Do you actually want to read some of the article before you go on about it?
That's fine.
Okay.
So just be the new Chelsea series of openers where I just read it right to you.
And I act as shocked as you because this is my first time reading it.
To be fair, even if it was your second or third time, it may act like it's the first.
True.
It all comes off the same anyway.
This one is entitled mysterious voice haunting American airlines flights.
I did read a couple instances of it before we got to this point.
Over the summer of 2022.
So this is recent as we're in fall 2022 now.
There has been reports of mysterious moaning sounds during several
American airlines flights.
Moans have been described as a guttural human voice crying out in pain, but the
source of the voice has not been found.
Not people trying to join the mile high club.
Is it most notable report comes from actor Emerson Collins.
He posted the following tweet recording the sounds and adding his commentary.
Someone on this flight seems to have broken into the intercom system and
continues to make a sound that is somewhere between an orgasm and vomiting.
Ladies and gentlemen, we realize there is an extremely irritating sound coming
over the public announcement.
The flight deck is trying to troubleshoot, trying to turn it off.
So please be patient with us.
We know this is a very odd anomaly and none of us are enjoying it.
So we do appreciate your attention just for a few more moments.
So we figure out how to turn it off.
Thank you. Who is having a puke yank?
Okay. That's enough of that.
It was initially assumed the voices were just a prank from someone who had found
a way to sneakily use the aircraft's PA system until it began happening over and
over again on different flights.
John NYC on Twitter pulled together a handful of different reports in a Twitter
thread on NYC says currently on AA 1631 and someone keeps hacking into the PA
and making moaning and screaming sounds.
The flight attendants are standing by their phones because it isn't them.
And the captain just came on and told us they don't think the flight systems are
compromised. So we will.
There's obviously more, but I'm not going to read more.
Twitter thread contains several different reports from airline employees and
frequent flyers on both Boeing 737, 800 different types of planes.
Other people have reported hearing similar sounds on flights as far back as
July, 2022 flights are always American airlines and usually flying around the
greater Los Angeles area.
Do you think that it's the, what did we call him?
Balloon man?
Pac-Man?
Flying humanoid.
Yeah.
Jetpack man.
Yeah.
Maybe he's got a PA system now.
Yeah.
Maybe he's just flying close enough.
I would be curious if any new radio stations opened up in this period of time.
And like, they just have a really bad radio signal that interferes with it every
now and then.
It would have to be a really bad radio station to be putting those noises onto
the air and having people listen.
There's a lot.
I don't think this has to do with the haunting because the ghost, I mean, the
ghost could have a sense of humor to be haunting airlines.
You could haunt one specific corporation.
I'm sure of it.
You definitely could.
I mean, I would probably want to haunt a corporation if I wanted to and do it
with like hilarious, sarcastic, weird, blah, noises on the intercom.
I'd want to haunt Disney.
And then you have the option to go to all their different theme parks.
Yeah.
Like for life, for all of death, which is longer than life.
Now there's just a bunch of people giving their experiences.
July, somebody says they heard strange pain sounding groans coming from the
aircraft sound system four or five times.
Aircrew didn't know what was going on.
We've all had those weird airplane poops though, that's, you know,
that painful moans come out.
Yeah.
And then you just have to go onto the PA system.
Another person said it happened during her flight.
The flight attendant said it had happened on the same plane a few days earlier,
but they hadn't been able to figure out where it was coming from.
September six, another flight.
This was the flight we just listened to on Twitter.
Then another one mid September.
Oh, this is like still happening.
Doug Boner wrote that there were lots of weird noises.
Yeah, I'm assuming that's how you say it.
B-O-E-H-N-E-R.
Okay.
That's how you would say that, right?
Boner said there are lots of weird noises, including an, oh yeah, just before landing.
That is crazy.
He assumed the pilot has left his mic on.
Are these just pilots maybe that aren't willing to admit they didn't
turn off the PA system?
It's a troll for sure.
For sure it is.
Okay, the September 18th, lots of moaning and screaming noises coming through the intercom.
The voice sounded male and would only last five to 10 seconds before stopping.
Official response from American Airlines is that they are having problems with the
PA system malfunctioning on several of the aircraft.
