50 States of Fear: California Part 1

Astonishing Legends Network Disclaimer. This episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here, but in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me. Hey, everybody, welcome back to Scare It all the time. I'm your host, Chris. Klari, and I'm Ed Vicola. I guess also a host. He's sometimes a host, usually when he's paying attention. Today we are closing out this summer of Fear by launching a new series that we've been threatening to do for a while, but it is here today. Ed, drummroll please, I just held up I held up a bush light. Welcome to the Fifty States of Fear projects. Oh yeah, much like a musician that Ed probably likes more than I do. Sufjan Stevens, Randy new not Ranny Newman. Fellow California though. Yeah, but souf Jon said he was going to do a record for all fifty states. Did three and stopped, or maybe two. He did Illinois and that was the famous one. Let's Tink got a bunch of good tracks on that, and then he I think maybe did one or two more and never finished. We are going to finish. This is not going to be in every week thing. This is not like we're only doing states from here on every six years, but this is we are going to do every state in the Union. At some point we had this idea about a year ago when a fan shout out an emailed us a very long list of all the reasons to be scared of Cleveland, Ohio. I went back and looked. It's a very long list. Because I remember we were like, oh, you know, I bet every state has stuff like this, the river caught on fire, I don't remember. I didn't look at what the actual reasons to be afraid were. And Randy Newman has a song about that. Okay, well, maybe Randy Newman can do a theme for our fifty states. If we would love it. I'd be too afraid to ask. But when we saw that list, we were like, oh, I bet every state has stuff like this, and fifty states of fear was born. Now, don't worry. Ohio is very near the top of our list of the state to tackle. We're not doing it alphabetically. We're not doing alphabetically. We can do it in whatever order we want, and we wanted to start with California for a few reasons. A. We live here and have for almost twenty years. And B I think, with the exception of maybe Florida, no state is more closely associated with good summer vibes than California. Are you just ignoring Hawaii? Well, Hawaii, Yeah, okay, Hawaii and Florida. But other than those two summer state, I. Mean, the summer requires good weather. Are you going in the summer good weather and water like the beach down the shore? Yeah? I don't know. I mean every state probably has their spot for the summer, but yeah, I would say in terms of like gunder your head, you have to pick three states right now just that are synonymous summer. Yeah, I imagine people are gonna go California at Florida unless you're like some fucking rich person who's like, I don't know, the Hampton's or something, then maybe New York State. But that's ridiculous and let's get through the cold open. I'll cut all that. Also, like Florida, what parts of California are hell on Earth? This state has been a reliable generator of pain, chaos, death and destruction since long before America was even a country. No matter who you are or why you come here. It seems like no one really leaves unscathed, whether it's because of monsters in the mountains, cults, killers, ghosts, greed, or even just the ground. We're here to prove that the West Coast is the best coast if you like being scared all the time? What are we scared? When are we all the time? Now? Which is time for time on Scared Time? Hey, everybody, just wanted to check in with you real quick. A little bit of housekeeping as we come to the end of the Summer of Fear for twenty twenty six and kick off a new era of scared all the time with our fifty States of Fear journey. If you've been enjoying the show, if you've been enjoying the Summer of Fear, we would just ask you please, if you have no money at all, head over to YouTube and like and subscribe. We are starting a YouTube presence. We've been putting a lot of work into making sure that our videos are awesome, and we've heard from a lot of people that it's a lot more fun to watch the show than just listen to it. So if you haven't signed up, over at the YouTube, go like and subscribe, and if you do have a couple bucks to throw around and you'll like the show. We do have a Patreon, Patreon dot com slash scare it all the time. We've got bonus episodes of New Fear unlocked. We've got you hear about this shit that we've done two or three episodes of at this point. Yeah, we've got Button of the Month Club. We've got all kinds of good shit. So it's all sorts of stuff over there. Check it out. You'll love it. You'll love each and every last job we do. As Ed always says, you make an attempt to be the best deal in podcasting, and I think we come through on that all the time. If you need just a little bit more convincing of how good things can be when you become a scaredy cat. We wanted to stop in with just a couple of five star reviews as well, so if this is the first time you're tuning in and hearing a five star review corner. The gist is, if you leave a five star review for the show, we will sometimes read it at the top of the show. So let's dive right in here with our first one five Stars best medicine for panic attacks. This is from Elise I or Elease Roman Numeral one. I'm not sure which Elise we're speaking with, but at least says five stars best medicine for panic attacks. I've been listening since very early on and found this show to be my all time favorite. I hate banter, however, something about Ed and Chris is just a magical combination that keeps me coming back for more. I have a metaphobia, the fear of vomiting, and I one thing I really struggle with is going to the dentist. I just had to visit the other week for two crowns, and even with Nitris, I was still freaking out. My dentist suggests that I put on some music, so I grabbed my headphones and started the Tsunami episode and after a few minutes Ed and Chris's voices. We haven't lured anyone into anything. No, we lull our voices. Lulled Elise into a nice calm. But we're also happy to lure people into the Patreon. So yes, whenever I'm having a rough time with my anxiety, I turned to them to help distract me, and it always makes a huge difference in parentheses. I don't know what it says about me that these topics help call my anxiety. Probably should get that checked out. In all seriousness, you guys have been a real support to me during some tough times and I can't thank you enough for that. Keep doing what you're doing, so thank you, Elise. I hope we can lull you to sleep on every desperate occasion. Yeah, that's glad we're helping out somebody. There's actually I'm looking through these. There's a lot we have and a lot that are very very nice, but I'm gonna choose one here because they mentioned our beloved Patreon. So okay, this one's from It's Amber, World's best fear based podcast. Five stars, longtime listener, first time reviewer Chris are the best and who knew a fear based podcast can make you lol on the regular? Also join the Patreon ten out of ten worth it exclamation points. So yeah, awesome. So that's exactly the kind of review that we wanted for today. And then, since a lot of these have mentioned that they are longtime listeners, I feel like we could wrap up five star review Corner with a new listener. Five star reviews my favorite new podcast. The review is from CFW twenty eighteen and the review says found you because of astonishing legends and took a few years to get to you, but I'm so glad I did ye. There are several episodes I have skipped over because they are my fears, but all the others have been amazing. You both make me laugh for so many reasons. Dark and Light keep the scares coming, and that's the idea. We feel like, if we do this show right, everybody, even our biggest fans, there should be an episode or two that they will never listen to because it's too scared. And that's the idea. So I'm glad we're coming through for you. CFW Hall twenty eighteen. And we have other five star reviews. There are many that we have yet to get to. We will get to them all someday, but for now, I think we can leave the five star reviews there again, hit the YouTube, hit the Patreon, you know where to find us. And I think with that said, let's kick off the Fifty States of Fear with Part one of California. Part one, so there's more California to come after this, but we are really on the final stretch of Summer of Fear, I'm about to answer. Spooky season, so you know, get it while you can get it all right, ed, this is going to be a fun one. This is also going to be a two parter for those of you who are keeping track. California turns out is a very, very big state. I mean, we could probably do fifty States of Fear, fifty reasons to be Afraid of California, and stretch California out over another ten years of episodes. But there's so much stuff in California that is scared. We're barely going to scratch the surface. But I guess. Before we dive in, I wanted to continue a debate that we may have just started in the cold open or ed, maybe you've cut at this point, but I wanted to end the Summer of Fear with the debut of California as fifty States of Fear, because to me, California, with the exception of Florida, is maybe the summeriest state that you can imagine. And then if I hadn't cut it, or other should have maybe cut too. And there I said, what about Hawaii? And I said, that's a good point. Let's hold it for the beginning of the episode. And now we are here, and Ed, I have to tell you I've come up with the reason that I think California is actually the summeriest state. We have the Beach Boys. Yeah, okay, well, I mean, if there's anything more evocative of an American summer than the Beach Boys, it certainly isn't Hawaii or Florida. Well, California also showed the rest of the world everything so California as their local sons, the Beach Boys, and also all the ability to of that propaganda around. That's true. That's true. We have already film and music industry, film and music industry, marketing, advertising, all that shit kind of comes out of here. So if the same infrastructure was in Akron, Ohio, Akron, Ohio would be the summer state if they wanted it to be. That's true, But it's not, and they're not. I don't think there's any other state that has a claim. I mean, I guess maybe the association of surfing with Hawaii might be a little summary er, but the Beach Boys were also surfers where they are pretended to be no idea. I don't know if they're from here. That's I think they are from here. I don't think they're actually surfers. I do think they're bad people. I think like Mike Love was really like he was chummy with. Hanson. Yeah, who wasn't. Well that's true, that's true. But there's lots of weird rumors and stuff about the Beach Boys. Maybe some of it that's connected to the fact that Hotel California is sort of a creepy song. It is a creepy song. I've always thought that. Yeah, I think a lot of people think Hotel California is kind of a creepy song. Kind of like the Shining the song. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, if any of our listeners were alive when the Hotel California first came out, I'd love to know if it was considered an unsettling weird song when. Because it's a banger, but it always has this I don't know why, And this is a crazy one for me. Earth Angel. Also, I just find like creepy and I think I'm like, I'm alone on that one. I'm alone. There's no it's not like I can point out the lyrics like which would be like that Christmas song it's super raypy. It's not even like there's no like thing that you can go froust in the snowman. Yeah, exactly. It's like there's no one thing but for me when I would like go to these like car and coffee, like uh dairy Queen, parking lot, car shows, classic car shows. They always have like doo wop music to shit on for some reason every time that song came out and like bothered me. There's a couple, there's a couple of older I think sometimes it's the recordings are a little creaky and a little they have that sort of retro weird sort of vibe to them because we're used to hearing music in the present day and such insanely high death and quality that anything that has it's funny, like you hear about another famous California and Phil Spector killed somebody. You know, he invented the wall of sound production technique, right, and that to change rock and roll, change the record industry. And you go back and you listen to Phil Spector songs and like technically, especially for the time, they're really incredibly well arranged and mixed and whatever. But when you listen to them now, they don't sound big and rich. They sound kind of tinny. And that tinny sound I think is partially why older songs sound creepy. But but I go back into the Beach Boys, Yeah, like that was the pinnacle of engineering, right like pet sounds. Yes, it's what caused the Beatles to then go do Sergeant Pepper. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they were. They were pushing boundaries on that record and on a California Baby Yeah yeah, yeah, Liverpool in terms of what you could make a record sound like while we're on records, we're having more music talk in this episode than we did in music festivals. That's true. But people always clown on the band Boston. I don't think about them in any capacity. Well, I have a record that has like a UFO in the front. Yeah okay, And every single song on that record is like a number one hit. And every single song on that record, even though now they're kind of cheesy songs, that was a record that was recorded. I forget the guy. I don't know the band all that well, but basically that was a record that was recorded and produced and you know, engineered in that guy's like basement, Like he had a vision for what like a modern at the time rock record should sound like. And if you go listen to that record, it sounds crazy like. That record sounds insanely good considering it's I don't know, forty years old at this point, easily. Maybe a bit older than that. Yeah, I mean forty years ago. It was nineteen eighty five, so yeah, I bet you what's earlier than that? That's true. I yeah, August seventy six was when that first fifty years is Yeah, damn mastermind Tom Showls recorded most of the instruments in his apartment base basement alongside vocalist Brad Delp. Yeah. I mean also another I think, kind of underrated genius. That's what I got. Like Alan Parsons, that is that a guy? Yeah, like those there's just some fucking lunatics who were really good at that shit. Yeah, well, we're getting a little off track. We'll bring it back, We'll bring all of this. We'll bring it back to the fifty States of Fear and California and. Fifty year old album yeah from California. Yeah, or it might be before we dive into this collection of weird, deadly, scary stories that California has to offer. I think this is a really great place to talk about. I know we always try to start the episode with like our personal connection to the fear, and I'm not sure we've ever done an episode about such a about a more personal topic than California. Considering how good wildfire, Well, yeah, we did wildfires. But I mean, considering we've been living here for twenty years, we have a lot more fears I think, connected to this state than we do almost anywhere else. I would argue, and this goes out to all of our fans, no matter where you are in the country, perhaps the world. Yeah, that we have less fears about California than any of them do. I feel like every time I leave the state, I got to meet someone who's like, here's a problem with California. I heard about it, read about here's a problem with California. I saw on the news. Here's a problem. I'm like, motherfucker, what do you care? Well, you don't live here. And also, none of that I've experienced. I will say, maybe we haven't experienced a lot of that, but are the very top of the fear tier that the number ten on the fear tier, your fear of getting a hot bucket of piss and shit comes from here, dumped on your head comes from just up the street in Hollywood, California. Yeah, yeah, but didn't happen to us. No, it didn't happen to us yet. But it also didn't stop us from going to Hollywood, California. No, thousands of times in different levels of inebriation. That's true. That's very true. And look, I say this with no disrespect towards the state of California. I didn't realize I was going to open such a can of worms asking you, but ed, I need to know, what is the scariest thing that you've ever experienced in the state of California. I would I guess I would say, I think it's strictly California and not like like I could run into a person at road rage anywhere. I can run into people down in their luck trying to rab you anywhere. So those aren't things I would say or specific to California. But like an earthquake, I guess like the first time I felt that, even though it didn't knock anything off the shelves, it was like a genuinely scary what is this right thing? And I'm sure I talked about in the earthquake episode. Yeah, I was an intern. I was putting movie posters in movie frames, like they were swapping out movie posters on this wall. So like I was on the ground doing that and before I put them up, and so I'm like on my hands and knees and I like feel my whole body. It wasn't a shake earthquake. It was a rolling earthquake. Those are the weird one because you expect to shake. Also, it's my first earthquake. Yeah, so I'm certainly not expecting this because the whole world's expecting shake. Yeah, because we've all been raised on movies where when there's an earthquake, the camera starts to go blah blah, that's it. So all of a sudden, it felt like I was on the fucking high seas, like what the fuck is this? And I looked to the right and the posters that had already been put back in the wall were like we're like moving like shaking, like swaying. And then the lamp had like a ceiling lamp was on like a cord and like that was kind of like whoop whoop, like going back and forth, and I was like, what the fuck is happening, because it just felt like like waves were rolling underneath you. But it was very quick, like you know, seconds long, you know, but then you still have that like tinklink a link of glasses and stuff, and so that was I remember that being like what the is that? That could have been worse in my head, you know what I mean? And I don't like them anytime that happened. So I think California for me, the scariest thing is that, or if I'm driving up north, I just don't like being in northern California like like that like San Francisco to maybe like Eugene, Oregon, like some sort of like that that space of northern California where like end Door was shot, Like in the woods through southern Oregon always just feels like extra creepy in the woods, big trees. Yeah, it's beautiful, but it is a little. At night though, like at night you're actually you're like, please don't rude again. The only time I've ever been up there, I think, was at night our mutual friend Ellie Smulkan shout out Ellie. When the first summer I ever came to visit La, I jumped in his car and we took a road trip up to his family's place in Vancouver, and we did it in like a twenty two hour stretch basically, like we didn't stop to and we stopped, but we didn't like stay overnight anymore. We just drove. And by the time we got up to that part of the country, it was getting dark and I remember kind of heading into those wooded areas as this was going down and kind of being. Like, whoa, we're really in the middle of nowhere. And it was also so synonymous with like illegal weed growing and other shit, so you're just like, you know, you really don't want to be pulling off to ass directions. No, once you're once you're past San Francisco. Yeah, so that's creepy. So just like, the redwoods are the most amazing things if you get a chance to see them, but it's also just scary because they're giant trees. Like it's at night or whatever. It's just it's just weird to think they exist. Yeah, it's dwarfs, you, so earthquakes, big trees, wildfires or wildfires, which, by the way, twenty years have been out here. This is kind of like them being all the time feels kind of newer Yeah, yeah, we had seen it previous, but now it's like annoying. Yeah, I mean until last year, I think I probably would have had a few different contenders for scariest thing about California. But that fleeing that fire was really even though in hindsight my literal life and my wife was we weren't in super danger, that was I mean, my wife was eight months pregnant. It was so stressful and very I mean, I will never forget pulling out of the driveway and that was the first time I turned around to face the mountain. I think I said this on The Wildfire's episode, but you know, I'm getting all these texts, but I can't see it. I can smell smoke, but I can't see it from my house. And after the sun went down was when we left and we backed out of my driveway, and that was the first time I was facing the mountain and it just looked like the world was on fire because it was dark, so all you could see was fire literally in what appeared to be the sky. Yeah, and that was and then driving around all the fallen trees because it was in the middle of the windstorm, and like that was that was really that was one of those moments where I was right tipping into oh, this is how how people die, like, this is how they go. Oh I was five minutes too late to get out of there. Sure like it was. It was intense, I would say, outside of wildfires and earthquakes, which really feel California centric, yeah versus other states. Yeah, other places have wildfires. Canada has wildfires, but like the earthquakes is kind of an US thing. Yeah. Other than that, And I won't go into any detail on this at all, Okay, I won't. I'm trying. I was just sitting here thinking, like, what's such a California specific fear thing? And it's not even a real fear. It's not a fear. I want people to know this is not a fear, Okay, but absolutely absolutely there is twenty years in this specific industry, in this specific city, there are times where you're like, oh, that conspiracy might be true, or this thing might be might be as not great as people say. There's there's there are people that I've run into in this industry where you get the eerie feeling that they just don't live in the same world that you do. And that's that's not always a an evil thing, but there are just people that you really feel it in your gut, like, oh, I don't know that this person thinks of me as a human being, And maybe not because they're necessarily a psychopath, but just because they just live in a different stratosphere of wealth and power, and. You get you get it. It's like a feeling you get of like oh, I'm just not here. I might you know, and that those those sensations are weird. I did have have I talked about the like Freddy Krueger guy in my driveway? I don't remember. I guess this is sort of a socioeconomic thing, That's what I'm. Saying, Like I didn't I cut that earlier. But yeah, there's things where if it was just gonna be about like a I got plenty of stories about scream and hobos, but that doesn't feel like California. That just feels like socioeconomic Uh, no safety net issues, Yeah, every state has. It was definitely a no safety net issue, but it was. It was very very frightening. It It was until that Gardner told me that there was a man living underneath my apartment. Yeah, that guy, the Freddy krueger Man in my driveway was the scariest guy. And then also facing city bureaucracy because I called. At the time, I was living in West Hollywood, and I was like, oh, I'll call the West Hollywood Sheriff because they'll get here faster than the LAPD. And they wouldn't come because I was one block one street south. Yeah, yeare they go? And then I had to call the LAPD and then they took an hour and have to show up, and it was. It's crazy that when the day I learned that was interesting too, Like when we got broken into here and it was like, oh, yeah, I know you're you're sixty one feet and away from what the Sheriff's apartment handles or like the Sheriff's department only handles aside the street with odd numbers, and so you have to call LAPD. And it was like, wait, I mean it makes sense. I guess the jurisdictions or whatever however that works. But yeah, when I realized it was like a just distinct line in the sand about that was interesting. Well, anyway, all of this is a long winded way of saying I think, as I just said at the top, the California could probably be a whole sub series in and of itself, and we're not going to cover an exhaustive list of all the scary things about California even in these two parts. And partly we should probably say this at the top of every one of these episodes, of every state based episode, of every episode about states fifty States of Fear. Yeah, is that I have to imagine the stories you're about to tell me, or the facts are about to tell me are things that happen in this state, but not necessarily representative of the state. Well, no, I mean the Fifty States of Fear is mostly going to cover the worst parts of every state. So now when you say parts, I would like to again implore that people recognize that we meant like stories or events or things in history or cryptids or whatever the fuck you're gonna say, and not like this is a neighborhood you shouldn't go through, but these are a school system that's crumbling. Yeah, now you say the worst parts of a state, That's what I go through. Sure, Yeah, don't worry about that. Ed Ed has a fear of