135: Why I’m Obsessed With The Macabre

Direct from the Broski Nation Headquarters in Los Angeles, California. This is the Broski Report with your host, Brickney Broski. "Daradaan, da da dan, da da dan, da da dan, da da dan, da da dan, da da dan, da da dan, da da dan, da da dan. " They say you catch more flies with honey. Dead bodies also work. Though the question remains why you want flies at all. Trust me, they will come soon enough, and I've heard they go for the eyes first. "Welcome, my dear fellows, ghouls, goblins and gals, to the Broski Nation Emporium and Macabre Audity's department. I'm your host and owner, Brickney Brickney, and here today I'm enjoying a delightful oat milk vanilla cortado." Mmm, a Victorian favourite. A Victorian favourite, a lavender marcher oak latte. "Welcome, as I've previously stated, to the new and improved Broski Report set. Here on my table you have handed eccentricity and eclectic collection of Victorian oddities. And can I just say I've never felt more myself? Look at this fun unironically. This is my look. Are you out of your fucking mind? Look at me. I've never looked better. In all my 20 years of living, I've never truly looked better." Wow. "Welcome, guys." Y'all know my mother's a ghost hunter. She loves everything Macabre, everything morbid. We wanted to do the catacombs, and we didn't have time. We ended up running out of time to do the catacombs because other things took precedence. We spent way too long at the Louvre because the Louvre, in and of itself, you could spend a whole week there and not see everything. We prioritize art because that's what I wanted to do. Also, the catacombs sell out so quickly. You can only have a certain amount of people down there in a day. We finally did it. This trip around. I didn't really know the tea. I didn't know the history of it. I don't know why there's a fucking city of bones under the city of Paris. I never gave much thought to it other than, like, Dutch kind of creepy. We did a self-guided audio tour through it. This is for reference only a part of the catacombs. The catacombs goes under, I'm fairly certain, the majority of the city of Paris. It is massive, a complete, massive underground system that was built. What is it, like, 500 meters below the surface? Okay, so, 20 meters? Okay, so, 60 feet. Yes. Hello. Not 500 meters? That is a very, very long, wait, maybe I'm at 500 feet. Well, it's 66 feet. The Paris catacombs are about 66 feet deep, which is roughly the height of a five-story building. To get to the catacombs, visitors must descend 131 steps and climb back up 112. Now, that was crazy, because it's a spiral, okay? You're going down, down, down, you don't know where it's going, because I wasn't counting. My dumb ass isn't counting. I'm just like, "Oh, this is taken forever!" And it's just a constant spiral, and then you start to, there's no windows, obviously, because it's underground. You lose the natural light, the more you descend, and then these like weird fucking archeology lights come on, and it's so strange. You get to the very bottom, and then you see the steps change from, like, you know, modern construction to, like, "Oh, that's the earth." And so you go down, you descend all those steps, and we did the self-guided auditorium. They do some, you know, like any sort of tourist attraction, spoken guides, and we thought about it, and then it was so expensive, and there was only a room for one person, I was like, "We're not doing that." So they give you these little things that look like phones, and you just put it up to your ear. But, so, okay, let me start it, let me start at the beginning. Okay, so when you think about Paris around this time, this is 1780s Paris. Hygiene doesn't exist. There's really no public sanitation or any formidable public sanitation. There is disease rampant across the city and outside the city, mass graves, okay? There is no proper hygienic way to dispose of bodies in this sort of amount. So they started moving bodies from the city to these gravesites outside the city walls, sort of the city borders. That started to become a problem. And so around this time, this is revolution time, this is a time of mass outbreak, of disease, plague, whatever. One made the executive decision to take all of these bodies, burn them, exume them, and move them rather to a grave site underneath the city. Why they did this? I don't know. I will read about it in a second. But there was a series of mass, exhumations, evacuations of all of these bones to under the city. So they're literally digging up bodies and it would become a public spectacle. They would have these huge open pits where they would lift out the bodies and I mean, there were so many. It's hard to identify them, which also makes part, I have so much to say on this, but it makes part of the Paris catacombs so interesting is because it's not a traditional gravesite or even a mass gravesite for places that I've visited before, historically, where it's a memoriam, it's in memoriam of a larger sort of tragedy and they try to account for as many names as they can when it comes to major historical events like that. The catacombs is one of the only places I've ever been where it's like, this is a place of death, but it's not specific to honoring like a one person or this sort of remember me mentality that a lot of gravesites have so you descend the steps and if you've never seen a picture of the Paris catacombs, there are human bones, human femurs, human skulls stacked in a way that resembles logs like the way that you might store lumber and they are stacked so symmetrically and with such like intention and it goes on forever, forever and they let you just walk down there, none of it's behind glass, none of it's behind netting, it's just there. Skulls, human skulls have been arranged in different artistic ways. There used to be a little area where human skulls were arranged in the shape of the fucking Eiffel Tower and tourists couldn't help themselves and touched it too much and now it's not open to the public. Because the oils and grease on your fingers starts to corrode things after a while. You see this with statues, you see it with art when people touch things all the time. It wears it down to the point where eventually there will be nothing left and so my question is why are there no guard walking rails? You can bring kids down there, kids over there playing with the bones. Are you talking about the fucking sex you're all out of here? So we're walking through and it's literally just human bones and it's there. I really can't put into words the feeling that it invoked in me because y'all know I really obsess and spiral about my mortality. Like I really do. I thought this is not the first time that I have mentioned mortality and how precious life is because immortality takes away the value of life. I don't know why this is a continued talking point for me on this podcast but when I talk about vampires and when I talk about whatever, that immortality is a curse for a reason and it's not something you should want to aspire to whatever and being in a temple of the dead in this sort of metaphorical way, 66 feet underground, absolute silence. The hustle and bustle of the city above you is silent. It's not to be heard. This is a place for the dead to rest, to rest. So we're