That seems about right.
Impossible explanation.
That's all they've said.
Okay.
Some have speculated that someone is hacking into the PA system somehow.
That makes sense.
The intercom system on the aircraft were closed analog systems, which make it very
difficult for anyone to hack into them without physically picking up a microphone or
phone physically connected to a device on the wired system.
I wonder if anybody's like been keeping track of where the pilots have been as well.
Maybe if they like tied it all together, it's all the same pilots.
Most likely explanation is it's an issue with the PA amplifier system, which has a
filter on it that removes any sound that isn't a human voice leaving only sounds
which sound human.
That doesn't seem right.
It's somebody trolling for sure.
If it's that widespread, they got to be flying a lot or know how to hack into a
vehicle that is moving through the sky several miles up, moving 700 kilometers an hour.
You would think if it's that big, it's probably not that big of an issue.
They probably have bigger issues, but they would be putting something together to see
if there's a common denominator of passengers and pilots or stewardesses until it actually
impacts ticket sales or anything really that's valuable.
They won't do anything about it.
Yeah, it'd be annoying, but I'd also be talking about that flight forever.
So the mystery continues of American Airlines.
Look at that. Good advertising.
So check out American Airlines.
See if it moans.
Yeah, I was just going to say, let us know on your next American
Air flight what goes down.
And with that, let's get this episode started.
From the unexplained to the mundane, join us on our journey to the fringe.
Hello and welcome to Journey to the Fringe, where hard hitting fringe questions are answered.
Like, why is it called a grilled cheese?
Does anyone cook them on a grill?
No, everybody does it on a stovetop in a frying pan.
So it should be a fried cheese or maybe closer and good compromise griddled cheese.
I don't know the answer.
We only answer fringe questions no one else is answering like that one.
This is just an example, which is too bad.
I do want to know the answer, but apparently that's going to be left up to future.
Anything else other than grilled cheese doesn't sound right.
Doesn't have the right mouthfeels.
We are your hypothetically wondering hosts, Taylor and Chelsea.
And today we will be doing another Halloween episode.
And what goes with Halloween more than witches, vampires, ghouls, ghosts and hell?
Well, the idea of being cursed.
You're not going to curse everyone, are you?
Well, we might.
I don't know for sure.
Okay.
Really depends on if just talking about some of these things does curse people.
Like the play Macbeth, but we're not doing a play of Macbeth.
So it doesn't really apply to us.
Today, we will be talking about items and events that allegedly are cursed
throughout the eras and people who have been afflicted by these curses and what's
happened to them just for ease of understanding right up front.
We are only looking at the alleged curses, not the simple answers as some of them may
be, in fact, to how they are not actually curses.
And this is stupid.
We are keeping the suspense of scariness and Halloween in good spirits with this.
So buckle up.
We're going to go through the gambit of cursed things.
We're going to start with the vaguest ones and we're going to work our way down.
Okay.
I like where you're going with this.
First off, we're going to talk about the Silver Bassano base.
Chelsea, have you ever heard of this?
I've not, no.
And I'm also wondering why a base is cursed.
Sorry, it's a vase.
I don't know why I put base.
Okay.
The Silver Bassano vase.
Okay, I've also never heard of that.
So that's also good.
This is a fairly nondescript vase that dates back to roughly the 15th century,
at least allegedly.
The curse of the 15th century Silver Bassano vase is said to have started
with the young Italian bride on the Iver Herr wedding.
She did not show up for her ceremony.
When people went to look for her,
she was found dead from a mysterious cause in the vase and clutching the vase
to her chest, which was a gift that was given to her that night.
From an unknown person.
Sounds like grounds for a curse.
At least if that's actually how it worked.
I don't know, like history is spotty in the 1500s.
Yeah, I also heard this is a fairly vague example.
Well, I mean, there's no names attached to it in any way.
Even the Silver Bass.
Despite rumors that the silverware was now haunted by a deceased owner,
it was then handed down the family as each new owner died a mysterious and sudden death.
Allegedly, it was two or three family members it passed through the hands of.
During this time, each of them dying of some sort of bizarre illness.
