132: Ramtha & Grottoes

finale of The Vow on HBO. This is a night email, actually, and it is anonymous and it is juicy. Okay, So they write really enjoying all of the conversation around the Vow and glad to hear I'm not the only one who seems to have been driven crazy by many aspects of the series. How did Keith pull this thing off? Where's Mark to blame in all of this? Why do you so many of these ladies have bad eyebrows? What the hell is up with this aerie's narrative structure? Who

shortens Anthony to Nippy? Great question? Anyway, back in I was working at an unscripted production company that was shopping around a project about the housekeepers of Beverly Hills homes. I'm sure you can guess what the very clever title was. The sizzle was tasteless even for the time. We were talking the height of Jersey Shore and the eve of here comes Honey, boo boo, and featured long sequences of

the housekeepers just cleaning fancy houses. One of the featured housekeepers was employed by none other than the daughter of Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, Dynasty's Amanda Carrington and next M's public enemy number one, herself, Katherine Oxenberg. I don't remember specifics, but I do remember one woman complaining about how long it took the housekeeper to walk up and down the driveway to get the mail, and one obsessed with having

crystal clear windows. I've seen a lot of failed projects, but the level of cringe from this one was really breathtaking. I'll never forget it. Thank you so much for this scoop. So it turns out that that Katherine Oxenburg was like so close to being a real housewife. The spotlight fell on her housekeeper instead, and what sounds like a really awful project that I'm glad ton't go to a series.

You know what's funny is that when they showed the interior of Katherine Oxenberg's house and the wall of religious artifacts that's so densely packed with crosses and stuff, I was like, man, a nightmare to clean right there. Oh my god, who's gonna dust all those crosses? She has one of those houses that's like so white and minimalist looking where you're like, oh, it must take so much cleaning. It's white and minimalist, but it has a lot of

chat It has chats. It's got spiritual chatch keys. It also looks like kind of small from the outside, but like in a Malibu way and where it's like it's small, but it's like probably costs a zillion dollars. But I mean, I wonder if Katherine signs off on that, if she like nominates her housekeeper to be in that show, Like,

how does that work in that instance? I mean she would have to give permission at least, but I would imagine that it would be some kind of a weird casting call where people would recommend I was like, Oh, my housekeeper happens to also clean houses for so and so like and then put them in touch. But it's such an obvious trap to be portrayed as a horrible boss. Who on earth would sign up to let like a Bravo s docuseries be made about their housekeepers and their staff.

Probably someone who thinks they're going to come off as an amazing, gracious, wonderful Yes, and I can totally see Katherine Oxenbourge being that person, honestly, Like they don't. They rarely showed domestic laborers on Real Housewives. They did more in the beginning, and I loved when they would do that because you would see these people being such assholes to their housekeep first, uh, and then maybe they realized that that wasn't good for making anyone sympathized with the

housewives ever, But occasionally it's a plotline. Yeah, it was this tricky thing they always do, like especially in the early seasons of those shows, where it's like they're trying to do this balancing act of portraying outrageous wealth and you know that kind of lucky lou aspect of it, with like, oh, but you care about these characters, and by the time you've actually like gotten to the point for the further along in the series where you do care about some of the characters and you have to

like be very then this, then that stuff, and that, like look at how outrageously wealth they are, like entitled this person is. SIT's weirder and weirder with the rest of the show. There was a big plot line on Real Housewives of New York where Sonia Morgan, who is like fallen from grace. She used to be married to JP, someone from JP Morgan, and she's like very attached to the fact that she had this name and all the status, and then he left her, and so she just has

the name and this town house. I love it because it's very like Edith Wharton. She's just like I'm going to get back up there somehow, you know, even though I'm in my fifties now, I'm like, it's gonna happen. I just need a plan. But you know, the townhouse is basically what what she has at this point because she lost all this money and all these bad investments and she had somebody stay with her. She had Tinsley Mortimer stay with her, and they fought a bunch over um.

She was like, you can't ask my maid to do things for you, even though you're living here. That's my maid and you're just my guests. No, I mean all of this just makes my skin crawls so much. She does. But it's interesting. It is. It's Tinsley Mortimer, a real housewife of New York. Yeah, for like two seasons, although she just left. Oh I didn't. I never watched New York. I have to say her plot line is great too, because it's like she comes back to New York after

being disgraced. She had a mug shot in Florida for trying to break into her boyfriend's house. I remember that, um. But it's like she comes back to New York and she trying to recapture the early two thousand's but they're gone, you know. So she dresses the way she dressed it's when she first became semi famous, and her mom, her mom is like this insane Southern mom who's like, you know, you're still gonna like find the perfect husband and have

a grandchild for me. But there's this incredible episode where they go to the circus together and they're both wearing like she's wearing like circus clown like cutie makeup because she is doing something on stage at the circus and then she just has a complete mental breakdown at the circus with her mom. Is she becoming like a or like our first oughts, Misshavis Sham, Like, oh good, that sounds incredible. Real house Lives of New York is so

