50 States Of Fear: California Part 2

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 Collari. And I'm Ed Ficola. And today we are revisiting the scary state of California for part two of our journey to Through the Nightmares of the Golden State. If you're just walking in, there is a part one. It came out at our last episode, and if you didn't listen to it or you skipped it, all is forgiven. But go back, catch up, and make sure you do, because I think the two halves of this topic complement each other kind of nicely. The first half was loosely about the land of California, the tar pits, the mining goblins, the ghost towns crumbling to dust, and the awful truth of what the earliest Californians did to the native people on all of that land. But the land of California has only ever been half the problem. The other half is the people, a collection of dreamers and psychos, of whom Ed and I are two, who will stand the test of time. So this week, we've got a ghost on the Hollywood sign, a drug rehab that built itself an army, and the sweetest little old lady who ever rented you a room. Just be warned, it might be the very last place you ever stay. What are we? Scared. When are we? All the time. Join us. Join us. Join us. Now it is time for... Time for... Scared all the time. Hey everybody, welcome back to Scared All the Time. We've already said that, I think maybe, but this is housekeeping. We need to do it for part two for a couple reasons. One, YouTube. YouTube. I am looking into a camera right now, and as much as it pains me to say this, we have to do video, and so... We need you all, all y'all, to go to YouTube and hit subscribe, like, all that shit. Really subscribe. I don't even care if you hit thumbs down and everything. Yeah. Just hit subscribe. They're jerking us around. So if you want to be heroes, go subscribe to the Scared Old Time YouTube channel. It's a really, I don't know why it's so important, but it is. People need this shit. And we keep making it. So please help us out. That'd be really, really great. And that doesn't cost you a thing. But if you do have money, if you'd like something to cost you a thing, you could also head over to our Patreon, patreon.com slash scared all the time and sign up for one of our three tiers that are absolutely loaded to the damn gills with every kind of bonus material, merch, anything you could possibly want. We're thinking about adding feet pics for Ed. It's a thing. We'll get to it later. Not for Ed. Do you mean of Ed? Of Ed. I certainly didn't request anything like that. No, but we've had some people request them of you. And so why not charge a couple of our most special listeners extra money to get it? peek at those little piggies but. Gross but if you do get a peek i guess they're gonna want to review them because people love. To review us and this brings us to five star corner if you have listened to this show before you know it you love it if you leave us a five star review on apple podcasts we just might read it on the show that's what we're here to do right now So I will start us off with a five-star review from Buff McNugget. Five stars. Central PA scares for life. What's spookier than a fear-based podcast? A fear-based podcast where one of the hosts grew up in the same area as you and frequently name drops locations you are all too familiar with. Speaking of which, Gettysburg Ghosts episode, when? Much love to this podcast that keeps me laughing and gasping in equal measure. Thank you very much, Buff McNugget. Gettysburg Ghost episode will be whenever I can get Ed to come up here and maybe take a field trip to camp out overnight in the darkness of the Gettysburg woods and listen for those soldiers from the past. Ed, how about you hit us with a five-star review? I'm going to go with two very quick shorties before the next one because they're both one sentence. First one's from Zellars. I don't know if I should pronounce it, but five stars. Thanks a lot. Morgellons disease episode made me itchy. Thanks a lot, guys. You're welcome, Zellars. Zellars, we fucked your life up. It happened to us as well, yeah. Yes. And the other one just says, five stars, good show. This show was pretty good. Hoseboys forever. Forever. Like those two. Love them. Before we get into the episode, a lot of people commented about a flub up we had. about Hotel California being written by the Beach Boys. I certainly didn't think that was the case. I'm not sure Chris realized that he was attributing it to the Beach Boys in the episode. I think we were just talking about, hey, Hotel California is a weird song. Yeah, I. This is how I learned that the Eagles wrote it. I thought Oasis actually wrote Hotel California. So I don't know where the. Beach Boys came from. I've seen the Big Lebowski enough to know exactly who wrote Hotel California. But yeah, it was a mess up. Sorry about that. It was not always nice to get engagement, but crazy when it's every single person being like, what are you, an idiot? Yeah. Hey, you know what? If. This is how you learn that this show is not to be cited in your research papers, hey, there's worse ways to have learned that. Also, we're going to learn in this episode about a cult who has a very similar tactic for helping people. That's true. We are. We got meta. So with that said, everybody, like and subscribe on YouTube, sign up for the Patreon, keep listening to us wherever you get your podcasts, and now sit back Relax and enjoy the season finale of Summer of Fear 2, 50 States of Fear, California, Part 2. That's not an unreasonably long episode title. Before we get into it, Ed, Part 1. What stuck with you? What was your favorite story? What's the thing that's going to keep you up? Well, I don't know if it'll keep me up. My favorite story was that emperor or whatever. Oh, the emperor of America? Yeah, America. That is not the scariest part of the episode, but God damn. He's fun. What a life. What a life. I think I've been kind of focused on the ghost towns and the fact that so much of California feels like, I don't know, time feels like you really feel the passage of time in California. I don't know if it's because it's a. Young- I don't. That's a crazy thing to say. Well, okay. You don't. Objectively don't because there's no seasons. Let me back up. Okay, please do. You objectively don't on a day-to-day basis because there's no seasons and every day sometimes feels the same. Which is why I feel like I moved here two days ago. But when you look around California, you can feel the history passing you by in a way that I don't know that you feel in other states. You can see it on a micro level, like the fact I used to live off of Melrose. Every two years, half the restaurants change. You know, I would find a place I liked, the rent would go up, they'd leave, someone else would come in. So on the micro level, you can feel it. On a medium level, you can feel it. We talked about one real ghost town and one sort of fun ghost town last week, but there's so many ghost towns in this state. There's so many places where mines were built, homes were built, and people just left when the industry left. Parts of Route 66 left. You can feel the passage of time where everything left. And I don't know, maybe it's just because I'm melancholy about the film industry these days and it feels like the film industry is like the next thing to leave. But you can feel the, you can see if you can't feel everything in California changing around you. So I don't know, that's what really stuck with me from part one. But I've been thinking about it a little bit more between part one and part two. And I think the through line of the whole state, and I'm not the first person to say this, is really the dream of California. It's a place where. People move to become someone else or become more of who they already are, richer, famouser, sober, new in some way. It's the last stop. It's the farthest you can go before you fall off the continent. It's the last stop. You cannot run any further west. And California leans in. It sells that dream very, very hard. So we're going to start part two with somebody who came out here to be a star, and depending on who you ask, maybe never really left. Her name was Peg Entwistle. And 90 years of legend has flattened this woman into, well, flattened is maybe the wrong term, but has turned her into the woman. Who jumped off the Hollywood sign. But that's not You know, that's a terrible legacy for her to leave because she was more than that. She was an actress who was born in Wales in 1908. She was raised in London, and she came up through the New York theater world in the 1920s. Between 1926 and 1932, she appeared in 10 Broadway plays, which means she could have appeared in a play that Randy Newman was doing the music for. No, maybe Alfred Newman was. She appeared in 10 Broadway plays with the Theater Guild and shared stages with people like George M. Cohan and Dorothy Gish. In 1925, she played Hedwig in Ibsen's The Wild Duck at a repertory in Boston. And the story goes that sitting in the audience that night was another teenage girl who walked out and told her mother, I want to be exactly like Peg Entwistle. And that woman... was Betty Davis. Whoa. She supposedly told that story for the rest of her life. Talked about Entwistle until the day she died. She did. She did. In an industry so famous for changing your name. Went with Entwistle, huh? She did. Either kept Entwistle or thought Entwistle was better than what it was. She leaned into Entwistle. She didn't feel the need to change it. So that might have been the first of. The first of her mistakes, really. Because no amount of talent is saving you from the name Peg Entwistle. It's a wild name. Entwistle. It's like having a name where there's a hard stop in the middle of it is tough. Yeah. Entwistler. There's no way to pass that. No. Maybe in her native London tongue, maybe it flowed. A little better. Well, she's from Wales, right? Oh, yeah. It's a different country. Well, she was raised in London. Okay. She was born in Wales. Is that where the people from the mines were born? No, that was... They were from... God, this was a week ago now. I can't even remember. Cornwall. Cornwall. The Cornish in London. Or the Cornish. For some reason, I thought it might have been Cardiff, which is also in Wales. Yes. No, it was the Cornish from Cornwall. So, Peg. Entwistle comes to Los Angeles to change her name in 1932 and completely skips that part. She moves in with her uncle Charles at 2428 Beachwood Drive. We can go there right now. Yeah. She moved in there to try to save money because she did have a few jobs when she first got here, but the money ran out quick. So she moved in with her uncle. And I think this is sort of an important part of her story because Beachwood Canyon runs straight up the hills into what at the time was the Hollywood Land sign. If you're not familiar with the history of the Hollywood sign, it originally said Hollywood Land because that was the name of the development and the sign was like an advertisement for the development. Yeah. And it was supposed to come down, but they just kept it up. It became a part of the landscape. Have you been there? Have you hiked to it? Yeah. It's massive, which is an, I feel like for a temporary structure. Yeah. That is an insanely massive, presumably temporary structure. Yeah. I'd also be like, I know we did just leave it. That's crazy. We'll never get that back down. Yeah. It was, it was, it seemed like a great idea at the time. It was not like just a billboard or like some sticks. Well, each letter is 50 feet tall, basically. Yeah. What are we doing? What were anyone doing? And then they also, there were so many letters, Hollywood land. Hollywood land. Okay. So we need 50, we have a million letters, 50 feet tall. I think they can see it, Bill. I don't know how much bigger we should go. Well, Peg could definitely see it and she could see it from her neighborhood every single day. She looked up at that sign and dreamed her