Finally convinced the vase was cursed,
it was buried away where it remained for years until it was rediscovered in 1988
when a homeowner was digging in his backyard.
Inside the vase was a single note which read, Beware, this vase brings death.
Obviously, if you dug that up in your backyard, you saw that note.
You wouldn't want to hold on to it either.
So he naturally went and sold it at auction.
Exactly.
And heedless of the great warning, the new owner threw the note away and promptly
sold the vase at auction for roughly three thousand American dollars.
Who wouldn't do that?
The pharmacist who purchased it died unexpectedly not long after he acquired it.
And with that, the deadly curse struck again.
It would strike twice more, allegedly a doctor and an archaeologist before finally
the family of the archaeologist threw the vase out of window and it was promptly
picked up by a passing police officer who went up to the family's home and find
them for littering and returned it.
They paid the fine and said they didn't want to see the thing again.
So the officer tried to pawn it off on many museums.
None of them wanted it.
So he decided to bury the vase and with it, the curse in an undisclosed location
where it remains to this day.
This seems like an example of someone who decided to curse a vase and haunt a vase
upon their death where other people choose to haunt corporations such as American Airlines.
I'm not sure if that's what it is or somebody put a curse on it and killed a bride,
a nameless bride.
Ah, you took it in a different direction.
And then she was trapped in.
Ah, see, I wasn't even thinking that.
I was thinking she was killed on her wedding day, had the vase.
Maybe it was given to her by the murderer.
And so she cursed the vase.
She is attached to the vase because she cursed it.
Both are equal and relevant.
Who knows?
But what I like about it is the believability and the specificity of that curse.
Yes, very specific.
Very specific people like pharmacists were hurt by this.
Yeah, the lawyer, actually doctor.
Yes.
This next one I find fascinating because I've never put it together this way,
but it's probably not a curse, but we're going to go through it.
It's called the Curse of Tipikinu or Tikumseg's Curse.
And it is a widespread explanation for why, for some reason,
between the 1840s and the 1960s, a U.S.
president seems to die every 20 years or so in office.
Rumor has it that the Native American leader Tikumseg administered the curse
when William Henry Harrison's troops defeated his forces at the Battle of Tipikinu.
Seems weird, but William Henry Harrison was elected in 1840.
He caught a cold during his inauguration,
which turned into pneumonia and he died April 4th, 1841, one month into his tenure.
Abraham Lincoln shot April 14th, 1865, 24 years later, died the next day.
James Garfield shot by Charles Guiteau in July of 1881.
Garfield died several months later from complications in office.
William McKinley on September 6th, 1901, was shot by Leon Chogos, who considered
the president an enemy of the people, and McKinley died eight days later.
And that's a 35 year gap.
Warren G.
Harding was elected in 1920 and he suddenly died of either a heart attack
or a stroke while traveling to San Francisco three days after being elected.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president many times, 32, 36, 40, and 44,
and then died of a stroke suddenly in 45.
And then John Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 in Dallas.
Notably, nothing strange about that murder, but.
Oh, not off the top of my head.
Continued it on right around 20 years after.
And the chain breaker Ronald Reagan was in fact shot in 1981, but he did survive.
Some say this broke the curse.
And then George W.
Bush, who was elected in 2000, escaped and went on to serve for a second term in office.
However, he did have a close run in with a shoe.
Had Thrower known about his sacred duty as a curse bearer, he would have probably
brought something more deadly like a stiletto.
And I think most importantly, with the Tip Canoe Curse, this would also mean we're
hitting the prime years for a president to die in office right now.
I think they've got the prime president for it.
Is that bad to say?
Well, not only that, if the next one's Trump, he'll be in his 80s, too.
Let's be honest, Trump seems in much better health than Biden.
See, I don't know. I've seen what Trump eats.
He tweets out a lot of McDonald's and KFC.
Okay.
Oh, president presidential curse.
Yeah, from the Native Americans who they had subjugated for a long time.
It's not a bad curse.
I give it a point five.
Okay.
Next up, the curse of King Tut, which we all know his name's Tutankhamun.
Why is it King Tut not King Tut?
