Midnight Ghost Shows with Chelsey Weber-Smith

Summary

You're Wrong About

"Midnight Ghost Shows with Chelsea Weber Smith"

Release Date: October 14, 2025
Host: Sarah Marshall
Guest: Chelsea Weber Smith (American Hysteria)

Overview

In this special Halloween-themed episode, Sarah Marshall and guest Chelsea Weber Smith (host of American Hysteria) unearth the forgotten phenomenon of the Midnight Ghost Show—a campy, theatrical blend of magic, spiritualism, horror, and vaudeville that swept American movie theaters from the 1930s to the 1960s. Combining historical deep-dives with vivid descriptions and plenty of laughs, the duo explore how these once-popular spectacles bridged seances, haunted houses, and horror camp, leaving a hidden legacy that stretches to Rocky Horror, late-night movie rituals, and modern haunted attractions.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

What Were Midnight Ghost Shows?

• Definition & Format:
  Stage performances that took place at midnight in movie theaters, often paired with horror films. These were part seance, part magic show, part stationary haunted house—an explosion of camp, fake gore, lighting tricks, and audience participation.
  "[They] took something that had true believers and turned it into a true vaudevillian spectacle." – Chelsea (09:35)

• Origins:
  Rooted in spiritualist seances (mid-1800s-1920s), but drifted towards pure entertainment as the public grew more skeptical and the medium became debunked (esp. by Houdini).
  "It's kind of the missing link between spiritualism and the haunted house that you and I would go to today." —Sarah (09:55)

• Peak Era:
  Early 1930s to late 1960s, predominantly in American theaters, both big cities and small towns. Travelling troupes and stage magicians were the main performers (10:46–11:26).

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Structure and Showmanship

Setting the Stage

• Opening Monologue:
  A "Ghost Master" would dramatically introduce the show, sometimes appearing through clouds, behind giant spiders, or explosive effects.
  "When a ghost master would enter, eventually it would be something like a giant spider would be lowered, and then it would spit out a ball of flame..." —Chelsea (14:07)

• Types of "Ghost Masters":

  • Mostly magicians adopting "mad scientist" or "doctor" personas—e.g., Dr. Silky Knees, Dr. Banshee, Dr. Sin, Dr. Evil.
  • Sometimes (problematic) "Indian guru" types, reflecting Western fascination and appropriation of Indian stage magic (16:22–18:29).

• Audience & Atmosphere:
  Overflowing with teenagers, a raucous crowd, often riotous, anticipating cheap thrills, horror, and laughs.
  "Like the Eras tour, but lots more skeletons." —Chelsea (12:31)

Show Phases

• Phase 1 (1930s–early 1940s): Seance-focused—table-raising, floating instruments, ghostly apparitions, spirit trumpets, and automatic writing (25:15–26:41).
• Phase 2 (1940s–1960s): Shift to theatrical horror and gruesome effects: fake blood, monsters, "dismemberments," and intense, violent skits aimed at thrill-seeking teens (15:26, 62:00+).

Notable Segments & Tricks

• Spirit cabinets, talking skulls, floating handkerchiefs, "spirit slates" with ghostly writing, audience volunteers as "participants" or "victims."
• The Ghost Master would foment anticipation with warnings of potential horrors lurking in the dark (39:05–44:54).

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The Showstopper: "The Blackout"

• Description:
  The lights are cut; the theater plunges into pitch darkness for several minutes (not just seconds), and an orchestrated barrage of sound and tactile sensations bombards the audience.
  "Prior to this blackout, there would have been a kind of, like, suggestive speech about all the things that might happen in the dark..." —Chelsea (49:04)

• Effects:

  • Screams, moans, thunder, and howling from hidden speakers or tape decks
  • Performers or "ghosts" with luminescent paint moving in the aisles
  • Popcorn, rice, wet strings, or even cooked noodles tossed into the crowd to simulate terrifying insects or worms crawling on the skin (49:41–52:42)
  • Water guns for sudden "rain attacks"
  • Flashbulbs to "charge" glowing paint on props, costumes, and ghosts ("luminous paint," sometimes dangerously containing radium)
  • Sometimes, children paid in candy were spread throughout the audience doused in glowing phosphorus, so "ghosts" appeared seated among the crowd (56:12–58:01)
  • "Spook paddles" and other gimmicks for even more surprise audience contact

• Audience Involvement:
  High levels of participation—volunteers (or sometimes "stooges") would be called up for illusions or pranks, and the darkness gave rise to friendly mischief among audience members.
  “The haunted house for me is truly, like, the most cathartic part of my year is my haunted house marathon in the fall.” —Chelsea (53:22)

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Camp, Comedy, and Cultural Themes

Camp Aesthetics & Legacy

• The shows reveled in camp humor, drag, mad scientist and horror tropes, foreshadowing modern fandoms and interactive entertainment.
• Influence Trail:
  • Seeds of modern haunted house attractions
  • William Castle's horror movie gimmicks (The Tingler, House on Haunted Hill, etc.) (47:54–48:49)
  • The Rocky Horror Picture Show midnight screenings—call-backs, prop-throwing, costumed participation, homage to ghost show meta-theatrics (51:04–51:19, 94:27–95:51)

Violence & Gender

• Violent skits disproportionately focused on violence against women (e.g., women "sawed in half," pulled from the audience and "dismembered"), a point both hosts note as revealing tensions in gender, sexuality, and societal id.
  "It's interesting that so much of this is like, what if we could use magic to kill women?" —Sarah (69:26)
• Some acknowledgment of problematic racial and ableist themes, with gothic "witch doctor" tropes and hunchbacked villains—a fossilized record for later criticism (67:46–73:47).

Social & Economic Context

• Why They Thrived:
  • Depression & wartime eras: People crave cheap escapism during hardship (31:19–32:01).
  • Geared to teenagers as consumers—cars and new freedoms drive demand after WWII (62:02–62:45).
• Decline:
  • Audience rowdiness, vandalism, and changing entertainment habits (81:26–82:19)
  • TV, the suburbs, and drive-ins replace downtown theaters and alter communal experiences (83:10–84:49).
  • By the late ’60s/early ’70s, the midnight ghost show tradition dwindled into pop culture memory, only to be partly revived as mythologized camp.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “You make every haunted house a haunted home.”
  — Chelsea & Sarah, riffing affectionately (05:18–05:24)
• “Things can be bad and perfect. Like what we’re talking about today.”
  — Chelsea (13:22)
• "[The blackout] would only last a handful of minutes, but every light in the theater would be cut... and it would plunge the theater into absolute and total darkness."
  — Chelsea (46:34)
• “Crabs, we need your wisdom now.”
  — Chelsea, on horseshoe crabs as icons of survival (20:38)
• “Wouldn’t that be amazing? I want to see [the jaw-clacking skull] on the Drew Barrymore show.”
  — Sarah (40:25)
• “Sometimes you want to see a ghost, and you are the ghost, and who could see that coming?”
  — Sarah (59:02)
• "It ain't no sin to take off your skin and dance around in your bones."
  — Song lyric from a ghost show publicity parade (88:43)
• "If you passed out, you would have this card... so that they could take you to the hospital or take you home after you fainted—again, this was before stranger danger."
  — Chelsea (91:18)

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Important Timestamps

• 00:12 – 02:21: Dr. Schlock’s (Chelsea) highly campy intro—Halloween mood, podcast recommendations, miniseries announcement
• 04:51 – 06:18: Hosts bond over their shared love of camp, ghosts, and live shows
• 13:31 – 14:02: Chelsea pledges to focus on the show and not a social deep-dive
• 15:26 – 17:06: Show phases: Seance era to gore/horror era
• 24:00 – 26:41: Sarah recaps (with Chelsea’s input) the roots of spiritualist seances
• 39:05 – 49:04: Anatomy of the ghost show—seance tricks and stagecraft
• 46:33 – 53:04: The Blackout: sensory bombardment, audience contact, chaos
• 56:12 – 58:01: Glowing children as "ghosts" in the crowd (including a firsthand memory)
• 67:17 – 77:36: The horror era: gendered violence, sexualized and gory illusions, Universal monster tie-ins
• 83:10 – 84:49: Drive-ins, TV, and the twilight of the ghost show
• 94:27 – 97:06: Rocky Horror as spiritual and literal successor; interactive audience culture; queer community
• 99:00 – 100:46: Modern haunted houses, ecstatic communal experience
• 101:06 – 102:08: Endorsement of American Hysteria; mutual appreciation

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Legacy and Impact

• Halloween & Haunted Houses:
  Much of today's haunted attraction culture, as well as interactive horror cinema rituals, owe a direct debt to the innovation and rowdiness of the midnight ghost shows.

• Rocky Horror & Beyond:
  Midnight movies, audience participation, and queer/fandom community roots trace back through this circuit of darker, sillier, and sometimes subversive communal entertainment.

• Camp as Survival:
  The episode is an ode to the forgotten fun-house of American camp—the ways we process fear, social changes, and the inexplicable through shared joy, screams, and laughter.

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Further Listening/Reading

• American Hysteria podcast for deep dives into cultural panics and weird Americana
• Past You're Wrong About Halloween episodes: Corn Mazes, The Donner Party, Killer Clowns
• Rocky Horror Picture Show episode of You're Wrong About
• Bloody Mary episode on American Hysteria (recommended for Halloween chills)

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Closing Note

“May you scream in public as much as you dream, and I'm just so happy to share every scare with you.”
— Sarah Marshall (101:51)

“You make every haunted house a haunted home.”
— Chelsea Weber Smith (102:08)

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Summary compiled for the true believers, the skeptics, and all midnight ghost show enthusiasts yet-to-be.

Transcript

[Dr. Schlock (Chelsea Weber Smith)]

Welcome mortals to a ghoulish night of phantoms and monsters. A hellish parade of otherworldly horrors brought to you by me, your ghost master of the evening, Dr. Schlock, known to the uninitiated as Chelsea Webersmith, my beautiful assistant. This evening, Sarah Marshall will allow me to perform unspeakable terrors upon her for the entertainment of you, my precious innocent sacrificial lambs. Tonight I will be presenting to you an informative look at the history of my midnight ghost shows. Campy, ghostly, gory performances that from the 1930s to the 1960s accompanied horror movies in theaters. A combination of a spiritualist seance and a stationary haunted house. Beware. This show contains descriptions of hella fake violence and you may not make it out alive of this twisted amusement. Dr. Schlock's camp of the damned right here in the. You're wrong about theater. I am thrilled and chilled to the bone to make this unbelievable announcement. Sarah Marshall will be hosting a brand new eight part miniseries from the CBC on the past, the present and the future of the satanic panic. The podcast is called the devil you know and is premiering on October 20th.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Pause for gasps and roaring applause.

[Dr. Schlock (Chelsea Weber Smith)]

Let me also remind you, if you love your wrongabout, you can become a patron@patreon patreon.com your wrongabout or Apple+ to get bonus episodes every month. Most recently you can learn about the history of one of my ex girlfriends, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. Brought to you by another mistress of the dark, but sadly not my ex girlfriend, Eve Lindley. Oh, and stay tuned for a new bonus episode with another beautiful beast of the underworld, Jamie Loftus, called the year of the bimbo. May I humbly, indulgently recommend previous episodes of your wrongabout, co hosted by me, last year's Halloween special, Corn mazes, the Donner Party and killer clowns. Oh, and over at my own haunted home, the American Hysteria podcast, you can hear Sarah's presentation on spontaneous human combustion out on October 20th. The hypnotizing music in this episode was produced and performed, formed by our resident rat kings, Miranda Zippler and A.J. mcKinley of Magpie Cinema Club. Now thank you my fiendish friends, for listening to this unhinged introduction by me, Dr. Schlock, in preparation for my camp of the damned. So without further ado, I would like, if you, if I may, to take you on a strange journey into the haunted historical heart of the midnight Ghost show. And remember, anything can happen when the lights go dark. You may even Discover a ghost sitting right beside you.