Mishavis Sham. They're all mishavi as Sham and they're all single now right, they're all single, and they all hate it and they'd all throw each other under the bus for a man, which is like a really interesting dynamic to watch on a show. Yeah. Man, it's like a Sex in the City went on for five more decades. Like it's very It stops being glamorous at a certain point. Because I'm always like, these shows are a critique, which

is what I taught myself so I can keep watching them. Yeah, if you watched them the right way, there a critique. I'll say, there's a critique available in the text. It's not necessarily at the top. Well, they seem miserable despite the money, and they're so attached to this rich New York Manhattan lifestyle that they have that it's like they're all just clinging onto it for dear life. And they refuse to do anything that might make them happy. That

isn't that? Yeah? Right? Can I wait? This is like a little segue, and we weren't necessarily going to talk about this, but I just saw this on Twitter this morning because I'm like probably an advisable and advisably dipping my toe back into Twitter, but I was I saw a thread that was started by uh Sarah Maslin near Um. She's a journal to New York Times, and she you know, there have been least threads all summer that are like

New York is dead, New York is over, etcetera. And she was just saying like, because I guess she lives in the West Village, and she's like, it's actually totally empty, nobody's here anymore. And then of course everybody's like, no,

New York is stronger than never, blah blah blah. Even though we were talking about a city of five boroughs and there could be wild variation between them, but like, from from what she was described, it did sound like like, you know, Manhattan and i e. The place where rich people live, is like completely empty now, like everybody is going to their country homes for real. I think that is a real phenomenon. I think a lot of rich people have been fleeing cities for their vacation homes because

they can well. I also think that with the travel restrictions, um, that may have made things even worse, because I think as soon as it was mentioned that there were they were going to be restricting travel from New York to Connecticut New Jersey vacation home places, I think everyone was like, great, let's go right now we're not allowed to, then we have to. I mean the New York Times has also run a lot of insane stuff about stuff like this. They ran that thing that was like turning your second

home into a first home. God, but I'm interested, like, and I'd be interested for any of our listeners who are in New York and specifically who can access like Lower Manhattan and the most ridiculous parts of Manhattan easily. Like I would like a scene report from like how dead meat packing is? Right, it's dead at all? Because

I think it's been. I mean, I think it's like there's a certain class of person who's like, it's dad, it's over, and then there's all the like younger broker people who are like, it's amazing, we can just run around and do whatever we want. It's like old timey

New York. But this is the thing is like I think that part of New York has been so taken over by stuff that is only for the rich people, and like you know, designers show ups and stuff like the Mark Jacob's store and shipped like that, and like hotels that are more or less nonfunctional. Right now, that I think that when you do take that cohort out of there, it does become a ghost town of its own design because you did not design a place that

is for everybody. You don't have affordable places to go do outdoor dining or whatever. Like. Also, though, just to be sympathetic to what New York is going through, um my parents have a lot of friends who are older, like in their late seventies and eighties and um one in their nineties. And they're not necessarily wealth either, like long term New Yorkers who basically have had to leave

grand control. Yeah, but they they are staying with relatives and staying with friends outside of New York because for them to be you know, walking around the streets of New York has just gotten to be scary. You know, you have high risk, so I think, you know, I I was having some fun thinking like, hey, new York's over, but then I was like, oh, but that's you know, it's not just like all the rich people have been chased out. It's a lot of them are just old

New Yorkers who are the cohort of New Yorkers. Is like the ancient New Yorkers who have been there for and people who can't leave their apartments because there aremunocompromised. I think that is a lot. Yeah, I mean I just think all these is New York over. It's like, no, when the rich people live, that's like when a city gets cool. You know. Yeah, I think that's the thing. Like New York is over can means so many different

things to whoever you're talking to you. Uh. And I think like I wouldn't say New York is over, but I would say that like it sounds like anecdotally, it feels like there was some kind of maxine out of the uber wealthy development that that happened, especially like in

Lower Manhattan. Uh. And that is interesting to me because it's like, oh if that stuff all, if that if that really cannot get back up to that level of you know, outrageous wealth and and you know, nothing but Lilabo for miles and miles, Like maybe there's a chance for interesting stuff to come back there, yes, um, which is you know, not not necessarily looking for silver linings here at the moment, but that would be interesting if

that happened. So well, I love when people come to l A and they're like, oh, it's so debt, and it's like no, it's always like that pretty much. That's what we love about it. Yeah. I also, though, I think a lot about how families are doing in New York right now, and especially with the kind of cluster fuck that's been going on with schools reopening not reopen.

You know, it just seems like it's going to be this endless shuffle that's going to go on for way longer than a lot of families of young kids can handle. So I also just wonder like how and I talked about this last week too, of like, well, you've got to think about like the different architecture that will happen after this pandemic. It's so exciting because I'm so depressed

that I'm clinging to these things. But I do wonder how New York is going to kind of reinvent itself as a place that can withstand these kinds of pandemics, because I'm sadly as ming that this is not the last one that we're going to encounter in our lifetimes. And you know, I think about where I grew up in New York and how often I needed to get out of the apartment, and like a lot of my friends were in one bedrooms with their families. You can't really be in a one bedroom with four people for

seven months, you know, what do you do? Yeah? Well, that's the thing is It's like a lot of cities are based on the idea that like maybe you have a small apartment, but it's because you have the whole city as your playground, and if you can't leave, your apartment becomes a different thing. And that's why I you know, I take a little bit of exception when people are shaming people who are leaving, especially people who are more

