Endless Dread: Haunted Hayride

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Anne-Marie, she's a witch, Sievertson. Ben, boogeyman, Johnson. We are publishing this episode on Halloween of 2025. And once a year, we do a thing in commemoration of Halloween. It is different every year. And this year, we wanted to go on a haunted hayride together. Oh, did we? And do a haunted house. Yes. Did we want to do that, Ben? Yeah, I think it was we. No, it wasn't we? No? You know.

I live to tell the tale, so I can't complain. There you go. But we also wanted to bring you a kind of haunted hayride or haunted house from the internet. We kind of did both. We went out near where Ben lives and freaked ourselves out. But we also told each other some internet-y, spooky stories. Yeah. Rated PG-13, maybe? I think that's fair. Yeah. Earmuffs, kids. Maybe instead of listening, just tuck yourself into bed.

Make sure you check there's nothing in your closet. Without further ado, thanks to McCrae's Haunted Hayride in South Hadley, Mass., and the Internet, we bring you this year's special episode of... Endless dread. What's the thing that's gonna... What's the thing you would like to avoid? I'm going to the wrong place to avoid the thing I want to avoid, which is people jumping out at me. If you're in the back, that's not a good place to be. Well, let's not be in the back.

But you might be in the back. That's the thing. It's just the luck of the draw wherever your seat on the wagon is. This is it. Look at this. What are you seeing? I'm seeing lots of floodlights. It looks like a... Lots of cars. Okay. What's that over there? A big skeleton? A big statue of a... Is that the Grim Reaper? Yeah, it looks kind of grim. It looks pretty grim to me!

Okay. We're just going on a little hayride. Just going on a little hayride. Hello. Hey, where are we? Which way is, what's down this way? What's down which way? You want to go? That way? Which is the most scary way? You got to get on the cart first. Okay. It'll drop you off and it's got not one, but two haunted houses. Okay. And you know what?

I think I smell poopies already. Are you scared, little girl? Are you going to go home and leave the lights on? Probably. Well, have a great time then. Thank you. I like that they just assumed that you were pooping instead of me. They're like, she looks incontinent. He seems fine. Hey, how are you? I think we want, can we buy tickets for the hayride here? Okay. That's the first scream in the night.

Our show is called Endless Thread, but our scary episode is always called Endless Dread. We heard this was the place to be for some spooky times. I can assure you that. So you work here? Yeah. Would you mind sharing your name with us? My name is Ken and that's Carl. Ken and Carl. And how long have you been working here? Carl's been here too long. A long time. Next week, okay?

That line will go around, it'll come up here, and then it'll go down to that second light down there. You're gonna enjoy it. You probably got 70 workers here. So he's got to have people. Okay. All right. And you will get scared. No doubt. No doubt. I can already smell the poopies here. It's him. It's him. It's him. We hope you guys enjoy it. Thank you very much. Thanks, Kenny. Have a good night.

These folks are just like buying corn. That's the beer tent. Right on the back of that wagon and I'll get you on the next ride. Okay, thank you. Back of the wagon. Back of this ground. I don't want to be on the back of the wagon. Yeah, remember what I told you? The back of the wagon is the scariest spot. That's not good. I hope we get this guy as the driver because his mustaches will protect us. I really don't. I'm not into this. I'm already upset. This is the slap happy trailer. Okay.

Because the tractor slap happens. Okay. I kind of go forward and backward. Sometimes it bumps, sometimes it don't. Okay. I try and do my best to keep it from doing that. And I'm going to make sure I do it good for you and I think I'm waking up. We're fucked. That's... Translation, we're fucked. You and I are in a giant cart behind a... pretty large tractor driven by a man with a majestic mustache. But we're pointing, the way, the direction we're going into is very dark. Into the darkness.

