Great Lakes Mysteries, Elmer McCurdy, Vodou & A Real Life Oddity

This week on The Oddities Department, history gets wet, explosive, misrepresented, and unclaimed.

In Episode 22, Gavin and Lindsay take you through four bizarre oddities from the stranger corners of history.

 First, we head to the Great Lakes, where freshwater looks calm from the shoreline, but underneath the surface, things get cold, violent, ancient, and deeply suspicious. There are vanished ships, missing planes, singing sands, underwater stone formations, ghost ships, lake monsters, red goblins, and one very important reminder that “it’s just a lake” is how people end up in the footnotes.

Then we meet Elmer McCurdy, a real-life outlaw with a tragic beginning, a drinking problem, bad instincts, and just enough nitroglycerin knowledge to make every robbery worse. Elmer wanted fortune, glory, and a place in outlaw history. What he got was loose change, destroyed money, poor planning, whiskey, bloodhounds, and one of the most embarrassingly unsuccessful criminal careers the American West ever coughed up.

From there, we pull apart what people think they know about Vodou. Zombies, dolls, curses, demons, possession, and scary movie nonsense all go under the museum lights, and what we find underneath is older, richer, and far more human. This exhibit digs into Haitian history, slavery, survival, resistance, ancestors, religious camouflage, and the way fear can turn someone else’s sacred tradition into a horror prop with bad lighting.

Finally, we end in the back room with A Real Life Oddity, a story that starts with a dead man no one came to claim and spirals into funeral homes, sideshows, carnival theft, wax museums, exploitation films, amusement parks, glow-in-the-dark paint, forensic investigation, and one deeply unsettling question: who the hell let this happen?

This episode has everything: shipwrecks, outlaw stupidity, cursed freshwater, spiritual misinformation, singing beaches, missing planes, train robberies, bad explosives math, mystery bodies, carnival chaos, and just enough education to make the whole thing legally defensible. 

Content warning: This episode contains discussion of drowning, shipwrecks, plane crashes, death, body parts, human remains, slavery, colonial violence, religious discrimination, corpse exploitation, mummified remains, gun violence, alcohol abuse, illness, tuberculosis, profanity, and historical mistreatment of people and bodies after death.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:07

Do you smell that? The smell of fresh paint? Yeah. It hit me like a sack of bricks when I walked in.

SPEAKER_03 0:15

Come to think of it, I did see a memo about doing some work down in the Wild Wild West exhibit. Uh no. I um yeah. Do you know something that I don't? Maybe. Okay, perhaps it's time that we start doing midshift meetings. There's always so much happening around here all at once that I don't know if even the director knows what's what anymore.

SPEAKER_02 0:37

They really do just be letting us do whatever we want down here. You know, and something tells me that you might have something to do with the pantheoms. I'm not saying you're right, but I'm also not saying you're wrong. Yeah, it's always you. Yeah, I get that a lot. Welcome to the Oddities Department, where history gets weird, science gets stranger, and humanity continues to prove that confidence is not the same thing as competence.

SPEAKER_03 1:03

I'm Gavin. And I'm Lindsay, and this is episode 22 of the Oddities Department. We hope you brought a raincoat, life jacket, and absolutely no loose nitroglycerin. Because you have wanted to go part of the museum where the exhibits are damp, explosive, misunderstood, and suspiciously unlabeled.

SPEAKER_02 1:23

And today, we're taking you on a tour full of Violet Lakes, failed outlaw ambition, spiritual misinformation, and one backroom oddity that has traveled much further than anything with such little paperwork ever should.

SPEAKER_03 1:37

So, what you're telling me is this is less a museum tour and more of an episode of How Did We Get Here?

SPEAKER_02 1:43

And every answer is worse than the last.

SPEAKER_03 1:46

First, we're headed to the Great Lakes, where fresh water looks peaceful from the shoreline, but underneath the surface, history gets cold, deep, violent, and very unwilling to explain itself.

SPEAKER_02 1:58

Then we're meeting Elmer McCurdy, a real-life outlaw with a tragic beginning, terrible instincts, and a criminal career that proves ambition and competence are not mutually exclusive.

SPEAKER_03 2:08

After that, we're pulling apart what people think they know about Voodoo, where the scary stories are only the surface, and the truth underneath is older, richer, and far more human.

SPEAKER_02 2:20

And finally, we end in the back room with a real life odd whose journey is stranger than it should be and whose story raises several very important questions. Who is this guy, and who the hell let this happen?

SPEAKER_03 2:34

Before we begin the tour, we have two quick rules for you. Rule number one: if an exhibit looks calm, harmless, sacred, or already dead, do not get cocky. That is how humans end up in footnotes, lawsuits, and poorly labeled display cases.

SPEAKER_02 2:49

Rule number two, please remember this is a museum. If an exhibit in the backroom has no name on the placard, don't go snooping for more information. I will introduce them to you when I know everyone's ready for it.

SPEAKER_03 3:03

Please enjoy your visit. Stay with the group, lawyer voices, and your expectations accordingly. Please secure your life jackets and your muck boots. We're starting this tour at the water's edge. Which sounds gentle, peaceful even. Uh don't get ahead of yourself. Fair enough. So let's step into the shoreline. This is Exhibit 123. The Great Lakes and the Consequences of Human Confidence. Today we're diving, literally, into something way closer to home than you think. The Great Lakes. Yeah, those big puddles in the Midwest. Except they're not puddles. They hold 20% of the entire planet's surface freshwater. And not only that, thousands of ships have gone straight to hell in them. Thousands of lives. Some spots even act like the Bermudo Triangle's drunk, pissed off cousin. Most people look at the Great Lakes and think big friendly swimming holes. The lakes look back and say, hold my beer. So here's the question. Are the Great Lakes mysterious because of monsters and ghosts, or because reality is already strange enough?

SPEAKER_02 4:17

Reality is always stranger than fiction.

SPEAKER_03 4:21

Agree. So let's pull the lever, Gavin. We're going in.

SPEAKER_00 4:24

Let's begin with We're diving in.

SPEAKER_03 4:31

Let's begin with fresh water and violence. Have you ever noticed how humans love pretending that big bodies of water are chill? Ocean? Sure. Great lakes, it's just fresh water, bruh. Wrong. These things are inland seas that get pissed off and eat steel for breakfast. Oh dear. Oh dear. So let's start with the Michigan Triangle. Lootington to Benton Harbor to Menitwalk. Ships, planes, people, they all just poof. Skeptics say it's weather and statistics, but believers say the lake has a personality. And it's a dick. Let's start with may twenty first, eighteen ninety one. The three masted schooner Thomas Hume leaves Chicago empty, headed back to Muskegon with six crew. They're riding high and on schedule when a squall kicks up. Their buddy ship, the Rue Simmons, turns back like a smart person would do. But the Thomas Hume, nah, they push on. And then nothing. No distress signal, no wreckage, no bodies for one hundred and fifteen years. Whoa. That's a long time. That is a hot minute. And you have to imagine, something disappearing like that. There were insurance fraud theories, piracy theories, guys going, they must have repainted the ship and fucked off to start a new life theories. People were losing their minds. Then Do we have more information on the pirates of the Great Lakes? I said piracy theories, not piracy facts. I did not dive too deep on that. Fine. You have a side project. Go go research the Great Lakes pirates. How fun would that be? That could be our next vacation. We could just go cruise around on the Great Lakes married lake board ship. We would suck as pirates. What do you mean, smob the deck? I'm tired. Get me in the mouth that. So you can understand that people were losing their minds. I think I already said that. Then in 2006, divers finally found her. She was sitting upright, 150 feet of water, almost perfectly preserved. The masts were fallen, but the hole was intact. There were personal items still in place, a locket, coins, even a pair of brass knuckles. The lake kept her secret for over a century and then, you know, casually handed her back, like, here, all done. But that's just the appetizer. Let's jump to june twenty third, nineteen fifty. Northwest Orient Flight twenty five oh one. That's a DC four airliner. There were fifty-five passengers, three crew headed from New York to Seattle. They're cruising over Lake Michigan at night when the pilot calls in a request for descent because of a squall line. The request was denied because of air traffic. And that was the last transmission. And poof. Gone. They found an oil slick, some debris, a few body parts, but the main wreckage, it was never located. Till this day. The deadliest commercial aviation disaster in US history at the time, and the plane is still effectively missing inside a lake.

SPEAKER_02 8:05

That's crazy to think about.

SPEAKER_03 8:07

Yeah, and I mean to the it's 2026. We literally have the most advanced equipment available, Gavin, and Nada. Zip zilch. Where the hell is James Cameron and why is he not funding this? No shit. He thought the Didynic was cool. That's the ocean, bruh. Go find the missing plane in the bottom of a lake. Yeah, just give the people what we want. Can you imagine if he somehow is hearing this? He's like, damn, what did I do to these losers that nobody knows? They're so mad at me. So if the Great Lakes can swallow something that big without giving us answers, what the hell else are they hiding down there? The mystery isn't that things disappear. I mean storms happen, ships sink, planes crash. The real answer is that these lakes are just so massive. They're so deep, so cold. Not only do they keep secrets, they also keep the answers. And it's not gonna give them back. Not even when we ask for it. But really, we're still in that, yeah, nature's a bastard, but what are you gonna do? Zone. Buckle up. It gets weirder. So now of course it does. It always gets weirder. So let's flip it. We're gonna put that thing down, flip it, and reverse it. Okay. Instead of what the lakes took, let's talk about what they kept. We're gonna talk about the archaeology of what the hell is that? Underwater archaeologist Mark Hawley isn't even looking for ancient mysteries at this point, he was dragging side scan sonar across the bottom of Grand Traverse Bay, about forty feet beneath the surface. Of course, he was searching for shipwrecks, because apparently that's what you do. So side scan sonar works by firing sound waves across the lake bed and building an image from the echoes. Think of it as like ultrasound, but for a lake. But then the sonar starts showing something weird. Not a ship, not a reef, not random rocks. A deliberate arrangement of stones stretching more than a mile across the lake floor. When divers investigated, they found a long line of boulders, circular stone features, and one particularly intriguing rock that appears to bear the image of a mastodon.