walking through. It is bones stacked up to above your head. I mean, literally, I'm eye level with the top of where these bones end. It is just halls and halls and halls and there are markers on the walls in the catacombs when you're down there that correspond to the matching avenue that's above you. Now, because of history and because of governmental, whatever, the names have changed but the little audio guide would tell you like, you're now turning right on to, what day, avenue day, whatever. And the name has changed obviously since the 1800s but it's the same street. It's the same exact street where used to be cobblestone and horse and carriage and torches and vendors and whatever, and then not even 100 feet below you are, is this silent city of resting souls who have not even been identified. So we're walking through, there are skulls arranged in a heart, there are skulls arranged in stars and crosses and temples. And every so often as you're walking through this small area that they've designated tourists can visit, there'll be a little plaque that has things in either French, Italian, Latin. There's a whole bunch of languages. I mean, I saw a lot in Latin that are little ponderings or musings about death and about mortality. And I wished that I had serviced down there because there's this app that you can scan something and it'll translate it immediately. And all of these little plaques were in French and they all had something to do with death. And that's my shit. I want to read people's musings on death and on letting the dead rest and on how all of us are going to be this one day. And the way that I am looking at these bones that were exhumed in 1786 and I'm thinking, God, that's so fucking old. This person has been dead longer than America has been a country, like, I'm having this mental existential come to Jesus for lack of a better term. About my mortality and my youth and how is youth really something that you should be sought after and is it an honor to have lived and died for something as notable and respectable as the French Revolution? You know what I mean? Like, I'm sat here with these old-ass brown bones and then you have to just walk on. You know, then you have to just like leave them there. It's a very weird thing and not to get too poetic or whatever, but anytime you visit a site like that, it's hard not to get attached to, I don't know if you all do this, but I'll go to like a cemetery or a memoriam site and I just by accident will hyper focus on one name because I think it helps me sort of imagine if I were them or if I knew them. What was this person like? You know, if it was a woman, if it was a child, if it was a soldier, like, I try to imagine what was their life like and it humanizes it to me because you walk through the catacombs. It probably takes you about an hour and a half and it's easy at the end to be like, well that was creepy. All right, let's go get a croissant. You know, it's like, this should be a, it is, it is so contextualizing. If you get me, if you make, if that makes sense, it put my life in context of everything that has come before me and will come after me and I'm just, I'm gagged. That's just there and it's open because the catacombs used to be something that only royalty and only government officials could go visit. You know, it was this sort of exclusive thing. It wasn't open to the public until I want to say, you know, the 1900s and 1920s. And they would invite you down. You have to buy a ticket, I believe. And you would have to bring your own candle. You'd have to have a candle to go walk through because there's no electrical lighting. That should probably be as scary as fuck back then. Damn. Shit. Holy shit. That was probably so scary. And if you're, if your candle went out. Holy shit. Okay, can I say something I haven't actually kind of worried about. What the fuck is the lamp dream? What is the lamp dream? And why are people, why are women on TikTok having crises? I feel like I know, but I'd like to sort of explore it. Girl, the first fucking thing is a Reddit and creepypasta link. What are y'all talking about? How have we somehow landed back on creepypasta? How? How? Actually, this, that checks out, okay. The Internet is captivated by eerie lamp story. The lamp story, Reddit, creepypasta, guys fuck you. Let's read it. All right, FBI agents, I'm entering back into creepypasta. You're gonna have to pull me out by my fucking ankles because I'm diving head deep into this bitch. Head first. Gary Monkey. Notice this is an allegedly true story posted in the comment section of an r/askreddit post. Okay. One second. Okay, go ahead and rewind for me. Let's go back to that original Google search because r/glitch in the matrix. Let me go ahead and cut to the chase of what we're talking about. I feel like I'm an apparition. I am on, I have so much caffeine in my system right now. I feel like a ghostly form. You know, when you go on a ghost tour in like a city, do y'all do that? When you go to a new city or you're like, get a check out the local hots. I always go on a ghost tour in the city I'm going to. One of the best ones I've ever been on was in San Antonio, Texas. Y'all need to go on that walk-and-tour. I wish I remember the name of the company that puts it on, but the guy dressed up like a fucking ghost. And that's how you know it's going to be good. That's how you know he takes his job seriously. And they took us to this hotel called, I think I've talked about this before a long time ago, they took us to this hotel called the Yellow Rose, like the Yellow Rose of Texas. Or maybe it's called the Elizabeth. I don't remember. It's one of those super high rise hotels in downtown San Antonio. Apparently, the top, just picked a book, or if that's cool, the very top floor used to be the surgery level, okay? And now it is permanently stained in the walls. It smells like formaldehyde, or like that anesthesia smell to sterilize things. And the service elevator in that hotel was the old body shoot because at the very basement of this hotel was a mortuaryum. It was a crematorium, you know what I'm trying to say. They would burn the bodies, the sick dead bodies. So have a great sleep tonight. Here's the lamp story. Creepypasta time! This is an allegedly true story posted in the comment section of an R/Ask Reddit post. The question was, have you ever felt a deep connection to a person you've met in a dream? The original post was made years ago on a throwaway account. A screenshot can be found here. Throwaway account because this is really personal, okay? Okay, okay. This story is also known as a parallel life or a woken by a lamp. Here we go. My last semester at a certain college, oh Jesus Christ, trigger warning guys. My last semester at a certain college, I was assaulted by a football player for walking where he was trying to drive. Note he was 325 pounds, I was 120. While unconscious on the ground, I lived a different life. I met a wonderful young lady. She made my heart skip and my face red. I pursued her for months and dispatched a few jerk boyfriends before I finally won her over. After two years we got married and almost immediately she bore me a daughter. Hey, why did you tie me like that? After two years, she graced me with her seed. Okay, I had a great job and my wife didn't have to work outside