be doing my first setup over there. It's it's you know, this is such a big project that they're they're taking four days to prepare for four hours of getting all this set up properly. So it's gonna be wild. It's gonna be wild. But uh, well look, I'll keep you updated. You know I I will. And uh in the meantime, I hope that you're having fun and that you're making the most of your Halloween season, and I hope that you'll tell all your friends to uh listen to this podcast. That's what uh keeps me doing it, knowing that you're listening and that you're sharing it with others. It's called Joshua P. Warren Daily. It's always short, it's always free. You can go to joshua pwarren.com and subscribe through various means, or just follow me on Twitter at Joshua P. Warren at Joshua P. Warren, and I will tweet a link when a new one is posted. So that's it for today. Thank you for listening, thank you for your interest and support, thank you for staying curious, and I will talk to you again soon.