2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20. Two dozen people. There's a couple girls on the ride. Please keep your hands inside the cart at all times, your feet underneath the seat at all times. My characters do come up on the cart. You guys are going to get scared.

and you guys might jump out of your seats. All I ask is that as soon as you guys compose yourselves, you know, make sure you guys, you know, your pants aren't wet or anything like that, that you guys do sit down as soon as possible just for your safety. All right, other than that, guys, enjoy your ride. They come up onto the cart? You didn't tell me that. That's not okay. You're gonna be messed. There's no question. ladies and gentlemen boys and girls welcome to McCray's hot today ride

What do you think so far? Pretty much fine, right? I don't know if I'm even going to be able to look at anything. I'm trying to look straight ahead. Now we've got some skeletons, a pile of skeletons. Okay. Oh, we've got a demon here. We've landed on a demon. Okay. Oh, no. Oh, no. No. Okay, now we're being, now we're surrounded by... It's just a creepy clown. It's some lasers. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. That was... I got no handle on! That's loud.

Oh God. Okay. Chainsaw. Chainsaw scarecrow. Chainsaw scarecrow. Gas mask, clown butcher? There's a clown. Gas mask, clown butcher. When the cart comes to a complete stop, you guys are going to exit the cart and paddle towards the haunted house to beat the greeter. Have a great night, guys. Thank you. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Absolutely.

So you and I are on the Haunted Hayride in real life, but also we are going to do an internet-based Haunted Hayride together right now. We're going to go room by room. And try to freak each other out with some spooky little stories. That's like haunted house, but this is our haunted hayride. Yeah. We both have to go like this. Like the wagon stopped. You know what I mean? Oh, oh, oh.

You know? Okay. The wagon stopped. All right. What do you got for me? So this is from the subreddit. Black magic fuckery. Yep. Yep. I'm ready for some fuckery. You're ready. Okay. So I'm going to play you a little spooky piece of audio. What do you hear? Don't overthink it. It's weird. I hear like a kind of like lightsaber sound. It's like. And then I hear, I'm going to say I hear green needle. Green needle. That's what I hear. Okay, that listen, I also heard green needle. Okay. So.

The question is whether you hear green needle or the word brainstorm. Okay. Do you know anything about the origins of this audio before I go any further? No. I don't know anything about it except for, I know this video, like I've seen the video. It's this woman. She has like a caption above her head and it says, you will only hear the word you are reading.

And then she points and there's two things that appear. One of them is Green Needle and the other is Brainstorm. So this TikTok video, it has 34,000... upvotes at the time that we're recording this. It was posted just a couple of weeks ago. Which, when I first saw this, my thought was like, oh, it reminds me of another auditory illusion that we actually covered on this show when it blew up.

back in 2018, and that was... Yanny... Yanny... Yanny Laurel. Yanny Laurel, that's right. Which is sort of like the dress, right? Like, is the dress... black and gold or blue and gold or white and gold, right? Blue and black or white and gold. Blue and black or white and gold. That's right. Yeah. Okay. So that particular one. broke in 2018. What I was not expecting to find out about this brain needle green, brain needle green storm. Brain needle green storm.

All right. About this one. Brainstorm versus Green Needle. Yes. Is that this also initially went viral in 2018. No. Yes. What? I mean, it's not unusual for something to be posted on Reddit. That is years and years old and to go viral because none of us have a memory anymore. We're all goldfish now when it comes to the internet. This was same month, May of 2018, very shortly thereafter. For real? For real. Went super viral on Twitter at the time. Wow.

And the origin of this, are you familiar with a kid's show called Ben 10? Ben 10? Or Ben 10 Alien Force. Oh, my God. I feel like I'm living in an alternate universe all of a sudden. No, I don't know. I do a little bit, too, because I haven't heard of this. I mean, wrong age demographic for us, but apparently the audio from this... Brainstorm Green Needle clip comes from a 2014 vlogger's review of a Ben 10 Alien Force toy. What? So I'm going to send you a link. Ooh.

That's a cool looking toy. Yeah. Little light up toy. The cool technology sound makes more sense because it looks like it's like an electrical zap that's happening in the toy. Yes, yes. And unlike the Yanny Laurel debate of 2018, where... It really came down to two words being on top of each other in the audio file. And it was about which frequencies your ears are more inclined to hear, upper or lower. This debate, Brainstorm versus Green Needle.

is absolutely solvable because the toy is saying the name of a character in Ben 10, which is... Brainstorm. Brainstorm, yes. This auditory illusion, I would say, is almost more mysterious to me because as the TikTok video that then just went viral on Reddit explains, you can train your brain to hear. What you want it to hear. So if you're looking at the word brainstorm, you hear. If you're looking at the words green needle, you'll hear. That's why. Why is that? OK, so.