Anyhow, in 1923, archaeologist Howard Carter and his sponsor, Lord Carnivron,
opened the burial chamber of the ancient Egyptian boy King Tutankhamun.
The tomb hidden in the valley of the kings in Egypt had been untouched and packed
with treasures, yet while they marveled at the astounding archaeological finds,
some entered the tomb with trepidation.
It's rumored that a message inscribed into the burial chamber's entrance read,
Death shall come on swift wings to him who disturbs the peace of the king.
I never understood people who wanted to disturb mummies anyway.
I mean, I get that they look cool, but you should probably just leave them alone.
Like, would you go digging up graves and being like, this is so cool?
Like, what are they?
We've surprisingly done that for a long time.
That's true. We have.
And then for a long time, like there were so many mummies in Egypt,
they were using them as firework.
Yeah, pretty much. And they're all over the globe now.
Also, the other part with the mummies specifically in Egypt,
they were buried with a ton of nice shit.
Yeah, that's true.
Which now they can't use in the afterlife.
Thanks, assholes.
Yeah, I think it's fairly rude of people to be doing that.
Yeah. But with that inscription supposedly there,
let's talk about the people this impacted.
George Herbert, the fifth Earl of Carnivon,
the man who financed the excavation of King Tut's tomb, Lord Carnivon,
accidentally tore open a mosquito bite while shaving and ended up dying of blood poisoning shortly after.
This occurred a few months after the tomb was opened in a mere six weeks
after the press started reporting on, quote, the mummy's curse,
which was thought to afflict anyone associated with disturbing the mummy.
Legend has it that when Lord Carnivon died, all the lights in his house,
or according to some accounts, the lights in Cairo mysteriously went out.
Oh, that's cool.
Sir Bruce Ingham, Howard Carter, the archaeologist who discovered the tomb,
gave a paperweight to his friend, Bruce Ingham, as a gift.
This is kind of a showing of the times.
The paperweight consisted of a mummified hand wearing a bracelet
that was supposedly inscribed with the phrase, curse be he who moves my body.
So I don't know if they were friends per se.
You know who'd love this guy?
This fucking idiot.
Yeah.
God, I hate this guy.
I immediately thought of you when I saw this.
I hate going to dinner parties at your house.
Ingham did not die from the mummy's curse, though,
though his house burned to the ground not long after receiving the gift.
And when he tried to rebuild, it was hit with a flood.
That ain't coincidence.
George J. Gould.
Gould was a wealthy American financier and railroad executive
who visited the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1923
and fell sick almost immediately afterward.
He never really recovered and died of pneumonia a few months later.
Aubrey Herbert, Lord Carnivans half brother.
He was born with a degenerative eye condition and became totally blind late in life.
A doctor suggested his rotten infected teeth were somehow interfering with his vision,
and Herbert had every single tooth pulled from his head in an effort to regain his sight.
Surprisingly, he died of sepsis as a result of the surgery.
Just five months after the death of his supposedly cursed brother.
And just in case you were wondering, he did never regain his vision.
Hugh Evelyn White, a British archaeologist,
visited King Tut's tomb and may have helped excavate the site.
After seeing death sweep over about a dozen of his fellow excavators by 1924,
that number is embellished, definitely.
Evelyn White died by suicide.
His alleged suicide note written in his own blood read,
I have succumbed to a curse which forces me to disappear.
What the fuck? He wrote it in his own blood?
Yeah. Aaron Ember, an American Egyptologist, was friends with many of the people
who were present when the tomb was opened, including Lord Carnivans.
He died in 1926 when his house in Baltimore burned down
less than an hour after he and his wife hosted a dinner party.
He could have exited safely, but his wife told him he had to go back
and save his manuscript he had been working on while she fetched their son.
He and the family maid died in the catastrophe.
The manuscript that was lost, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, was the working title.
What? Oh, he didn't just lose that. He also lost his life.
Richard Bethel. He was Lord Carnivans secretary
and the first person behind Carter to enter the tomb.
He died in 1929 under suspicious circumstances,
though one modern historian has attributed,
I had to add this just because of our history,
they have attributed his death to the work of the occultist Alastair Crowley.
I don't know how that might actually be something to look into,
but this was a tight turnaround for this episode.
