Our Dearest Fears with Chelsey Weber-Smith

This week, American Hysteria’s Chelsey Weber-Smith gives Sarah some exposure therapy.

You can find Chelsey / American Hysteria here.

Support You're Wrong About:

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Where else to find us:

Sarah's other show, You Are Good
[YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase

Links:

https://www.chelseywebersmith.com/
https://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-about
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpod
https://www.podpage.com/you-are-good
http://maintenancephase.com

Transcript

Sarah: Hi! You've reached-

Chelsey: The voice mailbox- 

Sarah: Of-

Chelsey: American Hysteria-

Sarah: And You're Wrong About.

Chelsey: This is Chelsey. 

Sarah: And this is Sarah. And we have- 

Chelsey: A very special episode for you today. 

Sarah: It's a two-parter. You can find the other part on American Hysteria. They're not linear parts, they’re…

Chesley: … ‘listen in whatever order you want’ parts.

Sarah: In this episode, I tell Chelsey about my fears. And in the American Hysteria episode…

Chesley: I tell Sarah all about my fears.

Sarah: We love making both of these shows, talking about the fears that we feel and the fears that society experiences. And we had a lot of fun making these episodes for you and talking about-

Chelsey: Our dearest fears. 

Sarah: Thank you for listening. Here's our show.

Chelsey: Nailed it. 

Sarah: I have a little message welcoming you to this very special episode, but first a little info for you. This episode is a collaboration with our dear sibling podcast, American Hysteria, hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith. And we are also collaborating with them on a holiday show at Portland's Aladdin Theater on December 6th. We are calling it “A Massive Séance”, and we are trying to connect with the spirits of the past and the future, release our 2023, let it go, and prepare for the new year, and do it all together. We really hope we get to see you there. 

We also have a bonus episode that I recorded with Chelsey talking about urban legends. The concept within sociology that Chelsey and I love so much, and also Urban Legend, the underrated late 90s slasher movie. So you really can't go wrong. And that will be available on Apple+ subscriptions and on Patreon at the end of this month, which as you can see is coming right up. Happy Halloween, my friends.

Chelsey: Hey, Sarah!

Sarah: Hey, Chelsey! Funny running into you at this abandoned mall. 

Chelsey: Oh, I wish! I wish we were recording in an abandoned mall. We're here doing another part of our series about our fears. I'm so excited. I love telling you my fears, Sarah, and now I'm so excited to hear all about yours. And I can only freaking imagine.

Sarah: I'm so excited to tell you my fears. As someone whose job now is looking at moral panics and hysterias and America's feelings getting ahead of our logical faculties, as I do so much, and making You’re Wrong About. It's also important for me to return and to emphasize when talking about this stuff that I'm a very fearful person. I'm not claiming to stand outside of the impulses that govern human behavior. I think I like to observe my own behaviors to try and understand what we're dealing with as people. 

Chelsey: Absolutely. Same here. So what do you got for us today, Sarah? What are we talking about?

Sarah: I have an opening montage, which is just to tell you some smaller fears from childhood. I remember as a kid my paternal grandpa had, I don't know, time life-seeming books on paranormal stuff. And I remember him trying to give me a book on psychic surgery and me not wanting it because it creeped me out too much. And then his feelings being hurt by that, and my dad being upset about it because he had a bad relationship with his dad, not that he would admit that at the time. And so it was like I had to take the psychic surgery book to heal whatever. 

Chelsey: What is the psychic surgery book about? 

Sarah: Do you know about psychic surgery? Because I feel like this came up in my cable TV viewing. And also I'll say that as an elementary school student, because I was born in 1988, so my elementary into early middle school years were like right in the golden era of like stupid cable TV programming, I would often sometimes just literally be too anxious to not be extremely nauseated and therefore feel unable to go to school, because I was afraid I would throw up in front of other people. And so my mom was pretty permissive about that. And I would just get to stay home and watch America's Most Haunted Hotels. 

Chelsey: Awesome. 

Sarah: Yeah, it was great. And I learned so much and look at me now. Look at me now! I'm using it! I'm using all that information, and how much algebra do I do? 

Chelsey: Thanks, nausea. 

Sarah: And so psychic surgery, this also comes up in Man on the Moon, the Andy Kaufman biopic with Jim Carrey.

Chelsey: I haven't seen it.

Sarah: It's basically this idea promoted by charlatans where if you have cancer or something, you go in and they massage their hands on your body. And the idea is that they draw the tumor up, like out through the skin, and then they show it to you and they're like, “Look, you're better now.” And you're like, “Gee, thanks.” And really what they have in their hand is like a piece of chicken meat or something. 

Chelsey: I have heard about this. I have heard about this.

Sarah: Yeah. Or chicken organ meat or something like that. Jim Jones also did this. Jim Jones loved a psychic surgery. 

Chelsey: That is so dark. Wow. Okay. So your dad wanted you to learn about psychic surgery.

Sarah: My grandpa did. And I was part of this weird, paternal, toxic love triangle. So the real fear there is the troubled relationships men have with their own fathers, but then also psychic surgery. It's a secondary thing. But I was into creeping myself out. I really liked Ripley's Believe It or Not, and I can't remember the author, but if I asked my mom who it was, she would tell me. Wait, should I just, I'll just try and ask her right now. I'm going to call her. 

Chelsey: Do it. Call your mom.

Sarah: Ok. 

Chelsey: You got screened. 

Sarah: Oh yeah. Damn it! Yeah. But there was this guy who was very popular mid-century, and he had a newspaper column and I think a radio show. And I remember reading a compilation of those columns that was in like the sixth-grade class library for some reason. You know how you would get a weird book at school and be like, where did this book even come from? And it was all facts like, one night - and this is actually one I later saw on Unsolved Mysteries - one night a church choir of 25 people, everyone for different reasons was late to church choir practice. And on that night, the church exploded, but no one was hurt because they're all late for different reasons. It makes you think.  

