Thinking Sideways: Places You Don't Want To Go

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Thinking Sideways. I don't stories of things we simply don't
know the answer to. Hi. There, Welcome again to another
episode of Thinking Sideways. I am Joe, joined as always

(00:25):
by Devon and Steve. So you guys ready to tackle
a really groovy mystery? Just one? Yeah, actually three? And
actually these aren't entirely mysteries. One. The theme of this
week's episode is places you don't want to go, and
I gotta say, I don't want to go to any
of these. Yeah, they're scary places. I kind of want
to go to mine because you're we Well, okay, I

(00:48):
can see why you'd want to go down, but you're
still weird, that's true. I am no, Actually I do
want to go to your place. Oh you do, not
your house, but yeah, that's there. I don't really want
to go back, just kidding stuff. Yeah, well, okay, let's
just start talking about these unpleasant, scary places. My vote

(01:11):
for the place to stay away from is in a
Hottie Valley, which is in the Northwest Territories in Canada,
that is the northern part of Canada. It's just um
to the east of the Yukon Territories, which are just
to the east of Alaska. So it's well up there.
It's way up there. Yeah. Yeah, I've heard estimates as
many as forty four people have known to either disappear

(01:34):
or diet under mysterious circumstances in this valley. Yeah that's
I mean, that's you know, it is way up in Canada. Yeah,
there's bears and some people, so well, I mean, well
we'll get there. Yeah, Okay, on on with our story.
When the first European trappers and gold miners began to

(01:55):
get into the area around the valley, they talked to
the natives quite a bit and heard a lot of
legends about it. The Indians said that they avoided traveling
there because it was inhabited by evil spirits. They also
thought that it was home to spirit creatures known as
the Wahila, which is supposed to be kind of half
wolf half bear and it sounds like a really ugly critter. Yeah,

(02:15):
I don't know, and that's when I would stay away from.
They also thought that the natives actually thought the Wahila
has had mystical powers like the ability to appear and
disappear it will. Yeah, that would be one scary critter.
It's a pretty handy handy little power. Yeah, yeah, I know,
I wish I had it. Uh. The locals also had
stories about a tribe called the Naha. They were this

(02:38):
fierce mountain tribe that lived in and around the valley,
and they would come pouring out of the mountains occasionally
on slave rating parties on the low landers. And yet somehow,
right about the time white people arrived here a little before,
even the entire tribe just disappeared. That's unusual. Well, you know,
maybe they were wiped out by disease. M Well, there's

(02:59):
a lot of reasons, and I know we're going to
get into some of that, but there's a lot of
reasons why people would disappear. But it's just weird that
it it precludes the appearance of the white man. Yeah,
it's just like Rono colony man, Yeah, a little bit.
So anyway, it's this is either a huge historical mystery
or it's just the wilderness version of an urban legend.
I'm not sure where. So it's possible that they didn't

(03:21):
never exist. Yeah, I think it's there's really no evidence
that they did. No artifacts, Okay, got it. Yeah, so
who knows. But anyway, back to our story, as the
Europeans began to come into the area. They looking for
gold and furs and stuff like that. There are stories
that were spread that there was gold in the Nahanti Valley,

(03:41):
and so that's when the troubles began. That's always when
the trouble began. You saw Treasure of the Sierra Madre
written by B Traven. Yeah, totally saw. Also, we just
talked about gold being found last week. I did Joe's
kind of thing about stories that involved gold. If I
like gold, I'm hinting I want for gold bars for
my birthday. Not that nice new patio out back is

(04:05):
hiding something. Okay. It was kind of a rush job though.
A couple of guys were on the on the lookout
for gold nineteen o six. The place was the Honey
Valley was pretty much untouched and unexplored. But a couple
of brothers, William Frank McLeod decided they wanted to head

(04:26):
up to the Yukon. Willie and Frank. Yeah, William Frantiska.
I thought you said Willie Frank as in it was
first in middle name. I thought, I said William Franco. Yeah. Yeah,
So they wanted to go up to the Klondike, I guess,
and they decided to go through the valley and they
persuaded another guy named Bobby Weir to go along with them.
So they had it up the Hone River in spring

(04:47):
nineteen o six and they were never seen the live again.
All three all three, uh the Clouds. The Club brothers
bodies were eventually found about two years later, but their
heads were gone. Yeah, they had ben decapita. I'm not
sure exactly what kind of shape their bodies were in,
and some of some coupts I've heard they were just skeletons,
and they should think after two years, I don't know

(05:09):
how much would be left. Well, that depends on when
they died. If they died as soon as they got there,
then yes, two years would have gone by. Yeah, but
if they lived for a year, so there might even
remains other than small after a year. It's pretty cold, though,
It's not as if they were in a tropical jungle

(05:29):
where it's nothing but bugs and other critters. Yeah, but
you've got scavengers looking for a warm, easy meal. Yeah,
that's true. Probably a lot of those, a lot of
that going on. So yeah, I would say they were
probably skeletons, but whatever. But the key point here is
their heads were gone. Okay, yeah. And as for as

(05:51):
to the other guy, Bobby, we're apparently a native hunting
party found at a decomposed body a year later, about
half a mile away from that spot where the brothers
were found. But it's not that it apparently wasn't. I
don't even know how they really identified the brothers. Maybe
through their possessions, it's the only thing I can obviously,
not their fingerprints or their dental records. Dental records weren't

(06:14):
really Also, they never found their heads, so yeah, that
makes it quite It's hard to do dental records with
no dentists dentie, yeah, okay, yeah, And and so that
was not the end of it. A guy named Martin Jorgensen,
who was a prospector, was found headless in nineteen seventeen

(06:39):
outside the burnt remains of his cabin along the Flat
River and other versions. He was found inside the cabin
and so and so, I was right about this time
that the nickname of Headless Valley, or also the Valley
of the Headless Men both of them began to like
append itself to the Honey Valley for good reasoning. Yeah,
thanks so. And then at the time went by, people

(06:59):
were disappearing, of course at a steady rate. Minor from
Ontario was found in his sleeping bag in the Valley
of the Headless Man. What again, his head missing. And all,
by the way, none of the heads that disappeared whatever found, well,
they never are in Highlander either, yea, nobody else has
made that connection. Come on, this valley is obviously where

(07:21):
the Highlanders are going. It could be quickening the Yukon. Sure, okay, yeah,
see there were other mysterious desks that didn't involve to
be heading. In one case, the body of a trapper
named John O'Brien was found sitting this camp frozen solid,
next to his campfire, with a box of matches in
his hand. I also heard in a version that it

(07:43):
appeared that the fire had been burning amazingly hot at
one point, and so he must have flashed frozen. Did
you come across that? I saw that. I saw that
that out there, and I don't it doesn't make any sense.
I couldn't find any support for that. I think he
probably actually fell and fell in the river. Was like,
you know, I had really bad exposure and was, you know,
shaking like a leaf and trying to get a fire

(08:05):
lit and just didn't quite. Yeah, that's that's probably what
I think. Or somebody murdered him. But he's still at
his head. He's still had his head, got it, Yeah,
kept his head about him. Yeah. So here's some theories
about this place and why it became this evil, this
place of evil headlessness. Some people thought that there might
be some sort of mad trapper or murderous hermit running
around in the Honey Valley. That sounds familiar, Yeah, Yeah,

(08:27):
I remember remember Albert Johnson, Yeah, trapper of Rat River. Yeah,
there's a guy named Dick North who wrote a book
about him. And North speculated that Johnson might have passed
through the valley in the years prior to his moved
to Rat River, and he thinks Johnson might be responsible
for at least some of the murders, but of course
he has no evidence of that. And of course Johnson

(08:47):
died in nineteen thirty two, so he obviously couldn't have
carried out the nad Yeah, and I think he was
too young to have murdered the McCloud brothers in nineteen
o six, I would agree, Yeah, because he was in
his forties when he died. Is that right? But they
weren't really sure that Johnson. I mean I think they
were thinking maybe right around forty. Yeah, that would make

