Mummies

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 Scaret all the time. I'm Chris Klari and I'm Edvacola, And this week we are digging into the past to unor something ancient, sacred, and very very fucked up. With the new Mummy movie hitting theaters tomorrow, we thought we'd break out the bandages and crawl from the tomb to talk about the wild history and persistent mystery of all things wrapped and bandagaged and mummified. Okay, before you tune out because you think you know everything about mummies from watching Boris Karloff stumble around a backlot or Brendan Fraser punching sand, trust me you don't, because it turns out curses are far from the weirdest, scariest things about mummies. From the gory details of how they were created to the unspeak things we've done to their remains over the centuries, the story of the desiccated dead is a bizarre and twisted tail on par with any horror movie. So join us as we crack open the sarcophagus this week. Don't breathe in the dust, and please, for the love of God, do not take any souvenirs. This podcast is cursed enough as it is. Saman, what are we screwed? When are we? All? The time? Now? Which is time? Full time scan? All right? So, longtime listeners of this show might be thinking, haven't you guys already talked about mummies? And you would be correct. I guess you actually haven't. You wouldn't have to have been listening that long to have heard us talking about mummies us curses episode, And we also touched a little bit on mummification in the Buried Alive episode two parter two part are Buried Alive? Yeah? Two part two parts? I remember which part. If you haven't checked those out, go do that. I think they'll nicely implement this episode. But today is Mummy's the main event, because unless you are some sort of a professional mummy doctor, studier, scientist, eddie, you looking for a mummy? You're looking for Sorry, I just had to move something my mummy collection. I stolen artifacts display case. Unless you are a professional mummy head mummy studier. I'm gonna bet that almost everything that you think you know about them is either wrong, incomplete, or nowhere near as disturbing as the actual truth about them. But before we dive into all of that, Ed, I gotta know what is your relationship with mummies? Were you scared of them ever? Were you ever a mummy for Halloween? That's interesting because I'm not I've never been a mummy, but it's an easy costume. Yeah, I've never been a mummy for Halloween. My relationship is I'm a person of a certain age. So there was never a Mummy movie that wasn't just the most fun. Yeah, so like we're Brendan Fraser mummy people, I would imagine yep. And I don't consider that movie scary in the slightest. I don't find the Mummy to be a genuine threat. I think he's doing something that might end the world. I don't know, But that movie, it's like it's in the way that I don't find a lot of any Ed Jones scary, even knowing like the Second Ones got a lot of scary stuff. Yeah, it's just like I'm having so much fun. Yeah watching it, I associate the word mummy with having a good time. Actually, okay, all right, well this episode's gonna be a good time, I would say. In the Brendan Fraser Mummy movies, there's one scene where a guy gets eaten by scarebs that I found kind of scary when I was younger. I feel that exact same way about the boobox and hook. Yes, so yes, get these bugs off of us. Yeah, there's Look, mummies are a tough sell as scary horror villains. I think they shamble, they moan, they do a lot of strangling. They're basically a zombie that's one zombie and doesn't eat brains. That's why I think the Mummy dit a good job of being like, well, it was just kind of like a hot guy, like like not Billy's in. Well, we'll see what this Mummy movie is like that comes out tomorrow. Saw the trailer had to wait too much Mummy in it. Lee Cronin's The Mummy. It seems like they're trying to make they're trying to go for a scary thing, but it does seem like there's not actually like a shambling mummy. It's this more possessed dead kid angle. Yeah, I think a suicide squad a little mummy ask shit in it too, where they just got a babe. Yeah, so I think you gotta throw. Like a hansom or hot you gotta throw a hot person in there and get rid of those wraps immediately. Well right, but then what that does I think and what you see in most of the attempts Universal has made to relaunch The Mummy as a franchise is both the but the addition of the hot person and the fact that they always feel like they have to give the Mummy some kind of powers to make up for the fact that it's dead turns it more into you. Why isn't there just a voodoo movie. It's just more of a fantasy horror adventure at that point. No matter how you square it neck, yeah, you're not really getting that kind of groaning, shambling kind of mummy that I think is is one of the first things that comes to mind when people think of mummies. Well, I mean it's in their defense of making it that way. Yeah, don't they have like their brains taken out through their nose. They're not working with brains. The first they'd be like, oh, we will, we will get to exactly. We will get into detail about what comes out of mummies and how Yeah. And they're going to little jars and stuff. We'll get into that, I'm sure. And I feel like that's the stuff they tossed to the side in the movies. Yeah. Like, well, because we think about it, this guy's he's thinking with sand to quote, what was that movie? Was that movie with Bruce Campbell where he's in like a retirement home is like elvis o bubbajo tap. Yeah, there's that kind of a mummy vampire thing coming out. But to quote that movie, I'm thinking with sand here, Yeah, you got a brain or whatever? I yeah, my favorite I'll say, I don't know if you have a favorite classic mummy design. I mean my first encounter with the classic mummy design were those orange Crestwood horror books. They were hardcover, bright orange, and they were like, uh, they were nineteen thirties horror movies repackaged as sort of books for second or third grade readers with black and white photos from the movies and the stories were simplified. Now was the first place I came across the classic Karloff Mummy, and it was slow move in wrapped in stuff wrapped in stuff. I think. Yeah, I guess I can't pinpoint mummies. I mean so much of you know, Monster Squad and stuff where they're like making fun of the universal monsters would be some of my earliest. Yes, but I was just gonna say the Monster Squad Mummy. Actually, all of the Monster Squad monsters I think are incredible modern ish version of those creatures. Not in the sense that they are necessarily the most frightening, but stan Winston designed all of them, and they are They managed to capture everything we love about the universal version of those monsters but give them sort of a fresh coat of paint. And the Mummy in particular, even though it's not particularly threatening in the movie, I love the visual design of the Mummy in that movie. It's angular, it's dirtier, It's like, there's just something cool about the Mummy in that movie, about all the monsters in that. I guess the Mummy to me just in the context of universal monsters. Yeah, even at the time they were made, which wasn't amazingly a time where they were like these are scary movies. Uh, even at the time they were made doing press or whatever, I feel like there probably was like and the Mummy. You know what, It's like, we got fucking Belle Luguzu's vamb We've got a were wolf, and there's a mummy. You also have this Mummy. There's man maybe the better Rapped Guy movie. But we have the Mummy as well. I think we mentioned this in the Curses episode that you know, the Mummy movie itself wasn't made that long after a sort of egypt Mania of like the Curses of Opening the Tomb and so like a lot of that I think was kind of coasting on almost like recent news. You know, it was like semi recent. And it's a great concept of like pillaging in the sense that like a bunch of British dudes and stupid hats show up and they're like, oh, this is tight, I'm gonna take this. Yeah, and it would just be. I mean, the fucking Museum of Natural History and like every major city has some shit from Egypt in it. Yeah, And so there's a good thing if something is cursed. It's a great idea, especially at the time they were making those movies where it was like not long after, like. The New York Museum is introducing mummies. Yes, this mummy thing, so they would be like, Oh, wouldn't it be cool if something followed you home? Actually, now that I think about it, though, I guess maybe we would not necessarily have the idea of the modern Romero zombie without the karl Off mummy, because the modern Romero zombies like zombies have existed in culture, but they were always more of like a Haitian voodoo like the real zombie was that sort of the serpent in the Rainbow styles of it. That's why I said earlier, like what if you without the rappings? These things are just voodoo stories or necromancers. Right, But I sort of wonder. I mean, it's too late to ask him now because he is a member of the undead, but I wonder if Georgia Merrow was influenced at all by the shambling mummy figure and just sort of turned it up to eleven to create Mobably. I've seen that original movie. They couldn't afford the rappings, No, it probably was originally a mummy movie. And he was like, we don't got enough toilet paper, Yeah, like the crewhose isn't already using. Let's just make them a guy in a suit. Yeah, And I also think I would also say the reason mummies probably fall to the bottom of most people's monster fears is that my theory and this is different for everybody, but generally I feel like the most effective horror is more gent, like if you can imagine something scary happening to you, if it feels like it's something that could happen when you go outside, that's the most effective horror. And the only way that you're really coming across a mummy is a pretty specific like you either have to be a grave robber or a running a museum or something to really encounter a mummy on a regular basis. I love India Jones is always like this belongs in a museum. Yeah, in the museums, Like, will you stop giving us these? It's been a nightmare for Yeah, just leave them where they are. Indeed, so I'm not particularly concerned about waking up to find a mummy standing at the foot of my bed, but the lore and the science and the myth around them is so gross and gory and dusty and in touch with the world of the dead that this might actually end up being one of my favorite episodes. Well, the thing I'm most looking forward to in this episode, and if it exists, I'm pumped, and if it doesn't, less pumped. I'm fired. They're fired. Is I really want there to be an insane number of booby traps where they're buried? Oh oh boy, you might be disappointed. Yeah, you might be unemployed. There's really the creation of the chambers that a lot of mummies were buried in. Let's just say that there's a disappointing amount of traps. Booby Traps were not something that ancient peoples were particularly invested in making last very long. If there ever were booby traps, Okay, nature set some booby traps by I don't get into it in the episode, but there is some research around and I think this is what we talk about in Curses. If you haven't and you want a deeper dive on this, go listen to Curses. But the idea that perhaps there was some kind of like bacteria or viruses or whatever that had been kind of sealed up in some of these pots and chambers, and that when people broke open those doors to go in there, they may have been exposed to like mold or whatever that made them sick. But I don't think any of that was set there on purpose. It was just sort of nature doing its thing. Yeah, your air being like you're telling me there's no way out, air being no way out. Yeah, well we're toxic now. So to start, let's still nail down exactly what a mummy is, because the same images that caught my attention as a kid are so baked into the cultural idea of a mummy that you'd be forgiven for thinking that mummies are a exclusively Egyptian and b only count as when wrapped in thin strips of fabric. But that is just one example of the form. We turned to Wikipedia, which tells us a mummy is a dead human or animal whose soft issues and organs have been preserved by either intentional or accidental exposure to chemicals, extreme cold, very low humidity, or lack of air, so that the recovered body does not decay further if kept in cool and dry conditions. So mummy is not a noun then, because because if it's if it's unintentional as well, someone's been mummified. Well you can you