Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 33: KILL BILLies, Vol. 2: Haint Tales
Episode Date: October 31, 2017Scary stories from special guests: Felix Biederman, Elizabeth Catte & Josh Howard, Emily Hilliard, Drew Nutter, and Sally Sexton. The second part to our two part Halloween special. Tracklisting (Star...t Time): Intro "Sexual Hauntings" by Emily Hilliard (3:29) "Bullseye" by Drew Nutter (10:29) "The Gathright Phantom of Lake Moomaw" by Elizabeth Catte + Josh Howard (11:58) "Virginia Haint Tales" by Tom + Tarence (15:47) "Adactilydium" by Tarence (26:12) "The Great Chicago Potted Plant Caper of 2006, a Psychological Thriller" by Felix Biederman (32:55) "The Big Toe" by Sally Sexton (Tom's Grandmother) (50:26) Outro: "Halloween Town 2012" by Dog Layer
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Five years ago, the Trillbilly Workers Party, Masters of the Macabre, created their hallmark
of horror.
Kill those sisters!
Many would argue that nothing of significance has happened since.
Until now.
There's no life without darkness.
I can't.
Cheers. Hello everybody. This is so weird right now because Terrence and I are huddled to one mic like a goddamn doo-wop group.
We've been pushed to the margins of the podcasting world.
We live in an alternate reality in which Tom and I have been exiled to podcasting purgatory.
Where we no longer get our own mics.
Everybody only gets one mic.
We have to share it.
Share a set of headphones.
Share a set of headphones.
Share one mic and pretend we're a doo-wop group.
But the quality is not that bad.
Does it sound good?
It sounds pretty good.
I can't hear shit.
It sounds pretty good in headphones.
Take this on faith. We're good. Welcome, everybody. right sound good sounds pretty good it sounds pretty good it sounds pretty good take take
take this on faith we're good um welcome everybody it's a part two of our halloween special
um you can check out part one it's called volume one kill bill is this one might be called
oh hell i don't know volume two right uhies. Right. Something like that.
We have some scary stories lined up today for you all.
In the great Appalachian storytelling tradition.
The haint tale tradition, as we call it.
Right. And we even have a Midwesterner submitting a story, too.
And, you know, there's some overlap between...
We got a West coaster too and a
west coaster too right we're all over the map we're all over the map it's it's uh we got to
end this regionalism right yeah like john kelly said compromise or lack of compromise caused the
civil war so uh you know that's how you know we're recording this literally on the day of Halloween.
This is how bad we've procrastinated and why we're exiled to one Mike Island.
Anyways, so we're going to go ahead and get some of these started.
But we'll be interjecting, I think, at various points with our own stupid-ass scary stories.
Hope you enjoy.
So I've recently come into possession of this book entitled Sexual Hauntings Through the Ages, published in 1993 by Colin Waters.
in 1993 by Colin Waters. And I'll read the NFLAP description of this book that has been quite an inspiration to my own imagination and fantasy life, I must say. So Sexual Hauntings Through
the Ages is a titillating collection of over 40 real cases gathered from around the world
and ranging from harmless naked figures to horrifying and bizarre entities who have brought
death and destruction to those who have come into contact with them. Dark rectories, modern airports,
ordinary private houses, and pleasant country estates all have their stories to tell. Ghostly figures of
hooded monks, headless bodies, and strange goblin-like figures compete in their attempts
to spread terror, as do the spirits of noisy skulls, unearthly disembodied screams, and the
naked dancer who appeared in the middle of a crowded dance floor. I think I was at that party, actually.
Author Colin Waters is by no means a firm believer in all things ghostly,
but his open-minded approach to his subject is evident.
In his efforts to present only genuine cases,
he has intentionally discarded a number of stories
where details were unclear or some facts were doubtful.
So this is a thoroughly curated volume. What remains is an absorbing collection of sexual
hauntings, many of which are here told for the first time. The reader is left to make up his
or her own mind as to the explanation behind them. So, because this book has been such an inspiration for me,
and I think actually the titles themselves are actually just as good as the stories, if not better,
and I thought they might inspire some of your own tales of sexual hauntings.
your own tales of sexual hauntings. And they've actually inspired some of ours. In fact, at a party this past Saturday in Charleston, West Virginia, we created our own titles for sexual
hauntings based on those included in this volume. i'm gonna read some of my favorite titles
and then some of the few that we made up um so to begin naked embrace at reddell's den rectory
there's a lot of rectories in this book. I think maybe because it sounds like something else.
I don't know, maybe there's a lot of sexual hauntings that happen in rectories.
Patty's Backyard
The Brothel for Ghosts and Specters
Mary Fitton Visits Australia
The Ghost of the sex-crazed cat.
The wicked highway woman.