[Sarah Marshall]

Welcome, all you ghoul cats and kittens, to American. Oh, wait, we're on my show. Keep it in. What a great mistake. Welcome to youo're Wrong about. This is definitely my show and not American Hysteria. But, Kelsey, you and I get together to talk about goblins and ghouls and ghosts so often that it's hard to remember because my house is your house and your house is my house. I hope my house is definitely your house.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

You make every house a haunted home.

[Sarah Marshall]

Aw, wait.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

You make every haunted house a haunted home.

[Sarah Marshall]

You make this haunted house a haunted home. Yeah, there it is. Kelsey, you were here to tell us about. The title is Ghost Shows, and I feel like that could go in so many directions. And also, you and I have done a ghost show. But for people who are just joining us. Hello, welcome. Please sit with us. Kelsey, who are you and what do you do and what do you love?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Well, my name is Chelsea Weber Smith, and I host American Hysteria, which is a podcast that covers a lot of similar things to you're Wrong about. And yeah, I am here as a massive horror fan, a massive paranormal fan, especially drag of the paranormal. And, you know, I love haunted houses. And what I think we're talking about today is kind of a combination of all the things that I love and all the things that you love. So I am absolutely thrilled to be here.

[Sarah Marshall]

And, Kelsey, you and I have talked a lot about both the idea of ghosts and ways of faking ghosts for entertainment and where the sort of lines between desire and belief and charlatanry get interesting and blurry. We've talked about Houdini recently on your show. I love that episode. And we talked about the cottingly fairies on my show not too long ago. And also we've done kind of a paranormal Christmas show the last couple of years, which we're doing, recalibrating and making bigger and badder for 2026. But we have done a variety show quite a few times now called A Massive Seance. And I wonder, before we get into it, what it was like to approach this topic as somebody who is now through American hysteria and also now in a live setting in these shows that we've been doing. And of course, in all the other ways of your life, that I'm not thinking of somebody who not only talks about ghost entertainment, but also does ghost entertainment. What did that make you think about researching this topic?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

What a great question, Sarah. Thank you.

[Sarah Marshall]

Thanks.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, I mean, I think what was so much fun about discovering this kind of forgotten piece of horror history was how much it mimicked what we did together for our live show. Like, it was like we connected on the unified field, to borrow David Lynch's term. We really. I don't know, we. We like, channeled something. We conjured something that sort of already existed.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

And I think we did that because of our love of camp, our love of drag, our love of kind of the vaudeville spirit.

[Sarah Marshall]

Giving Chelsea an exorcism.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I did get an exorcism to Fleetwood Max.

[Sarah Marshall]

So as we all should.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Please keep that on your calendar.

[Sarah Marshall]

Chelsea gets an exorcism.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Ghouls and boys. And it really did feel good.

[Sarah Marshall]

It felt great to be a part of it. I got to have a tambourine.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

You did.

[Sarah Marshall]

And we've talked a lot, especially in this recent Houdini episode, about sort of the belief in the paranormal or just in things that we can't see or understand that makes Charlotte Henry possible and how dangerous that is. But also, if you look at just true things we know about the actual universe, that we're getting blasted all the time with atoms being shot out of stars or I guess subatomic particles, if we're talking about neutrinos. Because all the things that I don't even know to mention because I don't know enough about the world that we cannot see or perceive, but the. That still exist and are happening to us. I think it's not at all unreasonable to believe that the limits of human perception are not the limits of what exists. And I feel like that tension is going to be with us here today, too.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Well, it may be a little bit, but it might be less so than you think, because what we are talking about today, I will just say that they're called midnight ghost shows, also midnight spook shows. But what these really were, taking the seance performance and turning it into popular culture entertainment.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, that's interesting.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So it was like the way that it kind of crossed over from being like there weren't any true believers here. It's like they took something that had true believers and turned it into a true kind of vaudevillian spectacle that people, you know, got to enjoy in. In a way that had no gray area.

[Sarah Marshall]

So this is kind of the missing link between spiritualism and the haunted house that you and I would go to today.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Absolutely. Perfectly put.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yep. I love it. Well, where should we begin? Chelsea Weber Smith.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Well, I think I'll just kind of start with a few basics. Midnight ghost shows, as I said, and also known as Midnight spook shows. They were these elaborate late night stage shows that almost always accompanied horror movies.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, wow.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So they either led into. Or a horror movie ended with the show.

[Sarah Marshall]

See, theaters are like, wah. Nobody's coming to the movies anymore. It's like, try harder. And Also, stop charging $19 for a pretzel. But, you know, a separate issue.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Gimmicks, people. We need gimmicks.

[Sarah Marshall]

We need gimmicks. Bring back the tingler. And also this. Okay, so what period of time are we talking about and where are we?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Okay, so we are very much in America. This is a very American art form. It did go to other places.

[Sarah Marshall]

We are so in the middle of America that we're in Missouri. Geographically, the center.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I think they were certainly in Missouri, these ghost shows. But they did go overseas or they went to Mexico. But really this was an American phenomenon. And it was in small towns, big towns. The shows traveled around. I mean, you could really go anywhere and find a ghost show, which is pretty wild considering that you and I, as lovers of this type of history, had no idea about them.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yes. And also, what can you go anywhere in America and find today? Aside from a Dollar General?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, it's a good point. I'm a Dollar Tree man myself.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, me too. Dollar General, I think just means generally a dollar. And by generally, they mean 13% of the time. Whereas Dollar Tree will really get you out of many a jam.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It really will. It really will. Wrapping paper especially.

[Sarah Marshall]

This is not sponsored by Dollar Tree. We're just both frugal.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So what I'm gonna say, and you already kind of brought this up, but these shows were basically a combination of a spiritualist seance, a magic show, and a stationary haunted house.

[Sarah Marshall]

God, can we make one, please? Right now?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Well, let's see. By the end, my baby needs it.

[Sarah Marshall]

My baby needs the ghost house.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So this was a massive craze, especially for teenagers, of course. And these were like shows that would have these massive overflow crowds outside. Like, people would just be begging to get in. There was a very riotous atmosphere.

[Sarah Marshall]

Like the Eras tour.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Just like the Eras tour, but lots more skeletons.

[Sarah Marshall]

So what time period is this? Is this like before movies or as movies are beginning to be born? Because I know they took a while to do that.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So from the early 1930s to the late 1960s.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, wow. So movies are like fully happening. Like they're competing because you were saying these happen before the movies, and it's kind of like an opening show, like an opening act for a horror movie.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Or it was the closing act. Sometimes it was. Yeah, sometimes it came before.

[Sarah Marshall]

So it's not competing as much as holding hands, but even so, it's like the only thing you get to see before a movie now is Maria Menounos.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

That's true. It's true. Or, I guess Nicole Kidman stepping in a puddle with their stiletto heels.

[Sarah Marshall]

Heartbreak feels good in a place like this.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It's such a bad script. I can't believe I love it. I mean, it's also perfect. Things can be bad and perfect. Like what we're talking about today.

[Sarah Marshall]

Exactly.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

And I want to just mention up top here that, you know, a lot of times I come on the show and I give a very kind of detailed history and a sociological analysis of whatever I'm talking about. Today we are going to the Ghost show, and we are not talking about its cultural significance, if that's okay with everyone.

[Sarah Marshall]

I mean, I'll inject cultural theorizing wherever I go without really meaning to. That sounded violent, but, yeah, I'm. So please take me to the ghost show.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

You will. All right. I'm gonna be your ghost master. This is a. A term that was invented.

[Sarah Marshall]

You're, like, coming down the grand staircase in the Titanic. You're like, so you want to go to a real party?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Well, when a ghost master would enter, eventually it would be something like a giant spider would be lowered, and then it would spit out a ball of flame, and then within the smoke, the Ghostmaster would appear. It's fucking awesome.

[Sarah Marshall]

Fantastic. Okay, let's all take a second to it. Do you want a giant spider, or what would you want if we were to put this on? You're like, sarah, I've lain awake thinking about this for eight days and nights.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I know that I would maybe. I think I would want, like, a skeleton to be lower down. That was, like, wearing my outfit. And then, like, you know, like a sudden expl. I think an explosion would be fun. I think fire and flame. And then from where the skeleton lay, or from where the skeleton was, I would appear in my really cool outfit. So go shows had basically two phases, and we'll get into both of them. But the early kind of 1930s to early 1940s was very seance focused, very ghost focused, very paranormal focused. And then from the 40s, the 50s, and into the 60s, it was much more focused on, like, horror and gore and, like, just a bloody crazy night. So we will, you know, explore both of those.

[Sarah Marshall]

A bloody crazy night.

[Dr. Schlock (Chelsea Weber Smith)]

A bloody crazy night.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I'm so bad at accents. Famously, I Know, we.

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, we're just. And it's funny because we're both trying to imitate the people who raised us and are doing a worse job. Very true. True.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Okay, so here's some of the titles of these midnight ghost shows.

[Sarah Marshall]

All right. Okay.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Dr. Silky Knees, Asylum of Horrors.

[Sarah Marshall]

Dr. Silky Kneeks.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Dr. Dracula's Den of Living Nightmares. Raymond's Zombie Jamboree, Zombie Camper.

[Sarah Marshall]

Doesn't that sound like a song from, like, 1962?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It definitely does.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, my God.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Back to back, belly to belly. We have Dr. Sin in the House of the Living Dead. Dr. Satan's shrieks in the Night.

[Sarah Marshall]

A lot of doctors. Are they, like, medical doctors? Are they. Is Dr. Satan have a doctorate in the humanities?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I'm gonna explain that to you in one second. Okay, so we've got Dr. Evil's terrors of the Unknown and a personal favorite of mine, Dr. Banshee's Chasm of Spasms.

[Sarah Marshall]

I'll take you to Dr. Bank. She's Chasm of Spasm, honey.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So as you noticed, Sarah, a lot of these characters who were largely magicians that kind of took on this new project of doing a midnight ghost show.

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay, interesting. Yeah. Magicians. Got a magician.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

They got to. And so they kind of went with this kind of mad scientist, doctor vibe.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, interesting.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Like kind of, I. E. Dr. Frankenstein a little bit.

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay. Yeah. And Frankenstein came out, like, what, 1931? 32, like the movie, to be clear.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. So, like, pretty concurrent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Frankenstein and his monster will play a role.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, good.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

If they weren't mad scientists, they often played kind of an Indian guru type which was, of course, extremely problematic because every single one of them was a white man.

[Sarah Marshall]

They were like, it's the 50s. We gotta find a way to be racist. Even if it wouldn't even come up without us trying really hard to do it. I also. I feel like you're. I'm. This is something you're gonna get to momentarily. But this makes me think of the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Well, don't you even.

[Sarah Marshall]

I would like, if I may.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Don't you even talk about it yet.

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay, perfect.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Don't you even talk about it.

[Sarah Marshall]

Don't you say Rocky Horror Picture show to.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

We will definitely have a Rocky Horror Moment. So I just thought it would be worth explaining that part of the reason, the main reason that people in these ghost shows kind of portrayed this Indian guru archetype was that magic in India, like stage magic, was pretty superior to American stage magic.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, really? Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Even looking at Houdini he had a period of time where he pretended to be, you know, this Indian magician.

[Sarah Marshall]

That's probably why he called himself Houdini, now that I think about it. Don't you love the world in the sense that, like, there are so many things you wonder about and then there are things that you didn't even get around to wondering about? Because never in my life have I had time or been pointed in the direction of being like, what was stage magic like in India in 1930, you know?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Well, it was dope.

[Sarah Marshall]

Chelsea, do you know how long horseshoe crabs have been around?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

No, I don't. I can't say I do.