Bethel was found smothered in his room at an elite London gentleman's club.
Soon after, the Nottingham Evening Post
mused that the suggestion that Honorable Richard Bethel had come under the curse
was raised last year when there was a series of mysterious fires at his home
where some of the priceless finds from Tutankhamen's tomb were stored.
Bethel's death then drove his father, Lord Westbury,
to commit suicide by jumping off a building.
The press were quick to catch on to the connection with the King Tut.
Sorry, let's go with the right way of saying it.
Connection with King Tut attributing the death to the mummy's curse.
I appreciate that.
There's also Sir Archibald Douglas Reed, a radiologist,
who x-rayed Tut before the mummy was given to museum authorities.
He got sick the next day and was dead three days later.
That's all I know about that.
Then there was James Henry Breasted, the inventor of breasts,
another famous Egyptologist of the day,
and he was a member of Carter's team when King Tuck's tomb was opened.
Shortly thereafter, he allegedly returned home to find that his pet canary had been
eaten by a cobra and the cobra was still occupying the cage.
Since the cobra is a symbol of the Egyptian
monarchy and a motif that kings wore on their headdresses to represent protection,
this was rather ominous of a sign.
He was breasted in 1935, and that I mean he died nowhere near any visits he had to Egypt.
And then finally, this guy doesn't die, but Howard Carter.
And sorry, I shouldn't say he doesn't die.
He definitely dies.
But it's not associated with this at all.
It's lymphoma when he was 64.
His tombstone, in fact, says, May your spirit live.
May you spend millions of years, you who love speed sitting with your face
to the north wind, your eyes beholding happiness.
And basically he was able to escape the curse.
For a long time, people visiting the golden mask of Tutankhamun were warned not to look
into its eyes lest the curse strike them down to know might seem fairly mysterious.
But of the 20 plus people who excavated King Tut's tomb, only nine of them actually died
within that next three year period or so.
29 died of curse circumstances.
20 plus people entered the tomb and then process of excavating it.
Only nine of them actually die of weird things in the next couple of years.
And again, you do have to extend the period quite significantly to say that it's a curse.
That's the thing with curses.
You never know when they're going to hit you.
Could be now. It could be in 50 years.
Good curse would be sooner rather than later, I think.
Or not because you're waiting for it constantly.
So it declines your quality of life.
Yeah, I have a few comments on this one.
Okay.
Number one, as somebody who what are they called?
Like coroners that pronounce like how people died.
Yeah.
I wonder how many times that's used now where they're like this person died of
mysterious circumstances and they actually say it was probably a curse.
You think that still happens?
It depends on what you mean.
Like, do you mean in Canada, US, Western Europe or like all over the world?
I probably just mean here because I listen to a lot of true crime.
And there's mysterious circumstances in true crime sense.
Like they were murdered probably.
But how many times is it like this might be a curse that we're looking at, guys?
Probably very slim to none.
Just putting it out there is over thought.
Cause of death unknown does come up, I'm assuming, quite a bit when it actually
comes to stating what killed the person.
True.
Okay.
I'm going to start thinking curse.
Second, I'm going to rate this one 9.5 out of 10 because I would do the same thing.
And I'm going to put this into my will when it gets updated or I make one.
Anyone who disturbs my grave and steals my shit, they're getting cursed.
I would wait.
Let's see if you come up with a better answer by the time we're done this entire episode.
Yeah, I feel like King Tut is right.
Cursing everybody is my feelings right now.
Well, you just waste at the end.
You might hear a better answer.
Next up, the Hope Diamond.
This pricelessly, roughly 115 karat blue Hope Diamond was allegedly stolen from the eye of a Hindu statue.
Several accounts, however, we don't know for sure.
This is based on remarks written down by a French gem merchant by the name
of Jean-Baptiste Tavignet, who obtained the gem in India in 1666.
You know, hanging out in a part of the world that isn't Western Europe.
What are you going to do?
You're either going to subjugate the people that are already living there or are you going to steal their shit?
He went with the latter option.
He obtained the gem in 1666 and suggests that the gemstone originated in India in the Kohler mine in the Bunter district of Andhra Pradesh.
And this would be in the 17th century.
