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- [00:03]
Ben
This episode of Haunted Cosmos is brought to you by Indigo Sundry Soap, Gray Toad Tallow, the Kingsridge elderberries, forged beer company Stone Crop Wealth Advisors and our supporters at patreon.com.
- [01:19]
Brian
The high deserts of the western United States are funny places. In a single day, the weather might move from warm in the morning to to boiling hot at noon to snowing into the night. Trees are scant. It's mostly just chaparral and clay that moves fluidly from gray to red and then back to gray again. The gray clay is the worst of it. It makes the whole world lose its color, but that is the most of what's there. The hard dirt and limestone could make one think they were walking on the surface of some lifeless planet if it wasn't for that chaparral. Those bushes of wood that look almost petrified are sharp and hard themselves. They join in with the chorus, the whole landscape singing its constant overture of death, an overture that sings death to any who dare to venture into its barren domain. The deserts of America are no forgiving place. They blanket the better part of Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada, and something about this landscape tends to shape the people who settle there. Coming from a place filled with trees, one might be surprised at their own claustrophobia. Under the wide skies of Utah and Nevada's basin, or Arizona and New Mexico, Mexico's tabletop plateaus, all the air seems too much, too dry and too thin. In a twist of irony, the vast, thin atmosphere can feel like it's pressing down on you, coming for you. The whole region bears the mark of death, quiet, salty and alkaline, eager to take, to desiccate, to grind to dust and blow away. The desert is a knife that never stops cutting, is a hardened prairie mother who cares only for her own, refusing to nurse any other who might seek for nourishment. Of course, people have carved out plenty of livelihoods here from the native Indians with their lanyards of scalps who ran their horses all along the mesas and valleys well into the American age. To the willful Mormons who landed in the heat of the Salt Lake Valley. No better place to go. Now sure, most of those people, western or otherwise, only made their homes in the desert to eventually realize that what they'd actually made were their graves. But even then, the hot hills of iron ore didn't take them without giving something back. For it is in these most despairing places that we find traces of the Old West's great romance. The boxy timber frame downtowns replete with saloons and general stores, the prairie houses left alone and abandoned in clefts of mountain shadows, the buried remains of cowboys and Indians and lawmen fighting for a piece of the elusive wealth hidden deep in the unyielding ground. Yes, the desert wants to kill you, but at least it will make you feel immortalized first. One can't help but wonder why such places exist. Places where the sun feels closer and the threat of a sudden blizzard in the heat of autumn feels closer still. Places where the fine crimson sands invade everything and bite at the eyes of the squinting wanderer looking for his way home. Places where one's only company may be a coyote howling at the moon a dozen miles away. Places where a great number of other darker, less than things might actually be keeping you much closer company than you would care to think. These places feel almost incomplete, or perhaps too complete. One senses that it is not a lack of vitality in resources that gives the desert its sense of nearly transcendental wonderful, but rather an abundance of both that used to be. It is as if the overwhelming brown peppered with such dark green fauna, is masking a history of richness so vast that even its first pages might shock us. It's that mystical feeling of being surrounded by so much space that yet feels concentrated on whatever single point you happen to occupy by rocks that should not care about anything but seem nonetheless to bear down on you with whatever gaze they have, with a malicious curiosity. And it is this rich and deadly ethos, this spare tapestry of desert and sky, that gives us a rich well of legend from which to draw. Whether the chicken of supernatural power or the egg of human interaction with it came first doesn't really matter. The fact is, along with the death and life of the desert landscape comes a great measure of strangeness. And if the stories are to be believed, the rough, shod, sandpaper slopes of Mount Wilson outside of Pioche, Nevada, are home to some of the most potent strangeness of all. Welcome to haunted Cosmos. In 1996, business mogul and futurist Robert Bigelow made two large acquisitions for his National Institute for Discovery Science Skinwalker Ranch in northern Utah and Mount Wilson Ranch in Pioche, Nevada. His reason for purchasing the two properties were similar alleged paranormal activity at both locations. Wanting to devote a large portion of the NIDS research efforts towards investigations into the paranormal, he jumped at the opportunity to study two similar, but also distinctly different places where similar tales of strangeness had been told. The peculiarity of Mount Wilson Ranch, however, is a puzzle to us. The former owners of Skinwalker Ranch Before Bigelow, the Shermans had gone on television requesting help for their supernatural problems, which is how Bigelow found out about it. It was in those circles, already mainstream. But Mount Wilson Ranch was different. To this day, nobody knows for sure why Bigelow purchased it or how he knew that it also had a proclivity for high strangeness. Some have posited that it is because of how close the ranch is to Area 51 and the Nevada test range. Others have claimed that Bigelow had insider knowledge with someone deep in the government actually telling him about happenings there. Ultimately, we do not know what it was that brought Bigelow's attention to this place. After all, it had just been an old west tourist hotel, a less than glory dude ranch for decades prior to his purchase. What we do know, however, is what he thought he would find once he started investigating. Via whatever source. Bigelow was convinced that some type of extraterrestrial craft was buried on the grounds of the ranch somewhere. Additionally, he believed that the ranch and Mount Wilson itself were riddled with secret tunnels dug by. Well, dug by someone or something. That is anyone's guess. Initially, the testing did not yield much. But as was the case with Skinwalker Ranch, that eventually began to change. The team started having encounters with forces beyond their reckoning. Malfunctioning equipment that seemed to fail without any apparent cause. Tools and sensors moved to different locations, despite everyone testifying to keeping things as they had been. Orbs floating through the trees and UFOs flying in the sky. Apparently anomalous magnetic readings from underground. The things that ought to still shock us but somehow don't anymore, began plaguing the NIDS team at Mount Wilson on a seemingly daily basis. And yet, in the midst of this excitement, there still stood a melancholy Bigelow. He was most certainly interested in these smaller events that struck the team. But he was also very disappointed. He had purchased the property because of his belief in buried mysteries, but he was not seeming to have any luck in finding them. All of the orbs in the world could not shift his single minded focus from this desire. That is, not until one fateful night spent in an extra room on the ranch. As I said, the ranch had been a sort of novelty hotel, an old west resort before NIDS moved in. There's a small block of what looks to be a western Main street, plucked right out of Tombstone from Wyatt Earp's day and placed on the ranch. There's a saloon and a general store. There are restaurants and multiple hotels. But these had been added supposedly after the ranch experienced whatever it was that attracted Bigelow. For that reason, and for the sake of investigational efficiency, he and the team neglected to study any of these buildings. They were content to use them for housing and offices and little else. It is said that Bigelow slept in one of these many rooms on an ordinary early spring night in the early 2000s. It was not anything special. Two twin beds sat atop some thin, dark green carpet from the 80s, and rustic themed beadboard rose halfway up the wall around the entire perimeter of the room. White and beige paisley wallpaper plastered the wall over the beadboard, ultimately joining with the popcorn ceiling. To top it off, it was dusty in sections. Even in the heyday of the resort, this room was not the most popular, and it had that old desert smell, lending the room an overall impression of dryness. It looked like the kind of place that had been frozen in time for so long one might expect the bed sheets to crumble into dust when touched. It was also incredibly dark. To be sure, this darkness could largely be blamed on the area the ranch was nestled in. It was a dark region of the world to begin with. There's even an astronomical observatory on the other side of the same mountain. But something about this room. Maybe it was the dark carpet with the thick window curtains made it feel darker than mere dark at night. If one was not careful, they might sleep in well past the sunrise and wake up in the middle of the day, only to judge by the light in the room that it was still night. But whatever factors of decor might be given in explanation for its darkness, the room still seemed too dark, like it had some quality of its own that transcended everything else man might consider when made into the void. Bigelow fell asleep quickly and sank into the bed unmoved for hours, a very deep dream world that he could not remember after the fact. But at some point in the night he woke in a daze, confused. As he labored through blinking heavy eyelids, he found that he could just make out the features of the room. His eyes were so adjusted, and there was just enough moon and starlight peeking in through the gap in the curtains that the room sort of shimmered in a muted silver. His sleepy eyes couldn't make out the sharpness of the room's features at first, but that soon changed. Before he knew it, he was awake. Or at least he was mostly awake. But just when he wondered at how odd it was to randomly wake in the dead of night from the best sleep he'd had in years for no apparent reason. He noticed something in the peripheral vision to his left. It was a shadow. Not a shadow cast by the scant light coming in from outside. It was just a shadow, a shadow standing on its own without belonging to anything else. At first he thought it was up against the wall in the room's corner, but after turning his head and propping himself up just a bit on his elbows, he realized that wasn't it. It was closer to him. He knew it because he squinted and strained his eyes enough to confirm that he could not see the wall or anything else behind it. It was very close to him, this darkness that seemed to be a mass in and of itself. It stretched all the way to the floor and lingered there like a pillar that existed before the room was even built. Faintly, he began to hear a croaking sound. Not loud like a frog, but low and rough, like an elderly person's last breath drawn out in a gravelly rattle. A breath released, but never followed by the intake of another. It just continued on and on, and as it continued, it got louder. The gravelly character to it faded out, but the deep clicking sound only grew. It sounded to Bigelow's still foggy mind that the sound was coming from above him. He wondered if it was something in the ceiling that had woken him up. But as he traced the block of darkness from floor to ceiling, he received the horror of his life. The shadow was what was making the sound. This thing, this being made of the dark was standing over him, tall enough to have to crouch and double over. At the ceiling. At the apex of the terrifying thing, he saw the outline of what looked like a face, a grotesque thing of impenetrable night. It had antlers on its head, antlers made of the same darkness as the rest of the thing hanging around its neck. His eyes traced the outline of dried up things that looked like bladders and native charms. Just as his mind began to draw the shape into one coherent figure, he was struck by the most putrid smell he'd ever encountered. It shocked him until he was fully awake and aware. No more guessing. He gasped at the fullness of the thing before him. The shadow that was no shadow, the shadow whose very being was shadow. It was a giant native shaman figure, doubled over by the height of the room and glaring down at him through the buck skull mask that it wore. The bladders and bird skeletons about him brushed together and sounded like the essence of the dryness of the desert itself, the arid life sucker of the west. But all of these Things were drowned out by the eyes. Eyes of menace and malice, recklessly hateful eyes, glaring red and pulsating in their glow back towards him through the skull. He reeled and tried to bury himself deep into the bed as the creature finally opened its mouth. A maw that was somehow even more black, even more of an empty void met his gaze as it widened far beyond what was natural. The jaw unhinged like a snake, and