(09:10):
you a child at in when the first murders occurred. Yeah,
that doesn't work, Okay. Our next theory, uh is some
people actually believe this, the natives mostly something. I thought
that it was a remnants of the missing Naha tribe.
So maybe they didn't actually completely disappear. They're just hiding
and they're looking at the valley and then so they

(09:32):
did it. Tell me you read up on how this
gets tied into the hollow earth theory. Oh, the hollow
earth theory. You know, I didn't. I've heard of the
hollow earth theory. I wasn't really going to include this
whole thing with the hollow earth theory. But yeah, there
is there is a theory out there among some people
that you know, the earth is hollow and that the
entrance is in this valley, which is why if you
get too close to finding that entrance to the hollow Earth,

(09:55):
then you know you've got to be off. You know what.
It also makes me think of this this whole the
rance to where this tribe is living. And I don't
think Devon's going to know this, but you might remember
this is there was an old comic called Tar Rock,
Son of Stone. Do you remember that at all? That
sounds vaguely familiar. Yeah, I remember seeing that. I don't.
I don't think I ever read that. Well, yeah, it's

(10:16):
been on and off for fifty sixty years, but it's
it was written as two Indian or it was an
Indian man, an American Indian man, and an American Indian boy.
Find a cave, go into the system, and come into
a world where dinosaurs are still about. It's basically kind
of the same Hollow Earth, find your way in, find
your way out, travel between the two. But that's exactly

(10:38):
what it made me think of, is that they're going
into this paradise and then they're protecting the entrance of
paradise for all these interlopers who were going to come
in and destroy it on them. I always like it
when you're like, Devon's too young to know this totally
nerdy reference that totally knows about you. Do. Yes, you
just watched the animated version, didn't you know. Let's keep

(11:00):
going okay, all right, okay, next theory. The then a tribe.
They're the ones who, like you, lived outside the valley
and didn't not to go into the valley. They had
a theory that it was the New luck, the new Cluck. Yeah, okay,
what the heck is the new cluck? Yeah? New Cluck
is a word that translates as men of the bush.
All the Arctic tribes knew of the New Cluck, and

(11:21):
they all were afraid of the New Cluck. Apparently, what
they are is they're short, sort of Neanderthal like sort
of human human, but with with more fur, and they
have they carry stone weapons, like stone clubs and such things,
and they're very violent. And it's said that they used
to run the whole the Arctic Circle and that and
that as at the time of our story, their numbers

(11:42):
were believed to have been reduced enough that they were
all maybe had hanging out in the Honey Valley. They're
like a hairy ogre or something. Is that what that is?
I know obviously the more locks, right yeah, yeah, from
the time machine. Yeah yeah, yeah, that would make sense too.
I could be yeah, yeah, I don't know. These guys
apparently were some sort of just left behind branch of
humanity and perhaps this is one of those things. Not

(12:03):
I don't want to like railroad sidetrack this at all,
but this is one of those things that makes me
contemplate how aware we are as humans of our past
and how much leftover there is and mother civilization and
going down a rabbit hole. But the fact that you know,
Native indigenous people very often refer to this thing that

(12:24):
we know now definitely existed and predated us, and they
always have that as like a remnant somehow of a memory.
But they live, they live literally on the ground there
in the middle of it all the time, and they're
passing that history, whereas we as a society. The white man,
from what I can understand, hasn't explored this area other

(12:45):
than aerial photography. We said, a plane over, we took
a picture. That's it. Yeah, Like there's tons we don't know. Yeah,
I just mean, like in terms of having this kind
of mythical thing, Well, you're talking not just this particular
value in general, the new cluck. Yeah, I'm always I'm
always astounded it when you hear stories of that. Anyways,

(13:09):
there there are actually a few European men who who's
seen these critters. In ninety four, trapper named John Baptist
was was with some companions and in the valley and
they came across a strange man like creature about five
feet tall, had long, bushy hair and beard and hairy
chested back, and the hair was not quite so thick
on the arms and legs, and yeah, he took the

(13:31):
new Cluck took off. Baptist and his friends tracked it
for a while. Uh, and the entire time they heard
strange whistling calls in the brush around them. Members of
the tribe later explained what that whistling meant. That's how
the new cluck communicated when they were on the hunt.
So these guys thought they were tracking the new cluck,
but apparently a group of them, we're tracking these guys.

(13:51):
The hunter becomes the hunting. Yeah, just like a group
of velociraptors. Yeah. There There was another new exciting in
nineteen sixty four by a sound kid whose name. His
name does not has not been passed down to remember. So,
I don't know, I don't know that these things are
actually real. It sounds like it might not be beyond
the realm of possibility. Yeah, Yeah, that's always a hard

(14:13):
one to say. We don't have anything that says they
don't exist, that's the hard part. Yeah. Um, so I
believe in their existence, maybe a little bit more than
than a hot tribe. So our next theory the Wauhila.
Remember the Wahila, that wolf bear hybrid. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
so it could have been the Wahila, except I don't
really believe in the Wahila. The Waka. You know, what

(14:35):
the Wahuila sounds like to me is kind of like
that hairless bear they saw. Remember that bear, the like
sun bear or something that was roaming around. Maybe it
was a grizzly bear that was like really really sick,
and so it didn't have any hair on it, and
people were taking pictures of it and they were like,
what is this creature? This just happened like a few
months ago. Remember this, No, never mind, our listeners will know. No.

(14:57):
I was just gonna say, is that. I mean, critters
that are in states of distress tend to look really
weird too. I remember the Montauk creature a couple of
years back. It turned out to be a pig. Yeah,
but it was all it was washed up in the
ocean and all beat up and it looks like something
completely different. But I could see how a very sick
and I'm like, sick mange or something. Yeah, this bear

(15:20):
looked like a brand new animal that nobody had ever
seen before. And they finally tranquilized it, and they're like,
oh crap, it's a really really sick bear. So they
got it and treated it and released it and it
looks totally normal. Again. Good for the bear anyways. Yeah, well, okay,
so so much for the Wahila. There are next areas
that maybe these incidents were just unrelated. I mean, that's obviously.

(15:42):
It's in a really rugged environment with bears and wolverines
and stuff like that. I'm inclined to go with this one,
just so, you know, is it because it's reasonable? Yeah, exactly.
I realized nobody can see me. Not yeah, but boring.
In the case of the McCloud brothers, Bobby weird body
was not found with him, so maybe he killed them, uh,

(16:03):
and then took off himself. And maybe they did yeah,
and then they got a whole bunch of gold and
then Bobby killed him and took off. The remains that
were found a half mile away may or may not
have been his remains, and maybe the clouds died from
disease and in the cold, and we're left to get
help just or just to say it himself, and he
just died somewhere along the way. And it's just really

(16:24):
really hard to say. As for their skulls, I mean,
if you're laying there in the rush for like, you know,
a couple of years, an animal might actually just come
and but chew your head off and carry it away.
We've we've talked about this many, many times about how
far bones will travel from the initial side of death. Yeah, yeah,
I think this is a remote, inhospitable place. And the

(16:46):
odds of dying from a cold accidents animal tax because
you can't just call nine one one emergency. You're just
out of luck. And just if you do something as
a routine in our society as breaking a leg, well
that's it for you. There's say, okay, well it's gonna
be a three month hike to get to the doctor,
which is a problem. But on the other other hand,
last there it is interesting that deaths occurred with the

(17:07):
beheadings and everything within a span of about forty years,
and in more recent years people have visited the value,
and nobody's lost their head, so it's possible beheadings and
the murders were done by one person. That really is possible.
So I mean forty years, that's not an unnaturally long lifespan. Obviously,
you're not gonna start killing people till you're at least like,
you know, fifteen or eighteen whatever the legal ages in Canada. Okay,

(17:35):
But and and it's it's also possible of this if
if it was some serial killer, you know, real mad trapper,
kind of lunatic. It turns out that the value that
has this mans has a lot of limestone caves in it,
so a lot of places to high bodies. Yeah, yeah,
So who knows gonna be one of these days somebody
will be exploring a cave and make a really ghastly

(17:55):
fine and or something. Uh, that would be really the
Throne of them In the first Conan movie and the
Throne of Skulls, I don't remember, it's been so long
since I've seen that. I know, I swear it was
a Throne of Skulls. Maybe it was in the comic
good Man. Yeah, I know. So that's it. So the
value they had this man don't go their kids yeah, don't. Uh.

