From the unexplained to the mundane, join us on our journey to the French. Hello and welcome to Journey to the Fringe, where it is October and that means it is Halloween time. Which only kind of limits our topics that we're going to talk about. It doesn't really limit us all that much, because we still have the fringy topics. It's just more spooky themed. We almost maybe get more options, because we have to hold off on certain ones to save them for Halloween. Exactly.
It really bullsizes us to like laser prisms us in the right direction. Chelsea, I thought we could take a look at some horror movies. And I wanted to know which horror movies were at least inspired by true stories. And my god, I have a good list of movies we're going to go through them that you probably don't expect, but at least bear their initial ideas from something that actually happened in real life. I'm intrigued. Especially if it's a surprising one. There are some surprising ones on here.
I am going to spoil it. The thing is not on here, or let's say like Alien vs Predator, although not a horror movie. So you take from that what you will. I thought that was based on a true story. Well, it's not a horror movie is what I'm saying. Right. Okay. So it didn't fit the categories. Yeah. Okay. And with that, we're going to start off with a 1963 classic from Alfred Hitchcock known as the birds Chelsea. Oh, I thought you're going to say Seiko. Oh no. Why are you starting with that one?
Yeah, because it's the best way to start Halloween off is to terrify Chelsea just a little bit with being set. Why? And that makes it spookier. And yeah, I specifically avoided in this episode serial killer inspired at once. That could be its own entire. We're just avoiding that. The birds. 1963 classic one of Alfred Hitchcock's most iconic films centers on a small California coastal town terrorized and rendered hopeless by a flock of malevolent birds.
Now it is based on a short story by Daphne de Morier, but it has roots in history when residents of Capitola, California awoke to a scene straight out of a horror movie. Inexplicably, hordes of seabirds were dive bombing houses crashing into cars and spewing half digested fish onto lawns. That comes from a local newspaper from the time and it was a complete mystery at the time. That happened in 1961, two years before the birds came out. Chelsea, I just have to show you the title of the article.
This is the newspaper from that day. And unfortunately, I didn't pay for the subscription, so we get a very low quality version. But there it is Santa Cruz, Sentinel seabird invasion hits coastal homes, thousands of birds floundering in something I can't read it. It's really pixelated. The cop looks at thousands of birds floundering the street toasts in streets. He fluttered the streets. Oh, I think it's floundering. That's not even there.
Anyhow, that cop is super pumped about what's going on here. Yes, he looks excited. He's head out the window. She's got to see what's going on with those birds. Exactly. You can't just look at the windshield with something like that. This isn't actually something that's happened only once in history and not just the birds. And this is kind of why they think they know what happened in 61 to make this event happen.
In 1987, four people died and 100 were hospitalized on Canada's Prince Edward Island after eating mussels. In 1991, there were several animal stranding events in Southern California. And it turns out these events all befell due to an algae. They examined the contents of the stomach of all these animals. They found a toxin making algae that causes amnesia, disorientation and seizures.
Great researcher, Sybil Bargu of Louisiana State University who worked on the study has long been fascinated with the story of the birds. And she said, when I started to work on harmful algal blooms and her toxins then learned of this super exciting connection, I felt I had to work on this when she learned about the connection with the actual events of the birds.
Work they did, Bargu and her colleagues found a connection between the algae consumed by the victims of the events in 1991 and 87, leading them to believe that the algae was also responsible for the 1961 incident, thus involving the mystery of the birds. So that one's been solved. I don't know if that makes it any less terrifying that it actually seems like it's something that's fairly mundane that could happen. Yeah, and that is terrifying, yes. And that's the thing about a good scaring movie.
It's a mundane thing that could happen and it's terrifying. I would never want that to happen. And Chelsea, I think this brings us to our next story or horror movie, speaking of good films, The Shining. It's true. It's inspired by true events. So let's just talk about this. In 1974, Stephen King and his wife spent time at the isolated Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado.
So mid 1970s and he and his wife stay in room 217 and that specific room has a haunted history involving the chief housekeeper, Elizabeth Wilson. In 1911, Wilson was injured in an explosion caused by lighting a lantern. Though she survived the event, it's said that she still wanders the room, moving luggage and folding clothes. King claimed to have seen a young boy while going to his room, which wasn't possible, considering he and his wife were the only confirmed guests.