essentially, you can find a mummy. There's there's many many animal mummies throughout the world, particularly that one that with the Cheetos one from our from our live show. Yeah, it just like fell into a cave and then like became desiccated and dried out, and we found it eight thousand years later. And yeah, and then just the devradd It live. You want to hear that mummies of humans and animals have been found on every continent, both as a result of natural preservation and as cultural artifacts. We'll get into this a little bit more later, but over one million animal mummies have been found in Egypt, many of which are cats. Evidence of deliberate mummification in human cultures is documented to have existed across Southeast Asia, China, New Guinea, and Australia, where discoveries made just last year in twenty twenty five tell us that various cultures have been practicing mummification since approximately ten thousand BC. These new finds are prompting research into cultures documented to twenty thousand years ago for evidence of use of the same mummification methods. So this means that the oldest deliberately mummified humans are somewhere around eight thousand years older than Egyptian mummies and six to seven thousand years older than. The wheel Oh wow. So they had to carry all of these mummies to get around just two guys. It's funny each mummy. We'll get into that in a minute, but I just think it really puts our perspective to turn human beings into jerky, or it really puts our desire to turn human beings into jerky, into perspective that we were doing this thousands of years before we figured out how to move them, and. If climate change as it's way, we might be doing it for sustenance soon. Yeah. So I know we sometimes go in historical order on this show, but I think for this episode, the best place to start our journey through the Dead is with a closer look at the Egyptian mummy, because it's what most people think of first, and we know a lot about them. And we're getting to that thing now where everything's being memed as, like you know, we're now as far away from whatever as the Egyptians were from whatever. Yeah, and I never remember, obviously the fill in the blanks on that, but I see the Pyramids come up a lot. Well. It's the big one for me is we live closer to the era of Tyrannosaurus racks than Tyrannosaurus wracks lived to I believe stegosaurus. How the fuck is that helping anybody? Oh it's not, but it's just wild, Like that's how much time. But I can't figure that out. I don't understand the reference. I'm saying, like I can look and see the pyramids and I get that. Yeah, and I know that humans made them. Yeah, Okay, there goes half our audience or aliens whatever. Yeah, whoever you want to have made them. We have no evidence, but it is yeah that I can I can track, but I can't. I don't as far as I'm concerned. Ttegosaurus and t rexes are hanging out together, right, but they weren't. There was like a it's like sixty five million years between us and t rex, and I think like a hundred million years between t rex and stegosaurus. So they're never together. No, only in the movies. Only in the movies. Like they say that a lot about mummies today too. Yeah, the Jurassic the earliest parts of the Jurassic Period and the latest parts of the Cretaceous Period. I don't remember that the actual time scale, but it's it's immense amounts of time. And then if you going back to the Triassic period forget about it. That's like, do you. Think people who know this type of stuff when they saw Jurassic Park were like. You crazy for this one? Yeah, that's fucking together. I never thought, well, Jurassic Park wouldn't work for a lot of reasons. But yes, part of the reason it wouldn't work is because you're not only put dinosaurs and humans together. You're putting dinosaurs together that had never experienced Oh. That's like, you know, I can't even imagine. I'm trying to think of like a zoo where it's like a zoos must be nuts for animals, Yeah, but like a draft hanging out with something, it's like what the fuck are you? Yeah? Yeah, t Rex would be like what are you? Ye too a stecosaurus? Yeah, exactly, So we don't we don't have to worry about it. I mean, you could also argue that dinosaurs in a Jurassic Park wouldn't really be dinosaurs. They would be some sort of modern uh Frankenstein hybridization of the closest thing we could get. So what you're saying is is that t Rex would be like, what even are you? And then Stecosaurus would say what are we. Yeah, t Rex would say, what even am I? Yeah? Yeah? Anyway. One of the most important things to understand about mummies is that the Egyptians weren't mummifying the dead for fun or to preserve information about their culture. Even funerary right. Rituals changed over time, but mummification in the Egyptian culture was considered an essential component if you were to have a successful afterlife. Accordingly, for like rich people like pharaohs in ger where regular asks people getting for everybody. Okay, so according to match, some of these mummifications look real shitty. They do, like what are the Turkish hair transplants of. Yesterday? In real time? According to the Spurlock Museum at the University of Illinois, quote, two very important things were necessary for a person to go to one's ah or become a blessed one who could spend a pleasant eternal life. One component to that was passing a final judgment. The other component was having a well preserved body that that person's soul could recognize and return to after something called the opening of the mouth ceremony. Okay, better name would be better. I mean, it's pretty straightforward. What happens during that ceremony. I believe the mouth is opened and the soul returns body. Interesting that that the mouth is, but like everything else, is. With the nose, although some stuff is through all kinds of different holes. Well hold, hang, hold that thought, Hold hold that thought. The two most important divisions of the soul were the Ka and the baka. The Ka was the person's double, and it stayed with the deceased in the tomb. The Ba was portrayed as a human headed bird that could leave the tomb during the day but needed to return to their body at night, sort of like Jeffrey Epstein when he was put in prison for his first crime. During the day, you could think of a Ba as sort of a Jeffrey Epstein with wings. Without the mummified human, the Ba and the Ka could not survive. So the body, the mummified body, was like the anchor for both parts of your soul is the body the ba doing that there were two parts of your spirits, so the Ka stayed with the body in the box out. And spirit base gotcha, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha? Uh. So to assure your continued existence in the afterlife, the Egyptians worked hard to find the perfect method of preserving the body. Interestingly, the Global Egyptian Museum tells us that our knowledge of the mummification process does not come from the ancient Egyptians themselves, and the City Museum elaborates that quote. Ancient Egyptian sources on the treatment of the human body after death are scarce, with only a few inscriptions and funerary images. The few texts that have survived, such as the Ritual of Embalming, focus on the rituals, and the more practical and gruesome aspects of mummification are largely ignored. No, I've never thought about this in my entire life until right this second. Yep, higher glyphs. Yeah, it is a language that's a picture base. Yes, where are the better drawings? Like literally, image is worth a thousand words, But they're like what if it's just one word? Yeah, So why do we not have a wood etching of these events from a gyps versus? Like, well, I told them about it. You can see from the bird had bird had bird ed guy doing the Egyptian dance. Yeah, there's lots of guys doing the Egyptian dance. Yeah, so you have to like kind of glean from that what you will. There's a lot of speculation about this. Some people think that the rituals were considered so sacred that they were never passed down anywhere. They were just or they were I'm sorry that they were never written down anywhere. They were only passed down through an oral tradition. Some people think that perhaps you know they were written, if there were ever written instructions for any of this, that perhaps it was written on papyrus that didn't survive very long and was never painted onto a wall or something never higher glyft into a tomb, because once you're in the tomb, you wouldn't necessarily need the rules for how to make a mummy on the wall. Yeah. I mean, look, I hung for the longest time. The ratio is for how to make a good cup of coffee over my coffee machine, So like maybe you would do that for a moment. Yeah, I haven't my refrigerator right now. That's like the breakdown of like two tea spoons is one, yeah, or whatever, you know what I mean. But they had it, as we'll get into in a moment here, they had a lot of guys who were very good at all the different aspects of this, so they didn't. This is the kind of thing where generations of people existed to do one part of the ritual, you know, so you didn't necessarily need to write any of this down. Yeah, and it's a good job to add. Everyone's getting it done. Great job, great job to add. Like, and no one can kill you because no one else knows how to do it. Yeah, well, great job for some people. But oh, I'm sure there were something some sons and daughters who were like, I feel like I want to dance. I don't want to cut brains out anymore, or even to begin with. But in any case, this is where the ancient Greeks come in, as they usually do around this point in the show. Is that was that a stone included Egyptian hieroglyphs, didn't it? Well, no, no, no, I take it back, I don't. I don't know if there was that Ai zone included Egyptian hieroglyphs. But the Greeks are coming in on this at this part of the show because we actually know more about the ummification process in Egypt due to the writing of the Greeks then the writing of the Egyptians. Yeah, that's why I brought up the Resetta Stone, because that was shit where they were out here just transcribing stuff in three languages the same sign, right, and so it sometimes it takes another culture to come up and be like, hey, this way to Denny's on the sign is written for everyone who lives there, and you're not going to get that if it's all just hieroglyphs, if it's all just Latin. So yeah, I guess Greeks are pretty cool because they wrote things down. Well, not only did they and preserved it. Yes, they did write it down and preserve it. The problem that we will face here in a moment is that. The financial collapse they faced a few years ago. Do they have money anymore? I don't know. The Greeks, like the countryquent bankrupt. I think they have money, but they don't have jobs. I think is okay, we're hurdling towards that. We just start writing everything down and triplicate too. No, the issue is that the writing we have isn't contemporary with mummification processes, so like we don't have the first hand witnesses to a lot of it, but we have what was what was recorded as having been passed down. So thanks to the writing of Herodotus, Deodorus Siculus, and fragments of Plutarch's writing. We do know convention this weekend. We're hoping people are wearing Diyota title this serve. Like I just said, Ed's making a stinky comic fan joke. We'll see you at Wonder con folks. Yeah, this will come after that. But that's true. But thanks to the writing of those three, we do know a lot of the process and we have also been able to confirm a lot of what they wrote by mummifying things with the processes that they wrote about in the present. So if only the Greeks were there for those fucking Homunculi stuff, had better Homunculi records. We could have we might actually have Humunculi in the studio with us. Oh hell yeah, at the homunculirius level of patrion. You can get your own one cent too. It will dial on the way. It will be made from equal parts my shit and Ed's come. It's going to be an incredible little man. Yeah, but we're going to write for the service that it's a book. I guess the Greeks would have to go home and try it a few times, just because there could be. You know, I've seen enough movies about journalists where it's like, don't tell them, or even my mom giving out recipes, she doesn't want it to be if it's like a family recipe, she might leave like one really important thing out right so that people can't replicate as good of granola. And but it hang on a second, and journalists leave important things out. Why No, I meant people who were like talking to a journalist as my source might leave out