(18:21):
You guys want to talk about my place, but I
kind of want to go We're gonna talk about the
Aokigahara Forest, which is also known as the Japanese suicide
forest cheerful place. So if that is the sort of
thing that disturbs you, skip ahead twenty ish minutes. Sorry, everyone,

(18:47):
We're not going to call it that. We It's often
referred to as the Sea of Trees, which in Japanese
can be said as the Jucai, which is how a
lot of people refer to this forest. So we're going
to go ahead and just refer to it as that. Okay,
let's pretend I didn't already tell you that it's a
suicide forest, because it's a beautiful, lush forest, the kind

(19:10):
that you would see like in a Miyazaki film. Kind
of Uh. It's an idyllic fourteen square miles at the
foot of Mount Fuji, and it is the most the
second most popular place in the world to commit suicide,
the first is the Golden Gate Bridge. Numbers vary, but
reportedly anywhere between ten and a hundred people kill themselves

(19:30):
in the Juchai every year. In two thousand and ten,
there were fifty seven confirmed suicides. In two thousand to
the number of confirmed suicides was seventy eight. And I
say confirmed because we don't have a way of knowing
for sure. In two thousands three, after a rumored hundred

(19:52):
and five confirmed suicide, the government decided maybe telling everybody
how many people killed themselves in this forest is a
bad idea, and the reason that was to stop it
from attracting other people to go to do it. I
think that was definitely part of it. Part of it
was to stop this kind of cycle. Another part of

(20:13):
it was it is a tourist attraction. There's a really
famous ice cave there. There's a couple really famous other caves.
There's a wind cave and a bunch of other really
beautiful stuff. Yeah, go look at the photos of the caves.
They're fantastic. Yeah, you have to. You have to google
specific things in regards to this one. If you just
google the forest, it'll just kind of show you some

(20:33):
pictures of a really beautiful place. But they were trying
to nip the whole everybody will kill yourself there thing
in the bud, but also not scared tourists away. That
makes sense. It kind of like in Jaws. Yeah, so
many weird references today. Uh So, in addition to the

(20:54):
kind of confirmed numbers, I don't know how they necessarily
can confirm what happened in this past year versus not,
but they the local government does conduct annual searches for bodies,
and with the forest being what it is, it's hard
to know if the bodies are older or younger, or

(21:17):
maybe they got missed in last year's search. It's always
it's an incredibly lush forest. It's really easy to get lost.
It's hard to tell. It's also frozen half of the
year or more so. It's possible that bodies could freeze
in a non decomposed state for six, eight, twelve almost months,
and then they have a warm spell, it decompos, it

(21:39):
starts to decompose, it freezes again. It's hard. Yeah, and
frankly I think sometimes they just don't even try, because
that's a lot of bodies. Yeah, it's a very small
group that has to deal with it. Yeah, it is
in the name of prevention. Not only are there large
signs at every trailhead urging people to seek help, but

(22:01):
workers also play signs as they search for the bodies
to remind people that there's something to live for, just
kind of sporadically around the forest. So at least they're
just hundreds and hundreds of these signs all around the
four They are a bunch of them. Yeah. One of
the big signs is loosely translated to kind of say, quote,

(22:22):
let's think once more about the life you were given
your parents, your brothers and sisters and children. Don't suffer alone. First,
please contact somebody. And then it has a suicide hotline
number on the bottom of it. It's you know, it's
funny to me. I mean, I've seen a lot of
you see those signs on bridges and stuff here about,
you know, to encourage people to get help and they're
going to jump, But I do say suicide counseling this

(22:44):
phone number. Well, no, I've seen some different different signs.
But what I crack up about this is this kind
of plays on that that cultural bend of you know,
your family, which is very important in Japanese society. It's
actually really smart. I was I read it. I was like, oh,
whoever wrote that really knew what they were doing when

(23:04):
they put this together. Yeah, Yeah, it's pretty interesting how
intelligent they've been about trying to prevent suicide. It's just
a popular thing to do over there, kill yourself. Yeah,
and suicide of Japan is a lot higher than it
is over here, that's true. If you haven't already, you
should definitely creep yourself out by googling Chucai and uh
quote forest bodies. Hopefully I don't need to add this disclaimer,

(23:28):
but some of those images are pretty disturbing, or could
be disturbing. I don't know why. Maybe it's because we've
been doing this podcast for so long, but dead bodies
don't really creep me out. This. This is right up
there with body farms. And then have you ever looked
at images from body farms, the ones where they just
leave them laying out in the brush to figure out

(23:49):
what happens? This was very much in line with the
imagery I've seen from that, and I think it's the
same thing. We've looked at it enough. Yeah, I will
say I'll show you a picture later on in one
body that really will creep you out. Okay, The forest
is really really lush, really, it's really if you don't
know what's going on in this forest, it's really beautiful

(24:10):
if you just look at pictures of the Jucai. It's
it's just kind of breathtaking. It is genuinely if you
saw Spirited Away or Um Princess Mononoke, it looks like
the forests from those movies. It really really does. So
because of the lushness of this forest, bodies are very
often missed less these days because people have started um.

(24:35):
People who are hesitant to kill themselves will take trail
tape with them, you know that, like nylon trail tape
that you see tied around tree branches. Sometimes they'll take
that and they'll tie one in around a tree and
they'll just like flow it behind them in a straight
line instead of yeah, so they won't get lost. So
often that leads to something it's it is. I know

(24:59):
you're gonna tell talk about this, but it's really easy
to get lost in this Well, it's really easy. Yeah,
it's super super easy. The and the most common way
that people kill themselves is they either the first most
common is hanging and the second most common is taking
sleeping pills. But is that is there any do you know,
is there a male female ratio there? I almost imagine

(25:21):
that men would be more likely to hang themselves than women. Um,
from what I've heard, it's not so much a male
female ratio, it's a determined and not determined ratio. So
the people who are determined will not mark their trail
in and they hang themselves. So hanging bodies or nooses
with skeletons underneath are often found years and years and

(25:42):
years later because there's no trail mark versus the fresher
bodies that they find are often marked by a trail,
and they're not hung. They've taken sleeping pills, and then
it takes them a while to die from exposure because
they're too weak from taking the sleeping bills. That doesn't
kill them, but they're two weeks it can, but it

(26:02):
turns out that the people often it doesn't. People don't
take quite enough in this forest. People tend to overestimate.
It's probably the fault of movies. How many pills it
takes to actually make that. And they actually have This
is really really creepy, but they have suicide manuals that
they come out with in Japan that they'll find on

(26:23):
a lot of these bodies that tells people how to
kill themselves in in the Chucai. Yeah, it's really it's
really creepy. Yeah, and it says either hang yourself or
take sleeping pills. Yeah. Okay, alright, I was gonna make
some joke about, you know, killing your leadership, but never mind.
And some I guess the third most common way to

(26:44):
die in the forest is just by basic exhaustion, dehydration,
or malnourishment. This is due to something we're gonna talk
about in a minute. That's called ubats but it's a
traditional practice in Japan. Aditional I hesitates called traditional, but
it is. I have a number of Japanese friends, and

(27:04):
when I was talking to them about this story, I
mentioned and they said, oh, does that happen there? Like,
that's a thing that happens a lot. So you're looking
at me, you know where we're going, like I do.
But apparently the people of Japan, at least the people
that I know from Japan, believe that this is a
thing that legitimately happens. So alright, we'll leave it at
that for a minute. Okay, it's not happening anymore though, right, Well,

(27:28):
maybe it's hard so I'm assuming besides bodies, because the
story has got enough traction, there's other stuff that's being
found there's lots of other stuff, and visitors do describe
the forest as being unnaturally silent, as if all life
has abandoned the forest intentionally. I've watched some videos of

(27:48):
people walking through and you can hear birds and things
like that, but it is really muffled, kind of as
you know when you have have the first snow, at
least in Portland. I know places that get a lot
of snow don't have this as much because the plows
are out immediately, but it gets really quiet and muffled.
And that's the truth of this forest as well. And

(28:09):
a lot of people do leave stuff behind. Like you said,
there's ice and snow a lot of the time in
the forest, and I don't know why people would leave
a lot of this stuff behind, Like shoes of all
sizes get left behind, including children's shoes, and it's not
like that kid dropped his shoe, better leave it. Pairs

(28:30):
of shoes lined up, which is weird. There's people leave
packs of photos, children's toys. There's a really interesting I
don't know if you guys got to watch the Vice
video that I posted for the links. It's really really interesting.
They follow Japanese geologist who's part of the suicide patrols

(28:53):
that go out there that I don't think I've mentioned yet,
but I'm going to mention and he kind of explains things.
But they find this stuffed animal that's kind of a
humanoid figure that's been nailed upside down to a tree
and kind of like cut open, and then there was
a curse that was nailed into the inside of him.