the eyes bulged. The clicking, croaking noise was deafening now, like rusty gears cranking on a pinion. His heart raced in a breakneck thunder. His chest heaved in the dry air in terror. And just before the lunging, gaping mouth of the shaman swallowed him up into its void, the image dissolved. And the thing, whatever it was, was gone. Bigelow, covered in sweat and still trying to catch his breath, began pinching himself and getting up and walking around. He was trying to wake himself up from what he was sure must have been a dream, the worst nightmare he'd ever had. But it was no dream. He never woke up any more than he had already awoken. He had not been paralyzed by anything other than his own fear. Whatever the shadow shaman was, it was something he had really seen. From that day on, he longed to leave the ranch. He longed to sell it. Right then, right in that moment. Still shaking with the lingering terror of what he had endured, he began to mumble to himself, I have to get out of here. So he did. The ranch was sold by Bigelow himself to its current owner. But that owner has discovered since that Bigelow was not idle in the final days of his ownership. In 2023, a small team of investigators consisting of a YouTube creator, a journalist, and an ex CIA operative arrived on the grounds of Mount Wilson Ranch to try and determine what it was that Bigelow saw in the place for them, just as it had been for nids. The investigation began slowly, eventually following the trail of breadcrumbs that was Bigelow's conviction, that something was buried somewhere on the ranch. They started to scan large swaths of the ranch using LiDAR. Once they studied the results, things began to heat up. The scans in one area showed the presence of caverns or voids beneath the surface somewhere. These voids, though, were not just random blotches of loose soil. They were in straight lines. Nature doesn't tend to occur in straight lines, and the team posited that these cavities could actually be the leftovers from a tunnel system made by Bigelow, or perhaps even someone before him. With this idea in mind, they began to dig around the area of a large void, which led to one of these slender tunnel voids. As they did, they discovered just how busy NIDS had been in their final hours on the ranch. The excavator began by picking up bucketfuls of loose dirt and rock, but that changed almost immediately once they broke beneath the surface. Metal sheeting, old sliding gates and security fences, even entire utility trucks were pulled up from the dirt by the digger. Even still, they had not reached the level of the supposed void yet. They continued to dig in the area, the ground above the void being too tough for the excavator to get through, and pulled more and more of the NIDS equipment up from their graves. What would have caused Bigelow and the NIDS team to pile so much of their equipment underground and bury it? Why not leave it all standing? The new investigative team were plagued by these questions, but they'd run out of daylight. Answers or just more questions would have to wait until the next day. Two of the researchers, Paul Biben and Andy Bustamente, decided on a whim to take one twin bed each in the string of rooms closest to the day's action. Neither of them knew that the room they had chosen was the very same room that proved to chase Robert Bigelow off of the ranch before totally settling in. Though the ranch's owner, a man named Jeff, informed them of the story, they gave each other a sideways glance of excitement. This was just the kind of thing they were there for, and began setting up sensory equipment in the room in order to see if anything happened while they slept. And right when Paul turned on the thermal camera, he gasped slightly at what he saw. He frantically waved Andy over, nearly unable to speak, and pointed at the screen. He had not even had the chance to press record on the thermal device yet, just recording the screen through the cameras behind him. Right in the corner of the camera's frame, which corresponded to the bedside table on the left side of the far bed, the one Bigelow slept in, stood the thermal signature of a man. Only this was not an ordinary man. Where Andy and Paul's body heat had been picked up by the camera as bright red, this figure was a cold, dark blue. It was some kind of unman, frozen there in the ether and invisible to the naked eye. The figure was stooped slightly over the bed as if it studied the pillow, and where the body was dark blue with coal. The face was vantablack, utterly devoid of any heat whatsoever, just a black circle belonging to some faceless thing stalking the room still after so many years. The two men shook with shock and excitement at what they saw for long moments before words finally escaped their mouths. They shouted about hitting record about what the heck the thing was about there being something there that seemed to sink all the heat into itself. Without giving anything back in the few seconds they excitedly shouted, though the figure vanished, the wall behind where the pillar of black cold figure had melted back into its usual warm orange. The figure was gone. But there was no question it had been there moments before. Waiting, Watching. Hunting. There are countless places in the world like this. Places where the boundary between seen and unseen seem to overlap with special frequency and strength. These are thin places. Like our old friend Skinwalker Ranch here in Utah. This episode is a tribute to those places. From Utah to Pioche, Nevada, and well beyond. Join us as we explore the places they don't want you to know about.
- [21:10]
Ben
Welcome to Haunted Cosmos 2025 Axe Edition.
- [21:14]
Brian
Wow, that was terrible. You know, in this episode we're talking about thin places, which rules out your mom.
- [21:23]
Ben
He's been waiting to say that now for the past three minutes.
- [21:25]
Brian
I've had that in my pocket and.
- [21:27]
Ben
He'S been hyping it up like it was the funniest thing. I thought it was going to be a lisp. A lisp thing? Like Thin Walker range.
- [21:33]
Brian
No, no, that'd be a lame joke compared to the joke that I said.
- [21:36]
Ben
That was an amazing joke.
- [21:37]
Brian
Thank you.
- [21:38]
Ben
Five out of five stars. Welcome to this episode of Hana Cosmos. And hey, Happy New Year.
- [21:43]
Brian
Happy New Year.
- [21:43]
Ben
Because we didn't say it in the episode that released on New Year's Day.
- [21:46]
Brian
Yeah, we didn't. We probably didn't know when we recorded that that it would be released in 2020.
- [21:50]
Ben
No idea. It didn't even cross our minds. So.
- [21:51]
Brian
Happy 2020. Hope you guys are having a great one so far.
- [21:55]
Ben
Yep.
- [21:55]
Brian
You know what would really make 2025 a great year for you, Ben? What for all of our listeners is.
- [22:02]
Ben
If I lost that 50 pounds, is.
- [22:05]
Brian
If both of us lost weight.
- [22:07]
Ben
Hey, you know what I like about 2025 so far is that I haven't shot a bogey yet on a golf course.
- [22:13]
Brian
Nice.
- [22:13]
Ben
And you haven't beat me at golf.
- [22:15]
Brian
That's true. We haven't played golf all year.
- [22:17]
Ben
We're trying to keep that trend going. Yeah.
- [22:19]
Brian
Till at least the spring.
- [22:20]
Ben
Yeah. In which case we will keep it going.
- [22:23]
Brian
What I was going to say, though, is that what would really make 2025 a great year is two things. Number one, if everybody who had already picked up and got for Christmas our new book, Haunted Cosmos Doing youg Duty in a world that's not just stuff. Available@newchristantimpress.com Cosmos.
- [22:38]
Ben
Buy another one.
- [22:39]
Brian
If they bought two more. Go on Goodreads, Give us a review. Give us a five star review over on Goodreads. If you don't want to give us a five star review, but just keep.
- [22:46]
Ben
It to yourself, just give us a five star. But say in your heart that it wasn't.
- [22:51]
Brian
And if you're wondering what we're talking about here.
- [22:53]
Ben
Yeah, okay. If you're wondering what we're talking about.
- [22:56]
Brian
Book.
- [22:56]
Ben
What? Hana? Cosmos. Doing your duty in a world that's not just stuff. Martin, cut to the completely vanilla, totally unassuming montage of book shots that we just took. Okay, I think we're back.
- [23:41]
Brian
I think we're back.
- [23:42]
Ben
So if that doesn't answer your question, then you're not smart enough to watch the show. It's just pictures of a book.
- [23:47]
Brian
It's just like us. We wrote a book.
- [23:49]
Ben
Get a copy of our book if you're interested. Yeah, yeah.
- [23:52]
Brian
Well, in this episode, Ben, we opened up with some fascinating stories from Mount Wilson Ranch.
- [23:59]
Ben
That's right.
- [23:59]
Brian
I want to unpack that a little bit. But before we do, maybe tell us where we're going. Where are we going in this episode?
- [24:04]
Ben
So this is a selfish episode that I wanted to write because I just really like Skinwalker Ranch, to be totally honest with you guys. But I think y'all like it too. So in that way, it's also something that y'all want. And this episode is not about Skinwalker Ranch directly, but it's about Skinwalker Ranch adjacently. We're trying to look at the patterns of Skinwalker Ranch and look at other areas in the world that have similar patterns. So you'll hear throughout the episode, us begin with the basic kind of strange legends and mysterious death type stories and type places. And then we'll move into more Cryptid type things, which I'm very excited about. And then we're going to end with, honestly, one of the craziest things I've ever heard about in my life. Didn't know about it until yesterday. And it's like it's the Russian version of Skinwalker Ranch, which is to say it's the crazier version of Skinwalker Ranch because it's Russian.
- [24:59]
Brian
Yes.
- [24:59]
Ben
And that's going to bring together everything and introduce the thing that we really appreciate about Skinwalker Ranch. UFO activity mixed in with Cryptids and mixed in with strangeness and deaths and all this stuff. So I'm excited to take you guys on this journey, but really we don't want to gloss over Mount Wilson Ranch because that has some crazy stuff happening. And it comes from a show actually called Beyond Skinwalker Ranch, which we mentioned in the cold open. And they've had some other strange encounters as well, haven't they?
- [25:28]
Brian
Yeah, they have this team just to catch you up. If you weren't following the. The Skinwalker Ranch episodes first, you should go back and listen to the three part series that we did. Skinwalker Ranch is one of the biggest hotspots for alleged high strangeness paranormal activity.
- [25:45]
Ben
It's as big as Brian's mom.
- [25:47]
Brian
Thank you. Wow. It's. It's. My mom is. Is very trim, so it's not that big. It's bigger than my mom. It is.
- [25:54]
Ben
Wow. It's even bigger than your mom. That is insane.
- [25:59]
Brian
YouTube commenters who don't like your mom jokes. I'm sorry, YouTube commenters who like them. You're welcome. Skinwalker Ranch is. We did a three part series where we covered basically the three eras to date in the story of Skinwalker Ranch. One of them was the early era, the Shermans, who owned the ranch through the 90s. And they had some very strange encounters with everything from orbs to uap, UFO.
- [26:29]
Ben
Encounters to cryptids, Cattle mutilations.
- [26:32]
Brian
Cattle mutilations. Immortal wolves. Dude. Absolutely insane.
- [26:37]
Ben
The dire wolf.
- [26:38]
Brian
And then there was a group called NIDS which comes into. This is the connection. National Institute for Discovery Science, which was founded by strange billionaire Robert Bigelow.
- [26:50]
Ben
Yeah.
- [26:51]
Brian
Who made his money in motel chains in like Vegas, I think. Yeah, something like that. And, and then got involved in all sorts of things ranging from a company that makes parts for the International Space Station through like investigating cattle mutilation, UAP and paranormal phenomenon.
- [27:12]
Ben
He's like the hotel. Hotelier.
- [27:15]
Brian
Hotelier.
- [27:16]
Ben
Hotelier version of Tom DeLonge from Blink 182.
- [27:20]
Brian
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like a rich guy who was like, I'm going to use my wealth to basically live out my childhood dreams from the Travel Channel.
- [27:29]
Ben
Space cowboy.
- [27:30]
Brian
Yeah, space cowboy. Some people call me the space Cowboy.
- [27:33]
Ben
Some people call me Maurice.
- [27:35]
Brian
Really? That's wild. Anyway, and then after the NIDS era, all sorts of things happened again. See our published works. We have the current era that's still ongoing, which is owned by a man named Brandon Fugal, who is a local Salt Lake City and really Utah in general and probably outside of that, but based here in Salt Lake City real estate developer, commercial real estate investor. And all around guy who's interested, like Bigelow, in supernatural high strangeness phenomena which led to the History Channel show the Secret.
- [28:07]
Ben
Secret. The Secret, I think, of Skinwalker Ranch. Yeah.
- [28:11]
Brian
So that started a whole new investigation with more technology involved than any other previous era of the ranch. And they had all sorts of their own strange things. Like when me and Thomas Winterton, I.
- [28:22]
Ben
Was gonna say they brought in the best personalities that Skinwalker Ranch has ever seen.