[Sarah Marshall]

Do you want to guess? And, and I'll tell you as a clue that they're known as a living fossil, okay? Because they are unchanged from, you know, how they were when they first existed. Long ago. But how long, Chelsea?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Damn. No friggin evolution.

[Sarah Marshall]

I mean, look, I'm not a horseshoe crab scientist, but they've been, they've been with us.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

You sound like you are.

[Sarah Marshall]

And they, they've been with us and they've been horseshoe crabs for a very long time. And I want you to tell me how, how long of a time you guess that could possibly be?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

A hundred million years.

[Sarah Marshall]

445 million years.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Damn. How old's the earth sound off in the comments?

[Sarah Marshall]

6,000 years, according to some people. But, but what about the horseshoe crabs, you guys? And I mean, I a. Isn't it amazing to think that if you're looking. Look at a picture of a horseshoe crab. Look at a crab right now.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes.

[Sarah Marshall]

If you're looking at that, you're looking at something that you could have looked at at a time in history when we don't really know what anything really looked like, you know, that's pretty crazy. We know a lot, but like, we don't know really what color a lot of things were. There's a lot we don't know from the fossil record, but we know what horseshoe crabs looked like.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Wow.

[Sarah Marshall]

Again, not a crabologist. And I know they're not crabs. They're actually more closely related to spiders.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Wow, you do sound like a crab expert compared to me.

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, I. But you didn't get excited about horseshoe crabs in the last few days and keep thinking about them.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I guess that is true.

[Sarah Marshall]

Just to say that like, when the world feels impossibly bleak, like a, you're not wrong, like, look, I'm not gonna lie to you, but B, there are so many things that we haven't even gotten around to learning yet and I Just. I just. I don't know. Thank you to the horseshoe crabs.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Crabs, we need your wisdom now.

[Sarah Marshall]

Horseshoe crabs, we need you now more than ever.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

How many fascist governments have you faced?

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, boy. All of them.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Every single one. God. Okay. All right. So now that we've figured that out.

[Sarah Marshall]

I guess I had to tell you, Chelsea.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

No, I love the crabs. This is perfect. Every crab is a glamorous woman.

[Sarah Marshall]

Every crab is a glamorous woman. Although what's nice is that they've also been around for several hundred million years before anyone was thinking about gender. And I like that, too.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

God, non binary icons, non binary survivors. That's true. Okay, so I think that an important place to really start here is. Sarah, would you like to give us. Since we have covered this quite a few times on both our shows, I don't want to go into a whole lot of detail, but would you like to give us kind of your, like, quick and dirty rundown of, like, spiritualist seances and that movement?

[Sarah Marshall]

Yes. And I will say it also. I'll start out by saying that everything I'm saying I learned from you.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Great.

[Sarah Marshall]

I learned it by watching you. And that essentially the spiritualist movement, in your conceptualization of it, which I agree with, is connected in a big way to the rise of technology like the telegraph and to the period immediately following the American Civil War when sudden we have technology that allows us to directly communicate with people who aren't there. And also, everyone knows someone who has died and died pretty traumatically and where a big portion of an entire generation, if not multiple generations, has been wiped out. So the way that we have talked about it in the past, the sort of collective grief, plus these changes in communication technology that are happening faster than the human brain can keep up with them, I can't imagine that that remind me of anything that's happening right now. Causes a lot of things, but partly the birth of this new massive cultural movement, which is really more of a religious movement than anything having to do with entertainment at the time, where suddenly there is essentially a belief system called spiritualism, which involves ideas about the afterlife, that people go to this place called Summerland, where they get to attend lectures. And it sounds basically because Summer, like Carleton or something, it sounds like Palo Alto, but without all the cybertrucks. And that also people are spending a lot of time and energy both making careers as spiritualists who hold seances and also going to seances. I mean, and also if you look at sort of conservative Christianity and especially charismatic elements within American Christianity, there's so much about American Protestantism in the past hundred years. That is about the search for ecstatic experience. Right. And I think that we start seeing this in spiritualism too, where people are going in order to try and communicate with the people that they've lost or to reach the other side. But it also becomes a place where you can go see a beautiful seance conducting woman who is allowed socially because she's possessed, to make out with everyone, regardless of gender.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

The most important part. Yes.

[Sarah Marshall]

What do you want to add that I might have missed in that run through?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So, yeah, I think that was a fantastic walkthrough, Sarah. I think the only things I'll add is kind of a float through. Exactly. Is what made the seances kind of what they were. And that was that mediums, as they hosted, you know, and tried to speak with the dead and channel the dead, there would also be a lot of parlor tricks. That's where that term comes from.

[Sarah Marshall]

Shit, we didn't even get to that in all of our conversations about it.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, that's it.

[Sarah Marshall]

Because there. Where do you do a seance in the parlor? Why are there not enough seances in America? Because the parlor has been replaced with the TV room. Get it together, you guys.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Dude, that's my conspiracy theory.

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, I mean, now the TV room is where we go to commune with people who aren't there.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

That's a great point. That's a great point. And boy, do I love tv.

[Sarah Marshall]

Me too. You know what I love even more? Watching people trying to get me mad on Tick Tock and succeeding.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes.

[Sarah Marshall]

I'm just. I'm like a fish who's like, oh, there's a worm swimming in the ocean. I'm gonna get that.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

You're just a powder keg.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Is that what you mean?

[Sarah Marshall]

Living in a powder keg and giving off sparks?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So, yes, as these mediums were, you know, trying to commune with the dead, there were also these parlor tricks happening where, like, you would see. And this is kind of the. The stuff you've seen in movies, the images you. That would come to mind when you think of an old school seance.

[Sarah Marshall]

My favorite being the Others.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes, exact. Like, you know, the table would float, there would be objects floating around the room. Entities would walk around and touch the people who were in the seance, which they called the sitters.

[Sarah Marshall]

Now, I've seen this in movies, and my favorite examples are the others and also the changeling, which the others is referencing in this scene where someone's doing automatic writing, where you're kind of moving your hand across the page, and the ghost kind of steps inside you and starts writing with your hand. Did that really happen?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, automatic writing was definitely part of the whole thing.

[Sarah Marshall]

And something like that I find compelling because it's something that a person could just be writing that. So it really is based on the strength of either the performance or, I think, the person being able to go into some kind of a genuine trance state, and even if nothing supernatural is happening, technically, to be able to maybe express something that they couldn't with their conscious mind.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Totally, totally. And today, kind of the part of the seance we're focusing on, Are those parlor tricks, Right. Are those floating instruments? Are those ghostly apparitions?

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, the spirit trumpet, if you will.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

The spirit trumpet is one of them. Where people would listen and hear ghosts only through the trumpet. And there were all of these parlor tricks. There were people who were helping the seance happen. The medium was essentially a magician that was getting people to believe in the paranormal by tricking them with, you know, fake. And it was. It was very entertaining for people. There were believers. There were also people who went to seances, especially toward the latter part of the movement, because, you know, it began the mid-1800s and really lasted until the 1920s. So as we got farther along, you know, the. The religious aspects started to fall away, and the entertainment aspect started to really rise to the forefront. And so when we're in the 1920s, these mediums who are still kind of peddling the idea that they are somehow connected to, you know, the great beyond, we start to see them being debunked by people like Harry Houdini.

[Sarah Marshall]

There you go.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Here we go.

[Sarah Marshall]

Very sexy man to be debunked by.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Very sexy. And again, if you want to learn more about that, we just had an American hysteria episode that Sarah co hosted with me with Tim Harford from Cautionary.

[Sarah Marshall]

Tales, which was so joy. I loved getting to do that with you.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, it was great. We learned so much more about Houdini than we knew. And we love Houdini. That dreamy.

[Sarah Marshall]

We learned that Houdini was a mommy's boy. And we love to see it.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

We love to see it most of the time. Some of the time, yes.

[Sarah Marshall]

We love to see it in general. Yeah. Like, anything. You can take it in the wrong direction.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

You can. That's right.

[Sarah Marshall]

Looking at you. Ronald Reagan.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Oh, Ronnie. Ronnie and his mommy. So, as I kind of mentioned, midnight ghost shows are basically the pop culturalization of these seances that, at the end, were held in theaters. Like, we're on stage, right?

[Sarah Marshall]

We're about to watch the Blob. Like, it's no secret that this is entertainment.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes. And I think there were some hangers on. You know, there was some, like, sense that Even in the 20s, these things were real. But once people like Houdini were able to really display how their tricks worked, it just kind of was the death knell for. For spiritualism as a act, kind of cultural force.

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, and also, I imagine that, like. Because obviously, as someone who hosts a show called you're wrong about, I began it in the spirit of, like, once you give people the facts, they'll be like, oh, no, I behaved in error. Thank you for telling me. And you know what? A lot of people do, and they're the people who like the shows that we do. And so, like, the fact that those people have not seized control of the country doesn't mean that you don't exist and that you're not out there there helping each other through this. But it's very true.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

But, but, but, but.

[Sarah Marshall]

And it's a big, juicy. But a lot of other people are kind of immune to facts and logic. And I feel like what I would hazard as a hypothesis is that the nature of seance has changed partly because people wised up to a degree and saw parlor tricks in the cold light of day and were like, oh, how silly of me. And also just that, you know, too many mediums got too comfortable bilking people and behaving in bad fai. And that. That gets noticed. But also, I imagine that the structure of society changes and that going to a theater instead of somebody's parlor became just more in line with the way people were living their lives. Does that sound reasonable to you?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, I. I totally think so. I think so. And I mean, just by virtue of it, being on a stage really changes, you know, versus being in a parlor.

[Sarah Marshall]

Because you're no longer a participant, which is interesting.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It is interesting. And I would say also that, you know, we were seeing actual congressional hearings, that Houdini was speaking spiritualists, which speaks.

[Sarah Marshall]

To the scale of this as well, that this was a national issue to that level.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I mean, spiritualism was massive.

[Sarah Marshall]

I realize that we invent problems to have hearings about today, but in general, in the past, I think they have been about real things.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that once we get to our Bendet ghost show, we have everyone kind of being in on this joke. It is camp, it is comedy, it is vaudeville. And as we have mentioned, the universal monster movies and horror movies in general were becoming really popular in the early 1930s as people were going through all this really awful economic devastation. What we do know about times of depression, perhaps more economic than personal.

[Sarah Marshall]

They do go together.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

They do.

[Sarah Marshall]

It is depressing to have hungry children.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It's very depressing. But regardless of that, people usually will shell out for cheap entertain.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

That's like. That doesn't usually die when we have tough economic times. It's bars and. And shows. Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

That's very interesting. It's interesting. I mean, I. Again, I don't. I'm not an economist, I'm not a cribologist, but I think that luxuries and cheap entertainments tend to do well in recessions because people who are super rich are going to stay rich and keep doing what they're doing.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

And people who are struggling and who are getting squeezed are going to alleviate that. How we can. And God knows, horror movies do the job pretty well for a lot of us.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

God, don't they?

[Sarah Marshall]

God only knows where I'd be without them, for that matter. Well, and to speak of the Universal monster movies for a second, what comes to mind for me is we have Frankenstein in like, what, 31, 32. James Whale's Frankenstein. Wonderful, amazing movie. We get the Bride of Frankenstein and we also get Claude Rains was the Invisible man. And that's an amazing movie.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yep. And we have, like, Dracula as well.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yes. Belle Lugos. I never drink wine.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Who will make an appearance later on. Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Little Edwood is watching with glee.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Exactly. So, you know, we have kind of the audience ready to go. So what we need is the showman. And we have these movie theaters that are still, of course, looking for more income, especially during this time. And so these magicians kind of had the idea to create these shows that were a supplement to the movies and happened at midnight, which meant that it wouldn't interfere at all with the movies that they were showing. So it would just be automatically more money.