SPEAKER_01 10:38

What?

SPEAKER_03 10:40

So now, before anyone starts screaming it's Atlantis, there's an important detail here. When these stones were placed, they probably weren't underwater at all. Ten thousand years ago, after the last ice age, lake levels were dramatically lower. What is now forty feet underwater would have been dry land, a landscape where ancient people hunted, travelled, and lived. The media, however, naturally, lost its collective mind. Underwater Stonehenge, ancient mystery, lost civilization. Meanwhile, Holly was basically standing in the corner waving his arms and yelling, Ah, please stop calling it Stonehenge. Because despite the headlines, nobody really knows exactly what it is. The leading theories are far less glamorous, but arguably much cooler, I think. They could be a hunting drive used to funnel game, a ceremonial site, a marker on an ancient travel route, or maybe a combination of all three. So that means there is a very real possibility that while you're out jet skiing, fishing, or complaining that the water's too cold, you're also floating over evidence of people who were hunting Ice Age megafauna ten thousand years ago. That's uh dope. It makes me kinda wanna scuba dive. Like, what about the bodies of water here?

SPEAKER_02 12:05

Like, what's what's down there? I don't know, but the more you talk about these lakes, the less I want to go in them.

SPEAKER_03 12:12

Yeah, I never will. I'm terrified. But the idea is fun. Let's I just think about it and then I don't do it. That's the safe bit. That's why I have Google. So it's basically like the lake swallowed their world, preserved it, and then quietly forgot to tell anyone where it put it. It's like the planet is this chaotic old bastard who keeps receipts on everything we've ever done and occasionally drops them in the water, like, remember when you were hunting giant elephants with sticks? Yeah, I do. That's my voice for Earth, by the way. Do you like it? Yeah, we did it. Uh why is Earth a stoner in my brain? I don't know. He sounds very doofy. Yeah, bruh. I yeah, your rocks are down here when you want them. Let me know. So if you thought that was strange, let's talk about the singing sands. And yes, the sand sings. It's basically lakeside ASMR for free. For free? Full free And this is something that we could go witness because it does not involve getting in a big giant deep scary lake water. I love that for us. Same. So on beaches like Baydegree on Lake Superior, people have reported hearing squeaks, whistles, hums, and even low booming sounds when they walk across certain stretches of the shoreline. Naturally, before anyone understood what was happening, people started inventing explanations. Indigenous legends spoke of the voice of a woman mourning her lost lover. Settlers, of course, blamed ghosts, which actually honestly feels kind of reasonable, in my opinion. If the beach starts talking, ghost is not the worst first guess. No.

SPEAKER_02 14:05

I would probably assume the same. But then I wonder if it's anything like the squeaky sand in Oregon. The squeaky sand in Oregon? Yeah, when you walk across it, the sand squeaks. I don't even know how to explain it better than that.

SPEAKER_03 14:19

Well, then science showed up and somehow made the explanation even weirder. The sound appears to come from millions of tiny quartz grains. Oh so it could be applicable to organ beaches, like quartz is not unheard of. Under the right conditions, just the right size, just the right shape, just the right humidity, just the right amount of friction, they vibrate against each other and produce audible sound.

SPEAKER_02 14:48

That's fascinating. Right. I always wondered how it did it. I have videos of my little feet squeaking through the sand. I was literally having the best day of my life.

SPEAKER_03 15:02

Oh man, you did it without me, I just discovered this. So the scientific explanation is, and I quote, the beach is made up of microscopic glass beads that occasionally decide to form a choir. So that's cool. Cool, cool cool cool cool. But here's the really frustrating part. That's the scientific explanation, but scientists still don't completely understand it. They just know what conditions tend to create the sounds. But they still can't fully explain why one beach sings while another seemingly identical beach stays silent. Well, have they tried boosting its self-esteem? Like what I'm very disappointed. Why aren't you singing, girl? That's where we should go. We should investigate why the silent beaches are sad at this point. I'm here for it. But enough with facts and science. Let's talk about the good stuff. This is the part where we can finally say, and side note this is my favorite part, that the evidence has now left the building. Let's go to November twenty first, nineteen oh two. The SS Bannockburn, a Canadian steel freighter loaded with wheat, is spotted pushing through worsening weather on Lake Superior. Then the snow rolls in, she vanishes. Twenty crew, no distress call, no wreckage, and no answers. The only thing recovered was a single life preserver. But within a year, sailors started reporting sightings. A ship matching the Bannock's burn description, appearing through fog banks and before storms, and then disappearing just as quickly. I don't know why I envisioned the Spongebob ghost ship specifically, but that's my mental picture.

SPEAKER_04 16:58

Oh, definitely.

SPEAKER_03 17:01

And just like that, Lake Superior has its own flying Dutchman. Now, don't get me wrong, sailors are a superstitious bunch for a reason. When you're just out there and the lake decides it wants you, you start believing in anything that makes the terror make sense. So let's talk about different angles on how people make sense of things that they can't understand. First up, Nessie. But this time she cone fed. This is not to be She bricked up. She bricked up N Bessie, hot damn. Not to be confused with the Loch Ness Nessie. Well we're gonna talk about Lake Erie's resid no we're gonna talk about Lake Erie's resident cryptid Bessie. Can we please it's my favorite thing. And I just take a moment to appreciate that. The Scots looked at a mysterious aquatic monster and named it Nessie. The Midwest looked at a mysterious aquatic monster and named it Bessie. Exactly. It sounds less like an ancient terror from the depths and more like a cow that occasionally gets stuck in the neighbor's tomatoes. So anyway, lake cow sightings go back to the 1790s. A thirty to forty foot dark serpent swimming fast. There's newspaper reports from the 1800s, and then modern sightings in the eighties and nineties. I mean, there's plenty of plausible explanations. It could be a giant sturgeon, a misidentified wave, a hoax, or something that we haven't even found yet. And then finally, we've got Detroit's emotional support goblin. Peg your finest pardon. You heard me. His name is Nanrous, which is French for red dwarf. Legend says Detroit's founder, Antoine Delamot Cadillac, was warned by a fortune teller not to mess with Nanroge. Cadillac whacked the little red imp with his cane and told him to fuck off. That was a bad idea. You don't why why would you hey don't mess with that thing. I'm gonna mess with the thing. And I'm gonna insult the thing.

SPEAKER_02 19:24

Whack him with my cane.

SPEAKER_03 19:27

And his last name is Cadillac. Like, I'm I the mental I'm envisioning him dressed in purple fur and a top hat.

SPEAKER_02 19:36

Definitely sounds like the type.

SPEAKER_03 19:40

Anyway, Cadillac whacked him with a king, told him to fuck off, and that was a bad idea. The goblin supposedly shows up before disasters. Fires, battles, riots, ice storms, a grinning red faced creature with sharp teeth and glowing eyes. He's basically a harbinger of doom for the city. Detroit the Mothman, but for Detroit.

unknown 20:04

Right.

SPEAKER_03 20:05

And I don't know why I feel like a tiny little red goblin that is just fucking shit up is deeply on brand for Detroit.

SPEAKER_02 20:16

I like that way better than the Mothman.

SPEAKER_03 20:19

Right. Like you have your own little guy that I never knew about. I love this for you. Detroit even has a parade now where they burn his effigy. It's like the city looked at all its problems and said, you know what? We're gonna blame the little red goblin. And also, let's light him on fire. It's just like the ogre ogre. Exactly. I thought of that too. So uh this I sh wish I had this example for that episode. Not only that, people in Detroit burn tiny little red goblins.

SPEAKER_02 20:51

Those cultural appropriators.

SPEAKER_03 20:59

They've apparently got enough to deal with. My bad. Anybody from Detroit listening is like, fuck you. We're so sorry. Why do we do this? This is uh the ape brain strikes again. Because for us big lumbering apes, uncertainty is unbearable. The Great Lakes sit in this perfect, horrifying middle ground. They're lakes. It's familiar. It's supposedly safe, ringed by cities and cottages, but the Great Lakes are basically inland seas. They're bigger than us, they're older than us, every wrecked ship, every missing plane, every singing beach, every ghost light, every red dwarf goblin burning slash sighting. They're all just humans trying to explain the unknowable, but highly desired truth. So the next time you're standing on the shore of one of these lakes looking all peaceful, just remember she's listening. Human history in many ways is the story of people encountering forces far beyond their understanding and responding in the same way, summed up in one singular word. Bet. The lakes, the Great Lakes, are no exception. Well, Gavin, how do you feel? Uh did you know any of the weirdness surrounding the Great Lakes? I did not.

SPEAKER_02 22:21

And not only that. I know a vague story, I don't remember the name of the ship, but I know of another ship that went down and wasn't discovered until pretty recently. Crazy.