There may have been several other accounts detailing unexplained noises, figures, and personal objects stolen or broken. While roaming the real hotel, King felt inspired by the long corridors and the isolated feel. His experience instantly gave him the idea for the horror novel. The Stanley Hotel was built by Freeland Oscar Stanley of the Stanley steamer fame.
When opened in 1909, the 142 room resort was meant for wealthy vacationers and also served as a health retreat for those suffering from tuberculosis. Man, tuberculosis was such a wild thing back in the day. Or apparently really fancy resorts in Colorado. Depending on how fancy you are, of course. The Stanley Hotel is still in operation today and its panoramic views of the Rockies remains a tourist destination.
The hotel also has a very haunted history which has helped attract viewers and paranormal investigators. During Stephen King and his wife's stay, the couple checked in just before the hotel was shutting down for the winter and they were the only guests there. King noted the eerie feeling of being in an empty hotel and he stated this on his website. Direct quote from him. In late September 1974, Tabby and I spent a night at a grand old hotel in Estes Park, the Stanley.
Wandering through his corridors, I thought that it seemed the perfect, maybe the archetypical setting for a ghost story. That night, I dreamed of my three-year-old son running through the corridors, looking back over his shoulders, eyes wide screaming. I got up, I lit a cigarette, sat in the chair, looking out the window at the Rockies. By the time the cigarette was done, I had the bones of the book firmly set in my mind. End of quote.
And of course, he's probably leaving out the vast amounts of cocaine he did at that time as well. He had a real big, big, big, big, big. Oh yeah. I'm glad we addressed that, yes. Here's the story of Elizabeth Wilson and King's own experience of ghostly apparitions inspires the shining's ominous Overlook Hotel, a location that's been an iconic landmark in pop culture from the Grady Twins down the hall to the carpeting on the floor.
Just to add a little bit to this too, there's also a pet cemetery on the grounds of the Stanley Hotel where the owners have traditionally buried their animals. The ghosts of two of these animals have been glimpsed by guests over the years. Cassie the Golden Retriever and Comanche, a fluffy white cat, having seen wandering rooms and surrounding grounds by surprise overnighters. Are they the ghosts or the witness or the ghosts? That's a good question. I do not know. A different context.
It's never been stated specifically, but Stephen King does go on later to write another story called Pet Cemetery that's likely it could be inspired by this part of the hotel as well. It could be. I mean, how often do you stumble upon a pet cemetery? With ghosts. Ghosts. Ever. They go woof woof woof. Yeah, woof woof woof. I've never seen one personally. I gotta think that's the ones in a lifetime. Kubrick's version of the Shining's Overlook Hotel does not match King's vision in his novel.
There's actually Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick did not like each other because of the changes. Kubrick changed much of the layout and added the hedge maze at the end, which is not on that property at all. And for some reason, Kubrick changes the infamous room from 217 to 237. There's the whole movie about all the changes that he made to it because Stanley Kubrick was so famous for cryptic things in his movies. So there's a whole. And being OCD.
Yeah. I'm curious though, which of Stephen King's movie renderings he enjoyed the best because he famously has really shitty movies of his books. The Shining being a better one. Is it the fog or the mist? That one where they're stuck in that grocery store? There is a decent one. He actually praised the ending of that one because it's actually far darker than anything Stephen King wrote. Really? That's the one. I can't say it. I'm not going to just say it. Oh yeah.
He's like, I really should have thought of that. Even though it's a movie that's pretty old by this point. It's pretty old. I don't want to spoil it. Okay. But yeah, he's had some shitty movies done in his books. But I didn't know this. Apparently, because Stephen King was so displeased with Kubrick's version of The Shining, he made a made for TV miniseries of The Shining that came out in 1997. And the Stanley Hotel was used as the filming location. I mean, I've never even heard of that.
Neither have I. And due to the Shining's popularity, one of these weird reverse based on its true stories, the Stanley Hotel has embraced the connection by hosting tours and events related to the story. And in 2015, it added a hedge maze, which has been a hit with visitors. Because the story was based on the true story, but they changed that. They changed the true story that it came from to have a hedge maze. That makes it true in the end, right?
No, except now Stephen King's the one that's wrong. It's an Aurobora truseness. Throughout The Shining, as in King's own experience, it's never clear precisely what's going on. One of the great strengths of The Shining's real life and fictional story is how it's consistently contradicts itself, never revealing whether the overlook is possessed by ghosts. Demons are simply madness. And I think that's kind of drawn from that event, that time he spent at the hotel.