The voyeuristic wizard.
The marquee and the radiant boy.
The transvestite valet.
Granny's woodshed.
Naked bald Agnes
The heavy breather of Heathrow
The mooner of Romney Marsh
Archibald's orgy in hell
A sight for sore eyes
The flagellated nun
The gelded ghost
The groaning bubbles
The urinating goblin
Ravished by a glass tube in the Tower of London
The skulls that had sex
Fanny of Cock Lane, the marriage bed monk, the
naked five who refused to die, the gypsy girl and her lesbian lover, the ghosts
who broke wind. I'm not sure why that's included in a sexual hauntings
book, but no kink shaming. The choof at choof cottage. The copulating couple. The phantom The Phantom Groper of Borley Rectory.
Australia's Adam and Eve.
Bathtime at Sutherfellside.
The Screams of the Homosexual King.
The Ghostly Pickup.
And The Suckling Witch.
And now for a few original titles, collaboratively created.
The New Bile Dungeon of the Pulsing Used Bookstore.
The Horny Fish-Netted Haint of the Scottish Highlands.
The Langwood Naked Hitchhiker Pegging the Senate Floor The Desperately Leather Castle at Suck Cemetery
The Masticating Sensual Bus Boy
The Spooning Skeleton at the Abandoned Pool House
The Frosty Manhole at Appalachian Power Park. And that's actually the name of our
minor league baseball stadium here in Charleston, West Virginia. I don't think I've discovered the
Frosty Manhole bar at the ballpark, but maybe next season. Sounds pretty cool.
season. Sounds pretty cool.
The baker with elephantitis in the dungeon.
The sex-starved
earlobe in the
rambling bog.
The sweaty lovers
fucking in Joe's apartment.
The furries skull-fucking the
undead at Long Point.
The messy succubus farts in the castle of Berkeley Springs,
which is a real castle in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia, in fact.
And to round it out, the caressing werewolves of London at Old MacDonald's Farm.
What's up, Trillbillies?
It's your number one favorite guest, Drew Nutter,
reporting live.
Well, not reporting live.
This is a fucking recording,
but you know what I'm saying.
Here in England,
here in sunny London, England, and I wanted to tell you guys a spooky Halloween story so when I was
about 10 years old I took a shower and because I'm a very very fancy man the
shower in my mom's house has a glass door opposed to a curtain.
And obviously this glass door gets all fogged up
whenever you take a hot shower.
I had finished my shower and I'd opened the window
and all of the sort of fog on the glass door had gone away
except for the shape of a perfect crosshairs, like the crosshairs that you
would see in a sniper rifle. This was happening in the middle of the DC sniper killing spree.
Upon later review, I think I might have dreamed this, but I remember it like it actually happened to me. So happy Halloween to the Trillbillies, to all your listeners, and stay safe and spooky out in EKY.
Big love. This is the Gathrite Phantom of Lake Newmaw by Elizabeth Catt, read by Josh Howard.
It came to pass one day that an old redneck, let's call him Rodney,
found himself in a bind down there at the Gathrite Wildlife Management Area in southwest Virginia on a frosty winter night.
Rodney had just finished an unsuccessful day of hunting and was
heading back to his truck empty-handed apart from his best dog and some Slim Jim wrappers when he
heard what sounded like a crunch of tires on gravel in the ridge below. I'm caught, Rodney thought to
himself, but I ain't gonna make it easy on him. Rodney had been hunting without a license, you see,
and figured a game warden had seen his truck and decided to investigate. He was a well-known poacher, and he had escaped many fines, but everyone knew his truck, and he
didn't blame the warden for thinking he was up to no good, because he was. Rodney turned
off his flashlights, grabbed his dog, and settled into the little bit of cupboard offered
to them by a small cluster of trees up on the ridge. It was fiercely cold, and it snowed
the night before, and his dog was
reckless. Rodney took stock of his options and determined there was no way he could loop
back to his truck without being seen, unless he wanted to walk a few miles through the
snow in the dark, and his only hope was that his makeshift blind, slightly above the warden
on the ridge, would conceal his position. Sure enough, Rodney soon spotted the glow
of a flashlight about a quarter mile in the distance, and judged by the way the warden was walking back and forth several dozen yards before moving up a bit in the direction of the ridge and repeating the process, he was determined.
It was almost an hour before the warden made it near the ridge, and Rodney felt frozen.
If he starts coming up this ridge, I'm just going to turn myself in, he said to himself.
Although he dreaded the confrontation, there was something not right, he thought, about the way
the warden was moving. Slow and with a pattern, but also never stopping to check his phone or
investigate an area more closely, and that flashlight beam was almost too steady. He almost
couldn't make out any features on the person below, or a uniform, and he couldn't be completely sure it wasn't someone up to something worse than coaching.