big dreams. And then Ed, her career started to take off. Now, this is a feeling you and I both know well. Yeah, well, the downfall we also know. Well, you know the familiar sensation of, oh my God, things are going great. She lands a well-reviewed stage gig opposite a young Humphrey Bogart. Didn't know he was ever young. He didn't feel young. He never felt young. It was always like him and the most beautiful 20-year-old you've ever seen in a movie. And he always looked 70. Maybe they met, yeah, when a young Humphrey Bogart, he was 52. Probably. Humphrey Bogart died at just 57 years old. He was excellent in Casablanca, where he looked at least 89. RKO is impressed. They scoop her up as an actress, and she shoots her first movie, a thriller called Thirteen Women with Myrna Lloyd and Irene Dunn. Things are awesome. Now, I have never seen this movie Thirteen Women, but I want to. Because Wikipedia, as I was researching this, Wikipedia says it is sometimes cited as having an early influence on slasher films. Oh, it might actually be on the server. It might be. Yeah. And you can see why. So this is, I'm going to read the summary of the film because it is both insane and you can, if you squint, see a very early slasher movie. Is it like a sorority row type thing? Yes. Yeah. So basically, so women, I've watched a lot of old movies. Mm-hmm. And I don't know, and I never actually dig into it, but there's always like a house den, like a house mother who like some character would be like, I'm here to see Susie. And it was like, you get out of here, girls only. The women, but there were grown women who were living here. It's just, they only rent to women. And then there's like a person who keeps out scoundrels. And so I imagine if it's not actually a sorority row, I'm thinking in my mind, it's like women in one of those houses. It is a sorority movie. So this movie is about 13 women. who are sorority sisters at the all-girls college St. Albans, and they all write to a clairvoyant, quote-unquote, swami, which I'm not sure is a term we use anymore, who by mail sends each of these women a horoscope foreseeing swift doom. However, the clairvoyant is under the sway of Ursula Georgie, a. Half- Octopus? No. Oh, different Ursula. Wikipedia has listed. A half-Javanese- Sorry, I'm drinking water. I spit it everywhere. I don't know if Javanese is... Oh, no. Javanese people. They are real people. Yeah. Well, the V is real far from the P on the keyboard, so it couldn't have been a mistake. A half Javanese Eurasian woman who is... Okay, let's back up because there's a lot of descriptors here. So the clairvoyant that all the girls mail. To and receive their doom-laden horoscopes from... Is under the sway of Ursula Georgie, a half-Javanese Eurasian woman who was snubbed at school by the other women owing to her mixed race heritage. Sure. Behavior which eventually forced her to leave the school. She now seeks revenge by manipulating the women into killing themselves or each other. She also goads the clairvoyant, who she's controlling, into killing himself by falling into the path of a subway train. Wow, what power. The victims are set up and killed off one by one until Laura Stanhope, living in Beverly Hills, is one of the few still alive. With the help of Laura's chauffeur, Ursula tries to kill Laura's young son, Bobby, with first tainted candy and then an explosive rubber ball. Well. But is thwarted. Ursula follows Laura and Bobby as they flee by train, unaware that police sergeant Barry Clive is escorting them. After confronting Laura and hypnotizing her into falling asleep, Ursula enters Bobby's room... the little boy's room, and is caught by Clive, the police officer. She flees to the back of the train and jumps to her death. If only that explosive ball worked. I know, what a shocking plan that backfired. Yeah. So in this madness, Peg plays a woman named Hazel Cousins, a married woman who kills her husband and goes to prison. In the book the film is based on, Hazel is a virgin who remains so because she is considered too beautiful. Men are either too intimidated to approach her, assume she is married or engaged, or believe. Assume she is married or engaged. Or believe that she will break their heart. In the book, Hazel eventually becomes a lesbian after she is seduced by the wife of the doctor treating her for tuberculosis. This is a different time, dude. This is. I mean, the zigs and zags this story takes. Now, depending on the source, I had trouble pinning down the truth of the matter here, but depending on the source, the studio is either just dismayed by the quality of the film and kind of found the whole thing lacking, or there were details in the movie that suggested that Hazel Cousins was a lesbian. And either way- She. Was in the book, but now if they even hinted that, there's like a Hays Code issue or whatever. Well, so this came out before the Hays Code was being enforced. In that case, there's a pre-Hays Code issue. It is. So that's why I'm not sure whether, because most of the sources I found said that it was because she was portrayed as a lesbian, and so the censors wanted to cut the film. But this would have been, the Hays Code wasn't enforced at this point. So I'm not sure what was really going on. But Whatever the issue, they cut 14 minutes out of the movie. Get him out of here. It shrank from a scant already 73 minutes to 59 minutes. That's Ernie Hudson. And from 13 women to 11. Oh, really? So the movie 13 Women is about 11 women because two of them didn't make the final cut. So she was entirely cut out. No, she wasn't entirely cut out. Her screen time went from about 18 minutes to four. So she was mostly cut out. So it's truly Ernie Hudson. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In Ghostbusters, if people don't know, Winston in Ghostbusters was supposed to be Eddie Murphy. Yeah. And so they had written it like really big. And then when he didn't do it and they got Ernie Hudson, whom I love and I love the character of Winston. Yeah. He was like, got this script. I was like, holy shit, I'm all over the script. Winston's an unbelievable character. I said it was all said and done. He doesn't even show up until like 48 minutes of the movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He just kind of drives around, smokes cigarettes with them. I mean, Ghostbusters is one of those movies that is... It's perfect, but it's a miracle that it exists at all. Everything about the making of that movie was just like, The most famous cokeheads in the world basically got together and were like, what if we spent an unheard of amount of money on a special effects movie that none of us have any idea how to make? Yeah, and it's plumbers, but instead of toilets, it's ghosts. I mean, yeah, the whole thing is nuts. Yeah, it's just like blue collar guys catching ghosts. Go Ernie Hudson. Great movie. He has more to do in the second movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, Peg was mostly cut out of the movie, and when her contract option came up, RKO let her go. And on the night of September 16th, 1932, Peg told her uncle that she was walking down to the drugstore to meet friends, which was a thing you did as a 20-year-old woman in the 1930s. And instead, she walked up the canyon to the base of the sign, folded her jacket, set down her purse and shoes, climbed the workman's maintenance ladder, bolted to the back of the letter H. and jumped. 50 feet enough to kill you i guess so she. Was only 24 years old one so i kind of had the same thought because it's not even i think the actual total height of the fall was like 43 feet or something and it's. Not like concrete the bottom or anything it's like a. Hillside no now this is the kind of the official cause of death was. Multiple stab wounds. It was like multiple fractures to the pelvis or something huh which makes me think that land on her butt i mean she either would have had to do literally a swan dive and land on her head and break her neck Okay. Or she fucking went feet first and just broke her entire pelvis and, like, coughed. I choked on blood and died, maybe. Like, I don't know. Yeah. But it doesn't seem like she fully, you know, splatted. It seems like it was probably a real rough. I can't imagine it was instant, maybe. Like, the howl of coyotes that night might have just been her for a while. Yeah. Because that is a coyote. It could have been taken by coyotes. Well, she wasn't. They found the body and there were no bite marks on it. Well, they brought her back. And they cleaned her up, you see. Yeah. Two days later, a hiker found her jacket and her purse and anonymously reported the discovery. That's the guy who killed her. Yeah. That's the black doll you killed her. It's a little bit of a weird detail. Yeah. They actually have the transcript of the phone call. I didn't put it in here, but it is like, I found this woman and I don't want any of the, they didn't use the word drama, but any of the trouble associated with it. So I'm placing this anonymous phone call. Well, he found her purse and jacket. Yeah, and found the note inside of it. But they didn't find her. He didn't find her necessarily. I forget if he reported. I think he saw the body. I think the person who reported it saw the body. Anyway, when the police arrived, they found a note inside the purse that read, quote, I am afraid I am a coward. I am sorry for everything. If I had done this a long time ago, it would have saved a lot of pain, P.E. One story says that two days after her death, A letter arrived at her house from the Beverly Hills Playhouse offering Peg the lead in a new play. The role of a woman driven to suicide. Stop it. It's the most repeated detail in this whole story of Peg Entwistle. It's everywhere that you read her legend, and it is almost certainly not true. Gave me chills. It's almost certainly not true. Her biographer, a guy named James Zarek Jr. What do you mean her biographer? A person who asks questions? She was a 20-year-old who was in like one thing. She wouldn't have had a biographer. Well, this guy, maybe he was just sort of obsessed with her, but he spent years on trying to, you know, piece together the story of her life with the cooperation of her family. Oh, there was a podcast back then he could have been on. They found no evidence that this letter ever existed. So it's a nice little dramatic Hollywood... Twist of fate. No evidence the letter came saying you have a role in mind for you, but there was a letter saying I killed myself. I'm a coward. Correct. Her note existed. The letter from the playhouse did not. I feel like Black Dahlia was doing some shit up in the hills, though, too. Was she? They found her, I think, downtown was where they found the body. Black Dahlia? I think. I mean, I'm thinking of L.A. Noire. You might be thinking of L.A. Noire. L.A. Noire. It is, as we said earlier, worth noting that the Hollywoodland sign was originally just a temporary ad. And we're coming back to that because nobody was keeping it up. That's part of the problem with that sign. It's part of how she was able to climb it without anybody noticing. There was really no attention being paid. I guess it's not like now. It's not a fence around it and like a weather station there. Right, right. It wasn't considered a monument or anything. So in 1944, that H that Peg jumped from gave up and tumbled down the hill. So the H collapsed. And that is... That is. Right around the time that the legends began. As the sign crumbled and land was eventually hauled away before it could fall down in 1949... Residents in Beachwood Canyon started seeing a woman wandering the trails. The descriptions are eerily consistent across the decades. It's foggy here so infrequently, unless you live in Santa Monica in the morning or something. Yeah, I mean, the hills maybe get hazy. Maybe. I see fog so little here that I feel like the next time we see fog, we can just run to the Hollywood sign. Probably. She's got to be there. I mean, to be fair, if you approach a