[Sarah Marshall]

So after the movies, you would, like, stay later.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, exactly.

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay. Have you ever been to a. They at least used to do this at the Clinton Street Theater in Portland, where at the end of showing the Rocky Horror Picture show, the cabaret says, this isn't Ferris Bueller, so go the fuck up home. But in this case, you would be correct. Y.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Exactly. So it's kind of widely believed that the first guy to really create the Midnight Ghost show was a guy named Elwyn Charles Peck. And he went by Lwyn E, L, W, Y, N. That was his stage name.

[Sarah Marshall]

I like him already.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

And his show was Elwyn's midnight spook party. And he actually started it in 1929.

[Sarah Marshall]

And he lived with his friends.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, right. He probably did. I don't have any intel on his sexuality, unfortunately.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right. We know nothing about his life, but this is my theory.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So if you want to head to the document, you can look at a poster of one of his shows that I think would be fun for you to describe.

[Sarah Marshall]

Ooh. Oh. And it's okay.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Take us there.

[Sarah Marshall]

So actually, I feel like it's Elwyn, like El Cid or something. That's pretty good too. Elliot Win. Okay, so I'll just read this poster. Don't be a. I will speak for yourself. Come on down to the spook party tonight. Spooks, ghosts, shivers, shudders, thrills. We have a Nosferatu. Max Shrek looking face. Nosferatu has also come out recently, I would think. We have a maiden being carried. She's in a swoon, like that lady at the. In the Edward Gorey mystery animation. And then in the top left hand corner, is that or is that not spongebob?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It does look a little like spongebob.

[Sarah Marshall]

I mean, not literally, but he really looks like spongebob. Oh. And then someone is written on a blackboard, you will die. Which is the best way to pack them in in person on the stage. Elwyn, Midnight spook party. This is a midnight show and requires a separate admission, so you couldn't even stay after the movie. That's great. You have to buy your way in. Mystery, laughs, thrills, table raising. Ghostly spirit. Slave writing, wrappings, talking skulls. And I will point out that we also had wrappings in our hero show.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

We did. And kind of talking skulls a little bit.

[Sarah Marshall]

The quote, ghosts sometimes leave the stage, come into the audience, and sit with you, but you'll love it on the screen. The vampire bat. Fay Ray. Lionel Atwell. Balcony $0.25. Lower floor $0.40. Make up a spook party. If you come alone, you'll be afraid to walk home. Home. No children's tickets sold. It's too scary. Okay.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Beautiful.

[Sarah Marshall]

The amount of information on that poster is very impressive to me. Like, if you have questions, they manage to answer them, but in like a fun ghosty way. I really love it.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It's great. It's great. I really want to make shirts of some of these posters. Stay tuned.

[Sarah Marshall]

We should also have our next show posters be like that.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Sarah Marshall]

And you say if you come alone, you'll be afraid to walk home. Bring your friends.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

But you won't be afraid when we do it in Portland because nothing bad is actually happening there.

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, okay, here, look to address Portland, my hometown, which I love so much and which at this moment is perhaps being attacked by the National Guard like Kent State. There are bad things happening in Portland, but you know who they're happening to? Vulnerable people. Who are the people that bad things always happen to. People who are likely to be victims of hate crimes, unhoused people. People dealing with addiction and not getting the resources that the city has but is not using on them, or who are just, you know, the victims of a city being unwilling to put their effort into the right places or not having the capacity. You know, it's both. These things are true. And so, yes, bad things happen in a city. City without that being generally the fault of the people that they're happening to. And also, Portland is a, yes, frequently annoying and also beautiful, wonderful city full of people who I adore. And if you walk around my neighborhood, you will see lots of fruit trees and lots of fruit that has been set out for people to take and that is. Is also going on at any time. And people are growing their tomatoes.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Well said.

[Sarah Marshall]

Still, we shouldn't be able to be, but we are.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Somehow we persevere. Yes, very well said, Sarah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Anyway, very walkable town, very lovely to be in. But yes, when we do the massive seance again, bring your friends or you'll be scared to go home alone.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

As I mentioned, the show often started with a horror movie and usually kind of a schlocky B horror movie. The best, of course, course, one of.

[Sarah Marshall]

Fay Ray's other movies in this case.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So after that, you know, like, if it were opening the show, which it often was, there was like an after horror glow. Right? There's this, like, you're kind of primed because you get in that mood where everything's a little creepy and scary.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. And also, horror movies at this time are like 75 minutes long, you know, so you're not particularly tired. I mean, a lot of them are at that length now.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

We always want a tight 90 when we can get it.

[Sarah Marshall]

Another great movie this time is island of Lost Souls. Mm, you should watch that. If you haven't. Okay, so we've just seen a horror movie. We've read this amazing poster. Like, I am, like, amped up. I'm ready for anything. Basically.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

You should be. So at this point, the host comes on. Whether he explodes from a spider or not, there are many ways to enter. But regardless, there would be this kind of, you know, monologue about how the theater was Home to a host of ghosts. And, you know, you might just see them tonight.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, my God. We did at, at our show. I see what you're saying. Wow.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes. So the opening of the show would be very seance esque. So they would be doing the tricks, like what we call the spirit cabinet, which was kind of a place where a lot of paranormal things would come out from in the seance.

[Sarah Marshall]

Like the spirit secretary of the interior.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Exactly, exactly. So a lot of times I would open seemingly by a paranormal hand, and then things like a handkerchief would be held by the ghost master and then kind of fly off his and float around the stage.

[Sarah Marshall]

Nice.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

You know, someone in the audience would be asked to come on stage and help with the spirit slate trick, which is, you know, they'd put chalk slates together and when they pulled them apart, they would have, you know, strange messages on them and as if by a.

[Sarah Marshall]

Ghostly hand or a magician, you know, one of the two. Yes.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So, you know, you're kind of seeing how there's these magic tricks, kind of simplistic magic trick tricks, but kind of turned into this Seancey vibe and, and mimicking what a lot of people already had some reference to. So here's one that I liked. Sometimes they would place a skull on a bench and it would answer questions by clacking its jaws once for yes, twice for no.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, my God, wouldn't that be amazing? I want to see that on the Drew Barrymore show.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Oh, me too. Me too. She'd do it. She'd do it for Halloween.

[Sarah Marshall]

She would. And you know, that skull would feel very comfortable.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

She would probably cry.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Into its skull. Into the skull. Skull. Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's gonna be okay with it.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It's all right. Sometimes, you know, again, tables would float, light bulbs would float. There was one trick that people just loved for some reason where two pans would float in the air and one had water in it. And then it would pour the water into another floating pan.

[Sarah Marshall]

I, I would honestly lose my mind if I saw that happening.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So I guess that trick's for you.

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, because it's like, it's. You feel like it's tricky to balance something that well. Like even if you're a ghost, you'd be like, oh, oh, oh, oh, I'm losing my balance.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

And I won't be really revealing these tricks, how they work, because I don't know. And that's more fun.

[Sarah Marshall]

And also, there's a magician's code.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Exactly, exactly. I'm not here to break it. I'm not here to be hunted down by roving bands of magicians. Another gag that I liked that also kind of reminded me of our live show was that they would ask for two audience volunteers, a man and a woman. And the man would be tied with his wrists to two posts that were tightened by the woman. And then there would be kind of a screen put in front of him and he would be illuminated from behind. And it was kind of like an Austin Powers thing. You remember this scene, right?

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, the. Like the shadow puppet. Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes. Wow.

[Sarah Marshall]

I had not thought of that in such a long time. I loved those movies when they came out.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Oh, yeah, they're. I'm. I haven't watched them in a while, but I have a feeling I would still enjoy them very much. But, yes, the Austin Powers thing is, like, you can't really see them in their shadows. Look like they're doing all these sexual things, but they're really not. And it's very funny.

[Sarah Marshall]

Which, again, Rocky Horror Picture Show.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. I mean, it's a total direct rip off of Rocky Horror, which is great.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's amazing.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So anyway, this man would be, you know, his. His shadow would be illuminated on this blind that had been pulled down. And suddenly you'd see his jacket and vest and shirt fly off his body and float around behind the screen. But the man appeared not to move, which I think is just kind of sexy and fun.

[Sarah Marshall]

I mean, the thing is, there's just. And I. I think of this whenever people bring out conspiracy theories where they're like, what possible explanation could there be except this specific thing I'm afraid of, and it's my trans child, right? Where with so many things, including magic or just like, I don't know, when you're eating something and you're like, what's in this?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

This.

[Sarah Marshall]

How is this prepared? I can't imagine. And it's like, yeah, because a lot of what we're able to do and how we perceive the world comes down to the knowledge base and the skills base that we have. And so, yes, I, as a layperson, could not begin to imagine how that could happen. And so part of my brain is like, even if I don't believe in ghosts, and I know I'm here for thrills, kills and spills, like, this is a little bit eerie, you know, and if I'm a magician, then, like, I know I can think of probably. Probably a couple different ways off the top of my head that that's doable. But until you have that experience level, like, if you're forced to fill in the blank. With something from your general knowledge base, you might just come up with nothing.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

No, I think that's. That's exactly right. It's very good point.

[Sarah Marshall]

Thanks.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So another gag I thought you would really like involved a floating skull.

[Sarah Marshall]

I love a floating skull.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Of course. What could be better? So the ghost master would stand in of front, front of the stage's black curtain, and suddenly a skull would float from behind the curtain. Right. He's standing kind of in front of the stage, which I learned is called the skirt of the stage. The part in front of the curtain, which was great. So a skull would kind of float out from between the two curtains right up to where he was standing. And then when he turned to see the skull, it would, like, fly back between the curtains. Like, it was kind of shy, you know.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, yeah, because they're not used to not having hair. They feel self conscious.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Hey, you know, or a body, I guess.

[Sarah Marshall]

Or. Yeah, or skin.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Or skin. Or eyes. And this would happen, like, a few times. This gag would happen.

[Sarah Marshall]

That's really cute.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It's very cute. And then eventually it would stop and hover in the middle of the stage until the showman kind of opened his hand out, and then it would shoot out really fast toward the other side of the stage, which I just think is a lovely, lovely little image. Image, yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

I love that. And again, it's like, especially in an atmosphere where, like, you control the lighting, you know, you have a certain amount of stage craft, then, like, I'm sure there were a few different ways to do this and make it very convincing from an audience perspective. But also it's like, absolutely. As an audience member, like, unless you're a total dick, you're not trying that hard to poke holes in it. You know, you just want to have a good time.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Well, exactly. And like, when people were selected from the audience, you know, a lot of times they were planning, granted, stooges, but a lot of times they were people from the audience. And if you've ever been to a fair state fair and watched the hypnotist, at least that's a thing at the Washington State Fair, where a hypnotist kind of brings people on stage and hypnotizes them and everybody kind of does what he says.

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, also, you're. If you're being observed by so many other people.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, that's kind of what it is. It's like this, right. Need to. To please the audience. But at the same time, like, the ghost master might be like, hey, like, do this when I Say just kind of whisper to them. And they were thrilled to do it. You know, I mean, people want to perform, right?

[Sarah Marshall]

Because you get to be a part of it.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. So it was like a very audience participation based show as well, which I think is part of its appeal is like the, like, ooh, will I be chosen?

[Sarah Marshall]

Right. And then you see in a horror movie, and now you get to sort of like, have a little taste of not the real thing, but a more embodied version of it, maybe.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, exactly. So. So now we're gonna get into the very most important part of the ghost show, the kind of finale that all of this would lead up to. And it is called the blackout.

[Sarah Marshall]

Ooh. Oh, boy.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So when the blackout came, it would only last a handful of minutes, but every light in the theater would be cut.

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay, I thought you were gonna say seconds.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

No, it's a handful of minutes.