His dog had also taken to whimpering, not loudly, but with a low whine that Rodney had never heard before.
As quietly as possible, Rodney took his eyes off the warden and started going through his pockets to make sure there wasn't anything on him that might get him into a little bit of extra trouble with the law,
just in case it came to that.
But when he looked up, that light had vanished.
It was pitch dark, and it seemed impossible
that someone would try to navigate out of those woods without a flashlight.
Just to be sure, however, Rodney sat there for another two hours,
listening for, but never hearing,
the crunching noise that had taken for a truck
pulling out the lane when he decided to make a break for his truck rodney didn't know whether
or not to run or to walk slow or to try to creep real silent he had to be careful going down the
ridge but what helped him make up his mind to run was when he saw a more like what he didn't see, down below. There was no tracks in the snow,
no footprints whatsoever. Rodney had, in his mind, marked out the warden's entire journey back and
forth by the tree line, but he couldn't find a single disturbance in the snow, so he ran. Now on
that night, Rodney vowed to never go illegally hunting ever again, but it wasn't long before he
broke that promise. This time, Rodney wasn't out all night, and the weather was finer.
But when he got back to Gathright, sure enough,
walking back to his truck after another unsuccessful outing,
he heard a truck pull up behind him, too close to be friendly.
Angrily, he turned around, but there was nothing and no one there.
And this time, Rodney never went poaching again.
You just heard stories from Emily Hilliard,
our good friend Drew Nutter.
Elizabeth Kett and Josh Howard.
Yeah.
And I think that catches us up.
That catches us up.
You brought an interesting volume in here, Terrence.
I have a volume of Virginia Folk Tales, one of which I wanted you to read because it was right up your alley both of them both of the there's three that I marked out and maybe I'll read
two of them one of them overlaps very nicely with the themes of the show this
is from Fletcher Sulfurage in Coburn Weiss County County, November 18, 1940.
It was about 25, maybe 30 years ago.
There was an old man named Greer, lived out in Flatwoods,
right close to where I was raised.
He was called an unbeliever, didn't go to meeting,
or didn't believe in any church or anything.
This old man had a wife and several children.
One boy, about 15 years old old was an awful good singer.
This boy took sick and died, and they buried him in the graveyard up on the point just above the house.
About a year, maybe not that long after the boy died, there was a big revival going on near Greer's,
and his wife and girls all went.
He wouldn't go, stayed at home by himself.
They would try to get him to go to the meetings, but he wouldn't do it.
They got the preacher to come out one night and talk to him, trying to get him to go, but it done no good.
He said, no, you would just as well hush. I'm not going.
The revival went on. The girls were all saved.
Mrs. Greer had been a Christian a long time.
One night, just after the meeting had broke up, and they got home, and they were sitting around talking,
and Mrs. Greer and the girls was pleading with him to go next night they heard somebody singing went like it was up at that graveyard and just plumb blank which was the
old word for exactly which is i found out like the boy that had died it came nearer and nearer
till it seemed to be right over the house then it stopped a little in a little light come right
through the wall in the corner of the house and moved right around next to the ceiling until it was right over the bed where Mr. Greer and his
wife slept, and came right down the wall and went under the bed. They looked under the bed,
but couldn't see anything. But after a while, it came out and went right back up the wall,
around the ceiling, and out through the wall. Then the singing started again and went off up
the hill toward the graveyard. It was exactly 10 o'clock when it started. Next night they got home earlier than usual and had
gone to bed by that time. They heard the singing again and again. It came on down the point and
over the house and hushed. Then the light came through the wall and around the ceiling and down
the wall and under the bed. And the bed just lifted up and set over in the floor and began to dance about it's pretty creepy they jumped out of it
and mr greer it's funny to imagine them being in the bed while the bed is dancing but they jumped
out of it and mr greer grabbed it and tried to hold it but it just throwed him about and kept
on jumping about after a while the bed moved back to where it had been, and the light
came out from under it, crept back up the wall, around the edge, and out through the solid wall,
and the singing started off again. It got rumored around, and the whole neighborhood gathered in to
see and hear it. The fifth night, everybody at meeting, which is church, nearly came to see it.
It'd done the same thing. Four of the strongest men they could pick out got one of each corner
and tried to hold the bed in place, but they just couldn't do it.
It just stirred them about, same as if they had been dolls.
It just kept right on.
Mr. Greer seemed to be thinking a lot.
The sixth night, his wife talked him into going to meeting.
Again, that's church.
That night, it came again.
The seventh night, he went to and went to the mourner's bitch.
That night, it was just the same thing.
The ninth night, he confessed religion, and the singing was not heard at the light scene anymore.
