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Welcome back to the show.
My name is Matt, my name is Nolan.
They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer called Mission Controlled Decant. Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Tonight, we're going to do something a little bit different to demonstration for the class. You could say. Our fellow conspiracy realist from around the world write in constantly with stories of local legends, regional folklore,
ghost and so on. And each of these tales is a unique product of those communities in which those tales exist, but they all have several key things in common. And I don't know about you, guys, there's been something on my mind for a long time. I'm quite excited we can do this. If these things have commonalities, that means they can, for lack of a better word, be hacked, be emulated, and that's what we're exploring tonight. But first,
here are the facts. What is an urban legend. It's kind of a misleading term, I think.
Yeah. I mean, I guess when you add.
The word urban to it, I think it implies it happens in like neighborhoods or in places where people live, and it becomes sort of a oral tradition of that region, you know. So, I mean, it's not that far off from just regular old myths and legends, but I think when you attach urban to it, it sort of modernizes it a little bit, right, It sort of puts it a little bit more in the context. And often it involves like murder and acts most foul.
Usually cautionary tales. Yeah, But ultimately it's a story, right, Yes. An urban legend is a story that somebody told once or maybe it really happened, maybe it didn't. But as the receiver of that legend or that myth or that story, often you don't know if it's true or not, but there's almost a common belief that it could be true.
Oh yeah, oh yeah, man. And I think part of why urban legend as a term has become a little misleading is unfortunately due to the fact that in the West, for some time, politicians started using urban as a racist dog whistle. This has nothing to do with that. You can, as a matter of fact, you can just use the phrase modern legend and it'll still get you there. Yeah, there was about the suburbs.
Let's not forget about the suburban legends.
You know, these things happen in gated communities, do right.
Yeah, Well, and think about the word myth. When we're growing up in public school or pa even private school, we hear the word myth associated often with Greek and Roman mythology. First, all right, right, that's a for sure we encounter it and too you know often if you're in the US or if you're in a Western country, that's treated as myth like, oh, those are just the stories you know that we're told back then and all of that. But remember there are temples built based on
the characters within those myths. Sure, you know it's it's not for people growing up in ancient Greece. It's much less of the way you probably think about a myth and what a myth is.
Humans have always loved merchandising. That's just step space franchise. Right, Yeah, so there are okay, so there are a few key differences we want to unpack before we get to the really fun stuff, all right. Myths, regular old legends, urban life legends, modern legends. What's the difference? Where's the beef? Myths, Like you said, Matt, are stories. There's some of the
earliest narrative technology. It passes through generations and they're all the old stuff, and they're all attempting to explain how stuff works and why it happens. Why does the sunrise, why are their eclipses? What are seasons? Why do those happen? Their origin stories. That's essentially every myth is an explanation, an origin story. They're usually called analogies or allegories. Fables are related. They take non human things or fictional characters,
and they just sort of reframe observations. Legends, though, aren't just origin stories. They can be a little bit, but they're primarily meant to teach a lesson, sometimes a really good one, a really nice happy one, sometimes a cautionary tale, and sometimes they're an anecdote. But they always have at least one true thing involved a real person, a real place, real events, and the facts about that are dramatically altered to convey a point. So legends are grounded in reality
but are not necessarily true and urban legends. Therefore, I posit they're a form of what we could call creative history, like creative writing.
Sure, speaking of creative writing, I would argue that without these urban legends, we wouldn't have the explosion of found footage horror films, you know, and like things like the blair Witch Project, you know, which really relied on the fact that people thought that it was real, that it was you know, footage that had been actually found. It's the name of the genre, and that really led to the kind of initial groundswell of support for that movie.
And then even once people realized it wasn't, it was still a fine film and a real good horror thing. But that, I would argue, kind of combines urban legend, because the urban legend of that story is that these filmmakers disappeared, right, But then the legend is the blair Witch part.
So it sort of combines these two.
Oftentimes these stories do there'll be some aspect of supernatural horror that is kind of more of a legend or a myth, and then the urban part is sort of modernizing it and making it like able to be touched, you know, by modern individuals, where it's like this is close to home.
Yeah, and I think that's an astute observation. We're going to dive into that in a few minutes, like, Okay, here's what we need to know. The tricky thing about these sort of categories is there much more of a spectrum than they are distinct, discrete buckets of thought. What does modern mean? After all? The meaning of modern changes with every generation because they have new stuff that's modern. That's why terms, at least in my opinion, terms like
postmodern literature are intellectually fraudulent. It doesn't make sense. It's post what post what is it?