- [28:25]
Brian
Ever had.
- [28:25]
Ben
Thomas Winterton and I went down to the mesa and Travis Taylor, Dr. Travis Taylor.
- [28:30]
Brian
First of all, I just want to say to Mr. Fugal, if you want to come on our show, you absolutely should. Yeah, we will come to you. We'll interview you in your cool conference room up on that one building I drive by all the time with the glass and the panoramic view. We'll set up there. It'll be an unassuming four to six hour commitment on your part. We're also. Our budget is low. I mean, we're also. Let's just say whoever has a higher net worth covers the event.
- [28:54]
Ben
Yeah. And the snacks. We're also totally willing. Brandon 100. Can I call you Brandon to come to Skinwalker Ranch and do a full camp out? I was gonna say. Oh, yeah. We're not gonna do.
- [29:07]
Brian
We're not gonna do an investigation, but.
- [29:08]
Ben
We will camp out there and I don't know, we'll do a podcast, do.
- [29:11]
Brian
Some stargazing and Brandon, listen, We're a top 10 podcast in our category. A growing YouTube channel. Think of the high profile attention we could bring to the small project that you've undertaken so far.
- [29:24]
Ben
Yeah.
- [29:25]
Brian
With the number one show on history.
- [29:26]
Ben
What we're trying to say, Brandon, can I call you Brandon? Is you're welcome for the offer and we look forward to getting your call.
- [29:34]
Brian
We cordially accept.
- [29:35]
Ben
Yes.
- [29:36]
Brian
Anyway, so Brandon Fugal and his team have done just an awesome investigation. They've done several seasons of the show so far. That was. Ben, I wanted to talk to you about something. I'm concerned about you.
- [29:54]
Ben
What are you concerned about?
- [29:56]
Brian
Every time I see you, you have more and more Indigo Sundries products.
- [30:00]
Ben
I feel like you're overdoing it. Dude. Give me one example.
- [30:04]
Brian
Dude, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Do you see? Like, where did you even get this from?
- [30:07]
Ben
What's the problem with having some soap on hand?
- [30:10]
Brian
Ben, we're at work right now. There's.
- [30:14]
Ben
You don't want to smell good at work.
- [30:15]
Brian
There's gonna be no situation where you need Indigo Sundry soap at work.
- [30:18]
Ben
Uh, have you ever gotten sweaty in this basement? Dude? Yes.
- [30:21]
Brian
Every time we're filming, I look at you and I go, he's so handsome.
- [30:26]
Ben
Well, then, uh. Well, then you're gonna need some soap so that you don't smell as bad.
- [30:31]
Brian
Do you see what's happening to you? Like, how are you even. Are there fairies? Do you have fairies that give you this?
- [30:38]
Ben
Dude, what are you talking.
- [30:39]
Brian
Have you partnered with the fae?
- [30:41]
Ben
No, I'm a stone cold Christian who likes soap.
- [30:45]
Brian
Dude, I feel.
- [30:46]
Ben
Wait a second.
- [30:47]
Brian
Is that Calendul?
- [30:49]
Ben
Oh, not so mad about it now, are you?
- [30:51]
Brian
They make liquid soap.
- [30:53]
Ben
You didn't know that?
- [30:54]
Brian
Dude, I didn't know that. Well, they're not.
- [30:56]
Ben
They're a sponsor of the show.
- [30:57]
Brian
You should know that I have duties and responsibilities. Not all of us can just be Indigo Sundry maxing all the time.
- [31:02]
Ben
Okay, well, since you didn't know that, I'm assuming you also also didn't know that if you use their subscription plan, you'll get 10% off of your order.
- [31:10]
Brian
10% off? 10% off of their already great prices. I'm telling you. Are you kidding me?
- [31:22]
Ben
I just got tickled at my.
- [31:23]
Brian
And you should go watch that show. There's a ton of really interesting stuff. But they began to investigate other areas of strangeness beyond Skinwalker Ranch. That was the spinoff show now, and I love this show because it's got all the hallmarks of, like, this genre.
- [31:39]
Ben
Yes.
- [31:40]
Brian
They've got the random CIA agent.
- [31:43]
Ben
Yes.
- [31:43]
Brian
Who's, like, constantly saying things like, I'm using my CIA former CIA training to note that we should use thermal cameras when investigating ghosts.
- [31:55]
Ben
He like. He like. He, like, walks into a room and looks in the closet. He's like, just clearing the room. Little something they taught us at Langley. You know, stuff like that.
- [32:04]
Brian
Hey, I can't remember your name. Bustamente. Is that.
- [32:06]
Ben
Yeah, Andy.
- [32:07]
Brian
Andy Bustamente.
- [32:08]
Ben
He's actually seems like a cool guy.
- [32:10]
Brian
We accept your invitation to be interviewed on our show as well.
- [32:13]
Ben
So, Andrew. Can I call you Andy? I'll stop. So.
- [32:19]
Brian
And in their investigation of several properties, they covered Mount Wilson Ranch twice, which has the connection with Robert Bigelow, who owned both. And in the course of their investigation, they discovered, like, where it stands now, there's a lot of loose ends. It's kind of a mystery still. Just like Skinwalker, where they've discovered more and more strange, unexplainable, inexplicable things. But they haven't really come to any conclusions and said mystery solved or anything like that.
- [32:50]
Ben
Everything's led to more questions than answers. They found this weird. Well, they think they found this really weird tunnel system using LIDAR and then ground penetrating radar where these like straight line cavities underground. Nature hates a straight line. And so basically this place has as much strangeness as Skinwalker Ranch, just kind of on a smaller scale. It doesn't have as much of the history behind it. There's whispers of former owners seeing weird things. But it seems like Bigelow was onto something or maybe he knew something. Maybe he knew like about a government project that had taken place there and he was doing an investigation to see why it was happening there. But it's a fascinating place.
- [33:34]
Brian
Yeah, fascinating place. It reminds me some of the, the most compelling thing to me actually. I mean some of the underground stuff's really interesting, but the story of Bigelow and this encounter, it mirrors another story. I want to touch on here in a second, but I do want to clear away first. The initial explanation most people would give for Bigelow's encounter would be some form of hypnagogic sleep paralysis type thing that they would say this is just natural. But the way that Bigelow describes the encounter, I want people to notes it's different from sleep paralysis stories even on a level because Bigelow, in the midst of the encounter, he moves, he pushes himself up on the bed. He's moving around throughout this encounter. So he's not like paralyzed, can't move.
- [34:24]
Ben
Yeah.
- [34:25]
Brian
And at the end of the encounter he's seamlessly in a waking state and not able to like he thinks I must be dreaming.
- [34:32]
Ben
He doesn't. Like there's not come to moment. It's all, it's all awake and there's not a moment. You know, usually in these sleep paralysis stories, see our published works, people will start to be able to fidget their fingers.
- [34:43]
Brian
Yeah.
- [34:44]
Ben
First and then they move. You know, they can ball their wrists up or something and then the image just kind of fades away. But that's not how this one worked.
- [34:51]
Brian
It was really strange and it had all the hallmarks of. Again, note the web of connection between dark supernatural phenomena across the board.
- [35:02]
Ben
Yeah.
- [35:02]
Brian
So we have a putrid smell which is encountered in paranormal alleged ghost encounters. Many Cryptid and Bigfoot encounters feature similar putrid smells, feelings of dread. It has the. I'm going to consume you. Reminds me of the Sallie house. The encounter with that crone witch lady that the one owner had where he was in his bedroom. And the witch figure sort of appeared out of dust, like motes of dust in the. In the air, like coalesced into this grown witch figure.
- [35:39]
Ben
Yeah, forgot about that.
- [35:40]
Brian
Who then, like, was reaching for him before exploding in dust. And like, things around the room are shaking. Poltergeist activity, uap, UFO phenomenon and alleged abduction accounts. And our point throughout many of these is that many of them are explicable. Many of them are obviously explicable through natural phenomenon. People making things up, wanting attention. But some percentage of them seem beyond that. And of those, we often allege to the point where people have made a Facebook page that they can tag in conversations to the effect of haunted. Cosmos has investigated this and determined that it was demonstration. But it really does seem like some of these are spiritual and demonic encounters of demonic and unclean spirits. Basically deceiving and attempting to destroy or assault the image of God and human beings.
- [36:41]
Ben
Yeah, yeah. Or even drawing people in to the point where they become obsessed with these type things. And, you know, with Bigelow becoming obsessed with studying these areas and things like that, and then kind of going into a decline in his health and stuff like that. Anyway, that's all speculation in terms of, you know, why these encounters might happen or what the deception actually is. But what seems to be at least compelling is that there are cases where there's more going on than just anatomical anomalies, biological anomalies, or people making stuff up. And that's really where you get into the fascinating stuff. And it reminded me actually of this story from Skinwalker Ranch, where they had. They had one of the. And this is in the Utah Skinwalker Ranch, not Mount Wilson Ranch. The show had a. Had on one of the former security guys from the NIDS team. And I don't know if. I don't know if you remember this, but they were doing a tour around Homestead 2. Cause at that time, the guy was saying that Homestead 2 was the hotspot. Like, if you wanted to see something weird, you go to Homestead 2. And he was talking about how one afternoon, it wasn't night yet. Like, he could still see. He was walking, doing a patrol, going by Homestead 2. And he felt almost this wall of cold that he stepped into. And he could step back and it would be warm again. And then he stepped forward and it was really cold. And he just happened to look over at Homestead 2 and up in the top where there's no floor anymore. So it wasn't like a person just chilling up there. But up in the top window, there was this, like, jet black figure, like a silhouette of a humanoid something staring back at him. And he got this, like, terrible sense of dread. And the dog, too, you know, tail tucked and ran, and he chased after the dog. And like, that reminds me of Bigelow in the same sense. It inspires dread. It's this black cloaked figure. It seems like it's ethereal where it's there, but it's not really there. Or maybe only some people can see it. But then the evidence that the guys got on the show beyond Skinwalker Ranch when they were doing the thermal imaging of that same room, that was wild. Was genuinely crazy.
- [38:52]
Brian
Yeah. The figure in the thermal. And thermal imaging is detecting, instead of seeing visible light spectrum, it's seeing heat. So, you know, obviously it sounds obvious, but just so you're tracking, they turn on this camera and they're still filming the screen of the thermal because they haven't even hit record on the thermal device. And they never did actually the whole thing before they could hit record. So you see it all unfold through the recording of the camera, the camera screen, like the preview screen on the back. And it is wild. I mean, there's like a dark figure there, and then it's gone.
- [39:24]
Ben
And it's like, so cold, like arctic cold. It would be the temperature reading, and it is in the shape of a person kind of looking down at the bed, and you might think, like, maybe it's a glitch, whatever. But then it just leaves. It doesn't, like, dissipate or fade out. It just vanishes in an instant.
- [39:41]
Brian
Yeah.
- [39:41]
Ben
Really crazy.
- [39:42]
Brian
It's very creepy. It reminds me of another connection between, you know, this type of phenomenon. And in skinwalker, one of the NIDS team, like, what they would. They were well known for finding these portals or witnessing these portal activity. One of them, a pair of investigators, had been watching at night with different imaging equipment, and they saw what they describe as a portal open up and then a dark figure come out of the portal and it close. They describe seeing UAP fly through port. Like all sorts of weird stuff.