(29:14):
They find that while they're wandering around, so you kind
of have the sense that that's the sort of thing
that's around a lot. This is kind of like getting
into Blair which territory a little. Yeah, there are a
couple of theories about why people go here to kill themselves,
why it's so popular, and ubats plays a role in it.

(29:35):
Ubot s is it literally translates to the leaving of
an old woman, and it's this rumored Japanese tradition, although
tradition I don't think it's the right word. Practice, I
guess of leaving a family member who's very old or
ill in a place to die. Basically, it's it's somebody

(30:00):
is a burden on the family. You take them out
into a forest or some other deserted area and leave
them to die. So that they are no longer burdened
to you nice as I said, there's there's not a
whole as far as I can tell, this is not
a thing that actually ever happened. You know, in Japanese culture.
Isn't the only place that I've heard of this kind

(30:21):
of thing. Other cultures talk about taking the old out
or the old wandering away when they decide that they
become a bird. Yeah, that's that's kind of back in
the way back days, like when you're we were living
in the Stone Age and the way back in the
way back. Yeah. There, And there's a larger conversation to
be had here about the traditional treatment of seniors in

(30:44):
Japan and the fact that Japanese seniors have the higher
much higher rate of suicide than seniors in the rest
of the world or the average rate of suicide in
the rest of the world. But we're not going to
dive into that so much. Yeah, they haven't kept stats
on the age of the people what they find having
their bodies out here, right, No, they ever really kept
stats other than numbers for the most part, it sounds

(31:06):
like but even though I'm not totally willing to say
that you bots is a real thing. Let's assume it is,
and we can say that because it is vengeful spirits
from the family members who have been left behind haunt
the Jucai and call people in. That's a good theory, right. Alternately,

(31:28):
vengeful spirits from samurai who killed themselves in feudal times.
Did they all go to the forest to kill themselves?
I don't know. I don't think so, but that's a theory.
It's smacks of so many bad Hollywood movies where there's
the house or the woods that are filled with evil
spirits that draw people in. I mean, it makes me
think of The Evil Dead with Bruce Campbell. Yeah, the houses,

(31:51):
it draws them in. It does crazy stuff that's completely believable.
Next theory that has the exact same smack to it
is the urry, which are demon ghosts. Also maybe the
Buddhist monk, which is a demon ghost. Will There have
been reports of people seeing a Buddhist monk wandering the

(32:13):
forest uh and some people claimed to have even spoken
with him. He asks people wandering the forest why they're there,
and he tells them how to get out of the forest.
He gives them, you know, there's the trail around Basically yeah.
If they say, oh, my gosh, you're right, I don't
want to kill myself, I don't think oh yeah, actually

(32:34):
I guess I did mention that there's a core of
volunteers that goes out to try and find people who
haven't yet committed suicide. Know you talk about the people
who go out and look for the bodies. Oh, they
are also trying to find people who are out there
who might be about to commit suicide and try to
talk them out of it, not in like, oh you
have so much to live for blah blah blah. This

(32:55):
is another thing you get to see in that Vice
video because the gentleman that they're following is part of
this core, and they do find somebody and he just
kind of sits there and talks to him for a
couple of minutes. He says, what are you doing out here?
You know you can't you're not allowed to camp out here. Okay,
Well do you have food and water? Okay? Well I
just want you to think really hard about what's going on.

(33:16):
It was really nice to meet you, okay, you know
by basically, uh, you know, it's not like you have
so much to live for and don't kill yourself. And
blah blah blah blah blah. It's more of a let's
have an honest human interaction with each other and hopefully
that will discourage you from doing whatever you were thinking
about doing, the cluttering up our forests with corpses. Anyways,

(33:37):
the reason that I bring this up is it turns
out one of the people that's very active in this
is a man by the name of Chaozin Yamashita, who
is a Jodo Shinshoo priest. It's a sect of Buddhism,
and Yamashita juice Shaku, is one of those monks, and
he does dress in the traditional robes, not the it's

(34:00):
not the bright orange robes familiar. Yeah, they're dark robes,
but they are traditional. You can kind of you could
go out and google it if you want. They are
they're kind of big, dark, flowing robes. So I think
it's pretty possible that people are freaked out in the
middle of the forest and have a real encounter and

(34:20):
go back and talk to their friends and they say, yeah,
I talked to a monk in the middle of the forest,
and people are like, you're crazy, that's not a real thing.
You probably saw a go I can very easily see
that in a forest where it's super weird and creepy
and you're on your own or such, the two of you,
and suddenly a monk, which is not something I think

(34:43):
you would normally expect to run across in the forest,
suddenly shows up. Yeah. Yeah, strange. Yes. Next up is
the q Roi Jucai book, which is by s Cho
Matsu Moto, who's a very famous Japanese novelist. He's written
just an absurd amount of novels and books and poems

(35:05):
and things like that. He's very, very famous. But he
wrote this book. I came out in I think it
was nineteen sixties. Some things I read said nineteen sixty two.
It's not in print and English, and despite my clearly
flawless Japanese product pronunciation, I do not actually read kanji
or katakana, and that's the only way that you can

(35:27):
get information about this book. I did find a Wikipedia
page on this book, and it was in Japanese, and
I said, hey, Chrome, translate this page into English, and
I literally could not make the English words that appeared
on the page makes sense to my American brain. There

(35:49):
were some very very interesting things that happened, and I
was I know I mentioned to you guys. I was
talking to one of my Japanese friends, and I said,
can you just read the synopsis and tell me what
this book is about? And she kind of looked at
it for a minute and said, uh no, so Ese.

(36:12):
She read in Japanese and I there are two different
ways that it could that this book could be. And
it's also possible that it's like just a there are
a lot of Japanese concepts that don't translate very well
into English, so it's possible that she just was like,
I'm tired of you asking me things about Japan, so
stop and uh, I don't really want to try and

(36:35):
explain this to you. But as far as I can tell,
this book is either about a woman who kills herself
in the forest because of kind of a star cross
to lover forbidden love situation, or about a woman whose
sister dies in a bus accident and she like won't
leave her sister and then she tries to take over

(36:57):
her sister's job. Or maybe there's like an evil spirit
that possesses the sister. It's hard to tell. If you
want to run this experiment, please be my guests, go
out in your English speaking brain and find the Wikipedia
page and try and Google translate it and and then
if you can figure out what it means, tell me please.
But apparently it was a very very popular book in Japan.

(37:20):
Many people read it and thought, hey, that's a cool
place to kill myself. Yea, at some point at the end,
she commits suicide and in the forest, yeah, as far
as I can tell, in that particular forest, in the Jucaia,
as far as I can. And then my final theory
is that it could just be a really pretty place.

(37:42):
And I died Sena to go kill yourself. It's really beautiful,
it's really quiet. There's a lot of really secluded spaces.
You don't have to look at anybody. Somebody's not going
to stumble upon you and a campsite or something. Yeah,
and it also, you know, not to be macab or anything.