woman on a hiking trail on a foggy night, she's going to disappear. She's going to get out of there real quick. You can't even nod to people on hikes anymore. Then there's also the matter of the spooky smell. People report that her appearance comes with the heavy scent of gardenias, which was supposedly Peg's signature perfumes. Hikers smell it on the trail in the winter, sometimes with nothing blooming anywhere near them. Though, you know, gardenias do bloom in LA. So I don't know, make of it what you will. I actually, I don't know that it was a ghost story, but I had a very, very odd situation when I was living in this tiny studio apartment in a very old building in West Hollywood. It had been built and people, the room I was in, it was basically like a one room tiny studio with like barely even a kitchen in it. And it apparently had been renovated that way after World War II because more people, more vets from the war were coming to California and they just wanted places to stay. So they had turned this, originally the building was just the two-on-two, like big, Too big on the bottom, too big on the top. Okay. And they basically turned the back bedroom of one of those into a studio apartment. So it had a storied history. I would sometimes think about all the people who must have come. In and out of there over the years. And I don't think it was a ghost because nothing really seemed to... There was seemingly no reason that this started or stopped. But for a couple of nights in the middle of the summer... After I'd been there a few years, I smelled the distinct scent of cigarettes and lavender perfume in my apartment. I have no idea where it came from. When you left your apartment, it didn't sound like it anymore? It wasn't like wafting in from the window? No. I would be sitting there watching TV or whatever, and I would start to smell it like it was wafting in from somewhere. I could never figure out where it came from. It was only a couple nights that I ever smelled it, but it immediately made me think of like the ghost of an old woman. Like as soon as I smelled it, I was imagining, you know, an old woman just sitting in that apartment, chain smoking out the window. I have no idea what it was, but I did have an encounter with sort of a spooky, pleasant smell. I was like, what is this? Maybe someone's grandma was visiting. The ghost of Flo. Yeah. In 1990, a couple hiking in Griffith Park which is close, but not that close to the Hollywood sign, reported. That their dog started to freak out for no reason. Instead of running around the trail through the bushes like he usually did, he started to whine and hang back behind the couple. They'd never really seen him act that way before, and they didn't know what was causing it until they spotted a disoriented blonde woman in vintage clothes walking nearby. And when they went to go say hi to her, supposedly she vanished right in front of them. And the couple swears that they had no idea who Peg Entwistle was before they saw this woman. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That's kind of what I say. Mm-hmm. Okay. Sure. But also, if I see someone disoriented, my thing is not to go say hi. Well, they approached her. I don't know if they were going to say hi or they were going to say, do you need help? But they approached her and she seemed to vanish into the trail, the dry. Dusty trail. Sure. Okay. The best witness. or the biggest liar might be a Griffith park ranger named John Arbogast who patrolled the area around the sign for years and has claimed multiple run-ins with peg always late at night. They're dating. They're actually dating now, dude. It's crazy. You know, you, you'd find probably larger age gaps elsewhere in Hollywood. Yeah. On screen with her. If she ever got that other job. Um, It was always late at night, and he says, always in the fog, which, as you point out, is not really all that common, so. I mean, but then you immediately counter that with, like, maybe it gets foggy in the hills, so I don't know. Maybe. These days, and when he was patrolling, the sign is wired up with security cameras and motion sensors, and Arbogast recalls a number of times when the motion detectors say that someone is standing five feet away from him, and he can't see anyone there. Probably him. If it's within five feet, if it's beeping and bopping, he's like, this place is so haunted. Everywhere I go. Everywhere I go, it's like someone's right next to me. The ghosts are following me. And it was like, yeah, there's like a 11 foot, like the tolerance for this can be within 11 feet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, you know, I can't think of where it would be. Do you want me to do that last part again? No, I'm just going to continue to think about it forever. One parapsychologist, Larry Montz, has a theory that And this is a theory that, this is not like his original theory, this gets thrown around a lot for different ghosts, but he believes that if Peg is there, he doesn't believe that her spirit is consciously lurking around the sign. He calls it a residual haunting, which is the idea that you can find throughout ghost lore that says when some kind of tragic event happens, it leaves a mark, an imprint, an extreme emotion can leave an imprint on the world around it. And what you see when you're experiencing a residual haunting is just some factor of the universe, like playing it back. Like an echo. Like an echo. It just happens to be a visual echo that you're seeing. And that that possibly is why people think they see Peg and Whistle up there. There's not a ton of great evidence for the ghost of Peg Entwistle. There's one or two other people who have publicly reported seeing her, but this is not an incredibly common ghost. It's also, you know, if you're up near around the Hollywood sign these days, you can't really get that close. To the Hollywood sign anymore. Yeah, yeah. Probably partially because of this. Yeah, I may be. The most sunburned I've been in the last 10, 15 years was hiking to the Hollywood sign. Yeah, you'll get cocky. It's a barren trail. And I was wearing. sunblock and stuff too but it's i don't know i was it was the day i was wearing my from the summer of Fear announcement thing. I was, I was, don't know why I wore that out into the world. It was that like California Raisins tank top. And I walked up there and I was just fucking as red as, not a raisin, they're purple, but. I was red as fuck for, like, days, and it hurt like a son of a bitch. I was so pissed. But I felt like someone had invited me. My friend Demi invited me, and I was like. Demi Moore? Demi Moore invited me. And I remember telling her, I was like, you should do that movie, The Substance. You guys think this podcast doesn't have fans. I got news for you. Demi Moore is out there. Different person. But I was like, you know, I had been here 15 years at that point or whatever, and I had never walked to the highway side. I'm like, I might as well just do it at some point. You know, that's why I went. But fuck, I walked up. You didn't see ghosts? I mean, there was a residual feeling after the residual pain of the sun beating me up. Mm-hmm. Well, we'll leave Peg's story with this because I think it's kind of sweet. In September 2014, about 100 people gathered in the parking lot of the Beachwood Market, which is a market just down the hill from the sign in Peg's old neighborhood, for an outdoor screening of 13 women. Really? The proceeds went to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and the organizer told the LA Times that the whole point was to memorialize Peg as more than just the girl who jumped off the H. Wow. Kind of a cool kind of a cool thing to do. It's kind of a weird thing to do too because it's like yeah it's cool and i only say weird not weird that they did it it's just weird that like a 20 year old not celebrity yeah has become so famous from her death yeah so if she was seeking fame she found it not Not something we should encourage. Oh, absolutely not. Yeah, yeah. Because it's not like, oh, James Dean or something. We're going to go to where his car crashed. It was just like, oh, a lady who was in some place. Well, and what's also 13 women was pretty poorly received. It came out a month after she died and it was pretty poorly received by critics. And so there is. Also something a little bit weird about one article I found was like, Peg got her premiere after all. And I was like, oh, you mean you screened the terrible movie they cut her out of mostly? Like, I'm not sure. At a grocery store? Yeah. I mean, I understand the intent, but maybe. It is cool. It's cool. Any kind of legacy stuff is cool. It's depressing how she got it, but it is cool. But my old boss, if you take a left at that store and go up the hill right there, that's where my old boss lived. I wonder if she's aware of. the lore of her neighborhood. Maybe i mean i think it's famous enough that did you ever watch the i think it was came out like 2020 or 2021 the ryan murphy show hollywood no so i did because i'm a sucker for old hollywood stuff and it was there's a documentary no no it's a it's a show about sort of a alternate hollywood history uh and it it touches on a lot of the sort of you know, rumors about like the gas station boys that you could, if you were a gay man in Hollywood in the 1930s, you could go pick up men at the gas station. There's a specific one. It's where Tad, I don't know, it goes into different parts of Hollywood history and fictionalizes a lot of it. But the sort of inciting incident for the show is Peg jumping off the H and then people making a movie about her life in the time period called Peg or something. So it's, Decently well known as a, you know, a 1920s. Got you. Yeah, I wasn't. Where's the first I'm hearing of it? So California has a storied history with the dead, but it's not just the state's collection of souls that make California one of the scariest states in the country. In the Golden State, the living are a much, much bigger problem. I think. It would be a dereliction of our spooky duties as chroniclers of all things scary not to touch on at least one of the many cults that have recruited people off the sunny sidewalks of this state. Do you think that cults, they got going kind of hot and heavy in this state. Because of what you said at the beginning about how, like, It's where people come to like get away from things or chase dreams or you can't run any more left. And so you get people who are already like soul searching and thinking for stuff. And it only takes one person to to like capture them. Yeah, I think that's probably part of it. I would say particularly more in areas of the state like around Los Angeles where you have people who are, you know, a lot of us out here that are artists that a little bit piece of our soul is maybe missing. There's something we're looking for. And so there's that. I think when you get up into parts of Northern California, there's a lot of kind of mystical places. There's Mount Shasta. The state itself is large and beautiful, and there's lots of places where you can end up and be looking for a community and fall into a group that may or may not have good intentions. And yeah, I think it's a place where there's a lot of creativity and a lot of money. And I think all of those things combine to make it a place where there's a lot of people trying stuff, you know, and, and some of those things take off. I mean, according to crime reads.com quote, you can't explore the sociology of California without encountering cults. It has long been associated with them and has produced a formidable roster of But many, including Jim Jones' notorious People's Temple, who were the ones who killed themselves all down in Guyana eventually, originated elsewhere and relocated. Likely for the same reasons a lot of average people do. Great weather, an ethos receptive to new ideas, and access to Hollywood and money, if. You play your cards right. It's like I just waited two sentences. I