I don't know that I fully knew that. I did not know that at all. I knew a little bit. And that is somewhere you can go. Next up here, Chelsea. You know, I'm just going to start this story and we'll get into what movie this is, okay? Okay, let's see if I can guess it. In the mid-1950s, a film distributor Jack Harris, eager to break into producing, he wants to make a monster movie. But he is having a hard time coming up with a hook. So he asked his friend Irvine H. Milgate for help.
Over a middle of the night phone call, the latter pitched him the bare bone story of a meteorite in a mysterious space jelly that crashes down right outside of Philadelphia. This weirdly sounds like a police report that happens in 1950 just outside of Philadelphia. Two patrolling police officers witness an object falling from the sky. They then discover a mysterious glowing ooze hanging off a corner telephone pole.
And as they go in for a close look, the blob begins to not just move but to crawl. The cops are back up and give chase, following the thing into a field and compelled by curiosity one of the officers reaches out and puts his hand into the purple goo. The substance falls apart immediately leaving no trace of its existence. Outside of some very confused cops, that's the end of the story.
Though neither Harris nor Milgate nor screenwriter Kay Lenokor or Theodore Simpson, for that matter, ever officially confirmed this connection, they don't deny it. This inspired the movie The Blob. Oh, I was going to say more as a text. Oh, that's actually not a bad guess. But much of the fictional blob's discovery and description matches up with the real life police report right down to the purple eschew.
Never mind that the blob was filmed on a soundstage in Valley Forge, written by and starring mostly Pennsylvania locals who would have remembered the media circus for a few years prior. Now following its discovery by Philadelphia police, both the FBI and US Air Force were called in to investigate the flying saucer that had crashed and dissolved without a trace. The incident made a number of headlines at the time.
Two, the story was distributed nationally by the Associated Press, but no one was ever quite able to explain what that glowing ooze really was. The blob's influence is still around. You can see it in Ghostbusters, James Gunn's slither, Mind Flayers and Stranger Things. Those all come from the blob. They're inspiration from it. Oh, really? That's an interesting thing that is based on, I've never heard any such story before. That one's a wild card.
Yeah, and I'm going to keep going too because it explains this whole idea of gelatinous goo from space. Yeah. I believe that this Philadelphia incident wasn't an isolated event. As unbelievable as it already is that the blob was based on anything from real life, it turns out the mysterious disappearing space goo has been falling across the globe for centuries. What? The phenomenon is known as pudra ser, Welsh for the rod of the stars.
And it was given its name all the way back in the 1600s and has recurred sporadically throughout history. Several recent events include Tasmania in 1996 and Scotland in 2009. From the earliest sighting in the 1400s, the blobs, also known as star jelly, earth stars and star slime, have been associated with meteorite showers. They were originally alleged to be essentially melted space rocks. Most modern scientists have been quick to disregard that theory.
Meteorites don't melt and gelatinous substances would never survive a plummet through Earth's atmosphere. This credit hypothesis suggested that the blobs were slime molds, fungi, bacterial algae byproducts or even caustic soda from battery reprocessing plants. So what is the star rot then? Well we don't know. The most widely accepted theory is that the star jelly is some kind of animal regurgitation. Popular contenders include frog spawn or partially digested poisonous toads.
Being barfed back up by birds. Oh my god. New scientists have more specifically posited that the mysterious ooze is the result of pre-ovulation frog overducks being swallowed and regurgitated and then swelling dramatically with moisture with avian digestive tracts. Confounding matters though is the fact that no frog eggs have ever been found within any samples of pewter ser. Also missing DNA. Whenever it's been studied there isn't any kind of DNA in it.
Following all those reports of earth stars landing in Scotland in 2009, scientists in Edinburgh Royal Botanic Gardens decided that enough was enough and they examined in several samples. While they felt short of shouting aliens at the top of their lungs, they were forced to conclude that the star rot was neither plant nor animal. And to add to the above, the fact that even the most swollen of regurgitated frog parts doesn't reach six feet across, which reported length of many pewter ser.