(38:02):
But it saves your family and friends from having to
find you. It's a pretty much guaranteed that your family
and friends aren't going to be the ones who stumble
upon your body in the middle of this forest. Somebody
else is going to, and they're going to if you're
still recognizable, they will tell your family, what happened to you,

(38:23):
and where it happened. I I have never really contemplated suicide,
but I can see where the draw could come from that. Well,
but of course you know that, and I think that
the people who are in that situation don't think of
his exact opposite side of that, which is your unrecognizable,
you cannot be identified, which means your loved ones then

(38:44):
live on forever wondering what happened to you. It's always
the other side of the coin. Yeah, they I'm sure
they leave a note behind, say I'm going to go
off myself. Oh maybe for their family before they had
that strike out for the forest. Well, I have another
theory is that these are suicidal people and they go
out to the forest to do it because they're animal evers.
They figure, I'll not only kill myself, but I'll leave

(39:06):
a nice, a little tasty meal for all the animals.
It's kind of like an air funeral. Yeah, you know
in that Vice video, not to like refer too much
to it. This is the third time. Now, sorry, Hey
what about the Vice video? Yeah? No, but the the
guy that they're following, you know, he says they find
this little area where there's a bunch of flowers in
a box of chocolates, and he says, oh, it must

(39:27):
have been the family and friends of this person who died.
And he said, you know, I think it's a really
beautiful re minder that you're never alone. Even if you
think you're alone, you're not. So there's that. That's the
up note to remind our thoughts of this story. I
really don't know how I'm going to follow that act
because wow, it's going to be an upper you have
something I read it before you're started. Read a little

(39:51):
fun little piece of trivia regarding this, which is that
the work cruise that have to go out and get
the bodies and bring them in. They take him down
to the police station and I think there's they have
a special room just for the suicide. They put him
in there and put the body in there, and then
they have to roche embo to see who gets to
spend the night in the room with the body, because apparently, um,
it's bad mojo that to just leave the body alone,

(40:13):
so somebody has to stay with the body all night. Yeah,
so that one. You know, it was a pile of
bones and it's okay if it's anything otherwise rotting corpses
you to I don't know. I like from the living perspective,
it's kind of an early job, but from the the
ideology of it, it's kind of sweet. You don't want

(40:36):
to leave this spirit alone? Yeah? I would. It's a
nice sentiment. Yeah, the sentiment is that it's good way
to put it. Can we stop talking about suicide? Please? Hey, everybody,
we're done. Let's talk about something else. I think we
lie to people. It's been a little more. It might
have been a little more. In twenty minutes, we're going
to talk about a new one. Yeah. So, Steve, do

(40:57):
you have an exciting terrible place for us? I I
do have a what is a beautiful but terrible place?
I know it's just like me. Yeah yeah, but for
completely different reason. Is it a terrible place? Okay, okay,
not so much A terrible place? Has a scary place? Yeah? Yeah, yeah,
there's there's a lot of fear involved here. Let's let's
go ahead. Um, the place that I don't think that

(41:19):
these people, that any of our listeners should be going.
It's one that randomly catches on fire. Yeah, things like
a bad thing. It's kind of a bad thing. Not
the whole place doesn't catch on. No, it's not Pumpey
or anything like that. We're talking about the village of Coronia.
It's on it's on the island of Sicily, which it's
east of if you know the island at all, it's

(41:41):
east of Plamo and Sicily is Italy Sicily. In case
somebody didn't know that, I thought I said Italian village.
If I didn't, an Italian village. Um, it's it's a
pretty little coastal town. You know from the photos and
and everything. It's exactly what you'd picture a coastal town

(42:01):
on the island of Sicily. Look like it's built up
into the hills a little bit. It's really nice. I'm
showing you pictures of Griano. Yeah right, yeah, it's very picturesque.
Oh it is. I did my usual thing. I did
a little street tour on Google. Beautiful neat little town.
It was actually really hard to drive around into Google
street View though, because it's one of those weird little

(42:23):
towns where it looks like the street keeps going but
the road doesn't. The street does because you can walk
on it. Yeah. I was like, why won't you go there?
And by the way, there's the streets in this village
are not like what you're thinking used to thinking of
the streets. They're more kind of like alleys. They're very small,
very scared. It's a traditional village. Yeah, and lots of

(42:44):
like a little weird underpass and yes, all of that
good stuff. But enough talking about this beautiful little place.
Let's talk about the story. Okay, talk about why you
should be scared to go. Yeah, you really undersold this
so far. The story begins somewhere in the beginning of
January of two thousand four, when randomly things literally started

(43:08):
catching on fire. Lots of things, like physical things. Okay,
here's a list of things according to the media reports.
Because this is the difficulty with this one is most
of his media reports. And I did the same thing.
I was putting stuff into chrome and getting it translated,
and it makes a little rough. Here's the things that
catch on fire. There's furniture, there's electronics like TVs or

(43:34):
microwave stuff like that. Um or computers would have their
memories randomly wiped. That's a kind of an odd twist
on the whole electronics bit part. Cars would either can't
just be on fire or there. The glass would implode
into the car from some kind of weird heat source. Uh.

(43:57):
The doors, electric doors on cars, the law box, they
would go on and off, opening, closer, locking, unlocked, constantly weird.
And there's there was there's electronic gates that would randomly
open and close on their own. So you'd just be
walking up the street and then the gates of the
head would open and then closed, and then open and
then closing. He sounds like the whole town got hacked it. Yeah,

(44:22):
I've even seen a photo of what it looks like.
It was a water tank on a wall. So if
you imagine in the if you're from the States, you've
got your toilet tank. It's almost like that shape, that
square shape of but as a water tank with a
pipe coming down, and it looks like the whole thing
had caught fire at a water pipe looked like they

(44:43):
had caught on fire. It wasn't a toilet tank a
toilet No, No, it wasn't, because there were pipes running
away from it and it was kind of cropped, but
the pipe took an angle in in what I saw,
so I'm pretty sure it wasn't. Somebody was smoking on
the John now. Of course, at first when things are
going up, especially the electronics are catching on fire, people

(45:04):
started unplugging things. There are other things like appliances like
toasters and yeah, appliances that things in general that plugged in,
we're catching on fire. So people were unplugging them and
the power company would eventually cut off the electricity. That, however,
didn't stop the problem. One of the famous pictures you
see is a hair dryer hanging on the wall, the

(45:26):
core looped up next to it, not plugged into anything,
and the dryer on fire, which is really weird that
what did the owner of the of the hair dryer
like take a picture of it or something that somebody
had a picture of it as it was catching As
it was flames were coming out of it. Yes, it was.

(45:46):
It almost looked like it was they had stuck it
in the towel rack. There was no towel, but they'd
stuck it in the towel rack itself. And so you
can see the wires, you know, looped up around and
and the head of it was had flames coming out
of it. Bizarre. Yeah, that's a hell of a hair dryer.
Let's see there's oh, and there's there's other weird things
that were going on in this village. At the same time,

(46:08):
people were reporting seeing glowing orbs over the ocean, because
as we said, it's right on the ocean. And they
also reported that there were UFOs flying just off the coastline.
So this is a nice little addition to the Oh,
by the way, everything I own is catching on fire?
How many? How many different people reported things catching on fire.