[Sarah Marshall]

That's amazing. And also probably impossible today from a liability perspective. So sadly.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

O, you're telling me. Yep, very, very true. But yes, every light would be cut, and it would plunge the theater into, like, an absolute and total darkness. And that was really important. Like, they would ask that all the exit signs that every source of light be covered to get it as pitch black as humanly possible.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, it's like the ending of Wait until Dark. Yep.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

And so as soon as that darkness fell in the theater, instantly it would be like, just started, like, popping the off. All right.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, my God. Yeah, I want to go. I would be too scared to walk home. That's very scary.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It is, it is. So as soon as the lights were cut, you know, all these ghost masters and their assistants, they created, like atmospheric soundscapes using pre recorded tapes, music boxes that they played into microphones. There was like the classic thunder sounds and blood curdling screams and wolves howling and people moaning and evil laughter. All things you would expect from your typical kind of Halloween soundtrack.

[Sarah Marshall]

Again, we've talked in these shows about House on Haunted Hill, the William Castle movie, because Castle was kind of known as master of the gimmick. And I'm sure you've thought about this too. That as you're talking, I'm like, oh, yeah, he definitely did great stuff. He did the Tingler, and he, I'm sure, innovated it. But the idea of a theater, Gavin, would have been so familiar at this point. And one of my favorite horror movie things, like, of any movie, is that House on Haunted Hill opens with a few seconds of pure darkness and just the sounds of shrieks and cackling and stuff. And it would be so unnerving in a theater. And now I see it. And again, this doesn't mean that he's a hack. It means that he was adapting something and preserving it so that people like me could see it. Where there would have been such a tradition of sitting in a dark theater, hearing screaming and cackling and stuff.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. And, I mean, William Castle was absolutely inspired by these ghostes. I mean, there's no question about that.

[Sarah Marshall]

Good job, William Castle.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. Keeping it alive. We need a new William Castle, and it is us. We are the people who will take up the mantle. I'm sure there are people out there.

[Sarah Marshall]

Doing this, so there are lots of little William Castles. And I'm so happy that everyone is out there making skeletons. Zoom right around.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. Please let us know if you do that, because I'd love to. To hear about it. Okay, so everything's black. Creepy sounds are playing. Prior to this blackout, there would have been a kind of, like, suggestive speech about all the things that might happen in the dark. Right. So it would be like, oh, yeah, you'll. You will see ghosts. You'll feel their hands, you know, so he might say something like, don't turn around if you feel cold, clammy hands clutching you or something crawling up your leg. Worth worms and spiders will fall from the ceiling or get loose on the ground. So then as soon as the lights.

[Sarah Marshall]

Went out, they have somebody, like, throwing popcorn at the audience. Tell me.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes, that's exactly right.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, really? So literally, popcorn.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Literally, they would toss out popcorn kernels more. They toss out rice. So, you know, you'd be primed to kind of experience what you're feeling as the horrors described to you.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Sometimes they throw out just wet scratch strings that felt like worms. They'd shoot water guns out into the audience.

[Sarah Marshall]

There's a light over at the Frankenstein place.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

And this is exactly. I mean, it has to have been where the rock and horror stuff came from.

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, I guess that, like, I think about this a lot. Like, you and I exist in 2025. Right. But, like, we were born in the 80s. We were raised by people from different decades. You know, I was raised by. By boomers, and my dad was actually a bit older. You were raised by different people with sort of different experiences of history. And so the moment you're living in, you're also bringing all the times you've lived in, and to a somewhat lesser extent, the times that the people who, you know and who raised you have lived in. And so, you know, the Rocky Horror Picture show coming out in 1975. It feels like it would have been, like, within very easy reach of human memory to think of a time when people did that at that kind of movie.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Absolutely, absolutely.

[Sarah Marshall]

Because as if you don't know. And Kelsey, you can speak more to this. The Rocky Horror Picture show is what it is. Not just because it was a movie, but because it became this cabaret theater experience that has persisted now for 50 years.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. This is actually the 50th anniversary of Rocky Horror. So let's say a hearty happy birthday to. What is my favorite film?

[Sarah Marshall]

Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. And then there's meatloaf under the table.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yep, exactly. That's perfect. So in addition to all that, sometimes they throw cook noodles into the audience, like, from the balconies, which I really love.

[Sarah Marshall]

Just like when you're having, like, a neighborhood party for kids and you have them, like, stick their fingers in peeled grapes and stuff.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes. And the kind of creation of the modern haunted house as we know it is sort of happening concurrently. And I think these two things are feeding each other.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right. And you've done shows on that that.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, we did one. We did a Halloween episode on your show last year that was kind of a history of Halloween. And then we have a episode called Haunted Attractions that really kind of takes us all through the history of. Of the Halloween haunted house. And it's a lot of fun. So another thing that they would do is. I love this. They would take two long poles and hold them kind of at opposite ends of the stage. There'd be a rope tied between them, and then they drape wet mop strings all across the pole, and then they pull them across the audience's faces.

[Sarah Marshall]

I would lose it.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I know. Other times they use silk thread, and they had told the audience it was spider webs on their faces. That's where I freak out.

[Sarah Marshall]

I would scream, you know this. You've gone through a haunted house with me. I would scream so much.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I know. And it would be wonderful. And everyone was screaming. In fact, it's like as soon as the lights went out, it was a perfect opportunity for all of the kind of mystery, mischievous people in the audience to start, like, tapping on their friend's shoulders or grabbing their ankles. And the ghost masters loved this.

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, and, I mean, I just feel like if you have not gone and screamed in, like, a haunted house or in something like this or just, like, had the opportunity to, like, be screaming with a group of people who are also screaming, you really should I think that people need screaming more than many of us realize today.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I'm mean, the haunted house for me is truly, like, the most cathartic part of my year is my haunted house marathon in the fall. So, okay, so then all of that's kind of happening. But what also happens pretty early on in those few minutes is suddenly there would be a massive, like, flashbulb flash that would go off from the stage, which not only, like, was frightening. Right. Because it's shocking.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

But it would also kind of blind the audience momentarily.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

And that would give a chance for kind of things to go into place. And the performers were told to kind of close their eyes so they wouldn't have that effect, which is cool. But the reason. The main reason for this was that they had used, like, luminous paint on a bunch of different things, like objects, decorations, actors.

[Sarah Marshall]

An old seance favorite favorite.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yep. And the flash from these flash bulbs would charge the paint instantaneously. Right? Yes. It was usually phosphorus paint, but sometimes it was radium paint. So that's another episode, I'm sure.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. Boy, we sure were putting radium in a lot of stuff for a while. Shouldn't have done that.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Glowing.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's almost like we need federal agencies that determine the safety and efficacy of the things before we start putting them in our bodies. But, you know, whatever.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Sounds gay, Sarah.

[Sarah Marshall]

And also. Yeah, I mean, why do that when you can just, you know, invent a fake cause of autism? Because your self imposed deadline ran out and because rather than creating a society that helps support the needs of people with autism, we're gonna just treat them like monsters.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yep. That's. That's what we're doing every.

[Sarah Marshall]

And you know what? Look, if you want to see a monster, go to a ghost show, don't do it at your job. That's all I'm going to say. More ghost shows for this country, please, God.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Unless your job is our job. Or a ghost master job. Okay, so this luminous paint would be put on balloons. Like, it would make faces on balloons that would then kind of drop from the balconies or get kind of tossed out into the ocean audience. It'd be sprayed on cheesecloth ghosts that were mounted on poles and, like, zooming around over the audience.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, Kelsey, we love a cheesecloth ghost. I won't say more, but, boy, do.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

We find out more about that at our live show. The performers would kind of go out into the audience as ghosts. Glowing.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

But I think my favorite way that the paint was used is this way. And I'm Going to read a quote from a man recalling his time as a boy at one of these ghost shows. I'm gonna read it like a little like a boy, though, because it's funny.

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay, yeah, maybe with a little newsies accent. If you have one in your pocket you've been wanting to use.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

We'll see. One Halloween, when I was a boy, the largest theater in town staged a midnight show advertising that ghosts would appear in the audience sitting right next to next to you. That fascinated me. The theater marquee also promised a horror movie in a stage show featuring a spooky musician. I could understand that kind of stuff, but how could a ghost suddenly appear in the seat next to mine? I found out the only place a kid might get a penny candy bar was in a downtown pool room. And that's where magic struck. A stranger asked us if we'd like to see the Halloween show at the Majestic. He said we'd only have to do a little work to earn a mission.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, boy, I love it.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

As instructed, we appeared at the theater 30 minutes early. Backstage, something greasy was wiped on our hands and faces and we were ordered to sit in the auditorium. Widely separated, we received no explanation of what we were supposed to be doing. So we were bewildered. But it didn't matter.

[Sarah Marshall]

That is a very late call time.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

But it didn't matter because we were also in free. You guessed it, the green greasy stuff was phosphorus. After the crowd came in and the lights went on, I glowed in the dark. I wasn't sitting next to a ghost. I was a ghost. I didn't catch on until a woman leaned into my face and said, my God, kid, what happened to you? Then I saw my friends shining in other rows and I realized I was in show business.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh my God, I love it.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I waved my ghostly hands in the air and said boo. And laughed menacingly. People were so frightened, they giggled. It was marvelous.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh my God.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Isn't that just absolutely lovely?

[Sarah Marshall]

Yes, it's perfect. And like. Ah. I. Yes. I love every. I love everything about that story.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Would you. How would this go if. If they asked you in a pool room when you were looking for a candy bar? What would you have done at this.

[Sarah Marshall]

Moment or when I was like 11?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Let's go with when you were 11.

[Sarah Marshall]

11. Oh, boy. I would have probably been in a pool room with my dad, probably. Because he would be having a beer.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Sure.

[Sarah Marshall]

And I would be like, no, I'm a big scaredy cat at this time in my life.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

That's okay.

[Sarah Marshall]

Ask someone else. But today I would be very jazzed. Yes. Also, I do think that, like, just out of, like, general social anxiety and, like, burnout, like, I do. I always complain about this. I don't leave the house enough. I don't leave the house enough at night. Like, I do find it difficult to just, like, show up for the thing and see what happens. And I feel like this is good validation of, like, just. Just go ahead and do it. Because sometimes you're. You want to see a ghost, and you are the ghost, and who could see that coming?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It's magical.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I mean, if it would have been me, I think we know what would have happened.

[Sarah Marshall]

I would have been like, yes, you would have. You would have been the most legendary ghost that they ever had. And they would have talked about you for years and been like, where is that kid? I wonder what they're up to now.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I mean, back then, you could just get a job as a child. They'd be like, come on tour with us, kid. Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, you would have joined the ghost show circus.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So another thing they use were called spook paddles. And they were also, you know, for.

[Sarah Marshall]

When the ghosts need a good spanking.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, exactly.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

What I should say, actually, before that, a fun fact is that they really stopped doing the kid luminosity trick because people kept getting punched in the face because they were so scared, like, the kids did. The kids were getting assaulted.

[Sarah Marshall]

And also, you have to assume that, like, at some point in time, there's a good chance that they used radium for that as well. And, you know, we know now that you're not supposed to do that.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yep. And we can hope that maybe just a little radium that night didn't hurt them.

[Sarah Marshall]

That would be nice.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

That would be nice.

[Sarah Marshall]

But I mean. I mean, to speak to. Just like, America is a country founded on the almost religious belief that if we love companies, they will love us back. The Radium Girls, famously. I mean, there's a wonderful book about this. It's called the Radium Girls. But they died so painfully and became ill so quickly because they were painting things like clock faces that used radium in order to glow in the dark. And they were told to lick the points of their paintbrushes to make them pointier. And it's like. Like, I. You just feel like things wouldn't have been so bad if they'd spent a few pennies on, like, just a tool that they could. Just a. A glass of water, maybe. Why did they have to lick them? You Know, so the amount of radium that people were putting inside their bodies and I think also taking as a health tonic. God, again, there's a reason why. And the blob starts like this. There's a lot of monster movies about this theme. I think for a good reason. Like, there's a reason the American people can't be trusted to just start putting glowing things inside of our mouths as soon as we see them. I know we want to, but we really shouldn't. We need to be protected from ourselves.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It's. It's very, very reasonable. Yeah. So there were lots of other gimmicks that happened that would make it look like ghost bats, spiders, eyeballs were running around, you know, in the theater.