SPEAKER_03 22:32

Was was James Cameron in involved? No. Oh. Well fuck him. God, James. Get your shit together.

SPEAKER_02 22:41

But also, Fun Dark Podcast, James.

SPEAKER_03 22:43

Right? And he is um, I mean, love you, sorry, call me. But also, uh, a shout out to uh last episode, my coworker Nikki told me about the mammoth caves in Kentucky. Her husband uh was very jealous, so Cal told me about the Great Lakes. And when when Nikki told me that, I said, uh, and what about the Great Lakes? And it was just like, I don't know, read about it. And I did, and I was like, actually, all right. So Cal, thank you.

SPEAKER_02 23:14

Lots of weird shit up in the Great Lakes. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 23:17

Alright, Gavin. Well, I discussed large bodies of water and sinking ships. What do you got for us?

SPEAKER_02 23:24

I have exhibit 124. The story of Elmer McCurdy, a real-life outlaw. This exhibit is one hell of a story. It starts in 1880 in the state of Maine, and ends in 1977, in the great state of Oklahoma.

SPEAKER_03 23:45

That's a hell of a span of time for anything regarding an individual. I'm just saying.

SPEAKER_02 23:51

What? And in between those two points in time was written one of the strangest, saddest, and most absurd journeys a human has ever taken in American history. But like all good stories, we must start from the beginning. Washington, Maine, January 1st, 1880. An unmarried 17-year-old named Sadie McCurdy falls pregnant. And that's a problem. A massive problem in 1880, New England. It's a problem today. Where shame is currency and illegitimacy is a stain that doesn't wash out. So when the baby comes, when Elmer is born, the family does what families did back then when they needed to save face. They covered the entire thing up. Sadie's brother and his wife adopt baby Elmer and raise him as their own. Elmer grows up thinking his mother is his aunt, thinking his uncle is his father, and thinking the world is one way when it is actually another. And for a while that works. Yeah. But then in 1890, his adoptive father dies. And Sadie, his real mother, moves in to help raise him. And eventually, because secrets like this never stay buried, she eventually tells him the truth. She tells Elmer who he really is, who she really is. She tells him he was born wrong, born outside of the lines, born into a family that had to lie about him just so that they could keep him. And something inside of Elmer breaks. Oh you think? My God. Right? By this point, Elmer is a teenager, a young man in the making, full of questions, hormones, bitter and angry. He's completely disconnected and can't seem to hold down a job. He's unruly, difficult, the kind of kid who's always one step away from trouble because trouble feels more honest than the lie he's been living his entire life up until this point. Because of all of the turbulence in his life, Elmer picks up quite the drinking habit. And then his mother dies in nineteen hundred. Two months later, his grandfather passes from tuberculosis, and Elmer is left with nothing. No family, no anchor, no reason to stay in Maine or anywhere else for that matter. He's unmoored and lost in a world that wasn't designed for young people like him. So Elmer unties himself from the docks of Maine and drifts.

SPEAKER_03 26:12

Aw, poor Elmer.

SPEAKER_02 26:15

He ends up traveling all the way down to Kansas, through Missouri, picking up work where he can. He's a plumber here, he's a lead miner over there. He's acquiring skills long his travels. He's not stupid. However, let us not forget that drinking problem he has picked up along the way. And that drinking problem makes him a bit unreliable, and unreliable men don't keep jobs for very long. He gets a job, he gets fired. He moves on, he gets another job, gets fired again, moves on, he just keeps moving. This pattern goes on for years. This becomes his entire life. Drifting, drinking, working just enough to get by, never settling in, never building anything, just existing in the margins of early 1900s American working class. And then in nineteen oh seven, at about the age of twenty seven years old, Elmer joins the Army. He lands in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He enlists in the United States Army and the Army does what the Army does. It trains him. They teach him to operate machine guns, they teach him to work with all sorts of different kinds of chemicals used for explosives, like nitroglycerin for demolition. And this right here is worth sticking a note in because now Mr. Elmer McCurdy, drifter and drunk, knows how to blow shit up. Oh no. Elmer served in the Army for about three years before being honorably discharged on november seventh, nineteen ten. Stick another note in that nineteen ten. Alright. While he didn't leave the army as some sort of elite explosives expert, he left with just enough explosive skill to become dangerous. Unfortunately, he did not learn enough to know how much nitroglycerin was too much. And that difference, my friends, is where our little Elmer becomes our little outlaw disaster and his real story begins. Elmer leaves the army and immediately decides on a career path. Crime. Cold, hard crime. Just a few weeks after he is discharged from the army, Elmer and his army buddy, another former soldier, were arrested in Saint Joseph, Missouri with what looked very much like burglarly burglary.

SPEAKER_03 28:26

Don't change it. You better fucking keep that in there. That's the most adorable thing I've ever heard out of you.

SPEAKER_02 28:32

Burglary equipment. Chisels, hacksaws, nitroglycerin, funnels, gunpowder, and money sacks. This is not a good look for Elmer and his buddy. This is real bad, actually. These findings come with some pretty serious charges, but Elmer, bless his little heart with a defense. He tells the court that they weren't planning to rob nobody. No, no, no. They were inventing a foot operated machine gun. I mean, props for the creativity, but get the fuck out of here. I mean I I I'd want to know more. That that sounds pretty cool. And surprisingly, the jury buys it. Ah, of course they did. Elmer is eventually acquitted, all charges dropped, and he walks away a free man. But unfortunately, this win has given Elmer even bigger ideas. Elmer walked away from the courthouse thinking, well, if I can talk my way out of that, maybe I can get away with this whole outlaw thing.

SPEAKER_03 29:35

See, that's why they tell you not to react to the like the class cloud. Like you're just encouraging them. This is not going to be good. I already know it.

SPEAKER_02 29:45

Spoiler alert, no, he in fact cannot get away with it. Also, side note, while Elmer was in jail awaiting trial, he ran into the likes of Walter Jarrett, a career criminal and self-professed outlaw in his own right. Outlaw enough that he had himself a little pocket-sized crime committee that included names like Lee Jarrett, Albert Connor, and Billy Brown. Which those names may not really mean much to anybody. And that is fine.

SPEAKER_03 30:13

I mean, they sound cool though.

SPEAKER_02 30:16

They definitely sound like outlaw names.

SPEAKER_03 30:18

Billy Brown. Good old Billy Brown. Yep.

SPEAKER_02 30:23

Now historical records around whom was involved in the events I'm about to disclose are unclear. However, we know more now than we did five minutes ago. But I digress.

SPEAKER_03 30:34

Do we I get I need to know? Oh my god, I'm gonna explode.

SPEAKER_02 30:40

Don't worry, it's it's about to. Fast forward to March 1911, just four months after he walked out of that courthouse. Elmer is near Lennipaw, Oklahoma. He and three accomplices decide that they are going to up the ante and really dig their heels into the whole outlaw career path. They've decided they're gonna rob a train. How they knew there was a safe on board with four thousand dollars cash in it is beyond me. It was also beyond them. To Elmer, this was just a rumor he had overheard from a railroad worker. Now four thousand dollars in nineteen eleven money is big money. That would amount to roughly one hundred and forty thousand dollars in today's money. Holy shit. For Elmer and his band of foot pads, this is a life-changing amount of money. Foot pads. All they have to do is get on board, locate the safe, blow the safe up with explosives, take the cash and run for the sunset.

SPEAKER_03 31:39

Oh that's all?

SPEAKER_02 31:40

They managed to do almost all of the things required. Elmer sets the charge, but Elmer, as we already know, doesn't know as much about nitroglycerin as he thinks he does, and he uses way too much. The safe explodes. The money inside is destroyed, burned, fused to the wreckage. The whole job nets them somewhere between $100 to $500 in loose coin and bills that they scrape up from the wreckage. $4,000 gone. Vaporized. Because Elmer measured with his heart, not his head.

SPEAKER_03 32:15

Nitroglycerin is not garlic, Elmer. You dumb dummy head.

SPEAKER_02 32:22

Does Elmer learn anything from this blunder? Does he think perhaps he's not cut out for this line of questionable monkey business? No, absolutely not. However, he did get away with it. Of course he did. On September 21st, 1911, just a couple months later, in Chautauqua, Kansas, Elmer and two other men decide to rob a bank. Or did you get excited over the word Chautauqua like I did?

SPEAKER_00 32:47

Did I know that one? I know that word too. Chautauqua open to Chewilla.

SPEAKER_03 32:54

For anyone who doesn't know, Chewila is a town in our vicinity, and Chautauqua is a annual little fair slash festival that happens there. Okay, and see, continue.

SPEAKER_02 33:07

So Elmer and two other men decide to rob a bank. They spend two hours, two painstakingly slow hours chiseling and hammering through the back wall of the building to get inside. Once they finally make entry, they once again use nitroglycerin to blow the outer vault door. Success Well, sort of. They still have to blow open the safe inside of the vault. So they set another charge. Oh god. And boom. The safe doesn't budge. Oh. Their lookout, terrified by, you know, all of the loud explosions, runs away. Elmer and his partners in crime make out with one hundred and fifty dollars in loose coin and skedaddled their little bandit butts out of town before the rest of the town woke up. Come on guys, we got a skydaddle. At this point, Elmer's reputation as an outlaw is not making any sizable waves. But he's got one more job in him, a big job. He catches wind of the smell of big money. Like the kind of money that would set him, his buddies, and half the town of Chautauqua up for life. A train carrying four hundred thousand dollars in Osage Nation royalty payments, oil money. Oh is somewhere on a train down the line. That's approximately fourteen million dollars in today's money.