(46:30):
I don't have a clear sense. I'll say this now.
I don't have a clear sense of how much stuff
caught on fire. I don't have a clear sense of
how long things caught on fire. Four. We're gonna talk
about this in a sec. But there's the time frames
in the descriptions lead me to either believe that it
was a short time frame, say like a month or years,

(46:54):
that this stuff kept happening. But let me, I don't
know that for sure. I believe that it's stopped, but
I don't know that for sure because the reporting is
so like even the English versions of things not to translated,
but the English versions are vague, So I'm not positive
if it's stopped. I have to imagine that for the

(47:15):
most part it's stopped. But well, and some of this
will be covered in theories. For the time frame thing.
The time frame about a week after of fires had happened,
they evacuated the town. And did they evacuated after about
a week or so? Yeah, it was after about a
week the well, again this depends on the accounting. Some

(47:35):
say it was after two or four weeks they have
they evacuated, Some say after seventeen fires. Like again, it's
never an exact number, but they evacuated the town. Government
brings in every expert that they can think of, They
run tests on things that have been burned. They start
they put up cameras all over the town to try

(47:57):
and figure out what's going on. The odd bit to
me is that as soon as the as as big
as the government swoops in and starts doing all of this,
the fire stopped. That's nothing caught according to the government reports,
nothing caught on fire while they were there, and they

(48:18):
couldn't figure out what was going on. So eventually they
know the people are like, hey, I'd like to go
home please. So eventually they say, okay, well we can't
figure it out, go ahead and go home, and the fires.
At that point, this is what I got to earlier
sporadically seemed to start happening again. Weird. Here's some other

(48:40):
weird things that then happened after that, is water pipes
begin to leak and burst, the pipes under your sinker whatever. Um.
There's some theories on that that we can talk about
in a bit. Let's see what else we've got. There is,
Oh this Devon's I know you love. There's there's farmers

(49:02):
in the area who grow eggplants, and according to their reports,
all of their eggplants change colors, not the you know,
as egg plants will do. They change one color to
to another color when they're right, they all changed to
different colors. That Yeah, I was reading through the script
and I was kind of skimming. I missed this part,

(49:24):
and I was reading through the theories and it says
the egg plants, and I was like, what, the eggplants
are responsible for everything? Apparently Steve has lost it. But
but these eggs plants, the eggplants didn't just change to
one odd color. That changed to multiple different colors. That
is what the reporting that I've seen set. And I'm

(49:46):
going to put that in doubt because that seems a
bit fantastical. We'll talk about that a little bit in
the theory section. But I actually did some research on eggplants,
just trying to figure out in the eggs action of
the grocery store aisle. Yes, let's see, we also have
there's some other weird stuff. And this again, this is

(50:07):
another vegetation thing. There's a local grass called the Mauritanian
grass Martinian. Yeah, and it's it's a big grass, so
not like your lawn. This is a grass that grows
eight feet high in a big Your lawn is brown

(50:27):
and scorched, is not tall, unlike these plants, which are
super tall. What this plant has in common with your
lawn is that it was scorched. It was the plant
at ground level showed signs of burning, but it wasn't
as if it had ever cast caught on fire. Was
more of a smoldering heat kind of look. And I

(50:50):
don't know how they figured this out, but I guess
somebody would start digging them up. Is the roots were
blackened as if they had been burned. That's odd, it is.
And the last thing that I'll put in here is
people have said that from that time or during that time,
that compasses weren't working correctly, that they were deviating from

(51:13):
magnetic north. You're pointing somewhere else UFO influence here, then
we are. We are laying a ton of hints for
the possible UFO theory right there. I will totally admit it. Yeah.
And another theory you're going to talk about too, Yeah, yeah,
and we we should go ahead and just jump right
into the theories. Yeah, I think so, because really that's
about all of the description that we've got for this

(51:36):
particular story. Theory number one, the devil did it well, Satan.
You know what we should have named this this episode
is things that nefarious spirits do. Yeah, because that just
rolls off the tongue places you don't want to go
things nefarious spirits, Okay, nefarious alright, fine, but that's been

(51:56):
a common thread throughout everything, and it kind of is
that bad spirits are doing this thing. Yeah. Well, okay,
this is kind of a commo. It's either the devil
or evil spirits, which is much like what we talked
about in the forest that you had. I've got to say,
the more superstitious villagers seem to fall in line with

(52:19):
this right away. And you know that the devil makes
tunnel sense. It comes from a really hot place. Of course,
he would catch on stuff on fire. It's his fault.
I get. I get why people would see that. Italian
villages are also very religious usually. I think that you know,
if the devil was up to this kind of stuff,
he'd be spreading the he'd be spreading the love a

(52:40):
little bit. You would think, you would think it was
a very big concentration of centers in the city. Devil.
The devil is pro center. He would go, he would
go to the most pious village and starts. That's true. Yeah, oops, okay,
let's move away from the devil did it to the

(53:02):
evil spirit side of this theory, because there's actually some
very simple logic in this one. According to villagers, this
is the way things played out is somebody's stuff or
house would start to try to catch on fire, and
an attempt to save their stuff, if they had somebody
who would let them, they would take their belongings to
that other person's house, so that if the house went up,

(53:26):
at least they're they're precious things didn't go as well,
except that according to this the evil spirit was actually
in the possessions. The evil spirit was causing the fire,
was in a possession. That possession is brought into the
new house. The spirit then jumps from the newly transported
item to an item that had resided their previous to

(53:49):
its rivals. So it's jumped into the new home. It's
gonna catch things in that house on fire. That person
is going to do the same thing. Oh, I gotta
get my stuff out of here, moves it to the
next person's house, inadvertently passing the infection. Yeah, passing the
infection along it. From a very simple perspective, it makes

(54:11):
a lot of sense. I suppose I would think that
a spirit really wouldn't need a ride over to his
next place. He's gonna go to. You know, there's lazy spirits.
You do sit around, eat cheetahs, catch something on fire
and wait for a ride, play Xbox until that happens,
or short the Xbox out. One of the two it happens. Well,
I'm totally buying into this spirit thing. But what are

(54:32):
the theories do we have? Well, I got one that
you'll totally buy into. Yeah, yeah, okay, I said they
were flying objects seen in the area, glowing orbs over
the ocean, and UFOs flying in the distance. Their stories
of helicopter chasing something but never quite being able to
catch it. Those sightings supposedly became a regular occurrence right

(54:58):
about the same time that all of the fires started,
so that has led people to posit that it's aliens
that are causing the fires. Of the aliens did it right?
Why though this I love this, this is hol hilarious
to me, is that one article I read said they
were doing it as a way to test how we

(55:21):
as a society or a group would react and how
good our response would be to a crisis like a fire.
So once these pyromaniac aliens figure out how our response
patterns are, they'll be able to just in vain because
they'll know how to outwit us because they'll already know
what we do is a predictable pattern. Because a small

(55:43):
Italian village on an island is probably the best way
to test that small sample size. Baby, it's all about
the small sample size. I don't know, man, that just
it just seems like, yeah, you'd want to like, if
you're going to a place for you as an alien.
You don't really know that these guys are representative in

(56:05):
terms of the way they would respond to anything. Right, true,
in the size witch. You know, if they're powerful enough
to set things remotely on fire, wouldn't they send any
people on fire? Well, I can just imagine that it's
you know, it's it's some drone alien worker in the
drone alien worker reconnaissance office saying where am I gonna

(56:25):
put this? I don't know. All those humans sound alike,
these ones sound fine. This looks like a big enough
settlement will use it. I mean, it could be that,
or it could be that it's total OUI or the
aliens were like, this place has been around for a
long time. It's probably the pinnacle of what We've been watching.
This place for a thousand years. It hasn't changed. Therefore

(56:49):
it's perfect. Yeah exactly, or maybe not. Yeah, I'm gonna
move on. Yeah, the next one I actually will. The
next theory is actually the possible one in my mind.
I know, because you were bragging about it last week.
You were like, the theory that I came up with
is actually supported. I would try to deport it with

(57:10):
this seventeen page document that I found on the internet. Yes, exactly, Okay, Well,
our our next theory is volcanic gases. What are volcanic gases? Well,
you know when you eat a lot of beans. No, no,
let me. Let me explain a little bit of the
geography of the area. I think the geology is pretty

(57:31):
easy in terms of we know that there's a ton
of freaking volcanoes in that area. But the geography of
the area is this village is right on the coastline,
so it's at sea level for the most part, and
as you move inland, the land rises up and there's
little valleys. So if you keep that in mind, we're

(57:52):
going to keep going through some of this description, but
that that geography is what is important. Right above of
the village, just a couple of miles up is what
is called the Auto Strata A twenty and it's a
four lane motorway. It runs around the coast to Sicily,
and at the time two thousand and four it was

(58:16):
brand new. They finished construction in two thousand and four.
The train in the area, like we're talking about, there's
the valleys, it's kind of hilly. The engineers civil engineers
love this, well, I don't want to go over, I'll
just dig a tunnel. So they dug a tunnel. They
dug a bunch of tunnels, and what they did is
they would tunnel through the mountain. They would come to
a valley, they would build a bridge to the next mountain.