of the house. When my daughter was two, she bore me a son. What? When my daughter was two, my wife bore me a son. My son was the joy of my life. I would walk into his room every morning before I left for work and doted on him and my daughter. One day while sitting on the couch, I noticed that the perspective of the lamp was odd, like inverted. It was still in 3D, but just wrong. It was a square lamp base, red with gold trim on four legs and a white square shade. I was transfixed. I couldn't look away from it. I stayed up all night staring at it. The next morning I didn't go to work. Something was just not right about that lamp. I stopped eating. I left the couch only to use the bathroom at first. Soon I stopped that too as I wasn't eating or drinking. I stared at the fucking lamp for 3 days before my wife got really worried. She had someone come and try to talk to me. By this time, my cognizance was breaking up and my wife was freaking out. She took the kids to her mother's house just before I had my epiphany. The lamp is not real. The house is not real. My wife, my kids, none of that is real. The last 10 years of my life are not fucking real. The lamp started to grow wider and deeper. It was still inverted dimensions. I heard voices, screams, all kinds of weird noises, and I became aware of pain, a fucking shit down a pain. The first words I said were "I'm missing teeth" and I opened my eyes. I was laying on my back on the sidewalk, surrounded by people that I didn't know. Lots were freaking out. I was completely confused. At some point, a cop scooped me up, dragged, walked me across the sidewalk, and grass, and threw me face down in the back of a cop car. I was still confused. I was taken to the hospital by the cop and gave CT scans and shit. I went through about three years of horrid depression. I was grieving the loss of my wife and children and dealing with the knowledge that they never existed. Holy shit! I was scared that I was going insane as I would cry myself to sleep hoping I would see her in my dreams. I never have, but sometimes I see my son, usually just a glimpse out of my peripheral vision. He's perpetually five years old and I can never hear what he says. Holy shit! Okay, this was a little addendum, a little post script that the author added. I've had many private messages describing similar experiences and three posters stating such experiences are impossible. I'd say more research needs to be done on brain functions. Pre-meds students don't assume you know everything. Holy shit. I feel like purgatory is scarier than hell. Well hold on let's talk about this. Is purgatory meaning your stuck between ins, stuck between worlds? Is that limbo state scarier than the torture of hell? Like being a lost soul. Let's see what Dante has to say about purgatory. Dante, purgatorio, summary. In Dante allegory's purgatorio purgatory is a mountain where souls are purified from sin and prepare for heaven guided by Virgil and consists of terraces that spiral, spiral upwards. The mountain has terraces that spiral upwards each representing a different level of purification where souls are cleansed of specific vices and virtues. Dante guided by the Roman poet Virgil travels up the mountain of purgatory encountering souls who are undergoing purification and learning about the nature of sin, vice and virtue. Dante and Virgil meet repentant excommunicate souls including souls who delayed repentance and souls who died violently. The journey through purgatory is a quest for freedom and a preparation for entering paradise where souls can finally achieve eternal happiness. Okay tea, when I think of purgatory, I think you're trapped there. You are a wandering soul who will not and has not been laid to rest. Purgatory meaning. In the Roman Catholic doctrine, this is what purgatory is. A place or state of suffering inhabited by the souls of sinners who are expiating their sins before going to heaven. Oh, so it's an in between. Oh, like a toning. XB8. XB8. Great work. Purgatory is also referred to as mental anguish or suffering. It's purgatory a good or bad thing. Okay, this is from Corpus Christi P.H. X. The Corpus Christi Catholic Church of Phoenix, Arizona. Purgatory provides us with hope because God and His justice does not simply cast us out of His presence for all the messes we've made. Rather, in His mercy, He gives us an opportunity to cooperate with the redemptive work of Jesus and together with Him, we can clean up those messes. Why can't you do, isn't a point of you do that when you're alive? Right? Because if you wanted to convert, you'd do it while you're alive. Well, what if you weren't given the chance? What if you died before you were given the chance? I don't know, dude. I'd rather be in purgatory than hell. But what is involved in purification? What is involved in purification purgatory? Farming going. The purification involves suffering and a sense of fire, but the exact nature of this cleansing is not fully defined by the church. The pain of purgatory is a pain of love, a purifying suffering that atones for sins and reestabishes holiness and justice. See, this is where y'all start to lose me. Pain is not the way to, I don't, I just like that shit makes my skin crawl. I don't know. I'm not the one. The souls in purgatory are conscious of their personal responsibility for the delay in seeing God. But this is right. This is the eternal philosophical question. If you have never been exposed to God or to Christ or to any organized religion, and you die that way, you live and die never knowing who Jesus Christ is, are you damned to hell? And is that your fault? Or is that the missionaries fault? The missionaries never got to you? The mission to be punished. I just have never understood this idea. I remember someone saying that to me when I was still going to church of like, yes, they're going to hell, but they have an opportunity to an opportunity. Where are we fucking talking about? It's, it's this sort of dumb ass lacking, like not all encompassing doctrine that really makes me question like, how can you dedicate your whole life to something like this when there are such big plot holes? There's plot holes in the religion. This feels so exclusionary in a religion that is by definition, inclusionary. I will never understand it. And I've tried. I've tried to understand it. Anyway, I've been thinking a lot about death because what's new? I've been thinking a lot about death recently because Cersei is addicted to mortals. She loves them. And she finds them to be very interesting and intriguing and how emotional they are, how weak they are, but at the same time, so strong and how there's beauty in the imperfections because when you are surrounded by beautiful immortal gods, goddesses, nymphs, dry ads, niads, whatever the fuck, if beauty is the norm, then somewhere along that path, the roles become reversed, right? If that's all you see, then something off the beaten path or out of the norm is the new beautiful. So for her, when she sees marred skin or sunburn or age lines or smile lines or scabs or calloused hands, she thinks it's the most beautiful thing in the world. And honestly, it been freaking out a lot about this because as a kid, quote unquote, I say, she's thousands of years old, as a child, when she first realized that mortals die. And