SPEAKER_03 34:26

I can't say that I would not attempt to be a criminal as well. No, I can say that I would not do that. But I understand where he's coming from. You might have been a very different person back in 1911. Gavin, let's be real. I would be in the circus, full fat beard lady, like I don't get me wrong, I would be hustling and I would have money, but not that kind of money. Not even a little bit.

SPEAKER_02 34:51

On October fourth, nineteen eleven, near Okessa, Oklahoma, Elmer and his gang of delinquents stopped a train. But it was the wrong train. It is in fact not the royalty payment train. It's a passenger train.

SPEAKER_00 35:05

Oh no.

SPEAKER_02 35:06

So they rob it anyways, because why not? They scored a whopping forty six dollars, two jugs of whiskey, a revolver, a coat, and a conductor's watch. Historians would later describe this heist as one of the smallest train robberies in history. Oof. Poor Elmer.

SPEAKER_03 35:24

Poor Elmer. He's got train envy.

SPEAKER_02 35:30

With his hat a little droopy, he takes his share of the loot, fills his pockets with loose chains, and marches off with his whiskey. Elmer heads to Charlie Reverend's ranch, a few miles outside of Bartlesville. This ranch has become Elmer's hideout. There's a hay shed in the back and he's made himself a comfy little spot to rest his head up in the hayloft. Elmer collapses into the pile of hay. He's sick. All of his extracurriculars are beginning to catch up to him. He's ill with tuberculosis, pneumonia, his liver is overworked from all the drinking, and he's got parasites from his mining days. His body is failing him. Elmer is only thirty one years old. He's dying and he doesn't even know it yet. But he's got whiskey, so he drinks. He drinks with the ranch hands, and he drinks until he passes out in the hay. Outside the ranch, a posse is coming for him. Oh shit. They've got bloodhounds, and they've been tracking him since the train robbery. The dogs lead them right to the hay shed. In the early morning of october seventh, three deputies surround the hay shed and they call out for Elmer to come down and surrender. Elmer wakes up hung over, he's still drunk, he's sick, feverish, and barely able to stand. Do we think Elmer's gonna give himself up willingly? Hell no. Oh hell nur Elmer decides to shoot his way out, because of course he does. We're talking about Elmer fucking McCurdy here, the baddest outlaw in the West. You're never gonna get me coppers Yeet ye The deputies call out again for his surrender, and Elmer answers with a gun. He fires first, the deputies fire back, and for an hour, this little hay shed in Oklahoma turns into the final stage of Elmer McCurdy's deeply unsuccessful outlaw career. Elmer's lying in the hay, bleeding, shooting when he can, reloading, shooting again. He's got one shot wound to the chest and it's not looking too good for our dear Elmer. And he knows it too. He holds the wound in his chest and along with it a whole lifetime of hurt and bad decisions pressing down on him. Elmer keeps shooting until he can't shoot anymore. And then Elmer fires his last shot. The barn goes quiet, and Elmer McCurdy dies in that hay shed in Oklahoma at the age of thirty one, wanted for a string of robberies that netted him almost nothing, killed by a single bullet, alone except for the men who came to collect on him. While alive, Elmer was a terrible outlaw. He lived a strange little big life, a ridiculous, tragic, messy life. Every big score slipped right through his fingers. Every plan he made fell apart at the seams, every robbery turned into a catastrophe, and in the end, all that outlaw glory he went chasing led him to a hay shed in Oklahoma. But beneath the bad robberies the whiskey, the excessive use of nitroglycerin, and the absolute buffet of poor choices, Elmer was still just a man trying to become something bigger than the life he'd been handed. He may have chosen badly, repeatedly, and with enthusiasm, but he chased that dream as far as it would go. And history, being the petty little bitch that it is, remembers him not because he was the best outlaw in the West, but because he may just have been one of the worst. And honestly, that feels about right. Rest easy, Elmer. You were terrible at crime, but damn you gave us one hell of a story.

SPEAKER_03 38:49

I why do I still find Elmer so deeply endearing?

SPEAKER_02 38:54

Like why I love him.

SPEAKER_03 38:55

He did horrible, horrible, horrible things, but I'm like, I kind of was rooting for him. Like, come on. You gotta give the man some credit, he tried. You had a rough start in life, like I get the liquor, like maybe tone it down a bit on the nitroglycerin, but we you're a good guy.

SPEAKER_02 39:14

I thought his story was just too damn good not to tell.

SPEAKER_03 39:17

And where the hell did the name Elmer go? Why are why are people not naming their crotch goblins Elmer?

SPEAKER_02 39:24

I think I will name my next dog Elmer. Or maybe my next goat.

SPEAKER_03 39:28

Actually, that would be hilarious because Elmer Fudd, meh, that would be so good.

SPEAKER_02 39:36

Well, Lindsay, that was exhibit 124.

SPEAKER_03 39:40

Oh, that was a good one. I was highly entertained, and your edging skills are just on point.

SPEAKER_02 39:46

Like I am very pleased. I will accept my award at any point in time.

SPEAKER_03 39:51

I will actually get you a plaque that says Edge Master, and no one will know what it means. Well, people will assume what it means, I'm sure, but they will be very wrong. It will be very funny.

SPEAKER_02 40:04

Why don't you lead us into exhibit 125?

SPEAKER_03 40:08

Oh, you mean the voodoo that voodoo?

SPEAKER_02 40:11

Oh yes.

SPEAKER_03 40:12

Alright, Gavin. Well, what if everything you know about Ludo is wrong? So let's play a game. When I say voodoo, what pops into your head?

SPEAKER_02 40:23

Oh, I definitely think of like a voodoo doll. Yes. And and little effigies hanging from trees and swamps. Perfect. So yeah. New Orleans.

SPEAKER_03 40:36

And all of the um coolest places that I want to visit.

SPEAKER_02 40:41

And true blood.

SPEAKER_03 40:43

And true yes, all all of literally our our favorite things. The or the most thing things we find the most fascinating. So yeah.

SPEAKER_02 40:51

Are you gonna take us to Bontal?

SPEAKER_03 40:53

Not exactly.

SPEAKER_02 40:55

Oh.

SPEAKER_03 40:55

So most people when they hear voodoo, they think of a creepy doll, like you said, a curse or zombies, maybe a skull faced spirit making deals with the devil. And if you did, congratulations. You've consumed media. Oh no. Oh no. Have I been brainwashed? For most of us, it's not just you. That's where our understanding of voodoo comes from. Movies, television, urban legends. The problem is that the more I researched this episode, the more I started running into a very strange issue. The real history was consistently more interesting than the scary version. Happens every time. It usually is. Every time. When I found a story that I thought was going to end with curses, demons, or dark magic, it somehow ended with history, community, survival, oh, and a bunch of journalists making up absolutely wild bullshit assumptions. That checks out. It does indeed. So this raises a fascinating question. Did people become afraid of voodoo because of what practitioners were actually doing? Or did people become afraid of voodoo because somebody, somewhere, benefited from them being afraid of it?

SPEAKER_02 42:10

Oh.

SPEAKER_03 42:11

No, I do say, I do say I was I was highly entertained and educated after looking into this. So just to be clear, this isn't going to be an episode where I sit here and tell you that every supernatural claim is true. We're we're not doing that. But we're also not doing the opposite. This isn't gonna be a debunking exhibit. This is a story about how stories get twisted, exaggerated, commercialized, and sometimes even weaponized. And honestly, the deeper I got into this research, the more I found myself asking the same question over and over again. Wait, that's actually what they meant? Because it turns out that zombies weren't originally about what I thought they were about. The dolls weren't originally about what I thought they were about. And actually, the scariest stories had absolutely nothing to do with the supernatural. So tonight, we're gonna start with the version most people think they know, and then we're gonna start pulling the threads.

SPEAKER_02 43:17

Ew, that sounds voodoo y.

SPEAKER_03 43:22

Alright, so actually, let's start with the things that they couldn't take. To understand voodoo, we have to go back a few hundred years. Long before Haiti, long before Hollywood, and long before anyone was making horror movies about killer dolls. Across West and Central Africa, people like the Fawn, Yoruba, and Congo practiced rich spiritual traditions centered around ancestors, community, healing, and relationships with the spirit world. Religion wasn't something that was separate from their daily life, it was literally woven into it.

unknown 43:59

Then

SPEAKER_03 44:00

Came the transatlantic slave trade. Millions of Africans were taken from their homes and transported across the Atlantic. Many would eventually arrive in Saint Domingue, the French colony that would later become Haiti.