(58:39):
They bore a hole in that hill, come out. If
it was decent flat land, they put the road on
the ground, and then they do it again wherever they
had to drive around sicily on that road. The twenty
looks really cool. If you look at it in the
satellite views, you can actually see the shadow of the
bridge thrown across onto the shape of the valley. It's

(59:01):
really they're they're there. They're kind of that that span
arch bridge, the lower arch underneath, not on top. The
really neat looking. But this is what they did well.
The idea is that what happened is as they were
digging those tunnels, they accidentally popped open a fissure or

(59:22):
some kind of vein that was connected to a magma
system or a volcanic system. Nothing major, because if they'd
hit something major, we'd have known about it. Stuff had
blowed up, and I say that my best American accents.
Stuff blowed up, it would have been obvious. But instead
nothing happened, which means that they hit a crack or

(59:44):
they hit a small leak so this theory runs that
there's a fissure in a tunnel and it's not obvious
and it's leaking gas or we're talking explosive gas. So
not just carbon monoxide, but methane and things like that.
Are these things found in volcanoes? I know two of

(01:00:04):
the gases that would be flammable in a volcanic mixture
would be methane and hydrogen sulfide. Yeah, I know those ones.
What else is going to be in there? It's it's
a mixed bag. Were not yet? But those uh don't
those kind of odoriferous? No, they're not, they're not, they're not.

(01:00:26):
You gotta remember, is a lot of the gases that
we use that could I mean, like, methane does put
off kind of that sewer smell, Hydrogen sulfide does not.
So we're used to have a lot of gases having
like this is a common misnumbers. People like I would
know if I had a gas leak, you know, because
it smells like rotten eggs. Well, when you're out in
the woods, nobody's artificially put that rotten egg smell in it. Well, yeah,

(01:00:50):
that's that, that is true, because they do they do
put that in methane yeah, natural gas yeah yeah, so no,
those are the flammable. So though, as I we were
talking about again, and I'm going back to the geography,
if this crack is coming out of a tunnel, which
is uphill, it's gonna run down the valley, which this town,
this village sits in kind of the basin of a valley,

(01:01:15):
so it would all run down hit low spots create
little pockets of potentially explosive gas that if there's a spark,
which Okay, my TVs on, it's got little sparks running
around in it, or my computers running, or my car
ignition is on, but the cars not on. I can
see how that could cause a fire. What it doesn't

(01:01:39):
appropriately answer is the fires that are caught in things
like furniture or electronics that aren't turned on, or hair
dryer that's not plugged in. It also does in the
caf its for like you know, hard drives being wiped
and gates opening and closing on by themselves. It does not.

(01:01:59):
It does, and it really doesn't. Uh, there is there
is some discussion. At least one article that I came
across was talking about the fact that if it is
some kind of volcanic fisher that is leaking gas, It's
probably gonna be leaking volcanic ash at the same time
in very small quantities. But that's going to drift down.

(01:02:21):
And I've got to I've got to read this because
I didn't exactly get it. But this is what I'm understanding,
is that there is a bit of friction that has
caused between the ash when two pieces of ash rub
together or go across each other, which would create a
static charge. So if enough of that builds up, it's

(01:02:44):
going to create enough static charge that could potentially start
a fire. Then you would be dealing with like random
fireballs as well. You know, it wouldn't necessarily always be things.
I'm plus, I think people in the village would be
noticing that there's ash all over everything, you would think,
But if it's in small amounts or it's ground into stuff,
I can see how it's not noticeable. But Devin brings

(01:03:05):
up a good point because that ties back into remember
the UFOs, the the glowing balls over the ocean. I
guess that's true. I forgot about that. It could be
the old men in Black explanation of swamp gas or
a burning ball of gas floating over the horizon potentially,
So that's a bunch of their gas. It's just gone

(01:03:27):
out and got caught on fire somehow caught on fire
a cigarette and flickted straight up a hundred feet. And yeah.
The other thing about the thing about this theory that
I'm not so sure about is that, like, besides that
the flammable ones psychhydrogen, sulfide, and methane, there are a
lot of other gases that are associated with volcanic leaks,

(01:03:49):
and some of them are pretty caustic and and you
would be smelling them. Yeah, um, well, you know. And
one thing that we haven't talked about a little bit,
if we're gonna go into the series just a tad
bit more, is there have in reports of people saying
that as they were going through the tunnels around the
village on the twenty and I want to say that

(01:04:10):
the other road is the it's like the eighteen or
it's an eighteen. I remember that it's it's in the teens.
Is that there are random events where a car will
shut off the electronics with car die car coose to
a stop, they started back up, it starts, ignition fires,

(01:04:31):
and then they drive away. And they don't know how
much that happens when people have reported that in that area,
And I don't know if it's in the tunnels, or
if it's on the other road, or if it's on
the bridge. Like the reporting on it was very scant,
But it could be that it's some of those more
caustic other gases which when the car sucks it in

(01:04:54):
instead of oxygen, is going to kill the ignition, you
know in the in the cylinder gas can on ignite.
If there is not oxygen and it's some non gas
that doesn't burn right with it, then the car dies.
But it it rolls far enough forward to get out
of that pocket of gas, so then when they go

(01:05:14):
to turn it over, it sucks in air again. So
that's that's why the pocketpants of the car don't get assixiated.
Then they're moving too quickly. Yeah, it's not perfect, but
it's one of those things that I've heard or of read,
so I think I think the explanation for that is
these people just need to get their car worked on.
It's some auto body shop in the village or car

(01:05:34):
repair shop in the village that's doing it. Yeah, that's
probably what it is. So it could very well be. Um.
I know Devon likes this because we we've used nefarious
a number of times and this this plays a little
bit here. Well we've got our next theory and it
plays a little bit into the volcanic bid and then
it goes on to the much more defarious aspect. So

(01:05:55):
this kind of ties the two together. Is that when
there are vachanic eruptions, there tend to be some electro
magnetic issues that go on. Because I don't understand why,
because I'm not a volcanologist, as we've said, but it happens. Well,
that is one reason people say that there's these electro
magnetic issues. The other one is that some bad organization

(01:06:19):
is targeting the town. And what they're doing is they're
they're using a high powered electro magnetic beam shooting it
at the village from somewhere most likely out to see,
which I gotta say sounds like a total evil supervillain move. Um,
and they're frying stuff in the town. Yeah, that sounds legit. Yeah,

(01:06:44):
this is actually Yeah, Ano this works because I would
I would not be at all surprised if some of
the some some super villain wasn't working on some sort
of volcano lancing super laser. They could the blackmail of
the world. You're laughing, but this is like a serious
vocal Yes, a volcano that says super laser that. Yeah,

(01:07:04):
And you could just say, hey, guys, if you know
what a hot lava boiling down to your town, you've
been giving a cough up like a million bucks man, Yeah,
right now, one million, one billion dollars. Yeah. And so
it might be that these are kind of beta versions,
they're weaker beta versions. He still hasn't gotten all the
way up to the superpowered one end or she possibly

(01:07:25):
she or it as in a organization, because it's there's
there's a there's a US Air Force base right in
that area. So of course the finger gets pointed them.
The finger gets pointed at the government, at aliens, or
at a super villain. The quote that I've got here
talks about the fact that it would have to be

(01:07:46):
all ultra high frequency beam and it would have to
be transmitted somewhere between three hundred banker hurts and three
giga hurts. Makes sense. I mean they have been they
have been mucking around with the mp AMP weapons and
so well, we've talked about that mazers and every other
kind of silly laser item like that. Yeah, yeap, device

(01:08:09):
wouldn't set things on fire. Yeah, I'm gonna say no. Yeah,
it was not meant to do that. Yeah. Our next,
sadly theory, our next theory, sadly could be one of
the more plausible, and that it was it was a
local boy slash man. Yeah, that makes sense to me.
And by a boy slash man, I mean a boy

(01:08:32):
in two thousand and four, isn't a teenage boy who
is now a man, Because one of the Italian reports
that I found was talking about the fact that they
had found they believed, they authorities believe they finally figured
out what the problem was, and it was just sepi Posino.
He's twenty six and he had been so that means