[Sarah Marshall]

And also, like, the power of suggestion is never stronger than when it's dark work, I think.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Oh, absolutely.

[Sarah Marshall]

You know, the audience would do so much of it for you, which is just good economics.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Absolutely, absolutely. So that is how a typical blackout would go in the beginning. Okay. By the 1940s, as these, you know, more seance oriented shows turned more into horror oriented shows, there would be sometimes a monster that would be loosed in the theater. And we'll get into that as well.

[Dr. Schlock (Chelsea Weber Smith)]

Yes.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Okay.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, Rocky.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So as the shows were evolving, teenagers really became the main audience. And this is, you know, because we know what kind of the. The changes brought by World War II, there was just a little bit more focus on the teenager.

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, and teenagers have access to the automobile, which think opens up a lot and a lot for them. Acting as consumers.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes, they really become consumers in this time. And many had never seen a stage show. Right. They had been going to the movies as kids, but the stage had really started to die out. Vaudeville was dying out tragically.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So teenagers, of course, famously have kind of a short attention span and they want shit to go hard. Right. So they needed more transgressive content than a ghostly seance. They needed horror. And if they didn't get enough horror, they were known to trash the theater in anger. Kind of like our recent incident with the Minecraft movies.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. Although that wasn't about not enough horror. Right. That was just like a meme or something.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It was just a meme, basically.

[Sarah Marshall]

If you must trash a theater, at least do it because you're disappointed you. You didn't get enough horror. Like, even then I don't endorse it, but I can understand it.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes, exactly. More horror.

[Sarah Marshall]

You know, what movie I would attract to theater after was. I don't care that I'm spoiling this that French movie high tension, from 20 years ago, where you think that this, like, cute lesbian is, like, chasing down a trucker who's abducted her friend and killed her whole family, and then it turns out that she is the trucker because lesbians are murderers. It was incredible. And you're like, how is she chasing the guy in the truck who'd abducted her friend, like, who was driving the other car?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, it's a good point.

[Sarah Marshall]

There are five people out there right now who were also personally victimized by High Tension and are just as mad as I am to this day.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Well, one time. Well, when I was a kid, I would have trashed the theater, but this was a home video incident. And it was that I got a home video version of A Little Princess. And for whatever reason, it was the one that had the locket. That was. Yes, the locket.

[Sarah Marshall]

I remember that it came with a locket, like, under the plastic of the VHS clamshell case.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

You guys, it was awesome. Yeah. And there was something wrong with my vhs. So it stopped right before you find out if they take the other girl who lived in the attic, you know the one, she becomes friends with that, like, when she gets adopted. Oh, yeah, yeah. So, like, she gets adopted, but I didn't know that because my VHS cut off. And I thought that was the end of the movie. And I was like, take her. Take her with you and Becky.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

And I didn't find out until I was, like, in my 20s that that wasn't the end of the movie.

[Sarah Marshall]

This is like, my mom when I was a child, in order to try and get me to read Jane Eyre because she really believed I was going to read Read Jane Eyre when I was, like, nine. And, like, trust me, that was not gonna happen. Sure. She withheld the real ending of Jane Eyre from me until I was in college. I would be like, what's Jane Eyre about? She's like, well, she runs away when she finds out Rochester has a secret wife. And then she meets Sinjin and, you know, and then they get married, and it's a marriage of companionship rather than love, and she gets an inheritance. And I was like, well, that sounds awful. I'm not reading that. And then we watched, like, a Masterpiece Theater of Jane eyre in, like, 2007, where it got to the real ending, which, if you don't know what it is, I'll keep my mom's agenda going and not tell you. And I was like, mom, I would have read it if I knew that.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

See, they underestimate us. We Want. They don't know what we want. They fuck us up. Our mom and dad.

[Sarah Marshall]

My mom also miscalculated, speaking of ghosts, because she decided to introduce me to the book by, like, putting me in my bath when I. When I could not have been older than 7. And my parents remodeled in the 80s so they had this big Jacuzzi tub. And I was only allowed to be in, I don't know, 18 inches of water so I didn't drown. And so I remember just being mostly cold and unimmersed and listening to Dame Wendy Hiller read the opening of Jane Eyre, which is about Jane being locked in a room where somebody died and having a ghost bother her. And I was just like, I feel like I'm being visited by a ghost right now. Also, my mom, like, a lot of the time it paid off. Like, she just gave me Leonard Cohen's first album when I turned 14, as if that was a thing that everyone did when their daughter turned 14. And that worked out great. The Jane Eyre thing was just too early. It's okay, Mom. I love it now.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

We love you, Mom. Okay, so now that we're in the horror shows, I'm gonna kind of set some of the different scenes that you might see at these ghost shows. Okay. And I guess it's important to say that these tricks, because they're magic tricks, basically, would be kind of repurposed in different ways by the different ghost masters that were out there. Right. You can imagine these tricks done with just different circumstances and characters. So in one, a scantily clad woman. There were lots of scantily clad women in this era.

[Sarah Marshall]

You know, I don't think the word scantily is used for any other context except for the cladness of a woman.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It's very true. It's very true. Very true. So she would be chased around by a man in a gorilla suit, and then she would kind of faint, and then the gorilla would grab her and drag her to the table and lay her on the table. And then the gorilla would start ripping off her arms and legs and throwing them into the audience.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, no. Well, I thought you were gonna say clothes, so, you know.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

No, no, I like that.

[Sarah Marshall]

I mean, I. Okay. I. I guess I'll choose dismiss memberment over sexual violence. Although I didn't expect to have to make that choice today, you know?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I know, I know. Like I said, we're not getting into. We're not getting too deep into the. Into the political issues here.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yep. But the point is people liked it, so we. We can Learn from that, I suppose. Yeah, that. I mean, that is an impressive trick though, right? Just from a misdirection perspective.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It is. And then like she'd be covered in a sheet and then blood would soak through the sheet. And then eventually the showman would shoot the gorilla with a pistol and it would die on stage.

[Sarah Marshall]

God. It's kind of like a very low. But it's like your cousin does a sweded version of King Kong.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Absolutely.

[Sarah Marshall]

I also like how I'm like, how barbaric. Today we merely pretend to saw women in half.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Well, there'll be a little of that soon. Okay, so in one problematic skit called Jungle Voodoo, a young woman would appear in a leopard skin costume and do a sexy dance to the beat of drums off stage, which is totally fine and not. Not awful at all. And then as she danced, a large net would be lowered onto her.

[Sarah Marshall]

No.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

And then two performers dressed as safari hunters grabbed her while she was in the net and struggling and like, oh, let me go. And then the net would be hoisted up and an inch incantation would be said by the ghost masters. A flash of lightning would strike and then the net would fall and the young woman would have disappeared. And inside were the bones of a skeleton.

[Sarah Marshall]

Wow. Yeah, wow.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I know.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's so interesting that so much of this is like, what if we could use magic to kill women?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It's definitely a. A theme that is occurring in the ghost show.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, it is also like, I mean, speaking of horror, like showing the things we can't speak out loud. It's just. I welcome it for so many reasons and partly as a fossil record of the themes that we didn't have the courage to admit to in a more conscious way. And how so many of the monster movies of their 50s are like, you know, starting with King Kong, if not earlier, are like, what about when the monster picks up a hot woman and carries her away? And it's like, what are. What are. What's that? What are we saying with that?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Interesting. Yeah, I mean, they're. Is again, there are so many things to pick apart here, and it's all deserving of analysis. Perhaps another time.

[Sarah Marshall]

Although, to quote the kid in the Cider House rules, King Kong, much like Ronald Reagan, just wants his mother, perhaps. Hey, you know, still stomped on a lot of people to get to her, though.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

That's very true. So another skit would involve a man performing as a hunchback. There were many hunchback performers because of Frankenstein.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right, Right. Well, and I feel like the hunchback of Notre Dame is actually like, there was, I think, a Lon Chaney movie of that that had been very popular. So I feel like that would even be in the Zeitgeist. And of course, people do love Richard iii. Okay.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Anyway, so. Okay. Another one. Yeah. Would be this hunchback would find again, usually a female volunteer from the audience. I know. And then would hypnotize her, put her on this wooden table. And I'm guessing that this was usually a stooge, right? A stoogette, maybe we say.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, stine.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes. And she'd be laid out on that wooden table and they'd bring out a full sized buzz saw. Okay. And then they would. They would cut her head off with the buzz saw. The ghost master, in this case, Raymond was his name, would, you know, grab her severed head and there would just be blood pouring off the table. He grab her head, run into the audience with the head raised over his head. And then he would jump on the theater seats, kind of like Roberto Benini did that Oscar. And then he'd like on the armrests, he'd run across everyone, like, you know, jumping over everybody's legs. He'd run into the lobby, up in the balcony, and he would raise the head above his, you know, he'd raise the bloody head up and then walk along the edge of the balcony and then jump down from the main floor and then he'd run back on stage and announce, and now, ladies and gentlemen, someone is about to die. It could be you. And then the blackout sequence would happen right then.

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay. I mean, that is a strong opening. I do just to do a little bit on themes.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Uhhuh.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's interesting that we have to align women murdering with disabled people.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

That's very true. It's very right.

[Sarah Marshall]

And like, I'm not trying to cancel ghost shows, but like, again, I guess to point like the monster movie. And I mean, even King Kong, if you see it as. And I hate to hand one to Tarantino, but he believes King Kong is an allegory for slavery. And I don't think he's wrong about that. I think there's like a lot of interesting racialized subtexts, especially if you watch the whole movie. And so this idea that monsters in these scenarios, both on stage and in movies at the time, are representing what sort of white male patriarchal America is trying to disown is like, not me. Not that that's what wants to victimize women. I simply marry them to death.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, Yep, yep, yep. No, that's very Very true. And I do like your point of, like, this being almost some kind of ID that's acting out on stage. Right.

[Sarah Marshall]

I spent a lot of money on that English degree. I gotta use it somehow. So.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, I mean, there were many other versions of the similar thing. Like where King Kong.

[Sarah Marshall]

They had kind of a format.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, they had a form format. And it was, you know, usually some kind of violent, bloody thing. Sometimes, you know, a woman might be pulled from the audience or something and thrown off the balcony using a dummy and misdirection and, you know, pretty good.

[Sarah Marshall]

I mean, not that what you give the public is what they always want or what everybody wants. God knows they tell you that. But I feel like one of my short, I think, maybe, maybe analyses of why we see so much violence against women in media is. And especially sexualized violence is, you know, not all men, not all women. But if we're gonna generalize for a second, men like it because they like it.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Sure.

[Sarah Marshall]

And women like it because it's thought provoking to see an allegory of the thing that you're going through anyway.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

That's very true.

[Sarah Marshall]

And sometimes it even makes you realize how bad life is.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So here's a. An interesting one. All right. This seems kind of unique, but there were definitely, you know, in addition to this violence, there was definitely, like, a sexual element to some of these shows. There was a lot of, you know, hypnotizing of women. There was a lot of, again, those kind of scantily clad outfits and dances and kind of even. Even burlesque once in a while. But here's kind of a fun one. So in one kind of climactic scene that would happen before the blackout, there would be two women on St. And these were assistants. And one would be playing a corpse that was lying on a satin couch. And then there would be another woman who was kind of praying beside her. Then suddenly the lighting would change and the one playing the corpse, the woman would sit up and you would see from the new angle that half of her was a hot blonde and half of her was Satan, which is a pretty cool thing, like, right down the middle.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right? Very cool. Although, who's to say Satan isn't a hot blonde, frankly?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I mean, quite frankly. And then she stood up and did kind of like this sexy dance that made it look like she was being seduced by the satanic half of her body while the other woman was kind of trying to pull her and save her into her other body. And then the Satan half.