Pst ironic is one of my favorites, so that is after post You know.
So, the first time urban urban legend appears in print is in nineteen sixty eight. There's a guy we've mentioned on the show previously in our La You Ana episode, Richard Dorson. And for decades, this is something you wouldn't really care about unless you were in a class with a folklore professor, or you know, you were studying for a test. A ton of people in your town in the sixties, they might know a story about how the local bridge or cemetery or other liminal space is haunted
by a lady in white, for example. But they're not going to say, oh, I know what that's called. That's an urban legend. They won't say that until almost two decades later in the eighties, another guy, Jah and Harold Brunwald writes a book called The Vanishing Hitchhiker American and Urban Legends and their Meanings, and this stuff is, I mean, you're not going to hear about it, but it's very important to the modern world because their research directly informs
what we call conspiracy theories today. And they Bruval makes two very big points, very important points, says, Look, first off, get off your high horse, modern Westerners. Legends don't only occur in primitive societies. They're here with you today, and you might believe a few of them yourself. As a matter of fact, you probably do all of us listening
and recording the show this evening. There are probably things that we have taken to be historical fact that are simply legends, you know, like George Washington.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Presidents, the folklore that we have around our early American presidents, even later American presidents, it was. And again there's a use for it. There's a reason. If you want to be a big, powerful country with a lot of human beings that follow the leaders of that country, you do things like make them say the Pledge of allegiance and feed them stories about the great
powerful leaders that are almost deified. You know, who created this wonderful, glorious thing that you now get to live in, that you get to serve.
You should be so lucky. And it also unifies people, right in a common experience, unifies wildly different demographics of people. That's one thing that the US has been actually pretty great at in comparison to other civilizations, you know what I mean, pretty great by comparison, not by objective measure, just.
To be very clear.
Well, and it's funny how the term like oral tradition and like urban legend, all this stuff gets thrown around, but in a way it can be a stand in for things like propaganda or just outright lies, because if we have no real source material or no real way to verify these things, then anybody can add anything they want to them to make the serve their purposes.
Right, yes, just so.
I mean.
The other thing is the other big point that Brumwald makes is that studying these stories gives us this powerful opportunity to learn about the modern culture from whence these narratives spring, You know what I mean? You see this in our book that we released a little while back, where we explore how conspiracies and conspiracy theories proliferate. And urban legends are quite similar in this regard. They explain things about the world. They connect dots. They synthesize your
individual perspective into a larger common experience. But urban legends are different from the old technology because they operate off fear. Pretty much every form of a modern like an urban legend, includes an element of disgust or fright or shock value. And then the teenagers found a hook on the side
of the car, you know, stuff like that. They warn you not to do something, and they seem somehow authoritative when they warn you about this, and they I feel like at that point we have to say they're not made out of malevolence. People aren't purposely trying to hurt you. They're not purposely trying to just scare you for sadistic kicks.
They come about because people play the game of telephone. Right, a friend of a friend knows someone whose cousin once went to a school where et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's crowdsourced writing. When you think about it, it's like that surrealist game we sometimes play, exquisite Corpse, where people write a line of a story at a time. You know, yeah, we've all played cards.
It's also an exercise in creativity, especially young creativity. And you know, you think there's a reason why there's a term campfire stories or campfire tales, and it is because there are things like summer camps that a bunch of kids go to, and there's a common experience at those summer camps, often where there's a campfire and people are hanging around telling stories, trying to scare each other for fun, and it's real and it's it could just be some
of these urban legends could just be a single kid that had some creepy ideas creep into their head and just went, hey, you.
Know what if I said.
It like this and spit flames by the campfire there. Yeah, And also there's an interesting psychological note and it's not entirely ethical, but part of the reason why campfire stories, especially scary ones, are so popular is because when you are scared in a group, when you are experiencing heightened heartbeat, when you're getting those fear adrenaline rushes of chemicals in your brain, you associate the people in your environment with
excitement of some sort. That's the reason why you'll hear some unethical folks say scary movies are a great date idea, amusement parks and roller coasters. It's because that science is true. Now, of course, there's not like a bunch of boy scouts are like, I'm going to form a lifelong bond with these people by telling them about a death car.
I would imprint upon them. Yes, yeah, it's not quite like that.
It's not that insidious.
But unless your scout leader is Dennis Raider, right right, right, Yeah.
But I don't know.