the States of Fear that I'm going to force him into a political corner and I'm not. Don't worry. We know that California is the serial killer state. We know it's the cult state, it's the earthquake state. We could do this entire episode just on the famous stuff and it would be longer than most podcasts. The Manson Murders, the Nightstalker, Black Dahlia cut in half and still unsolved, Zodiac Killer. I mean, you know, all of those have books, movies, docuseries all about them. And we're gonna leave them all out. We're not gonna touch any of those because you know about them, and if you don't, there's better places to go find out. There's a much more pressing fear that I want to start with that reaches all the way back to the beginning of not quite time, but almost, and that is the death trap sitting right beneath our feet. And I don't mean the earthquakes. I mean literally like the tar and oil. Yes, okay, because we're literally on top of it right now. Yes, the tar and oil in southern California, famously centered around the Librea tar Pits, which is right down the street, has slowly and painfully killed innocent creatures for the past sixty thousand years. The very ground of California itself is deadly. These bubbling, sulfurous pits are located just over a mile from where we're recording, and you've probably seen them in TV and movies. No, way, that's a mile. I've walked there saying I walk a mile. Yeah, you've walked a mile, You've done it. It's certainly not a mile. I've never walked a mile in your shoes. Yeah, a half mile forre we're standing. It's it's close. You've probably seen them in TV and movies, whether it's the Tommy Lee Jones classic Volcano where a volcano opens up underneath in my neighborhood, it's Miracle Mile, the TV show Librea that was on a few years ago. I even think I maybe became aware of the idea of a tar pit. It's not the Librea tar pits, but the Land Before Time has a very scary sequence where Littlefoot and his friends fall into a vat of bubbling you know, tar. Pit, and they had that idea. Person they probably animated that in California probably, yes. Now it's now Librea is Spanish for the tar it is, so it's the tar tar pits. I guess yes, it's like an ATM machine. It is a little bit like an ATM machine. It is Librea is Spanish for the tar. Way back after the animals, but before California was heavily colonized. Native Americans would harvest the asphalt that came off the tarpits to waterproof baskets and boats, and early Spanish colonists would use the same asphalt to seal their roofs, and they were the ones who named the place Librea the tar. According to scientists that work at the tar pits, the image that you have in your mind of why they are dangerous is not entirely accurate. So when you think tar pits, you probably are picturing the statue of the elephants out front of the Librea tar pits that are getting sucked into a giant, bubbling, black vat of tar. That's not really the danger zone. I mean, stay far away from it. Don't go anywhere near the big open pits of tar. But also if you see a cone on the street near there, that cone is letting you know that tar is bubbling up through the street. Yes, So just be aware that those green cones, yes, and that rancid smell. Yes, yeah, just step away, sorry from that, your shoes are get all fucked up. It's really funny. There's a diner right. Oh, Johnny's. It hasn't been an operator, no, I know, but I can't imagine Johnny's diner. So it's this like nineteen fifties nineteen sixties diner that closed down probably, I don't know two DECs. It's in the big Lebaski. Yeah, but I can't imagine it was ever operable because that area smells like sulfur so often. I can't imagine opening a restaurant there. You have to imagine though, that when that was popular, been open and popular, they weren't like catalytic converters. The cars smelled like shit. Everybody smoked cigarettes. That's true. Everything was. No one smelled, no one noticed the tars smell. Point is, you don't really ever have to worry about a tar pit opening up beneath you and sucking you down like a giant sinkhole or something that that that doesn't really happen. Not only do you not have to worry about it, it is shocking to me that they have finally, and the entire time I've lived here, I've been working on this. It finally opened the Librea subway stop. Oh yeah, so they must have thought it was fine enough to drill a giant hole through this huge area, which must have been like an engineering feat in a disaster. That's true. I hadn't thought about that, but you're right, yeah, yeah, yeah, that must have been a really difficult tunnel to day. It's really deep. If you've been in it, it's not as deep, I don't think as when I was in London and you go to those like Survive the Bombs. Yeah, super deep, you know London subways. But it's really deep. It's multiple escalators down at the stop. The most famous open pit, the one that you're all thinking of at the Librea tar pits, didn't open by itself. That was actually left behind by a commercial mining operation in the nineteenth century. So that's why there's a giant hole in the ground and the tar actually filled it by seeping up from the ground. I think I said this in another another episode when we talked about the tar pits. But this is an amazing thing where it was like, hey, we fucked this up. Was give it to the city as a park. Yeah, no, we can't close this pit to a hell. Maybe throw a statue on here in a museum and say I donated it. So the Librea Museum tells us that those pits aren't the really dangerous spots. The really dangerous spots, although much less dangerous to us today, are the spots that don't look dangerous at all, and you can actually still see them around the park. They're usually fenced off around with. Those weird little fences. Yeah. I was wondering what those were. The weird little fences are places where tar is seeping up through the ground, so it's like the cone, like the cone, but in the park instead of the road. Yeah, the road. They can't help it. They have to just put a cone. People drive on that every day. But yeah, these little fences. I always wonder what thought there were little prisons or something for like bad animals, for amunculalling up out of the ground. They look like little prison cells. As Smithsonian Magazine tells us, quote for visitors, the first clue that there's something different about the land around the museum is in the bare patches among the trees, where the exposed earth is a little too dark and dead leaves are stuck in place. On one such patch, a stray soccer ball waits like an invitation to come closer. Don't These almost ordinary patches of ground are even more deadly for being less obvious. What they hide beneath the leaves is not a lake or even a pit, but a shallow seep. The dirt is saturated with asphalt, the lowest grade of crude oil. The oil. Yeah, the oil pushes up through narrow cracks in the rock from oil deposits between a five hundred and one thousand feet underground. And those deposits don't drag their victims down so much as they will trap them in one place, leaving them back in the day vulnerable to starvation and predation. It's a lot less of a concern now, but if fifty or sixty thousand years ago you were an ice age mammal wandering what is now southern California, stepping into a tarpet was likely the beginning of a agonizing death. I mean, and these fences are working because I used to like, it's never seen one kid screaming, That's what I'm saying. They start to go there, sorr. I don't think it's a mile away. I would go there and like smoke a jay with friends at those trees, and then like, never saw once a person stuck. In them, Nor did we end up stuck in. If you did, it probably be your shoe stuck. First of all, you would just take your shoe off. But back then, if you were a ground sloth or a mastdon or a prehistoric horse, you didn't have shoes, and so if your feet got stuck to the tar, you were fucked even worse. And I never knew this until I was researching this episode. A lot of them, scientists think got trapped by what probably looked like completely normal watering holes, because when it rains, the water sits on top and pools right on top of tar. So you would see like a pool of water, and you would go towards it and put your legs or your tongue or your face down into the water to drink it, and never. Be able to get back out. Now, you didn't spend a lot of time, and they have it in Boston. I feel like it's more synonymous with New York. But like when it's winter and you step up the sidewalk and you think it's like a solid ground, but it's like a super deep icy puddle. Yes, I imagine it's like that. Sort of yeah, but even deadlier because even just a couple inches of tar is enough to keep even a big animal from pulling its own legs out. So now it's stuck and it's panicking, and it's making a ton of noise. Best case scenario, it starves to death. Worst case scenario. It's yenas from lionsking it. Gets eaten alive. And most likely scenario is that every predator in earshot goes ooh free lunch, and they come running in and they get stuck, and their noise brings in the next round of predators and so on, and they all die together, stuck to the ground, sometimes pulled apart by more careful scavengers. And you know, if I don't know if if they understand each other's language. I don't think they do, but there's gotta be there's a number of people in that scenario who are like, I don't want to hear it, Like I told you, Yeah, there's a lot of it told you sos in that and a lot of I don't want to hear it. What's really interesting about the Librea Tarpits as a fossil site is that the ratio well, so, first of all, the tar preserves fossils and bones incredibly well. So that's part of why it's become such a destination for scientists looking to study this particular era. And you do see people work in there. Yeah, it's a working, it's a working. It's actually it's I think it's the only I was reading this on their website, it's the only fossil or I forget exactly how they phrased it, but it's like essentially the only paleon paleol it's the only paleontological dig operating in a major urban environment something like that. Normally, this is stuff that you're finding kind of out of the way, you know, when you're looking for bones whatever, you're. Not looking in a city. But yes, the tar really does a great job preserving the bones. So there's been for decades now a study of all the animals that were stuck in. One of the things that's really interesting about the Librea tarpits is a fossil site, is that the ratio of predator to prey fossils that they pull up out of the tar pits is completely backwards from a normal fossil site. Normally you find way more plant eaters than meat eaters, because that's how an ecosystem works. You need more prey than you have predators. Yeah, I didn't think about that, but at Librea it's flipped. Something like ninety percent of the mammals they dig up are carnivores. It's literally because they were coming for that free lunch. Yeah. So the sabertooth tigers, the short faced bears, the I don't remember the other but they had, you know, meat eaters, dire wolves. I think they've pulled a bunch of dire wolves, not the kind from Game of Thrones, like real dire wolves. It's literally. The term for it in the science is a predator trap. It's just a it's a it's like flies to honey. That's why Chris Hansen works there. Yeah, it's like at the at the door, ladies and gentlemen. The only good news for these animals are really, like I said, is that the bones are super well preserved, and since research began in nineteen thirteen, the tar pits have yielded millions of bones, including sabertooth tigers, dire wolves, and macedon skeletons, innumerable plants, small rodents, and insects. New discoveries are made daily in their open air excavations. When they say new discovery, I assume they don't mean they're discovering a new species every dight. Hey look another masdon head. Yeah, you know, it's got to be crazy to work somewhere where you pull up, you know, Yeah, a Macedon head and it's like, I'll put it in the pile with the others. Yeah whatever, selid at auction and nit cage. The Smithsonian tells us that these collections constitute an unparalleled resource for understanding environmental change in Los Angeles and the planet during the last fifty thousand years of Earth's history. And just maybe wonder how many macedon heads that were crunched up by the like augur going through underneath it for the subway. I'm sure more like it's it is kind of a bummer because. It's the actual dragon was discovered, but it was all smashed up by the like thing going through. It's like the beginning of rain of fire, but instead of stopping, they just drill through the dragon. Yeah. I's like, oh fuck, They're like COVID's not gonna be