I didn't see this or hear it myself, but there are lots of people in the Flatwoods who was there and seen it and heard it.
I don't know what it was or what it was for, but it converted old man Greer.
I've done the same thing several nights after getting really, really drunk.
I swear I ain't't gonna do it again
deliver me from this right right you know that's interesting because that story mirrors the johnny
booger story does it a little bit like the one you remember the guy we went and visited his grave
yeah halloween yeah we do dumb stuff like that right right right how so what is the johnny but
what are the outlines?
Johnny Boogers is a little bit different,
because he was like an avowed witch,
but like the same details about making the bed dance.
The dead dance.
Right, right, right.
That's pretty tight.
I just like the dancing bed.
But poltergeist experiences are uniquely terrifying, I think.
Because it's like you have a ghost or apparition manipulating matter.
Yeah.
And that's pretty fucking scary.
That is pretty creepy.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think of all the ghostly shit, like seeing stuff and all that kind of stuff,
the poltergeist thing is the creepiest because it's at least somewhat plausible.
Right.
You know what I mean?
Right.
Not like I believe in ghosts necessarily, but what I'm saying is, like, I don't know.
It just seems like, you know, stuff shit moving.
Right.
It's much more plausible than seeing, like, a ghostly fucking Robert E. Lee figure in a graveyard or something.
Oh, I agree.
So there was one I wanted you to read in the style of...
What's his name? Jenkins?
Or whatever that calls into the swap shop.
Jankum?
Yeah, yeah.
Jankum.
You don't have to read the whole thing that way.
But I just...
It's a very short one. I don't know if I could stay in character the whole time
The awfulest hank tale I ever heard
Was one back then
It's alright the name of this one is
A ghost makes a couple argue
Rachel Gardner
Interviewed by James Taylor Adams
In Glenmorgan Wise County Virginia
May 5th 1941 All the best stories in thismorgan, Wise County, Virginia on May 5th 1941. All the
best stories in this volume come from Wise County
Southwest Virginia.
The awfulest
hank tale I ever heard was one about
old man Smith Fouts who died
with typhoid over on Lion Fork
of the Kentucky
River. If Roy
the informant's brother, Roy
Mitchell, was here, he could
tell it so that it...
All the little sick boxes are fucking
in. Right. You gotta get in the
character. Yeah.
Let me start from
the top. Okay.
The awfulest hank tale I ever heard was
one about old man Smith Fouts, who
died with typhoid over on Lion Fork
on Kentucky River.
If Roy, the informant's brother, Roy Mitchell, was here, he could tell it so that it is a sight
to hear. Roy told me about it. Roy married old man Fouts' girl. All of the family nearly died
in one fall with typhoid fever. You know it hit, you know it used to strike in here and kill a lot of people.
All of his children and his wife had already died,
and he was going down with it at Brother Roy's.
He knowed he was going to die,
so he told them before he died that he wanted them to burn the bed he was lying on.
Well, after he died, they didn't burn it.
You've got to burn the fucking bed.
Burn the bed, people.
Always burn the bed of your sick relatives that die.
It wasn't long until Roy and his wife started falling out and fussing.
And one night they was mad and was sleeping in separate beds.
One of them was sleeping on the bed on which old man Fouts had died.
All at once, somebody knocked on the door.
Roy said,
Who's there and what do you want?
Never heard a thing, said.
They were knocking again.
Roy asked them what they was wanting and who it was.
Then something said,
It's me, Roy Smith.
Don't you know my voice?
You promised to burn that bed.
You'll never see any peace and satisfaction
until you do. I had the typhoid.
I had the typhoid.
That was all they heard.
These people obviously weren't hypochondriacs.
If it was me and you, we would have burnt that fucking bed.
We would have burned the house.
So Roy and his wife
got friendly and talked about it.
And Roy said he'd burn the bed.
But she didn't want to burn it.
So he went on a few days, and they had another big racket,
and they'd go past speaking.
And that night they was sleeping in separate beds
when they heard somebody knock again.
Roy asked who it was, and he said,
It's me, Roy.
Burn that bed, and you'll live a happy life.
And if you don't, you'll never see any more peace.
They put it off
and they just fussed and fussed.
If I had been visited by an apparition
one time and they told me to burn
the bed,
I'd burnt the goddamn bed.
Well, she might have been like me. She might have been one of those people
that thought that exposure... Super skeptical. Yeah, super might have been like me. She might have been one of those people that thought that exposure...
Super skeptical.
Yeah, super skeptical of ghosts
and that exposure to germs and other stuff
bolstered your immune system.
Oh, okay.
She was like,
I like sleeping in typhoid bed
and ghosts aren't real.
So I'm the...
You're the person.
Yeah.
I'm the woman in this scenario.