And as an adult, I'm like, yeah, it makes me think about how in a country with hundreds of millions of people in it, you almost have the statistical equivalent of infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters, and every possible thing is going to happen at least once. 

Chelsey: That's true. And also, could they have just lied?

Sarah: The church wasn't there the next day, so...

Chelsey: I don’t know. I feel like evangelical churches…

Sarah: Maybe the preacher was like, “Let's just not have rehearsal tonight”. And then when the church blew up, he was like, “No, everybody, we did have rehearsal”. 

Chelsey: Yeah. I feel like it's not unheard of for evangelical churches to create propaganda like that. But you're also right, statistically, it's going to happen. Once in a while. Just like when the Exorcist premiered, and lightning struck that cross and it fell into the plaza. I don't know. I've never seen proof that really happened, by the way. But, statistically. 

Sarah: It gets repeated. This is the thing, right? That the Exorcist… I can't remember if this happened with The Exorcist. It definitely happened with The Omen, which is about the Antichrist, that people died while that movie was in production, and we're supposed to take that as proof that it angered Satan. But two people who worked on Pretty in Pink died during or right after that movie came out, and that movie wasn't about Satan at all. 

Chelsey: Not that we know of. 

Sarah: Unless Satan is James Spader. 

Chelsey: Yeah, he would be a good Satan in something.

Sarah: James Spader in the 80s, are you kidding me? That would be a good Satan movie. Yeah, I loved his kind of creepy cable content, CCC. There was a story that haunted me for years that was also from a book I got from an elementary school book nook and it was about… if anyone knows what this book is, comment on Instagram! But it was this woman who was in an asylum, and she had a baby and she had been meticulously pulling hair out of her head and making a giant braid that she was going to escape out the window with. 

And then on this one fateful day where the story picks up, they come in, the orderlies or whoever, and they take away her baby and they throw her braid on the fire. Yes. Because that's the thing. Because it's the thing of oh my god, like someone has spent months, over a year the idea of something being destroyed in an instant in that way. That actually is a concept that really haunts me.

Chelsey: Yeah, especially if it's something where you're working to somehow become safe or to protect yourself from something, and then just the easy way that someone with more power can just kick you right back down the hill again, and you're back at the bottom. And that is very scary. That's really scary.

Sarah: I think a great work of horror fiction is Jack London's To Build a Fire.

Chelsey: I never read it. 

Sarah: It's wild. It's wild, man, Because that story is about a prospector in the Yukon. He's alone with his dog, who he treats very badly. So from the beginning we are not supposed to like him particularly. And he's also traveling alone in 70 below Fahrenheit, and there's this whole thing reasonably enough about only a complete idiot would be alone in the 70 below because you have zero margin for error. 

And so he goes about trying to build a fire. And he has some kind of initial minor fuck up that starts a chain reaction of fuck ups. I think he steps through shelf ice, and shelf ice is thin ice on top of water. So he steps into water, he has to build a fire, but his body is very quickly numbing up. And the horror that I feel as I read that story is unmatched by most experiences I've ever had with any kind of horror movie or over the top or supernatural horror fiction. Because this just happened to people. This exact scenario or something very similar to it has happened to so many people. Freezing to death is very real. 

And I get that's why a lot of the horror we choose to consume is more allegorical than that, but it's something that I find very compelling and grounding in terms of we are people, and we are on the earth and there are just certain physical realities that dictate what happens to us. And in the episodes that I've done with Blair Braverman on the ‘Miracle in the Andes’ and on the Dyatlov Pass incident, there is also comfort to be found in the idea that nature doesn't wish you harm. It just doesn't wish you anything.

Chelsey: Yeah. The Indifferent Stars Above is that Donner Party book that is my favorite.

Sarah: Yeah. It's insane. 

Chelsey: Same thing. 

Sarah: Oh, I'm made of gas and a million miles away. I can't really do anything.

Chelsey: Which is so comforting and so terrifying. There isn't an animating- well we don't know, I guess. I'm an agnostic, but there may not be any animating force to the universe that wishes you well. Nor is there one that wishes you harm. And it's both comforting and terrifying at the same time. 

Sarah: Yeah. I don't really waste time with simulation theory because I think it is a silly waste of time based on a 12-year old's understanding of the world. I get the viewpoint that when we're trying to conceive of God, and if there is a rational mind at the center of all this or if there's a thinking mind at the center of all this, what is it like? A sadistic 14-year-old inbreeding their Sims is what comes to mind. 

Chelsey: Locking him in a room with no door.

Sarah: It’s like, God just felt like torturing his Sims. 

Chelsey: Whereas I am terrified that we're living in a simulation. 

Sarah: Oh, okay. 

Chelsey: I think about it all the time. No, it's a waste of time. Don't get me wrong.

Sarah: Not to be insulting to your conspiracy theories, but, yeah. 

Chelsey: I don't want it to be true. I just feel as we get closer to AI, I'm like, is this just the cycle repeating itself into infinity? We got real big, real quick with our fears.  Straight to simulation theory. 

Sarah: We did. And with good reason, we should be afraid of all this. It's like Victorians being like, all this soot in the air, this could have ramifications. 

Chelsey: And they were so right. 

Sarah: And these are scary things, but to get to an iconic scary thing. Chelsey, I have never truly watched the Max Headroom signal intrusion video, and some of you just went, and some of you are like, what? But this is a video that for whatever reason, when I first found out about it, I'm sure it was from finding a list of creepy Wikipedia articles on Jezebel or something and then trying to read all of them, I found it so unbearably creepy that I watched it, but only with the sound off. And leaning away and I don't normally do that, but I find it so unsettling. And I don't want to put you on the spot, and I'll bring in dates and everything as we need them. But what was this thing? 