Puttles are. It doesn't match that description. Plus there's the constant coincidings with meteor showers across half of human history. Plus the blob's origins remain purely and steadfastly theoretical. Just a very weird thing that inspires that. Okay, well for how common it is I've never seen it. I hope to one day. You gotta think of common to mean something in a more relative sense. I'll see. It will not. And too, I don't think I ever want to see it because those descriptors were disgusting.
Yeah they were. Yeah they were. Okay. But that actually could be its own thing in its own maybe in a future episode. That is really interesting. And Chelsea, I have one more movie inspired by True Story and I just want you to take a guess at where I'm going with this one. Do I guess now or after you start talking? You can guess now. Fly. Not a bad guess. That is not it. The mummy. You know what? That could be. You definitely can say it's inspired by true events.
We've covered that in a previous episode on Christmas. Yes. And Chelsea, we are going to a nightmare on Elm Street. Nice. A toy. I'm happy. So this is a super bizarre story and just because we're recording this right around when Old Hague just came out. I know. I was just gonna say, weren't we just talking about that? Yes. On Old Hague. Yes. So I think this is a great one to go over right now. Super bizarre story.
Throughout 1981, the LA Times ran a series of articles about otherwise healthy Laotian refugees who mysteriously die in their sleep, apparently after experiencing violent nightmares. What? Most of the victims were men in their 30s and many were from the Hmong community, an ethnic group that had emigrated from China to Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand in the 19th century. Thousands of its members then relocated to the US after the Vietnam War ended in 1975.
The Associated Press Story from December of 1981 reported, quote, an unexplained affliction is killing Laotian refugees at an extremely high rate, striking its victims quickly and without warning while they sleep. End quote. There were reports of 38 such cases occurring between July of 1977 and October of 1981.
And by the end of December of 1981, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's Mortality and Morbidity Weekly report had linked these, quote, sudden, unexpected nocturnal deaths among the South Asian refugees, end quote, to a phenomenon more succinctly known as suns. So sudden, unexpected nocturnal deaths among South Asian refugees, suns. Oh, geez.
Okay. Quote, it is a completely new syndrome, end quote, declared Dr. Roy Barron an epidemiologist with the CDC, quote, death in young, healthy people that occur at night, that occurs in minutes and lacks explanation after autopsy, end quote. Then was wrong about one thing, the affliction that would become known as suns wasn't new. As far as we know, it was first described by a Philippine doctor in a 1917 Spanish medical journal.
And in 2018, a paper published in the Journal of the American Heart Association called suns, quote, the 100 years enigma, end quote. Similar deaths have been reported in China, the Philippines, Thailand, Hawaii, Japan and England under a variety of names. In the Philippines, it has a phenomenon named Bungungut, a word the International Journal of Epidemiologists translates as quote, to rise and moan during sleep, end quote. And in Hawaii, it's reportedly known as the dream disease.
In these cases that inspire a nightmare on Elm Street were part of a rash of deaths that were mostly confined to America's Haman communities. By the time the outbreak apparently ended in the late 80s, suns had claimed at least 117 lives, all but one known victim was male. And many were Haman men who had fled Laos after the Vietnam War to escape persecution under the country's communist government. In February 1981, an LA Times article speculated that a nightmare syndrome was killing the men.
In July, the paper ran a headline declaring quote, men of Haman, dogged by death, end quote. Several possible causes were suggested, but all were dead ends and autopsies didn't reveal any physiological clues. Some wondered if the answer might lie in the conditions that had led the men to the United States in the first place.
While the American military was fighting communist forces in Vietnam, the CIA was conducting what's been called a secret war in neighboring Laos, which we've talked about, it was in that giant POTS episode. Way back in the day. Haman people were integral to that effort. They were recruited and trained by the CIA to fight gather intelligence, protect American assets, and rescue American pilots who had been shot down over Laotian jungles.
The results were devastating for the Hmongs, who suffered tens of thousands of casualties during the fighting, as well as during their subsequent efforts to escape brutal persecution after America's withdrawal from the conflict in 1975. Many made their way to the US after spending time in refugee camps in Thailand and formed tight-knit communities in California, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Oregon.
Some attribute the puzzling deaths to chemical weapons the men would have been exposed to during the prolonged warfare in Laos and Cambodia. But proponents of that theory couldn't explain why the chemicals had taken several years to kill them or why the deaths only occurred at night, also why that doesn't show up on an autopsy. But many Hmong elders had another theory.