never want to cut you off. Well, you should. Cults like Children of God, Heaven's Gate, The Manson Family, NXIVM, Unaris Academy of Science, and Scientology have all called California home. Still do, some of them. Yeah, many of them, in fact. But I want to take a look at one of the lesser known cults that operated in Southern California. A group called Synanon. S-Y-N-A-N-O-N. Have you ever heard of it? No, I don't know what the fuck that is. It's a name you shouldn't use. You really shouldn't. It sounds like a tech company that runs on blood. Yes. They did not run on blood. I don't think they thought of themselves as a technology company. No, it just sounds like it would be. It was like, here at Synanon, we're making radishes. Yeah, we're making cars that run on people. Yeah, I don't know why I said that. I only said radishes because... Did you ever watch Better Off Ted? It's like one of my favorite shows that was canceled too soon. But they work for like a conglomerate, multi, how do you say that? Multinational conglomerate. They work like a multinational conglomerate that you can't really tell what they do. They're called Viridian Dynamics. Okay. Yeah, that, yes. And they have these like Viridian Dynamic commercials sometimes that open the episodes. And one of them's like, it's always like a woman narrating over like stock footage. It was like. Here at Viridian Dynamics, we can make radishes so hot people can't eat them. but we don't because people can't eat them. That's why I thought of radishes. Sorry. Well, there's really no, the exact origin is kind of debated. One set, one, line of thought goes that the founder of this group just liked the word, like Dasani. You know, or like... Is Dasani not a word? I don't think Dasani's... Like the water company? Yeah, I don't think Dasani's a word. I always assumed it was. Or Haagen-Dazs? I always assumed it was like Spanish for there's salt in this water. That's what I thought Dasani meant. Is it Dasani or is it. I think it's... Haagen-Dazs is definitely a made-up word. Really? Yeah. And so some people think that the guy who founded this just liked the name because it was unique and looked good on stuff. Other people say that it's sort of a slurred combination of the words symposium and seminar or anonymous. But it's a little fuzzy as to how exactly they arrived on the name Synanon. But it does sound like an evil corporation. It sure does. That we can agree on. Before we dig into Synanon, I will note, as I've done a number of times, we'll barely be scratching the surface of this particular story. If it interests you, one of my favorite podcasts, Truanon... which is not named as a play on Synanon, it's named as a play on QAnon, and they call themselves Truanon, did an incredible multi-part series on Synanon called The Game. And they did this because one of their hosts, a guy named Brace Belden, found himself in the clutches of a troubled teen program called the Monarch School when he was a kid, run by a disciple of Synanon. And the series is as much a history of the cult as as it is Brace ruminating on his experience with their practices. Every part of that sounded like evil. It was like the Monarch School or whatever sounds like it would be a James Bond villain training younger James Bond villains, and then Synanon sounds like an evil corporation. We're going to loop back around very briefly to the Monarch School at the end of all this. So Synanon, all that to say, there's a vast trove of information here, and if you're at all interested in it, you know, this is truly just the tip of the iceberg. But the basics here are that Synanon starts in 1958 in Santa Monica as a genuinely well-meaning and apparently quite effective drug rehab. According to an article in Time, I don't like that. Charles Detterich, Sorry. What, you don't like articles in time? No, I was saying I don't like that because it's almost like shooting fish in a barrel a little bit where it's like, hey, we've got these people who are really down on their luck and are trying to change to be better. Yeah. And so it's like a really open head to fill with whatever you want. Yes. You know, again, it did start apparently with good intentions. This guy who started it, Charles Dederich, was a former alcoholic who had gotten sober through Alcoholics Anonymous. And he started Synanon in 1958 because he was taken aback by what... was sort of a minor heroin epidemic in the United States at that time. And he felt that AA was ineffective in the sense that it didn't get people to open up enough. And he wanted to take that further with Synanon. So he initially called this group Tender Loving Care, which is hilarious considering what it became. And so Synanon, since it has its origins in Alcoholics Anonymous, it's probably what the Anon is. It's probably the Anon. Yeah. But after Tender Loving Care took off pretty quickly, he rebranded it and incorporated it as Synanon. So their intake process alone was pretty brutal. Newcomers had to quit everything cold turkey, including legitimate cigarettes. prescriptions from their doctor. They just had to stop everything the day they walked in the door and maintain a stone cold sobriety from the moment they walked in. For the first 90 days, and here's where you start getting in trouble and turning things into a cult right away, they were strictly forbidden from having any contact with. The outside world. Or owning any personal possessions. Pretty much. And then the main event, the big idea that Synanon launched was a group therapy session designed by Charles Dederich that he called The Game. The game was three times a week, Synanon members would go into this group therapy session, sit in a circle. One by one, each person would stand up and lay their soul bare to the group. The more insecurities you confess, the more traumas, the more shameful secrets, the more you opened up to these people, the better. I don't know. Three times a week? Three times a week. On the second week, it'd be like, I don't have anything left to say. But instead of getting a hug. or a thank you, or a thank you for sharing, like you might at AA. The rest of the circle's job was to pounce on you and tear you apart and jeer. Physically? No, no, no. Well, not at first. But at first, it was an emotional tearing apart. It was the rest of the group's job to boo you, to jeer you, to scream at you, hurl the most vicious insults imaginable about the things that you do. I'm leaving. I'm getting back on drugs. This sucks. It does suck. And it was part of Dederich's belief that the path to sobriety also kind of turns out to be the path to brainwashing, which is to tear a person down to nothing and then build them back up as a sober person. And if you had the opportunity to call someone else, they'd be like, You that's what you're doing is not accepted. Like, right. You need to leave. That's why he has to immediately say you can't call nobody. It's a nasty piece of work. But for a while, it did have real defenders. This guy, Donald Cressy, who is a sociologist at the University of California in 1961, described synonym synonym. described Synanon to Time as the most significant attempt to keep addicts off drugs that has ever been made. Keep in mind, much like Norman Baker, whose name you may remember as the guy who ran the cancer-curing Crescent Hotel that we covered in our Haunted Hotels episode. And we just watched the thing he came up in. Yeah, we did. You know, he famously, if you've been listening to the show since then, you remember Norman Baker as the man who had a poster for his cancer-curing hotel that said, We do not cut out any organ. Any organ. He had a lot of problems with grammar on that. Yes. What the hell? Peter Santadella. I was watching a Peter Santadella video when Chris was here. I was making food and he was walking around Wherever the fuck that place was. The Ozarks. And people were talking about the Crescent Hotel. He was walking around the Ozarks, and then he had to visit that hotel. And we were like, whoa, it's the hotel from that episode. So sort of like Norman Baker. But now a hotel. Now a hotel, yeah. I say this, the only connection between Norman Baker and Charles Dederich is that neither of them had any medical background. Charles had no background in therapy. He didn't have a college education. And the tactics that he believed were effective were not based on any kind of evidence or study. It was just sort of a gut feeling that this would work. I shudder to think who he initially tried. This stuff on. Like, who were the people that he did this to. And then went, oh. To have his aha moment. Yeah. And then went, oh, you know, can you imagine being a friend and you come to Charles as a friend and you're like, oh my God, buddy, I can't get off. I can't get off the booze. And I hit my kid and I cheated. That's because you're a piece of shit. And he's like, yeah, fuck you. You're garbage. You want to go off the booze? Get off it right now. And we're also going to stop being your friend. So it was real bullshit to begin with. And the program, but it did seem to be effective, at least anecdotally, even though later on, Charles himself would even admit to realizing that what he was doing was brainwashing his patients. Patients. He called them patients. It's amazing. He can just call people patients. Yeah, yeah. I'm not a doctor, but these are my patients. Yeah, yeah. And it's kind of nuts. How, you know, starting with that 90 days no contact, you can track the descent of this program into a cult almost step by step over the course of just a couple years. The first sign that something was amiss is how many people got sober and then just never left. Again, according to Time, some had burned too many bridges back home and stories of people relapsing also made people afraid to leave. By the 1960s, Synanon had become not only a treatment facility, but a communal living experiment. flashing red flag problem problem. I mean that sounds like going to college a little bit though like a communal living experiment. True true uh unlike college synanon took over a three-story building in santa monica. Who paid for this i guess the people they did they. Were making i forget i didn't quote the number in here but i think it was like 10 million dollars the second year of operation in 1960s money they were like So it must. You have to pay to be part, like, to do the, it's like a rehab you pay for? Yeah, I forget who was funding them, but yes, there was money. You know it was the fucking CIA. Yeah, I know, yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure, dude. If it wasn't the CIA, someone at that office got fired. Everybody, the CIA must have had, like, their second largest contingent of agents working in Los Angeles. Yeah. Mass weddings were performed, and members were encouraged to start families and took turns watching each other's kids. Wait, mass weddings meaning... Multiple weddings at once. Yes. Of Synanon members. Huh. Not marrying. I guess they can't talk to anybody else. No. Yeah. They're not marrying outside the community. They're just marrying each other in mass wedding ceremonies. And then. Do you think their vows are screaming at each other about how idiots they are? Like every other piece of treatment? I hope. Oh, God. I hope. I kind of want to go to a Synanon wedding. What the hell is this company called? By 1964. Only six years after opening its doors, the group was already attracting heat from investigators who suspected, suspected they were running an unlicensed clinic. Okay. Seems like a pretty easy question to say, show me your license. Yeah, or it's probably public, should be publicly available, no different than like our LLC is. Fast forward to 1968 and the mask really starts to slip. They ditch the two-year program that Synanon is built around. Synanon is synonymous with. It's a tough sentence. It is a tough one. They ditch what they're synonymous anonymous with and announce that sobriety is now a lifetime commitment. Was it not before? I thought