Several facets of the gemstone history are unclear, though,
including its original location, condition, finder and owners.
The earliest historical records start with Tavignet, so we don't know much about it.
He brought it to Paris as a large uncut stone and the first known precursor to the Hope Diamond.
This large stone became known as the Tavignet Blue, and it was crudely cut into a triangular stone of 115 karats when it arrived in France.
Another estimate waited at 112 karats before it was cut.
It is considered to be the most famous diamond in the world.
It's legendary not only for its huge size and value, even larger than the Pink Panther,
which may or may not exist from my understanding of how those movies work, and value, but also for its deadly curse,
for it is foretold that bad luck and death will visit whoever owns or touches the diamond,
probably for the shitty karma that it accrued by being stolen.
Good thing that they cut it up into so many small pieces so everyone can have some.
So, Jean-Petit's Tavignet.
The story goes that this gem merchant came down with a raging fever soon after stealing the diamond,
and after he died, his body was possibly ravaged by wolves.
However, other reports show that he lived until the ripe old age of 84, so who knows?
Probably cursed though.
Probably.
Next up, King Louis XIV bought the stone from Tavignet and had it recut in 1673.
Oh shit.
It was then known as the Blue Diamond of the Crown, or the French Blue.
King Louis dies later of gangrene, and all of his legitimate children die in childhood, save for one.
But to be fair, this was the 1600s.
That's not out of the ordinary.
Next up is Nicolas Fouquet.
Working for King Louis XIV, it is said that he had worn the diamond for a special occasion.
Shortly thereafter, he fell out of favour with the king and was banished from France.
The king then changed his sentence to life imprisonment, so Fouquet spent 15 years in the fortress of Pinerol.
Some rumours state that he was the real man in the iron mask.
However, this is disputed and nobody knows for sure.
Next up, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.
Louis XVI inherited the French Blue, obviously from the previous Louis.
And allegedly Marie Antoinette wore it.
However, there's no paintings that she posed for where she's wearing it, so this is kind of just rumour that she wore it.
I think we all know kind of what happened there.
A little.
But they got French Revolutioned, like hard.
Marie-Louise-Princesse-de-La-Bam, La Mbelle, a member of Marie Antoinette's court, was also her closest confidant.
She was apparently given to wear on occasion and she was killed by a mob in the most horrific fashion,
apparently hit with a hammer, decapitated, stripped and disemboweled, among other things.
Her head was impaled on a pike and carried to Marie Antoinette's prison window.
Wilhelm Fals, a Dutch jeweler who re-cut the diamond.
His son ended up murdering him, for he knew that he had obligations under the curse and then killing himself.
Simon Malchard, a Greek merchant.
He drove his car over a cliff, killing himself, his wife and his child.
Yikes.
And then Evelyn Walsh-McLean.
She was an heiress who lived a charmed life.
She would wear the diamond.
And there are stories that she would put the jewel on her dog's collar so it could think it was living the high life and walk around the apartment,
but it could not leave the apartment and show everybody how fancy it was.
So nobody knows for sure.
First, her mother-in-law died.
Her son died at the age of nine.
Her husband left her for another woman and later died in a mental hospital.
Her daughter died of a drug overdose at 25, and she eventually had to sell her newspaper,
The Washington Post, and died owing massive amounts of debt.
Evelyn's surviving kids sold the diamond to Harry Winston nine years later,
and Winston mailed the gem to the Smithsonian for $2.44 in postage and $155 in insurance.
And in 1958, that's when it was donated to the Smithsonian.
And since it has arrived at its new home, the curse appears to now be inactive.
So much so that according to a curator, it has brought nothing but good luck to the museum ever since.
Thank God.
And you can actually go see it at the Smithsonian Museum.
However, before it got there, its curse couldn't really stop.
So James Todd, the mailman who delivered the diamond to the Smithsonian,
apparently had his leg crushed in a truck accident shortly thereafter.
He also suffered a head injury in a separate accident.
Also, his house burned down.
Don't know the timeline on any of that.
Maybe the museum is just immune to curses because it houses so much cursed things.
It's like Mr. Burns and all his diseases.
How often does that come up on this show?