The Telegraph talked to a psycholinguist named Susie Stiles. Great name. back in 2018 when the story broke. And she said, this is a great reminder that everything we think we experience via the senses is just our brain's best guess at reality. What? So nothing's real. Nothing's certain. Nothing's known. We're just out here hearing different things and thinking different things and coming to different conclusions and everything is fine. Wow.

You know what? I mean, that makes so much sense considering the time that we're living in. Yeah, it's like you're more likely to seek out information that validates what you already believe. And this is you're more likely to hear what you're thinking. So it's both an explanation and a totally unsettling reality. All right. I got a little spooky number two. When Halloween comes around.

You probably dress up. You probably go to a couple of parties, right? Maybe 10 years ago. Not so much anymore. Well, let's put it this way. If you were to go to a party and dress up. what would your vibe be like? What genre of costume would you be getting into? This year, I will be handing out candy and I'm going to dress up as Jane Goodall.

Oh, that's nice. So I guess usually I go for not so spooky, more just something I admire. Yeah. I mean, I'll do whatever as long as it's hot. Like I'll be a hot zombie. I'll be a hot potato. I'll be a hot, I'll be a sexy potato. As long as it's hot. I'll be a flaming hot Cheeto. Well, no, I like that Jane Goodall is your zone because I think there's this genre here of how people dress up that you can go scary, but you can also go political.

It's not maybe I wouldn't call it activism, but it's like this like thing where people are taking this holiday and they're actually reminding you of something that's real that's happening in the world that we should be that we should be worried about. So I want to play you another video-based thing from TikTok. I think it's a really interesting exploration of this kind of thing. Okay. So this is going to take you two minutes, but you should watch it.

Okay. Taylor Swift launches Target exclusive vinyl of her new album, Life of a Showgirl. Imagine an ice cold Diet Coke and salty fries only at McDonald's. Drive to Target. Drop into HomeGoods and save, save, save. What's on your kids' list this holiday season? Don't raid your closet. Raid TJ Maxx for your fall fit check. Drive to Target. Get it now. Get it now.

Get it now. How would you describe this? So it's a woman who is like putting on a fake cheesy smile. She's doing like a commercial for... Target, a fake commercial for the store Target. And Taylor Swift and... Taylor Swift's vinyl album, McDonald's fries, ice cold Diet Coke. And then she starts doing a sort of mashup of some of the words in these fake ads. Don't raid your closet.

ice cold diet coke ice ice ice drop into home goods home goods home goods good home good home good home ice dropped into good homes until it's basically just a bunch of these words Cut together to call out ICE raids, taking kids from their homes. ICE, dropping into raid. You're a good home. You're good, kids. ICE, dropping into raid. You're a good home. Good home. Good kids. Good kids. And she lands on a place of referencing the allegations of zip ties being used to tie kids' hands together.

Which we should say are, you know, the sort of official statements about that have been that zip ties were not used and yet... There are witness accounts of zip ties being used in this building in Chicago in which U.S. citizens and non-U.S. citizens were pulled out of the building by ICE and arrested and tied up. with zip ties, according to some reports. Mm-hmm. And so over the course of the video, this cheery kind of like, get it now at Target becomes a like...