- [40:16]
Ben
Yeah.
- [40:16]
Brian
But in the Beyond Skinwalker episodes, they also went to a house in Taos, New Mexico. Is that what it was?
- [40:24]
Ben
Taos, New Mexico.
- [40:25]
Brian
And in this house, there had been a lot of that same sort of uap. The. The. The woman who owned it basically said that a demon.
- [40:33]
Ben
Yeah.
- [40:34]
Brian
Was oppressing the house.
- [40:35]
Ben
Yeah, she. And she did actually use that word.
- [40:38]
Brian
It was a demon. Like, she's. It was a demon. And people were Dying. Her husband died. I believe other people died around this house. Like, pets died.
- [40:45]
Ben
Yeah.
- [40:46]
Brian
There was a lot of death surrounding this house.
- [40:47]
Ben
As her kids continued to get older into. They, like, refused to come.
- [40:52]
Brian
They wouldn't go. Like, she won't stay there.
- [40:54]
Ben
Yeah.
- [40:54]
Brian
They had abandoned it for years when the team showed up. Because she felt it was that dangerous.
- [40:58]
Ben
Yeah.
- [40:59]
Brian
And then the Beyond Skinwalker team and the Skinwalker Direct team, they use rockets a lot to try and send sensors up through anomalous things in the air.
- [41:11]
Ben
Try to poke the hornet's nest.
- [41:13]
Brian
In the words of Dr. Travis Taylor, gotta poke the hornet's nest. So they would send rockets up. And they did this at this house in Taos, New Mexico. And the. It's so weird.
- [41:25]
Ben
Yeah.
- [41:25]
Brian
They have a GPS sensor in this rocket. It goes up, and they're gonna go find it and just see what readings they get from these multiple sensors in the rocket. And in classic Skinwalker Ranch style, even though this isn't Skinwalker Ranch, of course, stuff malfunctions. Stuff that works 999 times out of a thousand other places, like GPS, that's just dead solid. Very old technology at this point. It just doesn't work well. And this one doesn't work in a very specific and strange way.
- [41:55]
Ben
And creepy.
- [41:56]
Brian
Very creepy. They're trying to track where this rocket is. They see where it came down, but they're like, the GPS isn't reading properly. It's not showing where it is. So they walk visually to where it was, and they're picking it up. And, like, does it have the sensor? Did it get damaged? No, it looks like it's good. They're following it. Where does the sensor think this rocket is? Where does it think that that sensor is? And they're tracking it and tracking it. Oh, it points us this direction. Let's follow it. We're getting closer and closer. Closer and closer. Closer and closer. And where does it land them?
- [42:27]
Ben
The threshold of the cabin's front door.
- [42:30]
Brian
The front door. Like, walk up the steps. This is where I am. Like, it was drawing the signal in to the demon house.
- [42:39]
Ben
Yeah, the signal. That's weird. It never shut off. And it didn't just, like, go crazy and say, oh, it's hidden underground somewhere a thousand miles away. No. It almost seemed deliberate, like an intelligence was telling it, like, messing with them. Yeah. No, the rocket is actually not over there where you see it. It's right here in the front door.
- [43:00]
Brian
We have this trickster element.
- [43:02]
Ben
Dude, it's so creepy. That house also had the trope of portals as well.
- [43:06]
Brian
Yes.
- [43:06]
Ben
And this will just be a teaser because we're gonna do a remote viewing.
- [43:09]
Brian
Episode, but long anticipated remote viewing episode.
- [43:13]
Ben
Indeed, Indeed. Especially long anticipated by Brian.
- [43:16]
Brian
I have been viewing it remote. I'm just kidding.
- [43:20]
Ben
Don't do that.
- [43:21]
Brian
Hey, by the way, before we get to the episode, enhance. Do not do remote viewing. Okay. Stop if you are. Stop it.
- [43:30]
Ben
All right.
- [43:30]
Brian
Unenhanced.
- [43:33]
Ben
So I forget. Okay. I forgot where I was. The portal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the stories that the lady had told whose husband died even though he owned the cabin, included a lot of descriptions of portals opening above the cabin and things coming out of it. Shades, you know, obelisks, UFOs, all type of stuff. And then the portal will close and the things would eventually vanish. What they wanted to do. I don't know what gave them this idea. And part of me hates that they did it. Part of me also is glad that they did it. They asked a bunch of mediums and psychics who had no knowledge of this place because the woman intentionally has kept it on a very low radar. They asked, like, I think it was a hundred. I think it was a sample size of 100 psychics and mediums to do remote viewing of this place based on a very vague description and given the coordinates, like the geographic coordinates of where the place was. And it was something like 80% of them. So 80 of the hundred remote viewers included in their drawing of what they saw when they looked at this place. A portal in the sky with some dark entity coming out of it, like an evil face. A ufo. Yeah, it was. I was like, come on.
- [44:47]
Brian
You know that. You know what I'm doing in that situation? That's my house, dude. Getting on my kjv.
- [44:53]
Ben
Your kjv.
- [44:54]
Brian
I'm getting out my kjv.
- [44:55]
Ben
Oh, getting out your kjv.
- [44:56]
Brian
I'm pulling out my trusty. My sidearm.
- [44:58]
Ben
Yeah.
- [44:58]
Brian
And I'm just praying. I'm just praying. I'm just. I'm just sending the Lord and his angels at that portal.
- [45:03]
Ben
Yeah.
- [45:03]
Brian
And I'm like, you, not today. This is a. This is a Christian house.
- [45:08]
Ben
God lives here.
- [45:09]
Brian
We're Christians in this house.
- [45:10]
Ben
Because God lives in me.
- [45:11]
Brian
These walls. These walls have a hedge of protection.
- [45:13]
Ben
Yeah.
- [45:14]
Brian
And I'm saying, mm, mm.
- [45:16]
Ben
That's actually something, that parenting tip. If you have kids that like this show, but who also sometimes, because kids get scared of the dark, sometimes get afraid of things, you can tell them not that there's nothing ever that's, you know, scary or something in the world. Don't lie to them. But you can tell them what we tell our kids, which is, well, God lives in this house. So the devil can't get you. The devil won't hurt you.
- [45:39]
Brian
Second Corinthians 10, 3, 5.
- [45:41]
Ben
My friends indeed. Just, just say that to your kids, the world, and they'll know what it means.
- [45:46]
Brian
They'll know.
- [45:47]
Ben
Yeah. Anyway, they'll know.
- [45:51]
Brian
I was waiting for the camera to switch over. Wait, wait, wait. I was like, that was a long enhanced.
- [45:58]
Ben
They'll know now. Enhanced to me. Cheers, guys. Drink your tea. Drink some water.
- [46:05]
Brian
So we've got some strange activity and one of the tie ins too with the Mount Wilson ranch and the, the figure that Bigelow saw. That is just another connection that pulls on a lot of western coded threads of high strangeness is the Wendigo shaman antlered strange figure where the skinwalker trope, which was a Native American demonic practice of somebody committing a horrific evil, a native tribesman committing a horrific evil to attempt to essentially give way to the dark side and embrace, basically give themselves over to evil. And it was said that they could take the pelts of animals and turn into those animals, but like supernatural versions of those animals and that they would even consume human. They were cannibalistic and they would murder and they would do all sorts of. And these encounters, the skinwalker lore, it has through lines with a lot of these other phenomenon with the smells and the feelings of dread and the overt evil. And it just shows that to me. It shows the objective reality of evil. It's not just a relativistic human psychological phenomenon. It's actually a real thing that exists. And it might wear different masks. It might be wearing the mask of the jinn in the Middle Eastern deserts and it might be wearing the mask of the skinwalker in the Western American deserts, but it's the same forces behind it.
- [47:41]
Ben
Yeah, there is an objective corruption of the world that has taken place with the induction of sin and evil and all these things. And I think a good segue into our first story after the Cold Open would actually be to harp on that a little bit. This first story is going to focus on a place with rich, I say rich, deep Native American lore. And what I'm not going to say is that the Native Americans themselves were the ones that were doing all this evil all the time or summoning all this evil all the time. I think they did that a lot of time, but I think sometimes they may have found it also. And I would like us to keep in mind, this idea that the Puritans had and that the early American settlers had when they came over the Atlantic and began to really settle the New World, was that they were going into a place that had never been Christian before and that had never had the victory of Christ proclaimed to it yet and lived out in it yet. And so what they found was that they would build these settlements where, again, you know, it was this mindset of God lives here, and so he's going to protect us. But outside the boundaries, outside the stockade, in the forest, they would really see it as like the devil's playground because it hadn't been settled yet, it hadn't been Christianized yet. The Native Americans had not done the Christianization. And so the point that I'm making is that as we go into this first story and we hear some pretty fascinating Native American lore about this place in Arizona, you should think to yourself that that makes sense to a degree. Because when these people are developing these myths and legends and you know my opinion about myth, it actually wasn't a time where Christ's victory and just the truth of God in general had not been proclaimed explicitly by the dominion taker of the world in this place. And so you should expect to see a higher concentration of more malevolent evil and deception that's taking place. I think maybe with that, absolutely, we can go into this.
- [49:46]
Brian
Take us into this story about the Pima peoples.