Chelsey: Yeah, from what I remember this happened in the 80s, and it was a TV station that was essentially hijacked by this group of people who I think were maybe never identified. 

Sarah: Yeah, we don't know who did this, and it's been like 35 years or more.

Chelsey: It's just this creepy video of this guy wearing the Max Headroom mask. Which you're going to have to explain to me what that actually was.

Sarah:  Max, I don't really understand the lore of Max Headroom. But he was a character who, I don't know his origins, but he was just a popular kind of mascot guy in the 80s, like Spuds McKenzie. And he was an actor who was kitted out in a way that made him look pretty uncanny. Let's watch an actual Max Headroom ad. 

Chelsey: One, two, three. 

**recording** 

Max Headroom here with... This is my guest. 

Sarah: He like, glitches. 

I heard you were big time in the old pop biz. 

Oh, I'm going to take that as a no compliment. Nitty gritty time. What I'm talking about, and you're not, is that more people prefer the new refreshing taste of Coke over Pepsi. Are you sweating me? 

Chelsey: So very uncanny and a mixture of the uncanny valley and like the uncanniness of technology.

Sarah: So Max Headroom was played by Matt Frewer, who was the neighbor dad in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

Chelsey: Okay, great.

Sarah: And so he's canonically a computer-generated guy, but he's actually an actor in makeup and he's meant to glitch as he's talking to you. He's uncanny. I think this character was very divisive from what I can tell, and a lot of people were like, Okay, that's enough Max Headroom. He was in ads. He had a TV show briefly. He looks like a computer simulated newscaster, I guess.

Chelsey: Yeah, almost like Jay Leno.

Sarah: So that's Max Headroom. And then the signal hijacking incident was a guy in a Max Headroom mask. And I heard about this on Wikipedia one night and read about it and watched the video with no sound. And I just found it so unsettling. And Chelsey, I think today's the day and we should watch it. 

Chelsey: Okay. Are we going to do it? 

Sarah: And also, I think they burst in on an episode of Doctor Who, which is just disrespectful. 

Chelsey: Oh, yeah. That must have been intentional.

Sarah: Okay. You can count us down again. 

Chelsey: Yeah. One. Two. Three.

Recording 

Sarah: Your love is fading. Subtitles just say, *humming the tune to Clutch Cargo*.

Chelsey: My files!

Sarah: Wow. I’ve got to say, I find this a lot less scary than I used to. And that was it. Dr. Who. I mean it is creepy, but what I didn't realize is how much a part of the creepiness of the Max Headroom mask is. 

Chelsey: All right. What did you experience? What, what was going on while you were watching? 

Sarah: First of all, the incoherence of, okay, one of my first thoughts, and I knew that they did this, but I hadn't really been thinking about it, is that they have these wavy lines behind him, which is clearly a pretty spot on imitation of the actual Max Headroom commercials, but it's someone tilting what looks like a piece of corrugated metal back and forth, and that actually, from the beginning, then made it not that scary to me, because you're like, This is like a Max Headroom fan. There's something very un-sinister about being like, we have to do the background, though. 

Chelsey: What this kind of reminds me of for some reason is, are you familiar with the numbers station? 

Sarah: Yes. Yeah. Tell us about that. 

Chelsey: I think that might still exist, but that there are certain stations that you can find on the radio, and it's just a woman reading random numbers with static in the background forever. And it's an automated thing, obviously. And I don't really know, I don't think people really understand what they were for why. And there were a lot of conspiracy theories about them. It's just this sort of the creepiness of the unknown, a reason that something like that would exist. 

What makes the Max Headroom thing creepy is just the ‘why’ of it, that's really strange. And not understanding, they didn't really seem to have a particular message, I guess this was just edge lord chaos magic or something, but yeah. What did you find so scary about it before we actually heard the full audio?

Sarah: Part of it maybe has to do with the fact that TV isn't a part of my life anymore. It is, but it isn't because when I was growing up, you would turn on the TV and then whatever was on was what was going to happen. And now our relationship to media is actually completely different because we choose a streaming service, and then we choose a thing to stream. And we're not all watching the same signal that can then be hijacked by some random Max Headroom enthusiast. And I think the vulnerability of a signal hijacking is something that I don't really feel anymore because it's not something that could happen. 

Chelsey: I think of the Oscars as one of the only, the Oscars slap in the lineage of the Oscars streaker. But yeah, the only thing I can think of recently is the Love is Blind live stream finale that happened a few months ago. 

Sarah: What happened with that?  

Chelsey: I mean, Miranda and I are big Love is Blind people, and it was just the experience of everyone coming to watch something live on Netflix, which was not really anything that they'd done before. Maybe they'd done it once before, but it was a huge deal. And Love is Blind is a massive show. And so there were so many people coming to watch it. And we're just sitting there and it's just like this site is under construction, almost vibe. We kept waiting and there kept being these tweets and announcements that it was eventually going to start, and it was like two hours later that it started and then it was like really-

Sarah: It was like Woodstock 2.

Chelsey: Exactly. And then it was really weird because the mics were picking up people in the control room. So it was just like watching something that's supposed to be so shiny and so perfect falling apart at the seams. And it was really exciting. I wouldn't have had it any other way. Even though it was like, I've been here for two hours! And everyone’s so mad and I was just thrilled that we were all having an experience together. 

Sarah: Yeah. Aw, that's nice.

Chelsey: You just don't get you don't get that very often anymore where there is that vulnerability whether it be to just technological issues or something as weird as a pirate signal hijacker.

Sarah: There are facts that I love that just are from another time and one of them is that I think when they aired the Miracle on Ice in the 1980 Olympics, the hockey game. It was broadcast in either the U. S. or Canada before the other country. So you had from what I recall, people having to relay the information personally. So the Miracle on Ice, the miraculous, extremely lucky American victory in the 1980 hockey game in the Olympics, was broadcast live on Canadian TV but held back for primetime on American TV. So you could learn what had happened, but only by talking to a Canadian. 