[Sarah Marshall]

Women will do anything to have an excuse to grab our own boobs. Honestly, that's 100.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

True. And have a little less out time. Because then the Satan half tore off the woman's black dress, revealing, you know, again, a scantily clad body. And then the blackout came and everything went apeshit, as it always did.

[Sarah Marshall]

Beautiful.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, it's quite a.

[Sarah Marshall]

That's stripping in a way that can even please very scary Christians because it's not you taking your clothes off. It's about the danger of Satan.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It's educational and I'm wondering if that's part of why they did it that way. I don't know.

[Sarah Marshall]

I think so. Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Let's, let's, let's go with it.

[Sarah Marshall]

It sounds like it's a pretty fun premise.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It's a fun premise. So you'll remember, you know, that we've had some Universal monster movies involved in these shows and they really did start just explicitly using Dracula and Frankenstein especially.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

And there would be kind of a situation maybe where Frankenstein's creation would be being a celebration, assembled on stage underneath a sheet. They'd be bringing, you know, different limbs and the head and all the made.

[Sarah Marshall]

Out of parts of all the women they tore apart earlier.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, exactly. We're making a really cute Frankenstein, a non binary Frankenstein. And then there'd be like sparks, like very much that Rocky Horror scene where they're making Rocky with kind of goofy gadgets and practical effects. And then suddenly they, the creature would sit up and throw off the sheet and there he was. Frankenstein's creation, not Frankenstein. Okay. Frankenstein's monster. And then he would go out into the audience and choose a teenage boy. So at least we've got a boy on stage that will be brutalized. So they would then cover his head with a bag and the ghost master would just chop his head right off. Blood would be pouring on the table.

[Sarah Marshall]

What a head.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Cut.

[Sarah Marshall]

Cutting off. I'm surprised. A lot of it. I guess they really felt confident about that trick.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

They really liked that trick because there, because there'd be blood everywhere and then they'd get to. What else but grab the head and run out into the audience and kind of kick off the black.

[Sarah Marshall]

That's what you do with the head. Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

And you kick off that the most important part of the show. So there were always kind of these lead ins to that moment. Right. That were the most extreme part, I.

[Sarah Marshall]

Want to say, like full head football, you know.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes, yes. And eventually Dr. Silghini, as we mentioned before, he would get a cease and desist letter from Universal Studios, because they were like, you can't do this.

[Sarah Marshall]

Which I, I, I was wondering about the legality of this, because it's like you have a character, I assume it's the likeness. Right. Because Frankenstein's monster goes back to Mary Shelley and that book came out what end of the 18th century, started the 19th century. But then the sort of, like, Boris Karloff version, I guess, would be the thing that Universal owns.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

And then I wonder about, like, what, I mean, what are the legal ramifications of, like, putting Frankenstein's monster on stuff to this day? Because he ends up on everything. Like, are we still paying Universal for that?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It's a good question.

[Sarah Marshall]

If you're in Frankenstein Law, let us know.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. Or in, I guess, what is it when they, it's like, like a common.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. The public domain. And that happens for literature after 95.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Years after publication, but it never happens for movies.

[Sarah Marshall]

I don't know how it works for movies. I know that there are some movies that they accidentally left the copyright logo out of, like, for example, Charade. They just, like, forgot to put it in. And so there's many terrible transfers of Charade. But yeah, I don't know, it's. We gotta do an episode later on Frankenstein Law. Let's put that on the shelf, too.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Okay, great. Pop, pop it in.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's a normal BR on the shelf there.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So basically, Universal and Dr. Silkini and kind of from there, the ghost shows in general reached an agreement where they would promote the new films from Universal and pay a small fee.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right. You cut off my head, I cut off yours.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, I mean, you know, it really, everyone won at that point. And even an extension of that, like, as some of these Universal monster movie stars started to no longer be getting work in horror, they would go on tour with these ghost shows as special guests. So, like, Bella Lugosi went, Glenn Strange went. And, you know, it was just a great, Another kind of just celebrity gimmick.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's an early Comic Con kind of a thing.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, exactly. And actually this is a total aside and we're not going to get into it, but Jimmy Stewart got his start as an assistant for midnight ghost shows.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, he did.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right. Well, well, well, Mr. Silkini, I feel right about cutting that pretty young girl's head off.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Maybe he didn't do the cutting. I can't say. I don't know. I think he was actually a little on the earlier side.

[Sarah Marshall]

He was in charge of mixing the phosphorus or something.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I think he was more on the seance era. But I. I can't tell you.

[Sarah Marshall]

I'm not sure. Write me a play about that.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I know, right? So that's going to draw to a close a little bit of what the Ghost show was like. Because at this point, point, the market's getting saturated. Right. More and more people are trying to do them and a lot of them are just cheap imitators. It's not what it was before. People are losing interest. The audiences are becoming rowdier. They're like vandalizing everything and they're throwing. On stage, throwing bottles and like nails, and they even are sometimes breaking screens. One time, a teenager literally blew up his movie seat with a homemade bomb and the shrapnel from it hit a girl in the leg and luckily she wasn't too injured, but it did, like, draw blood.

[Sarah Marshall]

Jesus. Yeah, yeah, that's pretty terrifying, you know.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Because we're getting like into. Yeah, we're getting into the late 50s, you know, into the 60s, and, and teenagers. It's just a. It's a new breed.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Television's here also.

[Sarah Marshall]

Guess what? There's a deer outside my window right now.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Oh, that's nice. Nice. It's a really different thing to what we're talking about.

[Sarah Marshall]

I know, we'll see. It's fall.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It's fall.

[Sarah Marshall]

So it's interesting that teenagers ultimately become too destructive for the Ghost Show. And not to point all the blame at teenagers, I'm sure some adults were just getting rowdy and being like, it was the teens. But yeah, I'm sure, you know, the increasingly, I wonder too about just like media sort of pushing these kind of old time theatrics into corniness and maybe, maybe giving them less power to terrify.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

That's definitely true. And then, you know, we also have people moving from the cities to the suburbs after World War II. We have television coming in the 1950s. So people want to watch movies at home. They don't need to go out to the theater. All that rigamarole. You know, we start to see like Alfred Hitchcock Presents on cbs. We start to see screen gems create shock theater using all the universal monster movie classics. We see even, like former ghost masters becoming late night horror movie hosts like Dr. Evil, which is funny. He was. He became a host. And then, you know, people like Vampira, all these local horror movie hosts were coming out and it just kind of adapted, right. It again, kind of transformed itself. It was still campy, it was still comedic, it was still drag. But it was happening on tv, right?

[Sarah Marshall]

Or yeah, a little bit later. But, you know, in the 60s, we have Rod Serling in the Twilight Zone. And that's like a very scary story on contemporary themes. Yeah. Delivered conveniently to your very own living room.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

There you go. There you go. And you know, there was another thing that you mentioned that was one of the most massive changes in teenage culture of all time, and that is the car.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So at this time, because teenagers are driving around in cars but still want entertainment, we get the drive in movie.

[Sarah Marshall]

There you go. So I. And I guess there's like less, I would imagine, for many reasons, but partly because you can't control lighting. There's less capacity for that kind of theatrics there and for the kind of vaudevillian ness.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Exactly. They would perform mostly on like makeshift stages in front of the big movie screens or there. They would like drive a flatbed truck in and park it in front or they just stand on top of the concession stand, which is pretty sick.

[Sarah Marshall]

That's pretty good. Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. And really they just kept doing the same kind of violent tricks that were just less complicated. It would be like, hey, kid, come on stage. I'm gonna chop your head off and replace it with a dummy head.

[Sarah Marshall]

But the thing of being in the picture screaming together, it seems like got lost.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

That's gone.

[Sarah Marshall]

And also everyone's in their own individual vehicle, you know? Right. It's so interesting because used to being. To just like only being able to see drive ins through extreme nostalgia. It's interesting to think of them as the newfangled thing that's running out. The old fashioned ghost show.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. I mean, they were called Passion Pits. Right. That was the nickname for them.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, wow. Right. People had other stuff to do.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. And like, you know, people wanted to get scared so that they could cuddle up. Right. They wanted to kind of have this excuse to.

[Sarah Marshall]

It was long ago and it was far away. So much better. Better than it is today. Speaking of meatloaf.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes. Speaking of our patron saint. I don't know. Did he turn out to be a bad man? I don't know. Can't remember. Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

But. But you know, when Eddie didn't love his teddy, they said he was an awful kid, but when he threatened your life with a switchblade knife.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

What a guy.

[Sarah Marshall]

What a guy. Makes you cry.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. So, yeah, there would just be like a lot of guillotine tricks where kids, heads were cut off, replaced with dummy heads and blood spurting out. And, you know, people close to the stage would be covered in red liquid and beautiful. You know, they would have Frankenstein show Up. And Frankenstein might, you know, get shot in the eye with a gun, and blood would squirt out, and then he'd bump into a coffin covered in chains, and the chains would fall, and Dracula would pop out, and he'd go into the audience and bring her on stage.

[Sarah Marshall]

That would be fun. But, man, you got fake blood all over the wrong kids convertible. And then his dad sues you.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Seriously. Seriously. You know, but then it would be like. Yeah, like a woman's head would get cut off, and it was just. And the monsters would run around and. And it. It just. People enjoyed it, but it wasn't working. It just. It couldn't. It wasn't gonna last.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, because there are things that, like, arise organically, and it seems like this. It. In the sort of theater setting, and then you try and port it over. You know, it's like so many things that we tried to make happen on a zoom and just were not really zoomable. And, like, you know, you do it while you have to and you do it when you have to, but, yeah, it just feels like not the right environment for the ghost show to thrive in.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes. And so, you know, slowly, we just kind of forgot about the ghost show.

[Sarah Marshall]

Until a little ghost named Chelsea Weber Smith came along to remind us.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I feel like it's worth kind of zooming all the way back to the beginning to talk about some of the publicity stunts that they use to promote these shows. Because I love a good publicity stunt. I love gimmicks, famously. All frills. All gimmicks is me. So one of the things that they would do is they would find a local kid, and they'd ask the kid to dress up as a ghost and protest outside the theater.

[Sarah Marshall]

Perfect.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It would be like, the ghost master is unfair to ghosts. And, you know, so that was that cute. That would get people's attention.

[Sarah Marshall]

That's cute. We should do that for our show. We should steal a lot of these ideas and say that we're keeping history alive.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Absolutely. I. We. There is a lot to discuss here.

[Sarah Marshall]

Wonder how dark we're allowed to make the theater and for how long.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

That's what I'm wondering.

[Sarah Marshall]

If we can throw spaghetti at people at all. Just a little. Not. Not with sauce on it.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I know. I don't know. We want to make sure we treat them with respect. Yeah, yeah. No, not the audience. Audience. Like, we don't need to treat you with respect. I mean, the staff.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yes, yes, of course.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So sometimes the ghost masters would hold press conferences from coffins for photo Ops.

[Sarah Marshall]

You love talking about anyone who gets in a coffin on purpose. I know I am want to hear about every single instance of it from you.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I know they would. Local drugstores, department stores would agree to display coffins and signs in the their show windows.