The wife in this scenario.
You're the husband.
They put it off and they just fussed and fussed.
They never had any trouble till then.
But then they couldn't give one another a good word.
Then they heard it again and again, five or six more times,
till one morning Roy got up and told his wife she could say what she wanted to,
but he's going to burn that old deathbed.
And he rolled it up and carried it out in the yard and he burned it.
They never heard anything again.
And after that, they got along as good as any two
people ever did. So what I like
so much about this story
was that it's prefaced with
the awfulest haint tale
I ever heard.
It's like,
this is the most awful haint tale
you ever heard.
A hang is an old, old antiquated mountain word for ghost, for those, for the uninitiated.
I mean, it's pretty scary.
I only had one more story that I brought, and it wasn't, and I think I've told you about it before.
And I could read it from the book that I brought it in, and maybe I'll do that.
And it's not a scary story.
It's total, it's science. If it's in the same's not a scary story it's total it's science it's
it's the sort of it's in the same vein as a rabies thing oh okay it's one of those things
it's like real life alien um chest burster scene you know what i'm saying
okay this is from stephen j gould's The Panda's Thumb.
More reflections in natural history.
The name of this chapter is called Death Before Birth.
I think I've told you about this before, but just suspend all.
I'm going to act like I've not heard this before.
Like you've not heard it, but you may not recognize it.
Consider the curious life of a male mite in the genus Adactylidium,
as described by E.A. Albadri and MSF.
I don't, these are irrelevant names.
It emerges from its mother's body and promptly dies within a few hours, having done apparently nothing during its brief life.
It attempts, while outside its mother, neither to feed nor to mate.
We know about creatures with short adult lives that may fly a single day after a much lengthier
larval life, for example, but the mayfly mates and ensures the continuity of its kind during
these few precious hours.
The males of Adactylidium seem to do nothing at all but emerge and die.
To solve the mystery, we must study the entire life cycle and look inside the mother's body.
So, buckle up.
The impregnated female of Adactylidium attaches to the egg of a thrips.
A thrips is like another small insect.
That single egg provides the only source of nutrition for rearing all her offspring,
for she will feed on nothing else before her death.
This mite, so far as we know, engages exclusively in sib mating. Thus, it should produce a minimal number of males. Moreover,
since total reproductive energy is so strongly constrained by the nutritional resources of
a single thrips egg, progeny are strictly limited, and the more females, the better.
Indeed, Adactylidium matches our prediction by raising a brood of
five to eight sisters accompanied by a single male who will serve as both brother and husband
to them all. But producing a single male is chancy. If it dies, all sisters will remain
virgins and their mother's evolutionary life is over. If the mite takes a chance on producing
but a single male, thus maximizing its potential brood
of fertile females, two other adaptations might lessen the risk, providing both protection for
the male and guaranteed proximity to his sisters. What better than to rear the brood entirely within
a mother's body, feeding both larvae and adults within her, and even allowing copulation to occur inside her protective shell.
Indeed,
about 48 hours after she attaches to the thrips egg,
six to nine eggs hatch within the body of a female adactylidium.
Nice.
Yes.
Six to nine.
It's all throughout nature.
It's like a spiral.
It's a perfect fucking form.
The larva, the larvae feed
on their mother's body literally devouring her from inside two days later the offspring reach
maturity and the single male copulates with all his sisters by this time the mother's tissues
have disintegrated and her body space is a mass of adult mites, their feces, and their discarded larval and nymphal skeletons.
The offspring then cut holes through their mother's body wall and emerge.
The females must now find a thrips egg and begin the process again.
But the males have already fulfilled their evolutionary role before, quote, birth.
They emerge, react however a mite does to the glories of the outside world and promptly
die how long does that whole process is that just a continual yeah it's just so like as soon as
you're born that's your lot that's your it that's your it's just the recap for everybody the
wikipedia page does a much better job of condensing all that down to a few short sentences
but i'll just want to recap for everybody.
Dactylidium is a genus of mites known for its unusual life cycle.
The pregnant female mite feeds upon a single egg of a thrips,
growing five to eight female offspring and one male in her body.
The offspring devoured their mother from the inside out,
and the single male mite mates with all the daughters when they are still in the mother.
The females, now impregnated, cut holes in their mother's body so that they can emerge
to find new thrips eggs. The male
emerges as well, but does not look
for food or new mates and dies within a few
hours. The females die at the age
of four days when their own offspring
eat them alive from the inside.
There's so much horror
there. That's horror, my friends friends you don't have to look far there's
nothing you're born you commit incest you fucking die there's nothing supernatural metaphysical
whatever about it it's it is cut and dried the world is full of horrors there is no evil in the
world it's all it is all just as it is. Wow.
Yep.