Chelsey: Oh, scary. Just kidding. I was just in Canada. It's so nice to be in Canada and not feel the immense crushing weight of the American landscape, but that's neither here nor there.

Sarah: I assume there are plenty of Canadians who are like, “Hey, we're being crushed as well, you know!”

Chelsey: I know you are, babes, I know. I know. 

Sarah: So yeah, okay, so I've actually made a major fear less scary to me, and that's really exciting. Another thing I find very scary consistently, and this is used to great effect in Signs and the Blair Witch project. I wonder if you can, you know what I'm talking about. 

Chelsey: Signs and the Blair Witch. I just watched Signs recently and it scared the shit out of me. I hadn't watched it in a long time and Miranda had already fallen asleep and I continued to watch it and it was really upsetting to me.

Sarah: I've never even seen the whole thing, but I have seen the part where they're watching a video of a child's birthday party where one of the aliens that they're looking for walks very quickly across the frame. 

Chelsey: Very scary. 

Sarah: And that absolutely scares the shit out of me. And I think he looks over while he's walking, maybe. Okay so I want to say, and this is a show we've talked about. I loved and love the Disney Channel show So Weird. It's an amazing show. It's about a girl who is traveling around America with her mother, Mackenzie Phillips, on their band's bus, along with her brother and I think the tour manager's son, Clu, played by Erik von Detten, I'm pretty sure. 

And in every episode, they're in a new part of America that looks like Vancouver, BC, and they have to solve a regional paranormal thing. And it's very based on the X Files. Fi is trying to connect with the ghost of her dead dad. That's his Samantha Mulder. But it's also just like a fun Monster of the Week show, but I think that when I was a kid, I loved it, but it genuinely scared me a lot of the time, and there was also in the opening sequence, there was like a little clip or just an image of the Patterson Gimlin Bigfoot film, and I could not watch it. I would look away. 

Chelsey: Wow. Okay. Okay. 

Sarah: And for people who don't know, a lot of people are going to realize they do know what it is when you describe it, but what is this piece of Bigfoot media? 

Chelsey: All it really is Bigfoot walking in the distance or what we are supposed to believe is Bigfoot. And he's just got this long stride with his arms up, walking as if he was fast walking, this is my memory. He's like a fast-walking mom from the 80s. And right at the moment or at the moment that he's like dead center in the clip, he turns and looks at the person with the camera. And that's basically my, is that your general memory of it? It's been a while. Yeah. Okay. 

Sarah: And then it's a casual lope. And there's like a lot of mysteries about this film, I think, still. I think at least one of the guys who made it said later that he had made it. But I think there are things we don't know. I think there's maybe some degree of disagreement about who's actually in the suit and stuff like that. I'm not sure. Information gets lost to time and then you can use that to support your theory that no, it really is Bigfoot. But that video was so terrifying to me as a kid. 

And I think again, this is something that seems pretty benign, really, but I think it became such a part of the American consciousness because there is something very creepy about it. There is, and found footage horror movies really rely on this, something that happens to you when you know you're watching for something scary, but what you're watching is very boring, you're in some kind of a heightened state where it's like adding salt. Food tastes better, scares scare scarier. 

Chelsey: It's like we were what we were talking about in the other episode where context actually can twist the way that you're perceiving your own vision. And it's like you do see The Bigfoot look over and that is the scariest part.

Sarah: It is. And then the Blair Witch thing, I love this part so much. I wouldn't change anything about it. It’s where they run out of the tent, this is a part where things are really coming to a head. The Blair Witch is like beating their tent with sticks, really, the director's friends, and they run out of their tent. And Heather's got the camera, and she whips around and she's like, “What the fuck is that? What the fuck is that?” And you can't see a goddamn thing in the movie. And you were supposed to be able to, but I like that it didn't work out. 

Chelsey: Yeah, because it was actually someone dressed in all white, I think, covered in a white stocking and was just sprinting. So there's real fear in Heather's voice, as we've talked about many times. But yes, it is. It's the monster problem, in a way, where if you don't see the monster, the thing you're imagining is always going to be much scarier.

Sarah: And you're right. Bigfoot in this video is doing the walk that people do when they have to get into Target for just one item. 

Chelsey: It's very human. It's a very human walk. Yeah. 

Sarah: Because I will say when I was a kid, Bigfoot was one of my major fears. If you'd asked me when I was 10 Years old like Sarah, what are you most afraid of? There's a good chance. I would have said Bigfoot. Wow. And we lived in Hawaii. 

Chelsey: So that didn't really make sense. So why do you think you were scared of Bigfoot? 

Sarah: I think there is really an element and a lot of what we're talking about to like, humans seek to know so much and for anything to evade our understanding is upsetting to us. And I think that was part of it. 

Chelsey: That makes sense. 

Sarah: And it's funny, because I always remember the story I read once about a kind of friendly Bigfoot encounter, and I wanted to believe that Bigfoot was friendly, but for some reason I just felt sure that he wasn't. 

Chelsey: That's fair. I actually got to go as part of working for the podcast, Euphomet, with my friend Jim Perry. And we went and shadowed a Bigfoot hunter named Brian, who's really wonderful. And we went up into the woods of Vancouver, BC, and he showed us all the trails and the places that he had heard Bigfoot. And he was really into the fact that Bigfoot communicated using these runic symbols that he could find in stick shapes on the ground. Which, of course for me, I would call that confirmation bias. 

Sarah: Because there's always going to be sticks on the ground. 

Chelsey: Yes, and there's always going to be symbols that you can interpret. But he created this entire alphabet. Wow. And it was really meaningful to him. And I have to say…

Sarah: It's like that seagull that fell in love with a statue of a seagull. 