[Sarah Marshall]

Beautiful.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

There was one New York based showman who created a street parade to promote his ghost show that included a horse drawn hearse. And then he was there behind riding in a limo and he had a walking band playing as well in kind of this parade like setting that sang this song that I don't know the melody but the lyrics went, it ain't no sin to take off your skin and dance around in your bones.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh my God, that's perfect.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Sometimes I don't really know how this worked, but showmen would drive cars around blindfolded and it would attract like thousands of people and they'd be like, come to our ghost show. And they, you know, they used a lot of skeletons and they just put them all over the theater when people were coming in to see other movies. There'd be like artificial graves and fake grass and vases of flowers and these just like what I imagine were just such beautiful tableaus in the, in the lobbies of these theaters.

[Sarah Marshall]

I love it.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

They do this really classic with the ambulances parked outside, they'd have stretchers outside, they'd have, you know, nurses, people dressed as nurses standing outside the theater. And again they'd have hearses parked out front. And you know, anything that was like you might die for real. Yep.

[Sarah Marshall]

Which I think there's just like a sense of fun, especially if you're in kind of an interwar period of like the fun being that you're pretending and like you're in so much more danger than you are. You know, like how the classic Disney rides generally start with the premise that we're going to take a little ride. Oh no, we're all going to die. Like in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, they're like, you are going to die and then you can see a bunch of pirates.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

And. And then the other thing they did, which is what I would have been first in line for, were the giveaway gimmicks. Because I love merch, I'm a merch hound. So they would maybe give you like a die cut skull mast which was you know, basically a cardboard mask with a elastic string attached to it. You remember those maybe from the 90s.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh yeah. As like kind of a cheap promotional thing. I think a lot even then.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Feels like something you'd actually get at McDonald's or something during Halloween. They really popped off on Halloween. McDonald's. McDonald's did.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. Well, McDonald's, like, they used to give up videos. I remember again, they're like, man, why won't people come to our restaurant? It's like, give people stuff. You used to be better. Don't you remember?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

We do Teeny Beanie Babies. Say it with me. So sometimes they would hand out faint pills, and that would be, like, a single candy pill that you were supposed to take if you had a heart attack.

[Sarah Marshall]

That's so freaking cute.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I know.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, my God.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

They would give you faint checks that if you fainted, you would get into another movie free, which, again, just, like.

[Sarah Marshall]

Encourages you to faint and then make the show look scarier.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It's true. It's true. For a measly. What? I don't know what it costs.

[Sarah Marshall]

25 cents in the balcony, 40 cents in the front row. Yeah, exactly.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So you could also get a faint pass that would be like. If you passed out, you would have this card that you put your name and address on so that they could take you to the hospital or take you home after you fainted again. This was before stranger danger.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's just nice to have a business, even if it's a. Even if it's for a stunt. It's nice to have a business promise to take care of you if you faint. Because they don't even do that at clinics now. I don't think.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

They do not.

[Sarah Marshall]

You're like, calling Uber, leave me alone.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

They'd have, like, these optical illusion, like, magic eye cards that they would hand out, you know, that would change. You know, you remember those, right? You, like, turn it one way. It was one thing, you turn another.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Or if you, like, cross your eyes, it'll look different, you know?

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. Like the kind of thing that Riker is always showing you at the start of beyond belief.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes, exactly, exactly. That they would sometimes give out ID bracelets, which is what I most want is a Go Show ID bracelet. I don't know where they are again, if you've got one, please. You know, then it started to be like, rubber shrunken heads, because there was a lot of. I didn't get into it, but there was a lot of shrunken head content. Like, they would. You know, it was very problematic. There was like, a witch doctor theme for sure.

[Sarah Marshall]

Which, again, we can. Yeah, of course. But which we can see little hints of, you know, I mean, also mid century. I think that was Kind of a fascination for it was, yeah, American white people in a way that again, just reveals sort of how wild and racist our culture is. But there's like all, you know, that's the kind of thing where there are these little footnotes left behind. Like, you know, in Beetlejuice in that case.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, you can take a little ride on the old Disney Jungle cruise and really experience that in the modern era. And then, you know, they'd hand out rubber spiders, rubber snakes, just anything that, that a kid would really enjoy having. And I imagine there was a lot of collecting going on with that and that. That's really nice. I really like, I really like that. Feels like you could really have a community around the. Those objects.

[Sarah Marshall]

You're more likely to want to go out if you're, you know, you might get little toys or you might get a novelty item or you might faint. You know, that's like very compelling compared to today where they're like, well, it's bigger than at home. And also you can't eat any of your own food or talk to people.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So and so, you know, as I mentioned, they slowly died out and by the early 70s they virtually did not exist at all any anymore. But then in 1975, a little film called the Rocky Horror Picture show came out and tanked in the American box office. It did not do well because Americans.

[Sarah Marshall]

Do not understand camp historically.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

No, no, we're not great at it did better in the uk but famously, as we know, once theater started showing it at midnight, midnight, then it started to really take off and it was really a direct call back to the ghost shows that had happened before at the late night double feature picture show, you know, kind of the by rko.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, I want to go.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Exactly. And you know, there's just this. All of the campiness was there, all of the violence, but done in like a very tongue in cheek comedic way. Is there, you know, even the shadows as we talked about? Like the shadow trick is in the there, man.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, I love that.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

And a cult following developed around these midnight shows. And just like they did in the ghost shows, people would throw things on stage. You know, we throw rice during the wedding. They would bring newspapers to put over their head when it rained. And people would, you know, shoot water guns out into the audience. And you know, there are so many, so many elements to Rocky Horror that are interactive and that make them movie come alive and become something else entirely.

[Sarah Marshall]

You know, what's a joke I have always loved and remembered is Janet saying, oh, I don't like men with a lot of muscles. Do you remember what the audience callback to that is supposed to be? Or sometimes it is.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

No, what is it?

[Sarah Marshall]

Because, again, this is something that, like, started, I believe, pretty improvisationally. And then it became kind of a script and like a ritual that people did. But when I, at 13 or 14, saw this @ the Clinton Street Theater, big rite of passion passage, I was wearing a. A little homemade magenta costume. When Janet says that, you're supposed to shout. Yeah, just one big one. And boy, did she.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It's so good.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's so good.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It's so good. It definitely took on a raunchier tone for sure once it was. I mean, because it was 1975. It was the 1970s by then. So, you know, all bets were. Were kind of off.

[Sarah Marshall]

There were a lot of sweet transvestites who didn't have any other place to express that. And I feel like we've talked about this elsewhere. We did a. You're a good about Rocky Horror Picture show. And it's like it's nobody's job to love it. And I know that there exists, very reasonably, the argument that Frank N. Furter is a transphobic character. And I won't argue against that. But also I'll say that in 1975 and for a long time, you would just take whatever representation you could get. And I'll also. That this kind of a theatrical experience is also proof of the fact that the media we love isn't necessarily because we want to emulate everything about it, but because the characters and the story are able and the campiness are able to bring us together to find the people that we need in our lives. Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

There's absolutely like anything so much that you can critique fairly. But what I think is the most important is the fact that it created a community. It created a. A common experience. And the ghost shows did that as well.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It was this ability to go to one place with a bunch of strangers and experience what I would consider an ecstatic kind of spiritual experience. At least in my version.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yes.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I also think in addition to Rocky Horror, these must have been really influential on walkthrough haunted houses that were developing around this same time. You know, by the 70s, we really have it happening.

[Sarah Marshall]

Because this would kind of be the thing that you would look to for inspiration.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, right, exactly. And these were just really stationary haunted houses that you could transform into. Into a walkthrough eventually. Yeah. So everything that we know about Halloween, everything that we experience when we go through a haunted House. When we watch midnight movies and experience horror. Like, so much of that is brought to you by our midnight go shows. And I think that learning about this has been so much fun for me and so incredible because, you know, maybe no heads were cut off, and probably that's for the best. But so many aspects of this did happen in our live show, and we did arrive to them just through maybe like the trickle down understanding. Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Through emulating the media that we knew. But I think there's also, to speak of the unified field, There's a very strong internal logic and a sense if you've done a little bit of work on stage, maybe in your life, or been an audience member, because you get a good sense of it, then too, one of the real things happening as a theater is the energy that the people bring into it. And it's your job to kind of sculpt and facilitate that energy. Take a taking the shape that will transform the night into something bigger than the sum of its parts. And that is very much a spirit that you welcome in, and it's a spirit that everybody brings in when they. They come in and sit down.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Absolutely.

[Sarah Marshall]

And also to call back to our corn mazes episode is a haunted house, not a labyrinth.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. I would call it a labyrinth. You know, in. In the best case when people really give a shit about their haunted house and don't just make a terrible excuse for a haunted house. And that's a different. That. That's a different axe I have to grind.

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay. One that will not cut off anyone's head with it. Oh, my God.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

We did the same joke. But yeah, I mean, I think, you know, again, it's like there are many, many things about this that we could really dive into and critique.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. And also many things we can explore more in a joyful way.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I know. And it's like this thing is transforming during the post war years into something more brutal after we experience this really brutal war. You know, there are lots of interesting sociological perspectives, and I encourage everyone to. To do that thinking out there. But this was really my attempt at bringing you some Halloween content.

[Sarah Marshall]

I love it.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

And just getting to experience what one of these shows was like, oh, I.

[Sarah Marshall]

Just want you to turn off the lights and throw spaghetti at me, and then I'll just. That's. That's the Halloween of my dreams.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I can make that happen.

[Sarah Marshall]

Kelsey, thank you so much. Everyone who doesn't listen to American hysteria really should, especially on a long, dark drive, because there are some episodes that have genuinely scared the Pants off of me while educating me at the same time. And your show is so good in so many ways. But one. One thing I want people to know if they don't, is that you are so good at creating that theatrical experience, like inside of a person's brain while they're listening. It's so immersive. And I love. Just like the ghost. Mastering that you're able to do in audio makes me so happy and so scared sometimes.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

That is an incredible compliment. Thank you so much for that, Sarah. We. We really try.

[Sarah Marshall]

I remember listening. I forget which episode. I think it had to do with UFOs, but it was beautifully sound designed as well. And I listened to it while I was at a cabin by Mount Hood and I slept with the lights on afterwards.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I think that was our alien abduction series. Yeah, it's a. It's a freaky one.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, Yeah. I was just like, I am going to just lie here stiff as a board until I pass right out. Every light was on.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Amazing. Well, I would like to also encourage people to, to come over to our show for our Halloween episode on Bloody Mary. Oh, God. Yeah, it's a fun one.

[Sarah Marshall]

Speaking of things that have made me scream.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, if you want some real social commentary, I'll be going hard.

[Sarah Marshall]

Heck yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Sarah, thank you for giving me this platform. As soon as I started researching, I was thinking about making it one of our main fully produced episodes. And I was like, there's no way. I cannot bring this to Sarah Marshall. I just knew that I needed to deliver this bloody head right to your hands. And I'm just very grateful to you.

[Sarah Marshall]

And I love it so much and I will take it home and treasure it and I will feed it spaghetti. Have the best, creepiest time and may you scream in public as much as you dream. And I'm just so happy to share every scare with you.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Thank you, Sarah. You make every haunted house a haunted home.

[Dr. Schlock (Chelsea Weber Smith)]

Thank you, dear and dastardly audience. But wait, listen. There's a moral panic out there and the only way to stave off the hysteria is by subscribing now to the devil you know. Sarah's new eight part miniseries out on October 20th. This episode was brought to you by Dr. Schlock's Camp of the damned creature.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Created by me, Chelsea Weber Smith.

[Dr. Schlock (Chelsea Weber Smith)]

And thank you to my astonishing assistant, Sarah Marshall for allowing me to grace this sadistic stage for you. The editor and producer of you're wrong about is Miranda Zickler. The music you heard in this episode was also produced by Miranda with magician I mean, musician AJ McKinley. Check out their project Magpie Cinema Club for more. And make sure you listen to American Hysteria. I mean, American Hysteria. Wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time. When the lights go out and the ghosts rise from their graves to sit beside you.