not only do they die, but their lifespans are so short, she was like, why is no one pitying them? Like, why is, how can this happen? Like, it's this very innocent, what do you mean they die? Because immortality is the norm. And I've just been thinking a lot about death recently because what the fuck? Well, let me read this. I underline something because it made me fucking spiral. And if the real broskination comrades remember, when I went on mythical kitchens, last meals, and me and Josh had bonded over mythical chef, Josh had bonded over how death is our biggest fear because what do you mean it's just over? And also being raised religious and being x religious now, any sense of comfort or certainty that I had has been ripped from under me. The rug has been pulled. So now it really is me versus the darkness. It's me versus nothingness. And there is nothing. I don't know why I'm laughing. It's not funny. There's nothing scarier to me genuinely than the great beyond. Then this is it. And while it fills me with a sense of optimism, and I want to live my life to the fullest, the flip side of that coin is just eternal dread and a childlike fear of pain, of darkness, of loneliness, all of it kind of balls up into one big tumbleweed of anxiety. And that's kind of what's going on in my head. So anyway, let me find this passage. Sorry. Here is a passage from Cersei. Okay. So I've page 159. And I'm about to butcher these names. So just bear with me. Icarus, datalus, area Adne, all gone to those dark fields where hands worked nothing but air, where feet no more touched the earth. If I had been there, I thought, but what would it have changed? It was true what Ermi said. Every moment morals died by shipwreck and sword, by wild beasts and wild men, by illness, neglect, and age. It was their fate, as Prometheus had told me, the story that they all shared. No matter how vivid they were in life, no matter how brilliant, no matter the wonders they made, they came to dust and smoke. Meanwhile, every petty and useless God would go on sucking down the bright air until the stars went dark. I just kind of read that and I had to close the book. And honestly, the episode that I did when I came back from the Paris catacombs where I was like truly having a freak out spiral, reading this book, I'm finding myself back down in the catacombs and that just wash over me of this cannot be. It's like an incredulous disbelief of this cannot be me one day. Like the catacombs is such a visceral experience. You are face to face with death. These skulls and human bones are not behind wire. They're not behind net. You can go up and touch it. Don't, don't do that. But it's that close and it's on eye level and it is a human person's skull. And I just, it made me freak out. I don't know what makes me freak out more actually. The fact that it'll end or the fact that this is all I get or life is so fragile like you could die before your meant to or. the oblivion of it all, like death is loneliness. And that's why it's so important during life to bask in the comfort and love of your own presence. Up here and in the end, this is dark. And I don't know if I really agree with this, but like you are all that you have in your mind. That's why dementia scares the fuck out of me. Anyway, I'm actually gonna hear who's where I was going with this. Okay. I want to look up, both on this podcast and in my free time, what is the solution to that spiral of thinking? Because it's not a fun one to go down. And I, I don't find myself following the spiral often, but it does hit me, especially with books like this where I'm like fucking hell. Also, the story being told from an immortal's point of view is like, it's not necessarily preferable to being mortal, so just throw that out there. But I want to know a metaphorical salve or a serum to quell those thoughts when they start or some form of just comfort and outside the bounds of religion. I know the simple answer is, oh, just believe in God, believe in eternal life, you know, find your way to any of these prophetic deities and confess your loyalty and your whatever and promise to do. Okay. Now what? It's also one of those things where I don't really believe it as I'm saying it because I'm saying it for a selfish purpose. And that is what my issue with Christianity was. From the moment that I was acquainted with the idea of baptism or of salvation, it was from a purely selfish point of view. When I told you that story, my pastor said, if you're not for sure, if you died tonight, you're going to have and put your fucking hand in the air. And I said, well, hell, girl, I'm 11. That was bred out of a sense of helplessness and selfish worry for my own soul. Not because I believe that Jesus is the light in the way and the this and that and the whatever. It's, that's the disconnect. And I feel like the puzzle pieces never really fit together for me. And I'm struggling for that to find and keep that sense of certainty and security that I used to have. And also the validation of a church community telling you, you're doing everything right. You know, you are not alone. He walks beside you. All these things where you're getting positive, echo chamber feedback from people who believe the same or would like to believe the same for themselves. And it helps with the delusion. But being so far removed from the church, I have none of that now. And I don't miss the church. But this solitary solitude, it's too much sometimes. Let's look up some superstitions. In America, some people believe in the magical powers of black cats. I do. I do. And I know that a lot of you were gonna say, it's unfair prejudice toward black cats. I don't know, man. I don't know. I don't walk under ladders. I don't do the broken mirror shit. I, when I see a black cat, okay, they're cute. They are cute. I will admit that. And they look like toothless, especially if I can see they're new teeth, they're kind of sweet. But I don't, I'm not gonna touch it. I don't know. I don't know. It's how I was raised. I don't put a hat on a bed. We've talked about this before. That's an old cowboy superstition. I don't do that. Like, there's just some things where it's like, I don't know if it's real or not, but I'm not gonna do it just to be saying. And it makes me sound stupid as fuck, but I'm not gonna do it. Okay. In North America, it is bad luck if a black cat crosses your path. And good luck if a white cat crosses your path. Now that's racist. In Britain and Ireland, it's exactly the opposite. The blue cat in Russia brings good luck. The blue is often viewed as a gray cat. What the hell? Owls, many people used to believe that owls swooped down to eat the souls of the dining. If they heard an owl hooting, they would become frightened. A common remedy was thought to be turning your pockets inside out and you would be safe. Humans are so dumb. Like, what do you mean? Discat bad, discat good, seeing owls turn my pockets inside out, lick assault lick. What are you talking about? But I get it. At the same time, I get it because like I can't put a hat on a bed. (laughing) I can't do it. I don't know. Some believe if you catch a snail on Halloween night and lock it into a flat dish, then in the morning you will see the first letter of your sweetheart written in the snail slime. And I know some of you freak