Chelsey: Yeah. Yeah, and it was so meaningful to him, and clearly it was a big source of comfort he was not scared of Bigfoot. Bigfoot was his friend, and his spiritual cohort. 

But what I will say about it is, skepticism aside, he was very much, to me and Jim, he was very much you have to get in the spirit of it, right? And we were working as part of a paranormal podcast, so we were already in the spirit of it. We weren't coming in as skeptics, that's not Jim's show at all. We were totally stricken as we were driving up into the woods, him and I were looking at each other and thinking, I feel something, I feel different. I feel a change come over me. 

And I think that right there is the special sauce with all the fears we're talking about is like when you can get it. It's like you get into that space where you can accept things as creepy and you suspend that disbelief and you do have experiences. You have embodied physical experiences. 

Sarah: No place more embodied than a frickin forest, I would argue. 

Chelsey: Oh yeah. 

Sarah: And in a way it feels like Bigfoot is like the spirit of the forest. And actually, I just did a corn maze, and how you know how in corn mazes sometimes you can answer questions, and it'll tell you which way to go if you get a trivia thing right?

Chelsey: Oh my God, I've never seen that in a corn maze. But that’s really fun. 

Sarah: Yeah, I really like it because I know a lot of trivia and I really have terrible spatial reasoning.

Chelsey: It's your only hope. 

Sarah: Yeah, it's like oh my god, thank god there's something I know how to do. And so one of them was like, “When did Bigfoot start showing up in the news or start showing up as a figure a lot?” And I was like, I know the answer. It's shockingly late. It's like 1958. Because it was on commercial logging sites that people started theorizing Bigfoot. Or that there had been Bigfoot-like figures in all kinds of folklore, historically, but that was when 20th century white Americans came up with our vision of Bigfoot.

Chelsey: Like he was some kind of protector of the forest? 

Sarah: This is from the History Channel website, which I trust medium. And this is by Becky Little. Thank you, Becky. “What exactly are the origins of the Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, legend? In 1958, journalist Andrew Genzoli of the Humboldt Times highlighted a fun, if dubious, letter from a reader about loggers in Northern California who discovered mysteriously large footprints. 

“Maybe we have a relative of the abominable snowman of the Himalayas, Genzoli jokingly wrote in his September 21st column alongside the letter. Later, Genzoli said he'd simply thought the mysterious footprints ‘made a good Sunday morning story,’ but to his surprise, it fascinated readers. In response, Genzoli and fellow Humboldt Times journalist Betty Allen published follow up articles about the footprints reporting the name loggers had given to the so-called creature who left the tracks, ‘Bigfoot’. And so a legend was born.” 

Chelsey: Wow. Wow. Yeah, that is, I don't know, it makes sense in a folklore sense for sure where the manifestation of the forest's retaliation or its attempt at creating a being that will stop human destruction. I love it. I didn't know. I didn't know.

Sarah: Isn't that great? Yeah, apparently quote, “Loggers blamed acts of vandalism on Bigfoot.”

Chelsey: Convenient. 

Sarah: And he just passed into public consciousness and in the way we now see him. And yeah, it's like gremlins in World War II, it seems like we're if you're working with machinery, stuff is going to go wrong, either because someone is fucking with you or not maintaining it properly, or just because these things happen. And we need personifications of the forces in our lives, I think. 

Chelsey: Yeah. I mean, I would like to know what being is tangling my cords. Please! Who's taken my socks? Who is it?

Sarah: And then my third thing I wanted to talk about of things that scare me as we dive down into what causes our fears. Also, speaking of the forest of the Pacific Northwest, to paraphrase Stephen Fry, there's nothing better than waking up in the forest and there's nothing worse than going to sleep in the forest. 

Chelsey: Oh, yeah. I like both. 

Sarah: I know. It is like candy for my anxiety. If I get into a certain frame, every time you hear a crick or a crack or like a twig break, your brain can easily interpret that as something scary headed towards you. And the thing about being in the woods is that they're made out of wood, famously. And twigs are going to break all the time. All night long. 

Chelsey: All night long. Yeah. And just little tiny sounds that you can grow entire monsters out of, which is a metaphor.

Sarah: Yeah. I love stories on camping subreddits and stuff that people tell about something. Basically, I heard someone walking around my tent all night long and it turned out to be like a gopher eating under my head.

Chelsey: Do you want a story? 

Sarah: Yes. 

Chelsey: Okay, this feels relevant. I'm like 10 or 11, maybe. I'm like 11, and I'm camping with my dad, my stepmom, basically my brother Johnny, and we are drifting off to sleep. And basically we have pulled off a highway or forest service road, just down a dirt road, because he didn't want to pay for camping so we just parked in a random place. And all night, teenagers were partying around us and getting stuck in the mud in their cars and screaming and drinking. And it was unnerving, but it was okay. 

And then at some point as we're drifting off to sleep, we start hearing footsteps coming up to the tent. And my dad is asleep and so is my stepmom, and I'm like, “Dad. Dad. Dad.” You know how a dad sleeps? So he won't wake up. And finally I'm like, “Dad!” And then he's just like, “What?!” And then I was like, “Listen!” And then we all were quiet, and we could hear footsteps walking around the tent. And this is one of those times where my knees are shaking. That's when I know that I'm really scared. I'm a little Italian puppet, and my knees shake and clatter together. 

And he just heard this happen and then my dad was like, okay, and then out of nowhere pulls a pistol, bursts out the front of the tent. And we're like, “Oh my God!” And then he's just gone for a hot minute and then comes back and he's, “There's nothing out there.” And then we start to go back to sleep, and it happens again. And it happened multiple times. And he went out there and we just never figured out what it was. 