SPEAKER_02 44:15

When you're talking about the colony, do you mean like Haiti as in like the country Haiti? Yes. Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_03 44:23

Indeed. Indeed. Fascinating. I know. Um and I've heard the term Haitian voodoo, but after learning exactly where that came from and the history around it, I listen, I have become a new person after learning all of this information. Truly. So love this for you. I know. I'm very excited to share it with you. Change me. Change me for the better. And maybe we'll change some other people as well. I love this. Yes. The people in power didn't just want labor, they wanted complete erasure. Languages were suppressed, their families were separated, African religious practices were completely banned, and Catholicism was forced upon the entire slavation. Again God damn Catholics they ruin everything. And so, by doing this their message was simple. Now here's the problem. The problem is that people are remarkably stubborn in the best way. Stories, songs, beliefs survived, and the traditions adapted. Over generations, spiritual practices from different African cultures blended together. Catholic imagery mixed with older beliefs and new traditions emerged, and the old traditions evolved. What developed wasn't a perfect copy of what had existed before, it was something brand new, something built from deep memory, and that tradition became Haitian Voodoo. By the late seventeen hundreds, Sandaming had become one of the wealthiest colonies in the world. I mean wealthy for the plantation owners, anyway. The enslaved population vastly outnumbered their colonizers. Conditions were brutal and tensions were rising. Then, in August of seventeen ninety one, a gathering took place at a location known as Boa Caiman. The details are debated by historians, but what happened next is not. Within days, a massive slave uprising erupted. Over the next thirteen years, that uprising became the Haitian Revolution, and against all expectations, the revolution succeeded. Hell yeah. Hell yeah, Haiti, get 'em. In eighteen oh four, Haiti became the first independent black republic in the modern world and the only nation ever created through a successful large scale slave revolt.

SPEAKER_02 47:08

That's fascinating. I did not know that at all. They don't teach us nothing.

SPEAKER_03 47:14

No, of course they don't, because that's on purpose, Gavin. Yep.

SPEAKER_02 47:19

It's all by design.

SPEAKER_03 47:21

Information suppression is also a form of power.

SPEAKER_02 47:25

School is not education, it's training.

SPEAKER_03 47:29

Exactly. But let's think about how terrifying that would have been if you were a colonial power. A religion associated with enslaved people who had suddenly become associated with freedom, resistance, and revolution. From that point forward, many outsiders stopped seeing voodoo as a religion. They started seeing it as a threat. And this is where a lot of our story begins, because once people become afraid of something, facts tend to become optional. So first up, let's talk about zombies. Because if there's one thing people think they know about voodoo, it's zombies. And unfortunately, almost everything most people know about zombies comes from Hollywood. You know the version rotting corpses, brain eating monsters, the apocalypse brains. Brains. It usually involves a group of survivors making increasingly terrible decisions in an abandoned shopping mall or something. But it really do be like that. It really do be like that. It isn't a serious trope. But that's not where this story starts. The original Haitian zombie wasn't terrifying because it wanted to eat you. It was terrifying because it was you. To understand why, we need to go back to the world that created the idea. Imagine living under slavery, not as an abstract historical concept. Imagine personally knowing that every aspect of your life is controlled by someone else. Where you go, what you do, who you marry, whether your family stays together, whether you live or die. Now imagine the one thing that nobody can take from you freedom and death. The suffering ends, and your spirit returns home. And then someone introduces a new possibility. What if it doesn't? What if death isn't the end of slavery? No. Immediate visceral reaction. Oh my god, no, no. What if somebody could trap your spirit and force your body to keep working forever? Suddenly the zombie becomes a very different kind of monster. And that's the true horror. The loss of agency, the loss of self, and the loss of freedom. A zombie wasn't a monster that represented death, it represented endless servitude. Which, when you think about it, is a much darker idea than anything Hollywood could ever come up with. I'd say so, damn. Where's the movies about that?

SPEAKER_02 50:29

You don't have to.

SPEAKER_03 50:35

You are not wrong. One of the most famous zombie stories centers around a man named Clervius Narcisse. In nineteen sixty two, Narcisse was declared dead in Haiti. He was examined by doctors. A death certificate was issued. This is nineteen sixty two, Gavin.

SPEAKER_02 50:58

Like this is not all that long ago.

SPEAKER_03 51:01

Not at all. And after that death certificate was issued, he was buried. Then, nearly two decades later, he showed up alive. Narcisse claimed that he had been drugged, buried alive, dug up, and forced to work on a plantation as a zombie. Researchers became fascinated. One of them, ethnobotanist Wade Davis, stated that certain toxins, including compounds found in puffer fish, might induce a death like state convincing enough to fool observers. His theories generated enormous interest, as you can imagine, but they also generated enormous criticism. To this day, scholars debate the details of this case. Was Narcisse telling the truth? Was there a medical explanation? Maybe a psychological one? Nobody knows for certain. And honestly, for our purposes, that's not even the most important part. Because the real significance isn't whether zombies literally existed, it's why the story existed. The zombie was a cultural nightmare born from a society shaped by slavery, a symbol of the ultimate loss of freedom. Then along came travel writers, sensational journalists, and eventually Hollywood. And somehow a story about the horror of enslavement got transformed into a story about flesh-eating monsters. Which is a little like finding a deeply moving memoir and deciding it would work better as an explosion film action movie. Like where's Jason Statham at this point? White people do white people shit. And as some white people shit.

SPEAKER_02 52:51

If I ever heard some.

SPEAKER_03 52:52

Us. I mean, yeah. The original meaning tends to get buried. The spectacle, however, that will survive. And that's a pattern we're going to see again and again and again throughout this entire exhibit. Because zombies aren't the only thing people misunderstood. Let's take a few moments and talk about the fact that grandma is not, in fact, a demon. One of the quickest ways to make a religion sound scary is to tell people it involves communicating with the dead, which is hilarious because a surprising number of religions involve communicating with the dead. They just use different brands. In Voodoo, ancestors remain an important part of the family long after death. They're remembered, honored, consulted, and included. Death isn't viewed as the end of the relationship, it's a change in the relationship. And honestly, that's not particularly unusual. Catholics pray to saints. Families celebrate the Day of the Dead festival. Many East Asian traditions honor ancestors through offerings, rituals, and remembrance. People all over the world maintain connections with those who came before them. Humans are remarkably consistent about this. We straight up don't like losing people, so we find ways to keep them close. In voodoo, ancestors can provide guidance, protection, wisdom, and connection to family history. The dead are remembered not because they're feared, but because they're so deeply loved. And that's where things get interesting. Because when outsiders encountered these practices, many of them didn't see family remembrance, they saw necromancy. Which, if you've never heard the term before, which if you're a fan, I doubt it, but still, it's essentially communicating with or manipulating the dead. It sounds much scarier than, you know, remembering grandma. And that's kind of the point. A person leaves food for an ancestor. Someone else writes dark ritual. A family asks for guidance from those that came before them, and someone else writes sorcery. The actual practice stays the same, but the language it changes. And once the language changes, the public starts imagining something entirely different. Like I said before, this is a pattern that we are going to repeatedly run into. People see something unfamiliar, they interpret it through their own fears, then they write down the scary version. The result is that many people came away believing Voodoo was obsessed with death, when in reality, it's often obsessed with continuity, family, community, and cultural continuity. The belief that people who shaped your life don't simply vanish at the moment they're gone. As one practitioner described it, the dead aren't gone. They're just in a different part of the conversation. That's a lot less frightening than most of the movies made it seem. I like that version way better than most other versions. Right? I mean, think about it, movies make it seem like you're communicating with evil forces and using it for bad things when in reality they're just saying what's up. We miss you.

SPEAKER_02 56:24

Well, and even in like Christian religion, like when someone dies, they're just they go to heaven, they're gone.

unknown 56:30

Right.

SPEAKER_01 56:32

What you communicate with is God and I like this way better. Same zes.

SPEAKER_03 56:40

Let's talk about religious camouflage. One of the biggest misconceptions about voodoo is that practitioners worship a giant collection of gods. That's not exactly true. In Haitian voodoo, the supreme creator is Bandier, a distant and all powerful creator that is kind of comparable to the Christian concept of God. But most day to day spiritual interactions don't happen directly with Bandier. Instead, they happen through spirits known as lois. And this is where people tend to get confused. The Lois aren't gods. They're more like intermediaries or messengers, spiritual forces associated with different aspects of life. You can think of them as somewhere between saints, archetypes, and spiritual ambassadors. Some Lois are associated with healing, some with protection, others with love or wisdom, crossroads and choices. One of the most well known is Papa Legba, a spirit associated with gateways, communication, and opening the way between worlds. In many traditions, ceremonies begin by asking Legba to open the gate so communication with other La can occur. Now here's where the story takes a fascinating turn. Remember how the African spiritual practices were banned? Mm-hmm. Remember how Catholicism was forced upon enslaved populations? Sure do. Well, guess what? People adapted. Because if openly practicing your religion gets you punished, you get creative. Over time, many lois became associated with Catholic saints. Not because practitioners suddenly forgot about their own traditions, because survival is a powerful motivator. Danbala, a wise serpent spirit, became associated with Saint Patrick. Ogu, a warrior spirit, became associated with Saint James. Easy Landor, a fierce protector, often associated with motherhood and strength, became linked with images of the Black Madonna. To outsiders this looked suspicious. Colonial authorities would see an image of a Catholic saint and just kind of assume everything was chill. Meanwhile, the practitioners were seeing something very different. It's one of the most successful examples of religion it's one of the most successful examples of religious camouflage in history. Imagine being told that you're no longer allowed to practice your religion, then responding with all right, and then immediately hiding it in plain sight. Naturally, many outsiders interpret this blending of traditions as evidence of secret rituals, hidden agendas, and mysterious conspiracies. Because apparently, people adapting to survive wasn't nearly as exciting enough. But that's what was really happening. It was survival. Again. What a cool way to adapt.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:01

Like This is all so deeply fascinating.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:05

I'm I know I'm in love with things through a completely different lens than what we're used to.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:11

Yes. Really interesting and informative. I feel like I'm being educated on something I did not know. You be insane. Even though I thought I knew stuff about it, I apparently did not know jack shit.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:23