that was the goal. I know when you signed up sobriety, one week of sobriety was the goal. It was going to be hard enough. No, I think the idea is that, yes, of course, when you're working through a sobriety program, the hope is that it's a lifetime practice. But Synanon was basically telling addicts that they'll never be good enough, that they'll never be whole enough to survive in the real world, that their sobriety depended on them being a part of synanon you know when you go to aa yes you go to aa once a week you go to your meetings whatever but you don't belong to aa the way synanon was saying like oh no no no if you leave here you you break your commitment got you yeah. Is more i think the vibe here that. It's not good no it's not you're trading in one addiction for a weirdly another. Here's a fun thing they did to dodge taxes They pivot and rebrand as the Church of Synanon. They also cranked up the intensity of the game, stretching those brutal sessions from an hour to sometimes over 72 hours straight. That sounds like church. You hear about places people go to church every day. That's what church felt like growing up. Well, yeah, there's some time annihilation happening. Well, if you went to a Catholic church, you were being told how terrible you were for at least an hour at a time. Where do you think these guys got it? I know. By the 70s, Synanon is a full-blown cult. Dederich and his leadership were forcing women to shave their heads. mandating invasive procedures like vasectomies and abortions. Why? Two procedures that are not equal in any way. Yeah, in any way. Yeah, like one, yeah. And dictating who people could date, sometimes ordering them to dump partners on a whim. The problem with that is the people that are dictating their date and the people they've dumped, it sounds like are all down the hall from each other. All the same people. Yeah. Dead or Rich became paranoid about outside influence. I keep thinking you're saying his name is Dead or Rich. It's like you either, you're either going to die or become fucking rich. I mean, that sort of seems how he was thinking about it. That's what I'm thinking. He was born into it. His name's Dead or Rich. He became paranoid about outside influence, as I think you would. All cult leaders must. Yes. At the point where you realize that you're probably up to no good and you're still wrestling with that internally. Yeah. Yeah. But, unlike people who aren't cult leaders, Dederich promoted violence and told his members to protect themselves by any means necessary, specifically against attorneys looking to expose them. Oh, I can't believe you didn't say journalists. I'm sure journalists were on the list as well. Yeah, yeah. You'll see why the attorneys were important in a minute, but As a part of this so-called self-defense, Sinanon stockpiled hundreds of guns and built an actual armed security force called the Imperial Marines. It is weird that this is in Santa Monica, California. Santa Monica at a rehab center. Yeah, take rehab center out of it. It's just weird to think of all those guns in Santa Monica. Well, I mean, yes. The exception of the Marines being there last year. This is maybe a hot take. But I feel like the second your nonprofit rehab has a paramilitary wing called the Imperial Marines, someone, an alarm should go off somewhere. That's not normal. But it makes fiscal sense because by no longer having to pay taxes at church, you have extra money to rent a paramilitary wing. After this, as you may suspect, things really start to go downhill. The biggest thorn at this point in Synanon's side is an L.A. lawyer named Paul Marantz who goes after them on behalf of people who say the organization held them against their will. I don't go into the whole thing here, but essentially... Some people left. Well, no, no, no. There were some people who claimed that Synanon was essentially walking up and down the beach in Santa Monica looking for people to join, and if you went with them... you then were not allowed, like physically restrained from leaving. And some of those people were able to get out or family members tried to find them. You know, you'd think having cell phones now would make cults null and void, but is a new Netflix fucking special every year about like a cult very much in the present day where people still lose access to everyone. A musician and actress I very much hope to have on the show someday, Lola Blanc, who's a friend in Los Angeles, her mom was part of a cult that's in one of those Netflix documentaries. Oh. And Lola was raised in that cult. I think she might be in the documentary. There are some people who have emailed us with similar stories. Yeah. I mean, it's amazing when you start doing stuff like we do that you find out like, oh, there's actually a ton of people who were raised in kind of wild situations. Yeah. So Paul Morantz was going after Synanon. on behalf of these people who either they or their families claim that they were more or less abducted off of a beach. When I worked with.... On 12 deadly days yeah he got hired by parents of someone who was in a cult to to kidnap them from the cult and they later made a movie about it oh shit which i didn't see the film. Wait was this like a side gig he had as an actor. No it was like uh 30 years earlier he was like in his 20s or 30s or something okay but you've already been acting i think yeah but like yeah it was uh. Some like I don't even think it was a family friend. It was just like somebody they had known was like my kids in a cult and they won't call anymore, blah, blah, blah. And it was like him and a buddy got like hired to like drive a van down there and like kick a door in and like grab a lady and bring her back. At which point you got to be thinking, man, I hope that the parents didn't lie to me. But they did that. I think years later made an indie film about that experience. But I was also watching an episode of Barney Miller where I remember exactly how the situation happened. If you've ever seen Barney Miller, it's like in a. Police station, so you don't really leave that often. But the parents had come in saying that the daughter went missing, blah, blah, blah. And it was also a plot point of that storyline was like, my husband's going to break her out of this cult. Like, my husband, like, you can arrest us or not, but him and his gun are going to get our daughter out of a cult. And so it must have been prevalent enough Because the Barney Miller episode would have been, timeline-wise, like, met up with a f * * * ing story. Like, whatever that would have. Been, the 70s or 80s. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, wild scene. Well, Paul Morantz, in 1978, wins a $ 300, 000 judgment against Synanon, infuriating Charles Detterich. So they had to pay out $ 300, 000. They had to pay out $ 300, 000. Charles Detterich is f * * * ing pissed. Well, he had to melt down all the guns to pay the bill. He may have, because what he did next is even crazier than just hunting this guy down. Dederich turns the Imperial Marines loose to get revenge. And three weeks later, Paul Marantz reaches into his mailbox at his home at the Pacific Palisades, in the Pacific Palisades, and is bit by a four and a half foot long diamondback rattlesnake whose tail had been cut off so that he wouldn't hear it rattling when he approached the mailbox. Oh my God. Yeah. Just get a different snake. It doesn't make sound. He was taken to intensive care and survived. But according to an article I found from Oxygen Network's true crime department, quote, to this day, Morant suffers from a lifelong illness related to the rattlesnake venom, which requires him to receive blood transfusions. Every other week. Every other week? Apparently he got it fucking bad. That must be, I don't know, Tony Stark did better. With whatever shrapnel is itching towards. His heart, inching towards his heart. Yeah, I mean. Like every other week. It seems intense, but maybe, I don't know, maybe he has like an allergic reaction of some kind. Like maybe he's a particularly bad person to be bit by a rattlesnake. Was the mail already in there? Or did the mailman get bit first and no one ever saw his little truck drive off the road? I don't think there was any mail in there, no. So they just lowered the flag and he thought the mail was taken. Maybe, maybe. The two guys responsible for the snake's trip to the mailbox were Synanon Imperial Marines. How do you know? Did they print the snake? They lifted some prints off its skin? I would say, as far as schemes of vengeance go, assuming that you don't need your enemy to 100% be dead. Rattlesnake in the mailbox is a pretty good plan, actually, because it's very hard to trace back to you. Yeah. There's no barcode on them. There's no barcode. You're not going to leave prints. Now, it won't necessarily 100% kill the person. Also, anyone can open the mailbox. You can just hit a little kid. Or the mailman. That's true. I hadn't thought that far. But these guys didn't either, because they did get caught. And the way they got caught, you wouldn't ever get caught if no one saw you put the snake in the mailbox. Unfortunately for these guys, some neighbors, they didn't see them put the snake in the mailbox, but they did see a white van parked outside Paul Morant's house prior to the attack, and they wrote down the license plate number. That is a crazy thing to do. You're like already a too nosy neighbor. That or I couldn't find anything about this. I do wonder if Paul Morant knew that he was pissing off the Imperial Marines. And told people like, have you seen anything suspicious? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it is crazy to just see a white van and be like, hmm. Yeah, if you see a white van that on the sign says, snakes used in the wildest ways. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Definitely, that's the kind of thing you're going to want to take note of. Yes. But some neighbors saw the van, they wrote down the license plate number, and it came back registered to a van that was owned by the Church of Synanon. Oh, that was going to come back registered to that little snake that drives an apple in Richard Scarry's. Oh, that's a worm. Oh my God, you're right, it is a worm. It's lowly worm. I'm reading a lot of Richard Scarry to Felix right now. It's lowly worm. And lowly worm's hilarious. He's actually a very mischievous guy. Okay, because he used to be a snake. Yeah. When this same van was later spotted in the Pacific Palisades, the cops pulled it over and they arrested the two Imperial Marines who were driving the van in the front seat. So Dederich's involvement was harder to pin down, but he had such a God complex that he, quote, broadcasted his teachings to multiple Synanon facilities through what was called, quote. The wire. So he franchised this. I don't know if he franchised it, but they had multiple buildings at least. They had like properties that it grew. And he broadcast through, quote, the wire, which is a low power FM radio station. And the lengthy sermons, sort of like the trap Nixon fell into, were often recorded on tape. And so believing that these recordings could link Dederich to the rattlesnake attack, authorities obtained a search warrant for the cult's Tulare County compound in Central California. To get the tapes. To get the tapes. And sure enough, they're damning enough that a warrant is put out for Dederich's arrest, and he's tracked to a home in Lake Havasu. Havasu? Lake Havasu. Lake Havasu. He's tracked to a home in Lake Havasu, Arizona, where he's arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit murder. Now, according to Oxygen's True Crime Network, this is great. Ironically, once authorities found him, Detterich, quote, gave all the appearances of a man who was. Very, very drunk. The synodon leader. Was so intoxicated that he had to be carried out on a stretcher. A few years later, the IRS revoked Sinanon's tax-exempt status. A few years later? Well, I think all this went through