- [50:03]
Ben
The Pima people lived once in the central desert of Arizona. Their name in English means. I don't know, partly because of the complexity of their language and partly because even they themselves did not fully know how long they dwelt in that place. Though their legends go back to the beginning of all things. Just how long ago the beginning was is something that has escaped their collective memory. Their creation story, however, is akin to many being itself an echo of the true myth. Chorwit make, it is said, was the high God of the Pimas. Long ago, he took the form of a great butterfly, hovering over a void of darkness in the ether, which he fashioned into the earth. Following the land and waters being formed and separated from one another, he caused all. All plant life to sprout up from the dirt, followed swiftly by all animal life coming from his own self. After the animals came, Chir wit, the butterfly God crafted his greatest art, mankind. He placed them, it is said, in the midst of the animals, to watch over them and their shared world. But man turned to evil. He lorded his sovereignty over the creatures. And when that domination was not Enough. Enough. The stronger men started to place the weak and small of mankind in subjection under them. Man became a tyrant, and Cherewit Makhe grew angry. He sent a prophet, a man named Suha, to warn the primordial Pima of the judgment that was sure to come should they fail to repent of their deeds. But the people thought him to be a fool, a fear monger who had been driven mad in the wilderness and was speaking nonsense. Life went on in violent evil for the Pima. All the while, Suha never stopped warning them of their coming fate. Finally, the day of judgment did come. Sua and his wife were taken and placed into the hollow trunk of a great tree where they'd be kept safe from disaster. From their ark, they watched flood waters pour from the sky and rise from the ground. The water bore them away, and they watched the people founder in agony beneath them, one by one, each person slowly sinking below the waves and becoming forgotten. When the flood receded, Soua's ark landed on the peaks of sandstone pinnacles. Still in the desert, the area had been changed dramatically, and he hardly recognized the place for the home he had once known. Jagged towers of bleeding rock shot up from the ground all around him now, and he marveled at how strange the they looked. He wondered if they might not be the petrified remains of sinners who had been screaming and writhing as they drowned just a few days before. Despite the unease Sua felt on these renovated mountains, though he began to rebuild the world from them. A new Pima people grew there, ever unsettled by the shadow of the mountain towers above them, staring down like demons. And over time, their reason for being unsettled moved from the intuitive to the concrete, for a new evil was wakened in those hills. A devil came forth from the mountains, always under the COVID of night. A shapeshifter named Hauk, who stole the virgin daughters of the new Pimas and put them to slavery in his palace of shadow and stone. Thus the mountains that rimmed the Pima on all sides became evil indeed. For centuries, they could not escape them. And for centuries, the shades that lurked in them stole their youngest and most cherished life away at will. Thus the dark nature of the superstition mountains was sealed in dread and blood. In the 1840s, a prominent Mexican family was traveling north and west toward California. They wished, as many did in those days days to set a claim on land that had promised a rich yield of gold. Eventually they succeeded and drained the land for what they could before packing up the Wagons again for a long return journey home. It was a journey they knew would be perilous, too. Bandits and evil tribes of Apaches kept a keen watch on the remote areas of the trail they'd be forced to follow. They only could hope that the two parties would be so busy hating one another that they would let the family pass by unnoticed. But the hope proved futile. As the Peraltas warily waded through the sand trails that cut between the spires of the Superstition Mountains, the Apaches attacked them in the bloody fray. Only a few of the massive family escaped with their lives. But they paid for their lives with all the gold they had won from the west. Once again, the raving Indians of the Superstitions had stolen the life and glory of passers by by. Around the same time, an army doctor named Thorn was hiking in the foothills of the desert outside of the mountains where he stumbled upon a wounded Apache brave. He had only a rudimentary first aid kit on his person, but he nonetheless bent to work over the fading man and despite all odds, saved his life. He gave him water and food. He nursed him over the course of some days back to well enough health for the brave to go back to his own people, leaving the doctor with a thankful gesture. Later that same night, Dr. Thorne was abducted in sleep by a gang of Apaches. They blindfolded him and took him deep into the heart of the Superstitions. He felt sure he was being forced on a march to torture for sport and a slow death. But when the morning had already begun to lighten the blue sky to the east, Thorn felt a dry hand rip the blindfold up over his head. Before him stood the man he had healed from before. Far from a mere brave, he was clearly a leading member of the tribe. And behind him was a mountain of treasure. Gold, jewels, silver and bronze, towered up in the mighty cave, lit by fires reflecting off of the treasure itself. The Apache man smiled at Thorn and with the sweep of his hand to the gold, bid him to take whatever he could carry for himself. Once his arms and clothes were weighed down with loot, the blindfold was placed back on Thorn and he was led home in secret. He never knew where he had gone, but he still told many that he had been there, that he had been in the Superstitions and had seen incalculable wealth. The story tempted treasure hunters and explorers. For generations after the time of Dr. Thorne, countless dozens went searching for the lost gold of the Superstitions, but none ever found it. And if the stories are True, some found more sinister things still lurking in the mountains instead. Devils from elder days when the Pima sphered the monsters surrounding them. Almost 100 years after the strange events surrounding the Peraltos and Dr. Thorne, a man named Adolph Ruth walked into the Superstition Mountains completely alone, armed with a pack mule and a map that his son, who was a lawyer, had given him, which supposedly led to the lost gold. He was never seen alive again. Six months after his departure, after all hope of even finding a body had been lost, hikers in a very remote and seldom trod section of the mountains found a human skull lying decomposed under some brush at the trail's edge. It belonged to Ruth. Further investigation discovered his remains scattered through the wilderness. He had been torn limb from limb, perhaps by a beast. But how did he die? The coroner found two holes in the side of his head crushed in towards his brain. Whether shot or hit with a pickaxe, they could not say. But they determined his death to be a suicide. There's only one problem with that. They also determined that his head had been removed precisely. And post mortem boredom. And with that finding began a string of macabre deaths in the Superstition Mountains that have remained unsolved to this day. From the 1930s up to the early 2010s, nearly a dozen people mysteriously went missing in those cursed mountains. More decapitations, dismemberment and sightings of strange characters showering boulders down upon travelers and adventurers from canyons at night and all, all in the deepest backcountry of the superstitions. Eventually a legend began to circulate about a group of dark protectors of the treasure hidden in the mountains and the other demonic secrets it contains from its ancient past. This group was called the Black Legion, A shadow group of Apache warriors from of old, endowed with the strength of that old strong fallen God that ended Sua's bliss so long ago. It's said that their first leader was the self same man Dr. Thorne had healed so many generations prior. And that proof for this can be found in no man seeing the gold and remaining alive since the late Dr. Thorne. He of course took many secrets to the grave. He seldom dared to speak of the strange place though he told a few people about what he'd seen. And he never told them about any of the ceremonies that he had heard, apart from hinting. But whether driven by greed or some occult devotion to the evil spirit of Hauk Reincarnate, the fact remains that the Superstition Mountains are a range that has a strange habit of eating many of its young. It is a place we believe worthy of far more study and story.
- [59:33]
Brian
I just want to say, if you are ever treasure hunting in the Superstition.
- [59:36]
Ben
Mountains, watch your head because it's gonna get very superstitious.
- [59:44]
Brian
Riding on the wall.
- [59:47]
Ben
Wow.
- [59:49]
Brian
I think we just brought a lot of value to this.
- [59:51]
Ben
I was doing the Raven Simone version of that song.
- [59:53]
Brian
Really? She did so Raven?
- [59:55]
Ben
Yeah, that she did for Haunted Mansion with Eddie Murphy.
- [59:59]
Brian
Wow.
- [59:59]
Ben
In the early 2000s.
- [60:01]
Brian
Wow. Hey, Ben, I just read that our great grandparents probably experimented with butter on their dry skin as a moisturizer. Is that why you look so radiant?
- [60:14]
Ben
Maybe it's Grandma's butter recipe. Or maybe it's gray toe tallow.
- [60:18]
Brian
Their tallow products are 100 organic, organic and naturally contain the good stuff your skin craves. No mystery there.
- [60:26]
Ben
So say sayonara, Sammy to kitchen experiments. And say hello to healthier skin. Gray Totalo trusted by skin envied by Great Grandma's butter recipe.
- [60:38]
Brian
For more information and to get a sample pack, check out graytoadtalo.com don't forget to use the code COSMOS15. That's all caps COSMOS15 for 15 off your order. Ben, do you know what's weird?
- [61:00]
Ben
The fact that Gobekli Tepe contains advanced technology far beyond the time period in which it was made.
- [61:06]
Brian
Okay, nerd, I was thinking more in the vein of health and wellness in this cold and flu season.
- [61:11]
Ben
Oh, well, were you actually thinking about how God gave us amazing small native berries called elderberries that actually carry all kinds of vitamins and minerals and antioxidants and antiviral compounds that our bodies crave.
- [61:27]
Brian
And that Trevor and Autumn at the King's Ridge grow and produce the freshest elderberries and elderberry syrup known to mankind.
- [61:34]
Ben
Okay, so I'm guessing you were talking about that, but did you also also know that they're running a special for haunted cosmonauts? That's right. If you use code haunted all caps haunted, you can get 10% off your first order@tkrpharm.com.
- [61:52]
Brian
Dude, absolutely the best news I've heard. Today.
- [61:58]
Ben
We are living in the beginning of a new reformation. Christian content is being produced at a rapid rate. Art, businesses, publications, ministries, and a thousand other mediums are acting as agents to get us out of our current anti Christian world. And all of these mediums are going to need marketing to help them get more eyes and ears on them.
- [62:17]
Brian
New Dominion Design Company is ready to provide that help. Unashamedly Christian. New Dominion Design company exists to labor alongside fellow members of the Body of Christ as we engage in this great work of reformation.
- [62:28]
Ben
With over 15 years of design and marketing experience spanning across multiple industries, new Dominion Design Company was launched in 2024 to help like minded businesses, ministries, institutions, publishing houses and other content creators around the globe raise the bar of excellence in our Christian culture.
- [62:48]
Brian
If you're ready to build new Dominion Design Company is ready to work with you. Visit newdominiondesignco.com that's newdominiondesignco.com and reach out to Jenkins for all your graphic needs. And as always, that link will be in the description.
- [63:02]
Ben
Hey.
- [63:03]
Brian
All right. Hey. Let's talk crazy story. What a wild story. Can I just say, while you were reading it, I wrote down like three episode ideas for Haunted Cosmos because it was that good.
- [63:12]
Ben
You love to see it. It was fertile ground, fertile soil in vaunted cosmos. Here's one of the things I didn't say.
- [63:18]
Brian
What didn't you say?
- [63:19]
Ben
Okay, one of the craziest stories that I heard about these mountains, and you'll understand why I didn't tell it at the end, was that there was this one treasure hunter who went in in more Moder, like 1900s, not like 2000s, but later 1900s. And he goes in, he's by himself, he sets up his tent or whatever and he starts to hear like different people's voices around him.
- [63:44]
Brian
Nah, bro.
- [63:45]
Ben
Yeah, already. Nah, bro.
- [63:46]
Brian
Get out of there.
- [63:47]
Ben
Already a hard night.
- [63:48]
Brian
Get out of there.
- [63:49]
Ben
But what are you gonna do? Are you gonna run through the crowd surrounding you and like, get out. So he's like, oh, I'm stuck here.
- [63:55]
Brian
So anyway, I started blasting.
- [63:57]
Ben
Yes, my glass threw my tent. He's trying to stay like, he moves the tent really close to the fire so that he can keep stoking the fire all night, but from the tent. Because of course, it's like when you're a kid and your foot comes out of the blanket in your bed and you think that now the serial killers can get you when you're camping. You think that a tent is a high level of protection.
- [64:20]
Brian
Yeah, so true.
- [64:22]
Ben
So anyway, he starts doing that and he's like hearing these voices, but they seem like they're getting further away. They were never that close. Like they never came within the firelight. But they're all different voices and it seems like he can recognize some of them, which that's really creepy. Like people that he knows.
- [64:39]
Brian
Okay, okay.
- [64:40]
Ben
So anyway, he makes it through the night, nothing happens to him. He gets up the next morning, and he finds the footprints of a little child circled his tent all night.
- [64:51]
Brian
No, dude, if. If you ever see a little child in the woods. Step one and it's life.
- [64:58]
Ben
Okay, okay. It's not over. I just realized what you said.
- [65:06]
Brian
It's. Dude, hey.
- [65:07]
Ben
Enhance. It's a change.
- [65:08]
Brian
Look, do not do that. Okay? Go ahead.
- [65:13]
Ben
Okay.
- [65:14]
Brian
It's not over.
- [65:15]
Ben
So then the man's never seen or heard from again?
- [65:20]
Brian
What? And that we know. Exactly.
- [65:22]
Ben
That's why I didn't include it. Because you're like, well, how do we know that that happened?
- [65:26]
Brian
Come on.
- [65:26]
Ben
And I never heard. Someone commented that on the YouTube video that I heard the story from. And. And it. No one ever answered it.
- [65:32]
Brian
Okay, so that didn't happen.
- [65:34]
Ben
Well, we don't know that.
- [65:35]
Brian
I mean.