Let's talk about the thing that seems to have terrified outsiders more than anything else. People straight up having a good time. Food ceremonies often involve drumming, singing, dancing, prayer, offerings, and community participation. Oh no, sounds so terrible. Uh where can I attend? Uh this is that sounds phenomenal. Now, of course, depending on the ceremony, practitioners may seek guidance, healing, blessings, protection, or connection with a loi. And yes, this is where we encounter one of the most misunderstood concepts of voodoo spirit possession. Within voodoo, possession isn't viewed as an evil force taking control of someone against their will. Practitioners often describe it as being mounted by lois, much like a rider mounting a horse. During ceremonies, the lois may temporarily speak, act, or interact through a participant. To the people who practice it, this is not terrifying. It's sacred, its connection. To many colonial observers, however, well, uh, they saw people dancing, drumming, singing, entering trance states and speaking in unusual ways. And they just went, Well, obviously this is Satan. Which, to be fair, that is a very efficient way to misunderstand almost anything. True that. And I'm sorry, I've been to raves, dancing, drumming, singing, entering trans states, and speaking in unusual ways. Nobody thinks that's demonic. Well I mean nobody that I hang out with. Where can we buy tickets is the And really you have to admit, from the perspective of people trying to maintain control, any gathering that strengthened community bonds was potentially threatening. Suddenly, calling something devil worship becomes a very convenient shortcut. If there's one thing that I've learned from this exhibit, it's that a surprising number of historical accusations boiled down to people were doing something unfamiliar and instead of asking questions, we got weird about it. Yeah, that checks out. Yes. But this brings us to perhaps the most famous misunderstanding of all. The doll. So let's talk about the doll. Because if voodoo has a mascot, it's probably a little cloth doll covered in pins. Movies love it, Halloween stores absolutely love it. The basic idea is always the same. Stick a pin in the doll, hurt the person. But there's a problem here, Gavin. It's not actually a traditional feature of Haitian voodoo. Of course not. Of course not. Now, that doesn't mean people have never used dolls or effigies in spiritual practices. Humans have been making representations of other humans for thousands of years. But somewhere along the way, popular culture decided that every doll with a pin in it must be voodoo, because apparently branding is important. Researchers and practitioners have spent years trying to untangle where this image actually came from. Some point to European traditions, some point to sensationalized traveling, and some point to Hollywood's ability to take a complicated subject and reduce it to a spooky prop. Now, here's a theory that absolutely melded my brain. Some voodoo practitioners, including high priest Roby, have suggested that certain dolls may have been used less like magical objects and more like visual stand-ins for actual people. And look, I want to be clear, historians do not consider this a proven fact. Evidence is limited, and there are plenty of debates about where the whole thing came from. But just imagine this for a second. You're living in a community where a lot of people can't read or write. Medical charts aren't exactly hanging in a filing cabinet somewhere, so instead you have a simple doll representing a person. A pin in the leg might mean that they're dealing with a leg injury. A pin in the head might mean headaches. Marks on different parts of the body could help track who's hurting, where, and what kind of care they're receiving. And even if that is partially true, that is one of the most incredible things I've ever heard.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:20

Yeah, show me on the bear, where the bad man touched you.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:26

With a pin.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:28

With a pin.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:30

So, because somewhere along the way, a thing that may have helped people remember who needed healing got turned into a thing people associate with curses. That's such a weird transformation. It's like finding out a first aid kit somehow evolved into a horror movie villain. Again, we can't say for certain that's where the famous voodoo doll came from, but I really love the possibility because it fits a pattern we've been seeing all night. The closer you look, the The more human the story becomes. Every single time I looked at a scary voodoo stereotype, I found a real genuine practice underneath it. The zombies had roots in the trauma of slavery, ancestor veneration became necromancy, religious ceremonies became devil worship, a possible medical chart became a cursed doll. It's almost like somebody kept taking ordinary human experiences and they ran them through a machine that converted them into a horror movie. And if you've been paying attention, you've probably realized this isn't a voodoo problem. This keeps happening. Not just with voodoo, but with people. Take Wicca, take folk healers, take druids, take indigenous spiritual traditions. Again and again you see the same cycle. Someone sees a practice they don't understand and they get uncomfortable. The scary version spreads much faster than the accurate version. And before long, people are arguing about a caricature instead of the real thing. It's just like witchcraft.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:13

Witches were mainly just women who were utilizing the plants and herbs found in the regions that they lived in and learned that they had healing properties and medicinal properties.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:25

And the same thing with indigenous people. All of a sudden, you know, white male doctors come into town stating that they know everything, and all of a sudden those natural remedies that have been working for millennia are now witchcraft.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:39

Yeah. What?

SPEAKER_03 1:07:40

Now, don't give me a- Or being stolen. Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:45

And blown up your ass.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:48

If you have no idea what Gavin is talking about, please go listen to our previous episodes. It's like a little treasure hunt.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:59

Tobacco smoke animals is what you'll be looking for.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:03

Oh, you made it too easy. Now, not every misunderstanding comes with bad intent. A lot of them do, but not every single one. But listen, sometimes fear is useful. Fear is easy, and fear spreads. Fear sells newspapers, it fills churches, it wins arguments, and it makes for great movie plots. The more I looked into this, the more I realized I wasn't just learning about one religion. I was watching the same story play out over and over again. It's the same plot with a different font. So it turns out the real monster was the PR team. Let's take inventory. We started with zombies, we ended up talking about slavery. We started with cursed dolls, we ended up talking about healing. We started with demons, we ended up talking about loved ancestors. The story of Voodoo isn't really a story about monsters. It's a story about storytelling. Because every single stereotype we've talked about started with something real. Then somebody misunderstood it, feared it, exaggerated it, or twisted it to control others with that fear. And bam, a hundred years later, nobody remembers where the story came from, but only that they're supposed to be afraid of it for some reason. The real oddity here is how often we take traditions centered around healing, family, and survival, and somehow we manage to turn them into horror movies. The question isn't whether every story's true, the question is whether we're even telling the right story in the first place.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:55

Yes, that is exactly what I was thinking.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:58

How many other things do we think we understand only because somebody else told us what they meant? So maybe the next time somebody tells you a story about monsters, curses, demons, or things that go bump in the night, it might be worth asking, who exactly benefits from you being afraid of it? Because sometimes the scariest thing in the room isn't the mystery, it's the motives of the person explaining it. And that is damning damning. So let's sum up. Here's the takeaway. The next time someone tells you a story about monsters or something that's supposedly evil, take a moment and ask where that story came from. Sometimes the scary version turns out to be true. But more often there's a much richer, older, and more human story underneath it. Don't be afraid to pull the thread. You never know where it might lead. And Google is free, my friends. Don't be lazy. Look it up. Look that shit up. Google that shit. Go Google. Go to the Google. Well, Gavin, what do you think about the truth and some theories? So much. I just loved every second of learning because it was just uh an enlightening moment every single step of the way. It was what? Wait, what?

SPEAKER_01 1:11:27

What? It was very informational, very well written, kept me on the edge the whole time. I love it. Wait a minute, am I? You are also an edge master. Yay!

SPEAKER_03 1:11:41

I demand a t-shirt.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:45

He also did a very good job of keeping it culturally sensitive and like you weren't stepping on anybody's toes. I hope not. I hope not. No, that sounded wonderful.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:55

But if if anything was offensive, please send feedback. I did my best. Please understand that it was not my intent.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:04

He did great.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:08

Alright, Gavin. So after that whole thing, what do you've got for us?

SPEAKER_02 1:12:14

I have exhibit 126, a real life oddity. Ooh. For this next exhibit, I'm going to need everybody to take a step back. Not because we're entering a different time period. That would be too easy, too normal. We're stepping back because sometimes history finishes a story, closes the book, turns off the lamp, tucks everybody in, and then you hear a faint voice from down the hallway. A whisper that says we're not done here. Ooh. And when that happens, it means somebody made a choice. A choice that started with a dead body and ended with somebody else saying hear me out. What is happening? This story doesn't start with a birth. We're not starting with a childhood or a dream or a man staring across a dusty horizon. We're starting in a funeral home. In Pahuska, Oklahoma, a dead man lies on an embalmer's table. He has no family, no money, no mourners, just an undertaker, a corpse, and the kind of silence that should have led to a burial. Normally, this is where a life becomes a record, a name on a certificate, a body in the ground, and a story that fades, but apparently the universe heard the word normally and started laughing maniacally because the man on that table was not going to disappear quietly. Not because he was famous, not because he was beloved, not because he'd done anything impressive while he was alive. Because he most definitely had not. Who is this guy? The man lying on the funeral home table was a terrible bank robber. He wasn't very good at robbing trains either. He had a silly fascination with nitroglycerin and had died in a cloud of gunsmoke and a stack of hay after a shootout with the local coppers. What is happening, Gavin? And yes, for anyone keeping track, we've met this man before. His name was Elmer McCurdy.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:14

The fuck is going on? When you mentioned the dates, when you mentioned the dates at the beginning, I was like, wait a minute, that is not thirty some years, Gavin. What are you talking about?