forever. We gotta get as far as we can. Because that was the thing, Like, that's what really got them to the finish line, was like, oh. Was it it was easier to dig because everyone was inside. Well, it was just like, yeah, they had all I don't know if it was specifically for the subway, but all of that work down Wheelshure. There was no cars in the road, almost no cars in the road. That's interesting. They were there was something where it was like they are making these numbers up, but it was like, oh, we did like sixteen months worth of work in eight months or whatever what would have been scheduled for right two almost two years worth of work in less than a year. Yeah, because there was just no one out there, so they can just like work, work, work. Yeah. The scientists are out there like nature is healing, and the construction workers are like, we're gonna tear this bitch up in a giant drill machine. Yeah, but now you can get You can get to Johnny's from my house in one minute. That's true. So while the fact that this seeping lake of death has been hercolating here since practically forever is not a great start for California. I should note that, as far as we know, these particular tar pits have not been particularly dangerous to humans. In the millions of bones that have been dredged out of the earth, scientists have found exactly one person. She's called the Librea Woman. The skeleton is somewhere around ten thousand years old. They think she was in her late teens to mid twenties when she died, and interestingly, her skull is fractured, which leads some researchers to believe that she didn't just wander into the tar. She was killed and then tossed into the tar. And who knows, we're just taking the scientist's words for it. Maybe she's only not ten thousand years old. Maybe one of the scientists just dumped someone in the tar pits and it. Was like, we're the Librea woman has a name tag. Yeah, yeah, yeah, she has a butterfly tattoo on her lower back. Well, they wouldn't have that. Well, that's true. That's the way. If you see a tattoo on your bones, then you've discovered the first like android. That's true. So this ten thousand year old woman pulled out of the tar pits would be depending on how you want to count it, something like the oldest known murder victim. In older than the Boga people. Well, no, in Los Angeles. Oh well, los Angeles is incorporated eight days ago. But you meant Mexico or whatever this. Was, Well she she would, That's why I'm saying, depending on how you want to. In Mexico ten thousand years ago, it was just Pangaea or something. Yeah, depending on how do you want to count it, she would be potentially the oldest known murder victim in Los Angeles. But unfortunately the Librea woman would be the first of many. Oh my god. The history of California is painted with a gentle hand in most of the state textbooks, as PBS so called chicily summarizes it, quote, California was originally populated by people who did not farm, but made very nice baskets. The Spanish padres arrived, and California Indians moved to the missions to learn farm labor. Some of them died there, mainly because their immune systems weren't sophisticated enough to handle modern diseases by the time Americans arrived. Native Californian said mainly vanished. Somehow, the gold Rush happened and California became a modern society with factories and lending institutions. Book that's the textbook. No, that is PBS Sokel's sort of cheeky summarization of how glowing of a picture. The textbooks tend to paint the history so they know what they're doing, they know what they're Yeah, what they're missing in that. Well, I don't think they need to be cheeky your PBS. Well, if you dig any deeper and part of the article, the point that the article, the PBS article is making is that you quickly realize that California, like all of our fifty states, is built atop a massive Native American burial ground. To get all catholic. About it, the violent colonization of our country is the United States's original sin. And I'm sure we will touch on that shame in many of our states if you're utes, because there were natives in all of the fifty states, but California deserves special mention as one of the states who basically put a line that said genocide into the state's budget. Is this a manifest estity thing or that was just like I don't know. It was sort of a manifest destiny. Okay, we'll start about one hundred years before we manifested destiny on the West coast, because about one hundred years before that, the Spanish were already putting in work. In seventeen sixty nine, the Franciscan Order of Catholic Priests rolled into what we now call California, backed by the full military weight of the Spanish Empire. It was a calculated expansion of what was called New Spain into the farthest northern reaches of their territory, with civilian settlers and soldiers following missionaries to establish hubs like Pueblo de Los Angeles. Ultimately, twenty one of these missions would stretch up the coast, and indigenous people were rounded up and forced to provide the labor that would be required to cultivate crops and ten lives in the numbers needed to support all of these outposts. And then, to make it worse, many of these indigenous slaves essentially were forced to live in settlements called reductions, where they were packed in and exposed to European diseases, and a lot of them never really stood a chance. Combined with rampant abuse, starvation, and being worked to the bone. Out of roughly eighty seven thousand recorded baptisms of indigenous people, there were over sixty three thousand recorded deaths. So that's three quarters issh of everybody who was on record baptized. And I'm sure there were plenty of off record deaths and maybe some off record baptisms too. While some indigenous people fled or launched rebellions, the missionaries were actually often found complaining that they couldn't get the rest of the people to actually care about Catholic scripture. They desperately wanted to convert them, and we're stymied as to what their issue was. And it gets so much worse. After California becomes a state in eighteen fifty, they pass a law called the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, which was written to help mediate the violent conflict between natives and the miners who started to flood the state during the gold Rush. Ed. Do you want to take a guess whose side the law really comes down on. I don't you probably could, I bet I could, I'll do. I'll give you a hint. It includes provisions like employers are granted the right to obtain children and keep them until they reach eighteen years old for men and fifteen years old for women. Consent was required from a parent or friend friend a lot of yeah that, in order to gain a certificate of custody. The law also required proper treatment of those in custody, with fines of not less than ten dollars for incumunity treatment. It's cheaper just to pay the fine. Complain may be made before a Justice of the Peace by white persons or Indians, but in no case shall a white man be convicted on any offense upon the testimony of an Indians. It's not great. This seems pretty one sided. We've signed contracts that are similarly one sided, Yeah, but not as horrible. Most importantly, Provision fourteen, which reads, when any Indian is convicted of an offense before a Justice of the Peace punishable by fine, any white man may, by consent of the Justice, give bond for said Indian, conditioned for the payment of said fine and costs. And in such case the Indian shall be compelled to work for the person so bailing until he has discharged or canceled the fine assessed against him. So they've made a society of that has a debtors prison option. Yeah, all you have to do to turn a native or an indigenous person into a slave in eighteen fifties California is get them convicted of any loitering you know, they asked for booth like whatever, and then you can choose, instead of payment, which many of the natives didn't have, choose to make them work. For you for free. So basically, California made it legal to force Native people into labor and indenture their children. And in case anyone was unclear about how the States saw this all going, our first governor, a guy named Peter Burnett, said this about the creation of the law. Quote, I can't believe them. There's no slurs in here, but I can't believe I'm gonna say this quote. The white man, to whom time is money and who labors hard all day to create the comforts of life, cannot sit up all night to watch his property, and after being robbed a few times, he becomes desperate and resolves upon a war of extermination. That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected. This was his platform. This was his platform. Yeah, well, we can not anticipate this result, but with painful regret, it is inevitable, which is defined as certain to happen, unavoidable. Destiny of the race is beyond the power or wisdom of man to avert, which is a hell of a thing for a man who did not try to avert this at all at a say yeah, yeah, yeah so they I mean I also sign into law a thing that will exacerbate the situation exactly. In his twenty sixteen book An American genocide, historian, Benjamin Madly documented how state and federal government spent at least one point seven million dollars or about seventy two million dollars today funding the militia campaigns that became this war of extermination. We have many examples of fully legally documented massacres. One of them comes to us in a report by a lieutenant named Nathaniel Lyon, who ain't lion. I think this happened in May of eighteen fifty on a small island sitting in Clear Lake in northern California. The island would become known as Bloody Island. So that kind of gives you ask going Yeah, lions men attacked a Pomo community, and he wrote, quote, having rapidly cleared the island, I saw no alternative but to pursue them into the Tula, which is just sort of like. This big marshy area. The Tula was thoroughly searched, with severe and protracted efforts and most gratifying results. The number killed I confidently report as not less than sixty, and doubt little that it extended to one hundred and upward. These are all people who, by the way, think they're going to heaven. These are they're all like, God fearing fucked. I'm doing this because of whatever. Yeah, they know they're going. That's They're like, this is part of the Holy charge. They're probably gonna ask when I'm up there, how many people like Hill killed? And I gotta have the numbers ready, I gotta have it. Smaller bands of bounty hunters operated in even shadier capacities, paid in an endless river of blood money. According to PBS quote in Shasta City officials in eighteen fifty one offered a bounty of five dollars for every California Indian head turned in. Several unsuccessful miners suddenly found a more lucrative living in murdering Indians, bringing in horses laden with as many as. A dozen Native people's severed heads. Marysville and Honey Lake paid similar bounties on scalps in places where no bounty was offered. Freelance Indian killers. That's old job that someone's taken up. You mean serial killers. Basically, I'm a freelance people are exterminator. What does that mean? Exactly? Is your taxes? Is there a uniform? No? Not exactly, not exactly. Would you like to hire me? I will do it like that's so fucked up. Freelance Indian killers often sought and received payment for services rendered from the state government. As a result of all of this, the population of California. The Native population of California fell from around one hundred and fifty thousand to thirty thousand in just twenty five years. It's estimated somewhere roughly between nine and a half thousand and sixteen thousand people were killed outright by militias, vigilantes, and soldiers. With numbers like that, it's almost hard to believe the Californians had time to do anything except kill Indigenous people. That's outrageous. But the gold rush is in full swing, and as soon as men started spending time below ground, they found plenty to be scared of down in the dark. Yeah good, Yeah, hopefully their own actions would be one of the things that they had to think about. Yeah. Yeah, sitting in the dark gave me time to think. It's also just crazy to me before we move off this topic, because it is a really heavy thing, but a really important thing, that all of this did happen. But like, it is just nuts to me that we sanctioned murder at this scale. I think there are people actively working to get that back. Yeah, right now, that's true, and there are steps in that direction, but it certainly seems gross when you read it now, like and not even reading it through the lens of like, I can't imagine sometimes when I'm bored and I'm outside or I'm like waiting for someone, like