So that to me is a fitting part two to the rabies discussion
of the true horrors of the natural world.
God.
Man.
Let's start a new genre, horror stories of the natural world.
Reality is much scarier than like, yeah,
walking in a dark alley and fucking seeing a ghost bullshit
right it really is it really is rabies is the most well i'm gonna say it's the second uh probably
second worst fate next to uh uh boning all your sisters and then fucking just dropping dead
and then and then if you're a lady fucking eating your mother from the inside out.
Right. And then having your
offspring eat you from the inside out when
they get old enough.
Alright, well on that note, we've really set up
Felix's story, so
that's great.
We'll end ours here.
We'll hear one from Felix
and we'll hear one from your grandma, right?
We've got a good Chapo Tram House garn'll hear one from your grandma, right? And then we'll... We've got a good feet.
We've got a good Chapo Trap House garnet...
What's your grandma's name?
Sally Sexton.
Sally Sexton Mashup.
Chapo Trap House collaboration.
Thanks for everybody for joining us and for submitting your stories this week
for our Halloween special.
We would like to wish you all a great Halloween.
And try not to get too spooked.
And try not to eat your mother from the inside out. Try not to eat your mother from the inside out. We thank you all a great Halloween and try not to get too spooked and try not to eat your mother try not to eat your mother from the inside out we thank you all
hello trailblazers family this is Felix Biederman from Choppo I am
giving you my
scary story
for the Halloween episode
I have scarier
stories that have happened
in my life but
they're kind of downers
most of the scary stories
that people experience they don't have like a
they don't really have like a true conclusion, or they're not fun to listen to, and they're just kind of, you know, they're either something tragic and terrifying that happened to you, or it's, if you know a really stupid person, it's them talking about the time that they thought they ran into a ghost.
So, without further ado, here is the story from my adolescence when I was 16 the
guy the other kid I hung out with the most he had this older brother his older
brother Brian was this 27 year old who hung who hung out with 15- and 16-year-olds,
like his little brother's friends.
He was that type of dude.
And we thought he was cool because he could get alcohol,
and he had all these stories.
He was like a drug dealer in high school who later became a guy who robbed drug dealers,
and so there would always be
something weird going on with him like he drove this suv and one day he pulls up and just the
entire front seat is like charred it's like fucking bombed out and we go brian what the
fuck happened and he goes uh oh yeah someone threw a grenade in my car, someone who hates me.
And he would always just, you know, this was sort of like a matter of fact thing.
Like if you went into his house, there would always be a new weird thing there.
There would be a slot machine one day or a fish tank that always had some weird story to it that really didn't make any sense.
He had all these little bottles of liquor you get on airplanes on top of all his weird accoutrements
and we would ask to drink them, of course, and he would say, no, those are collector's items.
But the year is 2006.
I am 16 years old.
I'm like a shitty little upper-middle-class kid from Hyde Park,
which is where UChicago is,
a kid who is very bored by others in his class
and has just a lifelong rebellious phase where he doesn't want to do school and he's bored
by everything and just likes to game and post online and do reckless shit with people from outside his class of origin.
So that brings me to Wrigleyville in Chicago, Illinois, where the Chicago Cubs are.
For those of you who don't know, Wrigleyville is, take all the worst qualities of the upper
middle class Trump suburbs, put them in the middle of the city, and add an alcoholism
rate of 100%,
and there you go.
It's like a little Rhodesia in Chicago.
It's like a little white ethnostate in the
middle of the city, and it is just
fucking hell on earth.
And Brian had an apartment there with
all the,
you know, slot machines
and fish tanks and fucking, you know, slot machines, and fish tanks, and fucking, you know, couches that talk to you,
because they had a pre-Alexa, like, fucking voice thing, and we, we would hang out there sometimes,
like, so we're, we're hanging out there, like, early summer of 2006 of 2006 you know i'm done with my sophomore year
going into my junior year i'm hanging out with my my two friends brian's younger brother and
our other friend uh i guess i should change the names of those other two uh we'll call them
edward and uh and and joey which did not at all sound like their actual names.
So we're hanging out.
We're drinking Mickey's Big Mouths, and Brian has Xanax,
and we're taking a tiny bit of Xanax because we're little pussy baby children
who can't handle the full bar lifestyle but it's fucking us up pretty
good and we would always like i always like was fascinated by gang and crime shit i never claimed
to have been a part of it but i was just i would read about it a lot and i of course
loved the sopranos and i loved every stupid stupid crime thing I could read and we were
talking about I think black gorilla families and I said something about Big Meech being
in Supermax because I've always been fascinated with Supermax prison and Brian said how do you know about uh big meech i said i don't know and he goes oh you know a lot
and it's just you know any any time that like a fucking like know-it-all shitty little virgin
is like it's a challenging statement like that you just short circuit and i was like
i don't know and and I, like, wanted
to go outside to smoke, because that was just what I would do, I was, like, confronted with
something at the time, and he goes, Brian goes, well, do you guys want to ride on some people?