Do you get it now? Do you get where I'm going with this? Imagine it's your kids. You can't save, save, save. Get it now? One of the kind of meta aspects of what this woman is doing is she's, you know, she's using words that might not normally be censored on the platform. And so a thing that I've been seeing recently, and I don't know if you've seen this as well, but I've seen creators on TikTok, on Instagram, elsewhere.

as they are talking about things that are expressly political and raising the alarm, so to speak, the captions can sometimes be different from the words that are being said. And what I... see in that as a possibility is people are basically anticipating or assuming a level of censorship on these tech platforms or at least algorithmic punishment.

in terms of whether this stuff might actually get surfaced for viewers. And so they're trying to basically like work around that. So I saw one recently where a creator who has he was basically a political commentator was talking a lot about nazis and uh every time he said the word nazi in audio the caption which i think he had edited surfaced a different word than Nazis. It was like...

funny guys or weirdos or whatever. It was like switching the word Nazi out and swapping in another word. And I think that's an effort to essentially prepare for or avoid.

some form of algorithmic censorship driven by state powers, whether they are US state powers trying to control TikTok in the United States or state powers outside of the US, which I think is really interesting when you think about this video, because she's basically reordering words that might not be... uh expressly caught up by by state censorship um but she's you know she's clearly in the us so she's like raising the specter of state censorship

And she's also trying to get across a message to you as the viewer that you should be scared about this. And it is spooky. And the music in the video itself is kind of like spooky music. And so I think it's like a good reminder that sometimes. when we think about you know what's what's scary um a lot of it is like you know silly and spooky and and you know not real and um bizarre and whatever comes out of horror movies but

Often horror movies like science fiction are trying to have a conversation with you about like what's really happening and what are real things that we should be thinking about and worried about. And I thought this was a good example of that. Yeah. These days with that TikTok censorship, you could just claim it's an auditory illusion.

You could be like, you heard Nazi? I said cupcake. I said cupcake. There's no Nazis here. It's messed up that you heard that. That's an interesting thing, too. It makes you think about whether or not words... uh, on screen are actually easier to censor and, and, and like pick up by the censorship tools than audio. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Easier to censor a caption.

Revolution will not be televised, but it might be podcasted, guys. Just think about it. All right. Well, I think we should take a little spooky pause. Grab a candy bar. Yeah, it's a candy bar break. And we'll be back in just a minute. Hey, it's Roman Mars from 99% Invisible, the podcast about the unnoticed architecture and design that shapes our world. And it's Ben Brock Johnson from WBUR's show about online communities, Endless Thread.

and we're bringing you a brand new limited series that we made together. It's about how the video game world has changed the world beyond video games. From the history of the joystick to one of the strangest games that Sega ever made. We're calling our series Hidden Levels, and you can get it in the Endless Thread feed or the 99% Invisible feed. Hit start wherever you get your podcasts.

Democracy under siege, Democrats treading water, and one outlet after another checking out. All the big media giants are willing to fold. Slate has never been afraid to tell it like it is. and hold powerful feet to the fire. We want to try to defend our communities, our families, our people. But what if you can't? What Next asks tough questions, without forgetting who's at the center of our work? You. Follow and listen wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back.

You got another little spooky for me on our haunted hayride, our digital haunted hayride that we're on while we're on the real haunted hayride? Oh, I do. And this little spooky starts with a capital T. And that stands for tuberculosis. That was a good guess. My efforts to bring the music man into everything are dashed again. What can I say? It stands for 76 trombones.

I mean, if you saw 76 trombones coming down the street at you, that might be a little spooky. That's too many trombones. That's TMT. TMT. Too many trombones. Okay, no, the T stands for tuberculosis. What do you know about tuberculosis? Yeah, I know you cough a lot. It can be terminal. It's not good, right? Yeah, you cough a lot. There's usually like...

blood in the coughing in what comes up. So do you know what causes it or no? Nope. No idea. Okay. Well, according to some New Englanders in the 17 and 1800s. It was sin. Vampires. It was caused by vampires, Ben. What? Yes. Okay. These are not blood-sucking vampires like we think of today with... you know, the pointy eye teeth. These vampires were deceased people sucking the life out of their living relatives. Whoa.

And not in like a, you know, co-worker kind of way where they come over and they want to talk to you for a long time and you got stuff to do. Like they weren't doing that. Yeah, not a co-worker vampire, not an energy vampire. The way to stop them in this great New England vampire panic was to exhume the... the undead but dead person's body from the grave. What does exhume mean? This is a question I've always had. What does exhume the grave? What does that mean? You are exhuming.