weirdos are gonna do that tonight. I know some of y'all are gonna do that. Dumb supper. No talking at the dinner table. The dumb supper was brought to America by the Africans. This is an eerie hallomus meal where nobody is allowed to speak, not even whisper. It encourages spirits to come to the table. In Britain, people believed that the devil was a nut gatherer at Halloween nuts were used as magic charms. Peel an apple from top to bottom. The person with the longest, unbroken peel would be assured the longest life. Oh, that's scary. If you threw the apple peel over your shoulder, the initial it forms upon landing is the initial of your future mate. See, that should stew because what if you're already married? What are you supposed to do? Now you're fighting with your husband. Now, now you're laying in bed fighting this. I told you that we were supposed to be together. I told you that this wasn't gonna work out. And we were through it, and I know that we had the kids. And I just feel like my soulmate's out there. I just feel like he's out there. In fighting with your partner. In ancient, I'm gonna mispronounce this, and I'm sorry, it's the Irish word for the festival. Shaman, S-A-M-H-A-I-N, Shaman festivals. Bats would swoop over blazing fires to eat the mosquitoes. If a bat flies around a house three times, it's a death omen. If bats come out early and fly around playfully, it's a sign of good weather to come. If a bat flies into a house, it is a sign that ghosts are about and maybe the ghost let the bat in. If a bat flew into my house, I'd kill myself. If a bat flew into my fucking house, call the police. Call the fire department and set my house on fire. I can't live there anymore. That's the bat's house, it's not mine. Knock on wood. Oh my God, I do this all the time. If a girl puts a sprig of rosemary herb and a silver six pints under her pillow on Halloween night, she will see her future husband in a dream. All right, let me repeat that for all you weirdos. If a girl puts a sprig of rosemary and a silver six pints under her pillow, what is six pints? Not in general circulation and has no face value in the UK. Fuck. Though a decimal six pints was briefly valued at 2.5 new pints, okay, well, what would it be? It's 140th of a pound or half a shilling, 140th of a pound. I can't even do that math and I don't give a fuck. And I don't care too. Knocking on wood keeps bad luck away. You should walk around your home three times backwards and counterclockwise before sunset on Halloween to ward off evil spirits. But here's the thing, right? There's so many conflicting customs and traditions and best practices because sometimes on Halloween, as we've read, you're inviting the spirits in, okay? Like reconnecting with loved ones or lost souls. Now other times you're wording away bad spirits. So are you inviting them in or are you making them go away? Pick one. And you know what's really actually the most scary of all is that I put this white ass face paint on my face and my hands match and I didn't paint my hands. I'm just that fucking white. I'm just simply that white. It's upsetting. Why knock on wood? Superstition with roots and pagan and Christian beliefs. And by the way, we can't say lives. It's lives, but we can say belief beliefs. Well, I guess there's not an E on the end of that word. Never mind, answer my own question. Knocking on wood is an apotropaic tradition of literally touching, tapping or knocking on wood or merely stating that one is doing or intending to do so in order to avoid tempting fate. After making a favorable prediction or boast or a declaration concerning one's own death or another unfavorable situation. Apotropaic magic or protective magic is a type of magic intended to turn away harm or evil influences as in deflecting this fortune or averting the evil eye. Apotropaic observances may also be practiced out of superstition or out of tradition as in good luck charms, amulets, or gestures such as crossed fingers or knocking on wood. Many different objects and charms are used for protection by people throughout the world. Yeah, whoa, that is nuts, honestly, because all this shit permeates every single religion and they're all pagan superstitions. And that, like by definition, is what's the word. A religious, it's blasphemous. It's blasphemous, but we still do it. There are connections between ancient spirituality and trees influencing fortune. In the pre-Christian beliefs of the Germanic people, For example, three norms set fate up into the universe through a tree. Languages descended from these people include concepts such as knock on wood, touch wood, or three times wood, although only the first two expressions are in the descended English language specifically. Meanwhile, the ancient Celtic peoples also believe that the act of touching wood called on spirits or gods of the trees. Christians tie the practice to the symbolism of the wood of the cross of crucifixion. So much to keep up with, pick your poison, whatever makes you feel protected, I knock on wood, I don't walk under ladders, I dress up as Uncle Fester and I have my period. Okay, those are the four things that I kind of do to make myself feel protected. Sometimes having your period is a form of divine protection because what are you doing? What are you doing down there? You need to protect what's going on down there. There is a hotel in Austin called the Driscoll. And I know a lot about the Driscoll because I've done ghost tours of Austin, I've done a couple and the Driscoll is always a hotspot and it's a very interesting history with the Driscoll because it's that old like cattle oil baron money that built it. And I think the history is like they built it and that kind of went in the red and then it was so expensive because they were trying to recoup their money that no one could stay there and then it kind of shut down and someone else bought it and it was you know, whatever. And Driscoll I believe was, he was a cattle baron. The Driscoll Hotel, one of the premier historical hotels in Texas was opened in 1886 by Colonel Driscoll, a wealthy cattle baron. I'm so smart. The hotel cost $400,000 to build, which is equivalent to 92 million today. It's a Romanesque style building with 60 rooms. Look at that. It's so cute. I love it. It toasted many high society and political events. Okay, so these are the ghost stories because that's of course that's where I was going with this. The Driscoll is always a hotspot on ghost tours because there's a very famous story, two very famous stories of a little girl who stayed there. I think named Samantha, who was the daughter of I think a politician or one of the wealthy guests who stayed there and she was playing on the staircase while her father was, you know, at the top of the stairs, something like that. And she had this little wooden ball that she was playing with. And I don't know what happened. I don't know if it was a spirit that pushed her or something like that or if it was just a child's sort of lack of coordination, but she sadly fell down the stairs and died. And the wooden ball rolled down the stairs. And that's how I think the father found her or something like that. They always tell that story because sometimes the hotel staff late at night have reported they hear a wooden ball like rolling down the stairs. You're