EPISODE 91 — The 1st Annual Cracked Halloween Podcast Spooktacular

[JulyDiaz 2797]

Last year we covered in a podcast how truth is stranger and often scarier than fiction, especially when it comes to the history genre. Case in point: the story of Henry Rathbone. You're probably thinking, who's Henry Rathbone? That's kind of the point. Henry Rathbone and his wife Clara were sitting next to Abraham Lincoln the night of the assassination, and despite the decades of conspiracy theories and ghost stories surrounding the Lincoln family, the craziest and bloodiest story of the night belongs to Mr. Rathbone.

 

See, in the years following Lincoln's assassination, Rathbone's mental state declined as he blamed himself for not being able to prevent the president's death. Soon after that, he started to believe his walls were talking to him. Then he went full Shining and murdered his wife, tried to murder his children and stabbed himself 5 times in the chest. He spent the rest of his life in an insane asylum. This is an absolutely bonkers story edited from the margins of history, yet we choose not remember it because it doesn't read like a textbook.

 

This sort of historical amnesia also applies to how we look at the horror genre. There are countless unsolved murders, disappearances and mass hysterias that we don't know how to classify just because their details are too strange to swallow, the leads go nowhere and eventually we give up.

 

So in honor of Halloween, Jack O'Brien and Jason Pargin (aka David Wong) share 12 creepy and macabre unsolved mysteries that are just too weird to fit into our cookie-cutter version of the horror genres.

[VictoriaOosterhout 2]

I have a tamer example mass hysteria: When I was in middle school I was part of a mandatory winter chorus concert. I was one of about 120 kids arranged on a stage to sing holiday songs. One girl fainted early-concert. It was a probably a mixture of stage fright (due to the concert being mandatory), the heat from the stage lights, and dehydration (just a guess). In the span of 10 minutes, 5 more kids fainted. Of course, being a 6th grader, I didn't label this as "mass hysteria" at the time, that realization came later.

 

It's not quite as intriguing as "toxic blood syndrome", but such things are always crazy to watch happen in real time.

[JamesDonihueIII 0]

One of the truly creepy thing with elisa lam was in the video you can see her pushing all the elevator buttons and someone is keeping it from closing. She never actually rides the elevator, it doesn't close until she walks away

[Colfax McLiverneck 352]

The obvious explanation is that she saw the movie Dark Water or its Japanese version (or read the book), and acted out the events due to her mental illness.