You know when you're ooming? You know when you're ooming? You're ex-ooming. You're hooming. No, you're ex-ooming. It's to get him out of the grave. Why don't they just say that? Why are they going to say exhuming? All right. They're digging him up out of the graves. All right. And in some cases, they would just flip them over and be like, that'll do the trick. What? Just give them a flip.

The coffin or the person? The person. Oh, they have them like face down and then they rebury them. Oh, that's creepy to me. Or you could cut out some of their organs and burn them. Oh, I mean, as everyone knows. Which brings us. Yikes. To a Today I Learned post on Reddit from several years ago by a since-deleted user that reads, TIL, after her death.

Mercy Brown's heart and liver were burned and the ashes mixed into a tonic that was given to her sick brother to drink. Her father believed that she was a vampire and that the tonic would cure the brother of tuberculosis. Yeah. It didn't. He died two months later. Narrator voice. It didn't. Yes. Brutal. So this was Mercy Lena Brown of Exeter, Rhode Island, or just Lena Brown as her family called her. She dies of tuberculosis in 1892 at the age of 19. Tuberculosis was...

widespread at this time. It's devastating. It's the leading cause of death in the Northeast. And how do you actually get it now that we have science? Oh, a bacteria. It's a bacteria. Yeah, it's an infectious disease caused by, I think it's called... Bacillus? Yeah, yeah, sure. It's one of the bacillus ones. Yeah, yeah, everyone knows bacillus. So her mom dies of tuberculosis nine years before she does. One of her older sister dies of it. So tuberculosis is running through this family.

It's not well understood, and people are filling in the gaps of what causes tuberculosis with folklore, you know, that it's the work of the undead or a vampire that's causing it. Man, oh man. Mercy dies. Meanwhile, her brother, who's the only son out of seven children, is dying of tuberculosis. And her widower father wants to save her brother. So about two months after Mercy dies, he agrees to have the bodies of Mercy, one of his other daughters, Mercy's older sister, and his late wife exhumed.

Ex-hoomed. Ex-hoomed, yes. He's like, we already oomed him, let's ex-hoom him. That's right. To try to find out which of these three dead relatives is sucking the life out of his son, Edwin. Okay. So... They dig up Mercy's mother and sister. They are both decomposing normally. They're mostly bones because they died almost a decade before that. But Mercy's body shows almost no signs of decomposition.

And she still has blood in her lungs, which some thought to be the sign of a currently feasting vampire. Oh boy. So the villagers remove Mercy's heart and liver and they burn them on a rock. nearby. As you do. Right. It's like the 1890s equivalent of driving a stake through her heart, I guess. They're like, hey, Freddie, you got that hot rock? Make that rock hot. We're gonna... We're going to cook the stuff on the rock. They cooked them up. The ashes are then mixed with...

and turned into a tonic that is given to the brother Edwin to drink, thinking that it would cure him. As we know, it didn't. He dies a couple months later. But a couple important things to note. Mercy dies in January of 1892 in Rhode Island, which means it's cold. And as one Redditor put it, she was a mercy-sicle, or I'm like, just call her a mercy-sicle.

She was a merciful. No wonder she hadn't decomposed. Her body was so well preserved because it was winter and it had only been a couple of months. Yeah, that'll do it. That'll do it. But some other fun facts. Smithsonian Magazine notes that mercy's, your favorite word, exhumation, is referenced in H.P. Lovecraft's The Shunned House.

which is a short story about a man being haunted by dead relatives that includes a character named Mercy. And furthermore, that the character of Lucy in Dracula, like the original Bram Stoker's Dracula. Lucy, who's Lucy? She's a teenage girl who might have also had tuberculosis and gets turned into a vampire and is exhumed.

In the book. Wow. So she was potentially inspired by Mercy. And some say the character name Lucy is a combination of Lena, what she was called, and Mercy, her first name. Huh. But also, like, there are a bunch of comments in this very popular Reddit post about Mercy Brown saying things like, don't tell anti-vaxxers about this. And, like, you're giving anti-vaxxers new ideas. But...

As someone who, you know, made a series with me about the history of vaccines and anti-vaxxers. Yes, yes. The interesting thing is like this idea of grinding up the... the ashes of the heart and the liver and serving it to your son, to me, sounds a lot more like the history of early variolation and inoculation. Absolutely.