middle class or whatever and have that situation. It's like, the reason you're in New York is because of your job, needing to be you know, having proximity to whatever industry you're in, And if that's off the table, why would you live in that small of a place for that much money. Like, I don't. I don't think like there's this wild, very tribal New York shaming thing that happens. And I like understand it if you're talking about people

who have multiple homes and are just like ditching the city. Um, but if that's your one home and you have a one bedroom apartment in like Crown Heights or whatever, and you're paying like three thousand dollars for it or whatever, like I understand wanting to leave. Tons of people are moving back in with their families because they have no choice and you can't afford to live in a in a big city if they're not you know, making making

a salary. Um. But I do think that every time there's been one of these things where it's like, wow, what an exciting opportunity to like remake the city is something good over this year so far, it hasn't turned out the way I personally would want it to. It's like such a years long process to right. Like I feel like, you know, there's gonna be a wave of stuff closing or you know, corporations taking their their their franchises out of out of certain neighborhoods. And leaving vacancies behind.

And then there's they're still probably going to only run out those places too, you know, the kinds of businesses that can't afford there, and so it'll take to several waves of failure before it's like okay, like mom and pops can have this place again. Exactly, we're still at the point where we're identifying the problems like there were nowhere near being able to implement solutions until we recognize how any kind of recovery is possible for small businesses

and how much longer this will go on. I was talking to a friend um whose doctor said, like, you you should think of this pandemic as a marathon. Then you're in miles seven and it's very long. Six it's that sticker, that something on everybody's car. You can tell that we all by our six. I heard someone say two yesterday, twenty five or six to four, we're all moving to shock Chicago. Maybe that's where Tinsley Mortimer moved

to leave The Real Housewives. She went to Chicago for love, and they were all like, how dare you leave New York for Chicago? You'll never be happy in Chicago. She was like, I've kind of boyfriend. I'll be fine. Well, we're going to take a break and we'll be right back. Welcome back tonight. Call. So we have continued to get a ton of Pyramid Pals slash Crazy Architecture emails and calls.

We appreciate all of them we've got. Maybe we can like just tweet out a bunch of these or something, because the thing is that there there are a lot of them are just visual and like you know, we're a podcast, so there's only so much that we can get into with it. But we did want to highlight something that came up this past week in connection with the vow. Oh yes can I may I please do?

This is one of those things, so we talked about this. Um. We recently had a Patreon special episode with Nicki Mayor Um to talk more about the vow in the finale, and I Molly first brought this to my attention that Mark vas Sonny was not a cult newbie when he joined Nexium. He had, in fact belonged to a cult called Ramtha. And Molly mentioned this to us, and then I got so obsessed with Rampa I don't even know where to begin. I implore everybody who's listening to this

to read up on Ramtha. What if all of the vow was just like a long con to get people to join Ramtha because they're like this this cult sucks, but that well, you campinably come away from the vow being like, all of these people would join another cult tomorrow, Oh yeah, definitely, and then they'd be like, it's not a cult like the last one. It's self improvement, just like they were saying at the beginning of joining next um Um Rantha's School of Enlightenment is a cult that's

based in Yelm, Washington. Uh. It's started by a woman who named herself Judy Zebra Knight. She was born with a different name. Um. My favorite thing about Rampa is the origin story of Rampa's that Judy and her first husband in the seventies were messing around with pyramids that they thought could turn things into gold and had like magical properties, and she put one on her head like a little tiny pyramid, and then she spoke um with

ancient spirits voice and has continued to do so since then. Um. And when we were talking on the maybe maybe it was after the Patreon episode had wrapped, we realized Selma Hyak is a practitioner of Rampa. I think we talked about this on the pud. I can't remember if it was on the pot. We kept talking after we wrapped the pot because we are like Lane has has been and then Salma Hyak was as well. And then I found the connection between them and that that's a Sundance

Uh time's up story. But it was it's a very deep, deep dig. But um. But the crazy thing is I went back and I read that article again. So this is I don't know if people remember this. This is like a very like film twitter thing that happened on

at Sundance a few years back. There was a lunch a luncheon with like v I P Ladies of Sundance, and there was just an incident where Salmahayak was like talking over Jessica Williams Uh and kind of like referring to like she called her like baby and was just being being like basically saying that like she couldn't like her her struggles with like being being a woman of color or being a black woman in the industry were like not exceptional, and that we all had to like,

you know, basically have a unified struggle together and not necessarily recognizing that it could be different for different people. Um, and the but the language is she's using because Shirley McClain is also there is so nexium ish that it's crazy, Like I wonder if I wonder if they also dipped a toe into nextium at all, because it's very um, it's very like you can't identify as a victim. That's

the thing a lot. And also I think that they do they do things like exercises where they get blindfolded and they have they you know, all of these Rampa people have to run around and like find objects that they've put in a field earlier and try and remember where they put them, and then they bump into each

other and get hurt. I mean, it's just it's And also it has a very problematic layer where um, Judy Zebra will talk as Rampa, but she'll say really racist or anti Semitic things and then just be like, oh, you know, it's Rampa. It's a really intense is that because Rampa is an ancient Egyptian pharaoh's like I guess,