You know, even being a huge pussy at the time, I couldn't say no because it was like I was so bored by my life and I wanted some experience.
And I thought, well, if I want to be like Tony Soprano, I guess this is how I do it. I ride on somebody.
And I trust Brian and whoever he wants to ride on.
I bet they deserve it.
You know, great judge of character, like always.
And he goes, my neighbors think that I stole their grill.
And that's bullshit.
They just think that because I have priors. I didn't steal their grill and that's bullshit they just think that because i'm a priors i didn't steal
their grill let's fuck with them and i had no idea what that meant but i figured because
he was in charge this would be fine and so we all we me and edward not the little brother
little brother stays in he's like talking to his
girlfriend on the cell phone he stays in
we go with
we go with Brian and
we get into his car
and I was terrified that he meant like
to wave a gun around
or like to fuck some people up or whatever
but what he actually
meant by right on them
was to steal their potted plants and their
mail and you know it was like about I'd say like around midnight in Wrigleyville Lincoln Park ish
area and you know their lights are out they're asleep they have to go to bed and go to their jobs at the law firm the next day.
So we successfully steal so many pot of points, we just fill up layers and layers in the back section of his SUV.
but we get i remember one of the things we got was like samples of something for a doctor's office i get one one of them was a doctor and uh we i remember uh brian being like oh man we could
really flip this shit and me pretending like i knew what i was talking about was like yeah i bet there's some crooked doctors we could call too like i knew anyone who wasn't
also like a 16 year old dumbass and uh we're very i'm very happy i've completed this crime it's a
another thing that separates me from other uh of my socioeconomic strata that I think makes me cooler than them.
And we pull back into his garage, and then the very distinctive brights of a cop car just fucking illuminate the entire vehicle.
car just fucking illuminate the entire vehicle and you know the way that they illuminate you when they're coming up like 20 feet behind you where you're almost blinded by the contrast of
the shadows the backseat versus the parts of the car that are illuminated me and edward we take
like some of the mail and we just fucking book it inside we fucking book it and we're in his
apartment we're fucking panicking because we had run into cops before but when you run into cops
and one of you is white as i was uh and am but continue to be white uh and you you just have
the things that 16 year olds usually have which which is like a few fucking joints, maybe like a quarter ounce at the very most.
If you know, if what, if somebody like person is enough to, uh, for the racism
of the Chicago cops who have, uh, have something in the back of their minds that they're supposed
to protect white children that they usually won't arrest all of you, or they, they're not going to
arrest any of you because they're not going to just arrest two of you, and so all the runners
of cops, it was just, like, they were fucking awful shitty assholes they said horrible shit to my
friends but we always got away and it was like you lose weed but you're like okay we had never
had something where there was an actual like crime crime committed right and so a lot you know it
follows that we're absolutely panicking.
It feels like there's no air in this apartment.
We're trying to come up with excuses.
Like what?
Like we would be our own defense attorneys.
Like we were going to say, oh, we were just in the car with him and he happened to steal all these potted plants and mail.
Oh, we didn't know what was going
on oh we thought his neighbors had hired him to look after all this i was we were doing
this for like 20 minutes i was searching through my phone like trying to see if i had my uncle's
number because i guess he i guess i thought that he, he would have, like, a criminal lawyer that worked at his
firm, just fucking panicking, just that spiral, the panic spiral, I'm thinking about, oh no,
I'm gonna go to prison, and then I'll have to get my GED, and then I'm gonna have to,
I'm gonna have to get really good at day trading, because I'm not gonna get hired anywhere,
gonna get hired anywhere because I'll have the potted plant caper on my record and just fucking hyperventilating and we hear this fucking loud triple knock at the door and we look at each other
and Edward mans up before me and says, I'll answer it. And I stop pacing and I sit down.
Because in my very overdramatic mind, I think this will be the last time I get to sit down on a nice couch for a while.
Like what? I'm going to USB Marion.
And it's Brian.
It's Brian. Brian is is there he's smiling and what had actually happened was
yeah the cops questioned him about why he had all these fucking potted plants and bullshit in his
car and he you know he was one of those guys who had that like very ricky from trailer park boys
talent of like coming up with
some fucking idiotic bullshit that just hit all the right checkpoints in a cop's dumb brain and
he got away with it but uh that wasn't the end Brian was like yeah no it's easy to get away with
stuff uh let's go back out and after after this 20-minute panic spiral it felt like an
eternity I I guess that impulse to need to feel cool or seem cool to other
people is just so strong when you're that age or at least it was for us that
we get back into the fucking car with them and i guess we're done with potted
plants and letters for tonight because he sees like he pulls up to like one of the awful shitty
bar for shitheads in in wrigleyville and there are a bunch of people sitting outside i guess it
was like closing time they were doing the thing that all drunks in the north side of Chicago, it must be like a north
side Irish tradition, that you just sit down at the sidewalk, looking glumly at the shoes
while you complain to somebody else about how hard it is to work at the marketing firm.