SPEAKER_02 1:14:25

No, I know what you're thinking. No, you don't. Didn't we leave Elmer dead in a hay shed? We did. We absolutely did. That was not a metaphor. He was extremely dead. But unfortunately for Elmer, death was not the end of his story. Not even close. It was just the beginning of his story. At least this part of his story. However, it was the end of his terrible life choices, and the beginning of everyone else's.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:53

What? I I can't even commentate on this. My mind is absolutely blown.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:01

Because once Elmer McCurdy died, the living people around him looked at his body and one by one began making decisions so strange, so greedy, so tacky, so aggressively disrespectful, that his failed short outlaw life became the least bizarre part of his biography.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:18

What you didn't w was his body what what what was his body? Why why do they care about his body?

SPEAKER_02 1:15:25

So let's give a warm welcome back to Elmer McCurdy Part 2, The Real Life Oddity. The man was terrible at crime, but he was about to become outstanding at being exploited. So where were we?

SPEAKER_03 1:15:38

Oh I don't know at this point, Gavin.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:42

The shootout ends. Poor Elmer is lifeless and the whole ordeal is finally over, along with his outlaw career.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:49

That's right. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:50

The deputies take Elmer's body to the Undertaker in Pahaska, a man named Joseph L. Johnson. Johnson does what undertakers do. He embalms the body, he uses an arsenic based preservative, the kind that really gets in there, the kind that locks a body in time. He shaves Elmer's head, washes his wound and body, dresses him up in some fancy attire, and then stores him in the back. And then he waits for someone to come claim him and pay the bill. But nobody comes. Remember, Elmer has no more family. The only thing he had was whiskey and a couple really shitty friends. Days pass, weeks even. Nobody wants Elmer McCurdy. Nobody's coming to bury him, and Johnson's got a problem, because he's got a body taking up space and he's not getting paid. So Johnson decides to color way outside of the lines.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:42

Now now Johnson here. Johnson Johnson. Um why doesn't this man just take the L? You just let an embalmed body sit around in a closet for weeks?

SPEAKER_02 1:16:54

Just People back in the early 1900s were very creative.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:00

I I found very creative ways to make money. I don't know if I want to no, I do want to know. Continue, please.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:07

So Johnson dresses Elmer in a suit. He props him up in the corner of the funeral home, puts a rifle in his hands, and he starts charging people a nickel to come see the bandit who wouldn't give up. Oh no. And the people come. They come in droves. They want to see the outlaw, the desperado, the man who died in a shootout. They want to look at his face, touch his hands, take a picture if they can. For a nickel, they get to stand next to a real dead criminal. That's entertainment, ladies and gentlemen.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:38

I can't lie, I would probably pay to see it too.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:43

Most definitely I would too. This, unfortunately, goes on for five years. For five years, Elmer stands in the corner of that funeral home, slowly mummifying, his skin turning gray and leathery, his body hardening while people pay to gawk at him. And then, on october sixth, nineteen sixteen, a man calling himself Aver contacted Johnson, claiming to be Elmer's long lost brother from California. Aver had already contacted the Osage County Sheriff and a local attorney to get permission to take custody of the body. Shortly thereafter, two men walk into the funeral home. They say that they are Elmer's brothers. They've got paperwork, they've got permission from local officials, they've got a story about taking the body to San Francisco for a proper burial. Johnson believes them. He releases the body. The men put Elmer on a train. But the train does not go to San Francisco. It goes to Arkansas City, Kansas. These men are in fact not Elmer's brothers. I knew James and Charles Patterson, carnival operators, and they just stole a corpse. Those hood winking hood winkers. James Patterson is the second in a line of a long line of people who would end up exploiting Elmer's body. Charles had heard about the embalmed bandit in Pahuska. They concocted the scheme together, and once they had the body, they gave it new names. The mystery man of many aliases. They gave him whatever name they could to get them tickets sold. Patterson is a carnival operator, the kind of guy who knows what sells. He knows people want the grotesque, the morbid, the real. And Elmer McCurdy is very real. Patterson tours him as the outlaw who would never be captured alive, and he sets up the exhibit like a little theater. Elmer's propped upright, dressed in a suit, rifle still in his hands, positioned like he's mid shootout, like he's still defiant and still dangerous. Patterson tells the story, he talks about the train robberies, the shootout, the bloodhounds, the posse. He makes Elmer sound like Jesse James, like Billy the Kid, like somebody who mattered, and people come to see him. They come in hordes. They pay their nickel, they walk up close, they stare at his face, his hands, his clothes. Some of them even touch him. Some of them ask questions. Is that really him? Is he really dead? How long has he been like this? Patterson answers every question with showmanship, with drama, with just enough truth to make it believable and just enough exaggeration to make it worth the nickel. Elmer is a hit.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:28

Money making machine. He couldn't steal the money while he was living, but god damn he's making it when he's dead.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:35

He made bank after he died. For years, Patterson hauls him from town to town, fair to fair, carnival to carnival, and the whole time Elmer's body is hardening, drying out, and mummifying in the open air. The arsenate Johnson used is doing its job. Elmer is not rotting, he's preserving. His features sharpen, his hands curl, he starts to look less like a corpse and more like something ancient, something pulled out of a tomb, perhaps. Patterson tours him until 1922. Then he sells his operation to a man named Louis Sonny. In nineteen twenty even becomes part of the official sideshow for the Trans American foot race, traveling alongside runners crossing the country.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:18

What?

unknown 1:21:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:21

Wait a wait a wait a minute. So can you imagine like Bloomsday? Like there's Aylmer Come on, Aylmer, you put you got wheels, keep up. Like what Oh yeah. People are weird and I love it.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:39

Sunny also runs a traveling show called the Museum of Crime, and he's got even bigger plans for Elmer. Picture this. You walk into Sunny's tent, it's dimly lit inside by oil lamps. The air smells like canvas and sawdust and something faintly chemical. Along the walls there are displays, wax figures mostly. Jesse James in a black coat, frozen mid-draw, Bill Doolin with a rifle slung over his shoulder, staring out at nothing. John Dillinger, pretty boy Floyd, all the famous outlaws, all the legends, all perfectly sculpted, perfectly still, and perfectly fake. And then in the middle of the room, there stands Elmer. Same pose, same setup, same dramatic lighting, but Elmer's not wax. Elmer is real. And if you look close enough, you stare long enough, you can tell. His skin is too textured, his hands are too detailed, his face has too much character, too much wear. Sonny doesn't advertise which one is real. He lets people guess. He lets them walk around the room, study the figures, and debate with each other. Is that the one? Nope. That one's too clean. Maybe it's the one in the corner. Wait, is that one breathing? And when they figure it out, when someone finally points at Elmer and says that one, that's the real one, Sonny confirms it. He tells the story, and he talks about the shootout, the embalming, the years on display. He makes Elmer sound like a relic, like a piece of history, like something worth preserving. And people love it.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:12

I I I would eat that shit up. I'm not gonna lie.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:15

There is a mummy at the ye old curiosity shop in Seattle on the Pierre. And every time I go to Seattle I have to go and say hello.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:24

I have not been to Seattle since I was a child. And it's only five hours away. I do not know why.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:31

I have to That little shop is where my fascination in oddities and curiosities begun.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:37

I mean, same. The giant whale penis as well as the little coin operated peep shows. Uh I was convinced that that was porn uh for a very long time.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:49

Sonny tours with the Museum of Crime for years. He takes it to state fairs, expositions, carnivals, anywhere where people will pay to see something strange. And Elmer goes with him, standing silent in the middle of the tent, surrounded by wax imposters, slowly becoming more and more unrecognizable as the years pass. And then in 1933, while Sonny still owns him, a man named Duane Esper gets a hold of his body. Esper's an exploitation filmmaker, the kind of guy who makes cheap sensational movies designed to shock and horrify and make a quick buck. He is making a film called Narcotic, and he needs a gimmick, so he borrows Elmer's mummified corpse and he puts it in the theater's lobby. He tells people it's a dead dope fiend, a drug addict who killed himself, and the deteriorated skin, the sunken face, the skillful hands, that's all proof of what drugs do to you, kids.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:44

He's only been dead for less than forty eight hours, kids.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:50

But it's a lie. The body looks like that because it's been dead for over 20 years. Because it's been embalmed and mummified and dragged around the country in the back of trucks and train cars. It has nothing to do with drugs. Elmer McCurdy was a drunk and a failed outlaw, but he wasn't a drug addict, and his body isn't a cautionary tale. But Esper doesn't care. He's selling tickets. He's selling fear. And Elmer's body is the perfect prop because it can't object. When Esper's done with him, Elmer goes back to Sunny, back to the Museum of Crime, back to the tent, the wax figures, and the Carnival Circuit. And then in nineteen forty nine, Sunny dies. The body gets passed on. And this is where things start to blur, because after Sunny, there's no clear record of where Elmer went and to whom. The body changes hands, it gets sold, loaned out, stored, forgotten, rediscovered, sold again, it moves from carnival to carnival, owner to owner, and every time it changes hands, a little more of Elmer's story gets lost. Poor Elmer is passed around like a piece of Tupperware. The nineteen fifties pass. The nineteen sixties. Nobody's calling him Elmer McCurdy anymore. He's the mummy, he's the dummy, he's the outlaw. But nobody knows which outlaw. Nobody remembers where he came from, or who he was. He was just a thing, a prop, a curiosity. Elmer became lost provenance. Wow. He gets loaned out to filmmakers. He gets moved to wax museums, he gets stored in warehouses, showed in back rooms, covered with tarps, stacked next to old carnival equipment and broken rides and boxes of costumes nobody worn in decades. And every time he's moved, every time he's handled, he gets a little more damaged. The skin cracks, the joints stiffen. He's not a person anymore. He's not even a corpse. He's a relic of a relic. In 1967, filmmaker David F. Friedman borrows the corpse for a movie called She Freak. Then, in 1968, Dan Sonny, Lewis's son, sells the body to Spoony Singh of the Hollywood Wax Museum for $10,000. Singh has Elmer exhibited at Mount Rushmore, where it gets caught in a windstorm. His ears are blown off. He loses fingers and toes. Singh looks at what's left and decides it looks too gruesome, so he sells it to Ed Learsh, who owns an amusement park in Long Beach called the Pike, and that's where Elmer ends up. By the 1970s, he's hanging in a fun house at the Pike. What? He's a part of a Laugh in the Dark exhibit, one of those walkthrough haunted houses with fake monsters and rubber skeletons and things that jump out at you. He's been painted over with phosphorescent paint so he glows in the dark. He's hanging from a he's hanging from a gallows, dressed like a cowboy, and everyone who walks past him thinks he's simply a mannequin.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:44