like plopping and then they look in nothing's there. It sounds like a wooden ball. And so that's one of the stories. Very sad. The second story is it's right here. It has to do with room 525. It's the story of a dead bride who killed herself in room 525 after her fiance called off their wedding. And I don't know what the full story is. The gist of it is this. Exactly 20 years to the day and in the same hotel room is the original suicide bride. A second young bride took her life in the bathroom while on her honeymoon. After the second rumored death gathered some attention, the hotel's room 525 has become notorious for its bad karma. It's like this has been on ghost shows and stuff like it's really something sinister in that room. There's also a hotel in San Antonio, which I've always known as the yellow rose hotel, but it's actually called the Emily Morgan hotel. And Emily Morgan, her nickname was the yellow rose, which is like the yellow rose of Texas. It's like a thing, few for Texas you know. So the haunted hotel San Antonio named for the young woman they call the yellow rose of Texas, Emily Morgan, holds more than the spirit of its namesake, especially on the ninth floor. The Emily Morgan hotel is opposite the Alamo, perhaps San Antonio's most famous historical destination. And the story is, so this building, this hotel used to be a hospital during the time of like battle the Alamo. And the top floor was like the very top floor was the surgery and like emergency, you know, surgery floor. There was what is now the service elevator used to be a body shoot down to the crematorium on the very bottom floor. Now it is a fully operational like it's like owned by Hilton or or Hyatt or something like that. And I went on this ghost tour and they told us about it and I literally got a chill down my spine because he was like you can see for yourself you go up to the top floor and it smells different than the lobby. You know you go in the lobby, it's a normal like it's a beautiful, you know, Texan themed touristy hotel. Go up to the top floor, permanently in the walls, it smells like formaldehyde. It smells like antiseptic and it like like that sort of medicinal smell. And sure enough, we went up the elevator and we went up to the top floor and it has that smell. It smells like a fucking hospital. And I was like, oh, guests have reported that they hear gurneys going down the hallways in the middle of the night. Dude, be serious. They have reported that they hear screaming like people being operated on because back in those days there was no anesthesia. Okay, banging on walls. The squeaky wheels of a gurney or like, you know, hospital beds being wheeled down the hallways. And then of course the service elevator, which it's always the service elevator pitch. The body shoot. And so we went up there. Also, I need to confirm that. I need to Google it. But the swimming pool, which is on the roof, is particular because it's made out of metal. Like the bottom of it is made out of that silver metal that I think used to be the hospital bed. Something like that. Let me look it up. Okay, among the most famous is the apparition of a nurse from the 1920s or 1930s. Guests have claimed to see her in the hallways tending to her unseen duties. Yet when approached, she vanishes into thin air, leaving behind a palpable sense of the supernatural. Additionally, elevators within the hotel have exhibited peculiar, peculiar behavior. Guests have reported elevators and explicably stopping on the seventh floor. A floor unoccupied and inaccessible to guests. A cold chill and a sense of unease often accompany these elevator anomalies, leaving guests with goose bumps and a sense that something otherworldly is a foot. Room 810, where shadows watch and whispers haunt. If you dare to stay in room 810, prepare for an encounter with the unknown. Guests have described waking up in the middle of the night with an unsettling feeling of being watched. Others have heard faint whispers in the room where they were alone, adding to the room's eerie reputation. The mysterious phenomena extend to unexplained noises, like footsteps echoing in the night. On the ninth floor, a guest reported hearing distinct footsteps in the hallway, prompting an eerie investigation that revealed no one inside. A particularly chilling experience took place in the lobby, where a lone guest felt a sudden cold touch on their shoulder while seated in an armchair. The touch was undeniable, yet when he turned around, no one was around, leading the guest to question whether a spectral presence had made itself known. This, I think, all this shit's real. Like, sorry, I do think that there are my mom refers to it as residual hauntings, where those ghosts, ghosts, spirits, whatever are stuck in a loop associated with this building, and they're doomed to experience that same loop for whatever reason, forever and ever. Maybe there's something tethering them there, maybe it's unfinished business, maybe the tragedy of what happened to them is just forever going to link them to that place I don't know. The hotel's lobby has seen it share of other worldly apparitions. Guests and staff have reported witnessing shadowy figures or misty forms late at night. These apparitions often appear and disappear mysteriously. For some, shadowy figures are a haunting reality, and one reported incident, a guest encountered a dark, indistinct silhouette in their guest room. As they watched, the figure slowly dissipated, leaving them shaken and bewildered. And it's always like, you know, when a ghost quote-unquote is present, the temperature in the room drops, that's a thing that that my mom has also kind of confirmed is that you can feel the room get colder. While the seventh floor, ninth floor, and room eight-ten may steal the spotlight, paranormal activity has been documented on various other floors. Guests have recounted hearing footsteps, voices, or whispers, and hallways when no one else is around. Some have described an eerie and oppressive atmosphere that lingers in certain corridors as though the past refuses to rest. Electronic devices have been known to act on their own, accord, within the hotel. Guests have reported TVs and lights turning on or off by themselves in their rooms. Some guests have even experienced unexpected malfunctions of their electronic devices while staying at the hotel. Even the hotel's meeting and conference rooms have not been spared from paranormal reports. Attendees of events and meetings have shared stories of hearing strange noises, witnessing objects moving on their own, and encountering unexplained cold spots within these spaces. It seems that the supernatural doesn't discriminate when it comes to business or pleasure. You know, and then a bunch of reports of like guests feeling like someone's watching them sleep. I mean, look at this hotel, dude. It's beautiful. It is so beautiful, but we went in there and knowing that the basement used to be the morgue, like literally it was refrigerated like the morgue, the surgery on the top floor and for any failed surgeries, they'd just throw them in the body shoot directly down to the morgue, down to the crematorium. It's just like, who the fuck was like, you know what? Hotel. Okay, we got all these rooms. How about a hotel? I'm thinking high it. I'm thinking