- [65:35]
Ben
Well, there could be a very logical. All right, maybe the girl turned herself.
- [65:39]
Brian
In on the basis of that new information. Disregard what I said earlier in terms of things you should do. If you find someone in the woods who is of short stature, it doesn't mean you have to immediately kill them. But listen, they could be a. If they're circling your tent at night and imitating the voices of your loved.
- [65:55]
Ben
Ones, give them some warning shots.
- [65:57]
Brian
That's not a child.
- [65:57]
Ben
No, you give them some warning shots by shooting directly in their head.
- [66:02]
Brian
That's not a child you're dealing with, okay? That is an unclean spirit I calling to lure you out to consume your soul.
- [66:10]
Ben
One of those dark fairies, baby.
- [66:11]
Brian
You know, one of the dork fairies. Dark Fae, actually.
- [66:15]
Ben
Speaking of fairies, this story made me think a lot about fairies because. Do you remember in the Two Towers when. Yes. When they're talking about the Mountains of the Dead and Eomer says that mountain is evil?
- [66:32]
Brian
That mountain is evil, first of all.
- [66:34]
Ben
That's when it all changed for me. And I realized that he could be right.
- [66:37]
Brian
That maybe places can be evil.
- [66:38]
Ben
Maybe places can be evil. Maybe a mountain can be evil. The superstitions remind me of that kind of thing where people don't go. I mean, people don't go there and think, oh, wow, what a beautiful place. I feel so good here. I just stuttered, dude. I was trying to just move on, but it was a legit.
- [66:56]
Brian
You can't.
- [66:57]
Ben
Hey, that was a big stutter.
- [66:58]
Brian
Hey, everybody make fun of Ben in the comments.
- [67:00]
Ben
Let's recognize that it happened and then.
- [67:02]
Brian
We can move on.
- [67:02]
Ben
And let's move on and do better next time.
- [67:04]
Brian
Listen, have you been in the superstitions?
- [67:06]
Ben
No, I haven't. I want to go Though I've heard it's like good climbing.
- [67:11]
Brian
What kind of climbing rock? Is it nice or is it like.
- [67:14]
Ben
No, it's like sandstone.
- [67:15]
Brian
It's sandstone. I think crack climbing.
- [67:16]
Ben
I think there is some nice and conglomerate, though.
- [67:18]
Brian
Conglomerates. Fun.
- [67:19]
Ben
A lot of crack climbing.
- [67:20]
Brian
Yeah.
- [67:20]
Ben
There's not only crack climbing, though. They got like, you know, they got ledges.
- [67:24]
Brian
Crack climbing. I've never figured out how to do it, so I say that it's dumb.
- [67:27]
Ben
I went up to City of Rocks one time in Idaho. Great, great place. Granite. Granite climbing is hard. It's either slab or crack climbing. And I did crack climbing for the first time there. And it made me want to throw up because it was like off width. So you're shoving like half your body in and you're inching up.
- [67:45]
Brian
There's no resting.
- [67:46]
Ben
No. And I was like, this isn't fun anymore.
- [67:48]
Brian
Why would I do this voluntarily?
- [67:50]
Ben
I'm sorry.
- [67:52]
Brian
Anyway, were you attacked by an army of undead Apaches guarding their ancient treasure trove?
- [67:58]
Ben
See, that's the thing. No.
- [67:59]
Brian
Well, then that was not an interesting anecdote.
- [68:01]
Ben
That's true.
- [68:02]
Brian
And I'm wondering why you brought it up.
- [68:03]
Ben
Why did I bring it up in the first place?
- [68:06]
Brian
No, this is such a fascinating story, and it did. It really made me want to do a Haunted Cosmos episode on treasure hunting. So, hey, when you're listening in the future to a treasure hunting episode of Haunted Cosmos, know that the nexus of the idea for it happened during this recording right now. Historic moment.
- [68:24]
Ben
It is crazy to see how the legends rhyme, though, where you have the flood myth, where after the flood, there's this devil in the mountains that keeps stealing people and killing them, and then that is now rehashed for the modern day by people that, by the way, don't know that legend. Like, it's a deep. I had to go deep into some books to figure that out. But now it's essentially recapitulated for the modern day with this Black Legion, these devils in the mountains that kill people to either protect the gold or a lot of people think they are like dark, fey protectors of the mountains. And by a lot of people, I.
- [69:03]
Brian
Mean me, Ben, exclusively. A lot of people. A lot of times. When Ben says many people think this, what he means is I came up with this for the first time just 10 minutes ago.
- [69:15]
Ben
And then I Isajeted my way into convincing myself of it from all these books and stuff.
- [69:20]
Brian
I need no more evidence.
- [69:21]
Ben
Yeah, exactly.
- [69:22]
Brian
I agree with you.
- [69:23]
Ben
Yeah. Thank you.
- [69:23]
Brian
Well, you know what? This really reminds Me of. In terms of a really perfect segue, this reminds me a lot of, like, goat people.
- [69:32]
Ben
Well, yeah, because goats are demons.
- [69:35]
Brian
Goats are basically demons.
- [69:37]
Ben
Not universally.
- [69:38]
Brian
No, not really.
- [69:39]
Ben
Read Leviticus.
- [69:40]
Brian
My aunt had some basil.
- [69:43]
Ben
Have you ever seen the witch? Don't, man. We're gonna have to edit this out. We're gonna have to let you edit this out.
- [69:56]
Brian
I want you to know that we just edited something out that was really funny. Go on.
- [70:00]
Ben
Everyone now knows what it was. Context clues. Well, it depends on where we cut out.
- [70:06]
Brian
Martin's edit will be seamless.
- [70:07]
Ben
Martin, where are we cutting out? Where? Where did we cut out? This is all live. Like this is somewhere serious. My family had goats. That's all I'm saying.
- [70:21]
Brian
Your family had goats?
- [70:22]
Ben
Yeah, we had a few.
- [70:23]
Brian
And they were nice goats.
- [70:24]
Ben
They were fun. Yep.
- [70:25]
Brian
Yeah.
- [70:25]
Ben
Speckled.
- [70:26]
Brian
They were speckled goats.
- [70:27]
Ben
A couple white goats and they. Speckled goats. Yeah.
- [70:30]
Brian
That's all you had?
- [70:31]
Ben
One of them was named Nadine. I remember that. I only remember one where.
- [70:34]
Brian
What is Nadine from?
- [70:35]
Ben
I don't know, but it's a great name.
- [70:37]
Brian
The Stand.
- [70:39]
Ben
Really?
- [70:39]
Brian
Stephen King.
- [70:40]
Ben
Who? The old lady, Nadine. Who's Nadine?
- [70:43]
Brian
There's some. There's a Nadine connection in my head, and I couldn't tell you more.
- [70:48]
Ben
Cool with that, Brian, Why don't you take us into this next story?
- [70:52]
Brian
Yeah, this is a crazy story, and I'm honored to take us into it. The pine forests of Maryland have been around for a long time. Many believe they're some of the oldest forests and mountains in the entire world, aging and growing darker under leaves with each passing generation. Many further believe that the choking darkness one experiences inside of those forests is not only due to the lack of sunlight getting through, but also to the presence of some ancient malevolence that lives there. Witches, necromancers, cults, and killers with feral families have all made their dens and covens in those trees and deep in the hidden valleys of those mountains. It should cause us to wonder if such a tight saturation of evil might not have been called there by something worse than all of them put together. A sleepless malice, maybe. The old forests of Maryland are like some other places in the world, evil almost in and of themselves. Maybe they need a particularly martial light of the gospel shed in them that has not yet been lit. If you think all of this is hyperbolic, then first of all, I'd believe you. But it's not. Something terrible lingers in the heart of Appalachia. And if the stories are to be believed they do not settle for remaining entirely unseen or untouched by us. It was a clear Maryland night, and the salty air of the Chesapeake was carried far into the forest by a persistent wind. The year the year was sometime in the 1950s. Four friends drove quickly down the winding train of Tucker Road. The sky was a black sheet, glared everywhere by the full moon dipping silver through sheer clouds. The car's headlights traced the shadowy visage of trees placed tightly on either side of the road. The driver scanned carefully for any deer that may fulfill their suicide wish by his hand. The other passengers laughed at what could be to come and danced or sang along to the music coming from the old crackling radio. The driver judged by a bend in the road that they were getting closer to their destination. He turned the music music off to get everyone else's attention, and they all leaned forward in their seat to watch the onset of the bridge. Tucker Road was a popular place for kids like them, so they didn't expect to be alone that night. And yet they were. No oncoming lights had bothered them the whole way, so with the windows down they could hear the churning sounds of nighttime Appalachia breaking through the tires and tarmac. Owls shouted out their calls, and packs of coyotes answered the leaves kicked up by the speeding cars. Tires were so delicate and dry that they could even hear them break apart as they fell, but only just. Suddenly, as if peering like a hiding child behind a corner, the entrance to the covered bridge tiptoed into view. A moonbeam shone upon it boldly like a spotlight, and the car slowed to a crawl. The passengers looked at each other and then the driver. Silently, the driver adjusted his grip on the steering wheel and took a deep breath in his nose and out his mouth. He had seen this before and now regretted his bold claim of wanting to see it again. With a shove on the shoulder from his friend behind him, he took his foot off the brake and sped up again to a cruising speed that was not too fast to miss it, the terror they had come to see. Once the car was about 100 yards from the black entrance of the bridge, they watched in disbelief as a figure stepped out from its wardrobe of trees on the opposite shoulder of the road. In its hand it held a red brick, and it walked with the gait and tattered clothes of a man who had been left to rot in the wilderness. Overlong but the face. The face was the face of a goat. A long scraggly beard came down off the jutting chin and inhuman snout, lifeless eyes perforated with the the whitest whites one can imagine. Whiter than a witching moon. Where the eyes were not white, they were in obsidian black. The driver pressed his foot harder into the pedal and the observer sank back into the seat. They pressed themselves back forward to see it again. A minatory smile spread across the goatman's face, a man's smile, plastered with analog recklessness onto the anatomy of a goat. It spelled hatred and doom in every dark desire for carnage to the passengers, and as they reached the bridge, their ears started to sting with the bleeding sound that came from the monster. It brayed at them, and they knew it wanted to see them die, die inside of the bridge, his bridge, which he also hated. He threw the brick with incredible strength and it crashed through the rear window. It flew forward and just missed the driver's head. Only a sharp corner scraped above his ear and began to bleed. The brick continued on and slammed hard, but not hard enough, into the windshield. It shattered but did not break. And what's odd, they only noticed the the brick had been thrown once. It sat still on the dashboard for a few seconds. None of them had heard the glass break. The driver still did not feel the cut above his ear. By the time he reached the last third of the bridge, he was flooring the car. In a panic, he lifted off the glass and pressed both feet into the brake until he thought he might press through the bottom of the car. Altogether, the car slid to a swerving stop five lengths out the other side of the bridge, back in the moonlight and clear of the monster. All heaved, their chests pumping wildly with wide eyes staring straight forward. In the stillness they heard no wind, nor owls nor coyotes in the distance. All was quiet save their breathing and the soft idle of the engine. But suddenly there was another sound. It made them close their mouths and hold their breath again. It was the sound, as if from back across the bridge, of a child crying in the night for its mother. Driver slammed on the gas again and sped off into the darkness of Tucker Road, away from it all. It's said that sometime later those same kids went back, this time in the middle of the daylight. They parked a different car on the right shoulder in front of the the bridge and crossed the road to enter into the woods on the other side, the same woods the goatman had appeared out of. They carried with them a gas can and a box of matches. After an hour of walking, in what they hoped had been a straight line, they came upon a herd of goats grazing in a small meadow. The goats silently looked up at them. They Neither backed away nor moved closer. And once the kids had entered back into the trees, they resumed their eating. After another 15 minutes, they saw a ramshackle house through the lanky trees. It dwelt in thick shadow beneath the canopy with a sunken roof. Rotted wood hung disjointed everywhere like ribbons at a ball or drapes. In a manner. As they looked down upon the dirt path that led to the threshold of what had been a front door, they traced the shape of hoof prints in the dirt. The prints stopped in front of the house and turned neither to the right nor to the left. They poured gas on the house until the can was empty. They stood back some way and lit one of the sticks from the matchbox. They tossed the match gently onto the siding of the house and watched in awe as it burst into sudden flame. The flames seemed alive, and they hissed with anger mixed with pain. As the blaze grew and engulfed, for they could see the inside of the shack. They heard what seemed to them to be the sound of a bleating goat from the hearth. On their trek back the way they had come, they found that the meadow was now free of the goats. Since that day, sightings of the goatman have not ceased on Tucker Road and at the bridge thereof.