That's the memory as it stands in my 11 year old head and I will keep it that way. Maybe I'm exaggerating, I don't know. But it was definitely like, I will tell you, my knees were knocking together, and it was definitely a pistol.

Sarah: Yeah. And do you think there was someone walking around, or could it have been, like, something that sounded like that? 

Chelsey: I think also, by the way, this was all compounded by the fact that when we first pulled into this dirt road we went far down the dirt road until we got to the end. Where again, in my memory, there was an old house with a man standing there looking at us holding a pitchfork. And we were like, we'll just flip a U, and then we went like halfway back and camped. So it's like there were like many things happening that could have set this mood. But it had to have just been an animal. We always were like, it was ghosts, that's what we settled on. But like, why were they haunting my tent? I don't know, but anyway. 

Sarah: I love camping. I also think there's something really nightmare fuel about it, because you have the illusion of security. You have protection from the elements and from rain and stuff, but nothing protects you from the rest of the world but a thin layer of nylon.

Chelsey: It's such a joke.

Sarah: It’s nuts. And so you have this and it's weird. It feels like we don't know how to process tents because we have this feeling of containment and security and this cozy little home and we're warm and dry or at least dry in there while it's soppy outside. So we feel protected but if anyone violent came along, be it a scary person or a bear or whatever, then the tent is nothing. What is the tent? The tent is nothing.

Chelsey: I'm pretty anti tent. I'm either under the stars, or in my car or truck with my mattress, and I don't know. There's something about a tent that, A, you wake up, you're sweaty, it's hot, it's gross, although I will say I have a tent that's mesh, and I love that because I want to be able to see while I'm inside of the thing. I feel like not being able to see is not smart.

Sarah: That also contributes to the feeling of vulnerability, right? Because the reason you don't know who's walking around outside your tent is because you can't see outside your tent. 

Chelsey: Exactly, but if I had a mesh tent, I would see and maybe that would be better. Maybe it would be worse, but at least I would know.

Sarah: My mom has one of those for her cats so they can still enjoy the outdoors. 

Chelsey: Yeah, I wouldn't be wondering two decades later what the hell that was, you know.

Sarah: That is a scary story to me, because it's the Schrodinger's cat thing, in a way. If I can, feel free to misunderstand math for a second here, where if you don't know who or what is out there, if anything, then it could be an ax murderer, and it could be a terrier, and it's always all things that it could be until you see it.

Chelsey: Yeah, but it's always either an ax murderer or a terrier. 

Sarah: Or a terrier with a tiny little ax, little paws. 

Chelsey: Why not both? But yeah, that's obviously a bigger metaphor for so many things that we cover too. It's either an ax murderer or a terrier, it's either the most frightening thing that you could ever imagine or more likely it's nothing at all.

Sarah: And also I think what both of our shows are about is like how we can at least within all this try and get more information from analyzing the American tendency to confuse ax murderers with terriers and vice versa because we're like, so it's 1982, we are prosecuting lesbians for daring to work in daycare centers. But go right ahead Father. You seem fine. 

Chelsey: Yeah, exactly.

Sarah: So camping is scary. I'm with you. I think it's nice. We went camping recently and I slept in my car and had the hatchback open and that's a feeling of security. 

Chelsey: Absolutely. It really is. And I don't, I never sleep better than when I'm in my car with the hatchback open, I don't know, I just sleep great.

Sarah: Because you've opened yourself to nature, but you have an exoskeleton.

Chelsey: Yeah, definitely. And that's one of the things humans really lack. I think that's why we love our cars so much, partly. We like to have an exoskeleton.

Chelsey: Wow, that's really smart. That's really smart. 

Sarah: I never thought of that, but yeah, it feels great.

Chelsey: We also act more like insects when we're in our car. We're just reactive and have no real empathy or soul. Yeah. 

Sarah: And we swarm around. 

Chelsey: Oh yeah, we sure do. 

Sarah: One thing that really creeps me out is a really big frog. 

Chelsey: Yes, of course. How could I forget? 

Sarah: I just, I find it upsetting. 

Have you seen a big frog?

Sarah: No. 

Chelsey:  Okay, so is there a big frog in some media or?

Sarah: There'll be like the Daily Mail, you know how they have to print every upsetting thing they can think of every day. So they print a lot of stuff that definitely isn't news. And every so often I feel like the Daily Mail will be like, “here's a picture of a Chinese toddler holding up a gigantic frog that they found”, and they're like the same size. And I just find there to be something incredibly menacing about frogs above a certain… really I think a frog, if it's bigger than a coin purse, I don't want it anywhere near me. I just don't. 

I don't blame this, but I did grow up with family in Australia, and so you then hear about cane toads. Which actually do sound very dangerous. Cane toads, I think if a dog eats a cane toad, they can die. They're poisonous. And they were brought over, I think, as some kind of colonialist folly, and then took over. And I think at least in the past, it was a thing especially if you grew up on a farm, that you would just kill a bunch of cane toads for your chores. 

Chelsey: Yeah, okay. Yeah, they are big boys. They're big boys. Yeah, I gotta say, Sarah, this doesn't scare me. I'm not scared of these frogs. But that’s so interesting because you and I have had this running joke about how, like, where did all the tiny tree frogs of our childhood go? Because I feel every day I found a tiny frog. There were just tiny frogs everywhere, and I don't see him anymore. 

Sarah: I'm sorry, I just looked up ‘really big frog’, and I'm going to send you the results. It's really horrifying. I know, and every time I see a little frog, I send you a video of it. I just want to emphasize: a little frog? There is nothing better than a little frog. 

Chelsey: She just wants to say hashtag not all frogs. 

Sarah: Or you know what else I feel uncomfortable with is Koi. 

Chelsey: Koi? 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Chelsey: Like the fish?

Sarah: Yeah.

Chelsey: You know, I get that. 