Hilton. Crazy. How did I get started talking about ghost stories? Oh, the Driscoll. If you're ever in Austin, I would recommend staying at the Driscoll. It is beautiful. It's in the heart of downtown. The bar. If you don't stay there, go to the bar. It is so Texan. It's exactly how I want my house to look. And cocktails are delicious. The staff is really, really nice. And they'll answer any questions. I love staying at haunted hotels because you can ask them and everyone always has a story. Like it's crazy. I recently rewatched the first Sherlock Holmes with Robert Ninety Junior. Not the Benedict Cumberbatch TV show. The 2009 Guy Richie directed film, Sherlock Holmes, starring Jude Law and Robert Ninety Junior. I recently rewatched it. I've seen that movie probably 150 times. And I watched it through my 26 year old gaze. And I just like, I appreciate I think on such a more than just a topical level, the attention to detail of doing a film like that, like based in Victorian London. And there's such a campness of doing a film based on, you know, a Victorian writer, a Victorian author and doing it in like just time period. I don't, maybe I'm just gagged by time period accurate movies. (laughing) Maybe I'm just like really impressed by that. But like the attention to detail was so good. They brought in a Sherlock Holmes expert, which didn't know those existed. And I guess it's just one guy who just like, really fucking love Sherlock Holmes. It's like like his penis is just really hard for Sherlock Holmes for some reason. And they brought him in and like had him counsel R.D.J. on how to accurately play, you know, Sherlock would never do this. He would do this and the dynamic between him and Watson to be more so this, not that. And it was such a delicate balance that they struck between the two characters and the chemistry between Jude Law and R.D.J. It's just fantastic. If you haven't seen the movie, please go watch it. It's very important to me and my lore. Don't know why. I recently re-watched it and I was like, here is the thing. It's exactly what I want to be. It's exactly I want to be Sherlock Holmes, dude. Okay, it's not even like I don't even want to fucking. I don't want to be Sherlock Holmes in my mind. I could be. Okay, plus size, size g, tit, Sherlock Holmes. All right, guys, pitching this show to HBO, we are going to do a plus size American, Southern American remake of Sherlock Holmes, starring yours truly. And guess who my Watson is, Sam Hartman. And I'm fucking him, okay? And this is when Holmes and Watson are fucking, okay? That's beside the point. That is a B plot to the A plot line of me being Sherlock Holmes, stay with me. What I love about how R.D.J. played Sherlock Holmes, because I'll talk about Benedict Cumberbatch in a second, is it's a beautiful mix of, of course, he is wickedly intelligent. His deduction techniques and skills are unrivaled. He is a weapon to be utilized by Scotland Yard or whoever, you know, these private people who hire him as a private investigator, whatever. Like, of course, he's like the detective. He solves the mysteries, whatever. I appreciate how observant beyond, you know, deducing things about a crime scene or a person to come to a conclusion or, you know, one of the facts sort of thing. I appreciate how observant he is as a person. There is a scene in the first Sherlock Holmes. He's sitting at dinner. And he's early, he's waiting for Watson and Mary, his wife to arrive. And he's just sitting there and he's got his clock open and he's like just listening to the clock and he's observing and listening to every single thing that's going on in the room. I know this is a movie, dude. I know it's a movie based on a fucking book indulge me. He's sitting there at the dinner table, dressed to the nines and he's looking around and he hears how loud and fucking boisterous all these rich people are and this thing he's not impressed by it and then he looks over here and he sees a bus boy shining some of the silver and looking around and making sure no one's watching and he slips one of the spoons in his pocket. Okay, he's gonna go pawn off the silver for money and then he sees someone else, you know, scars that someone has or, you know, maybe a hidden weapon or a hidden tattoo or maybe some skin. There's a scene where he's making deductions about Watson's wife and he goes, you know, you're wearing all these gyms and purls but what I'm more interested in is the stones you're not wearing and then she immediately kind of goes to cover her left hand and he goes, you were engaged, you were betrothed and on her skin is like a tan line of where she used to wear her engagement ring and then he goes on to deduce honestly incorrectly that she left her husband because she wanted to marry a rich doctor and because he's trying to preserve his friend's integrity you know whatever, or his pride. And she pours wine on him. I'm just kind of telling you the plot of the movie at this point, but she goes right on all counts apart from one Mr. Holmes. I didn't leave him, he died. Right, and so now he's humbled and he feels like a dick and then she gets up and leaves. But it's things like that of like you are so, almost you are observant to a fault. And again, I know this is a movie, but I want to be more like that. I could have fucking slayed in 20th century London, okay? No baths, big dresses to hide Fupa, okay? You're not showing Fupa dude, you don't want to show Fupa? I would have been smearing that like mercury and lead makeup all over my face. I would have had rotted teeth. Hey, but they would have wanted me, okay? Who want me? Victorian Brittany, who want me? Yeah, dude, I would have slayed so much of the society back then. It was so, I mean, like any truly any society is, it was a caste system, it was, you know, classes. And the wealth gap was so stark. This was industrial revolution, turn of the 20th century, Victorian England. You know, this is, it's a corrupt government and it's patriotism, but also revolution is happening. And it kind of swells with this like, there's a weird socialist movement that's going on in the teens and the 20s and the 30s. And then there's the rise of fascist leaders in the teens, 20s and 30s. And it's like so much is happening. I could have slayed as a brain dead housewife. I would have worn one of those little, the big butt dresses. And I would have had one of those fancy little fascinator hats. And I would have had just mercury lead in my mouth. Just oozing, drooling all over my chest, okay? And I would have been wet off to some fat ugly man, but he would have been rich. And I would have gossiped with my girls. I would have ate sweet food. It was just sweetest sugar. The Coca-Cola had cocaine in it, dude. I would have been 11, high and mighty. Take me back. Take me back to 1893. I really would have slayed. Like it really would have been a moment. Would I have smelled like pus, yeah. What's wrong, hold on, wait, what's wrong? Everyone smelled like pus, come back, where are you going? Wait, where are you going? Oh, it's me, I smell like pus. Oh, sorry. A lot of you bitches are disturbed. A lot of you bitches are spooky and weird. And that's why I like you. You have stories to tell. You have things to say. And this is a big story. And this is, above all else, a kind of forum for the