That's not the first time.
Yeah, all the all the mummies cursing really balances it out.
Yeah, although the giant curses, they might actually amplify it.
Who knows?
Next up, this is a fun one.
It's called the Billy Goat Curse, and it's a sports one.
On October 6, a sad day in Cubs history,
the Cubs entered game four of the World Series, leading the Detroit Tigers two
games to one and needing to win only two of the next four games played at Wrigley Field.
This came from a bar website, so I'm just reading it as is.
It'll make sense once we're done.
OK, a local Greek, William Billy Goat Sianis, owner of the Billy Goat Tavern
and a Cubs fan, bought two tickets to game four, hoping to bring his good luck
goat Murphy with him to the game at the entrance to the park.
The Andy Fran ushers stopped Billy Goat
from entering, saying that no animals were allowed in the park.
Billy Goat frustrated, appealed to the owner of the Cubs, P.K.
Wrigley. Wrigley replied, let Billy in, but not the goat.
Billy Goat asked, why not the goat?
And Wrigley answered, because goats stink.
According to the legend, the goat and Billy were upset.
So then Billy threw up his arms and
explained the club ain't going to win no more.
The club will never win a World Series
so long as the goat is not allowed in the goat.
Also, Curse them. I'm sure he did something to.
Yeah, probably.
Subsequently, the Cubs lost game four
and the remaining series getting swept at home from the World Series.
Billy Goat promptly sent a telegram to P.K.
Wrigley, stating who stinks now for the next 20 years throughout the remainder
of Billy Goat's life, the Cubs would finish each season at fifth place or lower,
establishing a pattern that would reverse the Cubs luck and term the team
the lovable losers.
This World Series would become a dream and wait till next year would become
the team's motto from 1946 to 2003, the Cubs posted a terrible 466 win percentage,
having only 15 winning seasons and finishing in first place a mere three times,
having no pennants, no World Series appearances, let alone wins with only four
postseason experiences, resulting in a complete reversal of their fortunes.
And for this time, they were actually pretty popular.
And sorry, this is October 6, 1945.
A few examples of the curse, which I find hilarious.
In 1965, a year before he passed away,
Billy Goat Ciannis finally felt satisfied and claimed the curse is lifted.
But the goat still was better.
The Cubs began the season winning and posted throughout the season and into mid
August with a commanding first place lead.
On September 9, 1969, at Shea Stadium,
the Cubs played the New York Mets in a critical playoff race game.
A stray black cat walked between the Cubs captain, Ron Santo,
who was on deck and the Cubs dug out.
The Mets would pull ahead of the Cubs in that series and eventually win both
the newly formed NL East in the 1969 World Series.
Curse by curses.
And there have been many attempts to lift it.
In 1973, Billy Goat's nephew and new Billy Goat tavern owner, Sam Ciannis,
with the help of Tribune columnist Dave Condon, brought the goat to Wrigley
in an attempt to lift the curse.
The goat was escorted to Wrigley in a white limousine and given a red carpet
entrance to the park with a sign saying, all is forgiven.
Let me lead the Cubs to the pennant.
The ushers at the entrance denied the goat Socrates, a descendant of Murphy, yet again.
And the Cubs saw the midseason first place lead wither away to another unsuccessful season.
Didn't they know why he was there?
Apparently not.
There have been many attempts other than that to break the curse.
In 2003, a group of Cubs fans headed to Houston with a Billy Goat named
Virgil Homer and attempted to gain entrance to Minute Maid Park, home of the Astros,
which are a rival of the Cubs.
After they were denied entrance, they unfurled a scroll,
read a verse and proclaimed they were reversing the curse.
This was also the Chinese zodiac year of the goat.
So they thought that that would help.
In another bizarre twist, it was reported a butchered goat was hung from the Harry
Kerry statue on October 3rd, 2007, to which the Chicago Sun noted,
if the Prinksters intended to reverse the supposed Billy Goat curse with the stunt,
it doesn't appear to have worked.
That's going to make it worse.
In 2008, a Greek Orthodox priest sought to end the curse, likely by exercising the
curse from the field during the 2008 playoffs with the spraying of holy water
in and around the Cubs' Degu to no avail.