I don't know if that guy was smart enough to do that. You know. Anyway, it's the serial killers buy a larger or not intelligent entities. So this is all well and good and it makes sense, but it leads us to the bigger question. Tonight's question. All right, given that all that is true, and it is, can you make your own stories? Can you purposely design and spread an urban legend? That stands the test of time and becomes part of the culture. We'll tell you after word
from or sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy. Absolutely, yeah, absolutely can't. It's probably, in fact, it's probably easier now than at almost any point in modern history, isn't it.
No nuts out?
Yeah, I mean it's I mean think about it, like you guys, ever mess with any of those creepypastas or whatever, you know, all these little stories that circulate around the Internet and various subreddits.
I mean, that's what those are.
There are people making up stories that are rooted in Internet culture and then get spread around by people making remix videos or kind of rewriting them or repurposing them or whatever. And the thing that I think is interesting too is we're living in a society where truth is sort of irrelevant and in a certain sense, so it's like we don't really care if they're true or not.
We just kind of act as though they maybe are, you know what I mean, And that's all that it takes to get some thing out of them.
In my opinion, I don't know.
Well, no, you're right. You make a video series, a single video, you make a roadblocks game, you do anything like I think about the back rooms like exactly that that is a thing that is so ubiquitous now with kids. I had to have a talk with my son, like a pretty serious talk about how the back rooms aren't a real thing. He was freaking out about it.
It's this one guy, this creator who created this.
Basically, I think it's kind of well done, simple CG generated spaces that just kind of look like these abandoned offices, and they'll be it's just like a spookfest. You're sort of like a camera perspective that is you, I guess, right, Matt wandering through, and then there'll be a thing that pops out.
Exactly first person POV.
Well, it's not a game though, it's it's videos as well.
It's everything now, yeah, it's everything.
And then into a film. It's being a feature film by the original creator, but.
Prolifically tell me, I don't know, just the it's like an imagine an infinite you know, empty office space in a post apocalyptic time that just is like empty. It looks as though people exist here or live here, but it goes on forever. The hallways a little too long, they are too many doors, you know. Oh, and you're okay,
and you're being pursued exactly exactly. It's it's all these things together, but it's a very specific version of it that has now become so widespread that there are these things called the Rainbow Friends that are now associated with the back room somehow, and it's just it's nuts.
But it all came from one dude, one creator who made up a story and now you're having talks with your kid about. But again, we also, maybe in the eighties had to have our parents had to have talks with us telling us that Freddy Krueger wasn't real?
So how is it different? I know that it is, but I kind of want to dig into how.
Yeah, so in that case, just learning about backrooms down thank you for the info there, Matt. It's in that case it sounds like some people are being taken in, especially younger people children, but adults by and large understand this is not true. I do want to shout out the SCP article about the Endless IKEA. Check that one out. That's really good crowdsource writing. And yeah, fatal Frame. If you want to hatch your own kind of conspiracy, if you want to conspire to make an urban legend. We're
going to tell you what to do. The first step is to find one true thing, and the more local it is, the better an event, a place, a person bonus points. If you want to play clue and get a combination of all three, it needs to be something people can immediately confirm on their own that one true thing buys us the credibility we need for the rest of the story. And that's why so many of those gruesome urban legends bear strong resemblance to real life incidents of crime.
You know.
But the next question, why does it need to be local? It's a hack people feel included. Oh I know about that. I know a Pennyworth Street, I've been there. That building is creepy. So, for instance, this is just a little little hypothetical thing, no offense to the good people of Fairfield, Iowa. But imagine the town with a population of under ten thousand people. If these folks in Fairfield, Iowa, they hear a story about George Washington chopping down cherry trees and saying, oh, yeah,
you know, I just I'm bound by the truth. I can't tell a lie. They'll just shrug, They'll say, okay, fine, he's dead. He never even lived here. But if you tell a story about the quote unquote original site of the Carnegie Library and Fairfield, Iowa as two Carnegie libraries, or the true story of an early settler named Nancy Bonafield, they'll become inherently more compelled. They're included. They know there's a Carnegie Library in town, they've seen it before. They
could drive by it right now. They can hop on the Internet, then go to the library and they can read all about Nancy Bottomfield on their own. So it feels true because part of it is, the part in the front is true.
And then how do you get a bunch of other readers on Reddit to be into it.
Yeah, that's where we get to the interesting twist. We'll get there in just a second.
But I guess they could also they could google the same things, right, and they could find out, oh, wait, there really is you know that Carnegie library. Oh and it says on here there was a different location, and it all starts checking.