so also makes predictions. Rampa likes to predict the future, and there's a really heavy emphasis on you know, kind of quantum physics that you put through a sieve and take what you want, but it's not really quantum physics. But sorry, what the bleep? Well that's what it is, is that what the bleep was basically like Rampa, a Rampa project um. And it's very odd that that none of this was mentioned in the vow. I feel like it's very germane to that discussion of him being in

a call. Did we mention with with Rampa that that Judy Zebra was born in Roswell in n We have not mentioned that. Seems important, seems we're very important, um. But it's also a really fascinating, weird kind of encapsulation of the topics we've been discussing recently, cults and pyramids. It's all connected. Final destination of cults and pyramids is Rampha. This is night calling on so it make sense should

we take a night email about our weird buildings? Oh yeah, okay, this one comes from smaller demon loving the weird building emails. You could have an entire spinoff podcast based on it. Side note, maybe we just that's this. It's Alabamian who has lived in Nashville, Huntsville, Alabama, not Texas, San Francisco, and now back in Birmingham, Alabama. Alabama may not be a go to for weird buildings, but there are some strange things here. Birmingham is home to one of the

largest monolithic domes, the Faith Chapel Christian Center. This thing is nuts how big it is. Birmingham is also home to one of the most distinctive buildings I've ever seen, currently called the A T and T City Center. It was designed by Conn and Jacobs, a firm that designed a lot of New York City buildings that would fall into the dreaded glass and steel category. But this building in Birmingham is a weird stone and glass building that

I've not seen in many places. It combines black and white granite and shaded glass and it's just really cool. But and I'll make this separate from the rest of the email, the weirdest thing as far as structures, and I mean loosely speaking in Alabama might be the A Marie of Marie Grotto with a link. Words are almost impossible to use to describe it. The grotto was built over the course of fifty years by a Catholic monk

in the small city of Culman, Alabama. Basically it's Jerusalem and miniature built out a junk bottle caps, discarded glass, etcetera. Once you start digging around and find pictures and videos, you start to realize how utterly bizarre this is and where it is located. That said, Alabama is the home of e w t N, the cable television Catholic channel too, so Alabama has a lot of weird Catholics. E w t n's headquarters are literally a mile from where I live.

Please take a look at the grotto links though. I'll send you another bizarre Catholic structure of Alabama in another email, and some grotto photos. I love a grotto, Molly. You hang out at a grotto sometimes, I do. I mean, I just love grottos. I love roadside architecture and and stuff built out of junk by people. There's one in Cambria called Knitwit Ridge that is a house a great name.

Oh it's so great. I think it's nit Wit with like two teas, maybe in both, but it's um It's like a grotto house, like a coke bottle type house. And you go there in Cambria. There's a guy who owns it. Um I think he's trying to sell it, so obviously we should make it the Night Call headquarters. Have you guys ever been to the Hollywood Sculpture Garden No, Oh, my gosh. See it's it's a it's a it's a bit of a hike from from my current residence, but it is. It is in somebody's yard. It's just a house.

It's up in the hills, kind of above Beechwood Canyon. I know what you're talking about. Yeah, it's very tiki techie, just a bunch of stuff, like you know, the the the style is all over the map, uh, but a lot of like mannekins and like vaguely sexy architecture and stuff like that, and a lot of like you know,

stone collages and stuff like that. I just love when people decorate their houses weird because it's so it's so taken for granted that you have to have like a normal house that fits in with the neighborhood, and obviously in l A you don't necessarily have to do that. Well, it's really heartening there because everything else around it just looks like different iterations on the house from parasite and then you've gone from total ice or in the middle

of it. But it's like very heartwarming to Okay, it's so. I was among a bunch of parasite houses the other night.

We were doing an action and it was like up in the bird streets, which are up behind the Sunset Strip, and we walked past this house on the way to the house we are going to that had a million sculptures all over it of conquistadores and samurai and on the roof and on the roof were like elephant and you could just see there were like a weird waterfall or something in it, just like the cool the coolest, weirdest house I've ever seen, which cooked up agent lived

on that Larry Flint and he lives there still, I believe because my friend friend of the pod, Christ Chang, said, Larry Flint lives around here somewhere. I'm going to go try and find his house. And then he called me and was like, it was that weird house that we walked by. What's up with this crazy house? Um? So I looked into that house. It before it was owned by Larry Flint, it was owned by Sonny and Share and it has apparently a red heart shaped bathtub cool

that Larry Flint left left in um. And then another friend of mine said that she worked on something where it was right next to that house, and so she could see into the Larry Flint house all summer and she was like, what crazy see stuff am I gonna see at the Hustler House. And then it was all like old guys that are friends of Larry Flint hanging out in the yard and listening to old timey music. I like when it's like, what crazy things am I going to see it, It's like they're just just some

old old friends kicking at kitchy style. I love old guys in the porn industry because they're so like overseeing naked women at this point, you know, they're just like family men. Usually by the time they're like of a certain age, they're like, oh yeah, I did all that and now I'm going to listen to Ragtime with my friend. Um, we don't have time to read all of these emails,

so we're just going to mention this one here. We also got a night email from Zach about the Flintstones House, which, um, if you can just look them up on Wikipedia you'll have a fun time. It kind of looks like they're out of the Simpsons UM and they're located in Hillsboro, California. Uh, but those are they're fun to mention, but you just need to see them. We can't podcast. There is a Simpson's house called We did a whole dome homes run a while back, and now we're getting drawn back into