something that would reveal icy and so I guess I would have to go back and test. It could be like I don't know fucking whomever told me in Egypt, this is how you do it. But he could have had over his shoulder, like we never revealed to the men from over the horizon, the like white guy that came, We're not going to tell him exactly how this ancient procedure goes ICEE. I like leave out the part about how they get powers. Well they I think they did leave out the part about how they get powers, because nothing that was written down has anything to do with infusing a mummy with magical powers. But we do know that the earliest detailed account of Egyptian mummification comes from Herodotus writing around four to fifty BC. And I don't want to get too sidetracked by Herodotus, but he is a super interesting figure based on how much he traveled and the quality of his writing. They think, and by they, I mean archaeologists and people who study the classics and stuff think that he seems to have been very wealthy and educated. But no one has any idea where his money came from. Which if you had a ton of money in four fifty BC, and I mean people know, but if but you didn't get it anywhere or good. But also I think about this. Even Indiana Jones is probably gonna come up a lot in this episode, But I think about this, and even Indiana Jones where it's like the thirties, Yeah, and it was like he took a zeppelin there, Like these red lines on the screen across the map are not taking into account that was weeks yeah, Like so the fact that this guy's doing it even before that, he's on some weird trade ship like in three point thirty BC. Yeah, to get to a place that like someone assured him was there, like he's ever been to fucking well no, because even Julius Caesar, and it would be years later that they would ever go to hang out with Cleopatra. I'm saying, so this guy is really taking a chance that there is in Egypt, that there are things of interest there. And then also being rich, you're just carrying a bunch of gold or silver, hay. Or in the currency he didn't have checks then yeah, exactly. Yeah, so it's like, fuck, man, you had to show up with, Like, I hope this is enough gold to not kill, but also not so much that I'm instantly killed. True, you know, it's a it's a very fine line amount of gold that you need to have all times. Which also makes me think Togas must have just spen for the Senate, Like this guy had to have a backpack, maybe some clothes toed shoes, like he's gonna be tracking in the sun. Well, God, we're gonna let us know if you want us to do a full episode on Ed Learns about the very specific things that have nothing to do with the show that have interested me. Herodotus's most famous piece of writing is a book called The Histories, and it garnered him two memorable nicknames and two Peabody Awards. The father of history and the father of lies. The book opens with a hell of a line. Herodotus of Halikarnassis here displays his inquiry so that human achievements may not become forgotten in time, and great and marvelous deeds, some displayed by Greeks, some by barbarians, may not be without their glory, according to modern scholars. Quote what cements Herodotus as the father of history, where his attempts to explain the course of human events through causal consequences. This blew my mind because I'd never thought about this before. But he basically was on the tip of like this set of decisions by people led to a certain action, which brought on another reaction, and so on. Before that, the idea of the past and history was literally just who, what, when? Why? Where? Speaking to the warless or anyone, Yeah, who's writing right now? You usually will suffice. You don't have to. Well, not the way so far, we don't have Usually we don't get those from writing anymore. Not not the why, the who, the what, and the when? I guess he introduced. He introduced the why, sure, okay, why did the Persians hate the Greeks so much? Why did mighty Egypt, the crown jewel of antiquity fall to the Persians. Why did one powerful and leader after another fall victim to pride, revenge or greed. So they say that Herodotus invented history as we know it because he was the first to see these myriad stories from the past as small parts of a bigger story, the story of the known human world. Now, the problem is that the best historical data he could get his hands on were called logoi, the stories told by people who either witnessed an event firsthand or had received knowledge passed down through strong oral traditions. And the logoi weren't always the most reliable. Oh no, Herodotus wrote of winged serpents in Arabia, giant gold digging ants, and made claims about battles where almost everyone involved died. So there's a big question about who was left to describe what happened in the battle? Okay to him, but I will say to his point, to the first guy to bring the why into the equation, how often do inean. Jones or anything else? Where you see it was like, oh, this hieroglyph says like this is based on the Sanskrit word for whatever, because they believed that the earth was made by God had two piles of sand and then he did this. So the why, the cause and effect were mythology. Yeah, mythos, including by the way, very famously from the Greeks. Yeah. Yeah, So he might have been the first guy who was like, maybe it wasn't a cinaur, let me go see. And then he unfortunately for him, and he had to write it down because he's good at his job. He was like a lot of places think it's a cinaur. Like a lot of places they have different words for it. Yeah, but a lot of the same shit we've got because no one was around to be like, oh, this guy wanted power. Right right, So he did dig up a lot of truths, but he was a storyteller at heart, and you know, he could only check some of this information, sort of like this podcast. He could only do so much fact checking, and he went, hey, you know what, this sounds pretty good. We're gonna go with this. We do more than most. So we have to keep all that in mind. Because his account of Egyptian burial traditions starts plainly enough with descriptions of grief. He tells us that after a loved one passed, women of the household covered themselves in mud and walked through town beating their bare breasts. Okay, but then comes the part about necrophilia. According to Herodonus, if the deceased was a beautiful or distinguished woman, the family deliberately held the body in the home for three to four days to avoid before sending it to the embalmers, because they wanted to make sure the body was gross and stinky and rotten enough that if there were lecherous embalm are. Involved in the process, which is all of them. Which was probably in many of them, he would not try to ship where he eats. So to speare, right now, you're not allowed to make rules in this year United States about like there's like a you can't just say I'm I'm not gonna hire Chris because he's a fucking disgusting Italian. Yeah, I can't do that here correct these days? Right, I think we should be able to make a rule that, like, you can't work in a morgue if you're a guy. Like you know what I mean. I'm not saying anything's gonna happen, but I would say that Aramaalabalus or whatever here's gonna be like And on. My thirtieth interview, Herodotus and a chronicler of modern history, Quentin Tarantino, both show us what happens to a body left out more. I think if it was put up to a vote to society, I think people would be like, yes, is it against the freedoms of the people in this It is? But you know what, we're all on board. Yeah, just ladies work here so and also women fucking Jesus that horrible lives and probably still definitely still. But I'm saying, like every one of the stories we do that go back earlier than like like it was like boo, that's rough. The only way to keep the women from being assaulted was to hide them. Yeah, So, to be fair, no one else has ever made this claim about the bodies being kept at home to write. The only real one, dude, well will tell you what's up. Herodotus is the only one that gonzo journalists. He is, so it has to be taken with a grain of salt. Uh. It may be one of the lies that he fathered. But we luckily also have the writings of Deodoris Siculus, who is generally considered a bit more reliable, although still relying on a lot of the same skills that Herodotus us. He just wanted to be able to put it on TikTok. He's over here writing segs alived, were our boy? Hiraki? Yeah, I'm never gonna have these names. He's he's just like he doesn't give a fuck. U Yeah, well, deodor As Siculus tells us that the corpse, once they at it, would be sent to what the Egyptians called the Pernepher, which translates to house of beauty, which I think is really just a fancy and sort of optimistic name for the embalmers, just like a modern day burial or the scaret all the time Patreon. The family would be presented with three options from most expensive to least expensive, and we'll get to the differences in a moment, But after the family chose their tear, the chief embalmer would get to work. This guy was known as the Harry Seshta, or Master of Secrets, and he wore a jackal mask to represent a Nubis, the god of the dead. Do you think one of the secrets he carries is what he does for a living at parties? Being like, I'm just sort of because the Harry Sheshta oversaw a team of specialists, all of whom, despite being priests with sacred anatomical knowledge, were also considered ritually unclean and how had to live in a segregated necropolis away from the living. Yeah that's that's one too many dinner party was ruined by these people. Yeah, that's said. They're like, look, you guys, you live over here. You can't talk about where anyone else put each other. But I do find it interesting the anatomical secrets, because you know, even in fictional fantasy, you'd have like Game of Thrones, you'd have these like measters or whatever, where it's like I'm gonna have a baby, go find a master, Like no one else was taught that. Yeah, only like religious or very wealthy people had any knowledge of. Yeah, I mean even some of our some of our heroes from from these episodes were like ladies had eighteeth or more teeth or whatever. It was like people straight up like if you weren't in that very specific club, you're just guessing. Yeah, And so these guys knew a lot, but knew a little too much to be let out in public so anyway, if you were, if your family chose the most expensive mummification method, as many of the mummies that we have, what we still have, yeah, the ones that were made with care. The first step was to remove the brain. Now, many of you who have seen anything mummy related or ed, as you suggested earlier, this had to This was done through the nose. A long hooked iron instrument was inserted to your nostrils. But that was not to pull the brain out. That was to break the fmoid bone, which is the thin plate of bone between your nose and your brain. That when people are like, oh, if you give them a palm strike, yeah, break the fmoid bone. Oh, no one ever said the second part. Well, I heard it goes into their brain. That's the if you palm strike someone's nose. The idea is you shadow ship into their brain. But then cocaine can get around it without issue. I get well, not without issue, if any how much cocaine you do. But you had to break the bone first, and then this hook was used to liquefy the brain matter. But then the brain matter was not pulled out on a hook. How is it liquefied? Did they make it hot? Oh buddy, you just stirred it up. You stir it up, and then you drained the brain out through the nose by gravity. And I hate this. We know that this works because in nineteen ninety four celebrated the release of never Mind. Yeah, this celebrated egyptologist and philosophy professor Bob Bryer or mister Mummy. According to the article I found, Wow, was so stumped by certain aspects of ancient mummification that he and a research partner named Robert Wade decided to create a mummy themselves, using only ancient techniques and materials. This should have been and hopefully not a member of their family. Yeah. Man, this is again, this is something where it's like by two people who decided to remain anonymous, Like why would you throw your name on this disgusting. Opposite of anonymous? I guess famous for this. Yeah, but I guess it has to get done because, like you said, it took a lot of trial and error, and after a lot of trial and error with I assume maybe bodies that were donated to science. No, it has to like and you know what, thank God for these two guys to do it, not to prisoners of war, Like, this is just like everyone's on board. Yeah, it's good if everyone's on board. Yeah. They confirmed after much trial and error that the brain was not pulled out in chunks as you would think in these movies. It was liquefied into brain stew and then poured out of the head through the nose and then it's. So attached to the head but the body at this point, yes. Okay, and then all that brain matter was just thrown away because to the Egyptians, they considered the brain useless. To them, it was the origin of mucus. That's what they thought the brain was for that it created the mucus in your body. The heart, it's just a bunch of little mucinex guys coming out of your nose. Hey, he's all shitty and like as like an accent. They believe that the heart was where intelligence lived. Honestly, it does for me too. This is a sweet thought. Yeah. Four chambers. They loved chambers. The heart has chambers. The heart has chambers. What episode was it where we learned that there was somebody else that thought the heart was where the heart was for warming your blood or something. I don't remember anymore. I'm sure it was one of our heroes, but it's uh. Yeah. People have had all kinds of weird thoughts about the brain, the heart, the stomach, the lungs. They had no idea until like twenty years ago that we're. All just like everything else. We're just a brain in a mechs suit. Yes, the reality of the situation, but yeah, I think we I don't think it's gonna work for a button of the month, but I do think we should build some sort of like ever evolving Mount rushmore of like nonsense heroes from the show. Yeah. Yeah, ladies have different amount of teeth. Yeah, like people who show up a bunch like Eronymous or Hew. No, he's a ronymus Bosh as an artist. Yeah, but I'm saying, like that can be fun. Yeah, it would be ext to remember the things we once did. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I like this. I like this. Once the brain was juiced and dumped into the street, a scribe marked the left side God, a scribe marked the left side of the corpse is abdomen. Then a man again with very fine tuned, completely useless in every other aspect of life knowledge. This man called the Periski. I'm gonna fuck this up parastecise. A man called the parastecise or the slitter, stepped forward with an obsidian blade and made the incision down the abdomen city a cool rock. And then, according to Deodorus Siculus, the slitter immediately had to turn and run while his colleagues pelted him with stones and cursed him, because cutting a body was desecration, even when necessary. So the slitter was like a sin eater. He was like a ritual. Literally going to compare it to a seat. He did the dirty work and took the spiritual hit and was pelted with stones, So physical hits, it's like, so no one else had too. On a ship job. It's a ship job. This is a didn't Egypt also invent beer? They had I think they invented beer. They may have they had case, they had ales or something in which. I think is specifically for guys with this job. And it's like, I gotta go to the bar. How was your day? How do you think I'm a fucking slitter. I'm just gitting another round. Please. After the slitter fled and got drunk at the bar, and Embalmer reached into the incision that he made and pulled out everything except the kidneys and the heart. Let me do this, let me, let me dig into the corpse. This is fine. Yeah, what we do is fine. What he did was heinous. The removed organs were washed in palm wine, packed with spices, and placed into four jars, each jar guarded by one of the four sons of Horace. There was Imsetti, who had a human head and got the liver, Appi, the baboon headed one who got the lungs, Duamutef the jackal, who got the stomach, and Cabis sanoof the falcon, who got the intestines the jar. Yeah, yeah, right, there's like three small jars and one gigantic giant wine barrel size. The body was then packed inside and out with roughly five hundred eighty pounds of natron and naturally occurring salt, and left for forty days to dry out. Five hundred and eighty pounds. Yeah, almost six hundred pounds. I mean, how is that not shoving, you know, twenty pounds of shit in a five pound bag or whatever like that. Well, I'm I think the it was packed inside and out, so inside. It was incredibly dense and heavy. Maybe it's like a little bit of spent uranium goes a long way. Yeah, my brain, it's like, how do they fit that much in one? But maybe they're heavy. Well I think a bunch of it was put in and then they were probably packed around the body with the rest of it. Oh, so they probably put like forty pounds or whatever inside the body. You I thought this was fully turkey stuffing. No, no, okay. After the body was left for forty days to dry out, the cavity was stuffed with linen, sawdust, and sometimes onions, which that tells you how bad the body still smell that They're like, let's in here. Yeah. The skin was coated with ox fat and cedar oil and then cinnamon mrh and Frankincenseyes, I want. To eat these fucking things, but everything you described so far from like the spices in the heart or whatever. And then like all I would. I use like half these ingredients in cookies, Yeah, cookies. After the body was packed with cinnamon muhr and frankincense, each finger and each toe was individually wrapped in linen before the entire body was cocooned, and hundreds of yards of linen strips the most elaborate mummies used approximately four thousand square feet of linen. To RaSE the linen body plentiful. Whatever linen's made from. They made a lot of linens in Egypt. I guess looms or do they have looms that they don't know? I wish it could tell you, but I don't know. Protective amulets were then placed between well, I guess not then, but as the body was being wrapped in linens, protective amulets were placed between. The layers, so they were making great nachos. Basically, there was a widge at eye to protect against evil, a heart scareb to keep things light for judgment in the afterlife, and a headrest amulet to prevent decapitation in the next world. So to your point, you would think the smell would be horrendous, but a groundbreaking twenty twenty five study in the Journal of American Chemical Society analyzed nine mummies in Cairo and found that the dominant aromas of a mummy were woody, spicy, and sweet thanks to pine cedar and juniper resins mixed with myrr and frankinsense. Yeah, I'm sure. A guy pretty early on in this process was like, there's got to be a better way. Yeah, you know what, now they need uh popo ri to get to the other side, you know what I mean, just adding shit to not make it the most heinous job. Yeah, it's already hot in the desert. I still don't know about the onions, but hey, you know what, everything else sounds pretty good. So conservators have described the scent of a mummy as surprisingly pleasant. And it turns out the Egyptians actually equated a good smell with spiritual purity, so they were into, let's make this shit smell good because otherwise your soul's dirty. Also, like the Yankee candle factory there has like mummy smells. I was gonna say that might candle, that might be a good merch item for us. I don't I do make my own candles. I haven't in a while. I don't know if I'll be doing that soon because I've never got good at not having the wick just be like black smoke all the time. Right. So, like I said, all of this was the deluxe package. Yeah, I'm the twenty five dollars Patreon yea if you will. The mid range tire skipped the incision and the organ removal, so that guy was like, thank god if you got the mid range instead, cedar oil was injected through the anus, which was then plugged shut, and the body was left in salt, So you just got the old squirt cork, squirt cork in the salt. Seventy days later, the plugs removed, the oil comes out, all the dissolved organs squirt out with it, and really, quote from herodotus on that quote, nothing remains but the skin and bones. So that's the mid tier. You just kind of get that and they dump it. They don't put them in jars. I don't think, so got you, Okay, no physical rewards. The budget tier consisted of an enema with an unnamed liquid, which I'm thinking, maybe you think of. The previous liquid. They just took the other guy out of the other guy. Or this is where the brain juice went, is maybe what my thought. Fuck, dude, you're getting a brain juice plans. So you're getting a up the butt. Seventy days in Natron body returned, no wrapping, no jars, no ceremony, the salt salt Jimmy Natron Jimmy Natron boy enema, no wrapping, no jars, just sort of a here's your brother, you know, like justin I. Guess I didn't ask that the bodies go back to the family, I believe, so, so it's like a it's a pretty inconvenient. Well then you then you it's up to you where you put it, I guess. So then you have to hire an architect to get a fucking pyramid made. Yeah, if you're a giant family, you're just a regular family. I don't to be honest. On the mantle like ashes. Yeah, well they always say the home of the Mummy and it is haunted. No, the what's the history of the parlor used to be where the body was placed out? Oh yeah in the Victorian era, So maybe the Egyptians had their version of the parlor. I mean, at this point, this your your how big of these houses? Your loved one is basically a stuff fox. Yeah, so you can just put it wherever you sleep with it, just platonically. Not sure. The only thing it's like, what's that saying, It's like the only like whatever is death and taxes. The only thing is certain in life, Yeah, death in taxes. But I feel like we could make an Egyptian sitcom called Death and taxidermy, and the only thing is certain in life is death and taxidermy. And then it's like hard cut too. It's like, man, that's a lot of mummies in your. House, so that's how you make a human mummy. But humans weren't the only ones getting mummed up. The Egyptians mummified animals too, as I mentioned. Like a million million cats. They did this on an absolutely industrial scale. According according to history dot com, the. Chips of Hoy commercial when we were kids, like putting on the writs or whatever it is like playing yeah, but it's. Just the no, no, no, it wasn't. It wasn't putting on the rits. I don't Knowmber, the you you just did the like putting on the rits is bomb bomb boond No, it's not what. You just that's fucking freaksdatra or something that's New York, New York. That you're but you're thinking of. Uh the chips Hoy commercial. Uh when we were kid No no not not not no. No no no no no no. No. Hope is royalty free? Is that one from the commercial? It hads like a fun Glenn Miller orchestra ass yeah song, But either way, it's that. But with cats, it's all I'm getting it. Yes, and they weren't tap dancing though, they were just. Nobody tap dances in that either. I think they're just making cookies. I don't think I'm remembering a commercial. This may just be a dream. I think had dream you had because I think I'll find it, I'll put it in the show. Note anyway, Some mummified animals were intended as food offerings to humans in the afterlife, so they'd send you off. In the afterlife. Got you should have waited for that part. Many others were created to serve as sacred offerings to the gods, who in ancient Egypt often took animal form, including cats, cows, falcons, frogs, baboons, and vultures, among many others. Animals mummified for this purpose as a sacred offering were available for purchase or barter at sacred sites. So kind of like picking up flowers on the way to the grave, you'd swing by, you'd pick up the mummified baboon. Su go lean it on your loved ones, mummy. Show them you care with a mummified bear or something like that. There was ads and shit chizzled into the side of no zigger out. To different nationalities. Yeah, chizzling piers. By the way, I've ever seen the pictures of like the Pyramids of Giza from the other angle, and it's all just like KFC's and fucking yeah, that's a wild image. Hey man, human race, we did great. Ye. The people who bought these mummified animals would give them to a priest who would then bury collections of the animals as gifts for the gods. We grew up with that, right, Like, wasn't uh, like rabbits feet popular when we were kids, Like having a rabbit, Yeah, lucky rabbits. See, yeah, that's pretty different. I think this was sort of rabbit foot it is, and I guess it was lucky, so I'm not sure rabbit foot though. This practice was actually considered mor akin to lighting a votive candle at church. You go, you light a candle, and this is sort of you would go, you bring a. Wonder it's yeah, because it's like that seems pretty disposable versus having a rabbit. This was so widespread in Egypt that animal mummification became big