Out, right, Yeah, it says there's a different location, or they can't. They can find that there's a Carnegie Library in Fairfield, Iowa, but they can't learn much about the history of the land before that library was constructed, and so now there's someone with an explanation. You want an event. The second big thing to know to your earlier point about urban legends and murder, you want an event that is something very bad, gruesome homicide always a classic that's
like the Kobe Bryant of urban legend evil. And you want this threat importantly to be something that can be avoided or engaged with through certain sets of actions. There was another another thing you said earlier, Nola. I want to get back to the idea is supernatural. You have to decide at this point how supernatural you want your story to be.
Yeah, for sure, I mean, and it really there's so many different genres of these kinds of tales you mentioned Matt early on the cautionary tale. I think those are the ones that we remember and then they get reprinted in books that you could buy at the book fair, like scary stories to tell in the dark. And there were a bunch of other ones that really I can't remember.
They were really kind of gnarly, like they would have the one about the guy with the hook hand and the tapping and the blood dripping on the car and the foot scraping and all of that.
Stuff's got Mike Golden am that.
Then I remember there were a couple that had really not not the classic scary stories tell in the dark with those amazing pen and ink illustrations that will forever haunt all of our waking moments, but there was a series of these ones with like this kind of crypt keeper weird freak that was on the cover looked like kind of like a weird degenerate Methy serial killer guy.
Maybe I'm the only one that remembers these. There were a bunch, and.
They were all less rooted in supernatural stuff and more rooted in like stranger danger kind of stuff, and you could buy them at these book fairs, and I did, and I think it really messed me up. Man. I read a bunch of them, and they were really popular. Of course, those are the ones that the kids want
to read. But I also think that they kind of slipped under the radar and they probably shouldn't have been as available because it really does kind of mess you up a little bit and make you kind of scared of everybody.
I'm on the fence about it, because, as you know, a life lifelong or deathlog fan of horror, I think that's some of the most valuable stuff that CA can read, right.
I just mean I remember these being quite trashy and not particularly helpful, and so not particularly creative.
They're not Stephen King's stories. They're not well written. These were like pulp books for preteens, you know.
And there's also you know, there's that moment when you're a kid, you're reading a scary book and it crosses some social taboo line, some social mora and you actually look up and look around, like, oh, is anybody gonna see I'm reading this? I think that's an amazing moment. But with the construction of these legends to the point of moving beyond the realm of the supernatural into the secular,
that's a real tendency in older evenings. A lot of these legends were somewhat supernatural in nature inherently because they descended directly from previously accepted stories about ghost monsters and cryptids, non human spirits, and you know, ultimately those old myths. But today we're hearing stuff about secular fears. Like here's an example. Let's say we're starting one of the we're conspiring to make an urban legend in Fairfield Iowa in
the nineteen forties. We might spin a yarn about ghost from the underground Railroad because the underground railroad was a stop in Fairfield, Iowa. Or we might say something about cannibalism in the pioneer days because there were pioneers and settlers who founded a modern day Fairfield, Iowa. Maybe there's a massacre at the side of the library. Maybe it was covered up, but we get a lot more mileage in modern days if our cover up addresses modern concerns
and fears. Maybe instead of a massacre, that library is the site of environmental contamination a huge amount of lead, and that leads to insanity over time, right, according to the lead theory. And so maybe that contamination of lead on that site l to led to it could explain any number of unfortunate events that occurred in the town later.
I think that would work right one volume. Maybe we've fallen for it in the past, but I mean think about it, like, Okay, we have all through different shows, not just stuff they want you to know, but in our work as executive producers on any other number of shows, we've dug into local crime, right, and a lot of these crimes are things you might not have heard about
unless you were purposely digging for them. And when you go to crimes in smaller towns, what you'll see is there are all sorts of things that can look like connections. Everybody knows the Carnegie Library, and when crime happens, odds are are therefore that someone who is a victim of a crime, a witness of a crime, or the committer of a crime will have been by the library. They will have seen it. They may have some sort of
tenuous association. And now that we've reframed that as a key piece of the story, those coincidental associations have a new terrifying relevance. The killer didn't just happen to go to the library in school. Going to the library made them a killer, very dangerous, very tricky, very subtle.
Well, and I mean, you know, all of this dating back to.
The Greek mythology and all that stuff, and even certain religious parables, they're teachable moments. Everyone wants to know why things happen, you know, why things in natural processes happen, why people.
Are the way they are.
You know, I love what Neil Gaiman does with myth and you know, with American gods for example, or a Nancy Boy is where he takes kind of the African myths of like the Spider God and all of that stuff and personifies them and turns them into kind of superhero type characters.