On April 1, 2011, a social enterprise called Reverse the Curse dedicated to
bringing innovation to property by giving goats to families in developing countries
was initiated. The goats provided families with milk,
cheese and alternative income to help lift them out of poverty.
Reverse the Curse was expanded into reversing the curses that afflict the
world's children in education and obesity.
In February of 2012, five Chicago Cubs fans calling themselves Crack the Curse
set out on foot from Mesa, Arizona to Wrigley Field.
They brought along a goat named Wrigley,
who they believed would be able to break the curse of the Billy Goat upon arrival
at Wrigley Field. Additionally, they attempted to raise
$100,000 for the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
On April 10, 2013, a severed goat's head was delivered to the Cubs in an
impossible effort to lift the curse.
Wow, there's a lot of mutilation going on to try and lift the curse.
Yeah. And finally, somebody thought of an actual good idea.
October 7, 2016, it's called the Chicago Diner.
A local vegetarian, Ivery, near Wrigley Field, teamed up with Farm Sanctuary to
try to reverse the curse of the Billy Goat by displaying posters in the windows at
their location. The posters feature a goat named Peanut,
who urges the Chicagoans to reverse the curse by going meat free.
And in 2016, they actually won the World Series.
So the vegetarian restaurant did it.
Yes. That's a feel good story.
Maybe not eating goats was the key to this all along.
That was a nice one. And not mutilating them.
Yeah. I figure.
Yeah. In 2016, the Cubs beat the Cleveland Indians in the 2016 World Series
in seven games after trailing the series three games to one.
They won game seven by a score of eight to seven in ten innings at Progressive
Field in Cleveland, Ohio.
And then let's leave this one off with a potential curse.
And that will be the curse of Genghis Khan's tomb.
I thought we don't know where it is. We don't, actually.
There's a great story behind that.
Genghis Khan, commonly known as Genghis Khan in the Western world,
probably the most famous Mongolian ever to live, once ruled everything between
the Pacific Ocean and the Caspian Sea.
Upon his death, he has to be buried in secret.
A grieving army carried his body home, killing anyone it met to hide the root.
And when the emperor was finally laid to rest, his soldiers rode 1000 horses
over his grave to destroy any remaining trace.
So that's part of the reason we don't know where he's buried.
The other reason may in fact be due to the Mongolian belief that the world will end
of Genghis Khan's tomb, as that would be said.
Obviously, it's never been found. We have no inklings on it.
Never been found.
It actually doesn't stop people from looking for it.
I wouldn't assume so.
Yeah, but Mongolians are very weary of tomb based curses because of one known
as the Curse of Tamerlane, a 14th century Turkish Mongolian king whose tomb was
opened in 1941 by Soviet archaeologists, Tamerlane.
Upon opening his coffin, the team discovered an inscription,
whoever opens my tomb shall unleash an invader more terrible than I.
And within a matter of hours, Adolf Hitler's troops invaded Russia,
and an estimated 26 million people died as a result.
So that's kind of why Mongolians don't really want to mess with this Genghis Khan.
Yeah, but they're just a small portion.
I bet you there's I mean, we already said there's probably a lot of people looking for it.
But with that, we're going to wrap up this episode on cursed things and cursed places.
It truly can be a corporation that is cursed.
So probably haunted as well.
And case in point, the Cubs.
So I hope you learned a little something here.
We made your Halloween just a little bit more creepy and spooky,
and we will see you next week.
I just want to say that I'm still going to curse anyone that digs up my grave and taste my shit.
Okay. Oh, yeah.
Sorry. Did you get any new ideas for what to write in there?
I don't have any.
I mean, I can think I'm going to take my time to think about what I'm going to curse people with.
I thought you might want to take Genghis Khan's idea of what?
Hiding my grave?
No, the world will end if you mess with my stuff.
It's probably going to be something similar to that.
Just a general curse is just the idea I have right now.
But the diabolicalness of it is still TBA.
Okay. Well, with that, we will leave you all thinking about what curses you wish to leave on your stuff in your body,
which is also your stuff kind of in a weird way.
Thank you all for listening, and we'll see you next week.
Bye.
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