The deaths they said were the work of the Dab Sog, a malevolent spirit believed to attack and suffocate victims while they slept. The Dab Sog operates a lot like the old egg of European folklore, and it's part of attacks on me of beings sometimes known as the pressing spirits for their habit of squeezing the breath out of their victims.
In 2011, Dr. Shelley Adler, director of education at the Oshers Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of California San Francisco, published a book called Sleep Paralysis Nightmare in Nosebos and the Mind-Body Connection. She spent 15 years conducting field research on the Hmong sleep deaths and combing through archival records, and she had become convinced that while an evil spirit hadn't killed the man, their belief in it did.
Adler argued that the sun's deaths were a prime example of the nocebo effect, which is the dark flip side of the better known placebo effect. Pasebo takes its name from a Latin phrase meaning I shall please, while nocebos, Latin anticident, translates as I will be harmful. When we experience the placebo effect, as treatment with no real medical value improves our condition often in measurable ways, because we think it will.
With nocebos, the opposite is true, something that can't really hurt us such as a mythical demon that supposedly haunts our sleep could become physically harmful or even fatal if our belief in it is strong enough. Adler isn't the first researcher to study the phenomenon in 1942. Prominent American psychologist Walter Cannon wrote about what he called voodoo death, where people in Africa, South America, and Australia died after believing they'd been cursed.
Cannon described it as a quote, fatal power of the imagination working through unmitigated terror end quote. During her research Adler found that while experiences interpreted as dabb-tsoak, attacks were common in Laos, they were rarely if ever fatal. So why had the dabb-tsoak supposedly become a killer in America?
Adler attributes the shift to the fact that in Laos there were cultural infrastructures in place to process the experiences and sufferers could talk about what was happening to them without stigma, insult shamans, and avail themselves of rituals they believed would dispel the spirits. Among people who had settled in America on the other hand had no such support network.
Shamans were not as readily available in American Hmong communities and even if one could be located the curative rituals often involved animal sacrifice or other elements that were forbidden in the US. Besides that some of the most basic functions of traditional Hmong society were upended in America.
Hmong men were expected to provide for their families and honor their ancestral spirits but they had trouble supporting their families in America and had to rely on either social services or other family members including women for help. According to Adler all of these factors made Hmong men who had immigrated to America feel especially vulnerable to the predation of a dream killer.
Wes Craven who wrote and directed Nightmare on Elmstream read these articles in 1981 and this rage going through the news because that's just a crazy story and it inspires him to write about a killer that kills you when you're asleep. I just wish the Hmong people had known that they could have just strapped a board of nails to their chest and it would have been done. And Wes Craven has confirmed that this was the inspiration. There was a Rolling Stones article in 1988, our interview that he did.
He said he read these stories and he turned these occurrences around and asked what if the death was a result of the dream? What if the dreams were actually killing these men and what if they were all sharing common frightening dreams? So I started constructing a villain that existed only in dreams. And Chelsea those are our true horror movies inspired by true events that you probably did not expect to actually have anything rooted in reality.
I didn't actually, especially the blob that was the big shocker for me. The last one I quite enjoyed as well Nightmare on Elm Street just because we're so close to the old hate coming out. We're on our own timeline here, not the actual episode timeline. Yeah, it's a weird nonlinear string of episodes that we've come across. It really is. So I enjoyed that, that it was so relevant to something we just were talking about. And I love that.
I'm a big horror movie fan, not a big fan of the birds did not like that one. And I'm going to forget it immediately, hopefully. And yeah, that was great. I think it goes without saying if anybody feels the need, you should probably sleep with a board with nails coming out of it, strapped your chest to avoid any cases of suns. But you know, not legal advice, nor ethical advice coming from us at this point. And anyhow, it is Halloween.
So you do what you want, maybe that's just your costume you're wearing to bed. Or out. Probably don't. Or out. That would probably be dangerous. Yeah, you're going to get a lot of personal space though. Which is excellent. I hope everybody has a good time. We're just going to lead up to the festivities that are the candies and demons of the end of the month. So with that, I have been Taylor here with Chelsea. We are Journey to the Fringe. Thank you all for listening and we'll see you next week.
Bye. Thank you for listening to Journey to the Fringe. And if you really want to communicate with us and give us ideas for new episodes or tell us that we're wrong and terrible, either way, please send us an email at journeytothefringeatgmail.com. For now, I'll see you in the next episode.