I think all that's really creatives too.
But at the end of the day, these urban legends accomplish the same stuff as those things did. They're a way to kind of demystify the world to a certain degree, well somehow mystifying it more. It's very confusing, but it's very interesting phenomenon.
M M.
Yeah.
It exploits that, it exploits that cognitive mechanism that all humans have. I mean, in third, you want to appear to empower people, right, you want to have a lesson, because all legends are a lesson. Right, So you want to know you want the audience to know, or we want the audience to know how to avoid, engage with or confirm the threat is where specifics become the secret sauce. And this is this is a little bit of styling it.
But why don't we continue that Fairfield example and then Matt, maybe we can explore one of your examples too, because I think you wrote something special for this.
Oh yeah, well there's a story I got to tell you guys at some point, all right, right.
Therefore it yeah, and we'll be able to see how our process here jives up with it. So going back to Fairfield, let's say we go supernatural. How do we know the ghost from the underground railroad are still around today? Well, it turns out every May fourteenth, on the anniversary of some murders that were completely covered up by authorities, you can see their lanterns out there in the dark, right around midnight. You can hear their voices calling out from
beyond the grave. But only on May fourteenth. Giving this specific date does something mission critical. We are giving the audience a set of actions they may or may not choose to pursue. And that's all well and good, you know what I mean. That's the basic cooking. That's setting the oven and getting your misimplaus or whatever. The next part is the trickiest. This is where we get past the science of story technology. We start swimming into the
curious waters of propaganda as art. Let's talk about spreading the seat. The important thing we have to realize is back in the day, even in the current evenings, urban legends do not work when it seems like only one person is telling the tale, They'll be treated like they're just are to fiction, you know what I mean, Like some of those subredits and creepy pastas, they're clearly just meant to be scary stories. And there's a definite fourth wall.
There's a line between those tales and lived experience. But if you have multiple sources saying the same thing on multiple platforms, and you do it right, then people will increase assume it is the truth.
Can I just say I did find these books that I've been from my childhood. No, it's it's called the Scariest Stories You've Ever Heard. There are three editions. The first is by Mark Mills, the second by Katherin Burdon, the third by Tracy E.
Dills. But they all have these weirdo dudes on the cover.
There's cryptkeeper style, and the very first story in the first edition is called The Horrible Hook. And every single one of these is.
Like murdery and about like getting killed by some creep.
There's one called The dog Man, you know, the Night of the Okay, maybe there are some, there's the Night of the Sasquatch, but most of them were like about just you know, home invaders and like kidnappers and things like that, and I remember these distinctly, and they that's exactly what we're talking about.
And going back to this point about multiple platforms and multiple voices, one key aspect here is that those tales cannot appear one hundred percent redundant mm hmm. It cannot appear to be a copy and paste. The different versions out there have to have the same rough events, but they cannot be word for word unless there's a catchphrase, which is, you know, a little more advanced form of
this kind of conspiracy. And that's because if it's true folklore, people are going to be you know, functionally, they're eyewitnesses. They're going to get things wrong. They're going to tell a story about a story, and they're going to put their own spins or their own agendas on that, on the bones of that thing, on the beginning anatomy, the blueprint. And you see this, I think most often or pretty often in the details of the call to authority and
then the specifics of whatever the terrible event is. I think that's how it works.
It sounds correct to me, Well.
Why why then, Well, Okay, let's talk what is call to authority? What do we mean when we say that You hear that when you study rhetoric as well, right.
I mean, I think it's just the idea or there's like a component of the story where the storyteller gives a sense of authenticity to their recounting of whatever this thing is, you know, the idea of some sort of source. You know that that is that is real and that is to be believed.
Right, Yeah, Yeah, it's the part of the story. It's usually at the end or the beginning where they say, look this, this is how I Yeah. Usually it's one, but it's one or the other. Yeah, and it can be both. You can add more to it. You have to be careful because if you do too much, you'll give yourself away. So in this part, at the beginning of the end, the storyteller will give you you know, here's how I heard about this, or they'll end with some you know, some version of like don't take my
word for it, you know what I mean. I'm just I'm just letting you know. May fourteenth, m M. Don't go around the library late. For example, like at the beginning, it would be something like oh gosh, we wrote these. We wrote these weird example quotes. Since these are made up people, does someone want to do some of the quotes in a voice like a cool urban legend voice. That's like, maybe, uh.