business. Archaeologists have found thirty catacombs in Egypt. With each one they got their name catacombs. Uh. I doubt it, but sure, quick, that's quick, that's what I do. Uh. Each one of these was dedicated to a single animal and packed floor to ceiling with mummies, for a total that some reason estimate to be nearly seventy million animal mummies produced over roughly twelve hundred years. That's a booming industry. And here's the part where we learned that humans have always really been the same, because it turns out a lot of these mummies were a scam a bat. In the largest study of that kind, researchers at the Manchester Museum in the University of Manchester have used X rays and CT scams to examine more than eight hundred ancient Egyptian animal mummies, many of which are now housed or stolen by British museums. While a third of those mummies contain the well preserved remains of complete animals, researchers found only partial remains in another third, and in the last third they found that the mummies were empty of all bones or any animal remains, and the linens were stuffed with items such as mud sticks, eggshells and feathers. Wow, they couldn't use an onion on at those two precious The. Field Museum in Chicago confirmed their most beautifully detailed cat mummy was completely empty inside. I this is a job I'd actually fucking love to have if I was like on the X ray team at a museum. Every day is the most fun because you're like making bets. You're like, is it gonna be a fake? Is it gonna be real? Are we gonna find thirty gold coins? And yeah? Otherwise it a biggie bank, but it's a literal pig. Yeah. Like that to me would be just the coolest job. I'd also suggest to the Field Museum of Chicago that a great thief may have swapped their real cat mummy with a fake one. Oh my god, I didn't think about that. They might want to look into it seventy million times. Yeah. Some scientists and archaeologists argue that the ancient customers knew that these mummies didn't contain remains and the sticks and feathers. This sounds like an old timey sales pitch. The sticks and feathers were all considered just as important because they had been in close contact with the animals. Wow, that's after the first guy realized that it's bullshit. Yeah, but also I'd love to see a family member being like. There's bullshit lougging, there's. Sticks, And it was like, Dave, I can't help notice the mummified thing on the right was three hundred dollars and the one you bought was a dollar. Yeah, what did you think was in it? Yeah? Like it was clearly displayed. There's a price difference here. You grabbed the display version and its nose is falling off and you could see that there is hey in there. Dude, It's like you got a great deal in this votive candle. You cheat, piece of shit. But mummies have been around much much longer than the Egyptian mummies that most of us think of. Been around almost as long as scams pretty much. Yeah. Until the tail end of last year, the oldest mummies we'd ever found were in the Ata Kama Desert in modern day Chile and Peru, and we're going to get to those in a minute. But in September twenty twenty five, it was announced that we'd made an even more ancient discovery. According to Smithsonian magazine, New News this brand new news. This literally no joke. This literally turned what we thought we knew about mummification like upside down. At the very end of last year. Wow. According to Smithsonia magazine quote, researchers examined fifty four graves in southern China, the Philippines, Laos, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia. They noticed that many of the bodies that they found in these graves were tucked into tight crouching positions and that the remains. Clutching tiger, hid and mummy. The remains I don't even know if that's okay to say. I think it's fine. I think it's fine. I'd watch that movie. The remains looked burnt. The four thousand to twelve thousand year old graves didn't contain any evidence that there was ever been a fire within the grave, which indicated the corpses were exposed to heat before being buried. The scientists used non destructive techniques like X ray diffraction and infrared spectroscopy to examine the bones, and these tests revealed that the skeleton's discoloration, because they're like jet black, some of them was caused not by direct combustion as you would see in like a failed cremation of setting the body on fire, try to cremate it, but exposure to a low oxygen environment, and so the reason so it's. Like drying meats or drying like foods. The researchers concluded exactly that many of the bodies were smoke dried. They were arranged in these crouched postures before being propped over or positioned near a fire to slowly dehydrate them, and this process deliberately preserve the remains, which means they were mummified. Fuck man. The reasons that people may have done this are almost as interesting as the process. And this is where we get back to something else you said earlier about how how do you carry these guys around? Before the wheel They. Think crouched them up. You put them on sticks like in the cartoons. They is sooci as you you were about to eat and put in a cold ring. It is speculated that the people who created these mummies may have been a nomadic tribe of hunter gatherers who wished to travel with their dead, so they mummified them so that they could be easily packed in the in the carrions and shoveled off to the next location. Also, just the idea that what we have is like six guys here, but we don't have our shovels, so we can throw them on a stick. Let's carry him out. In one hundred years, we'll figure out how to bury them. Yeah. Not every archaeologist agrees that that's what happened, though, one such skeptic, Michael Green, told Smithsonian mag to quote, some of the bones the researchers study had been heated to more than nine hundred degrees fahrenheit, indicating something going on the outside that is not going to something going on on the outside of the body that is not going to result in a smoking of the body, but a burning of the body. I mean, listen, Mike, fucking skeptic buzzkill, Mike, Yeah, you've never gotten a phone call in the middle of making something. Now your risotto stuck to the bottom of the van. I'm sure every once in a while a fucking panther came to attack the camp and they had to leave the body. The body there a little too long. His point basically is that whatever was done to these bodies definitely involve fire, but it's possible that the mummification was not the intended purpose, but it was some sort of side effect. And it's tough to know who's right because these are. So old and people were eating people. Yes, there was deff. There could have been some of that, although it's unlikely because these corpses are like black charred. We'll put it. I think I put a picture on the shiver now. But something that, something that lends this theory credence is that this style of mummification is still practiced today by the Anga tribe in Poupun, New Guinea. I found an article in National Geographic that reported on what they called, quote the pungent smell of slow smoked human flesh at the last known modern mummification, that of village elder Gemptasu in twenty fifteen. I think it was one of those things where they found an uncontacted tribe from the smell and then they're like, we need in the best part is the guy who proposed going was like, something's so fucking good. Yeah, like over there, we need to see what's going on. And to this day they're like, oh. Something smells delicious. Uh, we were burning bodies. Weirdly enough, Anthony Bourdain discovered these guys on a no reservation trip because like this smell is delicious. No they he described the process. National Geographic describes the process of mummifying Gemtasu like this quote. The mummification method follows a strict structure. The body is suspended over a fire and as it bloats, it is poked with wooden sticks to drain its fluids, and later a stick is used to gently widen the anus to allow the organs to fall out. The tree is an amazing thing. Trees are fucking. Rat from start to finish. The mummifiers must remain with the body at all times, and no part of the dead, including his fluids, his intestines, and the body is allowed to touch the ground because that is a taboo invitation for bad luck. So what are they using to catch. All the juices? Unclear? Wasn't described. I'd assume some sort of bowl or a pot, or maybe the mouth made from tree. The mouth of an unlucky warrior in training may own No, that guy's not going to survive that. The finished mummies are then placed up on cliff ledges to sit hundreds of feet above their villages. Chief Moi, Mangao Mumma fight in the nineteen fifties overlooks one village from over three hundred meters up with twenty two of his boys at his side. That's sick. Unfortunately, the result of this process creates one of the most horrifying mummies I have ever seen in my life. And also a misunderstanding for anyone who shows up and like they're counting the people and putting them there to scare us away. Was like, no, that's just what we do. We'll pop this up on screen. But ed, this is what a smoke dried mummy in the modern day looks like, dude, that's sick. Like he's like a He's like in a hip hop pose. This could be an album. He's got the rap squad, yeah does. But he looks terrifying. He looks like the cover of Cannibal Holocaust. Yeah. Or I was gonna say, oh, zombie zombie movies. Yeah, yeah, that's how you know our words in a video store. You know the cover. I know the cover. It might be like Zombie three. Maybe I know exact one. Of the cover that I at first I which is exactly what I was thinking of, And I thought Cannibal Holocausts for I'm sure the cover doesn't have that. The only time I've seen that fucking horrible movie that all copies should be burned is because you showed it to me on Joy Street. Yep. I've shown that to a few people who have said, why are we watching this? I'm glad people got in trouble for that movie. So this is one of the scariest mummies I have ever seen, and that one showed me. Yeah, that genuinely love that guy. Well see if you love these guys, because the second scariest mummy I've ever seen is also the second oldest mummy in the world, the Chinchorro mummies of the Atakama Desert. So ed, maybe we'll bring these up on screen while we discuss what's happening. You can maybe put them in a little box on the side or something. I'll show you here in person, just so you can get a look at. Love it less, we're less and for people to know. It's kind of like if and this is not probably the actual thing that happened. This mummy looks like if someone cut your face off mumma fied it separately, and then placed it back on your head as you deflated. Below this is another one. And you know what, I think that's exactly what happened is that's not a fuck face. Nope, it's not a face. So it looks like a face. It looks like the weird like heads in the wall, Pink Floyd's the Wall. Yeah, it gets put on top of you. That's way worse. I don't want that as an album cover. I don't want that as a friend. But the other guys I hang out with today. I will say, though, the story of what's actually happened here is like sweet to the point of its touching story, despite how terrifying these mummies look. Yeah bad, Hang though. The Cinchoro people were mummifying their dead in the deserts of what is now Chile and Peru, roughly two thousand years before Egypt's first mummy, so around fifty to fifty BC. Okay, I think we touched on this tribe in episode. Oh my god, that's so many years before B. Yeah. Yeah, wait, no, that is B. It's so much B. It's it's before C. Yeah. Yeah, that's crazy. I guess the most I've ever heard B before C that doesn't have a dinosaur. I think we touched on this tribe somewhere in another episode. But these were marine hunter gatherers who developed an extraordinary process frommmification. The bodies were completely defleshed, scalped, disassembled, and then reassembled with sticks and clay, coated in black manganese paste and fitted with clay masks featuring modeled eyes and mouths. It's believed that the goal was to make the dead look alive. Now they failed some some archaeologists have described these as sophisticated, which I would agree with, but also visually appealing, which I would not agree with. Maybe to a serial killer. Yeah, if you know what you don't You don't know what you're going to be into until you see it, I guess. Unfortunately, Yeah, but that my body rejected this one. There were actually four types of these mummies, black, red, bandaged, and mud coated, so sort of like Egyptian