someone hasn't closed their tab yet, yeah, and I'm just like outside, I'm just kind of like your freelance exterminations. Yeah, neighbors, there's just like, especially when I'm not in the city, if I'm just like bored on the East coast or something, and it's just kind of me with my thoughts, and I'm like, oh, there's no way anybody was different than us. That there's no way any like there's human beings are human beings like like all over the world and in any different time period, like they weren't. It's not like people back then had thirty fingers and no capacity for carying about other people, right, And so it's just wacky to me that, like I don't even really know what the excuses are because it's not like, oh, well, I grew up different and I know different things, and so I am able to look at it through a modern lens, and you have to give these people no Like at this point, I'm like, I don't even know why I do. Like when you look at fucking pictures of just like people screaming at black kids trying to go to school, like during desegregation, and I'm like, not even getting on a high horse. It's just like like every one of those people should have to own that photograph, like that should have to be on the wall of all of their homes and be like, Oh, that's my aunt, that's my grandma, that's my sister, that's my mom screaming at these little seven year old kids like trying to just go to school. And I don't know, because that's not five generations ago or eight generations ago or two. That's fucking people. They're still alive. Some of those people, well, a lot of those people. Even this wasn't that long ago. You know, this was in the scheme of world history. It's not. But I'm saying, like this thing I'm talking about, so it's just like, oh, it's not. People weren't different. No. I mean, I think it's something you see timing to get throughout history, and it's one of the reasons that some people, you know, I go back and forth on whether or not human beings are innately good or innately evil. And religion wasn't keeping them good no now, and a lot of this ship was being done because they were like it was all it was all They wouldn't baptize high enough. Numbers, it was it was all motivated by greed. Essentially. It was you know, we want this land, and we'll try to get you people off of it without having to kill you. But if we have. Sure they tried and try very hard, that's for sure. But you know they they throughout the history of our country. They they got Native Americans to sign treaties that were you know. No, yeah, no, I'm aware, We're aware. We all we didn't have the worst schooling. Opposite of what people with someone people say about America and schooling, we had decent schooling. But I'm saying, like, it's just it's never going to be easy to hear these these stories ever and be like, oh, this was a vibe. No, And I don't think that's like a twenty twenty six viewpoint no of that. I think I think a lot of people would just go, that's not cool. Yeah, no, yah, it was terrible. But once the gold rush started, that both played into why all of that happened. But the gold Rush also was the birth of many of the legends that spread across California. One of those is the Tammy Knockers. You may have heard of the Tommy Knockers. I have heard of the Tommy Knackers because of that one book. So besides the shame I hope that they felt analyzing their own actions down there in the mines, there was a whole other kind of monster to be found below ground in California, and whispers of it started up around the same time that gold was found in California. So around eighteen forty eight eighteen forty nine, gold is found in the foothills of California, and basically the entire planet might as well have just tilted sideways and dumped everyone into California. To come and get gold. When you think about a prospector, we imagine them in overalls and hats, kind of crouched over a stream panning for gold, but much of the actual gold wasn't lying in the stream waiting to be scoop. That was just where men looked for signs that there was a jackpot of gold nearby. Some of it would make its way into the water. Most of the gold deposits were actually locked in quartz deep underground, and getting it out meant hard rock mining, which sounds like a really cool thing that an eighties metal band would do, or a. California law would be passed saying that's what Native Americans had to do or to make the way to the mines. Unlike mining soft sediment though, so there's hard rock mining and then there's soft rock mining, and coal and oil sand is soft rock mining, and mining those sediments is a little bit less labor intensive, although I'm sure also still very difficult. But gold had to be hammered and blasted out of the rock vast underground network, so tunnels had to be dug. It was a very highly specialized kind of mining. What the fuck? What? What the fuck is gold? Like in the sense that I am I'm just suddenly irate. What like what? Who was like, hey, gold matters? And then everyone was like I better go blow up everything to find it, Like like, it's not like gold. It's one thing. If people were like, you know what, there's not a lot of gold, and but the people who have it, like if you if you lick a gold bar, you you you stay young for fifty years longer than you should. Like there's no Well, it's just like someone's like, this is worth more. Well, because I think for for throughout history it was a it was a and still is a rare and precious metal. In terms of that rare. I walk outside every day and see people well where and things that look gold. Well, yeah, now things can look gold, But I mean back back in ancient times, in prehistory, at the beginning of trade and stuff, you know, you, people weren't even once they started manufacturing their own money. There was still a gold backed and silver back. And it was there was still a value to a shiny, precious, rare material. Saying it's weird that we've added values to anything. It's also very I believe, very malleable. Like it's really easy. Yeah, that's why they bite the coin to make it so. You can like, you know, you could coat things in it, you could melt it down easily. There were a lot of different purposes for it. And I, you know, humans, you don't have to actually answer that. I was just saying, I don't know if I'm answering it accurately. Yeah, I'm just saying it's kind of crazy that, like humans, like, there's just stuff we have that people went chasing. Yeah, whause it. Meant you were rich. Yeah, so people wanted to be rich. But in order to be rich, they had to get the gold out of the quartz, and that meant they had to get people who knew how to do hard rock mining, of which there weren't a ton in America. The best hard rock miners in the world when the gold Rush kicked off were Cornish from Cornwall, England, where the tin mines, which is another hard hard rock mining operation. We're drying up right as California's gold rush was kicking off. And this has got to be exciting for them because they're like, this particular set of skills we have we can use towards getting something that's worth something. Yeah, exactly that I was making like or something. They came over by the boatload, and to the extent that when mine owners wanted more of them. The story goes that they would ask a Cornish miner, hey, you got any guys back home who'd come work, and the miner would go, well, my cousin Jack back in Cornwall would come if you paid his way. So many people said this that cousin Jack's just became the American nickname for Cornish miners. So they were called cousin Jack's, the term I. Feel like there was an Italian equivalent on the East Coast probably for whatever you know, jobs were available. Greasy Dino's what they call this. So the Cornish miners came over, became cousin Jackson the corn and the cousin Jack's brought their gods with them, or not gods exactly. They're little guys. The Tommy Knackers pronounce Tommy Knackers. Per the lore. Now, if you've heard of Tommy Knockers, you probably are thinking of the Stephen King book. That's what not one of his Uh, he doesn't remember writing it. He doesn't remember it. It's not one of his better books. It is loosely connected to a Tommy Knocker mythology, though the creatures in that book are from a crash spaceship, so they don't really have anything to do with the actual Tommy Knocker legend, which again turns out is pronounced Tommy Knacker. Because they're so tired. I just yawned because you're knackered. So Tommy Knacker ed is ed knackered. Actually, if you were Tommy Knackered, I'd be my brother. Yeah, there you go. So, per the lore that came over with them, Tommy Knacker is loosely the Cornish version of a leprechaun, little man like two feet tall. Sometimes their skin was green in color instead of wearing green because they were dressed like miners. They literally were known to wear these little mining outfits and they lived down in the mine. They acted pretty similar to leprechauns, committing both good and bad deeds, often playing practical jokes and committing random acts of mischiefs such as stealing unattended tools and food. Okay, nothing to do with gold like lepracauns. No, just gold mines. Yeah, you would think though, because they came from the tin mines. You would think word would have gotten back to the leprechauns pretty quick about what's going on in California. Yeah, eleprechauns. All these different cryptids also show up. I thought you were gonna say that Tommy Knackers were like a boogeyman in the sense that, hey, man, I don't want anyone else coming to take this gold. Let's invent a cryptid or spooky doings thing that that keeps people from wanting to enter minds. And if we have like a big enough boogeyman, we can keep all the gold for ourselves. Well, there's a little bit of that going on. We'll get to in a second, but before we do, do you want to take a guess as to what the Cornish people believed Tommy Knackers were. Well, they're green mm hmm, and they have jobs that should be men's jobs, so I think they think they're scabs. It's a much more troublesome belief than that. Okay, I'll give you I'll give you an The Cornish belief about where the Tommy Knackers came from, and this is according to Legends of America. Quote. They believed that these wee little men were the souls of the Jews who crucified Christ and were sent by the Romans to work as slaves in the tin minds. This is something where I think you just keep that to yourself on the first day in the country. This belief was so strong that Tommy Knackers were allegedly never heard on Saturdays nor at times of Jewish festivals. I'm ati, this is out of control. I don't I can't take back what I said earlier. Maybe they were distinctly different people at that time period. This is both terribly anti Semitic, but also very bad news for anyone working in the mines on Saturdays or on Jewish festivals, because the Tommy Knackers were named after the vital role that they played in keeping the miners safe. Quote. The name comes from the knocking on the mine walls that often happens just before cavens, caused by the creaking of earth and timbers. Some thought these sounds of quote hammering were malevolent, indicating certain death or injury. Others saw their knocking as well, meaning warning the miners that a life threatening collapse was imminent, and others still believed the knocking sounds that they should follow the knocking sounds and they would be led to a rich a rich ore vein or some other kind of good luck. Okay, which which is weird because the knocking precedes this whole thing's caving in. Yeah, I feel like you shouldn't be walking inwards at all. No, you would think the people who believed that the Tommy knockers were guiding them towards more gold would not have survived long enough. Yeah to sell that belief. But apparently that's what some people thought. And to the miners of the day, you know, we've covered a lot of folk tales on this show. We've covered a lot of different monsters and spirits and whatever. To the miners of the day, this was not like a fun little myth that they told each other when they got drunk. This was reality. According to an article from a Nevada paper call The Union. Quote in a nineteen fifty seven interview, retired miner Fred NetTel, a member of a pioneer Grass Valley Cornish family described the miner's attitude towards Tommy Knackers. When a Cornish miner of the old school tells you how his life was saved by a Tommy Knacker's warning, he's not being facetious. His respect and feeling towards these underground elves is almost religious. And so this was a thing that was taken very seriously. You love them so much, why don't you like remove them from slavery. Well, they are very comfortable with how these people got in the mines, but they also are fans. So the evolution of the Tommy Knacker once it got