Carnegie Library man, that place gives me the willies. Let me do it like a cool guy, Kip Conegie library man, that please gives me the wheelies. Back in middle school, I remember that kid in the classroom across the hall this bit parents left town, but after everyone said he'd gone out to the library on midnight May and you know what that means?
Am I right?
Bro, I don't know what I did there, but that got great and I got to the end of.
That was great.
That's from a conversation with high school sophomores, maybe talking about yes, yeah, or in the end there might be something with it. Sounds crazy, right, No one really talks about it these days, but look it up. Fairfield was a stop on the underground railroad and May fourteenth isn't that far away, you know? And then cuge cheesy music, right, maybe a Rod Serling voice. Okay, so we've got these different stories, and we've got slightly different versions of the story.
Beats now and this is what you're asking about, Matt. Now we need to put those in different places. Funnily enough, the rise of the Internet should have made the world way more accurate, should have made it way safer for everyone. But instead it made things much worse. It exacerbated the rise of unverified and unverifiable claims. So you want to exploit those vulnerabilities. You want to hit local forums. You want to wait until it depends on like depend on
what date you pick, it doesn't really matter. You want to wait until it's about a month before Halloween, or maybe it's early October, and then you go into the community pages on Facebook for your neighborhood, right and go into God sadly, you could gird yourself and go into next store, But that place is pnemonium. Have you ever read next Door you guys?
Oh yeah, it's a fear mongering machine. Do you agree? Yeah?
I think it would work. It's also everybody there is so angry all the time. I don't know what happened.
Or they want to sell you things, or they need help, you know, with a project in their house. I don't know's I think next door in the suburbs, guys, is a little different than next door in like ITP.
Well, that's where the suburban legends come in. Guys. I've been screaming about that from the start. They get these too.
No I'm joking, but you know, these communities, it all is exacerbated and exponentially increased and muddled by the Internet, you know. And that's the Internet's a great place for busybodies and a lot of times that is where these types of things start. And you know who else does this kind of stuff? Donald Trump, of course, who is just here in Atlanta? You're getting fingerprinted and mugshot and all that he tweeted or whatever he does.
Truth, Atlanta is.
A terrible, degenerate place full of murder in the streets, where people won't go outside to buy a loaf of bread. That's an urban legend. It's just not true. We go buy bread all the time, we go outside. But when you simplify things down to such a you know, an absurdly oversimplified way of presenting something, that's kind of what that is.
Yeah, and you also want to hit specific subreddits for related things or specific forms for related things, but you don't necessarily want them a to be related. The more tangentially related. These forms are actually raises your chances of success, and it makes your mental contagion more likely to transmit. So go like if you think about redeed or dig back in the day, any kind of those community bulletin
board descended things. Go to the one about ghost tell a ghost story, go to the one about lead poisoning, tell a lead poisoning story, go to an unsolved mysteries one, and just say, hey, I heard this. Isn't this weird? Has anyone else heard this? And then you're further empowering people to investigate the thing. And if you do it right, their investigations are going to lead them to some other
version of the story that you wrote somewhere else. And like Jamie Madros the multiple man in Marvel Universe, now you are an army that agrees.
So that's fascinating. I didn't even think about that. It's like breadcrumbs leading back to the same loaf.
I don't know.
No, let's keep the bread thing going. And so so there's a there's a key aspect to this that a lot of people don't think about. And we're going to tell you, uh, We're going to tell you what will really set your conspiracy apart from other attempts. After word from our sponsor, timing right, good stories, good comedy, good horror. It's all about timing.
What a terrible joke. It's good.
It's good that joke about timing took a minute. Yeah, So look, you want to do this slowly. You don't want to go out everywhere and have your your carefully crafted versions of this all of a sudden appear in the same week or the same day, or even the same month. You farm it out. You space it out as long as you can. And that's because the visitors to these sites are ephemeral. They're going to come and go.
The words are going to remain. And every time someone looks at the most recent version of this story and they go digging, every time they find something that seems noticeably older from a clearly different source, it knocks the credibility up. Interesting, it's weird, ac Yeah, it's a weird one.
Yeah it's true.
So what what do you guys think about this? What if you give it a couple of years, let the heat die down in maybe six months to another year. After that, you start quoting your own earlier post from different forums.
Sure, that's a good idea. It's a method.