mummies. We ended up with a bandage. There was tears potentially. The black mummies were the ones that I just described, Yeah, the black paste, and they tend to be the oldest examples of these mummies. The red mummies are a little newer, and they were prepared slightly differently. According to an article I found, quote, the body would first be disemboweled, the organs removed through careful incisions. Then the body cavities were filled with different elements such as soil and feathers. The stitched up body would then be painted with red ochre while the face was painted with black manganese. Unlike black mummies, red mummies have long black wigs with no masks covering their face. This is they. That's the other example we saw. The first one that you commented on would be a red mummy. I believe the black wig. Sure, this is these are a people. We don't have horror films without these people existing. This is the craziest. And I was right that there was like ripping off faces and doing it separately because you reassembled them. Yeah, but this is a lot of trial and error. It feels like and I'm sure huge arguments, but like Manganese guys being like manganese. The only way bro, And it was like, no, red is a vibe, we should do red. And then they probably fought to the death. I loved red ocre before anybody else ever heard of red ochre. Well, we're still to a manganese faces, And it was like, oh blackface, Thatt'll age well, and they fight. The black and red mummification styles are the most elaborate of the Cinchurro mummies. The other two types, the bandage and the mud coated, were a little bit less elaborate. The beard to find manganese and red oak. At that point. The bandage mummies were a variant of the red mummy, with the skin being replaced with bandages, so instead of stitching the skin back on, they just said, fuck it, let's wrap it up. Sure. The mud coated mummies were naturally dried bodies that were covered in a thick layer of mud and were the newest Cinchurro mummies that we found, which kind of sounds like they just got lazy. They started being artists about this and then they're like, you know what, I. Think it's the same thing we see now. There's there's a skill gap. Yeah, Like I think some people are like I'm not going into this, dad, I'm gonna go right TV yeah or whatever. And then hard cut too, it's like we have no jobs and we don't know how to fix our toilets. It got in. Yeah, so these guys everyone got white collar jobs in this group, and nobody knew anymore. How to do it well. But here's what's sweet about it. Unlike Egypt's hierarchical system where only the rich and the wealthy got the full nice treatment, Centurro mummification was radically egalitarian. Men, women, children, and even miscarried fetuses all received the exact same style of care, well, whatever style was popular at the time. Yeah, yeah, because by the end they're just. Getting thrown Yeah, like this is not. In fact, the earliest and most elaborate mummies that we found were infants and children, which anthropologists makes Bernardo Ariatza suggests was a grief response. High arsenic levels in the Camerones River where they lived along caused a lot of miscarriages and stillburths, and mummification was how parents held on to their lost children. That's nicest. The rebirth doll of yeah, of the ancient times, almost more. Horrifying looking than when they put that big black on that baby. It's not gonna go great. But I do think that's very sweet, and that there is an element of like give them the full treatment because they're without sin. They're just little kids. Like give Boris a fucking the shittiest wig, Yeah, because he was kind of Dick when he was a lie, you know what I mean, Let's not waste his time on boris. But like, these kids did nothing wrong. No, they had to, they had to dress them up. So it certainly seems like no matter what culture you were part of, mummification was a sacred somber ritual that held great emotional and religious meaning. So of course, when the Europeans got their hands on mummies, they immediately desecrated them for health and pleasure. For roughly five hundred years, from the twelfth through the eighteenth century, Europeans consumed ground up Egyptian mummies as medicine. And this, I'm sorry, what this all start sounds like the gonna kill you whenever. Don't put that in your body. Yeah, this all started with the mistranslation. So get this. The Arabic word mumia originally was the word for bitumen, which is a greasy, black petroleum like product, which, according to a substack I found written about this whole debacle, the bitumen or mummia's oil. It did have legitimate uses like waterproofing ships and treating wounds. But when European translate, yeah, when European translators encountered the word. They confused it with the similar looking resin that coated Egyptian mummies. So one Italian translator, Gerard of Cremona, the wrongest man of all time, declared that mummia was created when quote, the liquid of the dead mixed with the aloes is transformed. Another scholar insisted that it formed when spices used in mummification mixed with bodily fluids. Body these two fucking homunculous ass So there's two giant leaps of logic happening here. Yeah. The first is that the stuff that was the stuff on mummy looked like bitumen, which was used to do actual things, which, by the way, neither of these were for health benefits. Correct, So like they jumped from they said, this looks like this other thing that didn't really have any health benefits. Yeah, but it was used. I've been giving my kids insulation instead of gotten and it's fine. They're doing great, they're doing great. The two leaps were this stuff on mummies looks like this other stuff that's useful. Then there was a leap of well, this other stuff that's useful might have health properties, which then turned into, oh, the stuff on mummies cures things, which then just jumped straight to crushed up mummies cure thing. It's amazing and I don't know. If it's like a European exclusive thing. It doesn't sound like it based on the fake cats. But it seems like we can't go. Three episodes without a snake oil salesman. No, like just everything is, everything is like you want to be young forever, You. Want to beautiful snort mummy powder? Yeah, eat mummy powder. Do this within a few generations. Oh, mummies look young forever. I mean, I'm sure that was the logic to a certain point. It was like, look there, Yeah, if we do it while we're alive, we'll be double young within a few generations. Every well stocked European apothecary was selling powdered Mummy. The sixteen eighteen London from. You know, only like one eighteenth of those were powdered Mummy. The rest were just like Cobblestone Street. Oh dust thousand percent. Yeah. The sixteen eighteen London Pharmacopeia, the official catalog of approved medicines in England, listed Mummy alongside essential remedies and described the taste as quote somewhat acrid and bitterish because you're eating a ground up dead person. Side effects may include death immediately it was prescribed. Ground up mummy was prescribed for headaches, epilepsy, plague, bruising, paralysis, nosebleeds, and child birth. King Francis the First of France carried a personal pouch of powdered mummy mixed with rhubarb everywhere he went. Something tells me there was a King Francis the second real quick after. Charles the second of England, rubbed mummy on his skin to quote, absorb the greatness of pharaohs, and even had a signature cocktail called the King's Drops, which was powdered human skull dissolved in alcohol. There's a It's a power you can't buy. Robert Boyle widely considered the father of modern chemistry because he. Was the first one who came up with the idea to boil this first to get rid of all the fucked up impurities. He called mummy. I survived one day longer. He called mummy quote, one of the most useful medicines. Yeah, but that sounds like a four to five doctors agree, like he was paid. Yeah, say that this is how this tells you how bad medicine was into sixteen hundreds, that they were like powdered mummy is one of the best options we've got, and you know it wasn't doing jack shit for anybody. Two things. One, the overwhelming disrespect of Europeans to the culture of the place they took it from. Just crazy, but I'm. Sure it was originally called like savage skincare or something, or like Barbarian beauty. But the second thing it tells me is the most shocking episode we've done is maybe waking up during surgery where we find out kind of how recent, genuinely good medicine and techniques are. And I find that's the first thing I thought of when you told me that they pelted a man who made an incision, Like just to tell you what hurdles we have to get to modern surgery that we have to overcome. And so yeah, between what I will refer to from here on out as get out of here science. So between get out of here science. Is that like an I fucking love science, but it's the bad version. It's you beat it, you scram science. So we'll deal with you. We're putting this down the kicking science down the road. So between get out of here science and the seemingly universal sirens call of scammery, yep, Like, it's amazing that we're living at a time period that we got to see at least a few years of like genuine benefits in both society and health. Yeah, most other places than here at the moment. But I'm saying, like, what a weird little pocket we got to experience. Well, that is a great segue into the next part of this story of mummy medicine, because much like those mummified animal corps as we talked about earlier, scammers quickly took over the medicinal mummy trade. Quote. Entrepreneurs got creative. Some merchants discovered it was easier to manufacture fresh mummies than dig up old ones. But you mean, really make mummies out of people? Well, they purchased corpses of executed criminals, plague victims and enslaved people, dried them out, coded them and resident and passed them off as ancient Egyptian royalty. Feel like purchase was in air quotes. In fifteen sixty four, our French physician Guy de la Fontaigne witnessed the process firsthand in Alexandria, watching merchants prepare fresh corpses for export. One dealer confessed they could produce forty ancient mummies in a single batch. Ah. Also we saw them preparing bodies for export. It was like, no, this was going to the cemetery, Like what this wasn't shipping abroad? Oh no, Now they're going all over the world. But even crazier, I think, is the practice of medicinal mummies lasted until at least nineteen oh eight, because we have a commercial listing for medicinal mummy in the Murk catalog of nineteen oh eight. So Merk Pharmaceuticals Murk is what the Mirk still exists. They're still a pharmaceutical company in America. In America, well, they're probably owned. By like yeah, but I'm saying they were an American company though at. The time I believe Merk was American. Okay, they were a big pharmacy. They're an early pharmaceutical company. And in their nineteen oh eight catalog they were still selling medicinal mummy under the heading quote genuine Egyptian as long as the supply lasts seventeen marks fifty per kilogram. What the fuck's a mark? Oh maybe a Dutch mark, so maybe a Dutch rump. And yeah, there's no way we were because America is eight days old. Sure, it's not like they didn't have doctors in Germany or or not bring up German doctors for any reason on this, or Danish doctors or whatever. Like there was science, there was knowledge in nineteen oh eight. Oh oh, nineteen oh eight for sure, that's when this went automobiles. This was nineteen oh eight. They were still selling genuine, genuine, giant Giant air quotes around genuine. Yeah, great way to dispose of a body. Though, if you were murdering people back then, grind them up in a mummy pace, and I. Will say there was probably a lot more money to be made having corpses on hand than not having corpses. I'd also love to know once you once you were purchasing powdered mummy, do you require or would you want to require some sort of proof of lineage that ties it to a mummy, because if you're just buying powdered mummy, I think. It would require it. But I think even lobbying at the time was like we don't have to. Actually, it would be cute though. If the pharmacists wrapped the bottle in a little bit of the mummy bandage. They probably did it and it wasn't real, all these little gimmicks. Anyway, I could see this shit in the. Manosphere right now, like Andrew Tap being like, you need to take mummy supplements that. We are a week away. Yeah, they jaw strong and take these mummy supplements. By the Victorian era, mummies had