Squaring the Strange

It's agritainment season, y'all! So get ready to pick apples, walk a corn maze, pet some goats and maybe get spooked at a rural haunted house! Folklorist and haunted house aficionado Betty Aquino joins Ben and Celestia to discuss themes in rural haunts and why the rural spaces have become romanticized by urban dwellers. We explore some themes of gender, power and politics in the haunted houses she...

From Romulus and Remus to Tarzan and Mowgli, children raised in the wild by animals is a popular tale in folklore. But what about feral kids in real life? There have been sideshow exhibits, hoaxes and recurring instances in literature and television. Do any of the tales reported as true have merit? And could a child raised by wolves walk on all fours or subsist -- even thrive? -- on raw meat? Why...

After some discussion of suspected sun bear cosplay and UAP fallout, Ben and Celestia are joined by Jeff Debies-Carl, who has just published "If You Should Go at Midnight: Legends and Legend Tripping in America" (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2023). What is legend tripping, and do we all do it -- even us skeptics? From a psychological and sociological perspective, what are the roots, motivations, an...

Adrienne Hill joins us this week, and we discuss some current events: RFJ Jr. has presidential hopes, "The Sound of Freedom" is in theaters, and magical nanotechnology makes an appearance in pro tennis. Then onto the main event: All Things Barbie! We have thoughts on the movie, some Barbie folklore and "oopsies," the Barbenheimer phenomenon, and her enduring reputation as both a heroine and a vill...

First, Ben discusses his recent excursion to a folklore conference, where he touched a plague box and went spelunking in the Devil's Ass, then Celestia pays tribute to Las Vegas eccentric Lonnie Hammargren. For our main segment we are joined by mentalist Banachek, who (like many skeptics this week) has some thoughts on a recent New York Times piece that gives a bit too much credit to a perpetually...

Celestia and Pascual infodump about the OceanGate submersible, gallows humor and what public science and engineering lessons have been circulating in the wake of that implosion. Then we take a journey into cybermyths versus real cybersecurity concerns, under the guidance of our resident tech hero, Pascual. From "juice jacking" to phishing to rubber duckies, we go over some hacker history and a few...

After a short chat about the recent alien sightings in Las Vegas and another faked abduction case, Ben brings us his examination of the Dover Demon. This little fellow (or gal) made a two-day appearance in the 1970s then wasn't seen ever again. We look into the possibilities -- an albino moose calf, a tall tale invented by a few bored teenagers, or a prank pulled on those same teens? While not a m...

This episode is a deep dive on a slippery subject. Many cultures believe in reincarnation, the recycling of souls into new bodies again and again. Reincarnation is an underlying principle behind the idea of karma, and many non-Buddhists believe in reincarnation to some degree. Why? What signals do we interpret as proof of reincarnation, and what would count as actual evidence? Are there any harms...

After some discussion of Ed Sheeran's day in court, and then Celestia's day in Calgary for the WeCanReason conference, Pascual and Ben take us on a nostalgic and investigative journey through Chimayo, a small town in New Mexico. Why do 30,000 penitent pilgrims travel here each year? Can the dirt here heal people? Pascual walks us through the tale of a mysterious buried crucifix and Ben details his...

For our 200th episode we are joined by Matt "The Tube" Crowley and Tim Cridland, aka Zamora the Torture King, to discuss the new documentary about the rise and fall of the Jim Rose Circus. This rock n' roll version of sideshow oddities reintroduced the art of sideshow to many who had never seen it. As two of the original four marvels of the Jim Rose Circus, Matt and Tim share tales of the road, th...

After some news on Mike Lindell and a few points about popular TV shows, we are joined by the inimitable Richard Saunders, who gives us the details on his Herculean undertaking, a 12-year roundup of psychic predictions made in Australia's popular media since the year 2000. While there were no surprises, the sheer amount of data he and his teammates collected and categorized provided some interesti...

Happy Easter everyone! Rabbits are a fluffy bag of contradictions . . . represented as tricksters but also as victims, lucky or unlucky, clever or depressed, harmless or scary, rabbits and hares have a solid place in the folklore pantheon. We go over tales of hares as witches' familiars, stories about how the rabbit lost its tail, pareidolia-inspired legends about a rabbit on the moon, how rabbits...