to the United States, it did evolve. It sometimes took a more spectral Well, the first way it evolved was that that insane myth about the creation of the Tommy Knackers fell away because the gold mines of America would not have been haunted by the go of anyone from the Roman Yeah, so that immediate that explanation changed pretty quickly, and also the mythos surrounding Tommy Knackers in some cases took on a slightly more spectral turn. And then knocking sounds started being attributed to the spirits of deceased miners who had died in a collapse or something. Easier, easier, cleaner story. Yeah, like from a from a film development perspective. Let's go with that. Yeah, let's cut off this runner about the Jews. Just make it that ghosts to people who used to work here, yeah, and not people who killed or knew Jesus ye right. To keep these friendly caspers on their side, miners would leave out scraps of food or small tokens, basically trying to bribe their way into the ghosts good graces. And there were other rules too. You did not whistle down in the mind because whistling, dude, whistling could set the Tommy Knackers off. To these these the those people that that sleeping woman lived with. Sleeping woman, uh, sleeping beauty, uh huh oh. The Seven Dwarfs they whistled while they worked. They did they spit in the face of this, I actually think, And they're miners and stuff. The Seven Dwarves kind of are Tommy Knackers a little bit in terms of they were small little men who were dressed like miners who like worked in the mines. But they they whistled against the rules Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah, saying they like they threw caution in the wind and spit in the face of this whole thing. Well, look, no one hears saying that that the Tommy Knackers couldn't whistle in the mines. It was just that the miners weren't to whistle in the mines. You also weren't allowed to swear, which I can't imagine worked very well. I think swearing is a new thing, is it? It might be. I don't know. I've seen Deadwood. Yeah, I guess that was not necessarily history television show. What it was history that? But that's also Deadwood is nowhere near California. True, But come on, people swore back in the old days, especially miners. Let's let's be serious. I don't know. I wasn't I never aim to be there. Some guys actually carved and I put a link to one of these in the show notes. But some guys actually carved little clay statues of the Tommy Knackers and would leave them. They'd give them eyes made out of matchtick heads, so they'd like leave a little spot, they'd break off matchtick heads, put them in the eyes, and then they would leave the the little figurines tucked away in the tunnels like little tiny shrines. Yeah, hope, there's no methane gas pockets aroun here in the mind. Don't accidentally rub against those eyeballs. These these strike on anything eyeballs. Now, in certain places, like you suggested earlier, the Tommy Knackers were rumored to be straight up malevolent and instead of guarding gold. Although I guess if you worked a convoluted enough plot, maybe this could work out for you. But there were places where mines were actually shut down because the crews were too scared to go back down into the mines because they felt that there were evil Tommy Knackers living down there. Today, someone would be like some engineer would be like, you were afraid because it was not safe, extremely Dan, you had a bunch of cavens and shit, we should never even been probably trying to mine this area. Even after those mines would get shut down, or even after gold ran out in a mine, the stories would continue. People would claim that the Timmy Nackers just moved into the neighborhood and sometimes took up residency in homes near the abandoned mine shafts. Okay and the same superstition took on a slightly different flavor once it was in the home with lots of families convinced that that rhythmic knocking or tapping on the wall was an omen that somebody in the family was about to kick the bucket or some other disaster was right around the corner. And the Cornish. Even though the Cornish brought this legend over here, they weren't special in terms of Europeans who had little creatures in their mining culture. Pretty much every mining culture in Europe had their own version of this guy. The Welsh had the cobblin now knee high little miners who'd knock you in the direction of a good vein. So again, I guess once you heard the knocking, which is definitely not a good sign. Yeah, well, I think it's there's two. There's two schools of thought. I'm just saying, like, maybe some minds it's established early on, like you don't you might not know when you enter a mind or start a mine what you're going to run into, right, and so you might find out pretty quickly. We have the ones that knock for Caven's and other ones might be like, oh, we have the ones that knock for good shit. But here's but here's my thought. The knocking in reality was the sound of the wooden beams that were supporting the mind beginning to collapse. So in what world did anyone ever follow the sound of the knocking? I mean, I guess maybe it could just be settling. It could also just be Tommy Knockers. It could also be Tommy Knackers. Feel like you're discounting the fact that there could also be I am, I am small creatures with their finger on the pulse of good gold ed. You're right to call me to the curb on this one, yeah, correct. The Germans, for their part, had cobolds which were meaner than Tommy Knacker's and better geister, which just straight up translates to mountain ghosts. So everybody who went underground for a living basically decided that somebody was down there waiting for this. It seems like a weird place. What does being super far in aer ground? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. And I don't know. I can only go by like coal mine imagery, but like you're not standing up straight or anything. I don't think you know what I mean. It's it's it's pretty terrible. It's a fucking it's terrible word, so you might have to come up with shit just to like get through the day. That's true. That's true. There's a folk loris named Ronald M. James who's basically like the go to guy on this stuff, and according to him, belief in the Knackers back home in Cornwall pretty much died out around nineteen hundred, which. Is America took a hall. Yeah, that's when everybody left. But it is interesting that out here the Tommy Knacker actually spread and it jumped the stories jumped through to miners who weren't even Cornish. This guy James talked to another guy who learned about Tommy Knackers from his dad, who is Portuguese. So as far as I. Can tell, I mean, we've, like I said, we've covered a lot of myths on this show. This is one of the only European folk spirits that came to America and actually did better here. It was that everyone who came to America did better than were there from It was an adsign period through fifty years ago. It was an American success story for Tommy Knackers. They found a new home here and they thrived. Yeah. Talk to tommyn Acker today though, and the rents in a cave they are well. After most of the big California minds shut down, really like there was a big wave of it sort of in the mid nineteen fifties. But as the mines were shutting down, there was a really interesting wave that kind of exposed that these beliefs hadn't really died out in the eighteen hundreds, because as late as nineteen fifty six, when one of these big California minds shut down, the owners went to seal up the entrance as you do for safety, and the miners, all of whom were fourth, fifth and sixth generation cousin ja acts who were all grown men, presumably with families and modern people, circulated a petition to demand the owners hold off on sealing the mind long enough to let the Tommynachers out and find work in a new mine. So I wasn't able to find a copy of this petition anywhere, but according to the stories, the mine owners complied, okay, and they said we'll give it a day, and the tommyn Ackers went elsewhere. Well, they were they were sent to another mind to be to be slaves. Per there to be the per their origin story. Hey, look, they want to find miners to help. They want to find that. You know, they're a shoulder to lean on if something bad is going to happen. I bet you in modern. Times saying their origin story, wasn't that their origin stories? I was gonna say, in modern times, maybe they're working in the data centers. Oh my god, they're all lumped up. They have like all sorts of fucked up diseases. They have to be around all that shit, like all that stuff you see coming out of like towns where they build them. Everyone's like, I'm sick all the time. It's where all the minerals went. So they're just like they followed. Then they're like, this isn't a cave. Yeah, this is what you guys have been doing this shit. I would never have led you to any of this if I had known. So all of this mining, all of this gold rushing resulted in the quick construction of rough, ramshackle towns where the miners could live, drink, fight, eat, sleep, and kill each other. When the gold rush was over, some of those places, like Sacramento and San Francisco, hung on and grew into bustling modern cities and towns. Other places weren't so lucky, and so we have a rash of ghost towns throughout California. Guess we imagine those are more inland than the ones on the water that succeeded. Yes, most of them are a little bit further inland. And there are two ghost towns, one traditional one not so much that I think are worth highlighting as we wrap up the part one of our journey through the frightening corners of California. The first, I. Think is maybe the more well known one, although I'm not sure how well known it really is outside the state of California. But it's a ghost town called Body up. Oh yeah, I'm aware of it. Yeah, up in the hills of the Sierra Mountains near the Nevada line, almost eight and a half thousand feet up. You're gonna pass a lot of signs for that. You are you're driving around ed Do you want to take center stage here and tell the people what the ghost town of Body is today? It's a tourist destination. No, I know, But why is it cool? Why is it interesting? Has everybody disappeared? Well, they didn't dissip they left have you. I've never bet. I just know the sign. I don't know edg just knows the sign. It sits at almost eight and a half thousand feet of elevation, and it's been there since around eighteen fifty nine, when a guy whose name has sort of almost been lost to history as either William aka Waterman aka Wakeman s body spelled differently. Bod e Y is his last name. Bode is the name of the town. He finds gold up in then There Hills, and the race is on and now unlock the gold out of the mountains. Here's a question that you can't answer, and I'm just just a thought I had right now in the middle of your story. Please, So the land wasn't necessarily free, Like, hey, I've found gold in this creek, which means that I'm probably near where gold originated. I'm gonna go dig for the gold. But someone probably owned that land, as the Native Americans learned, people are really interested in owning land. Yeah, so then you had to, I guess, like buy a steak in that land. Yeah. I mean, I don't know the whole system in and out, but the buying this buying a claim, staking a claim was I would imagine part of the way it worked was, you know, if you're a super rich guy in California in the gold rush. Take a percentage of whatever people find they are. Yeah, like you own tons miles and miles of land, but you don't have the time or the energy to go look for gold, so you allow other people to do it, and then they stake their claim by either paying you up front or a percentage of what they find or Yeah. But I but I imagine I always think about this with shipwrecks, anything where there's people looking for fucking gold. Yeah, so let's say you find it. You find it on the Calari Creek. It's in your backyard, yep. And you gotta get all these idiots to come in. You gottaet always Welshmen to come in and fucking rip it up and get it for you, and you gotta fight a Tommy Knocker. But I feel like that's almost the least of your problems. You got always people flood into California to find gold. How do you stop other people who aren't your friends and co workers just going in and stealing the gold or like also coming in and using it. Like that's the thing, Like if you find a shipwreck, which is very different. You have to then go and dive for it wants to stop. Anytime you drive away, someone else is going down there and taking shit. So now was there like a huge security force you had to also employ. Well, I think everybody had guns was part of it. But I know shipwrecks, at least nowadays, are if you find one, they're guarded with immense secrecy, like