Yeah, and again, I mean the anonymity of the Internet allows that to be done. I mean, and it's the same way that the Internet is used for propaganda because in the minds of some people, because it exists at all, and it's it's it's codified and written word, then there be some truth to it. And that kind of thinking is the kind of thinking that allows urban legends to proliferate in that same way. You know, because it's out there, it has to there has to be some grain of
truth to it. And that is something that I would say manipulative individuals and politics used to their advantage Hunter because it's out there. They refer to it as though it's fact, and that suits them, that benefits out.
A lot of people are saying, yeah, some people are saying, shout out to By the way, stand up comic I really like named Shane Gillis. Shane Gillis has a free a free special up down and it is so unendingly hilarious.
Because the guy that got he was gonna be on SNL and it was announced he was going to be on SNL, but then he got kicked out for some old stream he did or something.
Yeah, he has an SNL story. I remember too.
I can't.
I can't recall the specifics, but a lot of people are saying, no, I'm kidding. So when you quote yourself, make sure you put some small variations into the original story mix. Make sure there's one way you've heard it and there's another version you've heard. This further empowers your conspiracy. And we can measure the success of this when other non related sources start repping, repeating, and remixing the tail
on their own. And here's here's a spooky part. This is kid, you not much more likely to happen now than at any other point in human history because of machine learning, because of automated content scraping llms, large language models chat GPT. They love your campfire stories, Bro, They're
going to scrape them, you know what I mean. And they're going to inevitably use that content if you proliferate it well enough to assemble throwaway articles, clickbait things, you know, list of topics that are related to stuff you mention in your purposely designed urban legend. And then it'll go
back to the humans. They'll pull that up. They'll start quoting that article, you are, at the same time that you are proliferating your story, you are erasing the evidence that you created it, which is kind of neat, you know, also evil. It's also kind of evil.
Why do we want to tell people how to do this?
Because knowledge is power and we empowered people. Okay, but it's also I think it's important to understand how this stuff works and why because before we go to before we go to an urban legend Britten specifically for tonight's show, and head out on our night walks, there's one important thing to leave us with. It's something everyone needs to
think about when we're out there in the dark. It is the scariest point of all every step we just described in making up an urban legend for fundsies and hacking people's minds to make them believe it is true. Every single one of those steps works for real life dangerous things, real life siops, government propaganda, racist trolls on social media, the kind of stuff that religions and state entities use to push the public into war and to
egregious mass casualties. It's tech. It's narrative technology. It pushes people toward or away from beliefs that may not be in their best interests. And it's happening right now as we speak, all the world round. More than ghosts, more than lead poisoning, more than murder. That is the stuff the powerful don't want you to know, and they also don't want you to know. It's easy to do it yourself.
Hmmm, So I do it myself exactly.
So with all that you know, Noel, Matt, I think it'll be an interesting experience. We're working live, so I don't know. I don't know how this land. But Matt, you've got a got a story to tell all of us around the digital campfire here. Maybe maybe you can tell us and the three of us can figure out whether it jibes with what we just explored.
Oh yeah, Oh okay, Well I'll tell you the story I've heard. It's it's a little weird.
I would set it up this way.
Actually, no, why don't we Why don't I tell you the story and then I'll tell you what I've heard about the story?
Does that make sense? This does? Okay?
So you guys know that I worked at a place called PDC here in Atlanta for a long time, The Piedmont Driving Club and yes, I worked there for a long time. My dad had a history there. He was an accountant there since before I was born. I think it's one of the reasons he and my mom moved to Atlanta, or to just Georgia in general. H Well, look, I heard this from the bartender in the Men's Health Club, so is Brian. I can't attest to whether this is true or not. This is just something I heard because
it's an old story. The PDC was established in eighteen eighty seven, so it's got a long history here in Atlanta. And this story occurred apparently just a couple years after the club was established, So I don't know if that's like late eighteen eighties, early eighteen nineties, but it occurred
sometime just after eighteen eighty seven. According to Brian, there was a daughter of one of the early original members, a guy named mister Collins, and mister Collins had a daughter who was living right near Emory University in this place called Baltimore Block. And one day his daughter disappeared crazy stuff. So the neighbors of the rowhouses where she lived, this place called Baltimore Block, they were alerted because there was smoke coming out from under her door, and you know,
they're trying to get a hold of her. They can't. There's smoke coming out, so they break this door down. When they go in, they see dinners sitting there on the stove. It's clearly burned. It's been on there for a while. They can't find her anywhere in her row house in this apart it's like an apartment complex, but not really does that make sense? This is like the late eighteen hundreds.
It's it's a rowhouse, a condo kind we think of today.