And he pulls up, like,
we're about half a block away from him,
you know, keeps his headlights off,
and he goes,
Edward, I see a girl with a big purse down there.
You can run fast, right?
Edward was a soccer player in school.
He was, like, a really good soccer player.
And, you know thank
God I was a shitty runner because he didn't pick me but you know Edward
having the same impulse that I did is like okay yeah sure I'll rob somebody
I'm gonna take this one's first run off and we'll loop around the block and be able to pick me back up.
And so he gets out.
And in the back of my mind, I'm obviously thinking, like, holy shit, are we tempting fate?
Like, we got away with one thing, but this is, like, oh, like, fuck. They're gonna, like, this is Chicago PD.
If they catch my friend, like, taking a white woman's purse, there's high likelihood he's, chicago pd if they catch my friend like taking a white woman's purse there's
high likelihood he's like going to jail or they're gonna fucking kill him but also a 16 year old
pussy who gets to do crimes with his friend and not really do them just sit in the front seat like
a fucking pussy and so we we watch him stroll along we
watch him stroll along the half block he ends his pockets like looking trying to look non-conspicuous
and brian goes he's not gonna do it and i go yeah he's a pussy because yeah like you're just
you're waiting for the opposite you know you think at that age, like, if someone else is a bitch, you're not.
If you get that opportunity of saying that about someone else,
that's going to prove that you're not somehow.
And thankfully, he doesn't do it.
He just keeps walking along.
And we're like, ah, we fucking knew it, bitch.
And he walks back around the block gets back in the car
and he goes oh yeah i just couldn't see the you know they they were looking when i was looking
to take it there just wasn't the opportunity and we're like oh yeah of course i'm going yeah of
course like i know anything about doing any type of crime but just for this entire, like, couple hour thing, my heart was in my throat about the possibility of doing a crime or, like, the consequences of it.
For me now, I recognize it would have been negligible, and you can still work at a podcast anyway if you're convicted of the great potted plant heist of 2006.
if you're convicted of the great pot and plant heist of 2006.
But
at the time,
it was a psychological thriller, I would call it.
But
the moral of the story,
I guess there isn't too much of a moral,
it's just that children are
fucking idiots
and cowards and bad friends
to each other.
But am I glad I had the experience?
Yes, because I can tell it on podcasts.
All right.
Thank you to the Trillbillies family for having my story.
It was, I said one time there was a woman, she went out in the garden and she dug this big old toe up, this boy did.
He come back in and he asked his mommy he said mommy will you pick this for me
so she picked it for him and she went to bed that night he did
somebody come says what you got them big eyes for
see you is we're at the big nose for her to smell you with. And I'm gonna eat you.
Well he went down to this little girl. This little girl, they said the same
thing to her. So went down to her, his mommy and his daddy. So he went back to bed.
And the body says, I want my big toe.
I want my big toe.
That little boy got scared.
He said, well, you got them big eyes first.
Said, the see you with.
Said, well, you got the big nose first.
Smell you with.
Said, well, you got the big mouth first.. We got the big mouth for to eat it with.
Halloween Town 2012 Where was Coach and Goblin and a ton of fucking witches?
Halloween Town 2012
Where was Coach and Goblin and a ton of fucking witches?
There's a werewolf hailing at the moon
There's a mummy inside his tomb
There's a vampire screaming for blood
We're all weird down here
We don't give a fuck
Halloween Town 2012
Werewolves, goblins, and a ton of fucking witches
Halloween Town 2012
We're all weird down here
In hell down here in hell Halloween Town
2012
where it's got a
goblin and a ton of fucking witches
Halloween Town
2012
where it's got a gob novel and a ton of fucking witches
There's a werewolf howling at the moon
There's a mummy inside a suit
Dracula is screaming for blood
We're all weird down here, we don't give a fuck
We don't give a fuck on Halloween Town
Halloween Town, Halloween Town
Halloween Town, Halloween Town Halloween Town, we don't give a fuck.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, Halloween Town There's a goon ten the garden that'll kill you
There's a man in the woods, he's scared
Oh, Halloween town, don't come around
Oh, my God
Gonna kill you tonight in Halloween town
Gonna kill you tonight in Halloween town Come and get a ride around the week now