- [78:52]
Ben
Well, I mean, I. So take away from that story. Shout out to those kids for just burning a random cabin down in the woods.
- [78:59]
Brian
Look, shout out for just committing literal arson and maybe setting the whole forest.
- [79:03]
Ben
On fire and then, like, just killing a goat.
- [79:05]
Brian
And the goats aren't. The goats aren't in the meadow because they ran from the people who are setting the whole woods on fire.
- [79:11]
Ben
No, dude, that's the creepy thing, see, is that they go. They set the house on fire. They hear a bleeding goat. And then when they go. And then when they go back, all those weird goats that were just, like, not running, staring at them are all vanished.
- [79:24]
Brian
Goats are a problem. They would headbutt you if they could.
- [79:26]
Ben
Yeah, they would. But then the goatman kept being seen. Dude, goatman stuff is crazy. When I was a kid, I went backpacking. I used to go backpacking with my dad in the North Georgia mountains all the time. Mountains and haulers. Yeah. And one of the things that he told me when I was really young, after we were all done setting up camp and eating dinner and ready to go to bed, was the story of the goat man.
- [79:50]
Brian
Wow, that's really nice.
- [79:51]
Ben
He was like, hey, buddy, wanna hear a story?
- [79:53]
Brian
Hey, it's about dark. There's a goat man.
- [79:55]
Ben
Yeah. I was like, about ready for bed, and he's just staring into the fire. Like, listen to the story about the goat man. His version was a little different, though. It was like this guy who herded goats, and he always kept his goats with him everywhere he went. They were like his only friends.
- [80:11]
Brian
Yeah, I know what that's like.
- [80:12]
Ben
Yeah, I can relate.
- [80:13]
Brian
We all know what that's like.
- [80:14]
Ben
And I'm surrounded by a couple go right now. Anyway, so anytime he went into town, all his goats would be with him. Well, then one day, he is trying to find a goat who had gotten away from him in the woods, Falls into a ravine, breaks his leg. No. Okay. Turns out he, like, almost dies, drags himself back to his cabin. The goats nurse him back to health.
- [80:40]
Brian
Yeah, the goats would do that for you if you take good care of them.
- [80:43]
Ben
And then he becomes this, like, weird amalgamation of like a goat demon.
- [80:48]
Brian
He was healed by the goats.
- [80:49]
Ben
He becomes undead.
- [80:50]
Brian
So why is he throwing bricks at kids?
- [80:52]
Ben
Well, hold on, I'm not done yet. This is where the story really kicked off. So then my dad, he told me that and. And the story goes that if you ever hear the stomp drag of the goat man walking to you and dragging his still broken leg behind him.
- [81:07]
Brian
Yeah, I thought they nursed him then.
- [81:09]
Ben
Well, they, like, they're not good at. They didn't nurse him. Yeah, you know, they're not like, they.
- [81:14]
Brian
Kept him alive, but they didn't, like, set the bone problem.
- [81:16]
Ben
And so his. His head, his leg, never fully healed. And then later that night, he did it. I was sleeping and my dad did the stomp drag. Dude, that is so rude. And what you're viewing now is a hologram because that's when the real Ben Garrett passed away.
- [81:33]
Brian
He died and ever since, he has been deceased. Dang, that is really rude of your dad. But also, that's a great move I'm writing down and going to do to my own child.
- [81:43]
Ben
Oh, yeah, it's a great dad.
- [81:44]
Brian
You got to pass that on.
- [81:45]
Ben
It's a great day.
- [81:46]
Brian
It's called traditions.
- [81:47]
Ben
It may be better to do it when you're. When they have other kids with them to commiserate with. I was just by myself.
- [81:54]
Brian
I'd have to take all the firearms away before doing it because my kids.
- [81:58]
Ben
Dude, Ari. Rushes to the gun.
- [82:00]
Brian
He just unloads mag dumps through the tent. This is why I don't use tents when I camp. I prefer to be able to see my surroundings.
- [82:07]
Ben
If your 6 year old isn't strapped with like an AR and a plate carrier while you're backpacking. Then what's wrong with you? Do you live in Europe?
- [82:14]
Brian
Yeah. What are you European? Are you Canadian? Duh. Are you even American? Anyway, dang, the Goat Man. So the Goat man. What region is this? Is it all Appalachians?
- [82:24]
Ben
Appalachian.
- [82:25]
Brian
Appalachian kind of thing?
- [82:26]
Ben
A really rich legend in Appalachia. Midwest I think too, but they're more like dogman people.
- [82:31]
Brian
There's a lot of dogman stories in the Midwest.
- [82:33]
Ben
Turns out it's just they're women. I'm sorry.
- [82:37]
Brian
Oh.
- [82:44]
Ben
That was a joke.
- [82:45]
Brian
If that's cut out.
- [82:46]
Ben
I was a joke.
- [82:47]
Brian
That's cut out.
- [82:48]
Ben
Episode. All of you. Very delightful, I'm sure. Very fair.
- [82:52]
Brian
Ben.
- [82:53]
Ben
Midwestern ladies listening.
- [82:54]
Brian
We just lost 20% of our audience.
- [82:57]
Ben
Look, here's why I said it. And we deserve it because I thought it would sound like that Charles Barkley thing about San Antonio ladies.
- [83:03]
Brian
I hadn't heard it.
- [83:04]
Ben
Where Charles Barkley, like is infamous and he's fat for calling San Antonio women, specifically the most obese people in the world. I thought it'd be fun. Whoa, hold on, Brian. You're telling me you don't have a website for your business at all?
- [83:21]
Brian
I didn't think you needed a website.
- [83:22]
Ben
Anymore, Ben, what with all the marketing.
- [83:24]
Brian
You can do on social media these days. What does a website even do for you?
- [83:28]
Ben
My well, it provides a single place for all of the information about your business so that people can find you easier without scrolling through social media. Doom scrolling endlessly. You can also use it for an online portfolio, an online store and much more.
- [83:44]
Brian
But where would I even start?
- [83:46]
Ben
Well, I would recommend starting by calling Kendall Technologies. They are a Christian owned small business that doesn't consort with the demon of open overpricing. Also, for fans of the show, they're offering a special 10% off discount for a new website. So give Kintech Services a call at 208-789-6117 or visit their website KentechServices.com to get a quote today link in the description. Are you a God fearing patron, patriotic beardsman that struggles to keep your beard soft and healthy? Forged Beard Co. Knows that your beard deserves the best care and has intentionally crafted and fine tuned their products with natural ingredients to offer your beard and skin the most benefit. They're a veteran owned family run business with a passion for building up strong and courageous men. Not only will you experience a healthy and strong beard but but you'll enjoy a cleaner product as well as amazingly unique and authentic scent profiles handcrafted from essential oils. Visit forgedbeardco.com or click the link in the description below today and use code cosmos for 10% off your first purchase. Again, that's Code Cosmos, all caps, no spaces for 10% off your first purchase post. Millennialists often talk about creating generational wealth, but where do you even begin to turn that vision into reality? Stonecrop Wealth Advisors is here to guide you. They'll demystify the wealth building process and equip you with the strategies needed to secure a lasting legacy for future generations with Faith Based Portfolio. They help align your investments with your values, moving your hard earned dollars away from woke companies and into businesses. Advancing God's kingdom. As fee only investment advisors, Stone Crop is unwavering in its fiduciary commitment to act in your best interest. That means no commissions, no hidden agendas, just a dedication to serving you. Get started with Stone Crop Wealth Advisors today by visiting stone crop investors advisors.com haunted cosmos or by clicking the link in the description below. Investment advisory services offered through Stonecrop Wealth Advisors LLC, a registered investment advisor with the U.S. securities and Exchange Commission.
- [86:20]
Brian
Wow. So what do you. Do you think the Goatman. Like, are we talking real things?
- [86:26]
Ben
Legend, to me it reminds me of the Jersey Devil and the Pine Barrens, you know.
- [86:31]
Brian
Yeah.
- [86:32]
Ben
Where because of Hana Cosmos, I've radicalized myself into believing that these are Dark Fae.
- [86:39]
Brian
Okay.
- [86:40]
Ben
That are maybe not like maybe now it's just you're hearing legends and you want to see something that's there. Or maybe it's feral people that every once in a while or your dad are making themselves known. Or your dad, you know, when you're camping. But I think maybe they're grounded in something real. The Goatman thing is interesting to me because of the Azazel trope. That's even in scripture, where in. I think it's Leviticus or maybe it's numbers like 17 and 19 or something like that. God is telling Israel to stop worshiping goat demons. And then on the Day of Atonement, they would send out, you know, they would transfer the sins onto the scapegoat and they would send it into the wilderness to Azazel. And look like you don't want to put too much stock in that and say like, therefore now every Goatman legend is real. That's not what I'm saying. But this idea of goats being demonic is.
- [87:35]
Brian
Goats are creepy.
- [87:36]
Ben
Is there? Like, it's something that seems to be real and so I don't give it too much stock. But I also don't Just say, like. Well, it's therefore all made up also, because I was raised in Appalachia, and so those woods are creepy. I mean, those are.
- [87:52]
Brian
Yeah, they're so creepy.
- [87:53]
Ben
Appalachia is a creepy place.
- [87:54]
Brian
Especially since the. What's the. Is it the kudzu?
- [87:58]
Ben
Yeah, the kudzu. And then there's also Chinese privet. That's like a hugely invasive fauna species.
- [88:04]
Brian
Yeah.
- [88:04]
Ben
But really, those woods, if you live there, then, you know, you go in sometimes and it just doesn't feel right.
- [88:09]
Brian
No.
- [88:10]
Ben
Really creepy. Dark. Very dark place. And it is genuinely old. Like, it's one of the oldest wildernesses in the world. And it shows.
- [88:20]
Brian
The Rocky Mountains feel new.
- [88:21]
Ben
Like, sharper. Yeah.