Yeah, yeah, But she's not in there. Her personal belongings are all in there, you know, it's not as though she's left or anything. As they're looking for her, they hear meowing, like a pretty frantic sounding meowing coming from the bedroom area. So they go in there. They explore, and they find inside her closet the door is open to her closet, the light is off in her closet. The cat is in there meowing like at the wall basically and just won't stop me owing, And they can't
figure out what the heck's going on. They do a search for her. Her name was Anne, by the way. They do they do a search for her. They can't find her anywhere in the city. She's just disappeared, you guys. And then two days later Annie shows back up. She's in her apartment. She is just going about her day. One of the neighbors in the in the rowhouse complex. They're just kind of caesars, like, hey, Annie, where the heck have you been? And she's she thinks nothing of it,
as though nothing has happened. She's just regular ole Annie going about her day. And everybody is perplexed and doesn't understand. And there's a reason why it occurred, guys. This is the part of the story, the urban legend part of the story. Okay, it's about pets and closets. Have you, guys, ever noticed your pet paying especially close attention to your closet?
Yes?
Yeah, Have you ever noticed that it occurs at a very specific time of day.
Morning? No?
No, no, no, watch closely next time your pet is checking out your closet. There we go, check the time, because it occurs most often when the hour and minute is the same.
So like.
Or six oh six pm, I'm not getting check it out?
Watch for it.
What about triple digits? What about like three thirty three.
Three three works too. Yep, it's just less common because, uh, it's gonna occur more than you think. This is gonna freak you out. Okay, so look, uh there's a reason for that.
Guys.
Has your cat or dog or ferret or whatever ever attempted to make verbal communication while it's checking out the closet? You ever noticed that too, like sure, me ow and at the closet, barking at the closet, grolly. Yeah, guys, this is what I've heard. It's because closets are gateways.
Well, everybody knows that that's where the monsters come from. Well, under the beds the same.
There's that whole monster inc thing, and it makes you wonder like, who over there, Disney I came up with this idea? Well, guys, it wasn't born out of nothing. They're they're gateways for curious entities sometimes.
Yeah, like the Howie Mandel film from back in the eighties, what was it called Monsters, Little.
Monsters Monsters h Anyway, there's more to the story if you ever want to learn. But you can probably find some stuff about this online. You have to you have to look for it.
Oh bravo, Oh well done, Matt Well done. Yes, okay, so let's let's get a monster here as you. Let's let's let's kick it on some of some of the things that this tale did immaculately. So we have some pretty strong calls to authority. Right, we've rooted this in a real place. Uh, subconsciously, we have one of the biggest calls to authority that humans can encounter, which is a parent. So before we get into the store or we learn, we learn about time, right, we learn about
a depth of time. And even though that doesn't directly apply to the idea of closet to supernatural gateways, we are now rooted in some sort of credibility because we have the truth upfront, right, and now we have also a chain of custody for the story. Right, Matt is not you're not saying Meadow is barking. I opened the closet, I saw, you know, some nightmarish phantasmagoria. You're you're saying, I heard this from the following people, and these people
are all real. And then you've got some great You've got some beautiful specifics. We're empowering people with knowledge a set of actions to observe, to notice, to investigate, or.
Avoid yeah, look out Baltimore Block, Atlanta History.
I'll do it right now, History, and you can confirm you did not write this.
No, I wrote all of this, he wrote me.
You started the historical market database.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, really playing the long con.
Here's the that's the way it works. And those are what those are Atlanta's first apartments. Huh yeah, home to socialites, bohemians, and one parakeet.
Yeah, and you know the daughter of somebody living there going to Emory University, which was also established in like the eighteen thirties, was probably a member of the PDC.
Just saying.
More rights out well that I think that that is a beautiful way for us to end. So you can see, you can see the power of this because stories and narrative and language, they are technologies. They're some of the
earliest technologies and they're very powerful. And knowing this, knowing a little bit of the backstage or back room construction of this stuff will hopefully help all all of us be a little less credulous, right, a little more likely to start thinking through some of the flags and the processes we've explored tonight, Most importantly, fellow conspiracy realists, we want to hear what you think. We would love to
hear your own home brewed urban legends. Give us the ins and outs the story beats, do your calls to authority, get some specifics, and tell us why you believe your story could become ensconced in modern folklore. No promises, but if it's good enough, if we vibe with it enough, we might not even read your email on air. Instead, we might join you in propagating your conspiracy.
Indeed, and you can do so by reaching out to us at the handle conspiracy Stuff on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, We're conspiracy Stuff show on Instagram and TikTok.
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