Sarah: Look at the search results for ‘really big frog’. I sent you a link. There's a New York Post headline that says, “giant frog as big as human baby.” And I'm just going to let you look at this because I literally can't look at the frogs any longer. 

Chelsey: The image is the child holding the frog like under its armpits essentially. And when you see this frog stretched out, you really start to see the resemblance to the human form. That creeps me out. 

Sarah: You really do. And that's. That's creepy. I also, just to speak to how my brain works, I'm drinking out of a big thermos, and I just went to take a sip and my brain went, what if there was a frog in here? And it put me off my water. 

Chelsey: No, that makes me feel like my water's going to be slimy, and I don't like that at all.

Sarah: Are you looking at ‘Giant Frog Eats Tiny Rodent?’  Yeah, this is how it started with me and frogs. I remember reading something in National Geographic when I was a kid about it, a frog that eats bats or like frogs that eat birds. And I was like, No! That is not okay. And I was interested even at the time about why to me there was something so clearly monstrous about a frog eating outside of its place in the food chain, which I realize is a construct, but I did not like it. Frogs eat bugs. 

Chelsey: Were you scared of their tongues that are like those 25 cent sticky hands?

Sarah: I'm actually not afraid of the tongues, but I just feel like if frogs get any bigger, they're going to come eat the humans. 

Chelsey: That's interesting. Do you think it could have anything to do with that idea that we're creeped out? And I talked about spiders in our other episode, and I think the stance for them, too, is how they share very few traits in common with humans. They are by nature very foreign to us, which would make them more unnerving. 

Sarah: Yes. And with frogs, maybe there is an uncanniness because you can see more of a human resemblance.

Chelsey: You can.

Sarah: And also they start off as fish. What the fuck is that? 

Chelsey: That is weird. Not only that, Sarah, but they start out as like a slimy cloud of eggs.

Sarah: Yeah. We probably basically… 

Chelsey: It's not fair. We do too. Yeah.

Sarah: But yeah, there's just, I don't know, there's something about frogs. I can't handle it. Never bring me a big frog. That's all I'm going to say. 

Chelsey: Don't do it. Don't bring her a big frog. 

Sarah: But I love a lot of animals that people generally don't like. And an animal I love is the possum. 

Chelsey: Oh yeah. 

Sarah: And I'm not saying get me a possum because I'm not responsible enough. But possums, can't go wrong with them. I don't care how big that possum is. They will always be cute. A giant possum? Still cute.

Chelsey: Which is really funny because I was scared of possums as a kid because one time my dog was going absolutely freaking nuts barking at this little area under our house and my stepdad was like, got a light and shined it under there, and I was with him, and it was the possum's face, which is very human.

Sarah: That is scary. 

Chelsey: It's very human, and I just remember he got a broom to try to get it out from under the house, and I can still see it. He was poking at it, and it was just barely hitting it in the mouth, and it wasn't going anywhere, so its lips were just being poked by this broomstick. That's all I remember. 

Sarah: He's like, come get me, old man. 

Chelsey: Yeah, he's like, I don't think so. 

Sarah: Oh my god. See, that's just, I like that. 

Chelsey: Yeah, it's not scary in retrospect. Sarah, do you want to tell me about your final fear? 

Sarah: I would love nothing more, and I will preface this by saying this is from the Jezebel Scary Stories contest, which is one of my favorite things. Have you read this contest? 

Chelsey: No. 

Sarah: Okay, so I'm pretty sure they're still doing it, but for at least many years Jezebel had an annual reader-submitted scary story contest, and the rules were that they had to be true. And some of them are paranormal and some are not. And I really enjoy reading them every year, and I also enjoy being a big stickler about what I will admit to being scared by. Because, for example, I've noticed that a lot of people who post ghostly encounter stories, it's like, I fell asleep and I woke up, and I saw a ghost and I went back to sleep. 

Chelsey: And you're like, sleep paralysis. Yes. 

Sarah: Or something, and I'm not saying that you didn't see a ghost, but I'm just saying for me personally, to take that ghost story seriously, I needed to be wide awake when that ghost shows up. But there are some that have really creeped me out and stuck with me to this day. And the one that has the most is called ‘A Little Hole in the Wall’ by someone whose username is ‘4,000 of them’. And it's about someone who is working in news, moved to Cincinnati, rents a first-floor apartment, has a big dog, and is settling into life there. And then one day comes home from shopping and the toilet seat is up. And she's like, the guy I've been hanging out with probably did that. So that's probably not anything. 

And then, other little things start happening along those lines. And then she comes back from a trip, and everything is covered in dust and she's like, that's incredibly weird, but I have no idea what that's about. So I guess I'll just clean it up and deal with it. And she's also moved in a bunch of furniture, including ‘a huge yellow hutch’. And it took me a while to figure out what that was, but I think it's one of the pieces of furniture that we have 50 different words for. So like a sideboard, a buffet, like an armoire.

Chelsey: It's like a big cabinet that you would put like china plates in. 

Sarah: So she cleans up the dust and things again calm down for a while. Pictures are arranged on a table. She comes back from a trip and all her food is gone. Just like all kinds of creepy stuff for a really long time. Mail disappears. More food, alcohol disappears, just stuff keeps disappearing that she brings into the house. 

And so the story reads, “Other stuff disappears over time. A collection of coins my dad has given me from the places he's visited. More food, any drop of alcohol I buy. But nothing ever happens to me. No one breaks in when I'm home. There are no menacing figures at the window. No creepy feelings at night. The longer things are normal, the more it fades. I barely sleep. It makes everything feel even dreamier. And then one night, I'm getting dressed cute to go out. I use the blackness of the long windows to check my reflection. I put on my shoes, and one turns white. It's dust again. It's not all over like before. It's concentrated around my huge hutch. I get out the vacuum and get to work, teetering in heels, but it's piled around the side of the hutch, which is hard to move. I turn off the vacuum, brace my legs against the couch, and push the hutch out toward the center of the room. In the wall is a hole the size of a man. The dust, of course, had been from the sawing.”