Wait, wait, wait, so they didn't tell people that this was an actual corpse. He's literally just hanging there with no context. Oh no.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:54

He'd been there for years. And nobody knows what Or who he really is. December eighth, nineteen seventy-six, a television crew is is filming an episode of the six million dollar man. Ever heard of it? Yes, indeed. They're filming this television show at the pike. They need to move some props around to get the shot that they want. A prop man reaches up to move what he thinks is a wax dummy hanging from the gallows, and he grabs the arm. And then the arm breaks off. And inside of the arm, clearly visible where the paint had flaked away is bone, muscle tissue, and ligaments. The prop man is holding a piece of an actual human being. Oh my god. The police are called, the coroner's office is called. The body is taken down, transported, laid out on a table. Coroner Joseph Choi conducts the autopsy, and for the second time in his death, Elmer McCurdy is autopsied. Lucky Elmer. They open him up and they find the old autopsy scars from 1911. They find arsenic in the tissues, the residue of Johnson's embalming work. They find evidence of tuberculosis in the lungs. They find bunions, the same bunions McCurdy was documented to have in life. They find a bullet jacket, the kind first used between 1905 and 1940. They find a 1924 penny lodged in his mouth, probably placed there by someone as a joke or a token decades ago. They find ticket subs from Louis Sonny's Museum of Crime.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:29

Wait, did were these just on his person? Like I don't know what a bullet jacket is. Is that a literal jacket?

SPEAKER_02 1:29:35

Like a bullet casing.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:37

Did they find these inside his body during the autopsy? These were not on his person, they were in his person?

SPEAKER_02 1:29:44

He very well may have still been wearing the clothing and they had just painted over the clothing and people had put things in his pockets.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:53

Okay, okay. I needed clarification. I was like, were people through the years literally shoving these things down his mouth for the autopsy to find The body weighs approximately 50 pounds.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:05

It stands 63 inches tall, the ears are missing, the big toes are missing, and the fingers. Investigators contact Dan Sonny, Lewis's son. Sonny confirms what he suspects. This is Elmer McCurdy. And then they bring in a forensic anthropologist named Clyde Snow. Snow takes the skull, he takes a photograph of Elmer from 1911, a death photo taken right after the shootout, he takes radiographs of the skull and places them over the photograph. He does something called skull superimposition, overlaying the image onto the bone, matching the structure, the eye sockets, the jawline, and the teeth. And it's a complete match.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:44

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:45

After sixty-five years, somebody finally knows who this body is. Elmer McCurdy, born eighteen eighty, died in nineteen eleven, stolen in nineteen sixteen, exploited, displayed, sold, forgotten, and rediscovered in a funhouse in 1976. The State of Oklahoma requests the body back.

SPEAKER_03 1:31:06

As if they have any ownership over it. He was born here, it's ours, give it back. It's ours now.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:14

The state of Oklahoma requests the body back. Fred Olds, representing the Indian Territory Posse of Oklahoma Westerners, convinces Dr. Thomas De Gucci, the chief medical examiner, coroner, to allow the body to be buried in Oklahoma. De Gucci agrees, and on April 22nd, 1977, there's a funeral.

SPEAKER_03 1:31:33

Okay, thank God. Uh I don't know why I didn't jump to the fact that Oklahoma wanted to give him a proper burial. That was not my first thought, but I am okay with it now.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:45

Three hundred people show up. There's an entire procession, there's a graveside service. Elmer is buried in Booth Hill, the outlaw section of Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie, Oklahoma, right next to Bill Doolin, another outlaw from the same era, another man who died young and violent. And then, because apparently even in death, Elmer McCurdy can't be left alone, they poured two feet of concrete over his casket.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:13

I mean, the temptation to go steal that specific body would be very strong because of all the media hype. I get it. I get it.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:23

They poured the concrete to make sure nobody can dig him up. Nobody steals him and nobody puts him back on display. Born in Maine, Elmer McCurdy died in 1911 in Oklahoma. Lost in wandering, somewhere in between. But he didn't get to rest until 1977. And that's the story of Elmer McCurdy, the real life outlaw and the real life Oddity.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:45

Oh my god, Gavin, you beautiful genius bastard. That was incredible. Wow. I thought you might like that. There's okay, so we we we've discussed body disposal methods previous in a previous episode as well. Um would would this interest you as a menu item? I mean, obviously it's probably super illegal. But if after you died, would you want to be just passed around like that between not knowing what would happen, like you eventually end up in a prop? I I kind of feel like that would be cool. Like my soul's not there. And if I have the ability to watch, I'll be like, where are you gonna put me now?

SPEAKER_02 1:33:28

Like when I found this exhibit, I started reading it and I could not believe what I was reading. Because the most fascinating part you would think would be the ending, and that's why he really shows up as an oddity. I wanted to know more about him, and so you get to know about who he was, where he came from, how he grew up, and then what how you know how he died, and this is like a whole ass movie.

SPEAKER_03 1:33:55

Yes. And in the first episode, like like I would never judge you because you are amazing and you pick great oddities. Part of me was like, Okay, this is yeah, this is odd, but it's not like oh no, it's it's relatively odd. Um, and you got the dates wrong, and I was like, should I tell him? And I was too panicked to say something in the moment.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:14

Where did I get the dates wrong?

SPEAKER_03 1:34:15

You didn't, but you in the first story, you said 18 whatever to 1977. Oh you said he died at the age of 30 something, and I was like, that math ain't mathing, my friend. We got something wrong there, brother. And then bam!

SPEAKER_02 1:34:32

And I was like, Rick Rolled. I was really worried that somewhere along the line it was gonna spoil it, but I think I did a pretty good job of writing.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:41

I am so glad I didn't call you out and think you got your math wrong because that would have given me a little bit of a hint of a spoiler, and it wouldn't have felt the same.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:51

Was it a good surprise though? Did it genuinely surprise you? Jaw dropped.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:55

Like the wait a wait a minute. And at first I thought like maybe we had like scrolled up and you were accidentally reading the incorrect part of something, and I was concerned. I was like, no, Gavin, stop. Thank God I have anxiety and confrontation gives me a heist. That worked out. Well, fuck me, Ron Gavin! So tonight, I took us to the Great Lakes, where freshwater showed up looking all calm and vacation friendly, then proceeded to swallow ships, planes, people, secrets, and several generations of human confidence. Then I took us to the history of voodoo, where zombies, dolls, demons, and curses turned out to be less about the supernatural, and a whole lot more about survival, resistance, family, fear, and people loudly misunderstanding things they had no business explaining.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:56

And I took us through the life of Elmer McCurdy, a real-life outlaw with a tragic beginning, a drinking problem, questionable friends, and just enough nitroglycerin knowledge to turn crime into performance art. Then we followed poor Elmer into death, where somehow his terrible outlaw career became the least disturbing part of his story. Because apparently in the early 1900s, if you died and more acclaimed, you became an attraction.

SPEAKER_03 1:36:21

So, tonight's tour gave us Angry Water, a failed bandit, a misunderstood religion, and one of the most disrespectful, posthumous road trips in American history. Which is a lot to take in. But it's also educational.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:36

In the same way, falling down the stairs teaches you about gravity, right? Right.

SPEAKER_03 1:36:42

Thank you for joining us at the Odyssey Department. If you made it all the way through this tour, congratulations. You survived the lakes, you survived the outlaw, you survived the magic, and you survived whatever the hell happened to Elmer. Honestly, that last one deserves some sort of an award. I mean, something at least coated in phosphorus glow in the dark pink, it's the least they could do. Unfortunately, for all of us, the museum is closing for the night. But don't worry, we've got more strange, disturbing, and hilarious exhibits waiting for you next time. As always, you should be excited and appropriately suspicious. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review the show wherever you listen.

SPEAKER_02 1:37:24

It helps other weirdos find us and it helps keep this cursed museum open. You can also follow us on Facebook and TikTok for clips, chaos, behind-the-scenes nonsense, and whatever falls out of the walls.

SPEAKER_03 1:37:35

We don't ask where it came from. We just check for bones first. Alright, let's get out of here before someone else finds out we have Elmer. Stay curious. Stay weird. And whatever you do. Do not underestimate freshwater just because it looks pretty on a postcard.

SPEAKER_02 1:37:50

And if you find an unlabeled oddity in the back room with a long travel history and absolutely no consent forms, leave him alone. The doors are closing. Bye!

SPEAKER_03 1:38:06

What a fun episode. That was oh. The shock I was shook to the shook to the shook I shook was shook I was shook to my core.