the courts and everything. But yes, eventually he was prosecuted. He went to jail. The other two guys went to jail for a shorter period of time. The IRS revoked their tax-exempt status as a church, forcing them to pay $ 17 million in back taxes, which bankrupted Sinanon. Detterich died in 1997, and Sinanon, as many people knew it, Was over. On this case, though, what we were saying earlier, it really was dead or rich. It was dead or rich. The ass went bankrupt and died. Yeah, exactly. But like I mentioned earlier in this section, Synanon's cruel legacy lives on in the troubled teen industry, which was founded. That's an industry. It is. So, I mean, once you said it, it kind of makes sense, but. Do you remember, this is how I first encountered the troubled teen industry. Okay. Do you remember back in the days of like Maury Povich and Jerry Springer? Yeah. Where they'd have like people on and throw chairs. Yeah. Yeah, but sometimes they would also have, like, you know, it would be like, my 15-year-old can't stop smoking methamphetamines. I didn't know this. I was watching Bob Barker on Price, right, when I was homesick. Well, sometimes when they would have these troubled kids on, the episode would end with people, like, security guard type people coming out and, like, dragging them off to, like, what they would call, like, a wilderness camp. or they would take them somewhere to basically scare them straight. So on television, we watch people be abducted? More or less, yeah. I mean, I didn't watch these shows religiously or anything, but every once in a while at my grandparents' house or whatever, I'd be scrolling through channels, and you'd see, like, you know, this kid's going to get dragged off somewhere for being a bad dude. And, you know, you'd watch a little bit of it, and it was kind of crazy. I had no understanding at the time, but a lot of those camps or schools or whatever you wanted to call them, were essentially part of the growing troubled teen industry, which was, hey, is your kid too fucked up for you to raise on your own? Send him out into the woods for a few months. We'll set him straight, and we'll send him back to you, and they won't cause you any more troubles. Sometimes those camps were led by ex-Marines or whatever, and there was a militaristic element to it. That's a scared straight aspect. Sometimes... these schools were founded- By the CIA. Well, yeah, yes, also by the CIA. But particularly disciples of Synanon, people who had left Synanon or- Already knew the playbook. Already knew the playbook and went, hey, you know what? He made a bunch of money trying to keep people sober. I wonder if we make a bunch of money with. All these kids that all- Keeping them off the pole. Well, and a lot of times it was rich parents. I mean, Brace Belden, who I mentioned earlier in the episode, his parents weren't like fabulously wealthy, but they were academics- You know, they were well-established people. And he talks about, you know, how part of the reason he was sent was, like, they just didn't know what to do with him. Like, he was a wild child. He was on drugs. And they had heard through somebody that, like, hey, these people will help Brace get better. And so... What's wrong with your voice? Who's going to help you get better? These people will help Brace get better. But. Everything was not as it seemed at these places. No, I imagine it isn't, especially when you're like, normally I hear from my kids at summer camp. Yeah. How come it's been radio fucking silence since Susie went there? These programs were modeled on the game, but once everything broke free of Synanon, I mean, it became this, like, the physical punishments went crazy in terms of the kind of abuse that. Would get doled out. Kids were running away from these places. There are a handful of children who ran away from these places to this day. Just vanished. I don't know where they went. I would be wildly suspicious of anything called The Game. The Michael Douglas movie, which is excellent. The Fincher movie. Yeah. I'd be suspicious of the people who put that on. Yeah. I would be suspicious of this group. Yeah. I'd be suspicious of who's that fucking creep who used to, like, who created, like, negging and shit to, like, get girls. Yeah. Neil Strauss. Yeah. Neil Strauss had The Game, which is, like, a fucked up, terrible book. Yeah. About, like... Tricking women into thinking you're cool? I'm not exactly sure. And you think it's bad that people were dragged off the set of the Maury show into these camps. Brace talks about how himself and others, part of what these places did was the parents would communicate with them and say, we want to send our kid here. They would come to your house in the middle of the fucking night and drag the kid out of bed, throw him in a van and drive him off to camp. never explaining to the kid where they were going until they got there. They just thought they were being kidnapped. So if his friend came to get them back, this is a bookend for them. Like this is how they start and end that story. Yeah. And, and the whole idea again was we're going to break them down. We're going to psychologically torture them. We shouldn't be doing that to anyone. No, no. That's how you literally get like ballerina school or whatever, where you raise them into these. Kids are going to fly planes into your buildings at some point. Yes. Don't do this. Earlier, I mentioned the Monarch School. There was also a school called the Elon School. This is getting bad fast. E-L-A-N. I think it was the Elon School. But they've recently come under fire because high-profile victims of these places, like, weirdly enough, Paris Hilton, has come out and talked about how they were sent to these places and how they were insanely abusive. And they left way worse than they went in because they just had the emotional and physical shit kicked out of them for months. They learned nothing. They were terrified. They tried to run away, and then they acted out more when they came home, because they were like, what the fuck did you do to me? That's what I'm saying. When you're a plane, everything's a tower. But digging into the troubled teen industry is probably an entirely different episode. We should do an episode on it. It sounds horrible. I'm not going to make any jokes. Oh, it's frightening. It's very frightening. But Sinanon's whole pitch was, come to us, and we will take care of you. And it turns out that in California... That very well might be one of the most dangerous sentences in the English language, because our last stop on our terrible tour of the golden state of California is with a woman who made the exact same offer to the most vulnerable people in Sacramento, California. And unlike Dederich, she didn't need a compound or radio station or an army of Imperial Marines. She just needed a spare bedroom and a garden. Okay, so this isn't going to be Dianne Feinstein. No, no. I think we could do a whole episode on her, too. Probably. She's got a storied past. It's fair game. It's fair game. According to history site Yesterday's America... Which sounds maybe like a backwards racist website, but I did double check. It is just a history website. Yeah, but then I triple checked, and it's super racist. Fuck! Yeah, you're fucked, man. Well, this fact still stands, racist or not. Quote, over 1,600 California residents have been murdered by a serial killer since the year 1900. Okay, 600 is a lot. 1,600. 1,600 is even more than what I just said. It is, but. But also, the thing you just said was a long time ago. Yes. You can't be the same person. No. No. It's just the total number of Californians murdered by serial killers since the year 1900. Oh. Not the same serial killer. I thought you said that they were killed by a serial killer. That would be sick. It was the same serial killer from the 1900s? Sometimes I'm thinking, you know that guy who's always on, like, Instagram's always feeding you shit about this idiot who, like, spends a bazillion dollars to, like, live forever? And not, like, Peter T. O. Way, like, in a computer. I mean, like, he's a guy. I'm an 18-year-old. Is his name? I got the body of an 18-year-old or whatever. it would be interesting if they were doing all that so that they can kill longer. If they were like, if they also misunderstood what you said, and they were like, 1600, I know the number now. Let's go. I got a thousand years to do it or whatever. Well, listen, buddy, I did the math. So serial killers have killed over 1600 California residents since 1900. Since the year 1900, over 175 million people have called the state of California homes. Which means it's a pretty rare. Way to go. You only, in the history of California, have a. 000914285 % chance that you would have been killed by a serial killer. So you're saying there's a chance. I'm saying there's a chance. We can hope. We can hope. And also you can do a pretty good, what's that song? It's like 9147, whatever the fuck you just said there. Oh,. 009142. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know why I rolled off the tongue in a way that should be in a song. My point being, though California is thought of as a state absolutely saturated with serial killers, being murdered by one of them is actually still a pretty rare way to go as far as deaths in the history of California go. And I think it's getting lower. The chance is getting lower because. Dropping significantly. Yeah, because I... I'm not picking up hitchhikers. No. But I think there was like a huge patch of time where hitchhiking and picking up hitchhikers was really prevalent. Well, we talked about it in our road trips episode. It was considered just part of how people got around. And so when that, I think, became less, you know, what's like a thousand miles of coastline or whatever, fucking California. Well, yes, I mean. And so, you know, people were going, getting picked up all the time and it was like, hey, is this, you take me to here? And it was like, I'll take you to your fucking grave. And so, that happened more back then. Yeah, decline in hitchhiking, the fact that local police departments speak to one another, that was a big help. Yeah. You know, cell phones are a big reason that people are caught before they become serial killers. That's why all horror movies are period pieces now. Yeah. But, My point, besides the fact that it is incredibly rare that you would be murdered by a serial killer, is that I think it speaks to the brutally violent and inhumane nature of many of these killers, that their names have gone down in history as these unimaginable monsters. They're full names, mind you. It's always like three full names. It's like their full fucking government name. They have gone down in history as these monsters, despite the fact that statistically... Serial killers have never killed. Anyone at all. I'm sorry, what are you saying? I'm saying, statistically, if you're a statistician. Oh. You're saying that they've done almost no killing in the world of killing. In terms of the number of deaths of the 175 million Californians, statistically... serial killers don't even show up. They've killed less than one all together killed less than one. But the ways that they have done it is so scary and so violent that we know a lot of their names i didn't want to cover any of the names that most people know I wanted to pull one of the more bizarre cases from the archives because I think it illustrates how even the parts of California that seem innocent are capable of hiding in incredible darkness. In 1980s Sacramento, which if you're unaware is the state capital of California, and all of this, mind you, happened less than a mile away from the physical state capital. This was directly down the street from the state capital. Okay, well, downtown's never great. A sweet-looking older woman named Dorothea Puente... ran a little powder blue Victorian boarding house at 1426 F Street. I drive a little powder blue Victorian car. You do. It's powered by your little Victorian feet. Yep. She's just shy of 60 with a grandmotherly perm. And to look at her, the only crime she seems capable of committing. Fashion crime. Ed, that's why we pay you the big bucks. Oh, wow. She's obviously guilty of an assault on fashion. Oh, wow, you're really going to say that? I really was. Yeah, I don't watch reality TV like you do, so I got there. A little joke I made for myself, but you beat me to it. Beyond that, she is seen as one of the pillars of the community, something that honestly can be said about probably way too many serial killers. No, yeah, I told you. My friend, Katie, RIP, God bless, you know, She wasn't a serial killer. No, but literally like her next door and her neighbor was BTK when he was caught. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And spoke to him the day before at the store. And he was like a pretty well-known member of the town. like worked at a church, like worked in local government. It was like crazy. John Wayne Gacy was the same way. Big democratic fundraiser, had a local business. There were a number of serial killers who part of their disguise was Dexter. He's a blood spatter analyst for the Miami PD. Hiding in plain sight. Hiding in plain sight. Dokes knew. Dokes knew. Fucking dokes knew. Dorothea Puente, though, uses her boarding house to take in people nobody else wants. The elderly, the disabled, mentally ill folks, people just falling through. The cracks with nowhere else to go. So no one looking for them. Bingo. She gives them a room. She cooked homemade tamales for them. Really gives them the whole kind of grandma experience. But that's all part of the trap because what she was also doing was drugging her tenants, killing them, burying them in the backyard garden, and continuing to cash their social security checks. Interesting. Interesting. And that's also grandma experience is interesting. It's like how people pay money to do like fantasy baseball camp. Yeah. I thought you were going to say the girlfriend experience. No, no. But you know, like how guys will be like, Oh, I'll do a week of spring training and fucking whatever. But if it's a lady makes you tamales, it's a grandma. I think just as stupid. Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that's interesting about Dorothea Puente is that it seems like, and she is, there's a great, very long article that I quote a lot from in this piece or in this section of the show from Sacktown Magazine, which is the Sacramento area magazine. They should have gone through a couple more options. I know. You really, you put them up on the board and you go, Sacktown, sack balls, ball sack? Like, which one are we going to go with? But Sacktown Magazine has a really great long read. Dorothea, I know we're not supposed to say this about serial killers, but she is a much more interesting person than I think I'm even going to be able to paint her as in this sort of tip of the iceberg look at her. She clearly has a severe mental illness, a severe inability to relate to other people. She's a consummate liar. But one of the things that's interesting about her is that, you know, There aren't a lot of female serial killers. Really one of the only other famous ones is Monster, Eileen Wuornos. Charlize Theron. Eileen Wuornos. Charlize Theron. Yes. Really one of the only other famous ones is Eileen Wuornos, famously played by Charlize. Theron in the movie Monster. And she killed a number of truckers. It seems like there was some very deep-seated anti-male rage wrapped up in there. She'd been abused. She'd been raped. She had a horrible life. And that that was part of that for her. Dorothea, she had a rough life, and we're going to get into it. Oh, good. But it seems like she mostly did it for the money. Money is tight. She wanted the money. She was making about $ 5, 000 a month off the Social Security checks. Not a ton of money, but enough she could afford plastic surgery. That's the thing that she went with first? She did. She got plastic surgery. She got a facelift. She bought a lot of nice clothes. It seemed like part of this was just. I would have asked if the doctor could make me look like someone who didn't commit these crimes. I need you to make me look 30 years younger and not at all like the person I am right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like if someone saw me recently. They'd be like, who are you? Who are you? Yeah, it seems like she was able to commit these crimes mostly because she just didn't view other people as people. They were just objects, which is what psychopaths, that's how they view people. People. Obstacles. Obstacles. Yeah. And it seems like that's part of what was going on here. Again, I don't get into it a ton. The article in Sacktown, if you want to go to the. It sounds like a boy band. If you wanted to read the article, it's in the notes. But yeah, it seems like she mostly did this for money. Throughout the 1980s, Dorothea Puente is believed to have killed at least nine people, and she buried seven of them in her own backyard. I can hear Robert Stack saying this. Yes. Again. Less than a mile from the state capitol. Yeah, but like, no one's looking at people's backyards. That's true. They certainly weren't looking in this backyard. As with many serial killers, like I said a moment ago, Dorothea had a brutal upbringing. She was born Dorothea Gray in 1929 out in Redlands, California. And according to Sacktown, her father died when she was eight and her mother, an abusive alcoholic, followed two years later. She spent the rest of her youth shuffled between various orphanages and foster care, and the LA Times notes that she was reportedly a victim of sexual abuse during this time. When she turned 16, she was working as a prostitute, although she eventually tried for a normal life by marrying a World War II vet. She popped out two kids in quick succession, but... Dorothea decided motherhood wasn't really for her and she pawned one kid off on some relatives, put the other one up for adoption before divorcing her first husband in 1948. According to, again, Oxygen Network, quote, what followed was a string of marriages and criminal convictions. She served four months in prison for writing a check under a false name and spent another 90 days behind bars after being caught in a police raid at a brothel. She eventually opened an unlicensed boarding house that she operated throughout the 1970s catering to disabled, elderly. And homeless people. She was secretly stealing their benefits checks, though, and was convicted in 1978 and placed on five years probation. Oh. So this is a pattern we're going to see reemerge. No jail time, though. No, no jail time. And she was nothing if not persistent because she drugged three elderly female patients and stole their money and valuables and landed in prison again in 1982. There, she was diagnosed by or she was evaluated by a state psychiatrist who diagnosed her with schizophrenia, saying, quote, this woman is a disturbed woman who does not appear to have remorse or regret for what she has done. She's to be considered dangerous and her living environment and or employment should be closely monitored. Just keep her where she is then. Do you think anyone monitored anything? No. No. It's like when you see people, it's like their old Seinfeld joke from his old stand-up where it's like, you see like America's most wanted, FBI's most wanted pictures and it's all like mug shots in the post office. And it was like, seems like you had, you took the picture. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Why are we looking for him now? You know what I mean? It's like. Well, it was around this point in Dorothea's life that people around her started mysteriously dropping dead. Just before she was arrested for drugging these patients, her business partner... a 61-year-old woman named Ruth Monroe, died suddenly after moving in with Dorothea Puente. The coroner determined she had died of an overdose, but there wasn't enough evidence to say if it was a homicide or suicide. Womp womp. Her next victim. Is believed to be a man named Everson Gilmouth, another one of the many incredible names on this show. Everson Gilmouth. But also a hard last name, a hard stop in it, which you know how I feel about that. Rolls off the tongue a little bit better than Peg Entwistle. Yes, that name's a nightmare. Everson Gilmouth struck up a pen pal relationship with Dorothea while she was in prison, and Everson fell in love with Dorothea. Am I, what mailing lists am I not on Like, how do these people even begin these pen pal ships with prisoners? Like, you hear about, you know, I guess if you're a famous enough serial killer, maybe people, they write you. Right. People are doing, they get married and stuff in prison from pen pals. But, like, how do you even get the address? Like, how do you even know, especially pre-internet? I think I'm asking for a friend. I'm talking out my ass here a little bit, but I think that some of these programs were started as a way, maybe not a rehabilitation, but the feeling was if we can keep our prisoners in contact with people in the outside world, they'll feel a sense of responsibility to humanity or it's, it's part of what will help them have a fuller life behind bars. And so the prisons out there handing out their address, I think, well. I don't know if the prisons were doing it, if there, or if there were like, um, Like outreach programs? Outreach programs and that kind of thing. But I think at some prisons it was sort of like a. We can't let you out to pet the horses yet, but we can probably get you a letter. Right. And it's true. I mean, prisons, another episode we'll do someday, the research and science around what makes more sense and how to rehab people and, you know, we are living in a world right now with private prisons where they're just hell holes. There's a very good chance if you go in Even if you come out, you will just continue to return to a life of crime. There's very little effort placed on rehabilitation or reintegration to society. And throughout the years, a lot of different people have tried a lot of different things, from petting horses to allowing prisoners to have pets like birds and cats. Sounds like we need to get Cinespio, I don't know how they're called. Synanon. Synanon. All the prisoners screaming at each other. Yeah, we got to get them in there. It seems like that's just a venue they haven't tried yet. Well, Everson fell in love, and after Dorothea was released, he moved to be with her. But Ed, wouldn't you know it, the marriage never happened. And in 1986, Everson Gilmouth was found dead in a coffin floating in the Sacramento River. So just fully thrown off the truck at that point. Just dead body in the box in the river you go. Why bother with a box? Who knows? Dorothea had a lot going on in that empty little head of hers. All this to say... When she opened her deadly boarding house in 1985, two people in her life were either dead or about to be. And she was running a house full of elderly people, stealing their government checks while on parole with two very specific conditions. Stay away from the elderly and don't handle anybody's government checks. Those were literally two of the things she was not supposed to do. Parole officers visited the house something like 15 times. And they never flagged a single thing. Well, she was just like, these are my friends. These are my friends, you see. These are my friends. They're over. We're going to go to shuffleboard later. You got a problem with my social life? Yeah, am I allowed to have friends because pickleball is not invented yet? I mean, we'll get to this in just a second. But there may have actually been some of this going on of just literally her lying and forcing everyone else in the house to lie about why they were there. But anyway, she operated out of this house for years until a developmentally disabled schizophrenic tenant named Bert Montoya disappeared in November of 1988. Oh, this is like Steel Sharp and Steel