been ground up and used in everything from medicine to fertilizer to even paint. But the Victorian's relationships isn't. This like how Crisco was made. It was like industrial runoff and now it's like the best way to make up eye. Yeah, I'm half joking. I think a lot of that is true. The Victorian relationship with mummies went way beyond paint and medicine. They also hosted mummy unwrapping parties. We talked about this in Cursions. We mentioned this in Cursing. Is going a lot deeper into it, hate to hear it. According to the website Burial and Beyond quote, it's generally. The bed in that they feel they fucked up. It's generally believed that the first unwrapping public event was conducted by archaeologist, a term we're using very loosely here Giovanni Bolzoni, who in eighteen twenty one unwrapped a cadaver in Piccadilly Circus to a reported audience of thousands. Now, Giovanni was known as the Great Belzonia. He was a prominent Italian explorer with a taste for showmanship. And he was a prominent Italian magician. Like nobody has that. Aided, this guy was like the rock of. His also aided magicians have aids. This guy's a magician. Let even his sentence. This guy was the rock of his time. He was an explorer, the taste for showmanship, and aided by his former career as a circus strongman. So he started at entertainment and became an archaeologist. He kicked off the era of mummy desecration with his own discoveries in Egypt, most notably his unearthing of the mummy at Simephis, and another source tells us that while he did in fact make many dramatic discoveries, Belzoni was also infamous for using a battering ram to open tombs and for carving his name in the temple of Abu simbel We. Here's the thing, like, this guy was like a he he was not American, but you'd be forgiven for thinking that he was. Yeah, jeez, Louise though, because there is an element of Nope, there's no element of anything. This guy's just kind of shitty. In any case, his event was marketed towards medical professionals, but Belzoni came out wrapped in bandages, which he knew exactly what he was doing. Yeah, it's like how in the early days of exploitation films, they would, you know, you see a sex movie, but it would be like the Dangers of Childbirth or whatever. In the first twenty minutes would be basically pornography and then but it was educational so it was safe. Yeah. I think that's what this guy was doing here. It's crazy to come out in ben you know, that's the circus in him. He couldn't get rid of his assistant for this show is again like magicians, Yeah, like a magician. But his assistant here was a prominent doctor named Thomas Pettigrew. Who apologized at every event for. In this Oh no. He was famous for vac having vaccinated Queen Victoria, I guess in the early days of vaccinations, and was friends with Charles Dickens, who he was a real man about town. And he also quickly stole Belzoni's whole act and became London's premier mummy showman. I feel like that also happens to magicians. This earned him the name of Mummy Pedigrew. His January eighteen thirty four unwrapping at the Royal College of Surgeons sold out, with people turned away at the door, and other mummy unwrapping events attracting up to three thousand spectators. I mean it is a cool event. Once the trend caught on, because it is a cool event, the rich jumped right on board, and according to Haunted Palace blog quote, many wealthy individuals were said to have obtained their own mummies and invited their friends over to soirees to dine, drink and dissect. As these upper class parties often involved copious amounts of alcohol, they could end up quite raucous. Who's that guy who had the ummy fucking Martine early or whatever. He'd be doing well now someone who had his own like cocktail, you. Said the King Charles had a skull drops. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure that made a callback. At these parties, often artifacts, rappings, and even body parts would get tossed around amongst the curious guests. Such parties were almost always purely for the entertainment of the upper class, and little regard was paid either to respect for the dead or preserving archaeological artifacts. Which makes me think mummy curses are bullshit, because if anyone was gonna get cursed, it would be these people who are tearing mummies limb from limb at a drunken party in some castle. Not one person has been indicted, and all the new stuff coming out in the news these days. You make a certain amount of money. It sounds like you can do with anybody part at any age you want. I don't know if mummy curses are real. We do introduce many characters who deserve to be cursed so far, Yes, I think is what the point you're making. But it never seemed to have come bit anybody in the air. It doesn't seem like anybody's getting in trouble for anything here. Although Victorian era, even if you were rich, the chances that you were going to eventually meet some sort of a protracted and painful death or pretty good. So you know, whether you were being hung in the town square by angry peasants or being carved inside out, or just getting some horrible disease, sure you were probably even even the wealthy, there was a level. Of like, let's throw the bodies around now before dysentery. Yeah, yeah, whatever. So this also continued until nineteen oh eight. And what happened in nineteen oh eight, I don't know. We hadn't started World War One yet, but that was nineteen oh I was there wasn't the Great Mummy Curse cleansing. Maybe maybe the Mummy curse was world War One. It just took a while to shit build up across Europe, all the all the angry mummies. You know, we got to check and see what was What was Ferdinand up to right before he got plugged? Was he dancing with the leg of an ancient prince? He might very well have been. He had the money. They come from a family, I think so. Yeah. The The last public unwrapping was performed in nineteen oh eight by Let's Hear It for the first woman appointed as a lecturer of archaeology in the UK. Margaret Murray. Welcome Peggy. She was the. Last known public unwrapper and maybe she put an end to it. Maybe she said we've had enough. Or people were like, women are doing it. That not as cool anymore. Anyway, I want to end this episode with the story of a modern mummy, a story that is equal parts funny and sad and fills me a little bit of mummy on we there's something eerie and beautiful about that. It's not that mummy that they made the voicebox work the dumbest thing in the world. No, okay, this is the story of Elmer McCurdy, the wandering Mummy. In life, Elmer McCurdy was a scoundrel. Yeah, Chloe's chasing bugs bunny. According to history dot Com, he was quote born in eighteen eighty in Washington, Maine, so confusion from a young age right there and raised by his aunt and uncle. He had twenty eight years where he could have seen a mummy unwrapping. And that's true. Yeah, but he never did because he was poor, and he learned by the time he was a teenager, he learned that his aunt and uncle weren't his actual parents. Oh no, so he thought that his aunt and uncle were his real parents until he was a teenager. Which he realized he was been inducted. History dot com notes possibly contributed to a life of discontent. For a time, McCurdy lived with his grandfather, apprenticed as a plumber, and did manage to reconnect with his mother life. But in eighteen ninety eight he lost his job in an economic crash, and in nineteen hundred his mother and grandfather both passed away, so McCurdy headed west, drifting through Kansas and Missouri. I thought this story was going to be like they passed away, and he found himself of the inheritance of two fresh bodies and. Went mummy mode. Yeah, dude, No, he became a drifter and in nineteen oh seven he joined the US Army, learning explosive skills crucial to his later crimes. Dude, he not tipped my hand about where this is going. But yeah, but he really could have fucked up. He could have joined the Army in the mummification department and would only have one year before those skills became unnecessary. True. He was honorably discharged in nineteen ten and quickly returned to a life of dishonor only weeks. Only weeks after leaving, the military, authorities rested McCurdy and another soldier for possession of burglary paraphernalia, including nitro glycerine burglary. That's like making TNT paraphnalia. McCurdy at his compatriot convinced the jury they were just building a foot powered machine gun. No additional details on that. McCurdy then traveled to Oklahoma, where he joined a gang of small time outlaws known as Yeggs. Yegs which sounds like a real slur, but it's just sort of a term for these lay about gangsters sort of okay. The Pinkerton Detective Agency published a pamphlet in nineteen oh four about a group known as Yeggs. Says Michael Williams, site director of the Oklahoma Territorial Museum in Carnegie Library, they were an element that grew out of the hobo community. Sure, where most hobos traveled to find work, Yeggs traveled to commit crimes. There was like a Hobo think there was some crossover between the hobo community and the yeg community. And if I've seen any Hobo language, it's pretty close to hieroglyphics. Yes, so we've come full circle. On October fourth, nineteen eleven, McCurdy and his yeggs robbed the wrong train. They made off with only forty six dollars and a jug of whiskey instead of the four hundred thousand dollars day four hundred thousand dollars they thought they were going to rob off this train. How many bindls did they bring to carry? Maybe that's how they got caught. They left the bendles on the train. But listening at home, who aren't comedy writers, bendles is the stick with the handkerchief attached to it that. You carry things in Robbing a train was not taken lightly, and a reward was issued from a Curdy two thousand dollars dead or alive, and in the early hours of October seventh, nineteen eleven. Just a few days later, law enforcement surrounded a barn near Bartlesville, Oklahoma, where McCurdy had taken shelter. He refused to surrender and opened fire on the officers. Not a great time in American history to be opening fire on it's ninety kind of law. If it's never a good time in American history to do that. But this is a yeggs last stand dude. Quote, he took a shot at me, first Officer Bob Fenton told the Blackwell Weekly Sun. Not quoted as him turning to all the other cops going right, right, guys. Then he took a shot at Officer Stringer Fenton, who's probably nodding yeah, yeah, yeah. And after that he took three shots at Officer Richard Wallace before we opened up. The on fight lasted more than an hour. Guns are not accurate, but when the shooting stopped would have been a lot faster if he had a foot powered MAI gun. What the fuck happened to that? Yeah? I couldn't get it together. I hope they at least filed a patent that could have been a real like he could have gone legit. He could have gone shilling no money for turn into no investors. They had no investors. I've never seen this, I don't think, but I imagine him basically like sitting in a bike seat, you know, with his legs up and like like that must have been what they were building. I don't know if those ever existed or if that's just in my imagination. I don't know. I mean, you just did some sort of like egg beatter boat things with your feet. So I don't know. Yeah, but you know, like shirt like pull like like a gatling gun that you power with your feet. Yes, that's a great idea and at all what I thought it was. I thought it was some sort of like a pedal, like a sitting like. I didn't even think it was powered like with your leg I thought it was like how they opened a trap and Ghostbusters. He just expresses it once, but yeah, you were thinking about the mechanic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, when the shooting stopped, these guys found mccurty dead in the hayloft. And it's here in this remote hayloft in the middle of nowhere of Oklahoma, that the light leaves Elma mccurty's eyes and his story really begins. His body was taken to the Johnson Funeral Home in pa Huska, Oklahoma, where it was embalmed and preserved with a heavy dose of arsenic. Do you think it's hard to embalm a body if it's filled with bullet holes? Like you have to patch all that so shit doesn't just pour out. I think actually they did patch. Yes, I think they patched these bullet holes. Okay, with his mom, dad and his actual father long gone, and his aunt and uncle, I guess none too enthusiastic about picking up their body of this damn yegg Yeah. Elmer's corpse, mummified with chemicals, sat in the mortuary unclaimed for six months. So this is an