dome homes. So just when we thought we were out, That's how I felt about the second Nextium documentary. Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in. We also, uh, you know, we talked. We started to transition a little bit into mounds last week and we got an email from Catherine about the mounds of Wisconsin, which I had no idea about UM, but she said true mountain heads such as yourselves will probably be interested

to learn about Wisconsin's effigy mounds. UM. And these date back to seven d b C. And a lot of them are kind of formed as animals UM, like birds and turtles and buffalo and stuff like that, and some align with the moon and sun sunrise set on the solstices or e winoxes. And they are about four thousand of them. That survived to this day, which is I had I'd never heard of these effigy mounds, these Wisconsin effigy mounds. But she she also says that Madison still

has a ton of them. Uh and one of them, the largest effigy mound in the world, which is an eagle with a six and twenty four ft wingspan um along with a dozen other eagles, I guess, is on the grounds of the Mendota Mental Health Institute formerly known as the Wisconsin Hospital for the Insane, where ed guy in the Serial Killer who inspired the Silence of the Lambs and other famous horror stories, spent the left last twenty years of his life. Wow, pretty wild stuff it is.

Did you guys see that cat Nascal lines thing that just got discovered? What this like a giant drawing of a cat on a hillside in Peru, Like an ancient drawing of a cat and so cool. I love stuff like that that's so old and you can still tell what it's supposed to be representative of. It's interesting in this email about Madison having so many of these mounds because it says that they're in city parks, backyards, cemeteries, and it's I'm just like, imagine if you had a

house with an ancient mound in the backyard. That's my dream. Yeah, no, they were uh she She says that like the soil from the mounds is uh is sometimes collected because it's like lucky mound dirt and people in their gardens. You can make moon water and mound dirt, and then you could just totally transform. That's how we're going to sell in our store. You will ascend um. It's also crazy that ed Gain connection is crazy. First of all, a Gain not guying. It's either it's either guying or Geen.

I believe I have. I don't know how to pronounce middle. I don't know how to pronounce anything. I looked this up right before we started, but apparently it's so contentious. You can say whatever you want me to say. Ed Geen ed Geen just because he was famous for digging burial things up, you know, so interesting you surrounded by burial mounts. I have learned a lot about ed Geen recently because I watched the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which is one of three all time classic horror movies based on

ed Geen. The other two are Psycho and Silence of the Lamps. I find it an unpleasant horror movie. Well, it's super unpleasant, no, but I mean I like unpleasant, like horror movies are intentionally unpleasant, clearly, but I find that it leaves me with that scuzzy feeling that I can't shake that I don't. I'm a little allergic to the because it was horrible to make, and you can tell everybody's super unhappy. Yes, but it's it's so good and everybody dresses amazing. It's I find it cluster Well,

obviously it's claustrophobic. I just watched The fun House last night too, which is the other Toby Hooper movie about like a scuzzy carnival. I mean his movies are scuzzy, that's what's cool about them. But like the ed Geen story is super scuzzy, and part of what's so creepy about it was that he was just like some guy in a farmhouse and nobody knew he was like digging

up all these bodies to make lampshades out of people. Yeah. Um, but I also heard because I watched that Errol Morris documentary. I didn't know this, but Errol Morris was going to dig up ed Geen's mother to see if he had, you know, dug up the body and done something with it, just based on the idea that he probably did psycho stuff and he was gonna do it, and he invited Werner Hertzog and they were gonna do it together on a trip, just buddy. So he was like a fan

of Verner Hrtzog, you've never met him before. This is when he was like, this is my husband plays Errol Morris in a short film currently at festivals about all of this specifically. So yeah, then Errol Morris totally whisked out. He freaked out. He was like, I can't dig up a body. And that is when Vernon Hurd talk said like, if this guy makes a movie, I'll eat my shoe.

And then he did. He did, and he did. He also like threw a ton of like wads of bills at Errol Morris, who then threw it out the window. It's it's a very interesting and strange friendship. I like it. I would love to get Errol Morris and Vernon Hertzog on Nightcall, Oh man, I would like Ernie on on Nightcall Ernie. We could just we could just ask him about some mounds, mounds and ribs they could be They could cause play the mound in the rid and have

a building personified conversation. Do you guys ever think about how weird it is that we like very dead people? Oh yeah, what else are we supposed to do with them? Though? Just leave him be? Well? A lot of people burn them, a lot of culture has just burned them space as a result. We all still like the mushroom suits, right, we love the mushroom Sits still down for the mushroom suits. It's crazy to think about how much space dead people take up in this country and around the world, you know,

just like crazy. Yeah, And how many like toxic chemicals are leached into the earth because of the sheer volume of dead people that are in the ground. It's crazy. What are the chemicals do? I don't know. They can't be good formaldehyde and shipped all the embalming fluids. I'm a big fan of cremation. I think, I think very neat and tidy, but that probably also is a pollutant when you think about, you know, the fumes. That's how

we got to do the mushroom suit. But I like, I like the idea of the mounds because it's like, wouldn't you just decompose and help play let's grow? I