Well, that's the thing that's so interesting about this stuff, right? Like, you know, the 17 and 1800s, there's all of this, like, pretty weird experimentation that is, you know. connected to what ends up being like scientific shared truth, right? Like you start to figure out like, oh, like. this thing seems to work. Let's start playing with this and maybe it'll be an actual thing. And sometimes it is a thing and sometimes it's like, no, whoops, we killed somebody.

Yeah. And Edwin already had tuberculosis. He was he was deathly ill to begin with. So you can kind of I mean, it's hard to imagine. And yet you can almost understand how desperate the father is. Absolutely. And tuberculosis, it killed more than a million people as recently as 2023. So this is not gone. And while I don't recommend grinding up your...

your exhumed loved ones organs. Yeah. Don't put it on a hot rock. Don't put it on a hot rock. Yeah, we do. We do interesting things when we're desperate, but. It's true. We're pouring one out for Mercy Brown, but no organs involved. Mercy deserved mercy, that's for sure. Well, she was dead. She didn't know. Or was she?

All right. Our haunted hayride of the Internet. is wrapped up, but we're about to go into the haunted house in real life. Listen on, if you dare. Okay, you're gonna go first, right? No! Yeah, no, you're good. No, no. You're fine, you're fine. No, we fit side by side. We fit side by side. That's true. It's just a bloody maze of bloody walls so far.

You really didn't like going around that corner. You did not like going around that corner. I don't like this. There's so many corners. There's just a woman with a cleaver next to it. Next to a fireplace I Knew that thing was gonna do that as soon as we started walking away It was gonna do something crazy. Oh, it's cool. We're just gonna go this way. Okay. And then this guy in the corner just started jumping around.

Oh, God. Oh, God. Crazy spider, deadly clown guy. He's ripped the arm off of a toddler. Oh, perfect. Perfect. I hate this, I hate this I hate this part. This is not good. Okay. The spider walk was good. What do you think? How are you feeling? How you doing? Okay, the jump scares, yes, that's terrible. Yeah, yeah. But, like, the world is so scary right now. Yes. Like, as it is. Yes. I mean, it's very well done, but I think, like...

The things that really keep me up at night, unfortunately, are like... Have nothing to do with... Are real. I feel like horror movies and like horror stuff, I feel like it's like trying to like wake you up a little bit.

I feel like when it's done right, it sort of takes down a notch some of the stuff that's actually scary in the world. Somehow. It lets you laugh at... death or something in a way that like makes you feel like it's good to be it's good to like face death before you have to face death yeah Does that make sense? Yes. Well, I think, yes, because death is like, for so many people, their greatest fear before they feel ready for it.

Yeah. If you can't laugh about it, even if the laughing is like, I was just so scared that now I'm going to laugh about it and talk about it and experience it with other people. Then you just like lose your mind over it. And so it's. It almost feels like we don't know what else to do with those feelings and fears. Yeah. All right. Endless dread it is. Another year. Endless another year. Another year of facing our mortality. It's good. It's important. On a hayride with a chainsaw.

Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was produced by Amory Shizowicz-Siebertson. Ha ha! And Ben Boogeyman Johnson. Sound design terrors by our production manager, Paul Vykus. Editing by... Meg Kramer. Our managing producer is Samita Joshi. The rest of our team is Dean Russell, Grace Tatter, Frannie Monahan, and Emily Jankowski. Big thanks to McCray.

Farm in South Hadley, Massachusetts. If you have an unsolved mystery, an untold history, or another wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up, endlessthread at wbur.org. Happy Halloween! Happy spooky Halloween! I was so freaked out the first one that came on there for like, not like, creepy guy with a chainsaw, but I was like, this seems dangerous. Yes, I knew you were going to feel that way. I knew you were going to feel that way. You're twirling that a little too...

It was a little too much. Is this guy certified? Is this clown? Is this chainsaw clown certified? Did he run his choreography before? Now. Tonight. Just to brush up and make sure that we weren't going to actually get our hair shaved off. Yep. Yep. That was good.