weird, spooky, disturbed bitches to speak to me. Come to me, speak to me. And so my Squire Elizabeth has put together a Google form. I think like two, three weeks ago, at this point, wherein she asked Prosky Nation to submit their ghost stories. I am prepared to read one to three of those right now. And I'd like to incorporate this every week where we kind of end on a Prosky Nation ghost story. And I either react to it and have some insight. Or it haunts me and I have to go to bed alone. So let's go ahead and do that. I think that this is a fun thing. OK. This one is from Hannah, pronoun, she/her. Thank you for your submission, Hannah. Here's the story. "Growing up, my dad took us kids camping a lot. We grew up in a house in front of a woods. This particular woods has been in my family for seven generations. Puyum. It holds all seven of their ashes as well. I've slept in this woods countless times, but I will never forget the first. We set up camp deep in the woods in an area we call the rocks. We call this because there's a pile of boulders bigger than any other rocks in the woods. It was late summer, almost fall, and the air was cool. Any story building? Okay, scene setting. Come on, Hannah. I shared a tent with my older brother, my dad slept in a hammock. I woke up in the middle of the night needing to pee. I was scared to go alone and I woke up my brother. Like a great, big brother, he told me to go by myself and quickly went back to sleep. I unzipped the tent and crawled out. The fire had gone out and it was pitch black all except the moon, the stars, and the man holding the torch. He was about 20 feet away. He was about 20 feet away just standing there watching me holding a stick with one in wrapped in some fabric that was ablaze with fire except even though the fire was bright, I couldn't see his face. The outline of a man in the dark holding a torch. I wasn't scared, not in the slightest. In fact, I wanted to go to him, Hannah, don't go to him, and I want to get right there. Ew, I don't want to finish this, I'm freaking myself out. In fact, I wanted to go to him. Every fiber in my tiny body was so drawn to this man. I wanted to go walk with him in the woods, but I was cold, so I peed right in front of him and went back in the tent. The next morning, I asked my dad if he had seen the torch man. He told me I was dreaming. When my mom told me the same thing, it was just a dream. It didn't happen. But my brother knows. He remembered me waking him up. In fact, I even peed on the tent. It was not a dream. Now that I'm older, my mom thinks it was one of our ancestors and I was drawn to him because I am his blood. Others say it was a trick and that's how they trapped you. They say if I had went to him, I never would have been seen again. But I long for the day I see the torch man and next time I will learn his name, Hannah, you better be fucking careful, girl. Hey, I don't, I do not go to the torch man. The torch man? Oh, I don't like that. Hannah, peace and blessings to you and please, universe, keep your arm around ahead and protect her from the powers that be amen. Okay, let's find one or two more. This one's from Megan. I grew up feeling connected to the paranormal and being a bit more aware of it. I've had many more stories I could share, but I think one that will stick with me forever was when I did a tarot reading after my dad died. I wanted to feel him one last time. I set my alter up, lit a candle and offered him a space next to me. The candle was flickering like crazy. Mind you, no fan or AC vent, I'm in a closet doing this. Once I asked if he was present, the candle angled toward where I had offered him a seed. I just got a chill. I immediately got chills and I just knew it was him. Like I could genuinely feel him there. I asked him if he had anything to tell me for closure for the both of us. We had a very rocky relationship due to his alcoholism. The cards I pulled relayed the following, I'll just summarize. But he was supposed to be a figure of strength and was led astray in life, that he knows he hurt those around him and wished he would have done better, that he is sorry for his wrong doings and that he knows I will be strong and fearless in my life moving forward and that I was loved. Oh my God. I cried a lot. I said he was free to go from the reading and the candle went back to flickering. And I've been grateful for that moment ever since. It has only strengthened my belief in the paranormal and beyond. Wow, wow. You know, stories like that, it's like when people pass on, I do believe that if they have unfinished business, they absolutely will come back. They will come back and communicate. I don't know how long it takes. I don't really know if they care how long it takes. But he had unfinished business with you is what it sounds like. And the fact that you were able to get such closure in a way that really was impactful, that's, that's amazing. It really, really is. This is from Lexi. These are crazy. You bitches are haunted. And I love you all for it. My family said that I would be outside for hours talking and playing with them. One night when I was getting a bath, my grandma had asked me, why did you move over, honey? I had said, oh, to make room for Seda, she had brushed it off since this was a daily occurrence for me to be so insistent that my imaginary friends were real. I had stated that her dad, the chief, was very mad and caught her smoking tobacco, so she had to stay home. And I had leaned over to my imaginary friend and cupped my ear as if she was telling me a secret and said, Seda said she died. She had scarlet fever at age three. My grandma was so distraught she had asked the city and had looked online for information about their house. Turns out their house was built right next to a sacred Native American burial ground. We still think to this day my imaginary friends were actually ghosts. I could tell so many more, but hearing that story is still since chills down my spine. That's nuts. I do think, even what I was talking about last episode, when I said if I were to ever have a child, which I won't, but I have strict guidelines that I would follow if I ever had a child. Children are so pure and susceptible and open to a lot of things. It's easier to learn a language when you're a child, it's easier to learn an instrument, you're just a sponge as a baby, as a youth. That I do think when it comes to matters of the spirit or of the paranormal or of communication with different realms. I know it sounds really woo-woo, but I do think that children are the perfect conduit. That's why it's so fucking creepy and scary movies when kids are the ones that are used as a vessel. But I think that's because, and guess what? My house is creaking now and I'm going to freak the fuck out. Oh, no, very much no. Very much don't do that. Okay. But I do think I believe every word of the story, because I do believe that kids, because they're so pure-hearted, have more access, and so absolutely 100% I believe that. Wow. Okay, y'all. I feel so happy to have with me for this episode. I need to go turn on every single light in my house and go turn on music in every single room. Thank you guys so much for joining me to see, and I'll love you very much if you want merch, go to broskey.shop, and I'll see you on the next episode for now. Goodbye.