We are joined by Peter Ash, founder and director of Under the Same Sun, a nonprofit dedicated to the education and empowerment of persons with albinism in Africa. Due to superstition-based persecution, the hardships endured by those born with this condition in rural African communities are staggering to list: from abandonment, discrimination and untreated skin cancers to outright murder by one's o...

We were inundated with news this week, so first we cover prehistoric bugs in Arkansas, the Desert Monkey King glyph in Southwest Las Vegas, the folkloric accuracies in Netflix's "Troll" movie, a new report on Havana Syndrome, and alleged gas poisonings of schoolgirls in Iran. Then Ben recounts his time late last year in Malawi, where he was able to spend time with an activist and reporter covering...

Ben and Celestia discuss the nostalgic sense of deja vu when hearing about UFOs and cults these past weeks. Then we are joined by David Thomas, who investigated author Michael Drosnin's notions of a code hidden in the text of the Hebrew Bible and how cracking that code could foretell the future. These ideas were popularized in a series of books published over 20 years ago, but the same number game...

First we nosh on some interesting tidbits about a long-dead casino magnate, a mysterious fortune teller with a prophecy about rom-coms, and a prematurely dead Simon Cowell. Then Kyle Polich of the Data Skeptic podcast joins us to talk about the Missing 411, a concept pushed by several books and movies produced by David Paulides. What or who are the Missing 411, and how are Bigfoot and UFOs involve...

It turns out the all-American fizzy sweet cola is also a veritable cornucopia of myths, rumors, urban legends and misinformation. We're not just talking about the explosive properties of Pop Rocks or Mentos. Can a Coca-Cola douche prevent pregnancy? (It can't, please don't even think about it). How many mice ended up sealed into bottles of Coke? Does Santa owe his whole look to Coke's ad agency? W...

We discuss a surprise paleoanthropological development from the past week and weigh some falsehoods coming from a new member of Congress. Then for our main topic we do an overview of romance scams, from the Spanish Prisoner Swindle a few centuries ago to the online catfishing scams that are presently fleecing Americans to the tune of $500 million a year. Longtime grassroots skeptic volunteer Wendy...

As we wrap up another year, we make a few predictions for 2023 and then answer some listener questions on what has fooled us in the past. Then for our main segment we dish on films that were right up our strange and skeptical alley. There was some brilliant folklore-inspired work involving Djinn and a puppet come to life, as well as some fantastic documentaries -- and also some absurd stuff disgui...

Ben titled this episode. In which we speak of all the reasons why you should think twice about renting a monochrome, windowless van in unfamiliar territory. From cursed vehicles to the average person's psychological priming that led police off the trail of the Beltway Sniper case, we look at the role vehicles have played in urban legends, dangerous rumors and real-life crime. How have the most com...

First Pascual and Celestia examine a mysterious woman "haunting" AI art, dubbed "Loab." Then we dip into a selection of the less famous lake monsters. There are literally hundreds. We talk about how they've spawned from either high-profile sightings/photos or questionable "news" stories from the period of yellow journalism. And even how some people have claimed copyright over a few of them for mer...

Ben has returned from adventures, so we hear about some of his travels and then discuss the Twitter blue checkmark brouhaha. In our main segment we look at Ley Lines, a literal game of connect-the-dots played on the surface of the earth. Somehow these evolved from simple common routes noticed by an early 20th-century landscape photographer to a catch-all mysterious network that affects dowsing, ps...

This week, after we take a moment to tally exactly how many kids were killed by rainbow fentanyl passed off as Halloween candy, we bring Sharon Hill on to speak about the excitement around a decade ago when Dr. Melba Ketchum announced she had tested and confirmed Bigfoot DNA. Ben sets the stage in terms of Bigfoot evidence timeline and the rise of genetic technology. Once a vacuum became apparent,...

First, Pascual and Celestia puzzle over Ben's location and discuss a few places in Vegas that skeptics might like to see while they attend CSI Con. Then we celebrate the nearly $1 billion judgment against Alex Jones and look into a minor (non)mystery about a ghost boat from WWII appearing in a California lake. Our main topic this week is a look back at our favorite scary episodes, and why they cre...

First we get sucked down a bit of a rabbit hole on all the things we never knew about crystal flutes. Then vampire expert Dr. Stanley Stepanic joins us to talk Slavic folklore, rabies and other diseases, shape-shifting, religious clashes in Eastern Europe during the early centuries of Christianity, and how all monster roads seem to lead back to vampires. Stepanic covers a lot of ground, all the wa...