over here. Dorothea thought she operated on the very premise that her victims that she was welcoming into the home were perfect targets because who the fuck would care about these societal detritus? Yeah. She was wrong about Burt Montoya. Burt had a tenacious social worker named Judy Moyes in his corner, and she kept calling the house to check on him. And when he wasn't there, Dorothea Puente was caught off guard, and she kept changing her story. At first, she said he went to Mexico. Sure. Which is just a place that I guess a. Developmentally disabled schizophrenic guy is just going to. Go off to. Well, he had all those postcards of Z. Watanejo. And then. And then she said he left with his brother. But all of this sounded very weird to Judy Moyes, and she filed a missing persons report. On November 11th, 1988, homicide detectives paid a visit to Montoya's last known residence, that same powder blue Victorian boarding house run by Puente. And on their initial sweep of the home, they found nothing. Out of the ordinary. Just a bunch of friends. Just a bunch of friends hanging out. And you know what? They interviewed a bunch of those friends. And all of those friends corroborated Puente's story until the cops went to leave, at which point one of the tenants slipped the cops a note that said, she's making me lie for her. Whoa. They then talked to that person a little bit more. That missing guy never had a sombrero. That was a lie. Yeah. He was never a fan of that other place. She planted those maracas. I saw her. Those were not from his trip. This person told the cops to check the backyard. He had seen some weird holes being dug, and he thought something was amiss. So the cops went in the backyard, and they pretty quickly pulled up a human leg bone. You've got to dig deeper than that. And a rotting foot. Excuse me. Oh, my God. No, you've got to. The shallow grave thing is only when you don't have the time. You have the time. You have the time. Dig deeper. But here's the even crazier part of this whole story. Dorothea Puente immediately realized she was in deep shit. But the cops didn't place her under arrest. She's an old woman. She seems a little bit befuddled. She seems like a nice person. And so they don't even... Literally, she asks them, am I being placed under arrest? They say no. She says... Good, because my friends brought those feet. Almost, almost just as bad. She says the growing crowd outside... is really starting to stress her out. And she would love it if she could go get tea with her nephew at a hotel down the street. The cops say, okay, go get tea with your nephew. Down the street, Tijuana. She's going to Mexico to get out of here. She hops in a cab, and according to the Sacktown article, she goes to a bar, slams back a couple of vodka orange juices to calm her nerves. Screwdrivers. Catches a bus and vanishes to Los Angeles. You should vanish out of the country, lady. You got a fucking yard full of feet. She should have gone a lot further. Yeah. Meanwhile, while Dorothea is slamming screwdrivers and jumping on the Greyhound, police dig six more bodies out of her backyard. Some of the victims were basically mummified in layers of bed sheets and duct tape. while another was fully missing its head, hands, and feet. Those are missing. Those are just gone. No one even knows. They don't know what happened to them. The total count ended up standing at four women and three men between the ages of 52 and 79, all of whom lived and died at that two-story powder blue Victorian. Many had been sent there by social workers who thought the place was safe harbor for their most vulnerable or difficult cases. And investigators later revealed that Puente was likely spiking their meals or drinks with a deadly cocktail of meds in order to pocket their Social Security checks and bring in that princely sum of $ 5, 000 a month. Well, back then, I mean, she probably had 30 properties. Probably. How many people were paying rent checks to this woman that weren't living in that house? Yeah, yeah. Wow, wow, wow. So the way she gets caught is. Shark can't stop swimming, man. Sharks die. She's down in LA a few days later. Just killing. Not yet. Not killing yet. The cops are looking for her at this point. She's in LA. No one knows where she is. She's in a motel and she gets bored. So she goes to a dive bar and starts talking to a retired carpenter named Charles Wilgus. She tells him her name's Donna. She's a widow. She just got to town. They start hitting it off. Looking to party. She's flirting with him. She's like, hey, you know, like, I'm alone. You're alone. I'm a great cook. Maybe we could get something going together. Like, whatever. And then she asks him, how much does he get from Social Security? Interesting. And Charles, something pings in Mr. Charles's head. Because she's been on the news that this woman. Oh. Now, I don't know how public it was that she was stealing the Social Security checks. But this woman who had been killing old people in Sacramento had been on the news. And he realizes, he sort of recognizes this woman who says her name is Donna. And he realizes who he's talking to. And he calls the cops. And that is how the most wanted woman in California ultimately got caught. A guy that she was actively trying to murder recognized her and turned her in. I like to quote X-Men 2. As you've been doing... All week, I should mention. Never trust a beautiful woman, especially one interested in you. Dorothea, if you were to look up a photo of her, beautiful's a stretch. I stand by what I said. She was convicted. Or what Magneto said. She was convicted of three of the nine murders. The jury was actually hung on the other six and died in prison in 2011, maintaining her innocence until the very end. In one of her last interviews, the one in Sacktown Magazine, she's pressed about her culpability in these deaths. And she gives a defense that to me sounds a lot like a confession. She says, quote, the only time they were in good health was when they stayed at my home. I made them change their clothes every day, take a bath every day and eat three meals every day. These were people the Salvation Army wouldn't take them. When they came to me. Salvation Army doesn't take people, do they? They take stuff. Maybe they did at one point. Maybe they did. Maybe it was like a. They had like a home. A retirement home type thing. Yeah, I don't know. But she says... They gotta fit them in that big red bucket. Like that Twilight Zone episode where they all realized they're toys. Yeah. She says, the Salvation Army wouldn't take them. When they came to me, they were so sick, they weren't expected to live. And I think that kind of says it all. She saw herself as the sort of savior of these people who hey however long they live in my house it's longer than they were going to live on the street. And according to the government they lived a lot longer than that because they kept sending the checks. Yeah so to Dorothea it was her job to take them out when and where she pleased. And fuck her That chick sucks. Fuck you, Dorothea Puente. Fuck you, Dorothea Puente. We don't like you on this show. Or Dorothea Gray, whatever your real name is. But R.I.P. God bless to all of her victims. R.I.P. God bless to all the victims we've discussed over all two episodes of 50 States of Fear California. And that does, Ed, bring us to the fear tier. Where do you place the state of California? On your fear tier. Now keep in mind, I'll remind you, the number 10 spot on the fear tier is based on an event that occurred in California. So just keep that in mind when you try to figure out. Where you're going to put it. What the fuck are you referencing? A bucket of hot piss and shit dumped on someone's head. That's number one. Well, it's the scariest. It's 10. It's high as it can go. And it happened right up the street. Well, since we didn't do any of those stories, I guess it's not top of mind. I'm still more scared of earthquakes and wildfires than serial killers because the numbers are just looking worse for those two things. I lived here for over 15 years, nearly 20 years. I hate that I'm saying that out loud. But, yeah, I'm not that scared here often. So I'm driving across the country again next week. I'll probably find scarier states than this one and just things that make me feel less safe. So, yeah, it's an eight. Holy shit, what? No, I meant to say two. I was going to say, Jesus Christ, that was a lot of windup for an eight. No, no, I'm going to give it a two. All right. I don't have any problems. I love this state, this adopted state. This state's been good to me. I've had a couple scary experiences here, all kinds. I've had experiences with earthquakes. I've had experiences with fires. I've had experiences with ghosts. I've had experiences with the mentally ill. So I think I've got to put California at a four on my fear tier. It's a little frightening. It's been a rocky road. I'm more scared here than I have been in Pennsylvania. I don't know. You don't know. I'm not that scared of many places. Things do ramp up fast anywhere you are. That's true. You go from not scared at all to scared pretty quickly. To scared all the time. Scared all the time. But I, yeah, I'm going to keep making it. I'll probably say two for a lot of these state ones, but... Yeah, it's tough. Maybe we shouldn't do the fear tier for the state ones. It's just a learning experience. Maybe. I'm still going to put it at a four. You can still keep it at a two. As we go through the rest of the 49 states, throughout the experience that we have here doing all 50 states of fear. We should change the fear tier to one out of 50. Yeah, we're going to end up. Where are you on a one out of 50 scale? There's a wrestling critic named Dave Meltzer who's been running a wrestling zine, essentially, for... for 40 years at this point and he ranks he's ranked pretty much every professional wrestling match that has ever taken place almost all over the world any wrestling match of note i mean not every literal backyard but anything televised anything he could get his hands on he's ranked them all and it used to be on a scale of one to five stars and he has fallen in love with a bunch of different wrestlers over the years from a distance not in an actual relationship with them but Slowly, that scale has crept from a 1 to 5 to a 1 to 5.5. And now he's all the way up to giving some matches 5.75. So there's other people who have expanded their scales in the past, and maybe we'll do the same. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sure we'll figure it out. But yeah, we don't really know. This is our first episode, or second, technically, of The Parts. So our first 50 states of fear. Yeah. We'll figure out the fear tier of it all. You know, we're too close to it. We can't see the forest for the biggest trees in the world. That's true. We'll figure it out. This has been fun. I'm glad we started with California. It's a great way to end our summer of fear with a long look at all the horrors of California. But until next time, I think that wraps it up. So the show is scared all the time. I am your host, Chris Colari. And I'm Ed Ficola. And we're in California. We're trying something new. And we'll talk to you next time. Bye-bye. Scared All the Time is co-produced by Chris Colari and Ed Ficola. Written by Chris Colari. Edited by Ed Ficola. Additional support and keeper of sanity is Tess Feifel. Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew. And Mr. Disclaimer is. And just a reminder, you can now support the podcast on Patreon and get all kinds of cool shit in return. Depending on the tier you choose, we'll be offering everything from ad-free episodes, producer credits, exclusive access, and exclusive merch. So go sign up for our Patreon at scaredallthetimepodcast.com. Don't worry, all scaredy cats welcome. No part of this show can be reproduced anywhere without permission. Copyright Astonishing Legends Productions. Tonight, we are in this together. Together. Together.