mean you should, but I think I don't know. Maybe if you're in a less um densely populated area, like if you are a native person living before you know, colonization and everything, and you've got the whole wide open country to yourself, you can just stick somebody in the ground and you don't need to worry about like making sure that I don't know, they don't well, you need to worry about the other people that are already in the ground. I guess, I guess. I mean, I think

it's too crowded. Well, we got into this on our on our episode about ghost Land, but just the idea that like all of America is a burial ground and so like it's all haunted because it's all built on top of a civilization that was you know, wiped out in a genocide by the people that built on top of it. The shining Yeah, I was actually I just watched um the second episode of the second season of Unsolved Mysteries. Oh, which, Oh, it's it's good. Uh. It

features a woman who is an unidentified woman. They think she was maybe an assassin or a spy. Um she signed into a hotel under a false name and a false birth date, and she it seemed to be a suicide, but then it seemed maybe not to be a suicide. She was shot in the head, but she had the gun, was in her hand with her thumb on the trigger, and the forensics people were like, there's just no way that, you know, the crime scene just does not seem like she took her own life. It has to be a homicide,

and maybe she was like a high profile assassin or something. Anyway, they had to bury her after a year, and they had no leads on who she was, her identity, and so they buried her. And then they decided to dig her back up, get DNA samples and examine her teeth. And one of the really interesting things was like, they can find your age by your teeth. And it's not just like with a horse's teeth where you can see, oh, it must be this age because of the growth of

the teeth. It's like the chemicals that your teeth have absorbed. It's weird because I guess your teeth absorb ambient radiation or something, and so they can test your teeth and see which nuclear events you've been affected by and therefore discover your age. That was a great scary episode, uh, because it was just so weird that nobody could identify this woman and they were running her photo everywhere and

just nobody had any connection to her whatsoever. But she was very specific looking and she looked just like gi Lane. She did. She looked exactly like Elane, which was interesting because she was probably CIA or some kind of you know, not CIA, but some kind of secret agent for probably like Belgium or something. They ultimately decided, well, she had listed this weird small town ver Lane, I think Belgium.

She listed a fake name and a fake hometown, and then they went to the hometown to try and find her and they were like, no, she's not from here. And then they used her teeth to figure out where she was actually from because of like nuclear testing, they could tell whoa. It was a really good episode. It was good. And that's where I learned which I had not known, that when somebody is murdered and they are

secret agent, they cut the tags out of their clothes. Yes, so this apparently this is this happens like not frequently, but it's not the first time it's happened that they remove all labels from clothing and that they kind of like sand off any identifying information from jewelry and weapons and stuff like that, so there's absolutely no way to trace where the person is from. Should take a break and come back with a little bit of spooky Halloween chap Let's do it. Welcome back. It is the reason

for the season. The Big Skeleton Man and the Ladies of Night Call. We just wanted to talk a little bit about Halloween, spooky fun time on our our last episode pre Halloween. Yeah, obviously this is going to be this Halloween is not like the others, but we have plenty of I feel like we have plenty of like Halloween material and stuff to do and activities and stuff, mostly movies, but also driving around and looking at people's in saying Halloween houses. Yeah, which has definitely I would

say it's dipped a little bit this year. I also just personally feel like it reached a peak a few years ago and then both people had less money and spend on Halloween stuff. Yeah. We talked about this when we were talking about The Big Boy, the Skeleton Boy, which I still have not seen any. And I was driving around Burbank the other day and I know where a few are. Okay, you'll have to share off pod will make a map and make a map of the big boys. That's perfect. They have medium boys in stock

at Rite Aid. If anyone is interested in a medium boy, they're probably they look to be like maybe four feet tall and they're posable. It's not big enough, No, that's that's not a big enough boy. I've gone on several spooky cruises so far, just by myself because I'm a weirdo. I went to Toluca Lake, which I recommend if you're looking for extremely decorated houses. To Luca Lake is like the place where they have really great lawn decorations of

all kinds. But I also went to South Pasadena yesterday, which is where all the filming locations from John Carpenter's Halloween are located, and they always kind of go crazy for Halloween there, I think because of that um But there were all these signs on the lawn that were like no trick or treating this year. Enjoy the decor, but like do not knock on the door. I mean, it makes sense, but that bums me. Out anyway, it

makes sense, but it was funny. It's like they made their own sign for the neighborhood because it's like a famous Halloween neighborhood that were like, please enjoy these decorations, but like it's different this year. A lot of people are taking driving tours of which houses I saw on like Hidden l A or something, um like witchy little Hoppit, witchy little habit homes. I just saw there was an Ecto one in my neighborhood that was cool inable Ecto one. Wait,

what's Ecto one? It's the Ghostbusters. Yeah, it's the car from ghost Pecto one. It's the license plate the Ghostbusters car busted mobile true Ghostbusters heads. No, that it's It's license plate is Ecto one one. Um. But I appreciate when people kind of make the effort to like do it up because it is it's kind of I guess it's not the first holiday we had. I mean we've had a number of holidays. We had the fourth of July under quarantine. We'll probably have a lot more holidays

under quarantine. But for some reason, Halloween, this one stings. Well, it's weird. It's like the one time that people go talk to their neighbors that they don't know exactly. It's like this, it's very surprising that we even do it because like there's such a weird social contract about it. I like, this is the night where it's okay to's just like randomly stopping at somebody house that you don't know. Yeah. I haven't lived in a neighborhood that has tricker treating

since I can't remember when. Like I I any time I moved to a new place, I always like get a bag of candy just in case. I mean, obviously I'm not going to do this year, but uh, and then no kids come and always even in New York. Yeah, no I'm not in New York. I mean, like they're a lot of times people will like be out on the stoops, but I don't even I didn't even see

that in my last apartment. Like kids would go to the businesses, Like they'd go to the business street and like you know, the delis and stuff, and they'd be handing out candy there. But they wouldn't be going to people's houses. I've seen some kind of workarounds. There is a drive through haunt that someone set up. I think it's the people who do the Haunted hay Ride normally in Griffith Park, which is definitely not happening this year.