(01:08:53):
he's been fifteen sixteen years old at the time. And
they're saying he's one who starts all the fires. Yeah,
he was running around starting fires. Kind of a pyromaniac situation.
Burning thing. That's not unheard of. It's not unheard of, though.
More unheard of is like breaking into a house to

(01:09:13):
set a hair dryer on fire and then escaping before
anybody noticed that you're in the house. Well, the hair dryer,
in my mind is kind of suspect because whenever I
walk into a room in my house and I find
something on fire, I don't stop to take pictures of it.
I grabbed I haven't seen the picture kind of just
looks like there's a flashlight. It just looks like there's

(01:09:39):
like a bright light, and I am I am taking
the photo and face value according to what it's written
about it. That's so, you're right, it does look a
little suspect. But here's here's what we're saying. Is that,
remember I told her. What I'm saying is I told
you that when the Feds came in they had put
up all these cameras, or when the government had come
in and then the fire stopped. Yeah, well, there evidently

(01:10:01):
is some footage just at the beginning of that time,
and one of this one of those pieces of footage
shows him by a car and doing something almost the
strike a match movement, if you were going to strike
a match, a wooden match away from yourself, and he's
in front of a car, and then it's obvious it's

(01:10:22):
one of those cameras that does every five or ten
seconds and then suddenly the car is smoky and billowing.
He's moved away, and then the fire department comes running
around to it. It almost, uh, it's really it's kind
of comical to watch. It's almost like a Benny Hills skit,
the way everybody runs around but they run over and

(01:10:43):
you can see him standing there, almost as if he's,
you know, on his phone, go. I don't know what's
going on or what happened over there. I do. I
question it because there was so many things, and I
really don't know how one guy could have got into
so many places unless nobody in that village ever locked

(01:11:04):
their freaking doors. You can't entirely rule out the possibility
of copycats too well. But the thing is what I
don't understand, and maybe this is tacked on, is all
the other weird the computer drives wiped. Okay, I could
see somebody goes in with the magnet just wipes the drives,
But what about car doors and weird electronics stuff, you know, locks,

(01:11:26):
opening and closing, things like that, those things happen. I'm
saying is that I don't know that those aren't tacked
onto the story. I can't say they're not. It just
it seems like a lot, and it seems like there's
According to the article I was reading, he might not
have done it all on his own because his dad,
at the time that he got in trouble, was head

(01:11:48):
of the fund to compensate people for things that had
caught on fire. Maybe his dad was helping him a
little bit once he figured out he was doing it,
and hey, help me keep my job. Kind the thing.
I don't know. Yeah, I mean, maybe Giuseppia is totally
totally the one who did it all. He probably is

(01:12:10):
Devin Judge jury right there. I think. I think it's
entirely possible to that at least some of these things
that caught fire, people just thought, hey, I want to
get on the act. I want the guy from the
National Enquiry to come by an interview me. So I'm
gonna let my toaster on fire, or yea, this hair
dryer doesn't work anymore, I'm gonna light it on fire
and then the fund will replace it. Yeah there's that. Yeah, Yeah,

(01:12:31):
that's that could be could do that. You could intentionally
overload something. I would do that and then plug it
back into the sock and say, look at caught on
fire right there. Oh my gosh, I need a new one.
I know this is the crappy one, but I'd love
the fancy super chrome queas and art version please. I mean,
that's the version I bought. When I bought it, you
just can't tell because it's so melted. Yeah, there's a

(01:12:54):
lot of evidence of people pulling that kind of fraud
off in the past to say that it's entirely pousible.
And as far as wiping your drive, your hard drive,
I guess I don't see what the hell you'd get
out of wipe in your computer, because every time my
computer dies, I am so angry, even if I have
it backed up. Yeah, I know, but no, I mean

(01:13:14):
I I would put a compensation for a claim for compensation,
Like you know that drive had that was filled with
cat videos. Spent a whole lot of time. It took
me five years at working, you know, twenty hours a
week to build up my collection of cat videos. They're
all gone. I would like to be compensated for my time.
I have a feeling that might actually get thrown out.

(01:13:35):
That surprises me. I got I've got to back up
my cat videos. I do have a couple of bits
that I want to throw out. These are not specifically
related to any theory, but they are explanations of some
of the things that were going on. Do you remember
I talked about the water pipes that suddenly, after all
the fires, suddenly water ironically, water pipes are bursting. There

(01:13:57):
is a theory on how that might be happening, and
that is through what is it's called a probably mispronouncing
cathodic or cathodic process. I think it's cathodic because it's
the cathode. I think that's right. But basically, what it
is is that you've got a water pipe and it's
welded together with some material, and somehow electronic charge is

(01:14:21):
getting to the pipe and that's going to corrode and
weaken that seem so that's what's causing us. So it's
almost like there's an electrical leak in the ground that
is weakening everybody's water pipes, because then it gets in
the system screws the whole thing up. Um. I must
say that this this village looks pretty old, it does.

(01:14:42):
It looks like it's been around a long time. I'm
going to give you that. The last thing I want
to talk about, though, is Devon's favorite part. The egg plants. Yes,
the evil, evil egg plants. Did a little bit of
research on this, and I, okay, I admit my ignorance
right off the bat. I thought all egg plants were
that weird dark purple. They are absolutely not. They are

(01:15:06):
as varied as the rainbow. They come in a million colors,
and most of them start out one color and then
turn another. I also want to point out the fact
that if this is a local farmer who is trying
to save money, he may have gotten eggplant seeds from
someone saying that they had a specific kind and did

(01:15:27):
quite the sloppy job and gave him a variety of
egg plants. Because I've had this at our house, is
that we'll say, oh, we're gonna plant this, and you
plant a bunch of seeds and then the one oddball,
like what is what is that weird carrot? And it
turns out not to be a carrot, but you know,
something utterly different. Yeah, an eggplant which I'll never grow. Well,

(01:15:49):
it could have been actually also a little farmer playing
a little prank on the press. You know, I know this,
I know that they're gonna come out all colors, but
these guys probably have as ever seen purple ones, you know,
So I'll ring them out to my farm and I'll
wind up my multi colored egg plants, and you know,
I make and just you know, kind of make make
a fool out of the one thing that I've always
seen In the articles those they said the entire crop
had to be destroyed because they couldn't sell it well,

(01:16:12):
which sounds kind of punkish to me. Cross Pollination is
also a thing, like you know, when you go out
in the summer and there's like this one bush that's
got flowers on it that's like half one color and
half another color. That's a thing. Yeah, I don't I
don't know if that's as prevalent in eggplant because it
seemed like they were very very linear in their their process.

(01:16:35):
But it completely could be, if possible, if he had,
you know, one plant that was a different color that
got cross pollinated with a bunch of them. I don't know. Yeah, yeah,
I personally think it was a seed mix up, That's
what I'm thinking to or I really think the guy
was drown asparagus and didn't know what it was. Yeah, yeah,
And the guy probably might he might very well deliberately
mixed up the seas produced different colors, you know, because

(01:16:55):
that would make your fields look a lot prettier if
they're all multi rainbow colored and everything. That's that's really
all we've got on this, this little village. So I'm
gonna vote for human agency. I'm I'm inclined to go
with the volcanic gas online. But you know, we never
talked about did we ever vote on the other's all?
Who cares? Not? No? No, I think I think I

(01:17:17):
think with mine the value of the headless Man. I
think it was probably just unrelated. I think it was Turrock,
son of Stone. Yeah, it could have been that. I
don't want to think about. We're just glossing over mine. Okay,
I'm totally okay with that. Okay, Well, so it concludes
another episode of Thinking Sideways the podcast. Hey, you probably

(01:17:40):
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(01:18:03):
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(01:18:25):
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(01:18:47):
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that's pretty much it. Hopefully you're gonna take our advice

(01:19:07):
and stay the hell away from these places. Vacation somewhere normal,
much nicer now. Actually, I think if I ever get
the chance, I think I'm going to go to Sicily
and go to this little village. It looks pretty cool.
Yeah yeah, yeah, I would. I just wouldn't stay there. Yeah.
The Valley of the Headless Man not so much. No, no,
yeah yeah. Okay, Well that's it. Then, see you all
next week. Later everyone,