the actual location of where someone is looking for a particularly famous ship rack. But I imagine it's all like what's his name Bellack in India Jones huh where it's like, let Anya Jones do all the hard work and it's come in and take it from them. That would make you a villain. Ed. I'm sure there were many villains of the time. I'm just saying it's kind of weird that. Yeah, I guess it must have just been the train robbery after train robbery at the train robbery there, or like mine robbery or bank roll robbery. Yeah. I mean, I don't know what recourse you had in a lot of those situations, other than you know, you would find something, you would try to keep it quiet to yourself. You would try to buy enough steak in wherever you were, to make sure that you know, if anybody did find gold, that you were getting a piece of that, you know. I don't think it was. It wasn't. I don't need an answer. I just thought I had themiliar story. Someone will write in someone right in. They'll be like, oh, the thing you just described, it's the plot of every Western Yeah, probably watched them. It's either that or a or a cow rustler. Is someone's killing my someone's killing my steed, not my steed. Could be a separate steed murder that happened there. The first cosmically dark thing about the ghost town of Body is that William aka Waterman aka Wakeman s Body didn't even live long enough to see the town that would be named after named after him be built. According to the ghost town's website, Body and his mining partner, known only as Quote Black Tailor, died in a blizzard that same winter. I think that was a descript name. I don't know it's capitalized. So okay, they died. So they they found this area. I think there were actually four four of them, and these two Body and Taylor went to go get supplies and got caught in a surprise blizzard and died in the blizzard. It never actually made it back. So then the story goes that the other two named the town after him, but that the sign, the person who made the sign. Spelled his name wrong and it just stuck there you go. So for years after it was established, though they they hadn't found much gold. They established some mines, but it was pretty much considered just a backward, backwoods nowhere kind of outpost. And then a mine caved in in eighteen seventy six and exposed a massive body of gold beneath the ground. So even the best thing that ever happened to body was a tragedy. I don't know if people died, but I assume there were. They died in the mind when I have. To imagine, unfortunately, that all cave ins there's somebody like with a pickaxe stand in there, yeah, causing it. Yeah, there's no yeah, exactly, no, there's no thing where I was like, oh, I was eating a sandwich and it just I looked, I looked, I looked over and something happened over there. Yeah. I betual it with some guy being like mad about even being in there, and then find out goddamn gold would dig no fucking golden here and bang bang, and then that was the last bank they ever heard. Yeah. Well four years later, by eighteen eighty, Body's population had exploded from next to no one to something like ten thousand people. And that's what I'm talking about. That's where it's like, we need to have a record of who are you. I've never seen you before. It's like it must be so crazy. Well, this town was Deadwood levels of feral. The town at its peak had around sixty five saloons, which is a lot of saloons, even for ten thousand people. That's a lot of saloons, plus brothels, gambling halls, opium dens. And it was so violent. It was so reliably daily violent. As you say, crime is. Oxygen, Crime is oxygen. That According to body dot com, the question that people would ask when they got up in the morning was have we a man for breakfast? Meaning did someone get killed last night? So every morning people would just get around the table and go, have we man for breakfast? Is there a body in the street? Like? That was the going concern each morning. According to one legend, when one little girl found out that her family was moving to Body she prayed to God with the words goodbye God, We're going to Body. That's amazing. The town's reputation even birthed its own little boogeyman, the bad Man from Body, which sounds like it could be. A Randy Newman song, Oh could be. He wasn't really thought of as like a living, breathing guy, but it was. The phrase seems to have inhabited the soul of everyone in that city. It was a phrase that bounced around the whole West Is Shorthand for like the worst guy you could run into you if you ended up in the wrong part of town, you might meet the bad Man from Body, according to the Little House of Horrors dot com quote. Apart from the gunfights and murders, the harsh conditions also took a lot of lives. During the Savage Winter of eighteen seventy eight to eighteen seventy nine, hundreds were killed of exposure and disease. Other lives were claimed by mining accidents. People got killed by falling timber, explosions of powder magazines, and other accidents. A disastrous fire struck in eighteen ninety two, The abandonment of the Body railway in nineteen seventeen, and another much larger fire in nineteen thirty two, which destroyed half the town led to the end of body. People weren't still getting gold in nineteen thirty two. No, But that's just like a town that was established. There was a town, and there were there were buildings, and I'm sure a couple people still live there. I don't think it was a bustling place. But from nineteen thirty two to nineteen sixty two the town sat more or less abandoned as it stood the day the last person walked out of town when the state in nineteen sixty two, the State of California stepped in and turned it into a State Historic park. But they made an interesting choice. This was probably an episode of California's Gold about it. Maybe what's California's goal? California's Goal With hule Houser, I've never seen Californias. It was like a PBS or like public act, not public acts. It was bigger than that. But like I mean, i've heard of fule Houser is that was that the name of his show was California's California's Goal. They like hull houses, Yeah, we're here. That bode and he's just like the friendliest, most fun yeah little guy who they think she's canna big. I think it was like a marine or something. But what I'm saying like he was just like a delightful person who would take you around different places in California on this show and they would just be like, you wore the look at this. And then he'd have like his cameraman who's always like talk of the caraman. He's like, hey Frank or whatever, Yeah, come look at this thing over here, and he'd be like, this is a flower. Isn't that great? Anyway? He's the best, And I can only imagine him in peak body trying to be nice to everyone. Killing We'll check, well, we'll check on YouTube and if there's a he's no longer with us, he no, I know, but if there's a right peak up, less you have. If there's an old episode of California's Gold on YouTube, maybe we can put it up in the show notes. Yeah, I'll see if I could find the body episode. Yeah. But the choice that the state made here was even though a lot of the town was still left, instead of polishing it up and kind of turning it into a museum, sort of they made the choice to preserve it in a state of what they call arrested decay, which means they don't fix anything, but they do everything they can to keep it from decaying further. Oh that's pretty cool. Yeah, so they've kind of frozen it in time. There's it's the Bodies exhibit of building buildings sort of. There's roughly, depending on what you consider a building, there's roughly one hundred and seventy structures still standing in bodies. Some of them are just like sheds and stuff. But they sit there exactly as they did with dishes on the table, pool balls still out on the felt. Stuff is still on the store shelves, and it kind of. Is it messed up that I don't think it's as cool because it's nineteen thirty two, Well, I don't think. I don't think it had changed much from you know, the eighteen nineties. It was something cooler about finding like a whole town frozen and amber from eighteen ninety versus like, well, if there were automatic it's up in New York and the can thirty two. Sure, but if you ever go up there or you see pictures of it, it looks like the eighteen hundreds. It doesn't been I've never followed the sign to boat it. It doesn't. It doesn't look like the nineteen thirties. It's all wooden homes and it looks like a Western set. I'm sure I didn't check, but I'm sure it's been used as a Western I'm sure. It's kind of a yoga like Sturbridge Village or something in New England. It's like a colonial town. It looks exactly the same. Still, Yeah, and Body, I th if I can skip it. Body isn't just a ghost town in name only, as many ghost towns are, a number of the buildings that remain are said to be haunted. There's the JS Cane House, which belonged to a big shot local businessman back in the day, and that house is reportedly haunted by the ghost of a rather large Chinese woman, likely a former maid. She has a habit of showing up to kids visiting one of the upstairs bedrooms. She also has the unfortunate habit of trying to suffocate people in their sleep. Okay, one park range, that's on them. Hey, One park ranger's wife had a particularly nasty run in with the ghost of this woman. She'd gone to bed early, only to feel a massive crushing weight pinning her to the mattress, and she actually had to fight for air so that she could breathe, and was struggling so hard that she fell right off the bed. Her sleep proausis demon is a large Chinese woman. Apparently it's not what you think of when you think of sleeperouse as demons, not at all. No, no, but this woman, and she's not the only one. Who is who has been accosted by this particular spirit. Another a park ranger, Gary Walter, was in that same room when he says the door swung open on its own and the air instantly felt heavy, like he was being smothered by something he couldn't see, which, now that you said, is just herved being big and fat, Just a big fat ghost who's like trying to let people pass and the doorways too small for them both to go through, and they're like, oh, what is that. There's also the day Chambeau House haunted by a female ghost who likes peeking out of the upstairs window, and the Mendocceni House said to be haunted by a couple of children whose laughter is so loud it can even be heard outside the house ghost farms, the giggling ghosts of Mendoino Farms. In addition to the ghosts, there is also the body curse that is barely a curse, but there's sort of a funny detail about it. The curse says, if you take anything from the remains of this town, a nail or a shard of glass, you'll be hit with terrible luck until you give it back. Supposedly, unsurprisingly, this curse was just straight up invented by a park ranger. It's gonna be like, stop taking everything. I'm sure they have the same curse at like the Colisseum in Italy. Yeah, But interestingly, it worked so well that, according to at least one source I found, the park gets a steady stream of packages from people sending back the bottle or the piece of rusty metal. That's actually awesome, or the wood that they. Took, often accompanied by long, guilt written apology letters describing the divorce, the car accident, or the dead pet that there's sure the curse caused. I fucking love that. Like that's that's your next you know, the ring or something, you know what I mean. Like there's like like like I feel like every one of those packages is another short story about the haunting that followed that person from body. Yeah, it sounds like it sounds like an old uh outlaw country western song like sent mock curses back to body. Oh that's good, that'd be a good song. And then I want to wrap up with less a lesser known ghost town that's a ghost town in a different way, a place called Coolma, California. This town does sit much closer to the water. It's just south of San Francisco. It's only a mere two point two square miles, but it boasts an impressive population of one and a half million people. I'm sorry, what this two point. Two square mile town has a population. This is a brain teaser for you. As it sounds like Carmel. How does a town that is only two square miles have one and a half million people there. They built vertically, No like New York City. No, I mean island. Here's here's the answer. Only seventeen hundred of them are alive. You piece of shit. I'm not gonna say yeah, you piece of shit. And that is because Coolma is a modern necropolis. Almost seventy five percent of the entire town is zoned for cemeteries and has been for over one hundred years. That's kind of sick, according to Mentor, maybe having a name of a town though, is to. Stop having the name of no