accidental mummification. Well, he was mummified to be buried. His body was preserved because they didn't know what else to do with it. And I guess they weren't just gonna throw it out and no one came to claim. Times of Change could have sold it to a rich, rich party. Locals took notice of Elmer's body sitting in the mortuary, and he became an attraction worth paying for. Wait, why did locals see it at all? I think, is it in the window? I think they put him out front. Yeah, I think at some point they put him out front. And then we know quote the undertaker tressed McCurdy and street clothes, gave him a rifle and charged visitors five cents to see the embalmed bandit collecting the coins through the parted lips of the lifeless alba. That is somehow more disrespectful than using the door busting thing on. No, it's not actually I'm grave, No, but it's closed. But remember that detail the coin slot. In nineteen sixteen, two men posing it Jimmy fin Dick showed yeah to use the coin slot. In nineteen sixteen, two men posing as mccurty's brothers convinced the funeral home to release the body to them. They were not mccurty's brothers. They were actually James and Charles Patterson, carnival promoters, who proceeded to add McCurdy to the Patterson Traveling Slide show as quote the outlaw who would never be captured alive, and he became a grim centerpiece in a lineup of human curiosities. Do we need to outlaws circuses? Like? It's like, I am sorry, but there are too many main characters in these come from that background. It gets crazier. McCurdy's body then changed hands repeatedly. For more than half a century. The McCurdy mummy bounced from crime exhibits to drug awareness campaigns, to haunted houses and low budget films. In nineteen twenty two, the body had passed to Louis Sunny, a former cop turned showman who ran a traveling museum of crime featuring wax outlaws. Mccurty, this real man. Yeah, McCurdy was the only exhibit that was real, and Sonny tored him up and down the West coast for decades. In nineteen twenty eight, mccurty traveled with the side show for the Trans American FOS Race, a cross country race that I guess he brought all these bodies with him. When it passed through Oklahoma, Sonny's son, Sonny's son o Louise, Sonny's son Edward, refused to display the body for fear someone might recognize it because again, this is where it's from. Yeah, and this is only twenty twenty five years after he was killed. Not even this is nineteen twenty eight, and he was killed in nineteen eleven. Yeah, and the last time you were in Oklahoma, you were like where his brothers were gonna give him a proper burial. Well that not harness his ghost soul. That was like three owners back. But Edward was smart and was like, we can't just put this guy out on the side of the road. Someone might know him. So Bob Fenton, the deputy who had helped kill McCurdy, seventeen years earlier requested a private viewing. He looked at the body, said nothing, and walked away. Weird, weird. Maybe he had some unfinished business. I don't know, but he somehow knew the body was in town and wanted some alone time with. I don't why, but this story, in particular is the first time I felt that the soul is trapped in this mummy and that his unfinished business might be like a business deal. At this point. In nineteen thirty three, exploitation filmmaker Dwayne Esper borrowed the corpse and stood it in theater lobbies during screenings of his drug scare film Narcotic with an exclamation point, rebranding McCurdy as a dead dope fiend who'd killed himself or gotten himself killed during a drug store robbery. Wow, we used to be a film industry man. He used to be able to really make some money. After Louis Sunny died in nineteen forty nine, his other son Dan shoved the body into an a warehouse in la for fifteen years. Stop at what year was this? Nineteen forty nine to nineteen sixty four, Elma mccurty's body sat Raiders of the Lost Ark style. I mean we won the war. People were getting free houses. Maybe we don't need the gimmick anymore. In nineteen sixty four, the body was lent to another exploitation producer, Datacket. Back at War, David F. Friedman and Curtius's McCurdy makes what is described as a blink and you'll miss it appearance in the nineteen sixty seven film She Freak, filmed at the Kern County Fair in Bakersfield, California. Wow. In nineteen sixty eight, Dan sold mccurty and a bunch of wax figures for ten thousand dollars to Spooney sing, founder of the Hollywood Wax Museum. OH. Spooney deemed McCurdy too gruesome to display, so two Canadian operators it's only been lightly. Used for forty years or whatever. Two Canadian operators then took the body of mccurty to display it, as shown near Mount Rushmore, where a windstorm blew off the tips of his ears, fingers, and toes. Oh. By nineteen seventy one, the damaged corpse ended up at the Pike Amusement Zone in Long Beach, mounted to a coffin with a mechanical rig that made him twitch as the cars passed by in the dark. Wait r Long Beach, Our Long Beach. When one operator drilled a mounting hole in McCurdy's foot quote, some yellow, gooey stuff came out on the drill. I feel bad for this. He didn't this guy didn't know that this was a real corpse. He was just told put this, you know, yeah, you thought it was body. Yeah. Yeah. Finally, around nineteen seventy two, the operators of the amusement zone defaulted on their lease. Sounds like circus people. Yeah. McCurdy was confiscated, spent a year in an electricians closet, got painted with day glow fluorescent orange paint, and was hung from a noose inside the Laugh in the Dark Funhouse, where he dangled by his neck for four years. I am losing my mind with this story. By this point, no living person on earth knew that the glowing figure was retten from this noose was real. Everyone just assumed it's a Paine. Not only real, it's in hell. Had the soul of this man who I don't know if he was a bad enough criminal honesty. December eighth, nineteen seventy six, sixty five years after McCurdy is gunned down in Oklahoma, a crew from Universal Studios filming the episode Carnival of Spies episode nineteen, season four of The Six Million Dollar Man is filming inside the laugh in the Dark ride where this body is hanging. Crewmember Chris Haynes noticed the neon reddish orange figure swinging from a noose in the background of a shot. Didn't want to have a repeat of the Wizard of Oz background hanging and tried to move it. When he grabbed the arm, it snapped off in his hands, revealing human bone and desiccated muscle tissue beneath the layers of wax and paint. Holy shit. Homicide detectives werecalled and the body was removed on a stretch, this one beneath the white sheet. Here's how they solved it because of. The bill of sales. It's moved hands. Even better, and autopsy revealed his gunshot wounds, so they went, okay, this guy got plugged. We know he was killed by guns. When they opened his mouth, they found a corroded nineteen twenty four penny Oh because he used to put the money ticket stubs in his throat one reading Louis Sonny's Museum of Crime five two four South Main Street, Los Angeles. Holy shit. So they were able to track him back to Louis Sonny and they said, who the fuck is this guy? Go, Coin's probably worth more now than that entire like all of his sales combined. And here is sort of the kind of sweet, touching cherry on top of this whole thing. On April twenty second, nineteen seventy years. Time purchased him for eleven dollars and he is he's in the studio. He drops from the ceiling on the news. On April twenty second, nineteen seventy seven, a horse drawn hearst brought Elma McCurdy to the Boothill section of Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie, Oklahoma, where he was buried alongside fellow bandit Bill Doolin and his Wild Bunch gang. Three hundred people attended the service, and to prevent any further exploitation, two feet of concrete was allegedly poured over his casket. But the thing that kind of gets me not the most patriotic guy in the world, but on Veterans Day and Memorial Day, Elmer mccurty gets a flag placed on his grave, just like any other veteran. Yeah he was a vet. Wow. So that is that of the Horror Wars. Yeah, that of the Skeleton Army, the Mummy Marines. Wow. Wow wow Wow. That story is unbelievable, And I apologize to anybody. I think we briefly may have mentioned some part of this story I could not find in our notes where you're probably thinking of the. Guy with the sunglasses, the monk with the sunglasses. There may be, but there's somewhere I think we may have mentioned Elman mccurty, but we certainly did not tell his whole story. I didn't remember most of this, but the million Dollar Man thing, I was like, wait a second, did we do this? This story? The thing I love about this story is it's unbelievable and interesting and also doesn't make for a movie or anything. So it's not even like it's just interesting to learn about it. It is. But here's the thing. I kind of think Terrence Malick or like somebody could do remember what's his name made that movie a ghost story. Yeah, but we don't need that, I mean that movie. But yeah, there you go. This is sort of this is sort of the Troma version of a ghost story. I shitting, he's like leaking, He's hanging to me. It's in the same way that I feel like I can't watch RoboCop. I just feel too bad for RoboCop. That is life. Yeah, and it's kind of against his will. And also after we're shooting. Yeah, I just feel so like inherently bad for this. At least he was buried in the Boothill grave. Isn't that what you usually put criminals? Well, the Boothill Cemetery, I think is a famous cemetery because of the amount of gangsters, Yeah, buried there. I forget or I guess, well, no, you might be right. He's buried in the Boothill section of some of you. So I guess maybe that's the yeah. Because I only ever, I only know it from that fairly fictitious Billy Joel song about Billy the Kid. Mmm, because there's no I don't knows. I think where his real name was where he's buried, but they has like he mentions, like the Boothill grave that bears his name. Yeah, And until this story, I've ever heard the term Boothill before. Well, but forever if you're ever driving back through the middle of the country, but you can maybe stop and visit. Definitely Almer McCurdy, I definitely check him out. I've gone through Oklahoma a bunch of times. So that brings us to the fear tier. Ed. Where would you place mummies on your fear tire. Considerably lower than whatever Elmer had done? After like you were saying, being Mumma fiederre being attacked by a mummy just because we didn't get into many like mummy curse things. I placed mummies at a one on my fear too. It's a one. I'm not afraid of them in the movies. I'm not afraid of them in real life. I am terrified of what's happened to Elmer got through hapening to. Me exactly dude. Although interesting that he had a you know, he lived on in many ways, Yeah, just the worst possible to live on. Yeah, Yeah, that's a one. If his car and Bob we're trapped hanging on by a thread, they're hanging on by a thread. I would say, yeah, I would say a one. To go all the way back to what I said earlier in this episode, which is and mummies. Mummies are an afterthought. Mummies are a thing. It's also here, yeah, but tough go of it. If anything, I'm like an eight on not being left alone after I die. It's like a high for me now. Or it's like either giving some medicine or like turn into a fucking day glow a park attraction, or having the wealth you throw me around at parties. So like, yeah, yeah, like being mummified and the torturous existence thereafter. I'm actually very on board with mummy curses. I think it's warrnted. Yeah, but yeah, it's a fucking one. Yeah, it's a one for me too. So that's the end of the episode. If you've made it this far, you probably love the show, so don't forget to go to patreon dot com slash scare it all the time. Sign up for one of our three mummification levels. You'll see them there on the site. We've got all kinds of good bonuses. Unfortunately, neither of us are equipped to put pine oil in your butt, but for pretty much everything else is available on the on the Patreon, so head over there, join us for some live shows, leave us a five star review, like, subscribe, follow, Wherever you're listening to this, don't miss an episode of Scared all the Time and until next time. I'm Chris Calari and I'm edva Cola. The show is Scared all the Time and we will see us soon. Bye bye, bye bye. Scared All the Time is co produced by Chris Calari and Edvacola. Written by Chris Calari. Edited by Edvacola. 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