- [88:23]
Brian
The Appalachian, it feels worn down.
- [88:25]
Ben
Here's the thing about the Rockies. When I go camping here or skiing or rock climbing or whatever, and you're deep in the backcountry. I'm not really scared of skinwalkers, to be honest with you.
- [88:35]
Brian
Right.
- [88:35]
Ben
I'm scared of weather. Like, if the weather really turns or if you fall, you're screwed. You're in trouble, you know? But in Appalachia, I'm not worried about weather. And I'm not really worried about getting lost, necessarily. I'm worried about some primordial supernatural entity eating me.
- [88:52]
Brian
I'm worried about Bigfoot.
- [88:53]
Ben
Yeah. Like, I'm worried about demons.
- [88:55]
Brian
That's when you believe in Bigfoot, is when you're walking through an Appalachian.
- [88:59]
Ben
That's so true.
- [89:00]
Brian
The invasive species that have, like, taken it over makes it feel even darker and even, like, more strangled and suffocated and, like, dense. It reminds me of Fangorn Forest in the Hobbit.
- [89:12]
Ben
Oh, yeah. I was gonna say this is kind of like Fangorn, though. It's like if a forest got reclaimed by nature in the way that, like, an abandoned grocery store gets reclaimed by nature, except it was already a forest and then it gets reclaimed again.
- [89:27]
Brian
Grocery store was such a specific thing to choose.
- [89:29]
Ben
I don't know. You know, it could be anything. Could be like, Jurassic Park Gymnasium.
- [89:32]
Brian
Like, the Jurassic park facilities.
- [89:34]
Ben
No, that are real, though. That's. Dude, so true. We're going to do an episode on the historicity of Jurassic Park.
- [89:41]
Brian
Just give us all. It was the Fae. Yeah. The Goatman stories are like. Nothing is creepier than Appalachian folktales. And I have a question for you.
- [89:51]
Ben
Why?
- [89:52]
Brian
You might not know, but I'm just curious about this. Why does satanic imagery have so much goat in the folklore? Because of cloven hoofs. There's a lot of goatiness to Satan. Is it because of Azazel?
- [90:06]
Ben
I do know about this. And it is because of Azazel.
- [90:08]
Brian
Okay, hit me.
- [90:08]
Ben
So, like, the Baphomet imagery is the goat Satan. And that was a derivative of the Azazel language in the Old Testament, which Milton really latched onto in developing his demons for Paradise Lost. And so a lot of it is because of, like, Milton and before that, you see traces of it in medieval imagery and iconography and stuff where demons are frequently associated with goats because God says, don't worship the goat.
- [90:37]
Brian
Demons don't do that.
- [90:38]
Ben
So there's something there.
- [90:39]
Brian
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, that makes sense.
- [90:41]
Ben
Yeah, man.
- [90:42]
Brian
Well, this has been a really fun episode indeed.
- [90:44]
Ben
So we've gone through Mount Wilson Ranch, really similar to Skinwalker Ranch in every way. Strange deaths in weird places with superstition, mountains, cryptid legends of Appalachia with the goatman. Now it's time to round it all up with. Seriously, one of the craziest things I've ever heard. The Ural Mountains. A nearly arrow straight line of jagged earth and stone pushed up in central Russia, dividing the vast country into east and western regions. These mountains, especially to more Western ears, already carry a sense of doom about them. They are inherently lesser, are known by us now, and will likely remain fuzzy parts of the map for many years to come. But they grab such an immediate hold of our attention because of how big a section of the map they take up and how incredibly remote they seem to be. Of course, there are the normal creature comforts of modern city life peppered along their length. Ski resorts and mountain towns for tourists no doubt make an appearance here. But these places are few, few and far between, and despite their modern attractions, are still difficult to get to. It is a wilderness largely bereft of man's dominating hand. What presence of man there is in these mountains is mostly limited to a village or is an otherwise shabby handful of prisons and camps used during the darkest days of the Soviet regime. On top of all this, the Urals have long been held as sacred holy places by the ancient Mansi people that inhabited these forests and foothills long ago. They are high places, dark and bloody and filled with a sort of pagan wisdom that only comes through grievous pain. One example that we have of this has been discussed before in our season two episode on Dyatlov Pass, and it involves a greedy goddess of fire named Sorni Nye. The legends say that this high goddess who dwelt on the mountain was also the goddess of the hunt. She took for herself the form of a great ball of light that weaved through the ravines and cooloirs from far north to far south, looking for prey. Any form of life would do for prey. When she was not leading her hellhounds of fire on these hunts, she would be worshiped in her temple by priests who knew how much she loved to consume life, and so would happily oblige her appetites. All sorts, sorts of animals would be sacrificed to her daily, and often in groups of nine. Nine ducks, nine deer, nine pigs, or in extreme cases, nine people. Long before the hikers of the Dyatlov party, who were nine by the way, were lost. The priests of Sorni Nye gave her nine young hunters from the Mansi tribe as tribute. And if the stories are to be believed, this was not the only time human sacrifice took took place with the mansis. But those times, we're told, have passed. Gone are the days of roaming, malevolent spirits in the mountains. Gone are the days of pagan worship. We have progressed far beyond such naive living. Now all that can be found of this supposedly extinct practice and paradigm are decaying mementos in the mountains. Spirals of stones with stone altars in the mountain middle, and wooden totems, idols commemorating the old gods. Yet some places in the Urals remain rebellious, seemingly stuck in an ancient world where rings in the earth meant something, and where the idols were not always lifeless. Man made things where fire in the sky was not a mere falling star, but was rather a visitor from heaven, bringing blessing or woe in its wake. One such place is called the Molebskaya Anomalous Zone, near the small settlement of Malebka, a place thought by some to be another skinwalker ranch. In the summer of 1980, a man named Sergei went for a hike in the countryside surrounding his quiet home of Malebka. Then, as is still the case now, no paved roads could be found in the town or on its outskirts. It was, and remains remote to the core. The man plodded along through the tall grass and weaved around dark copses of trees. He did not like the look of he had been warned by his fathers of what could linger inside of them. As he summited a hill on the far side of the River Silva that bounded the southern stretch of the village, he looked back over his home. He thought warmly of the little houses painted bright red and blue, with yellow and brown roofs that blanketed the gently rolling fields. It was all he had ever known, and he was content with it. For the most part, it and all of its oddities. As he gazed, there was a sudden flashing light in the sunset sky. Far above the sun, where the night was already trying to close in with purple, a pulsing orb twinkled as if from nowhere. It didn't fall like one of the falling stars. Stars. It didn't move that much at all, really, settling for a steady sway here and there, as if it was surveying the same area Sergei himself was looking at. He watched as it turned from orange to gold and into a shimmering blue, like ice lit by the moon. Then, just as suddenly as it had come, the light twinkled brightly and vanished again, as if sucked back into a vacuum. Sergey, being a native, thought little of it. He had seen the visitors before many times, even in the years that followed. The world of Malebka's strangeness somehow made it out of the village to larger cities like Perm and even Moscow. Far to the west, a steady flow of visitors started to pour in on the washboard gravel roads leading to the entrance of what was quickly labeled an anomalous zone by the government. One such visitor was a man named Bakarin. He was a geologist interested in the magnetic effects of the land around Molebka. He arrived in late October, just as the first snowfall began to come down from the mountains, and focused his attention on the dark trees caging in both banks of the river. He, like so many others, had been curious about the strange fear and anxiety that he felt anytime he neared them, and so he wanted to learn more. One afternoon, as he monitored the tree line from a field adjacent to them with his camera, he finally saw indicators of what may be causing his inexplicable fear, though even the evidence only raised more questions. From the shadows there rose a massive purple orb. It glowed softly and seemed almost translucent, as if Baccarin might be able to see through it if he was closer and strained hard enough. It lifted into the sky slowly, like a balloon being carefully unwound from a spool, and then sat at the top of the trees that it came from. Nothing happened then, save the sounding of a low hum that Baccarin could never find the source of. It is a sound that many have heard and that none have ever explained. After a few minutes of the orb sitting there, Baccarin felt pushed by a very strong and random gust of ice cold wind that came from the river's direction. He noted that though it disturbed the grass around him, it didn't appear to be swaying the trees or their leaves at all. At the river, it was as though the wind had come from them as a starting point. After the gust died away, the orb sank slowly back down and could eventually not be seen anymore. Baccaran moved closer to the trees to see if any trace of what he'd seen remained. There was no debris, but melted into the light coating of snow. There was a perfect circle almost 200ft in diameter, right below where the strange ball had been. He quickly packed up and left, and he felt unsettled. He never saw anything in Melepka again, but he did not fully escape it. He began to experience severe swelling of the legs after that night that eventually became debilitating. Anytime the episodes of swell dwelling came on, he'd be forced to lie down and wait it out in considerable pain. After his report of these events, the investigations only increased in volume. One such party, led by a man from a Moscow university named Irmalov, set the standard for those that followed, with their incredible number of encounters with whatever intelligence was governing that zone and that wilderness. He and his students documented time slippage, light orbs of incredible power, spinning plates and cigars in the sky, and the observation that the people who dwelt there seemed incredibly scared by what could happen should the investigations continue. They found spirals of stone in the hills above the river, ancient sites of worship that the locals called witches rings. They found wooden idols carved and set deep in the earth in forests that turned so many away. They found their town technology dated as it was, failing in difficult to explain ways. Many times, upon examining a photo of the tree line around the river, they would see a dark purple circle sitting up and in the midst of the trees, with a bright white circle in its center, like an eye staring back at them from an unseen world. They found carvings in trees, like old runes or spells etched in time. They found trees writhed and turned, turned in on themselves like serpents coiled into a knot by a God. And they found the sense of fear heightening all the more around those trees. The Snake trees, as they named them. All of this and dozens of other strange things were observed and documented and studied in the Molebskaya anomalous zone in the 1980s and 90s. And then it all just stopped suddenly. The investigations were called off. Off. Funding was pulled. Interest was apparently at least lost. But interest doesn't seem to us to be so quick to die. In one part of the zone, called the Cosmodrome by tourists, many men claimed to have had encounters with beings from other worlds. Tucked into a tight slot of the river, with steep banks on either side and a very narrow shore to stand on. Men claimed to see a symphony of lights open to them in the sky on nights when they waited there. From the lights, things like discs and dumbbells would form that would fall gracefully to the earth like leaves in autumn. The men would then meet sentient creatures who exited the crafts and spoke kind or otherwise meaningful words of deep wisdom to them, words they took to be knowledge that they didn't know before. And we know know much more can be said and should be said about this place. We hope that someday we'll say more. Maybe someday soon. But for now, let us settle for the unsettling fact of what was left behind by all these studies that so abruptly stopped. For in response to these things. The lights, the crafts, the encounters, the stone rings and wooden effigies, the time slippage. Researchers built a monument at the entrance to Malebka before they finally left. A wooden statue of an alien kneeling to the earth to welcome travelers on the roadside. Kneeling? It is nearly 6ft tall. Standing, it would be just over 10ft tall. It is the guardian fallen angel of the Molepka Triangle, one of the most haunted places on Earth. Sa Sa.
- [103:07]
Brian
Sa.
- [103:33]
Ben
Sa Sa sa.