people live there. Seventeen hundred people live there. The town motto is it's good to be alive in Colma. Stop it. Yeah we should go. I'm not driving that way at all, but we should stop in there if we If we visit Colma, Yeah, I've always wanted to go to Gilroy, California, which is up by San Francisco as well. It's like the California capital of garlic. Okay, like most garlic probably across the country. You buy it's like from Gilroy, and they have a Hershey Park style theme park that's all garlic themes and you get like it like instead of teapots, it's like garlic bowls. Wow. And they have like garlic ice cream. Okay. And I've always wanted to go for really no other reason, and then that's kind of ridiculous, it is, And so we should definitely do a a Gilroy you know, Coalma Coalma double feature. It's a great idea. I'm in. According to mental Floss, quote the town's morbid claim to fame as a result of laws passed in San Francisco in the early nineteen hundreds. At the turn of the twentieth century, the city was struck by an epidemic of the bubonic plague criminal It was also in the middle of the gold and silver boom, and land within the city limits suddenly seemed too valuable to hand over to the dead. Oh wow. So, in an effort to conserve real estate and out of growing concerns over the contagious nature of dead bodies, San Francisco outlawed burials in the year nineteen hundred. So you were no longer allowed to bury anyone in the city of San Francisco. The existing cemeteries because nobody wanted to operate them anymore, because you couldn't make money, because nobody was allowed to be buried there fell into such disrepair that reports of people playing soccer with exposed human skulls was not unusual. Woo, and between roughly nineteen twenty and nineteen forty, San Francisco unearthed and shipped one hundred and fifty thousand bodies buried within the city limits to Colma, California. Okay. It's one thing to be like, the land's too valuable, we can't make any more cemeteries. It's an entirely different thing to be like, you know what, just dig up all the cemeteries. That's land, as far as we're concerned, to use for other things. And people wonder what's wrong with San Francisco. Yeah, that place is a shittle and it's because of the Indian burial ground that it's for sure built on through ordinances. Well, they they uninterred one hundred and fifty thousand bodies, shipped them all to Coma, which at the time was mostly just farmland, and even worse, I think families of the dead were on the hook. So if you didn't pay for the cost of moving the gravestone, your loved one was just thrown in a mass burial pit in Coma and not properly reburied. So they charged fucked up because it wasn't their idea to move the body. No, but they still charged. They were like, we're I'm gonna pay for this shit. You're gonna pay for it, and if you don't, fuck you're dead people. So, according to Wikipedia, the unclaimed headstones were then recycled in various San Francisco public works. So you can see reclaimed recycled headstones in the drain gutters at Buena Vista Park and bolstering breakwaters near the Saint Francis Yacht Club. Oh my god. Yeah, they just used them. They just put them wherever they wanted they needed rock. That is the craziest. It's the same mentality of like, well, I'm just taking it and doing this. Yeah, you can't stop like this. Every part of California's history started with I'm doing this and there's nothing you can do about it. Pretty much. That's so crazy. So Cooma has since grown into a town where many, many, many people are buried. Famous figure can you still be buried there? Yeah? Famous figures currently enriching the soil of Coma include Joe DiMaggio, William Randolph Hurst, Levi Strauss, and Wyatt Irp, who is buried next to his wife Josephine Marcus Irp. But there is one other man buried in Colma who I think is worth mentioning before we bring this episode to a close. Joshua Norton, better known as Norton, the first Emperor of the United. States, Okay, I can't wait for this. But have you ever heard of this guy? Never in my life? Okay, I hadn't either ed Norton's grandfather probably. I have a question. So it's it's illegal in the city limits of San Francisco to bury someone, But is it also illegal in the city of Colma, that's name it a Colmar, Yes, to dig up people? Because I have to imagine, maybe the easiest place to find gold in San Francisco pocket is in the fillings and pockets of the people in this one town. Like people are really breaking their backs trying to find gold in the hills, but really just go to Colma and Robalie's grace. Yeah, I uh, that's a great question. I don't I would not imagine that digging people up is legal. Anyway, unless we decided I want that land dig them up. But I can tell you that it is still illegal that you still can't bury bodies in San Francisco. There are a few exceptions. There are like certain mausoleums and stuff that they've made exceptions for, but it is still new. Internments are outlawed and it remains in effect under San Francisco Health Code Section two hundred. So now they've added a health code to it. This bullshit. It's because they were concerned about the disease nature of rotting corpses. That's what they said, because it sounded like they started with this lands too valuable, not this land might be covered in German Now. According to CBS eight San Diego, Oh those liars, it was confirmed traditional burials are not returning, but California statewide has legalized human composting beginning in twenty twenty seven. I'm sorry, this is a new this is a new equo. I can't see that in the ballot. This is a new eco friendly option. We just voted for remains. I don't know where you. I mean, I kind of think burial is eco composting, but I guess maybe they're going to provide different places where you can compost. What color has that been gonna be? Jesus, it's gonna be stinky in the summer, that's for sure. What isn't But let's let's let's finish up here on Norton, the first Emperor of the United States, because this guy is the man. He was once a wealthy San Franciscan businessman and landowner, but he lost his fortune speculating on rice prices in the eighteen fifties, okay, and descended into what is described by Atlas Obscura as quote a gloomy and destitute self exile for several. Years, coming for all you polymarket people. Yeah, so there's there's I think there's gonna be a Norton the second any day. Now, I think so too. Then he re emerged, and on September one, eighteen fifty nine, he publicly declared himself Norton, the first Emperor of the United States and later Protector of Mexico, which is a wild thing to protect from San Francisco, which is famously nowhere near Mexico. I mean, depends on when you're standing in San Francisco, that's true. But well, even way back in the day, I don't know if Mexico stretched. Was Mexico ever where San Francisco is now. No, thank you, I don't know why you need to know who I am. Well ed, just asked what. It turns out I was wrong. San Francisco was part of Mexico. I had three years before the forty nine ers, three years for eight and forty nine. Yeah, I didn't realize that I knew Mexico had gone up in that we took a lot of it. I didn't realize it went that for North. We've got that in the span in the Mexican American War, and three years later we're smashing blowing it up for gold. Well, and ten years after that this guy was declaring himself the protector of Mexico. So maybe he wanted to turn back the clock. In any case, Norton, the first Emperor of the United States, was encouraged by local newspapers and he issued numerous public decrees on matters of public policy, and even issued his own currency, which apparently was widely accepted in San Francisco. Huh. People loved this guy. The military hooked him up with a uniform so that he could look the part, and local theaters made sure he had a prime seat for every opening night for any show he wanted to attend. When he wasn't being treated like royalty, he was just another guy. He loved to hang out at local clubs and apparently crashed in flophouses at the end of the night. According to Alice Obscura in the eighteen seventy National Census, Norton's occupation is officially listed as emperor. On the same census, it is noted that he does not have the right to vote. In that column, the reason is entered as insane. Oh my god. Really, yes, so he was officially considered too insane to vote, although I guess not too insane to be the emperor of America. Everyone pretty much agreed he was out of his mind, but they did love him. The US Army was a little concerned. At one point he issued a proclamation that the army should forcibly dissolve Congress. They didn't love that, but they just sort of ignored it. He did also. This is so by all accounts, he was a completely insane man who slept in a flophouse and then was treated like royalty all day. But apparently he was also super articulate, very well read, had some genuinely progressive ideas. He actually one of his decrees was to build a bridge and tunnel across the Bay, Oh, which was years before anybody did it. And apparently he was very very good. At chess as well. His reign ended on January eighth, eighteen eighty, when he collapsed on a street corner and died before help could arrive. The San Francisco Chronicle ran the headline de roy s mort the king is dead and reported the ten thousand people showed up to see him lie in state before a small procession followed him to his first resting place. Ryan State, meaning that like his body was on display. Yeah, I thought ten thousand people show up to see where he fell over, Like he's still there baking in the sun. No, they put him. I mean, I guess they didn't put him in the State House because that's down in Sacramento. But they put him somewhere and then they buried him, initially at the Masonic Cemetery, and then ultimately he was dug up and placed in the Kolma Cemetery, where his gravestone still reads nor In the first Emperor. Of the United And somebody had to pay for that move. It sounds like everyone just chipped in. Probably yeah for him, Yeah for him. Come on, it's portraits of. The marine thing. It's definitely cameras at the time there is. I'll put an and he doesn't really look that cool. Yeah, here I can. I can look him up for you real quick. It doesn't matter, matters. And then I'll put a picture in the show notes show notes. But yeah, he's sort of well seen this picture before. This one's pretty good. He looks pretty much exactly like what you would imagine a man who couldn't vote because he was too insane. Looked like too insane to vote. If you're watching this on YouTube, Ed is holding this man's picture up to the camera. If you're not, I'll put his picture in the show notes so that you can enjoy on your own time. Let me drink it in here one second. Yeah, those are the eyes of a guy who's having a lot of fun. I mean, oh my god. His cane is like a hand holding a cane. His cane is like a cane holding a cane. What am I looking at right now? I like a cane with a little hand holding the top part where you hold it. I love this guy, and I love the fact that there was a period in history where you could just do this. I mean, I guess people kind of still do in very different ways. You know, people who just insist upon being famous until they're famous to best. Yeah, he's the Emperor of America. That's true. Okay, you know what I stand corrected. That's the second time of this episode. Not in a sensus that he's insane. Yeah. So that is the story of the first Emperor of America, and that is where we are going to bring part one of California's Scary history to an end. So there's no fear to here this week because we're going to finish it up next time. So I guess until then, I'm Chris Calari, the second Emperor of America. And I'm Ed. I guess vice Emperor'sica. He's my vizier or what was what's the bad guy in Aladdin? I don't know. Ed's my CONSIGLIERI. There you go. I'm the Second Emperor of America. The show is Scared all the Time, and we will see you back in California next time. Scared All the Time is co produced by Chris Calari and Edvacola, written by Chris Calari, edited by Edvacola. Additional support and Keeper of Sanity is test Fightful. Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual. Stu and Mister Disclaimer is And just a. Reminder, you can now support the podcast on Patreon. You can get all kinds of cool shit in return. Depending on the tear you choose. We'll be offering everything from ad free episodes, producer credits, exclusive access, and exclusive. So go sign up for a Patreon and Scared All the Time podcast dot com. Don't worry. Whole Steady Cat's welcome. No part of the show can be reproduced anywhere without permission copyright Astonishing. Legends Production Night. We are in this together, together, Together,