The drive through Haunt has gotten mixed reviews. People are like, it's not that good. It's kind of short and basically just a bunch of people come up and like, bang on your car. I think that sounds awful. Um. I just discovered trunk or Treat, which is you decorate the trunk of your car, you meet in a parking lot, uh, and then whoever has the best trunk wins. But Halloween's not supposed to be competitive with in a car sense. I mean, I feel like that sounds like a drug

deal drunker treat. We all meet in a parking lot and open our trunk and give each other money. Well, do you guys have any good h Halloween viewing lined up or anything you've been watching recently that you've been really into, um, that you would like to recommend. I've been watching everything on Movie Past, which is my friend Michelle's Twitch channel where she's been programming movies all summer. Uh, and they're doing a Spooky Past series that's all spooky movies.

So they did like a really good Hong Kong Horror Day a couple of days ago. Yesterday, they did one that was all Dark Ride themes extremely Nightcall, and they showed Dark Ride and walk through videos between the movies. They owed Waxwork, which was really scary, which is like a Horrors of the Wax Museum movie. Wax Museum adjacent horror movies are like extremely scary, engrossed me. So scary. And then The Fun House, which I've seen before, which

is the Toby Hooper but I love it. It's um people did these like two teen couples on a double date go to a super sketchy carnival and decide to stay overnight in the Dark Ride for fun. Spoiler it's not fun. Also, it's another Toby Hooper like incestuous Family of Deformed People thing. So he's really into that. I thought that though, because his parents ran a movie theater in Texas where they showed a lot of like exploitation movies,

and so that's why he makes exploitation movies. And then they showed Final Destination three, Oh Great, which I couldn't handle because it's too scary. I really Destinations that's the one where they it's uh I think it's Mary. Elizabeth Winstead is the lead, and she they're at a theme park and she had a theme. She sees that the roller coaster is going to derail and kill everybody and convinces people to get off, but then of course they

are killed anyway. Those movies, those are the movies that I find like too bleak, really the Final Destinations, Yeah, because you can't escape death in them. It's like, well, you can't escape death in real life, and exactly I know that's why they're so fucking scary. I don't know. There's something like so outrageous though about the desks in them, where it's like this is like fate like arranging the

most grizzly death for you. That is so it's so nasty that I just like it makes me laugh, Like right, no, when it gets into that nightmare on Elm Street territory where it's like you're gonna have the dad that like makes the most sense for you, and that person the tailor made death is really alarming, so scary. I might watch some Freddie movies I've been I've seen all of the Freddie movies a couple of times. Now, those are the ones that really freaked me out as a kid

too much to even engage with. And then I finally watched them and they're really good and funny. Emily, what are you thinking of watching? Well? I wanted to just recommend a couple of things. One, I think we talked before about the seventies horror series on Criterion right now, which is really great. Um. I did watch Dracula uh nine a d uh the other day, which is truly ridiculous, but just like, yeah, it's like a fun thing to watch.

Uh and then uh oh. And then there's also I've found myself like browsing HBO Max, which I rarely do because like lately I've just had specific things that I'm watching on HBO Max. I haven't been like going through and looking at what they have. But they also have a pretty good, um like classic horror or seventies horror situation that has like I think they have like The Brood and like, uh, Carnival of Souls is on there, and a bunch of other stuff. I would recommend that, Oh,

they've got Final Destination five. There's a really good movie in that seventies horror collection on Criterion that's so Nightcall called The Velvet Vampire. Oh, I haven't seen that. You haven't either. You recommended it, and it sounds great. It's great, and it's directed by Stephanie Rothman, who's like one of the few women who made a bunch of Roger Corman movies, who's really rad. But it's like the most nightcall movie.

It's basically The Love Which but about a vampire, and it's about a sexy female vampire bisexual who invites hipsters to come to her desert house in Joshua Tree and then seduces and destroys everybody. That's I mean, that sounds great. When was it made? It's so great. It's seventies and it's like the most seventies movie. It's the most California maybe because it's like she's a vampire but she has

son and she drives a dune buggy. Oh hell yeah, it's so nightcall Um and the guy and it is one of it's like the Himbo from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. It is a delight. I had never heard about it. That sounds perfect for it's great. Well, I had also been saying, like I I said, like a minute before my boyfriend like why aren't there more horror movies where all the victims are met? And then this was a little more like that. Oh yeah, that's like good there should be because it's all like dudes