 I have chills as I'm reading this. 

“My company put me up in a hotel after that until I could move. My landlord let me break the lease. Later, during the process of getting a felony conviction, I learned that two men did all that stuff specifically to scare me. That they sat peeping through the gap at the back of the hutch for months. One lived in the apartment next door. The wall opened into a little pocket between the apartment stairwell and the basement. They hid it with plywood. My neighbor described it all for me in court, smiling at me. They watched me check myself out in the full-length mirror, cook meals, watch sad movies, flirt with guys on the phone, do sit ups, talk to my dog, have the occasional cry, go to the bathroom, everything. They kept a hoard of snacks from my kitchen in the wall to enjoy while they passed the time. My long kitchen knife was found in the wall, plus a boning knife I didn't recognize. But they didn't want to come in while my dog was home, and I was never without her. Every morning, on the way to work for six months, I'd driven past a ‘wanted’ billboard featuring one of their faces. I have never lived alone again.” 

Chelsey: Ooh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Miranda and I have been watching phrogging, P H R O G G I N G. Which brings us back to frogs as well for you, which is like double the fucking terror.

Sarah: A real theme is emerging, yeah. 

Chelsey: But that's the phenomenon of someone, the reason it's frogging is someone who hops from house to house, living in the house without the person knowing. So it's like a real phenomenon. There's a whole true crime show about it. And so sorry not to make your fears come to life. But generally, it's not quite so sensational as someone just enjoying watching you through the wall. That's very urban legend-esque. Babysitter in the man upstairs type of stuff, it feels like. 

Sarah: There's something very primal about it. And we I think we also talked in that bonus about the home as a place where it feels eerie-er than in other places to be in danger, because our home is where we have to try and trust that we’ll be safe. We have to have a space where we can do that. And also with the story, naturally, I have tried to find news about it because this is described as happening in Cincinnati and couldn't find anything. And that doesn't really make the story to me more or less real because that is the kind of thing I can very easily see two guys doing and also that being considered not terribly newsworthy. 

Chelsey: Yeah, it's totally possible. And was it presented as a real story?

Sarah: Yeah, the rule is that you have to submit real stories, although, God knows people have tried to circumvent that.

Chelsey: Oh, but that is it's entirely possible that happened. It's not something that will probably happen more than once a decade, but I don’t know.

Sarah: It is terrifying to me to think about, I think. And there's also this idea that women living alone are by definition, doing something either dangerous to society or to themselves, or probably just both. And the idea that any freedom you have, is highly conditional, where in crimes like that, part of the creepiness is the implicit message of you were never really free, you were never really safe.

Chelsey: I was always here.

Sarah: Like you're always subject to my whims. Yeah, I was always here. So I guess my greatest fear is a giant frog glancing over casually at me as it hops by, and then I go try to fall asleep in the forest and I wake up and the giant frog has been in my tent the entire time and I didn't realize. 

Chelsey: And then the broadcast of your camping trip is interrupted by an 80s newsman mask.

Sarah: One of the themes that I can see here is not realizing that you're in danger when you are. 

Chelsey: Yeah, that's really scary, which is weird because it's an unconscious fear, so by definition, you're saying you don't know that you're afraid of the thing that's happening, so it's a really weird phenomenon.

Sarah: I have to move my bed because I have windows where my head goes when I sleep. And I think I would sleep much better if I did not have my head near windows, where I have this kind of subconscious fear of somebody who I can't see, but can see me. But also, my bed is too big and I don't know where else to fit it.

Chelsey: I don't know. I wish you'd move it, but, if you don't know where to put it. I think you've talked, too, about your fear of people under the bed. 

Sarah: Yeah, someone under my bed, someone grabbing my feet, just anybody under there was clearly bad news. And I was also very freaked out by, I watched it the other day, and it is so campy, and I'm amazed that it scared me so much as a kid, but the episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark, where this family moves in next door to these kids, and they decide that it's vampires. And there's a nightmare the girl has where she's sleeping with her neck exposed and a vampire is leaning down to bite her neck. And as a consequence of that, I made sure to cover my neck with blankets extremely thoroughly until I was like 12. 

Chelsey: It's Tale of the Nightly Neighbors, I know it well.

Sarah: Yes!

Chelsey: When I was reading about why kids are scared of the dark, and why we would be scared of something under our bed it was very much just the primal fear that every child has of dangerous predators lurking in the dark and so it has nothing to do with anything about your child other than this biological necessity that they are possessing to be like, I don't have protection right now. I don't understand. My primitive brain doesn't understand that I'm safe in a house. My primitive brain thinks I'm in a cave and my protectors are not here. And so it makes sense and I think that just spreads to all kinds of different things, even as you're an adult, because like you're saying, it's you're afraid of the thing you can't see.

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. And we haven't even talked about your historical fear of alien abduction, but that feels in line with all this. 

Chelsey: Yeah, I'm terrified of aliens and we'll have to save that for another time, I guess.

Sarah: It's just amazing how as a kid you can watch something that is made very poorly and hastily by some guy who never wanted to be making stupid, alien, paranormal cable TV segments, but it can be more influential to you than the greatest art.

Chelsey: It's so true. It's so true. And then it makes you wonder, what really is great art?

Sarah: And that is our episode, and those are my fears. Thank you so much to Chelsey Weber-Smith, who is such a fun and generous conversation partner in all things. And I hope we got to the bottom of some stuff. I hope that next year I will touch a frog. 

Thank you so much to Carolyn Kendrick for producing this show, for putting this episode together, for making me a less fearful person all the time. And thank you to Louise Bickin for editing. That's our episode. See you all in two weeks.