making these movies for the most part. Um, That's why I was actually a little like stoked about in Texas Chainsaw Massacre. You know they don't discriminate. Oh they don't. Everyone's gotta go, uh what about you test? I'm taking it classic style. We're going to rewatch the Shining Um because we're living in the shining And then I'm also going to force us to watch Pet Cemetery, which I think is just such a terrifying movie. My parents, um

are not easily freaked out. But in New York they went to go see Pet Cemetery in the theaters and they had adopted a dog. I think they'd had dogs before, but they this dog had like some behavior issues. It was just one of those dogs where you like, what's going on in your mind? I'm not sure. And they got home and they also had a very mean cat. They got home really late from the movie and like opened the door and saw the pets and like couldn't

couldn't deal. They were like so rattled by the movie that they were like our our pets, like evil pets, and they had to just be like, good night, guys, I'll see you in the morning. I'm also gonna recommend that you guys have to watch Doctors Sleep because it is so bad. I can't bear to watch something that's so bad. Right, but it makes you appreciate The Shining

so much, But what about what? But watching the Shining also makes you appreciate But it's funny because it's like, you know, Stephen King hates Stanley Kubrick Shining because it's like not faithful enough to the book. This is like his opportunity to litigate that, and so he just like makes it all completely literal. It's like, just like here's all the rules and logic of the Shining Verse and like the things that make the things in the Shining happen,

which is totally demystifying and not something anyone wants. Yeah, well, it's like a scolding movie where he's like, I'll do it right here. It is so unscary. And the villain is a woman whose name is Rose the Hat because she wears a hat. Well, I'm Emily the headphones right now. I just want you to have to see it so that we talk about it, because it's so silly and dumb. I never read the book, so I have no you know, so good point for the faithfulness. I just love the movie.

I think all the stuff that that Stephen King was mad didn't end up in the movie. It's like, that's what makes the movie good is your brain is like trying to make connections and it can't fully make them right, and Stephen King is like it's because he's an alcoholic. Yeah, but I mean that the book is great, like they're two things can exist in the world without I've never read the book. Maybe we should do it for a

book club. Sometimes. I'm always down for some vintage Stephen King. Guys. Know, I've never read a single Stephen King book in my life. I guess I've read. I've read the anthology, like the short stories, but mostly I just would make tests, tell me what happens and that, and I'm here for that. Molly. You read The Lango Years though, right, No. I just saw the TV mini series. Oh my god, you guys. Look, I'm sitting I'm sitting on the floor and it's like

you're like by a pile of your Stephen King pyle. Look, it's like I even have like current Stephen King, this one of the like second last, it's all by my bed, and I'm embarrassed because like latter day Stephen King, like I could read something more nourishing for my brain, but it's nourishing the one that I always I'm like the girl who loved Tom Hardy. That's not what it's called, but the But everybody I know who's into Stephen King is like a completist in that way, and I like,

I don't look down on it at all. I think it seems really fun. I just never caught the train. I never got it on at the right time, and so now it feels really daunting. I did ask another friend of mine, who is like a major Stephen King fan, to like give me kind of a primer, give me, like, like, here's the first five you should read, and I remember

that she recommended, like I think she recommend. I know that Christina and Kujo were both in those that top five, and I was like, yeah, I want to read both of those books. Uh, I just haven't yet. They also go well together because it's the Possessed Car and the Possessed Kujo is actually holds up really while I re read Kujo, but that was the book where at my copy of Kujo, it was like a really cheap whatever,

shitty copy of Coujo. And I got maybe halfway through and then the pages started repeating, like there there was like a section that had were found out of sequence, and I was like, this is a really amazing book because it's just it's like making me feel like I'm insane and wow, like this is really incredible work by Stephen King. And then was like, oh, okay, there's just like a chapter missing and it's it's just a printing era.

That's amazing. It was just exactly, um, well, maybe we should take some night calls about the Stephen King of Verse to go and take us into November. We're also going to be doing some episodes about dreams. Uh, and so if you have any thoughts or don't, maybe maybe don't tell us your dream because I think I don't know about you guys. Maybe we can talk about this later. But like, listening to somebody tell me their dreams is like never the most interesting thing, but like recurring dreams

are interesting. Recurring dreams and prophetic dreams. Yeah, and also I would like to hear about some COVID dreams because I know it is a documented phenomenon that people are having lots of dreams about, like getting caught out with no masks. I I had a really intense COVID dream last night that I won't tell you about because of Emily's Emily's take on this is true, but I did realize like people are talking a lot more about their dreams.

I think people are having more vivid dreams in general. Um. Also, if you have movies or books that you love about dreams, please recommend them to us. So, yeah, I was gonna say it's one of like three stimuli we get now it's like food, sleep. Yeah, if you're I don't know, I was gonna say drugs. Yeah, you can say drugs. It's drugs. U keep it spooky and we will see you all next week. Thank you for listening Tonight Call. You can subscribe to us on iTunes and make us

a rating and review there please. We've gotten some recently and they're they're so fun to read, so thank you. If you have left one. You can also follow us on social media. We're on Twitter at Night Call Pod and Instagram at Facebook at Night Called Podcast, and you can join our Patreon at patreon dot com slash Nightcall where you can get our bonus episodes, our newsletter, our mixtapes, and also it's fun stuff. Check it out and we will see you all next week